by John Whitman
He hadn’t driven for more than a few minutes when he realized there was another call he needed to make. Probably it was a call he should have made hours earlier, but he had forgotten. The conciliatory conversation with Jiminez had reminded him. He dialed.
“Hello?” Teri’s voice was inquisitorial. This was a number she did not recognize.
“Ter, it’s me.”
“Jack.” He couldn’t tell if that sound in her voice was anger or relief. Maybe it was both. “What’s—?” “I’m good. It’s all good now. Thank you. Thank you for everything.”
And suddenly she was crying on the other end of the line. He did not interrupt her. A moment later her sobs subsided, and she said amid her tears, “God, I was so scared last night, I’ve been so scared, and all the time keeping this secret—”
“I know, I’m sorry, I really am,” he said, meaning it. It hadn’t been fair to expose her to danger. He’d already asked too much of her by just going under cover in prison. He’d told her, of course, but then he’d insisted that she maintain the secret. That hadn’t been hard — Jack’s work wasn’t well known to their friends and neighbors, and he traveled enough that a three-week absence, while unusual, wasn’t suspicious. But she’d slept every night with images of him in prison. “But that part’s over. The police know that I was undercover.”
“So you’re coming home?” she asked hopefully. “Kim hasn’t seen you in—”
“Today, later. But I can’t yet. I still have work to do.”
Even before she spoke, he sensed the change in tone. It was as though the word work had opened a huge chasm between them that no cell phone could reach across. “Okay,” was all she said.
“Ter, you know, what I’m wor— when I’m involved in something like this, I—”
“I know, Jack. It’s important. I’ll see you when you get home.”
18. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1 P.M. AND 2 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
1:00 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Ryan Chappelle was feeling more like himself. That is to say, he was feeling peevish and unhappy. Of course, at this particular moment he had two reasons to be unhappy. The first was that someone had given him a barbiturate overdose. The second was that Jack Bauer, of all people, had saved him.
It did not occur to Chappelle to admire Bauer for the sacrifices he’d made in the last few weeks. Not a day went by without some field agent somewhere surrendering his blood or his family time for the sake of his country. The possibility that Bauer might give more than others was, in Chappelle’s opinion, overshadowed by the man’s willingness (he would say eagerness) to flout policy and procedure.
As for the fact that Bauer had been instrumental in getting close to Zapata, well, as far as Chappelle was concerned, that proved his own good use of resources.
Chappelle considered Zapata his personal nemesis. Chappelle despised terrorists. He considered them evil and immoral, villains willing to kill and maim the innocent to achieve their ends. But at least they had an end goal, abhorrent as it was. Zapata was not immoral, he was amoral. He had no end in mind; he simply worked toward the deconstruction of the world as it was. Anarchy. Without leaders. Preposterous. The man had to be destroyed.
“You wanted to see me?”
Chris Henderson entered the office where Chappelle had made himself comfortable.
Chappelle motioned for him to sit down. When Henderson had settled in, he said, “This Internal Affairs investigation is heating up.”
A look of disgust crossed Henderson’s face. “It’s all anyone’s talking about.”
“From what I’ve read, it looks like Jack Bauer’s the one who’s been doing the talking. About you.”
The scowl on Henderson’s face deepened, his frown lines becoming sinkholes. “I assume Jack said what he thought, even though he’s wrong.”
Chappelle nodded. “Being wrong never occurs to him. The man’s a hard-headed smart ass. Frankly, I’d love to see him brought down a notch or two.” Henderson hesitated. “Is this what you called me in to talk about?”
The Regional Director seemed not to have heard him. “Between you and me, I’ve been tempted to pack his parachute myself, if you know what I mean, then let him jump out of the plane and just see what happens. But something always holds me back. Maybe it’s my own sense of right and wrong, but no, now that I think of it, it’s not that.”
“I’ll bite. What is it?” Henderson asked.
Chappelle leaned forward. “It’s that as much as he’s a rule-breaking pain in the ass, Bauer does what he does to get the job done. He doesn’t do things to stop the job from getting done.”
“Is there a point here?”
“Yes,” Chappelle said. “You know how much I dislike Bauer, and that’s even though I admit he tries to help the mission. Do you have any idea how miserable I’d make someone who was actually trying to stop the mission?”
Henderson’s mouth went dry. He tried to smile. “Pretty miserable, I’ll bet.”
“Pretty goddamned miserable,” Chappelle agreed. His eyes did not waver from Henderson’s face. Like a snake, he did not blink. “If I found out that someone tried to sabotage the Zapata mission just to save their own skin from the Internal Affairs investigation, especially if they did something to me as part of their sabotage, I’m going to personally see to it that person is crucified.”
“What the hell are you implying with—”
“That’s all,” Chappelle said.
1:11 P.M. PST Santa Monica
Sergei’s address was easy enough to find — a small Craftsman just north of Main Street, on the border between Santa Monica and Venice. The neighborhood was straight middle class, and except for the brown, untended grass, the Ukrainian’s house blended in perfectly well.
Jack climbed the three steps to the porch and pushed the old metal doorbell. There was a slightly rusty screen door that opened outward, but he left it closed and waited. After a moment, the inner door was opened by a small man who barely reached Jack’s shoulder. He studied Jack with bright, aggressive eyes, and Jack had that same, cautionary feeling one gets while being sniffed by a guard dog.
“Malenkiy, let him in!” someone ordered from inside.
Jack pulled open the metal screen door as Malenkiy stepped back. Jack walked into a house that looked like it had been decorated by a couple of college boys, with haphazard furniture and cheap prints on the walls. The hardwood floor was badly scratched in places.
Sergei was sitting on a brown faux leather couch. He had the same sharp eyes as Malenkiy, and they wore the same hawklike nose and thin brown hair, but Sergei was much bigger, taller and broader than Jack. He was reading the newspaper. Jack noticed that Malenkiy remained behind him and off-angle, ready for trouble.
The drug dealer folded the paper and stood up. “Mr. Felix Studhalter,” he said in a gentle accent, offering his hand. Jack shook it firmly. “We do not know each other. I must search you.”
“I’m carrying,” Jack said. “I’m sure your guy is, too.”
Sergei nodded. “I am not concerned about guns.”
Jack understood. He’d re-equipped himself with a SigSauer, which he carried in a pancake holster at his hip. He popped it out and laid it on the edge of the couch, then slipped off his jacket and pulled up the long-sleeved T-shirt until his chest was visible. He turned around slowly. He was not wearing a wire.
“Good,” Sergei said pleasantly. “Now we can do business. Why, again, have you hurried up our deal? Something about St. Louis?”
“Oklahoma City,” Jack corrected. “Like I said, the sooner the deal is done, the more I make.”
“Who is in Oklahoma?” Sergei asked.
Jack shook his head. “I make money because I know them and you don’t.”
Sergei sighed. “We are all middlemen. So, this is how it works. You and me and Malenkiy are going to our little warehouse. We are going alone, and you are bringing cash. For cash, you get crystal meth an
d the truck it comes in—”
“Do I know the truck is clean?”
“Your grandmother could sell it to a policeman,” Sergei assured him.
“And what makes you think that, all by myself, I’m going to go somewhere with the two of you with a bag full of cash?”
Sergei grinned. “Because it is the only way you will get the deal.”
Jack made a show of hesitating, assessing Sergei and his miniature. The truth, of course, was that this arrangement was fine with him. Tucked into the compartment under the back area of his SUV was a briefcase full of cash courtesy of CTU. Jack was perfectly content to hand it over and drive away with the meth, which he’d deliver to Smiley Lopez in return for information. LAPD and the FBI could sort out the gang-bangers and the drug dealers. He had a global anarchist to catch.
1:22 P.M. PST Don’t-Shoot-the-Messengers Carson, California
Gabriel “Pan” Panatello hung up the phone, having just received the most unusual phone call of his life. He was the owner of Don’t-Shoot-the-Messengers, a messenger company (and a name) he’d inherited from his jerk brother-in-law a few years back. He’d taken it partly because his wife nagged him to do it, and partly because the messenger service was a convenient front for his small-time drug deals and transportation business. The thievery wasn’t much more profitable than the actual delivery, but at least it wasn’t boring pencil-neck work. Pan got to keep his hand in the pot even though, as far as his wife, Tapia, knew, he’d gone legit. Plus, it allowed him to give work to some of his pals from Folsom, and that made him feel like a hero.
This call, now. This call was way out of the ordinary. Ironically, as crazy as the job was, the first thing Pan did was very pencil-neckish. He called his insurance company to make sure the insurance was up to date on all six of his cars. ’Course, he realized right away that that was stupid — he couldn’t use all his own cars for this. Maybe one, but the rest had to come from somewhere else. So next he made the first of several calls to some of the guys from the cell block.
“Hey, Doogie, it’s Pan. Yeah, listen, man, you still looking for work? Naw, man, not exactly. You still got a car? Yeah, I got my own, but I can’t — just listen. You’re gonna need your own car, and it might not run too good afterward, but I’ll give you a legit loaner. Okay, here’s what you gotta do. ”
1:25 P.M. PST Santa Monica
A few minutes after they left Sergei Petrenko’s house in the drug dealer’s big black Mercedes, Jack and his two new acquaintances pulled up in front of a building that was neither a warehouse nor little. They were parked in front of a large condominium complex. Sergei had activated his phone and muttered something in Russian or Ukrainian, which brought a man in a black leather coat and black cap out of the complex’s security gate. The man sauntered across a short strip of lawn, jerked open the back door of the Mercedes, and dropped himself heavily into the backseat next to Malenkiy and behind Jack.
Jack’s heart had started to pound in his chest, trying to crack his ribs from the inside, the minute the man in black had appeared. He knew this man. It was the assassin he’d run into at Smiley Lopez’s house.
Sergei spoke to the newcomer in Russian, and Jack picked up the name Franko. Franko replied in terse, unhappy sentences. Sergei responded sympathetically, but Malenkiy laughed. Franko thumped him in the chest, and the two began to squabble.
“You’ll have to forgive my friends,” Sergei said to Jack. “This one has had a bad day.”
Jack stuck to the things that would concern Stud-halter. “Now there are three of you and one of me.”
Sergei nodded agreeably. “Your math is excellent. I will not try to trick you when we count kilos.”
They dropped down onto Pacific Coast Highway, headed for the beach.
1:31 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Ryan Chappelle was on the phone with Tony Almeida, discussing the Pacific Rim Forum site down at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey.
“If we’re going to cover this by tonight,” Tony was saying from the freeway, “we need to scramble several full teams.”
“Who’s on security already?” Chappelle asked. “Somebody’s got to—”
“Wong is liaison,” Tony said, referring to a junior field agent assigned to coordinate information between CTU and the other agencies (including LAPD, the FBI, and security personnel for each country involved in the conference). “But we’re talking about eleven countries.”
Chappelle outlined a strategy: rank the countries by order of importance and impact from Jemaah Islamiyah’s perspective, starting with Indonesia; analyze the schedule of each country and look for anomalies that might create openings; examine the protocol written for installation security at the Ritz-Carlton. The list was extensive.
“Hold on,” Chappelle said. “I’m getting buzzed that Peter Jiminez is on the line. Some kind of emergency.” Chappelle put Tony on hold and took Jiminez’s line off hold. “What is it, Peter?”
“He surprised me, sir,” Peter said. “I’m sorry, Almeida and Myers said he was compliant. I let my guard down. I’m sorry—”
The hair on the back of Chappelle’s thin neck stood on end. “Talk sense, Agent Jiminez. What are you talking about?”
“Felix Studhalter,” Peter explained. “He escaped.”
Chappelle swore. He dialed the number of the cell phone Jack Bauer was carrying, but all he got was an out-of-service signal.
1:38 P.M. PST Topanga Canyon
The weather wasn’t hot enough to attract a huge beach crowd, so Pacific Coast Highway was open. Sergei Petrenko’s Mercedes cruised up the coast, reaching Topanga Canyon in no time, and turned up the winding highway into the Santa Monica Mountains that separated L.A.’s inland valley from the ocean. East of Santa Monica, where the mountains looked down on Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and downtown, the hills were stacked with expensive “Hollywood Hills” homes. Out here, though, on the fringe of Los Angeles county, the mountains looked and felt rural thanks to distance and no-growth laws. Long before it was a highway, Topanga Canyon had been a footpath for Native Americans and the winding, double-ess curves of the road memorialized the ancient trail.
Jack couldn’t have known it, but to reach Topanga he had passed Temescal Canyon, where Zapata was held up, and if he had traveled on Topanga Canyon up into the heart of the San Fernando Valley, he would have arrived at the safe house where Adrian Tintfass was having lunch.
But he couldn’t have known, of course. Besides, his mind was thoroughly preoccupied with Franko sitting right behind him. After several anxious minutes, Jack decided that Franko either wasn’t going to look closely at him, or hadn’t seen him well enough to identify him. He therefore settled into a watchful quiet as the three Ukrainians spoke to one another in Russian.
The Mercedes climbed up the steep road into Topanga Canyon. For several miles there were no buildings at all, just the bare beauty of the chapparal. Jack pulled his cell phone — actually, Studhalter’s cell phone — out of his pocket and checked it: no bars.
“No service up here,” Sergei pointed out.
As the road leveled out at the top of the pass, they drove through the tiny hamlet of Topanga. Several unmarked lanes branched out from the main highway, and Sergei took one that was almost invisible under two huge oak trees.
This lane was paved for a hundred yards, then turned to uneven dirt. As the Mercedes bounced along, Sergei spat a curse in Russian.
Franko, from the back, answered in English. “You’re an old woman, complaining about your bladder. We have to pave the road or you got to get yourself a fucking truck.”
Sergei scoffed. “I didn’t come to America to be driving a truck.” Several jarring minutes brought them to a shack that must have been someone’s mountain cabin or hunting lodge, once upon a time. Although more rustic and a bit more run-down than the house in Santa Monica, it impressed Jack with the same quality: not so run-down as to attract attention, not so well-kept that it prevented the owners from worthi
er pursuits.
There were already two cars parked in a wide dirt patch in front of the shack: an old seventies Dodge truck that looked like it belonged, and a BMW 560i that didn’t. Sergei parked next to the BMW. All four men got out and walked up the dirt patch to the house.
Now or never, Jack thought. He turned to look around, staring squarely into Franko’s face. Franko stared back, his eyes vaguely threatening. There was no sign of recognition in his eyes.
They walked into the building, which was neither a mountain cabin nor a hunting lodge. It was a crystal meth lab. Crystal meth. Methamphetamine. Tina, a corruption of sixteen, from one-sixteenth of an ounce. Providing a cheap, powerful high, crystal meth was rapidly replacing cocaine and heroin as the suburban drug of choice.
“You will excuse if we don’t go inside,” Sergei said. Jack understood. Meth labs were notoriously dangerous places because the chemicals, including ephedrine, being boiled down were notoriously unstable. Meth labs didn’t just catch on fire; they were immediately engulfed in flames. “This place blows,” Jack observed, “you’re going to burn down the whole mountain.”
Sergei shrugged. “This place blows, either I am safe in my house or I am inside there. Either way, is not my problem. Inside here, we produce half a million hits every two days. That’s a whole lot of tina for five dollars a hit.”
Jack made use of the information Studhalter had given him. “I never said five dollars.” “Relax, we are friends here, relax,” Sergei laughed. “Five dollars for the user. For you, two dollars.”
Jack nodded satisfactorily.
The door opened and two more people came out. One was another hard-looking Slavic man, although this one lacked the bright, intelligent eyes of the two Petrenkos. The other was an anachronism — a beautiful woman with long blond hair, tied into a thick Viking braid down her back. She hopped off the porch and threw her arms around Sergei, who buried his face in her neck and hair, growling pleasurably at her in Russian.