by John Whitman
Malenkiy chuckled and whispered something to Franko, who laughed and nudged Jack. “Our combination scientist and cock tease. Sergei pays her double because he’s trying to get up her skirt. He’ll give half the money in that briefcase to get his piston greased.”
“Is that my truck?” Jack asked, pointing at the Dodge.
Sergei heard him and dislodged himself from the blond. “Yeah. Give us a few minutes to load the shit and count your cash, and we’ll be done.” He barked an order to Malenkiy and the slow-moving Slav, who both went into the shack and came out with bundles
wrapped in plastic.
“I’ve seen you around.”
Jack’s heart popped up into his throat. Franko was staring sidelong at him. “Or you look like someone I know.”
Problems were best faced squarely, so Jack turned straight to the Russian. “I doubt you’ve seen me. I haven’t been in town that long.”
Franko chewed his lip for a minute, then shrugged. Jack turned away, but felt the other man’s eyes linger on him.
“Okay,” Sergei said, apparently resigned to the fact that he wasn’t getting any more action from the blond. “Let’s see the money.”
Jack held up the briefcase, but before Sergei could take it, a phone in his pocket rang.
“Cell service?” Jack said curiously.
Sergei tapped his own temple. “Satellite phone. For the man who has everything.”
He pulled the phone — a bit larger than the average cell phone — out of his jacket and answered in Russian. “Oh, sure,” he said, nodding politely at Jack and excusing himself with a gesture. He stepped away and said, “I don’t think so, no. Well, if you say so. I’ll talk to you later.” He hung up and turned back to Jack. “I’m sorry. It’s rude, but business. You know. Now, the money?”
Jack held the briefcase flat and popped it open, revealing the top layer of twenties and fifties. When he looked up from the case, he was staring at the black hole of a handgun. He frowned. “Do you want a check instead?”
Sergei spoke in Russian, and Franko drew his own gun. The blond watched curiously. Malenkiy, just coming out of the house with another load, set it down and produced his gun. The fourth Slav stopped, still holding his parcel.
“I get some funny calls on my satellite phone,” Sergei said. “That one was from Felix Studhalter.”
19. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2 P.M. AND 3 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
2:00 P.M. PST Topanga Canyon
Without hesitation, Jack tossed the briefcase at Sergei and lunged toward Franko. But the Russian had been tough enough when he was outnumbered. Now he was even more difficult. The muzzle of his gun clipped Jack across the temple, spinning him around. Jack allowed the spin to carry him full-circle and he swung his fist against the Russian’s head. But Sergei dropped low, hugging Jack’s legs and shouldering him to the ground. Jack sat up, grabbing Sergei by the hair to peel him off, but Malenkiy had reached them by then and Jack caught his booted foot squarely in the
face. The little Russian put his knee on Jack’s chest and jabbed a gun against his cheek. “Don’t,” Sergei ordered. “Too close to the house. And too close to the road for the sound.”
Jack’s head was spinning from the kick, but he felt their hands paw him, taking his gun. He had no idea what sort of screw-up had given Studhalter the opportunity to call, but if he survived this, someone was going to catch hell.
“I don’t know who you are. I don’t care, either. I’m taking your money and my tina,” Sergei said.
Jack gambled. “I’ll tell you who I am. I work for the government, but I’m not here to sting you. I’m here to buy your crystal meth and use it as a trade for another case. Wait!” At the word government, the little man had cocked back the hammer on his weapon. “Wait! I don’t give a shit about your meth lab or your drug dealing. That’s not my job. I have another case and I need the meth for a trade. That’s all. Take the money, give me the meth, and it’ll be just like you sold to Studhalter.”
“Except you work for the government,” Sergei observed. He barked in Russian. Jack heard Malenkiy’s name, but understood nothing else. Malenkiy kept his knee on Jack’s chest and the gun in his face, and Jack was sure the little man would use it despite Sergei’s orders, if Jack gave him a reason, so he kept still for the moment, staring past the gun and Malenkiy’s eager eyes and up into the blue sky. It wasn’t often Jack looked up at the sky. It was clear today, and peaceful.
Sergei and Franko seemed to be finishing the transfer of crystal meth from the lab to the truck. A moment later, Jack felt hands haul him roughly to his feet. Sergei, Malenkiy, Franko, and the slow one all had weapons trained on him. Sergei barked at Malenkiy, who nodded, while he and Franko backed away and then hurried over to the truck.
Malenkiy snapped at Jack in Russian and pointed up the hill past the little shack.
“That way,” the other Russian said. His forehead sloped and his lower jaw was slack. He eyed Jack curiously.
Jack saw no opportunity to attack, so he acquiesced, walking up the hill with the two Russian men on either side of him and the girl behind. Uphill from the house was a trail winding its way through the brown grass. He followed it, always with the men flanking him and their guns steady. The trail climbed to the top of a small rise. There it made a sharp turn, running along the edge of a ridge overlooking a steep barranca. The trail continued into the mountains, but the Russians stopped at the edge of the precipice.
Jack had to make his move now. He tensed his muscles, but before he could do anything, Malenkiy gurgled. Jack glanced at him. His body was stiff and trembling, his eyes wide as choking sounds came from his throat. Taser wires protruded from his body, reaching backward. Jack just had time to realize that the blond girl held the taser when she kicked the slow-witted Russian in the chest, sending him backward over the cliff, tumbling down the hill.
With superhuman effort, the vicious little Russian tore the taser barbs out of his body. He tried to raise his gun, but Jack pushed it aside and punched Malenkiy in the face. The little man followed his comrade down the hill.
Jack turned to the blond girl, who had rearmed her taser. Her face was cool and calm as an iceberg. “Ivan?” he asked.
She spoke in perfect English. “Who the hell are you?” “Jack Bauer, Counter Terrorist Unit,” he explained. “And thanks.”
“Thanks? Jesus!” she said, anger melting her icy facade. “Do you have any idea how badly you screwed this?”
“Tell me later!” Jack said. He ran down the hill. He had to get that crystal meth.
The undercover FBI agent, “Ivan,” followed him. By the time he reached the shack again, he saw that the truck and the Mercedes were gone. He jumped into the BMW.
Ivan threw open the passenger door. “You don’t have the keys!”
“I’ve had a lot of practice.” He tore the panel out from under the dash and hot-wired the car in a few seconds. By this time Ivan was in the car with him. She scolded him as he kicked up dust on his way down the lane.
“Four months! Four months of that gorilla’s paws on my ass! And you come along and blow the whole operation!”
He reached the paved part of the lane and sped up, reaching the main highway in seconds. Dust drifting on the highway suggested that Sergei had turned right, inland, so he followed.
“What gives you the right to — aggh!” He burned rubber onto Topanga Canyon, throwing her almost into the driver’s seat.
“Seatbelt,” he cautioned. “I can’t explain even if I had time. I need that supply of crystal meth. I’m happy to bring down Sergei, but it’s not that important to me. My case is bigger.”
“Bigger! Bigger than four months of my—”
“Yeah,” he said, and focused on the road. The speedometer was up in the eighties already. The BMW’s tires squeaked warningly as they tried to grip the asphalt on the sharp turns. One curve came up faster than Jack realized, and the BMW rubbed against the metal guard rail. T
he blond shut up for a minute, her face losing all its color.
“Shit, you’re going to kill us.”
On a rare straight piece of road, Jack saw the Mercedes and the truck down below. He accelerated.
“Okay,” the woman said, her voice changing tone. “Okay, okay, we, um, got off on the wrong foot. I’m Sue. Agent Sue Mishler, FBI. Jesus!” At the next turn, the BMW lifted off its two left wheels for a second.
“Call for backup,” she said. “Why not call for backup!”
“No signal,” Jack grunted. But that wasn’t the reason. He couldn’t call for police backup. They would confiscate the meth, or at least tie it up with paperwork until he could extricate it, and he had no time.
Reckless driving closed the distance between them, and on the next straightaway Jack pulled up close behind the Mercedes. He used the driver’s console to lower the passenger side window, letting in the roar of the wind.
The silhouette looked more like Sergei. Jack saw him look into the rearview mirror and then look down without changing his demeanor. He must have glanced backward, seen a man and a woman in the BMW, and assumed all was going according to plan.
“Do you have a gun?” he asked over the noise.
Sue put her hand into her pocket, then hesitated. She engaged on a brief internal struggle, then produced a Glock.40.
“Get ready to shoot him.”
Jack gunned the engine and swerved into the opposite lane, pulling up next to the Mercedes. Sergei glanced over at them and the grin collapsed on his face. “Shoot him,” Jack advised.
“I can’t! He hasn’t done anythi—” The first two shots shattered the passenger window behind them.
Sue flinched, then swiveled her upper body like a turret and brought the Glock to bear. Jack kept his eyes on the road, but at the corner of his vision he saw her calmly squeeze off three rounds. The Mercedes veered away, clipping the back of the Dodge pickup and then disappearing from sight.
“Nice,” Jack said. “Now don’t shoot.” He needed the truck intact. The Dodge fishtailed a little, then straightened itself out. Jack pulled up even enough to see Franko appear startled, then recover and glance over at them. “Trade places!” Jack commanded. He slid over until he was practically on top of the FBI agent. She had no choice but to take his place at the wheel. She planned to pull over the moment she was at the wheel, but somehow during the switch Jack had plucked the gun from her hand.
“Son of a bitch!” she yelled.
“Stay with him!” Jack warned, seeing the BMW drop a little behind. But Sue Mishler was no trained driver. Jack saw that she was losing ground, the BMW’s nose now halfway down the side of the Dodge. Jack hauled himself up out of the window. The two vehicles rounded another hard curve, and Jack nearly flew off. He clutched at the windshield wiper and scrambled on to the hood. Gathering himself, he leaped across the space between the BMW and Dodge and landed heavily on the edge of the cargo bed, his face planted in the plastic wrap that covered kilos of meth.
Jack threw himself over the side and into the cargo bed. He tried to stand up, but the Dodge swerved violently as Franko tried to throw him off. Jack half crawled up to the outside of the cab and dropped low when he saw Franko raise an arm. He heard the shots only as short, sharp claps, all but drowned out by the roar of wind and engine. Blindly, Jack raised the Glock, so close it almost touched the glass, and poured six rounds into the cab as glass shrieked and shattered. In response, the engine roared but the truck swerved. Risking a look, Jack saw Franko slumped against the steering wheel like a rag doll. But they weren’t slowing down, so his dead weight had to be resting on the accelerator.
Through the front windshield, Jack saw the Dodge heading for the edge of a precipice.
He scrambled up and jack-knifed his body, nearly upside down, into the cab, grabbing onto the steering wheel and swerving away from the abyss. He couldn’t reach the brake, so he steered the truck as best he could as he wormed his way inside, pushing Franko’s blood-soaked corpse out of the driver’s seat. The Russian’s dead foot came off the gas pedal and the truck began to slow. Jack shoved Franko over to the passenger side and settled in. The truck belonged to him now.
Suddenly the dark shape of the BMW flew past him, swerved back into his lane, and started to slow down. She was a determined agent. She knew her duty. Jack liked her.
But that wasn’t going to stop him.
He reduced his speed for a moment, waiting until they’d cleared the precipice and were driving through a cut in the mountain with sheer walls on either side. Then he gunned his engine, lurching forward. The Dodge struck the back of the BMW to the sound of tortured metal.
Jack caught a glimpse of Sue Mishler’s surprised, frightened face as he ran her into the side of the mountain.
20. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 3 P.M. AND 4 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
3:00 P.M. PST Temescal Canyon
“No offense, but you seem a little overconfident to me,” Kyle Risdow said.
He and Zapata were sitting beside his backyard pool, enjoying the afternoon sunshine. Kyle was drinking a mojito and Zapata was nursing a Pacifico.
“Because I’m relaxing here?” Zapata said, closing his eyes and lifting his face up to the sun. His shaved head exposed more skin to the sun’s UV rays, and he found that he liked it. “It’s just about planning.”
“Not just that.Your plan itself. How do you know it’s going to work?”
“Oh,” Zapata said, a little wearily. “It’s not complex. Have you ever done Rubik’s Cube?”
“That puzzle thing? Can’t stand puzzles.”
Zapata wasn’t surprised. Kyle was not a creature of intellect or, really, of ambition. He was simply a creature of money. “Let me educate you. In the cube you create corners that are like anchors. Preserve them and you finish the puzzle. Break them up, and you fail. A few sections support the whole. Remove the small piece and the whole thing falls apart.”
“But that’s just a game,” Kyle said lazily. “Life is more dynamic, more flexible.”
“Not really.” He drank his beer. Seeing that Kyle was unsatisfied, he continued. “This idea is not original to me. The U.S. Army, for instance. Their strategies involve understanding what they call ‘centers of gravity.’ They try to understand what is most important in a battle, in an occupation. When they fail, it is because they do not identify the right center of gravity.”
“And you think you’ve found one that will do that will help throw this country into chaos.”
Zapata nodded.
3:05 P.M. PST Topanga Canyon
Sue Mishler was unconscious, but not badly hurt. She hadn’t been wearing her seatbelt during the pursuit. The BMW’s airbag had deployed when she hit the wall and the force of it had thrown her back against the driver’s seat, knocking her out. She might have a miserable case of whiplash, but her neck was fine.
Jack jumped back into the Dodge truck and drove off with the crystal meth. He had to get to Lopez.
3:07 P.M. PST Marina del Rey, California
Tony Almeida stood in the center of the wide, high-ceilinged lobby of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey. The hotel was, at the moment, the most beautiful fortress Tony had ever seen.
“Tight as a drum,” Nina said, voicing his thoughts. “If Jemaah Islamiyah is doing anything here, I don’t see how they’re going to succeed.”
Tony had to agree. A combination of local law enforcement, the FBI, and security units from the visiting nations had established a standard three-layer security system with a wide perimeter, including emergency response vehicles, a middle field of screens and checkpoints, and a final layer at the entrances and around the individual dignitaries. All meeting and public areas had been swept several times for bombs, and every guest not registered with the Pacific Rim Forum had been (unbeknownst to them) subjected to a background check. Even if he was right, and this was the terrorist target, the conference was as guarded as it could be.
“
Why is that son of a bitch always right?” Tony muttered.
“Who? Jack?” Nina said.
“Yeah. Every goddamned time.”
“No, he’s not!” Nina laughed. “Are you insane? Not even close.”
“You don’t think—”
“The thing about Jack isn’t that he’s always right. The thing is that he’s always eventually right. He just keeps fighting until he gets it right.” She shook her head and spoke with grudging admiration. “No, I always figured that Jack’s secret isn’t that he’s always right. It’s that he isn’t afraid to be wrong.”
3:14 P.M. PST Temescal Canyon
“Mao understood it,” Zapata was saying. Kyle was drowsy from the sun and alcohol, and he was nodding. Zapata noticed, but didn’t care. He was not without ego, and now and then he enjoyed fleshing out his theories. “Centers of gravity. That’s how he defeated the Nationalists in China. He understood that the goal wasn’t to win a certain piece of territory, it was to wear the enemy down. He fought and ran, fought and ran, making the enemy stretch his supply lines thin. The center of gravity wasn’t a line of battle, it was a method of fighting. Modern terrorists understand it. The center of gravity isn’t to be moral. It’s to terrify the enemy into changing his way of life. It is utterly effective.
“The system, as it is currently run, simply doesn’t work. There is no effort at equality. There will never be equality, of course. There never has been. But there is supposed to be a movement toward it. Things should get a little better. But they don’t. Seven hundred years ago an Aztec peasant was brutalized by his priest-kings. Five hundred years ago he was massacred by the Spaniards. And ten years ago he was oppressed by the aristocrats. No, it’s not working. It’s a puzzle without a solution. I’m going to break it. This country is the key. And the key to this country is its economy.”
3:20 P.M. PST Boyle Heights
Jack parked the truck in front of Smiley Lopez’s house. He’d crossed the east-west access of Los Angeles on Mulholland Drive, riding the spine of the Santa Monica Mountains to avoid as much traffic as possible. The Dodge’s bullet-ridden back window — not to mention the dead body crammed in the leg area of the cab — were bound to attract the attention of any policemen who saw it.