24 Declassified: Chaos Theory 2d-6

by John Whitman

  Smiley Lopez was sauntering out of his house by the time Jack exited the truck. The gang leader wore a plaid shirt over his wife-beater now. His thumbs were stuck in his pockets and he walked belly first, nodding his head admiringly.

  “No shit,” he said. “You got the stuff.”

  Jack nodded. “And I brought you a present.” He opened the passenger door. Franko’s dead face stared out at them.

  “No shit,” Lopez said again. “You gotta come work for me full-time, homes.”

  Jack shook his head. “Zapata.”

  Lopez clicked his tongue. “Come inside.”

  He turned and walked up the steps with Jack close behind.

  “You know, that pendejo was one of us back in the early days. Shit, he was even one of the ones that got us thinking of going big, organizing and shit. But he didn’t stick around. He still comes around once in a while.”

  “You guys do him favors?” Jack asked. “We don’t do favors for nobody,” Lopez retorted. He opened the front door. “He pays.”

  They walked inside. Jack saw another gang-banger standing by the couch. It took him a moment to realize it was Oscar, and that Oscar was holding a gun.

  “Hey, ese.”

  3:26 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  “How could you let that happen!” Ryan Chappelle fumed.

  Peter Jiminez blushed. “I blew it.”

  “No!” the Regional Director said sarcastically.

  “He sandbagged me. He gave up so easy, I didn’t expect any trouble—” Chappelle sneered. “You fell asleep and put this whole mission in jeopardy.” “Not to mention one of our agents,” added Christopher Henderson, hovering nearby.

  “Is. is there any word?” Jiminez asked timidly.

  “No,” Henderson replied. “We can only hope for the best.”

  3:27 P.M. PST Boyle Heights

  Jack felt the pressure of the gun tucked in his waistband, but he knew he couldn’t get to it in time. Lopez was standing to his right. He’d have to go for the gang leader and hope Oscar was afraid to shoot his boss.

  “I got out, too,” Oscar said. “But no one seemed to care much about me.”

  “Funny thing, though,” Lopez added, “somebody wants you dead, and they pay for it. So I figure now that we have the tina, we just—”

  Jack lunged to his right. Oscar squeezed off one round and then, as Jack expected, he stopped as the line of fire swept across Lopez. Jack wrapped his left arm around Lopez’s neck and ducked behind him as he drew the Glock.

  “Go back to jail, Oscar,” Jack said. “I’m through just beating you up.”

  Oscar’s eyes widened and he shouted something in Spanish. Lopez replied angrily in the same language until Jack choked off the reply. “I’m counting to three,” Jack warned Oscar, who continued to point the gun at him.

  “One. ” He fired. Oscar’s head snapped back and he fell. Before he hit the ground, Jack punched the muzzle of the Glock into Lopez’s temple and shoved him forward. The Salvatrucha stumbled and turned around to face Jack and the gun.

  “I’m done playing with you,” Jack stated. “I want Zapata.”

  “I’m not telling you sh—”

  Jack shot him in the foot. Lopez screamed and kicked his foot back in pain, falling onto his side and clutching his foot, pouring a stream of Spanish obscenities. Jack moved forward and put his knee on the Salvatrucha’s chest, pressing the gun against his cheek. “Last chance.”

  “Risdow!” Lopez said with the pistol jammed into his face. “Kyle Risdow.” Jack kept his knee down but eased the pressure off the gun. “Who is he?”

  “No fucking idea!” Lopez practically sobbed. The bullet had shattered his foot. “Zapata doesn’t tell me shit. I just heard the name once.”

  Jack smacked Lopez’s forehead. “Who hired Oscar to kill me?”

  But Lopez was too busy crying in pain. Jack patted him down to make sure he had no weapons, although the gang-banger looked too far gone to be a threat. He pulled his cell phone out.

  3:41 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Ryan Chappelle took Bauer’s call. “What have you got?”

  “Kyle Risdow,” Jack said. “Run that name and tell me where to go. Also, send someone over here. I’ve got someone here who knows who’s trying to kill me.”

  Chappelle paused. Almeida and Myers were still in Marina del Rey, along with most of Henderson’s field agents. He didn’t have many choices. He put the phone back to his ear. “I’m sending Peter Jiminez.”

  A few minutes later, Jamey Farrell was watching her screen fill up with information on Kyle Risdow. There were six of them in the Los Angeles area, but Jamey began to weed them out quickly. Two of them were grandfathers. One was mentally disabled. Two others were incarcerated in Folsom and Chico, respectively. The last one lived in Temescal Canyon.

  3:46 P.M. PST Boyle Heights

  Jack couldn’t wait for Peter to arrive. He pulled Oscar’s belt off his corpse and used it to strap Lopez’s hands behind his back. He didn’t worry about the feet.

  He found two sets of keys on the coffee table next to a wide flat ashtray. He took both sets out back where two cars were parked — a 70s Cadillac and a silver Mercedes 560SL. Jack took the Mercedes and raced toward Temescal Canyon.

  3:48 P.M. PST Staples Center

  Mark Kendall moved in front of the mirror in his basement warmup room, 238 pounds of muscle bobbing and weaving, dropping down into a sprawl as an imaginary opponent rushed him. To the amateur observer, he moved like a huge, muscled cat, explosive and slick. But Mark wasn’t an amateur. He saw himself as he was: an older version of himself, a half step slower, a half thought behind.

  Kendall popped back up and pivoted, working on his footwork. As he did, the door opened and a young man walked in, then froze.

  “Oh, damn, wrong room,” the man said. Their eyes locked. It was Jake Webb, his opponent. They’d met face to face at the weigh-in yesterday, but today was different. Today was fight day.

  Webb bowed out without another word. Kendall watched him back up, and all he could think of was how young and strong the other fighter looked. He turned back to the mirror and stared at his face, with its bent nose and rough edges. He wanted to say that his skin sagged from too many punches, but he knew it wasn’t the fight he saw. It was age.

  The envelope. The money. His daughter. These were the things he saw as he continued to punch at the mirror.

  3:54 P.M. PST Temescal Canyon

  Twice black-and-whites had rolled up behind Jack, sirens blaring, but both times they’d been waved off by calls from CTU. Breaking every law that got in his way, Jack reached Temescal Canyon in record time. He was out of the car practically before it stopped rolling. Without hesitation he walked up to the house, then swung around to the side gate, which was unlocked. He swung around and passed by the pool until he came to a set of French doors. Those doors, too, were unlocked, so Jack walked in. At just the same moment a bald man walked out of the kitchen and stared at him in surprise.

  Jack raised his gun. “Federal agent! You’re under arrest.”

  21. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 4 P.M. AND 5 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

  4:00 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Seth Ludonowski didn’t like what he saw. While Jamey had been running down information on Kyle Risdow, he had been digging up data on Encep Sungkar for Tony Almeida. There was no doubt he was a bad guy, and no doubt that, given the chance, he would love to disrupt an event as important as the Pacific Rim Forum. But Jack’s cautionary comment — to suspect any information that Zapata allowed them to get — had stuck with him.

  He had pursued the connection between Sungkar and Zapata — Sungkar had gotten hold of weapons, which he then traded to Zapata for a computer virus.

  It occurred to him that they’d assumed Sungkar had contacted Zapata. But since tracking Sungkar, they’d gathered a whole portfolio of data on him.

  “Jamey, am I
crazy?” he asked.

  “To work here,” she muttered from her terminal.

  “No, I mean it. Will you look at this?”

  She sighed and stood up, then leaned over to his terminal. For a moment the rows of phone numbers, date lines, and names meant nothing to her. Then, as she assessed the information, her face took on the same confused look that Seth wore.

  “Well, there must be communication sources we missed. A cell phone number, a pay phone. ”

  Seth shrugged. “Okay, but we have all these sources, all used several times. You think he was careful the first time and then not again?”

  “All we can do is guess,” Jamey admitted. “But if this is right, then Sungkar didn’t get in touch with Zapata. Zapata’s people were the ones who started negotiations with Sungkar.”

  4:02 P.M. PST Temescal Canyon

  “Name!” Jack said, grabbing the man by the shirt and pushing him to the ground. The man didn’t struggle at all, but spread his hands out in compliance.

  “R-Risdow!” he said in a quavering voice. “Kyle!”

  Jack yelled him down, scanning with his eyes and his gun. “Who else is here?”

  “No one,” the man whispered.

  Jack waited another moment, listening. His breath came short, too short for so little exertion. He hadn’t slept in longer than he could remember. Fatigue was starting to get to him. It occurred to him that he should have had the area sealed off, called for backup. Was exhaustion clouding his judgment? But no, police backup might have made too much noise. CTU didn’t have any other agents to send. He’d done the right thing.

  “Get up,” he said, hauling the man to his feet. Risdow was short, with a shaved head and green eyes. “Who are you?” “Federal agent,” Jack said again impatiently. “Where’s Zapata?”

  “Who?”

  Jack glared at him. “The last guy who made me ask twice, I shot him in the foot.”

  Risdow believed him. Jack could see it in his eyes. He watched the familiar internal struggle of the prisoner about to break. There was no question that he would break. He just had to put up a fight for a moment longer so he felt better about himself.

  “Gone,” Risdow gasped as though he’d been holding his breath. “He said he had something important to do.”

  Jack put the gun to Risdow’s head. “I’m in no mood for games.”

  “Okay, okay!” Risdow squealed. His eyes went nearly crossed trying to see the gun touching his forehead.

  “I know you know Zapata. I know you know what he’s up to,” Jack said, although in truth he wasn’t sure. All he really had was the word of an MS–13 gang leader. But he didn’t have much time left, so he had to push. “Tell me what his target is.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Risdow pleaded. Jack studied his face, listening carefully to his voice. There was a tension in the voice and posture of the innocent, a particular desperation caused by the fear of being misunderstood. Jack saw it in the stress on Risdow’s face and heard it in his trembling voice.

  “Yes, you do,” he said anyway, leveraging the man’s fear. “You’ve worked with him before. He’s told you something.”

  “Nothing!”

  “Something,” Jack snapped back. “A place, a name.”

  “Well. ” That was it. Risdow hesitated, but he was already broken. Interrogation subjects often hesitated right before they gave up their secrets. It made them feel better afterward. “He said something about the Pacific Rim Forum. That’s all I know!” he added when Jack started to press further.

  The conference, Jack thought. Tony was right. “Is he on his way there?”

  “I guess,” the man said. “I swear I don’t know.”

  He kept his eyes on Risdow while he reached for his phone.

  “Look, can you let me go?” Risdow asked. “I’m not involved in this, I swear. I’m a businessman. I don’t do violence.”

  Jack was about to ask him if he’d heard of conspiracy or aiding and abetting, then tell Risdow to go to hell, but he hesitated. He was on Zapata’s trail now, and it was very possible that Zapata didn’t know it. The anarchist had no reason to think MS–13 would have helped him, and in fact Smiley had tried to betray him even after Jack had gone way outside the lines to strike a deal. The last thing Jack needed now was to scare him off.

  4:16 P.M. PST Boyle Heights

  Peter Jiminez stood in Smiley Lopez’s living room and called headquarters. “Henderson? It’s me. Yes, I’m here. The guy’s dead.”

  4:17 P.M. PST Temescal Canyon

  Jack hurtled down Temescal Canyon, then swerved onto PCH, determined to get to Marina del Rey as soon as possible. If there was an attack there, Tony would need all the help he could get. The ocean was to Jack’s right, the sun just starting to drop down behind his right shoulder. He glanced in the rearview mirror. His eyes stung from dryness and fatigue. Forget it, he told himself. You’ve been here before. Energy was an act of will. Victory was an act of will. He would not be tired.

  His phone rang. “Bauer.”

  He heard Ludonowski’s voice. “It’s Seth—”

  “The Forum,” Jack interrupted. “It’s the Pacific Rim Forum.”

  Jack heard white noise, then: “It can’t be.”

  Bauer snapped, “I just told you it is. I got it from—”

  “Jack, it’s Jamey on the line, too. The forum isn’t right. We tracked the communications between Zapata and Jemaah Islamiyah. They’re pretty one-way. It was Zapata who initiated the conversations. He’s the one who put the idea out there. The e-mail that mentioned ‘Papa Rashad’s factory’ came from an IP address at a Starbucks a block from the Biltmore where Zapata was staying. Another came from a café in Pacific Palisades, less than a mile from Risdow’s address.”

  Jack absorbed this information quickly. “You’re talking about what I was talking about. Zapata making us chase our own tails.”

  “Giving us a pattern to follow,” Seth observed.

  “Then he lied to Risdow, too,” Jack said, accelerating through a yellow light. “He seemed sure it was the forum.”

  “How do you know?” Seth asked.

  “We can ask him when he gets in,” Jamey said.

  “I’m not bringing him in,” Jack replied.

  “I know,” Jamey replied, sounding a bit confused. “The police are.”

  Her bewilderment was contagious. Jack felt it creep through the phone into his chest. “What are you talking about?”

  “The police. They collared Risdow. We put an APB out automatically, even though you were headed for his house. Santa Monica PD picked him up on Lincoln.”

  Jack swerved out of his lane and onto the sidewalk, standing up on the brakes and bringing the borrowed Mercedes to a halt inches from the fence of a public parking area.

  “Are you saying Kyle Risdow was on Lincoln Avenue five minutes ago?” Jamey was now impatient as well as confused. “Well, yeah.” “I just came from his house. I was talking to him five minutes—”

  Pressure welled up in Jack’s chest, threatening to burst like a capped volcano. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t have made such an amateurish—

  “Bring up a photo of Risdow. Tell me what he looks like.”

  Seth answered. “Hold on. Driver’s license photo from a couple of years ago. Caucasian, pretty typical WASP-y type. Blond hair, blue eyes. Six-foot-one according to this—”

  “Damn it!” Jack yelled. Stupid. Bush league. Weak. Letting fatigue make him so sloppy.

  “Jack, what’s wrong?”

  He was too angry at himself to be embarrassed. “I think I just let Zapata go.”

  4:24 P.M. PST Sunset Boulevard, Pacific Palisades

  That had been interesting.

  Zapata was driving a rented Ford Mustang down Sunset Boulevard, careful to accelerate to the speed of the traffic around him. His heart was still beating rapidly, though with excitement or fear, he wasn’t sure. Maybe they were the same.

  He was forced to acknowledge the presence
of luck. As a general rule, he did not believe in it. Luck was the name given by the uneducated to unaccounted-for variables that happened to unfold in their favor. He, Zapata, had always believed that all variables could be calculated if one were meticulous.

  This particular event, however, could only be fortune smiling down on him. He had not in his wildest dreams expected any government agent to make the connection between Kyle Risdow and himself. There was, quite literally, no connection that anyone could follow. For the first time in his adult life, Zapata had been utterly and completely shocked by the appearance of the blond man (his ID had said “Bauer”) at the back of the house, and because he believed in coincidences even less than he believed in luck, he knew for certain this was the same man who had killed Aguillar, the same blond man described by Franko, who. Ah.

  That was it.

  Synapses fired across his brain, bridging the gaps in the story. The blond man who “hadn’t acted like a cop” had saved Lopez. He was a government agent with some sort of special license. Maverick behavior. Zapata understood the premise without needing to know the details. They had sent a maverick after him, someone who did not follow the normal patterns of law enforcement behavior. Zapata saw all the events laid out before him like a storyboard. The agent was thrown in jail, befriended Ramirez, gotten close— literally, a door away. But Zapata had seen that coming. The minute Ramirez broke out of jail with a “friend,” Zapata had ordered Aguillar to kill him and Vanowen. But Aguillar had died, too, and Aguillar had an MS–13 tattoo. Bauer had tracked it to Lopez, and managed (again, luck!) to reach him before Franko could do his work.

  Zapata could not see how or why Lopez would have cooperated. Lopez could not have known that he had contracted Franko to kill him. As far as he knew, Lopez hadn’t even known about Risdow. But then, Zapata thought, Smiley was sharper than he showed and he kept his ears open. He could have heard Kyle’s name mentioned, and hoarded the information like a pack rat. But even if Lopez had information, why would he give it to a Federal agent? That part, Zapata could not fathom. There were not enough data.