24 Declassified: Operation Hell Gate 2d-1

by Marc A. Cerasini

  “If you’re to meet him at six, then you’re late,” she said.

  “That’s the point. I’m going to wait a few more minutes, scope out a couple of likely suspects from the people lingering near the clock. Then I’ll call Agent Ferrer on my cell, explain how I’m running late. If one of the people we’re watching answers his phone, I’ll know he’s the impostor.”

  Jack’s cell chirped in his hand, interrupting them.

  “Is it—?”

  “It’s CTU,” Jack told her. He answered, listened to Nina Myers for a moment. Finally he spoke. “I’ll tell her,” Jack said, ending the conversation.

  “Tell me what?” Caitlin demanded.

  “Back at CTU, Jamey Farrell is monitoring all New York City police frequencies and emergency channels. A few moments ago she intercepted a Police Department accident report.”

  Jack paused. Caitlin’s knees turned to water. “Tell me, Jack,” she said.

  “Shamus Lynch is dead. He was killed by an explosion inside a parking garage in Queens. At the scene of the accident, your brother, Liam, turned himself in. The police have him now. They’re holding him in protective custody.”

  Caitlin covered her mouth, shut her green eyes to stop the flow of tears that flooded them. “Ohgodthankgod,” she cried, throwing her arms around Jack’s neck.

  He held her for a moment, then pulled away to look into her face.

  “Listen to me very carefully. This whole thing is over for you now. Shamus is dead, Griffin is too busy running from CTU to chase after you. You don’t have to do this anymore. You can go to a policeman right now, any policeman, and ask him to put you in protective custody, too. In a few hours this will blow over. In the meantime, you’ll be safe. ”

  Caitlin pushed her hair back and shook her head. “No, Jack. I’m going to see this through…Look, me and my brother were a party to this bloody mess out of the gate. We didn’t mean to be, but now that I know we are, I want to help clean it up…If there are any charges against me and my brother, then maybe at the end of the day my helping you will help a judge see his way clear to goin’ easy on us. You understand?”

  Jack nodded and they went back to watching the crowd. It was Caitlin who spotted the most likely candidate.

  “How about that one, Jack?” she said, pointing.

  Bauer scoped the man through miniature tourist binoculars he’d bought at a newstand. The man was in his mid-thirties, physically fit, broad-shouldered, with either a dark complexion or a serious tan topped by golden, sun-bleached hair.

  “He’s the right age, and time is running out,” said Jack. “Let’s give it a try.”

  But just as Jack made the call, the blond man stepped behind the clock and out of sight. Meanwhile a voice answered on the second ring.

  “Agent Ferrer here.”

  “Jack Bauer. Look, I’m running a little late. Could you stay on the cell phone until I reach you. I’m with Caitlin, just outside Grand Central now. We’re on Forty-second Street. ”

  While Jack talked, Caitlin waited for the blond man to reappear. When he finally showed, he clutched a cell phone to his ear. She slapped Jack’s arm; he nodded. Jack had seen it, too. While Agent Ferrer continued to speak, Jack hit the mute button so the caller could not hear them.

  “Stay here,” Jack whispered. “I’m going to keep him on the line while I sneak up behind him, take him prisoner…”

  She watched as Jack hurried down the massive marble stairs to the main concourse. Within a few seconds, he’d vanished in the dense, fast-moving crowd.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Jack opened a hidden compartment on the cell phone case, extracted a tiny, single-wire headset. He slipped the wire over his head, the button-sized phones into his ear canal, the dot microphone under his chin without missing a beat in the conversation. Then he dropped the phone into his jacket, closed his right hand around the handle of his Mark 23.

  With the headset, Jack was able to shut out the ambient noise from the people around him — to concentrate on “Agent Ferrer’s” words and the noises around him. Immediately Jack heard the hollow sounds of the terminal as background to Ferrer’s voice, and he knew the impostor really was somewhere inside the terminus. While moving toward the central clock, Jack decided to see how much the impostor really knew.

  “Have you heard how the airport raids have gone?” asked Jack. “Did they stop the attacks in D.C., LA, Chicago…here in New York?”

  Ferrer was silent for a moment, then he dodged the question.

  “I’m not sure we should be discussing this on an unsecured line.”

  “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “How close are you, Special Agent Bauer?”

  Jack could hear impatience — and perhaps suspicion — in the man’s tone. Meanwhile Jack slipped between knots of people until he saw the blond man’s back. The impostor was only a few yards away now, still talking on his cell. In his Brooks Brothers suit, an attaché case in his hand, the impostor looked more like a stockbroker than an assassin, but Jack knew looks could be deceptive.

  “I’m almost there,” said Jack, stepping behind the man and slipping his weapon out of its holster. With the gun still behind his jacket, he shoved the barrel of the.45 into the blond man’s ribs. “In fact, I’m right behind you,” said Jack.

  The blond man lowered the cell, whirled to face Jack. “Hey, dude,” he cried. “At least say excuse me when you bump into—”

  The man saw the gun in Jack’s hands, only partially hidden in the folds of the jacket. He backed away.

  “Good try, Bauer,” the voice said in his ear. “But apparently you were stalking the wrong man.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Look up. Check on your friend.”

  On the mezzanine Jack saw Caitlin, face pale. Beside her, a tall man with dark skin and bleached blond hair clutched her arm. Despite his Western clothes, Jack recognized him from the files on his PDA.

  “Omar Bayat,” Jack whispered.

  “You recognize me,” Bayat replied. “I should be flattered.”

  “Let her go. Take me hostage, instead,” Jack insisted.

  “I’m not looking for a hostage, Mr. Bauer. I just want to get out of here without you following me.”

  “That’s fine. What do you want me to do?”

  “There’s a mailbox about fifty feet away. Do you see it?” Bayat asked.

  “I see it.”

  “I want you to walk over to that box and drop your cell phone and weapon into it.”

  “If I do that, what do I get in return?”

  “I’ll let this woman go, after I’m out of the station. Otherwise I’ll kill her on the spot with my bare hands, and no one in the crowd will be the wiser.”

  Jack hesitated.

  “You know I can do it, Bauer. Move to the mailbox now or she dies.”

  “I’m going,” said Jack. He was ten feet from the mailbox when the blond man Jack had accosted by mistake returned — with two New York City policemen in tow.

  “He’s the one!” The blond man pointed out Jack. “He pulled a gun on me!”

  Members of the crowd around Jack heard the blond man’s statement and moved to get out of the way. Jack used the crowd to shield himself as he turned and ran in the opposite direction. As he raced through the mob of commuters, Jack heard Omar Bayat laughing over his headset.

  “Wait, Bayat. Let her go,” Jack cried. “She can’t hurt you now and neither can I.”

  “She goes with me, Bauer,” Bayat replied. “A man named Griffin Lynch is anxious to meet her.”

  Jack heard the hiss of dead air. “Son of a bitch!”

  “Halt!” a voice barked. Jack heard screams and glanced over his shoulder. The policemen were still chasing him. One of them had his weapon out. Luckily, the man couldn’t get a clear shot because so many civilians were in the way. Jack continued to weave in and out of the crowd until he burst onto Forty-second Street.

  Traffic was heavy, but moving. Along Forty-secon
d Street, there were cars and trucks as far as the eye could see. Jack looked around, looking for a way out. At any moment, the policemen were going to emerge on the street, where they might just get a shot at him.

  Then, across the street, Jack spied a burly man sitting astride an idling Harley-Davidson motorcycle, an American flag waving on a short staff above the rear wheel. The bike was all chrome and rumbling engine.

  Perfect, thought Jack. Despite the traffic, he ran into the street, darting between moving cars. A taxicab driver refused to brake for him, so he rolled across the yellow hood. Landing on his feet beside the biker, Jack caught the man’s long ponytail, yanked him off the motorcycle.

  Before the man could stumble to his feet, Jack gunned the engine and sped away, racing down the sidewalk. Pedestrians scattered as he shot down the pavement for more than a block. Finally, confronted by a knot of tourists gathering under the awning of a hotel, Jack swerved back onto the street.

  Using his headset, Jack made contact with CTU. Chappelle answered the call. “Let me put you on speakerphone, Jack.”

  “The man who assumed Agent Ferrer’s identity is really Omar Bayat, Taj Ali Kahlil’s associate and the leading exporter of terrorism for the Taliban government in Afghanistan.”

  “How do you know, Jack?” Ryan asked. “Did you capture him? Neutralize him?”

  “No,” Jack replied. “Bayat managed to get past me and grab Caitlin. He’s holding her now. Is the tracer inside my watch working?”

  “Perfectly,” said Jamey Farrell. “I’m tracking Caitlin’s every move. Good thing you gave her your watch in case anything went wrong.”

  “Where is she right now?” Jack asked.

  “In a van, moving uptown on Third Avenue. The van’s at Fifty-seventh Street, moving into the right lane. I think it’s probably going to cross the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, into Queens. ”

  “We’d better not lose track of Caitlin,” said Jack. “Right now, she’s our only connection to the terrorists. Without her we don’t know where they’re hiding or what they’re up to.”

  23. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 7 P.M. AND 8 P.M. EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME

  7:19:43 P.M. EDT CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  The speakerphone at Ryan Chappelle’s workstation buzzed, interrupting him. Tired and cranky, Ryan punched the button. “Yes?”

  “It’s Nina. I just spoke with Roger Tyson, Deputy Director of the National Transportation Safety Board.”

  Ryan snickered. “Don’t tell me the airport raids hit the news? Does he want to apologize for doubting our intelligence?”

  “News of the raids has been suppressed so far, but Deputy Director Tyson did hear about them through bureaucratic channels. He called us with a warning.”

  Chappelle sat up. “A what?”

  “This afternoon a chartered CDC flight took off from Atlanta. It’s carrying bio-hazardous materials— samples of the deadly 1918 influenza strain—”

  “Why the hell weren’t we told? CTU should have received the same security report as the other agencies!”

  “The flight was mentioned in the daily DSA security alert, but no one here at CTU made the connection. We should have received a second alert when the aircraft left the ground, but we were shut out.”

  Ryan frowned. “What do you mean shut out?”

  “It was Hensley,” Nina replied. “According to Tyson, the alert was issued directly to the FBI. Apparently Hensley convinced his superiors to keep CTU out of the loop on alerts until Jack Bauer is apprehended and interrogated. He’s convinced them that until that happens, the entire unit is compromised.”

  “I can’t believe this!”

  “Ryan, listen. It’s worse than we thought. The CDC plane is a Boeing 727, the same type of aircraft Dante Arete was targeting at LAX. Its destination is LaGuardia Airport in Queens. It’s due to land at approximately 8:45 p.m., Eastern Daylight—”

  “Son of a bitch,” Ryan exploded. “That has to be the final target. No wonder nothing happened at five p.m.! The CDC plane isn’t landing until quarter to nine. They want to shoot down that aircraft, spread influenza virus over the entire city — and they just might be able to pull it off.”

  “We have to warn Jack—”

  “First the NTSB has to order that aircraft to land at the next airport.”

  “It’s too late for that, Ryan. The NTSB already tried without success.”

  “But they certainly have the authority to order it down.”

  “It’s not a question of authority. Due to security concerns, the CDC aircraft is maintaining strict radio silence. The pilot reports in once every hour, and we just missed the last window. The next time they establish radio contact, the plane will be over New York City.”

  7:23:13 P.M. EDT Fifty-ninth Street, Manhattan

  “Where are they now?” Jack raced toward the Queensboro Bridge ramp, an ancient structure of dirty steel girders rising up from Second Avenue and flanked by multimillion-dollar apartment buildings overlooking the East River.

  Jack had kept his cell phone connection to CTU, Los Angeles, open while Jamey Farrell followed Caitlin’s blip on a grid map of Queens. The thirtythree-second coast-to-coast delay had caused a few tense moments, but so far they were tracking the kidnapped woman with accuracy.

  “The vehicle Caitlin is in is still moving along Thirty-first Street in Queens,” said Jamey. “It looks like they’re heading for the Triboro Bridge, which means they could be going to Harlem, or even the South Bronx.”

  The Queens-bound traffic on the bridge’s lower level was moving in a start-stop fashion. New York was a late city — late to work in the morning, later leaving in the evening — so rush-hour traffic had not yet lightened. Jack’s years of youthful dirt bike racing served him well as he darted between cars and trucks with ease.

  As Jack twisted the throttle to slalom around a lumbering tow truck, he heard Nina Myers’s voice in his ears. “Jack, we’ve received some disturbing intelligence…”

  She told him about the CDC aircraft and its deadly cargo, how the aircraft would be entering New York airspace in less than seventy-five minutes.

  “That’s their target.” Jack was certain. It all added up.

  “That’s our feeling here, too,” said Nina. “But Ryan is concerned that you’re on a wild goose chase. That Omar Bayat isn’t heading for Taj’s location at all.”

  “No, that can’t be right. Taj and Bayat are a team. They’ve worked together since the Ali Kahlil clan was wiped out in Afghanistan. After downing the Belgian airliner over North Africa two years ago, they escaped across the border to Libya together. I’m betting that’s what they plan to do here, too.”

  For a moment there was silence on both sides of the phone connection. Then Jack spoke. “Let’s assume Omar Bayat is leading us to Taj and another terrorist cell. Where would they launch an attack from? They need someplace close to the airport, above the city skyline, yet remote — a launch from a rooftop or a building would be seen.”

  “How about the Triboro Bridge?” said Nina. “It’s the tallest structure in the area.”

  “It’s high enough, but too public. Thousands of cars pass over that bridge every hour. The terrorists could be spotted, reported by anyone with a cell phone—”

  “Jack!” It was Milo Pressman’s voice. “About a quarter of a mile upriver from the Triboro there’s a railroad bridge called the Hell Gate. The bridge goes right over Astoria Park, and across the East River to Randalls Island, then on to the South Bronx.”

  “He’s right,” said Nina. “Hell Gate is actually a little closer to LaGuardia than the Triboro, though both bridges are right under the flight path to the airport.”

  “Jamey, what’s happening to Caitlin now?” Jack asked.

  “The vehicle is turning onto the Triboro Bridge… No. Wait. It’s on Hoyt Avenue, a road that runs parallel to the Triboro, maybe under it…”

  Over the snarl of the Harley’s engine, Jack heard the analyst exclaim
something unintelligible.

  “Jamey? What is it?”

  “Hoyt Avenue, Jack. It leads right to the shore of the East River. To Astoria Park—”

  Three thousand miles away, Jack Bauer knew where he was headed. “Hell Gate Bridge…”

  7:36:09 P.M. EDT Astoria Park, Queens

  On a quiet residential street bordering Astoria Park, Omar Bayat stopped the van in front of a locked gate of an eight-foot chain-link fence. The sun was a hot orange ball shining between the tall oak and elm trees, but the van was shaded by the steel span of a railroad bridge a hundred feet over its roof.

  The Afghani looked over his shoulder at the woman, bound and gagged on the floor of the cargo bay. “I will be right back.”

  Bayat exited the vehicle, unbolted the padlock, and drove through the gate. He backed the van into a small wooden garage that butted up against one of the bridge’s ivy-covered, concrete support columns. It was cool and shady under the span, with abundant greenery bordering the fenced-in area.

  Hidden from view inside the garage and behind the concrete arch, Bayat changed into green New York City Parks Department overalls. Then he opened the back door and dragged Caitlin out by her red hair. She squealed, but the sound was muffled by the gag over her mouth.

  Bayat cuffed her. “Shut up or I will slit your throat.”

  Caitlin whimpered, rocked unsteadily on her feet while Bayat untied her wrists. He left the gag in place. Then the Afghani pushed her to the back of the garage, where a hole had been cut in the ceiling. A twelve-foot ladder poked through that hole and up the side of the concrete support column.

  “Climb,” barked Bayat.

  Caitlin looked up. On top of the portable ladder, rungs had been embedded in the concrete to form a permanent ladder that ran all the way to the top of the bridge. Caitlin’s eyes went wide and she shook her head wildly, trying to tell Omar Bayat she was too afraid. He struck her again, so hard it drove Caitlin to her knees. He reached down and yanked her to her feet by her hair.

  “Climb or die,” he hissed, his hot breath on her cheek. Hands shaking, limbs weak, Caitlin reluctantly reached for the first rung.