24 Declassified: 04 - Cat's Claw

by John Whitman

  “So we’re dealing with two strains,” Celia said. “And we have no vaccine for either of them.”

  3:23 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

  Kasim Turkel screamed again, but his cries sounded thin and empty on the deserted street. The blond man was barely touching him, but he kept tapping the barrel of his weapon right on the jagged spot where his leg bent at an unreal angle.

  “You are part of the Eastern Turkistan Independence Movement?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you hired Ayman al-Libbi to come to this country and attack the G8 summit?”

  No answer. Tap, tap went the muzzle.

  “Yes, yes!” Kasim shrieked.

  “What is he planning?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Tap, tap, tap.

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!” he screamed in Uygur, then in English.

  “He needed help once he got here,” Jack said. “Where did he go? Who did he meet with?”

  “I don’t—”

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  Tap.

  “Aghh!” Kasim sobbed. “I...I never met him before. We took him, but we waited outside. I don’t know what he wanted.”

  “Names,” Jack said threateningly.

  “F-Farrigian.”

  Tamar Farrigian. Jack knew him. He was a fence and trafficker who usually played in the shallow end of the pool. He was a sometime informant for CTU and kept out of trouble enough to continue in that useful role. But if he was selling arms to major players like al-Libbi, his time had come.

  “What did he buy?”

  “Bombs. Or rockets. Something explosive. I didn’t see what.”

  “When was he planning his attack?” Jack asked. “Where?”

  There was no answer. He tapped Kasim’s leg, but the man only screamed and sobbed in his native language. Jack didn’t press further—it would have surprised him if al-Libbi had shared his plans with his employers.

  “What about the virus?” he asked, thinking of Kim.

  “Wh-what?” Kasim replied. There was genuine confusion in his voice.

  “The virus!” Jack said, poking harder at the leg.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know what that is!” Kasim insisted, once he’d stopped crying. “What virus?”

  Jack believed him.

  3:29 P.M. PST Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China, Los Angeles

  The Chinese Consulate was downtown, near Vermont and Wilshire and a stone’s throw from Lafayette Park. A run at breakneck speed along the cliffs of Mulholland Drive to avoid the riot area, a race down the curves of Laurel Canyon, and then a hard left turn along Third Street with little regard for red lights and less for anyone else’s right of way, all helped Nina Myers reach the building in under thirty minutes.

  She was expected. The demure young woman in the gray dress suit took a cursory look at her credentials, then spoke softly into her tiny headset in Chinese before rising and escorting Nina to a side room with a short, wide table surrounded by thick leather chairs. Her shoes made almost no sound when she walked.

  “Water?” was all she said. When Nina declined, she gave a short bow and vanished.

  Richard Hong entered a moment later, as boisterous as the girl had been timid.

  “Ms. Myers, how are you?” he said in a very American accent, shaking her hand vigorously and dropping down on the couch opposite her and crossing his legs. The table, made more for coffee than for meetings, came only to his raised foot, and he tapped it gently and thoughtlessly. “What can I do for you?”

  Nina knew this game, and she didn’t want to play it. She cut through the layers of diplomacy, if for no other reason than she knew it was not the Chinese way. “You can tell me why the Chinese government never told us that Marcus Lee was really Nurmamet Tuman, and why he is giving money to ETIM.”

  Nina couldn’t have caught Hong more off guard if she’d jumped up on the table and slapped him in the face. The Chinese official straightened, and as he did, the diplomatic facade melted off his face. His black eyes gleamed. He looked at her, then quickly to the door, and then back, and in that moment Nina knew three things: the room was bugged; her

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  accusations were serious enough that Hong thought men might burst into the room; and someone higher up than Hong had decided to let this all play out.

  Hong tried to recover by reciting a memorized line. “There is no ETIM.”

  Nina started to protest, but Hong waved her off, recovering some of his former gallantry. “Oh, of course there are a few malcontents,” he said. “But to call them a real organization would be like calling the Clippers a real basketball team, eh? Factual in the strictest sense, but meaningless in the practical world.”

  “Well, they are real enough to receive two million dollars. And Tuman is real enough to give it to them. He’s also apparently clever enough to change his dossier so that no one noticed that he changed his name, or that he grew up in the heart of the East Turkistan resistance in Urumchi.”

  Hong glared at her in a decidedly undiplomatic way. She wasn’t intimidated. Very few things intimidated her, and none of them were in this room.

  There was a muted beep. Hong said, “Excuse me,” and deftly plucked a mobile phone from his pocket. He opened it and listened, muttered something in Chinese, and pocketed the phone again.

  “Ms. Myers, here is what I can tell you: Mr. Marcus Lee, or, as you call him, Nurmamet Tuman, is no threat to you, or to the United States in any way. Between you and me he is a former officer with the People’s Army, and if you cannot guess more than that, then you are not the kind of person I think you are.” By which Hong meant, He was a spy and you are probably a spy, too, so you figure it out. “His name was changed to protect his privacy, but I give you the solemn word of the People’s Republic that he is retired.” Hong placed heavy emphasis on that word retired.

  “His name is Uygur,” said Nina, silently thanking Jamey Farrell and the other analysts at CTU for the geography lesson she’d received during the drive over. “Before he was retired, did he work in the Xianjing-Uygur Autonomous Region? Did he infiltrate ETIM?”

  Richard Hong stood up and smiled warmly, as though Nina had said goodbye instead of asking a prying question. “It was great to meet you,” he said in his casual American way. “I hope to see you around again.” He bent down and shook her hand, stubbornly ignoring the fact that she had not yet stood up. “Have a great day.” Then he was out the door, leaving Nina alone in the room.

  3:40 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

  Jack had given up the interrogation when Kasim Turkel passed out. He knew he’d gotten everything he was going to get when Turkel gave up the name of Tamar Farrigian. He’d hoped to find out something about the virus, but he wasn’t surprised that Turkel was ignorant of that. Ayman al-Libbi was notorious for playing close to the vest, and had angered his patrons more than once by withholding information from them.

  A roar like falling water rolled down Wilshire Boulevard. Jack looked eastward and saw the police line break, cops stumbling backward as rioters broke through, pouring down the street like a reservoir suddenly rushing down a dry riverbed. Idiots, Jack thought. All they would do was bring out the cavalry and rubber bullets again. And for what?

  Jack left Turkel on the street, intending to have the FBI or other CTU agents pick him up later. With his leg broken like that, he wasn’t going anywhere. But the injured cop was another story. Jack went back to him.

  “Can you walk?” he asked.

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  The cop shook his head. “Only if you can make the street stop wobbling.”

  “Come on.” Jack helped him up and pulled the man’s arm around his shoulder. Together they hobbled back down the road to the Federal Building, through the line of waist-high stone pillars, across the grass, and up to the glass doors. Uniformed officers on the inside opened the doors for them and pulled them inside. There was a short-h
aired woman with them. She held her hand out to Jack Bauer.

  “Agent Bauer, Cynthia Rosen.” Jack remembered her name from the telephone.

  “Thanks for your help. Is there a car I can borrow? I have to get back to CTU. It’s urgent.”

  Rosen was nonplussed. “Well, yes. But your daughter—”

  Kim. Jack felt a tug at his heart, the primal urge a father feels to protect his daughter. Manufacturing the ruse that had brought her into police custody had been hard enough. Now that the immediate danger had passed, he wanted nothing more than to wrap her up in his protective arms. But he did not doubt for a second that she had indeed been exposed to a deadly virus. According to his captor, she had hours before she was in danger or even contagious. That meant the very best way to protect her was to find the people who had put her in harm’s way, make them cure her, and then make them pay.

  “Can you have someone escort her home, Agent Rosen?” he asked. “I’ve got to go. It’s urgent. Now please take me to a car.”

  3:47 P.M. PST Mountaingate Drive, Los Angeles

  The white truck with “Sanchez Landscaping” on the side rolled to a stop at the foot of the circular driveway, where a Secret Service agent stopped him. The Secret Service agent was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, but his short-cropped hair, angular build, and air of authority gave him away. Of course, al-Libbi would have known he was an agent even without these clues. He had been warned that the Secret Service might occupy the house.

  “Can I help you?” the young man said.

  “I guess,” al-Libbi said, affecting a Mexican accent nearly identical to that of the gardener he had murdered. With only a day’s growth of scruffy beard, dark skin, and the accent, he could pass for Latino. He’d done it many times to cross the border into the United States, even being stopped twice and deported, once to El Salvador and once to Guatemala. “I’m the gardener here. Is there something—?”

  The Secret Service man nodded as though he’d been expecting the gardener, which was indeed the case. He stepped away from the truck, turned, and muttered something into a microphone at his wrist. A moment later the front door opened and Nurmamet Tuman (whom he must call Marcus Lee) appeared, followed by another Secret Service agent in a suit.

  “Is everything okay, Mr. Lee?” al-Libbi asked in his most worried voice. “I have a green card.”

  Tuman nodded at him. “Yes, that’s him, of course it is,” he said to the Secret Service agents.

  The one in the suit nodded. “Okay, let him through.”

  Ayman al-Libbi rewarded them with his best nervous smile and eased the truck forward.

  3:49 P.M. PST Santa Monica, California

  His real name was Dr. Bernard Copeland, and until a short time ago he had planned to save the world.

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  He stumbled into his fashionable house on Fourteenth Street north of Montana in Santa Monica, closed the door, and fell onto the floor, exhausted. He tugged a small wrapper out of his pocket, unrolled it to reveal a wad of maracuja leaves. He popped two into his mouth and sighed in relief.

  Copeland had known for more than two decades that the world was spinning out of control. He’d seen the human species work overtime to destroy its own environment when he worked as a graduate biology student in the Amazon. He’d joined the EPA soon after getting his Ph.D., devoting his energies to the government’s own fight to save the human habitat. But seven years at the Environmental Protection Agency had taught him the true definition of doublespeak, for he found himself under pressure not to fight off developers but to justify alliances with them. The government rationalized its permissive attitude toward industries that poisoned rivers, spewed greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and turned acres of vibrant forestland into grazing ground for cattle. Disgusted, he had quit. To hide himself, he’d gone to work for the enemy, sold himself to a research firm studying the medicinal properties of fauna in the Amazon. It gave him an excuse to go back to the land he loved, and it gave him cover. The firm he worked for was pro-industry, and he carried its banner in public loudly and often.

  In private, he began to develop relationships inside the real environmental movement. At first he met quietly with members of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, but he knew immediately that they were too tame for his needs. He had worked inside the machinery of government, and he knew that it would grind itself slowly, inexorably, into oblivion. Stopping it would require much more radical means than they were willing to take. But, slowly, his associations in the Sierra Club brought him in contact with more radical sects, until eventually he was having coffee with Earth Firsters and taking hikes with the Earth Liberation Front. Foresighted, he had kept his name to himself, using a nickname from the eco-terrorist’s favorite read, The Monkey Wrench Gang. “Seldom Seen Smith” received a derisive laugh more than once, but preserved his anonymity.

  Copeland was no utopian. He did not expect the world to revert to some antediluvian paradise. He was neither a vegan nor an animal rescuer. He was a scientist. He had studied the data and reached the inevitable conclusion: mankind could not continue to destroy the Earth without consequences. Someone needed to stop human beings from continuing on their destructive path, and for better or worse, Bernard Copeland had elected himself.

  He’d spent several years committing low-level acts of terrorism: burning down isolated work sheds owned by timber companies, spiking trees. But even back then he’d known it was only exercise. He could spike a million trees, and it wouldn’t stop the world from destroying itself.

  At first he used his scientific background to motivate companies to preserve his first love, the Amazon. He published papers describing the curative effects of turbocuarine, a natural muscle relaxant that had helped Parkinson’s patients; he gave lectures on Podophyllum peltatum, commonly known as mayapple, which was the source of the etoposides used to fight testicular cancer. How, he argued, could we continue to ravage the Amazonian forest when it provided us with cures to our ills?

  None of it mattered. Though revelations like those motivated some companies with promises of profit, there was just too much money being made cutting, stripping, and baring for grazing land or building housing. As the years passed, Copeland came to understand a basic principle of human nature: greed was powerful, but secondary. Fear was

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  the prime mover of the human species. It was not enough to show human beings that the Amazon could provide them with profit. He had to fill them with fear of death and then show them that the Amazon was their salvation.

  For years he had operated with this knowledge but without a coherent plan until, quite by accident, he had discovered the curative powers in the resin of a Croton lechleri tree in Brazil: The resin carried the dramatic name of Sangre de Drago or “Dragon’s Blood.” Then, through either coincidence or design influence (Copeland was not sure he believed in either), he had discovered a virus so deadly, it had never spread out of the deepest part of the Amazon. It was a unique feature of the most terrifying viruses in existence that, without artificial aid, they actually could not spread: they simply killed their hosts too fast. This virus was a variant of hemorrhagic fever, a distant cousin of Ebola and Marburg in Africa. Copeland was a biologist, not an anthropologist, but his own personal theory was that this virus had brought down the Mayan Empire. The common strain, which he’d discovered in a troop of Capuchin monkeys and was harmless to them, killed a human being in about twenty-four hours. In the rural Amazon, it often took more than a week to hike out of the deep jungle just to get to any kind of transportation. Explorers might have “discovered” the virus a thousand times in the last three or four centuries, but no one would ever have survived long enough to carry it into civilization.

  The virus, in its native form, was terrifying. Within twenty-four hours it caused lesions in the skin that erupted so quickly that the skin seemed to come apart as though torn by giant claws. Some of the indigenous peoples, living in tiny villages at the fringes of the
deep forest, told tales of uña de gato, or Cat’s Claw.

  Bernard Copeland had found his weapon.

  But, with the wry observation that he could no more resist tampering with nature than the next man, Copeland had used his skills to “improve” Cat’s Claw. He nurtured more and more aggressive strains, until he’d developed a strain of the virus that killed within twelve hours.

  His plan was simple and admittedly vicious. He would infect people of prominence and force them to publicly acknowledge the need to preserve the rain forests, which provided the Dragon’s Blood cure for the virus. If they didn’t, they would die.

  Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Copeland had spent years gathering a team from the eco-terrorist groups, some of whom were even more radical than he. A few had even suggested simply spreading the virus around the globe, then releasing information about the cure a day later. Make the virus pervasive, they said; it was the best way to ensure that humanity needed the rain forest.

  Copeland had balked. He was a scientist, and as a scientist he had calculated the odds and understood that some people might have to die. But if the virus were simply released into the human infrastructure, thousands would die, maybe millions. That was a cost that could be avoided, and therefore should be. Copeland had also studied the actions of classic terrorist groups like the PLO and al-Qaeda, and understood their method: it was not how many people you killed, it was how many you scared, that counted.

  Time had passed, and Copeland’s small army grew, though few of them knew his real name. He continued using the nom de guerre of Seldom Seen Smith and called his group the Monkey Wrench Gang, finding cover in the pure ridiculousness of the names, since no one who was not passionate about the cause would take them seriously. He found people of many persuasions in business, in universities, and

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  even in the government, who were faithful to the environment. And when the G8 summit was announced in Los Angeles, he knew he was ready.