24 Declassified: 04 - Cat's Claw

by John Whitman

  The moon, nearly full, reflected enough light for Jack to see the path, except when they dipped down under thick groves of trees. Even then Jack didn’t use the flashlight. Somewhere ahead were men like the men he’d encountered at the Earth Café. Those men had reacted fast to his entry. He didn’t want to give their companions any more warning than he had to.

  He’d been giving a lot of thought to those men at the café. Ayman al-Libbi had clearly gotten assistance from somewhere, but where? He was sure these men weren’t ETIM. The two who had attacked him at the Cat & Fiddle probably were, undoubtedly muscle given to al-Libbi by Marcus Lee or the man Jack had questioned at the Federal Building. But the shooters at the Earth Café were more Middle Eastern than Chinese.

  Al-Libbi might be using this whole attack as a means of getting back into the good graces of terrorist sponsors. And if he’d already found muscle to do his bidding, his plan might already have succeeded. Which also meant that Jack had no idea the size of the force he was dealing with.

  There was nothing for it. He had to save Kim’s life. He had to save the President. He was going to find someone who could deal with this virus, and God help whoever got in his way.

  12:22 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  A cell phone sitting on a counter kept ringing. It rang every ten minutes or so. For more than an hour everyone had ignored it—there was far too much going on for anyone to pay attention to a phone not his own. But now, after midnight, the situation with the President had stabilized and the atmosphere at CTU, although tense, was steady.

  So when the phone rang again, Jamey Farrell saw that the ring was coming from a phone inside a plastic bag sitting at Jack Bauer’s station. She picked it up without answering it and carried it up to the security desk. “Where’d this come from?” she asked.

  The night guard had no idea personally, but he checked his log. “It was brought over from someone at the Federal Building. Bauer got himself arrested earlier and they took his cell phone.”

  Jamey nodded and brought the phone to Christopher Henderson. “Figures,” Henderson muttered. “He loses his gun, his ID, and his cell phone, and only the phone comes back.”

  As if on cue, the phone rang. “Bauer’s line,” Henderson said.

  “At last,” said the smooth voice at the other end of the

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  line. “Am I speaking to Agent Bauer or some other agent of

  the Counter Terrorist Unit?”

  “How can I help you?” Henderson said.

  “This is Ayman al-Libbi.”

  12:31 A.M. PST Temescal Canyon

  Jack and the others trudged up a steep rise where the path rose up out of a gorge and onto a hilltop. Up ahead he could hear the murmur of falling water. Then, over that, he heard someone shout in alarm. He started to run.

  12:34 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Three minutes after the phone call, Henderson had a recording of it put into a digital player. He and Ryan Chappelle played it back with Jamey Farrell listening.

  “This is Ayman al-Libbi. I was given this number by a certain young woman who was also kind enough to give me a very deadly virus. As you may know already, I have both the virus and the antiviral medicine that cures it. This puts me at a distinct advantage since I also know that your President and the Premier of China have both been infected. They will both die within a few hours unless they are given this medication. I will be in touch with you soon.”

  Chappelle swore a long, thin stream of expletives. “According to that waiter, how much time do they have?”

  Henderson checked his watch. “Less than eight hours.”

  12:38 A.M. PST Temescal Canyon

  Anything can happen in four minutes. The terrorists, whoever they were, could have killed Santiago a dozen times over. Or it might not even be Santiago. The people from the Volvo might not even be terrorists.

  But Jack Bauer ran as if his daughter’s life depended on it. More shouts drifted down from above. He didn’t wait for Ozersky or Mercy. He plunged down into another dell, then sprinted up out of it into moonlight again. The path leveled out and the sound of rushing water grew louder.

  Voices called to each other in Farsi and a moment later several shots rang out. Jack guessed that the terrorists had tried to dispatch their victim quietly, but had failed. Now they were resorting to gunfire. He saw several muzzle flashes in the distance.

  Jack stopped, took a deep breath, raised his weapon, and waited. A moment later there was another muzzle flash. Jack leveled his sights behind the flash and pulled the trigger twice. He heard one cry of pain and several shouts of alarm. He’d given his position away, but now the terrorists had to divide their attention between their victim and him.

  Jack moved to the inward side of the path. Trees lined the path from here to the waterfall he could hear ahead, but they were scraggly trees with thin trunks. They offered more concealment than cover, but he would take what he could get. Jack moved from tree to tree, silent now because his quarry had gone silent.

  The victim, however, was making a lot of noise. “Help! Help!” he shouted. “Whoever’s out there, they’re trying to kill me! Help!”

  Keep yelling, Jack thought. Cover the sound of my movement.

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  He moved up to the next tree and stopped, listening. He could see nothing, nor hear any threat, but some sixth sense told him he’d covered enough ground. The ambush would be somewhere in this range. That’s where he’d have put it.

  Someone sobbed in the darkness, and Jack’s muzzle swung there like a magnet to a steel plate, but he didn’t fire. It was the man he’d put down. Don’t reveal your position to kill a man who’s already dead.

  Footsteps behind him. Ozersky and Mercy were coming. They would draw fire. Jack prepared himself.

  He heard Ozersky’s heavy footsteps and Mercy’s labored breathing. They’d get shot in the dark if the terrorists were any good.

  Thunder and lightning erupted under the trees as the two gunmen opened fire. The minute their rounds went off, Jack found them. Jack emptied his magazine at them, and then all firing ceased. Smoothly he ejected the magazine and slid another one into place. As the snap of the slide gave his position away, he moved forward and crouched low.

  “Help!” someone yelled from near the water. “Help me!”

  Moans and whimpers rose up from the ground. He could hear something shuffling or rolling back and forth in the dirt. Jack moved forward quietly. Shreds of moonlight turned the area deep gray, and in the gloom he saw two figures lying on the ground, one motionless and the other twitching and sobbing. “Search them,” he whispered into the darkness behind him, and moved on. He passed the third body, the one he’d shot from long range, and kicked the gun from the corpse’s hand.

  “Help me!” The waterfall was just ahead.

  He couldn’t see it well in the moonlight, but from what he could tell, the falls consisted of one short cascade from the ridge above into a wide pool, then another much higher fall into the gorge below.

  “I can’t hold on!”

  The voice came from the darkness of the gorge. Jack pulled out his flashlight and shined it downward.

  “Pico Santiago!” Jack yelled, his voice nearly blending with the rush of falling water.

  “Help!”

  Santiago was there, halfway down the gorge, clinging to a ledge by his hands. Jack guessed what must have happened. The terrorists had caught up with Santiago and tried to kill him quietly. He struggled and broke free. When they pursued him, he had tried to escape by climbing down the gorge. It had been a brave and stupid thing to do. There was no way to climb down that cliff at night. Santiago had fallen or slid, but had been lucky enough to catch himself on an outcropping of rocks and bushes.

  “Hold on!” Jack shouted. “I’m coming down for you!”

  He didn’t know what else to do. Besides, he could be as brave and stupid as the next guy.

  “Jack!” M
ercy called out, following the beam of his flashlight. “Wait for the helicopter. They’ll be here soon.”

  “He’s not going to last,” Jack said, half to himself. The flashlight had a cord, which Jack looped around his neck. Then he held the light between his teeth and started to climb down. He chose a path above and just on the waterfall side of Santiago, so that he would land on the man if he fell. Unfortunately, that put him closer to the water, so the rocks and plants he grabbed for handholds were slippery.

  “I can’t hold on!” the man yelled.

  “You hold on, you son of a bitch!” Jack yelled.

  “My hands...” the man moaned.

  “It’s not about you!” Jack yelled down at him, dropping the light from his mouth and letting it swing. He was still twenty feet above, and the going was slow. “You hold on because people are going to die if you don’t!”

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  “Agh!” one of Santiago’s hands slipped away from its hold. He was clinging by one hand.

  “Hold on!” Jack inched downward, foot by foot. He willed Santiago to be stronger, to hold tighter. But in the end it was not Jack’s will but Santiago’s that was most important, and Santiago’s broke. His other hand slipped, and Jack watched him fall away from the beam of the flashlight with a short cry.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1 A.M. AND 2 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

  1:00 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Christopher Henderson was convinced his headache was permanent. He’d started the day worried about nothing more than crowd control at the Federal Building and what he’d thought of as Jack Bauer’s overeager attempt to find a terrorist needle in a haystack. Now he was co-managing a crisis of global proportions with Ryan Chappelle while Jack Bauer left a trail of bodies from one end of the city to the other.

  No sooner did they have forensics teams at one location than Bauer was calling from another, asking for more cleanup.

  Jamey Farrell was in his office giving him a summary of

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  the most recent information they had gathered. Her voice was hoarse from talking, but otherwise she was fresh. “The two shooters who attacked Jack on Sunset Boulevard this afternoon were definitely ETIM. We had them on a watch list, but they were never identified near any hot spots until the shooting, and they were too low a priority for surveillance. The one who survived the fight with Jack has been cooperative, but he doesn’t know much more than we know.”

  Henderson nodded. “With Marcus Lee dead and Kasim Turkel out of commission, I’d say ETIM is back to low-priority status. What about the others?”

  “Frankie Michaelmas is dead, Bernard Copeland is dead. Jack met up with two shooters at the Earth Café. Both of them are dead, but we do have information on them.”

  “Go,” Henderson said, focusing in.

  “They have nothing to do with ETIM as far as we can tell. They’re both Iranians who immigrated here in ’92 and ’94, respectively. We have files on them, shared with the FBI, but they’re scant. One was interviewed after the truck bomb at the World Trade Center in ’93, and both were interviewed after 9/11, but in both cases the evidence pointed toward Saudis rather than Iranians, so they weren’t pressed. Their files were kept active because they were known to attend a mosque run by a fairly vocal cleric named Ahmad Moussavi Ardebili, but they’ve never made a peep otherwise.”

  “Sleeper cell?” Henderson thought aloud.

  “It looks that way. And a really patient one.”

  “Okay, I’ll put a team together. Let’s revisit our database for this cleric and round up everyone we think is a possible suspect.”

  1:09 A.M. PST Silverlake Area of Los Angeles

  “Last one,” Tony Almeida said.

  “Too bad,” Nina replied. “I’m getting to like waking people up.”

  While Jack had gone to track down Pico Santiago, Nina and Tony had been given a list of three names—people who might know where Sarah Kalmijn was hiding. The first two had been dead ends, the individuals clearly having little or no idea what Sarah did in her spare time. This was the last address, a small house in the bohemian Silverlake area that looked down on Hollywood and central Los Angeles.

  Nina walked up to the door of the little Craftsman bungalow while Tony stood farther back by one of the wooden pillars that marked a Craftsman. But before she reached for the bell, Nina drew her pistol. Tony mimicked her movement and stepped forward where he could see what Nina had noticed: the door was closed but the jamb was shattered. Someone had broken into the house.

  Using hand signals, Tony indicated that he was going around the back. Nina nodded and counted to five silently, giving Tony time to get around. Then she eased the door open slowly. The house was dark. She listened, but heard no sound until a barely audible creak came from the back of the house. Tony was inside. Nina pulled a tiny Surefire flashlight from her belt and fired it up. The beam swept the living room and came to rest almost instantly on a figure lying on the floor. She swept her hand along the nearest wall and flipped up a light switch, illuminating the room.

  A woman lay on the floor, a piece of electrical cord wrapped around her neck. Nina knelt beside the body without touching it. The woman’s tongue was enlarged and

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  her eyes bulged slightly. She’d been strangled to death.

  Tony entered. “Damn it. I’ll the call the PD. Let’s get a forensics team out here.”

  “These guys are a step ahead of us,” Nina said.

  A door creaked behind them and both CTU agents whirled around, weapons ready. “Don’t shoot!” someone yelled from the closet.

  “Come out slowly!” Tony ordered. “Hands first, hands where I can see them!”

  A pair of thin female hands appeared in the half-open doorway, followed by two graceful arms and then the complete figure of a young woman in her thirties with short black hair. She looked terrified.

  “Don’t shoot me!” she pleaded. “I heard you say to call someone. Are you...are you the police?”

  “Federal agents, ma’am,” Tony said. “What happened?”

  “Thank god, thank god,” she said, shuddering as though releasing hours of pent-up tension. She broke down in tears for a minute, falling beside the body of the other woman as tears poured down her cheeks. “I just left her there. I was so afraid, I thought they might still be here.”

  “Who was it?” Nina asked. “Who did this?”

  “Two men,” the woman said. “They broke in. I was in there.” She pointed to the closet. “They attacked Susan. They hit her until she told them what they wanted, and then they— they...” She started to cry again.

  Tony checked the closet and realized why the terrorists had missed the woman. In the back of the closet, half-hidden by a couple of coats, was the door to a tiny darkroom.

  Nina put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but it’s important that we know what she told them. What were they asking?”

  The woman wiped her eyes. “Th-they were asking about Sarah. Sarah Kalmijn is a friend of ours. They wanted to know where to find her. Susan told them, she did, and they

  killed her anyway.”

  “Where did they tell her to go?”

  “What do you want with Sarah?”

  Tony curled his lip unhappily. “Right now we just want to save her life. Where would she be if she’s not home?”

  The woman had started crying again, but between sobs she gave them the answer Susan had given her tormentors. Sarah blew off steam at underground parties—raves. She was a lawyer now but she hated her job and forgot her troubles by attending the raves thrown by a college friend who ran a DJ company called Goodnight’s. That was all she knew.

  1:27 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  “Jamey, I need to leave,” Jessi said.

  Jamey Farrell looked up from her work, bleary-eyed
and brain-fried. She’d been through some long days at CTU, and this one matched them all. “Can you stay a little longer? I’m just getting a call from Tony Almeida and I’m going to need some research.”

  “No,” Jessi said. “I mean I need to leave CTU.”

  Jamey put down her pen. “You mean for good.”

  Jessi nodded. “I lost someone today—”

  “I know, I heard. I’m sorry. It comes with the territory here sometimes—”

  Jessi shook her head. “That’s everybody’s attitude. No one’s even stopped to think about it. Kelly worked here. Okay, not as long as Jack Bauer or some of the others, but he had friends here. But everyone goes on like nothing happened.”

  Jamey set her jaw. If Jessi had been hoping for sympathy,

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  she was going to be disappointed. “Listen, ’cause I’m only going to tell you this once. No one here pretends like nothing happened. But if you want to work in this unit, then you have to get tougher than this. In this line of work, people die. And do you know what happens if we stop to mourn them right away? More people die. Those agents out in the field can’t stop to bury every body because they’re busy stopping the bad guys from killing more people. Same goes for us in here.”

  “I—I know . . . that’s why I think I need to leave.” Jessi crossed her arms like a shield. “Jamey, I missed something earlier. I was going over security footage that I’d downloaded and I saw one of those people they’re looking for, Pico Santiago. I could have tracked him, I could have led Jack straight to him, but I missed it because I was upset.”

  “Then you screwed up. Now fix it.”

  “He’s dead! I can’t make him alive again—”

  “No, but you can do your job so the agents in the field do their job and keep more people alive.” She crossed her own arms. “You want to mourn the guy you had a crush on, then do it by getting the guys who killed him.”