24 Declassified: 10 - Head Shot

by David S. Jacobs

  “With all that cash in hand you could acquire a controlling interest in every corporation in every sector of the economy worth owning: utilities, insurance, energy, health care providers, software, manufacturing, you name it. The whole enchilada. And you’d have it all. Overnight you’d become the uncrowned king of the United States—king by fact if not by law or title. Master of a financial empire that no king, emperor, or mogul even dreamed of.”

  Wright was unflappable. “A not unworthy ambition, if I say so myself. In all due modesty.”

  Jack challenged, “Why be modest? Caligula was a piker—so you said. He would have given his eyeteeth to have an axe like the one you created, designed to lop off the heads of all those friends and confidants who’ve trusted you over the years.”

  “Do tell.”

  “An axe made not of finely honed steel sharpened to a razor’s edge but of people. Bad people. As choice a crew of thieves, sadists, and killers as ever labored for the hidden puppet master pulling their strings.

  People like Brad Oliver, who handled some of the financial aspects of your dirty work.”

  Wright pulled a long face and looked sad. “Ah yes, poor Brad. Such a tragic death, so untimely a loss to one of the brightest rising stars in the fiscal galaxy.”

  Jack snorted his derision. “I bet. What happened to Brad? Did he get greedy seeing all those vast sums he was in the process of making for you and decide to feather his own nest? Your super-scheme for shorting was slick and stealthy but his pint-sized version to invest a few million of his own on the coming apocalypse was rushed and clumsy. His junior league manipulations showed up on Chappelle’s radar screens because that’s just what Ryan was looking for, smelly investments made in a hurry on the basis of foreknowledge of imminent catastrophe. Once Chappelle gets a whiff of something like that, he keeps digging into the numbers until he finds out the real score. Oliver’s heavy-handed shorting is what put CTU on to the plot against Sky Mount in the first place.”

  Wright couldn’t have been cooler. “Brad’s one overriding fault, and I say to you what I would not hesitate to declare under oath in any court in the land, his great sin was avarice. Greed, pure and simple. He overreached himself and paid the price.”

  Jack countered, “Thanks to you he did. When you found out that his arrest was imminent you greased the skids out from under him, virtually literally. You tipped him off that we were coming to apprehend him, knowing that he would do what he did: take it on the run. Only before you went to him you made sure that one of your hatchetmen had arranged for Mr. Pettibone and his Deathmobile to be outside the gates waiting for him. When Brad tried to make his getaway, Pettibone ran him off the road on a thousand-foot drop to his death. Exit Brad.”

  Wright made a face. He was really enjoying himself now. “Dear me! Did I do all that? I’m afraid you’ll have some difficulty proving that in court, Agent Bauer.”

  “Don’t be so sure. Look at Marion Clary. She looks like she might be remembering something she’d seen but thought nothing of at the time. Like you having a private little chat in your office here with Brad right before he went out and got smeared all over the eastern slope of Mount Zebulon?”

  It was a shot in the dark, but Jack figured it was worth a try. The first mention of Oliver’s name had triggered a fidgety restlessness in Marion Clary, an agitation that increased as Jack explicated the mode and manner of Oliver’s death.

  Cabot Huntington Wright condescended to glance at the receptionist. What he saw there compelled him to take a long second look. She openly fretted, chewing her lower lip, her expression stricken, wounded.

  He said, “Marion, dear, surely you don’t give any credence to this preposterous twaddle?”

  She held herself so tightly that it looked like her neck cords would break. Her eyes were open, staring into space. She shook her head with short, tense movements. She said, “Believe it? Of course not! But—but you did call Brad into your office yesterday afternoon to speak with him, and when it was over he had the most dreadful look on his face and he rushed off like a crazy man and drove to his death—”

  “Pure coincidence. Brad had a guilty conscience because he feared his financial chicanery was about to come to light. He ran away and had the misfortune to suffer a terrible fatal accident due to his own carelessness and innate dishonesty.”

  She turned hurt eyes on him. “Cabot, how can you speak so cruelly about poor Brad, who never deliberately hurt anyone in his life?”

  “Honesty compels me to speak the truth.” Wright tsk-tsked. “I can’t believe that you’d be so credulous as to listen to the ravings of this prosecutorial young man. I’m disappointed in you Marion, very disappointed.”

  She wasn’t listening to him. Jack wondered if she was listening to an inner voice instead. He decided to press on. “That brings us to the other edge of your double-headed axe, Mr. Wright. Oliver was the financial edge. The homicidal edge was Larry Noone.

  “Noone was a driving wheel in your murder train. He was perfectly placed to do so. As a high- ranking executive of the Brand Agency, Noone had access to his own private intelligence network, one rivalling any in the public sector and less hampered by red tape. By delving into the Brand computerized files he could learn with a keystroke who was dirty, who could be corrupted and who couldn’t. Bribe takers, thieves, prostitutes, deviants, strong- arm goons, and contract killers, all listed there in the files. All he had to do was call them up and dangle the baited hook of Cabot Wright’s money in front of them.

  “It was Noone who found and recruited Reb Weld, using him to assemble a small army of hired killers. Noone who had all the inside information on security arrangements for the Round Table, allowing Weld and friends to circumvent them. Noone who murdered the board operators in the Brand command center tonight to allow Weld and his killer elite to plant bombs and poison gas in the basement on Level Two to blow up the fuel tanks to create a raging inferno to kill hundreds of innocent men, women, and children and burn Sky Mount down to the ground!”

  Wright said acidly, “Of course it’s in your interest to blacken the character of poor Larry Noone, considering that you’re the one who killed him. That, my dear young sir, is not a tower built on groundless speculation and absurd hypothesis but a fact!”

  Marion Clary recoiled as though she’d been struck. She said in a whisper that trembled on the edge of a shriek, “Larry Noone is dead, too? My God, no!”

  She covered her ears with her hands to keep from hearing any more. Cabot Wright sat back in his chair, favoring Jack with a richly supercilious smile.

  Don Bass went to Marion Clary. His expression was compassionate as he gently but firmly took hold of her thin wrists and eased her hands away from her ears. He said, “Marion, you must listen to me. I’ve never lied to you and I’m not about to start now. As the Lord is my witness, less than an hour ago Larry Noone held me at gunpoint and was about to kill me. This man Jack Bauer saved my life, and that’s the honest truth.”

  Ernie Sandoval had sat silent for a long while taking it all in. He now spoke up. “It’s a time for truth, Marion. You can’t stick your head in the sand and hope it goes away. Tell her, Jack. Tell her what Cabot Huntington Wright was going to do to destroy her beloved Sky Mount!”

  That caught her attention. Her head jerked slightly to one side and her eyes took on a glazed expression. “Cabot Wright . . . destroy Sky Mount?”

  Jack picked up the ball. He addressed his words to Wright, aware that Marion Clary was following them with a dreadful avidity. She could be a key witness in any future trial of Wright; her testimony could be invaluable if she could be convinced to give it freely.

  Jack said, “That brings us to the third leg of our murder triangle. Remember, means, motive, and opportunity. The means was money and the people it could buy, whether it was Brad Oliver and his financial sleight-of-hand or Larry Noone and his handpicked assortment of killers.

  “The motive was money, too, money and power, with one nightmarish
catastrophe that would make Cabot Huntington Wright richer and more powerful than any other man in the history of the world.

  “That brings us to opportunity. Like so much else in this case, opportunity wears more than one face. I’ve already mentioned the opportunity of having the movers and shakers of the national economy conveniently gathered together under one roof to make a big, fat target. But there’s another face to that opportunity, one that is and could only be known to a select handful of persons, and you, Mr. Wright, are the most select of that select few.”

  “You flatter me, Agent Bauer.”

  “No I don’t, not really. I’m just telling the plain truth the way the facts add up. The fact is that there is one secret that you are in a prime possession to know. It’s the old story of the Trojan horse: the enemy was already in the citadel, hidden where no one would ever suspect them. With the Greeks and the Trojans it’s a wooden horse. With you and Larry Noone’s murder squad, it’s a fallout shelter built long ago beneath Sky Mount that the world has forgotten but the few remember.

  “A fallout shelter built at the height of the nuclear jitters of the Cold War era. A bunkerlike fortress that accesses Level Two through secret doors and hidden passages. A shelter with an escape route in case Sky Mount should be bombed flat and the shelter inhabitants unable to dig themselves out from under a mountain of rubble. So the builder created himself an escape route, drilling a tunnel through and out of a rock spur of Thunder Mountain into a little high mountain valley named Winnetou.

  “The escape route, like the shelter itself, was a closely held secret. The creator didn’t want the public to know about it. In case of a threatened atomic attack he’d be besieged by hordes of neighbors and strangers all wanting to escape annihilation by holing up in the shelter, too. That wouldn’t do, so the shelter was kept secret and the escape route was hidden to look like part of the mountain so no outsiders would ever dream of its existence!

  “What happened then? I’m guessing here, but we’ll find out the facts soon enough. The builder died, the shelter entrances and exits were sealed and forgotten, and the few others who knew the secret mostly died out. But who would be better placed to know the secret or rediscover it than the Lord High Executor of the Masterman Trust, the master of Sky Mount itself, you, Cabot Huntington Wright!”

  Jack Bauer waited for Wright to respond but it was Marion Clary who reacted first. She stood up suddenly, the light of a massive revelation seizing her with an irresistible force.

  She blurted out, “It’s true! There is an abandoned fallout shelter hidden under Sky Mount! It was built in the nineteen-fifties by F. X. Masterman, the last surviving heir to descend directly from old H. H. Masterman, founder of the family fortune. Francis Xavier Masterman was an eccentric with an obsession about surviving an atomic war. He spent a fortune building his shelter and escape routes. After he died the family wanted nothing more to do with F.X. and his sensational bad publicity so they capped the tunnels, sealed the hatches, pretended it wasn’t there, and forgot about it.

  “I know about it because I’m the archivist and knowing the history of Sky Mount is my life’s work. I know it, yes—but how do you?”

  Jack said seriously, “I know it, Ms. Clary, because I’ve been there. Just tonight I took the grand tour of it to keep a gang of murder-happy psychos from using it to blow up the fuel tanks and turn the mansion into an infernal holocaust! Where did I learn of it? From a sadistic killer named Pettibone who killed that nice young man Brad Oliver and who knows how many others.

  “The big question is, who did he learn it from? From his boss, an even worse killer, who learned it from Larry Noone, who learned it from Cabot Huntington Wright! Unless you told Noone— ”

  “No,” she said firmly, shaking her head. “I’ve always respected the family’s wishes for privacy and kept the truth about the shelter a private matter and never spoken of it to any outsiders.”

  She was holding her body so tight that instead of turning her head she turned her entire body so she could look down at Cabot Wright and stare him in the eye. She went on, “I’ve never spoken of it to outsiders, but I have gone into detail about it on more than one occasion with my employer, Mr. Wright!”

  Wright literally tried to wave it away, dismissing it with a flicking gesture of his hand. “Marion, you’re becoming seriously overwrought. I begin to fear for your state of mind.”

  “You—you would have helped to destroy Sky Mount? All those innocent human lives? All those priceless art treasures?”

  “You’re being ridiculous, dear. Sit down and take a pill to relax before you give yourself a nervous breakdown.”

  Cabot Huntington Wright was beginning to show the first signs of agitation. He was restless, unable to sit still. He kept crossing and uncrossing his legs and squirming around in his seat as if unable to get comfortable.

  Marion Clary ignored his advice. She did not sit down or take a pill. She stood her place, staring accusingly down at Wright.

  Wright turned to the others as if unable to face her stare. “Do you see what you’ve done, gentlemen—and I use the term loosely—with your monstrous fabrication of lies and half truths, slurs and innuendos? You’ve driven this poor, simple soul nearly half mad with hysteria!”

  Jack Bauer said softly, “Maybe she’s starting to realize the truth of what you’ve done, Mr. Wright. The lies and scheming, the conniving at murder, and more: wholesale mass murder!”

  Wright affected an air of extreme nonchalance bordering on indifference. He studied his carefully manicured fingernails, flicked an imaginary spot of dust from his lapel. But he was watching Jack out of the corners of his eyes.

  Jack ignored Wright’s smooth front and kept hammering his points home. He said, “Speaking of opportunity, that brings up one last important element in your master plan. It was a lucky fluke but you saw it lying there and picked it up for your own use. I’m referring to the presence of Abelson Prewitt and his inner circle of Zealots at the compound at Red Notch. Every conspiracy needs a fall guy, a patsy who can be blamed for the crime, and Prewitt was ripe for the taking. It’s the time- honored ploy known as ‘Pay the Law.’ Give the authorities a ready-made scapegoat for the crime and the manhunt ends. Otherwise they’ll keep on looking and possibly even stumble across the real culprits.

  “Prewitt was your scapegoat. He was a crackpot cultist who hated the Round Table and all that it represents. There was no real history of violence in his background, but that was no problem. A lot of these cults go on their own way for years before reaching the breaking point and lashing out with overt acts. Prewitt’s crank economic theories and overheated rhetoric made him perfect for framing.

  “The plan was to lay the blame for the Sky Mount terror strike on Prewitt and his cadre. To carry that out they first had to be disposed of. The Mountain Lake MRT unit did the advance work. They’d all been suborned into working for the plot, bought and paid for. I’m guessing that Larry Noone handled that part of the operation. I wondered how the activity at Winnetou could have gone unreported until I found out a little while ago from Agent Sandoval that Hardin’s MRT had the responsibility of patrolling that area and consistently gave it a clean bill of health.

  “Red Notch was hit early Thursday morning. The MRT did the advance work of neutralizing O’Hara and Dean, the ATF agents monitoring the compound from the outside. Hardin and Taggart got the drop on the unsuspecting agents and put them out of the way. That left a clear field for Reb Weld’s kill squad. They blitzed the compound with BZ gas grenades, the potent hallucinogenic gas incapacitating the cultists. A hermit who witnessed the assault said that it was carried out by ‘hog-faced demons.’ Hog-faced demons— that’s what the killers in their gas masks looked like to him. He wasn’t so far off the mark at that.

  “The round- up of the Zealots didn’t come off without a hitch. There was violence, some blood was spilled. Those bloodstains held the telltale chemical markers allowing for the identification of BZ as the chemical we
apon agent. The cultists were herded onto their own bus and driven out to Silvertop in Shadow Valley to be disposed of. All but two of them were slaughtered and dumped down the air shaft of an abandoned mine, their bodies covered with dirt to make sure that they wouldn’t be found too soon.

  “Prewitt and his top lieutenant, Ingrid Thaler, were killed, too, but their bodies weren’t dumped with the others. They were taken to the base camp at Winnetou and kept on ice for future use. I came across the ice chest that had been used to keep the corpses in cold storage at the camp but didn’t know what it was for until later tonight. It wasn’t until I found Prewitt and Thaler’s bodies in Level Two that the significance of the ice chest became clear to me. The cadavers had been frozen to disguise the true time of their death. They were going to be planted outside the mansion to be found in the aftermath of the destruction. By then the heat of the firestorm would have warmed them up.

  “Prewitt and Thaler being found dead at the scene of the crime would have clinched the case for the Zealots’ responsibility for the terror strike. It would have been open and shut as far as the authorities and the public were concerned and no one need look any further into the matter. A crazy cult would have been blamed for the head shot that took down the national economy.

  “Only it didn’t work out that way. The strike was thwarted and now we know the real mastermind behind the plot was you, Cabot Huntington Wright!”

  Wright was squirming. He’d been unable to sit still as Jack Bauer drove home his summation. He now made a visible effort to regain his self- possession.

  Wright tried another tack. “Theories are all very well, Agent Bauer—in theory. But proving them in open court is another matter. Let us suppose for the sake of argument that your allegations against me are true? How do you propose to prove them?