by John Whitman
24 Declassified: Cat's Claw
( 24 Declassified - 4 )
John Whitman
The world's most powerful leaders are gathering in Los Angeles for the G-8 summit, unaware that they have been targeted by two separate terrorist groups, each with its own lethal agenda. Uncovering and disarming one bomb would be difficult enough; eliminating both will be nearly impossible.
On the trail of a rabid Islamic assassin, rogue CTU agent Jack Bauer doesn't know that another conspiracy is brewing around him — a poisonous plot to violently dictate the future of the free world. If Bauer does nothing, in twenty-four hours the entire planet may be plunged into chaos, its primary heads of state ruthlessly destroyed. But if he acts, his daughter Kim will die instead.
John Whitman
24 Declassified: Cat's Claw
After the 1993 World Trade Center attack, a division of the Central Intelligence Agency established a domestic unit tasked with protecting America from the threat of terrorism. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the Counter Terrorist Unit established field offices in several American cities. From its inception, CTU faced hostility and skepticism from other Federal law enforcement agencies. Despite bureaucratic resistance, within a few years CTU had become a major force. After the war against terror began, a number of CTU missions were declassified. The following is one of them…
PROLOGUE
1 Month Ago
Detective Mercy Bennet eased her Audi A4 up to the curb of the big ranch-style house on Roscomare Road. It was only five o’clock, but the Bel Air hills blocked the sun and the street was mostly in shadow. Thick ivy covered the ground from the curb all the way up to the rose bushes leaning against the front side of the house. Mercy walked up the middle of the driveway, keeping well clear of the ivy. Her father had been a pest controller and had always told her that rats loved ivy. Mercy worked pest control, too. Just a different kind.
She gathered information as she walked through the front door. The doorjamb was smooth and the chain was intact, but the Karastan rug in the marble entryway was rumpled, and a single thick, crystal candlestick on the hallway table had been tipped on its side. The frameless beveled mirror on the wall behind her was askew. To the right of the hallway, a set of stairs climbed up to the second story, while straight ahead the corridor opened up into a high-ceilinged living room. The living room was decorated with the same sense of class as the hallway — ecru walls trimmed in white crown molding surrounded two brushed suede couches and a wrought-iron coffee table. There was a marble chess set sitting atop a small round table where two chairs squared off against each other, and an Alexandra Nikita print hung over the fireplace, with a tall fake ficus tree in a wicker basket nearby. Except for the fake tree, the room looked like a picture from a Restoration Hardware catalog.
Two uniformed policemen were already there, as were two paramedics with a gurney, and the crime scene technician. The forensics tech was crouched over the dead body in the middle of the living room. The body was lying facedown on the carpet with the head, or what was left of it, soaking in a pool of blood. This had been Gordon Gleed, a forty-threeyear-old divorced businessman living alone. Habitually Mercy started collecting scenarios in the back of her head based on the facts she knew. These scenarios would fade away as the facts became more specific. Right now, given the fact that he was divorced, lived the bachelor life in a stylish Bel Air pad, and was obviously successful in business, Mercy thought home invasion, angry ex-wife, angry gay lover, angry business associate. They were clichés, but she noted them anyway. Ever since she’d read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, she’d been keeping track of her first impressions at crime scenes. So far she was fifty-fifty on the hunches she formed.
Mercy didn’t know either of the uniforms, but she had known Sam Kinsett, the forensics tech, since she was in uniform herself. His red hair had thinned as her waist had thickened, but both of them still looked pretty good ten years into their careers.
“Blunt trauma to the head,” Sam said by way of hello.
“They taught you well. That the weapon?” She pointed to a crystal candlestick lying on the ground nearby, the mate of the one in the hall.
“All signs point to yes,” Sam replied.
One of the uniforms joined in. “Neighbors called in because the door was open and said they heard sounds of a struggle. We showed up to find him like this.”
“How’s the rest of the house?” she asked.
“Tossed,” the other uniform replied. “Really tossed. The whole place is a mess.”
The rest of the forensics team arrived for pictures and prints while Mercy walked the house. The bedroom was a shambles, with clothes dumped from drawers and pictures taken off the walls. Gordon Gleed kept a home office, which had now been turned upside down, with most of the contents of his mahogany desk dumped across the top. The blue box of a Linksys wireless router sat in a corner, its lights still on, but the wireless laptop, if it existed, was now gone. The kitchen had been ransacked, plates broken and dish drawers left open. Even the refrigerator had been searched.
By the time Mercy returned to the living room, Sam and his team were packing up. “We’re ready to move the body. You got anything else you want?”
Mercy didn’t answer at first. Something about the house bothered her, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “How’s his wallet?”
“Empty,” said one of the uniformed cops. “No cash, I mean.”
“The DVD player’s gone from the den,” said the other cop. “TV’s still there. They only took light stuff.”
“Any other reports of home invasions in this neighborhood?”
“Nada,” said the first cop.
“Light stuff,” Mercy repeated. She looked around the living room again. She was sure she’d seen those couches in a catalog. The coffee table, too. Catalogs, but expensive ones. She walked over to the plastic tree and touched its leaves. They looked real enough, but they felt waxy and stiff. She plucked one and it popped out. The leaves were held in place with a clever little ball-and-socket arrangement. It was well made, but it still didn’t fit with the rest of the decor. She crouched down and looked at the big wicker basket that held the fake plant. Grabbing the basket with both hands, she pushed it aside.
“Look what I found,” she muttered.
The plastic tree hid a small, round floor safe set beneath the carpet. She bent down, careful not to touch, and examined the combination lock and the hinges. Both were covered with dust. If the killer was looking for the valuables, he hadn’t looked very hard. But he had tried hard to make it look as if he had tried hard.
This wasn’t adding up, she thought. No one commits a home invasion robbery in this neighborhood to steal a few dollars in cash and a DVD player.
The next two hours passed quickly. The uniformed officers knocked on neighboring doors and asked questions. Mercy found recent copies of Penthouse under the piles of clothes strewn around his bedroom, which put a crimp in the gay lover theory. The ex-wife had been “ex” for seven years, had her own money and a new husband. That left Mercy with only one hunch left.
“Let’s get to know Mr. Gleed’s business contacts.”
Five Days Ago
Jack Bauer stood at the bow of the Catalina Express, a huge hydrofoil boat that carried passengers from the mainland to Santa Catalina Island, twenty-six miles across the sea.
His wife, Teri, was standing next to him, holding her sweater close to her throat and pressing in against his body to ward off the breeze as the boat eased into its Long Beach dock. It had been a long time since she’d done that. It had
been a long time since he’d missed it.
“It was a good trip,” she said. “Than
ks.”
He nodded and let his cheek rest against her head. He didn’t deserve the thanks — the trip hadn’t really been his idea. Well, the specifics had been, maybe, but not the concept. Their marriage had been on shaky ground for a year, but Teri, not he, had had the courage to suggest they do something about it. A weekend away had seemed easy enough, so he’d rented a condo at Hamilton Cove on Catalina Island.
Her hair smelled like watermelon, and he breathed her in. He agreed. It was a good trip. When she pulled herself out of mommy mode and he stopped obsessing over his Counter Terrorist Unit caseload, they made a good pair.
“You think we can keep this up?” he wondered aloud.
He felt her shrug. “It’s easy to be a holy man on top of a mountain.”
Jack didn’t enjoy philosophy. “Meaning?”
“Meaning the last two days have been great, but it wasn’t the real world. That’s the real world.” She pointed to the dock ahead. The Catalina Express was just easing into its huge slip. On the walkway beyond, huge crowds of people walking past. Beyond lay the Express’s office building, and beyond that the buildings of Long Beach, and Los Angeles, and the mountains far off in the distance.
The ship docked, and Jack and Teri Bauer followed the passengers on their slow, small-stepped progress down the gangplank and onto shore. Crewmen carted all the bags onto the promenade. The Bauers picked theirs out. Jack shouldered his and Teri’s, and they turned toward the crowd milling past.
“There must be a lot of people coming back from Catalina this weekend,” Teri said.
One of the crewmen, overhearing, grunted, “Naw, you never get this many people from the island. These are all from Mexico or somewhere. A whole big fleet came in.
Bunch of protestors.”
“Protesting what?” Jack asked.
The crewman shrugged.
Hitching the two bags higher on his shoulders, Jack plunged into the crowd. The group was a mixture of South Americans — mostly short men and women dressed in poor clothing — and a species of political activist quite common to North America: twenty-something Caucasians in dreadlocks or stubbornly unwashed hair, wearing carefully selected secondhand clothes. Jack hadn’t had any direct experience with the type, but he’d read enough profiles and attended enough briefings to guess what they were protesting — a G8 summit was scheduled to start in Los Angeles in a few days. Like the meetings of the World Trade Organization, the G8 sessions usually triggered waves of protests from anti-globalization and pro-environmental groups.
Distracted, Jack didn’t see the other man until they collided. Without thinking, Jack pushed back, his right hand sliding under his jacket out of habit. The other man stumbled back a step and cursed under his breath, though Jack couldn’t hear exactly what he said. He threw Jack an angry glare — just long enough for Jack to catch a dark face and bright, burning eyes. Then he hurried through the crowd. Jack watched him go.
“Don’t start anything,” Teri said, only half joking. “You pushed him.”
“Yeah,” Jack said distractedly. He took a few steps, then said, “That guy just looked familiar.”
“Work familiar or old friend familiar?”
He didn’t need to look at her to know that a resigned frown had settled across her face. They’d come down off the mountain already.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. But Jack’s eyes didn’t leave the man until he was out of sight.
1. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 7 A.M. AND 8 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
7:00 A.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles
It was just seven o’clock in the morning, and already the mob had gathered in front of the Federal Building. LAPD had blocked off Wilshire Boulevard, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, for two miles in either direction. It was a concession to the size and force of the crowd. The original battle plan had called for the police to keep protestors at least five blocks away from the Federal Building, but no one in his right mind believed the protestors would obey that rule— just as no one in his right mind wanted images of L.A.’s finest beating and tear gassing hordes of protestors. So, at a permit meeting that felt more like a peace summit, the police had promised not to use excessive force if the protestors kept their feet on the wide green lawn surrounding the perimeter of the building and off the concrete plaza at its center. The protestors, in turn, had agreed to remain peaceful and keep their troops within the permit area.
Neither side expected the other to keep its word.
Jack Bauer moved through the crowd, following in his daughter Kim Bauer’s wake. He worked to make his footsteps heavy and his eyes dull. He did this partly for the benefit of any protestors on the lookout for undercover cops, but also for the benefit of his daughter. He didn’t want her to think he was on the job.
“These are my guys,” Kim Bauer said, turning a quick smile on her father. She skipped forward until she bumped up against a group of other teens who’d formed their own island in the sea of protestors. Most of them wore blue T-shirts with the words “Teen Green” scrawled across the front and back. As Kim giggled with them, a short, wiry man with glasses, a bald head, and a weary smile navigated his way through them and stuck his hand out to Jack.
“Marshall Cooper. You the parent chaperone?” He enunciated quickly and crisply, and had a pale, vegetarian sort of look about him.
“Jack Bauer. No, sorry, I just—”
“I’m here, I’m here,” said a harried and very loud female voice. A large woman with bright blond hair and a faux leopard-skin purse appeared beside them, grabbing Cooper’s still-hovering hand. “Andi Parks. You must be Mr. Cooper, right? I knew it, Cindi said you were a granola type; no offense, of course, I mean we’re all here for the same granola causes, right? That’s what Teen Green is, right?”
And that was just her hello. Marshall Cooper tried to speak — Jack thought he was saying something about being Teen Green’s student advisor — but he didn’t stand much of a chance against Andi Parks’s barrage of words. She went on talking to the little man even though she’d turned to look at the Teen Green girls already. Cooper glanced at Jack Bauer with a look that pleaded, Are you sure you don’t want to be the parent chaperone? Jack shrugged sympathetically.
“Kim. Kim!” Jack called over the noise. She tore her gaze away from a boy with straight hair that hung down to his eyebrows. “I’m getting some coffee. I’ll be back to check on things in a while.” He was sure she hadn’t heard a word, but she smiled and nodded anyway before turning her attention back to the boy.
Jack surveyed the sea of protestors around his daughter. What he saw was a collection of teens and twentysomethings mingling with older, grizzled protestors from a faded generation. It might have been a grandparents and kids gathering, if not for the twenty-story Federal Building looming over them and the atmosphere electrified by tension. The protestors tended to gather into groups, but then those groups blended into larger factions. Often these factions shared a common purpose. More often, though, the only thing they shared was a common enemy — in this case, the G8.
The G8, or “Group of Eight” was composed of the world’s leading industrialized nations, namely the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, and Russia. This was, of course, an old boys’ network of “leading” nations, since a number of countries rightly pointed out that Italy wasn’t exactly a manufacturing powerhouse compared to the exporting power of many Asian nations, many of whom were currently lobbying for a place at the table. In fact, one of the main issues on the agenda for this particular G8 summit was the possible inclusion of China, whose exploding economy was being watched anxiously by every other market on the planet.
The entire Los Angeles headquarters of the Counter Terrorist Unit had been subjected to several briefings on the G8 summit, of course. The briefings thus far hadn’t amounted to much. In the aftermath of 9/11, the newspapers and local law enforcement agencies used phrases like “highvalue target” in connection wi
th an event like the G8, but the truth was, attacking the summit wouldn’t be al-Qaeda’s style. Terrorists connected to Islamic fundamentalism had thus far chosen two specific types of targets: military assets located in Arab countries and purely civilian targets that caused maximum fear and confusion. Al-Qaeda and its loose collection of affiliates would assume that the G8 summit was shielded by a nearly impenetrable security screen and, Jack knew, that assumption would be correct. And, more importantly, both sides knew that attacks, even successful ones, against political targets would generate more outrage than terror. If and when al-Qaeda ever struck inside the borders of the United States again, Jack was sure they would attack a train or a shopping mall, a soft target that promised gruesome results.
Even so, there were plenty of other terrorist organizations with far more specific political agendas, and for them, the G8 represented the most logical target. Jack had attended no fewer than five high-level security briefings in the past two weeks; at each of them, the various layers of security had been reviewed with agonizing thoroughness. Aside from the uniformed security in and around the Federal Building, response teams had been positioned all around the perimeter of the protest group, and plainclothes agents mixed freely with the protestors. In addition to those plainclothes officers, undercover agents had infiltrated several of the more belligerent activist groups. With all that security on hand, the presence of one additional CTU agent meant very little.
Which was exactly the point made to Jack by the chief of his department, Christopher Henderson.
“There’s no need for you to be there,” Henderson had said a day earlier, rejecting his request.
“There’s no harm in it,” Jack protested. “I’m telling you I saw him.”
Henderson had tried unsuccessfully to hide his skepticism. He knew from past experience that Jack Bauer didn’t make idle suggestions. Bauer had bucked the chain of command, ignored the opinions of his colleagues, and risked making a fool of himself and everyone around him. If Jack Bauer stomped into his office claiming to have uncovered a plot to assassinate the entire line of succession in the U.S. government, Henderson would probably believe him. But this…
