24 Declassified: Cat's Claw 2d-4

by John Whitman

  “Breaking us out,” Jack replied. The van had been rocking sporadically for several minutes, the brief interruptions accompanied by screams and cries of alarm. Jack assumed that the police were trying to retake control of the area, but there were too many rioters covering too much territory. Either the same group of rioters retreated and returned, or new groups of rioters flooded in as soon as the last group had been driven off. Once Jack heard someone enter the cab and try to start up the vehicle, but the engine wouldn’t turn over.

  The rocking had been going on without interruption now for several minutes, and Jack guessed that the police had given up. Perhaps they didn’t know there were detainees in the wagon; perhaps they didn’t care. Either way, they’d ceded the ground to the rioters.

  The wagon went up on its side again, axles groaning, and this time it hung there for a moment as if it had all the time in the world to decide. Outside, the mob hooted and cheered, but their cheers turned to disappointment when the wagon fell back to all four tires. The chanting and the rocking started again.

  “They’re going to kill us!” the blond kid whined.

  “Brace yourself,” Jack instructed. “If it goes over upside down for you, keep your chin tucked.”

  The chanting started again, and the van rocked and groaned. Jack planted his feet firmly on the far wall. “Get ready.”

  Up went the van again, the frame trembling as it teetered on the very edge of the driver side tires. Jack was ready, hoping it would tip this way and put him on his feet. But the van fell back. Immediately it tilted to the passenger side. Jack felt his world turn upside down. He was on his shoulders with his neck pressed against the metal side wall. The wagon paused, then fell flat on its side. Jack felt the impact travel through his neck like an electric shock. Outside, the crowd cheered.

  9. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 3 P.M. AND 4 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

  3:00 P.M. PST Federal Building Command Center, West Los Angeles

  Kim Bauer had been sitting on a cot in the basement of the building for almost two hours. She was in some sort of minihospital, with several cots set up to treat sick people, those poles on wheels with the hooks at the top for IV bags, and other machines.

  They had kept the metal door to the hospital room closed, but now and then someone would come inside, sometimes to check on her, sometimes to get supplies from a cabinet. Every time she asked if she could leave, the man or woman would give her a quick “No” and rush out.

  As time passed Kim’s demands had become more urgent, but the replies were even more insistent. During the short intervals when the door had been opened, she saw Federal employees, some in police uniforms and some in suits, hurrying back and forth.

  But at that moment, two uniformed security guards carried in a third officer whose head was heavily bandaged. Blood still trickled out from under the bandage and onto his forehead and cheek. The other two laid him down on one of the empty cots. A doctor — the same woman who had taken Kim’s blood — followed close behind to treat him.

  “Excuse me, I have to go!” Kim said to one of the security officers. He looked at her, his beefy face sweaty under his round cap.

  “Trust me, you don’t want to go anywhere right now,” he said. “There’s a little trouble outside.”

  “Then let me call my mom,” Kim said. “She’s got to be freaking.”

  “You have a cell phone?”

  “The battery died.”

  The cop looked harried. “Come here.” He led her out into the main control room, which was bustling with activity. “Here.” The man handed her a land line and then hurried off.

  Kim dialed her home number quickly. Her mother picked up on the first ring.

  “Mom, it’s me, don’t freak—”

  “Kim! Thank god! Where the hell are you! You know there’s a riot—”

  “I’m safe, Mom. Dad got me into the building before it all started.”

  “He should never have let you go down there in the first place.” She sounded stressed out, and Kim knew that she’d been worrying all this time. She was sure that, once her phone was charged, she’d find a dozen frantic messages.

  “There was no way he knew this was going to happen, Mom. You’re too hard on him.”

  “They all knew, Kim!” her mother snapped. “Your father always knows more than he tells, trust me. Let me talk to him.”

  “He’s not here. He…went out.”

  Her mom said something she would have gotten in trouble for saying. “I’m coming to get you.”

  “I don’t think you can, Mom. I think there’s a lot going on outside.” She looked at the wounded security officer. “I’m okay in here. You should probably wait until it calms down.” She told her mother that her phone was dead and promised to call her again in thirty minutes. She hung up the phone and rubbed her arm where the doctor had drawn blood.

  3:10 P.M. PST National Health Services Laboratory, Los Angeles

  Celia Alexis rubbed her eyes before looking into the microscope. It had been a long day, and news of the riots at the Federal Building had not helped her concentration. She knew Jean could take care of himself, but she also knew that if he saw people in trouble, he would ignore any danger to help them. She’d seen that back in Haiti when they were kids, and she’d seen him act recklessly as an adult. He always laughed and told her that an L.A. Sheriff ’s deputy was supposed to run toward trouble, but she knew, she knew that he was always looking for ways to prove he was as good as or better than everyone else. It was an immigrant’s attitude he had never outgrown.

  Of course, she was self-aware enough to know that she suffered from a similar disease herself. First in her under-grad class at Stanford, top of her medical school class at UCLA. She didn’t have to be first, but anything less felt like failure. She had left her barefoot childhood back in Haiti, but somehow she’d managed to bring the burden of Haiti itself with her, like that hint of accent she could never seem to silence. Her friends liked it; the men in her life loved its singsong quality, but to Celia the slow roundness of her vowels evoked no images of Calypso and sun-drenched beaches, but only the dirty streets and poverty of Port-au-Prince.

  Celia pressed her eyes to the microscope and studied the slide. Someone had marked this urgent — a blood sample from a teenage girl. The researcher blinked, rubbed her eyes again, and adjusted herself at the scope. But when she looked at the blood sample, the image hadn’t changed.

  “Ken?” she called, sitting back. There was another researcher, Ken Diebold, working at the other end of the lab counter. Like her, he was wearing a sterile suit and mask. Researchers in the laboratory wore them as a matter of habit, although Celia felt with sudden dread that in this case, the sterile environment might be necessary. “Can you come look at this?”

  Diebold was decent enough, but he suffered from a deep appreciation of his own sense of humor. “What’s this? The Caribbean Queen asking for help?” he said dryly.

  “Just look,” she insisted.

  Ken walked over and, without sitting down, looked into the scope. He straightened and looked at Celia, then sat down as she moved out of the way, and looked again. “Where did this come from?” he said at last.

  “CTU Los Angeles just brought it in,” Celia replied.

  “CTU Los Angeles?” Ken said in shock, his voice rising an octave. “This patient is inside the United States?”

  Celia nodded.

  “You know what this is?” he said.

  Celia nodded again. “It’s a filovirus. It looks like it’s related to Ebola—”

  “—or Marburg,” the other doctor said.

  “But it’s not Marburg,” Celia pointed out. “The shepherd’s crook shape isn’t the same.”

  “Is the patient isolated? When did exposure happen?”

  “We’d better find out,” Celia said, “before half of Los Angeles dies from hemorrhagic fever.”

  3:14 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

  T
he door of the overturned police wagon flew open. Hands reached in and pulled the prisoners out one at a time. Jack, who had positioned himself near the door, was one of the first. There was a small mob around the fallen van, cheering as each one of the prisoners was helped out. Beyond the mob, the street was empty for nearly a block, but farther down Jack saw a line of rioters pushing against a line of policemen with shields and batons. The rioters had abandoned all reason, and were ignoring the blows of batons.

  “We managed to get through,” one of the protestors said to Jack, like one soldier briefing another. “Those bastards did a good job holding us back, especially with those god-damned horses. But we got to you. Here.” The man, who spoke with a slight Spanish accent, held up a pair of wire cutters. He stepped behind Jack and severed the flex cuffs.

  “Hey!” yelled a rioter, bending down to look into the wagon. “One of these guys is hurt. His leg looks really bad.” Jack glanced down. It was the man in the blue shirt. He screamed as they pulled him out of the wagon. His left leg was broken at the shin, snapped at such an acute angle that his leg appeared to have a second knee.

  “Look what we found!” someone yelled from the front end of the vehicle. Jack leaned around the corner to see three rioters pulling a half-conscious policeman from the cab. Jack recognized him as the same cop who said he’d try to call CTU. His face was covered in blood from a cut on his forehead and his eyes weren’t focused. He was as limp as a rag doll and no threat to anyone. But he was wearing a police uniform, and in the rioters’ maddened state, that’s all it took. One of them stomped on his head.

  Jack snatched the wire cutters from his rescuer’s hand and shoved him out of the way. He reached the injured cop before the three rioters and, as another one raised his foot to stomp down, Jack kicked his base leg. The rioter screamed and toppled over. The other two looked at him in surprise. Jack punched one of them in the stomach with the hand holding the wire cutters. The beak of the cutters jabbed into the man’s stomach and he crumpled to the floor. The third one grabbed Jack by the shirt, so Jack head-butted him in the nose and shoved him backward.

  “What the hell are you doing!” shouted the man who’d brought the wire cutters.

  “He’s not one of us!” It was the blond kid, who’d just been pulled out of the van. “He’s a cop!”

  But by now Jack was a cop with a gun, having taken the policeman’s sidearm. He held the 9mm Beretta level and steady at the center mass of the man who had held the wire cutters. “You’re done here. All except for him.” He nodded at the man in the blue shirt, who was lying on the ground. “Everyone else go. Now.”

  The man under Jack’s gun said, “Bullshit. You don’t get to—”

  Jack squeezed the trigger and put a round past the man’s ear. Everyone cringed away from the sound of the gunshot. Only Jack held steady. “Now.”

  The crowd scattered. Jack watched them until they were too far away to pose any sort of threat. Hastily he knelt down beside the cop, who managed to focus on Jack. “You okay?” Jack said.

  “H-hell, no,” the cop said. “Thanks. You…saved…”

  “Later,” Jack said. “Looks like they forgot about you and me.” He looked over toward the Federal Building, but there were no cops in sight. Everyone was either inside the building or out chasing rioters. He snatched the radio off the man’s collar. “Dispatch, this is—” He looked around for the man’s name, but his riot gear was blank.

  “Agastonetti,” the man said weakly.

  “This is Officer Agastonetti,” Jack said. “Officer down at Federal and Wilshire. Just outside the Federal Building. Officer down.” He cut off as someone squawked back. The less detail they got, the faster they’d respond.

  Jack wanted assistance, but he didn’t want it just yet. He jumped back over to the blue-shirted man and crouched down beside him. The man was shuddering and sobbing from pain. There was blood on his pant leg, so Jack knew without looking underneath that the fracture was compound. His shin had snapped when the police van turned over.

  Jack grabbed his face in one hand and turned his chin until their eyes met. “Your name.”

  The man sobbed again, but said, “Kasim Turkel.”

  “Kasim, you’re going into shock,” Jack said calmly. “Your leg is shattered and you’re hemorrhaging all over the place. You’re going to die, unless I get you help right now. Do you want to die?”

  Kasim shook his head.

  Jack sat down and sighed. “Personally, I don’t care one way or the other. You can live or die, it’s all the same to me.” Kasim looked up at him in fear. Jack continued. “So if you want me to care, one way or the other, that is, it’s going to be very important how you answer the next few questions. Do you understand?”

  Kasim nodded.

  Jack replied with a look of satisfaction. He tapped the barrel of the Beretta directly onto Kasim’s broken leg. Kasim screamed. “Good. Let’s start.”

  3:18 P.M. PST National Health Services Laboratory, Los Angeles

  Celia stood up as Eli Hollingsworth, the Director of NHS, walked in. He was wearing a sterile suit that had been hastily pulled over his business attire. “Show me,” he said tersely.

  Celia stepped out of the way and let him examine the blood sample. By the time he straightened, his face was grim and looked far older than his forty-seven years. “The data you’ve collected on this sample matches information we just received from Brasília. Local authorities down there in the province of Minas Gerais found a local in his hut. His body looked like it had been torn apart, but it turns out the skin ruptures weren’t caused by assault. The skin had broken open due to hemorrhagic fever of a kind not previously recorded.”

  “Most hemorrhagic fevers originate in Africa,” Celia pointed out.

  “Not this one,” Hollingsworth guessed. “At least, not according to current evidence. This is the only case so far. It happened in a populated area with no sterility and high probability of transference from one host to another. No one would have brought the disease down there, there’s no reason to. So we have to assume that it originated there.”

  “But now it’s here,” Celia said. “Do we have more information on the patient here? Were they in Brazil?”

  “CTU hasn’t released it yet, for security reasons. All we know so far is that exposure probably took place this morning around nine o’clock,” Hollingsworth replied. “One more thing. There is one difference between this virus and the one in Minas Gerais. This one seems to replicate more slowly. I’d guess the local patient won’t become seriously compromised until about twenty hours or more after exposure. The strain from Brazil killed its victim in less than twelve.”

  “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—”

  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 us
ually 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?”