24 Declassified: Cat's Claw 2d-4

by John Whitman

  This was going to work, Jack thought. They were going to find this Todd Romond and he was going to cure Kim.

  Romond’s apartment was a small seventies model shaped like the letter “U.” The empty middle of the shape was a grass yard open to the sidewalk, with a driveway on one side that led to a carport that supported the upper-story apartment at the back. There was a car parked diagonally across the driveway.

  “That Romond’s car?” Jack asked, already knowing the answer.

  Mercy conferred with the stats she’d written down after calling in for Romond’s profile. “Yep. Looks like he’s coming or going in a hurry.”

  “Guess which.”

  Jack stopped in the middle of the street and jumped out, Mercy close behind. Jack nearly stumbled at the curb, reminding himself how hard he’d pushed it all day. Jack checked the car quickly, his weapon drawn but held low at his side. Sure the car was empty, he ran to the apartment number that matched Romond’s. There were lights on in the living room.

  Jack pounded on the door. “Romond! Federal agents!”

  No answer. Jack didn’t want to wait for another warning. He stepped back and then kicked the door hard right where the bolt met the frame. The thick door held until the third try, when the wood shattered and the door swung open.

  Mercy, who’d come up behind, now slipped around him as he recoiled his foot. She stepped into the room and faded left. Jack followed, his own weapon now chest-level. But it wasn’t necessary.

  Todd Romond lay on his back on the living room floor. There was a small hole in his forehead, from which blood slowly trickled. Beside him was an old lady, facedown, as dead as he was.

  Mercy checked the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom, and that was the end of that small apartment. She came back to stand over Romond’s body.

  “Al-Libbi,” Jack said hoarsely. “We’re in a race now.”

  16. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 10 P.M. AND 11 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

  10:00 P.M. CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Christopher Henderson watched technicians from National Health Services carefully wheel a hermetically sealed coffin out of the holding room. They had sprayed the room down with powerful chemical cleansers and collected the soiled chemicals into special vats. They had gathered up what was left of the girl’s body, which wasn’t much considering that she’d been alive and actually participated in a firefight not two hours earlier. That was the fate that awaited the President if they didn’t do their jobs right.

  A call came through from Jack Bauer. Henderson took it at a spare computer station. “Tell me you found something.”

  “We did,” Bauer said from the other end of the line. “We have the names of three people who worked with Copeland.

  We think they know about the vaccine.”

  “Good! Let’s round them up.”

  “Agreed,” Bauer replied. “We have to move fast. The first one was just murdered. I’m standing over his body.”

  “Al-Libbi,” Henderson surmised.

  “The girl gave him the names. He’s ahead of us.”

  “But he can’t have our manpower. Give me the other names. I’ll get teams to bring them in right now.”

  Jack recited the two other names they’d gleaned from Copeland’s annotations: Sarah Kalmijn and Pico Santiago. “On it,” Henderson said. “I’ll call you back.”

  10:06 P.M. PST Bauer Residence

  Teri Bauer picked up the phone before the first ring had finished.

  “Honey, it’s me,” Jack said.

  Her voice was cold and quiet. “Great, how nice of you to call.”

  The tone of her voice stabbed Jack in the chest. “Teri, I’m sorry—”

  “You’re not!” his wife replied, her voice rising slightly. But she wasn’t frantic or passionate. She was earnest. “Jack, you’re not, that’s the thing about it. You’re out there doing your job. I know that. But it doesn’t make it any easier to be the person sitting here. There was a riot today, Jack. Our daughter was in the middle of a riot. My husband was in the middle of a riot. I haven’t even been able to process that, and you’re probably already doing god knows what else.”

  Trying to stop a virus from killing half the city, he thought. Trying to save the President of the United States and our daughter. But of course he said neither of those things.

  “How’s Kim?”

  “Sleeping,” Teri said, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. “She has a little fever and went to bed early. I’m hoping it was just all the craziness today.”

  The phone was silent for a minute. “Jack?”

  “Sorry,” he said after a second. “The connection dropped out. Just a fever, though? Anything to worry about? One of the protestors they arrested today had some kind of rash. Nothing serious, but some FBI guys caught it and said it itched like crazy.”

  “No, I didn’t see a rash.”

  “Okay.”

  “Jack, what time are you coming home?”

  Another pause. “I don’t know, Teri. As soon as I can, I promise. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” she said, in the same voice she’d used to answer the phone.

  10:12 P.M. PST Venice, California

  Jack ended the call and put his head down for just a minute. It was a moment of indulgence he could hardly afford, but he took it anyway. Teri was upset with him, but she didn’t know the half of it. He would have to tell her the truth soon. By his watch he still had a few hours, even allowing for a margin of error…but in the end he’d have to get Kim quarantined. She would hate him then.

  “You really do love her,” Mercy said. She’d watched the pain on his face when he made the call, and the nearly incomprehensible anguish in his thoughts afterward.

  Jack shrugged. “We’ve had a life, you know?”

  “I guess,” she said, then added, “but not really.”

  He had no response for that. He’d spent his savings of emotional currency on others already, including her. He had nothing to spare for a life and career that had kept her from a husband and family.

  The mobile phone rang, saving him from his obligation to respond. “Bad news,” Henderson said. “Santiago and Kalmijn are both gone.”

  “Al-Libbi?” Jack asked.

  “There’s no knowing for sure, but there are no signs of struggle, and certainly no bodies,” the field operations chief replied. “And phone records show that each residence received a call from Todd Romond’s location not long ago.”

  “He was already packed to go,” Jack guessed. “He warned them.”

  “Which means they’re in hiding. Let’s work on friends and family and try to find them.”

  Henderson said, “I’ll have Jamey Farrell run through video footage and electronic data. Maybe a traffic cam picked up their directions. Long shot, but we’ll try everything.”

  “I’ve got an angle I can work,” Jack said.

  He hung up and relayed the information to Mercy. “What’s your angle?” she asked.

  “I’ll take you there,” he said. This was a moment he’d been dreading.

  They drove in semi-silence, punctuated now and then by brief questions filling in bits and pieces of the day. Frankie must have been exposed to the virus at the same time Mercy was, but she’d received the weaponized version, the same one that had been used on the President. They made sure that NHS had tented that safe house as well. So far, they’d been lucky: the virus had been contained at several relatively controllable locations. Mercy herself had been lucky. It appeared she’d absorbed the slower-acting strain.

  Mercy didn’t realize where they were going until they pulled up in front of 16150 West Washington. Jack got out and she followed suit, a look of confusion settling on her face. “This…you know what this address is? This is my informant inside the eco-terrorist movement.”

  “I know,” Jack said. He climbed the exterior steps to the second floor with Mercy in tow and went straight to the apartment of Ted Ozersk
y, a.k.a. Willow. He knocked, and the door opened almost immediately. Willow shook hands with Jack and let them both in.

  Mercy sat down gingerly, as though she thought the floor might suddenly disappear beneath her. “What’s going on?”

  Jack took a deep breath. “Mercy, this is Ted Ozersky—”

  “I know him, don’t be an idiot,” Mercy said, suddenly irritable.

  “Ted Ozersky is a CTU agent.”

  The sentence was such a non sequitur to Mercy that it barely registered. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “I’m a CTU agent, Detective,” Ozersky said. The California drawl was gone. He spoke in crisp, efficient clips.

  Jack had been waiting almost a month to tell Mercy the truth, and he’d known since the moment she showed up at the Federal Building that the day had arrived. But he hadn’t had time to consider how to tell her, and there was very little time to spare, so it came out now in a rush.

  “Mercy, all the stuff you tried to tell me this morning, about radical eco-terrorists. I knew it was all true. CTU has had its eye on them for a while, but they were tough to get inside.”

  Ozersky (she had stopped thinking of him as Willow the minute his voice changed) said, “I had managed to infiltrate Earth First! but I could see that they weren’t a real target for CTU. It was their radical fringe that was the threat. Those guys are paranoid, and I couldn’t get any closer. But I passed along what I did hear.”

  “Including, several months ago, that someone in a fringe group had contacted Ayman al-Libbi, trying to learn how he operated,” Jack jumped in. “That’s when Tony Almeida and I got seriously involved.”

  “A couple of months ago…” Mercy said. She was in shock.

  “One piece of information that Ted passed on was the rumor that the eco-terrorists had someone inside the security services, but we didn’t know who. It could have been FBI, even CTU. It could have been more than one person. At the time, I was nervous about giving our operation too high a profile.

  “When Gordon Gleed was murdered, I knew the ecoterrorists were making a move. I needed someone to investigate, someone I knew was good, and that I could keep an eye on without the word getting out that CTU was involved.”

  “That you could keep an eye on…” Mercy repeated dumbly. Jack sat ramrod-straight, ready to take the brunt of her anger as soon as the meaning of that phrase seeped in. But she passed it over for the moment. She said, “Are… Jack, are you telling me that you arranged for me to get on the Gordon Gleed case?”

  Jack nodded. “And I made sure that Ted became one of your contacts. He was able to feed you information you could use, and it never appeared that the Federal government was involved. Copeland — I didn’t know his name until you found it out — Copeland was paranoid about the Federal government. One whiff of us and I was afraid he’d vanish.”

  “Did you know about the virus?” she asked.

  “All rumors,” Jack said. “But we knew that the ecoterrorists were trying to improve their game by learning from the big leaguers like al-Libbi.”

  The shock was wearing off. Anger crept into her voice. “This morning, at the Federal Building, you made me feel like an idiot.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But at that point we’d narrowed our suspects down. Tony believed that the mole was in the FBI, and that he was part of the surveillance team. I couldn’t be sure if he was listening to our conversation. If he was, I wanted him thrown off the scent.”

  “But—”

  “Remember, I tried to talk you out of coming to the Federal Building at all, but there’s no stopping you.”

  Mercy’s neck turned pink. “So I’ve just been in the fucking way…”

  Jack smiled. “Hardly. You’ve done all the work. You found out about the Monkey Wrench Gang. We didn’t know anything about these people except that they, or at least some of them, wanted to work with al-Libbi, who I knew was inside the country. The only snafu was when you came to see me. It made Copeland panic because he thought I was investigating him. He got Kim involved, and he kidnapped you. That threw a wrench into the works. But everything we learned about who they are we learned from you.”

  Mercy looked from Jack to Ted Ozersky and back to Jack. The emotions churning inside her were visible on her face. “You used me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. And he was; not sorry for doing whatever needed doing to complete the task. As far as he was concerned, that was the definition of his job. But he had an immense amount of respect for her, and he was genuinely sorry for any pain he caused her.

  “The thing to do now,” Ozersky said, saving them both from the tense silence that followed, “is to compare notes. Two people have gone missing. I spent a lot of time on the fringes of the group. You’ve spent a lot of time investigating. Maybe together we can come up with something.”

  The next moment was, perhaps, the moment Jack most admired Mercy Bennet. She’d just been humiliated personally and professionally by a man who, from her perspective, had nearly become her lover. But she rebounded almost immediately and plunged into a conversation with Ozersky. He talked about people he’d met on the fringes of Frankie’s circle. She whittled down his list from memory, discarding people she’d investigated and found to be inactive or unenthusiastic when it came to real action. It wasn’t long before they came up with a short list of contacts for both Santiago and Kalmijn that might know their whereabouts.

  “Good,” Jack said. “The three of us will follow up on Santiago’s contacts. I’ll call from the car and have Tony Almeida and Nina go after the others.”

  “Santiago worked at Earth Café over in Venice,” Ozersky said. “We should start there. It closes any minute.”

  They stood up, and Ozersky ran to get his gun and badge. During the interlude, Mercy stared daggers at Jack, but said nothing. Jack already felt like he’d been through hell, and something told him it was only the beginning.

  17. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 11 P.M. AND 12 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

  11:00 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Of all the times Christopher Henderson had wanted to hit Ryan Chappelle, this was the hardest to resist.

  “You authorized this whole goddamned thing without telling me!” Henderson yelled so loud that the thick glass of his office could not completely muffle it.

  “Don’t yell at me,” Chappelle shot back. He was exhausted and frustrated from dealing with a frayed and angry presidential staff for the last hour, while at the same time overseeing the security lockdown that kept an entire nation from knowing its president had been exposed to a violent hemorrhagic fever. “I’ll have you working postal routes searching for stray anthrax.”

  “This is bullshit!” Henderson continued. “How can I do my job as Director of Field Operations when you have my people running clandestine missions behind my back.”

  Chappelle had just informed Henderson of Jack’s operation linking the eco-terrorists to Ayman al-Libbi.

  Chappelle sniffed arrogantly. “It was need-to-know. Besides, if you want to blame someone, blame Bauer. He bypassed you. Better yet, blame yourself. Aren’t you one of the reasons he’s here in the first place?”

  “So Jack wants to run a secret operation and you give it your stamp of approval? Jack’s job is to think outside the lines. I thought yours was to stick to the rule book.”

  Chappelle laughed; it was a thin, unpleasant sound. “You know what I notice? How everyone thinks it’s great to have a loose cannon like Jack Bauer around…right up until the loose cannon rolls over their toes. Sharpton liked Jack, too, and now he’s dead. Don’t be surprised if someday you find yourself regretting that Bauer’s around.”

  11:07 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Jessi sat at her desk, staring at her computer screen. She was supposed to be analyzing downloads from security and traffic cameras within a five-mile radius of two addresses, and running the facial recognition systems to see if any cameras had picked up their mo
vement. But she knew she wasn’t doing a good job. Her focus was gone. No, it wasn’t gone, but it wasn’t here, either. It was with Kelly Sharpton.

  “Jessi, are you on it?” Jamey Farrell appeared at her side. “You look lost.”

  “Um, no, yeah, I’m good,” she replied. “Sorry. I’m on it now.”

  But she didn’t notice the picture sliding by her of the slim man with dark hair leaving his apartment. If she had, it might have saved more than one life.

  11:10 P.M. PST Earth Café, Venice, California

  A clerk was locking the front door of the Earth Café as Jack, Ozersky, and Mercy Bennet jogged up. Jack put his hand on the glass door just before it closed. “Hang on, it’s just after eleven,” he said, pointing at the sign that indicated closing time was eleven-thirty.

  The clerk, a dark-haired twenty-something girl with a nose ring and a very flat stomach between her T-shirt and her low-slung men’s trousers, pushed on the door again, a look of panic in her eyes. “We’re closing early. Sorry!” She shoved at the door and Jack relented. He watched her lock the door and then hurry behind the counter and into the back room.

  “Slackers?” Ozersky wondered aloud.

  “She’s pretty anxious,” Mercy said.

  “You guys walk back to the car,” Jack ordered. They all turned around and retreated to the sidewalk. Mercy and Ted continued, but as soon as they were out of sight of the doorway, Jack turned and sprinted toward the rear of the café. There was a small parking lot in back, but it wasn’t well lit. Jack stuck to the shadows and reached the back of the building in no time. He touched the back door gently, feeling it locked. There was a small window above and to the right of the door. Jack hopped up onto a blue Dumpster that stank of coffee grinds and rotting vegetables, balanced himself on the edge, and looked in the window.