“No need.” Jack slipped off the examination bed and snaked his hands around the medical technician’s neck before he could stop him. Drawing his grip tight, he pulled Chet into a sleeper hold and regarded the man as he gasped and struggled. “Don’t fight it.”
In a couple of seconds, the technician went limp and Jack settled him gently to the floor. He pulled Chet’s keys from the loop on his belt and plundered the cabinets for doses of antibiotics and painkillers. The other man was narrower across the chest than Jack, but the shirt he wore beneath the scrubs was a passable fit. He helped himself to what little cash the other man had on him and slipped away, back through the window he had used to gain access.
Outside, clouds were drawing in and the sun had already dropped out of sight below the tenement buildings that ranged down the avenue.
A block away, he found an aging Toyota with a corroded door lock, and five minutes later he was heading west, hiding in plain sight among the lines of rush-hour traffic.
Jack caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror and those familiar green eyes looked back at him, a memory lurking there. The recall of a promise made; the only promise he still had to keep, the only one he had left.
“I’ll see you soon, Kim,” he said to the air.
* * *
The elevator doors opened to deposit Special Agent Thomas Hadley on the twenty-third floor of the Jacob K. Javits Building, and he walked out into a kind of controlled chaos. The atmosphere in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York field office was strung tight, and he licked his lips unconsciously, almost as if he could taste the urgency in the air. Hadley signed in and was still clipping his ID pass to his jacket pocket when he almost collided with Mike Dwyer, a supervisory agent and his direct superior.
“Tom, good,” said Dwyer, pulling him aside. “You’re here.” In his late forties and stocky with it, Dwyer was a stark contrast to Hadley’s trim athlete’s build—pale and sandy-haired where the younger man was tawny-skinned and shaven-headed.
Hadley nodded, taking in the sight of a dozen other agents moving back and forth, each intent on urgent tasks he could only guess at. “All hands on deck, huh?”
Dwyer nodded. “And then some.”
“I got time to get a cup of coffee?”
“No.” The other agent jerked his thumb at a glassed-in office across the room. “ASAC left orders to send you straight in when you got here. He finds out I even let you take your coat off before you talk to him, and my balls will be in a sling.”
Hadley’s eyes widened. On the long drive in from upstate, he’d gotten piecemeal fragments of what was going on in New York from news radio stations, but nothing concrete. “That bad?”
“Whatever you’ve heard,” Dwyer said, walking away, “it’s worse.”
Hadley’s lip curled and he made his way across the office, catching glimpses of other agents working video feeds or barking into telephones. He’d hoped that the rumors about a terror attack in the city were just hysteria, some overreaction from people who had half the truth and an overactive imagination. But being in the room now told him that wasn’t the case.
As he approached the office of Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge Rod O’Leary, he saw the big Irishman was on a call, a handset clamped to his ear. O’Leary caught sight of Hadley through the glass and beckoned him in with a terse jerk of the hand.
“It helps exactly no one if you drag your damn heels,” the ASAC was saying. “You want the FBI to do something we can actually call assistance, I suggest you get the people at Homeland Security to kindly pull their heads outta their asses.” O’Leary nodded as a tinny voice on the other end of the line replied in the affirmative. “Uh-huh. Right. Do that. Call me back when you get it.” He dropped the phone back into its cradle and blew out a breath.
“Sir,” began Hadley. “You wanted to see me?”
“Close the door, Tom, and sit down.”
Hadley dropped into a chair across the cluttered desk from his boss and watched as the other man gathered his thoughts. O’Leary was uncompromising, he was often crass, but he was direct and that was something that Thomas Hadley could deal with. However, in the months since he had been assigned to the NYC office, he had never really felt that the ASAC had been willing to give him the time of day. He wondered what had changed.
“Long story short…” O’Leary launched into an explanation before Hadley could ask any questions. “In the past twenty-four hours we’ve had the head of a foreign government get kidnapped and murdered on our turf by his own people.”
“Omar Hassan,” said Hadley, with a nod.
“What’s not public knowledge is that Hassan’s killers had a dirty bomb they were gonna blow right here in New York. Or that apparently, there may be elements inside the Russian government who were involved in making it happen.”
Hadley’s throat went dry. “That … That’s confirmed?”
“No, it’s not damn well confirmed.” O’Leary snapped, his annoyance flaring. “We have the mother of all international incidents unfolding right before our eyes on top of a mess that could have made nine-eleven look like a sideshow. FBI, Homeland, Secret Service, NYPD, everyone is right in the thick of this and we’re not even on the same page. Counter Terrorist Unit got their asses handed to them, something about an attack on their systems, so they’re out of the game.…” He sighed. “And if that isn’t enough, it looks like the president is going to take a career nosedive before the day is out.”
“Okay…” Hadley’s mind was racing as he tried to process it all. “So, what’s my tasking on this?”
“We’ll get to that.” O’Leary’s manner shifted. “Something else first. I’ve got some bad news.” He paused. “I have to tell you that Jason Pillar was shot dead a little over an hour ago. I’m sorry, I know he was a friend of yours.”
“What?” Without conscious thought, Hadley’s hand strayed to the spot just above his clavicle, where beneath his shirt there was a tattoo in gothic script that read Semper Fidelis; Always Faithful, the motto of the United States Marine Corps.
“I know Pillar was your commanding officer in the Gulf, that you two were tight. I wanted you to hear it from me first.”
“Thank you, sir…” Hadley fell silent for a moment. The truth was, his time in the Marines had not been a good one, and if not for Pillar it could have been much worse. When Hadley and the Corps had finally parted ways—and on less than cordial terms—it was his former commander who had helped Tom find his way to a career in law enforcement and eventually here to the FBI. The man had said he saw something in him.
Pillar himself had gone on to bigger and better things, first at the Defense Intelligence Agency and later as executive assistant to former President Charles Logan, and the two of them had kept in close contact over the years. Hadley knew that there were some in the New York field office—including O’Leary—who believed that Pillar had helped to gloss over the things in Hadley’s past that might have been an impediment to his advancement.
All that was true, of course, but Hadley would never admit it. And now his friend and ally was gone.
“Details are sketchy,” O’Leary was saying. “The shooting took place inside the United Nations building. Charles Logan was there with him and he’s in critical condition from a gunshot wound. The Secret Service are playing it close to their chest, they’re not telling us anything. Nothing has been released about any suspects. But the word is, Logan may not make it through the night.”
“Is this connected to the Hassan killing and the bomb plot?”
“We can’t rule that out.” O’Leary leaned forward. “But right now, I need you to focus on a new assignment. I’ve got people coming in from all over, and on top of everything else we have a priority-one order straight from the deputy director.” He grabbed a sheaf of papers and handed them to the agent. “You’re going to put together a pursuit team to track down and arrest this man.”
“Jack Bauer,” Hadley read the name off the file
in front of him. “I’ve heard of this guy. If half of what they say about him is true, he’s a menace…”
O’Leary scowled. “Where he goes, trouble follows. We lost one of our own last night too, a former agent named Renee Walker. She was part of that whole thing with Starkwood a while back, but she left the bureau afterward … Bauer had something to do with that. I’m willing to bet he’s caught up in her death.”
“That’s what this is about?” Hadley held up the file. “We want him for Walker’s murder?”
“We want him because there’s a warrant on his head for acts of treason and conspiracy against the United States, and for the murder of a bunch of Russian nationals. All this crap with the IRK, the peace treaty…” O’Leary gestured at the air. “He’s wired into it. But we’re not going to know exactly how until he’s in an interrogation room. Your friend Pillar was using CTU to actively chase him, but he gave them the slip.”
Hadley’s eyes widened. “So Bauer is connected to the shooting at the UN?”
“It’s possible. We don’t know for sure. He had no love for Logan, that’s a given. But right now, we’re operating on assumptions and circumstance. That has to change. We’re pretty certain Bauer is still in the city, but so far I haven’t had the manpower to go chasing after him. That’s your job now.”
Hadley gave a grave nod, his gaze hardening. “Understood. I’ll finish what Pillar … what was started.”
The ASAC studied him carefully. “Look, Tom … I’m gonna level with you. We’ve never seen eye to eye, you and me. I think your methods are questionable. But right now, I have a manhunt to prosecute on top of a citywide terror alert, and by virtue of being the wrong man in the wrong place, you’re the guy who’s gonna do that for me. Now, you take whatever it is that’s gonna motivate you and you get this job done. I don’t want to see or hear from you again until Bauer is in cuffs. Is that clear?”
“Crystal, sir.”
“Dwyer’s got you some people on this. Dell, Markinson, Kilner, couple of others if you need backup. Get up to speed and brief them.” The phone rang and the ASAC snatched it back up, dismissing Hadley with a wave of the hand.
He stepped out of the room and back into the main office, thinking it through. He studied the file image of Bauer’s face, trying to read something of a man he had never met.
Hadley’s hands drew into fists. If Bauer was connected to Pillar’s death, he owed it to his former commander to bring him in, and it occurred to the agent that this could also be an opportunity to finally put to rest whatever mistrust had been dogging him since he came to New York. And if that meant he had to use some of those “questionable” methods O’Leary didn’t like … That wasn’t a problem for him.
* * *
Across Manhattan, a few miles to the north in a stone-fronted town house off East Ninety-First Street, another former soldier was considering the same face, and the same objective.
Arkady Bazin had been a boy when he had ridden to war during the invasion of Afghanistan, a youth below the age of enlistment who had stolen his elder brother’s birth certificate and used it to pass himself off as old enough to fight. Back then, he had been blinded by a kind of patriotic fervor that seemed quaint to him now, but even decades later, Bazin’s love for Mother Russia had not faded. It had transformed into a kind of dogged, ruthless inertia—as if he were a weapon that had been set loose to roll on and on, crushing the enemies of his people.
And there was never a shortage of those. In those first days of fire and blood as a young soldier, Bazin had learned a fundamental truth. War had no end; it was only the battlefields and the faces the enemy wore that changed.
He put down the file in his hand and his lips thinned. Through the arched window behind him, lines of bright light were moving around, casting colorless streaks over the walls and the ceiling of the conference room where he sat. There were television vans parked out there, a line of them sitting bumper-to-bumper with their broadcast dishes deployed and their interchangeable location reporters all prattling away into handheld microphones. The lights fell from camera lamps, capturing the white, blue and red of the flag fluttering over the entrance of the Consulate General of the Russian Federation.
Surrounding the TV crews were American police, grumbling and sour-faced at their duties, and inside the perimeter of the black iron railings that ringed the consulate building there was another rank of watchers. They were armed with Skorpion submachine guns and Makarov pistols hidden under bulky jackets, careful to make sure that the locals did not see them. The SBP—Russia’s presidential security service—were here in force to protect President Yuri Suvarov on his international visit, but the events of the past few hours had changed the tempo of that activity from a discreet projection of power to the manner of an occupying military force.
Inside the consulate, the SBP had posted guards on every level. Bazin had glimpsed them in the situation room, in terse communication with the crew of Suvarov’s jet out on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International. He frowned at the thought. Had the decision been his to make, Bazin would have sent his president directly to the airport and had him airborne by now, out of harm’s way and off foreign soil.
Truth be told, if it had been his decision, he would have never allowed Suvarov to come to America in the first place, to talk with the rulers of this country and all the others as if they were some kind of equals. The very idea made his lip curl into a sneer.
Years of covert operations in and around the United States had instilled in him a deep distrust of this nation and its people. As an officer of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, the Russian Federation’s external intelligence agency, Bazin’s exposure to America had largely been in dealings with the traitors, the greedy and the venal among the country’s populace. What always kept him focused was the knowledge that his work was a vital kind of corrosive, forever eating away at the imagined superiority of his homeland’s old foe.
Some days he tired of it, but he knew he could not step down. The West could not be allowed to win, not even for a moment. They had to be opposed, to the very grave if needed.
Bazin found it difficult to consider the Americans as real people, not in the same way he thought of his fellow Russians. They were inferior, with their self-obsession and their shallow, materialistic manners—and what frightened him the most was the possibility that this pattern of behavior was creeping across the ocean to infect his people.
He wanted to see that end, and it seemed like Yuri Suvarov was a man who thought the same. Some small part of Bazin hoped he might actually get to meet the president; certainly they were both under the same roof at this moment. This was a man who understood that the Great Soviet Bear had not perished, only hibernated. Suvarov was the kind of leader who could rekindle the old unity the Russian states had once enjoyed in the day of the Communist era, if only given the chance. He liked to think that Suvarov would see in him a kindred spirit, someone who recalled and revered the day when their nation was a force to be reckoned with in global politics.
But no. Bazin dismissed the thought as fanciful, unprofessional. It was right that President Suvarov would never know his face or his name. Bazin saw himself as a loyal son of the Motherland, and it was enough that Suvarov would only know that there were weapons at his disposal which could be brought to bear to show Russia’s might to her foes.
He looked down at the file photo again. This man, this Jack Bauer, was just such an enemy. The data on him had been gleaned from spies embedded in the Central Intelligence Agency and allies in the Chinese government, a patchwork of half-truths and hearsay that crafted an image of who Bauer was, of what he was capable of doing. A policeman, a soldier, a spy, an assassin … Bauer had been all of these things, but now he was only a target.
The sneer returned to Bazin’s face. This ex-CIA killer was the perfect exemplar of why he did what he did. They were nearly the same age, with little more than half a year between their birthdates, and perhaps on the surface the two of them migh
t have seemed like the same kind of man. But such a comparison would have sent Bazin into a fury. Bauer’s file revealed the truth of him; he was so very American, with every mission he had prosecuted spawned from some arrogant sense that his nation had the right to impose its will on the world. Bauer was a rogue, his bloody career at best barely clothed in tissue-thin justifications from his government, at worst the works of a psychopath with no code, no loyalty to anything but his own warped sense of right and wrong. They had never met, but on some level Bazin already reviled this man. He despised the cancerous capitalist system that could create a person like Jack Bauer.
There was a knock at the door, and Bazin looked up as a woman entered. She had the haughty poise of a Muscovite society girl, but he knew from experience that her outward manner was just a smokescreen. While Galina Ziminova was younger than him, and at times a little too liberal in her ways for his tastes, Bazin appreciated that the other SVR agent was an accomplished killer and a true patriot … even if the “new” Russia she came from was not the one that had been mother and protector to him.
“The team are here, sir,” she said.
He nodded. “Bring them in.”
Ziminova returned the gesture, and paused as she caught sight of Bauer’s picture. “Is that him?”
“Someone you might pass on the street and think as unremarkable,” Bazin replied. “And yet this man is marked for death by our highest authority.”
02
“We have a clear and direct mandate,” Hadley told the others. “A federal warrant for the arrest of Jack Bauer has been issued, and we’re going to bring him down.”
The other agents in the briefing room exchanged glances. To his left, sitting side by side, Special Agents Kari Dell and Helen Markinson looked as if they had been cut from the same cloth; both trim and austere in their looks, both dressed in a near-identical black pantsuit, at first glance all that differentiated them were their hairstyles. Dell’s short bob was henna-red where Markinson’s black hair reached to just above her shoulders, and the pair of them watched Hadley give his briefing with hawkish intensity. Scuttlebutt around the field office was that the two women had come up together at Quantico and they made a formidable team. Only a week earlier it had been their work that cracked the Anselmo case wide open. Hadley could work with that kind of skill set. He needed aggressive, proactive people on his team if he was to succeed.
24: Deadline (24 Series) Page 2
