He made it sound like the other man had come to him on bended knee, but Barbara saw right through the spin her husband had put on the situation and scowled at him. “Oh yeah? He snaps his fingers and you say, ‘How high,’ right?” She shook her head. “Mike, when you gonna stand up to that roach? You make me sick.”
Roker’s false front collapsed and Charlie watched his cheeks color. “Do what? I talk back to him and I get a bullet in the face ten seconds later! Where would you get your cash for your stupid shoe collection then, huh?”
“You know nothing,” she shot back. “Men like that? They respect strength.” Barbara looked toward Charlie. “You know what I mean, right?”
“Don’t ask him!” Roker bellowed. “What the hell does he know?”
Charlie opened his mouth to say something that would let him disengage from the unfolding argument, but there was no need. It was already under way and neither husband nor wife were registering him anymore. He drifted toward the bench where the dealership’s two mechanics were loitering.
Frank and Josh were in their twenties, and they seemed to think that working for Roker was an entry-level job into the lucrative world of Pittsburgh’s criminal underbelly. Charlie didn’t have the heart to tell them how mistaken they were.
“What happened?” asked Frank. He was the bigger of the two, thickset with a body honed by hours on free weights at the local gym.
Charlie shook his head. “Same old, same old.”
“Huh.” Josh nodded to himself, taking in Charlie’s answer as if it was something cryptic. The other mechanic was short and compact, and he radiated a nervous energy. “Hey man, you see the news tonight?” He pointed toward a small portable TV sitting on the workbench.
On the smudged screen there was a reporter from CNB talking over footage from New York. There had been a kidnapping and a murder of a prominent foreign leader, and now something was going on with the president. “What’s all this?” he asked.
“President quit, man,” Frank said sagely. “You know it’s gotta be bad if the prez throws in the towel.”
“Damn Russians.” Josh offered his opinion. “They did it, you betcha. It’s like they wanna go back to the eighties or somethin’. Evil empire and all that crap.”
Frank glared at the other mechanic. “What do you know about the eighties, dumbass? Your mom was like a baby back then.”
“I saw a movie,” Josh said defensively.
“What do you think, Charlie?” said Frank. But the driver wasn’t really paying attention. On the TV screen, the news feed was showing video from earlier in the day, figures in blue visibility jackets swarming along a street outside the United Nations building. Large yellow letters designated the agencies they worked for—FBI, NYPD, CTU.
The pain in his hand came again and Charlie walked away without answering. With his good hand he reached up toward the inner jacket pocket containing the bottle of Percocets. His cell phone rang before he could touch it.
The phone’s screen gave the caller ID as UNKNOWN, and on an impulse he couldn’t quite explain, he touched the tab to accept the call. “Yeah?”
“Hello, Chase,” said a rough, low voice on the other end of the line. “Can you talk?”
In that second, it was as if the ground opened up beneath him and he plunged into a freezing, bottomless chasm. His balance went away and he had to steady himself against one of the parked cars. Suddenly he was aware of every old wound he had ever suffered, every scar weighing down on him. Out of nowhere, the past he had worked so long to outpace had caught up with him.
He swallowed hard. “Who … Who is this?” But he already knew the answer before he heard it.
“It’s Jack. I need your help.”
He shot a look back at the events being displayed on the television screen, his thoughts racing. “How did you find…?”
“We can talk about that later.” There was a pause, and in those brief seconds he could almost hear the sound of his world cracking apart around him. “You owe me, Chase. And now I’m calling in the marker.”
“Chase Edmunds is dead,” he whispered, catching sight of his own face in the smoked-glass windows of the car. The face of a man who had gone on the run from himself, who had gotten lost from all he had been. Or so I thought.
“So was I,” said the voice on the phone. “It didn’t take.”
He wondered if it would be hard to just break away and leave it all behind once again. Every time in the past he had thought about doing exactly that, it seemed like an impossible choice to make. But now it felt simple. He had already made the decision, somewhere deep down, maybe months or even years ago. “What do you want, Jack?”
“Check your messages.” The line went dead, and a moment later the phone beeped as a text message arrived. An address out on the interstate, past Monroeville; he knew where it was.
“Hey! Hey, listen to me!” Abruptly, he realized that Roker was storming across the garage toward him, his face like thunder. “Talk on the phone on your own dime, shithead!”
He looked at the other man, and it was as if he was seeing him for the first time. He saw every little flaw in Big Mike Roker, saw everything he loathed and detested about this small, venial man. “You’re going to wind up dead, you know that?”
“What did you say?!” Roker bellowed. “Are you threatening me? Did deSalvo say something?”
“Mike…” he began, climbing into the 300. “I’m done. Take your crappy job and shove it. I quit.”
“Hey, that’s my car!” Roker came at him as he hit the gas and peeled off into the darkness. “Who the hell do you think you are, Charlie?”
“Not that guy,” said Chase Edmunds.
* * *
Jack looked down at the cell phone he had stolen from Agent Kilner, the inner workings of the device exposed where he had used a table knife to open the back and disconnect the tracking chip. Nobody bothered him in the roadside diner’s corner booth, the sparse clientele of the twenty-four-hour rest stop intent on their own meals and conversations. There was what appeared to be a cheap plastic security camera in a bubble over the doorway, but it was pointing the wrong way to capture a look at his face.
The diner was one of those faux-authentic 1950s places with a swooping roof and a neon sign out on a pole in the parking lot, all jet-age architecture and old tin signs—but it was too shabby to be considered retro, the fake-wood veneer peeling and the tired seats patched with duct tape. A line of semitrucks concealed Jack from the sight of any passing cars on the highway, and he glanced out of the window as a state police patrol car sped past at a clip, vanishing into the evening as quickly as it had appeared.
Beyond the oasis of light cast by the diner there was darkness, and nothing but fields, woodland and pockets of suburbia for miles around. The waitress who had poured him a generous mug of tarry coffee hadn’t remarked on the fact that Jack had walked in from off the road without a vehicle. He wondered if anyone had heard him bringing the Long Ranger down in a clearing a couple of miles back down the turnpike. If luck was on his side, the helicopter wouldn’t be found until daylight tomorrow.
The coffee was strong and good, and it helped him focus. He turned the phone over again, taking care not to nudge the SIM card protruding from the memory slot, and erased the record of the call he had just made. For a moment, Jack felt a flash of guilt. He knew from the tone of Chase’s voice that his contact had struck like a lightning bolt, coming out of nowhere to disrupt whatever kind of new life his former partner had set up for himself in Pittsburgh.
It gnawed at him, the sense that he could roll in and break open one man’s attempt to find a fresh start—but it wasn’t like Jack had any other options open to him at this point. His associates, his friends and his family would all be under close observation. To get what he needed, Jack’s only hope was to reach out to somebody whom the rest of the world thought was dead and gone.
Jack Bauer and Chase Edmunds had first crossed paths several years earlier, during an incident that had bro
ught CTU’s Washington, DC, and Los Angeles branches together. A complex plot to kill thousands of innocents in California had been thwarted largely due to the work of the two agents. Edmunds had transferred to CTU LA soon afterward and the two of them became an effective team. Months later, when the whole Cordilla virus attack blew up and Jack was undercover infiltrating the Salazar cartel, it had been Chase who had his back. But it had not gone well for either man during those deadly hours, and when it was all over things between the two agents had changed forever. Jack had made choices that still weighed heavily on him, and it was Chase who’d paid the price.
He wondered what he was going to say when he saw his old colleague again. At lot had happened since they parted ways, and it was only through some nagging sense of responsibility that Jack had continued to keep tabs on the other man.
How things played out in the next few hours would determine if Jack’s escape plan would work, or if he was destined to spend the rest of his life rotting in a federal prison. Or dead, he thought, recalling the words of the old veteran at the heliport.
There was a good chance that Jack Bauer would end up killed before the day was out, and he had to find a way to control those possibilities. He had to narrow the focus, control the situation.
He scrolled through the list of contacts on the data card, tabbing slowly past the names and numbers of friends and enemies alike. His finger hesitated over one particular entry and his eyes narrowed.
The information was old, the sole lead toward someone who had never been remotely close to being an ally. Someone who—on another day, in times gone by—Jack would not have hesitated to kill. But right now, he didn’t have that luxury.
He tapped the “call” button and waited for the line to connect. What he was going to do next would be another risk, perhaps the most dangerous one he had taken since his decision to flee New York. But if it worked …
The call was answered with the metallic click of an automated voice mail system. He wasted no time with preamble or explanation. “This is Jack Bauer,” he began. “I want to talk.” He gave the unlisted number of the reprogrammed phone, and cut short the call.
“Top you off, honey?” The waitress came back with a jug of fresh coffee in her hand and Jack gratefully accepted a refill. He ordered a burger and fries, and his stomach growled with the thought of it. All of a sudden, Jack realized it had been a long time since he’d refueled.
He was finishing up his meal as the phone trilled.
“You actually called back,” he said. “I figured it was fifty-fifty.”
“It’s been a while,” came the reply. “You have my attention, Jack.”
* * *
The staging area provided to the SVR operatives was in the rear of a run-down barbershop in Hell’s Kitchen, and the place had an ever-present smell of burnt hair and cleaning fluids.
Out in the front of the salon, a couple of men whose security clearance was too low to know the full details of the mission stood guard, watching the street. Alone in the back room, Ziminova had a ruggedized laptop computer set up on a rickety table and a satellite phone plugged into a charger cradle. She drummed the fingers of one hand on the tabletop, idly leafing through the pages of a months-old issue of National Geographic with the other.
Bazin and Ekel had yet to return with their vehicle; the commander had talked about picking up some special items of equipment from a safe house in Harlem, and it was taking longer than they had expected. She scowled at her watch.
Although she hid it well, the SVR agent was wired. Galina Ziminova detested inaction, a fact that was constantly at odds with the career that had chosen her. A key part of the espionage operations she worked involved doing nothing, often waiting for a target to make the next move before sweeping in for a kill or a capture. Yet she couldn’t make her peace with the silence and the clock-watching. In a mission like this, that tension grew tenfold. With every moment she sat in this room, Jack Bauer was slipping further and further away.
Ziminova’s operational record was exceptional—it was one of the reasons she had been deployed to America to work in Bazin’s unit—and she had no desire to see it marred by a failure to capture the renegade CTU agent. But still, she could not shake the nagging sense that the mission they were on was more about assuaging one politician’s petty need for reprisal, than it was about protecting her homeland.
She considered Bazin for a moment. She had only been a part of his team for the last six months, and she still did not have the full measure of him. Her commander was of an era when the people of the Soviet Union thought of their leaders as men of destiny, larger-than-life figures who exemplified the eternal character of the Motherland. That seemed old-fashioned to her, as a child of the New Russia. To Ziminova, the men at the top were part of the problem, part of the reason she had decided to serve her nation, so that she might defend it in spite of them. The Russia that Galina kept in her heart was one where the people were the nation, not the men who ruled them.
She frowned at that and glanced at her watch again. The asset she was here to meet was running late, a habitual trait that his handler at the consulate had warned her of. The man was a very cautious sort, given to overthinking things, and Ziminova could imagine that on a day like today, he was turning circles trying to make certain he was not being followed to the rendezvous. Her lips thinned. Tradecraft could only go so far before it became a waste of time.
A page-turn of the magazine revealed an image of an airliner, and Ziminova’s thoughts drifted to a different subject. President Suvarov’s jet would be airborne by now, racing away, up on a flight path across the North Atlantic that would take it home as quickly as possible. If the United Nations had wanted to question Suvarov about his part in the day’s events, they had lost their chance to do so—at least for now.
Bazin’s orders for the team included a directive to update the president’s chief of staff on the status of the hunt at regular intervals, but for now there was little to report, only that the FBI did not have Jack Bauer in custody. He was, to use the local vernacular, in the wind.
From out of nowhere the satellite phone chirped and Ziminova pulled it from the charging cradle. “Go ahead.”
“I have an update,” said Yolkin. The other agent was somewhere outdoors, perhaps up on a roof. Ziminova could hear the wind and the far-off whoop of fire engines in the background. “Mager has confirmation from his informant in the NYPD that there was an armed pursuit in the Chelsea district. There are reports that a commercial helicopter was hijacked, last sighted over New Jersey.”
“It was Bauer?”
Yolkin paused. “That is unclear.”
“What kind of helicopter?”
There was another pause as Yolkin checked the details. “A Bell 206 Long Ranger. But whomever the hijacker was, the law enforcement agencies are scrambling to find a lead on them. At this level of activity, it could only be our target.”
There was a gentle knock-knock at the doorway, and Ziminova looked up to see one of the guards peering through the half-open door. He jerked a thumb at the other room.
She nodded, dismissing him, before turning her attention back to the phone. “Don’t make assumptions,” she continued. “Bazin will want hard facts. I have to go, the asset is here.”
Ziminova cut the call and hesitated a moment, taking in what Yolkin had said. The aircraft he spoke of had a range of around 350 to 400 miles with a full fuel load. She wondered where Bauer hoped to go inside that radius, but it was a waste of time to chase vague possibilities. They would find the target with facts, not guesswork. She stood up and strode into the barbershop.
* * *
A man of average height with dark hair and a swarthy complexion was waiting for Ziminova in the middle of the room. The two SVR security men—both silent and thuggish in aspect—stood between him and the doorway back out to the street, and as Ziminova entered, one of them turned the latch to lock them in.
The man—the asset—kneaded the collar
of his coat and his eyes darted to Ziminova and then to the door. “I came as soon as I could,” he told her. “It was difficult for me to get away. I can’t be here for long, my absence will be noticed.”
She had glanced at the asset’s file. His story was a commonplace one in the world of espionage. He had been suborned not by love of an ideology or through blackmail, but by simple avarice. A technical officer working for the East Coast’s largest cellular network systems provider, he had been well paid by the Russian state in return for minor acts of industrial espionage. The commercial intelligence that he had leaked allowed the corporate interests that worked hand in hand with the Kremlin to compete on a level footing with foreign companies, even stealing a march on their rivals in some areas.
But that information had only ever been part of the deal. The asset had been cultivated for another reason, and now he would learn of it.
Ziminova gave the man a measuring look and set to work on him. “You are going to provide us with full access to your network’s logs,” she told him, and the man went pale. “Specifically, an area centered on New York City with a radius of…” She paused, thinking about it. “Four hundred fifty miles.”
“I … I can’t.”
“You can,” she said, as if the refusal was a foolish thing. “We know you can. And it must be done very quickly. We’re looking for someone, you understand?”
From a pocket she produced a data stick that had been prepared by a technician at the consulate. On it was a captured sample of Jack Bauer’s voice and a dedicated suite of pattern-recognition software.
The asset took the data stick with shaking hands. “You don’t understand,” he was saying. “This isn’t what I agreed to. Industrial secrets are one thing, but this is something else!”
“You will be compensated,” she told him. “Do you really want to consider what will happen if you refuse?” Ziminova didn’t wait for him to come up with an answer. “We do not have time to find a different option. So, the man I work for will have your wife and children murdered one by one until you do as you have been asked.” She kept her tone mild, almost conversational.
24: Deadline (24 Series) Page 7
