24: Deadline (24 Series)

by James Swallow

  Jack leaned forward and saw text on the marker that read DEADLINE—NEXT EXIT.

  09

  Deadline was a town that had died twice.

  First born as a small hamlet that had accreted around the path of the growing railroad network, named offhandedly by a construction gang foreman with a dry sense of humor, for a time it had been the home to a colony of hardscrabble farmers and strong-willed types who liked the savannah landscape and the open skies. But when the Great Depression came, it struck the township like a hurricane. People lost their jobs, their homes, their livelihoods, and Deadline became a skeletal caricature of a real community. It stayed that way for years, until the shadows of war fell across distant Europe, and from out of nowhere the promise of new purpose brought the town back to life.

  Drawn by the countryside and the nearby railroad, in the early 1940s the US Army came to Deadline with big plans. Families who had struggled to farm the unforgiving land for generations were bought out wholesale with generous government dollars. They left their homesteads to start anew closer to the town center in newly built houses. The military moved in armored divisions still fresh from hammering Nazi panzers into scrap metal, and ten thousand soldiers along with them. They named the place Fort Blake and built wide and far.

  For the locals, it was a golden age. The town became an engine to serve the needs of the base, with everything from diners and dry cleaners, through to a more illicit economy to cover the baser needs of the troops. Twenty years after the tanks had rolled into town, Deadline was a fully symbiotic entity, its entire existence supported by troops who were now on the front lines of the Cold War. Men and weapons trained and waited for the call to arms, for the lightning-fast deployment against a Soviet army advance that never ever came.

  Then one day, the Berlin Wall fell and the enemy Fort Blake had been built to defy went away. Just as politics and the threat of war thousands of miles away had brought the town back from the brink, now the reverse happened. In a matter of years, defense cuts and reductions in force took the soldiers away, mothballed the tanks, and slowly choked the life out of Deadline. The base was stripped, shuttered and left to decay. Those who could find the money sold up and followed in the army’s boot steps. Those who had no choice but to remain watched their lives crumble, forced to cling to welfare handouts while all around them entire neighborhoods went derelict. Whole streets became silent, echoing to the mournful howl of the freight trains that passed on by and never stopped.

  The town dried up and blew away. All that was left was a shabby main drag with a mix of cheap motels, strip clubs and liquor stores that catered to a transient population of truckers on their way to somewhere else.

  When the next influx of money and new arrivals came, there was a far darker purpose motivating them.

  * * *

  “Nice place,” said Chase, as they turned off the approach road and into the town proper. They had passed ranks of shuttered, boarded-up housing on the outskirts, but now they were seeing signs of life. Lurid neon signs and dilapidated storefronts made the whole town seem run-down and unwelcoming. The streets were wide but traffic was light, nothing more than the occasional battered pickup or motorcycle. The slab-sided shapes of big tractor trailers congregated in ill-kept parking lots across from greasy eateries and dingy bars, and the whole area had a decaying feel about it.

  Jack gave a grim nod of agreement. He’d seen better-appointed neighborhoods in Third World war zones, and there was something disturbing about seeing a place like this in the heartland of his home country. Unconsciously, he adjusted the position of the M1911 pistol in his waistband and scanned the side streets. “How far are we from the railroad?”

  “Close enough,” Chase replied. “But we’re early. We got plenty of time to kill. So we find somewhere to bed down, lay low and wait out the clock.” He nodded toward a brightly lit sign on the far side of the street, a half-mile distant. “Looks like a motel up there. As good a place as any to hole up. They may even have cable TV.” The car rolled to a halt at a crossroads as the traffic lights dangling from a wire overhead clicked to red. “I mean, we don’t wanna draw any attention, right?”

  Jack was going to reply, but a throaty, rumbling growl cut him off and he saw the flash of headlamps behind them as something else approached the intersection. He knew the sound, the powerful engines of big cruiser motorcycles, Harleys, Indians and the like. As a teenager he had ridden the same kind of bikes around Santa Monica, but he had never been able to connect to the nomadic subculture they symbolized.

  Six heavy bikes rolled up to halt at the stoplight, crowding in around the Chrysler like a pack of wolves circling a bison. Jack tensed, letting his hand fall to the butt of his pistol, and he shot a warning look at Chase. The other man nodded, keeping one hand on the steering wheel, and the other within reach of his own weapon.

  The motorcycle on the driver’s side was a Gilroy Indian Scout with blue-black details and a lot of chrome, obscured somewhat by a layer of road dust. The rider leaned slightly from his saddle and peered at the car. The biker’s black leather jacket was thick and patterned with rigid plate inserts, better to protect him in the event of a spill. Jack saw the three-part patch on the man’s back—his colors. Two curved “rockers” at the top and bottom declared him to be a member of the Night Rangers MC, and in the middle, an oval patch showed a monstrous, wraithlike figure with clawed hands crossed over its chest. The wraith held a huge serrated combat knife in one hand, and an old Western-style Colt Peacemaker six-gun in the other. If the triple patch wasn’t enough to convince him that these men were outlaw bikers, Jack also saw the smaller, diamond-shaped sigil on the rider’s chest. Inside the patch was a “1%” symbol, indicating that he wasn’t part of the so-called 99 percent of law-abiding motorcyclists out on the roads.

  The biker turned, removing a butterfly knife from his pocket, opening it with a flourish and using it to pick trail dirt out from under his fingernails. The action was all theater, all calculated menace. He extended his arm and gently tap-tapped the blade on the driver’s-side window.

  Chase lowered the window an inch. “Evening,” he said. “Can I help you with something?”

  The biker leaned down to get a better look at who was in the car, and Jack saw a name tag that read BRODUR. Next to it were other symbols, all part of the complex secret heraldry of the outlaw biker community—a skull and bones, an eight ball, a dollar sign. “Nice cage,” he said, looking over the Chrysler. “This year’s model…” Brodur seemed lean and angular, with a square face, a shaved head and five o’clock shadow around his blocky chin. He made a show of glancing at the car’s plates. “Out from Penn, huh? You gentlemen aren’t lost now, are ya?”

  “We’re just passing through,” Chase replied. “We’re not looking for any trouble.”

  “’Course not.” Brodur’s answer was languid as he toyed with the knife. “Word of advice? Keep on passing, pal. Folks from out of town can get themselves in a fix around here if they’re not careful.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Chase, as the light flickered over to green.

  “You do that.” Brodur settled back on his bike and throttled away, allowing the tip of the butterfly knife to scratch the paintwork on the car as he passed. The other riders went with him, revving their motors as they went.

  “Son of a…” Chase scowled as they drove on. “Like I said, nice place. I guess those boys must have been the welcome wagon.”

  Jack shook his head. “No, they were outriders. Fresh off the highway, same as us. They’re just making noise, showing us who the big dogs are here.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “I did an undercover op with an outlaw MC in Los Angeles. Years ago, before your time, before CTU. I know how they operate.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” They were approaching the entrance to the motel, and Jack caught sight of an old plaster sign in the shape of a cartoon tepee. “Apache Motel,” Chase read aloud. “And they got v
acancies. Great. Not exactly the Hilton, but we can’t afford to be choosy.”

  Jack threw a glance out the back window as they pulled into the motel forecourt. Another pair of Night Ranger motorcycles growled past behind them. “Find a spot for the car where it can’t be seen from the road. Like you said, we don’t want to draw attention.”

  * * *

  The office door opened and the asset was three steps into the room before he realized that it was already occupied. He reacted with an almost comical level of shock, nearly dropping the papers he was carrying. He glanced back and forth between Ziminova, who stood with her hands folded in front of her by the bookcase, and Bazin, who had taken it upon himself to sit behind the asset’s impressively large desk.

  “You can’t be here!” he blurted.

  Bazin opened his hands to take in the room. “And yet…”

  “No! No!” The color drained from the man’s face and he took a step forward. Then, as if he suddenly remembered where he was and who he was talking to, his voice dropped into a near-whisper. “You can’t just come to my office, you shouldn’t be here—”

  “You contacted us,” said Ziminova. “You said you had something.”

  “I do! I have! But I was going to bring it to you!”

  Bazin smiled and shook his head, toying with some of the items on the desk. “You do not get to make that sort of decision.”

  “It doesn’t work this way!” he insisted.

  “It works,” said the woman, advancing on him, “however we say it works.”

  What little fight the man had in him ebbed away at that moment and Bazin saw the defeated look in his eyes. “I can’t have you seen here. That will cause problems for me.”

  “We understand,” Bazin allowed. “Better than you think, my friend. We’re not going to put you in jeopardy, that would be bad for all of us. But as was made clear to you earlier, time is of the essence.”

  “I…” He swallowed hard. “I want some assurances.”

  Bazin nodded. “You’ll have them, of course.” He glanced at Ziminova, who continued to watch the asset in the manner of a hawk observing a field mouse.

  The asset didn’t stop to confirm what those nebulous assurances actually were, he just nodded back and seemed to accept that Bazin was telling the truth. It was pitiful, in a way, how simple this man was to manipulate. The reality was Bazin had no intention of keeping his word to the asset past any point at which he was no longer of use. He tapped the brass frame of a family photo on the man’s desk, and the action was enough to focus his attention.

  He dropped into the seat opposite Bazin and picked up the wireless keyboard of his computer, turning the flat-screen monitor so both of them could see it. “I ran the search protocol she gave me during a gap between our peak traffic and this was the result.”

  The screen sketched in a wire-frame graphic of the eastern half of the United States, painting clusters of dots up and down the map to indicate the locations of cellular communication towers. Around the cities, they formed dense blobs of light, but in the rural areas they became more thinly spread. The zone in the map was as Bazin had directed it to be, large enough to encompass the maximum range of the civil helicopter Jack Bauer had stolen.

  The asset’s hands moved over the keyboard, and he pulled the flash memory stick Bazin’s subordinate gave him from an inside pocket. Blinking, he slotted it into a port on the side of the keyboard and a pop-up window appeared. He tapped the “enter” key to run the program again, and there was a momentary babble of noise from the speakers on the bottom of the monitor. To anyone listening, it would sound like a garbled radio transmission, all guttural chokes and grunts—but in fact they were listening to a stream of sampled voice elements captured from various sources. The sound was the aural fingerprint of their target, the voice pattern of Jack Bauer broken down into its base elements.

  Moscow had paid their friends in Beijing very well for this file, and they had provided it willingly. It seemed the People’s Republic of China were also on the long list of those who wished Bauer to be dead and gone.

  The program on the flash drive used the network provider’s own internal software to parse the thousands of phone conversations that had gone through its servers over the past few hours, sampling and comparing bits of the pattern with the calls that had bounced around the Eastern Seaboard. It wasn’t a widely known truth that most cell towers contained a memory buffer that retained details of calls and routings that passed through them, holding on to that information for up to a day before they were purged and reset. Like the National Security Agency’s PRISM monitoring software or the covert access channels of the Counter Terrorist Unit, it was a dirty little secret that the Taylor administration had tried very hard to keep out of the public eye.

  Of course, what the NSA and CTU were aware of, so was the Russian government. Back home, the SVR had a similar setup in operation to spy on their own people, just like the Chinese did, the British, the French … But whereas the American agencies needed legal, authorized presidential mandates to make a search for a certain voice pattern, all Bazin needed was a man of weak character and the threat of bloody murder. It amused him that the Americans had provided him with the tools he would use to track and kill one of their own.

  “Here,” said the asset, as the program locked on to a splinter of voice traffic. “Bouncing off a cell tower near Monroeville in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. About fifteen miles east of Pittsburgh.”

  “Hello, Chase.” The voice was broken and echoey. “Can you talk?”

  “Is that him?” said Ziminova.

  Bazin said nothing, listening to the distorted conversation. “Who … Who is this?” asked a second voice, a younger man.

  “It’s Jack,” came the reply, and Bazin’s smile grew. “I need your help.”

  “You have your answer,” he told the woman. Bazin glanced at the asset and snapped his fingers. “Copy that exchange onto the flash drive, and then erase the cell tower’s buffer remotely.”

  The man licked his lips. “That will take time.”

  “Just do it,” Ziminova insisted, moving to hover over him.

  “All right…” He set to work, typing furiously. After a moment, he detached the memory stick and handed it to Bazin, unable to stop his hands from trembling.

  Ziminova studied the data on the screen. “The cellular telephone where the call originated. You can track it, yes? Isolate other cell towers that it pinged after this call was made?”

  “I already looked for that,” he managed, pausing. “Whoever you … I mean, the person who made that call … they made a second call, then a while later a third call came in. Then they deactivated the handset. It went off the grid.”

  “You have records of these communications too, I take it?”

  “No.” The asset looked fearful and shook his head. Before Bazin could say more, he spoke quickly. “Please understand! The second and third calls were directed through a BlackPhone encryption application! The buffer couldn’t read them!”

  Bazin and Ziminova exchanged looks, considering that fact. “What about the recipient of the first call, this man called ‘Chase’? You have data on that person’s mobile device?”

  “Yes. Some.” He paused, blinking.

  Ziminova studied the man carefully. “He believes we are going to kill him when we are done here. Don’t you?”

  The asset’s eyes shimmered wetly. “Yes,” he managed.

  “No,” Bazin corrected. “At this time, you are far too useful to me to be wasted for no good reason. Unless you are going to give me a good reason.” He pitched his voice in a careful, conversational tone. “Are you?” he prompted.

  “No,” said the man, swallowing the word in a shuddering gasp.

  “So answer her question.”

  “The other cell phone belongs to someone called Charles Williams, registered to an address in East Hills, Pittsburgh. He pays his bills on time, every time. He doesn’t use it very often.” The words flo
oded out of the man in a rush.

  Ziminova drew out her own phone and switched to speaking in Russian. “Sir, I will contact operations at the consulate, give them the name and address, get them to run it. Mager can talk to his informant in the police force, check for any criminal records.”

  Bazin nodded. “Good. And call Yolkin, have him get to this man’s home as fast as possible.” She returned his nod and stepped out of the office to leave the two men alone.

  The asset broke the silence. “I’m a traitor now,” he said, almost to himself.

  “You have been that for a quite a while.” Bazin went back to English, maintaining his sympathetic tone even as his loathing for the foolish little man grew. “It’s too late to have regrets. But don’t blame yourself. This is not your fault. We are giving you no choice.”

  “Is this going to get worse? Is it going to end?”

  Bazin allowed some of his distaste to show through as he drew out his Makarov PM pistol and held it down on the surface of the desk. He did it to underline the dynamics of power in their relationship, just to make certain there was no misunderstanding. “Those things are beyond your control,” he said. “Never forget that.”

  * * *

  The man at the front desk of the Apache Motel had the kind of paunchy look that made Chase peg him as a linebacker gone to seed. He wore a too-loud bowling shirt over the top of a greasy T-shirt bearing a picture of Dino, the cartoon house pet from The Flintstones. Immediately, that was the name that Chase tagged the man with in his thoughts.

  Dino measured the two men with a gimlet gaze that didn’t change when Jack peeled off a few hundred bucks and paid for two rooms. They were handed brass keys on big wooden fobs that mimicked the tepee shape of the sign outside on the street, the room numbers burned into the surfaces. “Pay-per-view costs extra,” he said, his words coming in the thick and scratchy tone of a habitual smoker. “You want it?” When neither man responded, his expression became a leer. “Or the real thing?”