24: Deadline (24 Series)

by James Swallow

  Rydell’s expression shifted, as if he saw something in Chase, like an apex predator sensing the shadow of death falling over a prey animal. The biker’s arm was locked around Chase’s, his dirt-smeared and dark with complex tattoos, Chase’s marked with the white web of long-healed sutures and surgical cuts.

  A horrible, chilling terror settled on Chase as he saw what he would never be able to stop. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be! This wasn’t right! He had fought hard for every victory his life had tried to snatch away, and survived every knock back, every single loss. Suddenly he was remembering Kim’s face, her smile and her bright eyes. He was thinking of Angela, of how much he loved her and how sorry he was that he had never been the father she had needed him to be.

  Slowly, the blunt maw of the Desert Eagle tipped back and back until it was pressing point-blank into Chase’s chest.

  “Bang,” said Rydell, and he pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  “Damn it!” Jack roared into the radio as he heard the hollow shout of the gunshot. “You son of a bitch!”

  An icy surge of cold prickled his skin and his breath choked in his throat. Jack gripped the radio, falling silent as the open channel crackled.

  “Your … friend…” The voice was Laurel’s, and she was sobbing. “Oh god. Chase…”

  “What?” Her words hit him like a punch in the gut.

  There was a rattling, scuffling sound as someone snatched the handset away from Laurel, and then he heard Rydell breathing hard. “Jack … Change of plan. The girl’s still breathin’. Your buddy, though? Not so much.”

  And then, as if it wasn’t enough to leave him with that terrible prospect, Jack heard a gasping wheeze and he felt his legs give out beneath him. He sank down on the side of the road and listened to Chase Edmunds breathing his last.

  “I’m sorry…” The voice was so faint, he couldn’t be sure he really heard it. After, there was only silence.

  In that moment, Jack Bauer felt a hateful sensation wash over him. Emotion seemed to drain from his body. The burning fury at the core of him was struck out, the fire doused—and all he felt was hollow inside.

  Another. He looked down at his smoke-blackened hands and thought about the blood on them. Another friend gone. The unseen scars, buried in his soul, one for each life that had been lost over the years gone by.

  Jack took a shuddering breath, and at the edges of his perception he could feel pity and sorrow crowding in, countless ghosts at his shoulders threatening to drown him in a torrent of grief.

  “No.” He surged back to his feet, and the emptiness within went away as quickly as it had come. Beneath that emotion was something else, as old and familiar as anything Jack had ever known.

  Anger. Hard-edged and diamond-sharp, it filled him anew.

  Rydell’s voice was issuing out of the radio. “I know you’re still listening! Enough of this shit. You got a butcher’s bill to pay, man. You don’t give yourself up in ten minutes, I shoot two of the women. Ten minutes after that, three more.” He bellowed into the microphone. “You hear that? Your boy was just the first! I will kill my way through every single one of these trailer trash fools until you come to me!”

  Jack let the radio drop and walked back in silence to the idling Harley.

  19

  “You know what the hell is going on?” Marshall glowered at Fang, his hands on his hips.

  “Payback,” said the other man. The two of them stood in front of the old Greyhound bus’s door, splitting their attention between the shouting they could hear from inside the derelict mega-mart and the fearful passengers on the motor coach. Fang paused. For a moment, he thought he heard the sound of a bike engine on the wind.

  “Sounds like Rydell is kicking off in there.” Marshall was still talking, rubbing his chin. “Man, if this thing is all going south, maybe it’s time to think about options…”

  “What you mean by that?” Fang shot him a steely glare, then turned away. The dusty Ford parked across the way caught his eye, and he stared at the woman fed in the driver’s seat. She looked steadily back, as if she were daring him to do something.

  “I mean, who’s the guy that’s been out all over scaring up these chumps to work making the ice, huh?” Marshall nodded toward the bus. “Me. All of them know my face. I’ve been seen, Fang. I got a lot to lose if this whole scam goes wrong!”

  The other biker prodded him in the chest with a thick finger. “You forget who you are, Marsh? You spend too long walking around without your cut on your shoulders, you start thinking like a civilian. The MC is the family, bro. Don’t lose sight of that.”

  Marshall blew out a breath. “Yeah. Yeah, I know it. But, shit, first the ’Case got set alight and now the works too, I mean did we just wake up the ghost of all bad luck or what?”

  “Something like that,” said a voice.

  From around the front end of the parked bus came the guy with the short hair and the craggy face that Fang had glimpsed in the strip club, the one that Sticks said had killed poor Sammy and set the fire.

  Marshall spun, but his reflexes had become dull in his time out of the saddle, and the man came at him in a blur of motion. He had a pistol in one hand and he used the weapon like a cudgel to crack Marshall across the temple and send him sprawling down into the weeds.

  Fang was faster, pulling a snub-nosed Colt .38 revolver from across his belly, but the weapon had barely cleared his belt loop before he found himself staring into the muzzle of an M1911 semiautomatic aimed squarely at his nose.

  * * *

  “Drop the piece,” said Jack, and Fang reluctantly obeyed, letting the gun fall to the ground at his feet. Above him, the biker saw some of the captives on the bus daring to watch the unfolding fight from their windows.

  But Marshall wasn’t out for the count just yet. The other man shook off Jack’s blow and swayed back to his feet, ignoring the deep gash across his head and the streamers of blood washing down his cheek. He went on the offensive, woodenly leading into an attack, his hands coming up like claws.

  Glimpsing the motion from the corner of his eye, Jack spun to meet Marshall’s clumsy assault, even as Fang went down, grabbing for the gun he had just dropped. Jack blocked Marshall midmotion and wrenched his arm around, acting on pure kill-or-be-killed instinct. Using Marshall’s weight against him, Jack caught the man around the throat and twisted, snapping his neck with a sickening crack.

  Marshall fell a second and final time. Turning, the heavy bag slung over his shoulder dragging on his back, Jack saw Fang’s fingers close around the .38’s trigger and again he reacted without conscious thought. Dropping into a deadfall, he landed on the biker before he could rise and pressed his knee across Fang’s throat, choking the life from him. Fang took longer to die than Marshall had, but the result was the same. Both kills were nearly silent, meaning that Rydell and the rest of his men remained unaware of what had just happened.

  Jack boarded the bus in three quick steps and found the passengers staring at him in shocked silence. To them, he had to resemble a blackened, bloody wraith. As one, they recoiled from him as he advanced. “Where are the others?” he demanded.

  “In-inside!” said a florid-faced man. “Please, don’t hurt us!”

  “Stay out of sight,” Jack ordered, and turned away, dropping back down to the ground.

  “Bauer.” A woman in a dark, severe pantsuit was waiting for him with a gun cocked and aimed at his head. She looked stern and the worse for wear, with the steely gaze of a career law officer. “Hands up.”

  He didn’t comply, studying her instead. “I know you,” he began. “I saw you in New York. With Hadley.” Jack’s lip twisted in a humorless smirk. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

  “Agent Markinson, FBI,” she explained, pulling out her handcuffs. “And you are under arrest.”

  Jack shot a look at the mega-mart. “I don’t have time to waste with you.” His gaze settled on the parked Ford Contour sitting nearby. “I’m g
onna need that car.”

  “You’re not walking away, Bauer!” she snapped.

  “If you put those on me, you think I’ll last more than ten seconds before Rydell blows my brains out?” He took a step toward her. “You heard the shots. He just killed my friend in cold blood! Did Hadley even try to stop him?”

  The barrel of Markinson’s gun drooped slightly, slipping along with her rigid expression. “I have my orders…”

  “What do your orders say about a busload of innocent people forced to work as slave labor in a drug factory?” Jack jerked a thumb at the vehicle behind him. “You want to do some good? Help them. Get these people out of here. Because I’m betting that Agent Hadley doesn’t give a damn about them, or you, or anything else but seeing me dead.”

  He saw the change in her face, the slow acceptance. “Hadley’s gone off the reservation,” Markinson admitted, lowering her weapon. “Way off.”

  “Don’t make the same mistake,” Jack told her, and made for the car, unlimbering his bag as he went.

  * * *

  Rydell shot Sticks a look. “How long is that?”

  “Two minutes more and then he’s up,” said the other biker.

  Rydell nodded. “Ain’t looking good for you, Laurel, is it?” He leered at her, and then turned his attention to the older woman by her side. “You neither, Cherry. Better make peace with your lord. Tick tock.”

  His gaze met that of the younger FBI agent who had rolled up with Hadley. Rydell knew the look he got from the guy, he knew it well. Disgust and hatred, he’d seen it a hundred times on the faces of men who thought they were better than him. He opened his hands, challenging the agent to respond.

  He did so. “This animal killed Edmunds right in front of us!” said the agent to Hadley. “Are we going to ignore that?”

  “Edmunds was a murder suspect and a fugitive, Kilner.” Hadley cocked his head. “And it looked like self-defense to me.”

  “And two innocent women?” The younger guy was reaching for his sidearm. “What’s that going to be?”

  “No, no.” Rydell made a gesture, and suddenly the handful of other Night Rangers standing around were all lazily aiming their guns in Agent Kilner’s general direction. He froze. “You don’t want to get in the middle of this, son,” Rydell went on “See, it’s just like the bad old days out here in Deadline, yeah? Rough justice, of a sort. If your pal Bauer don’t show his face, then it’s his fault these ladies will be taking a dirt nap. All he’s gotta do is surrender.”

  “He’ll be here,” said Hadley.

  “Sixty seconds…” began Sticks, but then he trailed off as an engine growled outside the building, and tires squealed on cracked concrete. “The car … Rydell, it’s moving…”

  The Ford Contour that the MC had provided to Hadley’s team came to life, and without warning it turned in a tight circle to lurch around and face the gaping, broken-down doors that led through to the derelict building’s interior. Lights on high beam, the car shot forward at full throttle, making straight for the gap.

  “What the hell is that woman doin’?” cried Sticks.

  “It’s Bauer, you moron!” Rydell shouted. “Shoot the son of a bitch!” The Night Rangers took aim and started to fire as the Ford bounded over the weed-strewn parking lot, closing with each passing second. Rydell jabbed a finger at Hadley and Kilner. “Stay the hell outta my way unless you wanna take a hit!” He left the FBI agents to take cover along with the women from the van, and took up a position where he could fire at the car as it approached.

  Rydell’s heavy handgun blasted fist-sized holes in the radiator grille and the windshield, but he couldn’t see anything inside the oncoming vehicle. Plumes of thick white smoke rolled out of the Contour’s open windows, as if the inside of the car was on fire—except there were no flames …

  Gunshots sparked off the car’s hood and a lucky hit blew out the right front tire, but it wasn’t enough to stop it. Rydell threw himself aside as the vehicle crashed in through the open doors, ripping away part of the frame as it scraped the walls and skidded on the damp concrete floor.

  Still belching smoke, the Contour came to a crashing halt as it struck an iron roof support with such force that the whole prefabricated building seemed to shake. The choking white haze rolled out through the car’s broken windows, and Rydell knew that Jack Bauer had never been in the vehicle in the first place. He must have jammed it into drive, tossed a dozen smoke grenades into the backseat and thrown it at them.

  Which meant …

  Rydell spun around, back toward the wrecked doorway as a bunch of slim black cylinders came skidding in across the floor. He didn’t have time to warn anyone else; instead he buried his face in the crook of his elbow and turned away as the flashbangs went off in crackling succession, temporarily deafening and blinding anyone within range.

  * * *

  Gaining access to the derelict building had been easy enough. These were common criminals, after all, not the kind of trained, disciplined threats that the contractor was used to dealing with.

  Arriving secretly in Deadline and finding the place in chaos had been a fortunate situation. It made the assignment all the more easy to execute. While these motorbike thugs had been distracted by the havoc that was being wrought on their nasty little empire, the contractor had simply walked through their lines. Two outrider guards were killed in the process, both shot at close range with a silenced Walther P99 semiautomatic. Their bodies were lying out in a culvert a few hundred meters from the shell of the mega-mart, and it was likely they would not be found until they started to rot.

  Climbing up to the apex of the roof without drawing attention had been challenging. At first, there had only been the refugee women there with the van, but soon after, the arrival of a group of the bikers and their leader had complicated matters. However, the contractor was nothing if not adaptable, and after finding an adequate position for a firing nest, it was a small matter of unlimbering the component parts of a Nemesis Arms sniper rifle from a backpack and assembling the gun in place.

  The skeletal weapon had a bulky thermal-optical sight that cut through the haze from the smoke grenades, making every human form below appear as a white phantom. Brighter blinks of light showed where guns were firing, muzzle flashes flaring in poorly controlled bursts.

  The view through the sight moved back and forth, briefly passing over a lone figure that came in through the smashed doorway. A man, hunched low around the shape of a submachine gun.

  * * *

  Jack slipped into the derelict shopping mart with the MP5/10 rock-steady to his shoulder, and he proceeded to pick out his targets. He found a half dozen of the Night Ranger bikers still disoriented by the distraction grenades, firing blind or staggering toward cover. Methodically, he took them out of the equation.

  Using calculated three-round bursts from the SMG, he aimed for headshots on his targets, putting them down before they could gather their wits and offer up any kind of adequate defense. Jack let his thoughts drop briefly into a feral, hunter’s mind-set where there were only targets, only enemies to be dispatched with clinical, cold-eyed detachment. In this moment, he was a soldier again, and he knew this kind of war.

  A biker with a heavy SPAS-12 shotgun dodged out of his arc of fire and tried to draw a bead on him, but Jack had his range and shot him as he rose up from behind a dust-caked display rack. He fell into cover behind a thick concrete stanchion and swept the space around him, finding more targets and ending them before they could combine their forces to engage en masse.

  Jack’s eyeline crossed the parked van and he met Laurel’s gaze, the young woman down low near the wheel well. She was shocked and relieved all at once at the sight of him, but he could see she understood that the danger was still far from over. Then Laurel turned away, a flash of guilt on her face, and Jack followed her look.

  Chase was nearby, sprawled on his back, his sightless eyes open and staring up into the dimness. An ugly red halo surrounded his head
and neck, and Jack felt his moment of disconnection fall away as he saw his former partner’s body lying where it had fallen. The anger that had powered Jack through so many confrontations surged again, the raw need for vengeance running through him like octane fuel.

  “Rydell!” he snarled. “I’m coming for you!”

  * * *

  The biker heard Bauer shout his name and he snorted with laughter. If he was going to call him out like this was some Old West showdown, then Rydell was more than happy to oblige. It didn’t cross his mind that his men were falling all around him, that perhaps Jack Bauer was a kind of opponent that he had never faced before. That wasn’t important to him. Sticks was bleeding out his last where the man had gutshot him at close range, and Rydell didn’t think to consider that. It was beyond him to wonder how many of the Night Rangers had fallen in the chaos of the past few hours. He was all the mattered, he was the club, the last of the original founders and the mind and will at the heart of it all.

  In that moment, Rydell didn’t care if it all came down around him, if every dirty cent, every bloodstained dollar the MC had made went up in smoke. All he wanted was Bauer dead, right here, right now.

  Shouting his fury, Rydell walked out with the big Desert Eagle raised high and started firing, releasing shot after heavy-caliber shot toward the pillar where Bauer was hiding. Chunks of masonry blew away into fragments and dust, the thunder of the hand cannon booming back across the echoing interior of the derelict building.

  Bauer broke away and sprinted, shooting from the hip as he powered toward a heap of junked chest freezers. Rydell felt the burning agony of a bullet as it creased the meat of his thigh, ripping open a long, bloody furrow, but he kept on firing, and one round finally found its mark.

  A .50-caliber round hit Bauer square in the chest and blew him back off his legs with the shock of it. Rydell watched him go down in a crumpled heap.

  But not dead. Not yet. Rydell advanced, limping on his injured leg, ignoring the blood soaking through the denim of his jeans. He was going to finish this.