The House Special Subcommittee's Findings at CTU

by Marc Cerasini

  The trachea and major bronchi show no evidence of soot or other obstruction.

  The 600-gram right lung and 400-gram left lung have smooth and shiny blue-gray visceral surfaces with mild anthracotic reticulation. The cut surfaces of both lungs are spongy gray with focal red mottling. The smaller bronchi are pink-tan and free of obstruction. The pulmonary vasculature is free of atheromatosis or thromboemboli.

  The 1400-gram liver has a smooth and shiny brown capsule. The parenchyma is firm and homogeneously brown. The gallbladder contains approximately 20 cc. of dark green bile without calculi.

  The 120-gram spleen has a light blue-gray wrinkled capsule. The parenchyma is homogeneously red-brown, firm, and without lymphoid follicles. The major lymph node groups of the body are not enlarged.

  The 160-gram right kidney and 150-gram left kidney have smooth and shiny brown surfaces. The parenchyma is homogeneously brown, firm, and with distinct corlcomedullary Junctions. The calyces and pelves are unremarkable. The ureters are patent and not dilated. The bladder has unremarkable mucosa.

  The testes have a light tan parenchyma and are free of nodularity. The prostate gland Is gray-white, firm, and nonenlarged. No lesions or calculi are present.

  The esophageal serosa Is pink-tan, smooth, and without lesions. The esophageal mucosa is light gray and free of ulceration or stricture. The stomach contains 35 cc. of a viscous green liquid. The gastric mucosa is tan and free of ulcers or other lesions.

  The surfaces of the small and large intestine are gray-tan, smooth, and glistening. The mucosa is pink to green-tan and free of ulcerations, diverticulae, or other lesions.

  The pancreas is yellow-tan, firm, and well-lobulated. The adrenal glands show distinct corticomedullary Junctions. The thyroid gland is free of nodularity. The pituitary gland is present in the sella turcica and is not enlarged.

  The surfaces of the pleural cavities are smooth and glistening. The peritoneal cavity has a shiny surface.

  LAB RESULTS: Drug and etoh [alcohol] screen: negative.

  MAJOR AUTOPSY FINDINGS:

  Major skull fracture with resultant brain damage.

  Extensive flash and flame burns consistent with gas explosion.

  REMARKS: While there was no presence of soot in the trachea and bronchial passages, this does not absolutely mean that the subject was dead before the fire occurred. Obviously, the amount of head and brain damage was enough to have caused his demise on its own. The more significant question is what caused the head trauma? Usually in falls, one has only contrecoup contusions, whereas in deliberate blows to the head, one has coup contusions but not contrecoup lesions. The present case has both types of lesions and is consistent with either a fall of great velocity or a strong blow from an object with a broad surface. Of course, a possible fall in itself may have been accidental or deliberate. The absence of a significant amount of hemorrhage lntracranially is often seen in head trauma, since vasospasm occurs posttraumatically and prevents massive blood loss initially.

  5:00 P.M.-6:00 P.M.

  SPECIAL AGENT JACK BAUER: I had forty-five minutes to get to a meeting with my next lead—a man in a red baseball cap—at a restaurant in California Plaza, which was a twenty-minute drive from the hotel. And I was supposed to “bring the money,” which I didn’t have. Elizabeth Nash was still hysterical and taken into another room. I ordered all my CTU agents to search Alexis’s room for the payoff money. They tore it apart and found fifty thousand dollars in bearer bonds.

  I still had blood on my shirt from trying to save Alexis’s life, so I switched with another agent and took off for the Plaza with Nina Myers, who volunteered to help. Unfortunately, as we arrived at the Plaza to set up security for the meeting, I found out that a CTU agent named Teddy Hanlin was assigned to be my armed backup. This was very bad news. Hanlin had a grudge against me because his ex-partner, Seth Campbell, was one of the men I helped bust for taking bribes. I remember he made a pointed remark to me about target confusion, words to the effect of “I’d hate to take down one of the good guys by mistake.” I warned him not to jeopardize the mission and hoped he’d back off.

  Teddy took his position across the Plaza, targeting his rifle to my area. He began making remarks through the radio receiver about his ex-partner and some tragic events that befell Campbell’s family. He was openly hostile

  I knew why Teddy was angry and I just let him vent. It was Nina who called George Mason back at the command center and asked him to conference into our radio to warn Hanlin to bury whatever problem he had with me. That did the trick. Hanlin shut up after that, but I was still uneasy.

  It was days later that I discovered who had assigned Hanlin as my armed backup. Alberta Green had insisted on the assignment through district level managers, and when Mason called to complain, they refused to give him a new backup man.

  REP. ROY SCHNEIDER, (R) TEX.: Are you saying that your superiors purposely assigned you a backup man with a personal grudge against you? A man who would be holding a rifle pointed at your head?

  BAUER: You can confirm it with George Mason, but yes, that appears to be what happened.

  CHAIRMAN FULBRIGHT: Can you give us some insight into that?

  BAUER: Chappelle and Green were furious with me for my actions at the Palmer breakfast earlier in the day, and even though Palmer himself had me provisionally reinstated, I was on their shit list—(pause) sorry, sir. Excuse my language.

  FULBRIGHT: It’s all right, Agent Bauer. Continue, please.

  BAUER: Alberta Green had already told me she held me personally responsible for compromising the integrity of CTU. And since the credibility of the agency was what mattered most to her, I’m sure she meant to royally—uh—(short pause) royally obstruct and impede me. At that point with Chappelle’s blessing.

  FULBRIGHT: So she purposely assigned Hanlin?

  BAUER: Yes. Hanlin would either take out his anger at me by shooting me—or by fouling up the mission. He threatened me, but didn’t harm me. In the end, he fouled up the mission.

  SCHNEIDER: Lord, talk about politics as usual—

  FULBRIGHT: Go on, Agent Bauer.

  BAUER: The man in the red baseball cap finally appeared. I later learned that his name was Alan Morgan. I approached Morgan and indicated that the briefcase I was carrying contained his payoff. He called me “Alexis,” so I knew I wasn’t made. I got him to spell out the reason he was being paid off.

  Apparently Morgan worked for Pacific Electric in Saugus, California. The Drazens were paying him to turn off the electricity in one section of the city’s power grid—sector 26GG—for five minutes at 7:20 P.M.

  At that point Morgan became suspicious of my questions and figured out I wasn’t Alexis. He bolted, so I quickly took off after him, warning everyone on the backup team to hold their fire.

  Hanlin said he had a clear shot to clip the fleeing man. I ordered him not to shoot—warning him at least five times—but he ignored me and fired anyway. Alan Morgan’s body crashed through a glass railing and fell to the ground. He died instantly. My lead was gone. I couldn’t even question him.

  I was furious with Hanlin and dressed him down for disobeying a direct order. I understand that since this incident, Division has promoted him.

  6:00 P.M.-7:00 P.M.

  SPECIAL AGENT JACK BAUER: How the hell was a Saugus power outage going to help the Drazens? That’s what I asked myself. But it’s all I had to go on until I received a call from David Palmer. By that time David had twisted some arms at the Pentagon and had them retrieve Ellis’s Operation Nightfall folder from their records. Ellis’s missing file was there. It listed dates and locations of Victor Drazen’s movements in the months before Nightfall. Its final entry was an address unrelated to anything else—21911 Kipling in Saugus.

  I called Agent Almeida at CTU who confirmed that the address fell within the grid coordinates that were going to be blacked out at 7:20 P.M. Nina returned to CTU, and George Mason accompanied me on the drive to Saugus.

  CHAIRMA
N FULBRIGHT: You say the Saugus address was in Robert Ellis’s missing file?

  BAUER: That’s correct.

  FULBRIGHT: And you eventually discovered a Level 3 detention facility there—part of an underground prison system operated by the Department of Defense, correct?

  BAUER: Yes, sir.

  FULBRIGHT: What do you make of that, Agent Bauer?

  BAUER: Clearly, Ellis knew that Drazen had been captured and imprisoned, that he wasn’t dead. At what point he knew is unclear. The notation in the files is obscure and not dated. It’s possible Bob learned the truth about Drazen after the outcome of Operation Nightfall. It’s also possible he set me and my team up to fail, then destroyed any evidence of his contact with General Henderson or DIA’s Special Unit for Counterintelligence Initiatives—the team that intimately captured Drazen.

  I liked Bob, but he was a dark horse. It could have gone down either way…. In any event, it’s not something I can enlighten you on.

  FULBRIGHT: Very well. I’ll turn this matter over to the Joint Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee to pursue, along with their investigation into the DOD’s underground prison system. Continue, please, Agent Bauer. Tell us about Saugus.

  BAUER: Saugus is an industrial area outside of Los Angeles, yet the area where we were headed was sanctioned as a wildlife preserve. It made no sense. And when we arrived, I saw no sign of animals.

  I used my handheld GPS to find the correct address—it was the middle of a field. Mason and I noticed a brand-new power transformer nearby. It was about then that I heard a chopper approach. I was convinced that someone had followed us. I just didn’t know who.

  It was around 7:00 P.M. at that point, and all afternoon I had been wondering about my family. I hadn’t talked to them for hours, but George Mason had assured me earlier that they were all right and simply sleeping at the safe house. I found out later, of course, that George Mason had instructed Tony Almeida and others at CTU to keep me in the dark about the shootout at the safe house. He may have had his reasons, but I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive him for that. I never had the chance to help my daughter and my wife during those hours when they needed me. During those hours when they were both missing …

  CHAIRMAN FULBRIGHT: Thank you for agreeing to testify, Dr. Parslow.

  DR. PHILIP PARSLOW: I’m happy to help you in any way I can. I cared deeply for Teri Bauer. She was a very lovely human being, and I know what an extreme loss this is to her husband and daughter.

  FULBRIGHT: Yes, we all share your condolences…. You can help us today by filling in some of the blanks about Mrs. Bauer’s movements between the hours of 4:00 P.M. and 7:00 P.M. on the day she died.

  PARSLOW: About four-thirty I received a call at my office from a nearby restaurant owner, who said Teri Bauer had wandered in off the street very confused. He thought she needed some help and asked if I wouldn’t mind coming over to talk to her—

  REP. PAULINE P. DRISCOLL, (D) CONN.: (Interrupting) Excuse me, Doctor, but could you tell us a little more about how you knew Mrs. Bauer? Give us some background so we know how she regarded you.

  PARSLOW: We had met six months before at the Getty Museum. There was a cocktail party in honor of a new exhibit, and I was there with some colleagues. Teri had an abiding passion for art and knew a great deal about it. It was a treat going through any gallery with her. I remember how much she admired the Titian that evening—it’s this lush painting of the goddess Venus trying to restrain her lover Adorns from going off to the hunt. She clings to him, appears to be pleading with him not to go, but Adonis is depicted as aloof, unaffected.

  At the time, I thought Teri’s preoccupation with that painting was superficial—the brush strokes, the use of color. But looking back, I think it had more to do with the problems between her and her husband, from whom she’d just separated.

  Anyway, as I said, she was a lovely human being and she appeared to be free, so I began to see her. We became close, but to be perfectly frank, we never slept together. She was afraid, she told me, of losing her family. I never even met her teenage daughter, Kim. But then she hadn’t met my two children either—I’m divorced. We figured it would be less complicated if we kept the kids out of it for a while, at least until we knew where we were going.

  Well, we weren’t going anywhere, as it turned out. I was a shoulder for Teri to lean on for a few months. When her husband asked to move back In, she decided to give it another try. At that point she asked me not to call her anymore, so I didn’t.

  DRISCOLL: Thank you for your honesty, Doctor.

  FULBRIGHT: Please continue with the events of the day in question. What happened after you arrived at the restaurant?

  PARSLOW: I found Teri in a peculiar state. She couldn’t remember her name or anything about her family or where she’d come from. I wanted her to come with me to the hospital, but she was very frightened by that idea. She was convinced it would be “dangerous.” Her panic alarmed me, so I decided to try to examine her there.

  I saw that she had been roughed up by someone—frankly, at the time, I thought it might have been her husband who had done it. Otherwise, she seemed stable. Most importantly, she seemed to show no sign of an injury to the head. I’m a surgeon, not a neurologist, but given her mental state, I guessed she was suffering from some form of dissociative amnesia—

  FULBRIGHT: (Interrupting) Doctor, please define that term for the record.

  PARSLOW: Certainly. While some amnesias can be a result of a blow to the head or other medical traumas, dissociative amnesia is a type caused by a traumatic event of some sort. The dissociative aspect is thought to be a coping mechanism—the person literally dissociates himself from a situation or experience too traumatic to integrate within the conscious self.

  DRISCOLL: And which was the traumatic event Teri Bauer was trying to block out or cope with at that point in the day? The poor woman had many—as you must know by now.

  PARSLOW: I do, ma’am. The event that I believe triggered her condition was witnessing her daughter’s death.

  DRISCOLL: Kimberly Bauer? But the girl’s alive—

  PARSLOW: At that point in the afternoon, Teri didn’t know that. She had witnessed a car going down an embankment and bursting into flames. Her daughter had been inside that car.

  From what I understand, a killer was after Teri and her daughter. Teri tried to escape the man by turning her car sharply off the road and into some bushes, but she didn’t realize that the front end of the car was extended precariously over a steep embankment. When she briefly left the car to check the road and see if they had lost the man, the car slid over the edge and burst into flames.

  At the time, Teri thought she had just caused her daughter’s death. The truth is, Kim opened the door halfway down the hill and was thrown from the car. Seeing the explosion, after the other traumas of the day, sent Teri over the edge, too, so to speak.

  FULBRIGHT: How did she get to the restaurant?

  PARSLOW: A young woman driving by picked her up. Teri couldn’t remember anything about her life at that point, including her name. But when the woman drove past a restaurant that Teri and I had frequented, some memory stirred deep inside her. She asked to be let off there. She seemed terribly disoriented, so the owner, who knew us both, called me.

  FULBRIGHT: What happened after you examined her? Did you manage to convince her to go to a hospital?

  PARSLOW: She absolutely refused—she began to panic and plead. I didn’t want to push her because she was in such a fragile state, so I took her to her home, hoping it would trigger other memories of her life.

  DRISCOLL: And that’s where the assassin was waiting, correct?

  PARSLOW: That’s right. That’s how I was shot. A CTU agent had been murdered before we even arrived, and another agent, a man named Tony Almeida, arrived in time to save our lives. I’m sorry to say that my friend Chris, a private security guard who worked in my office building, was killed, too. I had asked him to come over to help protect
Teri. I had no idea how much danger she was really in—if it had been her husband who roughed her up, I thought Chris and his gun would be enough to scare away any further threat.

  DRISCOLL: When did Mrs. Bauer finally recover her memory?

  PARSLOW: She was still mentally struggling when we walked around the house. Right before the assassin appeared, she seemed to be making a breakthrough. Then the assassin began gunning us all down. Although Agent Almeida arrived in time to stop him from killing us, it seems that this latest trauma is what restored her memory.

  Teri was hysterical when the memories flooded back to her. She thought her daughter was dead. She finally calmed down when Agent Almeida assured her that Kim was alive. After surviving the car’s fall, Kim had phoned CTU looking for her father. Unfortunately, Kim didn’t trust anyone, not even the other agents at CTU. So she hung up before Agent Almeida could confirm her whereabouts.

  That’s all I know. After I was shot, Agent Almeida drove me to the hospital, and I never saw Teri again….

  FULBRIGHT: (After a pause) Doctor Parslow? Are you all right?

  PARSLOW: The story ends tragically, you know?

  FULBRIGHT: Excuse me?

  PARSLOW: The story behind that Titian painting. Venus cannot prevent Adonis from going on the hunt. Ultimately, he’s killed…. I think deep down Teri feared that the same thing would happen between her and Jack—that their story would end tragically, too.

  FULBRIGHT: Thank you, Doctor Parslow, you are excused. Let’s take a short recess.

  POLITICAL CORRECTION

  Pundits and insiders have a few things to say…

  TEXTBOOK UNELECTABLE

  By Rick Norris

  “A senator’s duty, a president’s duty, an elected representative’s duty is not only to his country, hut also to his family. If he can’t manage the personal interactions of the people closest to him. then he can’t expect the electorate to believe in his abilities to lead a nation.”