The House Special Subcommittee's Findings at CTU

by Marc Cerasini

  —SENATOR DAVID PALMER, SUPER TUESDAY PRESS CONFERENCE

  How did he do it? The moment David Palmer uttered those words, every hardened political mind in the nation was thinking the same thing: the man has just rendered himself textbook unelectable. According to sources close to the campaign. Palmer’s own wife referred to this as his “concession speech.” Mike Hodges. Palmer’s opponent in the primary, said Palmer was “toast.”

  Things were looking pretty bleak for candidate Palmer. As the sun rose on Super Tuesday, he found himself neck-deep in a personal and political scandal. Yet by 9:(X) P.M. Pacific time. Palmer was the decisive winner of all eleven primaries. The most surprising thing about this scandal was that the electorate had heard all about Palmer’s dirty laundry—from him! And they not only gave him a pass, they also handed the senator from Maryland an approval rating of 86 percent.

  What caused this turnaround? What was Palmer’s strategy? How was this modern political miracle achieved?

  As it turns out. David Palmer relied on a controversial and previously untested political formula called honesty. He stepped up to the microphone, smiled for the camera, and told the American people the truth.

  It was refreshing. It was unheard of. And by God it worked!

  What David Palmer did on that historic Tuesday was more than expose his own mistakes—he bared his soul and revealed his basic humanity for everyone to see. Palmer admitted the mistakes of the past, and unlike previous seekers of high office, he took responsibility for them, too.

  Overwhelmingly, the American people loved him for it. That was because the average citizen could relate to a bumbling and sometimes clueless father out of touch with his family. A man whose daughter was the victim of an unspeakable crime. A man who put the needs of his children before his own ambitions, even if it meant an end to a lifelong career.

  The voters know how to forgive. What David Palmer discovered on Super Tuesday was how to ask for that forgiveness. He asked for forgiveness the way we all should do—with a frank confession, honest contrition, a willingness to accept full responsibility and the consequences of his actions, and the promise to do belter in the future.

  What more can we ask of a man—or a president?

  IT’S A CIRCUS! IT’S A FIREWORKS DISPLAY!

  NO … IT’S A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

  By Noreen Stroud. Washington Gazette

  Wow. what a show! I don’t know whether to applaud or weep. Perhaps I’ll indulge in a little of both, for I am hunched over my spare I kea desk, typing away on my tiny ¡Mac keyboard in my spartan little room, and I realize how downright unexciting my life really is. Especially when compared with the latest and greatest of our presidential candidates. David Palmer.

  Things sure are exciting over at the Palmer Ranch. Not at all like my house. Why? Not one of my children has gone near a ledge—let alone plunged off!

  And our moneyman—we call him Dad—doesn’t have time to conspire against the family, let alone knock off a therapist.

  And there hasn’t been an explosion in our house in weeks!

  My goodness me. And I used to think a glimpse of thong was shocking!

  I do remember that a little thong could sell newspapers, but I fear there are not enough trees left in America to keep readers abreast of the soap opera that is the life of our esteemed senator from Maryland—a state I once thought of as staid and sober and certainly no California.

  Gee, I may have to reconsider.

  Rumor even has it that the Super Tuesday •Address caused a severe rift between the previously happy couple. David flew one way. Sherry the other after Tuesday’s very eventful night.

  Should the three-ring circus we call Senator Palmer he sworn in as president? Will we witness press conferences with divorce lawyers instead of international heads of state? And interviews on Court TV instead of Face die Nation? Time will tell.

  But perhaps I’m being too harsh. Well … times is tough, folks. We’ve got to sell papers, and may I remind you. you’re the ones buying.

  America loves its suds—whether it’s J. R. Ewing. Princess Di. Luke and Laura, or that Man from Arkansas—fiction or fact makes no matter, it’s a story to be chewed, swallowed. and sometimes, sometimes choked on.

  Then there’s that other little item to consider—what we like to call free elections-even though, just between you and me. those elections seem to cost an awful lot of money for something billed as “free.”

  I guess that’s why we end up with all those nasty, evil moneymen who corrupt and manipulate helpless senators and maybe presidents, too.

  Funny how presidents can’t control the moneymen. Dad was so easy to tame.

  Transcript from Fox News’ Sunday Morning with Brett Hughes. This segment aired Jive days after the events of Super Tuesday.

  HOST BRETT HUGHES: What are we to make of the events of Super Tuesday? Has the election cycle gotten a little rougher, or is it just me?

  POLITICAL COMMENTATOR FRANK FARNES: (Laughing) It’s you, Brett. Politics has always been rough. Ask Gary Hart. Seriously, though, I haven’t seen anyone trash a hotel room like that since The Who.

  COLUMNIST ART CONACKIE: (Laughing) If Palmer wins the election, maybe he should smash the podium after he’s sworn in.

  POLITICAL COMMENTATOR TONY RAINES: (Laughing) Meet the new boss….

  FRANK FARNES, ART CONACKIE: (Singing) Same as the old boss!

  BRETT HUGHES: We’re showing our age here. We shouldn’t ignore our younger viewers. Our motto is “Objective and Honest.”

  ART CONACKIE: Do any of these kids today wreck hotel rooms? Eminem, maybe?

  BRETT HUGHES: (Chuckling) Plain or peanut?

  7:00 P.M.-8:00 P.M.

  SPECIAL AGENT JACK BAUER: After the sun went down, George Mason started to get second thoughts. I was determined to stick it out at the wildlife sanctuary until seven-twenty when the power grid was supposed to be shut down, but George was getting antsy. A call came in to him about then from the hospital—Alexis Drazen was conscious. Mason left to question him, and I remained behind.

  CHAIRMAN FULBRIGHT: But there was nothing in that Saugus field, according to George Mason.

  BAUER: George isn’t the best observer in the world. The sanctuary had wooden fences, paths, and property markers. It was also well tended. There were markers citing buried power lines, and that new transformer, too. After George left, I moved deeper into the area and spotted the old silo complex.

  FULBRIGHT: Farm silo?

  BAUER: Missile silo, sir, the underground facility. The sanctuary was obviously an old antiaircraft site left over from the dawn of the Cold War. Back in the nineteen fifties and sixties, antiaircraft sites were established outside of most American cities. I traced the origin of the site in Saugus to 1959.

  REP. PAULINE P. DRISCOLL, (D) CONN.: And this was the (papers shuffling) … the “Level 3” facility operated by the Department of Defense?

  REP. ROY SCHNEIDER, (R) TEX.: Ah, yes, the secret prison system.

  BAUER: That’s correct. And the guards there had quite a welcome waiting for me as I entered their underground facility—there was an ultrasonic alarm to disorient and confuse me and a taser to take me down. I woke up on a cot in a cold concrete cell and promptly threw up.

  Mark DeSalvo came in shortly after. He was a DOD operative serving as warden of this facility. I identified myself, but he’d already checked me out. He wanted to know what I was doing at his prison, so I told him.

  When I mentioned the time of the power grid shutdown, seven-twenty, I knew I’d touched a nerve. He admitted that a prisoner transfer helicopter was due at that time. I wanted to know the identity of the prisoner, but DeSalvo said it was classified—even he didn’t know.

  I warned him that something heavy was about to go down. He chose to trust me. Prom my own military experience, I knew DeSalvo had to be army or exarmy. I’m sure that’s why we got along….

  DeSalvo called for backup, but his request was going to take time to mov
e up the chain of command. So I convinced him to arm and outfit everyone at the facility, down to the maintenance and technical staff, to make it appear the prison was more secure than it was.

  When that helicopter arrived, I figured the Drazens would have some sort of strike team watching, waiting for the grid to fail so they could make their hit. But their power grid mole was dead, and the power would not go down. I just hoped that would be enough to deter the strike team until reinforcements arrived.

  The chopper—a civilian model—landed without a hitch. The prisoner was bound, shackled, and hooded, so I never got a good look at him as the guards hustled him out of the chopper and down into the prison.

  DRISCOLL: What about your family, Agent Bauer? Were you still worried about them?

  BAUER: Yes, of course. They were always on my mind, but I had no idea, during all those hours, that they were in any acute danger. George Mason continued to he to me, making me believe that my wife and daughter were secure in a CTU safe house. So I continued to put my energies into ending the threat against them—into stopping the Drazens.

  KIMBERLY BAUER: After I climbed up that hill, I called for my mom. She had gotten out of the car before it rolled, so I knew she would be okay, but she wasn’t there, and I figured she got kidnapped again.

  I was scared for her more than for myself. I found a pay phone and dialed CTU, looking for my dad. A man’s voice answered, said his name was Tony Almeida, but I didn’t know him. He said my dad wasn’t there. My mom had gotten tricked by a dirty CTU agent named Jamey Farrell, and I didn’t want the same thing to happen to me, so I hung up.

  Right away I thought of Rick, because I wanted to find my mom, and his dead friend, Dan, knew the people who took us in the first place. I thought maybe he could help me find out more. He gave me his address in Echo Park, so I got a taxi and drove there.

  When I arrived, I was in for a big shock—Rick had a girlfriend already, named Melanie. I sort of liked Rick, but I didn’t know he was seeing anyone, you know? Anyway, I told them both that I just wanted to search Dan’s room. Rick helped me look for any information that could help me find my mom.

  Then Dan’s brother, Frank, showed up at the house. What a psycho. He had arranged for a drug deal to go down at the house, and he wouldn’t let me leave. I guess he suspected I might tell someone about it.

  Dan was dead, but Frank didn’t know it—Rick had been too scared to tell him. And Frank was still expecting Dan to show up with the twenty-thousand-dollar payoff for kidnapping me and Janet.

  I let it slip that Dan was dead, and Frank went ballistic. He was so angry—and then he got worried. He said that the drug dealers were going to want their money, but it was too late to stop the deal from going down.

  When Frank stepped out of earshot, I really let Rick have it. I told him he should turn his life around. He was a good guy—smart, kind, brave, handsome—he had so much going for him, but he was surrounding himself with these low-life criminals.

  Rick said he did want to turn his life around, but at that moment Frank was making it difficult. I decided to make a run for it. But just as I got to the door, Frank’s friends barreled in with a duffel bag full of guns. Since he had no money to make the buy, Frank said he was going to rob the drug dealers.

  When they came to the house, Frank acted like a real badass. He demanded the twenty thousand dollars’ worth of Ecstasy from them. The dealers spotted Frank’s gun and pulled out their own. Suddenly there was this standoff. Frank’s crew came in with their weapons drawn. The dealers dropped their guns, and as Frank went to disarm them, he smashed Rick in his injured shoulder, saying, “All this because you couldn’t keep my brother alive.”

  Then Frank shattered the nose of one of the drug dealers with the butt of his gun. That’s when the dealer told us all we had the right to remain silent. He was a cop! Suddenly a SWAT team burst through the doors and arrested Frank and his crew. I tried to explain that I wasn’t a part of their stupid drug deal, but they didn’t believe me—of course, right? Who would? So they carted me off to jail.

  FULBRIGHT: What did you do next at the detention facility?

  BAUER: While DeSalvo and the guards processed their prisoner, I checked the place out. It was rundown, with a bad electrical system and no backup—my house was more secure than this place. The DOD relied on the prison’s remote location and its secretiveness for security—but that wasn’t enough when the enemies you were facing had reliable intelligence.

  And I knew the Drazens had come too far to quit—I knew that Andre would still attack that night. The strike team had just been delayed from accomplishing their mission, they had not been stopped.

  I needed to know the identity of the prisoner—that was the key to solving this whole mystery. I reached out to Senator Palmer, who promised to make a few calls. But time was running out. I had to act. I crept into the security command center of the prison facility and saw the interior of the cell on the monitor. The prisoner was sitting at a table, his back turned to me. As he rose, DeSalvo came in and caught me observing. Then I saw the prisoner’s face—

  I thought there could be no more surprises that day. But I was wrong. When I looked into that monitor, I thought I was seeing a ghost….

  DRISCOLL: It was Victor Drazen?

  BAUER: Yes, ma’am—the Butcher of Belgrade—the man I thought I’d assassinated during Operation Nightfall, exactly two years before.

  I knew in that moment that Operation Nightfall had been set up to fail from the start. The world was supposed to think Victor Drazen was dead—and me and my team were supposed to die, too, just to make the story of Drazen’s assassination more plausible.

  In my estimation, there was a traitor at work here—someone beyond Nina Myers, someone who had a higher position in the intelligence community.

  FULBRIGHT: Where do you think we should look for this traitor?

  BAUER: Sir, I wish I could tell you. This person could be operating out of any number of intelligence agencies—CIA, CTU, DIA, DOD.

  All I know is that a traitor set me up, killed my team, authorized the capture and secret imprisonment of Victor Drazen, and aided Drazen’s sons in breaking their father out of prison. This traitor is also responsible for every single death that occurred on the day of the California presidential primary.

  One thing is clear—Robert Ellis may have been in on this deception, but he was definitely not the mastermind. Someone else was responsible, and he or she remains at large today.

  FULBRIGHT: These are troubling revelations, Agent Bauer. If true, then our national security may still be compromised.

  BAUER: Yes, sir.

  FULBRIGHT: (After conferring with his colleagues) Please continue with your testimony.

  BAUER: I pleaded with DeSalvo to move the prisoner before the strike team lurking outside hit the facility DeSalvo put me off, but agreed to give me five minutes with Victor Drazen inside his cell.

  SCHNEIDER: You interrogated him?

  BAUER: I … tried. But it was like talking to a wall. When I introduced myself, it was apparent that he already knew who I was. He said next to nothing. Then I met his gaze and I knew …

  FULBRIGHT: (After a pause) Agent Bauer? What did you know?

  BAUER: How do I put this? Ever hear that saying “Be careful when you stare into the abyss. You might find the abyss staring back at you”? That’s what it felt like, staring into the eyes of Victor Drazen. You could see that he’d checked out of the human race a long time ago.

  DRISCOLL: That’s a rather extreme evaluation.

  BAUER: Ma’am, if you had seen what I saw in those eyes, you’d agree. Mark DeSalvo saw it, too. It’s something you learn in this business. With men like Drazen, all the signs are right there in the eyes—a kind of insane warning that something very bad is about to go down and you’re going to be on the receiving end of it.

  So when DeSalvo burst into that cell and took a hard look into Drazen’s eyes, he agreed to move his prisoner right away. We
didn’t know it then, but it was already too late.

  8:00 P.M.-9:00 P.M.

  CHAIRMAN FULBRIGHT: YOU said it was too late, Agent Bauer. What did you mean?

  SPECIAL AGENT JACK BAUER: DeSalvo, his guards, and I began to move Victor Drazen. We were in a corridor when the lights went out.

  That meant the strike team had cut the power—probably by blowing up the transformer. It was an act of desperation—taking out part of the electrical system would send all kinds of ripples through emergency services. In such events the power company immediately dispatches investigation and repair teams. Police and local fire departments are notified because there’s a danger of forest fire. That was why the Drazens tried to bribe a power company worker—it was more expensive, but less likely to attract attention. As it was, lots of people were going to be showing up at the detention center real soon, maybe even before the CTU team I’d requested arrived—if it ever arrived.

  REP. ROY SCHNEIDER, (R) TEX.: YOU’D CONTACTED CTU?

  BAUER: I spoke to George Mason directly. I told him everything—about the prison system, about Victor Drazen, and about the Serb strike team knocking at our door. I begged for a CTU tactical squad, but Mason sounded like he wasn’t going to do anything more than pass my request up the chain of command.

  I figured I was doomed, but it didn’t matter anymore. I couldn’t fight this battle alone. If Mason couldn’t help, then it was over.

  I didn’t know it then, but Mason had tried his best to secure help. He stuck his own neck out and sent in a tactical team without Chappelle’s authorization. Then he tried to smooth things over by contacting the DOD to help unify command at the scene. But Mason’s efforts were stalled by someone in General Henderson’s office.