“I’m Special Agent Jack Bauer of the Counter Terrorist Unit. This is Nina Myers, my partner.”
“Mr. Sanjore is eager to help you if he can. Please follow me.”
The woman turned and walked in short, measured steps down the carpeted corridor.
After he spoke with the helicopter pilot, Saaid realized he had not retrieved his master’s things from the master bedroom, as commanded. He hurried down the spiral staircase, terrified he’d meet armed American agents around the next corner — or Nawaf, who would realize Saaid’s mistake.
He reached his master’s bedroom, found the Louis Vuitton suitcase on the bed, the PDA on the dresser. Relieved the task was so simple, he grabbed the items and hurried out the door. In the hallway he heard voices, froze.
The Americans.
Saaid stared down the corridor. Someone approached, their shadows dancing on the walls. He had to get out of there! Heart racing, he hurried across the hall to the spiral staircase. On the way he crashed the suitcase against a stone pedestal, tumbling a pre-Columbian sculpture onto the concrete floor. The shattering sound was like an explosion.
Jack and Nina were walking down a hallway when they heard the noise. Jack turned his head toward the sound, but Nina Myers faced the woman Yasmina— and that was what saved them.
As Yasmina whirled, her dainty hand plucked the ornamental daggers out of her thick hair. She hurled one at Jack’s exposed throat.
“Jack!” Nina cried, pushing him against the wall. Her movement put Nina in the path of the dagger. The silver blade sank deep into her shoulder, and Nina cried out.
In an agile and graceful movement, Yasmina spun through the air and landed, legs braced, in front of Jack while he was still regaining his balance. A second dagger slashed his forearm. But the blade caught the bandages already under his shirt, and with a reflexive strike from Jack, the weapon flew out of the woman’s hands.
A heavyset man burst past them and down the hall, barreling like an out-of-control train toward a spiral staircase. He clutched a suitcase in one hand, what looked like a silver revolver in the other. For a split-second, Jack thought it might be Nawaf Sanjore.
Yasmina took advantage of the momentary distraction, aimed a sharp kick at Jack’s knee, slammed his jaw with the palm of her hand, then reached for another pair of daggers secreted in her clothing. She pulled both blades, poised to impale Jack, when a sliver dagger plunged into one side of her throat and ripped out the other. A fountain of blood gushed as Nina tugged the weapon free, cutting through veins, arteries and cartilage.
Yasmina lurched forward, eye glazed, red lips curled back. The daggers dropped from her hands. Then her head lolled backward and she pitched forward.
At the end of the corridor, the heavy man thundered up the spiral staircase. Jack’s head swiveled wildly. “Nina are you all right?”
Clutching her wounded shoulder, Nina stepped over Yasmina’s corpse. “I’ll be okay, but you’ve got to stop him.”
Jack was up and running for the stairs before she’d finished her sentence. He grasped the handrail with one hand, drew the Tactical with the other. Before he reached the top he thumbed the safety off. The stairs led to a narrow catwalk and a steel door. He slammed his shoulder against it, and pushed it open. Dust and hot wind battered him as a helicopter rose from the flat roof, twisted in the air and soared away.
Jack ran across the roof, aiming his Tactical at the fleeing chopper. He almost squeezed the trigger when he saw the heavyset man. The man was poised on the edge of the roof, the Louis Vuitton suitcase sitting beside him, as he watched the helicopter fade into the bright horizon.
“Do not move!” Jack commanded. “Step away from the edge of the building and turn around.”
The man raised his hands in surrender, but he did not face Jack.
“Step back and turn around!” Jack repeated. In the large man’s hand, he saw the object that he’d thought was a silver revolver. It was actually a PDA, an item that might have belonged to Nawaf Sanjore. Jack knew he had to get it.
“Face me!” Jack commanded, moving forward.
At the sound of Jack’s approaching footsteps, the man lowered his arms, then jumped off the edge of the high-rise.
“Allah Akbar!”
The diminishing volume of the suicidal scream reached Jack’s ears as the big man disappeared from view.
13. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 5 P.M. AND 6 P.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME
5:01:55 P.M. PDT Rossum Tower Century City
Jack returned to the corridor where the fatal confrontation had begun. He found the body of Yasmina, but Nina was gone. He dropped the Louis Vuitton suitcase he’d found on the roof, drew his weapon and held it in ready position with both hands.
“Nina! Nina, can you hear me?”
Her reply emerged through hidden speakers. “Jack! There’s a staircase at the end of the corridor. I’m two floors below you, in Sanjore’s office. I think I found something.”
Jack made his way downstairs, found Nina hunched over a computer keyboard. She had dressed her shoulder wound with century-old cognac, wrapped it with shreds from a white, Egyptian cotton towel. The puncture wound was deep. Already her bandage was stained with seeping blood.
“I’ve called in the forensics team,” he informed her, snapping shut his cell phone. “They’ll be here any minute. Nawaf Sanjore got away in a helicopter. CTU had the aircraft on radar, but lost it in the ground clutter over Los Angeles. He could be headed anywhere, by now. We’ve lost him.”
Jack secured his weapon. “I managed to corner one of Sanjore’s aides, but the man threw himself from the tower rather than face capture. He had a PDA in his hand, I doubt it survived the fall…”
“The computers have been wiped clean, too,” said Nina, her voice rock-steady despite the stab wound. “But look at this! I found it when I turned on the monitor.”
It was the largest screen in a room filled with them. Jack stared at the color schematic — some kind of plans for a building. But there was nothing to identify the structure.
“Someone forgot to close the program when they wiped the memory. The file is gone, but the contents of this screen can be downloaded into the printer’s memory,” said Nina. “At least I hope so.”
She tapped a few keys. A large printer in the corner fired up and spit out an oversized spread sheet of the plans. Nina and Jack both released breaths they didn’t know they were holding.
“That’s something, at least,” said Nina.
“Good work,” Jack replied. He touched her arm. “And thanks for saving my ass.”
“Jack! You’re bleeding.”
Jack raised an eyebrow as he rolled up his sleeve. “So are you.”
Nina glanced down at the blood staining the strip of towel she’d used to wrap her puncture wound. “But I dressed it already,” she told him.
She indicated the shredded towel on the desk. Jack reached for it. “Yasmina caught me where I had been cut before, at the al-Bustani mansion,” he told her, wrapping a strip of Egyptian cotton around his seeping arm. “I think the blade got tangled with the bandage. It saved me.” He smiled at his second in command. “Neat trick, Nina. Killing her with her own blade.”
Nina smirked. “Well, she stuck the damn thing in my shoulder. The least I could do was return it to her.”
Jack chuckled, but in that brief moment he saw a cruel glint in Nina’s eyes he’d never seen before. It was gone in a flash — so quickly he thought he’d imagined it.
5:07:45 P.M. PDT Terrence Alton Chamberlain Auditorium Los Angeles
Secret Service Agent Craig Auburn accompanied two private security consultants for a final electronic sweep of the entire auditorium. Both men were experts at special event security and brought along their own equipment. One man, about forty with peppered hair, carried a high-speed gas chromatography unit over his shoulder. A younger man, not even thirty, had a silver-gray micro-differential ion mobility spectrometer strapped to his bac
k. The trio started in the wings, climbed high into the catwalks above the stage, through the entire upper stage area, then down again.
Auburn, a fifty-five-year-old veteran of a Currency Fraud Division desk job, was huffing and puffing by the time they reached the massive main stage. Briefly he wondered if he’d make retirement, or if his deteriorating heart would kill him before he ever saw his pension.
Concerned, the older rent-a-snoop powered down his unit. “Hey, buddy. You okay? Need a rest or something?”
Auburn rasped a reply. “No, no. Just jet lag.”
The men crossed the stage, which seemed shiny smooth from a distance. Close up, Auburn saw blocking marks, hatches, electric plugs covered by metal hoods dotting the empty expanse.
Dominating center stage was a huge mock up of a Silver Screen Award, modeled after an old-fashioned box camera mounted on a tripod. This stage prop was massive, soaring thirty feet into the air. The box camera itself was the size of a minibus and fabricated from sheets of metal insulated with some type of synthetic construction material. The structure was mounted on a motorized dolly wrapped with burnished aluminum to reflect the footlights. It loomed over the stage, its shadow stretching beyond the orchestra pit to the front row seats.
As the men approached the prop, the ion spectrometer chirped urgently. The operator froze in his tracks, tapped the keypad to recalibrate the detector, but the chirping just became more insistent.
“What have you got?” the older man asked.
“Traces of nitrates, tetryl.”
The older man shook his head. “I have nothing, and your ion sniffer has a lousy false reading rate.”
Auburn studied the stage decoration and realized the huge Silver Screen Award prop was the final, assembled version of the parts the union men had brought in earlier — the team led by the Middle Eastern man.
“Are you sure it’s a false reading?” Craig Auburn pressed, ready to tear the prop apart if either man gave him reason.
The older specialist touched the base of a tripod leg. His hand came up stained with paint. “They just put this stuff together. There’s wet paint, traces of acetylene, fruit in somebody’s lunchbox. Anything like that can set this equipment off.”
“These traces are pretty weak,” the younger men said in agreement.
“Sure they’re weak,” the older man said. “If there was a bomb anywhere around here, this spectrometer would be ringing its head off. My bet. The culprit is wet paint.”
The specialists wandered off to scan another part of the stage. Auburn took one last look at the prop. Something about the prop still bothered him, but he knew very well that a hunch in the face of hard forensic proof was pretty much regarded as a crock of shit by anyone who had a career or cared about keeping it.
“Whatever you say. You guys are the experts.”
5:13:45 P.M. PDT Terrence Alton Chamberlain Auditorium Los Angeles
“Whatever you say. You guys are the experts.”
The words of the Americans were faint. Softer still were the footsteps moving away. But Bastian Grost had heard enough to feel great relief. He removed the stethoscope from the wall of the container, exchanged a glance and a nod with his brothers in arms.
Hasan was right.
The part of the stage prop they occupied was airtight. Above their heads, an air scrubber silently refreshed the atmosphere inside the chamber. Hasan had provided the materials, of course. Everyone had been pleased with the look of the large sculpture on the outside, the roominess within. But there was some skepticism among his men about the lining. Lead had always been the best shield against explosive detectors. But a lead-lined stage prop, combined with the weight of the men, would have been far too heavy.
None of them knew whether the specially treated polymer lining would do the job. Clearly, it had. Seven of his men sat around him now in the large box with twenty-five guns and sixty pounds of plastique — and the stupid Americans had failed to detect a thing.
Grost was confident they would also fail to detect the additional weapons inside a much smaller version of the Silver Screen prop he and his men now occupied. That smaller prop was positioned as a decoration at the back of the auditorium. When the time was right, their accomplices would shed their disguises among the audience, grab those hidden weapons, and guard the theater’s exits.
Grost checked the illuminated dial of his watch. Everything had been planned to the smallest detail. In less than two hours it would all come together. In less than two hours, he and his men would begin their journey to Paradise.
5:16:12 P.M. PDT Avenue de Dante Tijuana, Mexico
Ray Dobyns was holed up in an unexpected place — a modest split-level brick and wood-framed house in a quiet upper-middle-class suburb. To Tony, the streets, the houses seemed no different than the sitcom neighborhoods where Beaver Cleaver or the Brady Bunch grew up. The house was nestled in a shallow dip in the landscape, isolated from the other houses on the block by an expansive yard. The building itself was surrounded by shrubbery, now thin and brown and not worth much as cover. There was a large bay window and a garage in the front of the house and plenty of lawn around it, though little grass was green due to the prolonged drought that scorched both sides of the Cal/Mex border.
Tony noticed a large satellite dish on the roof, a microwave transmitter in the back and another dish mounted in a tall tree farther from the house. With all that state-of-the-art communications technology, Tony knew that more than chocolate chip cookies were being baked inside this particular house.
When Tony first arrived and saw the residence, he did a double-take, figuring that hooker Brandy had played him for a fool. But after he drove around the neighborhood a few times, and past the house once or twice, Tony finally spied Dobyns waddling into the backyard like some suburban fat cat. The man was wearing shorts, his bulk settling into a lounge chair next to a small built-in pool while he sipped tequila and puffed on a thick cigar. Now that he knew he’d found the right place Tony parked the van across the street and watched the house.
After twenty minutes Tony determined that the Chechens were probably somewhere else, and Dobyns was alone. Tony’s fists crushed the steering wheel. That just won’t do, he mused. I want everyone to be here for the party I have planned.
5:20:47 P.M. PDT Rossum Tower Century City
The data mining team had arrived and Nawaf Sanjore’s office was a high-traffic area. The noise was so thick Jack could not hear his cell phone when it rang, only felt its tremble.
“Bauer.”
“Jack? Jack. Is that you?” The voice was Frank Castalano’s. “You’re going to have to speak up, my ears still aren’t so good.”
Jack remembered the RPG hitting Castalano’s vehicle, knew the man had been lucky to walk away with only diminished hearing. “It’s me, Frank,” Jack loudly replied, eliciting stares. “How’s your partner?”
“What?”
“How’s Jerry Alder?”
“Still in surgery. His wife’s at the hospital now… What a mess.”
“How are you?”
“Cuts and bruises. The docs say my hearing will improve in a couple of days. Meanwhile, I’ve got the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral ringing in my head.” A pause. “Jack, about an hour ago we found a cell phone Hugh Vetri hid under some papers in his desk. Turns out he bought it with a fake ID just eight days ago—”
“Vetri must have thought he was being watched.
Wiretaps, maybe. Any sign of unauthorized surveillance?”
“Not yet. But we did find out that Vetri made three calls with that phone. All of them on the night of his murder, all to the same number — the office of Valerie Dodge, CEO of the Dodge Modeling Agency.”
5:22:42 P.M. PDT Highway 39 Angeles National Forest
The helicopter swooped low over the San Gabriels, skimming a section of thick forest until it located a particular stretch of deserted roadway that had once been part of Highway 39. The aircraft descended to the road’s cracked pavement
in a cloud of dust, fallen leaves, and parched pine needles. The wheels had hardly touched down when a door opened and Nawaf Sanjore jumped out. Crouching to avoid the whirling blades, the architect hurried across the concrete to the narrow shoulder of the road.
Shielding his face from the aircraft’s hot blast, Nawaf watched the helicopter lift off and soar away, the sound of its beating blades quickly fading. With mounting trepidation, Nawaf Sanjore scanned the empty road and the thick curtain of foliage on either side. Wind rustled the trees. A raptor cried out in the distance. Surrounded by wilderness, he felt quite vulnerable. He nearly cried out when he heard the sound of rock scraping against rock. He turned toward the sound and saw what appeared to be a section of ground opening up. Revealed in the gap was a narrow set of concrete stairs leading underground.
Nawaf heard footsteps. A bearded man in the black robes of an imam climbed the stairs to greet him.
“Please follow me.”
Inside the tunnel, the air was cool and scented. The robed man led Nawaf down the long corridor, into an underground maze of natural caves that led ultimately to a huge chamber deep inside the mountain. The hollow in the center of the earth had been transformed into a kind of paradise. Recessed electric lighting illuminated the breezy chamber with the colors of a fairyland. Hidden speakers filled the space with the gentle sound of wind chimes. Nawaf Sanjore estimated the cave’s ceiling was seventy or eighty feet above his head. It dripped with delicate icicles of stone — stalactites bathed in a rainbow of shifting lights.
On one end of the massive cave, a tumble of chilled mountain water plunged over a rocky ledge, into a rippling pool with underwater lights that glowed phosphorescent blue. On the other side of the cave, perhaps three hundred yards away, a three-tiered glass and stone structure had been constructed against the cave wall. Lights gleamed behind glass walls, where Nawaf Sanjore saw luxurious rooms filled with modern furnishings. The uneven stone floor under his feet glistened with bits of quartz, sparkling granite, crystals shards embedded in the stone.
24 Declassified: Trojan Horse 2d-3 Page 18
