24 Declassified: Trojan Horse 2d-3

by Marc A. Cerasini

  Morales already knew. “That was the sound of the steel doors closing all over the auditorium. Those doors are meant to be activated in case of fire — after the building has been evacuated — to isolate the damage to one section of the structure.”

  “Now they’re obviously being used as jail house doors,” said Cynthia, “to trap all of us inside.”

  Morales scanned Cynthia’s computer screen. “Can’t you do something?”

  “Sure.” Cynthia Richel picked up the weapon again, this time by the handle. She checked the magazine like a professional, flicked off the safety. “Tell me where to aim.”

  Special Agent Craig Auburn had memorized the evacuation route the old-fashioned way, by walking it ten times.

  When the evacuation order had come through his earbud, the Secret Service agent had been at his post in the lobby. He’d followed standard operating procedures and immediately moved to a set of utility stairs that led directly to the evacuation route — in this case a long, avocado-green corridor running beneath the theater, which led to a pair of glass doors that opened onto a loading dock.

  Earlier that day, Auburn had walked the route with the bomb detection team. A service elevator was located near the loading dock exit and he personally locked it into an open position to maintain the security of the route.

  Now that he’d arrived at the end of the corridor, Auburn was surprised to see that he was the first agent on the scene — and nearly six minutes after the flight order had been given. He moved through the glass doors, weapon drawn, to make sure the exit was clear of threats.

  Something’s wrong, he thought immediately. No other agents were outside, or any of their vehicles.

  While it was possible they’d gotten the two wives out by another route, no one had communicated a successful evacuation — or anything else for that matter. Auburn’s earbud had been quiet. He’d assumed the detail was maintaining radio silence, but now he suspected something else was happening and he couldn’t hear it.

  He walked back into the corridor, tried to hail his boss, Ron Birchwood, but got no response. Then he heard a loud clanging boom right behind him and realized with a shock that a pair of steel fire doors had just closed off the only exit on this end of the corridor. He searched for some way to open the doors or override their lock, but could see no key pads or control panels. Nothing.

  The sound of approaching gunfire came next. Auburn drew his weapon and ran toward the noise. Four people were entering the far end of the hallway through the open stairwell door. He immediately recognized the Vice President’s wife and the Russian First Lady. Marina Novartov was limping, trailing blood, from a wound in her calf. Assisting her were a young man in a blue blazer and a pretty, young woman with straight brown hair. Auburn knew they were two low-level members of the Vice President’s staff, but he couldn’t recall their names.

  Behind the foursome, Auburn saw Special Agent Ron Birchwood, and the head of Russian security, Borodin. They had their weapons drawn and were pumping off shots while retreating. A red tracer burned down the hall and tore through the Russian’s chest. A crimson explosion, and Borodin’s arms flew out as he fell backward.

  A masked man appeared in the stairwell doorway. Birchwood pumped off a shot, then two more. When the man vanished again, Birchwood glanced over his shoulder.

  “Auburn! There’s a whole hit team behind me. Caught us right outside the Presidential Box. The others are down…they’re gone. Communications are jammed. I’ll try to hold them off, buy you time while you evacuate the women.”

  The foursome moved past Auburn. “The exit’s cut off!” he cried to them, stepping behind them to guard their back. “Get into the elevator.”

  When they were all inside, Auburn plugged the key into the elevator panel and called to his boss. “Come on, Ron! It’s clear.”

  Before he could even turn around, the hail of gunfire tore Special Agent Ron Birchwood to pieces. Auburn turned the key. The doors closed and the elevator moved down the shaft.

  7:38:12 P.M. PDT Downtown Los Angeles

  Jack Bauer raced through the streets, running traffic lights without a siren. For the twentieth time, he auto-dialed Teri’s cell phone. Once again, he reached her voice mail.

  It was obvious she’d turned off her phone for the duration of the Silver Screen televised broadcast. The show had probably requested it of its audience, so he wasn’t surprised, but he was damned frustrated. With the Chamberlain Auditorium compromised, he wanted her out of there.

  By now Jack had realized that CTU had become non-operational. He’d come to that conclusion back in Valerie Dodge’s office when he’d tried to summon forensics and cyber-unit teams to the site.

  From what he’d seen of the schematics on Dodge’s computer screen, Jack had suspected more information was locked in the hard drive. He could be sitting on a gold mine of intelligence, but he couldn’t safely access it without a cyber-unit’s help. And with CTU in operational chaos, he knew he wouldn’t be able to get that help anytime soon. So he’d powered down the PC, yanked its connections, and dumped it into the back of his vehicle.

  Knowing CTU channels would be dead, he’d tuned his car radio to the Los Angeles Police band. That’s when he’d learned that the attack at the Chamberlain Auditorium had already begun.

  Slaloming around slower vehicles, he flew through the streets with one hand on the wheel, one hand on the speed dial of his cell, trying to reach his wife. He hit the first police barrier five blocks from the auditorium.

  “I’m Special Agent Jack Bauer, Counter Terrorist Unit,” he told the uniformed officer who’d asked for his ID. “I need to speak with your superior, immediately.”

  The man spoke softly into a shoulder radio. Listened to a response in his headset, nodded.

  “Okay, Special Agent Bauer. Captain Stone wants to speak with you. Park your car and follow me, sir.”

  Escorted by the uniformed officer, Jack walked two blocks along eerily deserted streets in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. A hot wind blew in from the desert, only to be scattered by the beating blades of helicopters circling the theater. Columns of white, beaming down from their belly-mounted searchlights, crawled along the pavement, across roofs, down walls.

  Around the next corner, Jack was still three blocks away from the brilliantly lit facade of the Chamberlain. Hugging the walls of buildings, a line of black armored vehicles were positioned to remain invisible from the auditorium’s view. Jack realized they belonged to his old outfit, the Los Angeles Special Weapons and Tactics unit.

  Captain Gavin Garrett Stone was inside the mobile command center armored-up and loaded for bear. As tall as Jack and at least fifty pounds heavier, his physical presence had nothing on his personality. He was a hardened police officer who’d distinguished himself many times over on the job. As forces of nature went, the man was a Category Five.

  Around the Captain, other members of the SWAT team were preparing for a physical assault of the complex. Jack approached Stone, hand extended. The man gave Jack a cold, don’t-piss-on-my-parade stare.

  “We’ve been trying to contact CTU, Bauer. Finally sent a squad car out to your headquarters. Some kind of computer attack, they said. Your Tac Team leader,

  Chet Blackburn, checked in with us over LAPD radio.”

  “Good,” said Jack.

  Stone made a show of checking his watch. “Blackburn claimed he’d be here. But he and his team are obviously having trouble getting out of the gate — or through traffic — or both.”

  “Homeland Security?” asked Jack.

  “The Director’s already spoken to the Governor. The California National Guard has been activated to help us secure the perimeter. With CTU offline — or, for all we know, sabotaged from within — Homeland Security is advising that LAPD take point.”

  Jack jaw tightened. “What are you planning, Captain?”

  “What’s it look like?”

  “Have the terrorists identified themselves or made any demands?
Have they executed any of the hostages? Released anyone? Have you even made contact with them, opened a line of communication?”

  Stone brushed past Jack, gestured to a television monitor. A single camera displayed a long shot of the stage. Men in black masks were gesturing, waving Agram 2000s, a compact Croatian-manufactured submachine gun, easily recognizable by the unique ring grip under the front of the barrel.

  “There are three men on the stage,” Stone said. “We figure maybe a dozen more among the audience. They’ve sealed the fire doors. They think we’re screwed. But we have an override ready to go on two doors—” Stone showed Jack a blueprint. It looked eerily familiar. “The doors are here…and here.”

  The attack points were on opposite ends of the auditorium. It looked good on paper, but Jack shook his head. “It’s too neat, too tidy. It could be a trap.”

  Stone sneered. “I won’t let this siege go on. The longer these guys have control of the situation, the worse it’s going to get.”

  “Listen,” said Jack, holding the man’s gaze, “what you probably have here is a reprise of the Moscow Opera House scenario. That means there may be dozens of terrorists in there, strapped with bombs. If you charge into that auditorium, they’ll set off those bombs and hundreds will die. You’ve got to wait for a better plan—”

  Another voice interrupted. “We’re out of time, Special Agent Bauer. The Vice President’s wife and the wife of the Russian President are both inside that building—”

  Jack turned. “And you are?”

  The man stepped closer. The dim light of the monitor illuminated his face. His skin was dry parchment, eyes hard behind lines and creases. “Evans, Secret Service. One of ours, an agent named Auburn, managed to get the two women down a service elevator to a sub-basement. He’s holed up there now with them and a pair of White House interns. The terrorists haven’t gotten to them yet. Auburn has the elevator locked. But it’s only a matter of time. FBI’s with us on this. We can’t wait.”

  “How are you communicating with Auburn?” Jack asked.

  “Crank phone, connected to a temporary land line. It was left there with tools and equipment by a crew working on the air conditioning system. Good thing, too. Cell phone and radio transmissions are being jammed.”

  Jack noticed one of the command center monitors was tuned to the television station that had been carrying the Silver Screen Awards show. A commercial was running. Jack pointed to the screen. “What does the public know?”

  “Nothing yet,” said Evans. “The network put a twenty-second delay on the broadcast feed. Someone at the network hit the panic button as soon as the bad guys showed up on stage. All Mr. and Mrs. America saw was the screen going dark for twenty seconds, then a commercial. Now they’re playing a rerun of a show that usually appears in the same time slot, but their news people want to know what’s happening.”

  “What are you telling them?”

  The Secret Service agent paused. “You have a suggestion?”

  Jack nodded. “Cut the power grid in the downtown area. A blackout is a visible event and television news can show it to the world. The public becomes convinced it’s a technical glitch, and if the men inside that auditorium insist on making some kind of broadcast statement to the world, we can tell them the power’s out, tough shit.”

  Captain Stone and the Secret Service agent exchanged glances. Evans nodded, and Stone motioned another SWAT officer over.

  “Talk to the power company,” Stone said. “See that the power is cut in a ten-block radius around the Chamberlain as soon as possible.”

  Relieved he’d gotten the proverbial inch, Jack tried for the yard. “Captain, you have to rethink this assault. Lives could be lost unnecessarily—”

  Stone cut him off. “I’ve spoken with the Mayor and the Governor. It’s my call to make and I’ve made it—”

  “But—”

  “Enough,” Stone said. “You guys at CTU are supposed to prevent this type of attack. You didn’t. Once my assault team’s ready, I’m going to see this is finished before it gets worse.”

  16. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 8 P.M. AND 9 P.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME

  8:01:01 P.M. PDT CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Almost as soon as the computers went down, Nina Myers arrived at the Cyber-Unit with a security team in tow, and took Lesser into custody. He didn’t resist. A crooked smile broke over his face as they led him off to a cell.

  For an hour after that, Milo, Doris, and Jamey worked frantically to restore CTU’s computers. No matter what they tried, the servers seemed to be stuck in a loop. Reboots and restarts, flushing and washing all failed to purge the system. Calendar rollback programs — which should have restored the system to the point where it was before the attack — simply wouldn’t function. There was no help coming from outside, either. The CIA’s computers had caught the bug and were down, too.

  After half an hour, Jamey began to panic. The LAPD had shown up and delivered the news of the hostage situation down at the Chamberlain; and CTU couldn’t even get its satellite televisions on line to see the events unfold like the rest of the world. The situation, and pent up emotion over Fay Hubley’s murder, sent Jamey over the edge.

  “I’m a programmer, not security expert!” she cried, her voice rising in volume. “That’s your job, Milo. Why don’t you do it?!”

  Jamey threw up her hands as she watched countless files vanish into cyberspace.

  Then Milo hit on an idea. He rebooted one computer, the very one they’d isolated and intentionally infected with Lesser’s midnight virus. Milo used the rollback program to purge the non-executed virus string, then washed the memory. Now he had a clean computer. With Doris’s help he tried to use it to hack into the infected mainframes and put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

  8:12:54 P.M. PDT Interrogation Block CTU Headquarters

  Ryan Chappelle entered the cell and sat down at the small table opposite Richard Lesser. The computer whiz had been searched, his hidden thumb drive taken from him. Now the two men silently eyeballed one another. The unspoken challenge? Who would talk first.

  Chappelle, a master of bureaucratic silence, won the match.

  “Why are you bothering me, pinhead?”

  Ryan didn’t reply.

  “What?” continued Lesser. “Is this some kind of silent torture? Sitting across from you, looking at your sorry, earthbound face.”

  “Earthbound,” said Ryan. “That’s an interesting choice of adjective.”

  “Yeah, earthbound. You’ll never know the ecstasy I felt when I was touched by God.”

  “Don’t you mean Allah? What’s a nice Jewish boy like you going to say when he meets his new Muslim pals. Shalom?”

  “You wouldn’t understand. God. Allah. It’s all the same. I’ve been to Paradise. I know.”

  “Paradise? You mean that place in the mountains?”

  Lesser’s eyes narrowed. He pointed his finger. “Now you’re trying to trick me. But you can’t.” He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “You don’t understand how I’ve been changed. Transformed. Only one man understands.”

  “Hasan?”

  Lesser sat back in his chair, fingered a button on his shirt. “Even you’ve heard of him. All of you people in your government cubicles, your marble matrixes, your subversive multinational corporate castles — Hasan already has you quaking in your military-industrial complex boots. He’s the real deal, the prophet, the savior, he’s—”

  “The Messiah? Is that why you’re working for him?”

  Lesser smirked. “I don’t work for Hasan. I serve him. Just like you’re all going to serve him. Like everyone is going to serve him. All of this you serve now, it’s nothing, vacant and pointless. All of human life, all of it, is a blink in cosmic time. You, me, everyone, we live in the past, the constant, continual past. Hasan is the future—”

  “Whereas you don’t have a future, Mr. Lesser.” Chappelle leaned back, causally folded his arms. “You’l
l be seventy before you walk out of a federal penitentiary, unless we drop you in the general population with cartel members, mob assassins and the like. You may last a week, but it won’t be a pleasant seven days.”

  Lesser’s smirk vanished. His face clouded, brow furrowed in thought. Chappelle waited, hoping Lesser would bargain for a shorter sentence in exchange for cooperation. Finally, Lesser spoke.

  “I guess I have no choice.”

  Chappelle nodded, pleased he’d broken through.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Chappelle,” said Lesser. In one fluid motion, he ripped the top button from his shirt, slipped it into his mouth, and bit down.

  8:16:03 P.M.PDT Terrence Alton Chamberlain Auditorium Los Angeles

  Teri Bauer winced. Carla Adair was squeezing her hand so tightly her fingers were turning purple. Between moans, Carla took deep, noisy breaths through her mouth, just as she’d been taught to do in her Lamaze classes. Finally, she released Teri’s hand.

  Carla’s labor pains began shortly after the auditorium was taken over. Nancy Colburn, in her fringed flapper dress, who had given birth herself just two years before, had helped Teri lift the armrests of the plush blue seats for Carla to lie across them. Their old boss, British producer Dennis Winthrop, had covered the pregnant woman’s gown with his formal evening jacket.

  “It’s the adrenaline,” whispered Nancy. “The fear she’s feeling is inducing labor.”

  “Christ,” hissed Dennis.

  Now Carla was propped on her elbows, face flushed, brow sweaty. Chandra Washington was about to tear off a section of her violet wrap dress, then spied a white silk scarf someone had left on his seat. She picked it up and used it to mop Carla’s brow.

  Pieces of elegant outfits were strewn all over the theater. During the crowd’s vain race for the exits, stiletto mules and strappy sandals had been kicked off, satin wraps and beaded handbags had been dropped, jewelry had been ripped away. Teri noticed a single diamond earring with a platinum setting, a broken necklace of rose gold.

  Are the owners of these items even still alive? Teri couldn’t help wondering. At least two dozen people had been shot during the initial mad rush for the exit doors. Then the terrorists demanded everyone drop to the floor wherever they stood. Now clusters of people were sitting in the aisles and by the theater’s back doors.