by John Whitman
“It’ll mean more volume,” Webb replied, as weary of the debate on his side as Friedman was. “We’re not talking about benefiting a few of your political friends. We’re talking about real stimulus. More volume means more revenue overall, including shipping, packaging, lower prices for imported goods.”
Friedman sighed. “Marty. You and I both know that a word from you is going to do more to relax Wall Street and the consumers than anything else. The plan isn’t all that important. Your endorsement is everything. “
Webb caught the whiff of politics. It was unavoidable, of course. But Martin had become the Fed Chairman because he saw it as a way to serve the public good without prostituting himself too badly.
Of course, his distaste for politics didn’t mean he was politically inept. He knew that Lou was giving him an opening.
“I know the papers will print what I say,” he said coyly.
Lou chuckled. “I was hoping you’d go on the Sunday shows. We could get you on Meet the Press, anything else you were willing to do.”
“And say what?” Webb asked, getting to the point.
“And say you think the President’s stimulus package will be just the thing to return us to the robust economy we all expect, especially the tax incentives. ”
“Hmm.”
“. and the devaluation of the dollar to stimulate overseas trade.”
Martin hesitated, letting thin white noise fill the void between them. This price was a bit higher than he wanted to pay, but he wasn’t sure the country could wait much longer. The economy needed a plan and, more importantly, it needed the confidence of the citizenry to keep the consumer engines churning. And Martin Webb knew, without ego, that his word would go a long way toward bolstering that confidence.
“The devaluation process first, Lou,” he said finally.
Lou let out an audible sigh of relief. “Deal. You’re going to save us, Marty. I know it.”
7:39 A.M. PST West Los Angeles
Jack jogged back to the parking lot where he’d dumped Peter’s car. His feet hurt — he’d been on the run for hours. The sun was fully up now, which reinvigorated him a little, but he hadn’t been this exhausted in quite some time. He was going to steal his third car since breaking out of jail; he was getting good at it. This one was a green Chrysler Sebring. He chose it from the monthly parking area, hot-wired it, and drove it out, paying the full days’ fare because he didn’t have the ticket.
Talia Gerwehr’s address was listed and not far away. He headed for Beverly Glen.
7:46 A.M. PST Larchmont Area
Zapata sat at a small, circular café table outside the Starbucks on Larchmont Avenue, nursing a caramel machiatto. He had a decadent habit of patronizing Starbucks. He pretended to himself that he was getting to know his enemy, but the truth was, he simply enjoyed it. He doubted it would survive his vision of anarchy, and he wanted to savor the elegant process that created elegant coffee on an assembly line before it disappeared for good.
And of course he liked to watch the people. At this moment in time, this Starbucks was the center of a ripple reaching out, touching all their lives. Coffee or not, he would have loved to have blown up that coffee shop, just to watch the disruption in the pattern of their existence.
He gave some thought to his larger plan. The ability of the Federal authorities to get so close was still disturbing, but he could see the reasons clearly, and that comforted him because it meant he could fix the problem.
Losing Aguillar was a setback, but a minor one. The real question was whether his goal could still be accomplished. After due consideration, he did not see why it could not succeed. The authorities could know nothing. Vanowen knew nothing of his real plan, and Ramirez knew less than nothing. Aguillar’s knowledge had died with him. Besides, his plan had already been set in motion. There was no reason to stop it, even if Zapata wanted to leave town.
But he was not ready to leave. He wanted to see the ripples.
As he finished the last sip of coffee, a gold Lexus pulled up to a metered space near the Starbucks. A blond man got out and began searching. Casually, Zapata stood and walked over to him, holding out a latte he had been saving. “Kyle,” he said.
The blond man looked at him uncertainly at first, then recognized him. “That’s a good look on you,” he said with a laugh.
“So I’ve been told. Do you mind if I spend the day at your house?”
They got in the Lexus and Kyle said, “As long as you promise me the kind of chaos I can profit from, you can stay there all week.”
13. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 8 A.M. AND 9 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
8:00 A.M. PST UCLA Medical Center
Nina reached the elevator at the same time as a John Wayne look-alike. “Ma’am,” he said, motioning her to enter first. She did and then turned, watching his enormous shoulders fill the elevator doors, which closed behind him. She checked the elevator’s weight capacity.
He grinned. “They grow ’em big down in the Gulf. But I just think light and the elevator does the rest.”
He reached for the fifth floor button and saw that she’d already pushed it. He smiled at her again, but this time his look showed that he was assessing her.
Finally, he stuck out his beefy hand. “Dan Pascal,
U.S. Marshal.” With his left hand he brushed back his brown jacket, showing the badge now attached to his belt.
“Nina Myers, Counter Terrorist Unit,” she replied. “I guess we’re headed the same way.”
Pascal chuckled. The sound was a low rumble in his chest. “Truth to tell, ma’am, I don’t know which way I’m headed, your boy’s got me turned around every which way.”
“He does that to everybody.”
The elevator opened on the fifth floor and they walked together to Ryan Chappelle’s room. Several uniforms were already there, including the one who’d been handcuffed to the sink. There was also a woman in a doctor’s coat — Nina had been told her name was “Chick-ow-liss” but you wouldn’t have known it by looking at her name tag. And there was Chappelle, lying unconscious on the hospital bed. Nina decided that he looked more lifelike than she’d ever seen him.
Nina let the U.S. Marshal introduce himself. He had a down-home quality that put people at ease, and he clearly used it to his advantage.
“I know you’ve already given your statement to these fellas,” Pascal said, “but could you run through it again, just ’cause I’m slow.”
Dr. Czikowlis looked bent, but not broken, as she told her story. The fact of having a gun pointed at her had clearly unnerved her, but there was no fear in her voice when she described Jack himself. She seemed to regard him with a certain amount of respect for having done what he’d done. Nina thought begrudgingly,
He does that to everybody, too.
Aloud, she said, “So Chappelle was awake?”
Dr. Czikowlis nodded. “He’ll wake up again. Now he’s just asleep, unconscious. Not a coma, though. That man was right. He was a victim of barbiturate poisoning. But the test came back negative, so—”
“There was a mistake on the tests?” Nina asked.
Pascal shifted back onto his heels, clearly content to let her take the lead and ask the aggressive questions.
“Well, they were wrong. The man with the gun said he thought the test had been switched, but I don’t know anything about that.”
“Tell me again what Mr. Chappelle said when he was awake.”
“He wasn’t awake for long. The man asked him about his Zapata resource. He seemed really desperate to get it.”
Nina’s eyes flickered, the only outward sign of her complete inward shock. “What was that he asked again?” she said casually.
“Zapata,” Czikowlis replied certainly. “He said ‘Zapata resource.’ Mr. Chappelle whispered a name, and then he collapsed. The man with the gun locked me in the bathroom and left.”
“What was the name Mr. Chappelle whispered?”
The doctor sh
ook her head. “He was barely conscious. It was Taylor Gerber, Talia Gerber, something like that.”
Nina nodded. “I see. Hard to hear. Is Mr. Chappelle going to recover?”
“Oh yes, now he will. He’ll sleep for a few more hours, though.” Nina nodded again and walked out, aware that Pascal was following her. “Ms. Myers, I’m hoping you’re going to share the information you’ve got,” he said over her shoulder. Nina stopped at the elevators. “You just got all the information I did.”
Pascal smiled a smile big as the delta. “The information she gave. But not the information in your head.”
Nina hesitated. There was a lot she could tell Pascal, if she’d wanted to. Tintfass was alive. Jack was not a murderer. But she didn’t know the whole story yet, and if there’s one thing she did know, it was that you didn’t show your cards until your hand was complete. She stepped into the elevator, but not far enough to let him on. “I wish I could help you, Marshal.”
“Deputy Marshal,” he corrected as the doors closed, “and I’ll find out one way or the other.”
8:13 A.M. PST Beverly Glen
Beverly Glen was a small West L.A. neighborhood of pretty houses bordered by upscale Brentwood on the west and the 405 Freeway on the east, one of the few enclaves of affordable (by L.A. standards) housing on the West Side.
Jack parked the stolen Pathfinder on Church Street and walked around the block to the street that paralleled Talia Gerwehr’s east-west street, but one block north. He’d driven through the neighborhood twice already, looking for anything suspicious, but if the house was being watched, the watchers were good and he couldn’t find them. To make their job harder, he walked to the house just north of the Gerwehr place, so that the two backyards abutted. Casually, Jack walked up the driveway to that house, then turned to the side gate and walked down the side yard. He passed several windows without looking in. He strode purposefully across the backyard — a small open space with a red oak hot tub that had been fashionable in the early eighties — reached the fence, and hopped over.
Talia Gerwehr’s backyard was small and landscaped with curving lines of brick and recently laid sod, dominated by a grand old oak tree. The elegant yard communicated with the house through a set of richly varnished French doors. Jack saw movement within the house, guessed that whatever alarm there was had been turned off, and popped a hand through one of the French doors’ glass frames. He reached in and had the door opened before the sound of tinkling glass faded.
Talia Gerwehr came around the corner with a cordless phone in her hand and a quizzical look on her face. When she saw the gun in Jack’s hand, her look changed to shock.
At the same moment, her phone rang. “Hello?” she said, trying to take it all in at once. “Yes, this is Talia Gerwehr. What, um, what can I do for you, Marshal?” She looked at Jack Bauer, and then at the gun again, as she listened to the caller. “Um, no, I understand. I don’t know why that would be. But everything’s fine here. I was just leaving for my office, though, would you, would you rather send someone there? All right, fine.” She hung up the phone and then said, “So you must be Jack Bauer.”
8:27 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
They were waiting for Nina when she rushed into the conference room, having broken innumerable traffic laws to get back to headquarters. Tony was there, and Henderson and a number of other field agents, along with half the analytical staff.
“Jiminez coming?” she asked quickly.
“Jiminez is in some hot water,” Henderson explained. “It looks like he tried to free Jack from custody.”
“That may have been a good thing,” Nina replied.
Henderson shrugged. “We’ll see. Go ahead.”
“Okay, here’s what we know,” she summed up for all involved. “Jack didn’t kill Tintfass. We know that because Tintfass is alive and being handled by the FBI. Jack broke out of jail with a guy named Emil Ramirez. We assume it wasn’t a coincidence that they broke out together. Jack seemed to be following some kind of trail, which deadended when Ramirez and another business associate got shot, along with one Francis Aguillar. When that trail ends, Jack goes to Chappelle, pumps him full of uppers to kick him out of a coma, and asks about. ” She paused to make sure they were all listening, “Zapata.”
Murmurs rippled around the room, but it was Tony who spoke up. “Zapata? The anarchist? Is that who Jack’s after?” His question was directed at Chris Henderson.
The Field Operations Director rubbed his hands in an act of ablution. “I’ve got no part in this. If I did, I’d be filling you all in right now.”
“Well, Chappelle did, because he had some resource on Zapata. It looks like they were making a run for him.”
Another murmur filled the room, and this time it contained an undercurrent of admiration. Every analyst and operator in the room had heard of Zapata. He was unique in the world of international terrorism because he was not, strictly speaking, a terrorist, at least not according to the most current definition. If he could be called a terrorist at all, Zapata was a throwback to the Weathermen and the Red Brigade of the seventies, not fighting for any particular cause or homeland, simply looking to destablize the status quo. But even the Red Brigade had wrapped themselves in the flag of socialism. Zapata was a pure anarchist: he endorsed no cause, he took no side.
“He isn’t an Islamic fundamentalist. He’s not a fascist or a communist,” Nina was saying, rounding out a picture of Zapata for anyone who needed it. “We think he helped the Basques bomb a train station. But then he gave the Spanish government information that helped them arrest a couple of ETA members. He blew up polling places during the last Venezuelan elections, and that helped the new leftists there gain power. But then he bombed power stations of the leftist government in Venezuela.
“He’s famous,” she continued, “for having no patterns. Impossible to trace. Makes lots of associates and then drops them. They say he spent a year helping the Chechens fight the Russians, but just because it helped destabilize the Russian government. Then all of a sudden he stopped. We think it was because he realized the Chechnya crisis was actually helping the Kremlin solidify power. If it’s true, he saw that coming a year before anyone else did.”
“Which brings us to the last thing,” Tony Almeida said, taking over for Nina at her signal. While she’d raced over, he’d gathered more information on Zapata. “We should all start with the idea that Zapata is a genius. He started out life as Jorge Rafael Marquez.”
Seth Ludonowski, who’d been slumped in his seat, sat up with a start. “Oh shit,” he gasped.
8:34 A.M. PST Talia Gerwehr’s House
Jack sat in one of Talia’s living room chairs and drank the coffee she made for him, but he didn’t let himself relax. According to Talia, the Marshal had said he’d contact her later, at her office, but he wouldn’t put it past them to send units to her house anyway. The Marshal running the manhunt was clearly squared away, since he’d pounced on the arms trade so quickly.
“Chappelle told me about you, but I didn’t know what to expect,” she said.
Jack laughed. “You’re not exactly seeing me at my best.” Sitting in her clean house, drinking coffee, he was now painfully aware that he stank of dirt and sweat and the sulfur smell of firearms. He hadn’t even managed his shower the night before, when all this had started.
Talia Gerwehr, on the other hand, was immaculate. If she worked at a think tank, Jack knew what thoughts the men there were thinking. She was in her mid-thirties, with flawless olive skin and smooth dark hair swept away from her face. Her appearance was very much like the appearance of her yard and her house: plainly but elegantly designed, simple but rich.
“I saw the news. They didn’t give your name, but they gave Ramirez’s, so I assumed — well, I assumed it was all part of the plan.”
Jack sipped his coffee. As the hot liquid went down, he realized how empty his stomach was. “It is now. I had to get out quickly, and everyone who knew why I was in w
as out of action. It was either you or the FBI guys who had Tintfass, but I figured you’d be easier to get to.”
Talia nodded. “I’m just glad Chappelle told me
about you. He didn’t give much more information.” “This operation has a tight lid,” Jack agreed, “which is making all kinds of trouble.” “The truth is, that was my idea, not Chappelle’s. You’re not going to catch Zapata any other way.”
“I’ll manage,” he said.
Talia Gerwehr studied him for a moment. She found herself instantly fascinated by Jack Bauer, suddenly standing there in her house, strong and certain and utterly physical. He was action to her thought. If she was the electrical pulse firing between synapses, he was the muscle that flexed.
Because Talia Gerwehr, despite her good looks, was a creature of the mind. A member of Mensa, captain of the debate team, wannabe poet with a few scribblings in the Hudson Review and the Atlantic Monthly, she had a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT, where she had published extensively on chaos theory. She’d assumed she’d gain tenure at some university somewhere, but a trick of fate introduced her to the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California. Soon after that, she’d begun to learn about a particular terrorist — anarchist, really — called Zapata, and she had made him the focus of her studies.
8:36 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
“No, no,” Seth Ludonowski repeated. “I don’t know anything about Zapata. I don’t even know what an anarchist is. But I sure as hell have heard of Jorge Rafael Marquez. Every computer geek this side of 1995 knows him.”
Tony scanned through his Zapata notes. “He made a fortune in computers.”
“He raked in huge dollars!” Seth said admiringly. “And he deserved it. He wrote algorithms that were pure genius. Half the systems we run in here use software built on his ideas. I had no idea that Jorge Rafael Marquez had become a terrorist.”
8:38 A.M. PST Talia Gerwehr’s House
