24 Declassified: 06 - Chaos Theory Read online

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  Title Page

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One: The Following takes place between the Hours of 8 P.M. And 9 P.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Two: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 9 P.M. and 10 P.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Three: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 10 P.M. And 11 P.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Four: The Following takes place between the Hours of 11 P.M. and 12 A.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Five: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 12 A.M. and 1 A.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Six: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 1 A.M. and 2 A.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Seven: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 2 A.M. and 3 A.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Eight: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 3 A.M. and 4 A.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Nine: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 4 A.M. and 5 A.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Ten: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 5 A.M. and 6 A.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Eleven: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 6 A.M. and 7 A.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Twelve: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 7 A.M. and 8 A.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Thirteen: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 8 A.M. and 9 A.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Fourteen: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 9 A.M. and 10 A.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Fifteen: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 10 A.M. and 11 A.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Sixteen: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 11 A.M. and 12 A.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Seventeen: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 12 P.M. and 1 P.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Eighteen: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 1 P.M. and 2 P.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Nineteen: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 2 P.M. and 3 P.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Twenty: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 3 P.M. and 4 P.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Twenty-One: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 4 P.M. and 5 P.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 5 P.M. and 6 P.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 6 P.M. and 7 P.M. Pacific Standard Time

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Following takes place Between the Hours of 7 P.M. and 8 P.M. Pacific Standard Time

  About the Author

  24 Declassified Books From HarperEntertainment

  Copyright Notice

  About the Publisher

  CHAOS THEORY

  JOHN WHITMAN

  JOHN WHITMAN

  Based on the hit FOX series created by Joel Surnow & Robert Cochran

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Bauer kicked in the door and let his SigSauer lead… 1

  1

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 8 P.M. AND 9 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 3

  2

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 9 P.M. AND 10 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 18

  3

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 10 P.M. AND 11 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 35

  4

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 11 P.M. AND 12 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 51 5

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 12 A.M. AND 1 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 71

  6

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1 A.M. AND 2 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 86

  7

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2 A.M. AND 3 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 101

  8

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 3 A.M. AND 4 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 116

  9

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 4 A.M. AND 5 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 131

  10

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 5 A.M. AND 6 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 148 11

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 6 A.M. AND 7 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 161

  12

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 7 A.M. AND 8 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 177

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  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 8 A.M. AND 9 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 185

  14

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 9 A.M. AND 10 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 200

  15

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 10 A.M. AND 11 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 212

  16

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 11 A.M. AND 12 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 221 17

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 12 P.M. AND 1 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 231

  18

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1 P.M. AND 2 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 240

  19

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2 P.M. AND 3 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 255

  20

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 3 P.M. AND 4 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 263

  21

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 4 P.M. AND 5 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 274

  22

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 5 P.M. AND 6 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 288 23

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 6 P.M. AND 7 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 303

  24

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 7 P.M. AND 8 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME 314

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  24 DECLASSIFIED SERIES

  COVER

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  After the 1993 World Trade Center attack, a division of the Central Intelligence Agency established a domestic unit tasked with protecting America from the threat of terrorism. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the Counter Terrorist Unit established field offices in several American cities. From its inception, CTU faced hostility and skepticism from other Federal law enforcement agencies. Despite bureaucratic resistance, within a few years CTU had become a major force in the war against terror. After the events of 9/11, a number of early CTU missions were declassified. The following is one of them.

  prologue

  Three Weeks Ago

  Bauer kicked in the door and let his SigSauer lead the way into the back room. The five men at the round wooden table gawked silently, and the only sound in the room was the battered door whining as it bumped the wall and swung back. Jack stopped it with his foot.

  “Tintfass,” he said.

  They’d been playing cards, and four of them were statues now, including the dealer, who held one arm out, a card waiting to be flicked to one of the others. But one of them, an older guy with wide-set eyes, a paunch, and probably a little more to lose, was less comfortable staring at the downrange end of the Sig. He turned his head toward one of his partners. The Sig slid smoothly over to cover the one he’d looked at.

  Adrian Tintfass was short and round, but bulky rather than fat. His head was bald on top and stubbly around the sides. His cheeks were chubby and soft, but his eyes were quick and bright, like a rat’s. Behind the cherub face his mind was racing.

  “Thought I’d stop just because CTU did?” Jack said. “You don’t know me very well.”

>   “I’ll work on it,” Tintfass said, more hopeful than

  anything.

  “You don’t have the time.”

  A quick flick of the gun sent the other four card-

  players scraping their chairs away from the table.

  “We don’t know you at all, man,” one of the others, the dealer, said nervously. “I don’t think we want to.”

  Bauer glanced at them. “You left the game early. Tintfass stayed behind to clean up, make a phone call, like that. None of you saw what happened after that.”

  The dealer nodded in complete agreement. “I’m in bed an hour ago.”

  The others nodded, too, though the man with the paunch hesitated a little. “I’m . . . I gotta be dreaming.”

  “Don’t remember this one,” Jack said. He laid the sights over Tintfass’s thick chest and pulled the trigger.

  2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

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

  8:00 P.M. PST Federal Holding Facility, Los Angeles

  “Bauer, you’re up!” the corrections officer barked.

  Jack sat in the gray plastic chair, shackled to the hard seat, which was bolted to the concrete floor. He was bent forward, his elbows resting on the orange pants legs of his prison jumpsuit.

  “I’m not calling anyone,” he said.

  “Someone’s calling you. Get the damned phone.”

  Jack stood up and walked toward the phone cubicles on the far side of the community hall. He wasn’t expecting a call. He walked past a few rows of other inmates, all dressed in identical orange. Most kept to themselves, waiting for their turn to reach the outside world, to talk to the lawyer or the girlfriend that was supposed to care about them on the inside. A few glared at Jack as he passed. These were the ones who had nothing else to do, the ones who had no lawyer but what the county paid for, and whose girls had left them for guys who hadn’t been collared. Jack glared back at them as he passed.

  He hadn’t met this corrections officer yet. He was a big man, with the broken nose and lumpy eyebrows of a former boxer now gone to fat. He pointed to an unoccupied cubicle.

  Jack sat down in another molded plastic seat and

  picked up the phone. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Jack, you okay?”

  Peter Jiminez. Jack was surprised he hadn’t called

  days ago.

  “Considering,” Jack said with a shrug. He had no interest in long conversations with Jiminez. No good would come of it. CTU didn’t recruit the naïve, but if anyone in the Counter Terrorist Unit could be called wet behind the ears, it was Peter. Somehow his three years in Diplomatic Security Services and five years in the CIA had failed to stamp out the young man’s quixotic notions.

  “You’re going to beat this, Jack, I know it,” Peter said. “It’s bullshit what they’re doing, it’s bullshit that they didn’t back you about Tintfass in the first place, and I’m saying it to their faces right now.”

  Right now. So Henderson was in the room, and probably Chappelle. That was fine with Jack. He was happy to have Henderson listen to the conversation, and as for Chappelle, well, he was what he was.

  “It’s all going to be fine, Peter,” Jack said into the phone. “I did my job and I’d do it the same again.”

  “Chappelle says they have a witness.”

  Jack thought of the man with the paunch. His name was Arguello. “That doesn’t matter. No one’s arguing about me pulling the trigger. We’re talking about cause.”

  “You had cause,” Jiminez said. “I know you did. Two months on the job and I already know that about how you work. They shouldn’t let bureaucrats judge field agents.”

  Jack heard a squeak in the background and recognized the familiar note of Regional Director Ryan Chappelle’s disapproval. “Tell Chappelle I’m having a good time. I wish he was here.”

  “Jack, is there anything—?”

  Bauer cut him off. “I’ll be fine.” He heard a voice behind him calling time. “I have to go.” He hung up.

  “Showers!” the broken-nosed guard said. “Let’s go.”

  “Let’s do it tomorrow!” an inmate yelled.

  “Screw that. You stink,” called another.

  Jack knew they wouldn’t wait until tomorrow. The prison had a schedule to keep, even if overcrowding had pushed the schedule back. Showers, meals, everything was late due to the number of inmates packed into the jail.

  He moved away from the phone and fell into line with the other prisoners.

  8:11 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Peter Jiminez put the phone down and glared at his superiors. Regional Director Ryan Chappelle was accustomed to receiving those looks from everyone, and his pinched face remained impassive. Christopher Henderson, Director of Field Operations and Peter’s direct boss, shifted uncomfortably.

  “He okay?” Henderson asked.

  “He’s in jail, sir,” Jiminez replied, biting down hard on the sir. Two months under Jack Bauer’s wing had taught him a lot, but the forced politeness of the Diplomatic Security Services remained.

  “Where he belongs,” Chappelle sniffed.

  No one, not even Jack, denied what he had done. Jack had barged in on a poker game in the back room of Winston’s, a dive bar in the Fairfax District, and shot Adrian Tintfass in the chest. There were witnesses; there was video. Those facts were not in dispute. But the why of it was everything. Tintfass was a connector, a middleman who made his cut by putting together people who could use one another. Three months earlier, the CIA’s listening stations had plucked his name out of the air in a conversation between a Ukrainian arms dealer and a known terrorist named Hassan, recently escaped from an Afghan prison. Tintfass, it seemed, had put the two men together, and since Hassan had publicly promised to “turn the streets of America into rivers of blood,” or something like that, Tintfass immediately graduated to the Counter Terrorist Unit’s A-list. Jack tracked him down and brought him in for questioning. Tintfass broke easily under interrogation, but most of CTU became quickly convinced that he had little or nothing to do with Hassan. He’d had some semi-legitimate business dealings with the Ukrainian, and everyone was convinced that he’d never met or spoken with Hassan.

  Everyone, that is, except Jack Bauer. He’d continued to push the investigation, insisting that Tintfass was not only complicit, but pivotal to Hassan’s next plot. When no one at CTU would listen, Jack did what Jack was known for: he solved the problem on his own.

  The problem was, no one at CTU could back him up. As far as Ryan Chappelle was concerned, Jack had murdered an innocent man in cold blood. He’d been handed over to Federal agents immediately, and he’d been stuck in a Federal jail for the past two weeks. No judge in his right mind would give bail to a suspect with Jack Bauer’s skills and resources, so there he sat, waiting for his trial.

  “Did he say anything?” Henderson asked.

  Peter looked at the Ops Director. Henderson had a hard face, but blue eyes that softened when he was truly concerned. They were soft now. Peter knew that Henderson had helped recruit Jack into CTU, and that the two men had been friends.

  “No, he wanted off the phone.”

  “That’s Jack.” Henderson nodded. “He’ll shut it all off. Undercover inside his own skin.”

  Chappelle smirked. “You sound sorry for him. He’s a murderer.”

  Peter stiffened. “From everything I’ve heard he’s saved our asses more than once.” He walked out.

  Chappelle’s little eyes watched Jiminez’s tense shoulders as he left the room. “Hero worship,” he said as if the words tasted bad in his mouth.

  Henderson considered Chappelle. He didn’t share Jack’s visceral dislike of the Regional Director, but there was no love lost between them. Chappelle was a cog in the machinery, no more or less than he or Jack. “You’re just as committed the other way. You’ve already tried and convicted him.”

 
Chappelle shrugged. “I know exactly what Jack Bauer did.”

  Henderson checked his watch, looking for a way out of the conversation. “Threat assessment meeting at eight-thirty, I need to prep. I’m going to need coffee for this. You want coffee?”

  “Sure,” Chappelle said.

  8:18 P.M. PST Federal Holding Facility, Los Angeles

  The shower room was like showers Jack remembered from high school—a long room with tiled floors and walls tiled six feet up. The tiles were dirty beige and the grout was gray. There were shower heads along the walls, and in the middle of the room a long pipe ran the length of the room about seven feet off the ground, with more shower heads sprouting from either side. The room could shower thirty or forty men at once, and often did.

  There were only twenty in Jack’s group. Following a routine, they all entered the adjoining room carrying another orange jumpsuit, underwear, T-shirt, and socks, put this folded pile on a shelf. Then they undressed and dropped their dirty clothes in a wheeled laundry cart with canvas sides and marched into the shower room. They were an ugly assortment of bodies, as far from the human ideal as was possible: mostly slouch-shouldered, hairy, spotty, with folds of belly drooping over their hips.

  Jack found an open shower nozzle, turned it on, and stepped under the jet of water. There was pressure and heat, which was something to be grateful for. Warm water pounded his head, massaging it, then poured down his face and neck. This was the only pleasurable experience allowed in the Federal jail. There was a small plastic bottle of liquid soap on the wall. Jack squeezed some out and scrubbed it into his hair.

  As much as he allowed himself to enjoy the moment, Jack had not let his guard down from the minute he’d stepped inside the jail. His instincts told him something was wrong even before his brain had assessed the details. The shower room was filled with a low roar of twenty or thirty shower nozzles, and steam clouded the air. But the room was empty. The other inmates had turned on their showers, then all of them had left.

  Not all.

  Three inmates, all Latino, stepped into the shower fully clothed. There was no way for them to hide so they strode toward Jack. The one on the left was stocky, with a barrel chest and huge arms. The middle one was the tallest, thin and wiry. Jack noticed the shiv, a sharpened toothbrush, in his right hand. The one on the right carried the most bulk, but it was mostly fat, and he looked least confident. They didn’t say anything. If they had any message to deliver, it was carried in the point of the shiv.