24 Declassified: Cat's Claw 2d-4 Page 25

  Someone sobbed in the darkness, and Jack’s muzzle swung there like a magnet to a steel plate, but he didn’t fire. It was the man he’d put down. Don’t reveal your position to kill a man who’s already dead.

  Footsteps behind him. Ozersky and Mercy were coming. They would draw fire. Jack prepared himself.

  He heard Ozersky’s heavy footsteps and Mercy’s labored breathing. They’d get shot in the dark if the terrorists were any good.

  Thunder and lightning erupted under the trees as the two gunmen opened fire. The minute their rounds went off, Jack found them. Jack emptied his magazine at them, and then all firing ceased. Smoothly he ejected the magazine and slid another one into place. As the snap of the slide gave his position away, he moved forward and crouched low.

  “Help!” someone yelled from near the water. “Help me!”

  Moans and whimpers rose up from the ground. He could hear something shuffling or rolling back and forth in the dirt. Jack moved forward quietly. Shreds of moonlight turned the area deep gray, and in the gloom he saw two figures lying on the ground, one motionless and the other twitching and sobbing. “Search them,” he whispered into the darkness behind him, and moved on. He passed the third body, the one he’d shot from long range, and kicked the gun from the corpse’s hand.

  “Help me!” The waterfall was just ahead.

  He couldn’t see it well in the moonlight, but from what he could tell, the falls consisted of one short cascade from the ridge above into a wide pool, then another much higher fall into the gorge below.

  “I can’t hold on!”

  The voice came from the darkness of the gorge. Jack pulled out his flashlight and shined it downward.

  “Pico Santiago!” Jack yelled, his voice nearly blending with the rush of falling water.

  “Help!”

  Santiago was there, halfway down the gorge, clinging to a ledge by his hands. Jack guessed what must have happened. The terrorists had caught up with Santiago and tried to kill him quietly. He struggled and broke free. When they pursued him, he had tried to escape by climbing down the gorge. It had been a brave and stupid thing to do. There was no way to climb down that cliff at night. Santiago had fallen or slid, but had been lucky enough to catch himself on an outcropping of rocks and bushes.

  “Hold on!” Jack shouted. “I’m coming down for you!”

  He didn’t know what else to do. Besides, he could be as brave and stupid as the next guy.

  “Jack!” Mercy called out, following the beam of his flashlight. “Wait for the helicopter. They’ll be here soon.”

  “He’s not going to last,” Jack said, half to himself. The flashlight had a cord, which Jack looped around his neck. Then he held the light between his teeth and started to climb down. He chose a path above and just on the waterfall side of Santiago, so that he would land on the man if he fell. Unfortunately, that put him closer to the water, so the rocks and plants he grabbed for handholds were slippery.

  “I can’t hold on!” the man yelled.

  “You hold on, you son of a bitch!” Jack yelled.

  “My hands…” the man moaned.

  “It’s not about you!” Jack yelled down at him, dropping the light from his mouth and letting it swing. He was still twenty feet above, and the going was slow. “You hold on because people are going to die if you don’t!”

  “Agh!” one of Santiago’s hands slipped away from its hold. He was clinging by one hand.

  “Hold on!” Jack inched downward, foot by foot. He willed Santiago to be stronger, to hold tighter. But in the end it was not Jack’s will but Santiago’s that was most important, and Santiago’s broke. His other hand slipped, and Jack watched him fall away from the beam of the flashlight with a short cry.

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

  1:00 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Christopher Henderson was convinced his headache was permanent. He’d started the day worried about nothing more than crowd control at the Federal Building and what he’d thought of as Jack Bauer’s overeager attempt to find a terrorist needle in a haystack. Now he was co-managing a crisis of global proportions with Ryan Chappelle while Jack Bauer left a trail of bodies from one end of the city to the other.

  No sooner did they have forensics teams at one location than Bauer was calling from another, asking for more cleanup.

  Jamey Farrell was in his office giving him a summary of the most recent information they had gathered. Her voice was hoarse from talking, but otherwise she was fresh. “The two shooters who attacked Jack on Sunset Boulevard this afternoon were definitely ETIM. We had them on a watch list, but they were never identified near any hot spots until the shooting, and they were too low a priority for surveillance. The one who survived the fight with Jack has been cooperative, but he doesn’t know much more than we know.”

  Henderson nodded. “With Marcus Lee dead and Kasim Turkel out of commission, I’d say ETIM is back to low-priority status. What about the others?”

  “Frankie Michaelmas is dead, Bernard Copeland is dead. Jack met up with two shooters at the Earth Café. Both of them are dead, but we do have information on them.”

  “Go,” Henderson said, focusing in.

  “They have nothing to do with ETIM as far as we can tell. They’re both Iranians who immigrated here in ’92 and ’94, respectively. We have files on them, shared with the FBI, but they’re scant. One was interviewed after the truck bomb at the World Trade Center in ’93, and both were interviewed after 9/11, but in both cases the evidence pointed toward Saudis rather than Iranians, so they weren’t pressed. Their files were kept active because they were known to attend a mosque run by a fairly vocal cleric named Ahmad Moussavi Ardebili, but they’ve never made a peep otherwise.”

  “Sleeper cell?” Henderson thought aloud.

  “It looks that way. And a really patient one.”

  “Okay, I’ll put a team together. Let’s revisit our database for this cleric and round up everyone we think is a possible suspect.”

  1:09 A.M. PST Silverlake Area of Los Angeles

  “Last one,” Tony Almeida said.

  “Too bad,” Nina replied. “I’m getting to like waking people up.”

  While Jack had gone to track down Pico Santiago, Nina and Tony had been given a list of three names — people who might know where Sarah Kalmijn was hiding. The first two had been dead ends, the individuals clearly having little or no idea what Sarah did in her spare time. This was the last address, a small house in the bohemian Silverlake area that looked down on Hollywood and central Los Angeles.

  Nina walked up to the door of the little Craftsman bungalow while Tony stood farther back by one of the wooden pillars that marked a Craftsman. But before she reached for the bell, Nina drew her pistol. Tony mimicked her movement and stepped forward where he could see what Nina had noticed: the door was closed but the jamb was shattered. Someone had broken into the house.

  Using hand signals, Tony indicated that he was going around the back. Nina nodded and counted to five silently, giving Tony time to get around. Then she eased the door open slowly. The house was dark. She listened, but heard no sound until a barely audible creak came from the back of the house. Tony was inside. Nina pulled a tiny Surefire flashlight from her belt and fired it up. The beam swept the living room and came to rest almost instantly on a figure lying on the floor. She swept her hand along the nearest wall and flipped up a light switch, illuminating the room.

  A woman lay on the floor, a piece of electrical cord wrapped around her neck. Nina knelt beside the body without touching it. The woman’s tongue was enlarged and her eyes bulged slightly. She’d been strangled to death.

  Tony entered. “Damn it. I’ll the call the PD. Let’s get a forensics team out here.”

  “These guys are a step ahead of us,” Nina said.

  A door creaked behind them and both CTU agents whirled around, weapons ready. “Don’t shoot!” someone yell
ed from the closet.

  “Come out slowly!” Tony ordered. “Hands first, hands where I can see them!”

  A pair of thin female hands appeared in the half-open doorway, followed by two graceful arms and then the complete figure of a young woman in her thirties with short black hair. She looked terrified.

  “Don’t shoot me!” she pleaded. “I heard you say to call someone. Are you…are you the police?”

  “Federal agents, ma’am,” Tony said. “What happened?”

  “Thank god, thank god,” she said, shuddering as though releasing hours of pent-up tension. She broke down in tears for a minute, falling beside the body of the other woman as tears poured down her cheeks. “I just left her there. I was so afraid, I thought they might still be here.”

  “Who was it?” Nina asked. “Who did this?”

  “Two men,” the woman said. “They broke in. I was in there.” She pointed to the closet. “They attacked Susan. They hit her until she told them what they wanted, and then they— they…” She started to cry again.

  Tony checked the closet and realized why the terrorists had missed the woman. In the back of the closet, half-hidden by a couple of coats, was the door to a tiny darkroom.

  Nina put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but it’s important that we know what she told them. What were they asking?”

  The woman wiped her eyes. “Th-they were asking about Sarah. Sarah Kalmijn is a friend of ours. They wanted to know where to find her. Susan told them, she did, and they

  killed her anyway.”

  “Where did they tell her to go?”

  “What do you want with Sarah?”

  Tony curled his lip unhappily. “Right now we just want to save her life. Where would she be if she’s not home?”

  The woman had started crying again, but between sobs she gave them the answer Susan had given her tormentors. Sarah blew off steam at underground parties — raves. She was a lawyer now but she hated her job and forgot her troubles by attending the raves thrown by a college friend who ran a DJ company called Goodnight’s. That was all she knew.

  1:27 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  “Jamey, I need to leave,” Jessi said.

  Jamey Farrell looked up from her work, bleary-eyed and brain-fried. She’d been through some long days at CTU, and this one matched them all. “Can you stay a little longer? I’m just getting a call from Tony Almeida and I’m going to need some research.”

  “No,” Jessi said. “I mean I need to leave CTU.”

  Jamey put down her pen. “You mean for good.”

  Jessi nodded. “I lost someone today—”

  “I know, I heard. I’m sorry. It comes with the territory here sometimes—”

  Jessi shook her head. “That’s everybody’s attitude. No one’s even stopped to think about it. Kelly worked here. Okay, not as long as Jack Bauer or some of the others, but he had friends here. But everyone goes on like nothing happened.”

  Jamey set her jaw. If Jessi had been hoping for sympathy, she was going to be disappointed. “Listen, ’cause I’m only going to tell you this once. No one here pretends like nothing happened. But if you want to work in this unit, then you have to get tougher than this. In this line of work, people die. And do you know what happens if we stop to mourn them right away? More people die. Those agents out in the field can’t stop to bury every body because they’re busy stopping the bad guys from killing more people. Same goes for us in here.”

  “I–I know. that’s why I think I need to leave.” Jessi crossed her arms like a shield. “Jamey, I missed something earlier. I was going over security footage that I’d downloaded and I saw one of those people they’re looking for, Pico Santiago. I could have tracked him, I could have led Jack straight to him, but I missed it because I was upset.”

  “Then you screwed up. Now fix it.”

  “He’s dead! I can’t make him alive again—”

  “No, but you can do your job so the agents in the field do their job and keep more people alive.” She crossed her own arms. “You want to mourn the guy you had a crush on, then do it by getting the guys who killed him.”

  1:38 A.M. PST Temescal Canyon

  With no fear of an ambush, Jack and the others made better time down the hill. They had waited for the mountain rescue helicopter and lost a few precious minutes while Jack explained what had happened to the stricken pilots surveying the carnage, and then double-timed back down the trail.

  As Jack, Mercy, and Ted Ozersky climbed back into the car, Jack’s phone rang. It was Jamey Farrell. She briefed Jack on the events Almeida had reported. “Thirty more seconds and I’ll have an address for you. You’re taking one and Tony and Nina are taking the other. They’re the two most probable locations for Sarah Kalmijn.”

  “Where’s Henderson? Why isn’t he briefing me?”

  “He’s out. The guys you killed may be part of an Iranian sleeper cell. Henderson is leading a raid.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “We keep swinging and missing. We have to hit a home run this time.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Jamey said. She told Jack about the call on his cell phone from al-Libbi.

  “Has he made any demands?” Jack asked.

  “Not yet, but Henderson and Chappelle are sure he will.”

  “We’ll get him first.”

  “Here’s the address.” She read off a location.

  1:54 A.M. PST Rancho Park Neighborhood, Los Angeles

  Christopher Henderson sat in the back of a CTU van studying a hastily generated blueprint of the house owned by Ah-mad Moussavi Ardebili. The easiest way to botch a raid was failure to plan, and Henderson’s five-minute pep talk with his squad hardly counted as planning. But it couldn’t be helped. They were running out of time.

  “It looks like there are two rear entrances,” Henderson said to A. J. Patterson, his squad leader. “Send half your men around the—”

  “We won’t need it,” someone said from the front of the van. “Look!”

  Henderson pushed forward and looked out the window. They were in a well-lit neighborhood of short but well-kept lawns and fairly large houses, many of them rebuilt “Persian palaces” that were popular in the area. In front of one of these, four or five men were hurriedly running out of the houses carrying boxes, which they stowed in the back of a Dodge pickup truck.

  “Moving day,” Patterson said, hefting his MP–5. “Let’s see if we can help.”

  The CTU van stopped and the agents poured out, shouting at the men to freeze. Three of them did, but two of them ran into the house, with Henderson, Patterson, and two other agents in pursuit.

  Henderson was second in the door behind Patterson. There was a loud bang and Patterson fell out of sight. Henderson nearly tripped over him, but managed to keep his feet and squeeze off a burst of automatic fire in the direction of the blast. He barely had time to register that he was in a living room with a fire burning in the fireplace before someone slammed into him, pinning his MP–5 to the wall. But Patterson was suddenly on his feet again. A short burst from his submachine gun made Henderson’s assailant vanish.

  The entry team flowed forward, and now Henderson saw a short, squat man with a long salt-and-pepper beard kneeling at the fireplace, squealing at the sight of the CTU team as he lifted a box and dumped documents into the fire. Henderson grabbed the bearded man and hauled him away. Without regard for his own safety, Patterson stuck his hands into the fire and scooped the papers, some of them ablaze, into his arms and hauled them out. He fell on the stack, rolling back and forth with his body to stifle the flames.

  “Ahmad Moussavi Ardebili, you are under arrest for conspiracy to commit terrorist acts against the United States,” Henderson said, panting. He glanced at the papers. “Start going through these immediately.”

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

  2:00 A.M. PST Fairfax District

  The club w
as called Plush, and it was anything but. It was, essentially, a giant warehouse space with a long wooden plank that served as a bar. Only two things recommended it: the bar was fully stocked and the DJ was fantastic. Since most people went to raves to drink and dance, the setup was perfect and the club was an enormous underground success.

  The ride over had been silent. Jack was completely focused on finding this last person who could stop the virus. Mercy had not had time to recover from the shock of Jack’s revelation, and sat lost in her own thoughts. Ozersky guessed at the tension between them and decided to stay out of it as much as possible.

  It wasn’t until they reached the warehouse just off Fairfax Avenue that Jack spoke. “I’ll go in alone. Mercy, you and Ted go in together. We’re looking for the DJ named Good-night. He’s friends with Sarah Kalmijn.”

  Ozersky started forward, but Mercy grabbed Jack’s arm and held him back a few steps. “I was thinking in the car. When you were telling me about your marriage, you said you and your wife had gone to Catalina for the weekend, and that it was a great weekend.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said noncommittally.

  “That’s where you saw al-Libbi, isn’t it? When you got back?”

  “Yes,” he affirmed again.

  She shook her head in disbelief. “You’re a piece of work, Jack. You used the vacation with your wife as a setup for staking out the docks. You’re the best operator I’ve ever met, but you’re a real son of a bitch.”

  2:08 A.M. PST Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles

  Tony and Nina arrived at their assignment. This club was on Melrose a mile east of Plush, designed into the shell of an old forties movie theater. The big bouncer at the door, standing six feet, five inches and built like a comic book superhero, tried to stop them, but Tony held up his badge. “Where do we find Goodnight?”

  The bouncer waved them inside. “He’s spinning the records, man.”

  Tony and Nina walked inside and were immediately assaulted by pulsing red and blue lights, strobe lights, and music with a bass line that throbbed in their chests and a melody, if that’s what it was, that was repetitive and hypnotic.