24: Deadline (24 Series) (2 page)

Lindee glared at him. “Don’t you get it? This is a big deal! People will get angry … People could get hurt!”

But Chet was already walking away. “This is the kinda crap that happens when we mess around with other countries. Wouldn’t be anything if those Kami-whatever guys stayed at home, yeah?” He gathered up a clipboard and threaded his way down the corridor toward the examination rooms at the rear of the building. The first job he was going to do this shift was the inventory for rooms ten and eleven—and if he took his time about it, Chet knew he’d be able to stay off his supervisor’s radar for at least a couple of hours.

He was two steps into examination room ten when he realized the light switch wasn’t working. Chet flipped it up and down twice and grimaced, but in the next second his shoe crunched on a piece of broken glass and he realized that the fluorescent tube overhead had been deliberately smashed. Cold air touched his face and he saw the wired-glass window across the room was open, letting in the breeze.

Lit only by the fading day, the room was all shades of gloomy, and Chet’s heart leapt into his mouth as he belatedly sensed the presence of someone else in there with him.

A man in a torn, slate-colored sweatshirt emerged from behind a privacy curtain near the examination bed, and in one hand he held the metallic shape of a gun.

Chet’s gut tightened and he felt a cold sweat break out on his neck. “Oh shit.” He threw up his hands. “Hey. Hey, wait. Don’t shoot me, okay? I … I have a family. Just … Look, take whatever you want, okay? I won’t stop you.” They had warned him about this kind of thing when he took the job at the clinic. Strung-out junkies or street criminals looking to make a fast buck by robbing walk-in clinics of painkillers or whatever drugs they could sell.

“Lock the door,” said the man with the gun.

“What?”

“Lock it.” The second time he spoke, Chet found himself obeying without hesitation. Hands shaking, he turned the latch and then retreated into a corner, eyes darting around the room in search of some means of escape. There was only the open window, and the gunman was between him and it.

The guy looked like he had been in an argument with a Mack truck and come off worse. He sported cuts on his forehead and chin, and through tears in the sweatshirt Chet could see other wounds and contusions of varying seriousness.

“You’re going to help me,” said the gunman. He eyed the technician’s name badge. “
Chet
. I need to clean up. I need fresh dressings. Medicine.”

“Are you going to kill me?” Questions fell from Chet’s lips before he was even aware of them forming in his thoughts. “That thing on the news, is that you? Are you … a terrorist?”

“No.” The gunman let the barrel of the pistol drop until it was aimed at a point somewhere near Chet’s right kneecap. “But what I am is a very good shot. And I will cripple you if you try anything stupid, understand?”

“Yes.” It was the most emphatic answer Chet had ever given for anything.

“Good.” The man switched on a bedside lamp before picking up a scalpel and using it to slice open the sweatshirt, shrugging it off to reveal his bare chest beneath.

Chet’s breath caught in his throat as he glimpsed the patchwork of scars across the gunman’s torso. He knew the healed pucker marks of bullet wounds when he saw them, and the severe lines of stabbings and old knife cuts. But there were other blemishes there, things he couldn’t even begin to guess at. The man’s flesh was a map of violence done and violence survived. The most recent was a field dressing over a grazing gunshot, and the cloth patch taped over the wound was black-brown and soaked through. Gingerly, Chet peeled the old bandage away and set to work applying a new one.

*   *   *

Jack Bauer watched as the technician did as he was told. The man’s hands were shaking, but that was to be expected.

“You said you’ve got a family.” The man tensed when Jack spoke.

“Yes?” he said, his voice thick with fear.

“Tell me about them.”

Chet swallowed hard. “A … A son. Petey. He’s six. Wife. Jane.”

“Here, in New York?”

“Right. Yes.”

Jack weighed the stolen Sig Sauer pistol in his hand. “You should take them out of town for a few days. Get away.” He couldn’t stop himself from seeing Kim’s face in his mind’s eye, his daughter smiling up at him and promising him that things were going to be better for them. At this moment, Jack wanted that to be true more than anything in the world.

But fate had a habit of getting in the way of what Jack Bauer wanted, of dragging him into one bloody mess after another. He looked at the man before him, this ordinary guy with his ordinary job and his ordinary life, and for a split second Jack
hated
him for it.

Chet must have seen that flash of fury in his eyes, because he backed away, the color draining from his face. “Wh-what?”

Jack shook off the moment. “Keep working.” The impulse had faded as quickly as it had come, but the burn of it lingered. On some level, Jack resented the fact that whatever chance at a normal life he might have had was long gone. He could feel the weight of it all pressing down on him, not just the hours of fighting and running and battling to stay alive, but the ache in his soul. The consequence of all the choices he had made and the things he had done.

Once upon a time he had been a soldier for his nation, for an ideal that he believed was right and good. Somewhere along the line, that loyalty had blurred and slipped away. He turned his gaze inward and found a question waiting there:
What are you going to fight for now, Jack?

“I have family,” he said in a low mutter. “They’re all I have.”

“Are they … here?”

Jack didn’t answer. Anything he said to this man would eventually end up in the hands of the people who were hunting him. “I’m getting out,” he said after a moment. “Far from here.
Hong Kong
.” It was the first place he thought of, and a good enough lie to leave behind him.

Chet paused, the bandage over the gunshot wound replaced and the other cuts dressed as well as they could be. He turned, pointing toward one of the medicine cabinets. “Look, I can…”

“No need.” Jack slipped off the examination bed and snaked his hands around the medical technician’s neck before he could stop him. Drawing his grip tight, he pulled Chet into a sleeper hold and regarded the man as he gasped and struggled. “Don’t fight it.”

In a couple of seconds, the technician went limp and Jack settled him gently to the floor. He pulled Chet’s keys from the loop on his belt and plundered the cabinets for doses of antibiotics and painkillers. The other man was narrower across the chest than Jack, but the shirt he wore beneath the scrubs was a passable fit. He helped himself to what little cash the other man had on him and slipped away, back through the window he had used to gain access.

Outside, clouds were drawing in and the sun had already dropped out of sight below the tenement buildings that ranged down the avenue.

A block away, he found an aging Toyota with a corroded door lock, and five minutes later he was heading west, hiding in plain sight among the lines of rush-hour traffic.

Jack caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror and those familiar green eyes looked back at him, a memory lurking there. The recall of a promise made; the only promise he still had to keep, the only one he had left.

“I’ll see you soon, Kim,” he said to the air.

*   *   *

The elevator doors opened to deposit Special Agent Thomas Hadley on the twenty-third floor of the Jacob K. Javits Building, and he walked out into a kind of controlled chaos. The atmosphere in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York field office was strung tight, and he licked his lips unconsciously, almost as if he could taste the urgency in the air. Hadley signed in and was still clipping his ID pass to his jacket pocket when he almost collided with Mike Dwyer, a supervisory agent and his direct superior.

“Tom, good,” said Dwyer, pulling him aside. “You’re here.” In his late forties and stocky with it, Dwyer was a stark contrast to Hadley’s trim athlete’s build—pale and sandy-haired where the younger man was tawny-skinned and shaven-headed.

Hadley nodded, taking in the sight of a dozen other agents moving back and forth, each intent on urgent tasks he could only guess at. “All hands on deck, huh?”

Dwyer nodded. “And then some.”

“I got time to get a cup of coffee?”

“No.” The other agent jerked his thumb at a glassed-in office across the room. “ASAC left orders to send you straight in when you got here. He finds out I even let you take your coat off before you talk to him, and my balls will be in a sling.”

Hadley’s eyes widened. On the long drive in from upstate, he’d gotten piecemeal fragments of what was going on in New York from news radio stations, but nothing concrete. “That bad?”

“Whatever you’ve heard,” Dwyer said, walking away, “it’s worse.”

Hadley’s lip curled and he made his way across the office, catching glimpses of other agents working video feeds or barking into telephones. He’d hoped that the rumors about a terror attack in the city were just hysteria, some overreaction from people who had half the truth and an overactive imagination. But being in the room now told him that wasn’t the case.

As he approached the office of Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge Rod O’Leary, he saw the big Irishman was on a call, a handset clamped to his ear. O’Leary caught sight of Hadley through the glass and beckoned him in with a terse jerk of the hand.

“It helps exactly no one if you drag your damn heels,” the ASAC was saying. “You want the FBI to do something we can actually call
assistance,
I suggest you get the people at Homeland Security to kindly pull their heads outta their asses.” O’Leary nodded as a tinny voice on the other end of the line replied in the affirmative. “Uh-huh. Right. Do that. Call me back when you get it.” He dropped the phone back into its cradle and blew out a breath.

“Sir,” began Hadley. “You wanted to see me?”

“Close the door, Tom, and sit down.”

Hadley dropped into a chair across the cluttered desk from his boss and watched as the other man gathered his thoughts. O’Leary was uncompromising, he was often crass, but he was direct and that was something that Thomas Hadley could deal with. However, in the months since he had been assigned to the NYC office, he had never really felt that the ASAC had been willing to give him the time of day. He wondered what had changed.

“Long story short…” O’Leary launched into an explanation before Hadley could ask any questions. “In the past twenty-four hours we’ve had the head of a foreign government get kidnapped and murdered on our turf by his own people.”

“Omar Hassan,” said Hadley, with a nod.

“What’s
not
public knowledge is that Hassan’s killers had a dirty bomb they were gonna blow right here in New York. Or that apparently, there may be elements inside the Russian government who were involved in making it happen.”

Hadley’s throat went dry. “That … That’s confirmed?”

“No, it’s not damn well confirmed.” O’Leary snapped, his annoyance flaring. “We have the mother of all international incidents unfolding right before our eyes on top of a mess that could have made nine-eleven look like a sideshow. FBI, Homeland, Secret Service, NYPD, everyone is right in the thick of this and we’re not even on the same page. Counter Terrorist Unit got their asses handed to them, something about an attack on their systems, so they’re out of the game.…” He sighed. “And if that isn’t enough, it looks like the president is going to take a career nosedive before the day is out.”

“Okay…” Hadley’s mind was racing as he tried to process it all. “So, what’s my tasking on this?”

“We’ll get to that.” O’Leary’s manner shifted. “Something else first. I’ve got some bad news.” He paused. “I have to tell you that Jason Pillar was shot dead a little over an hour ago. I’m sorry, I know he was a friend of yours.”

“What?” Without conscious thought, Hadley’s hand strayed to the spot just above his clavicle, where beneath his shirt there was a tattoo in gothic script that read
Semper Fidelis;
Always Faithful,
the motto of the United States Marine Corps.

“I know Pillar was your commanding officer in the Gulf, that you two were tight. I wanted you to hear it from me first.”

“Thank you, sir…” Hadley fell silent for a moment. The truth was, his time in the Marines had not been a good one, and if not for Pillar it could have been much worse. When Hadley and the Corps had finally parted ways—and on less than cordial terms—it was his former commander who had helped Tom find his way to a career in law enforcement and eventually here to the FBI. The man had said he saw something in him.

Pillar himself had gone on to bigger and better things, first at the Defense Intelligence Agency and later as executive assistant to former President Charles Logan, and the two of them had kept in close contact over the years. Hadley knew that there were some in the New York field office—including O’Leary—who believed that Pillar had helped to gloss over the things in Hadley’s past that might have been an impediment to his advancement.

All that was
true,
of course, but Hadley would never admit it. And now his friend and ally was gone.

“Details are sketchy,” O’Leary was saying. “The shooting took place inside the United Nations building. Charles Logan was there with him and he’s in critical condition from a gunshot wound. The Secret Service are playing it close to their chest, they’re not telling us anything. Nothing has been released about any suspects. But the word is, Logan may not make it through the night.”

“Is this connected to the Hassan killing and the bomb plot?”

“We can’t rule that out.” O’Leary leaned forward. “But right now, I need you to focus on a new assignment. I’ve got people coming in from all over, and on top of everything else we have a priority-one order straight from the deputy director.” He grabbed a sheaf of papers and handed them to the agent. “You’re going to put together a pursuit team to track down and arrest this man.”