24: Deadline (24 Series) (3 page)

“Jack Bauer,” Hadley read the name off the file in front of him. “I’ve heard of this guy. If half of what they say about him is true, he’s a menace…”

O’Leary scowled. “Where he goes, trouble follows. We lost one of our own last night too, a former agent named Renee Walker. She was part of that whole thing with Starkwood a while back, but she left the bureau afterward … Bauer had something to do with that. I’m willing to bet he’s caught up in her death.”

“That’s what this is about?” Hadley held up the file. “We want him for Walker’s murder?”

“We want him because there’s a warrant on his head for acts of treason and conspiracy against the United States, and for the murder of a bunch of Russian nationals. All this crap with the IRK, the peace treaty…” O’Leary gestured at the air. “He’s wired into it. But we’re not going to know exactly how until he’s in an interrogation room. Your friend Pillar was using CTU to actively chase him, but he gave them the slip.”

Hadley’s eyes widened. “So Bauer is connected to the shooting at the UN?”

“It’s possible. We don’t know for sure. He had no love for Logan, that’s a given. But right now, we’re operating on assumptions and circumstance. That has to change. We’re pretty certain Bauer is still in the city, but so far I haven’t had the manpower to go chasing after him. That’s your job now.”

Hadley gave a grave nod, his gaze hardening. “Understood. I’ll finish what Pillar … what was started.”

The ASAC studied him carefully. “Look, Tom … I’m gonna level with you. We’ve never seen eye to eye, you and me. I think your methods are questionable. But right now, I have a manhunt to prosecute on top of a citywide terror alert, and by virtue of being the wrong man in the wrong place, you’re the guy who’s gonna do that for me. Now, you take whatever it is that’s gonna motivate you and you get this job done. I don’t want to see or hear from you again until Bauer is in cuffs. Is that clear?”

“Crystal, sir.”

“Dwyer’s got you some people on this. Dell, Markinson, Kilner, couple of others if you need backup. Get up to speed and brief them.” The phone rang and the ASAC snatched it back up, dismissing Hadley with a wave of the hand.

He stepped out of the room and back into the main office, thinking it through. He studied the file image of Bauer’s face, trying to read something of a man he had never met.

Hadley’s hands drew into fists. If Bauer
was
connected to Pillar’s death, he owed it to his former commander to bring him in, and it occurred to the agent that this could also be an opportunity to finally put to rest whatever mistrust had been dogging him since he came to New York. And if that meant he had to use some of those “questionable” methods O’Leary didn’t like … That wasn’t a problem for him.

*   *   *

Across Manhattan, a few miles to the north in a stone-fronted town house off East Ninety-First Street, another former soldier was considering the same face, and the same objective.

Arkady Bazin had been a boy when he had ridden to war during the invasion of Afghanistan, a youth below the age of enlistment who had stolen his elder brother’s birth certificate and used it to pass himself off as old enough to fight. Back then, he had been blinded by a kind of patriotic fervor that seemed quaint to him now, but even decades later, Bazin’s love for Mother Russia had not faded. It had transformed into a kind of dogged, ruthless inertia—as if he were a weapon that had been set loose to roll on and on, crushing the enemies of his people.

And there was never a shortage of those. In those first days of fire and blood as a young soldier, Bazin had learned a fundamental truth. War had no end; it was only the battlefields and the faces the enemy wore that changed.

He put down the file in his hand and his lips thinned. Through the arched window behind him, lines of bright light were moving around, casting colorless streaks over the walls and the ceiling of the conference room where he sat. There were television vans parked out there, a line of them sitting bumper-to-bumper with their broadcast dishes deployed and their interchangeable location reporters all prattling away into handheld microphones. The lights fell from camera lamps, capturing the white, blue and red of the flag fluttering over the entrance of the Consulate General of the Russian Federation.

Surrounding the TV crews were American police, grumbling and sour-faced at their duties, and inside the perimeter of the black iron railings that ringed the consulate building there was another rank of watchers. They were armed with Skorpion submachine guns and Makarov pistols hidden under bulky jackets, careful to make sure that the locals did not see them. The SBP—Russia’s presidential security service—were here in force to protect President Yuri Suvarov on his international visit, but the events of the past few hours had changed the tempo of that activity from a discreet projection of power to the manner of an occupying military force.

Inside the consulate, the SBP had posted guards on every level. Bazin had glimpsed them in the situation room, in terse communication with the crew of Suvarov’s jet out on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International. He frowned at the thought. Had the decision been his to make, Bazin would have sent his president directly to the airport and had him airborne by now, out of harm’s way and off foreign soil.

Truth be told, if it had been his decision, he would have never allowed Suvarov to come to America in the first place, to talk with the rulers of this country and all the others as if they were some kind of
equals
. The very idea made his lip curl into a sneer.

Years of covert operations in and around the United States had instilled in him a deep distrust of this nation and its people. As an officer of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, the Russian Federation’s external intelligence agency, Bazin’s exposure to America had largely been in dealings with the traitors, the greedy and the venal among the country’s populace. What always kept him focused was the knowledge that his work was a vital kind of corrosive, forever eating away at the imagined superiority of his homeland’s old foe.

Some days he tired of it, but he knew he could not step down. The West could not be allowed to win, not even for a moment. They had to be opposed, to the very grave if needed.

Bazin found it difficult to consider the Americans as real people, not in the same way he thought of his fellow Russians. They were inferior, with their self-obsession and their shallow, materialistic manners—and what frightened him the most was the possibility that this pattern of behavior was creeping across the ocean to infect
his
people.

He wanted to see that end, and it seemed like Yuri Suvarov was a man who thought the same. Some small part of Bazin hoped he might actually get to meet the president; certainly they were both under the same roof at this moment. This was a man who understood that the Great Soviet Bear had not perished, only hibernated. Suvarov was the kind of leader who could rekindle the old unity the Russian states had once enjoyed in the day of the Communist era, if only given the chance. He liked to think that Suvarov would see in him a kindred spirit, someone who recalled and revered the day when their nation was a force to be reckoned with in global politics.

But no.
Bazin dismissed the thought as fanciful, unprofessional. It was right that President Suvarov would never know his face or his name. Bazin saw himself as a loyal son of the Motherland, and it was enough that Suvarov would only know that there were weapons at his disposal which could be brought to bear to show Russia’s might to her foes.

He looked down at the file photo again. This man, this Jack Bauer, was just such an enemy. The data on him had been gleaned from spies embedded in the Central Intelligence Agency and allies in the Chinese government, a patchwork of half-truths and hearsay that crafted an image of who Bauer was, of what he was capable of doing. A policeman, a soldier, a spy, an assassin … Bauer had been all of these things, but now he was only
a target
.

The sneer returned to Bazin’s face. This ex-CIA killer was the perfect exemplar of why he did what he did. They were nearly the same age, with little more than half a year between their birthdates, and perhaps on the surface the two of them might have seemed like the same kind of man. But such a comparison would have sent Bazin into a fury. Bauer’s file revealed the truth of him; he was so very
American,
with every mission he had prosecuted spawned from some arrogant sense that his nation had the right to impose its will on the world. Bauer was a rogue, his bloody career at best barely clothed in tissue-thin justifications from his government, at worst the works of a psychopath with no code, no loyalty to anything but his own warped sense of right and wrong. They had never met, but on some level Bazin already reviled this man. He despised the cancerous capitalist system that could create a person like Jack Bauer.

There was a knock at the door, and Bazin looked up as a woman entered. She had the haughty poise of a Muscovite society girl, but he knew from experience that her outward manner was just a smokescreen. While Galina Ziminova was younger than him, and at times a little too liberal in her ways for his tastes, Bazin appreciated that the other SVR agent was an accomplished killer and a true patriot … even if the “new” Russia she came from was not the one that had been mother and protector to him.

“The team are here, sir,” she said.

He nodded. “Bring them in.”

Ziminova returned the gesture, and paused as she caught sight of Bauer’s picture. “Is that him?”

“Someone you might pass on the street and think as unremarkable,” Bazin replied. “And yet this man is marked for death by our highest authority.”

02

“We have a clear and direct mandate,” Hadley told the others. “A federal warrant for the arrest of Jack Bauer has been issued, and we’re going to bring him down.”

The other agents in the briefing room exchanged glances. To his left, sitting side by side, Special Agents Kari Dell and Helen Markinson looked as if they had been cut from the same cloth; both trim and austere in their looks, both dressed in a near-identical black pantsuit, at first glance all that differentiated them were their hairstyles. Dell’s short bob was henna-red where Markinson’s black hair reached to just above her shoulders, and the pair of them watched Hadley give his briefing with hawkish intensity. Scuttlebutt around the field office was that the two women had come up together at Quantico and they made a formidable team. Only a week earlier it had been their work that cracked the Anselmo case wide open. Hadley could work with that kind of skill set. He needed aggressive, proactive people on his team if he was to succeed.

“A fella like that isn’t going to come quietly,” Markinson ventured, a little of her native Boston drawl coming through.

Dell nodded. “He may not leave us with a lot of options, when the moment comes.”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” Hadley replied, and he heard the man to his right draw a sharp breath. He glanced at the other agent, waiting for him to voice what was on his mind.

Jorge Kilner had the kind of open, honest face that looked better suited to a high school quarterback than an FBI agent, but right now his expression was one of deep concern. His hands knitted before him and he shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “This man…” He paused, framing his words. “He’s not a criminal.”

Dell tapped the warrant document on the conference table. “Beg to differ.”

Kilner shook his head and went on. “Look, you only need to read his file to know, Bauer is a former Counter Terrorist Unit operative. He’s been called upon to do a lot of things by this country, the kind of stuff that would give the rest of us nightmares. We owe him more than just treating the guy like some two-bit crook to be run down and thrown in a cage.”

“What we owe Jack Bauer is due process and his one phone call,” Hadley snapped. “That’s if he’s smart enough to put his hands up when we come calling.”

The other agent’s lips thinned. “Agent Hadley, I knew Bauer and Renee Walker. I don’t believe for one second he’s responsible for her death.”

“Right … You were at the office in Washington, DC, during the White House attack.” Hadley gave Kilner a level look. “That’s good. We can use your insight into the man. But that’s all it’s going to be. If you think you’re going to show undue sympathy to a wanted fugitive, I’ll ask Special Agent Dwyer to reassign you.”

“No, sir,” Kilner insisted. “If someone’s going to put the cuffs on Bauer, I want to be the one to do it. To make sure it’s done right.”

“So where do we start?” asked Markinson. “There’s a BOLO alert with Bauer’s face on it all across the Eastern Seaboard, and the NYPD have dropped a net over Manhattan because of this whole Kamistani thing. Are we still operating on the assumption that he’s within the city limits?”

“Right now, we are.” Hadley crossed to the conference room’s window and looked out across Federal Plaza. “As Agent Kilner reminded us, our fugitive is ex-CTU, before that Delta Force and CIA. He’s trained for urban operations, he knows our methods and our capabilities. He also knows that if he doesn’t get out of New York within the next couple of hours, he’s as good as caught. We have a small window of opportunity here, people, and it’s closing by the second.” He turned back and nodded toward the other agents. “We’ve got monitoring set up on every known contact Bauer has in this city, eyes on airports, train stations, ferry terminals, bridges and tunnels. He’s gonna stick his head up, and we’re going to be there when he does. Each of you is to coordinate search sectors with tactical command. If you get a scent of him, don’t hesitate. Drop the hammer.” Hadley aimed a finger at the door. “Get to work.”

Dell, Markinson and the other agents got to their feet and filed out, but Hadley put a hand on Kilner’s shoulder before he could leave.

“Is there a problem?” said the other man.

“You tell me,” Hadley demanded. “When it comes down to the line and you have to draw on Bauer, are you going to follow through?”

“If I have to—”