24: Deadline (24 Series) (15 page)

Jack found nothing, and his skin prickled as he realized that the black bag holding all the gear he had brought with him was also missing. Why would Chase have taken it? Where would he go? It made no sense.

A cold, horrible voice in the back of his mind told him his friend had betrayed him just like his former colleague Tony Almeida did, just like all the others Jack had foolishly believed he could trust. He shook his head, forcing the thought away, and looked out through the windshield, still pulling vainly at the immovable seat belt.

He didn’t recognize the landscape. The night was a curtain of featureless black and there were no stars. A white glow spilled from the Chrysler’s headlights, illuminating flat, dusty ground that faded away beyond the range of the beams. There was another car out there, a dark and blocky shape barely visible behind the dazzling flood of its own high beams.

Jack saw Chase walking toward the other vehicle, dragging the black bag across the ground behind him as if it were too heavy for him to lift. He called out his name, shouting at the top of his lungs, but if the other man heard him, he didn’t react. A second figure moved out from behind the other car, and a kernel of doubt grew in Jack’s chest.

Had Chase really betrayed him? Had something been done, some drug been slipped to Jack while his guard had been down? He believed that Chase Edmunds was still the man he had always been, even after the trials life had put him through, and Jack could not accept that his former partner would sell him out … But was that his greatest mistake? Was his sense of trust so damaged, so corroded that he had misplaced it once again?

Now he was pulling at the belt with all his might, and still it would not budge, still he could not slip out of it. He saw the other person moving to meet Chase in the middle of the spill of light, but they were unrecognizable, only a silhouette backlit by the headlights.

Chase halted, as if he had suddenly seen something, and he let the strap of the bag go, raising his hands. The other person raised a hand too, but there was something silver in it and a crack of thunder sounded.

“
No!
”

As if he had been kicked by a bull, Chase twisted away, an ugly stream of crimson jetting from his face. He crashed to the ground, falling out of sight. His killer turned toward the Chrysler and advanced on it with slow and purposeful steps, the big frame of the silver pistol glittering.

Jack’s fury translated to action, and he grabbed the jammed seat belt with both hands, wrapping it around his wrists to gain traction. With a wordless shout of effort, he pulled on the buckle with all his might and the metal tab suddenly shattered, setting him free. He slammed into the passenger door and burst out, scrambling from the car and across broken, drought-cracked earth. He felt dizzy and slow, as if he had been starved of oxygen.

Jack fought to regain his balance and looked back as a shadow fell across him. He saw a woman’s face framed with short, black hair, familiar pale skin and a wicked mouth. Once he had found a kind of solace in her arms, before he discovered it was nothing but a lie. Her eyes were cruel and icy. “Jack,” she purred. “You can’t run. You must know that.”

“
Nina
…” He breathed. “You can’t be here. You’re dead.
I shot you!
”

“You did,” she agreed, and now blood was pooling across her neck, soaking through the white silk blouse she wore. Nina Meyers tapped a finger against her head and smiled. “But you can’t kill me
up here,
Jack.” The woman who murdered his wife, whose treachery had almost destroyed him, looked down at Jack with cold amusement. “That voice you hear in the back of your mind? That’s not Cheng, it’s not Drazen or Marwan or any of the others. It’s me.” She raised the gun and the muzzle yawned like a tunnel mouth. “It’s always me.”

The pistol discharged with a monstrous crash …

*   *   *

… and Jack bolted awake, a chill on his skin.

Light flashed over him from the tractor of a passing truck in the far lane, and he blinked, sucking in a deep breath.

“You all right back there?” From the driver’s seat, Chase shot him a glance over his shoulder. “Jack?”

“I’m okay,” he lied, grimacing as he adjusted the seat belt where it had tightened over his chest.

“Bad dream?”

He ignored the question. “How long was I out?”

Chase’s lip curled. “Don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything.” He nodded as an interchange sign hanging over the highway appeared in the glow of the headlights. “Not far now.”

Jack leaned forward and saw text on the marker that read
DEADLINE—NEXT EXIT
.

09

Deadline was a town that had died twice.

First born as a small hamlet that had accreted around the path of the growing railroad network, named offhandedly by a construction gang foreman with a dry sense of humor, for a time it had been the home to a colony of hardscrabble farmers and strong-willed types who liked the savannah landscape and the open skies. But when the Great Depression came, it struck the township like a hurricane. People lost their jobs, their homes, their livelihoods, and Deadline became a skeletal caricature of a real community. It stayed that way for years, until the shadows of war fell across distant Europe, and from out of nowhere the promise of new purpose brought the town back to life.

Drawn by the countryside and the nearby railroad, in the early 1940s the US Army came to Deadline with big plans. Families who had struggled to farm the unforgiving land for generations were bought out wholesale with generous government dollars. They left their homesteads to start anew closer to the town center in newly built houses. The military moved in armored divisions still fresh from hammering Nazi panzers into scrap metal, and ten thousand soldiers along with them. They named the place Fort Blake and built wide and far.

For the locals, it was a golden age. The town became an engine to serve the needs of the base, with everything from diners and dry cleaners, through to a more illicit economy to cover the baser needs of the troops. Twenty years after the tanks had rolled into town, Deadline was a fully symbiotic entity, its entire existence supported by troops who were now on the front lines of the Cold War. Men and weapons trained and waited for the call to arms, for the lightning-fast deployment against a Soviet army advance that never ever came.

Then one day, the Berlin Wall fell and the enemy Fort Blake had been built to defy went away. Just as politics and the threat of war thousands of miles away had brought the town back from the brink, now the reverse happened. In a matter of years, defense cuts and reductions in force took the soldiers away, mothballed the tanks, and slowly choked the life out of Deadline. The base was stripped, shuttered and left to decay. Those who could find the money sold up and followed in the army’s boot steps. Those who had no choice but to remain watched their lives crumble, forced to cling to welfare handouts while all around them entire neighborhoods went derelict. Whole streets became silent, echoing to the mournful howl of the freight trains that passed on by and never stopped.

The town dried up and blew away. All that was left was a shabby main drag with a mix of cheap motels, strip clubs and liquor stores that catered to a transient population of truckers on their way to somewhere else.

When the next influx of money and new arrivals came, there was a far darker purpose motivating them.

*   *   *

“Nice place,” said Chase, as they turned off the approach road and into the town proper. They had passed ranks of shuttered, boarded-up housing on the outskirts, but now they were seeing signs of life. Lurid neon signs and dilapidated storefronts made the whole town seem run-down and unwelcoming. The streets were wide but traffic was light, nothing more than the occasional battered pickup or motorcycle. The slab-sided shapes of big tractor trailers congregated in ill-kept parking lots across from greasy eateries and dingy bars, and the whole area had a decaying feel about it.

Jack gave a grim nod of agreement. He’d seen better-appointed neighborhoods in Third World war zones, and there was something disturbing about seeing a place like this in the heartland of his home country. Unconsciously, he adjusted the position of the M1911 pistol in his waistband and scanned the side streets. “How far are we from the railroad?”

“Close enough,” Chase replied. “But we’re early. We got plenty of time to kill. So we find somewhere to bed down, lay low and wait out the clock.” He nodded toward a brightly lit sign on the far side of the street, a half-mile distant. “Looks like a motel up there. As good a place as any to hole up. They may even have cable TV.” The car rolled to a halt at a crossroads as the traffic lights dangling from a wire overhead clicked to red. “I mean, we don’t wanna draw any attention, right?”

Jack was going to reply, but a throaty, rumbling growl cut him off and he saw the flash of headlamps behind them as something else approached the intersection. He knew the sound, the powerful engines of big cruiser motorcycles, Harleys, Indians and the like. As a teenager he had ridden the same kind of bikes around Santa Monica, but he had never been able to connect to the nomadic subculture they symbolized.

Six heavy bikes rolled up to halt at the stoplight, crowding in around the Chrysler like a pack of wolves circling a bison. Jack tensed, letting his hand fall to the butt of his pistol, and he shot a warning look at Chase. The other man nodded, keeping one hand on the steering wheel, and the other within reach of his own weapon.

The motorcycle on the driver’s side was a Gilroy Indian Scout with blue-black details and a lot of chrome, obscured somewhat by a layer of road dust. The rider leaned slightly from his saddle and peered at the car. The biker’s black leather jacket was thick and patterned with rigid plate inserts, better to protect him in the event of a spill. Jack saw the three-part patch on the man’s back—his
colors
. Two curved “rockers” at the top and bottom declared him to be a member of the Night Rangers MC, and in the middle, an oval patch showed a monstrous, wraithlike figure with clawed hands crossed over its chest. The wraith held a huge serrated combat knife in one hand, and an old Western-style Colt Peacemaker six-gun in the other. If the triple patch wasn’t enough to convince him that these men were outlaw bikers, Jack also saw the smaller, diamond-shaped sigil on the rider’s chest. Inside the patch was a “1%” symbol, indicating that he wasn’t part of the so-called 99 percent of law-abiding motorcyclists out on the roads.

The biker turned, removing a butterfly knife from his pocket, opening it with a flourish and using it to pick trail dirt out from under his fingernails. The action was all theater, all calculated menace. He extended his arm and gently tap-tapped the blade on the driver’s-side window.

Chase lowered the window an inch. “Evening,” he said. “Can I help you with something?”

The biker leaned down to get a better look at who was in the car, and Jack saw a name tag that read
BRODUR
. Next to it were other symbols, all part of the complex secret heraldry of the outlaw biker community—a skull and bones, an eight ball, a dollar sign. “Nice cage,” he said, looking over the Chrysler. “This year’s model…” Brodur seemed lean and angular, with a square face, a shaved head and five o’clock shadow around his blocky chin. He made a show of glancing at the car’s plates. “Out from Penn, huh? You gentlemen aren’t lost now, are ya?”

“We’re just passing through,” Chase replied. “We’re not looking for any trouble.”

“’Course not.” Brodur’s answer was languid as he toyed with the knife. “Word of advice? Keep on passing, pal. Folks from out of town can get themselves in a fix around here if they’re not careful.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Chase, as the light flickered over to green.

“You do that.” Brodur settled back on his bike and throttled away, allowing the tip of the butterfly knife to scratch the paintwork on the car as he passed. The other riders went with him, revving their motors as they went.

“Son of a…” Chase scowled as they drove on. “Like I said,
nice place
. I guess those boys must have been the welcome wagon.”

Jack shook his head. “No, they were outriders. Fresh off the highway, same as us. They’re just making noise, showing us who the big dogs are here.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I did an undercover op with an outlaw MC in Los Angeles. Years ago, before your time, before CTU. I know how they operate.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” They were approaching the entrance to the motel, and Jack caught sight of an old plaster sign in the shape of a cartoon tepee. “Apache Motel,” Chase read aloud. “And they got vacancies. Great. Not exactly the Hilton, but we can’t afford to be choosy.”

Jack threw a glance out the back window as they pulled into the motel forecourt. Another pair of Night Ranger motorcycles growled past behind them. “Find a spot for the car where it can’t be seen from the road. Like you said, we don’t want to draw attention.”

*   *   *

The office door opened and the asset was three steps into the room before he realized that it was already occupied. He reacted with an almost comical level of shock, nearly dropping the papers he was carrying. He glanced back and forth between Ziminova, who stood with her hands folded in front of her by the bookcase, and Bazin, who had taken it upon himself to sit behind the asset’s impressively large desk.

“You can’t be here!” he blurted.

Bazin opened his hands to take in the room. “And yet…”

“No!
No!
” The color drained from the man’s face and he took a step forward. Then, as if he suddenly remembered where he was and who he was talking to, his voice dropped into a near-whisper. “You can’t just come to my office, you shouldn’t be here—”

“
You
contacted
us,
” said Ziminova. “You said you had something.”

“I do! I have! But I was going to bring it to you!”

Bazin smiled and shook his head, toying with some of the items on the desk. “You do not get to make that sort of decision.”