24: Deadline (24 Series) (16 page)

“It doesn’t work this way!” he insisted.

“It works,” said the woman, advancing on him, “however we say it works.”

What little fight the man had in him ebbed away at that moment and Bazin saw the defeated look in his eyes. “I can’t have you seen here. That will cause problems for me.”

“We understand,” Bazin allowed. “Better than you think, my friend. We’re not going to put you in jeopardy, that would be bad for all of us. But as was made clear to you earlier, time is of the essence.”

“I…” He swallowed hard. “I want some assurances.”

Bazin nodded. “You’ll have them, of course.” He glanced at Ziminova, who continued to watch the asset in the manner of a hawk observing a field mouse.

The asset didn’t stop to confirm what those nebulous
assurances
actually were, he just nodded back and seemed to accept that Bazin was telling the truth. It was pitiful, in a way, how simple this man was to manipulate. The reality was Bazin had no intention of keeping his word to the asset past any point at which he was no longer of use. He tapped the brass frame of a family photo on the man’s desk, and the action was enough to focus his attention.

He dropped into the seat opposite Bazin and picked up the wireless keyboard of his computer, turning the flat-screen monitor so both of them could see it. “I ran the search protocol she gave me during a gap between our peak traffic and this was the result.”

The screen sketched in a wire-frame graphic of the eastern half of the United States, painting clusters of dots up and down the map to indicate the locations of cellular communication towers. Around the cities, they formed dense blobs of light, but in the rural areas they became more thinly spread. The zone in the map was as Bazin had directed it to be, large enough to encompass the maximum range of the civil helicopter Jack Bauer had stolen.

The asset’s hands moved over the keyboard, and he pulled the flash memory stick Bazin’s subordinate gave him from an inside pocket. Blinking, he slotted it into a port on the side of the keyboard and a pop-up window appeared. He tapped the “enter” key to run the program again, and there was a momentary babble of noise from the speakers on the bottom of the monitor. To anyone listening, it would sound like a garbled radio transmission, all guttural chokes and grunts—but in fact they were listening to a stream of sampled voice elements captured from various sources. The sound was the aural fingerprint of their target, the voice pattern of Jack Bauer broken down into its base elements.

Moscow had paid their friends in Beijing very well for this file, and they had provided it willingly. It seemed the People’s Republic of China were also on the long list of those who wished Bauer to be dead and gone.

The program on the flash drive used the network provider’s own internal software to parse the thousands of phone conversations that had gone through its servers over the past few hours, sampling and comparing bits of the pattern with the calls that had bounced around the Eastern Seaboard. It wasn’t a widely known truth that most cell towers contained a memory buffer that retained details of calls and routings that passed through them, holding on to that information for up to a day before they were purged and reset. Like the National Security Agency’s PRISM monitoring software or the covert access channels of the Counter Terrorist Unit, it was a dirty little secret that the Taylor administration had tried very hard to keep out of the public eye.

Of course, what the NSA and CTU were aware of, so was the Russian government. Back home, the SVR had a similar setup in operation to spy on their own people, just like the Chinese did, the British, the French … But whereas the American agencies needed legal, authorized presidential mandates to make a search for a certain voice pattern, all Bazin needed was a man of weak character and the threat of bloody murder. It amused him that the Americans had provided him with the tools he would use to track and kill one of their own.

“Here,” said the asset, as the program locked on to a splinter of voice traffic. “Bouncing off a cell tower near Monroeville in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. About fifteen miles east of Pittsburgh.”

“
Hello, Chase
.” The voice was broken and echoey. “
Can you talk?
”

“Is that him?” said Ziminova.

Bazin said nothing, listening to the distorted conversation. “
Who … Who is this?
” asked a second voice, a younger man.

“
It’s Jack,
” came the reply, and Bazin’s smile grew. “
I need your help
.”

“You have your answer,” he told the woman. Bazin glanced at the asset and snapped his fingers. “Copy that exchange onto the flash drive, and then erase the cell tower’s buffer remotely.”

The man licked his lips. “That will take time.”

“Just do it,” Ziminova insisted, moving to hover over him.

“All right…” He set to work, typing furiously. After a moment, he detached the memory stick and handed it to Bazin, unable to stop his hands from trembling.

Ziminova studied the data on the screen. “The cellular telephone where the call originated. You can track it, yes? Isolate other cell towers that it pinged after this call was made?”

“I already looked for that,” he managed, pausing. “Whoever you … I mean, the person who made that call … they made a second call, then a while later a third call came in. Then they deactivated the handset. It went off the grid.”

“You have records of these communications too, I take it?”

“No.” The asset looked fearful and shook his head. Before Bazin could say more, he spoke quickly. “Please understand! The second and third calls were directed through a BlackPhone encryption application! The buffer couldn’t read them!”

Bazin and Ziminova exchanged looks, considering that fact. “What about the recipient of the first call, this man called ‘Chase’? You have data on that person’s mobile device?”

“Yes. Some.” He paused, blinking.

Ziminova studied the man carefully. “He believes we are going to kill him when we are done here. Don’t you?”

The asset’s eyes shimmered wetly. “Yes,” he managed.

“No,” Bazin corrected. “At this time, you are far too useful to me to be wasted for no good reason. Unless you are going to
give
me a good reason.” He pitched his voice in a careful, conversational tone. “Are you?” he prompted.

“No,” said the man, swallowing the word in a shuddering gasp.

“So answer her question.”

“The other cell phone belongs to someone called Charles Williams, registered to an address in East Hills, Pittsburgh. He pays his bills on time, every time. He doesn’t use it very often.” The words flooded out of the man in a rush.

Ziminova drew out her own phone and switched to speaking in Russian. “Sir, I will contact operations at the consulate, give them the name and address, get them to run it. Mager can talk to his informant in the police force, check for any criminal records.”

Bazin nodded. “Good. And call Yolkin, have him get to this man’s home as fast as possible.” She returned his nod and stepped out of the office to leave the two men alone.

The asset broke the silence. “I’m a traitor now,” he said, almost to himself.

“You have been that for a quite a while.” Bazin went back to English, maintaining his sympathetic tone even as his loathing for the foolish little man grew. “It’s too late to have regrets. But don’t blame yourself. This is not your fault. We are giving you no choice.”

“Is this going to get worse? Is it going to end?”

Bazin allowed some of his distaste to show through as he drew out his Makarov PM pistol and held it down on the surface of the desk. He did it to underline the dynamics of power in their relationship, just to make certain there was no misunderstanding. “Those things are beyond your control,” he said. “Never forget that.”

*   *   *

The man at the front desk of the Apache Motel had the kind of paunchy look that made Chase peg him as a linebacker gone to seed. He wore a too-loud bowling shirt over the top of a greasy T-shirt bearing a picture of Dino, the cartoon house pet from
The Flintstones.
Immediately, that was the name that Chase tagged the man with in his thoughts.

Dino measured the two men with a gimlet gaze that didn’t change when Jack peeled off a few hundred bucks and paid for two rooms. They were handed brass keys on big wooden fobs that mimicked the tepee shape of the sign outside on the street, the room numbers burned into the surfaces. “Pay-per-view costs extra,” he said, his words coming in the thick and scratchy tone of a habitual smoker. “You want it?” When neither man responded, his expression became a leer. “Or the real thing?”

“Just the rooms.”

“Enjoy your stay,” Dino said robotically, turning back to the magazine on his desk. Chase could tell by the look in his eyes, he was already forgetting about them. And that was fine. They didn’t need to make any impression.

The rooms were on the second floor, side by side with grimy windows that looked out onto faded planters full of brown, half-dead grass. The important thing was they could see the car from there, as well as get an angle on the office and the street. The downside was that the flickering glare of a gas station sign directly across the road poured yellowed light in through the windows, and the thin curtains did little to attenuate it.

Both rooms were mirror images of one another, with hard double beds and that kind of faux-wood veneer paneling over everything that hadn’t been in style since the age of disco. One room smelled slightly less ripe than the other, so they chose that as the place to bunk, but not before setting up the other as a decoy. Jack and Chase arranged the curtains, the lamps and left the TV on low, all to give any casual passerby the impression that someone was in there. The other they left poorly lit, and between them they quietly moved a wardrobe to block the door from being able to open fully.
Just in case.

There was a small window in the bathroom with a safety bar across it, probably to prevent anyone from using it as a fast exit rather than paying their bill, but it wasn’t hard for them to unscrew it and pop out the frame. Again,
just in case.

Without talking, they divided up the bedclothes between them and made sleeping arrangements on opposite sides of the room, low down on the floor and away from the actual bed. Chase frowned at the remains of an ancient rusty patch on the dark carpet, which heavy applications of cleanser had never been able to remove. Someone had bled in here, probably from a stab wound. He wondered what he would see around the room if he had a UV lamp, and decided that he was probably better off not knowing.

Jack was at the window, peering through a gap in the musty shades.

“Can you see Dino from there?” asked Chase.

“Who?”

“The desk guy.”

“Yeah.” Jack paused. “Doesn’t look like he’s calling us in to anyone.”

Chase looked up. “He didn’t make us.”

“No,” agreed Jack, “but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have standing orders to tell someone when new people come into town.”

“Who is he gonna tell? The local deputy? If there’s a cop within a hundred square miles of this burg, it’ll be a miracle.”

“I’m not thinking about the police.” There was another low rumble of motorcycle engines, a throaty growl like a powerful animal.

Chase came to the window and saw more bikes like the ones that had surrounded them, turning wide semicircles on the road as they made for a gaudy, neon-drenched strip club down at the end of the main street. The sign on the roof said the place was called
THE
CRANKCASE
.

“So, if you know something about outlaw motorcycle clubs,” he began, “you know something about those Night Ranger guys?”

“Heard the name once or twice,” Jack admitted. “But I don’t think they were ever on any CTU watch list. That doesn’t make them clean, though.”

“Just not dirty enough to be a threat to national security,” added Chase. “I’ve seen these types of creeps before, though. They make their way running guns up and down the interstate, that kinda thing.”

Jack gave a slow nod. “That’ll be part of it. But out here, you can bet they’re dealing drugs as well. Crystal meth or oxycodone.”

“Oh yeah,
hillbilly heroin
.” Chase walked away. “All the more reason to steer clear of them.” But Jack didn’t step away from the window, not for a while.

Chase sat on the bed, checking his Ruger, and tried not to watch the other man. Better than anyone, he knew how Jack Bauer had fought his own personal demons in a battle with drug addiction, and the hard road he traveled to get free of it. And as he thought of that, Chase wondered if his former partner had been able to keep himself clean in the intervening years. Jack Bauer had the strongest survival impulse of any person Chase Edmunds had ever known, but that had been a long time ago.

Jack seemed to sense his attention and shot him a look. “You must be tired after driving. Go ahead, get some rest. I’ll take first watch.” He lowered himself into a chair near the door, with Big Mike’s Remington across his lap.

As he said it, Chase had to stifle a sudden yawn. “You sure? If you wanna go first, I can deal.”

The other man shook his head, and his gaze turned inward. “I don’t need to sleep again. Don’t like what I see in there.”

10

In the history of all the bad choices that Laurel Tenn had ever made, it was starting to look like this was the worst.

The whole sorry business with her rat of an ex-boyfriend Don had been the catalyst, and just knowing that he was out there looking for her was enough to make Laurel want to get out of Indianapolis and never, ever look back. If she’d known what he was into, about the scams he played and the gambling, she never would have hooked up with him. But what was done was done, and in the end the only real choice open to her was to flee.

She had no blood family that she knew of. Her friends—not that they really deserved that name—were mostly Don’s friends, and reaching out to any one of them would see her wind up right back where she started. The foster parents left behind after she had cut and run years earlier were out in Oregon, far enough away that they might as well have been on the moon. And she doubted they’d want to see her again.