24: Deadline (24 Series) (20 page)

“Saw the same pattern in Serbia, years ago,” offered Jack. “Trading in human beings. Modern-day slavery.”

His words seemed to trip something inside the woman, and Laurel suddenly stood up, her face going pale under the grime on her skin. “I gotta … get clean.” She almost ran into the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind her.

*   *   *

Jack walked over to where Laurel’s jacket had fallen and picked it up, unfolding it. He pulled out Brodur’s revolver, snapped open the chamber to examine the loaded bullets.

“I can see it,” Chase said, his voice soft. “Right then, when she talked about her friend.”

“See what?” Jack put the pistol back on top of the jacket and turned to look at the other man.

“
Kim
.” Chase gestured at his face. “Around the eyes. And the hair. Don’t pretend you don’t see it too.”

Jack’s lips thinned. “That’s not why I went out after her.”

“You sure?”

He gave his former partner an iron-hard glare. “I’m sure. If you think I’d let
anyone
get assaulted and murdered twenty feet from where I was sitting, then you’ve forgotten a lot about me, Chase.”

The other man nodded at the glowing yellow-orange numerals of a digital clock on the bedside table. “If you wanted to kill time, read a book…” He sighed. “So what do we do now? Call the FBI? That’s not gonna work. And we sure as hell can’t take her with us.”

“I’m considering the options,” said Jack. With exaggerated slowness, he slipped off his jacket and started to remove his shirt. The pain he had experienced in the fight with Brodur was still there, and to his dismay he saw that the bullet wound he had taken during the situation in New York had reopened. “There’s a medical kit in my bag. Pass it here.”

Chase nodded and found it for him. “Sooner or later, Brodur’s playmates are gonna come looking for their buddy. Then what?”

Jack peeled off the used dressing and worked at cleaning up the wound. “How long do we have until the cargo train gets here? Six, seven hours?”

“Something like that.”

He nodded to himself. “Plenty of time.”

“For what?”

“You know me.” Jack gritted his teeth as he rolled out new bandages over his skin. “I like to keep occupied.”

12

The argument was loud enough that it could be heard on the stoop of the house, filtering through the ornate door that fronted the expensive colonial-style suburban home. The man halted with his hand reaching for the big brass knocker and listened.

He could hear two distinct voices. A man, all snarls and growling, and a woman, her pitch high and wheedling. The words were lost to him, but the tone was clear.
Husband and wife,
he guessed,
years of resentment seething between them
.

He banged on the door, and after a moment he saw a shape through the frosted glass panels, moving down the hallway toward him. The husband, who didn’t even halt his tirade as he walked.

“For crying out loud,” he was saying, “can you just shut your mouth for one damn second? I can’t hear myself think!” The door opened a few inches on a metal security chain, and the husband’s face was revealed. Ruddy complexion, sweaty and irritable. “Yeah?” he demanded. “What do you want?”

Dimitri Yolkin held up a passable fake of an NYPD detective’s badge. “Mr. Roker?” He didn’t really need to ask. Yolkin had seen a grinning, larger-than-life-size advertising cutout of “Big Mike” Roker inside the car dealership a short while earlier, after he had broken in to investigate the office there. It had been the next step in his search, after finding nothing of note in the sparse apartment rented to one Charles Williams, nothing worth following up but the paperwork that led to the car showroom. From there, Yolkin had found Roker’s home address and now he was here. “I have questions for you.”

Roker’s deep-set eyes narrowed. “What kinda accent is that? You ain’t no Pittsburgh cop, take a hike.”

“Who’s that out there?” called a shrill voice from the kitchen.

Roker glanced away, starting to close the door. “Shut up, it’s nobody—”

Big Mike, Yolkin reflected, wasn’t really that big at all. With a quick, hard blow, the SVR operative slammed the heel of his hand against the door with such force that the security chain popped out of its latch. The side of the front door clipped Roker across the cheek and he ducked back, shocked by the sudden flurry of motion.

Yolkin quickly stepped in over the threshold, drawing a silenced CZ 75 semiautomatic. Roker panicked and fled toward the back of the house, almost slipping on the hallway’s tiled floor. “Barb!” he shouted. “Oh shit, call the police!”

“What?”

The wife’s question gave Yolkin enough time to make it into the kitchen on Roker’s heels, and when she saw him she screamed and fumbled for a telephone handset fixed to the wall.

The Czech-made pistol coughed and the phone exploded into hot fragments of plastic and circuit board, eliciting another scream from the woman. “Your husband told you to be quiet,” said the Russian, offering the muzzle of the gun to the two Americans. “That is good advice.”

The kitchen was large, almost half the size of the entire apartment in Kiev where Yolkin and his family had lived when he was a youth. In the middle was an island table topped by expensive marble and festooned with various electrical cooking gadgets. He pointed at two stools and gestured for Roker and his wife to sit down.

“Did Ernie deSalvo send you?” asked the woman. “Oh, Mike, you stupid shithead, you pissed him off one time too many…” Tears began to stream down her face.

For a second, Roker forgot he had a gun aimed at him. “You gotta blame me for everything!”

“I do not know who this ‘Ernie’ is,” Yolkin corrected. He shrugged. “I do not care.”

“Then what the hell are you doing here?” Roker shouted.

“Calm down.” Yolkin moved to a position where he could see all entrances to the kitchen and keep the happy couple in his sights. “Charles Williams. Where is he?”

“Charlie?” The wife blinked. “You come looking for Charlie? He ain’t here!”

“Oh yeah.” Roker shifted in his chair and tapped his collar. “I see them tats you got. I get it now. You’re with the Russkie Mob, right?” He managed a weak smile, his confidence returning. “He owe you money or something?”

“Something,” Yolkin repeated, content to let the American continue with his mistaken assumption. “He works for you.”

“Not anymore,” Roker spat. “I fired the prick tonight. He stole my damn car!”

“Charlie
quit,
” insisted the wife. “Like you coulda stopped him!”

“Why?” said Yolkin, the gun never wavering. “Why did he leave tonight?”

Roker paused, wrong-footed by the question. “I … I dunno. He got a call. Talking to some guy. Next thing I know he tells me to go screw myself…” The man licked his lips. “Look, buddy, you got a beef with him, that’s nothing to do with me. Right now, I don’t give a shit about what happens to that son of a bitch.”

“Where is Jack Bauer?” Yolkin didn’t think that Roker knew the target, but he threw the name out there anyway, just to fish for a reaction. Both husband and wife didn’t show any sign of recognition, but he would have to be sure.

“Never heard of him.”

He nodded, reached into a different pocket and produced a digital recorder, placing it on the kitchen table, switching it on. “I want you to tell me everything you know about Charles …
Charlie
Williams. Begin now.” Yolkin gestured with the gun again. “Or I will kill you both.”

As it was, the threat was hardly necessary. Roker was almost falling over himself to spill out every last detail he could dredge up about the man. Along with the study of the apartment where Williams lived and its contents, now with Roker’s effusive descriptions Yolkin was building a picture of Jack Bauer’s apparent accomplice.
Ex-military or former law enforcement,
he suspected.
A comrade-in-arms.
That fit the kind of profile the SVR had on Bauer. He was a man who valued loyalty. In dire straits, he would be more likely to reach out to those he respected rather than those whose silence he could buy.

Around twenty minutes had elapsed by the time Roker ran out of things to tell him. Yolkin got up and nodded. “That is all?”

“That’s all,” Roker replied. His body language had altered, and now he seemed to be almost conversational with his captor, as if they were on an equal footing. “Listen, buddy, if you see my car while you’re looking for this dick, let me know. There’d be a finder’s fee.”

“You are certain that is all you know about Williams?”

Roker’s smile faded. “What the hell did I just say? Yeah! That’s all I know.”

“You understand I have to be certain. I have to motivate you, in case you are withholding something.” Yolkin turned and shot Roker’s wife in the thigh.

She shrieked and collapsed to the tiled floor, blood gushing from a ragged wound. Roker dove after her, his face white with shock.

“Keep pressure on the wound,” Yolkin instructed calmly. “She will bleed out in a few minutes if you do not do so.”

“
Motherfu—!
”

Yolkin silenced him with a look. “Is what you have told me really all that you know? Think carefully.”

“Oh god. Barbara, oh no.” Roker began to cry. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”

“If Williams needed to get away, where would he go? Who would he talk to? If he had to disappear, what would he do?”

“I … I don’t…” Roker hesitated, and Yolkin saw the fractional glimmer of a thought forming in the man’s wide, fearful eyes.

“Tell me,” he prompted. “She will die if you do not.”

“Matlow!” bleated Roker. “Hex Matlow, that pencil neck hacker … Charlie knows him. He’s a smartass … He could, I dunno, help…” He looked down at his hands. “There’s so much blood.…”

There was an expensive smartphone sitting on the kitchen table and Yolkin snatched it up. “This is yours? Matlow’s contact information is on here?”

“Y-yes,” Roker managed. “Please!
I don’t know anything else about Charlie Williams!
” His words became an anguished shout.

The Russian considered the reply for a moment. “I had to make sure. Yes. I have it all.” He raised the pistol again.

The next bullet went through Barbara Roker’s forehead, killing her instantly. The two shots after that struck Big Mike in the throat and the chest respectively. He would take a little longer to die.

Yolkin switched off the digital recorder and recovered it and the American’s smartphone, before he paused to carefully gather up the spent bullet casings from his weapon.

As he walked back to his car, he dialed an encrypted number. “I have something,” he said.

*   *   *

“How d’you wanna play this?” said Chase, as they crossed the parking lot toward the Apache Motel’s front office. Then he frowned and shook his head. “Wait. Why am I asking? Your usual approach?”

“What’s that?” Laurel was trailing behind them, eyeing every shadow, trying not to show she was afraid.

Jack glanced over his shoulder at her. “You should stay in the room.”

“No way,” she insisted.

He considered making his suggestion into something more forceful. Having a civilian in the mix could get in the way of what Jack had planned, but then there was something in Laurel’s eyes that told him she was no stranger to blood and violence. She didn’t seem like the squeamish type … and her insight could prove valuable. For now, Jack decided to let her stay close at hand.

He glanced back at Chase. “We need more intel before we make a move.”

The other man nodded. “Copy that.”

Jack had conducted many interrogations in his time, and been the subject of them more often than he wanted to recall. They were a game, in their own way, a contest of willpower—and the sordid truth was that in the end,
everyone broke
. No one could hold out indefinitely, not even someone with Jack’s steely self-control. Eventually, you would falter … The only variable in play was how long you could delay that terrible moment of surrender. You could never really win; you could only
endure
.

Having too often been on the wrong side, Jack had gained a unique insight into the power play required to draw out intel from an unwilling subject. He was good at it.

If this had been a CTU assignment, Jack would have planned it down to the very last detail. The target would be isolated, maybe taken in transit, or more typically, secured from a surveilled location by a snatch-and-grab team. A specialized mobile unit would be on station to act as an interview site if needed, that or the target would be rendered unconscious and taken to a secure “blind room” at the nearest CTU substation. There, a hostile interrogation would commence, with a full medical and technical support staff on standby. Every answer would be scrutinized and sifted for detail, searching out falsehoods and weaknesses with voice-stress analyzers, thermal imagers and pulse monitors.

But right here, right now, Jack had none of those resources to call upon. There was only the hard-won experience that he and Chase shared.

Years ago, as field agents for CTU Los Angeles, the two men had developed a working shorthand that bordered on the uncanny; their rate for mission success had been among the best that Division had ever seen. Jack had never really considered himself to be a team player, and for the longest time he had resisted taking on anyone that could be considered a “partner.” But Chase Edmunds had quietly impressed him with his skills and his tenacity, and for a while the younger man had become a trusted brother-in-arms. They saved each other’s lives several times over, and Jack knew the value of having someone to cover his back when the bullets started flying. The people he truly trusted to do that could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

But that had been a long time ago. A lot had changed, not just between the two men, but also in their personal circumstances. Even from a cursory look, Jack could see that Chase had lost something along the way, that some vital spark in him had been put out … or was it just that it had been hidden away? At once, he knew that this Chase Edmunds both
was
and
was not
the man he had known years before. Still, he couldn’t deny that it felt
right
to be working with him again. This was what they were best at, and it didn’t matter if they were under the aegis of the Counter Terrorist Unit or just stepping up to take a stand against something. He didn’t need to ask Chase if he felt the same way. He knew it.