24: Deadline (24 Series) (37 page)

He shot a look at his watch.
I still have time.

*   *   *

“This is an infirmary?” Bazin’s tone bordered on the incredulous as he looked around the private room. “I have been to whorehouses that were less extravagant.” He curled his lip at the well-appointed bedroom.

Ziminova did not doubt that her commander’s estimation was correct. She moved to the window and looked down at the street below. With her back to Bazin, she stifled a yawn and blinked away a moment of fatigue. She had not slept on the flight to Los Angeles, and it was beginning to wear on her. “This is a gamble,” she offered. “We do not know if Bauer will come here.”

Bazin snorted and nodded to the blond-haired man who had met them at the airstrip. “Keep watch.” The man nodded and stepped out into the corridor.

His name was Lenkov. All she knew was that he was one of the SVR’s local operatives on the American West Coast, and it was his duty to help Bazin, Ekel and her find and terminate their target.

“Bauer’s daughter is on her way here,” Bazin explained. “Her husband treats those with cancers … Such a worthy profession, eh?” As if in mockery, Bazin produced a lighter and a cigarette, raising it to his mouth.

Ziminova took two quick steps to his side and snatched the cigarette from his fingers. Off her commander’s furious glare, she nodded at a pale green cylinder near the unoccupied hospital bed. “Oxygen,” she said by way of explanation.

Bazin scowled and pocketed the lighter again. “He will come. And if he does not? We use his family as leverage to draw him out.”

“You have placed much faith in the words of a dying coward.” Ziminova looked around. The room they had secured was hardly an ideal base of operations, but they were operating well beyond their mission remit now. Bazin had not made contact with the consulate in New York for hours, and she was starting to wonder about Yolkin and Mager, who were similarly silent.

“Of course,” he replied. “Precisely
because
Matlow was dying,
because
he was a coward. At such moments, the ability to lie flees from men of that kind.”

She folded her arms. “What about the images your contractor sent us?”

Bazin’s craggy face turned to granite. “Staged, I imagine,” he growled. “I am very disappointed in her. I would like to think that Dimitri made my displeasure over those lies plain to her.”

“Is that what you think happened?”

He eyed her. “No,” said Bazin at length. “Yolkin would not hesitate to break protocol and contact me if he had ended Bauer or the assassin. He would want to show off.”

“The fact that he has not—” she began.

“The fact that he has not means Bauer killed him,” Bazin snapped irritably. “Mager and the others too, I imagine. All the more reason for us to succeed here.”

Ziminova fell silent, unable to frame her thoughts in a way that would not annoy her commander more if she voiced them.

He saw it in her eyes, though. “Galina, your silence is insulting.”

She sighed. “Does it not concern you that we have heard nothing from the consulate in New York or headquarters in Moscow? It has been several hours since President Suvarov touched down at Sheremetyevo. If Bauer’s capture is of such importance to him, why has there been only silence?”

Bazin looked away. “Suvarov has more to deal with than just the balance of this account.”

“My point exactly,” said Ziminova. “He may not even be in office anymore. In which case, our orders will be in question.”

He eyed her. “You think I am exceeding my remit? Bauer killed Russian citizens. That’s reason enough.”

“We are now well beyond the mission parameters given to us at the start of the operation, sir.”

“I expect better from you.” Bazin sniffed. “I did not recruit you to my command because you
question
orders, but because you
obey
them.”

“I serve the Motherland,” she replied after a moment, “not one man’s need for belligerence.”

Bazin was about to chastise her, but before he could draw breath there was a chime from his jacket pocket. He pulled a cellular telephone from the depths of his coat and spoke into it. “Report.”

Ziminova heard the faint mutter of Ekel’s voice on the other end of the line. “
I have located the watchers
.”

*   *   *

“
Deal with them,
” said Bazin, and he cut the call short.

Ekel nodded as if the commander were there with him, and continued walking up the shady sidewalk toward the parked Suburban. He made a point of looking carefully at the vehicle, even though he had already observed it from the front entrance of the hospital for several minutes. The American security agents had chosen a good viewpoint for themselves, but at the cost of making their presence highly visible to anyone with even the most basic understanding of surveillance techniques. Perhaps that had been part of their mission brief, to make sure they stood out in order to deter anyone who might come looking for their principals. If so, then the Americans had seriously misunderstood the adversaries they were facing.

But then again,
Ekel thought,
they so often did
. He guessed that these men felt secure and in control here, on the streets of a city that belonged to them. That overconfidence would work to the Russians’ advantage.

He approached the passenger side door and came up close, tapping on the opaque black glass of the window. After a moment, it dropped open a few inches, revealing the face of a Latino man wearing dark sunglasses. “Yeah?” he asked.

Ekel produced a gold detective’s shield with one hand and held it in his palm. He had exchanged a fake NYPD badge for a fake LAPD one on the way in from the airstrip. “You can’t be parked here.” He nodded toward a sign on a nearby light pole that said the same, warning drivers not to block a road used frequently by emergency vehicles.

“It’s not a problem.”

“What?” Ekel gestured at the window, motioning for the man to open it a little more. “You got to move this thing.” He mimicked an accent he heard on American cop shows.

The opening widened, revealing a shield of a different design dangling from a chain around the other man’s neck. “Federal agents,” he explained. “That doesn’t apply to us.”

Ekel took in another man in the driver’s seat and a third behind him. The Russian’s free hand dropped out of sight, snaking into the folds of his jacket.

“Show me your badge again,” said the Latino man, his tone flat and hard.

“Okay, sure.” Ekel nodded, offering it up for scrutiny. As the agent leaned forward to get a better look, Ekel’s other hand came back gripping a Makarov P6 pistol. The modified gun had an integral silencer capable of reducing the sound of a shot to a loud cough, and Ekel fired it into the agent’s face at close range. He kept on shooting, putting bullets into the driver and the other CTU operative until the magazine was empty, unloading the weapon in less than three seconds. He didn’t worry about through-and-through shots penetrating the walls or the windows of the SUV. The vehicle’s armor worked both ways.

When it was done, Ekel hid the P6 away and leaned briefly into the SUV to tap the automatic window control, slipping back out as the glass rose up and concealed his kills.

He walked casually back toward the hospital, watching an ambulance blaze past in a skirl of sirens and flashing lights. “It’s done,” he said into his cell phone. “What next?”

“
The daughter has arrived,
” Bazin replied. “
Make sure the package is in place
.”

Ekel nodded and made for the underground car park. “Confirmed. And the primary?”

He heard the smile in Bazin’s voice. “
Patience
.”

22

The elevator doors slid back and the first face Kim saw was her husband’s. He looked no different from the first time she had seen him, a chance meeting at the hospital before a lunch date with her friend Sue. In the months that followed, Kim had learned that Sue—a college roommate who was now a senior nurse as Cedars-Sinai—had intended the two of them to cross paths all along.

That memory seemed like something from another life, as if it belonged to another Kim. She had been single for a long time, drifting though a handful of relationships after she and Chase Edmunds had suffered their fractious breakup, but never finding someone she could really connect with. Sue later admitted that on meeting Dr. Stephen Wesley, she had known immediately that this was the person that Kim Bauer needed in her life. She’d been right.

Stephen was kind and he was patient, and most of all he was always there for her. Right now, Kim needed that more than ever.

“Hey, pumpkin,” she told her daughter, shifting the little girl’s weight where she lay draped over her mother’s shoulder. “Here’s Daddy…”

“Okay.” Teri blinked and yawned.

Stephen smiled ruefully as Kim approached. “She’s still sleepy?”

Kim nodded. “The flight back from New York wiped her out, I think.”

“I know the feeling,” said her husband, and he stifled a yawn of his own.

The trip home hadn’t been a smooth one. The sudden, unexplained addition of extra security measures at JFK delayed everything, and that alone would have been stressful enough, but being forced to fly home without her father had made Kim irritable and worried. A day ago, she hugged him when he promised that he would be coming back to California with them, to finally stick to his retirement from government service and find some low-key private security job. But that had not happened. Events overtook Jack Bauer, as they seemed fated to do, and now Kim was in the same place she had been time and time again over the past few years. She couldn’t be certain if her father was alive or dead, and she hated that this hollow feeling in her chest was so familiar, so well-known to her.

Stephen came close, and without words, he drew his wife and daughter into an embrace. Kim saw the understanding in his eyes, and she blinked away tears before they could form.

“Thanks for coming to see me,” he said. “How are you doing?”

“I don’t know.”

She put Teri down and all of a sudden the little girl came alive with a spurt of new energy, dashing ahead to lead the way down the corridor toward Stephen’s office. Other nurses and staff smiled and waved at the child. She was well-liked by her husband’s work colleagues, and a regular visitor. Kim tried to make sure mother, father and daughter spent a lunchtime together at least once a week.

When Teri was out of earshot, Kim leaned close to her husband. “No one is saying anything. All the news coming out of New York is frightening, this assassination, the president’s resignation … And nobody knows where my dad is.”

He frowned. “You used to work with these people once, right? The Counter Terrorist Unit? Isn’t there anyone you could call?”

She shook her head. “I already tried. But Chloe isn’t answering her phone, and the numbers I had for CTU Los Angeles are coming up dead.” Kim swallowed hard, fighting down a sob. “Oh god, Stephen, it’s happening just like last time. I think … I think I’m going to lose him.” She looked away. “I can’t go through all that again.”

Stephen squeezed her hand. “You don’t know that he got caught up in all that trouble.”

“
I do!
” She halted. Teri was fixated on a conversation with Sue, but still she turned so the little girl wouldn’t see the anguish on her mother’s face. “I know my dad,” Kim went on. “I know he could never stand by and let bad things happen to good people, it’s who he is!” She wiped at her eyes. “And … and I told him it was okay. I told him he could stay at CTU and come back with us later…” The next words made her blood run cold. “What if something terrible happened to him because he stayed in New York?”

He pulled her close again. “Kim, no. That’s not on you. Don’t blame yourself.”

“I told him to be careful,” she said in a small voice.

Stephen nodded. “Come on, honey. Come into my office. We’ll see if we can’t find somebody with some answers.”

Kim nodded and walked with him to the door. Teri dashed ahead to get there first and rushed in, running through the anteroom outside the office proper, dragging her plush toy bear along with her.

She heard her daughter call out in surprise as Stephen closed the door behind her.

“
Jack!
” piped Teri. “I mean,
Grandpa!
”

Kim pushed past her husband and into the inner room. There, crouched on his haunches so he could look his grandchild in the eyes, was her father. A smile, behind it a mix of joy and fatigue, relief and fear, split his face. “Hey, sweetheart. How’s Bear?”

Teri held up the toy. “He’s good. He was sad that you weren’t coming with us but now he’s happy.”

“Me too.” He stood up. “Hello, Kim. Stephen. Sorry to surprise you like this.”

“
Dad
.” Kim went to her father and hugged him. She felt him tense, and immediately she knew he had been hurt. He smelled of sweat, cordite and smoke, as if he had come from a battleground. “You’re here.”

“Yeah.”

Stephen came forward, casting a practiced eye over his father-in-law. “Jack … you look like you could use some help.” He nodded toward an examination alcove across the room. “Take what you need.”

A silent communication passed between the two men, and Kim’s father nodded. “Thank you.” He smiled down at Teri. “Sweetheart, Grandpa and Mommy need to talk about something. Why don’t you and Daddy go play with Bear, huh?”

“Okay…” Teri’s tone was a little sullen, but the girl didn’t question him. Jack had that way with her, Kim noted. She trusted him implicitly.

Stephen shot Kim a questioning look, and she responded with a nod. “We’ll be right outside,” he said, taking his daughter by the hand to lead her back out into the corridor.

As the door closed, Kim’s father slumped against the examination bed. “Hey. I know this isn’t what you had in mind when you asked me to come.”

“You’re in trouble.” It wasn’t a question.

A rueful smile crossed his face. “It’s complicated.” He shrugged out of his jacket. “Can you help me get this shirt off?”