24: Deadline (24 Series) (39 page)

“The SVR.” Jack’s blood ran cold. “If there’s one, there’ll be more. They’re here for me.” He turned to Kim and gave her hand a squeeze. “This is it. I have to go.”

She nodded, eyes shining, and let him pull away. Jack headed down the corridor toward a service elevator, and Stephen fell into step with him. “Jack … Look, I can’t pretend to know what’s going on with you, but I have … I have to protect my family.”

“I know.” He nodded. “That’s all I ask of you.”

Stephen sighed. “Okay.” He swallowed hard and then pressed a key fob into Jack’s palm. “Take my car. The black Audi R8, in the staff parking lot. Ride the elevator down to the basement, cut through the first storage room on the right. That’ll lead you into the parking garage.”

“Thanks.”

Stephen looked away without meeting his gaze. “Good luck,” he said, as the elevator doors slid closed.

Jack went down to the basement with no stops, using the time to check his pistol.
Only one mag left.
He scowled. A stand-up engagement was not an optimal choice.
I’ve got to draw them away …

The sublevel corridor was empty and Jack ducked out of the elevator, breaking into a run. As he went, he spun out multiple plans in his thoughts, weighing up his tactical options.

But until he entered the storeroom, it did not occur to Jack that he might have been betrayed.

He was barely through the door when they came at him.

23

“Daddy, what’s the matter?” Kim heard the panic bubbling up under the words as her daughter asked the question. Teri was a highly empathetic child, forever picking up on the emotions of others around her. Right now, she was feeling their fear.

“It’s okay,” Stephen insisted. “It’s all fine, pumpkin.” He carried Teri up close to his chest, arms wrapped around her as if she were the most precious cargo.

And she is,
Kim told herself. She kept pace with her husband as they exited the elevator and made their way quickly toward the public parking lot where she had left the family sedan. “Stephen,” she insisted. “Did he tell you something?” When he didn’t answer, Kim pulled on his arm. “
Stephen!
Talk to me!”

He whirled around and she saw an expression on his face she didn’t recognize. Fear, yes, that was there. But something else.
Anguish. Guilt
. Kim’s stomach flipped over and she felt sick with a sudden, nameless dread.

“You have to get out of here,” he told her. “Take Teri and get away. Go to my mom’s place in Pasadena, stay there until you hear from me, don’t open the door to anyone else…”

Kim shook her head. “Not until you tell me what he said to you!”

“Damn it, Kim! For once will you just do what I ask?” Stephen shouted at her and she recoiled, taken aback by his unexpected reaction. In his arms, Teri immediately started to cry. As quickly as it had come, the moment of anger faded again. “I’m sorry.
I’m sorry,
” he told them both. “Please. Just do this for me. Don’t ask why.”

They were at the car now, and Kim took her daughter, putting her into the booster seat. She strapped Teri in with her toy bear and then rounded on Stephen. “You know I’m not going to do that. That’s not who I am, it’s not how my father raised me.”

“Oh god, your father…” Stephen looked away. “Kim, we’re all in danger.”

“What did he say?” she repeated.

Stephen shook his head. “I didn’t have a choice.” He took a shuddering breath. “He didn’t say anything. It’s what Jack did, it’s the people who want him…”

A chill ran down Kim’s spine. “What happened?”

He looked back toward the hospital. “I’m going to make it right. But you have to get away from here, don’t you get it? The ones hunting him, they were already here! They know who we are, they know where I work … They could be watching the house, or looking for us right now. I can’t let them hurt us. I can’t lose you two.”

“Did…” She could barely form the words. “Did you give him up?”

“They said they would kill you. And Teri.” The words fell from him in a rush. “I had no choice! I had to stall them…”

Kim backed away. “No…”

“I’ll make it right!” he said. “But you have to leave. Please.”

For a moment, all Kim wanted to do was push past Stephen and run headlong back into the hospital to search for her father, but then she saw Teri in the backseat watching her with questioning eyes.

“Mommy?” said the little girl. “Are we gonna go?”

She seemed so small, so fragile, and suddenly Kim felt a powerful surge of protectiveness toward her child, enough that she found herself understanding the crippling choice her husband had made. “Yes,” said Kim, the words like ashes in her mouth. “We’re going.”

All around them there were hundreds of windows looking down on the street, and any one of them could be hiding somebody with a weapon, some killer ready to do them harm. Stephen glanced up, thinking the same thing, and pushed Kim toward the driver’s seat. “I won’t let anything happen to our family,” he vowed.

“I believe you,” said Kim, and she meant it.

Two minutes later they were on the highway racing east, and Kim found it hard to stay focused on the road ahead as tears blurred her vision.

*   *   *

Ziminova paused to check the safety on her Makarov pistol and then returned the weapon to the paddle holster in the small of her back. The weapon was a bad fit with the disguise of the nurse’s scrubs she was wearing, but now they were down on the lower levels of the hospital complex, it was less likely they would encounter someone who might recognize the SVR hunter team as interlopers. Ekel was waiting for them on the sublevel, that cocky grin he liked to wear plastered across his face. He talked about the American agents lying dead in plain sight up on the street, hidden inside their car, and made a passing mention of “other preparations” he had made. Bazin accepted this with a dismissive nod and did not explain any further. Ziminova wondered what Ekel was referring to, but she said nothing.

They found the storeroom and waited there, among the racks of medical supplies, old compressed air cylinders and stacked chairs. Lenkov bounced from foot to foot like a boxer limbering up before a bout, rolling a stubby baton around in one hand.

“You should have put a man on the doctor,” insisted Ekel. “He might panic and run.”

“No.” Bazin shook his head. “He will not flee. A doting young father has little perspective on things when it comes to his wife and child. I know. I was once that man.” He drew his Makarov and screwed a long silencer to the end of the muzzle.

Ekel raised an eyebrow. “Really? I find it hard to believe you are that attached to anything, sir.”

“Some parents are capable of great sacrifice,” he replied. “Others do not realize that their love for their offspring is a weakness they can never overcome.”

“If you are wrong…” began Lenkov.

Out in the corridor, they all heard the clank of the service elevator arriving.

Bazin smiled. “I am not wrong.” He nodded to the two men, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Remember. I want him alive.”

Ziminova shrank back into the shadows cast around by the stark lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, as Ekel and Lenkov took up positions on either side of the door.

It opened a moment later and Jack Bauer came into the room in a rush. Ziminova recognized the face she had seen staring up at her from the file documents she had read in the consulate, now set in a determined cast.

She held back and watched as Lenkov and Ekel rushed him. The blond-haired SVR agent led the attack, disarming the American as Ekel came in for his own shot at the man. The metallic shape of Bauer’s weapon skittered away across the concrete floor.

Their target shook off the moment of shock at the surprise attack almost instantly, however. Ziminova was impressed with how fast he turned it around. In seconds, Ekel was reeling backward with broken bones while Bauer was engaging Lenkov in close-quarter hand-to-hand combat.

It wasn’t an elegant engagement by any stretch of the imagination. Lenkov took a beating, coughing out specks of bright blood. Bauer’s fighting style was all about violence and velocity, putting as much hurt as he could on his assailants as was possible in the smallest amount of time.

Ziminova was already gauging him, considering how she would approach this man if the fight came her way.

But then the question became moot. She saw the moment as it happened, when the ebb and flow of the fight suddenly turned against Bauer.
He is tired, yes
. All that pressure from running, hour after hour, fleeing across the country, battling every step of the way … it had exacted a toll. The American made a mistake, he hesitated, and it was enough to bring him down. Ekel struck him in the back of the knee and Bauer toppled.

“End this,” snapped Bazin, gesturing sharply. “Now!”

The dark-haired man nodded wearily and pulled a boxy stun gun from his jacket pocket. He stepped up before Bauer could get to his feet, and pressed the contacts of the weapon into the man’s chest. Ziminova winced as raw voltage ripped into the American and sent him crashing back down to the floor.

With his foot, Bazin nudged a threadbare office chair into the middle of the basement, directly beneath the stark white lightbulb. “Secure him,” he ordered.

Lenkov and Ekel struggled with Bauer’s dead weight, both men feeling the harsh effect of the blows their target had laid on them. It took a while to maneuver him into place.

Finally, Lenkov tuned his head and spat out a glob of blood-laced spittle, producing two plastic cable ties that he used to tether Bauer’s wrists to the arms of the chair.

The target—no, the
prisoner
now—lolled forward and blinked owlishly. Ziminova drew her cell phone from a pocket and raised it to her face. She selected the camera application and snapped a couple of shots of Bauer. He seemed to become aware of her, and peered in her direction. His gaze was feral and full of anger.

Bazin walked around the chair until he was looking Bauer in the eye. “It amazes me you are still alive. You should be dead a dozen times over.”

“It’s been said.” Bauer’s words were gruff.

“No longer.” Bazin kept talking, amusing himself with the largely one-sided conversation, almost trying to goad the American into …
what?
Ziminova wondered what her commander’s intention was. Did Bazin think this was some sort of game? Or was it that he liked to revel in the victory?

Bauer’s death, when it came, would be a moment of import. The man was a renegade, and if his record was to be believed, he was a loose cannon in the black ops world. Killing the American would make a fine trophy for Bazin to carry home with him. That was why he had told the others to hold off from simply shooting Bauer the moment he entered the room. Bazin wanted to do the deed himself.

For her part, Ziminova found such attitudes distasteful. There were the needs of the mission and the orders at hand from the proper authorities to consider, nothing more. She disliked the way that Bazin played his operations out like they were games, to be scored and ranked upon completion.

“Your own people want you dead!” he was saying. “I do them a favor.”

Bauer’s answer was a weary, fatalistic snarl. “So do it, and be on your way.”

His breaths rasping through his bruised throat, Lenkov held up his own cell phone and tapped a tab to begin recording a video file.

Bazin raised his gun and took aim. “Jack Bauer … your time is up.” He turned and looked into the eye of the cell phone camera, switching to Russian for a moment to make the recording an official record of the act. “I am Major Arkady Bazin, field commander of Active Unit Green Six. Present with me to witness this lawful termination of a terrorist enemy combatant are operatives Lenkov, Ekel and Ziminova. Orders are authorized directly by the president.” He continued on in English as he spoke of the men that the American had killed in New York during his one-man crusade to find those responsible for the death of his lover, the root of the hunt that had led them across the United States to this dark, subterranean room and this final moment. “You are guilty of the murders of Diplomatic Attaché Pavel Tokarev, Foreign Minister Mikhail Novakovich and the members of his protection detail, of conspiracy to assassinate President Yuri Suvarov and sundry other crimes against the people and the government of the Russian Federation. You are a threat to the security of our nation. For this, you have been declared an enemy of the state and sentenced to death. Do you have anything to say?”

The prisoner looked up and met their gazes, each one in turn. As he looked Ziminova in the eye, she was startled by a sudden vibration from the phone in her hand. She looked down, frowning. The display read
INCOMING CALL: CONSULATE
.

Bauer’s reply came in pitch-perfect, unaccented Russian. “Maybe you should get that.”

*   *   *

“Ignore it,” snapped Bazin. “We’ll talk to them when this is over.”

But the woman, the one called Ziminova, shook her head and raised the phone to her ear, walking away across the room. She spoke Russian in low tones that Jack could barely register. Something about “the mission,” and he guessed by her manner she was talking to someone in authority.

Bazin, clearly the SVR field commander, gave her an angry look for her disobedience. Jack assumed that this guy had already plotted out a neat little narrative in his head about how this confrontation would work, and now the flow of that was being interrupted and he wasn’t happy.

He took the moment to test the flex in the two zip-ties holding him to the chair. They were tight, but his legs were still free, which meant he had a chance to exploit a weakness in the restraints.

Then the distraction he needed made itself available. Out in the corridor beyond the storeroom, the service elevator door slid open and they all heard the voice that called out a second later.

“Jack, where are you?” Stephen Wesley was shouting, desperate and terrified.

“
Stephen!
” Jack took a lungful of air and bellowed back at him. “Run! Don’t—”