24: Deadline (24 Series) (4 page)

“
If?
” Hadley prodded him in the chest. “Be realistic, Jorge. You really think a guy like him is going to give you the choice? Markinson is right. Bauer’s the
shoot-first
type.”

Kilner eyed him. “With respect … maybe it’s not
me
who should be thinking about his motivation.”

Hadley hesitated on the edge of a retort, then reeled it back in. “Your honesty is appreciated. In the meantime, I want you out on the street. Bauer’s running on empty, so he’s going to need money and gear. He was staying at the Hotel Chelsea on the West Side. Get out there and check in on the location, just in case.”

“In case of what? The Evidence Response Team have already looked the place over.”

“Still,” Hadley insisted, pushing past him to walk away. “Go check in. That’s an order.”

*   *   *

As the traffic crawled along Second Avenue past Stuyvesant Square, Jack shrank deeper into the threadbare hoodie he had found on the backseat of the stolen Toyota. Rush hour was always a pain in the ass, but New York City’s grid of streets conspired to make it a special kind of hell. Lines of cars and vans inched forward in fits and starts, and drivers leaned on their horns within a heartbeat if someone failed to go with the flow. He watched a pair of cab drivers in the lane alongside moving in lockstep, conducting a raucous argument back and forth out of their open windows. Now and then, a police siren would pulse out a whoop of noise, and in the rearview, Jack saw blue-and-white cruisers forcing their way through the gridlock, sometimes mounting the sidewalk in order to slip past.

The metallic rattle of a helicopter passed overhead and he resisted the urge to peer out and take a look. It would only take a single frame for a mobile camera or static monitor to capture his image and flag it. Jack had stopped to rub a dash of black grime on his cheeks before getting in the car, a broken asymmetrical line that looked accidental but would actually be enough to slow down any facial recognition software that did catch sight of him. It was a stopgap measure, though, and it wouldn’t work against a human observer.

His fingers drummed on the steering wheel. He felt
exposed,
pinned in place inside the steel box of the car. Even now, his hunters could be vectoring in on this location. Snipers in the buildings across the street, gunmen in the vehicles trailing him. Every person out there was a potential threat, every window a place for a shooter to fire from.

Jack became aware that the two cabbies had fallen silent, their voices replaced by the mutter of a radio. Other cars around him were doing the same, turning up the volume, rolling down their windows so everyone could hear. He leaned forward and snapped on the Toyota’s dashboard radio, and the same voice was there on every station he found.

Allison Taylor, the first female president of the United States, was addressing her nation in a live broadcast. “
My fellow Americans,
” she began. “
It is with a heavy heart that I must speak to you this evening. A situation has arisen that I cannot, in all good conscience, allow to progress any further. At this hour, I am formally resigning my position as your president and stepping down from my post as commander-in-chief. I am passing that grave responsibility to my vice president and trusted friend, Mitchell Heyworth.
”

Jack listened to her voice, imagining Taylor as she stood there before the lectern, her words issuing out across a room full of stunned, silent reporters. He tried to make sense of his own feelings toward the woman. His anger at her actions was still raw and harsh, and it was hard to separate it from the churn of emotion that seethed in the wake of Renee’s death.

That Jack respected the office of the president was without question—it was ingrained in him, and on some level, he would always be the good soldier—but he also knew full well the terrible responsibilities it demanded from those who held that lofty post. Jack thought of David Palmer, a man of strong character and high ideals who had struggled to execute his terms in the Oval Office with honor and courage, and of his brother Wayne who had done his best to follow David’s example. Others, like Noah Daniels and James Prescott, had been driven to make dangerous choices and pay for their consequences. Today, Allison Taylor would learn that price as well.

“
When I leave this room I will remand myself to the attorney general for questioning,
” she was saying. “
A grave conspiracy has been at work over the last day, and to my shame I must acknowledge that I did not do enough to bring it to light when the opportunity was presented to me. I ask for your forgiveness and your understanding at this time, and I promise you all that there will be a swift, just and above all, transparent resolution to these difficult hours. Thank you.
”

The room exploded with questions as the assembled reporters clamored to be the first to challenge Taylor’s words. Jack’s eyes narrowed and he turned the radio volume back down, processing what he had heard.

She had kept her word to him, her commitment to exposing the plot to disrupt the Kamistan peace treaty and power games behind it. Perhaps he had been wrong about her.

What happened next in the corridors of the United Nations, the White House, the Kremlin and the IRK Parliament would be the business of statesmen and policy makers. Maybe it would mean nations turning against nations, heightened tensions and daggers drawn … Right now, all that seemed a very distant thing, a long way removed from Jack’s world.

President Taylor’s honesty had rung the death knell for her political career and opened her up to the threat of arrest and incarceration. More than that, any possibility that her administration might have protected Jack and his friends had evaporated. His colleagues at CTU, people like Chloe O’Brien, Arlo Glass, Cole Ortiz and all the others, they too would now find themselves at the sharp end. It angered him that they might face prison sentences for daring to do the right thing in impossible circumstances. He felt powerless to help them, just as he had been powerless to save Renee’s life as she bled out from a sniper’s bullet.

A bleak mood settled on him, a yawning dark hollow opening up in his chest. So many people had been taken from him, so much of his life ripped away in fire and blood. And now, here he was once again, on the edge of an abyss. Forsaken and alone, his liberty measured by the ticks of the clock.

For a moment, Jack allowed himself to wonder what might happen if he were just to open the car door and step out into the street, hands above his head. What would Jack Bauer’s fate be?

Forces of his own nation were hunting him, and so were the agents of his enemies. There was a butcher’s bill with his name on it, and it would be a race between the American government and the covert operatives of the Russian Federation to find him first. Both wanted to make him pay for the laws he had broken and the lives he had ended. Jack knew that neither one would give any quarter when they came to take him. The best he could hope for was life in some nameless prison off the grid; the worst, a bullet in the back of the head and his body dumped in the river.

He rejected the thought.
No,
he told himself,
I made a promise to my daughter. I
won’t
let her down. I’ll see her again. One last time.

On some level he knew that the smarter choice, the practical and expedient option would be to cut loose and disappear right now, this very second. Jack knew a dozen ways he could become a ghost and rebuild a new life for himself in some other place.

But that felt like a betrayal. Kim was all the family he had left, the last bright star in his life’s dark sky. He thought about never seeing her again, and something inside him twisted like a knife of ice.

Even if nothing else was clear to him, the vow he had made to Kim was unbreakable. His daughter, her husband, Stephen, and Jack’s beautiful grandchild, Teri … All of them were at risk as long as he was still around. He had vanished before, and he would do it again, just drop off the radar and disappear. But first he would keep his promise and say his good-byes. Nobody would be allowed to prevent that.
Nobody
.

“Hey, pallie!” Jack snapped out of his reverie with a start, the sound of a blaring car horn bringing him back to the moment. He looked up and saw one of the cabbies leaning out of his window to shout at him. The taxi driver stabbed a finger at the road ahead and the growing gap where the traffic had finally started to shift. “Where you going, man?” he demanded.

“Home,” replied Jack.

*   *   *

“These orders come directly from President Suvarov,” said Bazin, and he paused to allow that statement to bed in. Ziminova said nothing, but he could see that the three other men in the room were all on the cusp of saying something. He made an accepting motion with his hand. “Speak up. I have little tolerance for those who stay silent out of fear of challenge.”

Predictably, Yolkin was the first to give voice. “Suvarov authorized this personally?” Thin and wiry, Yolkin had cold blue eyes and spoke in a flat monotone that droned around the room. “Today?”

“Less than an hour ago. The killing of an American citizen, yes.” Bazin nodded. “Was I unclear?”

“Not just a citizen.” Mager was the next to speak up. He was perhaps the most
average
of men that Bazin had ever known, so nondescript that you could lose him in a crowd and a moment later struggle to recall his face. “A highly trained soldier. A federal agent.”

“
Former
federal agent,” corrected Ziminova. “He is a wanted man now. Their law enforcement agencies have been mobilized to arrest and detain him.”

“Why not let them do so?” Ekel finally decided to offer his question from the depths of the cockpit leather chair where he slouched, one hand forever toying with a length of his oily black hair. “Would it not be easier to let Bauer find his way to a prison and then pay some murderer to smother him in his cell?” He held up his hands. “We would stay clean in the matter.”

Yolkin grunted in a vague approximation of a chuckle. “This is not about staying clean, pretty boy. This is about sending a message.”

Bazin nodded. “As usual, Yolkin cuts to the meat of it. Yes. The motivation for this directive is retribution, pure and simple. President Suvarov is angry at this Bauer. It seems he was directly responsible for derailing certain operational plans, and beyond that, the man also had the temerity to think he could strike directly at members of the Russian government.”

“Out of revenge,” Mager noted. “That idiot Tokarev shot Bauer’s woman.”

“Tokarev was made to pay for that,” said Ziminova. “He was sliced open, like a pig.”

“He wasn’t the only one,” Bazin added, his jaw hardening as he thought of the other murders.

Ziminova went on, picking up the thread of her commander’s briefing. “Bauer is also responsible for the deaths of Minister Mikhail Novakovich and his protection detail. Eight men in total.”

Bazin had personally known three of those men. He had trained them in counter-terror tactics, back in the days when the SVR had still been the KGB, and the American had seen them all to their graves. It was one more reason for him to be leading this operation, for a settling of that score. He leaned forward in his chair. “Make no mistake. This is a question of
respect
. A question of offense made and reparation to be paid. President Suvarov himself would have been in Bauer’s sights had circumstances played out differently. The American cannot be allowed to live after committing these acts.”

“That would be weakness.” Yolkin nodded. “It would make Suvarov appear foolish if he does nothing.”

“That ship has sailed,” muttered Ekel.

Bazin shot him a look. “What do you mean by that?”

Ekel colored slightly, then straightened. When he spoke again, he lowered his voice, as if he were afraid that Suvarov might hear him from wherever he was in the consulate building. “It is just … They are saying that the telephone lines are burning up between here and Moscow. The prime minister and his cabinet have called an emergency meeting of the Federal Assembly. There is talk that the president will be said to be involved in the Hassan assassination…” Ekel hesitated. “Suvarov will not find a warm welcome waiting for him at home.”

They had all heard the rumor, and it irritated Bazin that others were discussing it as if it were already fact. He drew himself up and fixed Ekel with a hard gaze. “The prime minister and his friends in the Duma … Those men are
politicians,
my friend. But Yuri Suvarov is a
leader
. We follow the orders of the latter, not the former. What does or does not occur when he next sets foot on Russian soil is not your concern. We have been given an order by our commander-in-chief and it will be obeyed. We have been tasked to find and terminate an enemy of the Motherland. Unless that order is countermanded, we will proceed in that intent.” He got to his feet and the rest of the team did the same.

As his second-in-command, Ziminova issued the next set of orders. “We will proceed to a staging area to pick up weapons and equipment. From there, we will break into teams and commence the operation. You will coordinate directly with our operator here in the consulate via encrypted communication.”

The three men nodded and walked out, leaving Bazin to stand at the end of the long, high table. He pulled a smartphone from his pocket and began to tap out a text message.

Ziminova watched him from the doorway. “Sir,” she began. “I know it goes without saying, but we must operate with the utmost care from this point onward. If any of our assets are exposed as we track down Bauer, the fallout could be considerable.”

“You are afraid to give the world more reasons to hate us?” Bazin sniffed. “We are Russian. That has never mattered to us. But do not be concerned. I am going to call in a local contractor to assist.”

“Is that wise?”

He continued to work at the tiny touchpad. “She has worked for us before. I have every confidence.”