Death Angel (3 page)

Two men got out of the car and started toward him. FBI special agents Hickman and Coates—he’d met them before.

Coates had been driving. He was big and bearish, like an ex-football lineman. He was carrying a lot of weight and he looked like the heat didn’t agree with him. His face and neck were lobsterred and sweat-slick. Perched on top of his
round head was a narrow-brimmed straw hat that looked a size or two too small. His navy-blue blazer, open-neck sport shirt, and slacks all looked rumpled.

He dropped the car keys into his right-hand jacket pocket. Jack took note of that; it would make things easier for him.

Hickman, the higher-ranking of the two, was neat, trim, and compact. He wore a summer-weight suit, a tie, and shiny black shoes. If the heat bothered him he showed no sign of it. His short, dark hair was parted as precisely on one side as if it had been laid out with a ruler. He looked like an accountant—one who specialized in foreclosures.

Jack nodded to the two men. Indicating his room, he said, “In there.”

He went inside, the others following. Coates brought up the rear and quickly closed the door behind him to prevent any civilians outside from seeing the corpse. There was none nearby but he did so anyway.

Jack took several paces into the room and stopped short, causing the FBI men to stop in their tracks to avoid bumping into him. They milled around impatiently behind him, craning for a better look at the body.

“Watch your step,” Jack cautioned.

“Yeah, we know. We’ve been to a few crime scenes before,” Coates said, his tone sarcastic.

“Not like this one. That’s a poison needle. The point was covered with a gray plastic cap to protect her from accidentally scratching herself and getting a dose of the toxin. The cap shattered when it went into her. You can see some of those gray pieces on the carpet. You don’t want to get any stuck to the bottoms of your shoes.”

“How do you know the needle was poisoned?” Hickman asked.

“When the stuff hit her she went out like that,” Jack said, snapping his fingers.

Hickman nodded, thoughtful. “Duly noted,” he said. He and Coates fanned out around Jack, moving deeper into the room to examine the corpse, stepping carefully around it.

Jack stumbled against Coates, bumping into him. He put a hand on the big man’s shoulder as if to steady himself. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” Coates barked.

“Sorry,” Jack said.

Hickman asked, “What exactly happened here, Bauer? How did it go down?”

“She came in to change the sheets and towels—she said. Then she made her move when she thought I wasn’t looking.”

“And…?”

“I was looking,” Jack deadpanned.

Coates hooked his thumbs in the corners of his front pants pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels. “Maybe she thought you were going to beat it without leaving her a tip.”

Jack moved to one side, out of the way. He stood leaning against the cabinet with his hands folded behind him. The others had eyes only for the corpse. Jack reached behind himself and carefully deposited an object behind a plastic ice bucket, which hid it from view. Nobody saw what he’d done.

Hickman studied the cadaver intently, like an auditor searching ledger entries for a decimal point in the wrong place. He glanced at Jack. “Can you ID her?”

Jack shook his head. “I was hoping you could.”

“I can’t place her.” Hickman turned to Coates. “What about you, Red?”

“I’m blank. She looks like somebody’s maiden aunt.

“Except for the knitting needle stuck in her throat,” he added.

“What tipped you to her, Bauer?” Hickman asked. “How’d you know she was a phony?”

Jack spoke directly to Hickman. “I’ve been here long
enough to know most of the service personnel and I’ve never seen her before. Not much by itself, but it got me wondering. Then she was wearing a uniform with long sleeves. All the other maids had short-sleeved uniforms. Long sleeves in this heat? It didn’t ring true.”

Coates was sour-faced, skeptical. “Maybe her other outfits were in the laundry. Or she had ugly arms and didn’t like to show ’em.”

“I thought of that, too. So I tried her out with another test. I asked her why the regular maid, Norma, wasn’t cleaning my room like usual. She said it was Norma’s day off.”

“So?”

“Norma was just a name I made up. The maid who cleans the room is Carmen,” Jack said.

Hickman nodded with a barely perceptible tilt of the head, as if acknowledging that the other had scored a point.

“You’re a regular Sherlock Junior.” Coates took off his hat and fanned his face with it. Thinning strands of pale orange hair were slicked back over a shiny freckled scalp.

Hickman squatted down and began turning out the woman’s pockets. “She’s clean,” Jack said. “I already gave her a onceover.”

“I bet,” Coates said nastily. “You wouldn’t be holding anything out on us, would you, Bauer?”

“She was a pro on a hit job. She wouldn’t be carrying anything that might indicate her true identity.”

Hickman stood up, reflexively straightening out the creases in his pants. “We’ll see what the lab crew can turn up. Her technique might furnish some solid leads, too. Pretty exotic…We don’t get too many poison needle kills in this neck of the woods.”

“Are you sure?” Jack asked.

Coates bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Dr. Yan started off the chain of Ironwood deaths. A heart attack, they said.”

“It happens. He was over fifty and he’d just finished playing a couple of sets of tennis in the hot sun.”

“He had a clean bill of health on his most recent physical and had no history of heart trouble.”

“An autopsy wouldn’t have missed something as obvious as a needle puncture wound, Bauer.”

“That toxin is so potent that I’m betting that even a scratch or a pinprick of it brings on instant death. And the symptoms could pass for a heart attack or stroke.”

“Under the circumstances, I suppose we’ll have to order an exhumation,” Hickman said. “We might learn something new, provided the toxin is one that doesn’t break down a short while after being introduced into the body.”

“You might also want to circulate photos of her around the tennis club,” Jack suggested, indicating the corpse. “Somebody might have noticed her on the premises about the time that Yan dropped dead.”

As if inspired by the thought, he took out his cell phone and used its camera function to photograph the cadaver from several different angles. He stepped back to capture a full body image, then moved in closer to click off a series of head shots, including full frontal views and profiles.

Coates’s unhappiness deepened. “What’re you doing?”

“Taking some souvenir snapshots for the folks back home,” Jack said. He returned the cell to its belt holder. He started toward the front of the room.

“Where’re you going?” Coates demanded.

“I’m going to upload the photos on the CTU net to see if our files can get a make on the killer. I’ll use the digital comm system in my SUV,” Jack said. “Any objections?”

“You’re damned right—”

“Don’t wander too far, Bauer,” Hickman said, cutting off his partner. “Sabito wants to debrief you when he gets here.”

“I don’t work for Vince. I’ve got my own bosses to answer
to and they’ll want this information as soon as possible.” Jack opened the door partway. “I’ll be right outside.”

Hickman shrugged, as if the matter were of no importance. Jack went out. Hickman began, “Red—”

Coates was already starting toward the door. “Stuffy in here. Think I’ll take the air myself.”

“Don’t crowd him. But don’t lose him, either.”

“Fat chance of that!”

Jack’s vehicle was parked near room eight. It was a tan Ford Expedition, a CTU vehicle with all the trimmings.

CTU had branches in most major cities in the United States, but its presence in Los Alamos was virtually nil. Its nearest divisional headquarters was in El Paso, Texas.

An agent from CTU/ELP had driven to Los Alamos to deliver the Expedition to Jack to use during his assignment and taken a plane back to home base.

The machine was basically the same model with the same options and special modifications as those used by CTU/L.A. With one notable exception. The Los Angeles vehicles had black exteriors. The Southwestern variety was tan to better resist the desert sun.

Jack reached into his right front pants pocket and took out a handheld electronic keying module. The SUV was equipped with motion-detecting anti-interference sensors capable of triggering a silent vibrating alarm in the electronic key component if anyone had been meddling with it.

The alarm was untripped; the Expedition had not been tampered with. Jack wouldn’t have put Sabito past planting a homing device or bug on the vehicle so he could track Jack’s movements.

Jack pressed the button on the keying device to unlock the SUV. It was parked head-out for a quicker getaway. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw Coates loitering beside the blue-black sedan, watching him.

Jack opened the driver’s side door and took a step back. The sealed SUV had been baking under the sun for hours. The heat inside was slightly terrific. He took a deep breath and climbed in, leaving the door open to let some of the heat out.

He switched on the ignition, the finely tuned engine coming alive with a surge of power. Working the pushbutton controls, he rolled down the windows and turned on the air conditioner. It would take a moment or two before its powerful blowers began pumping cool air into the compartment.

He glanced at Coates nearby standing beside the sedan. Coates glared back at him, scowling. No doubt he suspected Jack of planning to make a break. He couldn’t be dead sure, though, because Jack would have had to turn on the engine to run the air-conditioning and also to power up its digital media station.

The Expedition was equipped with a complex array of digitized communication and information processing systems. It was also equipped with a gun locker containing a formidable arsenal of weaponry.

Jack Bauer had not lied; he had only shaded the truth. He fully intended to upload the photographs on the CTU net where the agency’s extensive reserve of data banks and supercomputers could go to work to identify the assailant. He would do so.

Later.

For now he had bigger fish to fry.

He put the machine in gear and drove away. Behind him he heard Coates’s choked cry of outrage: “Hey!”

The SUV exited the lot, turned right, and headed west on the roadway. It cruised along at a moderate pace appropriate to the tempo of the street traffic.

By now Coates had already jumped into the sedan to give chase. He wasn’t going anywhere, not without his car keys.
Jack had lifted them earlier, back in the motel room, when he’d stumbled into the FBI agent. Crookery 101: misdirect the mark by jostling him or some other such ploy, while making the dip and picking his pocket.

Jack Bauer in the past had many times worked undercover posing as a criminal type to infiltrate a gang or syndicate operation. Along the way he’d picked up more than a few tricks of the trade. Picking pockets was one of the larcenous skills he’d mastered to bolster his cover, and for a clandestine operator such as himself it could be mighty useful at times.

He made a right turn at the second intersection he came to and began a series of evasive maneuvers to make it that much more difficult for others to pick up his trail. Maybe Hickman had a spare set of keys, but even if he did, Jack would be long gone before the sedan was fired up and in pursuit.

Jack hadn’t left the G-men totally marooned at the motel. After lifting Coates’s keys he’d hidden them behind the plastic ice bucket on the counter. Once he was sure he’d given them the slip, he’d phone and tell them where to find the keys.

Hickman and Coates would be sore as hell at Jack for working that gag on them. He had to admit it was a dirty trick but—

Too bad.

He was a long way from home base and operating alone deep in unknown territory here. For all he knew either Hickman or Coates—or for that matter, Sabito—could have fingered him to the assassin.

For now he’d play a lone hand, keep his own counsel, and strike off by himself whenever such action seemed called for.

That was the only way to stay alive for those up against Annihilax.

Take it another step further; tighten the screws of paranoia another notch. Jack could be riding into an ambush right now.

Peter Rhee was as much an unknown quantity as anyone else involved in the manhunt. He might be using their upcoming meeting as a setup to lure Jack into a death trap. One more tightly constructed and inescapable than the one Jack had just thwarted.

Or—Rhee might be only a pawn, an unwitting victim of a master ploy to maneuver Jack into the kill zone. The only way to find out the truth was to go the meeting place.

The motel’s name was Trail’s End but for Jack Bauer it was only the beginning.

12:10
P.M
. MDT
Alkali Flats, Los Alamos County

The meeting place was the Alkali Flats roadside rest area. One didn’t have to drive far in any direction in Los Alamos County to leave civilization behind and enter a desert wasteland of mountains, canyons, and plains.

The rest area was located on Old Sipapu Road, an obscure strip of two-lane blacktop connecting the rugged backcountry with the main roads into town and the lab complexes. It ran through land that was good neither for farming nor for ranching. A road that even the local folks used only to cross a patch of badlands on their way to someplace better.

The Expedition’s GPS system had no trouble in pinpointing the site. Jack was good with directions and had gotten a general sense of the layout of the Los Alamos terrain but
it was reassuring to have the computerized location finder for backup.

Once he’d gotten on Old Sipapu Road Jack had seen few other vehicles, and most of them were going in the opposite direction, driving northbound toward town. Jack drove south toward the meeting place.

The rest area was on the opposite side of the road. A lone vehicle was there, one he recognized as Peter Rhee’s car. Rhee was nowhere in sight and neither was anyone else.

Rhee had picked the site and in theory it seemed like a good one. It was remote, isolated, and out in the open in the middle of nowhere. Seemingly immune to surveillance or ambush.

Playing it safe, Jack avoided pulling directly into the site but instead continued southbound for an eighth of a mile or so before slowing to a halt to survey the terrain.

The landscape was utterly empty of all signs of human habitation. No other vehicle could be seen on the road in either direction, and on this sprawling expanse of terrain with its clear desert air, one could see a long way.

Jack used his cell to call Rhee yet again. As before, there was no reply. Rhee had been out of communication since his last call to Jack, which had been made at 10:30 this morning. That was when he said he’d developed an important lead in the case and had to talk to Jack alone in person.

Jack offered to come out and meet him at Ironwood but that option had been flatly rejected. Rhee said that Ironwood “wasn’t secure” for what he had to tell him and had instead offered the Alkali Flats rest area on Old Sipapu Road as the site for the rendezvous. It wasn’t too far out of town but it offered privacy and seclusion.

Jack had all but begged Rhee to at least give him some hints about what he’d found. Rhee refused to discuss it, even on a secure phone line. Jack agreed to the terms. He couldn’t blame Rhee for what others might have taken for
an excess of caution bordering on paranoia. Ironwood had become a nexus of violence and sudden death. What would seem like paranoia under normal circumstances had come to be seen as nothing more or less than good common sense.

That was the last conversation Jack had had with Rhee. Since then: silence.

Rhee’s car was at the rendezvous but where was its driver? His continued failure to answer his cell was foreboding, ominous. Despite the wide open spaces and sunny blue skies, the empty landscape took on an aura of menace.

Jack resolved to grab the hot iron and retake the initiative. He swung the SUV around in a U-turn and headed north toward the meeting place.

The rest area was on the east side of the road. A gravel lot featured a whitewashed concrete blockhouse restroom with a pay telephone stand nearby. Off to one side on the north was a stand of scraggly timber with a couple of picnic tables beneath it.

Behind the rest stop, the land sloped off to the east, dipping into a low, wide, dusty basin dotted with gnarled, stunted trees, boulders, and clumps of cactus. The landscape was bone-dry, not a pond, puddle, or trickle of a stream in sight. The ground was reddish-brown like the sands of Mars. These were the Alkali Flats.

Way off in the distance on the far side of the flats, a line of brown mountains ran north-south. Rhee’s car was to the left of the restroom blockhouse. It was parked head-in facing the flats and at right angles to the road.

Slowing to enter the rest area, Jack decided against pulling up alongside Rhee’s car. Gravel crunched under his wheels as he rolled to a halt behind the back of Rhee’s car. That put the SUV at right angles to the car and parallel to the roadway.

Jack drew his weapon and got out of the machine. He left
the engine running in case he had to make a quick getaway. He dropped into a crouch, sheltering behind the SUV.

It wasn’t bulletproof, but at least it provided some cover. Not only from any ambusher who might be lurking in or around Rhee’s car, but also from any lurkers in the restroom facility.

Jack’s outfit included a long-billed baseball cap and sunglasses. Long experience in desert conditions at home and abroad had taught him not to go out under the naked sun bareheaded or without eye protection. The sunglasses, a wraparound polarized pair, were particularly essential. The pitiless desert sun, especially at these high altitudes, could easily affect the eyes of unacclimated outsiders, quickly inducing vision problems and even sun blindness.

The air was perfectly still, without a breath of wind. The heat was broiling. The temperature must have been crowding the hundred-degree mark, a relatively moderate temperature for the area at this time of the day and season.

Jack circled around the front of the SUV, gun leveled, approaching in a low crouch Rhee’s car from the driver’s side. He kept the car between himself and the restroom blockhouse. Nearing it he saw that the interior and windows were sprayed red.

He went down on one knee beside the car, keeping his head below the cover of the top of the door line. He peeked under the vehicle, making sure that no one was hiding beneath or in front of it.

He popped up, gun pointing through the open driver’s side at the interior. Its sole occupant was the corpse that lay crumpled in the front seat.

Jack kept moving, circling the car to rush the concrete blockhouse of the restroom facility. A door in the north wall was marked “Ladies.” He flattened his back against the wall to the left of the door.

Crouching low to present a minimal target, he ducked
around the northeast corner, ready to put the blast on any hostiles who might be lurking behind the back of the building. The area came up empty.

He padded soft-footed to the southeast corner and ducked around it to come up on the building’s east side where the men’s room was located. No one on that side, either.

Next came the nerve-racking task of clearing the inside of the facility. He probed the men’s room first, not neglecting to check the stall. It was clean, stark, and functional, smelling of disinfectant and flinty dust. Unoccupied, save for himself.

The ladies’ room came up clear, too, and he went back outside. A blur of motion approached from the south driving north. It was the first vehicle to pass either way in the last ten minutes. It was moving along at a nice clip, about sixty miles an hour. A light blue pickup truck.

As it neared, Jack realized he was standing there with his gun in hand. He lowered it to his side and turned so that his body shielded it from the oncoming vehicle’s occupants.

The pickup truck drove by without slowing. Jack caught a glimpse of a man in a cowboy hat behind the wheel and a woman seated beside him. A couple of young men in work shirts and jeans sat in the hopper behind the cab, talking and laughing.

One of them waved to Jack and he raised a hand back in friendly greeting.

A rancher and his wife and some hands going into town on a Saturday afternoon, Jack guessed. A vignette of everyday normality that made the murder scene seem even more macabre by comparison.

The pickup dwindled to a dot in the northbound lane and winked out of sight.

Jack glanced at the picnic tables under a handful of thin, threadbare trees whose leaves were filmed with dust. No place for anyone to hide there. He couldn’t imagine anyone
choosing to picnic at this forlorn locale; it would be like picnicking on Mars.

Jack holstered his weapon and went to the driver’s side of the car. He walked carefully, watching his step. The un-paved rest area consisted of dirt and gravel. There was a chance that the loose-packed dirt might contain the killer’s footprints or the tire tracks of his vehicle.

Or her vehicle. Why should the killer be a man? The assassin who’d tried for Jack was a woman. To assume that the killer was male was to disarm one’s suspicions by half and allow for a possibly fatal mistake. Had Peter Rhee made such a fatal assumption?

In any case, the ground might hold valuable clues that could be picked up by forensics experts. Jack wanted to leave as minimal a footprint as possible while still surveying the scene.

Nearing the car, Jack noticed something so significant that it brought him to a sudden halt. The ground around the car had been smoothed out to destroy any telltale marks. Sanitized by the killer to erase all traces of evidence.

Regular swirl patterns disturbed the gravel-strewn, reddish-brown dirt, indicating that it had been raked or smoothed over. Not just the immediate area surrounding the car but an extensive patch to the left of it.

Car-sized? Could that be where the killer had parked his vehicle? It, too, had been smoothed over, obliterating not only any footprints but also any telltale tire tread marks as well.

Jack walked in a straight line to Rhee’s car and peered through the open driver’s side window. The interior resembled a slaughterhouse. Blood splattered the roof, windows, windshields, dashboard, and seats.

Peter Rhee didn’t have much of a face left. Not much of a head left, either.

He lay sprawled across the front seat of his parked car.
He must have been sitting behind the wheel when the blast got him, and the impact had blown him out of the driver’s seat, leaving him contorted in the throes of sudden, violent death.

His upper body lay on its side on the passenger seat. His legs were together and bent at the knees and his feet were on the floor on the driver’s side. His head and shoulders were wedged against the passenger side door. His right arm hung down off the edge of the seat cushion, his hand dangling a few inches above the passenger side floor mat.

Jack Bauer’s estimate that the delays at the motel would cause him to be about ten minutes late for his noontime meeting with Peter Rhee had been just about right.

Once he’d gotten off the highway trip and onto the open road he’d made good time getting to the rendezvous. But a killer had gotten there before him.

Peter Rhee had been shot in the face at point-blank range. And not with any mere handgun, either, not even a big-caliber job like a .357 or .44 Magnum. From the looks of the devastation he must have been on the receiving end of a shotgun blast.

No question that the dead man was Peter Rhee, though. The Korean-American counterintelligence officer had had a distinctively shaped hairline and ears that Jack had taken note of during earlier meetings.

Jack tried to put himself in the killer’s head. Why a shotgun? Even a sawed-off job had a certain unwieldiness compared to a handgun. It was pointless to destroy the victim’s face to conceal his identity because that could be determined by a simple fingerprint check.

Terror? That was a possibility. A shotgun was an intimidating weapon that made a real mess. Maybe the kill had been handled that way to terrorize, to throw some fear into anyone foolish enough to get mixed up in the action. Bauer
had seen the tactic before from professional killers like Annihilax.

Another question: How had a shotgun-wielding killer gotten the drop on a veteran operative like Peter Rhee?

Jack stuck his head through the open window. Not so pleasant but he found out a few things. Rhee was armed. The bulge of his shoulder-holstered gun was visible beneath his jacket. Why hadn’t he used it?

There were no car keys in the ignition. Rhee’s jacket and pants pockets were turned out, indicating they’d been searched. The glove compartment was open—also searched?

Jack stepped back, taking a few deep breaths. The super-heated air rasped in his lungs. Absently glancing down, he noticed something: a circular hole had been punched into the ground near the undercarriage between the driver’s side door and rear door.

He hunkered down for a closer look. A layer of loose dirt and sand covered the parking area. It took impressions easily. The hole was slightly wider in diameter than a twenty-five-cent piece and was about two inches deep. He couldn’t figure out what had made it.

It was close enough to the car’s underside that the killer might have missed it while he was smoothing over the ground to erase his tracks. Maybe the blinding glare of the desert sun had caused him to overlook it. Jack made a mental note of it.

He circled around to the rear of the car. There he found the missing ring of car keys, hanging from a lock in the trunk where a key had been inserted. Presumably the killer had unlocked the trunk to search it.

Jack resisted the impulse to unlock and open the trunk and take a look for himself. It could be booby-trapped.

The dirt on the passenger side of the car had been
smoothed over, too. The killer had been thorough—but maybe not thorough enough.

Jack was looking for it this time, and sure enough he found it: another of those curious round holes poked in the ground. This one lay in the shadow of the wheel well behind the right front tire. Like its twin on the other side of the car, this hole, too, was the width of a twenty-five-cent piece and two inches deep. Curious…

He prowled around the car to see if there was anything else he could turn up in the way of clues. A bumper line of telephone pole–sized logs bordered the edge of the rest area to keep parked vehicles from going off the edge right before the ground started sloping downward.

On the far side of the makeshift guardrail was a tangle of scrub brush. Amid the foliage a patch of whiteness where there shouldn’t have been any caught Jack’s eye. It marked where a branch had been freshly broken off a bush.