Death Angel (5 page)

“Not bad. It could have been worked that way,” Jack conceded. “One more thing I want to show you.”

He directed Sabito’s attention to the hole punched in the ground near the undercarriage on the driver’s side of Rhee’s car. “See that? Look like anything to you?”

“Yeah, a hole in the ground.”

“I don’t know what it is, either, but there’s another one just like it on the other side of the car. I’ll show it to you in a minute. It might have been left by the killer.”

Sabito squatted down to examine it, peering at it squinty-eyed from different angles. “Beats me. The only thing I can think of is that maybe the killer accidentally pressed the shotgun muzzle down into the dirt while he was cleaning up. If it was a single-barreled job and not a double. The width would be about right.”

“I thought of that, too,” Jack said. “But can you picture a pro killer who knows guns do something stupid like that? It’s a good way to block the barrel with several inches of hard-packed dirt and take the shooter’s head off the next time he fired it if he forgot to clean and unplug the barrel.”

“Hell, he’d already used it. He could always unplug it later.”

“Sloppy—very sloppy for a killer who was so methodical about erasing his traces from the scene. And the funny thing is there’s another just like it on the other side of the car.”

Jack took Sabito around to the passenger side and showed him the identical hole poked in the ground behind the front tire.

“That is odd. Damned odd,” Sabito said. “Could be a break. I’ll have the lab crew make plaster casts of the impressions. Might help us identify the make and model of the shotgun—if that’s what made the marks.”

“And if it didn’t, what did?” Jack wondered out loud.

Sabito took Jack off to one side, out of hearing of the others. “I don’t like to ask for favors from anybody but you’ve got me on the spot, Bauer.”

“How so?”

Sabito looked sheepish. “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep quiet about how you gave my men the slip—lifting Coates’s car keys and all. Just so I don’t look like a complete jackass in front of my superiors back at headquarters.”

“My lips are sealed, Vince,” Jack said solemnly.

1:24
P.M
. MDT
Route 302, Los Alamos County

The tan SUV was pulled over to the side of the road so Jack Bauer could take a cell phone call from CTU/L.A.

He was en route to South Mesa and Ironwood National Laboratory when the call came in. He pulled over to the shoulder and stopped so he could concentrate on his communication and in case he had to process any downloads on his satcom-equipped digital media station.

He’d left Sabito and his men behind at the Alkali Flats rest area where they were waiting for a special FBI forensics team to make the drive down from the resident agency in Santa Fe. Sabito had roped in the Los Alamos County Sheriff and his deputies to help secure the crime scene while at the same time keeping the county lawmen in the dark about
everything except that a murder had been committed and the Bureau would appreciate it if they could keep gawkers, rubberneckers, and the curious away from the site.

Route 302 connected Old Sipapu Road with the main highway to South Mesa.

This stretch of road was so lonely and little-used that Jack could have parked in the middle of it to take the call and not blocked any traffic. There wasn’t another vehicle in sight.

He liked that. It meant he wasn’t being tailed.

The call was from Nina Myers, his chief of staff back at the Los Angeles home base and Acting Special Agent in Charge of the installation in his absence.

He and Nina had a long history, both professional and personal. They had been colleagues, friends, and lovers. Some months ago their longtime platonic relationship had erupted into a passionate affair. It had happened during a rough patch in Jack’s marriage to his wife, Teri.

Jack prided himself on a near-photographic memory, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember who had made the first move, he or Nina. Somehow they suddenly came together in a feverish embrace, and once begun there was no stopping it. Their coupling ripened into an affair, a compulsion at once both savage and tender, all-consuming.

For a while it had become an obsession, prodding Jack into separating from Teri and moving out of the home he shared with her and their daughter, Kim. Jack had been torn between the two women, but in the end his marriage and family proved too important to him to give up on without a final try.

When he told Nina his decision, that he was going to try to reconcile with his wife, she was perhaps not unduly surprised. Unhappy, disappointed, sorrowful, and angry, yes; but not surprised. She was a being of keen perceptions and had sensed from countless reactions and tics of behavior
her lover being inextricably pulled back home. That didn’t make her like it any better.

They parted “like adults” and agreed to comport themselves as the same in their professional lives, where they continued to work closely as a team day in and day out.

Nina continued to exhibit the same seemingly unchanged loyalty and dedication in her post as Jack’s chief of staff after the breakup as she had before it, and Jack did his best to relate to her on the job with a similarly warm yet businesslike demeanor. Now they were friends, colleagues, and ex-lovers.

Still—their recent intimacy did make for some awkward moments that they both worked hard to gloss over.

Lovely Nina, fiercely competent in all the arts of sex and spy tradecraft. He could see her now, with short brown hair, a high-cheekboned, well-sculpted face with a challengingly appraising gaze that missed nothing. Coolly self-contained and elegant, yet capable of unleashing a firestorm of naked passion and raw, uninhibited sensuousness…

Jack put the thought out of his mind. The memories. Suppressed them reflexively, like slamming shut a door in his head.

That was over. It never should have happened.
But it did happen
, an inner voice reminded him.

“That was quick work,” Jack said, returning to the immediacy of the moment.

“What was?” Nina Myers asked, her voice expressing puzzlement as it came through the other end of the cell phone connection.

Now it was Jack’s turn for an instant’s confusion. “The poison needle artist. Don’t you have an ID on her?”

“Not yet.”

“Oh. I thought that’s why you called.”

“No such luck, Jack.” Her chuckle was rich and throaty. She shifted smoothly and swiftly back to business. “I only wish it was something as simple as identifying an assassin. This is something really dangerous: politics.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I hate to bother you with nonsense like this anytime, but especially now when you’re out of the office on special assignment. I’d handle it myself if I could, but this one I’ve got to drop in your lap.”

“Fire away, Nina.” Jack’s tone was guarded.

“There’s been some more comeback on the Maulana Mosque case,” she said.

Jack caught himself in time to stifle a groan. He kept his voice level neutral. “That case has been nothing but comebacks. But that’s the benefit of being out here on temporary duty. I’m out of it. You’re acting head of the branch, Nina. It’s your headache now.”

“Well, not exactly,” she said. “George Mason’s been after me about if for the last two days, giving it a full-court press.”

George Mason was Assistant Administrative Director of CTU/L.A. Jack considered him more of a pettifogging bureaucrat than an intelligence officer. Mason was an ambitious underling, an office politician who had his sights aimed at higher posts. He was so hungry for Jack’s job that you could practically feel the need coming off him like a miasma.

The Maulana Mosque case was an ongoing irritant, a recurring problem that wouldn’t go away. A prime example of the maxim about too many cooks spoiling the broth. The mosque was in the Los Angeles area, a target of a longtime CTU undercover investigation. Maulana Shaheed Zubayir was a religious leader associated with the mosque, an outwardly pious and scholarly elder respected for his encyclopedic knowledge of Sharia, Muslim religious law. Maulana was his title in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

An extensive CTU probe involving the use of informants, undercover agents, and electronic eavesdropping had proved conclusively that Zubayir was a recruiter for al-Qaeda who had sent a number of fanatical would-be mujahideen down a pipeline whose other end was in terrorist training camps in the no-man’s-land frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Once inculcated with the jihadist philosophy and schooled in the black arts of sabotage, bomb making, and murder, they’d been returned to the United States to set up their underground cells in preparation for future terrorist acts. CTU/L.A. had rolled up the operation, arresting in a massive predawn sweep the Maulana, his accomplices, and the newly returned jihadis.

What should have been the conclusion of a successful investigation proved to be only the start of a ride on the merry-go-round. The usual suspects were heard from, the “civil libertarians” protesting government intrusion into a place of worship, even though that place of worship had served as a recruiting ground, preliminary indoctrination center, and terror cell nexus.

The Maulana’s flock delivered a big bloc of voters who voted en masse according to their leader’s dictates, provoking anguished howls from city, county, and state politicians who benefitted from their support.

Worse, a Los Angeles Police Department political intelligence unit working on its own had recruited the Maulana as a confidential informant/source for their own counter-terror operations. Zubayir had played them like a virtuoso, feeding them tips about rival sectarians in other mosques while keeping his own operations a secret from the police handlers who thought they were running him.

It had all gone public, of course, and a war of charges and countercharges was currently being fought out nonstop on the 24/7 news cycle.

“George Mason I can handle,” Nina Myers said. “I’ve been handling. But he went over my head to Alberta Green and now she’s putting on the pressure in her own inimitable way.”

That added a complicating factor. Alberta Green worked for Jack’s boss, CTU Regional Division Director Ryan Chappelle. George Mason was a pint-sized version of Chappelle, a man of vaunting ambition and Machiavellian duplicity who aimed at nothing less than a top post at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Alberta Green’s official title was Assistant Regional Division Director; in reality, it meant that she was Chappelle’s enforcer, using her mastery of legalistic tactics to carry out the dirty work that Chappelle wanted to avoid being directly associated with.

Jack swore softly under his breath.

“What was that, Jack? I didn’t catch that last part you said.”

“It was nothing. What does Mason want?”

“He wants Tony Almeida to be debriefed on his role in the Maulana case.”

“That’s ridiculous! Tony was already extensively debriefed on that matter. His testimony is all on record. There’s enough there for even Mason not to screw up.”

“He thinks that the court case would be sewn up solid if Tony could testify during the trial.”

This time Jack did swear out loud. “Tell Mason to get his head out of his ass. What an idiot. Tony worked that case undercover. He can’t testify without blowing his cover and ending his usefulness as a clandestine operator.”

“Alberta Green thinks otherwise. She says that he could testify on a closed-circuit TV link to the courtroom, in the judge’s chambers with the prosecutor and defense attorney there. He could be sworn in live over the hookup and answer
questions. His image and voice would be digitally masked so he couldn’t be identified.”

“Any defense attorney worth his salt could figure out the part Tony played by asking the right questions.”

“I’m not arguing, Jack. I’m telling you what Alberta Green says.”

“Never mind about that. The important thing is what does Chappelle say?”

“Nothing. Not a thing. And don’t think I haven’t asked him. Alberta comes on like she’s carrying out Chappelle’s directive but when I discussed the problem with him personally he made it clear he’s carefully neutral on the whole situation. He tossed the ball back into your court, saying it’s your decision and he wouldn’t dream of interfering.”

Of course he wouldn’t, Jack thought. Chappelle was playing both ends against the middle as usual. He was covered no matter what way it went down. If the case was blown and the Maulana acquitted, it was Jack Bauer’s fault for not making a key witness available. If the case ended in a conviction, Chappelle would posture that he’d gone to bat for his SAC CTU/L.A. by letting him exercise his own judgment without undue pressure or interference from his boss.

Smart.

“…Jack?”

“Even if Almeida was available to testify on a closed-circuit hookup I wouldn’t allow it. It risks compromising him, our informants in the mosque, and the unit’s tradecraft and methods. Such knowledge would give the next terrorists a tremendous edge in knowing what to avoid.

“But luckily the question is academic. Because Tony Almeida is currently on an undercover assignment that makes it impossible for him to make himself available now and for the foreseeable future.”

“No one knows that better than I, Jack.”

Yes, Nina Myers knew. She and Tony Almeida were an
item. A couple. Nina had hooked up with Tony on the rebound after the breakup with Jack. He couldn’t blame her. Almeida was a good man and a top operative. After the breakup, Jack had Teri and Kim to go home to. Nina Myers had her lonely apartment.

Despite the rules, office romances were only natural in this line of work. The agency turned a blind eye to it as long as it was discreet and didn’t interfere with operations and unit morale.

Hard if not impossible for an operative to maintain an ongoing relationship with an outsider, a civilian.

So now Nina Myers and Tony Almeida were a couple, a clandestine couple. They were discreet about it, just as Jack and Nina had been discreet in the office when they were together. But Jack could detect all the signs between the two; after all, he’d been there himself. A mutual gaze held a beat too long, a friendly squeeze on the arm that meant something more, a certain reserve when he came across Nina and Tony having what had been a private conversation at the water cooler or at a shared table in the office cafeteria.

“I picked Tony Almeida because he was the best man for the job,” Jack said.

Nina Myers did not know what that job was and was too professional to ask a question that Jack could only refuse to answer. Two people knew Tony Almeida’s current assignment: Jack Bauer and Ryan Chappelle. Now that Tony was deep into it, neither of them knew the exact particulars.

“Who said otherwise? No need to get defensive, Jack.”

“Who’s defensive?” he said defensively.

“Nobody’s suggesting that you picked him because you wanted him to be away from the office for personal reasons—to break up a romance that you thought was unacceptable, say.”

“I think you know me better than that, Nina.”

“Sometimes I wonder how well anyone knows anyone
else. All we see are the actions and not what’s in the heart.”

“I only want what’s best for you, Nina.”

“I know, Jack. You made that abundantly clear.”

“Nina—”

“Forget it. That was unfair of me,” she said. Her tone changed, became all business. “So—what do I tell George Mason and Alberta Green?”

“I know what I’d like to tell them but we’ll skip that. Tell them that Tony Almeida is on a confidential assignment and unavailable until further notice. Tell them to take it to Chappelle if it’s so damned important. He’s the one who hands out the assignments.

“I can honestly say that at this moment I don’t know where Tony is and couldn’t get in touch with him right now even if I wanted to. He’s out in the field now and on his own,” Jack said.

“Aren’t we all?” Nina’s tone was coolly ironic. “Take care, Jack, and if by any chance you should happen to be in touch with Tony—”

“I’m not.”

“Of course. But if you were, I’d ask you to tell him the same thing: Take care.”