Authors: David Jacobs
He guessed that the leafy bough had been broken off by the killer and used to sweep up the ground to sanitize the scene.
Jack reckoned he had seen all there was to see. He got back in the SUV and used the digital media station to upload the cell phone camera photo images of the maid-assassin to the CTU net.
Satellite communication gear allowed him to transmit directly to home base at CTU/L.A., to the bullpen where board operating analysts would enter it into the system of networked supercomputers accessing not only CTU and CIA data banks but also linked to military, law enforcement, and national security assets. He also sent a brief verbal report on the murder of Peter Rhee.
After that there was nothing left to do but face the music. He phoned Vince Sabito and told him where he could be found.
12:37
P.M
. MDT
Alkali Flats Rest Area, Los Alamos County
Coates came at Jack Bauer. Hickman tried to restrain his partner but it was no good, like a greyhound trying to hold back a bear. Coates shook him off and kept charging.
Jack waited until Coates was almost on him, and then at the last second he ducked and sidestepped, avoiding Coates’s lunge.
Momentum kept Coates moving and he staggered forward a few paces before stumbling to a halt. His hat fell off and rolled around in a half circle in the dust. He turned, gathering himself for another try.
“One free pass is all you get,” Jack said matter-of-factly.
Coates’s florid face seemed to swell even more. He lowered his head like a charging bull.
“Coates! Knock it off,” Vince Sabito said. He was the head man of the FBI squad that had been sent out by the Santa Fe resident agency.
Of medium height, Sabito was built like a fireplug, with broad oversized shoulders, powerful upper body development, a short thick waist, and bandy legs. Shiny hair as black as India ink was slicked back from his forehead. His eyebrows were thick black horizontal lines that almost but not quite met over the top of a broad, flat nose. He was swarthy with narrow gray eyes, strong jaws, and a lot of chin.
Holstered under an arm was a .357 Magnum; the gun was like the man: short, squat, and packing a lot of firepower.
Coates stood there, head down, glaring up from his eye sockets at Jack, hands balled into fists. Breathing hard. He called Jack a dirty name. But that meant that the action phase was over.
Sabito said, “Cut the crap.”
“You heard the man, Coates. Cut the crap,” Ferney chimed in. His title was Executive Assistant. He was
Sabito’s stooge and yes-man. Slim, compact, he wore narrow-lensed glasses that banded his eyes like a visor.
“Let’s try and pretend that we’re all professionals,” Sabito said.
“You call that professional, what Bauer did, lifting my car keys?” Coates was aggrieved and working it like a man worrying a sore tooth. “Professional crook, maybe!”
“I told you where the keys were,” Jack pointed out.
“Sure, once it was too late for us to follow you!”
Hickman sighed. “Which was the point of the exercise,” he said with the weariness of a man explaining the obvious.
The federal men had come in two cars, the one assigned to Hickman and Coates and another that had conveyed Sabito and Ferney to the site. The cars were parked on the shoulder on the east side of the road to avoid further contaminating the crime scene. The cars were virtually identical late model sedans, the only difference between them being that the watchdogs’ car was blue-black while their boss’s was black.
Jack wondered idly if that was some subtle Bureau indicator of rank or status.
Hickman picked up Coates’s hat, brushed the dust off it, and handed it to Coates. Coates muttered some thanks and jammed it back on his head.
Coates wasn’t letting it go so easily. “If you ask me the whole setup stinks,” he said. More red color came into his face and neck. “This guy pulls a sneak to take off on his own and an hour later we find him wrapped up in the middle of another murder!”
“You didn’t find me, I told you where to come,” Jack pointed out. “And the first one wasn’t murder, it was self-defense.”
Sabito moved to the foreground, placing himself between the two men. “No matter how you slice it, Bauer, you’ve had a busy morning,” he said.
“That’s what we want, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know as I like the sound of that. Explain.”
“You’d better!” Ferney said, indignant. He stood behind Sabito, practically hanging over his shoulder.
“Something’s gone sour at Ironwood. In the last six months there’s been five suspicious deaths of people connected to the facility. Then in one day—today—they try to kill me and Rhee is murdered,” Jack said.
“He might be alive if you hadn’t played it cagey and tried to lone wolf it.”
Jack took it without flinching. “That’s a cheap shot. Rhee wanted a meet and said I had to come alone. He set up the conditions, not me.”
“So you say.”
“The point is that suddenly things are moving. The mastermind behind the Ironwood kills is getting worried. Up to now he was content to move at his own pace, framing the deaths so they looked like natural causes, accidents, random street violence—anything but what they really were: part of a wholesale murder conspiracy.
“Now he’s getting rattled, throwing caution to the winds. He sends out two assassins on open hit jobs, and damn the stealth. Somewhere he’s left a loose end and he’s afraid it’ll be found. Whatever the answer is, I think Rhee found it.”
Sabito shrugged, his massive upper body making it look like a titanic shoulder twitch. “Who knows?”
“Somebody thought he had something or they wouldn’t have blown his head off,” Jack said.
“Maybe the same somebody who thinks you’re on to something and tried to have you killed, eh, Bauer?”
“Could be.”
Sabito’s manner had been deceptively easygoing but he was sore and now made a point of showing it. He got up close in Jack’s face. “What are you holding out, Bauer? What makes you a target? What do you know that you’re
not telling? If you’ve got something you’d better spill it before you wind up like Rhee and take your knowledge to the grave.”
“Talk, Bauer!” Ferney echoed.
That was the hell of it. Jack
was
holding out on Sabito, withholding the key factor in the case: Annihilax. The world’s intelligence services, and that most definitely included the FBI, believed that Annihilax was dead. Only a tight handful of operatives in CTU, CIA, and the DIA knew otherwise.
The fact that NSA had intercepted a fragment of the master assassin’s crypto-code was top secret. Even the fact that they were able to do so was top secret. Annihilax’s resurrection was ultraclassified on a need-to-know basis, and the higher-ups had decided that the Bureau as yet had no need to know. As far as the Bureau knew, CTU was injecting a phony terror angle into the case so it could horn in on what should have been a strictly FBI investigation.
Jack Bauer was prohibited from divulging that information. He chafed under the restriction. But until he was authorized to do so, he couldn’t level with Sabito and reveal the real nature of the opposition they were combating.
“If I had something I’d tell you,” Jack said, lying with equanimity.
Sabito wasn’t buying. “Like you did about your meeting with Rhee?”
Jack took the offensive. “Maybe he didn’t trust your outfit to handle it properly. That’s how he wanted it and that’s how I played it. You guys denied there even was a pattern until the last kill when Morrow got liquidated.”
A flicker of unease showed on Sabito’s face, indicating that Jack’s last remark had struck a nerve. He backed off, literally, taking a few steps back. Ferney had to step lively to avoid a collision with his boss.
That was a relief. Sabito’s face had been thrust so close that Jack had felt his hot breath on his flesh.
“I had my suspicions long before Morrow. But the top brass felt otherwise and I had to follow orders. When Morrow got killed everything changed and I was able to take a more proactive stance,” Sabito said.
“After today it’s a whole new ball game. There’ll be no more doubt about the what, only the who,” Jack said.
“Just remember we’re supposed to be partners in this investigation.”
“I’m cooperating.”
“You’ve got a funny way of showing it, Bauer.”
Jack gave Sabito a refresher course on the facts of life. “There’s two ways to play an assignment like this: as Mr. Inside or Mr. Outside. The first way is to work undercover and insinuate yourself into the opposition’s organization. Burrowing from within as the inside man. That’s not an option here because we don’t know who to infiltrate.
“That leaves us with option two: the outside man. Forget about going undercover and the stealth stuff and do it the opposite way. Come in with a high profile and a big noise. Show yourself and keep pushing hard in hopes of stirring up the enemy. They don’t know what you know or if you even know anything at all, but if you come on strong enough you might spook them into breaking cover and making a try for you. Make a target of yourself and hope they take the bait. If they do and you survive it you’ve got a lead.
“That’s how I’m playing it: Mr. Outside,” he concluded.
Sabito was a tough sell. “Yeah, and look how well that’s working out. We’ve got one dead assassin and one dead counterintelligence officer.”
“At least we’ve got the other side worried,” Jack said.
“Watch out that you don’t wind up playing it as Mr. Dead.”
“Why Vince, I never know you cared.”
“I don’t. I just don’t want to have to fill out the paperwork.”
Jack could well believe it. “To demonstrate our newfound spirit of cooperation, let me point out a couple of things I noticed about Rhee’s killing.”
“I can hardly wait,” Sabito said.
He and Jack crossed toward the death car, Ferney following several paces behind Sabito. After a pause, Hickman and Coates drifted along in their wake.
A few paces from the rear of the car, Sabito glanced over his shoulder at the others and came to a halt. “Let’s all trample the crime scene to make sure we get rid of any clues,” he said, his voice dripping sarcasm.
Everyone else froze in place.
“The killer already took care of that,” Jack said easily. “See how the ground is smoothed over with those swirling patterns? The killer broke a branch off a bush and used it to sweep the ground clean.”
Sabito cut a quick sidelong glance at Jack, his expression dubious. “How do you know that?”
“The smoothed-over ground is self-evident.” Jack pointed at the greenery beyond the log ground rail. “There’s a fresh spot on that bush where a branch was broken off. A leafy branch makes a nice broom to sweep clean.”
Coates muttered under his breath. “Sherlock Junior.”
“What about that set of footprints going around the car on both sides?” Hickman asked.
“I made those,” Jack said. Sabito gave him a long hard stare. “I had to see if Rhee was dead or alive,” Jack explained. He changed the subject. “Notice the keys in the car trunk. The killer searched the car, looking for what?—incriminating evidence, if any. Assuming Rhee had some.”
“I suppose you took a look inside the trunk?” Sabito asked.
Jack shook his head. “Not me. It could be booby-trapped to take out snoopers. You know, turn the key and lift the trunk lid and set off a bomb.”
“Sounds pretty far-fetched.”
“Like using a disguised maid who’s a poison needle artist?”
Coates pushed his way forward. “You’re not buying this line of malarkey, Vince?”
Sabito fixed him with his cold gray-eyed gaze. “You going to open the trunk, Red?”
“Yeah, I’ll open it—”
“Wait a minute so the rest of us can get out of range in case it is rigged to explode.”
That cooled Coates off. “Well…” After a pause, he came to a decision. “Let the demolitions boys handle it. That’s what they get paid for,” he said.
Sabito nodded. “Uh-huh. I think we can all let it be for now.” He turned toward Jack. “What else have you got?”
“The brush marks extend way over to the left of the car,” Jack pointed out. “My guess is that that’s where the killer drove in and parked beside Rhee. Rhee was sitting in his car waiting for me to show up. The other windows were rolled up so he was probably idling with the air-conditioning on. The killer got out of his car, approaching him on the driver’s side. Rhee rolled down his window, probably to talk to the killer. The killer took him by surprise and shot him point-blank in the face. Looks like a shotgun blast from the extent of the damage.”
“I took a look at him before. I’d go along with a shotgun. Sawed-off probably, since it’s easier to get into action,” Sabito said.
“Here’s the big question: What was Rhee thinking?” Jack asked.
“You’re telling it.”
“His gun is in the shoulder holster untouched. Yet he was concerned enough about his safety to arrange a secret meeting at this out-of-the-way spot. A remote locale out in the open where he could see anybody coming from a long way off.
“His window was rolled down. Why? So he could speak to the newcomer approaching him on that side. He’s already on the alert for a killer—or killers—targeting Ironwood personnel. If the newcomer had been a stranger, Rhee wouldn’t have been caught napping. He’d have been ready for trouble. He would have had his gun in hand ready for action. But he didn’t.”
“Your point being…?”
“That the killer wasn’t a stranger. That it was someone he knew, someone he trusted. A colleague or a friend. Someone he didn’t suspect until right before his head was blown off,” Jack concluded.
“It’s possible,” Sabito said.
“Got a better theory?”
“An alternative.”
“I’m all ears, Vince.”
“Suppose the killer was a stranger, only someone so innocent-looking that Rhee never got suspicious? A type that not even a suspicious guy would ever figure as a killer. A schoolgirl in pigtails, say, or a uniformed Boy Scout. A nun or a priest, an old lady or a freckle-faced kid or whatever.”
“Why not a dwarf masking as a toddler with a lollipop?”
“Why not? Hell, they tried for you with a phony room maid. That shows they’re steeped in the tricks of subterfuge, camouflage, and deception. Somebody in a perfect disguise approaches Rhee, pretending to ask for directions. Being a nice friendly fellow, he rolls down the window to reply and gets a faceful of buckshot.”