Death Angel (6 page)

“Tony can take care of himself, Nina. Anything else?”

“That’s all for now. I’ll keep you posted on any developments on your current assignment as soon as they come in.”

“Thanks.”

“Goodbye, Jack.”

2:17
P.M
. MDT
VAP #8, Corona Drive,
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos County, 110 square miles of high desert country seven thousand feet above sea level, is bounded on the west by the Jemez Mountains and the east by the Rio Grande river valley. It consists mainly of a group of mesas, flat-topped archipelagos in the sky that are separated by canyons.

The city of Los Alamos sits on a mesa known locally as “the Hill.” Its population of some eighteen thousand numbers more Ph.D.’s than any other locale on the face of the earth. South of the Hill lies South Mesa.

Below that lies South Mesa, site of the massive nuclear weapons research complex of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Jack Bauer halted at Vehicle Access Portal number eight, an outpost of LANL’s security perimeter. It stood at the west end of Corona Drive, the main east-west thoroughfare across the mesa.

South Mesa was not entirely barred to unauthorized personnel. Several roads that ran through it outside LANL’s perimeter fences were open to the general public. But Corona Drive was restricted to lab personnel and others with the necessary security clearances.

VAP #8 was one of a number of gated guardhouse checkpoints controlling entrances and exits to the complex. Prominently displayed along the approach were signs proclaiming
BADGE HOLDERS ONLY
.

Jack’s Expedition halted at the entryway. A blue-uniformed guard with a hip-holstered sidearm came out of the gatehouse to examine the newcomer’s credentials.

LANL’s unusual security profile is a product of its unique historical origins. Despite its vital importance to the nation’s defense posture, it is not under the control of the military or federal government. Since World War II it has been owned and operated by the University of California, part of a multistate research and development contracting authority that also includes the Lawrence Livermore Lab. And yet paradoxically all of LANL’s nuclear-related discoveries are legally the property of the Department of Energy.

Just as LANL is under civilian supervision, its security is provided by a private contractor, the SECTRO Corporation. The blue-uniformed guards patrolling and securing the site are known as the SECTRO Force.

The security protocol makes use of a two-phase identification system: a photo ID badge that must be prominently displayed at all times, and a matching smart card ID that is processed by badge reader access scanners at entrances to all restricted areas.

To carry out his assignment Jack Bauer had been tempo
rarily issued the coveted blue badge and smart card denoting the Q-level, the highest security clearance rating and one that allowed him virtually unlimited on-site access.

A special dispensation permitted him to carry weapons and wireless devices throughout the facility, items that were generally prohibited to all but a privileged few. Considering the double killings of the last few hours, Jack felt a certain reassurance in having his gun near at hand.

Jack wore his photo ID badge on a lanyard around his neck. He took his smart card from his wallet and handed it to the guard.

The guard scrutinized the thumbnail portrait photo in the corner of the card, ensuring that it was in possession of its rightful owner. He swiped the card through a slot in the gatehouse scanner; it came up clean.

He returned the card to Jack. He gave the go-sign to his partner in the gatehouse, the other throwing the switch that raised a yellow-and-black striped pole gate to admit the tan SUV.

“You may proceed, sir,” he said, waving Jack through.

“Thanks,” Jack said.

He drove through the open gateway and went east along Corona Drive. The road was a straight line stretching across flat tableland whose bright blue sky was bare of clouds. The SUV’s wheels churned up a thin white line of dust as they rolled across the pavement.

The surroundings took on some aspects of a sprawling, ultramodern industrial park. Both sides of the road were lined with extensive fenced-in tracts that enclosed assemblages of cubes and rectangles that were labs, office buildings, and power plants interlaced by a webwork of transmission grids.

As always when he came on-site, Jack was not a little awed by the world-historical importance of what its denizens referred to as “the Laboratory.”

It had come into being during World War II as home to the Manhattan Project, the top secret crash program to develop an atomic bomb. The high desert was an ideal locale for the venture, combining seclusion, sparse population, and vast wastelands for testing purposes. The scientists who sought to harness the earthshaking power generated by splitting the atom into a bomb delivery system were tinkering with the basic stuff of Creation itself.

On July 16, 1945, at the nearby test site of Trinity, the first nuclear bomb was successfully detonated. New Mexico—“Land of Enchantment” according to its state motto—had become the crucible of the Atomic Age.

The great work continued with no less urgency today. Behind the facades of outwardly innocuous buildings, some of the keenest minds on the planet probed the outer limits of matter, energy, and space-time, ceaselessly laboring to keep America’s high-tech arsenal ahead of the competition. Implements of destruction and deterrence whose greatest triumph would lie in their never having to be used for the purpose for which they were designed.

All part of an endless race where second place could so easily become last place. Or no place at all.

A mile and a half farther down the road brought Jack Bauer to Ironwood National Laboratory. INL: epicenter of the murder plague stalking Los Alamos.

The facility was on the north side of Corona Drive, set back a hundred yards or so from the roadside. A chain-link fence ten feet high and topped with several rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire marked the perimeter. There was plenty of room between Ironwood and its immediate neighbors to the right and left, as if it craved elbow room.

Jack turned left onto a two-lane road connecting with the main entrance. The entryway was anchored by a guarded
gatehouse not unlike VAP #8. It, too, was manned by armed SECTRO Force guards.

Once more Jack had to stop and be identified. Again the blue-badged Q-clearance worked its magic. Presently he was passed through and drove onto the grounds.

A cluster of buildings sat on a low rise. The administrative building fronted south, a multistory cube with vertical white concrete ribbing and glazed yellow bricks. Behind and to the right of it stood a flat-roofed oblong structure that roughly resembled in size and shape a college gymnasium. It was virtually windowless except for some narrow slitlike windows set high up near the tops of its sides that might almost be mistaken for horizontal decorative bands. It housed the Laser Research Facility.

A parking lot containing about a hundred vehicles stood at the foot of the knoll. The area closest to the knoll was marked
RESERVED
. Some of the spaces were empty but Jack ignored them. Not even a Q-clearance could protect from the summary towing of any vehicle without the required VIP sticker that had the audacity to intrude on this privileged section.

He found a parking space in a distant corner of the lot. Dismounting from the Expedition, he pressed a button on the handheld remote that activated the SUV’s protective electromagnetic sensory field.

It was a long, hot walk across broiling blacktop to the knoll. Jack detoured to the right to take a look at the reserved parking section. Rectangular plaques on metal stands identified which slot belonged to whom.

He noted with interest that the spaces reserved for Professor Nordquist, Dr. Carlson, Dr. Tennant, and Dr. Delgado were all occupied.

Four brilliant scientists who were linchpins of the Perseus Project.

All were of interest to Jack Bauer.

A wide stone staircase with low risers and wide treads slanted upward to the top of the knoll. Jack climbed it to the admin building. Automatic glass doors slid open at his approach, allowing entry into a marble-floored lobby. The doors closed behind him.

The transition from desert heat to the coolly air-conditioned interior was almost too abrupt. He could feel the sweat cooling on his flesh.

His footsteps on the marble floor echoed hollowly through the vaulting lobby space as he crossed to a SECTRO guard station to once more present his bona fides and be duly processed through.

Beyond the barrier in the great hall there was light pedestrian traffic, mostly staffers crossing from one room to another. Ironwood personnel generally wore comfortable, casual clothes. This reflected the lab’s civilian origins with so many staff members coming from a university background. They found their comfort level in a campuslike environment.

The dress code was relaxed, informal—but badge display was rigorously enforced.

Jack’s attire was more casual than most but not inappropriate. He, too, was wearing his working clothes; the gun under his arm was the hallmark of his calling.

He went into the Office of Counterintelligence security annex.

2:35
P.M
. MDT
SCIF, Ironwood Administrative Building

The double kills had prodded Gabe McCoy into holding an emergency conference in the SCIF.

The Secure Compartmented Information Facility was
embedded in a basement level beneath the OCI annex. It looked like an undersized conference room in a modestly budgeted office.

The shoebox-shaped space was dominated by a rectangular table with some executive-type swivel chairs grouped around it. It had pale yellow walls and a green-and-black marble-patterned linoleum floor. The sole exception to the banal decor was the door. It was a vault door, armored and electronically secured.

The room was a vault. An extensive array of unseen hardware ensured that the spy-proofed SCIF was debugged and certifiably free of all electronic eavesdropping equipment. Ventilator grilles discharged a constant current of fresh, cool air into the hermetically sealed chamber.

Attending the meeting were Jack Bauer, Gabe McCoy, Debra Derr, and Orne Lewis. They sat around the table. “Everybody here knows everybody else so let’s get down to business,” Gabe McCoy said.

He was Acting Director of Ironwood’s Office of Counterintelligence. He had a thin, foxy face and too-wise eyes. He looked distinctly unhappy. Jack wondered how much of that unhappiness was due to worry that recent events might adversely impact McCoy’s chances of changing the “acting” part of his title to “permanent.”

Debra Derr was McCoy’s deputy. She was lean, leggy, and plain-faced, with shoulder-length brown hair parted in the middle.

Orne Lewis could be considered a colleague of Jack’s, of a sort. He could be—but Jack was as yet unsure just what he considered him. Only time would tell.

Lewis was a CIA counterintelligence agent who served as a permanent liaison to LANL. His office was in a building in another part of the mesa; the ongoing crisis caused him to spend much of his working time at Ironwood. He
was six-four, long-limbed, gangly, storklike. A patch of lifeless iron-gray hair that looked fake but wasn’t sat on his head. The nattiest one in the group, he wore a seersucker suit, bow tie, and tassel loafers.

Jack quickly brought the others up to speed on the poison needle incident and the murder of Peter Rhee. He made no mention of Annihilax. He was unauthorized to disseminate that intelligence to anyone else in the room and would continue to withhold it until directed to do so by his superior officers at CTU.

Ironwood’s OCI was a civilian operation that was part of SECTRO. Lewis was CIA but he had not been cleared for the information, either. Maybe he already knew it. He might even know more about it than Jack. It was possible…it was possible. Jack was CTU, CTU was part of CIA, and Lewis was CIA.

That’s where compartmentalization came in. Nobody knew another’s classified intelligence until there was a compelling reason to know. The system was clumsy but efficient, like watertight compartments on a ship. If the ship takes on water, the compartments can prevent it from sinking to the bottom.

Jack reached the end of his summary. “The fat’s in the fire now,” Orne Lewis said.

“All OCI offices are secured, but we put a special guard on Rhee’s when we learned about his death,” McCoy said. “We’re examining his files, appointment book, and computer entries to see if anything links to his murder.”

“Find anything?” Jack asked.

“Too much. There’s so much material there it’s hard to know where to start. Raw data, yes. Interviews, profiles, facts, figures, a mountain of data. But no smoking gun. Nothing that says this is it, this is why he was killed.”

Debra Derr looked Jack in the face, her eyes narrowed. “Why did Peter Rhee want to meet with you? I mean, why you and not any of the rest of us?”

Orne Lewis chuckled without mirth. “There’s a question.”

Jack shrugged. “He said that he had something important to tell me and he wanted to do it in private. Something about the case, but he wouldn’t say what.”

“Why Alkali Flats?” Derr pressed.

“He thought it was safe, I guess.”

“Obviously he was mistaken,” Lewis said.

McCoy harrumphed. “We’re not going to get anywhere unless we all put our cards on the table, Bauer.”

“I showed my hand.”

“What about the card up your sleeve?” Lewis chimed in.

Jack ignored him, speaking directly to McCoy. “Rhee set the time and the place. I never even heard of Alkali Flats before this morning.”

Lewis turned to the OCI chief. “Face the facts. Rhee was off the reservation. Whatever lead he was following, he didn’t want to share it with any of us. Except Bauer.”

“But why you, Jack? Why you?”

“Vince Sabito asked me the same question and I’ll tell you what I told him: I don’t know.”

“You were the target of an assassination attempt today—again, why?”

“Same answer.”

Gabe McCoy rolled his eyes. “You’ve been here less than two weeks and suddenly in one day we’ve got a murder and an attempted murder.”