Jack stormed back into CTU Headquarters feeling enraged and humiliated. Chris Henderson saw him from his loftlike office overlooking the analysts’ bullpen and was halfway down the stairs as Jack approached him.
“The techs messed up!” Jack snarled. He held up his cell phone as if it said everything. “The son of a bitch called me on my cell phone! Even when I got out of my car he knew I was walking!”
Chris’s shoulders sagged. “All right, we’ll have them test again—”
“We don’t have to, sir.”
The tech who’d helped Jack before reappeared. His face was screwed up, as though he was having trouble expressing surprise, admiration, and fear all at once. “We just finished a blood test on Agent Bauer.”
“You better have found the damned transmitter. I don’t care how small it is,” Jack said.
The tech nodded. “We did, sort of. But it’s not just small. It’s. ”
“I don’t care what it is,” Jack barked. “Get it out!”
“We don’t know how,” the tech admitted. “It’s not a device somewhere in your body. The transmitter is laced throughout your entire body. It’s in your blood.”
5. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 11 A.M. AND 12 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
It wasn’t easy, following a pint-sized twenty-something girl through a crowd of protestors at Federal Plaza. The blond hair helped, but Frankie was so short that several times Mercy lost her bobbing yellow head in the crowd. The good news was that the sea of people made it hard for Frankie to spot a tail. She did glance back once or twice, but Mercy had shifted off to one side, moving parallel to Frankie instead of behind her, and so the girl hadn’t noticed her.
Eleven o’clock, and the sun had already turned the protestors into twenty thousand sweating bodies. Mercy’s nose told her that more than a few of the people she passed kept personal hygiene fairly low on their lists of priorities. She rubbed up against one man with curly brown hair, his arm slick with sweat, and his stink clung to her like a plastic wrapper clinging to her fingers.
The first thing Frankie had done, after bolting away, was make a cell phone call. Mercy silently cursed Jack Bauer’s stiff neck. If she’d had CTU’s resources behind her, she could be listening in on that call right now and tracing it back to its source instead of elbowing her way through the masses. Now the girl was reaching the edge of the crowd at Veteran’s Park. Wherever she was going, Mercy was determined to stay with her.
Tony Almeida came back from the bathroom, yawning and stretching, reluctant to plant himself back in his plastic chair in front of the video monitors. He had been on dozens of stakeouts — electronic and otherwise — and he was used to the boredom, but this drab cinder-block room seemed specially designed to suck the life out of the most determined officer.
“Anything?” he asked.
One of the two FBI agents was gone. The other one, the thin, Slavic-looking agent, shook his head. “Not much. I spotted that detective your guy was talking to. Looks like she was meeting with an informant in the crowd. There she is.”
He jabbed a finger at one of the dozen screens. This was a very wide shot of the swelling crowd, probably from a camera positioned high up on the building. The agent pressed a toggle switch on his control board and the camera zoomed in. Tony saw the dark-haired LAPD officer moving through the crowd. He recognized the detective from her short stint as a CTU liaison. He hadn’t known her well, but her first name was distinctive: Mercy.
“Stay on her,” he said. “Not sure what’s going on, but Jack doesn’t waste time, so let’s assume she’s important.”
“Trying,” the agent said, leaning across to the other side of the control panel to flip some switches.
“Your friend’s gone a lot,” Tony observed.
“Tiny bladder,” said the Slavic agent. “Plus he drinks that swill.” He pointed to a paper cup on the counter with coffee dregs at the bottom.
“And you don’t?” Tony said. He’d never met an FBI agent who didn’t swig caffeine during surveillance.
“Oh, I drink coffee,” the agent said with the air of a connoisseur. “But that’s not coffee. You want to try real coffee, try fresh Costa Rican coffee beans.”
“I just go to my coffee place and point,” Tony said, sitting down.
The agent grunted. “You and everyone else. But Costa Rica, or Brazil, that’s where the good stuff is. You know, there’s a little coffee farm northeast of Rio de Janeiro in the province of Minas Gerais, the beans they grow there are amazing. It’s like coffee and chocolate grown together.”
Tony glanced at the screens. “I’ve never been.”
“Oh, you’ve gotta go. I’ve been all over. The jungle is—” The agent smiled at himself. “Forget it, I could go on about this stuff forever. I’m kind of a rain forest addict.”
“I took a canopy tour once,” Tony said distractedly. “You know, sliding on those ropes in the treetops. It was amazing, except that I almost got bit by a monkey.” He eyed the screen. “It looks like that detective is tailing someone.”
They both watched. The detective was moving parallel to and slightly behind a short girl with artificially blond hair.
Even in that mass of bodies, Tony saw easily that the woman deliberately matched her pace to the girl’s.
“You’re right,” Nick said. “Well, my turn to piss.” He stood up. “I’ve been on those tours. I hope everybody goes on them, actually. Helps people know about the rain forests so maybe we stop destroying them.”
“I guess it can help,” Tony replied, turning his attention fully to the monitors.
“It better,” Nick said. “They say a few more years and most of the forests will be gone.”
“Well, at least we won’t have to worry about the monkeys.”
It was a radio dye marker, also called a chemical emitter. The marker was a chemical compound that, when found in large enough quantities, emitted a low-frequency signal that could be tracked by satellite. The medical techs hadn’t ever heard of it, but Jack had. The military had initiated the project a few years earlier to help with intelligence gathering, but the system had proved inefficient. The dye markers were no more accurate than more conventional transmitters, which could be miniaturized to the point of being nonexistent.
“Okay, it’s in my blood,” Jack said. “So get it the hell out.”
The tech shook his head. “We’ve got a call in to Department of Defense,” he said. “But I don’t think anyone knows how to get this stuff out. It’s not harmful, so I think they just figured it would eventually get processed out of the body someday.”
Jack sneered. “Well, someday is today. I need this stuff out of my body right now!”
The tech stepped back. Chris Henderson rested a hand on Jack’s arm like a tamer calming a lion. “We can leave you here, Jack. I’ll put everyone else on the case.”
“That’s my daughter!” Jack jerked his arm away. “There’s got to be some way to filter this dye out of my blood.”
Jamey Farrell buzzed into the room over the intercom. “Chris, I’ve got someone on the line for you. They say it’s about Jack.”
“Is it Department of Defense?”
“No, Interior.”
Chris raised an eyebrow. Why would someone from the Department of the Interior call CTU? “Okay.”
There was a click, and a tentative male voice crackled over the conference room speakers. “H-hello?”
“This is Chris Henderson, Special Agent in Charge of Field Operations,” Chris said crisply.
“Hi. What — what can I do for you?” the voice asked nervously.
Chris frowned. “I don’t know. You called me.”
