This call, now. This call was way out of the ordinary. Ironically, as crazy as the job was, the first thing Pan did was very pencil-neckish. He called his insurance company to make sure the insurance was up to date on all six of his cars. ’Course, he realized right away that that was stupid — he couldn’t use all his own cars for this. Maybe one, but the rest had to come from somewhere else. So next he made the first of several calls to some of the guys from the cell block.
“Hey, Doogie, it’s Pan. Yeah, listen, man, you still looking for work? Naw, man, not exactly. You still got a car? Yeah, I got my own, but I can’t — just listen. You’re gonna need your own car, and it might not run too good afterward, but I’ll give you a legit loaner. Okay, here’s what you gotta do. ”
A few minutes after they left Sergei Petrenko’s house in the drug dealer’s big black Mercedes, Jack and his two new acquaintances pulled up in front of a building that was neither a warehouse nor little. They were parked in front of a large condominium complex. Sergei had activated his phone and muttered something in Russian or Ukrainian, which brought a man in a black leather coat and black cap out of the complex’s security gate. The man sauntered across a short strip of lawn, jerked open the back door of the Mercedes, and dropped himself heavily into the backseat next to Malenkiy and behind Jack.
Jack’s heart had started to pound in his chest, trying to crack his ribs from the inside, the minute the man in black had appeared. He knew this man. It was the assassin he’d run into at Smiley Lopez’s house.
Sergei spoke to the newcomer in Russian, and Jack picked up the name Franko. Franko replied in terse, unhappy sentences. Sergei responded sympathetically, but Malenkiy laughed. Franko thumped him in the chest, and the two began to squabble.
“You’ll have to forgive my friends,” Sergei said to Jack. “This one has had a bad day.”
Jack stuck to the things that would concern Stud-halter. “Now there are three of you and one of me.”
Sergei nodded agreeably. “Your math is excellent. I will not try to trick you when we count kilos.”
They dropped down onto Pacific Coast Highway, headed for the beach.
Ryan Chappelle was on the phone with Tony Almeida, discussing the Pacific Rim Forum site down at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey.
“If we’re going to cover this by tonight,” Tony was saying from the freeway, “we need to scramble several full teams.”
“Who’s on security already?” Chappelle asked. “Somebody’s got to—”
“Wong is liaison,” Tony said, referring to a junior field agent assigned to coordinate information between CTU and the other agencies (including LAPD, the FBI, and security personnel for each country involved in the conference). “But we’re talking about eleven countries.”
Chappelle outlined a strategy: rank the countries by order of importance and impact from Jemaah Islamiyah’s perspective, starting with Indonesia; analyze the schedule of each country and look for anomalies that might create openings; examine the protocol written for installation security at the Ritz-Carlton. The list was extensive.
“Hold on,” Chappelle said. “I’m getting buzzed that Peter Jiminez is on the line. Some kind of emergency.” Chappelle put Tony on hold and took Jiminez’s line off hold. “What is it, Peter?”
“He surprised me, sir,” Peter said. “I’m sorry, Almeida and Myers said he was compliant. I let my guard down. I’m sorry—”
The hair on the back of Chappelle’s thin neck stood on end. “Talk sense, Agent Jiminez. What are you talking about?”
“Felix Studhalter,” Peter explained. “He escaped.”
Chappelle swore. He dialed the number of the cell phone Jack Bauer was carrying, but all he got was an out- of-service signal.
The weather wasn’t hot enough to attract a huge beach crowd, so Pacific Coast Highway was open. Sergei Petrenko’s Mercedes cruised up the coast, reaching Topanga Canyon in no time, and turned up the winding highway into the Santa Monica Mountains that separated L.A.’s inland valley from the ocean. East of Santa Monica, where the mountains looked down on Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and downtown, the hills were stacked with expensive “Hollywood Hills” homes. Out here, though, on the fringe of Los Angeles county, the mountains looked and felt rural thanks to distance and no-growth laws. Long before it was a highway, Topanga Canyon had been a footpath for Native Americans and the winding, double-ess curves of the road memorialized the ancient trail.
Jack couldn’t have known it, but to reach Topanga he had passed Temescal Canyon, where Zapata was held up, and if he had traveled on Topanga Canyon up into the heart of the San Fernando Valley, he would have arrived at the safe house where Adrian Tintfass was having lunch.
But he couldn’t have known, of course. Besides, his mind was thoroughly preoccupied with Franko sitting right behind him. After several anxious minutes, Jack decided that Franko either wasn’t going to look closely at him, or hadn’t seen him well enough to identify him. He therefore settled into a watchful quiet as the three Ukrainians spoke to one another in Russian.
The Mercedes climbed up the steep road into Topanga Canyon. For several miles there were no buildings at all, just the bare beauty of the chapparal. Jack pulled his cell phone — actually, Studhalter’s cell phone — out of his pocket and checked it: no bars.
“No service up here,” Sergei pointed out.
As the road leveled out at the top of the pass, they drove through the tiny hamlet of Topanga. Several unmarked lanes branched out from the main highway, and Sergei took one that was almost invisible under two huge oak trees.
This lane was paved for a hundred yards, then turned to uneven dirt. As the Mercedes bounced along, Sergei spat a curse in Russian.
Franko, from the back, answered in English. “You’re an old woman, complaining about your bladder. We have to pave the road or you got to get yourself a fucking truck.”
Sergei scoffed. “I didn’t come to America to be driving a truck.” Several jarring minutes brought them to a shack that must have been someone’s mountain cabin or hunting lodge, once upon a time. Although more rustic and a bit more run-down than the house in Santa Monica, it impressed Jack with the same quality: not so run-down as to attract attention, not so well-kept that it prevented the owners from worthier pursuits.
There were already two cars parked in a wide dirt patch in front of the shack: an old seventies Dodge truck that looked like it belonged, and a BMW 560i that didn’t. Sergei parked next to the BMW. All four men got out and walked up the dirt patch to the house.
Now or never, Jack thought. He turned to look around, staring squarely into Franko’s face. Franko stared back, his eyes vaguely threatening. There was no sign of recognition in his eyes.
They walked into the building, which was neither a mountain cabin nor a hunting lodge. It was a crystal meth lab. Crystal meth. Methamphetamine. Tina, a corruption of sixteen, from one-sixteenth of an ounce. Providing a cheap, powerful high, crystal meth was rapidly replacing cocaine and heroin as the suburban drug of choice.
“You will excuse if we don’t go inside,” Sergei said. Jack understood. Meth labs were notoriously dangerous places because the chemicals, including ephedrine, being boiled down were notoriously unstable. Meth labs didn’t just catch on fire; they were immediately engulfed in flames. “This place blows,” Jack observed, “you’re going to burn down the whole mountain.”
Sergei shrugged. “This place blows, either I am safe in my house or I am inside there. Either way, is not my problem. Inside here, we produce half a million hits every two days. That’s a whole lot of tina for five dollars a hit.”
Jack made use of the information Studhalter had given him. “I never said five dollars.” “Relax, we are friends here, relax,” Sergei laughed. “Five dollars for the user. For you, two dollars.”
Jack nodded satisfactorily.
The door opened and two more people came out. One was another hard-looking Slavic man, although this one lacked the bright, intelligent eyes of the two Petrenkos. The other was an anachronism — a beautiful woman with long blond hair, tied into a thick Viking braid down her back. She hopped off the porch and threw her arms around Sergei, who buried his face in her neck and hair, growling pleasurably at her in Russian.
Malenkiy chuckled and whispered something to Franko, who laughed and nudged Jack. “Our combination scientist and cock tease. Sergei pays her double because he’s trying to get up her skirt. He’ll give half the money in
