was savvy enough to surround himself with dedicated, competent and incorruptible veterans of the drug wars like Miguel Avilla, so his pension was secure.
If Jack had an issue with Peltz’s management style, it was that the man chose to issue orders from a portable command center hidden inside a dirty van parked a block and a half away. As Jack saw it, Peltz should have been here, on the ground, among his troops. It troubled Jack that Peltz left the heavy lifting to an inexperienced assault team leader like Brian Mc-Connell, who was clearly not up to the task.
No harm done, but the snafu should not have occurred.
“Angel Three, this is Angel One. Do you have a positive ID on the car, the passengers?”
“It’s a different car, Angel One,” Avilla replied. “I think it’s the same driver, though. There are three other men in the vehicle but I can’t get a good look at them through the tinted glass.”
“Listen to me, Avilla. I need a positive ID, pronto, or we can pack up and go home right now.”
“I’m trying, McConnell. Give me a fucking minute.”
Jack chafed at the breach of radio discipline. Communications were breaking down and Agent Mc-Connell was making the situation worse by badgering Avilla.
“Angel One, this is Angel Two,” said Jack. “I observe movement on the northeast corner of the second building. Can you confirm.”
Jack had seen a bird fluttering on the roof and recognized what he’d seen. But he wanted to divert McConnell’s focus away from Avilla long enough for the man on the street to do his job.
“This is Angel One. I see no activity in the northeast. You probably saw a bird.”
“Roger that,” Jack replied.
“This is Angel Three. I have a positive ID on the passenger. The target is in the car. Repeat, the target is in the car.”
“This is Angel One. Let’s move. Go, go, go.”
Jack burst from cover, his chukkas kicking up dust as he sprinted across the bluff and descended the rocky slope, balancing with one arm, the other gripping his assault rifle. Behind him, three more figures emerged from cover — Chet Blackburn and members of his CTU tactical team.
Jack’s feet hit the asphalt before anyone else. He flicked off the safety, then aimed the muzzle of the G36 at the steel door marked with the number 9. Feet pounded the pavement at his shoulder. It was Chet Blackburn, covering his back.
They hit the wall simultaneously three seconds later, flattening themselves on either side of the door. Already, Blackburn had sculpted a wad of C-4 plastic explosives into a donut to encircle the doorknob. He draped it around the metal lock, plugged in the detonator.
“Five seconds,” Chet Blackburn warned.
It seemed longer. Jack had pressed closer to the wall, waiting. When the blast finally came, he felt the shock ripple along his spine. The door blew off its hinges, spun away. Jack heard the clang as it landed somewhere inside the studio. The noise of the blast quickly faded. Bauer and Blackburn moved cautiously but quickly through the door. The other two men remained outside, guarding their backs and making sure no one escaped the net.
Then, from the opposite side of the studio compound, and near the front gate, the CTU agents heard shots.
Squinting against the glare, Tony Almeida slipped heavy-framed sunglasses over his eyes. Already the Southern California sun was over the horizon and burning too bright, too hot. The L.A. basin was experiencing the most severe drought in fifteen years. Down here near the border it was even worse. A haze hung over the hills from the brushfires.
But this was nothing new. Since Tony had moved to the City of Angels after his stint in the Marine Corps, Southern California seemed to be in one crisis mode after another. Droughts and the resulting wildfires. Mudslides. Riots. And the ubiquitous earthquakes.
He glanced at the TAG Heuer steel chronograph on his wrist. Nearly 5:30 with six miles to go, and traffic so thick he might not make it in time. Tony cursed, swerved the late-model Dodge truck to get around a meandering driver, nearly adding to the dents and scrapes that covered the vehicle’s exterior. The woman in the seat next to him squealed. She’d spilled some of her steaming hot coffee on her low-riders.
“Slow down, Tony. What’s the rush?”
Tony downshifted, applied the brake — not to appease Fay Hubley, but because traffic had once again slowed to a crawl in all four lanes. When they rolled to a complete stop a moment later, Tony lowered the window. Dust and hot dry air filled the cabin. Fay, dabbing at the brown stains on her faded denims, coughed theatrically. Tony ignored her, stuck his head out in a futile effort to see around a lumbering truck that filled his windshield. An aircraft heading in to Brown Field Municipal Airport roared overhead, adding to the cacophony.
Tony closed the window, slumped behind the wheel. The rattle of the air conditioner replaced the ear- battering road roar.
“Thank god you didn’t get any coffee, you’re so tense,” said Fay. “Are we late? Is that why you didn’t want to stop? I mean, we lost like two minutes at the Starbucks drive-through.”
Tony let go of the steering wheel, stroked his black goatee, a larger amount of beard than he was used to beneath his lip. His hair felt strange, too. Long in the back and bunched into a small ponytail at the nape of his neck.
Fay glanced at Tony from under long blond lashes, then looked away. She pursed her glossed lips, brushed dangling strands of curly blond hair away from her tanned face.
“Chill out, will you, boss? It’s not like we’re on a deadline, right?”
“Actually we
“It’s not like we’re the bad guys. We can tell the border patrol who we are, what we’re doing.”
“Yeah, let’s let some border guard in on classified information,” Tony replied, his tone impatient. “Hell, for all we know the guard we talk to could be the same corrupt son of a bitch who let Richard Lesser escape across the Mexican border in the first place.”
Fay turned away from Tony, gazed out the passenger side window.
Tony regretted his tone, if not his words, as soon as he said them. It wasn’t Fay Hubley’s fault that she was inexperienced, that she had never gone undercover before, never even worked in the field. She wouldn’t be doing it now if circumstances didn’t demand her involvement. Tony needed Agent Hubley’s computer expertise to sniff out their prey’s cyber trail while Tony ran down the fugitive in the real world.
The man they were hunting, Richard Lesser, was approximately the same age as Fay. A graduate of Stanford, Lesser held a Master’s degree in Computer Science. He was also one of the top programmers in his class. Not satisfied making a cool half-million dollars a year creating security protocols or designing computer games, Lesser decided his first career move after university would be to hack the computer of America’s top computer security specialists, then hold its entire database hostage. Boscom Systems paid up to protect their reputation — to the tune of five million dollars. Ultimately their own cyber-sleuths managed to identify Lesser from a piece of errant coding his “Hijack” program inadvertently left buried in Boscom’s mainframe.
Two weeks ago, Lesser had managed to jump across the border hours before an indictment against him was handed down. Since his crimes were purely economic and limited to a narrow scope of damage, he wasn’t the type of malefactor CTU usually hunted. But in the past eight days, persistent and urgent chatter had been detected between two known Central American narco-terrorist groups and an unknown cell led by a shadowy figure named Hasan. All three groups mentioned Richard Lesser by name. One of these cells was located in Colombia, the other was based in Mexico City, and the third somewhere in the United States. All placed the fugitive Lesser somewhere in Tijuana, and analysts believed all three groups were dispatching representatives to snatch him up.
The intercepts set off alarm bells inside of CTU’s Cyber-Division — Fay Hubley’s unit. After being briefed, Special Agent Larry Hastings, Director of CTU’s Cyber-Operations in Washington, told Ryan Chappelle he believed Lesser to be the most dangerous fugitive of his kind in the world because of the knowledge and skills the man possessed. Hastings felt it was imperative Lesser be captured and returned to the United States, or prevented from linking up with the terrorists by whatever means necessary. With Washington’s stamp of approval, Tony’s and Fay’s mission was hastily assembled.
