“Yes, sir. Go on.”
“It’s been over three hours since Dennis and Nancy were taken away,” Chandra said, frowning. “Where did they take them? What did they do to them?”
Teri Bauer ignored the questions, checked on Carla. Her contractions seemed to have stopped. The woman’s eyes were open and she was pale, sweating.
“Carla?” Teri whispered. “Talk to me.”
“I don’t know what’s worse,” Carla replied. “When the contractions come, I think I’m going to die. Now that they’ve stopped, I’m terrified that something bad is happening to my baby.”
“Try not to worry,” Teri replied. “I was in labor with Kimberly for over twenty-two hours. My contractions stopped and started many times. My cousin’s stopped altogether and had to be induced.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know…I’m so scared.”
“You have to think positively, Carla. It’s the only way to get through something like this. For the sake of your baby, you have to keep your spirits up, believe things will turn out all right.”
Carla nodded, swallowed with difficulty, forced a smile.
“Hey, watch it there!” an angry voice suddenly cried.
Teri looked up to see two masked men approaching, machine guns slung over their shoulders. They were dragging the limp form of an older man between them. In the row in front of Teri, there was a line of empty seats, and the terrorists tossed the injured man into one of them.
“Nazi bastards,” the man muttered, spitting blood. Crimson rivulets poured down his face and onto his white shirt, open at the collar, the bow tie undone. One eye was swollen shut and there was a bloody gap in his jaw where a tooth used to be.
Another older man, still wearing his evening jacket, hurried up the aisle. He moved toward the injured man’s side, only to be yanked back and cuffed by one of the masked men. The man tore the Rolex off his own wrist and held it out to the masked men. Brushing the offering aside, the two walked away, laughing.
“Ben, Ben,” said the newcomer to the injured man. “Why did you have to shoot your mouth off?”
“Lousy Nazis. I should spit at them again.” Then Ben’s bloodied mouth grinned. “I sure pissed them off, didn’t I, Hal?”
“And look what it got you, you putz!”
Teri leaned forward. “Here, clean him up with this,” she said, handing Hal a discarded satin wrap.
“Thank you,” he said and went to work on his bleeding friend.
“I’m Teri Bauer.”
“Please to meet you. I’m Hal Green, the director of this miserable turkey.” He pointed to his friend. “And this big mouth here is my AD, Ben Solomon. We were in the control booth when everything went down. Tomas Morales and his security people tried to stage an attack but the terrorists gunned them all down. Then, after these nuts took over, they forced me to set up a camera in the booth and teach one of them how to operate it. Then they dumped us down here.”
Hal Green scanned the auditorium. “How are things down here? We’ve been out of touch upstairs.”
“They’re giving us bathroom breaks now. Ten people at a time. Abigail Heyer and her entourage got first dibs—”
“No surprise there.” Chandra snorted. “Once Hollywood royalty, always Hollywood royalty.”
“Still no food or water for the rest of us,” Teri added. Then she glanced up at the glass booth high over their heads and leaned in close to Hal so Carla wouldn’t hear. “You said they wanted to use a camera up there?” she whispered.
“That’s right.”
“They must be preparing to issue demands then. And if their demands aren’t met, they’ll start killing hostages.”
Hal Green eyed Teri. “What are you, doll, an FBI agent? CIA?”
“Close,” she replied.
Jack Bauer, Chet Blackburn, and a group of hastily assembled consulting engineers had been reviewing the blueprints for the Chamberlain Auditorium for over an hour. As one of only two people who’d escaped the terrorists, Lonnie Nobunaga was among them. Jack thought that since the photographer had actually been inside the auditorium, he might offer some insight.
The group deduced that the terrorists were unaware of a new air conditioning and filtration system being retrofitted to the auditorium to meet new state government standards for indoor air quality. The ducts being assembled were large and extensive enough to move armed snipers through the building unseen. But they would have to get into the building’s basement to reach the duct ports.
They studied the city’s water and storm drain system, but ran into another dead end. Nothing larger than a twenty-inch pipe ran into or out of the auditorium — too narrow for a human to pass through. The only building close to the auditorium was the Summit Studios offices, which actually abutted the theater. But the offices shared the same fire door system as the auditorium itself and was just as impenetrable.
“The walls of that auditorium are three feet thick in places,” said Jon Francis, a portly engineer in a rumpled Hawaiian shirt with a bald head shaved clean as a billiard ball. By day a professor of engineering at a local college, Francis freelanced as a CTU advisor. “It would take a construction team an hour to break through — maybe more,” he warned.
“And the terrorists would detonate their bombs as soon as they heard the first jackhammer,” Jack added.
Evans spoke up. “What makes you so sure they have bombs?”
“The Chechens were responsible for the siege at the Moscow Opera House,” Jack replied, “and you know how that went down. The terrorists seized the theater, used Chechen war widows with bombs under their clothing to cow the authorities into inaction. Eventually President Putin authorized the Russian police to use sedative gas to knock out everyone — that option isn’t available to us in this situation.”
“Why not?” asked Lonnie Nobunaga. “We have non-lethal gases in our arsenal, don’t we?”
“Unfortunately there’s no such thing as a nonlethal chemical attack, no matter what the experts say,” Jack replied. “Fentanyl or other calmative gases are deadly in large enough concentrations, and massive amounts would be needed to fill up the Chamberlain. That would mean death to a large number of people in the crowd. Children would be most susceptible, but everyone under a certain weight will overdose. Those who are allergic will have adverse, possibly fatal reactions. People with prior medical conditions could die from complications, and pregnant women will most surely miscarry. Over a hundred hostages lost their lives in the Moscow siege — most because of the gas, not the terrorists.”
Lonnie’s face fell. “I see your point.”
Evans frowned at the schematics on the monitor. “This place is impenetrable. With the fire doors closed, it’s like a fortress.”
A police technician approached the group. “Special Agent Bauer? Nina Myers is on the horn for you.”
Jack Bauer accepted the headset, slipped the earbud into place. “Nina. What have you learned about the terrorists?”
“The United Liberation Front for a Free Chechnya has been around for about eight years. The organization began small, but has tripled in size and power very quickly. It’s violent — sort of Chechen version of the Hezbollah. The group has become so influential that two years ago Nikolai Manos, the head of the Russia East Europe Trade Alliance, assisted the State Department in secret negotiates with its rebel leaders.”
“Nikolai Manos. Can we reach him?” Jack asked.
“I tried,” Nina replied. “Unfortunately Mr. Manos is unavailable. He was in the Los Angeles headquarters of his organization for a press event early this afternoon, but his aides tell me he’s left the city on a secret trade mission.”
“A bit too convenient. Find out all you can about Manos and his organization.”
“I’m already on it,” Nina replied.
Jack ended the call, looked at the monitor where Christina Hong continued her bogus broadcast in the likely event the terrorists were still tuning in.
