company building, which also boasted its own private generator and reserves of fresh water and food.
They were prepared to ride out the storm; now they would also ride out any armed assault.
The dark green SUV manned by Jack Bauer and Pete Malo pulled over to the side of the road and stood there, idling. They had been notified of an important incoming transmission from Director Cal Randolph at CTU Center, one that would be beamed to the transceivers that were part of the vehicle's array of onboard electronic communications hardware.
This included a monitor screen that was part of a console built into the dashboard housing. The screen was treated with a polarizing glaze process that rendered it opaque to any person or surveillance device that attempted to view it from outside the windows of the SUV. Audio was supplied by a speakerphone grid. Condenser microphones with fine-tuned pickup allowed Jack and Pete to respond directly to Cal in real-time, two-way conversation.
Cal said, 'We have a positive identification of the female shooter.'
The monitor screen imaged full-face and profile shots of the distaff member of the hit team, dead.
These were followed by a different photo of the assassin, one taken elsewhere and earlier, when she was alive. From the look of it, it was the product of a surveillance camera whose subject was unaware that she was being photographed.
It was an exterior shot, a street scene in an anonymous, unrecognizable urban locale. It pictured the woman standing on a street corner. She wore civilian clothes, a shortsleeved blouse and slacks, toting a handbag with a long shoulder strap. Her dark hair was much shorter than at the time of her death, a boyish pixie cut whose ends reached down to her firm jawline. She wore the same characteristic wire-rimmed spectacles with the oval lenses. Her forehead was high and smooth, almost bulbous; her mouth was a tightly compressed straight line.
Cal Randolph's disembodied voice came loud and clear through the speaker grid.
'This picture was taken by one of our sources eighteen months ago in Lima, Peru. The subject is Beatriz Ortiz, a Maoist, radical terrorist, and self-styled urban guerrilla.'
The name rang no bells with Jack. He'd worked some Latin American assignments, but his real area of expertise was the Middle East, South Asia, and the Balkans. He glanced at Pete Malo, whose face showed no sign of recognizing the woman.
Cal said, 'She's of Argentinean origin. Thirty years old, according to the record.'
The director continued, 'Her father was a college professor, her mother a dental technician. The father got on the wrong side of the Argentine military junta during the era of its 'Dirty War' against the left. He only signed a few human rights petitions, but that was enough to get him denounced, arrested, and sent to jail. He was never seen again and became one of the thousands of Desparacus, the Disappeared Ones. Presumably, like the others, he was tortured, executed, and buried in an anonymous mass grave.
'This radicalized the daughter. By the time she came of age and went to university in Buenos Aires, the junta was long gone and she was able to pursue her ideological passions with a minimum of scrutiny by the authorities. She began her student days as a committed Marxist-Leninist. She was spotted by a radical professor who steered her to a Cuban communist recruiter. She dropped out of sight sometime before graduation, her whereabouts a mystery to her family and few friends.
'We believe she was smuggled out of the country to Cuba, where she was extensively trained at a school for spies. Her training period took several years, during which she demonstrated real expertise in the clandestine arts, including demolitions and assassination.
'She surfaced in Colombia, where she was associated with FARC, the rural-based revolutionary militia that's fought a civil war against the government for over twenty years now. The record shows that she operated with equal facility in the cities or the jungle. In the cities, she helped blow up buildings and assassinate government officials, journalists, judges, and prominent capitalists. In the jungle, her targets were landowners large and small, priests, teachers, ranchers, farmers, villagers who wanted to stay neutral, and all others she deemed 'enemies of the revolution.'
'This experience further radicalized her, causing her to cast aside Marxism-Leninism as 'too gradualist' and embrace Maoism, specifically the most violent revolutionary excesses of the Red Guard era during the sixties, a program that was defunct years before she was born. She expressed admiration for the genocidal regime of Pol Pot's Cambodia, and was
'If Havana had ever fully controlled her — and there's some doubt on that score, the late Ms. Ortiz apparently having been something of a wildcard when it came to following party directives, due to her frequent denunciation of the Fidelista ruling clique as self-serving moderates afraid to get their hands dirty — she became a fully independent free agent following her years in Colombia with FARC.
'Since then, she's been a freelance radical terrorist and killer, working with the most extreme ultraleft elements in South and Central America and the Caribbean. She was sentenced to death in absentia in Brazil. Most recently, she's been spotted in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
'And get this: in the last year, she's reported as having been in the Orinoco in Venezuela, allied with a radical militia group terrorizing and killing owners of big estates and plantations opposed to Chavez's socialist takeover.
'A lot of governments will be happy to write 'Closed' on her files. Including ours. By the way, there's no record of her having entered this country legally — or any other way. It'll be tough to get a line on her. She was a pro. She went on the Paz hit job with no identifying documents, real or fake. No laundry marks in her clothes. Garments and sneakers that're mass-produced items available in hundreds of stores around the city. No leads there.'
Jack said, 'How about the glasses, Cal? Maybe she had them made in New Orleans. Or the States. Maybe we could get a fix on her from the prescription of the glasses, the grinding of the lens and the house style.'
'We're checking it out,' Cal said, matter-of-factly. 'So there you have her, the late, unlamented — unlamented by our side, that is — Beatriz Ortiz. Make of her what you will.'
Jack asked, 'Anything on the other three shooters?'
'That's all we've got for now. We'll keep you posted on anything else that comes in.'
Cal signed off, ending the transmission. Jack and Pete sat in silence for a moment, thinking, oblivious of the throbbing rumble of the SUV's idling engine.
Pete spoke first: 'That Chavez connection makes her a natural to link up with Paz.'
Jack said, 'Except that she tried to link him up with a bullet.'
'Thieves fall out. Maybe she was part of Paz's apparatus here in New Orleans until she had a change of heart and thought he was going soft and decided to purge him for 'deviationist tendencies.''
'It could happen,' Jack conceded. 'But that communist Cuba background could also tie her straight to Beltran — the joker in this deck.'
Pete pointed out, 'Havana's too moderate for her liking, according to Cal.'
'She might have been able to overcome her distaste if Beltran's got something really hot cooking, something big enough and explosive enough to whet her appetite.'
Pete said, frowning, 'When you put it that way, it sounds worrisome.'
Jack stroked his chin between thumb and forefinger. 'Here's a puzzler: how does a hard-core Maoist urban guerrilla like Beatriz Ortiz wind up siding with a piece of neo-Nazi trash like Dixie Lee? Talk about your odd couples!'
Pete shrugged. 'Politics makes strange bedfellows, they say. Still, according to Floyd Dooley, who knows his stuff, Dixie was a money-hungry cuss who wouldn't lift a finger unless there was a dirty buck in it.'
Jack said, 'While Beatriz Ortiz reads as a stone-cold ideologue and revolutionist who couldn't care less about personal gain. You couldn't buy her for anything she might consider counterrevolutionary, no matter how high the price.
'And another thing: why would Beatriz try to hit Paz? Whatever else he is, he's a bulwark of Venezuela's 'twenty-first-century socialist' regime. By her standards, a Chavez stalwart like Paz should be the last of her targets. We know she's a committed ideologue through and through; where does the Paz hit fit in with her ideology?'
Pete said, 'Paz is dirty as hell. A big-time drug dealer. Maybe that makes him counterrevolutionary.'
