reception, in case the kidnapper should call while you're down there.'
Susan said, 'You think he will? He said he'd contact us on the hour.'
Sears said, 'Who knows what he might get it in his head to do? I wouldn't necessarily trust the timetable of a kidnapper and killer. He might call at any time just to be unpredictable, to break up our timing and keep us off- balance. Or something could come up that could require him to contact us sooner.'
Susan said, 'You're right. Here's the phone, take it.'
'Thank you. I'll take good care of it; don't worry.'
'Don't worry!'
'You know what I mean,' Sears said. 'You'd better go with her, Gene. A million dollars in small bills packs a considerable weight. You carry it.'
'Will do,' Jasper said. 'I think I can handle it.' He sounded eager and made no attempt to disguise it. To stay close to Susan Keehan and make himself useful to her, especially at this time of crisis, was something he greatly desired.
Molineux said, 'Shall we go?'
There was the sound of footsteps, three sets of them, as he, Susan, and Gene Jasper crossed a long marble floor. It was a big bank, a big building, with a lot of floor to be crossed.
Molineux said, 'We'll ride the elevator down.
The signal had been affected by the masses of stone and metal making up the bulk of the bank's aboveground structure.
Now, as Susan, Jasper, and Molineux descended to the sub-surface vaults, with even more steel and concrete to block against the transmission, the signal began breaking up. The reception got mushy, muddy; gaps opened in the dialogue.
Noise fought with signal. There was more static than voice. Finally the voices gave way entirely to a hissing stream of white noise.
Jack Bauer said, 'There goes the signal. Only temporarily — I hope.'
He and Pete Malo sat in their SUV, which was parked around the corner from the Planters and Traders Mercantile Exchange building in the city's staid, old-line financial district. The area lay cross-town from where the Mega Mart building was sited.
The SUV was parked on a side street around the corner from the front of the bank building. Its windows were rolled up and the air conditioner was on. Pete sat behind the wheel, Jack in the passenger seat.
Their faces were intent, a study in concentration. Both men were hunched over a portable transceiver unit fitted into a dashboard housing and plugged into a power outlet. The idling SUV's engine supplied the power for the comm unit.
The console was roughly the size and shape of an attache case, its face crowded with dials, switches, and screens. Beaded telltale lights glowed green: on.
A digitized readout screen displayed real-time data measuring the strength and frequency of the signal from a bugging device that the agents were monitoring.
Earlier, back at the Mega Mart building in the KHF offices, Garros's absence and the failure of agents Topham and Beauclerk to respond to communications had alerted Jack that a crisis was at hand. He reached a quick decision to bug Susan Keehan, on the grounds that she was likeliest to receive a message from Raoul. As the group was riding down the elevator to the parking garage, Jack had accidentally-on-purpose bumped into Susan. He had done so for the purpose of planting a Flea on her, slipping the stick-on, button-sized electronic eavesdropper under the lapel of her blazer in the guise of steadying her after the collision.
That was why he and Pete had departed the underground garage as soon as possible, to activate the Flea and begin listening in. It proved to be in good working order, and once switched on, began fransmitting the voices of Susan Keehan and those of her associates who were in close proximity to her.
The signal was beamed to the transceiver in the SUV, whose amplifiers boosted the feed and sent it along to the board operators of CTU Center across the river.
It was a bold thrust, potentially risky, for CTU to bug a prominent Keehan dynast. Done without a warrant, too.
Mylon Sears orchestrated regularly scheduled electronic debugging sweeps and physical searches of the Mart's KHF offices, phone lines, computers, and faxes, as well as the private, personal vehicles of Susan and her management cadre and their places of residence.
It was his business to thwart CTU and all civilian and military government agencies and any other private parties that wanted to listen into the intimate details and secret dealings of the Keehan/Chavez alliance.
One thing he hadn't been prepared for, though, was a bug being planted on Susan herself.
The Flea model was proactive, capable of evading and eluding electronic anti-bugging devices. It came with a feedback sensor that responded to beamed or wave-pulse signal probes by closing down communication while continuing to passively store up information on its microchip; later, when the detector probes had ceased, the Flea sent the stored data to home base in compressed burst transmissions.
Today's killings and abduction had left Sears with tasks more pressing and immediate than to go bug hunting. When circumstances permitted, he would order a sweep of the KHF offices where Jack and Pete had been earlier today, on the chance that they might have planted some electronic eavesdropping devices there; but the idea that anyone had the lowdown gall to stick a bug on Susan Keehan was the furthest thing from his mind.
Jack Bauer had taken the initiative of bugging Susan Keehan. He'd taken the responsibility, too. The act was audacious, pushing the envelope, but the deaths of CTU agents Topham and Beauclerk had left him in no mood for half measures and pulled punches. He'd informed Cal Randolph of his act, one that the Center Director had heartily endorsed.
When the Flea was eventually found, it would close down for good. Inside it was a micro-fuse that could either be remotely tripped by CTU board operators monitoring the feed, or that would activate itself in response to any attempts to open or tamper with it, leaving its sophisticated electronic innards a chunk of fused plastic and metal.
It had deniability, too; no one in the Keehan camp could prove it had been planted by CTU.
Having a big ear planted squarely in the midst of the KHF ruling cadre's secret conferences and strategy sessions would have been a coup enough, but the Flea really started paying off dividends when it picked up the communication between the kidnapper and Susan Keehan.
Too bad it wasn't sensitive enough to pick up the kidnapper's voice on the cell phone, but it did pick up Susan's responses and the words of those around her. Here was the hottest of hot leads toward Garros's abductors, the slayers of agents Topham and Beauclerk.
The Flea broadcast two sets of signals. One came from a transponder, beaming its location on a wavelength that could be correlated to a map grid to plot its whereabouts at any given moment. Another frequency carried the audio component, the voices and sounds within the listening device's radius of activity/receptivity.
The speaker grid of the SUV's transceiver board was switched on, allowing Jack and Pete to follow the transmission without having to don earphones. Now, though, it gave out white noise: static. Chattering voices had been replaced by pips, pops, bleeps, and hisses.
Frustration showed on the agents' faces. Jack said, 'We've lost the audio, at least for now.'
Pete said, 'Center's operating on our feed, so if we're not getting anything, they're not, either.'
Jack scanned the transceiver board. 'The bug's still working, but the transmission's not getting through. I don't think it's been detected; it's probably being canceled out by interference. Which makes sense if Susan's gone underground, into the vaults beneath the bank. All that stone and steel is blocking the signal. With any luck, it'll come back when she's topside again.'
He raised his gaze from the box, looking up and around. Stiffness ached in his neck and shoulders from having sat hunched forward for so long, focused on the feed from inside the bank.
The Planters and Traders Mercantile Exchange was located in the old-line financial district.
No glittering sky towers of more recently developed commercial areas were to be found here; this was a citadel of old money. Broad boulevards were lined with rows of buildings built in the first decades of the previous
