Jack said, “There could be traces of residue remaining in the compound. For that matter, it might be worthwhile to have Lobo checked for the same in a postmortem. He might have been exposed to some of the stuff, and it’s possible that whatever it is could be retained in organic matter.”
Armstrong used her in-car comm system to contact Central. She relayed the message that Red Notch and Lobo should both be examined for possible exposure to airborne chemical weapons. She also noted that this was the suggestion of her colleague, Agent Bauer.
A nice touch, thought Jack. That way she got it on the record that the idea had originated with him. If it failed to pan out, it was his bad idea, not hers. He held no resentment against her for the gambit. That was how the game was played.
Several miles of mountain scenery unrolled in silence. The throbbing in Jack’s head worsened as the car continued to climb. He said, “You wouldn’t happen to have any aspirin on you, would you?”
She said, “Headache?”
“A little bit.”
“You should get checked out by a medic, make sure you’re not suffering from a concussion.”
“I’m fine. Just a touch of altitude.” Jack didn’t want to provide any pretext, medical or otherwise, that might result in him getting pulled off this duty. The violent deaths of Frank Neal and that strange hermit Lobo had given him a personal stake in the mission. It wasn’t about keeping Chappelle happy, it was about cracking the case, finding the killers, and solving the mystery of the Zealots’ disappearance. He now felt that there was a direct and legitimate threat to the Round Table and its array of high- powered, high-finance invitees.
Armstrong said, “Yes, the height can get to you flatlanders, can’t it? That’s what happens when you’re out of your element.”
That could have been a veiled crack about his being an outsider who’d been forced on CTU/DENV through power politics. Jack couldn’t blame her for feeling that way, but it didn’t stop him from saying, “I haven’t done too badly so far.”
She said, “You’re still alive.”
A long pause followed, then she said, “I think there’s some aspirin in my pocketbook.” Her pocketbook was on the transmission hump between their seats. She steered with one hand and opened the pocketbook with the other. She reached inside it, rummaging around.
The road was no longer straight but twisty, winding around a succession of blind curves. Armstrong drove at a quick pace with no reduction in speed, glancing alternately at the road ahead and the interior of her pocketbook. It made Jack a shade anxious, since the road on his side had only a few feet of shoulder and a knee- high metal guardrail standing between him and a thousand- foot drop.
She said, “I know it’s in here somewhere…”
Jack was on the verge of telling her to forget it, that he could get along fine without the aspirin. The car rounded a curve, coming face to face with a two-and-a-half- ton truck coming in the opposite direction. The truck was a foot or two over the centerline and Armstrong had to swerve to avoid it, the two right-side wheels crunching the loose dirt and stones of the shoulder.
She said, “Jerk!” She passed the truck and swung back into the lane so all four wheels once more gripped solid pavement.
Jack had a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. He forced himself to adopt a conversational tone. “That was a catering truck. Must be coming from Sky Mount.”
She said, “Oh, there’s a regular caravan of suppliers going up and down the mountain for the whole time the conference is on. Nothing but the best for the guests, you know. I wish some of those truckers would learn how to drive.”
She went back to rummaging through her pocketbook, finally coming up with a bottle of aspirin. “I knew it was in there.” She handed it to Jack.
Jack said, “Thanks.” He took his time uncapping the container and shaking out two tablets. His mouth was dry from that recent near miss and he needed to work up some saliva. He popped one pill in the back of his mouth, giving his head a toss to get it started down his gullet, then repeated the process.
Armstrong said, “Swallowing them without any water? My, you are tough.”
He said, “Can you spare a few extra for later?”
“Keep the bottle if you like.”
“No, that’s okay, I just want a couple in reserve.”
He shook four pills into his palm, dropping them into the breast pocket of his jacket. He capped the bottle, handed it back to her.
A gap opened on the west side, revealing a road sloping up a long incline. Armstrong turned left, entering the road. She said, “Masterman Way. That’ll take us up to Sky Mount.”
Jack said, “This is the first CTU vehicle I’ve ever ridden in that was a Mercedes-Benz. How’d you manage to work that with the bean counters?”
“Operational necessity. We needed it for protective coloration to blend in with all the other highline models at Sky Mount. Otherwise we’d have stuck out like a sore thumb.”
They climbed the slope. The road split into two branches at the summit. A checkpoint had been established there, manned by two deputies from the county sheriff’s department. Their car was parked in the middle of the road. Each branch of the road was blocked by a set of wooden sawhorses.
One of the deputies approached the CTU car on the driver’s side. Anne Armstrong presented her credentials, including her ID and a pass to enter Sky Mount. The deputy took the documents to his car and radioed in to Sky Mount to verify them. They must have checked out okay because he returned to the car a moment later and gave Armstrong her paperwork. His partner moved the sawhorse out of the way and waved them through, moving it back to block the road after they had passed.
The road switch backed up the side of a mountain, unwinding in a series of hairpin curves that topped out on a plateau. High mountain valleys in the Rockies are known locally as parks. This park was a vast circular meadow that was open on the east and ringed the rest of the way around by three mountains: Mount Nagaii, Mount Zebulon, and Thunder Mountain. It created an amphitheatre-like effect, with the park being the floor and the mountains being the semicircular tiers that soared up and up toward the zenith.
An amphitheater of the gods. A fit setting for Sky Mount itself. Sky Mount was the name of both the park estate and the fabulous structure that crowned it. The building was a unique creation, part Gothic castle, part Tudor-style manor house, and part chateau. It was an architectural folly on a grand scale, a magnificent white elephant that could be compared only to such equally monumental efforts as the du Ponts’ Winterthur estate, Hearst’s San Simeon, and the baroque nineteenth-century castles of Ludwig, the Mad King of Bavaria.
The edifice occupied the flattened top of a rise in the park. It fronted south, its long axis running east-west. Its central portion suggested a medieval keep, with a facade loosely modeled after the church of Notre Dame in Paris. Long, multistoried wings extended east and west from it, garnished with balconies and terraces. The spiky roofline bristled with spires, towers, turrets, and battlements. It had been built in the late 1800s, the Gilded Age, and sought to render the intricate architectural “gingerbread” decor of the period not in woodwork but in stone. The mansion stood at the center of intricately landscaped grounds, a complex of gardens, fountains, galleries and arcades, patios and pavilions. The rise on which it sat had been cut into stepped terraces that were hanging gardens. The rest of the estate spread out from it in a pastoral vista of gently rolling green fields, woodland groves, and sylvan ponds, honeycombed with winding paths and decorated with statuary.
It was one of the damnedest things Jack Bauer had ever seen. He said, “Is that really there or is the altitude getting to me?”
Anne Armstrong said, “It is something, isn’t it?”
“It makes Neverland look like a country shack.”
Cresting the edge of the plateau and suddenly coming upon Sky Mount had created a visceral impact. Now that Jack had had time to process the big picture, he began to pick up on significant details, the telltale signs of modernity.
The mansion’s roofline was studded with satellite dishes, looking like white toadstools that had sprouted out of the crevices of a gnarly rock formation. A helicopter landing pad stood on the flat south of the rise, toward the west end of the park. Two helicopters sat there. A large field in the southeast sector had been turned into a parking lot. It was filled with scores of luxury cars, high-end SUVs, and limousines, all arranged in neat, orderly rows. A line
