have an axe like the one you created, designed to lop off the heads of all those friends and confidants who’ve trusted you over the years.”
“Do tell.”
“An axe made not of finely honed steel sharpened to a razor’s edge but of people. Bad people. As choice a crew of thieves, sadists, and killers as ever labored for the hidden puppet master pulling their strings.
People like Brad Oliver, who handled some of the financial aspects of your dirty work.”
Wright pulled a long face and looked sad. “Ah yes, poor Brad. Such a tragic death, so untimely a loss to one of the brightest rising stars in the fiscal galaxy.”
Jack snorted his derision. “I bet. What happened to Brad? Did he get greedy seeing all those vast sums he was in the process of making for you and decide to feather his own nest? Your super-scheme for shorting was slick and stealthy but his pint-sized version to invest a few million of his own on the coming apocalypse was rushed and clumsy. His junior league manipulations showed up on Chappelle’s radar screens because that’s just what Ryan was looking for, smelly investments made in a hurry on the basis of foreknowledge of imminent catastrophe. Once Chappelle gets a whiff of something like that, he keeps digging into the numbers until he finds out the real score. Oliver’s heavy-handed shorting is what put CTU on to the plot against Sky Mount in the first place.”
Wright couldn’t have been cooler. “Brad’s one overriding fault, and I say to you what I would not hesitate to declare under oath in any court in the land, his great sin was avarice. Greed, pure and simple. He overreached himself and paid the price.”
Jack countered, “Thanks to you he did. When you found out that his arrest was imminent you greased the skids out from under him, virtually literally. You tipped him off that we were coming to apprehend him, knowing that he would do what he did: take it on the run. Only before you went to him you made sure that one of your hatchetmen had arranged for Mr. Pettibone and his Deathmobile to be outside the gates waiting for him. When Brad tried to make his getaway, Pettibone ran him off the road on a thousand-foot drop to his death. Exit Brad.”
Wright made a face. He was really enjoying himself now. “Dear me! Did I do all that? I’m afraid you’ll have some difficulty proving that in court, Agent Bauer.”
“Don’t be so sure. Look at Marion Clary. She looks like she might be remembering something she’d seen but thought nothing of at the time. Like you having a private little chat in your office here with Brad right before he went out and got smeared all over the eastern slope of Mount Zebulon?”
It was a shot in the dark, but Jack figured it was worth a try. The first mention of Oliver’s name had triggered a fidgety restlessness in Marion Clary, an agitation that increased as Jack explicated the mode and manner of Oliver’s death.
Cabot Huntington Wright condescended to glance at the receptionist. What he saw there compelled him to take a long second look. She openly fretted, chewing her lower lip, her expression stricken, wounded.
He said, “Marion, dear, surely you don’t give any credence to this preposterous twaddle?”
She held herself so tightly that it looked like her neck cords would break. Her eyes were open, staring into space. She shook her head with short, tense movements. She said, “Believe it? Of course not! But — but you did call Brad into your office yesterday afternoon to speak with him, and when it was over he had the most dreadful look on his face and he rushed off like a crazy man and drove to his death—”
“Pure coincidence. Brad had a guilty conscience because he feared his financial chicanery was about to come to light. He ran away and had the misfortune to suffer a terrible fatal accident due to his own carelessness and innate dishonesty.”
She turned hurt eyes on him. “Cabot, how can you speak so cruelly about poor Brad, who never deliberately hurt anyone in his life?”
“Honesty compels me to speak the truth.” Wright tsk-tsked. “I can’t believe that you’d be so credulous as to listen to the ravings of this prosecutorial young man. I’m disappointed in you Marion, very disappointed.”
She wasn’t listening to him. Jack wondered if she was listening to an inner voice instead. He decided to press on. “That brings us to the other edge of your double-headed axe, Mr. Wright. Oliver was the financial edge. The homicidal edge was Larry Noone.
“Noone was a driving wheel in your murder train. He was perfectly placed to do so. As a high- ranking executive of the Brand Agency, Noone had access to his own private intelligence network, one rivalling any in the public sector and less hampered by red tape. By delving into the Brand computerized files he could learn with a keystroke who was dirty, who could be corrupted and who couldn’t. Bribe takers, thieves, prostitutes, deviants, strong- arm goons, and contract killers, all listed there in the files. All he had to do was call them up and dangle the baited hook of Cabot Wright’s money in front of them.
“It was Noone who found and recruited Reb Weld, using him to assemble a small army of hired killers. Noone who had all the inside information on security arrangements for the Round Table, allowing Weld and friends to circumvent them. Noone who murdered the board operators in the Brand command center tonight to allow Weld and his killer elite to plant bombs and poison gas in the basement on Level Two to blow up the fuel tanks to create a raging inferno to kill hundreds of innocent men, women, and children and burn Sky Mount down to the ground!”
Wright said acidly, “Of course it’s in your interest to blacken the character of poor Larry Noone, considering that you’re the one who killed him. That, my dear young sir, is not a tower built on groundless speculation and absurd hypothesis but a fact!”
Marion Clary recoiled as though she’d been struck. She said in a whisper that trembled on the edge of a shriek, “Larry Noone is dead, too? My God, no!”
She covered her ears with her hands to keep from hearing any more. Cabot Wright sat back in his chair, favoring Jack with a richly supercilious smile.
Don Bass went to Marion Clary. His expression was compassionate as he gently but firmly took hold of her thin wrists and eased her hands away from her ears. He said, “Marion, you must listen to me. I’ve never lied to you and I’m not about to start now. As the Lord is my witness, less than an hour ago Larry Noone held me at gunpoint and was about to kill me. This man Jack Bauer saved my life, and that’s the honest truth.”
Ernie Sandoval had sat silent for a long while taking it all in. He now spoke up. “It’s a time for truth, Marion. You can’t stick your head in the sand and hope it goes away. Tell her, Jack. Tell her what Cabot Huntington Wright was going to do to destroy her beloved Sky Mount!”
That caught her attention. Her head jerked slightly to one side and her eyes took on a glazed expression. “Cabot Wright… destroy Sky Mount?”
Jack picked up the ball. He addressed his words to Wright, aware that Marion Clary was following them with a dreadful avidity. She could be a key witness in any future trial of Wright; her testimony could be invaluable if she could be convinced to give it freely.
Jack said, “That brings us to the third leg of our murder triangle. Remember, means, motive, and opportunity. The means was money and the people it could buy, whether it was Brad Oliver and his financial sleight-of-hand or Larry Noone and his handpicked assortment of killers.
“The motive was money, too, money and power, with one nightmarish catastrophe that would make Cabot Huntington Wright richer and more powerful than any other man in the history of the world.
“That brings us to opportunity. Like so much else in this case, opportunity wears more than one face. I’ve already mentioned the opportunity of having the movers and shakers of the national economy conveniently gathered together under one roof to make a big, fat target. But there’s another face to that opportunity, one that is and could only be known to a select handful of persons, and you, Mr. Wright, are the most select of that select few.”
“You flatter me, Agent Bauer.”
“No I don’t, not really. I’m just telling the plain truth the way the facts add up. The fact is that there is one secret that you are in a prime possession to know. It’s the old story of the Trojan horse: the enemy was already in the citadel, hidden where no one would ever suspect them. With the Greeks and the Trojans it’s a wooden horse. With you and Larry Noone’s murder squad, it’s a fallout shelter built long ago beneath Sky Mount that the world has forgotten but the few remember.
“A fallout shelter built at the height of the nuclear jitters of the Cold War era. A bunkerlike fortress that accesses Level Two through secret doors and hidden passages. A shelter with an escape route in case Sky Mount should be bombed flat and the shelter inhabitants unable to dig themselves out from under a mountain of rubble. So the builder created himself an escape route, drilling a tunnel through and out of a rock spur of Thunder Mountain into a little high mountain valley named Winnetou.
