He parked half a block away from the house and walked back. Heavy drapes hid the inside from view, and heavier iron bars protected the windows from the outside. Julio Juarez did not keep a very welcoming home. The whole place was still, and gave the impression that it was deserted. But Jack knew Julio was home. At least, Julio’s cellular phone was home. The LAPD printout had given Jack access to all kinds of information about Julio, including his cell phone number. Jack had the mobile number’s signal traced — as long as the phone was on, CTU’s satellites could find it — and sure enough, the eyes in the sky had pinpointed Julio inside his own home.
Jack walked up the cracked blacktop driveway to a green door splattered with yellow paint and knocked.
Jack knocked again without saying anything. To the right of the door was a window, again with heavy curtains on the inside. Jack pressed himself against the door just as that curtain was drawn back. Someone was trying to see who was knocking. Jack was also careful to duck below the little peephole in the door front. But he knocked again.
The door opened to the length of the guard chain and someone whined, “Who’s fucking with me?”
Jack drove his shoulder into the door, his weight snapping the chain. The man inside stumbled backward. He slipped inside and closed the door behind him.
The room inside was the complete opposite of the building’s exterior. It was painted cool blue, and one whole wall was devoted to a graffiti-style painting of zoot suiters and tattooed esses in Ray-Bans and plaid flannel shirts. The carpet was plush gray and the furniture was leather. Ranchero music tripped out of unseen speakers and a fifty-inch plasma screen was broadcasting “Sports Center.”
“What the fuck—?” the man on the floor said.
He looked like the mug shot. He was small and wiry, somewhere between twenty and forty, with a pathetically thin mustache, pockmarked skin, and short, dark hair. He picked himself up and puffed out his chest, but he didn’t advance on Jack.
“What you doing?” he challenged. “You know who I am?”
Jack nodded. “You’re Julio Juarez. You’re a two-bit coyote who makes a living smuggling illegals over the border at San Diego and sometimes up through the desert in Arizona.”
Julio scowled at Jack. His face seemed set into a permanent glare, with one side of his mouth drooping lower than the other. The eye on that side also looked eternally tired. “Yeah, that’s me. I got friends in MS13, bitch, so unless you want you and your family to end up in someone’s trash can, get the fuck out.”
Jack recognized MS-13 from CTU’s daily threat assessments. It was a street gang that had started in El Salvador and quickly spread to the United States. They were active in California and Maryland and Virginia. The situation had gotten so bad that those three states had formed special task forces to deal with them. The fact that Julio was connected to MS-13, and MS-13 was active near the U.S. capital, bothered Jack somehow, but he couldn’t figure it out at the moment.
“Relax, Julio,” Jack said. “I’m just here to ask you a couple of questions. I’m a Federal agent, and I have a lot bigger problems to deal with than a chickenshit like you. You answer my questions, I leave, and you get to go about your business.”
Julio’s weak eye drooped even farther. “Okay, ask your question.”
Jack nodded. “First, I want to know if you’ve ever smuggled anyone—”
He didn’t finish the question, because Julio Juarez kicked him hard in the groin. He moved fast for a man with a droopy eye, and the kick caught Jack almost square. He felt his midsection explode and the air went out of him. The edges of the room turned black for a moment, and Jack barely saw Julio bolt down the hallway. Ignoring the pain, Jack sprinted after him.
Ryan Chappelle sat in Kelly Sharpton’s office, thinking of ways to distance himself from Jack Bauer’s blundering activities. He had a promising career ahead of him, but unfortunately he’d been linked with that heavy- handed ex-soldier who thought the only way to deal with a wall was to knock it down. Chappelle preferred to build a door.
His phone rang. “Chappelle,” he said.
“Chappelle, this is Walsh,” said Walsh from Washington, D.C. “What the fuck is going on?”
“I’m sorry?” Ryan looked around as though the problem might be right there in the room with him. “What?”
“It’s all over the news! Who leaked it?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t—”
“Turn on your news, then figure out who leaked this story!” Walsh slammed the phone down.
There was a television in Sharpton’s office. Ryan searched for the remote, found it on top of the television itself, and fired it up. He flipped on CNN. The main story was something about an earthquake in Tunisia, but the running banner told Chappelle what he needed to know: “Intelligence officials acknowledge credible threat to President Barnes. Sources suggest foreign terrorists on U.S. soil.”
Chappelle felt the blood rise up into his cheeks. It hadn’t been an hour, and the story was already in the press.
Julio Juarez had gone out the back door and over the fence. Jack followed, nearly vomiting as his gut and groin bumped against the fence top. He made it over and sprinted down a dusty alley after the coyote.
His quarry turned left at the street, and Jack rounded the corner twenty feet behind him. He slammed into an old lady and spun around her without apologizing, trying not to lose sight of Julio. The wiry little smuggler ran two blocks down, dodging the cars. Jack gained on him slowly — Julio might have been quick with a kick, but he wasn’t all that fast. Jack gained enough ground to see Julio duck into a yellow adobe building with faded writing across the top.
Jack entered the doorway right behind him, racing out of the sunlight into a cool, dark room, very wide and scattered with small tables and benches. There was a stage at the far end of the room, over which hung a banner that read “Viva Ranchero!”
Julio was right in front of him. Jack dived, catching the coyote by the backs of the knees and bringing him down in a tumble of chairs. Julio squealed and struggled. Jack caught him by the waist and rolled him backward, slamming Julio’s head into the tiled floor. Some of the life went out of him then. Jack grabbed him by the hair and lifted his head off the tile, drawing his gun and putting it to the coyote’s temple.
At the same time, he heard four or five hammers click back. Jack looked up. Five gang-bangers stood around him, their faces turned down in angry frowns and their weapons all pointed at him.
“What the fuck, esse?” one of them, a heavyset man with a thick black mustache said.
“Cesar, shoot this puta!” Julio squealed. “He’s a cop!”
Jack rolled onto his back, pulling Julio on top of him and keeping the muzzle of his Sig pressed against the little man’s temple. He didn’t have to say anything. The big man, Cesar, was smart enough to understand.
“You got nowhere to go, white boy,” he said.
“They kill you!” Julio said, trembling.
“But I’ll kill you first, Julio,” Jack replied.
12. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2 P.M. AND 3 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
“Listen, I don’t want to arrest him. I don’t care about any of you. All I want is to ask Julio a couple of questions and I’m gone.”
“We don’t give a shit what you want,” one of the other gang-bangers said.
“I bet Julio wants to live, though,” Jack said. His heart was racing, but he kept his voice calm.
The second gang-banger said, “I don’t give a fuck about Julio. This white boy comes into our place with a gun? He’s dead, esse!”
But Cesar shook his head. “No,
