came up underneath the balloon, and when the crosshairs of his 20mm Gatling guns fell across the blip on his screen, he opened fire.
Jack Bauer held his breath as the two radar blips came together briefly, then broke apart. One of the contacts — the F-16—fell away. The other vanished.
“Target destroyed.”
The room erupted in cheers. Hands slapped Jack on the back and shook his arms. Kelly Sharpton, his hands still bandaged, threw his arms around Jack in a friendly hug.
The F-16 bucked slightly like a startled horse. Then the engines cut out all together. Jets feed on air, which is why the ceiling for most fighter jets is fifty thousand feet. To go higher than that, you need a rocket.
Lundquist had been flying nose up. When the power cut out, the F-16 tipped backward, and he found himself upside down, his plane flat on its back as it fell back toward home. He didn’t panic, but he did feel annoyed. He was a captain in the United States Air Force and this was his airplane. He was not about to have it scratched up by something as stupid as a lack of oxygen.
Lundquist initiated his relight procedure. Every display in his cockpit twinkled like Christmas. Then he felt the familiar rumble under his feet and heard the deep-throated roar of the engine behind him, and he grinned.
The grin fell away from his face the next instant when something clanged through the guts of the F-16. Lundquist knew immediately that it was foreign object damage, and he thought ironically that the only foreign object up this high was the goddamned thing he’d been shooting at. His engine groaned at him. “Command, this is Mustang 1–9,” he said calmly. “I’ve got FOD to the engine.”
Alarms went off like klaxons all around him. “My compressor is — shit!” He knew what was coming next and he hit the eject button. Small explosive charges popped the canopy off his plane, and a half second later his seat was blown out of the cockpit. At the same time, the F-16 turned into a ball of fire that enveloped him. He blew into the careening canopy and slammed his head, helmet and all, into the Plexiglas.
As the world went dark around him, Bob Lundquist wondered if it was a boy or a girl.
The entire staff of CTU Los Angeles watched in silent horror as the F-16’s radar signature plummeted toward the ground.
“Eject, eject,” someone whispered.
The radar screen gave no sign that he ever ejected.
“Oh my god,” Jamey Farrell whispered. “That pilot…”
They listened over the intercom as a control tower in Kansas tried to raise the F-16. The words “Mustang 1– 9… Mustang 1–9. ” until the words became a lament.
Jack allowed himself a moment of silence, a moment of remorse. Then he steeled himself. He had sent men to die, and had watched them die, before. He reminded himself why that man had died, what he had died for. Then he said hoarsely, “Tell the other pilot to confirm the target is down.”
Jamey Farrell looked at him as though he was a monster. “Jack, that pilot. ”
“Tell him!”
Someone relayed the query, which was relayed to the second F-16 pilot, Sam Amato, who confirmed.
Jack nodded in satisfaction. “Nice job everyone,” he said resolutely.
Then he turned away from everyone, down the hallway toward the holding cells. When he was alone in the dim passageway, he gritted his teeth to bite back tears.
Nina walked around the building, then walked back up the stairs to Matilda’s apartment. There was no back door. Nina tried to peek into the window. Through a crack in the drapes, she saw an easel and the back of a canvas. Matilda was a painter.
“Can I help you?”
Nina looked up toward a young man, maybe twenty, in a BareNaked Ladies T-shirt and jeans.
“Maybe,” she said. “I’m looking for Matilda Swenson. This is her apartment, right?”
“Yeah,” the kid said in that sardonic tone that only the young can master. “I’m sort of the manager. I guess she’s not here, which is why the door doesn’t open when you knock.”
Nina smirked. “Thing is, when the doors don’t open, I usually knock them down.” She showed him her badge. “Federal Agent Nina Myers. Can you open the door for me, Mr. Manager?”
He did. Nina walked into a sparse but elegant apartment with hardwood floors, Roman shades, and minimalist furniture. There was a two-seat red velvet couch, an ultra-thin flat-panel television mounted on a stand on the floor. There was no dining table, just two stools pushed up against a built-in bar in the kitchen. Almost all the space had been designed to allow room for paintings, and paintings were everywhere. There were small canvases and large ones; some were framed but most just leaned against walls near corners. Oddly, none of them hung on the walls, which had been painted seafoam green.
“She’s a painter,” said Mr. Manager, hanging out in the doorway behind her.
“How well do you know her?” Nina asked.
“Just sort of hello,” he said, waving to show what he meant. “She stays in a lot when she’s painting, I guess.”
Nina thumbed through a couple of paintings. Matilda favored a Picasso-esque style, but her shadings moved a little more toward pastel. The effect wasn’t very pleasing. Horses had become a theme for her. There were galloping horses, horses at rest, and horses with foals. But all the horses were done in that piecemeal, surreal style, with each part of the horses treated as its own unique shape, rather than as part of the whole creature.
“I’m not sure I like it,” Nina said.
Mr. Manager laughed. “I don’t think her boyfriend does, either.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, he burned one of the paintings. It was a painting of him, I think. So either he was sacrificing it to the gods, or. ” He didn’t seem to have enough energy to finish the sentence.
“He did? You saw him?”
“Yeah. He burned it in the alley. That’s where my apartment looks. I get the crappy one, but it’s free.”
“Can I see that painting?”
“Why’d you want to see it?” he said, looking at her like
“Right. Have you seen Matilda this evening? Since he burned the painting?”
“Nope.”
Nina nodded. She opened the folder she was carrying and pulled out a picture of Frank Newhouse. “Any chance her boyfriend looks like this?”
“Jessi, it’s Nina,” she said urgently. “I need your help right away.”
“Nina, I’m already searching as fast as I can. There’s nothing on Newhouse except his regular service record—”
“Forget that. I need you to get all the information you can on Matilda Swenson. What I want most is a tag on her cell phone. If it’s on, I want to know where she is right now.”
Before calling, Nina had dug through a small file drawer that held Matilda’s bills and found statements for her Verizon wireless account. Nina read off the account number. “Get linked up with them right away. And let’s just hope her phone is on.”
Nina paced back and forth, tapping her cell phone in her hand as she tried to think. Frank Newhouse had a second life, one that wasn’t on the grid, and Matilda was part of it. Find Matilda and you find Frank, or at least a little more about him.
Mr. Manager still stood in the doorway, leaning lazily against the doorjamb and watching her.
“Aren’t you going to ask what this is all about?”
The young man blinked at her with heavily lidded eyes. “You’re with the government right?”
“Yep.”
“Is it possible that what you’re looking for might kill me?”
