“I want to express my appreciation that you’re being a good boy. I trust you haven’t told anyone about our little arrangement.”
Jack glanced at all the people working around him. “Not a soul,” he lied.
“Unfortunately, it seems your daughter isn’t behaving quite so well. I trust she’s not being taken to a hospital?”
Jack frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What I’m talking about is the fact that your daughter has now left the Federal Building and is heading west on Wilshire Boulevard. I want to remind you, Agent Bauer, that I am not bluffing. No doctor you find in Los Angeles will have a cure for the fever she’s about to contract. Once her symptoms start, she’ll be dead before they can even diagnose it.”
“I haven’t talked to Kim in over an hour,” Jack replied. “Maybe she’s just going to get lunch.”
“We’ll see. If she travels more than one mile from the Federal Building, you’ll never hear from me again.”
The phone clicked off. Henderson came back in, and Jack knew by the look on his face that they hadn’t had time to trace the call.
He slammed his fist onto the table. Three more minutes.
Kim hadn’t walked far when her phone rang. “Hey, Dad,” she said.
“Kim, listen, I had to run to the office for a minute, but I’m coming back soon. You’re still there, right?”
“Where else would I be?” Kim said.
Bauer grinned wryly. He couldn’t fault his daughter for being a good liar. He was pretty accomplished himself. “Great,” he lied back. “I just want to check up on you. I’ll see you in a bit.”
Kim snapped her phone shut and sighed at Janet. “Guess I’m sticking around.”
Rickson Aruna waddled up to the house of Constantine Noguera. It wasn’t quite noon yet and already his hip was hurting him. He was getting too old to be the constable of the village, but of course no one else would do the job. They all said it was because he, Rickson, had performed so ably over the years, but in truth it was because no one else wanted to bother. The town was dirty, the pay was low, and most people considered him more of a gossip than a policeman. And, of course, when he did need to act as a policeman, the cause was far too serious for most of these peasants: there were disturbances caused by the drunken antics of the timber cutters, and now and then the protests and sabotage of the environmentalists.
Usually with the environmentalists and the timber cutters it was political, and the federal police became involved. At these times Rickson was eager to step aside. He was a caretaker of the town, not a defender of the forest. He did not like the timber people — he had grown up in a town farther up the river, but now that whole area was clear cut, and erosion had washed half the land into the water. But he was only one man, and he was not inclined to fight the powerful companies from the north.
But the silence from Constantine Noguera’s house,
There was no answer, not even a groan from inside.
Rickson pounded on the door again. “Constantine, get up! No one has seen you all day. Come out. The sun will do your hangover some good!”
Again there was no answer. Once more Rickson pounded on the door. This was too much for the old door. The lock broke and the door creaked open. Rickson Aruna found himself staring into Noguera’s little shack, with its front room that served as a kitchen and living room and its one back room for sleeping. The stench of decaying flesh assaulted Rickson’s nostrils and he staggered back. Rickson braced himself and entered, pushing through the stink until he reached the bedroom. When he got there he gagged, choking back bile. His nose had already told him Noguera was dead, but he was not prepared for what he saw: Noguera’s body lay on his bed. The flesh looked as if it had turned to slag on the bones, and huge pustules had erupted all over the body.
Terrified, Rickson tried to hold his breath. He had seen these marks once before, when he was a child and the disease had swept through his village. This was in a time long before modern doctors and medicines. He did not know if the doctors had a name for this disease, or if they had even heard of it. But the old women of his childhood knew it. They called it
6. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 12 P.M. AND 1 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Jack Bauer practically pulled the tubes out of his body himself.
“Hey, let that finish draining!” Dr. Viatour yelled. Thirty minutes after injecting the dialysis solution into his body, the doctors had drained it away, filling a clear plastic tube with a disgusting-looking, bile-colored liquid.
Dr. Viatour said, “This is the solution post-filtering. In theory, it’s filtered impurities out of your blood, including this chemical marker, whatever it is.”
“What do you mean, in theory?” Jack asked.
Viatour shrugged. “Well, peritoneal dialysis works. It’s performed all the time. But usually it’s done three or four times a day for patients with kidney dysfunction. I don’t know anything about this chemical marker, so I can’t tell you if one treatment has done the trick.”
“We’re going to find out,” Jack demanded. “Stitch me up.”
He lay back and let the doctors finish. The truth was, he felt nauseated. They’d filled his abdominal cavity with some kind of saline solution. As his blood passed through it, it had mixed with this solution and, in theory, had filtered impurities out of his body. With luck, that had included the chemical tracer that Ayman al-Libbi had inserted there. He had sat helpless and impatient during the procedure, but now that it was done, he felt spent. His stomach felt distended and awkward, and the large puncture wound in his stomach hurt like hell.
“Chris,” Jack said to Chris Henderson, “soon as I’m on my feet, I’ll leave CTU and see if they contact me again.”
“Suppose he doesn’t give you another warning, just packs up and leaves you and Kim?” Henderson pointed out.
Jack answered decisively. “Either way, I’m moving forward. If they’ve gotten hold of a virus, then it’s going to be part of the plan. He’s going to use it on the G8. I’m going to get Kim and make sure she’s safe. I’ll also get her blood so we can check it.”
“And if al-Libbi is watching like you think he is?”
“I’ve got a plan.”
Tony Almeida sat in a private room with an ice pack on the back of his neck. Across from him in the bed lay Agent Dyson, motionless and comatose. Two uniformed policemen were stationed outside, and FBI agents had been in and out of the room all day. They had all asked Tony the same questions and he’d given the same answers. They were at a loss to explain Dyson’s actions or to uncover his motivations. This was no great shock to Almeida — over the years the FBI had played host to any number of moles at various levels.
Unlike the FBI agents, who left when they learned Dyson was comatose, Almeida waited. This was partly because his head still felt like it had been split open with an axe, but also because he didn’t take kindly to having his head split open…and he planned on being there when Dyson opened his eyes.
Tony leaned his head back onto the ice pack. There was time still to rest. Eventually Dyson would snap out of it. Tony would ask him a few questions, and then put him into a whole different kind of coma.
Mercy Bennet had drifted in and out of consciousness for God knew how long. Every time she drifted toward wakefulness, she felt her face throb and her skin stretched tight over what must be scabs on her face. Darkness was all around her. A hood had been thrown over her head. She would sink back down into forgetfulness.
