pair.
“You think we can keep this up?” he wondered aloud.
He felt her shrug. “It’s easy to be a holy man on top of a mountain.”
Jack didn’t enjoy philosophy. “Meaning?”
“Meaning the last two days have been great, but it wasn’t the real world. That’s the real world.” She pointed to the dock ahead. The
The ship docked, and Jack and Teri Bauer followed the passengers on their slow, small-stepped progress down the gangplank and onto shore. Crewmen carted all the bags onto the promenade. The Bauers picked theirs out. Jack shouldered his and Teri’s, and they turned toward the crowd milling past.
“There must be a lot of people coming back from Catalina this weekend,” Teri said.
One of the crewmen, overhearing, grunted, “Naw, you never get this many people from the island. These are all from Mexico or somewhere. A whole big fleet came in.
Bunch of protestors.”
“Protesting what?” Jack asked.
The crewman shrugged.
Hitching the two bags higher on his shoulders, Jack plunged into the crowd. The group was a mixture of South Americans — mostly short men and women dressed in poor clothing — and a species of political activist quite common to North America: twenty-something Caucasians in dreadlocks or stubbornly unwashed hair, wearing carefully selected secondhand clothes. Jack hadn’t had any direct experience with the type, but he’d read enough profiles and attended enough briefings to guess what they were protesting — a G8 summit was scheduled to start in Los Angeles in a few days. Like the meetings of the World Trade Organization, the G8 sessions usually triggered waves of protests from anti-globalization and pro-environmental groups.
Distracted, Jack didn’t see the other man until they collided. Without thinking, Jack pushed back, his right hand sliding under his jacket out of habit. The other man stumbled back a step and cursed under his breath, though Jack couldn’t hear exactly what he said. He threw Jack an angry glare — just long enough for Jack to catch a dark face and bright, burning eyes. Then he hurried through the crowd. Jack watched him go.
“Don’t start anything,” Teri said, only half joking. “You pushed him.”
“Yeah,” Jack said distractedly. He took a few steps, then said, “That guy just looked familiar.”
“Work familiar or old friend familiar?”
He didn’t need to look at her to know that a resigned frown had settled across her face. They’d come down off the mountain already.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. But Jack’s eyes didn’t leave the man until he was out of sight.
1. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 7 A.M. AND 8 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
It was just seven o’clock in the morning, and already the mob had gathered in front of the Federal Building. LAPD had blocked off Wilshire Boulevard, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, for two miles in either direction. It was a concession to the size and force of the crowd. The original battle plan had called for the police to keep protestors at least five blocks away from the Federal Building, but no one in his right mind believed the protestors would obey that rule— just as no one in his right mind wanted images of L.A.’s finest beating and tear gassing hordes of protestors. So, at a permit meeting that felt more like a peace summit, the police had promised not to use excessive force if the protestors kept their feet on the wide green lawn surrounding the perimeter of the building and off the concrete plaza at its center. The protestors, in turn, had agreed to remain peaceful and keep their troops within the permit area.
Neither side expected the other to keep its word.
Jack Bauer moved through the crowd, following in his daughter Kim Bauer’s wake. He worked to make his footsteps heavy and his eyes dull. He did this partly for the benefit of any protestors on the lookout for undercover cops, but also for the benefit of his daughter. He didn’t want her to think he was on the job.
“These are my guys,” Kim Bauer said, turning a quick smile on her father. She skipped forward until she bumped up against a group of other teens who’d formed their own island in the sea of protestors. Most of them wore blue T-shirts with the words “Teen Green” scrawled across the front and back. As Kim giggled with them, a short, wiry man with glasses, a bald head, and a weary smile navigated his way through them and stuck his hand out to Jack.
“Marshall Cooper. You the parent chaperone?” He enunciated quickly and crisply, and had a pale, vegetarian sort of look about him.
“Jack Bauer. No, sorry, I just—”
“I’m here, I’m here,” said a harried and very loud female voice. A large woman with bright blond hair and a faux leopard-skin purse appeared beside them, grabbing Cooper’s still-hovering hand. “Andi Parks. You must be Mr. Cooper, right? I knew it, Cindi said you were a granola type; no offense, of course, I mean we’re all here for the same granola causes, right? That’s what Teen Green is, right?”
And that was just her hello. Marshall Cooper tried to speak — Jack thought he was saying something about being Teen Green’s student advisor — but he didn’t stand much of a chance against Andi Parks’s barrage of words. She went on talking to the little man even though she’d turned to look at the Teen Green girls already. Cooper glanced at Jack Bauer with a look that pleaded,
“Kim. Kim!” Jack called over the noise. She tore her gaze away from a boy with straight hair that hung down to his eyebrows. “I’m getting some coffee. I’ll be back to check on things in a while.” He was sure she hadn’t heard a word, but she smiled and nodded anyway before turning her attention back to the boy.
Jack surveyed the sea of protestors around his daughter. What he saw was a collection of teens and twentysomethings mingling with older, grizzled protestors from a faded generation. It might have been a grandparents and kids gathering, if not for the twenty-story Federal Building looming over them and the atmosphere electrified by tension. The protestors tended to gather into groups, but then those groups blended into larger factions. Often these factions shared a common purpose. More often, though, the only thing they shared was a common enemy — in this case, the G8.
The G8, or “Group of Eight” was composed of the world’s leading industrialized nations, namely the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, and Russia. This was, of course, an old boys’ network of “leading” nations, since a number of countries rightly pointed out that Italy wasn’t exactly a manufacturing powerhouse compared to the exporting power of many Asian nations, many of whom were currently lobbying for a place at the table. In fact, one of the main issues on the agenda for this particular G8 summit was the possible inclusion of China, whose exploding economy was being watched anxiously by every other market on the planet.
The entire Los Angeles headquarters of the Counter Terrorist Unit had been subjected to several briefings on the G8 summit, of course. The briefings thus far hadn’t amounted to much. In the aftermath of 9/11, the newspapers and local law enforcement agencies used phrases like “highvalue target” in connection with an event like the G8, but the truth was, attacking the summit wouldn’t be al-Qaeda’s style. Terrorists connected to Islamic fundamentalism had thus far chosen two specific types of targets: military assets located in Arab countries and purely civilian targets that caused maximum fear and confusion. Al-Qaeda and its loose collection of affiliates would assume that the G8 summit was shielded by a nearly impenetrable security screen and, Jack knew, that assumption would be correct. And, more importantly, both sides knew that attacks, even successful ones, against political targets would generate more outrage than terror. If and when al-Qaeda ever struck inside the borders of the United States again, Jack was sure they would attack a train or a shopping mall, a soft target that promised gruesome results.
