her. Ultimately, though, Teri was beginning to sense that his deepest loyalty lay with his country. Or maybe it wasn’t even his country. It was his mission.
“Are you all right?” Teri asked.
Kim was holding her head in her hands now. “Yeah. Just tired, I guess. I feel hot. I think I’ll go lie down.”
One of the shooters was dead. The other wouldn’t be eating solid food for a long time, and he was currently gagging uncontrollably thanks to his swollen throat where Jack had punched him.
Jessi Bandison hugged Kelly Sharpton, who winced visibly. His right arm was covered in blood. “Are you—?” she started.
“Not too bad,” he said. He rolled up his shirtsleeve. The round had slid along the inside of his arm, plowing a furrow from his wrist to his elbow, but never fully penetrating.
He looked a little older than Jack remembered him from his short stint at CTU. There was weight in his face and gray in his hair. Jack had worked well enough with Sharpton, though they were never friends and didn’t see eye to eye politically; still, he’d drawn fire when Jack needed it, and Jack felt grateful. “She called you,” he said.
Sharpton nodded. “Odolova was my contact from way back.”
“I was nervous about doing fieldwork,” Jessi said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
Jack waved her off. The end counted far more than the means, and they were all alive.
Black and white patrol cars materialized out of the gloom. Sharpton, no longer commissioned, put his gun away. Jack held up his badge, and after a moment or two of explanation, the uniformed officers lowered their weapons and began to cordon off the block. LAPD radioed for paramedics. The surviving shooter was choking to death. “I need him alive,” Jack said. “I’ve got questions.”
“You want to fill me in?” Sharpton asked.
Jack shook his head. “You’re a civilian.”
“A civilian who saved your ass!” Sharpton said amusedly.
Jack nodded. “And for that you have the thanks of a grateful nation.”
“That and a dollar. ” Sharpton sighed without finishing the sentence.
“Jessi,” Jack said, turning to the analyst, “make sure these uniforms keep a close watch on that one. I want him taken back to CTU for interrogation. Don’t let them give you any crap about medical attention. Go tell them.”
He turned away, ignoring her look of panic, and dialed headquarters on his borrowed phone. A moment later he was talking to the head of field operations, Henderson’s voice echoed by the speakerphone he was using.
“They took a shot at us,” Jack said, describing the attack in brief. “I guess al-Libbi’s got some friends in town.” He explained what Odolova had told them about the RPG–29s, and her oblique confirmation of an event happening that evening.
He summed up: “Russia, the U.S., and China are having a secret meeting tonight around seven. Al-Libbi almost definitely wants to attack it.”
Henderson replied, “RPG–29s are tank killers. He’s got to be going after the presidential limo. It’d take a tank round to do any real damage to that thing. But there’s no way the meeting is at Marcus Lee’s house. The Secret Service wouldn’t have picked it even if he wasn’t Chinese intelligence. So why were they there?”
Jack told him about his conversation with Mercy Bennet. “The Vanderbilt Complex.”
“That makes sense,” Nina Myers broke in, her voice softer and more distant from the microphone. “I was up there. Lee’s house looks right down on the place. That’s got to be why the Secret Service was staking it out.”
“Tell them what’s going on,” Jack said.
“Stand by,” Henderson said. The line dulled and Jack knew he was on hold.
“Never a dull moment for you,” Sharpton said during the interlude.
“That’s because I didn’t retire.”
The line came alive again. “Jack,” Henderson said, “the Secret Service tells us everything is under control at the Lee house. They checked with their men up there and all’s well.”
It’s not right, Jack thought. Ayman al-Libbi with high-powered rocket-propelled grenades, eco-terrorists with killer viruses, and the heads of three of the world’s most powerful countries all meeting together. “I don’t care what the Secret Service says. We need to be up there.”
“Bauer.” Jack recognized the angry nasal voice immediately. Chappelle. “We’ve already discussed options internally. I’ve passed along word to the President himself. This meeting is important, and the Secret Service has guaranteed security. We need to stand down.”
Jack banged the phone against his forehead in frustration. “What we need to do,” he said at last, “is send someone up there to have a look. I’m going. Are you sending me any backup?”
Ryan Chappelle’s voice rose an octave. “Bauer, you’re coming in. Right now. You’ve got problems you don’t even know about—”
“What was that?” Jack said, shaking the phone. “You’re breaking up.”
“Bauer! Report back here immediate—”
“Bad connection. It’s a borrowed phone, sorry!” Bauer yelled. He hung up.
Sharpton shook his head, but his eyes were smiling. “I see a lot has changed,” he said sarcastically.
Bauer ignored that. He was already thinking of the fastest route to the Vanderbilt Complex. If al-Libbi was there, stopping him alone was going to be difficult. He stopped and looked at Sharpton. “How retired are you?”
It had been easy, really. Disguised as the gardener, al-Libbi had had several hours to listen to the Secret Service communications. He’d heard how they responded to communications through their ear pieces and quickly memorized their call signs. And he had always, always been good at voices.
So each time they called in, he gave the call sign in a voice that approximated the man who had possessed the ear bud. Possessed it, that is, before al-Libbi had cut his throat and dumped his body into a closet.
It was almost time. The terrorist ignored the dead bodies and hefted several large, long boxes one at a time out of the truck and carried them into the backyard. A tall screen of bamboo marked the borders of Lee’s house, and hid part of the Vanderbilt Complex from view. Al-Libbi stacked his boxes there, then picked up the shears he’d used to kill Tuman and clipped a hole in the bamboo hedge. Once it was clear, he had a clear line of sight to the Vanderbilt Complex below. In fact, his sightline was clear straight to the reception hall at the heart of the building. The RPG–29s’ five-hundredmeter range would be more than enough to do the job.
Al-Libbi’s cell phone rang. Anyone who had his number was important enough to speak to, but he was surprised to see this particular number on his screen. “I thought we were done with our dealings,” he said by way of hello.
“There’s been a change in management,” said Frankie Michaelmas. “I’m in charge now, and yeah, I want to make a deal.”
If Stan Chupnik was nervous, he didn’t show it. Hell, he didn’t even
He started and finished his wardrobe slowly and fastidiously. His pants were pressed and the pleat stood up nice and straight. His shirt was wrinkle-free and as white as bone. He had shaved twice for the occasion.
After more than ten minutes of primping, Stan stood before the dressing mirror nailed to the door of the men’s locker room and sized himself up. His bow tie was a little crooked, so he plucked it loose and began to retie it. No clipons. That was the sort of detail that differentiated the Vanderbilt from pretty much everywhere else.
Stan had worked as a waiter at the Vanderbilt — or “the Van” as the employees called it — ever since it had been constructed, and had served at every important shindig the complex had hosted. Of course, the real money was made waiting tables across the plaza at the Almandine, the five-star restaurant where dinner for four ran about four hundred dollars. That was Stan’s bread and butter. But exclusive events at the Reception Hall allowed Stan to breathe the same air as celebrities and world leaders. As far as he was concerned, that was worth the loss of a few hundred dollars in tips now and then. That was certainly true of tonight.
“Did they hassle you?” Daniel Schuman was saying to one of the other waiters in the locker room. “They asked me about a thousand questions. I take that back, they asked me the same four or five questions about a thousand times.”
One of the guys on the catering staff said, “What kind of questions?”
