was another man standing there, but Jack couldn’t get a clear view of them.
“I’ll never get to them in time,” Jack said. “How about those mikes?”
“We’ve got them, but—”
“But what?” Jack snapped. “Feed it through so I can hear it.”
“Jack, they’re not on Federal property anymore. We don’t have a warrant to eavesdrop—”
“Screw it,” Jack said. “If that’s Muhammad Abbas, we have all the probable cause we need. Patch it through.”
Over the radio, Tony made a short, disgruntled sound, but a minute later there was a burst of static, then Jack was hearing the voices of the two men talking half a block down the street.
“…we thought, there’s no way of doing it here.” Based on their body language, Jack guessed that was the man in the blue T-shirt.
“. meet in an hour or two. I will contact you to plan for tonight.”
“Are you sure of success?”
Jack heard laughter, cold and flat in the microphone. “If it were easy, you would not need us. But we won’t fail. They’ll be—”
A truck rumbled by the two men, disrupting the signal. “—dead.” Jack swore. “Did you guys get that?” “Negative,” Tony said. “Goddamned traffic.”
2. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 8 A.M. AND 9 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
“Get off there!”
Jack felt someone grab his ankle. Without thinking, he raised his other leg and stomped down on the offender’s wrist. Only then did he see the uniformed cop standing below him, his angry glare transformed instantly into shock and pain. The cop released Jack’s ankle, but used his good hand to draw a collapsible baton from his belt. With a smooth snap of his wrist, he extended the baton and swung it. The hard aluminum connected with his shins. Jack’s vision went suddenly white and he toppled, landing on top of the officer, who collapsed beneath his weight.
“Officer down!” someone yelled. A second later Jack felt more blows across his back, then hands dragged him off the cop and onto his stomach. Someone put a knee across the back of his neck. Pebbles from the street asphalt dug into his cheek.
“Get the hell off me!” he snarled. “I’m a Federal—”
“Shut up!” someone barked into his ear. “You have the right to—”
“I’m a Federal agent!” Jack said.
“Believe it or not, he is.”
Jack heard Mercy’s voice resound loudly but calmly over the turmoil.
There was some muttering that Jack couldn’t hear — the knee across his neck had shifted and was crushing his ear— and then a moment later all the pressure was lifted from his back. He sat up and saw Detective Mercy Bennet staring down at him, smiling and holding out one hand. She was flanked by four uniformed police officers, one of whom was rubbing his wrist painfully.
Jack took her offered hand and let her pull him to his feet. “Sorry about that,” he said to the uniform.
“I think you broke it,” the cop grumbled. “You should ID yourself before pulling a stunt like that. This is a potential riot area.”
“You’ve got to forgive him, he doesn’t always work well with others,” Mercy said. To Jack: “Walk with me?”
Jack looked back over his shoulder. The two men were gone, probably driven off by the disturbance he and the cop had created. Damn. He spoke into his mike. “Did you see where they went?”
“Negative,” Almeida replied, sounding disgusted. “Down the street, but we couldn’t get more than that. The cameras are blocked by the tree line. Those guys are gone.”
Jack threw the uniformed cop an angry glare, but didn’t feel the drive to push it further. It wasn’t the cop’s fault.
“Hello, Jack?” Mercy said, waving her hand in front of his face. “Remember me?”
“Mercy,” Jack said, “I know you wanted to meet, but I’ve got something going here.”
“Me, too,” the detective said. “I think this might be your area.”
“Jack?” Tony Almeida’s voice muttered in his ear.
“Stand by,” Jack said. He refocused on Mercy. She looked as good now as the day they’d agreed not to speak ever again. She was a fascinating combination of shapes — a sharp nose on a round face framed by straight dark hair. It all came together in a way he found attractive, especially when coupled with her no-BS attitude. You’d have called her feisty except that she’d kick you in the groin for using that word. She was wearing a dark blue pant suit with a white blouse that offered just the slightest hint of her nearly perfect breasts.
Mercy Bennet had spent six months as LAPD’s liaison to the Counter Terrorist Unit, a thankless task that required diplomacy, patience, and tact.
Mercy had not been good at the job.
The first time Jack met her, she walked into the conference room at CTU to accuse Ryan Chappelle of withholding information and holding LAPD suspects in custody without notifying local authorities. At least that was what she’d written in her report. The words she’d actually used to his face were more along the lines of “sandbagging son of a bitch” and “pencil-necked twit.”
Jack liked her right away.
“All right,” Jack said after a moment. “What have you got?”
“…just kill him,” the man on the phone was saying.
“No, Nick,” said the man from his room. “We’re not going to kill anyone we don’t have to kill. Besides, killing him will raise even more questions.”
“Getting soft?”
The man grimaced, not so much at the challenge to his authority as to the tedium involved in defending himself. Nick was his inside man, one of the faithful — but he was a man of action, and like most men of action, he required constant affirmation of himself and his leaders.
“I am economical,” he said. “You should know that by now.”
“Well, you may have to spend a little something on this guy,” Nick said. “From what I’ve heard, Bauer isn’t the kind of guy to stop once he’s on the scent.”
“He’s hardly ‘on the scent.’ ”
“He just met with the detective on the Gordon Gleed case.”
The man in the hotel room hesitated. He was rarely surprised, and rarely unsure of himself. But this information was surprising, and was surely cause for concern. He had not expected the Gleed case to move from the local to the federal level so quickly.
“In twenty-three hours it won’t matter,” he said. “We will have to convince Mr. Bauer to slow down his investigation.”
Jack Bauer stood by the grill of Mercy’s slick-top white Crown Victoria, where she had led him. “So what’s the story?”
Mercy had just related to him the theory she’d been developing since the day Gordon Gleed was bludgeoned in his own home. From those first moments, she’d been convinced that Gleed had not been the victim of a robbery. The tossed house and stolen items were a feint. Gleed had been killed for political reasons.
“Gordon Gleed was president of the Free Enterprise Alliance. That’s a business group that supports rural resource developers.”
“Rural resource—?”
