Santiago was there, halfway down the gorge, clinging to a ledge by his hands. Jack guessed what must have happened. The terrorists had caught up with Santiago and tried to kill him quietly. He struggled and broke free. When they pursued him, he had tried to escape by climbing down the gorge. It had been a brave and stupid thing to do. There was no way to climb down that cliff at night. Santiago had fallen or slid, but had been lucky enough to catch himself on an outcropping of rocks and bushes.
“Hold on!” Jack shouted. “I’m coming down for you!”
He didn’t know what else to do. Besides, he could be as brave and stupid as the next guy.
“Jack!” Mercy called out, following the beam of his flashlight. “Wait for the helicopter. They’ll be here soon.”
“He’s not going to last,” Jack said, half to himself. The flashlight had a cord, which Jack looped around his neck. Then he held the light between his teeth and started to climb down. He chose a path above and just on the waterfall side of Santiago, so that he would land on the man if he fell. Unfortunately, that put him closer to the water, so the rocks and plants he grabbed for handholds were slippery.
“I can’t hold on!” the man yelled.
“You hold on, you son of a bitch!” Jack yelled.
“My hands…” the man moaned.
“It’s not about you!” Jack yelled down at him, dropping the light from his mouth and letting it swing. He was still twenty feet above, and the going was slow. “You hold on because people are going to die if you don’t!”
“Agh!” one of Santiago’s hands slipped away from its hold. He was clinging by one hand.
“Hold on!” Jack inched downward, foot by foot. He willed Santiago to be stronger, to hold tighter. But in the end it was not Jack’s will but Santiago’s that was most important, and Santiago’s broke. His other hand slipped, and Jack watched him fall away from the beam of the flashlight with a short cry.
19. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1 A.M. AND 2 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Christopher Henderson was convinced his headache was permanent. He’d started the day worried about nothing more than crowd control at the Federal Building and what he’d thought of as Jack Bauer’s overeager attempt to find a terrorist needle in a haystack. Now he was co-managing a crisis of global proportions with Ryan Chappelle while Jack Bauer left a trail of bodies from one end of the city to the other.
No sooner did they have forensics teams at one location than Bauer was calling from another, asking for more cleanup.
Jamey Farrell was in his office giving him a summary of the most recent information they had gathered. Her voice was hoarse from talking, but otherwise she was fresh. “The two shooters who attacked Jack on Sunset Boulevard this afternoon were definitely ETIM. We had them on a watch list, but they were never identified near any hot spots until the shooting, and they were too low a priority for surveillance. The one who survived the fight with Jack has been cooperative, but he doesn’t know much more than we know.”
Henderson nodded. “With Marcus Lee dead and Kasim Turkel out of commission, I’d say ETIM is back to low-priority status. What about the others?”
“Frankie Michaelmas is dead, Bernard Copeland is dead. Jack met up with two shooters at the Earth Cafe. Both of them are dead, but we do have information on them.”
“Go,” Henderson said, focusing in.
“They have nothing to do with ETIM as far as we can tell. They’re both Iranians who immigrated here in ’92 and ’94, respectively. We have files on them, shared with the FBI, but they’re scant. One was interviewed after the truck bomb at the World Trade Center in ’93, and both were interviewed after 9/11, but in both cases the evidence pointed toward Saudis rather than Iranians, so they weren’t pressed. Their files were kept active because they were known to attend a mosque run by a fairly vocal cleric named Ahmad Moussavi Ardebili, but they’ve never made a peep otherwise.”
“Sleeper cell?” Henderson thought aloud.
“It looks that way. And a really patient one.”
“Okay, I’ll put a team together. Let’s revisit our database for this cleric and round up everyone we think is a possible suspect.”
“Last one,” Tony Almeida said.
“Too bad,” Nina replied. “I’m getting to like waking people up.”
While Jack had gone to track down Pico Santiago, Nina and Tony had been given a list of three names — people who might know where Sarah Kalmijn was hiding. The first two had been dead ends, the individuals clearly having little or no idea what Sarah did in her spare time. This was the last address, a small house in the bohemian Silverlake area that looked down on Hollywood and central Los Angeles.
Nina walked up to the door of the little Craftsman bungalow while Tony stood farther back by one of the wooden pillars that marked a Craftsman. But before she reached for the bell, Nina drew her pistol. Tony mimicked her movement and stepped forward where he could see what Nina had noticed: the door was closed but the jamb was shattered. Someone had broken into the house.
Using hand signals, Tony indicated that he was going around the back. Nina nodded and counted to five silently, giving Tony time to get around. Then she eased the door open slowly. The house was dark. She listened, but heard no sound until a barely audible creak came from the back of the house. Tony was inside. Nina pulled a tiny Surefire flashlight from her belt and fired it up. The beam swept the living room and came to rest almost instantly on a figure lying on the floor. She swept her hand along the nearest wall and flipped up a light switch, illuminating the room.
A woman lay on the floor, a piece of electrical cord wrapped around her neck. Nina knelt beside the body without touching it. The woman’s tongue was enlarged and her eyes bulged slightly. She’d been strangled to death.
Tony entered. “Damn it. I’ll the call the PD. Let’s get a forensics team out here.”
“These guys are a step ahead of us,” Nina said.
A door creaked behind them and both CTU agents whirled around, weapons ready. “Don’t shoot!” someone yelled from the closet.
“Come out slowly!” Tony ordered. “Hands first, hands where I can see them!”
A pair of thin female hands appeared in the half-open doorway, followed by two graceful arms and then the complete figure of a young woman in her thirties with short black hair. She looked terrified.
“Don’t shoot me!” she pleaded. “I heard you say to call someone. Are you…are you the police?”
“Federal agents, ma’am,” Tony said. “What happened?”
“Thank god, thank god,” she said, shuddering as though releasing hours of pent-up tension. She broke down in tears for a minute, falling beside the body of the other woman as tears poured down her cheeks. “I just left her there. I was so afraid, I thought they might still be here.”
“Who was it?” Nina asked. “Who did this?”
“Two men,” the woman said. “They broke in. I was in there.” She pointed to the closet. “They attacked Susan. They hit her until she told them what they wanted, and then they— they…” She started to cry again.
Tony checked the closet and realized why the terrorists had missed the woman. In the back of the closet, half-hidden by a couple of coats, was the door to a tiny darkroom.
Nina put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but it’s important that we know what she told them. What were they asking?”
The woman wiped her eyes. “Th-they were asking about Sarah. Sarah Kalmijn is a friend of ours. They wanted to know where to find her. Susan told them, she did, and they
killed her anyway.”
“Where did they tell her to go?”
“What do you want with Sarah?”
