like an actor recovering in the middle of a scene.
“Are you staying in the city?”
“Well,” Marcia said, a little more naturally, “they’ve asked me to, for the trial and everything. But after that I’m moving to St. Louis.”
“Friends there?”
“A fresh start, I guess. It’s hard, losing someone. I didn’t know how hard it was.” Marcia Tintfass had gotten her rhythm now and sounded good.
Nina asked a few more perfunctory questions, questions that might explain the urgency in knocking on the door in the dead of night, but she left as soon as she could. In the car, she called in to CTU and talked with Jamey Farrell. “We need a tap on this phone, and her cell phone, and everything else right away. I guarantee you she’s calling someone somewhere right now and she’s nervous.”
The CTU strike team moved in with quiet efficiency. This was as close to a routine assault as the real world could provide. They had the layout of the two-story warehouse. Satellite and infrared imagery located the three occupants of the building. City business licenses, auto registrations, and telephone records told them exactly who would be inside.
By the time Tony Almeida got word from every unit in the assault and confirmed that the building was locked down, his people had three men in flex cuffs sitting in chairs in the middle of the warehouse. Two of them were little more than strong backs and mean looks. The man in the middle, according to their intelligence, was Arturo Menifee, although the name he was currently using was Richard Bonaventure. Arturo, born and raised in Florida, was a former procurement officer at Fort Hood, Texas, who decided to keep his skills sharp after his discharge from the Army. The military did a pretty good job of keeping track of its ordinance and weapons systems, but with such a massive operation, especially in wartime, it wasn’t all that difficult for a patient man to shave off a rocket-propelled grenade here, an M–60 there. Before you knew it, you could have your own little arsenal for sale.
Tony put his hands on his knees, taking himself down eye level with the seated arms dealer. He didn’t say a word, and the prisoner stared back at him, his face alternating nervously between fear and anger as Tony continued to stare. Menifee didn’t look much like Tony if they stood together, but a bystander would have described them about the same: medium height, dark curly hair, dark eyes.
“Okay,” Tony said at last.
“I ain’t telling you shit,” Menifee spat.
Tony smiled. “I don’t need you to tell me anything. Just talk. I want to hear your accent.”
“That’s one hell of a story,” Vanowen said. He still held the gun, but it was no longer pointed at Jack. Vanowen seemed to have forgotten what it was, and waved it around like a lecturer’s pointer stick. “I never met anybody who broke outta prison before.”
A knock on the door interrupted them. Vanowen looked perplexed, then went and cracked the door open. A second later he opened it wide, but did not step out of the frame. Jack could not see the other man’s face silhouetted by the hallway lights, but whoever he was, he was huge, his bulk filling the entire doorway.
“Mark, you gotta be sleeping now. It’s the big day!” Vanowen said. “Can’t sleep,” said the big man. “Gotta talk. Let me in.”
“I got people.”
“Lemme in, Van, come on.”
Vanowen hesitated, but then relented. The man who pushed past him looked like a cartoon drawing of a super hero. He was at least six feet, three inches, with shoulders as wide as two men put together, a narrow waist, and muscles that rippled through his American Eagle T-shirt. His face was chiseled out of rock and the bridge of his nose was permanently swollen. Both his ears were grotesquely misshapen. Jack recognized that as “cauliflower ear.” Wrestlers get it from bumping their ears against their opponents over and over again.
“Guys, this is Mark Kendall. Mark ‘The Mountain’ Kendall, former heavyweight champ, and soon to be returning champ.”
Jack and Ramirez nodded. Kendall grunted, but clearly had no interest in them.
“That’s what I want to talk about,” Kendall said. “I gotta know something, Vanny. You’ve got to promise me that I’ll get other fights if I lose this one.”
Jack had seen Vanowen slip the gun into his pocket as he answered the door. Now he saw the man slide his hand casually back into that pocket. “Come on, Mark. No promises in this business. You knew the score when you started your comeback.” For a man who had just called Kendall the next heavyweight champ, he was suddenly very unsympathetic.
For a man as huge as Kendall, he looked pathetically vulnerable. “I’ve got fans out there. They want to see me fight.”
Vanowen shook his head. “They want to see you come back, Mountain. See if a thirty-six-year-old guy’s been out of the cage for four years can still dish it out. You lose, they’ll have their answer, and no one’s gonna be interested anymore.”
Kendall’s cauliflower ears turned beet red, but Jack couldn’t tell if it was embarrassment or anger. Not just anger, he decided. Kendall’s massive shoulders hung low. He was a beaten man. But Jack was sure the fights hadn’t done it. Something else weighed him down. Something he couldn’t take care of with muscles.
“Come here, let’s talk,” Vanowen said. “I got money riding on you today, and your head’s not on right. You guys sit tight.”
Vanowen led the huge man into the other room. Ramirez stretched himself out on the couch. “Jesus, I didn’t realize how tired I was. I’m not used to running around all night like this.”
Jack shrugged. He’d done it before. Ramirez turned the television on absentmindedly. Jack watched with him, but his mind was on his next move. His eyes flicked about the room until he spotted a cell phone, undoubtedly Vanowen’s, sitting on a chair atop a pile of clothes. Jack got up and stretched. He walked by the chair and palmed the cell phone, then went into the bathroom. Now his movements became much more urgent. He closed, locked the door, and dialed CTU.
Henderson was half asleep at his desk. He wasn’t lazy, but it was late and he’d been waiting for updates on the Jack Bauer situation, on Tony Almeida’s leads, and on a few other lower-priority cases, and his eyes had started to droop. The ringing phone brought him to attention. The late night operator told him who was calling, and Henderson felt his heart thud against his ribs.
“Jack?” he said incredulously.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” Jack replied, his voice a hoarse whisper. “How’s Chappelle?”
“Turn yourself in, Jack,” Henderson said. “You look guilty now. You’ve got U.S. Marshals all over the city.”
“Chappelle?” Bauer asked again.
“No one knows. No explanation for his collapse.”
He heard Bauer swear under his breath. “Okay, Chris, I’ve got to tell you something, but I can’t give many details.”
“Come in here and tell me, Jack.”
“Listen!” Jack commanded, though his voice was still quiet. “None of this is what it seems. I’m working a case. Chappelle knows all about it. There’s an FBI unit that knows, too, but I don’t have their contact.”
Henderson frowned and gave an accompanying skeptical sigh. “Jack, come on. A jailbreak as part of a case?”
“Not that part. I had to do that, but it wasn’t part of the plan.”
“I’ll bet.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Would you believe it?”
Jack didn’t reply, and Henderson heard the low hum of cellular static in the background. Finally Bauer said, “How much of this is about the Internal Affairs investigation?”
Henderson snorted. He wasn’t surprised that Jack had brought up the investigation. Rumors of the
