that Pascal was following her. “Ms. Myers, I’m hoping you’re going to share the information you’ve got,” he said over her shoulder. Nina stopped at the elevators. “You just got all the information I did.”
Pascal smiled a smile big as the delta. “The information she gave. But not the information in your head.”
Nina hesitated. There was a lot she could tell Pascal, if she’d wanted to. Tintfass was alive. Jack was not a murderer. But she didn’t know the whole story yet, and if there’s one thing she did know, it was that you didn’t show your cards until your hand was complete. She stepped into the elevator, but not far enough to let him on. “I wish I could help you, Marshal.”
“Deputy Marshal,” he corrected as the doors closed, “and I’ll find out one way or the other.”
Beverly Glen was a small West L.A. neighborhood of pretty houses bordered by upscale Brentwood on the west and the 405 Freeway on the east, one of the few enclaves of affordable (by L.A. standards) housing on the West Side.
Jack parked the stolen Pathfinder on Church Street and walked around the block to the street that paralleled Talia Gerwehr’s east-west street, but one block north. He’d driven through the neighborhood twice already, looking for anything suspicious, but if the house was being watched, the watchers were good and he couldn’t find them. To make their job harder, he walked to the house just north of the Gerwehr place, so that the two backyards abutted. Casually, Jack walked up the driveway to that house, then turned to the side gate and walked down the side yard. He passed several windows without looking in. He strode purposefully across the backyard — a small open space with a red oak hot tub that had been fashionable in the early eighties — reached the fence, and hopped over.
Talia Gerwehr’s backyard was small and landscaped with curving lines of brick and recently laid sod, dominated by a grand old oak tree. The elegant yard communicated with the house through a set of richly varnished French doors. Jack saw movement within the house, guessed that whatever alarm there was had been turned off, and popped a hand through one of the French doors’ glass frames. He reached in and had the door opened before the sound of tinkling glass faded.
Talia Gerwehr came around the corner with a cordless phone in her hand and a quizzical look on her face. When she saw the gun in Jack’s hand, her look changed to shock.
At the same moment, her phone rang. “Hello?” she said, trying to take it all in at once. “Yes, this is Talia Gerwehr. What, um, what can I do for you, Marshal?” She looked at Jack Bauer, and then at the gun again, as she listened to the caller. “Um, no, I understand. I don’t know why that would be. But everything’s fine here. I was just leaving for my office, though, would you, would you rather send someone there? All right, fine.” She hung up the phone and then said, “So you must be Jack Bauer.”
They were waiting for Nina when she rushed into the conference room, having broken innumerable traffic laws to get back to headquarters. Tony was there, and Henderson and a number of other field agents, along with half the analytical staff.
“Jiminez coming?” she asked quickly.
“Jiminez is in some hot water,” Henderson explained. “It looks like he tried to free Jack from custody.”
“That may have been a good thing,” Nina replied.
Henderson shrugged. “We’ll see. Go ahead.”
“Okay, here’s what we know,” she summed up for all involved. “Jack didn’t kill Tintfass. We know that because Tintfass is alive and being handled by the FBI. Jack broke out of jail with a guy named Emil Ramirez. We assume it wasn’t a coincidence that they broke out together. Jack seemed to be following some kind of trail, which deadended when Ramirez and another business associate got shot, along with one Francis Aguillar. When that trail ends, Jack goes to Chappelle, pumps him full of uppers to kick him out of a coma, and asks about. ” She paused to make sure they were all listening, “Zapata.”
Murmurs rippled around the room, but it was Tony who spoke up. “Zapata? The anarchist? Is that who Jack’s after?” His question was directed at Chris Henderson.
The Field Operations Director rubbed his hands in an act of ablution. “I’ve got no part in this. If I did, I’d be filling you all in right now.”
“Well, Chappelle did, because he had some resource on Zapata. It looks like they were making a run for him.”
Another murmur filled the room, and this time it contained an undercurrent of admiration. Every analyst and operator in the room had heard of Zapata. He was unique in the world of international terrorism because he was not, strictly speaking, a terrorist, at least not according to the most current definition. If he could be called a terrorist at all, Zapata was a throwback to the Weathermen and the Red Brigade of the seventies, not fighting for any particular cause or homeland, simply looking to destablize the status quo. But even the Red Brigade had wrapped themselves in the flag of socialism. Zapata was a pure anarchist: he endorsed no cause, he took no side.
“He isn’t an Islamic fundamentalist. He’s not a fascist or a communist,” Nina was saying, rounding out a picture of Zapata for anyone who needed it. “We think he helped the Basques bomb a train station. But then he gave the Spanish government information that helped them arrest a couple of ETA members. He blew up polling places during the last Venezuelan elections, and that helped the new leftists there gain power. But then he bombed power stations of the leftist government in Venezuela.
“He’s famous,” she continued, “for having no patterns. Impossible to trace. Makes lots of associates and then drops them. They say he spent a year helping the Chechens fight the Russians, but just because it helped destabilize the Russian government. Then all of a sudden he stopped. We think it was because he realized the Chechnya crisis was actually helping the Kremlin solidify power. If it’s true, he saw that coming a year before anyone else did.”
“Which brings us to the last thing,” Tony Almeida said, taking over for Nina at her signal. While she’d raced over, he’d gathered more information on Zapata. “We should all start with the idea that Zapata is a genius. He started out life as Jorge Rafael Marquez.”
Seth Ludonowski, who’d been slumped in his seat, sat up with a start. “Oh shit,” he gasped.
Jack sat in one of Talia’s living room chairs and drank the coffee she made for him, but he didn’t let himself relax. According to Talia, the Marshal had said he’d contact her later, at her office, but he wouldn’t put it past them to send units to her house anyway. The Marshal running the manhunt was clearly squared away, since he’d pounced on the arms trade so quickly.
“Chappelle told me about you, but I didn’t know what to expect,” she said.
Jack laughed. “You’re not exactly seeing me at my best.” Sitting in her clean house, drinking coffee, he was now painfully aware that he stank of dirt and sweat and the sulfur smell of firearms. He hadn’t even managed his shower the night before, when all this had started.
Talia Gerwehr, on the other hand, was immaculate. If she worked at a think tank, Jack knew what thoughts the men there were thinking. She was in her mid-thirties, with flawless olive skin and smooth dark hair swept away from her face. Her appearance was very much like the appearance of her yard and her house: plainly but elegantly designed, simple but rich.
“I saw the news. They didn’t give your name, but they gave Ramirez’s, so I assumed — well, I assumed it was all part of the plan.”
Jack sipped his coffee. As the hot liquid went down, he realized how empty his stomach was. “It is now. I had to get out quickly, and everyone who knew why I was in was out of action. It was either you or the FBI guys who had Tintfass, but I figured you’d be easier to get to.”
Talia nodded. “I’m just glad Chappelle told me
about you. He didn’t give much more information.” “This operation has a tight lid,” Jack agreed, “which is making all kinds of trouble.” “The truth is, that was my idea, not Chappelle’s. You’re not going to catch Zapata any other way.”
“I’ll manage,” he said.
Talia Gerwehr studied him for a moment. She found herself instantly fascinated by Jack Bauer, suddenly standing there in her house, strong and certain and utterly physical. He was action to her thought. If she was the electrical pulse firing between synapses, he was the muscle that flexed.
Because Talia Gerwehr, despite her good looks, was a creature of the mind. A member of Mensa, captain of
