have the whole week ahead of you once you’re cleared.”
“Right,” Henderson said. “Sunday it is.”
He hung up, then used the intercom. A moment later Peter Jiminez marched up the stairs to Henderson’s office.
“Close the door,” Henderson ordered. Peter did so. Once they were alone, Henderson’s normally stoic features bunched up into a violent bundle of knots and veins and muscles. “Why the hell is Jack Bauer still alive!”
Jack hung up the phone. “Get this. Webb had no definite plans to see the fights until today. That’s why the visit wasn’t on our schedule.”
“But,” Seth asked, “if even the target didn’t know he was going to be there, how would Zapata know?” “Because that’s what he does,” Chappelle interjected. “Get down there, Bauer.”
Peter Jiminez glared back at Chris Henderson. “What do you think I’ve been trying to do!”
Henderson stood up from his seat, pacing the width of his small office. “Jesus, this is bad. Internal Affairs wants to interview me tomorrow. They’re not coming in on a Sunday to run a Bible study with me. Damn it!”
Christopher Henderson’s plan had almost worked. It had come so close to working so many times in the last few hours.
He’d been behind it from the beginning, of course. Bauer’s testimony would seal his fate once Internal Affairs started chasing the misappropriated funds. Jack had to die. Henderson had known it for weeks. The only question was how to do it without being blamed.
Chappelle had kept his little Zapata scheme close to the vest, but Henderson was no idiot. There was no mission being run out of his field office that he didn’t catch wind of, even one as tight as this. In fact, the confidential nature of the scheme was what inspired Henderson to hatch his own plot. Only a few people had known that Jack Bauer was innocent, and that his presence in the Federal Holding Facility was a setup to get him close to Zapata. Henderson had planned carefully to have them removed, so that Bauer would have no avenues of escape. Chappelle had been the easiest of the three — a large dose of barbiturates had put him down almost immediately. Henderson had known the hospital would conduct blood tests, of course, but he was a clandestine operative. Slipping into a hospital lab and switching the test results had been child’s play.
Bargaining with the MS–13 gang-bangers had proved relatively easy as well. Smiley Lopez had been eager to hire his men out as killers, especially when Henderson offered reduced or commuted sentences as a prize (the fact that he could not actually have had any sentences reduced did not bother him at all). That Jack had embarrassed some of their soldiers once before gave the Salvatruchas additional motivation.
It should have been easy. It should have been over hours ago. Isolate Jack in the jail. Have the Salvatruchas kill him. Over, done, end of story.
But it hadn’t happened that way. Jack Bauer had fought off the assassins not once but twice. In fact, the bastard had somehow used the fights to get even closer to his quarry Ramirez, and once he realized he was isolated, he’d somehow organized a prison riot to cover his escape.
From that moment on, Henderson’s plan had gone downhill. He’d put Jiminez on Jack’s trail, first watching the Bauer house. That lead had turned hot almost immediately when Bauer contacted his wife and asked her to make a delivery for him. Henderson, trying to keep himself and Jiminez at arm’s length, had sent MS–13 again, but they’d proved just as inept out of prison as in.
“You had him,” Henderson swore under his breath. “You had him in your hands and you let him get away.”
Jiminez knew exactly what he was talking about. He’d gone downtown to find Jack and deal with him, but the U.S. Marshals had picked him up first. Even Henderson had to admit that the younger agent had taken a bold step: ramming Pascal’s car and freeing Jack. Jiminez’s intention had been to help Jack escape, kill him, and dump him somewhere. But he hadn’t expected Jack to overpower him.
They had one more crack at Bauer when he assumed Studhalter’s identity. Jiminez had let him escape, hoping he’d contact his Ukrainian suppliers, which he’d done. But once again Bauer had fought out of his predicament. The man was a goddamned prodigy.
The only thing that had gone right was when Jiminez got to Smiley Lopez first. Jack had left him alive, of course, but Lopez might have identified Henderson as the man who’d plotted to have Jack murdered, so
Jiminez had put him out of his misery.
“So what now?” Jiminez said. “We giving up?”
“Give up?” Henderson said in a voice heavy with sarcasm. “Follow the nice men to the prison? No. You need to kill Jack Bauer.”
“What, right now, in the middle of CTU? I’m not going to prison for you.”
“We both took a piece of that money,” Henderson retorted. “You’re going to prison anyway, unless you kill him.”
Jiminez knew he was right. There was no way he was going to spend the rest of his life in Leavenworth over a few hundred thousand dollars that no one should have missed anyway. And if Jack Bauer had to die to make sure Peter Jiminez didn’t end up fighting off bull queers in prison every day, then so be it.
Henderson’s phone rang. He answered and listened for a minute, then nodded. “Good, keep me informed.” He hung up and smiled at Peter. Now’s your chance. Jack just left for the Staples Center.”
Zapata sat a few seats from the Chairman of the Fed, glancing his way once in a while but mostly observing the crowd slowly filling up the huge sports arena. The fights were sold out, with most spectators there to watch the much-anticipated title fight between Salvatore Silva and Ben Harmon. The Kendall-Webb fight was on the undercard, and was scheduled as the second fight of the night.
Several giant monitors hung from the high ceiling. Later, they would show the fight to the spectators in the cheap seats, but for now, they showed promotional video with interviews of the fighters, their past records, and highlights from earlier fights. The more he watched, the more certain Zapata became that Kendall would lose his fight. Young Webb was peaking, and Kendall was washed up. And the moment he lost, his chances of earning any big money from the fight game were reduced to zero, and he would take the offer.
Jack’s car sat in the middle of the worst traffic he’d ever seen in Los Angeles. The freeway was a parking lot, and according to the news, every other freeway looked exactly like this one.
“It’s unbelievable,” he said to Tony Almeida over the phone. “Can you get to the Staples Center?” “I can’t even get
Jack hung up and dialed CTU, getting Chappelle. “We’ve already alerted security at the Staples Center,” the Regional Director said before Jack could even ask. “They can’t roll any more units downtown.
The whole city’s paralyzed. But they have three or four black-and-whites there for every event. I’m having those uniforms go inside and stay close to the Chairman.”
“Good,” Jack said. “I’m on the 101 near Cahuenga. Can you send a helicopter for me?”
Chappelle paused. “Are you serious?”
“I guarantee you Zapata is there. I need to be there now. I’ve seen his face.”
Chapelle said, “We should evacuate. Or lock down.”
“No,” Jack replied sharply. “He’ll find a way out. I don’t want to warn him.”
He hung up before Chappelle could object. He glared at the endless stream of cars before him, gleaming in the last rays of sunlight like a river of steel. “What the hell’s going on!” he yelled.
Darren Spitz had worked for the Department of Transportation for the better part of two decades, and he’d never seen anything like what was going on that afternoon. Los Angeles traffic was always bad, but at least it flowed. If anyone understood that, he did. He was employed by the city planner’s office, and he specialized in traffic flow patterns. The end result of his job was pretty mundane — he helped determine how long the traffic lights stayed red or green, and how those changes related to the timing of other traffic lights nearby. Not the most exciting work. But Spitz liked it.
“Traffic is a force of nature in this city,” he would say to anyone who would listen (it was not a large crowd).
