Teri pulled her feet up and crossed her legs in the chair. This Peter Jiminez was very sincere, but she was confused. Did he want her to be his counselor? If so, he had another think coming. She had a daughter whose father was in jail for murder. “Agent Jiminez, is there something you need from me?”
“I just don’t think he did it, ma’am,” Peter insisted. “Not without a good reason. But there’s no one looking into it on his side. CTU has just written him off. I figured”— he fixed his eyes on her to let her know how serious his statement was—“I figured I’d see what I could do on my own to help out, and I thought I’d start by asking you if there’s any direction you might point me.”
So it was an investigation. Teri folded her arms across her chest. She wasn’t sure if Jiminez’s schoolboy demeanor was an act or his true persona, but she’d been around Jack long enough to recognize a good-cop interrogation when she saw one.
“Agent Jiminez,” she said, her voice hardening ever so slightly. “You have to know that there were lots of things about Jack’s work that he didn’t discuss at home.”
“Of course, ma’am. It’s just that. well, to be honest, a man will sometimes tell his wife things that he won’t tell anyone else.”
Teri laughed, but it was a small thing, with a bitter sound in it. “There are probably more things a man
Jiminez actually blushed. He really was a schoolboy. “Maybe you’re right, ma’am. But if you don’t mind me saying so, you seem like someone to trust. I’m wondering if there was something going on at the agency that Jack didn’t like. Something he might have confided in you. Maybe someone else was out to get him?”
“You think he was set up.”
Peter held his hands up, warding off the suggestion. “I’m not saying anything for sure, ma’am. I’m just wondering if he said anything to you about trouble with anyone else at the agency.”
Teri shook her head. “You may or may not know that my marriage with Jack has had some pretty rough patches, and pretty recently.”
Jiminez fidgeted in his seat, but nodded. “Ma’am.”
“There’ve been times when we’ve barely spoken and when we did, it wasn’t about his work. There are times when he’s gone for days at a time, and he comes home without a single word about where he’s been or what he’s done. For all I know, he’s saved the world from a nuclear bomb. Or maybe he’s just been in somebody else’s bed. I never know. So no, he’s never told me about any trouble at work. But I will tell you one thing I do know.” Now it was her turn to fix her eyes on him. Her gaze bored into him in a look she had long practiced. “The one thing I do know is that Jack is capable of anything.”
Jack followed Ramirez back into their cell, escorted by Lafayette and two other guards. As soon as the door was locked, Jack turned to the officer. “I need to get in touch with someone on the outside. Can you make a call for me?”
“Call tomorrow,” Lafayette drawled lazily. The trouble was over for now, and he wanted to move on before this became something that required paperwork.
“I can’t wait,” Jack said. “This gang will keep coming at me. Look, all I’m asking is for you to make a one- minute phone call.”
Lafayette frowned at him. He was fit for a man in his early fifties, but he wore all those years in the lines of his face when he frowned. “You know what it’d be if I made a one-minute call for every bird in this cage?”
“They’re not all getting killed. Come on, thirty seconds.”
The lines on the guard’s face deepened. “Awright. I make this call, you forget all about this fight tonight. Then I don’t have to do paperwork.”
Jack agreed. He gave Lafayette the number to CTU. “Tell them you’re calling for Ryan Chappelle. Tell them it’s an emergency. When you get Chappelle, tell him you’re calling because things are going south. Say exactly that, okay?”
Lafayette had been reluctant at first, but he also didn’t like too many fights on his watch. A scuffle here and there between inmates was all right — hell, sometimes it was downright entertaining — but he didn’t like what was going on with these Salvatruchas and Bauer. There was some bad sauce on those ribs, like his mama always said. He locked Jack back in his cell and moseyed down to the guard’s office behind its Plexiglas walls.
Lafayette had returned a few minutes later. “You’re having a bad day,” he said to Jack. “Or maybe it’s everyone around you’s having a bad day.”
“Did you tell him? Jack had asked eagerly.
“Nope,” the corrections officer said. “Couldn’t. He’s in the hospital, too.”
Lafayette had walked away, his job done. But Jack clutched the bars of his cage, squeezing until his knuckles turned white.
But it wasn’t in him to panic. He let go of the bars and watched the color flow back into his fingers. Observe. Assess. Act. That was how battles were won. He had suddenly become a target of MS–13, and since MS–13 was a major force in Los Angeles, and ran a crime syndicate that violated dozens of Federal laws, this Federal jail was crowded with Salvatruchas. They’d keep coming at him from different angles until they put him down. Adam Cox, who was more valuable to Jack than anyone in here knew, was dead. The warden, whom Jack could have turned to, was out of commission, maybe dead, too, for all Jack knew. And now Chappelle. It was certainly no coincidence that the three people he could turn to had all been neutralized.
He was in trouble. What kind of trouble, he didn’t yet know, and he would certainly never find out by waiting around inside for MS–13 to kill him.
By 10:16 Jack had made his decision, and by 10:18, he had a plan.
The truth of it was that Peter’s schoolboy style wasn’t an act. He’d been raised in Glendale, Arizona by his maternal grandparents, and they’d trained him up to be polite with a combination of what his grandma called “beatings and sweets,” rewarding good behavior and smacking the sass out of him when necessary.
He walked out of Jack Bauer’s house sure that Teri Bauer knew more than she was saying, but equally sure that she had no information about any personnel conflicts inside CTU. He’d watched her closely while they talked. When she’d mentioned that Jack never talked to her about what he’d been doing, her eyes had moved up and left, an indication that she was accessing the creative side of her brain. When she claimed that he never mentioned personnel conflicts her eyes flicked down and right, usually suggesting use of the brain’s factual side.
Peter got into his car and drove away in the fading twilight. He hadn’t gone more than two blocks when a Crown Victoria pulled up beside him. The window slid down, and a man in sunglasses flashed a badge and motioned for him to pull over. Peter complied, rolling to the curb. He was tempted to get out of the car, but he knew that if he was on the job and pulled someone over, even another Federal agent, he’d want them to stay put. Common courtesy.
Two men got out of the Crown Vic, both wearing half-decent blue suits and inexpensive, comfortable dress shoes. They split off, one to each side of Peter’s car. The one on the driver’s side, who looked Japanese, showed his badge again. FBI.
“Agent Jiminez, I’m Jason Fujimora, FBI, and that’s
Special Agent Holmquist.”
“You want to see my ID?” Peter asked.
“We know who you are, Agent Jiminez,” Holmquist said, making Peter turn his head to look the other way. “We just wanted to pass on a quick word.”
“Lay off the Bauer case,” Fujimora said.
Peter swiveled his head again. “That’s five. Words, I mean.”
Fujimora ignored that. “There’s nothing for you to find there.”
Peter smiled a friendly smile. “Well, fellas, if there’s nothing to find there, there’s no harm in looking. Nothing wasted but my time.”
“Wouldn’t want you to waste the taxpayers’ money,” said Holmquist. This time Peter didn’t bother to look. “Bauer’s in jail for good reason, and he’ll stay put. Understood?”
