“What triggered the attack?” Jack asked. “You’ve been with those guys all morning, right? There must have been something specific.”

“I was about to sound the alarm... oh, shit!” Tony yelled, as though he’d just remembered something. “My brain must still be fractured. I was reaching for the phone to call because I saw that detective, what’s her name, Bennet? She was grabbed.” In his still-quavering voice, Almeida described Mercy Bennet’s kidnapping.

Jack tried to will the frustration out of his body. “This never would have happened if she hadn’t come to meet with me. I should have done a better job of dodging her.”

Tony said, “I’ve already been in contact with LAPD. They’re on the lookout for the blue van, but the angle was too bad for us to get a license plate. They gave me the information Bennet was focused on.” Tony told Jack that Theodore Ozersky, a.k.a. Willow, had been taken into custody, and he passed along the name of Frankie Michaelmas.

“Okay,” Jack said. “We need to deal with Ozersky eventually. Is he cooling his heels for now?”

“He’s okay, there’s no hurry there,” Tony said. “I’m taking Agent Dyson to the hospital. I might have myself checked out, too.”

“Good,” Henderson said. “Keep us informed if he comes around.”

“We should add in Gordon Gleed,” Jack said. “He’s deceased. That’s the murder that started her investigation. There’s bound to be some connection.”

Chris Henderson scowled. “Well, then, we’d better get our asses in gear. There’s a terrorist plot happening tonight, and we don’t have a clue yet what it is.”

Jack looked at the tubes in his stomach and growled like a caged animal.

Twenty minutes left.

11:40 A.M. PST West Los Angeles

He sat back in his chair. He slipped a maracuja leaf into his mouth and chewed it slowly. The Spanish had called the maracuja “passionflower” because the broad white flowers somehow reminded the conquistadores of the Passions of Christ. The native population was much more practical, of course, and had long understood the maracuja’s natural properties. When taken in large doses, it acted as a sedative. In smaller quantities, such as he now absorbed, the maracuja had a pleasant, tranquilizing effect.

There was a small GPS tracker on the table next to him. The tiny blue dot was stationary at a location corresponding to CTU headquarters. He recalibrated the device, and a tiny red dot appeared at the Federal Building. Both Jack Bauer and his daughter were being well behaved.

He had just received a call from some of his operatives. Detective Mercy Bennet was in hand, and currently being transported to one of his two remaining safe houses in Los Angeles—the first having been used up during his temporary imprisonment of Jack Bauer. The involvement of CTU and the investigation by the LAPD both caused him anxiety, but now he felt the maracuja’s chemicals easing through his body like ice water flowing into his veins, and he relaxed. He wondered if he should have killed Jack Bauer. He was not squeamish; he had killed people before, but only when necessary, and he had not perceived it as necessary to kill the CTU agent. It was almost beyond the realm of possibility that CTU or any other government agency could discover his purpose. Few of his own people knew his real name or his whereabouts, and they were true believers. None would betray him willingly. By tomorrow, of course, everyone would know him, but by then he would be safely out of the country. He only needed to delay CTU for a few more hours.

No, it wasn’t Jack Bauer who disturbed him most. It was the LAPD detective who had thrown a monkey wrench into his own plans. He had her under wraps now, but how long would that last? Her absence would soon be noticed.

The man shrugged. Maybe it was the effects of the maracuja, but he found himself adopting a very Zen quality. The day would play out as fate would have it.

He picked up a vial that lay on the table next to the GPS. Its contents were clear liquid, basically water, but this was water no one should drink. In that liquid swam one of the most aggressive viruses nature had ever manufactured, a hemorrhagic fever so violent that it would kill a human being within hours. He had learned to weaken its strain ever so slightly. The smaller, weaker strains killed within a day, and they could be destroyed inside the body if the antidote were delivered on time. It was this smaller, weaker cousin that he had introduced into Kim Bauer’s body. She might feel ill, but she was in no real danger for another day.

11:45 A.M. PST Federal Plaza, West Los Angeles

As far as Kim Bauer was concerned, the demonstration was a bust. The weather had grown much warmer than anyone expected, she was surrounded by hot and sweaty people (none of whom, as far as she could tell, had bathed), and Brad Gilmore had turned out to be a major league dork. And to top it all off, she felt like she was coming down with something.

“I’m burning up,” she said to Janet York, one of her best friends, who looked as bored with Teen Green as she felt.

“I’m so sticky it’s disgusting,” Janet said, tugging at her shirt to air herself out. “How much longer?”

Kim checked her watch. “We’re supposed to stay during school hours if we want credit on the political science project.”

Janet rolled her eyes. “As if.” She glanced at their chaperone, Marshall Cooper, who was busy separating Brad Gilmore and another boy who had begun to wrestle for no apparent reason. “You want to skip out? We can hit the mall or whatever.”

Kim touched her forehead and felt beads of sweat. That is so attractive, she thought sarcastically. “Maybe skip out, but I don’t think I want to go shopping or anything. Let’s just get out of here.”

11:51 A.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Jack’s cell phone rang. “Bauer.”

“Agent Bauer.”

It was the voice of his former captor. “What?” he demanded. He waved to Henderson and motioned for him to track the call. Henderson nodded and ran silently out of the room, hailing Jamey Farrell as he did so.

“I want to express my appreciation that you’re being a good boy. I trust you haven’t told anyone about our little arrangement.”

Jack glanced at all the people working around him. “Not a soul,” he lied.

“Unfortunately, it seems your daughter isn’t behaving quite so well. I trust she’s not being taken to a hospital?”

Jack frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What I’m talking about is the fact that your daughter has now left the Federal Building and is heading west on Wilshire Boulevard. I want to remind you, Agent Bauer, that I am not bluffing. No doctor you find in Los Angeles will have a cure for the fever she’s about to contract. Once her symptoms start, she’ll be dead before they can even diagnose it.”

“I haven’t talked to Kim in over an hour,” Jack replied. “Maybe she’s just going to get lunch.”

“We’ll see. If she travels more than one mile from the Federal Building, you’ll never hear from me again.”

The phone clicked off. Henderson came back in, and Jack knew by the look on his face that they hadn’t had time to trace the call.

He slammed his fist onto the table. Three more minutes.

11:55 A.M. PST Federal Plaza

Kim hadn’t walked far when her phone rang. “Hey, Dad,” she said.

“Kim, listen, I had to run to the office for a minute, but I’m coming back soon. You’re still there, right?”

“Where else would I be?” Kim said.

Bauer grinned wryly. He couldn’t fault his daughter for being a good liar. He was pretty accomplished himself. “Great,” he lied back. “I just want to check up on you. I’ll see you in a bit.”

Kim snapped her phone shut and sighed at Janet. “Guess I’m sticking around.”

11:56 A.M. PST Minas Gerais, Brazil

Rickson Aruna waddled up to the house of Constantine Noguera. It wasn’t quite noon yet and already his hip was hurting him. He was getting too old to be the constable of the village, but of course no one else would do the job. They all said it was because he, Rickson, had performed so ably over the years, but in truth it was because no one else wanted to bother. The town was dirty, the pay was low, and most people considered him more of a gossip than a policeman. And, of course, when he did need to act as a policeman, the cause was far too serious for most of these peasants: there were disturbances caused by the drunken antics of the timber cutters, and now and then the protests and sabotage of the environmentalists.

Usually with the environmentalists and the timber cutters it was political, and the federal police became involved. At these times Rickson was eager to step aside. He was a caretaker of the town, not a defender of the forest. He did not like the timber people—he had grown up in a town farther up the river, but now that whole area was clear cut, and erosion had washed half the land into the water. But he was only one man, and he was not inclined to fight the powerful companies from the north.

But the silence from Constantine Noguera’s house, that was something he could deal with. Rickson rapped his knuckles on the rough-boarded door of Noguera’s house. “Constantine!” he called. “How drunk can you be?”

There was no answer, not even a groan from inside.

Rickson pounded on the door again. “Constantine, get up! No one has seen you all day. Come out. The sun will do your hangover some good!”

Again there was no answer. Once more Rickson pounded on the door. This was too much for the old door. The lock broke and the door creaked open. Rickson Aruna found himself staring into Noguera’s little shack, with its front room that served as a kitchen and living room and its one back room for sleeping. The stench of decaying flesh assaulted Rickson’s nostrils and he staggered back. Rickson braced himself and entered, pushing through the stink until he reached the bedroom. When he got there he gagged, choking back bile. His nose had already told him Noguera was dead, but he was not prepared for what he saw: Noguera’s body lay on his bed. The flesh looked as if it had turned to slag on the bones, and huge pustules had erupted all over the body.

Terrified, Rickson tried to hold his breath. He had seen these marks once before, when he was a child and the disease had swept through his village. This was in a time long before modern doctors and medicines. He did not know if the doctors had a name for this disease, or if they had even heard of it. But the old women of his childhood knew it. They called it uña de gato.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 12 P.M. AND 1 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

12:00 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Jack Bauer practically pulled the tubes out of his body himself.

“Hey, let that finish draining!” Dr. Viatour yelled. Thirty minutes after injecting the dialysis solution into his body, the doctors had drained it away, filling a clear plastic tube with a disgusting-looking, bile-colored liquid.

Dr. Viatour said, “This is the solution post-filtering. In theory, it’s filtered impurities out of your blood, including this chemical marker, whatever it is.”

“What do you mean, in theory?” Jack asked.

Viatour shrugged. “Well, peritoneal dialysis works. It’s performed all the time. But usually it’s done three or four times a day for patients with kidney dysfunction. I don’t know anything about this chemical marker, so I can’t tell you if one treatment has done the trick.”

“We’re going to find out,” Jack demanded. “Stitch me up.”

He lay back and let the doctors finish. The truth was, he felt nauseated. They’d filled his abdominal cavity with some kind of saline solution. As his blood passed through it, it had mixed with this solution and, in theory, had filtered impurities out of his body. With luck, that had included the chemical tracer that Ayman al-Libbi had inserted there. He had sat helpless and impatient during the procedure, but now that it was done, he felt spent. His stomach felt distended and awkward, and the large puncture wound in his stomach hurt like hell.

“Chris,” Jack said to Chris Henderson, “soon as I’m on my feet, I’ll leave CTU and see if they contact me again.”

“Suppose he doesn’t give you another warning, just packs up and leaves you and Kim?” Henderson pointed out.

Jack answered decisively. “Either way, I’m moving forward. If they’ve gotten hold of a virus, then it’s going to be part of the plan. He’s going to use it on the G8. I’m going to get Kim and make sure she’s safe. I’ll also get her blood so we can check it.”

“And if al-Libbi is watching like you think he is?”

“I’ve got a plan.”

12:05 P.M. PST UCLA Medical Center

Tony Almeida sat in a private room with an ice pack on the back of his neck. Across from him in the bed lay Agent Dyson, motionless and comatose. Two uniformed policemen were stationed outside, and FBI agents had been in and out of the room all day. They had all asked Tony the same questions and he’d given the same answers. They were at a loss to explain Dyson’s actions or to uncover his motivations. This was no great shock to Almeida—over the years the FBI had played host to any number of moles at various levels.

Unlike the FBI agents, who left when they learned Dyson was comatose, Almeida waited. This was partly because his head still felt like it had been split open with an axe, but also because he didn’t take kindly to having his head split open...and he planned on being there when Dyson opened his eyes.

Tony leaned his head back onto the ice pack. There was time still to rest. Eventually Dyson would snap out of it. Tony would ask him a few questions, and then put him into a whole different kind of coma.

12:07 P.M. PST West Los Angeles

Mercy Bennet had drifted in and out of consciousness for God knew how long. Every time she drifted toward wakefulness, she felt her face throb and her skin stretched tight over what must be scabs on her face. Darkness was all around her. A hood had been thrown over her head. She would sink back down into forgetfulness.

Eventually, though, her conscious mind would not be denied, and she came to. She was lying on her side, hooded, with her hands bound behind her back. Her ankles were tied as well. She was lying on a hard floor. Voices from another room drifted toward her.

“. . . ill her. Jesus, we’re in it this far. What difference does it make,” someone was saying.

“A great deal of difference,” said another voice, a very calm voice. “There is a distinction between killing for the cause and outright murder. You know that.”

“I know that makes you comfortable to say it,” replied the first speaker. “All I know is that I’m going to jail if they catch me, and so I don’t want to be caught.”

Mercy shifted her arms a little, trying to get some blood back into them. As she did, she felt something jab into her hand. It was a nail of some kind, sticking up from the floorboard. She rubbed her wrist on it and felt the cords catch. She listened again—the voices came through a wall. There was no other sound. If someone was in the room with her, he was quiet as a ghost. She rubbed the cord against the nail again...

12:10 A.M. PST Federal Plaza, West Los Angeles

Driving a borrowed SUV with a siren, Jack made good time from CTU to Federal Plaza. No call came during the drive, which meant that either the dialysis had worked or the terrorist wasn’t bothering to issue another warning. Jack didn’t care either way. He’d spent enough time lying down and leaving his daughter out in the cold. He was going to bring her in.

This whole day had turned to hell. He had planned it perfectly, but like all plans it had gone awry, starting with Mercy Bennet’s appearance at the Federal Building. Jack hadn’t counted on that. Their meeting had triggered a series of events that had spun the whole day out of control, and drawn his daughter into danger she did not deserve. But he was determined to take care of that.

As he drove, Jack sorted his list of worries. He had to get Kim out of harm’s way. He had to find al-Libbi and this virus. And he had to make sure al-Libbi’s plot against the G8 was neutralized.

And then there was Mercy. She’d been taken by the terrorists. She might be dead, she might be under torture. And he was doing nothing about it. He recalled his own words to her: you’ll always have someone who’s on your side. Those words sounded empty to him now. Jack had broken promises before. He’d lied and misled before. But only to complete the mission. Only to corner the enemy. That was part of his job. But Mercy was an ally and he’d made her a promise. He kept promises to his friends.

Jack turned onto Westwood Boulevard, which marked the eastern edge of the protest perimeter, and drove south past Wilshire Boulevard until he reached Olympic Boulevard, then swung west until he came to Veteran. He turned right back up Veteran until he reached the same parking area Mercy had discovered. Jack parked and looked around for the nearest set of available uniformed cops.

“Hey, gentlemen, can you help me?” he asked, showing them his badge as he approached.

One of the cops turned toward him, and Jack recognized the face and the bandaged wrist at the same time. “Oh, it’s you,” the cop said. “You back for the other one?”

Jack hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then he thought of basic infantry training: in an ambush, attack the attack. “Special Agent Jack Bauer, Counter Terrorist Unit,” he said in his command voice. “I need help from a few of you guys. Come with me, please.”

12:20 P.M. PST Brentwood, California

Ayman al-Libbi parked a dark blue Toyota Sentra close to the curb on a residential street in Brentwood, California. Brentwood was the next enclave over from Westwood, separated by the wide 405 Freeway. Not quite as large or wealthy as Beverly Hills, it was still drenched in money. The neighborhood was wealthy enough that his cheap auto would eventually draw attention, but for the rest of the day it would be mistaken for a car driven by a maid. By nightfall, it would no longer matter.

He checked the address. The house he was looking for was several doors down, a two-story house with a wide grass lawn, red-tiled roof, and a wall that hid a patio before the door. It reminded Ayman of the architecture of Spain. A green pickup truck was parked in front of the house, and he could hear the high-pitched whine of a leaf blower.

A leaf blower, he thought. The sound of the leaf blower made him angry in an irrational way. It seemed to represent everything he despised about the West—countries full of people too lazy to rake their own leaves, who used gasoline imported from the Middle East to power machines to move the leaves around for them. And then, of course, they would bomb those Middle Eastern countries to keep the price of gasoline low. It was the height of decadence.

By the time Ayman reached the Spanish house, the leaf blower had stopped. A pot-bellied Mexican man in green pants and a green shirt walked down to the sidewalk and put the leaf blower in the back of the white truck. He removed some kind of small shovel and then turned back toward the house. As Ayman approached, the gardener knelt down along a stone walkway that led up to the wall. Long-leafed agapanthus plants lined the walkway, resting in freshly dug soil.

“Those look good,” Ayman said pleasantly.

The gardener turned, his round face covered in a sheen of sweat. “Eh? Oh, thank you,” he said, saluting with his little shovel. He had a gentle Mexican accent. Ayman, who spoke four languages, understood how hard it could be to rid the tongue of the rhythms of home.

“Is this a good time to plant agapanthus?” Ayman asked.

The gardener had already turned back to his planting. Now he turned fully toward Ayman and smiled. “No. But...” He pointed the shovel toward the house and rolled his eyes.

Ayman nodded. “Well, we all work for someone.”

The gardener stood up and wiped his brow. “That’s the truth. Even though I like to think that I work for myself.” He walked past Ayman toward his truck, which had the words “Sanchez Landscaping” on the side.

Ayman followed him to the truck. “If we are lucky, we serve our own ends. But we work for others. Have you owned your own business for long?”

The gardener, Sanchez, opened the passenger door of his truck and reached inside for a card. “Nine or ten years, I think. Here.”

He turned to give Ayman the card and was surprised to find him standing so close. Ayman pushed the gardener almost gently back onto the passenger seat. As Sanchez lost balance, Ayman lifted a silenced .22-caliber semi-automatic handgun and shot him in the head.

12:34 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Jessi Bandison was potshot-ing. At least that was her word for it. Chris and Jamey had assigned her to track down any connections between the terrorist Ayman al-Libbi and any groups that might want to cause trouble at the G8. The problem, of course, was that there were a thousand groups that might want to cause trouble at the G8. Almost none of them had the resources to try. So Jessi had spent her first few hours analyzing those that did have resources: al-Qaeda, Falun Gong in China, Jemaah Islamiya (although they operated only in Southeast Asia), and a few others. But connecting al-Libbi and Falun Gong was like fitting a square peg in a round hole, and as far as al-Qaeda was concerned, al-Libbi didn’t practice their kind of radical Islamism.

After that, Jessi had transferred from a resource-oriented search to a motive-oriented. Falun Gong came up again and was discarded. The East Turkistan Independence Movement, or ETIM, was the most likely candidate simply because they had an office in Los Angeles, which proved they were politically savvy and had some resources. But the “office” turned out to be a Mongolian barbecue restaurant in a strip mall, and every source Jessi dug up on ETIM in eastern China was roadblocked. Beijing was very tight-lipped about political activism, especially when it involved violence. As far as the Communist Party was concerned, ETIM didn’t even exist because there was no East Turkistan at all.

“Any luck?” Chris Henderson asked.

“Nada,” she said, stiffening a bit. Henderson had never been anything but cordial to her, but somehow he gave her the creeps.

Bits of data shining out of the computer screen reflected on her light chocolate-colored skin and round cheeks. “We don’t have much data on activity inside China. I’m just potshot-ing now.”

Chris read the screen, conscious of how close his hand was to her shoulder. “You’re back on ETIM. I thought that was a dead end.”

“Oh, I’m not, really,” she said. “It’s all the shotgun approach at this point. I’ve got the computers doing a random match on any names that appear to be of eastern Chinese origin with any other unusual activity, such as plane flights, fund transfers, that stuff. I think I’m using half the RAM in the entire network. I’m surprised Jamey hasn’t—”

The screen flickered. Jessi stared at the screen as an enormous list of transactions appeared. “See, I knew there’d be too many to make the list usable—” She stopped speaking again. Her logarithm had ranked the listing in order of probability. The one at the top caught her attention: it had been ranked in the ninety-ninth percentile. She drilled down into the line and read the following:

TRSP $US2,000,000.00 FROM 343934425 TO 904900201* CAYMAN ISLDS *ACCOUNT NO. ACTIVITY MATCH: EASTERN TURKISTAN INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT

“Hmm,” Jessi said, astounded.

Henderson patted her on the shoulder. “I’m taking you to Vegas.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. If the computer match was correct, it appeared that someone had transferred two million dollars to an account in the Cayman Islands—an account that had been connected to ETIM. So much for ETIM not having resources. “Let’s find out who,” Jessi said.

Henderson watched her work. He’d liked her from the moment he took over as Director of Field Operations. She was certainly a wizard on the computer, but every analyst at CTU could make that claim. Bandison had a level head and a detective’s mind. One of his predecessors, Kelly Sharpton, had written her glowing reports.

“There,” she said. He tore his eyes away from her to study the computer.

“Marcus Lee,” he read. “Chinese American, living in Los Angeles. Now why would Mr. Lee want to give two million dollars to ETIM?”

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12:40 P.M. PST Federal Plaza, West Los Angeles

Kim stomped her foot impatiently. “I don’t care what my dad says, I need to get out of here.”

Her face was flushed, and she was starting to perspire so much, she was sure her makeup would run.

“We should just go,” Janet said, lifting her hair up from her shoulders to cool her neck. “There’s like nothing happening here anyway.”

Even as she said that, Brad Gilmore and another guy from Teen Green shoved into them, hitting Janet on the back and nearly knocking Kim off her feet.

“Hey, cut it out!” Kim yelled.

“It wasn’t us!” Brad complained. “It’s them!”

On the other side of Brad, two or three people Kim didn’t know had started to push and shove each other—a middle-aged granola with shoulder-length gray hair, and a cute guy who looked like he was in college. They were yelling over each other, and Kim could barely understand the words. The college guy shoved the granola, who shoved back. The people around them simultaneously whooped encouragement and yelled at them to stop causing trouble.

In moments, four or five policemen were on the scene, pushing past the spectators and grabbing hold of the two men.

“Excuse me, miss.”

Kim Bauer turned away from her conversation with Janet to find three policemen standing around her. They had serious looks on their faces.

“Yeah?” she replied.

“You’ll have to come with us, please.”

Kim looked around as if trying to discover something she’d done wrong. The fight was already breaking up, and she hadn’t even been involved. “What do you mean?”

“Is there a problem, officer?” Marshall Cooper, the advisor, pushed past several gawking members of Teen Green. “Is something wrong here?”

One of the policemen with a bandage around his wrist said, “Step back, sir. We’re going to have to take this girl inside for some questions.”

Kim didn’t like the sound of that. “What’d I do?” she asked fearfully.

The cop paused. “Disorderly conduct.”

“That’s ridiculous!” said a high-pitched voice. Andi Parks practically rolled over Cooper as she set herself between Kim and the policemen. “That’s completely and totally ridiculous, I’ve been here the whole time and that girl hasn’t done a thing, in fact she’s not feeling very well, are you, Kimmy?”

Her onslaught was enough to make all three cops step back, but they recovered quickly. The injured cop puffed his chest out again. “Back off, ma’am. We’re just doing our job. Now come along, miss.” He took Kim by the arm gently but firmly.

Kim looked from Janet to Andi Parks to Mr. Cooper, who looked confused, outraged, and helpless, respectively.

12:45 P.M. PST Federal Plaza, West Los Angeles

Jack watched from the crowd, a safe distance away. He was wearing a borrowed blue Dodgers cap that hid his blond hair, and he kept his chin tucked, hiding half his face in the collar of his shirt. If anyone was keeping an eye on Kim, he was sure they wouldn’t recognize him in that throng of people.

The police officers had surrounded Kim and were leading

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her toward the entrance to the Federal Building. Jack trailed them. He was vaguely aware that the shouting and arguments continued behind him.

12:50 P.M. PST West Los Angeles

There is a single-mindedness that settles over a person about to die. For Mercy Bennet, that single-mindedness refined itself into the single, repetitive motion of her bound wrists along the edge of an exposed nail. Elbows bent, elbows straightened, elbows bent, elbows straightened. It was not monotonous. It was not tedious. It was, in fact, the single most thrilling and interesting event of her entire life, because her entire life depended on it.

They had argued twice more about killing her. “They” comprised at least five distinct individuals, though by the sound of footsteps there might be others coming in and out. She had no faces to match the voices, but she had begun to learn more about them. They used names with one another that had to be codes: Jack Mormon, Rudolf the Red...and at last, when one of them spoke to the man she thought of as the leader, she heard the name Smith. She guessed who it was: Seldom Seen Smith, the leader of the Monkey Wrench Gang. At one point during her captivity, Smith apparently left the room, and two others spoke of him in voices mixed with reverence and contempt.

“What’s gotten in to him?” one male voice asked.

“Easy, Rudolf,” a female voice said. “Smith’s the man.”

“He’s turning in to some kind of Hayduke, though,” said Rudolf.

Mercy was surprised to find that she understood the term, and she thanked her research on the Edward Abbey book from which the terrorists took their name. Hayduke was one of the most revered characters in the environmentalist book—he was famous in part for the fact that he studiously avoided causing harm to other people.

“That’s not such a bad thing, is it?” the female voice asked.

Rudolf spoke stubbornly. “It is if it gets in the way of the goal. Hell, if we’re going to talk and not do anything, we might as well join the Sierra Club.”

“Quiet.” This came from a new female voice. Mercy thought she recognized it as Frankie Michaelmas.“I was with him in Brazil. I saw what he did to those surveyors that time. Trust me, when the time comes, he’ll kill her.”

Conversations like that were very motivating. Mercy had managed to roll so that her body lay almost over her arms, which she moved ever so slightly to fray the ropes. Under her hood, she had no idea if anyone was watching her, so she had to make her movements imperceptible. Twice she heard footsteps approach, and felt heavy steps on the floorboards beneath her, and she froze. Only when the footsteps turned and walked away did she resume her cutting.

After what seemed like hours, she felt the ropes part. She stifled a gasp. Her hands were free, but her feet were still bound. If she sat up and someone discovered her now, she’d be nearly helpless. She listened carefully, reaching out with all her senses to gather information about the room. There was neither sound nor movement. She had to risk it.

In one fluid motion, Mercy sat up and pulled the hood from her head. She was sitting in a bare room with scratched wood floors and faded yellow walls. The single window had been covered in heavy drapes. The door was half closed. There was no furniture.

Quickly Mercy pulled at the ropes tying her ankles. They

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were tied tightly, and at first her fingers fumbled over the knots. Although her heart was pounding, Mercy forced herself to stop. Focus, she told herself. Slow and steady wins the race.

She found the bit of rope that would loosen more easily, and tugged.

12:53 P.M. PST Federal Building Command Center, West Los Angeles

Kim Bauer’s heart was pounding as she passed through the metal detectors and into the Federal Building itself. The doors closed behind her, and the sound and energy of the protest outside was sealed away as neatly as if it were a scene on television. She could still see the protestors fifty yards away from the glass walls of the lobby, but they seemed a world away from the quiet, air-conditioned interior.

The three policemen still surrounded her, and one was still holding her arm. “I really didn’t do anything,” she said to them, her voice rising a little in panic. “It was those guys next to us. They started the fight.”

“Maybe so,” said the cop with the bad wrist.

At their direction, Kim walked into an elevator and rode it down to a basement level. She was led along a beige corridor with fluorescent lighting past several rooms occupied by men and women in business attire, but wearing guns in shoulder harnesses like the one her dad wore sometimes.

The officers stopped at one door, which opened just as they arrived. Out walked two men: the cute college guy and the gray-haired hippie. Kim’s eyes went wide. “That’s them!” she said. “Those are the two guys who caused the trouble.”

The gray-haired man smiled at her and looked back over his shoulder. “I guess you gotta be good at something,” he said. He moved out of the way, and Kim saw the person to whom he’d addressed his comment.

“Dad!” she yelled.

Her father pulled her into his arms and held her as though his hug could squeeze the infection from her body. “Are you all right?”

“I’m okay, but these guys are arresting me and I didn’t do anything—”

“I know, it’s okay,” he said. “You’re not being arrested.” He had already decided not to tell her about al-Libbi’s threats, or the virus. The news would terrify her, and he could offer no comfort. For all he knew, the terrorist was lying about the virus. So he lied, too. “I had to get you out of there because, because we got information that a riot was about to start. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Kim looked back out the door. “But what about Janet and Brad and everyone?”

“They’re okay. They’re being sent home.” More lies. “I just needed to make sure you were okay. By the way, are you okay? Your face is red.”

Kim felt her blond hair clinging to her forehead and pushed it back. “It’s so hot out there. I think I’ve got a fever.”

Jack saw his opening. He’d been wondering how he was going to get a sample of Kim’s blood without telling her why. This was his chance.

“Okay, there’s a doctor on call down here. I’m going to have her look at you. She’s a pretty thorough lady. She may want to give you a complete checkup, is that okay?”

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12:58 P.M. PST West Los Angeles

Mercy dug her fingernail under a stubborn loop. She felt her fingernail tear away, but the loop came loose and she pulled hard. The ropes around her ankles fell away. She jumped to her feet but immediately stumbled as a thousand hot pins and needles stabbed at her legs.

A young man wearing a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt walked into the room. His jaw dropped. “What the—?”

Mercy lunged toward him as fast as her numb legs would carry her. He had just enough sense to raise his hands as she punched him, and her knuckles smashed into the back of his hand, which in turn smashed into his forehead. Ignoring the pain in her legs, she kicked him in the groin.

He had no skill, but he was stubborn. As he doubled over, he lunged forward and wrapped his arms around her still-burning legs. She nearly lost her balance, but bent her knees forward, resting her shins on his shoulders and using her hands to push his face down into the floor. He grunted and loosened his grip. Mercy jerked her legs free and stomped on the back of his leg, then launched herself over him and out the door.

She was in a living room as bare as the room she’d left, except for a stack of five or six wooden crates filled with glass vials. Three people walked into the room from a hallway and gave Mercy the same surprised look that the first man had—except this time one of them moved more aggressively. He was another young man in his twenties, wiry and bald, with a hard look in his eyes as he threw himself at Mercy. She had no time to move. He wasn’t much taller than she was, but he was stronger, and he grabbed her in a bear hug so hard, she thought her back would break.

Mercy had been in fights before. Coming up from the uniform ranks, working as a female cop in Los Angeles, of course she had. She dug her thumbs into his eyes and pushed up and back. He screamed and lifted his chin, flinching away from the pain. Mercy headbutted him on the nose and felt it crush beneath her. Lifting her own head away, she let go of his face with her right hand and punched him in the throat. He made a wet gurgling sound and threw her away from him. Mercy smashed into the stack of glass vials. Glass cut her skin and warm wetness spread across her back.

“You idiot!” yelled one of the other two. Mercy saw a tall man in his forties, slightly balding, with a fierce, hawkish face. The voice told her this was Seldom Seen Smith. “Do you realize what you’ve—”

He didn’t bother to finish; his look of anger turned to horror and he started to back away. “Both strains,” he said fearfully. Beside him, a girl spewed a stream of obscenities. Only then did Mercy realize that it was Frankie Michaelmas. She glared at Mercy but she, too, had begun to step back. Mercy scrambled up and away from the broken glass beneath her. She didn’t know why they looked so suddenly upset, but her command instincts took over and she stepped forward as though she’d just drawn her gun. “Both of you, get down on your knees!”

Smith took one more look at the mess Mercy had made, turned, and ran.

12:59 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

Jack Bauer walked out into the lobby of the Federal Building. He knew Kim was safe now, and there wasn’t much he could do while the doctor examined her. He was afraid that

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if he stayed, he’d give away his concern. So he’d come upstairs for some air. He knew something was wrong immediately, since the cops who manned the metal detectors and X-ray machines were pacing back and forth along the tall windows, and two of them now stood before the shut doors.

He looked beyond the glass and saw why.

Around the Federal Building, the sea of people had turned into a storm. Protestors surged over the grass field and onto the concrete plaza. Police wearing helmets and carrying shields appeared out of nowhere, forming a hasty line before the building doors. A plume of tear gas rose up from somewhere. The protest had turned into a full-scale riot.

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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1 P.M. AND 2 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

1:00 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

The elevator doors opened behind Jack and half a squad of uniformed policemen hustled out, hastily strapping on their riot helmets, their thick plastic riot shields bumping against one another as they hurried toward the doors.

LAPD had managed to form a perimeter ten yards out from the building itself, and the sight of their wall of shields had slowed the crowd. They formed their own line a few yards from the police, shouting epithets and chants, raising their fists and their voices in anger. They were two armies drawn up in battle, waiting for the moment to strike.

But ten thousand people, once roused, needed some outlet for their frustration. Over the heads of the vast crowd,

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Jack saw smoke rising on the street, and he guessed that a car was burning. Jack’s lip curled into a sneer. From his training with the L.A. Sheriff Department years ago to his time in Delta Force to CTU, Jack had seen more than his share of chaos. He understood that a mob generated its own energy, and that this energy had to be transferred somewhere, somehow. But understanding it did not mean he respected it. The soldier in him felt nothing but disdain for misdirected violence. As far as he was concerned, a crowd of people engaged in protest were exercising their rights in a democracy. He risked his life to defend that right, whether he agreed with them or not. But a mob that destroyed property and caused violence was just a bunch of low-level terrorists.

Jack’s cell phone rang and he flipped it open. It was someone at CTU. “Bauer.”

“Jack, it’s Chris. I’ve got the surveillance team at the Federal Building on the line.”

Jack looked down at the floor, as though he could see through several layers of concrete to the command center below. “I’m at the Federal Building.”

“I know, but with Almeida at the hospital, they didn’t know how to reach you. I’m patching them through.”

There was a click, and Jack said again, “Bauer.”

“Agent Bauer, this is Cynthia Rosen, FBI. Are you still on the premises?”

“Upstairs, watching the shit hit the fan.”

“Listen, bear with me if I’m not sure about this, but my team just took over surveillance after whatever happened this morning, so I’m not totally up to speed. But your unit had requested FRS on a couple of people, didn’t it?”

“That’s right.” Jack watched a glass bottle arc up and out of the mass of protestors and bounce off a policeman’s riot shield.

“Well, we got something. Facial recognition on a guy you had videoed this morning.”

Jack straightened. “Muhammad Abbas?”

“No. Based on the video you guys took, it was the subject he was talking to. We don’t have his name, just a match with the previous video we captured.”

“Better than nothing,” Bauer said. “You have him now?”

“Affirmative. North side of the building.”

“Roger.” Jack slapped his phone shut and ran.

1:03 P.M. PST West Los Angeles

Mercy had no gun, no badge, and no radio, so she had pursued her two subjects on foot. Frankie and Seldom Seen Smith had bolted out the front door and onto a residential street. The small Spanish-style houses and low-hanging power lines told Mercy she was somewhere in West Los Angeles, but she couldn’t see any street signs.

Frankie and Smith ran together for several blocks, but then got smart and split up at a residential street, Frankie swerving west and Smith continuing north. Mercy stayed on Smith. Her feet started to ache almost immediately; having gone from near-zero circulation to a sudden sprint was too much for them. She’d have given anything for a radio, but she refused to quit. She wanted this bastard, if only to prove to Jack Bauer that she was right.

Fortunately, Smith was no athlete himself. She wasn’t gaining on him, but she wasn’t giving ground, either. And so far Smith hadn’t opted for the one thing Mercy feared most—that he’d swerve up a driveway, over a fence, and turn the chase into an obstacle course. Thank god for middle-aged terrorists.

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She stayed focused on Smith, but she became vaguely aware of the scene ahead of him. They were running toward a tall building, and there seemed to be some kind of loud noise and movement ahead. They crossed another residential street, and the Spanish bungalows gave way to small apartment buildings and duplexes. Mercy saw a cloud of white smoke in the distance and wondered if there was a fire of some kind. Then she picked up the faint acrid smell of chlorobenzylidene and knew that it wasn’t smoke; it was tear gas. She lifted her eyes up from Smith’s back and got her first clear view of the structure ahead of her.

It was the Federal Building.

Looking beyond Smith, she saw that the disturbance was a mass of people, frothing and surging like waves battering a sea rock. Another plume of tear gas rose up, and she heard wailing sirens mix with the roar of ten thousand people chanting.

Mercy realized what Smith was trying to do and she gave him her grudging respect. If Smith plunged into the midst of that chaos, he would be almost impossible to find.

Even as she thought this, he reached the edge of the crowd.

1:12 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Jessi Bandison hated puzzles. She hated puzzles in the same way she hated tangles in her curls—they were things that ought not to be, and she felt obliged to work them until they were out of her hair.

“Marcus Lee” was the current tangle she was trying to smooth away. A quick search had pulled up a file full of information on him, but none of it was of any consequence.

According to his file, Lee was a Chinese American who in 1998 had immigrated to the United States, where he already had several family members in residence. The FBI had a file on him, but it consisted of no more than a cursory background check that came up clean.

Jessi had contacted the CIA, hoping they might have done a workup on a former Chinese national. Through their database she managed to obtain a glimpse of the Chinese government’s own files on Lee. The prospect excited her until she’d mined the data and found Lee to be about as interesting as a stucco wall. The man had just enough background to be real but not enough to be interesting: born in Shenzhen, educated at UCLA, then returned to China to work in computers, but never achieved any strong connections in the Communist Party. Eventually he earned a visa and immigrated to the United States, where he’d turned his IT savvy into a thriving software business. He lived in Brentwood, paid his taxes, committed the occasional parking violation, but that was it.

Jessi didn’t like it. The story the data told her seemed believable, but the tangle was still in her hair, and now it was starting to bother her.

“I’ve got two choices,” she said to herself, staring at her computer screen in CTU’s bullpen full of computer terminals. “I can assume that my connection’s wrong, that this bank account has nothing to do with Marcus Lee, and that Marcus Lee is a solid naturalized citizen.”

But that didn’t smooth the tangle, it just ignored it.

“Or I can assume that the account connection is right, and there’s more to Marcus Lee than he wants me to know about.”

It was the bank account that was the key. How was Lee connected to the bank account? Instead of running down Lee, Jessi turned her attention to the Cayman Islands and be

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gan to research account number 343934425. Like accounts in Swiss banks, the Cayman Islands accounts were kept confidential, but unlike the Swiss, the Cayman Islanders had neither the tradition nor the backbone to maintain that privacy under pressure. As she dug deeper, Jessi expected to find history on some FBI or CIA investigation that had linked the name Marcus Lee to account 343934425.

She was right that a prior investigation had matched Lee to the account. But to her surprise she found that the investigation itself was Russian. Jessi stared at the screen for a moment, baffled by the notation. But there was no mistake: Russian intelligence had fed the CIA the data. This wasn’t completely unheard of, but to Jessi it was a gaping hole in the road.

Fortunately, she knew someone who might be able to help. She dialed a number she hated to admit she knew by heart.

“Hey,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

“Hi Kelly,” Jessi said. “How are you?”

“Well, better now,” said Kelly Sharpton. “I’ve been hoping you’d call.”

“It’s business,” Jessi said.

“Oh.”

Kelly Sharpton had been her boss for a short time at CTU. He’d been brought in on temporary assignment during Jack Bauer’s fall from grace. There’d been a spark between them, but Sharpton had left the unit some time ago, “seduced by the lure of filthy lucre,” as he put it, and the spark had never started a fire. At least that was how Jessi thought of it. But they spoke every now and again when Kelly was in town, and Kelly had been growing more and more obvious with his hints.

“You have some contacts with the Russians, don’t you?”

“Did,” he corrected. “It’s been a while.”

“I’m following a trail that leads from a CIA file to Russian intelligence. Can you put the word out for me?”

“Do I get a dinner out of it?” Kelly laughed.

Jessi felt her heart flutter. She shouldn’t be flirting with him. He’s older, he’s traveling, his work might put us in conflict... But she heard herself say, “Depends on how good you are.”

“Deal,” he said. “Expect a call.”

1:20 P.M. PST North Side of the Federal Building, West Los Angeles

Jack slipped out of the double doors and ran behind the line of officers near the entrance of the Federal Building.

The scene was rapidly spiraling out of control. A bottle shattered on the ground a few feet behind him. Dark smoke mixed with the plumes of tear gas, and Jack knew that protestors had set fire to something, probably a car. He also knew that over at the Veteran Center, half a mile away, LAPD had mustered the horse-mounted squad. If the violence continued, they’d be charging down Wilshire Boulevard, backed up by rubber bullets.

Jack reached the north end of the Federal Building. “I’m here,” he said into his mobile phone. “Talk to me.”

He was still in touch with Cynthia Rosen downstairs in the command center. She talked back to him now. “He’s still there. Getting tough to stay on him, though. Bodies are starting to fly around there.”

“I’m there.”

The north side of the Federal Building was the narrowest plot of land—an arcade no more than ten yards wide, with a grass lawn another twenty yards, and then the street.

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LAPD’s original plan had blocked traffic from the street, allowing the protestors to occupy the boulevard and leaving a healthy perimeter between them and the building. The riot had changed all that, and as Jack rounded the corner, the crowd was pushing its way onto the concrete. There was a police line there as well, and in Jack’s view they were exercising admirable discipline. Protestors were pushing at their phalanx of riot shields, but they had yet to bring their batons to bear.

“He’s at your nine o’clock,” Rosen said. “Blue shirt.”

Jack looked to his left. It was nearly impossible to get a clean look at anyone beyond the riot shields and in the swarming crowd. But a flash of blue caught his attention and he focused on it. The man wearing the shirt did not stand in the front ranks, but close enough to be noticed, raising his fist and yelling at the police line.

Jack hesitated before moving on. Something about this man’s presence at the protest didn’t make sense. Why would a terrorist working for Ayman al-Libbi bother with the political protest? It didn’t make sense even to risk a showing. There was no upside, and al-Libbi could not be completely confident that Federal investigators hadn’t identified at least some of his help. So this man was either so far down the food chain that al-Libbi considered him unimportant, or he had some other reason for keeping him at the protest. Jack tucked that thought away as he made his move.

He did not want the subject or anyone nearby to see him come from the Federal Building, so he turned back around the corner, then passed through the police line.

“Where do you think you’re—?” one of the officers asked.

“Federal agent,” Jack said, flashing his badge. He held it tight in his left hand, figuring he might need it again soon.

Crossing the line between the police phalanx and the rioters, Jack felt like a sailor leaping from the ship and into a choppy sea.

“Who the hell are you?” a young man challenged, grabbing Jack as he pushed his way into the crowd.

Jack kneed him in the groin. “No one to mess with.”

He stepped over the man and into the space created where he fell. A few more people yelled at him or clutched at him, but Jack ignored them, and a few steps later he was among people who hadn’t seen him and didn’t pay attention to him except for the second during which he pushed past them. They were all chanting in the same rhythm, but he had the impression the words changed from group to group, as though the rioters were made up of distinct groups with distinct messages who’d all fallen under the same spell. As he made his way through the crowd, rounding the corner of the building, a young Latino pushed him aside and threw a bottle. Jack watched it spin through the air toward a police officer, who ducked behind his shield as the bottle bounced away. The young man smiled at Jack and said something in Spanish that he didn’t quite catch. Jack resisted the urge to punch him in the face and moved on.

He waded through the crowd and reached the north side. Using the building as perspective, he made his way back to the point where he’d seen the blue shirt. There was an ebb and flow to the mob as it pushed close to the police barricade and then gave way, and the blue-shirted man was no closer to his original position than a man overboard at sea. But Jack spotted him at last, a few yards away. He shoved his way past four or five short Latino men dressed in primitive costumes, with signs that read “dejar la amazona tranquila!”, elbowed through two men holding a banner that said, say no to china! remember tiananmen! Finally, he forced an open space next to the man in the blue shirt.

Jack had expected him to look Middle Eastern, but if looks were any indicator, the man’s background was farther

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east and north. He looked Chinese, or Slavic, or both. Jack had traveled in the “-stans” that were the former satellites of the old Soviet Union—Uzbekistan, Turkistan, Kyrgyzstan, and the like. The blue-shirted man reminded Jack of men from that region. This thought reminded Jack of something he’d heard in a briefing several weeks earlier, but he couldn’t recall it at the moment.

Jack pulled out his cell phone and activated the camera feature. He knew the blue-shirted man wasn’t paying much attention to him, but he pretended to enter a number and hold the phone to his ear. “What!” he yelled, just for show. “What?” He pulled the phone away from his ear the way people did who’d lost a connection, as though moving the phone a few inches away would improve the reception. In that moment the blue-shirted man’s face appeared on the screen. Jack snapped the picture. A second later he forwarded it to CTU.

1:35 P.M. PST UCLA Medical Center

Tony Almeida woke with a start when his chin fell forward into his chest. His headache had eased over the last hour, but he was still having that strange post-concussion sensation of layered awareness. Every ten minutes or so he felt as if now, finally, his mind was completely lucid... only to discover ten minutes later that his mind really hadn’t been clear, but now it was... only to make the same discovery again in a few minutes, and so on.

He checked the big round clock on the hospital room wall. He’d been asleep only for a few seconds. Dyson was still in the bed, motionless, the monitors beeping along calmly. Dyson’s skull had been fractured by his impact with the cinder-block wall.

Tony stood up and was glad when the room didn’t spin. He walked over and stood next to the bed, looking down at Dyson. An oxygen tube hung under his nose and draped over his face.

Who are you working for? Tony asked silently. Why did you try to kill me?

The FBI had vetted Dyson’s record and found nothing. Not trusting them, CTU had done its own research, and even Jamey Farrell, who was a tenacious analyst, had drawn a blank. As far as any of them could tell, Dyson had absolutely no connection to Ayman al-Libbi or any groups that might want to hire him.

Tony opened his cell phone and called CTU.

“Jamey Farrell.”

“It’s Tony. Have we had any luck tracking any of the people in the van that took Detective Bennet?”

She sounded mildly annoyed. “Not yet. There’s nothing on the van at all. We ran a check on Frankie Michaelmas. No one knows where she’s at. What makes you think she has anything to do with Ayman al-Libbi?”

“Jack’s hunch,” Tony said. “Why do you ask like that?”

“Ozersky’s a granola. Goes by the name Willow, if that tells you anything. The girl is pretty much the same. She’s an environmental freak, not a political activist. Do you know something I don’t?”

“Just that Jack’s hunches are often right.”

Tony hung up. Jamey had no idea how far out on a limb he’d gone to pursue one of Jack’s hunches. In fact, very few people in CTU knew how far he’d gone. To make it all turn out right, they needed a break—a big one.

“And so far, you’re the only lead I’ve got,” Tony said to Dyson.

As he looked down, he was sure he saw Dyson’s finger twitch.

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1:45 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

Mercy closed in on Seldom Seen Smith.

Smith’s strategy had nearly worked. Mercy had lost him when he plunged into the crowd at the south end of the Federal Building. She’d plunged in after him, past jagged lines of people who seemed hesitant and uncertain. The protest chants had ceased, replaced by a loud, fearful buzz caused by the police activity a block or two to the north. She slid between people and stood on her toes, which did her no good.

She’d grabbed a cell phone out of someone’s hand. “Hey!” the young girl complained. Mercy ignored her and dialed 911, but the circuits were busy. She’d dialed the direct line for her office, but the line rang until a recording came on saying, “Thank you for calling the Los Angeles Police Department’s West Bureau. If this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911...”

Mercy closed the connection and tossed the phone back to the girl. If she needed another one, there’d be plenty around. She pushed forward, not knowing what else to do, knowing that Smith would do everything he could to lose himself in the huge crowd. As she moved forward, she made mental notes about his appearance: Caucasian male, over six feet, balding with brown hair, eye color probably brown, thin, probably under two hundred pounds...

And then she saw him. He had done the right thing, changing his pace, moving slowly to avoid attention. She would have missed him entirely if luck hadn’t turned her in exactly his direction. Their eyes locked for a moment, his opening wide and hers narrowing sharply. He moved away from her and she moved forward.

She had tracked him that way through the crowd until now, at the far northeast edge of the crowd, almost two blocks away from the Federal Building, he was coming to the edge. Mercy saw open street beyond. More importantly, she saw two uniformed police officers stationed at the corner. Pinning her eyes to Smith’s back, she moved toward the cops. “I’m a cop,” she said. “Detective Bennet, West Bureau. I lost my badge during a pursuit. I need help with an arrest. Can you call for backup?”

“Who’d we call?” one of the uniforms said sarcastically. “Everyone’s here.”

“Then it’s you two,” she said.

“How do we know?”

“You don’t,” she admitted. “But who else is going to walk up to you and say they are a female detective from West Bureau?”

The uniformed cops nodded; not quite convinced, but willing to play this out. They followed her into the crowd. Smith had seen them. As they moved forward, he moved back into the crowd itself. What’s he doing? Mercy wondered. She wasn’t going to lose him, and the crowd meant that he moved more slowly.

Much more slowly, in fact. The two uniforms fanned out and easily flanked Smith. Mercy moved forward. Smith had slowed almost to a stop. Was he giving up?

The uniform on Smith’s left moved in. Smith raised his hand and yelled, “I give up! I give up! Stop hurting me!” in a voice full of panic.

The cop stopped, taken aback by the fear in Smith’s voice, since the cop hadn’t touched him at all.

“Stop! Help!” Smith screamed in a high-pitched voice. He lunged forward at the cop, who held up his hands defensively. Smith clutched at the officer but yelled, “Let go of me! Help!”

“Hey, man, he’s not fighting you,” someone standing nearby said.

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“Get off him, you freakin’ fascist,” said a blond kid in a Von Dutch T-shirt.

“Get him off me, get him off!” Smith yelled.

The second uniform rushed forward, seeing his partner in a struggle, and pulled Smith away and to the ground.

“Goddamned pig!” the blond kid yelled, angry now.

Mercy saw it happen, but couldn’t stop it. Smith clutched at the officer, preventing him from standing up, but yelled, “Help! Help! He’s breaking my arm!”

Two protestors yelled and grabbed the officer from behind, pulling him away. The officer swung wildly and hit the blond kid in the face. He jumped on the officer’s back, and the first cop, who’d regained his feet, waded in to help. Before anyone could stop it, a huge fight had broken out, and the two uniforms disappeared under a pile of bodies.

Smith slipped away.

1:47 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

At that moment, Jamey Farrell hated camera phones. Worse than useless, they gave the impression of being useful without delivering much on the promise.

She’d received the photo sent over by Jack Bauer—a grainy close-up of a dark-haired man in blue. It might as well have been an Impressionist painting. But Jamey knew her job and she did it well. Within minutes of receiving the file, Jamey fed the data over into CTU’s image-enhancing software. A quick phone call to Jack confirmed that the man was of Slavic/Asian descent, which helped her nudge the program. The computers had spent the last few minutes reconstructing the subject’s face. Every ten seconds or so her computer screen rolled like a wave, and a slightly sharper version of the man’s face appeared. The image had just reached the point where Jamey felt it was worth running through CTU’s facial recognition software.

She used the inter-office line and called over to Donovan Exley, a young analyst with graphics expertise. “Van, I’m going to feed you an image. Can you run FRS on it right away.”

“No prob,” he replied.

Jamey sent the file and nodded in satisfaction. The wonders of science would turn Jack Bauer’s Impressionist painting into the complete biography of a terrorist suspect.

1:50 P.M. PST North Side of the Federal Building, West Los Angeles

Jack waited impatiently for Jamey Farrell to get off her ass and get him information. He knew that wasn’t fair—Jamey was one of the most capable analysts he’d met. But standing in the midst of ten thousand screaming protestors with clouds of tear gas wafting through the mob did not increase his empathy.

He looked to the east, where the tear gas had been fired. There was dark smoke there, too, probably a car fire, but he hadn’t seen people running from that direction. He guessed that the incident had been isolated. Tear gas had probably scattered the vandals, and so LAPD had backed off.

The blue-shirted man was still close by. Jack had spent the intervening minutes studying the people around him—they were a mix of Slavs and Asians, and they were definitely with the anti-China contingent. With nothing else to do except try to blend in, Jack joined in a chant (something about “China’s record doesn’t rate—keep them out of the G8”)

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while he formed theories about his subject. He decided that there was only one way the subject could and would be seen at the protest: he was expected to be there. There was no other explanation for why a man with terrorist connections had been seen twice. He wanted to be seen—at least, he’d wanted to be seen the second time. The first time, when the security cameras had caught him in the middle of his meeting with Muhammad Abbas, had been luck—Abbas had stayed away from Federal property like a vampire avoiding a church. But now the blue-shirted man was doing everything he could to get noticed.

He’s a member of an anti-China political group, Jack told himself. Someone who’d be expected to be here. Whatever’s going down at the summit, they know we’ll go after everyone when it’s over, and he doesn’t want to do anything out of the ordinary.

Jack smiled grimly at his own detective work. Who needed computers?

A moment later, he felt the change before he saw it. A wave of anxiety swept through the mob, moving like a murmur through a crowd, only stronger, more visceral. Row by row, lines of people turned their heads away from the Federal Building and toward the west. In the distance, someone screamed.

Jack stood as tall as he could, but saw nothing. At the edge of the plaza, near the sidewalk, was a row of short cement pylons. They were designed to look decorative, but their real purpose was to prevent car bombers from driving into the building. Jack pushed his way past murmuring, confused protestors until he found one of these pylons and stood up on it, raising himself a good two feet above the crowd. The screaming increased; the protest chants had turned to cries of fear and terror.

From his vantage point, Jack could see the far west edge of the crowd folding back in on itself like a riptide. And he could see why they were running.

A line of mounted policemen was charging down Wilshire Boulevard to scatter the crowd. It was archaic, but no less terrifying for that fact: a line of horsemen twenty strong, the horses charging at a steady lope, their eyes rolling in their heads, the riders holding riot clubs, herding the crowd of people like so much cattle.

At that moment, Jack’s phone rang. “Jack, it’s Chris,” Henderson said quickly. “Are you still in the crowd?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Get out,” Henderson commanded. “Some protestors just beat two cops nearly to death. LAPD is calling in the cavalry. They’re using rubber bullets.”

Jack hung up and looked for some escape route, but he already knew it was too late.

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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2 P.M. AND 3 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

2:00 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Jessi Bandison’s line buzzed. “Yes?” It was CTU’s call center. “You’ve got a call from the

Russian Embassy.” “I’ll take it,” Jessi said. “Jessi Bandison,” she said as the connection was made. “Miss Bandison,” said a female voice in smooth English,

with only a hint of accent around the edges. “I am Anastasia

Odolova. Anna, if you like.” “Jessi, then. What can I do for you?” “A mutual friend suggested I call you. I might be able to

help you with what you’re looking for.” Jessi found herself wondering what Odolova looked like.

Her accent was almost cartoonish, and Jessi couldn’t help imagining a lean vamp in a slinky black dress. She herself was round and chocolate-skinned, the opposite of a Russian seductress. “Okay, thank you. I was hoping—”

“You wish to know about Marcus Lee.”

“Right,” Jessi said. She rolled her eyes. Maybe it was the smooth, almost studied lilt of the Russian accent, but Jessi felt ridiculously like a 1950s espionage agent. She ought to be wearing a trench coat. “I’m running down information on him and I noted that there’s been an information exchange between us and the SVR,” she explained, referring to Russia’s foreign intelligence service. “I’m curious to know if you have any additional information I can use to corroborate my own.” That was standard operating procedure when talking with foreign entities: never admit how little you know. But Jessi wasn’t well versed in deception, and the words felt large and clumsy as she spoke them.

A smile spread itself across Odolova’s words, as though she understood exactly what Jessi was not saying. “I am happy to help you,” the Russian said with a slightly aspirated “H” in each word. “In fact, I believe I have what you need. We have a more extensive dossier on Marcus Lee, including”— Odolova paused for dramatic effect—“including his real name.”

Jessi’s heart skipped a bit. There were no aliases in her file, and no aliases according to the Chinese dossier she’d seen. To an analyst like her, a name was like the single thread that, when pulled, could undo the knot. “Yes?”

“I suggest you pursue the name Nurmamet Tuman. You will find that he is not from Shenzhen, but in fact he was born in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.”

Jessi furrowed her brow. “Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous...?”

“I believe the separatists refer to it as East Turkistan.”

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2:04 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

Wilshire Boulevard had turned into a river of people, and Kasim Turkel was being carried east by the current. The mob surged en masse away from the charging horses. For a split second, Kasim considered resisting, but he nearly lost his footing. To fall meant being trampled to death by stomping feet and, afterward, galloping hooves. So he ran with the crowd, swimming his way toward its edge like a man struggling toward the banks of a river. But each person he tried to push past panicked and clawed at him. The protestors and their chants were gone, replaced by mid-brained primates fleeing a pack of predators. Screams and shouts of anger and fear filled Kasim’s ears, punctuated by the sharp report of gunfire.

Kasim had been in that place of terror before—in the streets of Urumchi when the Chinese soldiers charged the pro-independence demonstrators. Kasim had been a teenager then; that afternoon had become a jumbled memory of arms and legs and screams, smoke, and tear gas. In his panic, Kasim saw once more rifle butts raised up and brought down violently on the heads of wailing Uygur women, children screaming for their parents, and men being dragged into waiting trucks. Though the images had blurred into one long scene of terror, the emotions of that night were as sharply defined today as they were ten years ago. That was the night of Kasim’s metamorphosis. That was the night the independence-minded boy was transformed into a freedom fighter.

Kasim had no idea where he was going. He knew the policemen on horses were behind him, but ahead he saw black smoke, like the smoke of burning tires, mixed with the white smoke of tear gas. Tear gas meant the police were close by, and he feared the American police were boxing them in to kill them all. Somewhere in his skull, a tiny piece of his mind told him that the Americans did not operate this way, but that tiny fragment was overwhelmed by the seething reptile of his mid-brain that understood only fear and anger. Terror had gripped him as it had gripped all those around him.

In the midst of all that confusion, Kasim looked around for an escape route, and his eyes fell on the face of an American man. The man had blond hair and wore a green shirt, but it was his eyes that caught Kasim’s attention. Those eyes were locked on Kasim with fierce intent. And in that moment, the same reptilian brain that drove Kasim along with the terrorized crowd told him that this man was a predator, and he was the prey.

Forgetting the crowd, risking the loss of his footing, Kasim turned at an angle to the human current and swam toward the far side of the street, scratching and clawing his way through anyone and everyone in his path. Someone shrieked at him and scratched at his face, but he pushed him down, stepped over him, and surged forward. He reached the sidewalk. The crowd was thinner here. He was facing a wall and knew that on the other side was a wide open space—a graveyard of soldiers, the Veteran’s Memorial. Kasim slithered along the wall, buffeted by people running past him. He reached the corner, the Federal Building still looming on the south side of the street; here on the north side, he was standing before a huge engraving built into the wall of the memorial. There were three figures carved in alabaster, three men with soldier’s uniforms from different time periods. Beside the memorial was a side street, far less crowded. Kasim started to run.

Instantly he felt something hard and heavy slam into his back. He flew forward and hit the ground hard, cutting

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open his chin and shoving all the air out of his body in one agonizing punch. He gasped for breath. Before he could regain his senses he felt strong hands grab his shoulder and spin him over. Kasim blinked up into the blue sky and sunlight. He was looking up into the face of the blond-haired predator.

“Don’t move,” the man snarled in a voice that sounded like smashing gravel. “Federal—”

But his words were cut off. In the same instant that he had spoken, dark shadows appeared behind him, blotting out the sun. More hands grabbed the blond man and pulled him off Kasim, slamming him to the ground. Kasim started to rise, but someone’s knee planted itself firmly on his chest. “LAPD, stay down!” someone ordered, and Kasim had no strength left to argue.

At the edge of his vision he saw the struggle as uniformed policemen restrained the blond man, who was yelling something. One of the policemen jabbed a small canister into the blond man’s face. There was a hissing sound, and the blond man gagged and coughed.

2:08 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

Chaos and hell.

Those two words kept repeating in Mercy’s head like a violent mantra. The general vicinity of the Federal Building had exploded into a full-scale riot. Packs of protestors ran this way or that, some of them fleeing the scene. Others seemed to have produced bandanas and masks from nowhere. She saw a Latino man in a “Save the Rain Forest” T-shirt light a Molotov cocktail and throw it at a police car. A man and a woman staggered past her, supporting each other as they walked. Both were bleeding from the head.

It had taken Mercy twenty minutes to travel the three blocks from the street she’d been on—somewhere east of the Federal Building—to Veteran, following the furtive movements of Smith. They were both moving against the current, which several times threatened to carry Mercy backward.

“Don’t go that way!” a well-meaning protestor said, wrapping one arm around Mercy’s shoulder. “They’ve got horses! They’re clubbing people!”

Mercy shoved him off. “I’m a cop!”

“Then fuck you!” he yelled, and was carried off by the stream of bodies.

Her twenty minutes of working against the crowd had paid off. She was exhausted, but as she reached the western edge of the riot she saw Smith again. He was cagey, sometimes sprinting ahead, sometimes slowing down to the pace of the crowd, often changing directions. But though he was sneaky, Mercy was tenacious. She had him in her sights, and she simply refused to lose him.

Mercy’s eyes stung from the tear gas. Though she hadn’t been in proximity to any shells, there was enough of the stuff in the air now that everyone was feeling some effects— runny noses, teary eyes, labored breathing. She wished that was all that was slowing her down. She’d done more running in the last hour than she had in the last year. She swore that if she got through this case, she’d get back on the treadmill.

Though she couldn’t see well, she knew she was near the veterans’ cemetery because she could see the alabaster statue. Smith had just passed it. Mercy hurried that way as well, when she saw several uniforms hauling protestors into a paddy wagon.

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2:10 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

Jack Bauer sputtered and coughed, spitting mucus out of his mouth, trying to gather enough air in his lungs to speak. The goddamned cops had blasted him with enough oleoresin capsicum, or OC spray, to drop an entire cell block. He was blind and he could feel snot running down his nose. His mouth frothed. His hands were secured with flex cuffs behind his back, and angry hands were hauling him to his feet.

“I’m a...” He coughed. “I’m a Fed—”

“Shut up and move!” a cop yelled, softening him with a punch to the stomach.

2:11 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

Mercy saw two cops half dragging one protestor toward the black police wagon. One of the officers punched the protestor in the stomach and he doubled over, his wispy blond hair quivering atop his head.

That’s Jack! Mercy thought.

She took one step toward the officers, but hesitated. She would lose Smith. She would lose him, and the Monkey Wrench Gang would fade away, and she had no idea if she had disrupted their plans or not. Jack would have to take care of himself. Eventually the cops would figure out that he was a Federal agent and release him. She had lives to save and a terrorist to capture.

2:12 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

Smith looked back to see if he was still being followed. His eyes, too, had been attracted to the cops on the corner. He saw the police officer punch his captive, and his eyes flew wide.

Agent Bauer! The man was indeed resourceful. Smith’s last GPS reading had shown Bauer still sitting inside CTU headquarters, doing nothing. How had he evaded the chemical markers?

In that moment Smith felt all the energy sucked out of his plans like the sap draining from a tree. Mercy Bennet had broken open the vials of his virus. Jack Bauer had evaded his tracking device. This was more than he had bargained for. He’d gone up against the full forces of the Federal government for the first time and found himself lacking. But he still had his anonymity. The riot had given him the cover he needed, and Mercy Bennet had not yet been able to call in support. If he could get away from her with his anonymity intact, he would have time to regroup and leave the country. He could go back to the Amazon, where he felt most at home, and fade into the forest for as long as the forest still stood.

He ran.

2:15 P.M. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Jessi presented her findings to a room full of people that included Chris Henderson, Nina Myers, Jamey Farrell, District Director George Mason, and even Regional Division Director Ryan Chappelle. Both had been called in from

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other appointments as the protests at the Federal Building heated up.

“The entire investigation began with a lead from Jack Bauer,” Jessi began. Immediately Ryan Chappelle shifted in his seat. The Regional Division Director had no patience for a man he considered a troublemaker. “Agent Bauer was certain he spotted the known terrorist Ayman al-Libbi slipping past border security aboard a flotilla of ships sailing up from Central America to protest the G8 summit.

“These suspicions were strengthened when Bauer was kidnapped briefly, then released, by subjects unknown but assumed to be al-Libbi. We began to search for connections between al-Libbi and the G8.”

“Al-Libbi’s a gun for hire these days,” Chappelle said in a high voice that, along with his narrow face, contributed to his reputation as a weasel. He did, however, do his homework.

“Yes, sir,” Jessi said. “Since China is at the top of the G8 agenda, we searched for groups with motivations in that area. A random search for anomalies uncovered a transfer of two million dollars to an account associated with the East Turkistan Independence Movement, or ETIM. Two million dollars is a huge sum of money for a movement that small. The money was then immediately withdrawn from that account, destination unknown. We traced backwards. The transfer came from a Cayman Islands account associated with one Marcus Lee, a Chinese national.”

“Would a Chinese-born person want to help a separatist group?” Mason asked.

“We almost hit a dead end there,” Jessi continued. “But I discovered that our information on Marcus Lee and the Cayman Islands account had actually come from a data exchange with the Russian SVR. I had a contact there, and through them I learned that Marcus Lee has an alias that the Chinese withheld from us. In fact, Marcus Lee is pretty much an invented person. Marcus Lee’s real name is Nurmamet Tuman. He was born in Urumchi, in what the Chinese refer to as the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.”

“East Turkistan,” Chappelle murmured. “So the money trail leads from this Nurmamet whatever to ETIM and then possibly to al-Libbi. To do what? Do we have ID on al-Libbi except for Bauer seeing someone who looks like him in a crowd?”

Henderson hid a grimace. That was Chappelle summed up in two sentences: a mind sharp enough to put the details together in a snap, and a tongue sharp enough to insult everyone who’d done the work before him.

“Nurmamet Tuman”—Jessi emphasized the name—“is one of our leads. Under the alias Marcus Lee he lives in Los Angeles.”

“I plan to bring him in,” Chris said. He looked to George Mason for approval, and Mason nodded.

“You said one of our leads,” Chappelle noted. “What’s the other?”

Jessi continued. “Earlier in the day surveillance spotted someone who looked very much like Muhammad Abbas, alLibbi’s aide-de-camp, meeting with an unknown subject. A short time ago, Bauer, who is still at the Federal Building, spotted the same man.”

Jessi looked to Jamey Farrell, who took over the narrative. “Bauer sent us a photo of the man, which we ran through computer enhancement and facial recognition. We have a nearly one hundred percent match for a man named Kasim Turkel, another Chinese national. His record was a little more transparent than Tuman’s. No criminal record we could find, but he’s from Urumchi as well.”

Henderson summed things up. “Turkel meets Abbas. Ab

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bas means al-Libbi is around somewhere. Money goes from Nurmamet Tuman to ETIM, and then disappears. We’re guessing it went to al-Libbi as payment for whatever he’s planning. He’s in L.A. now, so it’s got to be the G8.”

“What’s on the agenda?” Mason asked. “Likely targets?”

Chris replied, “That’s our next problem. Each is as likely as the next. Security is tight everywhere. Hitting a target this hard isn’t al-Libbi’s usual style.”

“There was the Russia-Israel détente meetings back in ’94,” Chappelle reminded him.

“He missed and was nearly caught,” Mason observed. “He never tried anything like that again.”

“He’s desperate for money,” Chappelle said. “Anyway, so we bring this Marcus Lee or whatever his real name is in for interrogation.”

Chris hesitated. “There’s a complication. The Chinese are insisting that this Marcus Lee has nothing to do with ETIM, that he’s not Nurmamet Tuman. They say we’ve got the wrong guy.”

He saw the look on Chappelle’s face change, watched what little color there was drain out of it. Henderson wanted more than anything for Chappelle to say, Bring him in anyway. But knew that wouldn’t happen. The Regional Division Director was a political animal, and at that moment he was connecting an entirely different set of facts: the United States wants China in the G8, the United States plays host to China for the summit; U.S. Federal agents arrest a Chinese national whom the Chinese have already cleared...

“Let’s use kid gloves,” Chappelle said at last. “Send someone to check this Chinese national out. If there’s something suspicious, I’ll clear it higher up.”

Henderson had known this was coming. He looked at Nina. “Go pay him a visit. And be nice.”

2:25 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

The effects of the OC spray were finally wearing off. Jack was sitting inside a police wagon—a long truck, the back of which was designed with two long metal benches. He’d been sitting there, half blind and choking, for what seemed like hours, but he guessed it wasn’t more than five or ten minutes. His hands were still flex-cuffed behind his back. He was the first one into the paddy wagon, and he had been shoved all the way back into the corner as the police brought in more rioters.

“Hey!” he said, pounding his head against the metal wall of the vehicle. He knew there must be a driver up front. “Hey! I’m a Federal agent!” he yelled.

A small window in the wall between the cab and the container slid open to reveal a metal screen and a police officer’s face staring through it. “What?”

“I’m a Federal agent,” Jack said. “I tried to identify myself to your partners, but I didn’t get a chance.”

“You have proof of that?” the officer said.

“You guys searched me,” Jack said, remembering the hands pawing at him when he was down. “You must have found my ID.”

“Hold on.”

The metal shield slid closed. As the OC spray wore off, Jack’s anxiety increased. His daughter, al-Libbi, the G8, Mercy Bennet... not a single loose end had been tied up. He had to remind himself that it had been only a few hours.

The metal door slid open again. “Sorry, pal, we bagged everything. There was no ID on you at all. Nice try, though.” The shield started to close.

“Wait!” Jack said. He thought back to his struggle with the man in the blue shirt. His ID must have fallen out then.

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“Look, I’m telling you the truth. Call CTU Los Angeles—”

“CTU?” the officer asked.

“Counter Terrorist Unit,” Jack said impatiently. Of course, CTU was a relatively clandestine unit. There was no reason for every beat cop in Los Angeles to recognize its name instantly. He recited an emergency number. “Call that number. They’ll clear me.”

The cop sounded accommodating. “Okay, look, I’ll do it, but I don’t want you to get your hopes up. The city’s pretty much gone to hell, and it may take a little while.”

“I don’t have a little while,” Jack said.

“You may not have a choice.” The metal door slid shut.

Jack Bauer fumed. He had no time to wait. For all he knew his daughter was dying, and he was sure Ayman al-Libbi was about to attack the G8. For the first time, he looked down the bench at the other rioters who’d been captured. There were four of them... including the man in the blue shirt, sitting on the bench opposite him and near the door. Jack looked at the person next to him, not more than a teenager. “Move,” he said, sliding past him so that he was near the door and across from his target. He stared at the man without asking a question. He would ask questions eventually, but only when he knew he would get answers.

The kid who had just moved looked at Bauer. “Did you say you were a cop?”

Jack didn’t answer, but the kid laughed. “You’re a cop? I love it. How does it feel to get beat up by the other fascists?”

Jack sized him up: Von Dutch T-shirt, tanned skin, with that California drawl drawn out by money and time. This was the kind of person for whom everything had come easily. He hadn’t even lived long enough to know what hardship was, hadn’t lived long enough to know that the people he called “fascists” were usually the ones who put their lives at risk so he could have an easy life.

“I guess you’re in here for no reason?” Jack asked.

The kid clearly wanted to tell his story. “Look at this bump on my forehead, man. Three cops jumped on me.”

“What were you doing right before that?” Jack said.

“I threw a rock at them, but that was only—”

Jack said, “Those cops, they spend their lives putting themselves in harm’s way so you can sleep at night. Most of them don’t ask for any thanks or praise from you at all. Think of that next time you pick up a goddamned rock.”

2:33 P.M. PST UCLA Medical Center

“I simply won’t do it,” the doctor said for the third time.

Tony Almeida ran a hand through his black hair. He looked at the doctor’s name tag. “Look, Dr. Gupta, this is a matter of national security. This man has information that could save lives.”

“I have an ethical responsibility,” Dr. Gupta said. He was young, not yet out of his twenties, with a lean, thoughtful face, dark eyes, and a stiff spine. “If I give him drugs to bring him out of the coma, it could kill him.”

“As long as he wakes up first.”

The doctor frowned at him, and turned to look for help from the group assembled behind him. There was quite a collection: a nurse holding a tray that contained a syringe full of some medication; the hospital’s chief of internal medicine; two lawyers; and two uniformed officers who’d come in just to see the show.

None of them offered Gupta any assistance, so the doctor turned back. “Agent Almeida,” the doctor said reproachfully. “I am not an executioner.”

“I’m not, either,” Tony said. “In fact, the only executioner

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around here is him.” He pointed at Dyson. “I’m telling you I saw his fingers move. I don’t think he’s in a coma anymore, and even if—”

“You’re hardly qualified to—”

“—and even if he is,” Tony repeated, “the risk of killing him is nothing compared to what he knows. I believe this man has knowledge of a terrorist plot that could happen any time in the next twenty-four hours, and I need to know what it is.”

The doctor hesitated. “I’ve taken an oath to do no harm.”

Tony sighed. “I haven’t.”

He reached past Gupta to the nurse and snatched the syringe off her tray. Before anyone could react, he popped the protective cap off the needle and plunged it into Dyson’s chest. The nurse gasped and Gupta cried out in alarm. He grabbed at Tony but the agent shrugged him off easily and removed the syringe. He watched the vitals monitor for a moment, the heart rate meter chirping steady and slow. After a moment the beeps came a bit faster, and then faster still. Dyson moaned. The lawyers sighed.

Tony leaned over the bed. “Dyson. Dyson, wake up.”

The FBI agent’s eyes fluttered. Tony slapped him lightly. “I said wake up.”

Dyson’s eyes opened. Dr. Gupta pushed past Tony and pulled out his penlight, shining it in Dyson’s eyes. “Pupil reaction,” he muttered. He checked the vitals. “Stable so far.”

“Dyson, who are you working for!” Tony said, moving Gupta forcefully. “Who are you working for?”

Dyson blinked once or twice. His watery eyes focused on Tony for a moment, then glazed over. A slight smile turned the edges of his mouth. A thin laugh rattled past his lips. “Monkeys... monkey gang... bitten by monkeys . . .”

His lips kept moving, but the words melted into incomprehensible dribble.

“Dyson!” Tony said, shaking the agent.

The heart rate monitor picked up its pace, sounding suddenly urgent. At the same time, his blood-oxygen levels started to drop. A second later, Dyson’s heart rate went from frantic to nonexistent.

2:35 P.M. PST Mountaingate Drive, Los Angeles

Nina Myers rolled up Mountaingate Drive to an exclusive tract in the Santa Monica Mountains that overlooked the Sepulveda Pass and the 405 Freeway to the east, and the entire Los Angeles basin to the south. The owners paid for the view, so every house had one, but one property in particular occupied the sweet spot. On the south side of the ridge stood an enormous white house with a panoramic view not only of the L.A. basin, but of Santa Monica Bay as well.

Or at least it would have, if not for the Vanderbilt Complex. The Vanderbilt Complex, or just the Vanderbilt to locals, was a vast, impressive castle built into the hillside. Although constructed lower on the slope than the houses of Mountaingate Drive, the Vanderbilt was big enough to mar the view from the large white house above it. Mountaingate residents had complained, but as wealthy as they were, they were peons compared to the Vanderbilt estate, which had both money and public sentiment on its side. The Vanderbilt was a museum complex built around the private collection of a few Vanderbilt heirs. The museum was free to the public, dedicated to advancing the cause of the arts among all people, and a political juggernaut. The estate bought the property and forced the approvals through the city bureaucracy. Environmentalists had decried the development because the Sepulveda Pass was one of the few green spots left in Los Angeles...but everyone, from the environmentalists to the

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residents of Mountaingate, had to admit that the finished structure was impressive. Perched on a shoulder of the mountains, it commanded a lordly view of the Los Angeles basin. The L.A. Weekly, the local cutting-edge weekly magazine, had featured a cover photo of the magnificent Vanderbilt with the headline “Acropolis Now!” Thousands of tons of travertine had been imported from Italy to cover its walls and form its plazas. A private road led up to the museum, but most visitors rode an automated tram that wound up the mountainside to the wide, flat steps. The Vanderbilt housed classic paintings, an impressive photography collection, and a rare books display that included an original Gutenberg Bible and one of the original thirteen copies of the Bill of Rights.

As she gazed down on the Vanderbilt from the mountaintop, Nina decided that the museum was an excellent location from a security point of view. The single road leading up to the complex was easily controllable; the steep slopes were inaccessible by vehicle and offered little or no cover to a team on foot. The wide open skies above allowed easily for exfil of the VIPs by helicopter if the need arose. Because of its isolated location on the hilltop and the security measures that had already been put in place to protect its priceless treasures, the Vanderbilt was a desirable location for dignitaries seeking a secure but elegant meeting ground. The only variable keeping the Vanderbilt from becoming a perfectly controllable site was, in fact, the house at the end of Mountaingate Drive.

Nina parked a few blocks down from the house—a tall, white, antebellum mansion with a circular driveway. The house even had one of those little statues of a jockey in a red coat, holding out one hand, to which was attached a metal ring. Nina walked past it and knocked on the door. No sound came from inside, but an intercom next to the door came to life and a static-laden voice came through. “Yes?”

“Hello, I’m looking for Mr. Marcus Lee, please,” Nina said in her nicest, most professional voice.

“Who is asking, please?” the intercom replied, and Nina knew intuitively that she was speaking to Mr. Lee.

“My name is Nina Myers, sir. I’m with the Federal government. I just have a few questions to ask.”

The intercom clicked off and Nina felt her muscles tense. Was he going to rabbit? She liked action, and part of her relished the idea. But a moment later the door opened and a small Asian man of indeterminate age smiled at her warmly. “I am Marcus Lee,” he said gently. “Please come in.”

2:41 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

Jack pulled at the flex cuffs on his wrists, more out of frustration than anything. They bit into his skin, reminding him that they were practically unbreakable unless they were severed with wire cutters. He didn’t mind the pain—it helped him focus. He stared across the short space to his quarry, the young man in the blue shirt. The young man returned his stare bravely, but his look of anger and defiance soon wilted under Jack’s glare.

Something bumped up against the outside of the police wagon.

“What’s that?” one of the other prisoners asked.

“Someone getting beat up,” said the blond kid next to Jack.

But the next sound they heard was the anxious voice of the police driver in the cab in front of them. “Get them the hell off!” he yelled, his voice pitched anxiously high. They heard several shouts from outside, then silence.

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“Have you made that call yet?” Jack yelled toward the cab, but there was no answer.

2:43 P.M. PST Mountaingate Drive, Los Angeles

Nina walked into Marcus Lee’s living room and blinked in the bright sunlight. The entire back wall of the living room was made of several sets of French doors nearly two stories tall, opening out onto a wide green lawn that dropped away where the property met the slope of the hill. Beyond the grass, Nina could see the roofs of the Vanderbilt Complex, and beyond that, the glistening blue water of Santa Monica Bay. To the left, she saw white and dark smoke rise up around the Federal Building, and she heard sirens wail plaintively far away.

“What can I do for you, Agent Myers?” Marcus Lee asked.

He was polite and welcoming, which immediately put Nina on edge. Most people were at least a little nervous when they saw a Federal badge, but Lee had scanned her ID as casually as a man reading the morning headlines. He had turned and led her gracefully into the house, offering her a drink, which she declined, and then escorted her to the living room.

Nina decided to ambush him immediately. “I’d like to talk to you about your involvement with ETIM.”

She watched his face closely. His eyes brightened, but otherwise he gave no reaction at all. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Yes, you do, Mr. Tuman.”

Half a beat. “Excuse me?”

“Your real name is Nurmamet Tuman,” Nina said, glancing at a notepad in her hand and using the same casual tone he had used to greet her. “You told the INS that you were ethnic Chinese, but you are in fact a Uygur from the eastern province of Xinjiang.” She looked up. “You’re also most likely involved with ETIM.”

Another half beat, but no change in his facial expression. Marcus Lee/Nurmamet Tuman was a very good poker player. “My real name is Marcus Lee,” he said. “And I don’t know what ‘ee-tim’ is.”

“You knew them well enough to give them two million dollars. Did you also put them in touch with Ayman al-Libbi, or did they already have their own contact?”

Bull’s-eye. Lee tensed, and Nina readied herself to go for her weapon. But instead of running or attacking, Lee put a hand to his temple and rubbed it as though she’d just given him a severe headache. “Agent Myers, I can neither confirm nor deny what you are saying. But I can tell you this. I am very well connected in the Chinese government, even to this day. I recommend that you contact a Mr. Richard Hong, who operates out of the Chinese Embassy here in Los Angeles. He may have information that will help you.”

Nina felt her stomach tighten into a knot. She did not know Richard Hong, but unless she missed her guess entirely, Marcus Lee had just referred her to his case officer in Chinese intelligence, which also meant that Lee was Chinese intelligence, which meant that with a few simple words Lee had made this whole affair much, much more complicated.

“In fact, I have his card right here.” Lee reached carefully into his pocket and pulled out a simple business card. He handed it to Nina with two hands in traditional Chinese fashion, and bowed slightly.

Nina read the card. “Stay here.” She walked into the hall

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way, keeping Lee in her line of sight, and pulled out her cell phone. She called CTU and asked for Jamey Farrell.

“Jamey, Nina. Can you do a quick check and patch me through to a Richard Hong at the Chinese Embassy. If they give you the runaround, tell them I’m calling about one of his assets.”

Nina waited on hold for only a minute or two, watching Marcus Lee, who had settled himself gently onto a plush white couch.

“Nina,” Jamey’s voice came on the line, “they tried to pass me off, but the minute I mentioned an asset, Hong was right there. Here you go.”

The line clicked. “Mr. Richard Hong?”

“Speaking. Who is this?”

Nina explained who she was, and why she was there. Richard Hong paused. “I think this is a discussion best had in person.” Meaning, Nina knew, no cell phones. “Can you come to me?”

“Not if Tuman is going out the back door at the same time,” Nina said.

“He is no flight risk. I can promise that.”

Nina considered her options. If she were concerned about protocol, she would heed the warnings and walk away. But she was more inclined to take Lee in, regardless of whatever Chappelle had said about using kid gloves. The Chinese could always come get him out of interrogation if he was that important. She was just about to tell Richard Hong that when Marcus Lee’s doorbell rang. Lee stood and moved past Nina, opening his hand to the door and asking permission with his eyes. Nina nodded and followed him.

“Thank you for your advice, Mr. Hong, but I think it’s important that we have a discussion with Mr. Lee. I—stand by.” She stopped as Marcus Lee opened his door. Three men in dark suits and sunglasses walked in as soon as the door was open, as though they knew they’d been expected. In fact, it was Nina’s presence that seemed to alert them most.

“Mr. Lee,” said one of the suits. He took off his sunglasses and held out a badge, but his eyes were already on Nina. “Clay Lonis, Treasury Department. Who’s this?”

Marcus Lee sidestepped and opened his arms as though trying to join Nina and the newcomer. “Mr. Lonis, this is Agent Myers.”

Nina’s jaw dropped. Treasury Department. Why was the Secret Service visiting Marcus Lee?

2:46 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

Jack heard—and felt—another loud thump against the outside of the police wagon. This time the vehicle rocked back and forth, as though giant hands had grabbed it and shaken it back and forth. There were more cries from outside, but these were not cries of alarm. A rhythmic chanting had begun, and the wagon was rocking in sync with it. Oh shit, Jack thought.

2:48 P.M. PST Mountaingate Drive, Los Angeles

Nina held out her own identification, and Clay Lonis frowned as he slipped his sunglasses back on. “A word?” he said, motioning to the door.

Nina nodded and followed him outside, first making sure that the other two Secret Service agents were staying with Lee. Nina stepped outside onto the shaded porch, stopping near the railing that overlooked Lee’s circular driveway. The

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property was beautiful and neatly landscaped, but the tension in the air told Nina that it had just become a very complicated maze.

Clay Lonis had been cut right out of the Secret Service training manual: a little over six feet, sandy brown hair trimmed short, mandatory cleft in his chin. He kept his sunglasses on, which Nina found annoying.

“Agent Myers, may I ask your business here?”

“What does the Secret Service want?”

“You first,” Lonis said with a thin smile.

Nina frowned. She wasn’t sure there was any interdepartmental rivalry here. She just didn’t like other people prying into her business. “I’m doing my job. Is Tuman considered some sort of security risk?”

Despite the sunglasses, Nina saw a reaction from the Secret Service agent. “You mean Lee.”

Nina shrugged. “That’s one name for him.” She thought out loud. “But it doesn’t make sense for him to be a security risk. If he really were, you guys would have rounded him up already. What’s going on?”

Lonis considered her from behind his shades. “Nothing too dramatic. But it’s on a need-to-know basis.”

“Well, I need to know.”

“Maybe you could at least tell me the broad strokes about your investigation. You guys are counterterrorist. That makes me nervous, considering my job.”

Nina decided she had to give a little to get a little. “We have questions about an alias of his, and about transfer of money from Lee to a terrorist organization.”

Now Lonis frowned. “That’s disturbing. But it doesn’t sound right. We’ve already done extensive background on Mr. Lee with the Chinese government. He’s not considered a security risk, that much I can tell you.”

Something was askew here. Nina wasn’t convinced, but one thing was clear: there was no way she could drag Marcus Lee into an interrogation room with the Chinese government and the U.S. Secret Service both screaming at her. She dropped immediately to her bottom line. “Are you guys going to be here for a while? I’m not looking for intel!” she added when Lonis started to object. “I just want to know that Lee isn’t going anywhere. I have some people I need to talk to.”

The Secret Service agent nodded. “Lee’s not going anywhere. That I promise.”

The CTU agent slid away from him and put her phone back to her ear. Richard Hong had already severed the connection, of course, so she called CTU again and had them patch her through. “I’m coming to meet you,” she said tersely. “I am going to need some explanations.”

“Always happy to assist,” Richard Hong said politely. The line went dead again.

2:55 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

The police wagon rocked so hard, the prisoners were thrown from one side of the wagon to the other. Jack Bauer braced his feet against the far side of the hold. The vehicle tipped again, so much that Jack was nearly standing upright. Then it lurched back the other direction until Jack was almost up on his shoulders.

“What are they doing to us?” the blond kid shrieked.

“Breaking us out,” Jack replied. The van had been rocking sporadically for several minutes, the brief interruptions accompanied by screams and cries of alarm. Jack assumed that the police were trying to retake control of the area, but there were too many rioters covering too much territory. Either

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the same group of rioters retreated and returned, or new groups of rioters flooded in as soon as the last group had been driven off. Once Jack heard someone enter the cab and try to start up the vehicle, but the engine wouldn’t turn over.

The rocking had been going on without interruption now for several minutes, and Jack guessed that the police had given up. Perhaps they didn’t know there were detainees in the wagon; perhaps they didn’t care. Either way, they’d ceded the ground to the rioters.

The wagon went up on its side again, axles groaning, and this time it hung there for a moment as if it had all the time in the world to decide. Outside, the mob hooted and cheered, but their cheers turned to disappointment when the wagon fell back to all four tires. The chanting and the rocking started again.

“They’re going to kill us!” the blond kid whined.

“Brace yourself,” Jack instructed. “If it goes over upside down for you, keep your chin tucked.”

The chanting started again, and the van rocked and groaned. Jack planted his feet firmly on the far wall. “Get ready.”

Up went the van again, the frame trembling as it teetered on the very edge of the driver side tires. Jack was ready, hoping it would tip this way and put him on his feet. But the van fell back. Immediately it tilted to the passenger side. Jack felt his world turn upside down. He was on his shoulders with his neck pressed against the metal side wall. The wagon paused, then fell flat on its side. Jack felt the impact travel through his neck like an electric shock. Outside, the crowd cheered.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 3 P.M. AND 4 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

3:00 P.M. PST Federal Building Command Center, West Los Angeles

Kim Bauer had been sitting on a cot in the basement of the building for almost two hours. She was in some sort of minihospital, with several cots set up to treat sick people, those poles on wheels with the hooks at the top for IV bags, and other machines.

They had kept the metal door to the hospital room closed, but now and then someone would come inside, sometimes to check on her, sometimes to get supplies from a cabinet. Every time she asked if she could leave, the man or woman would give her a quick “No” and rush out.

As time passed Kim’s demands had become more urgent,

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but the replies were even more insistent. During the short intervals when the door had been opened, she saw Federal employees, some in police uniforms and some in suits, hurrying back and forth.

But at that moment, two uniformed security guards carried in a third officer whose head was heavily bandaged. Blood still trickled out from under the bandage and onto his forehead and cheek. The other two laid him down on one of the empty cots. A doctor—the same woman who had taken Kim’s blood—followed close behind to treat him.

“Excuse me, I have to go!” Kim said to one of the security officers. He looked at her, his beefy face sweaty under his round cap.

“Trust me, you don’t want to go anywhere right now,” he said. “There’s a little trouble outside.”

“Then let me call my mom,” Kim said. “She’s got to be freaking.”

“You have a cell phone?”

“The battery died.”

The cop looked harried. “Come here.” He led her out into the main control room, which was bustling with activity. “Here.” The man handed her a land line and then hurried off.

Kim dialed her home number quickly. Her mother picked up on the first ring.

“Mom, it’s me, don’t freak—”

“Kim! Thank god! Where the hell are you! You know there’s a riot—”

“I’m safe, Mom. Dad got me into the building before it all started.”

“He should never have let you go down there in the first place.” She sounded stressed out, and Kim knew that she’d been worrying all this time. She was sure that, once her phone was charged, she’d find a dozen frantic messages.

“There was no way he knew this was going to happen, Mom. You’re too hard on him.”

“They all knew, Kim!” her mother snapped. “Your father always knows more than he tells, trust me. Let me talk to him.”

“He’s not here. He...went out.”

Her mom said something she would have gotten in trouble for saying. “I’m coming to get you.”

“I don’t think you can, Mom. I think there’s a lot going on outside.” She looked at the wounded security officer. “I’m okay in here. You should probably wait until it calms down.” She told her mother that her phone was dead and promised to call her again in thirty minutes. She hung up the phone and rubbed her arm where the doctor had drawn blood.

3:10 P.M. PST National Health Services Laboratory, Los Angeles

Celia Alexis rubbed her eyes before looking into the microscope. It had been a long day, and news of the riots at the Federal Building had not helped her concentration. She knew Jean could take care of himself, but she also knew that if he saw people in trouble, he would ignore any danger to help them. She’d seen that back in Haiti when they were kids, and she’d seen him act recklessly as an adult. He always laughed and told her that an L.A. Sheriff ’s deputy was supposed to run toward trouble, but she knew, she knew that he was always looking for ways to prove he was as good as or better than everyone else. It was an immigrant’s attitude he had never outgrown.

Of course, she was self-aware enough to know that she suffered from a similar disease herself. First in her under-grad class at Stanford, top of her medical school class at UCLA. She didn’t have to be first, but anything less felt like

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failure. She had left her barefoot childhood back in Haiti, but somehow she’d managed to bring the burden of Haiti itself with her, like that hint of accent she could never seem to silence. Her friends liked it; the men in her life loved its singsong quality, but to Celia the slow roundness of her vowels evoked no images of Calypso and sun-drenched beaches, but only the dirty streets and poverty of Port-au-Prince.

Celia pressed her eyes to the microscope and studied the slide. Someone had marked this urgent—a blood sample from a teenage girl. The researcher blinked, rubbed her eyes again, and adjusted herself at the scope. But when she looked at the blood sample, the image hadn’t changed.

“Ken?” she called, sitting back. There was another researcher, Ken Diebold, working at the other end of the lab counter. Like her, he was wearing a sterile suit and mask. Researchers in the laboratory wore them as a matter of habit, although Celia felt with sudden dread that in this case, the sterile environment might be necessary. “Can you come look at this?”

Diebold was decent enough, but he suffered from a deep appreciation of his own sense of humor. “What’s this? The Caribbean Queen asking for help?” he said dryly.

“Just look,” she insisted.

Ken walked over and, without sitting down, looked into the scope. He straightened and looked at Celia, then sat down as she moved out of the way, and looked again. “Where did this come from?” he said at last.

“CTU Los Angeles just brought it in,” Celia replied.

“CTU Los Angeles?” Ken said in shock, his voice rising an octave. “This patient is inside the United States?”

Celia nodded.

“You know what this is?” he said.

Celia nodded again. “It’s a filovirus. It looks like it’s related to Ebola—”

“—or Marburg,” the other doctor said.

“But it’s not Marburg,” Celia pointed out. “The shepherd’s crook shape isn’t the same.”

“Is the patient isolated? When did exposure happen?”

“We’d better find out,” Celia said, “before half of Los Angeles dies from hemorrhagic fever.”

3:14 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

The door of the overturned police wagon flew open. Hands reached in and pulled the prisoners out one at a time. Jack, who had positioned himself near the door, was one of the first. There was a small mob around the fallen van, cheering as each one of the prisoners was helped out. Beyond the mob, the street was empty for nearly a block, but farther down Jack saw a line of rioters pushing against a line of policemen with shields and batons. The rioters had abandoned all reason, and were ignoring the blows of batons.

“We managed to get through,” one of the protestors said to Jack, like one soldier briefing another. “Those bastards did a good job holding us back, especially with those god-damned horses. But we got to you. Here.” The man, who spoke with a slight Spanish accent, held up a pair of wire cutters. He stepped behind Jack and severed the flex cuffs.

“Hey!” yelled a rioter, bending down to look into the wagon. “One of these guys is hurt. His leg looks really bad.” Jack glanced down. It was the man in the blue shirt. He screamed as they pulled him out of the wagon. His left leg was broken at the shin, snapped at such an acute angle that his leg appeared to have a second knee.

“Look what we found!” someone yelled from the front

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end of the vehicle. Jack leaned around the corner to see three rioters pulling a half-conscious policeman from the cab. Jack recognized him as the same cop who said he’d try to call CTU. His face was covered in blood from a cut on his forehead and his eyes weren’t focused. He was as limp as a rag doll and no threat to anyone. But he was wearing a police uniform, and in the rioters’ maddened state, that’s all it took. One of them stomped on his head.

Jack snatched the wire cutters from his rescuer’s hand and shoved him out of the way. He reached the injured cop before the three rioters and, as another one raised his foot to stomp down, Jack kicked his base leg. The rioter screamed and toppled over. The other two looked at him in surprise. Jack punched one of them in the stomach with the hand holding the wire cutters. The beak of the cutters jabbed into the man’s stomach and he crumpled to the floor. The third one grabbed Jack by the shirt, so Jack head-butted him in the nose and shoved him backward.

“What the hell are you doing!” shouted the man who’d brought the wire cutters.

“He’s not one of us!” It was the blond kid, who’d just been pulled out of the van. “He’s a cop!”

But by now Jack was a cop with a gun, having taken the policeman’s sidearm. He held the 9mm Beretta level and steady at the center mass of the man who had held the wire cutters. “You’re done here. All except for him.” He nodded at the man in the blue shirt, who was lying on the ground. “Everyone else go. Now.”

The man under Jack’s gun said, “Bullshit. You don’t get to—”

Jack squeezed the trigger and put a round past the man’s ear. Everyone cringed away from the sound of the gunshot. Only Jack held steady. “Now.”

The crowd scattered. Jack watched them until they were too far away to pose any sort of threat. Hastily he knelt down beside the cop, who managed to focus on Jack. “You okay?” Jack said.

“H-hell, no,” the cop said. “Thanks. You...saved...”

“Later,” Jack said. “Looks like they forgot about you and me.” He looked over toward the Federal Building, but there were no cops in sight. Everyone was either inside the building or out chasing rioters. He snatched the radio off the man’s collar. “Dispatch, this is—” He looked around for the man’s name, but his riot gear was blank.

“Agastonetti,” the man said weakly.

“This is Officer Agastonetti,” Jack said. “Officer down at Federal and Wilshire. Just outside the Federal Building. Officer down.” He cut off as someone squawked back. The less detail they got, the faster they’d respond.

Jack wanted assistance, but he didn’t want it just yet. He jumped back over to the blue-shirted man and crouched down beside him. The man was shuddering and sobbing from pain. There was blood on his pant leg, so Jack knew without looking underneath that the fracture was compound. His shin had snapped when the police van turned over.

Jack grabbed his face in one hand and turned his chin until their eyes met. “Your name.”

The man sobbed again, but said, “Kasim Turkel.”

“Kasim, you’re going into shock,” Jack said calmly. “Your leg is shattered and you’re hemorrhaging all over the place. You’re going to die, unless I get you help right now. Do you want to die?”

Kasim shook his head.

Jack sat down and sighed. “Personally, I don’t care one way or the other. You can live or die, it’s all the same to me.” Kasim looked up at him in fear. Jack continued. “So if you want me to care, one way or the other, that is, it’s going to be

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very important how you answer the next few questions. Do

you understand?”

Kasim nodded.

Jack replied with a look of satisfaction. He tapped the barrel of the Beretta directly onto Kasim’s broken leg. Kasim screamed. “Good. Let’s start.”

3:18 P.M. PST National Health Services Laboratory, Los Angeles

Celia stood up as Eli Hollingsworth, the Director of NHS, walked in. He was wearing a sterile suit that had been hastily pulled over his business attire. “Show me,” he said tersely.

Celia stepped out of the way and let him examine the blood sample. By the time he straightened, his face was grim and looked far older than his forty-seven years. “The data you’ve collected on this sample matches information we just received from Brasília. Local authorities down there in the province of Minas Gerais found a local in his hut. His body looked like it had been torn apart, but it turns out the skin ruptures weren’t caused by assault. The skin had broken open due to hemorrhagic fever of a kind not previously recorded.”

“Most hemorrhagic fevers originate in Africa,” Celia pointed out.

“Not this one,” Hollingsworth guessed. “At least, not according to current evidence. This is the only case so far. It happened in a populated area with no sterility and high probability of transference from one host to another. No one would have brought the disease down there, there’s no reason to. So we have to assume that it originated there.”

“But now it’s here,” Celia said. “Do we have more information on the patient here? Were they in Brazil?”

“CTU hasn’t released it yet, for security reasons. All we know so far is that exposure probably took place this morning around nine o’clock,” Hollingsworth replied. “One more thing. There is one difference between this virus and the one in Minas Gerais. This one seems to replicate more slowly. I’d guess the local patient won’t become seriously compromised until about twenty hours or more after exposure. The strain from Brazil killed its victim in less than twelve.”

“So we’re dealing with two strains,” Celia said. “And we have no vaccine for either of them.”

3:23 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

Kasim Turkel screamed again, but his cries sounded thin and empty on the deserted street. The blond man was barely touching him, but he kept tapping the barrel of his weapon right on the jagged spot where his leg bent at an unreal angle.

“You are part of the Eastern Turkistan Independence Movement?”

“Yes.”

“And you hired Ayman al-Libbi to come to this country and attack the G8 summit?”

No answer. Tap, tap went the muzzle.

“Yes, yes!” Kasim shrieked.

“What is he planning?”

“I don’t know.”

Tap, tap, tap.

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” he screamed in Uygur, then in English.

“He needed help once he got here,” Jack said. “Where did he go? Who did he meet with?”

“I don’t—”

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Tap.

“Aghh!” Kasim sobbed. “I...I never met him before. We took him, but we waited outside. I don’t know what he wanted.”

“Names,” Jack said threateningly.

“F-Farrigian.”

Tamar Farrigian. Jack knew him. He was a fence and trafficker who usually played in the shallow end of the pool. He was a sometime informant for CTU and kept out of trouble enough to continue in that useful role. But if he was selling arms to major players like al-Libbi, his time had come.

“What did he buy?”

“Bombs. Or rockets. Something explosive. I didn’t see what.”

“When was he planning his attack?” Jack asked. “Where?”

There was no answer. He tapped Kasim’s leg, but the man only screamed and sobbed in his native language. Jack didn’t press further—it would have surprised him if al-Libbi had shared his plans with his employers.

“What about the virus?” he asked, thinking of Kim.

“Wh-what?” Kasim replied. There was genuine confusion in his voice.

“The virus!” Jack said, poking harder at the leg.

“I don’t know, I don’t know what that is!” Kasim insisted, once he’d stopped crying. “What virus?”

Jack believed him.

3:29 P.M. PST Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China, Los Angeles

The Chinese Consulate was downtown, near Vermont and Wilshire and a stone’s throw from Lafayette Park. A run at breakneck speed along the cliffs of Mulholland Drive to avoid the riot area, a race down the curves of Laurel Canyon, and then a hard left turn along Third Street with little regard for red lights and less for anyone else’s right of way, all helped Nina Myers reach the building in under thirty minutes.

She was expected. The demure young woman in the gray dress suit took a cursory look at her credentials, then spoke softly into her tiny headset in Chinese before rising and escorting Nina to a side room with a short, wide table surrounded by thick leather chairs. Her shoes made almost no sound when she walked.

“Water?” was all she said. When Nina declined, she gave a short bow and vanished.

Richard Hong entered a moment later, as boisterous as the girl had been timid.

“Ms. Myers, how are you?” he said in a very American accent, shaking her hand vigorously and dropping down on the couch opposite her and crossing his legs. The table, made more for coffee than for meetings, came only to his raised foot, and he tapped it gently and thoughtlessly. “What can I do for you?”

Nina knew this game, and she didn’t want to play it. She cut through the layers of diplomacy, if for no other reason than she knew it was not the Chinese way. “You can tell me why the Chinese government never told us that Marcus Lee was really Nurmamet Tuman, and why he is giving money to ETIM.”

Nina couldn’t have caught Hong more off guard if she’d jumped up on the table and slapped him in the face. The Chinese official straightened, and as he did, the diplomatic facade melted off his face. His black eyes gleamed. He looked at her, then quickly to the door, and then back, and in that moment Nina knew three things: the room was bugged; her

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accusations were serious enough that Hong thought men might burst into the room; and someone higher up than Hong had decided to let this all play out.

Hong tried to recover by reciting a memorized line. “There is no ETIM.”

Nina started to protest, but Hong waved her off, recovering some of his former gallantry. “Oh, of course there are a few malcontents,” he said. “But to call them a real organization would be like calling the Clippers a real basketball team, eh? Factual in the strictest sense, but meaningless in the practical world.”

“Well, they are real enough to receive two million dollars. And Tuman is real enough to give it to them. He’s also apparently clever enough to change his dossier so that no one noticed that he changed his name, or that he grew up in the heart of the East Turkistan resistance in Urumchi.”

Hong glared at her in a decidedly undiplomatic way. She wasn’t intimidated. Very few things intimidated her, and none of them were in this room.

There was a muted beep. Hong said, “Excuse me,” and deftly plucked a mobile phone from his pocket. He opened it and listened, muttered something in Chinese, and pocketed the phone again.

“Ms. Myers, here is what I can tell you: Mr. Marcus Lee, or, as you call him, Nurmamet Tuman, is no threat to you, or to the United States in any way. Between you and me he is a former officer with the People’s Army, and if you cannot guess more than that, then you are not the kind of person I think you are.” By which Hong meant, He was a spy and you are probably a spy, too, so you figure it out. “His name was changed to protect his privacy, but I give you the solemn word of the People’s Republic that he is retired.” Hong placed heavy emphasis on that word retired.

“His name is Uygur,” said Nina, silently thanking Jamey Farrell and the other analysts at CTU for the geography lesson she’d received during the drive over. “Before he was retired, did he work in the Xianjing-Uygur Autonomous Region? Did he infiltrate ETIM?”

Richard Hong stood up and smiled warmly, as though Nina had said goodbye instead of asking a prying question. “It was great to meet you,” he said in his casual American way. “I hope to see you around again.” He bent down and shook her hand, stubbornly ignoring the fact that she had not yet stood up. “Have a great day.” Then he was out the door, leaving Nina alone in the room.

3:40 P.M. PST Federal Building, West Los Angeles

Jack had given up the interrogation when Kasim Turkel passed out. He knew he’d gotten everything he was going to get when Turkel gave up the name of Tamar Farrigian. He’d hoped to find out something about the virus, but he wasn’t surprised that Turkel was ignorant of that. Ayman al-Libbi was notorious for playing close to the vest, and had angered his patrons more than once by withholding information from them.

A roar like falling water rolled down Wilshire Boulevard. Jack looked eastward and saw the police line break, cops stumbling backward as rioters broke through, pouring down the street like a reservoir suddenly rushing down a dry riverbed. Idiots, Jack thought. All they would do was bring out the cavalry and rubber bullets again. And for what?

Jack left Turkel on the street, intending to have the FBI or other CTU agents pick him up later. With his leg broken like that, he wasn’t going anywhere. But the injured cop was another story. Jack went back to him.

“Can you walk?” he asked.

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The cop shook his head. “Only if you can make the street stop wobbling.”

“Come on.” Jack helped him up and pulled the man’s arm around his shoulder. Together they hobbled back down the road to the Federal Building, through the line of waist-high stone pillars, across the grass, and up to the glass doors. Uniformed officers on the inside opened the doors for them and pulled them inside. There was a short-haired woman with them. She held her hand out to Jack Bauer.

“Agent Bauer, Cynthia Rosen.” Jack remembered her name from the telephone.

“Thanks for your help. Is there a car I can borrow? I have to get back to CTU. It’s urgent.”

Rosen was nonplussed. “Well, yes. But your daughter—”

Kim. Jack felt a tug at his heart, the primal urge a father feels to protect his daughter. Manufacturing the ruse that had brought her into police custody had been hard enough. Now that the immediate danger had passed, he wanted nothing more than to wrap her up in his protective arms. But he did not doubt for a second that she had indeed been exposed to a deadly virus. According to his captor, she had hours before she was in danger or even contagious. That meant the very best way to protect her was to find the people who had put her in harm’s way, make them cure her, and then make them pay.

“Can you have someone escort her home, Agent Rosen?” he asked. “I’ve got to go. It’s urgent. Now please take me to a car.”

3:47 P.M. PST Mountaingate Drive, Los Angeles

The white truck with “Sanchez Landscaping” on the side rolled to a stop at the foot of the circular driveway, where a Secret Service agent stopped him. The Secret Service agent was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, but his short-cropped hair, angular build, and air of authority gave him away. Of course, al-Libbi would have known he was an agent even without these clues. He had been warned that the Secret Service might occupy the house.

“Can I help you?” the young man said.

“I guess,” al-Libbi said, affecting a Mexican accent nearly identical to that of the gardener he had murdered. With only a day’s growth of scruffy beard, dark skin, and the accent, he could pass for Latino. He’d done it many times to cross the border into the United States, even being stopped twice and deported, once to El Salvador and once to Guatemala. “I’m the gardener here. Is there something—?”

The Secret Service man nodded as though he’d been expecting the gardener, which was indeed the case. He stepped away from the truck, turned, and muttered something into a microphone at his wrist. A moment later the front door opened and Nurmamet Tuman (whom he must call Marcus Lee) appeared, followed by another Secret Service agent in a suit.

“Is everything okay, Mr. Lee?” al-Libbi asked in his most worried voice. “I have a green card.”

Tuman nodded at him. “Yes, that’s him, of course it is,” he said to the Secret Service agents.

The one in the suit nodded. “Okay, let him through.”

Ayman al-Libbi rewarded them with his best nervous smile and eased the truck forward.

3:49 P.M. PST Santa Monica, California

His real name was Dr. Bernard Copeland, and until a short time ago he had planned to save the world.

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He stumbled into his fashionable house on Fourteenth Street north of Montana in Santa Monica, closed the door, and fell onto the floor, exhausted. He tugged a small wrapper out of his pocket, unrolled it to reveal a wad of maracuja leaves. He popped two into his mouth and sighed in relief.

Copeland had known for more than two decades that the world was spinning out of control. He’d seen the human species work overtime to destroy its own environment when he worked as a graduate biology student in the Amazon. He’d joined the EPA soon after getting his Ph.D., devoting his energies to the government’s own fight to save the human habitat. But seven years at the Environmental Protection Agency had taught him the true definition of doublespeak, for he found himself under pressure not to fight off developers but to justify alliances with them. The government rationalized its permissive attitude toward industries that poisoned rivers, spewed greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and turned acres of vibrant forestland into grazing ground for cattle. Disgusted, he had quit. To hide himself, he’d gone to work for the enemy, sold himself to a research firm studying the medicinal properties of fauna in the Amazon. It gave him an excuse to go back to the land he loved, and it gave him cover. The firm he worked for was pro-industry, and he carried its banner in public loudly and often.

In private, he began to develop relationships inside the real environmental movement. At first he met quietly with members of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, but he knew immediately that they were too tame for his needs. He had worked inside the machinery of government, and he knew that it would grind itself slowly, inexorably, into oblivion. Stopping it would require much more radical means than they were willing to take. But, slowly, his associations in the Sierra Club brought him in contact with more radical sects, until eventually he was having coffee with Earth Firsters and taking hikes with the Earth Liberation Front. Foresighted, he had kept his name to himself, using a nickname from the eco-terrorist’s favorite read, The Monkey Wrench Gang. “Seldom Seen Smith” received a derisive laugh more than once, but preserved his anonymity.

Copeland was no utopian. He did not expect the world to revert to some antediluvian paradise. He was neither a vegan nor an animal rescuer. He was a scientist. He had studied the data and reached the inevitable conclusion: mankind could not continue to destroy the Earth without consequences. Someone needed to stop human beings from continuing on their destructive path, and for better or worse, Bernard Copeland had elected himself.

He’d spent several years committing low-level acts of terrorism: burning down isolated work sheds owned by timber companies, spiking trees. But even back then he’d known it was only exercise. He could spike a million trees, and it wouldn’t stop the world from destroying itself.

At first he used his scientific background to motivate companies to preserve his first love, the Amazon. He published papers describing the curative effects of turbocuarine, a natural muscle relaxant that had helped Parkinson’s patients; he gave lectures on Podophyllum peltatum, commonly known as mayapple, which was the source of the etoposides used to fight testicular cancer. How, he argued, could we continue to ravage the Amazonian forest when it provided us with cures to our ills?

None of it mattered. Though revelations like those motivated some companies with promises of profit, there was just too much money being made cutting, stripping, and baring for grazing land or building housing. As the years passed, Copeland came to understand a basic principle of human nature: greed was powerful, but secondary. Fear was

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the prime mover of the human species. It was not enough to show human beings that the Amazon could provide them with profit. He had to fill them with fear of death and then show them that the Amazon was their salvation.