24 Declassified: 03 - Trojan Horse Page 2

  So why was he put in charge of the tactical teams?

  “This is Angel Three. Someone’s coming out to open the gate.”

  “This is it,” cried Angel One, voice tight with tension. “Get ready to move.”

  Breaking protocol, Jack spoke. “This is Angel Two, hold your positions. Hold your positions.”

  But no one was listening. No one from the DEA anyway. Jack could see men in black assault gear and lumpy body armor rising from cover on the opposite side of the studio compound.

  “Get your men down before they’re observed, Angel One,” Jack commanded. As he spoke, Jack slipped the Heckler & Koch G36 Commando short carbine from its sheath across his back, chambered a 5.56mm armor-piercing round.

  Another voice broke into the net. “This is Archangel. Stand down, Angel One. Wait for a positive ID on the men in the car.”

  Jack was relieved to see the men on the opposite bluff melt back into the terrain.

  Archangel was DEA chief Jason Peltz, the overall commander of this operation. Late forties, stoop-shouldered with salt and pepper hair balding in the middle, Peltz more resembled a high school history teacher than a major force in the Drug Enforcement Agency with two decades of experience. Last year Peltz had moved into the top spot at the DEA’s Los Angeles office. Since then, he’d become more of a bureaucrat than a front line operative. But Peltz was savvy enough to surround himself with dedicated, competent and incorruptible veterans of the drug wars like Miguel Avilla, so his pension was secure.

  If Jack had an issue with Peltz’s management style, it was that the man chose to issue orders from a portable command center hidden inside a dirty van parked a block and a half away. As Jack saw it, Peltz should have been here, on the ground, among his troops. It troubled Jack that Peltz left the heavy lifting to an inexperienced assault team leader like Brian Mc-Connell, who was clearly not up to the task.

  No harm done, but the snafu should not have occurred.

  “Angel Three, this is Angel One. Do you have a positive ID on the car, the passengers?”

  “It’s a different car, Angel One,” Avilla replied. “I think it’s the same driver, though. There are three other men in the vehicle but I can’t get a good look at them through the tinted glass.”

  “Listen to me, Avilla. I need a positive ID, pronto, or we can pack up and go home right now.”

  “I’m trying, McConnell. Give me a fucking minute.”

  Jack chafed at the breach of radio discipline. Communications were breaking down and Agent Mc-Connell was making the situation worse by badgering Avilla.

  “Angel One, this is Angel Two,” said Jack. “I observe movement on the northeast corner of the second building. Can you confirm.”

  Jack had seen a bird fluttering on the roof and recognized what he’d seen. But he wanted to divert McConnell’s focus away from Avilla long enough for the man on the street to do his job.

  “This is Angel One. I see no activity in the northeast. You probably saw a bird.”

  “Roger that,” Jack replied.

  “This is Angel Three. I have a positive ID on the passenger. The target is in the car. Repeat, the target is in the car.”

  “This is Angel One. Let’s move. Go, go, go.”

  Jack burst from cover, his chukkas kicking up dust as he sprinted across the bluff and descended the rocky slope, balancing with one arm, the other gripping his assault rifle. Behind him, three more figures emerged from cover—Chet Blackburn and members of his CTU tactical team.

  Jack’s feet hit the asphalt before anyone else. He flicked off the safety, then aimed the muzzle of the G36 at the steel door marked with the number 9. Feet pounded the pavement at his shoulder. It was Chet Blackburn, covering his back.

  They hit the wall simultaneously three seconds later, flattening themselves on either side of the door. Already, Blackburn had sculpted a wad of C-4 plastic explosives into a donut to encircle the doorknob. He draped it around the metal lock, plugged in the detonator.

  “Five seconds,” Chet Blackburn warned.

  It seemed longer. Jack had pressed closer to the wall, waiting. When the blast finally came, he felt the shock ripple along his spine. The door blew off its hinges, spun away. Jack heard the clang as it landed somewhere inside the studio. The noise of the blast quickly faded. Bauer and Blackburn moved cautiously but quickly through the door. The other two men remained outside, guarding their backs and making sure no one escaped the net.

  Then, from the opposite side of the studio compound, and near the front gate, the CTU agents heard shots.

  5:22:56 A.M.PDT Highway 805, south of Chula Vista

  Squinting against the glare, Tony Almeida slipped heavy-framed sunglasses over his eyes. Already the Southern California sun was over the horizon and burning too bright, too hot. The L.A. basin was experiencing the most severe drought in fifteen years. Down here near the border it was even worse. A haze hung over the hills from the brushfires.

  But this was nothing new. Since Tony had moved to the City of Angels after his stint in the Marine Corps, Southern California seemed to be in one crisis mode after another. Droughts and the resulting wildfires. Mudslides. Riots. And the ubiquitous earthquakes.

  He glanced at the TAG Heuer steel chronograph on his wrist. Nearly 5:30 with six miles to go, and traffic so thick he might not make it in time. Tony cursed, swerved the late-model Dodge truck to get around a meandering driver, nearly adding to the dents and scrapes that covered the vehicle’s exterior. The woman in the seat next to him squealed. She’d spilled some of her steaming hot coffee on her low-riders.

  “Slow down, Tony. What’s the rush?”

  Tony downshifted, applied the brake—not to appease Fay Hubley, but because traffic had once again slowed to a crawl in all four lanes. When they rolled to a complete stop a moment later, Tony lowered the window. Dust and hot dry air filled the cabin. Fay, dabbing at the brown stains on her faded denims, coughed theatrically. Tony ignored her, stuck his head out in a futile effort to see around a lumbering truck that filled his windshield. An aircraft heading in to Brown Field Municipal Airport roared overhead, adding to the cacophony.

  Tony closed the window, slumped behind the wheel. The rattle of the air conditioner replaced the ear-battering road roar.

  “Thank god you didn’t get any coffee, you’re so tense,” said Fay. “Are we late? Is that why you didn’t want to stop? I mean, we lost like two minutes at the Starbucks drive-through.”

  Tony let go of the steering wheel, stroked his black goatee, a larger amount of beard than he was used to beneath his lip. His hair felt strange, too. Long in the back and bunched into a small ponytail at the nape of his neck.

  Fay glanced at Tony from under long blond lashes, then looked away. She pursed her glossed lips, brushed dangling strands of curly blond hair away from her tanned face.

  “Chill out, will you, boss? It’s not like we’re on a deadline, right?”

  “Actually we are on a deadline, Agent Hubley. If we don’t cross the border at the right time, with the right border guard on duty, we risk the chance that we might get stopped. And if they found the stuff in the back of this truck we’d have some explaining to do.”

  “It’s not like we’re the bad guys. We can tell the border patrol who we are, what we’re doing.”

  “Yeah, let’s let some border guard in on classified information,” Tony replied, his tone impatient. “Hell, for all we know the guard we talk to could be the same corrupt son of a bitch who let Richard Lesser escape across the Mexican border in the first place.”

  Fay turned away from Tony, gazed out the passenger side window.

  Tony regretted his tone, if not his words, as soon as he said them. It wasn’t Fay Hubley’s fault that she was inexperienced, that she had never gone undercover before, never even worked in the field. She wouldn’t be doing it now if circumstances didn’t demand her involvement. Tony needed Agent Hubley’s computer expertise to sniff out their prey’s cyber trail while Tony ran d
own the fugitive in the real world.

  The man they were hunting, Richard Lesser, was approximately the same age as Fay. A graduate of Stanford, Lesser held a Master’s degree in Computer Science. He was also one of the top programmers in his class. Not satisfied making a cool half-million dollars a year creating security protocols or designing computer games, Lesser decided his first career move after university would be to hack the computer of America’s top computer security specialists, then hold its entire database hostage. Boscom Systems paid up to protect their reputation—to the tune of five million dollars. Ultimately their own cyber-sleuths managed to identify Lesser from a piece of errant coding his “Hijack” program inadvertently left buried in Boscom’s mainframe.

  Two weeks ago, Lesser had managed to jump across the border hours before an indictment against him was handed down. Since his crimes were purely economic and limited to a narrow scope of damage, he wasn’t the type of malefactor CTU usually hunted. But in the past eight days, persistent and urgent chatter had been detected between two known Central American narco-terrorist groups and an unknown cell led by a shadowy figure named Hasan. All three groups mentioned Richard Lesser by name. One of these cells was located in Colombia, the other was based in Mexico City, and the third somewhere in the United States. All placed the fugitive Lesser somewhere in Tijuana, and analysts believed all three groups were dispatching representatives to snatch him up.

  The intercepts set off alarm bells inside of CTU’s Cyber-Division—Fay Hubley’s unit. After being briefed, Special Agent Larry Hastings, Director of CTU’s Cyber-Operations in Washington, told Ryan Chappelle he believed Lesser to be the most dangerous fugitive of his kind in the world because of the knowledge and skills the man possessed. Hastings felt it was imperative Lesser be captured and returned to the United States, or prevented from linking up with the terrorists by whatever means necessary. With Washington’s stamp of approval, Tony’s and Fay’s mission was hastily assembled.

  On the road, the traffic began to move again. Tony shifted into first and drove on in silence, still rueful over his sharp rebuke. It didn’t help Almeida’s mood that he hadn’t showered or shaved in nearly twenty-four hours. That it wasn’t even 6 a.m. and he could already feel the heat suffocating him, the grit collecting around the collar of his denim jacket, the sweat pooling in his Steve Madden boots.

  “I can tell you’re not relaxing,” Fay Hubley said, trying to break the tension.

  “I’ll relax when we get to Tijuana,” Tony replied, eyes forward.

  Tony Almeida would have preferred to leave Fay Hubley safe in front of her computer in L.A. Under normal circumstances, that’s just what he would have done. But for this high priority mission to be successful, Tony required the help of someone who could keep constant tabs on the computer activity of the man they were hunting, to monitor Richard Lesser’s bank accounts, credit cards, his computer use and Internet activity. No one was better at this type of cyber-detective work than Fay Hubley, CTULA’s newest recruit.

  Agent Hubley was twenty-five, fresh out of Carnegie Mellon University graduate school and eager to serve her country. Instead of returning to her family in Columbus, Ohio, and taking a job with some dot.com, Fay Hubley was recruited by the Counter Terrorist Unit, where she served first in Washington, D.C., later in the Los Angeles division.

  It was Administrative Director Richard Walsh who brought Agent Hubley to the West Coast after he learned she’d created a bloodhound program that could trace a computer user using a phone line to a specific telephone number, or even a Wi Fi zone. Already CTU had used her protocols to trace the activities of a computer hacker who had nearly cracked the CIA database at Langley. The man was currently behind bars and awaiting trial.

  For her first undercover mission, Fay Hubley’s computer skills required the use of a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of hardware and software, now riding in the back of their van along with eye candy—several hundred stolen credit cards and a few magnetic strip detectors—there to mask their true mission.

  If Tony or Fay ran afoul of the Mexican authorities, they had a credible cover story and evidence to back it up. And Tony Almeida—a.k.a. Tony Navarro, gringo credit card fraud and identity thief—had enough cash on hand to get him and his girlfriend free of any corrupt Mexican law enforcement officials.

  They would face far less danger here if they were thought to be white-collar criminals than U.S. government agents working undercover. As far as Tony was concerned, DEA Agent Enrique Camarena Salazar was still a valid cautionary tale. Salazar had been snatched off the streets of Guadalajara and tortured to death by drug traffickers, who’d been tipped off by corrupt Mexican police officials.

  “Look! We’re almost there,” Fay cried. “Two miles to the border.”

  She gestured at the sign, sloshed more coffee on her jeans.

  Tony glanced at the woman’s attire, finding it hard to reconcile Fay Hubley’s quiet, conservative, sometimes drab appearance at CTU with her current undercover persona. At one time in his life, Tony Almeida had been accurately described as a street punk. Growing up in a tough, violent neighborhood in Chicago he became tough and violent, too. Though that period in his life was long gone, Tony could still summon enough of his former self to convince the badguys that he wasone of them.But tryashe might, Tony could not imagine what hidden aspect of her personality Fay Hubley mined to create her false identity.

  Over sandals and form-fitting low-riders Fay wore a scarlet, belly-baring cotton blouse with dangling, retro-1970s fringe. Sleeveless, the top revealed a tattoo of intertwined vines encircling Fay’s upper arm. Another tattoo of an elaborate dragonfly spreading its wings across the small of her back was also on display. Fay’s finger and toenails were polished bright purple to match her eye shadow and lipstick.

  Last night, after the pre-mission briefing, as the pair was preparing to depart CTU Headquarters for Tijuana, Jamey Farrell got a look at her co-worker in disguise.

  “Whoa,” she said, “who knew Fay Hubley was more Bratz than Barbie?”

  Tony was not certain if the tattoos were real or temporary, but the mission was assembled so quickly therewould havebeennotimefor Faytoget her navel pierced—yet a delicate silver dragonfly now swung on a thin chain that dangled from the woman’s navel ring.

  Tony looked away before Fay noticed his stare. Man, he thought, the quiet ones can really surprise you.

  5:46:01 A.M.PDT Utopia Studios

  They’d made it inside the abandoned studio, only to be stopped by a hail of gunfire. Now Jack Bauer and Chet Blackburn huddled back to back, between the concrete wall and a dumpster in one of Utopia Studios’ large sound stages. Armor-piercing rounds battered the metal container with enough force to pierce the steel and ricochet like mad inside the dumpster.

  “They’re cornered. They’re not going anywhere. Why the hell didn’t they just give up?” Blackburn cried over the noise. Under his faceplate, the man’s dark skin was shiny with sweat.

  “They brought guns,” said Jack. “They figured they had to use them.”

  Jack hunkered down, wiped the stream of blood that leaked from his nose. He yanked off his helmet, wondering why the communicator had stopped working. He discovered that the transmitter inside the liner had been shattered by the same round that had grazed his headpiece a moment before.

  “Try to reach Angel One,” Jack said, spitting crimson. “Find out what’s happening on the other side of that wall.”

  Cautiously, Jack poked his head out. Across fifty feet of sound stage cluttered with movie props—everything from ornate period furniture to grandfather clocks, fake laboratory machinery, even a suit of armor—Jack saw another steel door that was still sealed. His movement attracted a short crackle of fire. As Jack ducked back behind cover, metal rounds splattered against the wall, spraying the two men with shrapnel and dust. Jack grunted. A shard of hot metal had pierced his battle suit, burning a hole into his left arm at the biceps. Jack swallowed bile, ignored the fie
ry sting.

  “Angel One’s team should have been through that door by now,” Jack told Blackburn.

  “They can’t get through,” Blackburn replied. “That door’s been welded shut to protect the lab from this kind of raid. The DEA has taken the lab, captured the big fish, too. Now they’re looking for another way to reach us.”

  “They better hurry,” said Jack.

  Blackburn eyed the stain on Bauer’s arm. “You know we can’t sit here and wait. We move or we die.” Then a wry smile appeared. “You know, we could go out the way we came in. These guys are only goons and they aren’t getting away. We could wait them out, or come back in with more muscle.”

  Bauer shook his head. “Let’s finish this now, before someone gets hurt. How many shooters did you spot?”

  “I counted two,” Blackburn replied. “One at three o’clock. Another one’s lurking over there near that suit of armor, or he was a minute ago.”

  Now the man could be anywhere. They both knew it. Jack shook the shards of broken transmitter out of his Kevlar assault helmet, slipped it on. Jack lowered the cracked visor, then he and Blackburn checked their weapons.

  “Let’s go,” Jack said.

  They rolled away from one another, emerging in a sprint on either side of the pockmarked dumpster. Jack aimed the G36—at air. His prey had vanished.

  Chet Blackburn was luckier. His man rose up from behind cover and opened up with twin .45s. Hispanic, mid-twenties, the cholo wore athletic gear, white sneakers and enough bling to open a jewelry store. He clutched the handguns in a sideways gangsta grip, too—a tactic impressive in a drive-by shooting but hardly effective in this situation.

  Blackburn stood his ground as the first two shots warbled past his ears, winced when the third round nicked his body armor and tore away a chunk of battle suit. Then he fired twice. His first shot struck the shooter between the eyes, snapping his head back. The second entered under the man’s chin, blew away the top of his skull. The dead man flopped to the ground, the twitching hand pumping off one last shot, which ricocheted off the wall.