24 Declassified: Trojan Horse

13. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 5 P.M. AND 6 P.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME

Jack returned to the corridor where the fatal confrontation had begun. He found the body of Yasmina, but Nina was gone. He dropped the Louis Vuitton suitcase he’d found on the roof, drew his weapon and held it in ready position with both hands.

“Nina! Nina, can you hear me?”

Her reply emerged through hidden speakers. “Jack! There’s a staircase at the end of the corridor. I’m two floors below you, in Sanjore’s office. I think I found something.”

Jack made his way downstairs, found Nina hunched over a computer keyboard. She had dressed her shoulder wound with century-old cognac, wrapped it with shreds from a white, Egyptian cotton towel. The puncture wound was deep. Already her bandage was stained with seeping blood.

“I’ve called in the forensics team,” he informed her, snapping shut his cell phone. “They’ll be here any minute. Nawaf Sanjore got away in a helicopter. CTU had the aircraft on radar, but lost it in the ground clutter over Los Angeles. He could be headed anywhere, by now. We’ve lost him.”

Jack secured his weapon. “I managed to corner one of Sanjore’s aides, but the man threw himself from the tower rather than face capture. He had a PDA in his hand, I doubt it survived the fall…”

“The computers have been wiped clean, too,” said Nina, her voice rock-steady despite the stab wound. “But look at this! I found it when I turned on the monitor.”

It was the largest screen in a room filled with them. Jack stared at the color schematic — some kind of plans for a building. But there was nothing to identify the structure.

“Someone forgot to close the program when they wiped the memory. The file is gone, but the contents of this screen can be downloaded into the printer’s memory,” said Nina. “At least I hope so.”

She tapped a few keys. A large printer in the corner fired up and spit out an oversized spread sheet of the plans. Nina and Jack both released breaths they didn’t know they were holding.

“That’s something, at least,” said Nina.

“Good work,” Jack replied. He touched her arm. “And thanks for saving my ass.”

“Jack! You’re bleeding.”

Jack raised an eyebrow as he rolled up his sleeve. “So are you.”

Nina glanced down at the blood staining the strip of towel she’d used to wrap her puncture wound. “But I dressed it already,” she told him.

She indicated the shredded towel on the desk. Jack reached for it. “Yasmina caught me where I had been cut before, at the al-Bustani mansion,” he told her, wrapping a strip of Egyptian cotton around his seeping arm. “I think the blade got tangled with the bandage. It saved me.” He smiled at his second in command. “Neat trick, Nina. Killing her with her own blade.”

Nina smirked. “Well, she stuck the damn thing in my shoulder. The least I could do was return it to her.”

Jack chuckled, but in that brief moment he saw a cruel glint in Nina’s eyes he’d never seen before. It was gone in a flash — so quickly he thought he’d imagined it.

Secret Service Agent Craig Auburn accompanied two private security consultants for a final electronic sweep of the entire auditorium. Both men were experts at special event security and brought along their own equipment. One man, about forty with peppered hair, carried a high-speed gas chromatography unit over his shoulder. A younger man, not even thirty, had a silver-gray micro-differential ion mobility spectrometer strapped to his back. The trio started in the wings, climbed high into the catwalks above the stage, through the entire upper stage area, then down again.

Auburn, a fifty-five-year-old veteran of a Currency Fraud Division desk job, was huffing and puffing by the time they reached the massive main stage. Briefly he wondered if he’d make retirement, or if his deteriorating heart would kill him before he ever saw his pension.

Concerned, the older rent-a-snoop powered down his unit. “Hey, buddy. You okay? Need a rest or something?”

Auburn rasped a reply. “No, no. Just jet lag.”

The men crossed the stage, which seemed shiny smooth from a distance. Close up, Auburn saw blocking marks, hatches, electric plugs covered by metal hoods dotting the empty expanse.

Dominating center stage was a huge mock up of a Silver Screen Award, modeled after an old-fashioned box camera mounted on a tripod. This stage prop was massive, soaring thirty feet into the air. The box camera itself was the size of a minibus and fabricated from sheets of metal insulated with some type of synthetic construction material. The structure was mounted on a motorized dolly wrapped with burnished aluminum to reflect the footlights. It loomed over the stage, its shadow stretching beyond the orchestra pit to the front row seats.

As the men approached the prop, the ion spectrometer chirped urgently. The operator froze in his tracks, tapped the keypad to recalibrate the detector, but the chirping just became more insistent.

“What have you got?” the older man asked.

“Traces of nitrates, tetryl.”

The older man shook his head. “I have nothing, and your ion sniffer has a lousy false reading rate.”

Auburn studied the stage decoration and realized the huge Silver Screen Award prop was the final, assembled version of the parts the union men had brought in earlier — the team led by the Middle Eastern man.

“Are you sure it’s a false reading?” Craig Auburn pressed, ready to tear the prop apart if either man gave him reason.

The older specialist touched the base of a tripod leg. His hand came up stained with paint. “They just put this stuff together. There’s wet paint, traces of acetylene, fruit in somebody’s lunchbox. Anything like that can set this equipment off.”

“These traces are pretty weak,” the younger men said in agreement.

“Sure they’re weak,” the older man said. “If there was a bomb anywhere around here, this spectrometer would be ringing its head off. My bet. The culprit is wet paint.”

The specialists wandered off to scan another part of the stage. Auburn took one last look at the prop. Something about the prop still bothered him, but he knew very well that a hunch in the face of hard forensic proof was pretty much regarded as a crock of shit by anyone who had a career or cared about keeping it.

“Whatever you say. You guys are the experts.”

“Whatever you say. You guys are the experts.”

The words of the Americans were faint. Softer still were the footsteps moving away. But Bastian Grost had heard enough to feel great relief. He removed the stethoscope from the wall of the container, exchanged a glance and a nod with his brothers in arms.

Hasan was right.

The part of the stage prop they occupied was airtight. Above their heads, an air scrubber silently refreshed the atmosphere inside the chamber. Hasan had provided the materials, of course. Everyone had been pleased with the look of the large sculpture on the outside, the roominess within. But there was some skepticism among his men about the lining. Lead had always been the best shield against explosive detectors. But a lead-lined stage prop, combined with the weight of the men, would have been far too heavy.

None of them knew whether the specially treated polymer lining would do the job. Clearly, it had. Seven of his men sat around him now in the large box with twenty-five guns and sixty pounds of plastique — and the stupid Americans had failed to detect a thing.

Grost was confident they would also fail to detect the additional weapons inside a much smaller version of the Silver Screen prop he and his men now occupied. That smaller prop was positioned as a decoration at the back of the auditorium. When the time was right, their accomplices would shed their disguises among the audience, grab those hidden weapons, and guard the theater’s exits.

Grost checked the illuminated dial of his watch. Everything had been planned to the smallest detail. In less than two hours it would all come together. In less than two hours, he and his men would begin their journey to Paradise.

Ray Dobyns was holed up in an unexpected place — a modest split-level brick and wood-framed house in a quiet upper-middle-class suburb. To Tony, the streets, the houses seemed no different than the sitcom neighborhoods where Beaver Cleaver or the Brady Bunch grew up. The house was nestled in a shallow dip in the landscape, isolated from the other houses on the block by an expansive yard. The building itself was surrounded by shrubbery, now thin and brown and not worth much as cover. There was a large bay window and a garage in the front of the house and plenty of lawn around it, though little grass was green due to the prolonged drought that scorched both sides of the Cal/Mex border.

Tony noticed a large satellite dish on the roof, a microwave transmitter in the back and another dish mounted in a tall tree farther from the house. With all that state-of-the-art communications technology, Tony knew that more than chocolate chip cookies were being baked inside this particular house.

When Tony first arrived and saw the residence, he did a double-take, figuring that hooker Brandy had played him for a fool. But after he drove around the neighborhood a few times, and past the house once or twice, Tony finally spied Dobyns waddling into the backyard like some suburban fat cat. The man was wearing shorts, his bulk settling into a lounge chair next to a small built-in pool while he sipped tequila and puffed on a thick cigar. Now that he knew he’d found the right place Tony parked the van across the street and watched the house.

After twenty minutes Tony determined that the Chechens were probably somewhere else, and Dobyns was alone. Tony’s fists crushed the steering wheel. That just won’t do, he mused. I want everyone to be here for the party I have planned.

The data mining team had arrived and Nawaf Sanjore’s office was a high-traffic area. The noise was so thick Jack could not hear his cell phone when it rang, only felt its tremble.

“Bauer.”

“Jack? Jack. Is that you?” The voice was Frank Castalano’s. “You’re going to have to speak up, my ears still aren’t so good.”

Jack remembered the RPG hitting Castalano’s vehicle, knew the man had been lucky to walk away with only diminished hearing. “It’s me, Frank,” Jack loudly replied, eliciting stares. “How’s your partner?”

“What?”

“How’s Jerry Alder?”

“Still in surgery. His wife’s at the hospital now… What a mess.”

“How are you?”

“Cuts and bruises. The docs say my hearing will improve in a couple of days. Meanwhile, I’ve got the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral ringing in my head.” A pause. “Jack, about an hour ago we found a cell phone Hugh Vetri hid under some papers in his desk. Turns out he bought it with a fake ID just eight days ago—”

“Vetri must have thought he was being watched.

Wiretaps, maybe. Any sign of unauthorized surveillance?”

“Not yet. But we did find out that Vetri made three calls with that phone. All of them on the night of his murder, all to the same number — the office of Valerie Dodge, CEO of the Dodge Modeling Agency.”

The helicopter swooped low over the San Gabriels, skimming a section of thick forest until it located a particular stretch of deserted roadway that had once been part of Highway 39. The aircraft descended to the road’s cracked pavement in a cloud of dust, fallen leaves, and parched pine needles. The wheels had hardly touched down when a door opened and Nawaf Sanjore jumped out. Crouching to avoid the whirling blades, the architect hurried across the concrete to the narrow shoulder of the road.

Shielding his face from the aircraft’s hot blast, Nawaf watched the helicopter lift off and soar away, the sound of its beating blades quickly fading. With mounting trepidation, Nawaf Sanjore scanned the empty road and the thick curtain of foliage on either side. Wind rustled the trees. A raptor cried out in the distance. Surrounded by wilderness, he felt quite vulnerable. He nearly cried out when he heard the sound of rock scraping against rock. He turned toward the sound and saw what appeared to be a section of ground opening up. Revealed in the gap was a narrow set of concrete stairs leading underground.

Nawaf heard footsteps. A bearded man in the black robes of an imam climbed the stairs to greet him.

“Please follow me.”

Inside the tunnel, the air was cool and scented. The robed man led Nawaf down the long corridor, into an underground maze of natural caves that led ultimately to a huge chamber deep inside the mountain. The hollow in the center of the earth had been transformed into a kind of paradise. Recessed electric lighting illuminated the breezy chamber with the colors of a fairyland. Hidden speakers filled the space with the gentle sound of wind chimes. Nawaf Sanjore estimated the cave’s ceiling was seventy or eighty feet above his head. It dripped with delicate icicles of stone — stalactites bathed in a rainbow of shifting lights.

On one end of the massive cave, a tumble of chilled mountain water plunged over a rocky ledge, into a rippling pool with underwater lights that glowed phosphorescent blue. On the other side of the cave, perhaps three hundred yards away, a three-tiered glass and stone structure had been constructed against the cave wall. Lights gleamed behind glass walls, where Nawaf Sanjore saw luxurious rooms filled with modern furnishings. The uneven stone floor under his feet glistened with bits of quartz, sparkling granite, crystals shards embedded in the stone.

At each turn, a different aroma touched his senses — jasmine, rose, honeysuckle. The placid calm of the mystical location was broken only by the rustle of the imam’s robes as they passed through a stone garden of tall, serrated stalagmites sprouting out of the cave’s floor like bizarre cacti. Crossing a crystal bridge over a small stream, they entered a pathway to the house fashioned from inlaid black quartz illuminated from behind by buried lights.

The otherworldly beauty and aesthetic perfection of the underground lair awed the architect. As they approached the entrance to the structure, the doors opened with a whispered hiss.

The robed man halted. “Please go inside. Servants will minister to your needs. Hasan has not yet arrived, but he is expected shortly.”

5:30:02 P.M. PDT Terrence Alton Chamberlain Auditorium Los Angeles

Thirty minutes before the curtain rose for the Annual Silver Screen Awards, Teri could not even get to her seat. Dozens of people were bunched up in the lobby, crowding around the arched entrance to the auditorium, where a handful of ushers tried to deal with the mob.

Teri was about to snake her way to the front of the line when she heard a familiar voice. “Tereeee! Teri Bauer!”

“Nancy!”

The women embraced. “You look fantastic! What a great look for you,” Teri cried.

Nancy Colburn wore a bright red flapper dress, complete with layers of fringe. Her black hair was pressed, pre-Depression era style, and she wore a tiny hat. She’d gained a few pounds, but was happier than Teri had ever seen her.

“And aren’t you elegant,” cooed Nancy. “Is that Versace?”

Terri nodded. “Where is everyone? Why won’t they let us in?”

A male voice spoke up. “The Vice President’s wife and the First Lady of Russia’s coming through here, ma’am. She’s due any minute.”

Teri faced the police officer, a handsome, tanned Hispanic man with broad shoulders. She read the name under the badge. “Thanks for the heads up, Officer Besario.”

He smiled. “My pleasure, miss.”

“Over here, Teri. Come on!” Nancy called. She was standing with Chandra and Carla.

“Hey!” Teri cried.

She hugged her old colleagues. When they’d first worked together, Chandra was barely out of her teens, a gawky African-American garage animator who lived in oversized shirts and clunky glasses. Now she was a confident and successful filmmaker. The glasses were gone and the garage look was replaced with a svelte figure wrapped in blue-violet silk. But it was Carla who turned out to be the biggest surprise.

“Dennis tells me you’re engaged,” said Teri.

“And you can see why,” Carla said, rubbing her protruding belly. “Eight months and counting. Here’s the joke. Gary asked me to marry him three hours before the strip turned pink! Dennis said that means it’s true love.”

Teri laughed.

“Honestly,” said Carla. “I’m due to have this little bundle in seven days. I wouldn’t even be here except Gary insisted I come. Told me I’d worked on the movie, and I’d only have myself to blame if Dennis won a Silver Screen Award and I wasn’t here to share in the glory.”

“Speak of the devil. Where is the elusive Dennis Winthrop?” Teri asked, trying to hide her eagerness.

“He’s a producer. He gets to walk the red carpet,” said Nancy.

“You’re kidding?” Carla laughed. “I hope he’s wearing something besides those sweat pants of his. Otherwise Joan Rivers is going to tear him a new one.”

“Here come the VIPs,” said Chandra.

The woman watched as the First Lady of Russia and the Vice President’s wife entered the auditorium. Flanked by grave-faced men wearing dark suits and headsets, the ladies swept through the crowd, which parted like a body of water in a Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic.

Teri noted how much older the Vice President’s wife looked in person, and how tall Russia’s First Lady was — the tallest woman ever accepted to the Bolshoi, she had read somewhere. The dazzling women and their entourage were whisked through the archway and gone in a flash.

A moment later, a brace of uniformed ushers appeared in the doorway and began escorting singles and groups to their assigned seats inside the auditorium.

“God,” groaned Carla. “I hope they seat me near a bathroom. This close to the big day, I have to go all the time.”

“You know award shows,” said Nancy. “If this thing goes into double overtime, you might just have your baby right here.”

Alerted to their arrival, Ryan Chappelle intercepted Milo Pressman at the security desk. Flanked by four CTU agents who’d met them at the airport, the fugitives were hustled into a waiting area. On the way, a gurney rolled by carrying the shrouded figure of Fay Hubley to CTU’s morgue.

“Where’s Tony?” Chappelle demanded.

Milo cleared his throat. “He’s still down in Tijuana, following up some leads on Hasan.”

“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. Tony’s down there playing John Wayne.” Ryan eyed the gurney rumbling down the corridor. “What he’s doing is fine with me, as long as I don’t have to read about it in the morning papers — or get a call from the State Department.”

“I’m sure he’ll be discreet,” said Milo.

Ryan’s gaze shifted to the newcomers. “Introduce me to your friends.”

“This is Richard Lesser—”

“You’re Chappelle, right? Milo’s told me all about you.” Lesser offered his hand. Ryan ignored it.

“This is Cole Keegan, Lesser’s bodyguard. And this young woman is Brandy—”

The woman stepped forward, offered Ryan her hand. “Pleased to meet you Regional Director Chappelle. My name is Special Agent Renata Hernandez, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I was on an undercover mission in cooperation with the Mexican government, investigating a string of kidnappings of young girls in Texas and California, when I met up with your agents.”

Milo blinked in shock. Cole Keegan’s jaw went slack. Even Richard Lesser’s typically confident demeanor appeared stunned by the revelation.

“I told my contact down in Mexico that I’d be crossing the border this afternoon. I’ll like to contact my superiors in the San Diego office,” the woman continued.

“Of course,” said Chappelle, examining her identification.

“My compliments on the quality of your personnel,” Agent Hernandez continued. “Though obviously not a field agent, Mr. Pressman did what he had to do to rescue his colleague. I could not have acted alone and I frankly didn’t trust Cole Keegan here to get the job done.”

“Hey! That’s cold,” Cole whined.

“Thank you, Special Agent Hernandez. You can contact the FBI from my office.” Ryan faced the guards. “Take Mr. Keegan to the interrogation room for debriefing. He’s to remain here incognito until further notice.”

“Damn! That just ain’t right!” cried Cole.

“No, Mr. Keegan, but that’s how it is.” Ryan faced Milo next. “A Threat Clock is already running. I want you to take Mr. Lesser down to Jamey Farrell’s work station. She and Doris Soo Min are eager to ask this man some questions about his Trojan horse.”

Lesser smirked. “Government workers?” he muttered with disdain. “I’m not surprised they’re baffled.”

“We’re also eager to get a first-hand look at the second virus in your possession. We would appreciate it if you would help us find a cure for it before it is launched.”

Lesser nodded, smirk still in place. “Consider it done…as part of my immunity agreement, of course.”

Ryan matched Richard Lesser’s wry expression with one of his own. “We’ll talk terms later, Mr. Lesser…Or, if you prefer, I can turn you over to the CTU Behavioral Unit for extensive interrogation. You’ll find their methods are quite effective — for ‘government workers.’ ”