24 Declassified: 03 - Trojan Horse (21 page)

“It was the youth, Ibn al Farad,” said the architect. “He was weak and he was foolish. Most likely it was the Saudi who gave us away. It is good that Hasan moved the evacuation schedule forward. He must have sensed the danger.”

Saaid rubbed his hands. “The American intelligence agents are on their way up right now. What are you going to do about them?”

“I’m nearly finished here. These men”—Nawaf gestured to his assistants—“will purge the computers. Go to my room, take the suitcase and my PDA and go to the roof. Tell the pilot to start the engines. I will join you momentarily.”

“You must hurry! The Americans are coming—”

Sanjore raised a manicured hand. “Do not fear, my friend. We will leave this place together. Yasmina will deal with the Americans.”

The view through the glass elevators was spectacular, but Jack hardly noticed. He kept his eyes on the quickly ascending digital numbers above the door. The car began to slow on the thirty-first floor. On the thirty-fifth, the burnished steel doors opened.

The woman who greeted Jack and Nina was so petite Jack thought for a moment she was a child. A second glance revealed her age to be at least twenty-five. Slim, with a dark complexion and wide, black eyes, her tiny, perfectly proportioned frame was wrapped in a tight, sky-blue sari. Her small feet were encased in jeweled slippers. Her dark hair, piled high on her head and held in place with ornamental silver daggers, added inches to her height.

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Still, she barely topped four feet. Jack doubted the young woman weighed more than ninety pounds.

Graciously, she dipped her head. “Shall I announce you? My name is Yasmina.” Her smile was warm, her voice light and melodious as wind chimes.

“I’m Special Agent Jack Bauer of the Counter Ter
rorist Unit. This is Nina Myers, my partner.”

“Mr. Sanjore is eager to help you if he can. Please follow me.”

The woman turned and walked in short, measured steps down the carpeted corridor.

After he spoke with the helicopter pilot, Saaid realized he had not retrieved his master’s things from the master bedroom, as commanded. He hurried down the spiral staircase, terrified he’d meet armed American agents around the next corner—or Nawaf, who would realize Saaid’s mistake.

He reached his master’s bedroom, found the Louis Vuitton suitcase on the bed, the PDA on the dresser. Relieved the task was so simple, he grabbed the items and hurried out the door. In the hallway he heard voices, froze.

The Americans.

Saaid stared down the corridor. Someone approached, their shadows dancing on the walls. He had to get out of there! Heart racing, he hurried across the hall to the spiral staircase. On the way he crashed the suitcase against a stone pedestal, tumbling a pre-Columbian sculpture onto the concrete floor. The shattering sound was like an explosion.

Jack and Nina were walking down a hallway when they heard the noise. Jack turned his head toward the sound, but Nina Myers faced the woman Yasmina— and that was what saved them.

As Yasmina whirled, her dainty hand plucked the ornamental daggers out of her thick hair. She hurled one at Jack’s exposed throat.

“Jack!” Nina cried, pushing him against the wall. Her movement put Nina in the path of the dagger. The silver blade sank deep into her shoulder, and Nina cried out.

In an agile and graceful movement, Yasmina spun through the air and landed, legs braced, in front of Jack while he was still regaining his balance. A second dagger slashed his forearm. But the blade caught the bandages already under his shirt, and with a reflexive strike from Jack, the weapon flew out of the woman’s hands.

A heavyset man burst past them and down the hall, barreling like an out-of-control train toward a spiral staircase. He clutched a suitcase in one hand, what looked like a silver revolver in the other. For a split-second, Jack thought it might be Nawaf Sanjore.

Yasmina took advantage of the momentary distraction, aimed a sharp kick at Jack’s knee, slammed his jaw with the palm of her hand, then reached for another pair of daggers secreted in her clothing. She pulled both blades, poised to impale Jack, when a sliver dagger plunged into one side of her throat and ripped out the other. A fountain of blood gushed as Nina tugged the weapon free, cutting through veins, arteries and cartilage.

Yasmina lurched forward, eye glazed, red lips curled back. The daggers dropped from her hands. Then her head lolled backward and she pitched forward.

At the end of the corridor, the heavy man thundered up the spiral staircase. Jack’s head swiveled wildly. “Nina are you all right?”

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Clutching her wounded shoulder, Nina stepped over Yasmina’s corpse. “I’ll be okay, but you’ve got to stop him.”

Jack was up and running for the stairs before she’d finished her sentence. He grasped the handrail with one hand, drew the Tactical with the other. Before he reached the top he thumbed the safety off. The stairs led to a narrow catwalk and a steel door. He slammed his shoulder against it, and pushed it open. Dust and hot wind battered him as a helicopter rose from the flat roof, twisted in the air and soared away.

Jack ran across the roof, aiming his Tactical at the fleeing chopper. He almost squeezed the trigger when he saw the heavyset man. The man was poised on the edge of the roof, the Louis Vuitton suitcase sitting be
side him, as he watched the helicopter fade into the bright horizon.

“Do not move!” Jack commanded. “Step away from the edge of the building and turn around.”

The man raised his hands in surrender, but he did not face Jack.

“Step back and turn around!” Jack repeated. In the large man’s hand, he saw the object that he’d thought was a silver revolver. It was actually a PDA, an item that might have belonged to Nawaf Sanjore. Jack knew he had to get it.

“Face me!” Jack commanded, moving forward.

At the sound of Jack’s approaching footsteps, the man lowered his arms, then jumped off the edge of the high-rise.

“
Allah Akbar
!”

The diminishing volume of the suicidal scream reached Jack’s ears as the big man disappeared from view.

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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLAC
E
BETWEEN THE HOURS OF
5 P.M. AND 6 P.M.
PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME

5:01:55
P
.
M
. PDT Rossum Tower Century City

Jack returned to the corridor where the fatal con
frontation 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

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over a computer keyboard. She had dressed her shoul
der 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.

5:07:45
P
.
M
. PDT Terrence Alton Chamberlain Auditorium Los Angeles

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

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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 deteriorat
ing 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.”

5:13:45
P
.
M
. PDT Terrence Alton Chamberlain Auditorium Los Angeles

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

The words of the Americans were faint. Softer still

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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 air
tight. 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.