24 Declassified: Head Shot (2009) (2 page)

Jack said, “The background I got on Prewitt was that he and his group were nonviolent.”

Neal said, “So it seemed. He took pains to put up a legitimate front. He took a fall on a tax evasion rap about ten years back and served eighteen months in a Federal pen. Since then he’s been careful to be seen obeying the letter of the law.”

“Until now.”

“Cults like the Zealots are always basically unstable. That’s because they’re personality cults and the dominant personality is usually cracked.”

“Was Prewitt cracked? He seemed more tightly wrapped than most cult leaders, at least publicly.”

“Maybe he was wrapped so tightly that he just plain burst. Or maybe having two hundred of the richest folks in America gathered less than thirty miles away finally pushed him over the edge.”

Jack said, “It never has before. The compound’s been here during the last four or five annual Round Table meetings without incident.”

Neal barked a laugh. “Hell, the reason Prewitt set up here was just so he could irritate the Sky Mount crowd. If he could have moved any closer to them than this, he would have, but the Round Table Trust has all the land locked up for miles around.

“Anyway, there’s a first time for everything. Especially with the economy in the toilet the way it is now. Maybe Prewitt saw that as a sign his time has come.”

Neal halted the pickup outside a concrete blockhouse with a steep-sided roof. He got out, taking a flashlight with him. Jack followed. The concrete cube had a solid, brown- painted metal door and narrow, horizontal slitted windows set high in the walls.

The door was locked. Neal said, “Can you hold this flash for a second?”

Jack said, “Sure,” taking the flashlight and pointing the beam at the doorknob.

Neal held the key ring in the light, flipping through it before finding a likely looking candidate.
He tried it on the keyhole in
the doorknob but it wouldn’t fi
t. After a couple more tries, he found a key that did, unlocked the door, and opened it.

A heavy gasoline smell came wafting out. Jack and Neal stepped away from the open doorway, letting the reeking fumes dissipate. The dark interior was dominated by heavy, hulking forms. Jack shone the flashlight beam inside, revealing a generator in the foreground whose base was bolted to the cement floor. Gasoline drums were stacked against a rear wall.

Neal said, “Gas-powered generator. We had to leave it locked up so nobody came back later to, er, liberate the fuel. Gas prices being what they are nowadays, even some of our local lawmen might be led into temptation.”

Jack had nothing to say to that.
He held the flash-light while Neal worked over the generator, trying to start it up.
The machine sputtered, coughed, choked, spasmed, raced, shuddered like it was going to shake itself to pieces, and finally caught, turning over steadily. The racket was tremendous, sounding like the biggest leaf blower in all creation. The blockhouse filled with fumes, noxious blue-gray clouds that caused Jack and Neal to beat a hasty retreat outside.

Lights started coming on all over the compound. They winked on inside and outside the buildings, beginning as dim, fuzzy glowing patches and brightening as the generator continued supplying a steady source of power. Some of the buildings had exterior-mounted floodlights that came on. Some had interior lights that came on, too. Other structures remained dark inside and out. The lights did little to dispel the darkness that hung over the site. They were islands of brightness on a lake of black shadow.

The inside of the generator room remained dark. Neal reached inside the doorframe, groping around for the light switch. He flicked it on, a ceiling lamp filling the space with burnished brightness. The generator continued yammering noisily.

This was Neal’s turf, and protocol dictated that he be the one to communicate directly with Central. He went to the pickup and spoke into the hand mic. “Central, this is Unit Three. Over.”

Each mobile unit operating in the area had its own designation; Neal’s was Unit Three. The comm system worked on a secure tight-beam band whose frequency was in constant automatic change to thwart electronic eavesdroppers. The reply came back: “Unit Three, this is Central. Over.”

Neal said, “We have arrived at Red Notch and will be going temporarily out of service. I’ll be switching to handset mode. Over.”

“Roger that, Three. Over.”

Neal signed off, going over and out. He switched off the dashboard- mounted communicator, its green “on” light fading to darkness. He switched on his portable handset, running a comm check with Central to make sure it was working properly. It checked out okay. Neal fitted the handset into a holster fastened to his belt.

Jack was equipped with a similar handset, which was tuned to Central’s frequency. He ran a comm check on it, too, as a routine safeguard. It was functioning properly.

Neal killed the pickup’s headlights, a zone of darkness springing into being where the twin beams had been. He turned off the engine, dropping the keys into his right front pants pocket.

Jack gave the scene a quick visual scan. Lighting the compound didn’t help much. It added to the air of unreality, making it look like a stage set. Shadows were weird, elongated.

He found himself reaching under his jacket, adjusting the way his gun sat in the speed- rig shoulder harness under his left arm so that it settled the way he liked it.

Neal caught what he was doing and grinned. “Kind of gets to you, doesn’t it?”

Jack said feelingly, “It looks like a prison camp on Mars.”

Neal said, “Come on, I’ll give you the grand tour.”

Jack had been in his office in CTU’s Los Angeles Domestic Unit headquarters twelve hours earlier on Thursday afternoon, meeting with Ryan Chappelle. Jack was the SAC, the Special Agent in Charge of the site. Chappelle was the Regional Division Director. That made him Jack’s boss.

Jack regarded a meeting with Chappelle as something akin to having root canal work done. It was sure to be not only unpleasant but costly. The fact that Chappelle had come there to see Jack rather than summoning Jack to see him was a portent that Chappelle meant to hand him the dirty end of a stick. What remained to be seen was the size and shape of the problem he was about to dump in Jack’s lap.

Chappelle began by saying, “What do you know about put options?”

Jack said, “Not much, except that it’s the kind of tricky financial manipulation that casual investors like me would do well to steer clear of.”

It was typical of Chappelle to come at him sideways, rather than just coming out and saying what it was he wanted. Jack sat back and decided to let Chappelle carry the conversational ball. It was an old interrogator’s trick. You find out more when you let the subject tell the story in his own way, while at the same time committing yourself to nothing.

Chappelle looked mildly irked. “I didn’t come down here to rope you into some stock deal. This is official CTU business and it could be an important lead.”

Jack was all open- faced earnestness. “I know. You’re a busy man who doesn’t waste time on nonessentials. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t important.”

Chappelle nodded, accepting the other’s remark at face value. He went back into his pitch. “I’ll keep it simple.
A put option is a financial instrument for short selling.
Essentially, the investor is betting that certain stocks are about to experience a sudden drop in price. An extreme drop in price. By selling those stocks in advance of the drop, selling short as the term goes, the investor stands to make a steep
profi
t—a killing.

“That’s as long as the investor has guessed right, of course. In most cases, no guesswork is involved. The short seller is acting on the basis of inside information. Which is illegal, but easily gotten around by anybody who knows their stuff.”

Jack nodded to show Chappelle he was with him so far.
Chappelle continued, “The unit of fiscal analysts which I set up has detected a disturbing pattern of recent shorting on the market.”

There was no denying that Chappelle was a wizard with numbers. Today’s intelligence professionals tend to specialize in one of two areas: HUMINT and ELINT. HUMINT stands for human intelligence; that is, data collected by human sources.
This is the side of the trade that concentrates on cultivating informants with access to data desired in a targeted area, including but not restricted to military personnel, government officials, scientists, technicians, diplomats and consular attachés, and members of other intelligence services—usually, but not always, citizens of other countries.
Such informants may be motivated by altruism, greed, or extortionary pressures, depending on the individual. It is, in the words of former CIA counter- intelligence expert James J. Angleton, a “wilderness of mirrors,” a shadowy world of spies and counterspies, defectors and double agents.

ELINT—electronic intelligence—is the other side of the coin. Here murky human ambiguities are replaced by hard data acquired by hardware. This is the arena of spy satellites, sonar and radar networks, signal traffic, telephone intercepts, and the myriad communications of cyber sphere and Internet. A vast array of electronic eavesdropping devices are deployed globally to monitor transactions in private and public sectors, vacuuming up mountains of data daily in all areas where information is a commodity. It is a realm of technicians, collectors, analysts, and data miners.

HUMINT and ELINT, the twin-chambered heart of the modern espionage apparatus. A built-in tension exists between practitioners of the two disciplines. The HUMINT crowd tends to view the other half as board operators and number crunchers, overly reliant on technology
and tone- deaf to the human element. The ELINT crowd too often regard their counterparts as outdated relics of a bygone cloak and dagger age, trapped in a confusing labyrinth of deceitful and unreliable informants. Yet neither branch can operate successfully without the other.

Jack Bauer was an adept of HUMINT, a superb field operative who was equally skilled at the command level.

Ryan Chappelle was a disciple of ELINT, a technocrat supreme with a gift for selecting out significant data from signal noise, separating the wheat from the chaff.
One human element he had not neglected, though, was the art of office politics and bureaucratic infighting.
He’d risen far fast, and it was no secret that his goal was to win a berth on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters at Langley, the coveted precinct of the agency’s intelligence mandarins.

The Fiduciary Special Investigative Unit was a pet project of Chappelle’s.
The SIU was a team of specialists who monitored the financial sphere, tracking the fluctuations of the global marketplace to detect patterns, profitable motives, and forecast actions of private institutions and foreign governments.
It had proved to be particularly useful in charting and deciphering the clandestine money movements and funding of both independent and state-sponsored terrorist groups.

Chappelle went on, “In the last few weeks, several million dollars’ worth of put options have been bought in the marketplace. The stocks selected were all those of leading American companies and corporations. We’re not talking about any failing, fly-
by-night
market dogs; these are all solid blue-chippers. Media conglomerates, software titans, genetic engineering, pharmaceuticals, even energy- related combines. Representative of the healthiest sector of the national economy—such as it is nowadays.
These stocks have been bucking global recessionary trends by continuing to turn a profit.”

Jack said, “But somebody is betting that they’ll take a fall. Betting big.”

Chappelle said, “Exactly.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know; not yet, that is. Our mystery shorter has taken great pains to disguise himself. He’s covered his tracks by using a variety of shell companies, dummy corporations, and similar
cut-outs
. It’s like an onion.
Peel back one layer and you fi
nd another, peel away that and there’s another underneath. He’s also been careful to spread out his operations in a variety of exchanges, foreign and domestic.”

Chappelle’s expression was like a clenched fist as he added, “But we’ll get him.
We’ll peel back that onion to get to the heart of it, no matter how clever he thinks he is. It’s just a matter of time.”

Jack said, “Where do I come in?”

Chappelle’s features relaxed, a crafty look coming into his eyes. “The catch is we may be running out of time. One pattern stands out: all of the stocks our mystery man is betting against are those of companies whose owners and CEOs are attending the Sky Mount Round Table.”

The Round Table was a prestigious annual conclave of the movers and shakers of the U.S. economy. It was held each July in the luxurious and scenic splendor of the Sky Mount estate in the Colorado Rockies. Its invited guests were the elite of American business, members not of the Fortune 500 but of the Fortune 50. They occupied the apex of the national socioeconomic pyramid. It was a domestic counterpart to the periodic Bilderberger meetings of Europe’s corporate masters.

Jack’s bailiwick was the Los Angeles area, but he and his outfit had been much concerned lately with the imminent Sky Mount gathering. CTU/L.A. had increased its surveillance of local hate groups, militant foreign and domestic anti- American organizations, and the far wider pool of their sympathizers, fellow travelers, and enablers, monitoring them for any credible evidence of a plot aimed at this year’s Round Table. Two hundred leading lights of big business gathered in one spot at the same time presented an attractive target to the nation’s enemies. Or to any
crackpot or group of crackpots who happened to hate rich people and wanted to strike a blow at the corporate empire.