24 Veto Power (20 page)

Jack walked up the cracked blacktop driveway to a green door splattered with yellow paint and knocked.

“Hola?”
someone yelled from behind the door.

Jack knocked again without saying anything. To the right of the door was a window, again with heavy curtains on the inside. Jack pressed himself against the door just as that curtain was drawn back. Someone was trying to see who was knocking. Jack was also careful to duck below the little peephole in the door front. But he knocked again.

The door opened to the length of the guard chain and someone whined, “Who’s fucking with me?”

Jack drove his shoulder into the door, his weight snapping the chain. The man inside stumbled backward. He slipped inside and closed the door behind him.

The room inside was the complete opposite of the building’s exterior. It was painted cool blue, and one whole wall was devoted to a graffiti-style painting of zoot suiters and tattooed esses in Ray-Bans and plaid flannel shirts. The carpet was plush gray and the furniture was leather. Ranchero music tripped out of unseen speakers and a fifty-inch plasma screen was broadcasting “Sports Center.”

“What the fuck—?” the man on the floor said.

He looked like the mug shot. He was small and wiry, somewhere between twenty and forty, with a pathetically thin mustache, pockmarked skin, and short, dark hair. He picked himself up and puffed out his chest, but he didn’t advance on Jack.

“What you doing?” he challenged. “You know who I am?”

Jack nodded. “You’re Julio Juarez. You’re a two-bit coyote who makes a living smuggling illegals over the border at San Diego and sometimes up through the desert in Arizona.”

Julio scowled at Jack. His face seemed set into a permanent glare, with one side of his mouth drooping lower than the other. The eye on that side also looked eternally tired. “Yeah, that’s me. I got friends in MS13, bitch, so unless you want you and your family to end up in someone’s trash can, get the fuck out.”

Jack recognized MS-13 from CTU’s daily threat assessments. It was a street gang that had started in El Salvador and quickly spread to the United States. They were active in California and Maryland and Virginia. The situation had gotten so bad that those three states had formed special task forces to deal with them. The fact that Julio was connected to MS-13, and MS-13 was active near the U.S. capital, bothered Jack somehow, but he couldn’t figure it out at the moment.

“Relax, Julio,” Jack said. “I’m just here to ask you a couple of questions. I’m a Federal agent, and I have a lot bigger problems to deal with than a chickenshit like you. You answer my questions, I leave, and you get to go about your business.”

Julio’s weak eye drooped even farther. “Okay, ask your question.”

Jack nodded. “First, I want to know if you’ve ever smuggled anyone—”

He didn’t finish the question, because Julio Juarez kicked him hard in the groin. He moved fast for a man with a droopy eye, and the kick caught Jack almost square. He felt his midsection explode and the air went out of him. The edges of the room turned black for a moment, and Jack barely saw Julio bolt down the hallway. Ignoring the pain, Jack sprinted after him.

1:40
P
.
M
. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Ryan Chappelle sat in Kelly Sharpton’s office, thinking of ways to distance himself from Jack Bauer’s blundering activities. He had a promising career ahead of him, but unfortunately he’d been linked with that heavy-handed ex-soldier who thought the only way to deal with a wall was to knock it down. Chappelle preferred to build a door.

His phone rang. “Chappelle,” he said.

“Chappelle, this is Walsh,” said Walsh from Washington, D.C. “What the fuck is going on?”

“I’m sorry?” Ryan looked around as though the problem might be right there in the room with him. “What?”

“It’s all over the news! Who leaked it?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t—”

“Turn on your news, then figure out who leaked this story!” Walsh slammed the phone down.

There was a television in Sharpton’s office. Ryan searched for the remote, found it on top of the television itself, and fired it up. He flipped on CNN. The main story was something about an earthquake in Tunisia, but the running banner told Chappelle what he needed to know: “Intelligence officials acknowledge credible threat to President Barnes. Sources suggest foreign terrorists on U.S. soil.”

Chappelle felt the blood rise up into his cheeks. It hadn’t been an hour, and the story was already in the press.

1:45
P
.
M
. PST Boyle Heights

Julio Juarez had gone out the back door and over the fence. Jack followed, nearly vomiting as his gut and groin bumped against the fence top. He made it over and sprinted down a dusty alley after the coyote.

His quarry turned left at the street, and Jack rounded the corner twenty feet behind him. He slammed into an old lady and spun around her without apologizing, trying not to lose sight of Julio. The wiry little smuggler ran two blocks down, dodging the cars. Jack gained on him slowly—Julio might have been quick with a kick, but he wasn’t all that fast. Jack gained enough ground to see Julio duck into a yellow adobe building with faded writing across the top.

Jack entered the doorway right behind him, racing out of the sunlight into a cool, dark room, very wide and scattered with small tables and benches. There was a stage at the far end of the room, over which hung a banner that read “Viva Ranchero!”

Julio was right in front of him. Jack dived, catching the coyote by the backs of the knees and bringing him down in a tumble of chairs. Julio squealed and struggled. Jack caught him by the waist and rolled him backward, slamming Julio’s head into the tiled floor. Some of the life went out of him then. Jack grabbed him by the hair and lifted his head off the tile, drawing his gun and putting it to the coyote’s temple.

At the same time, he heard four or five hammers click back. Jack looked up. Five gang-bangers stood around him, their faces turned down in angry frowns and their weapons all pointed at him.

“What the fuck, esse?” one of them, a heavyset man with a thick black mustache said.

“Cesar, shoot this puta!” Julio squealed. “He’s a cop!”

Jack rolled onto his back, pulling Julio on top of him and keeping the muzzle of his Sig pressed against the little man’s temple. He didn’t have to say anything. The big man, Cesar, was smart enough to understand.

“You got nowhere to go, white boy,” he said.

“They kill you!” Julio said, trembling.

“But I’ll kill you first, Julio,” Jack replied.

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 PLAC
E
BETWEEN THE HOURS OF
2 P.M. AND 3 P.M.
PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

2:00
P
.
M
. PST Boyle Heights

“Listen, I don’t want to arrest him. I don’t care about any of you. All I want is to ask Julio a couple of ques
tions and I’m gone.”

“We don’t give a shit what you want,” one of the other gang-bangers said.

“I bet Julio wants to live, though,” Jack said. His heart was racing, but he kept his voice calm.

The second gang-banger said, “I don’t give a fuck about Julio. This white boy comes into our place with a gun? He’s dead, esse!”

But Cesar shook his head. “No,
tio
, we like Julio.

He brings my people up when I need him to. I don’t want to lose him.”

Jack slid out from under Julio, careful to keep his finger on the trigger and the muzzle on Julio. He stood slowly. Some of the gang-bangers clearly wanted to fire, but Cesar waved them off.

“Listen, Julio, this is all I want from you,” Jack said, moving to keep the little man between him and the other guns. “I saw your picture on a driver’s license by the name of Richard Brighton.”

“Never heard of no Brighton,” Julio said, his eyes straining to their corners to see him. “But if he looks like me he must be a handsome bitch.”

“I’m thinking you helped some people cross the border a while ago. Maybe about six months ago, maybe a little longer. Maybe you helped some men cross over, guys who weren’t Latino. Jog your memory?”

Julio hesitated. “Yeah, I did that. But it wasn’t no six months ago. Maybe two.”

“How many guys? What’d they look like?” Jack was inching backward toward the door. The gangbangers sauntered after him.

Julio said, “Eight, I think.” Jack pushed the muzzle into his cheek. “Eight, eight! They were Arabs or something like that.”

Jack stifled a desire to blow Julio’s head off right there. The U.S. spent billions of dollars to protect itself from enemies that wanted to tear it apart, rooting out terrorist training camps in Pakistan, buying off weapons-grade uranium in the former Soviet bloc, and spending countless man-hours snatching cell phone calls and radio signals out of the airwaves using the most complex technology on the planet. And here was Julio from Boyle Heights, tearing their carefully constructed fences into shreds with a beat-up van and a path through the mountains.

“Where’d you take them?”

“Shit, I don’t rem—okay! I dropped them off downtown. At a building on Flower. One of those new renovations with the apartments on top. I don’t remember which one. But the guy who paid me was named Farrah.”

“Thanks, Julio,” Jack said, reaching the door. “You’re a real patriot.”

He shoved Julio back toward the gang-bangers and bolted out into the street.

2:13
P
.
M
. PST Westwood

Kelly kept sobbing until the Demorol kicked in. The paramedics had arrived fifteen minutes after his plea for help, along with Nina Myers and several other CTU agents. By the time they treated him the pain had made him delirious, and all he could imagine was hot, burning coals entering his bloodstream and coursing through his body.

The medics poured some kind of powder on his hands to snuff out the burning material. Then they washed his hands with some kind of antiseptic that stung like hell, and finally they wrapped his burned hands and shot him full of Demorol.

Glenn Schneider had arrived with the CTU team. He was bald, with wide shoulders and a wide belly, too. Spaced out on pain and painkillers, Kelly imagined him to be a human shield against bombs.

The bomb squad leader looked at Kelly’s bandaged hands and said, “Whoever did this is a real bastard. That’s homemade napalm they used. I guess they didn’t want anyone messing with their bomb. You know, if you’d tried to pick it up instead of kicking it, it would have burned your hands and your face right off. It’s also lucky it didn’t hit the Solidox.”

“Oh, I feel lucky,” Kelly said dryly.

Nina Myers sat down beside him. “Nice work,” she said. “You know they found more of this Solidox planted in the heating system in the hallway. This bomb would have taken out this whole floor, and probably started a fire that would have killed more people.”

“We find anything here?” Kelly asked. He didn’t mind saving lives, but he was hoping his burned hands had helped to advance their case.

“One thing,” Nina said. “Bits of wire. Looks like someone tried to clean it all up, but they were in a hurry—”

“Yeah, well, they needed time to leave me that present.”

“Right. Anyway, they missed some. The wire is just wire, same as you’d use in a computer or stereo. But the insulation is weird, and there are a couple of connectors that are also weird. We’re taking it back to study.”

“Bits of wire,” Kelly said grimly, staring at his bandaged hands. “Well, I guess it’s better than bits of me.”

2:29
P
.
M
. PST Westin St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco

President Barnes never got angry in public, and he rarely lost his temper even in private. His self-control had nothing to do with temperament and everything to do with self-preservation; when Harry Barnes lost it, he lost it completely. The Presidential Suite at the Westin bore witness to that fact.

Barnes began with the telephone on his desk and progressed to the wooden guest chair. Those two objects and several others struck the desk with force, courtesy of Harry Barnes’s temper.

“What the goddamned hell does that asshole think he’s doing!” Barnes raged.

Mitch Rasher weathered the storm better than the shattered chair (it helped that he was neither the object nor its target). He stood to one side, serene as a stone, letting the storm blow over him.

“Who leaked the fucking story!” Barnes demanded.

“Well, offhand, I’d say it was him,” Rasher said.

“He wouldn’t dare!” the President said. His initial rage was passing. He felt it drain away, emptied into the sacrificial pieces of furniture. Everyone thought Mitch Rasher’s greatest contribution to his presidency was his political strategy. It wasn’t; it was this—this ability to manage Barnes as he passed through these infrequent but dangerous rages.

Barnes straightened his tie and smoothed his dress shirt. He picked up the remote and rewound, replaying comments from Attorney General Quincy at a press conference. “I assure you that the FBI and other agencies are investigating these threats and taking them quite seriously. I would like to point out that I have spoken directly with agents in charge of this investigation and I was told in no uncertain terms that these potential terrorists were under surveillance six months ago. However, the case was dropped due to an inability to gather evidence. If the NAP Act had been enacted back then, I’m sure these terrorists would have been apprehended long before they became a threat.”

Barnes took one more deep breath. Drained, calm, he returned to the stone-faced deal maker everyone outside that room believed him to be. “He’s using a terrorist threat against me to scoop up a little more power.”