Deadline E-Book

James Swallow

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The time is 5:00 P.M. One hour ago, federal agent Jack Bauer was declared a fugitive. If he wants to survive, he must get out of the country, and he doesn't have much time. With his former colleagues in the Counter Terrorist Unit now dead, under arrest, or shut down, Jack has no resources to call upon, no backup, and nowhere to go—only his determination can drive him on. One thing remains clear to him: the promise he made to his daughter, Kim. Jack vows that he will see Kim one last time to tell her he loves her . . . before he drops off the radar forever. Meanwhile, a hastily assembled FBI task force sets out to track down and capture Jack, even as a covert operations unit of Russia's SVR sets out to do the same—only the remit of the Russians is to "kill on sight." As the clock runs down, Jack must face old friends and past enemies in a desperate race to stay one step ahead of the hunters, leaving them with a grim warning— Stay out of my way, and I'll be gone within twenty-four hours. You'll never see me again. Come after me . . . and you'll regret it.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

24 Hours Earlier

01

02

03

04

05

06

07

08

09

10

11

12

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14

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24

About the Author

Acknowledgments

24: DEADLINE Print edition ISBN: 9781783296439 E-book edition ISBN: 9781783296446

Published by Titan Books A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd 144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: August 2014 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

24 ™ & © 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

www.titanbooks.com

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

PROLOGUE

He was barely through the door when they came at him.

Two men, one from either side, bolting out from behind the cover of the supply containers and storage racks. In the dimness of the basement, he couldn’t make out much detail, just an impression of muscle mass and speed before the blows were raining down on him.

A hard strike from a stubby baton cracked over his forearm and the force of it set his nerves alight. He dropped his gun, the weapon falling from his numbed fingers, and grunted with the pain. His other arm came up to parry a haymaker punch from the second assailant.

Turning in place before either man could lay their hands on him again, he leaned in with a follow-through from the parry and planted his elbow in the chest of the man coming from the left. He felt a rib snap under the impact and heard the assailant gasp in agony.

The room was lit by an industrial lamp, stark white light spilling out from behind an oval cage, casting the space around them with deep shadows. It was more than enough for him to fight with.

Keeping up the momentum, he let the man with the busted rib stagger back and pressed his attack on the one with the baton, who swung it up high for a second blow. Turning his emptied hand into a talon, he shot forward and grabbed at the first attacker’s throat, hitting hard enough to blow the breath out of the man’s chest. Stumbling, the two of them fell into the pool of light from the overhead bulb, and he kept up the pressure, punching over and over—short, stabbing strikes that landed in the softer tissues of the man’s throat.

He was aware of movement behind him. The one with the cracked rib was coming back into the fray, and he turned to put up a defense—but he was slow. Too slow.

All the fatigue of the past hours, all the endless strain, it was blunting his edge, and little by little, it robbed him of the precious seconds he needed.

Too slow. The other assailant kicked him hard in the back of the knee and his leg folded underneath him with a jolt of pain. He stumbled and went down toward the dusty concrete floor, palms smacking the ground as he arrested his fall.

He heard someone else call out, but the words were muffled and indistinct, the sound distorted through a fog left behind by the punches he’d taken to the head. Only the tone was clear—a command, sharp and hard. Someone angry about him, somebody who wanted him dealt with in short order.

A tiny flash of blue lightning glittered in the hand of one of the men, and before he could deflect it, the metal contacts of a Taser pressed into his chest and the device discharged.

Thousands of volts of electricity surged through his flesh and he howled. His muscles locked rigid, and for long, agonizing seconds it felt as if he had been dipped in fire. Then he was on his back, shivering with the aftershock. He smelled the faint odors of burnt cotton and seared meat.

They dragged him up by his elbows and dumped him in a careworn plastic chair. He lay there like a puppet with its strings severed, panting, trying to gather himself.

The man he had hit in the throat eyed him murderously, wheezing and coughing out blood, rubbing at his neck. The other assailant stooped to gather up his pistol from where it had fallen, moving with exaggerated slowness thanks to his new injury.

He became aware of others in the room. A larger, tanned man with a boxer’s craggy face and thinning white hair stood at the edge of the shadows, hands crossed in front of him with the long shape of a silenced pistol in his grip. Another figure—this one less distinct—was farther out from the pool of light, framed by the glow of a cell phone display. A woman, he realized, the cold blue of the telephone screen casting the planes of her face like an ice sculpture.

“Secure him,” said the big man, gesturing with the gun. The two thugs came in and used zip-ties to tether his wrists to the arms of the plastic chair.

He shifted slightly in the seat, thinking about angles of attack. It came to him automatically, instinctively. He began to build a plan about getting the man’s pistol, evaluating who was the greatest threat in the room, deciding which of them he would kill first.

“It amazes me you are still alive.” The big man spoke directly to him for the first time. There was a distinctive Eastern European accent beneath the words; Georgian, most likely. “You should be dead a dozen times over.”

He gave a weary nod. “It’s been said.” Carefully, he tested the play in the zip-ties. There was a small degree of freedom there, but not much.

“No longer,” said the Georgian. “Today, the clock runs out for you.” He cocked his head, examining his new prisoner as if considering a puzzle of some kind. “I know all about you. You have made so very many enemies, my friend. I wonder how many men will sleep sounder tonight, after this is done?”

He said nothing, waiting for the right moment.

The other man went on, disappointed that he hadn’t gotten the response he wanted. “Yes. It will be a sort of kindness, I think. Look at you. Like a war dog, long in the tooth and too far off your leash to be controlled. Your own people want you dead! I do them a favor.”

“So do it,” he growled. “And be on your way.”

The big man glanced at one of others, who produced a cell phone of his own and held it up, framing the two of them with the device’s tiny camera.

The gun rose and dull light glittered off the black barrel of the silencer. “Jack Bauer …” The Georgian said the name like it was a curse, and his finger tightened on the trigger. “Your time is up.”

24 HOURS EARLIER

01

Chet Reagan emerged from the staff room, pulling the top of his scrubs straight and working to stifle a yawn. As he crossed to the front desk, he noted that the waiting room was unusually empty for a weekday. Typically, the evening shift was when things started to get busy at the clinic. People coming off a hard workday would filter into the drop-in medical center, maybe looking for an excuse not to have to go back in the office tomorrow—those, or the folks who couldn’t get time off to make a doctor’s appointment in the a.m.

Not tonight, though. He saw a couple of people waiting their turn, East Village trendy types rather than the usual locals who lived in the clinic’s Lower East Side neighborhood. They looked a little out of their element, and he amused himself wondering what they had wrong with them. A little STD action, maybe? Something they didn’t want their regular doctor to know about? He suppressed a grin. The clinic got a lot of that sort of trade.

As he approached the desk, he saw Lindee on duty and he couldn’t help but scowl as she made a face and tapped her wristwatch with a long, manicured finger. Chet’s gaze flicked up to the TV screen on the waiting room wall, forever tuned to CNB’s main news feed, and he saw the time stamp in the corner. Five o’clock. That was the time his shift started and that was the time he was here. Sure, he knew full well that their supervisor liked the medical technicians to be in ten, even twenty minutes early, but Chet wasn’t about to spend any more of his day at the clinic than he had to. They didn’t pay him enough to go above and beyond.

“What?” he asked Lindee. “I’m not late.”

“Not early, either,” she retorted. “You’re lucky there’s not a rush on. Could be, though, any second. Did you get the text?” Her eyes narrowed, her dark, oval face tightening in an expression of annoyance.

“No.” His phone battery had died the night before and he had neglected to recharge it. “Look, I got in on time, didn’t I? No thanks to the cops, though. Damn police are all over the place today …”

“The text message,” Lindee insisted. “City Hall put all the hospitals and clinics on alert …” She trailed off. “Have you, like, been in a cave for the last day? Haven’t you seen the news?”

“No,” he repeated. “What, did someone famous die?” Chet scowled. One of the most inconvenient things about living and working in Manhattan was that it was also home to foreign dignitaries, embassies and the United Nations—and whenever they were in town in force, every ordinary New Yorker had to deal with the disruption their presence caused. Chet recalled something he had seen in the papers about a big political deal going on with people from one of those Arab countries, but he was disinterested in the details. “I never watch the news,” he said. “It’s a damn cartoon, is what it is.”

Lindee rolled her eyes. She’d had this conversation with Reagan more than once before and long since grown tired of it. Instead, she picked up the remote control for the TV and aimed it at the screen, thumbing the volume control. “Well, you might wanna pay attention to this part.”

Chet looked back at the screen as the voice of CNB’s anchorwoman grew louder. Over the shoulder of the blond-haired announcer were inset images of the UN building and then a roll of footage showing President Allison Taylor standing before a lectern. “I never voted for her.” Chet sniffed.

“… as circumstances continue to be fluid,” the anchor was saying. “What CNB can confirm at this time is that President Taylor, in a shock announcement to the world press, has walked out of the peace treaty talks between the United States, the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Kamistan. The president spoke of a conspiracy behind the treaty and of criminal activity that she herself has played a role in. The White House has promised that a full formal statement is imminent, but on a day where rumors abound regarding possible terrorist activity in New York City, a day that has also seen the assassination of IRK leader Omar Hassan on American soil, we can only guess at what revelations the next hours will bring.”

“Huh,” said Chet, taking it in. “So a politician lied about something. What a surprise.”

Lindee glared at him. “Don’t you get it? This is a big deal! People will get angry … People could get hurt!”

But Chet was already walking away. “This is the kinda crap that happens when we mess around with other countries. Wouldn’t be anything if those Kami-whatever guys stayed at home, yeah?” He gathered up a clipboard and threaded his way down the corridor toward the examination rooms at the rear of the building. The first job he was going to do this shift was the inventory for rooms ten and eleven—and if he took his time about it, Chet knew he’d be able to stay off his supervisor’s radar for at least a couple of hours.

He was two steps into examination room ten when he realized the light switch wasn’t working. Chet flipped it up and down twice and grimaced, but in the next second his shoe crunched on a piece of broken glass and he realized that the fluorescent tube overhead had been deliberately smashed. Cold air touched his face and he saw the wired-glass window across the room was open, letting in the breeze.

Lit only by the fading day, the room was all shades of gloomy, and Chet’s heart leapt into his mouth as he belatedly sensed the presence of someone else in there with him.

A man in a torn, slate-colored sweatshirt emerged from behind a privacy curtain near the examination bed, and in one hand he held the metallic shape of a gun.

Chet’s gut tightened and he felt a cold sweat break out on his neck. “Oh shit.” He threw up his hands. “Hey. Hey, wait. Don’t shoot me, okay? I … I have a family. Just … Look, take whatever you want, okay? I won’t stop you.” They had warned him about this kind of thing when he took the job at the clinic. Strung-out junkies or street criminals looking to make a fast buck by robbing walk-in clinics of painkillers or whatever drugs they could sell.

“Lock the door,” said the man with the gun.

“What?”

“Lock it.” The second time he spoke, Chet found himself obeying without hesitation. Hands shaking, he turned the latch and then retreated into a corner, eyes darting around the room in search of some means of escape. There was only the open window, and the gunman was between him and it.

The guy looked like he had been in an argument with a Mack truck and come off worse. He sported cuts on his forehead and chin, and through tears in the sweatshirt Chet could see other wounds and contusions of varying seriousness.

“You’re going to help me,” said the gunman. He eyed the technician’s name badge. “Chet. I need to clean up. I need fresh dressings. Medicine.”

“Are you going to kill me?” Questions fell from Chet’s lips before he was even aware of them forming in his thoughts. “That thing on the news, is that you? Are you … a terrorist?”

“No.” The gunman let the barrel of the pistol drop until it was aimed at a point somewhere near Chet’s right kneecap. “But what I am is a very good shot. And I will cripple you if you try anything stupid, understand?”

“Yes.” It was the most emphatic answer Chet had ever given for anything.

“Good.” The man switched on a bedside lamp before picking up a scalpel and using it to slice open the sweatshirt, shrugging it off to reveal his bare chest beneath.

Chet’s breath caught in his throat as he glimpsed the patchwork of scars across the gunman’s torso. He knew the healed pucker marks of bullet wounds when he saw them, and the severe lines of stabbings and old knife cuts. But there were other blemishes there, things he couldn’t even begin to guess at. The man’s flesh was a map of violence done and violence survived. The most recent was a field dressing over a grazing gunshot, and the cloth patch taped over the wound was black-brown and soaked through. Gingerly, Chet peeled the old bandage away and set to work applying a new one.

Jack Bauer watched as the technician did as he was told. The man’s hands were shaking, but that was to be expected.

“You said you’ve got a family.” The man tensed when Jack spoke.

“Yes?” he said, his voice thick with fear.

“Tell me about them.”

Chet swallowed hard. “A … A son. Petey. He’s six. Wife. Jane.”

“Here, in New York?”

“Right. Yes.”

Jack weighed the stolen Sig Sauer pistol in his hand. “You should take them out of town for a few days. Get away.” He couldn’t stop himself from seeing Kim’s face in his mind’s eye, his daughter smiling up at him and promising him that things were going to be better for them. At this moment, Jack wanted that to be true more than anything in the world.

But fate had a habit of getting in the way of what Jack Bauer wanted, of dragging him into one bloody mess after another. He looked at the man before him, this ordinary guy with his ordinary job and his ordinary life, and for a split second Jack hated him for it.

Chet must have seen that flash of fury in his eyes, because he backed away, the color draining from his face. “Wh-what?”

Jack shook off the moment. “Keep working.” The impulse had faded as quickly as it had come, but the burn of it lingered. On some level, Jack resented the fact that whatever chance at a normal life he might have had was long gone. He could feel the weight of it all pressing down on him, not just the hours of fighting and running and battling to stay alive, but the ache in his soul. The consequence of all the choices he had made and the things he had done.

Once upon a time he had been a soldier for his nation, for an ideal that he believed was right and good. Somewhere along the line, that loyalty had blurred and slipped away. He turned his gaze inward and found a question waiting there: What are you going to fight for now, Jack?

“I have family,” he said in a low mutter. “They’re all I have.”

“Are they … here?”

Jack didn’t answer. Anything he said to this man would eventually end up in the hands of the people who were hunting him. “I’m getting out,” he said after a moment. “Far from here. Hong Kong.” It was the first place he thought of, and a good enough lie to leave behind him.

Chet paused, the bandage over the gunshot wound replaced and the other cuts dressed as well as they could be. He turned, pointing toward one of the medicine cabinets. “Look, I can …”

“No need.” Jack slipped off the examination bed and snaked his hands around the medical technician’s neck before he could stop him. Drawing his grip tight, he pulled Chet into a sleeper hold and regarded the man as he gasped and struggled. “Don’t fight it.”

In a couple of seconds, the technician went limp and Jack settled him gently to the floor. He pulled Chet’s keys from the loop on his belt and plundered the cabinets for doses of antibiotics and painkillers. The other man was narrower across the chest than Jack, but the shirt he wore beneath the scrubs was a passable fit. He helped himself to what little cash the other man had on him and slipped away, back through the window he had used to gain access.

Outside, clouds were drawing in and the sun had already dropped out of sight below the tenement buildings that ranged down the avenue.

A block away, he found an aging Toyota with a corroded door lock, and five minutes later he was heading west, hiding in plain sight among the lines of rush-hour traffic.

Jack caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror and those familiar green eyes looked back at him, a memory lurking there. The recall of a promise made; the only promise he still had to keep, the only one he had left.

“I’ll see you soon, Kim,” he said to the air.

The elevator doors opened to deposit Special Agent Thomas Hadley on the twenty-third floor of the Jacob K. Javits Building, and he walked out into a kind of controlled chaos. The atmosphere in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York field office was strung tight, and he licked his lips unconsciously, almost as if he could taste the urgency in the air. Hadley signed in and was still clipping his ID pass to his jacket pocket when he almost collided with Mike Dwyer, a supervisory agent and his direct superior.

“Tom, good,” said Dwyer, pulling him aside. “You’re here.” In his late forties and stocky with it, Dwyer was a stark contrast to Hadley’s trim athlete’s build—pale and sandy-haired where the younger man was tawny-skinned and shaven-headed.

Hadley nodded, taking in the sight of a dozen other agents moving back and forth, each intent on urgent tasks he could only guess at. “All hands on deck, huh?”

Dwyer nodded. “And then some.”

“I got time to get a cup of coffee?”

“No.” The other agent jerked his thumb at a glassed-in office across the room. “ASAC left orders to send you straight in when you got here. He finds out I even let you take your coat off before you talk to him, and my balls will be in a sling.”

Hadley’s eyes widened. On the long drive in from upstate, he’d gotten piecemeal fragments of what was going on in New York from news radio stations, but nothing concrete. “That bad?”

“Whatever you’ve heard,” Dwyer said, walking away, “it’s worse.”

Hadley’s lip curled and he made his way across the office, catching glimpses of other agents working video feeds or barking into telephones. He’d hoped that the rumors about a terror attack in the city were just hysteria, some overreaction from people who had half the truth and an overactive imagination. But being in the room now told him that wasn’t the case.

As he approached the office of Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge Rod O’Leary, he saw the big Irishman was on a call, a handset clamped to his ear. O’Leary caught sight of Hadley through the glass and beckoned him in with a terse jerk of the hand.

“It helps exactly no one if you drag your damn heels,” the ASAC was saying. “You want the FBI to do something we can actually call assistance, I suggest you get the people at Homeland Security to kindly pull their heads outta their asses.” O’Leary nodded as a tinny voice on the other end of the line replied in the affirmative. “Uh-huh. Right. Do that. Call me back when you get it.” He dropped the phone back into its cradle and blew out a breath.

“Sir,” began Hadley. “You wanted to see me?”

“Close the door, Tom, and sit down.”

Hadley dropped into a chair across the cluttered desk from his boss and watched as the other man gathered his thoughts. O’Leary was uncompromising, he was often crass, but he was direct and that was something that Thomas Hadley could deal with. However, in the months since he had been assigned to the NYC office, he had never really felt that the ASAC had been willing to give him the time of day. He wondered what had changed.

“Long story short …” O’Leary launched into an explanation before Hadley could ask any questions. “In the past twenty-four hours we’ve had the head of a foreign government get kidnapped and murdered on our turf by his own people.”

“Omar Hassan,” said Hadley, with a nod.

“What’s not public knowledge is that Hassan’s killers had a dirty bomb they were gonna blow right here in New York. Or that apparently, there may be elements inside the Russian government who were involved in making it happen.”

Hadley’s throat went dry. “That … That’s confirmed?”

“No, it’s not damn well confirmed.” O’Leary snapped, his annoyance flaring. “We have the mother of all international incidents unfolding right before our eyes on top of a mess that could have made nine-eleven look like a sideshow. FBI, Homeland, Secret Service, NYPD, everyone is right in the thick of this and we’re not even on the same page. Counter Terrorist Unit got their asses handed to them, something about an attack on their systems, so they’re out of the game….” He sighed. “And if that isn’t enough, it looks like the president is going to take a career nosedive before the day is out.”

“Okay …” Hadley’s mind was racing as he tried to process it all. “So, what’s my tasking on this?”

“We’ll get to that.” O’Leary’s manner shifted. “Something else first. I’ve got some bad news.” He paused. “I have to tell you that Jason Pillar was shot dead a little over an hour ago. I’m sorry, I know he was a friend of yours.”

“What?” Without conscious thought, Hadley’s hand strayed to the spot just above his clavicle, where beneath his shirt there was a tattoo in gothic script that read Semper Fidelis; Always Faithful, the motto of the United States Marine Corps.

“I know Pillar was your commanding officer in the Gulf, that you two were tight. I wanted you to hear it from me first.”

“Thank you, sir …” Hadley fell silent for a moment. The truth was, his time in the Marines had not been a good one, and if not for Pillar it could have been much worse. When Hadley and the Corps had finally parted ways—and on less than cordial terms—it was his former commander who had helped Tom find his way to a career in law enforcement and eventually here to the FBI. The man had said he saw something in him.

Pillar himself had gone on to bigger and better things, first at the Defense Intelligence Agency and later as executive assistant to former President Charles Logan, and the two of them had kept in close contact over the years. Hadley knew that there were some in the New York field office—including O’Leary—who believed that Pillar had helped to gloss over the things in Hadley’s past that might have been an impediment to his advancement.

All that was true, of course, but Hadley would never admit it. And now his friend and ally was gone.

“Details are sketchy,” O’Leary was saying. “The shooting took place inside the United Nations building. Charles Logan was there with him and he’s in critical condition from a gunshot wound. The Secret Service are playing it close to their chest, they’re not telling us anything. Nothing has been released about any suspects. But the word is, Logan may not make it through the night.”

“Is this connected to the Hassan killing and the bomb plot?”

“We can’t rule that out.” O’Leary leaned forward. “But right now, I need you to focus on a new assignment. I’ve got people coming in from all over, and on top of everything else we have a priority-one order straight from the deputy director.” He grabbed a sheaf of papers and handed them to the agent. “You’re going to put together a pursuit team to track down and arrest this man.”

“Jack Bauer,” Hadley read the name off the file in front of him. “I’ve heard of this guy. If half of what they say about him is true, he’s a menace …”

O’Leary scowled. “Where he goes, trouble follows. We lost one of our own last night too, a former agent named Renee Walker. She was part of that whole thing with Starkwood a while back, but she left the bureau afterward … Bauer had something to do with that. I’m willing to bet he’s caught up in her death.”

“That’s what this is about?” Hadley held up the file. “We want him for Walker’s murder?”

“We want him because there’s a warrant on his head for acts of treason and conspiracy against the United States, and for the murder of a bunch of Russian nationals. All this crap with the IRK, the peace treaty …” O’Leary gestured at the air. “He’s wired into it. But we’re not going to know exactly how until he’s in an interrogation room. Your friend Pillar was using CTU to actively chase him, but he gave them the slip.”

Hadley’s eyes widened. “So Bauer is connected to the shooting at the UN?”

“It’s possible. We don’t know for sure. He had no love for Logan, that’s a given. But right now, we’re operating on assumptions and circumstance. That has to change. We’re pretty certain Bauer is still in the city, but so far I haven’t had the manpower to go chasing after him. That’s your job now.”

Hadley gave a grave nod, his gaze hardening. “Understood. I’ll finish what Pillar … what was started.”

The ASAC studied him carefully. “Look, Tom … I’m gonna level with you. We’ve never seen eye to eye, you and me. I think your methods are questionable. But right now, I have a manhunt to prosecute on top of a citywide terror alert, and by virtue of being the wrong man in the wrong place, you’re the guy who’s gonna do that for me. Now, you take whatever it is that’s gonna motivate you and you get this job done. I don’t want to see or hear from you again until Bauer is in cuffs. Is that clear?”

“Crystal, sir.”

“Dwyer’s got you some people on this. Dell, Markinson, Kilner, couple of others if you need backup. Get up to speed and brief them.” The phone rang and the ASAC snatched it back up, dismissing Hadley with a wave of the hand.

He stepped out of the room and back into the main office, thinking it through. He studied the file image of Bauer’s face, trying to read something of a man he had never met.

Hadley’s hands drew into fists. If Bauer was connected to Pillar’s death, he owed it to his former commander to bring him in, and it occurred to the agent that this could also be an opportunity to finally put to rest whatever mistrust had been dogging him since he came to New York. And if that meant he had to use some of those “questionable” methods O’Leary didn’t like … That wasn’t a problem for him.

Across Manhattan, a few miles to the north in a stone-fronted town house off East Ninety-First Street, another former soldier was considering the same face, and the same objective.

Arkady Bazin had been a boy when he had ridden to war during the invasion of Afghanistan, a youth below the age of enlistment who had stolen his elder brother’s birth certificate and used it to pass himself off as old enough to fight. Back then, he had been blinded by a kind of patriotic fervor that seemed quaint to him now, but even decades later, Bazin’s love for Mother Russia had not faded. It had transformed into a kind of dogged, ruthless inertia—as if he were a weapon that had been set loose to roll on and on, crushing the enemies of his people.

And there was never a shortage of those. In those first days of fire and blood as a young soldier, Bazin had learned a fundamental truth. War had no end; it was only the battlefields and the faces the enemy wore that changed.

He put down the file in his hand and his lips thinned. Through the arched window behind him, lines of bright light were moving around, casting colorless streaks over the walls and the ceiling of the conference room where he sat. There were television vans parked out there, a line of them sitting bumper-to-bumper with their broadcast dishes deployed and their interchangeable location reporters all prattling away into handheld microphones. The lights fell from camera lamps, capturing the white, blue and red of the flag fluttering over the entrance of the Consulate General of the Russian Federation.

Surrounding the TV crews were American police, grumbling and sour-faced at their duties, and inside the perimeter of the black iron railings that ringed the consulate building there was another rank of watchers. They were armed with Skorpion submachine guns and Makarov pistols hidden under bulky jackets, careful to make sure that the locals did not see them. The SBP—Russia’s presidential security service—were here in force to protect President Yuri Suvarov on his international visit, but the events of the past few hours had changed the tempo of that activity from a discreet projection of power to the manner of an occupying military force.

Inside the consulate, the SBP had posted guards on every level. Bazin had glimpsed them in the situation room, in terse communication with the crew of Suvarov’s jet out on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International. He frowned at the thought. Had the decision been his to make, Bazin would have sent his president directly to the airport and had him airborne by now, out of harm’s way and off foreign soil.

Truth be told, if it had been his decision, he would have never allowed Suvarov to come to America in the first place, to talk with the rulers of this country and all the others as if they were some kind of equals. The very idea made his lip curl into a sneer.

Years of covert operations in and around the United States had instilled in him a deep distrust of this nation and its people. As an officer of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, the Russian Federation’s external intelligence agency, Bazin’s exposure to America had largely been in dealings with the traitors, the greedy and the venal among the country’s populace. What always kept him focused was the knowledge that his work was a vital kind of corrosive, forever eating away at the imagined superiority of his homeland’s old foe.

Some days he tired of it, but he knew he could not step down. The West could not be allowed to win, not even for a moment. They had to be opposed, to the very grave if needed.

Bazin found it difficult to consider the Americans as real people, not in the same way he thought of his fellow Russians. They were inferior, with their self-obsession and their shallow, materialistic manners—and what frightened him the most was the possibility that this pattern of behavior was creeping across the ocean to infect his people.

He wanted to see that end, and it seemed like Yuri Suvarov was a man who thought the same. Some small part of Bazin hoped he might actually get to meet the president; certainly they were both under the same roof at this moment. This was a man who understood that the Great Soviet Bear had not perished, only hibernated. Suvarov was the kind of leader who could rekindle the old unity the Russian states had once enjoyed in the day of the Communist era, if only given the chance. He liked to think that Suvarov would see in him a kindred spirit, someone who recalled and revered the day when their nation was a force to be reckoned with in global politics.

But no. Bazin dismissed the thought as fanciful, unprofessional. It was right that President Suvarov would never know his face or his name. Bazin saw himself as a loyal son of the Motherland, and it was enough that Suvarov would only know that there were weapons at his disposal which could be brought to bear to show Russia’s might to her foes.

He looked down at the file photo again. This man, this Jack Bauer, was just such an enemy. The data on him had been gleaned from spies embedded in the Central Intelligence Agency and allies in the Chinese government, a patchwork of half-truths and hearsay that crafted an image of who Bauer was, of what he was capable of doing. A policeman, a soldier, a spy, an assassin … Bauer had been all of these things, but now he was only a target.

The sneer returned to Bazin’s face. This ex-CIA killer was the perfect exemplar of why he did what he did. They were nearly the same age, with little more than half a year between their birthdates, and perhaps on the surface the two of them might have seemed like the same kind of man. But such a comparison would have sent Bazin into a fury. Bauer’s file revealed the truth of him; he was so very American, with every mission he had prosecuted spawned from some arrogant sense that his nation had the right to impose its will on the world. Bauer was a rogue, his bloody career at best barely clothed in tissue-thin justifications from his government, at worst the works of a psychopath with no code, no loyalty to anything but his own warped sense of right and wrong. They had never met, but on some level Bazin already reviled this man. He despised the cancerous capitalist system that could create a person like Jack Bauer.

There was a knock at the door, and Bazin looked up as a woman entered. She had the haughty poise of a Muscovite society girl, but he knew from experience that her outward manner was just a smokescreen. While Galina Ziminova was younger than him, and at times a little too liberal in her ways for his tastes, Bazin appreciated that the other SVR agent was an accomplished killer and a true patriot … even if the “new” Russia she came from was not the one that had been mother and protector to him.

“The team are here, sir,” she said.

He nodded. “Bring them in.”

Ziminova returned the gesture, and paused as she caught sight of Bauer’s picture. “Is that him?”

“Someone you might pass on the street and think as unremarkable,” Bazin replied. “And yet this man is marked for death by our highest authority.”

02

“We have a clear and direct mandate,” Hadley told the others. “A federal warrant for the arrest of Jack Bauer has been issued, and we’re going to bring him down.”

The other agents in the briefing room exchanged glances. To his left, sitting side by side, Special Agents Kari Dell and Helen Markinson looked as if they had been cut from the same cloth; both trim and austere in their looks, both dressed in a near-identical black pantsuit, at first glance all that differentiated them were their hairstyles. Dell’s short bob was henna-red where Markinson’s black hair reached to just above her shoulders, and the pair of them watched Hadley give his briefing with hawkish intensity. Scuttlebutt around the field office was that the two women had come up together at Quantico and they made a formidable team. Only a week earlier it had been their work that cracked the Anselmo case wide open. Hadley could work with that kind of skill set. He needed aggressive, proactive people on his team if he was to succeed.

“A fella like that isn’t going to come quietly,” Markinson ventured, a little of her native Boston drawl coming through.

Dell nodded. “He may not leave us with a lot of options, when the moment comes.”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” Hadley replied, and he heard the man to his right draw a sharp breath. He glanced at the other agent, waiting for him to voice what was on his mind.

Jorge Kilner had the kind of open, honest face that looked better suited to a high school quarterback than an FBI agent, but right now his expression was one of deep concern. His hands knitted before him and he shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “This man …” He paused, framing his words. “He’s not a criminal.”

Dell tapped the warrant document on the conference table. “Beg to differ.”

Kilner shook his head and went on. “Look, you only need to read his file to know, Bauer is a former Counter Terrorist Unit operative. He’s been called upon to do a lot of things by this country, the kind of stuff that would give the rest of us nightmares. We owe him more than just treating the guy like some two-bit crook to be run down and thrown in a cage.”

“What we owe Jack Bauer is due process and his one phone call,” Hadley snapped. “That’s if he’s smart enough to put his hands up when we come calling.”

The other agent’s lips thinned. “Agent Hadley, I knew Bauer and Renee Walker. I don’t believe for one second he’s responsible for her death.”

“Right …You were at the office in Washington, DC, during the White House attack.” Hadley gave Kilner a level look. “That’s good. We can use your insight into the man. But that’s all it’s going to be. If you think you’re going to show undue sympathy to a wanted fugitive, I’ll ask Special Agent Dwyer to reassign you.”

“No, sir,” Kilner insisted. “If someone’s going to put the cuffs on Bauer, I want to be the one to do it. To make sure it’s done right.”

“So where do we start?” asked Markinson. “There’s a BOLO alert with Bauer’s face on it all across the Eastern Seaboard, and the NYPD have dropped a net over Manhattan because of this whole Kamistani thing. Are we still operating on the assumption that he’s within the city limits?”

“Right now, we are.” Hadley crossed to the conference room’s window and looked out across Federal Plaza. “As Agent Kilner reminded us, our fugitive is ex-CTU, before that Delta Force and CIA. He’s trained for urban operations, he knows our methods and our capabilities. He also knows that if he doesn’t get out of New York within the next couple of hours, he’s as good as caught. We have a small window of opportunity here, people, and it’s closing by the second.” He turned back and nodded toward the other agents. “We’ve got monitoring set up on every known contact Bauer has in this city, eyes on airports, train stations, ferry terminals, bridges and tunnels. He’s gonna stick his head up, and we’re going to be there when he does. Each of you is to coordinate search sectors with tactical command. If you get a scent of him, don’t hesitate. Drop the hammer.” Hadley aimed a finger at the door. “Get to work.”

Dell, Markinson and the other agents got to their feet and filed out, but Hadley put a hand on Kilner’s shoulder before he could leave.

“Is there a problem?” said the other man.

“You tell me,” Hadley demanded. “When it comes down to the line and you have to draw on Bauer, are you going to follow through?”

“If I have to—”

“If?” Hadley prodded him in the chest. “Be realistic, Jorge. You really think a guy like him is going to give you the choice? Markinson is right. Bauer’s the shoot-first type.”

Kilner eyed him. “With respect … maybe it’s not me who should be thinking about his motivation.”

Hadley hesitated on the edge of a retort, then reeled it back in. “Your honesty is appreciated. In the meantime, I want you out on the street. Bauer’s running on empty, so he’s going to need money and gear. He was staying at the Hotel Chelsea on the West Side. Get out there and check in on the location, just in case.”

“In case of what? The Evidence Response Team have already looked the place over.”

“Still,” Hadley insisted, pushing past him to walk away. “Go check in. That’s an order.”

As the traffic crawled along Second Avenue past Stuyvesant Square, Jack shrank deeper into the threadbare hoodie he had found on the backseat of the stolen Toyota. Rush hour was always a pain in the ass, but New York City’s grid of streets conspired to make it a special kind of hell. Lines of cars and vans inched forward in fits and starts, and drivers leaned on their horns within a heartbeat if someone failed to go with the flow. He watched a pair of cab drivers in the lane alongside moving in lockstep, conducting a raucous argument back and forth out of their open windows. Now and then, a police siren would pulse out a whoop of noise, and in the rearview, Jack saw blue-and-white cruisers forcing their way through the gridlock, sometimes mounting the sidewalk in order to slip past.

The metallic rattle of a helicopter passed overhead and he resisted the urge to peer out and take a look. It would only take a single frame for a mobile camera or static monitor to capture his image and flag it. Jack had stopped to rub a dash of black grime on his cheeks before getting in the car, a broken asymmetrical line that looked accidental but would actually be enough to slow down any facial recognition software that did catch sight of him. It was a stopgap measure, though, and it wouldn’t work against a human observer.

His fingers drummed on the steering wheel. He felt exposed, pinned in place inside the steel box of the car. Even now, his hunters could be vectoring in on this location. Snipers in the buildings across the street, gunmen in the vehicles trailing him. Every person out there was a potential threat, every window a place for a shooter to fire from.

Jack became aware that the two cabbies had fallen silent, their voices replaced by the mutter of a radio. Other cars around him were doing the same, turning up the volume, rolling down their windows so everyone could hear. He leaned forward and snapped on the Toyota’s dashboard radio, and the same voice was there on every station he found.

Allison Taylor, the first female president of the United States, was addressing her nation in a live broadcast. “My fellow Americans,” she began. “It is with a heavy heart that I must speak to you this evening. A situation has arisen that I cannot, in all good conscience, allow to progress any further. At this hour, I am formally resigning my position as your president and stepping down from my post as commander-in-chief. I am passing that grave responsibility to my vice president and trusted friend, Mitchell Heyworth.”

Jack listened to her voice, imagining Taylor as she stood there before the lectern, her words issuing out across a room full of stunned, silent reporters. He tried to make sense of his own feelings toward the woman. His anger at her actions was still raw and harsh, and it was hard to separate it from the churn of emotion that seethed in the wake of Renee’s death.

That Jack respected the office of the president was without question—it was ingrained in him, and on some level, he would always be the good soldier—but he also knew full well the terrible responsibilities it demanded from those who held that lofty post. Jack thought of David Palmer, a man of strong character and high ideals who had struggled to execute his terms in the Oval Office with honor and courage, and of his brother Wayne who had done his best to follow David’s example. Others, like Noah Daniels and James Prescott, had been driven to make dangerous choices and pay for their consequences. Today, Allison Taylor would learn that price as well.

“When I leave this room I will remand myself to the attorney general for questioning,” she was saying. “A grave conspiracy has been at work over the last day, and to my shame I must acknowledge that I did not do enough to bring it to light when the opportunity was presented to me. I ask for your forgiveness and your understanding at this time, and I promise you all that there will be a swift, just and above all, transparent resolution to these difficult hours. Thank you.”

The room exploded with questions as the assembled reporters clamored to be the first to challenge Taylor’s words. Jack’s eyes narrowed and he turned the radio volume back down, processing what he had heard.

She had kept her word to him, her commitment to exposing the plot to disrupt the Kamistan peace treaty and power games behind it. Perhaps he had been wrong about her.

What happened next in the corridors of the United Nations, the White House, the Kremlin and the IRK Parliament would be the business of statesmen and policy makers. Maybe it would mean nations turning against nations, heightened tensions and daggers drawn … Right now, all that seemed a very distant thing, a long way removed from Jack’s world.

President Taylor’s honesty had rung the death knell for her political career and opened her up to the threat of arrest and incarceration. More than that, any possibility that her administration might have protected Jack and his friends had evaporated. His colleagues at CTU, people like Chloe O’Brien, Arlo Glass, Cole Ortiz and all the others, they too would now find themselves at the sharp end. It angered him that they might face prison sentences for daring to do the right thing in impossible circumstances. He felt powerless to help them, just as he had been powerless to save Renee’s life as she bled out from a sniper’s bullet.

A bleak mood settled on him, a yawning dark hollow opening up in his chest. So many people had been taken from him, so much of his life ripped away in fire and blood. And now, here he was once again, on the edge of an abyss. Forsaken and alone, his liberty measured by the ticks of the clock.

For a moment, Jack allowed himself to wonder what might happen if he were just to open the car door and step out into the street, hands above his head. What would Jack Bauer’s fate be?

Forces of his own nation were hunting him, and so were the agents of his enemies. There was a butcher’s bill with his name on it, and it would be a race between the American government and the covert operatives of the Russian Federation to find him first. Both wanted to make him pay for the laws he had broken and the lives he had ended. Jack knew that neither one would give any quarter when they came to take him. The best he could hope for was life in some nameless prison off the grid; the worst, a bullet in the back of the head and his body dumped in the river.

He rejected the thought. No, he told himself, I made a promise tomy daughter. I won’t let her down. I’ll see her again. One last time.

On some level he knew that the smarter choice, the practical and expedient option would be to cut loose and disappear right now, this very second. Jack knew a dozen ways he could become a ghost and rebuild a new life for himself in some other place.

But that felt like a betrayal. Kim was all the family he had left, the last bright star in his life’s dark sky. He thought about never seeing her again, and something inside him twisted like a knife of ice.

Even if nothing else was clear to him, the vow he had made to Kim was unbreakable. His daughter, her husband, Stephen, and Jack’s beautiful grandchild, Teri … All of them were at risk as long as he was still around. He had vanished before, and he would do it again, just drop off the radar and disappear. But first he would keep his promise and say his good-byes. Nobody would be allowed to prevent that. Nobody.

“Hey, pallie!” Jack snapped out of his reverie with a start, the sound of a blaring car horn bringing him back to the moment. He looked up and saw one of the cabbies leaning out of his window to shout at him. The taxi driver stabbed a finger at the road ahead and the growing gap where the traffic had finally started to shift. “Where you going, man?” he demanded.

“Home,” replied Jack.

“These orders come directly from President Suvarov,” said Bazin, and he paused to allow that statement to bed in. Ziminova said nothing, but he could see that the three other men in the room were all on the cusp of saying something. He made an accepting motion with his hand. “Speak up. I have little tolerance for those who stay silent out of fear of challenge.”

Predictably, Yolkin was the first to give voice. “Suvarov authorized this personally?” Thin and wiry, Yolkin had cold blue eyes and spoke in a flat monotone that droned around the room. “Today?”

“Less than an hour ago. The killing of an American citizen, yes.” Bazin nodded. “Was I unclear?”

“Not just a citizen.” Mager was the next to speak up. He was perhaps the most average of men that Bazin had ever known, so nondescript that you could lose him in a crowd and a moment later struggle to recall his face. “A highly trained soldier. A federal agent.”

“Former federal agent,” corrected Ziminova. “He is a wanted man now. Their law enforcement agencies have been mobilized to arrest and detain him.”

“Why not let them do so?” Ekel finally decided to offer his question from the depths of the cockpit leather chair where he slouched, one hand forever toying with a length of his oily black hair. “Would it not be easier to let Bauer find his way to a prison and then pay some murderer to smother him in his cell?” He held up his hands. “We would stay clean in the matter.”

Yolkin grunted in a vague approximation of a chuckle. “This is not about staying clean, pretty boy. This is about sending a message.”

Bazin nodded. “As usual, Yolkin cuts to the meat of it. Yes. The motivation for this directive is retribution, pure and simple. President Suvarov is angry at this Bauer. It seems he was directly responsible for derailing certain operational plans, and beyond that, the man also had the temerity to think he could strike directly at members of the Russian government.”

“Out of revenge,” Mager noted. “That idiot Tokarev shot Bauer’s woman.”

“Tokarev was made to pay for that,” said Ziminova. “He was sliced open, like a pig.”

“He wasn’t the only one,” Bazin added, his jaw hardening as he thought of the other murders.

Ziminova went on, picking up the thread of her commander’s briefing. “Bauer is also responsible for the deaths of Minister Mikhail Novakovich and his protection detail. Eight men in total.”

Bazin had personally known three of those men. He had trained them in counter-terror tactics, back in the days when the SVR had still been the KGB, and the American had seen them all to their graves. It was one more reason for him to be leading this operation, for a settling of that score. He leaned forward in his chair. “Make no mistake. This is a question of respect. A question of offense made and reparation to be paid. President Suvarov himself would have been in Bauer’s sights had circumstances played out differently. The American cannot be allowed to live after committing these acts.”

“That would be weakness.” Yolkin nodded. “It would make Suvarov appear foolish if he does nothing.”

“That ship has sailed,” muttered Ekel.

Bazin shot him a look. “What do you mean by that?”

Ekel colored slightly, then straightened. When he spoke again, he lowered his voice, as if he were afraid that Suvarov might hear him from wherever he was in the consulate building. “It is just … They are saying that the telephone lines are burning up between here and Moscow. The prime minister and his cabinet have called an emergency meeting of the Federal Assembly. There is talk that the president will be said to be involved in the Hassan assassination …” Ekel hesitated. “Suvarov will not find a warm welcome waiting for him at home.”

They had all heard the rumor, and it irritated Bazin that others were discussing it as if it were already fact. He drew himself up and fixed Ekel with a hard gaze. “The prime minister and his friends in the Duma … Those men are politicians, my friend. But Yuri Suvarov is a leader. We follow the orders of the latter, not the former. What does or does not occur when he next sets foot on Russian soil is not your concern. We have been given an order by our commander-in-chief and it will be obeyed. We have been tasked to find and terminate an enemy of the Motherland. Unless that order is countermanded, we will proceed in that intent.” He got to his feet and the rest of the team did the same.

As his second-in-command, Ziminova issued the next set of orders. “We will proceed to a staging area to pick up weapons and equipment. From there, we will break into teams and commence the operation. You will coordinate directly with our operator here in the consulate via encrypted communication.”

The three men nodded and walked out, leaving Bazin to stand at the end of the long, high table. He pulled a smartphone from his pocket and began to tap out a text message.

Ziminova watched him from the doorway. “Sir,” she began. “I know it goes without saying, but we must operate with the utmost care from this point onward. If any of our assets are exposed as we track down Bauer, the fallout could be considerable.”

“You are afraid to give the world more reasons to hate us?” Bazin sniffed. “We are Russian. That has never mattered to us. But do not be concerned. I am going to call in a local contractor to assist.”

“Is that wise?”

He continued to work at the tiny touchpad. “She has worked for us before. I have every confidence.”

The woman hesitated. “Sir. Ekel made a salient, if clumsy point. President Suvarov wants Bauer dead not for political reasons, but for personal ones. This is about revenge. His motive is no different from the American’s, when he killed Pavel Tokarev.”

Bazin eyed her. “You have read Bauer’s file.”

“Just the high points.”