The first thing Frankie had done, after bolting away, was make a cell phone call. Mercy silently cursed Jack Bauer’s stiff neck. If she’d had CTU’s resources behind her, she could be listening in on that call right now and tracing it back to its source instead of elbowing her way through the masses. Now the girl was reaching the edge of the crowd at Veteran’s Park. Wherever she was going, Mercy was determined to stay with her.
Tony Almeida came back from the bathroom, yawning and stretching, reluctant to plant himself back in his plastic chair in front of the video monitors. He had been on dozens of stakeouts — electronic and otherwise — and he was used to the boredom, but this drab cinder-block room seemed specially designed to suck the life out of the most determined officer.
“Anything?” he asked.
One of the two FBI agents was gone. The other one, the thin, Slavic-looking agent, shook his head. “Not much. I spotted that detective your guy was talking to. Looks like she was meeting with an informant in the crowd. There she is.”
He jabbed a finger at one of the dozen screens. This was a very wide shot of the swelling crowd, probably from a camera positioned high up on the building. The agent pressed a toggle switch on his control board and the camera zoomed in. Tony saw the dark-haired LAPD officer moving through the crowd. He recognized the detective from her short stint as a CTU liaison. He hadn’t known her well, but her first name was distinctive: Mercy.
“Stay on her,” he said. “Not sure what’s going on, but Jack doesn’t waste time, so let’s assume she’s important.”
“Trying,” the agent said, leaning across to the other side of the control panel to flip some switches.
“Your friend’s gone a lot,” Tony observed.
“Tiny bladder,” said the Slavic agent. “Plus he drinks that swill.” He pointed to a paper cup on the counter with coffee dregs at the bottom.
“And you don’t?” Tony said. He’d never met an FBI agent who didn’t swig caffeine during surveillance.
“Oh, I drink coffee,” the agent said with the air of a connoisseur. “But that’s not coffee. You want to try real coffee, try fresh Costa Rican coffee beans.”
“I just go to my coffee place and point,” Tony said, sitting down.
The agent grunted. “You and everyone else. But Costa Rica, or Brazil, that’s where the good stuff is. You know, there’s a little coffee farm northeast of Rio de Janeiro in the province of Minas Gerais, the beans they grow there are amazing. It’s like coffee and chocolate grown together.”
Tony glanced at the screens. “I’ve never been.”
“Oh, you’ve gotta go. I’ve been all over. The jungle is—” The agent smiled at himself. “Forget it, I could go on about this stuff forever. I’m kind of a rain forest addict.”
“I took a canopy tour once,” Tony said distractedly. “You know, sliding on those ropes in the treetops. It was amazing, except that I almost got bit by a monkey.” He eyed the screen. “It looks like that detective is tailing someone.”
They both watched. The detective was moving parallel to and slightly behind a short girl with artificially blond hair.
Even in that mass of bodies, Tony saw easily that the woman deliberately matched her pace to the girl’s.
“You’re right,” Nick said. “Well, my turn to piss.” He stood up. “I’ve been on those tours. I hope everybody goes on them, actually. Helps people know about the rain forests so maybe we stop destroying them.”
“I guess it can help,” Tony replied, turning his attention fully to the monitors.
“It better,” Nick said. “They say a few more years and most of the forests will be gone.”
“Well, at least we won’t have to worry about the monkeys.”
It was a radio dye marker, also called a chemical emitter. The marker was a chemical compound that, when found in large enough quantities, emitted a low-frequency signal that could be tracked by satellite. The medical techs hadn’t ever heard of it, but Jack had. The military had initiated the project a few years earlier to help with intelligence gathering, but the system had proved inefficient. The dye markers were no more accurate than more conventional transmitters, which could be miniaturized to the point of being nonexistent.
“Okay, it’s in my blood,” Jack said. “So get it the hell out.”
The tech shook his head. “We’ve got a call in to Department of Defense,” he said. “But I don’t think anyone knows how to get this stuff out. It’s not harmful, so I think they just figured it would eventually get processed out of the body someday.”
Jack sneered. “Well, someday is today. I need this stuff out of my body right now!”
The tech stepped back. Chris Henderson rested a hand on Jack’s arm like a tamer calming a lion. “We can leave you here, Jack. I’ll put everyone else on the case.”
“That’s my daughter!” Jack jerked his arm away. “There’s got to be some way to filter this dye out of my blood.”
Jamey Farrell buzzed into the room over the intercom. “Chris, I’ve got someone on the line for you. They say it’s about Jack.”
“Is it Department of Defense?”
“No, Interior.”
Chris raised an eyebrow. Why would someone from the Department of the Interior call CTU? “Okay.”
There was a click, and a tentative male voice crackled over the conference room speakers. “H-hello?”
“This is Chris Henderson, Special Agent in Charge of Field Operations,” Chris said crisply.
“Hi. What — what can I do for you?” the voice asked nervously.
Chris frowned. “I don’t know. You called me.”
“Oh, oh, well yes, but they told me to. I mean, I got a call from the Secretary herself. I’ve never gotten a call from—”
“Who are you?” Chris demanded.
The voice squeaked. “Dr. — I’m Martin Shue. Dr. Shue. What can I do — I mean, no one explained to me exactly why I was calling.”
Chris’s neck turned pink and he bit his lip, but his voice was calm. “What exactly do you do over there, Doctor?”
“Environmental work,” the doctor said. By the sound of his voice, he was clearly relieved to be asked a question to which he knew the answer. “I was with the EPA for ten years, now here. I’m a zoologist.”
“And Interior told you to call us?”
“That’s — that’s right. They said it was an emergency.”
Chris shrugged. “By any chance do you know anything about radio dye markers or chemical emitters?”
“Oh, oh yes. Of course I do!” The zoologist’s voice perked up even more. “Are you trying to track an animal of some kind?”
Chris smiled. Nina Myers laughed out loud. Jack just glowered. Chris said, “Not exactly. We want to get this emitter out of someone. Do you know how to do that?”
“Out of someone?” Dr. Shue mused. “I didn’t realize anyone was still trying chemical emitters on people. The technology has sort of fallen into disuse, except for people in my field. We use them to track animals that are too small or delicate to be tagged with transmitter bands—”
“How do you get the stuff out!” Jack yelled.
The doctor squeaked again. “I’m — I’m not sure. That was never a priority, of course. But the chemicals aren’t harmful. They break down in the body after a year or two anyway.”
“We need it out right away,” Chris said. “It is an emergency. Do you have any ideas?”