“We are not destined to be friends,” his captor agreed. “To explain how I am going to extract a guarantee from you, I need to tell you about a virus.”
Jack froze. At the word virus, his focus changed. Escape was now secondary. Information was a priority.
“This virus comes in several strains. One of them, when injected into the bloodstream, begins to replicate within twelve to twenty-four hours but doesn’t show any symptoms until then. After that, it is infectious and all but incurable and it is decidedly fatal.”
Jack became conscious of the small, unique bruise on his left arm. “You injected me with the virus,” he growled.
The man, wherever he was, laughed. “No. From what I understand, you are not the kind of man to be blackmailed by a threat to your person. I injected your daughter.”
Chris Henderson sat at the end of the conference table, staring down the row of faces on either side. He’d gotten to know most of the team members well during his stint as Director of Field Operations. They were a good team. He’d watched them perform well under severe strain in the months since he’d come on board, and he’d read case files on some of their activities before his assignment. They were an impressive bunch.
“Tony,” he said to the speaker box squatting on the center of the table like a miniature spaceship. “Can you brief us on current activities at the Federal Building?”
Tony Almeida’s voice resonated from the box. “We’re approximately one hour into the demonstration, and so far so good as far as riots go. LAPD estimates the crowd at over ten thousand, but they figure on twice that before noon. It’s going to start getting hotter then, too, so we may see tempers flare.”
Tony Almeida was a sharp one, Chris thought. Even though the higher-ups in CTU continued to pressure him for budget cuts, he couldn’t imagine letting Almeida go. The guy had Agent in Charge written all over him.
“How about your lead on Muhammad Abbas?” Chris asked. “Has Jack finished beating up cops?”
Almeida laughed. “We lost Abbas. Jack is on his way into the office to do follow-up.”
Nina Myers, another first-class agent, spoke up. “If that was Abbas, and if he is still doing gruntwork for al-Libbi, then Jack’s right and al-Libbi is in town. His target has to be the G8, right?”
“Or part of it,” Almeida said. “Does it make sense for him to attack the whole summit? Al-Libbi’s last client was Iran, which has been trading arms from France, so why would they allow France to get bombed?”
Nina Myers said, “We have to figure out who al-Libbi is working for.”
Chris nodded. “What’s al-Libbi’s alignment these days?”
“Money,” Nina said. “The CIA says he lost religion years ago, and now he just works for the highest bidder. Last known base of operations was Iraq, but he was booted out in early 2001 for taking a job with the Iranians. He’s pretty much a hired gun, now.”
“Which means he could be working for anyone,” Almeida piped in. “We’re a target, of course, but with Russia here, too, I wouldn’t put it past the Chechens to go after the summit. They could easily have contacted al-Libbi.”
“Don’t forget China,” Nina said. “Half the protestors out there are upset that the G8 is considering letting China into the club.”
“Where’s our short list of active anti-China groups?” Chris said.
Nina reached for the remote that controlled the conference room’s display screen. She tapped a few buttons and a list popped onto the screen. “There’s Free Taiwan and the religious group Falun Gong. According to the Chinese, there are also about forty groups in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, or what the locals like to call East Turkistan. They vary in size, and some are more violent than others, but all of them are pretty localized.”
Chris nodded. All this had been covered in the advance work done several weeks prior to the summit. Most of the agencies involved — the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA, and CTU — believed that China’s presence would cause a huge political firestorm, but not a terrorist attack. Organizations with enough muscle and sophistication to launch an attack on U.S. soil, such as al-Qaeda, would go after the United States itself or Russia. Still, it had bothered Henderson during the advance meeting when no one seemed to know anything about these eastern Chinese groups.
“Have we gotten any more intelligence on them?” he asked.
Jessi Bandison, one of the analysts, spoke up, but she didn’t look at Chris. “Not really. The Chinese government plays an interesting game. They work very hard to report on the horrible things that these separatist groups do, but they refuse to give out any real information about them.”
“Do we know if any of them operate in the U.S. at all?” Chris asked.
“Only one,” Nina said. “ETIM, or Eastern Turkistan Independence Movement. But they’re small-scale, never done anything big even in their own region, and the CIA says they have no funding. Their cause isn’t close enough to al-Libbi’s heart to get him to work for free, and there’s no way they can pay his salary.”
Chris sighed. “Well, let’s put someone on it anyway. Where’s Jack?”
Blood pounded in Jack’s ears. He felt his fingers flex involuntarily as he imagined squeezing the life out of this man, whoever he was.
“She’ll be perfectly all right, Agent Bauer,” said his captor. “I have an antidote.”
“Let her go. Let me see her,” Jack demanded.
“I don’t have her. You’re missing the point. I know how these stories go. There’s a murder, or someone goes missing, and all of a sudden the cat is out of the bag. No one is going to go missing, Agent Bauer. Your daughter is going to go about her day. She doesn’t know she has been exposed to the virus. She won’t even become contagious for twenty-four hours. I am going to release you now, and you’re going to go about your day. You are going back to your office, and you are going to sit there for the rest of the day. But you are going to stop your line of investigation. Tomorrow you will receive a small package with the antidote. Give it to your daughter by seven o’clock tomorrow morning, and all will be well. Do I make myself clear?”
“I understand,” Jack growled.
“Good. I would like to tell you one more thing, and then our business will be concluded. I will be watching you, Agent Bauer. And I will be watching your daughter. I will know where you go, and where she goes. So what I expect you to do is go back to your office and sit there all day. If you leave it, I will know. If you try to get your daughter to a hospital, I will know. You will never hear from me again, and your daughter will die. Goodbye.”
Jack heard a faint scuffle — clothing sliding along wood. A few seconds later there was a heavy thud, the sound of a circuit breaker being thrown. Then bright lights came on. Jack, after sitting in the dark, was blinded. He blinked, waiting for his pupils to contract. When he could see again, he found himself in a small, bare basement with a concrete floor. Dust covered the floor, and cobwebs hung in the corners. The stairs, or what was left of them, were broken and rotted, but a brand-new aluminum ladder climbed from the dusty floor to the next level.
Jack ran for the ladder and climbed it quickly. A short hallway led away from the basement, then opened up into a larger room, an abandoned warehouse of some kind. There were windows on all sides of the warehouse, but they’d been papered over. Morning light leaked through and around them. Jack ran for the door, stopping only to pick up a few items that had been left in plain sight: his gun, his wallet, and his mobile phone.
Jack opened the door and walked out onto an asphalt parking lot. There was a faded sign on the warehouse, which was in a row of warehouses packed between two retail districts. According to the street signs he was at the corner of Barrington and Ocean Park. Four or five cars drove by on each street. Any one of them could have held the man who had just poisoned his daughter.