He glanced at Coates nearby standing beside the sedan. Coates glared back at him, scowling. No doubt he suspected Jack of planning to make a break. He couldn’t be dead sure, though, because Jack would have had to turn on the engine to run the air-conditioning and also to power up its digital media station.
The Expedition was equipped with a complex array of digitized communication and information processing systems. It was also equipped with a gun locker containing a formidable arsenal of weaponry.
Jack Bauer had not lied; he had only shaded the truth. He fully intended to upload the photographs on the CTU net where the agency’s extensive reserve of data banks and supercomputers could go to work to identify the assailant. He would do so.
Later.
For now he had bigger fish to fry.
He put the machine in gear and drove away. Behind him he heard Coates’s choked cry of outrage: “Hey!”
The SUV exited the lot, turned right, and headed west on the roadway. It cruised along at a moderate pace appropriate to the tempo of the street traffic.
By now Coates had already jumped into the sedan to give chase. He wasn’t going anywhere, not without his car keys. Jack had lifted them earlier, back in the motel room, when he’d stumbled into the FBI agent. Crookery 101: misdirect the mark by jostling him or some other such ploy, while making the dip and picking his pocket.
Jack Bauer in the past had many times worked undercover posing as a criminal type to infiltrate a gang or syndicate operation. Along the way he’d picked up more than a few tricks of the trade. Picking pockets was one of the larcenous skills he’d mastered to bolster his cover, and for a clandestine operator such as himself it could be mighty useful at times.
He made a right turn at the second intersection he came to and began a series of evasive maneuvers to make it that much more difficult for others to pick up his trail. Maybe Hickman had a spare set of keys, but even if he did, Jack would be long gone before the sedan was fired up and in pursuit.
Jack hadn’t left the G-men totally marooned at the motel. After lifting Coates’s keys he’d hidden them behind the plastic ice bucket on the counter. Once he was sure he’d given them the slip, he’d phone and tell them where to find the keys.
Hickman and Coates would be sore as hell at Jack for working that gag on them. He had to admit it was a dirty trick but—
Too bad.
He was a long way from home base and operating alone deep in unknown territory here. For all he knew either Hickman or Coates — or for that matter, Sabito — could have fingered him to the assassin.
For now he’d play a lone hand, keep his own counsel, and strike off by himself whenever such action seemed called for.
That was the only way to stay alive for those up against Annihilax.
Take it another step further; tighten the screws of paranoia another notch. Jack could be riding into an ambush right now.
Peter Rhee was as much an unknown quantity as anyone else involved in the manhunt. He might be using their upcoming meeting as a setup to lure Jack into a death trap. One more tightly constructed and inescapable than the one Jack had just thwarted.
Or — Rhee might be only a pawn, an unwitting victim of a master ploy to maneuver Jack into the kill zone. The only way to find out the truth was to go the meeting place.
The motel’s name was Trail’s End but for Jack Bauer it was only the beginning.
2. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 12 P.M. AND 1 P.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME
The meeting place was the Alkali Flats roadside rest area. One didn’t have to drive far in any direction in Los Alamos County to leave civilization behind and enter a desert wasteland of mountains, canyons, and plains.
The rest area was located on Old Sipapu Road, an obscure strip of two-lane blacktop connecting the rugged backcountry with the main roads into town and the lab complexes. It ran through land that was good neither for farming nor for ranching. A road that even the local folks used only to cross a patch of badlands on their way to someplace better.
The Expedition’s GPS system had no trouble in pinpointing the site. Jack was good with directions and had gotten a general sense of the layout of the Los Alamos terrain but it was reassuring to have the computerized location finder for backup.
Once he’d gotten on Old Sipapu Road Jack had seen few other vehicles, and most of them were going in the opposite direction, driving northbound toward town. Jack drove south toward the meeting place.
The rest area was on the opposite side of the road. A lone vehicle was there, one he recognized as Peter Rhee’s car. Rhee was nowhere in sight and neither was anyone else.
Rhee had picked the site and in theory it seemed like a good one. It was remote, isolated, and out in the open in the middle of nowhere. Seemingly immune to surveillance or ambush.
Playing it safe, Jack avoided pulling directly into the site but instead continued southbound for an eighth of a mile or so before slowing to a halt to survey the terrain.
The landscape was utterly empty of all signs of human habitation. No other vehicle could be seen on the road in either direction, and on this sprawling expanse of terrain with its clear desert air, one could see a long way.
Jack used his cell to call Rhee yet again. As before, there was no reply. Rhee had been out of communication since his last call to Jack, which had been made at 10:30 this morning. That was when he said he’d developed an important lead in the case and had to talk to Jack alone in person.
Jack offered to come out and meet him at Ironwood but that option had been flatly rejected. Rhee said that Ironwood “wasn’t secure” for what he had to tell him and had instead offered the Alkali Flats rest area on Old Sipapu Road as the site for the rendezvous. It wasn’t too far out of town but it offered privacy and seclusion.
Jack had all but begged Rhee to at least give him some hints about what he’d found. Rhee refused to discuss it, even on a secure phone line. Jack agreed to the terms. He couldn’t blame Rhee for what others might have taken for an excess of caution bordering on paranoia. Ironwood had become a nexus of violence and sudden death. What would seem like paranoia under normal circumstances had come to be seen as nothing more or less than good common sense.
That was the last conversation Jack had had with Rhee. Since then: silence.
Rhee’s car was at the rendezvous but where was its driver? His continued failure to answer his cell was foreboding, ominous. Despite the wide open spaces and sunny blue skies, the empty landscape took on an aura of menace.
Jack resolved to grab the hot iron and retake the initiative. He swung the SUV around in a U-turn and headed north toward the meeting place.
The rest area was on the east side of the road. A gravel lot featured a whitewashed concrete blockhouse restroom with a pay telephone stand nearby. Off to one side on the north was a stand of scraggly timber with a couple of picnic tables beneath it.
Behind the rest stop, the land sloped off to the east, dipping into a low, wide, dusty basin dotted with gnarled, stunted trees, boulders, and clumps of cactus. The landscape was bone-dry, not a pond, puddle, or trickle of a stream in sight. The ground was reddish-brown like the sands of Mars. These were the Alkali Flats.
Way off in the distance on the far side of the flats, a line of brown mountains ran north-south. Rhee’s car was to the left of the restroom blockhouse. It was parked head-in facing the flats and at right angles to the road.
Slowing to enter the rest area, Jack decided against pulling up alongside Rhee’s car. Gravel crunched under his wheels as he rolled to a halt behind the back of Rhee’s car. That put the SUV at right angles to the car and parallel to the roadway.