Carla bit down on the pink satin handbag. Her face was flushed, her skin coated with a thin sheen of perspiration. A whimper escaped her lips, which were pale and white. Dark shadows hollowed her eyes, her gaze seemed far away and lost in jets of agony.
“Oh, Jesus. Oh, God,” Carla wailed.
Teri Bauer kneeled on the floor, both hands grasping Carla’s arms to steady the woman. The contractions had started up again. Now they were less than three minutes apart. The baby was on its way.
“You! American bitch. Keep her quiet!”
Teri looked up. A masked man watched her from the aisle, just two empty seats away. He clutched a machine gun, the strap draped over his shoulder.
Teri bit her lip. Carla howled again, louder.
“Shut her up!” barked the gunman.
Carla cried out just then, oblivious to the danger.
Angrily, the man stepped forward. “I shut her up,” he grunted.
Teri Bauer jumped to her feet, blocked the assassin’s way. Her knees trembled, but her veins were suddenly filled with burning ice and she refused to back down.
2:44:06 A.M.PDT Chamberlain Auditorium Mezzanine
Peering over the edge of the balcony, Jack had already taken aim at the masked man seated center stage. The way the others deferred to him, and the way the man clutched his Agram 2000 in the crook of his arm—“Palestinian style”—told Jack this was their leader, Bastian Grost. Though the Serbian fugitive might prove to be a valuable prisoner, Jack decided he would not take the man alive. Victor Drazen’s killers had a knack for eluding justice. But Bastian Grost wouldn’t get away with anything. Not this time.
Jack checked the digital clock inside his sniper scope. It was less than a minute before the strike. His grip tightened on the pressed Kevlar handle, his finger rested on the grooved steel trigger. As he prepared to fire, Jack’s attention was drawn to a commotion in the aisles. A gunman was gesturing wildly at a woman.
Even from this distance he recognized his wife. Jack tensed when he realized it was Teri. He swung the Mark 11 away from his target, to level the barrel at this new threat.
Squinting through the scope, he placed the crosshairs over the masked man’s forehead. As the seconds ticked down, Jack steadied his hand and held his breath.
Five seconds—
The gunman stepped into the aisle. Teri jumped to her feet to block him.
Four seconds—
“Leave her alone,” Teri shouted.
The man raised an arm, poised to strike her down, possibly kill her with a blow from the butt of his machine gun.
Three seconds—
Jack pulled the trigger. The man’s head exploded.
Rifles seemed to pop all over the auditorium at roughly the same time, followed by supersonic cracks as the bullets warbled toward their targets.
Everywhere armed men in black jerked wildly, or spun around, or threw their arms wide as 7.62mm rounds tore bloody holes through their flesh, bones and organs.
One masked man, his skull shattered by a single round, flopped onto the lap of Chip Manning, still seated beside his agent. The dead man’s brains spilled out on the star’s Helmut Lang jacket.
Tough guy Manning squealed like a little girl.
Abigail Heyer jumped to her feet when she heard the supersonic crack. She’d been watching Bastian Grost, who suddenly flew backward as two bullets blew a massive hole through his chest, and the back of his chair.
When the Heyer woman stood up, Nina Myers spied a plunger in her hand. It was black, about the size of a large hypodermic needle, and trailed two thin wires that flowed into her clothing.
Nina leaped over a seat, grabbed the woman’s arm and twisted it backward until she heard the satisfying snap of bone. The actress howled, the plunger dropped from her limp hand. But Nina didn’t relent. She jerked the broken wrist upward, forcing Abigail Heyer to bend double. Then Nina brought her forearm down on the back of the woman’s neck, smashing her to the ground.
Nina dragged the still struggling woman into the aisle, flipped her over and cut the dress away with the Gerber Guardian II double-edged knife she’d tucked into her garter. Under the shreds of designer clothing, Nina saw the white harness. She sliced the straps and yanked the prosthetic loose. The inside of the fake belly was stuffed with explosives.
“Clear!” Nina cried at the top of her lungs.
From other parts of the auditorium, she heard her words echoed several times. What she didn’t hear told the real story. There was no deafening thunder of a detonating bomb, and Nina knew CTU had won this round.
“Go, go, go!”
Captain Stone screamed the words into his headset. Not even a second passed before dozens of LAPD squad cars, armored vehicles, ambulances, fire trucks and emergency vehicles rolled out of cover and across the pavement to converge on the Chamberlain Auditorium. Sirens blared and dozens of emergency lights flickered like tiny red beacons.
There was no way for Stone to know if Jack and his team had met with success or failure but it didn’t matter anyway. His orders were to move his officers in to surround the building at precisely 2:45 a.m., to open the fire doors they’d opened before, and enter the auditorium with maximum force, and that’s exactly what he did.
Stone watched through binoculars as firemen opened the steel doors, then police and SWAT team units poured through the opening. He listened for a long time, waiting for an explosion, the sounds of a fire fight. Instead, a voice crackled over his headset.
“Area secure. Repeat, area secure. The hostages are safe…”
Jack found his wife in the lobby. An emergency rescue team was wheeling Carla out on a gurney, with Chandra and Teri following close behind. As she rushed past him, Jack touched his wife’s arm and their eyes met.
“Jack, Jack,” Teri cried, throwing herself at him. “I knew you’d come. I just knew it.”
“It’s okay,” Jack whispered, holding her close. “You’re safe now.”
For a long time they embraced, an island in a sea of swirling activity. Then Teri pulled back, tears dewing her face.
“Is it over, Jack? Is it really over?”
“Almost,” he replied.
23. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 3 A.M. AND 4 A.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME
Jamey, Milo and Doris had taken control of the Cyber-Unit. It took all three of them to enter all the search parameters into Fay Hubley’s bloodhound program. Along with the names of the victims and players in the hostage drama — Bastian Grost, Nawaf Sanjore, Valerie Dodge, Hugh Vetri, Nikolai Manos — the names of their firms, companies, and institutes such as the Russia East Europe Trade Alliance, were also added to expand the search exponentially.
Once the program was launched, there would be so much information to correlate, so many places for the computer to search, that virtually every other computer function at CTU had to be shut down or curtailed.
“Ready?” Jamey asked when the programming was complete.
“Go,” Ryan commanded.
Jamey punched “execute” and they waited.
Jack and Nina observed the search from Jack’s glass-enclosed office on CTU’s mezzanine while they waited for a security team to process their prisoner, Abigail Heyer. Nina had expressed skepticism that the process would yield results, but Jack was willing to try anything. Milo, Jamey, and Doris all believed it was possible that the computer, augmented by CTU’s random sequencer, would come up with some clues— perhaps even answers — but none of them would state categorically that the program would work.