Only Tony Almeida, boots propped on a desk while he silently watched the process, truly believed Fay’s creation would find her killer. He remained cool when five minutes went by with no results.
The single screen that should have displayed promising leads remained dark.
Then, twenty-one minutes and six seconds into the process, the monitor abruptly lit up and the screen was filled with hundreds of possible clues. The operation was moving so fast Jamey had to step in and slow things down. In a steady stream, pertinent facts continued to emerge.
The single link that united all the disparate threads was Nikolai Manos. The program revealed that one of Manos’s shell companies hired a very expensive mapping firm to survey public land in the Angeles National Forest.
MG Enterprises, a Nikolai Manos-controlled shell company, paid for a series of deliveries of construction material to an area along Route 39—a road through the San Gabriel Mountains that had been closed to traffic for over a decade.
Pacific Power and Light recorded two years of mysterious power surges and incidents of voltage theft from high-tension wires running through the same region of the San Gabriel peaks where the survey had been conducted.
Three hikers and a pair of campers in an area near the spot where Ibn al Farad had been captured vanished without a trace over a fourteen-month period.
Rangers in the Angeles National Forest reported strange lights at night.
Unauthorized helicopter takeoffs and landings were reported to the FAA. A near miss between a light plane and an unauthorized aircraft was reported over that same area six months ago.
A 1977 article from the National Spelunking Institute — now posted on its website — featured an unconfirmed report of a large network of caverns discovered in the San Gabriels. Subsequent expeditions failed to locate the caves. The last one mounted just eighteen months ago ended tragically. The team’s vehicle was found at the bottom of a ravine, everyone dead inside. The incident was judged an accident, at the time.
Jamey Farrell kept narrowing the search until, at precisely 3:33 a.m., the program spit out a longitude and latitude in the San Gabriel Mountains, a threesquare-mile area just four miles from where Ibn al Farad was caught searching for his master.
Fay Hubley’s program had nailed the Old Man on the Mountain.
Abigail Heyer was seated in an aluminum interrogation chair. Both hands were strapped to the armrest, the woman’s broken right wrist, swollen and purple, had been treated with no more care than her left. The woman had been strip searched, had endured a thorough cavity check, and all of her clothes, jewelry and personal items had been taken from her. She would not get the opportunity to swallow poison, like Katya or Richard Lesser.
The international star wore an orange prison jumpsuit and nothing else. She stared straight ahead, unblinking, but Jack believed she knew he was right there, on the other side of the one-way mirror.
“Break her, Jack. Get her to confess.” Tony Almeida still wore his undercover clothing — black jeans, sweatshirt stained with blood, steel-tipped cowboy boots. His unshaven face was ravaged by fatigue, his eyes haunted. Jack knew Tony blamed himself for Fay Hubley’s death. Jack knew because he’d been in Tony’s situation himself, more than once.
Nina, still wearing the spangled dress, gazed impassively at the woman in the chair. It was Nina who’d brought Ms. Heyer back to CTU for interrogation. The woman had demanded her lawyers — plural, she had a team of them — and was denied. The actress went silent after that, not even answering Dr. Brandeis’s queries about her condition.
The doctor requested time to set her broken wrist— Jack vetoed that. Then Dr. Brandeis asked permission to administer a painkiller. Jack nixed that too. Brandeis did not ask to witness the interrogation. He already knew the answer.
Jack studied Abigail Heyer through the glass, his jaw moving. Nina touched his arm, leaned close and whispered, “The crisis has passed, Jack. Let the doctor take care of her. Hold her here until she’s willing to talk.”
Jack gently shook off Nina. “This ends now.” He swiped the keycard that dangled from a strap around his neck and entering the soundproofed interrogation chamber.
The woman refused to acknowledge his presence. Jack placed a metal chair in front of her, sat down. Still she resisted his gaze.
There were a number of ways to extract information, Jack knew — torture, drugs, sleep deprivation, the threat of death.
But such techniques wore the prisoner’s will down over time, and Jack was nearly out of it. Hasan had to be stopped. Now. They were never closer to the man than at this moment, and might never get this close again. He had to extract the confirmation he needed from his prisoner as quickly as possible.
Yet Jack knew in this case physical threats would also fail because Abigail Heyer was willing to blow herself up for Hasan, so she was not afraid of death. Which meant that he had to hit her fast and hard— with something she did fear.
“Hasan is dead,” Jack began. Despite herself, the woman winced.
“We knew about his hideaway — that place in the mountains. Five minutes ago we blew it up. Everyone inside perished. We’re assessing the damage now. I can show you the man’s corpse, when we find it.”
“Hasan will never die,” Abigail Heyer said, a half-smile brushing her full lips.
“You may be right.” Jack nodded. Now was the time to take the chance, make the leap. “Hasan, as a symbol, an ideal, might never die. But Nikolai Manos, the man who called himself Hasan, is dead. I killed him.”
Jack studied the woman’s face. He watched her calm, controlled demeanor crack into a thousand tiny splinters. He saw a black void open up inside of her and swallow the woman whole.
Jack watched Abigail Heyer’s reaction, and he knew.
24. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 4 A.M. AND 5 A.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME
Jack had called in every resource he could find for this raid. Chet Blackburn’s overworked Tactical Unit would lead the strike, but elements of the FBI, Captain Stone’s LAPD SWAT team, the California National Guard — even State Troopers under the command of Captain Lang — had been tapped.
Now a dozen helicopters circled the mountain, while CTU specialists used deep ground imaging to locate the hidden entrances to Hasan’s no longer secret underground lair.
“We found two exits, both covered now,” Chet Blackburn told Jack, shouting to be heard over the noise of the beating blades. “All the elements are in place. We’re ready to go once you give the word.”
Jack Bauer nodded, activated his headset. “Begin the assault. ”
Hasan’s anger was a physical force that battered everyone and everything around him.
Nawaf Sanjore followed a trail of smashed furniture and broken glass, to the deepest region of his master’s underground headquarters. He found several acolytes cowering in front of a steel door.
“Is he inside?” the architect asked.
The robed men nodded. “The master does not wish to be disturbed.”
Sanjore ignored the warning, pushed the heavy door inward. The chamber beyond was small, and crowded with computers and satellite communications equipment. Hasan sat in his command chair, his back to the door. He stared straight ahead, at a darkened monitor.