PART IV
Kate padded back into the kitchen on her way to the study, picking up the tea she'd set to brew while she changed into flannel pj's and a t- shirt. Setting down the teapot – she was used to loose tea now – she turned on her laptop and settled comfortably into the oversized leather chair that faced the desk. She'd had other plans for tonight, of course. She had lecture notes to prepare for her next class and committee minutes to review and some thank you notes to write. And she'd wanted to send Richard an e- mail, just to answer the one she'd gotten from him this morning and fill him in on the arrangements she'd made for their visit. And then Jack called, and she'd put all that aside to see him.
Of course, he would show up now, she thought with some annoyance. Here she had gotten Jack down to a small part of her mind, and to no part of her everyday life. She'd worked it through and made peace with it and kept her life going. The constant pain of missing him had settled down to a low ache, and then after more time it only appeared sporadically, when a song or a remark made her think of him. The emptiness he'd left in her house gradually filled in with people and events that had no connection to him. Things were working out, she was enjoying the life she'd built for herself post-Jack.
And then he reappeared from out of the blue and she had to think about him all over again. Just his voice on the phone re-opened issues that had been closed for months. She felt angry at how he could blithely pop in and out of her life without the slightest understanding of his ability to totally disrupt her world. And now he was back. So, if that made her so angry, why had she said he could call her again, and that she'd like to see him again? She knew the answer.
He made her stop and turn her head in his direction, and consider, just because he was Jack, and he was standing there, looking for her.
Well, "blithely" was the wrong word. The simple act of calling her had clearly been a struggle for him. He told her that he almost hadn't called. Did that hesitation come from embarrassment, or guilt, or did it come from the fear that, if they did see each other the fact that there was nothing left between them would be confirmed. Just good manners and politeness hiding a basic disinterest and indifference. She could imagine many reasons not to call her. What was strong enough in him to overcome all that, and for him to risk experiencing the rejection that he clearly expected and dreaded?
Why had he come looking for her?
She thought about him surveying the room, his quick glances back down the street when they waited to cross an intersection. When they walked together he had quietly made sure she was on his left side, leaving his other hand and side free. That way he could reach back quickly to the gun she knew was always clipped to the waistband of his pants, in the back, underneath his jacket. And then she knew part of the answer.
The Salazars were coming for him, and he expected it to happen soon. That was part of the reason he hadn't stayed at Kim's, of course. Just a little more distance but it increased her separation from him and therefore it increased her safety. So contacting Kate now meant he'd decided he better not wait any longer because the window of opportunity for seeing her was closing, perhaps for good. Kate was surprised at how much this thought disturbed her. He had calmly assessed the danger he was in and had seen it was considerable. And so he'd decided that bringing things involving Kate to some final resolution was in order. He was tying up the loose threads, making sure there was nothing left undone. Just in case.
But at the end of the evening, it hadn't felt like he was trying to say good-bye to her. Quite the opposite. So had he gone into tonight thinking one thing, and come out of it thinking something else?
She needed to pull her own thoughts together about how he was. She needed to resolve her impressions of him and reach some conclusions on her own. And that train of thought led her in a direction that was even more disturbing. If he was in as much danger as he seemed to think he was, there wasn't anything she could do about it. Jack would either handle it or he wouldn't; she had no role in that. But this other thing was nagging at her. What she had asked for, simply, was to know that he was ok. So what did she know?
She knew she didn't like how he looked and she didn't like how he sounded and she didn't like how differently he'd acted, different from a hundred other evenings she'd spent with him, whether before an assignment or after an assignment or just at the conclusion of a normal day. She could tick off the things that had registered with her very easily, without much effort. Inadvertently or unconsciously he had laid all the clues at her feet. Or, at least, they were right there in front of her, obvious and glaring, if only she took the time and the trouble to see.
Like how much he was drinking. Not with any sense of fun, or to relax, but in a steady, uninterrupted, constant stream, the way people drink when they basically want to just get drunk. She couldn't say he couldn't hold it, or that she wished she'd gotten the car keys away from him. But she'd never seen him knock-off an entire six-pack in a little less than an hour, with barely a pause to come up for air. He seemed so used to it, like there was nothing remarkable about what he was doing, like it wasn't anything he hadn't done for a long series of nights.
And then there was this awful tiredness about him. It wasn't as if she hadn't seen the effect of him working for hours on end. She could easily remember Jack putting in sixteen or eighteen hour days for weeks at a time, with no breaks during the weekends, under enormous pressure, with barely enough time to take a shower or change his clothes. She'd seen him fall asleep while he was taking his shoes off, or when she walked across the kitchen to make coffee or, once, in the time it took her to turn off the bathroom light and climb into bed beside him. Hs whole world would narrow down into an intense, unrelenting focus on his work, on solving the problem, on putting a solution together.
No, this wasn't just lack of sleep, although she thought that was part of it. He seemed defeated, as if he'd been in a battle about something important to him, and had finally...just given up. And in her experience Jack never gave up on anything. If he hit an obstacle he'd try to get over it by sheer force of will. And if that didn't work he'd figure out a way around it, or decide he could just leave it there, and get to where he needed to be some other way. Even when they'd broken up, when they decided it just wasn't going to work (and, despite what he'd said, she could have sworn she was in the room making that decision too), he couldn't let go of it. He'd still keep coming back, not able to make a final end to it, until the time for trying had run out, and he'd had to go away.
Kate thought back to what he'd said about Ramon Salazar. How had he put it? That Ramon was a "tough nut to crack". Hadn't he been at that very thing for close to a year? What more was there for Jack to try and do? If there had been some tangible results, something to show for all this, would Jack's voice have been so hard? Would he be wishing so obviously that he could just beat the information he needed out of the man?
And this defeat had shaken him profoundly; to the point that he questioned whether he could do other things he needed or wanted to do. To the point that he needed to hear Kate, of all people, say that she believed in him, and that he was capable of doing whatever he'd promised he would do. (And, by the way, was this Claudia his 'girlfriend', or was she his 'lover', and what did that make Hector, anyway?). In all her experience of him, had Kate ever known Jack to openly question himself that way? Sheer, dogged determination had gotten him through so much. But this defeat had stunned him in some way, and left him confused about himself.
And finally, there was that awful, quiet sadness in his eyes. Kate remembered she'd seen that look before when he lost someone he'd worked with, when another agent was killed. Sometimes it was an agent he'd trained or, even worse, someone Jack had picked for an assignment. She remembered one night in particular, when he had been bitingly sarcastic and abrupt and generally impossible. They had one of those nasty, bitter arguments that ranged over so many separate grievances and topics that neither of them knew what they were actually arguing about. He'd gone out for a run around eleven and she was relieved to see him leave the house. But when she woke two hours later and his side of the bed was still empty, she'd gotten worried. She wondered if she should follow the procedure he'd drilled into her head and call the night number at the office.
She walked into the study, the very room she was sitting in now, and turned on the light. Jack was sitting on the sofa in the dark, still in his running clothes, holding his head in his hands. He looked up at her and the tears were streaming down his face. So he'd finally told her they'd found out that afternoon that Larry Baker was dead. He'd been on an assignment in North Korea that Jack had sent him on and he'd been killed. Not killed outright, either. They'd recorded it. And they'd sent the DVD to CTU addressed to Jack. And suspecting what was on it he'd taken it up to his office and watched it alone, the entire two and a half hours. They even provided an English language voice-over, just so what was happening on the screen would be absolutely clear. Jack wouldn't turn it over to anyone else when he was done because he didn't want anybody else see Larry go through that. Jack was his boss – it was his job to see it – but he refused to let anyone else see it. He sent Michelle screen caps of the faces of the guys who seemed to be in charge, so the work to identify them could begin. He couldn't destroy it because one day they might need it for evidence. So he put it in an evidence bag and sealed it and put it in the safe in his office.
Kate watched him as he told her all this, after he'd stopped shaking and calmed down enough to talk. And that night and for days thereafter there had been a look in his eyes that reminded her of how he'd looked tonight. All the responsibility, all the grief, all the anger, and all the blame he assigned to himself for Larry's death was in that look
Her tea had grown cold so she went back into the kitchen to make a fresh pot. It was after midnight and she'd started this two hours earlier, but she was wide-awake so there was no point in trying to go to sleep now. How much more did she really need or want to know? And given what she already knew, what, if anything, was she supposed to do about it?
She wasn't his wife. They didn't live together. They weren't going out together. In fact, both of them had commitments to other people that, in the hierarchy of things, probably took precedence over any obligations of residual friendship they had to each other. If he was at the point where he needed professional help, and Kate thought it was a good guess that he did, she didn't have the training or the emotional distance from him to provide it. And you'd have to hold hot coals to his feet to get Jack to admit that he was in over his head, and couldn't take care of whatever problems he had on his own.
She sat back down at her desk and idly typed the name "Ramon Salazar" into the search line of her browser. It returned over a hundred references: Ramon had rated stories not just in the L.A.Times and the San Francisco papers, but in the east coast papers as well: The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Miami Herald, the Wall Street Journal were there, as were numerous papers in Mexico, Columbia and Panama, if her rudimentary Spanish was close to being right. Several publications had run background pieces on how Ramon had started out, how he had eliminated rivals in his immediate area one by one, how his operations had grown over the last five years, how much he was probably worth (well over a billion dollars), how they got the drugs into the country.
There was a particularly interesting chart about how Ramon's operations had prospered over the last year. There had been a conflict, a drug gang mini-war, which had involved increasingly sophisticated operations by Ramon's thugs. The conflict had spilled over and was affecting the civilian population who had nothing to do with the drug trade: innocent people who were just trying to live their lives were getting caught in the crossfire. And there were numerous retaliations against those politicians or public figures that tried to break the web of corruption that protected the Salazars from the law and from the honest policemen and jurists who were left.
One particularly notable assassination had happened just three months before. In broad daylight a convoy of heavily armed limousines carrying the most prominent reform politician in the country was ambushed. The article noted that the attack had been carried out commando style, with almost military precision, and involved the use of rocket-propelled grenades and other heavy weapons the Salazars had never used before. The explosion of a delivery van in front stopped the convoy, and they couldn't pull out and head in the opposite direction because a paneled truck blocked that escape route. Salazar's men then appeared on the roofs of the surrounding buildings and covered the trapped cars with automatic weapons fire until everyone, the politician and his twelve bodyguards, was dead. The various reports differed but it appeared that at least three and maybe as many as six civilians had been killed as well. There were more stories of the same kind of thing and speculation about whether this incident, and others like it which had occurred recently, meant that the drug dealers were about to break out of their current roles and become full fledged "warlords", who controlled the civil administration of whole states.
Kate looked at the screen for several minutes without really seeing it. And a question formed in her mind. If you were Ramon Salazar, and you had a tool at your disposal like Jack Bauer, what would you have him doing? He wouldn't be the guy who laundered the money through Switzerland or the Grand Cayman Islands. You wouldn't waste him on sneaking a few hundred bags of cocaine into Texas. She looked at the words "commando style" and "military precision" again. This had happened almost three months ago. Jack had returned two, no more than three weeks ago.
And then she knew why Jack had come looking for her.
She thought about how deeply he loved his daughter.
She thought about how much he loved Charles Dickens and how he could recite whole pages from his books, making up different voices and accents for the different characters: Yorkshire and upper-class London and cockney.
She thought about him patiently trying to coach the pathetic CTU softball team, and how much he wanted to beat the FBI team once, just once.
She thought about how proud she was of him, his courage and his dedication to his job, and of all the times he had pushed himself and sacrificed himself and offered himself up for his work, without thinking if there was any reward in it.
She thought about how gentle and kind and thoughtful and protective he was when she had needed him, and how she could count on him to be her rock.
She thought about his hands and his smile and how she'd felt when he'd kissed her tonight, like she was the most precious thing on earth to him and he was sorry, so sorry, for it all, and so ashamed that he couldn't face her.
She thought how much she wanted to sleep with him again and wake up with him again and how much she just liked being with him and how when he came home he would call her name as soon as he stepped in the door. And he would keep calling her, looking for her from one room to the next, still calling her, because he had to find her to be safe and whole.
And then it was her turn to hold her head in her hands and cry her eyes out. Because she knew he was hurt, and he was in such pain, because of what he had done.
Kate padded back into the kitchen on her way to the study, picking up the tea she'd set to brew while she changed into flannel pj's and a t- shirt. Setting down the teapot – she was used to loose tea now – she turned on her laptop and settled comfortably into the oversized leather chair that faced the desk. She'd had other plans for tonight, of course. She had lecture notes to prepare for her next class and committee minutes to review and some thank you notes to write. And she'd wanted to send Richard an e- mail, just to answer the one she'd gotten from him this morning and fill him in on the arrangements she'd made for their visit. And then Jack called, and she'd put all that aside to see him.
Of course, he would show up now, she thought with some annoyance. Here she had gotten Jack down to a small part of her mind, and to no part of her everyday life. She'd worked it through and made peace with it and kept her life going. The constant pain of missing him had settled down to a low ache, and then after more time it only appeared sporadically, when a song or a remark made her think of him. The emptiness he'd left in her house gradually filled in with people and events that had no connection to him. Things were working out, she was enjoying the life she'd built for herself post-Jack.
And then he reappeared from out of the blue and she had to think about him all over again. Just his voice on the phone re-opened issues that had been closed for months. She felt angry at how he could blithely pop in and out of her life without the slightest understanding of his ability to totally disrupt her world. And now he was back. So, if that made her so angry, why had she said he could call her again, and that she'd like to see him again? She knew the answer.
He made her stop and turn her head in his direction, and consider, just because he was Jack, and he was standing there, looking for her.
Well, "blithely" was the wrong word. The simple act of calling her had clearly been a struggle for him. He told her that he almost hadn't called. Did that hesitation come from embarrassment, or guilt, or did it come from the fear that, if they did see each other the fact that there was nothing left between them would be confirmed. Just good manners and politeness hiding a basic disinterest and indifference. She could imagine many reasons not to call her. What was strong enough in him to overcome all that, and for him to risk experiencing the rejection that he clearly expected and dreaded?
Why had he come looking for her?
She thought about him surveying the room, his quick glances back down the street when they waited to cross an intersection. When they walked together he had quietly made sure she was on his left side, leaving his other hand and side free. That way he could reach back quickly to the gun she knew was always clipped to the waistband of his pants, in the back, underneath his jacket. And then she knew part of the answer.
The Salazars were coming for him, and he expected it to happen soon. That was part of the reason he hadn't stayed at Kim's, of course. Just a little more distance but it increased her separation from him and therefore it increased her safety. So contacting Kate now meant he'd decided he better not wait any longer because the window of opportunity for seeing her was closing, perhaps for good. Kate was surprised at how much this thought disturbed her. He had calmly assessed the danger he was in and had seen it was considerable. And so he'd decided that bringing things involving Kate to some final resolution was in order. He was tying up the loose threads, making sure there was nothing left undone. Just in case.
But at the end of the evening, it hadn't felt like he was trying to say good-bye to her. Quite the opposite. So had he gone into tonight thinking one thing, and come out of it thinking something else?
She needed to pull her own thoughts together about how he was. She needed to resolve her impressions of him and reach some conclusions on her own. And that train of thought led her in a direction that was even more disturbing. If he was in as much danger as he seemed to think he was, there wasn't anything she could do about it. Jack would either handle it or he wouldn't; she had no role in that. But this other thing was nagging at her. What she had asked for, simply, was to know that he was ok. So what did she know?
She knew she didn't like how he looked and she didn't like how he sounded and she didn't like how differently he'd acted, different from a hundred other evenings she'd spent with him, whether before an assignment or after an assignment or just at the conclusion of a normal day. She could tick off the things that had registered with her very easily, without much effort. Inadvertently or unconsciously he had laid all the clues at her feet. Or, at least, they were right there in front of her, obvious and glaring, if only she took the time and the trouble to see.
Like how much he was drinking. Not with any sense of fun, or to relax, but in a steady, uninterrupted, constant stream, the way people drink when they basically want to just get drunk. She couldn't say he couldn't hold it, or that she wished she'd gotten the car keys away from him. But she'd never seen him knock-off an entire six-pack in a little less than an hour, with barely a pause to come up for air. He seemed so used to it, like there was nothing remarkable about what he was doing, like it wasn't anything he hadn't done for a long series of nights.
And then there was this awful tiredness about him. It wasn't as if she hadn't seen the effect of him working for hours on end. She could easily remember Jack putting in sixteen or eighteen hour days for weeks at a time, with no breaks during the weekends, under enormous pressure, with barely enough time to take a shower or change his clothes. She'd seen him fall asleep while he was taking his shoes off, or when she walked across the kitchen to make coffee or, once, in the time it took her to turn off the bathroom light and climb into bed beside him. Hs whole world would narrow down into an intense, unrelenting focus on his work, on solving the problem, on putting a solution together.
No, this wasn't just lack of sleep, although she thought that was part of it. He seemed defeated, as if he'd been in a battle about something important to him, and had finally...just given up. And in her experience Jack never gave up on anything. If he hit an obstacle he'd try to get over it by sheer force of will. And if that didn't work he'd figure out a way around it, or decide he could just leave it there, and get to where he needed to be some other way. Even when they'd broken up, when they decided it just wasn't going to work (and, despite what he'd said, she could have sworn she was in the room making that decision too), he couldn't let go of it. He'd still keep coming back, not able to make a final end to it, until the time for trying had run out, and he'd had to go away.
Kate thought back to what he'd said about Ramon Salazar. How had he put it? That Ramon was a "tough nut to crack". Hadn't he been at that very thing for close to a year? What more was there for Jack to try and do? If there had been some tangible results, something to show for all this, would Jack's voice have been so hard? Would he be wishing so obviously that he could just beat the information he needed out of the man?
And this defeat had shaken him profoundly; to the point that he questioned whether he could do other things he needed or wanted to do. To the point that he needed to hear Kate, of all people, say that she believed in him, and that he was capable of doing whatever he'd promised he would do. (And, by the way, was this Claudia his 'girlfriend', or was she his 'lover', and what did that make Hector, anyway?). In all her experience of him, had Kate ever known Jack to openly question himself that way? Sheer, dogged determination had gotten him through so much. But this defeat had stunned him in some way, and left him confused about himself.
And finally, there was that awful, quiet sadness in his eyes. Kate remembered she'd seen that look before when he lost someone he'd worked with, when another agent was killed. Sometimes it was an agent he'd trained or, even worse, someone Jack had picked for an assignment. She remembered one night in particular, when he had been bitingly sarcastic and abrupt and generally impossible. They had one of those nasty, bitter arguments that ranged over so many separate grievances and topics that neither of them knew what they were actually arguing about. He'd gone out for a run around eleven and she was relieved to see him leave the house. But when she woke two hours later and his side of the bed was still empty, she'd gotten worried. She wondered if she should follow the procedure he'd drilled into her head and call the night number at the office.
She walked into the study, the very room she was sitting in now, and turned on the light. Jack was sitting on the sofa in the dark, still in his running clothes, holding his head in his hands. He looked up at her and the tears were streaming down his face. So he'd finally told her they'd found out that afternoon that Larry Baker was dead. He'd been on an assignment in North Korea that Jack had sent him on and he'd been killed. Not killed outright, either. They'd recorded it. And they'd sent the DVD to CTU addressed to Jack. And suspecting what was on it he'd taken it up to his office and watched it alone, the entire two and a half hours. They even provided an English language voice-over, just so what was happening on the screen would be absolutely clear. Jack wouldn't turn it over to anyone else when he was done because he didn't want anybody else see Larry go through that. Jack was his boss – it was his job to see it – but he refused to let anyone else see it. He sent Michelle screen caps of the faces of the guys who seemed to be in charge, so the work to identify them could begin. He couldn't destroy it because one day they might need it for evidence. So he put it in an evidence bag and sealed it and put it in the safe in his office.
Kate watched him as he told her all this, after he'd stopped shaking and calmed down enough to talk. And that night and for days thereafter there had been a look in his eyes that reminded her of how he'd looked tonight. All the responsibility, all the grief, all the anger, and all the blame he assigned to himself for Larry's death was in that look
Her tea had grown cold so she went back into the kitchen to make a fresh pot. It was after midnight and she'd started this two hours earlier, but she was wide-awake so there was no point in trying to go to sleep now. How much more did she really need or want to know? And given what she already knew, what, if anything, was she supposed to do about it?
She wasn't his wife. They didn't live together. They weren't going out together. In fact, both of them had commitments to other people that, in the hierarchy of things, probably took precedence over any obligations of residual friendship they had to each other. If he was at the point where he needed professional help, and Kate thought it was a good guess that he did, she didn't have the training or the emotional distance from him to provide it. And you'd have to hold hot coals to his feet to get Jack to admit that he was in over his head, and couldn't take care of whatever problems he had on his own.
She sat back down at her desk and idly typed the name "Ramon Salazar" into the search line of her browser. It returned over a hundred references: Ramon had rated stories not just in the L.A.Times and the San Francisco papers, but in the east coast papers as well: The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Miami Herald, the Wall Street Journal were there, as were numerous papers in Mexico, Columbia and Panama, if her rudimentary Spanish was close to being right. Several publications had run background pieces on how Ramon had started out, how he had eliminated rivals in his immediate area one by one, how his operations had grown over the last five years, how much he was probably worth (well over a billion dollars), how they got the drugs into the country.
There was a particularly interesting chart about how Ramon's operations had prospered over the last year. There had been a conflict, a drug gang mini-war, which had involved increasingly sophisticated operations by Ramon's thugs. The conflict had spilled over and was affecting the civilian population who had nothing to do with the drug trade: innocent people who were just trying to live their lives were getting caught in the crossfire. And there were numerous retaliations against those politicians or public figures that tried to break the web of corruption that protected the Salazars from the law and from the honest policemen and jurists who were left.
One particularly notable assassination had happened just three months before. In broad daylight a convoy of heavily armed limousines carrying the most prominent reform politician in the country was ambushed. The article noted that the attack had been carried out commando style, with almost military precision, and involved the use of rocket-propelled grenades and other heavy weapons the Salazars had never used before. The explosion of a delivery van in front stopped the convoy, and they couldn't pull out and head in the opposite direction because a paneled truck blocked that escape route. Salazar's men then appeared on the roofs of the surrounding buildings and covered the trapped cars with automatic weapons fire until everyone, the politician and his twelve bodyguards, was dead. The various reports differed but it appeared that at least three and maybe as many as six civilians had been killed as well. There were more stories of the same kind of thing and speculation about whether this incident, and others like it which had occurred recently, meant that the drug dealers were about to break out of their current roles and become full fledged "warlords", who controlled the civil administration of whole states.
Kate looked at the screen for several minutes without really seeing it. And a question formed in her mind. If you were Ramon Salazar, and you had a tool at your disposal like Jack Bauer, what would you have him doing? He wouldn't be the guy who laundered the money through Switzerland or the Grand Cayman Islands. You wouldn't waste him on sneaking a few hundred bags of cocaine into Texas. She looked at the words "commando style" and "military precision" again. This had happened almost three months ago. Jack had returned two, no more than three weeks ago.
And then she knew why Jack had come looking for her.
She thought about how deeply he loved his daughter.
She thought about how much he loved Charles Dickens and how he could recite whole pages from his books, making up different voices and accents for the different characters: Yorkshire and upper-class London and cockney.
She thought about him patiently trying to coach the pathetic CTU softball team, and how much he wanted to beat the FBI team once, just once.
She thought about how proud she was of him, his courage and his dedication to his job, and of all the times he had pushed himself and sacrificed himself and offered himself up for his work, without thinking if there was any reward in it.
She thought about how gentle and kind and thoughtful and protective he was when she had needed him, and how she could count on him to be her rock.
She thought about his hands and his smile and how she'd felt when he'd kissed her tonight, like she was the most precious thing on earth to him and he was sorry, so sorry, for it all, and so ashamed that he couldn't face her.
She thought how much she wanted to sleep with him again and wake up with him again and how much she just liked being with him and how when he came home he would call her name as soon as he stepped in the door. And he would keep calling her, looking for her from one room to the next, still calling her, because he had to find her to be safe and whole.
And then it was her turn to hold her head in her hands and cry her eyes out. Because she knew he was hurt, and he was in such pain, because of what he had done.