Author's note: Please see my notes at the start of Chapter 1 - I do not own the "24" characters or any other commercial or company mentioned in my story.
Thanks for the reviews, and I hope that you keep reading... Michelle called through to Tony's phone.
A Little Later…
"I have Luisa on the other line," Tony said. "She'll only talk to her mother."
"Put her through, and meet me in your office in ten minutes." She heard a click. "Luisa, it's your mum."
"Mummy! There's a man here." Michelle looked through the glass window to see Tony who was still listening in on the call. He raised an eyebrow.
"He is probably just the babysitters boyfriend. Don't worry, darling. We'll see you in the morning." Michelle put the phone down. "Does Tony know you're still alive?"
"No. Last he heard was that I died on a mission in London several years ago."
After studying in England, she was hand selected to join a highly secretive government organisation. A year into the job, Lucy was undercover with a team working alongside other military organisations. Things turned nasty and after a couple of weeks, managers had not heard anything from a few agents, including Lucy. They declared these agents dead. A year or so had passed when these few were released from a bunker in the mountains. Families had mourned their loss, and so these few were given new identities, though kept on as agents, continuing the work they had begun. Eventually the investigation became dormant as there were no new leads on the men they were following. During the last month, the case was reopened when some new leads came to Lucy's attention. She followed them to Los Angeles from London, and knew that it was time to tell her family the truth.
"I have some news that may be hard for you to hear." Michelle sat down on the cream leather settee next to Tony. She took his hand within hers, and spoke slowly. "Your sister, Lucy. She is not dead. She is sat downstairs in the Conference Suite…" As soon as she begun to speak, she remembered the beginning of the conversation with Lucy. My brother may be in danger. Michelle knew whom she had to call.
His date had been sat in her seat for fifteen minutes. They had just ordered champagne when his phone rang.
"It's Michelle. I need you to go over to my house straight away. Luisa might be in danger. Take her somewhere safe please Jack. I wouldn't have called you if I could have asked someone else, I know that tonight is important for you, but…"
"Don't worry. I'll be straight over." He ended the call and spoke to his dinner partner, "I'm really sorry. I have to leave now." Jack stood up and pressed his lips on her cheek and squeezed her shoulder
Meanwhile, Michelle spied through the window of Tony's office to the floor below. Tony had marched over to the Conference Room. She caught the grumpy look on his face as he opened the heavy glass door, walked through and carefully closed it behind him. He stood just the other side of it with folded arms and his head to one side. Lucy stood up and casually walked towards him and wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders. Tony maintained his position for a moment, then pushed her away from him. Michelle could tell he had said something to her, as all of a sudden there was an eruption of body language, arms moving all over the place, and explosions of emotions shown on her face. Then, all of a sudden everything seemed calm. Michelle left the office and walked down the grey concrete stairs, across to the conference room and pulled open the door to see that Tony had pinned his sister to the opposite wall.
"What the Hell did you think you were doing?" His voice boomed. "Do you realise that because of your sloppy investigations, not only are you dead, but my daughter might be dead!"
Michelle ran across and pulled Tony away from Lucy. She felt his muscles were so tensely taught. She reassured him that Jack was on his way to bring Luisa in.
"He'll call us soon!"
Jack pulled up to the house in his ex-CTU car. Before he got out, he took a moment to think about his plan for he had no idea if the people inside were hostile or simply the Almeida's babysitters. He saw one tall male figure through the window. He appeared to be talking on the phone, and pacing. Jack took off his tie and put it in the glove box. As a reaction, he reached for his gun, but then thought better of it. He didn't want Tony and Michelle's five year old exposed to guns, especially when there may be no reason to use one.
He knocked on the door. No answer. He pulled his keys out of his pocket and unlocked the door. As he entered the hallway, Neil leapt out from behind the wall.
"What do you want? You know you shouldn't be here! Now, tell me what do you want?" Neil yelled.
"I'm Tony's friend, just came to borrow a tie. I'm going out on a date and I need to impress this girl, you know what I mean?" He smirked at the cover story he told, he needed this guy to believe him, so he could gain access upstairs, and of course he looked the part.
"Well just get it and leave!" The man watched as Jack trotted up the stairs and made a turn into one of the bedrooms, then he went back to his phone conversation in the living room.
Upstairs, Jack found a random tie and wrapped it around the knuckles of his right hand. He picked his mobile out of his trouser pocket and dialled a CTU number.
In a whisper, "I have seen one male, mid-twenties here; not seen the babysitter yet. Wait a minute."
Michelle waited with the CTU phone pressed to her ear as Jack, on the other end of the call, quietly made his way to Luisa's bedroom. "Shh!!! Don't say anything and come with me. I'll take you to Mummy." He put the phone to his ear and spoke to Michelle again, "I have Luisa now, keep the call open." He padded down the stairs hoping the man in the living room would not hear his steps. Jack had just managed to open the front door when he put Luisa down, out of his arms on the doorstep. "Run to the other side of my car!" He instructed her.
Neil came out of the living room and looked at Jack. "Did you get the tie?"
"Yeah, I got it. This girl had better appreciate the trouble I've gone to for her!" Jack snorted and closed the door behind him.
Jack stuffed the little girl into the car and sped away.
"Michelle I'm on my way to CTU. Luisa is with me." He put the mobile into a central cradle so he could use the speaker function. "She can hear you too."
"Thanks Jack. Darling are you there?"
"Mummy!"
"Please be good for Uncle Jack and do everything he tells you. I'll see you very soon! Jack, is everything alright there?"
"Yeah," he glanced into his rear-view mirror. "Michelle I'm being trailed, the guy must have realised I have Luisa, can you pick this up on Satellite?"
A few taps on the keyboard and then she asked what his location was. He explained he was just a few blocks north of her house, he was in the large black Ford and the car in pursuit of him was an old green car.
"Okay, Jack. I can locate you easier if you activate your GPS signal in your car. You have to drive along the highway a little to get back here." Michelle knew that, even at this time of night, the highway would be quite busy still.
Jack reached down and activated the GPS chip beneath the steering column. He knew there was a good reason for buying this car from CTU when they got rid of these older models.
"Your location is on the screen, and I can track the car behind you using Sat images." She hung up the phone.
On her screen, she could see a grid-like outline drawing of the area. Jack's car automatically appeared as a bright blue light and she labelled the other car as a bright red light. She watched as the two lights sped along the street, there was about half a mile between the two vehicles. Jack swerved his car around a corner to come near to the intersection that joins this neighbourhood and the highway, Neil followed. On his approach, Jack turned his head and glanced at Luisa. She must have been staring at him for a long time, and, for a five year old, she had a very inquisitive look on her face, though she looked painfully tired. A thought passed through Jack's mind that the little girl had no idea what was going on, she had so far been shielded from such erratic driving. He just knew that he had to get her back to CTU as soon as possible.
Jack made the transition from the intersection onto the highway in a swift motion, and the car's fast transition of speed was smooth. He noticed that the green car had also joined the highway, but was a few cars behind him. He turned his head once again; the small girl had flopped into the corner of the chair. Jack's heart lurched and a sick feeling ran though his stomach. This was Tony and Michelle's little girl, their pride and joy. He shook her hand to see if she might wake up. No. She was not asleep; she had passed out of consciousness. Jack noticed he was approaching his exit towards CTU and left the highway. Once he was on the main road, he once again saw the green car on his tail. Another thirty seconds and he was turning into the CTU car park. The green car did not follow him in, but carried on driving and cut his engine about 100 yards further down the road.
Inside the doorway, Tony and Michelle were waiting to greet him. Jack had the girl flopped in his arms and laid her in Tony's outstretched arms.
"I think she is unconscious, Tony. You need to take her to the medical wing, immediately."
Tony ran with the girl to the medical wing. Michelle's first question was if her daughter had seen any guns. Jack replied with a firm no, although he could not be sure of what she had witnessed before he got to the house. They looked back at the computer screen that Chloe O'Brian had been monitoring. The red light had stopped moving and was now flashing slowly.
"The driver has gotten out of the vehicle and is now walking along the footpath towards CTU."
Neil was following his instructions. The instructions given to him earlier that day over the phone. He was to keep the girl under constant surveillance until his contact called him. He needed to get the child back and out of CTU. It occurred to him the drug he had given her earlier to keep her from bouncing about too much would be beginning to kick-in. A perfect plan, he hoped. She would be in a bed by the time he got there so all he had to do was to sneak in and take her out of the bed.
At her computer terminal, Michelle watched the red dot flash slowly towards the building she was in. Neil did not attempt to enter by any of the main doors, but by squeezing himself through the air conditioning shaft. He wriggled along the shiny silver pipe until he fell out into a ventilation plant room.
A guard inside the room passed him the paper plans to CTU and pointed to where the girl was now lying in the medical centre. Neil put on a spare janitor uniform and left the room. He walked through the main body of CTU, and passed Michelle, who did not look at him, and on towards the medical centre.
It's like stealing candy from a baby, he thought as he walked through one of the doors. He saw the girl lying in the bed, and some man, Tony, asleep in a chair next to the bed. Neil placed his hands on the drip tube that was feeding into Luisa's arm. Just as he began to twist it out of her hand, Tony sat bolt upright and pointed a gun at Neil. Jack had now entered the room and was in the throes of pulling Neil's arms into a restraint position behind his back and cuffed his hands.
"You're in custody now!" Jack whispered in his ear.
"I'm just a janitor." Neil whinnied.
"Yeah, right. A Janitor who happens to be at my friends house one minute, then at my workplace the next." Jack yanked him out of the room and towards the holding rooms. "You can save all your excuses for someone who cares."
Michelle looked at her child, then at Tony.
"The doctor thinks its some sort of sleeping tablet. She will be okay once she wakes up, just a little dehydrated, hence the tubes…" He waved his hand at the tubes going into her hand.
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A silver plane charged through the sky high above mainland America, beginning to make its descent. One of its passengers dialled a number on his mobile phone.
"Hello?" A voice answered.
"I'll be with you in about an hour. I'm on a plane to Los Angeles!" The phone switched off.
Lucy snapped closed her mobile phone. She walked across the office to the desk where Tony was sitting. He was wearing headphones and concentrating on watching a live video-feed from the interrogation room on his monitor. After a few minutes, he still had not noticed Lucy standing at his shoulder, or if he had, he was definitely ignoring her. She made up her mind to make him aware of his presence, by touching his shoulder. He jumped. He did not know she was there after all. He removed one of his headphones to listen.
"There is a new problem."
