A/N: This chapter is where the season 5 prequel found on the season 4 DVD set will come into play. Again, if you have access to it, it might help you to watch it. If not, I think I've provided enough detail for you to understand. Thanks again for the reviews. I hope you'll keep reading.
Chapter 3
Audrey got up the next morning after a surprisingly good night's sleep. She had been so tired the night before that she literally collapsed into bed at just after 10 o'clock and didn't wake up until her alarm went off at 5:45. She showered and dressed and drove to work all the while planning her next move. After taking care of some pressing issues right after getting to the office, Audrey stepped out of her office and down to the IT department. Dean was on the phone when he saw Audrey approach his door and he waved her in. Audrey closed the door as she entered the office.
Dean hung up the phone and turned to his radio. Air Supply was singing "All Out of Love", a tune Audrey hadn't heard in at least 25 years. Dean turned down the volume a little and looked at Audrey. "What can I do for you?" he asked getting right to the point.
"I talked to someone last night about the edits on the autopsy report. He thought there were a couple of possibilities as to why the report was edited, but that the whole thing was probably not as bad as I was making it out to be." Audrey explained. "He thought that the motive might be money, possibly an insurance pay out to survivors. I don't know that we need to do much more about it; the only thing I want to make sure of is that there weren't any unusual sums of money paid to certain people." She handed him a half sheet of paper. "Here are the people we need to look into. I have their names and contact information." The paper had the names of Kim Bauer, Chloe, Tony and Michelle. "I know you shouldn't be looking at people's tax returns and bank accounts, but can you take a look at a couple of people and make sure there aren't any suspicious transactions?"
"That's spying, Mrs. Raines. You need to talk to the CIA about that one. We work for DoD, remember?"
"I know, Dean. I just don't know who else to turn to. If money was paid out to certain people in order to cover up something with regards to Jack's death, then they deserve to be caught."
Dean shook his head. "I'm not comfortable with this, Mrs. Raines. If there needs to be a full scale investigation of Mr. Bauer's death, then someone needs to order it. The parties involved need to be subpoenaed and their finances can be reviewed. I could lose my job for going into people's personal finances without due cause."
"I promise that I'll protect you, Dean. You have my word on it."
Dean smiled a shy smile. "I like you, Mrs. Raines. I like you a lot and I can see that you're passionate about this subject, but this is my livelihood. You are a political appointee. You're here for a term or two and then you're gone. The Secretary of Defense serves at the will of the President. If Charles Logan decides that he can't get along with your father, he forces James Heller to resign and he appoints a new Secretary of Defense. At that point you're no longer in the picture. I'm the one who has been working here since I was 25 and plan to retire from here when I'm 70. I can't afford to get caught looking into the finances of American citizens when there is no clear cut evidence of wrongdoing. I'm sorry, Mrs. Raines, but I can't help you. Feel free to find someone else. I won't tell anyone that you approached me. I hope you find what you're looking for but I just can't help you."
Audrey nodded and looked at the floor, embarrassed by her own actions. Dean was right; she had no cause to do what she was doing. She had justified it in her mind because she was willing to do anything that would help her understand what had happened to Jack. "You're right, Dean. What I asked was wrong and I had no right to ask you to do something illegal. I need reevaluate what I've got and to take my concerns to the CIA if there's enough actionable evidence. I'll leave it to them to investigate further. I'm sorry. Thanks for bringing me back to reality. I think I got caught up in the cloak and dagger of it all. Maybe after I leave DoD I should apply for a job at the CIA," she said smiling to cover her embarrassment.
Dean smiled back at her. "It's okay. You're right. You got caught up in the moment. It just took a killjoy like me to ruin it for you."
Audrey went back to her office and sat down hard in her desk chair. What was I thinking? I'm making myself crazy. This has to stop, she admonished herself mentally. The findings of the inquiry committee were that Jack was accidentally killed while he tried to escape. I have to live with that, she told herself.
"I'm sorry, Jack," she whispered aloud. "I wanted it to be different, but it isn't. I have to accept that. Please don't be angry with me." Audrey closed her eyes for a second and took several deep breaths. There was a pile of work on her desk and she had meetings for the rest of the morning. It was time to put her life back together.
Audrey went to her 11 o'clock and noon meetings. It was 1:15 before she stopped by her office on her way to lunch to pick up her messages. "Any messages for me, Ellen," she asked her assistant.
"Only two that need to speak directly to you. One is your father. He needs the specs on the new helicopter that the army is developing. He has a General that is telling him that the original order is for more choppers than he signed off on. He said that he'd be out of the office from one o'clock to three o'clock. So don't call him back before that. The other is Dean Baranski from IT. He asked if you could stop by his office. He wouldn't elaborate."
"Thanks," she said. "I'll stop at IT and then I'm going to go grab lunch."
"You have a conference call at two. Don't forget," Ellen called after her.
Audrey took the elevator down to the first floor all the while wondering what Dean could possibly want to talk to her about. He didn't see her approach his door so she knocked lightly knowing that he would startle as he always did.
"M…Mrs. Raines," he stuttered as his heart rate returned to normal. "I found something that I think you need to see."
"What is it? I thought we agreed not to look at any financial records."
"I didn't. It's been bothering me since yesterday that I couldn't back trace that autopsy edit to its source. I decided to try another method and I was able to trace it back to a personal hard drive. The programmer probably didn't have time to build a wall to prevent me from tracing the source. Those things are hard as hell to build and they take forever. Anyway, when I found the name of the person doing the editing, I noticed that it was the same as one of the people on your list of people whose finances you wanted me to look into."
"Who is it?"
"A CTU programmer named Chloe O'Brian."
Audrey smiled. "I suspected Chloe. She's very talented and she's very loyal to Jack. I'm sure she was trying to cover up anything that could have made him look bad." Audrey was thinking about Heath's suggestion that the edit was made to cover up a suicide. Chloe would definitely want that to be covered up and kept from Kim.
"I'm not so sure that's all it is, Mrs. Raines. Once I found this, I did a little more snooping than I should have. I have to admit that you've got my curiosity piqued. I didn't check banking records because those are a little harder to get into, but I did check phone records. Chloe O'Brian has been in somewhat regular contact with an undercover CIA agent living in Chicago. His name is Vince Harding. I hacked into O'Brian's personnel file. She was apparently on loan to CTU Chicago for six months a couple of years ago. She only ended up staying there about three months and both she and Harding have reprimands on their records for the day she was send back to LA. I'm going to assume that they had some sort of personal relationship that was interfering with work. She went back to LA and they haven't had any contact that I can document on either personal or government phones or computers since then. Chloe first reconnected with Vince two days after Jack Bauer was killed. In the ensuing 12 months she's talked to him three times."
"That may mean nothing. She might just be looking to rekindle an old romance."
"Vince Harding is married now. He's got an eight month old baby. Doesn't it seem strange that she's trying to rekindle a romance with a married man? Whatever Chloe is trying to cover up, Vince Harding is in on it."
"I think you're right. Now the question is: What do we do about it?"
"I'm not finished, Mrs. Raines. There's more. Someone else is also interested in back tracing the source of the edits on Bauer's autopsy. When I was trying to trace the source, I found evidence that someone else was doing the same thing. He's good. I couldn't figure out who he was nor could I back trace to his computer, but I can tell that he was looking at the edits."
"Do you think he traced the source back to Chloe?"
"I'm sure he did. He obviously knows what he's doing and I can't imagine that he wasn't able to trace straight back to Chloe."
"Can Chloe or whoever else is interested in Jack's autopsy trace this back to you?"
"Not a chance. I did it the right way and put a wall in place as I was going along. You can't trace any of my steps. I'm pretty much invisible."
"Good work, Dean. Any idea what it means?"
"None, but I'm going to keep an eye on Chloe O'Brian and see if we can get any more information."
"Let me know if you do."
Audrey went back to her office and tried to concentrate. She sat numbly through her conference calls and couldn't wait for the day to be over. Whatever the mystery surrounding Jack's death, it seemed to be wrapped in layers. Every time one layer was peeled back another one was there to replace it. Nothing had a simple explanation and no question was easily answered. Audrey was at a total loss, but one thing was clear. Chloe O'Brian was key to the whole thing. She would have to make Chloe talk and that might not be so easy. If she had any chance of succeeding, she needed to talk to Chloe face to face. A phone conversation wouldn't work. She also needed to take her by surprise. If she had any warning that Audrey was coming to see her, she would have time to create a cover story. Finally, Audrey decided that she also needed some leverage. She needed to find something that she could hold over Chloe's head. Since Dean had already accessed her personnel files, she might try and find something there to use against her. Chloe had pulled plenty of crazy stunts over the years that CTU directors were forced to ignore because of her ability to make computers do things that no one else could make them do. Any one of those stunts could potentially be held against her. Audrey hated the idea of playing hardball with Chloe but decided that it was her only option.
The next two weeks flew by. Audrey's work schedule was full and her days were busy. She was out of the country for 4 days and she spent another 4 shuttling between military bases on the east coast assessing readiness. The two weeks were gone before she knew it and she hadn't even had time to start planning a trip to Los Angeles or to figure out what kind of leverage she was going to hold against Chloe.
It was late on a Thursday afternoon when Audrey got another call from Dean Baranski. She knew Dean never left his desk before six or seven o'clock in the evening, so she waited until then to go and see him. She knocked lightly on the door and, as usual, he startled.
"What have to got for me, Dean," Audrey asked.
"I don't know that this is important, Mrs. Raines, but I thought I'd show it to you. I told you that I'd keep tabs on Chloe O'Brian. Well, today she bought a round trip ticket from LA to Chicago. She'll arrive at O'Hare at 1:50 this Saturday afternoon and return to LA on a 7:15pm fight."
"So, she's flying into Chicago for about five-and-a-half hours?"
"That's what it looks like. If it were during the week, I'd think she was going to some kind of business meeting, but not on a Saturday. Anyway, I searched the database to see if CTU or any related agencies had meetings planned in Chicago that day and no one does."
"Did she rent a car?"
"Yes, she rented through a local agency in Chicago. If she were on government business presumably she'd rent a car through one of the government contracts. She's going to Chicago for personal reasons."
"Can you tell if there's any family in Chicago?"
"From what I can tell, she has no contacts in Chicago except for Vince Harding and according to phone logs she hasn't talked to him in several weeks. I also checked the other names on that list you gave me to see if anyone else was going to Chicago and none of them is."
"This is getting weirder and weirder," Audrey said shaking her head. "I'm not even sure what to do with this information. It could be nothing or it could be something."
"That's why I decided to pass it on to you. I didn't know what it meant either but if it's important then I wanted you to know about it."
"Thanks, Dean. If you find anything else, let me know."
"Certainly, Mrs. Raines," he said politely.
Audrey left Dean's office and quickly headed back to her own. She knew that she was acting on pure emotion and that nothing that she was about to do made any logical sense, but she was going to do it anyway. She sat down at her desk and began looking at flight schedules to Chicago. Chloe was going to arrive at 1:50; Audrey planned to be there when she arrived.
With the flight booked, Audrey sat back to figure out what she was going to do once she got to Chicago. She couldn't just walk up to Chloe in the airport and ask her what she was doing there. No, that definitely wouldn't work. She needed to be invisible. The idea of following someone was creepy to Audrey and made her feel like a stalker, but what were the alternatives? She just had to figure out how she was going to do it. She wasn't sure how much training Chloe had in field work. Obviously that wasn't her focus, but most CTU agents, even computer analysts, got some training in case they had to work from a mobile unit in the field. Would she have been given enough training to spot a tail? Audrey hoped not because she certainly wasn't trained in the fine art of being an invisible tail.
Audrey drove home that evening still pondering how to best follow Chloe around Chicago without being noticed. She was pulling into her driveway when the solution to the problem hit her. As she opened the garage door, light from the now setting sun glinted off of the back wall of the garage causing Audrey to laugh out loud. It wasn't anything new. It had been sitting there are for the last ten years. It was her motorcycle.
Although she seemed an unlikely person to ride a motorcycle, it was a favorite hobby of hers. When she first met Paul Raines almost 12 years earlier, he was seriously into motorcycle racing. She found the sport exciting. It was one of the things that she found interesting about Paul. Soon after they started dating, Paul taught Audrey to ride. She wasn't interested in doing any racing as Paul had hoped, but she quickly became an avid rider. Their first summer together, just before Audrey started her last year of college, the two rode cross country on their bikes. Jim and Susan Heller were livid. They hadn't liked Paul, who was almost ten years older than Audrey and who they saw as a bad influence on her. Now that she was older she could understand their feelings but at the time their concern and anger seemed overblown.
The two months she and Paul spent exploring the country cemented their relationship and by the time she went back to college that fall she was already planning their wedding in her mind. For the first few years of their marriage, the two rode regularly taking both weekend trips and long vacations on the backs of their bikes. Later, their busy schedules got in the way of both their hobby and their marriage and they began to drift apart. By the time they separated, Audrey hadn't ridden her bike in well over a year. She didn't start riding again until she started seeing Jack. He was fascinated and more than a little turned on by Audrey's love of motorcycles. He, too, had done some motorcycle racing when he was young but gave it up when the responsibilities of job and family became more pressing. He eagerly bought a new bike just a few weeks after their relationship began and the two of them started taking off on the weekends for little known and out of the way places where they could spend time together and not risk running into people who knew them.
Audrey stood in the garage and looked at the motorcycle that she hadn't ridden since the week before Jack was killed. That was the answer. She would rent a motorcycle in Chicago. If she wore a biker's jacket and tucked her hair into her helmet, no one would ever recognize her. On top of that, Audrey knew that motorcycles tended to be almost invisible to automobile drivers. That was one of the reasons that riding a bike could be so dangerous. Unless the motorcycle rider was doing something careless or reckless, a driver in a car barely noticed them. Even someone as inexpert as Audrey could tail Chloe without her ever noticing.
Saturday morning arrived and brought with it an adrenaline rush that Audrey couldn't shake. Her pulse bounded as she boarded the plane at Reagan National airport. It continued to race all through the flight as she reviewed her timetable in her head. As soon as the plane landed, Audrey picked up her small carry on bag that contained her riding jacket and helmet and strode into the terminal. Before long she was in front of the airport hailing one of the dozens of yellow taxi cabs that sat waiting for arriving passengers who needed transportation into the city.
Audrey slipped into the back of the cab and gave the driver the address of the motorcycle rental shop. The ride was longer than she had anticipated. She glanced repeatedly at her watch doing mental calculations and adjusting her timetable. Despite the longer than expected ride to the bike shop, she remained confident that she would still be able to catch up with Chloe.
The driver pulled up to the bike shop just as Audrey finished her calculations. She paid him and went inside. The bike was waiting for her. It was sleek and good looking. She couldn't wait to get on it and see how it handled.
After completing the paperwork and handing over her credit card as payment, Audrey went into the ladies room, pulled the jacket out of her bag and put it on. She had worn a pair of jeans and old leather boots that weren't exactly the best for riding, but they would do in a pinch. After donning the jacket, Audrey stepped in front of a mirror and pulled her hair up on top of her head. With her helmet under one arm and her bag in the other hand, Audrey exited the ladies' room and made her way to the parking lot where the bike sat waiting for her.
If she was experiencing adrenaline rush earlier, it was practically killing her now. Audrey could feel her heart throbbing in her throat as she tucked her bag into the small storage compartment and strapped on her helmet. Now with the helmet with a shaded visor covering her face and the jacket over her clothing making her look bulkier than she was, it was impossible to tell if she was a man or woman. If anything could give it away, it was the boots which were decidedly female. Audrey would just have to hope that no one was looking at her feet.
She looked at her watch for what felt like the thousandth time that day. Chloe's plane was just about to land. Audrey assumed that Chloe would then head for the terminal and get a cab or a shuttle to the car rental company where she had reserved a car. If it went smoothly, all of that should take under a half hour. Considering the distance from the motorcycle rental back to that location, it was going to take Audrey every bit of a half hour to get there. She was going to have to hurry. She straddled the bike and quickly familiarized herself with the controls. The bike started smoothly and Audrey took a couple of turns around the parking lot to get the feel of it before taking it onto the road. Once on the road, she headed back toward the airport at the fastest speed reasonable on city roads.
It was a good day for riding and Audrey wished that she could enjoy it, but the overwhelming sense of urgency and her focus on the task at hand took any enjoyment out of it. As she turned into the street where the car rental was located, she cut her speed. There was a bank across the street with a small, empty parking lot. Audrey pulled the bike into the parking lot and in the shade of an oak tree to make herself less noticeable.
As she parked and killed the engine, an airport shuttle bus pulled up in front of the rental agency and deposited several passengers. The angle at which the shuttle bus had parked prevented Audrey from getting a good look at the passengers. She would just have to be patient and wait for them to come out one at a time, keys in hand and go to their cars.
Audrey's patience paid off. She watched as two men came from the agency and went to their individual cars. The next person out was a woman. Audrey knew her immediately. It was Chloe. Chloe had a strange air about her in the best of times, but today she was obviously nervous. She looked anxiously about before getting into the car. Audrey knew that she was checking to see if anyone was following her. She must have decided that it was safe to proceed because she unlocked the car and got behind the wheel.
Audrey waited for Chloe to pull out. The car was cobalt blue and would be easy to spot. Once Chloe was half way down the block, Audrey started her bike and pulled out onto the road. She followed Chloe through what seemed to be a circuitous route through the city. Paul Raines had done a lot of business in Chicago and Audrey knew the city pretty well. Either Chloe was lost or someone had given her this route to take to avoid being tailed. She finally ended up heading into a rough section of the city. Audrey stayed well behind her but had her constantly in view. She slowed down as Chloe did and pulled the bike to the side of a nearby building. Nothing indicated to her that Chloe had noticed her following.
Audrey watched as Chloe got out of the car and anxiously looked around. She wasn't sure if Chloe was still trying to gauge whether she had been followed or whether she was just looking around to make sure that she was safe in what obviously was not an area where a woman wanted to be walking alone even during daylight hours. She looked briefly at a slip of paper apparently checking an address and then moved forward toward a chain link fence behind which several 18-wheeled trucks were parked. She walked confidently but with an air of suspicion. Suddenly a person stepped from behind a truck, reached out and grabbed her.
Audrey's heart pounded harder than she thought possible. What should she do now? Was Chloe in trouble? Should she try and help her. As she watched, she noticed that there was no sign of struggle. She could see two pairs of feet under the truck: one set was Chloe's, while the other pair belonged to a man. Audrey relaxed a bit realizing that Chloe was meeting someone and that she was not in danger. Chloe was behind the truck less than a minute when she started to walk back toward her car. She stopped and turned around as the person she was with obviously called her back for one more quick exchange. Chloe continued to walk back to her rental car and pulled away.
Audrey debated what to do next. Should she follow Chloe or wait and see who came out from behind the truck. She decided that it was best to wait. Chloe was probably not going anywhere important from here before she went back to the airport. She would probably drive around some and get lunch or shop. All of that would just be a cover to make her coming to and leaving Chicago in just a few hours look less unusual. No, rather than follow Chloe, Audrey would wait to see who emerged from behind the truck.
She backed further into the shadows and watched as a long haired man in a hooded sweatshirt and dark jeans exited through the break in the fence and walked toward a white Toyota. She couldn't see his face, but she knew immediately from the way he walked and the way he carried himself who he was. She gasped. It was impossible. He was dead. She had been at CTU when his body was removed. She had been at the cemetery when his ashes were interred. Jack Bauer was dead; she was sure of that. Now as she looked down a vacant alley in a bad section of Chicago, she watched Jack Bauer saunter warily along.
It suddenly occurred to Audrey that she was imagining things. She so wanted Jack to be alive that she was imagining that he was. She decided to follow the man as he went to his car. She started the bike and knew immediately that he noted her presence. In order not to look suspicious, she drove the bike down the alley past him. As she did, he turned his head a fraction so that she got a look at him.
That was it. Now she knew for sure. The long haired man in the hoodie was Jack. She turned the bike around so that she was facing Jack's car from the opposite side of the street. She wanted to get off of the bike and go to him, but could see even through the windshield that he was watching her closely. She didn't know if he was armed but suspected that he was. If she got off the bike there was a chance that he would read the movement as hostile and open fire. She needed to approach him carefully.
Audrey had just decided to take off her helmet so that Jack could see who she was when a black BMW skidded around the corner and directly toward Jack's car. Audrey screamed his name but knew that there was no one there to hear her. She watched in horror as Jack threw the car in reverse and backed at high speed down the alley with the BMW in hot pursuit. She didn't know what else to do, so she followed the two cars at a safe distance. She knew that Jack was well trained in evasive driving and she hoped that he could get out of this unscathed. She wasn't sure exactly how the chase ended since the two cars were out of her sight when she heard the crash. Audrey held her breath as she pulled around to the side street to see which, if either, of the cars emerged. She let the breath out as she saw Jack's white Toyota pull out from behind a construction site and onto the road. She waited at the corner for a few seconds while Jack drove away. He was spooked right now and there was no way that she could safely approach him. Instead, she decided to follow him and see where he would lead her.
If Audrey thought that she had the wherewithal to tail Jack Bauer, she sadly mistaken. He knew that he was being followed and it took him only four quick turns and a u-turn onto a highway entrance ramp to lose her. By the time Audrey recovered from the u-turn and got onto the busy highway, Jack was lost in a sea of heavy Saturday traffic; his white Toyota swallowed and invisible. Audrey cursed herself for not even memorizing his license plate. At least then she could have gotten his assumed name and address from the department of motor vehicles. Of course, it was likely that, if the car was even registered, that Jack had given the address of some parking lot or public building.
Audrey gave up the pursuit and took the next exit ramp off of the highway. She needed to park the bike for a few minutes and think about all that had just happened if she was going to logically figure out what to do next. A few blocks off of the highway, she found a park where she could grab a hot dog from a vendor and sit for a moment.
Her first thoughts when she sat down under a shade tree were of Jack. How had they done it? How had they staged his death and gotten Jack out of CTU? It was clear that Chloe, Tony and Michelle were all involved. Audrey wondered how many others were also in on it. Bill Buchanan? Curtis Manning? Did Kim know that her father was alive? It all started to make sense. The edits that Chloe made to Jack's autopsy were to cover up the fact that the body at the medical examiner's office belonged to someone else. Now she understood why they were all so secretive. If the government found out what they had done, they would have all gone to prison. If the Chinese figured it out, they would start looking for Jack.
That led to more questions. Who was driving the black BMW? Whoever it was, their intention was to kill Jack. That part was clear. Was the person in the BMW the same one who had been looking at Jack's autopsy report? Dean couldn't trace that back to a source so they had no idea who had stumbled onto Jack's secret and was now after him. Whoever they were, they weren't going to give up at this point. Did that put Chloe in any danger? Would they go after her and either use her as leverage to bring Jack out of hiding or torture her to get information about Jack? Was Kim safe? The quickest way to Jack was through Kim. Audrey knew that Kim was one of Jack's few weak spots. If the person chasing him knew that, then Kim could be in grave danger.
Audrey was more frightened than she had ever been in her life. She was now privy to a dangerous secret and she didn't know who to turn to or how to protect those that were now in danger. Her first thought was to call Chloe, but she couldn't. It was likely that Chloe's calls were being monitored. If Audrey called, that might lead Jack's pursuer back to her. Maybe she should call Buchanan, but he, too, was an unknown. She didn't know a lot about Bill and feared that he might be on either side of this mystery. He might have helped in Jack's escape or he might be working with whoever was after Jack or, the third possibility, Bill could be entirely neutral and simply assume that Jack was dead. If Buchanan didn't know that Jack was alive and she contacted him, he might have the involved parties arrested and have the government begin pursuing Jack. She didn't want any of that to happen. No, Buchanan was not the right person to contact.
After much thought, Audrey decided that her best bet was to go back to the airport and catch Chloe before she headed back to LA. Together they could decide how best to act. With that decision made, Audrey felt much better. She finished her hot dog and diet soda and hopped back onto her bike. She would return it, take a cab back to the airport and hopefully, find Chloe waiting for her 7:15 return flight to LA.
It was almost five o'clock by the time Audrey got back to the airport. She checked the departure board and found that Chloe's flight was listed as being "on time". That meant that she had about two hours to find Chloe in one of the busiest airports in the world. For all she knew, Chloe hadn't even returned to the airport yet. Audrey decided that her best chance to find Chloe was to wait for her at the departure gate. That was a problem. Audrey's flight was leaving from a different concourse than Chloe's. Only ticketed passengers could pass the security screen at a particular concourse. Audrey didn't have any way of getting to the gate from which Chloe would be boarding. She stood staring at the security queue wondering if her DoD credentials would help, but put that thought out of her head as quickly as it had come in. Pulling out DoD credentials and trying to bully the security guards was going to attract attention. She couldn't afford to do that.
Audrey sighed. She had only two choices. She could either buy a ticket to a flight leaving from the same concourse as Chloe or she could wait some distance form the security entrance to the concourse and hope that she would see Chloe as she got in line. It was possible that Chloe was already passed security and had gone to her gate early, but with two hours to spare, Audrey thought that unlikely. She decided to buy a book or magazine at the newsstand across from security and wait on a nearby bench. From there she would have a full view of the security queue. If she didn't see Chloe within a half hour of her flight leaving, Audrey would have to assume that Chloe had already gone to the gate. At that point, she would buy a ticket on whatever available flight would give her access to that gate. Buying a one way ticket was a risky thing especially if done at the last minute by someone not carrying any luggage. Airlines red flagged passengers with one way tickets and no luggage. That was how terrorists traveled. She could explain it away somehow, but again she didn't want to call any attention to herself. Audrey pushed the thought to the back of her mind. She would do what she had to do to protect Jack. Yes, she also needed to warn Chloe, but her overriding goal in all of this was to protect Jack. And she had decided that the only way to do that was to get her father to pull enough strings to set Jack up some place safe, with a foolproof new identity and hopefully, herself by his side.