"How on earth could he have gotten your cell phone number?" Was the first
thing Jack said to Nina when he walked through the door. He ripped the
Velcro of the flack jacket open and pulled it over his head.
"What?" asked Nina, surprised.
"Your cell phone number." He spoke slowly. "Your own cell phone number." He tossed the flack jacket onto the table in front of her and Nina put the cap back on the marker she'd been using and placed her mug of coffee on the table, giving Jack her full attention.
"643..." Began Nina.
"Yes." Interrupted Jack, she raised an eyebrow at him. "Let's go through these tapes, what personal information have you given him?" he asked.
"He couldn't have tapped into the CIA sat net, could he?" Nina asked. They both knew that the CIA had a satellite network was capable of isolating a voice pattern and tracing for it on any phone number. Nina had probably used her cell since she'd first spoken to this guy. With the right software and access to the CIA satellite, after only a few seconds he could have found out her mobile phone number.
"I didn't see a computer in there." He told her, rolling up the sleeves on his shirt. Nina folded her arms across her chest. Thinking of any information she might have given him about herself that could have led to her phone number. There had been no questions about her home, where she lived, she hadn't talked about the Svingskys next door who were always fighting, or the children on the floor below, who loved to play in the roof garden at the end of the hall. She tried to remember if he'd asked her any numbers, or to repeat the hotline number that she might have read wrong. "What could you have said?" Jack asked her.
"Nothing but my name." She told him, absolutely certain. "I told him...which high school, which college, when I moved here...I never said where, or gave him any numbers."
"He could have made up some story to get past the office clerks to find out your information..." Jack considered, he called out to the agents in the room, "Someone get in touch with the education offices, see if anyone's called about Nina's school district asking for information about her from high school, or college." One agent nodded, and Jack presumed he went off to do it.
"Where else could he have referenced your name from?" he asked her.
When Nina didn't respond, thinking of an answer, Jack began mentally searching for possibilities himself, when he came across a simple choice. "What about the phone book?" He queried, "Are you in it?"
"It depends on when they published the last one," Nina thought, "I moved...But that would be my phone number at home, not my cell..."
Jack pulled out his mobile and scanned the memory for her home phone number, he didn't remember it because he rarely had to call it. He pressed the hands free button, and held the phone between the two of them, "Hello, I'm not available right now, but you can reach me on my cell, 643..." Jack ended the call.
"Well that answers that." He muttered.
Nina sighed, of course she had her mobile number on her answering machine, she spent most of her time at CTU, and so anyone who wanted to reach her had to call her cell or her line at CTU. She was angry with herself for putting it on her answering machine message, even though it was a perfectly logical thing to do. She took his flack jacket off the desk and placed it on her chair, and then collected her coffee mug again. "Copell's still over there, checking out his apartment, he's going to start dispatching people to talk to his friends and family."
Nina nodded and took a sip of her coffee, she was just pulling the mug away from her lips when Jack asked. "How are you feeling?" The statement surprised her, and it took her a moment to remember that the encumbrance when she moved her trunk or raised an eyebrow had, only an hour ago, been associated with pain.
"The painkiller must have been an opiate, I'd forgotten about it." She realised, and she absently brought a hand to her waist.
"If you get any unusual pains, bleeding, headaches..." Jack raised an eyebrow at Nina when she opened a mouth to object, "...I'm taking you straight back there." He wasn't about to let her ignore her health any more than he needed her to.
Nina nodded at him, which served as a catalyst for thought. "We should call the networks, most of them have the video footage of him on file, we can ask them to run a profile on him." Jack nodded, and began to do something constructive with his phone, which he'd held in his hand since he'd called Nina's home number.
-24-
Lacey Cauldwell took her latte from the countertop and wandered back into the rush hour traffic to check the timetable. Her husband's train was going to be late, they'd been delayed by nearly an hour somewhere along the line, leaves on the tracks, but it was finally due in twenty minutes. Lacey hadn't seen him in nearly a week now, and she was eagerly waiting for him to get home. She cradled the coffee between her hands and sipped it, tucking her arms as close to her body as possible. She was freezing, standing in the station, which whilst it had a roof, was completely open to the elements on one side to allow the trains to pull in and out. Lacey was used to colder weather than this, but today she'd turned up to pick Stewart up from the station in underwear and one of his large trench coats, so every tiny gust of wind felt like a snowball.
There was a man standing in the middle of the train station, leant up against the pillar that was giving her a creepy feeling. He was also in a long trench coat, except he was obviously wearing clothes under his, she could see khaki trousers poking out from underneath his. He had a briefcase, on the floor by his feet, the man kept glancing down at it, Lacey knew the feeling, he was worried about somebody just casually walking by and picking it up. Lacey had had her bag stolen like that twice. She looked up at the man's face again just as he looked over at her, a sharp glance that scared her enough to look away. When she finally plucked up the courage to look back over, he wasn't paying any attention to her.
For one panicked, arrested for indecent exposure moment, Lacey wondered if he knew what she was wearing underneath her coat, but calmed herself down quickly. The only person who would ever know about this was Stewart when he got off the train, and her best friend who'd persuaded her to do it. Happy again, she began tapping her feet to the beat of a personal stereo that was on quite loudly near her. She glanced up at the timetable again, taking note of the extra eighty seconds that had passed since she'd looked at it last, and she switched her attention to the massive flat canvas television that was doing the days headlines.
There'd been a bomb on the subway yesterday morning, and today another explosion, only a few blocks from Stewart's office. Lacey was desperately happy he hadn't been in town, and hence the lack of clothing. They were flashing up the details of the explosion, as much as the reporters could find out, and Lacey had seen it all earlier, and was tempted to look away. The image suddenly changed from the people running, screaming from the building to a picture of a man, and Lacey read the rolling captions underneath. "Police are currently searching for security guard Paul Davison, who may be involved in the bombing. Anyone with any information on his whereabouts should call the FBI hotline, on..." Lacey ignored the number, concentrating instead on where she'd seen the man's face before. She started chewing on the corner of her lip, and took another sip of her coffee, pirouetting to start with the circuit she'd been walking earlier on.
Lacey found herself in front of the timetables again, and near the guy with the similar trench coat. She considered going over to talk to him but thought the better of it. Instead she settled for glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. She did a quick double take. He was the man from the new bulletin, the security guard that the police were looking for, Lacey felt bile rise to her throat, what if the brief case was a bomb, she was so terrified she thought she was going to faint, and then equally terrified people would see her clothing. She tried not scream as she ran to the opposite corner of the room, pulling out her mobile phone and hoping that the headlines would come up again so she could get the hotline number she'd missed earlier.
-24-
The ride to central station, at seventy miles an hour through a convoy of police cars, was bumpy at best. All they could do was hope that rush hour traffic had moved off the street onto the pavement as soon as they'd heard the sirens, and that each time they rounded a corner, they weren't to smash into the back of a ten squad car pile up.
Jack slammed on the breaks of the car and stopped behind the barricade of squad cars, all of them with their guns trained on the glass entrance doors to the train station. He turned the engine off and didn't bother to lock his car as he jumped out, heading for the floristry van with the tracking equipment in it, followed closely by Nina.
They passed the SWAT team, which was filling out from their van, and went inside the open end of the florists van. Copell was inside waiting for them, he turned in his chair when they stepped up into the van. "What have we got?" Jack asked, standing in the centre of the van whilst Nina took a seat behind him.
"Seven calls to the hotline, fifteen minutes ago, each of them were placing Davison in the train station holding a briefcase." Copell told him, the two agents either side of him typing away fiercely, carrying out heated conversations via their headsets.
"The next bomb?" Jack suggested, Copell nodded.
"Your explosives guy was looking at his apartment before we got the call, he said it looked like he'd recently made another bomb." Copell told them. "We know he's got hostages, but no idea of how many, its rush hour."
Their bomber seemed to like rush hour, it meant more people were out and about, and it was harder to get injured people to help. "The SWAT team?" Jack queried.
"They'll be ready to go in in a few seconds, but a few minutes ago the hotline got a call from our bomber's cell, Johnson read me the string of numbers, but one of the possibilities is, 'don't go in, boom'." Jack nodded, and turned round, looking past Nina to see a thin border on the wall behind her, he lowered himself to rest against it.
"So what do we do then?" asked Nina, glancing sideways up at Jack.
He didn't answer her, so Copell did. "Well these guys..." he gestured to the two tech agents on either side of him, "...are patching into the CCTV system in the station, we're hoping to get some idea of what's going on it there..."
Copell was cut off my Jerry slapping the console and laughing. "Hell yeah!" He exclaimed, and then toned it down again when he realised the tone in the room was less than jubilant. "We've patched into the feed." He said after a cough, and tapped a sequence of commands into his keyboard. The row of monitors at the top of the wall sprung into life, each showing a picture of the activities with in the station. Most were useless, the inside of an empty drug store, the kiosks at Starbucks. Only two cameras showed any people on them. There were nearly a hundred people, all seated in a fifteen metre wide circle around a brief case. Everybody shifted to look at these two monitors. "Where's Davison?" asked Jack, scanning the image for him.
As if on cue, Davison walked into the camera image, he was doing laps at walking pace around the circle, brandishing a gun, and saying something to his hostages, unfortunately the image was black and white and without sound, so they had no idea what he said. Davison walked off the camera image.
Copell called over the SWAT team analyst. The head of the swat team, who Jack had run with in Davison's apartment. "What can you match up with the plans, and what do you think is our best entry point?" Copell asked him.
The young man tucked his helmet under his arm as he made his was round Jerry to look at the screen. "That's the entrance from the platform, the ladies, the gents..." he tapped each door or corridor as he recalled what they were. "That's the entrance to the subway, there's some stores off that way.."
"Any suggestions?" Copell queried.
"From the plans and video footage, I believe my team and I can enter via the subway access in the sewers, from there we can use the ventilation system and the back entrances to ticket booth to get men into the central area of the station, if we're quiet, we can disable Mister Davison and have the hostages out in a total of twenty minutes."
"Hang on a second, Jack." began Nina.
Copell and Jack had focused their attention on the SWAT analyst during his proposal, but Nina had been watching the monitors, and was now intently focused on one. She may have noticed something important. "Nina.." Jack prompted, when she hadn't spoken for a few seconds.
"Hang on a second, Jack." she said again. She walked straight past the three men to Jerry, and leant over his shoulder. "Next time Davison walks past, can you give me a close up on his left hand?" Nina asked.
Jerry nodded that he could and Nina smiled at him. Jack, pushed past Copell and the analyst to approach them. "Nina?" he encouraged, getting more than a little frustrated. She was intent on the computer screen, and he placed his hand on the small of her back.
"There!" Nina exclaimed, tapping the screen as Davison walked past. Almost instantly the image froze and changed to a computer picture screen, and Jerry selected various areas that he zoomed in on, until they had a fuzzy picture of Davison's chest.
"Let's just clear this up." Jerry selected a separate menu, and soon the image became clearer. Nina placed her index finger under some device in Davison's left hand.
"That looks like a remote." Jack muttered, looking over at Nina. She turned and caught his glance. "We can't go in, or he'll blow that bomb." They nodded grimly.
"What?" asked Nina, surprised.
"Your cell phone number." He spoke slowly. "Your own cell phone number." He tossed the flack jacket onto the table in front of her and Nina put the cap back on the marker she'd been using and placed her mug of coffee on the table, giving Jack her full attention.
"643..." Began Nina.
"Yes." Interrupted Jack, she raised an eyebrow at him. "Let's go through these tapes, what personal information have you given him?" he asked.
"He couldn't have tapped into the CIA sat net, could he?" Nina asked. They both knew that the CIA had a satellite network was capable of isolating a voice pattern and tracing for it on any phone number. Nina had probably used her cell since she'd first spoken to this guy. With the right software and access to the CIA satellite, after only a few seconds he could have found out her mobile phone number.
"I didn't see a computer in there." He told her, rolling up the sleeves on his shirt. Nina folded her arms across her chest. Thinking of any information she might have given him about herself that could have led to her phone number. There had been no questions about her home, where she lived, she hadn't talked about the Svingskys next door who were always fighting, or the children on the floor below, who loved to play in the roof garden at the end of the hall. She tried to remember if he'd asked her any numbers, or to repeat the hotline number that she might have read wrong. "What could you have said?" Jack asked her.
"Nothing but my name." She told him, absolutely certain. "I told him...which high school, which college, when I moved here...I never said where, or gave him any numbers."
"He could have made up some story to get past the office clerks to find out your information..." Jack considered, he called out to the agents in the room, "Someone get in touch with the education offices, see if anyone's called about Nina's school district asking for information about her from high school, or college." One agent nodded, and Jack presumed he went off to do it.
"Where else could he have referenced your name from?" he asked her.
When Nina didn't respond, thinking of an answer, Jack began mentally searching for possibilities himself, when he came across a simple choice. "What about the phone book?" He queried, "Are you in it?"
"It depends on when they published the last one," Nina thought, "I moved...But that would be my phone number at home, not my cell..."
Jack pulled out his mobile and scanned the memory for her home phone number, he didn't remember it because he rarely had to call it. He pressed the hands free button, and held the phone between the two of them, "Hello, I'm not available right now, but you can reach me on my cell, 643..." Jack ended the call.
"Well that answers that." He muttered.
Nina sighed, of course she had her mobile number on her answering machine, she spent most of her time at CTU, and so anyone who wanted to reach her had to call her cell or her line at CTU. She was angry with herself for putting it on her answering machine message, even though it was a perfectly logical thing to do. She took his flack jacket off the desk and placed it on her chair, and then collected her coffee mug again. "Copell's still over there, checking out his apartment, he's going to start dispatching people to talk to his friends and family."
Nina nodded and took a sip of her coffee, she was just pulling the mug away from her lips when Jack asked. "How are you feeling?" The statement surprised her, and it took her a moment to remember that the encumbrance when she moved her trunk or raised an eyebrow had, only an hour ago, been associated with pain.
"The painkiller must have been an opiate, I'd forgotten about it." She realised, and she absently brought a hand to her waist.
"If you get any unusual pains, bleeding, headaches..." Jack raised an eyebrow at Nina when she opened a mouth to object, "...I'm taking you straight back there." He wasn't about to let her ignore her health any more than he needed her to.
Nina nodded at him, which served as a catalyst for thought. "We should call the networks, most of them have the video footage of him on file, we can ask them to run a profile on him." Jack nodded, and began to do something constructive with his phone, which he'd held in his hand since he'd called Nina's home number.
-24-
Lacey Cauldwell took her latte from the countertop and wandered back into the rush hour traffic to check the timetable. Her husband's train was going to be late, they'd been delayed by nearly an hour somewhere along the line, leaves on the tracks, but it was finally due in twenty minutes. Lacey hadn't seen him in nearly a week now, and she was eagerly waiting for him to get home. She cradled the coffee between her hands and sipped it, tucking her arms as close to her body as possible. She was freezing, standing in the station, which whilst it had a roof, was completely open to the elements on one side to allow the trains to pull in and out. Lacey was used to colder weather than this, but today she'd turned up to pick Stewart up from the station in underwear and one of his large trench coats, so every tiny gust of wind felt like a snowball.
There was a man standing in the middle of the train station, leant up against the pillar that was giving her a creepy feeling. He was also in a long trench coat, except he was obviously wearing clothes under his, she could see khaki trousers poking out from underneath his. He had a briefcase, on the floor by his feet, the man kept glancing down at it, Lacey knew the feeling, he was worried about somebody just casually walking by and picking it up. Lacey had had her bag stolen like that twice. She looked up at the man's face again just as he looked over at her, a sharp glance that scared her enough to look away. When she finally plucked up the courage to look back over, he wasn't paying any attention to her.
For one panicked, arrested for indecent exposure moment, Lacey wondered if he knew what she was wearing underneath her coat, but calmed herself down quickly. The only person who would ever know about this was Stewart when he got off the train, and her best friend who'd persuaded her to do it. Happy again, she began tapping her feet to the beat of a personal stereo that was on quite loudly near her. She glanced up at the timetable again, taking note of the extra eighty seconds that had passed since she'd looked at it last, and she switched her attention to the massive flat canvas television that was doing the days headlines.
There'd been a bomb on the subway yesterday morning, and today another explosion, only a few blocks from Stewart's office. Lacey was desperately happy he hadn't been in town, and hence the lack of clothing. They were flashing up the details of the explosion, as much as the reporters could find out, and Lacey had seen it all earlier, and was tempted to look away. The image suddenly changed from the people running, screaming from the building to a picture of a man, and Lacey read the rolling captions underneath. "Police are currently searching for security guard Paul Davison, who may be involved in the bombing. Anyone with any information on his whereabouts should call the FBI hotline, on..." Lacey ignored the number, concentrating instead on where she'd seen the man's face before. She started chewing on the corner of her lip, and took another sip of her coffee, pirouetting to start with the circuit she'd been walking earlier on.
Lacey found herself in front of the timetables again, and near the guy with the similar trench coat. She considered going over to talk to him but thought the better of it. Instead she settled for glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. She did a quick double take. He was the man from the new bulletin, the security guard that the police were looking for, Lacey felt bile rise to her throat, what if the brief case was a bomb, she was so terrified she thought she was going to faint, and then equally terrified people would see her clothing. She tried not scream as she ran to the opposite corner of the room, pulling out her mobile phone and hoping that the headlines would come up again so she could get the hotline number she'd missed earlier.
-24-
The ride to central station, at seventy miles an hour through a convoy of police cars, was bumpy at best. All they could do was hope that rush hour traffic had moved off the street onto the pavement as soon as they'd heard the sirens, and that each time they rounded a corner, they weren't to smash into the back of a ten squad car pile up.
Jack slammed on the breaks of the car and stopped behind the barricade of squad cars, all of them with their guns trained on the glass entrance doors to the train station. He turned the engine off and didn't bother to lock his car as he jumped out, heading for the floristry van with the tracking equipment in it, followed closely by Nina.
They passed the SWAT team, which was filling out from their van, and went inside the open end of the florists van. Copell was inside waiting for them, he turned in his chair when they stepped up into the van. "What have we got?" Jack asked, standing in the centre of the van whilst Nina took a seat behind him.
"Seven calls to the hotline, fifteen minutes ago, each of them were placing Davison in the train station holding a briefcase." Copell told him, the two agents either side of him typing away fiercely, carrying out heated conversations via their headsets.
"The next bomb?" Jack suggested, Copell nodded.
"Your explosives guy was looking at his apartment before we got the call, he said it looked like he'd recently made another bomb." Copell told them. "We know he's got hostages, but no idea of how many, its rush hour."
Their bomber seemed to like rush hour, it meant more people were out and about, and it was harder to get injured people to help. "The SWAT team?" Jack queried.
"They'll be ready to go in in a few seconds, but a few minutes ago the hotline got a call from our bomber's cell, Johnson read me the string of numbers, but one of the possibilities is, 'don't go in, boom'." Jack nodded, and turned round, looking past Nina to see a thin border on the wall behind her, he lowered himself to rest against it.
"So what do we do then?" asked Nina, glancing sideways up at Jack.
He didn't answer her, so Copell did. "Well these guys..." he gestured to the two tech agents on either side of him, "...are patching into the CCTV system in the station, we're hoping to get some idea of what's going on it there..."
Copell was cut off my Jerry slapping the console and laughing. "Hell yeah!" He exclaimed, and then toned it down again when he realised the tone in the room was less than jubilant. "We've patched into the feed." He said after a cough, and tapped a sequence of commands into his keyboard. The row of monitors at the top of the wall sprung into life, each showing a picture of the activities with in the station. Most were useless, the inside of an empty drug store, the kiosks at Starbucks. Only two cameras showed any people on them. There were nearly a hundred people, all seated in a fifteen metre wide circle around a brief case. Everybody shifted to look at these two monitors. "Where's Davison?" asked Jack, scanning the image for him.
As if on cue, Davison walked into the camera image, he was doing laps at walking pace around the circle, brandishing a gun, and saying something to his hostages, unfortunately the image was black and white and without sound, so they had no idea what he said. Davison walked off the camera image.
Copell called over the SWAT team analyst. The head of the swat team, who Jack had run with in Davison's apartment. "What can you match up with the plans, and what do you think is our best entry point?" Copell asked him.
The young man tucked his helmet under his arm as he made his was round Jerry to look at the screen. "That's the entrance from the platform, the ladies, the gents..." he tapped each door or corridor as he recalled what they were. "That's the entrance to the subway, there's some stores off that way.."
"Any suggestions?" Copell queried.
"From the plans and video footage, I believe my team and I can enter via the subway access in the sewers, from there we can use the ventilation system and the back entrances to ticket booth to get men into the central area of the station, if we're quiet, we can disable Mister Davison and have the hostages out in a total of twenty minutes."
"Hang on a second, Jack." began Nina.
Copell and Jack had focused their attention on the SWAT analyst during his proposal, but Nina had been watching the monitors, and was now intently focused on one. She may have noticed something important. "Nina.." Jack prompted, when she hadn't spoken for a few seconds.
"Hang on a second, Jack." she said again. She walked straight past the three men to Jerry, and leant over his shoulder. "Next time Davison walks past, can you give me a close up on his left hand?" Nina asked.
Jerry nodded that he could and Nina smiled at him. Jack, pushed past Copell and the analyst to approach them. "Nina?" he encouraged, getting more than a little frustrated. She was intent on the computer screen, and he placed his hand on the small of her back.
"There!" Nina exclaimed, tapping the screen as Davison walked past. Almost instantly the image froze and changed to a computer picture screen, and Jerry selected various areas that he zoomed in on, until they had a fuzzy picture of Davison's chest.
"Let's just clear this up." Jerry selected a separate menu, and soon the image became clearer. Nina placed her index finger under some device in Davison's left hand.
"That looks like a remote." Jack muttered, looking over at Nina. She turned and caught his glance. "We can't go in, or he'll blow that bomb." They nodded grimly.