Chapter 6: Back in LA
Tony walked through the airport and caught sight of the limo driver carrying the sign saying "Almeida". He recognized the man as Agent Tim Richards; they had met the last time Tony was at CTU. Tony approached him and they exchanged pleasantries without appearing familiar with each other. Tony followed Richards to the limousine. Richards opened the door and allowed Tony time to get in. As expected, Hammond and DuBose were in the back seat waiting for him.
"First things first," Tony said without greeting either one of them. "Tell me what's going on with my family."
"Yuen's guys are rank amateurs, Tony." DuBose reported. "We spotted them immediately. They're watching the house but haven't followed Michelle at any time. We haven't spotted them anywhere near either of the kids' schools. They did try to enter the house while it was empty the day before yesterday, but they didn't have any luck. Apparently they couldn't figure out how to disarm your security system and didn't want to attract any attention by setting it off." DuBose paused. "So your house appears to be clean. They're such amateurs that I can't imagine that they have any long range listening equipment. If they did, they wouldn't have approached the house in the first place.
"Your office is a different story. They got in easily the night before last. They probably wired it. We aren't going to be able to contact you there." DuBose handed Tony a small handheld device. "You can check out your office with this. It'll pick up any bugs that they left. If you find them, leave them in place. We don't want Yuen to get suspicious. You may want to check out your house with that, too, but I don't think you're going to find anything. I think your family is safe, Tony, but we'll keep watching them to make sure."
"Thanks, Jeff. You can't imagine how much this means to me. I know you guys think I'm over reacting about this and I appreciate you putting Baker's unit on it. Baker runs a class act. I trust those guys."
"Can we get down to business now?" Hammond asked irritably. He pulled a file folder out of his briefcase and handed it to Tony. "Here is the rest of your information, Tony."
"Ok, what happens next?"
"We brought Bob Warner up to speed earlier this morning and he's on board. You need to call him tomorrow. Since we know that Yuen is listening, they need to hear you negotiating with Bob." DuBose told him. "Bob will agree to order a large shipment of computer equipment from Asia Technology Limited."
"We have two of our people in place at ATL." Hammond interjected.
"That's right," DuBose agreed. "They will make sure that Warner's order is 'accidentally' delivered to Yuen's warehouse. Yuen's people can bury their weapons components in the shipment. Then call ATL to let them know the shipment was delivered to the wrong location. ATL will come back and pick it up and deliver it to the dock for shipment to LA."
Hammond took over as DuBose stopped for a moment. "Our people have been watching the dock. The longshoremen don't check the shipments. They have the dogs sniff them for drugs and explosives. Otherwise, there isn't any real check on the contents of the container."
"What happens when the shipment reaches the US?" Tony asked.
"Bob Warner is going to call the head of the port authority and make some noise that he has been waiting for this shipment for a while and that he wants it expedited. Bob has been somewhat outspoken recently about the fact that LA is no longer a 'friend to the business community'. He has talked about moving his headquarters to a more 'business friendly' city. Of course, the mayor and other city officials are doing anything to please him right now, because if Warner Enterprises moves its HQ, other businesses are going to follow. So if he asks for his shipment to be moved out quickly, it's going to happen. That should prevent them from doing all but a cursory inspection on the shipment.
"When the shipment arrives at Warner Enterprises, Bob Warner will call you. You get in touch with Weldon Hutchins and Yuen's people can go to Warner Enterprises and pick up their weapons components. Of course, we'll have several people on the loading dock there to keep an eye on the situation. Then our agents will follow Yuen's people. We don't want to pick them up until we can get the whole cell. Right now, we can't identify any of Yuen's people. This way we'll know at least part of the cell and they can lead us to the others." DuBose told Tony.
"What about Yuen?" Tony asked.
Hammond spoke this time. "We'll be able to get Yuen without a problem. We have to wait until we raid the cell, though. If we pick up Yuen first, his gang is going to scatter and disappear like cockroaches. We have to pick up Yuen at the same time we raid the cell. So it may be a few weeks before we actually move in on Yuen or his boys."
"What do you know about Weldon Hutchins?" Tony asked.
"Richards," Hammond said to the driver, "fill Almeida in on Hutchins."
"Sure. Hutchins is a Korean American. We put a picture of him in the file so you'll know him if you see him. His father was a US GI in the Korean War; a Corporal Adam Hutchins. He ended up impregnating a 14 or 15 year old Korean peasant girl from a village near his base. He married her and sent her home to his family in the States and she gave birth to Weldon. When Adam got home, he decided that he wasn't interested in his Korean wife and filed for divorce. She moved into a Korean slum in LA and that's where Weldon was raised. He was in trouble from the time he could walk. He belonged to Asian gangs and was stealing cars by the mid-60s when he was only 12 or 13 years old. He eventually got into the drug trade. Now he is a big middleman for the Southeast Asian drug lords. The DEA estimates that thousands of kilos of heroin pass through his hands every couple of months, but they have never been able to pin anything on him. We're not sure how he got involved with Yuen, because Yuen doesn't appear to have anything to do with the drug market and Hutchins isn't involved with any anti-American terrorist activities. So we're not sure of the connection."
"You seem to have a lot of information. Was the DEA willing to share all of that?" Tony asked.
"No," Richards answered. "I was on loan to the DEA for about 18 months a couple of years ago. We were trying to pin something on Hutchins but couldn't get enough to make a conviction stick."
Hammond pointed at the file folder now sitting in Tony's lap. "The file will give you all of the details including the dates and times. Once you give the information to Yuen, you should be off the hook. I can't imagine that he would make any attempt to contact you after that, but we'll keep an eye on you and your family until he's arrested." He paused. "You've done a great job so far, Tony. We can't thank you enough. Finish this up and you're done, I swear, we won't call you again."
The three rode the remaining five minutes in silence. "Richards, are we being followed?" Hammond asked breaking the silence.
"Oh, yeah. I spotted the tail about a mile past the airport. He's definitely an amateur. He made several mistakes that gave him away."
As the limousine pulled into Tony's street Hammond addressed him. "If you need to contact us, use the scramble phone and call from outside of your office."
"Will do," Tony responded succinctly as he stepped from the car. Richards acted the part of the driver and stepped out to retrieve Tony's bag from the trunk. Tony closed the door and turned to see Joe run from the house toward him.
"Daddy!" Joe called. He dropped the soccer ball he was carrying.
Tony couldn't help but smile as he reached for the four year old. Joe looked exactly like Tony. He had a lean, sturdy build, deep brown eyes and coarse, curly brown hair. He loved to play outside and his olive skin had a perpetual southern California tan.
Tony picked the child up and tossed him to the air. "Hey buddy! I think you've gotten bigger since I left." He said as he caught Joe and held him tight against his chest. His relief at seeing his family safe was overwhelming. He kissed the boy over and over again.
Joe struggled to get out of his father's grasp. "Can we play soccer?" Joe asked eagerly.
"Sure we can play soccer. Let me say hello to Mommy first. Then I'll change clothes and we'll play soccer."
Tony picked up his suitcase and smiled to see that Joe was struggling to carry his laptop case. "How about if I get that, Sport. You get the soccer ball."
Michelle had stepped out onto the porch. She had a happy smile on her face for the first time in months. It was one of those smiles that lit up Tony's world. With the trip to Korea behind him and his fears for his safety and his family's safety relieved, he suddenly felt as if life was falling into place again.
As he ascended the porch steps, he took Michelle in his arms. They kissed softly. "God, I missed you. I love you so much." He whispered, his voice cracking slightly with emotion. Michelle noticed the emotion in his voice and again got the feeling that something was wrong. Tony kissed her again. His kiss felt so good that she forgot her concerns. She opened her lips and he slipped his tongue briefly into her mouth. He wanted to continue, but Joe was tugging on his belt loop.
"Can we play soccer now?" Tony and Michelle pulled apart and both laughed.
"Give me a couple of minutes, Buddy. Okay?" Tony said as he tousled his son's hair. "I need to change clothes."
Hammond and DuBose watched the reunion, invisible behind tinted windows, as the car pulled out of the driveway and away from the house. Tony was right when he said that Hammond couldn't stand that he had moved on to have a good life. Hammond had given up everything for the CIA. Wasn't that what was expected?
He was 28 years old when he got a job as a field agent. It was at the height of the cold war. He had always had a gift for languages and was teaching Russian, German and Spanish in a private high school near Atlanta. He had been teaching for five years now and was already disenchanted with it. The pay was low and the school was full of rich kids who didn't give a damn about learning a language. They were only in his class because they needed the credit to graduate. He heard that the government was recruiting people with foreign language skills as interpreters. That seemed exciting. He could work in a foreign embassy, see Europe or South America. He was engaged to a beautiful English teacher who thought moving to another country would be fun. She could get a job teaching English in a foreign school. Go for it, she told him, so he applied.
Instead of hearing from the State Department, he received a call from the CIA. They needed Russian interpreters badly. He interviewed for the job and took a required test. A few weeks later they called him for a second interview. They explained that his test scores showed that he had many of the qualities that they were looking for in a field agent. His Russian language skills made him even more useful. They could place him in the Russian embassy as an interpreter, but his real position would be as an agent. He would communicate with Russian double agents. At first the idea scared him, but the more he thought about it, the more intrigued he became.
His fiancé was livid. She refused to move to the Soviet Union, it was out of the question. Europe or South America, yes, but the USSR, no. On top of all that, the job sounded too dangerous, he could get killed. Brad decided that this was the chance of a lifetime, so he broke off his engagement and took the job.
The job was exciting and maybe just a little bit dangerous and he quickly grew to love it. He excelled as a field agent. He worked countless hours and was quickly promoted. After ten years in the USSR, he was promoted to a position in Germany and several years later back to the United States.
It wasn't until then that he realized that he was nearly 45 and had little to show for it. He looked up his one-time fiancé and found that she was married and had two children. He tried dating, but found he had little time or energy left at the end of a week to woo a woman. Instead he went home to his empty house at the end of the day and became more and more angry and bitter and lonely.
He found comfort at work though. Many of his colleagues were in a similar boat. Most, like George Mason, were divorced and spent little time with their children. Others either had bad marriages that they had excuses to stay in or hadn't married at all. All of them tended to be loners. They found some camaraderie together; a group of them played poker on Thursday nights and occasionally went to happy hour on Friday. But for the most part, they went home alone and talked to no one until they arrived at work the next morning.
When Tony was hired, he looked as if he would fit into this same mold. He worked tirelessly and quickly rose through the ranks. He was handsome and occasionally dated co-workers, but it never lasted for more than a few dates. Nina was the first girl he seemed to really spend any time with. His superiors noticed the relationship but weren't concerned. Both of them were hard workers and it wasn't affecting their work.
Once Nina was revealed as a traitor, Tony kept even more to himself and worked even more hours. His superiors, Mason, Hammond, Chappelle, were all thrilled with his job performance. He would eventually be promoted to CTU director and probably, over time, to much higher positions.
Even after Tony and Michelle were married, he continued to work an enormous number of hours. Hammond could tell that it strained the marriage and he and Chappelle had privately commented that they bet the marriage wouldn't last five years.
Now as Hammond watched Tony with his son and his wife, a sharp pang on jealously went through him. Tony was supposed to be one of 'them', one of the lonely CIA agents. There were so few of them left now. Mason was gone, so was Chappelle. Even Bauer was happily married and had kids. Hammond hated to admit it to himself, but Tony was right, he hated that Tony had moved on while he was in the same lonely rut.
Tony trotted up the stairs to the bedroom. He stopped on the way to peek in on Dess who was taking his afternoon nap. Joe followed close on his heels. He wanted to make sure that Tony did nothing but change clothes and come out to play with him. Tony changed quickly and descended the steps with Joe on his shoulders.
"Michelle," he called as he walked toward the kitchen. He put Joe down on the floor and told him to get the soccer ball and they would meet in the back yard.
"In here, Honey." Her voice came from the family room. She was picking up toys and straightening up.
"I'm going to take Joe outside to play. Dess is still sleeping. Why don't you take some time for yourself." She was giving him a puzzled look. "You know, take a nap or go shopping or have your nails done. Whatever you feel like."
"Are you trying to get rid of me?" Michelle asked quizzically.
"Oh, God, no. It's just that you were stuck here for the last few days with three kids and no help from me. I thought you might like some time to yourself." He pulled her into his arms and kissed her. He was so grateful to see her that he was over-compensating. He knew it, but couldn't help himself.
"Tony, are you alright? You're acting strangely."
"I'm not acting strangely, Michelle. I just know that my being away was hard on you and I want to make it up to you."
"Okay," Michelle said. "I do have some shopping I need to do."
"That's great. Enjoy yourself. If you want to pick up some good steaks on the way home, I'll grill them." Michelle agreed that she would do that.
"Do I need to pick up Sophie at school?"
"No, Tony, it's the Miller's turn to drive this week. I told you that already. Remember?"
"Ya, right, I ...ah... I remember you telling me that. So go and have a good time." He kissed her again. By then Joe was knocking on the sliding glass door to the family room and pressing his nose on it to create a large smudge.
"I'm going to go play with Joe." Tony smiled. "I'll check on Dess in a little while." He said as he kissed her goodbye.
Michelle looked out the window at Tony and Joe kicking the ball around. The game deteriorated very quickly into Tony playfully tackling Joe and tickling him. The little boy giggled with delight. Michelle watched as Tony kissed the child again and again. She knew by his behavior that something was wrong. She would have to get to the bottom of it later.