The following takes place between 5:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M.
Somehow the Mafia had found them. Ivan grabbed Kim and their group bolted down the stairs as their guards began exchanging shots with the Russians. The Russians, although they had surprise and numbers on their side, were not trained as well as the terrorists. Almost a dozen Russians were killed while only Ivan's two bodyguards were killed before he and Marks escaped with Kim.
XXXXX
Jack drove to the tar pits but there was no sign of Ivan or Kim. As he waited he got a call from Jenkins. "I managed to pull a file off Ivan's computer," Jenkins informed him. "Nothing much just a record of payments; here's the number." He read it out for Jack who wrote it down. It wasn't close to the numbers Ingram gave him earlier.
"Thanks." Jack then called the bank he visited earlier and got an address for the account. It wasn't the Landes residence. He waited around in case he was contacted.
XXXXX
Mac pulled off under a train bridge and contemplated his next move. 'I'm missing something.' He knew the answer to where he could find Kim was under his nose, in the palm of his hand but he couldn't see it. He could try the Mafia but that wasn't any insurance. Plus he needed to find Kim and Ivan before they could or Kim would be dead as well. But how? All he had to go on were a pair of numbers that didn't match… 'Wait,' Mac thought as he spotted an LA map on the overhead visor.
He activated the GPS in the vehicle and inputted the 'coordinates'; the first number on the paper had to be longitude and the second the latitude. "YES!" He declared as he got position in southern LA, in the middle of an industrial sector. "I'm coming Kim," he said to the dimming light as he left the area.
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Jack finally decided that he was given the cold shoulder and left the tar pits. 'God damn that, Mac,' he cursed Ingram. 'If anything happens to Kim…' His phone rang. "Bauer."
"Jack, its Jenkins. We checked the address given by the bank. It's an abandoned apartment building not far from the tar pits. I'm sending the address to your PDA now."
"Yeah I got it, thanks."
"Listen, there's more."
"What is it?"
"LAPD reports that a gang war was just fought on that property. It's probably why they didn't show at the Tar Pits. About a dozen people were killed. All male, so Kim is probably still alive. Most of them were Russian Mafia. But, two of them weren't. We're waiting on their identities from FBI and HOMSEC. Just thought you should know."
"I'm on my way there to check it out." He hung up and made for the apparent safe house.
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He pulled off into an abandoned warehouse across from the riverside refinery. He went to the roof with a pair of binoculars and scouted the facility which ran along a small river with a pumping platform close to the river. The road that led past the front of the refinery crossed the river with a dingy bridge. Ingram saw that security was tight. There were about a dozen bad guys with submachine guns and automatic rifles patrolling the grounds. He could expect another dozen inside similarly armed. But where would they hold Kim? The most heavily guarded area he guessed.
He saw such security around a new building, a tin garage that looked temporary. Odd place to hold a hostage. The door to it opened and a man in a lab coat exited. Ingram zoomed in and saw more personnel working on some kind of device. They were wearing radiation protective gloves and handling small black rocks; Mac guessed to be impure, or depleted Uranium hence the lack of full protection. It didn't look like they were building a precision device like a nuclear bomb by the way they just dumped the Uranium into cylinders surrounding the device. Then he saw more men loading bricks of what looked like plastic explosives into a central core. It definitely wasn't a nuke. "Oh my god," Ingram moaned. "It's a dirty bomb." And a big one too.
He saw motion from outside the fence and turned to see a pair of cars pull up to the main building. He zoomed in and in the fading light he could clearly see Ivan get out of the lead car. He also saw a blonde being held prisoner he assumed to be Kim. He saw she was bound and gagged but did not look hurt. He watched them take her into the main building. Through the windows he saw them put her in a second floor room. They put some kind of barricade on the windows and locked the door from the outside, leaving her bound and gagged inside with a guard.
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"We missed Ivan, Kolya," Kiryl said when he returned. "They had an escape plan ready."
"Then how are we going to find him now?" Kolya demanded to know.
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The place was a war zone. The bodies had already been bagged up and the discarded weapon collected; mostly AK47's and pistols. Jack checked the building and property and found Kim's purse in a red van in an adjacent alley way. She was definitely here and with no other sign of blood other than from the dead she probably was still alive. But they didn't show at the tar pits because Mac wasn't there. Now something was starting to click in Jack's mind that something was off.
Back at CTU Chloe O'Brian had finally regained consciousness in the clinic. Audrey was in there with her now. Chloe wanted to get back to work but Audrey forbid it. She was too badly injured. She brought her up to date on what's been happening. "Ingram is a mole?" Chloe was shocked. Audrey responded by showing her the infamous photo that implicated him. Chloe's instincts immediately noticed something was wrong. "This picture is wrong." She said as she looked more closely.
"What makes you say that? It came directly from Division."
"I don't know," Chloe said as she examined the photograph. "But something is not right about it." She began rubbing her temple as Audrey retrieved the photo. Although she didn't want Chloe pushing herself too hard, she knew Chloe enough to know that her instincts with this kind of evidence were almost never wrong.
"I'll have it checked," Audrey said as she left. "Just in case." As she was walking out of the clinic she was going over the ramifications in her head. 'If she's right…then someone fed us misinformation from the inside.'
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There would be no way he could get in, grab Kim, and get out without both of them being killed. Ingram knew this as he walked back down to the car. He could sneak himself in under cover of darkness, with difficulty, but he could do it. The problem was once he had Kim it would be damn near impossible for them to get out without being spotted. He knew where the terrorists were holding her and he knew they had a weapon of mass destruction. He didn't know the target but he didn't need to. He needed to stop it from getting there no matter what.
As he sat in the car he thought about how he could increase the chances of getting Kim out. For some reason he couldn't get her off his mind. Rescue Kim. Find Kim. Get Kim back. It was all about Kim. Sure he had to stop the bomb but it was still all about Kim. Maybe it was out of his respect for Jack. Maybe it was because of his nature to save a helpless civilian. Or maybe…He thought back to his last conversation with her. Her smile, it was so innocent and humble. The smile was as innocent as she was. She did nothing to deserve this.
But how to get her out of there alive? How was he going to get her away from Ivan…? 'That's it,' he realized as he recalled the attack on CTU. The Mafia wanted Ivan as much as he did. He recalled the places he might be able to find the Mafia and set off to get some reinforcements of his own. He knew he couldn't go to CTU. They thought he was a traitor and wouldn't trust him. But maybe he could still do that. Bring them to him as he went in. Still, he'd need the Mafia's help getting him in and getting Kim out.
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"Bauer," Jack answered his phone. On the other end was Audrey.
"Jack, Ingram may be innocent," she told him as she examined the photograph.
"What do you mean?"
"Chloe regained consciousness fifteen minutes ago. I showed her the photo of Mac and Bratchenko and she suspected that the photo may have been doctored by someone inside Division."
"So Mac…"
"What if he's telling the truth, Jack?"
"Oh, god. It was a ruse," Jack realized as the truth slapped him right in the face. "They have a mole on the inside and used that to frame Mac. Distract part of our attention onto one of our own. Divide and conquer. We've been chasing an innocent man, Audrey."
"I'm personally going over the photo with a fine tooth comb, Jack," she said as she worked on the image on her computer. "You just get back here and we can still work this out, alright?" They hung up and Jack got back to his car.
"Damnit." Jack swore to himself as he started the car and headed for CTU.
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Audrey scanned the photograph into the computer and punched up the original on file. She compared both pictures and ran both through an enhancement program. Once run through she cut out and made more enhancements of several parts of the pictures. She focused on the persons in the picture; compared shadows, lighting and other factors. She also checked color shadings. Nothing was coming up until she nailed what must've clicked inside Chloe's head.
The sunglasses Bratchenko were wearing, judging from the positions of Bratchenko and Mac there should be a reflection of Mac's face, or at least his figure, in the glasses. There was none.
She then fine scanned and examined Mac's figure in the picture. When completed she discovered that it had been cropped and pasted from a separate picture from an unrelated undercover operation a month after the Bratchenko picture had been taken. And the two events that were combined to make the forgery were nearly a thousand miles apart.
"This proves it," Audrey said to herself as she saved the evidence and printed a copy. "Mac's innocent."
5:59:59