Chapter 6
The Following takes place between 11:00 A.M. and 12:00 P.M.
Terrorist incident aside, the ceremony had gone very well. The President had signed the document along with the two premiers, he had given away the pens, had stood for dozens of photographs, and had answered his share of questions.
However, when the press secretary had told the assemblage that the President was done for the moment, the press had, once again, swarmed around the Congressional delegation, specifically James Heller. In the part of Mike Novick's heart that wished ill for those who would oppose his boss, he had hoped the feeding frenzy that had started on the President would start devouring the Chairman. Unfortunately, now events had intervened so that he would not be able to witness this. For that matter, he would be lucky if Congressman Heller would be the smallest obstacle that they would have to overcome for the rest of the day.
"Mike?" Lynn told her boss. "We're ready in the situation room."
Mike nodded and tried to discreetly step behind the door. Inside the room, several of the monitors in the main room now showed people from CTU and APO, in addition to having several speakerphones.
President Palmer walked inside and heading towards the front of the table. "Mr. President," Mike told his boss, "we're on the line with Tony Almeida and Sydney Bristow from CTU. We also have Jack Bauer, Michael Vaughn and Marcus Dixon from the APO unit working out of Los Angeles. "
"Jack," the President said, "it's good to talk to you again. It's my understanding that it was your unit that helped resolve the crisis. This country owes you a debt of thanks, even if your unit doesn't officially exist."
"Thank you, sir," Jack said modestly. "I wish I could tell that this was the end of our problems, but it seems that the situation isn't over yet, Mr. President."
"We are still gathering intel," Tony told the assemblage, "but there is a high probability that the attack on the hospital was a cover for a separate raid on Wilshire Memorial in order to obtain a genetically-engineered virus that was being kept off site."
"Who engineered this virus?" Mike Novick asked.
"It appears that it was done by a division of the DARPA," Tony said.
"Why would the Defense Department arrange to keep a material that dangerous in a county hospital?" the President demanded.
"We don't have an answer to that," Jack admitted. "Right now, what we do know is that the project was funded by Defense Department official named Simon Grady and that it was handled under the project name Turquoise. We've had our top tech going over the data stream from DARPA. He should be ready to brief us now. Marshall?"
11:04:26/11:04:27/11:04:28
Marshall got naturally nervous when he had to brief a small group of minor authority figures—minor being anyone with more self assurance than he possessed, which happened to be of the population of the planet. The fact that he was now about to brief the head of CTU, two senior White House officials, and, oh yeah, the President of the United States, on a virus that was potentially one of the greatest threats this country had ever faced, had nearly completely paralyzed him. Not for the first time, he wished that Kim or Nadia wear nearby, because they were always good at keeping him on track. But they were in the field, so it was going to rest on him.
"All right, ah, Mr. President," Marshall began, "by the way, I'd just like to say what an honor it is to be, um, talking with you right now. I mean, I voted for you, and I really think that you're doing a great job, you know, as leader of the free world, and all."
"Marshall, " Sydney said gently. "Project Turquoise."
"Oh, right," Marshall folded his hands together. "Okay, this is a nasty piece of work. I've just gone over the lab work from DARPA, and quite frankly, it's rather disturbing, and I'm talking The Hot Zone scary, only without the Ebola-effected monkeys. The sample that I've examined, in and of itself, is more or less neutral, harmless." He reached for a water glass that was on the table. "Kind of like this, by itself, nothing, but add a little arsenic to it, voila, presto, lethal." He raced the glass to his mouth, considered his previous metaphor, then set it down on the table.
"Think of this as our sample, " He removed a fountain pen from his pocket, and shook it until a drop of ink hit the water. "And this is a little genetic modification-- specifically a chain of amino acids that coincide with a particular section on the DNA strand. This kind of modification will alter the sample into a very nasty virus, but one that will be type specific."
Marshall wasn't great at reading people, and he was even less good at doing so through telecommunications, but he could tell he wasn't getting through to them. "All right, say I wanted to kill, um," he lowered his voice. "Director Driscoll. I would take a drop of her blood, and put it into the sample, and it would turn into something like a cross between Ebola and the flu, only a lot nastier. However, it would only be lethal to her, everyone else could be fine—but everyone else would be a carrier. If she were at this meeting of Division, I could spray a bottle of this over them. Everyone else would be fine, and she'd buy it like the Wicked Witch of the West, 'I'm melting, melllting,' only the effects would be more Sam Raimi than—"
A great amount of foreboding was beginning to settle on the people at this meeting. "You're telling me this is a personal assassination weapon?" Jack asked.
"It can be, but only if you chose part of the DNA strand that is specific to that one person. Right DNA, you could target individual families, ethnic specific groups--"
"So what you're telling me is that a project that amounts to a bottled form of eugenics is essentially in the hands of terrorists?" President Palmer said slowly. "How much of this to do they have?"
"We don't know specifically," Sydney told the assembled people. "According to what we found on hospital property, they could have as many a dozen vials of this substance. We're trying to run casualty projections, but this new information makes it tough to make any kind of estimate."
There was a moment of appalled silence as this registered. "Mr. Almeida," Mike asked, "how did Scarlet Circle find out about this?"
"It's more complicated than that," Tony said. "That's the other reason we needed to brief you. After interrogating the lone survivor, we have high confidence that two men are probably behind today's attacks. One is Li Chin Wang, who we briefed you on earlier today."
"And the other man?" Lynn asked.
"It appears that it's Julian Sark."
You could have heard a pin drop in the situation room. "I thought that Sark was in a detention facility in Langley," the President said slowly.
The people at CTU and APO exchanged glances. How could the President not been told? Answer: because he had more things to do than the destiny of one prisoner.
"Mr. President," Bauer began, his tone businesslike and relatively casual, "Julian Sark was first let out of his detention cell in an attempt to detain Anna Espinosa, who at the time was a more serious threat. We managed to detain her, but Sark escaped during the mission. There's been a federal manhunt for him ever since, but he's been dark for the past two years."
"Some people presumed him dead," Sydney added, shaking her head as she remembered the aftermath, "but I figured we'd run into him eventually."
"What made you so sure?" Mike asked.
"In this business, it's the dead you have to always keep an eye out for."
President Palmer gave the screens a tight smile. "By that definition, we should be worried about Arvin Sloane."
Jack's face was perfectly neutral as he said, "Mr. President, of everything that can happen today, Arvin Sloane rising from the dead will not be one of them—unless he was able to scrape himself off the sidewalk after a sixty story drop into concrete."
"Well then, Jack, I expect you to handle Sark with equal…efficiency."
11:12:06/11:12:07/11:12:08/11:12:09
Congressman Heller left the press with his usual smile, but he knew there was little sense in pretending that this conference had gone as well as his last one. Given the successful resolution of the crisis at the hospital, and the inevitable ebbs and flows of the media's attention, the President was going to emerge from this crisis in a favorable glow, while he would be considered an ambitious parasite. The fact that the President had handled the situation badly, and that Heller's comments and conferences with the minority leaders had been within his rights as Chairman, would not get filtered through the media's dependency on one-minute sound bites. He didn't have to take another meeting with his pollsters to know that he was going to take a hit, and probably a big one.
So when he received another call from his financiers, he thought that he knew what this conversation was going to be about.
"Yes," he said in an angry tone.
"James, we have a problem," Representative Logan said abruptly
"If you're going to chew me out for my latest press conference, don't waste your time. I was in the room, I know that I'm about to get covered in shit."
"That may be possible, but that's not what I called about," Logan said smoothly. "A couple of interesting items have just landed on my desk I received a phone call from Allan Milliken a little more than twenty minutes ago.."
Heller knew the significance of that name, and what it meant to the President. "What did he want?" he asked, lowering his voice.
"He wanted to know if you could arrange a sit down meeting with him, sometime this afternoon." Logan paused.
"And what would we be the topic of our discussion?" Heller asked, facetiously. "Does he have another missile contract that he needs to get pushed through committee?"
"Come on, Jim," Logan said. "This could be the move we've waiting for. Milliken's one of the President's top contributors."
"He's also one of your biggest contributors; don't you think that should tell you something?" Heller decided not to wait for an answer. "I'll call him, and I will set up a meeting, but don't expect more from him than dreams and air."
"You need to seize every opportunity you can," Logan told him. "And don't pretend Milliken isn't what he is."
"You said there were a couple of things you wanted to tell me about," Heller spoke as though the subject was closed.
Logan sighed. "We've been receiving reports over the last couple of hours that Defense has been receiving inquiries about one of our projects. Thirty minutes ago, one of their analysts was brought in for a Q and A."
Heller had a bad feeling about this, too. "Which one?"
"Simon Grady."
"I've told you over and over, I don't want any part of any project that Grady was involved with," Heller said in a stage whisper. "He operates without any regard for checks or balances, and he's too busy playing dice with the universe."
"I don't need to tell how valuable Simon is in certain circles," Logan told the Chairman.
"No, you don't," Heller spoke dismissively.
"Nor do I have to tell you that he knows where too many of the bodies are buried. If he should talk to the wrong people at CTU, a lot of heads could roll." Logan paused deliberately. "You want it to come out how many black bag operations we've been involved in?"
Heller was tempted to let Grady fry regardless-- he had enough on his plate as it was-- but he knew that some of the jobs that the man had done in Defense were paramount to national security. And even though he was trying very hard to fill David Palmer's shoes, he didn't want to have to clean up future messes that could be avoided today.
"I'll make some calls, " he said reluctantly, "but no promises. You tell Grady to get some good attorneys; regardless of my position, he's going to need someone else in his corner."
Heller didn't know that Grady and his problems were about to supersede anything that legal representation could fix.
11:18:31/11:18:32/11:18:33
"Do you have any idea where Sark or Wang are?" asked the President.
'We might be able to pick up the thread on Wang," Jack replied. "We've back-traced the alias that he used to work at the hospital. Plus we're busy going through all the cells that we found on the dead hostiles."
"In other words, you have no firm leads," Mike said.
"Sir, we can find these people," Sydney said. "But unless we can get started, with as little hindrance from the bureaucracy above us, the odds of these terrorists using this virus on civilians goes up exponentially every minute."
Mike understood this. "Tony, who's going to be running point on this mission?"
"That's actually a matter for debate," Tony said. "Because Jack's unit doesn't officially exist in the government, Division wants to make sure that we're running the show, and that Jack and the others don't interfere until they need him."
"We don't have time to mess around," the President said firmly. "Right now, I want APO and CTU to work on this mission in tandem, and I want Jack Bauer to be in charge of field operations. Does anybody here have a problem with this?"
"No, but I'd like to be on the call when you tell this to Division," Dixon said, smiling.
"Get this done, people," the President said. "I don't need to remind you what's riding on this. Contact me when you've made some progress."
And with that the President terminated the call.
Tony wasn't sure how much of this was going to fall on his head even knowing that the President was a man of his word, but he knew that so far APO had handled everything all right, and that they needed to have firmness at the chain of command. "All right, Jack, how do you want to work this?" he asked.
Jack looked off to one side, out of the line of sight of the camera. "Kim, Mr. Bristow, I want you to go back to base to support Marshall, and to find out any more information that you get from DARPA. Tony, have you managed to bring Grady in for questioning?"
"As soon as his name came up," Tony told them. "He'll be arriving in our offices in less than five minutes."
"Vaughn, go back to CTU to assist in the interrogation. Have Mancini and Wu transported back there also. They're better equipped to handle this kind of questioning, and it's more efficient to have them all in the same place."
"Got it," Vaughn said, and started to walk to the surgical room.
"Nadia, Marcus, I want to two of you to find out what intel we managed to pull from every bit of technology that we got from the hostiles here. Start with Hsu Kar-Wai and work your way through all of the others if you have to. One of them had to have known what the next step was."
"What about me?" Sydney asked.
"Syd," Jack paused, "you understand Sark better than anyone here. I need you to help me and the others in the field trying to track down any links that the man might have in LA."
"Jack, I don't work for you," Sydney said slowly. "And I haven't dealt with Sark in nearly two years. The man could have a whole new set of contacts by now, if he's even in the country."
"I don't have a problem temporarily turning you over to APO's command," Tony told her. "And I know how you are when it comes to your enemy's files. My guess is you've probably got Sark's memorized."
Sydney didn't deny the truth of this.
"Tony, " Jack finally said. "You know that APO doesn't have the manpower to lead this kind of search. I'm going to need your help to provide people and the appropriate tech support to try and coordinate things."
"So, you have all the fun in the field, and we have to do the heavy lifting," Tony said, half in jest. "All right, I'll start setting things in motion. Call me when you've got some locations to send us to."
"All right, you have your orders," Jack said. "What Sydney told the President is true. Wang is in possession of a lethal genetic virus, and every minute we hesitate he gets further away. Let's go."
Jack turned the phone off speaker, and they started to separate into the groups that Jack had assigned.
"Jack," Sydney said, as they began to walk over to the main unit. "I know one thing about Sark that nobody bothered to mention, maybe because it's so obvious."
"Which is?"
"All the years I've known Sark, he's never been his own master. He always worked for someone more powerful-- my mother, Sloane, the Covenant. And unless he's gathered a shitload of ambition, I don't believe he's going to be self-employed now."
"Your father told me that when got away," Jack admitted. "And if that's the case, we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Sark and Wang are a big enough headache on their own. Right now, we can't afford to worry if someone else is pulling his strings—we just need to make sure the strings get cut."
11:27:41/11:27:42/11:27:43/11:27:44
"Mr. President," Mike said quietly as they walked down the hall "I think we should keep this story contained for as long as possible. Every time people here the word 'virus', they have a tendency to panic, even if it's just the flu."
"Given what I've just heard, in this case that alarm might be justified," the President replied. "However, I'll agree to a Chinese wall-- pardon the phrase. No one outside our inner circle will be told about Project Turquoise, at least until we have further information."
"Sir," Mike began hesitantly, "given what we've just learned, I think you might want to reconsider meeting with Milliken in half an hour. Given the nature of this weapon, and considering your past history, there's a very good possibility that you could be a target for this virus."
"I've considered that," admitted the President. "You don't think there's anything Secret Service or the people at CBC could do to improve my protection? After all, it's not like the terrorists can just walk into a store and get a fingernail or a hair from me."
"There are a lot of dyed-in-the-wool lunatics out there," Mike reminded the President. "And given the fact that the Internet can meet almost anybody's needs, there might be someone out there determined enough who can get some of your DNA. Sweat from a baseball cap you discarded, a used tissue—do you count the flatware from the White House kitchen?"
"Milliken will probably be extremely pissed if I cancel this meeting with him at the last minute," the President reminded him.
"The two of you go back twenty-six years," Mike countered. "I'm sure if you explain to him the threat, he'd be more than willing to let this go."
The President thought this through. "Maybe there's another way," he said. " If Mohammed won't go to the mountain, the mountain will come to Mohammed."
Now Mike was concerned. "You don't think the press will raise all sorts of questions if Milliken shows up here, now?" he asked. "With half the White House press corps outside?
"We've done this kind of thing before, Mike," the President said. "If and when the media finds out, it will look a lot better if he comes here than I go to him, hat in hand. Besides, given his connections with Defense, there's a good possibility he could provide us with information on either Project Turquoise or this Simon Grady."
"And you don't think there's a potential risk if Heller finds out?"
"A fair amount of Congress is backed by Milliken," the President said firmly. "Half of the delegation that came here does business with him, publicly or under the surface. Milliken knows that, which is probably why he wanted me to come to him."
Mike could see the logic behind the President's thinking. "All right, sir," he said. "I'll call Milliken on a private line, let him know that there will be a car coming to pick him up. I'll also talk with Secret Service, have them send more protection around the retreat."
"And what if the media finds out about that?"
"I'll tell them that it has to do with us upgrading our security level," Mike said, thinking quickly. "It won't hold the media off for long, but it'll probably buy us a few hours. Maybe that will be long enough for CTU to find these terrorists."
"I hope so," the President said.
Both he and Mike knew how wishful this thinking was.
11:33:11/11:33:12/11:33:13
"Marshall, where are we on the calls pulled from the cell phone we pulled off the terrorists?" Nadia asked.
"Where do you want to start?"
"With Hsu Kar-Wai and Jin Wu."
Marshall began tapping on his keyboard. "I'm kind of curious," he asked as he typed. "Did I come off like an idiot to the President?"
"You would never come off sounding stupid to anyone, Marshall," Nadia answered diplomatically. "Talkative, perhaps, but not idiotic."
Marshall considered this, as the results appeared in front of his face. "Here's something. Both phones have three calls to a number in Baldwin Hills. I'm running down the number now." He hesitated. "I mean, I know have this tendency ramble on and on in front of certain authority figures, and President Palmer is like the ultimate authority figure with the possible exception of the Pope, and actually the Holy Father would make me less nervous, 'cause, you know, half-Jewish , and the President could actually--"
By now, Nadia was used to Marshall's little stream of consciousness discussion, as well as a couple of ways to shut them down. "I wouldn't worry about it too much," she assured the tech, "because you'll probably get many more opportunities to make a better impression."
"Really?" Marshall asked hopefully.
"Of course, when that happens, it'll probably be because the virus has been let loose on the city, and half of LA is now in danger of having their faces start melting -- "
Marshall got the message. "All right, the number is for a facility called Hobson's Research Laboratory, about a mile out of Inglewood," he said. "Kar-Wai's called there roughly three hours ago for approximately forty seconds."
"What can you tell me about Hobson's Laboratories?"
"It's going to take me a few minutes to gather the relative intel," Marshall sounded almost ashamed at this.
"Any other recurring numbers?" Nadia wouldn't have asked this of any other tech, but she knew how Marshal was capable of juggling nearly a dozen balls at once.
"Most of them are to calls to other cells in the network," Marshall said slowly. "Now most of the networkers died when you blew open the doors at the hospital, but there a few calls to at least a half dozen cells. So, not only did all these hostiles have the same terrorist network, they had the came cell carrier, too." Marshall paused. "Believe it or not, I wasn't trying to be funny."
"I know," Nadia assured him "Have you been able to track down the names that go with the numbers?"
"Hey, I'm not like HAL 9000. I can only carry out like, seven, eight tasks at once. Give me fifteen minutes."
Nadia considered this. "Task it off to CTU for the moment," she told him. "Find out what you can about Hobson Laboratories. I've got a feeling that it's going to have some link with virus."
"All right. By the way, I tracked down the last known address Li Chen Wang had in California."
"Where was it?"
"Under the alias Benjamin Lee, Wang has been living in an apartment complex in Glendale for the past ten months," Marshall told her.
"Well, my guess is Wang probably got rid of anything that would give up his plans by now," Nadia reasoned. "Still, we probably have to run it down. What's the number?"
"161 Alexander Place," Marshall told her.
Nadia paused, seized by an itch "Marshall, has CTU worked up any casualty projections?"
"We're trying, but without knowing if Sark is going to use the virus as a weapon for a very specific kind of assassination or to exterminate an extended family or ethnic group, we have no idea what the worst case scenario could be," Marshall admitted sadly. "Neither scenario exactly fills you with the warm and fuzzies."
"Do they ever?" Nadia told her friend. "Call me back when you've got more intel."
She hung up and went off to find her fiancé.
11:41:24/11:41:25/11:41:26/11:41:27
By the time Vaughn had started to take his prisoners through the various checkpoints at CTU, he could tell that something unpleasant was afoot. Tony was in the middle of a heated conversation with a guy in a very expensive looking suit, while Michelle was on the phone, looking nearly as irate.
Vaughn hadn't been in CTU in a while, so he looked around, eventually coming across a familiar face.
"Chloe, what the hell is going on?" Vaughn asked, as he finished signing his final document.
"You mean, aside from the fact that we're drowning in intel, and your guy Marshall keeps sending us more?" Chloe asked rhetorically.
Vaughn had heard second-hand a lot about Chloe's attitude over the last years. He knew from Syd that the best way to make progress was to be direct. "I'm sorry, what's wrong besides the fact that dealing with Marshall is squeezing your ego?" he responded. "Where are we on Simon Grady?"
"Nowhere," Chloe said. "We hadn't finished prepping him for interrogation when two attorneys who said that they represented Grady, and that no one was to speak with him. We've been spending the last fifteen minutes trying to get somebody at Division to supersede this authority, and we find out that somebody called both Driscoll and Alberta Green, and they told us that there getting instructions from the Director to release Grady and refrain from even talking to him."
"Lawyers," Vaughn said disgustedly. "Why hasn't anybody just brought this to the Attorney General?"
Chloe gestured towards Michelle. "Right now, Michelle is on the phone with Defense, but apparently they've superseded Justice."
Vaughn gaped. "They do realize what Grady is being accused of, and how important it is that we talk to him?"
"No, because none of us graduated high school. Vaughn, I'm telling you this guy is protected from on high by the frigging Prince of Darkness."
"What does the background check on Grady show?" Vaughn asked. "Any connection to anyone who could pull that kind of leverage?"
"So now, APO deigns to work alongside us lowly mortals?" Chloe asked snappishly. Before Vaughn could respond to this, she added more or less contritely, "Everything we've got says that Grady is a midlevel bureaucrat with only a Level 3 security clearance. I have access to more important government intelligence than he does. Certainly no reason for him to be given access to a bio-weapons operation like this virus."
"In other words, you think this guy's a patsy for someone a lot higher up the food chain, and that someone is protecting Grady?"
"Yeah, but I can't imagine who," Chloe admitted. "The President's gone to an enormous amount of trouble to make sure he had a clean house ever since the crisis with the nuke a year and a half ago. Which means its either someone with deep roots, or it's someone who has just established themselves recently in the administration."
Vaughn considered this. An idea tickled his forebrain. He didn't know if it was within the scope of his authority, but he decided to try it anyway. "Where are you keeping Grady?" he asked.
"Holding Three," Chloe said slowly, "but like I said, they're not letting anybody in this office talk with him."
"I have no intention of talking with this man," Vaughn said. "You're going to find a way to transfer one of the prisoners that I'm carrying into the same room as Grady. This particular prisoner's going to be wired for sound, and he's going to get around all the hurdles this guy has installed."
"How are we going to get past the suits?" Chloe asked, not rejecting the idea.
"Leave that to me."
11:47:49/11:47:50/11:47:51
Jack had been reluctant to leave the helicopter in the possession of Vaughn and Dixon, but he had been persuaded by the fact that they were probably be spending most of the next several hours in no-fly zones. So he and Sydney had gotten into her car, and started heading out to their next destination.
"You finished the research on Hobson Laboratories?" he asked his lead tech.
"I just finished pulling up to background information," Marshall said over the speakerphone. "It was established six years ago by Landis Pharmaceuticals to handle the testing of some prescription drugs before they were given FDA approval."
"That sounds rather innocuous," Sydney said.
"Yeah, but I pulled up some bank records on Landis, and apparently Landis was some kind of shell corporation. I'm still running back-traces on the names, but one of them sticks out like a sore thumb." Marshall paused. "Well, maybe not for you, Jack, but I'm reasonably sure Sydney will recognize it. Jacques Renault."
Because Sydney didn't even blink at this, it would have been very difficult for anything to know how much this had shaken her. "The same Renault who was on the council for the Alliance?" she said slowly. "Who Sloane supposedly murdered in cold blood?"
"Apparently, this was one of his last major actions before he was killed," Marshall said grimly.
"Wait a minute," Jack said. "Unless I've radically misread the files, the Alliance was completely demolished by the CIA."
"I know, Jack, I was there," Sydney reminded. "Do any of the other names of the board of directors connect back to the Alliance?"
"No, I ran it through one of the filters I created on SD-6 for the company a few years back," Marshall told them "There are none which obviously stick out. Here's the thing: Sark was supposedly working for the Alliance when he first started working with Mr. Sloane. If he had access to the same information that he did, he'd know about this lab."
"How far out are we?" Jack asked Sydney.
"Hang on," Sydney punched the accelerator.
Wang removed the last test tube from the centrifuge, and handed it to one of his couriers, who very gently put it in a biohazard bag. "I think that it's time we got out of here," he said to two of his bodyguards. He took out his cell phone and hit the top button.
"Yes?"
"The last of the vials has been prepared," Wang said.
"How long until the first couriers reaches his target?" Sark asked.
Wang looked at his watch. "If everything has gone to schedule, less than half an hour," he said.
"How long will it take you to sanitize the lab?"
"My men can get it done in twenty minutes," Wang told his fellow conspirator.
"Then I suggest you get out of there, and headed towards your fallback point," Sark responded. "We've got a tight schedule to maintain, and a lot of targets to acquire." He terminated the phone call.
"Remember," Wang told his men. "This facility can not be destroyed until all of the files here have been deleted. This government is very good at reclaiming information even from rubble. Get to it."
He left three men behind to carry out his orders.
11:53:04/11:53:05/11:53:06/11:53:07
Vaughn and Chloe listened from a small room out of the sightline of all the suits, as one of the guards brought a very rattled Mancini into Holding Three.
"Hey, what's going on here?" Grady said, sounding genuinely alarmed. Another Marshall invention, a micro-transmitter, was making every word in the cell ring out loud and clear.
"This prisoner is being held here while the transport shows up," the guard said as he sat Mancini down, across the room from Grady.
Vaughn had deliberately not told Mancini to dig for any particular information, figuring the less rehearsed the doctor was, the more likely things would flow more spontaneously. So when the guard left the room, Mancini's attitude was pretty genuine.
"What the fuck did you get me into?" he demanded in a loud voice.
"Calm down, Mancini," Grady tried a reassuring tone
"Calm down! They're going to cart me off the Guantanamo Bay and throw away the goddamn key!" Mancini said. "And I didn't even do anything!"
"What can they possibly charge you with?" Grady was still trying to be calm. "Tax fraud? So you do a few years in a minimum security prison in San Diego. You can do that standing on your head!!"
"Standing on my head, he says." Mancini looked at him. "All of that's assuming the terrorists don't kill me, or worse! The medical board may take my license!"
"Mancini, you're not going to be a target."
"Really? THE BASTARDS CUT OFF MY THUMB!" This shout was almost enough to make Vaughn glad the room was soundproof. "And now the fucking CIA wants to charge me with treason, even though all I did was take your money for your 'genetic research project!'"
"They don't have enough to charge you with that," Grady tried to reassure him.
"The government never needed an excuse to go after Italians before," Mancini was started to babble now, "and now they've got all the reason in the world to stick a needle in my arm!"
"Look, I realize you've been through a lot today--"
:"Yeah," Mancini countered, "and what for? What the fuck did I do it for?"
Grady's voice changed. "You did it for the greater good," he said solemnly.
"They're telling me that it's some kind of virus," Mancini continued to throw a fit, "How is developing the next Ebola for the goddamn greater good?"
"Trust me," Grady said. "When the right people use this virus, the earth will move."
"That's enough," Vaughn told Chloe. "The lawyers won't be able to protect him anymore." He got up from his chair and began walking into Holding Three."
Tony and one of the attorneys intercepted. "What do you think you're going?" the attorney demanded
"Your client just confessed to conspiracy," he told them both. "Which means any arrangement you've made for him is currently void."
"This will never stand up in court," the weasel dared to say.
"Well, then you can try and get a restraining order, but until you've got one, he's ours." By now Vaughn had reached the door.
Tony blocked the path of the wanna-be Dershowitz, and let him enter the room. He motioned to the guard to get Mancini out, and took out his gun and trained it on Grady.
"You fucked up, Simon," Vaughn told him. "Your lawyer friends can't protect you anymore."
"What are you talking about?"
"Give it up, Simon!" Vaughn's voice went up an octave. "Your life is going to become very painful very fast, unless you start telling us how this virus is going to be used."
He put his gun over the prisoner's forehead. "You've got til the count of three. One… two…thr--"
"All right, all right!" Grady's calm was replaced by panic. "All I know was one of the primary targets of the virus."
"Who?" Grady hesitated. Vaughn fired a shot over his head. "Last fucking warning!"
"En Lai!" Grady shouted. "The Chinese Premier!"
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