Chapter 7

Chapter 7

The Following Takes Place Between 12:00 P.M. and 1:00 P.M.

"What's the layout of the place?" Sydney asked Jack, who was looking at the blueprints Marshall had sent to his PDA. "Will we need some kind of security clearance to get in?"

Jack nodded, still staring intently at the blueprints for Hobson Laboratories. He glanced at the building. Despite the name, it looked more like a warehouse than a lab. Then again, it was supposed to be for storage, originally. "There are at least three security cameras at ground level. Marshall's working on a way to get us past them, but whoever's in charge will probably give some kind of warning to Wang's people."

Jack's phone chose that moment to ring. "Bauer."

"It's Vaughn. We may have another problem."

"I'll put you on speaker." Jack pressed the button. "You get anything out of Grady?"

"Yeah, but I'm not sure I believe him," Vaughn admitted. "He says that one of the reasons the virus was created was to take out the Chinese Premier."

"The security around the Premier is one of the heaviest of any foreign leader," Jack pointed out. "Plus the President has already upgraded the protection around the retreat when he learned of the virus's existence."

"But would that matter?" Sydney asked. Jack and she exchanged a look. "The virus acts the way of a common cold—not everyone can get it, but everyone will carry it. They could spray it arund a reporter on a lunch break right before a public meeting with the Premiere, and no one would know. Once the virus would be released into the air, as long as he stays in LA, it can still get to him."

Jack nodded slowly. "But if you released it at one end of town, it wouldn't matter—he won't be here that long, and the odds of it getting to him in China from here…well, when was the last time you met someone who has frequent flyer mileage between here and China?"

Vaughn deliberately cleared his throat. "I'm not sure how important this is. Grady gave up this information rather easily. Furthermore, if the virus was taken two hours ago, I don't know how fast it could be used as a weapon by anyone currently at the Western White House."

"How hard have you pressed Grady?" Sydney asked.

"Not hard at all," Vaughn told them. "We've spent the last thirty minutes dicking around with his attorneys. We haven't had time to really interrogate him."

"Call Aaron Pierce at the retreat," Jack told him. "Tell him to have his people keep their eyes open. Beyond that, I'm not sure what else we can do until you find out exactly what Grady knows."

Sydney parked the car about two blocks away from the address. "I think we'd do better to go the rest of the way on foot," she told Jack. "Vaughn, we're just a couple blocks away from Hobson Laboratory."

"I'll let you and Jack concentrate on your work. Call back if you get any intel that backs up Grady's story."

Vaughn hung up. As Sydney and Jack got out, Sydney went to the trunk, which, like every CTU vehicle, carried a fairly impressive arsenal. In addition to their service weapons, Sydney took out a Tag 17 pistol, and Jack grabbed a Weber.38. They were getting the ammunition out as Jack dialed Marshall.

"We're here," Jack told his. "Have you worked out an approach?"

"Well, I have been talking with Kim—she just showed up, by the way, very punctual," Marshall told them. "Now, were you going to take a slam-bang method or were you planning to exercise more subtlety?"

"I think we'd better be stealthy, at least until circumstances dictate otherwise," Sydney replied.

"Then the easiest way for me to do this is to tap into their security feed while you two start walking towards the back entrance," Marshall told them. "Which we should be able to do in less than two minutes."

Aaron Pierce, head of President Palmer's Secret Service detail, walked into the president's office, closely followed by Lynn Kresge. He wasn't as tall as most Secret Service agents assigned to the President—as a basketball player in college, Palmer required agents just as tall, if not taller—but he was the most experienced Agent on the detail, and had been with Palmer since the first, serious attempt on his life, when he was still just a candidate for office.

"What's going on, Aaron?" the President asked the agent he personally trusted the most in his detachment.

"Mr. President," Pierce began in his slow, precise drawl, "we received a call from CTU a few minutes ago, saying that there was a credible threat to the safety of the Chinese Premier."

Palmer straightened. "En Lai? How credible is your intel?"

"We are still obtaining information," Pierce admitted. "However, we believe it has something to do with the genetic virus we were told about less than an hour ago."

The President rose to his feet. "I thought that the retreat was secure, and that so far we had found no evidence of the virus."

There was a pause. "That's the other reason we're here, sir," Lynn told her boss. "Mr. President, Allan Milliken drove up a couple of minutes ago."

This was already a matter of some concern. Milliken had not been happy that he had to come to see the President, instead of the other way around, but since pissing off Secret Service agents was a federal offense, he had agreed to come-- if his driver could be allowed to bring him on to the retreat. The President had considered this a minor concession, but now he thought he could see the problem. "I take it he didn't like the idea of you searching him or his vehicle," he asked rhetorically.

"He called Mike, and said he would sooner drive away then be searched like a common criminal," Lynn explained.

"Did you explain to him that there was an elevated threat, and that there were no exceptions?"

Lynn hesitated. "He said that after more than twenty-five years to treat him like that was an insult, " she told him "He also said that his father didn't have hoses turned on him in Montgomery so that his son could be treated like a felon."

Palmer's eyes narrowed. That sort of accusation was tantamount to slander. The President understood perfectly well where Milliken was coming from, and that this could turn into a PR nightmare, but given what he was learning he was not in the mood to mess around. "Tell Allan that if he wants to see the President of the United States, he will have to temporarily forfeit some of his dignity, and be treated like every other citizen who enters these premises," he told tem. "He would also do well to remember that that the same rules apply to everyone, rich, poor, black and white."

Pierce nodded and walked away. "He won't be happy with this, sir," Lynn told the President.

"Right now, his feelings are the least of my concerns," the President said grimly.

12:08:53/12:08:54/12:08:55

After a few minutes, Kim had managed to loop the film in the security cameras at the lab so that Jack and Sydney could get around them. Sydney picked the lock, and opened one of the receiving doors in the back.

"Any idea how many hostiles are in the building?" Jack whispered into his transmitter as they walked towards the staircase.

"Just about finished with the thermal scan," Marshall told them. "There are only two on the ground level, one at the front desk, the other seems to be walking the perimeter. Of course, if this really is a bio-lab, the majority of the workers will be in the lower levels, and if they really are Alliance, they'll probably have some kind of lining to the floors that'll make any more of these scans difficult."

"Where's our back-up?" Sydney asked.

"Agents Manning and Baker are at the front of the building," Kim said. "Say the word, they can be inside in less than two minutes. However, from what I've taken from their own security cameras, eleven men walked into the building at 9:58, eight men left less than twenty minutes ago."

"If the math's right, backup will be unnecessary." Sydney said. "Where are you two on the internal cameras?"

Marshall: "One more second, and…All right. The building has one major sublevel that has three times the square room of the upstairs. If the schematic's right-- and I'm only ninety percent sure it is-- there are sixteen rooms on it. Of the men who walked into the building an hour ago, they all went to that sublevel. Five of them walked into Lab 4 at the front of the hall, four more went into lab five, the rest went into the data server room I've done the math, the two were in the data server never left."

"They're probably trying to purge their files," Jack said.

"Any chance that Wang stayed around?" Sydney asked.

"No, but I'm pretty sure they know where he is," Marshall asked.

"Because you're psychic, too?"

"No, because the last place he went to was the data server."

By now, they had reached the sublevel. "What room's the data server?"

"Third door from the left, as you come up the hall," Marshall told them.

"All right, tell Manning to be ready to wait for my command," Jack said. "Prepare to start looping the security cameras."

He signed off, and motioned Sydney to go to the other side of the door. He opened it, and waiting for the red blinker on the front of the camera to flash twice, indicating the loop had begun.

Jack then motioned to Sydney to begin walking quickly down the side of the hall. The internal camera was a harder model to hack than the one outside; the loops would only last sixty seconds, which was just about the length of time it took for the two agents to reach the data server.

They assumed their positions, and then Jack kicked the door open.

"CTU! Drop your wea--" was as far as Jack got before the two hostiles began firing on them. One of them had a basic semi automatic; the other was armed with an RF Micro. She turned.

We only need one of them, Sydney thought as she waited for the clip of the Micro to empty, knowing that he was the bigger threat. The second it did, Syd came out and fired three shots at the hostile on the left.

Then the one holding the semi ran over to the computer, and began punching in some keys. Sydney knew that only bad things could happen from this, and changed her priority to stopping him. She aimed for the hostile's arm, but he jumped backwards, and she accidentally hit him in the neck.

Jack, in the meantime, had managed to fire two shots from his Elite pistol into the man with the Micro-- one hit the shooter in the shoulder, and he dropped his weapon. He kicked it away. "Syd, what about the other one?"

"Forget it, he's dead." Sydney was now looking at the computer that her gunmen had been working on. "We may have another problem. They must've done something to corrupt the files on this hard drive."

"How bad?"

"Bad enough," Sydney sat down in front of the monitor. "I'm going to call Chloe. She's nearly at Marshall's level when it comes to these kinds of programs. And we need Marshall elsewhere."

"All right, I'll see what I can get out of this one." Jack grabbed the hostile to his feet and got out the transmitter. "Agent Manning, I need you to get a field kit ready. We have a prisoner we need to interrogate now."

12:17:08/12:17:09/12:17:10/12:17:11

Even though Milliken had suffered from hypertension that caused him to walk with a cane, he still carried himself with pride. Since Milliken was one of the most powerful black men in America, he had every reason to do so, but it was now clear to the President that there was definitely arrogance in it as well.

"I'm getting a little old to be treated like I still had to sit at the back of the bus, David," he said as he walked up to the President.

Milliken had known the President long enough so that he could let the lapse in etiquette slide. "We're in the middle of a crisis situation, Allan," he said, as he motioned for the millionaire to sit down. "It's one of the reasons that I wanted to see you."

"I thought that the crisis at the hospital had been handled," Milliken said, as he slowly lowered himself into a chair.

"In all your dealings with the Defense Department, have you ever done business with a man named Simon Grady?"

Milliken gave this some thought. "I believe he's a subcontractor for some of their outside projects," he finally said. "He did some work with Western Energy a couple years back on that troop carrier that was supposed to run on alternative fuel."

"That's all you know?" pressed the President.

"I only know the man by reputation, David. I've never set eyes on him. What is it that this Grady is supposed to have done?"

The President paused. "Until I have more information, I'm afraid I can't tell you," he finally told Allan.

"I've heard that exact phrase before, Mr. President," Milliken said with a surprising wistfulness, "by men in that exact position. I just never imagined you'd ever talk to me like that."

The President knew that this attitude of self-derision was not something Allan Milliken often did, and it was a sham. "Is that why you've been so insistent that I meet with you, Allan?" he asked. "So that we could reminisce about days gone by?"

Milliken's posture shifted—time to cut the BS. "We've been friends for twenty-five years, David," he began. "I think it's fair enough to say that you wouldn't be where you are without me. I also know that there are certain deals that you have to make when you reach your position, and I think that I've asked for very little in exchange for my helping you."

"But you're going to ask for something now," the President said.

"Yes," said Milliken simply. "I want you support Hanover in the primary run in the Illinois Fourteenth."

This definitely wasn't something that the President had expected. "You're telling me not to support my own brother for reelection in his own district," he stated flatly.

"And I want the full force of the White House to be behind Hanover's run."

"Leaving aside the political powers, why are you so adamant that Wayne not be reelected now? " The President demanded. "You've already had two elections to campaign against him."

"Because I had no problem with him being Congressman four years ago," Allan said bluntly. "I didn't have a problem until three weeks ago."

"And what changed your mind?" the President asked sternly.

"I learned that he's been having an affair with my wife," Milliken told him.

The statement had enough force to cause the President to be silent for a few moments. "Are you sure?"

"I've been suspicious for the last few months," Milliken said, sounding almost sentimental. "But I never thought that it would be with him. Not until the investigators I hired photographed them coming out of a hotel in Chicago. When a man of my age has a wife as lovely as Julia, he expects that there will be certain transgressions, but for them to come from a man who I let run one of my companies, who I considered a friend"—Allan shook his head—"that is something I cannot forgive."

Though inwardly he was still reeling a little, President Palmer had recovered enough to remember his politics. "Even if I were to do what you're suggesting-- " he began "something which I would find repugnant no matter who the idea came from-- I have no effect on who the people of Wayne's district vote for."

"If you honestly believe that, Mr. President, you are incredibly naïve," Milliken told him, "which is one of the few things you're not. You are the Democratic President, the leader of the Democratic party, and Chicago is the major voting block of Illinois—a thoroughly Democratic town run by a Democratic family dynasty. Illinois will vote for whoever the President backs, and if you go against Wayne, the voters will go with you. Now I have more than enough proof to ruin your brother's career, and I'm coming to you to try and spare his reputation. Because the media certainly won't when they find out about this."

David Palmer knew there was a grain of truth to this, but he also knew where his loyalty had to lie. "I will not sacrifice my brother of because of your feelings, even if it does hurt me politically, Allen," he said, "and you have to have come here knowing that."

"What I know, Mr. President, is that you've been given a lot to consider," Milliken said. "So here's something else to consider. I have a meeting scheduled later this afternoon with Congressman Heller. I could take this opportunity to tell the press that I am going to back him in New Hampshire instead of you."

Palmer's eyes narrowed, and he leaned forward. Most people were smart enough to recognize the posture as resembling a bear ready to attack. Milliken didn't blink. "After you just finished telling me that you can destroy Wayne's career by yourself, single handedly, by simply releasing a few photos, you threaten my entire administration because I won't be your errand boy. That's not about a favor for an old friend, Allan, this is about control. And you don't own me."

If Milliken have even noticed Palmer spoke, he didn't show any signs of it. "There will be repercussions, David. And you know better than anyone that it's not good to get on my bad side."

12:26:41/12:26:42/12:26:43

Wayne had hoped he would have been able to talk to his brother now that the crisis was over. Then he had gathered from the conversation of some of the press the rumor that Allan was now on the retreat, probably meeting with David now. He had been waiting all morning for the other shoe to drop, and now that it had, he was not sure how to proceed.

He could throw himself on his sword, and offer to tender his resignation right now, before the story went any further. That would probably satisfy Allan's bloodlust, but he'd be finished in politics and probably in business as well. He could utter a mea culpa to the media, and see if they would be as forgiving of his indiscretions as they had been of his brother's. In either case, he would probably lose forever the respect and compassion of his brother, and Wayne had seen what the loss of his brother's love had done to Sherry. He didn't believe that it would make him turn against his country the way she had, but the thought of being shut out by David was not something he wanted under any circumstances.

While he was considering this, his cell rang. He had a vague idea who it would be before he answered. "Palmer," he said as he answered.

"It's me."

Wayne made sure there was nobody in the hallways before lowering his voice. "Julia, this is a pretty terrible time for you to be calling."

"I know that, Wayne," Julia sounded nearly as distressed as he was. "But I didn't think it was safe to talk to you until Allan was out of the house."

"Well, he's here now," Wayne said tiredly, "probably spilling the details of our sordid affair to my brother. And once he does, one way or another, I'm finished."

"That's why I need to talk to you," Julia paused. "In person."

Wayne was starting to feel exasperated. "Do you know how hard it will be to get out of here without somebody from the press finding out?" he asked.

"We managed to carry on an affair for more than a year without the press catching wind of it," she pointed out.

"That's not exactly the kind of thing we should be proud of."

"You're picking an awfully bad time to rediscover your morality," Julia argued.

"This is a waste of time." Wayne was about to terminate the call, when her tone changed.

"I'm sorry; that was callous of me," Julia said. "Wayne, both of our lives are going to be upended if Allan goes public. Now I think that I can find a way that we can get out from under the thumb of my husband, but I need to be face-to-face with you in order to do it."

Wayne knew that looking for an out was probably the coward's approach, not to mention one his brother wouldn't approve of, but if there was a way he could help himself without soiling David's reputation, he was willing to try it. At least, that's how he justified it to himself.

"Where do you want to meet?" he asked.

"There's a bar in Santa Barbara off Norton Street. The Bronze Eagle."

"All right," he told her. "I'll get there as quickly as I can."

He hung up, and started looking for Agent Pierce, the only Secret Service agent on detail who had a long standing relationship with the Palmer family. Aaron would understand Wayne's needs, and would probably be more willing to accommodate them, probably without mentioning it to David.

Maybe something would go his way today.

12:32:18/12:32:19/12:32:20/12:32:21

"They were trying to purge the hard drive before you and Agent Bauer showed up," Chloe told Sydney. "They ran out of time, so they used a worm to corrupt the remaining data."

"How much of it is salvageable?" Sydney asked over the phone.

"The worm's not going to be that much of a problem," Chloe assured her. "It was one amateur version rather than the ones the best techies come up with. I've already managed a sixty-four percent recovery of that data. Whether or not this data is going to be useful is another question."

"You think the information was encrypted?"

"Possibly," Chloe said slowly, "though why you'd want to encrypt something that's already encoded is a mystery I don't think I can solve."

"We just want you to provide us with answers. We don't need them to be explained."

Chloe paused. "You might want to rethink that last sentence."

"Were you able to get any useful data?" Sydney asked.

"I think so," Chloe told her. "I've been running a decryption program based on some old Chinese code that we got from some messages we intercepted from Scarlet Circle over the past few months. There are a series of code words referring to agents already in the country, some who arrived today, some who have been in the country for awhile."

"And have you been able to make any sense out of them?"

"Yes, an Agent with the code name Black Water is scheduled to make some kind of delivery at 1:30 today."

"Where exactly is he supposed to make this delivery?" Sydney asked.

"According to this, Van Nuys Airfield, Gate 2." Chloe paused. "Before the security lockdown, that's the gate where the Chinese Premier was scheduled to leave on. But given the shift in security, the Premier's being held at the retreat for a few more hours."

"They might not have known that then," Sydney said. "Who is Black Water?"

"That's just it. All we have on him is a code name. No name, no description."

"Son of a bitch." Sydney considered this. "Well, we've got a prisoner upstairs. I think I'd better find out exactly where we are."

"There's something else," Chloe said. "The data on the hard drive that was purged may be recoverable."

"Really?"

"Your boy Marshall seems to have a data recovery program that can recreate the memory of the files." Chloe praised her rival reluctantly; Sydney knew from past experience that she was something of an egotist when it came to her tech skills. "He's says that there are at least three really large files with a lot of encryption on them."

"Does he have any idea what might be on them?"

"Why don't you call him and ask?" Now Chloe sounded openly contemptuous.

"Chloe."

"He says it's going to take at least a couple of hours before we know what data is on them."

"Call me when you have more results," Sydney paused. "On either front."

She hung up and started walking upstairs.

12:38:02/12:38:03/12:38:04

Once again, Jack had needed to come up with a makeshift setup to interrogate the prisoner, inside one of the CTU vehicles. After printing him and sending his photograph to APO, Kim had identified him as Takeshi Lin, a low-level mercenary who had been suspected as one of the men behind the Nanking bombings. In one sense, they had lucked out to have someone this valuable in their custody. In another, it presented a rather difficult problem, as he was not going to be someone who was easy to break. Jack had been working on him pretty hard for the last fifteen minutes, and hadn't gotten anything of substance out of him.

"You may think that you can take a lot of pain," Jack told Lin in a deadly whisper, "but you haven't even begun to suffer. Now, one more time, what was the primary objective of going to this lab?"

Lin remained stone-faced. Jack belted him across the eyes. "Tell me or I start gouging," he ordered Lin, as he reached for his knife.

"Jack!" Sydney shouted out, as she ran over the rest of the way. "I'm guessing you've reached the point in the interrogation where you start cutting things off."

Jack walked over to meet Syd and lowered his voice. "I'm prepared to do that, but I don't think it'll work," he reluctantly admitted. "I checked his file. Lin spent the better part of a year and a half in a Hong Kong detention facility until he managed to escape during the regime change in 1997. They say he never said a word."

"I take it he also rejected our offer for immunity?" Sydney said.

"It was the first thing I said to him," Jack told him. "Son-of-a-bitch spat in my face. We may have to find another way to get his intel, or find another pressure point, something mental. Did you get anything off the computer?"

"Chloe has been recovering the corrupted data off one of the hard drives," Sydney told him. "According to that, an agent named Black Water is scheduled to make some kind of delivery of the virus in a little more than forty-five minutes at the location where the Chinese Premier was going to be. Problem is, we don't have any ID on this guy, or know how he's making the drop."

"And you think that Lin knows that?"

Sydney looked at him. "Given what you told me, this guy has to be high placed in Wang's organization. At the very least he probably knows who Black Water is."

"Maybe," Jack said "but how do we get it out of him?"

Something occurred to Sydney. "Curtis," she yelled over to the other agent, "go to the front of my car, and check the glove compartment for a hypodermic for the hyoscine-pentothal combination."

Curtis let an eyebrow. "That still hasn't been authorized for this kind of interrogation."

"I don't think we have a choice."

The combination of drugs that Sydney was suggested had been given an okay for provisional testing by the agency less than a month ago. Part truth serum with a small measure of a highly toxic drug from the nightshade family, the drug simultaneously depressed the cortical functions in a person, while causing a deadly acid to flow through the body. In animal testing, however, more than sixty percent of the subjects had died after an injection of more than six cc's. Human testing had only begun a week earlier.

"Syd, I knew about that drug, " Jack said as Curtis brought them the hypodermic and solution, "and you know I believe in pulling out all the stops for these sessions, but I've seen the numbers for this. There's a good possibility only one dose of this could kill him, and we might still come up with nothing."

"We don't have enough to take him to a white room," Sydney reminded him. "Extreme measures are the only ones that we can take right now."

Jack considered this. "Get out the epinephrine," he told. "And check the lab for a portable defibrillator." Off Sydney's look, he replied "There's a very good chance that this will kill him. I want to make sure he doesn't die until we can make it happen."

"Three minutes, Jack," Sydney warned him. "We can't afford to fuck around anymore."

Jack rolled his eyes. "Should I even ask why you just happen to carry this around in your glove compartment?"

12:45:19/12:45:20/12:45:21/12:45:21

Chloe walked over to Tony and Vaughn. "I may have gotten something else out of the data stream," she told them

"Anything else on this agent Black Water?' Tony asked.

"No, " she admitted, "but I think I found out something that might lead us to Wang."

"What have you got?" Vaughn asked.

"The other man who was purging the files-- the one Sydney had to kill-- his name was Harold Yi, I had one of the tech pull the last five numbers he made on his cell. This last call was made forty minutes ago."

She went to her keyboard and typed in some numbers.

'I'm at the meeting point,' a speaker said in Cantonese. 'Are the others coming?'

'They just left,' Yi told the other speaker.

'This is a bad plan.'

'We've already discussed this.'

'How do we know that he's loyal? We only recruited him for this mission. He could still be working for them.'

'Even if he is lying, he doesn't know enough to hurt us.'

'And if he does betray us?'

'Then Black Water will make sure that it is the last thing he does. And we will help make sure that this country is painted in blood.'

The phone call ended. "Sounds to me like they're talking about the Premier," Vaughn said.

"All this does is tell us something we already know," Tony told her. "Unless…" He looked it Vaughn. "What if he's talking about someone on the inside whose loyalty he can get? Someone with access to the premier."

"Couldn't be the Secret Service," Vaughn thought out loud. "Given how extensively they're trained, there are a dozen different barriers he'd have to pass through just so he could be allowed to come to a conference like this."

"That's true about our security details," Tony said. "But how sure are we about the Premier's?"

"The consequences for that kind of betrayal are probably far more extensive than ours," Vaughn pointed out. "Still, given the fact that there is a certain element of the KGB behind Chinese lines before the Soviets fell, maybe somebody could slip through."

Tony turned to Chloe. "Get this information to Jack," he ordered. "And try and run a background check of everybody in the security detail."

"That'll be difficult. Their files just arrived in America today," Chloe told them.

"I don't care what kind of hoops you have to jump through," Tony said. "Just get the information to us now."

12:50:29/12:50:30/12:50:31

Sydney walked over to Jack. "The kit's ready," she told Jack. "You sure don't want any help?"

"I'm better with this kind of thing than you are," he responded. "Besides, it'll give you deniability if something goes wrong."

"I suggested the goddamn thing," Sydney reminded him as he took out the hypodermic. "The thing came from a CTU vehicle."

"You know how Division sometimes wants every detail spelled out?" Sydney nodded. "They can sometimes be persuaded to look away if things go bad, and their ass is covered. Chase has been a good friend to us, but there's only so much she can do. So we have to help her out."

"Are you just talking about this so you don't have think about what you're doing?"

Jack looked up. "Be ready if he gives us anything."

He walked back to Lin who had tubes sticking out of him, along with one of the heart monitors. Next to it was a small table had been taken from the lab. On it was everything Jack had asked for, including the defibrillator.

"Is this supposed to scare me?" Lin asked haughtily.

"The precautions are for our benefit, not yours," Jack said. "Not that you're entitled to one, but this is your last chance. Tell us, or there's a very good chance our relationship will end before it even has a chance to begin."

A flash of unease seemed to cross Lin's face before his natural stoicism returned.

"We'll start with one cc," he told Agent Manning, who began to send the liquid into the tubes.

It took less than ten seconds for the first results. Lin's face began to wrinkle as a wave of agony shook through him. He tried to keep his jaws clamped shut, but a moan of pain squealed out of him. His breathing accelerated.

"We're very interested in monitoring your reactions," Jack told him in a detached tone. "This drug is still in the immediate testing phase, and most of the subjects end up dead after five cc's. That's why we've got you hooked up to the monitor. Scientific method needs to be followed."

Sweat was pouring off Lin's body. "Where is Li Chen Wang?" Jack now all but whispered.

"I… don't… know." Lin managed to gasp out.

"Two cc's." Jack ordered. Manning, with an apparent hint of reluctance, introduced more of the substance.

Now Lin began to start physically shaking. He tried to curl up his hands, but they were handcuffed to his seat. He didn't just give an agonizing moan, he all but shouted. The monitor spiked radically, and Lin almost yanked himself away from the screen.

"What information was on the computers you were purging?!" Jack demanded.

It was hard to tell if the pain was too great or whether he was trying to maintain his composure, but now he all but shouted out: "I can't tell you!!"

"Three cc's!!" Jack ordered.

"Jack, that'll kill him!"

Jack couldn't tell if Agent Manning was faking or not, but it seemed to be enough to get to Lin. "All right!!" he shouted frantically. "I'll talk!"

"What was your objective at this lab?" Jack started with the most pertinent question.

"We were genetically modifying the virus for specific targets within the city," Lin said agitatedly. "Major race-specific neighborhoods that could hit a certain kind of people! We modified the rest to increase the casualty output when the virus was delivered!"

By now, Sydney had walked up to them. "How many vials of the virus do you have?" she demanded.

"Fourteen," Lin told them. "Half of them we augmented for specific people, the others were modified for maximum casualties!"

"What were the targets?" Jack shouted.

"I don't know." When Jack motioned towards the tubes again, Lin spat out: "Only Wang knew all of the targets! He only told the people in control of the vials what their target was; he didn't want the information freely distributed in case something like this happened."

"Where is Wang right now?" Jack demanded.

"He didn't tell us. Our job was to purge the files and then destroy the facility."

"Why?"

"This facility was used for a project by our American backer. Something he worked on a few years ago," Lin explained. "Wang never gave us the full details!"

"How are they going to get the Chinese Premier?" Sydney demanded. "Who is Black Water?"

"He's a mole within En Lai's private security detail," Lin said resignedly. "If the treaty was signed, he was to use the virus to kill the Premier!"

"His name?"

"Sheng Leung."

Jack turned to Sydney. "Contact Tony. Tell him to look for a security officer named Sheng Leung."

"They're half a step ahead of us," Sydney told Jack "Tony and Vaughn figured out that it had to be someone on the Premier security detail. Chloe just turned up Leung's name."

"Have they contacted Secret Service yet?"

"Doing it now."

Agent Pierce spoke into his radio. "Notify all agents that we have a hostile in the facility: Agent Sheng Leung, approximately five-foot-ten, dark hair, grey eyes. Subject is carrying a deadly virus, and should be considered armed and extremely dangerous! I also need a twenty on Premier En Lai, and we need to secure Eagle and President Suvarov, right now!"

The Chinese security detail did not have their radios on the same frequency that American Secret Service did. However, Leung's radio was not the traditional brand. His American contact had made sure of it. He caught the entire transmission, and managed to walk into the room with the Premier, just before the all points came out.

"What's all the fuss about?" the other agent watching the Premier said.

"Nothing to worry about," Leung assured both the men in the room. "Everything is completely under control."

As he turned around, he reached into his pocket and removed a small test tube with a disintegrating cap on it. He placed it on the floor, shut the door, and started to walk away.

By the time the Secret Service spotted him., it would be too late for anyone in that room.

12:59:57/12:59:58/12:59:59/1:00:00