Chapter 8
Chapter 8
The Following Takes Place Between 1:00 P.M. and 2:00 P.M.
"What the hell is going on?" demanded the President as Mike Novick entered the room he was being held in by the Secret Service.
"Sir, we believe that someone on the site has possession of the virus and is attempting to infect the Chinese premier," Mike said simply.
"The three most protected men on the planet are on this retreat. How did someone get past our security?""
"The assassin is a member of their security. His name is Sheng Leung, and he's part of Premier En Lai's personal detail."
"So you're telling me that this man could have walked up to the premier and no one would have stopped him?" asked the President angrily.
Before Mike could answer one of the phones in the room rang. Mike picked it up. "Yes?" He hesitated, then put the phone on speaker. "You're now on line with the President."
"Sir, this is Agent Pierce."
"Have you found this Sheng Leung, Aaron?" the President asked.
"No, Mr. President, and I'm afraid the situation is worse than we thought. Based on the security footage around the area where the Premier was being guarded, it appears that Leung was in the same room with the Premier for just under a minute, more than enough time to deliver the virus."
The President was so shocked by this that he sat down in one of the chairs with a dazed expression on his face.
"Aaron, get every agent out of there, and make sure the Premier and his guard are isolated," Mike said.
"Why?' asked the President hollowly. "If the information we heard about the virus was accurate, the only man who's in danger is Premier En Lai, and if he has been infected, it's already too late for him."
"Nevertheless, sir, I believe it is critical that you, President Suvarov, and the other VIP's get out of this building right now," Aaron told them.
"Have you forgotten the huge media cadre that's perched outside?" Mike said. "If the media learns that there's some kind of genetic virus and that a major world leader has been exposed to it, there could be mass panic here and abroad!"
Palmer winced, and snapped out of his initial shock. His eyes hardened. "We can't worry about the PR fallout now, Mike. If En Lai has been exposed to the virus, we have to notify the Chinese government now. No matter how we try to pretty this up, a foreign leader has been the victim of a terrorist attack on American soil. Unless we find the men responsible, there is a very good chance that we could be in a state of war before this day is out."
"How do you want to handle this?" Mike asked.
"We're already in contact with CDC. Find out how long the incubation period for this virus is, and how high the possibility of contagion is." The President held up his hand. "I know what we were told earlier, but all we got was a bare bones summary. We're going to need to have facts and figures so we can figure out how to prepare the public. In the meantime, tell them to get as many workers as they can over to the retreat. Have them seal the place down until everybody on the property has been cleared. "
"Yes sir," Agent Pierce said.
"How do you want to control the flow of information?' Mike asked.
"Start by notifying Suvarov and the other Congressional representatives," the President said. "I also want my Cabinet to be convened and the Vice President contacted." He paused. "As for the media, I want you to notify them that I will be giving a special press conference in an hour, explaining the situation to all of them."
"They're going to want more than that, Mr. President."
"The people who are in this retreat are going to get the story of their lives very soon," the President said grimly. "Tell them that I am asking for the good of the country for the patience until we have a better handle on the situation."
"All due respect, sir, you used that approach when you postponed the treaty signing," Mike reminded him. "They're already suspicious enough, and if they haven't figured out what's happening, they'll get there even if we don't tell them."
"Mike, the next thing I have to do is contact the Chinese ambassador at the UN, and try to explain how an assassin managed to attack their Premier." President Palmer shook his head. "Not to be callous, but I've got a hundred other things to worry about. Handling the media's going to have to be a lower priority, at least for now."
"I'll have Lynn start making the phone calls," Mike acquiesced.
"Above all, we have to hold off notifying the world that En Lai is probably going to die," the President said. "When the terrorists learn they've succeeded, they'll be enabled beyond their wildest dreams. I hate to think what they'll try to do next."
1:08:14/1:08:15/1:08:16
"Goddamn it!" Sydney swore. "How could they let Leung remain at large? And to let him infect the Premier—!"
Tony could feel for her tirade, but now wasn't the time. "CDC wants to know everything they can about the virus. I put them in touch with Marshall, but even he wasn't that definite about the incubation period."
"It varies depending on the person's genetic makeup and how the virus is programmed," Sydney told him. "But if we assume that this is an assassination tool, even the most conservative timetables say that he'll start showing symptoms in a little more than an hour."
"And you're telling us that there are thirteen more vials out there, and you don't have any idea where to start looking for them?"
Sydney thought. "I think we've got two, maybe three leads that we can follow to try and pin down the rest of Scarlet Circle," she said. "Chloe told me about the conversation you got off Harold Yi's phone call."
"We still haven't been able to identify the other speaker," Tony told her.
"We may not have to. In that conversation Yi said that they had two people on the Western White House. One was Leung, and someone else that they recruited solely for this mission."
"And whoever that person is," Tony surmised, "he has to still be on the retreat, because they locked the place down an hour ago. But Syd, the people there had to clear a dozen different background checks, including a couple of CTU's, just to get there in the first place."
"You know better than anyone that there can be holes in even the most thorough security searches," Sydney reminded him.
"I'll get Chloe on it. What else?"
By now, Jack had gotten off his own phone call with Marshall, and had walked back over to them. Syd spotted him and said, "I think Jack can explain it best."
"Marshall just finished going over the cells of the two Scarlet Circle members we caught up to here," Jack told them. "Harold Yi had the same kind of phone network that we pulled off the phones Scarlet Circle was using at Wilshire Memorial."
"I don't suppose they would happen to have some call listing for either Sark or Wang," Sydney said.
"No, but there is some good news," Jack told them. "Marshall managed to isolate the numbers of all the cells that were in the network. Most of them link to the phones we're now in possession of, but three of them have links to a number that's in the same network, but doesn't match with any of the outside lines."
"Have you nailed down who owns the phone?" Tony asked.
"Not yet, but we may not have to." Jack said. "Marshall's said that he can use satellite tracking to pin down the location of the cell if we can make a connection for sixty seconds."
"And who exactly is going to reach out and touch this member of Scarlet Circle?"
"The man we have in custody," Jack said. "Lin's high enough on the food chain that if he makes a call, whoever this guy is won't be in a position to ignore it."
"Have you tried just asking Takeshi Lin who this unknown number belongs to?" Sydney asked.
"He's back to that line that Wang kept everybody in the conspiracy on such a short leash that the left hand often didn't know what the right was doing," Jack said disbelievingly. "A little more work, and I'd probably be able to get straight answers from him, but I don't think we have time to fuck around."
"How long will it take for you to have the line ready?" Tony asked.
"Marshall says he can have it prepped in ten minutes."
"Then get moving." Jack started to leave, when Tony asked. "Sydney, you said that there might be three ways to get to Scarlet Circle."
"Third is more of a long-shot," Sydney admitted. "Dixon and Nadia finished going through Wang's address in Glendale."
"They find anything worth the effort?"
"Somebody cleaned the place out before they got there," Syd said. "Place was pretty much empty, computer had been purged, but Nadia found one disk hidden behind the monitor. Data stream was encrypted; Kim's trying to clean it up."
"I guess I'll call her, see if she's made any progress," Tony said. "Get back to me if you get anything from the phone call."
"Right." Sydney hung up, and walked over to Jack.
"We're getting spread too thin," he told her. "I'm pulling Nadia and Dixon out to help us when we get a location of this phone call."
"Then we'd better get lucky," Sydney said. "These guys have already succeeded in at least one phase of their plan. We need to stop them before they get any further on it."
1:16:31/1:16:32/1:16:33/1:16:34
If Wayne Palmer had known the full scope of what was happening back at the retreat, he probably would have turned around, even though there was very little that he could do. But he had a feeling that the meeting with Julia Milliken was more vital to his political future, and right now, he wanted to save that without his brother's help.
The Bronze Eagle wasn't a very distinguished restaurant, but he appeared to arrive just after the lunch rush had ended. Wayne was pretty sure that he hadn't been followed; now he would just have to hope that people in California wouldn't recognize the face of a Congressman from Illinois. How likely that would be as the President's brother was up for grabs—then again, no one could recognize the last President's brother. What was his name? Ryan? Roger? Something like that.
Julia was seated in a booth in the corner. Usually very upfront about her emotions, she was maintaining a pretty good poker face as Wayne walked to the back of the restaurant.
"Thank you for coming," she said as he sat down.
"It was against my better judgment," he told her bluntly. "There's some kind of crisis happening at the retreat. If I hadn't known the right people at Secret Service, I probably wouldn't be here."
"I realize the timing is horrible," Julia said, as she sipped from a glass of water, "but I needed to see you, before Allan came back."
"What was so important that you couldn't tell me over the phone?"
"I couldn't tell you over the phone because I believe that somebody has been tapping my cell," she said just as simply.
"Now who's being paranoid?" Wayne asked.
"I assume that it's being done by one of the private investigators Allan has on his payroll."
Despite everything that was going on, Wayne was somewhat surprised. "In that case, he hasn't been as oblivious to what has been going on as we thought he was," he told her. "How do you know you weren't followed yourself?"
"When I found out, I offered to double the lead investigator's salary," Julia told him. "I've learned something from my marriage to Allan."
"If you called me to warn me about your husband's intentions--"
"That's not why I called you." Julia's voice, already low, dropped another octave. "It has to do with Allan's work at Defense."
Wayne silently acknowledged her to continue.
"Allan's always been very secretive about the contracts his company has with our military," Julia told him. "After five years of marriage, I was used to never being told about what was going on. But as he's gotten older, and I started to be more background in our house, I began to notice some strange things. More and more calls late at night. He kept upgrading security on the office computers as well as the ones at home. He always been careful about his business practices, but now he's gotten positively paranoid."
"You have any idea what this could be about?" Wayne asked.
"I ignored my suspicions until two weeks ago, when he went to Boston on business." Julia hesitated. "By that time, I suspected Allan knew of our affair, and I wanted to see if I could find anything about his work that might give me leverage with his attorneys. So I went into one of his file cabinets, and tried to see if I could find any of his dirty laundry."
"And you found some."
"But not the kind I was looking for. " Julia paused. "In the topmost cabinet, I found a bunch of government contracts. Most of the stuff in the files was over my head, but I recognized the names of one of the contractors. Guy named Simon Grady. Allan's had him over at the house a couple of times over the last months."
"Name doesn't ring any bells with me," Wayne told her. "Do you have any idea as to what Grady was working on with your husband?"
"Papers were too complicated for me to interpret," Julia admitted. "But I do know that the project was being operated out of some offices here in Los Angeles. Scabbard Industries in particular."
Because Wayne had spent some of his career working for Milliken, he knew what this company sometimes subcontracted. "You're saying that your husband was working for on some kind of biotechnology?" he asked.
"Again, I don't know all the details," Julia told him, "but I'm not as naïve as Allan thinks I am. I think his company has been working on some kind of biological weapon for Defense, and that he did it without your brother knowing."
The depths of this so dwarfed Wayne's understanding of a man who, even though he'd had an affair with his wife, he had always respected, that he could took a sip from the water glass in front of him. "I need to tell my brother about this," he said, as he put the water down.
"You'll probably have to, eventually, but right now, you need more than my say so," Julia told him. "I'm on my way to talk with one of my lawyers. I want to make sure my position will be strong enough that it will be enough to counteract his pre-nup."
"Allan might be guilty of treason, and you're concerned about the divorce?"
"I know my husband," she told him. "I have to keep my options open."
1:24:53/1:24:54/1:24:55
"You sure you know enough of all of the major dialects?" Jack asked Sydney.
"If you have any doubts, it would make more sense to do the call in English."
"According to Marshall, all the recordings he pulled off Lin's cell were in some form of Chinese," Jack told her. "I imagine every member of Wang's team knows some English, but considering the stakes, I don't want to tip him off."
Sydney nodded. "Yeah, I know all of the major ones and a couple of more obscure ones. What we don't know is if Lin knows any code phrase that could alert them before we complete the trace."
Jack looked back over at Lin. "I'm pretty sure that he's broken," he told her in a whisper. "Besides, he understands that if he screws around with us in any way, we will kill him."
"Somehow, I don't think dying frightens him anymore," Sydney told him.
He smiled. "So I'll make it so that he's more scared of being alive."
"Have we decided what Lin is going to be asking of this unknown conspirator?"
"We've worked out a dialogue. It's plausible enough that it'll keep him on the line for long enough for Marshall to work his magic."
"Then I think it's time for us to stop screwing around, and get to it," Sydney said. "She walked over to the prisoner. "Is the phone ready?" she asked Curtis.
Curtis had rigged to phone to one of Marshall's radios so that they would be able to listen to it from the van, and Syd could do the simultaneous translation without any risk of them being overheard. "We're all set," he told her.
He and Sydney climbed into the CTU vehicle and gave the signal to Jack and Agent Baker to proceed. Jack punched in the number, and handed the phone to Lin. It rang twice before someone picked it up.
"Yes?" came from the other end.
"It's Lin."
"Why are you calling me?" Other than the voice was male and using a Cantonese dialect, Sydney could tell nothing from the speaker.
"There was a complication while I was completed my assignment." Lin said neutrally.
"What sort of complication?"
"Somebody tipped off the government. They got to the lab half an hour a before we had finished purging the files."
Sydney didn't show it, but she thought this was a dangerous game to be playing with a potential terrorist leader, even if they didn't have a whole lot of options.
"How did you mange to escape?"
"I had to destroy the facility before the files were completely purged, and while I was making my escape, Yi was murdered."
"How much time?" Sydney whispered.
"Twenty-five seconds."
"I've been backtracking for the last forty minutes," Lin said. "There's no sign of the government. I want someone to bring me in."
There was a pause. "You'd better not be asking to meet with Wang. He's already pissed by your delay."
"This has already been a shitty day," Lin told him. "I've done my job. I want to get what I'm owed and get to safe ground."
Another pause. "Expedition Park. Corner of Slauson and Vermont. Twenty minutes."
With that the call was terminated.
"You get the trace?" Sydney asked Curtis.
"Not complete, but we were able to narrow it down to a ten-block radius within the Watts district." Curtis told her.
"That's something, anyway." Sydney got out of the van, and walked over to Jack. "Did we get an ID on the caller?"
"Marshall's running the voice through every database we have." Jack told him. "Where did he call from?"
"Somewhere in Watts, but I think they were using some kind of scramblers. We weren't able to pin him down." Sydney looked at him. "So is that where were headed?"
Jack shook his head. "Nadia and Dixon can handle that. They're closer anyway."
"Jack, you can't seriously be considering having Lin try and make the meeting point?"
"Lin just said he was going to," Jack argued, "Besides we've got a better chance of finding Wang if we check both locations."
"Not to split hairs, but have you seen our prisoner?" Sydney gestured towards Lin. "These people aren't idiots, Jack. They probably already suspect something's up; the second they get within ten feet of the guy, they'll know he's been compromised."
"Depending on how this goes, ten feet might be all we need."
1:31:27/1:31:28/1:31:29/1:31:30
Even though Wayne's head was still reeling from what he had learned from Julia, he realized that hasty promises aside, he couldn't sit on this, especially if Allen was still at the retreat. The moment he was back in his car, he got out his phone, and speed dialed the President's chief of staff.
"This is Novick,"
"It's Wayne."
"What the hell happened to you?" Mike was pretty good at keeping an even keel even during high stress situations; right now, he sounded pretty pissed. "How the hell did you manage to get off the grounds?"
"Secret Service knows me, and some of them are always willing to help," Wayne told him. "I'm sorry I got through the lockdown."
"Actually, Wayne, you might be safer then anybody still on the retreat."
Now Wayne knew that something was very wrong. "What the hell is going on, Mike?" he demanded
"The terrorists who were responsible for the hostage situation managed to infect Premier En Lai with a fatal genetic virus."
Now Wayne started to feel the first tremors of fear. "Mike, I need you to listen to me very carefully. Is Allan Milliken still on the retreat?"
Mike seemed a little confused. "Yeah, we've been holding him here until the threat level is diminished. What's he got to do with this?"
"When Allan made his first excuse to come to the retreat, he no doubt told my brother that it was because Julia and I have been having an affair." Wayne started talking fast. "Mike, I realize how much trouble I'm in, but you're going to have to set that aside, because I think that was just a façade."
"What are you talking about, Wayne?"
"I just had a meeting with Julia. She told me that she suspected Allan of using one of his companies to develop a biological weapon in connection with the Defense department." Wayne let that sink in.
Mike had always been a quick study. "Did she have any evidence to back up her accusation?"
"She said that she had heard telephone conversations with a man named Simon Grady. Does that name ring any bells?"
"CTU has Simon Grady in custody," Mike said simply. "He's how we learned about the virus in the first place."
Suddenly the horror of just what was unfolding hit Wayne. He managed to hide it. "Mike, I know that there must be ten kinds of chaos unfolding there," he said, "but you have to arrest Allan and get his vehicle searched."
"He can't go anywhere because of the lockdown," Mike told them, "and we already searched his vehicle. They didn't find anything."
"Maybe they just didn't know what to look for." Wayne said. "How else do you think they got the virus there in the first place?"
"Wayne, where are you right now?"
"I'm in Santa Barbara. Why?"
"You still have the numbers to get in touch with CTU?"
"Yeah."
"They're handling the search for the virus. Call them, and tell them exactly what you told me. Then get to their offices as quickly as you can."
"What about the retreat?"
"My guess, it would be a huge weight off David's mind, if he knew that you were somewhere safe for the duration of this threat." Mike said honestly.
"You're asking me to abandon my family."
"Wayne, I've been briefed about this virus. According to all the information that we have, whatever version of it is on the retreat is not likely to effect David's health." Mike paused. "The thing is, there's a lot more of it out there, and the longer you are out on the street, the threat your own safety grows exponentially."
Wayne had always been the more rational brother in the family. "I'll call them the minute I hang up," he told Mike.
"Wayne, there will probably be some kind of retribution for what you and Julia did," Mike told him. "But right now, I think it's a blessing that you tried to handle your problem yourself."
"Funny," Wayne said. "It sure doesn't feel that way."
1:38:44/1:38:45/1:38:46
Sydney blinked when her cell phone started playing the theme to Mission:Impossible. The ringtone for Kim Bauer. She could never really figure out if that occurred to her because Kim babysat for her daughter, or if it was because they were essentially turning her into another Marshall at APO.
Jack looked over at her from behind the wheel and raised a brow. "Should I ask?"
"No, not really." Syd shook her head and flipped open the phone. "Kim, what is it?"
"The man Lin spoke with was Thomas Ying," Kim started. "One of the most vocal dissidents in the Chinese government after Tiananmen Square, he fled to the states in 1995. He has since established himself as a financier to several rogue operations against the current government. Before now, Ying's been strictly a moneyman for other terrorist groups, which is why we hadn't heard of him before now. Without the phone call, there'd be no direct link between him or anything else connected with Wang."
"Well, obviously he knows something about what's happening, or he would have terminated the call the second that he knew who it was," Sydney reasoned.
"Or there's the possibility that you and my father are walking into a trap." Kim had grown up a lot over the past two years, but there was still a bit of nerves in her voice at this.
"You know how this kind of operation works," Syd reminded her. "The only person that Ying and his people will see shall be Lin. The subcutaneous tracers that we have placed on him should be enough to lead us to someone higher up the food chain. The risk to us is minimal, and the potential for reward is a lot greater."
"How bad a job did my father do on Lin when he worked him over?" Kim asked bluntly.
"It isn't pretty, but they can't have expected him to have walked away from a fight with the government unscarred."
"It's not his wellbeing I'm concerned about," Kim corrected her. "The second he thinks he's safe, he could sell out your whole team. And you don't have enough men on the ground to grab him up."
This had Sydney worried as well, but she had been through enough of these assignments to know that a snatch and grab of the target would probably lead to a longer and more drawn out interrogation with even more diminishing returns-- something they didn't have time for. And she was pretty sure that Kim knew this, too.
"You're the one with access to the other material," Sydney said, changing the topic. "How is the retrieval project on the disk we found at Wang's house going?"
"Slow," Kim admitted. "Whoever it was Scarlet Circle has working in their IT department must be a damn genius, because it doesn't seem to bare any resemblance to the encryption program we found on the hard drives at Hobson Laboratories. These guys definitely didn't want us learning their secrets."
"You get anything from that part of the search?"
"Marshall's managed to recover about twenty-five percent of the data that was on that hard drive. The majority of it is some kind of series of scientific equations that are way over my head. I asked Marshall if he had any idea what they meant, he said his best hypothesis was that it was some kind of genetic map, possibly of the virus."
"That makes even less sense than what we've learned," Sydney admitted. "You'd think they'd want to hold on to that information."
"Marshall admitted that it was only a guess," Kim said. "He also told me it's going to take at least another two hours for him to finish recovering the data, unless he drops everything else, and focuses all his energy on it."
"Right now, I guess we'll have to keep that particular avenue on the back burner," Sydney told her reluctantly. "We've got a lot of things to juggle, and even Marshall subdivided is still better than almost anyone else giving it their all."
"How long until you and my father get to the meeting point?"
Sydney looked at her watch. "Less than five minutes."
"All right. I'll get to work make sure the tracers are receiving, and that the micro-cameras are working." Kim said. "The rest of Ying's file has been texted to your PDA's."
"You're a pretty good juggler, too."
"Yeah, but I'm still not ready to tackle flaming torches," Kim joked. "Yet. Call me when you're ready."
1:47:17/1:47:18/1:47:19/1:47:20
"Unbelievable," Nadia said as she took in the information that CTU had just received. "How sure are we of this information?"
"The President's brother doesn't strike you as reliable enough?' Tony asked.
"We're talking about bringing down one of the wealthiest and most powerful defense contractors in the nation," Dixon reminded them. "We need more than the hearsay of his wife to accuse him of treason."
Tony looked at him with a bland glance that said, clearly "and how much of a rookie do you think I am?" Instead, he merely said, "I'm calling in three reserve techs to start going through Milliken's financial and personal papers. But if this guy really was working for the enemy, he probably knew how to do so without leaving a paper trail. And the fact is, we do have Milliken and Grady in custody. We're probably a lot better off starting there, which is why I'm sending Vaughn to interrogate him."
Now Nadia was worried. "You're sending Vaughn to the retreat?"
"CDC has just finished testing and decontaminating the first group of people at the retreat," Tony said. "As per the President's instructions, Milliken is being sent to their facilities a few miles south of the retreat. Vaughn's heading there. As for Grady, he admitted that he served as a middleman for the manufacture of the virus. However, he has refrained from naming Milliken as the man behind the curtain, saying he only worked with go-betweens for the individual involved."
Dixon crossed his arms and frowned thoughtfully. "Do we believe him?"
"He knows the only way to save his ass is to give up a bigger fish. If he isn't going to give up Milliken to save himself, that probably means they never met. Besides, someone who's been in so many backroom deals as Milliken has probably knows nine different ways to keep his ass covered."
"Has Grady given up any other places that might be targets for the virus?" Nadia asked.
"He claims the virus was only developed to be used for covert acts of assignation of foreign enemies, not domestic ones." Tony snorted, turning back to the file. "He's giving the line that this virus was never meant to be used against America, let alone be used by an agency like Scarlet Circle."
This kind of bullshit was now so familiar to them that none of them even bother to comment further on it. Instead, Nadia asked a more pertinent question. "Have you had any luck narrowing down the radius where this guy Lin called half an hour ago?"
"No surprise, Scarlet Circle doesn't have any known agents operating out of Watts, so that's probably out," Tony told them. "Which leads me to think that Ying called from there because he was preparing to make some kind of delivery."
"And given how heavy the black population of Watts is, and it's troubled history over the past half-century, there are few places a terrorist would consider more ideal to demonstrate this virus' effectiveness," Dixon said worriedly. "How long until you can get CDC out here?"
"Fifteen minutes, but they're not going to be much help unless we can narrow down the parameters of the target." Tony told him.
A thought came to Dixon. "Part of the call radius was in the South Central section of Watts, right?"
"Yeah," Nadia acknowledged. "What are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking that more forty years ago, riots nearly destroyed this section of LA," Dixon said. "I think that these guys would probably consider it a good place to finish the job."
1:52:49/1:52:50/1:52:51
"Are the tracers receiving?" Jack asked Curtis as he watched Lin walk down to the meeting point.
"Coming in, loud and clear," Manning said. "So is the feed from the parabolic microphone. We should have audio soon enough."
None of the agents had liked the fact that they weren't going to be within five hundred feet of Lin. It gave him far too much room to get away. But they were well aware that Wang's men would be on the look out anything remotely suspicious, and that this was probably the best they could do.
"Marshall, do we have eyes?" Sydney asked from the vehicle that she was driving with Baker.
"I've re-tasked the satellite over the corner of Slauson and Vermont. If something moves, we'll be the first to know. Well, except for them, but then they'll be acting, so of course--"
"Marshall," Sydney said warningly.
"There is a blue Toyota SUV approaching the rendezvous point," Marshall switched gears abruptly. "Looks like this is it."
Jack looked through his binoculars to verify this. "Copy that. Mission is go."
The SUV circled the area twice before it pulled to a stop on the corner. Two men, one Asian, one American, neither immediately identifiable, walked up to Lin. They looked at him for all of five seconds before the American knocked him to the ground, and the other grabbed him by the ankles.
"Get him in. Now." The American ordered, as they shoved him into the car.
"This could be all we're going to get, Jack," Sydney said frantically.
"Neither of the men was Ying," Jack pointed out. "Right now, he's are best chance of getting to Wang or Sark. Let's pay this out."
By now they had managed to get Lin into the car. "What the hell are you doing?" Lin had managed to say.
"You disappear for two hours, then show up, tell us you managed to get away from the government, and you just expect us to believe you?" the American said. "Now shut up and sit still."
They had no visuals (they hadn't been able to get a micro-camera in the time between the call and the meet) but Sydney was pretty sure that they were giving him an electronic sweep. Marshall's transmitter could get back ninety percent of the current electronic equipment, but Sark (at least) had always had access to technology that could give him a slight edge.
"All right, he's clean," the Chinese man said.
It was hard to tell tones over a parabolic microphone, but Jack had been at this for a long time, and he was pretty sure that something was amiss. He also knew that what he had just told to Sydney was correct, and that to play this out at least a little longer.
The car began to pull away from the corner. "Do you have a visual on the vehicle?" Jack asked Marshall.
"Yes, blue SUV, heading west towards the harbor freeway."
"Is the data that we needed to get rid of gone?" the American was now demanding.
"We managed to purge almost all of it," Lin said, "but there's always a possibility that they'll recover something."
Now Sydney didn't like where this conversation was going, and she turned the keys in the car. "Are both tracers still receiving?" she asked, as she began to follow after.
"Yes, we're getting signals from both of them."
It appeared everything was going according to plan, but something now seemed off.
"Wang needs to know how exposed he is," the American said.
"They have nothing that can be traced back to him," Lin told them.
"And Yi?" the Asian asked. "They could get anything off him."
Jack didn't like where this conversation was headed. "Do you still have a twenty on the van?"
Now Marshall was sounding more concerned than usual. "If they keep heading west, they'll hit the tunnel in about a minute. There'll be a blind spot, it could be long enough for them to slip through."
"I think you know what we have to do," the Asian said soberly.
"Okay, we have to grab them now." Sydney punched the gas.
Unfortunately, even a car can't outrun a bullet. In the ten seconds it took for Sydney's vehicle to catch them up, a shot was fired, and the passengers threw Lin's body out of the car. Sydney had to swerve to avoid hitting them, which gave them enough time to drive the blue SUV into the tunnel.
By now, Sydney's car was closer to them that Jack's was. "Jack, Lin's dead, they are headed to the tunnel, I'm in pursuit!"
"Marshall, get the word out to LAPD," Jack yelled into the radio. "We are in pursuit of a suspect driving a blue Toyota SUV heading west out of the Harbor Freeway tunnel! Suspects are armed and dangerous but must be taken alive!"
1:59:57/1:59:58/1:59:59/2;00:00