CHAPTER 9

The Following Takes Place Between 2:00 P.M. and 3:00 P.M.

There were three men in the Toyota racing down the Harbour Freeway: the driver, Zhen; Walker, the American whose electronic sweep had revealed the tracers on Lin; and Jia Kammin, who had shot him. Because Lin had been a long time member of Scarlet Circle, Jia had not been happy that Ying, who by default was now one of the high men in the organization, had ordered Lin executed, and had also implied that they were to keep the government busy while the other cells carried out their missions.

Which was why, knowing that the government was in pursuit of them and that Ying would consider them 'expendable', decided to go over his head, and dialed a number he was not supposed to call.

"Yes?"

"It's Jia."

To say that Li Chen Wang was not glad to hear from them would be an understatement of gargantuan proportion. "Why are you calling me?" he demanded.

"Did you approve Lin's assassination?" Jia asked bluntly.

"You've been in this organization for twelve years," Wang replied just as bluntly. "You know that nothing happens without my approval. It was an honor for me to work with a man of Takeshi's caliber, but he had become a liability to today's plan."

"And what about us?" Jia said. "Have we become liabilities? Are Zhen and myself expendable?"

There was a pause at the other end. "The government is tracking you even as we speak," Wang said.

"They're probably trying to," Jia admitted. "However, we can outrun them. If you'll spare some of your precious manpower and get us out of it."

"This is not the kind of insubordination that I tolerate. Why on earth should I help you?"

"Because the next target for the virus is within the hour," Jia pointed out, "and as long as CTU is chasing after us instead of Ying, there's a much better chance that it will be deployed without a problem."

Wang considered this for a moment "Where are you right now?" he finally said.

"Heading north on Route 11, towards USC."

"All right," he said finally, "I'll arrange for an intervention, but you had damn well better make sure that you are as far from the target as possible. I'll call you with a location in five minutes."

Li Chen Wang, head of the Los Angeles cell of Scarlet Circle for more than five years, did not like receiving ultimatums from above or below. This operation had been in the works for two years, and he was not happy at the way leaks were starting to spring in his well-laid plans. Sheng Leung had gone dark, and there was no information as to whether or not he had succeeded, and the incident at Hobson Laboratories had probably exposed him far more than he had liked.

So he tried to assure himself that things were still proceeding by contacting the next man in the chain.

"Yes?" Thomas Ying asked.

"Lin is dead," Wang had said.

"Do we know the amount of our exposure?"

Ying always was so practical. "I have kept the participants in this plan very far apart," Wang reminded him. "Lin only knew so much, just as you do."

"Are you saying that I'm expendable as well?" Ying demanded.

"You're the one who insisted that he be taken care of," Wang said. "We could have gotten the full length of the government's involvement, protected our man on the inside."

"Don't tell me you're starting to become soft at this juncture."

"If you really think that, you don't me at all," Wang was starting to sound self-assured. "I have little tolerance for people who make mistakes. Remember that when it comes time for you to give your report."

"I'm at the drop point," Ying told him. "All I have to do is get the virus into the building's ventilation."

"How long will that take?"

"Five more minutes."

"This is going to be our first high-profile target," Wang told him. "Do not disappoint me. There's been too much of that already."

2:06:44/2:06:45/2:06:46

Somehow, in all her combined years with the CIA, Sydney had been on very few high speed chases. There had been a lot of driving, but most of that was done after the hard work was really over, with very few hot pursuits of hostiles with evil on their mind, and certainly almost never in Los Angeles itself.

Now, as she raced her vehicle after the people who were their only direct link to this virus, she found herself wondering why these people hadn't simply driven their SUV into a semi. They had to know that even if they got away, there were going to be some heavy duty repercussions with Wang or Sark-- men like them didn't appreciate unplanned carnage if it distracted from their underlying objective.

Furthermore, this was the third time today that the members of Scarlet Circle had been faced with death or capture-- and had chosen the latter. Sydney had encountered a handful of terrorists who would rather have their life than their liberty but this was not a method that was passed down to the grunts in the field, unless the rules in the Far East were much different than the ones everywhere else.

All of this flashed through Sydney's mind in a peripheral way, her sole focus was on running these bastards to ground. These guys were smart, though-- they had chosen a high traffic route down the freeway-- adding a lot more effort to the chase.

"Jack!" she shouted into her radio. "These guys are making my life hell! How long until LAPD can intercept?"

"Are they still heading west?" Jack shouted back

"Yeah, and if we keep going the way, we're going to crash in the middle of USC any minute now! They end up there, there could be collateral damage up the ass!"

"Marshall has both your cars on satellite. According to him, you're going to hit the exit to Baldwin Hills in less than two minutes. We've got a roadblock set up at the overpass!"

Sydney cursed as she frantically swerved around a car. "Somehow, I don't think the sight of a wall of cops is going to ram the fear of God into these people!" she pointed out.

"Five seconds before they hit the roadblock, they'll let up a chain of spikes that'll puncture all four of their tires," Jack told her. "It'll do the job!"

"All right," she said reluctantly. "I'm going to hang up and do my job! And these sons-of-bitches had better have a direct link to Sark for all the fucking stress they're putting us through!"

Sydney could see the overpass coming up, so she refocused her attention on the road ahead, and the car less than twenty feet from her.

What happened next took place so rapidly that Sydney only barely had time to react-- anything else would have killed her.

Ten seconds after the overpass had loomed into view, a maroon van appeared from the right side of the horizon, almost exactly between her and the car they were chasing.

Sydney automatically hit the brakes, yanking the wheel as far to the left as she could. The truck seemed to curve to the left, throwing itself into Sydney's path. Her reactions were lightning-like, but God couldn't have averted this crash

Fortunately, her seatbelt saved her from going through the windshield. Agent Baker, in the passenger seat next to her, was not as fortunate, leaving his left arm behind, as his body crashed through it.

Syd blinked a few times, trying to clear her head. Her vision was a blur of red…blood? No—crap, the engine's on fire! Frantically, she pushed open the car door—it wouldn't open. She'd need to force it. She pushed at the button released for the seatbelt—it was jammed. She yanked furiously at the belt, but it wouldn't give—sturdy Ford trucks indeed. Without even thinking about it, she reached for the knife on her CTU belt, and cut herself free. She drew her knees up to her chest, then kicked through the front window, and pulled herself out of the car.

I should be dead passed through her mind as she stood up, and frantically tried to regain her footing. How the fuck did I survive this?

She stumbled, and then fell to her hands and knees. She thought about crawling away, but that wouldn't work—too slow. She dropped and rolled, throwing her body weight so that she could get to the other side of the street. One gallon of gasoline was equal to 20 sticks of TNT, so that wouldn't do her too much good—but at least the fragments would go flying above her.

Sydney looked back to the car—and noticed that she had left a blood trail. She barely paid attention to the pain until she noticed that her hands were cut and bloody, and blood dripped off her nose—Damn it, I hate facial wounds.

But compared to Agent Baker, the driver of the truck that had hit her and probably a couple of the guys on the roadblock, she was walking away from this only slightly less hurt than Clark Kent would have been.

She rose to her feet. Phrases of prophecies she'd thought she'd forgotten-- about Rimbaldi and the Chosen One-- went through her head, as she numbly tried to get reception on her now damaged beyond repair cell phone.

"Lady!" Someone was shouting in her face. "You all right?"

In the strange disconnected haze she was in, Syd noticed that the blue SUV that she had been chasing was not also in a pile of rubble. Somehow, she knew she had to deal with this, also.

"That's the dumbest question I've heard today," she managed to get out, before her legs gave out from under her.

2:14:32/2:14:33/2:14:34/2:14:34

Watts was one of the largest black communities in the world, and though conditions had improved over the past few decades, there were a lot of people there who remembered very vividly when the region had gone up in flames. Even though the government was there to potentially save thousands from a horrible death, the citizens did not look happy that they were being ordered around by people with badges.

Nadia sighed and shook her head as she stepped into her biohazard suit. There wasn't too much room in the back of the CTU van, but it had enough room for a half dozen cramped people on the way to a black op, it should have enough room for two women to get dressed. "Why do I have the feeling that we're not going to be incredibly persuasive about today's threat?"

Michelle tightened the seal on her boots. "Because we're from the government and we're here to help you? In LA, the most gang-ridden city in the world short of full Mafia presence?"

"I wish Dixon were here," Nadia said as they began walking towards the CDC station. "Somehow I think his being here would help soothe the natives... and I wish I hadn't said that last phrase."

Dessler nearly rolled her eyes. Nadia had obviously been in LA too long if she were that concerned about being PC. "You know our protocols, Nadia," Michelle said. "CTU isn't putting any more lives at risk for this venture than it absolutely has to. Our priority is saving lives, not keeping the peace. And bringing Dixon here, when the virus is engineered specifically to kill anyone in his ethnic group, would be putting him in more danger. We couldn't even bring Curtis."

"Given the way Scarlet Circle is behaving, we may not be able to do much of either," Nadia said, as her phone rang. "Santos."

"Are you and Michelle prepped?" Jack Bristow asked her from APO.

"We're about to begin a sweep of the radius where we think the cell call same from," she told him. "The police have established roadblocks around the potential target zone, and we're about to do a building by building search."

"We may have a probable target for you to begin the search," Mr. Bristow told them. "The Watts Towers is located two blocks from the center of the grid. Three hundred people live in that housing development, and the far easternmost section is on the border of Compton. They put the virus in the right place, it would cause a major panic in that section, and probably all kinds of internal and external strife."

"Have satellites or security cameras picked up any location on Thomas Ying or anyone else from Scarlet Circle?" Nadia asked.

"No, but the security footage from this part of the city is badly behind the times," Sydney's father reminded her. "Marshall and Kim are cleaning it up, but that may take too long. Your best bet is residence-by-residence search."

"That could very well add to the conflict were hoping to avoid," Nadia said.

"Oh, it's going to," Jack Bristow said grimly. "But we'll worry about fallout after we find Ying.

Nadia had her doubts, but she also knew time was an issue. And arguing with Jack Bristow was almost as bad as arguing with Bauer; sometimes worse. "All right. Tell CTU that we're starting out."

"Copy that."

Mr. Bristow turned away from his desk at APO to see Kim scowling at him. With a low, calm, but fairly intense tone, she asked, "Was there any reason that you didn't tell her that Sydney's been in a multi-vehicle collision?"

"Yes," Sydney's father said, "You're just not going to like it. I didn't tell her, or Dixon, or Vaughn, because we are in the middle of a major crisis on several fronts. I can't have our best people distracted, because… Sydney may be in bad shape. It's cold, and unfeeling…"

"And it's something Arvin Sloane would do," Kim's tone was icy now, "or were the stories you've been telling me lies?"

This was a low blow, and it did hurt, but the mask that was Mr. Bristow's face never moved, and gave nothing away.

"With casualties in the millions, young lady, it would serve no purpose," he said, allowing a trace of emotion to enter his voice-- for him, a sign he was under a major strain. "And the honest truth is, I can do nothing for Sydney, here or there. So please, let me handle this the only way I know how."

2:22:14/2:22:15/2:22:16

Jack Bauer had always been the first to shrug off help from others on days like today when he thought that he could walk away from a bad situation, and he knew that Sydney was cut from the same cloth. Nevertheless, he was still surprised when he arrived at the roadblock to find Sydney pushing away medical assistance, and trying to get to get to her feet.

"Agent Bristow," one of the medics was telling her, as he put his hand on her shoulder, "you've just been a major trauma; we have to make sure that you aren't seriously hurt--"

Sydney grabbed the hand and peeled it off of her, and twisted—the motion rolled down the man's arm, and he was in a barrel armlock before he knew it. "I know my body," Sydney told him. "Nothing's broken, nothing's been pulled."

Jack put a hand on her wrist. "Sydney, you need to go to a hospital,"

"I've been to one already. That's where the whole shitstorm started," Sydney joked.

The medic added his two cents, despite that she held him immobile. "You could have a concussion, you could be bleeding internally, hell, you could have some kind of brain damage," the medic said frantically.

Bauer didn't even blink. "You must have a concussion, you're kidding around."

Sydney glared at Jack. "The only way I could get brain damage would have been if my head hit something, and in that car the only thing that it could connect with was the windshield," Sydney pointed to the burnt rubble that had been the CTU vehicle. "If I had, I'd be dead already."

"Sydney, you can't just shrug this off," Jack tried to reason with her.

"Shrug this off? This van had my name on it!" Sydney all but shouted. "We were this close to catching the guys in the car, and somehow Wang throws out the ultimate deus ex machina! Now, while everybody's bending over backwards to make sure I can bend over forwards, those assholes have fucking made their escape!"

"Syd, we'll catch up to them."

"And how exactly are we going to do that?" Sydney argued. "We don't have any security footage, I'm willing to bet all the money in my pocket that no one at the roadblock saw which way they went, and you know that Wang's going to make sure we don't find these people until it's too late."

"Can you let me go now?" the medic whined. Bristow let him go without even noticing, so she could face Jack with the full force of her venting.

For his part, Jack was beginning to wonder if Sydney really had brain damage – she was starting to sound delusional. "How do you know that?"

"They knew that they were being pursued by us, and they didn't try to kill themselves," Sydney was now speaking in a lower tone. "These people clearly had a greater agenda then just making sure that Lin was taken care of. Otherwise, they wouldn't have staged an incident this spectacular."

There was a certain amount of logic to this. But still, men like Arvin Sloane had used incidents far more over the top than this for far less result. "Do you have any idea what that could be?"

"Aside from them having some kind of cargo that was too valuable for them to lose, nothing else occurs to me," Sydney admitted. "And it's a moot point because we lost track of them the second I… hit that van."

For the first time, Sydney considered the vehicle that she had made contact with. It was a four by four, and the front end had been smashed in by her car. However… "What happened to the driver?"

One of the cops responded. "We just got his corpse out of the driver's seat. He wasn't wearing his seatbelt. I don't think that we found any ID."

Jack's mind was connecting dots. "This van had to come from somewhere," he said, "and that driver had to have a phone. Otherwise, he'd have no idea where to intercept you."

"And it couldn't have been from far away," Sydney reasoned. "They had maybe seven or eight minutes to pull this whole thing off."

"What lane of the freeway did that thing come from?" Jack asked the cop.

"From the westernmost lane," Sydney interrupted. Off Jack's look, she added: "Hey, I remember which way I had to turn to avoid becoming tomato paste."

I'd forgotten Sydney had a joke reflex when it came to near death experiences, Jack thought as he pulled out his phone. "Marshall, this is Bauer."

"Jack, hey!" Marshall sounded even more nervous than usual. "How's Syd doing?"

"She's still alive, and relatively unhurt," Jack told him.

Marshall exhaled. "Oh my god," he said. "I mean I heard the radio report, and I just thought, you know, Sydney would be lucky to walk away unhurt. I mean, um, she can walk away, right?"

"Assure him I'm fine," Sydney told Jack, but he chose not to. The amount of assurance Marshall needed didn't fit into any time from Bauer had.

"Marshall, I need you to find me the owner of a maroon Subaru four-by-four, license number FN4-1YL."

"Hang on," Marshall was back within ten seconds. "It belongs to a Howard Cason, student at USC."

"It's probably stolen then…" Jack trailed off, as Sydney walked towards the driver of the vehicle. It was hard to tell because of all the broken glass, but it looked like the driver was American, and just out of his teens.

"The freeway does come out at USC," Sydney reminded Jack

"Marshall, describe Cason to me…damnit." Jack slapped the phone shut. "What would a college student be doing in the middle of a Chinese terrorist plot?"

"When I was in college, I thought I'd joined the CIA," Sydney reminded Jack.

Jack started walking towards his car, but stopped when he saw Sydney moving towards him. "I don't think you're in any condition to be going anywhere except…" he told her.

"Jack, I think we both know that I'm not going to waste three or four hours getting worked up, when we have this kind of crisis," Sydney said. "Now I can either go on my own to check out this lead, or you can take me with you so you can make sure I don't faint or collapse. Make the smart play."

Once again, Jack found himself wishing Sydney didn't think so much like him.

2:31: 53/2:31:54/2:31:55/2:31:56

Michael Vaughn circled Milliken, and he wished that all his interrogation rooms were walled with sheer white panels. The clean room was made for biological purposes only. However, the atmosphere was perfect for an interrogation of Michael's variety-- a friendly chat with psychological pressures coming onto the subject like a vice.

"I don't know how many ways I can say this," Milliken told Vaughn again. "I don't know anything about a Project Turquoise."

Vaughn kept his arms folded in a relaxed, easy going manner, a half-smile on his face. "Tell it to Simon Grady."

"Grady's a lowly peon in Defense, who's mentioning my name so that he can seem big," Milliken countered.

"Hmm, funny..." Michael leaned forward, bracing his hands on the table. "You told the President that you'd never met the man. How come you didn't tell him he'd been at your house for dinner?"

"I have meetings with a lot of people, Mr. Vaughn; the fact that I chose not to tell the President that about one person doesn't mean I've decided to work with him," Milliken responded smoothly. "Grady has enough connections that makes him valuable to deal with from time to time. You honestly telling me you don't run across the same people in your line of work?"

"And Julia?"

"My wife has nothing to do with this."

"She does when she says she can connect you to this biological weapon."

If Milliken was even fazed by this, it only lasted for a moment. "My wife is a lying philanderer who will say whatever she has to in order to get what she thinks she has coming to her."

"Accusing you of conspiracy seems extreme."

"She signed a pre-nup. I divorce her, she gets nothing. If I die, or if I end up in prison, she becomes the sole executor to my entire estate." Milliken paused. "Considering what I'm worth, she'd implicate me in the Kennedy assassination. Now I've been more than reasonable, I've tolerated being manhandled by the Secret Service and the CIA, forced to strip and be decontaminated for some virus I supposedly created and you assure me I'm not in danger of contracting, and you're accusing me of betraying me the government. I've endured this because we do appear to be in some kind of crisis, but now my patience is at an end. I demand to speak with my attorney, and I refuse to answer any more questions."

The truth was, Vaughn didn't quite know where to go from here. When Congressman Palmer had told him and Tony what Julia Milliken had revealed to him, they had been unsure on how to proceed. Questioning a wealthy, powerful man, who was one of the President's oldest backers was a different story than a suspect felon, or even a Defense Department employee -- you couldn't just lock Allan Milliken in a confined space, and start pulling out his fingernails, much as he might deserve it. The only reasons they had been permitted to give him a relatively soft Q and A was because the President had convinced him to.

So he decided to see if he could get some leverage another way. Michael turned around, pulled out his cell, and dialed Chloe, who had been going through Milliken's hard drive.

"O'Brian."

"Chloe, it's Vaughn. You find anything yet?"

"I'm going through the business records of a multi-millionaire defense contractor," Chloe reminded him. "I'm having a hard enough time going through his income tax returns."

"Julia Milliken said that she had found a paper trail that linked Milliken to Grady."

"No insult to the woman's intelligence, but she wouldn't know a genuine paper trail to anything if it bit her in the ass," Chloe said bluntly. "It's not the kind of thing you can find with a simple glance through some stray business papers."

"Are you saying that she's lying?" Vaughn asked.

"I'm just a tech, it's not part of my job description to figure out whether people are lying or not," Chloe argued.

Vaughn thought this through. The fact was, no one had talked to Julia Milliken -- she hadn't taken any of the calls CTU left on her voice mail, and she hadn't yet returned to her house. Allan was right-- she did have more reason to lie than he did. He was about to suggest that they try and locate her, when there was a beep on his line. "Hold on a second," he told her.

"Agent Vaughn, this is Aaron Pierce. I think someone from CTU had better send someone over."

"What's up?"

"We've found Sheng Leung."

This was another surprise. "He's still alive?" Vaughn asked

"We'd interrogate him ourselves, but some of the press is still hanging around, and we need to keep this under the radar as long as possible," Pierce told him.

"I'll be right there," Vaughn get back on line. "Chloe, we've located the man who exposed the Chinese Premier to the virus. "

"I guess that qualifies as a fresh lead," Chloe said.

"Call me if you find any evidence linking either Milliken to this virus." Vaughn asked.

"So you don't believe her."

"It's part of my job description not to believe anyone."

2:39:46/2:39:47/2:39:48

"I don't give a fuck what kind of virus you think I'm in danger of getting," the black man in a wheelchair spat out again. "I'm not letting any government people take me anywhere without a goddamn warrant!"

Nadia was running out of patience. If Scarlet Circle really had targeted the Watts Towers in order to cause maximum chaos, they had made an inspired choice. Hundreds of people were crowded in a housing complex that was just a step or two above a slum. Searching the building theoretically shouldn't have been that difficult, but it was turning into a nightmare. The hallways were so crowded with tenants, CDC people, and law-enforcement agents that the noise was really beginning to rattle the walls.

"Mr. Howell," Nadia tried again. "We strongly suspect that there's a virus that could kill you in a matter of hours in this complex. We are trying to get you out for your own good--"

"'For our own good!' Howell choked back a laugh that had absolutely no humor in it. "That's why they told us we couldn't go to school with the white boys, or eat at the same lunch table, or why we got stopped by the po-lice for DWB. For our own good. Would you be doing this for them rich boys on Sunset, or your people in South Central?"

There was a general roar of approval at this from the tenants. Nadia was not concerned for her own well being, but she could tell that some of her colleagues were getting rattled. Riots had been started in this city for much less than what was going on, and those kinds of repercussions would be nearly as bad as if the virus got out.

She left Howell for the moment, and got on the radio. "Michelle, we're sitting on a goddamn time bomb, " she told her colleague. "Are we any closer to locating Ying?"

"We've combed three-quarters of the search grid, and so far we've come up with nothing," Michelle said over the radio.

"What about the virus? Is anybody showing any systems?"

"Not so far," Michelle paused. "Which strikes me as odd also. If Scarlet Circle really was going to deliver the virus, you'd think they'd have done it by now. This is the opportunity for maximum carnage."

"You think maybe Ying's come and gone?" Nadia asked. "Left the virus somewhere we won't be able to find it, and stolen away into the night."

"It's the middle of the afternoon, Nadia," Michelle joked. "I see your point, but CDC has been doing virus counts on the air for the last half-hour. If he had left it on time delay, we'd be picking something up by now."

What Nadia and Michelle didn't know was that Ying was walking among them even as they spoke. Using a biohazard suit and a fake ID that they had constructed, Ying had shot one of the doctors that had arrived, stolen his identification and taken the place of a CDC doctor twenty minutes earlier.

As for why he hadn't dropped off the virus yet, he had been watching the tension and anxiety come to a slow boil over the last fifteen minutes, and had decided to wait for just the right opportunity Which occurred when he ran into a young man listening to a boom box near the wall separating Watts Towers from the rest of South Central.

"Hey!" he yelled at the teenager "Why are you outside the cordoned area, kid?"

The young man got to his feet. Though he couldn't be more than fourteen, he had a gun in his belt. "You want to move me along, motherfucker?" he said calmly.

There would have been a lot of irony had Ying met his end there. But that wasn't the plan. Instead he put his gloved hand on the ground, and laid down the test-tube just an inch way from the boom box. "I didn't realize that you felt that way, sir," he said in a calm tone. "Stay where you are."

Then he started to walk away, thinking the hard part was over.

2:47:09/2:47:10/2:47:11/2:47:12

Jack watched Sydney open the door that led to Howard Cason's on campus housing. "What exactly are you expecting to find here?"

"Cason is an ordinary biology major at USC with no known psychological or mental problems, yet today he decides to skip his 2:00 class for no apparent reason," Sydney reminded him. . "Less than fifteen minutes later, he crashes his van into my car, killing himself and two other people. He owns a cell phone, but for some reason, there was none to be found when we searched his vehicle."

"He probably got rid of it before he crashed into you." Jack countered.

"Which still begs the question as to why a relatively ordinary nineteen-year-old with no obvious connection to a fringe terrorist group would sacrifice his life for them." Sydney told him, as she began to search his closets. "He may have been smart enough to junk his phone, but I find it hard to believe he emptied his room of any evidence of his connection to Scarlet Circle."

"Given the way colleges go now, he could have been recruited by an English professor," Jack muttered as he followed her in. He glanced around. "Do we have any idea where Cason's roommate is?"

"Supposed to be still in class. LAPD is trying to track him down." Sydney looked at the women's clothing that was hanging in the closet. "Maybe he can tell us which of them had a girlfriend living here."

Jack was looking over his desk, when he found a framed photo at the corner of Cason's desk. "I've got a feeling you may be on to something. Look at this."

The picture was of an Asian-American teenager with streaked blonde hair. "Doesn't exactly fit the description of the typical femme fatale," Sydney said. "But then they can come in all shapes and sizes."

"If they do, they're really recruiting them young," Jack pointed out.

"Excuse me, are you with the police?" Both agents looked up to see a nervous-looking brown-haired man in the late end of his teens standing at the doorway. "They told me that Howard was in some kind of automobile accident, but I just talked to him an hour ago."

"Sir, my name is Jack Bauer. This is Sydney Bristow. We both work for the government at the Los Angeles Counter Terrorist Unit." Jack walked over to the door. "You're Nathaniel Whitworth, Howard Cason's roommate?"

The nervous-looking man nodded. "Is something wrong with Howard?"

Sydney walked over to him. "Howard is dead, Nathaniel," she told him gently. "And it wasn't an accident. He drove his car into a freeway overpass, and he killed two other people."

"That's not possible." Whitworth appeared to be going through the same numbness that she and Jack had seen more times then they would like to have counted, and as was the case so often, they couldn't hold his hand for long.

"Nathaniel, you said that you spoke to Howard an hour ago," Sydney asked. "Did he give any indication that something was wrong?"

"To be honest, he sounded a little off," Whitworth admitted. "We were in the quad between classes, when he got this call on his cell. He listened to it for about a minute, then hung up and started walking away. I asked him where he was going, and he mumbled something about having to feed his dog."

"And he doesn't have one, does he?" Sydney was beginning to get a picture of what might have happened, and she didn't like it at all.

Whitworth shook his head. "And he left his phone behind. I called after him, but he didn't even bother to look at me. I should've done something then, but class was starting in five minutes."

"Do you still have the phone?" Jack asked. Whitworth nodded and handed it over.

"Nathaniel," Sydney said, showing him the photograph. "This woman here, was she Howard's girlfriend?"

Whitworth nodded. "That's Alicia Ro. She and Howard have been seeing each other for the past month."

"Could you give us her address?"

"You think she's involved in this?"

"I'm positive of it," Sydney said grimly.

2:53:49/2:53:50/2:53:51

"Agent Santos," one of the field agents who had come with Nadia and Michelle walked up to her.

"You find something?"

"I need to see you face to face. Meet me at the far eastern end of the high-rise."

Nadia was about to ask why the agent was being circumspect when she stopped to consider something that had escaped her notice. There was one way that Ying could have escaped their notice even though they'd been here for nearly an hour.

Though it was awkward to reach for it in the suit and gloves she was wearing, Nadia slowly removed her gun from her side holster, but it kept it out of sight until she reached her destination.

"What is it?" she asked as soon as she saw who she was looking for.

"I was establishing the quarantine parameter, and I found this." The agent-- a man, which did not ease Nadia's discomfort one bit-- gestured towards a dumpster. She lifted the lid to reveal a dead body in a white lab coat.

"Any ID?"

"No, but I fingerprinted him and sent it back to CTU. They just got the search done." He held up his PDA. "CDC. They claim that he was one of the first doctors they sent here."

This confirmed exactly Nadia's deepest suspicions. Trying to figure out the best way to do this, she took out her phone and speed dialed Michelle.

"Dessler."

"Michelle, Ying is on site. He is impersonating a CDC doctor named Robert Jaffe. I need you to find him as circumspectly as you possibly can."

Michelle heard this and immediately went out on the radio. "I need all CDC doctors to report to the front of the Towers."

Two of the doctors began walking towards her. The third, however, suddenly went still.

Michelle had had next to no experience in the field, so her lack of finesse in what followed could at least partly be understood.. She very slowly started moving towards the fake doctor, trying to make it seem casual. Her demeanor remained somewhat stiff, however, or perhaps Ying just had faster reactions; in either case, the result was the same.

Yang pulled out a gun. "Don't come any closer!" he said clearly in a flawless American accent.

"Don't try it!" Michelle said. "There's nowhere to run!"

"I'm not the one who has to run," he said, in a whisper. Then he turned ninety degrees, and shot one of the tenants standing not five feet away.

However, Los Angeles was the drive by capital of the world for a reason, and there was one Blood in the crowd, who, in addition to being harassed and hassled by the cops for what seemed like every day of his life, had been tending towards paranoia as soon as the feds had shown up. The second Ying fired., that man drew down on the gook in the space suit who had fired into the crowd.

The flaw in Ying's plan was revealed as he learned too late that his bio-hazard suit wasn't the tactical model of the CTU/APO crowd, punching through the cloth, and ripping through his body like tissue

Unfortunately for that man, Nadia had been shot at more often than he had fired off rounds. She wheeled around into a crouch , and fired on the blood, killing him instantly.

Then the crowd really started to get pissed. The tenants were for the most part old and unfit to fight, but there were a lot of them. And when they started attacking the government agents, they had no chance of getting away safely. The fact that the virus was being let loose while this was happening went completely unnoticed.

From a safe distance, Jia watched the mayhem unfold.. He speed-dialed Wang.

"Yes?"

"Ying was successful in his mission, but I don't think he'll be walking away from this one," Jia told them.

"Then stop talking and get to the rendezvous point." Wang said. "It's going to be even harder to get to President Palmer. We can't afford to waste anytime."

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