Chapter 10
Chapter 10
The Following Takes Place Between 3:00 P.M. and 4:00 P.M.
Nadia didn't open fire on the crowd. She had fired a simple, three-round burst that dropped a shooter from the crowd. That was all. She didn't fire one more bullet. She quickly scanned the area for another shooter, and was about to put her gun away when the crowd roared in on them.
Santos pushed back, onto her feet, and into a combat stance. And she gave the only order she could think of.
"Fall back!"
Unfortunately for the crowd, it wasn't a matter of turning tail and running. Standard military retreating since the wars of Napoleon was to slowly, calmly, step backwards, your offensive side facing the enemy.
Which was the the first wave of the attackers crashed into a wall of ready federal agents, half of whom had military training.
Nadia didn't even bother engaging the one attack with the broken bottle. He slashed for her, and she kicked him in the crotch, battle over. As she recoiled from the kick, she dropped forward a little to slam a hammerfist down into his kidneys.
Another attacker came in with a baseball bat, swinging it down like a hammer. She burst forward, around the first attacker, one arm up and diagonal to the ground. The bat came down, and she met the attacker's wrist with her own, and her arm deflected the arch of the strike, making it slide down her arm. She dropped the arm around the bat, and met the man's face with a roundhouse punch. She tore the bat away and retreated back with the rest of her line.
Michelle, however, didn't have anything in the way of restraint. One girl came after her, and she pistol whipped her casually. Her boyfriend saw the attack, and charged. She sidestepped and brought the pistol down like a hammer on the thick part of his skull, dropping him without killing him.
Before her limbs could even recoil, another man came at her with a right cross. She slapped it aside, deflecting it past her face, and she grabbed his wrist, holding it still as she torqued her entire upper body into driving the gun into his face. He fell back and fell over, his nose broken.
She saw a flash from the side, and she instinctively leaned away from it, her arm down straight over her hip, and unleash a side kick at the attacker's leg, scoring a hit on the kneecap.
She fell back alongside Nadia.
"I thought you spent your time in the office," Nadia asked her, holding the baseball bat still.
"Tony teaches Krav Maga. He could kick a gunman's ass with both hands bound behind him."
3:04:58/3:04:59/3:05:00
Getting on to the Presidential retreat was difficult even if you had the proper clearance; circumventing the legions of doctors, military and security guards made the trip to the moon seem like a cakewalk. Vaughn considered himself very fortunate to finally get to the section where the Scarlet Circle assassin was being held.
"Agent Vaughn, you're from the CTU detail?" Vaughn nodded. "Mike Novick, I'm afraid that there have been some dire complications that we need to discuss. Come this way."
"How's Premier En Lai doing?" Vaughn asked as he followed the older man.
"About half an hour ago, he started showing signs of infection," Novick said grimly. "We've got him in isolation now, but we're getting a lot of pressure from the Chinese government to have the premier released into the custody of their envoy."
"They understand the possibility of a health risk to the general public if that happens?"
"As far as their government is concerned, En Lai's already dead," Novick told him bluntly. "Right now, the only thing that matters is retribution. His would-be successors have made it perfectly clear that unless the guilty party is apprehended and delivered into Chinese custody by the end of the day, they will have no choice to consider this a violation of international law, and to declare war on the United States."
"So why haven't you handed Sheng Leung over to the Chinese?" Vaughn asked.
"The President knows that Leung is just the tip of the iceberg, and that millions of American lives may be in danger unless we stop this virus." Novick paused. "But he also knows that the virus was created by an American defense program. That's more than enough ammunition for the Chinese government to take up arms against us if they find out." He paused. "That's actually the real reason I asked to see you before you interrogated Leung."
"What haven't you told me?" he demanded.
"I asked Secret Service to go over all security footage for the last six hours to locate Sheng Leung. While they were doing so, they found this." Mike walked over to a television, and turned it on. "This footage is from a little more than two and a half hours ago from the parking lot."
A man in a blue suit and a cap was standing by a bright silver limousine. He removed something from the hood of the car, and put it next to the side-view mirror. He then walked out of the frame. "We fast forward a minute, and…" An Asian man-- Leung, based on the photos Vaughn had seen-- walked by the limousine and took something from the mirror, and put in his pocket.
"I'm guessing that was how Leung managed to get hold of the virus," Vaughn said.
"It's worse than that." Mike told him. "The vehicle he went by is Allan Milliken's, and the man who probably arranged the hand-off was Steven Cairns. He's been Allan's personal driver for ten years."
Suddenly, Vaughn was beginning to feel really out of his depth. "Have you interrogated Cairns yet?" he asked, with a sinking feeling beginning to fill him.
"Cairns says he will not give any explanation until he has been granted total immunity from prosecution. The President's in a meeting with the Attorney General right now trying to figure out his options."
"What options?" Vaughn argued. "If Cairns only implicates Leung, the Chinese are still going to demand that we hand him over to their justice system for punishment. If he implicates Milliken, and I don't see how he can't given the evidence, we will have no choice to implicate the American government. In either case, the Chinese will have more than enough justification to repudiate today's treaty."
"Agent Vaughn."
For the first time Vaughn looked at Novick, and could tell that underneath the veneer of detachment, the President's chief of staff was as scared as he was beginning to feel.. "The President knows that we are on the verge of World War III," he said slowly, "and right now, the only way that we can prevent this is to locate all the people behind what is happening today, and prove, not only to China, but to the international community that they, not their governments, are responsible for today's tragedies. We can then bring enough pressure so that we can all step away from the precipice."
"And what exactly do you want me to do to help stop us?"
"We need to use all of our resources to extract whatever information Cairns and Leung have related to today's threat, so that we can locate Li Chen Wang, Julian Sark, and whoever else is pulling the strings behind what's happening today."
"Sir," Vaughn said honestly, "what you're asking for may well be impossible."
"The President is aware of that," Novick admitted. "He also knows that the people at APO, as well as those at CTU, have managed to do the impossible. You've saved the world before, and we need you to do it now."
Vaughn knew this was true. He also knew that it wasn't his talents Novick was asking for. "In that case, sir," he told him, "I need to make a phone call right now."
3:09:04/3:09:05/3:09:06
"You intending to tell me why we're making such a major effort to follow this lead?" Jack asked Sydney as they pulled to a stop in front of Alicia Ro's off-campus housing.
"Based on what his roommate told us about the phone call Howard Cason received, I'm guessing that Howard Cason was given some kind of hypnotic suggestion," Sydney told him.
"And this Alicia Ro was his controller, I get that," Jack said. "What I don't follow is why we're looking for her."
"The majority of successful brainwashing takes a period of months in order to trigger those kinds of responses." Sydney paused. "Ro was able to do it in a matter of weeks, probably faster. There aren't a lot of people in this field who are that advanced that they can work on an accelerated timetable."
"So if this woman could be very familiar with someone a lot higher-up in the food chain," Jack extrapolated.
He was about to go on when his phone rang. "Bauer."
"Jack, please tell me you're with Sydney right now," Vaughn said coolly.
"She's in the car, next to me," Jack assured Vaughn, as he put her on speaker.
"Syd, where the hell are you? I've been trying to call you for the past five minutes."
Sydney looked a little abashed. "Sorry, my cell got totaled in the car crash," she said furtively.
There was a pause. "You were in a car accident?" Vaughn said. "Was it serious?"
"People died in it," Sydney replied grimly.
"And you're still in the field," Vaughn reasoned. He cleared his throat and said, "You know, I remember you went to CTU to stay out of the field. The exact reason for getting a desk job escapes me—oh, yes, our daughter?"
Sydney glanced at Bauer and flushed with embarrassment. "You're not going to make a thing of this now, are you, Vaughn?"
"Yes, I think I will. Later. Unfortunately, now I don't have the time," Vaughn went back to business. "I just finished a talk with Mike Novick. "
Jack almost groaned with relief for the change in subject. If Sydney thought that she was uncomfortable, Bauer wasn't much better. "What's the situation with the Premier?"
"Right now, the Premier's health is the least of our problems. For that matter, the possibility of mass attack on this nation by a genetic virus just got moved back to second place on our agenda."
Both Jack and Sydney knew the foreign situation well enough that they would have been able to gather what was probably going on behind the scenes with their government and that of the Chinese. "How bad?" Jack asked grimly.
"If we don't bring this to a successful resolution within the next few hours, there's a good possibility that keys will be turning in missile bases across the world," Vaughn answered grimly.
Sydney blanched a little at this. "And we're the ones who have been charged with putting the pin back in the grenade. Even though this is China's mess."
"That's the real reason I called," Vaughn said. "My interview with Allan Milliken didn't get me anything, except a lot more questions."
"How hard did you press him?" Jack asked
"Not as hard as I could have," Vaughn admitted. "Especially since I just saw a security tape of Milliken's driver handing the virus off to Sheng Leung while they were both on the retreat."
This was as bad as Vaughn said it was. "Are either of these men in custody?" Jack asked
"They apprehended both of them within the last hour." Vaughn told him. "That's why I called. I need one of you to get over to the Western White House, and help me interrogate them."
"Vaughn, you've been an agent for thirteen years," Sydney said. "You know how to run this."
"I got lucky with Simon Grady earlier," Vaughn admitted. "I know where I'm strong and where I'm not, and the fact is, interrogation and information extraction have never been my greatest strengths. These man need to be worked right, or we're going to lose any chance to control this crisis. Jack...this is your area."
"Vaughn, we're in the middle of following up on a lead," Jack told him.
"Correction. I am in the middle of following up a lead." When Jack was about to protest, she added, as she got out of the car: "Your continuing to view me as some kind of fragile flower is not exactly flattering for someone in my position."
Jack knew better than to than to try and argue with a Bristow. They were stubborn enough that not even killing them seemed to work—as Sydney's mother could attest. "All right, but you had better call CTU for some kind of back-up," he replied.
"That's not the kind of brain damage they're worried about, Jack."
"Vaughn, it's still going to take me fifteen minutes to get over to the retreat," Jack said.
"Which puts you ten minutes closer than anyone I can get from CTU," Vaughn countered. "At the very least you can do some kind of work-up en route."
"You're asking a lot," Jack said, as he began to drive out.
"No more than you've asked of any of us."
3:12:24/3:12:25/3:12:26...
Nadia stabbed into one attacker's chest with the bat and swung it against someone's else's head—thankfully she didn't have enough windup, only dropping him without crushing his skull.
A Crip had managed to get a hold of Michelle's wrists, and he was grinning as he jerked her around from one side to the other. The man had four inches on her, and a hundred pounds of muscle, and lifted her off the ground.
Not one ounce of that muscle helped him when she stomped both feet into his knees, and driving him to the ground. A smack of the temple with the barrel of her gun dropped him.
A knife jabbed at her, and she twisted her body so she could deflect it with her arm, and she backhanded the guy with her pistol.
"This is bad," Nadia said as she ducked someone's punch, and stabbed up with the bat into his crotch.
"I noticed."
Without warning, one of the larger trucks CTU had brought with them charged the crowd. All of them being LA pedestrians, no one assumed that it would stop for them as it charged.
Most of the front ranks of the crowd scattered. The truck stopped in front of the two women, and the overweight, flabby driver looked out the window and said, "Get in. As many as you can."
Not one agent wasted a moment of time. Michelle and Nadia piled in, along with the rest of them as another truck pulled up as the driver sped away.
Michelle's helmet came off quickly enough as she tried to breathe. She leaned to the cab and said, "I thought we brought all the agents with us into the field."
"You did ma'am, I'm a computer programmer. You left us with the cars...um, I'm Edgar."
She grinned with relief. "Thanks Edgar."
Nadia's cell phone rang. She sighed, took off her helmet, and answered, "Santos."
"Nadia, are you all right?"
"Considering that I've just left the scene of what could be another major race riot, yeah, I'm doing just fine. How are you Sydney?"
3:17:34/3:17:35/3:17:36/3:17:37
Bristow blinked at her sister's reply. "I was in a car crash, nearly killed, and I have major concussion. Why, what've you been doing?"
"We traced Tommy Ying to the South Central section of Watts. We finally tracked Ying down. Then he shot one of the residents of the local housing complex."
"Let me guess: Boom."
"Right," Suddenly the background noise got a little lower. "Michelle and I managed to take refuge, and the LAPD has just arrived. But once the gun has been fired, you can't put the bullet back. They may need to call in the National Guard to get this under control, and how they're going to manage that while keeping a possible quarantine is something I don't particularly want to think about."
"And I'm guessing you lost sight of Ying," Sydney reasoned.
"Sort of. He's dead." Nadia paused. "Which means we're going to need to follow any leads you've got. Which I'm guessing is why you called."
"Correct. I'm at USC, following up on what may be our last, best chance to get someone connected to Scarlet Circle."
"Scarlet Circle's recruiting college freshmen now?" Nadia said dubiously.
"Someone sent a freshman in a truck to kill me, and he came damn close to pulling it off."
"So in the past hour, I was nearly killed by an out-of-control mob, and you narrowly avoided death by a college kamikaze," Nadia summarized, partially in jest.. "You think maybe the universe is trying to tell us something about our jobs?"
"Hey, I'm the one with the quiet desk job, remember?" Sydney said.. "I think that the Scarlet Circle agents who sent the truck out to kill me have one of their own staked out around USC. I need some back-up, and you and Michelle are probably the closest field agents available."
"What's the address?" Nadia asked
"36 Dillard Place, roughly a quarter of a mile off the main USC campus," Sydney told her. "The woman we're looking for is called Alicia Ro. I've got Kim doing a background check now."
"All right, that's less then ten minutes away," Nadia said. "We'll be right there. Try not to do anything incredibly dangerous."
"Relax, this time I'm taking the safer route," Sydney assured her sister. "If Alicia Ro really is keeping up her front as a student, she'll be coming home from class any minute now. I'll wait until she comes home, and you arrive then we can snatch her up together."
"And if Alicia Ro really is a Scarlet Circle assassin?"
"Then she may have left the campus already. In which case, we'll go in and search her place for some kind of clue."
Nadia had been listening to this with a hint of doubt. "And what happens if she is an assassin, comes to her house to destroy it, and encounters you?" she asked.
"We'll burn that bridge when we come to it."
"Do that a lot on days like today," Nadia reminded her.
"In that case, I suggest that you and Michelle get here fast," Sydney said with a trace of a smile.
3:24:50/3:24:51/3:24:52
Nadia knew, joking aside, Sydney was only going to have so much time before she had to make some kind of move. She was just about to hang up, when her phone beeped. "Hold on, someone's on the other line," She pressed a button. "Santos."
"Nadia, finally got through," Marshall's voice sounded more jazzed than usual. "You and Agent Dessler make it out okay? Last I heard Watts was turning into another… Watts, I guess."
"Yeah, it's looking like another win in Scarlet Circle's column," Nadia admitted. "Have you got something that can help us turn the tide?"
"Well, um, not exactly with the whole race riot, I mean, I'm probably the whitest guy in America when it comes to these sorts of things, and tech support didn't exactly carry the day there."
"Actually, we were saved by tech support. A man named Edgar?"
"Oh? Really? Cool, I guess...though not cool that you needed saving of course, but, I—oh, right," Marshall paused, gathering himself. "But I might have found something that finally get us to locating another piece to this whole plot."
"Hang on, Syd's on the other line. I'm patching her through now. " Nadia did so. "Syd, Marshall thinks he may have something."
"What have you got?"
"Well, it took me two hours, but I finally managed to decrypt the hard drive that we found at Wang's Glendale address," Marshall said proudly "Turns out that the code there was very similar to the data we got off Hobson Laboratories, when you encountered Wang's associates. I won't bore you with details, but the long and short of it, I managed to decode what was on the files."
"All right. Start with Hobson Laboratories," Sydney asked. "What was so important that his followers spent a huge amount of time and energy trying to purge from the data stream?"
"Took me a little while to figure it out, but it seems to be a series of genetic equations," Marshall said. "Now I think eighty percent of the geneticists in this world wouldn't be able to figure out its importance, but I finally recognized that is has with alteration of a person's genetic makeup."
"You mean like Project Helix?" Nadia asked.
"No," Marshall paused for dramatic effect. "This is Project Helix."
"But those plans were destroyed. I pushed the button on the detonator that was used," Sydney argued.
"When Sark was in custody five years ago," Marshall said, "he eventually revealed that he had made a major effort to help Allison Dorian return to her own features." Marshall paused because he knew, even after all this time, how much Dorian's murder of Francie hurt Sydney. "Now we already know Hobson Laboratories was an Alliance property, so it makes sense that Sark would try and utilize it, and when it failed, they still had access to the technology."
This did explain a few things, but there was a larger question. "So how did Scarlet Circle use Project Helix today?" Sydney asked
Marshall deflated. "I haven't yet figured out who they cloned, However," he continued, "one of the code names they used in regard to this genetic map, was also found on the hard drive that Nadia found in Li Chen Wang's apartment."
"What was the reference?" Sydney asked
"The code name used was Moses." Marshall said, "and according to the reference, 'Moses' was somebody with the Inner Circle of the President."
Now Nadia was alarmed. "Allen Milliken," she said.
Michelle finally reacted. "Excuse me? It's one thing to say that Milliken is possibly guilty of treason, we've already connected the dots back that far to him. But the idea that he could be some kind of genetic duplicate--"
"Would explain how Scarlet Circle would have access to this virus in the first place." Nadia said. "Add to that, he's been hospitalized a fair amount over the past few years for supposed heart trouble, and Sark would have plenty of opportunities to make the switch."
"It's a good theory, Nadia, but we don't have any proof," Sydney pointed out. "However, I do think that Jack needs to be informed about it, before he interrogates Milliken's driver."
Suddenly, there was some noise in the background of Sydney's call. "Nadia, how far out are you?"
"Less than three minutes," Nadia told her.
"Well, then I advise you to the pedal to the mettle," Sydney told her sister. "Because Alicia Ro just showed up, and now I've got a few questions I need to ask her."
"Sydney--" But she had terminated the call.
Nadia swallowed, and punched the gas.
3:32:09/3:32:10/3:32:11/3:32:12
Now that the time had come to deal with Alicia Ro, Sydney decided to play as close to straight as possible, at least at first.
Syd approached the Asian teenager with blond streaks in her dark hair. Bristow moved down the suburban street with the confident strides of a government agent. "Excuse me, are you Alicia Ro?" she asked the.
"Yes, and you are?" Ro countered calmly.
"My name is Sydney Bristow, and I work for CTU. I need to ask you a few questions about Howard Cason. I understand that he's your boyfriend."
"I don't understand. Is Howard in some kind of trouble?" She sounded just curious. But Sydney could detect something else in her tone.
"Not anymore. But there are some questions that need to be answered."
"What kind of questions?"
Syd scanned the calm suburban homes. "Miss Ro, I'd prefer that we could talk out of the sight of your neighbors."
Again Ro's face remained perfectly neutral. "All right." She went to the door of her apartment, and unlocked it. "Come right in."
If there was some kind of trap, this was where Ro would spring it. Sydney cautiously entered the apartment. Out of the corner of her eye, she detected Ro moving behind her. "Did you know about Mr. Ca--"
Before she could finish the sentence, Ro sprung at her with what looked like a Halo knife. Sydney sidestepped and slapped the knife out her hand. Before she could follow up, Ro leapt and rolled to the side. She came to her feet, and sprang back at Sydney, leading with a right cross. Bristow leaned back and to the side, letting the punch fly past her. She burst in, towards Ro, and fired a palm into her forehead, sending her off balance. Syd spun, grabbed the outstretched arm, and then twisted her entire body around, taking the arm with her, and pulling straight down. The leverage hold threw Ro down to the ground.
Normally Sydney could have easily matched fighting styles with this student-warrior until her actions carried the day. But she was still feeling a little dizzy from her car crash and hour ago, so she simply decided to draw her weapon on her.
"If you value your life, I suggest you stop trying to end mine," Sydney said icily.
"Death does not frighten me, Agent Bristow." There was now a more pronounced accent to Ro's English.
"You're young yet," Sydney said in a relatively irony-free tone. "Now get up, turn around, and face the wall."
Reluctantly Ro did so
Sydney took out her cuffs. "CTU has a lot of questions to ask you--"
Ro's reaction time was fast. As Sydney reached for her cuffs, Ro whirled around to the outside of Sydney and swept her arm down, and wrapping it around her gun arm, locking the arm in place—with the gun pointing past Ro's body.
Syd dropped her gun a moment before Ro's left fist came up and struck her with a roundhouse punch, quickly followed up with an elbow strike. However, Ro was using a textbook maneuver, and the elbow was a passing strike as Ro reached for Sydney's gun—which she had already dropped.
And this is why I beat them into submission first, Sydney thought.
Immediately after the elbow strike, Bristow swung the rest of her body, using the shoulder of the trapped arm as a hinge, and kicked...up...straight up. Her left leg came almost parallel with her torso and cracked into Ro's nose, snapping her head back and jarring her grip on Sydney's arm. She recocked her leg, then swept her left arm foreward, clotheslining Ro in the throat-- enough to make her gag, but not enough to crush her windpipe.
Ro struggled in fits and thrashes. She tried a reverse elbow into Bristow's face, but only ran into Sydney's left shoulder. Bristow dropped her arm over Ro's, trapping it against her chest, and then dropped backwards. Ro released her arm in an attempt to escape, but Sydney rolled sideways, turning her motion into an armdrag, bringing her to the floor.
Syd rolled to her feet, and Ro did the same. Bristow grabbed the nearest weapon—in this case, an oversized decorative plate the diameter of a beachball on the coffee table. Ro grabbed the nearest weapon as well—Sydney's gun.
Bristow dropped to one knee, putting herself below the pistol's line of fire, and swung the oversized plate down and across her body, sending it to the other side of the room. Ro growled and leapt for her, but Bristow jabbed her with the edge of the plate, ramming the thing into her stomach. She hit the plate with the full force of her own body, driving ninety pounds of pressure into a two-inch edge.
Ro doubled over, and Syd pulled back, and stood, raised the plate high again, and broke it over Ro's head, dropping the college student to the ground.
Suckered by a college student, Sydney thought. Nadia'll never let me live this down.
"Now, we'll do this again..." Bristow panted. "Puts your hands behind your head."
"I always miss the fun stuff."
Sydney glanced over to the doorway, Nadia standing there, her gun at the ready. "You can have the next one.."
"You okay, Syd?"
"Never better," Sydney as she successfully manacled Ro's hands. "Just goes to prove that the next generation has nothing on me."
"I wouldn't bet on it, bitch," Ro snarled.
Sydney smashed Ro in the jaw. "From now on, you don't talk until I say so, get it?" She looked up at her. "I assume you came here in a CTU vehicle?" Nadia nodded. "Call Michelle. Get her to bring one of the kits."
"Granted this woman's hell on wheels, but does that mean she'll know anything about Wang or Sark?"
"Actually," Sydney said coldly, "I think she knows a lot of secrets, and it shouldn't take much prodding to get them out of her."
3:39:41/3:39:42/3:39:43
Vaughn had figured Milliken's driver would be easier for him to crack, and would probably provide a different angle on catching up with the American angle on the virus. Which left Sheng Leung for Jack.
"Agent Bauer," Agent Pierce said as he walked up to the section of the retreat where they were holding the Scarlet Circle operative. "They told us you were coming."
"I wish we could meet under better circumstances," Jack said. "Has Leung been prepped?"
"We've been working on him consistently for the past hour," Pierce told him. "Leung has a very high pain threshold. I don't know what methods you were planning on using, but you may have to take another approach."
"Has Agent Vaughn managed to get anything out of Cairns yet?" Jack asked.
"Not so far. The President has agreed to withhold offering any deals until Agent Vaughn finished with him," Pierce paused. "He also wanted you to know that the Chinese government has been demanding custody of Leung for the past thirty minutes."
"Is he going to give in?"
"I'm not party to those kinds of decisions, Jack."
Jack knew better than to pry. "All right. Call me the second there's any new information. And make sure no one disturbs us."
With that he walked into the room Leung was being kept in. He was cuffed in a chair with his hands over his head.
"I know you speak English, so don't bother playing ignorant with me," he said as he walked over to him.
"I think we are well past the point of facades, sir," Leung said angrily.
"The Premier has begun to show symptoms," Jack said almost casually. "Which means in a matter of hours he will be dead."
"En Lai was a traitor to over a billion Chinese," Leung snapped back. "My one regret is that they made me use this virus. It would have been so much simpler for me to have pulled the trigger myself."
"Would have been a lot simpler for us, too." By now Jack was right next to Leung. "Then we would simply hand you over to your government, and in a matter of days, you'd be tried, convicted and executed."
"I am more than willing to serve as a martyr for my people. Death has no hold over me."
"You're not going to die, Sheng," Jack told him. "Not with the tar baby you've gotten yourself stuck to."
"What's that supposed to means?"
"You committed this crime on American soil, which means we have as much of a right to determining your fate as the Chinese do." Jack paused. "No doubt there will be all kinds of maneuvering to decide who gets the pleasure of disposing of you, but we've arranged a special kind of punishment while you are in the wings. Let's say your government gets possession first. No doubt they'll send you to Siberia or Beijing or any of the other prison camps they borrowed. A few weeks will seem like years, so you'll be relieved when we take possession. You'll think that Guantanamo will seem like a cakewalk compared to the gulag, but I'll tell you, descriptions of what we do there have been greatly under-reported. After a few months, your government will regain possession of you, and the cycle will begin again."
Now Jack leaned over Leung. "The thing about government, Sheng, is that we are a bureaucracy. And given the mess you've instigated, this process could drag on for decades. Are you prepared for that, Sheng? Decades of beatings and whippings. Years of freezing cold or scalding heat. Malnutrition, thirst, sleep deprivation. By the end of the first month, you'll be trying to take your own life, except another thing that both sides will have in common is that you will be far too important a prisoner for either of us to let die. So you'll just go insane. That won't end your agony, and it probably won't make it any more bearable. It'll just make it impossible for you to remember what a hero you've been today."
Leung was starting to sweat a little now. "Your countries will be at war soon," he said. "They won't have time to keep fighting over me."
"The bureaucracy is the last thing to be destroyed in a war," Jack reminded him. "But maybe you're right, and one government gets to keep you. You'll be the one who started this war. That would make you to bad for a lethal injection. If you're lucky, they'll just arranged to have you drawn and quartered." Jack paused. "And that's if our side gets possession. I can't imagine what your own people would do to the man who murdered their leader."
"You are too weak for that," Leung spat. "I have seen this 'GITMO.' I have seen photos. Prisoners in your Fort Leavenworth should swear fidelity to Al Qaeda just to be transferred to Cuba. You are weak, you are pathetic, and that is why we will win." He looked at the room around him. "You think that this will break me? You think that this hurts? You think that anything your people are willing to do will even begin to undermine my victory? No," he sneered. "You cannot do that."
Jack leaned forward, and grabbed the arms of Leung's chair, meeting his gaze. He spoke evenly, low and measured, his voice a deep whisper. "If you really think that's true, look into my eyes, Leung, and tell me that we wouldn't make an exception just for you."
The Scarlet Circle terrorist stared long and hard into the eyes of Jack Bauer. And for the first time in a long, hard life in China, in Scarlet Circle, as a deep cover agent, Sheng Leung felt stark, abject terror. His faced paled, and he swallowed. "If this is case, there is no reason for us to be having this conversation."
"You have one way out, so listen carefully," Jack paused. "You're going to tell us everything you know about Scarlet Circle, Li Chen Wang, and the genetic virus that you used on the Premier, as well as any American contacts your group has. In exchange, I will arrange with our government to grant you asylum. You'll still go to prison, probably for the rest of your life. But you will be allowed relative safety, and the Chinese will never have access to you."
Leung considered this. "How do I know that you're simply not telling me what I want to hear?"
"You don't," Jack said simply. "But right now, you don't have a choice, because when I walk out that door, they're going to start working you over again. And when they're finished, you'll still go to prison. Only there are no guarantees there that you'll survive the day."
Jack walked to the door. "Five minutes, Leung," he said. "You can use it to tell me what I want to know. Or you can start getting used to a lot more of rooms like this one...and they will be manned by people much scarier than I am."
3:50:03/3:50:04/3:50:05/3:50:06
"Where are we with Ro?" Jack Bristow asked Nadia.
"Sydney's working her over," Nadia replied. "But this Ro woman has all the earmarks of being a true believer. Those can be the toughest ones to crack. Has Marshall gotten anything from the background check that we can use?"
"He didn't have to." For one of the first times since she had begun working with him, Sydney's father seemed a little uneasy. "Alicia Ro's the name that she used when she was in USC. Her real name is Chang Xian, and she's been working as a mercenary for various groups in the Far East for the past five years."
"She can't be more than twenty," Nadia said. "How the hell did she get the kind of training that allowed her to nearly get the jump on Sydney?"
"Because Sydney and she followed the same learning primer." Mr. Bristow hesitated. "You're familiar with Project Christmas?"
"I assume that's a rhetorical question." Even now, more than five years after she had learned about it, this was still a sore subject between Sydney and her father.
"But how would a Chinese national know about an American CIA program?"
"Not all of the people who were trained by Project Christmas were American born, and not all of them went into intelligence work."
"What I'm more curious about is how you knew the name," Nadia said pointedly.
For a moment it seemed like a hint of pain was in Mr. Bristow's voice. "Not of all the people who went into the program came out as well as your sister." His tone became more business-like. "But the how is less important than the end result. The people who went through this kind of training traditionally have a high resistance to interrogation. Breaking her will be difficult, even for Sydney."
"Assuming that's the case, what other options does that leave us with?" Nadia demanded. "Have you gotten anything off the numbers on her cell? Anything there that we can use?"
"Several things," Mr. Bristow told her. We've backtracked the calls that's she made over the past hour. Aside from the one that she made to Howard Cason's cell phone, she also has listings to several of the numbers that we'd traced earlier to Scarlet Circle. But the last call she made was a little more than forty minutes to a Santa Barbara area code."
"Does Marshall have any idea who?"
"Whoever it was used a scrambler to make it difficult for us to backtrack, and the phone's registered under a false name. We've been trying to raise the caller for the past five minutes using a rigged identity, but whoever it isn't biting."
Nadia thought for a moment. "What if we used a legitimate one?"
"What are you thinking?" Mr. Bristow said.
"That if we're not going to get anywhere breaking Xian normally, maybe we can convince her we don't need her anymore." Nadia said carefully. "Let's see how far she's willing to take this true believer act."
3:55:11/3:55:12/3:55:13
The major difference between Sydney's and Jack's methods of interrogation, Nadia was coming to realize as she walked back into the apartment, was that her sister somehow managed to do this without leaving external trauma. Nadia had often meant to ask how Syd managed to pull that off, but there never seemed to be a good time to ask.
Now, as Sydney stepped away from Nadia, she hoped that her sister's time out of the field, wouldn't stop her from catching the little act that she was about to perform.
"I've just had a conversation with your father," Nadia began.
"What did he have to say?"
Nadia reached for her service weapon. "That we can no longer afford to waste time on non-essentials."
Sydney gave no outward appearance of surprise. "Did you tell him that this may be our only chance of getting to Scarlet Circle?" she asked neutrally.
"We have her cell phone, we have her address book," Nadia said nonchalantly. "We can get more out of them quicker than we can wasting our time with this amateur."
Sydney turned around. "Has CTU signed off on the kill?" she asked emphasizing the last two words.
"Almeida's given us the green light." Nadia walked over to Ro, who was concentrating very hard on maintaining her calm exterior. "So what do you say, Chang? Any last words before your brains exit the back of your head?"
"You know my name," Ro managed to say.
"Another reason we consider further questioning of waste of time," Nadia now had the gun right between her eyes. "We Even you know you're a low man on the totem pole. We're after much bigger fish, and a flunky who believes she playing spy isn't worth our time."
Ro—or Chang, as Nadia supposed they should be calling her-- was starting to perspire rather heavily. "But I have information for you," she said.
"What could you possibly tell us that would be worthwhile?" Sydney said. "Fire on three. One-- two--"
Nadia had actually starting to squeeze the trigger before Chang spoke-- "Scarlet Circle didn't hire me!" she shouted.
"So?" Sydney asked.
"I was hired by an American contact!" Chang finally said. "The people who hired me are the one's responsible for designing the virus!"
Nadia took her finger off the trigger but did not lower the gun. "We already know the people behind it!"
"But you don't know where to find them! I do!" Chang sounded pretty frantic now. "I was scheduled to meet with them in an hour to pick up something that was vital to today's attack!"
"Really?" Sydney said honestly. "Then answer me this: How did a low-level hoodlum like you rub shoulders with a guy like Allan Milliken?"
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Xian demanded.
"Don't be fucking coy," Nadia said.
"I'm not. Allan Milliken has nothing to do with the virus."
"Things are starting to disintegrate," Wang said over the phone.
"From what I understand, the first two operations have been successes."
"Maybe, but I'm losing manpower right and left. I think we need to accelerate the timetable. Do you have what we need?"
Julia Milliken looked at the box in her car. "Yes," she said into her cell.
"My man will be at the rendezvous point in less than hour for the handoff."
"I'll be ready."
3:59:57/3:59:58/3:59:59/4:00:00