Chapter 11

Chapter 11

The Following Takes Place Between 4:00 P.M. and 5:00 P.M.

Jack Bauer walked down the hallway of the Presidential retreat the same way he walked down the hallways of CTU—long, brisk strides that informed people that he had someplace to go and that getting in his way would only result in being run over. "It's pretty clear that Leung only mission for Scarlet Circle was to get close enough to the Premier in order to dose him with the virus," Jack said into his cell phone. "Most of the names he's given me we already had in the file. He claims to have no idea where Wang is, and that he only met with Sark once, never while he was in the U.S."

"Do you believe him?" Tony asked, back at CTU.

'It's hard to tell," Jack said. "I think that's he holding out on us about something."

"Maybe he knows that we're not going to really give him a pass, and is trying to find a way to hold on to some bargaining strength," Tony pointed out. "Trying to find a way to keep from landing in the hands of his own government."

A beep on the cell signaled that someone was on the other line. "Hold on," Jack said. "Bauer."

"Jack, it's Nadia. We've got a major problem."

"I take it that you and Sydney tracked down Alicia Ro," Jack surmised.

"Her name isn't Ro, and she's currently the least of our problems." Nadia paused. "Can you contact Tony?"

"He's on the other line. I'll patch him through." Jack pushed the appropriate buttons. "Tony, I'm on the line with Nadia. I think there's been some kind of break."

"I don't know if that's the right word," Nadia told them. "Alicia Ro 's real name is Chang Xian. She's a mercenary hired by the people behind the development of the virus, and she claims her job was more extensive than just setting up an automobile crash to take out one of our agents. Part of her job was to help set up a paper trail, linking the virus to various companies run by Allan Milliken," Nadia stopped.

"Wait a minute," Jack said. "I've got videotape showing Milliken's driver giving a vial of the virus to Sheng Leung at the retreat. How is it that Milliken's not involved?"

"It's not Allan Milliken who did it," Nadia said. "According to Xian, the major force behind the virus manufacture was Julia Milliken"

There was a pause as both of the senior agents processed this. "Bullshit." Tony finally said. "Where would a trophy wife like Julia Milliken find the time to be a guiding force behind a conspiracy of this magnitude? How would she even hear of someone like Li Chen Wang?"

"Because she's not really Julia Milliken," Nadia told him. "Marshall finally managed to decode the data Jack and Sydney got out of Hobson Laboratories a few hours back. The data stream that they tried to delete was connected to Project Helix. Someone used that laboratory to change someone within the President's circle. Someone with the code name 'Moses'."

"And Moses was Julia Milliken's maiden name," Jack realized. He ground his teeth and spat out, "Damnit!

"Precisely." Nadia said grimly.

"Jesus Christ," Tony muttered. "Now I have to tell all my teams that they've been chasing the wrong trail for the past hour and a half. Has anyone been able to reach this fake Julia?"

"That's the next thing." Nadia said. "Xian claimed that she had a meeting scheduled with this Julia Milliken within the next hour, and that she would guarantee us a link with this woman in exchange for immunity from prosecution."

"Maybe there's another way to get to her without Xian's help," Jack said thoughtfully.

"I'm open to suggestions," Nadia said.

"Now that we have conclusive proof that a Milliken was involved in the production of the virus, we don't have to make any deals with Stephen Cairns," Jack told them as he began to walk to another section of the retreat. "I think it's time I gave Milliken's driver the full attention that he deserves."

4:05:15/4:05:16/4:05:17

Vaughn was even less satisfied with the interrogation of his prisoner than Jack had been with his. He had pushing Cairns pretty hard, even though he hadn't Jack's skills at this sort of thing. But Cairns was proving surprisingly resistant to a pretty hard questioning, particularly considering that Vaughn held most of the cards.

Suddenly Jack was in the room. "Steven Cairns, you're under arrest for perjury."

Cairns appeared a little vexed. "But I haven't lied to you about anything!"

"You've been lying to us since we began this interview," Jack said, as he got up in Cairns face. "Allan Milliken never instructed you to bring the virus on to the property. You got your orders from Milliken's wife. This entire incident wasn't just to get the virus to Sheng Leung, you were supposed to implicate your boss as well. How much did Julia give you to make this trip?"

Cairns now seemed positively shocked at what was going on. "How the fuck did you know that?" he sputtered

"Doesn't matter," Vaughn told him.. "You're involved in the murder of the Chinese Premier, which means you could be prosecuted by both their government and ours. If you're lucky, you'll only be thrown in an American prison for treason. If you're unlucky, which is more likely, China takes possession of you, and their system of justice is far less...pleasant than ours."

"This is bullshit!" Cairns yelled. "All Julia told me to do was to make sure somebody here got a hold of the package she gave me to deliver, and to make sure that to let it seem that my boss gave it to me.. She never said that anybody was going to die!"

"Your only chance is to give us everything you know about Julia Milliken right now, starting with where we can find her." Jack told him. "Otherwise, we have no problem throwing you to the Chinese and let them turn you inside out...slowly."

Cairns looked like he was going to piss himself with fear. "The lying bitch promised me ten million dollars for making this handoff," he stammered out. "After I made the drop, and Mr. Milliken was back at home, I was supposed to go to Vegas, out of the line of fire."

"Were you supposed to have any further contact with her?" Vaughn demanded.

"She said once I dropped the boss at home, she would give me a call from a specific place. If I missed the meeting-- which as of two hours ago, I have- -- I was supposed to be on the next plane out of town, and wait for her instructions."

"This was your only connect with Julia in the past few weeks?" Jack pressed.

"No. For the past several months, she's had me driving her to all kinds of locations late at night, and paying me double not to tell the boss. Lawyers, doctors, a couple of times she had me drive her to meet with Congressmen." Cairns sighed. "I've known this woman for seven years, and I gotta tell you, the past year or so, it's like she's been a whole different person."

"Turns out you were more right than you know." Vaughn mumbled. "Jack, a moment."

The two walked outside the room. "We're getting somewhere, at least," Jack told him.

"True," Vaughn countered. "But maybe we can find another way to get the information we need."

Jack whirled on him, and Vaughn had to restrain himself from raising a block. "I'm not making any deals."

"No need. We've access to two of the people who supposedly knew her best."

Jack got it, too. "Her husband and her lover...Wayne Palmer tipped us to the Milliken's in the first place. I doubt he'd lie to us about this now."

"He wouldn't lie," Vaughn agreed. "But he might have allowed himself to be misled. Maybe that's why the timing of this affair wasn't a coincidence."

4:10:55/4:10:56/4:10:57/4:10:58

Tony walked towards the conference room where he was about to connect Sydney with Wayne Palmer. "You sure you want to handle this?" he said into his cell

Sydney removed her hand from her temple. "Given my own problems, I'm probably the best qualified to talk him through his."

"You sure?"

Sydney raised a brow, and almost smiled as she stepped outside of Ro's home. "I was conned into SD6, my mother was an assassin, my father turned out to be a double agent, my SD-6 boss had a creepy thing for me as my boss at SD6, then as my enemy, then as my boss at APO, and then, again, as my enemy. This is of course, after discovering that my best friend had been killed and replaced but a double, whom I had to kill twice...oh, and my husband turned out to be lying to me about who he was for years, and only got around to telling me about a day before I found out I was pregnant. You want to tell me if I could be more sure?"

Tony smiled. "Gotcha." He stepped into the conference room, where the Congressman had been making some phone calls.

"...I'll get back to you," Wayne Palmer turned off his cell, and faced the CTU director. "I've just had a phone call with Mike Novick. He told me the horror that played out in Watts forty years ago is happening again."

Tony nodded. It had been the subject of a long conversation with a very pissed-off Alberta Green less than an hour ago. And talking with Green was the CTU equivalent of talking to the PC police. "I realize how bad the situation is, sir," he began, "but if we hadn't set up the quarantine--"

"Thousands of people might have died," the congressman finished. "I realize you were faced with an impossible choice. My brother understands it, and he's made it clear than he intends to give CTU full support for your decisions."

"That's very generous," Tony hesitated, "but it's not the reason that I'm here. One of our agents has uncovered information vital in stopping any further violence from breaking out, and she believes you may be the only one who can help us."

Tony turned on the speaker. "Agent Bristow, you're on the line with me and Congressman Palmer."

"I'll get right to the point," Sydney told him. 'The information that you gave us on Allan Milliken's involvement in the development of the virus was only partially correct."

Wayne blinked. "What are you talking about?"

"Sir, this will come as a considerable shock, but I can tell you with relative certainty that Julia Milliken helped the Defense Department develop the virus."

Sydney let this sink in, knowing what was going to come next.

"That's-- that's-- How can you be sure of this?" Wayne finally managed

"At this point, we have confirmation from two independent sources," Sydney told him patiently. "One of them is Steven Cairns, Allan Milliken's driver."

Wayne was positively stunned by what he'd heard. Unfortunately, things weren't going to get any easier for him to handle. "Why would she do something like this?" he asked, dazed.

"I'm afraid that things are worse than that," Now came the harder part. "Sir, how long has your personal relationship with Julia been going on?"

Wayne, still dazed, just said, "A little more than a year."

"Which of you initiated the affair?"

The Congressman blinked, shook his head to clear it, and nearly barked, "What does this have to with anything?

"I'm sorry to be so blunt, sir, but I have every reason to believe that this affair was engineered by Julia Milliken to gain information about the government and your brother's administration."

"You're saying that Julia was some kind of spy?"

"I'm saying that she hasn't been the Julia you've known for quite some time." Sydney paused. "Sir, when I was still a field agent with the CIA, I encountered a project known as Helix, a process to fundamentally alter a person's DNA, changing his or her physical appearance." Sydney paused. "We thought that we had destroyed all the research of Helix, but during the affair of Sayed Ali, we found out that terrorists have access to it."

"So what you're telling me is that the real Julia--" Wayne told her.

"Is dead," Sydney said bluntly.

"And there's this exact copy that's been in her place for maybe years."

"Congressman, I understand exactly what you're going through right now, the kind of betrayal and shock that you're feeling," Sydney said. "You've got a little longer to get used to the idea than I did, but you're going to have to deal with it just as fast."

"What are you asking?" Wayne Palmer said.

"This woman-- whoever has been pretending to be Julia Milliken-- is our best chance of getting to this virus before any more people die." Sydney was a little unsure about the next part, but decided to press anyway. "Now we can make some back-room deal, and have people who are responsible for what's already happened walk away from this, or we can get help from some other source." She paused, deliberately.

Wayne was not a Palmer for nothing. "You want me to contact this-- woman?" he paused deliberately.

"Sir, whoever this woman is, she's obviously been planning this for some time. We find her, I think the chances are very good that we'll get Li Chen Wang or Julian Sark," Sydney told the Congressman. "Now nothing this woman has done has been by chance, so if she told you about this virus, it's obvious that she has some secondary agenda, and it probably relates either to you or to your brother's administration."

"You don't need to give me the hard sell, Agent Bristow," Wayne Palmer sounded more in control of himself now. "These terrorists need to be stopped, and I'm one of the few chances we have of doing it. What do you want me to do?"

"One of the techs at CTU is going to modify your phone so that we can apply a trace to it." Tony told them. "If we're lucky that should be enough for us to find this person."

Sydney didn't add that whoever this woman was, she had obviously put a lot of forethought in to her movements, and that she probably wouldn't allow herself to be trapped that easily. Part of it was probably that he wanted to assuage Wayne Palmer that this would be simple.

The other part was to get him ready for more in case it wasn't.

4:17:34/4:17:35/4:17:36/4:17:37

"Kim!"

Kim Bauer whirled around to see Marshall approaching in his hyperactive matter. Only she knew her boss well enough to tell that his hyperactivity wasn't just nervousness. Something was scaring him. Hell, something had rammed the fear of God into him.

"What is it, Marshall?" Kim said in her most soothing voice.

"I need you to come over to my section for a minute." Marshall was trying to calm down, but was failing miserably. "I need another set of eyes."

"For what?"

"To make sure that I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing."

Kim walked over to Marshall's section of APO, and at the monitor where he had been, for the last three hours trying to salvage, then decrypt the files from Hobson Laboratories..

"I thought we'd already covered this," Kim said. "We know that Julia Milliken is being impersonated"

"Yeah, we just didn't know by who," Marshall went to his keyboard, and entered a series of commands. "I realize that this is a little above your pay grade, but I'm pretty sure you're smart enough that you can do the necessary math."

"What are you talking abo…" Kim trailed off, as the long lines of figures on the screen clarified to reveal one very clear conclusion. "Oh darn."

"Please tell me that I've made a miscalculation," Marshall still sound frantic.

Kim shook her head. "No, Marshall, as always, your math has been spot on."

"So we're saying…"

"You contact Sydney, I'll get in touch with my dad."

Nadia sat on the porch with Sydney. "Considering the deal's CTU make, you really think that Ro isn't worth it?"

Sydney shook her head. "Xian is too low on the totem pole, the same with Stephen Cairns." Sydney looked around. "We need big bait to draw this woman out of hiding, and Wayne Palmer is the only kind she'd surface for."

"I know, Sydney, that doesn't change the fact we're playing tag with the President's brother."

Before Sydney could respond to this, her cell rang. "Bristow.".

"Sydney, Marshall. Speaker...speaker phone,now!"

Sydney blinked. Marshall was actually insistent. Definitely not the time ask how Marshall had gotten a hold of her new phone numbers. "Done. What is it?"

"I worked out the equations that we got from Hobson Laboratories." Marshall said, with almost none of his usual gusto. "It's a lot of scientific equations, and you don't want to know the math, but I have figured out who is impersonating Julia Milliken... It's Anna Espinoza."

There were very few names to could cause Sydney's blood to simultaneously boil and run cold. Espinoza's was one of them. "You are absolutely positive?"

"I re-ran the figures, and I had Kim double-check them," Marshall assured her. "There is no doubt in my mind it is Anna Espinoza."

"But we had her in custody as recently as two years ago." Nadia argued. "I know, because I nearly got killed putting her there."

"I'm well aware of that," Marshall sounded more high-strung then ever. "I'm going to get in touch with Langley, see if I can get a straight answer."

"I take it you've already notified both of the Jacks we have working for us, " Sydney queried.

"I expect you'll be hearing from them soon enough."

4:20:07/4:20:08/4:20:09

Almost two years ago, after Jack had taken over APO from the late Arvin Sloane, he had to run an operation involving Julien Sark in an attempt to capture Anna Espinoza. He had mercifully limited contact with either one—he never met Espinoza, and Sark may have caught a glance at him.

Despite all of that, Jack had never gotten a complete history from Sydney on her struggles with Anna Espinoza, but the last time he had had enough trouble running her to ground and he didn't to want to repeat the experience. And losing Julien Sark was, for him, unacceptable. Not even Kim or Nadia had gone near him for the next week, except for an emergency. And even when that happened, they knew where they could find him—either in his office, chasing down leads, growling at Marshall for not finding Sark, or at the firing range, where he had fired off, conservatively, two thousand rounds.

As stood in his temporary office at the Presidential retreat, Jack listened to the insanity of Espinoza's continued freedom, and he was slowly starting to feel just as he had then.

"Let me get this straight," Jack spoke rhetorically to Dixon and Tony at CTU. "We put Anna Espinoza in prison nineteen months ago, she escapes from a sloppy goddamn prison transfer fifteen months ago, and we have to find out about it second –hand from a scientific laboratory, because the bureaucrats at Division didn't want it to get out that they had lost one of the most dangerous spies in a bureaucratic circle-jerk!"

"We can be pissed at the powers-that-be later," Dixon told him. "Right now, we have to deal with the fact Anna Espinoza has been impersonating Allan Milliken's wife for nearly a year. I can figure out why; what I don't know is for who."

Tony raised an eyebrow and looked at Dixon across the conference room table. "We already know who's behind today's attack."

Dixon shook his head and sat back in the chair. "You don't know Anna Espinoza like we do. She's a pure mercenary, but the majority of her missions have been against organizations like Scarlet Circle."

"Furthermore, Sark was the one who helped give her up," Jack told them. "If she ever saw him again, her first move would be to kill him, not partner with him."

Tony shook his head. "I'm well aware that this brings in an added complication to something that's already byzantine, but right now, we can't waste time on speculation. We need whoever's in control of this virus, and who's behind today's events. Right now that means we have to find Anna Espinoza."

"Well, I can tell you right now, trying to back-trace whatever phones she's using is going to be a waste of time," Dixon said. "She knows our protocols better than we do."

"What's Syd have to say about this?" Tony asked.

"She found out two minutes before I did," Jack told her. "Frankly, given the history the two of them have, I don't think she's going to be particularly clear-headed as to how to proceed."

"Excuse me, Tony." Everyone was a little surprised to see that Chloe had entered the room. "Did you want to see the progress reports on the operation involving the Congressman?"

Dixon's head whipped around towards the tech, and Tony blinked, his mouth agape. "Chloe, what are you talking about? Who said..." His eyes narrowed. "Sydney. What made you think that Agent Bristow had the authorization for something like this?"

Chloe's eyes narrowed into a squint. "Do I look like an idiot? I've been working with Sydney for the past year. I know the way that she can sometimes tweak authority so that she can get what she needs done. I also am not stupid enough to try this kind of maneuver with the President's brother, not if I wanted to keep my job. So I made sure to get approval from above her."

Dixon leaned forward in his chair, and gestured to the phone. "Sitting in this room are two of your immediate superiors. You're on speakerphone with the third. So who gave you the approval?"

"Jack Bristow," Chloe told them simply

There was dead silence in the room for a moment, when Jack said, "Don't make any calls. I want to have a discussion with the members of my unit.".

4:24:33/4:24:34/4:24:35

Once Bauer got Jack Bristow, he didn't say anything to him about how CTU found out, not even that they found out, only, "You're asking Wayne Palmer to try and go after a woman he trusted and cared about for the past year. What makes you think he'll be able to go through this without giving away the game?"

"Wayne has spent the part of his life showing a false face to the world as part of his job description," Mr. Bristow reminded Jack.

"Espinoza will be paranoid about any kind of meeting. She sees a security force, we won't even have a chance to grab her."

"Jack, we've done these kinds of operations a dozen times."

"That's not what concerns me," Bauer said. " Four years ago, I tried something very similar to what you're trying with Alexis Drazen. I severely underestimated the emotional makeup of the woman we used, and it was a fatal mistake. CTU had that hotel room surrounded and secure, and Elizabeth Nash still ended up killing him."

"You think that Wayne could take Anna?" Mr. Bristow said with a raised eyebrow.

"You know his file. Wayne was a Marine," Jack reminded him. "And the betrayal...we've both been there and gotten the t-shirt. You want to put someone with that much anger in the same room with the woman who deceived him?"

Even Sydney's father hesitated. "Agent Bauer, I'm sorry I went around you in getting this operation started , but you have to admit, it's the exact kind of mission you would argue for."

Bauer shook his head. "You're not listening. It's not about what I would do. Even if I give the okay, the second the President learns what we're planning, he'll leapfrog the entire chain of command to make sure that his brother is anywhere but near the line of fire. And you know someone in Division hierarchy is going to spill to him, when they learn about this."

"Try to keep it out of the chain of command for as long as possible," Mr. Bristow told him. "We can probably get this done in less than thirty minutes."

"All right. But get this straight," Jack said. "David Palmer is my friend. I've already had to tell him that his wife was killed under our watch. I'll be damned if I tell him he's lost any more of his family."

4:28:21/4:28:22/4:28:23/4:28:24

Sydney had directed Michelle-- the least experienced in field operations-- to maintain a guard over Alicia Ro until she was back in CTU custody, so that she and Nadia could get back into play by the time her father had helped get everything moving.

Sydney's phone rang again. Wearily, she picked it up. "Bristow."

"Bauer. Sydney, what the hell were you thinking going behind Tony's back?"

"All I was trying to do was avoid this argument," Syd said tiredly.

Jack did something that made Sydney take her eyes off the road and look at the phone—he laughed. "If you're worried about me, you'll be terrified when the President talks with you."

"I'm well aware of what I am asking Wayne Palmer to do," Sydney said.

"I'm sure you do. And setting up a meeting between the President's brother and a stone killer is the sort of thing I would do. But at least give me credit for at least giving notification before I abscond with him."

"I wanted to keep all of you isolated in case there was fallout."

Sydney could almost hear Bauer roll his eyes. "Since when have I given a damn about that?"

"Good point." Sydney asked. "I don't hear you berating my father for this."

"That's because I already had this conversation with him. I still need to teach him the finer points of stepping on the toes of upper management."

"So, what are you calling about if not that we're using Wayne as bait."

"Well, for one thing, to tell you not to use that 'bait' term when you're on the phone with the President. I'm sure that wouldn't ease his troubled mind about this operation. And be sure to tell Wayne what you're doing with small words...he was a marine after all."

Sydney almost smiled. "So was Tony."

"Yes, but he got smart and joined CTU. Wayne went into government." Click.

Sydney glanced at her sister. "When did you get him to lighten up?"

Nadia merely smiled and leaned back in her chair. Syd's phone rang again. "Bristow."

"I just want to be clear," Wayne Palmer asked, "when I ask," he hesitated deliberately, "this woman to meet with me, I'm going to need a pretty good reason for her to break whatever timetable she's now on to meet me.

"Stick as close to reality as possible," Sydney paused. "Tell her that the Secret Service has Allan Milliken in custody, and that they need her to come up with the evidence that she's collected in order to begin prosecuting him."

"She'll expect me to meet her at the retreat for that," Wayne pointed out.

"You can suggest it, but it's the last place that Anna wants to be. She'll ask for some kind of alternate meeting place. Get her to suggest some public place with enough of a time delay for us to get on site."

Sydney noticed Wayne's hesitation. "Congressman," she said. "am I asking too much of you?"

"You've been wasting a lot of time if you think I can't," Wayne countered.

"Officially, all I need to hear from you is that you can do this." Sydney paused. "But I had to go through scenario after scenario trying to convince a man I wanted dead that I was loyal to him. I'm not sure where I got the reserve to keep from killing Arvin Sloane everyday I went to work, and I was trained for it. You've had to deal with something as devastating in less than an hour. So I need to know, is this within your capabilities?"

Wayne hesitated again. "I'm a politician, Sydney," he told her. "My life is based on lying. It's also a field where sometimes you have to do what is hard for the greater good of the country. Now, I put this country in danger when I had an affair with this woman, and I need to do something to clean up the mess that I made."

What nobody knew was the nature of the mess the Congressman had made. Even he wouldn't have been sure of it unless he had seen was Anna Espinoza was doing right that instant.

"How long will it take you to modify the virus?" she demanded as she handed over the water glass that Wayne had sipped from when he'd met with her more than three hours ago to one of the Scarlet Circle people.

"Less than an hour," he told her. "Will you be in a position to use it then?"

"I don't see why not," Anna told him. "Even if they don't trust me anymore, we can still get close enough to get to the President."

4:34:19/4:34:20/4:34:21

Tony Almeida sat across from Wayne Palmer. "All right, you know what you have to say? Remember, you've never lied to someone who has lived her life being trained to avoid deception."

Wayne laughed as he took out his cell phone. "You clearly don't know how politics works. Are Jack and Agent Bristow patched in?" Tony nodded. "Then let's get this done."

He dialed. "Julia" picked up after one ring. "Who is this?"

"It's Wayne. I've been trying to reach you. Where have you been?"

"Like I said, I've been talking with my attorneys, "

"I have a feeling you won't have to worry about the pre-nup anymore," Wayne said calmly. "I've been talking with my brother. Allan's been arrested for this biological weapon."

There was a pause as Julia/Anna tried to measure her reaction. "You told the President?"

"Come on, Julia, you knew that I couldn't just sit on that information, especially with lives at stake."

"What are you talking about?" Anna demanded.

"You've about what's happening in Watts?" Wayne asked. "Now I don't have all the details, but David says that there's a strong possibility that this virus is connected to what's happening." He hesitated a moment. "He needs to know whatever information you have on the virus."

"The President wants to meet with me?" There was a slight lilt of surprise in Anna's voice.

"Yes, but he's too busy with the Chinese and what's happening over California. But he's given me the authority to act as his proxy."

"How… generous." Anna paused. "What does this have to do with Allan?"

"Julia, you have to know that this is bigger than your husband. Simon Grady's in custody, and he says he can link the virus to some very powerful people in DOD, and your husband, from what I've been told, isn't cooperating. If your husband won't give it to us, you're our only source."

There was a long pause on the other end. "All right, but neutral territory. I'm not going anywhere near any government facility. Redondo Beach. Just off Hawthorne Boulevard. I'm telling you now, I probably won't have anything definitive."

"That's my concern, not yours." Wayne terminated the call.

"Well, she bit." Sydney said, when she was sure the line was empty. "Now comes the hard part."

"Which, grabbing her or telling the President?" Jack asked.

"Either."

Wayne shook his head. "You guys have enough trouble. Let me deal with David. I'll talk to him on the way there."

Anna Espinoza hung up with Wayne Palmer and turned to the lab rats she was working with. "Change of plans. How long will it take for us to make the virus family-specific to Palmer?"

The scientist smiled. "Already there. It's the amount of DNA that we give it. For him it would take longer, but right now, we can kill him, his mother, brother, sister, everyone but his in-laws. Why?"

"Bottle a sample and get a team together. We're going to meet the President's brother."

4:41:08/4:41:09/4:41:10

Jack Bauer had been on the road the moment the name "Espinoza" had popped up, and was already on the road when Redondo Beach was chosen. He had merely taken a different exit, and had arrived within moments.

And he wasn't the only one.

He had chosen a perfectly good vantage point in a parking structure across from the target area.

And Sydney and Nadia were already there, and they seemed to have brought every field agent in the area.

Syd lowered the binoculars from her eyes, glanced at Jack, and said, "We borrowed some of the CTU people on the way from the hospital. You'd be surprised how many of them we left there since this morning."

Jack narrowed his eyes. "No, I wouldn't. May I ask—"

"Don't start," Nadia cut him off. She hadn't even moved her eyes from the high-powered binoculars she was using to view the park where the Congressman and Anna Espinoza were going to meeting. "We're not leaving."

Jack winced. He knew he would be walking on eggshells, but he didn't think he had a choice. "All due respect, when Anna nearly killed you, Syd went off the deep end. I was there, when she had to handle the missions with," he hesitated, "your father, and comparatively, she exercised a great deal of restraint. Going after Anna, we practically had to keep her on a leash to stop her from snapping the woman in two."

"Well, maybe, if you hadn't, we wouldn't be in this mess right now."

That was unusually brusque for the woman he loved. Jack only shook his head. "And you think I didn't want to give her the Nina Myers treatment?"

Nadia smiled. "I saw Anna briefly after I got out of the hospital. Are you sure you did not give her a preview?"

He smiled slightly...and then his phone rang. He grimaced. "Bauer," he said sorely.

"Jack, it's Curtis. Congressman Palmer's ready to go."

"Copy that, I'll make sure we're all set up on this end." He turned to Nadia. "Are the snipers in position?" he asked.

"Yeah, but given the layout of the place, we could only fit two in." Nadia must have known how indignant this would have made him, because she put her binoculars down. "Jack, we're right on top of the highway. The terrain couldn't get much flatter, which is probably one of the reasons that Anna wanted to meet her in the first place."

Jack would've asked Nadia why she thought Anna would be that suspicious, then realized if he were in her place, he'd be thinking along the same lines. "How secure is the location?" he asked Curtis instead.

"If we make it too secure, Espinoza's going to be pretty suspicious," Curtis told him.

This, too, was pretty obvious. Jack was liking this setup less and less, but he knew his orders. "All right, let's get this started, " he said into the cell. "Send the Congressman out."

He took out his binoculars and his walkie-talkie, and began to monitor the situation from a little more than two hundred feet away, hoping things would run smoothly long enough for them to prevail

4:45:06/4:45:07/4:45:08/4:45:09

In order to maintain the illusion of normalcy for as long as possible, CTU had prepped Congressman Palmer before he had even made the phone call. Wayne had then driven his car out to the promenade where he had agreed to meet Julia/Anna, parked and had gotten out, walking down Hawthorne Boulevard.

Despite the havoc that had already settled over LA in the past few hours, it was a nice day, and there were still a few people out, enjoying the late afternoon breeze. It was therefore easier to hide the two plainclothes CTU agents that were walking around the meeting area-- one sitting at a park bench , the other reading a book next to a wall.

"All agents, Wayne Palmer is in play," Jack whispered into his com. "Acknowledge positions." The agent at the bench took of his baseball cap, the one near the wall whistled quietly.

Belying its name, Redondo Beach was not entirely a recreational area. In fact, it was the site for some of the more active oil fields in LA. There were several derricks in operation, and several of the miners of shutting down the equipment for the day. Wayne walked past a couple of these fields towards the east side of the beach, looking around for the woman he was meeting.

A sky-blue Mercedes that was way above the pay grade of many politicians pulled up on the far west side of the area. Anna Espinoza got out of the car, still wearing the same pantsuit and sunglasses Wayne had seen her wearing a few hours ago. She might have looked exactly the same, but there was no way he could see her as the same woman.

"All units, target has arrived on scene," Jack Bauer whispered into his com to the agents on the ground, and the snipers, one of them hidden on a building, one concealed on a derrick two hundred yards away

Wayne walked over to her at a normal pace. "What the hell have you gotten me into?" he asked in a voice that usually rolled over opposition.

Anna did not appear the least bit fazed by this outburst. "How was I supposed to know that my husband was developing a weapon like this?" she asked reasonably.

"My brother is dealing with two major crises today because of this project!" the Congressman told Anna.

"He should know better than anyone how quickly racial violence can spread."

"It's worse than that." Wayne's voice dropped to whisper that the parabolic microphones barely heard. The Chinese Premier has been infected with the virus."

You had to hand it to Anna; she appeared to take this hard. "Seriously?" she said in a low whisper

"I don't know all the details, but they think he'll be dead before the day is over," Wayne said. "Unless we can convince the Chinese government that this was not a deliberate attack, they'll probably declare war on us in a matter of hours."

Anna looked so horror-struck that she had to brace herself on a nearby bench.

"Have you got a clear shot yet?" Jack whispered into the mike.

"Negative, she's too close to the Congressman."

Bauer had seen Anna up close and personal only once, and she had been so busy dealing with Syd that he'd only been able to make a few scattered observations about her reflexes and reaction time.

But there was something...

He refocused the binoculars closer on Anna's free hand—the one not bracing her on the bench. She wore a ring—which, in itself, wasn't unusual—but he could see the design. It was octagonal, and obviously edged.

And then he caught the glint of sunlight at just the right angle as she reached for Wayne Palmer's hand...

"Fire. I repeat, fire. Get Wayne Palmer's head down!"

He ripped the binoculars away from his face and growled, "She's trying to infect him with the virus!"

He pushed to his feet and broke out into a run, drawing his gun along the way.

The first burst of gunfire rang out, shattering the bench. Wayne threw himself to the ground in a roll, coming to his feet several feet away from Anna.

Espinoza, on the other hand, drew a Ruger and leapt behind the bench, firing as she jumped. Both plainclothes agents were dead on the ground.

"All units, converge on the target!" Jack cried out into his radio. "Espinoza has taken out our ground units!"

Anna's gun refocused itself on Wayne Palmer. The congressman managed to maintain a level tone. "Don't be an idiot," he said in a relatively calm tone. "CTU has you surrounded."

"I think I've proven how little your government frightens me." She cocked the hammer back. "Make any effort to run, you die."

Wayne slowly backed up. "No, you wanted to meet me here. I think you need me."

Anna smiled evilly. "Think what you like."

Another shot rang out, the sniper's bullet blasting apart the bench.

Jack burst out around the corner. "Anna! Give up! There's no where to go."

4:51:22/4:51:23/4:51:24

The moment Jack got into Anna's line of vision, she shot Wayne Palmer in the thigh. "Call off your snipers, Bauer!" she demanded. "I know they're out there, so don't try and bullshit me!"

"You must think I'm an idiot," he told her as he got stopped roughly ten feet away from Anna. "Without them, there's nothing to stop you from killing him and me."

Anna gave a shark-like smile "I could blow the Congressman's head off right now, and your orders would still be to arrest me," she argued. "See, I happen to know that what Wayne told me is absolutely true. You do need the people who created this situation. And I happen to be one of them. I die, you lose any chance of getting to my collaborators."

"We already know who they are," Jack said.

"But you don't know where they are, and I do," Anna reminded him. "That's why I acted out this whole charade ."

"If you knew it was a setup, why bother coming?" Jack said.

Anna smile flickered momentarily. "You thought you were so clever, putting on this little play," she said. "But did it ever occur to you that I might actually have wanted to see Wayne Palmer? That there's a reason I changed into Julia Milliken's body in the first place?"

An ugly picture was starting to form in Jack's mind. "This is bigger than the virus," he muttered.

Anna's smile regained it's intensity. "But that's all you get, unless you do exactly what I tell you to.."

"It is not the policy of the United States to negotiate with terrorists."

Jack had been so focused on Anna, he hadn't heard the speaker approaching; when he realized who it was, he realized there had been two reasons for that.

"And it is my policy to never negotiate with an asswipe like you," Sydney told Anna, as she came up from the far left.

If Anna was even slightly taken aback by the appearance of her nemesis, she gave no sign. "I was wondering why I hadn't seen you, Sydney," she said. "How's your sister?"

"I think we've had more than enough small talk," Sydney said as she raised her weapon. "You're pinned. Throw down your gun."

"Nothing's changed, Sydney," The calm in Anna's voice was becoming infuriating. "You still need me alive."

"You can't negotiate if you're a corpse," she argued.

While Sydney and Anna bandied threats, Jack looked at Anna's other hand. For some reason, she was holding an atomizer...what would she be doing with a spray bottle...

"Wayne, get out of here!"

Anna trained her gun on Wayne, putting the atomizer in front of the barrel of the gun—in the hope that the bullet would be covered in the virus especially designed to kill David Palmer's family.

Jack snapped off one bullet. It grazed the barrel of Anna's gun, doing no more than scratching the metal, but it was enough to knock the bullet's trajectory off-line of Wayne.

Anna deliberately spun in the direction of her gun, moving with the with the force of the bullet, and fired three times at Sydney, bolted to her immediate right, away from Sydney and the snipers.

Jack was on the radio immediately. "All units!" he shouted. "I need a position on Anna Espinoza now! And get me a Hazmat team, I need this area secured and Wayne Palmer tested for the virus." He ran to Wayne, grabbed him by the arm, and started moving him away from where the atomizer had broken open. "You okay, Congressman?" Jack asked .

"I'm okay," he muttered. "Get that bitch."

Anna couldn't go west, because only the Pacific lay in that direction, north was out because that would put her right into CTU's arms, and east only led to the highway, which was useless without her car.

So, for the moment, she had only one option left to her. The odds of Anna actually managing to escape on foot from several CTU vehicles seemed very remote, but Sydney knew her foe far too well to think that it would be impossible.

However, Anna had forgotten the other person from APO who wanted to see her dead, and nearly a minute after leaving the park, she literally ran into her.

Or to be more precise, when she literally ran into Nadia's pistol being slammed into her face.

Espinoza fell back, and the blinked, looking down the barrel of Nadia's Glock. "Don't you even apologize when you run into someone on the street?" Nadia asked Anna. "Otherwise that person can never give you a proper thank you for putting a bullet in their chest."

Anna smiled. She took a handkerchief and tapped her bleeding lip. "I'd love to stay and chat, but I've got pressing business elsewhere."

"Maybe you've forgotten how this works. You've put up a noble fight, but you're surrounded and outgunned. As we say in America, ballgame's over." Nadia got on the radio. "All units, target is down. Coordinates are--"

Anna tossed the handkerchief into the air, and it went up in a burst of flash-paper, the bright white magnesium light blinded Nadia. Santos still fired off three shots—

--but Anna had rolled away the moment she has thrown her distraction. She kicked up, flipping to her feet, and lunged forward, past Nadia's gun—

Nadia stopped...she had felt an impact, but she couldn't tell what..she couldn't even see yet. She suddenly found it hard to breathe. Her chest seized as she struggled to inhale.

The stars from in front of her eyes cleared...and she saw a knife sticking out of her chest.

Anna smiled, her eyes narrowed like a cat that had put one over on its owner. "I should've told you...I hate to leave a job unfinished."

Nadia's mouth opened, and she tried to speak. Her gun tumbled from her fingers. Her knees were about to give out...

Anna was about to step away, then paused, grabbed Nadia's fallen gun, then the knife in Nadia's chest. She twisted it, and yanked it out of Santos's chest.

"Waste not, want not."

Anna smiled, and ran off, as Nadia Santos fell to the ground, bubbles of blood already forming at her mouth.

4:59:57/4:59:58/4:59:59/5:00:00