Chapter 12
The Following Takes Place Between 5:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M.
Déjà vu all over again. Anna had been pinned down, then slipped through their fingers, and incapacitated Sydney's sister at the same time.
It was starting to feel like Sydney Bristow's life was trapped in reruns.
And once again using the traditional ice queen mentality that Sydney had always detested about the woman, she had done so in such a way as to guarantee that both she and Jack would have to slow their pursuits in order to do so.
"Fuck!!" Sydney shouted as she knelt in front of her sister, and tried to assess the damage that Anna had done. "Curtis! Get a medic to my coordinates, now!"
Sydney looked over her sister. Nadia was aspirating blood—little bubbles were forming at her mouth. There had been no major critical artery or vein hit, otherwise Sydney wouldn't be looking over a dying sister—only a dead one. Syd had medical training, and had been in enough situations to figure that the damage had been somewhere in her chest, but not through the heart.
"S-- Syd." Nadia was awfully pale, but was still conscious if only by the slimmest of margins.
"Sshhh," she told her sister, "don't try to talk."
"H-- how bad—is it--?" As always, the Derevko women were incredibly stubborn in taking orders.
"I don't know," she told Nadia. "She got you in one of the lungs, but otherwise—" She tore off a piece of Nadia's shirt, and started to make a tourniquet.
"I-- did it," Nadia whispered with a major effort. "I placed the tracker."
In the back of her mind where things were important, Sydney knew that this was absolutely vital to what they did next, but she was having a very hard time making herself care. "That's good, that's great Nadia, but you need to save your strength, you gotta wait for the medics to get to you."
By now the med unit had arrived, with Jack leading the group—Bauer burst out around the corner like a man at an Olympic sprint event.
In addition to the anguish and rage, Sydney could see some of the vestiges of shock—the sight of another woman he loved lying in a heap, blood rushing out of her chest...just like Teri after being murdered by Nina Myers nearly four years ago.
Bristow dismissed the shock. It would pass, and when it finally did, there would be no corner of the world where Anna Espinoza would hide. Jack would track her down, and rip her to pieces with his teeth, like a lion to a gazelle. This was, of course, assuming Sydney didn't get there ahead of him.
Nadia was ready for transport within seconds—the CTU med team had had more field experience than entire forward-deployed MASH units.
"How bad is it?' Jack asked one of the medics, in a voice that lacked much of the steadiness that he had gotten them through so many crises over the past couple of years.
"She only had time to get off one stab," the doc said grimly. "I don't think she hit a major organ or any arteries, but we need to get her to the nearest hospital now, before this gets any worse."
Fortunately, a CTU chopper had been used to get the Congressman and half of the tactical team here in order to beat Anna to Redondo Beach.
Curtis stood back until the medical team started moving away. He walked with them, looking from Jack to Syd and back again. "What are you and Jack gonna do?"
Sydney knew that protocol dictated she had to give some order as to how to handle Anna, but right now the threats of everything—the virus, the Premier dying, riots, possible war with China—all seemed relatively unimportant. The next person in the chain of command was Jack. And now Syd realized another heartless fact—one of them had to step up now or the situation would spin out of control.
And, typically, it was up to the man considered the most heartless to get back on track. "Congressman Palmer probably wasn't infected, but he'll have trouble walking."
"Good," came a weak voice from the stretcher. Nadia's eye were open, locked onto Jack like a limpet mine. "I'll...look after...him." She smiled. "After all...I am going to the hospital... An—Anna's always sl-sloppy when it comes to trying to k—kill me."
This actually got a smile out of him. He walked up to her and clasped her hand.
"Get her," she told him, speaking with a great deal more effort. "We must clean up this...You have to stop h—"
She trailed off, mid-sentence
"Okay, she's out of it," one of the medics, "We can transport her now."
"How long will it take you to get back to CTU?" Sydney asked.
"Less than ten minutes," Curtis told her.
"We'll get her," Jack whispered in Nadia's ear.
Jack turned and started striding towards the SUV, breezing past Bristow.
Sydney turned and started after him, pulling her cell phone and dialing APO.
"Sydney," Mr. Bristow's voice came through, crisp and clear and as businesslike as a CEO. "Anna is heading north down Hawthorne Boulevard," her father answered his in ever calm and controlled voice. "Given her current rate of speed, she must have a car. Marshall should have a location in two minutes." Sydney's father paused. "And remember, she has to stay alive until she leads us to Sark."
"Of course," Sydney said. "Killing her only ends the pain."
Mr. Bristow paused a moment. "Sydney, has it occurred to you that you might have been working with Jack Bauer for too long?"
"In this case, no."
"Sydney...just because it was your idea to have Nadia put the subcutaneous transmitter on Anna doesn't make it your fault."
"Then whose is it?"
"Sydney—"
"Make sure the teams that corner Anna are heavily armed. We're not doing the usual dance again."
"You won't be in pursuit?"
Sydney looked at her watch. "She has too great a lead on us right now. We'll head back in to CTU and coordinate from there...and I'll hold Bauer in check as long as I can."
5:09:48/5:09:49/5:09:50/5:09:51
It would have boded even worse for her if Jack and Sydney had known that a scant five minutes after stabbing her sister, Anna Espinoza had all but forgotten that she had done it. Her sole focus was getting as much distance from Redondo Beach as possible. In that time, she made it back to a stretch just off the main highway, jimmied the lock of a piece of crap Ford, hotwired it, and drove like hell towards the Pacific Coast Highway.
The second she was on the highway, she made the phone call that she'd been avoiding for the last hour.
"Yes," Julian Sark answered.
"We just got royally fucked," she told him without sugar coating. "My cover has just been blown, and judging from the way CTU tried to grab me, the President has to know by now."
Sark managed to keep a remarkably civil tongue when he heard that the plan he'd spent nearly two years on had collapsed in a matter of minutes. "I guess I owe you an apology," he told her in his usually sanguine tone.
"An apology!" Anna, however, was livid. "I've been completely compromised, just like I told you I was. We won't be able to complete the next phase of this operation, and I'm not going to have any measure of safety, now that Bauer and Bristow are wise to our operation, and all you can say is 'Sorry'?"
Sark's voice grew noticeably colder. "What's done is done. We've got other protocols in place, and I have a schedule that needs to be maintained, if we're going to complete the final phases."
"Oh, no," Anna's voice dropped several tones lower. "You are not leaving me to twist in the wind."
"I thought CTU was in the process of hunting you down like a dog," Sark said coolly.
"Listen to me, Sark, I do not fucking fall alone!" Anna vowed. "Bauer and Bristow may want me dead, but the rest of the government is still interested in what I know. And I'd be more than willing to turn in the man who's been making all the other frogs jump today!"
"You know as well as I do that's not the case."
"Doesn't look that way to them," Anna hissed with glee. "You know as well as I do that there's enough of a trail back to you now. And it would almost be worth ending up back in prison or dead, if before I did, I could see the lying white asshole finally reaping what he's sown." She gave a sour smile. "Like to see you rat your way out of that, boy!"
There was a long enough silence to make Anna wonder if she'd pushed Sark too far. But, as always, his desire for self-preservation overcame his annoyance. "What do you want?" he asked in a level.
"Safe passage out of the country via a method of my choosing," Anna told him. "Along with the last payment to be delivered to whatever offshore back accounts I choose when I get to safety."
"That's going to take some time."
"I'll be arriving at Torrance Municipal Airport within the next ten minutes," she told him brusquely. "If you don't have the process complete when I call you back, you will not live to regret it. "
5:14:05/5:14:06/5:14:07
Jack's continued quiet, as he got behind the wheel while she had contacted APO and got the information about where Anna was headed, was starting to alarm her.
Jack waited until they were securely on the road away from Redondo Beach when he finally spoke up. "Whose idea was it to place the transmitter on Anna?" he asked calmly enough. Unfortunately, Syd knew that type of calm. It was the same type of calm he used right before someone died.
"You have to understand, Jack, this was an emergency contingency," Syd began slowly.
"Considering our adversary, Plan B might as well be plan A. You knew better than anyone that Anna wouldn't make it easy, even if she believed Wayne in the first place."
Sydney decided not to argue the point. "I know her. Even with your methods, it would have taken hours to break her. Sark and Wang would have executed another attack by that time."
"So why bother?" Jack countered. "Using Palmer, teams—why waste our time?"
"Because Anna Espinoza is one of the cleverest operatives I know," Sydney reminded him. "Unless it looked and felt real, she would have suspected something."
"Was Nadia getting stabbed part of that strategy?" Jack's voice was getting lower. It was that tone that accompanied Nina Myers to Hell.
"Nadia and me both had transmitters on us," Sydney told him. "The plan was to disarm her, pat her down, plant the transmitter on her, and then lower our defenses for a few moments."
"And you didn't think that Anna wouldn't seize the opportunity to get it one good shot at either of you?"
Sydney shifted in her seat. She didn't like where this conversation was headed. "We were going to disarm her—"
Jack's eyes never left the road, but they blazed with sudden rage. "Bullshit!" he roared. "You strip Anna naked in the middle of a desert, she'd gouge your eyes out with her nails. Someone like her is never unarmed."
This was such a valid point, Sydney decided to ignore it. "What exactly is pissing you off more, Jack?" she said, changing tactics. "That Anna managed to get the drop on my sister, or that you didn't know anything about the real plan to begin with?"
"This is not about that!" Jack said angrily. "Had you let me in on it, I would have been able to improve on it...like putting Wayne Palmer up to the task of bugging her!"
Sydney blinked. She hadn't even considered that. "Wayne is a civilian, not an operative—"
"That didn't stop her from showing up."
"She didn't believe him."
"We didn't know that. If she had, he could have gotten close enough to her that he could have put the device on her himself. Or I could have. Or a dozen other things I could have thought of with a fifteen-minute warning instead of these ideas I'm pulling off the top of my head! You fucked up, Sydney. Get used to it."
Sydney winced inside. Jack had listened to her before on her constant guilt about when things went wrong. She always took it personally. Whether or not Jack was deliberately hitting that sore point didn't matter, he had a death grip on it like it was a pressure point. But, ironically, the more she dwelt on it, the more he had a point. She hadn't even considered telling Bauer for the simple reason that it was her and Nadia against Espinoza, always had been, always would be. The thought of someone else being involved, to interfere with her payback...
She simply stared at Jack for a moment, and it struck her that she had become a parody of Jack Bauer—personal payback over professional sense.
Only Jack knew better than to do this.
But my Jack...dad...approved it. It couldn't have been... Then it occurred to her that taking pointers from Jack Bristow about openness with her colleagues was sort of like Jack Bauer giving an ethics lecture about the treatment of prisoners.
Before she could dwell on it further, she got back on the radio with APO. "Marshall, you still getting a signal?"
"This is Kim," the young Bauer answered. "Marshall's stepped away a moment. But we repositioned the satellite monitoring Redondo Beach, and we have Espinoza. She's in a blue Ford sedan, currently heading southeast down the Pacific Coast Highway."
"What part of LA is she heading towards?" Jack asked, in a neutral voice.
"Half a mile away from the turnoff at Lomita, possibly to the Torrance Municipal Airport., but I doubt that's her final destination."
Sydney smiled to herself. "You sound unusually sure of yourself."
"If Anna has even half a brain, she'll be trying to get as much distance as she can between you and her. Torrance Municipal is strictly a private airport, mostly local flights. The next plane flying out of state only goes to Vegas, and that's not leaving for another hour. Considering the day she was planning for, she'd know the quickest way to get the hell out of the city. And I'm working on traffic cam pictures."
Jack nodded to himself. "Okay, Kim, that's a start."
"Dad...do we need Anna alive?"
Jack blinked, and glanced at the speaker phone. "Yes, Kim, why?"
There was a slight pause. When they first started dating, Kim had been, well, a typical teenager. She hadn't been thrilled, but she was understanding. While working at APO, she had become friends with Nadia. And now...
"Oh...because I just wanted to say... I want you to get her. And Marshall suggested that you just put a stake through her heart."
Jack blinked. "I intend to."
5:23:44/5:23:45/5:23:46/5:23:47
If Anna had belonged to a different culture of operative, considering her situation, she might have been expected to eat her gun. However, Anna was a mercenary in all aspects of her nature, and her next move was to try and negotiate for her life—a deal which, given the scope of her knowledge of terrorist activity, any President would be willing to sign off on.
But she also knew that Sydney Bristow was hunting her now, and that Sydney would sooner amputate one of her own arms, rather than allow any kind of negotiations with her—and that was before she had murdered her sister.
And then there was Jack Bauer...
Her only chance of survival was to get the fuck out of this parking lot, and if that meant killing all of the people who were now following her—well, she had managed far more complicated maneuvers.
Sydney and Jack were almost to CTU when the call came in. "We've got three dead, two more severely wounded," Tony Almeida said through the phone. "And we don't have Anna."
Jack furrowed his brow. "How did she manage that?"
"She turned the parking lot into a bomb site. She emptied her entire gun into the gas tanks of the cars around her, and then shot the pooling gas with the last bullet."
"What about the transmitter?" Bauer demanded.
"The explosion did something to the signal."
Jack ground his teeth, and slammed the steering wheel. "Damnit! You mean we've lost Espinoza, three agents are dead, and we're screwed!"
"Not yet."
Syd blinked, then leaned close to the speakerphone in the SUV. "We've got something? Is the tracer receiving again?"
"No. We found a small PDA. Anna escaped by jumping from the eastern face of the garage. But she didn't get away clean."
"You sure that it's hers?"
"I don't know who else would need a PDA that could survive a twenty-foot drop," Tony said. "Unfortunately, it's encrypted, but it's streaming to Marshall and Kim now, as well as us."
As if that was their cue, Jack's cell rang. "Bauer."
"It's Marshall. The last message on this PDA had nothing to do with the airport. She was trying to set up a contact with someone at the San Pedro Harbor."
Suddenly, things were making a bit more sense. "She never went there to get a plane," Sydney said. "She knows that every airport in California has her on the watch-list by now. But it's a hell of a lot easier to get past the harbor masters, especially if you know the right people."
"Which Anna apparently does," Marshall told them. "The contact number didn't register as an American land or cell line. Which its probably coming from one of the ships."
"Marshall, can you trace it back to its location?" Jack asked.
"San Pedro's part of Los Angeles Harbor," Marshall reminded them. "I'll need at least fifteen minutes before I can isolate the ship."
Even after all this time, it still amazed Sydney how often Marshall chastised himself for needing minutes to do what the best men in government needed hours for. "That's fine," Sydney said. "It'll give us enough time to assemble field teams and to notify Harbor patrol."
"I'll contact Division, make sure you have requisite manpower," Tony told them. "And don't tell me you're worried about spooking Anna. Right now, all the modest approach has done is get people killed."
Sydney expected Jack to object. Instead, he asked an important but not exactly pertinent question. "Tony, how's Nadia doing?" he asked.
"She's still under the knife," Tony told them. "Anna didn't hit any major arteries, but she got one of the lungs. The damage is serious, but not fatal."
Jack considered this for a moment. "Marshall, channel the rest of the data to the servers at CTU," he ordered. "There has to be something on it that'll get us a clue to the location of Wang or Sark."
"Jack," Tony said warningly.
"We're still going to try and take her alive," Jack told Tony. "But we need more options open to us, because I am not going to lose one more agent to that woman because we were treating her with kid gloves."
"So," Marshall said, his voice nervous, and as light as he could make it, "that means the gloves are off..."
5:32:44/5:32:45/5:32:46/5:32:47
If Anna had wanted to make the effort to find her contact at the harbor as close to impossible, she wouldn't have had to try that hard. The Port of Los Angeles, which included San Pedro, was one of the largest artificial harbors in the world. Hundreds of ships came in and out daily, and to try and isolate a single transmission source from it would have been nearly impossible for even the most brilliant of computer technicians.
And even though Marshall was one of a handful of people on the planet who could do it, he had to admit the process was giving him a pretty bad case of eyestrain.
"How many ships have we ruled out so far?" he asked Kim.
"About four hundred," Kim told him.
"Great," Marshall with a somewhat weaker show of his old enthusiasm. "Only six hundred and ninety four to go."
"Don't tell me that you're actually starting to flag," Kim said in mock amusement.
"Why, because I'm in the process of trying to find a needle in one pretty damn big haystack?" Marshall said. "And I don't even have a good solid electromagnet, which would do half the work for me."
"You're telling me that you're starting to complain about the quality of the tech you've got?" Kim asked, jestingly. "Unless I've been fatally misled, you designed ninety percent of it."
"I would think that would give me adequate cause," Marshall said. "Who better than me to know my own limitations?"
This kind of self-deprecation, even masked with Marshall's mocking tones, was really out of character for her boss. Kim knew him well enough to realize that he was worried about something else, and she thought she knew what it was. "Is this about Nadia?" she asked.
"What? N—no?" Marshall sounded a little offended at this. "She's Sydney's sister. Getting stabbed in the chest is just one of those things that make her deductible higher, and she's got the best health insurance plan in the country." He shook his head. "No, I just realized that the incubation time for the virus has just about reached its final stages. Which means that sometime in the next hour, the Chinese guy is going to die, and this will not only neutralize the treaty we signed, it'll mean that sometime soon, the free world's going to start lobbing nuclear warheads at each other."
Kim was used to her bosses discussing bleak scenarios in front of her; for Marshall to start doing it was really out of character for him, especially given his tendency to focus on his assignments rather than their consequences.
She decided to keep being honest. "Marshall, we've dealt with these nightmare scenarios before, and you've never been this upset."
"Yeah, when the situation's in your father's or Sydney's hands, I got no worries," Marshall told her. "Saving the world is right up their alley. But right now if I don't locate Anna Espinoza in, say, the next ten minutes, there's a good chance that she'll make a clean escape. And if you believe in chaos theory and the butterfly effect, as I do—a" Marshall was probably one of the few people on the earth who studied particle physics for laughs— "we'll be declaring war in about two hours, which will probably result in nuclear war, which leads to the eventual destruction of all life on the planet."
Kim wasn't sure which she was finding more discomfiting, the fact that Marshall was discussing the consequences of their failure, or that he was doing so in such a detached, almost cavalier, and very un-Marshall like attitude. She was saved further comment when at that moment Marshall's computer gave a chirp that Kim had once heard on an old rerun of Star Trek. "I think we've got it," she said calmly.
Marshall blinked. "Well, you know what they say, five hundred and ninety-fourth one's the charm."
With that, he speed-dialed Sydney and Jack.
"Bristow. Tell me you have something Marshall."
"The call originated from the Pushkin, a forty-five ton vessel originating from the Baltic Sea three days ago, charted to leave for Port-au-Prince at 7:15 tonight," Marshall read off the monitor. "It's bearing Ukrainian flags and is in the process of loading cargo as we speak. Loading Dock H15 on the easternmost end of the Harbor."
"All right, we'll notify our field teams, while you contact the harbor master." Sydney paused, then added, "Make it absolutely clear that everything has to appear SOP until we have a confirmed location on Anna. She's already hip to the last two plans. She sees a hair out of place on a customs official, she'll make a mess."
"Got it," Marshall said as he hung up. "Kim, get in touch with Customs and the harbor master."
As Kim began to work, she noticed that Marshall looked a lot more relaxed. "You okay?"
"Sure," Marshall shrugged. "Now, all Syd and your father have to do is corner and trap a dangerous assassin."
Even after working for him for nearly two years, Kim still had trouble gauging Marshall's reactions. "And that's not difficult enough?" she asked calmly
"Hey, for those two it's a walk in the park." Marshall hesitated. "Maybe that's a poor choice of words, considering the last assignment was an actual walk in the park, and that sort of boomeranged, but still—"
"You consider the possibility that Anna's not there yet?' Kim asked. "She gets there and finds the harbor sealed off, she might turn and run."
"Anna didn't call that number at random," Marshall pointed out. "She wants something very specific on that ship, and she's going to make every effort to get there. When she sticks out her head, they'll hit her like a giant Whack-A-Mole."
"You really are stretching your metaphors today," Kim pointed out.
"My phraseology isn't at issue," Marshall reminded her. "Catching this bitch is."
5:41:11/5:41:12/5:41:13
Marshall might not have been so blasé about APO's chances of apprehending Anna if he had known how aggressive the mercenary had been in getting to the harbor.. In comparison with her method of getting to Torrance Airport, Anna had been positively subtle.
First, she had run down to a cross section of the highway until she reached an intersection with a traffic light. The second that a car with no passengers stopped, she had shot the driver from twenty feet away. She then went to the car, yanked the door open, pulled the driver from his vehicle and gotten in.
She then made two calls, deliberately saving the more important one for now.
"What the fuck have you been doing?" Sark actually sounded a little cheesed, which Anna knew from past experience meant he was really pissed. "Are you trying to get caught?"
"My sole interest, which I know is also high on your list of priorities, is survival," Anna reminded him. "I had to get CTU off my tail long enough to ensure that."
"And causing a major disturbance at a crowded airport ensures they'll be off you?" Sark said disbelieving.
"It'll kept them busy long enough to allow me to conduct another bit of business," Anna told him. "Life insurance, to be blunt."
"What are you talking about?" Sark asked neutrally.
"You think I'm a fool? You'd have one of your goons kill me the second I got to the harbor, if I didn't have something to guarantee you serious damage if something should happen to me."
Now there was a deliberate hesitation on Sark's part. "So you have the package after all," he finally said.
"Correction, I had it. You don't learn where it is until I am safely out of the country," Anna told him calmly. "The second that I'm in international waters, you'll get a call telling you its location."
"The item only hurts me if it gets into the wrong hands," Sark pointed out coolly.
"Which is why you're the second person I've told this to," Anna countered cagily.
"So you've already called—"
"That's why I liked you, Julian," Anna told him. "Never had to draw you a map. Which means I also don't have to remind you how incredibly fucked you'll be if this person gets a hold of the package before you do."
Anna took a moment to appreciate the corner she had backed her erstwhile ally into.
"There's a possibility that they'll betray you too," Sark reminded her.
"Yes, but at the moment I've more faith in them than I do in you," Anna's voice turned colder. "Besides, you're the one who has the opportunity to betray me first. I have to worry about you before I can about them. I'll be at the location in ten minutes, which gives you just enough time to call off your dogs."
Sark was silent long enough for Anna to wonder if she'd overplayed her hand.. Instead, he gave a dry chuckle. "Care to share the joke?" she asked.
"You've put me in the position of having to root for CTU over my own interests," he told her bluntly. "Don't worry, you'll get no opposition from me. But you'd better hope that you've done a good job shaking the government's tail. Because if you haven't—" He trailed off. "Well, I don't have to finish that sentence, do I?"
This time, he was the one to terminate the call.
5:48:26/5:48:27/5:48:28/5:48:29
Sydney and Jack had almost reached San Pedro Harbor before Marshall had told them that the last text Anna had received had come from the Pushkin, along with the dock it was scheduled to set sail from in less than an hour. Learning this, Jack called both Tony and Sydney's father to help coordinate with the various federal officials and the harbor masters.
Sydney, in the meantime, was trying to get as much intel as she could from Marshall. "Have you any luck isolating the phone that made the call?" she asked.
"If the call had been made from a personal phone, I might have," Marshall told her apologetically, "but this call was made from a ship-to-shore line. Could have been anyone of the crew of the boat."
"You get anything off the ship's manifest?" Sydney countered.
"I tasked that to Kim," he told her. "She said she'd let me know if there were any possibles, but given Anna's connections with the former Soviet Union, it could be anyone on that ship…"
Sydney got out of the car and began walking over to the section of the harbor where the feds were setting up. "Do we have satellite covering the dock?' she asked.
"I lined up the satellites the second we got a location," he told her proudly. "We have total coverage of the eastern end of the harbor. Second she pokes out her head, you'll know it. I mean, if you don't spot her first."
"Marshall, " Sydney said with rare candor, "all the trouble that Anna has put this agency through in the last couple of hours alone, it might be better for the mission's sake if someone else does us that honor."
"You could also argue that considering the effort it's taken to find her, it's not in your best interest to just plug her the second she shows up."
"A valid point," Sydney admitted. "You wouldn't mind telling that to Jack?"
"They don't pay me enough for that," Marshall paused. "Then again, considering the long hours and efforts I put in, especially on days like today, they probably don't pay me enough, period. And there's no time and a half for helping save the world, is there?"
"If there was, I could've retired years ago," Sydney told him ruefully. "I'll get back to you when I'm in position."
She hung up, and walked over to Curtis, who had flown back from CTU after dropping Nadia at the medical unit. "Well, here we go again."
"The teams all know who we're looking for," Curtis told her. "I guess the question is, how badly do we still need her alive?"
"We need this woman's contacts and any intel we can get out of her," Sydney reminded them. "The answer to your question is: alive, yes; but bloody will suffice."
She got on the radio. "Jack, our teams have moved into position," she told him. "You?"
"All set over here," he told her simply. "How long after confirmation do we wait before grabbing her up?"
"Just until we see who she's meeting with," Sydney said. "I doubt she's meeting Sark or Wang here, but maybe we'll run into someone a little higher than her on the totem pole."
There was a pause before Jack spoke. "So now we wait."
Fortunately, they didn't have to for long.
5:52:47/5:52:48/5:52:49
The set up at the harbor was a little to much like the one at Redondo Beach an hour ago—the harbor had not been blockaded in order to keep Anna from being suspicious. Granted, there were twice as many armed agents hidden in the shadows, but given how easily Anna had managed to out maneuver them an hour ago, Jack was not exactly holding his breath on their success this time.
He continued to think this when, once again, he spotted Anna approaching from the southernmost side of the dock. "All units, I have a visual on the target," he said into his radio.
"Copy that," Curtis asked. "How long until she's in the zone?"
"Less than a minute," Jack told them.
The Pushkin was an unimpressive vessel—dull gray, less than a hundred meters across from fore to aft, and less than eighty crew. The only reason that Anna would voluntarily get a boat this undistinguished was because it was mundane enough to sail under the radar, as it were. Several bulky looking men were in the process of loading the ship, but only one of them paid any attention to the striking black woman who was nonchalantly approaching the ship. Slowly, he moved from the loading until he was closer to her.
"I think we got something," Sydney told me. "Jack, he's closer to you. Do you have a visual on the man with Espinoza?"
"Roger that," Jack said. "I'm sending the photo to APO for ID."
Anna looked around several times before finally walking up to the loading dock. The dockworker that had approached her only did so twice before approaching her. They exchanged a few words before she began following him.
"Every way in or out of this section is covered?" Jack demanded.
"Yeah."
"Grab her," Jack went for one of the radio. "All units, move in now!"
The man assisting Anna was clearly a novice as this kind of espionage—the moment he heard the sirens start blaring, he looked around, like a fourteen-year old who's been caught jacking off to his Dad's Playboys. Jack had just enough time to wonder why Anna was dealing with such an amateur before Anna pulled a knife and slit his throat. Before he had hit the floor, Anna pulled the gun and started shooting.
How many weapons does this woman travel with? Sydney thought, as she trained her weapon on Anna, approaching from the east
"Give it up!" she yelled, as Jack approached from the west. "Trust me when I tell you that you don't have nearly enough bullets to take out our teams!"
Anna's reaction to this was to begin running to the end of the docks, shooting back at both teams the whole way.
Sydney had no idea what her exit strategy was—swimming to China, maybe—but not even that angle was going to work this time. For a click, she considered just waiting, but she had to much personal animus towards the woman to let this happen
Anna ran like the wind, but by the time she was nearly thirty meters away, a police boat pulled up with sirens blaring.
"This is the U.S. Coast Guard!" the loudspeaker blared. "Drop your weapon or we will open fire!"
Considering she was now boxed in, Anna's reaction was even odder. She began to laugh.
"Mind telling us what's so goddamn funny?" Sydney said as she ran up to her, Jack a few steps behind her.
Anna's reaction was to throw her weapon off the pier, and put her hands above her head.
"I want it noted," she said calmly, "before I am gutshot by this bitch, that I'm surrendering in front of both civilians and law enforcement." She looked around, almost amused. "Fire when ready.."
"You kidding?" Sydney told her as she walked up to her. "You're not getting off that easy. Not today."
Anna considered this. "By the way, how's your sister?" she asked almost casually.
Anna clearly thought this would provoke a reaction. It did, but not the one she'd hoped for: Sydney stopped, shrugged, and took Anna by the shoulders—and hit her with a vicious head butt.
"She'll be fine," Sydney muttered as Anna crumpled to the deck. "A lot better than you're about to be."
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