Chapter 14

Chapter 14

The Following Takes Place Between 7:00 P.M. and 8:00 P.M.

The sun was just starting to descend below the horizon as CTU officials began their search of Faraday Laboratories which, compared to the one Jack had searched less than seven hours ago, was a much smaller building, roughly the size of an ostentatious Beverly Hills loft.

"Sweep the place from top to bottom," Jack said over the walkie-talkie. "Go through the place with a fine tooth comb."

"Not all of our teams are equipped with the biological masks," Curtis told Jack.

"We don't need everybody searching," Jack reminded him. "Besides, given the nature of this virus, the chances of exposure being fatal are relatively slim."

He got back on his walkie-talkie. "Is the prisoner ready for interrogation?" he asked.

"We're ready to proceed," came the response.

Jack had started walking when his cell rang. "Bauer," he said.

"It's Jack Bristow. I understand that you've managed to seize Li Chen Wang." Mr. Bristow's tone sounded businesslike and casual, as though Jack had done nothing more than prepare a business brief for a board meeting.

"That's right; I'm about to begin interrogation."

"I'm going to have to ask you hold off on that."

Normally, with any other person, Jack would be wary about his hearing, and ask for confirmation. But this was Jack Bristow...possibly one of the few people who didn't give a damn about what Bauer thought...mainly because he thought that he always knew better. . "Why should I?"

"We're going to have to been him in holding until the Chinese government can take possession of him."

"The Chinese have every right to demand custody, but he's involved in a conspiracy far more wide-reaching than Scarlet Circle. Right now, we need to find out where to find Sark and whoever else Wang planed this with."

There was a pause on the other end. "Jack, the Premier's dead," Mr. Bristow told him. "Right now the remnants of En Lai's government are demanding blood. They've made it very clear that unless the people responsible are handing over to them within the next eight hours, they will have no choice but to declare war."

"Don't you think I know that?"

"Did you also know that they intend to go before the U.N. before this night is over, and present a demarche to America, demanding international support for this?"

Mr. Bristow told him. "Or that a goodly amount of the international community is willing to give them support for taking that action?"

Even though Jack had suspected that something like this would happen, to hear it voiced gave it solidity. "I didn't think it would go through that quickly," he admitted.

"The President is beginning to feel that desperate measures need to be taken," Sydney's father told him. "So much so that he was willing to offer Anna Espinoza immunity in order to obtain her fellow conspirators."

Despite everything else that was going on, Jack couldn't help feeling betrayed by the President. "So what are you telling me, that it's Anna or Wang?"

"Right now, the Chinese don't consider Anna high enough on the totem pole take her in trade," Mr. Bristow said bluntly.

Jack was now beginning to realize that he, like the President, was faced with a Hobson's choice-- only the end results were fighting on a global scale. He thought, however, there might be a way to have his cake, and eat it too.

"Send a message to the President," Jack told him. "Tell them that we will hand over Wang to his government within the hour. We are relatively certain that he will be able to lead us to his co-conspirators by the end of that time."

"You're going to be pissing off a lot of people in both governments if you get him too badly hurt," Mr. Bristow reminded him.

Jack smiled tightly. "Given what the Chinese will do to him, I somehow doubt that they'll give me much trouble."

There was a pause. "Before you get invested in this, I'd contact Sydney. I think she found what you were looking for at the airport."

7:06:53/7:06:54/7:06:55

When Sydney and Jack had taken out Elena Derveko and Arvin Sloane more than a year ago, Sydney had hoped that she would never have to hear the name Milo Rimbaldi again.

"Aw man," Marshall said, "I thought we had cut the head off of this vampire for once."

Sydney smiled wryly. "Aren't you always the one telling me that they always come back?"

"Do you have any idea what we're looking at?" Marshall asked over the cell.

"I was hoping you would know," Sydney asked. "Tell me you've got some kind of Rosetta Stone for this."

Marshall considered this. "I'll check, um, Mr. Sloane's old files. I'm pretty sure that he had at some copies of his studies on some old files that I, uh, wasn't supposed to know about."

"Good man." Sydney's phone beeped . "Hang on, there's someone on the other line." She punched a button. "This is Sydney."

"Sydney, it's Jack. What did you find?"

"You're gonna like this even less than I do," Sydney told Jack grimly. "The locker the key opened led to a computer disk. On this disk were several files, and the first one I opened led to something that has made this entire day a lot more complicated."

There was a pause. "Please tell me you're not saying what I think you're saying," Jack said grimly

"Someone very carefully scanned several pages of a document onto this disk. I'm still waiting on the translations, but after all this time, I know Milo Rimbaldi when I see it."

Even after all this time, Rimbaldi was still a sore subject for Jack. While he was a superb agent and a great leader, he was, at his most fundamental level, a realist. Fifteenth-century inventions that made present technology look prehistoric, and creations that could lead to apocalyptic scenarios were things that were very beyond the scope of what he was trained to deal with. In their time working on APO together, particularly in the final hunt for Arvin Sloane, Jack had only been able to lead the hunt by converting his search to the most narrow of levels: seek, capture, destroy. Beyond that, he admitted he wasn't equipped to handle this part of the job, and he was less equipped to accept Sydney and Nadia's bizarre role in the prophecies that they had discovered.

Even the first time that Jack had been introduced to the Helix project, the most normal of her little world, he had first asked what kind of people she dealt with, and promptly dubbed it an "evil twin program." And, after a device to turn people into zombies, another one to make them spontaneously combust, Jack asked, "Tell me why he hadn't been set on fire sooner?"

Now, Jack took a slow, deep breath and asked, 'What exactly are you looking at?"

"So far I've got a series of pictures of what I'm pretty sure are Rimbaldi devices, and underneath that is a long line of script."

"You can't read it?" Jack asked. "I thought by now you understood a goodly portion of this kind of text."

"I can," Sydney admitted, "which is why I'm really baffled. At this point, I could probably translate at least a line or two of this, but so far all I can make out is gibberish, and I think it's gibberish in any language."

There were a lot of things bothering Jack right now, so he tried and focused on the most relevant. "Has there been any evidence that the virus we've been spending the day dealing with has some kind of Rimbaldi wrinkle that we weren't aware of?"

"I'm not sure," Sydney told Jack. "These kind of genetic virus is cutting edge for this century, and nothing that we've discovered involving Rimbaldi either working against Sloane or with the Special Projects had anything on this level."

"Yeah, but you can say that about a lot of things Rimbaldi designed," Jack reminded her. "I've got a better question: we dismantled both of the major organizations that dealt with Rimbaldi, and killed most of the people who dealt in his artifacts. How is it that this is resurfacing nearly a year later, and what the hell does it have to do with the Chinese?"

Sydney considered this. "Sark's gotta be the link," she reasoned out. "He's the only player in any of this who has experience dealing with Rimbaldi artifacts."

"Yes, but we already agreed that Sark wasn't the ultimate man behind the curtain," Jack said slowly.

"Which means there's a bigger fish out there that has ties to this," Sydney said.

They both had a long moment of silence. The list of people who were experts in Rimbaldi had grown increasingly short. And since Bauer had thrown Arvin Sloane off a building in Russia, and Jack Bristow had blown Elena Derevko's brains out of her head, and if Sark wasn't the puppet master, the short list still had a Derevko on it.

"Look, I realize this is obviously a major development," Jack said, "but we have to make this information a secondary protocol."

Sydney knew as well as Jack if Rimbaldi was involved, there were no bigger problems. Then she remembered the situation, and thought he might have a point. "Did you have any luck at the lab?' she asked.

"Li Chen Wang is in custody," Jack told her. "However, as is typical of days like today, this doesn't improve our situation that much. The Chinese are in the process of putting the President's feet to the fire. If we don't turn Wang over to the Chinese government in the next two hours, we'll probably be involved in World War III not that long after."

This led to another crossed wire in Sydney's head-- a relevant one. "Would you say that someone's in the process of leading the world to utter devastation?" she asked rhetorically.

Jack considered this. "You're not going to tell me that Rimbaldi is prophesizing this war?" he countered. "Because if I bring this to the President now, he'll be inclined to dismiss us as lunatics, despite everything we've accomplished today."

Sydney tried to think about whether or not President Palmer knew the full scope of the problems with Rimbaldi. But Director Chase could certainly explain it to him if it came down to that. "What are you thinking?"

"Have Marshall go through this file as thoroughly as he can," he told her. "I don't believe for a second Rimbaldi is the only thing on it. Somewhere there's a clue as to whose hands the file was destined for. It clearly wasn't Sark, so we need to find out who, and we need to find out fast."

"What are you going to do?" Sydney asked.

"I promised that I would hand Wang over to them within the hour," Jack said grimly. "I intend to extract all the information that I can learn about his co-conspirators, particularly Julian Sark."

"In that case, I think you'd better hang up and get to work," Sydney replied grimly. "We're closing in on a nuclear showdown, and right now, your lead has a hell of a lot better chance of stopping it than mine does.."

"You say that now," Jack added, "but I have a sinking feeling that we're going to need both of them before too long."

And Sydney had a feeling that they were both right.

7:18:25/7:18:26/7:18:27/7:18:28

In the trickle down fashion that was typical of how events on days like today were funneled through APO, Vaughn learned about what was happening with Sydney from Mr. Bristow when he walked in the door of APO. He wasn't nearly as upset about as Jack Bauer had been, but that was because his experience with Rimbaldi was far different and more widespread. Furthermore, given the tendency of Rimbaldi's prophecies to focus on Sydney and her family, he was more agitated about this then a lot of other people in the government.

"Has Marshall managed to make any progress decoding the file?' he asked as he walked into the computer lab.

"He's been assembling a database based on every bit of Rimbaldi paraphernalia that Sloane managed to assemble over the past thirty years," Mr. Bristow told him. "He's also had to pull the data from Special Projects, our files on the Covenant, anything that we found that might be relevant."

"I think I have something," Marshall piped up at that instant. Vaughn and Sydney's father gathered around him. "Now I'd just like to emphasize that even though I may have converted some of the raw data, I have only the vaguest idea—"

"At this point, we'll take whatever we can get," Vaughn said.

"What I've gotten out of the first few pages appears to be a listing of events," Marshall told them. "As we know with a lot of Rimbaldi documents, that in itself isn't anything new. However, what's different is that this list doesn't seem to be part of a prophecy."

"What are you talking about?" Mr. Bristow asked.

"Short answer, in the prophecies there was a portmanteau from Latin and English that amounted to 'it is ordained'. That phrase is in none of the lists," Marshall paused. "What I am seeing over and over is another phrase that amounts to 'if you can produce'".

"How is this significant?" Vaughn asked.

"The list of events is essentially everything that has happened today.," Marshall said simply. "The attack on the hospital, the Premier being killed, the riots in LA, the escalation towards war. In every case, all of them seem to lead to something bigger."

Kim, who had been quiet up until now, piped up. "So what you're telling us is that this isn't a foretelling so much as some kind of formula," she said. "But what happens if all these events are accomplished?"

Jack Bristow shot Kim Bauer a glance that made it clear he was surprised that Kim had managed to translate Marshall.

She replied with a dead plan look. "Just because I'm blond doesn't mean I'm stupid."

Now Marshall looked puzzled. "But that's just it," he said. "So far all I've been able to translate is more of this ultimate destruction talk that we've seen in almost every other prophecy. And if all this says is that nuclear war brings ultimate destruction, then this is the first time Rimbaldi hasn't seemed, you know, that awesome."

"There has to be more to it than that," Mr. Bristow said thoughtfully. "How much of the document remains encrypted?"

"A hit more than seventy percent," Marshall told them. "And before people start getting on me to do it faster, I don't think I can."

"Why?"

"These documents don't appear to all be from the same source," he told them. "Each of them seem to be translated to a different dialect. I can get bits and pieces from each page, but unless we can get some kind of universal translator, it's going to take a long time to make English out of this."

Just then, one of the phones near Marshall rang. Vaughn picked it up. "APO, Vaughn."

"It's Sydney," For the first time all day, Sydney was starting to sound a little rattled. "We've got another problem."

"If you're talking about the translation, we're well aware of the obstacles," Vaughn said.

"This is worse than a Rimbaldi prophecy,"

Something in his wife's tone worried Vaughn. "I'm going to put you on speaker. " As he did so, he asked again. "What did you find?"

"Hidden in all the Rimbaldi text was a smaller data file," Sydney said slowly. "Simple enough that I could isolate it myself. When I did I found a time and a location." Sydney paused. " 208 Willett Grove, before 8 PM."

"That's our address," Vaughn said numbly.

"They're after our daughter," Sydney said. "I don't know who or why, but they want Isabelle"

Vaughn felt a sudden surge of panic rise in his stomach. He desperately shifted his focus to action. "How long would it take you to get back there?" he asked.

"I'm thirty minutes away," Sydney told them. "Someone has to call CTU and LAPD, but if these people are involved with Rimbaldi, there's a very good chance they could be more determined than anyone else we've dealt with today. 'Cause right now, APO is a hell of a lot closer than I am."

"I'll get out there right now," Vaughn told them. "I'll contact Jack, and--"

"No!" Sydney almost shouted. "Jack is right in the middle of breaking Wang. He's also got his attention split worrying about Nadia; he can't be anymore distracted. We tell him when we're about to make a grab."

"You sure?' her father asked.

"We can't spread ourselves any thinner than we already are," she said grimly. "And Wang needs to be broken."

7:26:48/7:26:49/7:26:50

Sydney might have felt differently about telling Jack about what was going on, if she'd known how the interrogation of Wang was going..

He had decided that the best approach on the Scarlet Circle leader would be chemical, specifically the hyoscine-pentothal combination that had worked so well so quickly earlier in the day. He wasn't going to bullshit around either; Wang was getting the full dosage.

The problem was, Wang was made of sterner stuff. Two minutes ago, they had crossed the six cc barrier that was considered safe, and the terrorist hadn't said so much as boo. For that matter, based on the size of his body, Wang should have been in a barbiturate coma. He wasn't even close to unconscious.

"Wasting your time, little man," he said in an almost carefree whisper. "I'm not going to tell you shit!"

"You'll talk," Jack said with a confidence he didn't feel, "or I'll snuff you out myself."

"Better men have tried to break me," Wang said. "And you don't have the power to kill me, even if you wanted too."

There was some kind of self-assuredness in Wang's tone that Jack didn't like. "Hit him with another dose," he ordered Curtis.

"Jack, his stats are borderline," Curtis said. "Another two cc's and you'll probably kill him."

"If that's the case, how come he's still speaking to us?" Jack countered.

Curtis shook his head. "This prisoner is too important for us to fuck around with," he reminded him.

Jack was taking out another syringe and preparing to dose Wang himself, when this really registered. "Which stats are borderline?' he demanded. "If his blood pressure and pain receptors were really at the same levels we saw earlier, he shouldn't be able to so much as whisper, much less play these games."

"What do you want from me?' Curtis asked. "I'm not a doctor; I'm just telling you what the monitor's reading."

Jack looked at the monitors, which were indeed telling him that Wang should be on the verge of death.

"How are you doing this?' he demanded of Wang, not expecting an answer.

He was surprised when he got one -- of a sort. "I've been touched by God," Wang replied in a perfectly reasonable tone. "No agent of Satan will be able to hurt me."

Jack's natural reaction to this would have been that Wang was giving him a mindfuck, but he'd seen a lot of reasonable people-- and some out-and-out lunatics react just this way-- involving something else he'd been dealing with.

He was about to call Marshall, when he remembered that Sydney probably had him working the data file from the airport, which in its own way was at least as important as this interrogation. So he dialed CTU instead, hoping that he'd made the right bet.

"CTU, O'Brian."

"Chloe, this is Jack Bauer. Is Dixon still there?" he asked..

"I wouldn't bother him.. He's on the phone with representatives of the Chinese government, trying to convince them that Li Chen Wang needs to be in your custody rather than theirs." Chloe paused. "Please don't tell me you've killed him."

"Not yet," Jack said carefully. "When you were doing the background check on Scarlet Circle, did you find anything linking Wang to the Covenant?"

"No," Chloe said emphatically. "Believe me, Jack, if he was linked to Arvin Sloane, you'd be the first to know."

Jack hesitated. "This genetic virus that was developed in Defense; you find anything to link it to… Milo Rimbaldi?"

"Oh, God," Chloe said in exasperatedly. "You're not telling me that lunatic somehow foretold this goddamn mess were in?"

"Chloe."

"The last thing we need today is trying to solve a crime from the fifteenth century," she went on. "This isn't the damn Da Vinci Code."

"Didn't you bother to talk with the people at APO?" Jack asked forcefully

"No, they've got us busy preparing domestic response for the death of the Premier," Chloe said seriously. "We've already got one kind of race riot, now it's looking like civic disturbances are breaking out in Chinatown. LA could tear each other to shreds by sunrise."

This wasn't going to make Jack's job much easier. 'Tap into APO's files for Arvin Sloane," he told her "I'm guessing you can find a backdoor into them without breaking a sweat."

"Arvin Sloane is dead, and Milo Rimbaldi never did anything tied to the Chinese," Chloe asked. "What does this have to do with Wang?"

"I don't know," Jack said honestly. "But Wang is speaking a little too much like a believer to me. And if he knows something about Rimbaldi, the stakes may be higher than whether Los Angeles tears itself to ribbons."

7:34:13/7:34:14/7:34:15/7:34:16

Sydney was right about APO's numbers getting spread too thin. They needed Marshall to keep running tech support and to try and translate the data file, and Sydney's father was needed to handle operations.. So Vaughn's only choice for back-up right now was Kim Bauer.

Under other circumstances, Vaughn might have complained about having an agent who hadn't been out in the field in nearly a year, but the instant that Vaughn had heard his address mentioned, he had stopped thinking clearly. Jack Bristow had realized this, and hadn't even tried to stop Vaughn from going out on this mission without waiting for the LAPD or CTU. He knew that when your child was threatened, you did everything that was in your power to protect them.

Bristow Sr. had, however, instructed Kim to keep in touch with them in case there were any other developments anywhere.

They hadn't been out of APO less than three minutes when Kim's phone rang. She half-expected that it would be Sydney, telling them that she was en route. Instead, it was Marshall.

"Um, is there anyway that you can make this call a little more private?" Marshall asked hesitantly.

"Vaughn's in the driver's seat," Kim reminded Marshall. "There aren't a lot of place where I can hide."

"It's just that, if my kids were threatened, I'd be going bananas, so I've got a pretty good picture about how upset he is, but I've just found something out that may throw him into hyper-drive."

"We passed hyper about two exits back," Kim said carefully. "And I'm pretty sure he's got the pedal to the mettle already, so I don't think it can get worse. Just tell us what you got."

"All right. Remember how Sydney told us that she had tried to read a document, and all she got was gibberish?" Marshall reminded her. "Well, I've dug a little deeper into the document, and I think that it isn't gibberish."

"What is it?" Kim asked.

"It's combinations of four letters-- A, C, T and G. Any biologist in the world knows what those letters mean."

Kim blinked. Anyone who remembered high school biology knew what that meant. "In other words…"

"Adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine," Marshall said. "The four bases that make up DNA. These combinations are found reading through the document. I think that this is a genetic map, just like the one that we pulled out of Hobson Laboratories earlier today."

Before Kim could ask the next obvious question, Vaughn, who clearly got the possible implications of this, began trying to make the car go faster than the odometer.

"Vaughn, Vaughn!" Kim nearly shouted out. "You have to slow down!"

"Are you crazy?" Vaughn yelled. "You know what this means?"

"No, I don't, and neither do you," Kim said in a tone that she would not have been capable of maintaining even two years ago. "What I do know is that you're not going to do Isabelle any good, if you get us killed before we get to your house! So fucking slow down!"

Vaughn's expression didn't change, but he did ease off the gas a little. "Thank you," Kim whispered. "Marshall, how long do you think it'll be before you can finish running the same equations that you ran on Project Helix earlier?"

"First, I have to finish translating this document. Then I'll have to rewrite that program so that it can be refit for a Rimbaldi figures," Marshall did the mental arithmetic. "Four, five hours minimum."

'There's no way you can cut that?' Kim asked.

"Not unless I divert all of APO's resources to this, or piggyback the server off CTU's server, which right now would piss off a huge number of people given how thin resources are in general…"

He trailed off suddenly..

"Marshall?"

"Hold on a second. Someone's using a backdoor to look through your father's files on Rimbaldi."

"Don't tell me we're being hacked." Kim said disbelievingly.

"No, I think I know who's doing this. Give me a minute."

7:41:42/7:41:43/7:41:44

"I've gone through about half of the files," Chloe told Jack, "and so far, nothing has been flagged that gives any link between Sloane and anything connected with Scarlet Circle, much less a Rimbaldi connection between them."

"Try it from the other end," Jack told her. "See if there's anything in Wang's file that links him to any activity the Covenant or SD-6."

"I know I don't work at APO, which obviously makes me inferior, " Chloe reminded him, "but I'm far from a fool. I already double-checked it. Trust me, there's no link that way--"

Chloe was interrupted by a beep on her cell. "Hold on a second, I now have to explain to your tech support what I'm doing in your files," she said after reading the caller ID. "O'Brian, yes I am, Jack gave me permission to, why don't you talk to him yourself?"

Marshall had never had a warm relationship with CTU's tech support—a combination of her personality and that they were a little too alike for his comfort—and this delivery proved it. But his questions had been answered, and he did need to talk to his boss. "Put him through," he said wearily.

This time the pause was less than three seconds. "What is it, Marshall?" Jack asked.

"Is there a reason you didn't ask for my help going through our files?" he asked his boss.

"Because I think what Sydney pulled off the data drive is probably more important work at the moment," Jack said bluntly, "and despite your prodigious ability to multi-task, I didn't need your attention split that way until I actually had something."

"And do you actually have something?" Marshall asked. "Because we do, and CTU's actually in the position that they would be able to help us."

At that moment Chloe came back on the line. "I think I've got something," she told both of them. "Based off the information we got from some of our prisoners, I was able to trace Wang's movement. Ten months ago, Wang paid a series of visits to several former Soviet Republics attempting recruitments for Scarlet Circle. One of those locations was Croatia, where he met with Otto Van Illych, a former associate of Mackennas Cole. Hey, isn't that the Quentin Tarantino wannabe?"

Jack winced, remembering the monster who referred to himself as "The Man"..."What did Wang get from him?" Jack asked.

"The information's is still hazy, " Chloe admitted. "but there maybe something significant. For every other stop on trip, we can link some current and former Scarlet Circle recruits. Van Illych provided him with nothing, but Wang met with him on three separate occasions."

"So maybe this something to do with Rimbaldi?" Marshall asked.

"I don't know. But seeing as Jack actually has Wang in front of him--"

"Chloe, I'm getting very tired of people telling me how to my job," Jack said warningly.

"Fine. I suppose you want to me to track Wang's movements before and after his trip to Croatia," Chloe said sullenly.

"That'd be nice," Jack said.

At this point Marshall, who had people on his back as well, spoke up again. "Um, Mr. Bauer, I realize that what you're doing is very important, but Mr. Bristow asked me to tell you two things."

"Go ahead."

"He says that representatives of China are coming to take Wang into custody in the next ten minutes regardless of anything you may learn from him."

"I'm aware of that," Jack said, annoyed.

"He also wanted to let you know that there was a situation developing because of this document, and we may have another person in custody very soon who can help us connect the dots," Marshall hesitated.

"Who?' Jack asked.

"We only know where he is, we don't know who," Marshall told him flatly. "And right now, considering the moods of the people coming to intercept him, we may be lucky to get him alive."

A bad idea was starting to form in Jack's head. "Did Anna escape?"

"No," Marshall said assuringly, "we've still got her."

"Then--"

"Jack, hurry back here," Marshall told him." 'Cause I have a feeling we're going to have more headaches pretty soon."

7:49:30/7:49:31/7:49:32/7:49:33

As devoted as they were to their jobs, Sydney and Vaughn had been even more cautious as most young parents when it came to protecting their child. The au pair they had hired had gone through a background check more thorough then those of government agencies give in selecting agents (though as all of them knew, that wasn't saying much.) They also had a very advanced security system protecting the house designed by some of their own people, and as Kim had double checked five minutes ago, no one had subverted it yet. However, none of this did much to ease Vaughn's nerves, and, as he pulled into the parking slot just a few feet away from where he and Sydney lived, he knew he wasn't going to be relaxed until he saw his baby sleeping, safely in its bed.

"We've just arrived," he told Sydney over the cell. "How far out are you?"

"I should be there in five minutes," his wife replied grimly. "Has there been any sign of forced entry?"

"Not according to Louise," Vaughn said as he began walking the rest of the way. "She said she'd call the police the second she hung up with me."

"I'm going around to check the back door," Kim told Michael as she drew her weapon.

Vaughn was about to give some kind of assent, when suddenly all the lights within the immediate radius of their neighborhood went out, leaving Vaughn blinking around in the gathering twilight.

Kim blinked. "Oh crap." She charged towards the back, cautious, but definitely hurried.

"The lights just went out for our entire block," he told Sydney. "This can't be a coincidence."

"Whoever these people are, they know exactly how our security system works," Sydney told him.

The security system that Marshall had helped design was wired so that if the power went out, the doors and windows would remain secure. However, it would still take twenty seconds for this system to reboot. Because of the outlying security structure, it would take the average burglar three to four times that long to drill a hole in either a door or a window. Marshall had designed this system so that known measures would not be sufficient to bypass it. The problem was that in their jobs, there always seemed to be someone coming around who had the techs to beat it.

Kim discovered that, when she reached the back door no more than ten seconds after the power had gone out, to find that one of the windows had been completely jimmied open.

Without even hesitating, she went through the same open window without waiting for backup. After waiting ten seconds for her eyes to acclimate to the darkness, she began to advance. Her pistol was raised ahead of her, cupped in one hand, held in a proper Weaver stance.

"Louise?" she whispered. "Louise, are you there?"

But there was no response from either the nanny or her charge. Hoping that Vaughn and Sydney would have the sense to proceed carefully while reentering their home, Kim made her way towards the nursery. She would have attached the gunlight to the barrel, or even used her own penlight, but carrying a light of any sort would only just serve to highlight her position, and paint a target on her chest.

The house was quiet, but it didn't seem to be an unoccupied quiet. However, she didn't see that something was wrong until she got to the doorway of the nursery to find a corpse. Trying to regulate the hurt to the back of her mind—Kim had liked Louise—she took a step.

"Don't come any further," came an icy voice tinged with a Russian accent.

The old Kim Bauer's knees would have turned to water when she heard that voice. For even though she had never actually been in the same room with her, she had listened to enough audio on her to know Irina Derevko's voice when she heard it.

Despite this, it still took a lot of nerve for her to look up and say, "Step out and put your hands where I can see them."

She wasn't terribly surprised when Irina did neither. "They keep recruiting people younger and younger," she said in an almost nostalgic tone. "Where'd they find you, middle school?"

Trying to mentally recall everything she had been taught, she took another step in the room.

There was the sound of a gun being cocked. "Another step, and I will kill this child," Irina warned.

"Really?'" Kim saw an advantage. "Because you've obviously gone to a lot of trouble to get her; I can't imagine you'd just blow her head off now. Your own granddaughter?"

"This child is important, to me and to the world. But make no mistake, I will end her life rather than let the wrong people get their hands on her."

This did chill Kim's blood a little. "And who exactly are the wrong people?" she whispered.

"You're not going to find out," came the voice again—this time, from right next to her as the cold muzzle of a pistol touched her neck. "As you say, drop your weapon."

Kim hesitated less than a second—not because of stubbornness or bravery, but because she wondered about whether dropping the gun would cause it to discharge into the baby's crib. But she had a Glock, and was angled slightly off, so she dropped it, and slowly moved her hands up in a submissive posture.

"That is a good little girl. Now, how many of you are there?"

Kim remained silent a moment before Irina said, "Wait...aren't you Jack Bauer's daughter?" She nudged Kim's skull with her pistol. "Do not trifle with me, girl. I know you, I know you are a pitiful child, and a brave front will not stop a bullet...not at this range. You have been kidnapped by Drazens, menaced by common hoodlums, and hidden in an office where Daddy can keep an eye on you. Now tell me—"

Kim twisted her body. Her left swept arm back, pushing Irina's gun off-line, and swung it down in a pendulum-like motion, trapping the gun arm between her arm and her body.

At the same time, as her entire body twisted toward Irina, Kim's right arm shot out, her palm catching Irina on the center of the temple. Before Irina could even laugh it off, Kim's hand clamped down on Irina's shoulder and the young Bauer pulled down, driving her knee up into Irina's body.

Kim reached around, grabbed the gun and twisted it out of Irina's grip, and clubbed straight down into Irina's head as she twisted away.

She stepped back from Irina and leveled the gun at her—it was apparently a full-blown Uzi submachinegun.

Irina wasn't anywhere near down yet. She charged Kim, pulling a knife for her—

And Kim fired on full automatic, straight into Irina's chest.

Bullet after bullet pounded into Derevko's body. The roar of the gun didn't come—the woman had put a sound suppressor on it—but the multiple impacts send her staggering back against the wall.

Despite all of this, Kim knew too much about the woman to assume it would be this easy...she was right, Irina had body armor on.

Kim wasn't certain what to do next when she detected a flash of light off the knife blade, and she ducked a split second before the blade cut through the air she had occupied. She rolled, and nearly cut Irina's legs out from under her. Kim nearly got away with her maneuver—she was much younger and faster than the elder spy—but Irina staggered to one side before Kim reached her.

The sudden resistance had surprised Irina, and being shot didn't help her recovery. Despite bouncing back from normal bullet strikes while armored, being hit with a full thirty-shot clip was like being repeatedly slammed with sheet metal moving at ten miles an hour.

So she was disoriented when Kim pushed off her feet to charge into Irina, and swung the gun into Irina's face.

The Russian spy fell back a few feet, and Kim moved in to try and knock her out cold.

This was a mistake of youth, and Derevko made her pay for it by kicking the gun out of her hand as she drew a pistol. Kim recoiled and assumed a modified Krav Maga pose as Irina was finding her feet again, and kicked Irina in the stomach. This only winded the Russian, but the combination of blows were sufficient to loosen her grip on her weapon. Kim kicked it under the crib, then jumped at Irina, who had taken this advantage to pull out yet another small blade and aim it at her neck. Kim grabbed her hand, and pushed as hard as she could away from her.

"When did you become an expert?" Irina asked as she fought with the younger woman, the two of them rolling around on the floor for the weapon.

Kim thrust her forehead against Irina's nose, not breaking it, but it hurt like hell. "I babysit for a paranoid mother named Sydney." Kim swung a knee into Irina's side. "My dad's girlfriend insists I need protection." She swung her other arm up, and drove her elbow into Irina's face. "And my father is Jack Bauer." And again. "Bitch!"

Just then the lights came on, and an alarm started blaring. Irina was distracted for a fraction of a second, long enough for Kim to apply enough pressure to get the knife out of her hand. "In here!" Kim shouted. "I managed to escape from the Drazens; why does everyone freaking forget that?" she mumbled

Both Vaughn and Sydney tore into the room. Sydney ran to her daughter; Michael to Kim. "What the fuck are you doing here?" Vaughn demanded of Irina.

"Why so harsh a tone?" Irina said weakly. "After all, we're family."

Kim got to her feet. "You have cuffs?" she asked

"With her, you'd need a straitjacket," Vaughn got on his radio. "Attention all units. The intruder is Irina Derveko; I want all units to secure this location, and then her!"

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