24 Declassified: Death Angel

1

THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 11 A.M. AND 12 P.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME

11:04 A.M., MDT

Trail’s End Motel, Los Alamos, New Mexico

Jack Bauer was getting ready to leave for his meeting with Peter Rhee when somebody knocked on the door of his motel room, room number eight.

The sound was almost drowned out by the shuddering wheeze of the air conditioner. The unit produced more noise than cool comfort. It wasn’t much of an air conditioner, but then the Trail’s End wasn’t much of a motel, either. It was a grade-C lodging whose clientele consisted mainly of business travelers and tourists on a tight budget.

The room was a tight, boxy, low-ceilinged space. There was a single bed and a long cabinet with two sets of drawers. A round-topped table and an armless straight-backed chair were crowded into a rear corner. The furniture was made of synthetic composite material covered with dark brown simulated wood-grain plastic surfacing. A cable TV was bolted to the cabinet top, and the remote was secured to the night table. The bathroom was the size of a walk-in closet.

Anonymous, impersonal, the site fitted its occupant’s purposes. There were no front desk managers, night clerks, or doormen to monitor his comings and goings. The motel was conveniently located midway between Los Alamos city proper and the massive lab complex on the South Mesa.

Jack’s seeming isolation and vulnerability here were designed to entice the opposition out of hiding into making a try for him. He’d made himself a target—human bait in a trap that could work two ways.

Jack Bauer was in his mid-thirties, trim, athletic, clean-shaven, with short sandy hair and sharp blue eyes. He wore a lightweight brown denim vest, gray T-shirt, khaki pants, and ankle-high hiking boots. He looked like a nice, decent fellow, a caring and compassionate human being. Which he was—except when he was on a mission.

He was on a mission now.

He’d been detached from his post as Special Agent in Charge of the Los Angeles Counter Terrorist Unit, SAC CTU/L.A., for temporary duty as a field operative in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Los Alamos, the self-styled Atomic City where the A-bomb was born and extensive research and development of cutting-edge nuclear and other weaponry continued to be its stock-in-trade.

Ironwood National Laboratory, a key component of the Los Alamos complex, had over the last six months been struck by a murder wave. Five important staffers had died under violent and mysterious circumstances. The victims included scientists and security personnel. The first deaths had been made to look like accidents or natural causes.

In the last few weeks the pace had picked up, with no pretense of the last two deaths being anything than what they were: out-and-out kills. The assassin—or assassins—grew bolder with each fatality.

The FBI has jurisdiction in all domestic espionage cases. There is one exception: the CIA is empowered to investigate cases of spying at all nuclear research facilities.

Created in the aftermath of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, CTU was established as a division of the CIA to combat terrorist activities at home in the United States and abroad.

Whatever else they were, the Ironwood kills went far beyond the parameters of conventional espionage. The murder of persons associated with a facility responsible for the research and development of America’s high-technology weaponry was reason enough for CTU involvement in the case.

But it took something more than that to have Jack Bauer detached from his post as head of the unit’s Los Angeles branch.

The inciting element was a name from the past that had suddenly surfaced in the Ironwood affair:

Annihilax.

In feudal Japan, the shogunate’s dismissal from its service of the military samurai caste had loosed a flood of suddenly indigent warriors and swordsmen on the land.

These masterless men, known as ronin, no longer bound by their oath of loyalty to the emperor, made their living the only way they knew how, by selling their blades and skills to those who could pay, be they warlords, ambitious provincial tyrants, feuding clans, or the gambling syndicates of tattooed men known as yakuza.

The result was a generation-long epoch of anarchy, lawlessness, and ultraviolence that afflicted nobles and commoners alike.

Similarly, the end of the Cold War superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union had set the stage for today’s era of global intrigue. Thousands of intelligence professionals on both sides of the gap found themselves without a job. Their numbers included career professionals and contract agents of the now-downsized spy services. Among them were spymasters, analysts, technicians, specialists in the black arts of sabotage and murder, paramilitary types, and mercenary soldiers.

Like the ronin of Old Nippon, legions of clandestine operators now sold their skills around the world to the highest bidders. The less scrupulous among them found new employers in the form of moneyed terrorist organizations, ruthless industrial cartels, drug lords, and organized crime syndicates.

In this lethal new environment, a handful of names stood out in the subterranean milieu of the world-class elite of professional killers for hire.

At the top of the list: Annihilax.

Who or what was Annihilax? Was it a lone individual or a league of assassins?

The answer was unknown even among those who contracted for the services of this murder machine. What was known was that Annihilax was stateless, rootless, owing allegiance to no country, creed, or ideology except that of the highest bidder. And even that loyalty was good only until the assignment had been successfully carried out. Once completed, the former employer was vulnerable to targeting by any rival who cared to meet Annihilax’s price.

The exterminating agent took on only the most expensive and challenging contracts. An intricate network of ever-shifting contacts and go-betweens handled the initial groundwork between Annihilax and the would-be client. When the contract was finalized, exorbitant fees were deposited in escrow in secret numbered Swiss and offshore bank accounts.

Annihilax’s iron-clad guarantee promised a full refund to the client—minus retainer and expenses incurred in the course of the preliminaries—in the event of failure to fulfill the contract and make the hit. The inside line among those who knew, namely rival members of the killer elite, was that no such refund had ever been made.

Targets included heads of state, big business magnates, crime bosses, spy chiefs, generals, mercenary leaders, political dissidents, cooperative witnesses in high-profile investigations, those who knew too much, and those who stood between rich and powerful clients and something they wanted.

Five years ago, fate had conspired that the paths of Jack Bauer and Annihilax should cross.

The prime mover was NATO’s opening the bidding on the contract to develop a new light armored vehicle resistant to improvised explosive devices, IEDs, such as car and truck bombs so well beloved by terrorists the world over. The contract to equip all NATO fighting forces with this new LAV meant billions of euros in profits to the successful bidder.

While generally not discussed with outsiders, it is a well-known fact among professional arms dealers that the letting of a new, lucrative contract in their line is often accompanied by an epidemic of violent deaths in the ranks of competing munitions makers. Destabilizing the competition by decimating its top executives, vendors, and weapons designers can only increase the likelihood of its determined rival winning the prize.

The NATO LAV contract offering was no exception. Key personnel of various United States and West European arms dealers in the running for the winning bid began being systematically wiped off the board: thrown out of windows, pushed under buses, slain in seemingly random street muggings. This clandestine killing ground was located in Brussels, Belgium, site of NATO’s administrative headquarters.

The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency’s operatives learned that an East European arms cartel, on behalf of a weapons developer, had contracted with Annihilax to winnow out its rivals to be assured of claiming the contract.

Knowing of Jack Bauer’s outstanding record as a former Delta Force member and top counterterrorist field operative, DIA requested that Jack head the operation to seek and destroy Annihilax.

The story of that epic duel remains classified and cannot be told here. It can be said that after a ruthless covert war involving extensive casualties on both sides, Jack Bauer ultimately succeeding in neutralizing the cadre of killers assembled by Annihilax for the Brussels contract.

Jack’s relentless, no-holds-barred investigation convinced him that Annihilax was not a group but a single person. He’d worked his way up to the penultimate conspirator, the last link but one in the chain leading to the master assassin. That person, Boris Zemba, was killed by Annihilax to prevent his revealing the identity of his master.

The Brussels killings stopped and Annihilax vanished without a trace.

Whether through intimidation, fear, bribery, or a combination of all three, and despite the vehement protests of its unsuccessful rivals, the East European cartel was awarded the NATO contract. Annihilax had fulfilled his bargain and earned his fee.

No refund required, leaving his winning record unbroken.

The resulting LAV was a boondoggle that proved dangerous only to its occupants and had to be replaced at another staggering expense to the taxpayers.

A year later, U.S. intelligence services reported that Annihilax had been killed in the course of backing the wrong horse in a bloody insurrection in the Congo. Jack Bauer remained skeptical. Without a body or even a name to identify the master assassin, he believed that the killer was still at large.

The years passed without so much as a whisper or sighting of an Annihilax operation. Those who should know best, top-ranked performers in the killer elite, believed that the prolonged silence proved their hated competitor was retired or dead.

In the interim they’d all picked up murder contracts that would otherwise have gone to Annihilax.

Now, a cryptic fragment intercepted by the National Security Agency had broken that silence. A scrap of communication encoded in a cipher unique to Annihilax had been recently intercepted by the NSA while it was being uploaded to an orbiting communications satellite.

NSA code breakers had never been able to decrypt the code. The fragment now in their possession proved equally immune to their efforts, but its identity as Annihilax’s signature cipher was unquestionable.

The communiqué had been transmitted from somewhere in Los Alamos, New Mexico. That was enough to bring Jack Bauer to the Atomic City.

Now Jack crossed to the front of the room, lifting a fold of the curtain covering the plate-glass window so he could look outside and see who was knocking on his door.

A sad-faced older woman outfitted in the uniform worn by the motel’s room maids stood on the other side of the door, facing it. She was bracketed by a utility cart and a four-wheeled canvas hopper mounted on a tubular frame. The multitray cart was laden with fresh towels, bedding, and the like; the hopper was filled with similar used items of linen collected for cleaning.

Jack studied the newcomer for a long pause. She was a stranger to him. He’d been staying at the motel for the past ten days and hadn’t noticed her among the staffers. And he was a man who noticed things. That was part of his business. The business of staying alive.

She gazed fixedly at the door, hands primly folded in front of her, seemingly unaware of his scrutiny.

Jack let the curtain fall back into place. He reached under a front flap of his denim vest, his hand brushing the butt end of the pistol he wore in a shoulder rig under his left arm. He unfastened the safety strap at the top of the holster and jiggled the gun slightly to free it up to speed his draw if he needed to bring it into action fast. Gun and harness were concealed beneath the vest from casual observers who didn’t know what to look for.

He wore no protective Kevlar vest under his garments. Frankly it was just too damned hot to undergo the discomfort without a compelling and immediate reason.

Maybe that reason was now at hand; he didn’t know. But it was too late to don the vest now.

Jack took a deep breath, letting it out and willing himself to stay loose and relaxed. Tension slows reaction time. He set his face in a masklike expression of bland neutrality. Standing to one side of the door, he unlocked and opened it.

It was like opening the door of a baker’s oven operating at full blast. A wave of hot, dry air burst into the room, the arid heat of a high desert sun nearing its midday zenith on a late August Saturday.

Jack met it without flinching but it took an effort. He could feel the heat sucking the moisture out of him.

The motel was a two-story structure consisting of a long main building with two stubby wings jutting from it at right angles. It fronted south, making an inverted U-shape facing a strip of east-west running roadway. A paved lot stood between it and the roadside.

The ribbon of road was bordered on both sides by gas stations, fast-food joints, a car wash, mini-malls, cheap-jack electronics stores, discount clothing outlets, and the like.

Jack’s room on the ground floor of the motel’s west wing fronted east. A white concrete apron about ten feet wide extended along the building’s base. Its far end was lined by a row of the lodgers’ parked cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks, sunlight glaring off their brightly reflective surfaces. Shimmering heat waves rose off the pavement.

Somewhere out there a couple of FBI agents were watching Jack Bauer.

He was partnered on the investigation by FBI Special Agent Vince Sabito and a couple of underlings he’d brought with him from the Bureau’s Santa Fe resident agency.

Relations between the FBI and the CIA were notoriously bad, and CTU was part of the CIA.

Working conditions between the two had improved for a time, but that time was long gone and the relationship had since deteriorated more or less to its former tone of mutual suspicion, hostility, distrust, and jealously guarded territoriality.

Sabito and his agents were supposed to be on Jack’s side, but still he’d have to figure out some way to shake them before meeting with Rhee.

But first—the woman.

She stood on the other side of the open doorway in the scanty shade of the second-floor balcony. She looked like a desert dweller herself, spare and scrawny, sun-baked down to an irreducible minimum of hair, skin, and bones.

She was tall, only a few inches shorter than Jack’s full six feet, even in the sensible low-heeled shoes she was wearing. Her age could have been anywhere from forty to sixty years old. A straight-backed posture argued for the former while a seamed, weathered face indicated the latter. Iron-gray hair was pulled back and tied in a businesslike bun at the top of her head.

Her pale yellow uniform was trimmed with white piping, its hem reaching a few inches below the knees. The same standard uniform worn by other room maids Jack had observed while staying at the motel.

No, not quite the same. The other outfits had all been short-sleeved. This one was long-sleeved, with wide, white unbuttoned cuffs.

The utility cart was on her right and the canvas hopper on her left. Both nestled against the side of the building, leaving the way open and unblocked for any passersby on the concrete apron. For now there was none.

Okay if I make the room up now, mister? the woman asked, her voice sharp with the nasal twang of a native Southwesterner.

No Norma today? Jack asked. She usually cleans the room.

She’s off today.

I don’t think I’ve seen you around before, he said.

I only work here on weekends. She sighed. I’ve got a lot of rooms to do so I’d like to get started if it’s okay with you, mister.

Sure, come on in. Jack stepped back so she could enter.

She crossed the threshold, closing the door behind her. Don’t want to let the heat in while I’m stripping the bed.

Jack nodded, turning his back to her and going deeper into the room. Earlier he’d turned the TV set on its counter-top stand so it faced the front of the room. It was switched off, and its dead glass eye served as a mirror so he could see what was happening behind him.

The maid’s right hand reached into the loose cuff of her left sleeve and pulled out a long stiletto-like weapon. She lunged forward, thrusting it at Jack’s broad, unprotected back.

Only he wasn’t there when she made what should have been a killing stroke. He’d sidestepped, and the weapon stabbed empty air. Jack kept moving, pivoting, and facing her sideways to present the smallest target.

She was in a half crouch, legs bent at the knees, striking arm extended to its full length, her fist closed around the shaft of something long, slim, sharp, and glittering. Her weapon was a knitting needle about ten inches long. The spike was lethal enough by itself but it had something extra. The point was covered by a gray plastic protective cap not unlike the sort found on the tip of an ordinary ink pen.

She wielded the long needle like a veteran knife fighter, holding it with the dime-sized disk at its end braced against the heel of her palm, the rest of the spike emerging from the top of her closed hand.

She’d committed to her first stroke and missed. Jack was beside her, his open hand slapping down on and grabbing the wrist of the hand holding the needle. It was like taking hold of a snake, strong, sinewy, and wriggling. She twisted trying to get loose but couldn’t break his grip.

Her free hand shot across her, stabbing at him with fingers spread to spear and claw at his eyes. He bobbed his head out of her reach, still clutching her wrist.

She kneed him but he was ready for that, too. He’d turned his body so that the knee slammed into his thigh instead of ramming home into his crotch as she’d intended. The side of his leg went numb from the force of the blow but he maintained his balance.

She switched tactics, stomping her heel into the top of his foot.

The pain took his breath away and he could feel his grip weakening. She felt it, too, and redoubled her efforts to break free, but before she could do so he got his other hand on her forearm.

In one swift move that was a blur of motion he violently bent her arm backward and thrust the needle deep into her neck. At the moment of impact the plastic protective cap split open, coming apart, leaving the dark-stained needle point nakedly exposed for an instant before it rammed home. There was a crunching sound as the steel tip penetrated flesh, cartilage, and bone.

A fatal blow but not necessarily such as to bring on sudden death. In the natural order of things she might have lived a moment or two before expiring. But for the dark substance staining the needle point, whatever toxin the plastic protective cap had been covering.

In the span of a few heartbeats the would-be killer went into spasms, shaking from head to toe in one massive total body shudder. She went rigid, catatonic. Her eyes bulged like they were trying to pop free from the sockets. They were staring, not seeing. Her mouth fell open—to gasp for breath, to cry out? The light went out of her eyes and the life left her body as the poisoned needle sent her rocketing into eternity.

He let go of her and she fell to the floor with a thump. She lay on her back faceup, the needle sticking out of her neck like a handle. A line of blood so dark it looked black clung from a corner of her mouth to her chin.

Jack stood staring down at her for a timeless interval. After a while he shook his head as if to clear it and said, Huh!

His voice sounded funny in his ears. He was breathing hard. Damn, he muttered.

He’d wanted to take her alive but things had moved too fast. There hadn’t been time to draw his gun before she was on him. If he’d tried she would have had him. As it was, it had been close, too close.

He was drenched with sweat, and he could feel it cooling on him. The laboring air conditioner continued its uninterrupted juddering and wheezing.

She’d been smart, stomping his foot while trying to wrestle free. The bones at the top of the foot were thin and breakable. He wriggled his toes inside the boot. They all wriggled. Nothing felt broken. He could walk on it, and that’s all that counted.

His hiking boots had steel toes and reinforced tops of the kind worn by construction workers to protect against heavy weights falling on their feet and crushing them. Luck had nothing to do with it. He had selected the boots deliberately because they were good for street fighting, and on this case trouble was liable to come at him from any and every unexpected direction, and everything he had working on his side to give him an edge upped his chances for survival.

Jack was now reminded somehow of the classic mode of hunting tigers. The hunter stakes a goat to a tree as bait and then hides himself in a covert blind. When the tiger goes for the goat, the hunter shoots the tiger. Trouble was, he was goat and hunter both.

The gray plastic protective cap covering the poisoned needle point had split into several large fragments. A couple of them lay on the carpet near the corpse.

Jack held his hands and forearms in front of him, turning them around, inspecting them for any gray plastic shards that might be clinging to them. Some of that toxin might have rubbed off on the inside of the cap, and he wanted to make sure he was clear of them.

They looked clean. He eyed the front of his vest and shirt and pants, and they came up clean, too.

He circled the body and went to the front of the room, moving with a limp, favoring his left leg, the one she’d been working on. He lifted the curtain and looked outside.

There was a commotion nearby but it was of the everyday variety. A woman was trying to ride herd on a half-dozen noisy, hyperactive kids while her husband loaded some suitcases into the trunk of their car.

The oldest kid was a boy of about ten and the others were in various descending age ranges, including a babe in arms held by the mother as she halfheartedly tried to maintain some order among her brood. The whole clan couldn’t have been more obliviously unaware of the mortal struggle that had just taken place in room eight.

His quick visual scan of the scene detected no sign of hostile or suspicious elements. No sign of Sabito’s G-men, either, though they couldn’t be far away. Jack let the curtain fall, locked the door.

He glanced back at the body sprawled on the floor. This’ll put me in solid with Vince, he said to himself, grinning wryly.

He went into the bathroom, switched on the light. He felt like he’d jump out of his skin if anyone so much as said boo to him.

He examined himself more carefully now for flecks of the poison needle’s shattered plastic protective cap. He looked into the mirror mounted over the sink, turning his head this way and that, scanning his face and neck for any gray plastic flecks that might be clinging to his skin. He found none.

He ran his fingers through his hair, tousling it to dislodge any specks that might be caught in it so that they’d fall into the sink. There weren’t any.

He let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

He shook out his clothes, then crouched down to peer at the tiled floor in search of any gray shards, finding none.

He washed his hands in the sink with soap and water, scrubbing his forearms up to the elbow before rinsing them. He ran the cold water and held a washcloth under it. He mopped his face and the back of his neck with the cool, wet cloth.

He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror. He looked like hell, hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked. Pencil-thick veins stood out on both sides of his forehead. His skin had blanched under its deep tan, giving his skin a sallow cast. Wide black pupils swam in his bright blue eyes.

He thought of the corpse in the main room. Compared to her, he hadn’t come off too badly. You should see the other guy, he said aloud.

Gal, he corrected, after a pause.

He combed his hair with his fingers, pushing it back into shape. He grinned at himself in the mirror, baring his teeth.

He went into the main room and hunkered down beside the body. He rolled up the killer’s left sleeve, baring the arm below the elbow. Her flesh was disconcertingly warm. Strapped to the inside of her forearm was a red leather sheath that had held the poisoned needle.

He gave the corpse a quick frisk pat-down that came up empty. Her pockets yielded nothing but a ring with a set of passkeys to open the room doors. No ID, no personal documents.

He hadn’t expected to find any. She was a pro and she’d come in clean, with nothing to identify her or her employer.

Jack straightened up, wincing as sharp pains shot through his left leg and foot. Now that the floodtide of adrenaline was ebbing, the pain from her strikes was making itself felt. His thigh ached deep in the muscle where she’d kneed him. Reinforced boots or not, it had hurt when she’d stomped his foot. That was when he’d gone into full survival mode and turned her own weapon against her.

He eyed his assailant. His post as SAC CTU/L.A. had familiarized him with the faces and dossiers of hundreds of professional killers foreign and domestic. This one had been a stranger to him at first glance, and now that he took a closer look at her that status remained unchanged.

Local talent possibly, recruited for the hit. That would fit the pattern.

The Annihilax pattern.

That was how the master assassin had operated in Brussels, assembling a team of cutthroats, most of whom came from Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.

Jack checked his watch. The time was 11:11. Hard to believe that only seven minutes had passed since that first knock on his door.

He got out his cell phone and called Peter Rhee, the Ironwood counterintelligence officer who’d urgently requested a private noontime meeting with him. Rhee failed to pick up. Jack didn’t like that so well. He left a message on Rhee’s voice mail.

Somebody made a try for me. She was disguised as a room maid. She’s dead. I’m running behind schedule. I’ll be about ten, fifteen minutes late. Call me as soon as you can, Jack said.

And watch yourself, he added.

His cell phone and Rhee’s were both secure and scrambled but Jack didn’t want to be more specific than that.

Next he called Vince Sabito. Sabito picked up on the third ring. Sabito here, he said. Sabito’s cell was secure and scrambled, too.

This is Jack Bauer.

What do you want? Sabito wasn’t the type to extend himself with a pretense of friendliness or even collegiality.

I’ve got something you want, Jack said.

Yeah? What?

An assassin. She’s dead.

She—?! A woman, huh? What happened?

She wound up on the wrong end of her own poison needle.

You’re at the motel. That was a statement, not a question. Sabito knew where Jack was. His men were staked out watching him.

I’ll be right there. You stay put, Sabito said, breaking the connection.

11:17 A.M. MDT

Trail’s End Motel, Los Alamos

Jack Bauer stood in the shade of the second-floor balcony, leaning with his back against his closed room door. He was waiting for the FBI to arrive.

His wait was not a long one. Sabito had a couple of watchdogs posted across the street in a diner’s parking lot. The diner was doing a brisk lunchtime business and the lot was pretty well filled with vehicles.

The FBI car was salted in with all the others and Jack didn’t spot it at first. Then it got into motion, and when it did there was no mistaking it because it was in a big hurry.

A late model dark sedan suddenly came barreling out of the lot. After hanging up on Jack, Sabito must have phoned the agents and told them to step on it to secure the site and prevent Jack from leaving. The sedan was a little too hasty trying to exit the lot and had to slam on the brakes and stop short to avoid plowing into oncoming traffic.

A delivery truck driver who’d narrowly missed being tagged by it held down his horn in an angrily protesting note for a long time as he rolled east on the roadway.

When the street was clear in both directions the sedan swung around in a wide looping U-turn, crossing the eastbound and westbound lanes and darting into the Trail’s End lot. Slowing to avoid pedestrians, it arrowed toward the motel’s west wing, nosing into a parking space near where Jack was standing. Up close he could see that the sedan was blue, so dark a blue it was almost black.

Two men got out of the car and started toward him. FBI special agents Hickman and Coates—he’d met them before.

Coates had been driving. He was big and bearish, like an ex-football lineman. He was carrying a lot of weight and he looked like the heat didn’t agree with him. His face and neck were lobsterred and sweat-slick. Perched on top of his