24 Declassified: Death Angel 2d-11 Read online

  24 Declassified: Death Angel

  ( 24 Declassified - 11 )

  David S. Jacobs

  Firestorm!

  A mole has infiltrated Ironwood National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a top-secret research center for the development of high-tech and nuclear weaponry. Someone is about to commit the foulest, most catastrophic brand of treason — and one man must prevent it: CTU agent Jack Bauer.

  Caught in the crossfire between two rival criminal operations, each intent on controlling the terrifying machinery of Apocalypse, the rogue anti-terrorism operative has twenty-four hours to forestall America's worst nightmare. As a devastating wildfire ravages the countryside, each ticking second brings Jack closer to the explosive confrontation that will ultimately seal his nation's fate: a lethal battle with the world's most efficient killer, Annihilax, the Death Angel.

  David Jacobs

  24™ Declassified: Death Angel

  Based on the hit FOX series created by Joel Surnow & Robert Cochran

  After the 1993 World Trade Center attack, a division of the Central Intelligence Agency established a domestic unit tasked with protecting America from the threat of terrorism. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the Counter Terrorist Unit established field offices in several American cities. From its inception, CTU faced hostility and skepticism from other Federal law enforcement agencies. Despite bureaucratic resistance, within a few years CTU had become a major force in the war against terror. After the events of 9/11, a number of early CTU missions were declassified. The following is one of them.

  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.”