Collateral Damage - Marc Cerasini [14]
"The one that delayed us this morning."
"Bugger," Morris murmured. "Don't you want backup?"
Jack shook his head. "Not from this office. You and Tony hold down the fort until I get back. I'll be in touch if I run into problems."
Morris frowned. "Careful, Jack. I understand New York can be a very rough town."
* * *
9:39:20AM. EDT
CTU Headquarters, NYC
"Agent Almeida? I have the system schematics that you requested."
Tony nodded, his gaze fixed on the monitor. "Yeah, thanks," he muttered. "Put them on the desk."
"Agent Almeida?"
It took a moment for the voice to penetrate his concentration. Finally, Tony looked up, to find a young woman with dark, curly hair and wide, oval eyes standing over him. She offered Tony a nervous smile.
"I just wanted to say... if you need anything... anything at all, I'll be in the next cubicle." She pointed to her workstation with a thumb over her shoulder. "My name's Delgado, Rachel Delgado. Like I said, call me. If you need me."
The woman wore black slacks and platform shoes. Her tight, white blouse had a low neckline, showing more than ample cleavage. Tony shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "Ah... thanks."
As she walked away, Tony watched her swaying hips — until Rachel Delgado glanced over her shoulder and caught him peeking.
Tony quickly shifted his gaze — then the computer beeped, and it was back to work. He grabbed the schematics that Ms. Delgado had brought him and looked them over. In a few minutes, he'd isolated the problem, which turned out to be a glitch with the physical system and not a software issue.
Tony stood, hung his jacket over the back of the desk chair, along with his shoulder holster and the Glock inside it. Then he rolled up his sleeves and used a screwdriver from the console kit to open the access panel behind the computer.
The guts of the system revealed, Tony began to physically reroute the entire network through a different set of servers by reconnecting several dozen ports to ultrahigh bandwidth links.
* * *
9:49:55 A.M. EDT
Mulberry Street
After a short cab ride, Jack Bauer exited the taxi on the corner of Canal and Mulberry. At the teeming intersection, he considered his next move.
It was clear to Jack that someone at CTU New York had tipped off De Salvo and his crew. They knew about Jack's arrival in the city, and enough of his schedule to set up an ambush in the middle of Hudson Street in broad daylight.
Or did the leak originate somewhere else, out of the Tacoma office, perhaps? Jack decided to have a long talk with George Mason after this was over.
Angelo De Salvo had harbored a deep grudge against Jack — for good reason. Jack had led the siege in L. A. that had ended with the deaths of De Salvo's father and two brothers.
Angelo hadn't been with his family during that takedown, but he was a career criminal with a long rap sheet. He was also a hunted man, and according to O'Brian's research, De Salvo's alias — Angel Salinas — never had more than nine hundred dollars in his bank account. So there was no way he could have paid for the services of professional hit men.
So who had helped him mount this morning's ambush?
De Salvo was dead now, but whoever had helped him was still very much alive. Jack intended to find the source of the payoff money. He would start with the dead man's employer, Fredo Mangella.
Jack walked down Mulberry Street, the main drag of New York's shrunken Little Italy. The street was narrow but clean and colorful, with century-old brick buildings of six and eight stories, housing Italian restaurants, cafes, and gourmet pastry shops at street level. There were iron streetlamps and sidewalk tables with Campari umbrellas, but few tourists were around at this hour of the morning.
Most of the pedestrians were Asian, heading toward the streets around Mulberry, which belonged to Chinatown, a large area of Lower Manhattan that had grown even larger over the years with the influx of Asian immigrants, reducing Little Italy to no more than