Operation Hell Gate - Marc Cerasini [107]
Caitlin heard a moan, saw Jack stumbling to his feet.
"Jack, are you hurt?"
"He clipped me, but I'm not dead yet."
Caitlin ran to him, draped Jack's good arm over her shoulder and wrapped her own arms around him.
"Let's get you to a doctor," she said.
"Don't need a doctor," grunted Jack. "What I need is a good night's sleep."
Arm in arm, they limped across the bridge, toward the distant shore.
EPILOGUE
After Jack Bauer wound up his part of the debriefing, the conference room was quiet for a long moment. Finally, Richard Walsh spoke. "Talk about Frank Hensley. Has your team come up with anything?"
Jack leaned back in his chair, finally relaxing now that the whole of this mission was out of him. "Hensley was a mole."
"Can't be, Jack. No mole could get past the FBI's screening process; their background checks are legendary."
Jack shook his head. "I had Nina contact the Pentagon, retrieve Hensley's military records. Tony went over it all, discovered that Hensley's pre-lraqi records, including his fingerprints, had been tampered with — probably by another mole somewhere in the Pentagon. We went back even further, discovered that when Hensley was a teenager, he was fingerprinted for a security assistant's job at a local department store in Morgantown, West Virginia. We accessed those old prints and compared them with the fingerprints on file in the FBI's personnel office."
Jack met Walsh's incredulous stare. "The prints didn't match. The man who went to war in Desert Storm and the man who came back to America were not the same."
"999?" Walsh guessed.
Jack nodded. "The real Frank Hensley was a true war hero. He was captured by the Iraqi forces during Desert Storm and taken to Baghdad. We know that for a fact. What happened after that is speculation, but we suspect he was tortured and murdered by 999, Iraqi's secret special operations service. They likely extracted enough personal information from Hensley to replace him with one of their own. His parents were no longer living. Some plastic surgery and a standoffish attitude after the war would have helped him make the transition back into civilian life."
"But he had a wife?"
"Not until after the war. He met and married a woman whose father was a Federal judge. That alliance would have helped him into the FBI. Over the years, Hensley forged more alliances, and not with more judges. He began to make deals with the criminals he was supposedly investigating. But the big payoff he promised Felix Tanner and Fiona Brice, the Lynch brothers and Dante Arete, it was all a lie. The plot to blow up airliners to extort money was really just a mask for Hensley's real mission to down the CDC airplane and unleash a pandemic on New York City and most likely the entire Northeastern seaboard. From what Caitlin told us about what she overheard, Taj and the Afghanis were in on the real plot, and were willing accomplices."
"And Dennis Spain, Senator Cheever's aide?"
"He disappeared. The FBI is looking for him, but..." Jack turned his palms to the ceiling. "Nothing so far."
"And the Senator's in the clear?"
Jack frowned. "Not with me."
Walsh nodded. With thumb and forefinger he smoothed his walrus mustache. "And what about that anonymous tipster? The one who triggered this whole mission with the events at LAX? Ever get an ID?"
"That one was easy. A voice analysis of the tape message proved the man's identity conclusively — it was Georgi Timko. It seems Georgi's brother was a HIND helicopter pilot in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. His chopper was shot down by insurgents; Georgi's brother died in Afghan captivity. I guess Timko felt he had some unfinished business with Taj and his followers..."
"So it's over now?"
Jack shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not. Time will tell."
Walsh switched the tape recorder off, signaling the end of the official debriefing. Jack rose, gathered the papers spread out across the table.
"One more thing," said Walsh. "The crap hit the fan so fast, we never