Operation Hell Gate - Marc Cerasini [93]
"There's one more shooter. Holed up in the corner office," Jack whispered.
He gestured for her to duck into a cubicle. She obeyed, then peered around the standing wall to watch Jack move cautiously down the hallway. Just before he reached the corner office, Jack ducked into another cubicle, came out wheeling a desk chair. Renewing his grip on the Uzi, Jack kicked the chair forward. The chair bounced off the closed office door with a loud crash. A burst of automatic weapon fire came from the other side, instantly shredding the wood. The top of the door fell to the floor.
Jack flattened himself against the wall, fired the Uzi through the opening until the magazine was spent. Then he cast the empty weapon aside, drew his .45 and kicked through the remains of the door, disappearing into the corner office.
For thirty long seconds, Caitlin waited, listened to the silence. Finally, she emerged from her hiding place and crept carefully down the hall. She peered through the bullet-riddled doorway. Another assassin lay sprawled on his back, arms outstretched. A line of ragged bloody holes had been stitched up his abdomen. The corpse's eyes were askew, dead lips curled back from yellow teeth. Then she saw Jack, hunched over a man in a thick leather chair. He wore a tailored suit, now ruined by powder burns and bloodstains. He was an elderly man. Silver hair framed a substantial hole in the top of his skull. Bifocals dangled from his ear.
"Mother of God. Who is he?"
"Felix Tanner." Jack tossed the dead man's open wallet onto the desk, but Caitlin focused her attention on the ragged hole in Jack's jacket, the blood seeping through the tear in the sleeve. She saw he was wincing.
"You're hurt!" She moved to help him, but Jack pulled away, searching the desktop.
"There's got to be a clue, something in this office that will tell me who's directing this terrorist cell. Whoever it is, he's covering his tracks. Felix Tanner probably knew the man's identity or he wouldn't have been murdered."
Caitlin watched Jack as he desperately tore through the office, scattering papers across the desk, over the dead body on the floor.
Her eyes drifted to a television monitor in the corner of the office. It was on, though there was no sound. The man on the screen wore bulky black clothes and a ski mask. He stared into the camera as his lips moved.
"Jack? Come here. I think you should see this."
Jack stared at the monitor, adjusted the sound. He and Caitlin both listened as the masked man explained that he would not shoot down any commercial aircraft if each major airline transferred five hundred million dollars to a numbered Swiss account in the next sixty minutes.
"This isn't terrorism," said Jack Bauer. "It's extortion."
* * *
4:58:25 P.M. EDT
CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
A pall had descended over the Situation Room as the Threat Clock ran down to zero hour. The room was quiet, all eyes on the wall-sized HDTV monitor. The massive screen was broken up into five sections — each displayed live surveillance video feeds from locations inside the perimeters of Logan Airport in Boston, Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., O'Hare in Chicago, and Los Angeles International Airport just a few miles from CTU headquarters. One section in the middle of the screen was still dark.
"I don't see New York. Why don't I see New York?" Ryan Chappelle snapped, his voice betraying nervous tension.
"The satellite is almost in position," Nina replied. A moment later, crystal clear satellite imagery focused on a section of LaGuardia Airport.
"What about JFK?" Ryan asked.
"We're blind. Georgi Timko claimed he didn't have the resources to set up camera surveillance, and the NSA would only allow us access to one satellite."
"I don't like relying on some Russian mobster..."
"Ukrainian," Doris interrupted.
"Some Ukrainian mobster, just because Jack