Tony glanced away. “Yeah.”
The woman climbed into the passenger seat, buckled her shoulder strap. Tires squealing, the Explorer pulled away from the curb and raced down Crampton Street.
Slipping a.38 from its holster, Montel Tanner pushed through the broken door. His bodyguards followed, clutching.45s that looked tiny in their huge fists. They immediately heard the sound of something scraping across the floor.
Tanner reached the living room first — and stopped in his tracks.
He saw the wrecked chamber, the broken glass, Erno Tobias tied to a heavy leather chair. The Albino was obviously dead, but the chair was moving, sliding across the blood-slick floor and through the shattered sliding door.
Tanner blinked in shock. “What the f—”
The chair scraped across the balcony’s flagstones, then jammed to a stop against the balcony railing, the pale corpse falling limply over the chair arm. That’s when Tanner saw the nylon rope tied to the chair, the other end dangling over the edge of the balcony.
“He’s climbing down the side of the building!” Tanner shouted. “Get him.”
Tanner’s bodyguards blundered forward, jumping through the shattered frame of the sliding door, while Tanner himself stayed in the living room and hit speed dial on his cell phone.
As the first bodyguard peered over the balcony’s iron railing, Tanner heard a pop and saw the top of the man’s head explode. The big bodyguard fell backward, pitching to the flagstone floor. Tanner clutched the cell to his ear.
“Pick it up, damn it.”
“Yo,” his driver answered at last.
“There’s a guy climbing down the side of the building.
I want him— alive.”
Tanner moved to the railing, carefully looked down. Tobias’s murderer was already past the Caddies parked in the street. He’d crossed all four lanes of Central Park West and was now hopping over a stone fence. A split-second later, he melted into the shadows, escaping into the wooded ex-panse of Manhattan’s largest park.
Too late, Tanner’s men tumbled out of the Caddies below.
“He’s gone into the park!” Tanner shouted into the phone. “Go after him!”
The men drew their weapons and followed Tanner’s orders.
Jack Bauer was outnumbered and outgunned, but that didn’t bother him. During his training as a lieutenant in the Combat Applications Group — a.k.a. Delta Force—
he’d learned night combat tactics from instructors of the Seventy-fifth Army Ranger Battalion, an outfit whose credo was “We own the night.”
Now, Jack moved from shadow to shadow, hearing Sergeant Ryder’s voice in his head. Evade. Encircle. Move in.
Take ’em down.
Behind him, a deserted road ran through this section of Central Park. Jack could hear Montel Tanner’s men blundering along it.
Untrained and undisciplined, they made every mistake in the book. They called out to one another instead of using hand gestures. They clustered under lampposts instead of sticking to the shadows. Two men carried flashlights—
making them easy targets in the darkness.
Crouching between the hollow of two gnarly trees, Jack counted seven pursuers, all armed. One man had long dreadlocks streaming down his back. Another had a jewel-studded eye patch over his left eye and carried an Uzi. For a long time, Jack just watched them while they checked behind the wall he’d hopped, and the trees that clustered there.
Finally, the men fanned out, moving in a loose formation deeper into the park. Within a few minutes, they moved right past Jack’s hiding place without spotting him.
Jack smiled.
As the men continued on, a straggler hung back, gripping his.45 nervously in sweating hands. When he finally passed Jack’s position, Bauer rose up behind him.
One hand covering his victim’s mouth, Jack slid the bayonet between his ribs and deep into the man’s heart.
The man bucked in Jack’s arms, groaned under his hand.
Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he went limp. Silently, Jack lowered the corpse to the grass, then bolted for the shadows under the next line of trees.
“Hey, over there!” someone called.
For a split second, Jack thought he’d been spotted. Then he heard the boom of a.45. In the muzzle flash Jack saw a bearded man, his toothless mouth gaping in surprise.
One gunman with a flashlight moved in, played his beam on the corpse.
“Damn it, Tyrell, you shot some bum!”
The shooter kicked the corpse. “How was I s’posed to know he was some lame-ass homeless dude?”
“The smell, bro.”
The men snickered.
Eye Patch silenced them. “Tanner wants this guy. Keep looking,” he growled, gesturing with his Uzi.
They crossed West Drive, a curved, four-lane road that was closed to traffic at this late hour. Then the group moved into a shallow valley. Here, beyond a path lined with wrought-iron benches, a baseball field was a gray patch in the moonless night. Jack continued to stalk them.
“Where’s Jackson?” Eye Patch demanded when they reached the edge of the ball field.
The others shrugged. “Maybe he got lost in the dark,”
Dreadlocks said.
“Maybe,” the leader replied.
By his tone, Jack could tell the man was wary.
“You two, circle the field and meet me at those rocks over there,” the leader commanded.
The pair crossed the field until they were out of sight.
The other three, including Dreadlocks, headed for a tumble of rocks overlooking the field.
Moving through the shadows like a death-dealing ghost, Jack followed the trio. When they arrived at the boulders, the men discovered a narrow passage with stone steps leading to the top of a low hill. Eye Patch climbed the stairs first, the others watching his back. Then the second man entered the narrow staircase.
Before Dreadlocks could hit the stairs, Jack struck again. Seizing the man’s hair, he yanked his head back and slashed the M9 blade across his throat, cutting so deeply the vocal cords were severed along with the carotid artery.
With a gurgling choke, the man pitched forward, blood spraying the rocks.
Jack hopped over the corpse and dropped to one knee.
He aimed and hurled the bayonet at a second man at the top of the stairs. The blade tumbled end over end and struck his broad back, sinking to the hilt. The man went down, but not quietly.
Eye Patch heard his comrade’s death howl and raced back to the stairs. He loomed over Jack, a dark silhouette against the night.
The Beretta jerked in Jack’s hand; the sound suppressor coughed. The bullet struck the leader in the forehead. The Uzi tumbled from the dead man’s grip, and he rolled down the stone steps.
Jack heard a shot, and a bullet pinged off the rocks beside his head. He grunted as sharp splinters struck his face. Jack crouched low, snatched the Uzi from the ground, and bolted up the stairs.
A second shot rang out, ricocheted off the rocks.
At the top of the steps, Jack found himself at the foot of an ornate, wrought-iron bridge. He heard footsteps gaining on him.
Instead of crossing the bridge — and making himself an easy target — Jack jumped over the railing and dropped twelve feet to the riding path below.
He landed with a grunt, his knee striking a fallen branch. Still clutching the Uzi, Jack rolled onto his back.
Above him, his pursuers ran to the middle of the span, their shoes clomping on the wooden surface.