Tony bolted past the sobbing woman, kicked open a door. On the other side, Jessica Schneider was still struggling against one assassin. The other lay dead or unconscious in the marble entranceway. Tony grabbed the Asian man by his long black hair, yanked him backward. The assassin lunged. Tony kicked him in the throat. There was a crunch as the Asian’s larynx was crushed. Choking, he fell backward, legs kicking as he gasped for air. Tony ignored the dying man, checked Jessica’s wounds.
The knife was still buried in her shoulder. She gritted herteeth as he sliditout.There wasalot of blood, but no artery had been pierced. The Captain looked up at Tony through glassy eyes. Her face was pale and beaded with sweat, and Tony feared she was going to pass out.
“Stay with me!” he yelled.
Jessica opened her eyes, focused. Then she grinned sheepishly. “Guess I was too much of a Marine, huh?”
“You’ll live. But I’m going to get you to a hospital.”
She waved him off. “Take me to the CTU infirmary. This day isn’t over yet. You still need me.”
Tony offered her a faint smile while he tried to staunch the flow of blood. “Always the cowboy, right Captain?”
“I’m from Texas. It’s in the blood.”
Tony’s eyebrows rose. “So I see.”
Mrs. Hensley appeared in the doorway, her blouse ripped, jeans torn, clutching the jamb for support. She had a nasty bruise on the side of her face; otherwise she was nearly as colorless as Captain Schneider.
From the floor the Captain spoke. “Mrs. Hensley? Are you all right?”
Wide green eyes stared at the female Marine. The stunned woman nodded.
Tony stepped up to Mrs. Hensley. “My name is Tony Almeida. I’m an agent from the Counter Terrorist Unit. Do you have any idea why your ex-husband wants you dead?”
Ryan Chappelle called an emergency video conference with the other regional directors of Counter Terrorist Units across the nation.
“As you can see from the briefing material I’ve sent to all of you, we’ve determined beyond a reasonable doubt that unknown terrorists are targeting six airports in five major urban areas for multiple strikes scheduled to commence in less than two and a half hours.
“From the intelligence we’ve uncovered here in Los Angeles and with our agents in the field, we’ve concluded that the goal of these terrorists is to shoot down a large number of civilian airliners in an effort to bring air commerce to a halt and cripple the nation’s economy.
“Fortunately, we were able to get a digital outline of the plot, down to the smallest detail. That is why I propose we assemble strike teams in each of these cities, place them in strategic locations around each of the airports. When zero hour comes, we’ll be ready…”
“It’s risky,” said Phillip Keenan, RD of CTU, Seattle.
“It’s an opportunity,” countered Chappelle. “With all our tactical elements in place, we have the potential for a perfect storm, a sweep of terrorist suspects larger than any in history. This raid could be a real feather in all of our caps.”
“I met Frank Hensley after he returned from the Gulf War, at a party at UCLA. He was still in the Army, waiting to be discharged. I was majoring in art history; he was working toward his law degree. We got married the following June…Frank was in kind of a hurry.”
Katherine Hensley seemed small and fragile after the attack. As Tony drove back to CTU, she sat next to him in the passenger seat up front. Eyes downcast, the bruises on her face, throat, and breasts livid against her tan, Mrs. Hensley answered questions posed to her in an emotionless monotone.
From the backseat, Captain Schneider strained to hear the woman’s soft voice over the muted road noise. A blanket, bandages, and a painkilling shot from the first aid kit were all the medical care she would accept until they got back to CTU. Jessica was determined to interrogate Katherine Hensley herself. “How was the marriage?”
“When we first met, I thought Frank was the strong, silent type. Too late I found out he was just a man who never talked — never to me, anyway. People…people who knew him before the war…they all said he’d changed.”
“Changed? How?”
“Frank was captured by the Iraqis. He was a prisoner for several weeks. I guess he had a pretty rough time because Frank would never, ever talk about it. When the war ended he served out the rest of his enlistment, then quit the Army.”
Captain Schneider, face pale and shiny with perspiration, fought hard to focus on the woman’s stumbling replies, to ignore the throbbing pain from the stab wound, the dizziness from loss of blood. She leaned forward from the backseat. “You said Frank was in a hurry to get married?”
Mrs. Hensley nodded. “I thought it was because his parents both died while he was a teenager, that he wanted stability in his life. But after he joined the FBI, our lives were anything but stable.”
“The job affected him?”
“Frank took on dangerous assignments. He worked undercover and things between us became…tense. Then I found out he’d been having an affair with a coworker and I filed for divorce. In the end, I think my father was more upset than I was. Dad had helped Frank get into the Bureau, treated him like a son.”
Mrs. Hensley looked up. She met Jessica’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Maybe you should be having this conversation with Frank’s girlfriend. She knows more about my husband’s business than I do.”
Jack leaped from the bottom rung of the fire escape, landed in a narrow space between two buildings. He moved through a smoky haze to the sidewalk. Fire engines blocked Houston Street, hoses curled along the pavement like thick vines.
Jack slipped through the crowd, rejoined Caitlin.
“You did good,” Jack told her.
Caitlin blinked. “I burned the bloody building down’s what I did. I feel terrible about it, too. I was so stupid, so stupid—”
“It was a terrorist safe house. You may have saved hundreds of lives.”
Caitlin slumped down on the curb. “I need a rest.”
Jack leaned against a Village Voice stand. What he needed most right now was a CTU Crime Scene Unit, an “autopsy team” to work with local authorities and gather intelligence from the remains of the terrorist safe house on the sixth floor of the burning building and the shattered missile launchers in the ruined elevator. But the establishment of field offices in some cities was slow in coming, and often resisted by entrenched bureaucracies like the FBI, or local law enforcement agencies concerned with protecting their own turf. New York City was just one political hornets’ nest since its police department had its own counterterrorist team in place. Richard Walsh was lobbying hard to increase CTU’s presence, but change was coming slowly.
Jack’s cell chirped. He listened while Nina told him about CTU’s massive tactical response to the terrorist threat. Jack told Nina what he’d discovered at Wexler Storage.
“They are going to have a tough time hitting the New York airports now. I’ve destroyed the missile launchers stored here and killed most of their operatives. Except for the leaders, Frank Hensley, the Lynch brothers, and Taj Ali Kahlil, the New York cell has been neutralized.”
“We’re not so sure about that, Jack,” said Nina. “A missile launcher got away from us at Green Dragon, LA. It will turn up somewhere. And Omar Bayat has yet to turn up.”
“What have you found out about Felix Tanner?”