A year later, U.S. intelligence services reported that Annihilax had been killed in the course of backing the wrong horse in a bloody insurrection in the Congo. Jack Bauer remained skeptical. Without a body or even a name to identify the master assassin, he believed that the killer was still at large.
The years passed without so much as a whisper or sighting of an Annihilax operation. Those who should know best, top-ranked performers in the killer elite, believed that the prolonged silence proved their hated competitor was retired or dead.
In the interim they’d all picked up murder contracts that would otherwise have gone to Annihilax.
Now, a cryptic fragment intercepted by the National Security Agency had broken that silence. A scrap of communication encoded in a cipher unique to Annihilax had been recently intercepted by the NSA while it was being uploaded to an orbiting communications satellite.
NSA code breakers had never been able to decrypt the code. The fragment now in their possession proved equally immune to their efforts, but its identity as Annihilax’s signature cipher was unquestionable.
The communiqué had been transmitted from somewhere in Los Alamos, New Mexico. That was enough to bring Jack Bauer to the Atomic City.
Now Jack crossed to the front of the room, lifting a fold of the curtain covering the plate-glass window so he could look outside and see who was knocking on his door.
A sad-faced older woman outfitted in the uniform worn by the motel’s room maids stood on the other side of the door, facing it. She was bracketed by a utility cart and a four-wheeled canvas hopper mounted on a tubular frame. The multitray cart was laden with fresh towels, bedding, and the like; the hopper was filled with similar used items of linen collected for cleaning.
Jack studied the newcomer for a long pause. She was a stranger to him. He’d been staying at the motel for the past ten days and hadn’t noticed her among the staffers. And he was a man who noticed things. That was part of his business. The business of staying alive.
She gazed fixedly at the door, hands primly folded in front of her, seemingly unaware of his scrutiny.
Jack let the curtain fall back into place. He reached under a front flap of his denim vest, his hand brushing the butt end of the pistol he wore in a shoulder rig under his left arm. He unfastened the safety strap at the top of the holster and jiggled the gun slightly to free it up to speed his draw if he needed to bring it into action fast. Gun and harness were concealed beneath the vest from casual observers who didn’t know what to look for.
He wore no protective Kevlar vest under his garments. Frankly it was just too damned hot to undergo the discomfort without a compelling and immediate reason.
Maybe that reason was now at hand; he didn’t know. But it was too late to don the vest now.
Jack took a deep breath, letting it out and willing himself to stay loose and relaxed. Tension slows reaction time. He set his face in a masklike expression of bland neutrality. Standing to one side of the door, he unlocked and opened it.
It was like opening the door of a baker’s oven operating at full blast. A wave of hot, dry air burst into the room, the arid heat of a high desert sun nearing its midday zenith on a late August Saturday.
Jack met it without flinching but it took an effort. He could feel the heat sucking the moisture out of him.
The motel was a two-story structure consisting of a long main building with two stubby wings jutting from it at right angles. It fronted south, making an inverted U-shape facing a strip of east-west running roadway. A paved lot stood between it and the roadside.
The ribbon of road was bordered on both sides by gas stations, fast-food joints, a car wash, mini-malls, cheap-jack electronics stores, discount clothing outlets, and the like.
Jack’s room on the ground floor of the motel’s west wing fronted east. A white concrete apron about ten feet wide extended along the building’s base. Its far end was lined by a row of the lodgers’ parked cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks, sunlight glaring off their brightly reflective surfaces. Shimmering heat waves rose off the pavement.
Somewhere out there a couple of FBI agents were watching Jack Bauer.
He was partnered on the investigation by FBI Special Agent Vince Sabito and a