conspiracy has been at work over the last day, and to my shame I must acknowledge that I did not do enough to bring it to light when the opportunity was presented to me. I ask for your forgiveness and your understanding at this time, and I promise you all that there will be a swift, just and above all, transparent resolution to these difficult hours. Thank you. ”
The room exploded with questions as the assembled reporters clamored to be the first to challenge Taylor’s words. Jack’s eyes narrowed and he turned the radio volume back down, processing what he had heard.
She had kept her word to him, her commitment to exposing the plot to disrupt the Kamistan peace treaty and power games behind it. Perhaps he had been wrong about her.
What happened next in the corridors of the United Nations, the White House, the Kremlin and the IRK Parliament would be the business of statesmen and policy makers. Maybe it would mean nations turning against nations, heightened tensions and daggers drawn … Right now, all that seemed a very distant thing, a long way removed from Jack’s world.
President Taylor’s honesty had rung the death knell for her political career and opened her up to the threat of arrest and incarceration. More than that, any possibility that her administration might have protected Jack and his friends had evaporated. His colleagues at CTU, people like Chloe O’Brien, Arlo Glass, Cole Ortiz and all the others, they too would now find themselves at the sharp end. It angered him that they might face prison sentences for daring to do the right thing in impossible circumstances. He felt powerless to help them, just as he had been powerless to save Renee’s life as she bled out from a sniper’s bullet.
A bleak mood settled on him, a yawning dark hollow opening up in his chest. So many people had been taken from him, so much of his life ripped away in fire and blood. And now, here he was once again, on the edge of an abyss. Forsaken and alone, his liberty measured by the ticks of the clock.
For a moment, Jack allowed himself to wonder what might happen if he were just to open the car door and step out into the street, hands above his head. What would Jack Bauer’s fate be?
Forces of his own nation were hunting him, and so were the agents of his enemies. There was a butcher’s bill with his name on it, and it would be a race between the American government and the covert operatives of the Russian Federation to find him first. Both wanted to make him pay for the laws he had broken and the lives he had ended. Jack knew that neither one would give any quarter when they came to take him. The best he could hope for was life in some nameless prison off the grid; the worst, a bullet in the back of the head and his body dumped in the river.
He rejected the thought. No, he told himself, I made a promise to my daughter. I won’t let her down. I’ll see her again. One last time.
On some level he knew that the smarter choice, the practical and expedient option would be to cut loose and disappear right now, this very second. Jack knew a dozen ways he could become a ghost and rebuild a new life for himself in some other place.
But that felt like a betrayal. Kim was all the family he had left, the last bright star in his life’s dark sky. He thought about never seeing her again, and something inside him twisted like a knife of ice.
Even if nothing else was clear to him, the vow he had made to Kim was unbreakable. His daughter, her husband, Stephen, and Jack’s beautiful grandchild, Teri … All of them were at risk as long as he was still around. He had vanished before, and he would do it again, just drop off the radar and disappear. But first he would keep his promise and say his good-byes. Nobody would be allowed to prevent that. Nobody .
“Hey, pallie!” Jack snapped out of his reverie with a start, the sound of a blaring car horn bringing him back to the moment. He looked up and saw one of the cabbies leaning