Read 24: Deadline (24 Series) for Free Online Page A

that concerned Jack. It was keeping his mind focused. Fatigue was acidic, and it ate away at judgment and clarity. If he didn’t watch himself, Jack could be in danger of making the wrong choices at the wrong moment, and that would get him killed. It wasn’t enough for Jack to just react to the events unfolding around him. He needed to become proactive. He needed a plan.
    He couldn’t rely on Chloe or CTU; he couldn’t go back to the well with his old resources like Jim Ricker and his former CIA contacts. Everyone who might have been willing to help him was either being watched, shut down, under arrest or dead. He was alone, with no backup, no hardware and nowhere to go. He glanced up briefly, imagining a great noose tightening around him. He shook off the grim image and moved on.
    Jack took a deep breath and crossed over the avenue toward the corner of West Twenty-Third Street, moving with the other pedestrians at a steady, unhurried pace. Ahead of him, he caught sight of the Hotel Chelsea’s familiar frontage, the redbrick and black iron balconies of the old Victorian Gothic building ranging up toward the darkening sky. He liked the place; it had been Kim’s husband who arranged an apartment for him there, calling in a favor with a relative to get him somewhere to live while he was in town. A New York landmark since the nineteenth century, the Chelsea had been home to a laundry list of famous creatives—actors and musicians, writers and painters. His namesake Jack Kerouac had written On the Road there, and he remembered the first time he had entered the building, feeling something of the history soaked into the walls. It was a million miles away from the places where Jack Bauer had lived his life, the places he had called home.
    The police cruiser parked across the street from the Chelsea’s front entrance was clearly visible from a good distance away, and he could make out two cops in the front seat, talking animatedly, occasionally scanning their surroundings for some sign of him. Jack walked on, shifting his course to pass by the doors to the lobby. He angled his head to see if there was a second watcher inside, but saw nothing. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to risk anything as foolish as walking in the front.
    A few hundred yards away there was a plain glass door that led into a stack of offices squeezed in between a pair of restaurants, and he slipped into it and out of the line of sight. Throwing a quick look over his shoulder, Jack broke into a jog and threaded down a narrow corridor until he came to a window that opened out onto a courtyard in the center of the block. The first day he had arrived at the Hotel Chelsea, force of habit had taken him out the back of the building to scout for alternative methods of access, and the window was part of a route Jack had plotted in his mind’s eye. In his experience, it was always better to have an escape plan and not need it than to need an escape plan and not have it.
    Being a building of historic note meant that the Chelsea retained a lot of 1940’s era window fittings, making its security easy for Jack to defeat. In a few moments, he gained access to a service room on the second floor and from there he took the back stairs, pausing at each landing to make sure he wasn’t being followed.
    The apartment door was crosshatched with strips of yellow hazard tape shot through with text that warned POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS . Carefully, he ducked low to avoid disturbing them and unlocked the door as silently as he could.
    He caught the telltale smell of chemicals inside the entrance hall, the residue of fingerprint aerosols and luminol spray for blood detection. There were black marks around light switches and on surfaces where an evidence team had pulled prints from just about everything. In the apartment proper, it looked as if a careful tornado had moved though the rooms. Every cupboard was ajar, every drawer hanging open like a slack mouth. Jack saw his