‘Will you turn down that television, I can’t hear myself think,‘ Sarah said from behind the hardback she was reading. I pretended not to hear her so she closed  the book with a snap and turned her head in my direction. I could feel the blast of her stare but I held my nerve and concentrated on the action as Jack made a splint for his busted leg out of an old wooden pallet and a piece of oily rope.

 Goes without saying, Jack Bauer was in trouble again. Compromised by a mole at the White House he was trapped in a deserted warehouse somewhere near the docks in what looked like downtown Chicago. Surrounded by a dozen FBI agents who mistakenly believed that he was a traitor, unarmed and with a fractured leg, he looked around desperately for a way out. He had less than twenty minutes to escape and get in touch with the President. If he didn’t warn her in time the entire population of a small African island nation would be wiped out by the rebels.

 Sarah turned back to her book, flicking through it impatiently, searching for her page. She reads a lot lately, sitting with her long legs folded under her in the ‘Land of Leather’ armchair beside the big window and with her back to the alcove that now looks like a section of the local library since her brother Frank Devine had one of his carpenters put in shelving, light oak, from floor to ceiling. 

Sometimes she will sit, book open on her lap, not reading, motionless. At those times it‘s  hard to tell if she is even breathing.                                                                                                                                                     Anyway; Jack had found an old file under a workbench and with that otherwise everyday implement he had killed three of the so-called special agents. Armed now with one their guns and mad as hell he would be particularly dangerous.