10:00 AM -- 11:00 AM

Beep beep beep. "24." Kiefer's having a bad day and leans on the pole.

The previouslys. Theo is accused of murder, so Palmer is advised to control the spin on the story by breaking it himself. Lady Mac has other ideas. Kreepy Karl has other other ideas. As far as the structure of this terrorist organization goes, Gaines is merely a project manager. Or so we learn when ForeignAccentedTerrorBoss calls him up to bitch him out for botching the Palmer assassination. Nina's got her own problems with upper management. Kiefer assures the Kieferettes by cell phone that he's coming to save them. Soul Patch finds a lead -- an email from Gaines to the late Jalapeno. Kiefer follows up by hijacking the limo of an investment banker in Burbank named Ted Cofell. Real time. Day of the primaries. Et cetera.

CTU. Alberta Green, the substitute Kiefer, enters the floor of CTU, struts down the aisle between Nina and Soul Patch, pivots, and begins to brief everyone on the status of the Palmer case while she checks out the workstations of her new office bitches. This lady is so bad that she's even got Soul Patch sitting diligently at his desk, looking over his shoulder and doing work. According to SubstituteKiefer, Faux-tographer is now a suspect in the Palmer assassination attempt but is still at large. She wants a report on him within a half an hour. "Still no sign of Kiefer?" she asks Nina coyly. Nina maintains and says no. Soul Patch gives Nina the bad-boss stink-eye. Where have I heard this music before? Oh yeah, the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack. Not really, but almost.

Things are still cool in the Cofell limo with Kiefer at the wheel on their way to the airport, until Cofell's cell phone rings. It's a business associate who needs to meet with Cofell urgently before he leaves town. Cofell tells Kiefer over the intercom that there's been a change of plans; they'll be making a brief stop at a certain parking garage. A parking garage? You mean one of those places where bad things always happen? Why don't you just tell your driver to pick up a shovel and some rope and book a room at the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder clinic now? But then, it's not like Kiefer is listening. He just keeps driving toward the airport. Cofell realizes that something is up. Kiefer is not his real driver, so he orders him to stop the car. Kiefer puts the passenger doors on auto lock and keeps ignoring Cofell. After a half-assed attempt to open the doors by hitting them, Cofell whips out his cell phone and starts to call the police, or whomever it is you call when your limo driver has flipped out. This reminds me of a story about Kathleen Battle, the notorious opera diva. Apparently, she is such an out-of-control bitch that when she wanted the air conditioning turned down, instead of tapping on the glass and telling the driver herself, she picked up the car phone, called her agent, and had him call the limo driver's cell phone and relay her request.

Anyway, Kiefer stops the car and pulls a gun on Cofell, who assumes he's being mugged and offers him money. "Shut up," says Kiefer, getting into the backseat with Cofell, slapping him and making him sit on his hands. You know, if Kiefer loses his job at CTU when this is all over, I know people who'd pay good money to have this sort of thing done to them. Kiefer asks Cofell about Gaines and demands to know where his family is being held. Cofell plays dumb. Or is he playing? "This is your last chance," says Kiefer, the velvety Sutherland whisper sanded down to a soothing but porous white-noise texture. "Where is my family?" Cofell continues to play dumb, but Kiefer isn't diskouraged. He gets back into the driver's seat -- where he always is on some level -- and calls Nina to tell her that he's kidnapped Cofell and to katch up on the latest office gossip, like the fact that Alberta DeVil has made herself at home in the Kiefer Kube. Nina patches them over to a secure line to avoid being discovered by Empress Alberta and -- as she does at a few minutes past the top of every hour -- kwestions Kiefer's sanity and professional wisdom. "I just don't know how much longer I can kover for you," whines Nina, kneading her tired forehead. Kiefer reminds her of the Kaptured Kieferettes and persuades her to slap together an interrogation profile that will break Cofell. Of course Nina needs a full hour to do this properly, but Kiefer needs it in five minutes. I'd make a bawdy remark right now about that last statement, but I'm sure you're all perfectly capable of filling in your own. And frankly I need this profile in five minutes too, because if I wanted to watch government employees working in real real time, I'd be watching C-Span. Kiefer hangs up and drives away. They play the Requiem for a Dream theme again. Incidentally, I always hum music from Requiem for a Dream to myself when I've had too many lattes and I'm cleaning my house as fast as Ellen Burstyn did when she was hopped up on diet pills. My name is Jack Bauer and this is the longest day of my life. Oh yeah? Well, I'm Sarah Goldfarb and I want to be on televisionand your ex-fianc stole my Oscar!

Back at The Stable Of Sensuality, the camera focuses on Spawn of Kiefer reclining languidly with her head in her mother's lap. They don't know if CTU traced the call or not before the cell battery went dead, but Bride of Kiefer feels it's important to remain optimistic. Rick enters, apologizes about the phone, and stares outside through a hole in the wall. Bride thanks him for his help and begins to explain who they were calling, but he cuts her off, telling her that it's better if they don't tell him anything. Apparently Eli sent him into the SoS to gather information, and the less he knows, the better. "What are they going to do to you?" asks StockholmSyndromeSpawn. Rick exits before answering. Spawn looks out through the same hole in the wall that Rick was using and sees Eli beat Rick up for "holding out" on him. No, Eli still hasn't figured out that the man who warned him about touching his "wife and daughter" last week is Spawn's father and Bride's husband. Funny, though, how Eli is beating Rick up in a spot that is perfectly visible from the hole in the SoS wall. Makes you wonder what Rick is really up to, eh? Spawn gets upset that her apologetic kidnapper is getting hurt, and hugs her mommy. Bride makes an ambiguous facial expression.

Back at CTU, Nina furtively looks up some information about Cofell, which she hides just as SubstituteKiefer approaches her desk. Everyone who has ever had an office job in this day and age can relate to what Nina is going through right now with the screen toggle. I myself have hidden many a game of Tetris in a similar fashion. They discuss the discrepancy that Soul Patch discovered earlier between the crashed flight's manifest and its passenger list, and conclude that the real Martin Belkin was the missing passenger in question and that the assassin at the breakfast was a faux-tographer. No one has determined, however, how Faux-tographer got RealMartin's ID. Kiefer calls. Nina answers and tries to pretend for SubstituteKiefer's benefit that the caller is someone from the "bureau." SubstituteKiefer is about to take the call herself since it's someone she's expecting a call from, but Soul Patch saves the day by distracting her with some internet pornI mean, "some information that connects all of this to Eastern Europe." While SubstituteKiefer is out of earshot, Nina tells Kiefer all she could find out about Cofell -- oldest of three children, lost his father while still a boy, passive-aggressive control freak, overachieving entrepreneur with a heart condition. "Just a hunch," says Nina. "But people who are this tightly wound are more frightened by the thought of pain than the actual pain itself." Kiefer thanks her for the info. Nina apologizes for not having "more." They hang up. Kiefer exits the limo. An establishing shot ascertains that they have parked at Thunder Road from the movie Grease. Kiefer rolls up his sleeves, checks his gun, and makes an assortment of other grandstanding tough-guy gestures while Cofell watches him nervously from inside the limo. The time is 10:13:05 AM.

The time is 10:17:29 AM. Klockwise from the top left, Bride and Spawn hold each other tenderly, Cofell holds onto the contents of his bowels, and Empress Alberta holds her head high while consulting with Soul Patch. Kiefer enters the backseat of Cofell's limo and begins the interrogation. Does he know Flee-er from Kiefer? No. Does he know Alan York? No. Does he know anything about the Palmer assassination? No. "Your hands are sweating," says Kiefer. "That's because I long to place them all over your body and bring us both to new heights of pleasure," says Cofell. Oh wait, that wasn't Cofell; that was a bunch of living rooms across America. And that's not sweat on their hands, either. Cofell claims to be sweating because he's nervous about the whole limo-driver-flipping-out-and-interrogating-him-about-a-kidnapping-he-knows-nothing-about thing. Whatever! Kiefer kalls Nina to have her run a background check on Kevin Carroll, the alleged tools salesman that Cofell is meeting at the parking garage. While they wait for Nina's return call, Kiefer removes a towel and a plastic bottle from a compartment. Oh, I know people who pay good money for this too. Role-playing, exotic massage, it's all lucrative. Just put an ad in the classifieds section of the New York Observer and watch your phone ring off the hook. Are you listening, Po Ho? Oh wait, Kiefer is using the towel as an instrument of torture -- and not the "fun" kind of torture, either. He warns Cofell that he's going to "shove the towel down [his] throat" and take out his stomach lining -- something that's done all the time in gulag detention camps. Okay, maybe the New York Observer isn't the best place to advertise this service, but I still maintain that there's a market for it. "What kind of a man are you?" winces Cofell. "I don't want to hurt you," says Kiefer hypnotically and tenderly. "But I will do everything that I have to in order to protect my family." Cofell shows Kiefer a picture in his wallet of his own family -- a wife and two children -- and counters that he has a family too and that he'll do anything to see them again as well. "Believe me," says Cofell, "if I knew something that would help you, I'd tell you." Kiefer makes an ambiguous facial expression. Is Kiefer in a kwandary?

The time is 10:20:59 AM. A Mercedes SUV enters the TerrorKompound. Gaines nervously approaches the TerrorGate to welcome his new guest. Drazen, a.k.a. ForeignAccentedTerrorBoss, asks Gaines if they've found Kiefer yet. Gaines admits that they haven't. "For an American operation, we thought we needed an American crew," says ForeignAccentedTerrorBoss. "Perhaps we undervalued our capabilities." Hey, Drazen? Step off the U.S.A.! Our terrorists are awesome! And way cuter! Nevertheless, FATB announces that he's pulling the plug on Gaines's operation. "You're just going to kwit?" challenges Gaines. Oh, Gaines, don't you know that the whole "winners never kwit, kwitters never win" strategy only works on other Americans? And since Vietnam, not even all that much anymore. Nevertheless, FATB isn't kwitting. He's got a kontingency plan. "You never said anything about a kontingency plan," says Gaines. "It doesn't involve you," says FATB. Okay, FATB? I don't know how things are done in Eastern Europe, but in America, if you want to fire someone, you make damn sure that they no longer have access to you or your stuff once they've gotten their pink slip. What do you think the Weinsteins did after they shut Talk down? Had Tina Brown over for a slumber party? "Hello, is Graydon Carter there? Is your refrigerator running? Bwa ha ha!" People who live in capitalist countries get pissed off when they lose their jobs, and it's never pretty. And it's not like people are more civilized and understanding if the company is outside the law to begin with.

Although there was this one time that I was fired from a television production company that made the TerrorKompound look like a New Paltz food co-op. The owner of the company had this obsession with loyalty, and I had violated his trust by slipping one of the editors a copy of the show she had worked on so she could show it around to prospective employers after she had been fired herself. And it didn't really help that owner guy was, like, 5'2" and the day before I was fired he was trying to reach a VHS tape on a shelf that was beyond his reach, so he asked me to hand him a stool so he could stand on it. Well, I'm 6'3", so instead of handing him the stool -- he also weighed about 300 pounds -- I walked over to the shelf, grabbed the tape myself, and handed it to him. At the time I thought I was being "pro-active," but in retrospect, I guess it wasn't such a great idea. Anyway, I get fired and due to the heavy turnover at this company and the fact that there was no corporate structure in place, it becomes apparent as I'm on my way out the door that they need me to answer a few questions. "Gustave, where is the manual kept for the archiving software?" "Well, since all our software is pirated because we're too cheap to buy it, there never was a manual." "Oh, so how did you learn how to use it?" "Noah taught me." "Who is Noah?" "Some guy who was fired last month for complaining about the fact that all of our software is pirated." I was fired at 9 AM and at 6:30 PM, I left the office, and they still didn't know anything, so they started calling me at home. "Hey, Gustave? What's up?" "Not much, just busy at my new job." "Hey, I feel like an idiot asking this but you know the Digital Beta deck?" "Yup." "I'm hitting the record button but nothing is happening." "Is it on?" "How would I know?" "Is the front part lit up?" "No." "Then it's not on." "Thanks! One more question?" "Yup." "Where is the on/off switch?" "Upper left hand corner." "I'm still not seeing any lights." "Is it plugged in?" "Uh, no." And so it went. For those of you that think it's cold the way that some companies give you an hour to pack up your stuff and hustle you out of there, things could be worse. But for some reason, FATB gives Gaines another chance. He has "thirty minutes" to find Kiefer before he has to complete his final task -- killing the Kieferettes and pulling his men out of the TerrorKompound. Rick just happens to be walking by at that moment and hears them planning to kill Spawn and Bride. FATB pulls out a StarTac and calls someone who he speaks to in some Eastern European language. For all I know he could be arranging to have a Mylar balloon delivered to his assistant on Secretary's Day, but it sure sounds scary.