Cordilla virus attacks

On the morning of Day 3, former MI6 agent Stephen Saunders orchestrated a series of biological attacks in cities across the United States of America.

Saunders, a vengeful British soldier abandoned by the U.S. after a failed joint mission in Kosovo, purchased the Cordilla virus from a group of Ukrainian scientists, and dispatched couriers with vials of the virus to no fewer than nine major American cities, including Los Angeles, California; New York, New York; and Las Vegas, Nevada. He used the threat of a nationwide epidemic to enact a series of demands of President David Palmer, which were intended to force the United States to retreat within its own borders and "make America clean again."

Of the cities targeted, Los Angeles was the hardest hit; one vial of the virus was released in the Chandler Plaza Hotel in the city's Downtown area, as a demonstration of its potential for destruction. An escaped guest resulted in a wave of transmission across the city, resulting in a major citywide outbreak that was barely contained by the agents of National Health Services and CTU Los Angeles. Additionally, in the course of evading capture, Saunders also orchestrated a helicopter attack on the local MI6 office, and the government-sanctioned assassination of a high-ranking CTU administrator before he was finally captured.

Origin and motivation

 * See also: Operation Nightfall

Saunders' motivation for the attack stemmed from a highly covert mission by the United States Army's Special Forces, Operation Nightfall, in which Saunders took part while on loan from the United Kingdom's MI6. Sanctioned by then-Senator David Palmer, organized by NSA operative Robert Ellis, and commanded by Captain Jack Bauer, Nightfall's objective was the assassination of Victor Drazen, Slobodan Milošević's secret police chief, responsible for numerous campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Unknown to the team at the time, elements within the Central Intelligence Agency had set the mission up to fail, planning to capture Drazen alive and use him as a source of information while convincing the world that he was dead.

The mission ended with a missile strike on Drazen's base of operations, by which time the entire team had been killed except for Bauer himself. It was believed that Saunders had been killed with the others, but in truth he had been captured by Serbian security forces. For the next two years, they tortured him for information, until finally he was released or managed to escape. The ordeal left Saunders with a deep-seated hatred for the United States, which he blamed for abandoning him. He stated that his ultimate goal was to dismantle the American "military machine that exports its ugliness across the globe," to force the country to retreat within its own borders and cease its intervention in the affairs of other nations.

Early stages
Interpol discovered records of numerous meetings between Saunders and high-profile suspects during the four years between his release from prison and the attacks themselves. These included Sayid Kolobe, a major arms dealer based in the Middle East, and Ari Consul, a biologist from Jakarta, Indonesia serving a life sentence for the manufacture of biological weapons. It was presumably through one of these contacts that he learned of the existence of the Cordilla virus, a type-3 immuno-pulmonary virus engineered by a group of Ukrainian scientists. Saunders purchased the virus for twenty million dollars through the group's chief representative, Michael Amador. In addition, Saunders arranged the theft of twelve of the former Soviet Union's gas dispersal devices from a warehouse in the Ukraine, which he modified to release vials of the virus over a square mile radius.

To fund his operation, Saunders exploited his relationship with Diana White, who ran an escort service in Los Angeles catering to businessmen and diplomats. The two of them blackmailed these prominent officials in exchange for silence about their indiscretions.

CTU string operation

 * Main article: Cordilla virus sting operation

Initially unknown to Saunders, Michael Amador had offered up the Cordilla virus on the black market, attracting offers from various terrorist organizations and rogue states including al-Qaeda and North Korea. While Amador's plan was to con the selected buyer out of several million dollars, it was this plan that initially alerted CTU Los Angeles to the virus's existence. Agents Jack Bauer, Tony Almeida, and Gael Ortega organized a complex sting operation to obtain the virus before it could be sold to any of America's enemies.

The plan, executed over the course of the afternoon and night on Day 3, depended on placing Jack Bauer back undercover with Hector Salazar, a Mexican heroin kingpin whose brother, Ramon, had been arrested following Jack's initial cover assignment. To accomplish this, Bauer staged a prison riot to free Ramon from custody and transported him to Las Nieves, Mexico, where the sale of the virus was due to take place. While the operation was complicated by the arrival of a second interested party, represented by Nina Myers, it was ultimately revealed that Amador had no intention of selling the virus to either Myers or the Salazars, and he managed to escape from the Delta Force unit assigned to apprehend them. With more than two hundred million dollars from the auction in hand, Amador boarded a plane back to Los Angeles, where he had arranged to complete the sale of the Cordilla virus to its actual buyer: Stephen Saunders.