During Day 3, without the knowledge of their superiors or the rest of the government apparatus, Jack Bauer, Tony Almeida and Gael Ortega began an operation to recover the Cordilla virus from the hands of terrorists. The ultimate objective of the operation was to get Jack Bauer to buy the trust of Ramon and Hector Salazar's crime syndicate, so that he could go undercover with them and intercept the virus from bioterrorist and broker Michael Amador. The operation ultimately failed as Amador's auction was a fake, but it did give Jack and the CTU an extremely valuable head start in neutralizing Stephen Saunders's (the true purchaser from Amador) campaign with the virus.