What Else Would You Have Me Be?
Chapter 1
Dark spots clouded Alec's vision as he looked away from the screen and felt blindly for the phone.
"Nate?"
His eyelids were more sandpaper than skin, but he tried to read the
time off the corner of the screen through suddenly watering eyes. "What
time is it?"
"Hey, Hardison. Ah. Just past seven. In the
evening," Nate replied dryly, pushing Alec's awareness of his sore back
and empty stomach to the forefront of his attention.
He'd been at it for eleven hours straight, then. That explained a lot.
"I
just got back into town, wanted to check in, see if you'd gotten a
chance to look into the case yet. Do you have enough to call everyone
in tonight?" Nate was obviously trying hard not to press, and wanting
very much to do just that. When Alec didn't respond, he continued. "I
guess it's short notice. That's cool. It'll keep for a few days."
Alec
wished he had a phone like Nana's, heavy plastic and metal that
wouldn't break when he slammed the receiver down into the cradle. He
needed to sleep, he needed time to think. But Nate sounded wired, and his enthusiasm was apparently just contagious enough to push Alec too his feet.
Nothing's changed, everything's fine, we're all the same people we were last month.
"Nah,
man, let's do this," he stood, banishing the exhaustion from his voice,
and glanced again at the computer, doing a quick inventory and
surprising himself. "I've got all the high points and then some. Got
enough that we could do a fair amount of damage from here."
Nate snorted, then paused. "Seriously?"
"Seriously.
I can be there in twenty to set up." Rolling his shoulders, he caught
sight of himself in the hallway mirror and wondered it was such a good
idea.
But if he didn't go, all today's work would've been for
nothing, and nothing would change. He needed a shower first, though.
"Make that half an hour," he amended. "And order in some Chinese."
---
Alec
kept his head down as he plugged his computer in and brought up the
relevant files. Over on the couch, Sophie was cooing over something
small and shiny that Parker was showing her. Eliot was in the kitchen,
examining the takeout with a suspicious glare and evidently deciding
against it. Nate waited for Alec's nod, and began.
"Alright, so
I know it's been a few weeks, and I'm sure you're all a bit rusty."
Sophie looked back balefully and handed what looked to be the Dresden
Green diamond back to Parker. "But I'm sure you'll all rise to the
occasion for this bastard."
Absently wondering if he needed to go
look for recent gaps in the Smithsonian's, Alec brought up the first
batch of files, and four pictures of the same man appeared across the
screens.
He was fifty-two years old and probably hadn't stopped
scowling for thirty of them. Heavy-set and clean-shaven, he kept his
graying hair in a short military style that Eliot probably would've
thought distinctive before not explaining why. The frown alone would've been enough to make anyone want to take the guy out.
"Who's he?" Parker cocked her head, frowning back at him, and finally, it was Alec's turn to be on. Never mind the fact that Eliot was barely watching from the kitchen.
"Sheriff
John Arlington, of Maricopa County, Arizona," Alec began, keeping his
eyes the screen. "He's got the reputation as being the most badass
sheriff in the country. Among countless other cases of being the most
evil bastard in the state, he heads up the county jail. Now. Keep in
mind, I said jail."
He clicked ahead to the next series of images, all of the main building, he went on. "He doesn't just run the jail like a prison, he runs it like a prison in a country that also happens to be a third world fascist dictatorship." He clicked to the next slide, this time, an aerial shot of the grounds.
"Alright," Nate squinted, asking the question for the benefit of the others. "What're we looking at, here?"
"An entire city of 'em, patrolled from the outside by armed guards. Oh, and I should mention again, it's part of the jail."
He pointed out the roof of main building again. "If Gitmo is the
Hilton, this is the dodgy motor lodge out back behind the boarded-up
truck stop. See here, they've got tents set up, and all this
surrounding it is razor wire, and if you look close, here and here," he pointed, "Those are the security patrols around the outside."
Eliot seemed to be paying attention now, watching through his hair as he poured himself some coffee. Alec continued.
"Now,
the most dangerous inmates are kept in the building itself, higher
security and all that, but they're getting off easily. Most of the
inmates are housed in the tents in an area where temperatures range from
about a hundred and ten in the summer to forty in winter. When they're
not out working the chain gangs- which I did not know still existed-
they're regularly and deliberately humiliated as part of their
rehabilitation."
"I don't think their philosophy goes in for
rehabilitation," Nate corrected him. "They're a bit more into the
punishment side of things."
"And that's fair enough. But it's a
jail, not a prison, and this is where I point out that about a third of
the inmates have yet to be convicted. Of anything"
"It looks like a concentration camp," Sophie gasped, shaking her head in disbelief. "Is that legal?"
"The
court's still out on that- literally," Alec said, clicking ahead. "And
Arlington's got enough lawyers and judges in his pocket to keep it that
way for the next five centuries or so. But human rights violations are
not why we're going after him, at least not directly."
He waved
his hand at the next few slides, bringing up file names of various court
actions. "He's under investigation for everything under the sun.
Misuse of funds, abuse of prisoners, dodgy campaign donations, all sorts
of fun. There are a ton of lawsuits pending against the guy, but he's
still in office until the next election, and that's two years away. In
the meantime, he's using some of his misappropriated funds- which so far
could be as high as twelve million over the past ten years- to
investigate political rivals," he gestured to Nate, handing him the
floor as he clicked to a booking photo. "Which brings us to our
client."
"Ah, yeah. Jeanine Santiago has been a model employee
in the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department for fifteen years now, but
she made one mistake," Nate began, taking over the briefing. "She
decided to run for Sheriff."
Out of the corner of his eye, Alec
watched Eliot finally sit down next to Sophie, looking skeptical.
"Nate, man. Rigging elections? You sure this is our sort of thing?"
"They are when someone's being framed for a crime she didn't commit, by people who have access to manipulate all the evidence."
"What
are they saying she did, and what do we have that can fix it?" Sophie
leaned forward to better examine Santiago's picture. "And for that
matter, how did you find her?"
"I met yesterday with a woman
named Sally Branson, who's been writing a truly astounding number of
letters on Santiago's behalf, trying to clear her name. Arlington's
lawyers have it sewn up that she won't be able to testify during the
trial, though, and most of the mainstream press down there doesn't want
to hear from her. Anyhow, ah. I'm getting ahead of myself." He sipped
his drink and cleared his throat.
"Back in April, Branson was
still finishing her sentence when there was a riot in the main building.
Two inmates died, one from being crushed up against a wall in the main
building, and one out in the camp, who was stabbed. I'm guessing you
can see where this is going. Branson swears that Santiago had pulled
the knife out so she could do something about the bleeding, trying to
keep pressure on until the medics arrived, but…"
"Arlington and his cronies are saying she
stabbed him," Parker finished. The gleam in her eye was creepily
joyous enough that Alec was taken aback. They hadn't talked much since
she'd explained that she'd lost her taste for pretzels before taking off
on an inter-state burglary spree two weeks back. Alec had thought for a
while, now, that maybe it had been for the best, but now he was
starting to believe it. He wished she'd stop making stabbing motions so
happily.
Eliot cut his disgusted glare from Parker back to
Nate, and Alec stopped holding his breath when it remained focused, when
it didn't shift his way. "How do you want to hit Arlington?"
Eliot
hadn't actually looked at him head on all night, and Alec wished he
wasn't feeling so relieved about it. But Nate, at least, was carrying
on like just a few weeks hadn't changed everything.
"Well,
he's bold, and won't back down when challenged. He's confident and has
a lot of allies, especially in the right-wing camps. But it's politics,
and he knows it. He'll have a healthy suspicious streak. It'll take a
longer con, and obviously, he's not going to be winning any more
elections when we're through with him, but no. That's not enough. I
want him behind bars when we're done with him. Best way to do that is
to rope him in, run him for a while, and make sure he's caught out with
his pants down so egregiously that even his most die hard supporters
would slam the door in his face."
"So how to we do that?"
Nate looked startled at the question, and blinked. "I'm thinking, we need a dead priest."
---
It
was nearly midnight when the meeting breaking up. Alec had been doing a
fairly good job of playing cool, but Sophie had figured out that
something was definitely up. She'd held out longer than he would've
guessed, though, but she'd merely been biding her time.
Waiting
until the others were heading back into the kitchen gathering their
things and dumping dirty dishes in the sink, she stepped close,
ostensibly to hand back the printouts he'd made of the arrest reports.
"Did you sleep at all?" She smiled gently, almost apologetically. "I mean. Not that you're normally, well, you know, light on content, but this." Her smile found a bit more humor. "Nate said he only talked to Miss Branson last night."
"What
can I say?" Alec shrugged. As long as he didn't grimace or grin, he
wasn't admitting to anything. "I was on a roll. Lost track of time."
"Yes, well. There are rolls, and there are rolls."
Glancing up to make sure the others sere still busy in the kitchen,
she leaned in, her eyes darting in Parker's direction as she crossed
towards the door. "I know that things have been… off, lately, and
tonight's just proved that it'll take some time to find our feet again.
But if something's bothering you, you can tell me. You know that, right?"
"Yeah,
I know," Alec assured her, having absolutely no intention of taking her
up on her offer. It wasn't that she was the last person he trusted to
hear it. It was that she was probably the only one he did trust, this week, and he still remembered their first office. He knew how well trusting Sophie went.
He slid the laptop into his shoulder bag and grinned. "It's cool. I just wasn't in the mood for video games, I guess."
He wasn't lying. Not entirely.
---
There
were still several hours before Nate was due to check in to fill him in
on how the client meeting went, and Alec had nothing to do until he had
the first details. Armed with a bottle of soda and a bag of popcorn,
he logged in to Warcraft.
He was only five or ten minutes in when
the heuristic crawlers he had running on JARVIS suddenly sent up four
red flags and bounced them to his phone. Switching over to the other
computer, they looked like the results of a glitch.
But he'd learned to be paranoid enough to do his job, and he dug for a while. Eventually, he found the source of the warning.
Four
domestic flights to Boston had been booked on four different airlines,
all within the past half hour. Four identities with clean criminal
histories, none of which had any addresses or other information dating
back more than five years. Shallow credit histories on each of the four
names, and no connection between the four that he could find.
Individually,
the identities were brilliant, even perfect. Taken as a whole, though,
they were obviously a batch job, done by someone who didn't have half
the skills that Alec himself had. He went through the usual sources and
databanks, and after less than fifteen minutes, he found proof.
They
were not nearly as perfect as they'd looked a moment ago. All four of
them were based off birth certificates of children who'd died before
they'd reached a week old.
After double and triple checking, it
didn't take long to tie the names to outstanding felony warrants in
three states and two extradition countries, but that wasn't the point.
The
point was that they'd all used the same identity clearinghouse. The
same clearinghouse Moreau's European business partners tended to use.
And there had to be a reason for that.
For three hours, he went
over every job they'd done in the past year, every single near-lead
they'd had on Moreau that hadn't panned out, every move they'd made,
meant to make, and everything he could randomly guess at, and still, he
came up with nothing.
None of it was making any sense at all,
until he went back to the original data, and realized that it had been
staring him in the face the entire time. He went back to the birth
certificates, and he found it. Bethesda General Hospital, in Washington
DC.
He'd been trying not to think about DC for weeks, now, and apparently that had been a mistake.
DC had been insane.
Eliot
had worked for Moreau. Hadn't told anyone until he'd been so far
caught out that he hadn't had a choice. And as much as Alec understood
that he'd been trying to protect the team, that he'd thought he'd been
doing his job…
If it hadn't been for the fact that he'd noticed
the steady stream of small bubbles coming out from the chair's support,
if he hadn't managed to swivel around and get a decent seal on the gap,
he would have drowned.
In retrospect, it was easy to predict
what Moreau's most obvious choice for attack would have been. Alec had
been cuffed to a chair, with wheels, on the edge of the deep end of the
pool. It didn't take a genius to figure it out. But he'd been
distracted by the guns. By the time the kick came, he'd been too
startled to take a deep breath before hitting the water.
He hadn't seen it coming, because he'd been with Eliot. And Eliot was good at his job. Alec had trusted him.
Afterwards,
in the park, he'd decided to move on, to forget about the panic that
had set in when he was in the water. By the time he'd been dry again
he'd even managed to acknowledge that Eliot's reasoning had been sound,
given the circumstances. They'd had bigger fish to fry, anyhow.
The
next day, they'd faked a man's death, gotten the details on the
location of the world's largest EMP bomb, and discovered that they'd
been screwed, it wasn't where Moreau had said it would be. The
warehouse had been empty
It had taken some doing, but Alec had
managed to get a fix on the location. He'd wound up deactivating the
bomb. On a train. After jumping onto the train from a bridge.
That part was still fairly awesome, in retrospect.
Eliot
and Nate had nearly taken out Moreau before he'd slipped away, and by
the time he arrived with Sophie and Parker to find a recently rescued
double agent being loaded into the ambulance, he'd been exhausted.
They'd been on a flight to San Lorenzo thirty-six hours later. And
they'd finished the job.
When it had been all said and done,
he'd run his usual cleanup, checking police logs and security reports to
make sure their activity hadn't been recorded, or that some detective
somewhere wasn't nosing around their jobs, and he'd found nothing he
hadn't been expecting. When Nate gave him the list of buildings that
needed their security footage erased, he'd found nothing unusual.
It
didn't matter that it only took three hours in front of his computer to
stop the four strangers coming their way. What mattered was that he
had to do it in the first place. Because he'd missed something.
After
going over all his files two more times, Alec decided to look again in
the morning with fresh eyes. His brain, though, wouldn't power down
enough to sleep for more than half an hour at a time.
At some
point, far too early in the morning to even be thinking about standing,
he dragged himself out of bed. Pouring himself some coffee, he sat down
in front of his computer and, out of habit, opened his news feeds. He
wasn't really reading them when the idea hit him.
He headed over
to the Washington Post's website, entered the date range, and began
browsing through sports scores, news, accidents, and incidents. Nothing
unusual, nothing out of the ordinary.
He almost missed it.
Barely two paragraphs long, and buried in the news briefs. South side.
Warehouse. Improperly stored had ignited and burned the warehouse to
the ground, despite having cleared a safety inspection just four days
prior. No injuries. No leads. No suspicion of arson.
With a
knot coiling in his gut, Alec pulled up the text messages from JARVIS's
auto-compiler and found what he'd been missing. The auction location's
address matched the warehouse in the article.
Nate and Eliot, they'd been there.
Something much bigger than finding it empty had gone down.
And they were keeping secrets.
It
was almost a relief when Nate's call came, just after eight in the
morning. He'd found a new client, and there was a hell of a lot of
research that needed to be done before the team could be briefed.
The
distraction was what Alec needed. He was too angry to think clearly,
too furious to sleep, and a dirty sheriff in Arizona was as good a
scapegoat as anyone.
And if this was going to be his last job with the team, Alec wasn't going to half-ass it.