Black Hawk Down fanfiction

Gary/Randy, NC-17

Summary: An exfiltration in Tripoli. Follows six months after the events in The One Alone.

~*~

The phone rang in the dead of the night. Gary woke with a sharp intake of breath, reaching quickly for the receiver and tilting it off its cradle before its shrill noise could further break the silence in the room.

He didn’t stir.

Gary turned and looked over his shoulder, saw him laying still, and he knew Gary wasn’t sure whether it had woken him or not.

Gary faced forward and brought the receiver to his ear.

“Hello?” Gary said hoarsely.

At first there was silence, then a voice from the other end.

Gary sat up slowly, pushing the covers off his body. “Hey, Chuck,” he said, traces of confusion in his voice.

A brief torrent began on the other end, the muffled tones of a man’s voice speaking quickly but clearly.

“Sure, yeah, no problem,” Gary said. He then pulled the receiver from his ear and sat looking askance at. He reached over and dropped it in its cradle.

Gary sat, scratching his fingers through his spiked hair, until when he seemed woken enough he let out a breath and stood up. He bent over, and slowly, picked up his discarded jeans and pulled them on. Then he made his way across the room, scooping up items of clothing as he went along.

At the other side of the room, he collapsed into an armchair and began pulling on his socks, boots, and flannel shirt.

He watched as Gary went. Gary’s back, and ass, and thighs, his long calves, the tendons that connected his calves to his feet. Even his toes. He tried to close his eyes. But all he did was watch from under half-closed eyes.

It had been fifteen hours since Gary had called him while he had been down at Fort Bragg. An assignment that Gary had been sent on had been cancelled while the team had still been waiting in a hangar for deployment.

The rest of the team had returned to Bragg, but Gary had called and asked him whether he’d like to come up. He had hopped on a transport even before the line had disconnected.

They had been missing each other for six months. Ever since his return from the Congo. Gary had left on assignment, and then it had been his turn, and when he returned, Gary had come and gone for this assignment which had just cancelled.

Gary stood up from the armchair and stamped his feet in his boots. Then he grabbed his sheepskin jacket off the coffee table and made his way back toward the bed. He bent over, bracing a hand against the headboard.

“Randy,” he said gently. “I gotta go get this. I’ll be back in an hour.”

He opened his eyes and saw what he always saw when he closed his eyes. Dirty blond hair, blue eyes, a crooked nose, a jaw covered in stubble. Gary was smiling down at him. “Don’t act like you’re asleep,” Gary said.

“Is it your mother?” he asked softly.

Gary’s smile broke into a grin. Gary lowered his lips, dropped a kiss on his, but he lifted his head and opened his mouth, and Gary’s tongue had slid out before Gary could stop himself. From one moment to the next it was like being lit on fire. Gary’s hand holding his jacket came up on the bed, pressing the bulky material against his head as Gary trapped his head, held him still.

Their breaths mingled, and time stood still.

Five years, six months, four days, seven hours, and it still felt like the first time. They hadn’t slept in a day. They had turned into one of those couples that made the person in the next room pound their shoe on the wall. And still it hadn’t been enough. It would never be enough.

But they had had fun trying.

He reached up, smoothing the backs of his fingers over Gary’s zipper, pushing slowly into the stiff material. The response was just what he wanted, Gary groaning, releasing his jacket to grip his crotch, trapping his fingers there. Gary pulled back, breaking the kiss and looking down at him. He was letting out soft breaths, concentrating with the effort of forming his words. Instead Gary was pushing into his fingers, over and over.

“I need to get going,” Gary whispered.

“This isn’t what I married you for.”

“I know,” Gary said with a shaking breath. “My priorities are all fucked up.”

Then he snatched up his jacket and backed all the way to the door, holding up a finger. He mouthed, “One hour,” and quickly reached behind him and turned the knob, and within seconds he was gone.

For a while he remained where he was, his breathing slow and deep. When the feeling of falling from a dizzying height had passed, he sat up and went to pour himself a glass of water.

In the view of the motel room’s picture window, year-round snow glowed off the peaks of the Canadian Rockies. Frozen, ethereal and perfect in the moonlight, they rose in the distance to the north like another world, a strange contrast to the ordinary mining town below.

An old, all but forgotten mining town, frozen in time. An ideal location to which to disappear for forty-eight hours.

An unlikely place for a contact to have reached Gary.

Were it Roth, either of their beepers would have sounded. No one else knew they were here.

Whoever it was, they had either asked Gary to call them from a pay phone, or were here to meet Gary in person. If it was the latter, he was definitely going to want to be up when Gary returned.

Gary returned an hour after he had left.

By now, he was sitting at the coffee table, his bare feet up against the edge, dressed in his jeans and shirt. He listened without interrupting at the odd story Gary was recounting.

His caller had been a case officer with the CIA, out of the Middle East section. This man, who called himself Chuck Weaver, had explained to Gary that he was in a bind, and would like Gary to assist him with an exfiltration.

He had stared wordless at Gary while Gary had detailed the mission, trying to hear the holes in the story.

One man, a Libyan scientist and defector, to be removed from the country’s capital city of Tripoli. No mission parameters, a seventy-two hour window once they arrived.

Gary shrugged, shook his head when his eyebrows had gone up.

“It’s what he said,” Gary assured him. “No mission parameters. Whatever we want to accomplish the mission, even if in the end we have to fake a kidnapping to get him out of there.” Gary paused, then said, “He said the CIA would handle whatever came up if that ended up being the situation.”

He tried looking for the hole. Everyone in the intelligence community knew what the CIA was—individual cells pretending to be a whole. Taking any of their officers’ word at face value was absolutely not done.

But they knew that something else, above even that, made no sense. Aside from the simple fact that the CIA had the best extraction teams in the world, the CIA would hamper its own mission than come to Delta operators. The agency looked down on special forces, considering their methods to be loud and about the maximum show of force, when the very nature of a spy agency was secrecy.

And yet, here was the request.

“Did you ask him for the catch?”

Gary gave him a grim smile. It was a Delta habit—unceremoniously dump politeness and ask for the shit bomb up front.

“I did, and he said there was none.”

He ran his thumb along his jaw. “So why us?”

“Which is what I asked him. He didn’t try and jerk me off. He just came out and said they didn’t have anyone he could trust.”

He caught Gary’s eyes. “So the rumours are true.”

Gary nodded. “I think so.”

“So how well do you trust him?”

Gary shrugged. “As well as anyone can trust a CIA agent.”

Which was not much.

“But,” Gary drawled, holding his eyes, “he was the guy who got me the map when I needed to find you in the Congo.”

He involuntarily went still.

“And,” Gary continued, “he’s been my contact at the CIA since my first assignment in Delta.” Gary sat forward. “I can categorically say that he’s never let me down. So, if he was trying to throw someone to the wolves on a bad assignment, he wouldn’t call me.”

That settled the matter as far as he was concerned. Gary’s confidence was enough for him.

“Randy.”

He looked at Gary.

“What I want to know is... Will you come with me?”

He kept looking at Gary.

He didn’t understand it. Why Gary didn’t understand him.

When it came to things physical, sexual, Gary understood him more than he understood himself. It was as if Gary’s body was the magnetic north, and his was a highly sensitized compass needle. It was not something he took lightly. As, like a long-wearied traveler, he sometimes was so grateful for that clear, strong pull, unwavering throughout the years, that he could find no adequate way to express it.

But when it came to his mind, to his thoughts and fears, Gary didn’t seem to have much of a grasp. It was like watching a person with his ears plugged while a quiet, but distinct, orchestral played.

They had fought about everything under the sun. He had hid nothing from Gary, even when he tried to. And yet Gary found it difficult to tell whether or not he had to ask a question like that.

What had been on his mind and he hadn’t wanted to think about, was what he was accepting now. That the events surrounding the Congo, when Gary had responded without thought to self, unit or country when he had been sure of what would happen if Randy entered that jungle, had not been forgotten.

Something had changed between them. He knew it, and Gary knew it.

And that thing, unlike any other argument that they had had, did not go away.

He turned his head toward the phone. “We should get Roth on the line.”

Gary stood up and went for it.

~*~

He pressed up against the wall on his side of the boarded up fifth floor window, and Gary took position on the other side. Both their 9mms were out and the silencers screwed on.

Slowly, he reached over and pried off the thick wooden board covering the window. The metal brads securing it into the concrete wall came off easily, gleaming briefly in the darkness as he lowered the board.

Below and around them, Tripoli lay black and silent, and in the distance towards the south, the vast emptiness of the Sahara weighed heavily on the air. The neighborhood had no electricity, and the darkness seemed to enhance the chilling quiet of a police state.

Nothing moved in the alley below, and at the count of sixty, another minute had passed since he had unboarded the window. He indicated that he was going inside.

Gary nodded once, and he climbed through the window and pressed his back into the shadows, and waited.

After two full minutes, a tiny light flickered at the other side of the room. A door had cracked open and the shape of a stocky man silhouetted was in it.

The man stepped forward and the light flickered brighter, and he could see that the man was holding a candle. He was looking directly at the open window, at which Gary was standing with his arm propped over the opening, looking back at him.

The man smiled and said, “You’re right on time.”

Gary smiled back. “Am I?”

Gary remained where he was. They all knew what was expected, and until all identities were confirmed, Gary wasn’t about to make any assumptions.

“Hernandez,” the man said, placing a hand over his breast. “Technical Services Division. Which one are you?”

Gary gave Hernandez the alias Chuck had provided them. Then he asked the code question—how long they had been there—and Hernandez answered “Four years,” to indicate the number of people who should be in the apartment at that moment, and Gary holstered his weapon and climbed through the window.

When Gary was fully inside, he moved out of the shadows, still remaining by the window.

Hernandez looked over at him, nodding and smiling, seemingly more relieved by the minute. Otherwise he looked tense behind his smile, his skin producing an amount of sweat that was contrary to the cool air of the desert night.

Hernandez then looked over his shoulder and said, “We’re all in the clear. You can come out.”

For a moment nothing happened. Then from behind the door slowly emerged a man, whom from all indications was the man they had come for, Kassim.

And as was typical with such things, Kassim looked nothing out of the ordinary for a man who going to change his and Gary’s lives.

Light eyed, brown skinned, tall and slender, the scientist looked like the typical North African. His demeanor was that of someone well suited to his profession, quiet and reserved, though when he gave a bow it spoke a little of a military bearing.

Kassim extended a hand, propped at the elbow with his other one.

“Thank you for making this effort on my behalf,” he said in perfect, accented English.

“You’re welcome,” Gary replied, and moved forward to shake his hand.

Kassim turned, extending the hand toward him. He stepped forward and shook it, then stepped back to his position by the window.

When Hernandez then spoke up, his words were so startling that Randy thought he had made a joke.

“Kassim has to go back into the city, so you’ll have to excuse him for now.”

In astonishment, he and Gary watched as Kassim gave them a quick smile, bowed again, and headed toward the window.

Gary moved out of the way as Kassim quickly and expertly climbed out of the window, boarded up the space, and was gone.

They both turned back to face Hernandez. The TSD officer had kept his smile in place all through Kassim's departure, but now it slid off his face and he sagged visibly.

“I am so fucking glad you boys are here.”

Gary jerked a thumb over his shoulder and mildly asked, “Where the hell is he going?”

“To see his contact in the city. He does it every night.”

Gary’s face showed disbelief enough for both of them. Gary threw him a quick look to make sure he hadn’t heard wrong, and turned back to Hernandez.

“And you people let him? Even though he just defected from a dictatorship, and there’s a massive manhunt going on for him?”

“He insists.”

He left Gary to talk to Hernandez, and moved back to the window, staring out into the darkness that Kassim had wandered into.

“That’s not the real problem,” Hernandez was saying behind him.

“No?” Gary said. He could almost see Gary’s raised eyebrows.

“The real problem is that I still don’t have an alias for him.”

The room fell silent.

He was starting to believe that Chuck had played a joke on them. The clock had started ticking upon their arrival, and they had seventy-two hours. It took days to put together even a rudimentary alias, one that had to include paperwork and forged documents. He hoped to fuck it was just that they were missing something here.

“I’ve tried everything to reach him,” Hernandez softly went on, as if wanting them to listen carefully to him. He already sounded hoarse. “I’ve talked myself blue in the face, but there’s some part of him he’s keeping locked away from me. It’s preventing me from seeing inside him.”

“Why do you need to see inside him for a disguise?” Gary asked. “Isn’t that the whole point?”

“Not even close. Unless I can see who he really is, I can’t make him a convincing alias. At least not one that anyone will believe.”

The words made very little sense. And then it suddenly dawned on him who this man was. He quickly turned around to get a better look at Hernandez.

There was no way to tell for sure, but this would be exactly who would be needed in a tight situation like this. If you could get him.

This was the man they called the master of disguise in the clandestine world. If Gary’s contact, Chuck, had brought him in to handle this mission, then this could not be a run-of-the-mill engagement.

And if Hernandez was in a sweat days into this mission, then it was going to be far from text book.

Hernandez let out a breath. “I’m sure you gentlemen know how much prep time would be needed, not just for the disguise but for our TSD team to put together the paperwork to support it.”

But Gary had started coming toward the window. He knew to handle first things first.

He was still leaning against the frame of the window, watching to make sure Kassim had not doubled back since he departed, when Gary threw a leg over the sill.

“We’ve already had him tailed,” Hernandez said. “It’s okay!”

“He headed east out of the alley,” he quietly said to Gary. “You're less than two minutes behind him.”

“Thanks,” Gary said.

He grabbed the edge of the window and ducked out, taking the concrete stairs three at a time.

~*~

He got a briefing from Hernandez while Gary was gone: the CIA had readied a team of three agents, including the CIA station chief himself, to work on providing them with anything they would need for the extraction. Once Hernandez had settled on an alias for Kassim, the team would meet them there at the safe house and get his and Gary’s plan for the extraction. The team’s job would then be to provide them with whatever they would need to make it happen.

All great. Except that they weren’t about to make a plan until they understood what the fuck was going on.

He left Hernandez and entered the city while there was still darkness.

~*~

Sunrise the following morning, he, Gary, Hernandez and Kassim stood together in the just-brightening living room, which contained only a long, dusty couch and a busted armchair, waiting for reaction from Hernandez.

Kassim was smiling first at him, then at Gary, and then back at him again, nervous, but genuinely happy. In daylight dark circles could be seen around his eyes, and the pallor of his light-brown skin seemed dull and lifeless. When he wasn’t looking at them he was looking hopefully at Hernandez.

In Hernandez’s hands were a set of worn, yellowing documents, and on his face was a look of pure wonder.

“I know that you’ve been worried for me, for my alias,” Kassim said. “I hope these will help.”

Hernandez said nothing at first, still apparently trying to get past his disbelief. At last he shook his head. “No, this is good, Kassim, this is good.” He finally looked up from the papers, his expression clearly held in check. “Get some sleep, okay? I’ll think about this. You did good. Thank you.”

Kassim nodded. A tremendous amount of strain suddenly seemed to have dropped from over his face, like a man tired of even having to stand upright.

Kassim nodded to him, and Gary, and shuffled into the hallway.

Hernandez had gone back to shuffling the papers in his hands. From where he was standing he saw that the documents included a red passport. He couldn’t tell its nationality, but he could see that it didn’t look new, neither were its pages empty.

“A Russian arms dealer,” Hernandez said in wonder. “Who would have believed it? Can you believe it?”

“Does he speak Russian?” Gary asked.

“Yes.” Hernandez’s head whipped up. “Do you?”

Gary nodded. “Both of us.”

“Okay. Good, good. I’m gone for the time being.”

“Just a moment,” Randy said slowly, and Hernandez turned to look at him. “Send a message to your CIA team. We’d like to see them this afternoon and find out what they’ve got for us.”

Hernandez nodded and left, hurrying into the hallway, towards the bathroom where he had set up his equipment. Moments later, the sound of tinkering floated into the hallway.

Gary was still staring after Hernandez. He had an unperturbed expression on his face, and he knew instantly what Gary was thinking. Because when it came to the mission, Gary’s thinking was flawless.

“A man needing an alias walks into a city, and returns the following morning with almost everything he needs,” Gary mused aloud.

In covert operations, there were no coincidences.

“Kassim is probably taking bait he doesn't even know is there.”

And there was no going forward until the matter was resolved. It was either the scientist let them know who his contact was, or they wouldn’t risk their lives walking blind into a situation.

For the moment, however, it appeared Kassim had gone to bed. So he asked Gary about the tail the night before.

“Nothing happened. We walked for seven miles into a very poor neighborhood. No electricity. He went into a building, not abandoned, and I stayed downstairs and listened to him enter an apartment on the sixth floor. And then I went outside to sit and wait. No one went in after him, and no one came out by the time he came out this morning. It could have been the home of his contact, it could have been a meeting place.”

He sat down on the arm of the dusty armchair and went over the security situation he had observed on his own outing. It wasn’t encouraging. The manhunt for Kassim had permeated every level of the country’s security apparatus, from the top down.

They didn’t know what Kassim did in the Libyan government, and the less they knew the better, but there was going to be just one way to successfully accomplish this extraction. And that was with as few surprises as possible.

Gary rubbed his eyes. “We should get some sleep while we can. After which we have to go talk to him.”

He followed Gary into their makeshift bedroom on the opposite side of the apartment from where Kassim had gone. The room contained a dusty mattress thrown on the floor, and nothing else. The windows were all boarded up, but the bright desert sunlight created a diffused soft-white light that proved quite conducive for sleep.

Though he hadn’t had sleep in mind.

But when he propped himself onto his elbow, he found himself staring down at Gary’s sleeping face. It had been less than two seconds.

He settled back on the mattress and disparaged his luck. He had been looking forward to a mouth-watering taste of something fun. Gary had always been sensitive to their surroundings when it came to doing anything intimate, but he himself couldn’t care less. He closed his eyes and willed himself into a state polar to excitement. Sleep would come.

~*~

Kassim was still asleep when they woke up, so he and Gary reentered the city.

They wore local dress of light cotton pants and shifts, and wrapped their heads in the traditional headdress, disguised as merchants from out of town. Gary hauled sackfuls of cloth to complete the disguise. It hadn’t been difficult procuring these items.

Gary’s Arabic, which three years ago had been rudimentary, was now rolling off his tongue, causing quite a few of their fellow merchants to become quite taken with the fair-headed Egyptian. Blue eyes would have been too memorable for someone of his supposed nationality, and the brown contacts which he wore suited him easily.

Slowly, but surely, which was the only way to do it in a police state, they observed and discovered a myriad of security setups. In many other countries there was a differentiation between local police and secret police. But in Tripoli all was secret police. Even the ones on the streets were aware of the concentric circles of security that had been set up in the manhunt for Kassim, and he couldn’t help but wonder who exactly the scientist was.

Taking Kassim out of the country by the airport was out of the question. It was the fastest and surest way to safety—all they would need was a flight out to Zurich—but even with as good a disguise as Hernandez could probably create, they would be at the mercy of a simple flight delay.

That left them only by road. A Russian arms dealer could get by many checkpoints, as Russians were favored by the dictator for the illegal arms they supplied his embargoed regime, but that, by no means, guaranteed anything.

He was looking at a security outpost as Gary pretended to be listening to the merchant standing in front of them. They were sitting under the merchant’s makeshift awning, smoking from hookahs. Gary was smiling and nodding, keeping the merchant’s eyes on him, while Randy let his own eyes roam the outpost, until he was sure he understood the basic set up of the average one.

When it was getting toward evening, they made their way back to the safe house.

The sun was setting when they got there. They found Kassim on the concrete rooftop.

Hernandez had been in the bathroom when they left the flat, and from the looks of things he had not left since last night. He poked his head out as they passed by only to inform them that the team was on its way.

Kassim was sitting on a broken wooden chair, upholstered in black rubber that showed its foam cushioning through its many gashes. He was staring out at the setting sun on the Mediterranean. Gary went forward while he stayed back, and pulled up a chair next to Kassim, asking if he minded that they join him.

Kassim looked around and shook his head, smiling at him.

There was a double railing around the perimeter of the rooftop and Kassim was leaning his folded arms on the topmost one, looking out at the water. The neighborhood was starting to rest from the day, a quiet, half empty street of concrete buildings lined up and down. Silent, observant men leaned out of the open windows.

It was impossible to tell whether the men were idlers, or whether idling was their function in the police state. But sitting stories above every other building on the street, no one was looking up at them.

Gary sat back in the wooden chair, which hopefully would hold his weight, and trained his easy gaze on Kassim.

Gary didn’t speak for a while, the distant sounds of cars the water the only thing any of them could hear. Then Gary began.

“The CIA team putting your extraction together is coming this evening,” he told Kassim. “So we need to be able to tell them we’re ready to go. But we can’t be ready to go until we know who you’ve been paying all those visits inside the city. Who is this person?”

Kassim kept his lips pressed tight, his eyes in the distance. But inside his eyes Randy could see something. Kassim had the eyes of a man with a very big secret.

And now he kept his eyes on Kassim.

“He is...my partner,” Kassim said, hesitating on the word. “He has been helping me.”

“Yes,” Gary said gently, “but that doesn’t answer the question.”

Kassim threw a frustrated look at Gary. But he said nothing further.

Gary sat forward. He remained that way, tapping his finger on his knee. Then he said, “We have a saying in my line of work. Paranoia is just total awareness without the medication.”

The words sank in with Kassim. Reluctantly, he looked up and smiled at Gary, seeming to appreciate the notion.

“That’s a very useful thing to live by.”

“It is. So while I don’t disbelieve that this person is helping you, we also don’t know what’s happening right now. Are they being followed? Being picked up for interrogation?”

Kassim’s expression tightened on Gary’s words, a sharp inhale catching in his chest. He looked like a man experiencing a lot of pain. Blinking rapidly, he lowered his head and said just as tightly, “He can be trusted.”

Very gently, Gary said, “Even under torture?”

It seemed he could actually see Kassim’s heart pounding. Kassim struggled with whatever thoughts were flooding his mind at that mental image, and after a few moments he seemed to gain control. He raised his head, and with a slightly defiant tilt, asked of Gary, “How well do you trust your partner?”

Gary smiled, shaking his head, and sat back. He’d clearly seen that one coming. “You know that’s not analogous.”

“Why?” Kassim asked pointedly. “Because neither quantities nor variables have been properly defined?”

Gary broke into a grin. “Yeah. My partner takes it as a point of pride to remain an as-yet undefined quantity.”

Kassim, despite himself, seemed to find that very amusing. The scientist shot him a look. He didn’t say anything, and Kassim continued to smile.

Slowly but surely.

Kassim turned back to Gary. “How often do you do this kind of thing in the CIA?”

“We don’t work for CIA.”

That seemed to throw Kassim off.

“Then why are you here?” he asked in surprise.

“We’re doing it as a favor to Chuck.”

That seemed to baffled Kassim even more. He looked from Gary to him, then back to Gary.

“But— So then, who do you work for?”

Gary’s smile broadened. But Gary said nothing.

“You can’t say?”

“I could. But it would be something I made up.”

Kassim blinked. But he was looking at Gary as though seeing him for the first time.

Gary saw the opportunity and took it.

“So you’ll forgive me, Kassim, if I have to ask again. We need to meet this person you’ve been seeing. This person knows of our plans to get you out, and that is a very serious loose end.”

“That’s not a problem, he has always known of the plans. As he’s the one who originated it.”

Gary stopped. “Excuse me?”

“It was his idea that we defect at this stage. We were both originally meant to be exfiltrated.”

Gary looked over and caught his eyes for the first time, alarm in them. This was the mother of all loose ends. He himself was trying not to look as though the bottom had just dropped out of everything.

“So what happened?” Gary asked. “Why isn’t he being exfiltrated?”

Kassim shifted uncomfortably. He hesitated, then said, “Once they saw how much information he had access to, they asked if he could stay.”

“They?”

“The CIA. These new ones who replaced Chuck and his people.”

Gary’s eyebrows went up. “They just changed the plans? That one of you should stay?”

Kassim nodded. He seemed to be avoiding Gary’s eyes.

“But,” Gary prodded slowly, “isn’t it dangerous for him to remain? Especially after you leave?”

Kassim then fell silent.

Randy watched Kassim for a long time. When he finally spoke, he chose his words carefully.

“Who is he?”

And before Kassim gathered himself to firmly, defensively say the words, he knew what this person was to Kassim.

“He is my partner.”

He felt a wide, very unexpected chasm open up before of him.

Gary seemed to be trying to figure out what Kassim meant when he kept defaulting to that word, and much too quickly, comprehension suddenly dawned on him.

Gary’s eyes flew to him. He didn’t meet them.

Gary looked at Kassim’s bowed head. His eyes were shocked, but in a calm voice he asked, “H-how long have you two been togeth— How long have you been doing this? Operating as assets for the CIA?”

Words seemed stuck in Kassim’s throat. He swallowed and said, “Five years for Chuck, three for his predecessor.”

As long as he had been in the Army.

No one said anything more.

And he didn’t think there was anything left to say about the situation for the time being. He pushed away from the wall and headed for the stairs at the side of the building. They led down to the fifth floor landing.

He climbed in through the window and walked into the hallway. Hernandez was still inside the bathroom. He continued down the hallway until he entered their room at the other end. He waited.

Less than a minute later Gary entered the room. Gary reached behind him and shut the door. As he did so they heard the sound of voices coming from the living room. The bathroom door flew open and Hernandez strode out. The CIA team had arrived.

Gary let the door shut behind him without a backward glance. His expression was tightly controlled.

“We can get him out, right?” Gary asked without preamble. “The partner.”

“Of course we can,” he muttered, and before he could add anything else, Gary turned around and yanked open the door, and headed into the living room.

He lowered his head and took a moment.

Something was coming. Something that he didn’t want to face, didn’t want to bring up between him and Gary again so soon, when they had just, six months ago, finished facing up to things he still didn’t like to think about. This issue of expectation, of prerogative.

If he could sit this one out, he gladly would. But, feeling as though he desperately needed to stop time, he pulled open the door and went out to the living room.

Hernandez was standing by the entry to the hallway, and he kept moving until he was standing next to Gary, who was sitting on the window sill on the other side of the room.

Several feet from Gary Kassim was sitting on the broken armchair, his hands clasped tightly between his knees, and across from him, seated in a row on the edge of the long, dusty couch, were three cold-eyed CIA agents.

~*~

continued