I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country
Nathan Hale
Penn Station, Midtown Manhattan
It started as just another ordinary day for the Penn station as the diverse population walks around like tides in an ocean. All the voices talking and various electronic devices going off with music players and phones in their hands.
"Where the fuck is he?" Silas Odin coarsely curses to himself while waiting on a bench at the center. He loathed being here. The sounds, the noises, they were so annoying. He liked being around, and talking with, people, but not like this. Now he wanted to tear out his ear drums and smash them on the ground just so he wouldn't have to hear the vexation ruckus that this hoard of oaf and imbeciles consistently make. "He better get here soon, I'm dying here."
A sudden quiver in his pocket alerts him to the phone getting a text message and it says: we need to talk. That gave Silas the perfect excuse to leave the den of noise and finally get some quiet in one of the more silent quarters.
"Where are you Jack?" Silas questioned his colleague over the phone. "You were-supposed to-be here hours ago?"
Jack was coming from Virginia—Richmond to be more precise—to meet up with Silas and discuss the situation happening in D.C. only things must have undergone a metamorphoses for the worse seeing as how he's late.
"Silas, I'm blown!"
Oh fuck, Silas thought as he heard those words bounce back to him. "Please tell me you didn't go supple on them and sell me down the river."
Jack on the other side of this talk sounded in pain. For all Silas knew whoever found out could be preparing to erect him on a gibbet or make him into another Nathan Hale and leave him swinging on a tree.
"Conrad stopped me before I could get on my flight. They know there's a naked mole in their midst and they tried pushing me for information. I think he's following me and sent someone to look for you. You need to get the hell out of dodge." then the line cuts-off.
Silas had no way to know what was going to happen.
No one comprehended what was occurring next as a backpack left in the Manhattan subway station was suddenly making the sound of spraying air, releasing something sinister into the oxygen of the air.
Men and women alike were collapsing on the ground spasmodically as they slowly start to foam at the mouth and nose while vainly struggle and gasp for a breath of fresh air. It was a horrid sight. These people were the father, mother, son, daughter, brother, or sister to someone out there and their lives were being snuffed-out slowly and cruelly.
Silas overhears the shrill as screams and screeches echo through the hall, as he stood looking over his phone with a confused expression that quickly turned to horror as he rushed to find the source of the noise. He came upon the fringes to the sight of the massacre, as the victims had ceased their ungainly movements and remained lifelessly still on the cold hard ground.
If Silas had not been so far away from the scene and taken so long to get there, he too would have joined them in this mass of corpses that reminded him of the victims to the Black Death, only no children would be inspired to make up some catchy tune to sing and dance around with.
It may have been a strange coincidence of luck, but he certainly doesn't feel lucky.
Behavior Analysis Unit Headquarters
Quantico Virginia
Two Weeks Later
It was a little after eight in the morning when Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Hotchner was working at his desk dealing with a heap of paper work left for him.
For the last few weeks he's been put through nine kinds of a paper Hell with the changes in the bureau since a series of piecemeal terrorist attacks that have happened. It was not like he was the only one who did. Morgan, Reid, J.J., Prentiss do the same but he always feels like he gets the bulk of a paper horde. Aaron would prefer being home with Jack or spending time with his girlfriend, but he was a FBI agent and this is the life he chose so he would just have to lay in the bed he's made.
David Rossi was soon joining him in the compact office to talk about a recent case file Garcia was showing him. Nuzzling in the chair across the desk, Rossi asks "Have you read this yet?"
"Yes I have, Rossi." Hotchner gives his colleague the professional candid stare and sullen personality he always uses during work. "I've read it again and again, and again. DCO wants our help on this one and it's become priority number one for most of the Bureau. We don't have much of a choice David."
It's not going on the job that has the Italian-American warily of touching this perilous case; it was the Patriots that have David Rossi so reproached, Aaron knew that without question. They were a terrorist organization behind incidents of bombings and nerve gas release. And that was just the icing on the cake. What's promised to come can only be worse.
"Why does Martin need us there?" David protests more curious about why the Deep Cover Operations wants their help, "He already has a Counter-terrorism team helping him with half-a-dozen agents and other agencies clawing at the case."
"Getting cold feet?" Aaron asks with the hint of a friendly caricature. David nods his head "No, of course not." He says with a rueful smile. Touching the black hair around his mouth, David was starting to change back to a more relaxed posture in the chair. "Martin Templar's just never been the easiest one to work with."
"Truer words were never spoken."
Templar, the leader to the FBI's division of assets inserted within foreign or domestic criminal organizations, had worked with both Hotchner and Rossi in the past and they both found him cooperative but only when it doesn't compromise one of his people. The last few times he nearly got Rossi killed when one of his people turned out to-be a double agent.
"But David, there may be an imminent attack on U.S. soil again; this can not keep happening—even if it means working with Templar. This is of the most urgency."
Nodding his head in agreement, David says "I understand. I do not like, but I understand."
Emily Prentiss was ascending to their level as they were having this idle chitchat. Her head was ringing like a bell while composing herself in the elevator and only J.J., her best friend, for company in the square compact space.
"Oh my head is killing me." Emily complains.
"I told you not to drink so many shots," J.J. reminds of the admonishment the night before while watching Emily rub her throbbing head in an endless motion. "Tequila never bodes well with you. Remember Vegas?"
"Don't remind me."
J.J. held off her need to make chortles. Even the slightest snigger gave Prentiss an overwhelming tremor of a headache. For her to laugh now would give birth to one equal to an erupting volcano. The medication taken for the headache was still delayed but it would work soon—it had to or Emily would suffer hell on earth from the many sounds in the office.
It was a miracle she was not lurching.
When Jennifer and Derek found last night, practically trying to drown her own sorrows, the gradual amount of alcohol she had consumed could have possibly been enough to expand her girth if the drinks had been junk food or energy drinks.
"Is this going to-be a recurring thing with you?" J.J. continues to grow more concerned with Emily's continued loneliness in the wake of her turning down the Interpol offer in England. "Cause this is not a healthy way to end your nights."
"I know, I know." Emily responds half-dazed unperturbed. She had thought the idea that she may never find that one special person was growing on her and was getting used to it, yet it never stopped her in the night clubs from trying. "I didn't plan on it."
Finally the elevator door opens. The two women had reached their floor. Employees were tracking around the large office area lugging papers and files to-be signed in a system or rapid movement in cohesion like a well oiled machine. Agents were the only people sitting down—they're the poor bastards who have to sign all those papers. Emily and J.J. both see Derek Morgan and Spencer Reid had already arrived, sitting at their desks that have a lower view to Aaron and David's separate offices like a favelas do a towering corporate building.
"You look terrible." Derek said frankly as he and the boy genius see Emily as she and J.J. walk up looking like crap. Emily makes a face combined of insulted and slightly annoyed. "Not to sound mean or anything, but you look like they just brought you back from a dungeon."
"And yet somehow he has a girlfriend." Emily looks over at J.J. with her sarcastic words.
Derek would have apologized but Prentiss stops him. Showing that there were no hard feelings she takes a seat before Garcia calls them all to the round table of the conference room.
"Hello my lovelies; hope you're ready for America's Rome." Garcia stated with her usual quirky attitude.
"We're going to D.C.?" J.J. asked and Emily craned her head over a file she was given. She answers the question herself. "We're going after the patriots?"
"Indeed." Rossi curtly confirmed it, not attempting to sheath his own contempt for it. Emily could understand the feeling though. Her knowledge was vaguer, but she had heard of the accentuated Patriots—or the True Patriots as they referred to themselves—through some of the agents in the DCO she was friends with Emily knew of their activities in the States.
They've claimed responsibility for VX attacks in Los Angeles and recently in Manhattan with some bombings in Texas. There was also a dead undercover, Jack Griffin, found close by in their neighbor of Richmond. These people knew no boundaries; they transcend any notions of good or evil.
"With two terrorist attacks and one of our own dead, their just now calling us in?" Morgan asks, expecting this aggravating incompetence from small-town police forces but not from the FBI who are supposed to know what their doing. Their agency is supposed to be more effective than this and instead they were acting just as bad. "We have officially hit rock bottom."
"Not the complete bottom—yet." Aaron spoke up. "They were hoping to capture the Unsub to prevent further attacks but now they've grown concerned there's a leak and they want everyone and every resource available to help stop this next terrorist attack before it ends like Los Angeles or Penn Station."
"How do they know there's going to-be another attack?" Derek looks over to ask and Hotchner replies back "Their other agent on the inside, Jon Sinclair, discovered the plan before the Manhattan attack and alerted them."
Looking up, Emily asks "When are we leaving?"
"Now."
A/N: It took me some time but I finally finished it. Hope Everything was put together perfectly. Also if you've watched TNT's Legends some of the inspiration from this story like DCO comes from it.