Come in from the Cold
By OughtaKnowBetter
Obligatory Disclaimer: all theirs, nothing mine, even though they're not using them during the writer's strike. "A bad actor can ruin good writing, but a good actor can't save bad writing." Let the industry remember this!
A/N: this work is two stories in one, and will appear under the same title under two fandoms: Numb3rs, and The Unit. Each story is written from a different POV, and will merge later on. No one has to read the story from the other fandom--each story is designed to be complete--but those who enjoy both fandoms will hopefully like the additional tidbits that are offered. Let's see if this works...
A/N #2: Thanks to FraidyCat and Alice I for some early work. Any errors are mine.
A/N #3: Enough already! Seriously, come on over to the forum known as "Calling All Authors". It's a safe haven from Internet bullies and flamers, where writers can work to improve their skills. I know it's helped me!
"Life, as you know it, is over," Don told the suspect with a certain glee in his voice and his knee pressed into the small of the suspect's back, snapping the cuffs around the man's wrists. "I'd start thinking of ways to say, 'I'm sorry' to the judge when it comes time to plead guilty." He stuffed his handgun back into its holster.
This had been fun, despite the six AM start time, and, best of all, Don didn't have the reports to fill out. This was all Gary Mandelbaum's gig. Don's fellow agent had called for volunteers for an early morning raid on a suspected drug shipment, and it had paid off in more ways than one. The FBI had made a major bust, for starters, but that was just the beginning. Two: Mandelbaum was famous for supplying his troops with heavy doses of high quality caffeine prior to lift off, and three: Mandelbaum also knew this early morning bakery with these really fantastic mini-Danish that he always brought in as a way of saying thanks for volunteering…
All in all: good. Don 'assisted' his collar into the back of the truck where the suspect and all of his friends would be carted away, turning to help out where ever else he was needed.
Mandelbaum signaled to him from across the compound. "Don! Head in."
"What?" Don lifted his eyebrows. It was still early; normal FBI operations hadn't yet inhaled its own first cup of java. There shouldn't be anyone at Headquarters who even realized that Don Eppes was out of bed. "Why?"
"Got a call from the Area Director. He figured out that you were out here with me instead of snoring in your cozy little bed with Angelina Jolie. Get your butt in pronto."
Uh-oh. What the hell was this all about? Don never liked getting called into Area Director D'Angelo's office without warning. It usually meant trouble in some form or another. Sometimes, it was something that he'd done; sometimes, something that he hadn't done—but someone was convinced that he had. Don could go on and on in this vein but the fact remained that it still felt like he was being hauled into the principal's office for fighting on the playground with bullies who were trying to beat up on his little brother. And yes, he understood that he shouldn't fight them, he should run and get a teacher, but what were you supposed to do if the teacher wouldn't come, or you couldn't find one right away? Let Charlie get crunched?
This was getting silly. He was an adult. Charlie was an adult and well able to care for himself—although their father would beg to differ—and going to D'Angelo's office didn't mean that he was in trouble. And both Eppes boys had left high school in the distant past, so the caffeine in his belly had just better settle down and stop carving an ulcer in there.
D'Angelo's assistant waved him through which, at seven forty-five AM, Don found a trifle unsettling. Don was accustomed to having to wait in the outer office for a moment or two. The building could be burning down, and Don would still be invited to wait for a moment or two while D'Angelo fixed his tie.
Not this time. There would be no moss growing on the beige carpet in D'Angelo's outer office. The assistant again motioned for him to enter.
Don knocked gingerly on the door before sliding himself in, unwilling to disturb the door more than he had to.
"Come in, Eppes." The voice was gruff but not forbidding, a fact which cheered Don only slightly. If he were in trouble, it would have been something to the tune of "Eppes! Get your ass in here!" or "So glad you could make it, Special Agent Eppes", with a healthy dose of sarcasm. All right, so he was not currently in trouble. The other option was that trouble was about to be served to him on a silver platter, with the director's compliments.
That seemed more likely, especially when Don saw waiters who would do the serving currently sitting in D'Angelo's office. There were two of them, both men, both attired in business formal, and both taking pains to seem unremarkable. There were no distinguishing marks that Don could see, just well-toned muscular bodies hiding under well-tailored clothing. No beards, and Don couldn't even tell if that was a mustache on the sandy-haired man's face or just a shadow from the east-facing window in the office. If the pair was committing a crime in front of him at this exact moment, Don still would have had difficulty rendering an adequate description for an APB.
Though he didn't recognize the men, he still could recognize the type: spooks. Undercover personnel. Upper-class undercover personnel, the sort that went overseas and came home with information designed to save the planet from immediate immolation, or at least a significant portion of the industrial Western hemisphere.
Whatever. Bottom line: they meant that trouble had come to roost on Don's lap.
D'Angelo gestured. "Take a seat, Eppes. Gentlemen, Special Agent Don Eppes. Eppes, Randolph Abrams and John Ericks, of the National Security Agency."
"Pleasure." Don did the obligatory hand-shaking routine. "What brings you both to L.A.?"
Abrams was the one elected to speak. "We're here to request the cooperation of the FBI, Agent Eppes."
"You already have it." Don knew his lines as well as anyone. Cooperation between agencies was always verbalized. Actual receipt of same wasn't necessarily a given, but all agencies pretended that they were just overjoyed to work with each other and then meet downtown for drinks when the day was over.
"Good." Abrams also knew his part, only he was about to advance the plot. Don listened closely.
"We suspect a leak in our organization," was the opening gambit.
Aha. It became clear. Don supplied the next line of the script. "And you'd like our assistance in rooting them out."
Oops: plot hole. Abrams did not deliver the line that Don was anticipating. "No thank you, Agent Eppes. We have that covered." Abrams inclined his head with a gratitude that he didn't mean. "We do, however, have a mission with which we would like FBI assistance."
"Okay," Don drawled. Naturally it would be okay, and of course he would be taking this assignment. He wouldn't have been called into D'Angelo's office if that weren't a given. Don's acquiescence was a mere formality.
It didn't mean, however, that the NSA could waltz in here and get whatever it wanted. D'Angelo would be counting on Don to make things a mite difficult for their fellow government workers, just so that the NSA would remember this 'favor' in the future when the FBI needed something. Don planned to oblige, but first he needed more information. "What kind of mission?"
The pair exchanged glances. Studied glances, well-rehearsed. Don wasn't fooled one iota.
"We have a critical piece of information, Agent Eppes," Abrams said.
If it wasn't critical, you wouldn't be here. You'd be back home in Washington, sipping brandy in front of a fireplace. Spit it out, buddy.
Abrams had either flunked his mandatory telepathy course or he was ignoring the thoughts directed at him.
"The content of this information is unimportant to the mission in which we are asking you to participate," he said, leaning back in the chair.
"Take charge of."
"Beg pardon?" Abrams looked startled at D'Angelo's words.
D'Angelo shuffled some papers on his desk to make the NSA agent wait. "Take charge of," he repeated. "That was what we discussed prior to Special Agent Eppes' arrival, Mr. Abrams. The FBI 'participates' in joint operations. That is not what is being considered here. Any NSA agents on the scene will not have overall command; it is an FBI operation. Therefore, the FBI, in the person of Special Agent Eppes, will be assuming responsibility for the success of this assignment."
Wonderful. Whose side are you on, D'Angelo? I could get my butt kicked here.
Abrams sighed. "Agreed. Your man is in charge."
"Thank you." Don tried not to let the sarcasm show. "Now, what is this critical piece of information?"
That, it turned out, was the problem: the NSA didn't know. It was encrypted. Again, that shouldn't have been a problem, since the NSA was justifiably well-known for its ability to handle almost any code known to man, but apparently this one was created by alien-hybrids reared on Saturn, because the NSA was coming up blank. All they knew was that it was important.
No, it wasn't really created by half-alien man-bots, it just seemed that way. The real problem was that the critical information had arrived in a coded fashion, and the man responsible for de-coding the thing had had the misfortune to step in front of a bus before he could brief his back-up.
Was it an accident?
Probably, but the NSA was made up of paranoid types. They were still exploring the matter and would for the next several weeks if not years. Anyway, that wasn't what they wanted the patsies at the FBI—uh, their colleagues at the FBI—to do. The decoding part they had under control—sort of.
What was the FBI supposed to do?
The NSA had someone in mind who they were pretty sure could decipher the information. They'd used him before and found him to be reliable. They hadn't spoken to him yet, but they were certain that the man would drop everything to come running to the aid of his country. The man was a patriot in the finest sense of the word.
Right. What was the FBI supposed to do?
Once this man decoded the critical information, the NSA could take over and make best use of it. Given this level of code complexity, it was certain that the information contained something a little more important than figuring out which came first, the chicken or the egg.
Once again, slowly, for those of us in the room who don't seem to be understanding The Big Picture: what the hell was the FBI supposed to do?
Didn't we mention that?
Would we be bringing it up if we had?
There's no need to be sarcastic, Agent Eppes.
And there's no need to be obtuse, Mr. Abrams. What is the FBI's role here?
"I'd be interested in that myself, Mr. Abrams," Director D'Angelo murmured, as much to defuse the tension as to find out the answer.
Abrams stifled a sigh. "We'd like the FBI to handle security," he muttered.
"What was that, Mr. Abrams?"
"Security." Abrams cleared his throat, and his face flushed. "We want the FBI to handle the security while this man decodes the message."
There. Now that wasn't so hard, was it, Abrams?
Hell, yes, it was, Eppes. I just about choked. You think I like admitting that we need help from a bunch of locals one step up from flatfoots?
"We have an appropriate venue for our consultant," Abrams said, hurrying on, now eager to get the tough part over and done with. "The location is secure, with high end technology that we anticipate the consultant will require in order to decode the message. Mr. Ericks and I will deliver the consultant to the facility, and you will ensure that he is able to work without distraction."
"Those distractions being—?"
"There shouldn't be any," Ericks said, finally getting into the spirit of the mission. "We're keeping this quiet; we're not letting out anything in particular."
"But—?" Don heard the unspoken word in the sentence, and voiced it before Ericks could escape.
"As Abrams said, we've got a leak. We don't know where it is, and we're working to contain it. But, realistically, we need that critical information now. We can't afford to take our time with this."
Don nodded. It made sense. The NSA couldn't guarantee protection for their consultant, so it went to an agency that it thought could. And upon which, incidentally, if the assignment went bad, they could place blame. Oh, yeah, they had some smart cookies in Washington.
Okay, a certain Special Agent Don Eppes that he was fond of had better be smarter than the opposite side. Both of the opposite sides.
Three o'clock was never a good time in the afternoon, Professor Charles Eppes had realized long ago. It was the time when people went wandering in search of something, in search of anything that took their fancy at the moment. Some searched in libraries, some searched at the local Starbucks. Others went searching for their professors who, having completed the day's assigned lectures to students with varying degrees of comprehension, were now engaged in either a) preparing the next round of verbiage, b) catching up on scholarly journals in order to keep their place in the Greater Scheme of Things or c) hoping that the afore-mentioned students wouldn't realize that the professor had foolishly admitted to having office hours at three o'clock. For some professors, an unearned nap was so much more pleasurable.
Charlie Eppes was engaged in none of those things. This semester's workload was a repeat course for him and his lecture had been prepared last year, only requiring a bit of dusting off to make it ready for Monday. He had already demolished the latest journal, mostly because one Dr. Marshall Penfield had had the foolishness to allow a brief to be published without triple-checking the source that his graduate student had used. That source was Dr. Eppes, and the graduate student had mis-quoted the source, and Charlie was more than happy to point out the oversight in a pithily worded missive to the editor of said journal. (Hah! Take that, Penfield!)
Which left office hours. Professor Eppes was delighted that no student had yet arrived to darken his door because there was a test due to be handed back on the afore-mentioned Monday, and his share of grading those exams still needed to be accomplished. His two grad students had already done the lion's share of the work, but Prof. Eppes had been taught to always participate in these details. It made for better camaraderie among scholars, and besides: who knew when one of those grad students would graduate and end up on a scholarly review board for a journal that you wanted to be published in? Dr. Eppes did his share of the grading.
Then it came: the knock. The dreaded knock on the door. Half-timid, half-demanding, the sound would be followed by a shaggy head—didn't math students ever come in short hair?—that would poke a pimply nose in to ask if Professor Eppes had the time to discuss how he had come up with two plus two equals eight plus negative four.
Except that it wasn't. Now that the sound had had time to impinge on his consciousness, Charlie realized that the knock had avoided the half-timid part and gone straight to demanding. And the head that poked itself past the door jam was well-trimmed and followed by a smoothly muscled body in a suit and tie. The body was followed by a second body in another suit, tie not optional.
Not students.
Charlie didn't recognize these particular men, but he did recognize the type. He had seen them, had worked with them, in another time and another place. These were men who worked behind the scenes, men who accomplished things so that politicians could get up on a podium and pontificate about how the world was/is/would be a better place.
These were men who wanted something.
Since that something frequently involved some really fun math as well as another opportunity to give his accountant heart failure when it came time for tax season, Charlie was more than ready to listen. The grading of tests could wait. They would have to get done before eleven AM Monday morning, but they could wait for an hour or so. Charlie put on a professional smile, one that said 'mild interest' with 'I suppose I can fit you into my busy schedule.' "Gentlemen. What can I do for you?" Let's play it cool, Charlie. Remember, you promised to take Amita to that upscale Italian place Saturday night. Don't blow it by accepting something that will tie you up.
"Dr. Eppes?" Another formality. This pair had already studied his photo, knew exactly who he was, which made it a little easier to identify who they were. They were most likely from a former employer, or at least one of the employer's various departments; the same former employer who collected those taxes on a regular basis. Uncle Sam giveth, and Uncle Sam taketh away.
And they knew that the identification ritual was only a preliminary gambit, the opening remarks that would become progressively more interesting to their subject. Or so they hoped.
"Randolph Abrams," one introduced himself, extending a hand to be shaken. "John Ericks." That meant nothing to Charlie. "NSA." That did. The National Security Agency was one of those departments of the government for whom Charlie had done work over the years. Apparently they wanted him to do a little more work now. Charlie could put two and two together to come up with a hefty consulting fee, not to mention a neat little problem. Charlie squashed a grin. This could be a fun way to spend a portion of his weekend.
Charlie leaned back in his chair. "What can I do for you gentlemen?" And what, by extension, does my government want me to do?
"We have this piece of critical information, Dr. Eppes," Abrams announced.
"In code?" Of course it is. Why else would you be here?
"Yes," Abrams admitted, sticking to the script. "The man responsible for decoding it was killed in a recent accident. He hadn't had time to plan for back up. It was unexpected."
"That's why it's called an accident." Charlie still felt bad. Accidents happened. He wondered if it was someone that he knew; it could have been. There weren't all that many top level cryptographers, and Charlie knew a lot of them by name and work styles if not by face. But chances were pretty good that even if he asked for the name of the cryptographer, they wouldn't tell him, or they would feed him a fake name just to keep the conversation intact. "You need me to decipher it?"
"As soon as possible," Abrams said. "We suspect that this may have strategic importance."
"Didn't think you wanted me to decode a grocery list." Charlie too could be dry. He'd been practicing.
Abrams threw a half smile onto his jaw, pretending to appreciate Charlie's wit. "The usual rates, I presume."
"Unless you care to offer better." Charlie leaned forward, extended his hand. "If you give me the message, I'll be able to give you a rough estimate of how long it will take me."
Not a muscle twitched on either Abrams' or Ericks' face. "You misunderstand, Dr. Eppes. We will need you to come with us to decode it."
Uh-oh. Can't miss Saturday night. Might as well kiss my relationship with Amita good bye if that happens. "Gentlemen, I have a pressing engagement this week end that I cannot afford to neglect." Somehow I think that if I try to tell you that I'm choosing a girl over Uncle Sam, you're not going to be particularly understanding. Charlie hurried on. "And, forgive me, but I have already decoded so-called 'critical information' in the past that did indeed turn out to be someone's grocery list; an excellent hummus recipe, if I recall correctly. If you'd like to wait while I work here in my office you're more than welcome, but I'm afraid I must draw the line at traveling any great distance."
Abrams frowned. "Dr. Eppes, you misunderstand," he repeated. "This is information of critical importance, not your mother's laundry list."
"My mother passed away a few years ago, Mr. Abrams." Coldly.
Down for the count. Abrams realized that he'd made a fatal error while trying to enlist Dr. Eppes' assistance. Ericks took over, glossed over the faux pas. There's a reason that these guys travel in pairs. "Dr. Eppes, time is of the essence on this matter. This is a potential terrorist plot waiting to happen, and you are the only person that we can turn to."
"In which case, you can turn right here," Charlie said firmly. "As I said, I have no objection to your looking over my shoulder, but I will be working either in my office or in my home. That's my final offer, gentlemen; take it or leave it." He folded his arms, knowing that he had them over a barrel.
He was right. The pair made their decision through carefully noncommittal glances at each other, followed by a slight nod.
"Very well, Dr. Eppes," Abrams acquiesced. He looked at his watch. "We'll return in one hour, with the document. You will be in your office?"
"I will be here," Charlie agreed. And office hours will be over until Monday.