Disclaimers and Author's note:I still don't own Leverage or any of it's characters, and I'm still just doing this for fun.
So, I'm breaking my rule of not posting anything until all the pieces are written on this one...a few reasons for this:
1) It can stand alone.
2) The morning after I wrote it, SOMEONE sent me a PM that included the following instruction: "And write something, dammit :p" ... and apparently I respond positively to peer pressure :D.
3) I haven't posted anything in ages, the real plot-based story I'm working on still has a long way to go, and this little series is far easier to write than that story!
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it!
"I don't like guns ...and you know that." - The Nigerian Job *
Nate did know that. It was how he and Eliot met.
Nate wasn't chasing him, and they weren't working together. They were looking for the same thing – Nate because IYS didn't particularly want to pay out on the insurance policy, Eliot because rumour had it that a clue to the location of the Amber Room's hiding place had been concealed in the frame of the Russian icon in question ... and there were several people willing to pay good money for its retrieval.
They both found it. Simultaneously – which proved to be something of a problem since they effectively exposed each other and were suddenly both at the wrong end of several members of the Russian mafia's guns.
As an introduction, crouching behind empty barrels in a dockyard warehouse as bullets rain down is remarkably efficient.
Nate pulled a pistol from the shoulder holster concealed beneath his suit jacket and started shooting back. Eliot put his back to the barrels, closed his eyes, and listened.
Predictably, Nate ran out of ammunition before the Russians did.
"Give me your gun," Nate's urgent demand was barely audible over the continuing cacophony.
"What?" Eliot asked, opening his eyes.
"Give me your gun," Nate repeated. "I have a better angle from this side."
Eliot shook his head.
"I don't have one," he said, eyes closing again.
"You – what?" Nate turned to look at him as the words penetrated.
He turned incredulously to encounter the bizarre sight of Eliot Spencer crouched calmly amidst a hail of bullets and Russian expletives, an expression of Zen-like concentration on his face.
"What are you doing?" Nate asked in disbelief.
"Counting," Eliot replied briefly.
"Counting what?" Nate demanded, exasperated.
"Bullets and guns," Eliot was terse. "Now, shut up."
Surprisingly, Nate did. And when, a moment late, a particular sound caught Eliot's ear and he opened his eyes to give Nate the single-word directive "Move" before vaulting cat-like over the barrels into the fray, Nate followed that instruction, too.
Nate would never be entirely sure what exactly happened in those next few seconds. Somewhere in there, the shooting stopped, something flared into brightness and heat then died back down, and there was a series of grunts and sounds of flesh striking flesh interwoven with odd clatterings and splashes. Then silence reigned.
Nate pushed himself up from where he had landed on the concrete floor and took in the scene around him. A small fire was burning itself out near the barrels behind which he and Eliot had crouched, and he counted eight men in various postures of involuntary repose on the warehouse floor. There was a corresponding collection of guns – every one of them missing its ammunition clip – that Eliot was methodically collecting and dropping off the side of the dock into the sea water.
The icon sat unattended on the table where it had been laid out for examination before Nate and Eliot had so inconveniently interrupted one another. Nate moved towards it.
"Leave that," came the curt instruction.
Nate looked over to where Eliot was now bent over one of the bodies, securing its hands behind its back with a zip tie.
"Legally, as the representative of the insurance agency with whom a claim for the theft of this piece has been filed, I can take possession of it," Nate pointed out.
Eliot snorted, no words needed to express his opinion of the relevance of that fact.
"I'm also the one with the gun," Nate tried a more direct argument.
"But no bullets," Eliot countered, with a rather nasty little smile as he moved onto the next set of hands.
"You sure about that?" Nate asked.
"Pretty sure," Eliot replied. "I counted your bullets, too."
Nate nodded.
"I could have another clip, though," he pointed out.
"You could," Eliot agreed. "But you don't."
There wasn't really much point in arguing with that.
Nate changed the subject.
"So, they're not dead, then," he said, halfway between an observation and in inquiry as he gestured towards Eliot's efforts with the zip ties.
Eliot grunted.
"Interesting," Nate said as Eliot straightened after fastening the final zip tie.
Eliot's gaze shot to meet the blue eyes resting consideringly on him, but didn't reply. He approached the table Nate was leaning up against, looking down at where the icon lay on the cloth in which it had been wrapped.
Eliot picked the icon up to re-wrap it and swore as he discovered that the Russians had been less interested in examining it than in prying it loose from its frame.
"Problem?" Nate asked mildly.
He had noticed the damage, and surmised that theft of the piece had been driven more by the information rumoured to be hidden in its frame than by its own intrinsic value. What that meant for his own likelihood of success in returning to Los Angeles with the icon tucked safely in his luggage depended on how much the retrieval specialist in front of him knew about the icon's history.
Eliot shrugged.
Nate watched as Eliot folded the cloth efficiently around the icon, wheels spinning in his mind. Outgunned by Eliot even when Nate had been armed, he knew he didn't have a chance of taking the icon by force – and his attempts at stealth had so far been equally unfruitful. That left negotiation – which was really more of his strength anyway. Plus, while Eliot had disrupted Nate's original plan to obtain the icon, he had also technically (if somewhat incidentally) saved Nate's life when the shooting started. Maybe there was a way they could both come out ahead...
"Have you heard the story about this icon and the Amber Room?" Nate asked.
The glance Eliot shot him was scathing.
"Of course," he said.
"And you know that information is supposed to be hidden in the frame rather than the icon itself?" Nate continued.
"Where are you going with this?" Eliot sounded suspicious.
"Well, " Nate said. "From the insurance point of view, the main item is the icon itself. So, if I returned that, even if some payout related to the loss of the frame was made, it would still count as a win - and no-one would be chasing down whoever took the frame. Meanwhile, if your employer is mainly interested in the information about the Amber Room, they might not care greatly about the icon itself."
"So you want to split the baby?" Eliot asked.
Nate's face contorted as he considered that interpretation.
"I was thinking more of a cake-cutting metaphor that would give the people who like the icing best larger portions of that, with more of the cake itself going to the people who prefer that – but essentially, yes."
"But if I guess wrong about whether my employer wants more icing or more cake, I won't get paid," Eliot pointed out. "So it seems like my best plan would to be to take the whole cake."
"True," Nate had to concede.
He considered the man in front of him, weighing his next approach. The retrieval specialist was relatively young, late twenties at most, and Nate read military training and control in his every move – edged with a dark disillusionment, true, but still with the spark of professional pride and competitiveness that might make him sympathetic to Nate's cause.
The not-killing thing was interesting, too.
"Okay, here's the thing," Nate took the gamble with a truth. "I have this competition going with another investigator: every year, whichever of us recovers the smaller value of items has to buy the other a really good bottle of whiskey. Right now, I'm trailing by about $40,000...but that icon would put me in a good solid lead."
Eliot laughed.
"So you want me to hand over the icon so that you can win a bottle of scotch? I don't think so, man."
"Irish whiskey," Nate clarified – but Eliot just rolled his eyes.
"There might also be opportunities to work for us in the future," Nate continued. "We contract out sometimes - especially when we already know who has the item the insurance claim is being filed for."
This time Eliot hesitated.
"We pay pretty well," Nate added.
Eliot's smile was humourless.
"You'd have to," he replied, but he obviously wasn't ready to commit to anything yet.
"Who hired you for this job?" Nate asked, moving on to Plan B. "I've worked with a lot of art collectors and enthusiasts over the years. I might know if they're more likely to be interested in the icon or the Amber Room."
"That's confidential," Eliot snapped, although Nate got the impression he might be more used to the syllables of 'classified.'
Maybe Plan C, then.
"How about this?" Nate removed a folded paper from his inner breast pocket and showed it to Eliot. "It was lying next to the icon – the way it's folded, I suspect it was hidden in the frame. It could be the clue to the Amber Room's location."
This was all true. Nate had given the paper a quick read before pocketing it, and based on its date and the old feel of the paper it could be a coded clue regarding the location of the Amber Room. Of course, it could also be a letter to someone's long-dead sweetheart, but there wasn't any way to tell for sure right then.
Eliot reached for the letter, but Nate slipped it back into his pocket.
"Uh-uh," he said.
The beautiful thing about the letter as a piece of leverage was its fragility: while he didn't stand a chance against Eliot in a test of brute strength, he was more than capable of shredding, burning, or even eating the letter before Eliot could do very much about it.
"So," Nate went on pleasantly, "why don't we both go to your employer, you get paid in full, and then I negotiate a trade of the icon for this letter."
"I get paid first?" Eliot confirmed, sounding suspicious of how easy and beneficial this plan sounded.
"Why not?" Nate shrugged. "It makes no difference to what I want to trade."
"What about my client's confidentiality?" Eliot put forward next.
"Well, that's up to him – or her – isn't it?" Nate asked. "You present the information and then he or she can decide whether it is worth a face-to-face meeting with me – or can arrange some sort of go-between."
Eliot thought about it some more, certain that there must be a catch he wasn't seeing somewhere. But, finally, he agreed. After all, all the problems he could foresee wouldn't be his problems, so why should he worry about preventing them?
"Sounds like I've got nothing to lose," he growled.
Nate smiled.
"Your car or mine?" he asked.
"Mine," Eliot replied immediately. Heaven only knew what Nathan Ford's standards were for rental cars, but Eliot suspect they leaned towards the economy size sedan. And a long drive in one of those after a very reasonable fight with eight Russian mobsters? Simply not happening.
He tucked the icon under his arm and motioned towards the door.
"Let's go," he said.
Nate took one last look at the still unconscious and neatly trussed collection of Russian mafiosi as he followed Eliot to the exit.
"So," he wanted to know. "What kind of retrieval specialist doesn't carry a gun?"
"The kind that don't like them," Eliot replied, eyes straight ahead. He smirked a little, and added, "Or need them."
The End (for now).
Additional author's note:
*This is the first piece of what I think will be a five part series. The basic premise is that each instalment is a stand-alone piece written off the various lines that follow Eliot's trademark "I don't like guns" statement. This one came from the pilot. I have to admit that I have never actually heard the "...and you know that" which is supposed to have followed his statement to Nate about not liking guns, but that is how John Rogers says the line goes.. Seeing as he wrote it, I figure he should know!
The other lines I can think of, and which will form the basis for future instalments, are as follows:
2. They have a specific range of efficacy. (The Miracle Job)
3. "I thought you didn't like guns?" "Air gun." (The Morning After Job)
4. Never said I couldn't use them.(The Big Bang Job)
5. "You know I have a gun." "Yeah. That's what makes it fair." (The Last Dam Job)
My question to all of you is whether I am missing any? If you can think of others, please put them in the Reviews so that people can see which ones have already been suggested.
Thanks - and see you next time, when I figure out how the next one of these goes!