Well, this mission had gone to hell a lot faster than they'd anticipated. They'd had trouble getting in country to begin with, despite having arranged things through an offshore tourist agency that handled Cuban tourism all the time. The usual routine would have been for the customs people to wink them through with an offer to stamp their visa instead of their passport so they wouldn't get into trouble with U.S. authorities, effectively making their visit invisible, even on their manufactured identities. But, they'd been detained for hours. Seemed to amuse the guy at the airport. He and Jack had been on short tempers with each other and everyone else ever since.
And Mac was already prone to being a little short tempered after getting called back from leave to go Murdoc hunting. He was frustrated by what they'd found; or rather what they hadn't. And he'd wanted to keep looking. He'd been expecting at least a month to go looking for his father. Not the couple of weeks they'd gotten.
Matty was the one who'd insisted on the leave to begin with. Okay, that was probably unfair. The doc who'd gotten a look at him and Jack when Matty ordered them to Medical after the debacle with Tennant taking over Phoenix had suggested on a little vacation, but Matty didn't have to listen. She was the boss. As she all too often liked to remind them.
Then, the guy they'd come to question was just supposed to be a Grupo de Administracion Empresarial S.A. contact who had been seen with someone matching Murdoc's description. Neither he nor Jack were naïve enough to think a GAESA representative might not also be tied to the local crime syndicate. But they definitely hadn't expected to be pulled off the street in front of at least fifteen witnesses at gun point by this guy's bodyguards. Once they were off the street, they'd made a decent effort at getting themselves free, but it had been short lived.
Maybe Mac was still dragging a little from the siege at Phoenix, because one of the guys had gotten in a couple of good shots to where his ribs were still aching in the morning and it had dropped him to his knees gasping for breath. And Jack had gotten a couple of good hits in, but the bigger of the goons twisted Jack's better arm up behind his back, leaving him only his less dependable side to swing with. The injury was old, and Jack frequently insisted (after a couple of beers) that he only wrapped that wrist so women would ask him about it and he could show them the scar and tell them the heroic take of saving his Army buddy up in the mountains of the godforsaken goat farm everyone else knew as Afghanistan. But Jack could insist it wasn't a liability until he was blue in the face. Mac had been there when it happened. And it had been bad. And he'd been in enough fights around Jack to know that he just didn't have the power or stamina with that side that he did with the other. A couple swings that more irritated than injured the guards and they'd managed to get themselves maced for their trouble.
The guys had had the decency to hose their captives off a little, but left them tied up in the baking heat for an hour while the man in charge paced back and forth on a very new looking cell phone talking very heatedly to someone just out of earshot. Mac did here the man order the guards to go over to Camilo's and get van for clean-up. That sounded ominous. Mac made the mistake of thinking to himself that things couldn't possibly get any worse.
He spent the next hour or so (at least it felt like that long – time always seemed to draw out when someone was using your pain for their own gain) kicking himself for the sentiment. Whenever you said things couldn't get worse, it never failed that things always found a way. The guy liked to hit. And he was good at it; threw the sorts of compact powerful punches that Mac associated with someone who had boxed at some point. Having had more than his fair share of concussions, one of the solid jabs to the jaw had dropped Jack's head to his chest. It had been so swift, and he'd gone so boneless, if Mac hadn't been able to feel his partner breathing at his back he might have thought the GAESA guy had killed him.
Already sore, sunburned, tired, hungry, and pretty beat up, Mac wanted nothing more than to pull his hands free and lay into the guy. He'd always kind of loved Cuba. It just suited him. It was about as unpretentious as a place came, and if he could fit in anywhere on earth, it might just be in a place where people started with nothing and had been making things up as they went along for decades. But this trip was ruining that in a hurry.
Even in a flurry of blows alternated with irritating questions about his least favorite person in the world, he'd managed to recapture some of that Cuban spirit and break a button off the back pocket of his khaki's. Jack often teased him for his fashion sense, but if he'd been wearing jeans like his partner, he wouldn't have had a button, and if he didn't have a button, he couldn't have started sawing through the ropes. He could only reach the ones on Jack's wrist, and with Jack out cold he wasn't sure what good it was going to do him, but you did the best you could with what you had where you were. Or he did anyway.
When Jack came around again, he tried to communicate what he was doing through touch. Jack was a little dazed, but Mac was pretty sure he got the plan … well, the sort of plan. Things were starting to look up. Until Jack started talking, that was. Mac knew Jack had a protective streak. He always had. Literally since the day they'd met. And sometimes Mac appreciated it. Other times, like now for example, it made him kind of want to throttle his partner. Who said stuff like that? Jack Wyatt Dalton, that was who.
When the straight razor flicked open less than a foot and a half away from him, Mac had the irrational urge to just try to tip the chair. He'd been through a lot before. And hey, he only woke up in a cold sweat from dreaming about that stuff once in a while, right? No one had ever used knives though. And he didn't have any urge to add to his nightmare bank. That was quite a rich enough vault as it was. Maybe he'd get lucky and their chairs would break if he could tip them over. He'd planted his foot to try when Jack started laughing. Mac was trying to shake the punch and adrenaline induced cobwebs out of his brain while Jack got their captors attention back off Mac.
For his own part, Jack was kicking himself. Maybe those guys whaling on them to get them out here had knocked some stuff loose, or it was the heat, or the beating he was taking, but when he'd regained consciousness from his brief but blessedly pain-free stint in the dark, he'd wanted almost desperately to get the bad guy's attention off Mac. Taking the punches was Jack's job, damn it. Besides the kid needed a minute to breathe to finish the job of cutting his ropes.
And maybe he'd gotten a little over zealous; maybe his mouth had gotten ahead of him a little. He shouldn't have called Mac 'kid' though. Shouldn't have let the guy know it mattered to him that his partner be left alone. He could have stuck with insults and casually calculated cultural insensitivity and probably gotten a better result. But he overplayed his hand and let the guy know that Mac mattered.
When the bastard had pulled out that straight razor and headed back in Mac's direction, Jack felt like he was on an elevator and someone just cut the cable. He felt Mac stiffen. Jack had a moment of damn near panic. He was wondering about tipping the chairs over, thinking maybe they'd break under their combined weight and then he started trying to do mental math the way Mac always did to figure out if it would work when he felt his ropes drop away on one side.
The laugh that came out was at first as much spontaneous relief as it was a desire to make noise that would bring the bad guy back around where he could get at him. Then when it got the guy's attention, Jack just let the bottled-up tension and pain and stress bubble out in a long stream of mirthful crazy. Didn't matter where you were of who had you, the bad guys always found that move off-putting.
While the guy was focused on Jack's best crazy face, he slowly slid his free hand over and untied the other one, realizing as he twisted his wrist that he'd be surreptitiously icing it later. If he did it openly, Mac would start fussing at him again to get it fixed. And he could, sure. Phoenix had access to the best of the best minds, medically and otherwise. He just didn't want to. He could manage it just fine. Or so he told himself, and would keep telling himself until he ran out of excuses.
But he sure as hell couldn't knock this guy on his ass like he so richly deserved. That left one other option. One he took more often than not because of that wrist, though he would never admit it. He headbutted the man just as hard as he could and the world exploded into stars and darkness in front of his eyes for a second or two. And his head started pounding. He knew Mac was just as tired and hurt as he was, but when the kid said something about using his fists, he felt anger flare for just a second. Then he slowed himself down. That was tired and stressed Mac trying to bait him into admitting he was hurt to take attention off himself. Well, too damn bad, kid. He just brushed the comment off with some flip remark of his own that made Mac make his most irritated eyeroll-ready face. Then Jack went to work on his target.
It took Mac a second to collect himself. Concealing a groan with a sigh of frustration, Mac dropped down on one knee next to Jack and looked at their would-be captor with exhausted frustration born of taking one too many punches after coming up against one too many dead ends. And he wasn't just thinking about today. Or about Murdoc for that matter.
"Hey," he began. The dark eyes of the man on the ground had the good sense to show some fear now that Mac and Jack were both free, and while Jack's weapons were inside on the table, he did have the guy's straight razor in his hand, and a thoroughly pissed off look on his bleeding face. When Mac had his attention, he gave an almost shrug. "We know Murdoc was here." The man's eyes registered the truth of Mac's words, so he pushed just a little further. "Where is he?"
His eyes darted away from Mac's face, back to Jack, who was giving Senor GAESA his best mad dog crazy smile, made all the scarier by the blood running between his teeth. The man swallowed. "Yo no se."
Mac shook his head, regretting it almost instantly when it sent the courtyard spinning. He unthinkingly braced himself against Jack for a second. Letting go like he'd touched a hot stove when Jack tossed a look of concern over his shoulder. Mac just made a dismissive face and refocused on their obvious source of actionable intel. "Eso es mierda," he practically spat at the man.
This time the look Jack gave him was entirely approving and he almost smiled. Apparently, they were done being pissed off at each other for no reason. Good. This all sucked, pretty much beyond the telling, but they weren't the authors of each other's misery. "Mi amigo is right, there, cowboy. You're full of shit. Where's our wannabe super villain?"
The man hesitated again, looking back and forth between the two of them. Jack made a face and turned his head and spat. He grimaced when he saw how much blood was in it. No wonder he felt like puking his guts all over the stones here. And here he'd been worried he maybe had another concussion. When he returned his focus to the reason he just spat out about a half a pint of blood, he let his face go smooth and his voice grow cool. "Look," he lifted the straight razor and let the light catch it. "You were gonna use this on my friend here, so believe me when I tell you, I'd enjoy cutting what I want to know out of you."
Mac didn't have to look at Jack's face to know what was on it. He'd seen it before. That look of nothing there but rage, a cold calculating rage that was so much more dangerous than one that burned hot. Jack's eyes would be black and the man looking up into them would know that he was looking right at death unless he gave up what Jack was asking for. Mac knew that's what was there by the blood that drained from the face of the man on the ground.
Just to make his point, Jack deftly sliced all the buttons off the man's shirt with a flick of his wrist so quick and precise it was almost invisible. Then out of the corner of his eye, Mac caught Jack letting a lazy smile spread across his face. "But honestly, I'm in a real hurry now, so it'd be easier if you just spit it out."
The man's eyes went wide, but his mouth started working, trying to muster enough saliva to be able to form words. Jack in full interrogator mode did have an uncanny ability to induce dry mouth in people, Mac thought. After a few tried, words finally came.
"Some woman from La Direccion de Inteligencia brought him to me. I helped him move around town for a few days, introduced him to some people. I made a lot of money. Then both of them told me if anyone came looking to find out why and then get rid of them."
He stammered again for a moment when Jack's eyes flashed. Mac gave the man a calculating look that was nearly as cold as his partner's of a few moments ago. "Go on," Mac prompted. "Where is he now?"
The man shook his head and Jack's grip on his tightened fractionally. "I don't know. I swear on my family."
"Where did he go from here then, smart guy?" Jack asked, spitting more blood to the side, and kind of wanting to beat on the guy a little more just to make up for the headache he was getting.
"I sent him to mi primo, Miguel, ayer or the day before. That's all I know."
Jack gave him a long look, another Mac knew well. It was him using an almost eerie measure of whether the target was telling the truth. Jack gave a little nod. "Donde esta Miguel?"
"Four blocks from here. Garage. Bright yellow and white building."
"Gracias," Jack said with a shark-like grin, before punching the guy out like a light and then not quite biting back the curse that told Mac Jack was as hurt as he looked.
Mac got slowly to his own feet before offering Jack a hand up. "You alright, Big Guy? You took a little nap on me." He peered at Jack's face carefully, trying to discern if his pupils were even.
"I'm good," Jack lied. "How about you?" Jack returned with equal concern. "You were still draggin' a little from those Organization pukes and the whole 'run toward the explosion' thing when we got here."
Mac waved him off. "I'm fine, Jack. Let's go find Miguel and see if we can catch up to Murdoc and get back to what we were doing."
Mac's right hand went almost unconsciously to his left wrist and played absently with the new watch he was wearing. Kid was right. Matty owed him a couple of weeks. And something told Jack that they were onto something in the search for Mac's father, if not in the search for the killer who had caused them so much trouble in the last few months.