Chapter 2.

4PM

Olivia paid the cabbie as she climbed out of the cab, swearing under her breath at the dizzy spell that had her grabbing the top of the door. She'd been plagued by periodic dizziness and nausea since the night of the raid. The doctors said it was normal after a concussion and the symptoms should start to fade in the next few weeks. It was part of the reason she wanted to delay going back to work, it would be easier than explaining everything to her colleagues.

She looked up at the address she'd been given. It was an average looking building on a nice block on the outskirts of Tribeca. It was hard to tell if it was an apartment or an office building. Glancing at the signs in the lobby as she walked though, she guess residential. Wondering if she had the right address, she found the right unit number and knocked. The door opened after a very brief pause. George Huang stood in front of her, opened the door fully and gesturedher in.

"Olivia, it's good to see you!"

"Thanks Doc, it's good to be back. Thank you for..." she paused, not sure what to call this. "Thanks for agreeing to see me."

After ending up in the hospital, she had met with her Case Agent Dean Porter and the Lead Agent, a guy she had only met once before named Gary Bradford. After telling them all she knew, answering all their questions and refusing to answer hardly any of hers, they had told her she was required to meet with a staff psychiatrist before being released. Standard protocol they had said, deep undercover work was stressful and they wanted to make sure they took care of their people. She couldn't believe what she was hearing, and told them so, wondering how they could have such careless disregard during the operation but afterwards laying down the law with the pretense of concern for her health. Finding them unmoving and even unmoved, she had agreed. "Huang." She said. "I'll talk to Huang, no one else, I don't want to be shrinked by some other stranger you have in your pocket."

"Huang?" Dean replied. "George Huang? How do you know him?"

"I've...I've worked with him before, in New York. He's helped us out on a few cases. He'll agree I think."

"Fine," Bradford had said. I'll set it up. You have a ticket on the last flight out tonight, the red eye through Chicago." he said, passing her an envelope with a plane ticket and some cash. Your bank accounts and credit cards will be unfrozen today, your cell phone reactivated, we'll have the things we picked up from the camp delivered to you."

She had received a call while she was waiting for her flight from

Dean, giving her the address and telling her Huang was expecting her at 4pm.

Huang walked her over to a couch and offered her something to drink.

She accepted his offer for tea. As he walked into the kitchen to prepare the tea, she sat on the couch he had offered and glanced around the apartment. There were few decorations but what were there were tastefully done, she saw a few photographs and resisted the urge to get up and get a closer look. She settled for the staring out the window, which showed a partial cityscape of the westside.

Huang walked in the room and set two mugs of tea on the coffee table, gesturing towards her to take the mug. She reached down and pulled the mug into her lab, sitting quietly. He watched her closely, noting her body language. She seemed to be trying to make herself smaller.

"So what did you want to talk about, Olivia?" he asked calmly.

She looked up at him. "I don't really want to talk about anything." she said straight. "They told me I have to so..." she shrugged.

"Undercover operations, especially deep and long term ones are stressful on the body, emotionally, mentally and physically. You look like you already know about that." He expected some kind of response and went on when he didn't get one. "You need to address what you've been through, that's what they want, just for you to acknowledge it. You're strong enough to get through anything, but you need to address it before you can get over it. When you are undercover, it's extremely difficult to process anything. You are working to hard to make it through the days and weeks as another person. You don't process anything until it's over. It's why the first few days are so difficult: Sensory overload"

"I don't know where to start," she stated quietly, playing with the string of the teabag. She sat back on the couch, with the mug of tea warming her hands, she could feel the adrenaline she'd been running on for the last day, week, month leaving her body. She could feel the fatigue in her bones practically pulling her down into the couch. She felt like a stranger, like someone she didn't know living her old life. It was comparable to walking through a really thick fog, she knew where she was, but everything else seemed to be shifting around her. She sat silently as she felt Huang's eyes on her. He regarded her without moving, as if moving himself would spook her. He'd never seen this woman act like this.

"Why don't you start by telling me how you got that bruise?" he suggested. Her hand immediately went to her temple, where the staples were seen poking out the bottom of the cap, right at the edge of the hairline. If you didn't look closely the staples got lost in her dark hair and the edges of the bruise were fading to yellow, easy to miss if you were not very observant.

"I don't really remember," she started. "There was a raid. It was dark and chaotic. It was the FBI, but they had the local police there. The local guys knew the group, we had been a pain in their ass, a thorn in their side for months. They were angry. I remember getting caught in their kettle drum and they were coming at us, swinging, I saw Ginny..." She paused, should didn't want to go down that path, couldn't right now. She took the easy way out. "After that I woke up on the ground, bleeding from the head, I was pulled up and thrown into a paddy wagon." She shrugged.

"Olivia, what were you doing there?"

She glanced up at him, "Don't you have the report?"

"No," he replied, "They haven't sent it over yet. But it doesn't really matter. You need to tell me. Whether I know what happened or not, you need to tell me more than I need to hear it. You've told victims that hundreds of time. You know how it works." He paused to let her process that. "Why don't you start at the beginning."

She leaned forward, her arms folded across her front, as if she were almost trying to protect herself. "I was a member of the EFA, a radical environmental group. They were active in New York and when we'd done some work here I gained access as a member, it was easy enough to make the move as that person to Oregon, where they were headquartered. It was mostly small potatoes stuff, protesting companies with poor environmental records, disturbing the peace, blocking public access, that kind of thing. The Feds were involved because they thought the leaders of the EFA were also involved in a couple of assaults and bombings of company execs cars and one on a research lab. I was supposed to get close, find out what they were planning and let the Feds know before it all went down. Everything went well for the first week or so, then for whatever reason, this guy Ethan Jones, one of the leaders they were looking into, starting ratcheting up the rhetoric, talking about going back to living off the land, how modern conveniences were destroying the planet and how there was no middle ground. He got everyone out to a compound, a camp, out in rural Oregon. There were a bunch of old trailers and tent cabins for us to stay in, an old water pump, some surrounding farms where we could barter work for food; some people fished in the river. The place was designed for summer. There wasn't any heat, no hot water. It's winter. I don't think I've been properly warm since I left New York." She wrapped her arms around her midsection, as if she was remembering the cold trying to warm herself.

"It was a little surreal, almost like an extended camping trip. Jones and a couple of the other leaders let a few of us in on the plans they had, I let the Feds know when I got into contact with them, which wasn't often. I had a pager that received texts which I checked twice a day, I hid it in the old heating duct in the trailer I was sleeping in. After the first week the Feds closed off the roads, they cut off our access to food, and the little propane we were using for heat and fuel. By the end of that first week we were already rationing food. They misjudged, George. They totally misgauged how fanatical these guys were. They were willing to let their own people starve to prove their point and the Feds should have known that, or maybe they did know and they just didn't care. I didn't know the raid was going to happen that night."

She paused, opened her mouth a few times to continue, but something held her back, like she was trying to choose her words or figure out how to say what she meant. "Someone was staying at my trailer that night, I couldn't check the pager without getting caught. When we heard the noise, we ran outside...I lost..." She stopped talking and looked down, shifting in her seat.

Huang looked over at her. He could see the dark circles under her eyes, she looked pale, and thin. He could tell she had lost significant weight even with the thick winter clothes she was wearing. He waited for her to go on on her own. She sat, looking at her tea, still folded over, rocking barely perceptibly as she perched on the edge of the couch.

When she didn't go on, he prompted her. "What did you lose, Liv?" When he got no response, he took a gamble. "Who was at your place that night? Why were they there?"

"I..." Olivia looked up at him, a look in her brown eyes like was confused because she didn't know the answer, or perhaps she didn't know WHY she couldn't answer. She stood up quickly. "I'm not ready to talk about that yet," she said quietly. She grabbed her coat and walked quickly towards the front door, tipping against the hallway wall as another dizzy spell hit her. She swore under her breath.

Just as she reached the door "Olivia!" She stopped but didn't turn around. In her mind she was begging him to let her go, let her escape. "Same time tomorrow." he said, half statement and half question. She gave a brief nod to acknowledge that she had heard him and practically ran out of the room. He stood in the doorway watching her down the hall. She frantically pushed the button for the elevator and when it didn't arrive right away she took a quick glance at the stairwell and ran down the 8 flights of stairs as if something was chasing her. Huang stood there for a moment contemplating the things he had just learned. Benson was a predictably private person, she didn't like talking to psychiatrists or anyone really about herself and especially not her feelings. He'd often encountered resistance to her sharing personal details, but this was different. Benson could get angry, she let her empathy show when she worked with the victims, but she covered her own personal emotions almost completely while at work. He suspected that transferred to her personal life as well. You never could know what she was thinking or feeling behind those eyes. Years as a cop and as a neglected child had taught her that.

This was different though. This was not Benson not showing her emotions. She seemed almost anxious to show them but wasn't able to.

She seemed genuinely unable to broach what had happened, either in words or emotionally. This was not your typical post-undercover briefing. Something had happened, something had not gone as planned.

He had his concerns about the story she had told him about the operation as well. He quickly turned back into the apartment, grabbed his bag and his long winter coat and followed her out of the apartment, heading downtown towards the FBI headquarters.

Downtown, at headquarters, it hadn't taken him long to find the files he needed. They were incomplete, with the majority of the field reports and analysis of the final raid and arrests still in progress, but he found enough information to make him quite angry. Olivia's assessment of the leaders and the FBIs mismanagement of the situation was accurate and it seemed the FBI not only knew of the conditions in the camp, but were intent on exploiting the physical deconditioning of the people inside. Slamming the folders shut and tossing them back to the admin assistant that had helped him, he set off to find the Lead Agent. As he entered Bradford's office, he noted a suitcase in the corner. He must have arrived back in the city not long after Olivia.

Bradford was a middle aged man, brown hair, slight paunch. He appeared to be sorting through email at the computer. Huang knocked and walked him and began to give Bradford a piece of his mind. The walls were a little too thin for this kind of conversation he thought briefly. He put it out of his mind, it probably wasn't the first time this had happened. He continued to lay into the agent.

Don Cragan walked briskly into the 5th flood offices of the FBI. The assistant at the front had directed him towards the office of the agent he wanted to talk to. As he approached the office he heard yelling and immediately slowed his pace. Approaching slowly, he was grateful when he saw the door open and was surprised when he recognized the man coming out of Bradford's office.

"Doc!" he said with surprise. Huang looked at him, slightly pink the face as if from exertion and acknowledged him with a slight nod.

Cragen asked "Were you here to see about Ben-"

He was cut off by Huang stating "Good afternoon Captain, good to see you." as he looked him in the eye. Cragan got the hint and didn't finish his question. He nodded slightly and continued walking into the office.

Elliot had been sitting at his desk, ostensibly doing paperwork, a pen in his hand. He hadn't written down a thing in over 20 minutes. Finally he stood, grabbed his keys and coat. "I've got to take care of something, cover for me, Beck," he said as he walked out of the room. He was gone before any of them could respond.

"What was that about?" Dani asked.

"I've got one guess." Fin replied with a sarcastic tone. "Never could be patient, that guy." He turned back to the files he was reviewing.

'What do you mean?" Dani asked.

"Those two have had something in each others craw ever since that kidnapping case with Gitano a few years back. Stresses me out just thinking about it, they're stretched on a wire when it comes to each other. I mean, Stabler's always been sort of a loose cannon, but not like the past few weeks. That's not really him. I think Benson just disappearing like that hit him hard."

"What really happened with her?" the blond detective asked. "I never got the full story."

"We don't really know the full story," Munch piped in. "There was a case, an extreme environmental terrorist group, the FBI was involved, Liv was working an angle with them and then one day, the day after we closed the case, Liv didn't show up, her phone was disconnected. All we knew was she was on loan to the Feds and no one knew where or why or for how long. We figured Oregon, since the group we were working here had connections there, but that was it, until today."

"So you think he's gone to look for her." she replied.

"Of course. I'm surprised he lasted this long."

A few blocks away, Elliot jogged up to her apartment entrance and hit the buzzer from the entrance alcove. He could see Joseph, the old man who was half security guard, half doorman inside. He buzzed again and again without response. After laying on the buzzer for 5 minutes, he sighed and looked up to see Joseph holding open the inner door.

"Hey Mister Stabler." he said in a soft drawl. "Long time no see. Miss

Benson isn't home, so stop bothering the neighbors."

"Have you seen her?" Elliot asked sharply, immediately feeling bad at his tone towards the old man.

"Sure did. Was glad to see her too, I was a little worried, young lady not being around for a month and a half. I thought maybe she went on vacation, but...well, she's back now."

"Did she say anything to you?" Elliot asked.

"Just that she was glad to be home."

Elliot turned to leave, "Do me a favor, don't mention that I stopped by?"

"Hmmm" Joseph replied. "Is there something wrong?"

"No," Elliot replied, "Just a concerned old friend."

Returning to the station house 30 minutes later, Dani looked up as she he walked in.

"That was fast" she said. "I didn't do any of your paperwork, you still have to finish it. Did you find her?"

Elliot looked up in surprise from his desk.

"What?" Dani said, "You are not as sneaky as you think, everyone can see through you."

"No," he admitted, "she wasn't home. Cell phone is still disconnected." He looked at the other detectives.

"Listen to the Cap, Elliot" Fin said, "She'll call you when she's ready."

Elliot didn't reply, but slapped the papers on his desk a little harder in frustration.