Numb3rs: Crosshairs
Disclaimer: I don't own them, I just borrowed them. Numb3rs and its characters are the property of those that created them. No copyright infringement intended. No financial reward gained. All real places and organisations are used in a fictional sense. Original characters and the storyline are mine however.
A/N: Hmmn, this may not be what everyone expects, but then you all know how I like twists. *grin* Don't worry, there is much more danger for Don ahead! *evil!grin*
CHAPTER TWO
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"Are you sure you're alright?" David demanded in concern.
Don looked up at his agent from where he was seated at the back of the ambulance and tried not to wince at the pain that lanced through both shoulder and head at his movement. Pain that was not helped any by the paramedic shining a bright light into each eye in turn.
"I'm sure." He immediately saw the doubt in Sinclair's face and had to admit that even to him he had sounded more than a little rocky.
"Don," David started.
"I'm good, David." He replaced the icepack against the side of his head before struggling to stand. He was a little unsteady but shrugged off the paramedic's attempt to assist him.
The EMT for his part seemed used to law enforcement and simply worked to pack away his unneeded equipment, he knew this one wasn't going to be coming with him to hospital. "You know the spiel, Agent?"
"Blurriness, dizziness or nausea, see a doctor. Right?"
"Right." The EMT finished tidying up and grabbed his bag, heading into the bank to join his partner checking over the customers and staff.
"Don, maybe you should-"
"David, leave it. We have work to do. What do we have?"
David shook his head in frustration then got down to business. "You tell me. What happened here Don?"
Colby and Nikki had already gone inside the bank to question the witnesses. David had stayed outside watching as his boss had been placed semi-conscious into the ambulance before coming fully to. All he had to go on was what he could see and what the first responders had told him. The senior agent had been found unconscious, alone in the empty alley behind the bank. Scuff marks suggested some sort of physical altercation had occurred, most probably between said agent and the offenders. Other marks showed that a vehicle had left quickly, spinning it's tyres in a rapid exit.
"Was anyone else here when you arrived?" Don asked.
"Just the uniforms. And you."
"Damn. I got one of them, I hoped the others would have left him."
"You shot one?" David queried hopefully. The uniforms had not yet located the senior agent's weapon and were still searching the alley. Up til now there'd been no indication of anyone being shot.
He started to shake his head then immediately regretted it. Moving the icepack to the side of his neck seemed to help. "No, I'd been disarmed. I knocked one down and he was out cold before the other one got me. The sirens were close, LAPD couldn't have missed them by much."
It didn't take much, David knew. Don had already given them the description of the Dodge and it was out on the air but there were hundreds of them in the greater Los Angeles area and it had probably already been dumped and torched to destroy evidence. "There were only two of them?"
"No, four." Don had to get his thoughts under control before he confused the issue further. His mind was spinning off in a dozen different directions, not least of which was still trying to figure out what made him special in the robber's eyes. There was so much work to do and it was frustrating to have been so close to catching at least one if not all of the offenders only to have missed. "It was the AK-47s."
Pulling out his notebook and pen, David nodded. That much they already knew. "Don, start from the top. What happened?"
Don finished up his tale at his last recollection. "Then Two smashed me with his rifle butt. That's it."
David quickly finished writing before looking up and eyeing off the colourful bruise developing on the side of the senior agent's face. He couldn't believe Don had taken on men armed with AKs and survived. "You were lucky. They could have just shot you."
"Yeah, but they didn't." The senior agent said pointedly. They should have. He'd resisted and the robbers had already demonstrated their response to that. But instead they'd simply knocked him out and left him where he fell. The pressure from the approaching sirens could explain that, they'd only had time to take their own man and not come back for him. It didn't however, explain the rest. Why were they so keen to kidnap an FBI agent? And how was it that his presence could make the robbers' efforts obsolete? Two's comment about no longer needing money seemed to point that way.
"You sure they were going to take you with them? Not just out of the bank but away?"
"I'm sure." He figured if they hadn't been planning on keeping him there would have been a bullet or twenty in his back the moment after they'd left the bank.
"Why? It was close, sure, but they didn't need a hostage. They had no need to take you anywhere. They've never even tried to take anyone before."
"I don't know. What can I say, David? It seemed like they knew me, or at least two of them did. It changed their plans and they wanted me."
"If they knew you, then you know them."
"That's what I thought at first." He tried to play Devil's advocate. "Maybe they've seen the news and they just took advantage of the opportunity."
There had been more than one interview over the last few weeks as the robberies continued despite the FBI's best efforts. Interviews that had plastered his face across televisions nationally. He didn't believe it but it was still a plausible explanation for part of it at least. FBI agents were just as vulnerable as any other LEO, if the AK-47s had wanted an FBI agent they would have taken one by now. His stumbling in had been an accident.
"No." David shook his head. With the other information Don had just told him he didn't think that the senior agent's face on the television was the answer. He was however prepared to accept that taking one Don Eppes was not the end game of the offenders. If they had wanted his team leader they could have abducted him by now if they were serious enough, and he had no reason to doubt that the AK-47s were not serious enough.
David pressed on. "You said you recognised the voice of one of them. You know him, he also recognised you. This is our best lead yet."
"Some lead, I can't remember how I know the voice."
"But you're sure you do know it."
"I'm sure."
"Then it will come to you." David put away his notebook and looked his boss over again. It was still only spring but the day was shaping up to be a hot one, the forecasters were starting to predict a heat wave, and Don looked to be wilting. The bank was air-conditioned. Time for a little tact. "Come on, let's see what Colby and Nikki have got."
What they had was variations on the general theme. Four robbers all masked and professional had stormed in through the back door waving their rifles around. No shots had been fired, the offenders yelling and showing off their weapons had been more than sufficient to have customers and staff diving for the floor. The one security guard on duty had sensibly surrendered the moment a Kalashnikov had been pointed at him. The offenders had been moving to lock the doors when one last customer had entered. The rest in varying degrees of detail matched Don's account.
Only the manager, Kerry, had more to add. The offenders had taken her into the safe and had ignored some already bagged up cash. She had offered them the bags in an effort to get them out quicker but they had insisted on the large denominations and had taken the extra time to ensure that's what they got. Being in the industry she knew, just as the agents did, how odd that was but had no explanation. There had been no conversation other than instructions to find exactly what they were after. She also couldn't shed any light on the offenders' reasoning.
True to form the burnt out wreckage of the Dodge was located in a back alley a few blocks away. Attempts to question bystanders and staff in the immediate vicinity yielded no results. As on previous occasions they were unable to identify the second getaway vehicle or a direction of travel.
"So what have we got?" The frustrated team leader demanded.
They were back at the Field Office, Don had finished his statement to be included in the file as the team had been attempting to identify the getaway vehicle. David had insisted on his resting up in order to recover from his encounter by rightfully stating that his witness account was crucial to the investigation and had to be obtained immediately. After reading it through when he'd finished Don wasn't so sure but it was still more than they'd had before this. At least they could come to the conclusion that Two and Four were in command of the operation, the other two offenders were obviously not part of the decision making process. Where that led them he couldn't yet say but it was interesting all the same.
"Not much more than we had before." Colby summed up.
"I wouldn't say that."
"Have you got enough data now, Charlie?" Don asked after his brother's comment.
"There is never enough data." Charlie didn't bother going into the distinction between 'never enough data' and 'too much data'. The frustration the team was feeling was apparent, they would not appreciate a lecture just now. "But I can add what we got from this latest one to what we had. I should be able to narrow down the list of possible targets based on their need for large denomination cash, service roads at rear or side entrances, most probable escape routes and the layouts of the banks themselves."
"It hasn't worked so far." Don mumbled.
"I know, Don." Brotherly familiarity enabled him to decipher the words. "But the more we get the greater the probability I'll develop something that works."
"That's the problem, Charlie." David put in. "To get more data we need more robberies and that leads to the greater chance of more people being killed."
Charlie couldn't help but look at the deep red and purple mark on the side of his brother's face. The fact his brother hadn't been shot was a happy anomaly. "I know. I'm working on it. What I can tell you for now is that they will only target banks within the central Los Angeles area."
"Just because most of the others have been doesn't mean they'll keep doing it." Nikki said. "They gotta know we'll be watching for that."
"They do and you have been. Central LA offers them the best chance of hitting a bank with large cash reserves as well as the density of traffic providing their best bet at hiding their trail. I just have to try to find what made the specific banks they've already targeted stand out from the others that match their criteria to identify the next probable robbery."
Don rubbed his hand down his face, carefully avoiding the area that was letting him know it would appreciate an application of more ice. The team had been in this exact same position after the previous robberies, Charlie insisting that he was getting closer and promising to be able to predict the next target. So far however they had only slightly narrowed the field, enough to spread their resources painfully thin with no result. He looked at the results of their combined efforts over the last few weeks, the boxes and boxes of statements and reports and the boards holding bank blueprints and photographs.
"Charlie, get on that. The rest of us are going to go back to basics." He waved his hands at the evidence surrounding them. "We're going to take this from the top."
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Quite some distance away in a hotel room another team was meeting and working on their plan of action.
"If we have Agent Eppes they will give us what we want." The man that the agent in question had dubbed 'Two' pressed his point. The argument had been running in one form or another for a while now.
"Look, I know I agreed to it back at the bank. But that was when we had him. Now we don't." 'Four' responded. "We should just stick with the plan. We have nearly enough, two or three more jobs and we'll be right."
"So when we get him out we'll have nothing."
"There's nothing we can do about that. We can't keep pulling these jobs, they'll catch up with us soon enough."
"So if we take the fed and offer him in return, we get to keep the money for ourselves. We won't need to pay Turner and his crew."
"Maybe, maybe not. But we will have to pay the men he lent us." He glanced through the open door between their two rooms to where he could see the two other men quietly playing cards. West had a graze on his forehead as a result of the agent's attack. Turner's loan had been more than just the two men, West and Buckley, and the weapons they were using. The ex-military men had drilled their employers, greatly increasing their skill sets enabling them to pull off the robberies without being caught so far. A side effect was an increase in confidence.
"Fine, we pay them. We pay them a bigger cut than they asked for the robberies. Then that's it. We keep the rest. Think about it, with that much money it will be easy to vanish."
"You just want revenge."
The younger man stopped cleaning the sniper rifle and looked up at the older man, his father's best friend. "That fed put Dad in jail. What do you think? I want revenge, alright. I might even start by breaking his arm again."
"It wasn't his fault Scott went to jail. Scott handed himself in, remember?"
"I remember Eppes trying to talk Dad into giving himself up."
"And you remember that it wasn't until after Eppes had killed those two crooked cops that he did it."
"Eppes didn't kill them, they killed themselves. He was just there when it happened. Dad shouldn't have let himself be tricked like that, shouldn't have let the fed take him in."
"There were no tricks involved. You know that. It was just that what happened after the crash and all was too heavy for him. He wanted to pay his due."
"Well it wasn't too heavy for me." With a few kills under his belt now he felt more than a little confident in saying that. It hadn't bothered him in the slightest when his father had forced the FBI agent into the pickup that night in the forest, just as it hadn't bothered him to twist the agent's broken arm to force him to play along with his father's orders. "Dad would have got over it. There was no need to be scared anymore, we could have been away scot-free if he had wanted."
"Brad, we both know he doesn't belong in jail. Even though he's been moved to minimum security at La Tuna it's still a Federal jail and hard for him. We're going to get him out, alright? That's what all this has been about."
The younger man worked at calming himself down. He wanted to sell this idea he had to be rational. He could have the best of both worlds, he was sure of it. "Just listen to the plan alright, Jack? Then tell me if it will work or not."
Jack hesitated a moment before he nodded. He had to admit, privately, that giving away all the stolen money rankled. What they'd been doing recently went far beyond any of the plain amateurish hold-ups he'd ever pulled at gas stations and convenience stores over the years back in Albuquerque. Scott Nelson had always been a little too soft for his liking, having confined his criminal activities to non-violent thefts and fraud, but for all that they had maintained a friendship from childhood. He knew that Scott would disapprove of their latest venture but Jack liked the new occupation and his friend wouldn't be able to complain too much when it worked in his benefit. The money they had been rapidly acquiring was intended to go towards paying Turner's crew to spring Brad's father from jail and then to cover the cost of their escape from the US.
"Go ahead."
The younger man looked down at the sniper rifle in his hands, a rifle he'd discovered a new proficiency with. While Jack was still the far better shot and would be the main one shooting if his plan came to fruition, he was still planning on adding a few carefully targeted shots to the fray himself.
.
