Chapter Two - Reaching Out

The night didn't go as he had hoped.

Diving once again in the horrific images of his past, in the FUBAR missions he had barely escaped alive, in the pain and the trauma, had awakened the demons, and they had come to visit him in his dreams.

He saw flashes of dead soldiers of his unit, of bombs and hasty executions carried on by the roadside, the screams of the children, the stalwart expressions on the faces of the grown men as they were gunned down. And the women… he didn't even want to think about what had happened to the women.

Then there was Shadow Moses. On the remote island of the Alaskan archipelago a group of his former comrades had taken residence after defecting to the enemy and were threatening to launch a nuclear missile over Washington. He had been sent in, apparently to take them down, but in the end he had seen through the curtain of lies carefully placed over his eyes and had realized the true meaning of that mission.

His death, so the blame of a failed coup could be placed on him.

By surviving and getting out of the military base he had managed to throw their plans out of the window and, apparently, stop them for a while.

At what cost though?

He had been forced to gun down people he considered friends. Members of his unit, elite soldiers that had been harbored by the US Special Forces to survive in extreme conditions, to take care of missions no one else in the world would have undertaken. He had to place a bullet in their heads, the orders were adamant.

Their lifeless features haunted him like a wax statue all night, until he had given up, showered, dressed and went back to his notes.

If he had to see their faces all night, better do something productive instead of waste so much energy while trying to keep the panic attacks at bay. If he concentrated on something at hand, despite the fact that all those notes, all those pictures, those mission reports he had stolen through the years were the cause of all his troubles, he had a better chance to maintain at least some control over himself.

By seven in the morning, he had gathered enough on the nameless organization that had forged his life both as a soldier and as a civilian to prove his case. He said goodbye to his daughter and mother, who asked him to rethink this idea of going against them, again, but let him go all the same, then he walked out of the loft. File tucked beneath his arm in a new folder, he walked all the way to the 12th precinct, both to clear his head after a sleepless night and to come up with a good story to justify everything the folder contained and all his knowledge of this ubiquitous organization that had no name but apparently had tentacles everywhere.

It looked like the plot of a James Bond book.

We could call it SPECTRE. He thought as he entered the 12th precinct, with two cups of coffee on a small cardboard tray. He asked the uniform at the door if Detective Kate Beckett was already in and once he got an affirmative confirmation and passed through the security controls, he headed to the Homicide division.

The bullpen was almost empty, so early in the morning, but Detective Beckett was already at her desk, filing paperwork. She was leaning heavily on the table, one elbow propped on its surface as she held her hair in her left hand, to keep it out of her eyes.

She looked like she hadn't slept a minute, and yet she still shined in the bright yellow light of the morning sun.

Castle had to fight with a sense of incoming panic to actually walk up to her, but he did it despite the slight shaking of his hands.

Silently, he placed her cup of coffee in front of her and waited for her to notice him.

Beckett startled in her chair, the pen flying out of her grasp and rolling on the desk to hide behind a pile of folders. "Mr. Castle…" she called, a bit out of breath. "What are you doing here?"

"I come with a peace offering after yesterday, in the form of caffeine. I really hope I got your order right, grande skim latte with two pumps of sugar-free vanilla, right?"

He saw a sparkle of happiness in her eyes at the mention of the way she liked her coffee, but she was also baffled by it. She had never shared it with him, but she had asked a uniform going out to refill each one with their favorite order, the day before. A young girl, if he recalled right, at one point had come out of the evidence deposit room, claiming that no one would ever accomplish anything that day if they didn't eat something and had proper coffee, not the dishwater their brewer could make, and had offered to pick up everyone's order. Even his. That's how he had learned Detective Beckett's favorite.

"I heard you calling for it, yesterday," he explained as she took the paper cup and inhaled the thick aroma coming from it.

"Thank you, but it wasn't necessary."

"Not necessary, but I felt like I acted like an uncooperative witness yesterday and that I caused you more stress than you needed. So I'm here to rectify what I did yesterday."

"How?"

Castle picked a chair from a nearby empty desk and sat beside her, before handing her the file he put together from his own, bigger one.

"I told I was in the Special Forces, right?" She nodded and opened the file. He watched her as air caught in her lungs when she saw the grainy picture of the same type of bomb that had almost destroyed half of Manhattan the day before. A picture he had taken himself in Somalia, in 1997.

"Detective Beckett," he started, suddenly fidgeting on the chair as he fought with a sudden flashback of a child being gunned down by a rebel soldier while he hid beneath a cardboard box. "In Special Forces… sometimes you get drafted in more discreet type of units. Covert ops, secret missions, the whole lot. Unfortunately I can't disclose much, but I can tell you that I've encountered that type of bomb many times before. This one is from Somalia."

"Why are you showing me this?" she asked. "Do you have a lead on who built the bomb?"

Castle ran his fingers through his hair, trying to find the right words.

"Technically, the man that built the bomb in the picture is dead. I put a bullet between his eyes in 2005, I suppose his body burned to a crisp when the place was bombed after I had escaped."

"Mr. Castle, you either explain this or I'm going to have you escorted outside and ban you from this precinct." Her voice didn't leave room for misunderstanding. She didn't want to put up with his crap and he was making it harder than it really was.

He only wished he could disclose more details without putting her in the crosshairs of his own demons.

"Detective, listen to me. I can't tell you much of what I did or what I saw or why I was ordered to do this or that, but I beg you, believe me. The bomb yesterday… it wasn't a lonewolf with mania of grandeur, it wasn't just a random Islamic terrorist organization, it wasn't Al Quaeda or whatever… this is an inside job, someone in Washington wanted that bomb to go off."

"You mean this is CIA?"

Castle chuckled. "You wish. In comparison, CIA's hands are spotless, not a drop of blood on them. I don't have names, except for former associates, but I tell you, there's someone, above the upper management, more powerful than the POTUS or any federal agency, that wants to keep us at war. I've witnessed their deeds, first hand. I bear the scars of the cheap tricks they pulled on humanity in the past fifty years. All the evidence I could find are in that file."

"Sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory, Mr. Castle. Why are you even telling me this?"

He leaned closer to her and gently stopped her quick rifling through the pages, only to pick up a small stack of sheets clipped together by a rusty paper clip. "I wish it was a conspiracy theory, but it isn't. And I'm telling you this because this time they hit too close. They could beat me, hurt me, even kill me I wouldn't care. But yesterday, that bomb would have killed too many innocent people, my own mother and daughter among them. That's why I'm here. I can't let something like this happen, not after…" He paused, his mind flooded with images from the horrors he had witnessed in Bosnia. "Not after what I saw in the past. The blood on my medals that I spoke of yesterday, it's a lot. I can't wash it away, I can't go back and save those people, but at least I can prevent more from dying now."

He showed her the report of one of the first covert ops mission he had undertaken, back in 1993. It was one of the few that wasn't classified. Mostly because everything went as expected and no one got hurt.

The first page showed his own record, with a picture of a much younger Richard Rodgers, as he went back then, in high uniform. It wasn't necessary to their investigation, but he had put it in the file to give himself some credit in her light. If she decided to search his files, that particular mission report would probably pop up on the top of the list, and it would be the only one she could access, as the others, more than one hundred, were all marked as confidential.

"So you were really in Special Forces."

He nodded. "I was. And I've seen my share of crap in warzones. Now, you're free to refuse to believe my ramblings about overpowered men controlling the sorts of the United States of America for their own profits, just bear with me about the bomb. We can start from there."

"What do you mean we? There's no we in this!"

"Detective, you don't know what you're about to face. Believe me, I've seen it myself, I've lived it on my skin. They're invisible, but they are everywhere. Even here, and if they aren't here yet, they have ways to get in," he explained. "I'm here to help."

Her hand twitched, fingers spasming a little bit around the pen she had fished from its hiding spot. "Why should I trust you? You barged in after you lied to me yesterday, claiming you come with evidence for a case we are ready to close… you could be one of them. How can I be sure you're not here to derail us?"

Castle sighed. He had no way to prove to her he wasn't one of them. For what she knew about him, he could really be one of their spies.

"You can't be sure. I know, it's a lot to take in but let me help. I know how they work, I can see through their smokescreen and I tell you… someone is trying to replicate the work of an artist of bomb building. An artist whose life I ended six years ago, but I knew he had an apprentice. A member of my own unit. One that, at the time, hadn't defected yet. But it's clear they lured him and he's now on their side. Or they forced him, I don't know, but it's him. His name is Donald Chandler Anderson."

When he mentioned the name of the person he was sure was responsible for that bomb, Beckett reached into a pile of folders stacked beside her computer screen and pulled one. "Donald Chandler Anderson was found dead a week ago in a motel in Queens."

She gave him the thin file and he opened with hands shaking with anger. He quickly read the report, stabbed multiple times in the back, only one wound though proved to be fatal, murder weapon was a combat knife used in Special Forces. No fingerprints, no DNA, nothing.

He knew the drill. That was how they had planned to kill him too, six years ago, to make it look like he had fought with someone and had been killed in the process.

It was the first real lead he had in a long while and coming right after the bomb…

But when he thought he had read everything, Beckett handed him more files. "So were these men and women." Her voice faltered, when she pronounced the last word. "Same modus operandi, same type of weapon, everything matches. We thought we had a serial killer that killed randomly, but if you tell me that Anderson is probably the man that built the bomb… it can't be a coincidence."

He shook his head. "Nope, looks more like a contract killer." He omitted the fact that he knew the name said contract killer went by. No need to add more fuel to a fire that was already burning too bright. "So? You believe me now?"

She took a deep breath and looked at the contents of his file spread over her desk, hands down as if to keep all the sheets from flying away. "No… I don't believe you. Not about the whole SPECTRE style organization, but I do think you have a point about the bomb. And this photo…" She pointed at the print of Somali bomb. "This tells me you may know more than you are allowed to say."

"In fact, I do. And I'm willing to help."

"You'll have to speak with my Captain, I'm not sure you would be allowed to help us though, as a civilian."

"I have my way with words."

Two hours, a long chat with Captain Roy Montgomery and a stack of weavers signed, Castle was officially on board. Montgomery had been as skeptical as Beckett about his knowledge about that bomb, the only detail he had disclosed, other than the fact that he was part of the army for a while, but he had allowed him to join Beckett and her team in that investigation.

It seemed like he smelled something fishy too.

He signed the deal when out of nothing he brought up the name of Donald Anderson. The dead former bomb specialist was the link between his file and their investigation that allowed Castle to be taken seriously and not pushed aside as just another conspiracy theorist coming out straight from X-Files.

"Mr. Castle, these are Detective Kevin Ryan and Javier Esposito, my partners in the team. We were in charge of the murder that brought us to discover the bomb."

They shook hands. "Nice to meet you."

"Excuse the bluntness, but what could a mystery writer know about a dirty bomb?" asked Esposito.

"Mystery writer, former Green Beret and the guy who defused said bomb," Castle pointed out, hiding the annoyance of the insination behind a mask of sarcasm and a fake smile. "What else could I know, except for the name of the man who built this bomb?"

Esposito, who Castle could immediately identify as former military himself, shrugged his shoulders. "So, what do we have?"

Word count: 5836