A/N: It's me here! That's right, thisisforyou! Or more commonly known among lesser mortals who dislike fanfiction (I know, lesser is an understatement) as Antonia. I'm allowed to write in first person because I am the first person. If you get my meaning.

First of all: I have no idea where writingtitan intended to go with this, and I don't really care. That's the point of this little colab. It could go anywhere, and the not knowing makes it fun. One thing, though: there will be a CIA HQ break-in. Because Karl Urban (AN/WT: Ew) is too sexy not to rattle a few desks with.

Second of all: I apologise wholeheartedly for the lack of consideration shown by writingtitan for the little thing we like to call grammar. (AN/WT: Bite me) I've tried coaching her, ((AN/WT: 'coaching'? you call the physical and psychological abuse coaching? You're going to be the worst soccer mom) but she's impossible. Like a bloody two-year old. Honestly.

Oh, and third of all: neither I nor writingtitan owns RED, Con Air, the Gretchen Lowell series or any other works of fiction mentioned in this work of fanfiction. We just have a habit of pretending that I do, because I was there. It's much more fun that way.

Ok? Good. Right. On to the story.

-for you!

So that was really exciting. Perhaps not the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me, but definitely up-there. I'd been calmly walking down the street when I'd seen a man in a dress. Which in itself would have made my day. But I, being my usual bashful self, went to have a chat with him and next thing I knew I was under said man-in-a-dress' arm being carried back the way I had come, shoved in a truck and driven away.

And driven away. Seriously, the drive had taken hours. He didn't tie me up or anything, which was nice of him, but he didn't talk to me either and it got seriously boring in there. And the van smelt like a combination of gunpowder, old blood and unwashed male. Typical getaway vehicle.

Eventually we'd stopped and I thought we'd actually gotten somewhere, but next thing I knew I'd been tied up and the guy had taken off the dress – no, like taken it off completely, he wasn't wearing anything underneath and it wasn't something you could miss – and before I could even cry 'rape' he'd sat back in the driver's seat and fallen asleep. Naked.

Which was all fantastic because there was a knife next to me on the seat, in plain sight, so I cut through the scarves he'd tied me up with, set the dress on fire and scampered out the back door. I mean, all very interesting and everything, but enough is enough. And I don't sleep in vans and I was bored.

I became less bored when he jumped out of the van clad only in his wrinkles and followed me. A few more senseless hours of driving later and I was tied to a chair in a log cabin, so deep into the middle of nowhere there was no signal on my BlackBerry. The still-naked man, I found out, was called Marvin and was in fact not crazy but a slightly eccentric genius. Well, I'm not sure I'll be believing that one. In the cabin was also someone apparently high-up in the Russian embassy, his girlfriend (from the look of her hands I wouldn't want to be in a room with her and an AK-47) and another couple, some sort of bald CIA retiree and a girl who looked like she was having the time of her life.

All fine and dandy until the middle of the night. See, it's very difficult to fall asleep when you're tied to a chair so hard and straight-backed it could have come from the STASI HQ. So even though the old couple had made sure everyone else in their little commune was asleep before they started cuddling they didn't even glance at me. I could see that the fire was getting too high but they weren't looking, and I knew they'd blame me if the cabin burnt down after the escapade with the dress but I didn't want to interrupt them. People get embarrassed when they realise someone was (I couldn't help it, I assure you) watching them copulate. I know, go figure.

Marvin pulled me out of the fire. For a moment there I thought they'd all forgotten about me. But I wasn't crying. You know how smoke gets in your eyes and it really stings? Yeah. That was it. Period. But when we settled down to sleep – well, some of us, others of us were still tied up – I had to admit I felt a little less hostility towards these people. But Sarah took that one a tad too far.

Love.

She was crazy. They were all plainly insane and though my fingers itched to set up some kind of profile, the link was obvious. They were all retirees.

I've seen a lot of shit in my time (I won't even get into the story where I was shot by a criminal mastermind in an airplane. That cut me pretty deep, even after they removed the bullets from my chest. It was more the fact that he shot me with my own gun than anything else, and the stupid thing was I almost trusted him for a ridiculous second there. But I said I wouldn't get into it. I'm sure I wrote the story down when I was in brutally-enforced bedrest) and as such I can fully understand that that kind of stuff can really mess you up. But really. From the way the others all react to Marvin he's been like this all his life. Must be hell to put up with in public.

Love.

Sometimes you just feel a connection with people, y'know? You don't have to know them forever to realise that you belong with them and you never want to leave, and that, sure, maybe the only word you can use to describe such a situation is love.

This wasn't one of those times. Sarah hadn't been with the others that long, I could tell – her and the bald one were still in the honeymoon phase of their relationship – and had obviously never served with the CIA, but god-dammit, she was as crazy as the others. I could see she fit right in. Love? Yeah, sure, Spunky.

But I digress. What I should have been worrying about as Sarah turned away from me on guard duty was not how well I fit into their group but how I would get away from them. I didn't know why they'd kidnapped me, but they were so crazy it could easily be as simple as Marvin had liked the look of me. I didn't know why they were on the run from the law – they quite clearly were – but I'd report them to someone when I got back. Maybe. Maybe they were just a little bit too cute to put in prison or whatever other penalty was facing them.

But that aside, I had to get back. I don't mean to sound arrogant, although I usually do anyway, but the unit I'd been temporarily assigned to back in Nevada needed me somewhat badly. Honestly, you should have seen the state of the investigation before I turned up. They still thought they were chasing a man in an RV somewhere in the middle of the desert when it was quite clearly some sort of organisation. We'd checked for drug use but none of the victims had a history. Anyway, there had been a victim a week since I'd turned up and I really had to stay with the unit and make progress.

But this time there was no knife handy or dress to burn, so I had to stay put and try various methods of sailing away to sleep. I was so desperate I even tried counting sheep, even though I found out when I was five that one didn't work. Apparently when you're tied up and freezing your butt off outside, even the previously fail-safe method of imagining yourself tight in someone's muscular arms, to put it in a nutshell, failed.

So it was in an entirely unrested and somewhat grumpy state that the band of retirees woke to find me. And they knew about it. I thought breakfast was the least they could give me, but apparently I was asking for the world. I didn't get any yesterday, either, you'll remember. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, you know.

They eventually handed me something that was almost, but not quite, toast. Oh, fantastic. Sadly I was so hungry that it actually was. Then I glared at the bald one – Frank – for a while. He seemed to be the leader.

"So did you kidnap me for a reason or can I go now?" I asked petulantly. "And I mean a good reason, one that a normal person would accept. Not that, you know, my glasses don't match my suit." I glanced down at myself, at the black jacket-and-skirt combo I'd had to don for the resource-application meeting I was now two days late for. "There is a reason for that, in case that was it." I usually wear colour. But in the circumstances I hadn't packed a pair of contact lenses. I didn't think they'd make me do any of the greasing since I was technically only 'on loan' from the DEA. Long story.

"You're making a profile for the Desert Road killings," Frank replied calmly, sitting me up against the scorched cabin wall and crouching in front of me. "What do you think the guy's like?"

I rolled my eyes. "It's not a 'guy', it's an organisation," I told him. "There are clear signs. The ritualism, the shape of the bullet-holes. They were done by professionals and dressed to look like serial killings. It's some sort of group or gang or something."

Frank nodded slowly. He craned his head to look at Victoria, the blonde with the gun-worn hands. She shrugged. I was suddenly struck by the feeling that things were about to get interesting, like they hadn't been in years, not since the Beauty Killer fan club in Portland. He turned back to me.

"It's the CIA."

I blinked. "Excuse me?" He couldn't mean the murders. We checked them, none of them had any – I stopped running the thoughts through my mind and direct-looped them out my mouth instead. "We checked all the victims, none of them had any links to the CIA or the FBI or any other of that series of acronyms."

"It was a black-op," Frank replied calmly. He had a nice voice, actually. I notice voices, and this one was very nice; soft and quiet and comforting. Marvin's was a sort of reedy drawl, Ivan's a distinct Russian rumble, Victoria's prim and refined. Sarah's was annoying. "They were contractors. People went to a lot of trouble to make sure they couldn't be traced back to the CIA."

All right. Okay. I'd heard of government corruption and stuff, there was this case a few months back where some big arms dealer started ordering murders through the CIA and the Vice President was involved somehow and it all became rather messy. But come on. If all other excuses fell through – which, unfortunately, after a moment's scrutiny, they did – the CIA wouldn't try anything this close on the heels of that incident. It had been hell to clean up, apparently. "Why should I believe you? Were you guys involved in it or something?"

Another glance around from Frank to Victoria to Ivan to Marvin. Sarah got left out, but I knew what it meant.

It meant, oh shit, they were.