Nate was seated at the hotel bar, nursing his second glass of whiskey when a woman settled into the stool beside him. "Mr Ford?" She asked. Draining his glass, he gestured for a refill before turning to face her.
Apparently taking his acknowledgement as assent, she pulled a file from her bag and continued. "aka Tom Baker, aka Bob Gibson, aka Jimmy Pop…" The woman frowned at her file, and Nate rolled his eyes.
"Papadokalis. What do you want?" If his bluntness annoyed her, she showed no sign of it.
"Ellen Casey. Interpol. We have a job for you." The words surprised a bitter laugh out of him. Now there was a sentence he'd never thought he'd hear from an Interpol agent. It was usually "Stop thief!" or "You're under arrest!" or "I know what you're up to." or something like that.
"Haven't you heard?" He waved his newly refiled glass at her, and took a drink. "I'm retired."
"Even so. You may be interested in this one." She slid her file to him, and despite his weariness and wariness and incoming hangover, he took it. Simple curiosity, he told himself.
The first part was a basic profile of him, inconspicuously stripped of any sensitive information. They had about half of his identities (and a couple that he'd shared with that backstabbing, self serving utter bastard), a list of his favourite cons (they were missing the Jersey Variant and the Silkie Shuffle, among others), a handful of his old hideouts. Not bad, all things considered. Better than the FBI profile, at any rate.
The next page was another profile, much shorter than his. Anton Pierson, founder of Pierson Aviation, no criminal record except some minor drunken shenanigans in college, no aliases or known criminal contacts, nothing out of the ordinary at all. Except for one small comment at the bottom. "Connection to D. Moreau suspected". He clenched his drink (remembering burning wood and glass shards and… and…), and drained the rest of his whisky in one swallow. Shaking the memories away, he fliped the page over, with a little more force than necessary.
The last section was a report. Someone in Pierson Aviation noticed a discrepancy in the company's financials, to the tune of five million USD paid to a bank account in San Lorenzo. No direct connection, but it raised some red flags. Interpol had investigated, and turned up a few odd sales here and there, a few instances of the company erecting buildings in odd places and then abandoning them, and so forth. Nothing definite, but… Nate tapped the file thoughtfully. The locations, the bribes, the planes, he could see how they'd all fit into Moreau's operation.
"What is it exactly that you are asking me to do?" He asked quietly, sliding the file back to her. Taking it, the agent slid gracefully from her stool, and strode off purposefully. Irritated, Nate followed her out to the lobby, and up the elevator into what was presumably her hotel room. Dropping onto the sofa, he waited as she retrieved a folder from her luggage.
"As you saw, we have no proof that Pierson is working with Moreau. We'd like you to see if you could get us that proof."
"You want me to, what, root through his financials? Interrogate his people? Hide in his wardrobe and tape a conversation?" He scoffed. "I'm flattered, but I'm not sure what you think I'd be able to find that Interpol agents can't."
"Unfortunately, there's only so much investigation we can do. Within the bounds of the law." Ah, there it was. "We want you to find proof of his involvement with Moreau. In his office, or on his company servers. Are you in?"
"How, exactly, am I supposed to do that?"
"Are you in, Mr Ford?" Truthfully, the idea of working for Interpol for once was intriguing. And the opportunity to throw a wrench into that fucking bastard's plans, however small, was just the icing on the cake.
"I'm in."
The agent nods, and passed him the folder. "We've picked out three specialists to join you on this job. You may be familiar with them." Scanning through the folder, Nate found himself smiling. Oh, yes, he was familiar with them alright.
From the first page, a slender blond woman smirked up at the camera, a blur around her fingers indicating that she had been fidgeting with something when the picture was taken. Ghost, they called her. He'd never seen her face before, but he knew of her by reputation, and he'd seen the very impressive results of her work. Priceless statues on weight detectors swapped out for flower vases, stolen artefacts replaced with crude play dough mimicries, paintings seemingly disappearing into thin air. A thief that stole from other thieves, and returned every item. Idly, Nate noted that her file confirmed that she was the only "Ghost", just as he'd suspected (and for half a moment, he considered what he'd take for winning that bet with Jim before remembering…)
The second face he did recognise. The man had gone by Todd Redding last time Nate saw him, but according to the file, his name was Trigger. A deliberate choice, probably. Every unconscious hired gun Trigger left in his wake was found with their gun either unloaded or completely disassembled, and the man reportedly never used them. Lucky for Nate, given the circumstances of their last meeting. He still bore the scar from that particular incident.
Nate recognised neither the face nor the name of the last specialist, but judging from the listed skill set and his obvious youth, he could hazard a guess. This hacker, who used the handle Firewall, had been the bane of the black hat hacker community for the last few years. One rather irritating hacker he'd had worked with, Chaos or however it was spelled, had spent a good half an hour ranting at Nate and… ranting at Nate about a particularly nasty virus Firewall had sent his way.
A vigilante thief, a one man SWAT team, and a grey hat hacker. The last time Nate had a whiz mob with this much talent, he'd robbed the Vatican. An aircraft design company would be no trouble at all. The only problem was… "It's not gonna work. These people, they always work alone. I mean, I didn't even know Ghost was hireable. They won't work for you."
"That's where you're wrong, Mr Ford. Do you know what these three have in common?" The woman leaned in, smiling conspiratorially.
"They're all Interpol operatives."
"I don't like this." Eliot growled, pacing the floor of the suite. From her seat at the table, Casey frowned at him. "I'll do my job. But I don't like the idea of working with him."
"He's the best at what he does, Trigger." She responded wearily. "You've seen what he can do."
Eliot turned to scowl at her. "Yeah, I have. That's kinda the problem. How do you know this ain't a long con? Man's worked for Moreau for years, and now, all of a sudden he's out, for no reason we can tell? It smells like a set up."
"We don't have much choice, I'm afraid. Years we've been after Moreau, with nothing to show for it. Ford might be our only chance to take him down. We can't let this opportunity slip away."
The worst part is that Eliot knew it was true. Moreau was untouchable, had been for years. Every legal option was off the table, and most illegal ones too. But this, bringing in this outsider, and a notorious criminal at that, was an issue of security, and security was his specialty. Every instinct he'd honed over the last seven years of his life screamed at him that this was too risky.
"Hey look man, it's not like we're just blindly trusting him." Firewall called from the sofa. The hacker had his feet up on the coffee table, a laptop balanced on his thighs, and a lazy grin plastered on his face. "Those comms I gave you? They got a little switch at the back. You flick that, and any input from you bypasses Ford's comms. You can hear him, but he can't hear you." The hacker grinned as he twisted to face Eliot, his face expectant.
"Hmph. Not as useless as you look."
"Aw, those are some harsh words man." The hacker pretended to wipe his eyes, laying one hand over his heart. "You're hurting my feelings." Eliot scowled again, then jerked as his eyes caught a flash of movement. He was ready in a heartbeat, shifting into a defensive stance just as a blonde figure vaulted over the sofa to settle down next to Firewall.
"Can I have one?" She asked cheerfully, before plucking a comm from the bag and inserting it into her ear without waiting for an answer.
Firewall nearly dropped his laptop. "Damn, girl, you trying to gimme a heart attack?"
"Glad you could join us, Ghost." Casey said from behind Eliot, and he relaxed ever so slightly. Not an intruder or an assassin then. Turning, he frowned as he realized where she'd come from.
"You climb in through the window?" He asked incredulously.
"Uh, yeah. Where else would I climb in from?"
Well. Good to know Ghost was every bit as crazy as her reputation suggested. This was going to be a shitshow, he just knew it. He sighed heavily, rubbing his forehead as Casey spoke again. "I'll be listening in on a secondary set of comms with another team on standby. Any sign of foul play, any indication that he's stringing us along, and we can extract you and arrest him."
"'Sides, it's not like Ford's that bad, you know, for a criminal." Firewall piped up, sitting up on the sofa.
"Yeah." Ghost added, swiping some sort of candy from the hacker and completely ignoring his glare. "At least he doesn't kill people."
And there was his other concern about Ford. "Then how come the last time I saw him, he was trying to assassinate a Spanish general, huh?" Eliot growled, just as the hotel door opened. Speak of the devil.
"Technically, we were trying to fail to assassinate him." Great. Eliot turned, narrowing his eyes at the man standing in the doorway. "Just needed to scare him off for a few days."
Eliot was not in the least bit reassured by what he saw before him. Ford looked different. Tired. When Eliot had first seen him in Spain, he'd been struck by the criminal's intensity, how he'd moved with such purpose, his eyes so clear you could almost see his brain ticking back there. The man who stood before him now looked exhausted, like the weight of the world lay on his shoulders. And his eyes…
Eliot had seen those eyes before. He'd seen them in the army, in the faces of young soldiers who'd watched their whole squad get slaughtered. He'd seen them among the black ops boys, those hardened veterans who had seen and done too much. He'd seen them, dead and black in the mirror, in his lowest moments, before Interpol had picked him up and reforged him, turned him from a sword to a shield.
Ford wasn't quite there yet, as far as Eliot could tell. But he was close.
The man steped into the suite, and took a seat away from the others, pulling out a flask as he went. "So. What do you have on this guy?" Firewall tapped at his computer, and the hotel TV flickered to life.
"I'm gonna assume y'all got the same file on this bad dude I did, so we're gonna skip that. Oh, also, I had to pull out some wires out of the wall to get all this set up, so if the hotel complains, my bad."
It's amazing, Eliot thought to himself, that he could hear Casey's teeth grinding from across the table. Dragging out a chair, he took a seat, careful to keep Ford in his line of vision.
"Anyways, I hacked into Peirson computer through a little doohickey Agent Casey was kind enough to plant in the building. Checked the computers, emails, got nothing. Now, most of the hackers who could do this shit, they'd've just left it at that. Now, me? I dug deeper." Another few taps on the keyboard, and a mess of incomprehensible charts overtook the screen. "See here? There's some real hinky business going in one of the computers. There's a chunk of stuff missing that I can't account for. Might be sectioned off, which means I can't hack it from here. Either I gotta be at the computer, or someone's gotta stick this baby" He held up a computer stick thing, grinning "into it so I can access everything directly."
"Alright, so we hit the office, plug your thing in. We toss the place while we're there, just in case, then clear a way out." Ford's expression was more annoyed than anything else, and Eliot was certain his own face held a similar expression. A job like this, Eliot could have done alone. But the hacker wasn't done, apparently.
"Yeah, except the computer ain't in the office. Look." Blueprints flash on the screen. Building plans, Eliot realises after a quick scan, with two rooms highlighted. "Peirson's office is on the top floor, yeah? Big office, fancy art and furniture, blah blah blah. But the partitioned computer is in the server room, three floors down. And I don't know what alarms dude has in there. It's a lot of stuff sectioned off. Might be an alarm in there. Plus, place has some crazy security. I mean cray zee. Halfway to a Steranko, man."
"Ah. So we'll be running two heists simultaneously. And we only get one shot at this." Ford leans forward now, a trace of a smile on his face, and for an instant, Eliot sees a glimmer of the man he'd faced in Spain..
"Alright then. Let's go steal some evidence."