Close Encounters 15


"All this for one man," she said, standing in the middle of the clean room. She knew the regimen had been a big deal, had been a program that controlled her husband's whole life, but this was on a scale she almost couldn't fathom.

The compound - this installation out in the Congo - had taken them almost an hour to recon: building after building, barracks and storage spaces clustered around this one manufacturing plant. Now that they were inside, the vast reaches of the clean room with its efficiency and spare style made her blood buzz, adrenaline pumping through her.

They'd made it this far. And here she was, no suit, no mask, all her dirty particles agitating the fan filters in the ceiling over their heads. "Castle. Just how many of these pills you must have taken your whole life..."

Castle stood guard near the door, looking more tense than usual. She knew he wanted to leave and make quick work of searching the rest of the building, but she wanted to scour this lab first.

Never knew.

She started with the table containing the empty silver cases, opening drawers and pulling down bottles. If they had finished product here - like these cases - then maybe they had serum already stockpiled.

"It had to be refrigerated," Castle said from across the room.

She didn't see any refrigeration units. Kate spun slowly on her heel and scanned the long room, began pulling out drawers absent-mindedly.

All this for one man?

No. No, this couldn't be right. The lab was fully functional, and the spaces where equipment had been removed looked like it had only been updated with newer models. It wasn't abandoned at all. Maybe those outbuildings had been neglected but work was going on here, this was for more than just one man.

"What time is it?" she said suddenly, pausing as she ransacked the drawers. "Castle. Time?"

"Nearly five."

"When do you think their day starts?" she said quickly.

"Whose day?"

"Their work day," she added, gesturing to the lab. "This is active. This isn't a relic."

"Active? You think so?"

"I just found lipstick in this drawer. A woman's handwriting with an address and directions written down on a post-it note. No dust."

"Well, it's a clean room, Kate. No dust."

"Exactly," she pointed out. "Fan filters in the ceiling are still going. I guess the boiler room down there is powering those things 24/7. Which means people are going to start showing up to work-"

"Oh, shit. Soon."

"Soon enough," she admitted.

"Hurry."

She narrowed her eyes at him, but he was right. She kept searching the workstation, ignoring personal effects when she came across them, looking for more information. They couldn't have come all this way only to find stabilizers. Alone, the stabilizers were worthless. The serum in those injections caused all the magic, and if she had to have one without the other, she wanted the serum.

He needed the serum.

"Kate."

"Let me look," she insisted. The next work station was more of the same, and it looked like there were at least ten people assigned to the clean room. She saw ten distinct personalities in the little items left behind, even though - quite possibly - none of these things were supposed to be in here.

Could be more employees than that.

And they'd be coming in to work at what time? Six? Seven? Was the woman with the lipstick an early riser who liked the quiet before everyone else got to the lab?

They didn't have much time.

She found inactive ingredients in storage jars, all neatly labeled in French: binder, bulking agent, glidant. Their chemical names were things she couldn't translate, but the details gave her enough context.

She moved on to what looked like a file cabinet, rubbed her thumb over the lock. "Castle."

"Faster, Kate."

"I need a lockpick. Something."

He grumbled, but he left his place by the door and came to her, fishing into his pack and pulling out the kit. "Here. Quickly."

She bent over and picked the lock of the file cabinet, pulled out a low drawer filled with labeled folders. She thumbed through the tabs, looking for something - she didn't know what - and she felt Castle come up at her back. Charlie One, Patient Zero, BLK-AIT, MKU.

He reached past her, plucked an old-fashioned manilla folder from the tab labeled Charlie One. He opened it to read and she saw official-looking letters, copied on a mimeograph machine and the paper brittle with age. As Castle flipped through the file, the pages were the strong-smelling, purple-inked papers from ditto machines like she'd had in elementary school.

"What's that?" she said, not entirely interested. "Charlie One?"

"I don't know," he said slowly. "But that's my father's Army code at the top. This one is addressed to him."

She peered over his shoulder but the page he was looking at was so smudged, it was nearly illegible. "Dated December 1, 1974. Wasn't there some Cold War stuff going on in this region during that time?"

"Couple years off. That was from '60 to '65. The Congolese wanted independence from Belgium and the UN had to mediate because the Prime Minister threatened to go to the Soviet Union for help. This is December, 1974. Huh. I was five."

Five?

Beckett gave it a surface look, but she left Castle at the files, content to let him pore over history. A bunch of files wouldn't tell her where Black had hidden his regimen, unless it was a map.

"Hey," she said, glancing over her shoulder at him. "Is there a map of this place?"

Castle grunted, lifting an eyebrow at her, but then he nodded. "Yeah, maybe." He bent back over the file cabinet and began removing huge reams of paper - what looked like lab reports to Beckett from this distance. Not maps.

She kept going around the room, checking cabinets and drawers, opening glass doors and peering into canisters. She found another storage cabinet containing ingredients, and she ran her fingers quickly over them, expecting more of the same.

But she found an ingredient that didn't belong, wouldn't compound into tablet form. Benzodiazepine. She knew it only because it had been COD in a homicide she'd investigated, a psychoactive and anti-convulsant the man had been taking for his epilepsy. His wife had mixed heavy doses of his medication with alcohol and an anti-depressant in her bid for the life insurance money.

What Beckett had discovered in her research then was that benzo was safe in the short term but caused cognitive impairments and paradoxical effects over a long course of treatment. Didn't that match with what Saber had told her? That he'd expected Castle to go crazy with only the serum. Was it because benzo was in that serum?

"Castle," she said slowly. "What was the mood drug that King noticed in your file? The one he was supposed to keep tabs on?"

"I can't remember. Benz... something."

"Benzodiazepene," she said, her raw palms beginning to throb with the franticness of her pulse. "That's what this is. In this bottle. That's not in the stabilizers, Castle. That's in the serum. It's here. They make it here too. We have to find it."


"The other side of the hall?" he suggested.

Her face cleared, that anxious intensity morphing into determination. "Yeah. You get what you need? Any maps?"

"No maps," he said. His fingers felt numb though, and he'd stacked file after file on top of the cabinet. So many copies of official US Army documents, words he recognized, acronyms he knew - like AIT: Advanced Individual Training.

His father had mentioned it to one of the drill instructors he'd had in Afghanistan in 2002, back when he'd re-upped and thought he had escaped his father for a while only to have the man follow him. The unit he'd been assigned to had been up for AIT - and now these files addressed to his father from 1974.

He'd been five.

"Castle. Maps? Anything?"

He lifted his head, felt like he was swimming through that monsoon again. "No. Nothing."

"Then come on. We don't have much time."

She was heading for the clean room door, so he gathered the files he'd found, stuffed them into his backpack. He followed after her, saw her jabbing at the controls to the airlock, frustrated with how long it took to seal the door behind them. He laid a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, trying to transmit some calm, but he could feel how it had taken hold of her.

The idea that they'd done all of this for nothing, that there'd only be stabilizers here and nothing else - it had nearly sunk her.

She was first out of the ante-room even as Castle tried to muscle past her to check the hall. She flew to the opposite side where an equal number of doors spaced the wall. He saw her face light up when she reached for the door knob, already anticipating.

"Beckett," he barked.

She stopped, turned back to him.

"As a team," he insisted, coming up at her side now with his weapon. "On me."

She shot him a seriously dirty look, but he wasn't compromising on this one. Castle opened the door and shouldered through, his weapon drawn, and found himself in the same exact space.

Ante-room with windows. Only this time, the light in the lab was blue. Clean, cool blue.

No file cabinets in here. But he saw the long rows of refrigeration units, and he knew.

Something in his chest eased, like a weight tipping off of him, and Beckett came up at his side to touch the window with reverence.

"This is it. Look at it. This is it, Castle."

The serum. Those huge refrigerated units took up the entire back wall, and a sterile environment seemed to be set up around the work stations. White, rounded boxes stood on one table, their cords running into the cable holes at the back and disappearing.

"Centrifuges," she said. "For fluids. Angle rotors - I've seen Lanie use them."

"Fluids."

"Like blood analysis," she clarified. "But here for that serum-"

"It's liquid," he finished. "Got it."

"They make the stabilizers on one side of the hall and the serum on the other."

"I can't believe my father would have it done all in the same place," he said. "All his eggs in one basket?"

"Doesn't... sound like him," Beckett said cautiously. "Actually, you're right. Doesn't sound like him at all."

He nodded, but Beckett was already moving for the entrance to the lab, shoving hard on the sealed door and entering the airlock. Castle came with her, disliking the sensation of the closed space, the sense of being trapped, but he didn't know what else to do.

Those files next door were haunting him. Something about them made his guts churn.

"We can test it at home," she said quietly. Her chin was stubborn, her jaw hard in the blue light. Her hair had a strange wash of green to it. "We'll give it to Boyd and Threkeld and they'll make sure it's the right thing, that it won't hurt you."

He didn't like being caught in this lab, the rows of labeled jars and the mixing agents, the pipettes and the centrifuges lined up and ready. He felt exposed with those wide windows all along the wall.

1974. He'd been five years old.

"See?" she breathed. "Here it is. Castle."

She was already at the freezer units, and now he could hear them too - the sounds of the boiler room below, laboring to keep everything at a stable, consistent temperature.

Beckett tugged on the handle and crystal, cold air came washing over them. When the frost cleared, there it was, illuminated white and blue in the light from the freezer.

"Oh, thank you, God," she whispered, reaching inside and touching one of the vials.

She yelped and jerked her hand back, pressed her fingers to her chest with a wounded look in her eyes.

"Kate?"

"Burned," she said. "It surprised me. I'm fine."

"Burned?" He opened the other door and found larger containers of the serum, these stacked to be portable and fitted inside carrying cases. This side of the freezer had a temperature gauge and he whistled when he read it.

"That's 18 below," he said. "Flesh freezes when exposed in fifteen minutes or less. So - no - don't go touching the metal containers, Beckett."

"How do we get it out of there? Why is there so damn much?"

Good questions, but he could only answer one of them. "Look for gloves - I'm sure they have to handle it carefully. And see these cases? Like a bigger version of those silver ones that the regimen always came in - insulated so it will maintain its temperature."

"We can carry them out in those." She was already moving away from him and he shut the doors once more, looking for gloves or something they could use to carry the cases until the handles warmed up.

"We'd have to be fast, get them into cold storage ASAP. Or else..."

"I bet that's why they're frozen," she said from across the room. She was rifling through drawers, dragging out what looked like a roll of sanitation paper. "If they're 18 below, then they can survive long shipping trips."

"Could be. I don't think that paper will work. Too thin. We need something with padding."

"Yeah," she said, replacing it carefully. He was banging drawers and rattling things. She closed her fingers around his wrist. "Hey, love, be gentle. If we leave it as un-assed as possible, then maybe they won't know we've been here."

"We're stealing stuff," he said in response.

"But I mean, they'd keep making it here, wouldn't they? Since we can't take everything with us - maybe they'll keep making regimen, and we can come back."

No. No, they wouldn't be coming back.


Beckett shrugged her shoulders with the ache in them, but she had two cases of the larger serum wrapped in batting wool and shoved inside the backpack, along with some files Castle wouldn't let her leave behind. He had all the weapons and she had the precious cargo.

"You stay behind me," he said as they entered the anteroom.

She wished she had more, could carry more, but Castle had been adamant that both of them have their hands free. She knew it was dangerous for her to be completely defenseless, but it was a lifetime's worth of serum and it was killing her to leave behind so much of it.

She had an idea, somewhere in the back of her mind, that the two clean rooms and their stores of regimen were part of something much larger than she could possibly understand, that there was an agenda at work here.

All his eggs in one basket? No. That was definitely not Agent John Black's usual m.o. and if he was manufacturing regimen in the Congo at an installation that looked like it had been here for over fifty years, then there was something else going on here.

"Castle," she to his back, watching the fluid line of his shoulders as he hustled them down the hallway. "Castle, we need to check out the first floor."

He came to a dead stop. She clenched her fists and took a breath, waited for him to absorb that.

And then she explained. "Castle, something's not right about this place. And you know it."

His shoulders dropped.

"Rick," she urged him. "We can't - I feel responsible for this."

Castle turned in the hallway, his face grim and set. "You're not responsible for him. Whatever this is - it's been happening for decades. You're not responsible."

And yet... there was a connection to Black she couldn't deny. He was Castle's father; he'd made this man in front of her, half Black's DNA and the other half - while it might have been Martha's - now it was altered by the regimen Black had created. And then Kate had remade him, her husband the spy, and she and Black were the only two who would do anything to save him.

There was a connection there; she couldn't deny it.

"Castle," she said slowly. "I'm not responsible for what he's done here, no. But what is it he's doing here? Do you have any idea?"

"How would I know?"

"No, I'm not saying you would, but doesn't it strike you as wrong? All of this set-up, the vast quantities coming out of those labs, the packaging and the - look, here, you saw the instructions printed on the sides." Beckett eased the pack off her shoulders and unzipped it again, pulling the case out by the batting wool. "See here? Shake well before use."

"What about it?"

"Why in the world is this necessary?"

"For the guy on the other end who administers it," Castle said with a shrug, his eyebrows knitting together. "Kate, we're not going down there. Black is down there somewhere. We're keeping well away from him."

"Castle, why is it necessary for Black to have instructions to be printed on the sides of the cases? Wasn't that usually his job? Didn't he give you the shots?"

Castle growled and raked a hand down his face, but she wouldn't be swayed. They were responsible for the regimen in many ways, responsible for what it was doing to him, to their family, but they were also responsible for what Black did with it too.

"Because we know," she said. "We know about it and no one else does. Those guys who served with you in Afghanistan, they had no idea what they were signing up for. And it drove them crazy. Saber said it was more than just AWOL, Castle. They became psychotic."

His hand dropped and his eyes regarded hers bleakly. "Coonan."

"What?"

"Coonan was in one of those squads," he told her.

Coonan. "You said you thought he'd been trained in your squ... oh, God."

"I'm sorry," he whispered, looking away.

Trained in his squad meant Castle had been there. Castle had been training right alongside those men. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I did. I - sort of. I didn't realize, Kate. I wasn't thinking about it like that. I told you he and I were given the same training in Afghanistan, that we learned the same skills, followed the same program."

"Program. And program was supposed to mean regimen?"

"Yeah," he scraped out. "I didn't know then what I know about it now. I don't know when he flunked out of the program, but he was doing black ops work in '99. For - for Bracken, I guess. He must have known about the squads because he was on the Oversight Committee. My father knew someone had gotten their hands on one of his - his projects."

She stared at him. "And so - so he agreed to go after Bracken with us. He gave us the resources of the CIA to go after Bracken to cover his tracks."

Castle rubbed his hand down his face, but she could barely register any of it. Castle gripped the gun tighter and his shoulders squirmed. "Cover his tracks or get back his custom-made killers. Really, Kate, I thought they were all killed in the last mission we went on - back in 2002. Supposedly killed. I survived but I thought the rest of them hadn't. Until Coonan."

Her heart struggled to catch up, her pulse beating too hard in her ears. "I can't... Coonan killed my mother, Castle."

"If anyone is responsible for this fucked up regimen, it's me. It's not you. I don't want you down there with him. I'll take you out, boost you over the perimeter wall, and then I'll come back on my own."

"No!" The panic crawled up her throat. She shoved the case back into the pack and slung it over her shoulders, securing it before she reached out for him. "Castle. We're not splitting up; we're not."

He looked wrecked, and she didn't know how to comfort him. All she could do was step into his body, slide her curled up, mangled hands to his waist. She let her cheek brush his and she breathed him in, the oil and sweat of him, the despair leaking out of his pores.

"Castle, don't leave me."

"No," he croaked. One of his hands reached up and clutched the back of her neck. He was breathing fast. "No. I won't leave you."

"If there was any other way..." she whispered.

"No. I know," he rasped. His fingers were heavy on her neck. "I know. We can't let him keep doing this. Sins of the father."

She pressed her forehead to the hard ridge of his cheek and reached up to cup the side of his face. "You're a good man," she whispered. "And that's why you know we have to do this."


They'd only made it as far as the stairwell when the phone vibrated against his thigh. He startled to a halt, that sickening sense of this is how it ends welling up in his guts.

"What?" she whispered behind him. The stairwell was cramped on this end of the building and the air was muggy; sweat rolled between his shoulder blades and along his spine.

"The phone," he said. He safetied his side arm and holstered it, slid his fingers into the pocket of his pants. The satellite phone seemed heavy when he answered.

"Pilot this is Tower," Mitchell said. There was a strain to his voice. "We have unidentified third party in your area. Please be advised."

"Roger that," he scraped out. "No ID?"

"They're dark," Mitch answered. "Very dark."

Shit, that did not sound good. He was standing in a stairwell with his wife inside of a building that looked like it had seen more than its fair share of sieges and was ready to call it quits.

Mitch went on. "But, man? I gotta say - from what I can decipher of the activity in your area, they're not friendly."

"Of course not, but-"

"To either side. You get me? I've got heavy artillery movements and dark ops troop deployments. Not to mention an advance scouting party. Heat signatures all over the map. And then Black - he's scrambling around down there."

"The tracker tell you that?" Because Beckett had said it wouldn't give that much fine-tuning.

"Are you listening to me? Heat signatures. Plus our contact in the village said work was cancelled; everyone was 'warned' to stay home. Fucking notes were dropped on them from a chopper. Did you know that place is manufacturing something?"

"Yeah, forget that for a second," he muttered. "Your contact say what time they usually begin their work day?"

"Oh-six-hundred."

Not good. They had ten minutes. "Consider me warned," he told Mitch.

"Good hunting," the man answered and then the connection was severed.

Castle took a breath and pushed the phone back into his pocket, turned his head to look at his wife, the anxious set to her eyes and the bruises that had blossomed over her neck and shoulders. She shouldn't be here, not right now, not like this, but then again - neither should he. This shouldn't be their problem, their responsibility, but this was their life - saving the world, one mission at a time, right?

"Kate," he started. Helplessness battled at him but he shoved it down ruthlessly. He was finished with that. What had been done was already done - nothing to do for it but move forward, be better, be grateful for what he had standing in front of him.

If they never reached their dreams, it didn't matter. Because having the dreams - that was what was most important. She was someone he could dream with, and he'd never had that before. Never had the heart for it; she'd given him that.

So the battle to come? They could do it; they'd survive. They'd already survived. This was it.

"What?" she said. "Castle, you're scaring me. What's going on?"

He drew his weapon once more. "There's a black-ops team on its way here, right now, and they have heavy support coming in behind them. This same group has told the workers not to come in this morning - so Black probably knows the team is coming too."

"They're clearing out?" she asked, her voice tightening. "They're - the black ops team - it's not ours. It's not theirs either."

"It's not theirs," he confirmed. "They wouldn't be ducking for cover if it were."

"Who is it?"

Castle glanced back to the door leading to the second floor labs, remembered the reams of files describing in detail the work being done, the connections, the names. "I think... it's whoever established the program. They're cleaning up."