For disclaimers, warnings and etc., you must see the prologue/chapter one.
Essence of Colby – NaNo 2009 – Day Eleven
Don woke, finding himself in bed, in his pajamas, his bedside alarm going off. Sitting up, he turned the alarm off and then took a breath. Blinking his eyes, Don had the peculiar sense that he'd lost time somewhere and, grabbing his cell phone from the nightstand, he checked the time and date, frowning when the dark haired agent saw it was when it should be.
Wasn't it?
Sighing, Don got out of bed, heading to the bathroom. Stripping down, he found a couple of bruises he had no idea how he'd gotten. Frowning once again, Don got into the shower, immediately plunging his head into the water.
He distinctly remembered coming home from the hospital the day before yesterday… but then everything else, until waking up just a moment ago, felt like it was someone else's memories.
Don shook his head. He thought he was over these damn episodes! Was he ever going to be free of what happened to him all those years ago?
****
About a year into his Fugitive Recovery career with the FBI, the case he and Coop were working on got really hairy. The man they were looking for was a condemned murderer; escaped from prison during a transfer. A former soldier who had some special training but their superiors thought that Don and Coop would be able to handle the man on their own.
Well, they'd been wrong. Gray had set a trap for them which lead Cooper to be put in the hospital for two weeks and Don to be kidnapped.
Their colleagues hadn't known anything was wrong until a "John Doe" at some hospital had been identified as an FBI agent and the hospital had contacted the local field office for information on him.
A manhunt ensued and seven days later, Don had been found in such bad shape that no one knew if he was going to make it or not.
After almost four weeks in the hospital, another ten recovering at home and then another fifteen on desk duty, Don had finally been cleared to go back to field duty for the Fugitive Recovery department… if he still wanted to. It was just two months later that Don had first come in contact with Ian Edgerton.
However, ever since the kidnapping, Don had had issues with either missing time or feeling disconnected from his own memories – that what he was remembering about what had happened over the 'missing time,' weren't his, weren't right. After almost a year of therapy, medical attention and psychoanalysis, 'they' had simply labeled it as some unique Post Traumatic Stress symptom.
Don was told that, unless things changed, or something new presented itself, to basically ignore them and learn to live with the episodes.
As Don soaped himself in the shower, he thought of how they had been more frequent over the last few months but, other than that, nothing had changed.
Nothing was wrong really.
He just hated feeling so… vulnerable… out of sync… disconnected from his life.
When lunch arrived for Ian, Megan opted to go to the cafeteria and bring something back so they could eat together. Once she was settled back in her chair, Ian decided to take one bull by the horns.
"How's David handling all this?" He questioned Don's profiler, watching her carefully.
Megan sighed, aware of the sniper's scrutiny. "He was part of the team that searched Colby's place yesterday. David's… he's not taking things really well, but he's dealing. In his own way."
Ian nodded. "I noticed that he and Colby," Ian's voiced sounded strained when he said his deceased lover's name but continued, "seemed pretty close."
It was Megan's turn to nod, giving the other agent a tender glance, "Yeah. It was a good partnership. … Colby… he once said that he'd begun to think of David as a really good friend."
Ian took a large breath and then titled his head back, giving the ceiling a quick look before returning to his meal.
David was sitting at one of the outside tables of a little café not too far from the office, not paying much attention to his food, lost in thought. Yesterday he'd spent the majority of the day going through his former partner's apartment. A partner he'd begun to think of as a best friend; hell, even like a brother, a brother he'd never had.
Then to find out that that person was a spy… a spy for a foreign country.
The thought of Colby Granger, former soldier, Special Agent for the FBI, part of a family with a long military history… being a spy… was just… it was just too much for the handsome black man to wrap his mind around. David had been a soldier as well, he'd spent time under fire in Tel Aviv when he worked with bomb disposal and had been with the FBI for longer than Granger, having transferred to LA from Long Beach.
How could Granger … how could he turn his back on his own country – throw away all his family's honor and respect for… David shook his head. The more his mind kept going over everything, the more upset and angry and frustrated the agent became.
He'd gone into Granger's apartment, trying to distance himself from all the time he had spent here with his former partner; watching whatever game was on, dinners and movies when they had just gotten off a case and needed some downtime, sometimes just BSing about anything and everything until the adrenaline and stress had dissipated before heading off for his own place.
David had looked at the place with new eyes, looking for all the places that could conceal counter-intelligence equipment, information and etc.
The team he'd come with had torn the place apart and hadn't found much of anything that was or might be suspicious. They'd found a couple of those wooden boxes that you had to open in a certain way in order to unlock whatever was inside that would have to be taken back to the lab and x-rayed; some flash drives, a couple that looked like bullets, one like a credit card and two more that looked like toys that sat on a desk but other than that, there wasn't anything.
If Granger had been a spy, it seemed he did his business somewhere or somehow else.
They'd already gotten a warrant for search and seizure of all his assets, bank and phone records. David pulled out his cell phone, still playing with his food back at the café, and called the office, wondering if anyone had thought of pulling all of the CCTV footage from cameras between Granger's place and work… and within the office as well. Maybe what they were looking for was in plain sight; would Granger be dumb… or was that smart… enough to hide everything within the office or the building itself?
Don had been working on getting reports of a few previous cases finished and off his desk since he'd got in that morning. The case regarding Colby Granger and Ian Edgerton being shot was still open but with nothing new other than now knowing that it was a bungled assassination attempt, which, now that Granger was dead, seemed to have worked if he was the target. If not, that left Ian and himself.
And then there was the entire mess of Granger being a spy. He knew David, a few other agents and some techs had tossed Granger's place yesterday but from the preliminary reports, they didn't seem to have found anything overtly suspicious. Don also knew that David wasn't dealing really well with the situation but, that was to be expected he supposed.
Don and David would have to talk with Ian as there had been some personal correspondence from him to Granger and, as witnessed in the bullpen conference room and the restaurant the day before yesterday, they seemed to know each other well. And from the kiss that Don alone witnessed, they may have known each other much better.
The dark haired lead agent ran a hand over his head. What did Ian know? What did he suspect? Was Ian involved somehow with Granger being a spy? Was the hit for Granger or Ian, or both? If so, why? For what reason?
Don didn't even think that the hit could have been for him, personally. He had been on the other side of the SUV; the drive-by had been focused on the passenger side, where Ian and Colby were. Don was sure the intended target had been one of them, if not both.
Word Statistics
Pages – 3
Paragraphs – 35
Lines – 130
Words – 1439
Characters – 6517
Characters w/spaces – 7962
NaNo Day Total – 1439
NaNo Total – 15958
Actual story – 21529
