A/N – Hey all, thanks to all of you who review and who keep reading. Again I apologize for such a gap in between postings. My father had a heart attack scare and things have been crazy since than. He's okay though, just needs to stop working so much and stressing himself out.
I swear on the soul of my dearly departed childhood dog, Spunkamas Blue Boy Delight, that this was entirely plotted and mostly written before Checkmate aired.
"Who made this?"
"Me. Why?"
"Well, the wings are a bit thin."
"Forgive me if all my years in advanced applied mathematics take issues with that assessment."
"Well, forgive me if all my years in high school detention say I'm right."
- Don Eppes (Rob Morrow) to Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz). Soft Target, Numb3rs Season Two.
November 23, 1998
Quantico, Virginia
Hogan's Alley
oOo
Adjusting the ski mask to more properly fit his face increased the field of view as he stepped up silently and shoved the gun to the woman's head. The motion stopped her and the crowd of armor-vested agents making their way to the front doors. The black wool was wonderful to start, what with borderline freezing temperatures and a steady gusting wind. Now that he was in the bank's interior with adrenaline ramping, it was becoming uncomfortably warm and scratchy.
He figured it was only right. It was Monday after all.
"I told you to get the hell away," he shouted over terrified mutterings of the hostages and the negotiator's bullhorn as he dragged her across the bank's main lobby to a shielded space behind the teller's counter.
Her breath was hitching in her chest and her arms were instinctively grabbing at him to try to pull away until he motioned for her to kneel down out of sight. She complied, brushing her hands through her bottle-red hair in effort to repair the chaos driven pony-tail.
He shrugged his shoulders in apology and his hostage gave him a small wink of forgiveness.
"You're having way too much fun with this, Eppes," she hissed.
The floor was a shabby multi-industrial gray tile designed to hide dirt and stains and the walls a suspicious shade of green, not freshly mowed grass, but more aged due to time and wear. (Not to mention the same color as an ER to hide things like blood spatter and random gore.) Along the far wall from where Don was hiding, huddled ten hostages, men and women varying in age from early twenties to mid-fifties. Most said nothing but hushed whispers while one older gentleman calmly flipped through the Washington Post.
Damn. There were days he just loved his job.
"You can't tell me that you haven't been looking forward to this," he whispered as he handed her an extra gun that he had hidden under his heavy jacket.
"This isn't exactly fair, you know. Will they even see this coming?"
"Ehhh… Probably not but…"
"But it's fun, right?" She double checked the ammo and waited for his signal. "Yes, Patty Hearst is my hero and I love nothing more than playing paintball when I should be at home dragging out all the crap my mother-in-law bequeathed -" her sarcasm was heavy and unmistakable, layered over carefully with not-quite-respected distain. "- us before she gets here tomorrow."
"Here's your chance to burn your urge to kill before she gets here, Miriam."
Miriam Reilly, the tomboyish thirty-something firearm instructor looked at Don with baleful eyes and a sigh at the inevitable. She seemed ready to respond when the bullhorn blared out another warning for them to give themselves up and release the hostages.
"Hell no!" he shouted.
Don raised his eyebrows and Miriam hid her gun out of sight as they both stood, Don's arm around her with his gun pressed to her head. She wasn't much shorter than him with a muscular frame and served as an effective body shield. "Now if you don't back away from the door, I'm gonna blow her head off."
That seemed to cause the agents out front to scurry in some sort of action as they backed a few paces up. Miriam twisted around and muttered, "And I'm the one with violent urges?"
"Realism, Reilly." They crouched back behind the counter again, Don's smile read a little sheepish, "Have you ever spent any length of time with someone who likes to do fractal geometry for fun?"
Her face dawned with comprehension, "That's right. You said your brother was in town. How's that going?"
Don peeked out over the top and made quick hand signals to the other two gunmen taking shelter behind large pillars on the bank's floor. He knelt back down again, double-checking his gun and his watch. "Well, not too bad. Took him for a tour yesterday and today I was going to pick him up for a late lunch. If we ever get out of here."
"Rookies," she sighed.
"Yeah, rookies," Don echoed.
Her shoulder nudged his as the standoff dragged on, one painfully slow moment after another, "How's the teaching been going for you?"
He shrugged again as they both paused to listen to the negotiator. Mark Gallagher picked up the shouted threats where Don had left off. This wasn't going anywhere, he thought. And after another moment, he answered her question, "Hell of a lot different than FR. Not use to having this much of a schedule in a long time."
"Yeah, but it has to beat living on the road over ten months of the year."
"It wasn't all that bad. Something new every day. Nothing like this with lesson plans and all… You like being an instructor?" A few months before, it might have been a flippant question, but now he was genuinely curious. And it was an easy question to ask of Miriam. She was trustworthy and easy-going and had been around enough to know what not to ask. "You like nine to five?"
"I never thought I would. Never thought I wanted to," she amended. "But I have two kids and I can go to all of Andrea's ballet recitals and Eric's soccer games and sleep eight hours a night without being called out to talk down some crazy psycho. Adam is a big fan too. It just works, you know?"
"Fair enough," Don said. He looked at her intently, a grin pulling his lips upward, "So what do you plan to tell Adam when you get home from work tonight? 'It wasn't a terribly busy day at the office, dear. What we did? Oh we only took a few hostages, paint-balled and tear gassed a few recruits. You know, the usual.'"
She snorted, "He's going to be so jealous. I bet he'd love to take the English faculty out and paintball the tenured staff. From what he says, academic politics is a load of backstabbing crap. He submitted his tenure packet two months ago and there's still debate."
"That's too bad," he answered, his mind somewhat lost in what she said. He had never wondered before what avenues his brother had to navigate in the upper echelons of higher education. He seriously doubted though if Charlie would ever need to submit a tenure packet due to his genius. Or if he did, it'd merely be a formality.
From what he understood and gleaned from his brother's visit so far, nine or ten universities were tripping over each other to grab him for their staff. He was fairly certain that Pasadena, family and Larry Fleinhardt were the game winning points for CalSci. No other school held that sort of allure for his brother.
He returned his attention back to the negotiation process. From what he heard now, he hadn't missed much and wasn't terribly surprised by it. This whole exercise was conducted with very green trainees in a rude "kids, this ain't Hollywood" sort of way. It also served as practice for Don since he would not only help coordinate these sort of things, but soon enough, be running his own.
It had also inadvertently been the most fun he'd had on the job in a long while.
Don had a feeling that this was beginning to come to a close. He could hear Gallagher and Ty Walters come to a point of surrendering Miriam as hostage. Or at least what the newbies thought was surrender. The plan was rather sneaky and under-handed, but it happened to all of them at one point or another and better now than later with criminals who really wanted to kill.
"You ready, Patty?" he asked as he pulled off the ski mask, revealing his sweaty face. His coat was graced with exceptionally large pockets and pulled out limp rubbery plastic and tossed to her.
"Oh ya, you betcha, Comrade Che," she drawled in an overly thick Fargo accent. Miriam struggled with the awkward straps on the gas mask, her breathing going Darth Vader when it came on. Her voice was muffled when she asked how she looked.
"Ever seen The Fly?"
She groaned and answered in a whisper as she swatted his thigh, "I hate that movie. I still have nightmares about vomit-drop every time I see Jeff Goldblum."
"Traumatized much?"
"Try high school boyfriend who loved horror films and Geena Davis…"
They both stopped their quiet conversation as Ty shouted, "Okay, we're sending her out now."
All four of them exchanged looks, Miriam with Gallagher to Don and then back to a largely smirking Walters. They all tipped their heads in a way that seemed to say, this was gonna be good, while all three men pulled out their own masks to do their own Brundle fly impression.
Miriam let her hair down from the pony-tail, letting it fall easily over her face as she ducked her head and hid the ugly mask behind her hands, looking like she was weeping. The exercise had been kept realistic as possible so the trainees wouldn't be shocked by her reaction.
The three men kept her in view with the paint guns pointed at her back as she exited the building. She stumbled as crossed the threshold and let two small gray canisters tumble out in front of her.
The area erupted in clouds of white smoke as Don pushed his way through the doors, firing red paint balls next to Reilly as she pulled out her own gun. The five recruits were doubled over coughing, firing off random paint pellets in a rainbow of identifying colors.
oOo
It was almost there… Eppes drives it up the lane…
He shoots… He…
The combination of the door bell and a steady repetition of knuckles on the front door was enough to jar Charlie's fingers from the Nintendo 64 game controller. The ball bounced off the hoop and his player was still splayed out on the court as the computer's team took off down the other way. He groaned as he paused the game, it had taken him nearly the whole morning to get halfway through the tourney and he'd have to keep at it if he wanted to obliterate Don's high score.
Things hadn't changed much since that Commodore 64 and all-night marathons of Attack of the Mutant Camels.
Charlie ran his hands through his hair and shoved the sleeping bag in the corner along with his clothes that he had tossed aside the night before. He looked around the living room with dismay, Don was exceptionally neat, his normally dust free stacks of Sports Illustrated had been shoved aside to make room on the coffee table for Charlie's laptop and notebooks as he looked over his NSA report.
And now electronic basketball had ripped time from him and Robert Tompkins was here just as he promised… He doubted very much he'd have the time to change from his plaid pajama bottoms.
Don's house was comfortable, if not slightly bare. There were several boxes still stacked in the corner of the descent sized living room. Most of the posters and photos he had were still leaned against the wall with a hammer and nails waiting patiently on a tool box on a lower shelf of the surprisingly full bookcase. There were text books left over from his older brother's college days: a few criminal law and history texts peppered with Conversación y Controversia: Tópicos de hoy y de siempre and Literature and Its Writers. Charlie recognized the golf clubs that were Don's graduation present in the coat cubby by the front door and a white ash bat shoved in the bag for good measure.
The kitchen was equally bland – his brother just didn't have all that much furniture to properly fill the house and Charlie was fairly sure that this wouldn't change, couldn't imagine his brother settling down in one spot for too long. Most of Don's interesting things were kept in the second bedroom, he had poked around in a couple of boxes earlier that morning, after Don had left. There was a blue and orange Chicago Bears foam finger along with a French-English dictionary and other random items that didn't quite make much sense out of context.
Charlie swiped his fingers through his hair quickly and straightened out his Princeton sweatshirt, if anything the gray cotton would at least remind people he was presumably Ivy League smart if not entirely fashion conscious.
Director Tompkins face was distorted through the cut glass in the door, his profile unmistakable under the heavy wool coat he wore. He was a tall man with a deeply lined face, balding on top and looking slightly like Sean Connery.
Charlie opened the door quickly, it was a miserable day with no end in sight. "Glad to see you found the place," he said, awkwardly moving out of the way and closing the door as Tompkins stepped into the foyer. "Don's out most the morning…"
He didn't know how this worked and the moment was much to surreal to be taken at face value. It wasn't James Bond as much as Maxwell Smart. Charlie just needed to change his cell phone for a shoe phone and the Cone of Silence and he'd be set.
"Thanks, Professor." Tompkins shed his off-setting fedora and umbrella at the entryway, rain drops littering the floor, and followed Charlie into the living room. "I really can't stay long. The boys are waiting in the car," he waved his hand towards the door where Charlie could see a dark sedan at the curb. "—Just in and out."
For that, Charlie was relieved for he could almost hear a parental scold for not being a proper host. "Sure," he said. "I've got the algorithm stored on a…" Charlie grabbed the briefcase and opened it, flipping through the satchel. "It's all on the external hard drive and backed up on the…" He started stacking the various pieces of equipment on the coffee table, "You know the applications are really quite interesting…"
"I need it all, Professor," Tompkins interrupted. "Your notes, the raw data we gave you, the hard drive, everything."
"Oh… I, well… Okay." Charlie felt the heat in his face and for a brief moment he was a freshman at Princeton, catching two not-thirteen-year-olds doing much more than making out in the stacks.
At least Maxwell Smart got to burn all his sensitive documents.
He took a few moments more than necessary in placing everything back into the briefcase, hoping that he doesn't look as young as he is, hoping that Tompkins simply won't humor him.
"How are you liking Virginia?" Tompkins voice was conversational and friendly, his attention placed on his brother's stack of books and video games.
Charlie stuffed the last notebook in, closed the latches and held the bag by the strap. "It's probably a lot more pleasant in the spring."
Bob laughed and held onto the briefcase by the small handle at the top, "That it is, Professor. Maybe you'll come back for the Cherry Blossoms." The expression on the Director's face shifted from amusement to something more serious and thoughtful, "I appreciate this, Professor. You'll be in Pasadena if we need to get a hold of you?"
Charlie nodded, "At my parents for the time being." And then maybe a nice apartment close to campus in another few months, after his teaching schedule solidified and maybe, just maybe, he'd try for his driver's license again. "Director, do you need me to work with the implementation…?"
"Charles," he said indulgently. "You've worked with the techs, we were just waiting for the finalized version. Go to California, go surf or whatever you do in Pasadena and we'll take care of the rest."
He let out a long breath and straightened his shoulders, this wasn't Princeton and he wasn't thirteen anymore. "You'll let me know if you do need anything else though, Director."
"Call me Bob, Professor." Tompkins slapped Charlie on the back, "We had to call you in the first place, didn't we?"
oOo
It was a windy day with clouds steadily darkening the sky. It was probably going to rain soon, Don thought as he pulled off the gas mask after the white plumes dissipated. Sean Kelly was in charge of this particular training set up and was busy talking to the disheartened group, who must have been so sure that they were going to pull one over their instructors.
And then, in the natural progression of things, the Cubs would go on to win the World Series.
Five years in a row.
His sarcasm is not nearly as sharp as the bruise he could feel forming close to his left ankle. The denim there was splashed with the green paint from a lucky shot that must have come off during the foray; he remembered something brushing his leg, that something pissing him off and his vision going white, then the fury directed at taking down the shooter.
The rookie agent had been a tall guy, early twenties. Someone Don hadn't met yet. Someone who wanted nothing to do with him now. The fury had shaken from him as the frightened kid's face was realized from the illusion of a history too recently peppered with men and women to evil to exist in normality.
Don apologized and then watched as the guy walked off the tackle and the girl who had been assigned the purple paint pellets handed him tissue for his bloody nose. The yellow, pink and blue paint pellet Mod Squad had all taken a step back when he walked by.
He wasn't sure, but the phrase walk of shame seemed oddly fitting then. Or maybe the exit Gary Cooper took at the end of High Noon.
Don preferred the latter.
The locker room was layered with musky sweat and sports centered conversation as he made quick work of showering and changing into fresh clothes. Don shoved the damp and paint splattered clothes into his gym back and stole the ice pack out of his neighbor's half-eaten lunch and firmly ace bandaged it in place, figuring two out of the four requirements for the R.I.C.E. treatment were better than none at all.
He looked at his watch again; it was later than he originally thought, but there was the advantage to having an absentminded professor-brother who was constantly present-minded in Shiny Number Land (Don named that glazed look that his little brother wore more often than not when he himself reached sixth grade and capitalized it in ninth, after Charlie chose Happy Numbers over the jungle gym and kickball) and who would no doubt be hutched over the notebooks that he found scattered on the coffee table near his brother's sleeping form on the couch early that morning.
The ice pack had a little polar bear holding a dripping ice cream cone on both sides of the white plastic and two dimensions be damned, there was something that was steadily gumming the layers between the elastic bandage and his sock and skin. He conceded that it was very possible that it was the blue frozen goo, and not a more ridiculous explanation.
His locker was located towards a far corner where there were fewer working lights and combination locks on the metal doors. It was less attractive and no doubt where they put those lower on the seniority scale. Don had lived through worse and wasn't complaining, yet as he worked his way toward the exit and clean, sweet smelling air, conversation dampened and could feel the eyes at his back. He glanced back quickly and knew that paranoia served him well as heads turned away and a stilted hum filled the overly thick atmosphere.
Fugitive Recovery had given him a name, was regarded as something as an expert in the field, that he knew. What he also knew was that he and his FR colleagues were viewed as half-wild mercenaries the likes of which were found in the Mos Eisley cantina rather than the standard agent that was more commonly found in the suit-wearing agency.
Han Solo's duds beat out the Rebellion's crazy orange flight suits any day of the week.
He made quick work of the maze of halls to find that the rain had slowed to a few erratic drops as he crossed the parking lot, to his Wrangler. The echo of the outdoor gun range hit his ears as he swung the gym bag over the driver's seat, letting it fall behind, only to be blotted out as he started the truck and left the training center far behind.
oOo
They had driven into the City. It had been an incredibly agonizing crawl northbound on 395 as they skirted pass Annandale and Arlington and onto Dulles. The late lunch hour traffic had been unforgiving and Don knew that it would only get worse from there on out. Charlie's flight to the West Coast was scheduled to leave early that evening, leaving him with an after work special to drive through.
Though he did have his badge if he ever felt the need to go more than ten over…
The ride had gone by in relative quiet, Charlie's phone had rung five minutes after they passed the last gas station in Dumfries and he had been on it ever since.
Charlie talked in a quiet tone that, if it had been anyone other than Charlie, would have had Don's spidy sense pinging for suspiciously shifty behavior.
As it was, he heard his brother mention a certain correlation matrix he was working through, then tuned him out in favor of a radio station devoted to Tom Petty and the Ramones.
The last couple of days had gone by quickly enough, in a rather awkward sort of way. It had been a pleasant discovery that his brother had learned to make small talk. Of course, it had been mostly limited to how the cheese could have been more evenly distributed over the peppers and onions had Paul Revere's Pizza bothered to use Girko's Circular Law.
It was easy to see that Charlie still employed his nervous rambling tic. Or maybe he had just become so use to commanding an audience or even dead silent air, that the professor didn't even realize what he was doing, wasn't aware of the tangents he had disappeared down.
Don had stopped the unintentional filibuster Sunday afternoon, when he challenged his brother to a game of one-on-one in an empty gym at Quantico and soundly trounced him.
It wasn't nearly so violent as that particular afternoon three weeks before their senior prom. Val Eng was a nice girl, but even now Don wondered why Charlie thought she'd go with someone even younger, and oftentimes less popular than most high school freshmen.
He shook that thought out of his head as Charlie sighed and tucked the phone away in his jacket. "All's well on the math front?" Don jibed gently. Charlie's eyes had seemed far distant for a moment and for a second there Don thought of once-upon-a-time hushed talks discussing autism and intelligence tests.
"What?" Charlie's eyes widened and then came to realization, "Oh, that? Some work I did for… I was working on a project and the real life applications seemed to differ than the theoretical calculations."
This was something Don could appreciate. He knew all about how life never went according to theory and most oftentimes adjustments had to be made, plans thrown out the window and improv as important to him as to a cast member in Second City.
"So you got it figured out," Don said. He could feel his brother's eyes on him, Charlie's face fixed in that damn puppy dog look that he seemed to take on whenever he gave advice or approval. "It's good to be able to think on your feet like that."
"Yeah," Charlie agreed.
Don waited for the exposition, the 'variable was suppose to be here but ended up there instead as a direct result of the correlation between x, y and z.' But it never came and Don was at a loss for the conversation that would come next. He pressed his lips together, his eyes wandered over the large sign boards that lined the free space along the interstate.
He hit his blinker and started to merge on the nearest exit. Charlie looked at him questioningly and Don lifted his shoulders in deference to the restaurant signs, "What sounds good, Chuck?"
Charlie grinned and said whatever because anything served in the greater D.C. area had to be better than what Northwest airlines would be reheating on the flight later.
oOo
"Naw… We had them running through exercises in Hogan's Alley for most the morning," Don said as he set the half-eaten roast beef sandwich back on his plate. "Had it set up as a fake bank robbery and hostage negotiation with paint balls, so don't try to tell me that my in-class demonstrations are less cool than yours."
"Your masochists… they like being tear gassed?"
Charlie had been working quickly through a burger and fries, steadily topping it off with a milkshake and coffee, pausing only long enough for conversation that Don intentionally steered away from anything more difficult than high school level calculus.
Time had been good to his brother, Don decided. He had finally grown, looking less little kiddish and closer to his actual age. He was still damn skinny though, like he forgot to eat which Margaret had complained about Charlie doing time to time whenever she called from Princeton. Susan must have kept him fed in England, but as far as having a keeper since moving back to the States… It was probably a good thing for Charlie that he was moving home.
"Don't play stupid, Chuck. It doesn't suit you." It was times like this that Charlie tried a little too hard, came on a little too strong, tarnishing his more appropriate naïveté that complemented his personality. "Nobody likes being tear gassed, but it happens during training. Helps prevent unnecessary force."
He lowered his voice and leaned forward on his folded arms as if he was getting ready to confide a deep secret, Charlie looked eager to know, but there were some things Don would rather not elaborate on. So he lifted the diner mug to his lips and cautiously sipped at his refill. Tear gas was something he'd rather not repeat.
"When do you start at CalSci?"
Charlie frowned slightly at the change of topic but went with it, his excitement growing as he spoke of his classes, his office, the opportunities for research, "…So Larry's already sent me the calculations to look over and the outline of the paper. Its going to be great working with him again."
Don continued to pay attention to Charlie's ramblings on the periphery as he studied the line of traffic that whipped by the window. He checked the time on his watch again, the diner's clock was off by six minutes.
It was time to send his brother home.
