Firstly, apologies for not getting a chapter uploaded yesterday, we have been busy without internet for the weekend. Thank you again for the reviews - 'Guest' I couldn't respond privately, but rest assured the story is complete (only a few more chapters to go now :-( ) and I will carry on uploading every day until it's done.
I'm not sure Callen is thrilled that Eric and Nell visit him in this chapter, but they couldn't do everything via the big screen at Ops!
CHAPTER TEN
Callen slept through most of the night, the combination of the fresh air and exercise having given his body some sense of normality at last. Sam had gone home not long after they had returned to Callen's room, waiting until the nurse had swapped the oxygen back over to be sure his partner was going to be okay for the night, and begging him to stay put by promising that they would all meet again at the hospital first thing in the morning. It had taken all of his resolution to walk away and not camp out in Callen's room again to keep an eye on him, but he knew Callen needed the solitude.
In the morning, Eric and Nell were the first to arrive, wanting to see for themselves how Callen was. They knocked and entered his room a little shyly, unsure of their welcome, but the last of the sedatives had cleared from Callen's system and he was, on the whole, feeling more upbeat and determined that today was the day he would negotiate his release.
"Sorry, we're not too early are we?" Nell enquired, seeing him sat on his bed, though fully dressed. The tube in his nose still came as a shock to her, even though she'd seen him on the screen the day before. He gave her one of his crooked half smiles, not quite reaching his eyes. He looked tired, she thought. His hair and stubble were a little longer than she was used to seeing, like he wore it sometimes on undercover assignments. Softer, and somehow avoiding the scruffy homeless look of Deeks. "We brought you some tea."
"Real tea. None of that hospital machine gunk they say is tea, but actually isn't… And a breakfast muffin," Eric said, rambling, holding up a bag.
"Thanks," Callen said gratefully, standing to accept the tea from Nell with his right hand, feeling the needle of the cannula used for his twice daily shots shift uncomfortably under his skin in the back of his hand and trying to pretend it was normal to have his two young tech colleagues seeing him as he was, in that room. He nodded to the cabinet to Eric, who put the bag down, fidgeting as if not sure whether to look at Callen or not. Callen extended his smile to Eric, not wanting the awkward tech to feel his gift of food had been shunned; the truth was Callen was still finding eating a chore, something he knew would have to change if he stood any chance of getting out of there any time soon.
"Morning G," Sam looked his partner up and down carefully as he entered the room, relieved to see him still there and looking as though he'd had a relatively trouble free night. Callen was less pale and looked less exhausted, though he still had a slightly haunted look in his eyes that Sam knew was a combination of worry about the boy, frustration and humiliation at being injured in front of his younger co-workers, and desperation to get the hell out of there. Probably in that order, knowing Callen. "Starting without us?"
"We just got here," Eric said, still uncomfortable, and then seeing Sam was joking, looking embarrassed.
"Kensi and Deeks are on their way up," Nell informed them all, having just picked up a message on her phone.
Sam hovered near Callen's shoulder. "You okay?" he asked, unobtrusively. Callen nodded, giving Sam a reassuring smile that was at least in part genuine.
"Better when I get out of here," Callen replied in a low voice, and Sam briefly touched his arm, providing rock like support as always. He was quietly relieved to see Callen seemed to be breathing better today, and his voice was starting to regain its usual strength and confidence.
"Morning guys," Kensi said cheerily as she and Deeks arrived.
"Let's get this party started!" Deeks joked, and Sam chortled.
"You need to get out more… if you think this is a party," Callen told him. Turning to Eric and Nell, he asked, "Have you found anything… on the boy?"
"No," Nell said, regretfully. "He's still a John Doe. He doesn't match the description of any Missing Persons listed in the LA area. We're widening the search parameters today in case he's come from further afield, but for the time being it seems no one is looking for him."
"He's just a… little kid!" Callen exclaimed, his momentary outburst causing his chest to wheeze again. Sam put his hand on Callen's shoulder.
"We'll get to the bottom of it," he said. "He's been assigned a Social Services caseworker for now. He'll be looked after." Callen didn't look convinced, but moved past it.
"Where are we up to, then?" he asked.
"I'd say we're pretty close to wrapping things up," Nell told him, and Callen raised his eyebrows.
"Don't look so surprised," Deeks said. "Some of us have been working hard while you two have been partying all hours up here." Callen and Sam rolled their eyes at each other.
"Shall you hit him… or shall I?" Callen responded, only half joking.
"We apprehended the hacker yesterday afternoon," Kensi explained.
"I *thought* Deeks was looking uncommonly smug this morning!" Sam exclaimed.
"Well do tell, children… do tell," Callen prompted impatiently. He felt slightly edgy knowing Kensi and Deeks had been taking the lead on something without his knowledge, but better for knowing Sam was clearly in the dark too. Damn he'd be glad when he could get back to Ops.
"His name came up in the searches we were running of the companies who had interests in your warehouse," Nell explained. "He is a Mr Peter Lacey, and he is John Bates' cousin. He worked with Henderson before Henderson joined the Marines. He is the IT engineer for the company that currently owns the warehouse!" she said triumphantly.
"He'd got in way over his head," Kensi continued.
"Yeah, he was practically crying like a baby when we interrogated him yesterday, and showed him the photos of his cousin, Bates, dead. He couldn't spill the beans fast enough!" Deeks said gleefully.
"A challenging interrogation for you then," Sam responded sarcastically.
"Yeah… well…" Deeks said, mock humbly.
"Will you finish, for heaven's sake?" Callen's patience was running thin.
"Lacey said it was all Henderson's idea. He'd got some beef with the military, for some reason, and in his role at Pendleton he discovered he could steal ammo relatively easily, thinking he could make some money on the black market. He knew of the warehouse from his previous employment in one of the companies that leased it. We guess he worked out that with the warehouse being used by Xingu and almost totally unmanned, he could stash his illegal goods there, and not only use the warehouse for storage, but for safe distribution as well – he could be strictly hands off once he'd got the goods in place. All he needed was the IT expertise to hack into the computer system to put his plan into place."
"How did he find buyers?" Sam mused.
"Okay, so maybe we haven't wrapped everything up yet," Deeks said a little defensively. "Lacey only knows about the IT side. He thinks Henderson has a partner who handled the sale side of things – but he doesn't have a name, or even a description. He only ever dealt with Henderson."
"Henderson clearly had some sort of hold over Bates as well as Lacey," Kensi continued. "Maybe to do with them being related. We need to keep digging."
"What did Henderson have over Lacey?" Callen asked.
"Blackmail," Nell said succinctly.
"Lacey made a mistake in his first company that should have ended up with him losing his job, and maybe even go to jail," Kensi expanded. "Apparently Henderson always suspected…. From the time they were working in that same company. Confidentially of data. Lacey made some slip-up in the code that enabled confidential data to be copied off the system. He covered it up, but not before Henderson found out about it, though he didn't know it was Lacey at fault at the time. He confirmed it when he ended up working with Bates in the Marines – Lacey had confided in his cousin, and Henderson got the information out of Bates. The two of them were no match for Henderson. Lacey is crying for protection until we track down Henderson and lock him up – he's literally fearing for his life after discovering Henderson shot Bates."
"I'll bet he is," Sam murmured.
"We don't know… for sure," Callen interjected. "That Henderson shot Bates, I mean."
"No, but it's pretty likely, isn't it," Sam said. "There must only have been the two of them in the warehouse, only Bates shooting at us?" Callen nodded. He'd only seen Henderson, holding the boy as hostage, in enough detail to recognise. Bates had been shooting at him from the shadows, only identifiable as the source of the gunfire. Even so, Callen had been pretty sure he was the only other person there.
"It makes sense," Nell said, always the voice of logic and reason. "It's almost certain Henderson already meant to harm, or even kill, Bates at the start of all this, with his special order for the powder to be delivered to Bates in the first place. When that didn't work, he took him out at the warehouse instead."
Sam finished his call to Hetty and decided to wait in the hall while Callen's doctor carried out his morning check-up. Eric and Nell had returned to Ops to continue running down leads on Henderson, and Hetty had ordered Kensi and Deeks to return to the boatshed to question Lacey again, so they had just left. They hoped that once the initial shock of Lacey's first interrogation was over, they'd be able to glean more information that might help them either track down Henderson, or locate the mystery fourth person involved, the partner who dealt with the sales. Hetty had left Sam taskless, but wordlessly inferring his place was with his partner. As Sam saw the nurse approaching with the trolley of supplies to change Callen's dressings, Sam wondered again about Hetty's infallible sixth sense. He stood to hold the door to Callen's room open, and saw the composure Callen had maintained all morning start to falter as he caught sight of the nurse, so Sam wordlessly stepped into the room too.
"You're doing okay," Sam heard the doctor say reassuringly as he stood up to go, acknowledging Sam on his way out. Callen nodded, but Sam could see his attention was already on what he'd have to endure from the nurse and Sam moved closer to his partner, giving him another brief supportive touch on the arm. The nurse asked Callen to sit on the bed while she removed the cannula from the back of his hand and his relief to be rid of the needle at last was clear. She also took off the dressing on his forearm, exposing the long thin track of the deep graze that marched like a centipede across the well-developed muscle of his gun arm, a superficial injury, though painful in the short term due to the large number of nerve endings just under the skin. Sam winced as he saw it for the first time, but knew it could have done a lot more damage if Henderson's aim had been even slightly better.
It wasn't long before the nurse turned her attention to Callen's more serious wounds, and Sam didn't miss Callen suppress a shudder as she spoke to him quietly, reassuring twitchy patients a daily occurrence. She gently helped Callen unbutton his shirt so she could clean and re-dress the bullet wounds in his left arm and ribs. Callen was silent throughout, allowing the nurse to do her job swiftly and leave him alone. He remained silent after she left, and Sam gave him a moment to return from wherever he had distanced himself to in order to withstand the invasion of his personal space that he hated so much. After a minute, Callen stood up restlessly and walked to the window.
"I'm getting out of here today, Sam."
Sam looked Callen up and down. "Your doctor cleared you?" The question caught Callen off guard.
"Well… not yet," he admitted. "But I'm not… staying."
"G…" Sam said warningly, and then when Callen turned to him with a cold glint in his eyes he backed down. "I'm sorry. I'm worried. It's my job to worry. You could have died, G! I need to have your back so you can have mine…."
"Well you can… have… my back," Callen retorted, his rising anger having a constricting effect on his lungs, which only served to make him angrier as he desperately fought the overwhelming urge to run. "You can have… mine by… getting me… out!"
Sam sighed, and crossed the room to stand next to Callen. "I will always have your back," he said, quietly. Callen hung his head, ashamed.
"I'm sorry Sam," he said in a low voice. He hadn't meant to lash out at his partner. Sam was just there, as he always was, having his back…
"I know," Sam said, touching Callen's shoulder. "I know." He paused. "What can I do?"
"Oh… I don't know Sam," Callen sighed, rubbing a hand through his hair, fully aware he had been behaving like a petulant child. It wasn't like he was a stranger to being hospitalised, nor was this the longest stay he'd ever endured. It was a risk they all took, every day, that they might not come home in one piece. A risk he admitted would have been worth it, if the boy survived. He didn't remember ever feeling so trapped though. His doctor's insistence on continuing the oxygen meant even getting out of his room was a challenge, and even though he had dealt with much longer confinements, both after his shooting and after the Spiral virus, in the early days he had been so out of it he hadn't felt the same way as he did now. Now, his head was ready to be someplace else, and it was only his lungs that were letting him down. Still on edge, he turned to start pacing the small room once again and felt Sam's hand tentatively on his arm, gently restraining him. He took a deep, shaky breath, and without fully meeting Sam's worried eyes, he pulled the oxygen tube off over his head, tossing it back towards the bed before turning back to gaze silently out of the window again.
"Okay," Sam said, watching closely as Callen breathed slowly and deliberately in and out, recognising that his partner truly had had as much as he could take. "Okay. Let's get you out of here."