(A/N – Thank you so much for your patience and for the reviews. This is my longest chapter yet for this story; there's things starting to happen. Danger lurks on the horizon!

Sphinx – You have no idea how much you taking the time to make thoughtful comments helps me keep working. While not in this chapter, I can say that there is definitely some head-knocking on the way and Nate is going to overhear a single statement that totally … but I don't want to spoil it for you.)

Trust Issues

Chapter 11

"Look, you guys," Eliot climbed into the passenger's seat of Hardison's van and turned sideways to face the driver and back-seat passengers. Hardison paused with his hand on the key and watched the hitter's face.

"Everybody needs to be aware of something."

"You meant about Nate?" Parker looked up from fastening her seat belt.

"Yeah. See… Well, I'm not absolutely sure he was kidnapped. He may have split on his own."

"Without us? No way."

"No, he wouldn't… would he?" Sophie's voice went from scoffing to concern in those few words. "He'd only do something that idiotic if he thought he was protecting us."

"Or if he thought he had to for some other reason." Eliot made eye contact with each one of them before he went on. "You remember how I was blaming myself – I mean, I still do, even if it was an accident."

"Okay?" Sophie urged him to continue.

"I think Nate may blame me, too."

There was a moment of surprised silence after he made this statement, then Hardison responded.

"No way, Nate wouldn't, I mean," he hesitated. He let his hands drop from the steering wheel and slumped back in his seat.

"Eliot, why?" Parker's voice was earnest and worried.

"Remember in the room he said how there wasn't anybody but me in sight when he got hurt?"

"But he also said he thought…"

"I think he might have been making that part up. He didn't, doesn't, think some guy behind him nailed him with that knife. He thinks I tried to kill him."

"No, that doesn't make sense, Eliot. It would take more than a tiny bit of circumstantial evidence to make Nate think something that awful."

"What if several bits of circumstance kinda converged at once? Sophie, you know I actually threatened his life moments before…"

"Meaningless. You know it, we know it, he know it." Parker wrinkled her nose then corrected herself. "Uh, he knows it."

"Except, well, in those couple of seconds after…" the moment when he'd deflected the flying knife with the trash can lid flashed in his mind's eye. "Before…" His mental image became Nate Ford standing, staring up at him, with a knife handle jutting from his chest. "Nate spoke. I was even more pissed off that somebody had thrown a knife at me. I kind of snapped at him, maybe cussed at him." He scowled at the memory. "And then I saw."

"What the hell did he say?" Hardison had also shifted around to face the rest of the team.

"Just my name. But his tone, the sound of his voice… it was like…." Eliot shook his head at Hardison, at a loss to explain the sound that had started his earlier round of self-recrimination.

"Like your Nana just caught you reading 'Hustler' one-handed?"

The analogy was so bizarre and yet so spot-on that Eliot suddenly found himself laughing. Hardison looked startled and slightly embarrassed at what he'd said, but he quickly joined in the mirth. A cold silence came from the back seat.

"What does that mean?" Parker's own tone was so innocently puzzled that both men laughed even more uproariously.

"Don't worry about it, Parker." Sophie watched them reprovingly. "This is just boys being boys."

"Right attitude, wrong tone!" Hardison gasped.

"Yeah, you gotta have outrage; no shock…" Eliot sobered, back on the reality and wondering how he could be laughing at such a time. But the moment had loosened the knot in his gut a little and he found he could speak with more detachment as he finished his explanation.

"His voice sounded like he felt shocked and betrayed." Eliot let his head hang forward and his shoulders slump for a moment, but quickly made himself look up again and at his companions.

He could see understanding in their expressions along with concern. They grasped what he'd been telling them, now. It actually felt good to share his concerns with his friends.

Eliot shifted to face the front. "Let's go, Hardison," he told the hacker quietly. "We need to get back to the condo."

"Man, that's…" Hardison shook his head and started the engine.

"Scary," Parker said softly.

It was some time before anyone spoke again.

"Eliot, why didn't you tell us this earlier?" Sophie asked.

"I hoped I was wrong." He looked over his shoulder at her. "And anyway, I wanted to discuss it with him alone. Get it straightened out between us, whatever he might think happened. I sure didn't expect he'd be going anywhere any time soon."

"And so you decided to 'protect' us from worrying about it?"

"Um, well."

Parker crossed her arms over her chest and gave him a stern look.

"I thought so." Sophie sat back and looked out the window. "Is it just me, or is he getting more like Nate all the time?"

"He's not as sadistic."

"Parker! Nate doesn't mistreat us." Hardison tilted his head momentarily and gave a small shrug. "Not deliberately."

"She means the marks," Sophie explained. "Sometimes, on a job, Nate seems like he's enjoying what he's doing a little too much. Eliot doesn't do that."

"Well, now," Eliot interjected. He flipped a hand. "Maybe sometimes I do. When they really, really deserve it." He forced a grin. He might as well try to not bring them all down quite so much.

"Yeah, and Nate knows he doesn't deserve it, right? So he can't think you'd hurt him." Hardison wacked the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. "Anyway, if he did, the last thing he'd do is take off. He wouldn't leave the rest of us to be murdered by you, now would he?" He nodded affirmatively.

"It wouldn't make sense." Sophie leaned forward and patted Eliot on the arm.

He faced forward and sighed. "I guess you're right," he admitted. "I'd like to believe Nate doesn't imagine I would try to kill him.

"So we're back on Nate having been kidnapped, probably by whoever tried to kill me last night and nearly did kill him." He slowly banged his head against the seat's headrest. "At least the other way he wasn't likely to get murdered if we don't find him fast."

"Then we are just going to have to find him fast. Or find the scuzzball that's behind all this." Hardison wheeled the van into the alley behind McRory's. "Come on, guys and gals. It won't take me a minute to key up the recording from last night."

He was true to his word, and after a minor argument among the team as to what time the incident had occurred, he found what he believed to be the relevant part of the record from a camera that faced down the street to the left.

"I don't have anything covering the entrance," he told them apologetically. "But I'm pretty sure this is right before Eliot left the bar."

Eliot leaned forward, his eyes on the antique shop down the street a short ways. After about a minute and a half, just when they were starting to get restless, the door of the shop opened, and several obvious tourists emerged.

"That's the people I saw," he pointed. "Zoom in on that group, Hardison."

"Huh?" Hardison looked up from his pad, which he was staring at with a puzzled look on his face. "Oh, sure." A click of a few buttons on the keyboard in front of him made the adjustment requested.

As the group of tourists moved along the street toward the camera, Eliot suddenly spotted something.

"Freeze it!"

Hardison obeyed.

"Back up a little bit, but slowly."

The group walked backward a few steps until Eliot had Hardison stop the motion again. He stepped forward and tapped the screen, indicating an almost unnoticeable figure emerging from a narrow passage between buildings.

"This is him," he stated. "Go forward slow, let's see if you caught his face."

It almost seemed like the figure knew where the camera was and was careful to avoid being seen clearly by it. Then the group progressed clear of the hidden one. He already had his arm back in almost the exact position Eliot had demonstrated back at the hospital.

"Frame by frame!" Eliot urged.

The figure was left-handed, so it was the left arm that was raise, and it was, even now, blocking the man – you could at least tell for sure now that it was a man – blocking his face from view. Then his arm swept forward and Hardison froze the image without waiting for Eliot to speak.

Since his gaze was obviously on his target, he wasn't facing directly at the camera, but enough of his features were visible for Eliot to make an identification. Not that he really even needed it any longer.

'There isn't but one southpaw knife thrower I know in the business.'

Still he didn't speak until everyone was staring at the face attached to the throwing arm.

"Gaston de Theil," he announced. "Known as Lefty the Kill." He pronounced the surname with a hard 'T' and so it almost rhymed with 'kill'.

"'Lefty'? Seriously?"

"He's a serious assassin, Hardison."

"French?" Sophie stepped forward to study the face.

"Swiss," Eliot corrected her. "He grew up traveling Europe with his family, who were all circus performers. Learned knife-throwing from his great-uncle. There were always rumors he was a collaborationist during World War II. Probably who Lefty learned his morals from, too. Or," he amended, "Maybe I ought to say complete lack of morals."

"I thought Swiss were nonviolent?"

"Diplomatically neutral as a country, Parker, but Lefty isn't the first Swiss I've known who was an amoral son-of-a-bitch."

"Guys?" Hardison broke in. He had returned to his pad after freezing de Theil's face on the screen. "I've got activity on Nate's ear bud. It started functioning a little while ago, then after a few minutes switched off again."

Eliot's hand went to his pocket, where he'd routinely placed his own ear bud when he walked in the door with the others. Several possible scenarios flashed through his mind concerning Nate's temporarily active bud, none of them very encouraging.

"Can you hack into the hospital's surveillance system?" He circled around the high light table to the hacker's side.

"Already working on it, my man."

"We should have done that earlier," Sophie sounded annoyed.

"We've been busy, Sophie. Identifying our culprit was first priority." Eliot tried to keep his voice reasonable and level.

"Couldn't you have identified him from hospital surveillance?"

He forced himself to simply shrug mildly. "Too many people, when we didn't have a specific face to look for, or a specific place to look for it," he pointed out. "And if he's not working alone, he might not even have been there."

"Your friend 'Lefty' not being there is starting to look like a good bet after all." Hardison's voice sounded worried and a little upset.

"What's wrong?"

"Take a look." Hardison tapped something and nodded at the big screens on the wall.

The view of the street out front from the previous evening was replaced by a hallway in the hospital they had recently left. In a moment a familiar figure walked quietly by. Hardison switched to another security camera, and soon they were watching Nathan Ford, pale and drawn looking, but under his own power and completely alone, leaving the hospital and flagging down a taxi out front.

To be continued