At times like these, with so little time to sleep at such an odd hour, Javier often found that it wasn't the best choice to hit the sack. He knew his friends desperately needed the rest: Castle and Ryan, in particular, were probably both dead to the world even as he lay there. But Javier's mind was unfocused: a swirling, unstable pile of memories that was threatening to topple and give him a monster of a migraine.

Lanie got up, stretching her bare arms over her head, and Javier smiled, tracing a hand slowly down the beautiful curve of her spine. Lanie turned her head back towards her boyfriend, her relaxed, sated smile warming his heart. "Okay," she teased, "now are you gonna *finally* be able to get some sleep?"

Javier smiled back warmly, letting his hands roam over Lanie's shoulders, back, and arm; anywhere he could reach to get one last touch, one last sensual memory of the woman who was fighting to leave his bed...their bed. His smile widened a little more as he realized he could allow himself to finally think that way now. "Nah. Got too much on my mind right now."

Lanie's brow furrowed a little in concern. "Wanna talk about it?"

Javier shook his head. "Just gotta do some filing, is all."

Filing. Their 'code word' for the meditative process Javier had to do to keep his brain from exploding. Literally, in his case. Lanie could feel the fear and frustration start to bubble up to the surface of her own mind. Does that man not think about taking care of himself at *all*? "You haven't been keeping up?" she asked, trying to sound casual about the whole thing.

Javier knew his woman better than that. "No! No, chica," he soothed, "it's not like *that*. Something's bugging me about that warehouse. When I got in the place I had this crazy strong feeling of déjà vu."

"Like you've been there before?" asked Lanie. Her boyfriend nodded. "So you think someone you've already downloaded..."

"Might have had more to do with this than I thought they had at first read," replied Javier.

Lanie rolled back over and scooted across her side of the bed so that her lips could easily meet up with Javier's for one last gentle kiss. "Gotcha. I'm gonna take a shower. Want me to check on you in a couple of hours?"

Javier nodded. "Unless someone calls for me before that."

Lanie allowed herself one more quick kiss before using her man's strong, muscled chest to push herself back up to a seated position. "All right," she said as she stood, "good luck. I hope you find what you're looking for."

"Me too," agreed Javier as he settled himself in and closed his eyes. "Me too."

The familiar blinding white flash as Javier closed his eyes settled quickly into the white 'filing room' where he stored the memories he had collected. He slowly walked the aisles of evidence room-style shelving, chuckling as he thought...and not for the first time...that the large, square 'discs' of memories looked a little like they could have been Harry Potter's record collection. Javier set the thought aside quickly, refocusing on the task at hand. The Atwater case. How could I possibly have been there before?

Three piles of memories appeared on the shelf in front of him, representing the memories of the three people whose memories he had absorbed over the course of the investigation. Javier started with the most recent set. Derek Rhodes. He flipped through the memories like a picture book, taking his time with the past year and working quickly through about a decade's worth of memories. No luck. Most of Rhodes' business was transacted over the Internet.

Javier moved on to the next pile of memories. It was hard not to linger here, curious as he was about the roller-coaster life and poignantly tragic marriage of the Homeland Security agent. But while flipping through the man's memories showed a life lived on the edge of danger around the world, Fallon had *not* been at that warehouse before the raid.

That left...Douglas Atwater. The first victim's father. He didn't want to flip through these memories, knowing the deep grief he believed he would find there. Javier had made himself a promise when he first gained control over his gift: he treated the memories of victim's parents with kid gloves, keeping the times he downloaded such memories to an absolute minimum. Most of the time he would *only* download such memories when he had a justifiable reason to suspect the parents might have had a hand in their child's death, such as a suspicion of child abuse. Dr. Atwater had been a rare exception. Taking a deep 'breath' to sharpen his focus, Javier started flipping through the microbiologist's memories.

The sights Javier saw shocked him to the core. The warehouse was in Douglas Atwater's memories. Many, many times.

Javier's eyes flew open as he snapped out of the trance. As he stood up, his muscles protested at the combination of exhaustion, followed by exercise (wonderful though the exercise was), followed by not nearly enough rest. He pushed the pain to the back of his mind, knowing that the information he had just 'remembered' was far too important to be put off for any reason. The sound of the running shower told Javier that he couldn't have been out for more than ten minutes. He pushed himself to the living room where Lanie had, thoughtfully, put his phone on a charger. He picked up the phone and dialed the only person he was sure he would be able to reach at the precinct. "Captain? It's Esposito. Is Agent Fallon there?" The detective waited while his boss turned over the phone. "Fallon? We need to get a current location and any information you can scare up on a Dr. Douglas Atwater...That's right, the victim's father. He's been working with Medin al shems."

Captain Gates watched as Fallon quickly took down some information on a piece of scrap paper and end his conversation with Esposito. "What is it?" asked Gates as Fallon hung up the phone.

Fallon tore the paper off the notepad as he replied, "The victim's father was working with the terrorists, apparently..."

Gates' eyes widened as she realized what this information meant to their investigation. "Agent Fallon," she asked, trying to keep her cool as the agent was heading to her door, "may I speak to you for a moment? In private?"

Agent Fallon opened his mouth to protest, then closed it when he turned around and saw the expression on Gates' face. A picture of a mama grizzly bear standing on her hind legs, fiercely protecting her cubs, flashed through his mind. Fallon backed up against the door to push it closed. "What can I do for you, captain?" he asked.

Gates thought through her choice of words carefully as she spoke. "I'm getting the impression you've had a...very interesting morning, Agent Fallon?"

Fallon caught on to the implied statement in Gates' question immediately. "So you know?"

Gates nodded. "As do you, unless I miss my guess."

"No, you're right...they told me the whole story shortly after you called with the news about Central Park. How could you tell?" asked Fallon.

"There was no way that you could have blindly accepted that kind of information from Detective Esposito without having some understanding of where he gets it from," Gates told him. She walked around her desk until she was close enough to Agent Fallon that she had to look up to stare the man down. "Am I going to have a problem with your organization in the future, Agent Fallon?"

The meaning of Gates' question was obvious to Fallon, and he shook his head in reply. "Absolutely not, captain. I owe a debt to them that I will *never* be able to repay. My superiors will never hear about them from me, I can promise you that."

Gates saw the rock-solid conviction behind Fallon's words and nodded, effectively ending their conversation. Fallon turned on his heels and left the captain's office to work on tracking down Douglas Atwater.

Fallon walked quickly to intercept the four Guardians as they left the elevator. "Detective Esposito!" he called out as he got to them, knowing that would get the group's attention.

It worked. The group stopped as Fallon caught up with them. "Whad'ya got?" asked Esposito.

"You were right," replied Fallon. "Dr. Douglas Atwater got a payment of $50 million dollars wired from a Swiss bank account to an account in the Cayman Islands last week. He's our guy."

Beckett, Castle and Ryan all turned to Esposito in shock. Beckett was the first to figure out how to speak again. "How in the world did you figure *this* out?" she asked him.

Esposito looked to Fallon to see if he wanted to provide any more information, but the agent simply threw up his hands in surrender. "Hey, it's *your* lead. Start talking."

"Okay...when we finally got to a point in the warehouse when people weren't shooting at us," explained Esposito, "I had a major moment of déjà vu."

"Like you had been to the warehouse before?" asked Ryan.

Esposito nodded. "Yeah, but I hadn't. So that meant that someone else in my head *had*. When Fallon sent us all home to get some shuteye, I went back over the memories I got during this case, and figured out that Atwater had been working at that warehouse every day until he moved to Florida and checked in once a week after that. He had only *just* gotten back from New York when his kid died."

"Why did Atwater want to attack New York City?" asked Castle.

"To leave a legacy behind, as twisted as *that* sounds," replied Esposito. "When Bernham forced him into retirement in the middle of the anthrax project he pushed Thomas to take the partnership deal. *Hard.* When Thomas turned the deal down he knew his work on the anthrax spores would just end up being some footnote in a DoD file somewhere. If his legacy couldn't continue at the lab then he wanted his name and the disease he created in the history books."

"And when 2/3rds of his plan failed..." Ryan began.

Where Ryan might have thought they would have gotten speculation, instead Fallon handed him a computer printout. "Atwater filed a flight plan to flee the country and fly to Yemen. His private jet is leaving Republic Airport in an hour. Castle, I was hoping..."

The five of them disappeared before Fallon had a chance to finish the request.

The group materialized just behind the hangar of a charter flight company of a charter flight company at the small airport. "You're lucky I know this airport well," Castle informed the group, "I knew just where to drop us."

The three detectives simply rolled their eyes while Fallon ignored Castle's smirking and got down to business. "Beckett, what's in the area? Anything we've got to worry about?"

Beckett stretched out her hearing until almost to the nearby road, tuning out the noises of the nearby office building to focus on anything that her instincts told her meant danger. "Hangar to our southwest...private jet guarded by half a dozen guards armed with what sounds like AKs...a car pulling in..." She turned around to watch the black car service vehicle unload its passenger at the door to the hangar. "It's Atwater."

Fallon pulled out his service weapon, switching off the safely. He frowned in confusion when the three detectives didn't do the same. "Where are your weapons, detectives?"

Ryan shrugged off the agent's concern. "Don't really need it."

When the other two detectives nodded in agreement, Fallon couldn't help but shake his head in amazement. It wasn't hard to feel like David against Goliath when he looked at their weaponry versus what they were soon to be facing. The Biblical warrior, though, didn't have the advantages Fallon knew *they* had. "Castle, shields up?" When the wizard nodded, Fallon continued, "Okay, the objective here is simple: capture Atwater and secure the cure vials. I don't care what else happens so long as we meet those two goals, because if that plane gets off the ground with Atwater in it things are going to get a whole lot more complicated. Are we clear?"

"Yes sir," the four Guardians replied.

"Good," Fallon concluded, pushing a round into the chamber of his weapon. Shaking his head again at the fact that *he* was the only one carrying a gun-and by *choice*, no less-Fallon lifted his arm, giving the group the silent command to proceed.

Clearly the four Guardians had been holding back at the anthrax lab. Castle disappeared almost simultaneously after getting the attack order, reappearing just off the entrance to the hangar and primed to help his friends if needed.

The three detectives took off at a sprint that would have made Olympians green with envy. Fallon followed as best he could with his weapon drawn, looking to provide cover fire should any of the cops require it.

The Homeland Security Agent soon decided not to bother with such hindrances as taking cover. Ryan and Esposito had taken out all six guards before they could fire a single shot, and Beckett was in the process of reading his rights to a stunned Douglas Atwater when Fallon arrived on the scene. The agent quickly shook off his amazement at the talents of the group around him, focusing instead on the one job left to do. "Where's the vials, Atwater?" Fallon demanded angrily.

Douglas Atwater tried to bluff his way out of the situation. "What vials? I have no idea what you're talking abou..."

Fallon cut him off, angrily grabbing the older man by the lapels. "I won't ask again," he growled, "Where. Are. The vials?!"

Douglas Atwater composed himself as best he could with a furious Homeland Security agent literally breathing down his neck. "I know my rights," Atwater choked out, "I'm not saying anything else without a lawyer."

Fallon dropped Atwater and stepped back from the old man with a smile. "You don't have to. I'm pretty sure we already got what we needed. RYAN?!"

"Already on it," Ryan yelled back from inside the jet. The detective soon emerged from the plane with a small metal briefcase in his hands.

"Get that to Castle right away," Fallon ordered Ryan. "Tell him to bring it to Lanie and that she should call Bernham Atwater with instructions for them to call me ASAP." Ryan nodded and ran out of the hangar. Stepping further away from their suspect, Fallon pulled out his cell phone as he instructed the other two detectives, "Tie up the guards and make sure our friend here doesn't get away. I'll call Suffolk County PD and see if I can scare us up an escorted ride back to Manhattan."

As Fallon watched Esposito jog around to zip-tie the guards and Beckett 'casually' stand guard over their suspect, the agent finally allowed himself a small moment of awe at what he had just seen accomplished. A raid that should have taken a SWAT team and could have easily resulted in the loss of more than a few lives was completed by three detectives and a writer, without a handgun between them, in a matter of *minutes*.

He was *sure* he was going to miss these guys. A *lot*.

Only one more chapter to go! Don't forget to feed (leave comments for) the writer!