Disclaimer: Most of the characters in this story do not belong to me! I'm not profiting from them, swearsies.
Thanks for the reviews again! I like 'em. I really like 'em. So if you have something to say, I want to hear it! Or... well, read it. Close enough.
"Say something," Nicky pleaded from her spot on the bed in their tiny hotel room in Alexandria. They'd reached Egypt the day before and had mainly been in hiding since. Tiny traces of Jason's light heartedness had faded with every mile they drove and they seemed to disappear entirely the moment the door to the hotel had swung shut. Nicky had attempted to keep up with his tense sitting for several hours but eventually gave up and shed her shoes, collapsing unceremoniously onto the bed, on her side and propped up by every pillow available. She wanted so very badly to sleep. Bourne's presence made her comfortable enough to easily sink into slumber but there was something about the troubled expression on his face that said that would be against some kind of fleeing etiquette. Perhaps "No sleeping on the run" was a rule she was unaware of.
"Huhn," Jason grunted in brief response. He said something in a way. It wasn't an actual word, but he opened his mouth and a syllable came out, and for the moment that was going to have to satisfy Nicky's need for companionship. The human side of him had been shoved into the shadows. David had willingly stepped away. The veiled messages that threatened his anonymity and yet nothing else were out of David's league. This was Bourne's territory and Jason was very busy, mentally mapping out a plan. He didn't have much to work with. He'd collected an impressive bounty of American newspapers from a novel "American" shop in the downtown district that sported a collection of flags and watery coffee. Much to his surprise, the owners were earnest in their passion rather than indulging in some form of Middle Eastern mockery of the American culture.
After scouring the newspapers and coming up empty, thus being thrown right back to where he was at the beginning, Jason had sunk deep into his current mode of contemplation. He wasn't blind to human reactions and he certainly wasn't blind to Nicky's reactions. He was very aware that his demeanor was making her quite uncomfortable. He could see his own face in his mind's eye- gaze distant, posture tense, expression cold. However, he couldn't prioritize comforting her at the moment. Pulling himself from his mind to give her a hug she very well may not- and quite possibly should not- believe would be useless to them both and surely if anyone understood, it would be Nicky. She'd seen him kill. Watching him sit and think for hours on end should at worst be uninteresting.
His plan for simply making contact to inform Pam he'd intercepted her message wasn't going to be enough, he'd finally decided. It wasn't an instantaneous decision, nor was it easy. If anyone was going to drag him down, it would be her. If anyone was going to put a bullet in his head, it would be her. The benign "hello" could certainly be a ruse to pull him in under false pretenses, but a large section of Bourne's mind- the section he trusted most- said that he and she had an unspoken bond. There would be no underhanded games between them. Their game, if there was to be one, was to be a form of life sized chess- all above the board, all in plain sight, all a matter of wit against wit. May the best man win.
With a great deal of reluctance, Bourne realized he was going to have to make the call.
Pamela Landy could barely keep herself from slamming the tip of her ballpoint pen through the pad of paper in her lap. She couldn't imagine how Toro, with his slightly less contained self-restraint, wasn't himself in need of urgent medical attention. She knew he was covering a half angered and half panicked flushed with a constant ingestion of straight black coffee from his station in the corner of a pristine, isolated hospital room. Monitors beeped rhythmically at a pace far slower than the one Landy felt pulsing through her own veins. She felt time slipping away and this silence was frustrating. There was no need and no point. There was no reason for it except for defiance and it was that defiance that was creating the palpable tension in the air.
Paz was the central object of attention, face bruised and puffy, stitched and glued in some places. The most serious of injuries were beneath the blanket, two gunshot wounds that should have left him dead. One grazed his aorta while the other severed his femoral artery. In saving his own life, he had been forced to sacrifice a leg and the space where that leg had been was eerily empty on the bed. In one hand, Paz gripped the blanket and in the other he held a gun, poised to shoot at any and everyone at will. The situation had been far more heated upon Landy and Toro's entry, but it had been giving him the gun and giving him the control that had ultimately brought them to this point of high-strung balance. Something had to give. He had to speak, and not just to hurl insults and objects. As long as he was quiet, however, they would remain quiet. Greg began to speak twice but a well-directed glare from Pam stopped him instantly.
It was quite close to an hour before Paz began to talk. His voice was low and hoarse, just barely shuddering with the control he was so obviously using in order not to scream or possibly cry. He had, after all, traded the use of painkillers for absolute consciousness at the surprise of no one. "Female, late teens to early twenties, five-five to five-seven. Athletic build, brown hair, blue eyes. Fair skin tone, Western European descent. No accent. No distinguishing marks," the description was rattled off rapidly and Landy scribbled in shorthand in order to keep up.
"You can narrow down that description," she replied and her tone insisted it wasn't a question but a statement.
Fingering the trigger of the gun, Paz's jaw worked and he cleared his throat gently. "Female. Nineteen or twenty. Five-six and a half. Athletic build… can probably run a five minute mile, easy. Military training, martial arts training. She had a sore left hamstring," he spoke slower this time as if the words were more reluctant to come out. The more he said, the more hesitant he was to say it. "She had to be one of us. I never saw her before and she's… she's young and… female. But she had to be. One of us or counter-intelligence using our training. Something. I got three rounds fired. I think one might've landed."
Landy continued writing in her own form of shorthand, something only she would probably be able to decipher later and translate into typed and shared notes. She stopped immediately when something he said triggered her full attention, however. "How do you know she's had your training? Technique? Weaponry?"
"Technique, yeah. Technique, but there was the look. Lights on, but nobody's home. The robotic predator look…"
"I'm going to check local hospitals for gunshot wounds. Would you be able to recognize her if you saw her again?" Landy was already starting to rise from her seat. Her heart had dropped out from her body and the suspicious stirrings in the back of her mind had spiked to a peak. She caught a glimpse of Toro who had frozen in place, half hidden behind his Styrofoam cup.
Paz shook his head, but not to her question. "I'd recognize her, but she's not going to show face in a hospital. The only way I'm ever going to see her again is in a body bag," it wasn't a threat but a statement. The first thing Pamela had done in getting the phone call from Paz was to disband the search team. The second was to issue everything necessary to declare Paz dead. She was personally handling the process of finding him a new identity, but she had plenty of time. This military hospital would be his home for a while.
Everyone except Toro was under the impression Paz was dead. It would be easy to sniff out the leak if he ended up double dead now. If not, she now had a room full of people she needed to outwit and outsmart. She had made Paz's location public knowledge among her employees and he had been attacked, despite his own trap. In fact, his own trap was possibly the reason he lived at all. Someone in her team had spilled the address to the assassin or the handler and now she had another job- finding the mole in her little operation. As if she didn't have enough on her plate.
Landy gathered up her things and moved toward the door, gesturing Toro along like her obedient pet. "I'm going to check it out anyway. Get some rest and call if you need anything." She waited for a response but heard and saw none, so without another word she and Greg departed.
Quick, Lamaze-style breathing issued from the floor of the bathroom of an upscale hotel ten miles from the ratty apartment complex. Senka sat, propped up against the cabinets, digging deep into her stomach just below her ribs first with a pair of alcohol-doused tweezers and finally her fingers. The neat little hole near the fleshy ridge of her side quickly became a ragged mess and just as she hooked her fingertips around the smooth bullet, warmed by her body and slick with her blood, her cell phone started to ring. With a steady hand, she pulled the bullet out and dropped it down onto once pristine tile, letting out a half-choked breath. By the third ring, she answered the phone, hitting the speaker function in order to press pads of thready gauze against the bubbling wound.
"Mission status," the cool baritone voice demanded.
Senka risked the second she needed to catch her breath in order to sound as collected as possible. "Success," but there was a pause as she checked to see if the bleeding was active or just left over from nearly an hour of fussing with the wound, "I think."
The silence on the other end of the line lasted only a fraction of a second but it was cold enough to freeze any blood in its place. "Explain."
"It was a trap, sir," she said, pressing the gauze back into place. Senka rested her head against the counter, going through a series of mental curses. "The address- it was a set up. He was waiting for me. I got off two lethal hits and I got out of there before I could be the one terminated."
This time, there was no pause. "Are you wounded?"
"Yes. It's not severe. A few sutures, good as new," a third peek at the hole in her flesh told Senka that was in fact the truth. The bleeding had all but stopped and while she didn't have any medical monitoring equipment she could tell her blood pressure hadn't plummeted in any way that indicated the bullet ricocheted off an internal organ.
"You have the antibiotics. Take three. Now," the voice from the phone commanded. Senka cringed and looked over at her gear bag across the way.
"I need to stitch up first," she protested.
Before she could even finish with her argument, the man spoke up again. "Take the antibiotics now. Start off with four now, three in the morning. You're too vulnerable if you get an infection."
Deflated, too physically and mentally tired to insist otherwise, Senka crawled with one hand across to dig out the hefty bottle from her bag, rattling out a quadruple dose of pills and dry swallowing them as told. The movement caused her gunshot wound to begin weeping an angry red and she returned to her place by the sink slower than she departed. She took a sip of water, mouth almost instantly dry. "Yes, sir."
There were seconds of radio silence which gave Senka time to clean up the fresh blood. She didn't know why she bothered to argue about the pills anyway, now that she thought about it. She always ended up taking them and he always ended up right- never once had she ended up with some raging, debilitating infection. Come to think of it, why did she question him about anything at all? Not just the pills, but anything. Everything. He knew what was best, and he was her superior. She should obey without question, because he had never been wrong. Paz's trap was just a fluke and it was a lesson well-learned. It took her a long while to tune back into what was happening and when she did, she didn't know how much time had passed. She was midway through suturing her side closed and her handler was mid-sentence. She didn't know what he had said but it didn't seem important. She didn't feel like she was supposed to know. She already knew what she had to, and that was it.
With a clenched jaw, Senka shoved the sharp needle through both sides of her flesh and looped the thread around, snipping off the ends and finally patting the area dry. "-send someone to clean up if the mission failed. They'll be looking for you. You need to keep your nose down for now, wait for the dust to clear. I'll be in touch. You've got unofficial downtime until then, but don't get lazy," the man demanded in the same low key chilly tone as before.
The line went dead and Senka reached out to snap the phone closed. She was filled with a sense of… nothing. She felt nothing. And she thought nothing of it. Automatically, she cut a perfect square of gauze and taped it to cover the stitches then rose. Before retiring for any rest at all, she scrubbed that bathroom clean, ridding it of any sign of blood and perfecting the art of walking normally by ignoring the pain and stiffness of a wounded side.