Author's note: Tallcajun, your review might be the most beautiful one I've ever received. Thank you so very much for your kind words. But just as many thanks go out to all of you who are still reading and commenting, and following my story. It is an absolute pleasure writing these words knowing that people from all over the world are tuning in :)
Disclaimer: Sometimes I wish I would have been older when Castle was on the air; who knows, maybe I could have visited the set or something. Basically, I was too young to have been able to come up with these incredible characters. Also, some of the lines in this chapter were taken from an actual episode x
The last Castle had seen of Manhattan was thirty minutes ago. Thirty minutes prior, he had been walking in a park when he was forced into a car at gunpoint by the man from the sketch; the man Castle had just outed on national television as being connected to Beckett's disappearance, and the man who the 12th suspected of torturing the two Russian contract killers. Castle had tried to talk, offer him money, anything; but the man had turned on the radio, and now The Beatles were blasting through the speakers.
They'd crossed the George Washington bridge a while ago, and they were headed northwest into New Jersey. Every once in a while, Castle would dare to glance sideways. While he was sure he hadn't seen the man before, something about him seemed vaguely familiar. He couldn't quite place him, and quite frankly it was starting to bother him.
Being held hostage wasn't something you could ever really get used to, but ever since his consultancy at the NYPD, Castle had become somewhat of a connoisseur when it came to being forcefully held at gunpoint. Usually, the one holding the gun was either a coldblooded psychopath, or a hysterical person turned murderer.
The man behind the wheel though seemed relax, his fingers tapping to Fleetwood Mac's Dreams that had just replaced Here Comes the sun. If he didn't know any better, he'd say the man sitting next to him was just another Boomer on a nostalgia trip. But then the images of the two men's tortured faces appeared before him, and reality sunk in again.
The car came to a halt at a little rundown motel at an intersection of two major highways.
"Out," the man said, waving his gun to give Castle an extra boost of confidence. The sand crunched under his feet, as he took in his surroundings. Maybe he could try to-
"Don't even think about calling anyone," the man finished Castle's thoughts, nodding with his head to follow him. They walked up to one of the rooms on the ground floor. Once inside, the man took of his hat and jacket, and he placed his gun in the safe that came with the room. Castle remained close to the door, his eyes taking in the space before him. It wasn't in anyway messy, but it was clear someone had been living there for a while. There were a few takeout boxes on the corner table, some clothes nicely stacked on the bed, a suitcase bulging from under the bed. On the mirror in the back, there were some paper clippings, pictures of some sorts, but he couldn't quite make out of whom.
"So, what do they know?" the man said, as he sat down on the bed casually, looking up at him expectantly.
"Why should I tell you anything, if I don't even know who you are?" he sounded braver than he felt.
"Who I am is not important. Now, what do they know? The old lady, do they know she's part of it?"
"I'm not answering as long as you don't tell me who you are and why you took me?"
"Fine. Hunt. Jackson Hunt."
"Sounds made-up," Castle scoffed.
"It is, told you it wasn't important." At that moment, Castle's phone rung.
"You want to get that?"
"You just ordered me not to."
"It's probably Alexis. You oughta let her know you're safe," he smiled weakly.
"You know Alexis?" Castle grabbed for his phone, the caller-id unknown.
"Beckett?" he asked hopefully, the phone to his ear.
"I'm afraid not, Mister Castle" a deep Russian voice replied, "but I am the one holding her. If you value her life, you will give the phone to the man standing next to you. The one responsible for the bloodshed in New Jersey." Castle glanced up, exchanged looks with the man sitting on the bed. Who was he? His arm slowly extending, handing his phone over. The man kept his eyes on Castle as he took the phone and said:
"Yeah." Castle moved closer. He needed to know what the hell was going on. He walked past the bed and grabbed the chair in the corner, and sat down beside him.
"It's you, after all these years it is finally you."
"Time to let it go Volkov," the old man's face hardened.
"The way you let my poor daughter Ana go? No, it's time to end things. A life, for a life. I will let her suffer, just like you made her suffer. Twenty-three da-"
"Release her, she has got nothing to do with it," his voice strong, determined.
"On the contrary, Mr. Castle seems to love her very much. And as I now know, Mister Castle has everything to do with it. You know what I want. The ball's in your court. You decide who gets to live, and who gets to die. It's either you or her," the call had ended.
Castle got up, started pacing around the room with this new found and – to be honest – rather vague information. But the one thing that was clear to him was who the reason was for it all.
"This is about you?" he finally stopped pacing, his back to the room and the man on the bed. He just couldn't, he needed more time to process. But he had to know, a voice said.
"Yeah," Castle could see the man's reflection in the mirror in front of him.
"I don't understand. What does this have to do with Beckett? Why would they take her?"
"Because I was careless… Because somehow he found out who she was, who you were and what she meant to you. And he knew I'd come for her."
"Why? Why would you come for her?" Castle turned around, needing to see the look on the man's face, needing to look him in the eyes when he told him why in god's name Beckett was involved in this man's mess.
"Because of what she means to you," the man yelled out in agony, no longer seated.
"And why does that matter to you?" Castle yelled back with matching force.
"Because you're my son," he screamed. The world stopped for a minute. The only thing Castle could hear was the beating of his own heart, the gushing sound of blood in his ears. The traffic that travelled through the thin walls had disappeared, the creaky ventilator above them had stopped to creak. He couldn't possibly be…
"Richard, I'm your father," he said dead simply. The words Castle had secretly wanted to hear the moment he had learned about the concept of father. The words he had heard in countless of Star Wars marathons, pretending every single time that this one line didn't bother him in the slightest, that he couldn't care less. And there they were. Right in front of him. There he was. After all these years, his father.
Castle turned his back to him again, no idea how he was supposed to react or process this new piece of information. His eyes went over the mirror again, only now paying attention to the people in the pictures; the man holding his book in a newspaper clipping. The man on the page, he now realized, was him. And the people in the pictures were his daughter and him.
"So what, you're some kind of spy?" his voice managed to say.
"Intelligence asset is the term," he responded kindly, just as unsure as to how to proceed. My dad's a spy, the words floated through his mind. He had a million questions to ask, and if he could have, he would have asked them all. But they all faded in comparison to the most important one at hand.
"This man who has Beckett, who is he?" pushing aside his father related questions for now. Hoping that when the time came, he would be able to get answers to all of them.
"His name is Gregor Volkov, a psychiatrist and KGB's most feared agent. He was hired at the height of the Cold War, and was their most effective interrogator. He was rumored to be able to change people's perceptions of reality, make them not only give up state secrets but actually turn on their own people and murder their superiors. The CIA was able to rescue some of his victims, but they were unable to break the so-called 'spell' he had casted over them."
"And what does this have to do with you?"
"I was young, new in intelligence; Volkov had a daughter who was about to get married to Dimitri Turgenev, Russian nobility. I was ordered to hit him where it hurt. Some of our intelligence operatives were vengeful, having lost good people to Volkov's torturing techniques.
My task was designed to give him a taste of his own medicine. We captured the girl, Ana. Her fiancé, was high up the list of national enemies, too, so we figured, what better way than to kill two birds with one stone. We interrogated the girl for days, using techniques we knew Volkov would have used too. By the end of it, she went mad and she killed her own fiancé. Twenty-three days later, she committed suicide. My task was done.
First time he came after me, I put him away in a Tsjechen prison for life. Then, he escaped. And he's been figuring out a way to draw me out ever since."
"What about 3XK, where does he fit into this story?"
"He's nothing to it really, and nothing compared to what Volkov and his people are capable of. I was here on a mission when I heard about Beckett being a fugitive for the crime of her friend."
"But she wasn't, she was taken."
"That's what I figured as well. I had heard about this 3XK before; I knew it was you who let him go free last year," a feeling of shame washed over him at those words. Hunt, his father, or whoever the man was in front of him didn't notice though, as he continued:
"I knew in how much danger she was, and how much she meant to you-"
"How did you know what she means to me?" no longer able to contain himself.
"Oh come on, son. You don't have to be a spy to figure that one out. Every word you write these days is a love letter to her," he gave him a half-smile.
"You've read my books?" he asked, for a second forgetting the situation they were in.
"Oh yeah, I greased some wheels with the CIA when you were trying to get access to some information for research. I know that's not much but for a minute there… made me feel like a father." They smiled at each other for a second, conveying to each other where words fell short. Eventually, Castle scraped his throat, returning to business.
"So this Volkov, how did he figure out who I was to you?"
"When I tracked down the two men who had taken her, I didn't know they were part of his family. The ol-"
"The old woman, their neighbor. The one who provided us with a sketch," Castle added, wheels spinning in his head.
"She must have recognized me when I came over and tipped Volkov off. I tortured the two men for an hour before they finally told me where they'd left Beckett. I don't know how 3XK got involved with them, but their loyalty lied with Volkov, not him. They must have known that Volkov would put two and two together, so they stalled me as much as possible to give him enough time to get to Beckett. When I got to the warehouse, they were long gone. I put his body with the evidence, I thought that might make them claim you as the shooter. Like this, they wouldn't look for someone like me. Thanks to your little stunt on TV, however, they are. And now Volkov has me exactly where he wants me, with the full force of the NYPD on his side."
"If you know me at all, you know I'd do anything to save her," Castle took a step forward.
"That's what I was hoping you'd say. He said the ball's in my court; which gives us time."
"How do you know he'll give you time and not just shoot her?"
"He's a maniac, but he's poetic. After his son-in-law was killed, it took his daughter twenty-three days before she committed suicide. He'll give her the same amount of time. Which means we gotta start digging. Now, I've got some possible leads, but I have to stay under the radar. I need you to go back to the precinct, and get me information on that woman, the one who gave you my sketch."
Castle headed for the door when he remembered: "How do I contact you?"
"You don't."
"Then how am I supposed to give you information, how are we supposed to save Beckett if we can't communicate."
"I'll come to you, when it's safe. This already was a risk. Now they know who you are, they will keep track of your every move going forward."
"So what, I'm just supposed to wait around and hope that you'll take me at gunpoint again in a park? Meanwhile they're doing god knows what to Beckett, who might just as well be dead, for all we know. But no… We need to believe she's not. I just need to trust the word of my father who's been absent for forty years who believes that the KBG's most effective agent is poetic, ladies and gentlemen," Castle scoffed with disdain.
"You're getting emotional," he responded calmly.
"Oh, I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Although, really, shouldn't a father know their son gets emotional when the woman he l-, the woman he cares about is being held hostage by a Russian war criminal. So, in fact, no. I'm not sorry." All the anger he never knew was inside of him for a father he had never known, seemed to come pouring out. The hurt of not knowing whether his father had willingly left his son fatherless rose to the surface, and showed its ugly head.
The man standing before him seemed nothing like the character Castle had been imagining all these years; Hunt didn't even look like the man he described himself to be. He might be a spy, an intelligence asset, but right then and there, he seemed completely ordinary; a coward.
Hunt raised his eyebrows, as if he was waiting for his four-year-old son to calm down from his tantrum. When he saw the worst had passed, he spoke.
"Richard, I'm sorry for the hurt I put you through. The hurt I put your mother through. It wasn't my decision. I had just come off an operation and was going to be in town indefinitely when I met your mother. Our night together was magical, but then the next day, I was sent out for another mission again. It was only a year later I was home-bound again; it's then that I learned about you," tears were welling up in Castle's eyes. He let them stream over his cheeks, unbothered what the man in front of him might think or say.
"Richard, I don't need you to forgive me, I don't need you to understand. I just need you to know that this," he pointed to everything in the room, "is my life. This is the job I signed up for. And I might have all the cool toys, but it doesn't allow for a family. I'm sorry that my mess became yours; this is exactly why I never came forward. To avoid this."
Castle had no words to say or even think. His mind was blank; unable to process a story that seemed even too farfetched for him to write. His father was a spy; his father was the reason Beckett was in danger. Beckett. She needed to be priority, no more emotions. Castle scraped his throat:
"Okay, I will go back to the precinct and continue the investigation. I guess you know where to find me."
Author's note: I ended up writing most of yesterday, and have finished more chapters than I expected. Therefore, I thought to treat you all with a chapter earlier than promised :) fun side note, we finally had snow here today! :) x stay warm