Summary:

Henry and Jo have a long talk, baring their feelings for each other. He and Abe decide it's time to escape from their so-called refuge. Mike makes a startling discovery when he finally handles the Roman dagger, the Pugio, and makes an equally startling decision.

This chapter is a bit short but I'm comfortable with its stopping point. Thank you all for your comments, favs and follows, and your continued interest and support.

vvvv

"You bugged my home! Invaded our privacy!" Henry hurled the accusations at Austin, who visibly flinched from them.

"We had to be sure about you, that you were no threat, either," Austin explained. "We make no apologies for that."

vvvv

That evening in their room, Henry mulled over what he and Abe had learned in General Austin's office that morning. It was inconceivable to him that the federal government had even entertained, let alone employed Adam as one of their operatives at all. Not much good had come out of the meeting except that the government had now severed ties with him after his egregious assaults on him and others in New York City during the last few months of 2014 into the middle of 2015. The equally troubling conversation afterward with his now sleeping son returned to him.

"They should have had him drawn and quartered after he killed Mom," Abe grumbled.

"You've always contended that he didn't kill her," Henry reminded him. "That he only wanted her to lead him to me. But in the process," he conceded, "he frightened her so much that she felt taking her own life was the only way to keep him from us."

"Yeah ... well ... that was before we just found out that those clowns knew all about him and just ... allowed him to remain a loose cannon out there!" Abe angrily exclaimed. He looked at his father, whose countenance mirrored his hurt, anger, and frustration.

"Don't you see, Dad? They let her rot in that lonely spot all those years - "

Henry turned away from him but Abe stepped back in front of him.

"They could have told us!" Abe sobbed. He was now overcome with emotion and dropped down onto the sofa. "She didn't have to stay there all alone. We could have ... gotten her, given her a decent burial ... " His chest heaved with deep sobs at the thought of the woman who'd lovingly raised him dying in the small ravine and her body remaining there for 30 years. "Mom didn't deserve that! Those bastards!"

It was now well past midnight by his pocket watch. He snapped it shut and looked over at his sleeping son, envious of his ability to slumber. Sleep remained an elusive tease for him so he walked out onto the small patio and stood under the night sky's canopy of stars. He breathed in the crisp, night air as if it could cool his anger and soothe the hurt over how his beloved Abigail's life had ended in that ravine and how this government had allowed her body to rot there unattended and unclaimed for such a long time. This place, the Green, as Austin had called it, no longer felt like a refuge and he wholeheartedly agreed with his son that it was no longer desirable to remain there. But how to make that happen? He had to get a message to the Lieutenant. Perhaps Donaldson and his team could be sent back to retrieve them and return them to their home, he thought.

A familiar sound broke into his thoughts. The burner cell phone on the night stand next to his bed was buzzing. He smiled when he saw "Jo" displayed on the small Caller ID and he quickly activated it to answer it in the way that Abe had shown him.

"Hello, Detective," he greeted her, a smile in his voice. "Counting sheep not working for you, either?"

("Hey, Henry," she replied, chuckling. "Seems like insomnia is going around. Just got off the phone with Mike.")

"Sorry," he said. "Seems that anyone dealing with Adam will invariably be robbed of sound sleep."

("It's not your fault, Henry," she told him. "Sleepless nights seem to go hand-in-hand with many investigations. But ... that's not exactly why I called you.")

"Oh? All right." When she didn't speak again right away, he added, "For whatever reason you did call, it makes me very happy."

("It, um, it's just that we haven't had a chance to talk ... about things.")

Her loud sigh told him that she was nervous, almost embarrassed. "You said that you would have more questions for me," he reminded her.

("No. Yes. I mean ... God, Henry! I wanted you to know that ... you're still Henry to me. You're still my partner. My best friend.")

Friend, he thought to himself, pursing his lips.

("And I meant it when I told you that you had made me feel ... again. I don't know what my life would be like without you now.")

What was she telling him? "Jo, I ... feel the same way," he admitted. "Working with you ... getting to know you ... it's meant a great deal to me. You hold a ... a very special place in my heart." What was he telling her?

("That's, that's nice to know, Henry." After a short pause, "Don't leave, Henry. Don't go somewhere and hide like you said you've done before. Please come back to us. Come back to me.")

She was telling him the same thing, he happily realized. "I could never leave you, Jo. There's no place on earth I'd rather be than with you." He could hear her smile through the phone and he hoped she could hear his.

They spoke longer and when he hung up it was nearly 2:00 AM. Their conversation had unburdened both of them of their long-held secrets, mainly about how much they meant to each other. In spite of yesterday morning's revelations from Austin about Adam and his government connection, he basked in the soothing comfort of knowing finally where he stood with Jo and that they could now plan their futures together. But first, he had to find a way to extricate him and his son from this place.

Not bothering to undress except for removing his belt, tie, and shoes, he laid down on the bed and clasped his hands underneath his head. He smiled and closed his eyes as his heart closed the chapter on memories of his beloved Abigail and opened to welcome in Jo. Of course, he was taking a chance. A chance for his heart to eventually be broken again. But life was about the journey, Abigail had once told him. Life was about living, his wise son had told him. And with Jo, he was willing to live that journey no matter what the future would bring.

"Holy Sweet Nuthin's, Batman," Abe teasingly whispered.

Appalled but amused, Henry asked, "You were eavesdropping on our private conversation?"

"Some of it," he admitted. "Couldn't be helped. But most of it - I closed my ears. Kinda weird to hear your father coo like a lovesick turtledove over the phone with his girlfriend." Before Henry could finish rolling his eyes and dropping his jaw, Abe asked, "When do we escape?"

Henry chuckled, closing his eyes and shaking his head before replying, "Soon, Boy Wonder. Soon."

vvvv

Mike left Lt. Reece's house with all intentions of driving home. Instead, he drove to the precinct and debated with himself before leaving his car and entering the building. As he did so and eventually found himself in the Evidence Room, his own words rang in his ears about wanting to permanently deal with Adam the "normal" way. It was hard not to recall Zora's declarations, which felt more like an indictment, about him being a sleeping warrior able to permanently kill Adam or Oded, as she claimed he'd identified himself to her.

"Oded mentioned something about a Roman dagger, a Pugio," Zora told them while in the Interview Room. "That he was searching for it, needed it, in order to protect himself from its magical properties. That only certain ones, the sleeping warriors, could wield it against him and take him to eternal rest."

Mike found the aisle where the Pugio was boxed up. He hesitated before pulling the box off of the shelf and resting it on a nearby table. With blue-gloved hands, he pulled off the tape and the lid and saw the ancient weapon inside made of Illyrian iron in a large, plastic evidence bag. Something stopped him from just picking it up and examining it. He knew that the ancient weapon was used by Roman soldiers as a sidearm; not even their first weapon of choice, which was a sword. His interest in ancient weapons had begun when he was a young boy. Even though his father was a gun collector and many of the older firearms interested him, it was the knives, sabers, spears, swords and the like that really intrigued him.

A laugh scoffed out of him because it brought up images of the sword-wielding Immortals in the Highlander movies. Jo had only recently told him that Lucas had illegally taken the dagger from the Evidence Room back in 2015 and given it to Henry, who had attempted to give it to Adam one fateful night.

"What am I doing here?" he whispered to himself and to the empty room. Was he really buying any of this? The ramifications of such a truth becoming part of his life troubled him deeply. It would mean that he wasn't like other human beings. That his was a special "condition" that he, like Henry, had absolutely and totally rejected even though others might marvel at and be envious of it. Would it mean that he was also some kind of Immortal? No. He immediately and thankfully rejected that reasoning. Zora had said that Adam had told her that he was descended from this Aetius guy. That meant those descendants, his ancestors, lived and died as everyone else had. And so would he. But ... what would happen to him after he killed Adam with this Pugio? Would his destiny be fulfilled, therefore, eliminating the need for him to live any longer? Would he be unwillingly compelled to kill others like Adam?

He shut down his thoughts and clamped the lid back onto the box, shuddering. This was crazy. All. Too. Crazy. But how does one kill an Immortal? He'd just keep coming back. Was this really a way to do that and he was shrinking from his purpose forged centuries before his birth?

"How do you handle it, Doc?" Mike asked as they sat in Bellevue's ER waiting for word on Lucas.

"If there's one thing I've learned in my long life, Detective, is that one can only play the hand that fate has dealt them," Henry quietly replied. "Admittedly, sometimes kicking and screaming, raising all reasonable objections - other times with resigned resolve. In the end, we cannot escape what has been purposed for us."

"Damn it!" he cursed out loud. Then, calming himself, he thought, "If the Doc can do it ... so can I."

The lid removed once again, he stared at the Pugio and lifted the bag out of the box, holding it up in front of him. He unzipped the bag and reached in to remove the dagger. As soon as he touched it, he felt a tingling sensation like the one he'd experienced when he was a kid and had stuck his finger in the wall socket. The muffled chatter of raised voices played at his ears along with faint images of people huddled together inside what appeared to be an expansive meeting hall. He tightened his grip on the weapon's handle and the voices grew louder and, along with the images, more distinct.

A crowd of at least 20 or more men dressed in togas draped over tunics, withdrew from the bloodied body of a man similarly dressed. Despite his many injuries and loss of blood, the man managed to stagger to his feet and stumble a few steps forward, mouthing what sounded like, "Et tu, Brute?"

Astonished, Mike dropped the weapon and it clattered onto the table top. Great, he thought, that's all I gotta do is break this darn thing and have IA on my back. He swallowed, gathering his courage, and picked the Pugio up again. He knew from his high school English Lit class that what he was "seeing" somehow, some way, was the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C.

The mortally-wounded man now lay in a bloody heap on the black-and-white tiled floor of the meeting hall. The stadium seating, once filled on either side of him and a raised, throne-like chair was now emptied of its former occupants. They and the man's assailants had rushed out of the building except for a dark-haired man who had stabbed Caesar last then dropped his weapon in apparent disgust with himself.

Another man, apparently distraught, crept closer to Caesar's body. His manner of dress indicated that he was not as prosperous as either the victim or the others. He picked up the dark-haired man's discarded weapon and lunged at him yelling his name in anger: Brute! He raised the dagger and Brute froze. A Roman soldier stepped in front of Brute shielding him from the distraught man bent on vengeance. Seemingly out of nowhere, another man resembling - Adam - stepped in front of the distraught man and the next thing he saw was the soldier's dagger stabbing Adam in the stomach. But it was a mistake. The soldier had meant to stab the man wielding Brute's discarded dagger. Brute watched in horror as the distraught man helped the wounded and bleeding Adam out of the meeting hall.

The images ceased and Mike caught his breath. Dropping the weapon back into the plastic evidence bag and into the box, he wiped his brow and removed the gloves, tossing them into a nearby waste bin. He struggled to make sense of all he'd seen and how it differed greatly from what he'd ever heard about Caesar's assassination or what he'd been taught in school. It wasn't often that he wished that Henry was here to share his knowledge about things but he wished he was here now. If anyone besides Adam knew about the Ides of March, it would be Henry. Absent that, and the fact that he'd clearly seen the Roman soldier knife Adam in the stomach, he reluctantly decided to seek more information from another trusted source: his wife, Karen.

The Hanson home the following evening ...

"You wanna know what I know about Julius Caesar?" a disbelieving Karen asked her husband. He nodded and asked why that surprised her so much.

"Because you're asking me to sort of lecture you when you complain all the time about your ME friend and his lectures," she explained. "But ... okay. Don't say I didn't warn you, though."

For the next several minutes, she proceeded to recount to him what he already knew about Caesar's assassination. But she said nothing about a Roman soldier stabbing what looked to be a poorer class citizen. When he questioned her about it, she thought for a moment or two then said something that seemed to tie in with what he'd "seen" the night before while handling the Pugio in the Evidence Room.

"Two days after the assassination," Karen began, "Mark Antony summoned the senate and managed to work out a compromise in which the assassins would not be punished for their acts, but all of Caesar's appointments would remain valid. That kind of, well, it did mess up what the conspirators had in mind; why they felt the need to get rid of Caesar. Caesar was popular with the Roman lower classes and they became enraged that a small group of aristocrats had sacrificed Caesar."

"The lower classes," Mike repeated. Karen nodded. "Sounds weird," he scoffed. "What if one or two of them had tried to get revenge. Think that might have happened and nobody, uh, wrote it down? For posterity?"

"Anything's possible," she replied. "We all know that history only gets recorded because somebody took the time to sit down and write it down. Doesn't mean they always get all the facts. And some facts are simply omitted. Makes the account sound better."

Okay, Mike told himself, I'm a believer. Whether he was some kind of sleeping warrior or not, he wasn't sure but something was up with that dagger. And for that reason, he was willing to use it to take out Adam. But when? Can't just walk up to the guy and knife him without provocation, he thought. This warrior stuff was gonna be harder to pull off than he'd imagined.

Notes:

Information on Julius Caesar's assassination and ancient Roman togas found on the Internet