Chapter 21

Jason had his feet up on the old wooden table the team were using as the centre of their operations, it was in the middle of a large dilapidated room. He tipped up the rim of his baseball cap and stretched out his arms as he took his eyes away from the monitors and took in his surroundings. From the outside this was just another abandoned building in Mexico City, close to the centre of things but back from the main streets through a number of alleys. At a guess this had maybe been a factory on the ground floor, up here in the upper floors that they had been calling home for the last month was old office space, there remained some older style furniture and empty filing cabinets. Off to the sides were a number of corridors and rooms, a few of which they'd set up as sleeping quarters.

Their contact here in Mexico had quietly spread a rumour among the street kids that this building was still owned and used by one of the drug lords, a clever and effective way to keep the homeless and the kids from trying to break in or hang around. Davis had set up a complicated system of security monitors and discreet cameras around and inside the building as well as monitors that showed feeds of their own surveillance in the city.

"You can take a break, Jase. I've got this for a while" Davis said as she sat down beside him drinking a coffee.

"Not much on TV today Davis, same old re-runs" Jason took his feet off the table. He placed his arms on his legs lifting his cap to run his hands though his hair, looking somewhere between frustrated and restless

"We'll come up with something to work with soon. Somewhere to point the tip of the spear" Davis said understanding his wish to be doing something more than sit around waiting for intel to provide something they could work with.

When they arrived they'd been provided with a full wall and files of deep intel, this was detailed stuff, meticulously collected. CIA standard. They couldn't fault the work but unfortunately for them, no sooner had they arrived than their HVT, Ruiz was called out of town, out of country in-fact, unexpectedly.

So they'd been stuck following the people closest to him, his contacts and his people waiting for a sign of his return and any clues as to what he was up to.

The problem with these ops were they were very much on their own, and that meant a lack of intel about the wider picture. No phone calls to ask what other agencies knew about where he was, what he was up to or when he would be back. They were here waiting for as long as that took.

Jason rose from his seat stretching out again. He looked tired. Beyond tired. He didn't do well with waiting and he didn't sleep well when he spent all day waiting.

"Jason… go try to get some shut-eye while the place is quiet." Davis suggested "you know there'll be no peace when Sonny and Clay get back. You know they'll be bickering after sitting in a car together all day. And we've got the night shift, we need the rest. I already got a couple hours"

Jason opened his mouth to say something dismissive or argumentative but Davis just held up her hand to quieten him. "No. No ranks here remember, I'm ordering you, on behalf of Mandy. I promised her I'd make sure you got rest even when you bullshitted that you didn't need any"

Jason laughed and Davis continued "or at least do me the service of just pretending to get some shut eye"

Jason gave her a little salute "yes ma'am" and headed out down the corridor into the room he'd set up his bed. He shared this room with Ray. The room next to them was twice as big and Clay, Sonny and Brock and Trent were sleeping in there. Davis has a smaller room down the hall to herself.

Right now it was just him and Davis in the building, the others were on recon and surveillance or stretching their legs getting some air, they'd be back soon and Davis was right, the place would definitely get less peaceful then.

He lay himself down, taking off his cap and throwing it onto his bag on the floor. He stared up at the peeling paint on the ceiling above him and smiled to himself at the thought of Mandy giving instructions for Davis to look after him. He thought about the last time he saw her, tried to remember every line of her face. He'd laid awake the night before she left for her op, she had slept so soundly, and it made his heart full that her nightmares had faded in the time they'd been together. She didn't wake up with a start in the middle of the night anymore, and he hoped wherever she was that was still the case. He had people here under orders from her not to let him spin-out. He knew full-well it wouldn't just be Davis who she'd taken aside. He laughed at the thought of them all being scared-shitless to say no to Mandy Ellis. He hoped she had people looking out for her too. Maybe she was even home by now, he hoped she was. She'd be bored and going out of her mind if she was, but bored and safe.

Timelines were vague, one to six months. It had been a month for him already, longer for her. Their op was set to depart a week after she did but it got delayed another week and they weren't allowed to go on any other missions until this one, so he'd had to bounce around his apartment and the base trying not to go crazy. At one point Blackburn lost his shit at him and told him not to come back to base until they deployed because watching him pace around base like a caged tiger was distracting everyone.

It had given him some extra time with the kids, which he was grateful for. Well, apart from them giving him a hard time about how his apartment was more suitable for a bachelor than someone now in a committed relationship and how Mandy was supposed to feel at home when she hardly had anywhere to put her own things. Emma had been sneaking things in like lamps and cushions, and she'd been not-so-discretely leaving properly listings out on the kitchen table for bigger places. They had a point, but he'd never been very good at these things, making a house a home. It felt more like a home than a place to lay his head now at least, somewhere he wanted to come home to, at least when she was there to come home to.

He shut his eyes, he didn't feel like he could sleep but it was his weird way of staying connected to her, his way of saying "OK, you win, I'll try"