Disclaimer in Part 1.
The phone rang, and Charlie's head jerked up. He'd been absorbed in his calculations and redesign of fugitive recovery methods for most of the day, ignoring the pile of ungraded final exams that sat on the edge of the table. Sometimes working at home was easier than at school: there were no students poking their heads in the office and inquiring politely, or not, if he'd finished grading yet. On the other hand, there were no telemarketers or solicitors calling in the middle of the day at his office.
He reached across the table and snagged the phone. "Hello?" He flipped through the papers in front of him, ready to hang up the phone as soon as the caller revealed what he or she was selling.
"Charlie?" The voice at the other end was only slightly familiar.
"Yes. Who is this?"
"It's, uh, it's Billy Cooper."
The hesitant tone in Cooper's voice made the hair on the back of Charlie's neck rise. "What's up?" he asked, as his hand went still on the pile of papers. Cooper must be calling to check on the pattern he had put together. That was all it was, he told himself. Don't let your mind jump to conclusions.
And then he said the words Charlie didn't want to hear. "It's, uh, it's Don. He's been shot."
His hand tightened on the receiver. "What happened? Is he all right? Where is he? What -- ?" He broke off as one horrible scenario after another raced through his mind.
A man aimed a gun at your head and fired. The fact that you survived is an anomaly, and it's unlikely to be the outcome of a second such encounter.
He shook his head and forced himself to listen to what Cooper was saying. "They're taking him to L.A. County General. He was protecting our witness…I don't even know all the details, Charlie. We're going to talk to Dr. Fisher and find out what happened."
"How--" He swallowed past the lump in his throat. His voice came out smaller than it had before. "How bad?"
He heard Cooper sigh and closed his eyes, fighting down panic. "He was shot twice in the back, at pretty close range. The paramedics got him out as fast as they could, and they'll have the best people working on him, trust me." There were voices in the background, and then Cooper said, "I'm sorry, Charlie, I gotta go. I wish I had something more to tell you."
"Yeah. Thanks for letting me know." He mechanically put the phone down, then slumped back into his chair and buried his face in his hands.
Statistically, you're dead now. Sometimes he wished he didn't have near-perfect recall, especially when it came to the dire predictions he'd shouted at his brother months earlier. And if those predictions turned out to be right…he knew that part of him would think that just by speaking the words, he had made them come true.
"Charlie?" Alan's voice came from the back yard. "Who was that?"
Oh, God. He had to tell his father.
Charlie slowly lifted his head. "Uh, Dad, I think you'd better come in here," he called.
He heard the sounds of gardening tools being put down, the screen door opening, and Alan's footsteps across the kitchen. He tried to figure out what to say, how to break it to him, how to stay strong himself but still seek comfort from his dad.
"Charlie?" Alan's voice came from the doorway.
He turned to face his father, opening his mouth, which had suddenly gone dry. But from the way Alan's face fell, he knew his own expression said it all.
Alan gripped the doorframe as if for support. "Don?"
Charlie moistened his lips. "He's…he's being taken to County General. Dad, he -- " his voice caught, and he tried again. "He was shot."
His father's face paled. "Where?"
"I don't know where he was, it was something to do with the witness they're protecting…" He didn't know how it could have been at the safe house, since the point of a safe house was to keep the criminals away, but where else could they have been?
"Not where it happened, Charlie, where was he shot?" Alan snapped.
He looked up, surprised.
"Sorry," Alan said, shaking his head, "I…"
"I know. It's okay." He took a deep, shaky breath. "Um, in the back, Cooper said. He didn't know any more than that; I guess it just happened."
"Cooper, huh?" Alan's features hardened. "I knew he was trouble for Don. He was years ago, and now…" His voice trailed off. Then he straightened his shoulders, looking suddenly older. "County General, you said? Let's go."
Three hours later, they were sitting in the waiting room on the fourth floor of the hospital, still waiting to hear something about Don's surgery. Charlie had flipped mindlessly through all the available magazines a long time ago, and now he was staring off down the hallway, willing the doctor to come out and talk to them. They didn't know anything other than the fact that Don had been in surgery ever since his arrival at the ER, and that there was no way of knowing how much longer it might take.
Charlie hadn't been in a hospital for about eighteen months, and although it wasn't the same facility where their mother had been treated, it was hauntingly familiar. He realized that he'd spent so much time at Huntington Memorial trying to think about math that he now associated the sights and smells of the building with P vs. NP, the problem that had torn his mind away from his family for several crucial months. It was a fight now to keep his thoughts from tracing the familiar pathways of deterministic algorithms and diagonalization with reduction, not because he was trying to retreat from what had happened to Don, but because the setting was so oddly familiar.
Alan's quiet voice broke the chain of his thoughts. "I didn't think I'd be here again so soon." When Charlie turned to look at him, he said, "Not here, here; I've never been here before. But…here in a hospital, waiting to learn something."
Charlie looked away. He didn't want to say that he agreed, because he'd both figuratively and literally run away the last time Alan had been sitting in a hospital waiting room, during the one final surgery that hadn't beat the odds and hadn't saved Margaret Eppes' life. He didn't know how to say that this time, he was here for Don, and for Alan, without bringing up painful memories.
He felt his father's hand on his shoulder, and he looked up. "Stay with me, Charlie," he said quietly.
"Dad, I am," he said quickly, reaching up to take his hand. "I'm not going anywhere."
Alan looked into his eyes for a long moment, and finally nodded.
"I just wish…" Charlie gave a shrug and looked away. "I wish we knew what happened."
"I don't," came Alan's firm reply. "All that matters is that Don is in there fighting for his life. I don't want to know the details. It's bad enough as it is."
Charlie looked at him curiously. "You really think so?"
"Charlie, the only reason to know the details is to know who's to blame. Don's very good at his job, you know that. So are the people he works with, even if some of them have strange ideas about how much of your life you're supposed to devote to your work." He pressed his lips together, then went on. "So I know that whatever went wrong, it wasn't his fault, and it wasn't the fault of any of his colleagues. And I really don't want to hear the details of some murderer shooting at my son."
"That's an awful lot you're taking on faith, Dad. I mean, people make mistakes, even people who are good at what they do." His thoughts flashed back to a deserted downtown square and Don's sudden, panicked shout echoing off the glass-and-steel buildings. Then David Sinclair crashing into him, knocking him out of the way of a sniper's bullet, making him as much of an anomaly as his brother.
The fact that you survived is an anomaly, and it's unlikely to be the outcome of a second such encounter. Did that now apply to him, too?
Alan was looking shrewdly at him. "You're not blaming yourself for this, are you?"
"What?" He dragged himself back from his increasingly bleak thoughts. "What do you mean?"
"You have that look, Charlie. That look you get when you're worrying about something, thinking there was something more you could have done or some different approach you could have used. You're not blaming yourself for not figuring things out faster, are you?"
"No, I'm not." He started speaking more hurriedly. Better to dispel this myth than let Dad know what he was really thinking about. "I mean, I suppose I could have figured out the pattern faster, but then if Don and Cooper had arrived earlier at the place where those gang members were killed, they might have run into McDowd there, and then…" He trailed off as he saw the expression on Alan's face. "You really don't want to hear about this, do you?"
Alan sighed. "It's that Agent Cooper. I didn't like him when I met him years ago, and I didn't like how Don acted around him, and around us."
It almost sounded like the old days, when Dad was complaining to Mom about some friend of Don's who he thought wasn't good for their son. "What do you mean?"
"Oh, you remember. When Don was doing that fugitive recovery stuff. We wouldn't hear from him for weeks, and all he could tell us was that it wasn't possible to make a phone call because it was too dangerous. That was reassuring, let me tell you."
"Actually, Dad, I don't remember." Charlie folded his arms across his chest and leaned back against the seat. "Up until a few days ago, I didn't even know Don ever was on a fugitive recovery team."
"You're kidding! Charlie, it was at least for a year, maybe longer. There was that Christmas he couldn't come home; it drove your mother and me nuts."
He shrugged. "I just thought he was too busy or something." That had been his second year back in the States, well into his Harvard postdoc after the three years getting his Ph.D. at Oxford. He'd slowly but surely slipped out of touch with Don ever since leaving for Princeton, never quite understanding his brother's decision to join the FBI. At least, not until recently, once he saw how good Don was at his job and just how much of a difference he was able to make in the world. But at the time, as a twenty-one-year-old math professor, he'd been more concerned with finding his place in the world than finding his place in his family. He supposed Don was the same, but the difference lay in their jobs. Parents understood the pressures of the school term better than the pressures of chasing escaped criminals across the country.
Alan was saying something about Cooper. "I never liked the man, though I suppose I never gave him a fair chance. I mean, Don told us Billy was the one who got him interested in fugitive chasing, and I figured it was his fault that Don disappeared for weeks at a time." He sighed. "I guess if I'm honest with myself, I have to say that I'm holding him responsible for whatever happened to Don today. I don't suppose it's fair, but here Don goes for years without a serious injury in the line of duty, and then Cooper comes along, and…"
"Dad, we don't know what happened," he reminded him. "Billy said he would call as soon as he knew the whole story."
"The only story I want to hear right now is that Don's being moved into a recovery room and we can go and see him." Alan's voice was brittle as he reached for the long-cold cup of coffee he'd brought upstairs an hour ago. "Anything else can wait."
Charlie laid a sympathetic hand on his father's shoulder.
"Mr. Eppes?"
They both turned at the sound of the nurse's voice. "Yes?" Alan said, and Charlie was glad, because his own throat had suddenly gone dry.
She came before them and said quietly, "Dr. Williams just called and said your son is out of surgery. He'll be by in a few minutes to tell you the details."
"How is he? How's Don?"
"Dr. Williams will have to tell you that," she said apologetically, turning away to go back to the desk.
A few nervous minutes passed, with Charlie trying not to look up at the swinging doors that led to the operating rooms more often than every five seconds. Alan alternated between taking sips of coffee and firmly setting the cup down on the end table, as if trying to forego the caffeine that would only increase his nervousness.
Finally the doors opened, and a tall, red-haired man walked out, dressed in surgical scrubs with a few streaks of blood. "Mr. Eppes?"
"Right here." Alan rose to his feet and stepped forward, Charlie right behind him. "How's Don?"
"Let's take a walk, okay?" The doctor gestured towards a room off the corridor, and Charlie's heart sank. This was where they told you the bad news so the other people in the waiting room didn't have to witness it. He clenched a fist and fought down a wave of panic, keeping himself from demanding a simple answer from Dr. Williams out of dread of what that answer might be.
But when they entered the small conference room and the doctor shut the door behind them, he gave them a weary smile. "Don is not completely out of the woods yet, but we think he's going to be fine."
Charlie closed his eyes in relief and dropped into a chair, the tension suddenly drained out of him.
Alan's voice was sharp as he asked, "What do you mean, you think?"
"We'll know for sure once he regains consciousness, but for now, the signs look good. The surgery went well, he's a healthy, strong man, and nothing vital was severely damaged. We did have to remove a piece of his liver, but that will regenerate itself, as you probably know. His right lung was punctured, but because of the quick response by the EMTs and the short trip to the ER, no lasting damage was done. All in all, your son is a very lucky man."
"When can we see him?" Charlie asked quietly.
"You can have a brief look at him once we're through here, but any longer visits will have to wait until he's in his own room and out of recovery."
Charlie looked over at his father and saw the same mixture of relief and worry that he was feeling. Don was okay. He knew that as soon as he had a chance to see his brother, he'd be calling Terry and Billy and everyone else with an update. Then he'd be sitting in a different set of hard plastic chairs waiting for the opportunity to sit with Don for a little longer. "He's going to be fine, Dad," he said with the conviction that he had been missing ever since the phone rang, hours ago. "He's going to be just fine."