A/N: Luckily, I did not have to deal with massive lines at airport security when I flew out on Saturday. Just goes to show that no one goes to Cleveland.
I realized as I was writing this that it supposedly takes place several months ago. Well, whatever. Suspension of disbelief. Learn it. Live it. Love it.
Reggie. Thanks, anmodo!
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Molly knew it was going to be one of those days as soon as she woke up. She had a knack for knowing things like that right off the bat. Danny had mentioned more than once that perhaps having that attitude so early in the day was what made it become "one of those days", but she maintained that he was crazy and had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
She woke up to the shrill shriek of her alarm. She rolled over to hit the snooze button – unencumbered due to the absence of Danny's weight on top of her – only to realize that Danny had once again moved the alarm to the other side of the bedroom. He did that on occasion, in order to make her get out of bed and stop hitting snooze. He said it was because she hit the snooze button for nearly an hour, and it drove him nuts. If you're going to do that, why not just set the alarm for an hour later? he would say. And she would look at him and shake her head sadly. You just don't get it, she would say.
Truth be told, she hit the snooze button so many times because she secretly wanted Danny to continue to think of new and creative ways to rouse her from "slumber". She lay in bed for quite some time after she was awake waiting for him to do something – anything. She'd been awarded those fabulous wake-up calls precious few times, but it was worth it every time. That man could do amazing things with his mouth.
Molly threw her pillow at her alarm, knocking it off the dresser. Unfortunately, it did nothing to silence the shriek. She was forced to climb out from under the warmth and sanctity of the covers and turn the damn thing off. She was just stumbling back to the bed when Danny appeared in the doorway.
"You weren't going back to bed, were you?" he asked, even though from the tone of his voice and the look in his eye, he already knew the answer.
"Of course not," Molly said, collapsing on top of the sheets and snuggling up to her pillow. "I'm meditating. It's a good way to start the day."
Danny strolled over to the bed and tapped her bare feet. "Come on. Get up."
"Go away." She kicked at him. "You're ruining my concentration."
He sighed, gripped her ankles, and gave a good yank, pulling her several inches down the bed, so that now her legs dangled off the edge from the knee down. She buried her face in her pillow. "You know, Martin never has trouble getting Sam to wake up."
Molly rolled her eyes, though Danny couldn't see, as her face was still buried in her pillow. "That's because Sam is super human," she said, her voice muffled, "and doesn't sleep."
He gave another tug, and her hips were suddenly precariously balanced on the edge of the mattress. At least she still had her pillow. "I made coffee."
She resisted the urge to kick him again, afraid that she might damage parts of his anatomy that she often expressed appreciation for. "Call me when you turn water into wine. That's something that's worth getting out of bed for."
"You're going to be late."
Molly snorted into her pillow. "Like I care." She most likely wouldn't be doing anything of importance at the office, anyway. Homeland Security was dealing with the latest terrorist threat – liquid explosives being smuggled onto planes via carry-on baggage. She had had very little to do for the past several days, ever since decoding an encrypted message about the deadly shampoo bottles. The DHS operatives had swooped down on that so fast that she was still dizzy. It made her wonder why she got paid so much, if people were going to do her job for her. Not that she was really complaining. But still, it made for boring days at the office. Jimmy was hardly fascinating company.
Danny lifted her leg. She sensed what he was about to do even before he did it, and she lifted her face from her pillow to glare at him. "You wouldn't dare."
He grinned, resting his fingertips on the sole of her foot. "Oh, I would."
She narrowed her eyes further, attempting to gauge the sincerity of his statement. It was too early in the morning to think, so she couldn't tell if he was bluffing. Apparently, she waited too long to act, because in the next instant, Danny was running his fingers along the bottom of her foot and she was struggling to pull her leg free of his grasp. She rolled onto her back – a Herculean effort given that he had a death grip on her foot – and attempted to slide backwards along the bed. But Danny held tight. Eventually, she was forced to cave. "All right! All right! I'm up!"
He dropped her leg. "You're a dead man, Agent Taylor," she said, and she pounced. In seconds, she had him pinned to the bed and was straddling his hips. "I'm disappointed. You didn't put up much of a fight."
Danny made a choking noise, his hands settling on the curve of her hips. "Like I would really fight back."
Molly grinned and dropped a slow, deliberate kiss on his lips. He responded with full fervor, his hands tightening their grip on her hips, the muscles in his stomach tensing with anticipation. She indulged him a few more moments – for her benefit as much as his – and then abruptly pulled away and slid off the bed.
She was almost to the door when Danny propped himself up on his elbows. "Are you kidding me?" he asked, his voice strained.
She smiled demurely and pumped as much innocence into her tone as possible, trying to pretend that she wasn't just as aroused as he was by their brief interlude. "I'm going to be late. And you made coffee."
His frustrated groan followed her out the door and into the kitchen.
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Numbers were everywhere. It was a mess. She was never going to make any sense of this the way she was going. She was going to have to start over. But that would take too much time; time that she didn't have.
"What are you doing?" Jimmy asked. He half-stood out of his chair to peer over her computer monitor, so that he could get a decent view of her desk, where she was doing yet another Sudoku puzzle. She'd gotten addicted to the logic problems with her abundance of free time at the office. "Seriously?"
"Keeps my mind sharp," she said, not really paying attention. She'd learned long ago to tune Jimmy out. The sound of his voice was like white noise. She really didn't hear it anymore. If she happened to look at him while she was talking, she imagined that he sounded like all the adults in the "Peanuts" cartoons. If she squinted and tilted her head to the side, he kind of looked like Franklin.
Jimmy rolled his eyes and sat down heavily. He was slightly superior to her – by half a level of government clearance. That, coupled with the fact that he was six years older and had a Ph.D. from MIT apparently gave him the excuse to act like her boss. But he wasn't her boss. He wasn't her supervisor. He wasn't even technically her partner. He was a colleague – just an annoying grunt with an extra month of experience and two unnecessary extra degrees. "So does, you know, work."
"Uh-huh." She scribbled a seven in the center block in the top left square. She followed the row with her pencil. That meant that the other seven had to go in the bottom left block of the center square. She wrote that in, too.
"Are you even listening to me?"
Molly chewed on the eraser of her pencil, a nasty nervous habit she had no doubt picked up from Danny. Where did the last seven go? "Uh-huh."
"No, you're not." He banged on his desk with his ruler. She jumped at the sudden noise.
"Sorry, what?" She glanced at him over the top of her book. "I wasn't listening."
Jimmy looked very much like he was going to give her a stern talking-to, but he didn't have the chance, as Dave wisely chose that moment to grace them with his presence. He walked right up to her desk, completely ignored the fact that she was doing puzzles instead of her job, and leaned forward so far that his nose just barely brushed against hers.
She blinked, but his face was still fuzzy; he was a little too close. "Dave," she said, pulling her head back just a hair, so that she could breathe, "we've talked about personal boundaries before. I don't know about you, but I'm not anxious to sit through another sexual harassment seminar."
Dave ignored her. "Your boyfriend works for missing persons, yeah?"
Molly cocked an eyebrow. She wasn't sure which was more surprising – the fact that Dave was showing an interest in her private life, or the fact that he had not only paid attention to but also remembered when she happened to mention her private life. She nodded, unsure of where this conversation could possibly be going, but positive she wouldn't like it. "Yeah."
Instead of explaining his random question, he dropped a file folder on top of her Sudoku book. Even Jimmy poked his head over his computer with interest. Molly cautiously picked up the folder and opened it. Inside were dozens of surveillance reports, personality profiles, and photographs of a middle-aged man named Alexander Dubai. According to the profile, he was Iranian, but he looked Slavic. Maybe it was the unibrow.
She briefly perused the contents of the folder and then raised her eyes to meet her boss's. "And?"
Dave made a noise of disbelief in the back of his throat, like he could not believe how stupid she was that she hadn't made the connection. "He's missing."
Molly bit the inside of her cheek to keep from saying something snarky, but she couldn't resist. "And?"
Dave snatched the folder from her hands so violently that Molly started. "Special Agent Dubai was infiltrating the terrorist ring responsible for attempting to smuggle liquid explosives through JFK."
"Oh." Of course. How could I not have made that connection?
"And now he's missing."
Molly furrowed her brow in confusion. "Yeah." She still didn't understand what, if anything, this had to do with her and Danny.
Dave groaned loudly, picked up her phone, and handed it to her. She looked at it as though she had never seen a phone before. "Call your boyfriend and tell him to start investigating Dubai's disappearance now."
She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "If I had that kind of pull with the FBI, believe me, they'd all be out looking for Hoffa."
Jimmy, who had since gone back to his work, looked up. "He's fish food by now. No one is ever going to find him."
Molly leaned back in her seat so that she could look at him around her computer. "Oh, no way. He's buried in Giants Stadium."
Jimmy shook his head sadly, as though he couldn't believe what idiots he had to work with. "They debunked that urban legend ages ago. Don't you watch 'Myth Busters'?"
She smiled sweetly. "No. I have a life."
Dave hooked one of his feet around the legs of her chair and pulled her along the floor until she was directly in front of him. There was a manic glint in his eyes that she had only ever seen once before, and she swallowed unconsciously. She knew it was going to be one of those days when she woke up that morning. She just knew it.
"Sheehan," Dave said through clenched teeth, and Molly gulped again, "I am talking about a fellow agent here. This ring is unscrupulous. They have a tendency to dispose of people who displease them by tossing them off the George Washington Bridge."
Molly stared. Four suicides in the past three weeks, all of them pulled out of the Hudson, downstream from the GW. Danny's team had investigated all four disappearances, and each time it was determined to be suicide – but that many people jumping off a bridge was unusual, even for New York. Most jumpers chose buildings and crowded sidewalks. She knew Danny and the others suspected that there was more to these cases than what was on the surface, but there had been no reason to believe that these four deaths were anything more than tragic suicides.
Well, Dave had made her a believer.
Molly stood up and yanked the file from Dave's hands. She pulled her coat off the hook by the door and haphazardly put it on, somehow managing to put her arms through the wrong sleeves, so that the back of the coat was in front and the zipper was in the back. She looked down, but chose to leave it.
"I'm taking lunch," she said, scampering down the hall to the elevators.
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No one stopped her as she wound her way through the FBI office. She was almost a regular fixture there. Sometimes, on her lunch break, she dropped by to bring the missing persons unit coffee – good coffee, not the sludge they made in the break room. If the team was working late on a particular trying case, she showed up with pizza from her favorite pizzeria. She knew most of the staff by name, including the janitors, even though Stefan referred to her as "Little Red Head Girl". She was the godmother to Martin and Sam's unborn baby and, unless Sam changed her mind in the next three-and-a-half weeks, would be maid of honor at their wedding. Vivian treated her like an adoptive daughter. Even Jack had stopped calling her "Miss Sheehan" months ago.
So it was nothing new to see Molly hurrying her way up to Danny's floor – though it was unusual to see her carrying nothing but a file folder.
When she walked into the office, she noticed that there was a new picture on the dry erase board – one of the pictures in the file folder she was now carrying. Well, at least I don't have to worry about wasting any of the favors Danny owes me on something for Dave.
Martin, Jack, and Vivian were nowhere to be found. Sam, looking slightly green and nursing what looked to be a mug of tea, was slumped over her desk, a blanket wrapped tightly around her legs. She obviously wasn't moving any time soon. Danny was at one of the tables, obviously following a paper trail. He was surrounded by stacks of bank statements, phone records, and credit card receipts. Molly plopped herself in one of the chairs beside him.
He looked up when she sat down, question appearing in his eyes before it formed on his lips.
"Hey," she said, leaning forward and placing a chaste kiss on his lips, "I need to ask you something."
"Okay," he said, obviously confused. "Shoot."
She opened her mouth to ask, but stopped before the words could come out. She bit her lip. She wasn't quite sure how to phrase this. She laughed, embarrassed that she couldn't figure out how to talk to him, of all people. "I don't really know how to say this," she said, trailing off as she attempted to find the words.
Danny shook his head. "Unbelievable," he said, and something in his tone made her frown. "Are we really going to have this discussion here?"
Molly just stared at him. "What?"
He dropped his head into his hands. "I knew it. I knew, with Marty and Sam's wedding coming up, that you'd want to talk about it."
Molly's eyes widened slightly. Oh, shit. "No," she said. "That's not – "
"Look, Molly," Danny said, "you know I love you, but I thought we agreed that neither of us is ready to get married."
Molly sighed. Yes, they had agreed on that. Five months ago. But now was not the time to bring it up, and she couldn't believe that he would think she would come all the way over here in the middle of a work day to talk about this, when she could just corner him at home like she always did.
Danny laid a gentle hand on her arm, his voice soothing, if slightly condescending. "Okay?"
She narrowed her eyes at him. "I was going to ask," she said, grinding her teeth, "if you had any reason to suspect a connection between your last four cases."
To his credit, he looked embarrassed. "Oh." He was silent for a moment, obviously thinking, and then he shook his head. "Other than manner of death, no. Why?"
Molly dropped the folder on the table in front of him. Danny opened it and came face to face with the very picture pinned up on the dry erase board. He looked at her. "Molly, where did you get this?"
"That's CIA Special Agent Alexander Dubai," Molly said. "He was working undercover, trying to sniff out the men responsible for the latest attempt to bring down US airplanes." Danny's face paled significantly. "Apparently, the group he was infiltrating disposes of people who pose problems by staging their deaths to look like suicides."
Danny ran a hand through his hair. "How?" he asked, though it was evident from his tone that he already knew what the answer was going to be.
"They throw them into the Hudson."
"Fuck," Danny said, reaching automatically for his phone. "I have to call Jack." He dialed Jack's number and raised his eyes to meet hers. "And you have to go back to work."
She nodded, chewing on her bottom lip. "I'll see you tonight?"
Danny nodded. She leaned forward to kiss him goodbye, but he turned away from her at the last second. "Jack? It's Danny. You are not going to believe what I just found out."
Molly sighed and rose from her chair. She'd just known it was going to be one of those days.
