Chapter 11 - Natalie's Involvement
Natalie had bugged the van so that she was able to keep up with how the investigation was going, she was now aware the Will had found out about her input into the files, so it was only a matter of time before word was out to Declan and the triad who would be asking questions about her. This now meant that she had to create some sort of back story as to her relationship with Helen, and put together a disguise so they didn't know what she truely looked like. She was somehow able to find a wig that would transform her normal long dark hair to a short blonde hairstyle, she also used the help of some makeup to cover the resemblance with her mothers face to also deter any suspicion.
….
Will had returned to the storage facility to find Kate sitting on stairs and Helen still pacing.
"How did it go?" Kate asked Will.
"Good. Henry thinks he's found something, so…" Will went on to explain leaving out the part about Natalie he had to try and keep her involvement secret for as long as possible. That when all of a sudden Declan and his men rush in the door with weapons drawn.
"Magnus!" Yells Declan, Kate pulls out her gun ready to shoot if needed.
"Put it down, Miss Freelander. Right now!" Declan tells her.
"You brought them here? Helen asks Will, who was surprised to see them.
"No. No, it wasn't me." He pleaded he was sure he was careful as to not be followed but obviously he was wrong.
"Actually, it was." Declan explained.
"What the hell is this?" Will was getting angry again.
"I could very well ask you the same question. Dr. Magnus, you are hereby remanded into custody. You'll come quietly, please." Declan said .
"No. No! No!" Helen screamed as Declan's men try to grab her arms but she pulls away and runs stumbling into boarded enclosure. The men grab her again,
"No! Get your hands off me! Let go of me!" Helen still screaming,
"Hey, take it easy!" Will yells at them.
"She's becoming more dangerous. It's time to take extreme measures. Confine her in the SHU; maximum security." Declan tells his men.
"Will! Ow! Will!" Helen pleads to Will.
Will, Declan and the telepaths are now all gathered in Magnus's office.
"You made a very big mistake, mate. We're not the enemy. What do you know about Big Bertha?" Declan asks, Will turns to look at Declan but doesn't answer him.
"Your silence won't help you, Dr. Zimmerman. You can't control your thoughts." Scofield one of the empaths tells him.
"Who is Natalie?" He adds, Will had not been able to try and hide his suspicions about Natalie's involvement as his thoughts were all over the place after the arrest of Magnus.
"Stop it, Scofield. You know as well as I do he knows nothing. Will, I can assure you there is no conspiracy here. But we do need to know who Natalie is." Emma jumps in.
"How do you know? You said yourself you can't read each other's thoughts, so-" Will says while trying to avoid talking about Natalie.
"We can read his, Dr. Zimmerman." Scofield interrupts.
"And yours; harbouring a fugitive is a serious crime under the Sanctuary Charter, Doctor." The third telepath says.
"So you want to lock me up, too? Go ahead." Will leaves the library and Emma follows him out.
While out in the hallway talking to Emma the front doorbell rings and Declan goes to answer it. When he gets to the door and opens it he is taken aback by the strange women who is in front of him,
"Hi, I'm Natalie Michaels and I believe you have some question for me?" She asks Declan who is still at a lost for words, with him not answering her question she takes it upon herself to enter the Sanctuary, she then makes her way up to her mothers office hoping to find Will there.
"Hey!, Wait who said you could come in here?" Declan tries to ask her but she is already to far away so he hurries to catch up with her, he again tries to ask what she is doing but she ignores him and keeps walking. Just as she's about to arrive at her mother's office which Declan has no idea as to how she knows her way around so easily, she finds Will and Emma out in the hallway and asks them to rejoin them in the office. Both Will and Emma are shocked at this new arrival more so Will as it take him a second to realise who it was as to she looked totally different from the last time he saw her, luckily for him the with the shock of her being there none of the telepaths where trying to read his mind. So just before they head back into the office Natalie quickly goes to give Will a hug, she uses this to secretly implant one of her devices she had been working on behind his ear where it couldn't be seen, that way the telepaths could no longer read his thoughts. She couldn't afford Will giving too much away while trying to work out what she was doing,
"Ow, What was that?" He asked quietly while trying to feel what she had just done.
"Just a little something to keep the truth hidden, trust me?" She whispers to him as they enter so the others don't hear her.
"So you say you are this Natalie, the one who Will thinks has something to do with what going on?" Declan asks.
"Yes that would be me." She tells them, she looks around the room to see that all three of the telepaths are confused. She can see that her device must be working as they look to be struggling to read her thoughts, this is confirmed when Scofield asks,
"How are you doing that? Are you an telepath as well is that why your thoughts are somehow shielded, Wills now included?"
"No I am not an telepath, but I have my own ways of blocking your abilities. I do believe that it is not fair that you can see our thought but we can't see yours, How do we know that you aren't hiding something?" Natalie tells them,
"So that explains you, but what about him? Why hide his thoughts" Scofield asks her while pointing to Will.
"Oh another easy one, simply is as he knows somethings that can't be told which have nothing to do with the current events. I needed to protect that information." She explains, which makes Declan question what could possibly going on even more.
"Do you have anymore questions or would you like me to explain how I am involved?" Natalie asks the room with nods all around she begins to explain. She tells them of how she knows of the Sanctuary and that is because Helen had saved her as a newborn and has raised her till she was 6, how she had been working with the Sanctuary since she was 14 behind the scenes helping out with the systems. Thats when Helen called her a few years back asking for help to hid away some files, files in which she had no idea what was in them as Helen has asked her not to read them just to hide them, so that is what she did. As to how Will had found out about her involvement was that they had met a few months ago on a different case as that how he knew it was her who had hidden the files. After finishing her explanation Will could sense that there was something more to what Natalie had said, but he knew he had to get her alone before asking her about it.
Now that she had explained herself to Declan and the others she asked if both Will and her were free from to go as they wanted to get back to finding out the truth, Declan agreed but told them to be careful as he wasn't against arresting them if they got in the way again. Just then Henry called to say that he had managed to crack the encryption and that they should come and look. So they all headed to Henry's array, on the way Natalie pulled Will aside to tell him that they needed to get one of her devices onto Henry as quick as possible, once her saw her there he would reveal her truth through his thoughts, Will told her that he would be able to do it before she would enter the room, he just needed her to tell him where it needed to go. They continued to walk as Natalie told him that it had to be place in a certain spot behind the ear, Will nodded his head and sped up so that he could get to Henry just before the others and secretly place the device without Declan or the telepaths seeing. Once everyone had arrived and Henry had said a quick hello to Natalie and again the telepaths were taken aback as to how they could no longer read Henry's thoughts as well, they all were gather around looking at the computer.
"I thought you said you had it." Declan asked him.
"Yeah, I did, I just...It's a lot different with you guys standing over me like this. There. There's your Big Bertha file." Henry said then told Natalie, "You hid it very well, I almost could figure out your code." This made Natalie smile she added,
"I deliberately didn't make it impossible, I was told to make it difficult but not impossible."
"Oh, my God. She's alive." Emma remarked, this broke the conversation that Henry and Natalie were having.
"Not only that, Magnus is moving her." Declan added.
"Where?" Will asked.
"It just says she's in a container on the Arabian Sea. Look at the latest AIS data." Responded Declan.
"What is she thinking?" The third telepath asked.
"We need to mobilise the nearest Sanctuary retrieval team immediately. If Big Bertha falls into the wrong hands, it'll be disastrous." Scofield says, Declan tells them he'll organise the arrangements.
"Still think she's innocent?" Scofield asks Will, while also implying that Natalie knew more than she was telling them. They then all leave to get their tasks sorted, Natalie stays to catch up with Henry while Will heads down to check on Helen.
While down with Helen, Will witnesses her start to convulse and calls for help. Help arrives and Magnus is transferred to the infirmary,
"We put her in a drug-induced coma to stop the seizures. I'm afraid her condition is accelerating. It doesn't look good. I'm sorry." Declan explains, looking at Will, Kate and Henry while Natalie was finishing getting Helen sorted. Declan then walks around bed to stand before them and tells them,
"Now, there's more bad news. We just got word from our retrieval team. The ship we were tracking was attacked by mercenaries. By the time we boarded it, the cargo had been stolen. Big Bertha's gone." This shocks them all, and further make Will believe that Magnus was set up, he decide to head up to the crypt where the Bug guy is buried to try and sort out his thoughts. While there he notices that the flowers have been knocked of so he opens the crypt and finds that Biggie isn't in there anymore, that's when the pieces start to fall in line for him. He quickly goes to find the members of his team, he finds Henry still in the infirmary sitting next to an unconscious Helen.
"Where's the triad?" Will asks Henry.
"They left hours ago, why?" Henry responds confused at Wills question.
"All right, we've got to run a scan on Magnus' brain right now. Big guy's not dead." Will tells Henry who is surprised as he was the one that checked the Big Guy and confirmed he was dead. They move Helen to the scanner to get accurate results of her brain as Will suspected the one in her file where fake.
The team is looking at the new brain scans, Natalie joins them to see what they are working on,
"This can't be right. Where's the deterioration?" Henry asks.
"It never existed. Those other brain scans weren't real." Will says while looking over at Natalie knowing that she had something to do with these, she just looked back at him and shrugged her she wasn't allowed to tell them what was going, she wasn't meant to be here so they needed to work this out for themselves.
"Then why did she flake out?" Kate asks, seeing this interaction but not reading to much into it as she didn't even know who this woman was.
"I don't know, but I'm guessing she did it on purpose to conceal her thoughts from the triad."He again looked to Natalie for answers but again she gave nothing away so he continued,
"Okay, so you're Magnus, and you want to create these symptoms what do you do?"
"I don't follow you." Henry says confused.
"Is there a type of abnormal that would cause her to act this way?" Will asks them, neither of them knowing. Kate takes another looks at scan more closely, while Will agains stares at Natalie trying to get her to tell them what's going on. Kate interrupts,
"Ozone beetle."
"What, are you crazy?" Henry says not believing his boss would go to those lengths.
"Right there on the scan, the dark spot." Kate points out to where she is referring.
"What's an ozone beetle?" Asks Will as he has never heard of this abnormal before.
"It's a bug that crawls into your brain and nests in your hippocampus, but they're…" Henry starts to explain before Kate jumps in,
"Red-listed."
"The dealer she met last week. What does it do?" Will asks remembering the intel Kate had gotten.
"It secretes this fluid that gives you this wicked high, but if you leave it in there too long…" Kate began with Henry joining,
"It causes memory loss, paranoia, increased sensitivity to light."
"Which is why she hid in the basement." Kate said as the pieces began to fit.
"Okay, we've got to get it out of her." Will told them.
"All right, I'll go get a room ready." Henry said while looking to Natalie with a look telling her it had to be her to remove the beetle. Natalie just nodded her head while following Henry leaving Will and Kate to finish working out the rest of the plan.
"Why would she do this?" Kate asked
"Do you still have that email that she sent you last week?" Will asked, knowing that it must have something to do with what going on.
"Yeah, I think so." Says Kate as she moves to the computer to bring up the email,
"There." She says as it loads on the screen. Will looks at it carefully when he spots it,
"Right there; she spelled "retrieve" wrong."
"So?" Kate questions.
"So, Magnus is a spelling Nazi. She'd never do that." Explains Will.
"Five minutes ago I would have thought she'd never put a bug in her head, either." Kate tries to explain that over the last few days nothing about Magnus seems normal. But after Will clicks on the spelling error a map appears on the screen showing tracking. This shocks both of them with Kate saying,
"Whoa...What the hell is that?"
"Africa… I think we just found Big Bertha." Will says, seeming happy as he believes he has figured out what going on. He immediately heads to go find Declan to tell him what he has uncovered.
The next day Will, Kate and Declan along with a small team have arrived at East Africa Port the location as to where the tracking device was telling them. The stay hidden while a cargo container is being lowered to the dock, Emma is walking with some men.
"We took the ship yesterday. They gave up the cargo with no resistance." One of the men inform her.
"Good. We'll need to move it again to our more secure location before the Sanctuary picks up the trail." Emma says, the man tells her that he has a truck standing by, he calls on his radio for the container to be opened, as this happens Emma says,
"Some things are simply too powerful to be left in the wrong hands." The container opens but only a small device is found inside, the man goes up to investigate and picks it up.
"It's a tracking device." He tells her as he returns to show her the device. Suddenly Declan and the team appear,
"Freeze! Hold it! Don't move!" Declan yells. Will walks over to Emma.
"Can you read my mind now?" He asks her.
"Big Bertha's dead." She says after reading his mind.
"I'm sorry we ended up on opposite sides of this." He says referencing what she had said to him the previous day before she left.
Now back at the Sanctuary, with Declan back in London. Everyone apart from Henry are down in the infirmary speaking with Helen who is awake and back to her normal self.
"Okay, so let me get this straight. You knew Emma was bad news from day one?" Will asks Helen.
"Day one might be pushing it, but over the past few years, I'd noticed a series of information leaks that couldn't be traced back to the Cabal." She explains.
"So you came up with this insane plan to dangle Big Bertha in front of her. Drop an ozone beetle to take yourself out of the picture. Kill the big guy, which I'm still not entirely sure about, by the way." Will starts rambling the course of events which has happened and Kate jumps in saying
"And not tell any of us, so that we couldn't blow your cover."
"Quite simple really." Helen says while smiling at her plan.
"Oh, yeah." Kate says
"Yeah, yeah, it's totally simple." Will says in a way that says that it wasn't really simple at all.
"Okay, so spill. What is the gag on the big guy?" Kate had to ask.
"The subcutaneous facial layer of his species is four times thicker than that of humans." Helen explains with Will interrupting,
"The bullets didn't penetrate." He says.
"But Henry examined him. I mean, he was dead." Said Kate.
"In a manner of speaking; I tipped the bullets with the secretion of a Chilean Shepherd Frog. It slowed his heart enough to feign death." Magnus told them.
"Oh, my God, oh, my God, you're crazy. You're certifiably crazy. I should have let them take you away." Wills says still not believing she would go to these lengths just to uncover a mole in the network.
"Nonsense, I knew you'd figure it out. Besides, I'd left careful instructions to call the whole thing off in two days' time if things went badly." Helen said while looking at her daughter, who she was still shocked at how different she looked, she knew that this was as to hide who she really was as to not cause more questions. Will sees this and asks,
"So you did know all along what was happening?" Natalie just laughed.
"Of course I did, Will. Someone had to be able to have her back without giving anything away."
"But if you had this device that was able to block the telepaths ability why didn't you have Magnus use it instead of risking using the beetle?" He asked her, Helen hadn't known of this device so she questioned.
"What device? Natalie?"
"Um, yeah sorry about that but I wasn't sure if it was going to work, plus I didn't think we should risk them finding it while you where out." She said sheepishly to her mother. Helen understood that her daughter was only looking out for her and make sure her plan worked,
"But how did Will find out about it." She asked.
"Well, This one here caught on to my involvement…" She said while pointing to Will, "So I had to use the device to be able to come into the Sanctuary to get things back on the right track." She looked to see if her mother was understanding which Helen nodded that she was, Kate on the other hand was confused as to what was going on. She know knew her name and why she was there, but apart from that she had no clue. Natalie continued her story,
"I knew it was a risk, with not having tested it before but I knew it was a risk that had to be taken so that no-one found out any other information." She said while looking at Will.
"Luckily she did, as I had no hope of trying to keep my thoughts hidden. I was so worried about you I couldn't even think straight." Will added.
"Wait so how do you all know each other?" Questions Kate, as she hadn't been told of how Natalie was related.
"That's a long story, let's just say I've known Helen since I was little, and when I was old enough to start helping out here I did. I help out whenever Helen needs me to" Natalie explained hoping that this would be enough fo now.
"So, the big guy." Will interrupted trying to help steer the conversation away from the truth.
"Huh…" Kate said confused.
"Shouldn't he be back by now?" He asked Helen and Natalie, they both nodded their heads.
…