later than i wanted and without a moodboard/edit thing to put up on tumblr yet, but it's here! boy howdy it's here.
thanks again as always, and enjoy!
There are very few things that Jack enjoys more in life than watching a person do something they're really, unbelievably good at. It's hard to describe, the way their faces change, their eyes come alive and they seem like for a moment they've lost that ever-present fear everyone carries that someone, somewhere is watching what they're doing and finding them dissatisfactory. It's one of his favorite things about working with Mac. For someone who is so anxious so much of the time, constantly hyper-aware that he is in fact probably being evaluated, it's like none of it matters any more when he's faced with a problem and has the answer in his hands. It's incredible.
Jack has never seen Riley work before. It's deeply impressive and a little frightening, the speed with which her brain processes the information in front of her and directs her hands to carry out the solution she's identified for whatever problem she's discovered. There's a small notebook Mac had produced from somewhere, open next to the keyboard, and Riley scribbles something in it every so often, using it to sort out some complicated piece of what is the electronic equivalent of tangled yarn. For all she seemed to be absolutely furious when she'd seen him, whatever she was feeling about Jack has been shoved quickly to the back-burner. She hasn't looked back at him once.
Mac hadn't either. The entire time Riley worked, demonstrating before Jack's eyes the expertise he'd logically known she had but never quite grasped the extent of, Mac was riveted. The two of them are sat at the desk together, Riley on Rasmussen's ratty old swivel chair, Mac on a stepladder he'd pulled over from somewhere else in the building. Mac's elbows are propped on the edge of the surface, knocking an empty 5 Hour Energy bottle onto the floor in the process, and he's looking from the screen, to Riley, down to her notes on the paper beside her, back to the screen. He's asking questions, too, smart questions that Jack wouldn't have known to ask, and Jack is struck for a moment with the thought that putting the two of them in the same room was either going to be the best or the worst idea he's ever had. They could build a kingdom or tear one down when they put their heads together, he's sure of it.
Seeing Riley work, and Mac sitting with her watching what she was doing, Jack almost forgets that someone else is there with him. Matty clears her throat after a while. It doesn't distract Mac or Riley at all, but it gets Jack's attention immediately. He looks to the side and sees her jerk her head at the front door in one quick nod. For a moment, he hesitates, not wanting to let either of them out of his sight - Riley because it's been so long he still can't hardly believe she's actually here and he's actually seeing her again, and Mac because in his experience thus far bad things tended to happen to the kid the second Jack takes his eyes off him, ever. The look on Matty's face is serious enough though, that he does so without too long a pause.
Jack shuts the door behind him softly so as not to disturb Mac and Riley, and turns to look at Matty. However hot it is inside the building, it's worse outside without the roof to shield them from the sun, though there's a light breeze that's kind of nice. At least the air isn't dead-still and smelling vaguely of evaporated energy drinks and stale Twix bars. Matty is standing by the side of the door, and he's immediately overcome once again with appreciation for the fact that she's here at all right now. That she'd gotten Riley here. That couldn't have been simple.
"Thank you," he says again, more seriously than he'd said it inside, where it had been an offhand mutter. Something about the way he says it must convey to her that he actually means this, as more than just a polite formality between coworkers and friends who were just, as she'd said, doing their jobs, because she doesn't dismiss it.
"What for?" she asks, and he shrugs.
"For whatever you said to her that made her forget hating me enough to show up here."
Matty shrugs, looking out over the horizon of buildings, the ocean in the distance. "She's a good person. Didn't need that much convincing, once she understood what was going on." There's a brief pause, and then she looks at him. Something in the air between them feels different in the moments separating those words and the ones that come next. "Listen, Jack, something weird happened back in Los Angeles."
"What kind of weird?" Jack asks, guard instantly raised.
He glances back out of habit, looking through the window into the haphazard hideout. There had been newspaper taped over it when they got there, but they'd pulled it down to allow some natural light in, and he can see now to the desk, where Mac and Riley are still sitting together. Riley is still working, fingers flying over the keyboard, and Mac is still watching her. His own hands are moving on the desk now, and Jack is worried for a second that maybe they'd found some kind of actual bomb as well as a cyber-bomb or whatever. After squinting hard, though, he identifies that what Mac is doing isn't anything to do with any kind of threat. He's just twisting discarded foil wrappers into some kind of abstract shapes, and Jack's shoulders relax a fraction.
It had been pure instinct, hearing 'something weird happened' with that serious voice, and needing to immediately put eyes on his partner, verify he's still in one piece. Now that he's sure the kid's okay, Jack feels a little silly, but he can't bring himself to regret it. Mac is okay, and he can breathe a fraction easier. Until Matty tells him what's gone wrong this time, at least.
"The kind of weird," Matty says, in a remarkably calm and reasonable tone given their present circumstances, "where the Director of DXS didn't know the on-call analyst had been dispatched to Moscow before he sent his top team out on a very sensitive, technologically focused mission to Brazil. That's what kind of weird."
"I…" Jack blinks hard, shaking his head. "What? Sorry, he didn't know what?"
"Amos Bright," Matty explains, "the on-call analyst you were supposed to be able to call, he was dispatched by the head of IT on an assignment to Moscow. With the other two analysts who could've handled this assignment already on jobs, I believe they're in Helsinki and Abidjan at the moment, he was on-site at DXS to be the on-call senior analyst in case a dispatched team needed help. Well, a dispatched team needed help. In Russia."
"And the Director just… Didn't know?" It's very hard for Jack to wrap his brain around what's going on right now, how the Director of their agency could possibly not know where an asset that important was when there was an operation of this importance happening with this heavy a computer aspect. They were dealing with a cyberterrorist. And James hadn't known they didn't have a computer analyst available. It's incomprehensible to Jack.
"He said that he didn't know because it wasn't his job to know." The look on Matty's face makes it pretty clear how she feels about that concept, and Jack has to agree. He can't hardly believe what he's hearing. "He told me the head of IT was in charge of dispatching IT assets, and the man must have just… Not told him about sending Bright to Moscow, leaving us without a single on-call senior analyst."
Jack shakes his head. He wants to say something, but no words are coming to mind, just an empty, shapeless disbelief that this could possibly be happening. That the Director could really be that careless.
"There's a serious problem with departments not talking to each other happening in DXS, I think," Matty says, saving him the trouble of having to figure it out. "It's not the first time I've seen or heard of this kind of thing, and nobody seems to understand exactly why this can't be happening. Why the Director of this agency can't be unaware of things like all senior analysts being off-site and unreachable, why he can't have his assistant communicating orders to the head of exfil and not reporting back about the fulfillment of them."
At the way Jack's eyebrows shoot up his forehead, Matty nods and smiles grimly.
"Yes, that's happened. There's communication breakdowns around every corner and I think it's because of what I asked you to help me investigate. The problem in DXS that's causing all of these issues on missions."
"Right, the mole the Director maybe didn't get the first time around," Jack says. At least that he understands and remembers. Something about the way her face changes when he says it, though, leaves him feeling somehow even less reassured than he'd already been throughout this conversation.
"The more I look into things," she tells him grimly, but straight to the point, "the more I think we were wrong before. I don't think the Director failed to see the problem. I think the Director is the problem."
Jack wishes that, when he heard this, he felt surprised. He wishes he could say that when he heard Matty essentially accuse the Director of DXS, his partner's father, of endangering missions and personnel through his behavior, he was shocked, incredulous, immediately dismissive of the possibility. But he isn't. Instead, all Jack feels is a sinking in his gut, like some terrible suspicion he's harbored for a long time has been anticlimactically and horribly confirmed. Matty thinks James is the problem. And in all the years he's known her, Jack has not seen Matty be wrong very often, especially not about a problem of this magnitude.
"Okay," he says. "Okay. What do we do now?"
"Proceed with the investigation as we were conducting it before."
It's a relief she actually has an answer, and Jack is reminded of why people like Matty are in charge and people like him are in the field. If he had to be the one troubleshooting this mess, picking apart the rubble of the organization he'd been dropped into to find what was salvageable and what was ash, Jack is sure he'd walk off the job before getting anywhere near this far.
"There's nothing much we can do yet," Matty continues, "not until we know the nature of what's going on with the Director. If it's life-threatening carelessness or if he's got some kind of agenda he's working towards, making the calls he does. No matter what, this all just got a lot more complicated and a lot more dangerous for both of us - our jobs at least, if not more than that. Do you still want to be involved? I won't hold it against you if you bow out now."
He respects her for the offer, made in good and genuine faith. If Jack were to take her up on it, recuse himself from assisting her investigation into the conduct of their boss - an endeavor that could very well end both of their careers if not worse - then no hard feelings would exist between them. Matty knows that Jack wouldn't breathe a word of her secret mission, just as Jack knows that Matty wouldn't think less of him or treat him any differently. And it's tempting, Jack can't deny that. He thinks of it seriously for a moment, of getting out now and not making his already complicated and hazardous life just that much more so. But something stops him.
Inside Rasmussen's badly constructed little shack house, Mac is talking to Riley. He's got an elbow propped against the surface of the crowded desk and he's gesturing with his other hand, which holds one of the twisted and folded foil candy wrappers. It's hard to see through the window, having been cleaned but obviously not recently, but Jack thinks it might be a fish of some kind, the little design Mac's made out of the garbage from Rasmussen's work station. He's riveted to what's happening on the screen, the magic Riley is working over their digital time-bomb, and his movement is animated. Gone is the anxiety of before, thrumming through his entire body, practically radiating off him in waves. Anxiety over not being able to complete a task he'd known from the start he wouldn't be able to complete because his superior, who happened to be his father, hadn't taken his concerns seriously. Anxiety over having yelled at the man when the ignoring of those concerns had landed them in the situation they were in that required springing their help from federal supermax.
If Jack walks away from this investigation now that Matty has identified a target, and it's Director MacGyver, then he has to walk away from DXS too. There's no way he could stay. He'd leave, and they'd find Mac a new partner, and he'd be the latest in a revolving door of partners, gone as soon as he'd arrived. And that's a thought that Jack admits, standing here on this dusty road alone outside with Matty, he can't stomach contemplating. He's made a lot of poor choices in his life and this isn't going to be one of them.
In for a penny, in for a pound, in for potentially taking his career by not only conducting an investigation under his boss's boss's nose, but an investigation into the man himself. In for maybe landing himself in prison if he's really unlucky.
"I'm seeing this through," Jack tells Matty, tearing his eyes off the window and looking back to her. "No matter how it ends. Especially if it means his dad, malicious or not, on purpose or not, is going to end up getting him hurt."
Especially if the man already has.
Matty nods, and she doesn't say this is why she picked him to begin with, doesn't admit she'd been counting on his stubborn, dig your heels in, hell or high water, do this the right way or die trying nature from the start. Jack gets the feeling she's thinking it, though, and he respects the thought process behind it, the four-dimensional chess she's always been playing while the rest of them were locked in slow-moving bouts of checkers. If it were him, he'd have called her, same as she'd called him, and he's only slightly bothered at having been used like that. When one has assets, one uses them, that's just life. He's frankly honored, in a way, that she chose him.
"There's one more thing," Matty says before Jack can fully turn around and go back inside, a new level of duplicity making his life that much more winding a maze of what he can and can't say and who he can or can't say it to.
"What?" If Jack's voice comes out so cautious he doesn't sound like he wants the answer at all, well, it's probably because at this point he mostly doesn't. One major horrible breakthrough per day, thank you.
"Riley."
Every muscle in Jack's body tenses and his jaw grits so hard he's worried he might break a tooth.
"What about Riley," he grinds out, trying to sound normal and failing miserably.
"What do you say about the idea that we keep her on at DXS?"
Someday, Jack is going to stop trying to predict what's going to come out of Matty's mouth next, or at the very least stop being surprised when she says something fully out of left field.
"Keep her on at DXS," Jack repeats, not because he didn't understand it, but because he did and he can't possibly have heard her right.
"Yes." Except evidently he did, because Matty's response is immediate and dead serious. "Keep her on. She's incredible, look at her, we could use a mind like that. We're so desperately short-staffed right now, and your team specifically needs a dedicated technical analyst with the kind of jobs the Director is starting to send you on now that you're off your training wheels. But I wanted to run it past you first, given your… History. So, what do you think? Can you work with her? More to the point, do you think she can get over how she feels about you enough to work with you?"
"Yes to the first, I'm cautiously optimistic on the second." Jack actually means it, too. She's managed to get past it enough to help them out enough so far, though things might be different if this were a permanent position rather than a one-time field trip with an unfortunate chaperone. "The real problem I'm seeing with that idea is the Director. He didn't sound exactly excited on the phone, and that was before you hung up to talk him down."
"Why don't you let me handle the Director," Matty says in the tone of a person who's well-versed in the art of managing difficult superiors. She's going to run her own agency, one day, and Jack hopes he's around to see it.
In the end, it takes Riley exactly seventy-one minutes from the moment she sits down in the chair to untangle and diffuse the mess of coding left behind in what Jack had taken to referring to, at least in his own head, as Rasmussen's cyber-bomb. She sits back at the desk, looking exhilarated and proud and like she's just had the time of her life. When she looks back at Jack and Matty, she doesn't even glare daggers at Jack telling her she's done a great job. She gives the briefest flash of a smile, before turning back to the computer and hitting a few more keys. The screen flickers and goes dark before pulling up a wall of scrolling green text.
"Do you have a hard drive?"
Jack blinks at the question, not having processed it by the time Mac is already nodding, leaning to the side to dig around in his messenger bag.
"Why do you have a hard drive?" Jack asks, when he pulls it out and hands it to her. He glances over his shoulder and shrugs.
"Picked it up from IT on the way out. You never know."
"Actually," Riley puts in, plugging the thing into the side of the monitor, "you always know, and the answer is always 'yes, we're going to inevitably need an external hard drive, that is if we want any evidence of our big bad cyberterrorist's plans, current or future, so we know if he's got any nasty surprises out there somewhere'. So, if you don't mind, give me like, fifteen more minutes and we're gonna be good to go."
She takes her fifteen minutes with no protest from anyone else in the room. Matty uses the time to contact exfil, and give their retrieval team - Sierra November again, the same one that had come to get them from Siberia the day Matty first brought Jack into the investigation into conduct at DXS - a heads up that they would be transporting two more people than they'd planned on. Riley tucks the hard drive safely away in her bag, and then they're off, back into the car Matty and Riley had been brought in.
Matty sits up front with the taciturn officer from the Policia Federal while Jack, Mac, and Riley sit crammed awkwardly together in the back seat. Mac had wordlessly opted to sit between them, and Jack can feel his rigid discomfort from where their arms press together. The anxiety that had left him while watching Riley work seems to have returned, and Jack doesn't know if it's because he's crammed between two people, one he's hardly met and one he's hardly began to trust, or because his mind has drifted back to his post-mission review. Regardless of what it's about, Jack wishes he could do something to calm the kid's nerves, ease some of the tension causing slight tremors in his body, so minute Jack never would've noticed if he hadn't been paying attention. He's too restricted in his own movement, though, never mind being able to say anything with four other people within immediate earshot. So he does nothing at all, and hates the feeling for the entire drive.
Sierra November is waiting for them at the retrieval point, and it's the smiling face of Meredith Casey, the exfil agent who spoke Russian that was the reason they were dispatched for Siberia, that greets them.
"Hey there, guys," she says, as bright and chipper as Jack remembers her being last time. "Got transport here with your names on it, MacGyver and Dalton plus two. Y'all ready to head home?"
"Am I ever," Jack says, and can't help but glance over his shoulder at Riley when he says it. There's a funny look on her face, and he can't quite tell, years separating now from a time when he could read her like an open book, if it's because of the overall situation or the question itself.
Regardless, she says nothing and climbs up into the vehicle just like the rest of them do. Jack watches as she's drawn into animated small-talk with Mac, and the two of them keep up a near-constant chatter the entire trip back to Los Angeles. He gives Matty a raised-eyebrow look at one point, and sends her a surreptitious text message over the airplane's on-board network.
Are you sure, it reads, that we know what we're unleashing on the world, setting up the two of them to work together?
Matty doesn't answer, and rolls her eyes at him from across the plane's aisle, but he can see the smile on her face. He's glad he was able to amuse her at least a little bit. She's been working double time, if she's kept up with her regular Deputy Director's duties on top of their little side project.
The trip home is uneventful, and what feels like far too soon, Jack finds himself standing outside the Director's office with Matty, Mac and Riley hovering awkwardly in the hall behind them.
"Riley," Matty says, without taking her eyes off the name plaque beside the door, DIRECTOR JAMES MACGYVER inscribed in understated polished metal, "would you mind waiting outside a moment? Jack, Mac, and I need to speak with the Director about a few things before we get you taken care of."
"Sure," she says, sounding like she's nervous and trying to hide it.
The door swings open at the first knock, and Jack is left face to face with Director MacGyver himself for the first time since Matty's revelation. He can hear it in the back of his mind as he meets the man's eyes steady on, I don't think the Director failed to see the problem, I think the Director is the problem.
Well, Jack thinks, refusing to let his gaze waver. Game on, sir.
