apologies for any logistical weirdness in this chapter - much as i am not a medical professional, neither am i an covert operative or an expert in international criminal organizations. also, let's all wave hello to my jewish riley headcanon, because as your resident fandom jewish friendTM, it is my obligation to get one in there whenever possible. now, onward!
(chapter title from radical face's song 'guilt')
Things taken exactly as they were, Jack could have stayed there forever. He could have stayed exactly in that spot, perched on the arm of the deck chair on the back porch, Mac's head a warm weight against his chest, the boy's back rising and falling with deep, even breaths under his palm, for an honest as dirt eternity. Jack wonders if Mac can feel his own lungs expanding so acutely, where Mac's cheek is pressed against the bottom of his ribcage. It's peaceful and calm, quiet broken only by the faint, quiet sound of their breathing and the distant buzz of the life of the city around them, and being allowed to hold Mac like this, like the father Jack would swear out loud up and down that he isn't trying to be, is worth more than gold.
A thought crosses his mind, errant and fleeting as the meteor that streaks over the Western edge of the night sky, a flash of burning particles disappearing into the vast empty of space. One day, Jack wants to hug Mac just for the sake of it - and wants Mac to reach the point of being able to let him.
Including now, Jack has been permitted to do so on two, debatably three occasions, each of them stained in heartache. There had been the day he'd almost died standing on the Ghost's bomb and then felt like he was dying all over again, when Mac had cried so hard he'd nearly made himself sick, leaving wrinkles in the back of Jack's shirt with desperately grasping fingers. Then on the plane after Mac was given the drug he'd had such a bad reaction to, only Jack's arms around him keeping him upright. And now here, because the ugly secret Jack's been keeping from him is finally out in the open, and Mac had gotten himself thinking it meant their entire relationship has only ever been about James.
At no point has Jack been able to just… hug him. No memory exists of being able to touch Mac with the kind of protective, open affection that itches under the skin of his hands every time he looks at the kid, that isn't also tainted somehow. It only serves to make Jack that much angier, when he looks at James and can't find an ounce of the same fondness for Mac in him. He's looked for it, time and time again, and each time he comes up empty handed. Maybe, he's told himself in order to be able to tolerate standing in the same room as the man, the Director is just that good at compartmentalizing, at separating the child he adores from the agent he commands.
This thought has grown fainter and fainter, twisting and souring until Jack had seen the end of that review, and it died completely. The very thought of speaking to Mac like that, of saying something that could make him look the way he'd looked that night, cuts Jack to the bone. He doesn't care any more, Jack realizes, stroking his thumb gently over the back of Mac's golden head, how much James might think he loves the kid, if he does at all. No amount of whatever possessive selfishness men like James call love could ever make up for this.
Of course, like all moments, this one does not last forever. Eventually, Jack comes to the conclusion that it's time to go back inside. Mac is obviously weak and unsteady from his stint in the hospital, and he's started to either shiver or shake, just in the last minute or so. Jack isn't entirely sure which, and he's not really sure he wants to know, either.
"Come on, kid," he says, keeping his voice low and quiet, accompanying the words with a brisk rub of his palm over Mac's shoulders. "Time to head inside, yeah?"
The rest of the evening waiting for Bozer to get home from his class is mostly uneventful. The one hiccup comes as Jack is trying not to hover too obviously, escorting Mac to his room so he can get some rest. As he's about to turn and reluctantly head back to the living room, to give his partner some space and the opportunity to fall into a much needed sleep, Mac's voice stops him, saying his name. When he turns around, Jack sees him sitting on the edge of the bed, hands fumbling with the now done-up zipper of the hoodie he's still wearing. Jack's hoodie.
"This is, uh," he's saying, cheeks just barely visibly pink in the dim light of the lamp on his desk. "This is yours, I should-"
"Why don't you hang onto it." Jack doesn't know why he says it, it just comes out, and as soon as he does, he knows it was the right thing to say. Mac's hands go still, one of them flattening out to press over the front, where the Dallas Stars logo sits square on his chest. He offers no protest, doesn't keep insisting on giving it back or trying to take it off, which means either he's even more exhausted than he'd seemed, or he really hadn't wanted to give it back at all. Either way, Jack is more than happy to let him keep it - it's not like he wears that particular hoodie very much in the first place.
This time, just as his foot crosses the threshold of the room out into the hallway, it's Jack's own thoughts that stop him. He looks back and asks the indistinct outline of Mac, laying on his side facing the doorway, "You really just went for a run, huh? That's all this was?"
Mac hums in response, followed a few moments later by one word, half-asleep and small, without a hint of deception or evasion. "Promise."
Most of the remaining time remaining before Mac's roommate returns to the house, Jack spends sitting on the floor of the living room, thumbing through and reading the backs of Bozer's massive DVD collection. He's too keyed up to watch anything, or to sit playing Candy Crush on his phone, so he fiddles with movies and dust jackets, opening the cases even to take a look at the designs on the disks themselves. When Bozer does get home, they don't talk much, a few brief words exchanged about Mac's condition, a thanks for coming to watch him, a soft rebuke that thanks are far from necessary for that sort of thing, and then Jack is leaving.
Until he isn't any more. There's one last thing he needs to do, one loose thread he can't bear to leave untied tonight.
"Hey," Jack says, stopping Bozer in his tracks just as he'd been about to close the door. There's a weariness in the young man's face that makes Jack's chest squeeze sharply, sympathy for the horrible back and forth of worry and suspicion he's trapped in because of his best friend's job stealing his breath away. He swallows hard, inhales slowly, and tells him, gentle and almost apologetic, "If it helps at all, he was telling the truth. It was just heat stroke. It was just a run."
Bozer doesn't respond right away. He stands there with his hand on the open door and breathes, shoulders rising and falling and giving the distinct impression they're carrying something unimaginably heavy. Eventually, with a faint smile at Jack, he says, "It doesn't. But thank you anyway."
As soon as Bozer leaves for work the following morning, Mac abides by what they'd agreed the night before and texts Jack to let him know. Jack then makes his way over, beating the time they'd agreed on with Matty and Riley by a little over an hour. They're going to tell him this together, lay out their case and hope that, between the three of them, they'll be able to find the words to help Mac understand not just what's happened, but what has to happen next. First, though, there's something else that Jack and he need to talk about, questions Jack needs answered.
Which is how they've ended up here, Mac bunched up at one end of the couch, still looking paler than he should and not entirely steady, while Jack sits on an armchair turned to face him. Mac's looking down at his hands, fiddling with some attachment to his Swiss Army knife, and Jack figures it's now or never - he's been trying to figure out how to say this since he left the night before, and now he's just got to come right out and ask.
"What I need to know," Jack says, doing his best to keep his voice non-confrontational, measured, normal, "because I can't for the life of me work it out, is why I didn't find out my partner had been in the hospital until after he was released. And, on top of that, why I have the distinct feeling I wouldn't have found out except for the fact that Bozer called me not wanting to leave you alone, knowing you wouldn't let him stay home from class to take care of you?"
Either Mac has been thinking about this as hard as Jack has, or the answer comes so instantly, so instinctively to him that he doesn't have to think about it at all, because he says without pause, eyes still on the corkscrew he traces the edge of with his thumb, "It wasn't relevant."
The words suck the air out of Jack's lungs. It wasn't relevant. They sound off and wrong and grate against him like the misshapen, jagged edge of a piece of metal, torn in a place it was never supposed to tear.
It hadn't made sense before, something that Riley had said to him sometime in the not so recent past. She'd tried to explain it to him, face twisted into a troubled frown, the way Mac talks sometimes and the way it sounds to her, like someone else's words are coming out of his mouth. Jack thinks he understands it now, because that didn't sound like Mac at all. It was his voice, but those weren't his words, and Jack has a suspicion, one that ignites something deep and snarlingly angry in him, that he knows who they belong to.
"I get that you were mad," he tries, swallowing down the monster his partner's father wakes up in him, wrestling it down until it's quiet once more - quiet but never gone. "And that's okay. I know you said last night that you aren't, but it's okay to be mad, but even when you are, these are the kinds of things I need to know."
"It wasn't because I was mad." Though he kind of sounds mad now, an irritated sharpness to the edge of Mac's words.
Jack would be lying if he said he didn't have at least something of a sneaking suspicion that it hadn't really been about that. Relevant, Mac had said. He'd described his hospitalization by saying that it wasn't relevant, not that it was none of Jack's business, and though they're both wrong, they're very different statements.
"Then help me understand what happened here," Jack says. His hands are open wide, held out by his knees, like Mac might be about to physically hand him the answer. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"I tried!" It comes out in a burst, Mac's eyes snapping over to lock onto Jack's for the first time in their brief conversation, bright and burning. He looks angry, and it's impossible to tell who he's angry with, so Jack sits there and silently lets him be.
Jack had meant what he said, last night and just now, that Mac's anger was acceptable, was permissible, was allowed to exist and take up space. Even if that means the kid needs to yell at him, even if that means he's going to make this conversation ten times harder, if he needs to be mad, he gets to be mad. Honestly, Jack hopes it's him that Mac is mad at, because the alternatives are James - unlikely, and Mac himself - an option Jack doesn't like at all.
Shoulders heaving up and down once with a tremulous breath, Mac looks away after a long moment, shaking his head slightly and continuing, softer but no less off-balanced. "I tried to tell you, but I guess they didn't understand what I was saying, and they called the wrong person. My phone was at home, and I couldn't… They had me on this medication, I couldn't think straight enough to dial myself, and so I asked the nurse, and they called the wrong person."
Jack is confused, and it must show on his face when Mac's eyes flick briefly over to it, and away again. He gives another sigh, this one cut off short, and elaborates.
"I wasn't speaking coherently, so I think they misheard the name I said. Jack, James, they're not hugely different, and- and my dad is my emergency contact."
Now that sounds like a massively bad idea, but Jack figures they should probably have just one major conversation at a time. Besides, given everything else they're going to be talking about today, this doesn't seem like the appropriate moment to go hey, your dad has your best interests nowhere on his priorities list, you really ought to remove him from your medical file and you know what, go ahead and put me down instead. Though Jack does shelve that piece of information for later, when things have cooled down somewhat.
"They called him," Mac says, continuing. He's got the Swiss Army knife back in his hands, wire stripper tool pressed into the pad of his thumb. "I talked to him on the phone, it was…" He cringes, and the tool presses harder. Jack can see the way the skin around it has gone blanched and bloodless, and he'd be worried about Mac doing some kind of damage to himself if he didn't know that, from that angle, there isn't anything on it that's sharp. "The whole thing was stupid. It was all just stupid."
And there that monster is back again, roaring to life and bashing at the inside of Jack's ribcage, screaming to be let out to tear through the city until it finds James, until it rips the man's throat out. Jack shifts where he sits, discretely pressing his palm to his own side, like he can physically hold it back, and asks, quiet and thankfully calm, "What did he say to you?"
"It doesn't matter-" Mac starts, and Jack is having none of it.
"No, it does matter, see, because apparently whatever it was, you walked away from it thinking there could ever possibly be a time when you being in the hospital isn't relevant to me."
Whether it's Jack's refusal to let it drop, or the way he's thrown Mac's-but-not-Mac's own word back at him, it's hard to say, but Mac goes still. His cheeks have flushed deeper than they already were from the aftershocks of the heat stroke, the multi-tool closed and discarded on the couch cushion next to him. He just sits there for a few seconds, then shakes his head once, shallow and dismissive.
"Well it's not, like, you know." This is not how Mac is supposed to sound, Mac with the brain that runs a hundred and fifty miles an hour, Mac with the answers and the plans and the ability to do just about anything if he sets his mind to it. This is Mac not parroting someone else's words, but unable to find his own, thanks to a lifetime of conditioning refusing to let him, and a vocabulary that lacks the right words. "Technically, it's not. I had no reason to expect you to be there." No right hovers behind no reason, and Jack is talking before he's quite realized what he's planned to say.
"What about Riley?"
Looking up, frowning and bewildered by the sudden left turn in conversation, Mac makes a questioning hum in the back of his throat.
Uncowed, Jack goes on. "I'm just giving you a hypothetical here. Riley's in the hospital, are you gonna be there?"
"Of course I would." He sounds a little upset at the implication, anger creeping back in around the edges, and the instant defense of this fact causes something hot and affectionate to throb in Jack's chest.
"Really?" he forces himself to push, leaning forward a little and bracing his elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front of him. "How about if it happened off the job? If she slipped and fell on an icy staircase or was in a car accident on her way to a Starbucks or sprained something trying to move furniture by herself?"
Now Mac is frowning in a completely different way, all hints of confusion gone. He leans back, snags the remote off the end table, fiddles with the side of the dark grey plastic casing. They're back once more to refusing to look at him, Jack notes, even as Mac says, "I see where you're going with this Jack, but-"
"But what?" Jack cuts him off for the second time in this conversation, and only feels mildly bad about it. "But it's different when it's you?" There's no answer. Mac bites his bottom lip and sits, tense as a tightly coiled spring, the remote making a slight clicking sound as he slides a tool from the knife into a seam at the side. "Why? What makes you different?"
The casing of the remote is cracked open now, the wires visible in a tangle of unfamiliar circuitry. Mac pulls at one of them, not seemingly for any reason, just tugging lightly at the connection. He's worrying at his bottom lip with his teeth and he's breathing harder than normal and, even more pronounced, Jack can see the tension in him, bunching his shoulders and straining his chest.
"You're not," Jack says. "You're not different. You exist outside of that building, outside of those missions. If I had known what..." He pauses to take a deep, steadying breath, to be able to speak around the sting in his throat without his voice cracking. They're here to deal with Mac's feelings, right now, not his own, not the way he'd nearly had a panic attack when he'd got Bozer's call, heard his partner's name, his boy's name in the same sentence as hospital and gone through mugging stabbing car accident blood brain spine heart before he processed heat stroke and already home. "If I had known you were in the hospital, wild horses couldn't have dragged me away from there, you hear me? Half a sentence into that phone call and I'd have been out the door and on my way."
This time, Mac does answer. He says something quiet, too faint for Jack to make out, still looking down at the inside of the remote. When Jack asks, he just wordlessly shakes his head, and Jack insists again that no, seriously, he'd very much like to hear whatever that had been.
"I said," and his voice is low, embarrassed and hesitating on every syllable, "even if you were busy?"
It's almost funny, the way Jack has developed the ability to pinpoint these moments, the exact seconds in which this kid breaks his heart. And it happens again, when Mac keeps going, keeps asking those horrible, eviscerating questions.
"Even if there was a lot going on, and I literally did it to myself because I wasn't thinking? Even if I knew better?"
Jack has the distinct feeling that they're not talking about him any more. He answers as if they were anyway, because right now, Mac needs the man that cares for him, not the rage filled monster that hates his father.
"You could sit there and list 'even if's until the cows come home, and you're still not gonna find one that's gonna make me change my mind on this. Wild horses, Mac."
Staring at the guts of the remote, the exposed wires that shiver ever so slightly with the faint, barest shaking of his hands, Mac's lips move silently. Wild horses, Jack sees him mouth to himself, airless and awed. His entire demeanor is that of a nerve ending left exposed, the raw wound left behind when the dirt and grime has been rinsed clean. Then, all in one moment, he lurches back to himself, shutters in the same moment that he snaps the remote casing closed again. One of Mac's wrists comes up to scrub at his eyes as he takes a deep, sharp breath and mutters, "Thanks."
It marks the end of that conversation, and Jack allows it to be over there. He figures he's gotten through as far as he's going to in one morning, and they can't afford for Mac to be any more on edge or emotionally friable, walking into what's going to happen next.
When Matty and Riley show up, it's awkward at first. Mac tries to launch up off the couch to make coffee, but Jack tells him to "sit his fool butt down" and makes it himself, because if someone is going to mess around in the kitchen, it's not going to be the one who was hospitalized yesterday, thanks very much. Riley joins him to 'help', and stands next to the counter beside the coffee pot, fiddling with something. Jack can't help but notice, her fingers twisting around something hanging from her neck, and he glances over.
This is how Jack sees that she's wearing something he hasn't seen in years, and it makes his heart do a funny skip in his chest when he realizes the necklace she's anxiously playing with is the one he got her for her bat mitzvah, over a decade ago, when she was thirteen. It's a small bar of heavy, hammered metal, etched on one side with her name in English, Riley, and on the other side with her Hebrew name, letters Jack can't actually read himself but that form the name Yocheved. He knows they do because he ran it by Diane maybe a dozen or so times before he gave it to her, making sure he'd gotten it right.
Riley must have caught onto the fact that he's seen it, and quickly tucks it back under her shirt, glaring with only faint heat. Jack turns back to what he's doing without drawing attention to the necklace, something in him glowing and unsteady. It feels significant that she's wearing it, and he's going to get choked up if he thinks too hard about why.
Back in the living room, coffee distributed appropriately, things begin in earnest. They've brought all their materials to explain exactly what's going on with the investigation, what they've identified as their reasoning for thinking it's James responsible for what they've found. Mac has picked up one of the packets of paper and is thumbing through it, eyes skimming over the pages in a way that means he can't actually be reading any of the words on them, as he listens to them talk. They take turns talking, the explanation jumping from voice to voice as each puts their part in, hoping to build a picture he can understand.
"So," Matty says finally, when they've gotten through most of it, at least in broad strokes - the mistakes on the missions that Riley has begun to categorize into 'the stupid, the bad, and the dangerous', the miscommunications, the disconnect between departments and operatives, the way DXS is being held together by luck and a handful of department heads. "We had to look into everything we could, to see what's going on here. And it all keeps coming back to one answer, and that answer is the Director."
Mac is listening. He looks a little sick, and not in a way that can be explained by the heat stroke. Swallowing hard, he eventually says, "I see why you're thinking this, but it's not true. He's difficult, and different, and the way he does things is- yeah it could probably be better, but if there's something going on here it's not him. What about Warren?"
"Anthony Warren?"
At Matty's addition of the first name onto the last, Mac nods. "Yeah. He got pulled out of the exfil department after he got passed over for promotion three times. Dad tapped him as his assistant, I think he liked the way he took orders and didn't need, uh, babysitting, is how he put it. Maybe there was something wrong with him, something going on that people kept getting promoted over him, maybe it's him you should be looking at."
Glancing to the side, Jack exchanges a look with Matty, the same dubious concern in her face that he's feeling as well.
"We're investigating all avenues," Jack says carefully, "but the person who's responsible for this has power and access, the kind that you don't get when you're the director's assistant. Warren has his finger in a lot of pies, that's true, but not enough of them. He's connected to a lot, but not all of it, and not even the majority, and it goes too deep. Either we're looking at multiple people, which would have to mean another entire full-scale infiltration after the one last year, or it has to be the Director. I'm sorry, Mac, but there's no way around it."
While Mac is quiet, digesting this information, Jack studies his face. He watches the microexpressions flickering over it like an old-time film reel and remembers what he'd told Riley, back when she'd first balked at the idea of not telling Mac until they were sure, until they had more evidence. Because as soon as they told Mac, they brought the world as he knew it crashing down around his ears. And Jack can see the consequences now, the this can't possibly be happening, no way, bone-deep denial settling in before Mac opens his mouth again.
"You're right," is what comes out when he does, and Jack has just enough time to be blindsided by that before Mac goes on, and his heart sinks all over again. "Something is going on here, it has to be, but you're wrong about who it is. It can't be him. He just… he wouldn't. He couldn't. He's too smart, too good, he wouldn't make mistakes like this. There's another explanation. It's someone else, or he's being framed, or- there's another answer."
He puts the papers he's holding down, waves at the piles of them stacked in front of him. Riley had hoped that maybe by putting it physically in front of him, it could help him understand, help him grasp the enormity of it. The mountains of collated notes and color coded files, they contain the what, when, how, and who of the whole deep, ugly mess. Everything is there but that last, lingering question, the lynchpin of it all - why.
"Somewhere in here, there's another answer. Because it isn't him."
Matty can see Jack's resolve is cracking, and she can't blame him. He's gotten invested in ways she didn't predict or plan for, despite recruiting him in part because she knew she could trust him not only with the boy's physical safety, but his emotional wellbeing too. Matty had known from the word 'go' that Jack would care for Mac the way he needed someone to, she just hadn't known it would go this far, that she would see her old friend start to look so much like a father.
And then there's Riley, who's gotten deeply attached in her own way, slotting in next to Mac like two peas misshapen by pods not designed for them, mirror images of each other's warped edges. She's just a kid herself, and she's already juggling more than she ever should've been asked to. In her life before this, she may have been in prison, she may be a genius and a criminal and a hundred other things, but Riley got recruited, she didn't sign up for this.
So this part, the part where they have to push Mac, to see if he'll snap in a way they can't afford and tip their whole hand, is the part Matty needs to step up and do herself. Someone needs to say it, and she needs to be the one to do so, because it would be unfair and cruel to ask either Jack or Riley to.
"I understand where you're coming from," she tells Mac, and it's true. She does. It's an impossible situation that he's been put in, and Matty resents her boss more than she ever thought was possible. "I get that this is all very hard to take in. But I need to be sure that, no matter if you believe us or not, or about what, that you're not going to take this to your father. I need you to give me your word that you'll protect the integrity of my investigation, wherever it takes me."
To be completely honest, Matty has no idea what she's going to do if he refuses. This entire conversation is a gamble on the hope that he won't, that some part of Mac, even if he can't consciously acknowledge it yet, sees the writing on the wall. Or, barring that, that he'll understand what he's risking for them if this makes its way back to James.
Mac nods stiffly. "I won't breathe a word," he says. There's a hollow, distant tone to his voice that Matty finds concerning, but his eyes are steady on hers. "You're not going to find it. Whatever proof you think you're going to get on him, it's not there. But he'll have you all so fired the scorched earth will keep you from working intelligence ever again if he even comes close to finding out, so I'll go along with this. But I won't help you."
Satisfied that he's telling the truth, Matty nods and thanks him. It's a start. At the very least, it's a start.
The office is as quiet as it ever gets when she returns to it. She's left Mac home under the watchful eye of Jack while she went back in, promising to call with updates regularly. There's a rather odd objective on her plate for the rest of today. James is off-site somewhere, chasing down a lead for some project he won't tell her about, so she has the run of the place to herself. Well, herself and Anthony Warren, who, last she saw, was on a wild goose chase trying to get ahold of the head of IT about some intel issue. This leaves Matty with plenty of time for her own personal project.
The team of the mission she's monitoring is already on the ground in Bosnia, approaching the next identified base of Simon Halilovic's semi-nomadic arms dealing operation. They'd elected to send Mac, Jack, and Riley due to the former two's previous experience with Halilovic, on the assignment in Croatia shortly after Jack was hired. It was a pretty easy decision that the people with previous exposure to the group would be best equipped to deal with them again, especially given the dust-up that went down at the end of that particular mission.
However, given Mac was hospitalized more recently than the minimum twenty-four hour post-discharge policy allows for, that's obviously off the table. James reassigned them yesterday, and Matty didn't find out until she got a text from Jack asking her if she knew why. Which leaves a different team headed to Halilovic's new hideout, to install the same kind of surveillance equipment that Mac and Jack had been sent to remove, all those months ago some twenty miles from Zagreb. Partially because of this last minute reassignment, partially because she just has an odd, unsettled feeling about the whole affair, Matty has chosen to monitor the progress of the mission closely, and has recruited Riley to help her.
Presently, she sits at her desk, watching a live feed of the transcription from the sector of IT devoted to monitoring comms chatter scroll across a tablet. Not much that's interesting has happened so far, just a lot of small talk between Agents Paiz and Luther. In all likelihood, they will get in, install the needed equipment, and be on the plane home before the sun rises the next day. There's no need to delay the return any longer, once they've verified the equipment is working. The timeline on this one is rather short, too, because the next day the Halilovic operation has a meet scheduled with their first contact to come to their new location, and the Director had wanted them out before that happened, something about risking showing their hand if they stuck around.
Something about this thought, Matty absently going over the timeline as a line of text displays a comment from Luther to Paiz about, of all things, literally the weather, jars her out of her half-bored haze. She looks sharply up from the tablet over at Riley, who is doing some data mining on the chatter in the area, seeing if there's anything they should be worried about.
"Does your file have anything on the group that's meeting with Halilovic tomorrow?" she asks, though she already knows the answer. Matty made the file herself. There's still the chance that she'd forgotten a section, slim though it may be, and that chance is dashed when Riley lifts the cover of the folder with one fingernail, and shakes her head.
"No, should it?"
Matty frowns, not answering, and Riley sits up from where she'd been lounging on her back on the couch in the Deputy Director's office, legs thrown up over the arm-rest. It was a terribly unprofessional way to sit, but Matty figured she'd let it slide after the day they'd both just had, and given nobody else was around to see it. (It didn't hurt that she's quickly developed a massive soft-spot for the kid, though far be it from her to let that become public knowledge.)
"Matty, what's going on? Who is Halilovic meeting, why does it matter?"
"It matters," Matty says as she begins shuffling digital files around, searching for the initial intel report that they'd gathered on the new location, including the note about the meet the next day, "because every piece of information you do or don't have on a mission could mean the difference between life or death. Yours, your partner's, some person walking down the street."
"I thought they were supposed to be out before the meet anyway?"
Distracted by sifting through information, looking for the line that will contain what she needs, Matty takes a while to answer the question. "They are. But we still need to- Oh damn it."
"What?" Now Riley sounds alarmed. She's gotten up from the couch completely and walked over to the desk, sitting on the chair across from Matty's. "What's going on?"
"It's Excelsior."
"What's Excelsior?"
Instead of answering, Matty puts the tablet down and gestures towards the computer Riley has been working on. "In your monitoring of the area, did you see anything about kidnappings? Ongoing investigations, recent?"
"Uh." Riley snags her rig off the low table by the couch, squinting at the screen. She clicks a few keys, and then says, "Two."
"Either of them American nationals?"
"...Yes, actually." Flicking off the screen, Riley's confused eyes land on Matty, before returning. "Zachary Wright, twenty, an American college student from Peoria, he went missing two days ago. Family got a phone call, but no ransom demand yet. How did you know that?"
"Because Excelsior is a terrorist ring known for extortion kidnappings of young Americans abroad. And we should've been scanning for abductions the instant we knew they were involved with Halilovic and coming to the area." Moving quickly, Matty leaves her chair and rounds her desk, heading for the door. She needs to speak to Agents Paiz and Luther as soon as possible, and can only do that from a mission control room connected to comms. Behind her, she hears Riley scramble to follow.
"This is why we need to have all the information," she says over her shoulder as she walks as fast as possible down the hallway. Matty would feel bad about near-snapping at the girl when certainly none of this is Riley's fault if it weren't for the forty-five other things pinging through her brain at the moment. "It's a complete gamble on whether a paid ransom will guarantee a return of the victim, literally an almost fifty-fifty split. They're exactly the kind of world-class nightmare we're monitoring Halilovic to catch, but we can't wait for monitoring. If we leave the area before that meet, Zachary Wright is as good as dead."
The entire objective has shifted. She no longer cares about surveillance equipment - there would be plenty of time for that later. What she cares about is a twenty year old boy going home to his parents and his college dorm room.
Matty doesn't care if this wasn't the mission as it was set out. She doesn't care that she's likely to be in for an unholy argument with the Director when he gets back - in fact, she's about ready to kick his teeth in as soon as look at him, right now. It's as clear as day in Matty's mind, what he'd say - We weren't to know it mattered who Halilovic was meeting, his group deals arms. Any civilian threat comes after the fact, we can't be expected to predict every eventuality, and there's no way I could've known there would be some kind of hostage involved. If anything like that came up, we ought to be able to trust our agents to handle it.
In a stroke of luck, they catch Paiz and Luther before they get too deep into the equipment setup, and they are able to abandon the objective with ease and without leaving behind evidence that they were there. The combined efforts of Matty and Riley home in California, and Paiz and Luther on the ground in Bosnia just outside the capital city of Sarajevo, are enough to, with a relative degree of certainty, pinpoint the location they're likely holding their captive. From there, it's a matter of waiting with held breath while they execute an unplanned rescue mission, getting in and getting out as quickly as they can with minimal time to prepare and entirely the wrong equipment.
Not until she hears Agent Paiz's voice over comms, elatedly telling them, "Home base, this is Paiz, we're out and we've got the kid," does Matty feel like she can breathe again.
She congratulates Paiz and Luther on a job well done, agrees that the U.S. Embassy will likely be the safest place to take Zachary, and ends the transmission. Matty sits heavily down on the couch, knees weak after the release of tension that's been gripping her even before she put two and two together and identified Excelsior. Riley looks similarly exhausted, and Matty calls her name softly, getting her attention.
"You did good," Matty tells her, and is rewarded by the relieved grin that breaks out over Riley's face. "Today, with Mac, and with this just now, you did good. Jack was right to bring you on, you're an asset to this team."
And if Riley suddenly thinks of another thing she needs to add to her notes on what just happened, opening her computer and hiding her face behind it, Matty's not going to point out the deep, pleased blush she'd noticed just before.
The next day, when the frantic call comes through, it isn't Paiz's voice this time, it's Luther's. She's babbling down the line so fast Matty has to ask her to slow down twice before things start making sense.
"-on the news," she's saying, high pitched and still rushed, "you'll see it, I don't know how this happened, we had him, he was out, we had him."
Heart turned to a frozen block of ice in her chest, Matty fumbles for her tablet, switching it on and opening the first news channel live stream she can locate. And there it is, blue and red and white blaring in alarm, BREAKING NEWS splashed across the page before cutting to a solemn-looking anchor.
"We have just received word," the man on the screen says soundlessly, his words displayed in subtitles below his face, "that missing American college student Zachary Wright has been killed. His body was found outside Sarajevo, Bosnia-"
"I handed him off to the man at the Embassy myself, he was fine, he was shook up but he was fine, the Embassy man said he'd- they'd- And then Paiz got this call and it was this computerized voice and an address and there he was on the ground, there was blood everywhere I- there was nothing we could-"
"Slow down," is all Matty can think of to say. She's reeling, mind spinning. Nothing about any of this makes sense. If their agents had passed the kid over to the Embassy, he should've been okay. Excelsior operates in back alleys and nightclubs, they don't take risks like that. They wouldn't break into an Embassy just to re-kidap a mark that was already rescued. "You did everything you could. This isn't on you."
"There's something else." At least this time, Luther's shaking, distraught voice has slowed and steadied enough to be clearly comprehensible. It's the least reassuring thing she possibly could have said, and Matty's heart stutters through a few frozen beats. "Local authorities were on the scene so fast we could hardly- but there's one thing. He had something stuffed in his hand, like it was put there after- after he- It was a message. A message for us."
"What did it say?"
"It was just one sentence, it wasn't signed, looked handwritten. It just said," Luther clears her throat before continuing, reciting, "It said to, 'Tell MacGyver that next time, he better show up himself.'"
