Chapter XXII

Hamptons, Long Island

The late summer weekend started off so well [changed good to well]. He'd headed down to his Hamptons home early on Friday with Alexis and then Beckett joined them later when she got off work. They watched the sunset and had a late-evening barbeque and then slept in on Saturday morning.

Castle had received the final edit of Heat Wave and was eager to go over it, preferably while sitting on a deck chair by the pool.

He did get to that part, although at first he'd been too distracted watching Kate do a few laps in front of him, never mind that she made it a point to splash some water on him every other lap.

She was wearing a pastel pink one-piece bathing that made think of flamingos and Miami Vice. It went well with the slight tan she was sporting but it covered far too much skin. It made him think of that gorgeous black bikini he'd seen in the window of one of those pricy little boutiques in SoHo. It was nothing more than an intricate pattern of strings and his mind already pictured them wrapped around Kate.

He'd even sent her a photo and told her he was getting it for her.

-Don't even think about it, she'd texted back.

-I'm gonna get it. This was made for you. And for me. Me ogling you in it, that is.

And then she called him.

"Rick. Please don't. I'm not ready…"

"Ready?"

"For anyone but you to see…all of me. Not Alexis. Not your mother."

The panicky tone in her voice had made him feel like a thoughtless jerk. The last time she'd sounded like this was at the loft. During that black out.

"Kate…I'm sorry. I didn't think."

"It's okay. Just please don't."

"I won't."

He wanted to say more. To tell her that he hoped that one day she'd look at her scars and see the only things that he saw. Her strength and resilience.

But one thing he'd learned with her was not to push. He might have said too much already, so he left the rest unsaid.

"What? Her name is Nikki Heat?"

"Jesus…" Castle had almost jumped out of his beach chair. How the hell had she gone from the pool to sneaking up behind him? Was she that stealthy? Had he been that absorbed in his book? It was probably a bit of both.

She'd moved around the beach chair to face him, arms crossed and water still dripping down them from her hair. "Tell me I'm wrong."

"About…?"

"The character you based on me, the NYPD detective…tell me you didn't give her a stripper name!"

"Okay. You're wrong."

"So her name isn't Nikki Heat?"

"No…you're wrong about it being a stripper name."

It hadn't been one of his strongest arguments.

So she'd insisted, strongly and vocally, that he change it and once she finally accepted that it was far too late for that, she did an awful lot of head shaking and eye rolling and then she'd splashed him extra hard after diving back into the pool.

An hour later, before they even really got over that argument, while he was still poring over the edit and Kate was suntanning next to him, she got a call to come in to work.

Now he was the one who was irritated. "You're kidding, right? This is our first weekend in…forever. Can't you tell them you're out of town?"

She looked torn. "I told Gates. And she's got Javi and Kevin on this already. But she said this one is strange. That she wanted me on it too. Maybe this is my chance to finally prove myself to her."

"I don't think you need…"

"I do. We both know it. I dropped the ball on your case."

"Kate…I've watched you solve half a dozen other cases since then!"

She kissed him. "I'm going. I'm sorry. I'll make it up to you."

The only good thing about it was that their earlier argument was forgotten.

"I'll come with you."

"No. Don't be silly. I'll drive back alone. This is your weekend with Alexis too."

He set down his book. "To be honest. I had to twist her arm to come here. She'll probably be thrilled to go back early."

Kate raised her eyebrows, not understanding.

"There's a boy, back in Manhattan."

"Oh…" Understanding, dawned on her. And amusement. "Of course there is."

It made Castle cringe. "Let's not go there. I'm sure it's nothing serious."

"Uh huh."

So he did suggest it to Alexis and it ruffled him to see how much her eyes lit up at the prospect.

The three of them packed up before lunch, said goodbye to his long-awaited long weekend, and drove back into town in two different cars.

Castle was the first one to arrive at the precinct and Beckett followed suit shortly thereafter. Ryan filled them both in as quickly as he could. Apparently, their homicide victim had been shot, stabbed, and choked before he was thrown out of a four-storey apartment building.

Gates hadn't been kidding when she said this was a strange case.

"Gives new meaning to the term overkill," Castle quipped. It got a chuckle from Esposito and a glare from Beckett.

"Luckily there was a streetcam right next to where the guy fell to his death. We ran it and saw the killer get into a cab."

"How'd you know it was the killer?" Beckett questioned.

"He was wounded, and holding a hostage at gunpoint."

"Oh…"

"We figured it was a fair guess."

Esposito jumped in. "So we tracked the cab and found the guy. Having a pizza with his hostage."

"What?"

Even Castle was getting confused.

"So we have the guy," Beckett added, perplexed. "But you needed me to come in on this? I don't understand."

"Correction," Ryan told them. "We had the guy. Past tense."

"Come again?"

"We had him. He had ID with the name Thomas Gage. Turns out that was fake. We interrogated him and he gave us nothing. The guy didn't seem bothered. Like this was just a walk in the park for him. Then we put him in holding and spoke to the woman he took hostage. She says that Gage admitted to killing the guy when he asked her to patch up his leg wound."

"Hold on…so he confessed and you put him in holding? So what exactly do you mean you 'had him'?"

"He broke out of his holding cell."

Beckett looked at him in disbelief. "Broke out? Of holding?"

"Precinct was locked down, searched from top to bottom, cameras scan so far…nothing."

Castle's eyes lit up. Barely ten minutes in, this one was already close to edging out the Blue Butterfly as Best Case Ever.

"What about the victim?" Beckett wanted to know.

Neither Ryan nor Esposito answered and suddenly the entire room fell into silence.

"Guys?" Beckett pressed.

"He, uh…" Ryan didn't quite meet her eyes. "He, I should say, his body…disappeared."

"Disappeared? From the morgue?" Beckett ran a hand though her hair. "You've got to be kidding me."

Castle was starting to understand why Gates had called her in.

He could see the wheels spinning as Beckett tried to get a foothold. "Did we at least get in ID on him?"

Ryan swallowed and didn't even have to say anything for her to see that the answer was no.

"Gates isn't happy," Esposito added.

Beckett raised a single, sarcastic brow. "Really? I can't imagine why."

"Look, sorry to bust your weekend plans but we need help on this."

"Ryan, do another camera scan. There's no way this guy got out of here without us catching anything. He's not the Invisible Man, is he?"

"On it."

While he did that Castle watched Beckett start a murder board, as she always did. Old School. Photos, timelines, hand-written clues. By the time she was done her hunch had paid off. Ryan caught footage of Gage stealing a police uniform and accessing an NYPD computer, specifically to pull up a file of a research scientist who lived in Queens.

They had something.

Or so they thought.

Castle accompanied Beckett to the woman's house in Queen's, only to find her shot to death in her home. Gage had gotten to her first.

And that's when things got even weirder.

Because she suspected it might not be empty, Beckett had her Glock in hand when scanning the house. But as soon as she stepped out of his view, Castle had a gun pointed at his head and then a hood thrown over it. He could hear, but not see, the same thing happening to Beckett.

Whoever this guy, or guys were, they were good. Terrifyingly good.

For a brief moment, he thought that this was it. That a bullet would pierce his skull before he even got a chance to think of the things he still wanted to do. To say…

But then he felt himself, and Kate, being pushed out of the house and into a car.

The drive lasted maybe twenty minutes. Occasionally he'd call out to Kate just to make sure she was still there.

The fact that they were still alive gave him hope. If whoever was behind these killings wanted them dead too, they'd have done it, then and there in the house. Not put a hood over their heads and drag them through the city.

When the car stopped, they were manhandled into a building, and judging from the electronic sound of an automatic door opening, they were then pushed into an elevator that went down. Way, way down.

It was only when they exited the elevator that their hoods were finally removed and they found themselves in a massive, cavernous room full of people and state-of-the-art electronics that looked like it could double as a NASA control centre.

And then he saw the last person he expected to come and greet them.

His ex-girlfriend, CIA agent Sophia Turner.

Later

Inside that underground bunker they discovered that Thomas Gage was a former CIA asset-gone-rogue.

Not only that, but their first homicide victim was also a CIA agent. A guy who'd been sent to bring in Gage after they'd tracked him down. It was an assignment that cost him his life and it was why his body was taken from the morgue.

Sophia Turner also told them that Gage was still out there, out of the CIA's grasp. He was a lethal professional who had killed their second victim, the woman in Queens, because he was on a mission. A mission called Pandora, which meant absolutely nothing to Beckett.

The CIA, understandably, had to keep all this under wraps. And since they were already on the hunt for Gage anyway, Turner wanted them both on her side, working in tandem with the CIA. She'd even gone so far as to reach out to the Chief of Detectives get his permission, so Beckett couldn't exactly say no.

Beckett mostly wanted to wipe the smug grin off Sophia's face.

God, she was insufferable. Arrogant. Condescending. Self-important.

And also smart, and gorgeous and getting her kicks bossing around an NYPD detective. Worst of all, Castle was tripping all over himself at the thought of being part of a top-secret CIA assignment.

Actually, no. The worst thing was that she was Castle's ex. He hadn't yet admitted it to her but it was glaringly obvious.

What he did admit was that he'd shadowed her and based one of her favourite characters in his Derrick Storm book on Sophia-bloody-Turner.

Kate used to love Clara Strike!

Not anymore.

All this time, Castle had made her feel that she was special. His muse.

She'd always thought she was his only muse, but now it turned out that she was merely his second. Or who knew? Maybe there were multiple muses!

Beckett told herself that this wasn't the time. They were in the middle of a challenging high-profile case with potential national security implications.

Bu then she'd never been very good at hiding her irritation.

So they had a fight in the car ride back to the precinct.

A fiery one that Castle had almost succeeded in taming by pointing out that his new character wasn't a minor one, that the detective-with-the-stripper-name was far more complex and nuanced than Clara Strike. That Nikki Heat was his protagonist.

His reasoning cooled her irrational jealousy until Beckett made the mistake of asking him how long he'd shadowed, and dated, Sophia Turner.

A year!

If they hadn't arrived at the precinct and had to get out of the car, their fight might have exploded into something much bigger.

Because suddenly she saw everything differently.

Was this what Richard Castle did? Become fixated on the inspirations for his novels? Is this why they were together? Because he needed her in order for Nikki Heat to come alive? Needed her to produce another bestseller?

Would it all end when the novel (or novels) ended?

Her heart thundered in her chest and it was only when she got out of the car after slamming the door shut that she realized why it suddenly felt like the ground was unsteady under her feet.

She loved him.

Back at the precinct, Beckett had to admit that it gave her some pleasure to see Gates annoyed that they couldn't share any details of their new top-secret assignment with anyone, even her.

Keeping it from the boys was harder, and that part brought her no joy. She already hated that she hadn't told them about her relationship with Castle. These were the same guys who'd take a bullet for her.

Considering all their other dead ends, Beckett decided to go back to their second crime scene. Tracey McGrath, the woman in Queens.

Castle went with her of course, and they barely spoke on the way there. By the time they were in the woman's house, she'd managed to put her emotions into a compartment that she could shelve, at least temporarily. She needed to give this case her full focus, because the victims deserved nothing less.

That focus eventually led them to McGrath's missing car, a rare 1967 Pontiac GTO, which wasn't parked near her home but in a long-term parking lot near Newark airport. When they found it they also found evidence that the trunk had been tampered with.

So they popped it only to find a briefcase inside it with military spy equipment.

Every time they found a new lead on this case it gave them more questions than answers.

Was McGrath a CIA asset too? One whom Sophia Turner conveniently forgot to mention? And if not, what was her connection to Thomas Gage?

They didn't have a chance to ask any of them, because suddenly a gun was pointed at her head.

Thomas Gage.

Had she been alone she might have tried to take the gun from him, even though he was a trained professional and her chances were slim. But with Castle next to her she couldn't risk it. She had to take the chance that he wouldn't kill them.

And. Shockingly, he didn't.

Instead, he took their phones and forced them into the trunk of the car.

The two of them, wedged into the trunk of a 1967 Pontiac GTO. Their eyes met in the near pitch darkness and for a split second she knew that he was thinking the exact same thing that she was.

"If we make out in here it'll use up more air, won't it?"

Okay, maybe not.

Beckett was more concerned about getting them out.

"Maybe someone will find us?" Castle suggested, with such casual optimism that it seemed a little odd, even for him.

She scoffed at the idea. As if someone would look for them in the trunk of a car in long-term parking at Newark.

Thankfully the car was old. Locking mechanisms were simpler back in the 1960s. There were hooks and switches, not electronic fobs, and because of it, it took her only a couple of minutes to figure it out.

She popped the trunk with a victory smile.

One that faded quickly when they were greeted by two CIA agents holding hoods. And suddenly it dawned on her. The reason for Castle's optimism about getting rescued.

Before Gage took their phones, Castle had pressed the CIA panic button that his ex-girlfriend had put on them.

She really was going to kill him today.

After being dragged back to the CIA bunker, they suddenly had a new lead. Or at least the CIA did.

Using telephone tracking systems that were more than a decade ahead of anything the NYPD had at its disposal, they tracked down the last person whom McGrath had called before her death. For a moment Beckett swallowed her bitterness, knowing that if they had these kind of tools at their disposal they might have tracked down Salvador Ojeda and his burner phone before he got away.

Turns out that the mysterious caller was a Dr. Nelson Blakely, who specialized in geo-political models and linchpin theories, minor events that were guaranteed to trigger larger, catastrophic ones.

Which might have been no big deal if Dr. Blakely weren't supposed to have died in 2002.

Finding Blakely was now the only thing that the CIA cared about, whereas for Beckett, her number-one priority was still Thomas Gage. She was a homicide cop and he was the guy who'd killed her two victims. Not this returned-from-the-dead Dr. Blakely.

On their way out of the CIA bunker, Sophia Turner thanked them for finding McGrath's car.

She did it by running her perfectly manicured hands over Castle's blazer and it took every ounce of self-control that Beckett had not to swat them off.

As if all of that weren't bad enough, Castle suddenly got it in his head that he wanted to try and find this mysterious Dr. Blakely. The doctor had used a chess code in his phone call to their homicide victim, and Castle thought he could figure it out.

As if the CIA and all their high-tech codebreaking gadgets wouldn't figure it out first.

"We're all on the same team here," Castle reminded her during their elevator ride up from the bunker.

"No," she shot back. "You're on her team. 'Cause from the way I've seen you look at her, you're sure as hell not on mine."

Castle gave her an incredulous look and maybe he'd have rebuffed her if the agent in the elevator with them hadn't said it was time for their hoods to come back on.

12th Precinct, NYC

The next day Beckett didn't call him to meet her at the precinct. Nor did she answer his text asking whether she wanted him to come in.

Since she'd first met him, Richard Castle had always been a welcome distraction. Even in those early days out in the Hamptons when he'd gotten under her skin and made her roll her eyes more often than not.

But right now, he was taking her much needed attention away from the case. His puppy dog excitement about working for the CIA and Sophia Turner was making her irrationally angry.

So she'd resorted to her usual method of dealing with adversity.

Avoidance.

By the time late afternoon rolled around, Beckett figured that Castle had taken the hint and wouldn't be showing up at the precinct anymore.

And immediately after she came to that conclusion, there he was.

Standing in front of her desk holding a chess board.

"Hey…" She greeted him casually. As if all the tension between the last two days hadn't existed. "What are you doing here?"

"I found something. It's about Blakely."

Of course.

"Shouldn't you tell Sophia about it?" she shot back icily.

Those blue of eyes of his that she could absolutely drown in, locked with hers. "She's not my partner. You are."

And when he asked to sit down, she gave him a subtle nod. Accepting the olive branch.

He then explained his theory, how the code and the chess pieces might not have been about the game itself at all. But rather about a place where the avid chess players might have met and played before. How the clue could be in the first letter of the pieces he'd chosen.

It' was a leap, but he'd always had good instincts and his ability to think outside the box were better than that of anyone else she knew.

It was worth a try.

They made their way down to Brooklyn Bridge Park. To an area with public chess tables, where they sat and waited for Blakely to show up.

Whether she wanted it or not, it gave them the chance to talk.

"I'm surprised you never mentioned her before," she pointed out, chilled from the breeze coming off the East River, in spite of her wool jacket. The temperature had plummeted the last two days.

"I wasn't allowed to," Castle explained. "She's an active CIA agent. It was considered classified information. But now that you know…you can ask me anything you want to know about her."

"No, thanks."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah. It's really none of my business."

Did you love her?

"Okay. Then we're done with it."

"Fine."

But of course it wasn't. She was so close to opening her mouth to ask whether he'd loved her when…

"There he is?"

Beckett whipped her head around, and there he was. The not-so-dead Dr. Nelson Blakely, CIA advisor and predictor of global catastrophes.

He was clearly on edge, that much was obvious from one glance at the man, and when they got close enough to tell him that Tracey McGrath was murdered, it spiked his panic even further.

"If they got to her they can get to me."

Blakely was adamant about getting out of here. Away from the park.

Beckett agreed, mostly to stop him from trying to flee. He convinced her to drive him to Pier 32.

But getting the reason for that particular destination out of him was mission impossible. Not even Castle, who was better than she was at getting others to open up, wasn't having any luck.

When they got to the pier, Beckett was done with niceties.

She forced him to tell them what Gage's Pandora mission was about, and Blakely did. He told them that he'd discovered an alarming weakness in US national security, a linchpin linked to the economy and once that initial domino was tipped, the others would simply keep falling. The ensuing catastrophe would be unstoppable.

Beckett was skeptical but she pressed him further. They had to know what exactly this linchpin was. What one event could possibly bring their country to its knees?

That was when Blakely spied a flock of pigeons flying above them, and it spooked him so hard that he bolted from the car.

Beckett yelled after him and was about to undo her seatbelt and give chase when he was shot in the back, right in front of their eyes.

Castle gasped and Beckett turned to see the shooter, only to have her back suddenly pressed into her car seat. A black SUV rammed into her cruiser and pushed it forward like a toy.

They were less than twenty feet from the water's edge.

Beckett slammed on the brakes. Hoping it was enough to hold off the unexpected attack.

But it was futile. The more powerful engine and heavier weight of the SUV was no match for her NYPD cruiser.

"Hold on, Castle!"

They were going to dive straight into the river.

A/N: As you've probably noticed, the story follows season 4 canon for a few chapters (rest assured the Pandora episodes are the only ones that will do it with this level of detail). However, because my story began in summer it has to segue into fall, unlike a canon season, which begins in Fall and ends in Spring. In other words, canon weather will be upside down. ;)