Author´s note: Once more it has been a while and I hope you guys still bear with me. I´ve noticed this story keeps enjoying a good number of hits which I am sure has to do with the last season being on right now… which reminds me that it has been quite a time since I started this crazy little story that is now slowly nearing its final chapters. A few more p.o.v. jumps in this one that I hope won´t bother you guys. As always, thank you so much for reading, liking, reviewing.

Clio1792: Oh yes, she´s not been too lucky with regards to her parents, but who knows…they are already pitting themselves against each other so let´s see where this is getting them. And she´s not helpless, despite her situation she´s in. She hardly ever is. :) As for Fitz: pretty much that.

Noro: Thank you. So it has taken a whole long time longer than "soon" for the update. Sorry for that and I hope you´re still reading.

Jennkyle: Thanks a lot.

Kelleekellkell: Hoping to keep you on the tip of your toes there. Thanks for the review.

Chapter 41

Escape routes

Things had happened so fast that he had stood no chance to fully comprehend what was happening. He was combat trained, he had the reflexes and perception of a pilot but Secret Service wasn´t the kind of club to put up with his fretting if the life of their Commander in Chief was threatened. With a few well-placed pushes, covering his body with their own, they had maneuvered him out of the press conference room that, even as he was spirited out and away, had started to turn into a madness of gunfire and screams. Fear had come first, and he felt terrible for that. Fear for his own life. And maybe that wasn´t something to feel ashamed for, because he knew what bullets felt like. But then, when he had come to his senses, when he had been pushed into the limo and The Beast had spun around on screeching tires after a hurl through backrooms and an escape staircase, he had come to his senses when he noticed that she was missing.

"Where is Olivia?" he demanded, trying to struggle free from the agent who was holding him down, bulletproof window notwithstanding. The other man didn´t budge.

"Where…is Olivia?" More insistence this time and finally the agent straightened up as the motorcade accelerated, no doubt speeding away from the airport and away from danger. But he could tell the Service was on high alert. One never knew.

He asked his question a third time, near roaring this time around, the kind of tone he only took when he was really mad. And right now he was. Mad, and above everything: scared to death.

"We don´t know, Sir." the agent replied. "We are trying to assess the situation as we speak, but it´s chaos." There was no reassurance that she would be all right. Secret Service agents didn´t mince their words. They always cut to the case, no matter how dire the truth.

Fitz closed his eyes, tried to calm his hammering heart, fought against the overpowering urge to be reckless, to demand them to stop the car, turn it around, go and find her, because like hell this was going to happen. "We need to find out what is going on." He could feel his voice tremble a little and tried to focus. "If there are any … dead. Who attacked."

He released a trembling breath. "Any of our agents still in the room?"

"Three." The man tapped his earpiece, listened, then nodded. "There is no information yet, but things are going to leak. There was press in the room after all."

"We need to get back!"

"That is impossible Mr. President."

"We need to get somewhere where I can assess the information." he growled coldly. "and where I can react to whatever is going to happen." He knew damn well that he could order an atomic strike from this vehicle but his thoughts were racing. "For God´s sake that was a terrorist attack…" His voice had become increasingly louder with each word, partly because the agent was, after about half of his verbal volley, not listening any more, but instead listening to whoever was speaking into his ear, tossing him a somewhat apologetic look. He waited until his boss had stopped yelling, then said:

"Only some of Nasri´s people made it outside. Half his security. But Nasri didn´t."

Fitz felt his heart skip a beat. "What?"

oOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

As she clambered into the taxi and told the driver her destination, she briefly ignored the buzz of her phone. Instead, while it was still ringing, she dug it out of her pocket and, as the taxi started to accelerate, her nervous for the first time that morning, broke open the side of the phone´s case, ignoring the splintering of her nails. Maya could feel the eyes of the taxi driver on her in the rearview mirror and ignored it as she ripped out the phone´s battery and hard drive. Heart hammering she noticed with grim satisfaction that the buzzing stopped, the phone in pieces as she thrust it back into her pocket, one finger bleeding. Stupid! She hadn´t thought of that in her curiosity, but it was untraceable now. In the best case this was just some interference or someone calling a wrong number. But she knew that there were seldomly such coincidences. Somehow she felt her phone had been hacked and tracked. The phone she had bought at this very same airport a day earlier with a fake name credit card. But now the thing was merely expensive parts. No way to trace that she thought grimly.

"Ma´am…" There was suspicion in the young driver´s voice.

"I suggest you just keep driving."

When backed into a corner, Maya Pope´s voice took on a dangerous predator snarl that would make anyone´s blood crawl. She felt the taxi driver hit the gas pedal.

oOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo

"Hey, Finn?"

Maybe fifteen minutes had passed after the phone call that had assured Kimi that her strange knight in not so shining armour was indeed no axe killer but working for the president of the United States and that the man she had met at the diner earlier was some big time criminal that had taken out the president´s son. A kid! That made her relatively safe in all of this, unless one thought it possible that in the big clusterfuck she was in it was maybe possible that the president hired axe killers to work with. She hadn´t voted for the guy anyways. Charming as he might be the day she voted for a Republican would be the day any of that party would make an actual effort to not forget this "great country´s" First Nations, Kimi thought with a cynicism she understood could only be the result of her brain trying to make the shock a little less acute.

Finn or whatever his real name was had been busy bustling around the place for the last minutes, after a phone call, and he was now checking the motel room for bugs once more. He had told her to be ready in a few minutes so he could take her to another safe house. He had, as promised, even given her time to call her mother, watching her like a hawk as Kimi gave a performance worthy of an Oscar. Her mother had bought it and she felt bad about it later, but right now there seemed to be more pressing matters. Like what she was just seeing unfold on the screen of the beat up little tv set that she had switched on to pass the time since Finn was making her all the more nervous as he bustled around and packed.

"Finn!" she called out again, her eyes fixed to the news. She had, of course, tuned in to CNN in the curiosity to see her news story…HER news story breaking but had landed in the middle of a short commercial block that was abruptly interrupted by a breaking news special report. "I think you might want to see this!"

The impeccably dressed female news anchor looked serious and solemn, the image behind her was that of an airport building, Brussels by the looks and subtitles of it and obviously archive material. This shit was too new to have yielded any pictures yet. She heard Finn rush into the room but was too focused on the story unfolding on the screen, the news anchor a voiceover over shaky smartphone camera footage showing panicky crowds rushing out of the aieport building, armed police rushing in.

…story as it is unfolding." the news anchor narrated. "What we know at this point is that there have been shots fired inside the building and that police forces and Secret Service have been rushing in immediately. President Grant´s motorcade has been spotted leaving the premises but we have no conformed information on anything regarding the goings on inside the building at all. All we can say thus far is that this does not look like a false alarm and that once more Brussels finds itself in the centre of a terrorist attack."

"What is going on there?" Finn was standing in the room now and Kami shushed him with a hurried gesture and a shush when the handheld shaky footage was replaced by a reporter standing outside the building. "We have confirmed information from our European colleagues now that shots were fired at the end of the press conference of president´s Masri and Grant, just after our live coverage ended." the reporter said, looking shaken. "We have unconfirmed rumours that president Masri has been heavily wounded and that the situation is not yet under control, but that we have a hostage situation within the building."

"Oh no…" Kimi made another shushing motion, not daring to take her eyes off the TV set when she heard the dull little jingle of Finn´s phone.

oOoOoOoOoOo

The message was from Liv. Just three words. No capitalisations. No punctuation. Immediately there was no question for him that the rumours of that hostage situation were true. And that she would have called otherwise. These words had been written hidden away, hoping not to be found out and shot.

Alive track parents

Huck instantly knew what to do. With flying fingers he took the laptop he had already stored away. Thanks God they had still been here. He opened it, and started to hack away.