Disclaimer: I do not own Castle or the recognizable characters who appear in this story. Any other names, for characters or businesses, are fictional, uncompensated, or are in the public domain. In addition, for this chapter and the next two, there'll be text from the Cops & Robbers episode, used directly or with slight modifications.
A/N: It took a little longer to tell this part of the story than I thought, so I've split it up into three chapters. If you've seen Cops & Robbers recently, you can skip or skim this chapter, since it sets up the next two. More notes in the next chapters.
The officers holding the line around the New Amsterdam Bank & Trust scatter as Beckett careens toward them her car, shooting her nasty looks and raised fingers as she finally stops her cruiser with the yellow security tape neatly bisecting its hood. The looks and gestures fall away when she rockets from the car looking like she'll eviscerate the first person who makes a comment.
"Command Center," she barks, yielding three involuntarily raised arms that point to the trailer she seeks. Beckett's on the move before the stunned officers realize they reacted.
Someone – Officer Monfriez, according to his uniform – tries to intercept her, but a quick spin and a pivot have her past him and pulling open the trailer's door before he can object.
"… need SWAT analysis, sit rep, building blueprints," she hears as she enters and focuses on the speaker. "Five minutes," he says, the voice of command obvious. "Who are you?" he asks as he turns to inspect the interloper, just as a disgruntled Monfriez catches up.
"Detective Kate Beckett, Homicide," she answers tersely. "My partner's inside."
Captain Peterson, his name and position obvious from his command and uniform, doesn't introduce himself. Instead, he studies Beckett briefly as if wondering whether she's up for the task.
"First contact," he says, pointing to the trailer's communication array, "and before I can get two words out he says and I quote 'I'll only talk to the lady cop. The one with the writer partner.' That you?"
"Yes," Beckett answers, annoyed they're wasting time. Of course, it's her. She's here, isn't she? "My partner's a civilian investigator. He's written books and given interviews about his time at the NYPD. That's probably how they recognized him."
"Whatever," Peterson replies, already thinking about how to manage this situation. "Our guy wants to talk to you, so you're in," he explains, his discomfort at this situation obvious. "I don't have time to give you a seminar, so think of it like this: you do the opposite of whatever your homicide training tells you to do, okay? So don't yell, don't bully – don't threaten him in any way."
Peterson pauses, noticing Beckett's visible discomfort with his instructions. Cursing the need to train a rookie in a live-fire exercise, he struggles to find an analogy. "You work with a civilian, right? Treat our guy like you treat him."
"I thought you said not to yell, bully, or threaten," Beckett mumbles in reply, running a hand through her hair as Peterson looks even more frustrated.
"Detective, you up for this?" he asks doubtfully.
"Yeah," she replies, steeling her resolve. She slips out of her coat, drapes it over the chair, then takes her seat. "I got this."
"Javi," Ryan calls out to catch his partner's attention as they mill about outside the command trailer. "Something's not right here."
"No kidding," Esposito snorts in reply. "We got a hostage situation with no cameras, no intel, and I can't get a hold of my buddies in the Emergency Service Unit," he grouses. "I'd say that qualifies as 'not right.'"
"I was talking about Castle," Ryan clarifies. "What's he doing here? I've pulled his banking records – all of them. Well," he hedges, "all the ones I could find. He's clearly moved his money in the last few months to somewhere new, probably offshore. But I've got every single record under Castle or Rodgers and this place never shows up. So, why was he here?"
"What you thinkin'?" Esposito asks, his attention snared. "Did…," he starts to ask before looking around and lowering his voice, "… did this place show up in the records for Montgomery, Raglan, or McAllister?"
"No," Ryan answers, looking bothered that he hadn't thought about that angle. "What if he was here to pull money out? You know, for his private WITSEC offer?"
"You think…," Esposito trails off, looking pensive. "No one's taken the offer, have they?"
"None of us, not yet," Ryan answers with eyes that shift away, making Esposito realize his partner's been tempted. "But maybe someone else got the same offer?"
"Who's this?" asks the voice of the man holding Castle and the other hostages.
"This is Detective Kate Beckett," she answers, trying to keep her tone even by reminding herself that she can actually help Castle this time. "I understand you wanted to talk to me."
"Yeah," comes the sardonic reply. "I don't like that other guy."
"Me either," Beckett replies with a smile for Peterson before she shrugs, covers the receiver, and repeats his instructions to build a rapport. "So, what do I call you?"
"With your bedroom voice? You can call me anything," the voice on the phone replies. Her head shakes and eyes roll in autonomic reaction. "Call me Trapper John," he suggests.
Not encouraging, Beckett thinks, given my track record with doctors.
She tries to establish the rapport Peterson encouraged but doesn't get far before Trapper John brushes aside her inane commentary about his name's origin or her pleasant offer of assistance. "Kate, Kate, Kate, stop running that idiot's playbook. Here's how this is going to work. You lie to me, I kill hostages. You jerk me around, I kill hostages. You storm the bank, I kill hostages. See the trend?" he asks, making sure she's following along. "And Kate? I'll start with the writer."
On that ominous note, Beckett's left with a dead line and a heavy heart.
"Well, we learned one thing," Peterson offers.
"What's that?" she asks. If he says anything about her voice she's going to knock him right out of this trailer, Beckett decides.
"He's not a punk who woke up and decided to rob a bank," Peterson explains. "He knows what he's doing. He knows our playbook. This guy's a pro."
His assessment, and the news from Officer Monfriez that there's no video from inside the bank, have Beckett feeling cold tendrils of fear crawling up her spine. Peterson's reminder that this isn't a homicide, that they need to just wait ('sometimes no move is the best move'), solidify her sense of dismay.
With instructions not to go far still ringing in her ears, Beckett steps out of the claustrophobic confines of the trailer to reconnect with her team, hoping fresh air and colleagues who share her background will help her focus.
"You got anything?" she asks of Ryan and Esposito, who'd moved toward the trailer when they saw her emerge.
"All bad news," Esposito replies ruefully, watching Beckett grimace. "ESU can't get eyes or ears inside. Bank cameras are disabled and the walls are too thick to drill from outside."
Beckett realizes the implications immediately. "So, what if ESU storms the bank?" she asks, casting a wary eye towards the staging area where men with Kevlar, helmets, and fearsome-looking automatic weapons have gathered to prepare.
"Then they'll be going in blind."
Beckett thinks she knows what that means, but she needs to hear it from someone with Espo's expertise. "And in your experience, in this scenario, what are the hostages' chances of survival?"
He answers only with a look, and Beckett feels her heart sink.
Beckett wracks her brain, desperately trying to find some option that'll give her a lever. She's knows she's in trouble if she can't find a handhold, can already feel the shadows of a panic attack creeping in her periphery. She wants to laugh at the absurdity of it all, but she knows it would come out as a sob. She's just started to get a tentative handle on all the changes in her life, just started to reconcile herself to what Castle was doing and what it might mean for them. And now this. She's never really bought the concept of karma and this just confirms her belief. Surely, she's not done anything so bad as to warrant this kind of retribution?
She's about to release a slightly mad chuckle when movement on the periphery catches her attention. The door to the trailer's flown open, and Monfriez is windmilling his arm to get her back into the command center.
"Remember the strategy," Peterson reminds her as Beckett moves directly to her seat and dons the communications headset.
"Hey," she says, reminding herself to sound approachable. "How's it going?"
"So far so good," Trapper John's voice crackles over the line.
"Yeah?" she replies as she scans a file Monfriez handed to her. "I'm pretty concerned about Simone, the pregnant teller. It's kind of a stressful situation, might want to get her out of there." Damn you, Castle, she thinks wildly with a smile that puts Peterson on edge, why couldn't you be pregnant?
"No, no, no, Kate," Trapper John scolds. "You've got to give before you can receive."
Yeah, I know what I'd like to give you, she thinks savagely. "Okay," she says instead, "what would you like?"
"A bus," Trapper John replies immediately. "With tinted windows, that'll take me, my partners, and my hostages to Teterboro Airport." Beckett swivels her head at the commotion, noting the reaction to 'my partners' – they suspected there were multiple perpetrators but had no confirmation. "There you're going to have a plane waiting to take us to the foreign country of my choosing. Now, you do that and I give you the knocked up bank teller. Once we land in paradise, I release the rest of the hostages. Well," he hedges, caught by a new idea. "Maybe I'll hold one back. It seems to me this would make a fabulous story." With a laugh at his last threat, Trapper John cuts the line.
Beckett's trying not to think about the horrible outcome where Castle's the only one who doesn't make it out of this when she tunes in to some of the chatter in the command center. "Wait a minute," she interjects, "you're actually giving him what he wants?"
"Of course not," Peterson looks at her with barely-stifled exasperation. "The only way that guy's leaving the building is in cuffs or a body bag. But, if it comes to it, I can use that bus to lure the robbers out, have snipers take them out."
Beckett's about to reply when there's a knock on the door of the trailer. Without waiting for a reply, Esposito pulls the door open and sticks his head through the gap. "Did you see the lights?"
"What lights?" Peterson asks before Becket can reply, all while Monfriez turns to the camera displays of the front of the bank.
Rather than answer, Esposito waits for Monfriez to confirm.
"I see it," the officer replies moments later, resting his finger on the monitor. "It's faint."
"Like the reflection off a watch face," Beckett offers, wondering whether her father's watch is going to help her again.
Looking confused, Monfriez offers a hesitant observation. "It looks like…"
"That's Morse code," Beckett confirms, since Monfriez is apparently concerned about hazarding a wrong guess.
They crowd around the monitor, Esposito still standing in the doorway.
"S-D-B 1-2-0," Beckett translates. "Over and over again. What do you think it means?"
Suddenly the tables have turned and Peterson's the one in unfamiliar territory. "Uh, someone's initials?" he offers weakly. "A code? Same… same day… same day bank?" he offers hopefully before realizing his suggestion is meaningless.
"Safe deposit box," Beckett offers with a smile, looking up from the notepad on which she'd been scribbling words to help her think. "Safe deposit box number 120. That's it."
"Monfriez," Peterson calls out, pointing at a terminal in request for the information on who owns that box. Turning to Beckett, he asks the obvious question. "What's a safe deposit box got to do with anything?"
She notes the tone of confusion in his voice and doesn't visibly react, but she's feeling better. This is what she's trained for. What they've trained for. It might not be the case she wanted, and it might not be optimal circumstances, but she and her partner are back on the hunt. "I don't know, yet, but if Castle went to the trouble of sending that message, it means something."
"How do you know it was him?" he challenges, looking again at the weak pattern of lights stuttering on the ceiling of the bank chamber.
"Trust me," she answers with a secret smile, "it's him."
"Agnes and Gideon Fields," Monfriez calls out from his terminal. "Married couple. They own box 120."
"Espo," Beckett calls out to her teammate who's still blocking the door. "You and Ryan track that down," she directs, getting a ready nod in reply.
Their situation hasn't really improved, she thinks as she turns back to the monitors, but she's over her despondency. They've got something to follow. She's worked enough cases to know this is how it starts – one odd thread, one slight inconsistency, one wrong note. It's all she needs. She recalls Castle's words from the restaurant. He was in no conditions to know he'd protect Alexis, but he was sure he could do it anyway. She feels the same sense of ridiculous optimism now. They've come too far, suffered too much, for their story to end here. She's certain she'll see her partner walk out of that building.
Her sense of optimism holds, but Beckett could use some hope. Sitting in the command center and watching the three hours tick away is slowly driving her mad, as are the scenes she can't help imagining from the inside of her bank. Castle might've changed because of what happened to him this summer, but she still knows her partner well enough to know that he's probably not sitting idly inside. He's too curious, too inquisitive, and too talkative. It's kind of an all-or-nothing circumstance – his natural demeanor is either going to charm his captors or get him shot. She's encouraged that she hasn't heard gunfire or gotten a call from Trapper John asking how to get Castle to shut up.
She jolts when her cell buzzes, her patience from not interrupting Ryan and Esposito finally rewarded. "What did you find?" she asks as soon as she answers Esposito's call.
"Place is trashed. Agnes is dead. Killer was looking for something," he answers. "There's a broken keychain necklace on the body, but no key."
"Okay, that might've been where she kept the key for the safe deposit box," Beckett infers, turning to the bobbing heads from the eavesdroppers in the command center trailer. She ignores the banter between the boys, including Esposito giving Ryan trouble for his 'Castle junior' suggestions for what might be in the safe deposit box to warrant such an elaborate heist. The reference makes her flinch, but she doesn't think anyone in the trailer recognized it.
"Hey, Super Cop," she hears Ryan say. "Check it out."
"What is it?" Beckett asks, barely refraining from asking them to switch to a Facetime call so she can see for herself.
"It's a bug," Ryan answers. "It's not from a spy shop, either. This looks professional."
"Guys," Beckett says with urgency. "I need you to dig up everything you can on Agnes Fields and bring it in. Go," she encourages. "Please find something for me."