It had all made so much sense back in the car when Lee explained it, the way the con worked, the way Will could have been taught to fool her. All the evidence was on Lee's side and yet, faced with Will Towne again in that interrogation room, she just couldn't shake the feeling that there was something terribly wrong with what they were doing.

Sure, maybe the flicker of panic in his eyes was because he knew he was caught, but it didn't seem like it. His laughing off their evidence of his 'death' with a Mark Twain joke had more of a ring of disbelief, like a guy who honestly thought they were kidding. He seemed to really think that this was all going to get cleared up if he could just get one person to believe him and he'd seized on her – the person with the least authority to help him at all, which surely he wouldn't have done if he'd been a real spy. She could see Lee getting exasperated as the interview went on, but she just knew she was doing the right thing – with everything that was riding on this, they had to be 100% certain.

She scolded Lee about his "football" crack as they went to join Billy.

"That was unnecessary!" she hissed. "There is no reason to treat him like that!"

"I thought we were doing good cop, bad cop," he protested. "But you are taking this good cop thing way too far!"

"Well, I'm still not sure he did any of it!"

"Oh Amanda, not this again!" She watched him almost literally bite his tongue to keep himself from starting another fight with her before they arrived where Billy was waiting and Lee launched into his theory about Will's supposed treachery.

When she spotted the MSG on the ingredient list a few minutes later, it really was like someone had torn away the last bit of gauze from her eyes and then to her delight, she watched the tumblers clicking into place for Lee too. It was the final piece; all the other little problems with Will's behavior could be waved aside individually– like pushing the pull door or seeming not to realize at first that the piano player really thought he knew him, but collected together, it was so clear. Whoever had set him up had spent a lot of effort getting the big picture right, but they couldn't have realized the avalanche effect of too many pebbles of behavior that were just too out of character - spy or not, Will Towne would not have made an error twice in two days that had dire consequences for his wife. The Russians had counted on people seeing only the obvious and making it easy for them to set up a fake trade – and they'd almost done exactly that. She was still mulling over the implications of that when she heard Lee speaking.

"Our Agent of Record caught it." She thought her heart might actually burst at the smile he was giving her and she could almost have cried from equal parts pleasure and relief. She thought maybe it was the same for Lee – that they'd both been harboring doubts about whether or not to trust her bad feeling on this one – he looked equally thrilled that it really looked like she'd been right.

It had been so great to be back on the old footing - and then Billy had handed them that Polaroid of Francine looking bruised and miserable in an Afghan cell somewhere and everything good in the day had vanished. She felt the color drain from her cheeks and looked at Lee who looked equally horrorstruck and confused.

"What the hell is she doing in Kabul? She's supposed to be in Cairo!"

She knew how Lee felt; it had to be another trick, another doppelganger, a fake photo of some kind. They couldn't have figured out the whole plan and still be faced with a terrible choice. She looked from the photo, still clutched in Lee's white knuckled fingers, back at Billy as he asked, "So how do we get her back? Thanks to your good work we don't have anybody to trade for her anymore!"

Her heart sank further. All my good work.

She looked over to meet Lee's bleak expression and knew he was thinking the same thing – just for a second, they had both wondered whether they couldn't just hand Will Towne over to the Russians anyway.

She shook herself, inwardly horrified that she'd even had that thought. "We have to find Wally Tuttle," she said firmly. "And I think I know where to start."

"No, no, no, no, no, no!"

It was all she could hear Francine yelling as they dove behind the ambulance pushing her gurney in front of them

"It's okay, Francine, we have you! It's all good!" Amanda was racing to undo the straps alongside Lee.

The second Francine's hands came free, she reached up and grabbed Amanda, pulling her down.

"No, you don't understand! It's a trick. Gregory's pulling something! You shouldn't have made the trade! You have to stop them!"

Lee finished with the strap around her legs and grabbed her hands, peeling her fingers away from where they were gripping Amanda's blouse. "Francine, it's okay! We just gave them some low level schnook of their own – it's fine."

Francine ignored them as she let Amanda help her to a sitting position grabbing her arm again, still babbling. "No, it's not fine. He had some plan – I heard them talking but they don't know I did. There's two guys, not one." She shook her head violently as if trying to clear it of fog. "I don't know what he's getting out of it but he was way too happy for this trade – it has to be a trick!" she wailed.

Amanda loosened Francine's death grip on her arm and wrapped her in a hug. "Yes, it was a trick but we double crossed him. He didn't get the guy he wanted, not even close." She squeezed her closer as Francine sagged with relief. "But we did!"

She looked up and beamed at Lee, who was grinning with glee that their counter scheme had worked, then glanced over at Will Towne who was standing bent over, hands on his knees, looking like he might be sick. She motioned with her head for Lee to come take her place beside Francine, then walked over and put her hand gently on Will's back.

"Dr. Towne? Are you okay?" She took his arm and led him over to the back of the ambulance, to sit down in its open doorway. "That was so brave of you, I can't even begin to tell you how grateful we are that you helped us get our friend back."

He lifted his head and squinted at her. "Your friend? Not an agent?" He reached for his glasses in his jacket pocket, fumbling to put them on.

"Oh well, she's an agent too, but mostly she's our friend," explained Amanda. Towne looked over to where she was gesturing, to the gurney where Lee was holding Francine in his arms. Francine had the heels of her hands pressed into her eyes as if she was trying to hold back tears of relief and Lee's chin was resting on her head as he talked quietly to her.

"Huh. He doesn't look like so much of a tough guy now," commented Towne grumpily.

"Well he's a very tough guy when he has to be," Amanda said in Lee's defense, "But yeah, he can be kind of a marshmallow sometimes too. Francine too"

"Sounds like good friends to have."

"The very best," agreed Amanda, watching the pair fondly. "Now, speaking of best friends, how about we go call Sonia and tell her you're ok?"

Only Amanda, he thought, would organize a thank-you lunch, with way too much Chinese food, to pave the way for apologizing to the Townes, but then again, every time he'd seen Francine for the last twenty-four hours, she'd been eating, so perhaps it wasn't such a crazy idea after all.

"Ugh – I picked up a bug the first day they took me and couldn't hold anything down for three days. But now I'm starving all the time. Do you think I should get Doc Kelford to run a test and make sure I didn't pick up a worm or something? Are you going to finish that muffin?"

Lee had handed her the half-eaten muffin wordlessly despite having watched her just demolish two Danish not five minutes before.

"Francine, how about you and I go pick up some lunch while Lee fetches Mr. and Mrs. Towne out of their debrief and we can go and sit quietly and eat?" Amanda had given him an eye roll over Francine's shoulder as she turned her from pawing through the break room fridge, and mouthed "Go!" at him.

"As long as it's upstairs and there's windows. I've had enough of being underground to last me a lifetime."

"Well then, how about coming with me to the Chinese takeout place two blocks over? We can walk there and you can help me pick out what you want."

"Amanda, you sound like that dog lady on TV, trying to take me walkies! Fine, I'll go with you, but only because I know I can get an egg roll to eat on the way back."

"Are there any more snow peas? No? Okay, I need to go get a candy bar."

He couldn't help looking at Amanda, biting the inside of his cheek when he saw that she was a hair's breadth from bursting out laughing as well. A wave of contentment washed over him as they saw the Townes out of the Q Bureau. There'd been something about the way they'd fought on this case, and made up, that had finally broken the uneasiness that had started to build up between them. She'd been right yesterday in the car – he'd been treating her differently, trying to step back to give her room to breathe and all it had done was make her think he was distancing himself from her. It wasn't until she'd called him on it that he'd seen it – that he should have seen her genuine enthusiasm for her assignment for what it was – proof that she was still perfectly capable of doing her job, a job she was good at, a job she loved – only to have him turn around and try and make it sound like unimportant busy work from Billy. No wonder she'd been so ready to fight with him.

He could tell she was having a hard time keeping a straight face even now as she teased him that she'd always known Towne wasn't KGB and he tried to explain away his reluctance to go along with it with a nonsensical philosophical discourse on knowledge.

Most of the time we only think that we know… …Therefore, I can't really know you too well.

He should have known he was headed into a trap by the way her eyes had lit up with mischief as he rambled.

"Exactly my point."

Lee had just started to answer when she held out the chopsticks and popped something into his mouth. He chewed slowly, realizing too late that it might have been a hot pepper or something. He relaxed slightly as he bit down on what turned out to just be a chunk of pork, but not before hearing that smothered gurgle that told him she'd known exactly what he was thinking.

She knows me too well.

He hid a grin at that thought and turned the question on her instead. "What's exactly your point?"

"That after all this time you should know me well enough to be able to say you know me well, not that you have no way to know me because you can only think that you know me."

"Well, at the very least, I know a black belt confuse-athon when I hear one," he responded, warmed by the husky chuckle he'd elicited and charmed by the poked out tongue that followed it.

This is what he'd been missing most the last little while, he realized, the easy back and forth of private jokes and smiles he'd come to rely on. She'd barely reacted when he sat on the cactus the other day – why hadn't he seen then that her edginess had all the signs of that old flight reflex? No matter – what he could see now was how brightly she was shining, buoyed by the success of the mission. She might complain he'd been the one treating her like damaged goods but in retrospect he could see that she'd been quick to anger over his attitude because she was second-guessing herself too. The only good thing that had come out of all of this was that when someone's else life had been on the line, it had been her fight reflex that came out on top.

He carried on in the same teasing tone. "And yet, impressive as that speech was, I still don't know exactly what exactly your point was."

Amanda had turned and was starting to tidy away the plates and empty take-out containers.

"Well, it's perfectly simple – if you really feel you don't know me well, you must not have been paying attention because I'm not really all that hard to know."

"Oh, that is so not true!" he said vehemently. "You blindside me every other day with something!"

She stopped for a moment to consider his laughing protest. "Well, I shouldn't be able to," she finally said, her dimples peeking out suddenly. "Not if you were really a good spy."

Lee began helping her clear the table, watching her thoughtfully as she moved quietly around the room, the same way he'd gotten used to her moving around his apartment that week she'd looked after him. He'd thought he'd known her pretty well before then, but she'd surprised him over and over even in just those few days. He'd been certain she would irritate him with chatter and mothering; instead she'd been comforting and intuitive. He'd thought she was defenseless; instead she'd revealed a hidden strength to withstand the unthinkable.

You're right, I should get to know you better.