Author's Note:
Wow guys! Thanks so much for all of the reviews, favorites, and follows. As requested, here is chapter two. Please let me know what you think! I always take suggestions into consideration.
-C
"What's the status gentlemen?" Hetty asked as she met them on the landing of the stairs on their way up to ops.
"We lost all contact with Kensi and Callen. Eric and Nell thought that they might have a lead so we were going to talk to them now," Sam briefly explained. It was evident that the senior agent was anxious to get back in the field and do some ground work.
Deeks kept his lips firmly pressed in a tight line, afraid of the whirl of unkind comments that he would bombard Hetty with. Lingual experience be damned- they knew that splitting up either of the pairs never ended well.
"Very well," she answered curtly and returned to her desk.
Sam and Deeks trotted up the rest of the stairs and found themselves in ops. Eric and Nell crowded the big screen, watching the same video feed over and over again.
"What do we have?" The blond inquired.
Eric sighed. "Not much. They left the warehouse in three SUVs. Nell and I tracked them for a few blocks before losing them completely."
"No luck tracking their cell phones either," Nell added. "They were destroyed."
"So we have nothing," Deeks mumbled.
"Not necessarily. We can get in touch with Patrick Lawrence. He's bound to know where they would take Kensi and Callen. And that's presuming that they're covers were blown. For all we know their cells could have been dumped and are continuing with the op," Sam argued.
"They would have contacted us."
"One step at a time. Let's get in touch with Lawrence."
The Wonder Twins spent the next ten minutes trying to reach their inside man. When it rang incessantly every time, they resorted to tracking it.
"It shows that he's near an old plant for demolishing cars just fifteen minutes south of the warehouse," Nell relayed. "Sending coordinates to you now."
"Thanks guys, you're the best," Sam dismissed. Him and Deeks were heading out of the operations center when another techie that they barely knew captured their attention.
"Code Red! How did they…I just stepped out to get a coffee…"
"What is it?" Sam demanded, coming up behind the guy in his twenties.
"Bruce? Code Red means that…oh God. I'm getting Hetty!" Nell realized with wide eyes. The petite intelligence analyst took off running. Eric looked extremely panicked as well.
Deeks squinted at Bruce's screen, which was showing security cameras outside of the building. Men were spotted on almost every one. Cartel members.
"Deeks, let's go!" Sam barked. Together, the two agents sprinted down the steps, past Nell at Hetty's desk, and outside. They were fifteen yards outside the main doors when they caught a glimpse of the darkened SUV burning rubber to get away.
"They must have followed us here from the meet. Kensi and Callen were clearly blown," Deeks reasoned.
Sam's eyebrows furrowed in thought. "On the tape, they were going away from the building…not to it. Which means-"
The detective, picking up on Sam's implications, immediately reached for the door, only to be blown back several feet by an explosion that brought part of the roof down on him; everything went dark.
Walking away from the burning ruins of the Spanish mission was easily the hardest thing Deeks had ever done. As close as Sam was to the work place, he had been hardened for warfare. The detective wondered how many other times this had happened: the grizzled agent being forced to move on from something he loved so much. For Deeks, it was summoning up emotions he had buried as a child. And now the feeling left an aching feeling in his heart.
Deeks held his arm close to his body, afraid to jolt it too much. Thankfully it was getting dark and passing civilians wouldn't detect the blood stains on the sleeve of his shirt. Part of the roof had left a huge gash in his right bicep, pretty much incapacitating it.
"Deeks! Deeks, can you hear me?" A voice questioned fiercely from above.
A harsh light was breaking through the detective's closed eyelids. He blinked the brilliance away, only to realize that it was caused by growing flames from what was formally the Office of Special Projects.
He bolted straight up, trying to get his bearings. They were now across the street and several ambulances and fire trucks were already on scene.
"What happened?" He moaned, holding his head in pain.
"Our operation was blown from the beginning. There's gotta be a mole in our division. We were followed back to ops, and…" Sam broke off, choked with grief. Other than a soot-streaked face, the big guy looked unharmed. He was farther from the building when it exploded. Luckily, it looked as if at least half the building was still intact, even if it was steadily being engulfed in flame. There was a higher chance for survival that way.
"We have to go in there," Deeks pleaded. For all the courage in his voice, he was struggling to get to his feet.
Sam put a hand on his shoulder to steady him. "There's nothing we can do here."
The detective sighed, knowing he was right. He watched as firefighters aided people getting out of the burning building, but he was too far away to make out any specifics.
"I can't just sit back and do nothing."
"We're not," the ex-Navy SEAL assured. "The paramedics, Hetty, and the Wonder Twins will handle things on this front. But right now, Kensi and Callen need our help- something we can't give with a mole in our midst."
"So what now?"
"Are you okay?" Sam inquired, checking to see if Deeks was keeping up in the raining night. "You got hit pretty bad."
"It's just a scratch," he answered through clenched teeth. When they had a moment, not only would he need a new shirt but to dress it as well.
"Sure it is. We're almost there; I'll take a look at it then."
"And where is there, exactly?"
"A safe house, kinda."
"Yeah, because that clears things up," Deeks muttered.
They continued a few more blocks until they were in more a rundown area of Los Angeles. Sam ducked into a convenience store that looked like it was ready to foreclose at any day. The windows were dirty and the signs offering bargain deals were hanging on one side. Deeks followed hesitantly. His friend would know what he was doing. But considering the fact that the Salinas Cartel ran the underground of Los Angeles and they were in the middle of it…this wasn't the ideal place to regroup.
He approached the foreign man behind the counter and greeted in a low voice, "As-salam 'alaykum."
"Wa-alaykum as-salam," the clerk returned in disbelief. He shook Sam's hand from across the counter and the two
continued to converse in Arabic. Deeks hung back a few feet, clutching his bleeding arm. He was tempted to grab a bag of Cheetos of the shelf, but that would be rude. He also didn't want to get blood all over the place.
After a minute or two, Sam beckoned Deeks forward. Together, they went into the back room and took a rickety staircase to the second floor which could be rented as an apartment. Well, rented to somebody who was extremely desperate to live with a roof overhead. It was one room with a small bathroom attached. There was a sink, a miniature fridge, and a stove to pass as a kitchen and one dirty mattress pushed in the corner. Next to it was a locked chest. There was a more obvious feature to the room, however.
Sitting in one of the fold up chairs with a gun aimed at the door was none other than Michelle Hanna.
"Michelle," Deeks said in surprise, although it came out more like a grunt.
Michelle got out of her chair and embraced Sam in a tight hug. Then the CIA operative gave him a curt nod as a greeting. "How bad is it?"
"Bad," Sam echoed absentmindedly.
"They found OSP," Deeks elaborated, "which means that every operative out there is left in the cold- including Kensi and Callen."
"We lost contact with G during an op investigation the Salinas Cartel. Nothing's for sure, but one thing we do know is that we have to find them."
"I brought clothes…extra ammo…the works," Michelle said as she handed her husband a bulging duffle bag.
"You need to get out of town for a few days with the kids until it's safe. Please."
She brought Sam into a loving kiss and patted his chest. "I'm only a call away. Here's your new burner phone."
Michelle handed him the small piece of plastic that couldn't have cost more than twenty bucks.
He smiled. "I know."
"I'd really hoped that it would never come to this."
With that, Michelle left the pair alone to rejuvenate. Sam quickly opened up a can of soup in a pot over the stove and then set to work on emptying the duffle bag. Deeks struggled to lift his blood-stained shirt over his head, pain radiating in his arm. He couldn't hide the bleeding wound from Sam, who immediately set to work on cleaning it out without a word at the table.
"What is this place exactly?"
"I saved the owner's life on a mission during my SEAL days. When Michelle and I got married, we agreed to have a safe house just in case anything ever happened to one of us in our line of work. He offered up this apartment as said safehouse," Sam explained, stitching up the wound.
Deeks winced. "Does Callen know about it?"
Sam nodded. "The problem is we have to find them. Even if Callen and Kensi managed to get away from the Salinas Cartel, there would be no way of them knowing what happened to OSP."
The detective let this all sink in. The smell of cheap chicken noodle soup wafted around the apartment until Sam finally served it to him in a plastic cup. It wasn't exactly a five star restaurant, but Deeks was so hungry he didn't care. They sipped on their dinner in silence for the most part.
"How's the arm?"
Deeks flexed his muscle, and a wave a pain took over. "It'll be a problem. I'm not as good with my left."
Sam muttered something unintelligible and then continued, "You better get good quick. Tomorrow we start at the warehouse and follow the road that Nell told us about."
"I'm good to go now. Every second we waste is only endangering them further," Deeks protested, eyes shining with despair.
The senior agent's eyes softened a little. "I'm worried about them too. But we need our rest. If they hit OSP, you can bet that every member of the Salinas Cartel is going to be on the lookout for us. And that's a gun fight we have to be ready for."
Deeks checked his weapon mournfully, his thoughts never leaving the unknown fate of their friends both at the mission and in the cold.