Part Three
Alex's leg ached by the time that the rusty lock snapped and he freed himself. He only paused for a moment to rub at it before he limped swiftly from the factor, very aware of how much time he had squandered and far ahead of him Scofield cold be by now. While Alex knew what Scofield's endgame was, he still had no way of knowing how he planned to get there, and Alex's legitimate authority as an agent of the United States stopped at the border. Within the US, Scofield's and Burrows's deaths could be explained away with relative ease. They were violent criminals, one of whom would surely be executed within weeks of his recapture, and had through their reckless disregard for civilian welfare over the course of their escape had made it abundantly clear that they would maintain their freedom at any cost. Eyebrows would be raised when their deaths came so close on the heels of the Apolskis boy, but Alex was long past the point where he could be brought to heel by concerns of professional reputation.
If Scofield made it to Panama, though, Alex had no doubt that he would be sent into the wild right along with him. He would not be released from the hand that held his leash until he brought back the heads of both brothers as a gift. Whatever that releasing would entail, Alex had long since lost any desire to make this longer than it had to be.
Alex walked out of the factory, into the bright sunshine, and found only a set of tracks in the dust where he had last seen a very expensive government-issued car. He touched at the keys in his pocket exhaled a puff of air that almost wanted to be a laugh. Under a different set of circumstances, he thought that he might even have been having fun. According to Scofield's file, he had grown up with a background that nearly rivaled Alex's own. Father gone before Scofield had even been born, mother dead before he hit adolescence, a series of foster homes after that which frequently hovered on the verge of poverty and more than once descended into outright abuse. Scofield had been no stranger to the inside of a hospital room by the time that he had turned eighteen and been declared responsible for himself. In spite of this, almost in defiance of it, he had resisted the temptation that a lot of other kids in his position had fallen into to let it turn him mean and push him towards the other side of the law once it became clear that the legitimate side that it would not or could not protect him. Prior to the conviction that had sent him to Fox River, Scofield had not had so much as a misdemeanor on his record. If he had learned how to hotwire a car from his far more criminally industrious brother, then he had seen no need to let it show.
Meanwhile, the tall woman with the auburn hair who was almost certainly the infamous Dr. Tancredi had a similar and nearly pathological need to rebel against her upbringing. Father a successful lawyer who had then turned politician, upper class from the day that she had been born, and yet she had seen no desire to live up to that standard. Her criminal record had begun at the age of fourteen and had continued well into her stint in medical school, and had on two memorable occasions had included being caught with a boyfriend in a stolen car. The boyfriend had taken the majority of the blame each time. If Alex was asked to lay money on which one of them was responsible for the mysterious disappearance of his car, he would have put it squarely on the fairer sex.
"Got yourself quite a girlfriend there, Scofield," Alex muttered to himself as he realized how much time that he was wasting by standing there. He began walking the mile or so that separated the factory from the place where the chase had begun, putting himself within Scofield's and Tancredi's minds for a moment and figuring that they must surely realize how foolish it would be to spend any substantial amount of time in a government car that was clearly bearing the marks of a collision. They would have gone back only far enough to retrieve Tancredi's vehicle.
Alex was not elated to be right as he sighted his car sitting in the exact place where Tancredi had left hers as the chase began. He nevertheless wasted no time in jogging across the remaining distance, sliding into the front seat, and pulling out from underneath it a file that contained all of the latest information on the case. Alex's fingers were trembling slightly, hatred and not fear, as he lifted his cellular phone from his jacket pocket and punched in a number. "It's me," he said as soon as the phone was picked up and before the person on the other end of the line had a chance to acknowledge him.
"I know," Bill Kim answered smoothly. "I was not aware that you were the sort who required your hand to be held."
Alex tightened his hand around the phone until the plastic creaked. "The retrieval won't be necessary," he said curtly, flipping through the folder on his lap. Pausing for a moment so that he could stare at the mess that Tancredi had left of all of the wires beneath his steering wheel, he added, "But I'll need a new car."
"I'll see what I can do within a few hours," Kim responded in a voice so oily-smooth that Alex did not think that he would have been able to resist the urge to put his fist into the man's teeth if Kim had been standing in front of him. As he was already standing in a place much darker and more impossible to climb out of than any of the mistakes of his misspent youth, Alex was seeing less and less reason to acknowledge that the previous three decades of enlightenment had ever happened at all.
"Fine," Alex said, and heard a growl that he neither desired to control nor thought that he would be able to if he tried. "When you've decided that I've learned my lesson, send the car around. Maybe if I'll develop powers of teleportation I'll be able to catch him before he crosses the border."
Kim made a huffing sound on the other end of the line that maybe have surprise, may have been amusement that Alex still thought that he had the autonomy to make his sass meaningful, may have been a warning that Alex would pay for it later. Alex could bring himself to care equally about all three options. "Scofield's in Gila?"
"Scofield's in Gila," Alex confirmed. He thought of the woman who had been with him and decided that this was a detail that Kim did not need to know. Only under the most Draconian of justice systems would a woman be condemned to death for something that stood an equal chance of being a case of aiding and abetting or a simple moment of forgetfulness.
It was funny, how Alex still found his thoughts falling into the ones that he had entertained while had still been working towards anything that could be considered justice.
"Is Tancredi with him?" Kim asked immediately.
Alex allowed only the barest of pauses to go by before he answered, "No. Either the rendezvous hasn't taken place yet or she got spooked and called it off. He's alone."
The barest of pauses was apparently still plenty pause enough. "Of course he is," Kim responded smoothly. "You are not in a position where lying is wise, Alex. What kind of example does it set for your boy?"
If Alex continued to clench the phone so hard, he was going to wind up breaking it. He forced his fingers to loosen and exhaled a long breath before he said, "Scofield cares for her, and he knows that we're after him. The chances that he would tell her anything and risk that-" Were roughly the same chances that he would have said anything meaningful to the Apolskis kid.
"Don't worry, Alex," Kim cut him off. It was almost as if he was the one with the superpowers that Alex had spoken of so sarcastically a few moments before. "Your job remains only to locate and deal with the convicts. Agent Kellerman is equal to the task of capturing Dr. Tancredi and discovering what she may or may not know."
Meaning that, rather than a clean and relatively painless bullet to the back of the head, the Tancredi woman could expect several hours of torture before Kellerman either discovered what he wanted to know or grew bored with her and disposed of her body in several different locations of his own devising. Yes. Alex was setting quite the example for Cameron to live up to by standing by and allowing that to happen. The phone creaked warningly beneath his hand again as Alex replied, "Good." He felt as if he might be sick, and was pleased to hear that the nausea did not sound in his voice.
"A car will be made available to you within half an hour, then," Kim said, clearly winding up to end the conversation. "Give me your location and I'll send it to you."
Alex flipped rapidly through the folder in his lap before he answered. "First I'll need the GPS information on a car rented out to either Sara Tancredi or a Kelli Foster," he said. The dead woman's wallet had not been found among her things. There was a good chance that Tancredi was adopting her identity for the purposes of fleeing across the country. Alex doubted that either Scofield or Tancredi would be foolish enough to return to Tancredi's original motel. "Send the car to that location."
"Of course." Kim accepted the fact that Alex was essentially giving him an order with a smarmy grace that made Alex want to put his fist into Kim's face again. "I need not remind you that you are not to interfere in Agent Kellerman's task."
"No," Alex said. "I know my job." He hung up the phone and then reached beneath the steering wheel so that he could touch the wires that Tancredi had helpfully pulled out for him against one another. She was not the only one who could return to her roots when the need arose.
---
Michael sank back against the end table for a moment, staring down at the note in his hand and waiting, childishly, for the words to rearrange themselves into a more pleasing message. There was no clue to Sara's mental state in her hurried handwriting, no hint that she was feeling regretful or remorseful about her decision to flee. When pressed right down to it, Michael could not say that he altogether blamed her. A great many women would have refused to give their meeting a chance at all.
Sara had not had time to stew like Michael had, however, and realize that the same people who had launched the conspiracy against his brother and her father and were willing to send a corrupted (but not willingly, Michael's mind insisted, pointing out over and over again that the behavioral math simply did not add up, no matter how much he had misread people before) agent out to kill him would not stop there. The same logic that had applied to David would apply to Sara as well.
His decision made for him in a single instant, Michael exhaled and then hurriedly reached for his pants and shoes. Sara could yell at him, she could poke all of the holes in his plan that she wanted, she could pound her fists against his chest and even give him the punch in the kidneys that they both knew that he probably deserved. Sara could not, however, leave. After everything else that had happened to her because of him, Michael would not abide adding death to that list.
And if that entailed more manipulation and more of taking her autonomy away from her all over again? Michael paused with his hand on the motel room door and heard someone rev an engine in the parking lot outside. Then Sara could hate him forever, but Michael would throw her over his shoulder and carry her off like a caveman before he would allow her to be hurt.
The revving of the engine in the parking lot only grew louder, now accompanied by the squealing of tires. Michael suddenly had a terrible feeling, made all the more troubling because it was so irrational, that could not be displaced. He threw open the door and stepped out into the sunshine.
Stepped out, and then leapt back into the room again almost as quickly as a gray Taurus blew past him as such a speed that he would have been killed if his reflexes had not been fast enough to jerk him backwards again. It was not moving so fast that Michael could not see the blur of Sara's brilliant auburn hair in the driver's seat, or the profile of a man in the passenger seat. Michael swore bitterly and darted back into the hotel room, briefly cursing his own disinterest in weapons. His gaze fell upon the phone. Michael could hardly save her from a car crash, but the police would be almost as disastrous.
There was a loud screeching noise of traumatized metal and a crash that shook the entire building less than a second later. He dropped the phone and ran out the door again. Sara had, for reasons that were at present known only to herself but which Michael intended to ask her about as soon as he made sure that she was not dead, elected to drive her car directly into the side of the motel's office. The hood had been crumpled and pushed so far towards the interior of the car that the occupants would be lucky if they were not dead, even luckier if they were not spitting out pieces of the engine for the next week. Sara was slumped over the steering wheel, all of that hair falling forward and obscuring her face, and Michael thought for a moment that his heart was going to stop in his chest and leave the rest of his body to fend for itself. He rushed forward without pausing to think of the faces that were peeking out of the motel room doors, the shocked cries.
Sara began to twist and move as Michael reached the car. That was the cue for his heart to remember that it was more than just a shocked spectator to all of this and actually had a job to do. There was blood on her face as she straightened, and on her hand as she pushed her hair back. Sara blinked about her owlishly and for several seconds did not appear to know where she was. She jumped when Michael jerked hard and fruitlessly against the door in an effort to open it.
Michael gave the door three hard tries, putting such effort into each one that his shoulder threatened to go on strike the same way that his heart had a few moments before, before he was forced to admit that it was going to take much more than human strength alone to pry it open. He turned and saw, just before the entryway to the office, a flowerbed where a few bright marigolds were struggling to grow. More space was taken up by rocks than by flowers. That was just fine, so far as Michael was concerned; it was not the flowers that he was interested in. He picked up the largest rock that would fit his hand comfortably and then brought it down hard against the driver's side window. A starburst pattern appeared in the glass. Though the car was not smoking and the only sound that was emerging from the engine was a disinterested clicking sound, Michael still swore that he could smell gasoline. He brought the rock down against the window again, shattering it. Sara yelped from inside the car and flinched away from the shards as they fell in on her. She was not paying him a great deal of attention, Michael noted, but was instead watching the man beside her, who had also fallen unconscious and was just beginning to stir.
"Come here," Michael said, reaching into the car and grabbing Sara beneath her arms so that he could lift her from the car.
"Hey, man, you shouldn't move her, you could turn her into a quadriplegic or something," a kid who did not look yet old enough to drink said from behind Michael. Michael promptly ignored him. Deep inside the car, he could see the glitter of gunmetal.
"No," Sara muttered as Michael began to lift her out of the window. He was cutting his forearms on the jagged shards of glass that had not been knocked from the window, but he hardly felt it. Sara was bleeding from a long cut across her hairline that at the very least did not look particularly deep and had a red mark spanning across her forehead that would soon become a bruise. She was slurring her speech slightly and her eyes, from the quick examination that Michael was able to give them, did not appear to be reacting to the bright light at the same rate. "Michael, he has a gun."
"I know," Michael said. "We'll work it out later." He lifted her from the car and set her down on the ground beside him. Her legs only held her up for a few seconds, obliging Michael to sweep her up and into his arms before she could fall. A larger crowd was gathering around them by the second, and most of them were exhorting Michael to put Sara down before he wound up breaking her spine. Michael grit his teeth and ignored them all. Better he risk hurting her than they both be killed by virtue of staying and allowing their pursuers to know where they were.
Not that he was not taking an enormous risk as it was, for the crowd was not dispersing and someone surely had to have called the police by now. Michael probably still had time to flee and get away, if he moved quickly, but that would involve setting Sara back down to the pavement and leaving her to her fate. The man who was still in the car suggested pretty strongly what that fate would be. Michael ground his teeth against one another, spun with Sara in his arms to take in the growing number of people, one of whom was bound to put a name to the nagging feeling that they recognized him from somewhere sooner or later, and waited for the spark of a plan to come to him.
There was a screech of tires over pavement just as another car window was broken out behind him, and Michael thought, 'That's not what I meant.' The crowd parted way to allow a black sedan with a long streak of missing paint along its side to come screaming into the parking lot. Mahone slammed on the brakes so hard that it was a wonder that he did not put his own head through the windshield, and his face as he stepped free from the car was enough to make everyone scatter back even further and one or two who did not look as if they were on the right side of the law to slip quietly back inside. Michael's first thought upon seeing Mahone was, absurdly, that the man did not look well. His face was pale, and the angry, desperate conviction that had been driving him while Michael had held him prisoner was burning even hotter now, so that he seemed on the verge of being consumed into a cinder with it. Michael exhaled and took a step back, closer to the car, before he set Sara to her feet again. The look in Mahone's eyes was not that of a man in full possession of his faculties, and if he should shot at him, then Michael did not want Sara to be caught by the bullet that was meant for him.
Sara if anything was operating at an even shakier level than Mahone was. She wobbled back and forth for several long moments like a newborn colt before she gave up and put her hand back against the Taurus. Her hand left a sticky print of blood on the paint. "Oh, my God," she whispered as she finally caught on to the fact that it was Mahone and that he was holding a gun. "Michael, you pissed off the Terminator."
Michael was pretty sure that that was a combination of the concussion and the adrenaline poisoning talking, but he could not help but give Sara a look as he slowly raised his hands into the air. Mahone would not shoot them in front of a crowd, not unless he planned on shooting everybody who had gathered to watch the commotion. He was far gone, but Michael did not think that he was quite that far.
Did not think so, at any rate, but Michael had been staggeringly wrong about people before. He thought of how he had tried to reason with Mahone while he had still had the man trapped, and how frustrating it had been to see those glimmers of a good and rational man beneath the strain and the corruption, only to have that man twist away again every time that Michael thought he might be listening.
"It's okay," Mahone said to the crowd as he held up his badge with one hand and pointed his gun steadily at Michael with the other. There was no tremble in his hand. "I'm a federal agent, and these two are wanted criminals."
"I think someone already called the police," said the same young man who had been so troubled by Michael's lifting Sara out of the front seat.
Mahone's face tightened. Michael thought for a moment that he might put a bullet between the kid's eyes, and the crowd be damned. The darkness moved away from his face, if not his eyes, as he replied smoothly, "I can guarantee you that I outrank them."
Michael could hear a second loud cracking sound from behind him as the glass in the passenger window finally gave way. He did not turn his head to watch the man who had tried to take Sara captive emerge from the car. Trapped between two predators, it was the one that he knew, the one who had once been a good man, that Michael refused to take his eyes away from. "It's one thing to hunt me and my brother," Michael began, loudly enough for the entire crowd as well as Mahone to hear. The warning glare that he was given in return was hardly a deterrent, given what he already knew of Mahone and his plans. "But Sara, too? She's innocent in this."
"Aiding and abetting hardly makes someone innocent," Mahone snapped back, jerking his gun briefly in the direction of Sara. Her eyes were clearing of their fog more rapidly by the second, and she cast Michael an alarmed glance. He ignored it in favor of staring at Mahone hard, while Mahone for his part was occupied with watching the man emerging from the car as intently as Michael was listening to him.
"Is that a crime worth killing someone over?" Michael asked softly. Mahone's eyes jumped towards his. Beneath all of that muck that the man had surrounded himself with, Michael had no idea what he was seeing.
Before Mahone could answer, whether he was planning a real answer or, more likely, another arrow from the wall that Michael had been relentlessly throwing himself against, the sound of shifting from the car behind him became that of a pair of feet striking the ground, a muffled curse. Michael turned his head far enough to see a well-dressed man with a deceptively cherubic face leaning up against the car as if he would not be able to stand without it.
Sara, Michael noticed, was also watching him. "Michael," she said in a soft, frightened voice.
"It will be okay," Michael assured her.
She cut him a look. "I thought you were going to stop lying to me."
Fair point. "It's a work in progress," Michael murmured as he noticed that Mahone's eyes were moving rapidly between him and the new man, as if he was having trouble deciding who was the biggest threat from one minute to the next.
"Agent Mahone," the man with the cherubic face said as he found his balance again. He was wearing sunglasses, but one of the lenses was cracked out as a result of striking his head against the dashboard when Sara had implemented her kamikaze mission. Michael saw that he had been right in his original assessment of the man's angelic looks, for the eyes were chill, practical, and impossible to negotiate with. "Thank you for your help. You arrived just in time." Michael could not be certain and did not want to give himself false hope, for he was becoming well-accustomed by now to Mahone's actions and his demeanor telling two entirely different stories, but he thought that he saw Mahone's upper lip curl slightly before he acknowledged the thanks with a jerk of the head.
The new man ran his eyes across the curious crowd and looked as if he were struggling to hold back a moue of disgust. "Thank you for your help, folks, but we don't need you anymore," he announced. "I'd like all of you to go back inside and wait until the Gila police give you the all clear to come back out again. I don't want anyone getting hurt if these two get desperate and stupid." The man locked eyes with Michael long enough to let Michael know that it was his most fervent wish that Michael would do something stupid. "Now," the man added in a fierce tone when the few who looked as if they had nothing to fear from police attention were slow to obey. "Dr. Tancredi, come here." Though he was holding a weapon on her, she still looked swiftly back at Michael. He had a few ideas in his head, but they made the Panama plan that she had disliked so much look like a well-oiled machine in comparison. Mahone had a line of sweat dotting his forehead under the sun. They all did, for June in New Mexico was nothing to take lightly, but it was Mahone who Michael found his eye being continually drawn to. "Dr. Tancredi, need I remind you that you are not the one in control here?"
'That doesn't mean that you are, either,' Michael thought, at the same time that Mahone said sharply, "No." Though the veneer of calm on the surface appeared unchanged, Michael got the curious feeling that underneath it Mahone wanted nothing so much as he wanted a good, stiff drink. "I'm to take Tancredi into custody along with Scofield."
Their new man stopped looking like an angel everywhere, finally, and not just around his eyes. An angry flush rose up in his cheeks. He stepped forward and around the car. "That's not the plan, Alex," he said, putting a deliberate stress upon Mahone's first name that managed to be both an insult and a threat.
Whatever moment of conflict that Mahone had gone through before announcing that he was going to be taking control of Sara as well as Michael, either it had ended or he had learned to hide it better. "Orders have changed, Agent Kellerman," he said smoothly. "Maybe you're out of the loop." Mahone pointed his gun at Michael while Michael was preoccupied with watching Agent Kellerman jerk back as if he had received a nearly physical blow and said, "Come here and turn around."
"Michael," Sara whispered next to him, while Michael in one flash of insight came to two very important conclusions.
"Trust me," Michael whispered back to her, while Mahone said, "Scofield" and let his gun say a few more things besides that his voice did not. Sara flashed him a look that even in the midst of her remaining mental fog said clearly that trust was the very last thing that he was allowed to ask of her at that moment. "I have an idea."
Michael walked over to Mahone as he was commanded, turned around, and crossed his wrists behind his back. He maintained eye contact with Sara, who looked scared and angry and determined all at once as Agent Kellerman came up to her and, Mahone be damned, took her possessively by the elbow. There was such a great deal of the first emotion moving across her face that it was not until someone knew her well that they could appreciate the second and the third. Michael hoped that that would work in their favor.
"What is he going to do to her?" Michael murmured as Mahone behind was forced to holster his gun and trust in Agent Kellerman's own weapon to keep Michael subdued. The first touch of Mahone's fingers against his wrist stilled for a moment. "Not kill her. You can do that yourself. Sara's as innocent as David was, and you have no reservations against killing." Michael felt a bitter twist overtake his mouth for a moment as he threw Mahone's own words back at him.
The fingers paused for only a second before they resumed their work, and Michael felt the first cold bite of a handcuff around one of his wrists. If he allowed it to get to the second, then he and Sara both were done where they stood. "Interesting theory," Mahone said. "Why don't you tell it to me in the car, if you can do it succinctly. There won't be time for much else." Up close, Michael realized that Mahone had not overcome his conflict from a few moments before, only learned to hide it better: his voice was less steady than a power line in a high wind. Surely the possibility of Oscar Shales's murder being discovered could not do this to a man, Michael thought, and wondered what the other options could possibly be.
"So what is it, then?" Michael continued as if Mahone had not spoken. He felt the hands go still again. Mahone's skin was very warm against Michael's own. "What is it that he's going to do to her that is so bad that you would rather take her with you and kill her yourself? Is he going to rape her? Torture her?" The momentary hitch in Mahone's breath behind him was the most overt confirmation that Michael was ever going to receive.
"Oh," he breathed out, suddenly feeling sick. Sick, and angrier than he could remember being in years. "So that's it. He's going to torture her. Because she knows something, or for his own pleasure?" When Mahone did not answer, Michael went on, "I don't suppose that it matters, in the end. Sara is going to die horribly, and you're going to allow it because you're too frightened of whatever hold the Company has over you to remember that you used to be a good man."
The hand around his wrist became a vice, jerking Michael even more closely towards Mahone than he had already been standing. A few more inches and they would be pressed flush against one another. "Scofield," Mahone whispered against Michael's ear, all of the hesitation fled from his voice to leave it hot and pulsing with anger instead. "There are layers and layers to this that you cannot begin to understand, and until you do I suggest that you keep your goddamned mouth shut." Mahone's ragged hot breath pushed against the skin beneath Michael's ear. Michael realized that it was the first time that he had ever heard Mahone swear.
"Gila's a small town," Michael said by way of reply. "Lots of isolated back roads. That gives me, what, about half an hour to make all of the pieces fit?"
Mahone huffed out a laugh against the side of Michael's neck. It was as dark and bitter as day-old coffee, and sounded as if Mahone would never laugh from joy again. Before he could answer, Agent Kellerman called out, "Is there a problem, Alex?" He must have tightened his grip upon Sara as he said it, for her face contorted for a moment in pain. Knowing what he knew now, even with his general aversion to violence Michael could not help but wish for a moment that he had taken the rock around to the passenger's widow, broken it, and then broken the man inside as well.
"No," Mahone answered, sounding angry that he had allowed a visible break in his self-control to appear at all. Michael felt the first cold touch of the second cuff around his other wrist and thought, 'No trouble at all.' He stared hard at Sara and hoped that she would be able to catch up.
The useful thing about being a structural engineer was that it required a nearly perfect sense of spatial awareness. Michael stepped back into Mahone before the second handcuff could be locked into place and felt both the flush of skin and heard Mahone's startled exhalation. It turned into a grunt as Michael drew his elbow forward and then slammed it back as hard as he was able into Mahone's abdomen. The unlocked handcuff slipped down over Michael's hand, covering his knuckles. Michael spun free from Mahone's grasp and then drove the hand with the impromptu brass knuckles viciously into Mahone's face. He grappled for the gun with the other. Michael had never had an interest or an aptitude towards violence, not even during those sporadic occasions from his youth when Lincoln had tried to teach him how to fight. Playing what would have happened to Sara without intervention in his head, it was easy to convince himself that this time was the exception.
The useful thing about being a federal agent was that they were the cream of the crop, and trained to deal swiftly with virtually any resistance that a prisoner might offer. The brief, shocked burst of air was the closest thing to an advantage that Michael was able to gain. The hand on his wrist turned into a vice and struggled to jerk Michael away from the gun as Mahone pulled his lips back from his teeth. Mahone was bleeding from cuts across the bridge of his nose and beneath his right eye, courtesy of where Michael had struck him with the cuffs, and his gaze was dark and furious. If he was still having doubts about his role in an organization that tortured and killed innocent people, then Michael doubted that he was going to let it slow him down again.
Michael was younger and slightly stronger, and had an advantage of leverage by having Mahone trapped between the car and himself, but Mahone had been doing this kind of work for a very long time. Pain sharp enough to make Michael's vision go white radiated up from his wrist as Mahone put a savage pressure down on the tendons and nerves on the underside, and Michael thought that he might have ceased struggling for the gun altogether if he had not heard Sara shrieking behind him. He risked whatever consequences that distraction might bring by twisting slightly to the side and peeking over his shoulder. Michael saw that Sara had used Michael's movement as an opportunity to lunge forward and make a bid for Kellerman's own weapon. She and Kellerman were currently grappling over the gun, a battle that was not coming to the swift end that it would have ordinarily, as the car crash had injured them both and thrown them off their game. Kellerman was having trouble using his superior height and weight against her while it was looking as if he was battling back a head injury even worse than Sara's own. Sara, gradually coming to be pinned back against the remains of the Taurus, tried to bring her knee up and into Kellerman's groin. She missed when he twisted with a speed that belied his injuries and wound up striking him in the meaty part of his thigh. Kellerman's loud grunt said that she had put a good deal of force behind it.
Michael's moment of distraction did wind up costing him, in the form of an elbow to the face that snapped his head back and filled his mouth with the taste of blood. Rather than indulging in a few moments of disorientation, he brought the hand that held the cuffs twice more into Mahone's face. Each time, the skin split beneath the metal, each time fresh, warm blood went trailing across Michael's knuckles, each time he felt a little more dismay. He had not been made for violence, either the implementing it or the enjoying of it, and he could not help but be sickened by what he was doing now.
Blood flowed down into Mahone's eyes, blinding him for only a second before he was able to shake his head and throw it free. Didn't matter; Michael had grown accustomed to having to react with a moment's notice to deviations from the plan. He drove Mahone back against his car until the other man grunted with the force of his shoulders hitting the metal and then pushed his thumb hard into Mahone's wrist. Michael hoped that he was a good mimic.
He was, and was told so when Mahone gave a short, sharp gasp that sounded as if it wanted to be much louder. His grip upon the gun that they were both grappling over loosened by a fraction. Michael had not expected to gain an advantage that big and would not be able to help but wonder later if Mahone had not on some level been glad of it, whether it was on a conscious one or not, but in the moment itself he was not inclined to ask questions. Michael wrenched the gun free from its holster at long last and then stepped back quickly, disengaging the safety and then covering the trigger with his finger.
Mahone leaned back against his car and panted as he watched Michael back away with the prize in hand. He did not seem overly concerned with the fact that Michael was now carrying a loaded weapon, but that could be the blood that was still running down his face and obscuring his expression. It was difficult to mistake the look in his eyes for anything other than calm, steady self-assurance, however.
"You're not going to kill me, Scofield," Mahone said in a voice that probably would have been reasonable under other circumstances. "Not if you couldn't even do it when you didn't have to get your hands dirty." Everyone was always so confident about what Michael would or would not do, he reflected, even himself, and always so shocked when they turned out to be wrong. As if he was thinking along these same lines, Mahone touched lightly at the cut across the bridge of his nose and rubbed his fingers together as he stared at the blood.
That same blood was now drying across Michael's knuckles and making the skin itch. It was not a feeling that he enjoyed. "You're right," he told Mahone. "I don't have it in me to be a killer. I don't think that you did once upon a time, either." 'And that was before your organization decided to hurt Sara.' Mahone's eyes came alive with something that might have been fury, had Michael waited long enough to decipher it. He instead flipped the gun around so that he was holding it by the barrel, stepped close to Mahone so that their bodies were once again only inches away from one another, and swung the butt of the gun as hard as he could against Mahone's temple. Mahone tried to block the blow, his fingers a moment of shocking warmth curling around Michael's forearm, but youth took its edge over experience in this round. Michael was not sure that Mahone was really trying all that hard, in any case. His mind prickled to know why, and filed it under the list of questions that could be asked later.
Mahone slumped forward bonelessly and with a nearly sub-audible sigh. Michael could have caught him before he struck the pavement with scarcely any effort at all. He thought of what would have happened to Sara if he had been unable to wrestle that gun away and didn't try.
Michael flipped the gun back around until he was holding it in the correct position again, if any position could really be said to be the correct one. They all felt foreign and strange to him. Michael stared down at Mahone's prone form for a few lingering and oddly detached seconds, unable on a visceral level to convince himself that he had really done such a thing, before he remembered Sara suddenly and spun towards her.
Kellerman had Sara backed up against the Taurus, covering her body with his in a way that made Michael's breath catch in his throat. It was not until Kellerman began to back up with his hands rising slowly into the air that Michael realized what had happened. Sara looked no more comfortable holding a gun than Michael felt, and her hand was shaking every bit as badly as his own. Sara glanced over Kellerman's shoulder at Michael, saw Mahone's prone form at his feet, and widened her eyes.
"Watch the other one, not him," Michael snapped.
Sara jerked her eyes away from Mahone and back towards Kellerman as he started taking the opportunity to sidle close again. She did not fumble before she found the safety and disengaged it. Between that and her ease in hotwiring the car earlier, Michael was willing to bet that she had quite a few tales to tell out of school.
"I don't think that you're going to shoot me, Sara," Kellerman told her in a low, soothing voice. Though Michael supposed that he could have picked up Sara's name from a file somewhere, but the tone of his voice as he said her name said otherwise. Michael kept a close eye on them both as he knelt to begin going through Mahone's pockets for the key to the handcuffs. He saw the flash of uncertainty that moved across Sara's face.
"He was going to torture you to death, Sara," Michael told her in a low voice.
Sara's mouth fell open for a moment before she looked at Kellerman's face and resolved herself. Michael found the kept to the handcuffs at last and unlocked the one that Mahone had managed to snap around his wrist. He turned the agent over and locked Mahone's own wrists together instead. When he glanced up again, Sara's hand had stopped trembling. "You need to back up," she told Kellerman in a voice that crackled. Though Kellerman's easy smile scarcely flinched, he no longer looked certain that Sara would not kill him.
"Keep the gun on him," Michael told Sara as he opened the door to Mahone's car and began putting the agent into the back seat. He glanced up and saw a few faces peeking at him from around the motel curtains, which twitched quickly closed again. There was still no sound of approaching sirens, even though the police were long overdue. Michael was more convinced than ever that either Mahone or Kellerman had put in a call keeping them away, and that they were regretting it now.
"Not a problem," Sara said.
Slamming the door shut behind Mahone's prone form, Michael said, "Okay." Sara began to inch around Agent Kellerman, who was looking more furious by the second. Yeah, someone was definitely regretting not allowing the local police to get involved.
"How far do you think that you're going to get before someone catches up to you?" Kellerman asked Michael. "Every day the distance gets a little shorter." He jerked his head in the direction of Sara. "And what will happen to her on that day?"
Sara saved Michael the trouble of answering by responding coldly, "About what you already had planned, I think."
Michael's lips quirked upwards for a moment before he told Sara, "Get into the car." She went, keeping the gun trained on Kellerman until the very second that her head disappeared into the passenger side door. "Think we'll take our chances." He ducked quickly into the car himself and barely waited until he had the door closed before he was slamming his head down against the gas pedal.
In the passenger seat, Sara dropped the gun to the floorboard with a thump and then rubbed briskly at her jeans as if she had touched something filthy. Her eyes were far, far away, and the blood that started at her temple and then ran in a slow trail down her cheek was very red. Michael hated to drag her back to the earth, but they didn't have a great deal of time.
"You were perfect back there," Michael told her, because she was looking lost.
Sara flashed him a wan smile. "Never did anything like that before," she confessed.
"You were perfect," Michael repeated. He hesitated for a moment, watching as Sara touched at her head and winced. The red mark that stretched across her forehead was already darkening into a bruise. She would not be able to go out without turning heads for at least two weeks. "I'm sorry, but I'm going to need you to hotwire another car. We can't go far in this one."
"No, that's fine-" Sara broke off, snapped her mouth closed, and took several deep breaths. Looking in the rearview mirror, she said slowly, "Michael, why are we kidnapping a federal agent?"
"He knows about Panama," Michael said.
Sara gave up on trying to assess Mahone's condition from the rearview mirror and twisted around in her seat, wincing as she did so. Probably had a few bruised or broken ribs, too. Michael resolved to keep an eye on her, nearly as much as he would the person in the back seat. "So you're going to take him to Panama in your suitcase?"
"No." Sara turned in her seat and arched an eyebrow at him. "Just to the border. If he knows about Panama, then you might also know about Bolshoi Booze." Michael shook his head as he took them swiftly down a side street where there were few cars and fewer people. "His authority stops at the border. All that we have to do is get there and leave him behind." Sara continued to give him a dubious look, as if she was seeing all of the many, many flaws in that plan and was only waiting for a less fraught time to point them out. If that was the case, she might have a long wait ahead of her. Mahone might have told other agents about Bolshoi Booze, or it might be that he was so thoroughly corrupted that he would not care that his authority ended at the border and would pursue them all the rest of their lives. That left the option of either taking him across the border and praying for a moral awakening, or of killing him.
Michael ignored the feel of Sara's stare against the side of his face and turned down yet another side street. He would have to come up with a third option, then. He always did.
End Part Three