Part Six
Sitting unrestrained in the front seat of the car was quite a different animal from being pitched trussed into the backseat. He could not pretend on any level that this was not happening of his own volition any longer, for one, or that it would not be entirely his own doing if Pam or Cameron died because of it. If they had not died already.
Alex closed his hand into a fist and drove it hard into the plastic of the glove compartment in front of him. In the backseat, Tancredi jumped. Scofield beside him barely bothered to take his eyes away from the road. 'No other choice,' Alex had told himself, and done his best to ignore the fact that the choices had simply not been pleasant ones. They might be dead already.
If that was the case, Alex promised himself grimly, then he would make Paul Kellerman look like a sweet young man who had just wandered down the wrong path by comparison. He had already thrown away everything else that he had in favor of that single, shining goal of protecting his family, and if that was gone…
Alex forced his aching fist to unflex and massaged at the knuckles so that he would not drive them drive them forward and into the dashboard again. Tancredi was being the more open in her watching of him, but that did not mean that Scofield was not also still giving him a careful eye. He was only being more surreptitious about it. The gun was still with Scofield, resting in the pocket of the driver's door. Mahone still knew that he could reach it before Scofield if he moved quickly enough. Probably he could reach it before Tancredi in the back put a bullet into him. After she had fired upon him in the motel room, Alex no longer had any doubt that she would do it.
"You're not going to be able to protect your brother if you go on the run," Alex said, as he was unable to stand the silence any longer. "Not forever." He snorted. "Likely not even for very long."
For the first time, Scofield looked at him directly rather than continuing to cast those glances from beneath his lashes. "We'll talk about it when we get there."
Alex twisted in his seat so that he could look at Scofield more fully. Scofield stiffened when he felt the gaze. "My family might be dead already," he said. Scofield was able to keep his expression neutral, though in the backseat Tancredi was beginning to look worried. Did Alex sound too composed as he said that, he wondered? He had had a great deal more time to contemplate the scenario than most people were faced with. "Because I've decided to do what's right." Scofield could not resist looking at him directly again, guilt clearly written on his face. "Don't hold me to standards that you're not willing to rise to yourself."
Scofield struck at the steering wheel and did not answer. He had not hit it nearly so hard as Alex had done the dashboard a few moments before, but Alex still leaned back in his seat and felt as if he had scored a victory. The light reflecting off of the desert landscape was wreaking hell on his head, adding one more layer to everything else that he already had swimming around in it. Thinking that it was a little late to worry about pride and that he was going to need all of his wits about him, Alex leaned down so that he could go through the suit jacket at his feet. Scofield's hand jerked towards the gun before he remembered and halted himself, Alex noticed from the corner of his eye. He approved. Morality would not keep anyone alive by itself. Best for Scofield and for Alex, too, if everyone remembered that they ought to be standing on the other side of the law.
"The other agent," Scofield began in a voice that Alex did not recognize at first, for Scofield sounded neither as if he was trying to sway Alex or as if he was in the grip of a powerful anger. It took Alex a few more seconds to realize that Scofield was, wonders and miracles, actually trying to reassure him. He would have laughed, had he not been so aware of how unpleasant a sound it would have been.
"His name is Agent Kellerman," Alex offered as he continued his rummaging. He glanced up to see Scofield's gaze turn cool and assessing for a moment. So long as Alex knew things about their foe that Scofield and Tancredi did not, he was a resource. That stopped when he know longer had any information to share. Something to keep in mind.
"Yes," Scofield said. If he continued to give Alex that intent and damnably compassionate look, then he was going to run them all off of the road and end the entire cat and mouse game then and there. "He saw us take you by force. If these people don't think that you're traveling with us voluntarily, they may hold off on harming your family until they're sure."
Alex continued searching for his pen so that he would not snarl openly into Scofield's face, though if he did not find it within the next few seconds… Alex's fingers finally closed around the cool, smooth plastic that may well have prevented a fistfight. He pulled out the pen, unscrewed the cap, and quickly shook out a pill into his palm without particularly caring that Scofield and Tancredi were both watching him very closely. After a second's hesitation, he decided against a second before he straightened and palmed the pill into his mouth.
"Do you have seizures?" Tancredi asked from the backseat, sounding curious. She had recognized the pills immediately. Of course she had.
"No," Alex said shortly and in a voice that said that any further discussion on the matter would not be appreciated. The arch of Tancredi's eyebrow as she leaned back against the seat said that the conversation was only being postponed, not tabled altogether. To Scofield, Alex went on, "They'll kill them the second that they think that I'm no longer useful. I have no way of knowing when that moment will come."
"I'm sorry," Scofield said. He sounded as if he meant it. That nearly made it worse. Alex blew out a long stream of air through his nose and was spared from having to respond to that impossible comment by Scofield pulling the car over to the side of the road. Alex could not see what it was about his particular streak of desert that was any different from the desert that they had passed ten minutes before, but he was not the one who had constructed an entire elaborate escape plan and then tattooed it across his torso. Had he not had so much weighing down on him, Alex thought that he might even been enjoying himself and his new, privileged position within the action.
Scofield turned the car off and threw an approving look over his shoulder at Tancredi as he did so. Were it not for her and her selective attitude towards the commission of felonies, the entire works would have ground to a halt the day before. Scofield grabbed both the gun and the second bag, the one that Alex had still not been able to look into, before he exited the car. Alex and Tancredi followed.
The glare from the sand pricked at Alex's eyes immediately, much stronger than it had been doing while he was still in the car. The pills had not yet begun to do their full work, so that Alex's head was still pounding with all of the tension that was weighing down on him. It took no more than a second for it to inform him that it was not pleased with his conduct thus far, not pleased at all. Alex winced and turned his face downwards, raising his hand to shield his eyes from the worst of it. To his left, he sensed Tancredi doing the same thing to a lesser degree.
"Here," Scofield said softly, taking off the sunglasses that he had been wearing and giving them to her.
"Thank you," Tancredi said in an equally subdued voice as she accepted them and slid them onto her face. Alex could see that she was watching him from the corner of her eye, but he had neither the time nor the inclination to decipher the meaning behind that look.
"Do you have a cellular phone?" Alex asked Scofield instead.
Scofield did not look surprised to be asked. "Sure," he said, handing over one of the prepaid and nearly untraceable phones that could be picked up almost everywhere. The motel phone was not equipped for long distance and it had been all that Alex's nerves could take to hold on for this long. By some mutual, unspoken agreement, Scofield and Tancredi both drifted off a few paces, Tancredi watching with interest as Scofield went through the mysterious contents of the second bag. Alex did not have the time for either of them now. He turned his back on them both and dialed the number to Pam's home.
It rang for times without an answer, and Alex pinched hard at the bridge of his nose. "Come on, come on," he whispered. The pill was working; he could feel the anxiety starting to be soothed away, at least in part. Alex had a mind that he would have kept a tension headache even if he had been on a full morphine drip by that point.
The phone continued to ring. "Come on, Pam." Alex's voice was ragged and raw, and for a few seconds he forgot that he was supposed to be whispering. Tancredi's shoulders tensed, but she was polite enough to pretend that she had not heard. Scofield turned back around so that he could look at Alex directly.
Alex was on the verge of hurling the phone across the sand when finally, finally there came the sound of a voice on the other end of the line. "Hello?" Pam asked. She sounded as if she had just woken up, in spite of the fact that it was nearly noon. Alex could already feel a perplexed frown crossing his face. "Who is this?"
"Pam, it's me," Alex said hurriedly, for the moment pushing aside his concern over the odd way that she sounded.
"Alex?" Pam went from still half-asleep to fully awake between one moment and the next. "Are you all right? You sound strange."
"I'm fine," Alex lied. A few feet away, Scofield turned and looked at him again. He was going to get a cellular phone thrown at him if he continued to do that. "Pam, something has come up at work, and I need you and Cameron to clear out of the house for a few days until I can come and get you." He could feel himself calming as he continued to speak. Pam sounded neither hurt nor frightened. That she had apparently been woken up from a nap in the middle of the day by his phone call was odd, but life was riddled with such oddities. It did not immediately mean that a conspiracy was involved. It was possible that Cameron had been sick the night before, that work was wearing her down, or even that she was still recovering from a very good date. The ink had been dry on their divorce for months, she was not beholden to him in any way.
He had been wearing the leash for so long that he could now still feel it tightening even after he had cut it off, was his problem, Alex told himself. Paranoia was a hazard of the profession, even when he had still been legit. He still could not shake the feeling of fingers crawling up and down his spine.
"Why?" Pam's voice was alert and sharp; whatever sleep that he had woken her up from had obviously not been a deep one. In all of the years that they had been together, Alex had hunted scores of vicious men, and he had never ordered her out of their house before. Save for once. "What's happened?"
"Things are getting a little out of control on the Fox River assignment," Alex said, which was not a lie, even if it still was an understatement so enormous that it was surely walking a fine line. "Threats have been made." Not strictly true, but they had certainly been implied heavily enough to let him read between the lines. "All that I need is for you and Cameron to move into a hotel for a few days." When Pam inhaled on the other end of the line, Alex turned to make eye contact with Scofield as he said deliberately, "I'm heading to Colorado now."
"Does this have anything to do with the cars?" Pam asked. Alex could hear rustling in the background on her end of the line. He assumed that she was already backing, and would have relaxed to hear it if Pam's question had not made every drop of blood that he possessed to stop in his veins.
"What cars?" he snapped in a voice so savage that Scofield and Tancredi both gave up their polite pretending that they were not listening to every word that he said and snapped their heads around towards him.
Pam paused for a moment on the other end of the line, and the sounds of her packing ceased. Alex was on the verge of calling her name when she went on, in a voice that was calm, level, and as close to losing control as she ever came. "Alex, what is happening? You don't sound right."
He had not sounded right for the past year, and they both know it. Pam was only being too tactful at the moment to mention it. "Pam, tell me about the cars," Alex instructed her in a voice that would sound steady and unconcerned to both Scofield and Tancredi. Only Pam would know him well enough to know how worried he was.
"I thought that they were from your office," Pam said. He could hear the effort that it was costing her to swallow back her questions. "I thought that maybe something had gone wrong and you didn't want to tell me, like just before you lost Shales's trail-"
"Pam," Alex cut her off, even though his audience could not possibly hear what she was saying. It was an argument that they had had many times before, both when things had started to go slightly bad and then later when they had fallen off of the rails altogether. When, if- when, Alex told himself sharply, and felt his fingers flex as if he was wrapping his fingers around a gun-he saw her again, they could return to the old fight until they both ran out of breath.
"I've seen sedans following me on the way to work," Pam said. "Once or twice they were parked on the other side of the street. I thought that they were FBI."
"They were," Alex told her. He had yet to actually lie to her. They could fight about the creative and malleable nature of the truth when he knew that she was not moments away from being killed, too. "There's…there's something else, and I promise you that I will explain everything to you when I know that you and Cam are safe." He was not a man who made his promises lightly. That was something else that they both knew.
"Okay," Pam said slowly, with the promissory note to an unpaid debt clearly evident in her voice. Alex very much doubted that she was going to like the answers when she got them. "Cameron is over at Danny's house, I'll go get him. Do you want to talk to him?"
'Yes,' Alex thought, and said, "There's no time. Just grab him and-"
There was a clicking sound on the line. It was so faint that an untrained ear would have no chance of catching it, and that Alex himself would have missed it if he had not been so keyed up on adrenaline. He froze.
"Alex?" Pam asked cautiously when more than a second went by and Alex did not continue to speak. "Are you there?"
"Yeah, I'm here," Alex said. His voice sounded normal to his own ears, but Scofield still turned his head to look at him. Tancredi was watching the both of them from behind her sunglasses without speaking. The portion of her face that Alex could see was blank of expression. "Sorry, babe, someone needed to pull me to the side for a moment." He had not called her 'babe' since they were dating and the very early years of their marriage. Pam's pregnant pause said that she was making note of it. "I just thought of something. Don't go wasting your money on a hotel room where you and Cameron will just be bored. Go to your sister's house. I'll pick you up there when I get to Durango later today." Pam was an only child, and Alex had only instructed her to go to her sister's once before.
"Are you sure that I need to bother her?" Pam asked. Alex had loved her for years, knew her better than anyone, and he still could not hear any betraying fear in her voice. 'That's my girl.' "She has so much going on this time of the year, with the kids getting out of school and all."
"I'm sure," Alex said firmly. "Cameron will have someone to play with this way. I'll contact you soon."
"Soon," Pam echoed. "Take care of yourself, Alex."
"I will." He hung up the phone, turned, and threw the phone back at Scofield. Only quick reflexes kept Scofield from being struck in the chest with it. "Tell me that you have a plan, or I am back in that car." Drive hard and fast, and he could be in Durango before sunset.
"I have a plan," Scofield said.
"You're a fucking liar," Alex told him in a voice that was much calmer than he felt. Scofield blinked when he heard the obscenity, but otherwise did not react.
"You're doing the right thing," Scofield told him after several seconds had gone by.
Alex turned and flashed Scofield a thin-lipped smile, made all the more bitter by the fact that he knew that Scofield was right and that there was a weight on him that had been removed ever since they had left the motel room. Had it not been for the new bite of worry, Alex thought that he might even have been in a good mood.
"When you are asked to sacrifice your brother, or to sacrifice her-" Alex threw his arm out to indicate Tancredi, who did not speak. "When you have to give them up for what's right, then I will tolerate a lecture on ethics from you. Not before."
Scofield's eyes flickered. If that was guilt that he was keeping carefully masked beneath the surface, then Alex was not sure that he wanted any part of it. "This is my only chance to keep my brother safe," he began.
"Killing you might be the only way to keep my family safe," Alex shot back. "Pick another excuse."
Anger moved Scofield's face when Alex called his determination to get Burrows out of the country at all costs for what it was, but Alex was not willing to back down. They glared at one another for another moment until Scofield echoed Alex's words of a moment before, "Do you have a plan?"
"Will that make it any more or less the right thing to do?" Alex asked, and knew that he had scored points as he watched Scofield flinch back by a few inches.
"I have to talk to Lincoln," Scofield said. His eyes were dark, his brain obviously working quickly. Had it not been for the problem of Burrows, Alex had an idea that the would have already won Scofield over entirely. "If I can't convince him, then I wish you luck. If I can…then we could use your help." Scofield looked more uncertain than Alex could ever remember seeing him before, and Alex had a feeling that the high-minded words were still heavily at war within him against the urge to get Burrows to safety regardless of the collateral damage. It was good to know that Alex was a member of a club, however exclusive that club might turn out to be.
'Not good enough,' Alex was on the verge of saying, had he not closed his lips around the words before they could make their way to the surface. His Pam and Cameron stood against a whole host of others. Scofield had not been wrong when he had said that Alex was doing the right thing by turning to strike back against the giant that held so many people in its grasp. Before the sacrifices had become his own, Alex would have said that the personal was always to be sacrificed to the Right when it was required. He thought that now, if he pushed himself, he could maybe become that man again.
"Fine," Alex said. Scofield nodded and, so discreetly that Alex nearly missed it, exhaled. The thought of Scofield putting weight on Alex's answer to the point that he was waiting for it with bated breath was so large and strange that Alex was not sure what he was supposed to do about it.
"Thank you," Scofield told him in a soft, sincere voice that was nearly as unsettling as the sigh had been. He pulled out a small GPS from the bag that Alex had not looked into. The view screen was for a few seconds turned so that Alex was looking at the coordinates upside down. He felt his eyes widening as understanding struck him.
"Bolshoi booze," Alex said, clarifying when Scofield glanced up at him. "Latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. It's very clever.
A slow smile spread across Scofield's face. It looked very good on him, so unexpectedly good that Alex was taken aback for a moment and left reeling yet again. "Thank you." He glanced at his watch and nearly started before he said, "We're running late," as if he, too, had found himself pulled into an unexpected interlude. Scofield started across the sand with Tancredi at his side. It did not seem to occur to him that Alex might not be willing to follow him, still, and Alex would have felt annoyance if he had not already begun moving his feet. Between his family and the ideal, he moved towards the ideal, and wondered if this would be enough to save him or merely damn him further.
The heat did not grow any less oppressive as the trio of them walked across the desert together, nor did the sun reflecting off of it grow any more pleasant to the eye. Alex wished for the sunglasses that he had back in the official car, and for the cellular phone. The phone had been rendered untraceable for the duration of his employment as a hired killer, and would have been safe for Pam to call him back on if she had run into any trouble. Alex had noticed that Scofield had turned the prepaid phone off as soon as Alex had given it back. It had been a wise decision. Even acknowledging that, Alex still wanted to put his fist through something. Strange moment between himself and Scofield or not, he was not completely opposed to making that something Scofield's face.
They crested one of the sand dunes in time to see what Alex assumed had once been a snug cabin, perhaps for hunting, perhaps for the intense drinking of beer or the equally intense avoiding of one's wife. Scofield began clambering down the dune without saying a further word to either of his companions, and Tancredi followed suit. She had been unusually quiet for the past hour, given the several tongue-lashings that she had delivered to him since they had met the day before. Alex did not know where her sudden taciturnity had come from, or worse, thought that he might.
In order to distract himself, he climbed down the sand dune just a few paces behind the other two and stared at the cabin, which he now realized was little more than a shack. "You needed a GPS locator to find this?"
Scofield threw a glance over his shoulder. It was more amused than the situation probably warranted. Scofield lifted up the GPS locator so that Alex could see it and gave the machine a slight shake. "Could you have gotten through the desert without it?" he asked.
Alex felt a small smile crossing his face as he shook his head and admitted that, no, he could not have. "I'm not the one who made the plan," he pointed out. The collective slime of the past several months was shrugged off, momentarily, as he looked around from his new vantage point within the plan as opposed to trailing along a step or two behind. Though he could not be sure, he thought that he saw Scofield roll his eyes good-naturedly before he turned back around.
"What happens now?" Tancredi asked as Scofield held open the door so that she could pass through ahead of him. Even though her face was now shrouded in shadow and the sunglasses had to be hindering more than helping her, she did not take them off. Alex had a mind that she was using them as a shield.
Scofield, finally seeming to catch on to the fact that Sara's body language was closed off and impenetrable and had been so for the past hour, reached out and touched her on the arm as she walked past him. It seemed to be a secret language between them, this moment of touch, if the tenderness that crossed Scofield's face as he brushed his fingers over her arm was anything to go by. If so, Alex reflected, then Tancredi was not in a mood to communicate back. She hunched her shoulders and stepped away from Scofield quickly, going to inspect the few pieces of dusty and battered furniture that littered the inside of the shack. "And how do you know about this place, anyway?"
Scofield watched Tancredi with concern and seemed for the first time to realize that she was using her sunglasses for more than to protect her eyes from the glare of the sun outside. He cast Alex a sideways glance, gone and wiped free from his face so quickly that Alex would not have realized it had happened at all if he had not been watching Scofield so closely, and said, "There are people coming." Another look at Alex. If he was wondering if he had made a mistake in bringing Alex this far into the plan, Alex thought irritably, then Scofield probably should have thought of that before he had turned it into a moral battle of wills. Alex leaned back against the wall, folded his arms across his chest, and watched. The wall behind him prickled at his skin even through his shirt, but he did not move away. The details were starting to leap out at him again after months spent wrapped within a single-minded focus. Alex did not think that that was a result of his having erred on the side of caution and taken a smaller than usual dose of Midazalom, either. He liked being right, generally. There were very few occasions when it made him want to put his fist into the wall until the skin across his knuckles split.
"And I found this place about five years ago," Scofield went on as he continued to watch Tancredi in her wanderings about the room. She took the sunglasses off finally and tucked them into the front of her shirt. Her eyes, so far as Alex could see, were normal, even if her expression was concerned. "Took some time off after college to wander."
Tancredi paused in dragging her finger through the dust on the tabletop and looked up at him. "I didn't know that," she said.
"You mean that I don't seem like the type," Scofield countered.
The corner of Tancredi's mouth quirked up, the first hint of a smile that she had displayed in more than an hour. "That, too," she said before glancing at Alex and then going back to her examinations of the table. Scofield did the same, as if she was still waiting for Alex to turn on them, to have the nervous breakdown that Scofield and Tancredi were both waiting for, or perhaps to simply disappear into thin air altogether.
Alex could be far more interested in the surreptitious glances that Scofield and Tancredi were giving him, as if they were in some strange, middle of nowhere recreation of high school and he was the new kid, if he could be moved to give a damn about any of this emotional back and forth. He left the wall so that he could move closer to the door and, shielding his eyes, peer out across the desert. "When are these friends of yours coming?" he asked over his shoulder.
Scofield made a dry sound that might have been a scoff, quickly smothered. "I wouldn't go so far as to call them friends," he said. "It's a business arrangement. They were going to get me and Lincoln across the border."
Were. Alex turned. Scofield was certainly smart enough to watch his speech, if that was what was required to keep a reluctant new ally from making the short journey back into an enemy. He was also honorable that doing so would leave a sour taste in his mouth.
"I made a promise," Scofield said in response to Alex's look, as if he had seen something of reproach in Alex's face. Alex would not be surprised in the slightest if that was true. At that moment, he would not have said no to a chance to give the entire universe one collective punch in the mouth. The stupid kid of decades before, it would seem, was making the worst of all possible times to make a return. "And it will be in our own best interests not to make these people angry if they get here before Lincoln does."
"That's probably true," Alex said mildly before he turned and stared out across the sand again. He could hear Scofield and Tancredi moving around behind him, but was frankly not interested in whatever it was that the two of them were doing. He had larger worries on his mind than whether Tancredi was proving receptive to Scofield's longing looks of vice versa. He barely contained his jump when Scofield appeared beside him.
"I'm sorry that your family is caught in the middle of this," Scofield said. He sounded as if meant it, too, which easily made things worse. Alex cast him a sidelong look and said nothing. "If I could have helped them when I went to see Pam, I would have. I didn't know."
Even knowing that Scofield bore Cameron and Pam no ill will and that he likely meant every word that he said when he professed that he would have helped them, Alex felt himself growing tense again. He arched his eyebrow and asked, "Because it's right?"
Scofield arched his eyebrow right back at Alex's sarcastic tone, as if asking when Alex had developed such a jaded outlook, as if he ever could have known that Alex had been different. Alex would have to ask Pam how long her conversation with Scofield had worn on and what other topics they had covered outside of his fascination with the bird bath when he saw her again. "Yes," Scofield said, as if that should be evident.
"Even if doing right would cost you your brother?" Alex asked. A smile was playing about the edges of his mouth. He did not need a mirror in order to tell him that it was neither a pleased nor a pleasant one.
Scofield came dangerously close to a scowl. The line that appeared between his eyes did nothing to detract from the perfect, nearly eerie symmetry of his face. "You keep coming back to that," he said.
That was not an answer. Alex did not intend to let it stand as one. "It's only fair," he said. "It's the same sacrifice that you're expecting me to make, after all." The same one that he had finally come around to demanding of himself, but he felt no need to show restraint on Scofield's account.
Scofield blew out the air in his lungs on a sigh and looked away. When Alex thought for sure that Scofield was going to burn his retinas out from the glare, he turned and gripped briefly at Alex's forearm. The shock of physical contact was such that it was all that Alex could do to keep still. "You're right," he said, which was nearly the bigger shock. "So I'll do everything that I can to make sure that it's not an either-or question."
That was an easy promise to make, Alex thought, and a very difficult one to keep. The sound of an approaching truck kept him from saying so. He and Scofield shielded their eyes from the sun as one so that they could watch the vehicle come closer, a tail of dust curling up behind it. Sara came up to join them and slipped the sunglasses back onto her face so that she could do the same.
"Both of you stay here," Scofield told Alex and Tancredi as he walked out of the shadow and into the sunlight.
"Not fans of new faces?" Tancredi asked Scofield as he left. While her body was spun taut with nervousness, she still tried to twitch her lips into a smile.
Scofield returned it. "You two weren't a part of the plan," he replied before he resumed walking towards the truck, which was only now coming to a halt. Alex took the measure of the situation for a few seconds through narrowed eyes before he moved to catch up. With his longer legs, it only took a few loping strides until they were walking abreast.
Scofield cut Alex an annoyed look as he saw what he was doing. "Pretty sure that I wanted you to hang back," he said.
"I'm sorry, Scofield, did I give you the impression that my playing nicely for now means that you're in charge?" Alex asked in a pleasant voice. "Because I would hate to think that I misled you."
Scofield muttered, "No, you've been more than honest." His face when Alex cut him a glance was neutral.
Alex was unsure how to respond to that, and even less sure that any answer he could have given would not have taken the eerie civility that they were maintaining between them and shattered it. He settled for quirking his eyebrow instead before he remembered that Scofield was not the only dangerous variable in this game. By the time that the driver's feet touched the dust, Alex was as alert and focused as he could remember being in months.
A tall Latino man of roughly Alex's same age climbed down slowly from the cab of the truck. He paused when his boots touched the dirt so that he could run his eyes across Alex and Scofield both, though he had surely known that there were two men instead of one as soon as Alex and Scofield had stepped out from the shadow of the shack. Alex stayed quiet, arms folded over his chest, and let the new arrival draw all of the conclusions that he wanted.
"I thought that you said you were going to be here alone," the unnamed man said to Scofield, while Alex watched two more men climb down from the back of the truck and walk around towards Scofield and himself. He was enjoying the fact that he was unarmed less by the second. Alex cast a glance towards Scofield, who had one of the guns tucked into the back of his pants but was making no move to reach for it, and then over his shoulder and towards Tancredi in the doorway. She was shielding her face from the sun with one hand; the other was hidden by the wall. Her eyes met with Alex's for a moment before he turned back, and they were cool.
"The plan changed," Scofield said in a smooth tone. He looked over at the unnamed man's two friends and added, "You brought company, too. Surely that makes us even."
Scofield's dubious business partner smiled and lifted his shoulders into an affable shrug that immediately made the hair on the back of Alex's neck stand up. "Cousins," the man said. "Just in case. You understand."
Scofield's hint of a smile was frozen and the line of his spine was taut. "Of course," he echoed.
"Relax," the man said, reaching out and clapping Scofield on the shoulder as he walked past him. Scofield did not jerk back from the contact, as Alex had no doubt that he himself would have. From where Alex was standing, Scofield's stillness was coming about as a result of being so tight and alert that he could not move immediately, not because Scofield was any more at ease with the situation than Alex was. "I can't go close enough to either American or Mexican authorities to collect the bounty on your head without being thrown in prison myself. You're safer with me than you are your friends."
"I somehow doubt that," Scofield replied as they walked towards the shack. Before Alex could go thinking that he was becoming needlessly trustworthy, Scofield added, "The government is not particularly fond of them, either."
"The best kind of friends to have," Scofield's unnamed man replied. He flicked his eyes across the arms that Alex had crossed over his chest, and Alex realized for the first time how very much the bandages wrapped around his wrists resembled a recent suicide attempt. He did not lower them.
Alex glanced back once more at the truck before he entered the shack behind the men and felt the nagging sense of uncertainty that he had felt ever since the driver had first tapped on the brakes dissipate. Big, all terrain tires, intimate knowledge of the desert, a desire to stay well away from both the Mexican and the American authorities. Alex felt his lip begin to curl for a second before he could catch the reaction and smooth it back down again. He turned to see that one of the unnamed man's cousins was lingering in the doorway in order to watch him. Alex barely resisted the urge to swear again. There was no way of knowing how many bodies were strewn through the desert between this place and the border.
Scofield and the unnamed man were talking in low voices by the table, their heads bent over some object that Alex could not see. Rather than craning his head, he walked over to Tancredi, who was standing in the corner and watching all that went on very carefully. She was making no pretense of hiding the gun, Alex noticed. He also noticed that the cousins were keeping a close eye upon her.
"Do you really know how to use that?" Alex asked her, bending his head so that he could speak directly into her ear and keep his words from carrying. "Or were you only putting on a show earlier?"
Tancredi leaned back so that she could look him in the face and then twitched her arm so that it would not be so easy for Alex to grab the gun if he wanted it. Clever woman. "It's just point and shoot, isn't it?" she asked him. She was following Alex's lead, he noticed, and being sure not to raise her voice above a whisper. 'Clever woman,' he thought again.
Alex sighed and only barely resisted the urge to pinch at the pinch at the bridge of his nose. "Not exactly," he said, his voice growing testy as he realized that he had fallen for what was essentially a confidence game the day before. Looking once again at the unnamed man and the muscle that he had brought with him, Alex did a few calculations in his head and decided that the chances of Tancredi's handing a gun over to him voluntarily were nearly nonexistent. The chances that he would be able to take it from her without doing her serious injury, however, were excellent.
"Why do you want to know?" Tancredi asked before Alex could move.
Alex paused for a moment, weighing how much he ought to tell her, before he realized how ridiculous a secret it was to keep. The lingering taint of the conspiracy was still hanging over him. That was as good an endorsement for full disclosure as Alex needed at the moment. "That man is a coyote," he told Tancredi in that same low voice, ticking his head slightly so that Tancredi would know which one of them he meant. The other two were unlikely to be any better, he amended to himself a second later. When Tancredi's face remained smooth and blank, Alex added, "A coyote is someone who accepts money in order to smuggle immigrants across the Mexican border illegally."
"I know what a coyote is," Tancredi said. The cousins and Scofield both had now noticed that the two of them were having a hushed conversation among themselves, though Scofield remained busy and courtesy was keeping the cousins from eavesdropping two closely while everyone was still supposed to be friends. Tancredi lowered her head into her hand and coughed when she noticed the attention.
"Then you know that he is probably responsible for the deaths of dozens of people, if not more." Picturing the bodies, feeling the old righteous anger rise within him, Alex had to remember for a moment that he was supposed to be keeping his voice down. There were some knee-jerk reactions, it would seem, that were going to be with him for as long as he still drew air.
Tancredi took a deep breath and looked over Alex's shoulder at the other men. Her expression was impossible to read, but the hand that held the gun drifted closer to Alex's own. He did not think that she was aware of the gesture.
"We can't possibly go to Panama," Tancredi whispered. She glanced up at Alex and what he presumed was his surprised expression before her face hardened. "This can't all be for nothing."
She would not have referred to Burrows as nothing, Alex thought, if she had ever known what it was like to have a family member's life literally depend upon what she said or did from one moment to the next. 'She's also right,' he went on. "No," Alex said simply and with that old conviction that still surprised him when it rose up. "We can't."
Tancredi tilted her head to one side so that she could fix him with a long, scrutinizing look. Alex suddenly realized what the likely subject of the argument between Tancredi and Scofield that he had only half heard the night before had been. Tancredi had challenged Scofield to put his money where his mouth was and had gotten nowhere, while Alex of all people had at least been able to make some kind of incremental progress. Small wonder, then, that she had been so subdued over the past several hours. That mystery solved, Alex blinked as he realized that another one was looming large over him.
"Think your friends over there are about to run off together," the coyote said in a voice that was loud enough for everyone in the room to hear.
Scofield looked up and noticed for the first time that Alex and Tancredi was standing so close to one another. In his case, that was a sign of high distraction. He met eyes with Alex for a moment, and Alex saw a challenge flashing there. For all that Alex had just had his brain light up in a flash of insight, leaving him reeling in the aftermath, it would appear that Scofield was still not comfortable with Alex being so close to his beloved Tancredi unsupervised. Alex raised his hands into the air in a mocking gesture and made a show of stepping a few feet away. He was sure that his expression was sarcastic; meanwhile, Tancredi's gun was still so close that Alex could have it away from here within a second.
They new vantage point allowed Alex to at least see what it was that Scofield had pulled from the bag and was using as a bargaining chip: a tray of vials that looked, at a distance, troublingly like the kind that were used to hold nitroglycerin. Alex felt a line appearing between his eyes as he glanced Scofield's way and wondered how many contingencies he had built into this long, convoluted problem of his. He also wondered if Scofield knew how many dangerous and deadly ways nitroglycerin could be used if it wound up in the wrong hands, or if what Alex had come to see as Scofield's characteristic tunnel vision even allowed him to see. Alex shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other.
"It's medical grade, as promised," Scofield continued saying to the coyote as one of the cousins slipped out the door of the shack, presumably so that he could make sure that no more surprises such as Alex or Tancredi could come creeping up on the shack unannounced. Or, Alex thought darkly, in order to block off all of their possible avenues of escape.
The coyote's face broke into a wide, delighted smile as he surveyed the vials that Scofield had brought him as a payment. Alex thought that it was the first genuine emotion that he had seen from the man yet. "This is almost impossible to find in Mexico," he said as he reached out to finger one of the vials. "Very inconvenient if you happen to have a heart condition."
'Or happen to be a criminal,' Alex thought sourly. He was sure that the look that he was directing towards Scofield was displeased, and noticed that Scofield was being careful at the moment not to meet his eyes.
Scofield offered the coyote a thin smile and inclined his head to one side instead. "I try to help where I can," he said. Alex noticed that he cast a glance towards the shack door, as if he was waiting for a figure to appear through it.
The coyote noticed the same movement. "When did you say that your brother was going to arrive?" he asked in a carefully neutral voice as he reached out to finger one of the vials. Alex swiveled his head towards the door in the same way that Scofield had moments before, albeit for a much different reason than Scofield himself had done. He did not like having anyone out of his sight at the moment. From the corner of his eye, he noticed Tancredi taking a step closer to him. Likely she was not aware that she had even done so.
Scofield's face froze. As his eyes were fixed upon the coyote's hands as he touched at the vials of nitroglycerin, Alex did not know whether Scofield's reaction had been caused by the question itself or by some other factor that Alex had not yet deduced. He was becoming rather used to creeping closer towards enjoying it again.
"Soon," Scofield said in a level tone. He tilted his head to the side and looked at the coyote hard, as if he was now getting the same feeling of all of the hair standing up on the back of his neck that Alex had experienced for the first time several moments before. Alex hoped that Scofield was having as much fun playing catch-up as Alex himself was. "Careful with that. Don't want to hurt yourself."
"No," the coyote murmured. "Don't want to do that." His expression was troubled, all of that easy geniality wiped away as if it had never been. "Isn't nitroglycerin ordinarily packaged in glass vials?"
Glancing at Scofield's face, Alex saw it freeze for a moment before Scofield was able to move on. 'You son of a bitch,' Alex thought. 'If you've done what I think you've done-' Then it was a good thing that Tancredi had taken that step closer to him, for he would be able to seize the gun from her now without even leaving a bruise.
"My guy repackaged them in plastic," Scofield said. His beat of hesitation had not even lasted a full second. Alex hoped that that had not been too long. "Said that glass was too fragile to transport it across long distances."
"Hmm." The coyote picked up one of the vials and held it to the light so that he could examine it for a moment before he flipped it quickly through the air. Everyone in the room sucked in their breath quickly, Scofield included. On the off chance that he was going to be wrong, Alex seized Tancredi and shoved her roughly behind him so that he was shielding her with his own body. She yelped in surprise, but still made no move to shoot him as she probably ought to have done, him being such a recent ally who was making swift and unexpected movements around her. Alex made a note of it for later use.
The vial of maybe-nitroglycerin had no chance to strike the ground. The coyote snatched it from the air before it could, the plastic making a light smacking sound as it struck his palm. Pure nitroglycerin still should have blown his arm off at the elbow at such treatment. Alex let out the breath that he had been holding and realized that Michael Scofield was either brilliant in ways that Alex was only beginning to full realize, or he was one of the stupidest men who had ever walked the earth.
The coyote stared at the flesh of his healthy, tanned, intact hand with a kind of wonder. He could not have possibly taken the risk that he had without being almost entirely certain as to what the result was going to be, Alex figured, but there would always be that nagging doubt. "You son of a bitch," he snarled at Scofield, and threw the vial down to the shack's wooden floor with all of his strength. When the plastic cracked, leaking the liquid all over the floor without any explosion to follow, everyone within the cabin grew even more tense. Alex watched as whatever it was that Scofield had used to replace the nitroglycerin soak into the raw wood and put his hand out to keep Tancredi from walking out around him.
"I'm fine," Tancredi whispered to him. Looking back, Alex saw that she was gripping the gun so tightly that she was turning her knuckles white and must surely be making her hand ache. That only meant that Alex would have to try a little harder in order to get the gun away from her.
"Dr. Tancredi," he answered, "I don't think that you quite understand that situation that you are in."
She stared back at him with cool, clear eyes, her very lack of expression making the hastily bandaged wound at her temped and the dark bruise stretching across her forehead seem all the more surreal as a result. "Agent Mahone," Tancredi said to him, her tone so similar to the one that he had used with her that he could not shake the feeling that he was being deliberately mimicked, "I think I might have a better understanding than you do."
"It was sold to me as medical-grade nitroglycerin," Scofield said quickly as the coyote's face began to grow dark. "I believed him. We both got screwed here."
The situation had gone long past the point of being solved with words, if indeed it had ever been possible to solve in the first place. Alex could see that by taking a glance around the shack, reading the violence that was written in every line of the bodies of the coyote and the remaining cousin. He could hear the floorboards shifting behind him as Tancredi moved her weight from one foot to the other, then the tickle of her breath against his neck as she peeked over his shoulder. They were watching Scofield with such identical expressions, Alex thought with a dry humor that he had not known himself still capable of, that they might as well be his fan club over here.
"You did," the coyote said in a controlled tone, giving a slight nod to the remaining cousin as he did so. It was his voice that warned Alex as to what was coming next, not the nod. He spun back around towards Tancredi only far enough to seize the gun from her hand and hear her gasp of mingled surprise and pain. She would have a bruised wrist within an hour, just as Alex had known that she would. He had a great many ethical and legal crimes standing against him; there was no one more aware of that detail than Alex himself. If Tancredi's bruise was able to get all of them out alive, then Alex thought that he would be able to keep on living with himself.
It felt good to have a gun in his hand again, Alex decided as soon as he was holding the skin-warmed metal. Not the potential, not the destruction of it, but the weight. The feeling of stepping, however briefly, back into the role that he had enjoyed and that he had been so good at before everything had gone to hell. Alex tested the safety and discovered that Tancredi had kept it off the entire time before he spun back around leveled it at the coyote. Even with his head still ringing every time that he tried to move faster than was wise, Alex's reflexes were very quick, and he had been given a great deal of motivation to keep them in good working order as of late.
Perfect reflexes, wrong thug. As Alex brought the gun to bear upon the coyote, he saw from the corner of his eye that the remaining cousin, who was in reality probably related to the coyote through about as much blood as Alex was, was pulling a gun from the waistband of his pants. Alex did not pause for even the length of time that it would have required to let a muttered curse slide by under his breath before he corrected his aim. His finger curled around the trigger as if it had been born to be there. Alex felt his lips pressing themselves into a hard, thin line as he pulled his finger back on the trigger.
He had been constructing feverish plans has he had corrected his aim to take in the cousin rather than the coyote, dismissing each one before it had become more than a few flickers of the neurons, as he figured that the responsibility would fall to him to defend Scofield and Tancredi from the coyote and both of the cousins. He nearly missed Scofield as Scofield reached for the gun that he had tucked into the back of his pants, so swiftly and with such calm assurance was Scofield moving. If Scofield saw that the cousin was pointing the gun at him with every intention of pulling back the trigger, then that awareness did not show on his face. He raised the gun, flicked the safety off in one smooth and practiced movement, and pointed it at the coyote himself. The entire movement took less than a second from start to finish, while Scofield himself appeared as calm and at home in it as if he had been caught in the middle of a potential bloodbath every day of his life. Looking at him, one would almost think that he had it in him to pull the trigger.
"Drop it!" Alex barked at the cousin, who had wasted no time in pointing his gun at Scofield and did not seem concerned by the fact that Scofield was pointing his own gun at the cousin's boss. Maybe he thought that he could affect a power play, maybe the health benefits involved in a life of crime were really just that terrible; it was not Alex's responsibility to care. He could see the cousin's finger curling to pull back on the trigger, even at this distance, and gritted, "Do you think that I won't put you down?"
"He will," Scofield said, never taking his eyes away from the coyote. There was no way to read an emotion into the careful blankness of his face. Only Alex's angle, slightly behind Scofield and with a view of his profile more than anything else, allowed him to see how tight all of the muscles in the back of Scofield's neck were knotted in tension.
Alex was interested in Scofield's thoughts on ethics right now, he really was. "Put the gun down," he warned the cousin one more time, drawing his finger further back on the trigger as he did so. He knew that the cousin, trained in weapons, violence, and death, would noticed the gesture and more to the point would know exactly what it meant.
The coyote, for someone who had a gun trained on him, was remarkably composed. It was making Alex's hackles rise all over again, making him want to peek around the corners for the trap that he knew must be there, somewhere.
"He will," the coyote said, jerking his head briefly in the direction of Alex. "Can you? Before you are gunned down?"
Alex saw Scofield take a quick breath, and he swore to himself again in the single second in which he had time to think. Of course Scofield could not, not in the amount of time that he needed to, and very likely not ever. He was not that kind of man.
Alex, meanwhile, was exactly that kind of man. He started to pull his finger back on the trigger.
"Michael!" Tancredi said in an urgent voice from behind him. Alex was sure for a second, however irrational it might be, that she was warning Scofield about Alex himself. It was on the tip of his tongue to snap at her before he caught himself. No matter how he had chosen before, he knew at the very least that he was pointing his weapon at the correct person this time around. The note of urgency in her voice made him second-guess himself, and he turned his head quickly to look over his shoulder as he did so.
Fernando Sucre was darkening the doorway of the shack, the sun behind him casting his features into shadow and making them virtually unreadable. Didn't matter. Alex had spent so much time studying those photographs that he thought he could pick any of the convicts from a crowded room in total darkness with nothing more than a glance.
Alex swore for what he was sure was not going to be the last time as he spun back towards the man that he now realized that he never should have taken his eyes off of in the first place. The cousin had apparently decided that Scofield could wait, his boss had a point there, and it would be best to take out the man who was the biggest threat while he still had the chance to do so. While Alex had had so many guns point at him over his life that it had nearly become routine, those barrels were never going to get any smaller. Alex pulled his finger back hard against the trigger; without having time to pause and center his aim properly, the shot wound up going into the wood about six inches above the cousin's head. The man still yelped and ducked as splinters rained down on his head, turning the gun away from Alex as he did so. Sucre behind him began yelling in Spanish. Alex did not understand the words, but the cousin began nodding vigorously and then knelt so that he could lay his gun down on the floor. Alex waited until the cousin had kicked the gun out of reach before he relaxed and, lowering his own weapon, turned around.
Perhaps that had been a mistake. Alex found himself face to face with the barrel of a gun and, behind it, Lincoln Burrows.
End Part Six