Part Eight
Under different circumstances, Michael would have expected the hours taking them back to Colorado among the most boring of his life. It did not take him long to realize that this had been a naïve assumption; he ought to have known better. There were far too many personalities who would rather be at war with one another sharing too small a space, and the atmosphere was that of gasoline waiting for the first hint of a spark. How many battle flags could be raised simultaneously while at the same time no one was quite looking anyone else in the eye Michael would never know. His forte was in analyzing structures, not people. The hidden language of the latter was by and large lost to him.
As Michael watched without being noticed or perhaps only being industriously ignored, Mahone occupied his time with staring out at the passing scenery as if he might leap from the vehicle at any moment. Even while he was doing a studious job of pretending that there was no one else in the vehicle with him and that it was propelling itself forward under the power of some kind of obscure magic, Mahone radiated tension that was just asking for someone to give him an excuse, anything to convince him that he had made the wrong choice. Michael saw Mahone's gaze being directed towards the back of Aldo's head more than once and thought it was a marvel that Mahone had not yet attempted to leap over the front seat, wrest the wheel away from Aldo, and drive them all to Colorado himself at a speed that would make a mockery of all of the limit signs. Alex Mahone did not like situations that were out of his control. It was something that they had in common.
Perhaps far from the only thing, when one got right down to it. Michael's gaze moved on to Lincoln, who had thus far been occupying himself by dividing his attention between glaring at Aldo, glaring at Mahone, and watching his son carefully to make sure that LJ's eerie sense of calm was not merely the beginnings of a complete and utter breakdown. Mahone had accused him of committing the exact same sin that he himself was doing before he had agreed to defect over to their side, however conditionally, that of putting the welfare of someone that he cared about ahead of that which he knew to be right. Michael had tired to deny it then and tried to deny it now, but there was a voice within him that refused to let it rest. He had not come up with the intricate plan to free Lincoln by until he had been convinced of Lincoln's innocence, he insisted to himself, and yet could not stop remembering that he and Lincoln had also been fighting at the time, and that Michael had decided that Lincoln was innocent based upon little more than faith. The actual proof had not come until much later, and with it a great many bodies that would have gone with their murders unavenged if Lincoln and Michael had not consented to alter their plans. Even now, fighting the conspiracy on its own terms rather than merely trying to outrun its reach could be looked up as being in Lincoln's best interests. It was not a pleasing thought.
Michael's soft, frustrated exhalation not loud enough to be called a sigh and ought to have been audible to him alone. He was not pleased when Mahone immediately turned his gaze away from the window and directed it towards Michael instead. Mahone's stare was neither hostile nor friendly, and only scrutinized Michael as if he was a difficult math problem. If this was the way in which Michael ordinarily looked at people, then he could perhaps understand why people had such visceral reactions to him. He and Mahone continued to gaze at one another for a few moments longer before either man consented to look away.
Beside Michael, Sara made a soft, tired sound and shifted in her seat. Michael looked back at her with a slightly guilty start, realizing that he had been so wrapped up within his head that he had nearly forgotten that she was there. The would not have happened if they had simply followed Michael's original plan and gone to Panama, he thought with a touch of irritability.
Sara had been sitting without speaking for the past hour, occasionally reaching into her bag so that she could touch at a bronze key. Her expression was solemn and nearly fierce every time that she did. Sara's body was pressed up against Michael's from her shoulder to her thigh, heat radiating from her body into his. It was more physical contact than they had shared with one another since the day in the prison when Michael had seized her face and kissed her for all that the two of them were worth, and this time to a far less self-serving end. Sara had her hand splayed against her temple now as if she was struggling to keep the pounding there from escaping out into the world.
Michael started to touch Sara on the arm, remembered that touch had a troubled history between the two of them, and paused with his hand hovering an inch or so above her shirt. Sara sensed that he was there after a moment and turned her head so that she could look at him. "Are you all right?" Michael asked her.
The corners of Sara's mouth twitched; Michael was going to be generous and call it a reassuring smile. "Sore," she said, shifting again. She cringed as a bolt of sunlight came through the window and struck her directly in the eyes. "Headache."
"That happens when you drive into a wall." It was still one of the bravest and most insane things that Michael had ever seen anyone do before. He finally brought his hand down on Sara's arm and rubbed in a reassuring cycle. "I'm sure that Aldo has painkillers at the safe house." Michael raised his eyes from Sara and was not surprised to see that Aldo was watching him through the rearview mirror. Jane was on the verge of lunging across the center divide and grabbing the steering wheel so that they would not veer off of the rod.
"Yes," Aldo said. He sounded more uncertain than Michael would have previously thought him capable of, and at the moment was hardly managing to keep meeting Michael's eyes. After a beat, he pulled himself together and continued in a normal tone of voice, "My people tend to be injured fairly regularly. We're well-stocked."
"Imagine that." Michael turned back to Sara before he wound up saying something that he might possibly regret. He noticed that Jane was giving him a reproachful look as he did so, and promptly ignored her. "Think you can hold on a little bit longer?" The landscape had been changing, and they could not be far now.
Sara lowered her hand from her eyes and peeked at Michael over the top of them. "I'll make it," she said, her voice neutral. She had been acting strangely for the past few hours, closed off and unreadable after the way that they had spent the previous two days of acting like separate halves of the same machine. Michael could not say why this sudden change had come about, only that he had the irritating conviction that the answer would come to him immediately if Sara were a building rather than a human being. She added to the confusion a moment later by slowly and almost hesitantly laying her head down against his shoulder and using his body to shield her eyes from the sun. Michael paused for a beat before he realized what she was doing and shifted so that he could put his arm around her, his movements if anything more cautious and careful than her own had been. Deprived of Michael's shoulder, Sara soon found room to shield her face against his chest instead. Both of them were moving as if they thought that the other one might break.
Michael was sure that he and Sara were the objects of a great deal of attention, given the way that everyone, including his own father, seemed to look at him as if he were the keeper of the keys to the universe, but he was in no kind of mood to deal with that now. He focused on Sara instead, stroking the strands of her brilliant auburn hair back from her face. That exposed both her multi-hued bruise and the butterfly bandages that were holding the edges of the cut on her temple together; his list of collateral damage was growing longer and longer.
"I would have wound up being involved in this even if you had not singled me out at Fox River," Sara broke the silence by whispering. She was pitching her voice low so that the conversation would remain private even in their cramped quarters, and Michael had to dip his head so that he could hear her. Sara nudged at her purse with her foot. Michael thought that she would have much rather given it a good, hard kick. "I wouldn't have been nearly as ready, though."
"I wasn't going to say anything," Michael said. He had already apologized to her for having made her a target for the same people who wanted Lincoln and himself dead so badly. Everything else was going to be a matter of turning thought into act, and preventing her from suffering for it any further.
Sara angled her face upwards so that she could look him in the eye. Had they been alone, Michael was not sure what he might have done. "You were thinking it," Sara said calmly before she turned her face against his chest again. "I could tell." Michael began to play with her hair.
"You said that you had a kid?" Lincoln startled them both by asking Mahone in a gruff voice. Michael had given Lincoln enough of the details of Mahone's deal with the Company to assure him that Mahone was unlikely to betray them now. Protecting family was something that he had known Lincoln would understand.
"I didn't, actually," Mahone said in that dry tone that he tended to adopt. Much as it puzzled Michael to realize that he could now read Mahone's moods, like a sudden needless embellishment interrupting what ought to have been a clean and perfect skyline, the sarcastic man who leaned back in his seat and viewed Lincoln through hooded eyes was far better than the one who had been on the verge of shattering into a thousand pieces without caring who was hit by the shrapnel.
Mahone lowered his eyes away from Lincoln's, looked at Michael instead, and let him know with that stare that he knew very well why Lincoln knew the details of Mahone's personal situation. Michael lifted his shoulders into a slight shrug. His intuition told him that Lincoln's question had come about in the first place because Mahone had been watching Michael and Sara with an intensity that Lincoln had not appreciated.
"But yes," Mahone finished finally, twisting his head back so that he could look Lincoln in the eye again. "I have a son."
Lincoln's face was solemn, hiding his emotions far better than Michael was accustomed to his brother being able to do. If not for the slightly narrowed eyes, he could have been talking to anyone. "What if you can't save him?" 'Whose side will you be on then?' Michael could have kicked his brother, if it would not have involved leaping over the seat and causing Aldo to finally drive all of them right off of the road.
Mahone's entire body went still as if he had been replaced with a stone replicate, staring back at Lincoln. Even LJ seemed to realize that a line had been crossed and straightened in his seat, looking rapidly back and forth between the two men. "Then I'll make sure that they know how much he's worth to me," Mahone said softly, somehow more dangerous by virtue of keeping himself at such low volume.
"Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord," Jane said from the front seat without taking her eyes away from the windshield. For a few seconds everyone was looking at her, in particular Mahone. Lincoln looked oddly satisfied by Mahone's response. Michael could still not stop himself from glaring at him.
"We're nearly there," Aldo said from the front. He was the only one who had not reacted to Jane's strange pronouncement. Michael thought that his father sounded nearly relieved, and found that he shared the sentiment. Let them all play out their alliances and soap operas in a place where they would not be forced into such tight proximity with one another.
"Nice," Lincoln said as the van pulled to a halt in front of a large stone house after several minutes spent in silence traveling down a gravel road. Michael made note of every detail of the scenery as they passed, noting the isolation. If one single thing went wrong…he noticed that Mahone on the opposite side of the van had grown tense and was willing to bet that he was running the same analysis.
"You Company guys," Lincoln went on, and Michael swore that he could see his brother considering adding 'former' and then dismissing it in the same breath. "You seem to have excellent taste in property."
Aldo's hands flexed against the steering wheel for a moment before they relaxed again. Michael, who thought that it was unwise to bait their only ally at the same time that he thought Aldo deserved everything that Lincoln was saying and then some, kept silent. He tightened his grip around Sara's shoulder, and she looked at him.
"Your tax dollars at work," Aldo grunted as he hit the brakes and brought the van to a halt.
Michael thought that Mahone would have leapt out before the vehicle even had a chance to stop moving if that had not meant scrambling over the bodies of everyone else in the process. Even then, it looked like a close call. "I need a car," he told Aldo, rather than asking. Michael could feel his eyebrows rising and saw that Aldo was making the exact same gesture. He was nearly a decade and a half too old to be having fits because he and his father happened to share a few gestures in common, probably, but Michael felt a prickle running up and down his spine all the same. Sara squeezed at his hand.
Aldo looked Mahone over and, a moment of recognition crossing his face, nodded once. "That can be arranged," he said. "Take Jane with you."
Mahone was already shaking his head. "This is something that I need to do alone."
"She knows how the Company operates."
"So do I."
Aldo let out a small and nearly bitter chuckle. "You have no idea," he said. Michael thought that he now understood the look of recognition that Aldo had given Mahone a moment before. "When they're still in the thick of it, no one ever really knows."
"I've been fighting the Company for five years, Agent Mahone," Jane broke in in a calm voice. Her eyes were as composed and as spooky as ever.
Mahone quirked an eyebrow at her and then twisted his mouth into a smile that should been friendly but wasn't. "How long did you work for them first?"
"Another five years," Jane replied smoothly and without appearing offended. "So you have about a fifty-fifty chance if you're trying to use that to determine where my loyalty lies. On the other hand, by your account you've been working for the Company for the past several months, and fighting them for the past two days."
Mahone let out a startled laugh. "Fair enough," he said, and threw out his arm in an after-you gesture. He managed to make the moment seem courtly in spite of the fact that he was clearly not pleased with the situation.
"The vehicles are this way," Jane said, starting to lead Mahone around the side of the house. Her demeanor towards him had warmed through the exchange, though Michael could not say why. He thought that his own inability to read her had nothing to do with his general difficulties in understanding people and everything to do with Jane.
"Alex," Michael called before Mahone could get too far. Mahone paused and looked back as Michael left the group at the front of the house. His body language went tense whenever Michael came near him, as Michael was sure his own must do in return. Having a history of attempted murder between them could do that. "Thank you. I understand the sacrifices that you might have to make in order to do the right thing here, and I'm very sorry for them."
Mahone tipped his head back and regarded the sky for a long moment. Whatever he saw there did not seem to satisfy him. "You don't, Scofield," he said when he had lowered his head so that he could look Michael in the eye again. There was no malice in his tone. "I hope that you never have to."
Michael glanced once over his shoulder at Lincoln and Sara before he held out his hand for Mahone to take. After a moment Mahone took it, looking nearly surprised. "For your sake, Alex, I hope that you never fully have to, either."
Mahone leaned back, and Michael thought surely that he would release his hand and then turn to leave without another word. He was nearly right; he did not expect the swift squeeze of his hand that came before Mahone let him go. Mahone was disappearing around the corner of the house before Michael could react.
He blew out a long stream of air through his nose. LJ was looking shell-shocked by the entire situation, Aldo was looking more displeased with every moment that they stood out in the open, supposed safe house or not, and Lincoln and Sara were both giving him strange looks that Michael could not immediately decipher. Lincoln's took only a little work: as much as conventional authority and Lincoln Burrows had seemed fated to butt their heads against one another over and over again since Lincoln had reached fifteen, authority that had then allowed itself to be corrupted was even worse. Lincoln was not going to be pleased for so long as Mahone was working with them, not matter how valuable Mahone's fresh insights into the Company turned out to be.
Sara presented a much more difficult and unexpected problem. She had drawn into a self-contained shell some hours before, save for rare flashes when Michael suspected that she was simply too tired and hurting to maintain it any longer. Her eyes were hooded, and it took a few seconds for her to squeeze back when Michael squeezed at her hand.
Lincoln had filled Michael in on all of the pertinent details of what had happened at the first safe house, so that Michael's nerves were jangling as he stepped into the second. It was spacious and well-furnished, without any of the dusty neglect or the dark corners that Michael realized he had subconsciously come to expect from a house were rebellion was being born. This home easily could belong to a well to do lawyer or physician. Michael and Sara looked at each other, thinking at the same time that their accumulated road filth was nearly blasphemous in such chill taste.
"There are facilities where you can clean up," Aldo began, at the same time that a short blonde came around the corner and into the entryway suddenly. She was busy looking down at a file folder in her hand; Michael would later wonder how large the resistance force that had pitted itself against the Company actually was, if they would afford to keep on people who clearly had no survival instincts at all.
"Miss Graves called," the woman said, glancing up from her file folder at the assembled group and even flashing them a quick, harried smile before she went back to her paperwork. "She wants a progress report, well, 'before I'm inspired to drink' was what she said, and I explained that there one of the other houses was compromised-"
"Who the hell are you?" Lincoln interrupted in a soft and dangerous voice. There was no trademark growl; he did not need it. The woman shut her mouth with an audible clicking sound and seemed to grow a danger sense from scratch in the span of roughly three seconds as she looked to Aldo for help.
"This is Monica," Aldo said swiftly, before Lincoln could take the woman and slam her up against the wall. Given the way that Lincoln's arm had jerked back quickly as if to shield LJ from a bullet that had not been fired yet, Michael thought that Lincoln would have done it. "She keeps the different agents and safe houses in contact with one another."
"She's also going to back up a little bit, she thinks," Monica said, taking a few steps towards the hallway again to take her out of Lincoln's immediate range. She eyed him up and down. Monica had spent the previous several seconds looking as if she was torn between creeping to Aldo for protection and fleeing the entryway altogether.
"I thought that you said this place was safe," Michael told Aldo. His hand had come up to cup Sara's elbow of its own accord, he discovered, and he was one step away from outright shoving her behind him as Lincoln had done with LJ.
"It is," Aldo told them all, even sounding a little peeved as he put himself between Lincoln and Monica. She looked relieved for it. "Monica has been working against the Company for nearly a decade."
"And I didn't actually work for them at all before that," Monica said, looking more sure of herself by the moment even as she clearly would have been pleased if Lincoln was not in such close proximity to her. "Which makes me the exception rather than the rule."
That was sadly seeming to be the case. "You're sure that she won't turn on us?" Michael asked Aldo, even though he did not believe that Aldo's opinion truly meant anything, in the end. He had doubtless believed that the man at the other house was incorruptible as well. Monica folded her arms over her chest and looked irritated, but not particularly surprised.
"I'm sure," Aldo said. Michael had known that eh would, and the glances that he was throwing Monica's way weren't giving him any new insights.
A leap of faith, then. Michael had done so many of those since he had decided that Lincoln was innocent, and they were reaching across such longer and longer distances, that he was bound to be brought crashing down to earth by one of them sooner or later. Michael took a breath, thought of Mahone way on his mission to pull his family from harm's way, and decided that he had one more leap left in him.
"It's our only chance," he told Lincoln in order to make some of the tension run out of Lincoln's shoulders. When it did, a healthy portion of it left Monica, as well. Aldo's face tightened, but for the moment Michael could not be moved to care.
Aldo nodded and touched Monica lightly upon the shoulder. "Let Graves know that I will contact her soon."
"She'll be thrilled," Monica said before she began to stride off with her files under one arm, only to turn back as Aldo called her name.
"And let Ben know that it would not be wise to enter any rooms suddenly for the time being."
Monica paused and raised her folder for a moment to hide her mouth. "I'll do that." She disappeared.
"Please don't assault my agents," Aldo told Lincoln in a dry tone. "They're hard enough to come by as it is." Lincoln's only response was to lift his shoulders into a shrug. To Michael and Sara both, Aldo went on, "As I said, there are showers and spare clothes."
Michael's shirt was still sticking to his back with dried sweat, the final mark of the trek through the desert that they had made earlier, and he had still never felt less like taking a break in his life. A glance at Sara told him that she was in the same place. Not while a potential end to this had entered into their landscape so swiftly, their very own secular miracle. Michael shook his head before his father could finish. "We're fine. Let's get on with it."
"What is this?" Sara said without further preamble, fumbling about in her purse until she located again the bronze key that was supposed to somehow set them all free and turn the nation onto its head. After having held her elbow and felt the way that she was trembling, Michael was amazed that she had even held out for that long. "What does it unlock that was worth my father's life?" And was worth an attempt on hers, Sara seemed to have forgotten. Michael certainly hadn't.
Aldo reached out and gently took the key from her. For a few seconds, Michael was not certain that she was going to let him have it, and she folded her arms over her chest again as soon as it was out of her reach. "That is the question," Aldo admitted, sounding vexed that he did not have a ready answer. Michael did not guess that such questions crept up on him regularly. "Before your father died, he received a recording. On it was both proof that Terrence Steadman was alive two weeks after your brother supposedly killed him, as well as a few more details that would make the president very unpopular in her reelection bid." As they all appeared shell-shocked, Aldo took a moment to let them all get used to the idea before he offered them a faint smile and continued. "I would not drag you back into danger for anything less than ending this once and for all."
Over Sara's head, Michael and Lincoln shared a look. For all that they seemed to have been operating on separate wavelengths for most of the trip northward again, driven in large part by the easy trust that Michael was granting Mahone based upon nothing more than a feeling, Michael knew that they were sharing a thought now: 'Yeah, you won't lead us into danger now. You had no problem doing it before.'
One more leap. Michael guessed that he had that in him. He inhaled deeply through his nose and only just fought back the urge to rub his hand over his head in frustration. Aldo went on, "Do you know what this key opens?"
Sara could not smother a small and disbelieving laugh before she shook her head. "No. No. I…I found his body, after he died, and the key fell from his pocket. I've never seen it before."
Aldo exhaled, clearly not liking that answer, but gestured for Sara to follow him through the house. Lincoln, LJ, and Michael all followed her without pausing to think about it; they were a unit now. "We'll work around that. Did your father have any hotels that he liked to stay in regularly, any favorite clubs?"
Sara paused in the middle of a living room that was as perfectly and lifelessly furnished as the rest of the house and looked stricken. Michael was reminded that her father's death had occurred not even a week before. She steeled herself before his eyes before she shook her head again and said, in a calm voice whose tremble was audible only to those who knew her well, "No. My father and I were able to reconcile before he died, but we still did not know very much about one another."
Aldo seemed to realize for the first time how his distant, matter of fact tone might have been unintentionally cruel, and his face softened. It seemed genuine. "I'm sorry about your father," he told her. "For what it's worth, we're cautious. The tape would not have been sent to him unless someone was sure that he would be willing to help."
"Thank you," Sara said. She did look as if it helped in some small way.
They followed Aldo into a study that differentiated from the rest of the house in one small way: it looked as if an actual person worked there. The rest of the house held an air as if someone had merely made a half-hearted attempt at making it look as if someone lived there, a museum piece on the habits of twenty-first century humans.
The study had an enormous oak desk on which a sleek laptop set, looking incongruous and modern against all of the careful age. Sitting at the desk was a black man who looked like a cross between accountant and male model, and nothing at all like a freedom fighter against the government. Between Monica and this new man, it would appear that the Company's opposite number was as adept at blending in as the conspiracy itself. The man leaned back in his chair when he noticed them there, gave a nod of greeting to Aldo, and watched Lincoln closely. "Monica told me that you guys startle easily," he said. "I'm Ben."
When all of the appropriate greetings had been exchanged, Ben looked towards Aldo again. "I'm bored," he said. "Tell me that you need something illegal, or at the very least interesting."
"It'll be all of the above before it's all over," Aldo said. "Pull up everything that you can find about Governor Tancredi. Everywhere where he spent money, everywhere he stayed, everywhere that he belonged." Ben nodded before he turned back to the laptop and began typing in a series of keystrokes. His fingers were nearly a blur. Aldo looked at his oldest son for a moment without speaking, before he added, "And find out where Veronica Donovan was heading before she died. I'd rather have the man himself under our control, too."
"Not a fan of the leap of faith?" Michael asked.
"No," Aldo replied solemnly before he went back to watching Ben work. "Not for a very long time."
End Part Eight