"Hardison, as a side thing, keep running Sasha Spencer. Don't tell Eliot."
Hardison looked up as Nate, Eliot, and Sasha walked in. He quickly navigated away from the pages of Sasha's personal history to some more mundane info about Jeff Rottfield, vice president of Premium Security. The look he gave Nate spoke volumes about what he'd found. The mastermind picked up on it and nodded.
"Call Sophie and Parker back. We've had a change of plans." He turned to his hitter. "Eliot, take your sister upstairs. Get her settled in the guest room." Nate grabbed his arm as he walked past and pitched his voice low. "There's some sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet if she needs something." Eliot stared for a moment, then nodded, leading a still-teary Sasha up the stairs.
The moment they were out of earshot was the same moment the thief and grifter returned.
"What is it, Nate?" Sophie asked. "First you tell us to break in somewhere, then you just call us back before we even get out of the bar?"
Nate sighed and shook his head. "Eliot and his sister are upstairs."
It was Sophie's turn to shake her head. "I don't get it."
"I do," Parker interjected. The rest of the group stared at her. She shrugged. "Ok, so maybe I don't. Why are we staring?"
There were multiple eye rolls around the group. Nate filled in the blanks.
"Eliot and Sasha had some… personal issues that they needed to work out. That's done." He motioned to the hacker. "Hardison? I'm assuming you found something?"
Alec nodded. "I sent my little webcrawlers digging. From 1989 to 1995, the oldest Spencer child was one of the worst of the worst." He clicked through different photos. The first was of a very young Sasha Spencer scowling at the camera as she reached out to block it. She had very matte black hair with blood-red streaks at the ends, and her eyes were a stormy gray-blue. The next photos weren't so pretty. "Kidnappings, assaults, robberies, an assortment of different 'questioning'" he made air quotes around the word, "methods, murder for hire. I'm telling you Nate, if she'd stayed this way we'd probably be working for someone else right now to take her down." Parker and Sophie were still staring at the pictures on the screen, pictures of people with broken bones and multiple bruises and cuts.
And pictures of people just broken.
"1989?" the British woman asked. "She could only have been in her early twenties!"
"Actually, she was only 19 when she started working for one of the gangs near her college as hired muscle." Hardison answered. Now Nate was staring as well.
"Why did she stop in '95?" he asked.
"Didn't say she did." Hardison pulled up the next series of images. "From 1995 to 2001, Sasha Spencer moved from low elegance beatings, smash and grabs and hits working solo to more finessed jobs with one Eliot Spencer." The last picture to pop up was the one the team had seen earlier, of the Spencer sibs in front of the Russian courthouse. "That is, until a job went wrong. We know that Eliot broke her out of prison, but she did a few more jobs on her own before she completely dropped off the planet to become Allisa. The last one she ever took was never completed and involved breaking into a Massachusetts State Police post, where one Harold Francis Hilbrand was on duty, known to his friends as Frank." He clicked up a picture of a man with a slightly rugged look about him, and a slowly balding head of dark brown hair.
"Aww," Sophie said, causing Nate and Parker to look at her with odd expressions. She looked back. "What?" Confusion still reigned. "She gave it all up for love!"
Nate rolled his eyes as Parker made her 'I-just-saw-a-cute-puppy' face before immediately snapping back to the large screens and the photos on them. Hardison just shook his head and clicked the last series of photos up.
"Sasha Spencer officially stopped existing in early 2002. At the same time, Allisa Massard, a Canadian national, applied for a marriage license in the state of Massachusetts with Frank Hilbrand. From there on, she's your average suburban housewife. A year after they got married, their daughter Erin Cassandra was born." A young girl with light brown hair and a crooked smile beamed out from the screens in what was clearly a school photo. "And two years later, they had a boy. Named him Jesse Eliot."
Sophie made her happy noise again. Even Nate looked kind of mushy as a gap-toothed six year old with shaggy brown hair flashed on screen.
"Two years ago, she joined the PTA, and a year ago she started working for Premium. Everything was normal until four months ago. Erin was diagnosed with Acute Pro-Myelocytic Leukemia. Very rare in children, and it doesn't respond well to chemo, which Erin already went through about two months ago. She's gonna need a stem cell transplant ASAP. Ever since the treatments stopped working, Eliot's sister has been looking for him. Apparently, no one else is a close enough match. Even found some links to aliases I thought I had buried, including the Roy Chappell Ruben and the Kenneth Craniacs." The kids' photos disappeared and he muttered to himself as he typed furiously. "Thought I got rid of all those." The kids' pictures jumped back up on the screen. "Anyway, that's when she found the file on the company's server, and Rottfield fired her." He clicked everything down from the screens, clicked Rottfield's info back up, turned to Nate, Sophie, and Parker, and continued, "So what the hell are we gonna do about it?"