A/N: I guess I forgot to put the standard non-ownership disclaimer here. And here y'all were, thinking I owned this stuff...
Chapter 5
Thirteen hours before Philadelphia...
Booth watches as two small guys break into room 8. The noise wakes Bones up, but he quiets her down quickly. He can hear the two guys ransacking the room. He looks at his watch - three and a half hours - these guys aren't that good. Obviously, Broadsky is using the B team right now.
That's fine by Booth.
The guys are slow, but not completely without training, and so they find the pad by the phone quickly enough. Three minutes later, the first one comes back out the door, looks slowly up and down the row. His eyes track past Booth's head and Booth stifles the urge to move. In the dark of the room, his quick motion would be easier to see than if he just stays in sight but motionless. Besides, only a small sliver of his face is visible, at most. The guys walks a few steps towards Booth, turns and looks in room 9. Seeing nothing, the goon leans back up, starts further towards room 10.
Before he gets there, the other guy, the littler of the two, comes outside again.
"Come on, they already left," he says to his partner. The bigger guy turns away from room 10 before looking in the window.
Booth watches them walk back to the portcullis and get in their car. He watches them pull out and head up to the on-ramp to get back on 95, back towards Baltimore. They are definitely the B team.
He can live with that.
It's not until they are on the interstate that he breathes a sigh of relief. He knows what he's dealing with now, and one last job - well, two last jobs, and then he can get some sleep. Then the real work begins.
"They are gone. We're safe for awhile. Can you hand me the phones?" he asks Bones.
Bones nods and gives him his FBI issue phone as well as her Jeffersonian iPhone.
He flips them open, puts the SIM cards back in and powers them up. As the phones' lights come on, he thinks of something.
"Know how to wipe your data off this thing, Bones?"
"Enter the password wrong five times."
"I'll be right back, and then we can sleep or talk or whatever..."
He leaves the room and walks across the lot, careful to stay out of the sightline of the clerk's office, and goes across the access road until he's in the grass near the on-ramp towards New York. He enters gibberish into Bones' phone a few times until it pops up an alert that her data is gone, and then does the same with his own phone. Then he crouches, hidden in the grass, and waits.
Ten minutes later, a semi-tractor trailer pulls out of the diner next door to the motel and pulls to a stop, ready to turn onto the interstate. Booth jumps up and crab walks over to the trailer on the far side from the driver. The trailer ends in a metal lip that acts as a step and bumper, made of corrugated steel on three sides, with the side facing the trailer left open. Booth places the phones into the little shelf that the open wall provides just as the rig powers up and turns onto the onramp. He watches the eighteen wheeler, with its new cargo of two smartphones, get up to speed and disappear north into the night.
He is very tired. He hopes his newly pregnant girlfriend is asleep when he gets back to the room, so that he can sleep too, rather than answer her inevitable twenty questions. Plus, he needs her to sleep - he's still, above all else, worried about the baby.
"I assume I am allowed to ask about last night's activities now?" Bones asks over breakfast the next morning. She had been asleep when he got back to the room, so he'd removed her shoes and watch, and tucked them both under the comforter. He thought it weird - they had still slept together more on the road, either undercover or on the run, then they had as an actual couple. Maybe it wasn't that weird - they'd only been dating for three weeks. Most couples didn't have to think about a baby before they worked out a first date.
"I'm surprised you didn't ask before now," he replies, chewing some bacon. The little roadside diner is surprisingly decent, and they are both famished after their long night and short sleep.
"I have a number of questions, and I am finding it difficult to find the proper hierarchy in which to delve into them."
"Well, let's start this way, Bones - I once told you that, if you asked, I would tell you about my past. I think it's finally time to ask."
"I know what you did."
"No, not enough. There's more."
"Booth, I don't care about what you did in the military. It does not affect the conceptualization I have of you now."
"I'm glad, but," he says with a sigh. He'd planned on this going according to some script, so that it would get him in the right frame of mind. She's changing the script. "I told you I went AWOL to be there for Parker's birth, right?"
"Yes."
"Well, afterwards... I'm sitting in the brig and this Colonel shows up. He says he can make my charges go away and promote me at the same time, if I'm willing to put my skills to use in a particular way. That's the stupid term he used. And I knew better, but I was still gambling too much, worried about how I'd take care of Parker, facing an Article 32 … so I agreed."
He takes a breath and a sip of coffee.
"The real name for the team was … doesn't matter. We called it The Program. That's where I met Broadsky for the first time."
"I thought you said you didn't know Broadsky?"
"Kinda hard to admit knowing him while not admitting to the existence of a super secret division of the army," he responds, sarcastically. She doesn't react, much, just a tightening around the eyes, but it's enough for him to back off. He doesn't need to take things out on her.
He gives her a small smile of apology, then he starts again, calmer.
"I'd known about him, but never met him until he was my training officer. For eighteen months I did wetwork - not just shooting, but other assassinations, as well as evidence planting, specialized demolitions … stuff that doesn't fall under the Geneva convention."
He stares at his coffee. He doesn't want to look at her - whether she's sympathetic or disgusted or just clinical - it won't matter. He just doesn't want to have to look at himself in her eyes.
"Tag was a training exercise. Infiltration is important, but for a lot of our missions, exfiltration was more important. We had to be able to get out without leaving a sign. Broadsky taught me how to play tag. Last night was a test - would I play along, and how good would I be?"
"We got away, so obviously you were good enough."
"No, we should have been caught, and caught earlier. Broadsky didn't come after us himself. I'm not sure why. I left enough clues that he'd have gotten to that motel room in an hour."
"That's why you didn't worry about the cameras at the car lot. You were testing our adversaries capabilities."
"Yeah, Bones. Bigger question is … which of the clues I left afterwards will they follow? I'm just hoping they don't have the manpower to follow both."
"And if Broadsky does?"
"Then we're facing a conspiracy, not just a guy gone whacko."
"When will we know?"
"Well, I wrote a note that hinted we were going to the FBI offices in Pittsburgh. I sent our phones on a long hauler to, most likely, Boston. I'll get Hacker to see where people turn up, and then we'll know. Bigger problem though. I have a hidey hole that we'd normally be able to go to, but if we're gonna take on Broadsky and whatever power he's got behind him, we're gonna need access to the team, to our networks. A cabin in the middle of nowhere ain't gonna help us. We need somewhere else."
Bones leans down, takes a bite of fruit salad. Booth recognizes the look on her face - her thinking look - and shuts up. Booth takes stock while sipping on his coffee. The whole frame of this is looking bigger than he'd ever thought. Broadsky couldn't have gotten out of Leavenworth without help, and reasonably powerful help at that, considering how fast it all went down. He would have needed someone to plant the note in Bones' apartment, and Booth doubts that came from the B team, considering that someone have to been watching them for a few days without Booth noticing, and the B team isn't good enough for that. So that implies two teams, which worries Booth even more, since that makes it obvious that this little game of Tag isn't meant to be the main offensive, but some feint in a larger game.
Booth's head starts to hurt. He wonders if they can find Max, get his help. The man did manage to stay hidden for decades.
"I have an idea, Booth."
"Someplace for us to go?"
"Maybe not directly, but I have a friend who has the resources to help us out."
"Somehow I'm thinking that it is unlikely anyone with resources is going to be willing to take us in and help us take on a criminal conspiracy. Unless it's Hodgins, and, trust me, Broadsky knows about Hodgins."
"No, of course not, Booth. I speak to Dr. Hodgins daily. And trust me, my friend will help. I am an excellent judge of character."
Booth blew a breath out his nose. "I've got one place I want to go first. A guy who might be able to help us for a day or two. After that, if there is an after, then we go to your friend. Where is he, anyway?"
"New York."
Booth nodded. At the least, maybe, he'd get some Gray's Papaya before he died.