A/N: Man this chapter has kicked my ass up and down and all over the place. It turns out exposition – a whole chapter full of it - is really hard to write and can both kill a plot's momentum and bog the story down in details. However – necessary evil – so here you go . . . and please tell me this works. Oh and before I forget - I didn't have time to reply to all of the reviewers individually last update - I'm SO sorry. You take the time to tell me things I should find the time to acknowledge it. I WILL do better - pinky promise.
Chapter Nine: When all your nights are starless.
Five months ago. . .
Castle sits on the sand alone . . . he's fifteen feet from the water when the waves wash out, but when they wash back in again they're barely four feet from his toes. He kinda expects a larger wave to swamp him in the relatively near future – and as a metaphor that's absolutely working for him this morning.
It's cooler today. Still sunny and a hell of a lot warmer than New York currently is, but there are clouds in the sky above him – they scud across the sun and block it out in regular intervals and suddenly the beach gets colder and more forbidding – and somehow that feels appropriate too.
His whole world feels so off kilter . . . and each hour without Kate – emotionally it feels like drowning.
The author's mind is both over-taxed and working over-time – and for a man whose mind is usually as active and as imaginative as his that's really saying something. He feels like he's caught somewhere between 'a-complete-daze' and 'a-total-downward-spiral'; his thoughts chasing each other across the vast landscape of his mind, a maelstrom of chaos that's almost too much to take in.
Because the writer blames himself now – now that he's been told enough to visualize the big picture. He can't help but see how he inadvertently not only stacked the damn dominoes – but was the one to push the first one down.
Everything else - from the need his father felt – stepping into his life in order to save it, to the desperate emptiness that threatens to swallow him with being so far away from Kate – to the devastation he knows his disappearance must be wreaking on those he loves – all of this it just snowballed from there.
This is because of him.
It was his stupid, stubborn pride that put them all here. His complete inability to just ask Kate a simple question in the wake of the Wall Street bombing– really, how hard is it to say 'why did you lie to me?' This is all because he was so damn afraid of her reasons – of the power she held so effortlessly over him. And yet - how could he ever have foreseen that his dumb ass idea to follow around a different cop would land him inside a nightmare there's no easy way to escape from?
'Muses are to provide inspiration and right now I ain't getting any – so Detective Nikki Heat, meet Detective Slaughter.'
God he wishes he'd been stronger – he wishes he'd never watched the television that morning.
One case – a couple of days – that's all he spent around Ethan Slaughter before he wised up. One tiny period of time spent with his head up his ass hiding – how unfair is it that one lapse in his judgment should lead to this?
Castle pushes himself up off of the sand, unable to just sit and think a moment longer. He feels compelled to move – walk – run even – just to go somewhere, yet now that he's on his feet - walking or running the beach is really all that's open to him . . . there's simply no where else for him to go.
Gabor hasn't locked him in his room or confined him to the villa because freedom is completely relative here. The spacious villa is one of only three stone buildings on a tiny island – the other two consisting of a boat house and a small cottage housing staff. A mile and half long by a mile wide, there are a couple of beaches and the rest is rocky hills and cliffs. As private islands in the Aegean go it should be a millionaires dream – but it's a prison in all actuality. Secret, accessible only by sea and legally belonging to a shady corporation that's a front for the Central Intelligence arm of the US government.
Castle stares at the sky – at the patches of blue between the clouds above him and the words write themselves across his vision – 'no where to run to and no where to hide.'
Mainland Greece is a good fifty miles away and the closest inhabited island is a ten mile swim – if he even knew which direction to head in. And to truly make it secure, Gabor has sent all the boats that had been stationed here away – so Castle is totally trapped – and it seems he's just going to have to get used to it.
He wants to scream in exasperation, throw things – punch somebody, but instead the writer heads down the sand and lets the water swirl coldly around his toes. He's trapped and Kate-less and who the hell is he kidding – not thinking about it? That's impossible . . . it just keeps going around and around in his head.
Yesterday, when Richard Gabor had laid out the story for him – frankly, Castle thought it was so insanely far-fetched a tale, that even he couldn't spin it and make somebody buy it. Yet it's the truth – his father isn't lying to him about it – of that one thing the writer is just horribly sure.
A powerful Mexican drug lord wants him dead – because it's the perfect way to make Kate Beckett pay for the loss of everything Cesar Valez once held dear – namely his family and his high-level position within the Mexican Mafia.
Killing her – it just wouldn't be enough – not when Cesar's wife and children have been taken from him, slaughtered in one of the worst ways imaginable. Oh no, the drug lord's pride demands the need to see her to suffer until he's tired of watching it and then when he's convinced she's truly broken – only then does Cesar plan on revealing to her that he's the one behind her pain and why.
Because of Kate, Cesar Valez exhibited a perceived weakness – and the perception of weakness is just not tolerated in Valez' line of work. The hardened bad-ass drug lord stood toe to toe in front of witnesses with Kate Beckett and meekly held his tongue while she proceeded to threaten him.
Something she would never had had cause to do if not for Castle.
Still, maybe that moment of silence – that lack of threats from Valez wouldn't have mattered – except that months after the fact Ethan Slaughter out-ted Valez about it, and not just to his own people – oh no. Ethan broadcast every detail of that conversation; broadcast it loud and proud - to the Westies, the Cazadores, the Trench Town posse even the local Italian mafia.
Slaughter regaled them all with the juicy details about how the beautiful female cop had sent the drug lord home with a flea in his ear - he made Cesar look bad – really, really bad – so bad in fact that Valez barely escaped the fallout with his life, and had to pop off three of his highest ranking cohorts in an effort to save face. And Slaughter knew that's exactly what would happen – in fact he counted on it ending badly for Cesar. Counted on his demise to begin a complete fracturing of the Mexican cartel's leadership which would then result in a weakening of their hold on their territory and have all the other drug gangs in the city owing him a solid.
It worked brilliantly too, initially. Slaughter was making collars and calling in favors all over the map.
But the backfire? Massive.
Because Cesar Valez didn't die in the leadership revolt the way Slaughter had planned it - in fact he's been fighting dirty to win back his authority and hell bent on revenge ever since. And this is where it gets weird – where the plot – if this were a novel gets so much harder to sell; because in order to reclaim his power and his status, Cesar Valez has gone into business with the CIA. In exchange for a virtual license from them to smuggle both heroin and cocaine over the Mexican border and into the United States, Cesar provides them with intelligence about all the rival cartels.
Information that is proving to be an invaluable asset in the ongoing Mexican drug war; a bitter armed conflict between rival cartels fighting each other for regional control while the Mexican Government Forces battle somewhat hopelessly to dismantle them and the CIA tries to keep drugs off the streets.
As Gabor explained it to Rick – with the Mexican cartels currently controlling ninety percent of all the illicit drugs that enter the United States - that's billions of dollars in the hands of criminals on the line. So for the CIA, ignoring Cesar Valez and his percentage of those dollars, in return for potentially all the other bigger fry is a huge win and Valez gets the protection and the secret weapon of the CIA in his back pocket as his end of the deal. Its still a huge risk for Valez - the rival cartels don't yet know where all this damaging intelligence is coming from – if they did they'd desperately want him dead in order to shut him up.
But never is a man more dangerous than when he's got nothing of value to him left to lose. And for that – Cesar Valez blames Detectives Kate Beckett and Ethan Slaughter.
One of whom is dead – the other – must be made to suffer.
Ethan Slaughter has been taken out. Valez simply fed him bad information - placed him carefully in the wrong place at the wrong time during a shootout between the Cazadores and the Westies. And amid the chaos no one noticed when it was Valez himself who took the giant brutish cop down. The NYPD's infamous 'widow-maker' is no more.
And for the now ex-Detective Beckett's punishment – well Valez is consumed by a burning need to make her suffer far, far more. A bullet between the eyes would have simply been too kind.
He wants her to pay slowly – by taking away from her what has been taken away from him. What she cares about and values the most in the world - Richard Castle.
And this is where Richard Gabor steps in.
The CIA spy is Valez' agency liaison. In the midst of a nightmare there is this fortunate twist of fate for his secret son it turns out. A hardened, experienced, deadly and brutally ruthless spy jaded by more years in the trenches with scum than anyone should ever see - but nonetheless the only man the CIA trusted to keep Cesar both in the program and under surveillance.
Slaughter's murder happened before the CIA could act to prevent it – Castle's . . . well Gabor was forced to think and act very fast; to literally snatch his son from a dark Manhattan sidewalk - under his partner's nose and without any witnesses. And he had to accomplish it on the very same night Valez had planned to take the author's life – as the drug lord had put it – 'poetically.'
Cesar wanted maximum pain for Kate out of killing Castle – so the writer was going to die not only on the painful anniversary of Kate's mother's murder; but very literally 'in a hail of bullets'.