A/N: The FBI meets the fixer. This chapter is from Agent Moss' and Zoe Morgan's POV

"Moss. A moment, please."

He looked calm, but Brian Moss saw the little tic barely twitching in the corner of his left eye. His boss was furious.

Moss excused himself and followed him to a small office down the hall.

The cause of his boss' fury was a woman standing by a window overlooking a sunken courtyard. She turned smoothly as they walked in, calm and unruffled.

"Agent Brian Moss," his director said, sliding behind the desk. "This is Zoe Morgan. She represents John Warren, the man who was allegedly assaulted at Rikers."

Moss nodded. She was coldly beautiful, the kind of woman you thought would just lay there in bed, but there was a spark there that hinted at a different personality under the elegant persona.

He wondered how she had gotten in here, much less knowing where they were.

Periodically their area director would have closed door sessions off-site with the senior agents – they would have candid discussions about current cases, directives from DC, personnel problems – whatever was hot.

This time the location was an empty office complex in midtown – a fact only known to a few key office staffers – yet somehow Ms. Morgan had tracked them down, bypassed security and gotten his boss to leave the meeting without anyone knowing she was in the building.

She didn't look like an attorney - perhaps she was a media representative, alerting them that some massive news conference about the multi-million dollar lawsuit her client had just filed against the FBI was going to be held shortly.

"Agent Moss," Moss sensed she already knew quite a bit about him. "As I explained to your director, my client is not interested in suing. He's asked me to broker another solution to this problem."

She sat in the guest chair and Moss knew that even though his boss had taken the position of authority behind the desk, she was the one in charge.

Ah. Moss knew what she was. A fixer, one of those shadowy people who take care of matters their clients don't want made public. He'd dealt with a few before, but not one like this – this one swam with the sharks, the real power in the city.

He would love to have a drink with her, ask her what her boundaries were. Did she have a moral code? What things wouldn't she fix for a client – abuse, molestation, rape, murder?

He'd never get to ask those questions, he knew.

He'd never even register with someone like her, much less get her to sit down with him for a drink.

Moss knew what his role was. He would be saying the things his director couldn't. "Can we speak frankly, Ms. Morgan?"

"Of course." She leaned back in her chair and crossed her long legs. "All of this is just a conversation between friends."

"From what I understand, your client is a well-regarded, upstanding citizen. He was handcuffed, dragged out of that bank in front of dozens of people, held for days without legal counsel, interrogated for hours and then beaten within an inch of his life – a beating that was orchestrated by a member of this office. Why wouldn't he sue our pants off?"

Her eyes leisurely scanned him from head to toe – yes, this one would be interesting in bed. "But you've just said why, Agent Moss. My client is very committed to his work, you might say it's a…" she smiled softly, "calling. It requires the utmost discretion and the absolute confidence of his clients. Even though he was completely innocent, I think you understand that even the slightest hint that he had spent some time as a guest of the city, no matter how unjustified, would impact his work negatively and ultimately affect the people he wants to help."

She leaned forward slightly as if she was sharing some wonderful secret. "We all know how this works, don't we, gentlemen? Even though the Bureau is clearly in the wrong, your bureaucracy will go into seek and destroy mode to protect the agency. I understand it's already underway – evidence has disappeared, prisoners have been transferred, the warden got a fantastic job offer five states away and that's just the beginning.

"My client will be attacked, vilified; falsehoods will be spread about him. He'll be linked to the other men that were taken into custody – all murderers by the way - and with two of them dead and one on trial for his life, he won't be able to dispute the allegations. 'Witnesses' will come forward and claim that he caused the attack. The press will hound him. It will be relentless and the only ones who will benefit are the lawyers and the media. My client would receive a settlement, eventually, but the life he has now, would be over."

Moss stood impassively. He knew she was correct; he'd already seen it in the way Donnelly's death was being handled, as though he had never set foot in the NY Bureau's offices, much less worked there – that same bureaucracy would try to grind Warren into dust. Clearly if Warren could engage someone like her, he had resources to fight back, but it would be long, drawn out and ugly – nobody would win. "But you are here for a reason, Ms. Morgan. What does your client want?"

"He wants your office to make a donation -

His boss rose out of his chair, outraged. "A donation? You mean a payoff! This is the FBI, not some borough councilman you're trying to shake down, Ms. Morgan!"

She continued, as though he had not interrupted. "- the monies to come from a 'discretionary' account. I believe you call it the Butler fund."

The director slumped in his chair, his mouth hanging wide open.

Moss raised an eyebrow. Shit. How did she know about that?

The Butler fund was the result of a botched department reorganization last year. Monies had been set aside for a major investigation into a financier, Joseph Butler, that never came to fruition. During the department reorganization, there was a mix up with departmental account numbers. The money was never put in the proper budget bucket and had just sat there, unaccounted for and unnoticed for months.

Moss had stumbled onto the fund recently, after the fiasco of Donnelly's memorial service. Some genius in accounting, apparently not aware that Donnelly was dead, balked at approving the expenses for the service out of the general administrative bucket, saying that the agent's accounts should pay for it.

After Moss, patiently, calmly, methodically explained several times via email, phone and finally in person, that Donnelly had died, he got the expenses approved, but it gnawed at him. All the other traces of Donnelly in the New York office had been quickly erased as though the man never existed. Why hadn't the accounts?

Mystified, Moss did a review on his own and found the Butler fund. Since the late FBI agent had been in an administrative no man's land - still on Boston's personnel roster, but with budgetary privileges within NY - the director had hidden the money there; Moss also suspected that his boss had orchestrated the whole set up, relying on Donnelly's obsession with the elusive Man in a Suit to keep him unaware of a scheme happening under his very nose.

The fund was used for activities that the director would be hard pressed to explain to his superiors – campaign donations, grants, sponsorships – advancing the Bureau's New York office's profile in the city's power structure and of course, enhancing his own social and ultimately, political position.

While the director had spent a great deal of it, there was still a sizable amount of money left.

When Moss confronted the director, he found out that his boss had implicated several senior staffers, including Moss, by making it seem as though they were participants in his scheme, and indeed Moss noted that he had been getting better cooperation from several movers and shakers in the city as of late. He thought it was because of his accomplishments – now it turned out that their cooperation had been bought and paid for.

Reeling, Moss was still trying to figure out how to deal with what he'd discovered – finding out that an outsider knew what his director had done was stunning.

The room was very quiet. Ms. Morgan sat there as if she had just commented on the weather, not that she knew a secret that would bring the New York FBI office to its knees, ruin careers and possibly get his superior thrown in jail.

"Agreed." Moss said.

"Now, wait just a minute," the director sputtered, "You can't –"

"I can," Moss shot back. "Unless you want to be tonight's top news story, Director. I'm sure Ms. Morgan has a media package already prepared."

The fixer ran her long fingers over the clasp of her briefcase. "The funds disappear and no one's the wiser, Director. Your payoffs have bought quite a bit of good will already. I'm confident you can garner the rest on your own."

The director's eyes glinted. "You'd let her get away with this, Moss?"

Moss smiled grimly. "I'm letting you, Director, get away with it. Better that, than ruining the careers of the good agents that you've dragged into this mess."

"And if it gets out? Your coworkers may survive, but you'll go down for it, with me."

Moss knew that if somehow this came out, he would be implicated, not just for the cover up, but also for his boss' original scheme. He was willing to take the chance. "But I won't go down alone, Director."

He watched as the director looked out at that sunken courtyard. Finally his boss nodded, stood and stalked out of the office.

Moss let out the breath that he just realized he'd been holding. "So, does Warren want this 'donation' made out to him, Ms. Morgan?"

The fixer looked disappointed. "Brian…no. He wants it donated to a cause we all can feel good about."

She explained what her client wanted.

The fixer took a tablet out of her briefcase. Moss picked up the chair from the behind the desk, placed it next to Ms. Morgan and sat down. Everything was already prepared – background on the organization, photos, mockups of press releases, the works. Over the next thirty minutes, they tweaked the materials and the agent made several phone calls.

Finally they nodded at each other, satisfied with the arrangements. Moss held out his hand. The fixer raised an eyebrow, her lips twitching, then extended her own hand and they shook.

As he escorted her out of the building, Moss asked, "How did you know to ask for me?"

"A friend of mine heard from a reliable source that you were a good agent, that you'd try to make things right – and you did." She smiled, a real smile, he saw, one that softened her face.

In that moment, Moss felt a connection with her. "Would you like to have a drink sometime?"

She looked surprised, he noted, not that he had asked her, but because he could see that she was actually considering it. "You want to ask me a few questions, perhaps take me to bed…You might not like the answers to your questions, Brian, and I…at least for a little while, want something more than a quick fuck."

Moss watched her walk across the sunken courtyard. She spoke with a tall dark haired man – John Warren, he presumed. Moss raised an eyebrow – perhaps he should have a drink with him – the conversation was bound to be fascinating.

As Moss watched them talk, out of the corner of his eye he caught a flash of red suddenly appearing at the far side of the courtyard.

The reliable source.

Moss smiled to himself. He had her pegged correctly. Detective Jocelyn Carter was very, very smart.

He turned and went back upstairs to the meeting.

XXX

As Zoe walked out into the courtyard, she heard a noise behind her. She had walked right past John Reese without realizing he was there. Zoe smiled as she turned around – she knew that John had made a noise as a courtesy to her, not because he was losing his touch.

"John."

"Zoe."

"It's a pretty sizable donation, John. You sure you want it all to go to one place?"

"They deserve it." He raised an eyebrow. "Your fee?"

"You have some funds in your account, that I think will handle it. And the list of who received the Director's payoffs will come in handy, I'm sure." Zoe looked at him closely. He looked good, not as thin as before and the circles under his eyes were gone.

"Thank you." His eyes went past her. For a moment Zoe saw his face relax, become almost peaceful, then resume that impassive exterior she was so familiar with.

Zoe didn't need to turn around.

The detective. The little detective.

He touched her hand and walked away.

Zoe couldn't help herself, she had to see them together. The detective looked good, too. Those bangs were gone and she had an absolutely stunning red coat on, a coat that said rip off my clothes and fuck my brains out. And perhaps he had.

John stood close to her for a moment and the detective's body curved just slightly towards his. Even though they weren't touching, Zoe could see something emanating from both of them, rising and swirling together – something fierce and strong and incredibly powerful.

With her finely honed survivor's instincts, Zoe pitied anyone who tried to come between them.

The detective nodded to her and then the two of them walked away.

Yes, some day, somehow, some way, Zoe vowed, she and Jocelyn Carter were going to have a talk.

A/N: Next, a fable, a ceremony and the real first time (yeah, yeah, I know, it's about time!) and in Chapter 17, we catch up with some POIs – Persons, and Pets, of Interest.