Disclaimer: I own neither Glee nor any part thereof. No money is being made off of this story and is intended only for entertainment purposes; therefore it falls within the parameters of "Fair Use"

A/N: Thanks one again to everyone who gives feedback, you guys are totally awesome. This one took me a while because I was having trouble getting Artie's voice right. I'm still not totally sure I did any good with him but I'm tired of rewriting it. I'm going to start out this chapter with a bit of a tease of action that we won't actually get to. Basically this chapter and the next were supposed to be one chapter but it started getting long so I'm splitting it. Hope you enjoy.

Chapter 6

Contacts and Conflicts Part 1

10:22 pm EST, May 23rd

Santana coughed herself awake. Her vision was blurry, her ears were ringing, and she tasted asphalt on her tongue, everything around her smelled like smoke. There was a pain in her left leg she couldn't identify and there was blood on her clothes that she also couldn't identify. There was a burning wreck of a car nearby and two other people on the ground, one of them on fire and not moving, thus probably dead. None of those things concerned her remotely as much as the fact that she didn't know where Brittany was.

X

11:25 am EST, May 23rd

Bright and early that morning Santana had gotten another encrypted text from Abe with a confirmation number of two train tickets from New York to Boston and a GPS location for them to meet. At a cursory glance, the location would put them in the Mid Dorchester neighborhood. Santana hadn't bothered nailing down an exact address on the train but as the two of them, following Santana's handheld GPS tracker, strolled onto the campus of The University of Massachusetts, Boston Santana began to wish that she had. The location would only get them within a hundred feet of where they were supposed to meet Abe which wouldn't even necessarily narrow it down to a single building much less a floor and an office or classroom.

As they approached the Computer Science building, Santana's phone rang, and she suddenly stopped walking as did Brittany a moment later. Santana retrieved her phone looking at the screen which told her that the number was blocked, but again, only Brittany and Abe had this number and Brittany was standing right in front of her. "Yeah?" she answered.

"Your Whitney's cute," Abe said.

"We're here," Santana said, "Where the hell are you?"

"Around," he said, "Go into the building at your 12, follow the main corridor ahead to the second cross hallway and make a left. Go in the first door on your right. It's a soundproof group study room. Hurry."

The line went dead so she quickly dumped the phone back into her pocket. "Come on," she said to Brittany, "I feel like we're going to have some serious hoops to jump through since he doesn't know you." Brittany followed her without question. "When we get in there he's probably going to try to grill you about… I don't know, probably everything. Remember the other day when we were talking to that Puck guy that I didn't trust and I asked you not to tell him anything? Well this is the exact opposite of that, I trust Abe with my life. Whatever he asks you, tell him, your real name, things about us, whatever. He was paranoid before Smythe crippled him, now he's fifty times worse. If he gets even a hint that you're not entirely on the level then he will assume that you're out to get me or more likely him and we'll never even get in a room with him let alone get him to help us."

All Brittany said was, "Okay."

They walked through the large glass front doors of the Computer Science building following Abe's direction once they were in. They quickly found and entered the study room in question. Santana held the door for Brittany and then followed her in. When the door closed behind her, Santana heard a distinctive click. "Abe, did you just lock me in this fucking room?" No response. "I know you can hear me."

Santana quickly took in the room. It was about fifteen feet by twenty feet. There were two windows in the room looking out onto the two hallways that bordered it; the blinds were currently down on both. One large table took up the center of the room with eight chairs arranged around it. In the middle of the table was a conference phone with a blinking red light.

Santana rolled her eyes at herself, crossed the room to the table, and pushed the button. "Yes, I can hear you," Abe said, "No, I didn't lock you in the room. I locked everyone else out of it. Now both of you sit, I need to get to know Whitney."

"Brittany," Brittany said sitting down in front of the phone.

"I know." "He knows." Abe and Santana said speaking over one another. Santana sat down next to Brittany.

"How?"

"He's Abe," Santana said.

"I know who you are, Brittany," Abe said, "because I know what's going on between you two. Mac here said more than she thinks she did when she called it a 'Costner/Houston situation'. She was trying to invoke the word 'bodyguard' but what's The Bodyguard about?"

Brittany looked at Santana and smiled before saying , "It's about a bodyguard who falls in love with his client."

"Exactly," Abe said, "I knew The Brotherhood wouldn't ever assign an operative of Mac's skill to babysit someone, so I looked into what she was doing. I found out that she had been sent out to kill you and that a month later she was still on the case. It's never taken her anywhere near that long to resolve a case, so that could only mean that something had gone sideways. I did a little digging into who you are and then I found some traffic camera footage of you two together in a very nice looking Audi. So Mac, tell the truth 'cause you know I'll know if you don't… are you really in love with Brittany?"

"Yes," Santana said.

"And this is… I don't know… serious?" Abe said.

Santana looked up to where she was pretty sure that she spotted one of Abe's micro cameras. "Serious enough that you don't have to call me Mac," she said.

There was silence over the intercom for a minute, "You…" he started and fell silent again, "Brittany, what is Mac's real name?"

"Santana Christina Maria Lopez," Brittany said.

"Do you know my real name?"

Brittany looked at Santana puzzled, "Not unless your real name is Abe," she said, "Which I never really thought it was. I know you guys all have codenames and aliases and stuff."

"What do you know about me?" he asked.

"Abe, come on," Santana said, "What's the point of this?"

"San, you told me to answer his questions," Brittany said putting a hand over Santana's, "You said we need his help and that we have to go through this so that he'll trust me. Abe, I'll answer anything you want to ask me. I know you use to work with Santana until you got hurt. Someone stabbed you in the back and now you can't walk. I know you're good with computers. I know that you and Santana are best friends and have been for like ever and I know you're the only person in the world that Santana trusts with her life. I'm sorry if any of that is stuff you didn't want me to know. I really am, but we need your help… I need your help. People want to hurt me for something I didn't do. I don't want to die and I don't want Santana to die because she helped me. She says you're our best hope of getting The Brotherhood to leave me alone, so if you need to ask me a hundred questions to make sure I really am who I say I am, then ask them. I'll answer all of them as best I can and I just… we really need your help, Abe."

"Okay, then," Abe said seemingly unaffected by her speech, "Just answer everything honestly and we'll have no problems. And just so you know, Brittany, I can spot a lie a mile away." Brittany just nodded. "Let's start easy. Can you tell me your full name please?"

"Brittany Susan Pierce."

"And were you named after anyone, Brittany?"

"Um, my middle name, Susan, was the name of my cheerleading coach in high school. She went to high school with my parents and they're still like best friends and stuff," Brittany said, "I think they just picked my first name out of a book or something."

"When and where were you born?" Abe asked next.

"Lima General Hospital in Lima, Ohio on July 17th, 1993 at six in the morning. My mom never let me forget that."

"That segues nicely," Abe said, "Tell me about your family."

"My dad's name is Jeffery Robert Pierce. My mom is Mary Ann Katherine Farmer or that was her maiden name, it's Pierce now. They met in college at Ohio State University. They've been married for thirty something years, I forget how many exactly."

X

Over the course of the next hour and a half, Abe questioned Brittany about her life growing up, moving to New York, school, her contact with Abstergo, and her version of meeting Santana. Brittany answered every question openly, honestly, and without hesitation. Santana learned a lot about her in that hour, things that weren't in the dossier The Brotherhood gave her since it was relevant to Santana's mission. So caught up in processing all this information was Santana that she almost missed Abe's last question to Brittany… almost.

"Are you in love with Santana?" he asked.

"What the fuck, Abe?" Santana reacted immediately, "She doesn't have to tell you that. Brittany, you don't have to answer that. That's not a damn bit of his business. You don't have to know every damn thing about everyone, you nosey fuck. She has been beyond cooperative while you grilled her now back the fuck off already."

The silence that followed was pointed. Abe was an intelligence officer in The Brotherhood and Santana knew that once he'd asked a question, he would wait for an answer, for days if needed and he also knew that they were sort of desperate for his help. Santana also knew that he wasn't intentionally being a dick, it's just how he was. If she were face to face with him she might get him to back down on intruding into Brittany's personal feelings that frankly he didn't need to know, but she wasn't in the same room with him. For all she knew, she wasn't even in the same building or the same part of town with him and even if she knew where to find him, she wasn't certain that she'd be able to enter the room without his permission. Security systems and intrusion countermeasures were Abe's stock in trade these days.

Santana was stirred from her thoughts when she heard Brittany speak once more. "Yes," she said with her eyes affixed firmly to the speakerphone, "The answer to your last question is yes." Santana had no idea what to say and Brittany never looked her way.

After a moment Abe spoke again, "Diving ship, pastime, halitosis, deuce, Twinkies, lonely, Zoso. Confirmed?"

"Confirmed," Santana said immediately. She stood and walked for the door. Brittany followed her. When they were back in the hallway she said, "Need to find an elevator."

"Back that way," Brittany said, pointing back the way they'd come, "I think we passed one on our way here." Sure enough, back in the first cross hallway on the right there was an elevator. "So that was more code," Brittany said as Santana pushed the down button.

"Yeah," Santana replied, "A diving ship is a submarine, the America's national pastime is baseball, halitosis means you have bad breath which means you need a mint, so that all adds up to 'sub' 'base' 'mint'. Deuce means two. Twinkies also means two because they come two to a pack. Lonely means one because one is the loneliest number, and Zoso is the title of an album that most of the world calls Led Zeppelin IV. So we're either going to the sub-basement to room 2214 or to sub-basement 2 to room 214." The elevator doors parted soon and they both stepped on. There was a sub-basement and a sub-basement 2, so Santana pushed both buttons. As the doors slid back shut Santana looked at Brittany and said, "Look, I'm sorry he made you do that. He can be a real jackass sometimes. There was no need for him to force you into answering that last question before you were ready. I'm so sorry, and I gonna punch him in the fucking face when we get down there. You hear that, Abe?" she said louder, holding her left fist aloft, "This fist, your face, asshole."

"It's okay," she said softly as the elevator doors slid open again.

"Wait here one second," Santana said, "hold the door open." Without waiting for any sort of response she made a left outside the elevator quickly making her way down the narrow corridor. She turned back after less than twenty yards. "Three digit room numbers, all starting with 1," she said to Brittany when she returned.

They both stepped back into the elevator and let it continue its descent. "I meant it," Brittany said softly. Santana didn't know how to respond to this confession. "Finding out who you are, what you do… it didn't change how I felt… feel. I'm not ready to act on what I feel but…"

After a moment it became clear that Brittany wasn't going to finish verbalizing the thought, Santana gently placed a hand on her shoulder. "Take all the time you need, Brittany. I'm not going anywhere, not without you, not unless you tell me to leave."

Brittany nodded. Neither of them spoke again and soon the elevator door slid open again. Santana led the way down the hall. They followed the directory signs and eventually came to room 214. Santana tried the door but it was locked. She quickly glanced up and down the hall as she retrieved her lock pick tools from her jacket pocket, glad that she'd brought the tools of her trade with her today. The lock was deceptively complex but then Santana had been expecting that. Whereas, a normal lock usually took less than ten seconds, it wound up taking her the better part of two minutes to pick this one. When the door swung open, Santana and Brittany were left staring at a cleaning supply closet. "Wrong room?" Brittany guessed.

"Not a chance," Santana said wading into the room, feeling long the walls as she went. Brittany stood at the door and watched her as Santana felt high and low clearly looking for something. A couple of minutes of searching later, Santana was knelt near the back wall when Brittany heard a click and a section of the wall slid away.

Brittany waded into the room to look beyond the hidden to see a flight of stairs leading even further down. "If your friend is in a wheelchair then how does he get down there?"

"Abe's not going to hole himself up in a place with only one way in or out," Santana said. She pulled out a flashlight and flicked it on to illuminate the stairwell. "Close the outside door." Brittany did as told and Santana led her down an interminably long set of stairs. Finally after so many stairs that Brittany had lost count they came to a landing where there was a ninety degree right turn and another ten stairs ending in a heavy metal door. Santana walked quickly down the stairs and tried the latch on the door but it too, of course, was locked. She banged heavily on the door and yelled, "Open the door, Abe!"

A small speaker embedded in the wall next to the door broadcast Abe's voice, "What's the password?"

Santana's head whipped over to stare at the speaker before shouting, "The password is OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR, ABE! I've put up with your paranoid shit as long as I intend to! I need your help but that doesn't give you license to abuse our friendship goddamnit!" Santana's outburst was immediately followed by the sounds of things in the door sliding, presumably the sounds of either locks being undone or more locks being done. Santana tried the door once more and found that this time it pulled open effortlessly.

The room beyond was huge. There were ten work tables in two rows facing a bank of about fifty monitors on the far wall all bearing different images. Abe was sat at table closest to the wall of monitors staring down at the computer screen on the desk. "Jesus, Abe, how did you manage all of this, you printing money these days?"

"Ha!" he barked, "Who needs to print money when I can just hack bank's network and create myself an account with as much money as I need? As for the monitor bank this used to be an NSA listening post. It was abandoned four years ago because of budget cuts. They stripped it of most everything but apparently that was too much effort or too many man hours to disassemble."

"What are you watching?" Brittany asked.

"Airports, sea ports, train stations, bus terminals, this school, obviously… honestly, the list of places I'm not watching would be shorter to describe," he said pointing over his shoulder, "All that video gets fed into a supercomputer that takes up the next room where it runs the most sophisticated facial recognition software known to man. I track the whereabouts of all known members of the Knights Templar at all times."

"To find the one that hurt you?" Brittany asked.

Abe looked at Brittany in surprise then quickly re-directed his attention towards Santana in anger. "Don't look at me like that," Santana said, "You interrogated her for an hour and a half, then pressured her into revealing something she wasn't ready to tell. After that, I'd have told her your real name, where you were born, your favorite brand of breakfast cereal, and whether or not you wear boxers or briefs. Don't pretend you're some saint here."

"Fine," Abe said tersely, "Call it a wash. You need help."

"I do," Santana said, "You already know most of this but a month ago I got a kill order on Brittany here from Il Maestro, but as it turns out she's not an agent or an asset of The Templars, she's not even an employee of Abstergo. She's a former human test subject for a project called Morningstar. I was hoping you either knew or could find out what that was."

"The only thing I know off the top of my head about it is that it's connected to The Animus Project," Abe said.

Santana sat there for a moment expecting him to explain, "I'm not in Intelligence, Abe. Those words are completely meaningless to me."

"Right," he said shaking his head a little, "Sorry," he added before turning back to his computer and clicking away on a few things. Suddenly the wall of monitors cleared of all the disparate images to show one solid image. It was a drawing of platform about three feet high, rectangular in shape with a row of what looked like lights running down the middle length wise and round plastic dome on one end.

"That's it," Brittany said. Both of them looked at her. "That's the thing I would lay on when I went in for the treatments."

"That's the Animus," Abe said, "It was the brainchild of Abstergo research scientist Dalton Rumba who had a theory that… well strictly speaking it wasn't even a theory so much as a hypothesis because theories…"

"Abe," Santana said.

"Right, sorry," he said, "Rumba had a hypothesis that each of us stores the memories of our ancestors in our DNA and built the Animus in order to access those memories and before you ask, I have no idea how. I do computers, not people. All I can tell you is that it worked, so apparently it's true. After the thing was built, several people from Assassin families disappeared never to be heard from again."

"They were taken alive?" Santana asked.

"They weren't trained operatives, Santana," Abe said quickly clicking on a few more buttons and twelve monitors along the bottom of the wall flashed up dossiers. "All of them were at least two generations removed from active duty. Most of them had never even set foot on a farm, but because of Animus technology it didn't matter. Strapping them to these machines and forcing them to relive their grandparents and great-grandparents' lives was every bit as effective as interrogating the operatives themselves, even better really because these people were likely never trained to withstand interrogation like we are."

"What was the endgame?" Santana asked.

"Rumba's was apparently just to create the machine," Abe explained, "As near as I can tell, he's an entirely legit, completely above board scientist… or rather he was. He got run over by a car a year and a half ago."

"They killed him?" Santana asked.

"Hard to say," he answered, "He was stone deaf in one ear after a bout of scarlet fever as a child, so it's possible it really was an accident, but yeah, it's more likely that they took him out to keep him from publishing his findings so that they could keep Animus a secret. As for Abstergo's endgame, I couldn't tell you. What I can tell you is whatever they were looking for odds are they found it because they've stopped looking… at least as far as anyone can tell. When The Brotherhood got wind of missing Assassins kids, everyone ever associated with The Brotherhood got set up with a protective detail. That's when I got my babysitters. No one has disappeared since."

Santana looked to Brittany and said, "And you don't remember anything like this?"

Brittany shook her head and said, "Maybe it didn't work on me."

"No," Santana said with certainty, "I can assure you that they didn't have you come in every day for months and pay you more than a million dollars if they weren't getting something out of you. No, it's more likely that they did something to tamper with you memories of what happened."

"They can do that?" Brittany said.

Santana looked to Abe who shrugged then back to Brittany, "I have no idea but apparently they can summon the memories of people who died decades maybe even centuries ago out of their great grandchildren. Suppressing memories has been done in one form or another for a hundred years or more through something as simple as hypnosis. I don't know why they wouldn't be able to." Brittany had no response to that. She sucked her bottom lip in between her teeth and nodded sadly.

When no one spoke again for a couple of minutes, Abe finally piped up, "So I can dig into the Morningstar thing but it might take some time, I can get through Abstergo's security system but it won't be easy and it definitely won't be quick." He pointed to a doorway on his right and said, "There's some makeshift living quarters through there, if you want to take a nap or get something to eat, or there's an armory and a dojo through there," he pointed the other way to his left, "if you want to exercise or whatever, mi casa is su casa, just please don't stand here and watch me work. It's unnerving."

Santana looked to Brittany and said, "Food?"

"Food," Brittany replied.