Close Encounters 13
When Beckett entered the lobby of the treatment center where Saber was, her phone vibrated angrily in her jacket pocket. She checked the alerts and saw the message from Castle, debated whether or not to let it go for now. She paused before the bank of elevators and called him back instead of texting, her mind racing for a strong enough prevarication.
In the end, she had nothing. Just the dry taste of dust in her mouth when it came to outright lying to him.
"Ryan said you left right before I got back," he said in greeting. He sounded fine, calm enough, but she detected a thread of question underneath the warmth.
"I did."
"Following up on something? I thought I had it covered."
Her mind slipped right off the edge of that, unsure where she was, where he was either, what was going on. For the first time in weeks, she realized maybe all this time they hadn't been talking about the same thing. "What covered?" she said dumbly, leaning back on her heels and studying the elevator as it made its slow descent to the lobby.
"Everything," he answered, sounding equally bewildered. "I've got the personnel files from the bank. We'll know soon who it was that facilitated the transfer. And then - Kate - I don't... I haven't let it fall through the cracks. I promise. Even with this thing with Mason going on. Mason is - he's Mason and he'll be fine-"
"Castle," she interrupted him. "I'm not worried about Bracken. We're closer to actually nailing him for all of this than we have ever been."
"Then what are you even doing?" Castle said. He sounded like a child, plaintive and out of sorts, whining to her.
"I'm at the treatment center," she admitted. "I've been... talking with Saber. Off and on."
He was stone silent, not even breath, and the elevator doors chose that moment to slide open, disgorging a host of medical workers leaving for lunch. Kate waited while they exited the lift, and then she stepped on.
"Castle," she said, more question than anything.
"I... that is legally irresponsible, Beckett."
"Why I didn't tell you."
"If he makes noise-"
"He hasn't. I think he enjoys lording it over me. All his knowledge."
"What are you even trying to accomplish here? Some kind of... is this therapy? Did Dr King tell you to-"
"No," she hissed, jabbing her finger into the button for the fifth floor. She'd been so hung on his next words that she'd forgotten when she first stepped on. "Castle. He knows about everything - what it was like, what went on behind closed doors, what the regimen did."
"But." Castle sighed and she could practically see him scraping his hand down his face. "Kate, please be careful. Turn your phone off so there's no tracking-"
"I'm on one of the burners, sweetheart." She'd already thought of that. She'd thought of a hell of a lot more than just how easily Castle could GPS track her phone. "I'm ghosting my calls and alerts."
"Oh, good. How did you sign in?"
"Classified. The guard has one of my covers."
"That can be traced back to you."
"With difficulty. But Saber isn't going to rattle any cages or make noise, Rick. It's just him and me up there in that suite and he likes it that way. He likes having me all to himself, knowing that Black hates me - and you and I together even more - and I can use that to my advantage."
"I don't like it."
"You don't have to like it. I'm doing what's necessary for the mission."
"What mission?" he growled. "This is just you... I don't even know. I thought you'd be here when I got back and we could work on these personnel records. We are so close, Kate. It's almost over."
She went quiet and the elevator doors slid open, revealing the suite of recovery rooms where Saber was being held. She had her alternate ID already out and allowed the guard in the hall to inspect it.
"Kate. We're so close to having it finally be done. Don't you want that?"
"Of course I do," she said automatically, her heart in her throat. "It's part of the plan - everything in place for..." She knew he wanted a family, knew he wanted to create this perfect life he'd never gotten, but she hadn't realized until now how desperately he wanted it. "We'll get him. You're right - we're so close. But I'll be back in a couple of hours, Rick. Just - I have to see Saber first."
"I don't understand why you're doing this."
"I don't understand why you're not," she said bitterly.
And then she hung up on him and walked through the suite to find Dr Saber.
Beckett bit the inside of her cheek to keep her temper on a slow simmer. She was perched on the edge of the upholstered wingback as Dr Saber was served his meal. His leg was in a brace and she could see the ugly black scars where stitches knitted skin together over the staples and pins and plates in his knees. He didn't look comfortable - he looked in severe pain, actually - and that was the only thing that kept her mouth shut.
The aide - a burly male with biceps bigger than Castle's - moved away from the narrow breakfast table and disappeared back through the door. Beckett knew there were two others in the anteroom who were on shift this afternoon, acting as both guard and therapist.
"To what do I owe the honor?" Saber murmured with a lift of his lips. Beckett couldn't help but dig her fingernails into the soft skin of her palm as the man slowly peeled the aluminum foil back from his baked potato.
No knife, and the fork was plastic, and she could tell that irked him.
"You know why I'm here," she said before she could edit herself. She clamped her lips together as his face flashed with irritation. "I need your help."
Her admittance caused the darkness in his eyes to harden, a cruel pleasure that made her skin crawl. She could understand how Black and Saber had been best buddies - and she could see even more how Black had left him behind.
Saber was a messy eater and she didn't think it was just because of the pain or the meds. He had a practiced air about him, pieces of baked potato dusting his sweater and butter stains on the paper placemat. When Saber took his first bite, he brushed his fingers off on his sleeve in a gesture that looked oft-used. That lack of fastidiousness would have crawled under Black's skin for sure; Beckett had worked under and around Castle's father too long not to know how exacting he was.
Not just the slovenly manner. Saber was too conniving, too self-serving for someone like Black to keep him on. Black was devious, yes, but he did it all in service to a greater goal, a purpose which made the ends justify the means. He had standards that Saber would never have measured up to.
Beckett loathed that Machiavellian philosophy, especially because of what it had done to her husband, but at least in choice of comrade, Beckett agreed with Black's ditching of Saber. Castle's father had surrounded himself with people who were strictly disciplined, people who abided by a code of conduct - to his credit, people like Eastman and Mitchell - and a guy like Saber must have been distasteful.
That alone meant Saber had information that Beckett could use. If Black had kept the untidy, pontificating asshole around, then Black had needed him for the regimen. For Castle.
And so Beckett did too.
"Did your husband suffer a relapse?" Saber said with a smirk. A soft piece of baked potato dropped from the raised fork.
Beckett held her breath, let her stunned silence do the work.
Saber's mouth unfurled like the Grinch's, eyes slitted with a perverse joy. "I thought so. What is it this time? He go AWOL? Stroke out? The squad had a variety of adverse effects before we got those stabilizers in place." Saber chuckled to himself over some memory that apparently amused him. "Oh, Martinez, poor bastard. Shoving razorblades under his skin to dig out the insects he imagined crawling under there."
Holy fuck.
Kate's breath stopped.
Saber lifted his eyes from his baked potato and his smile faltered. "None of that? At all?" His eyes narrowed. "Can't be long now though. Is he showing signs yet? Chills, hot flashes, hearing voices?"
Oh God. Castle.
"Cat got your tongue, girl? Come on. This is a two-way street. You tell me what symptoms he's got and I'll tell you what you want to know."
She opened her mouth and heard the sound that came out, the choking disbelief. "What?"
"If you don't talk to me, I don't talk to you. That's how this works."
"Signs of what?" Squad. Saber had said a squad. Martinez who shoved razorblades under his skin. "Signs of a... a breakdown?"
"Breakdown, stroke, heart attack, all manner of issues. Your boy had six doses of serum in one go. And no damn stabilizers. You bunch of idiots, mucking around in things you don't know. You didn't even ask for my help, just kicked me out of the inner circle, just like his damn father. He's got to have one of those conditions, something."
She stood slowly from the table and pressed her fists into the surface to keep from leaping over the short distance and strangling his smug little neck. "I asked you. I gave you the chance to help us and you-"
Saber growled and jabbed the fork in her direction. "You little bitch. You're the reason I'm in this damn chair with fourteen screws in my knee and being monitored like a damn traitor. A traitor. I did everything, gave everything, for this regimen, for Black's fucking experiment and his lab rat of a son."
She switched tactics. "You said stabilizers. What are those?"
"No. Nothing. You get nothing. Leave."
She leaned forward and felt the rage burning clear and bright. "You tell me what he needs, or so help me God, I will make your life hell in here."
"You fucking try it," he spat back. "You shot me; I don't owe you anything."
"And Castle? What about what you owe him? For years you worked with his father, screwing with his DNA, changing his body, shaping his brain to your own designs. You owe him the answers."
"For what? It's not like he was Frankenstein's monster. I took a pitiful little boy, an orphaned sniveling wimp, and I gave him power. He should be thanking me."
"He wasn't an orphan," she flared back. She bit her tongue, tasted blood as she struggled to just keep her damn mouth shut. Not give him any more ammunition. She couldn't bear to think of her husband as a boy, longing for a hero in his father and wishing for his mother at night in the darkness - and all the while, Black dosing him to see what would happen.
"No matter," Saber dismissed. "Without those stabilizers, I get the last laugh. I get to watch your spy fall apart."
"Over my dead body," she snarled and shoved back from the table to stalk away.
Hell no. No.
Castle was not falling apart.
"Castle?"
His spine jerked him upright in the seat at the sound of her voice on the phone. "Kate. Are you-?"
"I need-" There was a choked noised and he heard her breathing hard. "I - are you okay?"
"Am I okay?" he growled. "You sound - What's going on, Kate?"
"Just is there - are there - you said you'd tell me if anything..."
"Hey, hey," he soothed, standing up and abandoning his station. "Kate? There's nothing, I promise. Not even cold. What's going on, love? What did Saber say to you?"
"It's bad, Castle," she whispered over the phone. "Oh, God."
"He's just screwing with us, baby. I'm fine. I promise."
"No, he's not. He thought you'd already - he mentioned... terrible side effects, Rick."
"I'm fine, love. I'm just fine. I promise."
"For how long though? He said - there was a squad. There was a - a man who - razors that - Castle."
"Where are you right now, Kate?" He was already out of the command center and jogging towards the elevators. He punched the button hard and swiped his ID, waiting impatiently on the balls of his feet. Martinez. The Special Forces guys. "Kate? Where are you?"
"I'm at - just outside the rehab center."
"I'm coming to meet you."
"No, Castle, I-"
"Yes," he insisted. "Can you make it to Central Park?"
"Make it?"
"Love, this isn't the time to raise your hackles at my word choice. Go to Central Park. I'll meet you at Belvedere Castle. Okay?"
"I'm not-"
"Kate."
"Fine," she said tightly. But he didn't think it was irritation; it sounded more like Kate on the fine, crumbling edge of her control. "Central Park."
"It'll take me about twenty minutes," he warned her. "I'm in the elevator right now."
"Okay, all right already. I'm not going to collapse," she muttered. "I'll see you soon."
She hung up on him. He figured that was a good sign at least.
When Rick arrived at the base of Belvedere Castle, Beckett had already managed to get herself together. She hurried down from the top turret, taking the winding staircase in the near-darkness, and found him at the bottom before he could start looking for her.
"Kate," he said, relief evident in his voice. His embrace was bruising but she allowed it, kept herself strong under his touch.
"I made an appointment with Dr King," she told him. A way to soothe whatever beast still lived inside him after Russia.
"Oh. Good. That's good."
She was going there to pump him for information, as subtly as she could, but she knew Castle would interpret it a different way.
"What happened?" he asked. His face was lined when he pulled back from her, worry pressing cuts into the corners of his eyes.
Though she had it under control, she couldn't quite manage to keep from running her fingers lightly at those lines and trailing back through his hair. "Saber knows."
"What exactly?"
"He must have been in on monitoring or administration of the drugs. It's more than just the injections."
"Yeah, I know. I had pills and stuff." His careless shrug under her fingers made her want to squeeze his neck, but she only sighed and drew her hand down to his shoulder.
"He said the pills you usually took with the injections were stabilizers."
"Like the mood stabilizers?"
"No," she shook her head, felt it creeping back up her throat. "Like - to stabilize whatever was in those injections. I got the feeling he spent years observing you."
"I don't remember him, but I'm sure there a ton of people my father picked up along the way for his own ends."
Central Park was crowded this afternoon, tourists and natives both, and the crush of people pushing towards the turret made her step into Castle. He looped an arm around her waist so casually that she knew then that he was putting up a facade, that he was trying.
For her. Because he was afraid for her.
She held a fist around her composure, iron-willed and deathly tight, and she smiled. "It surprised me," she explained badly. "That he was so involved. That there was more to it."
"You said..." His hesitance made her stomach clench. "You said something about razors? What - what was that?"
"A story he told to scare me," she said easily. Almost easily. She was working on it; it would come. Castle wasn't the only one who could don a persona like a mask and make the world look brighter than it was. "Never mind. The point is that there was a program, at one time. More than just yourself."
"Oh? How do you know that?"
"He mentioned a squad. I'm guessing an Army squad who were their guinea pigs for various elements of the regimen. They weren't... given stabilizers," she admitted.
"Oh. So. It's bad without stabilizers," he said slowly. His eyes searched hers and she hoped he read only what she wanted him to. "The razor story. I knew him - Martinez. I knew only some of them, but I knew they - I knew it didn't go well. I just assumed... there was a lot of PTSD. But Kate, you don't have to worry because I've been taking those pills my whole life. I'm pretty damn stable."
His grin was crooked and a little more hopeful than he probably meant for her to see.
"You're pretty stable," she echoed. But she reached for his hand and squeezed, gauging the warmth of his fingers, just to check. "I'm meeting with King in an hour. He fit me in."
"Good. You're okay?"
"I'm fine. I just didn't expect it," she said.
"I don't want you to worry about this, Kate. It's doubtful I'll ever need it again and I promise you I'm keeping on top of things. The doctors are going to look at me and you'll see."
"I know," she answered. It was the most truthful she could be. He was flexing his fingers around her hand, studying her like he did a potential informant, as if she might have some hidden flaw, some crack in her psyche that would make her unstable.
"I love you," he said softly. His lips came to hers lightly, in a way that ached, and she couldn't help cupping the back of his head and holding him there.
His fingertips were blanched white in the cold.
Castle studied the lifeless skin with an odd sense of removal, curious about the total lack of feeling. He flexed his hand around his weapon and lifted his head to look at Mitchell in the bright cold. His partner for the raid gave him a tight nod, and Castle couldn't waste any more time staring at his hands.
He gestured for the team to follow him and began to lead his tactical group through the last of the winter sunlight. The frost crunched under his boots and the grip of his weapon was painful; blood rushing back to his fingers finally.
He'd tell her. He would.
After he took this guy in for questioning.
This was the man who'd paid Coonan for the hit on Kate's mother.
This came first.
Friday. It had to wait until Friday.
Threkeld was coming, Castle had tests scheduled. The cold in his fingers was just a sign that he was reverting to normal, nothing more. He'd been off the regimen for years, living with Kate, and it'd been fine.
Castle processed the lawyer who had arranged the money transfer between Coonan and Bracken, being certain that the paperwork was in order. The coterie of Secret Service agents on their joint task force were still hanging around the Office, acting as checks and balances, but Castle wasn't going to screw this up.
When Beckett came into the command center, he stood to meet her, filled her in on their progress. He noted her flushed cheeks, the mark of a session with King. "If we can break him," he finished up. "Then we'll have a direct lead back to Bracken. First one since..."
"First direct connection ever," she insisted with a rough smile. She looked like she was hanging in there. "That's good, Rick. I'm sorry I couldn't be any help."
"You do what you have to do," he allowed. "Now, I need you and Mitch on interrogation for this one. Do your homework because Secret Service is sitting in and the second this thing turns on us, we're screwed."
She nodded tightly but her hand came out and caressed his hip, a strangely intimate gesture for the Office. "You're okay," she said, as if she needed to remind herself.
"I'm okay," he said. He was. His fingers were no longer bloodless from the cold. He'd tell her later. "Get to work, Beckett."
"Sir, yes, sir," she said, smart-assing her way to her station.
He went back to his own computer and flexed his hand again. His fingers felt stiff.
Mitchell handed her another case file and she added it to the stack already swamping her desk. She hadn't meant to get so bogged down in work right now, but this lawyer had ties to Bracken somewhere back in the mists and Castle was watching her like a hawk.
"Oh, hey, Beckett," Mitchell said, pausing with the laptop in front of him. "I tried getting you access to those old mission logs. But turns out I gotta go through him to get it."
"No," she said quickly. "You don't need to do that. I'll ask Rick myself."
He nodded, but he wasn't stupid; she could see the calculation on his face.
"Okay, what about this?" she asked quickly, changing the subject. "Let's pull out his class at Harvard Law and see if there are any good ole boy connections."
"Worth a shot," Mitchell said, ready to let it go.
Beckett took a breath and carefully kept her face neutral, skimmed the folders in her hands until she pulled out the Harvard transcripts and details. Mitchell went back to the laptop, using electronic means to search databases for the lawyer's connection to Bracken.
She'd gotten nowhere with Dr King. Their therapist was entirely too clever for Kate to do any kind of subtle probing, so she'd ended up asking forthright questions of him, couching it in terms of needing reassurances about his trust once more, now that Castle had been in the hospital because of the regimen.
He'd seen through most of it, called her on it. Then they had a thirty minute session in which Dr King touched on all those dark, raw places that fed her need for control, to have answers and orderly results and everything at hand. Didn't change the fact that Castle needed regimen - needed those stabilizing pills. Didn't mean that Beckett was any closer to finding the truth, even if maybe she was now a little less likely to panic.
At least she was being reasonable; the conversation with King had given her that much.
And reason dictated that she had one last contact, one last play to make. King hadn't known details about those extra pills, Saber wouldn't be able to help her acquire them, and Kate couldn't get into Castle's old files. All her leads were dead ends but for one.
Agent Black himself.
He was the only other person in the world who not only knew about the regimen and what it entailed, but who also wanted Richard Castle to remain a super spy.
She was going to have to reach out to him.