Disclaimer: Neither Now You See Me, the characters, or the lyrics that appear at the beginning of each chapter belong to me.

Paperwork

This is the calm before the coming storm.
This is the red sky morning,
Without warning now.
This is the fight that we've been waiting for,
And there's no sense in running,
The hammer's coming down.
~The Hammer's Coming Down by Nickelback

He had thought that once he got his revenge that he would simply leave the FBI and go back to performing magic. Yet here he was, sitting in the bustling FBI office with nothing but paperwork to look forward to. Dylan Rhodes sighed, briefly wondering why he was still in this miserable office, but he forced the question away as soon as it came. The Eye had its reasons, even if they were a mystery to him. He may not like it, but they had given him his revenge and so he had full trust in them, though he still questioned.

Dylan lifted one of the papers and skimmed it quickly. Despite the Four Horsemen having vanished eighteen months previous, he was—with a little bit of pleading and prodding—still on the case. This of course allowed him to be the first to see the tips, such as this one which claimed that J. Daniel Atlas had been spotted in Kansas performing on a street corner. He frowned and placed it in the unfounded tips file, though as far as he knew Daniel was, in fact, in Kansas. He would have to call the man later and warn him again about lying low. They couldn't afford one of them being caught and arrested, especially when Dylan might not be able to be there to help them.

After being accepted into the Eye and jumping on the carousel that night, the Four Horsemen had separated. It was only a temporary split—the Eye had more plans for the Horsemen after all—but it was a necessary action. The whole world knew their faces, and the occasional program still aired about their feats. It would be nigh on impossible for them to blend into a crowd all together. Apart, it would still be difficult, but more plausible. So they were sent to opposite sides of the country with orders to keep low and limit the public magic—really he would prefer it if they did no public magic, but they were magicians and magicians need an audience. Henley had, despite her protests in favor of going to Australia, had been sent to Southern Florida. Daniel was currently in Kansas, which he had of course objected to simply for the sake of objecting. Merritt had happily gone to Massachusetts which he had never been too, and Jack had been ecstatic to visit California as the last time he had been there he hadn't had time to site see. They were all to remain in the area of the safe houses the Eye sent them too, were to contact no one but Dylan, and—most importantly—to keep a low profile and not get caught until the hype of their robberies wore off.

That's where Dylan came in. As the leading agent on the Horsemen's case, he had made it his mission to comb through all the tips in his effort to find the Horsemen. That was the official story, and he thought he played the part of a maddening cold case agent quite well. In reality, he removed the tips that would lead to the Horsemen and left the ones that would send the law on a wild goose chase. His personal favorite had been when he switched a tip that even had a picture of Jack in California and created a tip that placed Jack in the middle of Turkey. He had taken some heat from his boss for that one, but it had been funny watching the FBI run circles all the way across the world, far away from his Horsemen.

"Have you found anything?"

Dylan looked up to see Agent Fuller walking into the room. He motioned to the chair across from the paper-covered table and the other agent gratefully took the seat.

"Not yet," Dylan answered, running his hands across his face and stretching. "There haven sightings in every state except Hawaii and Wyoming, and about twenty other countries across the world on top of that."

"Any concrete enough to be worth checking out?" Fuller asked, picking a page at random from the clutter and scanning it.

"Texas, Louisiana, and Maine." Dylan motioned to a small stack of papers.

Fuller sighed.

"I don't know how many more of these bogus tips we can chase before the case is taken off the priority list."

"You're telling me." Dylan replied, placing another paper that said Merritt was in North Dakota in a plausible pile. "If I could just get out there in the field and look…"

"You know you can't do that, Dylan." Fuller sighed, used to this conversation. "Not after letting them go the first time."

"That wasn't my fault." Dylan replied, forcing his pent up anger into his voice. "Everyone was…"

"I know, I know." Fuller cut him off and got to his feet. "Well, I'll let you get back to it. At least you don't have Cowan looking over your shoulder every five minutes."

Dylan laughed and Fuller left the room. Watching him go, Dylan repressed a grin. Cowan had hinted at suspecting him to not really be a fool, but he had everyone else tricked. He glanced back down at the papers littering his desk and his shoulders fell. He may have everyone fooled, but he was still stuck with paperwork. Rubbing his neck, he bent over and got back to work. Time dragged by as the clutter slowly began to filter. He shredded the legitimate tips, and made sure that no hint of the correct towns remained, before packing up nearly two hours later. Grateful to finally be done, he grabbed his coat and all but ran to catch a cab to his temporary apartment.

Locking the door behind him, Dylan tossed his coat on the back of the couch and tugged his shoes off. He made his way to the bedroom, fighting with his tie even as he reached for the burner cell he had hidden away behind the fridge. Collapsing onto the bed, he dialed Daniel's number and waited as the phone rang. Unsurprisingly it went straight to voicemail, just like it did half of the time Dylan tried to call.

Whatever it is, I didn't do it, Agent Rhodes. It was all Merritt's fault.

Dylan rolled his eyes, amused at the voicemail even though he knew it was dangerous to have his name saved in such a way, even on a burner phone.

"Call me back as soon as you get this, Atlas." He said gruffly. "We need to talk. Again."

He ended the message there and dropped the phone onto the nightstand where he caught a glimpse of time. Seven thirty. He frowned as he did the calculations. Kansas was an hour behind New York, so it would still be only six thirty. So either Daniel was at dinner or he was deliberately ignoring his call. Again. Making a mental note to fuss at the man for that point as well, Dylan counted six hours up and sighed. It would be nearly three in the morning in Paris, so he would have to wait to call Alma. He briefly considered calling the other Horsemen—Merritt and Henley were in the same time zone, after all, and Jack was three hours behind so it wouldn't be an odd time—but in the end he decided against it. He hadn't slept much the night before and paperwork made him tired to begin with, so all he wanted to do was go to bed. But he also had skipped lunch, and his stomach was none too happy with him. Dinner or bed. It was a hard choose. Not to mention he still needed a shower.

Deciding that he should probably feed himself, he reluctantly got to his feet. He grabbed a t-shirt and shorts and headed for the bathroom. It didn't take him long to shower and he had to admit he felt better then he would have had he simply lain in bed. Making his way to the kitchen, he grabbed the remote and switched the TV on before plodding to the fridge to grab a microwavable meal. He wasn't paying much attention to Family Feud as he peeled the packaging off the steak and potato and pushed the timer on the microwave. He had just turned to grab a beer when a familiar voice caught his attention and he swung to face the TV where a grim-faced Thaddeus Bradley looked into the camera.

The Four Horsemen made their mark on the world eighteen months ago with their daring robberies and dashing escape from the FBI, but the time has come for their magic to be exposed for the trickery it is. Join me, Thaddeus Bradley, tomorrow night when I expose the Horsemen's tricks and reveal the identity of the mastermind behind the whole plot, the Fifth Horsemen.

The commercial ended and Thaddeus Bradley was replaced with some celebrity, but Dylan wasn't paying attention anymore. He just stared at the TV in shock, paralyzed as he realized what this meant. The beeeeep of the microwave brought him out of his shock and he bolted back to his room, cursing all the while as he grabbed the burner phone and dialed.