CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The team gathered round in Ops with hesitancy still hanging in the air. The plan initially hashed out privately by Callen and Mosley at the hotel, refined by him and an unenthusiastic Sam, had been met with resistance by the rest of the team, particularly Deeks, but in the end, they had all concluded it was their best, perhaps their only, option. Hetty didn't like it any more than the rest of them, but after a long talk with Callen she had given her blessing. Mosley's agreement to partake had once again been the deciding factor, and all eyes were now on her as she used the phone Eric had set up to dial.

"Marcel Janvier?"

"Who is this?"

"It doesn't matter who I am. What matters is that I have something you want." Silence reigned in Ops as Mosley spoke curtly to Janvier.

"Go on…"

In the background, Eric made a rolling motion with his hand, indicating that he needed Janvier to continue talking for longer. The few words he had spoken so far were barely enough to confirm a voice match – not that anyone in the room had any doubts – and definitely not enough to begin to triangulate his position.

"I have Agent Callen."

"Agent Callen is dead!" Janvier's voice rose and there was no mistaking the angry vocal vibrations: he clearly believed his prey had been lost.

"Is that so?" Mosely baited. "Then tell me, who else could it be that washed up on Venice beach yesterday, after a suspicious explosion nearby? Who else was admitted to hospital as a John Doe, unconscious and unable to identify himself? Who else…"

"I want proof that this is not a trick!" Janvier demanded, abruptly ending the call.

For a moment, the sound of silence in Ops practically vibrated in the air. Callen glanced at Eric, who despondently shook his head. The call hadn't lasted anything like long enough to trace.

"Are you sure you want to go through with this?" Sam asked Callen quietly.

"Do you really need to ask?" Callen's response was equally quiet, daring Sam to challenge him again. He glared at Sam through an eye that was puffy and bruised, impeding his vision but doing nothing to temper the intensity of his gaze.

"It's just… there'll be no turning back…" Sam tailed off. Of course it was a stupid question. They all knew nothing would stop Callen from doing whatever he could to apprehend Janvier and put the man back where he belonged, behind bars.

"What about you?" Callen turned to Mosley. "If this goes south…" All along, he hated the idea of putting anyone else anywhere near Janvier. Sure, none of them particularly liked Mosley, but that wasn't the point. Besides, she had a child. "Maybe there's another way," Callen said, clutching at straws. "A way we can get close to Janvier without Mosley being involved. Now that she's made contact… Her part could be done…" He turned to Sam.

"There isn't." Sam spoke firmly. "We've looked at every possible scenario. Seeing Mosley with you as her prisoner… This is the only way Janvier is likely to believe it's safe for him to show himself. I still think it's risky, and I don't like it, but there isn't another way."

Once again, they were all silent, including Mosley. Eventually she spoke, and Callen knew she was giving her final agreement for the op.

"We'd better send the photo before Janvier gets suspicious," she said.

Part of Sam's misgivings regarding the operation had been how they were going to sell it to Janvier that Callen had been caught up in the explosion, and subsequently overpowered by Mosley, who, needing money for her son's medical treatment had heard via her underground contacts that Callen was an asset worth a considerable amount to his arch enemy Janvier. There was truth enough in the past rocky relationship between Callen and Mosley for it to be believable that she might use him in such a way for her own ends, and Janvier had adequate reach into the criminal underbelly of LA to be able to have it confirmed how she had tried to sell him out to one of the cartels post-Mexico and had been on the run with her son ever since. But they still needed to make Callen look like he had been incapacitated badly enough in the explosion for Mosley to be able to abduct him without help, and that was more of a hard sell. Janvier knew just how capable Callen was. His injuries made it more plausible, but it was still a stretch.

The cuts and bruises on his face from his time on the boat were still visible, but far from fresh. With the help of some roughed up items from Hetty's wardrobe, they could dress him to look suitably bedraggled, and he could accentuate his limp, but they'd all come reluctantly to the conclusion that what he really needed to sell the whole story to Janvier was a head injury and some fresh bruises. And somehow – Sam still wasn't quite sure how – Callen had managed to persuade them that as far as his face went at least, only the genuine article would do.

"Think about it, Sam," Callen had said. "However good the make-up is, you slap a fake bruise on my eye and Janvier tries something like waterboarding, what's it gonna do?"

"You don't know that he's going to waterboard you," Sam grumbled.

"Don't know that he won't either," Callen countered. "One good hit, big guy, that's all I need. Split the skin and make it look good… You've done it before."

The two were alone in the armoury discussing the finer points of the operation before presenting the final details to the rest of the team, and Sam was thankful that it was just the two of them because he was having a really hard time agreeing to what Callen wanted him to do. Callen grew impatient, pushing up from his stool and moving round to the empty space in front of Sam. Standing a pace or so back, he braced his legs and put his left hand on the bench for good measure.

"One hit," he repeated calmly. "We can use make-up for the rest. But he's got to believe I was knocked unconscious by that bomb."

Sam stood up slowly, balled his fist, and then turned away. "I… I can't hit you, G," he said softly.

"Why the hell not?" Callen demanded crossly. He'd psyched himself up for the moment of impact and felt frustrated at Sam's reluctance. "You've hit me plenty of times before."

"Hardly 'plenty'…" Sam countered aggrievedly, "And anyway, none like this." He half-turned back to his partner, gestured to encompass Callen's arm hanging uselessly down by his side without the sling.

"For goodness sake!" Callen muttered, spinning and stomping away with annoyance.

"Where are you going?" Sam called after him.

"Wardrobe!" Callen shouted back over his shoulder without turning. "I need some damn make-up to do what you won't!"

Sam sighed, sitting wearily back down. Callen was still limping slightly. Sam knew he couldn't possibly bring himself to hit an injured man, even – especially – when it was Callen. His brother. He rubbed his hand over his face, feeling confused. Damned if he did and damned if he didn't – he understood what Callen meant about a real injury being safer, more believable, protecting his and Mosley's cover with Janvier. But dammit, after all that Callen had been through over the past week, how could he hit him now?

Sighing again, wondering if he could get Hetty to weigh in on what he should do, Sam eventually took himself off after his partner. He didn't see Hetty on his travels, but in short order found Callen and Kensi in the wardrobe department. Callen was sitting bare-chested on a stool while Kensi meticulously applied fake bruises to his upper arms and chest. His lower ribs still showed dark shades of genuine purple. He would wear a shirt they had torn in careful places to show glimpses of the bruised areas and he had retrieved one of the blood-stained pairs of jeans he'd worn earlier in the week to complete the picture.

Although they were engrossed in what they were doing, Kensi and Callen both noticed Sam's arrival even before he spoke, and they turned to him simultaneously. Sam was rendered speechless when he noticed the skin was split and reddened all around Callen's left cheekbone, and his eye was already starting to bruise and swell in a way that was one hundred percent authentic.

"I tripped in the locker room," Callen said by way of explanation, causing Kensi to raise her eyebrows slightly: she had assumed Callen had somehow talked Sam into landing a punch.

"Accidentally, of course?"

"But of course," Callen answered her innocently, and Sam rolled his eyes.

Where to take the photo of Callen as proof to send to Janvier was another problem. In the end, they decided to cuff him in Mosley's car in the car park of a seedy motel with no surveillance cameras anywhere in the vicinity, and Nell backstopped it to look as though Mosley had been renting a room there since the boatshed explosion, in order to keep Callen safely locked away.

Sam followed Mosley's car as back-up, Callen travelling with him as usual. The two men were unusually quiet for the first half of the journey. Sam still felt like he wasn't sure how to talk to Callen after the situation in the armoury earlier. The fresh cut and bruising on Callen's cheekbone was throbbing and he was doing his best not to poke at it. He was still feeling pretty annoyed that he'd had to self-inflict the injury.

"Here we are," Sam said, pulling up on the edge of the parking lot. The place was pretty empty, which suited their needs perfectly. Mosley's car was already parked outside one of the rooms. The two men crossed over to it, and Sam fished out a pair of plastic restraints from his back pocket. The three of them had debated at some length what kind of cuffs to use, as Mosley would need to present Callen to Janvier suitably restrained, but Callen needed to be able to remove them easily himself at whatever point the need arose. Traditional metal handcuffs would have been easiest for him in that respect, as they could have fiddled with the locking mechanism to make them appear locked but leaving them ready to spring open. They figured Janvier would be wise to that little trick though. Rope, duct tape or anything along those lines had all been dismissed as too difficult for Callen to remove in a hurry. In the end, the plastic snaps had won out. Although virtually unbreakable in normal circumstances, especially by a man with a broken arm, they would be able to cut almost through them in such a way that Janvier wouldn't notice unless he examined them very closely, leaving them so that a modest pull of Callen's wrists apart would snap them.

Remembering his resolve to act as though all was fine, Callen shelved his annoyance and needled Sam with some rude jokes about this dirty side of their relationship as Sam approached with the cuffs and proceeded to slip them over his partner's wrists, but Sam was still too apprehensive about the viability of the operation to respond in kind. Mosley, standing outside the car waiting, tapped her foot impatiently.

"We haven't got all day!" She couldn't help herself. Callen lowered himself stiffly into the passenger seat, leaving a leg outside the car as he sat facing up to his two stressed colleagues.

"Relax," Sam snapped at her. He used the toe of his boot to nudge Callen's ankle. "You need to be all the way in, G."

"Want me to buckle up too?" Callen raised his cuffed hands slightly, smiling sweetly at Sam, who rolled his eyes as he shut the car door.

There was something reassuring about the code in which they communicated, a code that was more about what wasn't said, than what was. Callen knew Sam was worried. Knew his mother-hen partner was doing a final check-in to confirm Callen was all the way in and committed to this path they had chosen to walk. Knew that however much his partner disagreed with the risks they were taking, he would have his back and support him no matter what.

Moving round to the other side of the car, Sam opened the door for Mosley to get back in her driving seat. Taking the photo in the cramped conditions would give Janvier a forced close up of Callen's cut and bruised face and the restraints round his wrists. Looking up through lowered lids, Callen organised his features into something that resembled a defeated but defiant glare as Mosley clicked. Wordlessly, Callen pulled his hands apart, snapping the doctored plastic. He nodded almost to himself, satisfied that they had done what they could, and with nothing more to do or say, they all returned to Ops to make the phone call to Janvier.

A/N: Thanks for your continued support. Oh these penultimate two / three chapters are still giving me grief! I'm finding it really hard after my brain injury to write the remaining little bits needed to link the major action together... I hope it won't be obvious when you get that far which bits were written post-injury!

I miiiight have managed to work out splitting the two troublesome chapters into three more manageable ones - a bit more editing and moving stuff around needed to get the timings of everything right... wish me luck. And continue to enjoy. Really very near the end now :(