Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.

Night Crawler

It was what she had dreaded for years: someone specifically targeting Amanda to get to Lee. She couldn't have dreamed that it would be Adi Birol who cracked the Lee-and-Amanda code and used it so brilliantly to his own vile purposes. But she felt guilty, somehow, for letting it happen — even though it couldn't possibly be construed as being her fault.

You let Phyllis go to grab your gun, the traitorous voice in her own mind reminded her, though, and she wondered if it really was all her fault after all.

You were the one who told him about the press conference that Adi Birol set up, the voice went on, and she rubbed her nose and sniffed.

He was broken.

He had flung himself out of Billy's office after yelling at both his superior and the agency doctor, and no one had dared to approach him.

But she had gotten him to go home, shower, and sleep, with a deftness and gentleness that few knew she possessed, and the next day on her advice he had gone down into the heart of the agency to find an odd little codebreaker who could find patterns in the most random of data points.

Leland had been one of her first recruits for her janitor network, and his expertise had helped her along many a time.

Maybe this time the strange little man might help to find Lee Stetson again, amid the wreckage that Birol had created in just one moment.

She stopped by the laundromat — a great way to get an errand done and make contact with an informant at the same time — and paused when she saw that he had found her and let himself into her car.

She sighed. She had been doing that a lot recently.

He got straight to the point when she slammed the door and looked at him.

"Billy took me off finding Amanda, Francine."

"It's rough," she agreed, and he stopped her bitterly before she could offer forced platitudes.

"It's common sense."

It was also cruel.

She didn't have to see his eyes to know that they were desperate and unfocused, even as his voice broke around the lump in his throat.

"Amanda is waiting for me to come and get her. She is counting on me and I am helpless! He's going to try for an ID on Night Crawler. He'll —"

She interrupted him before he could say the words.

"Don't think about it, all right?! Just - just stick with what's practical!"

Don't say the words "He'll kill Amanda to get what he wants from her".

He leaned in farther, as if Adi Birol could hear them even here.

"I want to try to revive an old case. You still have those brown contact lenses?"

Now that was an angle she had not considered. Did he know something she did not? Why bring in Magda Petrak?

Poor Magda, she thought.

She dropped Lee off at his apartment, yes, but when he didn't answer the phone there she called him at Amanda's house. He'd mentioned something about Dotty not knowing where her daughter was, and then said he was glad that Joe had the boys for a few days.

So deep down she knew, as surely as Lee knew the King family custody arrangements, that she would find him at the little Arlington house.

The contacts stung her eyes, but she shook their hands firmly and resolutely did not blink.

"Gentlemen, I think we have an arrangement."

When she had woken up the day of Adi Birol's press conference, she had never guessed that in a few days she would be making deals with "harmless Libyans".

She supposed that anyone could be considered comparatively harmless, depending on the alternative.

She had grease paint on her face and in her hair, and she crawled on her elbows next to Lee, knowing full well that this was a script that International Federal Films had neither written nor directed. They were, in all the ways that mattered, on their own.

But the agency did not seem terribly concerned with finding Amanda, and so now this was personal. It was more personal for Lee, of course, who loved Amanda more than he had ever loved anyone or anything else in his misspent life. But it was personal for Francine, too, because she loved Lee more than she loved most people, and anyway Amanda may have grown on her. Just a little bit.

So here she was, waiting for Lee to come back out of that horrible house with Amanda and Night Crawler both, her heart beating in her ears so loudly that she could barely hear the radio.

It crackled to life finally. It seemed an hour later, though it had been less than five minutes. "Francine, I got Birol. There's no sign of Amanda. Keep a look outside. Some of his boys may be waiting in the wings."

She shivered and hunched down, scanning the darkness.

Ten minutes.

Fifteen minutes.

Lee had said to come get him in thirty minutes if hadn't come out.

Twenty minutes.

Twenty-three minutes.

Twenty-seven minutes, and the darkness blossomed into searing light and shards of glass and chunks of brick and — for all she knew — bits of Lee and Amanda and Birol and Night Crawler that came raining down onto her like some twisted firework. The furnace heat with its sonic boom rolled over her, and her radio, along with her hearing, went dead.

Some things were expected in international intrigue.

You lost friends. Dear friends. People you counted as family.

Sometimes you lost them to bullets.

Sometimes you lost them to treason.

Sometimes you lost them to explosions.

Sometimes you lost them to kidnap.

Sometimes you lost them to torture.

And sometimes you were dragged into your supervisor's office to account for your actions and then left alone in a silent room for twenty minutes while he went to find out what had happened, when you had just seen the house with your best friends inside it blown to pieces after they had been kidnapped and tortured and perhaps shot, and only God knew what else.

The knowledge that no one had actually been killed in the blast was welcome indeed, though it was not particularly pleasant to have to pull herself together and explain to Billy that they themselves were planning to "sell" "Amanda" to the Libyans in order to trap Birol.

The only thing that helped, however, was that it was Billy who she had to convince to go along with their insane plan even with Lee missing. When it came to Amanda, he was a pushover.

She glanced into the squalid room at the back of the terrorist hovel and smiled involuntarily. It was such a change from earlier. She had seen his eyes — pools of misery and terror and ferocious desperation and fading hope. He had been sick with worry, crazed with fear.

Now he leaned against the wall, cradling Amanda in his arms. His face was peaceful and content, serene even, despite his frozen and haggard weariness. Amanda had gone limp from the zap gas, but even in her unconsciousness she clung to him, holding on to him tightly as if she could not bear to let him go.

She wasn't convinced that Amanda really understood just how deeply Lee loved her, but it was good to see her reciprocating.

Maybe there was hope for Lee, after all.