Who: Dylan, Jack and Max What: A mission that goes right, but still manages to get it all wrong Where: Mexico When: Recently Warnings/Rating: None
In general, Mexico was hot. And backwater Nowhere, Mexico was even hotter. Max didn't even know the name of the town they'd ended up in. It had been the third in three days, under the pretense of seeing property a dead relative had left her and her brother. No one questioned Corvus or her, with their dark hair and skin, and no one questioned McKendrick's presence as her gringo husband. Her Spanish was intentionally bad, just enough for the necessities, but American enough and erroneous enough that the locals felt still safe talking about her tits without restraint.
Now, on day three, they were situated in the rundown villa they would be calling headquarters until they were done. It was a squat, cream structure with overrun grass and a roof that leaked into buckets and splattered water on the old tiles that lined the floor. Once, the place had probably been gorgeous, but right now it was just neglect and decay, and it was only a lifetime of places just like this one that kept Max from recoiling at the rats that ran around during the night and the dirty water that ran from all the taps.
It was after dark now, and she'd spent the afternoon going over and over the intel for the night's job. She'd been all business since she'd gotten on the plane in Las Vegas. No banter, no quips. She was good at turning it all off when it needed to be turned off, and this was one of those instances when it was absolutely being turned off. Her hips felt like death, and her limp had been increasingly noticeable for the past two days, but she'd get through the night without a whimper, and no one would be the wiser. She could drug up once this was done, and she was willing to admit that she was going to have to take McKendrick's suggestion that she come up with a Plan B for her future. If she made it out of here, she'd work something out.
But it wasn't the time for that now, and she came out of the room she'd been holed up in for hours in a pair of jeans and a bulletproof vest over a tank, heat strapped to her middle, hair scraped back and her comm in her ear. She rubbed a hand at her temple and regarded the men in the living area. She didn't have a good feeling about this job, and it had nothing to do with them. She trusted her gut; it had kept her alive for twelve years in a field where the life expectancy has half of that. And her gut said something was off.
She walked straight to the table, where a schema map of the town was rolled out and weighed down with old knick knacks they'd found in the villa. "I'll be here with a sniper rifle," she reminded them, pointing at the highest point they'd found in the town. “Corvus, you're causing a distraction here," she said, pointing to the bar beneath the hot spot McKendrick needed to get to in order to finish lighting the town up on the tablets he kept checking perpetually. Of course, they already knew all that. They were probably tired of hearing her repeat the plan, too, but her gut was still twitching. She rubbed her temple again. "If Corvus gets made, McKendrick, you try to get the grid online anyway. Same happens if I get made," she added, looking from one to the other. Protecting McKendrick was the job here. She and Corvus were, ultimately, expendable. "If McKendrick hits a snag, drop the distraction plan. Then it's straight to the payload as his cover. Got it?"
Jack didn't like the looks of this job, and it wasn't just because of the debacle with Gabe he'd only become aware of much too late to do anything about. He'd been with the CIA for almost a year. He was hardly the seasoned agent that Max was, but he'd been on more than a few missions in that time, and nothing about this one felt right. From the beginning their survival odds had been low, but it wasn't that. Danger wasn't what made it feel wrong. Danger tended to whisk past him so fast he didn't even register it anymore, not even as a crawl under his skin. No, this was something else, something quieter and more true. Something about the town, maybe. He was starting to feel as if they were steps behind their quarry, not steps ahead, and the sensation crept in quiet and light and uneasy, like a light brush to the back of the neck. They were chasing ghosts - that was what the CIA did. But these hadn’t even whimpered in the dark to make their existence known.
That uneasy sensation wasn't going to stop him from doing the work and making sure both Max and Dylan made it back alive. Not the sort of thing he would have admitted to out loud, because that was the sort of thing that made one of his superiors file complaints about Max bringing him along on a mission when they had a personal association. He knew better, now. Next time, he wouldn't tell a damn soul.
Mexico was blisteringly hot and no one looked at either him or Max twice as being siblings, which held its own kind of black irony for his romantic life. Now he was comfortably well-suited to go make a fuss at the local watering hole, armed in case of trouble, dressed casually enough to seem the same non-threatening idiot American who had swanned into town to look at a property no one in their right mind would want. He wasn't sure about much, but he could do this, and he watched Max rubbing her temple with the kind of settled, quiet calm that didn't come for him unless there was something truly horrific on the horizon. "Got it."
Dylan was relaxed in the fraying wicker chair that he'd designated as his own in one corner of the living area. He'd spent enough time in the middle east that the heat here wasn't anything new, although just because it was familiar didn't mean that it was anywhere close to being enjoyable. Unless he was kicking it surfside and drinking out of a coconut, Dylan was pretty certain that there was nothing that could make this kind of swelter capable of being endured by choice. He was definitely taking a week long vacation when all of this was said and done, and that thought was a glowing beacon in the distance that was just as desirable as the success of this mission. Although it was probably just the stagnant heat that made vacation seem as momentarily enticing as securing the safety of so many government operatives.
Dylan glanced up when Max walked in, and attention went back down to the open file in his lap full of zoom-lens surveillance snapshots of his destination. "I'll get the grid online," he assured her. Dylan wanted to promise them that nobody was going to get made, he'd be in and out in minutes if everything went according to plan, but if he knew one thing about Mexico, it was that things rarely went the way they were intended. "I'll dismantle the interference and sync up to the satellite, it won't take me long." He glanced up to the pair, concentrating mostly on Max because she had actual agent training whereas Corvus was.. whatever Corvus was. "And when I succeed, you both owe me a beer." Which he emphasized with a smile because both of them were looking grave as a death march.
Max didn't return the smile. She wasn't looking as grave as Corvus, but she was in that place where there was nothing but this job and everything that hung in the balance. She knew, when it came right down to it, that this all led back to Bangladesh. If things hadn't gone wrong in December, they wouldn't be here now. If that green FBI agent hadn't broken under hours of torture, there wouldn't have been names to sell in the first place. If Brandon hadn't destroyed an entire base just to get her out, maybe this wouldn't have come this far. But it had, and she felt responsible, and she hated that she wasn't a physical peak where she could go in there herself and take care of covering McKendrick's back. She'd vouched for Corvus when he came aboard, but she didn't trust anyone as much as she trusted herself. There was a reason why she was better in a solo op; she had trust issues, and there was no way around them.
"Domestic. In the states," was her response to McKendrick's quip about the beer, and Corvus' acknowledgement got him a nod. "I'll head out first. Corvus, you follow in fifteen. McKendrick, you head out then. Acknowledged?" She slipped a shirt over her vest, and her dismantled sniper rifle was slung over her shoulder in a sedate black bag. Her hair got tucked up into a black cap. Getting out without being seen would be easy. They were in the middle of nowhere, and it was dark. Corvus would take the rental car, and they'd all just hope he made it to the bar to play the part of the drunken brother who'd left his sister and her gringo husband home to have sex in a falling apart villa that no one in their right mind would want to refurbish. Whether or not her hips would hold out for the hike, that was another matter entirely, but the hard set of her jaw threatened either of them to even consider mentioning it. She gave them both another nod, and she tucked her earpiece into her ear, and then she disappeared out the door without even a hint of a tearful farewell.
Jack didn't mention it, because he knew better than to draw attention to it, or to not trust Max. She knew what she was doing perhaps more than anyone else in the room, and if she trusted her legs, he trusted them, and that was all there was to it. For all the worries about how his behavior might be affected by their associations in the past, anyone on the outside looking in seemed to miss the trust. To him, that was most important, and a benefit, not a negative, though there were certainly pros and cons. Beyond just as an experienced agent, he knew to trust Max.
Jack waited after Max left. He made sure his weapon was loaded, and the safety was disengaged, and then he stepped outside, so that there would be no need for fifteen minutes of awkward silence while Dylan took care of whatever prep he needed to.
When the time came, he got into the car and drove for the village below. This part was easy - this part he knew how to handle. He parked, went inside, and swaggered up to the bar. It seemed obvious that he'd already been drinking up at the villa before sitting down, and within ten minutes he'd downed two shots of tequila. The liquid mostly missed his lips and dripped onto the neck of his shirt instead. He smelled of alcohol, and the tequila was on his breath when he started to talk adamantly with the halfway pretty girl at the end of the bar. He talked to her about poetry, because, distantly, he knew that if Max was listening she'd remember it later with an eye roll. His spanish was botched and she didn't understand english well enough to get the nuances of the poems he was quoting at her, but she did seem a little taken with the handsome, unattached American. Her husband was not so enthused. Within five minutes Jack was being noisily pulled from his seat at the bar, and everyone was thoroughly distracted with watching the drama unfold.
With Corvus starting no small amount of chaos inside the dusty cantina, Dylan had an open window of time to operate. Not that such a thing meant he wanted to take his sweet time, but it certainly meant that nobody was watching as Dylan made his way around the back of the bar and pulled himself onto the tiled awning that sloped over the back patio. A once-crowded porch recently abandoned by beer drinkers that wandered inside to witness the commotion as some tourist apparently made moves on a regular's wife. In his long dark sleeves, with an equally dark backpack slung over one shoulder, nobody should have spotted him unless they were really looking. They were just going to have to keep their fingers crossed that Max was the only one watching on.
Dylan paused for a moment before slipping through an open window, giving a brief glance in the direction that he knew Max would be observing through her scope. He held up a hand with all five fingers spread, signaling five minutes before she should assume something was wrong. He reemerged in four, with that interfering signal disassembled, and went by rooftop to the next building. It was an old shop front, reported to be currently empty. Inside, Dylan systematically emptied the backpack of a half dozen electronics spread out across a roughly-finished wooden table. Then, he touched the comm at his ear and paced in the soft glow of three different screens, all scrolling with searches. "We'll have light in a minute," he murmured.
And sure enough, there it was. "Alright, we're good, we can..." And Dylan fell into abrupt silence as notifications began to flood the screen. Twenty-six minutes ago, on the complete opposite side of the world in Dhaka, the name sale went through. "No, no, no, no, this isn't possible." They'd been positive it was going to happen in Mexico, everything had pointed them this way. He didn't say it over the comm, that they'd failed. If Max wasn't getting texted by headquarters yet, she would be any second now. "...We have to go," and it was all he said before he crammed everything back into the pack and scaled out the window, and down to the street below.
Max had caught Corvus' intentionally annoying poeticism, and it had almost made her smile in the midst of so much tension that she couldn't even feel the persistent ache in her left leg any longer. But it had been a brief second of entertainment, because McKendrick had crossed her scope then, and she'd started a countdown back from five.
For an agent, five minutes could be eternity, or it could pass by in a heartbeat. When there wasn't enough time to get a safe open, or to get clear of an explosion, five minutes could be nothing. On nights like this, when five minutes meant the potential safety of hundreds of agents across the country, five minutes was endless. And she wasn't worried about Corvus down there. Corvus could sweep that entire bar if he needed to, and she knew it. It was the reason the agency had brought him on without any clearance whatsoever, and it was the reason he'd spend his entire future right where he was. Because he was the kind of assassin that always walked away from a kill. That was his value to the CIA and, as long as no one was threatening her in any way, she trusted him to do his job. But she'd never seen McKendrick in any kind of fight, and she had a hard time imagining him at the end of a barrel. She knew, logically, that he'd been trained in the logistics; she wouldn't have been able to drag him into the field without clearance. But that was different than actually facing down a bar filled with Mexican cartel members. And she was a good distance shot, but this wouldn't be a distance fight, if it came down to that.
And all those thoughts only managed to kill three minutes.
Luckily, McKendrick reemerged after four, and she didn't need to see him to know he'd gotten it done. One word, just that we'll, and she breathed easier. A glance through the scope told her Corvus was still good, and she waited. "Corvus hold position," and then her earpiece beeped. Before McKendrick even managed that alright, she knew they were done. The security code in her ear was Langley, and Langley didn't call unless the world was ending. She layered the call over McKendrick's disbelief, the Langley call secured only to her, and she was off it by the time McKendrick started saying they needed to go.
She closed her eyes for less than three seconds, mentally tallying how many people might lose their lives over this. And that was how she almost missed the incoming on McKendrick's position. The cartel member was five feet behind McKendrick out the window, and Max sniped him before he hit the floor. The man's lifeless body fell past McKendrick, landing at his feet, and she was moving before the thud resonated from McKendrick's earpiece. "Agent compromised, Crow." She didn't mention her own status, because that didn't matter. And maybe keeping the hacker safe didn't matter either, but this was already fucked up, and she wasn't going to make it worse by losing either of them. She kept her rifle pointed, pacing McKendrick's movement from her vantage point, in case something else showed up before McKendrick was clear. "If you can't shake the cartel, Crow, lead them to Plan C location. I repeat, Plan C location. If you're clear, meet Hack street-side and cover. Rendezvous point Cigna."
Everything seemed like it was going swimmingly until Jack hear Dylan's tinny voice in his ear say the word no. That wasn't good. That was bad enough that his focus stuttered for a second and he stare into the middle distance past the boyfriend whose face was about an inch from his just long enough to get punched in the face.
Jack stumbled back and fell to the floor heavily enough to burst the bubble of tension in the bar into laughter. The girlfriend, perhaps for her own preservation by that point, tossed her drink on him, and he began to stumble out of the bar, the ignoble, badly scorned lover, followed all the way to the door by cartel members and locals. He'd embarrassed himself enough that no one seemed particularly interested in killing him, and he waved them loosely off as he veered toward the street behind the bar.
He staggered, he limped, and the second he was out of sight he sprinted. "En route," he said, and he was coming up behind Dylan less than a minute later. His gun was in his hand and he moved quickly, checking periodically behind them to be sure there weren't more approaching from behind. He tried not to think, and for the moment, it was easy. All the lives that could potentially be destroyed by the bad intel they'd gotten washed away in a tide of adrenaline and focus. At the very least, he was making sure Max and Dylan both made it out of this alive. This whole thing had been pointless. No one should die for it now.
By the time Dylan's boots were biting into street side sand, he was deeply detached with his thumbs hooked into the straps of that backpack like a chided kid walking home from detention in some after-school special. Still not quite comprehending how bad it was, or maybe just not allowing himself to think that far ahead. Although the harder he tried to think of things that were crucial right now in these minutes directly critical to their extraction, the more he got snagged up on everything that was inevitably going to go wrong. All of the people that were going to die now from this kind of exposure. Somehow they'd been wrong. He'd been wrong.
This kind of wrong with these kinds of consequences had never happened to Dylan before, and he was completely unprepared for the emptiness that came with acknowledging that. It wasn't that he thought he was infallible, but he was never wrong about the big stuff. Not ever. Not once, and even if the intel was bad, he was part of the intel. He should have been looking over his shoulder, but his tunnel vision was so dark that it was like walking through a cave far below the Earth. When the body of a cartel member hit the ground beside him, Dylan stared at it like he wasn't quite sure what it was, like he'd never seen a body before. A bleeding body didn't belong in the black tunnel cave of his recycling thoughts. He heard Max's voice in his ear, and that served as a reminder of what he needed to be doing, or at least the direction he needed to be walking in. When Jack showed up at his side, Dylan didn't even glance. He just kept walking, drawing his own firearm and folding his fingers around its grip, keeping it pointed toward the ground, silently absorbing the buzz of the comm in his ear, listening for Max. Focusing on what she said was preferential to thinking of all of the ways that he'd just fucked up.
Max had put blame and fuck-ups in the back of her mind for the time being. It hadn't been easy, but that split-second lack of concentration had almost cost McKendrick his life, and she wasn't going to make the same mistake twice; she shouldn't have made that particular mistake even once. But the truth remained that she wasn't cut out to be a Handler. She wasn't cut out to be a strategist, and she wasn't cut out to mastermind missions. She was a spook. Plain and simple - a spook. She took orders, she killed people, she grabbed things, and she got in and out of places. Killing people, that was what she was really good at. Infiltration? When she had her body working right, no one could beat her. But it was injury that had ended her here, and it wasn't a good fit, and everyone had known that - even the General. All her youth, he'd tried to make her less tactical, more strategic, and no amount of bullying had ever accomplished it. And now here they were. She didn't blame McKenrick. She didn't blame Corvus. This wasn't their op. But there was time for that later, at Langley.
She followed the movements below with her scope, and she breathed into the comm when Corvus came into sight. A quick glance left told her there were two oncoming, and a scan right said there were three behind. "Three armed, north. Two armed, south. Continue south. Will handle south targets. North targets yours." The bullets were felling the two men ahead of them before they even made it into range, and there would only be two bodies to step over once McKendrick and Corvus reached them - perfect, clean kill shots. And they'd always known getting out was going to be hard. Getting out after walking into a carefully orchestrated diversion to put the federal government in the wrong place, that just made it sting more.
As she watched, she called in the extraction, and she waited for refusal. But the approval code came, and the breath she exhaled into the comm was audibly relieved. The last time she'd made that kind of call to Langley had been in Bangladesh, eight months earlier, and she'd gotten denied. She knew it was McKendrick that got them pulled out. She was too injured to waste resources on, and that had been the case for months now. And they'd never send out a team for Corvus. "Extraction plan 560-9, approved," she said into the comm, dismantling the rifle as she spoke. "Proceed to coordinates once clear." The extraction plan would separate them, giving them individual rendezvous points with local and federal agents within the hour. Their flights would take Corvus back to Rawlings and Reed in Las Vegas. She would head onto Langley, in Virginia. McKendrick would have questions to answer at FBI HQ in D.C.
Below, more men appeared, and she heard incoming at her back, but it was all about reaching the rendezvous points now. There wasn't any stopping this, and forward movement was the order of the day. She should have reported about the monkey on her back, but she didn't trust Corvus not to double back. "Clear here. Don't stop moving until you hit rendezvous. See everyone back home," she said, sounding marginally positive - she could do that at least.
Jack had his gun trained behind them before the bullets even made it to the men in front, and the only acknowledgement he afforded them was to glance briefly down to step over them. The three men behind them appeared in quick succession from opposite alleys. One came out on the left, and Jack fired. A direct headshot, and the man hit the ground as dead weight. The one on the right appeared, got off a short round of fire, and then he was down, after Jack's bullet punctured his neck, splattering carmine across the dirt. When his comrade emerged from behind him with an automatic, Jack didn't even afford him enough time to think about firing. Two bullets this time, both to the chest.
Jack kept his eye trained behind as they broke away from the buildings of the little town, and no more faces emerged from the buildings armed and ready to punish. There was blood leaking from his ear where that one quick blast of shot had fired past and clipped it, and the fact that they had made it this far with only that much blood shed between them was a damn miracle. Jack registered only that Max sounded positive, and as she expected he took that to mean she was clear. He glanced to Dylan, checking him for injuries. "Go on," he said. They had extraction points to get to.