Gabriel Reed (matchesmade) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-05-05 23:10:00 |
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Entry tags: | emma woodhouse, x-23 |
Who: Gabriel Reed and 'JR'.
What: A meet. And turncoating.
When: We're going with 'recently' what with all the continuity blurring here.
Warnings: Violence?
North of the plaza was very little. A few benches, fewer trees that had managed to eke out some sort of existence, as sparse as it was, in the desert. Being a weekday, and at noon, the baseball fields were quiet, void of children and teens that would no doubt come screaming into the place to bring life and sound to an otherwise barren existence. Even the plaza itself was quiet, no shows going on, just the wind over the buildings and through the trees. It might have been a ghost town, long forgotten by the world, except for the few people that walked paths they knew through the park and the trees. Some were couples, some were singles, and Faol watched them from the corner of his eye, never looking up from the half-empty coke bottle that dangled from his numb fingertips between his knees.
He knew at least one of the joggers had to be CIA, hot off the presses of training. He doubted Gabe trusted him enough to meet him alone (even in the cartel they had always gone in pairs for pick ups and drop offs, sometimes more if it was a large shipment, but never less than two) but he had done as the man asked and left the weapons behind. All except for the graphite Balisong that rested in the back pocket of his jeans (jeans that were loose the further down his legs they went, cargo style). It had been a gift when he had been working in the gang and though he knew he should get rid of it (he wasn't James) on him it remained. Besides, it had other uses besides rooting a bloody path into flesh.
It remained, and the bottle swung slow back and forth between his thighs. He watched the shadow of it and every so often, a muscle in his forearm twitched to keep it moving. Faol might have looked like any other man, waiting for a date or sadly contemplative, except that curling up the right side of his neck was the edge of a tattoo. The rest of it was not visible beneath the collar of his green polo shirt. Not a damn part of him was well kept, not even his hair that twinged red in the sunlight, freshly cropped and short around his head. Nor the day's worth of stubble on his cheeks, or the broken in work boots that he wore on his feet. There was nothing about JR to ever suggest that he'd once been Faol, pressed in his nice, crisp suits, his hair cut by the same man that'd been doing it for all his quietly lived in existence.
It had been a last minute scramble. Protocol wasn’t suited to last minute scrambles. Yes, there was a jogger, CIA and armed beneath the jogging suit and there was a walker, north-north-east, miked and radioing in. But it was small. Agile. The only way something could get flung together last minute with no idea of what was going to go on down and the troops to come in at the end. Gabe didn’t trust JR, didn’t trust that hollowed-out, haunted voice on the end of the phone-line and he didn’t trust the man who knew his name. He’d hauled up early, from the motel that sat sleepily on the edge of town and he’d gone in, shower-fresh to check the detail on his kids and Eloise and to review what they knew, which was nothing. The hacker - female and brusque - had been on assignment for less than half a day, and there wasn’t intelligence enough to clarify what he was walking into, but the buzz of a comm in his ear.
Gabe hated it when that happened.
He didn’t look like an agent then. He didn’t try to blend in and he didn’t try to hide himself; he figured that the cane and the slow, broken walking pattern were obvious enough and that if the man knew his name and the number to the old, secure phone, then he knew what he looked like. He was a well-made jacket over a shirt - dark, because beneath the shirt was a vest and although Gabe was bulky enough to hide that extra layer with height and breadth he also figured that the man would guess he’d come in dressed for it and he wore softly-faded jeans without the brace. The cane was obvious weakness enough but without the brace, his leg wasn’t nearly as strong and it hurt, so he moved slower still. He didn’t look like an agent anymore but the familiar pulse of adrenaline - hot and furious and quick - drained into his veins and it felt the same, slow halting progress or no. He was cleanly shaven and his hair was the almost-neat of the same haircut for twenty years and whilst he was older, and he looked it, there was little mistaking Gabe had you seen him out of undercover.
There was just one person sat still in the plaza. No one else and that might have been coincidence or it might have been agents corralling near the entrances and exits or it might just have been the thin mist of anticipation that hung like a drawn curtain in the air. Gabe shuffled on over, and he took his time. There was no hurry. His weight down on the bench was heavy, and he held the cane between his hands; his gun was on his hip but it stayed there.
“So,” he said. It was conversational, mild as two strangers talking about the weather. “Nice day for it.”
Faol noticed the shuffle of his footsteps first. The rubber end of the cane made no noise on the dust-clouded walkways, but the shuffle of footsteps was harder to hide unless one was truly working at it. The second thing he noticed, besides the fact that Gabe still looked like himself, only a few years older, was the gun at his hip. It was no surprise and the corner of his mouth tugged upwards, wryly at seeing it from the corner of his eye. He did not regret coming unarmed -- this meeting wasn't one of those meetings, regardless of what Gabe thought.
He hadn't hurt anyone, explosions or otherwise, since Mexico. A show of good will, an act of faith, to come here unarmed when Gabe certainly would be (and was) and when they would certainly have people in the park, well, it wasn't going to hurt him any. Of the two ways this was going to end: with him walking out or with Gabe taking him out of here, he wanted to ensure the first. The second option meant returning to the agency, to be questioned, debriefed, for retinal scans to be done since he'd burned off his fingerprints long ago. It was not the option he wanted.
"Yeah," Faol agreed, his voice rusty since he hadn't used it since yesterday, directly after their phone call when he thanked the bartender for his beer. He remained hunched over, elbows on his thighs, the material of his shirt pulled over his back enough to show the lean bunch of muscles, the dip and rise of his ribs and vertebrae. "No reason why it has to change."
If Gabriel expected anything it was not immediately apparent in the placid, almost forcible calm of his voice and his presence. For a large man and one with the careful placement of one foot and then the other and then the cane that implied motion, he carried with him the vague impression of quiet and of stillness. He sat still on the bench and he looked at JR, mild brown eyes sifting over him like sand through a sieve neither careless nor overtly interested. Whether he intended to hurt anyone was not a forefront consideration but rather a piece of the background mechanism, something that ticked over lightly, a metronome to thinking rather than a thought itself. The gun on his hip was a precaution and one obvious enough to imply trust. Had he hidden it, it would have been a nod to a greater danger, one that required both obfuscation and the need to arrange himself as to drawing it. (Gabe gave such things quiet consideration, the pieces of a jigsaw that were shuffled artfully into place with no obvious reason or method to them but method all the same.)
All that looking and all that quiet thinking was a pause both lengthy and light. The reddish hair that glinted in the desert sunshine and the knot of the man’s hand around the bottle were dusty but familiar, long-dead memory faded to blankness. Gabe had not expected to know him but the barrenness of bones, the starkness of musculature and skull even turned away was pared down to sharp point that scraped at the back of memory.
The gun would not be needed; perhaps not. Gabriel breathed out. It was a slight sound. “Why did you call yourself JR?”
Slight, yet it carried with it the breath of recognition. Familiarity. Perhaps he was not so lost as he once thought he had been to be recognized so easily by someone that had known him in the years that still seemed like they were more dream than true memory. "The name on my ID is John Robert. JR." It was the name on a fake ID, because his real ID was in safe deposit box back in DC and Faol wasn't ready to go back and retrieve it yet. "There are over forty-five thousand people in the States with the name John Smith. Five million people named John, two million with the surname Smith. Seemed like an easy name to use as cover."
Like he had told Shailee, he was a ghost. A pale reflection of who he had once been, even if Gabe could recognize him within a few moments. He screwed off the cap of his coke and leaned back, the bones of his torso no longer so prominently displayed as he lifted the bottle to his lips and took a swallow of the cool soda.
The cap went back on and he screwed it shut with one hand, the plastic whining. "I didn't set any explosives, not for your agents. Not for anyone." He didn't have any and though he could make them, he had no desire to make anything explode after Mexico. One explosion this year was enough for him.
Who he was exactly hadn’t been pinned down. It was charcoal on rough paper, the edges of an outline that would - could - be filled in but Gabe hadn’t got quite that far. The shape of him, that registered for a man who had spent years honing his memory until it could catch at edges, cast out a net and haul on home the truth. A ghost was exactly what JR was - an absent flicker of something long since put away. Gabe sat on the bench and he eased his hands between his thighs, “That’s good to hear.” Easy. Reasonable. As though Gabe believed every word that came from his mouth, like he took them on promise.
“Who were you before you were John Robert, JR?” Because that name - that name was a dispensable as the pieces of plastic the department put out as IDs. “And what were you doing in Tijuana?” Gabe turned his head. There was no one near by, the wind was soft enough that it didn’t carry a single word. The comm was small enough to fit deep, nothing bulky, nothing obvious. He looked at JR, amenable as a dog-walker passing the time.
Faol wanted to believe that Gabe believed him, took his words for what they were, but the cynical part of him that saved his ass more than he could remember, knew that Gabe didn't. He was playing the game. Faol took a deep breath and leaned back against the bench, the coke bottle once more dangling between his legs. It was his choice what he gave the other man in the time that they had.
"Someone else," he said offhandedly, still clinging to who he wasn't, instead of who he was. He wasn't Faol with his suits and his haircuts and memories that weren't dreams. "Five years ago, I agreed to go undercover with a biker gang operating out of San Diego that was running drugs and guns. The cartel wanted them. Wanted their route, their connections. We moved for them or we went swimming in oil drums if we were lucky. Wasn't much of a choice. Was less of one when I called in and got a nice voice in my ear telling me that this number had been disconnected. And still I went." He gave a wry, hollow sounding laugh. There was no humor, no joy in it. "Because I didn't have the green light to come back. Because I could get intel from them that we might not have. No one came. No one picked up the phone. You can't call anyone else when you're that far under. If they don't kill you, they'll kill whoever you call." All of this was said without looking at Gabe, but his gaze followed the runner on her second circuit in front of them.
Five years back and Gabe counted them in children. He counted them in pearly teeth under pillows, in the strained timbre of Eloise’s smiles, in the bubbling laughter and the starfish hands of Phee and then Earnest. Five years and it wasn’t Earnest, it was a long, tiresome stay in somewhere as grey and as dreary and as half-dead as the rest of them with men who dealt in powder marched on out of Mexico. He’d been south, scrubby beard and dark tan and wanting his wife and his daughter something fearsome, about to pack it in. He wouldn’t have gone past the base, would have checked on out as fast as he could and he wouldn’t have stopped for a colleague in passing. It sounded right. It sounded like the worst scenario they warned for in training; whiteboards and scenarios written up on them, chequer-boards of people shuffled around. Sit tight. Hold still. They’ll fetch you out. Uncle Sam who smiles as he gives the orders.
Yeah. It sounded about right. Gabe was an exhale of breath, an ease of his own weight forward onto his knees and the curve of his spine bowed there. It could be wrong. It could be pieces shuffled together, assembled from late night shows and the kind of moves where you slept through the end. But it sounded about right.
“Who would you have called?” He was watching, not the horizon but an empty coke can, a meter or two away. It caught the sun, tin-made-diamond. Gabe began to count - silently. They had had five minutes. The snipers would be positioned. Take-down shot, tranquilizers. JR - whoever he was - brought in to crisp yellow lights and glass that glinted back at you.
They train for it and it's always the same answer -- hold tight, we're coming to get you. But after three years with no contact, with no knowing of how his parents were, how the sad, sorry excuse of his life was, Faol came back all on his own. Made his plan with a half piece of hope and a mountain of desperation and followed it through with a barrel of gas and a pack of matches from the little store in town.
"Don't know. Not home. Maybe my old boss. Maybe the switchboard operator. Whoever picked up the phone." His head tilted enough to the side that he could look at Gabe for a moment, nothing more. He was definitely older, gray beating out the darkness of his hair, lines on his face that he didn't use to have. There was still a familiarity though, a familiarity that reared its ugly fucking head when he looked around and took stock of the people in the park. More.
Then he knew, with whatever remained of his tarnished, impure gut, what was going to happen. The edges of his mouth crooked, wryly, hiding that thin sliver of betrayal. Was it worse that he had trusted? Or was it worse to have this man that he had reached out to make this choice? It was hard to tell which, but it was an old familiar blade walking an equally well-worn path through his psyche. It barely hurt at all. "It didn't have to be like this," he said to Gabe, giving him one more glance, but now there was nothing in his eyes. Not humor, nor pain, nor anger, only a dim resignation.
What options did he have? He didn't want to go back in, wasn't ready to be dragged back into the tide of working for the government, but getting out of here in one piece was going to be problematic. They could have tranqs, could have live bullets... He would have to move fast. There was the option of taking Gabe hostage, especially with the gun on the man's hip, shiny-bright and beckoning, but he turned that thought aside. That wasn't the path Faol wanted. It would have to be himself then and a hospital. Notoriously hard to watch. "Both our days are about to get a lot worse, Gabe. Make sure they go with a chest shot and not a head one." Because he could live with a chest wound, but if they had live bullets, a headshot was going to end things real fast.
He took a deep breath, steeling himself for the fact that this was going to hurt and leaned back, one hand sliding into his back pocket opposite Gabe. His fingers closed around his well loved blade when he felt the first prick of a tranq in his chest. Fuckers were fast. No time to waste and before the second one hit, he had the blade out, handle swinging before he jammed it into his own side, level with his navel and grunted. The coke bottle fell from his fingers as heat bloomed beneath his ribs, spread up his spine and flared brilliantly into pain. "Fuck."
It didn’t have to be, no. Gabriel bowed his head like a failed man in front of the altar to his God and said nothing, his fingers a loose tangle together, one elbow propped on his good knee. The cane was nearby - that could be a weapon, he supposed, and he saw the glance slide over, sharp as quicksilver that noted the gun that rode his hip, out and easy like a promise in open air. But he didn’t think JR would do it, he didn’t think a man who spoke with desperation on his tongue and the shadow of Mexico on his heels would reach for his own weapon and take him down. The chest piece said that he didn’t know and the crackle of static in his ear said the same thing.
He turned - not quick enough, and his hands moved but they fumbled, caught shirt instead of at JR’s hands, the glint of the blade bright - too bright in the sunshine. Shots rang out, the thin whine of missiles cutting through air and first one and then another: Gabriel slid onto his knee, the good one, and he had palms slick with bright, poppy-red as he clamped hands down over the wound. He didn’t need to look back to know the edge of the plaza had rippled forth with people, people in distinctive navy and who ran, surging forward like the tide come to haul JR home. Whether JR wanted it or not. There were medics, snapping on bright blue gloves and elbowing him aside and the hiss of voices in his ear that Gabriel ignored. They packed JR onto a stretcher and they passeled him up, restraints as much as for his own protection, and Gabriel picked up his cane and he limped on after them, after an agent the Company had let go, let drown, same as cutting loose his anchor and now demanded return to port, as mercilessly as if he’d never been abandoned at all.