sonora_coneja (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sonora_coneja) wrote2011-03-06 02:27 pm
sonora_coneja) wrote2011-03-06 02:27 pm
Missed Opportunities - Chapter Four
Pairing: Face/Hannibal, Face/Lynch
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Summary: A year after the jailbreak, the three members of the A-Team are hired under the table by the DoD to take down the two men responsible for the as-yet unresolved theft of the Treasury plates - ex-CIA agent Vance “Lynch” Buress and former Spec-Ops officer Templeton “Faceman” Peck.
a/n: I know I've been neglecting this, but I'm going to try to have it done by the end of the month...
It was a long night.
And worse than it should have been.
Because he hated doing this.
It wasn’t that Face hated the whole torture thing in principle. Principles didn’t give him much trouble these days. He’d given up on most of those a long time ago, cutting away all that useless bullshit they tried to teach him at West Point. Duty, honor, country. Everything else grew out of that.
No use for anything like that, Face figured as he rolled his sleeves a little further up, soaping to the elbow in the industrial sink in the back of the warehouse. Why bother when the foundation had already proven itself too unreliable, too shaky, to be trusted?
The water smelled funny and the gangster that owed this place had Chinese soap in the dish, harsh and nasty stuff. Face stared at the yellow bar in his hand for a minute under the flood of unnatural incandescent light from the naked bulk overhead. Dawn was leaking in through the high, greasy windows, but the world hadn’t woken up yet. He was alone with his thoughts, nothing to disrupt them.
West Point.
He squeezed too tight on the soap and the bar popped out of his hands. It clattered down onto the dented stainless steel and the conman gripped the sides.
White hallways. He remembered those, the dirty white hallways in the dorms, the bare walls of the academic buildings, windowless classrooms, everyone in gray, everything in gray. The blanket on his bed, the uniform shirts he wore to the gym, the bras on the girls, gone dingy from too many hot washes by the laundry service, boiled fabric on sweaty skin that didn’t taste anything like what a girl should taste like. That was how he’d developed his taste for men. At least the sweat and the smell seemed right on a male body. But those girls... downright criminal.
Sure, he’d hated the Army, his asshole CO, the training, the things he’d done in Afghanistan. but it was West Point that he truly loathed.
SERE training, over the summer. That’s where he’d learned about what torture can do to a person.
It wasn’t the professional thing the Army put on. nope, that had been useful. But West Point? An exercise in sadism.
Shove a group of twenty-something year old boys, and girls who had to keep up with the guys, into the woods for three weeks, deprive them of food, sleep, comforts and crazy shit was just going to happen. Everybody knew it. Just the way it was.
And it hadn’t been a big deal, not for a kid who’d grown up in orphanges and foster homes all over LA, half-starved and neglected for most of his childhood. He could take anything.
That’s what Face had told himself, going into SERE that summer. That he could handle it.
What he hadn’t counted on was the rabbit.
His chalk’s big, white, fluffy rabbit. One of those big meat rabbits, probably about twelve pounds of bouncy floppy-eared innocence. Reminded Face of the breed rasied by one of the sisters who’d run the orphanage he’d run away from at fifteen.
He wasn’t an idiot. Since basic the summer before, he’d heard stories about the rabbit. Everyone had a killing-the-rabbit story. The cadets always got briefed on how to kill it properly, some insanity about clubbing it on the back of the head. Face knew from the sister, who sometimes fixed rabbit stew for the kids, that the proper way to do it was hold it in your lap, calm it down, slit its throat with a very sharp knife and a very quick stroke.
Cadets, on the other hand, didn’t do either.
So, they’d been without food for two days, land-navving through the forests of upstate New York, and they were at a checkpoint for the evening. Tonight wasn’t MRE night, one of the cadre declared, and out came the cages.
For whatever reason, everyone seemed to think that being without food for two days and being dead tired and being out in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere gave them the right to behave like assholes.
College kids who’d never killed anything in their life, never seen death. Never sat beside their dead mother in their reeking studio apartment, five years old, waiting three days before the neighbors found him. She’d just fallen over. Aneurism, the docs had said, and he’d had to ask one of the Child Protective Services workers what that was.
Fucking children, Face had thought them.
The cadre, juniors and seniors pulling leadership duty out here for the summer, were passing out cages to the chalk leaders. Face wasn’t in charge, hadn’t wanted to be, part of his younger self’s desire to sit back and watch everyone else fuck up around him, but he’d watched Murdock hand the carrying cage to the girl who’d gotten pushed into the position.
She’d brought it back to their camp. Tough girl, too much muscle for a female and no soft planes on her entire body. “I’m not killing it,” she declared.
Straws were drawn, people were called out as being pussy for not wanting to, blood rose. The rabbit started screaming, stopped, and that’s when the laughing began.
He watched it, the whole thing, the one that had ended in a sloppy skinning job on a body gone stiff from death far, far too soon, head popped off and one of the other guys dancing around with red-streaked fur, fingers jammed up into the skull.
Murdock, the same guy who’d beaten his ass through basic, the same junior, now senior, he’d had nothing but respect for, was on them, yelling at the top of his lungs. Face, ashamed, moved away from their little camp, sat down and buried his eyes in his palms, looking at nothing.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked up. Murdock, staring down at him with hard green eyes in the weak light from the fire beyond. The older cadet had taken his BDU blouse off, wrapped it up around the carcass and was cradling it in his arm. Blood was dripping through onto his pale t-shirt.
Face snorted, and Murdock looked like he wanted to punch him.
“You hungry, Peck?” he’d asked sarcastically, something angry in his voice.
“You’re taking it?”
“Yeah. Your chalk doesn’t deserve it.”
“Good,” Face had said. “Meat’s ruined from the adrenalin anyway.”
“You knew how to kill this thing properly?”
He hadn’t replied.
Murdock hadn’t spoken to him until spring semester of the next year. And even then, it was just to walk into his room and asked him what he’d learned.
“Never enjoy it,” had been his answer then, and Murdock had just nodded and walked out.
Fuck, he’d hated that place.
“Hey, Face, you okay?”
The sound of the big Australian’s voice broke through, and Face shook himself. He was still scrubbing his hands, his cuticles just starting to bleed, actually, and he shuts off the water. “Ruined a good suit. My own fault for not bringing any work clothes, huh?”
“That guy’s a bleeder, isn’t he?”
“Who isn’t? Let’s give him until the afternoon, start it up again. You get him hung up right? Moussad are slippery little bastards and everything...”
“Mate, what’s wrong?”
The conman turned around to face his friend, who was retrieving the soap. He did most of the work, so he was a little more messed up. Red everywhere, streaked into that platinum blonde hair of his, short but still somehow ropey. Tall, affable, extremely easy going until he got pissed off, and that’s when the lethality came out.
He’d worked with Terry, on and off, for the past seven years. A former Special Forces man himself, they both had the distinction of being on some of the first missions into Afghanistan when the bombs started falling during the American incursion against the Taliban. They’d met there, a somewhat scared, somewhat disaffected Ranger lieutenant and an SASR Lance Corporal.
Both of them young, both of them enthusiastic, and Face had seen the kind of damage Terry could do, first hand and close-up, the man’s knife nearly slicing the head off of some jihadi in the process of beating the then-lieutenant to death in one of those caves, in that op that had gone so horrifically pear-shaped.
Terrible things. Four weeks on a joint op that saw half the team dead and the casualities rotting from sepsis by the time they’d gotten back inside the wire. Within the week, they were the only two left.
What had happened to their chalk leader, their captain, Face’s first CO, was an entirely different story. Face didn’t regret it, what he’d done, what he’d had to do, shooting the bastard in the back of his head for the idiocy that had gotten them into melee in the first place.
And still, just him and Terry left alive.
Face had schooled his own feelings out of the situation, away his countenance, took the details out of the official report, accepted his Silver Star, but he’d had dreams about their dark, confined, bloody battle under the earth for months after. And that’s when he started to realize that part of him had died there, or started to die there, now so far away from him as to not have ever existed at all. That West Point had lied to him, that Cadet Murdock had lied to him, that there was no honor in any of it.
That nothing meant anything at all.
So there was just the killing.
A valuable lesson, that Lieutenant Peck had thought at the time.
But the Australian’s green eyes had been haunted. Tery hadn’t said anything about it, of course, but when Face had run into him in a bar outside Saigon a few years back, out of uniform, drowning in cheap Chinese whiskey, a gun in an open shoulder hostler, it made a kind of sense. He’d also thanked his lucky stars. Finally, somebody else in his business he knew he could rely on. He’d call, or Terry would. Job offers, missions, hot spots to go exploit. And off they’d go.
Face trusted him. As much as he trusted anybody. Which wasn’t much, but it was still something. “Memories, buddy,” he finally said.
“The caves?”
“Training.” He never told anybody he went to West Point, not if he could help it, not even to people who knew he was ex-military. Not when he’d been military. He didn’t really consider himself a graduate. Fuck knew he didn’t conform to the expected standards.
Terry nodded. “The rabbits?”
They exchanged a look, shuddered, and both turned away again, Face wiping his hands on splattered trousers, Terry sticking his entire head under the faucet.
“Why’s it easier to kill people than animals?”
“I have no idea, man.” He clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Come on. We can stil get a few hours of sleep before the circus starts up.”
+++++
“You look like shit, boss.”
Hannibal sighed and drained his coffee. He felt like shit. No hangover, nothing like that. But he hadn’t slept well, and his body was still echoing the fuck from yesterday, the memory of that hard body against his, the wall, the rough penetration, squatting on the edge of his dreams all night, lurking around the corners even now.
It wasn’t that the kid had been good, although he had been. No, it had nothing to do with technique. It was something about the man himself, something deep and beautiful and unsettling, running right through him. Hannibal hadn’t felt anything like it in years. It reminded of Morrison, his first and only real love, back when they were both still young men, full of ignorant promise.
And look what we turned out to be, he thought gloomily.
“Boss?”
Oh, right. The boys. The mission. “What’d we get off the pinhole camera, BA?”
“Nothing good, Hannibal. We came back with a couple very bad hits.”
And that was Sosa. Fuck, he’d almost forgotten she was there. Another of her public meetings places, one of the food courts in one of the shopping malls. Everything plastic and shiny and oh-so-fake. Murdock was drumming his fingers on the table.
Why couldn’t he concentrate? The kid was so much like Morrison...
Sosa tapped up a screen on her laptop. “We’ve got at least organized crime families, a contingent from one of the UN divisions, a very prominent North Korean arms dealer and...”
“What about the blonde guy?” BA asked. “The guy who was talking?”
“We’re still trying to ID those photos, the databases take time to search,” Sosa replied a little too smoothly.
Hannibal yawned. He wasn’t too tired to catch that. “How much support do you have for this?”
“I planned the op...”
“No, wrong, I planned the op,” he told her. “You made the decision to go for this. I seriously doubt the DIA’s put any kind of force behind this.”
She looked a little offended. “This is a matter of national security, Hannibal, and I don’t think...”
“It don’t involve military security,” Murdock interjected. “Bossman’s making a good point, el diablo...”
“Can you stop him from calling me that?” he asked BA, who just shrugged.
“...and it really doesn’t matter, captain,” Hannibal replied. “What’s our bank account look like?”
“The fake bank account?” she asked. “We set it up for an upper limit of about $300 million...”
“That won’t be competitive,” BA pointed out and shuffled a napkin around. “Money in that room last night? Bids could go billion or more.”
“We don’t need it to be, Bosco. Winning the plates would be good but we can easily get them...”
“No,” Sosa said, and three sets of incredulous eyes turned on her. Her normal arrogance seemed to waver for a moment. “No. We can’t risk you recapturing the plates somewhere else.”
“They’re in Singapore,” BA said.
“We think they’re in Singapore,” she said.
“And your intel has already proven spotty,” Hannibal agreed.
She stared. He stared back. She looked away first. “We can’t take the risk of another bidder winning and taking delivery somewhere else in the world. We need to be competitive. We need to win.”
“Your slush fund big enough for that?”
“I can spoof the funds,” BA said. “Ain’t that hard to fake. Money don’t really exist anymore anyway.”
“The account I’ve got set up is...”
“I can do it,” BA said levelly, and looked at Hannibal, something almost pleading in his eyes, like he desperately needed the back-up here, and when, the colonel mused to himself, had things gotten so bad that BA felt like he didn’t have that automatically? “It can be done.”
Underneath the table, Murdock squeezed the big guy’s hand. Hannibal tried not to look. “We don’t know what anyone else is going to put in, BA. It’s impossible to guess.”
Murdock raised his hand like an over-eager kid in class, and BA tried to grab him by the sleeve to pull in back down. But the pilot just grinned. “What about the accountant’s computer?”
“Accountant?” Sosa asked sharply.
“Yes, Sosa, the accountant,” BA said with an eye-roll Youngish guy, earlier thirties by the look of him, was in the back geekin’ away on a...”
She bit her lip. “There was supposed to be Lynch and that other guy. Now there’s a third one?”
“Not part of scheme,” Hannibal said. “Just there to handle the money. And yes, Murdock, his computer would be the best source, but...”
“...encryption,” BA finished. “Probably using a VPN tunnel too, through the hotel’s... I won’t just hack it.”
“Direct access?” Sosa said.
“How ‘n’the’hell we suppos’d to get physical access?” Murdock retorted, and Hannibal was frozen by a sudden, horrible thought.
“What would you need to do for us to get into his system?” Hannibal asked.
BA shrugged. “A thumbdrive that should cut it. Give me an hour or two to check the format. We can do a download, too, Sosa,” he added, looking over at their incredulous DoD representative. “Get you anything you want.”
“Can’t be traced?”
“Not casually.”
She sighed and threw up her hands. “Yeah, I guess we could... use that.”
“Don’t be coy, captain,” Hannibal told her, and nodded to BA. “Get it done.”
“Got a plan for plantin’ it, boss?” Murdock asked, and with that gleam in the pilot’s eyes, Hannibal knew he was hoping for something ridiculous and daring and fun, all that Indiana Jones bullshit he used to scheme up for them.
But those days were gone. Whenever Hannibal thought of something batshit insane now, as the pilot had once put it, he thought of Harmon’s brains, blown out on the indifferent concrete floor, the hole in Morrison’s chest big enough for him to put his fist through, and the appeal just wasn’t there for him anymore. In those days, he might have suggested something with Murdock cross-dressing like the housekeeping staff or daylight chaos at a restaurant or something like that.
So no. Not anymore. Never again. Simple and direct. Fewer moving parts, fewer points of failure. That’s the way Hannibal wanted to play things from now on.
“I’ll take care of it, Murdock,” he said, clapping his captain on the shoulder. “I think I can manage that much.”
Sosa was just watching him, and he wondered if she could see the pit forming in his stomach. Hannibal had meant what he’d told that arrogant kid, that he wouldn’t be back. Something dangerous about that kid, swimming, right under the surface and diving out of reach. Sneaky little bastard.
But it was the perfect in. The only in, and so he smiled at Sosa and lit up a cigar. Like nothing at all was wrong.
Like nothing at all was coming.
+++++
“No, no, no. Jesus, Face... how’d you put this list together?”
Face was sprawled out on the living room sofa in his own suite, still damp from their shower, eating dragonfruit out of a plastic cup from the vendor downstairs on the street, and flipping through the surveillance photos from the night before with the other man. Lynch was in one of those silk hotel robes, no line on his hard body left to the imagination, but it was like looking at a Greek statue in a gallery - beautiful, perfectly chiseled, burnished to a soft sheen, but cold. Hard. Emotionless.
And he didn’t buy this asshole’s cover story for a moment, the whole CIA administrator angle. No, Lynch may have lost when he faced Hannibal down that day on the docks, but Face had seen him fight before that. Fought him himself. Found that scar on the underside of his arm, an expert cut. And there was no way this guy was less than some kind of clandestine services officer. Greedy, stupid greedy, out of his depth on that job maybe, but not stupid. Not without his own skills.
So Face suspected he’d thrown the match on purpose, and he had no idea why. Normally he avoided mysteries - wading into one was like swimming out too far from shore in strange waters, no idea where those currents would carry off to - but this one was too interesting to resist.
And profitable.
And really, really good in bed.
“Oh, you know, the usual way, spying on your guests. And why weren’t you there last night?”
“For reasons like the one you’ve got locked up in Shanghai Chen’s warehouse,” Lynch said, as if it should be an obvious point, and held up one of the glossy photos. “For reasons like this.”
It was the banker, Singer, that bodyguard of his, the big black bruiser guy. Was Lynch know that he’d fucked the guy? Was he pissed? Face shrugged, keeping that little concern buried deep. “So?”
“So? This is Hannibal motherfucking Smith, Peck. Hannibal Smith. And BA Baracus. The same cunts who cheated me out of the plates the first time around, and...”
“The guy who’s lieutenant I shot.”
“Yeah, that’s right, you did, didn’t you?” And Lynch grinned, sipped at his coffee. “Never realized you were such a klutz.”
“He was right in the line,” the mercenary said, remembering the sight through his scope. “And somebody was supposed to get me hollow points. Would have stopped at Morrison.”
“If you’d given a shit about ammo you’d have procured it yourself.”
“Your CIA lackies were idiots,” Face pointed out.
And Lynch waited just a moment too long before answering, “damn right, stupid kids right out of Quantico...”
Interesting. Very interesting, and Face narrowed his eyes, remembering the man he’d seen at the airport.
Because last he’d heard, the guy was part of Hannibal Smith’s team, made Ranger and everything. Hannibal Smith, a legend in certain circles he’d once been privy to.
Murdock.
Cadet Henry Montgomery Murdock.
Oh fuck.
“Murdock’s with them.”
“Murdock?”
“Saw him at airport,” he admitted. “I had no idea, thought I was seeing things...”
Lynch ran both hands up into his hair and stood, pacing to the hall and back, pausing at a table with a rounded Korean vase, running his hand around it for a moment, and then Face had to duck the blameless ceramic as it hurtled involuntarily to the opposite wall.
He watched it crash with as much detachment as he could muster. “Yeah, I never liked Yang Dynasty shit either, it’s just tacky, all that eggshell glaze...”
“Motherfucking A-Team, Face! Why didn’t you tell me?”
The mercenary sighed. What was that Patton quote, about how the best plans went to shit the seconds bullets started flying? About how no plan survived first contact with the enemy? Murdock had made him learn it, all those years ago. And now... “How the fuck was I supposed to know it was Murdock?”
“Murdock’s not the problem here, Face. Hannibal is, jesus christ, what the fuck is he...”
His room phone rang. Once, twice, a third time, and then Lynch stopped mid-rant. “Are you going to pick that up, cupcake?”
The mercenary rolled his eyes and reached for the receiver. “Just for you, honey-bun,” and lifted the phone to his ear. “Yes?”
“Peck?”
Face smirked at Lynch, and leaned back slowly against wall, kind of rubbing himself into it. “Mmm, Mister Singer. How lovely to hear from you.”
“I have a question about the bidding.”
“Of course you do,” the conman practically purred, and was rewarded with a little cough on the other end of the line. One of Lynch’s eyebrows shot up, and Face mouthed the word Hannibal at him. “Do you want me to come meet you somewhere or...”
“I... if you’re around...”
“Sure, come on by. But make it soon. I’ve got stuff to do today,” and Face hung up the phone immediately, just imaging the groan that was dragging out of the older man right about now. He turned to Lynch. “Your Hannibal is not going to be a problem.”
“Are you fucking him?” Lynch asked with an incredulous little laugh in his voice.
“Stick around, you can watch. That closet’s got slats.”
Lynch nodded. “And what about your Murdock, Face? How the fuck do you know that nutjob?”
“He’s not crazy,” Face said automatically, the decade-old defense coming right to the fore again, and the other man did not look happy. Damn. “Not really. He’s just... unfettered. Does what he wants.”
Lynch was still watching him, suspicious, but at least he was standing now, grabbing his shirt off the back of the suite sofa. “He’s nuttier than squirrel shit, Face, and Hannibal’s the one we need to worry about.”
“Get your ass in the closet, darling,” the mercenary smiled blandly, “and I’ll show you exactly what we don’t need to be worried about.”
+++++
Back in his own room, Hannibal shoved the handset back into its cradle, and dropped his face into his hands. There had to be an easier way, a better way, a different way... calling Peck out and sneaking in, or...
But none of his plans were going to work on this one. They wouldn’t flow right. Because he couldn’t get past yesterday, the way the kid had just thrown him against the wall, how he’d just taken, without a thought to ask, and how fucking good it had felt to finally, for once, not be in control. Not have somebody’s life depending on...
With a growl, Hannibal pushed himself off the bed and stalked into the outside room, where BA and Murdock were huddled around one of the laptops. “You got it for me?” he asked, and the big corporal held up the thumbdrive, his eyes in guarded neutral.
“Be careful, boss,” Murdock said, like he knew.
And Sosa studiously did not look up from her magazine.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Summary: A year after the jailbreak, the three members of the A-Team are hired under the table by the DoD to take down the two men responsible for the as-yet unresolved theft of the Treasury plates - ex-CIA agent Vance “Lynch” Buress and former Spec-Ops officer Templeton “Faceman” Peck.
a/n: I know I've been neglecting this, but I'm going to try to have it done by the end of the month...
It was a long night.
And worse than it should have been.
Because he hated doing this.
It wasn’t that Face hated the whole torture thing in principle. Principles didn’t give him much trouble these days. He’d given up on most of those a long time ago, cutting away all that useless bullshit they tried to teach him at West Point. Duty, honor, country. Everything else grew out of that.
No use for anything like that, Face figured as he rolled his sleeves a little further up, soaping to the elbow in the industrial sink in the back of the warehouse. Why bother when the foundation had already proven itself too unreliable, too shaky, to be trusted?
The water smelled funny and the gangster that owed this place had Chinese soap in the dish, harsh and nasty stuff. Face stared at the yellow bar in his hand for a minute under the flood of unnatural incandescent light from the naked bulk overhead. Dawn was leaking in through the high, greasy windows, but the world hadn’t woken up yet. He was alone with his thoughts, nothing to disrupt them.
West Point.
He squeezed too tight on the soap and the bar popped out of his hands. It clattered down onto the dented stainless steel and the conman gripped the sides.
White hallways. He remembered those, the dirty white hallways in the dorms, the bare walls of the academic buildings, windowless classrooms, everyone in gray, everything in gray. The blanket on his bed, the uniform shirts he wore to the gym, the bras on the girls, gone dingy from too many hot washes by the laundry service, boiled fabric on sweaty skin that didn’t taste anything like what a girl should taste like. That was how he’d developed his taste for men. At least the sweat and the smell seemed right on a male body. But those girls... downright criminal.
Sure, he’d hated the Army, his asshole CO, the training, the things he’d done in Afghanistan. but it was West Point that he truly loathed.
SERE training, over the summer. That’s where he’d learned about what torture can do to a person.
It wasn’t the professional thing the Army put on. nope, that had been useful. But West Point? An exercise in sadism.
Shove a group of twenty-something year old boys, and girls who had to keep up with the guys, into the woods for three weeks, deprive them of food, sleep, comforts and crazy shit was just going to happen. Everybody knew it. Just the way it was.
And it hadn’t been a big deal, not for a kid who’d grown up in orphanges and foster homes all over LA, half-starved and neglected for most of his childhood. He could take anything.
That’s what Face had told himself, going into SERE that summer. That he could handle it.
What he hadn’t counted on was the rabbit.
His chalk’s big, white, fluffy rabbit. One of those big meat rabbits, probably about twelve pounds of bouncy floppy-eared innocence. Reminded Face of the breed rasied by one of the sisters who’d run the orphanage he’d run away from at fifteen.
He wasn’t an idiot. Since basic the summer before, he’d heard stories about the rabbit. Everyone had a killing-the-rabbit story. The cadets always got briefed on how to kill it properly, some insanity about clubbing it on the back of the head. Face knew from the sister, who sometimes fixed rabbit stew for the kids, that the proper way to do it was hold it in your lap, calm it down, slit its throat with a very sharp knife and a very quick stroke.
Cadets, on the other hand, didn’t do either.
So, they’d been without food for two days, land-navving through the forests of upstate New York, and they were at a checkpoint for the evening. Tonight wasn’t MRE night, one of the cadre declared, and out came the cages.
For whatever reason, everyone seemed to think that being without food for two days and being dead tired and being out in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere gave them the right to behave like assholes.
College kids who’d never killed anything in their life, never seen death. Never sat beside their dead mother in their reeking studio apartment, five years old, waiting three days before the neighbors found him. She’d just fallen over. Aneurism, the docs had said, and he’d had to ask one of the Child Protective Services workers what that was.
Fucking children, Face had thought them.
The cadre, juniors and seniors pulling leadership duty out here for the summer, were passing out cages to the chalk leaders. Face wasn’t in charge, hadn’t wanted to be, part of his younger self’s desire to sit back and watch everyone else fuck up around him, but he’d watched Murdock hand the carrying cage to the girl who’d gotten pushed into the position.
She’d brought it back to their camp. Tough girl, too much muscle for a female and no soft planes on her entire body. “I’m not killing it,” she declared.
Straws were drawn, people were called out as being pussy for not wanting to, blood rose. The rabbit started screaming, stopped, and that’s when the laughing began.
He watched it, the whole thing, the one that had ended in a sloppy skinning job on a body gone stiff from death far, far too soon, head popped off and one of the other guys dancing around with red-streaked fur, fingers jammed up into the skull.
Murdock, the same guy who’d beaten his ass through basic, the same junior, now senior, he’d had nothing but respect for, was on them, yelling at the top of his lungs. Face, ashamed, moved away from their little camp, sat down and buried his eyes in his palms, looking at nothing.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked up. Murdock, staring down at him with hard green eyes in the weak light from the fire beyond. The older cadet had taken his BDU blouse off, wrapped it up around the carcass and was cradling it in his arm. Blood was dripping through onto his pale t-shirt.
Face snorted, and Murdock looked like he wanted to punch him.
“You hungry, Peck?” he’d asked sarcastically, something angry in his voice.
“You’re taking it?”
“Yeah. Your chalk doesn’t deserve it.”
“Good,” Face had said. “Meat’s ruined from the adrenalin anyway.”
“You knew how to kill this thing properly?”
He hadn’t replied.
Murdock hadn’t spoken to him until spring semester of the next year. And even then, it was just to walk into his room and asked him what he’d learned.
“Never enjoy it,” had been his answer then, and Murdock had just nodded and walked out.
Fuck, he’d hated that place.
“Hey, Face, you okay?”
The sound of the big Australian’s voice broke through, and Face shook himself. He was still scrubbing his hands, his cuticles just starting to bleed, actually, and he shuts off the water. “Ruined a good suit. My own fault for not bringing any work clothes, huh?”
“That guy’s a bleeder, isn’t he?”
“Who isn’t? Let’s give him until the afternoon, start it up again. You get him hung up right? Moussad are slippery little bastards and everything...”
“Mate, what’s wrong?”
The conman turned around to face his friend, who was retrieving the soap. He did most of the work, so he was a little more messed up. Red everywhere, streaked into that platinum blonde hair of his, short but still somehow ropey. Tall, affable, extremely easy going until he got pissed off, and that’s when the lethality came out.
He’d worked with Terry, on and off, for the past seven years. A former Special Forces man himself, they both had the distinction of being on some of the first missions into Afghanistan when the bombs started falling during the American incursion against the Taliban. They’d met there, a somewhat scared, somewhat disaffected Ranger lieutenant and an SASR Lance Corporal.
Both of them young, both of them enthusiastic, and Face had seen the kind of damage Terry could do, first hand and close-up, the man’s knife nearly slicing the head off of some jihadi in the process of beating the then-lieutenant to death in one of those caves, in that op that had gone so horrifically pear-shaped.
Terrible things. Four weeks on a joint op that saw half the team dead and the casualities rotting from sepsis by the time they’d gotten back inside the wire. Within the week, they were the only two left.
What had happened to their chalk leader, their captain, Face’s first CO, was an entirely different story. Face didn’t regret it, what he’d done, what he’d had to do, shooting the bastard in the back of his head for the idiocy that had gotten them into melee in the first place.
And still, just him and Terry left alive.
Face had schooled his own feelings out of the situation, away his countenance, took the details out of the official report, accepted his Silver Star, but he’d had dreams about their dark, confined, bloody battle under the earth for months after. And that’s when he started to realize that part of him had died there, or started to die there, now so far away from him as to not have ever existed at all. That West Point had lied to him, that Cadet Murdock had lied to him, that there was no honor in any of it.
That nothing meant anything at all.
So there was just the killing.
A valuable lesson, that Lieutenant Peck had thought at the time.
But the Australian’s green eyes had been haunted. Tery hadn’t said anything about it, of course, but when Face had run into him in a bar outside Saigon a few years back, out of uniform, drowning in cheap Chinese whiskey, a gun in an open shoulder hostler, it made a kind of sense. He’d also thanked his lucky stars. Finally, somebody else in his business he knew he could rely on. He’d call, or Terry would. Job offers, missions, hot spots to go exploit. And off they’d go.
Face trusted him. As much as he trusted anybody. Which wasn’t much, but it was still something. “Memories, buddy,” he finally said.
“The caves?”
“Training.” He never told anybody he went to West Point, not if he could help it, not even to people who knew he was ex-military. Not when he’d been military. He didn’t really consider himself a graduate. Fuck knew he didn’t conform to the expected standards.
Terry nodded. “The rabbits?”
They exchanged a look, shuddered, and both turned away again, Face wiping his hands on splattered trousers, Terry sticking his entire head under the faucet.
“Why’s it easier to kill people than animals?”
“I have no idea, man.” He clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Come on. We can stil get a few hours of sleep before the circus starts up.”
+++++
“You look like shit, boss.”
Hannibal sighed and drained his coffee. He felt like shit. No hangover, nothing like that. But he hadn’t slept well, and his body was still echoing the fuck from yesterday, the memory of that hard body against his, the wall, the rough penetration, squatting on the edge of his dreams all night, lurking around the corners even now.
It wasn’t that the kid had been good, although he had been. No, it had nothing to do with technique. It was something about the man himself, something deep and beautiful and unsettling, running right through him. Hannibal hadn’t felt anything like it in years. It reminded of Morrison, his first and only real love, back when they were both still young men, full of ignorant promise.
And look what we turned out to be, he thought gloomily.
“Boss?”
Oh, right. The boys. The mission. “What’d we get off the pinhole camera, BA?”
“Nothing good, Hannibal. We came back with a couple very bad hits.”
And that was Sosa. Fuck, he’d almost forgotten she was there. Another of her public meetings places, one of the food courts in one of the shopping malls. Everything plastic and shiny and oh-so-fake. Murdock was drumming his fingers on the table.
Why couldn’t he concentrate? The kid was so much like Morrison...
Sosa tapped up a screen on her laptop. “We’ve got at least organized crime families, a contingent from one of the UN divisions, a very prominent North Korean arms dealer and...”
“What about the blonde guy?” BA asked. “The guy who was talking?”
“We’re still trying to ID those photos, the databases take time to search,” Sosa replied a little too smoothly.
Hannibal yawned. He wasn’t too tired to catch that. “How much support do you have for this?”
“I planned the op...”
“No, wrong, I planned the op,” he told her. “You made the decision to go for this. I seriously doubt the DIA’s put any kind of force behind this.”
She looked a little offended. “This is a matter of national security, Hannibal, and I don’t think...”
“It don’t involve military security,” Murdock interjected. “Bossman’s making a good point, el diablo...”
“Can you stop him from calling me that?” he asked BA, who just shrugged.
“...and it really doesn’t matter, captain,” Hannibal replied. “What’s our bank account look like?”
“The fake bank account?” she asked. “We set it up for an upper limit of about $300 million...”
“That won’t be competitive,” BA pointed out and shuffled a napkin around. “Money in that room last night? Bids could go billion or more.”
“We don’t need it to be, Bosco. Winning the plates would be good but we can easily get them...”
“No,” Sosa said, and three sets of incredulous eyes turned on her. Her normal arrogance seemed to waver for a moment. “No. We can’t risk you recapturing the plates somewhere else.”
“They’re in Singapore,” BA said.
“We think they’re in Singapore,” she said.
“And your intel has already proven spotty,” Hannibal agreed.
She stared. He stared back. She looked away first. “We can’t take the risk of another bidder winning and taking delivery somewhere else in the world. We need to be competitive. We need to win.”
“Your slush fund big enough for that?”
“I can spoof the funds,” BA said. “Ain’t that hard to fake. Money don’t really exist anymore anyway.”
“The account I’ve got set up is...”
“I can do it,” BA said levelly, and looked at Hannibal, something almost pleading in his eyes, like he desperately needed the back-up here, and when, the colonel mused to himself, had things gotten so bad that BA felt like he didn’t have that automatically? “It can be done.”
Underneath the table, Murdock squeezed the big guy’s hand. Hannibal tried not to look. “We don’t know what anyone else is going to put in, BA. It’s impossible to guess.”
Murdock raised his hand like an over-eager kid in class, and BA tried to grab him by the sleeve to pull in back down. But the pilot just grinned. “What about the accountant’s computer?”
“Accountant?” Sosa asked sharply.
“Yes, Sosa, the accountant,” BA said with an eye-roll Youngish guy, earlier thirties by the look of him, was in the back geekin’ away on a...”
She bit her lip. “There was supposed to be Lynch and that other guy. Now there’s a third one?”
“Not part of scheme,” Hannibal said. “Just there to handle the money. And yes, Murdock, his computer would be the best source, but...”
“...encryption,” BA finished. “Probably using a VPN tunnel too, through the hotel’s... I won’t just hack it.”
“Direct access?” Sosa said.
“How ‘n’the’hell we suppos’d to get physical access?” Murdock retorted, and Hannibal was frozen by a sudden, horrible thought.
“What would you need to do for us to get into his system?” Hannibal asked.
BA shrugged. “A thumbdrive that should cut it. Give me an hour or two to check the format. We can do a download, too, Sosa,” he added, looking over at their incredulous DoD representative. “Get you anything you want.”
“Can’t be traced?”
“Not casually.”
She sighed and threw up her hands. “Yeah, I guess we could... use that.”
“Don’t be coy, captain,” Hannibal told her, and nodded to BA. “Get it done.”
“Got a plan for plantin’ it, boss?” Murdock asked, and with that gleam in the pilot’s eyes, Hannibal knew he was hoping for something ridiculous and daring and fun, all that Indiana Jones bullshit he used to scheme up for them.
But those days were gone. Whenever Hannibal thought of something batshit insane now, as the pilot had once put it, he thought of Harmon’s brains, blown out on the indifferent concrete floor, the hole in Morrison’s chest big enough for him to put his fist through, and the appeal just wasn’t there for him anymore. In those days, he might have suggested something with Murdock cross-dressing like the housekeeping staff or daylight chaos at a restaurant or something like that.
So no. Not anymore. Never again. Simple and direct. Fewer moving parts, fewer points of failure. That’s the way Hannibal wanted to play things from now on.
“I’ll take care of it, Murdock,” he said, clapping his captain on the shoulder. “I think I can manage that much.”
Sosa was just watching him, and he wondered if she could see the pit forming in his stomach. Hannibal had meant what he’d told that arrogant kid, that he wouldn’t be back. Something dangerous about that kid, swimming, right under the surface and diving out of reach. Sneaky little bastard.
But it was the perfect in. The only in, and so he smiled at Sosa and lit up a cigar. Like nothing at all was wrong.
Like nothing at all was coming.
+++++
“No, no, no. Jesus, Face... how’d you put this list together?”
Face was sprawled out on the living room sofa in his own suite, still damp from their shower, eating dragonfruit out of a plastic cup from the vendor downstairs on the street, and flipping through the surveillance photos from the night before with the other man. Lynch was in one of those silk hotel robes, no line on his hard body left to the imagination, but it was like looking at a Greek statue in a gallery - beautiful, perfectly chiseled, burnished to a soft sheen, but cold. Hard. Emotionless.
And he didn’t buy this asshole’s cover story for a moment, the whole CIA administrator angle. No, Lynch may have lost when he faced Hannibal down that day on the docks, but Face had seen him fight before that. Fought him himself. Found that scar on the underside of his arm, an expert cut. And there was no way this guy was less than some kind of clandestine services officer. Greedy, stupid greedy, out of his depth on that job maybe, but not stupid. Not without his own skills.
So Face suspected he’d thrown the match on purpose, and he had no idea why. Normally he avoided mysteries - wading into one was like swimming out too far from shore in strange waters, no idea where those currents would carry off to - but this one was too interesting to resist.
And profitable.
And really, really good in bed.
“Oh, you know, the usual way, spying on your guests. And why weren’t you there last night?”
“For reasons like the one you’ve got locked up in Shanghai Chen’s warehouse,” Lynch said, as if it should be an obvious point, and held up one of the glossy photos. “For reasons like this.”
It was the banker, Singer, that bodyguard of his, the big black bruiser guy. Was Lynch know that he’d fucked the guy? Was he pissed? Face shrugged, keeping that little concern buried deep. “So?”
“So? This is Hannibal motherfucking Smith, Peck. Hannibal Smith. And BA Baracus. The same cunts who cheated me out of the plates the first time around, and...”
“The guy who’s lieutenant I shot.”
“Yeah, that’s right, you did, didn’t you?” And Lynch grinned, sipped at his coffee. “Never realized you were such a klutz.”
“He was right in the line,” the mercenary said, remembering the sight through his scope. “And somebody was supposed to get me hollow points. Would have stopped at Morrison.”
“If you’d given a shit about ammo you’d have procured it yourself.”
“Your CIA lackies were idiots,” Face pointed out.
And Lynch waited just a moment too long before answering, “damn right, stupid kids right out of Quantico...”
Interesting. Very interesting, and Face narrowed his eyes, remembering the man he’d seen at the airport.
Because last he’d heard, the guy was part of Hannibal Smith’s team, made Ranger and everything. Hannibal Smith, a legend in certain circles he’d once been privy to.
Murdock.
Cadet Henry Montgomery Murdock.
Oh fuck.
“Murdock’s with them.”
“Murdock?”
“Saw him at airport,” he admitted. “I had no idea, thought I was seeing things...”
Lynch ran both hands up into his hair and stood, pacing to the hall and back, pausing at a table with a rounded Korean vase, running his hand around it for a moment, and then Face had to duck the blameless ceramic as it hurtled involuntarily to the opposite wall.
He watched it crash with as much detachment as he could muster. “Yeah, I never liked Yang Dynasty shit either, it’s just tacky, all that eggshell glaze...”
“Motherfucking A-Team, Face! Why didn’t you tell me?”
The mercenary sighed. What was that Patton quote, about how the best plans went to shit the seconds bullets started flying? About how no plan survived first contact with the enemy? Murdock had made him learn it, all those years ago. And now... “How the fuck was I supposed to know it was Murdock?”
“Murdock’s not the problem here, Face. Hannibal is, jesus christ, what the fuck is he...”
His room phone rang. Once, twice, a third time, and then Lynch stopped mid-rant. “Are you going to pick that up, cupcake?”
The mercenary rolled his eyes and reached for the receiver. “Just for you, honey-bun,” and lifted the phone to his ear. “Yes?”
“Peck?”
Face smirked at Lynch, and leaned back slowly against wall, kind of rubbing himself into it. “Mmm, Mister Singer. How lovely to hear from you.”
“I have a question about the bidding.”
“Of course you do,” the conman practically purred, and was rewarded with a little cough on the other end of the line. One of Lynch’s eyebrows shot up, and Face mouthed the word Hannibal at him. “Do you want me to come meet you somewhere or...”
“I... if you’re around...”
“Sure, come on by. But make it soon. I’ve got stuff to do today,” and Face hung up the phone immediately, just imaging the groan that was dragging out of the older man right about now. He turned to Lynch. “Your Hannibal is not going to be a problem.”
“Are you fucking him?” Lynch asked with an incredulous little laugh in his voice.
“Stick around, you can watch. That closet’s got slats.”
Lynch nodded. “And what about your Murdock, Face? How the fuck do you know that nutjob?”
“He’s not crazy,” Face said automatically, the decade-old defense coming right to the fore again, and the other man did not look happy. Damn. “Not really. He’s just... unfettered. Does what he wants.”
Lynch was still watching him, suspicious, but at least he was standing now, grabbing his shirt off the back of the suite sofa. “He’s nuttier than squirrel shit, Face, and Hannibal’s the one we need to worry about.”
“Get your ass in the closet, darling,” the mercenary smiled blandly, “and I’ll show you exactly what we don’t need to be worried about.”
+++++
Back in his own room, Hannibal shoved the handset back into its cradle, and dropped his face into his hands. There had to be an easier way, a better way, a different way... calling Peck out and sneaking in, or...
But none of his plans were going to work on this one. They wouldn’t flow right. Because he couldn’t get past yesterday, the way the kid had just thrown him against the wall, how he’d just taken, without a thought to ask, and how fucking good it had felt to finally, for once, not be in control. Not have somebody’s life depending on...
With a growl, Hannibal pushed himself off the bed and stalked into the outside room, where BA and Murdock were huddled around one of the laptops. “You got it for me?” he asked, and the big corporal held up the thumbdrive, his eyes in guarded neutral.
“Be careful, boss,” Murdock said, like he knew.
And Sosa studiously did not look up from her magazine.
no subject
Did we already know that? Have I missed that bit?
I assumed it was Face's buddy who did it, not Face. Nightmare. Was really hoping the guys would rescue him fron his life of crime and show him what a good guy he really is. But they will never forgive him for this. Ever... :( (Will they?)
Finish! Quick!
no subject
And yeah, the boys are going to want to forgive Face. And I think a big part of Face here will want that, too. Whether or not they can, on the other hand...