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Some random pieces of unfinished White Collar fics
I was going through my WiPs folder tonight and decided to post the existing parts of some fics I started that I'm probably not going to finish. Most of these are for either CollarCorner prompts or old h/c bingo squares. I thought it might be fun for people to read them, although keep in mind that the reason why I'm posting these is because the stories are abandoned and are very likely to never be finished, so this might be more frustrating for you guys than anything else. *g* On the other hand, you never know when I'll go back and pick up one of these again.
Most of these are not particularly spoilery, but my intro text for #2 contains a season four spoiler, and #4 is very spoilery for the end of season three/beginning of season four.
#1: Plane crash fic
This was actually one of the very first White Collar fics that I started writing ... possibly the first. It was for the "plane crash" square on one of my old h/c bingo cards. I liked the concept a lot (small plane goes down in the Hudson with Peter, Neal, and possibly Diana on board) but for some reason could never get it to actually come together, and eventually I gave up.
--
The plane was a low-slung, twin-engine Beechcraft, the engines already warm and idling. Peter skidded onto the private airstrip at the head of an FBI convoy, took in the situation at a glance -- the exchange already going down, far ahead of schedule; Neal and Farriman, a woman who must be the buyer, and two other guys standing feet (feet!) from the open cargo door. While the other FBI vehicles blocked the way off the airstrip, Peter cranked the wheel of his sedan and slammed on the brakes right under the nose of the plane. The Beechcraft could probably push it aside without damaging itself -- it had a whole lot more mass, not to mention engine power -- but he hoped it'd give the pilot something to think about, at least. Beyond the plane, behind a high chain-link fence and a retaining wall, the Hudson glinted in the afternoon sun.
It had been only a couple of minutes since Neal had murmured into the tracking watch and transmitter: "Deal's happening now, guys. You better be close." Peter drew his sidearm, nodded to Diana in the shotgun seat, and wished Neal wasn't right there, in easy hostage-grabbing range. They'd spent weeks getting Neal into Farriman's inner circle, but he was still very much the new kid on the block, the first one they'd all look at when three carfuls of FBI agents turned up when Farriman had two suitcases of dirty money. Things weren't supposed to go down this fast.
"FBI! Freeze!"
It had been seconds, no more. The little group at the plane were still reacting, and as far as Peter could tell, Neal was still playing along, as shocked as the rest of them at the FBI agents fanning out to surround the plane. The buyer tried to run, and Jones took off after her. Farriman threw the suitcases through the open cargo door and scrambled inside, his two guys right behind him. Neal hesitated, very briefly, but it wasn't like he had a choice: fall back towards the FBI and get shot by Farriman's goons, or go along -- Someone gave him a hand into the plane, and he took it, shooting a glance at Peter over his shoulder.
Oh, son of a bitch, Peter thought. The plane's engines kicked up a notch and it began to reverse. One of Farriman's bodyguards snapped off a shot at him; it kicked chips off the asphalt a few feet to his right. As the plane came around, though, Peter saw his chance -- he put on a burst of speed and got hold of the bodyguard's gun arm through the open cargo door, using his own body weight to haul the guy out the door.
In a minute the Beechcraft would complete its rotation and then it would be facing a couple thousand feet of open runway and a straight shot to the sky.
Peter threw himself into the open cargo door before he could talk himself out of it. Element of surprise, right? And Diana had been right behind him -- they might have a shot at this, if they could just move fast enough. He came up right under the nose of the second startled-looking bodyguard, and knocked the gun out of his hand -- heard it clatter to the tarmac and then socked the guy in the jaw. The shock felt like he'd punched a sack of cement. It didn't exactly knock the guy out, but it did knock him out of the plane, right into his buddy and almost on top of Diana.
The Beechcraft was still moving, turning, its engines shifting into a different register. They were gearing up to take off.
And if it had been just the two guys and Farriman on the plane, he might've had a good shot of pulling this off. But there were two more, and both had mini-Uzis trained on him. Peter glimpsed Neal backed up against the row of windows at the far side of the plane. He looked scared, but also distant and distracted, like his brain was working a thousand miles a minute, as usual. But there wasn't a hell of a lot he could do, certainly nothing without blowing his cover and turning himself into a hostage as well.
Peter let his sidearm fall to the floor of the plane. "Can't blame a guy for trying," he said with a half-smile, gauging the distance between himself and the little black muzzles pointed at him.
"On the floor," the nearest goon snapped. "Cuff yourself to the seat."
Not like he had a choice. Kneeling, Peter snapped one cuff around his wrist and the other around the support strut of the seat.
Farriman, who had been in the cockpit talking to the pilot, came storming back with his gun drawn. "What the hell is going on back here? Just shoot him for God's sake."
The floor of the plane vibrated under them. Taking off, Peter thought -- he caught glimpses of the tarmac speeding past, and wind whipped his hair. Diana clearly hadn't managed to make the jump. Even if he hadn't been handcuffed to a seat, they were moving too fast to jump out -- besides, he couldn't have bailed without leaving Neal in their hands.
Which left bluffing.
"If you kill a federal officer, then you'll be running for the rest of your life, Farriman. And it won't be a long life."
Farriman's eyes were hard as chips of glass. "I can run faster than you think," he said. "Kill him."
Everything seemed to go into slow motion as the muzzle of the nearest mini-Uzi came up to point at his face. Handcuffed and kneeling, he couldn't dodge. He could feel acceleration pressing him to the floor of the plane as they cleared the runway and began to gain altitude.
Well, Peter thought, this could have gone better...
Neal seized the handle of one of the suitcases and swung it at the back of the goon's head.
The case was metal and Farriman's guy went down like he'd been hit with a sack of bricks. Chaos erupted -- Peter lunged for the mini-Uzi lying temporarily unattended on the floor of the plane, only to be yanked up short by the cuff around his wrist, gouging painful furrows in his flesh. He glimpsed Neal catching a hard blow to the side of the head from the butt of Farriman's gun. Neal crumpled and Peter lashed out with his foot, kicking Farriman's legs out from under him. Farriman's finger convulsively tightened on the trigger and a burst of gunfire raked the bulkheads and cockpit; the plane slewed wildly to the side and Peter felt his stomach lurch as they suddenly lost altitude.
[I also toyed with the idea of having the plane fly north of New York and go down along the Atlantic coast somewhere. Consequently, I wrote another chunk that doesn't quite mesh properly with the above - in this version, Peter isn't yet handcuffed.]
"Kill them?" the other goon asked. The floor of the plane vibrated under them. Taking off, Peter thought -- he caught glimpses of the tarmac speeding past, and wind whipped his hair. It was probably already too late to jump out, and besides, he couldn't do that without leaving Neal in their hands.
"Not yet," Farriman said thoughtfully. His glass-hard eyes lingered on Neal, who was leaning groggily against the side of the plane. He hauled the cargo door shut, and it slammed with a very final sound, sealing out their last glimpse of freedom. "I want to know how deep this goes, and who's involved."
They were both manhandled to the nearest seat, and Farriman snapped the handcuffs around one of Peter's wrists and one of Neal's, with the chain hooked under the metal bar holding the seat to the floor. Another rough search relieved them of their cell phones and Neil's lock picks, although they still had the tracking watch -- for whatever good it was likely to do them in the immediate future.
Neal's usually neat hair was a mussed mess, and there was blood running in his eyes. He looked more disgruntled than hurt, though. "You okay?" Peter asked him over the roar of the engines.
"What were you thinking, Rambo?" Neal hissed at him. "You realize you're not bulletproof, right?"
"Neither are you!"
Neal's disgruntled expression dissolved into a boyish grin, despite the bruise purpling his forehead and the blood drying in his hair. "I was pretty cool, wasn't I?"
"More like completely insane." Peter looked up at the front of the plane, where Farriman was leaning into the cockpit, talking to the pilot. The goon that Neal had coldcocked appeared to be coming around; the other was keeping them covered from a safe distance.
"So," Neal said, settling back against the seat. "What's standard FBI protocol in a situation like this?"
Peter imagined himself in an impromptu control center, the familiar controlled chaos and bad coffee and carefully tamped-down panic... "They'll be figuring how much fuel we have, calculating our flight range and guessing where we might try to stop." He dropped his voice still further, hoping that it was audible on the transmitter in Neal's watch but not wanting to take the slightest chance of tipping off Farriman that the FBI was tracking them and listening in. "Neal and I are okay. There are three guys on the plane -- four, counting the pilot. General trajectory looks like ..." He tried to gauge the angle of the sun on the wall, slanting through the windows. "Almost due north. I'd guess we're heading for Canada."
"Always wanted to go to Canada," Neal said thoughtfully.
Something rustled behind the seat. Peter started to raise his head, then thought better of it just as Neal's hand shot out and grabbed him by the wrist.
"Diana's on the plane," Neal whispered, barely moving his lips.
Peter stared at him.
"She got in while you were --" a quick grin glided by "-- so effectively distracting everyone."
#2: Fic in which Christie is the doctor on call when the Burkes are in a car crash
This is another of the very first stories I started, for another h/c bingo square ("blood loss") ... which never went anywhere. Obviously this one has been made obsolete by Diana and Christie's breakup, though it could still theoretically be made to work.
--
Christie doesn't mind working the night shift at the hospital. It's quiet, mostly -- she catches up on a lot of paperwork and keeps an eye on sleepy residents and interns to make sure they don't get careless.
But then there are nights like tonight. Must be a full moon, she thinks as she helps Briana and Dave hold down a thrashing OD victim, one of his wrists handcuffed to the gurney. She's not normally on ER rotation, but several people are on vacation or out sick, and the place is bedlam tonight.
"Car accident incoming," Carmelita says softly in passing, as Christie kneels beside a frightened-looking little girl who's clutching her arm. "Drunk driver ran a red light and T-boned another car. It's bad. You're the only doctor available right now --"
"I know. I'll be there in a minute." Once she's examined the little girl and sent her in for X-rays, along with her nervous parents, she heads out to the admitting area of the ER, where an ambulance has just pulled up with lights flashing.
Carmelita's right: there's blood everywhere, and one of the victims is DOA or close to it -- there's a paramedic pumping the still chest. This is one part of the job she hates, when there's nothing to be done, but the desperate obligation to try anyway.
She puts on her game face and wades into the controlled chaos, settling into the cold calculations of triage. One of the victims, a woman, is struggling with her oxygen mask, trying to pull it off, trying to say something. She catches Christie's wrist with cold, bloodstained fingers. "My husband," she gasps, her eyes wide with panic.
Christie gently settles the mask back over her face and prays to God that the husband isn't the one on the next gurney over, the one who's not responding to the paramedic's resuscitation efforts, the one with his legs severed who's bleeding out all over the gurney and the tile floor. "We're doing everything we can for your husband, ma'am. Now focus on my fingers. Can you feel it when I do this?"
The woman has a broken arm and some ribs at the very least, possible internal injuries. Male victim #1 she's almost certainly going to have to declare in a minute, but not yet, not yet; male victim #2 is a head injury with possible spinal complications, and she pauses for a minute in the act of helping a new, frightened-looking intern set up an IV on him. She knows this guy. Christie's pretty good with faces, but she can't place him -- not like this, not with his face slack and gray and covered with blood. And she pushes it away, focuses what she can do for his body and not the soul inside it. This guy could be her high-school math teacher or someone who took her order at a restaurant last week, or he could be one of her closest friends, but it doesn't matter, not right now.
She has the on-call neurologist paged and turns to relieve the paramedics and a resident whose name she can't remember, as they labor over the DOA. Pupils fixed, completely unresponsive ... "He's been like this since the scene?"
"He coded in the ambulance," the paramedic says.
She calls it and records the time and hands off the -- the body, that's all it is now, to the nearest intern so that she can help the paramedic sit down. "I tried," he says, and Christie says, "I know," and squeezes his hand. She wishes she could do more for him, but she's just left two badly injured patients in the care of a very green resident. He's going to have to get through this on his own.
Dr. Gupta from Neurology has taken over the head injury, so Christie can focus on the female victim with the possible internal bleeding. She's still conscious and trying to talk. "I didn't see what happened," she says, and starts to cry. "I don't know what happened. Can you tell me where my husband is?"
"He's in good hands, ma'am," Christie says, and still she can't shake the feeling that she knows these people. Someone Diana introduced her to? Yes, she can hear Diana's voice, making introductions, and they're at some kind of party, and it's --
"Peter," the woman says, and that's what makes it all fall together. It was Diana's office Christmas party, and that guy is Diana's boss. The dark-haired woman is his wife. Shit.
"You're going to be fine," Christie tells her. "You and your husband will be fine."
Before going into surgery, she snatches a moment to call Diana. She thinks about letting it go, letting Diana sleep a little longer. Maybe she's wrong. Maybe it isn't them. But if these are Diana's friends, she ought to know about it.
At Diana's sleepy mumble, she says, "Honey, it's me," and hears the rustling as Diana sits up, going from fast asleep to wide awake with speed that Christie has always envied.
"What's wrong? What happened?" Diana says. "Something is wrong, isn't it?"
#3: Peter out of body experience
This is for a CollarCorner prompt in which Peter is injured and has an out of body experience in the ambulance or hospital. Once again, I couldn't figure out where I was going and stalled out.
--
It was never a good sign, Peter thought, when you couldn't remember where you were or how you got there.
He was standing on the steps in a stairwell, which didn't really narrow down the possibilities all that much. It was clean and newish, with no suspicious stains in the corners. The light seemed too bright, somehow. He had a headache.
There had been a case ...
He tried to recall the details, but his thoughts skittered away like a drop of water in a hot skillet. It was very difficult to think at all. His memories were hazy, his thoughts scattered and disjointed.
He was very worried about Neal and he couldn't figure out exactly why.
"Peter?"
The voice was familiar. Very familiar, though he couldn't place it. Peter turned, wobbled and steadied himself on the railing -- apparently his balance was a little off, too. His other hand went automatically to his shoulder holster, but he wasn't wearing it.
The woman was standing on the steps above him. He saw her in a series of disjointed mental snapshots. Long dark hair. Purple silk shirt. And a heartbreaker of a face with the biggest blue eyes he'd ever seen. He knew that face, but trying to remember was like wading through mud, and for a minute he could only see it on a little snapshot clipped to an FBI file. Then her identity snapped into focus, and he was surprised he hadn't recognized her, although in fairness, he'd never expected to encounter her standing around in a stairwell.
It helped that she was wearing a name tag, the kind of big silly-looking tag that's handed out at conferences, with HELLO MY NAME IS printed in big block letters. Her name was written in neat blue letters below it.
Kate.
Who had been dead for over a year.
He blinked and she was still standing there. She was holding a clipboard, and she smiled at him.
"This is probably not good," Peter said at last. "You being here, and all."
"Not as bad as you think," she said, still smiling. "You're a little turned around. Come on, Peter. Walk with me. I'll get you where you need to go."
"Yeah, that's kind of what I'm afraid of," he said, but he fell into step with her after doing a quick visual check for weapons. She didn't seem to have any, aside from the pen on the clipboard, and frisking her would probably be rude.
Climbing the stairs made his headache worse. He rubbed his temple.
"Do you remember anything?" Kate asked, frowning at him in a puzzled, worried sort of way.
"I don't have amnesia, if that's what you mean." Sort of. Not as such, anyway. "Look, there's no point in beating around the bush here. Am I dead?"
Kate smiled, like she was proud of him. "That's a very astute question."
"That," Peter said, "is not a no." He thought that he probably ought to be panicking, but mostly he was just worried, suddenly gut-clentching worry because he didn't know what had happened to him or where his team was. "Neal?" he said. "El? My agents? Are they okay?"
"Everyone is fine," Kate reassured him. "Everyone but you, that is. And no, Peter, you aren't dead, although you're currently in what I suppose you might call an in-between state. You were injured very badly, and you're in surgery at the moment. I'm guessing your memories are a little confused right now, but that's normal." She reached out as if to pat him on the shoulder, then drew her hand back awkwardly.
"I want to see my team," Peter said, holding onto that. "And Elizabeth. Is she here?"
"Of course she's here. Before you see her, though, I need to finish giving you the orientation. You won't be able to touch her, and she can't see or hear you. Some people do best with some time to adjust beforehand."
[there's a discontinuity here because I couldn't figure out exactly how to transition from the above to the next part]
"I'm not alive or dead?" Wasn't that like being just a little bit pregnant?
"You're in surgery." She beckoned him; still confused, but now slightly less so, he followed her. "Probably you coded a couple of times, maybe in the ambulance or maybe here. Perhaps it's just that the outcome is uncertain right now. I'm not really sure how it works. Based on my information --" she glanced at the clipboard "-- it looks like you're very likely to go back, but it's not completely certain."
"And the reason why you're meeting me like this?"
"Well, because this is my ... job, I suppose you'd call it."
"Job?" Peter said, raising his eyebrows.
She looked down and away. "I didn't live a very good life, you know. It's not that I was bad; at least I don't think I was. it's just that I lived very much for myself, not for other people. Even when I was with Neal, it was more for me than for him."
"So this is a sort of atonement?" Peter asked cautiously.
"I don't know if I'd put it quite like that. Well, maybe." She smiled. "I wasn't sure how I'd handle this assignment, but I like it, actually. People are frightened and confused when they come to me, and I help calm them down and explain to them what's going on. Sometimes I get to send them back; other times I sit with them 'til they're ready to move on. And maybe someday I'll move on, too. But not yet."
#4: Story in which a bounty hunter kidnaps Peter to draw out Neal
This is for another CollarCorner prompt that was left after the Season 3 cliffhanger. The prompter wanted a story in which a bounty hunter kidnaps Peter to draw out Neal. I loved the idea, but as you can see I never got very far with it, and now it's wildly AU, so I don't know if I'm ever going anywhere with this. I still think it would be a fun story to write; I don't have any concrete plans for the rest of it, except that it would be h/c-riffic.
--
Thirst woke Peter: an aching desperate thirst, along with the headache and cottonmouthed feeling that could only mean he'd been up late, drinking. Eyes still closed, he reached across El for the bedside table --
-- and was pulled up short with a sharp tug at his wrist.
Peter peeled open his gummy eyes. The first thing he saw was a low plaster ceiling, filthy with the overlapping brown rings of water stains. A ceiling fan turned lazily, doing little to move the stifling air.
Peter twisted his head to the side and squinted as harsh white sunlight, slanting through sagging blinds, stabbed straight into his brain like an icepick. Each of his hands and ankles was separately handcuffed to the headboard and footboard of a cheap motel bedframe. He was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jeans; his feet were bare.
Where the hell am I?
After a couple of experimental tugs on the cuffs, he relaxed, closed his eyes and tried to focus on calming himself down. Being tied down, unable to move or defend himself, left him on the edge of panic. He was painfully thirsty, in desperate need of a bathroom, and from the fuzziness in his head and the leaden ache of his limbs, he thought he'd probably been drugged.
The bedframe didn't seem very sturdy, and he was fairly sure that he could break it or otherwise free himself from the handcuffs, given some time. Before he did anything, though, he needed to figure out where he was and how he got here.
Related to a case, maybe? As his brain became a little less foggy, he remembered several open cases currently under investigation -- one regarding copyright infringement, another involving someone who'd been cheating elderly widows out of their pension checks. As usual these days, thoughts of work were tempered with a certain distant sorrow and sense of grief and loss -- time had dulled it, but never truly healed it. He'd loved his work once. And he still enjoyed it, but Neal's absence had left a hole that couldn't be filled.
... which was neither here nor there right now. He dragged his thoughts back on topic. He'd taken some files home with him to work on ... that seemed right ...
The last thing he remembered was kissing El goodbye and leaving the house in the morning.
His eyes snapped open. His assailants, whoever they were, had nailed him on the street, in broad daylight, before he could get into his car. He remembered a sting at the back of his neck -- whirling around, reaching for his gun as the world went soft and melting around him ...
And now, here he was. The fact that his team hadn't found him yet did not strike him as a good sign.
A key rattled in the door. Peter hastily considered playing unconscious and then discarded it. He needed answers, and more than that, he needed a bathroom, a drink, and a little exercise before he developed bedsores from lying here. He raised his head and steeled himself to confront whoever came through the door. It would be easier to feel in control if he weren't flat on his back and immobilized.
The man who entered was no one that Peter could remember seeing before. He was a big guy, broad-shouldered, with long brown hair and a huge pistol -- a Desert Eagle, Peter was fairly sure -- stuck openly through the waistband of his pants. If he was wearing it around like that, Peter thought, they were either in a jurisdiction with open carry, or not in the U.S. at all. No way he'd be risking the attention of law enforcement in such a blatant way otherwise. Seeing Peter looking at him, he smiled slowly and closed the door behind him.
"Good morning, Agent Burke. Or ..." He glanced towards the window. "Afternoon, rather. I expect you have questions."
"I'd prefer a bathroom," Peter said.
"Sure. Don't get the idea I'm not a good host. But first, let's lay down some rules." He grinned, displaying broken teeth. "You're a fed -- you like rules, right?"
Keeping his voice calm, Peter said, "Depends on the rules."
His captor drew the Desert Eagle and tapped it into his palm. "You might've figured out by now that we've taken a little trip outside your jurisdiction, courtesy of a friend of mine with a pilot's license who owed me a favor. Right now, you're in a country where you probably don't speak the language, with no money, no passport and no weapons. If you try to escape and I catch you, I'll hurt you enough that you won't be able to do it again. Are we clear?"
"Crystal clear," Peter said. "Do I get my bathroom break now?"
"Sure." He jammed the pistol back into his waistband. "Remember the rules, now. Oh, I almost forgot." He crossed the room to a cheap plastic cooler, opened the lid and took out a bottle of water, setting it on the floor. Peter's throat constricted with thirst. "Behave yourself, and this is yours. Afterwards."
Peter allowed himself to be uncuffed. With the guy so close, he thought about trying for an attack, but his limbs still felt heavy and uncoordinated. When he tried to sit up, the head rush almost knocked him over. No point in trying if he knew he couldn't win -- not yet.
The bathroom turned out to be down the hall. His captor escorted him with the gun in the small of his back. The hallway was filthy, completely unlit except for an open window at one end, letting in a breeze that was no cooler than the hot wet air inside. "Leave the door open."
"You get your rocks off this way?" Peter wanted to know. He didn't like it, but he'd done worse things than take a piss in front of the bad guy. Also, getting up and moving around was starting to clear his head a bit.
"I've heard you're tricky. Not taking any chances."
There was no point in lingering, especially given the unpleasant state of the bathroom. Back in the hotel room, his captor handcuffed one of Peter's bare ankles to a leg of the bed, which still allowed him to sit up, and tossed him the water bottle.
"You're definitely going for the good-cop thing at the moment," Peter conceded, after chugging most of the bottle. His throat felt a little less raw and his headache was starting to clear up.
"As long as you don't become a pain in my ass, there's no reason we can't stay friendly." His captor leaned against the wall and ostentatiously checked the chamber of the Desert Eagle.
"So what do I call you?" Peter said. "'Hey you' probably isn't going to cut it, if we're going to be friends and all."
An amused snort. "Call me Steve if you want."
"All right. Steve." Peter finished the bottle of water and set it on the nightstand, in reach. "You've gone to a lot of trouble to get me here -- wherever here is. Are you going to tell me what you want from me?" In truth, he thought he might have figured it out, but he wanted to hear it in Steve's own words.
"From you? Not much." Steve mimed pointing the gun at Peter, then let the muzzle drop to the floor. "All you are is bait on a bounty I'm trying to collect. I don't necessarily need you to be healthy bait, though I'm willing to play nice as long as you play nice with me." He smiled unpleasantly. "I think you know who you're bait for, too, don't you?"
"Yes," Peter said, because there was only one reason he could think of that someone he'd never met would kidnap him and drag him to another country, and it looked like his hunch was right. Son of a bitch is after Neal. And he knows he can get to Neal through me. "Guess you did your homework."
"I'm thorough."
"Were you thorough enough to know that I have no idea where to even begin looking for him?"
"You might not," Steve said. "But I do. I have contacts the FBI and US Marshals don't. And it so happens that I've got a pretty good lead on the alias that our mutual friend is using."
Peter set his jaw and forced himself not to react. "So what do you need me for?"
"Just narrowing down the area isn't enough. Caffrey's good at hiding, and if he gets the idea I'm onto him, he'll rabbit." Steve grinned and fished in his pocket, then held up a small item. "That's why he needs a good reason not to run."
Small. Gold. It was a ring. For the first time Peter noticed that his finger was bare. He'd worn the ring so long that he no longer felt its presence; it was like a part of him.
"You son of a bitch," Peter said.
Steve shrugged. "You want it back? You can have it back when I'm done."
It was that which decided him. This guy isn't planning to let me go. Fear washed through him in a cold rush and drained away, leaving him calm. If Steve did plan on turning in Neal for the bounty, there was no way he planned to leave any evidence that capturing Neal had involved kidnapping and threatening a federal agent. Neal might argue otherwise -- if Neal survived -- but who was going to take the word of an escaped felon, who might well have killed Peter himself?
For Neal's sake -- for my sake -- I have to get out of here.
"Fair enough," he said, looking Steve in the eye. "Do I get something to eat, too, or is that not part of the deal?"
Steve flashed him another of those creepy, broken-toothed grins. "You be nice and cooperate, and maybe I'll bring you up something a little later."
With no warning, he leaped into motion -- Peter, reacting, brought his hands up in an automatic self-defense pose, but Steve pistol-whipped him across the face before he could do anything. Dazed, he felt himself wrestled back onto the bed and handcuffed in the same position as before. Steve was done and out of reach by the time Peter's eyes uncrossed, his forehead throbbing and blood trickling into his eyes.
For a big guy, Steve could move fast -- and quietly, too. Peter filed that away: more information that he could use.
"Sorry," Steve said, not sounding sorry in the slightest. "Not taking any chances there." He opened the door. "Don't wait up, sweetheart," he added, and there was a click as he locked it behind him.
***
Peter waited, by his own reckoning, about half an hour before he made his escape. It was hard to judge time when he had nothing to use for a clock except the imperceptibly slow crawling of the shadows across the ceiling, and the growing ache in his shoulders and arms.
He didn't think Steve had been making an idle threat about incapacitating him if he tried to escape, which meant he was only going to get one shot at this. He'd better make it good.
The bed was not large, and Peter was a tall man with long arms. When he scooted as high as the ankle chains would let him, he was able to get a grip on the underside of the headboard. He wrestled with it, yanked it, and finally bashed it into the wall a few times before getting it to come loose. After that it was a simple matter of slipping the cuffs off the broken posts and then doing the same to the footboard. With the cuffs still rattling on his wrists and ankles, he went to the window.
Below the window, traffic -- foot and car -- bustled in the slanting afternoon sun. Peter still couldn't tell where he was, though he thought probably somewhere in Central America. Which would mean relying on his fragmentary Spanish. He was about three stories up, too high to jump without something to land on, so he'd have to go out the front.
Having the chains dangling from his wrists and ankles was annoying and was going to not only impede him, but also attract attention. Though he hated to waste the time, he worked a nail free of the smashed headboard and used that to pick his cuffs. He also took a second risk and spent the extra time to retrieve a bottle of water from the cooler and chug most of it. He was still shaky, and passing out from dehydration in the middle of his escape wouldn't help anyone, least of all Neal.
The door was, of course, locked, and the ancient doorknob could only be locked and unlocked with the key. However, the whole door was probably flimsy enough to come off its hinges at a good kick. Peter's heart was racing -- Steve could come back at any minute. He broke off a length of wood from the headboard and, gripping his makeshift weapon, threw his weight against the door. It gave way easily, and he stumbled out into the dark, filthy hallway.
There was no one around. From behind one of the doors, he heard the rhythmic squeaking of bedsprings. Barefoot, he went down two flights of stairs without meeting anyone, though he could hear voices from the other floors. The stairwell ended at a metal door that opened into a narrow alley between brick walls.
A teenage kid, leaning against the wall near the door, sprang suddenly into motion, dashing off down the alley. He was saying something into a cell phone. Could be completely unrelated -- or, Peter thought, Steve could've slipped some local kid some cash to watch the door.
Better get moving, Burke, he scolded himself. His thoughts were still running a little slow. He was shaky, hungry, not up to a hundred percent, but it would damn well have to be good enough.
He jogged down the alley while trying to figure out his plan. Steve was right that Peter didn't have many assets -- no money, no ID, not even so much as a watch.
But he had something better: friends. All he had to do was get to a phone and convince someone to let him make a long-distance call to the FBI.
Or to El ... he really didn't want to give the FBI too much of a lead and get them on Neal's tail. Damn it. Complications within complications ...
The alley ended at a narrow, busy street.
#5: Sci-fi AU in which Neal stumbles upon prisoner!Elizabeth
The basic genesis of this AU is that I've run across several AUs in which Neal is a slave, but none in which Peter is a slave. I still like this whole concept and would love to write this. The problem is that it's going to be a long one, and I have very little idea of what happens in the rest of the story (though obviously it's going to involve Neal and his gang helping Peter and Elizabeth).
--
The Glass Tower
Halfway up the tower, Neal began having second thoughts.
Heights didn't normally bother him. Acrophobia would have been a severe liability in a jewel thief's line of work, after all. But there was just something about being so very high, the wind buffeting his body, the glittering lights of the city spread out all around and, mostly, below him.
Mozzie's spiders continued to do their work, the little robots adhering to the tower's steel frame and opaque glass, carrying him smoothly upwards -- he could never have climbed something this high on his own. Mozzie's tech had never failed him before. Still, he had to force himself to look up, not down, raising his eyes to the manmade cliff rising above him, framed against the sulfur-orange clouds of the night sky.
"I'm in," Keller's voice said quietly in his ear. The channel was private and coded (unbreakably, Mozzie swore). Still, Neal flinched. "How you doin' up there?"
This high on the tower, some of the alarms were highly vibration sensitive, so Neal didn't dare speak. There was a silence on the other end of the line, then Keller laughed. "That high already? Hey, that means I can talk to you and there's nothing you can do about it." Keller sounded delighted. "Say, have I mentioned how hot Kate's looking lately?"
"Have you forgotten Kate's listening?" Kate cut in, and Neal grinned. "Focus on getting to the computer room, damn it, and let Neal worry about his end of things."
"I love it when you get forceful with me, baby."
"Radio silence unless you have something important to say," Kate snapped.
Neal wished he had Kate with him on the tower. They worked so smoothly together, and she was their best cat burglar, better than Neal himself. But Kate was their inside person, and they didn't want to risk burning her alias yet. If this went wrong, if he and Keller tripped an alarm or stumbled across a security guard, they'd still have Kate placed in Adler's company -- they'd still have another shot at it.
And they'd been working on this one too long to blow it. This wasn't just about money anymore ... well, okay, it was about money, but it was also about scoring one for the little guy while fucking up Adler's whole misbegotten operation.
It had taken eight months of careful maneuvering and stealthy conniving to get Kate from an entry-level marketing job up to a level where she had access to some of Adler's secure data -- enough to get them into the computer system and the lower levels of the tower, at least.
"I feel like I've sold my soul," Kate had moaned, slipping off her earrings and heels at June's boarding house after another day of processing orders for behavior-correctional implants.
Keller had looked up from cleaning his gun. "Just think how good screwing Adler is gonna feel."
"I hope that didn't come out like you meant it."
Keller had grinned at her. "You got the goods, babe. Why not use 'em?"
If it had actually come to that, they would've pulled her -- Kate had made that very clear -- but Adler already had a fiancee, as well as the resources to hire any high-end call girl that he wanted.
"Or use implants to trank a different girl a night," Kate had said darkly.
"If he wants to implant anything in you -- if you need it for career advancement -- you're out of there, understand?"
It had not escaped any of their notice that Kate was Adler's "type"; he usually appeared in public with a pretty brunette on his arm. In fact, it had made getting her in the door a lot easier. Many of the other female employees had that general look. According to Kate, though, it was pure rumor that Adler's personal staff had to wear the behavior-modification implants in order to work there.
"He's too smart," she'd said. "Adler wants employees who can think and reason, especially his personal bodyguards. He doesn't want zombies working for him."
"Do you think he uses the implant on his fiancee?" Keller had asked. "A nice little zombie in his bed?"
"You're such a pig."
It was black humor, though, because all of them knew what they were risking if they were caught. The threat of prison had been enough to keep them on their toes. But the threat of being added to those dead-eyed crews of human robots who shuffled around the city, cleaning the streets and performing other menial tasks ... it was enough to strike terror into any freewheeling thief's heart.
Or, in the case of Neal and his crew, to give them the nerve to strike at the beast itself.
No one really knew how many zombies there were in the city. Adler liked to proclaim how the city's crime rate had gone down and its prison overcrowding problem had been relieved since his company had been supplying the implants to law enforcement. It was an all-over win for the government, who were saving a ton of money not only on the prisons but on regular cleaning, maintenance and other simple tasks that implanted convicts could do for much less than paying an actual worker. And Adler was raking it in from contracts to private companies, too. Supposedly the implants could only be used on someone who'd been convicted of a crime, but everyone on the street had heard rumors of unscrupulous employers requiring it as a condition of employment. For the most part, private employers and government contractors alike kept their zombie gangs out of the sight of the city's population. Laboring away in the dark, serving those who de facto owned them.
If tonight went well, Neal and his crew would not only walk away with millions in jewelry and art from Adler's private penthouse collection, but also open up Adler's firewalls to the city's hackers. Adler's proprietary code would be all over the citynet by morning, and the implants would be wide-open to anyone looking to crack them -- which would be everyone from bored hackers looking for a challenge, to concerned citizens' groups who'd been protesting the technology ever since it had appeared.
Sticking it to the Man, and getting rich at the same time. What could be better? Neal grinned, imagining his hands full of diamonds, slick and supple, trickling through his fingers. It was better than focusing on how the tower shuddered whenever a gust of wind hit it.
Looking up, he saw that the sheer cliffside of the tower no longer stretched above him to infinity. The top was, in fact, very near. He lightly fingered the spiders' controller, slowing them to a crawl and creeping to just below the underside of the balcony that circled the tower's top.
After months of carefully researching contractors' records and aerial photos, they had a pretty good picture of the security on top of the tower. The balcony was enclosed in bulletproof glass panels that could be opened for ventilation. There were also concussion-proof blast shields that could be raised at the touch of a button, or automatically if any of the sensors were tripped. There were also rooftop-mounted lasers; Adler was taking no chances of having something crash into his rooftop penthouse retreat, accidentally or otherwise.
The upper defenses were primarily aimed at flying vehicles and other forms of aerial attack; apparently the idea that someone would be reckless enough to climb a half-mile private skyscraper was low on Adler's list of priorities. But there were still things to be wary of -- the balcony, for example, was electrified when the defenses were armed, which they almost certainly would be, with Adler out for the evening. The penthouse had its own independent power supply, and its own computer system.
Neal shuffled around the underside of the balcony until he found an access panel. Then, dangling from his harness, anchored only by the spiders, he opened his backpack and got to work. Prying up the panel, he located the fiber-optic cables for the computer system and spliced in one of the little devices that Mozzie called Typhoid Marys, delivering its payload of carefully engineered computer viruses. The point, at least at the moment, wasn't to destroy Adler's system, but to make it think it was doing its job when it actually was contemplating its own navel instead.
"Moz?" Neal whispered, clipping a spy-eye to the edge of the panel to feed information back to Mozzie and Kate. "You getting this?"
"Clear as day," Mozzie said. "Have you cut the electricity yet?"
"I was about to. There are a lot of wires here, and I don't want to clip the wrong ones."
"Hang on a sec." There was a clattering of keys -- Mozzie bringing up blueprints. Then Mozzie said, "That batch of wires there by your hand -- second one from the top should kill power to the balcony, and leave the rest alone."
"Should?"
Mozzie heaved a put-upon sigh. "'What men want is not knowledge, but certainty.'"
"Einstein?"
"Bertrand Russell. Trust me or not, mon frère, but the clock is ticking."
Neal clipped the wire. Nothing visibly changed, and he waited a moment to see if he'd tripped any defenses. So far, he hadn't.
"No alarms. So far, so good."
"See? Let's take a look inside," Mozzie said, sounding eager.
Neal sent one of the spiders up with a spy-eye. The micro-camera cycled through different spectrum settings: visible light, infrared, UV... Neal squinted at his little handheld screen, trying to get a good look inside.
"The windows are full of sensors," Mozzie said, typing audibly. "All as dead as last season's vertical stripes. Looks like you cut the right wire." He took a bite of something that crunched, chewing in Neal's ear. "The glass is blocking both UV and IR, though -- I can't get a good enough look at the inside to tell if there's anyone there."
"Kate," Neal whispered, "when we're all back at June's, remind me to hide Mozzie's potato chips, would you?"
Kate giggled.
"Not that this banter isn't sickeningly entertaining," Keller said quietly, "but I'm going to need some technical assistance in a minute here. I need to kill the security cameras and the little guy's bugs don't seem to be doing the trick."
"Did you deploy the Typhoid Marys like I told you to?" Mozzie asked, sounding affronted.
"I followed your instructions exactly, Baldy, but the sensor lights are still on and I can see the cameras tracking."
"Clearly you did something wrong."
While they bickered, Neal decided it was time for a visual inspection. Heart racing, he carefully pulled himself up to the edge of the balcony. Now would not be the time to discover a new set of laser defenses ... but nothing zapped his head off, and he peeked into a room lit only by the reflected glow of the city beneath him. The carpet was pure white, and he could make out the dim shapes of nearby pieces of furniture. Nothing else.
"Kate, you have eyes on Adler, right?" Neal whispered. Adler was spending the evening at a party for some of his investors at an exclusive downtown club.
"Not at the moment," Kate said quietly, "but I've been sitting on the entrance ever since he went in, and he hasn't come out. He had a brunette on his arm when he left the limo, though I can't tell you for sure if it was his fiancee or not."
There was no way to be any more sure, and the more time that passed, the narrower their window became. As Moz had said, the clock was ticking. "I'm ready to go in," Neal whispered. "Going off the radio now. See you on the other side."
"Good luck," Kate said.
Neal switched off his radio. They'd worried about electromagnetic leakage from the radio possibly setting off alarms once he was inside -- they had no idea what kind of security Adler had inside the penthouse itself. So he was on his own now; the only contact that he'd have with the others until he made it out again would be if he had to send a distress call.
He felt a slight twinge, missing Kate and Mozzie's supportive presence on the radio. On the other hand, there was something to be said for being completely on his own, working without a safety net, relying only on himself.
With the sensors in the window dead, he fell back on old-fashioned, cat-burglar technology, and cut the glass. There was no point in hiding the fact that a burglary had taken place. When they were done, there would be no doubt in Adler's mind that he'd been robbed.
Neal slithered over the railing and into the penthouse.
He tracked motion out of the corner of his eye, and ducked just in time to hear something swish past his head, the wind of its passage stirring his hair. Neal reached out blindly in the dark; he felt warm human flesh, heard a gasp, and then someone kicked him in the thigh, narrowly missing his groin. He went down anyway, his leg knocked out from under him, and his unseen assailant landed on top of him, squashing him under his backpack. Something hard and cold pressed into the back of his neck. Neal went still.
"Don't move," a woman's voice whispered fiercely.
"I'm not moving," Neal said into the carpet. "See? This is me not moving."
There was a moment of silence. He could hear the woman breathing hard, and feel her weight on top of him, keeping him squashed into the floor with all the gadgets that Mozzie had given him out of reach.
Keller had told him he was a complete idiot not to bring a gun. Neal was starting to agree.
"Look," Neal said, "I'm not sure who you are, but I'm not here to hurt you. Really."
"Oh, that's why you're sneaking over my balcony in the dead of night, dressed in black?"
My balcony? Shit ... it was the fiancee, Elizabeth Mitchell. Had to be. But she hadn't called security yet. Maybe he could lie his way out of this, although it was hard to think of a good reason why he'd be accidentally climbing a half-mile tower in the middle of the night. "I think we've had some kind of misunderstanding," Neal began.
"Are you here to rape me?"
"What? No!" Neal said, genuinely shocked and horrified.
After a pause, she said, "Stay right where you are. Don't move at all." She waited until he nodded, then her weight slid off him and he heard her feet whispering on the carpet.
Light flooded the room and Neal squinted. It was only a bedside lamp, but it was painfully bright to his dark-adapted eyes. He raised his head.
He'd been right: the woman was Adler's fiancee, Elizabeth. She was wearing a sheer white robe, her hair dark and long, falling loose over her shoulders. She'd moved over to the bed; one hand was on a lamp, and the other was holding --
Neal started laughing. He couldn't help it. "A curling iron?"
Elizabeth smiled ruefully and blushed as she set it down. "It was the nearest thing in reach. And you thought it was a weapon."
"You're not still afraid of me?"
"I am," Elizabeth said, "but I also believe you that you don't mean me any harm. If you're here to steal from Vincent, I don't really care. In fact, I'll show you where he keeps everything."
"Really," Neal said, rising slowly and warily to his feet.
"Certainly, as long as you make it look as though you took it from me by force."
"Okay," Neal said. Why argue?
Elizabeth shook her head and made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "It's been awhile since I had a conversation with anyone, let alone someone dressed in black who broke into my apartment," she said, and went to a well-stocked bar on the far side of the bed. "Would you like a drink before you finish robbing us?"
Moments later, Neal found himself in a most unexpected position: sitting side by side with Adler's fiance.
[There is a rather long scene here, as yet unwritten, in which Elizabeth explains that she's being forced to marry Adler because he's holding her boyfriend Peter hostage against her good behavior. Peter has been implanted with one of the personality-squashing mind-control devices (the only thing I'd really figured out about how they work is that they make it extremely difficult to formulate a coherent thought and cause brain damage in the long term) and thrown into a work gang. Prior to all of this, Peter was a cop and he's had some run-ins with Neal -- Neal kind of knows him, in a cat-and-mouse sort of way, much like the relationship they had in canon prior to Neal's capture. In any case, Elizabeth asks Neal to help them. He doesn't really say yes, exactly, but he can't turn her down cold, either. This is obviously going to cause quite a bit of contention in the gang later on.]
"I see you must have climbed up here," Elizabeth said, "but how were you going to get down? Climbing down seems even harder than climbing up."
Neal laughed. "Oh, I wasn't going to climb."
He reached into his backpack and tugged out the collapsible glider. It didn't hurt to show her. The confusion on her face changed to delight when she realized what it was; the expression made her look very young and girlish.
"Oh, that's wonderful. Insane, but wonderful."
"It only carries one," Neal said hastily, in case she was going to want to run away with him.
"I'm not a prisoner, exactly," Elizabeth said. "I could walk out any time I want. It's just ..."
"Peter."
"Yes. Peter."
Most of these are not particularly spoilery, but my intro text for #2 contains a season four spoiler, and #4 is very spoilery for the end of season three/beginning of season four.
#1: Plane crash fic
This was actually one of the very first White Collar fics that I started writing ... possibly the first. It was for the "plane crash" square on one of my old h/c bingo cards. I liked the concept a lot (small plane goes down in the Hudson with Peter, Neal, and possibly Diana on board) but for some reason could never get it to actually come together, and eventually I gave up.
--
The plane was a low-slung, twin-engine Beechcraft, the engines already warm and idling. Peter skidded onto the private airstrip at the head of an FBI convoy, took in the situation at a glance -- the exchange already going down, far ahead of schedule; Neal and Farriman, a woman who must be the buyer, and two other guys standing feet (feet!) from the open cargo door. While the other FBI vehicles blocked the way off the airstrip, Peter cranked the wheel of his sedan and slammed on the brakes right under the nose of the plane. The Beechcraft could probably push it aside without damaging itself -- it had a whole lot more mass, not to mention engine power -- but he hoped it'd give the pilot something to think about, at least. Beyond the plane, behind a high chain-link fence and a retaining wall, the Hudson glinted in the afternoon sun.
It had been only a couple of minutes since Neal had murmured into the tracking watch and transmitter: "Deal's happening now, guys. You better be close." Peter drew his sidearm, nodded to Diana in the shotgun seat, and wished Neal wasn't right there, in easy hostage-grabbing range. They'd spent weeks getting Neal into Farriman's inner circle, but he was still very much the new kid on the block, the first one they'd all look at when three carfuls of FBI agents turned up when Farriman had two suitcases of dirty money. Things weren't supposed to go down this fast.
"FBI! Freeze!"
It had been seconds, no more. The little group at the plane were still reacting, and as far as Peter could tell, Neal was still playing along, as shocked as the rest of them at the FBI agents fanning out to surround the plane. The buyer tried to run, and Jones took off after her. Farriman threw the suitcases through the open cargo door and scrambled inside, his two guys right behind him. Neal hesitated, very briefly, but it wasn't like he had a choice: fall back towards the FBI and get shot by Farriman's goons, or go along -- Someone gave him a hand into the plane, and he took it, shooting a glance at Peter over his shoulder.
Oh, son of a bitch, Peter thought. The plane's engines kicked up a notch and it began to reverse. One of Farriman's bodyguards snapped off a shot at him; it kicked chips off the asphalt a few feet to his right. As the plane came around, though, Peter saw his chance -- he put on a burst of speed and got hold of the bodyguard's gun arm through the open cargo door, using his own body weight to haul the guy out the door.
In a minute the Beechcraft would complete its rotation and then it would be facing a couple thousand feet of open runway and a straight shot to the sky.
Peter threw himself into the open cargo door before he could talk himself out of it. Element of surprise, right? And Diana had been right behind him -- they might have a shot at this, if they could just move fast enough. He came up right under the nose of the second startled-looking bodyguard, and knocked the gun out of his hand -- heard it clatter to the tarmac and then socked the guy in the jaw. The shock felt like he'd punched a sack of cement. It didn't exactly knock the guy out, but it did knock him out of the plane, right into his buddy and almost on top of Diana.
The Beechcraft was still moving, turning, its engines shifting into a different register. They were gearing up to take off.
And if it had been just the two guys and Farriman on the plane, he might've had a good shot of pulling this off. But there were two more, and both had mini-Uzis trained on him. Peter glimpsed Neal backed up against the row of windows at the far side of the plane. He looked scared, but also distant and distracted, like his brain was working a thousand miles a minute, as usual. But there wasn't a hell of a lot he could do, certainly nothing without blowing his cover and turning himself into a hostage as well.
Peter let his sidearm fall to the floor of the plane. "Can't blame a guy for trying," he said with a half-smile, gauging the distance between himself and the little black muzzles pointed at him.
"On the floor," the nearest goon snapped. "Cuff yourself to the seat."
Not like he had a choice. Kneeling, Peter snapped one cuff around his wrist and the other around the support strut of the seat.
Farriman, who had been in the cockpit talking to the pilot, came storming back with his gun drawn. "What the hell is going on back here? Just shoot him for God's sake."
The floor of the plane vibrated under them. Taking off, Peter thought -- he caught glimpses of the tarmac speeding past, and wind whipped his hair. Diana clearly hadn't managed to make the jump. Even if he hadn't been handcuffed to a seat, they were moving too fast to jump out -- besides, he couldn't have bailed without leaving Neal in their hands.
Which left bluffing.
"If you kill a federal officer, then you'll be running for the rest of your life, Farriman. And it won't be a long life."
Farriman's eyes were hard as chips of glass. "I can run faster than you think," he said. "Kill him."
Everything seemed to go into slow motion as the muzzle of the nearest mini-Uzi came up to point at his face. Handcuffed and kneeling, he couldn't dodge. He could feel acceleration pressing him to the floor of the plane as they cleared the runway and began to gain altitude.
Well, Peter thought, this could have gone better...
Neal seized the handle of one of the suitcases and swung it at the back of the goon's head.
The case was metal and Farriman's guy went down like he'd been hit with a sack of bricks. Chaos erupted -- Peter lunged for the mini-Uzi lying temporarily unattended on the floor of the plane, only to be yanked up short by the cuff around his wrist, gouging painful furrows in his flesh. He glimpsed Neal catching a hard blow to the side of the head from the butt of Farriman's gun. Neal crumpled and Peter lashed out with his foot, kicking Farriman's legs out from under him. Farriman's finger convulsively tightened on the trigger and a burst of gunfire raked the bulkheads and cockpit; the plane slewed wildly to the side and Peter felt his stomach lurch as they suddenly lost altitude.
[I also toyed with the idea of having the plane fly north of New York and go down along the Atlantic coast somewhere. Consequently, I wrote another chunk that doesn't quite mesh properly with the above - in this version, Peter isn't yet handcuffed.]
"Kill them?" the other goon asked. The floor of the plane vibrated under them. Taking off, Peter thought -- he caught glimpses of the tarmac speeding past, and wind whipped his hair. It was probably already too late to jump out, and besides, he couldn't do that without leaving Neal in their hands.
"Not yet," Farriman said thoughtfully. His glass-hard eyes lingered on Neal, who was leaning groggily against the side of the plane. He hauled the cargo door shut, and it slammed with a very final sound, sealing out their last glimpse of freedom. "I want to know how deep this goes, and who's involved."
They were both manhandled to the nearest seat, and Farriman snapped the handcuffs around one of Peter's wrists and one of Neal's, with the chain hooked under the metal bar holding the seat to the floor. Another rough search relieved them of their cell phones and Neil's lock picks, although they still had the tracking watch -- for whatever good it was likely to do them in the immediate future.
Neal's usually neat hair was a mussed mess, and there was blood running in his eyes. He looked more disgruntled than hurt, though. "You okay?" Peter asked him over the roar of the engines.
"What were you thinking, Rambo?" Neal hissed at him. "You realize you're not bulletproof, right?"
"Neither are you!"
Neal's disgruntled expression dissolved into a boyish grin, despite the bruise purpling his forehead and the blood drying in his hair. "I was pretty cool, wasn't I?"
"More like completely insane." Peter looked up at the front of the plane, where Farriman was leaning into the cockpit, talking to the pilot. The goon that Neal had coldcocked appeared to be coming around; the other was keeping them covered from a safe distance.
"So," Neal said, settling back against the seat. "What's standard FBI protocol in a situation like this?"
Peter imagined himself in an impromptu control center, the familiar controlled chaos and bad coffee and carefully tamped-down panic... "They'll be figuring how much fuel we have, calculating our flight range and guessing where we might try to stop." He dropped his voice still further, hoping that it was audible on the transmitter in Neal's watch but not wanting to take the slightest chance of tipping off Farriman that the FBI was tracking them and listening in. "Neal and I are okay. There are three guys on the plane -- four, counting the pilot. General trajectory looks like ..." He tried to gauge the angle of the sun on the wall, slanting through the windows. "Almost due north. I'd guess we're heading for Canada."
"Always wanted to go to Canada," Neal said thoughtfully.
Something rustled behind the seat. Peter started to raise his head, then thought better of it just as Neal's hand shot out and grabbed him by the wrist.
"Diana's on the plane," Neal whispered, barely moving his lips.
Peter stared at him.
"She got in while you were --" a quick grin glided by "-- so effectively distracting everyone."
#2: Fic in which Christie is the doctor on call when the Burkes are in a car crash
This is another of the very first stories I started, for another h/c bingo square ("blood loss") ... which never went anywhere. Obviously this one has been made obsolete by Diana and Christie's breakup, though it could still theoretically be made to work.
--
Christie doesn't mind working the night shift at the hospital. It's quiet, mostly -- she catches up on a lot of paperwork and keeps an eye on sleepy residents and interns to make sure they don't get careless.
But then there are nights like tonight. Must be a full moon, she thinks as she helps Briana and Dave hold down a thrashing OD victim, one of his wrists handcuffed to the gurney. She's not normally on ER rotation, but several people are on vacation or out sick, and the place is bedlam tonight.
"Car accident incoming," Carmelita says softly in passing, as Christie kneels beside a frightened-looking little girl who's clutching her arm. "Drunk driver ran a red light and T-boned another car. It's bad. You're the only doctor available right now --"
"I know. I'll be there in a minute." Once she's examined the little girl and sent her in for X-rays, along with her nervous parents, she heads out to the admitting area of the ER, where an ambulance has just pulled up with lights flashing.
Carmelita's right: there's blood everywhere, and one of the victims is DOA or close to it -- there's a paramedic pumping the still chest. This is one part of the job she hates, when there's nothing to be done, but the desperate obligation to try anyway.
She puts on her game face and wades into the controlled chaos, settling into the cold calculations of triage. One of the victims, a woman, is struggling with her oxygen mask, trying to pull it off, trying to say something. She catches Christie's wrist with cold, bloodstained fingers. "My husband," she gasps, her eyes wide with panic.
Christie gently settles the mask back over her face and prays to God that the husband isn't the one on the next gurney over, the one who's not responding to the paramedic's resuscitation efforts, the one with his legs severed who's bleeding out all over the gurney and the tile floor. "We're doing everything we can for your husband, ma'am. Now focus on my fingers. Can you feel it when I do this?"
The woman has a broken arm and some ribs at the very least, possible internal injuries. Male victim #1 she's almost certainly going to have to declare in a minute, but not yet, not yet; male victim #2 is a head injury with possible spinal complications, and she pauses for a minute in the act of helping a new, frightened-looking intern set up an IV on him. She knows this guy. Christie's pretty good with faces, but she can't place him -- not like this, not with his face slack and gray and covered with blood. And she pushes it away, focuses what she can do for his body and not the soul inside it. This guy could be her high-school math teacher or someone who took her order at a restaurant last week, or he could be one of her closest friends, but it doesn't matter, not right now.
She has the on-call neurologist paged and turns to relieve the paramedics and a resident whose name she can't remember, as they labor over the DOA. Pupils fixed, completely unresponsive ... "He's been like this since the scene?"
"He coded in the ambulance," the paramedic says.
She calls it and records the time and hands off the -- the body, that's all it is now, to the nearest intern so that she can help the paramedic sit down. "I tried," he says, and Christie says, "I know," and squeezes his hand. She wishes she could do more for him, but she's just left two badly injured patients in the care of a very green resident. He's going to have to get through this on his own.
Dr. Gupta from Neurology has taken over the head injury, so Christie can focus on the female victim with the possible internal bleeding. She's still conscious and trying to talk. "I didn't see what happened," she says, and starts to cry. "I don't know what happened. Can you tell me where my husband is?"
"He's in good hands, ma'am," Christie says, and still she can't shake the feeling that she knows these people. Someone Diana introduced her to? Yes, she can hear Diana's voice, making introductions, and they're at some kind of party, and it's --
"Peter," the woman says, and that's what makes it all fall together. It was Diana's office Christmas party, and that guy is Diana's boss. The dark-haired woman is his wife. Shit.
"You're going to be fine," Christie tells her. "You and your husband will be fine."
Before going into surgery, she snatches a moment to call Diana. She thinks about letting it go, letting Diana sleep a little longer. Maybe she's wrong. Maybe it isn't them. But if these are Diana's friends, she ought to know about it.
At Diana's sleepy mumble, she says, "Honey, it's me," and hears the rustling as Diana sits up, going from fast asleep to wide awake with speed that Christie has always envied.
"What's wrong? What happened?" Diana says. "Something is wrong, isn't it?"
#3: Peter out of body experience
This is for a CollarCorner prompt in which Peter is injured and has an out of body experience in the ambulance or hospital. Once again, I couldn't figure out where I was going and stalled out.
--
It was never a good sign, Peter thought, when you couldn't remember where you were or how you got there.
He was standing on the steps in a stairwell, which didn't really narrow down the possibilities all that much. It was clean and newish, with no suspicious stains in the corners. The light seemed too bright, somehow. He had a headache.
There had been a case ...
He tried to recall the details, but his thoughts skittered away like a drop of water in a hot skillet. It was very difficult to think at all. His memories were hazy, his thoughts scattered and disjointed.
He was very worried about Neal and he couldn't figure out exactly why.
"Peter?"
The voice was familiar. Very familiar, though he couldn't place it. Peter turned, wobbled and steadied himself on the railing -- apparently his balance was a little off, too. His other hand went automatically to his shoulder holster, but he wasn't wearing it.
The woman was standing on the steps above him. He saw her in a series of disjointed mental snapshots. Long dark hair. Purple silk shirt. And a heartbreaker of a face with the biggest blue eyes he'd ever seen. He knew that face, but trying to remember was like wading through mud, and for a minute he could only see it on a little snapshot clipped to an FBI file. Then her identity snapped into focus, and he was surprised he hadn't recognized her, although in fairness, he'd never expected to encounter her standing around in a stairwell.
It helped that she was wearing a name tag, the kind of big silly-looking tag that's handed out at conferences, with HELLO MY NAME IS printed in big block letters. Her name was written in neat blue letters below it.
Kate.
Who had been dead for over a year.
He blinked and she was still standing there. She was holding a clipboard, and she smiled at him.
"This is probably not good," Peter said at last. "You being here, and all."
"Not as bad as you think," she said, still smiling. "You're a little turned around. Come on, Peter. Walk with me. I'll get you where you need to go."
"Yeah, that's kind of what I'm afraid of," he said, but he fell into step with her after doing a quick visual check for weapons. She didn't seem to have any, aside from the pen on the clipboard, and frisking her would probably be rude.
Climbing the stairs made his headache worse. He rubbed his temple.
"Do you remember anything?" Kate asked, frowning at him in a puzzled, worried sort of way.
"I don't have amnesia, if that's what you mean." Sort of. Not as such, anyway. "Look, there's no point in beating around the bush here. Am I dead?"
Kate smiled, like she was proud of him. "That's a very astute question."
"That," Peter said, "is not a no." He thought that he probably ought to be panicking, but mostly he was just worried, suddenly gut-clentching worry because he didn't know what had happened to him or where his team was. "Neal?" he said. "El? My agents? Are they okay?"
"Everyone is fine," Kate reassured him. "Everyone but you, that is. And no, Peter, you aren't dead, although you're currently in what I suppose you might call an in-between state. You were injured very badly, and you're in surgery at the moment. I'm guessing your memories are a little confused right now, but that's normal." She reached out as if to pat him on the shoulder, then drew her hand back awkwardly.
"I want to see my team," Peter said, holding onto that. "And Elizabeth. Is she here?"
"Of course she's here. Before you see her, though, I need to finish giving you the orientation. You won't be able to touch her, and she can't see or hear you. Some people do best with some time to adjust beforehand."
[there's a discontinuity here because I couldn't figure out exactly how to transition from the above to the next part]
"I'm not alive or dead?" Wasn't that like being just a little bit pregnant?
"You're in surgery." She beckoned him; still confused, but now slightly less so, he followed her. "Probably you coded a couple of times, maybe in the ambulance or maybe here. Perhaps it's just that the outcome is uncertain right now. I'm not really sure how it works. Based on my information --" she glanced at the clipboard "-- it looks like you're very likely to go back, but it's not completely certain."
"And the reason why you're meeting me like this?"
"Well, because this is my ... job, I suppose you'd call it."
"Job?" Peter said, raising his eyebrows.
She looked down and away. "I didn't live a very good life, you know. It's not that I was bad; at least I don't think I was. it's just that I lived very much for myself, not for other people. Even when I was with Neal, it was more for me than for him."
"So this is a sort of atonement?" Peter asked cautiously.
"I don't know if I'd put it quite like that. Well, maybe." She smiled. "I wasn't sure how I'd handle this assignment, but I like it, actually. People are frightened and confused when they come to me, and I help calm them down and explain to them what's going on. Sometimes I get to send them back; other times I sit with them 'til they're ready to move on. And maybe someday I'll move on, too. But not yet."
#4: Story in which a bounty hunter kidnaps Peter to draw out Neal
This is for another CollarCorner prompt that was left after the Season 3 cliffhanger. The prompter wanted a story in which a bounty hunter kidnaps Peter to draw out Neal. I loved the idea, but as you can see I never got very far with it, and now it's wildly AU, so I don't know if I'm ever going anywhere with this. I still think it would be a fun story to write; I don't have any concrete plans for the rest of it, except that it would be h/c-riffic.
--
Thirst woke Peter: an aching desperate thirst, along with the headache and cottonmouthed feeling that could only mean he'd been up late, drinking. Eyes still closed, he reached across El for the bedside table --
-- and was pulled up short with a sharp tug at his wrist.
Peter peeled open his gummy eyes. The first thing he saw was a low plaster ceiling, filthy with the overlapping brown rings of water stains. A ceiling fan turned lazily, doing little to move the stifling air.
Peter twisted his head to the side and squinted as harsh white sunlight, slanting through sagging blinds, stabbed straight into his brain like an icepick. Each of his hands and ankles was separately handcuffed to the headboard and footboard of a cheap motel bedframe. He was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jeans; his feet were bare.
Where the hell am I?
After a couple of experimental tugs on the cuffs, he relaxed, closed his eyes and tried to focus on calming himself down. Being tied down, unable to move or defend himself, left him on the edge of panic. He was painfully thirsty, in desperate need of a bathroom, and from the fuzziness in his head and the leaden ache of his limbs, he thought he'd probably been drugged.
The bedframe didn't seem very sturdy, and he was fairly sure that he could break it or otherwise free himself from the handcuffs, given some time. Before he did anything, though, he needed to figure out where he was and how he got here.
Related to a case, maybe? As his brain became a little less foggy, he remembered several open cases currently under investigation -- one regarding copyright infringement, another involving someone who'd been cheating elderly widows out of their pension checks. As usual these days, thoughts of work were tempered with a certain distant sorrow and sense of grief and loss -- time had dulled it, but never truly healed it. He'd loved his work once. And he still enjoyed it, but Neal's absence had left a hole that couldn't be filled.
... which was neither here nor there right now. He dragged his thoughts back on topic. He'd taken some files home with him to work on ... that seemed right ...
The last thing he remembered was kissing El goodbye and leaving the house in the morning.
His eyes snapped open. His assailants, whoever they were, had nailed him on the street, in broad daylight, before he could get into his car. He remembered a sting at the back of his neck -- whirling around, reaching for his gun as the world went soft and melting around him ...
And now, here he was. The fact that his team hadn't found him yet did not strike him as a good sign.
A key rattled in the door. Peter hastily considered playing unconscious and then discarded it. He needed answers, and more than that, he needed a bathroom, a drink, and a little exercise before he developed bedsores from lying here. He raised his head and steeled himself to confront whoever came through the door. It would be easier to feel in control if he weren't flat on his back and immobilized.
The man who entered was no one that Peter could remember seeing before. He was a big guy, broad-shouldered, with long brown hair and a huge pistol -- a Desert Eagle, Peter was fairly sure -- stuck openly through the waistband of his pants. If he was wearing it around like that, Peter thought, they were either in a jurisdiction with open carry, or not in the U.S. at all. No way he'd be risking the attention of law enforcement in such a blatant way otherwise. Seeing Peter looking at him, he smiled slowly and closed the door behind him.
"Good morning, Agent Burke. Or ..." He glanced towards the window. "Afternoon, rather. I expect you have questions."
"I'd prefer a bathroom," Peter said.
"Sure. Don't get the idea I'm not a good host. But first, let's lay down some rules." He grinned, displaying broken teeth. "You're a fed -- you like rules, right?"
Keeping his voice calm, Peter said, "Depends on the rules."
His captor drew the Desert Eagle and tapped it into his palm. "You might've figured out by now that we've taken a little trip outside your jurisdiction, courtesy of a friend of mine with a pilot's license who owed me a favor. Right now, you're in a country where you probably don't speak the language, with no money, no passport and no weapons. If you try to escape and I catch you, I'll hurt you enough that you won't be able to do it again. Are we clear?"
"Crystal clear," Peter said. "Do I get my bathroom break now?"
"Sure." He jammed the pistol back into his waistband. "Remember the rules, now. Oh, I almost forgot." He crossed the room to a cheap plastic cooler, opened the lid and took out a bottle of water, setting it on the floor. Peter's throat constricted with thirst. "Behave yourself, and this is yours. Afterwards."
Peter allowed himself to be uncuffed. With the guy so close, he thought about trying for an attack, but his limbs still felt heavy and uncoordinated. When he tried to sit up, the head rush almost knocked him over. No point in trying if he knew he couldn't win -- not yet.
The bathroom turned out to be down the hall. His captor escorted him with the gun in the small of his back. The hallway was filthy, completely unlit except for an open window at one end, letting in a breeze that was no cooler than the hot wet air inside. "Leave the door open."
"You get your rocks off this way?" Peter wanted to know. He didn't like it, but he'd done worse things than take a piss in front of the bad guy. Also, getting up and moving around was starting to clear his head a bit.
"I've heard you're tricky. Not taking any chances."
There was no point in lingering, especially given the unpleasant state of the bathroom. Back in the hotel room, his captor handcuffed one of Peter's bare ankles to a leg of the bed, which still allowed him to sit up, and tossed him the water bottle.
"You're definitely going for the good-cop thing at the moment," Peter conceded, after chugging most of the bottle. His throat felt a little less raw and his headache was starting to clear up.
"As long as you don't become a pain in my ass, there's no reason we can't stay friendly." His captor leaned against the wall and ostentatiously checked the chamber of the Desert Eagle.
"So what do I call you?" Peter said. "'Hey you' probably isn't going to cut it, if we're going to be friends and all."
An amused snort. "Call me Steve if you want."
"All right. Steve." Peter finished the bottle of water and set it on the nightstand, in reach. "You've gone to a lot of trouble to get me here -- wherever here is. Are you going to tell me what you want from me?" In truth, he thought he might have figured it out, but he wanted to hear it in Steve's own words.
"From you? Not much." Steve mimed pointing the gun at Peter, then let the muzzle drop to the floor. "All you are is bait on a bounty I'm trying to collect. I don't necessarily need you to be healthy bait, though I'm willing to play nice as long as you play nice with me." He smiled unpleasantly. "I think you know who you're bait for, too, don't you?"
"Yes," Peter said, because there was only one reason he could think of that someone he'd never met would kidnap him and drag him to another country, and it looked like his hunch was right. Son of a bitch is after Neal. And he knows he can get to Neal through me. "Guess you did your homework."
"I'm thorough."
"Were you thorough enough to know that I have no idea where to even begin looking for him?"
"You might not," Steve said. "But I do. I have contacts the FBI and US Marshals don't. And it so happens that I've got a pretty good lead on the alias that our mutual friend is using."
Peter set his jaw and forced himself not to react. "So what do you need me for?"
"Just narrowing down the area isn't enough. Caffrey's good at hiding, and if he gets the idea I'm onto him, he'll rabbit." Steve grinned and fished in his pocket, then held up a small item. "That's why he needs a good reason not to run."
Small. Gold. It was a ring. For the first time Peter noticed that his finger was bare. He'd worn the ring so long that he no longer felt its presence; it was like a part of him.
"You son of a bitch," Peter said.
Steve shrugged. "You want it back? You can have it back when I'm done."
It was that which decided him. This guy isn't planning to let me go. Fear washed through him in a cold rush and drained away, leaving him calm. If Steve did plan on turning in Neal for the bounty, there was no way he planned to leave any evidence that capturing Neal had involved kidnapping and threatening a federal agent. Neal might argue otherwise -- if Neal survived -- but who was going to take the word of an escaped felon, who might well have killed Peter himself?
For Neal's sake -- for my sake -- I have to get out of here.
"Fair enough," he said, looking Steve in the eye. "Do I get something to eat, too, or is that not part of the deal?"
Steve flashed him another of those creepy, broken-toothed grins. "You be nice and cooperate, and maybe I'll bring you up something a little later."
With no warning, he leaped into motion -- Peter, reacting, brought his hands up in an automatic self-defense pose, but Steve pistol-whipped him across the face before he could do anything. Dazed, he felt himself wrestled back onto the bed and handcuffed in the same position as before. Steve was done and out of reach by the time Peter's eyes uncrossed, his forehead throbbing and blood trickling into his eyes.
For a big guy, Steve could move fast -- and quietly, too. Peter filed that away: more information that he could use.
"Sorry," Steve said, not sounding sorry in the slightest. "Not taking any chances there." He opened the door. "Don't wait up, sweetheart," he added, and there was a click as he locked it behind him.
***
Peter waited, by his own reckoning, about half an hour before he made his escape. It was hard to judge time when he had nothing to use for a clock except the imperceptibly slow crawling of the shadows across the ceiling, and the growing ache in his shoulders and arms.
He didn't think Steve had been making an idle threat about incapacitating him if he tried to escape, which meant he was only going to get one shot at this. He'd better make it good.
The bed was not large, and Peter was a tall man with long arms. When he scooted as high as the ankle chains would let him, he was able to get a grip on the underside of the headboard. He wrestled with it, yanked it, and finally bashed it into the wall a few times before getting it to come loose. After that it was a simple matter of slipping the cuffs off the broken posts and then doing the same to the footboard. With the cuffs still rattling on his wrists and ankles, he went to the window.
Below the window, traffic -- foot and car -- bustled in the slanting afternoon sun. Peter still couldn't tell where he was, though he thought probably somewhere in Central America. Which would mean relying on his fragmentary Spanish. He was about three stories up, too high to jump without something to land on, so he'd have to go out the front.
Having the chains dangling from his wrists and ankles was annoying and was going to not only impede him, but also attract attention. Though he hated to waste the time, he worked a nail free of the smashed headboard and used that to pick his cuffs. He also took a second risk and spent the extra time to retrieve a bottle of water from the cooler and chug most of it. He was still shaky, and passing out from dehydration in the middle of his escape wouldn't help anyone, least of all Neal.
The door was, of course, locked, and the ancient doorknob could only be locked and unlocked with the key. However, the whole door was probably flimsy enough to come off its hinges at a good kick. Peter's heart was racing -- Steve could come back at any minute. He broke off a length of wood from the headboard and, gripping his makeshift weapon, threw his weight against the door. It gave way easily, and he stumbled out into the dark, filthy hallway.
There was no one around. From behind one of the doors, he heard the rhythmic squeaking of bedsprings. Barefoot, he went down two flights of stairs without meeting anyone, though he could hear voices from the other floors. The stairwell ended at a metal door that opened into a narrow alley between brick walls.
A teenage kid, leaning against the wall near the door, sprang suddenly into motion, dashing off down the alley. He was saying something into a cell phone. Could be completely unrelated -- or, Peter thought, Steve could've slipped some local kid some cash to watch the door.
Better get moving, Burke, he scolded himself. His thoughts were still running a little slow. He was shaky, hungry, not up to a hundred percent, but it would damn well have to be good enough.
He jogged down the alley while trying to figure out his plan. Steve was right that Peter didn't have many assets -- no money, no ID, not even so much as a watch.
But he had something better: friends. All he had to do was get to a phone and convince someone to let him make a long-distance call to the FBI.
Or to El ... he really didn't want to give the FBI too much of a lead and get them on Neal's tail. Damn it. Complications within complications ...
The alley ended at a narrow, busy street.
#5: Sci-fi AU in which Neal stumbles upon prisoner!Elizabeth
The basic genesis of this AU is that I've run across several AUs in which Neal is a slave, but none in which Peter is a slave. I still like this whole concept and would love to write this. The problem is that it's going to be a long one, and I have very little idea of what happens in the rest of the story (though obviously it's going to involve Neal and his gang helping Peter and Elizabeth).
--
The Glass Tower
Halfway up the tower, Neal began having second thoughts.
Heights didn't normally bother him. Acrophobia would have been a severe liability in a jewel thief's line of work, after all. But there was just something about being so very high, the wind buffeting his body, the glittering lights of the city spread out all around and, mostly, below him.
Mozzie's spiders continued to do their work, the little robots adhering to the tower's steel frame and opaque glass, carrying him smoothly upwards -- he could never have climbed something this high on his own. Mozzie's tech had never failed him before. Still, he had to force himself to look up, not down, raising his eyes to the manmade cliff rising above him, framed against the sulfur-orange clouds of the night sky.
"I'm in," Keller's voice said quietly in his ear. The channel was private and coded (unbreakably, Mozzie swore). Still, Neal flinched. "How you doin' up there?"
This high on the tower, some of the alarms were highly vibration sensitive, so Neal didn't dare speak. There was a silence on the other end of the line, then Keller laughed. "That high already? Hey, that means I can talk to you and there's nothing you can do about it." Keller sounded delighted. "Say, have I mentioned how hot Kate's looking lately?"
"Have you forgotten Kate's listening?" Kate cut in, and Neal grinned. "Focus on getting to the computer room, damn it, and let Neal worry about his end of things."
"I love it when you get forceful with me, baby."
"Radio silence unless you have something important to say," Kate snapped.
Neal wished he had Kate with him on the tower. They worked so smoothly together, and she was their best cat burglar, better than Neal himself. But Kate was their inside person, and they didn't want to risk burning her alias yet. If this went wrong, if he and Keller tripped an alarm or stumbled across a security guard, they'd still have Kate placed in Adler's company -- they'd still have another shot at it.
And they'd been working on this one too long to blow it. This wasn't just about money anymore ... well, okay, it was about money, but it was also about scoring one for the little guy while fucking up Adler's whole misbegotten operation.
It had taken eight months of careful maneuvering and stealthy conniving to get Kate from an entry-level marketing job up to a level where she had access to some of Adler's secure data -- enough to get them into the computer system and the lower levels of the tower, at least.
"I feel like I've sold my soul," Kate had moaned, slipping off her earrings and heels at June's boarding house after another day of processing orders for behavior-correctional implants.
Keller had looked up from cleaning his gun. "Just think how good screwing Adler is gonna feel."
"I hope that didn't come out like you meant it."
Keller had grinned at her. "You got the goods, babe. Why not use 'em?"
If it had actually come to that, they would've pulled her -- Kate had made that very clear -- but Adler already had a fiancee, as well as the resources to hire any high-end call girl that he wanted.
"Or use implants to trank a different girl a night," Kate had said darkly.
"If he wants to implant anything in you -- if you need it for career advancement -- you're out of there, understand?"
It had not escaped any of their notice that Kate was Adler's "type"; he usually appeared in public with a pretty brunette on his arm. In fact, it had made getting her in the door a lot easier. Many of the other female employees had that general look. According to Kate, though, it was pure rumor that Adler's personal staff had to wear the behavior-modification implants in order to work there.
"He's too smart," she'd said. "Adler wants employees who can think and reason, especially his personal bodyguards. He doesn't want zombies working for him."
"Do you think he uses the implant on his fiancee?" Keller had asked. "A nice little zombie in his bed?"
"You're such a pig."
It was black humor, though, because all of them knew what they were risking if they were caught. The threat of prison had been enough to keep them on their toes. But the threat of being added to those dead-eyed crews of human robots who shuffled around the city, cleaning the streets and performing other menial tasks ... it was enough to strike terror into any freewheeling thief's heart.
Or, in the case of Neal and his crew, to give them the nerve to strike at the beast itself.
No one really knew how many zombies there were in the city. Adler liked to proclaim how the city's crime rate had gone down and its prison overcrowding problem had been relieved since his company had been supplying the implants to law enforcement. It was an all-over win for the government, who were saving a ton of money not only on the prisons but on regular cleaning, maintenance and other simple tasks that implanted convicts could do for much less than paying an actual worker. And Adler was raking it in from contracts to private companies, too. Supposedly the implants could only be used on someone who'd been convicted of a crime, but everyone on the street had heard rumors of unscrupulous employers requiring it as a condition of employment. For the most part, private employers and government contractors alike kept their zombie gangs out of the sight of the city's population. Laboring away in the dark, serving those who de facto owned them.
If tonight went well, Neal and his crew would not only walk away with millions in jewelry and art from Adler's private penthouse collection, but also open up Adler's firewalls to the city's hackers. Adler's proprietary code would be all over the citynet by morning, and the implants would be wide-open to anyone looking to crack them -- which would be everyone from bored hackers looking for a challenge, to concerned citizens' groups who'd been protesting the technology ever since it had appeared.
Sticking it to the Man, and getting rich at the same time. What could be better? Neal grinned, imagining his hands full of diamonds, slick and supple, trickling through his fingers. It was better than focusing on how the tower shuddered whenever a gust of wind hit it.
Looking up, he saw that the sheer cliffside of the tower no longer stretched above him to infinity. The top was, in fact, very near. He lightly fingered the spiders' controller, slowing them to a crawl and creeping to just below the underside of the balcony that circled the tower's top.
After months of carefully researching contractors' records and aerial photos, they had a pretty good picture of the security on top of the tower. The balcony was enclosed in bulletproof glass panels that could be opened for ventilation. There were also concussion-proof blast shields that could be raised at the touch of a button, or automatically if any of the sensors were tripped. There were also rooftop-mounted lasers; Adler was taking no chances of having something crash into his rooftop penthouse retreat, accidentally or otherwise.
The upper defenses were primarily aimed at flying vehicles and other forms of aerial attack; apparently the idea that someone would be reckless enough to climb a half-mile private skyscraper was low on Adler's list of priorities. But there were still things to be wary of -- the balcony, for example, was electrified when the defenses were armed, which they almost certainly would be, with Adler out for the evening. The penthouse had its own independent power supply, and its own computer system.
Neal shuffled around the underside of the balcony until he found an access panel. Then, dangling from his harness, anchored only by the spiders, he opened his backpack and got to work. Prying up the panel, he located the fiber-optic cables for the computer system and spliced in one of the little devices that Mozzie called Typhoid Marys, delivering its payload of carefully engineered computer viruses. The point, at least at the moment, wasn't to destroy Adler's system, but to make it think it was doing its job when it actually was contemplating its own navel instead.
"Moz?" Neal whispered, clipping a spy-eye to the edge of the panel to feed information back to Mozzie and Kate. "You getting this?"
"Clear as day," Mozzie said. "Have you cut the electricity yet?"
"I was about to. There are a lot of wires here, and I don't want to clip the wrong ones."
"Hang on a sec." There was a clattering of keys -- Mozzie bringing up blueprints. Then Mozzie said, "That batch of wires there by your hand -- second one from the top should kill power to the balcony, and leave the rest alone."
"Should?"
Mozzie heaved a put-upon sigh. "'What men want is not knowledge, but certainty.'"
"Einstein?"
"Bertrand Russell. Trust me or not, mon frère, but the clock is ticking."
Neal clipped the wire. Nothing visibly changed, and he waited a moment to see if he'd tripped any defenses. So far, he hadn't.
"No alarms. So far, so good."
"See? Let's take a look inside," Mozzie said, sounding eager.
Neal sent one of the spiders up with a spy-eye. The micro-camera cycled through different spectrum settings: visible light, infrared, UV... Neal squinted at his little handheld screen, trying to get a good look inside.
"The windows are full of sensors," Mozzie said, typing audibly. "All as dead as last season's vertical stripes. Looks like you cut the right wire." He took a bite of something that crunched, chewing in Neal's ear. "The glass is blocking both UV and IR, though -- I can't get a good enough look at the inside to tell if there's anyone there."
"Kate," Neal whispered, "when we're all back at June's, remind me to hide Mozzie's potato chips, would you?"
Kate giggled.
"Not that this banter isn't sickeningly entertaining," Keller said quietly, "but I'm going to need some technical assistance in a minute here. I need to kill the security cameras and the little guy's bugs don't seem to be doing the trick."
"Did you deploy the Typhoid Marys like I told you to?" Mozzie asked, sounding affronted.
"I followed your instructions exactly, Baldy, but the sensor lights are still on and I can see the cameras tracking."
"Clearly you did something wrong."
While they bickered, Neal decided it was time for a visual inspection. Heart racing, he carefully pulled himself up to the edge of the balcony. Now would not be the time to discover a new set of laser defenses ... but nothing zapped his head off, and he peeked into a room lit only by the reflected glow of the city beneath him. The carpet was pure white, and he could make out the dim shapes of nearby pieces of furniture. Nothing else.
"Kate, you have eyes on Adler, right?" Neal whispered. Adler was spending the evening at a party for some of his investors at an exclusive downtown club.
"Not at the moment," Kate said quietly, "but I've been sitting on the entrance ever since he went in, and he hasn't come out. He had a brunette on his arm when he left the limo, though I can't tell you for sure if it was his fiancee or not."
There was no way to be any more sure, and the more time that passed, the narrower their window became. As Moz had said, the clock was ticking. "I'm ready to go in," Neal whispered. "Going off the radio now. See you on the other side."
"Good luck," Kate said.
Neal switched off his radio. They'd worried about electromagnetic leakage from the radio possibly setting off alarms once he was inside -- they had no idea what kind of security Adler had inside the penthouse itself. So he was on his own now; the only contact that he'd have with the others until he made it out again would be if he had to send a distress call.
He felt a slight twinge, missing Kate and Mozzie's supportive presence on the radio. On the other hand, there was something to be said for being completely on his own, working without a safety net, relying only on himself.
With the sensors in the window dead, he fell back on old-fashioned, cat-burglar technology, and cut the glass. There was no point in hiding the fact that a burglary had taken place. When they were done, there would be no doubt in Adler's mind that he'd been robbed.
Neal slithered over the railing and into the penthouse.
He tracked motion out of the corner of his eye, and ducked just in time to hear something swish past his head, the wind of its passage stirring his hair. Neal reached out blindly in the dark; he felt warm human flesh, heard a gasp, and then someone kicked him in the thigh, narrowly missing his groin. He went down anyway, his leg knocked out from under him, and his unseen assailant landed on top of him, squashing him under his backpack. Something hard and cold pressed into the back of his neck. Neal went still.
"Don't move," a woman's voice whispered fiercely.
"I'm not moving," Neal said into the carpet. "See? This is me not moving."
There was a moment of silence. He could hear the woman breathing hard, and feel her weight on top of him, keeping him squashed into the floor with all the gadgets that Mozzie had given him out of reach.
Keller had told him he was a complete idiot not to bring a gun. Neal was starting to agree.
"Look," Neal said, "I'm not sure who you are, but I'm not here to hurt you. Really."
"Oh, that's why you're sneaking over my balcony in the dead of night, dressed in black?"
My balcony? Shit ... it was the fiancee, Elizabeth Mitchell. Had to be. But she hadn't called security yet. Maybe he could lie his way out of this, although it was hard to think of a good reason why he'd be accidentally climbing a half-mile tower in the middle of the night. "I think we've had some kind of misunderstanding," Neal began.
"Are you here to rape me?"
"What? No!" Neal said, genuinely shocked and horrified.
After a pause, she said, "Stay right where you are. Don't move at all." She waited until he nodded, then her weight slid off him and he heard her feet whispering on the carpet.
Light flooded the room and Neal squinted. It was only a bedside lamp, but it was painfully bright to his dark-adapted eyes. He raised his head.
He'd been right: the woman was Adler's fiancee, Elizabeth. She was wearing a sheer white robe, her hair dark and long, falling loose over her shoulders. She'd moved over to the bed; one hand was on a lamp, and the other was holding --
Neal started laughing. He couldn't help it. "A curling iron?"
Elizabeth smiled ruefully and blushed as she set it down. "It was the nearest thing in reach. And you thought it was a weapon."
"You're not still afraid of me?"
"I am," Elizabeth said, "but I also believe you that you don't mean me any harm. If you're here to steal from Vincent, I don't really care. In fact, I'll show you where he keeps everything."
"Really," Neal said, rising slowly and warily to his feet.
"Certainly, as long as you make it look as though you took it from me by force."
"Okay," Neal said. Why argue?
Elizabeth shook her head and made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "It's been awhile since I had a conversation with anyone, let alone someone dressed in black who broke into my apartment," she said, and went to a well-stocked bar on the far side of the bed. "Would you like a drink before you finish robbing us?"
Moments later, Neal found himself in a most unexpected position: sitting side by side with Adler's fiance.
[There is a rather long scene here, as yet unwritten, in which Elizabeth explains that she's being forced to marry Adler because he's holding her boyfriend Peter hostage against her good behavior. Peter has been implanted with one of the personality-squashing mind-control devices (the only thing I'd really figured out about how they work is that they make it extremely difficult to formulate a coherent thought and cause brain damage in the long term) and thrown into a work gang. Prior to all of this, Peter was a cop and he's had some run-ins with Neal -- Neal kind of knows him, in a cat-and-mouse sort of way, much like the relationship they had in canon prior to Neal's capture. In any case, Elizabeth asks Neal to help them. He doesn't really say yes, exactly, but he can't turn her down cold, either. This is obviously going to cause quite a bit of contention in the gang later on.]
"I see you must have climbed up here," Elizabeth said, "but how were you going to get down? Climbing down seems even harder than climbing up."
Neal laughed. "Oh, I wasn't going to climb."
He reached into his backpack and tugged out the collapsible glider. It didn't hurt to show her. The confusion on her face changed to delight when she realized what it was; the expression made her look very young and girlish.
"Oh, that's wonderful. Insane, but wonderful."
"It only carries one," Neal said hastily, in case she was going to want to run away with him.
"I'm not a prisoner, exactly," Elizabeth said. "I could walk out any time I want. It's just ..."
"Peter."
"Yes. Peter."
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