"When your world is dark
When your eyes won’t open
When your heart is still
When your life is over
Are you on your own?
Does the night disturb you?
Do I move your soul?
Do these memories hurt you?
I’m on your mind…
- “On Your Mind,” Patient Saints
What right do we have asking for control?
When in the space of five days someone has seen dead people, been followed, been watched, been shot at, had their apartment broken into, shot other people, found out that what they’re a part of is bi-coastal, and had to question that perhaps one of her coworkers – her superiors – murdered a murderer in cold blood, what right does that person have asking for control?
And what can the people around her do but watch as she pushes herself farther and farther in pursuit of what she believes is the truth, and in pursuit of some sort of justice that has passed everyone else by, driving herself to limits of physical and mental exhaustion, driving herself to what is beyond her limits until she reaches her certain destruction?
And what can she do but continue to run down blind corridors which may lead to the truth or to lies, to chase the facts that never lie but for some reason are lying now, to find out if the shooting she has only heard of was clean, to find out why she is now a target of something that she has studied and anticipated but still cannot handle, to find out how she has become involved, to find answers no one will give her when she knows all lies lead to the truth?
She lives her life by only one law: fight or die.
If one leads to another, that is of no consequence.
Because there is no hesitation, only acceptance. No second chance, only one mind. No peace, only the art of war. No hope, only the lack of faith. No patience, only perpetual motion. No time, only risk. No answer, only the hunt. It is everything in search for nothing, nothing when the game is everything. And the pieces will fall one by one until the board is clear.
********
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Victim, suspect, crime scene.
Special Agent Stark Patrick finds herself staring at all three, standing on the landing outside Marita Covarrubias’s office, outside the U.N. computer office, looking at a shattered door and a shaken woman holding a murder weapon and a corpse she doesn’t know with half his head splattered across the wall. It is a justifiable homicide – but as of late, nothing makes her sick more than justifiable homicide. She feels the bile rising in her throat and does what she has never done before in her seven-year history as an officer of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
She turns and walks away.
She walks past her partner, past Fox Mulder, past her one-time catch and now ally, down the hallway, past the empty raided office and out onto another landing where she can look at the skyline and hope that everything is the terrible nightmare that she knows it is worse than. She cannot muster words, she cannot muster feelings. She is simply shut down. “Damn it,” she says, once, then again. She can’t think about anything else – Krycek’s justifiable death, the assailants’ justifiable deaths. Which all seem so unjustifiable. So worthless. So wrong. A quest for justice has now become a murder spree in her eyes. And if this ever goes on record at the Bureau, she may be going down a murderer. She may be becoming everything she doesn’t want to be, in the pursuit of everything she believes in.
“I know this hurts,” he says, even though he doesn’t have to.
“I know you do,” she says to the night, and turns to face him with stunned, drained, exhausted eyes. The spark that he has always known of her, seven years later, the impossible later, is now but a flicker. It is burnout, plain and simple, in one brutal whirlwind that breaks John Doggett’s heart.
He closes the distance between them, putting an arm tightly around her shoulders, offering her the warm embrace of a partner. He knows that she can’t find words this night, and he doesn’t expect them. He holds her while she fights back tears, resting his chin on her head, looking out at those same stars and feeling the exhaustion in her body and wondering, of all people, why she had to do this. He understands the reasons why, but he never wanted to see this. He knows that she knows he opposed her for this reason. And she finally understands it, pulling back just enough to look up at him, for them to make the eye contact only loyal partners and friends can, and to ask.
“Should I?”
“Should you what?” he says, even though he knows.
“Walk away.”
He shakes his head. “This is the right thing to do.”
“I know that,” she says. “I sometimes wonder if it’s just too much.”
“I understand.”
They’re the two best words one partner can say to another. And he has to smile when they bring a brief smile to her face and a flicker to her eyes. She squeezes his hand, the reverse of their usual significant gesture. “I know,” she says.
“Am I interrupting something?”
They make a turn perfectly coordinated by years of knowing each other. Stanley Jobson stands in the landing’s doorway, his eyebrow raised in the silent question that has haunted them for years, without any of the connotations. They smirk. “Don’t worry about it,” Doggett says quietly. “What’s up?”
“She’ll be okay,” Stanley says of Marita Covarrubias, with equal quiet. He produces Stark’s service weapon from his jacket and offers it to her, butt first. She is stunned and concerned and Doggett can read it in her eyes. He looks sideways to see what she will do, and so does Stanley. It is the ultimate question: resist or serve. Fight or die.
Her eyes fall on the black Walther, reading with self-doubt and fear and pain and exhaustion and all the emotions that now bubble beneath her surface. She knows that she needs to make a choice. But she knows, as the two men standing beside her know, here is no real choice to make.
It takes but a heartbeat. She fills her lungs with fear and exhales.
Her hand tightens around the grip of the weapon and she holsters the gun inside her jacket. There is silence between them as she takes a second to refocus her thoughts, then quietly turns and exits the landing, leaving them to follow. She may not be all right, John Doggett knows, but she will be. He has had seven years by her side, seven years of other such crusades, to know that it is his partner’s nature to survive.
And that it is his nature to make sure such a statement is true.
“Will she be okay?” Stanley asks him then.
Doggett takes a moment to examine the hacker. He hasn’t had much contact with the man, and knows him only through Stark’s explanation of a Texas case she worked the one year that they were separated. Now forced into cohesion with the convicted felon, he cannot help but question.
“Yeah,” he says after a moment. “She will be.”
Stanley nods, almost imperceptibly, an acceptance.
They move back toward the building. It is climbing closer to morning, and with every second lies a heartbeat between life and death, success or failure, everything or nothing – Krycek or Swordfish.
********
It is a complicated situation: two FBI agents who are supposed to be at work in less than three hours. An ex-agent who’s not supposed to be involved. A hacker who’s not supposed to be in the state. A UN agent whose life is in danger. Three dead bodies. A ruined computer office and presumed theft. A bi-coastal conspiracy. It is three twenty-four in the morning on a Friday, and with the sun will come chains they cannot afford. Security officers. Phone calls to residences. Lack of attendance. Their crime scene exposed, their murders wide open, their secret pursuit blown public. If there’s any hope to be had, they must now cover their tracks, and wait for the final showdown – wait for nightfall.
TO BE CONTINUED...
