He kept his left hand tucked between his thin undershirt and ragged sweater, pressed into the damp heat of his armpit as he worked out his calculations on blackboard six. The cold got into his fingers otherwise and made the healed breaks ache so badly that he couldn't see past chalk and slate to numbers and possibilities, and he had no time to waste in pain.
The final versions of the new algorithms marched across boards three, four, and five in steady rows, neatly recopied out of their beds of figuring. Now he had to work the pattern with several sets of plausible variables derived from the intel he'd been given, transforming possibilities into probabilities, a plan of action. He hated this part. It was mechanical and tedious. He couldn't quite hold all the calculations in his head, but also couldn't be bothered to slow his thoughts to the pace of his limping fingers and show all his work. If he was interrupted, he often lost his place and had to start over, and he was interrupted often--more often when Williamson left HQ. He could usually tell how far Williamson had gone, and how long it would be until he returned, by the frequency of harassment from the others. At least when Williamson was present he was only interrupted when Williamson wanted something, and the things Williamson wanted from him always related to his work.
Which wasn't to say that Williamson didn't have a knack for making those discussions unpleasant. The ache of his left elbow--constant whether he was cold or not, though he was almost always cold--kept that fresh in his mind, not that he was in any danger of forgetting. Not of forgetting Williamson, anyway.
"Fuck," he muttered, and lowered his right hand to rub his elbow. He'd spaced out and lost his place, without the least bit of outside help. He knew the logic of the algorithm front to back, up and down (and strange and charming), but all the specific numbers blurred together by the time he'd spent days crunching them with too little sleep separating shifts of work.
It occasionally occurred to him that this was what computers were for, but Williamson had never, ever offered him one to speed up the process, and he suspected it was better that way. He had long since decided that taking more time was an axiomatic good, and this would have taken a fuck of a lot less time with a computer. Anyway, he didn't think asking Williamson for one would end well, though sometimes Williamson just laughed at things like that.
He started the algorithm over from the beginning with his latest variable set, plugging in values and making periodic notations on the board in front of him, incoherent outside the particular context of the expression unfolding in his brain at the given moment. It all worked, one piece into another into another, click click slide thump. For a moment he honestly thought he was just hearing the sound of his own thoughts, and then he realized someone had unbarred the door.
He stopped calculating, got his left hand out of his sweater and pressed it--damp with sweat, it would leave a clear handprint--flat to the board, ignoring the sharp flare of pain in his elbow at the quick motion. They liked his hands where they could see them. He kept scribbling furiously, trying to get all the figures down before the door opened. If he had them down, he could pick up where he'd left off later, and he wouldn't lose so much time. Even if they took him upstairs, he could return to the calculation when he got back, right in the middle like they'd never opened the door at all, and that would help.
His left hand twitched with cold and his elbow throbbed, and his writing turned erratic--more erratic than usual--as the lock scraped back. He was out of breath, sweating buckets, wet fingers melting the chalk in his hand, and the door opened and still nobody was yelling at him, stomping inside to drag him out. He scratched out the last of the figures and froze, allowing himself one more moment facing the board, fixing the calculation in his mind, and then, shivering, he turned to look.
There was a stranger standing in the doorway, holding a bag and bedroll under his left arm, his flannel jacket open so that the gun holstered under his arm was visible, a dark gleam of leather and metal. He was wearing a stocking cap and though his mouth was a small flat line, there was a kind of smile at the corners of his dark brown eyes. The stranger was looking at him intently--almost hungrily--more than any of the others ever had, and the pit of his stomach shook. The others always looked bored when they saw him, interested only after he became an object for their amusement. They wanted his indignity, sometimes his pain; Williamson only ever wanted information. This one wanted him, and he desperately hoped he was wrong about what exactly that might mean.
Williamson was there, just behind the stranger, who was shorter though by no means small or slight. Williamson smiled over the stranger's shoulder, and he felt a stupid, treacherous relief to have Williamson back in the building, even with the stranger there.
"Brought you your very own guard," Williamson said, and then there was a dull smacking sound and the stranger--guard, new guard--oh God, they were going to leave someone in here with him all the time, Williamson being here would be no better at all--stepped quickly inside, nearly jumping across the threshold toward him.
He turned his back on the stranger as the lock and the bar slammed shut outside, though his skin was crawling in anticipation. He could feel himself edging toward total panic, and the only thing that helped that was to do his work. The wet, weakened chalk snapped in his grip, and he stood facing the chalkboard helplessly, shivering, trying to breathe, as his sweat turned cold and the stranger behind him didn't make a sound.
It was a terrible kind of déjà vu: he felt like he'd had his guts shot out. Like Charlie had shot him again, both barrels straight into his stomach, two dark eyes full of terror as brutal as shotgun shells. If he moved he would bleed out. If he moved he would make a sound, and he didn't like to think what it would be, what wounded cry would come out of his mouth on a bubble of blood. If he moved this would be real, and it had to be just another bad dream.
It couldn't be that Charlie didn't know him. It couldn't be that Charlie, here in this room so like his own garage, surrounded by chalkboards covered in math, was so damaged that he didn't know Don, that he was scared of Don. After a hundred and thirty days of silence, a hundred and thirty days of keeping his head down, a hundred and thirty days of waiting, searching--after he'd walked away from his whole life, killed a man to get here--it couldn't all come to this. To nothing. To Charlie not being Charlie, not knowing who either of them were.
This was supposed to be the end, or practically the end, of all of it. All they needed now was for Charlie to give him the sitrep, Don to lay out the precise tactics. A little shooting, a little running; maybe one of them would get hurt, maybe he'd have to kill Williamson, but then they'd be out of here. Home free. Dinner in Chicago, breakfast in LA.
Don stood very still just inside the door, forcing himself to breathe slowly and silently through his nose, teeth clenched. He closed his eyes and tried to talk himself down--Just imagine the part of you that can get the job done is a hostage, Terry had told him once, and your emotions are a crazy person who's got the rest of you at gunpoint. Talk them down. He'd squinted and said, Are you encouraging dissociative tendencies? and she'd said, I'm not a psychiatrist, Don. No code of ethics. I just want you to do the job. He'd smiled and said, Remind me never to get on your bad side, and she'd smiled back, and now the thought of her smiling made his throat close up with panic, his heart racing harder and his mouth tasting bitter with adrenaline overdose.
He had to breathe. He had to open his eyes. He had to look at the situation in front of him: the real one, not the one he'd wanted. Whatever he'd landed in chasing Charlie, he was in it now up to his neck. He had to know what. He had to breathe. He had to open his eyes.
After another couple of minutes he did it, focusing his gaze on Charlie, and it should have been funny, he's as scared of you as you are of him. But it was terrible, it was more wrong than anything Don had ever seen. He had to look at it in parts, break it into its components, or it was too much to deal with.
Charlie was shaking visibly. Don could hear his breathing, too, shallow and rapid: two quick pants for every carefully slow breath Don took. There was a wet handprint drying on the chalkboard from where Charlie's hand had been pressed when the door opened, and the back of Charlie's sweater was dark with moisture. Hyperventilation, even trembling, could maybe be faked, but Don didn't think Charlie was a good enough actor to sweat on command. He didn't think anyone was.
Charlie was scared. Charlie was really scared. And the only thing in this room with Charlie was Don, so Charlie was scared of Don, more scared than Don had ever seen him. This was worse than monsters under the bed, worse than his thesis defense, worse than sniper fire. And Charlie would only be scared of Don if he didn't know who Don was.
So there was something wrong with Charlie, some kind of brain damage, or psychological trauma, and it wasn't like he hadn't had plenty of opportunities for both in the one hundred thirty days it had taken Don to get here. Words clawed up Don's throat, filling his mouth, pressing against his gritted teeth, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but he couldn't say that. Not to this stranger who looked at him out of Charlie's eyes. Not now.
But the stranger still had Charlie's brain, Charlie's math; Don could see that scrawled across three walls. He still had to be Charlie in some way--this couldn't be permanent, couldn't be really, absolutely, permanently real. It had to be a coping mechanism, Charlie's own dissociative hostage situation. Terry would be proud.
So Charlie had forgotten Don, but he'd held on to math, which made sense. Math was useful. Math was clearly why Williamson kept Charlie around. Don hadn't been any demonstrable use to Charlie since he'd been taken.
But Charlie had had more to lose than Don, and Williamson hadn't called a name, any name, to get Charlie's attention. Names were less useful than math, if probably more useful than Don. Charlie might not have kept his name. Probably hadn't. Don swallowed the Charlie? that lingered on his tongue and forced himself to look away from his brother.
He tugged off his hat and rubbed a hand through his sweat-damp hair, letting his heart rate settle and wondering what the hell to do next. Every procedure he'd ever learned had been some variation of call for backup, and he'd very neatly left himself without any. Unavoidable, or at least he'd thought it was--let himself think it was. The blank postcard he'd sent to Coop before leaving Chicago seemed less like a sensible precaution now, and more like a message in a bottle.
Maybe he should just assume they were going to die, and count every minute he didn't get both of them killed as a victory. Maybe he should take the Sig out right now and call it quits for both of them. He'd dreamed so many times of finding Charlie's body, of being able to stop because it was all over, the searching definitively ended along with Charlie's life. He could make it real now: one little crook of his trigger finger and Charlie would be lying there in front of him for real this time. It'd only take another few seconds to bring the thing to its logical conclusion--the same gun at his own temple, the same crook of his finger, one for him and one for Charlie, exactly equal and fair and Charlie even got to go first.
But no, that was the adrenaline talking, making colors too stark and lights too bright and desperate situations hopeless. So it wasn't going to be a cakewalk: so he'd have to start from scratch, earning Charlie's trust, learning the terrain. It didn't matter. He'd come here to do a job, and he'd do it or die trying.
He looked back up at Charlie just in time to see him rub his face against the arm of his sweater. Don stayed very still as Charlie started to move, and Charlie raised a stub of chalk to the board and began, slowly and shakily, to write. Don let himself breathe out as the chalk tapped faster. Charlie had math, and Charlie could always calm himself down with math. Charlie was still Charlie, still Don's brother, even if he didn't know it. Don would know it for both of them.
Don passed a hand over his own face and carefully, silently, set down his bag and bedroll beside the door, keeping his eyes on Charlie. Charlie kept working, and Don locked down the urge to go to him, touch him, reassure him, reassure himself. This was close enough to see: Charlie was alive, really alive, and right there across the room.
One hundred thirty days, and you couldn't call this day's work nothing, not really. He'd found Charlie. He could do the rest. Hell, if he could just get Charlie to trust him, Charlie would probably be able to figure out how to get them both out. This just set the timetable back a little.
Don looked around the room carefully, trying to analyze it tactically, though it was a pretty grim picture: no exits, no cover. They had about half the basement, so three walls were solid cinder block, with blackboards bolted to them all the way around. He suspected they covered any windows that might have been present, but couldn't remember any sign of basement windows visible in his brief glimpse of the house's exterior. The fourth wall was drywall, painted primer-white. That wall appeared to be flush to floor and ceiling, solidly constructed.
There was a wood and canvas folding cot set up against the interior wall with an unzipped sleeping bag crumpled on it, and beyond the cot there was another doorway. Don walked far enough to see that it was a tiny cubicle of a bathroom, just a toilet and sink, and that there was no door in the frame. He could see the holes where the hinges had been taken out.
There were two card tables pushed together in the center of the room, with papers stacked untidily on top. The floor was bare, smooth cement, the ceiling unfinished. Ducts and wiring ran between the joists that supported the floor of the house. Light came from a couple of bare bulbs in plain fixtures, operated by a switch near the door. There was a work light hooked to the corner of the blackboard where Charlie was standing, connected to the orange extension cord that was plugged in outside, but it was turned off.
Don stole another glance at Charlie. Looking at him was easier every time, familiarity dulling the jolt of panic and desperation in his belly. Charlie was wearing a faded black sweater--much too big and unraveling in a couple of spots--baggy jeans, and white socks, but no shoes. His hair had grown into a short curly cap, dense as wool, and his face was pale, shadowed with a few days' stubble. His shoulders looked sharp, like he'd lost weight, and he'd pulled his left arm inside his sweater, but at least he'd stopped shivering. He held his chalk in a weird-looking crabbed grip, and his writing was different from how it had been before, the corners of his fours and sevens more jagged than the ones Don had stared at on and off for three months in the garage. He was writing fast, lost in his work and giving no sign that he even remembered there was anyone in the room with him.
Don leaned against the wall and fished the walkie-talkie out of his pocket, looking it over carefully. There weren't any obvious signs of tampering; it probably wasn't bugged, though he couldn't be certain without disassembling it and he didn't have the tools for that. It would be ridiculously easy for Williamson, or anyone else in the house, to be listening in by less exotic means, though there was always the possibility that they just weren't bothering: Williamson was in control of the situation, and knew it. There wasn't a hell of a lot Don could do from down here, locked in with eight heavily armed men--or a dozen, or a platoon, for all he knew--in the house above him. Don shoved the radio into a pocket and shrugged his coat off, tossing it down on top of his bag. It'd make his gun that much more prominent, but maybe Charlie would get used to that. Though the room was cool, it wasn't cold enough to warrant the coat.
He started a slow tour of the room, staying well away from Charlie but having a good look at everything else. There didn't seem to be any cameras tucked into the ceiling wiring or obvious bugs on the light fixtures. The papers on the tables were mostly sheets of numbers he couldn't decipher, sorted into sloppy piles that were doubtless intensely meaningful to Charlie. There was also a large box of white chalk, and a smaller box with assorted colors. Don looked around for erasers, but there weren't any, just a rag hanging over the top corner of one of the boards. There was nothing else in the room, not so much as a chair.
By the time Don had checked over the whole room, the adrenaline tide was washing out, leaving his hands and knees shaky. But if he sat down, he might not get up, so he kept pacing, six slow strides from one wall to another, steady as a clock.
He'd gotten good at dividing his attention, as long as none of the things he was paying attention to were excessively urgent. Little by little he managed to steal attention from listening for the stranger's booted steps approaching to devote to resuming his calculations.
He kept going without pause at the soft thuds that were 97% certainly the sounds of the stranger setting down his bag and bedroll, and managed not to flinch visibly when he heard the first soft scuffing steps that meant the stranger had moved away from the door. He tucked his left hand under his right arm again, because it was getting cold and the blow still wasn't falling. Clearly the stranger was the kind who liked to let anticipation build, and he knew that anticipating the blow only made it hurt worse. He devoted increasing proportions of his attention to his work as the steps behind him stayed soft and slow and never came closer than a couple of meters. There was a brief rustling of the papers on the table, and then the sound of the stranger pacing at the other end of the room, across blackboards one and two.
The steps settled into a steady, reliable rhythm, pausing for short, regular intervals before proceeding again. They never came closer, and were neither so silent that the stranger's movement could not be tracked, nor so loud as to be deliberately intimidating.
He paused between calculations for a moment, scratching out a tidy little expression to describe the stranger's movement behind him. If his own fixed position was used as the focus of a circle, the stranger's motion was a tangent line...
The footsteps deviated abruptly from their established path, moving not nearer to him, as he'd been expecting, but further away. He kept writing as he listened, until he was startled into total stillness by a different sound entirely, a cloth rustle and metallic zipper rasp and--and then a distinctly liquid sound. He turned, keeping his feet planted in the same spot, and peered toward the bathroom doorway. He couldn't see anything, and felt himself drawn toward the sound as it continued, leaning further and further and finally going on tiptoe to lean further yet, until he finally caught a glimpse of the stranger's back. His shoulder was wrapped in the leather of the holster he wore, and his blue jeans were tight, though the seat sagged a little in the way that indicated they were unzipped, as, of course, they had to be, because the stranger was--
The liquid sound stopped, and he turned away abruptly, settling back on his feet with his face to his blackboard, raising his hand to the board and wiping away the expression for the stranger's movement. He'd been naked in front of Williamson and a succession of others; he'd had to piss with armed men watching every move he made. The reverse was distinctly weird, and wildly unexpected. None of the others had ever stooped to giving up their privacy in his presence, however uniformly the reverse had been true. And the stranger had made no attempt to make the act a threat, made no real reference to him at all. It was an anomaly beyond his ability to describe.
He heard the sound of the sink running and then shutting off, and then a wordless annoyed sound from the stranger. He couldn't resist turning around again, to see the stranger standing in the doorway, wiping his hands on his now-zipped jeans. The stranger had taken his hat off, and his dark hair was standing out at angles.
He stood a moment, staring, idly calculating those angles, and then the stranger raised his eyebrows and he realized what he was doing and turned away quickly. Before he could resume his work, the stranger said softly, "Hey, I don't think we've really been formally introduced."
Wasn't that the punch line to some joke? That was not a formal introduction. He turned his head just far enough to see the stranger leaning in the bathroom doorway, his hands open at his sides and his hair still a wild, largely vertical mess. He wondered if there was some way to quantify the way wiping your hands on your pants made you look less threatening, and whether the stranger was aware of it.
He looked back to his blackboard, studying his notations, and said, "Williamson calls me Know-Nothing or Know-It-All, interchangeably. Like flammable and inflammable."
"Yeah?" the stranger said, as though this were an interesting bit of trivia. "Williamson calls me Mac."
He nodded. Mac. That was the kind of name Williamson's men tended to have. Skip, Randy, Hank, Sam, Jimmy. Mac.
"You like being called that?" Williamson-calls-me-Mac said, and it was such an odd question that he had to turn and look. He couldn't remember ever being asked whether he liked something by a person who sounded as if they'd take his answer as anything other than a clue to how hard to hit him.
Mac was watching him curiously, and he shrugged and looked away again. "It's not actually my name, if that's what you mean."
Mac snorted. "Yeah, I didn't think it was. So if we're going to be stuck in this room together all the time, what do you want me to call you while I'm here?"
It was an interestingly bounded question: it placed the two of them inside a matrix from which Williamson first and foremost, but also everyone else, was excluded. And yet it only reflected a reality that Williamson himself had established--newly, for the first time; he'd never had a guard of his own before, for all that he was sometimes locked in with one or another of Williamson's men. But Mac was to stay here, for some duration, inside the room with him at Williamson's order--and Mac had asked him a question.
It wasn't as if he hadn't given some thought, from time to time, to what he'd like to be called if he could choose. He'd considered the possibility that it was important to have a name for himself, even if no one else knew it, but he'd found that no name he chose lasted long without an external point of reference. It was a peculiar, artificial exercise, trying to apply some textual string as a label to himself. He'd considered the major constants--pi, e, i--and there would be some amusement in naming himself imaginary, but he was real enough, and not entirely constant. He smiled then and made an impulsive choice, reached over to a blank space and scrawled c on the board.
When he glanced back over his shoulder, Mac had folded his arms, and was leaning his head against the doorframe, eyes half shut. c wondered how much time had passed since Mac had asked; he wasn't any good at gauging. Mac picked his head up when c looked at him, and squinted at the board.
"C..." Mac said, clearly waiting for another letter.
"c," he corrected. "Lowercase, italicized. It's a physical constant, the--"
"Speed of light," Mac interrupted, nodding. "Like E=mc2."
c stared at him, and Mac smiled suddenly, bright and startling, his eyes so warm and pleased that c could only nod mutely.
"I passed physics in school," Mac said with a dismissive shrug. "I know some things."
c looked away from Mac's gaze. "You may be aware that it's not entirely constant, then. It's different in different environments."
He bracketed the c he'd written, idly, but it was an incomplete matrix. There was a space unfilled.
"What about you?" he asked abruptly, turning back to look at Williamson-calls-me-Mac again.
Mac raised his eyebrows. "I just said, I--"
c shook his head, "No, no, you, while you're here. I told you what you should call me in this room, but you didn't tell me what I should call you."
"Oh," Mac said.
He went very still, holding c's gaze, and his face was as blank as someone trying to hide something, which was odd in itself: no one bothered to hide anything from Know-Nothing. c watched him, waiting, wondering how this question could possibly be difficult for someone who knew his own name.
"How about you call me Don," he said finally. "In this room."
c nodded. "Okay. Don."
There. The matrix was complete. Know-It-All = c and Mac = Don, just as he reported all his calculations to Williamson in English units even though he did them in metric. He turned back to his blackboard, satisfied, and glanced over the last notations he'd made, taking a moment to pick up the calculation where he'd left off. He was nearly finished before he heard Don start to pace again.
He managed to work through his calculations, with Don pacing somewhere behind him, and finally turned to record it on a sheet, pulling the single mechanical pencil he was permitted from his pocket. Don stopped pacing and watched as he scribbled, taking a step closer to the opposite end of the tables. "What are you doing, anyway?"
c looked up at him, tilting his head. Don seemed honestly curious, so much so that c was almost tempted to try to explain it to him.
"Did you study much math, in school?"
Don shrugged and looked away, glancing sideways at c as he spoke. "My brother used to do my homework, actually, until our mom caught us and made him stop. Math wasn't much fun after that."
"Ah," c said. Don wasn't altogether different from the others, then; he was still one of those who viewed math as a dry, useless discipline, for all c accomplished with it daily. "Well, even if you'd done your own homework, you wouldn't understand what I'm doing here."
Don looked oddly wounded at that, and c winced. Stupid to offend the man. "I mean, it's really boring, anyway," c added. "And Williamson doesn't like me to talk about it with anyone else."
Don nodded, and then abruptly turned his back on c, standing with his face toward blackboard three as though it fascinated him, running a hand through his already-disarranged hair. c tried to mimic the gesture, but his fingers caught in the tangles--when had his hair gotten so long?--and he had to tug it back out. He turned back to the board and started to erase his last calculation with the side of his hand, and then flinched when something struck the floor beside his feet. c glanced over his shoulder, but Don was staring fixedly in another direction. When c bent down to pick the thing up off the floor, he realized it was the rag he'd left hanging on one of the other boards. c smiled, baffled, and used the rag to clean his board, tucking the end of it into his pocket when he was done.
He'd gotten halfway through his next calculation set when he heard the door being unbarred, and his heart started to race again, his breath coming short and sweat breaking out--what now, what now? He worked faster, pressing his left hand flat to the board, and then in his peripheral vision a shape moved--Don, stepping between him and the door. c felt his lips twist into a grim smile, even as his pulse raced. Someone should probably explain to Don that there wasn't much danger of him making a run for it.
The door opened just enough to admit a hand holding a crumpled paper sack, and someone outside said, "Lunch."
Don took the bag, and the hand withdrew and the door was barred again. c returned his focus to the board, trying to get back into the rhythm of his work, let the numbers fight off the shakes.
"Hey, c," Don said, behind him. "Lunch."
c nodded, but didn't look back. "I just have to finish this," he said, hating the unsteadiness of his voice.
If Don wanted him to stop working and eat now, he could easily force the issue, but if he'd let c work, the queasy terror would pass on its own. He kept working frantically, and didn't register that Don had left him entirely alone until he turned around to record his next set of results and found a peanut butter sandwich, a pear, and a condensation-covered can of Coke sitting on a tiny cleared space on the table nearest to him.
Don sat with his back to the wall, his lunch a solid knot in his stomach, watching Charlie work.
It had been a stupid thing to do, telling Charlie his name: possibly the single stupidest thing he'd done since he'd hared off on his own, and quite likely stupid enough to get them killed all by itself. Even if they didn't know what Charlie's brother looked like, they were bound to know his name; Charlie must have said it at least once, if nothing else. Don wished he could tell himself he had no idea why he'd done it, that his brain had shut off and he'd heard himself speak. But that hadn't been it, though the moment had felt a little bit like his brain shutting off, and a lot like free fall--everything happening too fast, nothing to catch, nothing to hold on to. That moment when you jumped, so you couldn't even console yourself, in the instant before the ground rushed up and crushed you, that it hadn't been your fault.
But this instant stretched sickeningly on and on, because so far he and Charlie were alone. The consequences of that one stupid, stupid word wouldn't come in a few mercifully quick seconds. They were just waiting for him down the line somewhere, when Charlie slipped and said it to Williamson, when somebody bothered to listen in on them down here. It could get him killed. It could get them both killed.
And the worst part was, he'd said it because he wanted Charlie to recognize it, recognize him. When he'd had to look away after Charlie failed to, it hadn't been because he was worried about both of them dying. It was because he'd been disappointed.
He banged his head gently against the wall, too softly to make a sound or threaten his remaining brain cells. To think he'd flattered himself, weeks back, that he understood how little perspective he had on this thing. He'd come here to save Charlie, and he'd throw both their lives away right now if Charlie would just look at him and know who he was.
So here he was, alone with Charlie, operative word alone. No safety net, no backup, no partner. No one even knew for sure what he was doing, never mind where. He was falling and falling and falling, and Charlie, over there doing math in his stocking feet, was looking like a pretty flimsy parachute.
Don shook his head, trying to rattle his brain into better order. He only succeeded in making his head hurt, so he got up and paced again, criss-crossing the room, eyeing the lines of sight from the door. He wished he could knock for hollow spots behind the chalkboards, but even Charlie, changed as he was, would probably recognize what he was doing. If Charlie realized Don was thinking about escape routes, Williamson would know about it soon enough. Williamson wouldn't have any reason to treat his unnamed genius more gently than he did Don, and Charlie obviously possessed a hell of a survival instinct to have made it this far. If Williamson asked him anything, Charlie would tell what he knew. So Don couldn't say a word or take a single false step, which was going to be hard, locked in with him like this all day. It wasn't just Charlie he couldn't reach out and touch: it was everything.
Don stuffed his hands into his pockets and stalked back and forth across the concrete until he could cross the distance with his eyes closed and judge it perfectly. His stride lengthened and quickened with every turn. Don was nearly running when he noticed that Charlie had stopped writing, and was casting him quick glances, making little jerky motions of his head. Don was distracting Charlie, maybe scaring him again. Don forced himself to be still--and for a minute he couldn't make his body obey, momentum driving him onward. For the length of those few quick heartbeats he was scaring himself, out of control. Then his brain reasserted itself, and he was dropping down to sit by the wall again, concrete cool through his jeans, unyielding under his fingertips. He barely breathed until Charlie was safely back to work, chalk taps speeding along in a staccato like Don's heartbeat.
Sitting there watching Charlie work, not being able to interrupt him, reminded Don of nothing so much as the months before their mom died. She'd asked him, sometimes, to check on Charlie. "But don't bother him, Donnie, just see how he's doing. Is he eating?" So he'd gone out to the garage and stood in the doorway, watching while Charlie worked and worked and worked, leaving sandwiches and cookies and Cokes where Charlie would find them if he ever took a break, restraining the ever-present urge to yell, to grab Charlie and shake him, to drag him inside by his ear.
And then he'd gone back and held his mother's hand and told her Charlie was all right, just busy with some important problem. Don never raised his voice, never let her see him upset. She'd never asked why Charlie's math problem was more important than she was. She'd never asked Don why his knuckles were always bruised, either. For a while he'd patched the plaster in his apartment every weekend, but for the last month he'd let it go. By the time he got around to it, after the funeral, the place looked like the set of one of those action movies they were perpetually shooting downtown.
It hadn't been that he was angry at Charlie, really. After the first few weeks, he'd realized there was no more use being angry at Charlie than at God, or doctors, or cancer, or his mother for being mortal, or his father for not being able to fix it somehow. Don had just needed to hit things.
He wanted badly to hit something now, and couldn't. He'd scare Charlie. He'd give himself away. He'd mess up his hand, get them both killed when their chance came because he was too slow to his gun. He just had to sit, quiet as if he were at his mother's bedside again, and wait for whatever was going to happen next. Another deathwatch.
After twenty minutes, when Charlie was safely back into his math again, Don got up and paced some more, eyeing the chalkboards, wondering if he could do pull-ups. If he broke one "accidentally," Charlie might not suspect anything--but then, if he broke one with a window behind it, Charlie wouldn't have to suspect anything. Don would be shoving him up and out the window, and then... what? Running to the nearest house, maybe empty, maybe full of innocent bystanders? Williamson was tidy, organized, probably not the type to mow down an entire family--unless he was pushed, unless it was the efficient thing to do. It might be, if the alternative was letting Charlie get away, letting Don take him.
Don's fists clenched and he forced himself to look down from the chalkboards that might or might not conceal windows, staring at the floor. He had to keep his steps even and light and quiet, or he'd scare Charlie again, and soon enough he sat down. After that, he found himself dreading the idea of pacing; it was harder to control himself when he was in motion than when he was still. He sat, instead, watching Charlie, evolving increasingly improbable scenarios for their escape: setting a fire, improvising a small explosion from his spare ammunition, somehow persuading Charlie to fake an illness. He spent more time than he wanted to add up entranced by the idea that he could simplify matters by having Charlie not fake an illness: he could force Charlie to eat chalk, like that time he'd dared him to when they were kids. He could shoot him, force Williamson to get him medical care--
He could see it, too easily. Pulling his gun--he could do it just like this, while Charlie was facing the board, so he wouldn't see it coming, wouldn't have time to be scared. Not until afterward, anyway, while Don was trying to stabilize him on the basement floor and Charlie was staring up at him with those dark, terrified eyes--not surprised, because Charlie expected Don to hurt him--but hurt, and scared that Don would hurt him more. And then Williamson would come down and shoot Don in the head for damaging the genius, and he'd never know whether Williamson got medical care for Charlie or let him bleed out right there, or maybe die slower, with an untreated infection...
No. Not an option. Too much risk, too little likelihood of accomplishing anything, too much shooting his baby brother.
Don glanced at his watch when he heard the sound of the door being unbarred, and was startled to find it was evening. The constant fluorescent light was disorienting. Don crossed the space quickly, squeezing his arm against the reassuring solidity of his gun as he moved himself between Charlie and the door. He could feel his own heart rate kicking up, and he could hear Charlie starting to freak out again in the suddenly increasing tempo of chalk-taps.
The door opened wide this time, and it was Williamson, with a Beretta on his hip and a plate of food--meat and potatoes and peas, weirdly normal--in his hand. He looked right past Don to Charlie, and when Don turned to look he saw Charlie almost smiling: looking not happy exactly, but relieved, instantly un-panicked, wiping his hands on his rag and stepping away from the blackboard.
Don knew what Williamson had probably done and ordered done to Charlie in the last three months, but it was that half-smile on Charlie's face that made Don want to kill the man, suddenly, viscerally, an eager twitch in the muscles of his arms and hands. He wouldn't even need his gun.
"You're out," Williamson said, glancing at Don and jerking his chin toward the door. "Go eat, take a shower if you want. You have about an hour and you don't get out again until this time tomorrow."
Don stood perfectly still for a second, forcing down the impulse to refuse, to pull his gun, to try to pull Charlie out right then and there, with Williamson and an unknown number of armed thugs between him and the front door. When Williamson started to raise an eyebrow Don burst into motion, grabbing his duffle from where he'd dropped it by the door and letting himself out. Sam, or possibly Jimmy, was standing near the bottom of the stairs--Don wouldn't have made it even to the door, if he'd taken Williamson down--and said, "Bar it behind you." Don nodded, blank-faced as he could manage, and turned and locked and barred the door, sealing Charlie in with his captor. Locking himself out.
He followed Williamson's thug up the stairs, watching his own feet all the way. There were four other guys in the kitchen, dishing up food and eating wherever there was room, and Don dropped his bag and joined the crowd. He wasn't hungry--not with Williamson under his feet, alone with Charlie--but it'd look weird not to eat, and anyway, Charlie was probably safe enough for now. He wouldn't have looked relieved if Williamson was inclined to include torture on the dinner menu. Probably. Unless Don's presence had changed the routine, like old Heisenberg said.
Don ate standing up at the counter, trying to watch the others without looking like he was watching, keeping his mouth shut and his ears open. It didn't matter: they weren't talking, weren't giving him anything he could use. All he could tell was that they were all bigger than he was, all armed. Two of them were talking idly about the Packers, giving Don a little intel on Brett Favre, none on them except that they didn't seem to care very much about the Packers.
They dispersed as they finished eating--rinsing their dishes and stacking them in the dishwasher like well-trained kids, and it was fucking eerie--mathematical precision, again, and this was obviously Williamson's, not Charlie's.
Not mathematical at all, Don thought, staring at the bottom of his bowl, a little lightning-struck with the obviousness of it: military. Ex-military, maybe Special Forces? Christ, didn't they do psych screens at all? But whatever Williamson was, he had expertise not unlike Don's, and if Don could see it on him, there were excellent odds that sooner or later he'd spot it on Don. If he hadn't already. If--
The skin was crawling on the back of Don's neck, and he was nearly alone in the kitchen, just one guy sitting at the table now, going nowhere. Don put away his own dishes, grabbed his bag, and headed off in search of a bathroom.
Through the other doorway was a living room with a threadbare couch and a cheap TV. Two of the guys were sitting there, one flipping through channels while the other stared, unblinking, at the screen. Don glanced toward the small foyer, the heavy front door, locked and deadbolted. He didn't let his gaze linger on it any more than he let it linger on the guns they were both wearing --one was a Desert Eagle .45, the other a semi-automatic he couldn't identify at a glance, maybe a Russian make.
Off the living room was a short hallway with a bedroom on either side--Don caught a glimpse of cots and sleeping bags through an open door--and a bathroom further down, on the right, toward the back of the house. The door at the end of the hall was firmly closed, and the doorknob had a key lock. Don didn't need to check it to know it would be locked.
Don went into the bathroom and locked the door behind him, dropped his bag in front of the door and turned on the shower, and then stood still in the small room, alone for the first time in twelve hours. He covered his face with his hands and let himself shake. He wanted to kill somebody, right that minute, and he wanted to run back down to the basement and refuse to leave Charlie's side, and a little part of him just wanted to call for help, fall on his knees and beg to be bailed out of this mess. If he could get hold of local law enforcement... but the odds of getting Charlie killed in the crossfire were too high, to say nothing of whatever poor bastard from the Wisconsin State Police came out here to answer the call. To say nothing of himself.
He wanted--God, he wanted to be at home again, going to his dad like a little kid with a bad dream. He wanted someone else to fix this. But all his dad had said was, "I can't lose you both," and Don had thought he knew better.
I'm sorry, he thought, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm not the genius, I'm sorry, I let you down, I'm sorry, nobody's coming home, Dad, I'm sorry.
But his dad had said, "I forgive you," too, and he'd said, "Find your brother." Don had done that much at least: even if no one else ever knew it, even if Charlie himself didn't know it, Charlie wasn't really lost anymore. Even if they both died here, at least Don had found him first.
Don straightened up, taking a breath, getting hold of himself as the room warmed up, filling with steam. He hadn't had a choice, really: there hadn't been a choice to make. Charlie was his brother, and he'd had an idea that he knew how to find Charlie; he'd had to do what he could with it. He couldn't have lived with himself if he hadn't, and he knew, after ten years, just how much that wasn't a figure of speech for an FBI agent. Guys like that found a way to stop living, sooner or later, and they usually made a hell of a mess for everyone around them.
So there: he'd done that much good. Whatever happened to him and Charlie here, it wouldn't get Terry or David killed--probably wouldn't even destroy their careers. Terry was smart. If she had to give him up, she'd give him up. She'd told him once she'd never lie for her partner. Of course, it had been a long time ago; maybe she'd changed her mind since then, maybe his secret was safe. Maybe she hadn't, and the FBI was working on hunting him down right now.
Don smiled--it was a win-win, wasn't it? A loyal partner, or the cavalry coming? He could feel the unbalanced edge to the smile and his thoughts, but it was closer to control than he'd been all day, so he'd take what he could get. He forced his breathing into an even rhythm and started getting undressed, unlacing his boots and hanging his holster on the back of the door. Don showered and shaved quickly, and got dressed again in the sticky-wet heat of the tiny room. He dried his feet carefully before he pulled his socks on, knowing he'd have his feet in his boots for the next twenty-four hours. That had been one of the weirder things he had to get used to after he left fugitive recovery, taking his boots off to go to sleep. It had been weeks after he transferred before he could sleep without being ready to bolt out the door at a second's notice. If he made it out of here alive, he might be sleeping in his boots for good.
Don headed straight back down to the basement, but his watch showed he'd only burned half of his hour. It wouldn't look right to be eager to go back in. Don glanced up the stairs, thinking longingly of the front door, open air--but it wouldn't look much better to be eager to get out.
He put his ear to the barred door, but couldn't hear anything but a low murmur of voices. He strained to catch some note of fear in Charlie's voice, but instead he picked up the familiar tone of Charlie in lecture mode. His guts twisted and his breath caught. It shouldn't have been possible to miss Charlie so much from so close, but his little brother hadn't spoken to him like that in a long time, and might never again.
Don looked around and then headed over to the other side of the basement, checking the solidity of the interior wall, the layout. Everything looked normal and depressingly well-constructed, offering no obvious opportunities for escape or concealment. There were boxes stacked up against the walls of the bathroom, and Don walked over to look at them. He put his ear to the wall again, glanced at his watch. He had twenty-five minutes to go, and everything was quiet in Charlie's room. There was a layer of dust on the boxes--more than three months' accumulation if he had to guess. Don glanced toward the door to Charlie's room, listened for movement upstairs, and then lifted the top off the nearest box.
There was a school kid's art project on top; it shed glitter on Don's fingers when he picked it up. There were papers and folders underneath, and Don wondered who'd lived in this house, who'd planted the flowers out front, and what the hell had happened to them, why they'd left these things behind, whether they were all right. He couldn't think about it, though; they were gone. Charlie was here. Don replaced the lid and moved the box, going to the second, which was more of the same, papers and report cards. He closed it up and set it aside, and opened a third.
Pay dirt. The entire box was stacked full of glossy comic books. Don grinned suddenly, almost laughed before he choked back the sound. The year he was eleven he'd broken his arm in April, losing himself an entire season of Little League. His dad had brought him comic books the first day, and after he got hooked he'd walked ten blocks to the comic shop every week--he wasn't allowed to ride his bike until he got the cast off--and bought up all the comics he could scrape together the change to afford. It was the only way he'd kept from going nuts until June, when the cast came off and he could at least play sandlot ball again.
Don flipped through the comics quickly; he didn't care about the contents, but he was curious about the dates. None was less than a year old. He hoped that meant that whoever they belonged to had been long gone before Williamson started using this place as his HQ. Don opened up his duffle and slipped in as many comics as he could fit. They weren't weapons, but he had more guns than he had uses for them, right now. He was perilously short on ways to pass time without driving himself insane, and clearly he was going to have to be patient. Comic books would help.
Don put the lid on the box again and stacked the other boxes on top of it just as they'd been, wiping the top one clean to make the finger marks less obvious before he went back to stand by the door. There was still no sound from inside, and he was straining so hard to hear that the squawk of his walkie-talkie from his pocket startled him. "Mac," Williamson said, and he could hear a faint echo of the man's actual voice inside. "Come on down. You're back on."
"Gotcha," Don said into his radio, even as he unbarred the door.
Williamson looked amused. The plate in his hand was empty, and Charlie was already back to work, looking completely unperturbed. "You're punctual," Williamson said, and Don forced himself to focus on the boss.
He shrugged, a little tensely, but Mac would be tense. It was all right so far. Williamson didn't seem to know.
"I do my job," he said, and Williamson just smiled and walked out. Don didn't move until he heard the door barred and locked, and then he sat down on the floor, watching Charlie with his hand on his bag. He'd wait until he really needed a comic book, and then he'd take it out.
c looked up at some point and discovered that Don had set out his bedroll and lain down. He was stretched out across the door, with his feet toward the wall and his head toward c. He had his back toward the door, and his holster was folded neatly on the floor near his head, empty. c set down his chalk and moved closer, looking for the gun, and then spotted it tucked between Don's shoulder and his throat, half-hidden by the pillow he rested his head on.
Don seemed to be asleep. c hadn't noticed him lying down, and he wondered how much time had passed. He had some idea that it made a difference; the longer someone had been asleep, the more deeply they slept. He'd never seen anyone sleep before. He supposed he'd known that they did, just the way he knew that other people pissed, or took their clothes off, or felt pain. But as far as he could remember, all those interactions had always gone one way for him.
Until now, until Don. He might have to have a guard with him all the time, but it meant that the guard had c with him all the time, even when he wasn't... on guard. c took a step closer to him, and then another, quicker. The hungry way Don looked at him scared him, but Don had talked to him, too, had asked his name like he expected c to have one, and now he thought maybe he did. None of the others had ever expected him to have a name. None of the others had ever sat quietly while he worked, trying not to distract him (though Don's very presence could be intensely distracting). c was forced to consider the possibility that Don was qualitatively different from every other person he'd ever met.
Different, and still sleeping. He wasn't really scary at all like this, not looking at c, not moving, though fear shivered down c's spine, as inescapable as the chill radiating from the walls. Another step and c was towering above him, looking down at him the way other people usually looked down at c on the floor, or bound to a chair. For a wild thoughtless instant c wanted to kick Don as hard as he could, just to see what it felt like to be on that side of the equation, but just visualizing it made fear run cold and sharp through his veins. Every action had an equal and opposite reaction, and Don's reaction to being kicked would only begin with striking back; Don would wake with that gun at his hand and c at his mercy. If c kicked him, he might find Don wasn't different from the others at all.
c crouched down instead, trying for another perspective. He leaned close to look at Don's face, motionless in sleep. Don had long eyelashes, and his hair was mashed by the pillow into all-new angles. It wasn't quite black like c had thought, nor quite straight. Don was breathing slowly and shallowly, in a rhythm that c thought he knew meant Don really was asleep. There was a kind of safety in that. He could look as much as he wanted until Don woke up.
c waved his hand cautiously in front of Don's face, but Don didn't move. c shifted closer and then closer again, sitting down on the cold floor and leaning in until he could feel the sleeping warmth of Don's body. Don hadn't zipped up his sleeping bag, and he seemed to have his arms folded in close to his chest. A little of the band of his watch was visible on his left wrist, and c suddenly hungered to know what it said, what the time was.
He shut his eyes and forced himself not to care. It didn't matter; time was an arbitrary construct. If he started wanting to know, it would be hard to stop, and he'd wind up scratching at the door, crying and begging until someone came down and forcibly distracted him from the whole concept. He bit down hard on his lip--didn't care, didn't care, not about that--and then opened his eyes to distract himself from time with Don.
So close, he could see the butt of Don's gun, matte black, pressed against the skin of his throat. Don's cheek was smooth; he must have shaved during his hour off. c rubbed at his own itchy days-old stubble, and then reached out a hand toward Don's cheek, with some unformed thought of testing the contrast, before he jerked back. He could feel his heart beating faster, hands closing into helpless fists. He hardly dared to breathe, waiting for Don to wake up, waiting for the inevitable explosion.
Don shifted slightly, sighing in his sleep, and c was close enough to feel the air stirred by his breath. Then he was still again, and c took in a long deep breath and felt a little thrill of recklessness, the same one that had once or twice made him talk back to his tormentors. They only hit him more, but somehow it had felt good to be making them do it, to exert that one sliver of influence available to him.
Don had moved a little; more of the butt of the gun was exposed, and words drifted across c's brain, fragmentary and meaningless. Handle toward my hand. c reached out with a shaking hand, and this time his fingers closed on his target, the plastic grip plate warm from Don's skin when he touched it. He tugged, and then everything happened at once. Don's eyes flashed open--Don's hand closed over his on the gun--Don's arm across his chest pushed him back--Don rolled up and over him.
c blinked and he was on his back on the cold floor, his heart racing and the back of his mouth flooded with a bitter taste, his vision going bright and sharp. Don didn't immediately move, resting above c with most of his weight on his left arm across c's chest, the gun firmly in his right hand. Don glanced at it--c looked too, and Don wasn't pointing the gun at him. Don turned it carefully but kept it aimed away from them both, and then reached back and tucked it into the back of his pants.
Otherwise he didn't move, just stayed suspended above c, and c thought of the hungry look in his eyes, the things he might want, things Williamson had only obliquely threatened so far. This could be it, and all c could think was that he couldn't remember ever being this close to someone else. Don wasn't hurting him yet, and c found he was as much curious as scared, maybe more so. For now, all he felt was warm, between the frantic rush of his own blood and the proximity of Don, who was staring down at c and looking more puzzled than angry.
"Don't do that again," he said. Just that. He didn't even shout the words.
c blinked, baffled, and nodded. He couldn't have spoken if he wanted to. He couldn't breathe, and only half because of the weight on his chest. Don shifted, not moving his arm but redistributing his weight, and c inhaled and nodded again, still waiting for what would happen next.
Don smiled suddenly, inexplicably, and his eyes went warm and intent. c's stomach twisted--this was it--but up close Don didn't look hungry, just focused. He said, "What were you planning on doing with it, anyway? You gonna shoot your way out?"
c opened and closed his mouth. The gun. He'd grabbed the gun. Don hadn't even pointed it at him when he took it away, hadn't even really hit him. c had thought he was provoking Don, but that seemed to be beyond him. He felt off-balance, for all he was firmly on the floor.
"I didn't actually have a plan," he admitted.
Don snorted, shifted off of him entirely, and sat up. c was cold without him, and almost weightless. He sat up too, hugging his knees.
"You gotta have a plan," Don said firmly, and then glanced at his watch. "Shit, c, it's three in the morning. Go to bed."
Three in the morning is an arbitrary construct, he thought, but he said nothing, nodding and stealing a last curious glance at the only person who'd ever told him the time. He went to his cot, lay down and pulled the sleeping bag over himself. It wasn't as warm as Don, and the cold crept up through the canvas of the cot, but it was better than nothing. c was tired, suddenly, now that he was horizontal. The lights went out, and he heard the rustle of Don getting back into his sleeping bag, and a muttered, "Night."
"Night," c whispered back, smiling uncontrollably, invisible in the dark, and then he fell asleep.
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