Missing Persons

They had guns.

Charlie had gotten so used to people with guns that it didn't immediately strike him as strange--never mind threatening--and then the guns were pointed at him, and hard hands were yanking him off his bike. They barely let his feet touch the ground as they hustled him toward a car. He looked around desperately in the gray light before dawn, and saw only two other people, one on a bike and another walking.

He opened his mouth to yell--for help, as a warning--but someone hit him hard in the mouth. He was still seeing stars as a gun fired twice, very loud, very close to his ear. He saw the walker and the person on the bike both crumple to the ground as his mouth filled with blood, and he didn't even think about resisting further. A rough hand reached into his pocket, took his cell phone and tossed it to the ground with a small plastic clatter, and then they shoved Charlie into the backseat of the car.

No one had said a word.

Don heard about the mess at CalSci about ninety seconds after he got into the office that morning. The shootings kicked up jurisdictional issues out the ass with one body in the street and one on university property, and three or four different agencies were fighting over turf. So far, the Bureau was keeping its nose out. If the rumors floating around were true, though, about single-shot kills from a distance, sooner or later people would start thinking sniper, and then they'd be hauled in again. If it was another copycat, months after the last sniper case, kicking off another chain of copycats... Don didn't want to think about it.

Through the day, Don left Charlie a handful of voice mails: breezy, annoyed, teasing, and terse in succession, calling whenever he could spare enough time to get to a part of the office with decent cell reception. He and Terry and David were up to their necks in evidence for the Magruder case, trying to get warrants. Don knew it was stupid to be stealing attention from it to worry about Charlie--he was Dr. Charles Eppes, people would be talking about it if anything had happened to him, and they would be talking about it to Don--but it nagged at him anyway.

He went over to the house for dinner, hoping to see Charlie and stop thinking about the damn shootings, get his head back into his own work--or get the scoop on them, if Charlie had been incommunicado all day because he'd been sticking his nose into the case--but his dad said Charlie had been at school all day.

"He called last night at midnight and told me he was going to stop by his office for a few minutes before he came home," his dad said, waving a hand. "I locked the doors and went to bed. Charlie probably fell asleep at his desk. He does that sometimes when he's got a big project."

He gave Don a little look, like he was scrupulously not saying A big project involving math, not that you pay any attention to Charlie's work when it doesn't involve your work, which was a lot to not say in a split-second glance. Don heard it loud and clear anyway, including his dad's merciful decision not to get into it right then. "He'll come home when he gets hungry."

Don grinned. "He's not a cat, Dad."

He thought about mentioning the shootings, but bit his tongue. There was no need to worry his dad if he didn't know about it. It was early yet; maybe the rumors were wrong, maybe it wasn't any kind of sniper at all.

His dad smiled back and said, "No, he's a grown man, and he'll be here when he gets here. Now grab a couple of plates, dinner's almost ready."

They ate together, just Don and his dad, and Don soaked up his dad's total unconcern over everything. They talked about baseball, and about his mom, which they never did with Charlie. His dad told Don stories about when Don was little--before Charlie was born--and Don tried to remember the last time he'd hung out with his dad without Charlie around. It was kind of nice.

The doorbell rang as they were clearing off the table, and Don went to see who it was as his dad made up a plate to put in the fridge for Charlie. It was Amita, and she smiled as brightly as ever at Don. He smiled back automatically.

"Hey," Amita said, "I just needed to talk to your brother," and right then Don knew, even though Amita was still smiling, even though his dad was still humming in the kitchen.

He saw Amita's eyes widen as he said, "He wasn't at school today?"

He had to get his voice under control; that had come out harsh, unsteady. He had to be under control for this.

She shook her head, starting to look scared instead of just startled. "I haven't seen him all day--I tried calling twice, but he didn't answer, and Larry hasn't seen him--"

Behind him, his dad called out, "Don, who is it? Don't keep them standing on the doorstep there, you're as bad as your brother."

Don shut his eyes, shut out the sight of Amita's face, closed off the thought process--he should call local law enforcement, he should call Terry, he should give Charlie's cell a call just to rule it out--and put a calm, professional smile on his face.

"It's just Amita," he said, looking back at his dad's untroubled face. "Charlie gave her a message for me, that's all. I'm gonna go get him."

"Oh," his dad said, frowning slightly, but Don could see him dismiss it. "All right, then."

Don nodded, grabbed his keys, and stepped out onto the porch. Amita was still standing there, and she looked more scared than ever.

"Don," she said in a small voice.

"Come on," Don said, "I'm gonna want you to tell me everything you know in the car."

He called Terry, because it was still hours too early to call anybody in an official capacity without some kind of solid evidence. She didn't bother telling him any of the things he already knew about time frames and procedures, just said she'd meet him on campus. They checked Charlie's office first, and though it was a mess there was no sign of struggle. Nothing seemed to be missing. Charlie's backpack and jacket were gone. Amita checked some programs he'd left running on the computer and said it looked like he'd been there until around five in the morning.

They checked the nearest bike rack next. Amita seemed encouraged when they found Charlie's bike was gone, and Terry shot Don a grim look and sent her back inside, telling her to keep trying Charlie's cell phone.

"Okay," Terry said, when Amita was out of earshot. "So he took his bike from the rack and headed for home at five in the morning, and now it's been fourteen--"

"Closer to fifteen," Don muttered, looking around, checking the lines of sight to the bike rack.

"Close to fifteen hours," Terry finished, her voice clinical, steady, as if this was just a case. "If he'd been in some kind of accident, he'd have turned up by now, since he appears to have had his ID with him. If he decided on his own to disappear--"

"The shootings were over here," Don said, and started down the sidewalk, not quite letting himself break into a run. When he got out of the shadow of the building, he was looking out at the street and parking lot where the bodies had been found, and--

"Home's that way," Don said, pointing. "If Charlie took his bike from here and headed on a straight line toward the house, he'd have biked right through that parking lot at five in the morning."

"Word is the bodies were found about five-forty," Terry said. "So we've got at least a circumstantial connection."

Don started walking, and Terry followed him without saying a word. He passed one scuffed chalk outline and then another, skirting the remaining streamers of crime-scene tape. Don looked around desperately, trying to triangulate to--to what? To where Charlie's body had fallen? To--

He just stood there, staring into the falling darkness, his mind skipping from one possibility to the next: crime-scene snapshots of Charlie, bloodied, beaten, Charlie's wide eyes blank, Charlie, Charlie, and then Terry said, "Don," in a low, urgent voice. She'd gotten ahead of him, and when she started running, he had to sprint to catch up. When she stopped short between two cars, he nearly ran into her.

He didn't understand what was going on until she dropped to her knees, and when he crouched beside her, he heard it, saw it. Charlie's cell phone was vibrating on the asphalt, rattling in a slight indentation. Of course it was on vibrate, Charlie would never hear it if he was working, but usually he'd feel it in his pocket, or he'd leave it balanced somewhere and hear the clatter when it fell. Charlie complained sometimes that they should offer interesting vibration rhythms as well as ringtones, Charlie--

Don lunged for the phone, hand grasping for that tiny plastic connection to his brother, but Terry held him back. "Don, gloves."

She reached into her pocket for one and used it to pick up the vibrating phone. Don spotted the smear of blood on the blue plastic just as it went still.

Don sat down like his strings had been cut, right about the time the local PD showed up to check into this possible third crime scene to go with their murders. Terry took the liberty of calling the AD to alert him to the potential kidnapping case--Charlie being who he was, the AD didn't say a word about her calling him directly, just said he'd assign a couple of agents right away--while Don sat on a curb with his head down. Terry was tempted to join him, but one of them had to keep going, and if this was a real case--involving Don's baby brother--he really shouldn't be any closer to it than he absolutely had to be.

Terry was standing beside Amita, keeping a steadying hand on her shoulder as the police began to question her, when Don's phone started to ring. Terry squeezed Amita's shoulder and went to Don, who had taken his phone out of his pocket and was staring at it like he'd never seen it before.

"Don," she said, looking around for a police officer, wondering how they could record the ransom demand, "Don, is it--"

"It's my dad," he said. His voice sounded rusty, and he shut off the phone altogether, stopping the sound in mid-ring. "Probably wants to know where I am. Where Charlie is."

Terry looked away while Don buried his face in his hands, and then he said, "I'm going to have to--Terry, I have to go, I have to--"

"I'll drive," she said firmly. "You're in no condition."

Don just nodded, and she gave him a hand up. He let go as soon as he was on his feet. He didn't say a word, not to Terry, not to Special Agents Henne and Preston, who'd shown up and started taking over the scene, flashing their badges and pulling rank on the police--not even to Amita, who was trying desperately to hold herself together. Terry told Preston where they were going, and Preston gave Don an unhappily assessing look which Don, thankfully, didn't seem to notice. Preston took down the address and said he'd see her soon.

Terry kept her hand on Don's arm, guiding him through the parking lot to where she'd left her car. He buckled himself in and then sat frozen; she didn't think he was even breathing. She couldn't let herself think about what they were about to do. She'd had to deliver a lot of bad news in her career, but never like this. Never to family.

Don flinched when she turned off the car in front of the house, and she said softly, "Don, do you want me to tell him?"

Don shook his head. "I've got to. I can't let him hear it from someone else."

At any other time she would have objected to the idea that she was "someone else," but Don sounded like nothing but his resolve was holding him together and there was no point keeping him out here arguing about it.

Terry nodded and said, "I'll come in with you."

Don didn't object, or give any other sign that he'd heard her.

The front door was locked, though there were lights on in the living room. Don let them in, and they only made it as far as the foyer before Mr. Eppes appeared. "Don! I've been trying to call both of you, where have you--"

He stopped short when he spotted Terry, and gave her a puzzled smile. "Hello, Terry."

"Mr. Eppes," she said, nodding, and set her hand lightly at the small of Don's back.

"Dad," Don said, and Mr. Eppes' attention was immediately riveted on his son. Don's voice sounded broken, sounded naked like she'd never, ever heard it before, and he reached out a hand to his father. Mr. Eppes took it in a tight grip; she could see the tendons standing out in his wrist.

"Dad," Don repeated. "Dad, Charlie is--"

Mr. Eppes pressed his free hand over his mouth, his eyes widening as his face went sickly pale, and Terry could hear Don choking on the word missing while the word dead hung horribly almost-audible in the air.

"We believe he's been abducted," she said quickly, because she couldn't leave either of them to suffer until Don could get the words out. "He hasn't been seen since early this morning, and we found his phone near a crime scene. The investigation is getting underway right now."

Mr. Eppes stared at her blankly, and then pulled Don to him in a tight hug. Don leaned his head on his father's shoulder like a little boy. Terry could see him shaking, but stayed where she was, outside their two-man knot of grief. She heard Don say, "I'm sorry," in a faint, unsteady voice, but she had no idea who he might be apologizing to.

Charlie, probably, knowing Don.

"I'll go," she said quietly. "Don, don't forget to turn your phone back on."

It was a very strange sensation. Charlie could feel that he was cold, and he could feel the place where the inside of his elbow hurt because they'd stuck him with needles, and he could even feel the place where they'd hit him in the mouth hard enough to bleed, but he didn't care.

He didn't care about much of anything, but he could still think, in a slow scattered fuzzy way. He thought he had good reasons not to answer their questions, so he didn't. He giggled when they got angry with him, even though it wasn't exactly funny. He recited digits of pi whenever they asked for numbers, no matter what numbers they asked for. He knew a lot of digits of pi. Probably all the numbers anyone could want were in there somewhere, if you went on long enough.

They asked him a lot of things he didn't know--things nobody knew, codes and decryption keys, impossible things--but he never told them he didn't know. He had a feeling it was important for them to think he knew.

They dumped a bucket of water over him and left him shivering on a dirt floor until he started to care again, the giggles and the floating sensation ebbing away into the muddy floor. Caring was a sick cold feeling in the pit of his stomach, a throbbing behind his eyes, fear rising up to choke him--but he knew it was all just a matter of time. He was holding up his end. He was keeping them talking. He was staying alive, mostly unhurt. Don would be there soon. Don would find him.

Nobody had to tell Don not to go to work when there was a command post in the dining room, but Terry showed up around nine in the morning to tell him anyway.

"You're on leave for at least the rest of the week, no matter what, AD's orders," she said.

Don just nodded. He hadn't slept, but he'd showered and changed clothes and downed a lot of coffee and talked, one at a time, to Henne and Preston and Abrams and Cash, watched them come and go and make a lot of quiet, urgent phone calls. Everything was sharp-edged and remote. Charlie had been missing now for twenty-eight hours. There had been no ransom demand, no contact from the kidnappers.

Don wasn't allowed to touch the files being assembled six feet away. His father was handling production of coffee and breakfast for everyone in the house. Terry was crouching in front of him where he sat in an armchair, looking up at him intently.

"David and I have the Magruder case under control, don't even think about it."

"Yeah," Don said. "No, I won't."

A latex-gloved hand touched his shoulder, and Don looked up at a woman in a vaguely medical uniform.

"I need to take a sample," she said. "For DNA testing."

Don stared blankly for a moment before he nodded and rolled up his sleeve. Terry squeezed his shoulder and disappeared.

Larry's first impulse, when he came around the corner and spotted Amita sitting on the floor with her back against his office door and her face in her hands, was to flee. It might save steps, to go straight to Charles and ask him what on earth he'd done now, and get him to apologize before the star-crossed love of Doctors Eppes and Ramanujan destroyed the delicate departmental détente between Math and Physics.

He became distracted by the words--delicate departmental détente--and stopped walking, and then Amita looked up. She was pale, her face bare of makeup and tear-stained, her eyes red. Larry remembered abruptly--how could he have forgotten?--that Derek Albright from Applied Physics had been shot dead yesterday morning, along with an undergraduate named Casey from over in GeoSci. Just possibly, Amita and Charles' nascent romance was not the issue here.

He hurried across the short distance as Amita pushed herself to her feet, his mouth was open on a question he couldn't voice as Amita said, "Larry, the killers--they took Charlie."

His verbal skills never really blossomed under stress, but Larry knew he would think later that staring mutely at Amita, his mouth hanging open, was a particular low point. For now, he didn't care: Amita was crying again and Charles was lost.

Larry thought he should probably hug Amita, or at least bring her into his office, but she blocked his path to the door. He stood staring out the windows at the bright morning sunshine, listening to Amita's muffled sobs in the summer-silent corridor, thinking about all the things you could never really grasp when you first heard about them: black holes, an infinite universe, zero Kelvin. And this.

Don spent a couple of hours thinking of things Henne should be doing, and telling Henne to do them. After Don's dozenth good idea, Henne said, "Fuck, Eppes, I know how to do my job, let me do it!"

He ended on a near-shout that woke something Don had been trying to let sleep, and Don was swinging quicker than he could think. He'd have broken Henne's nose if his father hadn't caught his wrist, jerking him back and forcing him to turn away.

Don yanked out of his father's grip, rubbing his shoulder awkwardly with a hand that didn't want to uncurl from its fist, not looking at anyone, fury shaking through his veins. His father said, "Why don't you go outside for a little while, Don," and he went.

He knew there was nothing he could do. He just couldn't stand doing it.

Don was standing in the garage, looking at the chalkboards, when Henne came out to talk to him. Charlie had erased something sloppily on one of them, so there were broken bits of numbers around the edges. Don reached out and touched the smear of chalk dust, and when he took it away there were clean, empty spaces on the board where his fingers had been.

He turned around at a knock on the doorframe, and Henne was standing on the threshold, only a little warily.

"You wanna sit down?" Henne asked, gesturing vaguely toward Charlie's papasan chair. Don kicked over a milk crate and sat on that instead, letting his hands hang open between his knees, and Henne walked over and crouched in front of him, looking him steadily in the eye.

"We found the car they took him in," Henne said. He didn't sound happy about it, and Don was glad he hadn't been macho enough to stay on his feet for this. His stomach was somewhere around his shoes as it was. He covered his eyes with one hand and nodded, and Henne went on.

"It was abandoned in the parking lot of a 7-11 in Glendale. No surveillance tape, and we haven't found any witnesses yet. There was a small amount of blood in the back seat. The type matches Charlie's, we're still running the DNA comparison. We found fingerprints on the rear window. They were smeared, but we picked up partials, and they match Charlie's. They were the only useable prints we could pull from the entire vehicle."

Don looked up, trying to think. "Smeared, like--they started to wipe them off and didn't finish?" That could be good, if they were getting sloppy, or bad, if they were feeling pressed.

Henne's mouth went tight, and he shook his head a little. "Dragged," he said, clipping the word off sharply. "Three or four inches."

Don could see it, sickeningly clearly: the mark of a hand trying to gain purchase on a smooth surface, pulled away. He put his head in his hands and tried to push the image away, to think. Everything he wanted to suggest now--check tire tracks, check for stolen cars in the vicinity, check, check, check--Henne and Preston and the others who were actually seeing the evidence would already have thought and tried. Henne was only being polite, updating him like this.

"We're trying to run down the attendees of the lectures he gave last month on his work with you, but they were pretty much open to the public and no one's come forward to mention anyone suspicious yet. We're doing everything we can, Don, you gotta believe me."

"I know," Don said quietly. He did know; he'd watched enough of their activity to know. The case just wasn't breaking. No ransom demand, no contact, no sloppy trail of evidence, just Charlie's blood and prints in a car in Glendale.

"Thanks," he muttered, and Henne nodded, straightened up and left. Don waited until he was gone before he got up and stumbled as far as Charlie's chair, sinking down into its unsteady hollow and closing his eyes.

Sometime around thirty-six hours they found Charlie's backpack, abandoned on a public transit bus in North Hollywood. About the same time, Charlie's bike turned up at another bike rack on campus, a quarter of a mile from where they'd found his phone, locked up with Charlie's bike lock. That night, a plastic bag containing his clothes--right down to socks, shoes, and underwear--was found in a bathroom stall at LAX. The fingerprint and DNA searches for the spaces involved yielded up dozens of possibilities, a dizzying array. The prints were almost certain to be mostly worthless, and odds were good any real evidence would be lost in the noise. There were no prints or DNA on any of the items themselves except Charlie's.

There was blood on Charlie's shirt, and wrapped up in his jeans was a Ziploc bag full of what appeared to be Charlie's hair. It had all been cut, not pulled out, so there was no testable DNA.

Don looked at the plastic bag, the mess of dark disconnected curls under the harsh light, for barely a second. Then he turned and walked into the kitchen and threw up in the sink.

Charlie started answering their questions properly after they broke the little finger on his left hand (it wasn't fair for something so small to hurt so much, he couldn't believe how much it hurt, couldn't think of anything but how much it hurt and how many more fingers he had). He stammered and mumbled and repeated himself, making things up when he didn't know what they meant.

He only said "I don't know," when it wasn't true, I don't know, I don't know in time to the beat of his heart and the nauseating waves of pain. I don't know, I don't know, and it drowned out everything, even Don is coming, Don will find me.

At 4:59 AM--forty-seven hours and fifty-nine minutes after Charlie disappeared--Don was sitting on the edge of the tub in the bathroom he'd once shared with his brother, his cell phone in his hands. It hadn't rung since his father had last tried to call him.

The time turned over to 5:00 and Don held his breath, the bright white light of the overhead fixture seeming brighter, stinging his eyes. At 5:01 he tried to inhale and started to cry in wracking, painful sobs, inadequately muffled against his hands, even as he told himself that forty-eight hours didn't really mean anything. He didn't stop until he passed out on the floor, half from hyperventilation and half because he hadn't slept in days.

He woke up twelve hours later. His dad had tucked a folded towel under his head and covered him with a blanket, but Don hadn't missed anything. There were no new developments. Sixty hours in, Charlie was just as missing as he'd ever been.

On the fifty-eighth day, there seemed to be calendars everywhere, reminding him of the date. Don kept his eyes turned down, kept looking away. Terry was watching him; Terry knew why.

He could barely do paperwork. Every time he signed anything he had to date it, nine five zero five. Thirty years to the day after nine five seven five--the date Aunt Irene had embroidered on a soft yellow blanket--the date Don's life had changed forever. The date his father had lifted him up to the edge of a hospital bed and introduced him to his brother.

Don sat in a bar, buying drinks just often enough that no one encouraged him to move it along, barely tasting them. Fifty-eight days. They hadn't even begun to plan a party before it happened, though Don had made some threats on the basis of his own thirtieth birthday. He hadn't had the faintest idea what he was going to do for a present, and wouldn't have come up with anything until the weekend before, maybe the night before. Twenty-nine years of baseball cards and books with numbers on the covers. He'd been sure he could do better this year, sure that he and Charlie were really getting to know each other, working together.

So much for that. This year he hadn't gotten Charlie a present at all.

After midnight, Don stood on the sidewalk outside the bar, ran himself through a couple of field sobriety tests just to be sure, and then drove to his dad's. The house looked dark and quiet, and he let himself in with his key, walking softly toward the stairs only to stop short at flickering bright light in the living room. Charlie was on the TV screen, seven years old, his mouth moving without sound as he talked to their father behind the camera; Don could almost hear him.

Charlie's head turned abruptly, and he dashed away from the camera, and then Don could hear him, memory washing over him with almost hallucinatory clarity: it had been Charlie's seventh birthday, and Don had been twelve and bored and ignored. He'd climbed up a tree and onto the garage roof, and launched a paratrooper attack with GI Joes, including a couple of the new recruits Charlie had just unwrapped.

On the screen, Charlie ran toward the garage, into the bright plastic hail of action figures, screaming. Don remembered the rough shingles under his belly and elbows, remembered Charlie's high, thin voice yelling, "Don, stop it, stop it, you're killing them!" The picture jerked and Charlie was kneeling on the grass, gathering up GI Joes and clutching them protectively close, small and bright in the scratchy, faded image, his head down and his face invisible.

Don walked into the living room and sat down on the floor, a stack of video tapes between him and his father's knee. Twenty-three years ago Charlie bounced to his feet, laughing again with his arms full of toys, and ran.

Coop showed up two days later out of the blue, on his way from somewhere else to somewhere else. He called from an hour away. Don named a bar outside of town, and Coop said he'd be there when he got there. His father was watching him as he hung up his phone.

"David," Don said calmly. The lie was as smooth and easy as any he'd ever told undercover, and the easing of worry in his father's face was its own reward.

"I think it's girl trouble," Don added with a wink, and his father was drawn in, snorting a half-laugh.

"He should be talking to someone who knows something about it," his dad said.

Don just smiled. "I'll be home for dinner," he said, lightly, like there was no question of him not being home for dinner, and his father nodded.

He was at the front door when his father called from the kitchen doorway, "I love you, Don."

He looked back, wondering if he'd fooled his father for a second, if his father thought this might be the last time he'd see Don for weeks, months, forever, and was letting him go anyway.

"I love you too, Dad," he said, but he didn't quite pull off the smile.

Coop was there before him, and the bartender set their beers down as Don settled onto a stool.

"So, I heard," Coop said, and there was no need to say what he'd heard. "Came as soon as I could."

Don nodded. It was no wonder it'd taken a while for word to get to Coop; they'd ruled out any kind of public media appeal early on, knowing that the kind of professionals who had Charlie wouldn't be swayed by a tearful father but might be spooked by an angry brother in the FBI. Spooked kidnapers meant dead victims. Don's throat closed on the beer, and he set the glass down hard.

Coop's shoulder bumped his. "Kind of surprised to find you here, as a matter of fact."

And that was the reason Don had had to see him, no matter what his father was home thinking right now. Billy Cooper was the one person Don would never fool with the Dutiful Agent scam he was running.

"Yeah," Don said slowly, "Well, right now I got nowhere else to be."

Coop nodded at that. He might generally support going off half-cocked, as long as it meant going sooner, but Coop knew as well as Don did that Don was only going to get one shot at this thing. He had to sit tight and pull down every scrap of intel he could get before he made his move.

"You know Eddie's still in business, down in El Cajon."

Don nodded. Eddie was strictly gray market: guns and prescription drugs and anything else almost legal and totally untraceable. Information, too, when you put the right kind of squeeze on him, which was how Don and Coop had gotten to know him in the first place.

"If I need anything, I'll know where to find it," Don said. He'd want a weapon that wouldn't get back to him, or to anyone else, when the time came.

"Yeah," Coop said. "Figured you would."

Coop gave him a thoughtful, measuring look that reminded Don of the first day of their partnership, the skeptical way Coop had said, "So you're our new manhunter, huh?"

Don sat up a little straighter, and Coop gave him a small smile and a smaller nod, and started talking about baseball.

They finished their beers, and Don didn't ask whether Coop wanted another, but tapped his fingers against his empty glass and said, "I better get home."

"Yeah, I got places to be, unlike some people," Coop said. They walked out to the parking lot together, and hugged one-armed between their trucks. Coop grinned at Don as he unlocked his door. "Tell Charlie the next round's on him, next time I'm in town."

Don grinned, feeling the same anticipatory surge of adrenaline he'd always gotten from working with Coop, looking forward to a job about to go down. The certainty rushed through him that he could do this, he would do this, and he and Charlie and Coop would be back here drinking beers together somewhere down the road.

"I'll tell him," Don said, and Coop slammed his door and drove off without looking back.

When the break came on the seventy-third day, it wasn't the oblique reference or buried allusion Don had told himself to expect; it was right at the top of the daily Bureau briefing. He read it through, forcing himself to keep still and quiet, pressing his hands to his desk to keep them from shaking, and only looked up after he'd scanned it, carefully, three times. No one was looking at him. No one was shouting that this was it. No one else saw what Don was seeing.

Three days earlier, a coordinated crew of six had robbed a shipment of condemned cash headed for destruction from the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis. They'd taken less than a quarter of the cash--close to $20 million, not a shabby payday--and had executed the robbery in slightly under two minutes. The driver of the armored truck had reported that one of the men had actually called off a countdown as they worked, which appeared to have been the limiting factor on how much money was taken. They'd gotten away clean, leaving no useable physical evidence. Their faces had been masked.

No one had used the word mathematical precision in describing the job in the briefing, but it was all Don could think of. This was the job Charlie had stopped the Charm School Boys from pulling, but this time it had been done right.

Don knew what he wanted to check next, but he also knew enough to know that this was the earliest of early indications. He had to risk a reality check before he spiraled off completely into investigation by wishful thinking.

"Terry."

Terry looked over her shoulder at him and then swiveled her chair in his direction, giving Don her undivided attention.

"What's up?"

Don tilted the briefing toward her. "You see this? Robbery of a shipment of cash headed out of a Federal Reserve bank for destruction?"

She nodded. "Little bit like the Charm School Boys, except there was no pattern of bank robberies leading up to it. So really not like the Charm School Boys at all."

Don nodded slowly. "Yeah, yeah. I guess not."

Terry was watching him closely now. "Don? You think it is?"

Don shrugged. "It's obviously not them, they're all in prison."

And not a conventional copycat, either: their bank robberies had made the papers, but the public had never heard about the biggest heist the Charm School Boys didn't pull off. He'd told Charlie a lot about how that went down, bragging to his wide-eyed baby brother.

Terry nodded, and then stood up and walked over to him, leaning over his chair without quite touching him, speaking too softly to be heard by anyone else.

"Don, how are you doing?"

Don blinked as he looked up at her, as clear-eyed and honest as he knew how to fake. "Terry--"

"Seriously, Don, I know you didn't get much time off, and Henne told me you finally went through the files--" finally, because obviously Terry, for one, had expected him to crack sooner. It might not be long now before she found out she'd been right. "So I want you to tell me, honestly, are you okay?"

Don let his shoulders slump, flipping the briefing shut as he looked away. Terry wouldn't expect him to be able to meet her eyes. "I--you know. Some days, I think I can--and then some days I can't think of anything but--he's still out there somewhere."

When he glanced up at Terry's face, he could see her being kind enough not to say out there somewhere in an unmarked grave, probably.

"Okay," she said finally. "If you want to talk about anything, I'm here, all right?"

Don nodded, and Terry touched his shoulder in passing on her way back to her desk. He set the briefing on a stack of papers and left it there for a day and a half, as though it didn't matter at all. He didn't research anything but their current case from his computer.

At home that night, he started putting it together from publicly available wire reports. There had been no neat pattern of bank robberies leading up to the big heist, but there had been bank robberies.

Four in northern Missouri, all in different cities, in the three weeks before the hit on the armored truck. Eight in Arkansas, three in Southern Indiana, four in western Kentucky and two in western Tennessee. The same MO was shared between no more than two of them. There was no pattern to the frequency or locations.

They'd scored anywhere from two hundred to six thousand dollars, and though some had involved brandished weapons, none had resulted in injuries to bystanders, so in the absence of a pattern they wouldn't be top investigative priorities. They were in different states, local to different FBI field offices, being investigated by a total of eight different agencies, none of which seemed to be talking to each other yet. But they were nearly all inside the St. Louis Fed District, and had all taken place at least four weeks after Charlie was taken and ended two days before the hit on the armored truck, and they were all unsolved.

Charlie had told him once, quite confidently, that bank robbers stuck with a pattern; here were bank robbers who didn't. Charlie had used the pattern to catch the Charm School Boys, but whoever had pulled off these robberies wasn't leaving that kind of trail, and wasn't getting caught.

It was a lot of information, taken together, and it all pointed to a coordinated op planned by someone who was too smart to leave a trail and knew how to get the information they'd need to hit a Federal Reserve shipment. It had Charlie written all over it, but Don didn't think he could--or should--go to Terry and tell her that his evidence was that there was no evidence, the pattern was that there was no pattern.

Even if anyone did believe him--if they accepted that Charlie might be alive, if Don wasn't just strongly encouraged to take a good long leave to get over his brother's death--it would be the same as the original investigation all over again. No one who knew Charlie would have anything to do with it, no one who cared about him, no one whose first priority was getting him out safely.

They would, in fact, want to arrest whoever was responsible for planning these crimes. Don didn't like the thought of Charlie in prison one bit more than he liked the thought of Charlie wherever he was now. If Charlie was doing this, he was under duress, maybe suffering from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, whatever. Charlie needed rescuing, not arresting, and as long as Don was the only one looking into this, he could make those kinds of decisions.

It wasn't like he had any privileged information, anyway; if the people actually investigating these crimes managed to solve them, then they'd find Charlie, and Don would probably thank them for it. But if Charlie was as smart and as good as Don thought he was, nobody else was going to find him.

"Just let me find you, buddy," Don muttered, and then he realized he was talking to his computer, shut it down, and went to bed.

He couldn't act on a single data point, no matter how big it was: after a job like that they'd be long gone, and with $20 million in untraceable cash, they'd have no trouble going just about anywhere. Despite the payday, Don had a feeling that whoever had Charlie wasn't going to want to stop now. They knew what he could do. If they were smart, the next one wouldn't be so high-profile, but they'd pull something else. If Don could find the next crime, maybe he could get a handle on how to find them. Find Charlie.

On the eighty-first day he spotted it: a media report of a robbery three days prior, four armed men cleaning out an illegal high-stakes poker game in Denver. It was estimated they'd made off with close to two million dollars in cash, and naturally, despite the number of witnesses no one had come forward with useful information to identify the thieves. They'd left no evidence, and from what sketchy evidence local law enforcement had put together, they'd pulled the job off like clockwork.

Two data points formed a long and wobbly line in this case, but it was enough for Don to set things in motion. He'd already done most of the background work, but now it was time to get serious. Once he filled out his forms and spoke to the AD--assuring the man he'd speak to Terry and David himself, make sure they were up to speed--the clock was ticking. He was on his way.

The last two weeks were the trickiest. He was already committed but had to wait, had to keep his cool, and he had to continue looking for more information. Terry had an eye on him these days--waiting for the explosion--and if she found out before he was gone, she'd stop him. Luckily they got slammed with cases, one after another--a double murder and then another kidnapping, and this one took four horrible days to solve, following which Don slept twenty-four hours straight without dreaming at all.

When he woke up, he staggered straight to his computer to start prowling his usual news sources for signs of Charlie. It took him less than an hour to find a hotel robbery in Casper, Wyoming that had what Don was starting to consider the hallmarks of one of Charlie's jobs: it involved three men, none of whom matched the vague descriptions from the other two jobs any more than the rest of the population. Nothing about the MO connected it to the armored truck job or the heist in Denver, though Don thought it had a similar feel to one of the bank robberies in Kentucky, nothing he could have put into words. They'd gotten away with about $100,000 and various valuables estimated at twice that. Police had no leads.

Don was starting to feel weirdly proud of this string of slick, competent crimes. Mainly, he supposed, it was the habit of being proud of anything Charlie did. Partly it was the pride of knowing he was the only one who saw the connection between them. But partly...

This was how he'd commit crimes, if he were going to. You couldn't help thinking about it, when your job was to exploit the mistakes the bad guys made. After ten years, he knew just about every trick in the book, but he didn't know how to catch these guys--certainly he'd never be able to make a prosecution stick for most of them--and he had to admire that.

Their only mistake had been taking Don's brother, really--because Don wasn't going to stop until he'd taken Charlie back.

Alan woke up when the door opened, and he had a moment of sleepy confusion--Don was standing in the doorway, must have had a bad dream--but the Don in his doorway was far too tall to have come to him when he couldn't sleep. Or at least, he hadn't, not any time in the last twenty-nine years.

"Don," he said softly, and Don came inside, a dark blur in the dark room.

He crouched at the side of the bed, and when Alan reached to turn on the bedside light, Don reached out a hand to stop him.

"Don't," he said quietly, and his voice sounded strange. Not so far from that brave but frightened six-year-old after all. "Dad, I have to--"

And Alan knew, right then, that he was about to lose the only son he had left. He caught Don's wrist, unable to say a word.

Don shook his head, but didn't pull away from his father's grip. "Dad, I think there's a chance--like, a crazy, win-the-lottery kind of chance--that Charlie is still alive."

Alan caught his breath; it hurt to hope for that, to think of what Charlie's life might be like right now if he was still alive, and Don was talking about a big gamble for even that much.

"And I think there's a chance--like a struck-by-lightning-while-holding-the-winning-ticket chance--that I can find him. Dad, I think I can find him. I can bring him home."

Alan could see that, dreamlike and vivid: a slip-of-paper victory burning to ash in Don's lightning-struck fingers. He couldn't imagine Don bringing Charlie home at all.

"Donnie, don't do this. I can't lose both of you."

Don shook his head. Stubborn, always stubborn. Why had they ever told their little boy that he had to look out for his baby brother? Why had he ever listened?

"Dad, I have to. If there's a chance and I didn't try--"

And yet Alan couldn't bring himself to say to his son, There's no chance. Even to himself, he couldn't say Charlie is dead. And if Alan couldn't pull him back from this, then Don was already lost. Alan could see it clearly there in the dark, and maybe he'd always known it. Maybe Don had been lost to him from the moment Charlie was taken. Maybe it had all been borrowed time since then.

He raised his hand from Don's wrist to his cheek, and his son smiled unsteadily under his hand.

"I can't stop you," he said softly. Don's smile winked out.

Alan leaned up on one elbow. "Go with God," he said softly. "Find your brother. I love you both."

Don bowed his head, and Alan pressed a kiss to his hair, as dark and soft as the day he was born. Then he lay back and closed his eyes, and did not watch his son go away.

There was something unspeakably terrible about the sight of Don's desk, empty and clean. Terry forced herself to keep walking, and sat down in her own desk chair only a little hurriedly. There was an envelope tucked under her keyboard, a proper memo dated twelve days before, from Don to her and David, notifying them of his upcoming indefinite leave of absence. On a Post-It, in smudgy pencil, he'd written, I couldn't tell you. You'd have stopped me.

He hadn't resigned, then: that was something. He was allowing for the possibility that he'd come back. The Post-It, on the other hand, was alarming. She tore it from the page, crumpled it and shoved it in her pocket; eating it or burning it would be far too conspicuous. Then she picked up her purse and briefcase and walked right back out of the office, leaving David to find out for himself when he got in.

She drove over to the Eppes' house, quietly and methodically cursing morning traffic for the entire hour it took. When she knocked at the door, she had to wait a few minutes before Mr. Eppes answered. He gave her an almost wary look, but said rather lightly, "I'm sorry, Terry, but Don can't come out to play today."

She smiled almost despite herself. "Can I come in? Just for a second?"

"For a whole minute, if you want," he said, stepping back from the door.

She waited only until he closed the door behind her to ask, "Do you know where Don is?"

He didn't look surprised, or caught out. "He's visiting friends. Up in Minnesota, I think it was. Getting away for a while, trying to deal with things. It's been hard for him."

Terry nodded. He had his story straight. He'd protect Don as surely as she would.

"Good," she said, "Minnesota, with friends, that's a good place for him to be."

Mr. Eppes nodded, and when he offered her a coffee for the road, she accepted. He made it with milk and sugar, just the way she liked it, and it was a damn sight better than what she could get at the office.

Don had had a bag of IDs and cash in a storage locker, just waiting, for weeks. He cleared that out in the middle of the night, and by the time the sun came up he was officially in the wind. He had a choice of names to use, personas of varying stability, even one he'd used before in case he wanted a little history.

Two of the IDs he carried had Charlie's face and stats, just in case Charlie needed someone else to be when this was over.

He drove down to Eddie's, and he saw Eddie notice that he wasn't flashing his badge or asking for information. Eddie nodded, and Don nodded back, looking down at the case of handguns.

"See anything you want?" Eddie asked, after Don had been staring for a few minutes and the only other customer in the store had edged away.

He wanted his Glock. It fit in his hand like an old friend; he'd fired a good thousand rounds with it in the last three months, thanks nearly entirely to the shooting range. It had his fingerprints all over it, inside and out, and it was publicly and traceably registered to Don Eppes, backed by his ten years' exemplary service with the Bureau. Even if it weren't traced, it was FBI standard and might as well say FED on the side in letters of fire.

It was safe in his apartment with his badge, and Don had to fight through a moment like looking down from a rooftop, wanting so bad to go back and get it, get both of them, find some way to make this work on the level despite everything he'd done to get this far. Maybe, maybe he could keep control of the situation, maybe he could make it come out right, if he got lucky, if they listened, if--

But maybe wasn't enough, not when it was Charlie on the line. Don had already made his choice a thousand times, but he stood staring down at the array of weapons available to him and had to make it again. He was about to buy an unregistered handgun under a false identity without observing any kind of waiting period. It wasn't exactly the heat of the moment, rubber meeting the road, but this was the moment he had to make his choice for good.

Don took a deep breath and forgot all about his Glock and his badge. They were behind him now.

He tapped the glass decisively. "The Sig."

It was still a cop's gun, but he'd be damned if he'd carry some nickel-plated gangbanger's toy. "And I'm gonna need a car, something that won't light up every hot sheet from here to Vancouver."

Eddie had a little Honda that fit the bill, and Don's bag of IDs fit into a pocket of the duffle bag he filled with clothes, ammunition, and a backup weapon. The Sig rested under his arm, shoulder-holstered; it felt huge and awkward, but he knew by the time he got where he was going, he'd only notice its absence. It only took him ten minutes to find the hiding place already concealed in the backseat by the last criminal to own this car, thirty seconds to stash his and Charlie's real identification inside where nobody but a fucking narc would find it.

He was on the road barely after daylight, headed east, toward Charlie.

He'd chosen Chicago half randomly--because random was the name of the game--but he'd had his reasons, too. It was a big city, and Don had a better idea of how to operate in big cities than anywhere else. It was inside the territory of the crimes committed so far, which had stayed off the coasts and out of the Southwest, but not a city they'd hit yet. They were going through a lot of personnel, changing crews to keep from attracting attention, and that was going to create a pretty big footprint at a certain level. If they stuck with that technique, they were going to keep going through a lot of personnel, and if Don was in position when they worked their way around to Chicago, he just might manage to be one of them.

It felt almost easy; he knew the kinds of places to go, the attitude to adopt, the things to say to the people who talked to him. Inside of five days (after he'd found word of a robbery in Des Moines, new faces, no leads, a quick million dollars) he was standing behind a middle-tier dealer named Dre, watching over a drug deal, the Sig comfortable in its holster. He'd loaded it with gloves on, no prints on the rounds.

Eleven days later he'd shepherded half his body weight in coke safely onto the streets of Chicago and found newspaper accounts of two more robberies, one in Milwaukee, one in Cincinnati. The Cincinnati job was worrying him: it had included a murder, one of the robbers shooting a security guard in the head on the way out. It was unnecessary, sloppy. He would bet anything they hadn't listened to Charlie on that, and if they weren't listening to Charlie, Charlie was in more danger than ever.

But Don wasn't thinking about that now; he was watching another deal going down, keeping an eye on the other side's guns, because that was his job. When the shouting started and the weapons came out, he pushed Dre behind him with one hand and pulled the Sig with the other, because he was working on autopilot, because he'd had ten years of practice pushing people behind him. And when he saw a gun taking aim--light flashing on the nickel-plating--he brought the Sig down and fired for center of body mass, dropped the shooter cleanly.

They hustled out of there and he didn't think about it, because he'd had years of practice at that part, too. Dre kept thanking him, and Don kept brushing it off. It wasn't until later, until he was back in the bare little room where he was sleeping these days, that he let himself think.

He'd just killed someone--hardly more than a kid, carrying a flashy gangbanger's gun--and not in the line of duty, but to protect a drug dealer, a drug dealer who was paying Don to do that sort of thing so he could go on selling poison to Chicago's kids.

He tried to think about it, poking at what he'd done like a bruise, like skin scraped raw or gashed open. He could see the kid, but only as a body on a slab, a photo tacked up on a bulletin board; in Don's memory he was just a blur eclipsed by the flash of light off his weapon. He thought of the cops who would investigate, who would go down to some south side neighborhood to tell a mother or sister or girlfriend, who would do their best but find nothing: ballistics would be a dead end, forensics at the scene too confused by the crowd who'd been present, witnesses willing to talk as plentiful as free lunches for footsore detectives.

He could only see it as a case; a frustrating one, one that would make him angry with everyone from himself to his team to forensics to--to Charlie--because of the unfairness of it, because no one should get away with a murder just because the victim had been the wrong kind of guy. The thought of having Charlie around to be angry at caught his imagination more than the man he'd killed, and Don put his head in his hands.

He couldn't detach himself from this. This victim wasn't his to investigate, his to champion; he'd killed that kid, he was the perp, the murderer. Don shuddered as it finally, finally hit him, like a physical thing, like a punch in the gut. He felt sick, felt pained, doubling over with his arms wrapped around himself, gasping for air. He'd killed somebody. He'd done this thing, he'd turned his back on everything he'd ever been, and still he couldn't hold that poor dead kid (a life, snuffed out, ended, over forever, just like that, and who knew what he might have been if Don hadn't--) in his mind. Still it was Charlie he kept thinking of.

The sick stabbing pain in his belly was just like he'd dreamed: Charlie whispering "If you loved me you'd have found me by now,", and it felt a little like dying already.

He was a murderer now, a dealer's hired gun. That was what he was capable of, if it meant getting to Charlie--and after tonight, he'd be Dre's favorite. Information, introductions, it would all be a hell of a lot easier to come by, and all he'd had to do was kill some kid in the middle of a drug deal.

Don sucked in a breath, forced himself to lie down like he was going to sleep. As long as tonight got him to Charlie, he'd deal with it. Getting Charlie out was all that mattered now. Charlie was the only one who would have a life worth going back to after this, and Don meant to get him back to it.

Early the next morning, Don went to the post office and rented a box. Later, from a few blocks away, he dropped a heavy, padded envelope in the mail to himself--his wallet, and Charlie's. He could go and get them (go and get his real self, go and get Charlie) anytime he was ready to lay claim to them. For now, they were best kept out of the way.

In the next sixteen days Don found a report of a robbery in Fargo and saw half a news story about a shootout in Billings that seemed to have been sparked by the theft of several labs' output of crystal meth. There was no way of knowing from the half he saw which victims might have been shot during the thefts instead of after; the reporter talked like it didn't make a difference.

He couldn't sleep for more than an hour or two without having horrible, vivid nightmares of prison. It was him on the inside some nights, his father writing him to tell him they'd found Charlie's body, but it was worse when it was Charlie he dreamed behind bars, scared or dead-eyed. It took longer, after he woke up, to convince himself those ones weren't real. He took to cat-napping at odd hours, and spent a lot of his long dark wakeful nights sitting around with Dre, now that he'd become one of the boys. He said as little as he could, but listened to every word, every rumor about who was doing what in Chicagoland.

Sixteen days of listening, talking to Dre's friends and some guy a friend of Dre's knew, and a guy he had sort of heard could be found at a certain bar. That guy talked to a guy he'd worked for one time, and then Don was sitting in a noisy bar, across a table from a man with dirty blond hair and a smile not quite charming enough to raise Don's hackles. Nothing wild-eyed about this one; he was in control and sane and smart. Smart enough to be the guy using Charlie, Don would bet. And now he was interviewing Don for an opening in his organization.

Don watched his eyes for any sign of recognition. If this guy had ever so much as seen a photo of Don it might all fall apart right here. He could get himself killed, get Charlie killed, before he ever got closer than this. But so far, there was nothing. So if this was the guy who had Charlie, maybe he didn't know what Don looked like. Or maybe he didn't have Charlie, and this was a blind alley, and Don was sitting here having a beer with some random criminal while Charlie--no. He had to focus on the lead he had.

The guy was probing Don's past, but Don had had the entire drive across country to practice this and weeks since then to perfect it. He knew his story backwards and forwards, knew how much of it he wouldn't talk about. He was just a guy looking for work in a particular field of expertise. He didn't play any harder to get than anyone in his right mind would, faced with a mysterious job at an undisclosed location with a potential employer lots of people knew about but no one would exactly vouch for.

"I dunno," he said, fiddling with his beer. "We're talking, what? Shooting, smash and grab, something like that?"

"We're talking a lot of money," the guy said, giving Don a critical look.

Don snorted, settling into his identity, letting himself stop thinking about playing a role, stop waiting for the guy to notice his real self behind his alias. "Sure, money's great, unless you're dead. Then it's just paper in somebody else's hand. I like to know what I'm getting into."

The guy was silent, looking him over intently, but Don knew his story. He had nothing to hide. The blond guy said abruptly, "What's the most math you ever took in school?"

Don didn't think he could breathe until he heard himself say in a nicely puzzled voice, "I got to third base with a girl who took calculus, that count?"

The guy barked a loud, sharp laugh, and Don let himself give the guy a skeptical look as he took a sip of his beer to wash the cotton out of his mouth. Math, God, he was talking math. The guy was talking Charlie, this was it, and still he didn't seem to have twigged to Don. Don wanted to laugh, for one dizzy, horrifying second, at the thought that this might work.

"Yeah," the guy said, still smiling, "yeah, that counts just fine. Listen, I hear you do good work on guard duty."

"Yeah, sure," Don said slowly, like he had no idea. "But you look like you can take care of yourself."

"Oh, I do," the guy said. "But there's an item I have. An item that I would prefer not get lost or stolen. Lately I've been thinking it needs more security, and I'm thinking you might be just the man for the job."

And Don was glad, suddenly horribly fucking glad that he'd killed that drug dealer, that kid, because it was going to get him to Charlie. It was going to get this guy to make Don the fox guarding his henhouse. Don took another swallow of his beer and managed not to choke on it.

"Sounds kinda boring, just guarding some package," he said, and he almost actually sounded bored. Close enough for government work, like they used to say.

The blond guy snorted. "Weren't you just saying you wanted to know what you were getting into? Long periods of boredom, doesn't that sound good?"

"Only if I survive the short periods of terror," Don replied, raising an eyebrow.

The guy grinned. "See, smart. Smart. I like that."

"Smart enough to know it sounds like I should be getting combat pay."

They haggled the rest of the way through their beers, and then the blond reached a hand across the table to shake on it--ten grand base and two percent of every haul, not bad since he'd never be anywhere near the action--and said, "Williamson."

"Lenny McDonald," Don replied, without missing a beat.

Williamson grinned, tilting his head. "You don't look much like a Lenny."

Don shrugged easily. "My mom's the only one ever thought I did."

"Right," Williamson said. "Mac it is." He scribbled something down on a coaster and slid it across to Don. Don palmed it without looking.

"Meet me there tomorrow, six sharp. And I mean in the morning. I'll take you up to the location, you can start immediately."

"Sure," Don said, showing Williamson a cocky money-in-the-bank smile when he wanted to beg to go now, now, now. "Tomorrow, six sharp. See you then."

It had been one hundred thirty days since Charlie was taken when Don got into a car with the guy who had probably taken him. It was still dark, cold and--naturally--windy, and the chill got into his bones. Don was wearing a stocking cap and a quilted flannel jacket over his jeans and long-sleeved t-shirt. The Sig was tucked under his left arm in its holster, and he'd tossed his duffle in the backseat before he got in the front.

Williamson didn't say anything, except when they stopped at a drive-thru for coffee, and then he just asked what size. Don drank his coffee and stared out the window as they headed to the freeway. The coffee was bad, but no worse than he was used to. He sipped at it slowly and let the stomach-lining burn of it ground him. He was all nerves and adrenaline, and adding caffeine to the mix was probably a bad move, but he had no idea how much longer he'd have to keep running without a stop. If he and Charlie got an early chance--if Charlie said the wrong thing and blew it inside the first ten minutes--if Williamson did know who Don was and was just driving him out of the city to dispose of him...

Don crumpled the empty cup between his hands and slumped back in his seat, letting the sharp broken corners prick his palms as he watched the road signs go by from under his eyelashes. They were into Wisconsin now, and the sun was well up. A few miles past Janesville, Williamson took an exit and headed out on a two-lane road, north and east into the middle of nowhere. Don watched the turns, estimated the mileage as best he could. Williamson didn't seem concerned about him knowing the route. Given what Don was pretty sure he knew about Williamson, that didn't strike him as a good sign.

Williamson pulled the car into the gravel driveway of an ordinary-looking ranch house with an attached two-car garage on a tidy half-acre lot. There were trees along the fence line between the house and the next one to the north, branches half-bare, leaves gone red and yellow and brown. To the south was a much larger lot, the house set a long way back from the road.

The house had blue aluminum siding, the porch railing painted white. There were dying flowers in the flower beds and the grass had been cleared of leaves and cut in wide, even stripes. Williamson got out and headed up the drive to the side door into the garage, and Don followed him, duffle bag in hand, gauging the distances as he walked.

It was twenty feet from the car to the side door. Fifty feet to the trees at the south property line, a good fifty yards from the side door to the road. It would take ten or twelve seconds, running flat out--twenty under fire, in a serpentine pattern. Maybe as long as thirty, if Charlie was hurt or stumbled, and then there'd better be somebody waiting on the road, and Don had no backup to call for out here. They'd passed all of four cars in the last ten miles.

One last glance around and Don stepped through the door. It was dark in the garage after the dazzle of morning sunshine, and Don had left his sunglasses in a pocket of his coat; he just had time to blink before Williamson grabbed him, wrenching his right arm behind him. Williamson had five inches and forty pounds on Don, and he had Don's gun hand immobilized. Still, Don tensed for a second, about to break the hold, frantic--Charlie, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I blew it--and then his brain caught up with his muscles.

Don relaxed, letting Williamson shove him face-first against the rough-finished wall. It wasn't an all-out attack; if it had been Don would've been dead as he stepped through the door. This was an orientation.

Williamson dragged his right arm high enough to start putting serious strain on Don's shoulder, and Don turned his head and said, "Okay, boss, I got it."

In his peripheral vision, Williamson smiled. "You got it when I say you got it, Smart Mac. I am the boss here. I know more than you do and I am stronger than you are. I am in charge, and there are eight guys in this house who will all kill you as soon as look at you, on my say-so."

Don nodded, and resisted the urge to go up on tiptoe to ease the dull burn in his shoulder; he didn't really need the punch in the back of the head it would probably earn him. He listened to what Williamson was telling him, instead: eight guys. Figure eight hours of sleep apiece a night, so probably only four to six of them were on watch at any given time. If they were getting less sleep, there'd be more awake, but they'd all be less alert. Maybe as few as two or three on watch at night, if Williamson was telling the truth. Maybe Charlie would know, if he'd been paying attention...

"This is not to say I won't stand by my deal with you," Williamson said evenly, and Don trained his eyes on the wall and focused on Williamson's voice again. "But you need to understand how things work around here. We are not a team. I am the boss. You work for me. Everyone here works for me. You copy?"

"I copy," Don said, as calmly as he could.

Williamson would hold him here until Williamson felt his point had been demonstrated, and there was nothing Don could do but let him demonstrate it. Williamson liked Mac because Mac was smart: smart enough to know his place. Terry, Don thought longingly, would already know what Williamson's mother had been like, and whether he'd wet the bed as a kid, and his precise odds of killing Don in the next five minutes just to watch him die.

Williamson stood there in silence for a minute, and Don's skin crawled with the sensation of Williamson's breath on the back of his neck. Then he gave Don a hard little shove and let go. "Turn around, stay against the wall, spread 'em."

Don raised both hands, turned around, and leaned against the wall. Williamson shoved him again, open hand in the middle of the chest, and Don just widened his stance and spread his hands further. Williamson patted him down with his free hand, reaching under Don's jacket to pull the Sig from its holster. He pressed the point of his elbow to Don's chest as he examined the gun two-handed, and Don noted that Williamson never pointed the gun at him as he checked it; he was only going to threaten Don when he intended to threaten him.

Worse and worse: Don hated competent criminals. All the time that he'd been admiring Charlie's work, though, he'd been admiring Williamson's, too. That was crystal clear by now. He hadn't thought enough about that. He hadn't thought enough about a lot of things.

Williamson jammed the Sig back into its holster and continued the pat-down, shifting his restraining hand down to jam uncomfortably and unnecessarily hard against Don's belt buckle, just about where that morning's cup of coffee was sitting. He didn't find anything but the spare change in Don's pocket, and nodded in satisfaction.

"Stay there," he said, and Don didn't twitch a muscle as Williamson picked up his duffle and unzipped it. He wondered what he'd have to have in there to get himself summarily shot in the head. IDs for Charlie probably would have done it, but those, along with his own extra sets, were long gone by now. A cell phone might only have gotten him laughed at as it was confiscated, depending, but he hadn't risked it.

Williamson checked Don's backup weapon as efficiently as he'd checked the Sig, noted the boxes of ammunition, rifled through his underwear, checked the toes of his socks and the pockets of his pants, unzipped his shaving kit and examined the contents. He snorted at the first aid kit in the side pocket, opened it up and checked it, but it was all ordinary stuff in single-use packets. He flipped through the worn wallet that contained the McDonald ID and some cash, an old phone card and an expired condom and a piece of paper, soft with age, crumpled and smoothed and neatly folded and entirely blank. Williamson unfolded it, looking it over carefully, and then refolded it neatly and tucked it back in, right next to the condom. He dropped Don's wallet back into the duffle, zipped the bag, and tossed it at Don. Don caught it readily but didn't otherwise move, waiting for whatever would happen next.

"Well," Williamson said, turning toward the door into the house. "I guess it's about time you met him."

"Him," Don repeated neutrally, heart suddenly pounding double-time, feeling fluttery and wild in a way that he couldn't honestly blame on exhaustion or caffeine. This was it, this was really it. Charlie.

Williamson glanced over his shoulder with a knowing smile. "Hoping for a her?"

Don smiled crookedly back and shrugged, hoping his inability to get another word out looked like some kind of nonchalance. Williamson led him through the ordinary-looking kitchen of the house. There were two guys sitting at the table, both prominently armed, and Williamson said, "Sam, Jimmy, Mac," without particular direction as he unlocked the basement door. Don supposed Sam and Jimmy would get the drift, and he at least had two names to go with two faces.

He took a quick glance around, noting that Sam and Jimmy had lines of sight on both the garage door and the basement door, while the fridge and cupboards blocked the line from one door to the other. It would be a bad corner to get caught on. The other option was a doorway that probably led into the front room, but that would be worse, a complete U-turn in full view of the men at the table.

Williamson stepped back from the door and gestured for Don to precede him down the stairs. They were bare wood, and the floor at the bottom was cement. In the light of a bare bulb, Don could see a heavy door to the left at the bottom of the stairs, locked and barred from this side. A bright orange extension cord was plugged in to a socket and disappeared under the door. The framing around the door was solid, the gap above the floor barely allowing the extension cord to pass. The door wasn't getting busted down from the inside, not without SWAT gear. If he was locked in with Charlie, they'd be sitting tight for a while; any escape would rely on seizing a moment when the door was opened for them.

"Here," Williamson said, behind him, stepping to the right at the bottom of the stairs, switching on another light. Don turned his back on the locked door and looked at the other half of the basement, washer and dryer and furnace and water heater, shelves of unmarked boxes and various supplies. Williamson grabbed a sleeping bag, rolled up and tied with a ground mat and pillow, and handed it to him. Don took it, suppressing the giddy thought that this was just like going to camp as a kid, duffle in one hand, sleeping bag in the other. Waiting to meet his bunkmate, already calculating how soon he could call his dad and say he wanted to come home.

"You need anything, you use this," Williamson said, holding out a compact walkie-talkie. Don started to shift his loads to free a hand, but Williamson grinned and tucked it into the front pocket of his jeans.

"Banging on the door's a little unscientific," Williamson explained, without backing out of Don's personal space.

Don nodded and didn't back away from Williamson, holding his gaze steadily. Williamson jerked his chin toward the door and said, "Well, in you go, then. You're on the clock, Mac."

Don turned, shifting everything to his left hand as he took the few steps to the door, and lifted the bar. His hand didn't shake as he turned back the deadbolt. He had to take a step back as he pulled the door open, and Williamson was right behind him as Don took his first look inside.

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 t