Prison Break fic: A Walk-On Part in the War 16/20
TITLE: A Walk-On Part in the War
RATING: This chapter is rated NC-17.
PAIRINGS: Michael/Alex, Michael/Sara, Lincoln/Jane
SPOILERS: It goes AU immediately after ‘Rendezvous’, but select elements from the rest of the season wound up finding their way into the work, great, sprawling thing that it grew into.
SUMMARY: A conscience is a hard thing to get rid of.
Part Sixteen
Sara expected Chicago to be different. She did not know why. She had been gone only a few days, and while she did feel different herself-stripped down, more sure of what she was capable of-surely the difference was not that great. The core of her was still the same woman who had stared down an assassin, stolen a dead woman’s identity, and held a gun on a federal agent. It was even, when Sara had time to realize that this woman was really her, the same city where she had found her father dead. The tall, solemn buildings did not seem to mourn him the way that Sara felt that they ought to, since she herself had been forced to put her own grief on hold.
She would feel better once she was able to lay him to rest, Sara decided. Once she had fulfilled that goal, even symbolically, by finding gout what it was that he had left behind for her to find, then everything else would fall into place like a row of dominoes.
Sara lifted her head from where she had been resting it against the SUV’s window and rubbed at the kinks in her neck. In the backseat, LJ kept jerking his head up as if he was going to give in to the urge to sleep himself at any moment. No one had really been able to rest in the motel the night before, and it was still so early that the sun was more of an ambitious goal than it was a reality. Only Jane seemed fixed and alert. Sara slid her a glance over the console, noted how easy Jane’s posture was in her seat and how relaxed her hands were around the steering wheel.
Jane was clearly utterly terrified.
“They should have called us by now, shouldn’t they?” Sara asked.
Jane flicked her a look and turned back towards the road before Sara could read her expression as anything more than a snapshot taken mostly out of focus. She shook her head, once, and then reached for her cup of coffee. It barely touched Jane’s lips before she was setting it down again. It seemed to Sara that Jane was carefully measuring out each of her reactions into their correct portions, pantomiming the correct emotions rather than actually feeling them. She had not know that Jane could ever be moved enough to give a damn about even pretending.
“Aldo’s gone longer than this without contacting me,” Jane said. Her hand hovered over her cellular phone for a moment before she closed it into a fist. A second drink of coffee did not seem to settle her. “It’s fine.”
‘But you’re still scared,’ Sara thought. They were supposed to be the backup mission, the one that would close the deal if the fact of a living, breathing dead man was not enough to drag the Company blinking forth into the light. Sara hadn’t paused then to wonder if the tall buildings around them would not have a few more bodies before it was all said and done. She did now as she turned back towards her window and found a cuticle to chew on.
“We have a decision to make,” Jane said abruptly from the driver’s seat. She pulled the SUV into the nearly empty parking lot of a convenience store and cut the engine. LJ stirred in the backseat and rubbed at his eyes.
“We there yet?” he asked.
“Close,” Sara said before she turned back to Jane. “We do?”
Jane swished the remains of her coffee around in the cup. For the first time, Sara could see the fine tremble in her hands that Jane could not quite control. “Your face is well-known by now,” she said to Sara. “Everyone loves a scandal and everyone loves a love story, especially when it’s forbidden. You and Michael gave them both.” Sara felt her mouth twist. “You had hardly jumped bail by an hour before you were on CNN.”
“So what does that mean for us?” Sara asked.
Given something to do that was within her wheelhouse and that would distract her from her own worry, Jane relaxed again before Sara’s very eyes. She first at the gun in her shoulder holster and then at a small golden crucifix around her neck before she said, “Wherever you go, the law is going to follow after you very quickly. That means that the Company will be only a few paces behind them. Everything that Ben was able to dig up will be available to them, too.”
Sara shook her head, still not getting it. She had a feeling that Jane was struggling not to roll her eyes at her, for the blonde touched at her gun again before answering. “We can only hit one of those places before the Company knows that we’re in the area. First one ought to be a piece of cake. Second one will get trickier. We might have to abandon it.”
It was not until Jane lifted her eyebrow at her, waiting, that Sara realized that the decision was being left up to her. She leaned back against her door, surprised. Sara had somehow thought that her presence on this mission would amount to being a face that could gain them access to her father’s effects, and possibly as a getaway driver. Two weeks before she never would have thought herself capable of taking such a major role in treason.
Two weeks before, she had also not survived two separate assassination attempts. Sara twisted a strand of hair around her fingers and ignored Jane’s impatient sound. She was learning that she capable of a lot of things that she had not thought possible before. “The cigar bar,” she said at last.
Jane nodded and started the engine again. “Your turf, your choice,” she said. “Just please tell me that you’re going on more than a coin toss here.”
“No,” Sara said. “My dad was carrying the key to the cigar bar on his person when he died. He probably went there to hide the tape.”
“Could have still gone to the box first,” Jane said. She sounded more like a schoolteacher than she did a dangerous killer, suddenly, and oddly prim. Sara looked at her askance. “Why wouldn’t he have?”
“You’re a crappy actress,” Sara told Jane in a flat voice. “You could at least pretend that you’re not testing me here.”
Jane’s smile was glittering and dangerous even when she was trying to be friendly. “I wasn’t hired to be subtle,” she agreed before she made a carry-on gesture. Sara had still not answered.
“Who stops off for a leisurely cigar after learning about whatever is on that tape?” Sara asked. “Quick drink, maybe.” Her father was not a drinker except under the most extreme of circumstances, and even then Sara had smelled no alcohol on him when she had found his body. “No, it’s the cigar club. If we have only one shot at this, that’s the best one to take.”
Jane had been turning the SUV towards the cigar club before Sara had even finished spinning out her reasoning. Her expression was approving. “Very good,” she said before she threw back the rest of her coffee in one long swallow. If Jane’s grimace was anything to go by, it had long since gone cold. Sara did not see how Jane could stand to take in so much caffeine, when Sara’s own nerves were twitching and jittering badly enough on their own.
Sara felt her eyebrow going up of its own accord. “Well, as long as I’m getting a gold star,” she said in a tone so dry that Agent Mahone himself would have had to approve. The cigar club was in sight. Sara could feel her stomach tightening accordingly, until it had formed a ball so tight that she was half-convinced that she was going to form her own personal black hole right there in the center of the vehicle. It was not about the danger alone. Sara could think back across her childhood and recall a great many times when her father had smelled of cigar smoke, most especially during the early days of her rebellion. Mom had been getting really bad by then, and he had taken breaks from the two of them as often as possible, but he had never mentioned this place. It was staggering to Sara to realize how little she actually knew about her father.
‘You and me, Michael,’ Sara thought in a sour internal voice. ‘Two peas in a pod.’ Or separate pods, as the case might be now, but Sara was resolving not to think about that again until she had cleared some of the bigger items off of her desk first.
Jane pulled the SUV into a parking spot and cut the engine. She studied the building with cool, assessing eyes, her expression turning hungry for a moment with whatever it was that was flashing through her mind. Sara actually preferred this Jane to the softer and more human Jane that had been shown to her before. This Jane knew what she was doing.
“I’ll go in with you,” Jane said. She touched at her gun and crucifix again. Sara hoped that she was not planning on keeping that up when they went inside, or else the entire job could become very complicated very quickly. “But I’ll have to stay at the bar while you retrieve the tape. Members and surviving relatives only.”
Meaning that if the situation really turned sideways on them, Sara was probably going to be on her own. Even if Jane did realize that something was wrong, there would be a delay before she was able to come to the rescue. Sara paused for a moment so that she could process all of this before she slipped a baseball cap onto her head to hide her bruise and said, “All right.” She was the recipient of another approving look from Jane. Sara wondered for a moment if Jane maybe could have been a schoolteacher in another life. An incredibly terrifying schoolteacher who would have had the best attendance in the school district, and who would never have to fight with students in order to get them to turn their homework in on time because they wouldn’t dare.
“What do I do?” LJ asked from the backseat. He had shaken off the last of his sleepy demeanor several minutes before. So had Sara, even though she and LJ had not had so much as a sip of coffee between them. For the moment, they were adrenaline twins.
Jane barely threw so much as a glance towards the backseat. “You’re going to watch the car,” she said.
LJ’s face twisted into the ugly and somehow endearing expression that only a teenager could get. Everything was life or death to them. It wasn’t his fault that he had been thrown into a situation where he was very literally wrapped up in matters of life and death. “I can help!” he said hotly in a voice that was probably more shrill than he had intended in order to get what he wanted. “If it’s because I’ve never done anything like this before, Sara doesn’t know what she’s doing, either!” LJ shot Sara an apologetic look as she said it. Sara only lifted her shoulders into a slight shrug. Much as she was determined to go along with the plan, she couldn’t really argue with that logic.
Color rose in Jane’s cheeks for the first time. Her hands clenched around the steering wheel and she exhaled a shaky breath from between her teeth. It as the most overt sign of emotion that she had given either of them yet, and Sara and LJ both stared at her in surprise and something that was nearly horror.
“I’m not going to tell your father that I have your body in the backseat,” Jane snapped at LJ. Her voice cracked, betraying her, and she threw a glance down at the unresponsive cellular phone before she turned a stoic gaze back out the windshield.
‘Oh,’ Sara thought as she understood. It was not what she had expected-she had thought that Jane was twisting herself sick with worry over Aldo alone-but stranger things had happened. Prison doctors and structural engineers turned bank robber. Structural engineer turned bank robber and federal agents turned murderer turned freedom fighter.
Jane did not look as if she was inclined to elaborate while LJ was clearly gearing himself up for another outburst, and they could only sit here for so long before someone peeked in and noticed that one face in particular was extremely recognizable. “We’re all worried about your dad and uncle,” Sara cut in before LJ could get started up again. He made a face at her, having a typical teenager’s tolerance for being spoken down to. “Jane has a point. Your dad will be a lot more worried if we have to bring you back hurt or dead. You’re not a kid, fine. Don’t put us into that position.”
Bringing his father into hit was a low blow, Sara knew as soon as LJ leaned back against his seat. He sucked in his breath and fixed Sara with a wounded look. Sara then did not hold in against him when he snapped back at her, “What if I have to tell Uncle Mike that you’re dead?”
‘He won’t care as much as you think,’ Sara nearly said back, and only just stopped herself. It was petty on the one hand and untrue on the other. The whole situation would be so much easier to bear if she did not think that Michael was every bit as confused by it as she was, and if she really could convince herself that he did not care.
‘This is what happens when you get pulled into arguments with teenagers,’ Sara thought as she looked at LJ’s defiant and nearly triumphant expression. ‘So learn from the mistake and don’t do it again.’
“Your uncle cares for me very much,” Sara replied in a soft voice that made LJ lean back and blink. He had been expecting her to get angry and yell back just as he was yelling. “And I know that he will grieve for me if I don’t come back. But I’m not his kid. It is nothing compared to what Lincoln will feel if get killed in this.” The way that her own father had stepped in again and again to pull her from the fire and ignored each time the way that she had snapped at his hand for his trouble was all the testament that Sara needed to that.
LJ shrank further back into his seat, lowering his head, until he looked much younger than he actually was. Sara felt bad even as she watched LJ gear up for another argument that they did not have the fucking time for now. Jane sighed from the front seat, pulled the keys from the ignition, and turned. Sara did not realize that Jane had grabbed the cellular phone until she thrust it into LJ’s hand. LJ looked nearly as surprised to receive it as Sara was to see Jane willingly give it up.
“If this rings and distracts me in there, someone will be hurt,” Jane told LJ. “Keep the car running. We may need to get away quickly.”
“Oh-okay,” LJ said, looking down at both of the items that had been handed to him. For better or worse, he might now be the first person to hear what had happened to his father and his uncle.
“That was nice of you,” Sara said as the two of them exited the SUV and walked across the street. She adjusted her baseball cap; with her bruise, it was less than comfortable, but she was already on CNN as it was. Jane did not button up her suit jacket, but she did pull it more closely around herself and straightened out the fabric until the gun was no longer visible. Thank God for small favors.
Jane cut Sara a look and then sniffed. “It was necessary. I was telling the truth, if that phone had gone off I would have answered, and maybe gotten you killed because of it.”
“Right.” Sara could not imagine what sort of life that one would have to live in order to make an act of simple compassion into something that brought about defensive reaction. It made the assessing looks that Jane would not stop giving her that much more troubling. “Who knows what might happen if you’re actually human.” Jane had fallen behind her, but Sara still did not need to turn her head in order to know that Jane was pulling a face at her.
They had reached the door. “You’re on your own,” Jane murmured against Sara’s ear. She pressed her fingers against the small of Sara’s back. It was not to urge Sara forward, for Sara was already moving fairly quickly on her own, but to offer a few last seconds of solidarity. She peeled away as Sara approached the attendant.
“Hi,” she said, pasting on the most winning smile that she was capable of. The attendant’s eyes had widened and his body language had stiffened from the second that he saw her, though he had schooled his face back into blankness within seconds. All that Sara could think was, ‘Oh, fuck.’ Jane had already glided out of sight, even if there was something that she could have done outside of shooting the place up. Sara was on her own. She wondered if she should not have done something with her hair, as it was her most distinctive feature, before she set out. It might have delayed the attendant’s recognizing her for a few moments, at least. Sara tucked her hair behind her ears and kept walking.
“Can I help you?” the attendant asked. Oh, he was good. Sara could hardly see any betraying flicker of recognition in his eyes at all any longer, and she knew from liars. Being a drug addict had a way of instilling that kind of recognition in people.
“I’m looking for my father’s box. Frank Tancredi?” The smile was making Sara’s face hurt at this point. She hoped that she still looked natural there, and not at all like a deranged lunatic who had jumped bail on charges that she had had a better than decent chance of beating before she had gone running off to meet her treasonous, bank-robbing boyfriend and his murderous brother.
God, Sara hated CNN.
“Sure,” the attendant told her when she had shown both the key and her ID. It made Sara twitchy to pull out her actual identity now, and she had been on the run for less than a week. She was making out to be a great fugitive already. “Right this way.”
Sara accepted the directions that were given to her and then walked alone down a long hallway, the key to her father’s box clutched within her sweaty hand. There were people on either side of her, seated in comfortable chairs, smoking, and talking amongst themselves, but she still felt horribly alone. She threw a glance over her shoulder, hoping against hope for a flash of platinum hair, but none came. Jane did a lot of things. Lying, Sara thought, did not happen to be one of them.
Sara tuned out the hush of conversations all around her, inserted the key into its appropriate slot once she had reached the box, and turned. The lock made a satisfying clicking sound. Exhaling, Sara pulled the box out and looked inside. The only thing within it was a flash drive. Sara snatched it up and shoved it into the front pocket of her jeans so that she could go before her disappointment got the better of her. It was stupid and petty, but she had been unable to stop herself from hoping that there would be a message in there from her father. He had not planned to die or for her to find the key and carry out his mission for him; it was only an accident that Sara had stumbled in on it before the Company had had time to fully clean up after himself. Still…she had hoped. Michael was rubbing off on her to a greater extent than she had realized.
Sara’s gestures were short and a little angry as she slammed the box shut, so that it made a clanging sound that echoed and set Sara’s teeth on edge before she was able to get herself under control again. There was no point in stealth, not when numerous people knew that she was here and who she was. There was plenty of reason, however, for her to move quickly. She could save the tears for later.
Sara took a swipe at the few that had dared to well up all the same as she turned to go. She swore that she could hear the far-off cry of police sirens, and wondered if Jane could also hear them.
A hand grabbed at Sara’s wrist before she could get more than halfway around, startling her and causing her to drop the box key. In spite of the neat, tailored suit that ended the wrist, the grip was strong. Sara did not think that the owner did anything so sedate as work out in a gym, surrounded by free weights. Not unless he took a break sometimes to hit people with them.
A peek at her attacker’s face, and Sara knew that she was right. Definitely swung the weights into someone’s face every now and again, purely for fun. “Hello, Sara,” Kellerman said to her. “Sooner or later, we’re going to get this right.”
“Hello, Lance,” Sara replied coolly. Her voice was steady in spite of the fact that her heart was thundering in her chest. She could be proud of herself for that. Sara could also not seem to make herself stop referring to Kellerman as Lance even as she had known for that past two and a half days that that was not his real name. “That’s a great idea. You should let me go so that we can talk about it.” Her voice was becoming high and breathy; okay, now she was going to take the opportunity to freak right out. That was comforting.
Kellerman actually smiled at her. The fear was pushed to the side by that smile long enough for Sara to struggle with the need to punch him right in the face. She was on the verge of doing exactly that, screaming for all that she was worth, and taking her chances with the legitimate police until Kellerman used his free hand to push back his jacket. Shoulder holsters were all the rage these days.
“I’m afraid that I can’t do that, Sara,” Kellerman said. He punctuated his words with a nasty squeeze to Sara’s forearm that made her bones ache. He was saying her name a great deal. That was supposed to be a good sign, ordinarily, proof that the criminal was now seeing his victim as a person rather than a mission to be carried out. Sara somehow did not think that Kellerman’s mind worked like those of most people. She pulled back on the grip that Kellerman was keeping on her arm experimentally and was rewarded with a twist so hard that it made her gasp and would leave deep bruises etched across her skin later.
She had hit very hard the day before, Sara remembered now. Apparently, he was the kind of man that held a grudge.
“You shouldn’t try to scream,” Kellerman told her in that pleasant voice, that trust-me voice. He had a choirboy’s face that he was twisting up and ruining with that smile of his. “So far as everyone here is concerned, I’m the good guy.”
“The sirens,” Sara managed around her dry mouth. She still sounded normal, if frightened, much to her satisfaction. The edges of panic that she had been feeling moments before were long gone. They had been burned away.
“I work with the Secret Service,” Kellerman told her. “My custody over you is completely legit.” He shook her once, carelessly and as if he was delivering a lesson to a recalcitrant child, before he let her go and stepped back. Sara’s fingers twitched, but Kellerman was swift in pulling his gun from its holster and pointing it at her.
“Get the key,” Kellerman ordered her in a soft voice. Sara had forgotten that she had even dropped it. She knelt and scooped it up from the floor as Kellerman continued, “Now open up the box.”
Sara nodded and turned to do so, though she looked over Kellerman’s shoulder for a flash of blonde hair as she did so. There was nothing, of course. ‘Tell a frigging lie, Jane,’ Sara thought in an internal voice so hysterical that she nearly broke her promise not to panic and fall into giggles. ‘Once will not hurt you.’
Sara opened up the box and then stepped back so that Kellerman could peer inside. He never turned the gun away from her, not even for that single second that Sara thought she would need, but he forgot to take the key away from her. Sara wiggled it down between her fingers and stroked at the copper, now warm and slick from the way that she had been clutching it in the center of her palm.
Kellerman barely looked into the box for a second before he was slamming it shut with enough force to make the entire thing shake. “Where is it, Sara?” he asked her. For the first time, his voice was trembling with a fine-tuned anger. Sara had seen how singularly terrifying Kellerman had been while he was pretending to be pleasant only a few minutes before, and she was not impressed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sara said. She tucked the key back into her palm so that she could rub at her injured forearm. It both eased the hurt and made her look smaller and more vulnerable than she actually was, less likely to launch an attack. Sara did not know where this sudden thought came from, but she would accept it as long as it was there. “All that I knew was to come here.”
Kellerman rolled his eyes up towards the ceiling and smiled faintly, as if he thought that it was just so gosh-darned cute that Sara would still try that lie even though they both knew that it was untrue. “Sara,” he chided her. “I have access to all of the information that your new friends have.” Something must have shown on Sara’s face, no matter how hard she was trying to remain stoic, for Kellerman gave that disturbing chuckle again. “There’s a blonde sitting at the bar out there, playing with a martini even though it’s nine in the morning and hoping that no one notices that she hasn’t even take a sip of it.” He leaned close, into her face. “Oh, I could tell you some tales out of school about her.”
Sara still preferred the shark that she knew to the one that she didn’t, especially since the more shapely blonde was not prone to pointing a gun at her. She put her face back into those lines of confused fear and took a step back until she could feel her spine pressing against the rows of private boxes behind her. As if he was being pulled by her own personal gravity, Kellerman flowed forward and into her personal space again. His face was very close to hers. If her father had been alive, Sara thought in a savage moment, she might have kicked him in the shins for choosing a club that was so clearly and chronically understaffed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sara insisted again. Lack of panic or not, she was not having to work hard to put that edge of desperation in her voice. “I just came back and laid low around Chicago until I was able to get my nerve up-“
Kellerman used his free hand to punch hard at the cabinet beside Sara’s head. She flinched once, and then flinched again as Kellerman forced the gun up against her ribs. The key nearly slipped away from her grasp and down to the floor where it would not do her any good at all. Sara noticed, in this strange and detached way that she had fallen into of picking up very detail that popped out at her and tucking it away for future use, that Kellerman had taken a glance over his shoulder to ensure that the hallway was clear before he had pushed himself even further into her personal space. Whatever it was that he had told the staff in order to keep them away from this place, it was not going according to plan. She could scream, then, and pull people here so that they could see for themselves. She could also get a bullet into her abdomen. It would be an ugly way to die.
“Do not lie to me, Sara,” Kellerman told her. She could feel his breath on her cheek, and it made her want to twist her face away. “Believe it or not, I do not want to hurt you, but I also can’t help you once you start lying to me. What have you done with the tape?” He used his free hand to begin mechanically patting her down, his movements brisk and efficient. Kellerman’s hand passed less than six inches away from where he would have felt the lump against Sara’s thigh; he would find it on the next try.
Sara saw a flash of platinum blonde over Kellerman’s shoulder, and only for a second before Jane tucked herself safely out of sight again. It was still all that Sara could do to keep her knees from unhinging. “Okay,” she said before she paused to lick at her lips. Kellerman’s hand stilled. Less than two inches. “My dad gave me a tape to listen to, but it’s not here, it’s-“
Jane popped up again from shadow and nothing in the hallway behind Kellerman, drawing her weapon with a movement so smooth and fluid that it made Sara think that Jane may even have been born with it in her hand. As she took aim, Sara realized that with Kellerman’s body pushed down so tightly over hers there was no guarantee that Jane would be able to get a shot into him that would not kill Sara as well. Nor was she certain, even now, that Jane would hesitate.
Jane showed not so much as a flicker of indecision before she fired the gun. The bullet struck the cabinet only inches from Kellerman’s head, pinging off metal and sending splinters of wood into both of their heads as it ricocheted. Kellerman’s only reaction was to draw in his breath sharply before he began whirling around to face the new threat, dragging Sara along with him. The gun pulled away from Sara’s ribcage by a few inches.
A few inches was all the chance that Sara had been waiting for. She grabbed at Kellerman’s wrist and twisted it to push the gun further away from herself, and she fought back the urge to yelp as it went off and sprayed the both of them with more shrapnel. Kellerman was strong. Sara knew from the first second that he began forcing the gun back around to end her that she was not going to be able to wrestle it from him this time.
Sara dropped the key that she had been clutching in her palm down between her fingers and gouged it as hard as she could into the soft flesh of Kellerman’s cheek. Only a split-second’s worth of recalculation prevented her from putting it directly into his eye; Sara would wonder at herself later. Adrenaline made her both strong and ruthless, and the end result was a deep red furrow that immediately began spilling blood down Kellerman’s face. The immaculate white of his dress shirt turned crimson as it drank it up.
Kellerman gasped again, though the way that he pressed his lips together again immediately afterwards suggested that what he had really wanted to do was yell, and loosened his grip on Sara’s arm by those crucial few millimeters that she needed to wrench free. She scraped her back scooting along the cabinet far enough to put herself out of Kellerman’s reach before she broke and ran to Jane. Jane’s expression did not change as Sara reached her; the only part of her body that moved was her finger against the trigger. Sara heard the boom, but it was not until she turned around that she realized that Jane had struck her target this time. Kellerman dropped without a sound, a bloody red rose that she could not take her eyes away from spreading across his chest. Sara put her hand over her mouth, her doctor’s instincts overwhelming her and propelling her forward before she could halt herself. Only Jane’s hand around her bicep pulled her back.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Jane hissed into Sara’s ear as she began to yank Sara towards the door.
Sara did not resist, but neither did she look away from the small and crumpled form that Kellerman had made as he had fallen to the floor. He was not moving. He had been planning on torturing her, but Sara still could not stop herself from waiting with bated breath for him to move.
“I’m a doctor,” she protested. Sara did not need to see Jane’s look of exasperation to know how silly that sounded. She hadn’t been a doctor and nothing else since she had deliberately left the infirmary door unlocked. It was that the outlines of the something else that she could be were so large and so difficult to wrap her head around, and she had been given so little time to stop and catch her breath.
Jane did not let Sara go even as the two of them were sprinting down the hallway and towards the door, as if she thought that the leash was the only thing that was keeping Sara from bolting back in the direction that they had come. She might not have been wrong; Sara was not sure. She heard a roaring sound in her ears and was only barely aware of the gun that Jane raised at curious employees in order to keep them at a healthy distance. A series of yells rose up from the back room as Kellerman was discovered. From far away, the sirens began to cry again. Kellerman must have been using his connections in order to keep them at a distance so that he could collect her himself. She wondered if the sirens were now playing his dirge.
“Good girl,” Jane whispered against Sara’s ear as they reached the door and she was finally able to release Sara’s arm. Was she really as pale and disjointed as all that?
Jane looked out across the street and swore explosively. It took Sara a moment longer to realize that the SUV was gone, and so was LJ along with it. “That fucking kid, I’m going to murder him!” Jane looked over her shoulder, back into the cigar club, with her lips pressed into a thin line before she glared at Sara. It was clear that she considered LJ to be Sara’s project and Sara’s alone.
“Have faith,” Sara said, Michael’s line, even though she was reeling on her feet and didn’t feel like having faith in anything at the moment.
Jane snorted when a glare alone was not enough to express her displeasure, but she was cut off by a set of screaming tires and a roaring engine. The SUV whipped around a corner towards them and then came to a halt that made the brakes yelp like dogs. It nearly threw LJ over the steering wheel and into the windshield inside.
“Shut up,” Jane said to Sara even though Sara was not saying a word, and then nudged Sara towards the backseat. Sara stumbled in without complaining and took several shallow breaths as Jane hopped into the front seat and signaled for LJ to drive. He obeyed at a speed that would have made any Drivers Ed teacher’s hair turn white.
“Why did you leave?” Jane asked LJ as he pulled away from the curb. There was an edge to her voice that made Sara raise her head, and Jane snapped, “Put your head down between your knees, you look like you’re going to pass out.” Sara obeyed as the world tilted from side to side on her as if she was standing on the deck of a restless ship.
“There was a guy in a suit watching the car,” LJ said as he took a corner fast enough to hurl Sara against the door. She forgot Jane’s order to keep her head down until she no longer felt like fainting and took a peek out of the vehicle’s back window. There did not appear to be anyone following them. LJ was driving like a NASCAR hopeful on an adrenaline high solely because he wanted to, then. Sara guessed that she could sympathize. “I thought that he was either Company or a cop and decided that it would be better to be on the move.”
“Easy.” Jane reached out and grabbed the wheel as LJ took another hair-raising turn in a vehicle that was not particularly known for its good behavior in the middle of them. LJ slowed them all down, albeit reluctantly. “Good decision.” LJ took his eyes off of the road to stare at her and nearly demolished a mailbox as a result. “Did the phone ring?”
“No.” LJ sounded scared, trying to hide it, and not doing a particularly good job. He wasn’t a kid, Sara thought, but neither was he a man just yet. Maybe his father and Jane had a point there.
Her head feeling clearer, Sara sat up more fully in her seat and rubbed at her face. Jane looked at her over the headrest with a furrowed brow. “I’m fine,” Sara said. “How close are we to my father’s bank?”
The furrow deepened. “I thought that the tape was at the cigar club,” Jane said.
“It was.” Sara pushed her hair behind her ears and tried to clear the clouds from her mind. It was possible, even probable, that she had allowed a man to die. Even knowing what he would have been willing to do to her in order to get that tape, it was a thought that did not sit easily with her.
“Here,” Sara said as she realized that Jane was continuing to look at her as if she thought that Sara was about to pull a gun or worse, go into hysterics, at any moment. She dug about in her jeans until she found the tape and then placed it into Jane’s palm.
Jane closed her hand around it slowly. “You performed very well in there,” she told Sara. “Few people who have not received the correct training would have been able to remain that calm. It was impressive.”
“Thanks.” Sara spoke cautiously, unused to Jane doling out compliments purely for the sake of them and sure that there was a hidden motive waiting to be discovered. Small wonder that LJ had also looked gobsmacked when Jane had complimented him. “I didn’t-um, I had to cut my residency short for personal reasons-“ Rehab counted as a personal reason. “-but the part that I stayed around for was in the ER, and at Fox River I dealt with a lot of trauma injuries. You learn not to panic.”
“It was impressive,” Jane repeated again before she secreted the tape away in her jacket. She inadvertently displayed her holster and the gun again as she did so. “So I can’t help but wonder why you’re determined to sabotage it now.” Sara glanced up. Jane continued in the most gentle voice that Sara had ever heard her use. “Sara, we talked about this before we went in. It was one of the other. Now that the Company knows that you’re back in the city, they’ll beef up security at you father’s bank in anticipation of a visit there, too.”
“No, they won’t,” Sara said. “They’ll figure that we got what we came for, that we were spooked by the close call, and that we’re going to head right out of town again.” Maybe she impressed Jane again with her assessment, maybe she didn’t. Jane’s face was giving nothing away.
“We did get what we came for.”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to help me.” It wouldn’t make sense for either of them to put themselves at risk for Sara’s own personal matters. Sara was not even sure that it made sense for her to put herself at risk, but she needed to do it. “I’ll take care of it myself and meet back up with you guys if I’m able.”
Jane sighed and pinched at the bridge of her nose. Rather than asking LJ to pull the vehicle over so that Sara could do just that, as Sara had expected, she instead gave LJ directions to the First Bank of Chicago. He began to follow them immediately.
“You don’t-“ Sara began.
“Do you know how to use a gun?” Jane interrupted her. “I mean, do you really know who to use a gun, not just how to pull the trigger and hit something that’s standing three feet in front of you.”
“No.” Frank Tancredi had been an old-school Republican, but that did not mean that he had liked guns himself. They had not been permitted in the house. He had not even liked having security around for political events.
“Then yes, I have to.” Jane pulled her gun from its holster and ejected the clip so that she could check the number of bullets remaining. “There could be something useful there.”
No wonder Jane did not lie very often. She was terrible at it. “Thank you,” Sara said.
“Hmm,” Jane mused before she told LJ, “Keep the car circling around the block. Sara and I are probably going to be coming out of that bank fast, and you’re going to have to drive hard.”
“I can do that,” LJ said. He seemed more relaxed now that he had been given responsibility for something.
“I’m my father’s next of kin,” Sara protested. “Whatever he has in that deposit box, I’m entitled to it.”
“Are you prepared to prove that and be politely stalled while they call the police?” As the bank came into view, Jane pulled the tape from her jacket and gave it to LJ. He hesitated for a moment before he took it. “If something happens to me or to Sara, take the care somewhere safe and hit the first speed dial on that cell phone. Tell the woman who answers who you are and where you are, and she’ll send someone out to pick you up.”
“Are you sure?” LJ asked as he slipped the tape into his pocket. “Me and my dad and Veronica, we, uh, we trusted people who weren’t worth it a few times.” And Veronica was dead now.
Jane let out a soft laugh. “If the woman on the other end of that phone is not trustworthy, then we’ve already lost whether you call her or not,” she said. The SUV pulled to a momentary halt, and Jane snugged her jacket about herself to conceal the gun once more as she raised her eyebrows at Sara. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.” The trembling that had been with her when she had got back into the vehicle was gone. Sara stepped out of the SUV and watched as it pulled away from the curb. “What do you want to do?”
“Now you want to follow my lead,” Jane said without anger. The two of them began to climb the steps together. Sara felt strange with so many eyes around her and only fought down the urge to fidget as she realized that this would draw more attention.
“I’ve never robbed a bank before. Give me some credit for still being on the learning curve.”
“Just do what I tell you.” While Jane was being careful to keep the front of her jacket closed so that her gun would remain hidden, Sara noticed that she did not button it up. It wouldn’t do if she could not reach the weapon quickly when the need arose.
“Don’t shoot anyone and we have a deal,” Sara said.
“Unlikely. If Kellerman lives, he won’t be up and about for some time. He would have raised the alarm otherwise.” Jane’s glance waited for Sara’s reaction.
“He needed to be taken down.” She believed it.
They entered the bank side by side, Jane wearing her sleek business suit while Sara was still dressed in jeans and the navy top that she had worn for the past three days, minus a brief interlude back at the safe house when they had been in the washer. Sara tried to match her demeanor to Jane’s in spite of their disparate appearances, tried to be so chill and indifferent that no one would even dare to ask her if she belonged there, and found that it was easier than she had supposed. As inapproachable as they both ought to have appeared, naturally a bank manager came towards them immediately anyway.
“Can I help you ladies?” he asked. Jane’s hand twitched, and Sara gave her a hard look until she realized that Jane had not been reaching for her weapon at all. Jane’s only response was a slight smile.
“My father. Frank Tancredi,” Sara said, and watched as the manager began to form his mouth into a small ‘O’ before he caught himself again. “He died five days ago.”
“Yes, yes, I heard,” the manager said, casting a look towards the nearest security camera even as he had no way to signal it from the middle of the floor. “I’m very sorry.”
“Thank you.” Sara tried to give a smile that seemed appropriately grateful, but she had noticed the cameras herself and now did not believe that she could stop looking at them. “He had a deposit box here. I’d like to see it. I know that a will hasn’t been read yet, but I’m his only surviving relative.” She pulled her ID from her purse carelessly, as if the game was already up, as if she had nothing at all to worry about when it came to being caught.
“Yes, yes. There’s some paperwork that needs to be dealt with…” Sara cast a long glance towards the door as the manager spoke, tensing up her entire body like a rabbit on the verge of running. “In your circumstances, however, I’m sure that we can find a way to streamline it for you.”
“I would appreciate that.” The manager had to turn away and take them to his office in order to retrieve the keys. Sara followed and watched with anxious eyes, feeling rather than seeing Jane’s amusement beside her. Jane’s expression did not change.
Along the way, the manager paused and gave one of his clerks a significant look. The clerk followed his boss’s gaze, saw both Sara and Jane, and betrayed himself with a quick jerk. His eyes went wide.
“Damn it,” Sara said in a voice that was surprisingly clear and calm.
“It was inevitable,” Jane said in a voice that was if anything more composed than Sara’s own. On a mission and in her element, she almost seemed to glow. “Ordinarily we would have four minutes. Since they are now distracted by Kellerman, we may have as many as six, but that is no guarantee.”
“Play it as if we had four,” Sara agreed. They followed the manager with identical smiles on their faces as he ducked into his office and then emerged again within seconds. He was wearing the same. No one believed each other.
“Right this way,” the manager said as he led them down a long hallway and towards the vaults. Scarcely had he turned his back on them or taken them to a place with few other people about to witness her than was Jane flipping her jacket open and stepping close against the manager’s back. She was good at this; Sara was looking for it and still barely saw the gleam of gunmetal. Someone who did not know what they were looking for was likely to miss the way that the manager’s spine went rigid.
Sara cut Jane a glare. “You said that you wouldn’t shoot anyone.”
Jane shook her head and did not reply. “I know that you think you need to stall us,” she murmured against the manager’s ear, and he flinched away from her. “Here’s one very good reason why that would be a mistake.”
“I can see what you mean,” the manager said in a soft voice. He sounded as if he would very much like to lean over and be sick. Sara cast Jane another sour look and was just as roundly ignored again. “Right his way.” He led them to the room that contained the deposit boxes, shooing a few regular customers out as he did so. The dirty looks that he received as a result was enough to make Sara quickly put her hand over her mouth to stifle a hysterical giggle.
“Here,” the manager said as he found her father’s box and set it down in the center of the table. “If you have your key…?”
“I don’t,” Sara said helpfully. Jane agreed with her by raising her gun and taking careful aim at the lock. The boom of the gun echoed and reechoed in the smaller room; Sara was not sure how much of the four minutes remained. The manager jumped hard and did not relax when Jane stepped back accordingly so that he could have a few more feet of personal space. Sara took up the box and tapped it against the metal table until it accordingly fell open. The only thing inside was a sealed envelope. Her fingers were shaking as she reached out to pick it up.
“If you were going to shoot it open, anyway…?” the manager started.
Jane’s smile, at least, had a tinge of an apology about it. “We didn’t know which box it was,” she said. “Thank you for that.”
Sara examined the envelope and then the rest of the box, not sure what she even hoped to see within it. A signed confession from President Reynolds would be nice, but she would also settle for unassailable video evidence of the body being put into the car before Lincoln ever arrived scored second on the list. An envelope with neither address nor name written on it was not what Sara had expected. No. Wait. Upon looking further, Sara found that there was also a diamond ring. The envelope went unopened into Sara’s back pocket to be examined later; it was the ring that she was most interested in for the moment. She had seen it adorning her mother’s finger for fifteen years before her mother had ripped it off and flung it at her father during one of their bad fights, their gin and politics fights. Her mother had stormed from the room, dragging Sara with her, and her father had claimed that the ring had been lost. It had been six months before had grudgingly bought her a new one.
“Three minutes, Sara,” Jane said. When Sara did not answer her, she went on, “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Sara replied as she turned the ring to and fro in the fluorescent light, watching the diamond sparkle. As Jane’s expression turned impatient, Sara took a breath and gave herself a hard mental shake before she pushed the ring into her jeans pocket. “Three minutes.”
“Two and a half, now,” Jane said in a sour voice. To the manager, she said, “If I tell you not to sound the alarm until after we leave, it’s not going to mean a thing, is it?”
“Probably…probably not.” The manager winced as soon as he said it.
He need not have. Sara could have told him that Jane was a woman who appreciated honesty. “Okay.” Jane ticked her head towards Sara to indicate that she should follow.
With the weight of the ring in her pocket, Sara was not sure that she could do anything else other than follow until she pulled her head back together again. Still, she whirled towards the manager, who had not moved, on her way to the door and said, “Sorry for the, uh, hostage thing. At least we kept it short.”
Jane said sharply from the doorway, “Sara!” and Sara realized that she could now hear the wail of sirens. By some mutual agreement, she and Jane sped towards a run without every quite crossing that line. Somehow, they could not seem to stop themselves from the desire not to attract too much attention at the same time that they had less than a minute before it was not going to matter.
The sirens were very loud. Sara broke and sprinted across the final yards to the door, hearing Jane do the same behind her. There were red and blue lights coming down one side of the street. Luckily, they had LJ coming down the other.
“Go, go, go!” Jane yelled at LJ as she scrambled into the vehicle, almost before LJ had time to bring it to a complete stop. Sara leapt into the back while LJ put all of his weight down on the gas pedal. She was thrilled, genuinely ecstatic, to learn that LJ’s crazed teenaged driving skills had not diminished any as she was hurled back against her seat with a yelp. Two cars stopped at the bank; the other two came in right on their ass and with no signs of being shaken off any time soon. Jane threw one arm over the front seat and leaned over it so that she could stare out the back window with wild eyes and bared teeth. Sara thought that Jane would have been glad to shove LJ out of the driver’s seat and take over the job herself if that would not have cost them time that they did not have. She made an impatient ‘hurry up’ gesture with her hand instead, and LJ made the SUV’s engine roar as it leapt forward even faster.
“Uh,” Sara said as she threw her arm over the backseat and hunched over it in a posture very similar to Jane’s. The red and blue lights were not falling back. “I think that faster would be better.”
“I’m trying!” LJ swung the car in a haphazard arc around a coupe that was refusing to get out of his way, putting them briefly in the opposite lane amidst a blaring of horns before he managed to right them. Sara grabbed hard at the back of her seat so that she would not be hurled into the floor. “I can’t drive any faster!”
“Then drive crazier,” Jane snapped before she reached out and jerked on the wheel so hard that she nearly pulled it out of LJ’s hands altogether. The SUV jumped to the left and clipped a truck hard enough to make the vehicle shudder and nearly flip; Sara had a sudden and irrational urge to clap her hands over her eyes. Because she didn’t, she saw the truck spinning out in front of the police cars and slowing them. LJ took control of the wheel again and shot Jane a dirty look as he whipped the SUV into one of those sharp and physics-defying turns that he liked so much. They took several more before the sirens and the lights were behind them and Jane signaled to LJ that he could stop driving like quite so much of a madman. It was still at least a dozen minutes more before she allowed them to pull into a darkened alley and halt.
Jane hopped out of the car immediately and went around to the back. As Sara and LJ followed, she opened p the hatch and began rummaging about in a compartment that Sara had not seen before. Inside were several different license plates from a variety of states and a screwdriver with which to swap them out. Jane pursed her lips and decided that they would be from Florida for the time being before she crouched down and got to work.
Sara leaned against the vehicle as her legs proved shaky on her and stared at the broken tail light and battered quarter panel that was the result of their life-saving clip with the truck. LJ let out a shocked “Whoa” when he saw what he had done.
“Yes,” Jane said as she glanced up. “We will have to be very careful as we exit the city.”
Sara gripped LJ’s shoulder and smiled at him when he looked at her. “You did a good job.”
“Okay.” Jane rose to her feet and threw the screwdriver and the old license plate into the back before she shut the hatch and held out her hand for the keys. “Let’s go.” Before LJ could do so, the long-silent cellular phone began to ring. All three heads snapped towards it.
End Part Sixteen
RATING: This chapter is rated NC-17.
PAIRINGS: Michael/Alex, Michael/Sara, Lincoln/Jane
SPOILERS: It goes AU immediately after ‘Rendezvous’, but select elements from the rest of the season wound up finding their way into the work, great, sprawling thing that it grew into.
SUMMARY: A conscience is a hard thing to get rid of.
Part Sixteen
Sara expected Chicago to be different. She did not know why. She had been gone only a few days, and while she did feel different herself-stripped down, more sure of what she was capable of-surely the difference was not that great. The core of her was still the same woman who had stared down an assassin, stolen a dead woman’s identity, and held a gun on a federal agent. It was even, when Sara had time to realize that this woman was really her, the same city where she had found her father dead. The tall, solemn buildings did not seem to mourn him the way that Sara felt that they ought to, since she herself had been forced to put her own grief on hold.
She would feel better once she was able to lay him to rest, Sara decided. Once she had fulfilled that goal, even symbolically, by finding gout what it was that he had left behind for her to find, then everything else would fall into place like a row of dominoes.
Sara lifted her head from where she had been resting it against the SUV’s window and rubbed at the kinks in her neck. In the backseat, LJ kept jerking his head up as if he was going to give in to the urge to sleep himself at any moment. No one had really been able to rest in the motel the night before, and it was still so early that the sun was more of an ambitious goal than it was a reality. Only Jane seemed fixed and alert. Sara slid her a glance over the console, noted how easy Jane’s posture was in her seat and how relaxed her hands were around the steering wheel.
Jane was clearly utterly terrified.
“They should have called us by now, shouldn’t they?” Sara asked.
Jane flicked her a look and turned back towards the road before Sara could read her expression as anything more than a snapshot taken mostly out of focus. She shook her head, once, and then reached for her cup of coffee. It barely touched Jane’s lips before she was setting it down again. It seemed to Sara that Jane was carefully measuring out each of her reactions into their correct portions, pantomiming the correct emotions rather than actually feeling them. She had not know that Jane could ever be moved enough to give a damn about even pretending.
“Aldo’s gone longer than this without contacting me,” Jane said. Her hand hovered over her cellular phone for a moment before she closed it into a fist. A second drink of coffee did not seem to settle her. “It’s fine.”
‘But you’re still scared,’ Sara thought. They were supposed to be the backup mission, the one that would close the deal if the fact of a living, breathing dead man was not enough to drag the Company blinking forth into the light. Sara hadn’t paused then to wonder if the tall buildings around them would not have a few more bodies before it was all said and done. She did now as she turned back towards her window and found a cuticle to chew on.
“We have a decision to make,” Jane said abruptly from the driver’s seat. She pulled the SUV into the nearly empty parking lot of a convenience store and cut the engine. LJ stirred in the backseat and rubbed at his eyes.
“We there yet?” he asked.
“Close,” Sara said before she turned back to Jane. “We do?”
Jane swished the remains of her coffee around in the cup. For the first time, Sara could see the fine tremble in her hands that Jane could not quite control. “Your face is well-known by now,” she said to Sara. “Everyone loves a scandal and everyone loves a love story, especially when it’s forbidden. You and Michael gave them both.” Sara felt her mouth twist. “You had hardly jumped bail by an hour before you were on CNN.”
“So what does that mean for us?” Sara asked.
Given something to do that was within her wheelhouse and that would distract her from her own worry, Jane relaxed again before Sara’s very eyes. She first at the gun in her shoulder holster and then at a small golden crucifix around her neck before she said, “Wherever you go, the law is going to follow after you very quickly. That means that the Company will be only a few paces behind them. Everything that Ben was able to dig up will be available to them, too.”
Sara shook her head, still not getting it. She had a feeling that Jane was struggling not to roll her eyes at her, for the blonde touched at her gun again before answering. “We can only hit one of those places before the Company knows that we’re in the area. First one ought to be a piece of cake. Second one will get trickier. We might have to abandon it.”
It was not until Jane lifted her eyebrow at her, waiting, that Sara realized that the decision was being left up to her. She leaned back against her door, surprised. Sara had somehow thought that her presence on this mission would amount to being a face that could gain them access to her father’s effects, and possibly as a getaway driver. Two weeks before she never would have thought herself capable of taking such a major role in treason.
Two weeks before, she had also not survived two separate assassination attempts. Sara twisted a strand of hair around her fingers and ignored Jane’s impatient sound. She was learning that she capable of a lot of things that she had not thought possible before. “The cigar bar,” she said at last.
Jane nodded and started the engine again. “Your turf, your choice,” she said. “Just please tell me that you’re going on more than a coin toss here.”
“No,” Sara said. “My dad was carrying the key to the cigar bar on his person when he died. He probably went there to hide the tape.”
“Could have still gone to the box first,” Jane said. She sounded more like a schoolteacher than she did a dangerous killer, suddenly, and oddly prim. Sara looked at her askance. “Why wouldn’t he have?”
“You’re a crappy actress,” Sara told Jane in a flat voice. “You could at least pretend that you’re not testing me here.”
Jane’s smile was glittering and dangerous even when she was trying to be friendly. “I wasn’t hired to be subtle,” she agreed before she made a carry-on gesture. Sara had still not answered.
“Who stops off for a leisurely cigar after learning about whatever is on that tape?” Sara asked. “Quick drink, maybe.” Her father was not a drinker except under the most extreme of circumstances, and even then Sara had smelled no alcohol on him when she had found his body. “No, it’s the cigar club. If we have only one shot at this, that’s the best one to take.”
Jane had been turning the SUV towards the cigar club before Sara had even finished spinning out her reasoning. Her expression was approving. “Very good,” she said before she threw back the rest of her coffee in one long swallow. If Jane’s grimace was anything to go by, it had long since gone cold. Sara did not see how Jane could stand to take in so much caffeine, when Sara’s own nerves were twitching and jittering badly enough on their own.
Sara felt her eyebrow going up of its own accord. “Well, as long as I’m getting a gold star,” she said in a tone so dry that Agent Mahone himself would have had to approve. The cigar club was in sight. Sara could feel her stomach tightening accordingly, until it had formed a ball so tight that she was half-convinced that she was going to form her own personal black hole right there in the center of the vehicle. It was not about the danger alone. Sara could think back across her childhood and recall a great many times when her father had smelled of cigar smoke, most especially during the early days of her rebellion. Mom had been getting really bad by then, and he had taken breaks from the two of them as often as possible, but he had never mentioned this place. It was staggering to Sara to realize how little she actually knew about her father.
‘You and me, Michael,’ Sara thought in a sour internal voice. ‘Two peas in a pod.’ Or separate pods, as the case might be now, but Sara was resolving not to think about that again until she had cleared some of the bigger items off of her desk first.
Jane pulled the SUV into a parking spot and cut the engine. She studied the building with cool, assessing eyes, her expression turning hungry for a moment with whatever it was that was flashing through her mind. Sara actually preferred this Jane to the softer and more human Jane that had been shown to her before. This Jane knew what she was doing.
“I’ll go in with you,” Jane said. She touched at her gun and crucifix again. Sara hoped that she was not planning on keeping that up when they went inside, or else the entire job could become very complicated very quickly. “But I’ll have to stay at the bar while you retrieve the tape. Members and surviving relatives only.”
Meaning that if the situation really turned sideways on them, Sara was probably going to be on her own. Even if Jane did realize that something was wrong, there would be a delay before she was able to come to the rescue. Sara paused for a moment so that she could process all of this before she slipped a baseball cap onto her head to hide her bruise and said, “All right.” She was the recipient of another approving look from Jane. Sara wondered for a moment if Jane maybe could have been a schoolteacher in another life. An incredibly terrifying schoolteacher who would have had the best attendance in the school district, and who would never have to fight with students in order to get them to turn their homework in on time because they wouldn’t dare.
“What do I do?” LJ asked from the backseat. He had shaken off the last of his sleepy demeanor several minutes before. So had Sara, even though she and LJ had not had so much as a sip of coffee between them. For the moment, they were adrenaline twins.
Jane barely threw so much as a glance towards the backseat. “You’re going to watch the car,” she said.
LJ’s face twisted into the ugly and somehow endearing expression that only a teenager could get. Everything was life or death to them. It wasn’t his fault that he had been thrown into a situation where he was very literally wrapped up in matters of life and death. “I can help!” he said hotly in a voice that was probably more shrill than he had intended in order to get what he wanted. “If it’s because I’ve never done anything like this before, Sara doesn’t know what she’s doing, either!” LJ shot Sara an apologetic look as she said it. Sara only lifted her shoulders into a slight shrug. Much as she was determined to go along with the plan, she couldn’t really argue with that logic.
Color rose in Jane’s cheeks for the first time. Her hands clenched around the steering wheel and she exhaled a shaky breath from between her teeth. It as the most overt sign of emotion that she had given either of them yet, and Sara and LJ both stared at her in surprise and something that was nearly horror.
“I’m not going to tell your father that I have your body in the backseat,” Jane snapped at LJ. Her voice cracked, betraying her, and she threw a glance down at the unresponsive cellular phone before she turned a stoic gaze back out the windshield.
‘Oh,’ Sara thought as she understood. It was not what she had expected-she had thought that Jane was twisting herself sick with worry over Aldo alone-but stranger things had happened. Prison doctors and structural engineers turned bank robber. Structural engineer turned bank robber and federal agents turned murderer turned freedom fighter.
Jane did not look as if she was inclined to elaborate while LJ was clearly gearing himself up for another outburst, and they could only sit here for so long before someone peeked in and noticed that one face in particular was extremely recognizable. “We’re all worried about your dad and uncle,” Sara cut in before LJ could get started up again. He made a face at her, having a typical teenager’s tolerance for being spoken down to. “Jane has a point. Your dad will be a lot more worried if we have to bring you back hurt or dead. You’re not a kid, fine. Don’t put us into that position.”
Bringing his father into hit was a low blow, Sara knew as soon as LJ leaned back against his seat. He sucked in his breath and fixed Sara with a wounded look. Sara then did not hold in against him when he snapped back at her, “What if I have to tell Uncle Mike that you’re dead?”
‘He won’t care as much as you think,’ Sara nearly said back, and only just stopped herself. It was petty on the one hand and untrue on the other. The whole situation would be so much easier to bear if she did not think that Michael was every bit as confused by it as she was, and if she really could convince herself that he did not care.
‘This is what happens when you get pulled into arguments with teenagers,’ Sara thought as she looked at LJ’s defiant and nearly triumphant expression. ‘So learn from the mistake and don’t do it again.’
“Your uncle cares for me very much,” Sara replied in a soft voice that made LJ lean back and blink. He had been expecting her to get angry and yell back just as he was yelling. “And I know that he will grieve for me if I don’t come back. But I’m not his kid. It is nothing compared to what Lincoln will feel if get killed in this.” The way that her own father had stepped in again and again to pull her from the fire and ignored each time the way that she had snapped at his hand for his trouble was all the testament that Sara needed to that.
LJ shrank further back into his seat, lowering his head, until he looked much younger than he actually was. Sara felt bad even as she watched LJ gear up for another argument that they did not have the fucking time for now. Jane sighed from the front seat, pulled the keys from the ignition, and turned. Sara did not realize that Jane had grabbed the cellular phone until she thrust it into LJ’s hand. LJ looked nearly as surprised to receive it as Sara was to see Jane willingly give it up.
“If this rings and distracts me in there, someone will be hurt,” Jane told LJ. “Keep the car running. We may need to get away quickly.”
“Oh-okay,” LJ said, looking down at both of the items that had been handed to him. For better or worse, he might now be the first person to hear what had happened to his father and his uncle.
“That was nice of you,” Sara said as the two of them exited the SUV and walked across the street. She adjusted her baseball cap; with her bruise, it was less than comfortable, but she was already on CNN as it was. Jane did not button up her suit jacket, but she did pull it more closely around herself and straightened out the fabric until the gun was no longer visible. Thank God for small favors.
Jane cut Sara a look and then sniffed. “It was necessary. I was telling the truth, if that phone had gone off I would have answered, and maybe gotten you killed because of it.”
“Right.” Sara could not imagine what sort of life that one would have to live in order to make an act of simple compassion into something that brought about defensive reaction. It made the assessing looks that Jane would not stop giving her that much more troubling. “Who knows what might happen if you’re actually human.” Jane had fallen behind her, but Sara still did not need to turn her head in order to know that Jane was pulling a face at her.
They had reached the door. “You’re on your own,” Jane murmured against Sara’s ear. She pressed her fingers against the small of Sara’s back. It was not to urge Sara forward, for Sara was already moving fairly quickly on her own, but to offer a few last seconds of solidarity. She peeled away as Sara approached the attendant.
“Hi,” she said, pasting on the most winning smile that she was capable of. The attendant’s eyes had widened and his body language had stiffened from the second that he saw her, though he had schooled his face back into blankness within seconds. All that Sara could think was, ‘Oh, fuck.’ Jane had already glided out of sight, even if there was something that she could have done outside of shooting the place up. Sara was on her own. She wondered if she should not have done something with her hair, as it was her most distinctive feature, before she set out. It might have delayed the attendant’s recognizing her for a few moments, at least. Sara tucked her hair behind her ears and kept walking.
“Can I help you?” the attendant asked. Oh, he was good. Sara could hardly see any betraying flicker of recognition in his eyes at all any longer, and she knew from liars. Being a drug addict had a way of instilling that kind of recognition in people.
“I’m looking for my father’s box. Frank Tancredi?” The smile was making Sara’s face hurt at this point. She hoped that she still looked natural there, and not at all like a deranged lunatic who had jumped bail on charges that she had had a better than decent chance of beating before she had gone running off to meet her treasonous, bank-robbing boyfriend and his murderous brother.
God, Sara hated CNN.
“Sure,” the attendant told her when she had shown both the key and her ID. It made Sara twitchy to pull out her actual identity now, and she had been on the run for less than a week. She was making out to be a great fugitive already. “Right this way.”
Sara accepted the directions that were given to her and then walked alone down a long hallway, the key to her father’s box clutched within her sweaty hand. There were people on either side of her, seated in comfortable chairs, smoking, and talking amongst themselves, but she still felt horribly alone. She threw a glance over her shoulder, hoping against hope for a flash of platinum hair, but none came. Jane did a lot of things. Lying, Sara thought, did not happen to be one of them.
Sara tuned out the hush of conversations all around her, inserted the key into its appropriate slot once she had reached the box, and turned. The lock made a satisfying clicking sound. Exhaling, Sara pulled the box out and looked inside. The only thing within it was a flash drive. Sara snatched it up and shoved it into the front pocket of her jeans so that she could go before her disappointment got the better of her. It was stupid and petty, but she had been unable to stop herself from hoping that there would be a message in there from her father. He had not planned to die or for her to find the key and carry out his mission for him; it was only an accident that Sara had stumbled in on it before the Company had had time to fully clean up after himself. Still…she had hoped. Michael was rubbing off on her to a greater extent than she had realized.
Sara’s gestures were short and a little angry as she slammed the box shut, so that it made a clanging sound that echoed and set Sara’s teeth on edge before she was able to get herself under control again. There was no point in stealth, not when numerous people knew that she was here and who she was. There was plenty of reason, however, for her to move quickly. She could save the tears for later.
Sara took a swipe at the few that had dared to well up all the same as she turned to go. She swore that she could hear the far-off cry of police sirens, and wondered if Jane could also hear them.
A hand grabbed at Sara’s wrist before she could get more than halfway around, startling her and causing her to drop the box key. In spite of the neat, tailored suit that ended the wrist, the grip was strong. Sara did not think that the owner did anything so sedate as work out in a gym, surrounded by free weights. Not unless he took a break sometimes to hit people with them.
A peek at her attacker’s face, and Sara knew that she was right. Definitely swung the weights into someone’s face every now and again, purely for fun. “Hello, Sara,” Kellerman said to her. “Sooner or later, we’re going to get this right.”
“Hello, Lance,” Sara replied coolly. Her voice was steady in spite of the fact that her heart was thundering in her chest. She could be proud of herself for that. Sara could also not seem to make herself stop referring to Kellerman as Lance even as she had known for that past two and a half days that that was not his real name. “That’s a great idea. You should let me go so that we can talk about it.” Her voice was becoming high and breathy; okay, now she was going to take the opportunity to freak right out. That was comforting.
Kellerman actually smiled at her. The fear was pushed to the side by that smile long enough for Sara to struggle with the need to punch him right in the face. She was on the verge of doing exactly that, screaming for all that she was worth, and taking her chances with the legitimate police until Kellerman used his free hand to push back his jacket. Shoulder holsters were all the rage these days.
“I’m afraid that I can’t do that, Sara,” Kellerman said. He punctuated his words with a nasty squeeze to Sara’s forearm that made her bones ache. He was saying her name a great deal. That was supposed to be a good sign, ordinarily, proof that the criminal was now seeing his victim as a person rather than a mission to be carried out. Sara somehow did not think that Kellerman’s mind worked like those of most people. She pulled back on the grip that Kellerman was keeping on her arm experimentally and was rewarded with a twist so hard that it made her gasp and would leave deep bruises etched across her skin later.
She had hit very hard the day before, Sara remembered now. Apparently, he was the kind of man that held a grudge.
“You shouldn’t try to scream,” Kellerman told her in that pleasant voice, that trust-me voice. He had a choirboy’s face that he was twisting up and ruining with that smile of his. “So far as everyone here is concerned, I’m the good guy.”
“The sirens,” Sara managed around her dry mouth. She still sounded normal, if frightened, much to her satisfaction. The edges of panic that she had been feeling moments before were long gone. They had been burned away.
“I work with the Secret Service,” Kellerman told her. “My custody over you is completely legit.” He shook her once, carelessly and as if he was delivering a lesson to a recalcitrant child, before he let her go and stepped back. Sara’s fingers twitched, but Kellerman was swift in pulling his gun from its holster and pointing it at her.
“Get the key,” Kellerman ordered her in a soft voice. Sara had forgotten that she had even dropped it. She knelt and scooped it up from the floor as Kellerman continued, “Now open up the box.”
Sara nodded and turned to do so, though she looked over Kellerman’s shoulder for a flash of blonde hair as she did so. There was nothing, of course. ‘Tell a frigging lie, Jane,’ Sara thought in an internal voice so hysterical that she nearly broke her promise not to panic and fall into giggles. ‘Once will not hurt you.’
Sara opened up the box and then stepped back so that Kellerman could peer inside. He never turned the gun away from her, not even for that single second that Sara thought she would need, but he forgot to take the key away from her. Sara wiggled it down between her fingers and stroked at the copper, now warm and slick from the way that she had been clutching it in the center of her palm.
Kellerman barely looked into the box for a second before he was slamming it shut with enough force to make the entire thing shake. “Where is it, Sara?” he asked her. For the first time, his voice was trembling with a fine-tuned anger. Sara had seen how singularly terrifying Kellerman had been while he was pretending to be pleasant only a few minutes before, and she was not impressed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sara said. She tucked the key back into her palm so that she could rub at her injured forearm. It both eased the hurt and made her look smaller and more vulnerable than she actually was, less likely to launch an attack. Sara did not know where this sudden thought came from, but she would accept it as long as it was there. “All that I knew was to come here.”
Kellerman rolled his eyes up towards the ceiling and smiled faintly, as if he thought that it was just so gosh-darned cute that Sara would still try that lie even though they both knew that it was untrue. “Sara,” he chided her. “I have access to all of the information that your new friends have.” Something must have shown on Sara’s face, no matter how hard she was trying to remain stoic, for Kellerman gave that disturbing chuckle again. “There’s a blonde sitting at the bar out there, playing with a martini even though it’s nine in the morning and hoping that no one notices that she hasn’t even take a sip of it.” He leaned close, into her face. “Oh, I could tell you some tales out of school about her.”
Sara still preferred the shark that she knew to the one that she didn’t, especially since the more shapely blonde was not prone to pointing a gun at her. She put her face back into those lines of confused fear and took a step back until she could feel her spine pressing against the rows of private boxes behind her. As if he was being pulled by her own personal gravity, Kellerman flowed forward and into her personal space again. His face was very close to hers. If her father had been alive, Sara thought in a savage moment, she might have kicked him in the shins for choosing a club that was so clearly and chronically understaffed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sara insisted again. Lack of panic or not, she was not having to work hard to put that edge of desperation in her voice. “I just came back and laid low around Chicago until I was able to get my nerve up-“
Kellerman used his free hand to punch hard at the cabinet beside Sara’s head. She flinched once, and then flinched again as Kellerman forced the gun up against her ribs. The key nearly slipped away from her grasp and down to the floor where it would not do her any good at all. Sara noticed, in this strange and detached way that she had fallen into of picking up very detail that popped out at her and tucking it away for future use, that Kellerman had taken a glance over his shoulder to ensure that the hallway was clear before he had pushed himself even further into her personal space. Whatever it was that he had told the staff in order to keep them away from this place, it was not going according to plan. She could scream, then, and pull people here so that they could see for themselves. She could also get a bullet into her abdomen. It would be an ugly way to die.
“Do not lie to me, Sara,” Kellerman told her. She could feel his breath on her cheek, and it made her want to twist her face away. “Believe it or not, I do not want to hurt you, but I also can’t help you once you start lying to me. What have you done with the tape?” He used his free hand to begin mechanically patting her down, his movements brisk and efficient. Kellerman’s hand passed less than six inches away from where he would have felt the lump against Sara’s thigh; he would find it on the next try.
Sara saw a flash of platinum blonde over Kellerman’s shoulder, and only for a second before Jane tucked herself safely out of sight again. It was still all that Sara could do to keep her knees from unhinging. “Okay,” she said before she paused to lick at her lips. Kellerman’s hand stilled. Less than two inches. “My dad gave me a tape to listen to, but it’s not here, it’s-“
Jane popped up again from shadow and nothing in the hallway behind Kellerman, drawing her weapon with a movement so smooth and fluid that it made Sara think that Jane may even have been born with it in her hand. As she took aim, Sara realized that with Kellerman’s body pushed down so tightly over hers there was no guarantee that Jane would be able to get a shot into him that would not kill Sara as well. Nor was she certain, even now, that Jane would hesitate.
Jane showed not so much as a flicker of indecision before she fired the gun. The bullet struck the cabinet only inches from Kellerman’s head, pinging off metal and sending splinters of wood into both of their heads as it ricocheted. Kellerman’s only reaction was to draw in his breath sharply before he began whirling around to face the new threat, dragging Sara along with him. The gun pulled away from Sara’s ribcage by a few inches.
A few inches was all the chance that Sara had been waiting for. She grabbed at Kellerman’s wrist and twisted it to push the gun further away from herself, and she fought back the urge to yelp as it went off and sprayed the both of them with more shrapnel. Kellerman was strong. Sara knew from the first second that he began forcing the gun back around to end her that she was not going to be able to wrestle it from him this time.
Sara dropped the key that she had been clutching in her palm down between her fingers and gouged it as hard as she could into the soft flesh of Kellerman’s cheek. Only a split-second’s worth of recalculation prevented her from putting it directly into his eye; Sara would wonder at herself later. Adrenaline made her both strong and ruthless, and the end result was a deep red furrow that immediately began spilling blood down Kellerman’s face. The immaculate white of his dress shirt turned crimson as it drank it up.
Kellerman gasped again, though the way that he pressed his lips together again immediately afterwards suggested that what he had really wanted to do was yell, and loosened his grip on Sara’s arm by those crucial few millimeters that she needed to wrench free. She scraped her back scooting along the cabinet far enough to put herself out of Kellerman’s reach before she broke and ran to Jane. Jane’s expression did not change as Sara reached her; the only part of her body that moved was her finger against the trigger. Sara heard the boom, but it was not until she turned around that she realized that Jane had struck her target this time. Kellerman dropped without a sound, a bloody red rose that she could not take her eyes away from spreading across his chest. Sara put her hand over her mouth, her doctor’s instincts overwhelming her and propelling her forward before she could halt herself. Only Jane’s hand around her bicep pulled her back.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Jane hissed into Sara’s ear as she began to yank Sara towards the door.
Sara did not resist, but neither did she look away from the small and crumpled form that Kellerman had made as he had fallen to the floor. He was not moving. He had been planning on torturing her, but Sara still could not stop herself from waiting with bated breath for him to move.
“I’m a doctor,” she protested. Sara did not need to see Jane’s look of exasperation to know how silly that sounded. She hadn’t been a doctor and nothing else since she had deliberately left the infirmary door unlocked. It was that the outlines of the something else that she could be were so large and so difficult to wrap her head around, and she had been given so little time to stop and catch her breath.
Jane did not let Sara go even as the two of them were sprinting down the hallway and towards the door, as if she thought that the leash was the only thing that was keeping Sara from bolting back in the direction that they had come. She might not have been wrong; Sara was not sure. She heard a roaring sound in her ears and was only barely aware of the gun that Jane raised at curious employees in order to keep them at a healthy distance. A series of yells rose up from the back room as Kellerman was discovered. From far away, the sirens began to cry again. Kellerman must have been using his connections in order to keep them at a distance so that he could collect her himself. She wondered if the sirens were now playing his dirge.
“Good girl,” Jane whispered against Sara’s ear as they reached the door and she was finally able to release Sara’s arm. Was she really as pale and disjointed as all that?
Jane looked out across the street and swore explosively. It took Sara a moment longer to realize that the SUV was gone, and so was LJ along with it. “That fucking kid, I’m going to murder him!” Jane looked over her shoulder, back into the cigar club, with her lips pressed into a thin line before she glared at Sara. It was clear that she considered LJ to be Sara’s project and Sara’s alone.
“Have faith,” Sara said, Michael’s line, even though she was reeling on her feet and didn’t feel like having faith in anything at the moment.
Jane snorted when a glare alone was not enough to express her displeasure, but she was cut off by a set of screaming tires and a roaring engine. The SUV whipped around a corner towards them and then came to a halt that made the brakes yelp like dogs. It nearly threw LJ over the steering wheel and into the windshield inside.
“Shut up,” Jane said to Sara even though Sara was not saying a word, and then nudged Sara towards the backseat. Sara stumbled in without complaining and took several shallow breaths as Jane hopped into the front seat and signaled for LJ to drive. He obeyed at a speed that would have made any Drivers Ed teacher’s hair turn white.
“Why did you leave?” Jane asked LJ as he pulled away from the curb. There was an edge to her voice that made Sara raise her head, and Jane snapped, “Put your head down between your knees, you look like you’re going to pass out.” Sara obeyed as the world tilted from side to side on her as if she was standing on the deck of a restless ship.
“There was a guy in a suit watching the car,” LJ said as he took a corner fast enough to hurl Sara against the door. She forgot Jane’s order to keep her head down until she no longer felt like fainting and took a peek out of the vehicle’s back window. There did not appear to be anyone following them. LJ was driving like a NASCAR hopeful on an adrenaline high solely because he wanted to, then. Sara guessed that she could sympathize. “I thought that he was either Company or a cop and decided that it would be better to be on the move.”
“Easy.” Jane reached out and grabbed the wheel as LJ took another hair-raising turn in a vehicle that was not particularly known for its good behavior in the middle of them. LJ slowed them all down, albeit reluctantly. “Good decision.” LJ took his eyes off of the road to stare at her and nearly demolished a mailbox as a result. “Did the phone ring?”
“No.” LJ sounded scared, trying to hide it, and not doing a particularly good job. He wasn’t a kid, Sara thought, but neither was he a man just yet. Maybe his father and Jane had a point there.
Her head feeling clearer, Sara sat up more fully in her seat and rubbed at her face. Jane looked at her over the headrest with a furrowed brow. “I’m fine,” Sara said. “How close are we to my father’s bank?”
The furrow deepened. “I thought that the tape was at the cigar club,” Jane said.
“It was.” Sara pushed her hair behind her ears and tried to clear the clouds from her mind. It was possible, even probable, that she had allowed a man to die. Even knowing what he would have been willing to do to her in order to get that tape, it was a thought that did not sit easily with her.
“Here,” Sara said as she realized that Jane was continuing to look at her as if she thought that Sara was about to pull a gun or worse, go into hysterics, at any moment. She dug about in her jeans until she found the tape and then placed it into Jane’s palm.
Jane closed her hand around it slowly. “You performed very well in there,” she told Sara. “Few people who have not received the correct training would have been able to remain that calm. It was impressive.”
“Thanks.” Sara spoke cautiously, unused to Jane doling out compliments purely for the sake of them and sure that there was a hidden motive waiting to be discovered. Small wonder that LJ had also looked gobsmacked when Jane had complimented him. “I didn’t-um, I had to cut my residency short for personal reasons-“ Rehab counted as a personal reason. “-but the part that I stayed around for was in the ER, and at Fox River I dealt with a lot of trauma injuries. You learn not to panic.”
“It was impressive,” Jane repeated again before she secreted the tape away in her jacket. She inadvertently displayed her holster and the gun again as she did so. “So I can’t help but wonder why you’re determined to sabotage it now.” Sara glanced up. Jane continued in the most gentle voice that Sara had ever heard her use. “Sara, we talked about this before we went in. It was one of the other. Now that the Company knows that you’re back in the city, they’ll beef up security at you father’s bank in anticipation of a visit there, too.”
“No, they won’t,” Sara said. “They’ll figure that we got what we came for, that we were spooked by the close call, and that we’re going to head right out of town again.” Maybe she impressed Jane again with her assessment, maybe she didn’t. Jane’s face was giving nothing away.
“We did get what we came for.”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to help me.” It wouldn’t make sense for either of them to put themselves at risk for Sara’s own personal matters. Sara was not even sure that it made sense for her to put herself at risk, but she needed to do it. “I’ll take care of it myself and meet back up with you guys if I’m able.”
Jane sighed and pinched at the bridge of her nose. Rather than asking LJ to pull the vehicle over so that Sara could do just that, as Sara had expected, she instead gave LJ directions to the First Bank of Chicago. He began to follow them immediately.
“You don’t-“ Sara began.
“Do you know how to use a gun?” Jane interrupted her. “I mean, do you really know who to use a gun, not just how to pull the trigger and hit something that’s standing three feet in front of you.”
“No.” Frank Tancredi had been an old-school Republican, but that did not mean that he had liked guns himself. They had not been permitted in the house. He had not even liked having security around for political events.
“Then yes, I have to.” Jane pulled her gun from its holster and ejected the clip so that she could check the number of bullets remaining. “There could be something useful there.”
No wonder Jane did not lie very often. She was terrible at it. “Thank you,” Sara said.
“Hmm,” Jane mused before she told LJ, “Keep the car circling around the block. Sara and I are probably going to be coming out of that bank fast, and you’re going to have to drive hard.”
“I can do that,” LJ said. He seemed more relaxed now that he had been given responsibility for something.
“I’m my father’s next of kin,” Sara protested. “Whatever he has in that deposit box, I’m entitled to it.”
“Are you prepared to prove that and be politely stalled while they call the police?” As the bank came into view, Jane pulled the tape from her jacket and gave it to LJ. He hesitated for a moment before he took it. “If something happens to me or to Sara, take the care somewhere safe and hit the first speed dial on that cell phone. Tell the woman who answers who you are and where you are, and she’ll send someone out to pick you up.”
“Are you sure?” LJ asked as he slipped the tape into his pocket. “Me and my dad and Veronica, we, uh, we trusted people who weren’t worth it a few times.” And Veronica was dead now.
Jane let out a soft laugh. “If the woman on the other end of that phone is not trustworthy, then we’ve already lost whether you call her or not,” she said. The SUV pulled to a momentary halt, and Jane snugged her jacket about herself to conceal the gun once more as she raised her eyebrows at Sara. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.” The trembling that had been with her when she had got back into the vehicle was gone. Sara stepped out of the SUV and watched as it pulled away from the curb. “What do you want to do?”
“Now you want to follow my lead,” Jane said without anger. The two of them began to climb the steps together. Sara felt strange with so many eyes around her and only fought down the urge to fidget as she realized that this would draw more attention.
“I’ve never robbed a bank before. Give me some credit for still being on the learning curve.”
“Just do what I tell you.” While Jane was being careful to keep the front of her jacket closed so that her gun would remain hidden, Sara noticed that she did not button it up. It wouldn’t do if she could not reach the weapon quickly when the need arose.
“Don’t shoot anyone and we have a deal,” Sara said.
“Unlikely. If Kellerman lives, he won’t be up and about for some time. He would have raised the alarm otherwise.” Jane’s glance waited for Sara’s reaction.
“He needed to be taken down.” She believed it.
They entered the bank side by side, Jane wearing her sleek business suit while Sara was still dressed in jeans and the navy top that she had worn for the past three days, minus a brief interlude back at the safe house when they had been in the washer. Sara tried to match her demeanor to Jane’s in spite of their disparate appearances, tried to be so chill and indifferent that no one would even dare to ask her if she belonged there, and found that it was easier than she had supposed. As inapproachable as they both ought to have appeared, naturally a bank manager came towards them immediately anyway.
“Can I help you ladies?” he asked. Jane’s hand twitched, and Sara gave her a hard look until she realized that Jane had not been reaching for her weapon at all. Jane’s only response was a slight smile.
“My father. Frank Tancredi,” Sara said, and watched as the manager began to form his mouth into a small ‘O’ before he caught himself again. “He died five days ago.”
“Yes, yes, I heard,” the manager said, casting a look towards the nearest security camera even as he had no way to signal it from the middle of the floor. “I’m very sorry.”
“Thank you.” Sara tried to give a smile that seemed appropriately grateful, but she had noticed the cameras herself and now did not believe that she could stop looking at them. “He had a deposit box here. I’d like to see it. I know that a will hasn’t been read yet, but I’m his only surviving relative.” She pulled her ID from her purse carelessly, as if the game was already up, as if she had nothing at all to worry about when it came to being caught.
“Yes, yes. There’s some paperwork that needs to be dealt with…” Sara cast a long glance towards the door as the manager spoke, tensing up her entire body like a rabbit on the verge of running. “In your circumstances, however, I’m sure that we can find a way to streamline it for you.”
“I would appreciate that.” The manager had to turn away and take them to his office in order to retrieve the keys. Sara followed and watched with anxious eyes, feeling rather than seeing Jane’s amusement beside her. Jane’s expression did not change.
Along the way, the manager paused and gave one of his clerks a significant look. The clerk followed his boss’s gaze, saw both Sara and Jane, and betrayed himself with a quick jerk. His eyes went wide.
“Damn it,” Sara said in a voice that was surprisingly clear and calm.
“It was inevitable,” Jane said in a voice that was if anything more composed than Sara’s own. On a mission and in her element, she almost seemed to glow. “Ordinarily we would have four minutes. Since they are now distracted by Kellerman, we may have as many as six, but that is no guarantee.”
“Play it as if we had four,” Sara agreed. They followed the manager with identical smiles on their faces as he ducked into his office and then emerged again within seconds. He was wearing the same. No one believed each other.
“Right this way,” the manager said as he led them down a long hallway and towards the vaults. Scarcely had he turned his back on them or taken them to a place with few other people about to witness her than was Jane flipping her jacket open and stepping close against the manager’s back. She was good at this; Sara was looking for it and still barely saw the gleam of gunmetal. Someone who did not know what they were looking for was likely to miss the way that the manager’s spine went rigid.
Sara cut Jane a glare. “You said that you wouldn’t shoot anyone.”
Jane shook her head and did not reply. “I know that you think you need to stall us,” she murmured against the manager’s ear, and he flinched away from her. “Here’s one very good reason why that would be a mistake.”
“I can see what you mean,” the manager said in a soft voice. He sounded as if he would very much like to lean over and be sick. Sara cast Jane another sour look and was just as roundly ignored again. “Right his way.” He led them to the room that contained the deposit boxes, shooing a few regular customers out as he did so. The dirty looks that he received as a result was enough to make Sara quickly put her hand over her mouth to stifle a hysterical giggle.
“Here,” the manager said as he found her father’s box and set it down in the center of the table. “If you have your key…?”
“I don’t,” Sara said helpfully. Jane agreed with her by raising her gun and taking careful aim at the lock. The boom of the gun echoed and reechoed in the smaller room; Sara was not sure how much of the four minutes remained. The manager jumped hard and did not relax when Jane stepped back accordingly so that he could have a few more feet of personal space. Sara took up the box and tapped it against the metal table until it accordingly fell open. The only thing inside was a sealed envelope. Her fingers were shaking as she reached out to pick it up.
“If you were going to shoot it open, anyway…?” the manager started.
Jane’s smile, at least, had a tinge of an apology about it. “We didn’t know which box it was,” she said. “Thank you for that.”
Sara examined the envelope and then the rest of the box, not sure what she even hoped to see within it. A signed confession from President Reynolds would be nice, but she would also settle for unassailable video evidence of the body being put into the car before Lincoln ever arrived scored second on the list. An envelope with neither address nor name written on it was not what Sara had expected. No. Wait. Upon looking further, Sara found that there was also a diamond ring. The envelope went unopened into Sara’s back pocket to be examined later; it was the ring that she was most interested in for the moment. She had seen it adorning her mother’s finger for fifteen years before her mother had ripped it off and flung it at her father during one of their bad fights, their gin and politics fights. Her mother had stormed from the room, dragging Sara with her, and her father had claimed that the ring had been lost. It had been six months before had grudgingly bought her a new one.
“Three minutes, Sara,” Jane said. When Sara did not answer her, she went on, “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Sara replied as she turned the ring to and fro in the fluorescent light, watching the diamond sparkle. As Jane’s expression turned impatient, Sara took a breath and gave herself a hard mental shake before she pushed the ring into her jeans pocket. “Three minutes.”
“Two and a half, now,” Jane said in a sour voice. To the manager, she said, “If I tell you not to sound the alarm until after we leave, it’s not going to mean a thing, is it?”
“Probably…probably not.” The manager winced as soon as he said it.
He need not have. Sara could have told him that Jane was a woman who appreciated honesty. “Okay.” Jane ticked her head towards Sara to indicate that she should follow.
With the weight of the ring in her pocket, Sara was not sure that she could do anything else other than follow until she pulled her head back together again. Still, she whirled towards the manager, who had not moved, on her way to the door and said, “Sorry for the, uh, hostage thing. At least we kept it short.”
Jane said sharply from the doorway, “Sara!” and Sara realized that she could now hear the wail of sirens. By some mutual agreement, she and Jane sped towards a run without every quite crossing that line. Somehow, they could not seem to stop themselves from the desire not to attract too much attention at the same time that they had less than a minute before it was not going to matter.
The sirens were very loud. Sara broke and sprinted across the final yards to the door, hearing Jane do the same behind her. There were red and blue lights coming down one side of the street. Luckily, they had LJ coming down the other.
“Go, go, go!” Jane yelled at LJ as she scrambled into the vehicle, almost before LJ had time to bring it to a complete stop. Sara leapt into the back while LJ put all of his weight down on the gas pedal. She was thrilled, genuinely ecstatic, to learn that LJ’s crazed teenaged driving skills had not diminished any as she was hurled back against her seat with a yelp. Two cars stopped at the bank; the other two came in right on their ass and with no signs of being shaken off any time soon. Jane threw one arm over the front seat and leaned over it so that she could stare out the back window with wild eyes and bared teeth. Sara thought that Jane would have been glad to shove LJ out of the driver’s seat and take over the job herself if that would not have cost them time that they did not have. She made an impatient ‘hurry up’ gesture with her hand instead, and LJ made the SUV’s engine roar as it leapt forward even faster.
“Uh,” Sara said as she threw her arm over the backseat and hunched over it in a posture very similar to Jane’s. The red and blue lights were not falling back. “I think that faster would be better.”
“I’m trying!” LJ swung the car in a haphazard arc around a coupe that was refusing to get out of his way, putting them briefly in the opposite lane amidst a blaring of horns before he managed to right them. Sara grabbed hard at the back of her seat so that she would not be hurled into the floor. “I can’t drive any faster!”
“Then drive crazier,” Jane snapped before she reached out and jerked on the wheel so hard that she nearly pulled it out of LJ’s hands altogether. The SUV jumped to the left and clipped a truck hard enough to make the vehicle shudder and nearly flip; Sara had a sudden and irrational urge to clap her hands over her eyes. Because she didn’t, she saw the truck spinning out in front of the police cars and slowing them. LJ took control of the wheel again and shot Jane a dirty look as he whipped the SUV into one of those sharp and physics-defying turns that he liked so much. They took several more before the sirens and the lights were behind them and Jane signaled to LJ that he could stop driving like quite so much of a madman. It was still at least a dozen minutes more before she allowed them to pull into a darkened alley and halt.
Jane hopped out of the car immediately and went around to the back. As Sara and LJ followed, she opened p the hatch and began rummaging about in a compartment that Sara had not seen before. Inside were several different license plates from a variety of states and a screwdriver with which to swap them out. Jane pursed her lips and decided that they would be from Florida for the time being before she crouched down and got to work.
Sara leaned against the vehicle as her legs proved shaky on her and stared at the broken tail light and battered quarter panel that was the result of their life-saving clip with the truck. LJ let out a shocked “Whoa” when he saw what he had done.
“Yes,” Jane said as she glanced up. “We will have to be very careful as we exit the city.”
Sara gripped LJ’s shoulder and smiled at him when he looked at her. “You did a good job.”
“Okay.” Jane rose to her feet and threw the screwdriver and the old license plate into the back before she shut the hatch and held out her hand for the keys. “Let’s go.” Before LJ could do so, the long-silent cellular phone began to ring. All three heads snapped towards it.
End Part Sixteen