The Occam's razor job - Chapter 31 - A
Title: The Occam's razor Job
Characters: Nate Ford, Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison, Parker, Sophie Deveraux, Patrick Bonnano
Fandom: Leverage
Spoilers: The Lonely Hearts Club Job, The Boy's night out Job
warnings: Dead people, language, violence, medical bullsh*t, extreme violence in later chapters, and extreme angst
Disclaimer: I do not own blah blah blah
Special, special, special, special thanks to trappercreekd for Betaing :D
This one, believe it or not, has almost 20 000 words, so it'll go in A, B and C parts.
o.0.o
“Fuck.”
That was the only word Hardison was able to say for an entire minute when he jumped out of Lucille, and realized where they were. Nate watched him, waiting for him to connect two and two, but Parker interrupted that process.
“Where are we?” she asked looking at the building in the park. They were more than two hundred meters away.
“It’s Estrella, Villacorta’s famous restaurant,” Hardison murmured. “It’s the place where he comes every day, at the same time, to take a working breakfast with his lieutenants. Fuck,” he turned to Nate. “How could Eliot be sure he would come today, after all the chaos during the night?”
“Because not coming here, now, would be a sign of weakness, which he can’t allow now. You told us about the power and respect he has to keep.”
“How long did you know Eliot would come here?” Hardison looked at him and sighed. “At the moment I mentioned it the first time, two days ago?”
“How much time do we have?” asked Sophie.
“Fifteen minutes, tops. Hardison, blueprints, surveillance, cameras, everything you can think of.”
“What shall we do?” Parker was sitting on the floor of Lucille, carefully swinging her legs. “And where’s Eliot?”
“We’ll park a little closer, but remain hidden. He is somewhere near, maybe already there. I don’t know, the cameras will show us. Get in, we have to move.”
He found a small parking lot behind a row of magnolias; Lucille was a target, but they needed to be as close as possible. The good thing was that there were three other vans, probably delivery, one almost similar to Lucille. If their luck held, no one would think they had come so close, and they would just presume they were one more delivery van. It was thin, but there was nothing they could do about it.
“He said he has one more thing to do, Nate,” Sophie said quietly when Parker went to help Hardison, leaving two of them in the front seats. “And you said to Hardison one option is killing Villacorta, and the second is something you don’t know if he is thinking about or not.”
Nate smiled; she forgot the earbuds again. “I also said that killing wouldn’t be his first choice, didn’t I? I don’t know, Sophie. We’ll know more when Hardison-”
“I’ve got something, come here,” the hacker called them, showing them a detailed 3D ground plan of the building. “It’s a huge recreation complex, with pools, a bowling alley, fitness and similar healthy shit in the basement and on the first floor. Estrella is on the second floor - peek through the window - we are looking at an open terrace. It’s famous because of its live gardens, there’s actual soil on that platform. Luckily for us, the static of the building had to be specially designed because of the weight, so the blueprints weren’t hard to find. It also has fountains and-”
“Focus, Hardison.”
“Yeah. Escape routes.” Hardison enlarged the basement part, and it was visibly much bigger than the rest. “The front section, facing us, is where the pools are. Behind it is a bowling alley, and a few larger rooms that I have yet to see what they are. The corridors that are spreading out everywhere are for different deliveries. The first one, the left, goes behind the building, underground, to the other building in the park, where there's probably a heating plant… the second one, the right, comes from an auxiliary engine room, and we have two that are mainly surface entrances for delivery vans. Everything is in the back part of the building.”
“Connections to the first and second floor?”
Hardison painted red routes from Estrella to all the exits. “And we can’t forget the exits on the ground floor, simple back doors.” Those he painted blue.
“Now go away - I have to hack their surveillance. Remember those two hackers from the attack on Mass Gen? If the second one did their surveillance, I’ll have to be extra careful not to let him to see me. Though I hope he’ll be busy somewhere else. Or dead.” He was typing as he spoke, and Nate waited, knowing he would call him to come back before he reached the front seat.
He was wrong. It took seven seconds longer than that.
“Wow.”
“Wow?”
“Peter Jackson would ask this guy to work on The Hobbit if he knew what he was able to do with a simple cam-”
“Hardison. Time.”
“The entire park is one giant laser grid, Nate. The park itself is huge; Estrella is in the middle and there’s more than fifteen minutes from the entrances of the park to here, everything is full of playgrounds, fountains, pavilions, and full of small paths. And trust me, the cameras on the trees, that’s trouble, especially if they have motion sensors. He made a net anticipating the movement of the wind - the cameras change focus and angle according to the direction and the strength of the wind. This guy is an artist. Too bad he ran into me.” Hardison finished the sentence with one press of his finger, and dozens of small images tilted for a second. “They are mine now. Okay, moving on to the complex now… here, he didn’t need to think about movement, so he could play with the performance - the effective dot area is almost 100%, the coverage is near perfect on the ground floor and the first floor… the second floor and Estrella, there we have even better quality and… what the hell is he drinking?”
Even Nate had a problem connecting the image to reality, as he stared at Eliot who was sitting at Villacorta’s table; yes, it had to be his table, on a slightly raised plateau surrounded with plants that went up the columns; his legs were stretched out and crossed at the ankles, he sat completely relaxed, and he was stirring a large red-purple slushie with a straw, seemingly concentrated only on the girlie decorations on his drink. Black suit, purple shirt, fancy sunglasses, and a lazy smile.
“Bloody hell,” Sophie whispered. “I can’t say what I expected, but I can tell this isn’t it. He is just… waiting for Villacorta to come? As if he isn’t on the list of people to be killed on sight? Nate?!”
“No, Villacorta will listen to what he has to say first.”
“Video is perfect. The cameras that surround Villacorta’s table are the best quality, and every one is focused on one chair. Also, there is one camera for each table on the terrace as well. Look how sharp the close up is; Villacorta records all his meetings here, for further analysis. He can see every blink, every reaction of his opponents, every look and smile, to study later in peace. I’m working on the audio now, it’ll take a few sec-”
“Erm, hurry up.” Sophie whispered when a large group entered the terrace. They had been warned he was there, because they spread out in a second, surrounding the table with weapons in their hands. A few of the guests that were sitting on the terrace were chased away in three seconds; Estrella was closed for business.
“I presume we can’t just go in there, say: ‘Excuse us, this is ours’, and take him away?” Hardison asked desperately, watching the scene, typing at the same time.
“That’s much better than 60% of the plans that I’m working on now,” Nate said watching Villacorta’s approach.
“As long as you’re working on it, I’m not worried.”
”You should be. We can’t do anything until we find out what Eliot is doing.”
“That means Villacorta can order his men to put a bullet in his head at any second, and we can’t do anything?” Hardison squinted when Villacorta raised his hand at the moment he finished his sentence, but sighed in relief when he sat at the table, and his men put their guns away.
“I wouldn’t say we can’t do anything…” Nate said thoughtfully. “There is one thing we can do. In fact, we are very good at it.”
“What?”
“We can record it,” Nate grinned and pointed at his screen. “Again.”
Sophie gasped, in a helpless attempt to stop a laugh becoming a cry, and Parker openly snorted. Hardison slowly facepalmed.
“You finally snapped, huh?” he asked Nate, almost worried. “I was wondering when it’d happen.”
“Maybe. A little,” Nate said absentmindedly, watching the table, with his head slightly tilted. “And now, do what you always do… get control of everything that you can hack, and give me that damn audio. Now.”
“Creepy,” Parker smiled almost gently, crawled to the bag, and took out both kitchen knives. “Okay, now we are ready.”
o.0.o
Eliot brought only three phones, he destroyed all the rest of them. No guns or needles, either. Even the pen was floating in one of the fountains in the park.
Destroying the cheap phone was particularly hard, he thought while watching the terrace filling with armed men. Twenty-two, armed and trained. Onto that phone he transferred all of his contacts and history, and the SIM card had to be scratched with the scalpel, torn into halves, and put into the fountain… and yet he wasn’t sure if it was safe enough, if could it lead to them somehow. He really should have paid attention to Hardison’s geek babbling when he had a chance.
Sitting was good. He was low in the chair, with his elbows on the armrests, holding a drink with both hands, and the immobility kept the pain on a level he could control. He really had come a long way from yesterday morning with Bonnano, when he was also without morphine… he had learned a lot about hiding it. Or maybe he had just came to the level where even the agony became a boring nuisance. Even pain couldn’t torture someone who didn’t give a shit anymore.
His mind was bright and relaxed, and he knew he had to be very careful with this strange cheerful mood, but damn, everything was so fucking funny, from whatever angle he looked at it. Hilarious, in fact. He grinned, looking up at Villacorta, and said: “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” Villacorta nodded, still standing, and two of his men came closer. Eliot saw scanners in their hands and made no move, except taking the drink in his right hand, letting them sweep him from the head to the toe in search for weapons. Good thing, those modern cartels; he wasn’t sure how it would go if they searched him in the old fashioned way. He showed them the phones, all three stuck in one pocket.
“No weapons, no wires,” one man reported, switching the scanner with the gun, and Villacorta went to the other side of the big table, followed by Yonni Bugueno. Eliot followed Bugueno with his eyes; if this was winter, if the nights were longer, maybe this wouldn’t have been their first meeting. He almost regretted that he didn’t have the chance to deal with him, when the man turned and smiled. His eyes, in a broad, soft face under short dark hair, were cruel. Prostitution was, in many ways, more cruel than drug trafficking, and this one was an expert in his field.
Villacorta didn’t smile. And his eyes weren’t a bit cruel.
Bugueno sat three chairs away from Villacorta. Smart move. They were forcing him to divide his attention, and at the same time, there was no danger of a crossfire when their goons started to shoot.
Two waitresses brought plates arranged with food, a pitcher with coffee, cups and smaller plates, but Villacorta stopped them when they gave him his coffee. “That will be enough, thank you. Take the rest of the day off, and tell everybody to go home.” He didn’t smile, but his voice was pleasant. He looked at him and rose his eyebrows. “Unless you want something else?”
“One more slushie, darlin’,” Eliot smiled at the girl, and added, “Nice touch with the mint leaves, and these orange and banana flowers look fabulous.”
The slushie took his very first victim when Bugueno snorted, revealing the exact level of his comprehension and understanding of the situation and people. He might have been very good at scaring the young girls, but he wasn’t a player for the big deals. “She made it look like a rose.” Eliot opened his eyes wider, turning to Bugueno. “Have you seen it? Look, there’s even a small petal.” Bugueno’s plump face grimaced with disdain, and he glanced at Villacorta in silent question.
Villacorta wasn’t looking at him, so no answer came to that.
The picture of Villacorta that Hardison had sent him was just a pale sketch, though it was high quality; the picture couldn’t show the power that was radiating from him. Eliot smiled; Hardison would probably go into an explanation about force fields or something like that. Good looking, middle-aged man, with black hair that was going just slightly gray, naturally darker skin and black eyes. His finely sculpted features revealed that even if he thought about finding the Lady Killer later, in some alternate ending to all this, it would be of no use; she wasn’t a Chilean assassin because of the money. She was there because of this man.
Damn, Villacorta wasn’t the best because his men followed him in fear; they followed him in respect, maybe even love. And it wouldn’t have lasted, if it wasn’t returned. He remembered that Villacorta sent Tapia to toughen up, gave him the rest of the lieutenants and tried to help him to survive in a world he didn’t belong in. Now he could understand why he’d launched the crusade when they’d dealt with San Guillermo, the overkill that was confusing him from the beginning. He took care of his men, his property, his business; what was his, what he controlled, couldn’t be touched under the penalty of death. Damn, he understood that too well.
Maybe it would be wise to avoid mentioning Rojas and Barclay in this conversation, Spencer.
Yep. He was right. This was fucking hilarious. He managed to erase the glint from his eyes, and arrange his smile in a more prudent, formal form, forbidding himself to take this too lightly. Being dead or not, he had a job to do, and taking this man by the hand and leading him where he wanted him to go, might prove a lot harder than he ever expected. Maybe even impossible.
Villacorta’s gaze was bleak and steady, showing no traces of any trouble, or a sleepless night.
“You have to know a few things before I let you speak,” Villacorta said when the girl brought another slushie and put it on the table. He waited until she went away, then continued. “You won’t leave this place alive.” It was a calm statement, disinterested and very nasty in those circumstances. “If your boss thought he could deal with the situation by sending me someone to negotiate, he made a dreadful mistake. I don’t negotiate. You’ll be killed.”
Eliot stirred his drink, and then peeked the other one on the table. The other one had a pineapple tulip.
“So, you think Nate Ford sent me here to negotiate?” he asked him with the same calmness in his voice that Villacorta so naturally obtained. He felt stirring in Villacorta’s men, they stayed alerted. “Or, do you think he made a mistake by sending me here, not realizing the danger I’m going into? Or, perhaps, he purposely sent you a pawn, to play his move on the board?”
“Why would Ford send me the weakest piece?”
“At the moment you find an answer to that question, Villacorta, we’ll be able to really talk,” he smiled. “I’ll wait. In meantime, I’ll speak.”
“Eliot Spencer.” Villacorta entwined his fingers, watching him attentively. “Not only will I have immense satisfaction in killing you first, but also I’ll profit from it. You’re aware of the rewards on your head? Some of them are astronomical.”
“You did your research, but not thoroughly enough. You know nothing about me.”
Villacorta nodded. “But I do know something about pawns,” he said. “I use them a lot myself. The pawn is perfect for a man like me, because it’s not in his nature to retreat. He can’t retreat. He can only go forth, without turning around, blind to all the moves that are playing out behind him. He steps aside only to take a life. Or to be sacrificed. He is rarely included in the real moves that decide the game, there are other, more versatile pieces on the board for that. They do the real winning.” Villacorta stopped for a second to put sugar in his coffee before he continued with the same easy rhythm. “You see… the pawns are the grunt force, but they are very hard to find. The real ones. I’m not talking about the mindless minions who are expendable and whom you can find on every corner. When a man finds a real pawn, he better not let him skip away; in right hands, a pawn is priceless. He can be used for anything, he’ll do his job with sheer force, because it’s the only way he knows. He’ll do anything needed to get the job done. The pawns represent an honor and loyalty, courage and force, in their purest shape.” Villacorta looked him directly into the eyes, sinking his gaze. “I have my pawn, and I’m using him scarcely, knowing his worth. Why did Nate Ford send his to his death? Why are you being sacrificed, Eliot Spencer?”
If he ever, even for one second, thought he should underestimate this man, now was the time to come to his senses.
“I was bored to death,” he said simply. What was that Sophie had said during that job with the violin? Scheherazade bought her life, night after night, by prolonging her story, keeping her husband interested; she was alive as long as he wanted to hear the rest, as long as she had something worth listening to. God, he hated talking, so much. He smiled again, knowing he had to buy minutes, one after another, with the talk that Villacorta must not understand, which made things way more interesting… and started to talk. “He said, it would be fun, you’ll be surrounded by pretty nurses. He said, you'll rest, and watch TV, while we work our asses off. It sounded cool, ‘til I figured out all the nurses were psychopath sadistic bitches, and that I’d be practically tied to the bed ‘til nights, when I was only able to walk around. All that, while they were havin’ fun with your people.”
“Having fun?” Villacorta asked quietly. Bugueno wasn’t so unreadable; without turning his eyes to him, Eliot could see the involuntary twitch of his shoulders, as if he stopped himself from leaning forward before it became a real move.
“Well, we do enjoy our work,” Eliot smiled, watching Villacorta’s eyes, trying to find irritation in them. There was none. There was fucking nothing. “You gave us an opportunity we couldn’t miss, practically a gift. That ambush in the warehouse was perfect, once we found out where your men were taken. It took us a little time to arrange and set up everything necessary for the acceptance of a victim with an almost fatal chest wound, and his immediate reception in the post surgery care. You know you can make the certain steps disappear, right? Or, I should say, to erase all the traces that they didn’t happen at all? When the board was set, they started to play, leaving me to the boredom and lousy TV programs. I know you thought you were the one that drew my team to the sitting duck, yours truly, but I have to tell you that your sitting duck was plastic bait, already set up when you came up with your brilliant idea.”
Villacorta raised his hand, and the blond guy behind him came a step closer. The short order that Villacorta gave him was too quiet to be heard, and his head was turned so Eliot couldn’t read his lips, and he could only hope that Villacorta asked for more coffee. Right.
“What was the result of their play with the hospital?” Villacorta returned all of his attention to him; it seemed that man had loads of attention ready to be poured out, causing his already overheated brain to speed up even more. It wasn’t good; he had to spare almost half of his concentration on his breathing, the control of the pain, the control of the every single move he made, and he wasn’t sure if the rest would be able to stay focused enough to match this gaze that was never leaving his eyes. And he thought Barclay’s calmness was terrifying. Damn fool.
“Information. Knowledge. Power. That’s the only currency we operate with, that’s our main product.” He took his glass and leaned back again; holding the glass would cover up the slight trembling of his fingers. He felt it in time, before it became real, visible shaking, and hoped this would stop it. Letting Villacorta notice that would be a giant mistake. “You might have done your research, Villacorta, but the pieces you managed to collect are far away from the whole picture, and you’re aware that you know very little about your victims. Let me tell you something, something that I will probably repeat to you more than once: If you want to control everything, you need to know everything.”
“How can you be so sure of what I know?”
“We are alive.”
Silence. Damn, that man didn’t smile, he didn’t change his facial expression into anything worth seeing, he just sat there and watched him, patiently. And he had no idea how to read him, how to see what was going on behind those dark, keen eyes. For the first time in his life, he couldn’t read someone’s silence, and it had to happen right in the middle of the most important thing he ever did.
If he allowed five more seconds of silence, if he doesn’t give him something worth leaving him alive for a little longer…
“In short, you made a mistake,” he continued lightly, but this time he returned Villacorta’s even stare with the same one. “You drew our attention on yourself with this hunt; it interfered with our jobs, our plans, and disturbed pretty much everything that we were doing - and we were in the middle of a few huge things. We were forced to reset, and to concentrate on the clear and present danger. And we are not happy about it.”
The blackbirds’ chirping was the only sound that was heard for five seconds. Villacorta took a sip of the coffee, and carefully returned the cup to the table. He should be discouraged with this silence, Eliot thought, watching Villacorta watching him; discouraged and shaken. Probably terrified, too. He struggled for better control of his face, but it was in vain, he just couldn’t stop the derisive smile from showing. This man had played this game with many, many victims before. Yet, this time, it wasn’t a victim before him.
He subdued his smile. “If I’m annoying you, I can return later.” For a moment, Eliot thought he caught a faintly ironic light in Villacorta’s left eye, but he couldn’t be sure. “I’m sure you have to discuss many important things with your lieutenant…s.” He averted his eyes from him only to look at the table, at Bugueno, and the empty chairs where the other lieutenants should have been sitting, then looked at Villacorta again. “Or not,” he smiled sweetly.
Villacorta went very, very still.
“Now that I have your undivided attention, I’m glad to inform you we have a present for you.” Eliot fixed his features into a polite smile. “I had to fool your Lady Killer, and make her believe I was in the hospital to keep my eyes on your three morons. No, I was there to be the bait and draw your forces within our reach, to keep them there long enough to be observed. We used an opportunity you gave us, and analyzed your actions, the preparing of the attack, and delivery. All the steps were evaluated, all the flaws recorded. I insisted on giving you an A plus on the coordination of the small units in the main attack, but I was outnumbered… sometimes it’s hard to explain an professional opinion to the professionals from another field. You’ll get a copy during the day. I hope you’re color blind, there’s a lot of red in the comments. But with compliments. We are polite people.”
“Yonni, remind me to send a thank note,” Villacorta glanced at Bugueno, but not for longer than one blink. “I’m sure the trained professional certainly found many flaws and mistakes,” he continued casually. “Yet, that same professional voluntarily came directly into the hands of the people who are going to kill him. That usually means he has an exit strategy - and I’m sure we shall come to that at some point; but what will happen if the other side don’t follow your script? How well are you prepared for unexpected twists and turns?”
Damn, he almost shrugged, he was too concentrated on Villacorta, and forgot to control his body; he managed to stop the move at the very beginning, but not before an outburst of pain ripped through him, causing his teeth to clench, and his smile to become frozen on his face. It lasted three seconds, an eternity under Villacorta’s stare, and he could only hope that the Chilean would think his words caused his breathing to stop.
Villacorta’s voice went soft; he noticed. “The professional would know there’s a possibility of using him, while he’s still alive, against the others - as a weapon, as a tool, or as bait. Yet, I don’t see even the slightest hint of worry, much less the fear that that could happen. What conclusions should we draw from this? Either you have a strong assurance that you yet have to reveal, or there’s no one who can be blackmailed with your life. Maybe both combined.”
Now was Eliot’s turn to go very, very still.
Eliot returned his gaze evenly. “I might be a distraction,” he offered. “Even better… I might be the distraction who will tell you he is the distraction, while he is here just to kill you.” And again, the only one who tensed was Bugueno.
“No. You will try to kill me only if anything else fails. That’s expected,” Villacorta said thoughtfully. “Your coming here is a desperate move, Eliot Spencer, and I’m even beginning to doubt that the rest of your group knows you’re here. Do you think it was clever to show me what state my opponents are in? You don’t know what to do, how to get out of this, and desperate moves are only things that are left for you to try.” Villacorta put his elbows on the table, seemingly more concentrated than before, which was a disturbing sight. “Your words are empty,” his face hardened a little. “If you have an exit strategy, now would be a good time to start working on it.”
Villacorta didn’t have to give a clear order; the five men that were standing behind him relaxed their arms. The others, behind Eliot and at the two tables at the back of the terrace, he couldn’t see now, but he knew they were ready too. Damn, he was right; this man didn’t have to maintain the power and the respect. Particularly not the damn control. And he still hadn’t found out anything about him… he couldn’t catch any reaction that would show him even the slightest way to carefully attack. This puzzle was better than he’d expected; there must have been much more boring ways to spend the last hour of his life.
“You haven’t smiled even once since you came here,” he said carefully. Then he smiled, taking care to control it, not letting it be too broad, too genuine. “And you are winning. That’s strange.”
Villacorta waited for the rest.
“I don’t need the exit strategy,” Eliot said gently, and slurped his juice only to make Bugueno twitch. Yep, he grimaced again, like a trained dog. “What?” he asked him over the straw, peeking through the banana rose. “Not manly enough? You’ve got serious issues, Bugueno.”
“Kill him already, Renan,” Bugueno hissed. “We have more important things to do than listen to this rambling.”
Well, if Bugueno thought this was rambling, maybe he was succeeding, though he doubted Villacorta shared his opinion.
Villacorta was too smart to ask him what the hell he was talking about all this time, and when he would get to the point; nope, he used the situation and just collected piece after piece of information that was given freely, patiently waiting to see where it would lead at the end. The dangerous thing was, he couldn’t be sure when, exactly, Villacorta would decide it was enough, that there was nothing more he could get from him, on what subject it would happen.
He had many subject matters to go through, and he had to distribute his strength… okay, not quite the strength, there was none… better to say, he had to stretch his weakness, and slow it down. When Villacorta turned to Bugueno to dart him a look, Eliot took two seconds to assess his condition; Bugueno, whom he was not looking at directly, was slightly blurred, the edges of his vision were dotted with the tiny black spots. For now, they were not spreading. The second use of the slushie, the crushed ice that should cool his throat and constrict the small veins, slowing the bleeding, was turning against him. He was chilled, and the pale sun wasn’t warm enough. The cool breeze wasn’t helping, either. But his mind still worked. And the pain… nope, no use to think about it.
He was fucked, but crazy enough not to care.
Villacorta relaxed his fingers on the table, and looked at him again. “So, the hospital was your playground. I get it.” For a second he seemed to be on the edge of a smile, and suddenly, the chill from the slushie spread where no slushie had gone before. Eliot slowly blinked, waiting. “I have someone who would like to discuss that matter with you; he claims, categorically, that he never misses his target.” Villacorta’s eyes turned to the doors that led to the inner part of the restaurant, a stairway and back offices; the blond guy had returned, and he wasn’t alone.
The funny thing was, it took a moment for him to recognize the rough face under the braided hair with a bandana, though he'd been very close when they'd fought in that warehouse. His memory sorted it out only when he put him a little further away, and when he added the flash of the fired gun that lit the face behind it. That image was clear, brilliant in every fucking detail. He managed to only flinch inwardly when he almost felt that bullet slamming into him again, the memory was so vivid.
“If you lied, there’s no point in listening further, right?” Villacorta said softly.
Eliot tried to rub his smile back off his face. “Good morning, Cuchillo.” He knew his bared teeth had little in common with a smile. “Nice to see you. Again.”
The Spider just started to pull his strings around the Fly.
o.0.o
Nate was extremely happy that Sunday mornings in the half private park didn’t draw too many walkers, just a few joggers were caught on the cameras, because the motion sensors on the park cameras gave a quiet ‘ping’ every time they caught a person in their radius. More than that, he was happy because if any of them saw Lucille, they would certainly call the police to arrest them for having public sex.
Lucille was rocking.
Hardison was at his place, he was sitting right beside the hacker, and Parker was sitting on something so her chin could be rested on the table near Hardison’s elbow, just twenty centimeters from the monitors. Sophie… Sophie was pacing the van, the entire - how much? - four meters, up and down, behind them. She was marching, for god’s sake, and they all felt as if they weren’t in the van, but in a small boat on not so calm a sea.
“You have to find some way to call him, this is unacceptable… he has no idea what he's doing! Do any of you know what he is doing? I thought not. Look - his posture is all wrong, he is sending all the wrong signals, this is dangerous!”
“Calm down, Sophie,” he automatically repeated, for the tenth time, but in vain. She hastened her pace. He tried to concentrate again on the dialogue that was going before them.
“What’s the point of screwing up the facts?” she went on, her softly modulated voice very high on the edges. “No, let me rephrase that: What’s the bloody point in sitting in front guns, waiting to be shot, and screwing up the facts? What the hell does he think he is doing?! This is not grifting, you hear me, it ain’t griftin’, he needs backup, and he needs it now! Nate!”
“Calm down, Sophie,” he repeated tiredly. “You’re mixing dialects. You sound like a UN conference gone bad.”
“Bleh.” The monitors swayed when she took a turn and stormed in a different direction. “This is a madness. Hardison, try again if he turned on his phones. NOW!”
“Calm down, Sophie,” Hardison murmured. “No phones yet.”
“Calm down!?” she stopped and Hardison flinched, rising his shoulders. “I won’t calm down! Villacorta is reading him, and Eliot hasn’t decided yet what stance he is going to take; he is too exposed to him, he wavers between openness and closeness, and he is in the wrong position! You can’t lead the conversation where you want it if you’re sitting too relaxed! Every little detail is important, and he-” she stopped and Nate turned for a second to see what happened.
Sophie was looking at Parker. The thief was slowly going with the kitchen knife, a centimeter a second, along the lines of the escape routes that were on the monitor near her. The tip of the blade was almost touching the monitor, causing Hardison to flinch again.
“-he needs the backup, Nate,” Sophie finished, venting a long sigh. “I don’t know what he's doing, but he can’t do it alone. You mustn’t, in only two sentences, talk with a man trying to leave one impression, and in another, provoke another one with banana roses. Villacorta is catching the mixed signals, and he will-”
“Trouble,” Hardison caught his breath with a hiss, and Sophie came nearer to look at the new man on the scene.
“Hardison.” Nate pulled her to sit beside him. “When I tell you, hit all the alarms in the building. The fire alarms, and especially the alarms in the offices. Those are connected to the police and security.”
“Police?” Sophie whispered. “With all this going on the whole night, the response time shall be ten times longer. He has one more minute before they see he really was shot, and they’ll kill him, there’s no-”
“No, they won’t. Villacorta won’t kill him while all the alarms are ringing, drawing police, he won’t explain a dead body on his terrace when the police arrive. They’ll take him somewhere else to kill him, which means there won’t be more than twenty Chileans around him, like it is now, just an escort party. We’ll be able to follow-” Nate stopped his explanation.
“What?!” Hardison hissed, his trembling fingers ready to press all the buttons at the same time.
“Stand down, Hardison,” he put a hand on his shoulder, hoping he was right. He stared for a few seconds at Eliot’s smile, a vicious grimace, expected from a man like Eliot Spencer at the moment he met the man who’d shot him… but Eliot’s eyes were calm. Maybe, just maybe, a little relieved. Relieved?!
“We’ll wait,” he simply said. And smiled.
Parker was quietly humming.
Characters: Nate Ford, Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison, Parker, Sophie Deveraux, Patrick Bonnano
Fandom: Leverage
Spoilers: The Lonely Hearts Club Job, The Boy's night out Job
warnings: Dead people, language, violence, medical bullsh*t, extreme violence in later chapters, and extreme angst
Disclaimer: I do not own blah blah blah
Special, special, special, special thanks to trappercreekd for Betaing :D
This one, believe it or not, has almost 20 000 words, so it'll go in A, B and C parts.
o.0.o
“Fuck.”
That was the only word Hardison was able to say for an entire minute when he jumped out of Lucille, and realized where they were. Nate watched him, waiting for him to connect two and two, but Parker interrupted that process.
“Where are we?” she asked looking at the building in the park. They were more than two hundred meters away.
“It’s Estrella, Villacorta’s famous restaurant,” Hardison murmured. “It’s the place where he comes every day, at the same time, to take a working breakfast with his lieutenants. Fuck,” he turned to Nate. “How could Eliot be sure he would come today, after all the chaos during the night?”
“Because not coming here, now, would be a sign of weakness, which he can’t allow now. You told us about the power and respect he has to keep.”
“How long did you know Eliot would come here?” Hardison looked at him and sighed. “At the moment I mentioned it the first time, two days ago?”
“How much time do we have?” asked Sophie.
“Fifteen minutes, tops. Hardison, blueprints, surveillance, cameras, everything you can think of.”
“What shall we do?” Parker was sitting on the floor of Lucille, carefully swinging her legs. “And where’s Eliot?”
“We’ll park a little closer, but remain hidden. He is somewhere near, maybe already there. I don’t know, the cameras will show us. Get in, we have to move.”
He found a small parking lot behind a row of magnolias; Lucille was a target, but they needed to be as close as possible. The good thing was that there were three other vans, probably delivery, one almost similar to Lucille. If their luck held, no one would think they had come so close, and they would just presume they were one more delivery van. It was thin, but there was nothing they could do about it.
“He said he has one more thing to do, Nate,” Sophie said quietly when Parker went to help Hardison, leaving two of them in the front seats. “And you said to Hardison one option is killing Villacorta, and the second is something you don’t know if he is thinking about or not.”
Nate smiled; she forgot the earbuds again. “I also said that killing wouldn’t be his first choice, didn’t I? I don’t know, Sophie. We’ll know more when Hardison-”
“I’ve got something, come here,” the hacker called them, showing them a detailed 3D ground plan of the building. “It’s a huge recreation complex, with pools, a bowling alley, fitness and similar healthy shit in the basement and on the first floor. Estrella is on the second floor - peek through the window - we are looking at an open terrace. It’s famous because of its live gardens, there’s actual soil on that platform. Luckily for us, the static of the building had to be specially designed because of the weight, so the blueprints weren’t hard to find. It also has fountains and-”
“Focus, Hardison.”
“Yeah. Escape routes.” Hardison enlarged the basement part, and it was visibly much bigger than the rest. “The front section, facing us, is where the pools are. Behind it is a bowling alley, and a few larger rooms that I have yet to see what they are. The corridors that are spreading out everywhere are for different deliveries. The first one, the left, goes behind the building, underground, to the other building in the park, where there's probably a heating plant… the second one, the right, comes from an auxiliary engine room, and we have two that are mainly surface entrances for delivery vans. Everything is in the back part of the building.”
“Connections to the first and second floor?”
Hardison painted red routes from Estrella to all the exits. “And we can’t forget the exits on the ground floor, simple back doors.” Those he painted blue.
“Now go away - I have to hack their surveillance. Remember those two hackers from the attack on Mass Gen? If the second one did their surveillance, I’ll have to be extra careful not to let him to see me. Though I hope he’ll be busy somewhere else. Or dead.” He was typing as he spoke, and Nate waited, knowing he would call him to come back before he reached the front seat.
He was wrong. It took seven seconds longer than that.
“Wow.”
“Wow?”
“Peter Jackson would ask this guy to work on The Hobbit if he knew what he was able to do with a simple cam-”
“Hardison. Time.”
“The entire park is one giant laser grid, Nate. The park itself is huge; Estrella is in the middle and there’s more than fifteen minutes from the entrances of the park to here, everything is full of playgrounds, fountains, pavilions, and full of small paths. And trust me, the cameras on the trees, that’s trouble, especially if they have motion sensors. He made a net anticipating the movement of the wind - the cameras change focus and angle according to the direction and the strength of the wind. This guy is an artist. Too bad he ran into me.” Hardison finished the sentence with one press of his finger, and dozens of small images tilted for a second. “They are mine now. Okay, moving on to the complex now… here, he didn’t need to think about movement, so he could play with the performance - the effective dot area is almost 100%, the coverage is near perfect on the ground floor and the first floor… the second floor and Estrella, there we have even better quality and… what the hell is he drinking?”
Even Nate had a problem connecting the image to reality, as he stared at Eliot who was sitting at Villacorta’s table; yes, it had to be his table, on a slightly raised plateau surrounded with plants that went up the columns; his legs were stretched out and crossed at the ankles, he sat completely relaxed, and he was stirring a large red-purple slushie with a straw, seemingly concentrated only on the girlie decorations on his drink. Black suit, purple shirt, fancy sunglasses, and a lazy smile.
“Bloody hell,” Sophie whispered. “I can’t say what I expected, but I can tell this isn’t it. He is just… waiting for Villacorta to come? As if he isn’t on the list of people to be killed on sight? Nate?!”
“No, Villacorta will listen to what he has to say first.”
“Video is perfect. The cameras that surround Villacorta’s table are the best quality, and every one is focused on one chair. Also, there is one camera for each table on the terrace as well. Look how sharp the close up is; Villacorta records all his meetings here, for further analysis. He can see every blink, every reaction of his opponents, every look and smile, to study later in peace. I’m working on the audio now, it’ll take a few sec-”
“Erm, hurry up.” Sophie whispered when a large group entered the terrace. They had been warned he was there, because they spread out in a second, surrounding the table with weapons in their hands. A few of the guests that were sitting on the terrace were chased away in three seconds; Estrella was closed for business.
“I presume we can’t just go in there, say: ‘Excuse us, this is ours’, and take him away?” Hardison asked desperately, watching the scene, typing at the same time.
“That’s much better than 60% of the plans that I’m working on now,” Nate said watching Villacorta’s approach.
“As long as you’re working on it, I’m not worried.”
”You should be. We can’t do anything until we find out what Eliot is doing.”
“That means Villacorta can order his men to put a bullet in his head at any second, and we can’t do anything?” Hardison squinted when Villacorta raised his hand at the moment he finished his sentence, but sighed in relief when he sat at the table, and his men put their guns away.
“I wouldn’t say we can’t do anything…” Nate said thoughtfully. “There is one thing we can do. In fact, we are very good at it.”
“What?”
“We can record it,” Nate grinned and pointed at his screen. “Again.”
Sophie gasped, in a helpless attempt to stop a laugh becoming a cry, and Parker openly snorted. Hardison slowly facepalmed.
“You finally snapped, huh?” he asked Nate, almost worried. “I was wondering when it’d happen.”
“Maybe. A little,” Nate said absentmindedly, watching the table, with his head slightly tilted. “And now, do what you always do… get control of everything that you can hack, and give me that damn audio. Now.”
“Creepy,” Parker smiled almost gently, crawled to the bag, and took out both kitchen knives. “Okay, now we are ready.”
o.0.o
Eliot brought only three phones, he destroyed all the rest of them. No guns or needles, either. Even the pen was floating in one of the fountains in the park.
Destroying the cheap phone was particularly hard, he thought while watching the terrace filling with armed men. Twenty-two, armed and trained. Onto that phone he transferred all of his contacts and history, and the SIM card had to be scratched with the scalpel, torn into halves, and put into the fountain… and yet he wasn’t sure if it was safe enough, if could it lead to them somehow. He really should have paid attention to Hardison’s geek babbling when he had a chance.
Sitting was good. He was low in the chair, with his elbows on the armrests, holding a drink with both hands, and the immobility kept the pain on a level he could control. He really had come a long way from yesterday morning with Bonnano, when he was also without morphine… he had learned a lot about hiding it. Or maybe he had just came to the level where even the agony became a boring nuisance. Even pain couldn’t torture someone who didn’t give a shit anymore.
His mind was bright and relaxed, and he knew he had to be very careful with this strange cheerful mood, but damn, everything was so fucking funny, from whatever angle he looked at it. Hilarious, in fact. He grinned, looking up at Villacorta, and said: “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” Villacorta nodded, still standing, and two of his men came closer. Eliot saw scanners in their hands and made no move, except taking the drink in his right hand, letting them sweep him from the head to the toe in search for weapons. Good thing, those modern cartels; he wasn’t sure how it would go if they searched him in the old fashioned way. He showed them the phones, all three stuck in one pocket.
“No weapons, no wires,” one man reported, switching the scanner with the gun, and Villacorta went to the other side of the big table, followed by Yonni Bugueno. Eliot followed Bugueno with his eyes; if this was winter, if the nights were longer, maybe this wouldn’t have been their first meeting. He almost regretted that he didn’t have the chance to deal with him, when the man turned and smiled. His eyes, in a broad, soft face under short dark hair, were cruel. Prostitution was, in many ways, more cruel than drug trafficking, and this one was an expert in his field.
Villacorta didn’t smile. And his eyes weren’t a bit cruel.
Bugueno sat three chairs away from Villacorta. Smart move. They were forcing him to divide his attention, and at the same time, there was no danger of a crossfire when their goons started to shoot.
Two waitresses brought plates arranged with food, a pitcher with coffee, cups and smaller plates, but Villacorta stopped them when they gave him his coffee. “That will be enough, thank you. Take the rest of the day off, and tell everybody to go home.” He didn’t smile, but his voice was pleasant. He looked at him and rose his eyebrows. “Unless you want something else?”
“One more slushie, darlin’,” Eliot smiled at the girl, and added, “Nice touch with the mint leaves, and these orange and banana flowers look fabulous.”
The slushie took his very first victim when Bugueno snorted, revealing the exact level of his comprehension and understanding of the situation and people. He might have been very good at scaring the young girls, but he wasn’t a player for the big deals. “She made it look like a rose.” Eliot opened his eyes wider, turning to Bugueno. “Have you seen it? Look, there’s even a small petal.” Bugueno’s plump face grimaced with disdain, and he glanced at Villacorta in silent question.
Villacorta wasn’t looking at him, so no answer came to that.
The picture of Villacorta that Hardison had sent him was just a pale sketch, though it was high quality; the picture couldn’t show the power that was radiating from him. Eliot smiled; Hardison would probably go into an explanation about force fields or something like that. Good looking, middle-aged man, with black hair that was going just slightly gray, naturally darker skin and black eyes. His finely sculpted features revealed that even if he thought about finding the Lady Killer later, in some alternate ending to all this, it would be of no use; she wasn’t a Chilean assassin because of the money. She was there because of this man.
Damn, Villacorta wasn’t the best because his men followed him in fear; they followed him in respect, maybe even love. And it wouldn’t have lasted, if it wasn’t returned. He remembered that Villacorta sent Tapia to toughen up, gave him the rest of the lieutenants and tried to help him to survive in a world he didn’t belong in. Now he could understand why he’d launched the crusade when they’d dealt with San Guillermo, the overkill that was confusing him from the beginning. He took care of his men, his property, his business; what was his, what he controlled, couldn’t be touched under the penalty of death. Damn, he understood that too well.
Maybe it would be wise to avoid mentioning Rojas and Barclay in this conversation, Spencer.
Yep. He was right. This was fucking hilarious. He managed to erase the glint from his eyes, and arrange his smile in a more prudent, formal form, forbidding himself to take this too lightly. Being dead or not, he had a job to do, and taking this man by the hand and leading him where he wanted him to go, might prove a lot harder than he ever expected. Maybe even impossible.
Villacorta’s gaze was bleak and steady, showing no traces of any trouble, or a sleepless night.
“You have to know a few things before I let you speak,” Villacorta said when the girl brought another slushie and put it on the table. He waited until she went away, then continued. “You won’t leave this place alive.” It was a calm statement, disinterested and very nasty in those circumstances. “If your boss thought he could deal with the situation by sending me someone to negotiate, he made a dreadful mistake. I don’t negotiate. You’ll be killed.”
Eliot stirred his drink, and then peeked the other one on the table. The other one had a pineapple tulip.
“So, you think Nate Ford sent me here to negotiate?” he asked him with the same calmness in his voice that Villacorta so naturally obtained. He felt stirring in Villacorta’s men, they stayed alerted. “Or, do you think he made a mistake by sending me here, not realizing the danger I’m going into? Or, perhaps, he purposely sent you a pawn, to play his move on the board?”
“Why would Ford send me the weakest piece?”
“At the moment you find an answer to that question, Villacorta, we’ll be able to really talk,” he smiled. “I’ll wait. In meantime, I’ll speak.”
“Eliot Spencer.” Villacorta entwined his fingers, watching him attentively. “Not only will I have immense satisfaction in killing you first, but also I’ll profit from it. You’re aware of the rewards on your head? Some of them are astronomical.”
“You did your research, but not thoroughly enough. You know nothing about me.”
Villacorta nodded. “But I do know something about pawns,” he said. “I use them a lot myself. The pawn is perfect for a man like me, because it’s not in his nature to retreat. He can’t retreat. He can only go forth, without turning around, blind to all the moves that are playing out behind him. He steps aside only to take a life. Or to be sacrificed. He is rarely included in the real moves that decide the game, there are other, more versatile pieces on the board for that. They do the real winning.” Villacorta stopped for a second to put sugar in his coffee before he continued with the same easy rhythm. “You see… the pawns are the grunt force, but they are very hard to find. The real ones. I’m not talking about the mindless minions who are expendable and whom you can find on every corner. When a man finds a real pawn, he better not let him skip away; in right hands, a pawn is priceless. He can be used for anything, he’ll do his job with sheer force, because it’s the only way he knows. He’ll do anything needed to get the job done. The pawns represent an honor and loyalty, courage and force, in their purest shape.” Villacorta looked him directly into the eyes, sinking his gaze. “I have my pawn, and I’m using him scarcely, knowing his worth. Why did Nate Ford send his to his death? Why are you being sacrificed, Eliot Spencer?”
If he ever, even for one second, thought he should underestimate this man, now was the time to come to his senses.
“I was bored to death,” he said simply. What was that Sophie had said during that job with the violin? Scheherazade bought her life, night after night, by prolonging her story, keeping her husband interested; she was alive as long as he wanted to hear the rest, as long as she had something worth listening to. God, he hated talking, so much. He smiled again, knowing he had to buy minutes, one after another, with the talk that Villacorta must not understand, which made things way more interesting… and started to talk. “He said, it would be fun, you’ll be surrounded by pretty nurses. He said, you'll rest, and watch TV, while we work our asses off. It sounded cool, ‘til I figured out all the nurses were psychopath sadistic bitches, and that I’d be practically tied to the bed ‘til nights, when I was only able to walk around. All that, while they were havin’ fun with your people.”
“Having fun?” Villacorta asked quietly. Bugueno wasn’t so unreadable; without turning his eyes to him, Eliot could see the involuntary twitch of his shoulders, as if he stopped himself from leaning forward before it became a real move.
“Well, we do enjoy our work,” Eliot smiled, watching Villacorta’s eyes, trying to find irritation in them. There was none. There was fucking nothing. “You gave us an opportunity we couldn’t miss, practically a gift. That ambush in the warehouse was perfect, once we found out where your men were taken. It took us a little time to arrange and set up everything necessary for the acceptance of a victim with an almost fatal chest wound, and his immediate reception in the post surgery care. You know you can make the certain steps disappear, right? Or, I should say, to erase all the traces that they didn’t happen at all? When the board was set, they started to play, leaving me to the boredom and lousy TV programs. I know you thought you were the one that drew my team to the sitting duck, yours truly, but I have to tell you that your sitting duck was plastic bait, already set up when you came up with your brilliant idea.”
Villacorta raised his hand, and the blond guy behind him came a step closer. The short order that Villacorta gave him was too quiet to be heard, and his head was turned so Eliot couldn’t read his lips, and he could only hope that Villacorta asked for more coffee. Right.
“What was the result of their play with the hospital?” Villacorta returned all of his attention to him; it seemed that man had loads of attention ready to be poured out, causing his already overheated brain to speed up even more. It wasn’t good; he had to spare almost half of his concentration on his breathing, the control of the pain, the control of the every single move he made, and he wasn’t sure if the rest would be able to stay focused enough to match this gaze that was never leaving his eyes. And he thought Barclay’s calmness was terrifying. Damn fool.
“Information. Knowledge. Power. That’s the only currency we operate with, that’s our main product.” He took his glass and leaned back again; holding the glass would cover up the slight trembling of his fingers. He felt it in time, before it became real, visible shaking, and hoped this would stop it. Letting Villacorta notice that would be a giant mistake. “You might have done your research, Villacorta, but the pieces you managed to collect are far away from the whole picture, and you’re aware that you know very little about your victims. Let me tell you something, something that I will probably repeat to you more than once: If you want to control everything, you need to know everything.”
“How can you be so sure of what I know?”
“We are alive.”
Silence. Damn, that man didn’t smile, he didn’t change his facial expression into anything worth seeing, he just sat there and watched him, patiently. And he had no idea how to read him, how to see what was going on behind those dark, keen eyes. For the first time in his life, he couldn’t read someone’s silence, and it had to happen right in the middle of the most important thing he ever did.
If he allowed five more seconds of silence, if he doesn’t give him something worth leaving him alive for a little longer…
“In short, you made a mistake,” he continued lightly, but this time he returned Villacorta’s even stare with the same one. “You drew our attention on yourself with this hunt; it interfered with our jobs, our plans, and disturbed pretty much everything that we were doing - and we were in the middle of a few huge things. We were forced to reset, and to concentrate on the clear and present danger. And we are not happy about it.”
The blackbirds’ chirping was the only sound that was heard for five seconds. Villacorta took a sip of the coffee, and carefully returned the cup to the table. He should be discouraged with this silence, Eliot thought, watching Villacorta watching him; discouraged and shaken. Probably terrified, too. He struggled for better control of his face, but it was in vain, he just couldn’t stop the derisive smile from showing. This man had played this game with many, many victims before. Yet, this time, it wasn’t a victim before him.
He subdued his smile. “If I’m annoying you, I can return later.” For a moment, Eliot thought he caught a faintly ironic light in Villacorta’s left eye, but he couldn’t be sure. “I’m sure you have to discuss many important things with your lieutenant…s.” He averted his eyes from him only to look at the table, at Bugueno, and the empty chairs where the other lieutenants should have been sitting, then looked at Villacorta again. “Or not,” he smiled sweetly.
Villacorta went very, very still.
“Now that I have your undivided attention, I’m glad to inform you we have a present for you.” Eliot fixed his features into a polite smile. “I had to fool your Lady Killer, and make her believe I was in the hospital to keep my eyes on your three morons. No, I was there to be the bait and draw your forces within our reach, to keep them there long enough to be observed. We used an opportunity you gave us, and analyzed your actions, the preparing of the attack, and delivery. All the steps were evaluated, all the flaws recorded. I insisted on giving you an A plus on the coordination of the small units in the main attack, but I was outnumbered… sometimes it’s hard to explain an professional opinion to the professionals from another field. You’ll get a copy during the day. I hope you’re color blind, there’s a lot of red in the comments. But with compliments. We are polite people.”
“Yonni, remind me to send a thank note,” Villacorta glanced at Bugueno, but not for longer than one blink. “I’m sure the trained professional certainly found many flaws and mistakes,” he continued casually. “Yet, that same professional voluntarily came directly into the hands of the people who are going to kill him. That usually means he has an exit strategy - and I’m sure we shall come to that at some point; but what will happen if the other side don’t follow your script? How well are you prepared for unexpected twists and turns?”
Damn, he almost shrugged, he was too concentrated on Villacorta, and forgot to control his body; he managed to stop the move at the very beginning, but not before an outburst of pain ripped through him, causing his teeth to clench, and his smile to become frozen on his face. It lasted three seconds, an eternity under Villacorta’s stare, and he could only hope that the Chilean would think his words caused his breathing to stop.
Villacorta’s voice went soft; he noticed. “The professional would know there’s a possibility of using him, while he’s still alive, against the others - as a weapon, as a tool, or as bait. Yet, I don’t see even the slightest hint of worry, much less the fear that that could happen. What conclusions should we draw from this? Either you have a strong assurance that you yet have to reveal, or there’s no one who can be blackmailed with your life. Maybe both combined.”
Now was Eliot’s turn to go very, very still.
Eliot returned his gaze evenly. “I might be a distraction,” he offered. “Even better… I might be the distraction who will tell you he is the distraction, while he is here just to kill you.” And again, the only one who tensed was Bugueno.
“No. You will try to kill me only if anything else fails. That’s expected,” Villacorta said thoughtfully. “Your coming here is a desperate move, Eliot Spencer, and I’m even beginning to doubt that the rest of your group knows you’re here. Do you think it was clever to show me what state my opponents are in? You don’t know what to do, how to get out of this, and desperate moves are only things that are left for you to try.” Villacorta put his elbows on the table, seemingly more concentrated than before, which was a disturbing sight. “Your words are empty,” his face hardened a little. “If you have an exit strategy, now would be a good time to start working on it.”
Villacorta didn’t have to give a clear order; the five men that were standing behind him relaxed their arms. The others, behind Eliot and at the two tables at the back of the terrace, he couldn’t see now, but he knew they were ready too. Damn, he was right; this man didn’t have to maintain the power and the respect. Particularly not the damn control. And he still hadn’t found out anything about him… he couldn’t catch any reaction that would show him even the slightest way to carefully attack. This puzzle was better than he’d expected; there must have been much more boring ways to spend the last hour of his life.
“You haven’t smiled even once since you came here,” he said carefully. Then he smiled, taking care to control it, not letting it be too broad, too genuine. “And you are winning. That’s strange.”
Villacorta waited for the rest.
“I don’t need the exit strategy,” Eliot said gently, and slurped his juice only to make Bugueno twitch. Yep, he grimaced again, like a trained dog. “What?” he asked him over the straw, peeking through the banana rose. “Not manly enough? You’ve got serious issues, Bugueno.”
“Kill him already, Renan,” Bugueno hissed. “We have more important things to do than listen to this rambling.”
Well, if Bugueno thought this was rambling, maybe he was succeeding, though he doubted Villacorta shared his opinion.
Villacorta was too smart to ask him what the hell he was talking about all this time, and when he would get to the point; nope, he used the situation and just collected piece after piece of information that was given freely, patiently waiting to see where it would lead at the end. The dangerous thing was, he couldn’t be sure when, exactly, Villacorta would decide it was enough, that there was nothing more he could get from him, on what subject it would happen.
He had many subject matters to go through, and he had to distribute his strength… okay, not quite the strength, there was none… better to say, he had to stretch his weakness, and slow it down. When Villacorta turned to Bugueno to dart him a look, Eliot took two seconds to assess his condition; Bugueno, whom he was not looking at directly, was slightly blurred, the edges of his vision were dotted with the tiny black spots. For now, they were not spreading. The second use of the slushie, the crushed ice that should cool his throat and constrict the small veins, slowing the bleeding, was turning against him. He was chilled, and the pale sun wasn’t warm enough. The cool breeze wasn’t helping, either. But his mind still worked. And the pain… nope, no use to think about it.
He was fucked, but crazy enough not to care.
Villacorta relaxed his fingers on the table, and looked at him again. “So, the hospital was your playground. I get it.” For a second he seemed to be on the edge of a smile, and suddenly, the chill from the slushie spread where no slushie had gone before. Eliot slowly blinked, waiting. “I have someone who would like to discuss that matter with you; he claims, categorically, that he never misses his target.” Villacorta’s eyes turned to the doors that led to the inner part of the restaurant, a stairway and back offices; the blond guy had returned, and he wasn’t alone.
The funny thing was, it took a moment for him to recognize the rough face under the braided hair with a bandana, though he'd been very close when they'd fought in that warehouse. His memory sorted it out only when he put him a little further away, and when he added the flash of the fired gun that lit the face behind it. That image was clear, brilliant in every fucking detail. He managed to only flinch inwardly when he almost felt that bullet slamming into him again, the memory was so vivid.
“If you lied, there’s no point in listening further, right?” Villacorta said softly.
Eliot tried to rub his smile back off his face. “Good morning, Cuchillo.” He knew his bared teeth had little in common with a smile. “Nice to see you. Again.”
The Spider just started to pull his strings around the Fly.
o.0.o
Nate was extremely happy that Sunday mornings in the half private park didn’t draw too many walkers, just a few joggers were caught on the cameras, because the motion sensors on the park cameras gave a quiet ‘ping’ every time they caught a person in their radius. More than that, he was happy because if any of them saw Lucille, they would certainly call the police to arrest them for having public sex.
Lucille was rocking.
Hardison was at his place, he was sitting right beside the hacker, and Parker was sitting on something so her chin could be rested on the table near Hardison’s elbow, just twenty centimeters from the monitors. Sophie… Sophie was pacing the van, the entire - how much? - four meters, up and down, behind them. She was marching, for god’s sake, and they all felt as if they weren’t in the van, but in a small boat on not so calm a sea.
“You have to find some way to call him, this is unacceptable… he has no idea what he's doing! Do any of you know what he is doing? I thought not. Look - his posture is all wrong, he is sending all the wrong signals, this is dangerous!”
“Calm down, Sophie,” he automatically repeated, for the tenth time, but in vain. She hastened her pace. He tried to concentrate again on the dialogue that was going before them.
“What’s the point of screwing up the facts?” she went on, her softly modulated voice very high on the edges. “No, let me rephrase that: What’s the bloody point in sitting in front guns, waiting to be shot, and screwing up the facts? What the hell does he think he is doing?! This is not grifting, you hear me, it ain’t griftin’, he needs backup, and he needs it now! Nate!”
“Calm down, Sophie,” he repeated tiredly. “You’re mixing dialects. You sound like a UN conference gone bad.”
“Bleh.” The monitors swayed when she took a turn and stormed in a different direction. “This is a madness. Hardison, try again if he turned on his phones. NOW!”
“Calm down, Sophie,” Hardison murmured. “No phones yet.”
“Calm down!?” she stopped and Hardison flinched, rising his shoulders. “I won’t calm down! Villacorta is reading him, and Eliot hasn’t decided yet what stance he is going to take; he is too exposed to him, he wavers between openness and closeness, and he is in the wrong position! You can’t lead the conversation where you want it if you’re sitting too relaxed! Every little detail is important, and he-” she stopped and Nate turned for a second to see what happened.
Sophie was looking at Parker. The thief was slowly going with the kitchen knife, a centimeter a second, along the lines of the escape routes that were on the monitor near her. The tip of the blade was almost touching the monitor, causing Hardison to flinch again.
“-he needs the backup, Nate,” Sophie finished, venting a long sigh. “I don’t know what he's doing, but he can’t do it alone. You mustn’t, in only two sentences, talk with a man trying to leave one impression, and in another, provoke another one with banana roses. Villacorta is catching the mixed signals, and he will-”
“Trouble,” Hardison caught his breath with a hiss, and Sophie came nearer to look at the new man on the scene.
“Hardison.” Nate pulled her to sit beside him. “When I tell you, hit all the alarms in the building. The fire alarms, and especially the alarms in the offices. Those are connected to the police and security.”
“Police?” Sophie whispered. “With all this going on the whole night, the response time shall be ten times longer. He has one more minute before they see he really was shot, and they’ll kill him, there’s no-”
“No, they won’t. Villacorta won’t kill him while all the alarms are ringing, drawing police, he won’t explain a dead body on his terrace when the police arrive. They’ll take him somewhere else to kill him, which means there won’t be more than twenty Chileans around him, like it is now, just an escort party. We’ll be able to follow-” Nate stopped his explanation.
“What?!” Hardison hissed, his trembling fingers ready to press all the buttons at the same time.
“Stand down, Hardison,” he put a hand on his shoulder, hoping he was right. He stared for a few seconds at Eliot’s smile, a vicious grimace, expected from a man like Eliot Spencer at the moment he met the man who’d shot him… but Eliot’s eyes were calm. Maybe, just maybe, a little relieved. Relieved?!
“We’ll wait,” he simply said. And smiled.
Parker was quietly humming.