Synergy [1/5]
Title: Synergy
Fandoms: Inception/Criminal Minds
Pairing (highlight to read): Arthur/Reid
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 40K
Warnings: Violence, discussion of addiction and rape.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, no disrespect intended.
Notes: Canon-compliant for Criminal Minds only through season 5. Gratitude beyond telling to anowlinsunshine for covering my blind spots with truly above-and-beyond beta work. All remaining mistakes are my own. Thanks to everyone who expressed interest in this and kept me going.
There’s only one team member that the Fischer and Rothchild jobs had in common, which means only one person who could theoretically tie the two cases together.
Whatever the FBI knows, Eames wants to know it, too.
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
- Virginia Woolf
“Eames.”
The voice throws him for a minute, because it’s one he hasn’t heard in more than a year now, timid but with a determination behind it that helps him place the caller.
“Ariadne,” he answers, tucking the phone under his ear and wondering how she got this number, or from whom. “This is a surprise.”
“Have you heard about Fischer?”
The name comes as a surprise, although it perhaps shouldn’t; there are few things tying the two of them together, and Fischer is one of them. When he doesn’t answer immediately, Ariadne speaks up again.
“You should turn on the news.”
He’s in Australia at the moment, which makes the story easy to locate once he switches on the television. “…the scion of the family behind one of the biggest energy corporations in the world fell into a coma on Friday, and was discovered in his Los Angeles penthouse by a member of his household staff. Doctors remain unsure about the cause, although a spokesperson for the company has assured the media that drugs were not a factor. Fischer remains in the care of…”
“Was it us?” Ariadne asks, interrupting the flow of words from the reporter. “Did we do this?”
Doubtful, Eames thinks. Still, there are other factors to consider. “I’ll call you back,” he tells Ariadne.
He leaves the television on while he works, checking message boards and tracking the story across several of the more reputable world news sites. At around half-past seven, he finishes reading one of the most recent articles just in time for the reporter’s voice on the news to filter through. “…are unsure whether there is a connection between the two cases. Rothchild, a Boston native, has been airlifted from Miami back to the care of her primary physician at…”
Eames stills for a moment, and then does another search, skimming headlines with a grim sense of foreboding. Marion Rothchild, heiress and head of the Rothchild Foundation, who six months ago had announced out of the blue her decision to sponsor medical research instead of the arts. Eames still remembers the cold tube of the IV in his arm and the thin blanket he’d had over his lap when Marion had stooped down beside his wheelchair in the pediatric ward and kissed Eames’ bald forehead, calling him a very brave little girl.
He doesn’t waste any more time. Two cases, both in the United States, and there’s a young blonde woman on the television now promising that the FBI will do everything in its power to discover the truth behind the cases of Ms. Rothchild and Mr. Fischer.
He checks the area code of his last received call, and sure enough it has a U.S. country code attached.
“Get out of the states,” he says when Ariadne picks up. “Get back to Paris, or go home to Canada. You should be fine so long as you’re not in the country.”
“It was us, wasn’t it?” Ariadne sounds young, still, but not afraid. Quiet and certain, like she’d known even before she’d picked up the phone to call Eames. Women’s intuition.
“Yes,” Eames replies. “It was us.”
-
The FBI team heading up the investigation are members of the Behavioral Analysis Unit, which Eames takes to mean that the government believes the comas are the work of a malicious individual rather than from natural causes. Natural causes being, say, the aftereffects of an experimental dreamsharing technique, rather than an overdose on sleeping pills.
He keeps his ear to the ground and hears just enough to know that others involved on the inception teams are already following up on the criminal leads, chasing rumors through the dreamsharing community. The point on the Rothchild job, Silvashko, is doing a better job of tracking down that information than Eames can, so he turns his attention elsewhere.
There’s only one team member that the Fischer and Rothchild jobs had in common, which means only one person who could theoretically tie the two cases together.
Whatever the FBI knows, Eames wants to know it, too.
-
Bugging the FBI team members’ vehicles is almost laughably easy. With as much technology as the common automobile holds these days, tapping into the GPS systems and planting microphones takes no more than a handful of minutes, done safely out of sight of surveillance cameras.
The only flaw in his plan comes with Dr. Spencer Reid, who takes public transportation every day and has, so far as Eames can tell, never learned how to drive. According to the files Silvashko had sent along, he’d been busy with graduate studies by the time he was old enough and the parent who’d been granted custody lived out of state, so Eames supposes that’s understandable.
Luckily for Eames, Dr. Reid’s flat is not equipped with state-of-the-art security, and it’s a simple enough matter to break in while his FBI team is away in Boston interviewing family members and employees, and plant a bug inside his entertainment center.
It’s not quite the bachelor pad Eames had been expecting, even for an FBI agent. Everything is in its proper place, neat and tidy, with the exception of the books that are everywhere, stacked from floor to ceiling on shelves and tables, wherever there’s room. There are two bedrooms, both furnished, which makes Eames both quick and cautious in his investigation. Being surprised by a roommate returning home won’t do at all.
The first bedroom has a closet filled with suits, neatly organized in garment bags overhanging a generous collection of men’s dress shoes. Reid’s room, obviously. The closet in the other room is nearly empty, but the drawers are filled with sweater vests and short-sleeved dress shirts, rumpled khaki pants and cardigans. The tie selection looks to have been chosen from a 1970’s department store catalogue. A student, perhaps, or an older professor, subletting the room. It’s a common practice in the D.C. area, and Reid’s name is the only one on the lease.
There’s a Leon Kossoff on the wall in the hallway, which Eames recognizes from a web search he did years ago after coming perilously close to losing an argument with Arthur on the subject of modern British painters. It looks like an original, which puts the roommate either in a well-placed position or a higher pay grade.
The biggest surprise is the Glock taped to the ceiling of one of the cupboards in the kitchen. It’s a standard-issue FBI firearm, but the hammer is cocked, and Eames suspects that if he took the time to look, he’d find a round in the chamber. Not standard FBI practice, and certainly not for a secondary weapon. Presumably Reid has his primary firearm with him in Boston.
Eames gets out clean and returns to the corporate apartment he’s renting weekly near Quantico. There’s nothing new from Silvashko, but Eames hadn’t really expected anything. Yusuf has checked in with an all-clear on the international front; with both incidents in the U.S., Interpol hasn’t made any inquiries. It’s still in the hands of the FBI.
Eames checks the police reports in Boston, and settles in to wait.
-
The lives of FBI agents are just as terrifically boring as Eames suspected they would be. Apart from a few juicy personal phone calls and one horrifying instance of full-blast country karaoke, Eames gets absolutely nothing from his first day of surveillance. The second day is much the same, although with the added bonus of a phone call between two of the agents in which Eames learns that they have no leads and no suspects, as yet.
The third day is when it gets interesting.
“Garcia?” Reid’s voice asks, cutting off a generic cell phone ringtone. The roommate hasn’t come home yet, so far as Eames knows; if he has, he’s been quiet about it.
“I’m in my apartment,” Reid says, sounding confused. Then, “No,” drawn out slowly, wary. “What’s this about?” A pause, followed by, “I’ll meet you there in half an hour?” There’s the sound of a door closing, after which Reid’s voice becomes too muffled to decipher.
It could be nothing, but Eames has fuck-all else to go on. He loops back to the first cell phone ring and raises the volume, filtering out the background noise to pick up the other side of the conversation.
“Where are you?” A woman’s voice, tinged with urgency. Then Reid’s reply, followed by, “Reid honey, is anyone there with you?”
Bugger, Eames thinks. He has a bad feeling even before the woman continues, “I need you to come in. I’m sending a team out to sweep your apartment now, I think you’ve been B-U-G-ed.”
Eames takes off his headphones and taps his pen against the wooden desk. After a moment, he does a quick search through the BAU files on his hard drive. Penelope Garcia, Technical Analyst. Apparently FBI tech support extends beyond the office for this team.
It’s only a matter of time before they search the other agents’ homes, if they aren’t already. Eames can always hope he’ll get lucky and no one will think of checking vehicles, but he doesn’t have enough information yet to withdraw completely.
He waits until the agents have left Reid’s flat, gives them half an hour to report the all-clear, and slips in to plant another bug.
-
Phone chatter gets very interesting after that. None of the agents know who bugged Reid’s flat, and whether it was an internal action taken by the Bureau or one performed by an outside source. Supervisory Special Agent Hotchner is on the phone with someone for every minute of his commute, asking questions and demanding answers with the air of someone who knows how to work the system and will use that information as ruthlessly as he has to in order to get what he wants.
It’s gratifying that they seem to believe it’s an isolated incident, but the hubbub over the bug is distracting from the case. Eames is going to have to switch to another plan shortly if he hopes to get anywhere.
Three days later, the technical analyst catches on again and a team shows up to sweep for bugs. They find the first one. Not the second.
Reid makes a phone call not long after he gets home, from the debatable safety of his living room. There’s no voice on the other end, just an automated message that goes straight to voicemail.
“Hi, it’s me,” Reid says. “I think I might need you.”
Eames is trying to pull favors to have the line hacked and traced when he gets a call himself, this time from Kinkaide. He hasn’t worked with the man in years, not since their failed attempt at an extraction via inception.
“We have a problem,” Kinkaide says, without any preliminaries. “They found Proserpina Christakos.”
-
“This unsub will not inject himself into the investigation,” Hotchner had told the police chief in Galveston. “Whoever we’re looking for doesn’t want us to see him.”
Eames was willing to grant that assumption the benefit of the doubt, but then he wasn’t the unsub. The day after Proserpina Christakos was found comatose in her summer home, a Dr. Geoffrey Black was on the red-eye flight to Texas.
“I appreciate your interest in the case,” Agent Hotchner told him, “but this is an ongoing investigation. Any information we may have is not ready to be shared with the public.”
“Of course,” Eames demurs. “I was merely offering my expertise.”
“Thank you, but right now I’m afraid we can’t accept that offer.” It’s a polite but firm dismissal, and clearly Hotchner intends it to carry enough authority to put Dr. Black right back onto a plane out of Galveston.
Instead, Eames hangs around looking hopeful and academic until he catches someone else’s eye.
It doesn’t take long; he’s chosen his props well, and he’d guessed that either Morgan or Reid would be drawn in by the neatly-printed Dream Therapy for Coma Patients on the cover of the book in his hands.
He gets Reid, who approaches sideways, like a crab, before settling on the bench beside him just inside the busy waiting room of the police station. “Dream therapy,” he says, indicating the title of Eames’ book. “That’s a pretty experimental field.”
“It’s a young science, but growing,” Eames agrees easily. “Dr. Geoffrey Black,” he says, offering his hand. “I heard about the cases on the news and thought I might be of help.”
“I wasn’t aware dream therapy had even been tested on coma patients,” Reid says, studying him. He reminds Eames a bit of a frog, with his wide mouth and prominent bones. There are bruises smudged beneath his eyes that Eames has seen before on work-obsessed, insomniac point men, that tell of nights spent reading poetry and absorbing information.
“There’s been one case study,” Eames answers. “It’s difficult, of course, without the lucid interludes of discussion and discovery one normally has with patients, but many believe that some good can be done by studying the subconscious.”
“You mean dreamsharing technology,” Reid says, and Eames has to hide his surprise. He’d debated whether or not to push them in this direction, but with Christakos now on the list of victims, he hadn’t seen another choice. There was nothing to link Christakos to Fischer and Rothchild; no behavioral changes, no sudden suspect decisions. Because the inception hadn’t worked.
The only thing linking all three victims, so far as Eames knew, was inception. And Eames himself.
He hadn’t expected Reid to catch on so quickly, however. “You’re familiar with the field?” Eames asks.
There’s a flicker of something in Reid’s expression, there and gone before Eames can pin it down, and in its absence a keen interest that Eames can read like his own reflection in a mirror. It occurs to him suddenly how very dangerous it is to be playing this game with an FBI profiler who may well be as good as he is.
“I’ve read some of the theoretical work,” Reid answers. “As I understand, the prospect of dreamsharing therapy hasn’t yet become a reality.”
“Ah, but the possibilities available to us if it does,” Eames enthuses, letting some of Dr. Black’s passion glimmer in his eyes. “Child psychologists already use the medium of fiction, asking their patients to tell stories and act out events with toy dolls. Imagine if we could reach the patients directly in their dreams, test their reactions to people and places, discover hidden truths. Amnesia patients could be helped to unlock doors within their own minds.”
“And coma patients could be shown the way back to consciousness,” Reid finishes for him. “Is that why you’re here, Doctor?”
“This is the perfect opportunity for a field test,” Eames confirms. “If you had someone on-hand, someone familiar with the relevant theories and techniques….”
“Dreamsharing technology, even in its current state, is restricted and overseen by the U.S. military,” Reid says. “How did you think you were going to facilitate a field test?”
Eames lets his expression go blank, bewildered. “You’re the FBI.”
Reid is still suspicious, Eames can tell, but he has no reason on the surface to distrust Eames’ alias, so after a few more minutes of small talk, Eames is shuttled off to another officer willing to take down his - fictional - information and send him away. It’s not what he’d hoped for, but it’s better than nothing. With any luck, the FBI will be able to turn over stones that Eames’ own resources can’t reach. He needs to find out who’s targeting inception marks, and why.
He needs to find out soon, before anyone can tie them all to him.
-
Eames is lurking a block away from Christakos’ summer house when a black sedan with rental plates pulls up just outside of the police blockade, parking rather brazenly in front of two marked cruisers with lights flashing. Eames doesn’t recognize the car, but he does recognize the silhouette and body language of the man who gets out, flashing some sort of falsified identification at the officers guarding the perimeter and ducking confidently under the crime scene tape.
Eames turns and makes his way back to his own car, careful not to angle himself in a way that reveals his face until he’s back in his own vehicle, safe behind tinted windows.
“Fuck.” He dials Kinkaide because Silvashko doesn’t know about Christakos, and Eames would prefer to keep it that way. The fewer people who can connect him to this, the better.
“We have a problem,” he says when Kinkaide picks up. “There’s another team.”
-
“Arthur’s in Belmopan,” Ariadne says when Eames calls her.
“Arthur was in Belmopan yesterday,” Eames corrects. “Apparently something came up and he left late last night for Los Angeles.”
With the time difference and the red-tape of American customs, even for an ex-military agent with Arthur’s credentials, that makes it likely that he’d only taken one connecting flight. Taking the time to cover his tracks is apparently not as critical as unearthing whatever it is the FBI has found.
There’s some risk in disappearing from sight so quickly when Dr. Black would have been expected to keep trying, to hang about asking questions and posing theories, but with another dreamsharing team in the mix, Eames can’t take the chance of being spotted. He’s already in the airport, booked on the first flight back to D.C. as Dr. Black.
“There’s more,” Ariadne says. “I got in touch with Cobb, he says that while the BAU is handling the coma patient cases, there’s more going on. One of the agents has access to information about extraction teams, and it’s being leaked to other agencies. That’s not part of the official investigation. Probably because dreamsharing technology isn’t public knowledge yet, even for the FBI.” She sounds impressed, undoubtedly delighted that a Canadian citizen has one up on an important branch of American law enforcement.
“You got in touch with…” Eames cuts off the question. Of course Ariadne had gotten in touch with Cobb. She’d been able to track down Eames within a day of the story breaking. “Have you contacted all of us?”
“Not Saito,” she says, for which Eames is profoundly grateful. “And not Arthur. All I knew was that he was in Belmopan, I couldn’t get a number.”
“Yes, he does tend to make it difficult,” Eames agrees. He wonders if Cobb really thought through what he was doing, introducing Ariadne to their little underworld. In his reflective moments, he fully believes she and Arthur will be ruling them all by the new year.
“So what do we do now?” Ariadne asks.
“Let me handle this for now, all right?” Eames replies, already formulating plans. “I have a team of sorts already. It should be a simple extraction, and then we’ll know everything they do.”
“You’re going to extract from the FBI?” Ariadne’s tone is mixed parts horrified and thrilled. Eames can already imagine her setting her sights higher.
“Only one of them. We can use this,” Eames tells her. “If Arthur’s here, he’s after the same thing we are. He’s ex-military; he has government contacts, and his intelligence is bound to be better than ours. All we have to do is wait to see which member of the team he focuses on. That’s our man.”
“Why don’t you just work together?”
Eames smiles briefly. “You haven’t spent nearly enough time around Arthur and I if you have to ask that question.”
Besides which, he doesn’t like the idea of anyone from the dreamsharing community knowing something he doesn’t. If the FBI connects all three victims to him, which they no doubt will, Arthur may decide to cut his losses and take Eames out directly before he can lead them to everyone else.
It’s what Eames would do.
-
There’s a black sedan with tinted windows and rental plates parked a block from Reid’s flat, so Eames assumes Arthur has chosen his target for the night. He doesn’t make a move yet; Arthur could be doing the same thing Eames is, watching everyone in turn and narrowing down his suspect list. It’s too early to tell.
He thinks he may have made a mistake when his bug picks up the sounds of an altercation around midnight after Reid returns home, scuffling and the thump of a body hitting something with force.
Fucking hell, Arthur’s already made a move, he thinks, checking his gun in haste and preparing to force his way in if necessary, if it’ll give him access to the information Reid has before Arthur can steal it and disappear. He’s in the process of jerking off his headphones when he hears Reid speak, breathless but still unmistakably, “Yes.”
Eames pauses. Setting his gun back down on the desk, he adjusts the background noise filter and turns up the volume.
“Oh, oh.” Reid’s voice, high and breathy, and Eames is cracking a grin even before he hears familiar wet slapping sounds, distorted by the ambient noise filter but still recognizable. Eames has done enough surveillance in his day to be able to identify the sounds of someone receiving excellent head.
Awkward, evasive Dr. Reid is apparently getting lucky.
Eames listens for another few seconds to confirm, and then takes off his headphones and turns his attention elsewhere. He’s not above a little voyeurism, but he’s not sordid enough to eavesdrop on someone’s private party just for the hell of it.
He wonders if Arthur is getting an earful, as well. The idea of buttoned-down, put-together Arthur squirming in the confines of his rental car listening to someone else getting off is enough to make Eames’ night.
He hopes Arthur brought tissues on his stakeout.
-
The next night, Arthur’s sedan returns to park two blocks from Reid’s flat. And again the night after that. That’s all the proof Eames needs.
The following afternoon, while Eames is still putting the final touches on his extraction plan, he receives an alert message in his inbox. Arthur has booked a flight out of the country. He’s leaving that night.
There’s only one reason for Arthur to be laying down an escape route. Eames has to do the job on Reid today, or Arthur’s going to get in ahead of him and fuck the whole thing to hell.
Eames prefers his plans for sedation and extraction to be clean, elegant, leaving the mark with no trace of suspicion. If you’re made after the job, it’s just as bad as being made before it. The end result will be the same, once the mark knows you’ve been in their mind.
If pressed, however, Eames knows how to default to a backup plan. A home invasion and mugging isn’t an unusual crime, and Reid’s security is negligible. There will be enough trauma from the event to cover up any hints of unease that might linger from the dream.
He makes his move the next day, breaking in just before Reid typically returns from Quantico and waiting just inside the front door. If he times it right, he can have Reid unconscious and unaware before he ever gets a glimpse of Eames’ face.
What he hadn’t counted on was Reid having all the grace of a newborn colt, and being on the phone besides. “I told you, it’s fine,” Eames hears, muffled through the front door. The lock clicks, the handle twists. Reid’s voice grows louder and clearer as he pushes the door open. “Garcia’s checking my apartment again tomorrow, it could be nothing. It could be the Bureau, this kind of thing happens sometimes when agents…”
Eames is a breath away from catching Reid in a sleeper hold when the strap of Reid’s messenger bag catches on the door handle and he gets caught, twisted up in his own luggage. He tries to lift the strap free, misses, bangs his elbow into the door, trips over his own feet, and overbalances enough that the weight of the bag yanks the door handle backwards, revealing Eames lying in wait behind it. Reid’s eyes go wide, surprise followed almost immediately by understanding.
“Dr. Black,” he says, still holding the phone open. “I didn’t expect to see you again. You’re looking very well for someone who died in his eighties, by the way. Your colleagues at Stanford send their condolences.”
Well, it’s not as if Eames had expected that alias to hold water for long, anyway. He tilts his head sideways, pushing the door shut behind Reid when he complies with the wordless instructions. Eames holds his free hand out for the phone.
“You don’t have to do this,” Reid says, almost in a rush. “Whatever you want…”
The click of Reid’s jaw snapping shut is almost as loud as Eames’ safety going off.
“Spencer?” Eames hears through the open phone line. A deep male voice, tinny and tense. “Spencer?”
Reid lowers the phone slowly and clicks it off.
“Good boy,” Eames approves. “Now turn around slowly, please.”
Reid goes tense. Eames imagines he’s spent enough time in hostage situations to know what that usually means. “They know you’re here,” Reid says, still trying to be reasonable. “There’s someone coming for me already, they’ll be here any minute. You can still end this.”
“Turn around,” Eames says again.
When Reid does, every movement of his body tight and afraid, Eames clocks him neatly across the back of his head with the butt of his gun.
-
He doesn’t have much time. The authorities have no doubt been alerted, and Reid has seen his face, which is going to make working in this country hell unless Eames actually abducts him, which is a logistical nightmare and almost worse than ending up on the FBI’s most wanted list.
He drags Reid’s body into the first bedroom and dumps it across the bed, cracking open the PASIV case and readying the lines. Response times vary by city and Reid will undoubtedly be called in as a priority, but it still takes time to make calls and dispatch vehicles. He should have three minutes in the real world, and Reid won’t be militarized. There shouldn’t be any problems.
He’s just slid the needle into one of Reid’s prominent blue veins when he hears footsteps thundering up the stairs. Too soon, far too soon.
Eames steps into the hallway and levels his gun just as Arthur kicks in the front door.
Arthur’s expression goes slack with surprise and recognition, but he doesn’t waste time. “Where is he?”
“He made a call, someone’s already on the way,” Eames answers. “If we do this together, it will be faster.”
“Where is he?” Arthur repeats, biting out the words.
“In the bedroom,” Eames says, gesturing with one elbow. Neither of them have lowered their guns. Eames supposes it’s only self-preservation, getting into a standoff with Arthur. “Where’s the rest of your team?”
“There is no team,” Arthur says. “It’s only me.”
That’s unexpected, but then Arthur did drop everything on a job in Belize to get here and he has nearly as much to hide as Eames does where Fischer is concerned, so perhaps Eames shouldn’t be surprised that he’s working this one solo.
“In that case, shall I go down alone while you stand guard?” He’ll have to lower his gun to roll up his sleeve, but they’re running out of time. Waiting for the FBI to break down the door is just as dangerous as giving Arthur a clear shot. “Three minutes, full disclosure…”
“There is no team, Eames,” Arthur repeats. “There is no job. He’s not a mark.”
Eames pauses.
Arthur’s jaw is tight. “Profile the room, Eames,” he says, which is an odd choice of words coming from Arthur, but Eames supposes it must be what comes to mind, standing in Reid’s flat…
Reid’s flat.
Two bedrooms. One of them filled with suit jackets and designer ties, and Eames has spent enough time watching the BAU now to know that Reid dresses like someone’s academically-inclined grandfather. A Glock much like the one currently in Arthur’s hand, taped to the top of a cupboard, in carrying condition one. An original Kossoff on the wall, which Eames knows is exactly Arthur’s taste.
Eames lowers his gun. “You’re not here about Fischer,” he says cautiously.
“No,” Arthur says, moving past him into the bedroom - Arthur’s bedroom - now that they’re no longer holding each other at gunpoint. “I’m here because someone bugged my fucking apartment.”
Eames follows him in, waiting in the doorway while Arthur crouches down beside the bed to check Reid’s vitals.
“Did you give him anything?” Arthur asks, with unexpected urgency. “Sedatives? Narcotics?”
“Nothing. A mild concussion, possibly. You arrived before I could put him under.” Eames checks his watch. “Speaking of, should we be worried about the company on the way?”
“No one’s coming,” Arthur answers shortly. “I’m the only one who knows you’re here.”
“And vice versa, it seems,” Eames comments. “I didn’t know you kept a place in D.C.”
“You’re not supposed to. That’s the point.” Arthur glances over at him. “You have a team?”
“No one in the city.” It’s the truth, and less revealing than anything else he might have said. “I take it your flight back to Belize was scheduled because you’d determined the surveillance wasn’t a threat?”
“So I’d thought,” Arthur replies darkly.
“Perhaps that was a premature conclusion,” Eames allows.
Arthur shoots him a glare and doesn’t deign to respond.
Eames isn’t such a bastard that he doesn’t understand he’s probably blown Arthur’s cover in this city, and that Arthur may have to burn an alias because of it. “Can I help?”
“No,” Arthur says, shrugging his suit jacket off and rolling up his sleeves. “I’ll take care of it.”
-
“You don’t see a conflict of interest, sharing a flat with an FBI agent? A profiler, at that?”
Arthur ignores him, packing up Eames’ PASIV with practiced proficiency. This lasts until he stands up and tries to leave the room, only to find Eames still in the doorway, blocking his path.
“He knows what I do,” Arthur says finally, recognizing that Eames is not about to be moved without persuasion. “There’s no conflict.”
“What you used to do, or what you do now?” Eames inquires, because everyone has heard Arthur’s background story: ex-military black ops, possible CIA connections, one of the first pioneers of the United States dreamshare program. Most of it is almost certainly fabricated or at least exaggerated, but there’s enough of a paper trail beneath the bluster to give it credence.
Arthur hesitates, then sidesteps Eames to get through the door. This time Eames lets him go, because handling Arthur is always something that’s best done with one step forward and two steps back. There’s also the fact that Eames can easily block him again on the way back, this time putting himself between Arthur and Reid, which is an even better strategic position.
Arthur turns on the tap in the kitchen and runs a glassful of water through the filter on the faucet. “Do you really believe,” Eames asks behind him, “that any cover story you’ve fed him will stand up to scrutiny at close quarters if he gets curious? That he won’t start tracking your comings and goings, wondering why an ex-military agent is called on so urgently to travel abroad?”
Arthur remains still for a long moment. Then he turns around and faces Eames squarely. “I’m not ex-military,” he says finally.
Eames rejects the correction with an impatient gesture. “Whatever…”
“I’m not ex-anything.”
Eames falls silent. There are a great many ways that statement could be interpreted, but he instinctively knows already which one Arthur means. He’d heard the rumors about Arthur still having ties, about being dirty rather than divorced, but he hadn’t given them credibility. Now he wonders how far they were off the mark.
Arthur isn’t dirty, though. Arthur is noble, whatever his criminal actions, and loyal to a fault.
“How long,” Eames asks, “have you been spying on all of us?”
Arthur doesn’t flinch. “Since the beginning,” he says. “Since it started. There were undercover agents in the field from every country with a dreamshare program as soon as the technology leaked. Don’t think I’m the only one.”
Eames grits his teeth. When he gets his temper under control, he can still tell that his tone is too calm to be anything but a threat. “I’d rather not leave a trail of bodies behind me in this country, Arthur. How much do they know?”
“Only what’s relevant,” Arthur replies, as if that makes it any less of a knife in the back. “My job is to monitor and report back, not give the details of every job and everyone involved.”
“You could, though,” Eames counters, cold with the knowledge that it’s the truth. Arthur’s network spreads farther and wider than anyone else has ever managed; it’s one of many reasons why he’s the best. If it ever came to it, Arthur could hand them all over on a platter with enough rope to hang them all, and with plenty to spare.
Arthur, at least, doesn’t try to deny it.
“I could kill you for telling me this,” Eames tells him. “I should. It’s the smartest thing to do.”
“You could,” Arthur agrees. “But you won’t.”
There’s a rustling noise from the bedroom. Arthur doesn’t take his eyes off Eames, but he moves away from the counter with clear intent, and Eames has to either force the issue or step aside and let him pass.
He stays in the hallway for another moment, just breathing. Fucking Arthur. It might sting less if some part of Eames hadn’t already suspected he was being double-crossed.
When he finally walks back into the bedroom, Reid is just stirring. Eames sees his eyes flutter and then focus, taking in Eames standing by the doorway.
“Hey, it’s all right,” Arthur says, crouched down beside the bed again. “Spencer. You’re okay.”
Eames watches the quicksilver dart of Reid’s eyes as he maps out Eames’ position relative to his own, and then Arthur, the gun on Arthur’s hip, and his own line of sight, in that order. Eames holds up his hands, showing that he’s unarmed before Reid decides he can get to Arthur’s Glock and take the shot. The FBI trains shoot-to-kill, and Eames would rather not be a casualty.
Arthur sees the same danger and turns his body slightly sideways, just enough to discourage any attempt at drawing his firearm. “Spencer, this is Eames,” he says, before Eames has a chance to interject another alias. “Eames, Dr. Spencer Reid.”
“Sorry about before,” Eames says mildly, still watching Reid’s eyes and his hands for any sudden movements while keeping his own posture open and unthreatening. “There was a slight misunderstanding.”
“Misunderstanding,” Reid echoes, pushing himself upright on the bed and turning away the water Arthur tries to offer. “You broke into my apartment and knocked me out with a gun by accident?”
“He thought you were my mark,” Arthur says tightly, retreating slightly from Reid’s side and incidentally putting himself in a position where he has a clear view of both of them. Eames doesn’t believe for a moment that it’s an accident, or that any of them is anywhere close to having their guard down.
Reid looks Eames over, sharp intelligence in his eyes that isn’t hidden by the wince when he presses one hand to his head. “I wondered if it was you, when you showed up in Galveston. I’ve read your file, you fit the description. The only thing that didn’t fit the profile was you injecting yourself into the investigation. When you disappeared, I was almost expecting another victim.”
Eames throws a hard look at Arthur. “My file,” he echoes.
Arthur holds up both hands. “I use code names in my reports.”
“It wasn’t difficult to figure out, once I had some basic information,” Reid says absently. “The dates and locations all matched up, although it would presumably be more of a challenge for anyone who only had the official reports to go on.”
“So much for your code names,” Eames tells Arthur. His right eyelid is beginning to twitch.
“Like I said, not everyone would have had the ancillary information necessary to make the connection. I haven’t even brought up the theory that it’s related to dreamsharing yet, I wanted to do more research first. It’s only a viable theory if there’s something else connecting the crimes.”
No one else knows yet, Eames thinks. Arthur catches Eames’ eye and shakes his head slowly, correctly interpreting Eames’ expression. “If you kill him, I will bury you,” he warns. “You’re not even a suspect for this yet.”
“That being said, the risk you’ve taken in coming here is significant for someone with nothing to hide,” Reid continues, blithely overconfident about Arthur’s ability to keep Eames from putting another hole in his head. “You must have been following the investigation closely even before…ah.” He cuts off, eyes squeezing tightly closed and pressing his hand gingerly to the back of his skull.
“Do you want a painkiller?” Eames asks, not remorseful in the least but willing to at least make the offer.
“No,” Arthur and Reid say together, and there’s a beat of silence before Reid adds, “Thank you.” He pries his eyes open carefully and says, “I’m fine. I don’t need to go to a hospital.”
Eames snorts. Arthur’s eyes do the compulsive twitch he can never quite stop when he so obviously desperately wants to roll them. “Of course you’re not going to the hospital,” he says. “It’s a concussion.”
Reid smiles at Arthur, although Eames doesn’t get the joke, and says, “I’ve missed you.”
-
“Brief me,” Arthur orders, sliding a coffee mug onto the table and taking the third chair. “Everything you know.”
“I want assurances first,” Eames says, toying with the handle of his own mug. None of the mugs in the cupboard match, but they’re all arranged in the same direction, handles facing back and left. Eames wonders which of them is OCD.
He turns his attention to Reid now and asks, “How much of what’s said here gets back to your friends in the Bureau?”
“I trust them,” Reid says. He’s painfully honest for someone who’s seen the kinds of things he must have seen, working for his particular division. Eames keeps catching himself trying to spot the con behind the big-eyed baby deer act. If there is one, Reid hasn’t slipped up long enough to show it yet.
“I don’t,” Eames says, and over the objections he can already tell Arthur is about to raise, adds, “You’re not the only person to suspect dreamsharing as a common element. Someone on your team has been funneling information into other channels.”
Reid frowns. “They wouldn’t…”
“Prentiss,” Arthur says, cutting him off. “She used to be Interpol. Black market dreamshare technology is their jurisdiction. They’re the only ones watching closely on an international level.”
“She’s proven herself before,” Reid says stubbornly. “She wouldn’t go behind our backs.”
“She wouldn’t have to,” Eames points out mildly. “There’s nothing to stop her from reporting to both departments, possibly even with your team leader’s knowledge.” When Reid looks taken aback, Eames raises an eyebrow. “You don’t see any conflict of interest here either, I take it?”
“Technically, the existence of dreamsharing technology hasn’t been acknowledged by any world government,” Reid replies quickly. “Extraction, while immoral, can’t be considered illegal so long as there are no laws restricting its employment.”
“You’re prevaricating,” Eames says.
“It’s not Emily.”
“I’ve learned that Arthur is very rarely wrong, unless he chooses to be,” Eames says evenly, holding Reid’s gaze. “In this case, the only reason I could see that happening is if he were protecting someone, most likely you. If it isn’t you, then I would start with her.”
Reid shuts his mouth. He doesn’t look happy, but he nods.
Arthur takes that as his cue that they’re all cooperating for the time being. “You said there would be something connecting the victims. Fischer and Rothchild were both inception jobs, which is the first place I’d look. But there have only ever been two known inceptions, and you can’t keep that kind of thing quiet.”
Reid frowns again. “You think the unsub ran out of targets, so he had to change his victimology in order to keep satisfying his urge to harm?”
“No,” Eames says, before Arthur can respond. “Christakos was an inception job as well.” He clears his throat when Arthur pins him with a look. “Two years ago. The attempt failed, which is why you never heard about it. People rarely brag about their failures.”
“You were on the team,” Arthur infers.
“Which is another thing tying the victims together, if we’re keeping track,” Eames says, keeping his tone deliberately light. “I worked all of those jobs, and I’m the only team member they have in common.”
Reid’s attention sharpens and focuses, but Arthur brushes the information aside with a gesture. “Not surprising. Inception requires a strong personal connection with the subject, and there are only three forgers worth working with in the world. I’d have found it stranger if one of those teams hadn’t used a forger.”
“So it’s someone who knows the dreamsharing community well enough to track the failures as well as the successes,” Reid surmises. His fingers twitch and jerk briefly in another gesture Eames recognizes from working with Arthur, that of the eternal need for a writing implement when receiving new information.
“Unless it’s someone on the teams themselves,” Arthur says. “But the only overlap on all three jobs is Eames.”
“There could also be a connection between the employers,” Eames points out. “Anyone willing to hire a team for an inception is in an influential position. You don’t get to that level without having some skeletons in the closet.”
“There are also contractors,” Arthur adds. “Teams who hire out for sedatives, or an outside party who assembles the team.”
“Guys,” Reid says suddenly, “I really need to get to my team.”
Arthur gestures, an offhand go that signals Reid bolting from the table in his haste. “Keep Eames out of it,” Arthur says. “Use my name as a source if you have to, they already know enough about me to buy it.”
“I’ll call you from the office,” Reid promises, just before the door slams behind him.
Eames stares across the table at Arthur, trying to determine where to even begin with the conversation they’re about to have. “Do we even know what’s happening to these people?” he asks finally.
“Yes,” Arthur answers. “They’re in Limbo.”
-
They talk around the issue until there’s nothing left to do but confront it.
“You realize that if one word of your allegiance gets out, you’ll be dead within days.” Eames has dealt with enough spies - and seen them dealt with by others, which is always worse - to know that Arthur’s unflinchingly put his life into Eames’ hands. It’s a staggering demonstration of trust, and not one Eames would return.
“It doesn’t matter,” Arthur answers. “If we don’t find whoever’s targeting marks, all of us are going down anyway.”
Eames rolls his mug between his hands on the wooden table, back and forth. “How long have you been sharing living space with an FBI agent?”
“A few years,” Arthur answers. “We met when he worked a case at Langley. It’s a convenient arrangement; I have to keep up enough places as it is. I don’t consult for his team. We don’t work together.”
“Until now,” Eames corrects.
On cue, Arthur’s cell rings. He glances at the caller ID, at Eames, and finally opens the line. “Arthur.”
“Hi, it’s me,” Eames hears through the speaker, followed by something rapid and complicated that Eames can’t parse and which makes Arthur frown.
“Hang on, I’m putting you on speaker, it’ll be faster,” Arthur says, apparently giving up on getting a word in and just hitting the button mid-sentence.
“- looking at the victimology, trying to predict a pattern. If you’re right about the reason these victims were selected, then we might be able to learn something by figuring out why they were chosen before anyone else. If Christakos wasn’t even the victim of a successful inception, she wouldn’t have been a high-profile target. There had to be another reason the unsub chose her: accessibility, knowledge, another common link.”
“Does he ever stop to breathe?” Eames asks quietly. Arthur glares at him.
“Is that Arthur?” a man asks in the background, and Arthur’s glare redirects at his cell phone speaker, turning sour.
“Morgan’s here, we’re putting together a timeline,” Reid continues, seemingly unbothered by the fact that neither Arthur nor Eames have offered up any information yet. “I need to know the dates of when the inceptions were performed on Fischer and Rothchild, as well as a list of any other potential victims that you can think of. Have there been any other successful inceptions?”
Eames shares a look with Arthur. “Those are the only ones I know of,” Eames admits. “There were rumors about Douglas Kennington, but never anything substantial.”
“Cobb said he’d done it once before,” Arthur says slowly. “He never told me who. It had to have been someone on his research team, before he went on the run.”
Mal. Eames is surprised into silence. He’d heard the story from Ariadne, not long after the whole inception fiasco, but Arthur had disappeared immediately after the Fischer job the way he always did, handling payment and covering their tracks from a safe distance. Eames hadn’t realized that Cobb had never told him.
“Already dead,” he says briefly, ignoring the sudden weight of Arthur’s gaze on his face. He’ll have to tell Arthur at some point now, he knows, but if he has any choice in the matter he’ll put it off as long as possible. “That one’s irrelevant. There may have been a woman in Switzerland, but I don’t have a name.”
“He’s kept within federal bounds, there must be a reason,” Reid muses. “Christakos spent three-quarters of the year in Greece; the unsub may have struck when he did because it was when she was available.”
“You think this guy won’t leave the country,” Morgan - he of the terrible karaoke - says in the background.
“I think it’s more likely that this is where he’s comfortable,” Reid says. “Any time serial crimes are spread across jurisdictional lines, it makes the evidence more difficult to process. Sometimes neighboring districts or states aren’t even aware that there are other ongoing investigations into similar cases. Fischer traveled regularly, it would have been easy to target him while he was in transit. Instead he was found in his own bed, inside a well-armed security system. Christakos was only in Texas for two days before she was scheduled to leave on a cruise; that’s pretty exact timing.”
“It may be more to do with your legal system,” Eames puts in. “If I were given a choice between pulling off a risky crime here or in, say, Indonesia…”
“Here,” Arthur agrees. “They can’t prosecute. You said it yourself, earlier: There are no laws yet against crimes that have taken place inside someone’s mind.”
“That’s true of everywhere, though,” Reid says.
“True,” Eames allows. “But in a lot of other countries, they simply wouldn’t care.”
“Stick to the U.S.,” Arthur advises. “I’ll see if I can come up with any more names.”
“Start with failures,” Reid says. “Christakos was the most recent victim; it may be that the unsub has reached his limitations as far as getting access to victims and that’s why he’s moved on to subjects who weren’t actually incepted.”
Eames raises an eyebrow. “That’s a longer list. The idea has been around for years, and extractors love the prospect of a challenge. It’s a competitive field.”
Arthur remains silent. When Eames looks at him, questioning, he finally speaks.
“Candice Forsythe,” he says. “Four months ago. Sixteen years old, she lives with her parents in Philadelphia. The job failed, but word still got around afterward.”
“Why didn’t it succeed?” Eames asks, intrigued. It has to have been Arthur’s job, and he can’t imagine Arthur failing at anything.
“Because I didn’t let it,” Arthur says shortly.
Eames shakes his head. The idea of Arthur intentionally sabotaging his own job is even harder to believe than the idea of him failing. “You can’t tell me you’ve grown a conscience now, after all…”
“She was sixteen, Eames,” Arthur says sharply. He takes a deep breath and returns his attention to the silent, waiting phone. “Check on her first. I’ll call you with a list once I have more.”
Eames supposes Reid must be used to Arthur hanging up on him, if they’ve been roommates for this long. He waits while Arthur takes another moment, before they meet each other’s eyes.
“I could use your help on this,” Arthur says.
Eames has a dozen sarcastic responses he could make to that, but he’s well aware that right now he’s still the prime suspect. He’s also uncomfortably aware of how much trust Arthur has put in him to keep this from going any further.
“I’ll call Ariadne,” he says finally. “Three will be able to work faster than two.”
-
Eames is ending a call to Bhaktapur when he registers that the tone of Arthur’s voice has changed, softer around the edges than the clipped professional tone he uses on the job.
“I’ll ask him,” Arthur says, and his gaze flicks briefly to Eames. “Either way, I’ll see you in half an hour.”
“The roommate?” Eames asks when Arthur hangs up.
“They’re having trouble with the profile. Reid’s the only one who knows even the basics of dreamsharing, and he’s never been under. They’re getting bogged down in the technical side.”
“And they’ve asked for a consultant,” Eames surmises.
“Two, actually.” Arthur gives him another veiled, measuring look. “Would you consider…”
“No,” Eames says flatly. “You must be joking. Would I like to waltz directly into the FBI, attend a meeting with a team of profilers, at least one of whom is connected to Interpol, and reveal myself as the prime suspect of their investigation?”
“They won’t know who you are.”
“The illustrious Dr. Reid had me pegged after one conversation from a code name in a file. How long do you think it will take the rest of them, once we start discussing the details of my colorful criminal past?”
“That’s different,” Arthur says, rubbing at one eye like he has the beginnings of a headache. “That’s Spencer.”
“No,” Eames says again.
Arthur eyes him for a long, considering moment. “You’ll have access to an official FBI visitor’s pass for several hours,” he says. “And I’ll let you borrow my consultant’s badge while we’re inside.”
Arthur has always been skilled at baiting a hook. Eames blows out a breath. “Fine,” he agrees finally. “But we don’t use your bloody code names.”
Part Two
Fandoms: Inception/Criminal Minds
Pairing (highlight to read): Arthur/Reid
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 40K
Warnings: Violence, discussion of addiction and rape.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, no disrespect intended.
Notes: Canon-compliant for Criminal Minds only through season 5. Gratitude beyond telling to anowlinsunshine for covering my blind spots with truly above-and-beyond beta work. All remaining mistakes are my own. Thanks to everyone who expressed interest in this and kept me going.
There’s only one team member that the Fischer and Rothchild jobs had in common, which means only one person who could theoretically tie the two cases together.
Whatever the FBI knows, Eames wants to know it, too.
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
- Virginia Woolf
“Eames.”
The voice throws him for a minute, because it’s one he hasn’t heard in more than a year now, timid but with a determination behind it that helps him place the caller.
“Ariadne,” he answers, tucking the phone under his ear and wondering how she got this number, or from whom. “This is a surprise.”
“Have you heard about Fischer?”
The name comes as a surprise, although it perhaps shouldn’t; there are few things tying the two of them together, and Fischer is one of them. When he doesn’t answer immediately, Ariadne speaks up again.
“You should turn on the news.”
He’s in Australia at the moment, which makes the story easy to locate once he switches on the television. “…the scion of the family behind one of the biggest energy corporations in the world fell into a coma on Friday, and was discovered in his Los Angeles penthouse by a member of his household staff. Doctors remain unsure about the cause, although a spokesperson for the company has assured the media that drugs were not a factor. Fischer remains in the care of…”
“Was it us?” Ariadne asks, interrupting the flow of words from the reporter. “Did we do this?”
Doubtful, Eames thinks. Still, there are other factors to consider. “I’ll call you back,” he tells Ariadne.
He leaves the television on while he works, checking message boards and tracking the story across several of the more reputable world news sites. At around half-past seven, he finishes reading one of the most recent articles just in time for the reporter’s voice on the news to filter through. “…are unsure whether there is a connection between the two cases. Rothchild, a Boston native, has been airlifted from Miami back to the care of her primary physician at…”
Eames stills for a moment, and then does another search, skimming headlines with a grim sense of foreboding. Marion Rothchild, heiress and head of the Rothchild Foundation, who six months ago had announced out of the blue her decision to sponsor medical research instead of the arts. Eames still remembers the cold tube of the IV in his arm and the thin blanket he’d had over his lap when Marion had stooped down beside his wheelchair in the pediatric ward and kissed Eames’ bald forehead, calling him a very brave little girl.
He doesn’t waste any more time. Two cases, both in the United States, and there’s a young blonde woman on the television now promising that the FBI will do everything in its power to discover the truth behind the cases of Ms. Rothchild and Mr. Fischer.
He checks the area code of his last received call, and sure enough it has a U.S. country code attached.
“Get out of the states,” he says when Ariadne picks up. “Get back to Paris, or go home to Canada. You should be fine so long as you’re not in the country.”
“It was us, wasn’t it?” Ariadne sounds young, still, but not afraid. Quiet and certain, like she’d known even before she’d picked up the phone to call Eames. Women’s intuition.
“Yes,” Eames replies. “It was us.”
-
The FBI team heading up the investigation are members of the Behavioral Analysis Unit, which Eames takes to mean that the government believes the comas are the work of a malicious individual rather than from natural causes. Natural causes being, say, the aftereffects of an experimental dreamsharing technique, rather than an overdose on sleeping pills.
He keeps his ear to the ground and hears just enough to know that others involved on the inception teams are already following up on the criminal leads, chasing rumors through the dreamsharing community. The point on the Rothchild job, Silvashko, is doing a better job of tracking down that information than Eames can, so he turns his attention elsewhere.
There’s only one team member that the Fischer and Rothchild jobs had in common, which means only one person who could theoretically tie the two cases together.
Whatever the FBI knows, Eames wants to know it, too.
-
Bugging the FBI team members’ vehicles is almost laughably easy. With as much technology as the common automobile holds these days, tapping into the GPS systems and planting microphones takes no more than a handful of minutes, done safely out of sight of surveillance cameras.
The only flaw in his plan comes with Dr. Spencer Reid, who takes public transportation every day and has, so far as Eames can tell, never learned how to drive. According to the files Silvashko had sent along, he’d been busy with graduate studies by the time he was old enough and the parent who’d been granted custody lived out of state, so Eames supposes that’s understandable.
Luckily for Eames, Dr. Reid’s flat is not equipped with state-of-the-art security, and it’s a simple enough matter to break in while his FBI team is away in Boston interviewing family members and employees, and plant a bug inside his entertainment center.
It’s not quite the bachelor pad Eames had been expecting, even for an FBI agent. Everything is in its proper place, neat and tidy, with the exception of the books that are everywhere, stacked from floor to ceiling on shelves and tables, wherever there’s room. There are two bedrooms, both furnished, which makes Eames both quick and cautious in his investigation. Being surprised by a roommate returning home won’t do at all.
The first bedroom has a closet filled with suits, neatly organized in garment bags overhanging a generous collection of men’s dress shoes. Reid’s room, obviously. The closet in the other room is nearly empty, but the drawers are filled with sweater vests and short-sleeved dress shirts, rumpled khaki pants and cardigans. The tie selection looks to have been chosen from a 1970’s department store catalogue. A student, perhaps, or an older professor, subletting the room. It’s a common practice in the D.C. area, and Reid’s name is the only one on the lease.
There’s a Leon Kossoff on the wall in the hallway, which Eames recognizes from a web search he did years ago after coming perilously close to losing an argument with Arthur on the subject of modern British painters. It looks like an original, which puts the roommate either in a well-placed position or a higher pay grade.
The biggest surprise is the Glock taped to the ceiling of one of the cupboards in the kitchen. It’s a standard-issue FBI firearm, but the hammer is cocked, and Eames suspects that if he took the time to look, he’d find a round in the chamber. Not standard FBI practice, and certainly not for a secondary weapon. Presumably Reid has his primary firearm with him in Boston.
Eames gets out clean and returns to the corporate apartment he’s renting weekly near Quantico. There’s nothing new from Silvashko, but Eames hadn’t really expected anything. Yusuf has checked in with an all-clear on the international front; with both incidents in the U.S., Interpol hasn’t made any inquiries. It’s still in the hands of the FBI.
Eames checks the police reports in Boston, and settles in to wait.
-
The lives of FBI agents are just as terrifically boring as Eames suspected they would be. Apart from a few juicy personal phone calls and one horrifying instance of full-blast country karaoke, Eames gets absolutely nothing from his first day of surveillance. The second day is much the same, although with the added bonus of a phone call between two of the agents in which Eames learns that they have no leads and no suspects, as yet.
The third day is when it gets interesting.
“Garcia?” Reid’s voice asks, cutting off a generic cell phone ringtone. The roommate hasn’t come home yet, so far as Eames knows; if he has, he’s been quiet about it.
“I’m in my apartment,” Reid says, sounding confused. Then, “No,” drawn out slowly, wary. “What’s this about?” A pause, followed by, “I’ll meet you there in half an hour?” There’s the sound of a door closing, after which Reid’s voice becomes too muffled to decipher.
It could be nothing, but Eames has fuck-all else to go on. He loops back to the first cell phone ring and raises the volume, filtering out the background noise to pick up the other side of the conversation.
“Where are you?” A woman’s voice, tinged with urgency. Then Reid’s reply, followed by, “Reid honey, is anyone there with you?”
Bugger, Eames thinks. He has a bad feeling even before the woman continues, “I need you to come in. I’m sending a team out to sweep your apartment now, I think you’ve been B-U-G-ed.”
Eames takes off his headphones and taps his pen against the wooden desk. After a moment, he does a quick search through the BAU files on his hard drive. Penelope Garcia, Technical Analyst. Apparently FBI tech support extends beyond the office for this team.
It’s only a matter of time before they search the other agents’ homes, if they aren’t already. Eames can always hope he’ll get lucky and no one will think of checking vehicles, but he doesn’t have enough information yet to withdraw completely.
He waits until the agents have left Reid’s flat, gives them half an hour to report the all-clear, and slips in to plant another bug.
-
Phone chatter gets very interesting after that. None of the agents know who bugged Reid’s flat, and whether it was an internal action taken by the Bureau or one performed by an outside source. Supervisory Special Agent Hotchner is on the phone with someone for every minute of his commute, asking questions and demanding answers with the air of someone who knows how to work the system and will use that information as ruthlessly as he has to in order to get what he wants.
It’s gratifying that they seem to believe it’s an isolated incident, but the hubbub over the bug is distracting from the case. Eames is going to have to switch to another plan shortly if he hopes to get anywhere.
Three days later, the technical analyst catches on again and a team shows up to sweep for bugs. They find the first one. Not the second.
Reid makes a phone call not long after he gets home, from the debatable safety of his living room. There’s no voice on the other end, just an automated message that goes straight to voicemail.
“Hi, it’s me,” Reid says. “I think I might need you.”
Eames is trying to pull favors to have the line hacked and traced when he gets a call himself, this time from Kinkaide. He hasn’t worked with the man in years, not since their failed attempt at an extraction via inception.
“We have a problem,” Kinkaide says, without any preliminaries. “They found Proserpina Christakos.”
-
“This unsub will not inject himself into the investigation,” Hotchner had told the police chief in Galveston. “Whoever we’re looking for doesn’t want us to see him.”
Eames was willing to grant that assumption the benefit of the doubt, but then he wasn’t the unsub. The day after Proserpina Christakos was found comatose in her summer home, a Dr. Geoffrey Black was on the red-eye flight to Texas.
“I appreciate your interest in the case,” Agent Hotchner told him, “but this is an ongoing investigation. Any information we may have is not ready to be shared with the public.”
“Of course,” Eames demurs. “I was merely offering my expertise.”
“Thank you, but right now I’m afraid we can’t accept that offer.” It’s a polite but firm dismissal, and clearly Hotchner intends it to carry enough authority to put Dr. Black right back onto a plane out of Galveston.
Instead, Eames hangs around looking hopeful and academic until he catches someone else’s eye.
It doesn’t take long; he’s chosen his props well, and he’d guessed that either Morgan or Reid would be drawn in by the neatly-printed Dream Therapy for Coma Patients on the cover of the book in his hands.
He gets Reid, who approaches sideways, like a crab, before settling on the bench beside him just inside the busy waiting room of the police station. “Dream therapy,” he says, indicating the title of Eames’ book. “That’s a pretty experimental field.”
“It’s a young science, but growing,” Eames agrees easily. “Dr. Geoffrey Black,” he says, offering his hand. “I heard about the cases on the news and thought I might be of help.”
“I wasn’t aware dream therapy had even been tested on coma patients,” Reid says, studying him. He reminds Eames a bit of a frog, with his wide mouth and prominent bones. There are bruises smudged beneath his eyes that Eames has seen before on work-obsessed, insomniac point men, that tell of nights spent reading poetry and absorbing information.
“There’s been one case study,” Eames answers. “It’s difficult, of course, without the lucid interludes of discussion and discovery one normally has with patients, but many believe that some good can be done by studying the subconscious.”
“You mean dreamsharing technology,” Reid says, and Eames has to hide his surprise. He’d debated whether or not to push them in this direction, but with Christakos now on the list of victims, he hadn’t seen another choice. There was nothing to link Christakos to Fischer and Rothchild; no behavioral changes, no sudden suspect decisions. Because the inception hadn’t worked.
The only thing linking all three victims, so far as Eames knew, was inception. And Eames himself.
He hadn’t expected Reid to catch on so quickly, however. “You’re familiar with the field?” Eames asks.
There’s a flicker of something in Reid’s expression, there and gone before Eames can pin it down, and in its absence a keen interest that Eames can read like his own reflection in a mirror. It occurs to him suddenly how very dangerous it is to be playing this game with an FBI profiler who may well be as good as he is.
“I’ve read some of the theoretical work,” Reid answers. “As I understand, the prospect of dreamsharing therapy hasn’t yet become a reality.”
“Ah, but the possibilities available to us if it does,” Eames enthuses, letting some of Dr. Black’s passion glimmer in his eyes. “Child psychologists already use the medium of fiction, asking their patients to tell stories and act out events with toy dolls. Imagine if we could reach the patients directly in their dreams, test their reactions to people and places, discover hidden truths. Amnesia patients could be helped to unlock doors within their own minds.”
“And coma patients could be shown the way back to consciousness,” Reid finishes for him. “Is that why you’re here, Doctor?”
“This is the perfect opportunity for a field test,” Eames confirms. “If you had someone on-hand, someone familiar with the relevant theories and techniques….”
“Dreamsharing technology, even in its current state, is restricted and overseen by the U.S. military,” Reid says. “How did you think you were going to facilitate a field test?”
Eames lets his expression go blank, bewildered. “You’re the FBI.”
Reid is still suspicious, Eames can tell, but he has no reason on the surface to distrust Eames’ alias, so after a few more minutes of small talk, Eames is shuttled off to another officer willing to take down his - fictional - information and send him away. It’s not what he’d hoped for, but it’s better than nothing. With any luck, the FBI will be able to turn over stones that Eames’ own resources can’t reach. He needs to find out who’s targeting inception marks, and why.
He needs to find out soon, before anyone can tie them all to him.
-
Eames is lurking a block away from Christakos’ summer house when a black sedan with rental plates pulls up just outside of the police blockade, parking rather brazenly in front of two marked cruisers with lights flashing. Eames doesn’t recognize the car, but he does recognize the silhouette and body language of the man who gets out, flashing some sort of falsified identification at the officers guarding the perimeter and ducking confidently under the crime scene tape.
Eames turns and makes his way back to his own car, careful not to angle himself in a way that reveals his face until he’s back in his own vehicle, safe behind tinted windows.
“Fuck.” He dials Kinkaide because Silvashko doesn’t know about Christakos, and Eames would prefer to keep it that way. The fewer people who can connect him to this, the better.
“We have a problem,” he says when Kinkaide picks up. “There’s another team.”
-
“Arthur’s in Belmopan,” Ariadne says when Eames calls her.
“Arthur was in Belmopan yesterday,” Eames corrects. “Apparently something came up and he left late last night for Los Angeles.”
With the time difference and the red-tape of American customs, even for an ex-military agent with Arthur’s credentials, that makes it likely that he’d only taken one connecting flight. Taking the time to cover his tracks is apparently not as critical as unearthing whatever it is the FBI has found.
There’s some risk in disappearing from sight so quickly when Dr. Black would have been expected to keep trying, to hang about asking questions and posing theories, but with another dreamsharing team in the mix, Eames can’t take the chance of being spotted. He’s already in the airport, booked on the first flight back to D.C. as Dr. Black.
“There’s more,” Ariadne says. “I got in touch with Cobb, he says that while the BAU is handling the coma patient cases, there’s more going on. One of the agents has access to information about extraction teams, and it’s being leaked to other agencies. That’s not part of the official investigation. Probably because dreamsharing technology isn’t public knowledge yet, even for the FBI.” She sounds impressed, undoubtedly delighted that a Canadian citizen has one up on an important branch of American law enforcement.
“You got in touch with…” Eames cuts off the question. Of course Ariadne had gotten in touch with Cobb. She’d been able to track down Eames within a day of the story breaking. “Have you contacted all of us?”
“Not Saito,” she says, for which Eames is profoundly grateful. “And not Arthur. All I knew was that he was in Belmopan, I couldn’t get a number.”
“Yes, he does tend to make it difficult,” Eames agrees. He wonders if Cobb really thought through what he was doing, introducing Ariadne to their little underworld. In his reflective moments, he fully believes she and Arthur will be ruling them all by the new year.
“So what do we do now?” Ariadne asks.
“Let me handle this for now, all right?” Eames replies, already formulating plans. “I have a team of sorts already. It should be a simple extraction, and then we’ll know everything they do.”
“You’re going to extract from the FBI?” Ariadne’s tone is mixed parts horrified and thrilled. Eames can already imagine her setting her sights higher.
“Only one of them. We can use this,” Eames tells her. “If Arthur’s here, he’s after the same thing we are. He’s ex-military; he has government contacts, and his intelligence is bound to be better than ours. All we have to do is wait to see which member of the team he focuses on. That’s our man.”
“Why don’t you just work together?”
Eames smiles briefly. “You haven’t spent nearly enough time around Arthur and I if you have to ask that question.”
Besides which, he doesn’t like the idea of anyone from the dreamsharing community knowing something he doesn’t. If the FBI connects all three victims to him, which they no doubt will, Arthur may decide to cut his losses and take Eames out directly before he can lead them to everyone else.
It’s what Eames would do.
-
There’s a black sedan with tinted windows and rental plates parked a block from Reid’s flat, so Eames assumes Arthur has chosen his target for the night. He doesn’t make a move yet; Arthur could be doing the same thing Eames is, watching everyone in turn and narrowing down his suspect list. It’s too early to tell.
He thinks he may have made a mistake when his bug picks up the sounds of an altercation around midnight after Reid returns home, scuffling and the thump of a body hitting something with force.
Fucking hell, Arthur’s already made a move, he thinks, checking his gun in haste and preparing to force his way in if necessary, if it’ll give him access to the information Reid has before Arthur can steal it and disappear. He’s in the process of jerking off his headphones when he hears Reid speak, breathless but still unmistakably, “Yes.”
Eames pauses. Setting his gun back down on the desk, he adjusts the background noise filter and turns up the volume.
“Oh, oh.” Reid’s voice, high and breathy, and Eames is cracking a grin even before he hears familiar wet slapping sounds, distorted by the ambient noise filter but still recognizable. Eames has done enough surveillance in his day to be able to identify the sounds of someone receiving excellent head.
Awkward, evasive Dr. Reid is apparently getting lucky.
Eames listens for another few seconds to confirm, and then takes off his headphones and turns his attention elsewhere. He’s not above a little voyeurism, but he’s not sordid enough to eavesdrop on someone’s private party just for the hell of it.
He wonders if Arthur is getting an earful, as well. The idea of buttoned-down, put-together Arthur squirming in the confines of his rental car listening to someone else getting off is enough to make Eames’ night.
He hopes Arthur brought tissues on his stakeout.
-
The next night, Arthur’s sedan returns to park two blocks from Reid’s flat. And again the night after that. That’s all the proof Eames needs.
The following afternoon, while Eames is still putting the final touches on his extraction plan, he receives an alert message in his inbox. Arthur has booked a flight out of the country. He’s leaving that night.
There’s only one reason for Arthur to be laying down an escape route. Eames has to do the job on Reid today, or Arthur’s going to get in ahead of him and fuck the whole thing to hell.
Eames prefers his plans for sedation and extraction to be clean, elegant, leaving the mark with no trace of suspicion. If you’re made after the job, it’s just as bad as being made before it. The end result will be the same, once the mark knows you’ve been in their mind.
If pressed, however, Eames knows how to default to a backup plan. A home invasion and mugging isn’t an unusual crime, and Reid’s security is negligible. There will be enough trauma from the event to cover up any hints of unease that might linger from the dream.
He makes his move the next day, breaking in just before Reid typically returns from Quantico and waiting just inside the front door. If he times it right, he can have Reid unconscious and unaware before he ever gets a glimpse of Eames’ face.
What he hadn’t counted on was Reid having all the grace of a newborn colt, and being on the phone besides. “I told you, it’s fine,” Eames hears, muffled through the front door. The lock clicks, the handle twists. Reid’s voice grows louder and clearer as he pushes the door open. “Garcia’s checking my apartment again tomorrow, it could be nothing. It could be the Bureau, this kind of thing happens sometimes when agents…”
Eames is a breath away from catching Reid in a sleeper hold when the strap of Reid’s messenger bag catches on the door handle and he gets caught, twisted up in his own luggage. He tries to lift the strap free, misses, bangs his elbow into the door, trips over his own feet, and overbalances enough that the weight of the bag yanks the door handle backwards, revealing Eames lying in wait behind it. Reid’s eyes go wide, surprise followed almost immediately by understanding.
“Dr. Black,” he says, still holding the phone open. “I didn’t expect to see you again. You’re looking very well for someone who died in his eighties, by the way. Your colleagues at Stanford send their condolences.”
Well, it’s not as if Eames had expected that alias to hold water for long, anyway. He tilts his head sideways, pushing the door shut behind Reid when he complies with the wordless instructions. Eames holds his free hand out for the phone.
“You don’t have to do this,” Reid says, almost in a rush. “Whatever you want…”
The click of Reid’s jaw snapping shut is almost as loud as Eames’ safety going off.
“Spencer?” Eames hears through the open phone line. A deep male voice, tinny and tense. “Spencer?”
Reid lowers the phone slowly and clicks it off.
“Good boy,” Eames approves. “Now turn around slowly, please.”
Reid goes tense. Eames imagines he’s spent enough time in hostage situations to know what that usually means. “They know you’re here,” Reid says, still trying to be reasonable. “There’s someone coming for me already, they’ll be here any minute. You can still end this.”
“Turn around,” Eames says again.
When Reid does, every movement of his body tight and afraid, Eames clocks him neatly across the back of his head with the butt of his gun.
-
He doesn’t have much time. The authorities have no doubt been alerted, and Reid has seen his face, which is going to make working in this country hell unless Eames actually abducts him, which is a logistical nightmare and almost worse than ending up on the FBI’s most wanted list.
He drags Reid’s body into the first bedroom and dumps it across the bed, cracking open the PASIV case and readying the lines. Response times vary by city and Reid will undoubtedly be called in as a priority, but it still takes time to make calls and dispatch vehicles. He should have three minutes in the real world, and Reid won’t be militarized. There shouldn’t be any problems.
He’s just slid the needle into one of Reid’s prominent blue veins when he hears footsteps thundering up the stairs. Too soon, far too soon.
Eames steps into the hallway and levels his gun just as Arthur kicks in the front door.
Arthur’s expression goes slack with surprise and recognition, but he doesn’t waste time. “Where is he?”
“He made a call, someone’s already on the way,” Eames answers. “If we do this together, it will be faster.”
“Where is he?” Arthur repeats, biting out the words.
“In the bedroom,” Eames says, gesturing with one elbow. Neither of them have lowered their guns. Eames supposes it’s only self-preservation, getting into a standoff with Arthur. “Where’s the rest of your team?”
“There is no team,” Arthur says. “It’s only me.”
That’s unexpected, but then Arthur did drop everything on a job in Belize to get here and he has nearly as much to hide as Eames does where Fischer is concerned, so perhaps Eames shouldn’t be surprised that he’s working this one solo.
“In that case, shall I go down alone while you stand guard?” He’ll have to lower his gun to roll up his sleeve, but they’re running out of time. Waiting for the FBI to break down the door is just as dangerous as giving Arthur a clear shot. “Three minutes, full disclosure…”
“There is no team, Eames,” Arthur repeats. “There is no job. He’s not a mark.”
Eames pauses.
Arthur’s jaw is tight. “Profile the room, Eames,” he says, which is an odd choice of words coming from Arthur, but Eames supposes it must be what comes to mind, standing in Reid’s flat…
Reid’s flat.
Two bedrooms. One of them filled with suit jackets and designer ties, and Eames has spent enough time watching the BAU now to know that Reid dresses like someone’s academically-inclined grandfather. A Glock much like the one currently in Arthur’s hand, taped to the top of a cupboard, in carrying condition one. An original Kossoff on the wall, which Eames knows is exactly Arthur’s taste.
Eames lowers his gun. “You’re not here about Fischer,” he says cautiously.
“No,” Arthur says, moving past him into the bedroom - Arthur’s bedroom - now that they’re no longer holding each other at gunpoint. “I’m here because someone bugged my fucking apartment.”
Eames follows him in, waiting in the doorway while Arthur crouches down beside the bed to check Reid’s vitals.
“Did you give him anything?” Arthur asks, with unexpected urgency. “Sedatives? Narcotics?”
“Nothing. A mild concussion, possibly. You arrived before I could put him under.” Eames checks his watch. “Speaking of, should we be worried about the company on the way?”
“No one’s coming,” Arthur answers shortly. “I’m the only one who knows you’re here.”
“And vice versa, it seems,” Eames comments. “I didn’t know you kept a place in D.C.”
“You’re not supposed to. That’s the point.” Arthur glances over at him. “You have a team?”
“No one in the city.” It’s the truth, and less revealing than anything else he might have said. “I take it your flight back to Belize was scheduled because you’d determined the surveillance wasn’t a threat?”
“So I’d thought,” Arthur replies darkly.
“Perhaps that was a premature conclusion,” Eames allows.
Arthur shoots him a glare and doesn’t deign to respond.
Eames isn’t such a bastard that he doesn’t understand he’s probably blown Arthur’s cover in this city, and that Arthur may have to burn an alias because of it. “Can I help?”
“No,” Arthur says, shrugging his suit jacket off and rolling up his sleeves. “I’ll take care of it.”
-
“You don’t see a conflict of interest, sharing a flat with an FBI agent? A profiler, at that?”
Arthur ignores him, packing up Eames’ PASIV with practiced proficiency. This lasts until he stands up and tries to leave the room, only to find Eames still in the doorway, blocking his path.
“He knows what I do,” Arthur says finally, recognizing that Eames is not about to be moved without persuasion. “There’s no conflict.”
“What you used to do, or what you do now?” Eames inquires, because everyone has heard Arthur’s background story: ex-military black ops, possible CIA connections, one of the first pioneers of the United States dreamshare program. Most of it is almost certainly fabricated or at least exaggerated, but there’s enough of a paper trail beneath the bluster to give it credence.
Arthur hesitates, then sidesteps Eames to get through the door. This time Eames lets him go, because handling Arthur is always something that’s best done with one step forward and two steps back. There’s also the fact that Eames can easily block him again on the way back, this time putting himself between Arthur and Reid, which is an even better strategic position.
Arthur turns on the tap in the kitchen and runs a glassful of water through the filter on the faucet. “Do you really believe,” Eames asks behind him, “that any cover story you’ve fed him will stand up to scrutiny at close quarters if he gets curious? That he won’t start tracking your comings and goings, wondering why an ex-military agent is called on so urgently to travel abroad?”
Arthur remains still for a long moment. Then he turns around and faces Eames squarely. “I’m not ex-military,” he says finally.
Eames rejects the correction with an impatient gesture. “Whatever…”
“I’m not ex-anything.”
Eames falls silent. There are a great many ways that statement could be interpreted, but he instinctively knows already which one Arthur means. He’d heard the rumors about Arthur still having ties, about being dirty rather than divorced, but he hadn’t given them credibility. Now he wonders how far they were off the mark.
Arthur isn’t dirty, though. Arthur is noble, whatever his criminal actions, and loyal to a fault.
“How long,” Eames asks, “have you been spying on all of us?”
Arthur doesn’t flinch. “Since the beginning,” he says. “Since it started. There were undercover agents in the field from every country with a dreamshare program as soon as the technology leaked. Don’t think I’m the only one.”
Eames grits his teeth. When he gets his temper under control, he can still tell that his tone is too calm to be anything but a threat. “I’d rather not leave a trail of bodies behind me in this country, Arthur. How much do they know?”
“Only what’s relevant,” Arthur replies, as if that makes it any less of a knife in the back. “My job is to monitor and report back, not give the details of every job and everyone involved.”
“You could, though,” Eames counters, cold with the knowledge that it’s the truth. Arthur’s network spreads farther and wider than anyone else has ever managed; it’s one of many reasons why he’s the best. If it ever came to it, Arthur could hand them all over on a platter with enough rope to hang them all, and with plenty to spare.
Arthur, at least, doesn’t try to deny it.
“I could kill you for telling me this,” Eames tells him. “I should. It’s the smartest thing to do.”
“You could,” Arthur agrees. “But you won’t.”
There’s a rustling noise from the bedroom. Arthur doesn’t take his eyes off Eames, but he moves away from the counter with clear intent, and Eames has to either force the issue or step aside and let him pass.
He stays in the hallway for another moment, just breathing. Fucking Arthur. It might sting less if some part of Eames hadn’t already suspected he was being double-crossed.
When he finally walks back into the bedroom, Reid is just stirring. Eames sees his eyes flutter and then focus, taking in Eames standing by the doorway.
“Hey, it’s all right,” Arthur says, crouched down beside the bed again. “Spencer. You’re okay.”
Eames watches the quicksilver dart of Reid’s eyes as he maps out Eames’ position relative to his own, and then Arthur, the gun on Arthur’s hip, and his own line of sight, in that order. Eames holds up his hands, showing that he’s unarmed before Reid decides he can get to Arthur’s Glock and take the shot. The FBI trains shoot-to-kill, and Eames would rather not be a casualty.
Arthur sees the same danger and turns his body slightly sideways, just enough to discourage any attempt at drawing his firearm. “Spencer, this is Eames,” he says, before Eames has a chance to interject another alias. “Eames, Dr. Spencer Reid.”
“Sorry about before,” Eames says mildly, still watching Reid’s eyes and his hands for any sudden movements while keeping his own posture open and unthreatening. “There was a slight misunderstanding.”
“Misunderstanding,” Reid echoes, pushing himself upright on the bed and turning away the water Arthur tries to offer. “You broke into my apartment and knocked me out with a gun by accident?”
“He thought you were my mark,” Arthur says tightly, retreating slightly from Reid’s side and incidentally putting himself in a position where he has a clear view of both of them. Eames doesn’t believe for a moment that it’s an accident, or that any of them is anywhere close to having their guard down.
Reid looks Eames over, sharp intelligence in his eyes that isn’t hidden by the wince when he presses one hand to his head. “I wondered if it was you, when you showed up in Galveston. I’ve read your file, you fit the description. The only thing that didn’t fit the profile was you injecting yourself into the investigation. When you disappeared, I was almost expecting another victim.”
Eames throws a hard look at Arthur. “My file,” he echoes.
Arthur holds up both hands. “I use code names in my reports.”
“It wasn’t difficult to figure out, once I had some basic information,” Reid says absently. “The dates and locations all matched up, although it would presumably be more of a challenge for anyone who only had the official reports to go on.”
“So much for your code names,” Eames tells Arthur. His right eyelid is beginning to twitch.
“Like I said, not everyone would have had the ancillary information necessary to make the connection. I haven’t even brought up the theory that it’s related to dreamsharing yet, I wanted to do more research first. It’s only a viable theory if there’s something else connecting the crimes.”
No one else knows yet, Eames thinks. Arthur catches Eames’ eye and shakes his head slowly, correctly interpreting Eames’ expression. “If you kill him, I will bury you,” he warns. “You’re not even a suspect for this yet.”
“That being said, the risk you’ve taken in coming here is significant for someone with nothing to hide,” Reid continues, blithely overconfident about Arthur’s ability to keep Eames from putting another hole in his head. “You must have been following the investigation closely even before…ah.” He cuts off, eyes squeezing tightly closed and pressing his hand gingerly to the back of his skull.
“Do you want a painkiller?” Eames asks, not remorseful in the least but willing to at least make the offer.
“No,” Arthur and Reid say together, and there’s a beat of silence before Reid adds, “Thank you.” He pries his eyes open carefully and says, “I’m fine. I don’t need to go to a hospital.”
Eames snorts. Arthur’s eyes do the compulsive twitch he can never quite stop when he so obviously desperately wants to roll them. “Of course you’re not going to the hospital,” he says. “It’s a concussion.”
Reid smiles at Arthur, although Eames doesn’t get the joke, and says, “I’ve missed you.”
-
“Brief me,” Arthur orders, sliding a coffee mug onto the table and taking the third chair. “Everything you know.”
“I want assurances first,” Eames says, toying with the handle of his own mug. None of the mugs in the cupboard match, but they’re all arranged in the same direction, handles facing back and left. Eames wonders which of them is OCD.
He turns his attention to Reid now and asks, “How much of what’s said here gets back to your friends in the Bureau?”
“I trust them,” Reid says. He’s painfully honest for someone who’s seen the kinds of things he must have seen, working for his particular division. Eames keeps catching himself trying to spot the con behind the big-eyed baby deer act. If there is one, Reid hasn’t slipped up long enough to show it yet.
“I don’t,” Eames says, and over the objections he can already tell Arthur is about to raise, adds, “You’re not the only person to suspect dreamsharing as a common element. Someone on your team has been funneling information into other channels.”
Reid frowns. “They wouldn’t…”
“Prentiss,” Arthur says, cutting him off. “She used to be Interpol. Black market dreamshare technology is their jurisdiction. They’re the only ones watching closely on an international level.”
“She’s proven herself before,” Reid says stubbornly. “She wouldn’t go behind our backs.”
“She wouldn’t have to,” Eames points out mildly. “There’s nothing to stop her from reporting to both departments, possibly even with your team leader’s knowledge.” When Reid looks taken aback, Eames raises an eyebrow. “You don’t see any conflict of interest here either, I take it?”
“Technically, the existence of dreamsharing technology hasn’t been acknowledged by any world government,” Reid replies quickly. “Extraction, while immoral, can’t be considered illegal so long as there are no laws restricting its employment.”
“You’re prevaricating,” Eames says.
“It’s not Emily.”
“I’ve learned that Arthur is very rarely wrong, unless he chooses to be,” Eames says evenly, holding Reid’s gaze. “In this case, the only reason I could see that happening is if he were protecting someone, most likely you. If it isn’t you, then I would start with her.”
Reid shuts his mouth. He doesn’t look happy, but he nods.
Arthur takes that as his cue that they’re all cooperating for the time being. “You said there would be something connecting the victims. Fischer and Rothchild were both inception jobs, which is the first place I’d look. But there have only ever been two known inceptions, and you can’t keep that kind of thing quiet.”
Reid frowns again. “You think the unsub ran out of targets, so he had to change his victimology in order to keep satisfying his urge to harm?”
“No,” Eames says, before Arthur can respond. “Christakos was an inception job as well.” He clears his throat when Arthur pins him with a look. “Two years ago. The attempt failed, which is why you never heard about it. People rarely brag about their failures.”
“You were on the team,” Arthur infers.
“Which is another thing tying the victims together, if we’re keeping track,” Eames says, keeping his tone deliberately light. “I worked all of those jobs, and I’m the only team member they have in common.”
Reid’s attention sharpens and focuses, but Arthur brushes the information aside with a gesture. “Not surprising. Inception requires a strong personal connection with the subject, and there are only three forgers worth working with in the world. I’d have found it stranger if one of those teams hadn’t used a forger.”
“So it’s someone who knows the dreamsharing community well enough to track the failures as well as the successes,” Reid surmises. His fingers twitch and jerk briefly in another gesture Eames recognizes from working with Arthur, that of the eternal need for a writing implement when receiving new information.
“Unless it’s someone on the teams themselves,” Arthur says. “But the only overlap on all three jobs is Eames.”
“There could also be a connection between the employers,” Eames points out. “Anyone willing to hire a team for an inception is in an influential position. You don’t get to that level without having some skeletons in the closet.”
“There are also contractors,” Arthur adds. “Teams who hire out for sedatives, or an outside party who assembles the team.”
“Guys,” Reid says suddenly, “I really need to get to my team.”
Arthur gestures, an offhand go that signals Reid bolting from the table in his haste. “Keep Eames out of it,” Arthur says. “Use my name as a source if you have to, they already know enough about me to buy it.”
“I’ll call you from the office,” Reid promises, just before the door slams behind him.
Eames stares across the table at Arthur, trying to determine where to even begin with the conversation they’re about to have. “Do we even know what’s happening to these people?” he asks finally.
“Yes,” Arthur answers. “They’re in Limbo.”
-
They talk around the issue until there’s nothing left to do but confront it.
“You realize that if one word of your allegiance gets out, you’ll be dead within days.” Eames has dealt with enough spies - and seen them dealt with by others, which is always worse - to know that Arthur’s unflinchingly put his life into Eames’ hands. It’s a staggering demonstration of trust, and not one Eames would return.
“It doesn’t matter,” Arthur answers. “If we don’t find whoever’s targeting marks, all of us are going down anyway.”
Eames rolls his mug between his hands on the wooden table, back and forth. “How long have you been sharing living space with an FBI agent?”
“A few years,” Arthur answers. “We met when he worked a case at Langley. It’s a convenient arrangement; I have to keep up enough places as it is. I don’t consult for his team. We don’t work together.”
“Until now,” Eames corrects.
On cue, Arthur’s cell rings. He glances at the caller ID, at Eames, and finally opens the line. “Arthur.”
“Hi, it’s me,” Eames hears through the speaker, followed by something rapid and complicated that Eames can’t parse and which makes Arthur frown.
“Hang on, I’m putting you on speaker, it’ll be faster,” Arthur says, apparently giving up on getting a word in and just hitting the button mid-sentence.
“- looking at the victimology, trying to predict a pattern. If you’re right about the reason these victims were selected, then we might be able to learn something by figuring out why they were chosen before anyone else. If Christakos wasn’t even the victim of a successful inception, she wouldn’t have been a high-profile target. There had to be another reason the unsub chose her: accessibility, knowledge, another common link.”
“Does he ever stop to breathe?” Eames asks quietly. Arthur glares at him.
“Is that Arthur?” a man asks in the background, and Arthur’s glare redirects at his cell phone speaker, turning sour.
“Morgan’s here, we’re putting together a timeline,” Reid continues, seemingly unbothered by the fact that neither Arthur nor Eames have offered up any information yet. “I need to know the dates of when the inceptions were performed on Fischer and Rothchild, as well as a list of any other potential victims that you can think of. Have there been any other successful inceptions?”
Eames shares a look with Arthur. “Those are the only ones I know of,” Eames admits. “There were rumors about Douglas Kennington, but never anything substantial.”
“Cobb said he’d done it once before,” Arthur says slowly. “He never told me who. It had to have been someone on his research team, before he went on the run.”
Mal. Eames is surprised into silence. He’d heard the story from Ariadne, not long after the whole inception fiasco, but Arthur had disappeared immediately after the Fischer job the way he always did, handling payment and covering their tracks from a safe distance. Eames hadn’t realized that Cobb had never told him.
“Already dead,” he says briefly, ignoring the sudden weight of Arthur’s gaze on his face. He’ll have to tell Arthur at some point now, he knows, but if he has any choice in the matter he’ll put it off as long as possible. “That one’s irrelevant. There may have been a woman in Switzerland, but I don’t have a name.”
“He’s kept within federal bounds, there must be a reason,” Reid muses. “Christakos spent three-quarters of the year in Greece; the unsub may have struck when he did because it was when she was available.”
“You think this guy won’t leave the country,” Morgan - he of the terrible karaoke - says in the background.
“I think it’s more likely that this is where he’s comfortable,” Reid says. “Any time serial crimes are spread across jurisdictional lines, it makes the evidence more difficult to process. Sometimes neighboring districts or states aren’t even aware that there are other ongoing investigations into similar cases. Fischer traveled regularly, it would have been easy to target him while he was in transit. Instead he was found in his own bed, inside a well-armed security system. Christakos was only in Texas for two days before she was scheduled to leave on a cruise; that’s pretty exact timing.”
“It may be more to do with your legal system,” Eames puts in. “If I were given a choice between pulling off a risky crime here or in, say, Indonesia…”
“Here,” Arthur agrees. “They can’t prosecute. You said it yourself, earlier: There are no laws yet against crimes that have taken place inside someone’s mind.”
“That’s true of everywhere, though,” Reid says.
“True,” Eames allows. “But in a lot of other countries, they simply wouldn’t care.”
“Stick to the U.S.,” Arthur advises. “I’ll see if I can come up with any more names.”
“Start with failures,” Reid says. “Christakos was the most recent victim; it may be that the unsub has reached his limitations as far as getting access to victims and that’s why he’s moved on to subjects who weren’t actually incepted.”
Eames raises an eyebrow. “That’s a longer list. The idea has been around for years, and extractors love the prospect of a challenge. It’s a competitive field.”
Arthur remains silent. When Eames looks at him, questioning, he finally speaks.
“Candice Forsythe,” he says. “Four months ago. Sixteen years old, she lives with her parents in Philadelphia. The job failed, but word still got around afterward.”
“Why didn’t it succeed?” Eames asks, intrigued. It has to have been Arthur’s job, and he can’t imagine Arthur failing at anything.
“Because I didn’t let it,” Arthur says shortly.
Eames shakes his head. The idea of Arthur intentionally sabotaging his own job is even harder to believe than the idea of him failing. “You can’t tell me you’ve grown a conscience now, after all…”
“She was sixteen, Eames,” Arthur says sharply. He takes a deep breath and returns his attention to the silent, waiting phone. “Check on her first. I’ll call you with a list once I have more.”
Eames supposes Reid must be used to Arthur hanging up on him, if they’ve been roommates for this long. He waits while Arthur takes another moment, before they meet each other’s eyes.
“I could use your help on this,” Arthur says.
Eames has a dozen sarcastic responses he could make to that, but he’s well aware that right now he’s still the prime suspect. He’s also uncomfortably aware of how much trust Arthur has put in him to keep this from going any further.
“I’ll call Ariadne,” he says finally. “Three will be able to work faster than two.”
-
Eames is ending a call to Bhaktapur when he registers that the tone of Arthur’s voice has changed, softer around the edges than the clipped professional tone he uses on the job.
“I’ll ask him,” Arthur says, and his gaze flicks briefly to Eames. “Either way, I’ll see you in half an hour.”
“The roommate?” Eames asks when Arthur hangs up.
“They’re having trouble with the profile. Reid’s the only one who knows even the basics of dreamsharing, and he’s never been under. They’re getting bogged down in the technical side.”
“And they’ve asked for a consultant,” Eames surmises.
“Two, actually.” Arthur gives him another veiled, measuring look. “Would you consider…”
“No,” Eames says flatly. “You must be joking. Would I like to waltz directly into the FBI, attend a meeting with a team of profilers, at least one of whom is connected to Interpol, and reveal myself as the prime suspect of their investigation?”
“They won’t know who you are.”
“The illustrious Dr. Reid had me pegged after one conversation from a code name in a file. How long do you think it will take the rest of them, once we start discussing the details of my colorful criminal past?”
“That’s different,” Arthur says, rubbing at one eye like he has the beginnings of a headache. “That’s Spencer.”
“No,” Eames says again.
Arthur eyes him for a long, considering moment. “You’ll have access to an official FBI visitor’s pass for several hours,” he says. “And I’ll let you borrow my consultant’s badge while we’re inside.”
Arthur has always been skilled at baiting a hook. Eames blows out a breath. “Fine,” he agrees finally. “But we don’t use your bloody code names.”
Part Two