Age(s) of the Geek, 4/7 - Leverage / Heroes crossover
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Age(s) of the Geek, chapter 4: Leverage / Heroes, part 1.
Summary: Alec Hardison just can't work out how Nathan Petrelli won his 2006 Congress race. But he's got more important things on his mind right now, like getting the hell out of New York before the Feds catch up with him...
Genre: gen AU crossover.
Rating: PG-13 for language and non-graphic references to violence.
Word count: 1,500 words.
Spoilers: pre-canon for Leverage, so no spoilers. Spoilers for season 1 of Heroes, plus minor spoilers for the pilot episode of White Collar.
Author's notes: this is the fourth in a series of interconnected Leverage crossovers, all focusing on Alec Hardison and his encounters with fellow geeks from various TV shows. It can be read independently, but it'll make more sense if you read the previous chapters first:
Chapter 1 (Buffy crossover)
Chapter 2 (Veronica Mars crossover)
Chapter 3 (Doctor Who crossover)
I had to split this story in half, for the sake of the overarching plot's chronology; part 2 will serve as the epilogue to the series. So the crossover character from Heroes only appears indirectly here.
***
Alec Hardison, 2006
Alec didn't pay a huge amount of attention to politics these days. He was a registered Democrat, because his foster-mother Nana always had been, but held a pretty low opinion of all politicians. He figured that ordinary folks got screwed over, no matter who was in charge in Washington, and he hated the petty squabbling that seemed to prevent anything useful getting done.
Besides, he'd been hacking into federal computer networks since he was a teenager. The top-secret documents he'd read had destroyed any illusions he'd ever held about the law-making process.
But Alec was living in New York City during the 2006 midterms, so he couldn't miss Nathan Petrelli's all-out Congress run. The guy seemed decent enough on paper (for a Republican). He'd served his country as a Navy pilot, in several warzones. Then he'd worked as a prosecutor, rising through the ranks at the District Attorney's office.
However, a little digging revealed that a Mob-connected billionaire from Las Vegas was bankrolling Petrelli's campaign, which raised some very interesting questions. Alec didn't care too much, though; all the polls suggested that the Democratic incumbent would win comfortably.
So when the November 7th election turned out to be a landslide for Petrelli, on an unprecedented scale, Alec sat up and took notice. There was something distinctly hinky about that result. He didn't trust those electronic voting machines - not when he knew how easy it would be to tamper with them.
The more he investigated, in the hours following the announcement, the weirder Petrelli's win looked. Alec hacked into the state Electoral Commission (a worryingly simple process) and examined the voting patterns. It was suspicious that entire polling stations had voted for Petrelli, even in solidly blue areas of the traditionally blue Congressional district.
It also seemed strange that ballots cast during the morning and early afternoon favored the Democrat, roughly in proportion with pre-election polls. The turning point was oddly specific: after 3:25pm, the voting suddenly tipped massively in favor of the Republican. In the end, Petrelli won 64% of the vote.
Despite all his efforts, though, Alec came up with precisely squat. He couldn't prove that someone had messed with the individual machines or the district's computer network. There were absolutely no traces of fraud, no evidence that the machines had been pre-programmed by the manufacturer, and no signs of hacking on the day.
Honestly? It looked like someone had just waved a magic wand at 3:25 that afternoon, and ordered the system to only register votes for Petrelli from then on. Most people would probably dismiss that explanation as ridiculous. But Alec knew someone who'd been inside a time-traveling spaceship, had met a vampire slayer with super-strength, and counted a seriously powerful witch as one of his oldest friends. So his parameters for what was possible were broader than most people's...
In particular, Alec wondered if a techno-pagan could have interfered with the voting machines. He put out some feelers on the paranormal forums he belonged to, but everyone else seemed mystified too. Nobody had bragged about rigging the result, and it was the kind of achievement that most hackers (magical or not) would crow about from the rooftops.
***
Unfortunately, Alec quickly had to put the whole Petrelli thing aside. The day after the election, something a lot more important came up.
His most recent job had involved creating fake identities for a bunch of thieves, and then facilitating their infiltration of a major investment bank. It was a two-pronged attack, targeting the bank's Wall Street headquarters and its Los Angeles office. But the key inside man at HQ had just blown his own cover, spectacularly, and Alec felt a sudden need to get the hell out of town.
The whole screw-up reminded Alec why he preferred to work alone: other criminals often turned out to be really fucking stupid! Seriously...if you spent weeks planning an inside job to defraud a top company of millions, wouldn't you choose to insert a conman who could at least fake a decent level of financial expertise when put on the spot?
Not this gang of idiots, though. Instead, the firm's recently-hired quantitative analyst had crashed and burned during a big presentation to the board. When his boss got suspicious, the fake analyst had panicked. He'd negotiated a deal with the DA, and then confessed to everything. Now the FBI was after his accomplices, both in NYC and LA.
Alec had been using one of his carefully-constructed throwaway aliases, as he always did when working with a new crew. The other guys couldn't give him up because they didn't know his real name, and he'd thoroughly destroyed all electronic evidence of his involvement.
Still, running seemed like the safest bet. Alec had heard stories about Peter Burke, head of the FBI's White Collar unit for New York, and had no desire to make the agent's acquaintance in person. Burke had even managed to catch Neal Caffrey, widely considered to be one of the best conmen and forgers around, after Caffrey had eluded the authorities for many years.
Burke had a similar rep to Nathan Ford, one of the people IYS sent out to investigate insurance claims: tenacious, brilliant, and incorruptible. Ford had chased Alec a few times when he'd been freelancing for art thieves, and even caught him after one museum job. That was the lowest point in Alec's career, for sure.
Luckily, Ford had let him go after receiving an anonymous tip-off about the location of the crew's boss, Steve Mathers, and the stolen Rembrandt. If Alec had sent Ford that SMS from a burner phone concealed in the lining of his jacket, well, he was pretty sure nobody could ever prove it.
Alec didn't feel too bad about having ratted out Mathers to save his own ass. The psychotic fucker had totally deserved to go down for what he'd done to that poor security guard at the museum. Alec had deliberately gone into white-collar cybercrime to avoid violence like that...
Nathan Ford cared about retrieving stolen items for his insurance company; he wasn't so concerned with pressing charges. Alec would rather not be chased by a Fed who was just as good as Ford, but with the law on his side and the FBI's resources at his back.
***
So as soon as he finished packing up his Manhattan apartment, Alec would be catching the next flight to Atlanta. He'd been planning on heading home the following week anyway, for Nana's 60th birthday. She'd been in hospital recently, after a minor heart attack, and Alec wanted to cheer her up.
He and his foster-sister Sheena had organized an awesome party (Nana knew about it, of course; Alec didn't think that surprising an old lady with a bad heart was a good idea). They'd booked out Nana's favorite restaurant for the entire evening. It was an old-fashioned soul food place, run by some of her church friends, and they made the best sweet potato pie Alec had ever tasted.
He'd contacted all his foster-siblings, and tracked down others that Nana had welcomed into her home before Alec's time. God bless the Georgia care system's stupidly-easy-to-hack database, even if it was sadly short on clues as to Alec's birth parents...
Around 20 of Nana's former foster-kids would be coming back to Atlanta for her birthday. It was going to be a pretty big crowd: most of them had partners, and half a dozen had children of their own. It was hard to believe that Sheena had a baby girl now, or that Tommy and his wife had adopted twin boys.
Alec didn't think they'd ever gathered all together to thank Nana for her loving care. She was in poor health now, worn out by a lifetime of hard work, and he didn't know how much time she had left. It was vital that they hold this reunion sooner rather than later.
So Alec had gone all out to ensure that everyone could make it back to Atlanta to see Nana: he'd bought plane tickets, hired rental cars, and booked hotel rooms. He could easily spare the money, and he was happy to use it for such a good cause. The way Alec saw it, what was the point of having a highly profitable talent if he didn't use the proceeds to help out his family?
***
Alec took one last look around, making sure he'd packed everything and had left no evidence that could identify him. He'd already called a local company which specialized in providing a discreet and thorough cleaning service to the criminal fraternity. By the end of the day, there would be no stray hairs or fingerprints left anywhere in the apartment, hallway, elevator, or building lobby.
As he walked down to the corner to hail a cab to LaGuardia, Alec passed a newsstand. Nathan Petrelli's smirking face appeared on the front pages of the Post and the Times, with the headlines proclaiming his remarkable win. Alec rolled his eyes. He wished he had time to investigate that supposed landslide more closely; he had a feeling that there was a really interesting story behind it.
But right now, he had a plane to catch.
***
Chapter 5
Age(s) of the Geek, chapter 4: Leverage / Heroes, part 1.
Summary: Alec Hardison just can't work out how Nathan Petrelli won his 2006 Congress race. But he's got more important things on his mind right now, like getting the hell out of New York before the Feds catch up with him...
Genre: gen AU crossover.
Rating: PG-13 for language and non-graphic references to violence.
Word count: 1,500 words.
Spoilers: pre-canon for Leverage, so no spoilers. Spoilers for season 1 of Heroes, plus minor spoilers for the pilot episode of White Collar.
Author's notes: this is the fourth in a series of interconnected Leverage crossovers, all focusing on Alec Hardison and his encounters with fellow geeks from various TV shows. It can be read independently, but it'll make more sense if you read the previous chapters first:
Chapter 1 (Buffy crossover)
Chapter 2 (Veronica Mars crossover)
Chapter 3 (Doctor Who crossover)
I had to split this story in half, for the sake of the overarching plot's chronology; part 2 will serve as the epilogue to the series. So the crossover character from Heroes only appears indirectly here.
***
Alec Hardison, 2006
Alec didn't pay a huge amount of attention to politics these days. He was a registered Democrat, because his foster-mother Nana always had been, but held a pretty low opinion of all politicians. He figured that ordinary folks got screwed over, no matter who was in charge in Washington, and he hated the petty squabbling that seemed to prevent anything useful getting done.
Besides, he'd been hacking into federal computer networks since he was a teenager. The top-secret documents he'd read had destroyed any illusions he'd ever held about the law-making process.
But Alec was living in New York City during the 2006 midterms, so he couldn't miss Nathan Petrelli's all-out Congress run. The guy seemed decent enough on paper (for a Republican). He'd served his country as a Navy pilot, in several warzones. Then he'd worked as a prosecutor, rising through the ranks at the District Attorney's office.
However, a little digging revealed that a Mob-connected billionaire from Las Vegas was bankrolling Petrelli's campaign, which raised some very interesting questions. Alec didn't care too much, though; all the polls suggested that the Democratic incumbent would win comfortably.
So when the November 7th election turned out to be a landslide for Petrelli, on an unprecedented scale, Alec sat up and took notice. There was something distinctly hinky about that result. He didn't trust those electronic voting machines - not when he knew how easy it would be to tamper with them.
The more he investigated, in the hours following the announcement, the weirder Petrelli's win looked. Alec hacked into the state Electoral Commission (a worryingly simple process) and examined the voting patterns. It was suspicious that entire polling stations had voted for Petrelli, even in solidly blue areas of the traditionally blue Congressional district.
It also seemed strange that ballots cast during the morning and early afternoon favored the Democrat, roughly in proportion with pre-election polls. The turning point was oddly specific: after 3:25pm, the voting suddenly tipped massively in favor of the Republican. In the end, Petrelli won 64% of the vote.
Despite all his efforts, though, Alec came up with precisely squat. He couldn't prove that someone had messed with the individual machines or the district's computer network. There were absolutely no traces of fraud, no evidence that the machines had been pre-programmed by the manufacturer, and no signs of hacking on the day.
Honestly? It looked like someone had just waved a magic wand at 3:25 that afternoon, and ordered the system to only register votes for Petrelli from then on. Most people would probably dismiss that explanation as ridiculous. But Alec knew someone who'd been inside a time-traveling spaceship, had met a vampire slayer with super-strength, and counted a seriously powerful witch as one of his oldest friends. So his parameters for what was possible were broader than most people's...
In particular, Alec wondered if a techno-pagan could have interfered with the voting machines. He put out some feelers on the paranormal forums he belonged to, but everyone else seemed mystified too. Nobody had bragged about rigging the result, and it was the kind of achievement that most hackers (magical or not) would crow about from the rooftops.
***
Unfortunately, Alec quickly had to put the whole Petrelli thing aside. The day after the election, something a lot more important came up.
His most recent job had involved creating fake identities for a bunch of thieves, and then facilitating their infiltration of a major investment bank. It was a two-pronged attack, targeting the bank's Wall Street headquarters and its Los Angeles office. But the key inside man at HQ had just blown his own cover, spectacularly, and Alec felt a sudden need to get the hell out of town.
The whole screw-up reminded Alec why he preferred to work alone: other criminals often turned out to be really fucking stupid! Seriously...if you spent weeks planning an inside job to defraud a top company of millions, wouldn't you choose to insert a conman who could at least fake a decent level of financial expertise when put on the spot?
Not this gang of idiots, though. Instead, the firm's recently-hired quantitative analyst had crashed and burned during a big presentation to the board. When his boss got suspicious, the fake analyst had panicked. He'd negotiated a deal with the DA, and then confessed to everything. Now the FBI was after his accomplices, both in NYC and LA.
Alec had been using one of his carefully-constructed throwaway aliases, as he always did when working with a new crew. The other guys couldn't give him up because they didn't know his real name, and he'd thoroughly destroyed all electronic evidence of his involvement.
Still, running seemed like the safest bet. Alec had heard stories about Peter Burke, head of the FBI's White Collar unit for New York, and had no desire to make the agent's acquaintance in person. Burke had even managed to catch Neal Caffrey, widely considered to be one of the best conmen and forgers around, after Caffrey had eluded the authorities for many years.
Burke had a similar rep to Nathan Ford, one of the people IYS sent out to investigate insurance claims: tenacious, brilliant, and incorruptible. Ford had chased Alec a few times when he'd been freelancing for art thieves, and even caught him after one museum job. That was the lowest point in Alec's career, for sure.
Luckily, Ford had let him go after receiving an anonymous tip-off about the location of the crew's boss, Steve Mathers, and the stolen Rembrandt. If Alec had sent Ford that SMS from a burner phone concealed in the lining of his jacket, well, he was pretty sure nobody could ever prove it.
Alec didn't feel too bad about having ratted out Mathers to save his own ass. The psychotic fucker had totally deserved to go down for what he'd done to that poor security guard at the museum. Alec had deliberately gone into white-collar cybercrime to avoid violence like that...
Nathan Ford cared about retrieving stolen items for his insurance company; he wasn't so concerned with pressing charges. Alec would rather not be chased by a Fed who was just as good as Ford, but with the law on his side and the FBI's resources at his back.
***
So as soon as he finished packing up his Manhattan apartment, Alec would be catching the next flight to Atlanta. He'd been planning on heading home the following week anyway, for Nana's 60th birthday. She'd been in hospital recently, after a minor heart attack, and Alec wanted to cheer her up.
He and his foster-sister Sheena had organized an awesome party (Nana knew about it, of course; Alec didn't think that surprising an old lady with a bad heart was a good idea). They'd booked out Nana's favorite restaurant for the entire evening. It was an old-fashioned soul food place, run by some of her church friends, and they made the best sweet potato pie Alec had ever tasted.
He'd contacted all his foster-siblings, and tracked down others that Nana had welcomed into her home before Alec's time. God bless the Georgia care system's stupidly-easy-to-hack database, even if it was sadly short on clues as to Alec's birth parents...
Around 20 of Nana's former foster-kids would be coming back to Atlanta for her birthday. It was going to be a pretty big crowd: most of them had partners, and half a dozen had children of their own. It was hard to believe that Sheena had a baby girl now, or that Tommy and his wife had adopted twin boys.
Alec didn't think they'd ever gathered all together to thank Nana for her loving care. She was in poor health now, worn out by a lifetime of hard work, and he didn't know how much time she had left. It was vital that they hold this reunion sooner rather than later.
So Alec had gone all out to ensure that everyone could make it back to Atlanta to see Nana: he'd bought plane tickets, hired rental cars, and booked hotel rooms. He could easily spare the money, and he was happy to use it for such a good cause. The way Alec saw it, what was the point of having a highly profitable talent if he didn't use the proceeds to help out his family?
***
Alec took one last look around, making sure he'd packed everything and had left no evidence that could identify him. He'd already called a local company which specialized in providing a discreet and thorough cleaning service to the criminal fraternity. By the end of the day, there would be no stray hairs or fingerprints left anywhere in the apartment, hallway, elevator, or building lobby.
As he walked down to the corner to hail a cab to LaGuardia, Alec passed a newsstand. Nathan Petrelli's smirking face appeared on the front pages of the Post and the Times, with the headlines proclaiming his remarkable win. Alec rolled his eyes. He wished he had time to investigate that supposed landslide more closely; he had a feeling that there was a really interesting story behind it.
But right now, he had a plane to catch.
***
Chapter 5