NUMB3RSfic post: Reciprocity, 168KB AU rated P for Plotty
Hey there cool kids,
Yes. It's time. Many thanks for your patience and encouragement in these past few weeks.
Title: Reciprocity
Author: raucousraven
Rating: P for Plotty. And if your mother's okay with you watching the show, you can read this.
Category: as rageprufrock might put it, AU, AU, Totally An AU.
Spoilers: up to 2x06 Convergence. The action in this story relies on events from 2x04 (Calculated Risk) and 2x05 (Assassin).
Disclaimer: all the names you recognise are belong to Heuton, Falacci and Scott2. No profit made, no harm intended.
Feedback: will be esteemed and adored, and probably named Lawrence. Or possibly Charles.
Many thanks to stillane, who started me thinking in this direction. Due blame credit go to dsudis, who got me hooked on Numb3rs, and especially to qe2, who poked me till I started writing.
Big Beta Ups go out to the lovely&amazing qe2 and the divine troyswann! We’re very grateful, the Monster and I.
ETA: This is a two-parter! Part the Second is here.
*
Charlie doesn’t understand why no one’s thought to use it against them yet, because this pattern is not hard to isolate: Math all over Federal white boards, Don’s hand on his shoulder. Agents all over his office, Charlie’s proportional increase in lab hours; Don’s spiking solve rates, Charlie’s documented consulting fees. Their last name. Sometimes, correlation really is causation but the Eppes brothers have been lucky till now.
Stupid to depend on probability. Charlie remembers blood on his brother’s arm, the world falling backward as the shot whistled just past his head. The gun panning slightly to his right, past his panicked eyes, down and to the side. This is getting him nowhere.
And he’d only been out fifteen minutes after the call, down to see Larry and gotten involved in random matrices, and when he came back the SynTel file was gone. Charlie only noticed because it had been in one of the new 8.5x11 blue folders; they ruined the peaceable flow of manila-covered 11x14 folders covering his desk, and he didn’t like them. He’d been going to call Don but then Don had shown up holding a half-burned book and the whole Colombian consulate almost blew up in their faces. In the ensuing manic rush to keep Gabriel Ruiz alive he’d forgotten to tell Don about the missing file, and then suddenly his brother was also gone: Michigan, no notice; just one quick phone call at 6 AM on Thursday, and Charlie barely had time to ask.
“Does Dad know about this? And what do you mean, approximately Lansing? Doesn’t the Bureau need to give you time with your family before they ship you off into guns and motor oil and snow past your armpits?”
“Hey now. Don’t go confusing little Lansing with its big brother Detroit, okay?”
“Don.”
“Aw, c’mon Charlie. They just called me last night, okay, I have to pack, don’t make this any harder. Tell Dad it’s just for a few weeks, till the office there gets back on its feet. You know we took a rough hit over there last month.”
Charlie does know; he’d remember the footage, even without the small memorial at the Bureau’s front desk and Don gone stiff and silent for days, reviewing the tac manuals and quietly drilling his team’s responses. Four agents down and two still in hospital didn’t exactly make for settled work conditions, and Don’s had his team running on rails for awhile here. None of this actually justifies losing his brother on zero notice, but Don won’t listen to that. He has his mission voice on, all execute and go, and besides, Don is not slow. He called Charlie at 6 AM in order to avoid this very discussion. Charlie sighs helplessly.
“How long?”
“I told you.” Don’s voice has gone sharp, impatient. “Two months at most, didn’t I already say that?”
“Well now you have.” And there’s an edge to match his brother’s, but Charlie doesn’t want his last words angry. “I… Don? Did you just call yourself big, bad and full of diesel fumes?”
“Hey. Don’t make me come over there, Lansing.” Charlie can hear the grin. “Gotta go, okay buddy? Tell Dad to save me some beer. I promise I won’t freeze anything vital.”
Don hangs up. Charlie doesn’t. He stands in his ratty bathrobe as the day lights up the windows, listening to his brother leave.
*
The Tuesday after that, Charlie comes home to find his front room a mess and his father gone; the door is intact but unlocked, the chair’s a dead loss and there’s splintery dirt all over the rug. Don’s favorite lamp is smashed, and half the plants are spilled across the floor. His father’s work paraphernalia - cardboard tubes, finely sharpened pencils, a cell phone - are scattered haphazardly across the parquet. It’s 4 pm; they must have caught Alan coming home from a meeting.
Charlie knows a flood of Bureau agents answer his frantic call, but doesn’t know how he ends up sitting on Don’s desk at the office while Megan takes the letter (Don’t come after us) apart molecule by motive with the forensics techs and David searches the house again for any clues left in the scuffle. The neighbors say they saw very little; a surgically clean strike, David calls it, shaking his head as he gets back in. Charlie feels his brow crimp further. Alan may not be a young man, but he’s not weak or easily cowed. Possible correlation: It argues for something he dearly wishes to ignore. Statistically significant? There’s no way to tell: insufficient evidence. Proceed with caution.
There was no blood. But Charlie can think of more than one way to disable someone who’s not looking for a fight.
The gun panning slightly to his right, past his panicked eyes, down and to the side at Joran’s desperate yell. Kuyber’s maddened snarl. The snake. Charlie leaps left.
They took the dirt for analysis, but Charlie already knows it’s TechSec. Colby’s horrified face when Charlie finally tells the team about the missing file is just confirmation, because the file had dealt in part with his analyses of the roundabout financing the SynTel frauds set up during their dual filching from the public purse. TechSec had worked for both the cautiously embezzling Galway Sr. and his thieving son; that should really have red-flagged them earlier than it did, but Mag Vorenky of Hamilton TechSec is a better accountant than even the SEC has guessed.
Not even Lucinda Shea’s careful accounting caught up to Mag and her brother Viti until near the end; then Lucinda’s murder disrupted futher investigations. Charlie has few illusions about why it’s Malcolm Galway and not Viti Vorenky sitting in an LA jail cell awaiting trial for that shooting. It would have been Mag’s brilliant idea, on par with her ruthlessly profitable accounting, to hide TechSec’s involvement in the SynTel frauds by duping the ambitious junior Galway into proving himself, again, making his hand the one that orphaned eleven year old Daniel Shea.
And Charlie had been going to give that file back to the SEC anyway, like a good boy, even before the phone rang. He'd gone to see Larry to calm down a little, after. The file hadn’t been on his desk until right then. It hadn’t stayed there long, either, and how long had they been tapping his office line?
The gun panning slightly to his right, past his panicked eyes, down and to the side at Joran’s desperate yell. Kuyber’s maddened snarl twisting his sharp face, the snake tattoo flaring along a bicep, his knuckles red and white around the gun. Charlie leaps left.
And Charlie knows Don is supposed to be righting that office in Michigan, but no one’s seen or heard from him in days. Don should have called Alan Monday evening, like he did in Phoenix and Albuquerque. Should have checked in with the Bureau, even if he didn’t want to call home. David’s already called Terry and Kim to see if they’ve heard from Don, but keeps getting voicemail or passed along or put on hold.
The LA office keeps telling Charlie they’re on it. He notices they’re careful not to give him any actual data, especially not in hard copy.
Since LA doesn’t trust Charlie, it’s Colby going to Nadine and the LAPD and the DA and demanding answers now, dammit, until they find that several SynTel execs, who stayed around to prove their innocence while Galway Jr. awaited trial, have scattered to all points as of just this morning. Two are left in L.A., and Colby’s all for going out in force to nail those rich bastards right now. Charlie barely restrains himself from hauling Colby in by his lapels and screaming the man deaf. Attacking SynTel now would be a death sentence.
Alan has perhaps 36 hours before the last exec liquidates his holdings and gets out of the country. After that, Charlie’s analysis fails but his other training kicks in just fine. There are only a few ways to guarantee that Alan won’t talk. TechSec will probably take the easiest.
The gun panning slightly to his right, past his panicked eyes, down and to the side at Joran’s desperate yell. Kuyber’s maddened snarl twisting his sharp face, the snake tattoo flaring along a bicep, his knuckles red and white around the gun. Sweat, fear, the smell of smoke; Charlie leaps left and dives into a roll, untucks only to see the snake writhe again as Kuyber brings his gun to bear.
Right before Charlie leaves the crowd of milling, concerned neighbours it’s Mrs. Lee, seventy-four and bird-tiny, who tilts her head and puts her hand on Charlie’s arm. She used to feed him crumbling almond cookies when he was small; for a moment he can smell them as she leans in and says, There was one man all yesterday, watching. Tall. Tattoo, red hat. He left when you come home. What tattoo, Mrs. Lee? All wavy, maybe a snake. Where? His arm. She points to her frail elbow, graphs sinx across her shoulder. And the hat. Real red? No. Like dead blood. And Charlie flushes, feels his heartrate trip past panicked into terrified, fueled by a rage so high it’s threatening to take the top of his head right off, because the last time he’d seen Terence Kuyber the man had been shooting to kill. Had, in fact, barely missed.
Has probably practiced more than once in the three years since.
Charlie can’t think about Alan alone, can’t think about Alan alone with goddamn Kuyber, can’t fucking think. And Don is nowhere, and Charlie would like to be sick and pass out, but it’s Kuyber, and there’s no time. Promise me, Joran had said. Promise you will call me up. Joran’s voice echoes through Charlie’s mind, smooth and dry. As always. Charlie had curled shamelessly into the assurance of help, not caring that it was almost certainly far too generous. He’s still going to take it.
There’s a box in his mind, sealed shut over that particular data set: black gun, red dust, the snake tattoo and the red beret. The flare of hatred across the sheen of steel; a set of codes he strives not to recall. The box is where Joran’s phone number lives. Charlie closes his eyes and cracks the lid. The sequence unspools, effortless as numbers always are. It brings the grit-taste of hot wind and Nevada dust; Charlie feels his right hand clench around the nothing at his hip. The other Agent Eppes opens his eyes and slides quietly off his brother’s desk, slipping through the busy blue-lit halls, headed toward the greatest amount of noise he can find. Charlie unfolds David’s phone and wishes he believed in luck. Dials London. Cat. It’s L.A. calling; game's back on. Veni nu, mi amiko. He can't stop himself from adding: Be careful.
*
Charlie’s first time on the ranges had been fifteen inept minutes of fire-at-will; he’d felt the recoil travel all up his arm and jaw, metal slipping under his sweaty fingers, felt the gun misreading his demands and been unable to compensate. He’d been newly tenured, shiny-new to both gun ranges and high security clearance. the NSA had only recently informed him that his codebreaking contract would require “a specific training regimen, nothing fancy; three months in Nevada. Several other contract teams are doing the same.”
After the smoke cleared, their instructor had taken a quick stroll across their sad, sad targets, lip curling higher the farther he got. He’d picked up Charlie’s sheet and looked carefully at the scatter. Then Col. Awasi, CIA, USMC Ret’d., had clipped it to a board, glared at them all, and grimly gone over the faults in posture and focus likeliest to have caused each of Charlie’s awkward civilian misses. He’d stood by Charlie’s elbow through the next two rounds, snapping corrections as required; Charlie’s accuracy might even have improved if his nerves hadn’t just been blown to hell. His hands shook all the way through his first field-strip and cleaning, muzzle carefully pointed away and down. But as the others left for the mess hall, Awasi had turned to Charlie and said, far more quietly than he’d spoken yet, “The left hand, Dr. Eppes. It’s responsible for holding the right steady during a shot with this kind of pistol. For most guns, actually - remember that.” Charlie had been too shellshocked to even nod.
Later, a few other coders gathered to congratulate Charlie, laughing at his confusion - most civs didn’t earn the honor of the Colonel’s personal slurs on their competence before the one-month mark. Charlie’s since read the rest of those first-summer notes himself. Superior aim and concentration is written in Awasi’s square hand on his file, right next to the words specialized training recommended, which got him sent back to Nevada next year. Charlie thinks of the other words after that, stamped and sealed for a clearance level far above his brother’s but well within his own: Field training complete. Grade: operative. Note: marksmanship excellent. Note: reactivation suspended pending review.
It’s the biggest secret he has ever kept.
*
They’re approaching 0300h, asymptotic to some fresh new infinity and the L.A. Bureau is humming, processors whirring over the click of keys and terse agent voices fueled on fluorescent light, bad caffeine, pure adrenaline. Megan and David are tracking rich bastards and their big liquidations while simultaneously organizing the hunt for an FBI agent gone missing in the snow near Lansing. The office there got antsy Monday afternoon but hasn’t breath to spare to go looking for one misplaced agent somewhere between LA and Lansing. With David’s news, the state troopers are fanning across airports and highways, searching for evidence of conspiracy; by now they’ve found Don’s abandoned rental 4x4 and the tracks of another car, but the trail is two days cold and new snow is falling. David gives the troopers till dawn before he calls in the Feds, but he isn’t going to wait. Not for this. He hangs up firmly, and then gets up, headed for the tac room and its racks of guns and gear. Charlie watches him go, then murmurs need a walk call me if to a distracted Megan, on the phone with DC. She nods, doesn’t look up. Charlie drifts after David, carefully nonchalant, but stops outside Interrogation 3 to watch Colby working at the top of his game.
Colby is grilling the DA’s human sacrifice (“God, Granger, take him and get out”), an informant close to Hamilton TechSec but nowhere near the top. At least, that’s the story so far. Colby’s been at it, enthusiastically, for the past four hours; he’s currently prowling the room, window to door to right in front of the spotty kid huddled in the uncomfortable plastic chair. The kid’s cracked once already, spilling details on drop locations and security schedules somewhere in hour three, but doesn’t know what Mag and Viti got planned, sir, he just did the small stuff, he swears. Colby twists low and fast, planting hands on desk and still coming; the kid jerks back, terrified.
He did confirm it was TechSec took the file. Doesn’t know how TechSec knew to come after Charlie. But Charlie knows; Mrs. Lee told him: sinx=Terence Kuyber, a near-miss, a dead man. Blood arcing across the sky to splatter the rocks in Nevada.
Megan doesn’t think these guys will move fast, but Charlie knows differently; he helped Lucinda Shea run those numbers the first time. He also knows exactly what happened to her. And while Kuyber’s arms rating and professional experience are off-limits to the Bureau under privacy acts, Charlie’s clearance got him all he needed. Charlie’s broken his own silence, telling the team about Kuyber, but Megan insists his profile doesn’t fit what Charlie’s saying. That’s because Charlie can’t tell them about Awasi’s notation on Kuyber’s files without getting them all kicked off their jobs. Pathologically obsessive is only part of the problem. The other part is …complex.
David is suiting up in the tac room, loading up, arms easy and smooth in the familiar motions of menace and protection. Charlie watches him leave, then tries on boots until a pair fits and Kevlar vests until he finds one small enough. He leaves the D-rings on the bench and hopes Agent Thorne won’t mind him borrowing the spare. Charlie folds the vest underneath his own coat and slides back out into the blue light. The shoes go under Don’s desk, and no one is looking at his new boots as he gestures, again, to emphasize that the team call him with any new information. Something. Anything. Megan, abetted by David, sends two agents home with him. Charlie doesn't argue; it would raise more problems than he can currently solve. He half-dozes in the Bureau car as Wednesday dawns grey and unenthusiastic, trying to figure out how best to cover his ass at CalSci while he gets his father out of Mag Vorenky’s murderous hands.
*
Well of course he’s noticed that Charles isn't underfoot today; unlike some theoreticians he could name, Larry isn’t blind. But almost one year’s worth of experience has taught him to remain quite sanguine about such absences. After all, the precedents suggest that Charles is likely out gallivanting with Don, doing some exciting, tangential, Bureaulike thing. Larry is always quick to point out that such things usually end in missed seminars, late-night grading marathons and attempts to co-opt Larry’s TAs over the weekend. Again. That’s usually when Amita starts laughing at Charles’ increasingly hangdog expression.
All japery aside, Larry sometimes does consider asking for his lab back, for Charles' cases inevitably end up in, on or near his own blackboards and mainframes. Larry might even have considered genuine annoyance once or twice last term, running late for deadlines only to find FBI agents loitering in his hallways grinning at Kepler's Farside pinups. He might even have given in to a little pique, were it not for the way this work has strengthened all of their capabilities, stretching their comprehensions faster than academia can take them. Larry smiles a little as he considers the fallout; all in all, it hasn’t been bad.
Working Don's cases brings out the very best in his brother’s brilliance, refining Charles’ theories to ever-greater precision as case after case exposes him to the realities of this beautiful, troubling, very imperfect world. The particular smile on Larry’s face in this moment is one Alan would understand best, as both his sons are rather young to comprehend the rare joy of having a protégé grow into a decent human being, even at the cost of great personal sorrow. Larry does not underestimate Don’s steadying role in Charles’ difficult maturation after the passing of Mrs. Eppes. For that gift, for Charles’ re-engagement into this present existence, Larry would willingly forgive far more than the coolly efficient men in suits and holsters lounging all over his office, even when they make him feel a trifle grubby around the equally efficient Agent Reeves.
Also … well, in Larry’s cosmology, anyone who laughs at the comic genius of Gary Larsen deserves a little lenience - even when that person is Colby Granger, who sees little beauty in mathematics and needs physics only to drive his car and fire a gun in the right direction. And, all right, stay attached to the earth’s surface instead of falling off into space-time, and Colby came up with that one all on his own. He’d been grinning then, too, and Larry is a little hazy on what makes a good FBI agent but he’s unwilling to bet inflexible stupidity is anywhere near the top of the list.
So yes, anyhow, Larry already knows Charles missed delivering his morning lectures, and that’s what he tells the Provost the first time he asks. Besides, Charles’ undergraduates have been coming to Larry all morning in lieu of their usual supply of Eppesian game shows, tilted eyebrows and theoretical brilliance. It’s probably a natural result of Larry’s occasional through-the-door comments and frequent guest spots, and the times he’d sat in on that 300-level nonspecialist class. Well, Charles’ methods of explaining advanced math to fuzzy-headed biologists are interesting. Surprisingly, they also seem to work - not that Charles’ being effective is surprising - but, well, biologists aren't always the best logicians. Take that Wilkins, for example, treating Rosalind Franklin like dirt instead of lauding her to the skies for her groundbreaking work on the structure of DNA.
Actually, there are two students in this class who are quite intelligent mathematicians, and another one, a truly remarkable coder, who might turn out to be something more. Larry would be after all three to consider changing majors if he didn’t know they were part of the same research group, and properly dedicated to their own intricate and really quite fascinating work.
Dinoflagellates aside, Larry’s examples today have used few goats but rather more vintage cars; he thinks Charles would be pleased. This mood lasts until the Provost corners him and Dr. Lourdon late Wednesday afternoon, pinning them with questions because Professor Eppes has a) missed all his morning lectures, b) not yet administered or submitted his evaluations and c) not informed their office of any scheduled absences. Larry leads them to Charles' TAs, and sticks around to hear the scrimmage. It’s not till the Provost, the head of the math department and both TAs turn to him in bewilderment that Larry sees any dawning reasons for concern. Normally, Charles at least sends the TAs some sort of message, an awkward but sincerely apologetic note: I’m really, really sorry, please tell the students by email, I’ll take your office hours on Monday to make up. Now, standing just inside Charles’ office door, unnecessary key dangling from his hand, Dr. Larry Fleinhardt looks around and owns himself a trifle worried.
*
The NSA had required that first summer in Nevada when Charlie was put on their biggest high-clearance codebreaking case. The Agency upped the ante after the second successful attack, which had resulted in three civilian contractors dead and media hush-jobs left and right. And a new mandate: no one could break the assassination codes without knowing what to do if targeted by them; the NSA doesn’t want more contractor blood spilled violently on its anonymous bunker floors. So Charlie spent that second summer in Nevada’s breathless heat instead of presenting papers in air-conditioned auditoriums (Chicago, Pasadena, Mumbai; he missed the series on Wiles, and Ieng and Bruzhina’s influential talk on applications of combinatorics in neurochemistry, and had to pester details out of Larry for the next year).
Predictably, the theory of death is far easier than any theory of numbers. The main parameter is location: avoid shut-in canyons, walk-in freezers, unfamiliar food, large bodies of water. Stay away from all windows. Keep your backup informed, keep your backup armed. Carry at all times. During his year with the NSA he feels itchy if he’s out too long in the sun, or even standing in the middle of the quad. Open spaces make for an easy target. Stay low and to the side, or someone might see. It’s a life Charlie’s never once wanted.
Gabriel Ruiz, the target currently risking his life by choice in Colombia, is the only person who’s ever mistaken Charlie for an assassination specialist. It had struck Charlie as funny at the time, mainly because Ruiz was correct. They’d saved Ruiz, but it had been a near thing. Charlie doesn’t know if he can pull off a miracle like that without a full team behind him. He shakes his head, and because he’s standing in front of the bathroom mirror he actually sees his eyes come back into focus. His shirt’s off and the door’s locked, and why - oh. Charlie blinks, and contemplates the curls tumbling down to his nose. He’d let his hair grow out, after Nevada, blatantly unmilitary, then found he liked it longer. His father had nagged, whined, and eventually accepted it; Don, home briefly for the holidays, had grinned and attempted a noogie. Their mother had just laughed and handed Charlie some new hair-ties for New Year’s, all in serviceable black except for the big sparkly gold one.
Charlie picks up the scissors, watches his half-smile iron out to a grim line. He’d been meaning to go for a trim, but there never seemed to be time, what with returning midterms and revising finals and toning down the more fanciful musings in Larry’s latest paper. And Lucinda Shea’s orphaned son in his garage, professional assassins shooting from the trees, the NSA demanding he return files he has no business touching after walking out on Nevada.
Charlie had never thought to clear his involvement with Don’s work through the Agency. He’d never meant for things to blur, to get this entangled again in deaths per data-point. Most especially Charlie had never wanted to recalculate required calibers and lines of sight, all the ways to kill a man within a fifteen-foot radius of his own home. All the ways to make it look like an accident, every kill code indicating how long in the freezer (an evening to freeze over, about five hours to suffocate), how many floors up (7 is best, although 4 is enough), the heat of the fire (760 degrees centigrade for ash), time under water (10 minutes till cardiac arrest, 6 minutes till brain death). But the CONDOR codes reappearing after 30 years meant the NSA was involved again, and Charlie could have seen this coming the second Don’s last name showed up anywhere near Awasi’s desk, except for how he didn’t.
It should have been Colby asking Gabriel Ruiz all those questions, David following Ruiz through his café, through his house, figuring out where to stand and what to avoid. And Charlie had known it at the time, also knows he needed that information - to see the assassin’s terrain himself, to run the numbers of strategy and defense one last time. To get someone else’s little brother out of trouble, even if just for a little while.
Then Don, running to Michigan at 6AM on a Thursday and vanishing into the snow. Now Alan, held hostage against his sons’ good behaviour. Charlie has no illusions about why they went after Alan and Don, and left him alone in the house. He wonders if Kuyber’s told Mag yet about how tragically hopeless Charlie is in the field.
But it’s desperate times. So scissors, snip, dark curls falling into the sink; Charlie runs a hand across his new-shorn head, considers various mourning customs and hopes it’s not any sort of omen. He takes a shower, jams an ancient Stockton Rangers cap on his shorn head, then unwraps the key from its tape-built nest in the chalk boxes and walks out to the garage. The two agents trailing him don’t look surprised, and stop obligingly at the door.
The NSA Codebreak Palace had been nothing like this comforting wilderness of cardboard, rattan and slightly musty chalk-covered slate. The NSA had provided him with a two-room temperature-controlled bunker at some carefully unspecified depth, bleached hospital smell seemingly soaked through its gray floors. It had the blankest, most featureless walls Charlie had ever seen. Before Charlie’s Nevada trips, he doesn’t give much thought as to why; in the year between the first and second, working frantically through weekends, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Reading Break to prevent another killing before the codes mutate beyond his reach again, he knows it’s to facilitate the sweeps: the ones for bugs, the ones for bombs, the frequent ones for non-Agency cameras.
He’s realizing he never once asked himself what happened to the teams before him, why the NSA chose to train him, and him alone, to do the work of three. He’d always assumed it was because he was brilliant. He’s starting to wonder if it’s because he does what he’s told.
Once inside the garage Charlie checks the walls himself, looking for the glass-eye shine of a camera, then pulls back the planking hiding the small inner locker, takes out everything he finds and drapes it over all available surfaces. He runs a practiced hand over the gear, checking for rust, fraying, rips, holes. Unnecessary shiny bits. Charlie strips and cleans the gun, carefully, loading up in the gloom with the first of the clips he swiped from the Bureau. He tries not to notice how easily he remembered how as he puts on two layers of gear he hasn't touched since the last summer in Nevada. His brother had been in Albuquerque, his father employed by the City, his mother still well enough to laugh with him on the phone and email pictures of the koi pond. His gloved hands slow on the silencer, remembering. There had been two babies that year, white and blue and gold; the smallest of them is now bigger than his hand. Charlie shrugs on Thorne’s spare over the heavy fire-retardant shirt, checks his range of motion. Winces at the stiffness of unused muscles. But everything still fits well enough, and he has a good vest to replace the battered one he’d left folded neatly on an upper bunk no longer his.
Why can’t you plan in advance of your data? I know that you’re famous for your intuition in your own field. Why can’t it work in this field? Awasi, eyes narrowed in frustration, Charlie in front of Awasi’s desk. The request between them (NSA: reassignment, internal) had been in triplicate, pink and yellow and white; light slanting off Awasi’s ridged knuckles, the frustrated curl of his hands. Charlie’s mouth tightened in response. Awasi had grimaced and reached for the forms.
Charlie refuses to find out how many agents went missing, unaccounted for in the months that follow his unofficial resignation. How many good people vanish, in Kazakhstan and Belgrade and Key West and Rio, because the NSA can’t decode fast enough to warn them. He hates that he knows it was at least two, based on what the codes were when he left them. He hates that he may have trained with both that summer, that he may have waved hello, or been the one to teach them vectorial analysis. He hates that these unnamed lives cost him food and sleep, that he fears his dreams because of them. He knows they have frozen his hands in the middle of more than one upper-class combinatorics seminar, breath choked off, mouth dry. What am I teaching these children to do?
He stretches out, belts on the gun, then holsters and draws, again, again, faster, until he looks up and sees only trajectory and ricochet, until the shine of glass (camera, goggles) is a target to be taken down without thought. Conditions and possibilities of success write themselves across the familiar terrain: there, a good place to hide from cover fire; there, a great place to get shot from three different angles. Charlie takes off his glove, wraps his hand around bare steel. It’s no longer cold to his touch. He can hear himself one year ago, telling Edgerton that he doesn’t believe in guns, voice thin with fear for Don, for his students, for himself. And it had been true. It had been true, then.
Charlie shakes himself back into now, tugs various straps, checks flex and fastenings, then takes it all off, wraps his gun carefully and puts everything back in the duffel bag for transport to the house. He dusts off the lingering chalk and turns to leave, then turns back to scrawl one last message for Don on the cleared board:
d/dx(n)=n-1
It’s not math. It’s reciprocity: inversion and upheaval, the world upside-down from what it seems to be. The derivation of normalcy upended. Charlie can only hope Don will understand.
*
In all his years Larry has never been able to see the bare surface of Charles' desk at this point in the term, let alone walk the perimeter of the bookcases without tripping over something. Last time, it had been the pachinko game; the time before that, a tome on the care and feeding of mice and two ominously empty cages. Today, Larry slips the unused key absently into a pocket and walks through the looking-glass.
His disbelieving eyes sweep the familiar room at a glance: all the books are shelved, and the overflow is stacked neatly in the corners; the disastrous pile of second-round undergraduate midterms has been carefully sorted into MARK and DONE. The DONE stack is significantly higher. And that - well, that is definitely unusual, because Charles always gets the first round of midterms marked and returned within a week of collecting them, but leaves the second round till just before finals review. His reasoning is that he should be focusing on review prep and that the students who really care will ask; so far, that’s worked. Dr. Eppes’ students tend to do very well, unless they have no analytical acumen whatsoever, in which case even Charles Eppes cannot help them.
Larry returns his mind to the present reality, scanning the room for any hints. A loose thread, or a telltale leak - a place to start solving this puzzle. The blinds are straight, the sills are pristine, the plants are watered, the ant farm has new gel to eat and - wait. Larry stops his increasingly frantic cataloguing of impossibilities, feeling the frown deepen further into his brow. That’s Charles’ new work folder, flat and pinned beneath the MARK pile. He usually keeps it well hidden behind two dusty volumes of Euclid he’s had since he was six; it’s a faded orange 11x14 with decrepit elastic bands, stuffed full of Post-its, notebooks, journals, reams of looseleaf and the odd envelope, and it contains the germ of his latest ideas. Larry’s never seen that folder not bursting at the seams. He scrambles around the desk, then stops as his brain catches up to his eyes.
Charles’ desk is a picture of meticulous order and his new work folder is empty; of course it’s a message, and Larry can feel his unease ratchet right into genuine concern. Larry has seen offices like this before, but usually only right before do-or-die presentations. Or That Meeting. Or, once, in preparation for chemotherapy, and Charles knows these stories because of course Larry’s talked about them. Told them many, many times, often enough that Charles jokes about how Larry must be in the pink of health to have such a chaotic workspace, symmetry or no symmetry.
This could be very bad.
Standing at the desk, Larry folds the slim sheaf of unmarked midterms over one arm and picks up that disquietingly empty folder. He lets it fall open, for lack of any other ideas. Larry can feel the worry tense across his eyes and tighten through his jaw; the sudden flash of blue startles him so badly he drops everything he's holding. The folder coasts to the ground amidst a flutter of hopeful proofs; Larry’s mind idiotically comments on Reynolds numbers and produces a friction constant. He freezes, heart picking up speed, remembering Charles’ carefree plane-folding grin and who - and what - had landed next at the door. Larry dives after the sprawled folder and comes up with a very small picture, clipped to the inside: Arizona, or Nevada perhaps? Somewhere hot and red. A mile-high sky, blue and hard; it’s tank-top weather, apparently. Charles has on one in grey, visible beneath the vest, and is laughing into the camera, tanned like mathematicians never are.
Larry remembers commenting on the tan; definitely not last year, and not the year before - that had been their Pasadena paper and Amita’s big presentation - but, yes, the year before that. Mumbai and Chicago, and yes, of course, that fascinating lecture series on Andrew Wiles he’d attended on Charles’ behalf. Charles had taken an unexpected sabbatical that year; unusual, in that he’d just taken one the previous summer, but not completely remarkable. Said sabbatical had certainly not slaked his intellectual thirst; Charles had demanded frequent emails throughout the conference season but declined to give any details of his own. Eventually, Larry had stopped pestering. Mostly.
An overdue vacation, Charles had finally said with a reluctant crimp to his mouth, standing slender and tanned in Larry’s office, more graceful in the August sun but also uncharacteristically tense. Three months of the outdoors - yes, like the year before, but definitely more adventurous. He’d handed Larry a shirt with little grey men in floral patterns and the words Area 51 is for glxzthorps on the back, and asked something about modeling chemical pathways in the brain.
There had been a small shower of reddish dust on the desk as Charles pulled the shirt out of its little plastic bag; he’d wiped it off quickly, the tense, pained flush on his face totally at odds with either his usual lively curiosity or his livewire response to new stimuli. It was around then that Larry noticed how still Charles was standing.
Larry has a compendium of images stashed in his head, of Charles at faculty meetings, lunchtime seminars, even in the middle of a dissertation defence: fidgeting and gesturing, playing with his chalk or a random pen, restless and a little spastic; the remnants of his unused adolescence, perhaps. The energy of youth. Larry can still remember a wide-eyed Charles at his first conference, all of a puppyish sixteen and a half, alternately completely enthused or bored out of his mind, and pretty well always in motion. No hint of that spark had been visible in the man standing wearily by his desk, holding a vaguely silly shirt Larry would wear the next day. Larry had looked his dawning apprehension; Charles had rephrased his question, face and stance brooking no comment.
Obscurely dismayed, Larry had left the subject of Charles’ new frown lines and allowed himself to be guided into a stream of molecular formulae. By the time they'd placed their orders, the conversation had segued into a protracted discussion about whether subatomic physics properly belonged to the realm of logic or the aforementioned little grey men. Those worrisome lines had smoothed out completely over lemon meringue, which Charles ate like he was dying without it, and he'd recovered at least a partial dynamism by the end of his second slice.
When Larry next saw those harsh lines on Charles' face, they had been about Mrs. Eppes, and any questions he might have had then stayed bitter in his mouth.
Sitting at Charles' desk, the little photo in his hands, Larry has a dim memory of the paper plane landing at Don’s feet as he blew through that very door holding a burnt book in his ash-smeared hand. Larry is clearer on Megan's grim eyes and carefully neutral mouth; he distinctly remembers Charles looking down at the blackened page, brows drawn in concentration, Don dark and quiet by his side. Larry's lost count of how many times he's seen it in the last year: the two dark heads, one a tousled tumble and the other short and clipped, bent over a single problem. Then Charles had raised his head, and this Larry wants to forget: there had been no trace of the expected vagueness in those bleak eyes. Larry feels a frisson of disquiet prickle up his spine at the memory of Charles' entire expression flashing still and cold, harsh in a way mere code didn't warrant, just before he'd said something about assassinations and the CIA. Larry slumps back further into the chair, the smell of ash strong in memory, the events of three summers ago rearranging themselves in his mind.
*
Gabriel Ruiz, Lucinda Shea, Terence Kuyber, the NSA. Charlie at 20, marveling at Don’s new badge. Charlie at 8, dazzled by vectorial addition. Those moments have led directly to this one, straight lines with no deviation, to Awasi’s voice out of the blue after three years, gravel and dust on his phone at CalSci. Charlie had felt his past and present as a queasy collision somewhere midchest and had to sit down before he fell over.
It shouldn’t have felt so much like betrayal when Awasi asked when he’d be coming back to finish his work. He’d known it was coming, but still. Goddamn. Charlie cut Awasi off in the middle of a lyrical description of the Colorado joint military project and hung up, slamming the phone just a little. He had stared at the placid blue folder, mind looping through his analyses as he tried to choke back his temper.
Then fifteen minutes only, out to Larry’s to calm down; Charlie had a class that afternoon and couldn’t afford to be guilty and infuriated. He’d come back and the file had been gone; one more point on the line. In a few hours Don would blow through the door with a half-burnt book, a question and a set of codes Charlie sometimes sees when the dreams get really bad. Charlie had never planned to be kitted up and moving out again, gun ready, lines of subtle confusion and attack spinning again through his mind. He’d moved on; these circumstances were never supposed to find him again. Luck be a Lady my ass.
Charlie sheds the agents at the house with a number and extension to call, just in case, while he supposedly heads back to campus. He and Joran are parked not quite two blocks from TechSec’s back entrance in the middle of a grey Wednesday afternoon, Joran fiddling with the scans, Charlie tense and kitted out beside him, adjusting resolution. At CalSci that morning, Charlie’s email turned up a nonsense string containing a set of coordinates and a colour in binary, apparently sent this morning; when he got up from lunch to check the street again there was an unfamiliar dusty green van half a block down and Joran draped over a deckchair on Dr. Edelstein’s porch reading back issues of OK!. They have run this scenario enough times to know how it works; Joran doesn’t even twitch as Charlie walks past and flashes three fingers. The green van pulls up behind him three blocks later, between a coffee shop and the laundromat.
Sidi Joran is a handsome bastard who knows his way around sex and surveillance, and Charlie really, really doesn’t want to know how he got from London to L.A. in less than 17 hours. Suffice to say: it’s likely MI-5 has temporarily lost track of its best Brixton snoop. Charlie is hoping they can both stay lost for at least a few more hours. By then, either his father will be safe or they’ll need all the help they can get.
The rig is set; Charlie is leaning over Joran’s shoulder, watching EM fields and heat signatures glow like ghosts on the screens. The elaborate security system isn’t on, or the building would have lit up their scan like fireflies - and set off the FBI’s like Rudolph and Kwanzaa combined. Joran’s jury-rigged van Eck phreak was able to confirm that much, but he can’t do more till Charlie’s inside. They’ve chosen a much higher frequency for their own communication; it’s not perfect or perfectly safe, but they’re out of time and resources for anything fancier.
So Charlie checks the silencer one last time and takes a deep breath. Slips out the back of the van, engages the three-step approach that will get him unnoticed into the service corridor of Hamilton Technological Securities Inc.’s big glass-fronted vanity address. The real offices are on the third, fifth and sixth floors because Mag isn’t stupid enough to centralize; that shivering kid had told Colby the first part, eventually. Charlie figured the second part himself. There’s Kevlar poking at his chin, extra clips on his belt, an earpiece snug against the curve of his head; Charlie waits out the perimeter sweeps while crouched in shadow, counting time while Joran drops the van back another two blocks. Four and four, pistols only, sweeping left, right, left, average of about eight minutes per circuit. They’re very tight but not overlapping, which means whoever’s running TechSec’s perimeter is not too worried. Professional, he thinks coolly, waits for Joran’s go and moves in as the left sweep disappears around the corner.
The door’s quiet hydraulic hiss can’t be helped, but Charlie puts a piece of foam into the jamb to prevent the giveaway click. Just as he was taught. The gun (his gun, earned, paid for) hangs in his grasp, balanced and deadly. It’s been years but he still remembers how to hold one, how to carry like the pistol’s part of his hand. For the year he’d worked at the NSA, it had been. Charlie tries to be grateful to the Agency for this training, for the merciless pressure that taught him hyperawareness, for the constant fear sapping him down to rage and bone. Red dust. He can’t quite manage it.
Joran’s quiet voice is a familiar rasp in his awareness, directing Charlie according to the faint EM scans on expertly jury-rigged screens lighting the interior of a rental van some office near LAX will never get back now. Of course, the rental company will be paid; Joran’s no amateur. They’ll just never see the van again. Charlie is headed for the back stairs and its bad camera angles, but he checks briefly into that fancy glass atrium to make sure the elevator stops at floor 8 and stays there.
Charlie oils the next door open, quiet and quick, and heads up the back way to the third floor; it’s Mag’s office, the kid said, and the place all Joran’s heat sources are showing up. Not hot enough, though; that’d be the vests. Awasi had made them all learn those faded heat signatures quickly. Charlie’s borrowed boots barely sound against the worn gray linoleum. There are advantages to being small and light enough to ballast a cat, as Joran had pointed out that first uncomfortably warm afternoon, both of them sent alone from their teams, standing awkwardly in the blistering stripes of red-rock sun. Charlie had, perforce, taken the top bunk as the chatter of forty-eight other people setting up and shaking hands and sorting out drawer space hummed around them in six or maybe eight different languages. Makoto Taniyama and his teammate Kevin Coombs were next to them, switching into English for a round of hellos, then Dan Lung and Lorimer Bok: Kyoto, Brisbane, and Bok was from Montreal by way of Johannesburg. Charlie had wished out loud for a babelfish, drawing a few amused stares from the Brits and a surprised laugh from his lanky bunkmate. They’d called each other Dr. Maths and Communications Specialist Joran until they discovered their mutual addiction to Red Dwarf, after which they were Holly and Cat.
Matt Islington and Terence Kuyber, Ithaca, had been diagonally across from them. Charlie hadn’t noticed much beyond Kuyber’s height and Islington’s buzzcut.
Joran is the only contact Charlie kept from either of his agency-sponsored summers; they send each other links to things like Mathra, Superhero Physics and fraudulent ads for caffeinated Cialis. Personal updates are rare, but they’re always signed via amiko. Charlie still hangs onto the wistful Listerian dream that someday everyone will speak Esperanto and all grammar rules will make sense. It hasn’t happened yet.
*
Zbigniew Ollnytzkiej was the kind of teacher students prayed for and then cursed as they struggled through diabolical problem sets at 4AM in the CompSci labs. That second year in Nevada he taught them strategy, or Survival of the Least Stupid, and refused to either shorten his first name or help them pronounce his last. He’d been a spy - “operative, operative,” he always corrected them - during the Cold War, but had defected when it became clear that the Communist Bloc wasn’t going to change its stance on disappearing political dissidents any time soon. The afternoon of the first day, he’d had them decide on the best five ways to approach a motorcade for the purposes of assassination. He’d held up the most ludicrous examples, then told them off about the fifteen different things they could have considered instead of getting themselves blown away by security in the first five minutes. Then he’d criticized their IQs, good looks, and parentage, and sent them off in pairs to do it all over again, properly, while he touched lighter to cigarette and read what Charlie guessed were their Agency files from the previous year. When Zbigniew had looked up he’d brought Charlie to the board to explain vector analyses on bullet trajectories and why they should care. This, Charlie could handle, and it wasn’t long before he had the class acting out vector addition and miming spin from the corners of the room. Zbigniew had smoked and smiled almost benevolently, as Islington looked skeptical and Kuyber’s frown deepened into a scowl. “No idea what died up his bum, you were great,” Bok had grinned when Charlie asked.
All that week, Zbigniew had them pore over famous assassinations in Syria, in Panama and of course in Dallas, TX, analyzing speed of execution against waste of resources, mapping sniper locations against best lines of sight, calculating ratios of blast to bombs to cost. Make lists of the most efficient ways to assassinate by Force, by Stealth, by seeming Accident, classify each attack’s level of difficulty, the risk to the perpetrator, and chances of success, all in neat grids. Then he required his students find effective defenses against each method of attack, based on what had worked in the past, drilling them in proper response until Charlie woke one night to hear Joran muttering attack and response codes in his sleep. They had progressed from diagrams to simulations to physically acting out scenarios of attack and defense, and it was by far Charlie’s favorite class until Zbigniew announced the pop quizzes.
Not paper-based. No, Zbigniew Ollnytzkiej was a good teacher, and his quizzes consisted of one daily unarmed attack on a randomly chosen group of trainees by an unknown assailant, one Operative Z. Three days later it switched to attacks on random pairs. It was bruising, terrifying, demoralizing, and the debriefs next day were painfully humiliating. Kevin Coombs finally cracked near the end of day six, speaking for at least half the class when he cussed Ollnytskiej out for treating them like raw recruits. Zbigniew’s response had been typical.
“Ah, technician. You think death will temper itself for you because you are not a military man? Be easy to dodge, be sweet when it comes? I say to you this: it will not. And the simplest way to temper death is to avoid it entirely. So learn, damn you. Be fast, be smart, and do not shame me by dying for some idiotic reason like forgetting to duck, Mr. Coombs.” Charlie had flinched away from the glint in Zbigniew’s eye.
“Dr. Taniyama, see that he learns. By force if you have to, if you value him enough.” Zbigniew had grinned at them all, unnervingly fierce, and upped the ante to random attacks on lone walkers as well. Still unarmed, although now the operative could approach from all sides.
Life reorganized itself along new axes, keeping pace uneasily with their small arms practice and the classes on ballistics, on open conflict, on stealth. Easy: never be alone. Hard: sometimes you couldn’t protect each other and survive. The stakes in the quizzes rose from fighting unarmed to requiring the use of one implement to having to fight back with whatever was in the room; Joran took a few hits for Charlie until Charlie learned to keep his head down and reject engagement in favor of throwing the nearest heavy implement and running for it, since he couldn’t go for the guns no one was wearing yet.
But slowly, his reflexes improved until Charlie started to think he might actually survive the next month. Then Zbigniew horrified him all over again by announcing that teams would begin planning quizzes for each other, and not only that. Now, for the first time: guns. And paint, paint only, but everyone was to wear tac vests, and the pants and boots to go with them. And get used to carrying at all times, and go next for the gun but first for cover, even if these bullets merely left smears of green or blue across the CIA’s on-loan Kevlar. Charlie swallowed around the rising nausea, picturing twenty-four days of sheer tactical hell, and looked nervously from Coombs’ shaking fingers and Lung’s grim mouth to Joran’s still-serene face. Kuyber’s eyes had lit so fast they’d practically started to glow.
*
Joran’s voice moves Charlie up two floors and across a waste of hurriedly overturned workstations. The second floor is a shambles of melted plastic, shredded paper and ash; clearly Mag and Viti had been in a hurry to clean out their files. He starts to wonder why their team of thugs thought the huge building secure enough to hold a hostage before catching himself; he cannot afford to think of his father now. Alan uncharacteristically pale, face scared into stillness; long hands tied tight, soft mouth efficiently gagged beneath his terrified dark eyes. That terror partly for Don and mainly for Charlie, always for Charlie - Stop. Full stop. They’d found no blood at the house, but that means nothing. Rage and fear combine like a noose; Charlie stumbles, gasping for air. Tries again, can’t find any.
“Hey now, stop that, Holly, you can’t - it’s that complete arse Kuyber, couldn’t see his face before - you still with me? Hols. Charlie. In through the nose… You were right, can’t believe it,” mutters Joran. “He just walked in the front door, open as you please. Watch it in there.”
I knew you were too soft for this. Academics, good God. Charlie shies away from the memory of Terence Kuyber’s curled lip, coughing on his knees, blood in his mouth, sparks of pain whirling from his stomach to his head. In his ear (in the now) Joran’s voice is far too concerned. Charlie shakes his head hard, evens out his breath. Checks again for cameras. No time for this. It’s gotten him in trouble before. He gives Joran a personal all-clear neither of them buys and starts moving again, headed dizzily for the first of two sets of stairs to the third floor.
*
He thought he'd just imagined it, that unfamiliar chill in Charles' familiar eyes, imputed some icy alienation into the angle of the sun and the glare off the desk. But now, staring at the little photo in his hand, Larry has to admit he's no longer certain. He's no longer certain of anything Charles' eyes may or may not have seen, and that is genuinely painful to know. For a moment, Larry is close to tears, but he does not indulge himself. He once told Charles they all had the same number of minutes but this photo could make time a precious relativity indeed.
In retrospect, letting Charles evade this issue may have been less than wise. That his office looks as it does means he’s reasonably sure his chances of returning aren’t high. Charles being Charles, that deduction would be founded on solid calculation. Larry can recall nothing in the last 24 hours that could have brought his erstwhile student to such dire circumstances. He searches his mind for a disaster sufficient to empty this folder, something that could stop the mind of Charles Eppes, and draws a complete blank. And now he is truly, genuinely afraid.
Larry looks again at the image in the picture, noting the presence of tension singing through Charles' stance, even etched into his seemingly carefree smile. Little grey men; red dust: Nevada, then. Neither of these things explain the muscle groups he didn’t even know Charles had. Or the boots, or the heavy vest, or the gun on the belt slung carelessly around his waist, small and black and probably not for show. Charles' right hand drifts just above it, index finger not quite touching its grip. Larry’s seen vests like that before, mainly in movies before the last twelve months made them an increasingly large part of his weekly realities.
Larry flips the photo; For the smegging smart smegger is written in someone else’s lolloping hand across the back. He gets the reference, but doesn't recognize the writing. At this point, it’s just one more thing he doesn’t know. How had Charles phrased it? I have a friend at the NSA who knows someone from the CIA...
Larry has honestly never feared for his best student like this: not during the whole Penfield debacle, not when Amita finally walked to Astrophysics and didn’t come back, not the afternoons Charles spent staring at the same page in his texts while several blocks away Don and Alan kept an increasingly difficult vigil.
Not even during P vs. NP. No, not even then, because then, Charles had still been working.
And Larry may sometimes seem like he’s not paying attention, but he knows that the sum of Charles Eppes’ perfect desk and what was apparently a quasimilitary training camp in the Nevada desert gets him an arrow pointing directly to the FBI. Larry salvages the MARK pile, takes the photo with him and goes looking for Megan, but not before carefully replacing the empty folder behind the Euclid, where Amita would find it, should she care to look.
*
To Part the Second
Yes. It's time. Many thanks for your patience and encouragement in these past few weeks.
Title: Reciprocity
Author: raucousraven
Rating: P for Plotty. And if your mother's okay with you watching the show, you can read this.
Category: as rageprufrock might put it, AU, AU, Totally An AU.
Spoilers: up to 2x06 Convergence. The action in this story relies on events from 2x04 (Calculated Risk) and 2x05 (Assassin).
Disclaimer: all the names you recognise are belong to Heuton, Falacci and Scott2. No profit made, no harm intended.
Feedback: will be esteemed and adored, and probably named Lawrence. Or possibly Charles.
Many thanks to stillane, who started me thinking in this direction. Due blame credit go to dsudis, who got me hooked on Numb3rs, and especially to qe2, who poked me till I started writing.
Big Beta Ups go out to the lovely&amazing qe2 and the divine troyswann! We’re very grateful, the Monster and I.
ETA: This is a two-parter! Part the Second is here.
*
Charlie doesn’t understand why no one’s thought to use it against them yet, because this pattern is not hard to isolate: Math all over Federal white boards, Don’s hand on his shoulder. Agents all over his office, Charlie’s proportional increase in lab hours; Don’s spiking solve rates, Charlie’s documented consulting fees. Their last name. Sometimes, correlation really is causation but the Eppes brothers have been lucky till now.
Stupid to depend on probability. Charlie remembers blood on his brother’s arm, the world falling backward as the shot whistled just past his head. The gun panning slightly to his right, past his panicked eyes, down and to the side. This is getting him nowhere.
And he’d only been out fifteen minutes after the call, down to see Larry and gotten involved in random matrices, and when he came back the SynTel file was gone. Charlie only noticed because it had been in one of the new 8.5x11 blue folders; they ruined the peaceable flow of manila-covered 11x14 folders covering his desk, and he didn’t like them. He’d been going to call Don but then Don had shown up holding a half-burned book and the whole Colombian consulate almost blew up in their faces. In the ensuing manic rush to keep Gabriel Ruiz alive he’d forgotten to tell Don about the missing file, and then suddenly his brother was also gone: Michigan, no notice; just one quick phone call at 6 AM on Thursday, and Charlie barely had time to ask.
“Does Dad know about this? And what do you mean, approximately Lansing? Doesn’t the Bureau need to give you time with your family before they ship you off into guns and motor oil and snow past your armpits?”
“Hey now. Don’t go confusing little Lansing with its big brother Detroit, okay?”
“Don.”
“Aw, c’mon Charlie. They just called me last night, okay, I have to pack, don’t make this any harder. Tell Dad it’s just for a few weeks, till the office there gets back on its feet. You know we took a rough hit over there last month.”
Charlie does know; he’d remember the footage, even without the small memorial at the Bureau’s front desk and Don gone stiff and silent for days, reviewing the tac manuals and quietly drilling his team’s responses. Four agents down and two still in hospital didn’t exactly make for settled work conditions, and Don’s had his team running on rails for awhile here. None of this actually justifies losing his brother on zero notice, but Don won’t listen to that. He has his mission voice on, all execute and go, and besides, Don is not slow. He called Charlie at 6 AM in order to avoid this very discussion. Charlie sighs helplessly.
“How long?”
“I told you.” Don’s voice has gone sharp, impatient. “Two months at most, didn’t I already say that?”
“Well now you have.” And there’s an edge to match his brother’s, but Charlie doesn’t want his last words angry. “I… Don? Did you just call yourself big, bad and full of diesel fumes?”
“Hey. Don’t make me come over there, Lansing.” Charlie can hear the grin. “Gotta go, okay buddy? Tell Dad to save me some beer. I promise I won’t freeze anything vital.”
Don hangs up. Charlie doesn’t. He stands in his ratty bathrobe as the day lights up the windows, listening to his brother leave.
*
The Tuesday after that, Charlie comes home to find his front room a mess and his father gone; the door is intact but unlocked, the chair’s a dead loss and there’s splintery dirt all over the rug. Don’s favorite lamp is smashed, and half the plants are spilled across the floor. His father’s work paraphernalia - cardboard tubes, finely sharpened pencils, a cell phone - are scattered haphazardly across the parquet. It’s 4 pm; they must have caught Alan coming home from a meeting.
Charlie knows a flood of Bureau agents answer his frantic call, but doesn’t know how he ends up sitting on Don’s desk at the office while Megan takes the letter (Don’t come after us) apart molecule by motive with the forensics techs and David searches the house again for any clues left in the scuffle. The neighbors say they saw very little; a surgically clean strike, David calls it, shaking his head as he gets back in. Charlie feels his brow crimp further. Alan may not be a young man, but he’s not weak or easily cowed. Possible correlation: It argues for something he dearly wishes to ignore. Statistically significant? There’s no way to tell: insufficient evidence. Proceed with caution.
There was no blood. But Charlie can think of more than one way to disable someone who’s not looking for a fight.
The gun panning slightly to his right, past his panicked eyes, down and to the side at Joran’s desperate yell. Kuyber’s maddened snarl. The snake. Charlie leaps left.
They took the dirt for analysis, but Charlie already knows it’s TechSec. Colby’s horrified face when Charlie finally tells the team about the missing file is just confirmation, because the file had dealt in part with his analyses of the roundabout financing the SynTel frauds set up during their dual filching from the public purse. TechSec had worked for both the cautiously embezzling Galway Sr. and his thieving son; that should really have red-flagged them earlier than it did, but Mag Vorenky of Hamilton TechSec is a better accountant than even the SEC has guessed.
Not even Lucinda Shea’s careful accounting caught up to Mag and her brother Viti until near the end; then Lucinda’s murder disrupted futher investigations. Charlie has few illusions about why it’s Malcolm Galway and not Viti Vorenky sitting in an LA jail cell awaiting trial for that shooting. It would have been Mag’s brilliant idea, on par with her ruthlessly profitable accounting, to hide TechSec’s involvement in the SynTel frauds by duping the ambitious junior Galway into proving himself, again, making his hand the one that orphaned eleven year old Daniel Shea.
And Charlie had been going to give that file back to the SEC anyway, like a good boy, even before the phone rang. He'd gone to see Larry to calm down a little, after. The file hadn’t been on his desk until right then. It hadn’t stayed there long, either, and how long had they been tapping his office line?
The gun panning slightly to his right, past his panicked eyes, down and to the side at Joran’s desperate yell. Kuyber’s maddened snarl twisting his sharp face, the snake tattoo flaring along a bicep, his knuckles red and white around the gun. Charlie leaps left.
And Charlie knows Don is supposed to be righting that office in Michigan, but no one’s seen or heard from him in days. Don should have called Alan Monday evening, like he did in Phoenix and Albuquerque. Should have checked in with the Bureau, even if he didn’t want to call home. David’s already called Terry and Kim to see if they’ve heard from Don, but keeps getting voicemail or passed along or put on hold.
The LA office keeps telling Charlie they’re on it. He notices they’re careful not to give him any actual data, especially not in hard copy.
Since LA doesn’t trust Charlie, it’s Colby going to Nadine and the LAPD and the DA and demanding answers now, dammit, until they find that several SynTel execs, who stayed around to prove their innocence while Galway Jr. awaited trial, have scattered to all points as of just this morning. Two are left in L.A., and Colby’s all for going out in force to nail those rich bastards right now. Charlie barely restrains himself from hauling Colby in by his lapels and screaming the man deaf. Attacking SynTel now would be a death sentence.
Alan has perhaps 36 hours before the last exec liquidates his holdings and gets out of the country. After that, Charlie’s analysis fails but his other training kicks in just fine. There are only a few ways to guarantee that Alan won’t talk. TechSec will probably take the easiest.
The gun panning slightly to his right, past his panicked eyes, down and to the side at Joran’s desperate yell. Kuyber’s maddened snarl twisting his sharp face, the snake tattoo flaring along a bicep, his knuckles red and white around the gun. Sweat, fear, the smell of smoke; Charlie leaps left and dives into a roll, untucks only to see the snake writhe again as Kuyber brings his gun to bear.
Right before Charlie leaves the crowd of milling, concerned neighbours it’s Mrs. Lee, seventy-four and bird-tiny, who tilts her head and puts her hand on Charlie’s arm. She used to feed him crumbling almond cookies when he was small; for a moment he can smell them as she leans in and says, There was one man all yesterday, watching. Tall. Tattoo, red hat. He left when you come home. What tattoo, Mrs. Lee? All wavy, maybe a snake. Where? His arm. She points to her frail elbow, graphs sinx across her shoulder. And the hat. Real red? No. Like dead blood. And Charlie flushes, feels his heartrate trip past panicked into terrified, fueled by a rage so high it’s threatening to take the top of his head right off, because the last time he’d seen Terence Kuyber the man had been shooting to kill. Had, in fact, barely missed.
Has probably practiced more than once in the three years since.
Charlie can’t think about Alan alone, can’t think about Alan alone with goddamn Kuyber, can’t fucking think. And Don is nowhere, and Charlie would like to be sick and pass out, but it’s Kuyber, and there’s no time. Promise me, Joran had said. Promise you will call me up. Joran’s voice echoes through Charlie’s mind, smooth and dry. As always. Charlie had curled shamelessly into the assurance of help, not caring that it was almost certainly far too generous. He’s still going to take it.
There’s a box in his mind, sealed shut over that particular data set: black gun, red dust, the snake tattoo and the red beret. The flare of hatred across the sheen of steel; a set of codes he strives not to recall. The box is where Joran’s phone number lives. Charlie closes his eyes and cracks the lid. The sequence unspools, effortless as numbers always are. It brings the grit-taste of hot wind and Nevada dust; Charlie feels his right hand clench around the nothing at his hip. The other Agent Eppes opens his eyes and slides quietly off his brother’s desk, slipping through the busy blue-lit halls, headed toward the greatest amount of noise he can find. Charlie unfolds David’s phone and wishes he believed in luck. Dials London. Cat. It’s L.A. calling; game's back on. Veni nu, mi amiko. He can't stop himself from adding: Be careful.
*
Charlie’s first time on the ranges had been fifteen inept minutes of fire-at-will; he’d felt the recoil travel all up his arm and jaw, metal slipping under his sweaty fingers, felt the gun misreading his demands and been unable to compensate. He’d been newly tenured, shiny-new to both gun ranges and high security clearance. the NSA had only recently informed him that his codebreaking contract would require “a specific training regimen, nothing fancy; three months in Nevada. Several other contract teams are doing the same.”
After the smoke cleared, their instructor had taken a quick stroll across their sad, sad targets, lip curling higher the farther he got. He’d picked up Charlie’s sheet and looked carefully at the scatter. Then Col. Awasi, CIA, USMC Ret’d., had clipped it to a board, glared at them all, and grimly gone over the faults in posture and focus likeliest to have caused each of Charlie’s awkward civilian misses. He’d stood by Charlie’s elbow through the next two rounds, snapping corrections as required; Charlie’s accuracy might even have improved if his nerves hadn’t just been blown to hell. His hands shook all the way through his first field-strip and cleaning, muzzle carefully pointed away and down. But as the others left for the mess hall, Awasi had turned to Charlie and said, far more quietly than he’d spoken yet, “The left hand, Dr. Eppes. It’s responsible for holding the right steady during a shot with this kind of pistol. For most guns, actually - remember that.” Charlie had been too shellshocked to even nod.
Later, a few other coders gathered to congratulate Charlie, laughing at his confusion - most civs didn’t earn the honor of the Colonel’s personal slurs on their competence before the one-month mark. Charlie’s since read the rest of those first-summer notes himself. Superior aim and concentration is written in Awasi’s square hand on his file, right next to the words specialized training recommended, which got him sent back to Nevada next year. Charlie thinks of the other words after that, stamped and sealed for a clearance level far above his brother’s but well within his own: Field training complete. Grade: operative. Note: marksmanship excellent. Note: reactivation suspended pending review.
It’s the biggest secret he has ever kept.
*
They’re approaching 0300h, asymptotic to some fresh new infinity and the L.A. Bureau is humming, processors whirring over the click of keys and terse agent voices fueled on fluorescent light, bad caffeine, pure adrenaline. Megan and David are tracking rich bastards and their big liquidations while simultaneously organizing the hunt for an FBI agent gone missing in the snow near Lansing. The office there got antsy Monday afternoon but hasn’t breath to spare to go looking for one misplaced agent somewhere between LA and Lansing. With David’s news, the state troopers are fanning across airports and highways, searching for evidence of conspiracy; by now they’ve found Don’s abandoned rental 4x4 and the tracks of another car, but the trail is two days cold and new snow is falling. David gives the troopers till dawn before he calls in the Feds, but he isn’t going to wait. Not for this. He hangs up firmly, and then gets up, headed for the tac room and its racks of guns and gear. Charlie watches him go, then murmurs need a walk call me if to a distracted Megan, on the phone with DC. She nods, doesn’t look up. Charlie drifts after David, carefully nonchalant, but stops outside Interrogation 3 to watch Colby working at the top of his game.
Colby is grilling the DA’s human sacrifice (“God, Granger, take him and get out”), an informant close to Hamilton TechSec but nowhere near the top. At least, that’s the story so far. Colby’s been at it, enthusiastically, for the past four hours; he’s currently prowling the room, window to door to right in front of the spotty kid huddled in the uncomfortable plastic chair. The kid’s cracked once already, spilling details on drop locations and security schedules somewhere in hour three, but doesn’t know what Mag and Viti got planned, sir, he just did the small stuff, he swears. Colby twists low and fast, planting hands on desk and still coming; the kid jerks back, terrified.
He did confirm it was TechSec took the file. Doesn’t know how TechSec knew to come after Charlie. But Charlie knows; Mrs. Lee told him: sinx=Terence Kuyber, a near-miss, a dead man. Blood arcing across the sky to splatter the rocks in Nevada.
Megan doesn’t think these guys will move fast, but Charlie knows differently; he helped Lucinda Shea run those numbers the first time. He also knows exactly what happened to her. And while Kuyber’s arms rating and professional experience are off-limits to the Bureau under privacy acts, Charlie’s clearance got him all he needed. Charlie’s broken his own silence, telling the team about Kuyber, but Megan insists his profile doesn’t fit what Charlie’s saying. That’s because Charlie can’t tell them about Awasi’s notation on Kuyber’s files without getting them all kicked off their jobs. Pathologically obsessive is only part of the problem. The other part is …complex.
David is suiting up in the tac room, loading up, arms easy and smooth in the familiar motions of menace and protection. Charlie watches him leave, then tries on boots until a pair fits and Kevlar vests until he finds one small enough. He leaves the D-rings on the bench and hopes Agent Thorne won’t mind him borrowing the spare. Charlie folds the vest underneath his own coat and slides back out into the blue light. The shoes go under Don’s desk, and no one is looking at his new boots as he gestures, again, to emphasize that the team call him with any new information. Something. Anything. Megan, abetted by David, sends two agents home with him. Charlie doesn't argue; it would raise more problems than he can currently solve. He half-dozes in the Bureau car as Wednesday dawns grey and unenthusiastic, trying to figure out how best to cover his ass at CalSci while he gets his father out of Mag Vorenky’s murderous hands.
*
Well of course he’s noticed that Charles isn't underfoot today; unlike some theoreticians he could name, Larry isn’t blind. But almost one year’s worth of experience has taught him to remain quite sanguine about such absences. After all, the precedents suggest that Charles is likely out gallivanting with Don, doing some exciting, tangential, Bureaulike thing. Larry is always quick to point out that such things usually end in missed seminars, late-night grading marathons and attempts to co-opt Larry’s TAs over the weekend. Again. That’s usually when Amita starts laughing at Charles’ increasingly hangdog expression.
All japery aside, Larry sometimes does consider asking for his lab back, for Charles' cases inevitably end up in, on or near his own blackboards and mainframes. Larry might even have considered genuine annoyance once or twice last term, running late for deadlines only to find FBI agents loitering in his hallways grinning at Kepler's Farside pinups. He might even have given in to a little pique, were it not for the way this work has strengthened all of their capabilities, stretching their comprehensions faster than academia can take them. Larry smiles a little as he considers the fallout; all in all, it hasn’t been bad.
Working Don's cases brings out the very best in his brother’s brilliance, refining Charles’ theories to ever-greater precision as case after case exposes him to the realities of this beautiful, troubling, very imperfect world. The particular smile on Larry’s face in this moment is one Alan would understand best, as both his sons are rather young to comprehend the rare joy of having a protégé grow into a decent human being, even at the cost of great personal sorrow. Larry does not underestimate Don’s steadying role in Charles’ difficult maturation after the passing of Mrs. Eppes. For that gift, for Charles’ re-engagement into this present existence, Larry would willingly forgive far more than the coolly efficient men in suits and holsters lounging all over his office, even when they make him feel a trifle grubby around the equally efficient Agent Reeves.
Also … well, in Larry’s cosmology, anyone who laughs at the comic genius of Gary Larsen deserves a little lenience - even when that person is Colby Granger, who sees little beauty in mathematics and needs physics only to drive his car and fire a gun in the right direction. And, all right, stay attached to the earth’s surface instead of falling off into space-time, and Colby came up with that one all on his own. He’d been grinning then, too, and Larry is a little hazy on what makes a good FBI agent but he’s unwilling to bet inflexible stupidity is anywhere near the top of the list.
So yes, anyhow, Larry already knows Charles missed delivering his morning lectures, and that’s what he tells the Provost the first time he asks. Besides, Charles’ undergraduates have been coming to Larry all morning in lieu of their usual supply of Eppesian game shows, tilted eyebrows and theoretical brilliance. It’s probably a natural result of Larry’s occasional through-the-door comments and frequent guest spots, and the times he’d sat in on that 300-level nonspecialist class. Well, Charles’ methods of explaining advanced math to fuzzy-headed biologists are interesting. Surprisingly, they also seem to work - not that Charles’ being effective is surprising - but, well, biologists aren't always the best logicians. Take that Wilkins, for example, treating Rosalind Franklin like dirt instead of lauding her to the skies for her groundbreaking work on the structure of DNA.
Actually, there are two students in this class who are quite intelligent mathematicians, and another one, a truly remarkable coder, who might turn out to be something more. Larry would be after all three to consider changing majors if he didn’t know they were part of the same research group, and properly dedicated to their own intricate and really quite fascinating work.
Dinoflagellates aside, Larry’s examples today have used few goats but rather more vintage cars; he thinks Charles would be pleased. This mood lasts until the Provost corners him and Dr. Lourdon late Wednesday afternoon, pinning them with questions because Professor Eppes has a) missed all his morning lectures, b) not yet administered or submitted his evaluations and c) not informed their office of any scheduled absences. Larry leads them to Charles' TAs, and sticks around to hear the scrimmage. It’s not till the Provost, the head of the math department and both TAs turn to him in bewilderment that Larry sees any dawning reasons for concern. Normally, Charles at least sends the TAs some sort of message, an awkward but sincerely apologetic note: I’m really, really sorry, please tell the students by email, I’ll take your office hours on Monday to make up. Now, standing just inside Charles’ office door, unnecessary key dangling from his hand, Dr. Larry Fleinhardt looks around and owns himself a trifle worried.
*
The NSA had required that first summer in Nevada when Charlie was put on their biggest high-clearance codebreaking case. The Agency upped the ante after the second successful attack, which had resulted in three civilian contractors dead and media hush-jobs left and right. And a new mandate: no one could break the assassination codes without knowing what to do if targeted by them; the NSA doesn’t want more contractor blood spilled violently on its anonymous bunker floors. So Charlie spent that second summer in Nevada’s breathless heat instead of presenting papers in air-conditioned auditoriums (Chicago, Pasadena, Mumbai; he missed the series on Wiles, and Ieng and Bruzhina’s influential talk on applications of combinatorics in neurochemistry, and had to pester details out of Larry for the next year).
Predictably, the theory of death is far easier than any theory of numbers. The main parameter is location: avoid shut-in canyons, walk-in freezers, unfamiliar food, large bodies of water. Stay away from all windows. Keep your backup informed, keep your backup armed. Carry at all times. During his year with the NSA he feels itchy if he’s out too long in the sun, or even standing in the middle of the quad. Open spaces make for an easy target. Stay low and to the side, or someone might see. It’s a life Charlie’s never once wanted.
Gabriel Ruiz, the target currently risking his life by choice in Colombia, is the only person who’s ever mistaken Charlie for an assassination specialist. It had struck Charlie as funny at the time, mainly because Ruiz was correct. They’d saved Ruiz, but it had been a near thing. Charlie doesn’t know if he can pull off a miracle like that without a full team behind him. He shakes his head, and because he’s standing in front of the bathroom mirror he actually sees his eyes come back into focus. His shirt’s off and the door’s locked, and why - oh. Charlie blinks, and contemplates the curls tumbling down to his nose. He’d let his hair grow out, after Nevada, blatantly unmilitary, then found he liked it longer. His father had nagged, whined, and eventually accepted it; Don, home briefly for the holidays, had grinned and attempted a noogie. Their mother had just laughed and handed Charlie some new hair-ties for New Year’s, all in serviceable black except for the big sparkly gold one.
Charlie picks up the scissors, watches his half-smile iron out to a grim line. He’d been meaning to go for a trim, but there never seemed to be time, what with returning midterms and revising finals and toning down the more fanciful musings in Larry’s latest paper. And Lucinda Shea’s orphaned son in his garage, professional assassins shooting from the trees, the NSA demanding he return files he has no business touching after walking out on Nevada.
Charlie had never thought to clear his involvement with Don’s work through the Agency. He’d never meant for things to blur, to get this entangled again in deaths per data-point. Most especially Charlie had never wanted to recalculate required calibers and lines of sight, all the ways to kill a man within a fifteen-foot radius of his own home. All the ways to make it look like an accident, every kill code indicating how long in the freezer (an evening to freeze over, about five hours to suffocate), how many floors up (7 is best, although 4 is enough), the heat of the fire (760 degrees centigrade for ash), time under water (10 minutes till cardiac arrest, 6 minutes till brain death). But the CONDOR codes reappearing after 30 years meant the NSA was involved again, and Charlie could have seen this coming the second Don’s last name showed up anywhere near Awasi’s desk, except for how he didn’t.
It should have been Colby asking Gabriel Ruiz all those questions, David following Ruiz through his café, through his house, figuring out where to stand and what to avoid. And Charlie had known it at the time, also knows he needed that information - to see the assassin’s terrain himself, to run the numbers of strategy and defense one last time. To get someone else’s little brother out of trouble, even if just for a little while.
Then Don, running to Michigan at 6AM on a Thursday and vanishing into the snow. Now Alan, held hostage against his sons’ good behaviour. Charlie has no illusions about why they went after Alan and Don, and left him alone in the house. He wonders if Kuyber’s told Mag yet about how tragically hopeless Charlie is in the field.
But it’s desperate times. So scissors, snip, dark curls falling into the sink; Charlie runs a hand across his new-shorn head, considers various mourning customs and hopes it’s not any sort of omen. He takes a shower, jams an ancient Stockton Rangers cap on his shorn head, then unwraps the key from its tape-built nest in the chalk boxes and walks out to the garage. The two agents trailing him don’t look surprised, and stop obligingly at the door.
The NSA Codebreak Palace had been nothing like this comforting wilderness of cardboard, rattan and slightly musty chalk-covered slate. The NSA had provided him with a two-room temperature-controlled bunker at some carefully unspecified depth, bleached hospital smell seemingly soaked through its gray floors. It had the blankest, most featureless walls Charlie had ever seen. Before Charlie’s Nevada trips, he doesn’t give much thought as to why; in the year between the first and second, working frantically through weekends, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Reading Break to prevent another killing before the codes mutate beyond his reach again, he knows it’s to facilitate the sweeps: the ones for bugs, the ones for bombs, the frequent ones for non-Agency cameras.
He’s realizing he never once asked himself what happened to the teams before him, why the NSA chose to train him, and him alone, to do the work of three. He’d always assumed it was because he was brilliant. He’s starting to wonder if it’s because he does what he’s told.
Once inside the garage Charlie checks the walls himself, looking for the glass-eye shine of a camera, then pulls back the planking hiding the small inner locker, takes out everything he finds and drapes it over all available surfaces. He runs a practiced hand over the gear, checking for rust, fraying, rips, holes. Unnecessary shiny bits. Charlie strips and cleans the gun, carefully, loading up in the gloom with the first of the clips he swiped from the Bureau. He tries not to notice how easily he remembered how as he puts on two layers of gear he hasn't touched since the last summer in Nevada. His brother had been in Albuquerque, his father employed by the City, his mother still well enough to laugh with him on the phone and email pictures of the koi pond. His gloved hands slow on the silencer, remembering. There had been two babies that year, white and blue and gold; the smallest of them is now bigger than his hand. Charlie shrugs on Thorne’s spare over the heavy fire-retardant shirt, checks his range of motion. Winces at the stiffness of unused muscles. But everything still fits well enough, and he has a good vest to replace the battered one he’d left folded neatly on an upper bunk no longer his.
Why can’t you plan in advance of your data? I know that you’re famous for your intuition in your own field. Why can’t it work in this field? Awasi, eyes narrowed in frustration, Charlie in front of Awasi’s desk. The request between them (NSA: reassignment, internal) had been in triplicate, pink and yellow and white; light slanting off Awasi’s ridged knuckles, the frustrated curl of his hands. Charlie’s mouth tightened in response. Awasi had grimaced and reached for the forms.
Charlie refuses to find out how many agents went missing, unaccounted for in the months that follow his unofficial resignation. How many good people vanish, in Kazakhstan and Belgrade and Key West and Rio, because the NSA can’t decode fast enough to warn them. He hates that he knows it was at least two, based on what the codes were when he left them. He hates that he may have trained with both that summer, that he may have waved hello, or been the one to teach them vectorial analysis. He hates that these unnamed lives cost him food and sleep, that he fears his dreams because of them. He knows they have frozen his hands in the middle of more than one upper-class combinatorics seminar, breath choked off, mouth dry. What am I teaching these children to do?
He stretches out, belts on the gun, then holsters and draws, again, again, faster, until he looks up and sees only trajectory and ricochet, until the shine of glass (camera, goggles) is a target to be taken down without thought. Conditions and possibilities of success write themselves across the familiar terrain: there, a good place to hide from cover fire; there, a great place to get shot from three different angles. Charlie takes off his glove, wraps his hand around bare steel. It’s no longer cold to his touch. He can hear himself one year ago, telling Edgerton that he doesn’t believe in guns, voice thin with fear for Don, for his students, for himself. And it had been true. It had been true, then.
Charlie shakes himself back into now, tugs various straps, checks flex and fastenings, then takes it all off, wraps his gun carefully and puts everything back in the duffel bag for transport to the house. He dusts off the lingering chalk and turns to leave, then turns back to scrawl one last message for Don on the cleared board:
d/dx(n)=n-1
It’s not math. It’s reciprocity: inversion and upheaval, the world upside-down from what it seems to be. The derivation of normalcy upended. Charlie can only hope Don will understand.
*
In all his years Larry has never been able to see the bare surface of Charles' desk at this point in the term, let alone walk the perimeter of the bookcases without tripping over something. Last time, it had been the pachinko game; the time before that, a tome on the care and feeding of mice and two ominously empty cages. Today, Larry slips the unused key absently into a pocket and walks through the looking-glass.
His disbelieving eyes sweep the familiar room at a glance: all the books are shelved, and the overflow is stacked neatly in the corners; the disastrous pile of second-round undergraduate midterms has been carefully sorted into MARK and DONE. The DONE stack is significantly higher. And that - well, that is definitely unusual, because Charles always gets the first round of midterms marked and returned within a week of collecting them, but leaves the second round till just before finals review. His reasoning is that he should be focusing on review prep and that the students who really care will ask; so far, that’s worked. Dr. Eppes’ students tend to do very well, unless they have no analytical acumen whatsoever, in which case even Charles Eppes cannot help them.
Larry returns his mind to the present reality, scanning the room for any hints. A loose thread, or a telltale leak - a place to start solving this puzzle. The blinds are straight, the sills are pristine, the plants are watered, the ant farm has new gel to eat and - wait. Larry stops his increasingly frantic cataloguing of impossibilities, feeling the frown deepen further into his brow. That’s Charles’ new work folder, flat and pinned beneath the MARK pile. He usually keeps it well hidden behind two dusty volumes of Euclid he’s had since he was six; it’s a faded orange 11x14 with decrepit elastic bands, stuffed full of Post-its, notebooks, journals, reams of looseleaf and the odd envelope, and it contains the germ of his latest ideas. Larry’s never seen that folder not bursting at the seams. He scrambles around the desk, then stops as his brain catches up to his eyes.
Charles’ desk is a picture of meticulous order and his new work folder is empty; of course it’s a message, and Larry can feel his unease ratchet right into genuine concern. Larry has seen offices like this before, but usually only right before do-or-die presentations. Or That Meeting. Or, once, in preparation for chemotherapy, and Charles knows these stories because of course Larry’s talked about them. Told them many, many times, often enough that Charles jokes about how Larry must be in the pink of health to have such a chaotic workspace, symmetry or no symmetry.
This could be very bad.
Standing at the desk, Larry folds the slim sheaf of unmarked midterms over one arm and picks up that disquietingly empty folder. He lets it fall open, for lack of any other ideas. Larry can feel the worry tense across his eyes and tighten through his jaw; the sudden flash of blue startles him so badly he drops everything he's holding. The folder coasts to the ground amidst a flutter of hopeful proofs; Larry’s mind idiotically comments on Reynolds numbers and produces a friction constant. He freezes, heart picking up speed, remembering Charles’ carefree plane-folding grin and who - and what - had landed next at the door. Larry dives after the sprawled folder and comes up with a very small picture, clipped to the inside: Arizona, or Nevada perhaps? Somewhere hot and red. A mile-high sky, blue and hard; it’s tank-top weather, apparently. Charles has on one in grey, visible beneath the vest, and is laughing into the camera, tanned like mathematicians never are.
Larry remembers commenting on the tan; definitely not last year, and not the year before - that had been their Pasadena paper and Amita’s big presentation - but, yes, the year before that. Mumbai and Chicago, and yes, of course, that fascinating lecture series on Andrew Wiles he’d attended on Charles’ behalf. Charles had taken an unexpected sabbatical that year; unusual, in that he’d just taken one the previous summer, but not completely remarkable. Said sabbatical had certainly not slaked his intellectual thirst; Charles had demanded frequent emails throughout the conference season but declined to give any details of his own. Eventually, Larry had stopped pestering. Mostly.
An overdue vacation, Charles had finally said with a reluctant crimp to his mouth, standing slender and tanned in Larry’s office, more graceful in the August sun but also uncharacteristically tense. Three months of the outdoors - yes, like the year before, but definitely more adventurous. He’d handed Larry a shirt with little grey men in floral patterns and the words Area 51 is for glxzthorps on the back, and asked something about modeling chemical pathways in the brain.
There had been a small shower of reddish dust on the desk as Charles pulled the shirt out of its little plastic bag; he’d wiped it off quickly, the tense, pained flush on his face totally at odds with either his usual lively curiosity or his livewire response to new stimuli. It was around then that Larry noticed how still Charles was standing.
Larry has a compendium of images stashed in his head, of Charles at faculty meetings, lunchtime seminars, even in the middle of a dissertation defence: fidgeting and gesturing, playing with his chalk or a random pen, restless and a little spastic; the remnants of his unused adolescence, perhaps. The energy of youth. Larry can still remember a wide-eyed Charles at his first conference, all of a puppyish sixteen and a half, alternately completely enthused or bored out of his mind, and pretty well always in motion. No hint of that spark had been visible in the man standing wearily by his desk, holding a vaguely silly shirt Larry would wear the next day. Larry had looked his dawning apprehension; Charles had rephrased his question, face and stance brooking no comment.
Obscurely dismayed, Larry had left the subject of Charles’ new frown lines and allowed himself to be guided into a stream of molecular formulae. By the time they'd placed their orders, the conversation had segued into a protracted discussion about whether subatomic physics properly belonged to the realm of logic or the aforementioned little grey men. Those worrisome lines had smoothed out completely over lemon meringue, which Charles ate like he was dying without it, and he'd recovered at least a partial dynamism by the end of his second slice.
When Larry next saw those harsh lines on Charles' face, they had been about Mrs. Eppes, and any questions he might have had then stayed bitter in his mouth.
Sitting at Charles' desk, the little photo in his hands, Larry has a dim memory of the paper plane landing at Don’s feet as he blew through that very door holding a burnt book in his ash-smeared hand. Larry is clearer on Megan's grim eyes and carefully neutral mouth; he distinctly remembers Charles looking down at the blackened page, brows drawn in concentration, Don dark and quiet by his side. Larry's lost count of how many times he's seen it in the last year: the two dark heads, one a tousled tumble and the other short and clipped, bent over a single problem. Then Charles had raised his head, and this Larry wants to forget: there had been no trace of the expected vagueness in those bleak eyes. Larry feels a frisson of disquiet prickle up his spine at the memory of Charles' entire expression flashing still and cold, harsh in a way mere code didn't warrant, just before he'd said something about assassinations and the CIA. Larry slumps back further into the chair, the smell of ash strong in memory, the events of three summers ago rearranging themselves in his mind.
*
Gabriel Ruiz, Lucinda Shea, Terence Kuyber, the NSA. Charlie at 20, marveling at Don’s new badge. Charlie at 8, dazzled by vectorial addition. Those moments have led directly to this one, straight lines with no deviation, to Awasi’s voice out of the blue after three years, gravel and dust on his phone at CalSci. Charlie had felt his past and present as a queasy collision somewhere midchest and had to sit down before he fell over.
It shouldn’t have felt so much like betrayal when Awasi asked when he’d be coming back to finish his work. He’d known it was coming, but still. Goddamn. Charlie cut Awasi off in the middle of a lyrical description of the Colorado joint military project and hung up, slamming the phone just a little. He had stared at the placid blue folder, mind looping through his analyses as he tried to choke back his temper.
Then fifteen minutes only, out to Larry’s to calm down; Charlie had a class that afternoon and couldn’t afford to be guilty and infuriated. He’d come back and the file had been gone; one more point on the line. In a few hours Don would blow through the door with a half-burnt book, a question and a set of codes Charlie sometimes sees when the dreams get really bad. Charlie had never planned to be kitted up and moving out again, gun ready, lines of subtle confusion and attack spinning again through his mind. He’d moved on; these circumstances were never supposed to find him again. Luck be a Lady my ass.
Charlie sheds the agents at the house with a number and extension to call, just in case, while he supposedly heads back to campus. He and Joran are parked not quite two blocks from TechSec’s back entrance in the middle of a grey Wednesday afternoon, Joran fiddling with the scans, Charlie tense and kitted out beside him, adjusting resolution. At CalSci that morning, Charlie’s email turned up a nonsense string containing a set of coordinates and a colour in binary, apparently sent this morning; when he got up from lunch to check the street again there was an unfamiliar dusty green van half a block down and Joran draped over a deckchair on Dr. Edelstein’s porch reading back issues of OK!. They have run this scenario enough times to know how it works; Joran doesn’t even twitch as Charlie walks past and flashes three fingers. The green van pulls up behind him three blocks later, between a coffee shop and the laundromat.
Sidi Joran is a handsome bastard who knows his way around sex and surveillance, and Charlie really, really doesn’t want to know how he got from London to L.A. in less than 17 hours. Suffice to say: it’s likely MI-5 has temporarily lost track of its best Brixton snoop. Charlie is hoping they can both stay lost for at least a few more hours. By then, either his father will be safe or they’ll need all the help they can get.
The rig is set; Charlie is leaning over Joran’s shoulder, watching EM fields and heat signatures glow like ghosts on the screens. The elaborate security system isn’t on, or the building would have lit up their scan like fireflies - and set off the FBI’s like Rudolph and Kwanzaa combined. Joran’s jury-rigged van Eck phreak was able to confirm that much, but he can’t do more till Charlie’s inside. They’ve chosen a much higher frequency for their own communication; it’s not perfect or perfectly safe, but they’re out of time and resources for anything fancier.
So Charlie checks the silencer one last time and takes a deep breath. Slips out the back of the van, engages the three-step approach that will get him unnoticed into the service corridor of Hamilton Technological Securities Inc.’s big glass-fronted vanity address. The real offices are on the third, fifth and sixth floors because Mag isn’t stupid enough to centralize; that shivering kid had told Colby the first part, eventually. Charlie figured the second part himself. There’s Kevlar poking at his chin, extra clips on his belt, an earpiece snug against the curve of his head; Charlie waits out the perimeter sweeps while crouched in shadow, counting time while Joran drops the van back another two blocks. Four and four, pistols only, sweeping left, right, left, average of about eight minutes per circuit. They’re very tight but not overlapping, which means whoever’s running TechSec’s perimeter is not too worried. Professional, he thinks coolly, waits for Joran’s go and moves in as the left sweep disappears around the corner.
The door’s quiet hydraulic hiss can’t be helped, but Charlie puts a piece of foam into the jamb to prevent the giveaway click. Just as he was taught. The gun (his gun, earned, paid for) hangs in his grasp, balanced and deadly. It’s been years but he still remembers how to hold one, how to carry like the pistol’s part of his hand. For the year he’d worked at the NSA, it had been. Charlie tries to be grateful to the Agency for this training, for the merciless pressure that taught him hyperawareness, for the constant fear sapping him down to rage and bone. Red dust. He can’t quite manage it.
Joran’s quiet voice is a familiar rasp in his awareness, directing Charlie according to the faint EM scans on expertly jury-rigged screens lighting the interior of a rental van some office near LAX will never get back now. Of course, the rental company will be paid; Joran’s no amateur. They’ll just never see the van again. Charlie is headed for the back stairs and its bad camera angles, but he checks briefly into that fancy glass atrium to make sure the elevator stops at floor 8 and stays there.
Charlie oils the next door open, quiet and quick, and heads up the back way to the third floor; it’s Mag’s office, the kid said, and the place all Joran’s heat sources are showing up. Not hot enough, though; that’d be the vests. Awasi had made them all learn those faded heat signatures quickly. Charlie’s borrowed boots barely sound against the worn gray linoleum. There are advantages to being small and light enough to ballast a cat, as Joran had pointed out that first uncomfortably warm afternoon, both of them sent alone from their teams, standing awkwardly in the blistering stripes of red-rock sun. Charlie had, perforce, taken the top bunk as the chatter of forty-eight other people setting up and shaking hands and sorting out drawer space hummed around them in six or maybe eight different languages. Makoto Taniyama and his teammate Kevin Coombs were next to them, switching into English for a round of hellos, then Dan Lung and Lorimer Bok: Kyoto, Brisbane, and Bok was from Montreal by way of Johannesburg. Charlie had wished out loud for a babelfish, drawing a few amused stares from the Brits and a surprised laugh from his lanky bunkmate. They’d called each other Dr. Maths and Communications Specialist Joran until they discovered their mutual addiction to Red Dwarf, after which they were Holly and Cat.
Matt Islington and Terence Kuyber, Ithaca, had been diagonally across from them. Charlie hadn’t noticed much beyond Kuyber’s height and Islington’s buzzcut.
Joran is the only contact Charlie kept from either of his agency-sponsored summers; they send each other links to things like Mathra, Superhero Physics and fraudulent ads for caffeinated Cialis. Personal updates are rare, but they’re always signed via amiko. Charlie still hangs onto the wistful Listerian dream that someday everyone will speak Esperanto and all grammar rules will make sense. It hasn’t happened yet.
*
Zbigniew Ollnytzkiej was the kind of teacher students prayed for and then cursed as they struggled through diabolical problem sets at 4AM in the CompSci labs. That second year in Nevada he taught them strategy, or Survival of the Least Stupid, and refused to either shorten his first name or help them pronounce his last. He’d been a spy - “operative, operative,” he always corrected them - during the Cold War, but had defected when it became clear that the Communist Bloc wasn’t going to change its stance on disappearing political dissidents any time soon. The afternoon of the first day, he’d had them decide on the best five ways to approach a motorcade for the purposes of assassination. He’d held up the most ludicrous examples, then told them off about the fifteen different things they could have considered instead of getting themselves blown away by security in the first five minutes. Then he’d criticized their IQs, good looks, and parentage, and sent them off in pairs to do it all over again, properly, while he touched lighter to cigarette and read what Charlie guessed were their Agency files from the previous year. When Zbigniew had looked up he’d brought Charlie to the board to explain vector analyses on bullet trajectories and why they should care. This, Charlie could handle, and it wasn’t long before he had the class acting out vector addition and miming spin from the corners of the room. Zbigniew had smoked and smiled almost benevolently, as Islington looked skeptical and Kuyber’s frown deepened into a scowl. “No idea what died up his bum, you were great,” Bok had grinned when Charlie asked.
All that week, Zbigniew had them pore over famous assassinations in Syria, in Panama and of course in Dallas, TX, analyzing speed of execution against waste of resources, mapping sniper locations against best lines of sight, calculating ratios of blast to bombs to cost. Make lists of the most efficient ways to assassinate by Force, by Stealth, by seeming Accident, classify each attack’s level of difficulty, the risk to the perpetrator, and chances of success, all in neat grids. Then he required his students find effective defenses against each method of attack, based on what had worked in the past, drilling them in proper response until Charlie woke one night to hear Joran muttering attack and response codes in his sleep. They had progressed from diagrams to simulations to physically acting out scenarios of attack and defense, and it was by far Charlie’s favorite class until Zbigniew announced the pop quizzes.
Not paper-based. No, Zbigniew Ollnytzkiej was a good teacher, and his quizzes consisted of one daily unarmed attack on a randomly chosen group of trainees by an unknown assailant, one Operative Z. Three days later it switched to attacks on random pairs. It was bruising, terrifying, demoralizing, and the debriefs next day were painfully humiliating. Kevin Coombs finally cracked near the end of day six, speaking for at least half the class when he cussed Ollnytskiej out for treating them like raw recruits. Zbigniew’s response had been typical.
“Ah, technician. You think death will temper itself for you because you are not a military man? Be easy to dodge, be sweet when it comes? I say to you this: it will not. And the simplest way to temper death is to avoid it entirely. So learn, damn you. Be fast, be smart, and do not shame me by dying for some idiotic reason like forgetting to duck, Mr. Coombs.” Charlie had flinched away from the glint in Zbigniew’s eye.
“Dr. Taniyama, see that he learns. By force if you have to, if you value him enough.” Zbigniew had grinned at them all, unnervingly fierce, and upped the ante to random attacks on lone walkers as well. Still unarmed, although now the operative could approach from all sides.
Life reorganized itself along new axes, keeping pace uneasily with their small arms practice and the classes on ballistics, on open conflict, on stealth. Easy: never be alone. Hard: sometimes you couldn’t protect each other and survive. The stakes in the quizzes rose from fighting unarmed to requiring the use of one implement to having to fight back with whatever was in the room; Joran took a few hits for Charlie until Charlie learned to keep his head down and reject engagement in favor of throwing the nearest heavy implement and running for it, since he couldn’t go for the guns no one was wearing yet.
But slowly, his reflexes improved until Charlie started to think he might actually survive the next month. Then Zbigniew horrified him all over again by announcing that teams would begin planning quizzes for each other, and not only that. Now, for the first time: guns. And paint, paint only, but everyone was to wear tac vests, and the pants and boots to go with them. And get used to carrying at all times, and go next for the gun but first for cover, even if these bullets merely left smears of green or blue across the CIA’s on-loan Kevlar. Charlie swallowed around the rising nausea, picturing twenty-four days of sheer tactical hell, and looked nervously from Coombs’ shaking fingers and Lung’s grim mouth to Joran’s still-serene face. Kuyber’s eyes had lit so fast they’d practically started to glow.
*
Joran’s voice moves Charlie up two floors and across a waste of hurriedly overturned workstations. The second floor is a shambles of melted plastic, shredded paper and ash; clearly Mag and Viti had been in a hurry to clean out their files. He starts to wonder why their team of thugs thought the huge building secure enough to hold a hostage before catching himself; he cannot afford to think of his father now. Alan uncharacteristically pale, face scared into stillness; long hands tied tight, soft mouth efficiently gagged beneath his terrified dark eyes. That terror partly for Don and mainly for Charlie, always for Charlie - Stop. Full stop. They’d found no blood at the house, but that means nothing. Rage and fear combine like a noose; Charlie stumbles, gasping for air. Tries again, can’t find any.
“Hey now, stop that, Holly, you can’t - it’s that complete arse Kuyber, couldn’t see his face before - you still with me? Hols. Charlie. In through the nose… You were right, can’t believe it,” mutters Joran. “He just walked in the front door, open as you please. Watch it in there.”
I knew you were too soft for this. Academics, good God. Charlie shies away from the memory of Terence Kuyber’s curled lip, coughing on his knees, blood in his mouth, sparks of pain whirling from his stomach to his head. In his ear (in the now) Joran’s voice is far too concerned. Charlie shakes his head hard, evens out his breath. Checks again for cameras. No time for this. It’s gotten him in trouble before. He gives Joran a personal all-clear neither of them buys and starts moving again, headed dizzily for the first of two sets of stairs to the third floor.
*
He thought he'd just imagined it, that unfamiliar chill in Charles' familiar eyes, imputed some icy alienation into the angle of the sun and the glare off the desk. But now, staring at the little photo in his hand, Larry has to admit he's no longer certain. He's no longer certain of anything Charles' eyes may or may not have seen, and that is genuinely painful to know. For a moment, Larry is close to tears, but he does not indulge himself. He once told Charles they all had the same number of minutes but this photo could make time a precious relativity indeed.
In retrospect, letting Charles evade this issue may have been less than wise. That his office looks as it does means he’s reasonably sure his chances of returning aren’t high. Charles being Charles, that deduction would be founded on solid calculation. Larry can recall nothing in the last 24 hours that could have brought his erstwhile student to such dire circumstances. He searches his mind for a disaster sufficient to empty this folder, something that could stop the mind of Charles Eppes, and draws a complete blank. And now he is truly, genuinely afraid.
Larry looks again at the image in the picture, noting the presence of tension singing through Charles' stance, even etched into his seemingly carefree smile. Little grey men; red dust: Nevada, then. Neither of these things explain the muscle groups he didn’t even know Charles had. Or the boots, or the heavy vest, or the gun on the belt slung carelessly around his waist, small and black and probably not for show. Charles' right hand drifts just above it, index finger not quite touching its grip. Larry’s seen vests like that before, mainly in movies before the last twelve months made them an increasingly large part of his weekly realities.
Larry flips the photo; For the smegging smart smegger is written in someone else’s lolloping hand across the back. He gets the reference, but doesn't recognize the writing. At this point, it’s just one more thing he doesn’t know. How had Charles phrased it? I have a friend at the NSA who knows someone from the CIA...
Larry has honestly never feared for his best student like this: not during the whole Penfield debacle, not when Amita finally walked to Astrophysics and didn’t come back, not the afternoons Charles spent staring at the same page in his texts while several blocks away Don and Alan kept an increasingly difficult vigil.
Not even during P vs. NP. No, not even then, because then, Charles had still been working.
And Larry may sometimes seem like he’s not paying attention, but he knows that the sum of Charles Eppes’ perfect desk and what was apparently a quasimilitary training camp in the Nevada desert gets him an arrow pointing directly to the FBI. Larry salvages the MARK pile, takes the photo with him and goes looking for Megan, but not before carefully replacing the empty folder behind the Euclid, where Amita would find it, should she care to look.
*
To Part the Second