Reading Time: 89 Minutes

Title: To Fix What’s Broken One Last Time
Author: ImaliFegen89
Fandom: Burn Notice
Genre: Angst, Action Adventure, Crime Drama, Episode Related, Het, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Relationship(s): Michael Westen/Fiona Glenanne
Content Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Canon-level/graphic violence, canon-level mental/physical torture, mild suicidal thoughts, non-consensual drugging, non-explicit sexual content, canon-level discussions/hallucinations of child abuse, DIscussion-domestic violence , death-minor characters, canonical deaths, kidnapping, explicit language, canon-level alcoholism, use of bio-weapons.
Beta: Rangersyl, Taiamu
Alpha: Aethir
Word Count: 187,781
Summary: After killing his mentor, Tom Card, Michael decided to surrender instead of running away. He thought that was the best way to keep his friends and what was left of his family safe. Little did he know that fate had other plans.
Artist: AngelicInsanity

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Part Seven – A New life, A New Mission

Chapter 19

14-3
13th Street
Little Gables
Miami

Nobody really had any idea what the transfer of a few hundred dollars to the mysterious bank account meant, or why it had to be broken down to three small deposits from two banks. Michael stubbornly remained tight-lipped about his little secret code and how it worked, much to the tangible frustration of Pearce and Jesse. All they knew was it was an account in the Cayman Islands, and that it was a brand new account that had no prior transactions.

The reply in the form of another small amount appeared in the account within two hours of Michael’s deposit to all of their surprise. Even Michael had looked a little taken aback, clearly not having expected a response that fast. Then the entire grand total of six hundred something dollars disappeared from the account to make space for three more ridiculous amounts – transactions that looked like they generated from three different countries – which somehow turned out to be a contact number.

The entire process was starting to give Fiona a headache, and it was a palpable relief to all concerned when Michael finally made contact with the terrorist like a normal human being – over the phone – and set up a time and a date to meet.

Which was why Fiona showed up at the house in Little Gables three days after the initial contact, so that she could drop him off at South Beach where the meeting was supposed to happen.

She found him already dressed in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and he was sitting on one of the chairs tying up the laces of his boots.

“Ready to go?” She asked breezily when he looked up.

She saw one of his eyebrows climb up in silent inquiry even as a small smile broke out on the corners of his lips.

“Hey, we’re going to the beach,” she said, and twirled around to give him a good look of her peach sundress. She had it on good authority that it was one of his favourites. “I’m going to enjoy the sunshine and the sound of the waves with sand between my toes.”

“After the meeting,” Michael, the killer of all fun and games, said with all the seriousness of a totem pole. “You’re going to have to stay out of sight with Pearce. Remember, there’s a good chance, Sonya knows you.”

“Fine, fine.” She rolled her eyes with an exaggerated sigh. “I’ll make sure your terrorist won’t see me. Shall we then?”

Instead of getting up to leave, Michael sat back on his chair and pinned her with an expression she had only seen on his face when he wanted to dwell into things he usually avoided. Most of the time when he decided to open up to her, it was a good thing. But sometimes it wasn’t. She had a feeling this was going to be one of those rare times where it was a bad thing.

“Fi, can we talk?” His quiet, hesitant question confirmed her dread.

“Yeah.” She said, and settled next to him with a smile designed to hide her apprehension. “We have time.”

Michael had his gaze fixed on the ugly, scarred spot on the table’s surface when he spoke. “There’s something I have to tell you before we go any further down this… operation.”

Fiona had had her misgivings, intuitive feelings that had snuck up on her when she had watched Michael talking about Sonya. She had noticed the way his tone, mannerisms, and the look in his eyes very subtly changed whenever her name came up. She had firmly dismissed those suspicions, chalking it up to Michael dealing with his rough experience, because it was easier than agonising over things she had no control over.

Now, his entire demeanour told her that what she had felt initially and chosen to ignore was right after all.

“Is it about you and Sonya?” She murmured.

“Yes.”

That was not the answer she wanted to hear. “Did you two–” she started, and let her voice trail off, not really wanting to put words to it.

“Yes.”

His admission was a barely audible whisper. But to her it was like thunder echoing inside her skull. The rational part of her knew that it was completely his choice and it was up to him to decide whom he slept with or not. Their relationship had ended when Michael surrendered to authorities, and Fiona had moved on to find someone else while Michael had gone to prison. So it really shouldn’t have bothered her as much as it did to learn that he had found some comfort with another woman after going through an awful experience.

That was, however, the reasonable part, and it only was a very little part compared to the rest of her that wanted to scream and roar in raging fury. He had always been hers, he still was… if she had any say in it. It had never mattered whether they were separated by a mere street, state, country or a damned continent. They had a bond, a soul deep connection, that transcended time and distance.

How dare that bitch? How dare he?

Through the red haze that descended in her mind at his admission, another small logical part did its best to calm her down and make her think through it. That part drew her attention to Michael with monumental effort, and got her to notice how he was barely holding it together. It made her notice that he wasn’t sitting there like a pale statue because he was trying to gloat, or rub it in her face. It urged her to set aside her own rage and the fear hidden beneath it for a moment and try to figure out what had driven him to do that. To listen to what he had to say because he clearly looked like he needed to talk about it.

“She came back for you and helped you out of a rough patch,” Fiona murmured when Michael continued to stay silent, and was quietly proud that her voice stayed more or less level, “That’s what you said the other day.”

“It was just after we escaped,” Michal said, his tone flat, unemotional…almost numb. If he had noticed any of her emotions through her tone, he didn’t show it. “I wasn’t doing that great. Had a bleeding hole in my upper thigh because I caught a ricochet just as we ducked out.”

“We were told that Zhirkova moved fast and had the police force of the entire east coast chasing after you when you did,” Fiona chimed in when Michael went quiet again. Pearce had given them all a summary of Michael’s debrief when she had met them at their resort back in Cuba.

“Yeah,” he said, picking up from where he left off. “We got cornered in a tight space a few hours into our run. I offered to stay back and cover her escape, mostly because I didn’t want her to kill any cops. To be honest, I wasn’t in any shape to be moving much anyway–”

“You got her out,” Fiona said, trying to piece it together.

“I covered her escape,” he said, his voice still quiet and without inflection in a way that had Fiona feeling very much worried. “She took off in a way that got them all to chase after her, giving me a chance to get the hell out too. I made it to an abandoned shop about two miles out. The plan was to stay there until dark, find some first aid for my leg, and then get moving the next day.”

It didn’t sound like things had gone according to plan. “What happened?” she asked, dreading the answer.

“I passed out,” Michael gave a half hearted shrug, his dull gaze still focused on the damned spot on the table. “Didn’t realise I’d lost too much blood. Either too tired, too beaten up, or didn’t care enough to notice.”

“Michael!” She exclaimed in horror, abandoning her previous caution to keep her emotions in check. She didn’t care that he saw exactly how she felt about such a nonchalant admission of something so terrible.

Her outburst finally got him to turn towards her and meet her shocked gaze with a haunted one of his own.

“I was in a bad place, Fi, in more ways than one.” He said brokenly before looking away again.

That was when she noticed that her own hand was wrapped around his wrist in a death grip, and apart from fixing his gaze where she held onto him, he did nothing to move or dislodge her hand.

“The truth is, if she hadn’t come back when she did, I don’t think I’d be here right now. I woke up to find her holding a knife over me, and the first thing I thought was that she’d at least make it quick. I was too tired to put up a fight.”

Throughout all the years she had known him and the extremely dangerous and volatile life he led, through all the terrible things they had lived together and apart, Fiona had never, ever seen Michael stop fighting. When his determination wavered trying to overcome a seemingly impossible obstacle, his inherent stubbornness would take over and find a way around it, or take everyone down along with him. Or it would be the relentless drive he had in him to see everyone he cared about and loved safe, that surfaced to carry him through the worst situations.

And through it all, the one thing she had never, ever seen him do was hang his head down to accept and welcome a permanent end.

It frightened her to the core to hear that admission from him. She felt her fingers tighten even more around his thin wrist of their own volition, as if her hold alone would be enough to drag him out of the dark terrible pit he seemed to have lost himself in.

“Instead of finishing me off, she opened up a bag full of medical supplies and patched me up,” Michael said, seemingly unaware that Fiona was on the brink of snapping his wrist.

“Was that…” she swallowed, and tried again. “Was that when it happened?”

He nodded and let out a long sigh that left him slumping in on himself. “She said she needed it.”

Fiona didn’t give a damn about what the terrorist had needed.

“What about you?” She demanded, her voice shaking. If that woman had done something Michael hadn’t wanted, at a time he hadn’t really been in a position to defend himself, Fiona would save everyone the trouble in a few minutes by shooting the bitch in the head. Contracts with the CIA be damned.

“I guess I wanted to feel something other than numbness for a while, something to remind me what it felt like to live again.” Michael murmured haltingly, making it clear that it had been something he had needed at the time, too. That was another curve ball she didn’t see coming. He was full of them. That changed things.

“I wasn’t terribly keen on keep going at that point, you understand. I didn’t think I had any reason to.”

She let go of his hand to wrap her arm around his shoulder, pulling him closer, which he allowed. There was a red line forming around the skin on his wrist where she had gripped him, she noticed, and tried not to feel too guilty about adding another bruise to his already impressive collection of fading ones.

She hated the sense of weariness and defeat radiating from his tone…his entire mind, body and soul. Nate’s death, Card’s murder and all those cursed months he had spent in that hellhole had done far too much damage, more than she had ever imagined possible.

What was worse was the fact that now she had a goddamned terrorist to be grateful for pulling Michael out of the deep end, where she could have lost him for good.

“Michael,” she said, her mind scrambling around to make sense of what he had just confessed, and her own conclusions. “Sonya came back for you. She risked her own life to get back to you.”

“And I still don’t know why she did that.”

Because it was obvious enough to her, too, Fiona realised, feeling all kinds of exasperated at him and more than a little enraged at her. Sonya had known him only for a week, and that had been enough for her to risk everything to make sure he got through it alive too. Michael was an absolute nightmare when it came to making friends, but when everyone involved got past that initial stage of wanting nothing more than to kill or maim him, all of them bonded to him with such loyalty, it was a scary thing to witness at times.

Fiona had to admit that the same thing happening to Sonya wasn’t even that far out in the realm of possibility. They had shared a common enemy, been prisoners in the same place, shared the horrors of torture, and kept each other from going insane or breaking, before finally uniting over a shared goal to get out of it together.

Fiona understood something about connecting over shared trauma, and it was obvious to her that this woman now meant something to Michael in a way he hadn’t revealed to anyone else. She didn’t know how deep that connection went, how much he cared, or what he felt about it.

Mostly, she didn’t know what to do with that realisation, herself.

“Are you going to be able to do this, Michael?” she asked quietly after a long moment, “You’re going to have to look the woman who actually saved you from certain death in the eyes and betray her at the end.”

If she knew him at all – and she did, more than anyone else – she knew it would break him. Just how much was the question.

“I have to,” he swallowed thickly, and she felt a tremor run down his back. “We weren’t enemies when we were in captivity together, while on the run, or when things happened. But, now we are, even if she doesn’t know it. I have to do this because I made a promise to my Mom…”

Fiona closed her eyes, deflating. It had been her idea to bring Madeline, thinking that was their only chance at saving Michael from himself. “I’m so sorry–”

“No, no,” he said quickly, and surprised her by covering her hand resting on his shoulder with his own. It was the first time he had actually touched her for no other reason than to offer a little comfort.

“I’m glad you brought her to me,” he said sincerely, squeezing her hand once softly before letting go. “I needed that, very much. Thank you for making it happen.”

“It wasn’t only because you wanted to keep us safe that you wanted to go back, was it?” Fiona asked when the painful realisation finally dawned. “You wanted to keep her safe too, didn’t you? At least, not be directly responsible for her fate–”

“Can’t always get what we want,” Michael sighed. “It’s life.”

“What will you do, Michael?”

“My job,” he replied, sounding mostly like his old self again. “Am I going to lose sight of the mission when it comes to her? No, I don’t think so. But, am I going to do my best to see if there’s a way to get her out and maybe turn her around? Yeah, I am.”

“What if she’s in too deep?”

“Then I’ll do my best to make her end quick and painless.” He tried his best to keep his sorrow hidden, but she heard it as clear as day nevertheless. It made something in her break right along with him.

“Michael–”

He turned around then, to lock his shining gaze with hers. The raw emotions swirling in those hazel depths were more than enough to draw her complete focus to him.

“Listen, Fi,” he said, his voice filled with simple sincerity, “You’re the only woman I ever really loved, and still do, even though I don’t know what we are to each other anymore. I want you to know that I’m going to need your help on this one. Even if at times it might look like I’m losing my mind, I’ll need you to trust me that I know what I’m doing and I haven’t lost sight of what matters most to me.”

“Anything you need.” She promised, just as earnestly.

“Thank you,” he said, checking the time on his watch and grimacing a little. “It’s time to go.”

No, it wasn’t. Not just yet. Fiona held his face in her palms, keeping her touch soft, and willing his cold skin to warm up a little. “Michael, there’s one thing you need to know too,” she said.

Michael closed his eyes and melted in her hold. “What?”

“That you’re the only man I ever truly loved too, and I do still love you,” she said, and smiled when he opened his eyes in shock, a sort of reluctant hope shining through the pain that was still lingering there. “I want you to keep that in mind. No matter where we are or where we stand, we still have that. The rest we’ll figure out once all of this is done.”

“It’s a deal.” Michael murmured with an answering smile.

She let go of him to hook her hand around his elbow. “Let’s go see your terrorist, then.”

Overwatch
South Beach

The surveillance vans were always the same. They were hot, stifling, cramped and had no windows. You were always required to share it with one or two more people, along with the computer screens, sound setups and other surveillance equipment, which made being cooped inside it for longer periods without feeling claustrophobic a difficult task. The only consolation Fiona found when she dropped onto the empty chair Pearce pointed to was the armoury that was attached to the panel next to her. It was a small cupboard, but at least, it had a few decent looking rifles, flash grenades and a stash of C4.

“Oh, wow! Thanks,” Pearce said, sounding a little surprised when Fiona handed her the container of two ice teas she had with her.

“Don’t give me that look,” she snapped when the CIA agent raised an eyebrow at her own drink, which was a whiskey double, neat. “I need it.” And she really, really did.

“Feel free.” Pearce muttered, and handed the extra drink to the tech seated by the video feed before sitting next to Fiona. “What do we have, Derrick?”

“We have a clear visual on the meeting site, ma’am,” Derrick the tech replied softly, and toggled a knob experimentally to zoom in and out of the view from the camera.

Michael was seated by a drinks table under a beach umbrella away from the beach going crowd, under the shade of a tree. He had his sunglasses on to protect his sight from the glare of the sun shining relentlessly on the waves. He also had an ice tea before him, the one he had already half finished drinking.

“Sounds?”

“Checking.”

Fiona knew that Michael was wearing one of the new generation earwigs. He had complained that it went so far up his ear canal it felt like it tickled his brain. But he agreed that a little discomfort was much preferable to having Sonya discovering she was being targeted and proceeding to react violently.

“Argh!” Michael’s sudden groan of pain and the ear-splitting squeal came through the comms on speaker at the same time.

“Sorry! Calibrating–” Derrick, the little asshole, slapped a few dials hurriedly while Pearce glared at the back of his skull. Fiona idly contemplated whether she should have added a few drops of the poison she carried in a vial in her handbag into the moron’s iced tea.

On the feed, she saw that Michael had managed to cover his surprise by burying his head in his hands, pretending to stave off a headache. Which was a good thing; because the last thing they needed was for Sonya to show up while the surveillance tech tried to kill Michael with his flagrant incompetence.

“Let’s not do that again,” Pearce growled at the tech before opening the two-way channel to talk to Michael. “Sorry about that, Michael. How do you copy?”

On the feed, Michael took a sip of his drink to hide his response. “Five by five.”

The comms unit he had on was completely untraceable, and they had direct control of it from the surveillance van. Derrick the tech, if he managed to overcome his nerves and keep it together, could kill the signal and turn it on remotely in case Sonya decided to rock up with a scanner to check for listening devices.

Fiona noticed the tall, blond woman in a pair of well-fitting cargo pants and a casual button up shirt the same moment Pearce did. She tried to blend in with the rest of the tourists and the beachgoers by leaving her hair down and wearing a flashy pair of sunglasses that covered most of her face. But nothing could hide the precise way she moved, or the casual way she scanned her surroundings for possible threats. To the trained eye, she looked like a stalking tiger when she approached Michael from his blind spot.

“On your six, Michael,” Pearce said softly over the comms before glancing at Fiona. “Well, she’s uh, very different from what our grainy images led us to believe.”

“Yeah,” Fiona agreed, staring at the woman with a tangle of emotions she didn’t know how to separate. “She could pass for a runway model, if she wasn’t moving like she’s conducting solo urban warfare.”

“And she’s strapped.”

Pearce was right. There was a telltale bulge on her back which meant a handgun. There was also the handle of a ka-bar peeking out of her left boot.

“Michael’s not,” Fiona said, wishing for the hundredth time that the stubborn idiot had listened to her and taken a gun. She tipped the glass she held in her hand and let all the contents pour down her throat. The burn that followed was satisfying, and Fiona let her frustration fade a little with it. “Let’s hope his show of trust isn’t rewarded with a bullet to his skull.”

“Or a knife to the gut,” Pearce added, her eyes glued to the screen.

Michael stood up calmly when Sonya was only five feet away from him, causing her to freeze. He turned around and took off his sunglasses, offering her a small, inviting smile. Fiona knew that smile. It was the one he usually reserved for his friends, and it looked sincere. Even worse was the bright grin that lit up the Russian’s face, because she looked like she was genuinely happy to see him, too. After a quick hug and a pair of kisses she planted on his cheeks, they sat down at the table. Sonya asked for a bottle of their best vodka from a passing waitress before turning to face Michael.

Then she started to speak. Fiona let out a soft curse and shared a glace with an equally frustrated Pearce. It seemed that Sonya was determined to conduct their meeting in Russian, and Michael was more than happy to oblige.

“Make sure you record everything,” Pearce said to her tech with a grimace.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Fiona let out a long sigh and settled into wait.

Outside Cafe Theodora
South Beach

“To good health.” Sonya held up her glass, her blue eyes twinkling with amusement in the afternoon sun.

“And new friends.” Michael clinked his glass against hers and drank the shot, letting the potent spirit burn all the way down his throat.

“This is the last place I’d have imagined you’d show up, Michael,” she said, glancing around at all the tanned, scantily clad crowd around them, “Seeing as you’re a very popular man with all your intelligence agencies.”

Michael was privately glad that his fugitive status since his kidnapping hadn’t been changed. The casual way she said it implied that they had their ways of getting information from places they really shouldn’t. If even a whiff of his short foray into the Cuban embassy were to get out, he knew he could add Sonya’s network to the people who hunted for him.

“Believe me,” he said, pouring another round of shots for both of them, “This is the last place I wanted to be, too. But I had to. I needed to tie up some loose ends before I vanished without a trace. And of course… there’s this.”

He slid the thumb drive across the table towards her before gulping down the second shot. Sonya did the same and stared at the drive with a frown.

“What is this?”

“The Collective,” Michael said, and the way her eyes slightly widened told him that she knew exactly what he was talking about. “Everything they ever had on anyone, it’s all there. They’re also not in business anymore.”

“That’s very generous of you,” she said with a sharp smile that did nothing to hide the glinting suspicion in her gaze. He knew she was wondering how he got his hands on the same people who were responsible for her capture. He decided to stay quiet. He was a spy after all, and he was not in the habit of sharing his ways, and methods of how he got the job done.

“You went through all of this trouble just for me?”

“No, not only for you,” Michael said softly, letting his voice go low and heavy. He wanted to let her feel his grief over what he was saying, which wasn’t really that difficult to convey after, well…everything.

“I wanted a last chance to see my friends and family,” he said, fixing his gaze on the crashing waves in the distance. “One last job for the road, you could say,” he let the raw emotion in his expression fade a little when he turned back to face her, “And yeah, I wanted to be able to give you something back. I owe you for saving my life.”

Sonya’s unease dissolved into a smile again. “Well, in that case, this is a great start,” she said, narrowing her eyes at the drive in a way that reminded him of a bloodthirsty predator for a moment, “Taking this organisation down was the next item on my list.”

Michael had a feeling her way of doing that would have probably involved a hit squad or an air strike, not all the trouble they went through to get it done with as little damage as possible.

“Happy to help,” he said.

“I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this is not the only reason you wanted to see me,” she said, rolling the drive nimbly between her fingers.

“And you’d be right,” Michael admitted, and cocked his head to the side to regard her in silence. “I kept thinking about what you said when we were back in Cuba,” he said finally, after a long moment Sonya allowed him to have without interrupting,

“You talked about how you found something worthwhile to be a part of,” he murmured, thinking back to the first time he had spoken to her, “All this time when I was serving my country in the army, and then the CIA, that’s how I used to feel. That I was a part of something bigger than myself, and what I was doing – no matter how close I had to skirt the line to get things done… doing bad things and even worse things at times – It was that feeling, that belief that it all meant something in the bigger picture, was the life line that kept me from drowning…”

“And you lost it when your own people turned their back on you,” she said when he trailed off, her face darkening in a way that told him she also had her own demons, “That was when you realised you’d been serving… wasting your life away on a lie.”

“You know the feeling, then,” Michael said.

“I do.” She agreed.

“I’m lost, Sonya,” he said, pouring as much sincerity as he could into the confession, “I– I need something to hold onto again. Being what I am is all I’ve ever known, and now that I’ve lost it, the world doesn’t really make much sense to me anymore. I don’t know how to keep going.”

“I know you think that’s what you want, Michael,” Sonya said, her voice full of understanding, “But this organisation…what I’m part of, isn’t just a job.”

“I know what it is.”

“No, you don’t. Not really,” she said kindly, “To be with us, you have to be willing to make sacrifices… extreme sacrifices.”

“Sacrifice,” Michael let out a humourless chuckle, trying to blink away Nate’s fear-filled eyes and the blood that covered his face, fruitlessly, “I know sacrifice. I can handle it.”

“I’m not talking about your training,” she insisted, “To do what we do, you have to be willing to give up everything. I went straight from the G.R.U. to this. This is the only life I know. I never had a chance for friends or a family. Don’t throw whoever you have left away lightly.”

“I have nothing left to throw away,” Michael snapped through clenched teeth, trying very hard to keep his voice from raising or breaking, and lied to her face. “My friends, they moved on, built new lives without me. I look in their eyes, and all I see is pity. My brother is dead. My mother will never forgive me for getting him killed. This thing that you’re part of… You’re the only thing I have left.”

There was a heavy silence in the air between them, a moment they both shared to commiserate the losses, heartbreak, grief and pain they had both lived through in their lives. Michael managed not to flinch in surprise when he felt her hand close lightly around his left wrist, over the same place where Fiona’s death grip earlier had left a reddened bruise.

“That’s one thing we have in common.” She said very quietly, and when Michael looked up, he saw her looking at him with the same intensity she had looked down at him when he had held her in his arms.

“I’m a fugitive,” he said, keeping his arm resting on the table under her hold with effort, “I’m being hunted for the attack in the Dela Garcia airfield on top of my kidnapping, which they see as me breaking out. It won’t be long before the CIA goes after everyone who’s ever had the slightest connection to me. I don’t want them to keep paying for the things I’m responsible for even when I’m no longer in the picture. Your people are my only hope to keep my family safe and there’s nothing I won’t do to make it happen.”

She listened to him with a kind of rapture that made him feel somewhat unnerved.

“Is it nice?”

Michael frowned at the non-sequitur. “What is?”

“Having friends and family you truly care about, that you’d go to any lengths to protect? And having them do the same for you? Being with someone who could love you even when they know exactly who and what you are?” She asked with almost child-like curiosity, increasing his unease even more. “I just always wondered what it would be like to have a personal life as well as a professional one.”

“Sometimes it is,” Michael said slowly, blending in as much as he could of the truth with what he felt she wanted to hear, “It’s nice to have a family to belong to or have someone to share your life with… until it’s not. The kind of lives you and I lead, they have a tendency to catch up with us when we least expect it. Then, when the storm dies down, all you’re left with is a lot of pain, disdain and blame.”

“Was it worth it, though?” She wanted to know, “Coming back to your family the way you did?

“Honestly,” said Michael, sighing, “I don’t know.”

She let go of his hand to grab the bottle of vodka and pour them another round. Michael downed the shot like a man parched, relieved at the reprieve from having to dig so deep into himself and lay it all open in front of a woman he had made a pact to destroy.

“Randall’s death left an opening in our network,” she said after placing her glass back on the table, her tone once again business-like. “A very significant one, not to mention the grief and sorrow of losing a comrade. My boss would like to give you a chance.”

Michael wasn’t expecting that. He had been prepared to play the waiting game. “What?”

“I’ve spoken to him about you,” she said, flashing him another private smile. “Let’s just say I had a feeling.” Then she dug into one of the pockets and pulled out a passport and an airline ticket. “Here. Your travel documents. They are good. They won’t get flagged in any system,” she continued while Michael studied the documents. She was right. Even he couldn’t tell they were fakes. It had him under the alias Walter Darcy, and the same year of birth with a different month and a date.

“You need to arrive in the Bahamas on the 12th,” she said, “Five days from now. Someone will be there to meet you at the Nassau International airport. I can’t promise how it will go. It is up to the boss to decide whether you’ll fit in with us or not, but I have faith.”

“Thank you.” Michael said.

“You also need to bring with you a full and complete account of your history,” she went on, “Your work history as a spy from the day you were recruited until the day you were burned, and everything else you did after, until your arrest.”

For a spy, preparing a job history was infinitely more complicated than updating a resume. Since official files of an operative were usually classified, and in Michael’s case, didn’t even really exist anymore, he knew he would have to fill up a few books with handwritten records of his lengthy career.

Then there were the years he spent stuck in Miami, doing odd jobs here and there while relentlessly pursuing the people who burned him, which ultimately led to his less than favourable liaisons with Carla, Victor, Gilroy, Vaughn, Simon and Anson.

The request also was a clue to what he could expect when he made it to the meeting. If they wanted a record of history, that meant he would be interrogated about it, everything checked and rechecked for even the slightest deception. He would be fine as long as he could keep his facts straight. Otherwise, he just might not live through the process.

“Why?” Michael swallowed, not bothering to cover up his unease at the request. He was a goddamned spy, and what she had just asked of him was akin to telling him to show up glaringly naked in the Bahamas.

“So that we’ll know what we’re getting ourselves into, of course,” she replied with a glint in her eyes, almost as if enjoying his discomfort.

“Fine,” Michael said, and poured himself another shot of vodka that went down his throat like a stream of liquid fire, “You’ll have it.”

Sonya stood up from the table, signalling their meeting was at an end. Maybe it was all the vodka he had been chugging, or the fact that her entire presence left him feeling off-kilter that had Michael feeling absolutely not obligated to follow suit. So he stayed where he was, matching her amused expression with a supremely unimpressed one of his own.

Then, as he watched, her features darkened a little, and she looked away to fix her gaze on the unconcerned, barely-clad crowd sunbathing on the beach. She looked like she was having some kind of an internal battle over something, and Michael stayed quiet, letting her take her time to make a decision.

“One more thing–” she murmured finally, rather hesitantly.

“Yeah?”

“If you see your friends and family before you leave, tell them to have faith too,” she said, having made the decision to share a little after all. “And not to believe everything they see on the news. Tell them that everything will work out as it’s supposed to.”

Before Michael could insist on more clarification on that cryptic remark, she leaned forward to place another soft kiss on his cheek.

“Until we meet again, Michael,” she said, and was gone.

Overwatch

“She just got into her rental and drove off,” Pearce’s voice in his ear said while Michael took his time finishing the rest of the iced tea he had abandoned in favour of the vodka shots. “You’re clear to move.”

Michael gave it ten more minutes, just in case Sonya had decided to leave a spotter to keep tracking his movements. When nothing of interest stood out, he got up from his seat, collected his shades and strolled casually away from the beach towards the surveillance van that was parked fifty yards back, wedged between a coffee shop and a Radio Shack.

Pearce chose to greet him with a calculating gaze while Fiona sat on a corner chair with her arms folded against her chest, her eyes blazing. He wasn’t quite sure if it was whiskey he could still smell in the air, or something else.

In his periphery, he could see the tech cropping up a few clear shots of Sonya from the recording on his screen, possibly to update the files they had on her with a proper, identifiable image.

“Well,” said Pearce, patting the seat next to her in an invitation for him to sit. “How’d it go?”

“Uh,” Michael said, pulling out the passport and the ticket she had given him out of his back pocket, “Better than I expected.”

“What’s that?” Fiona narrowed her eyes.

“Travel documents,” he replied, “Apparently. I have an appointment in the Bahamas on the 12th.”

Pearce took a quick look before passing it to Fiona. “These are good.”

“Yeah.”

“So you weren’t the only one with a surprise.”

“Nope,” Michael said, agreeing with Fiona. “She said she had a feeling and spoke to her leader already. I’m supposed to provide them with a complete record of everything I’ve been doing until I went to prison. So I’m guessing I could expect a good, long interrogation session in my future.”

“Michael, this is moving faster than we thought.”

Pearce had a point. It was almost as if they had been waiting for him to make the first move so they could pounce on him. He could understand that Burke’s death may have left a hole in their otherwise flawless network, but it still made him quite uneasy that they already had him singled out as a possible candidate to fill the position.

“Tell me about it,” Michael sighed.

“What else did she say?”

“Nothing much, really,” Michael said, thinking back to Sonya’s expression that had seemed quite genuine, “Other than warning me that this network is something that’s going to require a lot of dedication and extreme sacrifices on my part. I had a feeling she wanted me to think very carefully before committing all the way in.”

“Despite showing up with papers and demands for what basically amounts to your job interview?” Fiona raised an eyebrow, scoffing.

“I know,” said Michael, “It’s confusing.”

“What’s confusing was trying to follow a conversation that happened entirely in Russian,” Fiona muttered. Michael had to bite back a smile. He had a feeling that was part of the reason she was irritated.

Pearce unplugged a thumb drive from the laptop she had behind her and handed it to him with a smile that was a little on the sharp side, “Here you go. You can fix that for us.”

Michael frowned. “What’s this?”

“Your entire conversation,” she said, “That you’re going to transcribe in English.”

“You’re giving me homework, too?” He muttered, shaking his head pitifully.

“Should have done your little meet and greet in English if you didn’t want the extra work.”

Michael pocketed it with a sigh. Fiona did have a point. But he was glad it went the way it had. It had been hard enough to open himself up to a woman he barely knew, and he was grateful for the little privacy the language barrier offered. The words on a document were much less personal than having to utter them with a live audience.

“I’ll have it done by the evening and email you the report,” he murmured.

“Fantastic.”

“There was one other thing that struck me as odd,” he said, recalling Sonya’s last words to him.

“What is it?”

“She said to have faith about this meeting on the 12th,” he said quietly, “She also asked me to let my friends and family know to keep faith as well, and not to believe everything they see on the news…”

Pearce exchanged a concerned glance with Fiona before turning back to him. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I have no idea.”

Chapter 20

Temporary Command Centre – CIA Field Office
Nassau
The Bahamas

Five days Later

As far as command centres went, it was far better than the one Max Newman or Brady Pressman had. Not that Sam had any lingering grudges against the two good men who were now dead, but neither of them had managed to acquire a classy, cosy set up as the one Dani Pearce had managed to get her hands on.

Newman had a dump he called a hotel that had bad water, bad ventilation, and a terrible room with one bed for four of them for the op they had done back in Venezuela. He had tried to offer a free mini-bar as a consolation, which had contained the most horrible beer in the world.

Pressman had an even shittier abandoned building back in Panama when they went after Tyler Gray, and no amount of cool gadgets he had brought along with him made up for the fact that the place didn’t even have running water or electricity. Worse thing was they had ended up losing almost all of the goodies to a mercenary squad before the op had even started.

Pearce had a private import/export warehouse only half a mile from the Nassau airport. The place was a fortress with a ten foot wall all around it, and had armed guards at the four corner posts and at the single entry/exit point, guarding them 24/7. According to the papers, it belonged to a multinational company that dealt in manufacturing, sorting and distributing medical and surgical equipment, which had its parent company based in Maine. In reality, however, it belonged to the CIA, and was utilised by the company as one of their bases of operations in the Caribbean ocean.

Apart from the cavernous space it offered for the command centre, it even had a few nicely-appointed single rooms with relatively good beds to serve as accommodation for its users. The fridge in the designated kitchen area even had beer, to his utter delight. After what they had already experienced, it was a hell of an improvement. The only downside, in Sam’s opinion, was the fact that the warehouse was a completely closed, windowless unit, and the bright fluorescent lighting was their only source of illumination – a condition that kept everyone inside blessedly ignorant of the changes of day and night outside.

The command centre was buzzing like a hive when he wandered in to see what was happening. He found Pearce standing before the live feeds, while, at their stations, a team of analysts went about compiling all the data they were getting from around the entire country.

There were nine screens in total, and Sam knew they had access to all security feeds on the airport, as well as access to their operating systems and communications. They also had access to flight control, traffic cams, and law enforcement systems and operations. On top of that, there was also a satellite that floated in space somewhere, patiently waiting at their beck and call to track whatever Pearce demanded.

The ex-operator in him admired the sweet, no-expense-spared setup, and it also told him exactly how desperately the CIA wanted this network burned to the ground. What worried him was their own finicky luck when it came to well-funded, well-planned and well-equipped operations. While those kinds of operations were an absolute dream come true on paper, they tended to go sideways more often than not. Most of the time, they found themselves either having to abandon all the good stuff in a hurry, or get stuck with all the support they’d ever need but unable to use any of it because the op went down somewhere else.

“I’ve always wanted to take a vacation in the Bahamas.”

Sam turned around to see Jesse spinning in half- circles on one of the workstation chairs, his eyes glued to the security feed on the arrival terminal. “Wanted to see if the beaches and the weather were different from Miami.”

“Well, is it?” Sam asked, sipping his beer.

“Who knows,” Jesse shrugged, “I haven’t even seen the damned sky since we got here two days back.”

“Good thing it’s not a vacation then,” Sam said. “I mean, we’re here to watch Mike make nice with terrorists.”

“I vote to take down an Asia-based terrorist network next time,” Jesse declared with a grin. “I’m thinking about a nice long stay in the Maldives, in one of those huts they have right in the open sea.”

“I’d hope not.”

Sam whirled around to see Fiona behind him. She was staring intently at the large screen in the middle that displayed the live feeds from the airport. He hadn’t even heard her approach, and he had no idea how she managed to do that in her three-inch, wedged heels. He suspected that it had something to do with old Irish witchcraft.

“This is supposed to be the last mission,” she said, her voice soft, and Sam had a feeling she knew something the rest of them didn’t, something private that was between her and Michael. “After this, no more spying and no more CIA.”

“His flight just landed.” Pearce’s curt announcement got all three of them to take a few steps forward to stand before the monitors. Pearce brought up the feed from the arrival terminal to the main screen, so they had the best view when Michael finally showed up to greet his contact.

“There he is,” Jesse said after thirty minutes, when Michael finally walked out of the terminal. He had only one carry-on with him, and he deliberately stayed out in the open where the cameras had their best angles.

“And there,” Sam said, pointing with the neck of his beer bottle when a bald guy in a suit and tie approached Michael with an extended hand and a pleasant smile. “Whoever that guy is.”

“He’s scanning him,” Pearce said. The new guy did it subtly, but they all saw the hand scanner he used to check Michael for any signals that indicated he was wearing a wire.

“Man, these guys take paranoia to a whole new level.”

Sam had to agree with Jesse’s claim. It was a good thing Michael had insisted on no trackers or comms.

They all watched as the new guy took Michael’s hand luggage from him and led him out to the parking lot outside the airport, where they both got into a tinted SUV before driving off towards the nearest highway.

“Guess that’s how they stayed off the radar all this time.” Pearce said.

“There goes the cell signal,” Fiona nodded at the screen on the top left corner. Sure enough, the blinking red dot on the regional map disappeared the moment they started moving.

“Tossed it out, did they?”

“Yup.”

Pearce had already briefed her tech team of the importance of keeping track of Michael at all times. They were on the ball and had the feeds from the airport smoothly transfer to that of the traffic cams, with the SUV carrying Michael now in the front and centre of the screen.

“If they stick to this route without taking the incoming exit, we’re going to lose them in a few minutes.” One of the techs announced.

“What do you mean?” Pearce snapped.

“The underpass,” he said, pointing to a tunnel-like pass that was fast approaching. The traffic seemed to slow down to a crawl at the intersection underneath the highway.

“Do your best to stay on it.” Pearce said, since there really wasn’t anything they could do about it.

The SUV didn’t take the exit. Instead, it crawled along with the traffic jam to pass underneath the highway, disappearing from their feed for two and a half minutes.

“Ah, crap.”

Crap indeed, Sam sighed.

Sonya’s people did take paranoia to insane levels. He had to admit that their caution had paid off, even though, unfortunately, it meant Michael was now cut off from support. Instead of the single SUV that went under, five identical ones emerged on the other side, having clearly waited out of sight to time their exit with the SUV that had Michael.

“Track them all for as long as we can.” Pearce said, shaking her head in frustration.

That really was all they could do, besides praying that they wouldn’t lose track of him when they reached their destinations, and that they’d get to see the one that had Michael dropping him off to a meeting with the mastermind behind the network.

***

Operating under a cover ID, becoming an entirely different person who’d been tailor made to fit into the specific mission, was the main job description of being a spy. That was why the operatives got trained to study and memorise all the little details of those legends they had to become before they walked into situations where they were going to be out of reach of immediate support.

If you had a passport, the first thing you did was memorise your name, age, date of birth and where you came from. Then you had to know the entire travelling history of the person you were claiming to be. The visas on your passport said you travelled to certain countries within certain periods, and you had to know where you were and when, and what you were doing there.

Michael knew when and where Walter Darcy was born, and which countries he had travelled to and when. He’d prevented Pearce from using agency resources to dig deeper into the cover he had been given, since it had been obvious from what Sonya said that they had resources within the intelligence agencies. So, to obtain more details, they’d had to use Sam’s very reluctant buddy, Dixon, and his hacking skills to see if Walter Darcy raised any flags. All his probing had revealed was that Darcy was a virologist out of Stanford, California, and that he was an active member of the Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders.

All in all, it seemed that his new prospective employers had provided him with a solidly backstopped legend. As long as he wasn’t called out to separate a strain of ebola from a blood sample of a monkey from east Africa in front of an audience, he would be fine.

The meeting with his contact went without a hitch. Michael knew Pearce had eyes on him via the feeds from the airport. He was relieved that he had no active trackers on him when he saw the man who said his name was Carlton run a scanner over him. Once Carlton was satisfied he was bug-free, he took him to their ride.

The first unpleasant surprise waited for him inside the vehicle. Carlton made him sit in the back while he took the driver’s seat. The man in the back had a Sig-Sauer P226 in his hand, pointed at Michael.

“Whoa,” Michael exclaimed, raising his hands. “What’s with the handcannon?”

The guy looked and behaved like an ex-soldier. He kept his distance and had a telling gleam in his eyes that promised a bullet in his gut if Michael even breathed wrong.

“Put that on,” he said, nodding at the zip tie on the seat between them in lieu of a polite introduction.

“Why?” Michael grimaced, “Your buddy Carlton just cleared me.”

“That’s why you’re not dead,” the man said calmly, “Now, put it on.”

“Fine,” Michael grumbled, and seeing as he had no other choice, did as he was told, using his teeth to fasten the binding around his wrists.

The man wasn’t done. The moment he was restrained, he re-holstered the gun and proceeded to pull a black cover over Michael’s head.

“Oh, come on, man, not the bloody head bag!”

“Shut up and stay put, Westen,” said the man, ignoring his complaint. “This is routine.”

“Sure know how to make a guy feel special,” Michael muttered under his breath, accepting that it was how he was going to spend the drive. The SUV pulled away with a low growl of its engine.

The drive continued for about twenty minutes, and Michael felt that they were moving at about forty miles per hour. It was also obvious that they were taking precautions to shake any potential tails. Then the ride slowed down to a crawl when they hit what felt like a traffic jam, and finally came to a stop another twenty five minutes or so later.

The man helped him out of the SUV and walked him over to another vehicle, shoving him inside the back of what felt like a utility van. The head bag came off just as the double doors shut behind him.

“Welcome to the Bahamas, Michael,” Sonya smiled at him from the seat across from him. “How was the flight?

“Flight was alright,” Michael said, looking around his new ride. “It’s the rest that was not very fun.”

He heard the sound of the SUV leaving, followed by the same identical sound four more times. His heart sank with the realisation that those were five decoys, and he was truly alone, stuck inside a van without any means of letting his team know where he was.

“Sorry about that,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. Her demeanour was different than when they had met, and Michael felt that was because she was now running the op. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” Michael remarked, trying to figure out what was happening by what was around him.

There were a bunch of dry-cleaned suits hanging by hooks to Sonya’s left, and another black-clad, beefy soldier with a MAC-10 to her right. There was a suitcase on the floor next to his feet and two more well armed men sitting at the front of the van. Without much of a context, he had no idea what it all added up to.

“You’re going to like this even less,” she said, opening the small silver case she had on her lap to reveal a massive injector nestled inside a padded mould.

“What’s that?” Michael asked, eyeing the case with unease. He knew it was yet another unpleasant surprise he was not in any position to avoid.

“It’s what’s going to save your life.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only answer you’re going to get for now.” She said calmly, and removed the injector from the casing. The man next to her took off the safety of his gun with a loud click that echoed around the interior of the van. It was a non verbal warning for Michael not to try anything reckless.

So he gritted his teeth and let the needle sink into the vein in his neck. He did his best to keep his breathing even, trying not to panic.

“That’s it,” Sonya said, returning to her seat. “Just relax.”

The contents she had just emptied into his system had a fast acting sedative. He only realised it when his head fell back to thump loudly against the panel of the van. It also rapidly slowed his heart beat into a weak pulse, making him feel hot and heavy all of a sudden. His senses started shutting down then, slowly dragging his awareness and consciousness down what felt like a dark, narrow tunnel.

“Michael–”

Sonya’s voice sounded distant, as if he was hearing her under water. It took him a moment to realise that she was holding him by the chin, trying to make him look at her. It took great effort from his part to blink his suddenly very heavy eyelids and focus on the blurry mess that vaguely resembled a woman’s face.

“When the time comes, do not resist,” he thought he heard her insist. “Just let it happen. Have faith.”

Temporary CIA Command Centre
Nassau

Jesse ambled into the kitchen area to find something to eat, and got distracted from his mission when he saw Fiona sitting at a corner table, her gaze distant, with a forgotten coffee mug in front of her.

“You alright?” he asked, sitting on the chair in front of her from across the table, and grinned when she made a face at him. “Sorry. Stupid question.”

“Four hours, Jesse,” she said worriedly, “Still nothing. There’s enough access in there to scour the entire island twice over, and we have nothing.”

“Look at it this way. They wouldn’t have gone through all this trouble just to kill him, right?”

She looked away, then. “Not unless something went wrong.” Her words were very quiet.

“It’s Mike,” Jesse said in a lighter tone, trying to convince himself as much as her, “As great as the man is walking into trouble, he’s better at talking his way out of it.”

Fiona continued to stay quiet. The look in her eyes and the expression on her face said she was mulling over something.

“Is there something else?”

“Sonya… She’s trouble, Jesse.”

“Well,” Jesse said, frowning a little, “She is an ex-GRU turned terrorist. Kinda goes without saying, doesn’t it?”

He didn’t like the way she shrugged and averted her gaze.

“Anything else we should be worried about?”

“I don’t know.” Was her evasive answer.

Before Jesse could probe into it, however, her cell phone started ringing.

“Hello,” she said, and she jerked back in her seat at whatever she heard on the line.

“Who is it?” Jesse demanded, not liking the way Fiona went pale.

“Maddy,” Fiona said raising her voice to be heard, “Madeline, take a deep breath, calm down, and then tell me–”

“He’s in there with them, Fiona,” Michael’s mother shrieked over the phone when Fiona put her on speaker. “Tell me you’re seeing this! It’s all over the news.”

“Maddie who’s with who and where?” Jesse intervened over the sounds of her panic.

“Michael! He’s trapped with those men, and they are going to kill him.”

“Pearce,” Jesse yelled as he ran out to the command centre with Fiona following closely at his heels. “Turn on the news.”

Pearce and Sam both turned around in shock at their wild entry.

“Huh?”

“Any channel,” Fiona added over the sounds of Madeline’s yelling, “Anything local or international.”

A tech brought up the local ZNS network on the main screen, turning the volume up as he did so when he saw the Breaking News alert on the news belt.

“….are now standing in front of the Serenity Resort in Red Bay,” the reporter was saying. It was a hotel located in the northern tourist district of the main island.

In the background, several police patrol cars and a command vehicle had set up a perimeter around the hotel complex with cops and crime scene tape. While some tourists and locals seem to linger, most of the people, especially the exodus that was piling out of the complex from the resort’s main gate, were intent on fleeing the area as fast as they could.

“…and as we speak, we see the hotel staff and guests being herded out by the attackers.” She turned around with reflexes that weren’t so common with a newscaster and grabbed a woman as she tried to run past her.

“Pardon me, ma’am, I’m Maria and I’m with the ZNS. Can you tell us what is going on?”

“There’s, uh, there’s a lot of them,” the nervous woman stuttered. She looked like she had been by the pool when she was chased out. She only had a large beige towel wrapped around her. “They have guns, lots of guns. They came in from everywhere. Told us to get out and get clear. I– I think we all need to clear out at least two hundred yards,” she looked around anxiously in the middle of her rambling, trying to gauge if she was out of the danger zone. “That’s what they said… they said to leave if we wanted to live.”

“Two hundred yards?” Jesse repeated, “Is that a blast radius? That’s not good.”

“Dave, get me Langley,” Pearce snapped at one of her techs. “I’m going to see if we have anyone on the scene.”

Meanwhile, the reporter, Maria, managed to stop another fleeing guest. “Sir, sir, anything you can tell us about what’s going on inside the Serenity?”

“Tap into those comms, Matthews.” Pearce barked out another order while waiting for her call to connect. Soon, the sounds of static, and the shorthand commands of the emergency response team filled the interior of the command centre, adding to the commotion unravelling in the news feed.

“Satellite image is coming up.” Another team member announced as she split the main screen between the news report and the overhead view of the resort under attack.

“Jesus! What the hell is going on?” Sam cursed.

He was right. What they saw on the map didn’t make sense. The entire horse-shoe shaped building seemed to be locked down tight, with all the windows, screen doors and gates blacked out. Whoever was behind the attack, they seemed to have moved very quickly and in a coordinated pattern to get everyone out before anyone figured out their intentions. The entire area seemed like a ghost town – the pool, garden and the immediate beach area were completely devoid of people.

“They are going to kill them,” the man, who was dressed in the suit and jacket of the hotel security, mumbled, averting his face away from the reporter’s microphone.“They kept chanting that it was God’s will and justice.”

“Did you get a look at any of the attackers, sir?” Maria demanded. “Did they identify themselves?”

“Couldn’t see the faces,” he shook his head, swallowing visibly. “They had masks on. Said they were there for the day of reckoning, and to deliver just revenge for the death toll those people have caused.”

“Do you have any idea who they are, sir? The group of people the attackers kept behind?”

“I don’t know!” The man wiped the back of his hand over his sweaty forehead, looking very much like he wanted to be anywhere but there. “I think they’re doctors or professors. They were supposed to have a conference tomorrow. The men in the masks accused them of killing a lot of innocent people.”

“The police are urging us to move further back,” Maria turned back to face her cameraman when the man she was interviewing finally excused himself to run away. “All we know is that there are about ten armed attackers in total, and they have eight guests of Serenity Resort as hostages. They haven’t made any statements, demands or any explanation for why they are doing this, as yet, except for the initial broadcast they released. We’ll be back with you once we learn more…”

The feed then cut to the video clip she’d mentioned, the one that had already been broadcast by the news channel, the one Maddy had seen.

It was a low quality recording of what looked to be a conference room. The curtains all around the area were drawn tight, and the door seemed to be locked and barricaded. The table and the chairs had been pushed aside into a haphazard pile to make space in the middle. The man doing the recording did a poor job of keeping the camera steady, and the video took a few hazy tumbles followed by the sounds of angry, incomprehensible yelling before it finally focused on the hostages.

There were eight of them, seven men and a woman, their ages presumably ranging from forties to sixties. They were all kneeling in the middle of the room on the carpeted floor, their hands restrained behind their backs and mouths gagged. Three of the attackers could also be seen in the video, dressed in all black ensembles, kevlar jackets, and black balaclavas. And, as the first woman had said, they did have big guns, AK-47s to be precise.

The amateur cameraman did a panorama shot of the hostages, making sure to capture everyone clearly without too much of a wobble, as if it was important for them to show the world who exactly they had in their captivity.

“I need names on these people, Shawn,” Pearce said to the tech manning the workstation behind her, “Run the facial recognition software.”

“On it.”

The shot started from left to right. The first was a dark-skinned man with salt and pepper hair who looked to be in his fifties. He glared at the camera with a pair of equally dark eyes full of venom. The second was the woman. She looked like she was the oldest of the group. Her bleached blond, shoulder-length hair was just as messed up as her make up, which was running down in rivulets over her cheeks mixed with her tears.

The third man was also blond, with a beard that covered the entire lower half of his face. He tried to get to his feet when the camera focused on him, shouting something that got muffled by the gag in his mouth, only to be hit in the back of the head with the butt of a rifle.

The forth was a small, mousy man who could have been in his late sixties. He was bald and clean shaven. He visibly trembled and rocked back and forth on his knees, looking like he was either praying or going into shock.

Fifth in the line was Michael. Jesse felt Fiona’s hand close around his right elbow in a grip hard enough to almost cut off his circulation. Sam moved in closer to his left, his shoulder bumpiing against Jesse’s, his face pale and his gaze fixed on his best friend on the screen.

Michael was still in the same clothes he was in when had arrived at the airport. Apart from a fresh, slightly bleeding cut on his forehead, he looked otherwise unhurt. The man in black behind him moved forward and grabbed him by his hair to pull his head back, making sure that his face was captured clearly in the clip.

Michael stared at the camera with the same, hardened gaze they were all very familiar with – the one that was cold, emotionless, and gave out absolutely nothing of what he was thinking or feeling. It was not an easily decipherable look, since it only made an appearance when he was at a point of no return, be it with him staring down a barrel of a gun, or pointing a gun at someone else.

He did give them a signal, however, a small head shake they almost missed when the camera moved onto the next hostage at the same moment. It wasn’t a desperate call for assistance, or an indication of a last minute play he had come up with. No. It was none of that. It was a deliberate movement of his head from left to right, and what it implied was that it was over, and there was nothing they could do to stop what was already in motion.

“Oh, dear God.”

Jesse heard Sam’s barely audible whisper at the same moment Fiona made a sound like a half swallowed sob. Even Pearce looked rooted to the spot, the phone in her hand entirely forgotten. They were all forced to helplessly watch their friend in the hands of unknown combatants, completely outgunned and out of options.

And they all knew what they were about to witness was an execution.

“Fiona, what’s happening?” Maddy’s loud, watery voice through the speaker on Fiona’s phone was what broke them all out of their shock.

“Maddie, listen to me,” Fiona said, fighting to keep her voice level. “As much as I hate to trust the word of a terrorist, it’s all we have. Stay strong and have faith. This is not the end. It won’t come to that. We have to believe in that.”

The Conference Room
Serenity Resort & Spa
Red Bay
The Bahamas

Waking back up from the sedative-induced slumber had been another unpleasant surprise. Sudden, thunderous banging on the door followed by angry yelling had jerked Michael out of a deep blackout to full, disoriented wakefulness in no time at all. Before his groggy mind could comprehend what was happening, two black-clad gunmen had burst into his room, dragged him out of the bed to the floor to restrain his hands behind his back. He had put up a struggle, mostly due to his training, reflexes and survival instincts kicking in before his brain did, and had caught a rifle butt to the head for his troubles.

Now, he was here, locked up inside a conference room with four masked men with AK-47s. He had no idea where he was or why he was forced to kneel in a line with six other men and one woman.

Their captors spoke a distinct mix of Farsi and Arabic, and no matter how much he trained his ears, he couldn’t really catch much of what they were saying, other than curt orders to “hurry it up and keep recording so the rest of the world could learn.”

“Dr. Hamad Latif,” barked one of the masked men, inviting the guy with the camera to capture the first man on his knees. “The scientist with not one, but two PhDs from the prestigious university of Oxford,” he said, clear hatred written in his eyes as he glared down at the man on his knees. “Instead of finding a cure to cancer as you’ve promised your sponsors, what did you do? You experimented on kids in Liberia. August ‘96, twenty seven kids, none over eight years of age. They were told it was a vaccine for stomach flu, only it wasn’t, was it, doctor?”

Latif growled something that was muffled by his gag. Michael had a bad feeling about the entire thing. It sounded like a list of crimes. If the pattern was to repeat, he knew all eight of them, including Walter Darcy, had some terrible secrets in their pasts that the band of masked terrorists had somehow managed to unearth. He had no idea if the accusations were true or not. What mattered was that their attackers believed that it was, and that meant nothing good for their situation.

The room had only one exit, which was barricaded and guarded by an armed guard. Three of them were positioned behind their line, ready to shoot if any of them even moved. The man doing the speeches also had a rifle, leaving the guy with the camera as the only unarmed terrorist.

Even if Michael could somehow untie himself before their attackers ran out of dirty laundry lists to publicise – which didn’t seem possible – there was no way he could take down all six of them by himself. He would only invite a barrage of bullets on himself, and the others.

There was absolutely no play he could make, or a way to try to talk his way out. That was the hard, irrefutable fact. All he had going for him was a hazy memory – one where he thought he heard Sonya asking him to let things happen without getting in the way.

As far as hope went, it wasn’t much to hold onto. But that was all he had. He realised that it was the test. He was supposed to have faith, and accept the bullet to the back of his head, or whatever unpleasant end their captors had planned for them.

Not that long ago, when he had skirted the end of his rope, it would have been easy. But now, Michael had reasons to keep fighting, keep surviving, and those renewed instincts were hard to curb in the face of a seemingly inevitable end.

“Dr Anika Sidorova,” the man said, moving on to the woman on the verge of hysterics, “The charitable lady that you are, you funded an entire hospital in Lahore, Pakistan, with state of the art facilities, the best medical equipment and, best of all, free health care to those in need. Free clinic, free consultations, free pills and even free surgeries. Turned out too good to be true, didn’t it? The villagers started dying from unknown diseases, showed up with never-before-seen symptoms, unknown ailments. When the local authorities finally started getting their act together to sniff around your establishment after two years of poisoning and experimenting on people, what did you do? You burned the entire place down, blew it up, with all the three hundred and eighty four people who were in there at the time. Do you remember, doctor?”

I’m going to die on some asshole’s propaganda video, Michael thought to himself resignedly. What a way to go.

He had no idea if the guy recording was broadcasting live or just recording to use it later. He had a feeling whatever happened, it was going to go out into the world unless a miracle happened. He hoped Pearce and his team would get their hands on it before it was released onto local networks or, God forbid, internationally. They had more resources to track down information about what the hell happened, even though it would never happen in time to change his own fate, or the band of allegedly very bad people he was sharing the floor with.

The accusations went on and on, making it clear that all the academics were worse than the terrorists they were sharing the conference room with, if any of the stories had a grain of truth to them.

Darcy had worked for a militia in Venezuela, if the masked man were to be believed. He had apparently developed a cruder, nastier version of Sarin gas which a private army had used to attack and take over an entire operation of drug manufacturing and smuggling based up at the Colombian border. The brutal power play had not only killed the drug lords, but an entire village next to their base.

The three gunmen stepped forward the moment the masked man was done reciting their crimes. Michael felt a barrel touch the back of his skill, and tried not to flinch. Latif had another gun at his back, as well as the man on the other end of the line, Dr. Khan. No one made any rash moves, too frightened, too shocked and horrified to do anything other than to stay on their knees and stare numbly at the man pacing before them.

“Today, you’re going to suffer the consequences of your crimes,” the man declared with the fervour of a true believer willing to go to any lengths for his beliefs. “Today, you’re going to taste your own medicine, so to speak. What other fitting way for you to die than by a terrible virus made by one of you to kill innocent people.”

At the end of his passionate speech, he pulled a canister out of his vest. Latif tried to run, and was immediately struck down by a terrorist. The same thing happened to the man who was identified as Dr Gordon as well, before the message was received by the others to stay put and accept their fates.

The black canister let out a hiss when the man pulled the seal. A cloud of mist started to seep out of it to mix into the atmosphere and slowly spread inside the sealed room. What bothered Michael was the fact that the six terrorists showed no fear or concern that they were all exposed to whatever had been just released into the air. Either they had nerves of steel and were willing to die with the rest of them for their cause, or they had the antidote.

He didn’t have much time to wonder, however. The contents proved to be fast acting, as they all dissolved into hacking coughs almost simultaneously, their gags making it worse. It was like he had breathed in fire, and Michael felt like his lungs were melting in heat. The man next to him sprouted a glob of blood out of his nose before toppling on his side in a full body seizure, followed by Sidrova, who whimpered pitifully, suffering the same fate. Even the terrorists started dropping one by one, their guns forgotten as they coughed, and screamed and writhed on the floor, dying.

Michael felt his uncontrollably shaking body hit the floor as well, joining the rest of them in their shared final moments. As the excruciating agony – akin to liquid fire – engulfed him from within, one thought lingered a moment longer while everything else rapidly faded:

I think I failed… I’m so sorry.

Temporary CIA Command Centre
Nassau

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Sam murmured, and leaned against the nearest table for support, suddenly looking quite unstable on his feet.

“Sir, I don’t know who they are,” Pearce tried her best not to yell at whoever was at the other end of the line. Her face was a sickly shade of pale, and the hand that was holding on to the receiver shook visibly. “There aren’t many networks known for murder-suicide methods, are there?”

Jesse stayed where he was, unsure what to do, what to feel or what to think. The video cut off with the camera facing at an obscure corner of the room’s ceiling when the cameramen finally succumbed to the effect of the deadly gas.

What they had all just witnessed was an ugly sight. The extremely potent biological agent worked fast, reducing everyone stuck inside the conference room to seizing, coughing, blood-vomiting bodies within seconds.

Jesse felt bile rise in his own throat when his mind kept flashing back to the images of Michael suffering the same fate right before their eyes while they all watched.

“Did they just… is that it?” Sam sounded like he was on the verge of a breakdown himself. “Did they all just…die?”

“Could it have been some sort of an elaborate setup?” Jesse asked, his scrambling mind coming up with reasons to justify what they just witnessed, steadfastly unwilling to accept that it was the end of their friend. “Maybe that was what they wanted us to believe.”

“We need to move,” Fiona snapped urgently, desperately holding onto the flimsy hope his unlikely theory offered. “The local police won’t move in until the disease control units go in to clear the building, which will take too long. If that was a setup, we need to go and take them down before–”

Her words got cut off by the explosion that lit up the entire screen. The news feed had been running even after that macabre live feed from inside the conference room had ended, the reporter still talking with the resort in the background.

It was a surreal sight, to witness the resort suddenly turn itself into a massive fireball as it blew up in the explosion that seemed more than enough to level the complex to the ground. The fire that engulfed the entire area seemed to reach as far as the sky, taking all the evidence, the bodies and all hope they had along with it.

Chapter 21

Unknown Location
Unknown Time

Waking up was a slow, painful process.

His mind felt like it had turned into an unnavigable swamp, where all the coherent thoughts, memories, emotions and everything else that made him human had been replaced by a thick blanket of darkness. All he knew was that each and every inch of his body hurt, and all he wanted to do was return to blissful unconsciousness for a few more hours, or possibly forever.

“Michael.”

The voice he heard was quiet, and had an odd fluctuating quality. He didn’t know whether it was because of his current condition or whether the owner of the voice had a speech impediment.

“Michael.”

Okay. So the man didn’t have any speech issues. It was all him. The single word reverberated inside his skull like a ricochet, sending his existing headache into excruciating levels. He heard a groan, and it took him a moment to realise that it was him.

“Wake up, Michael.”

There was a soft tap on his cheek, causing him to turn his face away from the unknown contact. Sudden movement didn’t help his headache either, but it did convince him to try and open his eyelids to see what was going on.

After much blinking, the blurry image before him turned into that of a man probably in his late forties, with longer hair and a face full of beard. When he saw Michael looking at him, he smiled brightly like he was a long lost friend.

“Oh, fucking hell! Ow!” Michael groaned again, and shifted, realising for the first time that he was seated on a couch and he had a bad crick in his neck. Looking down at himself, he saw that he was still in the same clothes he had been wearing since arriving in the Bahamas. His shirt still had a few dried blood stains on it. The concerning sight failed to remind him how those got there. “What the hell happened?”

“How does it feel to rise from the dead and wake up among the living?” The stranger asked and handed him a glass of water. Michael’s hand shook a little when he took it, but he managed to finish it without spilling it all over himself.

“Like I should have stayed dead,” he mumbled, returning the glass. “I feel awful.”

“I’m sorry,” the man said apologetically. “The effects of the antidote will flush out of your system in a few hours.”

Those words pried loose some memories from Michael’s scrambled mind. He saw flashes of armed gunmen and a room full of bleeding, writhing bodies, his included.

“Those people,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose when the agony in his head spiked again, “The other seven doctors… they’re dead, aren’t they?”

“Everything they were accused of during their final moments were true, Michael,” the man said. “And only the ones who deserved it died at the end.”

“What about those terrorists?”

“They died serving the purpose they believed in.”

“And Walter Darcy?”

“He died for his sins as well,” he said, settling on the couch before Michael.

Looking around, Michael saw that they were in some sort of a lounge. It was mostly empty except for a few oddly arranged tables, chairs and a sofa that were still covered in dusty tarps. There were three windows with no blinds, and the dim light streaming through them told him that, wherever he was, it was late in the evening there.

“Walter Darcy served his purpose by giving you a clean break from the people who were hunting you.”

That got Michael’s attention. “What do you mean?” He asked quietly as a sliver of unease wormed into his mind.

“We have taken care of your CIA problem,” said the man, spreading his arms benevolently, “They all saw you die a horrible death in the international news. You can be rest assured that you’re now free of people hunting you all over the world.”

Michael felt a jolt of cold terror run through his entire system, making him jerk back in his seat. “What about my friends? My family?” he demanded, unable to contain his horror at the thought. “You mean to say they saw me die in some propaganda video too?”

“Michael,” the man smiled, like it was no big deal. Michael had to restrain himself from lunging forward to grab him by the neck and strangling it. “If all goes well with your time here with me, you’ll be returned to them unharmed. Now, I know they’ve been around you long enough not to make a wave if they were to find you alive and well. So, you shouldn’t concern yourself. Your death will only be a temporary thing to people who care about you.”

“Alright then,” Michael said, accepting that for the moment, “What now?”

“Now, well… now I apologise in advance for the even more unpleasant few days ahead of you.”

Michael didn’t like the sound of that. It seemed that he was constantly forced into very unpleasant situations since the moment this network and its terrorists wandered into his life.

“Why?” He murmured.

“Because, now that we have proved you can trust us, it is my turn to find out if we can trust you.”

Michael had serious reservations about this stranger’s definition of trust. He didn’t think he should trust a man who could somehow rope an entire extremist group to commit a brutal act of murder-suicide on live TV just so he could erase Michael’s existence from the world.

That only made him insanely dangerous in his book, not trustworthy.

“Who are you?” Michael asked, studying the man seated before him with caution.

“I am the man you’ve been waiting to meet.”

“Do I get a name?”

“One day. Perhaps.” he said, and took the thick folder that was resting on the table to his right to rest it on his lap, “But we’re not here to talk about me. We’re here to talk about you.

Michael didn’t feel like talking. What he wanted was to go back to sleep, and then go home. “Is that really necessary?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said, and opened the folder.

Inside it, there was a stack of files. Michael recognised them because they had been inside his carry-on when he had arrived at the Bahamas. Those files contained his entire service record for the period he was under contract for the company since he had signed his life away to secrecy at only twenty six years of age.

“Almost everything I want to know about you, is in here,” the man smiled again, “I must thank you for being so thorough with your accounts. It isn’t enough, but it is a start.”

“I was told you wanted to know everything,” Michael said tiredly, nodding at the files that contained his hand-written records, “There’s everything. My entire life as a spy, before and after my burn notice.”

“It was a fascinating read, I must admit,” the man said calmly, “Shall we begin?”

“Yeah, sure, why not?” Michael muttered, knowing that he had no other option but to sit through whatever the man had planned.

“What is your full name?”

“You already know my name,” he snapped, irritated. “You’re wasting your time.”

His gaze narrowed at Michael’s dismissive tone. “We have all the time in the world to get this right,” he said, his voice sharp, “So, if you want to find a place with us as you expressly wished, you will answer my questions with nothing but the truth. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” Michael sighed.

“What is your full name?”

“Michael Allen westen.”

“Do you know why you’re here, Michael?”

“Because I’ve shown my willingness to be here,” Michael murmured, thinking back to the time he’d had to pry himself open and let Sonya catch a glimpse so that he could be invited into the core of her network. “Because of what I could offer in terms of skills and training to your organisation for a chance to be a part of something better than where I was.”

“You do have skills.” the man said softly, nodding. “And you have earned the trust of one of my top operatives for what you have done for her. But all of that only gets you in this room. This is where we go deeper than your skills. This is where you and I, together, learn if you are the man you say you are.”

With that, he opened the first file. Michael took a deep breath and let it out slowly, willing the ache in his head to abate so that he could get through what was shaping up to be an interrogation.

Training had taught him that he could expect for it to be about rhythm and repetition. Experienced interrogators would establish the pace of questioning to establish control. Once they had control, they would probe for more detailed information, exactly where you’d been and what you’d done. The initial approach would always be about getting the facts straight, and doing their best to poke holes at the information they had to work with, to see if what was in the paper matched with the words of the one being questioned.

“When were you recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency?” He started at the beginning.

“During my deployment in Panama,” Michael replied, “Three weeks later, I was sent to the Farm.”

“Describe your relationship with Mr. Card.” The man ordered, “He was your training officer, wasn’t he?”

“He betrayed me,” Michael snapped, and jumped right to the end. “So I killed him.”

If he was unhappy with the less than detailed answer, the stranger didn’t show it. Instead, he proceeded to ask a few more questions about his training, forcing Michael to answer each and every one of them until he was satisfied with the answers he was getting.

“The mission in Panama,” he said, going back to the mission that had drawn the CIA’s attention to Michael, “Was that when you first worked with him?”

“No, we met during a hostage rescue in Bolivia,” Michael mumbled tiredly. He hadn’t realised hashing out all the details of his life with the company from the beginning after all this time would be so physically and mentally exhausting. “Would you like me to go over the details of that mission?”

“Not yet,” he said, ignoring Michael’s brash tone, “Let’s go over your time in Paraguay instead.”

He was good, Michael had to give him that. It was obvious to him that the man had gone over his records a few times and knew exactly where the appropriate pages were in the thick binder.

After Michael had gone over the joint training mission he had participated in detail, he finally decided it was time to take a break.

Except, when he was escorted to where he was supposed to be held, Michael realised with a sinking feeling the break he was supposed to take wasn’t going to be the much needed reprieve he had imagined at all.

Serenity Resort & Spa
Red Bay
The Bahamas

The entire Red Bay area was a hive of activity with police patrol cars, ambulances and fire engines still saturating the main access road to the Serenity resort. Their temporary and fake press passes were enough to get them to the outer perimeter of the site that was still billowing black smoke to the sky with more than a few structures still on fire.

Sam waited outside the crime scene tape, keeping an eye out while Jesse and Fiona split up to see what they could find out. He had a hard time keeping an eye on the cops on patrol or anyone who might be suspicious of their presence there, since his mind kept flashing back to the gory sight of his best friend’s possible demise he had witnessed not even seven hours ago.

It had been a while since any terrorist organisation had been so brash enough to do something that horrible on live TV, for all the world to see. It had all the intelligence agencies in the world in a frenzy trying to find out how or why it happened. And, as far as all of them were concerned, Walter Darcy/Michael Westen was now very dead to the world.

“Any luck?” He called out when Jesse ducked under the tape to reach him.

“Nope,” the ex-CIFA agent shook his head tiredly. “According to the chatter, there were no bodies to find after the fire department gave the all-clear to move in. Everything was incinerated to ashes.”

“I walked around the area where the conference room was supposed to be,” Fiona reported as she joined them. She had soot stains on her arms and left cheek. “Couldn’t get any closer. Too much rubble. No idea if there was a way out before the building went up in flames.”

“Well, there were no other ways out according to the blueprints.” Sam reminded her dejectedly.

“Any idea what they used to blow the place up?” Jesse asked.

“Yeah,” Fiona said, “Strategically placed C4, and accelerant… lots and lots of accelerants.”

“Well, I’ll call Pearce and give her the update,” Jesse volunteered and walked away while Sam and Fiona stayed where they were, their gaze locked onto the charred ruins of what used to be a five star resort of fifty or so suites.

“Sam–” Fiona’s voice dipped low in a way that suggested she was about to say things that Sam wasn’t in the mood to hear.

“Fi, don’t–” he snapped before she could continue.

“I should have killed that bitch when I had the chance,” she muttered to herself through clenched teeth. Sam usually didn’t agree with needless killing, but under the circumstances, he found himself agreeing with her. If that had been the case, they wouldn’t have been staring at the ruins that could very well have contained Michael’s Westen’s final moments on Earth.

The heavy silence that descended between them was broken by the sound of Fiona’s cell phone ringing.

“Hello, Maddy? She said, and listened to Michael’s mother on the other side of the line.

“What?”

Sam didn’t like the way her eyes narrowed into tiny slits, the look she got when she was in the mood to kill someone.

“When?”

“Alright, I’ll be there, Maddy.” She said before ending the call.

“What was that about?” Sam frowned.

“She’s barely holding it together as it is,’ Fiona said. “Now she has another problem. One of Nate’s old bookies showed up. He’s trying to shake her down. I have to go.”

That was indeed a problem. Without any of them to watch out for her, Madeline was an easy target, especially with little Charlie in the picture.

“Go.” Sam said, and pulled out his own phone. “I’ll let Pearce know. “

Their covers were intrinsically woven to that of Michael’s. And by some miracle Michael was still alive and the people he was with were watching, it made perfect sense for either of them to go back home in a hurry the moment they received news that Michael’s mother was in need of assistance.

Unknown Location
Unknown Time

Within the first hour, Michael started hating the white padded room they had locked him in with passion. It was too goddamned bright with white fluorescent lighting that never switched off or dimmed. Then there were the goddamned speakers lining the walls that never stopped broadcasting ear-splitting squealing noises at him at unpredictable intervals from all around.

Intellectually, he understood what they were trying to do. Techniques such as sleep deprivation, noise irritation, and sensory overload were common tactics used to pacify a subject against their resistance to questioning. The Geneva Convention didn’t consider these methods to be torture, but when you were the one who had to live through it after having faced one harrowing, near-death experienced already, it sure felt like the most brutal torture ever to exist.

Squeezing his eyes shut against the white light didn’t help, nor did trying to plug his ears with the heel of his palms. There was absolutely nothing he could do but suffer through the excruciating levels of renewed headache and nauseating disorientation until they came back for him, or his overloaded senses caused him to pass out into oblivion.

It took two hours for them to drag him out of the torture chamber to drop him back on the familiar couch. The man was already in his seat, studying him with a blank expression. Michael hadn’t realised how cold it had been in the other room, and he wrapped his arms around himself, trying not to shiver violently in the pleasant warmth that tried to seep into his chilled bones.

“I want to talk to you about Africa,” the man said, picking up where he had left off as if Michael hadn’t even left the session. “You were there to negotiate oil interests for the CIA. What were the names of the warlords? Who received payoffs?”

Mihcael wanted to tell him where to shove his questions. But he also knew doing that would only prolong his torture. The only way to get through it was to give the damned answers he needed and hope that he would still have a shred of his sanity left by the time he was done.

“Kwame Alaka and Chidi Buhari.” he mumbled.

“Before you said you negotiated with three,” the man pointed out, pouncing on what he thought was a mistake Micheal had made in his thoroughly worn out state. “Now it’s just two.”

“I negotiated with…Three.” Michael forced out with effort. “But the third never received the payoff. My burn notice interrupted the deal.”

“Tell me about the deal that went wrong.”

Michael did, and realised he was starting to slur his words as he came to the part where he had to describe his escape. When he reached the end of the account with his arrival in Miami, he felt something warm trickle down his nose to wet his upper lip. Wiping a hand unconsciously to get rid of the irritation, he almost didn’t notice that the back of his palm came back red, wet with his blood.

“I think we will take another break.” the man said.

Temporary CIA Command Center
Nassau
The Bahamas

Later that Evening

“I think that was the hundred and twelfth call you had to answer within the past eight hours,” Sam commented when Pearce slammed down the receiver of the landline with vengeance.

“Twenty eighth, actually,” she looked up and grabbed the coffee Sam was holding out for her with a tired smile. “I was counting.”

“Langley?” Sam asked, settling on the chair across from her.

“Fort Lauderdale.”

“Ah. The CSS.” Sam nodded, “Who else?”

“Cuban Intelligence Services, Interpol, NSA, Homeland Security…FSB–” She trailed off.

“You’re popular.”

“Yeah,” Pearce sighed, closing her eyes, and let the steam from the coffee wash over her face. “They all want to know how I got the man of the hour killed in the most devastating and public manner possible.”

“Well, you’re on paper as the agent in charge of hunting Michael,” Sam shrugged. “Now, you gotta sell it that he really is dead. And get everyone to back off.”

“It’s not that hard,” Pearce muttered. “The entire goddamned world saw it.”

“So, what are you telling them?”

“That Michael got his hands on the worst possible cover that got him in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“If this is how Sonya’s people operate, it’s the most terrible recruiting programme ever.” Sam felt the need to point out.

“Tell me about it,” said Pearce. “‘Don’t believe everything you see in the news’ and to think that’s all we have to hold on to, Jesus…” She set the mug aside to bury her head in her hands. Sam could sympathise. Michael was her friend as well. “I’m beginning to think I should have let your initial plan play out.”

“What?” Sam smiled, “The kidnapping and smuggling?”

“I think Jesse called it, ‘creative intervention and forced vacation in a non-extradition country,’” she said with a small grin.

“Yeah,” said Sam, drinking his coffee, “I’m beginning to think you have a point.”

Unknown Location
Unknown Time

“Stop! Just…stop! All right?” Michael yelled the second time they dragged him back to the lounge where the interrogations took place. He had been given a bottle of water and a few hours to pass out from pure exhaustion. Then the lights and the sounds had come back with vengeance, jerking him back from his exhausted sleep back to a torturous wakefulness, driving him back to the edge of agony-driven insanity.

The man abandoned his chair to kneel before him and place a placating hand on his knee. Michael flinched.

“Michael, calm down.” he said softly, “We’re done with this.”

“So this is over?” Michael mumbled, scared that it was too good to be true.

“The first part, yes.” he said, dashing any hope Michael had that he was finally free. Then he slowly walked back to an empty shelf where a black medical case rested. “Now, we set our sights on new horizons.”

“What does that mean?”

“This is gonna loosen you up.” the man said, and opened the lid of the case to reveal four injectors resting inside the padded interior. Michael closed his eyes and groaned, knowing that nothing good came out of it by adding even more crap to his already thoroughly messed up system.

“It’s a chemical relative of benzodiazepine mixed with a synthetic hallucinogen.” the man went on, ignoring Michael’s reaction.

“Drugs will only make this more complicated.” Michael said desperately, “You know I already have whatever Sonya gave me earlier. You don’t need to do that. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“Yes, you will.” He turned around with one syringe in his hand and walked back to Michael to kneel before him again. “Trust the process, Michael. You might be surprised at what we discover.”

“I doubt it.” Michael muttered, eyeing the syringe hovering near his inner elbow with dread.

“Give me your hand.” the man said, pinning him with an earnest look that urged him to trust him. “We’ll go through this together, Micahel. Give me your hand.”

“I had better not die for real from that.” Michael whispered, and extended his arm.

“I’m not gonna lie to you,” the man said as the needle went in without much resistance. Michael averted his gaze, trying his best to breathe evenly, and struggled to keep the panic at bay. “This is gonna hit you pretty hard. And you’re not gonna be able to tell the difference between what is real and what is not real. But you won’t die from this. The trick to get through this as quickly as possible is not to resist. Just lean into it.”

“What now?” Michael asked, wondering if the strange, cold sensation he felt running inside his veins was the drug or just another manifestation of his rapidly weakening health.

“We’ll reconvene in a few hours.” the man said, patting him on the shoulder.

Palmetto Bay
Miami-Dade County

The Next Evening

Fiona sat inside her car with Madeline, parked out of direct line of sight of the people mingling on the sidewalk near the building where her GPS tracker had led them to. They now knew exactly where Leo Sapienza, Nate’s old bookie, did his business.

“What are we doing?” Maddie asked, shuffling in her seat. “We’ve been sitting here since noon for more than five hours.”

“We’re waiting for the little weasel to leave the office so that we can get to his stash,” Fiona said.

She had flown back to Miami within the hour of receiving Maddie’s call, and found out how the bastard had threatened Maddie to pay up a debt of eighty thousand dollars Nate had owed him. She had arrived at her place to find an agitated Maddie scrambling to put the money together. That was when she learned how the man had left a bullet in Charlie’s hand as a silent threat of consequence if Maddie failed to find the money.

Fiona’s first instinct had been to find him and blow the bastard to pieces. He had chosen the worst possible time to come calling when they were already dealing with Michael’s disappearance. After the initial homicidal rage had passed, Fiona had done some rational thinking, and come up with a way to destroy the bookie in a much more satisfying manner. That was how a day and a half after that initial call, Fiona found herself with Maddie now surveilling the place where he had his office. The GPS tracker she had planted in one of Maddie’s jewellery had led them straight there.

“Are you okay?” she asked, noting the way Maddie fiddled with her nicotine patch.

She’d had to stand in front of the asshole and convince him to take the twenty four thousand and the jewellery as collateral earlier, so they could get the plan in motion. Fiona had hidden in the guest room and listened, and she knew it had been hard for Maddie to say the things she’d had to say to make it believable.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Maddie lied. “Those things – the things I said about Nate earlier…”

“You said what needed to be said,” Fiona pointed out, recalling how she had admitted to her son being a loser, drunk and a drug addict. “Those things weren’t true.”

“Except they were,” Maddie sighed, “Maybe if I’d just done it differently, when he was little…”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I wish I believed that.” she scoffed, “Maybe I’m crazy thinking that I can do it better for Charlie.”

Before Fiona could reply, Sapienza came strolling down the stairs, and got into a sports car that was parked right in front of the building.

“Well, there’s our favourite bookie. and he’s not carrying your jewellery box,” she said, starting the car, “So I guess he stashed it.” As she turned the car around to get to the alleyway behind the building, she addressed Maddie again. “Madeline, you know what you’re doing for Charlie? This.” She said, pointing out to the back wall of the building where they knew the bookie’s safe was lodged against from the inside. “This. Right now. Let’s go teach this bastard a lesson.”

It was a satisfying thing to teach Maddie how to place a det cord to blow up a hole in the wall, and even more satisfying to watch her trigger the detonator with a smile on her face for the first time since Fiona had seen her that morning.

When the safe fell out of the fresh hole in the wall into their waiting hands, it only took mere minutes for Fiona to plant another small charge on the door to get it open. In it, they found everything they needed to put Sapienza out of his nasty little business for good.

Unknown Location
Unknown Time

Michael knew he was in real trouble when Fiona walked into his padded chamber in the beautiful red and orange dress she had worn when they had done a mission together back in South America for the CIA.

The translucent form of her was way too real for a hallucination. He heard the soft click of her heels when she walked towards him and breathed in a lungful of her rich perfume when she knelt before him.

“Michael.” Her voice was quiet, but he heard it so clearly in his mind and felt it in his soul.

“How are you here?” he slurred, doing his best to keep his hazy vision fixed on her.

She smiled sadly at him. “I’m not here.”

“Fi, I…I can’t take it,” he murmured brokenly, wishing he could touch her, and feel her warmth, her vitality – something to breathe some life back to his fracturing existence. “I can’t take this any more.”

“Yes, you can.” She whispered and he saw her lifting her hands to gently hold his face. The almost tangible contact wasn’t nearly enough. “Yours isn’t the only life on the line. If you tell them everything… We all die.”

“I know.” Michael sobbed. “The drugs are too strong. I can’t take it much more.”

“Yes, you can.” She insisted.

“Help me, Fi,” he begged, not caring that she was just a product of his abused mind. “I need you.”

“I can’t, Michael,” she said, her entire face morphing into an expression of great sorrow. “Just remember, if you tell them everything, we all die.”

No amount of pleading and frantic yelling at her to come back was enough to keep the image of her from fading back to nothingness, leaving him all alone again in his own private hell.

Carlito’s Restaurant
Miami

Fiona sat at a table outside the Carlito’s and sipped a glass of whiskey absently while her mind wandered aimlessly.

It had been satisfying to see Madeline confront the bookie the day before. Michael’s Mom had walked right up to the man and showed him what she had, his entire client list and their details from his little black book. She had told him that she was going to keep the money she found as Charlie’s college fund, and had advised him to disappear from Miami for good with his ledger. She had then gone on to explain why he should never return as well, not unless he wanted Maddie distributing all that information to people he didn’t want with the copy she kept.

That had been the end of that. Sapienza had bowed his head, accepted his defeat and left the state within the hour.

With that trouble taken care of, Fiona didn’t have any more distractions to keep herself from thinking about Michael, where he was or if he was even alive. Sam’s last update had been the night before, and it hadn’t been encouraging at all.

Michael seemed to have vanished off the surface of the planet, and if he was alive, the people who had him were determined to keep him that way for a while.

“Hey,” the greeting had her turning her head around to see Carlos approaching her. “There you are.”

She graced him with a smile and nodded at the empty seat before her. She had last seen Carlos on the same day they had seen Michael for the first time after long fourteen months – the same day she had almost died at the hand of a madman named Dexter Gamble.

The day she had realised, despite all her stubborn claims to the contrary, she hadn’t moved on past Michael at all.

They hadn’t even fought. Carlos had packed a bag and announced that he would be staying at his own place for a while, since he needed some space to figure things out. He had hesitated at the door, hoping she would try to reason with him and stop him from leaving. Fiona hadn’t said a word and ignored him completely while he had seen himself out.

She hadn’t really wanted to meet when Carlos called, but had changed her mind at the last minute, thinking if he had a job, that would at least be a distraction to keep herself occupied with until they received any information about Michael.

“Carlos,” she said, when he sat down and ordered himself a drink.

“I heard what happened,” he said softly, his face twisting into a pained grimace. “Saw it on the news actually. Couldn’t believe it.”

“Yeah,” Fiona murmured, trying to chase away the images of what could have been Michael’s final moments from her mind and failing miserably.

“When I saw you were back, I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Keeping tabs on me, are you?” She asked without any heat.

“I was worried, okay,” he said, “Still am. How’re you holding up?”

“As well as can be expected.” She said evasively.

“Look,” he said slowly, somewhat hesitantly, “If you need anything, Fiona, anything at all, I just want you to know I’m here, even if we–”

“Carlos,” she interrupted, “I appreciate you checking up on me, but I’ll be fine.”

She was mostly sure he was just trying to be nice, since he really was a good guy. But it wasn’t the kind of attention or care she needed at the moment. She didn’t really care if he had any plans to talk about their relationship, or had any notions about rekindling their romance now that, for him, Michael was permanently out of the picture. For her, he was still out there, and until Sonya showed up to say otherwise, or they stumbled upon his body, he was still very much alive, fighting for himself and the rest of them as he always did. That was the hope she stubbornly clung onto to keep going.

“Fiona–” Carlos tried, only to be cut off by her again.

“I think you should leave now, Carlos,” she said, suddenly feeling very tired, “You’ve said what you had to say and I’ve listened. We’re done here.”

Unknown Location
Unknown Time

The point of administering a psychoactive drug during an interrogation was not to make the subject automatically spill every secret that’d ever had, but to make it harder to lie. Coupled with the continued disorientation and sensory overload tactics, the hallucinations robbed the subject of any hope of holding onto a clear head or sanity. That wretched state of being made it that much difficult to make up a story and stick to it.

“Don’t fight this, Michael.” The hated man said when Michael finally managed to wrench his mind out of the turmoil wreaking havoc in his head and focus on him, “Relax. Breathe.”

He didn’t want to. All he wanted was to hide in a deep, dark, quiet corner and shut down, and not come out until the storm cleared.

“Look at me, Michael, look at me,” the man snapped, and then tapped him on his cheek. “There you are. Here, drink this.”

Michael took the glass full of clear liquid and drank it automatically, unable to enjoy the cool soothing sensation running down his parched throat with everything else that was going on. “We’ve learned a lot about you,” the man said, once he was done. “What you’ve done. But for my purposes, the ‘what’ is less important than the ‘why’.”

“It’s in there.” Michael said mechanically, nodding at a random direction where he thought his file was. “It’s all in there.”

“Well, we’ve gone over it. You’ve given me the names, the places, a little history. But now we need to go much deeper. We need to find out how you became the man you are today.”

Michael blinked, wondering why he couldn’t distinguish the man’s features very clearly anymore. “I don’t understand.”

“Here’s what I’m curious about, Michael,” he said, walking over to a window to stare at the sky. “When the CIA recruited you, your test scores were good. Your field work? Strong enough. But then when you were operating in Eastern Europe, you elevated your game. You went from a slightly above average operative to a living legend…” he let his voice trail off before turning to face Michael again. “Now…How does that happen?

“I followed orders.” Michael said, feeling as if the voice coming out of him wasn’t his at all. “I did what I had to do. It just happened.”

“I don’t think so.” The man shook his head as he walked back over to take his customary seat across from Michael. “The CIA would never give the highest priority operations to the Michael Westen that they recruited. You evolved into something that they never expected. Something inside of you, it shifted. What was it? What do you think it was?”

“My training kicked in,” Michael muttered, “Look at my time in Kiev. That many high-risk Ops in seven months, you grow stronger or you die.”

“Gradual improvements that come with training and experience had something to do with it, but that is only the icing on the cake…”

Michael found his focus drifting then, because, very strangely, he had started to feel the warmth of a fire on his face. The surroundings of the man and his hardly-used lounge started to get blurrier by each passing moment as it slowly morphed into a snow covered forest at the edge of a small, hidden village in a forgotten corner of Russia.

“What’s happening?”

Michael heard the man’s demand as if coming from a long distance, as if he was also fading right along with his surroundings to make space for what was unravelling in his mind’s vision.

“What are you seeing?”

A cold drop on his forehead made him look up, and Michael saw the tiny flakes of snow gently falling down upon him. He was cold, but the fire burning before him was just enough to keep him warm. The drug in his system insisted that it was perfectly okay to exist in two different places at once, in two different timelines, and that both those things could be real and true no matter what the laws of physics and science said.

“What’s happening?” The man asked again, “What are you seeing, Michael?”

“I don’t–I don’t know,” Michael stuttered, blinking at the embers mingling with the snow. “I–”

“Michael…” the man called from far away, “You only need to put yourself there to find the answers.”

“They’re talking about me, kid.”

Michael recognised that grating voice before the owner of it wandered into his line of sight. It was Larry. He was just walking out of the treeline towards the fire. He was in his camouflage BDUs and had a rifle in his hands.

“No, no…No!” Michael mumbled, curling in on himself in a useless attempt to flee from the hallucination. Larry Sizemore, the heartless psychopath, was dead. Fiona had taken care of it. He did not want to be staring down this particular demon when he was at his weakest.

“I am the answer.” Larry grinned like the madman he was and plopped down on the log next to Michael.

“No!” Michael yelled, “Get out of my head.”

“I’m the only one who ever really believed in you!” Larry shouted in his ear, “I made you!”

“That is not true.” Michael snapped, his gaze firmly fixed on the cackling fire because he didn’t want to look the dead man in the eyes and get lost in his insanity again.

“Aww, the hell it isn’t.” Larry was relentless, “You can’t lie to me, kid. I am in your head. You know exactly how much time and effort I put into you.”

“You didn’t do anything.” Michael bit back, fighting all the forceful sensations of the drug insisting at him to give in.

“Oh, please.” Larry scoffed. “Everyone thought you had the heart of a boy scout. But I saw your true colours. I discovered that homegrown anger, the resentment, all that stuff you kept bottled up inside of you, and I taught you how to use it.”

Not true, not true, not true, Michael started to chant in his mind desperately.

“Oh, you’re welcome, by the way.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.” he mumbled.

“Oh, I know exactly what I’m saying. I was there, kid. I remember how fast you took to it, how much you loved it.”

“You are not real.” Michael yelled through gritted teeth. “Get out of here.”

“You show some goddamn respect for the dead!” Larry yelled back in his ear, causing him to flinch away from the painful echoes of his deep, guttural voice. “I’m not asking for a candlelight vigil, but at least honour my untimely passing by admitting the truth. You are who I made you! And that is all I ever wanted, Michael… For you to accept who you are.”

“You’re wrong!” Michael roared.

“Who’s wrong?”

It took him a long time to realise that it wasn’t Larry, but the man who held him captive that was asking. It was all blurring together in a horrendous mess. Michael was starting to fear in earnest he would never be able to find his way back to himself.

“Who’s there, Michael?” The man now sounded very close, even though Michael couldn’t quite see him. “Answer me.”

“I don’t know,” Michael groaned, closing his eyes. The hallucination of the snow covered village refused to leave. “I just– It’s the drug. I’m not thinking straight.”

“Michael, don’t think straight. Just let whatever floats through your mind come out unfiltered, and you focus on the question,” the hypnotic voice of the man wrapped around Michael, along with the cold breeze in the night air, making him shiver uncontrollably. “How did you become the CIA’s ace?”

“Just tell him.” Larry sneered at him.

“Stop it. Stop it. Stop…”

“Come on,” Larry went on, completely ignoring Michael’s feeble protests. “What’s the harm in giving credit where credit is due?”

“Stop it! Stop it! It’s in the past! This doesn’t matter!” Michael didn’t know whom he was trying to convince – himself, Larry or the unidentified man who was putting him through all of it.

“Oh, yes, it does. It matters to you,” the man insisted, “Otherwise we wouldn’t be here together. Now just let it out.”

“Just stop!” Michael begged, his voice shaking, “Please!”

“What? Oh, you think he’s gonna hate you if he knows who you really are?” Larray let out a ringing laugh. “Come on, tell him how much fun we had. That’s what he wants. Say my name, and I promise you you’ll feel better.”

“No…”

“Say it, kid.” Larry howled in his ear. “Say my name!”

“Larry!” Michael screamed.

Everything went silent after his explosive outburst, leaving just the soft sounds of crackling fire and the distant chirps of nighttime creatures. Micheal was cold, weary to the bone and felt hollowed out by each and every shallow breath he dragged into his lungs and the weak, out-of-rhythm beat of his heart.

“Well, isn’t that interesting?” The man said after a long moment, breaking the silence and the meagre moment of reprieve. “There’s a Larry Sizemore in the file, listed as a field officer. The missions you went on together were very intriguing to say the least. What was so special about him?”

“Nothing special,” Michael whispered, willing the hated face to disappear from his vision. “He was a special kind of monster.”

“Well, you worked with plenty of monsters,” the man pointed out in a calm, unbothered manner. “What was so special about this one?”

“He was dangerous, and I was afraid.” Michael said, and gasped out loudly when he realised that the words had slipped out without his conscious input. The drug was starting to take hold of him in earnest, mercilessly penetrating through his crumbling mental layers.

“What were you afraid of?” The man’s voice sounded very near, and Michael felt his warm breath against his ear.

“I was afraid I was becoming like him,” Michael said, utterly helpless to stop the truth from spilling out, “And I was afraid I was starting to like it.”

“Finally, we’re making progress,” the man declared triumphantly. Michael felt a hand clamp around his elbow, and was utterly dismayed when he couldn’t gather any strength to pull his arm away from the unwanted contact.

“Here’s what we need, Michael,” he continued eagerly, “We need to understand who he was to you. The things that these mission reports can’t reveal.”

“What do you want to know?” Michael breathed.

“Why did you and Larry stop working together?”

“I was needed in the Middle East,” he said, keeping it short, “So that’s where I went.”

“Well, you can’t deny that you were a powerful team,” the man sounded distant again, and thoughtful. “And the CIA wouldn’t let you split up without good reason.”

Michael wanted to get out of the cold of Russia. He wanted to get out of this place where all he inhaled was dust motes. He just wanted it to end.

“Don’t know what you want me to say.” he murmured tiredly.

“Talk to me about Vedeno, November, ’95.” The man ordered. “What happened there? You and Larry were never on record working together again after that Op. Talk to me about that.”

“Recon mission.”

“Recon? Then why were you sent home six months before your posting was finished?”

“I made a tactical mistake.”

“What did that mistake look like?”

It was daylight. Somehow. Michael didn’t know how that happened. He had lost track of time a long time ago along with the little pieces of his soul the man kept chiselling out of him. He was standing just outside an abandoned warehouse, near a factory he didn’t really want to look at. He could hear Larry moving around inside the building, shouting in unintelligible Russian.

“We trusted a local military commander,” he said, willing it all to go away. “But he betrayed us.”

“Oh, so you got played by an asset. Ops have gone bad on you before,” the man said dismissively. “What makes this one so unique?”

Michael didn’t want to dwell into that. It was a memory he wanted to forget, move past it like never happened, and hold himself to levels of monumental self-restraint so he never made any more memories such as that one.

“Michael. Michael? Michael!” The man raised his voice, and Michael thought he was walking around him in circles. “Pay attention!” He heard the snapping of fingers right in front of his face. “You and Larry, betrayed by your contact, then what?”

“We had to find him,” Michael said, wondering when he had lost control of his own words. “The intel he had could expose everyone.”

“That bastard,” Larry decided to come out of the warehouse then, cursing loudly. He had a rifle with him. “He couldn’t have gotten far. Let’s move.”

“We tracked him down.” Michael recited the memory playing before him, “Standard Op. Locate, corner, neutralise.”

“Now you’re just parroting orders.” The man sounded irritated. “What did you and Larry do?”

“Ah, kid, it happened,” Larry laughed at him. “You know, you can deny it all you want, but nothing’s gonna change the facts.”

“Why don’t you want to talk about it?” The man was relentless. Michael would have punched him if he had any motor control of his limbs.

“Hey, you know, these– these were our glory days,” Larry crowed like a madman. “This was beautiful. This was something to be proud of.”

“Get out of my head, Larry,” Michael snapped. He was getting sick of the sound of his voice, his laughter, his words, his miserable existence…and the day he’d had the misfortune to lay eyes on Larry Sizemore the first time, “I’m not listening to you anymore.”

“Ah, don’t look at me like that,” Larry mocked, and kicked a Russian farmer who was on the floor next to them, bound and gagged. “These aren’t innocent people. They were hiding an enemy. Our enemy!”

“That wasn’t how it was supposed to happen!” Michael murmured, dreading what was to come and utterly unable to prevent it.

“What happened?” The man pounced, digging at the truth Michael was desperately trying to hold on to. “What happened, tell me.”

“We interrogated the villagers.” Michael felt the words escape through his tightening throat, completely out of his control. “They had helped him escape. They were just farmers. Didn’t take long to figure out where they had hid him. He had barricaded himself inside of a factory–”

“He doesn’t want tactical details,” Larry interrupted with a scoff. “He’s not gonna stop until you give him what’s inside!”

“It was too risky to breach and extract,” Michael murmured. “So we neutralised the situation.”

“Damn it! Again, with ‘neutralise’!” Larry yelled in frustration, bringing his gun up way too close to Michael’s unprotected chest. “For the love of God, use real words! The man was hiding like a coward! Was it worth risking our lives to silence him? Hell, no! So tell him how you solved it. Tell him what you did–”

“I blew it up.” Michael barked, just to get the voice of Larry to shut the hell up. His head was so far beyond agony, he didn’t know how he was still conscious. “I blew up the building.”

The factory he still wasn’t looking at blew up behind him, painting the white snow with the deadly shade of orange. The sound of the explosion echoed in his ears, mind and soul, leaving him feeling as if he was shattering from within all over again.

“Is that what’s bothering you?” The man asked, sounding quite sceptical about the whole thing. “That you blew up a building? There is more to it than that. You’re safe here, you can tell me.”

Safe was the last thing Michael was feeling. He was trapped. And he had no way out but with the truth.

“Go on. Come on.” Larry encouraged, “Tell him why you ran away from me.”

“I didn’t know there were people in there.” Michael murmured with a last ditch effort, unwilling to give up fighting until he couldn’t.

“Stop right there.” Larry bared his teeth at him in an unpleasant grin. “You knew.”

“I couldn’t see inside!” Michael pushed out through clenched teeth.

“Are you kidding me?” Larry grabbed him by the shirt collar and shook him violently, “You could have looked through the window. You could have counted cars in the lot! But you didn’t! No, you want to try and play the boy scout and tell yourself, ‘oh, it was an accident,’ but I know better, ’cause I saw the look in your eye, that killer instinct.”

Please make this stop, his desperate prayer went unheard.

“You knew they were there!” Larry yelled.

“I didn’t care!” Michael lost the battle with himself and yelled. “I lost control, I was angry. My friends– my friends were gonna die. I didn’t care what it took or who stood in my way, I was gonna make sure that son of a bitch was dead.”

“Tell me, Michael.” The man’s encouraging words felt like thorns in his ears.

“I let my feelings blind me.” Michael kept talking, unable to stop himself now that the dam was broken, “I never wanted that to happen again.”

“And that is why you always get the job done without collateral damage.” The man declared in a tone that he had just stumbled upon a great revelation.

“The people… In the factory,” Michael said quietly, closing his eyes. Something warm trickled out of the corner of his eyes and ran down his cheeks, making him shiver. “Sometimes, I hear them scream.”

“They never stop.” The man said equally softly. He sounded like he understood exactly what Michael was saying. “They can get quieter, but they never stop.”

Something in his heavy, low tone made Michael open his eyes again. To his immense relief, the village in Russia, the burning factory, the snow and Larry were gone. In their place, he was once again looking at the empty shelves, covered furniture and the understanding written all over the man’s face.

“Michael, I want you to understand what you’ve done here today, it’s very important,” he said softly when Michael’s gaze focused on him. “Because I can’t protect you unless I know what’s driving you. You share your burden, I will help you carry it.”

Michael didn’t know what to say to that, or whether he was supposed to. So he stayed quiet, hoping this was the end.

“Now, you get some rest,” the man patted him on the shoulder and shattered his flimsy hope for an end to it all with his next words, “It is clear to me there are more demons inside of you, and I will do whatever it takes to dig them out.”

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