Manipulation - Chapter Ten
Aug. 20th, 2011 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
indigo_angelsAgent Bryce Taylor wasn’t happy. This was his big chance, this case could be what all that was needed to propel him onto bigger and better things. He couldn’t understand where it had all gone wrong, all that planning and organisation, all that bare faced lying and scheming right out in front of the eyes of the whole country. All that risk and for what? The whole damn operation had ground to a halt, just when it should have been flying to a glorious conclusion. Well, glorious for him anyway.
He popped a beer and collapsed down on his sofa, staring blankly at the football game. He had agents working on the case for him now, hopefully they were going to have some success. Meanwhile, he was going to let himself have this one beer, then he was just going to kick back, wait and pray.
____________________
Hannibal counted three on his fingers and then they moved. A sharp kick from BA, then Hannibal was in, making his way straight to where Taylor was scrabbling for his gun, Murdock right behind him, sweeping the rest of the room, BA checking behind them and closing the door. Within five seconds, Taylor was flat on his back in the seat of the sofa, hastily spit out beer all over his shirt, his eyes wide in fear and his hand still ineffectively reaching for his gun.
“Smith...” he stuttered, beer trailing down his chin, “I thought you...”
“Were on ice? Were out of the way? Were tied up?” Hannibal scoffed, “Come on, you spooks didn't do any research on us at all?”
“Agent Bryce Taylor,” Murdock supplied from the other side of the room as he leafed through Taylor’s things.
“Right then Agent Taylor,” Hannibal muttered, “you have exactly twenty seconds to tell me where my Lieutenant is. Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen...”
“I can’t!” Taylor exclaimed, struggling hopelessly in Hannibal’s grip.
Hannibal’s expression didn’t waiver as he called, “BA!”
In two strides the big guy was at Hannibal’s side, hauling Taylor up off the sofa and towards the open balcony doors.
“No!” Taylor screamed as he quickly caught on to the plan.
BA ignored him and they were soon at the side of the balcony railing. In one easy movement, BA lifted the Agent up, holding him around the knees and letting the rest of his body hang over the edge, eight stories above the busy road below.
“Stop, stop! Let me up!” The screams were pitiful but Hannibal just lounged against the side of the glass watching with an impassive expression on his face as he counted down, “Nine, eight, seven, six-”
“Alright! Alright! I’ll tell you!” Taylor looked as if he were in imminent danger of wetting himself right away.
Hannibal nodded and BA hauled him up, setting him on his feet in the apartment where he staggered as far away from the open window as he could. “You!” he spluttered, “You’re crazy! All of you! Damn crazy!”
There was a creeping smile over Hannibal’s face as he looked at Taylor’s white countenance. “Well, Agent Taylor, you and your accomplices have set up one of my team, chased us through the streets, pointed guns at us and left us tied to beds in some house straight from a suburban horror movie, so you will forgive us if we are not in the best of tempers at the minute.” His words were punctuated by the meaty thwack of BA’s fist hitting his palm. Taylor cringed and Hannibal smiled, “Now. You were about to explain all about Face.”
Taylor flopped down onto the sofa and pushed his dishevelled hair out of his face, “Okay, okay,” he whispered and Hannibal wondered if he was just trying to make up a hasty untruth. “So, any of you heard of the Afghan warlord, Abdul-Razaaq Yousafzai?”
Hannibal folded his arms, “Razaaq the Razor? Of course we have.”
“That the guy who used to drag his victims into the caves in the mountains and slice thin strips off ‘em until they were dead?” Murdock’s face was creased in thought.
“Yeah,” Taylor visibly shuddered, “that’s the guy.” Hannibal just stared as he waited for more. “Well, he disappeared when the new regime took power, but we have been searching for him ever since, he’s wanted for the murder of at least twenty US service men, as well as untold Afghans and foreign nationals. Anyway, recent intelligence has placed him actually here in the States for a very brief window of time.”
“Why?” Hannibal was frowning.
“Business contacts,” Taylor explained. “Seems the man wanted to inspect his own merchandise. Anyway, he’s here, but we have no idea where, so we needed something to draw him out.”
“Somethin’” BA growled, “or someone?”
“Yeah,” Murdock took a threatening step in, “what’s all this got to do with our Face?”
“Well,” now Taylor had started looking very shifty, “it seems that Yousafzai has had a long running grudge against a US serviceman called Templeton Peck.”
“Face?” Hannibal was wearing a grim expression as if he knew where this might be going, “Why?”
“It seems,” Taylor fidgeted nervously, “that Peck was running something of a supply pool out in Afghanistan...”
“ Kandahar Cosco,” Hannibal muttered angrily, “I damn well told the kid to stop all that crap, he swore to me he had!”
“What’s that Colonel?” Murdock was frowning and Hannibal realised that he and BA would need a brief infill of information, sometimes it was easy to forget that the four of them had not been together forever.
He waved his hands impatiently, “When we first went out to Afghanistan, Face was ‘appropriating’ goods, booze, tobacco, food stuff and so on from transports headed for the Taliban and selling it on to the troops on the base.”
“Man! That’s stealin’” BA’s brow was creased into deep furrows and Hannibal briefly wondered how a man who could rip batteries and airbags from other people’s vehicles without a second’s thought could get so het up about stealing vodka from the Taliban in a warzone.
But now it was Taylor’s turn to look confused, “Well, I don't know anything about drink and tobacco, but it was the guns that Yousafzai was most upset about.”
_______________________
“Guns!” Face’s eyes were wide. “No way. I never touched your damn guns!”
“You lie!” Yousafzai spat, his own eyes blazing with terrifying anger. “You took my guns, my ammo, the rocket launchers I had ordered, the grenades, everything!!!” Face just shook his head, “And when I opened up the crates in front of all my brothers, there was nothing but rocks! Crates and crates of rocks and they laughed at me! Me! Abdul-Razaaq Yousafzai! They laughed at me and then they took my finger as a reminder of my disgrace!” He reached out and grabbed hold of Face’s chin, three hard, tight fingers and one thumb digging brutally into the thin flesh, “And that was all your doing, Peck!” His voice had dropped to a deadly whisper, “And for fifteen long years I have plotted how I will make you pay for it,”
Face just stared back, his eyes bleak now.
______________________
“No.” Hannibal shook his head vehemently, “I was with him back then and he was never peddling weapons. Never.”
Taylor shrugged, “The facts of the matter are irrelevant, Smith. All that’s important is that Yousafzai believes that Peck stole his weapons and that he wants revenge enough to come out of hiding to do it.”
“An’ so you needed to get Facey out in the open so you could dangle him in front of Yousafzai like a livin’, breathin’ cat toy hey, Taylor?” The anger was almost palpable in Murdock’s voice.
Taylor met his eye. “General Dobson was also after Yousafzai, it was his idea to use Peck and it was simply a means to an end, Captain Murdock. Every conflict will result in some collateral damage.”
“Collateral damage!” It was, incredibly, BA that held both Hannibal and Murdock back as they surged towards Taylor, murder in their eyes.
“Easy, easy,” he murmured as he held his team mates back, this aint helping Face, guys.”
__________________________
Face fought to pull his head back into an upright position as yet another punch landed hard against his jaw. He’d lost count, had tried to keep a record as something for his increasingly panicked mind to hold onto, but a particularly vicious left cross to his temple had put paid to that about five minutes ago and now he was struggling. He blinked through the haze of pain and realised that blood was starting to drip into his eye making it hard to see, but he could still make out Yousafzai, sitting in a seat just across from him, one foot resting on his knee, shelling pistachio nuts all over the floor watching his men taking it in turns to beat the living daylights out of him. Just peachy.
______________________
Hannibal contented himself with slamming Taylor up against the wall for his ‘collateral damage’ comment and he just hoped the guy could read the look in his face. “If you don’t want to go back out of that window, pal, you better tell us where Face is pretty damn quick!”
Taylor gave a shifty look around the room and had just opened his mouth to reply when a knock at the door saved him. The three men stiffened as a woman’s voice rang out, “Taylor? I know you are in there, and I want a word about this memo! Open up!”
“Samantha,” Murdock mouthed silently at his team while Hannibal made sure his gun was pressing right into Taylor’s cheek. He nodded at his two men and Murdock and BA instantly took up positions either side of the door, Murdock reached out and put his hand on the knob while BA waited, tense, just at the side of the door jam. On a prearranged signal, Murdock yanked the door wide open while BA reached out and grabbed the startled woman by her jacket, yanking her in and fitting a huge hand over her mouth before she had the chance to make a sound.
Murdock instantly closed the door behind her as Hannibal turned and gave her a cold smile. “Well, well, if it isn’t our friendly neighbourhood Siren. You draw any other perfectly innocent soldiers into any more of your traps today then?”
Samantha bristled and BA removed his hand, confident for now that she had seen the gun pressing into Taylor’s neck and wasn’t going to start any fuss right now. “Smith,” she greeted him coldly, “perhaps if you had kept him a little closer to home then maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to do it all on his own!”
Hannibal’s eyes narrowed, “Don’t think your limited contact with Face makes you anything like an expert on his emotions and motivations.”
She folded her arms and glared at him, “And why should I? All your years of running around with him certainly haven’t helped you understand him any better!”
He turned away, no patience for that sort of conversation at the moment and tried to ignore the nagging guilt that was coiled up in his stomach. “So, Taylor, for the last time, where is my man?”
Taylor exchanged a glance with Samantha and her expression darkened further as he replied. “I don't know.”
There was a moment’s silence as those words permeated into everyone’s heads before Hannibal pulled him off from the wall and threw him back again. Hard. “What the hell do you mean? You don’t know?” he yelled. Wincing as his head hit the wall, Taylor’s hands automatically came up to grab ineffectively at Hannibal’s wrists. “What were you thinking, sending him out like that as bait for a crazed psychopath with a grudge against him and no way of tracing him once the bait was taken?!!!”
“We had a way!” Taylor yelled, panic in his eyes, “The PDA! It has a tracker in it! But Peck ditched it! Left it at that studio with the giant chicken!”
Four identical groans of despair sounded around the room. “He hated that screenplay,” Murdock whispered, his voice thick with guilt, “’cause we made fun of it. So he left it behind.” BA scrubbed a hand through his Mohawk and kicked out at the coffee table.
“Right, you,” Hannibal turned back to Taylor with gritted teeth, “I want all your intel now. Everything you have on Yousafzai,” he saw Taylor frown and open his mouth and Hannibal shoved him hard against the wall once more. “And so help me, if you dare say the word ‘confidential’ I’ll throw you out of that damn window myself!”
Taylor’s eyes flicked to Samantha, who nodded at him before he turned back to Hannibal, his eyes wide in fear, “Alright,” he whispered.
___________________
Face realised that it was definitely getting harder to think now. At some point they had untied him from the chair, more to give them better access to beating his body he felt rather than anything else. It was getting harder to cope by the minute and so Face decided to take himself away, and since he couldn’t do it physically, then he decided to try his hardest to do it in his head. It was a technique that he’d used with some success in the past so why shouldn’t it work now?
He tried to find something to latch onto, something he could focus on now that he had totally lost track of the number of punches they had landed on him. It didn’t take much searching around in his head to come up with something, and before he knew it, there was a fully formed vision of Hannibal right there smiling at him. He smiled back, although it was hard to do with his split lip and then he asked the Hannibal in his head when he was coming to get him out of this hell.
And that’s when it all went wrong. Hannibal’s smile faded and he just shook his head instead and suddenly Face understood. Of course, he’d walked away hadn’t he? From his team, his family, from Hannibal. Why had he done that again? What had he been hoping to find out there that he didn't already have in his life? The blows to his head were making it so hard to concentrate, but he was sure there must have been something worthwhile to make him leave the team like that. But now... no, it was gone.
So he looked back at Hannibal who was starting to fade and Face began to panic. He reached out but again the boss shook his head and became even fainter in Face’s mind. So this was it then, he realised, this was the one time that Hannibal wouldn’t come to save him, wouldn’t charge in like a knight of old and haul his butt out of danger. Face let his hand drop as Hannibal finally faded into nothing. No, he’d left the team, left the boss, left the only home he’d ever known, all for a lie, and now he’d burnt every bridge he’d ever had. No one was coming for him, no one was saving him. This putrid, blood splattered hole was where Templeton Peck finally met his end. Fitting really, he thought, and then it all went black.
_______________________
Hannibal leaned back in his chair and rubbed his hands over tired, sore eyes. The morning sunshine was creeping around the corner of the apartment block next door and everyone else was asleep around him. Hannibal himself had had an hour earlier on, at Murdock’s insistence, but he couldn’t sleep longer, dreams of Face writhing in pain, screaming out for him tormented the brief rest he’d had. He ran an eye over Taylor’s apartment, strewn in intelligence reports and satellite images and phone transcripts and nothing nothing to bring them any closer to Face. He stood up and headed over to the kitchen to make some coffee before he woke everyone up for a meeting.
_______________________
Face woke with a start as a deluge of icy water washed over him. His whole body spasmed in shock which only resulted in him crashing against the rough wall, scraping his already abused flesh on the brickwork, tearing his wrists and ankles on the shackles that held him up. He tried to calm himself down, knew his pounding heart and rapid breathing wouldn’t help him keep control, heard the laughter of his captors echoing around the cavernous space he was in, knew he was blindfolded and naked, chained spread eagled against a wall and surrounded by buoyant hostiles. He took a deep breath to steady himself, thinking grimly, ‘and so it begins’.
Next
He popped a beer and collapsed down on his sofa, staring blankly at the football game. He had agents working on the case for him now, hopefully they were going to have some success. Meanwhile, he was going to let himself have this one beer, then he was just going to kick back, wait and pray.
____________________
Hannibal counted three on his fingers and then they moved. A sharp kick from BA, then Hannibal was in, making his way straight to where Taylor was scrabbling for his gun, Murdock right behind him, sweeping the rest of the room, BA checking behind them and closing the door. Within five seconds, Taylor was flat on his back in the seat of the sofa, hastily spit out beer all over his shirt, his eyes wide in fear and his hand still ineffectively reaching for his gun.
“Smith...” he stuttered, beer trailing down his chin, “I thought you...”
“Were on ice? Were out of the way? Were tied up?” Hannibal scoffed, “Come on, you spooks didn't do any research on us at all?”
“Agent Bryce Taylor,” Murdock supplied from the other side of the room as he leafed through Taylor’s things.
“Right then Agent Taylor,” Hannibal muttered, “you have exactly twenty seconds to tell me where my Lieutenant is. Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen...”
“I can’t!” Taylor exclaimed, struggling hopelessly in Hannibal’s grip.
Hannibal’s expression didn’t waiver as he called, “BA!”
In two strides the big guy was at Hannibal’s side, hauling Taylor up off the sofa and towards the open balcony doors.
“No!” Taylor screamed as he quickly caught on to the plan.
BA ignored him and they were soon at the side of the balcony railing. In one easy movement, BA lifted the Agent up, holding him around the knees and letting the rest of his body hang over the edge, eight stories above the busy road below.
“Stop, stop! Let me up!” The screams were pitiful but Hannibal just lounged against the side of the glass watching with an impassive expression on his face as he counted down, “Nine, eight, seven, six-”
“Alright! Alright! I’ll tell you!” Taylor looked as if he were in imminent danger of wetting himself right away.
Hannibal nodded and BA hauled him up, setting him on his feet in the apartment where he staggered as far away from the open window as he could. “You!” he spluttered, “You’re crazy! All of you! Damn crazy!”
There was a creeping smile over Hannibal’s face as he looked at Taylor’s white countenance. “Well, Agent Taylor, you and your accomplices have set up one of my team, chased us through the streets, pointed guns at us and left us tied to beds in some house straight from a suburban horror movie, so you will forgive us if we are not in the best of tempers at the minute.” His words were punctuated by the meaty thwack of BA’s fist hitting his palm. Taylor cringed and Hannibal smiled, “Now. You were about to explain all about Face.”
Taylor flopped down onto the sofa and pushed his dishevelled hair out of his face, “Okay, okay,” he whispered and Hannibal wondered if he was just trying to make up a hasty untruth. “So, any of you heard of the Afghan warlord, Abdul-Razaaq Yousafzai?”
Hannibal folded his arms, “Razaaq the Razor? Of course we have.”
“That the guy who used to drag his victims into the caves in the mountains and slice thin strips off ‘em until they were dead?” Murdock’s face was creased in thought.
“Yeah,” Taylor visibly shuddered, “that’s the guy.” Hannibal just stared as he waited for more. “Well, he disappeared when the new regime took power, but we have been searching for him ever since, he’s wanted for the murder of at least twenty US service men, as well as untold Afghans and foreign nationals. Anyway, recent intelligence has placed him actually here in the States for a very brief window of time.”
“Why?” Hannibal was frowning.
“Business contacts,” Taylor explained. “Seems the man wanted to inspect his own merchandise. Anyway, he’s here, but we have no idea where, so we needed something to draw him out.”
“Somethin’” BA growled, “or someone?”
“Yeah,” Murdock took a threatening step in, “what’s all this got to do with our Face?”
“Well,” now Taylor had started looking very shifty, “it seems that Yousafzai has had a long running grudge against a US serviceman called Templeton Peck.”
“Face?” Hannibal was wearing a grim expression as if he knew where this might be going, “Why?”
“It seems,” Taylor fidgeted nervously, “that Peck was running something of a supply pool out in Afghanistan...”
“ Kandahar Cosco,” Hannibal muttered angrily, “I damn well told the kid to stop all that crap, he swore to me he had!”
“What’s that Colonel?” Murdock was frowning and Hannibal realised that he and BA would need a brief infill of information, sometimes it was easy to forget that the four of them had not been together forever.
He waved his hands impatiently, “When we first went out to Afghanistan, Face was ‘appropriating’ goods, booze, tobacco, food stuff and so on from transports headed for the Taliban and selling it on to the troops on the base.”
“Man! That’s stealin’” BA’s brow was creased into deep furrows and Hannibal briefly wondered how a man who could rip batteries and airbags from other people’s vehicles without a second’s thought could get so het up about stealing vodka from the Taliban in a warzone.
But now it was Taylor’s turn to look confused, “Well, I don't know anything about drink and tobacco, but it was the guns that Yousafzai was most upset about.”
_______________________
“Guns!” Face’s eyes were wide. “No way. I never touched your damn guns!”
“You lie!” Yousafzai spat, his own eyes blazing with terrifying anger. “You took my guns, my ammo, the rocket launchers I had ordered, the grenades, everything!!!” Face just shook his head, “And when I opened up the crates in front of all my brothers, there was nothing but rocks! Crates and crates of rocks and they laughed at me! Me! Abdul-Razaaq Yousafzai! They laughed at me and then they took my finger as a reminder of my disgrace!” He reached out and grabbed hold of Face’s chin, three hard, tight fingers and one thumb digging brutally into the thin flesh, “And that was all your doing, Peck!” His voice had dropped to a deadly whisper, “And for fifteen long years I have plotted how I will make you pay for it,”
Face just stared back, his eyes bleak now.
______________________
“No.” Hannibal shook his head vehemently, “I was with him back then and he was never peddling weapons. Never.”
Taylor shrugged, “The facts of the matter are irrelevant, Smith. All that’s important is that Yousafzai believes that Peck stole his weapons and that he wants revenge enough to come out of hiding to do it.”
“An’ so you needed to get Facey out in the open so you could dangle him in front of Yousafzai like a livin’, breathin’ cat toy hey, Taylor?” The anger was almost palpable in Murdock’s voice.
Taylor met his eye. “General Dobson was also after Yousafzai, it was his idea to use Peck and it was simply a means to an end, Captain Murdock. Every conflict will result in some collateral damage.”
“Collateral damage!” It was, incredibly, BA that held both Hannibal and Murdock back as they surged towards Taylor, murder in their eyes.
“Easy, easy,” he murmured as he held his team mates back, this aint helping Face, guys.”
__________________________
Face fought to pull his head back into an upright position as yet another punch landed hard against his jaw. He’d lost count, had tried to keep a record as something for his increasingly panicked mind to hold onto, but a particularly vicious left cross to his temple had put paid to that about five minutes ago and now he was struggling. He blinked through the haze of pain and realised that blood was starting to drip into his eye making it hard to see, but he could still make out Yousafzai, sitting in a seat just across from him, one foot resting on his knee, shelling pistachio nuts all over the floor watching his men taking it in turns to beat the living daylights out of him. Just peachy.
______________________
Hannibal contented himself with slamming Taylor up against the wall for his ‘collateral damage’ comment and he just hoped the guy could read the look in his face. “If you don’t want to go back out of that window, pal, you better tell us where Face is pretty damn quick!”
Taylor gave a shifty look around the room and had just opened his mouth to reply when a knock at the door saved him. The three men stiffened as a woman’s voice rang out, “Taylor? I know you are in there, and I want a word about this memo! Open up!”
“Samantha,” Murdock mouthed silently at his team while Hannibal made sure his gun was pressing right into Taylor’s cheek. He nodded at his two men and Murdock and BA instantly took up positions either side of the door, Murdock reached out and put his hand on the knob while BA waited, tense, just at the side of the door jam. On a prearranged signal, Murdock yanked the door wide open while BA reached out and grabbed the startled woman by her jacket, yanking her in and fitting a huge hand over her mouth before she had the chance to make a sound.
Murdock instantly closed the door behind her as Hannibal turned and gave her a cold smile. “Well, well, if it isn’t our friendly neighbourhood Siren. You draw any other perfectly innocent soldiers into any more of your traps today then?”
Samantha bristled and BA removed his hand, confident for now that she had seen the gun pressing into Taylor’s neck and wasn’t going to start any fuss right now. “Smith,” she greeted him coldly, “perhaps if you had kept him a little closer to home then maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to do it all on his own!”
Hannibal’s eyes narrowed, “Don’t think your limited contact with Face makes you anything like an expert on his emotions and motivations.”
She folded her arms and glared at him, “And why should I? All your years of running around with him certainly haven’t helped you understand him any better!”
He turned away, no patience for that sort of conversation at the moment and tried to ignore the nagging guilt that was coiled up in his stomach. “So, Taylor, for the last time, where is my man?”
Taylor exchanged a glance with Samantha and her expression darkened further as he replied. “I don't know.”
There was a moment’s silence as those words permeated into everyone’s heads before Hannibal pulled him off from the wall and threw him back again. Hard. “What the hell do you mean? You don’t know?” he yelled. Wincing as his head hit the wall, Taylor’s hands automatically came up to grab ineffectively at Hannibal’s wrists. “What were you thinking, sending him out like that as bait for a crazed psychopath with a grudge against him and no way of tracing him once the bait was taken?!!!”
“We had a way!” Taylor yelled, panic in his eyes, “The PDA! It has a tracker in it! But Peck ditched it! Left it at that studio with the giant chicken!”
Four identical groans of despair sounded around the room. “He hated that screenplay,” Murdock whispered, his voice thick with guilt, “’cause we made fun of it. So he left it behind.” BA scrubbed a hand through his Mohawk and kicked out at the coffee table.
“Right, you,” Hannibal turned back to Taylor with gritted teeth, “I want all your intel now. Everything you have on Yousafzai,” he saw Taylor frown and open his mouth and Hannibal shoved him hard against the wall once more. “And so help me, if you dare say the word ‘confidential’ I’ll throw you out of that damn window myself!”
Taylor’s eyes flicked to Samantha, who nodded at him before he turned back to Hannibal, his eyes wide in fear, “Alright,” he whispered.
___________________
Face realised that it was definitely getting harder to think now. At some point they had untied him from the chair, more to give them better access to beating his body he felt rather than anything else. It was getting harder to cope by the minute and so Face decided to take himself away, and since he couldn’t do it physically, then he decided to try his hardest to do it in his head. It was a technique that he’d used with some success in the past so why shouldn’t it work now?
He tried to find something to latch onto, something he could focus on now that he had totally lost track of the number of punches they had landed on him. It didn’t take much searching around in his head to come up with something, and before he knew it, there was a fully formed vision of Hannibal right there smiling at him. He smiled back, although it was hard to do with his split lip and then he asked the Hannibal in his head when he was coming to get him out of this hell.
And that’s when it all went wrong. Hannibal’s smile faded and he just shook his head instead and suddenly Face understood. Of course, he’d walked away hadn’t he? From his team, his family, from Hannibal. Why had he done that again? What had he been hoping to find out there that he didn't already have in his life? The blows to his head were making it so hard to concentrate, but he was sure there must have been something worthwhile to make him leave the team like that. But now... no, it was gone.
So he looked back at Hannibal who was starting to fade and Face began to panic. He reached out but again the boss shook his head and became even fainter in Face’s mind. So this was it then, he realised, this was the one time that Hannibal wouldn’t come to save him, wouldn’t charge in like a knight of old and haul his butt out of danger. Face let his hand drop as Hannibal finally faded into nothing. No, he’d left the team, left the boss, left the only home he’d ever known, all for a lie, and now he’d burnt every bridge he’d ever had. No one was coming for him, no one was saving him. This putrid, blood splattered hole was where Templeton Peck finally met his end. Fitting really, he thought, and then it all went black.
_______________________
Hannibal leaned back in his chair and rubbed his hands over tired, sore eyes. The morning sunshine was creeping around the corner of the apartment block next door and everyone else was asleep around him. Hannibal himself had had an hour earlier on, at Murdock’s insistence, but he couldn’t sleep longer, dreams of Face writhing in pain, screaming out for him tormented the brief rest he’d had. He ran an eye over Taylor’s apartment, strewn in intelligence reports and satellite images and phone transcripts and nothing nothing to bring them any closer to Face. He stood up and headed over to the kitchen to make some coffee before he woke everyone up for a meeting.
_______________________
Face woke with a start as a deluge of icy water washed over him. His whole body spasmed in shock which only resulted in him crashing against the rough wall, scraping his already abused flesh on the brickwork, tearing his wrists and ankles on the shackles that held him up. He tried to calm himself down, knew his pounding heart and rapid breathing wouldn’t help him keep control, heard the laughter of his captors echoing around the cavernous space he was in, knew he was blindfolded and naked, chained spread eagled against a wall and surrounded by buoyant hostiles. He took a deep breath to steady himself, thinking grimly, ‘and so it begins’.
Next
