Archive of Our Own

"Professor. We meet again."

"Brackett? Brackett!"

"You remembered. I'm touched. Let's go."

He was pointing a gun firmly in Blair's direction and suddenly a quiet Thursday afternoon in his office writing a lecture on rites of passage had turned into a total disaster zone. Why me, Blair wondered.

Brackett looked like shit. He was pale, dark-eyed, stubbled. He smelled kind of ripe too, come to that. He could have been a street person, rather than the smooth CIA renegade Blair remembered. But his eyes were wide open and took in every detail of the office, every move Blair made.

"No way."

"Look Sandburg, I'm in a hurry and I've got a gun. Do as I tell you and no-one gets hurt. Piss me off and I'll shoot you in the hip and take you anyway. Start with me on the way out of the building and I'll take out the next student we meet. Got it?"

He gestured with the gun and Blair looked carefully at him, assessing his chances. The first time they had met Brackett had been a cold, hard-eyed professional, but now he was a cold, hard-eyed professional with sweat on his face and a nervous tic in the corner of his eye. So Blair used his brains, stood up, and walked as directed towards the door and out of his office. He moved through the corridors of the university with Brackett at his shoulder and the gun pressing into his back. There were students passing, an endless colourful stream of them. God, they all looked so young, so vulnerable... Brackett would eat them up and spit them out without pausing for breath. So he went quietly, and smiled non-committally at the one or two who greeted him by name, and gave Brackett no excuse to do anything except walk with him, outside.

"Where's your car?"

"In the shop," Blair lied fluently. "Where's yours?"

Blair was parked around the corner and Brackett didn't look as if he had the time or the inclination to search. But then how had he got there, and why did he need to change cars?

Brackett put his elbow through the window of the nearest car, popped the lock, swept the broken glass off the seat and gestured to Blair to get in.

"You drive."

"How, man? I don't exactly have a spare set of keys to this thing in my pocket."

Brackett grinned and did something complicated that started with him grabbing Blair's wrist, twisting his arm up behind his back in a competent one handed grip that kept him immobilised while Brackett used his other hand to do something under the dash. The car purred obediently to life and Blair's heart sank. This was real, then. He looked around vaguely, hoping inspiration would strike, but nothing came to mind. He put the car in gear, pulled away from the kerb and drove off, Brackett lounging back in the passenger seat, the gun pointing unwaveringly at Blair.

"Where to?"

"Head for the freeway. Where's your cellphone?"

"Back in my office."

"You got a wallet?"

"Yes."

"Gimme. Empty your pockets."

Blair hesitated.

"Or I will."

"Give me a break!" he muttered, trying to drive one-handed while with the other he emptied his pockets. He handed over his wallet, keys, swiss army knife. Brackett inspected them, pocketed the keys and knife, looked disgustedly through the wallet.

"I need some cash, Sandburg, and you've got maybe eight dollars here."

"You want cash, kidnap a rich guy."

Brackett smiled, almost, and his eyes closed, almost. Blair hesitated; could he get the gun?

"Don't."

So he didn't.

They stopped at a Wal-Mart and Blair parked, as ordered, in a quiet spot that wasn't overlooked by the security cameras.

"Get out."

Brackett was warier now, watching him intently, and keeping his body between Blair and the store while he popped the trunk.

"Get in."

"No way."

"Give yourself a break. The gun's silenced, no-one would bat an eyelash if I shot you and stuffed you in the trunk myself. I need supplies, and if I take you inside with me you'll try something and I'll have to shoot someone and we'll attract more attention than I'm ready for. So get in the trunk, Sandburg, and I'll be back in five minutes."

There was a brief, unequal, struggle, and Blair had time for a howl of denial before the lid slammed shut on him. He lay cramped in the darkness, groping around unsuccessfully for a flashlight or a tire iron or anything that might help. Nothing. The trunk felt as pristine and empty as if the car had come from the showroom that morning, although sadly you couldn't say the same about the way it smelled...

And then in five minutes or so he felt the car rock slightly as Brackett returned, as promised.

Of course he hadn't said he'd let Blair out of the trunk when he returned... Blair fumed helplessly as he felt the car move off.

Was he going to suffocate? How long would the air in the trunk of a car last anyway? At least when Thelma and Louise had driven off with Brad Pitt they'd put a few bullet holes in the trunk first. OK, this is SO not helping. Think, Sandburg! he told himself furiously. Yell for help? Yeah, right - no-one could hear him through two layers of metal, against the traffic noise, and even if they did, what was to stop Brackett just shooting them? So could he get out? Lid won't pop. Sides won't break. Floor isn't going to give. How about the back seat? He concentrated his energies on trying to burrow out into the back seat, breaking his nails and barking his knuckles on what proved to be an immovable metal wall. And it hadn't been Brad Pitt they'd stuffed into the trunk, his grasshopper mind insisted on remembering. Great! Sandburg to subconscious, he thought, can we concentrate on the real problem here?

It seemed like hours later, when the trunk finally opened and the gun was, once more, pointed at his face.

"You are my least favourite person, Brackett, have I ever mentioned that?"

"Hey, believe me, I would have been just as happy never to see you again, too. If I hadn't spotted the signs for Cascade this afternoon and thought 'there's a way out of my little situation,' we would never have had to meet again."

It was a motel. No-one, of course, was around. The sun was setting against a gloomy twilight and they might as well have been the last two people on Earth. Brackett forced Blair inside the end cabin and examined the room critically. It was ugly, musty, and drab. Perfect. No-one in their right mind would want to dispute their possession of it. He picked up an ugly wooden chair that stood against the wall and placed it precisely in the middle of the room.

"Sit."

Blair sat.

Brackett ripped out the phone wire and smiled.

"Hands behind your back."

Blair sighed, but then resigned himself to having his hands tied. Brackett also tied his ankles and then tucked his feet under the chair and ran the rest of the cord between his wrists and ankles, immobilising him completely.

Brackett produced a cellphone, still in its supermarket wrapper, and started putting it together.

"Remind me; what's Ellison's number?"

"Oh come on."

"Hey kid, I can just call information."

"So call information."

But, in the end, Blair told him, and Brackett called the loft and listened to the ring, and then held the phone to Blair as Jim's voice answered.

"Sorry, man, Brackett came to my office this afternoon. Don't know where we are..."

Brackett had bought duct tape too. He was still smiling at Blair as he took out the roll and cut off a piece and Blair started to hear himself babble...

"but I'm tied to a chair in a really ugly motel room with orange carpets and Brackett picked up some duct tape at a Wal-Mart..."

And then all he could do was concentrate on breathing, in, out, carefully, remembering not to panic, and listen impotently as Brackett explained to Jim what he hadn't bothered to tell Blair.

"Hey there, supercop. Yes, it's me and yes, I've got your little buddy. No, shut up and listen. I'm being followed. It's Kyril and he wants me dead. So get him off my back and I'll let Sandburg go - simple as that. And make it fast; I've been running hard for the best part of two weeks and I'm near the end of my resources. And if he finds me, he finds your partner too, and you and I both know he isn't going to leave any witnesses."

Brackett listened intently, eyes on Blair, as Jim apparently had quite a lot to say about this. Brackett raised his eyebrows at Blair and smiled slightly.

"Does he bitch like this all the time?"

If his mouth hadn't been duct-taped shut Blair might even have grinned back. Brackett snapped the cell-phone shut.

"OK, we've got a while to wait. I'm going to get some food. Sit quietly like a good boy and I'll get you something too."

And he was gone.

Blair rocked the chair over towards the bed and managed to grab the discarded phone up with his bound hands. He groped blindly for the numbers and dialled - he hoped - 911, then turned his head to the side and started to rub off the duct tape gag onto his shoulder while the recorded message asked him whether this was really an emergency. He rolled his eyes in disbelief and made as much noise as he could through the stubborn tape.

"Mmmmph. Mmmph!"

"Sir?"

"Mmmph!!!!!!"

"Please state the nature of the emergency."

"M'm mmm mmph mm mm mmmph mmph!" How could she not interpret that as "I'm tied up in a motel room?"

Of course, it was at this interesting stage in the relationship that Brackett came back.

It was a blur of movement: the door flew open, the bags of burgers and fries fell to the floor unregarded, and Brackett backhanded Blair so he and the chair fell over. Winded and dizzy, Blair lay on his back, his arms crushed beneath him. He panicked, looking up at Brackett towering over him, and fought for breath while Brackett clicked the phone shut and pocketed it.

"Nice try Sandburg, but you're just going to get yourself hurt if you don't try being a bit more co-operative.

Brackett's priorities were not Blair's: he shut the door, rescued the bags of food, unpacked them onto the table, tutting in annoyance at losing one of the coffees which had spilled in the excitement, and then sat and began wolfing down one of the burgers. Blair regarded him from his position on the floor, concentrating fiercely on keeping breathing, in, out, though his nose.

"I don't know, professor. I'm wondering whether you're going to be more trouble than you're worth."

Blair thought about trying the puppy-dog eyes on him but really he was too annoyed to be bothered. Finally Brackett finished his own meal and condescended to lift Blair, chair and all, back upright. He took hold of the end of the duct tape over Blair's mouth and said. "Ready? On three. One. Two..."

"Owwwwwwww! Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow."

"Keep it down, Sandburg. If a little duct-tape-burn is the worst thing that happens to you today you should be grateful."

"Yeah, well try and keep the tape off of my hair next time. MAN! That HURT!"

Brackett untied Blair's wrists and put a burger and fries down in front of him.

"Here you go. I spilled your coffee. So shoot me."

"Happy to. Lend me your gun?"

But he ate the burger anyway. He had enough experience to know that, when kidnapped, you take every chance you might get to eat and drink. And other things.

"Where are you going?"

"The bathroom??? I'm the one who spent the afternoon locked in the trunk of a car, remember?"

Brackett grinned and let him go.

The bathroom had no window and the air vent was too small for Blair to crawl out of, even if he'd been able to unscrew the cover, so he contented himself with writing "Jim, sorry. Blue ford" and the license plate number in soap on the tiled wall. He signed it carefully "Blair" and then looked at his handiwork. It was invisible for all practical purposes but Jim would see the slight traces of difference in texture.

He looked up at a noise and saw Brackett, unceremoniously opening the door to check on his progress.

"Here."

He threw him a toothbrush, still in its wrapper. Blair looked at him, confused.

"I need some sleep. Which means I need you to get yourself comfortable so I can tie you up for the night first."

Blair's heart sank. But what alternatives did he have at present? Jim would need some time to find them. So he brushed his teeth and went back out into the motel room.

"Strip," Brackett commanded brusquely, and then, when he didn't immediately move to obey, "Oh come on, Sandburg, your virtue is safe with me. But if you sleep in your clothes you'll start to smell as ripe as I do after a while. When on the run, sleep in your underwear. First rule of the road. Trust me."

Under threat of the gun Blair stripped down to his t-shirt and boxers and lay down, reluctantly, in one of the beds. And Brackett, efficiently, impersonally, duct taped his wrists together behind his back, taped his ankles together, and then stepped back and looked at his handiwork.

Well, OK, thought Blair, the minute he's gone I can kick off the covers and hop over to the door. It was one of those that doesn't need a key to unlock from the inside so he could open it and keep hopping until someone came along to his rescue.

"So the minute my back is turned you're going to be jumping around, I suppose."

Blair gave him the puppy-dog eyes and said "Scout's honour?"

Brackett laughed.

"You forget, I've seen your file. You were never a boy scout in your life."

"But hell, that troop of Girl Scouts in Tacoma was friendly."

Frowning in concentration, Brackett used the longest piece of telephone wire to tether Blair's ankles to something out of sight at the foot of the bed. The bed's own feet? It didn't have a headboard but presumably it was on castors so maybe the tether was just looped over one of the castors. Still, he thought, he would be able to sit up... in fact he could probably get to the bag with the cellphone and call Jim.

Brackett was showing a terrifying ability to read his mind. He stood over Blair and looked at the bindings assessingly.

"No, no good. You're still going to be jumping around annoying the hell out of me."

He took another piece of the wire and coiled it around the tape on Blair's wrists and then fastened the other end to something under the top end of the bed, presumably the opposite foot from the one where his ankles were tethered. He wasn't going anywhere, dammit, but had enough movement to be able to turn over and get at least a little comfortable. Brackett pulled the covers up over him and then looked down at him thoughtfully.

"I'm not going to gag you overnight in case you suffocate, but you may have noticed I'm pretty ripe at the moment so I'm going to take a bath and I don't want to have to get out of it to supervise you. So shut up while I'm next door..."

"You don't need to do...mmmph. Mmmmph!!"

Brackett grinned.

As soon as Brackett left, Blair tested his restraints and found that, no, he couldn't reach the cellphone, or the bag where Brackett had stashed his swiss army knife, or indeed the floor. He could roll over, or lie still, and that was about it. Brackett, irritatingly, started singing La Isla Bonita, out of tune, from next door. Blair lay brooding. How did he get himself into these situations?

And then there were footsteps.

Jim! His first thought, joyfully, was that his partner had found him and it would all be over in a minute. There were stealthy noises at the door - someone picking the lock? Wait a minute, why would Jim pick the lock and not just kick it in? Surely he'd listened in and identified that he and Brackett were in separate rooms...

But it wasn't Jim. It was a tall, well-built guy, late twenties, black cashmere overcoat, big - BIG - gun...

Blair felt his pulse rate go through the roof as the man walked over to the bed, the gun pointing firmly in his direction. The gunman saw the duct tape over his mouth, smirked, pulled back the covers, saw the bonds...

"Kinky. Well, well, well... what are you supposed to be? A party favour?"

The sound of Brackett's happy splashing came - mercifully unaccompanied by badly-sung Madonna covers - from next door. The gunman produced a knife and cut the tethers that held Blair onto the bed and then lifted the bound and gagged anthropologist to his feet and carried him over to the bathroom door. The splashing noises continued. Oh god this was it, this guy was going to kill Brackett and then him... Blair struggled as well as he could with wrists and ankles still bound, and made as much noise as he could through the gag, and the gunman took a second to push the gun, painfully, into the hinge of Blair's jaw and whisper, reprovingly, "shhhhh!". Then he kicked in the bathroom door.

Blair was hurled into the room and fell forward onto the tiled floor, twisting desperately as he fell in an attempt to protect his face. He and the gunman both took in the sight of the water running into the bath over a waterfall of junk - sink plunger, shower head, basket of complementary toiletries - creating the splashing noise. And then - BAM - Blair was covered in blood and there was a warm heavy weight lying across him and he was looking up at the hole in the ceiling and the corpse of the gunman.

Brackett, stark naked and holding the biggest gun Blair had ever seen, came back in through the bathroom door and looked down at him.

"You OK Sandburg?"

He ripped off the gag.

"AAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHH!!!!! JEEZ! I'M COVERED IN THIS GUY'S BRAINS!"

"Shut up, Sandburg."

Brackett turned over the corpse with a disdainful push of his toe and started to go through his pockets.

"STOP TELLING ME TO SHUT UP! I'M COVERED IN BLOOD AND - AGGGHHHH - BRAINS AND STUFF AND... SHIT... AND YOU BLEW HIM AWAY. GET HIM OFF OF ME!!"

"Shut UP, Sandburg, or you get duct taped again."

"MAN!"

This must be what shock felt like.

"I DO NOT BELIEVE THIS!"

Somehow, he couldn't seem to get his voice back within normal hearing range, even though Brackett was now glowering at him behind the gun.

"SOMEBODY HELP ME!!!! GET THIS PSYCHO OFF OF ME!!"

Brackett hit him across the face, adding "Just shut the fuck up, professor." And then, seeming to enjoy the sensation, hit him again. But he did, finally, roll the corpse off of him and then helped him to his feet. Blair sucked in a deep breath and repeated one of Naomi's mantras to himself and then managed to get it together to lower the volume a little, still panting for breath.

"Is that - him? This Kyril or whoever?"

Brackett ripped the duct tape off Blair's wrists, matter-of-factly.

"Nope. One of his men. And lookee here..." He held up a pair of handcuffs he had taken from the corpse.

"... looks like Kyril wants to do me himself."

"God, man, I mean, why? I mean, is it business or personal?"

"Oh, very personal. I kind of killed his sister. OK, we have to go now - wash that blood off while I get dressed. But at least there's good news-"

He found the handcuff key in the corpse's pocket. Blair looked questioningly at him.

"No more duct tape."

Ten minutes later, clean, damp and still in his underwear, Blair was shivering in the passenger seat of a black sedan with his hands cuffed behind him and the seatbelt completing his immobilisation. Brackett had hustled him out in seconds flat, ignoring his loud protestations that there was time for him to get dressed first. They had compromised, in the end; if Brackett threw his clothes into the back, Blair agreed to walk to the car rather than be carried kicking and screaming, and if Blair shut up about his goddam clothes for five minutes Brackett agreed not to make him wear a gag again.

Brackett was driving fast but competently, riding the wave of adrenaline that had perked him up from shambling street person back into killer for hire. They both knew Brackett's condition wouldn't last, but if Kyril's men were that close then he needed to move, right now, and in the absence of Jim coming to the rescue Blair had no real choice but to go along for the ride.

"So tell me about Kyril."

"What, going for the psychoanalysis approach, professor? You going to talk your way out of this?"

"If I'm going to be collateral damage when someone kills you I'd at least like to know what I'm collateral to, if you don't mind. Come on, what difference does it make to you, and talking might help keep you awake."

Brackett snorted..

"Yeah, your partner had better do something soon, or we're both going to finish up dead in a road wreck because of lack of sleep, never mind Kyril and his boys."

"So tell me. What's the story?"

"Nothing too exciting. I was supposed to identify Kyril, get a handle on him. I found him, found he had a sister, got, er, close," he looked sideways at Blair as he said it, "You know? I got real close to her. And then Kyril and I had this shoot out and she got kind of dead."

What do you say to that?

"I'm sorry."

Brackett grunted acknowledgement but carried on driving in silence, apparently lost in thought.

"What's that?"

Whatever it was, it was coming up behind them like a runaway train. Brackett sawed at the wheel and the world started bouncing up and down. Then they were off the road and running down something steep and jolting, Blair desperately trying to brace himself with his feet. Then a confused moment of darkness, banging his head on the dash...

When the world reassembled itself into some semblance of order Blair struggled to put it together. Someone had found them, that part he understood. They seemed to have run off the road, down an embankment and crashed into some trees, leaving them both relatively unharmed and gaining them a precious few seconds before their pursuers could make sense of their unconventional trajectory and follow.

Brackett was already out of the car, gun in hand, but he spared a second to look back at his erstwhile hostage. "Sorry kid," he said as he disappeared off into the night.

Another car, another trunk, thought Blair resignedly, fighting off an insane urge to giggle. It was either that or give up and go mad right now: one minute he was struggling to get out of the seat belt with his wrists cuffed behind him and the next he was being dragged into the darkness by someone yelling in Russian. All very well - he was still alive, albeit he had added a gag and a hogtie to his handcuff collection - but the trunk of a car was still not his favourite form of transport. Just remember to breathe, he told himself sternly. We are just going to lie here and breathe. That's right, in... out... no panic attacks going on here, nossiree. No-one in THIS trunk is hysterical, in shock, or traumatised even the slightest.... The fact that he had to share this particular trunk with the corpse of an extremely dead Russian whose brains he had spent several minutes washing off of his face not half an hour ago was just the acid cherry on this whole poison pie.

Then it was another motel room, even uglier than the last, only this time he was stuffed in the closet. Hey, look on the bright side, he thought: at least they hadn't stuffed the corpse in there with him. He tried to work the gag further forward in his mouth, tried to swallow some saliva, in an attempt to give his conscious mind something to think about while his subconscious ran in small circles screaming for his mommy. Or, preferably, his supercop partner and a whole bunch of their friends, the ones with big, reassuring riot guns and night-sticks.

When, after no more than a couple of hundred years or so, they finally dragged him OUT of the closet - hand on the back of his neck, kicked a chair under him and then moved him and the chair where they wanted them - there were five people in the room with him. Ugly1 and Ugly2 were plainly just muscle, the neck-pulling chair-kickers of the outfit. There was a thin, dark man with a notebook who didn't even look up when Blair made his somewhat reluctant entrance. There was another suit talking quietly in Russian into a mobile phone. And a woman, who leaned back in her armchair and regarded Blair with amusement.

"So," she said, in heavily accented English, "who the fuck are you and why shouldn't I kill you."

Ugly1 helpfully, if a little brusquely, pulled out the gag and Blair instantly started talking.

"Blair Sandburg, observer with the Cascade PD. And you just rescued me," he emphasised gently, "from a renegade CIA agent called Brackett who was trying to use me as a hostage to force my partner to get someone called Kyril off his back. So that makes you heroes who I'll be sure to mention in my report as the good guys who saved the day... or, if you prefer anonymity, I'd be happy to leave you out of my account altogether. Now, I'm sure my partner's worried enough to have called every police force in the country, not to mention the FBI, the CIA and the National Guard for all I know, so if you'll just direct me to a phone and lend me a key to these cuffs, I'll be out of your hair and you and your, er, colleagues can carry on doing whatever it is that you do..."

"What is the name of your partner, the cop?"

Did that mean they were buying it? Or that they weren't buying it?

"Jim Ellison."

More dialogue, in a language he didn't recognise, between the woman and the suit. The thin man looked up from his notebook and added something which seemed to involve looking Blair over carefully as if he were a pound of horsemeat he wasn't particularly interested in buying. So were they going for it? Now they all looked at him and laughed. Was that good laughter, as in "let the hippie go" or bad laughter, as in "put him back in the trunk with Boris - oh, and be sure to blow his brains out first."?

"What's the cop's number?"

Oh great; as if all this wasn't enough, now they were going to make him beg Jim for help again. He was never going to live this down.

"Detective Ellison? Do you happen to be missing a partner at all? About so high? Long hair, compulsive talker?"

Jim must have a standard spiel worked out in reply to that one by now. About thirty-seconds' worth, by the looks of it. The woman frowned at the phone.

"Well, yes, but things change. Yesterday you arrested a man - a John Doe, I think the phrase is? I am told the charges were invented, presumably to comply with Mr. Brackett's demands that you take my colleague out of circulation. And now I have your little friend and I want my man back."

Ah. So, no, they weren't buying into his heroic rescue scenario. He tried to look cool and nonchalant, as if being kidnapped by two different sets of people within 24 hours was all in a day's work. Well. actually...

"Simple," she was saying, "you release my man, he has pre-arranged contact instructions, and the moment he contacts me, I let your man walk."

She listened some more to Jim talking, keeping the same bland, smiling expression on her face, her eyes on Blair.

Then she held the phone out to Ugly2 and said "ten seconds."

Ugly2 held the phone to Blair's ear and he heard Jim's voice saying "Sandburg? You there?"

"Yeah. Sorry about this, Jim. Brackett crashed his car and these guys picked me up out of the wreckage."

"You OK?"

"Yeah..."

His time was, evidently, up. Ugly2 handed the phone back to the woman and she nodded to him and his pal. And there was that hand on the back of his neck again...

"Um - before you stuff me back in the closet?"

She raised an eyebrow. God, that was so cool. She must practice in front of a mirror or something.

"Er, can I use the bathroom first?"

Well, making Russians laugh was turning into a regular item on his resume.

"I liked the ride in the trunk a lot better this time, thank you. Not sharing the space with a corpse is a big help. Ow! Watch the hair, man!"

Ugly1 and Ugly2 were really not good conversationalists.

He tried again, in Russian. This time they laughed, but maybe that was just his accent as they still showed no signs of understanding a syllable he said.

Blair rubbed his abused wrists and looked around curiously. He had no idea where they were except it was a deserted highway in, apparently, the middle of nowhere. From the temperature and the light it must be four or five in the morning. Ah, nothing like a refreshing night's sleep hog-tied and gagged in a closet, followed by a bracing ride in the trunk of someone's car, elegantly attired in your underwear and some second-hand cuffs. The Ugly brothers stood looking at him. No sign of any of the rest of the cast of War and Peace, and both the Uglies had their guns in hand. Was this it, then?

Ugly2 raised his hand - yes, his gun hand - and pointed... but, mercifully, not at Blair. At the road?

"What? What's over there?"

What is this, he thought, an episode of Lassie?

Oh, great, now the other one was joining in too. And then, finally, the penny dropped and he got it.

"What, that's it? I can go? That way?"

He smiled. They smiled. He still had his hands cuffed behind him but he half turned so they could see his fingers and made walking gestures, questioningly. They made walking gestures back, assertively.

"You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?" he smiled. They smiled back. He walked a few steps, walking kind of crabwise, so he could still see them in case he'd got it wrong and they interpreted this as a shoot-me-in-the-back style escape attempt. They carried on smiling and gesturing him to go on. So he turned his back on them and, feeling as if he had a big target painted on his undershirt, walked a few more paces.

They said something. He stopped, panicked, and turned around. But they were just gesturing with a coat. He was, unsurprisingly, freezing cold. He took a step back towards them. One of them came over and wrapped the coat around him and buttoned him into it. It was obviously made for a much bigger man, as it buttoned without straining over Blair, bound hands and all, and it reached down beyond his knees. Maybe it had belonged to the late lamented Boris-in-the-trunk? Too bad. He smiled and nodded his thanks. And then he walked off down the road, and didn't look back.

Phone, phone, be a phone. Or a diner. A gas station. Another car. A moose, for heaven's sake! There has to be something, somewhere, in this godforsaken wilderness. He was going to have to stop muttering to himself, or else by the time Jim found him he was going to be in a psych ward somewhere, gibbering about dead Russians. Maybe they were Latvians. Or Estonians. Dammit, they could be Westonians for all he knew! Freedonians. Kidnapponians. Anthropologistonians. He shrugged deeper into the coat. Say one thing for insane Westonian kidnappers, at least they know how to do warm clothing. A hat would have been nice. Some pants would have been nicer. He wondered, academically, if it was true that bits of a person would simply fall off from frostbite. Given the usual Luck of the Sandburgs, he was taking no bets as to which bits.

He walked on down the road shivering, wondering if he would ever find out what it had all been about, who his mysterious liberators had been. Jim would know. He walked on, jogtrotting a little, keep the blood flowing, keep warm. Keep on trucking, Sandburg, he told himself. Somewhere out there was a phone, and food, and warmth, and safety. And Jim.

Oh, and a handcuff key.

Car! He heard it coming before it came over the rise and made sure he didn't rely on his smile for a ride - and, hell, he couldn't even get to his thumb, what with the handcuffs and the cocooning coat and all. Instead, he stood square in the middle of the road and hoped the Luck of the Sandburgs would take a five minute break. "Get in," the driver said cheerfully. He looked at the driver in astonishment. And then said, "Where the hell are my pants, Brackett?"

"What can I tell you, man. The Russians let me go, I was walking down the road the way they sent me, and then suddenly Brackett drove up..." "Sandburg!" "Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm really sorry, Jim. This is so embarassing." "Shut up and listen, Chief. Are you all right?" "Yeah, a few bruises, maybe a touch of frostbite; nothing to get all blessed protector about." "Good. Listen, the Russians are the good guys. Got that? Just hold on and don't get dead. The cavalry's on its way." Gotta love a guy who can pack all the important information into ten words or less. The Russians are the good guys? The cavalry is coming? What was he supposed to do with that? *Sorry, Brackett, I don't like your motel room; throw me back to the Russians?* I don't think so.

But Brackett, it seemed, wasn't taking him to a motel room, not this time. Kyril's men - well, presumably the Estonians/Russians/whoever had BEEN Kyril's men, or else he was even further from understanding what the fuck was going on than he thought - had freaked Brackett out, big time, and so he wasn't stopping. The only difficulty he could see with that was that Brackett hadn't slept in at least the past twenty four hours that Blair had been (on and off) with him, and had been ragged with weariness when he kidnapped Blair in the first place.

After a few miles driving the adrenalin hit from being recaptured started to wear off, the heater started to kill the shock shivers and Blair found he was starting to doze off himself. He briefly considered snoozing while Brackett drove but decided Brackett was much more exhausted than he: this might be his best chance if he could only stay awake longer than his captor

.

"Where are we going?"

"I need somewhere to hole up, so I can get some sleep. I've got a couple of ideas, provided we're alone..."

Blair twisted to look behind them. The road was empty; the Russians were long gone.

"You could just drive over to our place, give yourself up? Jim wouldn't let Kyril get you and you aren't actually wanted for anything, are you? I mean, apart from kidnapping me, that is, and we could always find a way round that..."

"Shut up, Sandburg."

"Oh. OK. But-"

"I want you to imagine that I'm homicidal, ragged from lack of sleep, and holding you hostage. And that if you don't shut up I'm going to take this gun, here, and put it against your foot, there, and start shooting bits off of you. Are you imagining it?"

"Mm-hm."

"And are you going to shut up now?"

"Mm-hm."

And he did.

They drove along the deserted highway as the day dawned around them, Blair torn between wishing Brackett would nod off so he could make his move and worrying what exactly, his move was going to be. Was it likely, was it possible, even, that Brackett was so wasted he would simply fall asleep at the wheel? And was there anything Blair could do to help himself. He could make no headway with the cuffs still - they were snug, although not tight - and he couldn't even make a try for the seatbelt cocooned as he was in the Russian coat.

After half an hour it was clear Brackett was losing it, the car visibly starting to drift across the lanes. Blair kept a sharp watch and kicked Brackett's ankle, hard, the next time it happened.

"Hey! Come on, man, you're going to get us both killed. Let me drive. At least open a window or put the radio on or something."

Brackett grunted in reply but pulled over and got out. He unfastened the seatbelt and helped Blair out, and then calmly unbuttoned the Russian coat and peeled it off him.

"Hey! What the..."

Brackett produced a key to the cuffs. He unlocked Blair's wrists and pushed him into the driver's seat... and then cuffed his left wrist to the steering wheel.

"OK, professor, let's see what you've got. You drive - get us to the Canadian border in one piece, and I'll spring for brunch."

"Oh, you're too kind."

"Just drive."

He watched Brackett settle comfortably down on a pillow made from what he now thought of as HIS coat, then contented himself with muttering quiet curses in Tagalog as he threw the car into drive and pulled out.

So now Blair was jolted wide awake by anger-adrenalin and cold, and Brackett wasn't driving, but settled comfortably with the gun on his lap. The window was open and the radio blaring to keep him awake... but he didn't, at his core, Blair thought, consider his hostage to be a danger to him. Short, geeky-looking, academic... Blair was used to being underestimated by jocks. Brackett would never have relaxed his guard around an alpha male like, well, like Jim.

So Jim wouldn't have been able to surreptitiously turn up the heater, and quietly close the window, and gently reduce speed, and, when he was sure Brackett really, truly, was asleep, smoothly take the off ramp and gently turn them around and stealthily increase their speed again, till he was driving one handed like a bat out of hell back in the direction of Cascade and the loft and Jim and safety.

The mobile was on the back seat. but he picked a good straight stretch of road to take his free hand off the wheel and recklessly grope for it. He dialled the loft, carefully, one-handed, and kept the cellphone clamped to his ear.

"Jim? It's me. We're in a grey Chrysler with New York plates, headed back towards Cascade on route, er, 9, about five miles out of somewhere called Lone Pine. Brackett's out of it at the moment but he's still got the gun, and I'm cuffed to the wheel."

He spoke as softly as he could, and thank heavens for Sentinel hearing.

"Jim?"

"Sandburg! How do you get yourself into these things! OK, I've got highway patrol on their way - is Brackett drugged or anything, or just asleep?"

"Neither!"

Brackett grabbed for the phone, and Blair yelled "Jim!" but let it go and jabbed at Brackett's head with his elbow. But the angle and momentum were all wrong and his arm didn't connect hard enough to do anything except piss Brackett off even more. Brackett dropped the phone and cocked his gun, and they both heard Jim's stentorian bellow, converted to a tinny whisper down the phone, "Brackett! Don't do it. The deal's still on as far as I'm concerned but you lay a hand on Sandburg and you know I'll hunt you down. Brackett? You hear me?"

The phone lay on the floor. Brackett answered, relying on sentinel hearing.

"I hear you, Ellison, but the little shit is hyperactive. God knows how you put up with him, but I swear to you if you don't get moving and find me a solution I'm going to have to kill him anyway."

Blair had one more weapon at his disposal. He put his foot on the gas and sawed at the wheel and they started to spin wildly, making all those wonderful handbrake-turn squealing-brake noises you get in TV car-chases and Brackett, as he had hoped, was flung back by the centrifugal force. There was a beautiful "Jim moment" when Brackett lost hold of the gun again, and then Blair was stamping on the brake and trying to scoop up the gun but he didn't have quite enough reach with one hand cuffed to the wheel and all, and he found he had been yelling all this time, a continuous stream of "Fuck! Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfucketyfuck" How embarrassing! Not only was he going to die, but his partner was going to hear his Hugh Grant impression before he went.

"Brackett! Blair!!! Someone tell me what's happening!"

Brackett did something cool and clever with his thumb, that sent a shooting pain all the way up Blair's right arm and out through the top of his head and he forgot all about the gun and discovered an unexpected talent for screaming like a girl. But the car was still whirling and it was still the only weapon he had, so he stomped on the brake and lunged for the gun again.

Then it was quiet, except for the sound of the pair of them breathing heavily. Jim's voice came, tinnilly, over the phone. Blair had something in his hand. He pointed it at Brackett, refusing to collapse the wave by looking to see; gun or cell? He had made his move and would have to go with the consequences. Brackett calmly picked up the cell phone and said "Everyone's fine here, Ellison. But he's pointing a gun my way. Explain the facts of life to him. And say goodbye."

Brackett put the phone down on the seat between them, carefully unthreatening, and sat back with his hands up and a strange blank expression on his face.

"Chief? Chief?"

"Yeah, Jim, it's me. It's over. Like he said. I got the gun. Can you get ..."

"Shoot him" Jim said urgently.

"What?"

"Shoot him, right now. Chief?"

"Why? I won, Jim. It's over."

"It's not over, Chief. That's what he meant by *the facts of life*. You have to shoot him, right now, or he's going to take the gun away from you and kill you."

"I ..."

"Shoot him. He doesn't think you can do it, not in cold blood. Please! Shoot him. Shoot him now."

Would you believe it, not a single car had passed while Blair's stunt driving had been going on? A horrible silence was all around, broken only by Jim's voice telling him things he didn't want to hear.

"Please! Please, Blair, you can do it. Pull the trigger."

Brackett was sitting back in the passenger seat, perfectly relaxed, hands up in the classic "I surrender" pose. Why did no-one come?

"How far away are they?" he asked Jim.

He could hear Jim on another line and for a moment he pictured him home at the loft, cell phone clamped to his ear while he spoke to the local PD on the land line.

"Maybe ten, fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes, tops."

Too long.

"You have to decide. Chief. Either shoot him now, or give it up. He knows he's a dead man if he harms you. He'll trade."

"But I've got the gun!"

It wasn't fair. He'd got the gun, he couldn't face being a hostage again. But then why hadn't he fired yet?

"Chief? You have to fire. Now. Or give him back the gun. Either way, it'll be all right. No-one will blame you, whatever you decide."

"It doesn't have to be a kill shot..."

"Chief, don't. Don't. A bullet in the leg won't stop him, not at such close quarters. It wouldn't stop me. He wouldn't need to run after you, and he'd be so mad he'd... He'll kill you. At best"

Why didn't Brackett make his move? If Brackett moved, even a litttle, he would fire, he decided. But Brackett just kept on looking at him with that odd blank stare and he wasn't doing anything, anything at all, that could be construed as a threat. So how could Blair fire?

"OK, you have to give him the gun now, Chief. If he takes it away from you he'll kill you. Please. If you can't shoot him, you have to give it up. He won't ... do anything, if you... you know."

It wasn't fair. Somehow there were tears of anger standing in his eyes. Why couldn't he shoot? He wanted Brackett dead. But he thought of the dead Russian, the weight of him, the greyness, the coldness, the emptiness in his eyes. And he remembered stupid things - the way Brackett had bought him a toothbrush, and a burger - and he couldn't do it. And he knew that either of them, Brackett or Jim, trained killers, in the same situation would have pulled the trigger. And both of them knew, that he, Blair Jacob Sandburg, couldn't.

Or, rather, wouldn't.

He still had the choice.

Brackett, you're going to live because I choose to let you. The thought helped him to gather up his last shreds of self-respect as he handed over the gun.

Brackett got out of the car, pulled Blair out, slammed him up against the roof of the car while he unlocked his wrist from the wheel, locked his wrists together behind his back and then picked him up bodily and threw him in the trunk. And looked him in the eyes while he said into the cell, "Good advice, Ellison. All right. You have three hours." And snapped the phone shut, and threw it away. And then used just a finger, to jab at the pressure points there, and there, and there, so that Blair couldn't breathe to scream, and couldn't see for the pain, and couldn't move for the tingling agony in his arms and neck. And then Brackett, finally, smiled. And slammed the lid shut.

Blair bitterly regretted the loss of the Russian coat as what warmth there was gradually leached out of him. Whoever had owned the Chrysler hadn't been much of a neat freak, either, because it felt as though Blair was lying on a bed of nails. OK, maybe short, blunt, lumpy nails, but certainly lots of cold, hard, knobbly things that rolled about randomly and bit you on the knee whenever you made an incautious move. The car had stopped moving some time ago and Blair could make no sense of the muffled noises from outside. Uncharacteristically subdued after his battle of wills with his partner and his captor, he decided to be a good hostage and wait for the promised cavalry.

But waiting to be rescued gets really boring after a while, and, once it occurred to him that, cramped in darkness as he was, he could probably wiggle his butt through the hoop of his bound hands and wind up with his hands cuffed in front instead of behind him, well, the thought was irresistible.

A few minutes struggle and he felt his circumstances had improved 100%. But then he couldn't resist feeling around the coffin-sized space, looking for a way out, and found to his chagrin that the back seat was the kind that folds down out of the way if you ask it nicely, and, ten seconds later he had light and twice the space, and...

And he was lying across the back seat of a car parked in the car park at an enormous out of town shopping mall, and all he really had to do was open the back door and walk away...

He felt a momentary surge of illogical anger at Brackett, who had clearly abandoned him, but, hey, this was a GOOD development, right? All he had to do now was handle the embarrassing facts of being handcuffed, wearing day-old underwear, and being miles from home but surely any common or garden security guard in a rent-a-cop uniform could handle that one, right?

Feeling a little light-headed he walked boldly towards the nearest building, smiling sunnily at the happy shoppers he passed.

"Hello!" he told them cheerfully, "I was kidnapped and I've just escaped. Have you got a cellphone I can borrow please?"

People being people, the first family he asked backed away from him in "don't talk to the loony" mode. He smiled and walked on towards the bright lights of, well, a wonderburger, but, hey, you can't have everything. He tried his "lend me a cellphone" line unsuccessfully on three more families before he reached the door of the wonderburger and looked around for his next move.

The bathroom? Try the effect of a little soap and water, maybe take the edge off his "just escaped from Conover" persona? Or straight to rentacop, try and get a call in to Jim before anything else happened?

One of the minimum wage slaves behind the counter must have pressed a panic button as soon as he came in, because the decision was taken out of his hands. Two uniforms approached him, one on either side, and said courteously "May we help you, Sir?" They were really rather good, too; they edged him out of a door and into the backstage corridors of the mall using nothing more than body language.

"Yes!" he said firmly, "you're just what I've been looking for. Can you please call Detective Jim Ellison at Cascade PD and tell him I'm here? My name is Blair Sandburg. I'm his partner and I was kidnapped - what day is it?"

"Saturday."

"Wow. I was kidnapped on Thursday afternoon... I just escaped, from the trunk of a car in your parking lot. Where the hell am I, anyway?"

"A long way from Cascade..."

Their names were Henry and Duwayne and they escorted him to their office awkwardly but kindly, his status part prisoner to be guarded, part victim to be helped. He found his tongue seemed to have taken on a life of its own and he heard himself talking to them about their college courses and the basketball team and the differences and similarities between their own jobs and "real" cops'. Henry clearly would rather have been flipping burgers if the management hadn't had a spare suit he fitted, but Duwayne was more thoughtful about his role and confessed the, strictly part time, job had made him think seriously about law enforcement as a career. Blair heard himself use the words "thin blue line" and suggest some electives Duwayne might consider, heard himself recommend a call to Simon about career opportunities, offer to arrange a ride-along. He saw both men smile but somehow it was as if there was a wall of glass between him and them, and there was a version of him on the other side that was chattering away brightly while the real Blair was dying of weariness.

They gave him coffee and a blanket while they checked him out and he, finally, started to relax as he heard them calling information for the Cascade PD number. They didn't have a key to the handcuffs but, hey, he was starting to get used to his awkward bracelets by now. Best of all, they pointed him towards a bathroom and even managed to rustle up a comb and a hair-tie so he could have a go at taming the bird's nest on his head.

When he came back, everything had changed.

"Mr. Sandburg? Good to meet you."

Two of them, in suits and shades. Not the Russians, but then who the hell could they be? Their whole manner smelled "spook" - if they had taken out the Men in Black's normaliser and flashed a light in his eyes, told him he'd spent the last 36 hours on an alien spacecraft, at least his universe would have started to make some sense.

The taller one flashed a badge - too fast to see - at Henry and said "Thanks for your help, boys, but we'll see to Mr, Sandburg's safety now. We have a car outside, ready to take him back to Cascade."

Behind the glass wall, the real Blair knew at once that this was a crock; these were more bad guys of some kind (Oh god, kidnapped four times in forty-eight hours, by three different sets of people...) Duwayne, bless him, wasn't going for it either. (Please god, don't let me get Duwayne killed...) "Can I see your badge too? Gotta fill out a report anyway, and they like it if we put badge numbers and shit like that."

"We don't have time for this."

"Aw come on, let the kid cover his ass."

Goodcop smiled and let Duwayne, laboriously, copy down his badge number. Badcop frowned and rolled his eyes at Henry. Blair, walled in by glass, kept quiet, willing Duwayne to let them take him. One more set of bad guys, what did it matter. Let them take me, stay alive, and then call Jim, he pleaded silently, willing the words to jump from his brain to Duwayne's.

"OK, let's go. Mr. Sandburg, you'll be home by suppertime."

He heard himself say, brightly, "From your mouth to god's ear. Henry - good to meet you, thanks for your help. Duwayne, think about those courses I told you about - and make that call."

Duwayne grinned at him and gave a thumbs up. Stay alive, Duwayne, he thought earnestly.

They hustled him outside. They didn't have a car but a van; big, black - like the A-Team, he thought crazily. They hustled him inside, sat him down in a chair.

"All right, Sandburg; tell us about your boyfriend."

The question - and the sneer behind it - were so out of left field that he had no idea how to answer them.

Badcop slapped his face, and the shock of it seemed to get his brains working again.

"My name is Blair Sandburg. I am a kidnap victim. I'd like to go home now. And if you have anything else to say to me, I'd like a phone call and a lawyer first."

Well, Badcop hit him again, but at least he had defined his objectives.

The other one - my goodness, were they really going to try "good cop/bad cop"? He had been joking! - tried a placatory tone.

"Now, Blair, what are we supposed to think? Here you are running around in your underwear with another guy - hey, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against what people do in the privacy of their own homes. But your boyfriend is caught up in some business - some very serious business - that has a bearing on national security. So if you want to do him, and yourself, a favour, tell us everything you know about him."

"I'd like that phone call first, thanks."

"We don't have time for this."

He was held in a headlock - hey, he thought, you're supposed to be Goodcop! And Badcop had a syringe. He struggled, but they injected him with it anyway.

And then sat back, and watched him. As if he were nothing more than a lab rat.

One of them looked at his watch.

"All right, Blair. Let's try again. Tell us who brought you here."

He felt disassociated, light-headed.

"You did," he giggled.

"Before that."

"Duwayne and Henry."

"Before Duwayne and Henry."

"Me!!!! I esc... esc... esc... escaped. I got away. Harry Houdini has nothing on me!"

"Where did you escape from?"

"From the Chrysler," he said earnestly, "and it was waaaaay uncomfortable in there, man. Don't go there. In fact," he advised them seriously, "if you HAVE to get in a car, insist on getting in one of the seats. That's my advice. Not the trunk. Boot. Did you know the English call it a boot? What's all that about? And the hood is a bonnet. Weird. Cute. Weird. Cute."

He balanced on the cusp for a moment. Was it weird, or was it cute? And then let go, and let the darkness claim him.

"Tell me about him."

"What?"

Something hit him.

"Don't get clever with me, kid. Start talking."

"I don't.."

What did they want to know? Not Jim, mustn't tell them about Jim, mustn't talk about Jim at all, mustn't talk...

He stuck to silence - safer than trying to edit - and something hit him, hard, in the face. Something held him, firmly, and there was the needle in his neck again. He stared at the light bulb in the fitting over the van door and bit his tongue. Don't talk, don't speak, don't give anything away...

"What the hell's he resisting for, if he's got nothing to hide? Hit him again."

Can't argue with twisted logic like that. Something hit him in the stomach and he heard, rather than felt, all the breath huff out of him.

"Five more minutes, Jim," he mumbled.

"Mister?"

"Unh?"

He opened one reluctant eye. He appeared to be lying not on his own futon but on a really rather uncomfortable patch of concrete. And the person shaking his shoulder wasn't his partner but a devastating brunette wearing a hot pink micro skirt and a cropped tee that read "Grrls just wanna." She must have been, oh, all of six years old.

He opened both eyes, decisively, and looked carefully around. He was lying in between two cars in the parking lot outside the Wonderburger and there were no renegade CIA agents, Russians, or Men In Black, anywhere in sight. Which was nice, if a little unusual at this time of year.

"Hi," he said.

"Are you a weirdo?" she asked earnestly "Only my mom says I shouldn't talk to weirdoes."

"No, I'm not a weirdo," he said sincerely, "I'm a kind of a teacher. And my roommate is a policeman. I got kidnapped."

"Like on TV?"

He held up his handcuffs and smiled disarmingly. "Just like on TV."

She wasn't buying it.

"What are you lying next to our car for then?"

"The kidnappers must have left me here."

"Why?"

"I don't know. Maybe they got tired of having me around."

"Maybe," she agreed, thinking about it, "'cause you do kind of smell."

"Sorry about that. What's your name? I'm Blair."

"If you're a teacher shouldn't you be Mr. Blair?"

"No, I'd be Mr. Sandburg. But you can call me Blair, because I'm not your teacher."

"OK Blair. I'm Marnie."

"Hey Marnie," He fell silent for a second, trying to get his brain working.

"You have to call the police if you get kidnapped. My mom says if I see a bad man, I have to call the cops right away. You can use my phone if you want."

He smiled, expecting Fisher-Price, but, no, she handed him a real, honest to goodness, working cellphone. It had a pink fluffy case and a Pikachu transfer over the numbers, but frankly who cared at this stage. He dialled Jim's cellphone number, saying "Thanks, Marnie. You're a hero. Is there a grown-up with you?"

"Yeah: Luisa's mom. It's Luisa's birthday. We went to Wonderburger - it was cool!"

"Yeah? I was there a while ago too. You're right. It IS cool. Hey, where are Luisa and her mom?"

Marnie pointed.

"Over there."

A hundred yards away was a birthday party of little girls spilling excitedly out of the Wonderburger, shepherded by a harassed woman in hugely unsuitable stilettos. And five yards away from them, looking carefully around for something - someone? - was Brackett.

Blair was suddenly hugely calm, as two possible futures flashed through his head. In one, he took Marnie's hand and walked boldly over to Luisa's mom and, guarded by a phalanx of attention-attracting little girls, went back to Duwayne's office and called Jim and then waited, at the centre of a protective crowd of civilians, for the cavalry to arrive. Taking care, in passing, to give a triumphant finger to a fuming and impotent Brackett.

And in the other, he took Marnie's hand and walked boldly over to Luisa's mom - who saw an underwear-clad, handcuffed, escaped pervert/loony approaching and ran screaming, scattering little girls as she went, while respectably clad Brackett (warmly clad in HIS Russian coat, damn him) explained he was the poor deluded Blair's psychiatrist or something, before locking him in the trunk of yet another goddamn car.

Or, worse still, pointed a gun at Marnie or another of her little friends until Blair climbed back into the trunk of his own accord. Or helped himself to a pint-sized hostage or two to enforce Blair's obedience the way he was trying to use Blair to enforce Jim's...

So. Get away from innocent bystanders? Check.

"Can I have my phone back?"

"Marnie, I can see the kidnapper and he's looking for me. I need you to run back to Luisa's mom, right now. Right now!"

"I want my phone," she said stubbornly, a hint of tears in her eyes. "Give me back my phone!"

Jim's voice answered, just as Marnie's voice went up a notch.

"Give me back my PHONE!"

In a minute she would be howling and screaming, and Brackett would see him - and her - and he couldn't cope with any more of this stuff.

"Here! Take your phone, and go away right now, and tell Luisa's mom that I'm a bad man and I'm after you and she should call the cops. Right now! Run!"

He made "boo!" gestures, and Marnie stood her ground for a second and then broke and ran and Blair said calmly, "Jim! It's me, Blair. And I really hope you can hear this because I'm still at the mall and I'm hiding from Brackett and ... shit."

Because Marnie was back with her friends and Luisa's mom, and had shut the phone up and put it back in her koala backpack and why wouldn't anyone in the universe just lend him a goddamn phone for five minutes?

He crouched low and threaded his way between the lines of cars until Brackett was out of sight.

The September dusk was spreading pink and purple hues across the low sprawl of the mall and the day's deceptive warmth was starting to be sucked out of the universe. He had no idea of how long he had been unconscious in - or out of - the Men in Black's A-team van, but the number of people leaving the mall seemed to outnumber those arriving by a factor of twenty . He considered briefly whether he could sneak a ride out of here with some respectable citizens, preferably someone heading towards Cascade, but the best idea he could come up with was concealing himself in the trunk of someone's car and he just plain didn't think he could do it again, not in cold blood. He cursed Brackett for depriving him of his clothes and thus his credibility. It just took too long to explain his circumstances to anyone who wasn't one of the bad guys, leaving him too vulnerable to being hoovered up by any of the competing factions in whatever the hell this little drama was all about.

He would try his luck with Duwayne and Henry again, see if they had called Jim, maybe had some kind of reaction from him. But as he moved towards the mall entrance he saw police cars pull up and hung back to check it out...

...and saw the Men in Black saunter over, slap them on the back, and generally behave like long-lost brothers-in-arms. No way, he thought; not going there again.

He was lurking miserably between a van and a sports car, trying to think what his next best move should be, when a man and a woman walked toward him. He recognised the Russian woman and the suit a fraction of a second before they recognised him. But Jim's "the Russians are the good guys" paralysed him with indecision for that vital necessary second that would have let him run away, and so when the van doors slid open and hands reached for him, he was too slow to avoid being scooped up. Ugly1 and Ugly2 grinned at him and pushed him down into the back seat, and the woman and the suit followed him inside. The doors slid shut.

"Hello Mr. Sandburg," the woman said cheerfully, "we meet again."

Before he could draw breath to reply at the preposterousness of it all, they started talking amongst themselves again in the language that wasn't Russian.

"Look, what language IS that," he demanded, irrationally angry.

"Estonian," she said briefly, before turning to Ugly1 with a mouthful of, well, Estonian. Ugly1 laughed and took hold of Blair's wrists. He struggled reflexively, but then stopped resisting when he realised what Ugly1 was doing, which was unfastening the cuffs. His right wrist was released when the woman said, "Have you seen anything more of our friend Lee?"

He turned his head to reply. "Not unless you count being kidnapped by him - again - and almost killed, and beaten up, and abandoned in the trunk of a car, and then chased around the mall, no."

Ugly1 said something irritable in Estonian and Blair looked again at what he was doing. He had managed to unlock Blair's right wrist, but the key was broken off in the lock on his left.

"Well, that's better than nothing, I suppose. Thanks, man."

He held his arms wide apart, out to the side, as if demonstrating the size of the fish that got away, just because, for the first time in forever, he finally could.

"Ah, Mr. Sandburg, what am I going to do with you?" she asked, smiling.

"Find me some clothes?" he suggested helpfully, "A phone? Maybe a pizza?"

Somehow her amusement was more irritating than Brackett's menace or the Men in Black's surrealism. It was as if she knew exactly what was happening and how to make it work to her advantage. Which, if he thought about it, was probably true. Hell, Marnie probably had more idea of what was going on than he did at present.

"I think we can manage the pizza at least." She gave Ugly2 a brief command and he headed for the door.

"With everything," Blair added "and potato salad."

She looked at him, with a concentrated energy that was neither sexual nor hostile, as if he were a particularly cryptic crossword clue she was determined to solve.

"Potato salad with the pizza, not on it," he clarified. She shook her head.

"I don't know... you're the piece that doesn't fit, in all this. Clever move by our friend Lee, bringing you in. You have..." She struggled for the word, "a hinterland."

He gaped at her, bemused. A what?

"Bringing you in brings in your persistent partner. And bringing him in, means bringing in the authorities. But not the controllable ones. A whole section of a police department neither corrupted nor corruptible! What a wonderful thing. I was in despair over how to release my brother till you fell into my lap."

"Your brother?" It began to make a kind of sense. "You're Kyril's sister? But Brackett said you were dead..."

"I went to a lot of trouble to make him believe I was."

She gave him a conspiratorial grin, as if this ought to make things clearer to him instead of more puzzling.

"As to my being Kyril's sister, you might just as well say that I AM Kyril."

He thought about that one for a moment. What did he know about Kyril? Brackett had told Jim, way back in the motel, that Kyril was after him and wouldn't leave any witnesses if he found them. And later, in the car, he'd said he'd been assigned to get close to him and had moved in on his sister. Blair's working assumption had been that this was some leftover cold war vendetta - Brackett and Kyril working on opposite sides. But what did he know? Ugly2 came back bearing pizza and he realised suddenly he hadn't eaten for two days. There was bottled water, too, as well as some coffee. He bit into the pizza as if it was manna in the desert. He'd take what was on offer. And call it the next best thing.

"What are we waiting for?" he said suddenly. The pizza, the potato salad, the coffee were long gone. He swigged some more bottled water and looked around. The woman, neat and precise in her business suit, looking like a bank clerk or a secretary. The middle aged man, equally anonymous in grey. The Uglies, like a pair of night club bouncers, tidy and menacing, both at once. There had been another one, he thought; the last time there had been a thin, dark man talking in Russian on a mobile phone, where was he?

"Be patient. It won't be long," the woman said, soothingly.

"WHAT won't be long?"

She looked at her watch and didn't answer. He eyed the van door assessingly. Would he be any worse off if he made a break for it? Hell yes: if he didn't make it they'd probably tie him up again; wouldn't be hard to do either - although his hands were free there was still a pair of broken cuffs dangling conveniently from his left wrist. So he sat, shifting uncomfortably on the badly designed seat and thought longingly of lumbar cushions, and warm baths and clean underwear and cashmere sweaters and his favourite well worn jeans. The Russians are the good guys, he repeated like a mantra.

Of course, these were the Estonians...

The van door slid open. Ah, yes; right on cue, here was the other guy from the motel room - still with a cellphone clamped to his ear. He raised an eyebrow at the sight of Blair and the woman said one short word that Blair didn't recognise as English or Russian. Did Estonian have a special word for "sucker"?

New guy finished his conversation, shut up his phone, and took a gameboy out of his pocket. Welcome to bizarro-world. Ah, no, not an actual Gameboy, more a gameboy-shaped gizmo that had dots and beeps. Shit, if this were Star Trek, that would be tri-corder, Blair thought, fighting off the urge to giggle. More Estonian dialogue. Blair provided his own mental subtitles.

New guy "Klingons at twelve o'clock."

Boss woman "OK gentlemen, let's go get 'em."

Ugly1:"What about hostage-boy?"

Boss woman: "He can come too."

New guy:"Aw - we haven't killed anybody in ages. Can't we kill him a bit?"

Ugly1: "Yeah, go on. Please?"

Ugly2: "Pretty please? With sugar?"

"Blair? Stand up, now."

Real dialogue, in English, from the woman. Something in the beeping gameboy/tricorder had got them all excited and guns were being lock-and-loaded, equipment being checked. He stood up, slowly, bending a little as his head brushed the ceiling of the van. If Jim were anywhere within a hundred miles surely he'd pick up the sound of Blair's heart racing in panic.

The woman looked him over carefully and then made firm eye contact.

"Blair? Nothing bad is going to happen, OK? But I need to move you and I need you to be quiet. Do I need to have Piotr gag you or can you, will you, stay quiet for me?"

Oh god don't gag me, he thought, remembering the terror of being in the trunk with the corpse, his mouth wadded with cloth and taped shut till he couldn't breathe. "I'll be quiet," he said softly, "you have my word."

She looked him in the eye as if trying to read his soul.

"Good enough," she said finally. "Don't speak again till I tell you you can."

She nodded at one of the Uglies and they each took him by an arm, gripping him firmly but not painfully just above the elbow. The woman moved towards him with something in her hands and he tried to struggle, to back away, but they held him remorselessly. We had a deal, he thought desperately, but he didn't say it out loud...

But wasn't a gag, it was a hood. A bag of thick black cloth that pulled over his head and pulled shut tight around his neck and he was wrapped in darkness and muffled in silence and he clamped his mouth shut on the whimper of panic that threatened to escape, because if he made a noise she'd gag him as well and he couldn't breathe now but with something in his mouth too he'd suffocate and...

They were moving him, lifting him out of the van and making him walk somewhere and he understood - his rational brain understood - that they were just making sure he was pliant, that their hostage didn't give them any trouble while they stashed him out of sight. They walked him across a smooth surface - the parking lot, his rational brain supplied - and then there was a stop, and they lifted him over something and then made him walk faster and they were inside now and twisting and turning and he could hear something, them opening doors, he thought, looking for something. The Russians are the good guys, just hold on, the cavalry is on its way... the Russians are the good guys. So why did he hope, whatever they were looking for, they didn't find it?

They lifted him again and then put him down carefully, gingerly. "Blair?" the woman's voice said, just behind his head. "You're at the top of a flight of stairs. Don't move."

The hands released him and he felt forwards, cautiously, with one toe, and felt edge. He froze, and the hands grabbed him again, lifted him up, whirled him around, put him down, dizzy, petrified.

"I said don't move..."

The woman's voice was further away, there were no hands on him but he had lost all sense of where the edge was, and the primal fear of falling was wiping his brain clear of anything but panic. Feet rooted to the spot, in terror that the simple act of standing still and upright would suddenly desert him, it took him a good thirty seconds to understand that all he had to do was raise his hands, pull the bag from off his head.

It was fastened shut, somehow, around his neck and he found he was holding his breath as if the darkness that enwrapped him were the darkness of the fountain and the water pressing on his chest SHUT UP SHUT UP THIS IS SOOOOO NOT HELPING!!!!!

And then the stubborn strings gave way, and he lifted the hood off his head and blinked at the light...

...of an empty janitor's closet, where the Russians had left him standing on a box.

Mind games. They hadn't, to be fair, actually hurt him at all. They'd unfastened his cuffs and fed him a meal and then locked - he supposed he ought to check; yup, locked - him safely in a closet out of the way while whatever it was came to its conclusion. He put it out of his head. He couldn't quarrel, really, with Jim's "the Russians are the good guys" theory. Not while Brackett was around.

So. What resources did he have? A phone? No, they'd cut the wires. A sink....ah! Bathroom privileges at last! Jim ought to be able to track him by scent alone by now. And, yesssss! The janitorial staff wore coveralls! Clothes! He dressed himself in the blue one piece closest to his size and felt like a new man.

What else? Well. cleaning supplies. No doubt MacGyver could have constructed a small bazooka and armour piercing bullets from the assorted junk lying around but the best he could think of was to uncap one of the bottles of bleach and leave it ready to hand. A faceful of that ought to slow Brackett down a bit. He remembered his favourite scene from Terminator Two and tried breaking off a chunk of mop handle to use as a makeshift ninja weapon but Linda Hamilton had clearly had stunt men to break mop handles over their knees for her, because all that happened when Blair tried it was a bruised knee and a certain amount of hopping about and swearing.

So he unscrewed the mophead altogether and used the entire handle like a quarterstaff, tried a few practice swipes with it and nearly succeeded in braining himself with falling cans of floor wax.

He was, he thought, as ready as he'd ever be.

Waiting around sucks. Waiting around locked in a janitor's room sucked, in Blair's considered opinion, only slightly less than waiting around locked in the trunk of a car. Not lying on top of a corpse, not being bound and gagged, both had their attractions, obviously, but they paled next to the comparators of, say, not being at home in the loft, not sitting in front of a Jags game whilst not wrapping yourself round a six pack, a bowl of popcorn (with melted butter) and that new TA in Theatre Studies, Cindy-with-legs-that-go-on-forever. Sigh. Comparisons suck, Blair thought to himself sadly, whilst trying to decide whether consoling himself with the janitors' caffeine stash would constitute a felony or only a misdemeanour. What the heck. He switched on the coffee maker and then had a look at what was on offer... coffee - but only some low grade instant, tea - Liptons, euw... and a souvenir can of Fortnum and Masons Earl Grey teabags. No contest.

But when he opened the can, it was to find there was only one single solitary teabag left. Goddamit, couldn't he get any kind of a break?? A person who would steal a man's last Earl Grey teabag was nothing more than a monster. He sighed. Liptons it was. Let's stay one of the good guys.

He drank the tea and then amused himself for a while by having another go with the ninja floormop, rehearsing his moves. In the narrow space it seemed to work best if he held it about a foot from the end with one hand and about a third of the way along with the other, using it to push and distance or punch rather than slash or swipe... bang! He bounced it off the wall again and stopped to wipe the sting out of his palms...

...and then looked, more closely, at the wall he had just bashed. It wasn't a wall, as such, at all but a piece of plasterboard (drywall??) held in place by studs holding it onto a thin metal frame. In fact, he realised, if he didn't worry too much about the noise he could pretty much demolish his prison around himself with the Ninja Floormop of Death.

"Blair! You were going to be quiet? I thought that was the arrangement."

He whirled to face her, mop in hand, and raised the makeshift weapon to fend off the Uglies. Ugly1 wrapped one meaty hand around the business end of the mop, heaved, and Blair was disarmed, twisted around and the damned handcuffs clicked shut one more time.

"Oh come on," he heard himself saying as his mind raced to catch up with his mouth and think of something useful to persuade them not to... Dammit. The Uglies held him still and clamped his nose shut till he had to open his mouth and then there were thick, soap-tasting fingers in his mouth, holding his jaw, and they were stuffing it with cloth and why did they all have to be so fucking big? Fucking bullies, that's all they were.

So they gagged him and held him still and then the woman came and stood by him with an odd look on her face and then she took out a gun, showed it to Blair, and then moved round behind him. What next? They stood there facing the closed door of the janitor's room; the woman, the two Uglies, and Blair. What were they waiting for? Who were they waiting for? And then Blair got it and started to wriggle desperately in the Uglies' grasp and to make as much noise as he could through the gag because it was a trap, a trap for someone, and who could be coming to get Blair except for Jim?

The door opened and the woman pushed the gun, hard, into the hinge of Blair's jaw and pulled his head back by a handful of hair to bare his throat and there was nothing he could do as Jim turned to the man at his side and said, accusingly "I thought we had a deal."

The man took in the tableau in front of them - the woman, the Uglies, and Blair - and shrugged. "Things change. Talk to my sister."

Kyril! Can't fool me, Blair thought wildly.

"As my brother said, things change. Put down your gun."

Jim had his gun out, but wasn't threatening Kyril with it, looking instead at Blair, checking him out, checking him over. Full Blessed Protector mode, Blair diagnosed briefly, which sometimes meant rational brain disengaged. Why should Jim put down his gun? They've got me, but he's got Kyril - fair trade, he thought.

Jim made eye contact with Blair briefly and gave him a half smile, but spoke to the woman holding him.

"The deal I made with your brother was a straight swap, him for my partner."

"I understand. And all I'm asking is a little more, that you don't intervene with what's going to happen. So you give up your gun, and we tie your hands, and leave you and Blair locked up in here. It won't take you long to get free, but it will be enough. Enough time," she clarified, "and you won't bear any responsibility for what happens next. It's a good deal."

"We HAD a good deal," Jim said dryly. Blair could see him look assessingly at the Uglies, at the woman. Blair looked sharply towards the wall, where he had punched the hole through with the ninja floormop, in case the existence of an escape route helped him decide. But in the end they had three guns and Jim had one and if he fired she'd kill Blair and there would still be two Uglies and Kyril left to get Jim even if he shot her first.

"Take out the gag and we've got a deal."

"I'm not here to negotiate with you, Ellison. If I shoot you and Blair I still get my amnesty and all the time I need to go after Lee. But Blair's a nice guy, and an innocent bystander - you both are, and I'm turning over a new leaf so I don't kill innocent bystanders any more. Unless I have to. Do I have to?"

"Blair gets panic attacks sometimes. If he gets one while we're both tied up he could suffocate if his airway's blocked. Take out the gag and we have a deal."

No, don't! Blair thought wildly, but then, what other way was there? Ugly2 untied the gag, helped Blair spit out the wad of cloth.

"You OK?" Jim said softly, keeping his eyes on Blair as he handed over his weapon.

"Fine," he said, Sentinel soft, trying to summon a grin, "Only tell me again who the good guys are?"

They pushed Jim to his knees and he went with a kind of sinister grace, looking like a caged panther might look, feral but patient, waiting for his moment. Jim put his hands on his head without being told, and one of the Uglies quickly and superficially patted him down. He was wearing a bullet-proof vest that made him look like a linebacker, and the Ugly didn't bother looking to see if he had anything in his shirt pocket under it.

They tied Jim's hands behind his back with cord and then - finally - the woman took the gun away from Blair's jaw. She pushed Blair down and he thought they meant to make him kneel on the floor like Jim so there were a couple of awkward moments, the Uglies pushing, Blair trying to co-operate but not understanding what they wanted.

In the end, though, they positioned Blair and Jim how they wanted them, sitting back to back on the ground, legs out in front of them, and it was annoying and a little scary not to be able to see Jim, but oh it was comforting to have that reassuring bulk of muscle to lean on. They looped another piece of cord round Blair's chest, under his arms, and as it pulled tight he realised they'd also threaded it around Jim, so they were tied together, back to back, sitting on the ground.

When the Uglies were done they stepped back and said something to each other in Estonian. The woman said something sharply to them and they shut up. And then Kyril - if that was the new guy's name - said "I'm sorry Jim. Really. I didn't think it would work out like this."

"It's not too late..."

"Yes. Yes it is. We only have till dawn. But it can still be done. If you and your partner stay here you'll be all right. Won't they?"

He turned to his sister, seeking reassurance.

"If they stay."

Kyril laughed.

"See, Jim? So all you have to do is stay." He said it humorously one more time, as if talking to a dog. "Stay!"

And then, finally, they left, and Blair and Jim were alone. Blair opened his mouth to speak but then stopped: "I knew you'd come" was too needy and "Where the hell have you been!" was just plain rude.

"Goddammit, Sandburg, to the left!"

"Where do you think I'm going?"

"The OTHER left!"

Standing up when you're tied together back to back is tougher than it looks in the movies. Once they stopped snapping at each other it still took them four tries, three swearwords and a sprained thigh muscle to lever themselves, finally, onto their feet.

"There are scissors in the drawer, I think," Blair offered. But Jim was heading for the door and Blair was being dragged backwards with him.

"Sheesh, Ellison, warn a person when you plan a sprint."

"Ssshhh."

"I am SO tired of people telling me to shut up."

"Sandburg! I'm trying to tell what's going on out there."

"Oh fine. Listen, Mr Super-senses, you could hear just as well from over there where the scissors are, and I could be cutting you free while you do it."

"Where?"

"Over there!"

"Over where?"

"Would you just stop with the Marx Brothers impressions! I told you already, there are scissors in the drawer. I've been here a while, remember???"

Jim's body was tense against his back but he felt the muscles un-tense, deliberately, slowly, and when he tried a tentative step in the direction of the drawers Jim followed him.

He leaned forward and used his teeth to pull the drawer open by its metal handle and then, moved by the same thought, they turned sideways to allow their bound hands to rummage in its contents.

"Hey!" Blair protested, feeling Jim's hands on the scissors, "I'm wearing handcuffs, genius - you're going to cut them off with scissors? Wow. I'm impressed, Superman. Give 'em here."

Jim dropped them, Blair fumbled for them, Blair dropped them, they both tutted and then had to readjust their positions to allow Blair's bound hands to reach them. But, finally, slowly, their Laurel and Hardy act achieved its objective and Blair managed to cut the cords around Jim's wrists. Jim freed them both from the cord around their chests and then they turned to face each other at last.

"So what took you so long?" Blair couldn't resist asking as he squatted to thread his legs through his arms and bring his cuffed wrists round to the front.

"Give me a break, Sandburg. I've been following your trail of breadcrumbs non-stop since Brackett called me on Thursday." He had a paperclip untwisted in his hands and was using Sentinel sight to squint at the lock on the cuffs.

"I had your friend Kelso help me out with Kyril's identity, and I arrested the guy on a bogus possession charge. If it came to it I thought I could get the INS to deport him. But then a bunch of suits turned up and I was in the middle of a turf war. Seems Kyril had offered to defect: wants to give up and get out of the killing business, and we've offered him an amnesty and a green card if he agrees to give up his employers and his contact list."

"What, he's some kind of spy?"

"No, he's some kind of assassin. Started off KGB but when the Soviet Union broke up he went freelance and has been responsible for some very high profile unsolved deaths. And he's willing to tell who hired him, and why, and apparently we really, really want to know - gives us a hold over all kinds of interesting people. But then I turned up and arrested him and they thought they could take him in without making a deal, save a few bucks on what they'd promised him to get him to turn."

"The Men In Black!" Blair realised - quickly he explained to Jim about his encounter with the mysterious bunch of suits who had taken him from Duwayne's office, interrogated him, and then dumped him unconscious in the parking lot.

Jim frowned, pressed hard on Blair's wrist and the right hand cuff went clunk! and fell open.

"So is that the whole story?" Blair was thinking aloud, impatient with his Sentinel's careful scrutiny of the remaining lock. "Kyril wants to kill Brackett because he thinks Brackett killed his sister. But his sister isn't dead, and she's apparently the leader of a bunch of Estonian... somethings. And the Men in Black want Kyril in custody but they don't want to pay him what they promised. And Brackett. Why would he still be here?"

Jim was looking closely at the lock on the left hand cuff, eyes wide, pupils black. Blair automatically put a hand on his wrist, checking for zone-outs but Jim shrugged him off, talking to the lock as much as to Blair.

"He was on edge the last time I talked with him, and twenty-four more hours on the run can't have done him any good."

"So how are we going to stop the Russians from killing him," Blair asked.

Jim looked up, finally, and grinned.

"We're not."

"We're not?"

"Why should we? This is between them: Lee Brackett is a CIA renegade, Kyril is a KGB renegade, the CIA are on it - you heard the man. We're just innocent bystanders. We stay here, and Simon will be outside by now anyway. Let the CIA do their thing, and then we go home."

Jim unclasped the fastenings on his bullet-proof vest... to reveal another one underneath. He turned Blair around and put the vest on him and fastened it around him and then, satisfied, started unclasping the one he himself wore.

"You brought me a bullet-proof vest? You couldn't bring maybe shoes?"

"Hey, your clothes are in the truck, but I didn't know what I was getting into here."

Under the second vest Jim was wearing his backup gun. He took it out, checked it, and then put his vest back on. And then calmly went to the coffee maker and set it going again.

"Jim!"

"What?"

"You *always* chase the bad guy."

"You'd prefer I left you here barefoot on your own?"

"You're just going to sit here and drink *coffee*?"

"Sounds like a plan."

Jim's face scrunched up in concern and he froze, listening, like a pointer identifying game.

"Someone's coming."

And then abruptly, horrifyingly, Jim yelled as if he had been shot and fell in a crumpled heap on the floor, his gun falling from fingers that were, instead, clamped over his ears.

The door was kicked in and there was Brackett. In a blur of movement Brackett was inside the room, dragging Blair away from Jim, stilling them both with a gun pressed against Blair's temple. Jim made it, just, to his knees, his eyes slitted with fury, as Brackett said softly

"Ah ah ah, Ellison, stay there unless you want another blast of the dog whistle. God I love the mall, don't you? You can find just about anything you want." He knotted his hand in Blair's hair and forced the anthropologist to his knees. "Hey, little buddy, here we are again! Did you know that fucking coat you were wearing was bugged?"

"What?"

"Yeah. Why do you think they let you go? They put a tag on you and released you into the wild. And you led them straight to me... just another reason for me to be grateful to you, huh?" He twisted Blair's hair viciously and, when Jim stirred, pressed the gun harder into Blair's ear. "I took out one of those big ugly mothers and he was carrying a scanner and, lo and behold, I scanned and found... myself! Oh, and you, of course. Where have they put one on you this time?"

"The cuffs," Jim said unexpectedly.

"What?"

"There's a key broken off in the lock but there's something else in there underneath it, something that buzzes."

"So being without your guide for a couple of days hasn't done anything to your senses then, I see? Good. OK, Ellison, listen up. All I want is out of this. Go and get me a car and bring it to the exit that way. And then Blair and I will join you and you can drive us out of here."

Jim stood up slowly.

"Not going to happen," he said calmly, carefully. Brackett, enraged, gave another vicious twist to Blair's hair, bringing tears to his eyes. At this rate he would be bald before he was rescued.

"Don't fuck with me, Ellison!"

Wow, Blair thought as the spittle flecked his ear, I never saw someone literally foam at the mouth. Although, strictly speaking, he couldn't actually _see_ much of Brackett, what with him standing behind him with the grip on his hair and the gun in his ear and all. Still. Wind up the bad guy, seemed to be the game of choice - time to take a hand?

"She's not dead, you know." He said it quietly, in his "teacher" voice, the one where you shut down a troublesome class by saying something really important really quietly. But maybe this wasn't such a hot idea, because Jim had been edging forwards trying to get in striking range and Brackett, enraged, used his gunhand to dip into his pocket and give another blast on the dogwhistle that had incapacitated Jim before and then Blair was struggling to untangle Brackett from his hair and Brackett was breaking the ninja floormop effortlessly in the Linda Hamilton move and clubbing Jim down with one of the pieces and jabbing the other, just once, into Blair's solar plexus leaving him gasping for air on the floor like a landed fish while Jim's face ran with blood and Brackett was screaming "What did you say? WHAT DID YOU SAY!" and he knew he had, finally, pushed him too far.

"Up."

As Brackett tried to force him to his feet, Blair could see Jim - face battered and still bleeding - struggle to get to him. Blair's ribs ached and he was having trouble breathing, but lying on the floor like a deadweight looked like a good move anyway. Passive resistance, he thought, that's Plan B. Not a bad plan, too, unlike Plan A - wind up the bad guy - which had gone so wrong so quickly.

As if in slow motion, Blair saw Jim crash into Brackett and then it was bad guy sandwich - Jim on top of Brackett on top of Blair - only with far more knee, elbow and headbutting action than seemed to Blair to be strictly necessary. Blair managed to get enough breath to see if an "OW!" would stop bits of bodies thumping into him but Jim and Brackett were locked together fighting like wildcats, no attention to spare for bystanders.

Blair wriggled under the fight looking for an identifiable piece of Brackett to punch or bite. Brackett was getting the upper hand again. Jim seemed still groggy from the blow on the head and the whistle that had assaulted his senses earlier. Then there was a thud, a solid percussive jolt, that Blair felt through the body - whichever one it was - directly on top of him. The weight pressing him down halved, the fight was over and the victor climbed to his feet, but it was Brackett's voice that said "You heard me, Sandburg, get up."

Jim stirred, semi-conscious, and rolled groggily to the side, his hand fumbling for Blair's. Brackett had the piece of wooden handle he'd used as a club in one hand, but in the other he now had a gun again. Probably Jim's, Blair thought ruefully. He was pointing it at Blair but, when the anthropologist didn't move to obey him, he simply pointed it at Jim and said again "On your feet, Sandburg." It was Jim, however, who answered, "He's not going anywhere." Blair realised what Jim had done as Jim raised his wrist... now encircled by the other cuff. That's my blessed protector, he thought with a grin.

Brackett brought down the makeshift club on Jim's unprotected head once, twice, ignoring Blair's protesting bellowed "No!" Blair rolled towards Jim, trying to cover his partner's head with his body, but Brackett used the club to pry him loose, roll him back over.

"All right Sandburg..." The club was now at Blair's throat and Brackett was blank-eyed with killing rage. Blair tried to bat the club away but his left hand was brought up short by the chain now linking him to Jim's unconscious form and he couldn't begin to break Brackett's hold one handed. "Tell me about her."

The club eased off, just a notch, just enough for him to snatch a breath.

"I was telling you the truth, man; she's not dead. She's the one in charge. They picked me up out of the car wreck, and told Jim they'd trade me for him letting her brother go."

"She's dead. I saw her die. Don't bullshit me, you little bastard."

Brackett dropped the club and backhanded him viciously. He felt blood running from his nose and managed to sit up far enough to clear his airway, spitting and swallowing blood, choking; discovering that drowning in your own blood had to be his least favourite way to die.

"I'm not lying. I'm not! She told me she went to a lot of trouble to make you believe she was dead."

Brackett was angry beyond reason and, for the first time, Blair's belief that it would all work out in the end started to desert him.

"If I'm going to die here," Brackett said, bringing up the gun, "here, now, today, in this nothing mall in the middle of nowhere, do you really think I care whether I take you two with me or not?"

"I'm telling you the truth," Blair said desperately, "for once in your life believe it when you hear it. She's alive, and she's the one looking for you. You can work it out, man. Talk to her."

"Kyril is going to kill me because I got her killed. It doesn't make sense any other way."

"She said," Blair said slowly, remembering, "that *she* was Kyril."

Brackett sat down abruptly on the floor, all the colour draining out of his face, the light of some terrible understanding dawning in his eyes.

"Who was with her? How many?"

"The two Uglies, the suit, and the guy with the mobile phone..."

Brackett was silent, head down, body shaking with some violent emotion. Now would be a good time for you to wake up, Jim, he thought hopefully. "You know what this means?" Brackett stood up again, a mirthless grin stretching his face. He shook Blair by the shoulder like a terrier with a rat and Blair meekly humoured him and shook his head. Harmless hostage-boy, that's me, he projected.

"No, I guess you don't actually know anything, do you. And chained to that," he kicked at Jim and Blair bit back a protest. Meek, harmless, useless, yessir, he thought; see me grovel. "You're no further use to me." Brackett raised his gun... and then fired one bullet contemptuously into the ceiling as he turned and walked away.

"Jim? Jim!"

Blair was shaking with reaction as he turned Jim into the recovery position, but he still kept up a constant running commentary about deadweight jocks with more muscle than brain. He saw, to his relief, a pair of bright blue eyes staring back at him.

"Jim? How do you feel?"

"Like someone hit me over the head with a stick."

"Three times," Blair helpfully reminded him and he managed the ghost of a grin in return. He tugged at Blair's wrist and then, seeming to remember the cuffs, raised his other hand to tug significantly at his ear.

"Problem with your hearing?" Blair said, going automatically into Guide mode.

Jim sighed, shook his head, put his finger over his lips for a silent "ssssh!" and then tugged again at his ear. Ah. Ix-nay on the entinel-say - they were being overheard? But how? And by whom?

While he helped Jim find a comfortable position to sit, Blair's mind insisted on worrying away instead at the problem of Brackett. What had he said, what had Brackett heard, to cause his reaction? Surely Blair must now have all the pieces, if only he could put them together. "I'm Kyril," she'd said. I'm Kyril? I'm Kyril...

I'm Spartacus?

The CIA wanted Kyril and his contact list. In exchange they were offering amnesties and green cards. But something about the Estonians had been nagging at Blair's anthropologist brain all along.

That was it. They weren't a gang, they were a tribe. That was it, a tribe. Brother and sister, yes, but the others reacted like family members too, not like employees - acted autonomously, needed no instructions before acting, interacted non-verbally... He was certain of it. Which meant... what exactly?

"Jim? I think I've got it. I think the Russians/Estonians are ALL 'Kyril'. I think they're a family, and I don't think your 'Kyril' is THE Kyril any more than the woman is. I don't think there IS a Kyril, it's kind of a code name. So that would be why Kyril seemed to be such a good assassin, because you'd never know which of them was going to get you... Which means the deal they've cut with the CIA is smarter than it looks too - one of them plays Spartacus and lets us have him, tells all. But the others get to live here, get their green cards, clean records - and maybe they've got millions stashed away somewhere, I don't know."

Jim sighed wearily. Blair suddenly realised why - this was not a good demonstration of shutting up. But he had to complete the thought.

"So why risk the deal just to kill Brackett?"

Anthropology teaches us many things. It is the study of people in society, or, rather, of people in societies. Because the first thing that anthropology teaches us is that not all societies function alike, but that every society believes that its rituals and norms are the one, true, "normal" way to behave. And it is the task of the anthropologist to study those rituals and norms, to enter into them without being influenced by them. It is, in effect, the study of seeing the other person's point of view.

Anthropology is, then, the study of the peacemaker.

His first ever teacher had said that to him, to all of them, in the first anthropology class he had ever taken, and Blair repeated it to himself now, as the entrance to the room in which they sat filled up with Kyrils, that wary tribe of warriors, who had come back at the sound of gunfire, to collect their ... what? Innocent bystanders? Standby hostages?

Jim was drifting, in and out of consciousness, and so it seemed to be up to him. Plan C: anthropology is the study of the peacemaker. OK, I can do this: anthropology is the study of the peacemaker, he told himself. I'm an anthropologist, the anthropologist is the peacemaker, ergo I am a peacemaker... And then he shut up, because he realised he was saying it under his breath, and Jim could hear him perfectly well, and assuming they lived through this, would never let him hear the last of it.

"Did you guys ever see 'Spartacus'?" he asked.

Weird out the class - who'd told him about that student-taming technique first? Worked every time.

Well, with freshmen.

The Kyrils stood at the door of the janitors room and looked at him, politely humouring his obvious insanity but gesturing with their guns, making Jim and Blair move out into the shadowy twilight of the deserted mall.

"The Romans have beaten the slaves who were rebelling against them," and it's no good telling me to shut up, he thought, because Jim ought to know by now that when he was nervous his mouth moved on automatic and it didn't matter what his brain had to say about it, "and the only thing they want to do now is to find their leader Spartacus and kill him... Anyway, all the captured slaves are going to be sold back into slavery, but the Romans tell them they'll be crucified instead unless they give up Spartacus. So Kirk Douglas stands up to say 'I'm Spartacus' and sacrifice himself for his comrades. But Tony Curtis stands up at the same time and says 'I'M Spartacus!' and then suddenly they're all doing it, one after one, standing up and saying 'I'm Spartacus', so that even in defeat they win a kind of victory..."

They were looking around now, suspecting this madness was some kind of diversion, looking for Brackett jumping out at them. Blair felt Jim tense alongside him. Whatever was going to happen, was going to happen soon, he thought.

"...and that's what made me get it. You see, Brackett used me to make Jim get 'Kyril' off his back, but you -" How had he come this far and still didn't know the woman's name? "You wanted me to get Jim to let your brother go - and you told me you were Kyril. So here's what I think. I think all of you are 'Kyril' and you've made a deal with the CIA that means only one of you has to turn himself in while the rest of you go free. And the only thing holding it up is Brackett. But Brackett nearly killed me a couple of minutes ago because I told him you weren't dead. So I'm deducing there's something going on between the two of you that has nothing to do with the CIA and killing people and stuff."

And that was his best shot.

No-one said anything, no-one moved, and Blair wondered if he'd just committed a spectacularly wordy and embarassingly futile suicide. But then the woman nodded and the remaining Ugly moved towards Blair and Jim and Jim tensed and this was it...

"Irena?"

And then Brackett's voice came, softly, from the PA system.

"Is it you?"

She was surprised but not nonplussed. She merely nodded, and the Ugly and the man with the mobile phone both ran off, guns in hand. Which left her, 'Kyril' and the guy in the suit. If he and Jim weren't chained together, now would be a good time for... something.

"Irena, if you're hearing this, if you're still alive, you have to let me talk to you, give me a chance to explain..."

Blair looked at her face which was taut with some emotion he couldn't read. Jim moved slightly and Blair recognised the signs of him extending his senses...

The Ugly and phone guy came back, shaking their heads, and as soon as they were all assembled again, they heard the snick of a safety coming off, and Brackett stepped out into the light above them, holding them all in his sights.

"Irena?"

"Lee." She acknowledged his presence, but her face gave away nothing.

"Guys! Could we have less guns and more talking maybe?"

Well, the anthropologist as peacemaker was the whole of Plan C, so it was - he felt - only sporting of him to move things along. Jim growled softly "Sandburg!" and turned fractionally, making Blair move slightly so Jim's body was between him and Brackett's line of fire.

And then there were lights. Lots of lights. The mall lit up like Christmas and there were more safety-snick noises and everybody froze in the glare of the Men in Black.

CIA/MiB, didn't seem to matter. Blair and Jim sat side by side, a little way off from the rest of them, watched by a wary and alert Man in Black. One moreover who had clearly been told to watch them and not let anything distract him, because he was keeping his eyes on them, keeping out of range of any possible covert action miracle from Jim, unblinkingly wary. After a few moments Blair had absorbed this pattern of behaviour and tuned it out in favour of concentrating on what was happening with the Kyrils and Brackett when one of the MiBs approached them.

"Detective Ellison? Mr. Sandburg? I'm Robert Clay, from the three-letter agency?"

"Gee," Jim said sarcastically, "the IRS gets everywhere."

"Ellison, don't be an asshole. You know what I mean. I just need to check if you and your partner are going to get with the program."

The CIA had disarmed Brackett and he, too, was sitting separated out under alert guard. But the Kyrils still held their guns: they were just out-numbered, out-gunned and surrounded.

"What program are we talking about?"

"Oh, you know - how we saved your partner from Brackett."

"You stuck me full of drugs, without my consent needless to say, and then dumped me unconscious in a parking lot!"

Jim looked momentarily startled at this breathless piece of precis but he gestured Blair to silence and said, "Could be do-able. Assuming we ARE 'saved', that is."

"Well, now, that's the real question, isn't it? You see, I think you came here to rescue your partner from Brackett, but you had to put him down to do it. It was a righteous shoot, though; my boys and I are here to testify to that. If Sandburg is too squeamish to back you up, well, let's say he was locked in the trunk of Brackett's stolen car at the time and didn't see a thing. We found the car and there's forensic evidence to back that up. So what do you say?"

Jim was scratching at his ear as if it was on fire and Blair felt, suddenly, as if the ground under his feet was tilting. Something was happening here, something important, why couldn't he get it?

"Only one problem I can see with that," Jim said carefully, "and that's Brackett. In case you hadn't noticed, Sandburg got away from him all on his own. Not only was it not me that shot him, he isn't actually dead."

"Really not a problem. Kyril gets a free shot, you get the credit, the world's a better place. What do you care?"

"Jim!"

"Shut up, Sandburg." Jim turned to look at him. He wasn't pleading, not exactly, and he wasn't giving an order, not quite, but it was as if some secret message was branded on Blair's forehead in letters of fire and Jim was trying to WILL him to see what it was, without a mirror.

"But you can't go along with this... you're the good guy... it's murder..."

"Blair, so help me..."

But the man in black had lost interest.

"Sorry we couldn't work it out," he called over his shoulder, and Blair realised he had just signed both their death warrants.

The MiB/CIA guy went over to the Estonian Blair still thought of as Kyril, the one Jim had brought with him to the party.

"It's time."

"It isn't over. We had a deal."

"So get on with it and let's go."

The woman looked sharply at her brother, with some meaning Blair couldn't discern.

"What about your men?"

"Look, the deal was, you came in tonight and your family got a free ride. If Brackett disappeared along the way, well, hell, like we care. So this is your last chance. If you're going to do it, do it, and let's go."

"You already tried to double cross me once, when I was arrested. How do I know this isn't another trick?"

"You don't, Kyril, but if you and your boys want to take Uncle Sam up on his offer you do what I tell you, when I tell you, and be grateful. Because, make no bones about it, you're going to talk to me, one way or the other. And I don't much care which."

"Jim!" Blair said softly, "we have to do something."

Jim twisted the cuffs on their wrists. "What exactly do you suggest? Just keep quiet, I'm listening."

Jim was still looking at him strangely, as if what he was saying had some special meaning, and Blair held his gaze questioningly. What was going on here?

"No talking," their guard said, casually backhanding Blair as he said it. Jim sunk down and his foot struck like a snake, further than you would imagine it could possibly reach, and the guard went down clutching his family jewels.

"Son of a-"

"Leave them alone," Kyril said unexpectedly.

"What's it to you?"

"I'm not going to kill Brackett in front of witnesses, and I'm not going to have Ellison turn up dead when the last time anyone saw him he was with me."

"Well, I'm sure it's a terrible shame that Detective Ellison and Mr. Sandburg got caught up in the shoot out at the mall, and no-one will be more surprised and upset than I am when we find their lifeless bodies in the morning, but you've got Brackett here to help you mop up any witnesses. 'Oh dear, it turns out Brackett killed Ellison while Ellison killed Brackett for kidnapping and killing his little friend Sandburg.' How's that sound?"

"You're supposed to be on our side," Jim said contemptuously.

"Come now, Ellison, I've read your record. You've been in the military. You've heard of friendly fire, I'm sure. And you're familiar with the concept of expediency. Nothing personal. But you and Sandburg were just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

He took Kyril's gun arm, extended it as if the man were a puppet, and pointed his gun hand at Jim's head.

"Do it now."

Kyril and Jim looked into each other's eyes and there was, Blair thought, some understanding there...

But he was never sure whether he'd really thought that at the time, or whether he'd reconstructed it with hindsight, because the next thing that happened was that there were percussion grenades and smoke bombs everywhere, like Chinese New Year and the Fourth of July and World War Three all at once, and there was Simon, and Rafe, and Henri, and what looked like a hundred guys in FBI vests and Blair thought, as he sat in the ambulance taking Jim to hospital, that it would be really nice when all this stuff stopped happening and they were alone in a quiet hospital room and Jim could explain what the hell had been going on.

Stangely enough, none of the myriad cops would admit to owning a set of handcuff keys, a bolt cutter or a jaws of life, so the usual fuss at the hospital was immensely simplified by their being cuffed together. Jim's concussion turned out to be a minor skull fracture, and Blair was in anxiety overdrive about him for a while before some dragon of a nurse sat him down and started cleaning the blood off his face. He was astonished when she called in a doctor and they started a quick exam that seemed to let the whole of the last few days catch up with him at once, so that he finished up weighed down with an IV and diagnosed with exhaustion, minor hypothermia, dehydration, multiple bruisings and minor lacerations. They injected something into the IV and before he even had a chance to ask what it was, he was asleep.

Blair woke up and looked around. The IV had gone: good, he hated those things. And Jim was lying peacefully in the next bed, and their chained wrists had been thoughtfully propped up on a trolley in between their cots. He became aware of blue eyes staring thoughtfully at him.

"How're you feeling man?"

"Like I have a skull fracture, Darwin, what do you expect? How are you?"

"Oh, fine, fine," he said dismissively, "you know me. I'm out of here as soon as I can get these off... What?"

Jim was smiling. "Oh, nothing - just enjoying the unfamiliar sensation of actually knowing where you are for once."

Understanding dawned. "You have no intention of letting anyone 'find' the keys!"

"Go back to sleep Blair. You look like hell."

"Oh, and you don't," he thought. But whether the thought made it as far as his mouth was a moot point...

Next time, he woke up hungry.

"Do you realise all I've eaten since Thursday is a burger and some pizza? Man, I'm going to wrap myself around the biggest steak..."

"Chief, it's four in the morning, dammit. Go back to sleep!"

"Hey, how are you?"

"Tired! But then with nurses who wake me up every hour on the hour, and you imitating the dawn chorus in between, what do you expect?" "Oh. Sorry man. And, well, thanks for the Blessed Protector routine back there."

Jim would have waved a hand, airily dismissing the need for thanks, but with one hand weighed down with the IV and the other chained to Blair's...

"So give. What the hell have I been in the middle of?"

"Now?"

"Now," he said firmly. Come on, guy, you're killing me here. What was with all the..." He imitated Jim's ear-tugging and shushing, ending with a humourous frenzy of meaningful ear-scratching.

"Oh, that. Well, when Kelso found out about Kyril for me, he also turned up the deal Irena had made to get a get-out-of-jail-free card on killing Brackett. Turns out there's a bunch of 'the end justifies the means' types in the CIA who've been behind a lot of things way outside their remit, and the CIA's own version of Internal Affairs was keen to take them down. I called in a few favours, made a deal... the vests were bugged. There should be enough evidence on the tapes and now with the Kyrils' testimony..."

Blair frantically tried to recall what he'd said while he was wearing the bulllet-proof vest. Had he said anything about Jim's senses?

"It's OK Blair. They got nothing on... you know."

"Oh... good. So it's over?"

"Yeah..." But Jim was already asleep.

#

"This isn't funny any more, man."

Blair rattled the hancuffs at Jim reproachfully. It was six thirty a.m. and the hospital routine was starting around them.

"Hey, I'm laughing, Sandburg..."

Blair took a deep breath and centred himself, and then turned on the ol' puppy-dog eyes.

"It's kind of tactless, though. I mean, in the last four days I've been kidnapped," (He paused for a quick mental checklist. Brackett, Russians, Brackett, MiB/CIA, Russians again, Brackett again... should he count Russians a third time AND MiB again? What the heck) "Eight times by three different sets of people - a new personal best. I've been tied up with telephone cable, duct tape and handcuffs, been locked in the trunks of cars three times - once with a Russian corpse I might add - stuffed into closets, vans and janitors cupboards, interrogated with mind bending drugs, beaten up, left unconscious in a parking lot and most of the time I was in my underwear! So don't you think I might kind of have issues about being cuffed to anyone right now, even you?"

Actually he felt great, that bubble of irrepressible energy that you get after life-threatening experiences buoying him up. But if he was going to get cop-hazed, a little guilt-inducement always worked wonders.

And Jim, the big lug, was falling for it like he did every time, his eyes crinkling with pain, his IV-ed hand reaching automatically but futilely to the cuff linking their wrists.

"I'm so sorry, Blair - I haven't slept for four days and it was kind of comforting hearing you breathing next to me. All I wanted was to know where you were, for a change. But you're right, I wasn't thinking. I'll get Simon..."

"Oh come on, man, you're going to do yourself an injury. It's OK. It'll wait till Simon comes by..."

He settled down in the narrow hospital bed and waited for Jim to do the same, watching anxiously as the lines of pain and exhaustion started to smooth out as the Sentinel fell back to sleep.

And then he got it.

Hah!

Hoist with his own petard! Jim had turned his own patented guilt-inducing technique right back at him. Boy, he was good.

Well, OK then, he thought, finding a discarded biro in the bedside drawer. It was the nice clicky kind - which meant a spring - which meant wire... As he picked the lock on the cuffs, he thought generously, all he wants is to know where I am, so...

"Jim: gone for breakfast." he wrote carefully, propping the note up on the trolley between their beds.

And went in search of some clothes, and some breakfast, chuckling quietly to himself all the way out to the street.