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magibrainTitle: Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – 5. Threat
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – Index
At least having Collins here makes things begin to make sense. A twisted sort of sense that leaves out the details, but now he's sure that Kate was on to something, and that something's going on in the airport here. He's worked with less.
There's also something niggling at the corner of his mind, like he realized something important, but now can't remember what it was. Probably it was a plan smarter than the one he's come up with. But the time is well past for sitting back and thinking about his choices. It's time to act.
The terminal isn't a large building; the Seychelles are a destination, not a hub. He makes it to the end of the building and turns the corner before the doors can fly open, and then he can see the high fence which corrals the runway. Razor wire at the top, and he didn't bring anything to cut it, but there's another way into the concourse from that direction if he's clever enough to find it. He likes to think of himself as a fairly clever man.
What, exactly, he's going to do after breaking into an airport is another question, but he's not thinking that far ahead.
Down maybe sixty meters or so, he sees a road sawed in two by a tall, rolling gate. The gate has its own adornment of razor wire, but there's a gap between the wire of the gate and the wire of the fence. A slim chance, literally. He jogs over to examine it.
He's always been happy to go for the slim chances. You don't get anywhere by playing it safe, right?
He takes handfuls of the fence, and slings himself up. Quietly as he can: there's not a lot of challenge in this part, though he does what he can to keep the fence from rattling. He gets to the top and gets his arm through the gap – it's not too bad, maybe eight or nine inches clearance, and he can get his fingers (carefully, carefully) along the blunt edge of one coil, pushing it gently but firmly away just long enough to propel himself over the edge and catch himself on the other side.
–and the wire catches him around the ankle as he does, biting in hard.
He almost shouts; twists and pulls his leg free with a tearing sensation that shoots up his shin and hits the bottom of his stomach. Drops to the ground, catches himself on his palms, and one hand closes on the cut.
There's not as much blood as there should be, but the blood under his fingers is hot and thick as oil paints.
He almost throws up, there.
That wasn't elegant. He scrambles for the nearest cover he can see – a truck, probably maintenance of some sort – and presses himself back into its shadow, while the pain thrums up and down his leg. Glances out – there are doors back into the terminal building from here, but it's a matter of choosing which one to take. Hopefully one where someone clearly not in uniform, walking in from the airstrip, won't attract too much attention.
A quiet corner of his mind tells him This is going to get you shot, and you know it. He ignores it. Maybe he'd listen if it had anything useful to say.
But no. There's no motion that he can see, no patrolling security guards, and if the floodlights aren't on him from his trip over the fence, probably no cameras. He gauges the distance to the next truck, closer to the terminal building's wall, and makes a break for it; makes it, ducks into cover, and listens hard. The next dash – to one of the doors dotting the building's facade – goes as smoothly, though he's limping by the time he makes it, and his breath is ragged with the pain.
Should have brought something to tie off any inconvenient injuries. Should have done a lot of things. It's just, he wasn't expecting–
The nearest door swings open to an empty utility corridor, grey industrial walls, lights glaring like streetlights. No excuse for unpreparedness. That's a Mozzism, though what Mozzie sees as being prepared Neal usually sees as excessive and somewhat disconnected from the realities of probability. He closes the door behind him.
Seeing the airport from this side does nothing for its carefully-constructed veneer of tropical carefreeness. Neal is in fact, fairly certain he's been in warehouses and abandoned slaughteryards that looked cheerier, though just the one, on that last one.
He picks a direction and heads in it. Glances at the doors as he passes – maybe a storeroom here, maybe a broom closet there, hopefully a locker room somewhere where he can pick up a change of clothes; be nice if there was a first aid kit somewhere, too. He's just about resolved to give up on that idea and sneak into the concourse when he turns a corner, and someone yells out, "Hey!"
"Hey. Neal. Neal!" Mozzie is snapping his fingers in front of Neal's face, and Neal jumps and focuses on him. Mozzie looks exactly as annoyed as he usually does when Neal has betrayed his attention by being distracted by something.
It's equal parts reassuring and not fair.
"If you're going to hallucinate, you can at least keep hallucinating the most helpful of your imaginary friends," Mozzie says. There's a pause. "That would be me, by the way."
In a better situation, Neal could have smiled at that. In a better situation, he'd probably not be hallucinating. "I'm not exactly controlling this, Mozzie."
"Well, obviously." Mozzie huffs. "You have better fashion sense than this shirt." He tugs at the Hawaiian shirt he's wearing – which really is an atrocity against garments everywhere. Not that Neal thinks that'd be enough to keep it from Mozzie's wardrobe, but he's not about to argue the point with a figment of his imagination. "You know I don't look good in CAT-shovel yellow."
"No one does," Neal says.
"So." Mozzie wipes his hands on the offending shirt, and gives Neal a pre-op look. "Let's work this through. Why don't you just – I don't know. Call me?"
"What?"
Mozzie rolls his eyes. "You have, so far as I know, no major psychiatric disorders, save your Suit-oriented Stockholm syndrome. I doubt you've recently taken up any recreational pharmaceuticals. So, having eliminated the exceedingly unlikely explanations for why you're hallucinating, whatever remains is probably plausible. You're in trouble, right?"
It's not like he can argue that.
"So, if you're in trouble, why haven't you called me?"
"I can't get to you," Neal says. "I don't know why, but I can't."
"How do you know?" Mozzie asks. Neal shrugs.
"If I could, I would have already."
"A pragmatic reason," Mozzie says, with a tone of approval. "Something is telling me that we need to exercise an unusual degree of caution in this situation. Who can you trust to get you out?"
Neal manages a dry, shaky laugh. "You always told me never to trust anyone."
"And you never listened," Mozzie counters. "Come on. List your assets."
It doesn't take a lot of thought. "You. Peter." That's punctuated by a rumble of thunder, like God is questioning his life choices. "That's pretty much it."
"Ordinarily, I'd prefer to be your first call," Mozzie says. "However, if it's brute force you need, the Suit may be your best option. He has the cavalry."
"I'd like the cavalry," Neal admits.
"And seeing as it was probably him who got you into this trouble in the first place..."
Outside, the thunder rumbles its assent.
"You know," Mozzie says, carefully, "there was a time you'd have told me all about this little case. I could have watched your back."
"You don't want to be neck-deep in FBI work," Neal says. Any more than I do, he's about to say, but the words don't make it out. Maybe so, maybe not; he's had a bit of trouble, recently, telling what the hell he wants at all. Like he's expecting an answer on that point, he looks up, into the trailing edge of the storm.
And startles, like he's been dreaming that he's falling, and has to catch himself here in the waking world.
Something is screaming through his head, something about Kate, how he has to find Kate, but the airport is an airstrip, but–
"Neal," Mozzie says, gingerly. "This isn't helping."
Neal blinks at him. "What?"
"You forgot you were hallucinating."
Oh. He takes a breath to ground himself, which does the opposite of working: he can't tell if he's actually taking a breath, actually feeling the air come into his body, actually focusing his mind on anything real. Given that he's still seeing Cape Verde, he doesn't think he is.
At least he can recognize that much. "It's a lot easier, when you're here." Neal looks to Mozzie, then has to laugh. "I don't know. Maybe it's the conspiracy nut in you."
"Ah–hah!", Mozzie says, jabbing a finger at Neal's chest. "Now you see! What you call being a conspiracy nut?" He taps his own temple, then pistols his finger at Neal. "I call being informed and capable of seeing the truth. And now, you see the truth of that, as well." He crosses his arms, and his expression reaches at least an eight-point-five on the ten point Mozzie Scale of Smugness. "I just hope you remember this when you return to reality."
There cannot possibly be a correct response to that.
"Or maybe," Mozzie says, stepping decisively around the table, its poster long forgotten, "it's continuity. You did something wrong, here. You saw the past when it was supposed to be the present. You collapsed the waveform."
"Mozzie," Neal says. "Even when you're in my head, I still don't know what you're getting at."
"Collapse the waveform," Mozzie repeats. "Everywhere. Force your mind to confront the fact that it's not engaging with reality. None of this is real, so take advantage of that fact." The first scattershot drops are beginning to hit the balcony, and Mozzie's eyes are fixed on him. "How lucid are you in these other hallucinations?"
Neal gives an uneasy chuckle. "This is a really weird conversation, Mozz."
"Doesn't matter. Answer the question."
Neal reaches up to knead his forehead, then realizes that it's not here that his head is hurting. If it hurts here, that can't be a good sign. Things keep bleeding through, ink spills across cheap paper, and he's losing the edges of where the spills begin and where they're supposed to end. "How am I supposed to know in one lucid hallucination how lucid I am when I'm hallucinating non-lucidly?" he asks, and then almost explodes into a fit of ill-advised laughter. He doesn't, but he can hear the hysteria dancing through his teeth. "What am I supposed to do?"
"Find me," Mozzie says. "Find the Suit."
"Kate," Neal says.
Mozzie stills.
Neal turns back to him. "Kate's in this, too. I don't know how, but she is. She's in trouble. I have to find her."
"Um, you're in trouble," Mozzie points out. "Maybe focus on that, first?"
"Yeah, and when I take that advice, I end up–" Too late to the airstrip, he wants to say. But he bites that down; if he admits to knowing that, he admits to knowing that Kate is really the least of his problems right now. Whenever now is, wherever now is, whatever this is. That's not an admission he can make, not even to himself.
"Neal," Mozzie says. "You know what you have to do."
There's a ringing in his head. At first Neal thinks it's the payphone again, but then it fades. There's a certainty, nestled under his lungs, that he's surprised to find there, and he takes it out and examines it like he's trying to tell whether or not it's a forgery.
It's a bit early in the game for a move of last resort, but sometimes the way to win is to do such an end-run around the expected rules that you end up in Belgium while they're holding the line at Luxembourg. A part of him flinches at that analogy, but Mozzie's right, even if Neal can't remember when Mozzie would have told him any of this. He's got the confidence he'd have if they'd worked out a plan.
"Kate and I aren't the only ones out to stop you," he remarks, to the black plastic of the phone receiver. "Let's see if I can get a few more pieces in play."
He's on the run, but Adler went on the run long before he did. You can think you're a big name in the criminal world, and still run like a rat from the sight of a flashlight. And while the life is too messy for that enemy of my enemy crap to ring true, sometimes, at the very least, the enemy of your enemy can take your enemy down.
Adler being involved means that this is already way over Neal's head. And Kate is involved, and Kate isn't an innocent, but maybe she's innocent enough, in the eyes of the law.
There's a thick phone book tethered to the pay phone, and Neal picks it up. He has a feeling that he should already know what he's looking up, but feelings don't get him too far, most days.
The pages are fragile under his fingers.
Special Agent Peter Burke lives in a Brooklyn townhouse that Neal can get to by the end of the work day, even with all the trouble of concealing his tracks and misdirecting his trackers. There's a kind of giddy rush to the decision, like he's just about to go over a waterfall in a barrel, like he's just about to dive headlong over a point of no return.
It's a very him feeling.
He takes a deep breath and makes his move.
Index Post: [Fic][White Collar] Three Times Neal Ran (and one time he was found) – Index
(ii)
At least having Collins here makes things begin to make sense. A twisted sort of sense that leaves out the details, but now he's sure that Kate was on to something, and that something's going on in the airport here. He's worked with less.
There's also something niggling at the corner of his mind, like he realized something important, but now can't remember what it was. Probably it was a plan smarter than the one he's come up with. But the time is well past for sitting back and thinking about his choices. It's time to act.
The terminal isn't a large building; the Seychelles are a destination, not a hub. He makes it to the end of the building and turns the corner before the doors can fly open, and then he can see the high fence which corrals the runway. Razor wire at the top, and he didn't bring anything to cut it, but there's another way into the concourse from that direction if he's clever enough to find it. He likes to think of himself as a fairly clever man.
What, exactly, he's going to do after breaking into an airport is another question, but he's not thinking that far ahead.
Down maybe sixty meters or so, he sees a road sawed in two by a tall, rolling gate. The gate has its own adornment of razor wire, but there's a gap between the wire of the gate and the wire of the fence. A slim chance, literally. He jogs over to examine it.
He's always been happy to go for the slim chances. You don't get anywhere by playing it safe, right?
He takes handfuls of the fence, and slings himself up. Quietly as he can: there's not a lot of challenge in this part, though he does what he can to keep the fence from rattling. He gets to the top and gets his arm through the gap – it's not too bad, maybe eight or nine inches clearance, and he can get his fingers (carefully, carefully) along the blunt edge of one coil, pushing it gently but firmly away just long enough to propel himself over the edge and catch himself on the other side.
–and the wire catches him around the ankle as he does, biting in hard.
He almost shouts; twists and pulls his leg free with a tearing sensation that shoots up his shin and hits the bottom of his stomach. Drops to the ground, catches himself on his palms, and one hand closes on the cut.
There's not as much blood as there should be, but the blood under his fingers is hot and thick as oil paints.
He almost throws up, there.
That wasn't elegant. He scrambles for the nearest cover he can see – a truck, probably maintenance of some sort – and presses himself back into its shadow, while the pain thrums up and down his leg. Glances out – there are doors back into the terminal building from here, but it's a matter of choosing which one to take. Hopefully one where someone clearly not in uniform, walking in from the airstrip, won't attract too much attention.
A quiet corner of his mind tells him This is going to get you shot, and you know it. He ignores it. Maybe he'd listen if it had anything useful to say.
But no. There's no motion that he can see, no patrolling security guards, and if the floodlights aren't on him from his trip over the fence, probably no cameras. He gauges the distance to the next truck, closer to the terminal building's wall, and makes a break for it; makes it, ducks into cover, and listens hard. The next dash – to one of the doors dotting the building's facade – goes as smoothly, though he's limping by the time he makes it, and his breath is ragged with the pain.
Should have brought something to tie off any inconvenient injuries. Should have done a lot of things. It's just, he wasn't expecting–
The nearest door swings open to an empty utility corridor, grey industrial walls, lights glaring like streetlights. No excuse for unpreparedness. That's a Mozzism, though what Mozzie sees as being prepared Neal usually sees as excessive and somewhat disconnected from the realities of probability. He closes the door behind him.
Seeing the airport from this side does nothing for its carefully-constructed veneer of tropical carefreeness. Neal is in fact, fairly certain he's been in warehouses and abandoned slaughteryards that looked cheerier, though just the one, on that last one.
He picks a direction and heads in it. Glances at the doors as he passes – maybe a storeroom here, maybe a broom closet there, hopefully a locker room somewhere where he can pick up a change of clothes; be nice if there was a first aid kit somewhere, too. He's just about resolved to give up on that idea and sneak into the concourse when he turns a corner, and someone yells out, "Hey!"
(iii)
"Hey. Neal. Neal!" Mozzie is snapping his fingers in front of Neal's face, and Neal jumps and focuses on him. Mozzie looks exactly as annoyed as he usually does when Neal has betrayed his attention by being distracted by something.
It's equal parts reassuring and not fair.
"If you're going to hallucinate, you can at least keep hallucinating the most helpful of your imaginary friends," Mozzie says. There's a pause. "That would be me, by the way."
In a better situation, Neal could have smiled at that. In a better situation, he'd probably not be hallucinating. "I'm not exactly controlling this, Mozzie."
"Well, obviously." Mozzie huffs. "You have better fashion sense than this shirt." He tugs at the Hawaiian shirt he's wearing – which really is an atrocity against garments everywhere. Not that Neal thinks that'd be enough to keep it from Mozzie's wardrobe, but he's not about to argue the point with a figment of his imagination. "You know I don't look good in CAT-shovel yellow."
"No one does," Neal says.
"So." Mozzie wipes his hands on the offending shirt, and gives Neal a pre-op look. "Let's work this through. Why don't you just – I don't know. Call me?"
"What?"
Mozzie rolls his eyes. "You have, so far as I know, no major psychiatric disorders, save your Suit-oriented Stockholm syndrome. I doubt you've recently taken up any recreational pharmaceuticals. So, having eliminated the exceedingly unlikely explanations for why you're hallucinating, whatever remains is probably plausible. You're in trouble, right?"
It's not like he can argue that.
"So, if you're in trouble, why haven't you called me?"
"I can't get to you," Neal says. "I don't know why, but I can't."
"How do you know?" Mozzie asks. Neal shrugs.
"If I could, I would have already."
"A pragmatic reason," Mozzie says, with a tone of approval. "Something is telling me that we need to exercise an unusual degree of caution in this situation. Who can you trust to get you out?"
Neal manages a dry, shaky laugh. "You always told me never to trust anyone."
"And you never listened," Mozzie counters. "Come on. List your assets."
It doesn't take a lot of thought. "You. Peter." That's punctuated by a rumble of thunder, like God is questioning his life choices. "That's pretty much it."
"Ordinarily, I'd prefer to be your first call," Mozzie says. "However, if it's brute force you need, the Suit may be your best option. He has the cavalry."
"I'd like the cavalry," Neal admits.
"And seeing as it was probably him who got you into this trouble in the first place..."
Outside, the thunder rumbles its assent.
"You know," Mozzie says, carefully, "there was a time you'd have told me all about this little case. I could have watched your back."
"You don't want to be neck-deep in FBI work," Neal says. Any more than I do, he's about to say, but the words don't make it out. Maybe so, maybe not; he's had a bit of trouble, recently, telling what the hell he wants at all. Like he's expecting an answer on that point, he looks up, into the trailing edge of the storm.
And startles, like he's been dreaming that he's falling, and has to catch himself here in the waking world.
Something is screaming through his head, something about Kate, how he has to find Kate, but the airport is an airstrip, but–
"Neal," Mozzie says, gingerly. "This isn't helping."
Neal blinks at him. "What?"
"You forgot you were hallucinating."
Oh. He takes a breath to ground himself, which does the opposite of working: he can't tell if he's actually taking a breath, actually feeling the air come into his body, actually focusing his mind on anything real. Given that he's still seeing Cape Verde, he doesn't think he is.
At least he can recognize that much. "It's a lot easier, when you're here." Neal looks to Mozzie, then has to laugh. "I don't know. Maybe it's the conspiracy nut in you."
"Ah–hah!", Mozzie says, jabbing a finger at Neal's chest. "Now you see! What you call being a conspiracy nut?" He taps his own temple, then pistols his finger at Neal. "I call being informed and capable of seeing the truth. And now, you see the truth of that, as well." He crosses his arms, and his expression reaches at least an eight-point-five on the ten point Mozzie Scale of Smugness. "I just hope you remember this when you return to reality."
There cannot possibly be a correct response to that.
"Or maybe," Mozzie says, stepping decisively around the table, its poster long forgotten, "it's continuity. You did something wrong, here. You saw the past when it was supposed to be the present. You collapsed the waveform."
"Mozzie," Neal says. "Even when you're in my head, I still don't know what you're getting at."
"Collapse the waveform," Mozzie repeats. "Everywhere. Force your mind to confront the fact that it's not engaging with reality. None of this is real, so take advantage of that fact." The first scattershot drops are beginning to hit the balcony, and Mozzie's eyes are fixed on him. "How lucid are you in these other hallucinations?"
Neal gives an uneasy chuckle. "This is a really weird conversation, Mozz."
"Doesn't matter. Answer the question."
Neal reaches up to knead his forehead, then realizes that it's not here that his head is hurting. If it hurts here, that can't be a good sign. Things keep bleeding through, ink spills across cheap paper, and he's losing the edges of where the spills begin and where they're supposed to end. "How am I supposed to know in one lucid hallucination how lucid I am when I'm hallucinating non-lucidly?" he asks, and then almost explodes into a fit of ill-advised laughter. He doesn't, but he can hear the hysteria dancing through his teeth. "What am I supposed to do?"
"Find me," Mozzie says. "Find the Suit."
"Kate," Neal says.
Mozzie stills.
Neal turns back to him. "Kate's in this, too. I don't know how, but she is. She's in trouble. I have to find her."
"Um, you're in trouble," Mozzie points out. "Maybe focus on that, first?"
"Yeah, and when I take that advice, I end up–" Too late to the airstrip, he wants to say. But he bites that down; if he admits to knowing that, he admits to knowing that Kate is really the least of his problems right now. Whenever now is, wherever now is, whatever this is. That's not an admission he can make, not even to himself.
"Neal," Mozzie says. "You know what you have to do."
(i)
There's a ringing in his head. At first Neal thinks it's the payphone again, but then it fades. There's a certainty, nestled under his lungs, that he's surprised to find there, and he takes it out and examines it like he's trying to tell whether or not it's a forgery.
It's a bit early in the game for a move of last resort, but sometimes the way to win is to do such an end-run around the expected rules that you end up in Belgium while they're holding the line at Luxembourg. A part of him flinches at that analogy, but Mozzie's right, even if Neal can't remember when Mozzie would have told him any of this. He's got the confidence he'd have if they'd worked out a plan.
"Kate and I aren't the only ones out to stop you," he remarks, to the black plastic of the phone receiver. "Let's see if I can get a few more pieces in play."
He's on the run, but Adler went on the run long before he did. You can think you're a big name in the criminal world, and still run like a rat from the sight of a flashlight. And while the life is too messy for that enemy of my enemy crap to ring true, sometimes, at the very least, the enemy of your enemy can take your enemy down.
Adler being involved means that this is already way over Neal's head. And Kate is involved, and Kate isn't an innocent, but maybe she's innocent enough, in the eyes of the law.
There's a thick phone book tethered to the pay phone, and Neal picks it up. He has a feeling that he should already know what he's looking up, but feelings don't get him too far, most days.
The pages are fragile under his fingers.
Special Agent Peter Burke lives in a Brooklyn townhouse that Neal can get to by the end of the work day, even with all the trouble of concealing his tracks and misdirecting his trackers. There's a kind of giddy rush to the decision, like he's just about to go over a waterfall in a barrel, like he's just about to dive headlong over a point of no return.
It's a very him feeling.
He takes a deep breath and makes his move.