UC: Undercover
If… With No Choice
Original Characters and story plot © E Phillips 2001 - 2006. Premise for the character of Jane remains © Dekooning, although the fleshed out character is © E Phillips 2006, and Eric ‘Land’ Wolfe and Kelly MacKnight are © Gamma. UC: Undercover premise and characters from the show are © Shane Salerno, NBC and associated companies. No copyright infringement intended.
Author’s Note: This is the last story in a trilogy of connected UC: Undercover stories that began with “If… In the End” and continued in “If… As We Try.” Technically speaking it shouldn’t be strictly necessary to have read the other stories to understand or even follow it – all pertinent points are referenced or recapped. However I would encourage doing so in order to fully realise some of the more impactful threads in the story. This story is set almost four years after the events in “…As We Try.”
This story is rated for mature readers due to scenes of sex and violence and for the implied, underlying subject matter.
“Cody, talk to me. What do you see?” Once again he turned full circle on the concourse that was eerily abandoned, save for the security personnel hurrying from the site of one possible weakness to the next.
“I told you,” Cody’s voice held that note it always did when he was trying to be patient with them even though he was patently very irritated. “You should be right on top of it. Your locator and the signal are overlapping on my screen.”
“There’s nothing here.” Frank said, turning another circle just to be sure. “Jake?”
“Nothing.” The other agent’s voice confirmed. “I’ve been through the entire area three times.”
“It was a coded warning, Jake. The code was viable. It has to be there.” Cody said through the link-up.
“I’m not doubting you, Cody.” Jake said.
“That’d be a first,” the Tech-op retorted quietly.
Frank stood listening to his agents, and thinking hard. What were they missing? Cody was right. The FBI had received a valid coded warning two hours ago. The importance of it coinciding with the resolution of their latest case was not missed and Frank didn’t like the way it felt, or the implications, but they had no choice other than to act on it. Even so they left it as late as they could to evacuate the busy rail terminal after they’d picked up their suspect. He wasn’t about to let six months of undercover work and surveillance go to waste. So now they remained behind, helping the station security guards and Chicago PD sweep the station for signs of anything suspicious, while Cody, as usual, coordinated everything from the van that was parked in the freight yard, with Monica at his side, watching over them all.
“Time, Cody?”
Frank turn again as the last member of the team returned to report her findings to him in person. Still on probation, under his direct supervision, he insisted on her working with someone at all times… and more often than not that someone was him. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her. She was a capable agent, if less experienced than the other members of his team. It showed in her fresh face and in the brightness of her green eyes.
“Fifteen twenty one… twenty… nineteen…”
He couldn’t help smiling as Cody began to give Agent Jesse Hart a running countdown of the time they had left to find the explosives that the warning had said were planted around the station and somehow disarm them.
“Anything?” he asked her. Pursing her lips she shook her head, sending her light brown hair spiralling around her face.
He sighed and said, “All right, people, let’s go though one more time.”
**
Slowing his horse, Caillate, to a walk he sighed softly as he looked over at the woman that was leaning against the rail watching him. He’d loved her for as long as he wanted, willingly, to remember. She was the reason he was where he was, doing what he’d always wanted to do… and doing it this time on the right side of the line. He sighed again… because loving her as he did, he also knew her well, and knew she wasn’t happy.
Oh not in the way that mean she hated every moment of her life with him. He knew that wasn’t true… in fact he was more than confident that she didn’t hate any of it at all. But he sensed that there were things that she was missing, and missing terrible. It was all very well for her to be the partner of an up and coming racing stable owner, but it wasn’t enough for her to feel useful… needed… fulfilled.
He would talk to her about it… perhaps over dinner… or as they groomed their personal horses. She would probably try to tell him that there was nothing wrong, but he knew that she was missing the life she’d had before her injuries – he shook his head, forcing himself to remember the truth of it – before she’d died and they had brought her back, to lie for months in a coma. He knew the woman she was well enough to know that for Alex Cross, the sedentary life of relative safety was never going to be enough. She needed the challenge, she needed the risk, and she needed her friends… and yet he also knew that, this time, he could not let her go.
**
Jake threw himself down onto his back and scooted until his head was beneath the bank of seats for the second time in the last few minutes, shining his flashlight at the metal supports and underside of the chairs, part hoping to find something and equally, if not more, hoping that the search would come up empty again.
Somewhere inside his head a silent countdown was ticking away toward zero and for him, zero had two faces that were counting on him to be well away from the station before it arrived. Crazy, he thought to himself, being here, searching for explosives when Julia and Madison – his tiny baby girl – were counting on him to come home. Never thought he’d have a family to be worrying about him. Girls like his Juli didn’t fall in love with guys like him… leastways not outside of movies or television shows.
“Nothing, Cody. I’m telling you, this section is clean,” he snapped his mind back to the search.
“And I’m telling you, you’re wrong.” Cody told him. “There’s a signal coming from where you are… same with Donovan.”
“Then why aren’t we finding anything?” he snapped in frustration. “Not even so much as a cell phone.”
“I don’t know, Jake. It doesn’t make sense. There are multiple signals coming from all over the station. I don’t know why none of you are finding anything.”
“The logical explanation—”
“The only logical explanation right now,” Cody interrupted, and Jake could almost see his fellow agent running a hand through his hair in frustration, “is equipment failure, but don’t you think it’s a little bit coincidental that my board should go down now, just when we’re minutes away from some crackpot blowing the shit out of Chicago central?”
“Yes, I do, Cody,” It was Frank’s voice that answered, “which is why we’re going to assume that it hasn’t, and that we’re just missing the obvious. Time?”
“You don’t have time, Donovan,” Cody answered, “You gotta pull everyone out. You have four minutes and fifty four seconds. Even if you did find any devices, that’s not enough time for the bomb squad to get there and make it safe.”
“Jesse, Jake, you heard the man.” Donovan ordered. “Take yourselves and your teams off site to a safe distance. Do it now. I’m heading back to the van.”
He didn’t need a second urging, just slid out from under the bank of seating and got to his feet. As soon as he had he gave a shrill whistle to attract the attention of the security guards and police officers on the ground and signalled by circling his raised index finger twice above his head before gesturing toward the exit. He was comforted by the fact that they obeyed to a man.
The count inside his head continued onward.
**
Steady hands reached up to push the sunglasses back up his nose. The light was bothering his eyes as he squinted across the street, toward the station, where the uniformed officers were beginning to come out from the building. He checked his watch and nodded, and then looked again toward the station, looking for one particular man, not even sure he’d recognise him or even have a chance of knowing him after so long.
From the corner of his eye, as he turned his head, he saw the slender arm and hand of his companion reaching for the control box that was resting on the dash panel. Like a striking snake he reached out and caught her wrist.
“Not yet,” he told her softly, and tapped the watch that graced the wrist he held.
“But they’re coming out.” She said. Her voice was urgent, her accent less pronounced than his. He shook his head, the years she’d spent in the
“Jana,” he said, his voice full of regret, “have I taught you nothing…?”
“I want it finished with,” she snapped, pulling on her arm until he let her go.
“And so do I, my love,” he leaned over and kissed her hard on the mouth before repeating, “so do I, but if we do not hold our nerve in this, we will never see the retribution we deserve to have and all these years will have been for nothing.”
“I want her back, Peotr,” she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and he realised that he would have to work much, much harder to find his Jana buried within. “I don’t care what you do to him, but I want her back.”
“I didn’t think you—”
She gave him a cold look that cut off his words for a moment. In the silence he turned his attention back to the front of the station and the people gathered there.
As his eyes searched the crowd he said moodily, “Do you think that I cannot give you the same, Jana?”
“It isn’t a competition, Peotr,” she said quietly. “You don’t understand.”
“Then help me to understand.”
He turned back to her again, and reached for the control device, to hold it between them, his thumb hovering over the switch that graced the middle of the small black box.
She laid her hand over the top of his wrist, her fingers caressing and then almost clawing at the back of his hand, creeping along until she could slip her fingers between his, a sensual but in the same moment almost angry caress.
“He,” she said slowly, “took her from me.”
“You left him,” he countered, “you left her behind.”
“I had no choice,” she met his eyes, “what had gone before left me no choice. So now he has her and will turn her into something that even I won’t recognise and that’s something that I cannot allow to happen.”
“So you’re using me,” he said, pulling his hand away from hers.
“No more than you used me,” she said. “What have you got against him anyway – apart from the obvious?”
“Everything,” he growled, his thumb beginning its descent, “blood.”
**
Jake finished the quick head count he was making and nodded in satisfaction as Jesse came to his side.
“Everyone out?” he asked her. She nodded. “You got that Cody? Our teams are out. You have Donovan?”
“Not yet, Jake,” Cody answered and Jake could hear the tap, tap, tap of his fingers on the keyboards in the van, “but he’s close. You should get your people further back; just to be on the safe side.”
“Will do,” Jake turned and began to order the police to move the lines back further than the centre line of the road that they’d closed as soon as their operation started, watching as Jesse helped with pushing the cones that supported the tape and listening to the steady sound of Cody working quickly to get to the bottom of what was going on coming through on the headset.
He shook his head. This was crazy, there was something going on. He raised his hand to look at his watch… ticking down the last minute of the time they’d been given.
As the second hand on his watch passed the thirty second marker something in the rhythm of Cody’s typing hesitated, almost a hiccup before Cody hissed, talking to himself, “Tell me I’m wrong…”
“Cody?” he asked, turning and starting to walk back in the direction of the station. He saw Jesse do likewise, and heard the same question repeated to Cody by both Monica and Frank. Cody didn’t answer… the sound of his fingers flying against keys took up again after a momentary pause, faster and more furious than ever.
He heard the familiar click, and then change in acoustic quality of the sound that he knew meant that the van door had opened, no doubt Frank returning, and then suddenly Cody was yelling urgently.
“Out!” he cried, “Get out! Mov—”
Instinct had Jake make a grab for Jesse and throw her to the ground under him, covering them both with his jacket. Around him, officers were likewise throwing themselves to the ground and behind shields to give them cover as shards of glass rained down around them with the accompanying sound… a massive rolling explosion… splitting the breathless silence of the previous moment.
As soon as he could no longer feel the tinkling fall of glass against the back of his jacket he rolled over carefully, expecting to see rubble where the station building had been. The station was intact, but from behind the station a spreading pillar of smoke began to darken the sky.
“Cody?” Jake pulled Jesse to her feet and began sprinting toward the station entrance. “Damn it, Cody, answer me!”
The static in his ear hissed, mocking him in answer.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
If… With No Choice – Chapter 2 (coming soon)