Archive of Our Own ^beta

Mark leaves the pharmacy with a couple bottles of pills that really aren’t doing much good at this stage, but it isn’t like he has any better ideas. He puts on his sunglasses even though the sun is already starting to set and gets in his truck. A spike of pain hammers behind his right eye, forcing him to put his head down on the steering wheel and try to breathe through it. He squeezes his eyes shut and starts counting the seconds until it passes enough that he can drive home. 47 seconds later, it finally eases enough that he can straighten up and turn on the ignition. 

Mark manages to get home without incident. He pulls into the driveway and parks his truck. There’s an electric company truck parked on the street. He hopes they aren’t fucking around with the lines, because it’s way too fucking hot to be without air conditioning. He doesn’t see any workers around, so he grabs the plastic bag and heads inside.

Mark’s unlocking the door when he feels something pressed against his back. “Don’t move,” says a voice with a distinct Eastern European accent. “Don’t scream. You will regret it.”

Fuck. “Okay, okay. You’re in charge,” he replies in a low voice. 

“Put your hands behind your back,” the man says. 

Mark complies. The man zip-ties his hands and then puts a balaclava on his head, but backwards so the eyeholes are in the back and his vision is completely blocked. 

“Come quietly and I will not taser you,” the man instructs him.

Mark lets himself be led to what is presumably the “electric company” truck. He hears the back door creak as it’s opened, and then he’s shoved into the back of the panel truck on his side. His phone is in the front pocket of his jeans, so he tries to stretch his fingers enough to get some kind of purchase on it. 

The truck careens around a corner, knocking Mark flat on his back. Shit. Left with no other options, he starts scraping the back of his head against the floor of the truck, trying to turn the balaclava the right way around. He’s gotten it about halfway when the truck comes to a stop. The creaky door opens, and two different sets of hands grab him and drag him toward the doors. He tries to kick out, but one guy grabs his feet and zip-ties his ankles. They’re speaking in Russian or Belarusian; he can’t tell which. They lift Mark out of the truck and carry him to a chair. A metal chain gets wrapped around his waist and his arms, anchoring him to the chair. It clicks into what sounds like a padlock. Even though his feet are tied, another chain is put around his legs and presumably the legs of the chair, and another padlock clicks closed.

Okay, so…this is bad. Unless someone reaches out to Mark before he’s supposed to report to work tomorrow, no one will know anything’s happened. There’s a chance that Amber will text him or call him—she’s done it before. Ever since he told her the truth, she’s been not-so-subtly keeping tabs on him. So if she tries to get in touch and can’t, she’ll probably try to do something to track him. 

Mark feels hands on his shoulders, then his arms. They’re patting him down. Fuck, fuck, fuck. They’re going to find his phone and destroy it. Unless Amber is already looking for him, she isn’t going to be able to find anything useful. 

The hands take the phone out of his pocket. About a minute and a half later, Mark hears the glass shatter. He closes his eyes and tries to think of something, anything, that he can do to get out of this. He has no idea how Volchek’s men found him, but find him they did. Had he been tailed and not realized it? Had someone talked? 

Mark hears footsteps approach him. They stop just in front of the chair. “Who are you?” asks a different Russian or Belarusian-accented voice. 

“Jack Walker,” he answers, figuring it’s worth a try. 

“Jack Walker doesn’t exist,” the voice replies, and he feels the heat when the man steps into his personal space. Two hands take one of his, and though he tries to fight them off, he’s unable to. He hears the snap a split second before pain explodes in his right pinky finger. He groans through gritted teeth and drops his head back. Oh, so that’s how this is gonna go. 

“Who are you?” Mark takes a deep breath and wonders if there’s any way out of this that doesn’t involve giving up that information. Once he runs out of fingers, they’ll move on to something else. Of course, they’re probably going to do that anyway, so—

His train of thought comes to a screeching halt when the guy snaps his right ring finger. He howls and squeezes his left hand into a fist. This isn’t sustainable—he’s not going to be able to hold a gun for at least a month if this keeps up.

“Who are you, and who do you work for?” the man says, sounding exasperated. 

Mark frowned. “If you knew where I live, how do you not know?”

Another snap, and pain spikes in his right middle finger. 

“I ask the questions!” the man shouts. And then he breaks Mark’s index finger. 

“Fuck!” Mark screams, digging the fingernails of his left hand into his palm. 

The man grinds Mark’s broken fingers together and yells, “Who are you?” Mark’s vision goes red, then black, and he doesn’t have enough air in his lungs to scream. 

He comes to with a shock when a bucket of ice-cold water is dumped over his head. “Jesus fuck!” he yells, squirming in the chair instinctively to try to get away. 

“Jesus can’t help you now,” says the first voice—the one he’d heard outside his house. “But I can...if you will cooperate.”

“Yeah, what does that mean?” Mark asks through chattering teeth. That water was really fucking cold. 

“Tell me who you are, and who you work for, and I will release you to them,” replies the first man.

Mark scowls into the blackness. “You know I can’t do that.” 

“That is unfortunate,” says the man, and Mark hears the hum of electricity a couple seconds before the taser is pressed to his sternum. The pain blossoms into a fireball, and his chest muscles spasm, leaving him unable to scream and barely able to breathe. Christ, they are not fucking around. He’s pretty sure he’s going to have to tell them something. He wonders if giving them Drew’s name would work, but under a different agency. Drew being dead and the task force not having anyone on it from the CIA or NSA should roadblock them long enough for him to figure out a plan.

“CIA,” he gasps. “I work under Damon Drew at the CIA.”

There’s a brief exchange in whatever language Volchek’s underlings speak, and one of them walks away. Mark closes his eyes and tries to take a deep breath. He’s bought himself a little time, at least. As for a plan—well, there’s no way he can escape physically. The only thing he can do is talk. But if these guys are with that security agency they tried to raid the other day, they’re professionals, so he’s not going to be able to manipulate them. He has two choices: convince them he can pay them off, or convince them that fucking with him will bring consequences they haven’t anticipated. The wrath of Uncle Sam doesn’t mean shit to these guys. So he has to figure out what does.

Mark doesn’t know what else they’re involved in besides Volchek’s terrorism plot. Drugs, guns, and human trafficking are the usual side hustles. But it’s possible Volchek’s keeping his eyes on the prize and not risking a bust for smuggling or trafficking. Fuck, Volchek killed his own wife. There’s not much that’s sacred to him. He has a feeling these guys are completely disposable to Volchek. So maybe he can appeal to their sense of self-preservation.

Mark feels the point of a knife on his right shoulder. “There is no Damon Drew at the CIA,” says the second guy. He starts pushing the knife in, slowly, drawing it out to cause the maximum amount of suffering. Mark clenches his jaw and groans. “Who do you work for?” 

Mark feels something pop—a tendon, most likely—and howls in pain. The guy literally twists the fucking knife, and Mark sees bright sparks at the edges of the blackness. The guy rips the knife out, and Mark feels the gush of blood run down his arm. He doesn’t know how much longer he can hold out. “Homeland Security,” he says, his voice shaking from the effort of not screaming in pain. “Drew works for Homeland Security.”

Mark hears footsteps retreat. About a minute later, he hears quiet speech at what must be the door of whatever room they’re in. 

Time passes. He’s not sure how much, because he’s drifting in and out of consciousness. 

Footsteps approach. “Drew worked for Homeland Security. He’s dead,” says the second man.

“Sorry,” Mark mutters in the direction of the voice. “Forgot. Recent development.”

“This is getting tiresome,” the man says. “So, I say to you again: who are you, and who do you work for?”

Before Mark can answer, he feels a hand on his thigh. He hears a tactical knife snap open, and a second later the man slices his right Achilles tendon. The scream that rips from his throat is so raw that it causes him to start coughing. “LAPD,” he spits out between coughs. “I’m with the LAPD.”

“We checked that database already,” says the man. “You weren’t in it.”

“Check again,” Mark gasps, fighting to catch his breath. 

The footsteps go back towards the door. Mark drops his chin to his chest and lets the blackness claim him. 

He wakes up to a searing pain on his right knee. It’s literal fire—they’re burning him with an open flame. He can smell the scorched flesh, and it makes him start coughing and gagging. The pain lessens a bit, and he hears a click, presumably a lighter being extinguished. 

“What do you want?” Mark asks, his voice hoarse and strained. 

“Your name,” says the first man. “And the names of your associates.”

“I thought Volchek—” Mark has to stop to clear his throat. “—was smarter than that.”

“Who says I work for Volchek?” replies the man.

“Oh, come the fuck on,” mutters Mark. “I’m not stupid.”

“What if I work for Mikhail Durko?”

“He is stupid,” says Mark, clearing his throat again. “And he’s too scared.”

“Of you? Hardly.” The man grabs Mark’s right palm with one hand and his forearm with the other. Oh fuck, oh fuck, please don’t— The guy twists until Mark hears the bone crack, and the shock of pain hits him so hard he can’t even breathe, let alone cry out. 

“We can continue to do this the hard way,” says the man. “Or you can tell me who you work for, and I can contact them to come get you.”

He’s pretty sure the guy’s lying, but fucked if he isn’t considering taking him up on it. He’s already hurt badly enough that he’s probably going to be sidelined for the literal rest of his life. He’s already looking at surgery on his ankle, and maybe his wrist and shoulder too. So, he’s basically useless from here on out. 

It’s not fucking fair.

The footsteps retreat again, and he can hear the two henchmen conversing quietly in whatever language they speak. Two sets of footsteps approach, one on each side. 

“Mark Meachum, of the LAPD,” says the first guy. God, his name sounds fucking ugly in that accent. 

“You figured it out,” he says, and starts coughing. 

“We have notified your team leader, Nathan Blythe of the FBI,” says the second guy. “Now, to see if they can come and collect you in time.”

In time? “The fuck does that mean?” sputtered Mark.

Neither of them responds, but he does hear one of them walk to the back end of the room, the opposite end from the door. There’s no sound for a minute, and then a beeping sound starts. It’s faint, like it’s on the other side of the wall, and it’s slowly speeding up.

Of course it’s fucking Volchek. He’s the explosives expert. 

They unlock the chains then, but leave the zip ties. Not like he could run, or even walk, with a severed Achilles, and crawling on his busted up hand and shoulder wouldn’t do him any good either. So he’s just got to trust that Blythe and the team are coming to get him. 

The beeping ramps up to a steady tone, and then the explosion happens. He doesn’t feel anything at first, which confirms that they set it off in some room behind where he is now, and he’s so cold that he doesn’t feel the heat of the fire until it starts to get loud. It sounds like the wall behind him is completely engulfed, and he has no idea how far away he is from it. He might have to try to get out of here on his own, even though that’s basically impossible. He’s just about to try throwing himself forward and trying something when he hears sirens outside.

Oh, thank fuck.

It’s not long before he hears Oliveras yell his name. He hears her, and presumably Finau and Bell, running towards him. Someone pulls the balaclava off of his head while someone else cuts the zip ties. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” says Oliveras. She’s standing in front of him, but he’s been in the dark so long and it’s so dim in the room aside from the firelight that he can barely make out her features. “We gotta get you outta here. Ambulance is five minutes out. Can you walk?”

“No.” He coughs. There’s a lot more smoke in the room than there was a couple minutes ago. 

“Finau, Bell, get over here!” Oliveras kneels down in front of him and assesses his injuries. “This is gonna hurt like hell, but there’s no time.”

“I know,” he grates out. “It’s okay.”

Finau puts his arm under Mark’s left, uninjured shoulder and hoists him up to standing. Mark starts to pitch forward, having lost all feeling in his hands and feet from being tied so tightly, but Bell steadies him with a hand on his right hip. Bell gets under Mark’s injured shoulder, which hurts so badly Mark sees red, but they manage to get him out of the building and onto the back seat of the cruiser that Blythe is standing next to. 

“Ambulance should be here any minute,” says Blythe. 

Shepherd runs up then from the back of the building. She stops dead and stares at Mark in horror. “Oh my God,” she says, before snapping back into Fed mode. “Back side of the building’s clear. No vehicles, no one on foot. They’re gone.”

“And you never saw their faces, right?” asks Oliveras. 

Mark shakes his head. “No. There were two of them, that’s all I know.” He turns to Shepherd. “They smashed my phone. Does that destroy all the data?”

Shepherd bites her lip. “There might be enough in the cloud to pull cell tower records, but presumably they were using burner phones, which wouldn’t tell us anything.”

“Do it anyway,” says Blythe. He turns to Mark. “They were linked to Volchek?”

“I assumed,” Mark replies. “They tried to—” He starts coughing, and it takes far longer to stop than it had previously. “They tried to say otherwise, but I’m sure it was bullshit.”

The ambulance pulls in then. Oliveras and Shepherd step back. “I’m going,” says Oliveras, looking to Blythe for approval. He nods impassively. 

Mark gets onto the gurney under his own power, for the most part. He tunes out most of what the EMTs say, figuring Oliveras has it under control. Thankfully, one of the EMTs starts a morphine drip pretty quickly, so he lets it pull him under.

When he wakes up, there’s bright white all around him—a hospital room. His right arm feels heavy as hell, and he turns his head to see a giant fucking cast from the middle of his forearm down to his fingertips and a shit-ton of padding and an elastic bandage on his shoulder. 

Oliveras is asleep in a chair next to the bed. He’s got an IV in his left hand, but he manages to reach out and touch her knee without pulling the needle out. She jerks awake and scrubs her hand over her face. “Shit, sorry,” she says.

“What time is it?” His voice is so hoarse he can barely hear himself speak.

“It’s 3:15…on Friday.”

“Friday?” He starts coughing from the outburst, and Oliveras immediately grabs a cup of water from the bedside table and helps him drink from it. 

“They had to stabilize you first, before they could operate on you,” she explains. “So you were in a medically-induced coma for a good chunk of Thursday.”

He narrows his eyes and tilts his head slightly to the left. “Because of the…?” 

“No, actually, it was the hypothermia,” Oliveras answers. “It takes talent to almost freeze to death in a burning building.”

“Have you been here the whole time?” Mark asks, even though he’s pretty sure he knows the answer.

“I went home a couple times to shower and eat,” she answers, sitting back in the chair. “But mostly, yeah.”

“You didn’t have to,” Mark tells her. 

Oliveras takes his good hand in hers, careful not to touch the IV needle. “I wanted to.” She looks down at their joined hands. “I feel terrible that I didn’t check in with you that night. Fuck, we didn’t even look. They had to hand you to us on a silver platter.”

“It’s not your fault,” he says with all the strength he can muster. “I don’t blame you. Any of you.”

She shakes her head. “We got this backwards. You shouldn’t be comforting me.” 

Mark squeezes her hand. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.”

Oliveras’ phone buzzes. She takes it out of her pocket and looks at it. “Shit, I said I’d let everyone know when you woke up.” 

“Who is it?” Mark asks.

“Shepherd,” says Oliveras. “She’s kinda fucked up over it. I don’t think she’s ever seen anything like that before.” She types on the phone for a while and then pockets it again. “I mean, you looked like you’d been through absolute hell.”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Mark agrees. “But there’s something I can’t figure out.”

“What’s that?”

“The pattern is….bizarre,” he says. “They didn’t hit me in the head. Not once.” He turns his head to face her. “Almost like they knew.”

Oliveras’ eyes widen. “So, you think not only does Volchek know who you are, but he’s seen your fucking medical records?”

“I don’t know,” says Mark. “But it seems like a hell of a coincidence. Especially since—” He nods at the massive cast on his right hand. “He’s basically knocked me out for the rest of my fucking life. It’s gonna take months to recover enough to get back on the job.” He lowers his voice. “And I don’t have months.”

Oliveras leans forward. “Listen to me, okay?” She looks directly into his eyes with a ferocity that makes him shrink back a little. “You are not allowed to just give up, you hear me? I won’t let you.”

Mark glares back at her. “The fuck am I supposed to do if I can’t run and I can’t shoot?”

“You can do desk duty,” replies Oliveras. “Maybe Shepherd can teach you whatever the hell she does in those databases.” She grins. “And you can continue to annoy the shit out of Heather.”

Mark cracked a grin of his own at that. “I think she’d kill me if I was in the office all day every day. She’d poison my coffee or something.”

“The point is, you’re not completely useless just because you can’t jump off fucking RVs anymore,” says Oliveras. “You said you wanted to go out saving something. And you’re not out yet. You’re down, but you’re not out.”

Mark sighs, and starts coughing again. Oliveras helps him finish the cup of water. He leans back against the head of the bed. “I’m awfully far down. It’s pretty fucking dark down here.”

She straightens up and narrows her eyes. “So you’re just gonna let Volchek win? What if he goes after Shepherd next? Or me? If he knows you and Blythe, presumably he knows all of us.”

Mark shakes his head. “I just don’t understand how you can think I’m anything but a huge liability. I can’t fucking walk, I didn’t get any identifying info on those guys, and I can’t even defend myself, let alone any of you.”

“So you’re just going to go home and wait to die?” Oliveras crosses her arms over her chest, but the look in her eyes doesn’t match the movement. It’s not anger, it’s resignation. Some part of her clearly knows the argument is lost. 

“What choice do I have?” Mark replies. “There’s just not enough time.”

She sits back in the chair and shakes her head. “I don’t want to lose you. Not off the team…” She takes a deep breath. “And not for good.”

He reaches out with his good hand and touches her knee again. She places her hand over his fingers, in deference to the needle only an inch or so away. “I’m here now,” he says, looking directly into her eyes. “And I’m not going anywhere. At least, not right away.” He squeezes her knee. “One day at a time, right?”

She nods and lets out a shaky breath. “We got it turned around again. I’m supposed to be the one supporting you.”

“You’ll get your chance,” Mark replies softly. “After all, you’re not going anywhere either, right?”

Oliveras leans forward and pushes a stray lock of hair off of his face. “Of course not. You’re stuck with me.”

He smiles. “I can live with that.”