Collared

by Alex51324

Summary:

In an alternate universe, felons are routinely released to work for law enforcement agencies...wearing shock collars. Peter decides Neal should be one of them. His intentions are good, but Neal is not happy about it. AU of the pilot. See notes for warnings.
(Previously posted on LJ, February 2012. Chapter 1 is the main story; 2 and 3 are DVD extras.)

Notes:

Warnings: References to past sexual assault; prisoner abuse, both in the past and on-screen.

See end notes for full, spoilery details. This one's a little dark.

Chapter 1

“Agent Peter Burke?”

He looked up. “Yeah?” He tried to sound like he hadn’t had butterflies tap-dancing in his stomach all morning in anticipation of this.

“Delivery for you. Prisoner 05671358, Neal Caffrey.”

Neal was standing behind the guard, head down and hands cuffed behind him, looking about as cowed as it was possible for a felon convicted of multiple counts of fraud, forgery, and theft to look. He had to be faking it. “Right,” Peter said, and signed the papers the guard held out for him.

When he handed them back, the guard held out a small remote control. Neal flinched away—it didn’t look faked, but you could never tell with Neal. “You know how to work one of these?”

“Yes.” Peter took the remote and stuck it in his jacket pocket.

“I need my cuffs back.”

“Keys.” Peter held out his hand. Faking it or not, he didn’t want the guard touching Neal.

The guard reluctantly handed them over. Peter circled behind Neal, steadying him briefly with one hand on his shoulder before unlocking them.

“You don’t want to switch them out for your own?” the guard asked.

“No,” Peter said, returning the guard’s cuffs. “He’ll just pick them.” He tried to catch Neal’s eye and make it a joke between them, but Neal looked resolutely at the ground.

“Well, you signed for him.” The guard buffeted Neal with his shoulder as he turned to go. Neal took a half-step to steady himself, but otherwise didn’t react. “Have fun.”

The guard left, and Peter shut the door behind him, feeling an involuntary grin split his face. Neal, Neal Caffrey, was finally here, his. He managed to get a stern, sober expression pasted o his face before he turned around—as Elizabeth had reminded him this morning, just because they had been looking forward to this ever since he arrested Neal, didn’t mean Neal was. It wouldn’t be right to seem too happy about it.

“So,” Peter said, taking a seat behind his desk. Neal hunched his shoulders a little and didn’t answer. Despite El’s warning, Peter had thought that Neal would be at least a little bit glad to see him. Neal had flirted with him shamelessly toward the end of the chase, and once he was in prison, he’d kept up a sporadic correspondence, sending Peter birthday cards, press clippings with ironic commentary, and the occasional tip on a case Peter was working on. Hell, he had himself half-convinced this was exactly what Neal had wanted to happen, once it became clear that continuing his life of crime without legal penalty was not an option. “Did they tell you it was going to be me?”

Neal swallowed hard, his adam’s apple sliding beneath the beige plastic band of the correction collar, and nodded slightly.

If he was pretending to be scared, he was selling it way too hard. Bravado with little touches of vulnerability when he pretended he thought Peter wasn’t looking would be more plausible. Peter had meant to play it pretty stern this first day, figuring that Neal would press him at every opportunity, but now he wasn’t so sure. “You were—incredible,” he said, hoping a little sincere admiration would bring back the Neal Caffrey he’d chased for years. “The best. A lot of the Bureau thought we’d never catch you.” But he had, and since Neal was the best, that meant Peter was pretty damn good, too. Together, they were going to be unbeatable. Stifling that grin again, he said, “This is going to be great. Sit down,” he added. “Take a look at--”

Suddenly, Neal grunted, doubling over like he’d been punched in the gut. He started to reach for his collar, then quickly lowered his hand like he thought touching it might only make things worse.

“Damn it!” Peter fumbled the remote control out of his pocket. The things were designed so you couldn’t push the buttons by accident, so how had—“Damn it,” he said again, finding the small switch at the bottom and flipping it back to ‘manual.’ “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s off. Are you okay?” Of course he wasn’t; God only knew how many times that thing had gone off since they’d put it on him. “Here,” Peter said, helping him into a chair. “Take it easy for a minute—I’ll get you some water.”

Not that water was going to help, but it was something to do. Why in hell had the collar been on automatic to begin with? Everybody knew that setting didn’t work the way it was supposed to. The idea was that it would deliver a shock when the wearer even thought about committing an infraction, but it worked off of basic biometrics, like pulse and skin moisture, like a lie detector. It would go off if the subject was nervous, never mind why, and the possibility of receiving a painful electric shock at any time was enough to make anyone nervous, even Neal.

By the time Peter got back with the water, Neal looked like he had caught his breath, at least. After handing him the paper cup, Peter futzed around unnecessarily with some papers on his desk, giving Neal a moment to pull himself back together. Now, at least, he understood why Neal seemed so spooked—although he wasn’t sure whether that made it more likely that his fear was genuine, or less, or what to do about it.

One of Neal’s talents was and almost supernatural ability to blend in. Put him in almost any situation, and he’d figure out how to look like he belonged there. What Peter wanted was to get him using that talent now. If Peter started giving orders, Neal was likely to balk, and if he was really as shaken up as he seemed, there wasn’t any way Peter could deal with that that wouldn’t get ugly fast. Given enough hints to figure out the script on his own, though, he might just play along. Peter held out a file. “Take a look at this.”

Neal made a small, interrogative sound, not quite a word, or even a “Hmm?” and glanced up at him for about half a second.

“Just, read it over and tell me what you think.”

Looking wary, Neal took the folder and started reading.

#

Neal stared at the first page of the file for a full minute before he could get his eyes to focus on the print.

For a while, he had thought being caught by Agent Burke was the worst day of his life. Then being sentenced to 124 years in prison took the title. It wasn’t until he was brought into the Alternative Sentencing Program that he realized prison wasn’t really so bad. The training period had been short, but brutal, and now….

Now he had absolutely no idea what was going on, and that was the worst thing of all. The very first thing he had learned after being collared was that he could be punished for breaking rules he didn’t know existed. He had thought he knew what Burke wanted with him. “You’re going to have so much fun,” the ASP trainer who had collared him had said. “That FBI man has had a hard-on for you since before he caught you. Word is, he only brought you in after he got a promise he was the only one who could have you.”

That sort of thing was supposed to be against the rules, but the second thing he’d learned after having the collar put on was that nobody cared about the rules that were supposed to protect collared prisoners. So he’d pretty much planned on sucking Burke’s cock as soon as he got here, and had been a little relieved to at least know what to expect. Only—Burke’s little speech about how “incredible” he was aside—it looked like it wasn’t going to go down that way. He’d been here almost fifteen minutes, and Burke hadn’t ordered him to do a thing other than sit down and read this file.

So maybe he had better read it. It was pretty thin, so once he got started, it didn’t take long. Customs had seized a couple of suitcases full of a particular Spanish-language edition of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. There were reports on the book’s rarity and value—nonexistent and negligible, respectively—and several pages of lab reports dating the paper, ink, and other materials to right around the copyright date printed on the title page. The importer had documentation showing where and when the books had been legally purchased, and several copies had been disassembled without turning up anything unexpected.

“Well?” Burke said.

Neal froze. He didn’t know what he was supposed to say about it. The books weren’t one of his jobs—hell, as far as he could tell, there was no job; they were just books.

“We know they’re part of some kind of scam, but we can’t figure out what it is,” Burke explained. “Any ideas? What would you do with a couple hundred copies of a 1940’s edition of Snow White in Spanish?”

Read them? Have a bonfire? Burke was waiting for him to say something, so finally he said, “It can’t be about the books. They’re not worth anything.” He glanced up. The collar didn’t go off, and Burke was nodding encouragingly, so he must be doing all right so far. Burke wanted ideas, and he didn’t have any good ones, yet, but he could do ideas. “Did you check the suitcase for hidden compartments?” He shook his head, risking a quick glance at Burke to see if he was going to react to the stupidity of the suggestion. “No, never mind. If he was smuggling, the cover cargo would be something that wouldn’t attract attention. If he was hiding something in the suitcases or the books, he’d use a lot of different old books. This is too noticeable.” He paged through the file again, to make it clear he was still thinking. This looked like an absolutely stupid crime, but there had to be some detail that made it not-stupid, something he didn’t know. “Maybe…one of the copies is valuable, or has something valuable in it, and he’s buying every copy so he can find it—no, because why would he bother importing them all? He could just check for it as soon as he bought them. Whatever it is. What if, he stole the one with the something-valuable in it, and he thinks it’ll look more legitimate if he makes it obvious he’s buying every copy?”

“That’s an idea.”

Burke nodded, looking thoughtful, but Neal was already shaking his head. That was still stupid. “He could work that angle just buying a few copies. He has hundreds. Either he wants to look suspicious…or it is about the books. Somehow.”

“Back up. Why would he want to look suspicious?”

The other train of thought was more promising, but Burke had the remote to his collar, so if he wanted Neal to think about why someone would want to look suspicious, he’d think about it. “I don’t know. He was doing something else at the same time—except Customs is not going to be so distracted by the bizarre fairy-tale books that the miss the suitcase full of heroin; that doesn’t make any sense.” Was that enough? He hoped so. “It’s about the books, it has to be, but in some way that’s so obscure he doesn’t care how suspicious it looks to import hundreds of copies of the same worthless book.” The only way that made sense was if the books weren’t books, in the scam, they were…raw materials. He paged back through the file, looking at the report on the disassembly of some randomly-selected copies. They were made out of…the usual book-stuff. Cloth-covered cardboard covers. Paper. Binding thread, plus some adhesives, and the kind of ink you’d expect to see in a mid-priced full-color book from the 1940’s. Nothing there that would help him.

“What? What do you need?” Burke asked.

“Can I…uh, can I see one of them?”

Burke reached down with his right hand, the side the remote was on, and Neal’s breath caught in his throat. But Burke kept reaching past his jacket pocket and slid open his desk drawer. “Here,” he said, taking out an inter-office manila envelope and handing it across the desk.

Neal took it, careful to keep his hands from shaking, and slid the book out. He examined it with a professional eye. The illustrations were four-color processed—easy enough to copy, if for some reason you wanted to—and there was something charmingly naïve about the lines, that made Snow White and her pals less saccharine than the Disney versions. But it wasn’t about the books, or at least, it wasn’t about the contents, he already knew that. He flipped back to the front to examine inside the cover, and there it was.

The flyleaves, front and back, were each a full sheet of rag paper, heavier weight and higher quality than the pages that had the story printed on them, folded in half and stitched into the binding. “This,” he said, looking up at Burke. “They don’t make paper like this anymore. If I had hundreds of copies of this book, I would do something with this.” The thrill of the discovery, like he had just worked out the last, tricky step of a con, surprised him. He ought to be glad he figured it out, since now Burke wouldn’t have any reason to hurt him, but it was more than that. A very small part of him—the part that wasn’t in a state of gibbering panic over how monumentally screwed he was—had actually enjoyed the exercise.

Burke smiled like it was Christmas morning and Neal was exactly what he had hoped to find under the tree. That would have been more alarming if Neal wasn’t fairly sure he had managed to do what Burke wanted of him. Burke pleased that he was cooperating was definitely better than any of the alternatives. “Come on,” he said, standing up. “It’s time for you to meet the team.”

Burke showed him down a half-flight of stairs and into another office, about the same size as his, but with several desks crammed into it. Both of the occupants turned to stare at him. “Team, you know who Neal Caffrey is. Neal, this is Agent Jones,” he indicated a young black man, “and Agent Berrigan.” A light-skinned black woman. Neal raised one hand in a half-wave. “Neal just got here, and he’s already worked out that our guy is collecting all these copies of the book for the flyleaves. “They don’t make paper like this anymore.”

“Did he find out anything new?” the woman asked.

Neal felt a stab of humiliation that as sharp as a collar correction. Of course they already knew that. Of course that was what this was about—proving, once again, that he wasn’t as smart as the FB-fucking-I. After all, they had caught him, right?”

“Yeah,” said Burke. “But it took us four days. Neal’s had since lunch.” The look Burke gave him was pure approval. “Have we made any progress on the next piece of the puzzle?”

“What he was planning to do with it?” Jones asked.

Burke nodded.

“It could be almost anything,” Berrigan said. “Either one thing with a lot of pages—a book, a manuscript—or a lot of copies of something, like deeds, stock certificates, even currency. We have to narrow it down.”

Burke nodded. “Sure. Any ideas?” He looked at the two agents, then at Neal. “Anyone?”

Neal already had several, but taking ‘anyone’ as including him could be a misstep. On the other hand, Burke was still looking at him, and ignoring the question could be considered disobedience. It was entirely possible that he would be wrong no matter what he did. Finally, he settled on saying, “Do you want me to answer that?”

“Please,” Burke said, sounding slightly irritated.

Taking Berrigan’s categories as a starting point, he said, “It can’t be a manuscript on this paper—a writer would use cheap paper for a manuscript.” Contradicting one of Burke’s agents felt dangerous, but he wanted Neal to narrow the list down. Burke just nodded, so Neal continued more confidently, “Probably not letters, either. A batch of letters probably wouldn’t all be on identical paper, and he’s gone to a lot of trouble for identical paper. I can’t think of a book from the 1940’s that would be worth enough to make something this elaborate pay. The only thing would be if it was a specific copy that was valuable because of who owned it, maybe signed by the author to somebody famous—and then it would be much easier to just get a copy of the right book and fake the signature and provenance.” He thought that just about took care of the ‘one thing with many pages’ category. “Maybe a register—a tax register, a marriage register, so he can ‘recover’ it and prove some property transfer or other legal act took place. Unlikely, since this isn’t a Victorian novel.”

Peter was still watching him with that Christmas-morning look, so he kept going, and switched over to the ‘lots of copies’ category. “Deeds—that’s not likely either. If you were doing a batch of them, you’d have to forge the printed deeds all alike, and then the individual signatures, which is a lot of work, and doing a stack of them rather than just one makes it more likely you’d be caught. Currency—maybe. The paper’s thicker than you usually see, but I don’t know that much about foreign currency from the 1940’s. Maybe something that’s collectible and worth more than the face value…or from a country that doesn’t exist anymore. Collectors aren’t as good as they think they are at spotting fakes.” He rubbed the paper between two fingertips. “But for stock certificates or some kind of financial instruments—this would be perfect. All you have to do is find something that was printed on paper exactly like this, set up the plates, and run off as many copies as you want.”

“Our guy probably decided what he was going to print, then found the paper,” Burke pointed out, very dry, like he knew Neal had forgotten for a second he wasn’t actually planning a scam to run with the paper, but—fortunately—thought it was funny. “But we’ll have to work backwards.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon doing that. After working up a list of characteristics they were looking for—1940’s, probably Spanish, moderate to high value, and a large percentage of the issue unredeemed—Burke and the other two agents started searching databases for possible matches. Burke told Neal that he knew better than give him the run of the FBI computer system, and directed him to a shelf of reference books.

Still, Neal managed to find a respectable number of possible matches—not as many as Burke, but more than Jones or Berrigan—and also to stay busy enough not to dwell on how he was essentially the personal property of the Fed who had captured him. He couldn’t exactly forget about the collar, though, and he was pretty sure that not only Burke, but also the other two agents, had noticed how he flinched whenever Burke’s right hand got anywhere near his pocket. That was humiliating, but he knew exactly how much worse it could be.

Plus—pity might be something he could work with.

At five on the dot, Burke announced they’d pack it in for the night and pick up where they left off in the morning. Even if Neal hadn’t known from the days when Agent Burke had been chasing him that Burke wasn’t usually a clock-watcher, he would have figured it out from the way the other agents teased him about it.

Burke was in a hurry to get to—whatever came next. Neal had no idea what that might be, and the little bit of tension he’d managed to shed over the course of the afternoon came slamming back with a vengeance. If Burke really only wanted him as an office-boy, he could stick Neal in a cell overnight. Or he could take him home, if he had other uses for him there. He wasn’t sure which to hope for. Burke was the only person who’d managed to have Neal’s remote in his possession without pressing any buttons, and if he left Neal here, the remote would go to whoever was responsible for him overnight.

Was he really more afraid of the collar than of getting fucked by a Fed?

Yes.

Neal was capable of an honest answer, at least inside his own head. The third thing he’d learned about the collar was that on the higher settings, the pain was enough to reduce him from a man to a screaming, sobbing, suffering thing. The fourth was that he’d humiliate himself in any way he had to, with willing, desperate eagerness, to avoid a collar correction. He’d do just about anything if that remote would just stay in Agent Burke’s pocket.

By the time he worked that out, Burke was collecting his briefcase from his office. “Come on,” he said, starting down the stairs.

Burke headed for the front door, Neal trotting after him and trying not to get his hopes up. No matter which way it went, this wasn’t going to be pleasant.

Still, when Burke signed him out with the security guard and they stepped out into the fading sunlight, he had a fleeting impulse to fall on his knees and thank Nicholas, the patron saint of thieves.

Burke’s cell phone rang. He answered and talked as they crossed the parking lot to his car. “Hi, El. Yep, we’re on our way. Mm-hm. You were right, by the way. Oh, with the capers and the fire-roasted…yeah, those. That’s great. Probably not, unless you want some. Okay, see you soon.” He pocketed the phone. “My wife.”

Right, he had forgotten that Burke had a wife. It sounded like that’s where they were going, to the house where Burke lived with his wife. Burke couldn’t mean to fuck him there…could he?

“She’s looking forward to meeting you.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

#

When Peter unlocked the car doors, Neal stood looking at the car like he had never seen one before. Peter had half-thought he might try to bolt once they were outside the building, just to see what would happen, but he was doing the scared-stiff routine again. Peter reached around him and opened the passenger door. “Come on, get in.”

Neal half-turned, holding his hands out with his wrists together.

“I’m not going to cuff you,” Peter said. Neal got in, looking uncertain, and Peter went around to get in on his own side. Once he’d backed out of the space and gotten underway, he continued, “Why would I cuff you? Did they tell you how that thing works?” he asked, gesturing at the collar.

“Um. There’s a GPS tracker in it. If I attempt to escape, the collar will deliver a level nine correction, you will be notified immediately, and I will be apprehended by FBI, Department of Corrections, and any other applicable law enforcement personnel,” Neal recited. “Any attempt to remove or tamper with the collar will be considered an escape attempt.”

“And if you don’t cooperate, or you try to run away, you can be sent back to prison,” Peter added. “And if that happens, you go back inside with the collar.” The use of correction collars on inmates was generally considered cruel and unusual—unless the inmate had previously ‘failed to achieve rehabilitation’ in the Alternative Sentencing Program. That rule had come about after a number of ASP prisoners deliberately got themselves sent back to prison because they preferred it to the collar. “You know that, too?”

Neal nodded.

“You’re not stupid, and you know how to control your impulses. I don’t have to cuff you.” This was more like what he’d been expecting today to be like, laying down the law with Neal, making sure he knew that any kind of bullshit would be both useless and stupid. “You’re going to cooperate with me because we both know you don’t have any other reasonable options. There’s no need for games.”

Neal nodded again, wide-eyed.

“Just so we understand each other,” Peter muttered, fighting an impulse to reassure Neal that as long as he cooperated, everything would be fine. He had to keep control of the situation, and not let Neal’s act get to him.

Neal didn’t say anything else for the rest of the drive home. Peter couldn’t think of a way to say, “My wife has been looking forward to meeting you, so try to, you know, act like a human being,” so he kept quiet, too.

He parked in back of the house, next to El’s minivan, and opened the gate. “Always make sure you latch this if you’re the last one through. If you just let it swing shut, the dog gets out and goes wandering around the neighborhood.”

Speaking of the dog, he needed to clean up the yard this weekend.

They went in through the kitchen, where Elizabeth was standing at the stove, turning the chicken over in a pan. “Hi, honey,” he said, dropping his briefcase and giving her a kiss on the cheek. “This is, uh, Neal. Neal, Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth smiled at Neal.

Neal backed up against the door and muttered, “Uh, hi.”

“I’ve heard so much about you,” El said, giving Peter a skeptical look. Yeah, she’d heard about the gorgeous, charming con man that Peter had been chasing for most of their marriage, and he’d brought home—Peter tried to see Neal through her eyes—a practically mute scarecrow.

He really did look like hell. Peter hadn’t paid much attention before—he knew what Neal Caffrey looked like. But this Neal Caffrey was about twenty pounds underweight, dressed in polyester navy slacks and an ill-fitting gray shirt with his prisoner number printed on it, with a half-grown-out buzz cut that reminded Peter of nothing so much as a mental patient.

“He cleans up better than this,” Peter said, a little embarrassed on Neal’s behalf. He heard a jingle of tags and the click of toenails on the floor, and Satchmo ambled into the kitchen. He stopped to sniff Peter’s legs and accept a scratch on the head before moving on to a thorough investigation of the more interesting new person. “That’s Satch,” he said. “He’s friendly. You can pet him,” he suggested, since Satch was nosing at Neal’s hands, and clearly wondering why Neal didn’t respond.

Neal patted him. “Hey, buddy.”

“How long do we have?” Peter asked, gesturing at the stove.

Elizabeth recovered quickly. “Long enough for Neal to see his room and get changed.”

“Good idea.” Neal Caffrey had once given up a perfectly good cover identity because it required him to wear polyester; getting out of the prison uniform would probably have him feeling more like himself. “Come on, it’s upstairs.”

Upstairs, Peter said, “Our room, bathroom, office,” pointing at the doors. “And here’s yours.” Neal’s room had formerly been the guest room, but they’d never used it much; if anyone stayed overnight they could sleep on the futon in the office.

Neal made no move to go into his room, so Peter led the way. “It’s small, but, you know, it’s okay. El fixed it up for you; you should tell her if you like it.” The furniture was the same they’d always had in there, a double bed and the secondhand dresser from Elizabeth’s college apartment, but she’d painted and gotten some new sheets and stuff, and curtains. She’d also put a plant on the dresser and raided their shelves downstairs for a few books she thought he’d like—crime thrillers and a few textbooks from his ill-fated art history minor, which Peter thought might be a little too on the nose, but he hadn’t had any better ideas. “Look in the closet,” Peter advised, hiding a smile. Neal would like this.

Neal hesitated for a moment, then obeyed. It took him a minute to react; when he did, he turned to Peter with a worried look. “I don’t understand. This is my stuff.”

“Seized property auction,” Peter explained. A lot of what had been found in Neal’s apartment was held as evidence or returned to the rightful owners, and some of what was auctioned had gone too high for them to afford, including most of his shoes, watches, and cufflinks, but his clothes, they could manage. “So…you have time to shower, if you make it fast,” he added, pleased to have thought of that one on his own. Inmates didn’t get to shower every day in prison, and Neal was pretty fastidious, so he’d have hated that. “Come on down when you’re ready.”

Leaving Neal in his room, Peter went to his and El’s room and put his gun in the nightstand drawer. Taking the remote to Neal’s collar from his pocket, he weighed it in his hand for a moment. He didn’t think he’d need it, but it was early days yet. He stuck the remote in his pants pocket and locked the drawer.

Downstairs, he picked up Satch’s bowl and started opening a can of Iams.

“Did he like the room?” El asked, dumping rice from the saucepan into a bowl.

“Yeah,” Peter said. “He liked it. He’s being really quiet, but I’m sure he liked it.”

“This has to be really weird for him,” El said gently.

Weird for her, too, probably. Agreeing in theory to bringing the criminal her husband was fascinated with into their home was one thing; actually having him there was another. Peter had been counting on the patented Neal Caffrey charm to smooth things over, but it looked like that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. “He’s a little shaken up. He’s had a rough day.” Peter explained the mix-up with his collar.

“That’s awful. How long was it like that?”

“I don’t know.” Probably since they’d put it on him, Peter thought, but he didn’t know whether that had been first thing in the morning or just before they were ready to transfer him. “But he was okay…better, at least…at the office, once he had a little time to adjust. Did some good work.”

“You don’t have to sell him to me, sweetie,” El reminded him with a smile. “I already said yes. Go set the table.”

#

Neal faced himself in the mirror. He had learned a lot about the correction collar in the last few days, but this was the first chance he’d had to actually look at it. The band looked flimsy and fastened like a hospital bracelet, but he knew that the plastic was layered around titanium mesh—it would be possible to cut it, but not quickly, and not without the some serious tools. And since the collar would activate as soon as even one link of the mesh was severed, the cutting would have to be done by an accomplice that Neal could trust both to use dangerous tools right next to his trachea, spinal cord, and major blood vessels, and to keep cutting even while Neal was convulsing in pain.

And meanwhile, the collar would be screaming out a signal that would have Feds and cops and corrections officers homing in on them, so his accomplice would also have to dispose of the collar and get him away from it, while Neal was too incapacitated to help.

So to call it tamper-proof may have been an exaggeration, but it was pretty much get-away-with-tampering proof.

Not only that, but the thing was hideous. The tracking and shocking mechanisms were contained in a bulky plastic box on one side, and the whole thing was the off-beige color of early 90’s computer equipment. Now that he could touch the thing without getting punished, he discovered that he could shift the position of the box from one side of his neck to the other, but there really was no good place to put it.

Neal had a feeling that the thing could have been made a lot smaller, more comfortable, and less noticeable, if that had been the point. It was supposed to be obvious and ugly, so that anyone who saw him would know what he was.

Shaking his head, he buttoned his shirt. It had been a—thankfully non-literal—shock to find his own clothes in a closet in Agent Burke’s house, and he still didn’t know what he was supposed to make of that. Theory: they were starting him out with lots of privileges so they could later take them away. Theory: Agent Burke did want to fuck him—or maybe they both did—and wanted him to be pretty. Theory: Burke had figured out that giving Neal a taste of his old life would make it hurt more when he sprung whatever nasty surprise he had in mind.

All of the theories were plausible and, unfortunately, not mutually exclusive. When the ASP guards had trained him on his collar, they’d made him crawl like a dog, kiss their feet, piss himself, and beg for more. But he’d been able to hold back one small part of himself that knew that those guys didn’t matter, and he didn’t matter to them. They didn’t know or care who Neal Caffrey was, so in a way, it was like it wasn’t really him. Just another nameless, faceless prisoner, exactly the same as all the others.

But Burke knew who he was. Burke, he thought, sort of liked him, in whatever bizarre way you could like somebody and still throw him in jail and have a collar put on him.

And Neal liked him, too, when they had met as equal adversaries. Maybe still did, in whatever bizarre way could survive being thrown in prison and collared.

Even putting him in jail was fair enough—within the rules of the game, anyway. Reading about whatever of Burke’s exploits made it into the papers, sending letters and cards, keeping up that connection, had been one of the things that helped him stay sane in prison. He felt like, somehow, Peter Burke understood him.

But being understood by somebody who had the power to turn him inside out with the press of a button was…horrifying. Burke—if and when he used the collar—wouldn’t be fooled by torturing some dumb creature that could stand it; he would insist on doing it to Neal Caffrey.

He knotted his tie with trembling hands and turned down his shirt collar, crushing one side down so it would fit under the box of the collar.

“Neal?” Burke called from downstairs. “You coming?”

He arranged his features into a neutral expression and went downstairs, trying like hell not to throw up.

#

The man that came down the stairs looked almost like the one Elizabeth had seen in the pictures and surveillance videos Peter had brought home when he was chasing Neal. The suit helped, and the deliberateness with which he moved could, almost, be mistaken for grace instead of terror.

Peter, she thought, didn’t realize how scared Neal was. He probably didn’t want to, since it was, in a way, his fault Neal felt that way. Peter had, she thought, fallen in love with Neal before he even met him. The whole time he’d been chasing him, Peter hadn’t wanted to apprehend Neal, so much as save him. And maybe he had, but the man her husband was watching with stars in his eyes and a goofy grin on his face clearly did not feel like he had been saved.

Having both of them standing here watching him walk down the stairs like it was a performance-art piece couldn’t possibly be helping, so Elizabeth turned away from the spectacle and started fixing their plates. “You’re just in time,” she said. “This is Peter’s favorite; if you’d taken any longer he’d have eaten it all before you got any.”

Neal smiled uncertainly at the weak joke. “The room is, uh, it’s very nice. I like it.”

Peter, Elizabeth was sure, had told him to say that. “Thank you. I hope you’ll be comfortable.”

They sat and ate, Elizabeth and her husband making slightly stilted conversation, Neal responding briefly and politely when spoken to. Peter had his usual two and a half helpings, and Neal picked at his single serving, saying meekly, “It’s delicious, thank you, Mrs. Burke,” when Peter asked if he liked it, sounding even to her like he was accusing Neal of not liking it.

“You know, Neal, we don’t bite,” Elizabeth said.

He murmured, “I know,” but didn’t relax—in fact, he seemed to get more nervous toward the end of the meal.

By the time they had finished, Neal was reduced to shredding the chicken he was obviously not going to eat down to its constituent molecules. Elizabeth felt it was her job to bring the ordeal to a close. “I cooked,” she said brightly, “So you boys can clean up.” If Neal was a guest, of course, he wouldn’t be asked to help clean up, but he was part of the household now. She settled on the living room couch and turned on the TV, keeping an ear out for any signs of mayhem in the kitchen.

The cleanup was accomplished without incident, or at least without any incident she could hear from two rooms away. Peter came into the living room, Neal trailing him like a silent shadow. “Honey, do you want to take Satch out, or…?”

“You go,” she said. “You still have your shoes on.”

“Okay,” he said. “Uh.” He took something out of his pocket and held it out to her.

It took her a moment to recognize it—the control device for Neal’s collar. Peter had shown her one before he brought Neal home, and had explained how it worked, which she supposed was necessary, but she really didn’t want it.

“If I’m going, and he’s staying, you have to keep it,” Peter reminded her.

She took the remote, depositing it on the coffee table as quickly as she could. Neal’s eyes followed it the whole way.

Peter took the dog out, and she coaxed Neal to sit down on the other end of the couch, feeling like she was trying to get a wild bird to eat out of her hand. “Peter hates crime shows,” she confided, gesturing at the episode of Law and Order that was playing. “He can’t watch one without yelling at the TV cops about all the procedural errors they make.”

Neal gave her a startled look, then a smile that was almost genuine. “Someone I, uh, used to know did that, only with, you know, the criminals, in caper movies.”

She smiled back. He was cute when he wasn’t so scared. It only lasted a minute, though, because when a commercial came on, she reached for the remote to mute the television, and Neal flinched, looking both terrified and betrayed.

The TV remote was, of course, sitting right next to the other one. She quickly carried out her original mission of muting the TV, then picked up the other remote, holding it gingerly with two fingers, as if it was a roach trap, saying, “I’m just going to get this out of the way.” She found a place for it on a side table, out of arm’s reach of either of them.

Neal watched her do it, then carefully looked away from the remote, like he was trying to forget it was there. “So you’re, ah, you’re a wedding planner?”

“Event planner,” she said. “Weddings, parties, fund raisers, corporate functions—we do it all.”

#

“I’m thinking…calla lilies,” Neal said. “Have you tried that?” According to Mrs. Burke, the bride of the wedding she was working on had changed her mind about the flowers half a dozen times, and the florist was on the verge of quitting in disgust.

Mrs. Burke shook her head. “Version two, I think, featured star-gazer lilies, but not calla lilies.”

“The shape would echo this line on the dress,” he said, pointing it out on the photo of the bridal gown.

“You’re right,” she agreed. “But we did try a monochromatic white-on-white look, and she decided she didn’t like it.”

“You could include some colored ones—no, wait, I got it. Half of the arrangements pure white, and half the color of the bridesmaids’ dresses.” They were simpler versions of the bridal gown, in a deep purple color that matched that of the calla lilies called “black.” “Make each arrangement one color, and alternate them.”

“That could work,” she said slowly.

“You want something really minimalist,” he added, picturing them in his head. “Just the lilies, stacked in straight-up-and-down plain glass vases.” He drew a quick sketch of what he had in mind. “What do you thi--” Neal froze as the front door opened and the Burkes’ dog came in, followed by Agent Burke. “—nk?” he finished weakly.

Once Mrs. Burke began talking about her business, Neal had started working her for information, almost on reflex. One of the easiest ways to infiltrate a private home was to find out when they were throwing a party and dress up as a cater-waiter, so an event planner was a great person to cultivate. As they talked, he’d been drawn into the substance of the conversation, asking intelligent questions and offering suggestions, but that happened when he was running a con, too—it was one of his tricks. It was amazing how people opened up if you were genuinely interested, and Neal knew how to be genuinely interested in almost anything.

But Burke had interviewed enough people that Neal had used the very same trick on, that he wasn’t likely to misinterpret what Neal had been up to. He might, might, buy that Neal didn’t have a specific use in mind for the information he got out of Mrs. Burke—which was God’s honest truth—but Neal wasn’t sure that mattered.

“Hi, honey.” Mrs. Burke rubbed the dog’s ears.

“You talking to me or Satch?” Agent Burke asked, kissing her on the cheek on his way to hang up the dog’s leash.

“Either-or,” Mrs. Burke said. “Neal’s helping me with the flowers for the Rothstein-Yu wedding.” She picked up the sketch. “Can I take this, to show the bride?” she asked him.

“Sure,” Neal said.

Burke took of the scrap of paper out of her hand and studied it.

He hadn’t given any thought, before drawing it, to whether he was allowed to do that or not. Under the terms of his sentence, he wasn’t allowed to possess or touch the tools of his trade, but drawing in number 2 pencil on the back of an invoice was miles away from forgery, and ought to be okay. Unless Agent Burke decided it wasn’t.

But Burke just said, “Kind of plain, for a wedding.”

“Minimalist,” Mrs. Burke said.

Burke didn’t pick the remote back up—Neal noticed, even though he tried not to—and he managed to settle back down and discuss more wedding details with Mrs. Burke. The Rothstein-Yus, it turned out, wanted a floral arch, and making that work with the calla lily concept was a challenge. Later, Mrs. Burke got them some ice cream—chocolate with a cinnamon swirl, very decadent—and he actually managed to eat his.

Sitting in a federal agent’s living room, being given ice cream by said agent’s wife, while the agent’s dog drooled into his lap and looked up at him with soulful doggy eyes, was definitely one of the more surreal experiences of Neal’s life. Mrs. Burke, he was increasingly certain, was not playing any kind of an angle. A good cop/bad cop scenario was definitely on the table, but if so, only because Agent Burke knew that good cop was the role his wife was best suited to play. Elizabeth Burke was nice¸ and already liked him at least a little.

Seeing him hurt would upset her, and Agent Burke wouldn’t want that. Whatever Burke had in mind, he’d shield his wife from the details. Neal could use that. Since it looked like they meant for him to live here, there would be long stretches of time when he was relatively safe, and if he was lucky, Burke wouldn’t want to do anything the rest of the time that would lead her to ask questions.

At about ten, Mrs. Burke stretched and said, “Time for me to turn into a pumpkin. I have an early meeting tomorrow.”

“I’ll be up soon,” Agent Burke said.

“Okay. Goodnight, Neal.”

“Goodnight,” he echoed as she started up the stairs, already regretting the ice cream.

Agent Burke watched the last few minutes of the news, then turned off the TV. “You should go to bed too. We have a lot to do tomorrow.”

Neal nodded.

Burke got up, collecting the collar remote. He hesitated for a moment, then pointed it at Neal and said, “Don’t leave the house.”

He nodded again, hardly able to breathe.

“Unless it’s on fire.”

“O-okay,” Neal said.

Burke pocketed the remote, patted him on the shoulder, and went upstairs, followed by the dog.

Don’t leave the house—unless it’s on fire. That was, apparently, the only rule Burke felt he had to give him. He wasn’t even going to shut Neal in his room. Not that there would be much point, since the door didn’t lock. Neither did the window, for that matter, but the window would be leaving the house. It sounded like he was allowed to wander around the house if he wanted to.

So he waited until the sounds from upstairs indicated that both Burkes had brushed their teeth and gone to bed, and made a brief, neat, but thorough search of the downstairs. He half-expected that Burke would assume he was up to something an double back down, and formed a backup plan of screaming loudly enough to attract Mrs. Burke’s attention, then stuttering out a tearful apology and explanation that he hadn’t known he wasn’t allowed to do whatever plausible explanation he came up with for what he was riffling through when Burke caught him. A collar correction would make it easy to sell both the screaming and the tears; he wouldn’t even need to act.

But as it turned out, he didn’t need to use the plan—Burke didn’t catch him—and he learned a number of things, mostly without obvious use. The house didn’t have a security system, but he supposed that that, like handcuffs, was made superfluous by the collar. There was a large bag of diet dog food and a dusty box of low-calorie dog biscuits in plain sight in the pantry, but there were also two separate stashes of dog treats—one of Beggin’ Strips and one of gourmet white chocolate and carob dipped peanut butter bones—hidden in different parts of the kitchen. Conclusion: Satch was on a diet, but both Burkes secretly slipped him forbidden snacks without the other’s knowledge. Getting Mrs. Burke to bend the rules for him when Agent Burke wasn’t watching might not be much of a stretch, then.

Agent Burke’s degrees—hung on the inside of the coat closet door, for some reason—were in accounting, with an undergrad minor in history. Elizabeth’s was in Comparative Literature with a minor in Spanish. The bookcases showed influences from all of those fields, with a substantial sprinkling of popular fiction, design, and cookbooks.

The most recent incoming calls on the home phone were Burke and Mrs. Burke calling home on their cells, a dry cleaner, and one out-of-state number that Neal tentatively concluded was Mrs. Burke’s mother—the last name matched the maiden name on her degree.

The last thing he checked was Mrs. Burke’s purse. That would be the moment for Agent Burke to come downstairs—he couldn’t think of an excuse he could give for rummaging through that, and he risked getting on Mrs. Burke’s bad side if she found out, but once he thought of it, he had to follow through. Her wallet held a small amount of cash, a lot of receipts and business cards, a few charge cards, a frequent-buyer card for a midtown coffee place with all but four holes punched out, and an expired gym membership card. Automatically, he narrowed down the location of Mrs. Burke’s office to within a couple of blocks. The cell phone had Burke’s cell phone and office as the first speed dial numbers, then several women’s first names with Manhattan numbers, then a lot of florists, caterers, venues, and rental companies, and finally the out-of-state number from the land-line, helpfully labeled, “Mom.” Good to know he was right. He scanned through the saved messages. One, two years old, from Agent Burke’s cell, he couldn’t resist. “El, honey,” Agent Burke’s voice said. He was breathing hard. “We’re going in in a minute. I…’ll see you tonight. Love you.” Burke must have been going into some dangerous situation, and he’d called to say goodbye, just in case. And Mrs. Burke had saved it, just in case next time he didn’t get to say it. The message ended, and Neal backed out of voicemail, feeling like a voyeur.

Other than that, the purse held a hairbrush, a few lipsticks, a packet of tissues, and a couple of tampons. He put everything back exactly as it had been, and took a last look around before going upstairs, carefully sticking to the edges of the steps so the risers wouldn’t creak.

He’d probably played with fire enough for one night, but once he was in the bathroom, he couldn’t resist a quick rummage through the medicine cabinet, which turned up nothing unexpected—Tylenol, mouthwash, shaving cream, pink-handled disposable razors, Q-tips. The only prescriptions were Mrs. Burke’s birth control pills and three Percocets, prescribed to Mrs. Burke last year by a dental surgeon.

Neal closed the cabinet and brushed his teeth with the new toothbrush that had thoughtfully been left out on the sink, and went to his room.

He really didn’t know how to feel about the room. Even if he took it completely at face value—and if Mrs. Burke had done it on her own, maybe he should—he didn’t know. It was a nice, simple little guest room in an ordinary middle-class home. He was supposed to be, what, grateful? He’d had better. Neal Caffrey slept in thousand-dollar-a-night hotel rooms whenever he felt like it, usually without paying for them.

On the other hand, Neal Caffrey had spent the last few years sleeping on a vinyl-covered mattress that was about as thick, and as comfortable, as a lawn-chair cushion, with a stiff polyester blanket, and the last few nights on worse than that. The Burkes’ guest room bed, with its two-hundred-thread-count sheets and cotton duvet looked pretty good in comparison.

With a shrug, he changed into a pair of his own pyjamas and got into bed. It was hard to find a comfortable sleeping position with the collar, but having a selection of fluffy pillows at least made it possible to try.

#

“Neal?” Burke tapped on the door of the guest room—Neal’s room. “Time to get moving.” He’d set the alarm in Neal’s room to go off a little after theirs, not quite sure how the three of them all trying to get ready at the same time with one bathroom would work out. The alarm had been shut off a few seconds after it sounded, so Neal was in there and presumably awake, but he hadn’t emerged.

He raised his hand to knock again, and the door opened. Neal was up, if not exactly alert, and dressed in another one of his sharp suits, the jacket slung over his shoulder. “Is this…okay?” Neal asked, indicating his outfit.

“Yeah. Fine.” The collar was where it belonged, which was the only part of Neal’s attire that was any of his business. “Bathroom’s free; breakfast in a few minutes.”

Downstairs, Elizabeth was starting the coffee, so he got out juice glasses and cereal bowls. “Well, he’s still here.”

“You didn’t think he would be?”

“I had my doubts,” Peter admitted. “The collar’s supposed to be tamper-proof, but, you know, Neal. He’d take that as a challenge.”

“He’s afraid of the collar,” Elizabeth said, glancing meaningfully at the stairs.

“He’s supposed to be.” He knew Elizabeth didn’t like the collar—he didn’t like it either, really—but it was a fact of life, and Peter was sure that at some point, he’d have to demonstrate to Neal that he was willing to use it.

Fortunately, Elizabeth didn’t press the subject. Neal came downstairs, and they ate breakfast at the kitchen table, Neal looking even more incongruous there in his designer suit than he had in the dining room. Peter still couldn’t quite wrap his head around Neal Caffrey in his house; it was like having a celebrity, maybe a minor member of the royal family, sitting in his kitchen.

Neal ate his store-brand corn flakes and drank his coffee without complaint, and was polite and careful. Peter reminded himself that that was a good thing. He was in no hurry for Neal to start feeling comfortable enough to push the envelope.

Neal stayed careful and quiet on the way to work, and settled down with his stack of reference books without a peep. Peter went to a meeting, only a little worried about what Neal might get up to in the middle of an FBI office but out of his personal line of sight. When he got back, Neal was still at his desk, but was leaning with his head propped up on his hand, staring into space, one of the books open and ignored in front of him.

“Hey.”

Neal sat up quickly, knocking the book into his lap. He caught it and put it back on the desk, ostentatiously smoothing the dust jacket.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Just, um, tired.”

“It can be hard to sleep in a new place,” Peter said sympathetically. The collar probably took some getting used to, too, but Neal had done that to himself, when he chose to commit one felony after another. “Get some coffee,” he suggested. “It’s over there.”

Neal stood up quickly. “What do you take in it?”

Peter shook his head, exasperated. Neal was really overplaying the meek and obedient thing. ‘Neal Caffrey: Office Gopher’ was just not believable. “I meant for you, but while you’re up, cream and two sugars.” Might as well go with it, though, as long as he didn’t fall for it.

When he got back, carrying two mugs of coffee, Peter accepted one and rested one hip on Neal’s desk. “Jones and Berrigan are working other aspects of the case. You can keep going with this.” He handed Neal a folder and added, “Here’s their lists; look them over and see if you can add or eliminate anything.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll be in my office. Try to stay awake.”

#

For the rest of the morning, Neal sat at the desk at next to the stairs that led to Agent Burke’s office, and worked. At one point, someone else was looking for one of the books he was using, and Neal overheard a clerk saying, “It’s on Caffrey’s desk.”

So, apparently, this was his desk. He had a desk now. Under other circumstances, that would be hilarious. He’d worked scams that required him to pretend to be someone who sat at a desk and looked at files, but this was his actual desk. He’d never had a desk before. He wondered if, at some point, they’d give him a nameplate.

The phone (on his desk) rang, surprising him. He hadn’t been sure if it was even connected. On the second ring, he decided he had better answer it.

In the half-second it took to reach for the phone, he thought about how to answer it. The call wasn’t likely to be for him. If he answered, say, “FBI,” somebody might tell him something he wasn’t supposed to know. On the other hand, if it was for him—say, Agent Burke—he could get in trouble that way. He picked up the receiver and said, “Neal Caffrey.” If whoever was calling didn’t recognize the name, he might still learn something he wasn’t supposed to know, and he couldn’t possibly be blamed for the misunderstanding.

“Hi, Neal. It’s Elizabeth.”

Mrs. Burke. Was this phone connected to Agent Burke’s extension? “Hi.”

“How’s the first day going?”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m just, you know, working.” He resisted the impulse to say, ‘At my desk.’

“Has Peter taken you to lunch yet?”

“No.”

“Oh, good. I’m going to stop by with some catering samples.”

“Okay.” Neal had, of course, scoped out the contents of his desk, so he took the “While You Were Out” pad from the top right-hand drawer and wrote down, “Mrs. Burke: Stopping by with lunch.”

“See you in a little bit.”

After hanging up, he amused himself by filling out the rest of the form. Message For: Agent Peter Burke. Time: 11:18 AM. (Did the FBI use military time? He’d have to find out.) Message Taken By: Neal Caffrey. Maybe he’d missed his calling as a secretary.

He wasn’t sure whether to take the message up to Burke or wait for him. What had the secretaries of people he had pretended to be done? He thought it depended on how urgent the message was, and whether it was more important than what the boss was doing at the time, things he didn’t know.

Fortunately, Agent Burke came down the stairs a few minutes later, saving Neal from having to make a decision. Neal held out the message slip, saying, “Mrs. Burke called.”

Burke glanced at the message. “Why did she call you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “This phone rang,” he explained, indicating it. “I answered it.”

Burke shook his head. “Whatever. Did she say when she was coming?”

“In a little bit,” Neal reported.

Burke wandered off to talk to somebody else for a moment, then went back to his office. It must be nice to be able to wander around whenever the mood struck you instead of being stuck at your desk. If you had to have a desk.

He buckled down and managed to strike off several items from Jones’ and Berrigan’s lists of what could be forged onto the Snow White flyleaves. It was a good thing he’d had a perfectly-taken phone message to distract Agent Burke with before, since he hadn’t made much progress on it then.

Mrs. Burke came into the office carrying two insulated bags along with her purse. Neal briefly considered the possibility that she was stopping by to tell her husband that she had noticed her purse had been riffled through—but no, he had been really careful, and she hadn’t noticed anything wrong when she had taken her car keys out that morning. If she noticed something later, it could have been anyone.

She set the bags down in a clear spot on his desk. “Angela Yu loved your idea for the flowers. She swore up and down that she wasn’t going to change her mind again, and we could go ahead and place the order and put down a deposit. So I managed to talk Karen down off the ledge.”

Karen, Neal remembered, was the exasperated florist. “Great. Glad I could help.”

“You’re a life-saver.” She started unzipping the bags.

Agent Burke came down from his office. “Hi, El. This is a surprise.”

“Hi, honey.” She took out a styrofoam container and sat it in front of Neal. “These are samples for another event, a charity fund raiser. Beef burgundy, salmon with a dill sauce, and the vegan option.” Opening the other bag, she added a second container. “And assorted salads and desserts. Let me know what you think; I’ve used these guys before and they can be kind of…uneven.” Mrs. Burke pulled up a spare chair and took out a second set of containers for herself.

Agent Burke looked confused. “Don’t I get any?”

“Sweetie,” Mrs. Burke said, “the last time I surprised you with lunch at work you pouted because it was chili day in the cafeteria.”

“It’s not chili day today,” Burke said.

“Well, I have better things to do than keep track of the cafeteria menus at your job.”

Neal watched this byplay with some uncertainty. On the one hand, it confirmed his dog-biscuit-based hypothesis. Mrs. Burke was definitely slipping him the white-chocolate-dipped peanut butter bones, and not even bothering to wait until Agent Burke’s back was turned. On the other hand, if Burke was really offended, it wasn’t his wife he was going to take it out on. “We could share,” he suggested.

Burke held up his hands and shook his head. “Far be it from me. I’ll go to the cafeteria. It’s Swedish meatballs.”

Mrs. Burke smiled fondly at this parting shot. “He hates Swedish meatballs.” She dug into her food unconcernedly.

Neal tasted the three entrees. The vegetarian pasta dish was surprisingly good, considering, and the beef bourguignon was perfect. The salmon… “Pedestrian,” he said. “And kind of dry.”

She sampled her own and nodded. “Maybe we’ll let Peter have that.”

The salads were good, too, and all but one of the desserts.

“Final verdict?” Mrs. Burke asked, gathering up the containers and plastic utensils.

“Mmm…the cream puffs are almost unforgivable, but the beef was as good as I’ve ever had, so I’d give them another chance to step up their game with the fish and the cream puffs. They can do better.”

She nodded. “I think so too. Actually, they could just eliminate the cream puffs—two good desserts is better than two good ones and one ‘unforgivable.’ But the client wants a fish option. It’s for heart disease research, so, Omega-3’s, you know.”

“If they can make a good vegan option, they can make a good fish option,” Neal opined. “They just have to put in more of an effort.”

“I’ll tell them exactly that,” Mrs. Burke said. “Thank you.”

“Thank you. You can have lunch at my desk any time.”

“Maybe next time I’ll let Peter have some, too. If he’s good.”

Yesterday, no lunch at all and a mouth-breathing prison guard knocking him around; today, catered takeout with a beautiful woman. Okay, so she happened to be married to his FBI handler, but still, things were definitely looking up for Neal Caffrey.

 

#

When Peter arrived at the afternoon team meeting, Neal was sitting at the table like he belonged there, chatting with Jones and Berrigan. Peter reminded himself that it was a good thing he was coming out of his shell, and tried not to resent that he seemed willing to turn on the patented Neal Caffrey charm for everyone except Peter himself—up to and including his wife. It was just when Peter was talking to him, or looking at him, that he froze up and stammered.

It happened again when Peter stepped into the conference room. Neal was saying, “No, I think that’s—” and stopped cold, sitting up straight in his chair and folding his hands primly.

“Time to share,” Peter said, taking a seat. “Berrigan’s been tracing our rare book dealer’s movements in the US before his most recent trip to Spain, Jones his movements in Spain, and Neal’s been working on narrowing down the list of potential targets. Who wants to go first?”

“Ladies first?” Jones suggested to Berrigan.

“Age before beauty,” she responded.

The book dealer’s movements matched his stated purpose for being in the country. He had visited book shops all over Spain, staying at mid-range hotels that catered to business travelers and eating at hotel restaurants and tourist-friendly places. The only anomaly was that he had apparently also spent two days hiking near Altamira, which didn’t seem to fit with the dead man’s image, but it wasn’t a crime to have layers.

Berrigan’s report was similar in broad outline—he bought books, he sold books. No hiking. But Berrigan was saving the best for last. “The day before he left for Spain, he visited the National Archives.”

Neal sat up even straighter than he had been before.

“We’ll check that out first,” Peter said. If it didn’t turn up any leads, they’d have to interview all of the book dealers Field had done business with, but that was a lot of leg work and didn’t seem very promising.

“They close at four-thirty,” Berrigan said, glancing up at the clock. Right, they would have to do it first thing tomorrow.

“That’s a problem?” Neal asked.

“Maybe not for you,” Peter said, “but we’ll want to interview the staff.” He tried to remember if there were any unsolved thefts from the National Archives.

“I didn’t mean that,” Neal said. “I just meant, if you tell them the FBI is coming, they’d have to stay and let you in, wouldn’t they?”

Jones answered. “We probably could if we had to, but it’s not an emergency.”

“We’ll go first thing in the morning,” Peter said. “Neal, you have anything for us?”

Neal flinched, then said, “Oh, right,” and got out his list, quickly going down it with a pencil and x-ing out some items and circling others. “There are still a lot of things it could be. But if we assume his trip to the National Archives was for this job—and maybe it wasn’t, he could have more than one job in play—but if it is, the biggest target there is the Spanish Victory Bond.” He opened one of his reference books. “It was issued in 1944, the same year as the books. It was printed in full color off of a design by Goya—very intricate, it’s a work of art in its own right. It would be a challenge, but there’s only one known copy, and out of thousands made, only a few were redeemed. You could theoretically claim to have found entire boxes of them and nobody could say you hadn’t.” Neal frowned. “Except one recovered copy would be worth at least a couple million to the right collector. Flood the market with them and the value dissipates.”

Jones reached toward the book. “Let me see?”

“Sure.” Neal pushed it across the table.

Jones studied the color plate in the book, a look of enlightenment coming across his face. Berrigan leaned over to look at it. It wasn’t until Jones pointed out a detail in the image that she said, “Ohhh.”

“You want to share with the rest of the class?” Peter asked.

“It’s a zero option,” Jones said. “Still negotiable. A thousand dollars face value, at nine percent interest….”

“For sixty-four years,” Berrigan added.

“Two hundred forty eight thousand dollars,” Neal said. “Each.”

“And he has six hundred sheets of the paper,” Jones said.

“About a hundred and fifty million,” Neal said. “Yeah, okay, that’s way more than a single copy would be worth as an antique. And once you’ve forged the plates, you might as well make as many copies as you have the paper for.”

“That has to be it,” Jones said.

“It’s a very strong possibility,” Peter corrected. He’d seen investigations go wrong by committing to a theory too soon.

“He’d have to be very, very good to manage the Victory Bond. The color, and the level of detail,” Neal said thoughtfully.

Peter hoped he wasn’t thinking about how he could pull it off, but suspected he was. “Any runners-up, Neal?” he asked, to distract him from his felonious impulses.

Neal came back down to earth. “If he’s not up to the challenge, there are a few other things he could try.” Neal described them, and for good measure, the targets that had been at the top of his list before Berrigan’s new information.

“All right,” Peter said. “Good work, everybody. Productive day.”

Jones and Berrigan included Neal in their exchange of significant looks. Admittedly, he didn’t usually end meetings by congratulating everyone involved, but people could change.

 

#

Neal had missed the significance of Agent Burke saying, “We’ll go first thing in the morning,” until Burke passed the turnoff for the FBI building and drove instead to the National Archive on Houston. He’d assumed that “we” meant Burke, Berrigan, and Jones.

Not only was this his first time out in public with the collar on—something he’d been dreading—but…they knew him here. And not as Neal Caffrey.

Maybe Agent Burke would leave him in the car.

He didn’t. “Come on,” he said, when Neal hesitated.

He got out of the car. The sidewalk was crowded with people on their way to work, and Neal felt like every single one of them was staring at his collar. Normally, he liked crowds—you could disappear in them, be anything. But anyone who saw the collar would know exactly what he was. A man buying a newspaper from a cart gave him a disgusted look, and two women in business suits and sneakers clutched their purses tightly as they passed.

Falling into step behind Burke, Neal turned up the collar of his suit jacket. It wouldn’t really hide the collar, but maybe people who weren’t really looking would miss it. If they were nearsighted.

It had been over four years since Neal had been in the National Archives. That was long enough for people to change jobs, move away, forget. If he was lucky.

He wasn’t. The clerks at the information desk were unfamiliar, but before Burke could get their attention, a very familiar figure walked across the lobby. Nancy, the archivist who had been so helpful with the Luxembourg job. It had required a lot of research; he’d promised to mention her in the acknowledgements of his dissertation.

She was approaching him from the side, and smiled when she saw him. “Andrew! Or is it Doctor Camden now? We haven’t seen you here in a while.”

There was no avoiding it; Neal turned to face her, smiling sheepishly.

“Oh,” she said.

Now he had gotten Agent Burke’s attention, too. “Explain,” he said.

“I, uh, did some research here a few years ago,” Neal said.

“Research,” Burke said skeptically.

“Research. For, uh, Luxembourg. All background, I didn’t steal anything. From here. This is, um, Nancy Mitford. She’s very helpful.”

“You’re a criminal?” Nancy said, looking like she had found a cockroach doing the backstroke in her coffee cup.

Burke flashed his badge. “Agent Peter Burke, FBI. He’s Neal Caffrey, multiple felon.”

“I went to dinner with a felon?” She looked frightened.

“All nonviolent,” Neal said.

“Art theft, forgery, fraud,” Burke said. “He’s practically a gentleman criminal.”

Nancy looked around at where they were, surrounded by things that could be forged, stolen, or fraudulently used. “That’s not exactly comforting.”

“I’ll frisk him before we leave,” Burke promised. “We’re here on business.” He explained what they were after, showing the picture of the dead book dealer.

Nancy recovered from the shock and was as helpful as ever. She hadn’t helped Field, but was able to work out who had, and introduced them to an archivist named Vincent.

“Is there a problem?” he asked, shooting anxious glances at Neal, or, more accurately, Neal’s collar.

“This man was killed,” Burke said, indicating the photo of Field. “We’d like to see what he was working on beforehand; it might help us find the killer.”

That was interesting. Neal couldn’t think of a good reason not to tell Vincent the truth about why they were here. Of course, he would have made up a cover story even if there was nothing incriminating in his real reason, but he hadn’t quite realized that Feds did that, too.

“Of course. We keep records of what documents have been retrieved for patrons, but I remember him. The Spanish Victory Bond—he was writing a book about it.”

Neal was very careful not to let his feeling of triumph show on his face; when you were pumping someone for information, it was important not to let them know you’d succeeded. Burke wasn’t so careful, though—he turned his head slightly and grinned at Neal, before saying to the archivist, “Spanish Bond…can we see it?”

Vincent showed them into a study room and went to get the Bond. Returning, he put on a pair of white cotton archival gloves and said, “He actually came to see it twice—a few months ago, and then last week. He took a lot of photographs the first time, for his book. It’s a shame he’s dead; the Bond has a fascinating history.”

He talked about it, mostly going over the same information Neal had found in the books yesterday, while Burke examined the Bond with a loupe. He did add one new detail: “There’s speculation that there are whole boxes of these hidden away in the caves of Altamira.”

That explained the hiking, sort of. But why had he gone looking for the bonds if he was planning to forge them?

Oh, so he’d have a checkable story about where he found them.

The next question was why he’d come twice. If he took good photos the first time, he shouldn’t have needed to. Maybe there had been some detail he had to re-check, but this guy wasn’t sloppy.

“Can I look at it?” Neal asked, when Burke put down the loupe.

“Yeah.”

Vincent reluctantly handed over another pair of gloves, and Neal slipped into the chair that Burke vacated. Nancy must have warned him about Neal; Vincent was clearly not happy having him up close and personal with the rare document. He kept drawing in his breath as if he was about to say something, then letting it out in a huff. Burke rested his hand on the back of Neal’s chair, possibly to convey that he had the situation under control.

When Neal picked up the document and sniffed it, Vincent could no longer contain himself. “I’d really rather you didn’t--”

“I’m not going to steal it,” Neal said. “I can’t. It’s already been stolen.”

“It’s right there!” Vincent said.

“This is a forgery,” Neal said confidently. “The ink isn’t fully dry; you can still smell the gum Arabic.”

“It’s been here since 1952,” Vincent protested.

“It’s been here less than a week.” The second trip had been to replace the real bond with the forged one—but why?

Removing the forged bond as evidence took over an hour and several phone calls between Vincent’s boss and Agent Burke’s. Neal wondered if that was because of him. Forging an FBI badge was well within his skill set, so they were right to ask questions. Stealing something by walking out the door with it in plain sight was always fun, and claiming it was a fake and you had to confiscate it as evidence would be good for infinite style points. But Burke didn’t seem particularly annoyed by all the hassle, so maybe this was normal.

Agent Burke, as promised, frisked Neal before they left. He found only the loupe and gloves, which Neal had pocketed without thinking about it.

That gave him a tense moment, but Burke just shook his head and plunked them down on the information desk, saying, “You always have to push, don’t you?”

Neal thought that maybe Burke was just waiting until they got to the car to “correct” him—which, you know, small mercies—but all he took out of his pocket was his cell phone, which he used to call his team and tell them what they’d learned, and to start trying to figure out how swapping the real bond for a forgery fitted into the scam. “You have any ideas about that?” he asked after hanging up.

“Not yet,” Neal admitted. Replacing the thing you stole with a copy was a great way to buy yourself time to fence the real thing before anyone noticed it was missing, but if you were planning to “discover” a few hundred more copies of that very thing, it didn’t quite add up.

“Think about it. We’ll stop for lunch on the way back.”

Today must not be chili day, either. Burke took him to a little deli around the corner from the Bureau, the kind of place that didn’t have a posted menu. But it was a little early for the lunch rush, and the level of traffic suggested it was either good or trendy, and it didn’t look remotely trendy.

He’d gotten over feeling self-conscious about the collar in the Archives, but here people definitely were staring. A teenage girl snapped a picture of him with her camera phone as they waited in line.

“It’s okay,” Burke said to the counter-woman, who was looking at him with open suspicion. “He’s with me. Roast beef on white, combo, with the potato salad.”

She wrote down the order. “Is he getting anything?”

“Yeah. Neal, what do you want?”

“Oh, uh, turkey club.” It was the first time in four years he’d had the chance to choose what he was going to eat, so he probably should have made more of it, but he didn’t think Burke would be amused if he tied up the line asking about his options. Everywhere had a turkey club, right?

“Combo?”

“Get the potato salad,” Burke advised. “It’s good. He’ll have the potato salad,” he told the counter-woman.

Apparently he did not get a say on the potato salad issue. He was trusted with sandwich decisions but not potato salad. Okay. Burke let him choose his drink out of the cooler, too, and snagged them a table.

Neal guessed the potato salad was fine; his dry mouth and churning stomach made it a little hard to tell.

“Something wrong with it?” Burke demanded.

He still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of eating with Burke watching him. He’d worked out that he was expected to eat without being explicitly given permission, and Burke didn’t seem to have any particular fixations about table manners, but there was still a lot about the rules he hadn’t worked out yet. Now that he’d gone almost forty-eight hours without a collar correction, he was starting to wonder if it was really as bad as he remembered, but he was still pretty sure that getting one while he was swallowing would make him choke. Mrs. Burke usually interceded when Agent Burke noticed he wasn’t eating, but she wasn’t here. “No, it’s great, thank you, I appreciate it,” Neal said, then took another bite to stop his babbling.

“You could still stand to tone it down a little bit more,” Burke said around a bite of roast beef on white.

What was that supposed to mean? Tone what down? “I—what did I do?”

Burke just shook his head.

Neal fought down a rising tide of panic. Begging Burke to tell him what he’d done wouldn’t help—one of the rules he had worked out was that Burke wasn’t going to tell him the rules; ‘Don’t leave the house—unless it’s on fire’ had been an exception.

He was just going to have to try harder.

#

Peter guessed he hadn’t really thought that feeding Neal lunch would work as well for him as it had for Elizabeth. And calling him on the meek and scared routine had clearly been a mistake—if anything, he’d turned it back up a couple of notches.

In the team meeting, Neal sat on the information that he had figured out why Field swapped the bond, letting the rest of them spin their wheels uselessly until Peter asked him if he had anything to contribute.

Neal gave a quick little nod. “When he tries to cash in the forged bonds, the government will want some proof that they’re real.”

He stopped talking, but didn’t seem finished. “Okay,” Peter said.

“The National Archives has the only known copy, so that’s where they’ll go to authenticate them. And this way, he can be sure they’ll match perfectly.” Finishing up, Neal watched him with an anxiously hopeful expression, as if he was waiting for Peter’s approval.

He had it, but Peter tried to show some restraint. “Good. Okay, let’s think about this.”

They got caught up in working out their next move—Neal contributing meaningfully when prodded, and otherwise trying to fade into the wallpaper—and Peter didn’t realize how late it was getting until El called.

“Hey. Would you believe I’m on my way out the door?” he asked hopefully, ushering the others out of his office.

“No,” she said. “Honey, you can’t keep Neal there all night. Have you even given him any dinner?”

“It’s fine if I do, but not the convicted felon?” he checked.

“He won’t complain, and it’s not fair.”

Peter didn’t want to fight with El, and anyway, they had a long list of things they couldn’t move on until morning, so he relented. “All right. Ten minutes. Twenty, tops.”

One strange thing happened when they left the building. On the way to the car, a short, bald man in nerdy glasses approached Neal, a cigarette clamped between his lips. “Hey. Can I bum a light?”

Neal glanced anxiously at Peter and said, “I don’t smoke.” He edged around to Peter’s other side, putting Peter between the other man and himself.

The man lingered for a moment before walking away, not bothering to ask any of the other bystanders for a light.

“Something I need to worry about?” Peter asked, once they were in the car. Neal must have enemies in the criminal underworld—was there someone on the other side of the law after him?

“No,” Neal said.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

Would Neal tell him if there was? Probably not. “I’m responsible for you, you know. It goes both ways.” It wasn’t just his job to protect the rest of the world from Neal; it was also his job to protect Neal.

“I understand,” Neal said.

Peter gave up and drove home. Elizabeth had waited dinner for them—well, she had waited it for Neal; Peter knew from experience that when it was just him working late, she fed his dinner to the dog. But this time she graciously allowed him to have some too.

Neal picked at his food and gave terse answers to El’s attempts to ask about his day or get his opinion on various event-planning dilemmas. After dinner, Elizabeth shooed him into the living room to watch TV, and dragged Peter into the kitchen.

“What did you do to him?”

“I didn’t do anything to him,” Peter said. “He’s been sulking since lunch.”

“What did you do to him at lunch?”

Peter glanced through the dining room to make sure Neal wasn’t eavesdropping. “I told him to can the ‘I’m so scared of the big bad federal agent’ act. I’m not sure if he’s still trying to sell it, or just pouting because I insulted his acting chops,” he added.

“Peter, honey,” Elizabeth said. “He’s not acting.”

“And you know that because of your vast experience with con-men in general and Neal Caffrey in particular?” Peter demanded in a whisper.

“I know, because I’ve seen how he reacts to you, and I’m not an idiot,” El retorted. Then, with a sigh, she softened. “Just…you like him. That’s why he’s here. What can it hurt to let him see that?”

“I have to maintain some kind of authority over him, or he’ll be running con games from the middle of the Bureau,” Peter said. “It’s fine for you to be the nice one, but if I let him con me, he goes back to prison. I’m willing to risk hurting his feelings to keep that from happening.”

El considered that. “Okay, that’s fair enough. But then you have to cowboy up, mister, and stop telling yourself he’s fine.”

Peter did the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen, knowing that wasn’t enough to get him out of the doghouse with El, but it was a start. After that, he joined his wife in the living room and watched Neal stiffen when he entered the room and flinch whenever he moved his right hand.

If he was faking it, he was good. Half the time, if Neal was listening to El or something, he didn’t even seem to notice he was doing it. But Peter knew Neal was good.

If he wasn’t faking it…Peter had missed something big. Neal liked his comforts, but he also knew how to roll with the punches, and having the collar set on automatic for a few hours before being delivered into Peter’s hands wasn’t enough to rattle him for long.

Peter wasn’t sure that anything could rattle Neal for long. The day Peter arrested him, Neal had been joking around, completely un-cowed by either the array of agents pointing guns at him or the long list of charges against him. During his trial he’d flirted with the jury, mugging with a “win some, lose some” expression when, despite his best efforts to charm them, they found him guilty of all charges. It was like nothing could touch him.

Which made it all the more likely that nothing had.

Still, he’d married a smart, perceptive woman, and if El thought she smelled smoke…he at least had to consider the possibility that there might be fire. So when, shortly after they went to bed, he heard Satch barking and noticed as he went to investigate that Neal wasn’t in his room yet, he tried not to assume the worst.

Down in the kitchen, the back door was open and Neal was standing in the doorway, the toes of his loafers just inside the door jamb but most of his upper body leaning out. “What’s going on?” Peter asked.

“Oh. Um, Satch had to go out, and now he’s barking at something and won’t come back in.”

Peter stepped closer to the door and whistled. “Hey, Satch. C’mere boy.” Satch, a light-colored blur at the far end of the yard, kept barking and bouncing around. “There must be a cat or something out there. You have to go out and get him, when that happens.”

“I’m not supposed to leave the house,” Neal said virtuously.

Right, and he had hewed to the letter of that prohibition. “The yard is okay,” Peter decided. “Go get him; you have shoes on.”

Neal gave him an uncertain look before slipping out the back door. He returned a moment later with Satch, who was wriggling with excitement. He had an unauthorized nighttime adventure, and now one of his favorite people was here, too!

Peter fussed over him for a minute, fed him a Beggin’ Strip from the stash hidden under the good table cloths, and sent him to bed. “You should go to bed, too,” he told Neal. “Busy day tomorrow.”

#

Neal knew he was on thin ice. He was hazy on some of the details, but he could feel it cracking underneath him. Burke apparently thought he was running some kind of a scam, which would have been dangerous enough if he actually was, but at least that way he’d have the option of calling it off. And Mozzie hanging around wasn’t helping. Neal couldn’t imagine what had possessed him to show up outside the FBI building, and he was halfway suspicious that the “cat” Satchmo had been barking at last night was five foot six and bald.

He had been keeping his eyes open for a familiar face, but he had expected it to be Kate. She could have made contact without Burke noticing; Moz’s paranoia sometimes led him to get overly baroque. That was something Neal absolutely did not need right now. He wanted to warn Moz off, but to do that, he’d have to make contact, and if Burke noticed that, there was no way he’d buy that Neal was communicating with a known criminal associate for no reason other than to tell him to buzz off.

So Neal’s best option for staying on Burke’s good side was to pull off a miracle. When Burke was in a meeting with the higher-ups, Neal slipped into the junior agents’ office and looked surprised. “Agent Burke isn’t here?”

“He’s in a meeting with Hughes,” Berrigan said.

“Oh,” Neal said. “I guess he forgot about me. I hope he’s not mad; it’s not like they’ll let me get the forged bond out of the evidence lockup.” He leaned against a desk, hunching his shoulders a little. “Anybody want coffee?”

Berrigan said, “Black, two sugars,” but Jones said, “I’ll sign it out for you.”

Unbelievable. He’d even reminded them he was a con, and Jones still fell for it. Neal hid a smile and followed him to the evidence room, taking note of the sign-out procedure for future reference.

He borrowed a magnifying glass and sat down at his desk with the bond. He got wrapped up in examining it, though, and didn’t manage to execute step two of the plan—returning it to the evidence lockup with no one the wiser—before Burke’s meeting ended.

“Where did you get that? What are you doing with it?”

Faced with Burke’s wrath, he fessed up immediately. “Agent Jones signed it out of the evidence lockup.” Neal was no snitch, but he had no moral qualms about ratting out a Fed to another Fed.

“And where is Agent Jones?” Burke asked, looking around at the conspicuous absence of Agent Jones. He planted his hands on the edge of the desk and loomed over Neal. “Evidence has got to be maintained with a clear chain of custody. Now that you’ve been playing with it unsupervised, there’s no way to prove it’s the same one we took from the archives. God damn it, Neal, can’t you show a little common sense for once in your life?”

Burke’s right hand left the desk.

“I know who the forger is,” Neal blurted out.

The hand went back on the desk. “Enlighten me.”

“Curtis Hagan. He’s an art restorer—one of the best in the world, but his own work never took off. He specializes in Goya restorations.”

“What makes you think that?”

“He signed it. Look.” He shoved the magnifying glass at Burke, who took it in his right hand, and pointed. “Here, in the Spanish peasant’s pants. It’s the initials C and H.”

Burke examined the spot Neal indicated. “It looks like it could be a C and an H,” he admitted. “Does that help us catch the guy?”

“If he’s still working on the legitimate side—and he’d be stupid to stop, in the middle of pulling off something this big—he won’t be hard to find.”

Burke stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Okay.” They went to the junior agents’ office. “We have a suspect,” Burke told them. “Curtis Hagan. Get me addresses, known associates, everything you can find. Not you,” he told Neal. “We’re putting this back where it belongs.”

In the elevator, he shook the bond in its evidence envelope in Neal’s face. “You cannot do this. We can’t use this in court now. Do you understand that? There’s no judge in the world that would believe evidence tampering is beneath you.”

“I was in plain sight with it the whole time.” Neal tried to defend himself.

“That doesn’t matter. On this side of the law, we have the burden of proof. The defense doesn’t have to prove you tampered with it; we have to prove we didn’t. And we can’t, because we both know you could have switched this bond for another one in full view of half the New York bureau.”

“I didn’t, Agent Burke, I swear--”

“That doesn’t matter! I can’t swear you didn’t, and Jones can’t swear you didn’t, the clerk in the evidence lockup can’t swear you didn’t. Your word isn’t worth shit.” Burke made as if to slam the evidence envelope into the wall, but stopped himself in time. “And that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that if this Hagan guy walks over this, some hotshot at OPR could review the case and say ‘Hey. Neal Caffrey and Curtis Hagan are both world-class art forgers. It’s not out of the question that they know each other. Maybe Neal Caffrey deliberately created reasonable doubt surrounding the admissibility of the key piece of evidence in the case, so that his friend could walk.’ And then your ass goes back to prison. Is that what you want?”

“No, I, I--” This had gotten completely out of control. He hadn’t thought of any of those angles; all he’d been thinking about what giving Agent Burke something to be happy about so he wouldn’t get in trouble.

Boy, that had worked out for him. “I don’t know Hagan. I mean, I’ve heard of him, but if anything, we’re rivals. Were rivals. I don’t care if he goes to prison--” Wait, that sounded wrong. “I mean, it’s fine with me, go team Feds. Peter, you have to believe me. I don’t want to go back to prison. Really, I’m--” Neal realized he was almost crying and heaved in a deep breath in an effort to control himself. “I’m trying. I want this to work, Peter--” He had just called Agent Burke by his first name, twice, and that was one of the rules he hadn’t figured out yet. “I mean, Agent Burke. Sir.” He slumped against the wall, exhausted by the effort of so much honesty at one time.

The elevator dinged, and Burke dragged him out and steered him toward a bench in the hallway. “Jesus, Neal, sit down.” Burke paced three steps up and back, then sat down next to him, dragging a hand through his hair. “I believe you. At least, I believe large parts of what you just said. I believe you didn’t tamper with the bond, and I believe you’re not working with Hagan.” He sighed. “But it’s not about what I believe.”

“I’m sorry,” Neal said. It wasn’t a direct response to anything Burke had said, but he was still shaking, most of his higher cerebral functions whited out with terror at the thought of returning to prison with the collar.

“Yeah, okay. Look, that OPR, going back to prison thing, that’s a worst-case scenario. Realistically, this just means we work a little harder to catch Hagan. And knowing who he is, if that is who it is, is a big help. I mean, really, that’s huge. It’s a great catch. But if you handle evidence, I have to be watching you. Or Jones, in a pinch. Not Berrigan right now, while she’s a probie, but me or another full agent. You got that?”

Neal nodded. He took a deep breath, trying to calm his racing pulse. He was going to be okay. In fact, he would have freaked out sooner if he had known it would get him Agent Burke reassuring him and being straight with him. “I got it. I won’t do it again.”

“Good.” Burke squeezed his shoulder, and they went down the hall to the evidence lockup. As it turned out, Burke had to show his badge and sign the envelope back in, so slipping it back in on his own wouldn’t have worked anyway.

It wasn’t until Neal was back at his desk that he could really process what had just happened. There was no doubt that he had fucked up badly, and Agent Burke had been furious, but…. Neal touched the collar. The remote had stayed in his pocket. He’d even waited until he and Neal were alone to really bawl him out, instead of shouting at him in front of everybody.

Neal began to consider the possibility that he was operating under some faulty assumptions.

#

“Shut the door,” Peter said to Agent Jones.

Jones shut the door.

“Take a seat.”

Jones took a seat. “What’s up?” he said, trying not to look nervous, and failing.

“You signed the forged bond out of evidence for Neal.” Peter was able to keep his voice level, all professional and aboveboard, because unlike with Neal, he wasn’t terrified for and frustrated with and absolutely fed up with Jones. Jones he was just righteously and uncomplicatedly pissed off at.

“Yeah—wait, he said you wanted him to look at it.”

“Did he?”

Jones thought about it. “Aw, shit. No, he didn’t say that, he just let me think that. I got played.”

“Yes, you did. And then, after signing for the bond, you left him alone with it.”

Jones caught on to the significance of that detail much faster than Neal had, but then, Jones supposedly knew about chains of custody. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“No, you shouldn’t have.”

“Is this going to screw up the case?”

“It could,” Peter said. “It could also get Neal in a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“Hey.” Jones held up his hands. “That’s his problem. I shouldn’t have let myself get conned, but it’s on him to keep his nose clean.”

“Neal says he had no idea what kind of repercussions that little stunt could have, and I believe him because Neal has not been to Quantico. Neal’s understanding of the justice system comes from being a criminal. You, on the other hand, are expected to know better.”

“Yes, sir,” Jones said, raising his chin a little.

“I’ve explained to Neal that he is not to handle evidence except under the direct supervision of an agent. I also told him he should come to me first—if he asks you to show him something, and I’m available, he’s conning you. If I’m not available, and it’s not urgent, he might be conning you. Use your judgment. If you sign something out for him, watch him, every second. Neal is a tremendous asset—and he’s likeable, I know he’s likeable—but he’s not trustworthy, and that means the rest of us have to be above reproach. Are we clear?”

“Clear.”

“All right. Get back to work.”

There was a lot to do following up on the Hagan lead, and Peter didn’t have time to puzzle over the mystery that was Neal Caffrey. They found Hagan’s home address fairly easily, and discovered that he was currently working on a church restoration on Third Street. He wouldn’t be working on the bonds at either place, but they could arrange surveillance on both locations, and hopefully he’d lead them to his other “workplace.” But they also had to dig deeper into the city records to find out if he owned or leased any other property, as well as checking for property outside New York, and look for aliases or known associates whose names he might have property under.

There wasn’t a lot Neal could do to help with the afternoon’s work, since Peter wasn’t willing to let him into the FBI databases just yet. He did generate some search results he could print out and have Neal go over—it didn’t really save the rest of them much time, but an unoccupied Neal was a danger to himself. Still, Neal had trouble concealing his boredom and skepticism with the whole situation.

“Welcome to the glamorous world of the FBI,” Peter said, perching on the edge of Neal’s desk.

Neal did the wide-eyed, scared thing for a second, then said, “Is this really what you do? Did you catch me by doing stuff like this?”

Right, Neal had only seen glimpses of the more exciting parts of the search for him. He had no idea. “Searching property records? No. You never owned or rented any real estate under your own name, but we didn’t know that until we checked. It’s part of the process.” Peter shrugged. “With you, it was more airline records, security tapes at major museums, things like that. It wasn’t always exciting. Running cons must have boring parts, too.”

Neal considered that for a moment, then shook his head with a faint smile. “Not really. I mean, there’s research, but you know what you’re looking for and some idea of where to find it. And setups, sometimes those can get dreary, but knowing you could get caught keeps it interesting.”

“Well, putting criminals behind bars is interesting, too. What would you be doing if this were a con? Say you wanted to—I don’t know. Steal the forged bonds so you could sell them yourself.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Neal said. “If you steal from citizens, they wait for the police to arrest you. Steal from criminals, and people can get killed. But if I needed to know where Hagan does his off-the-books work…I’d ask people. We’re not friends,” he added hastily. “Never ran with any of the same crews. But it’s a small world. Chances are I know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody….”

“Ah.”

“Or I would, if I hadn’t been out of the game for four years,” Neal clarified. “I don’t have the contacts anymore, and anyway, no one would tell me anything now, unless they’re desperate get a reputation as a snitch.” He brightened. “If Hagan has any known associates awaiting trial, I could talk up the benefits of cooperating with the Feds.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Peter said. It was a use of Neal he hadn’t thought of. “In the meantime.” He took another stack of documents off the printer. “Check over these.”

They knocked off work not too long after five. There was plenty of work left to do, but with this kind of thing, you had to pace yourself. If you kept slogging away at it too long, you’d get sloppy, start making mistakes. Tomorrow, they should have enough to get the surveillance started; that way, they could have a little more variety, switch off tasks so they didn’t get burned out.

On the ride home, Neal seemed more relaxed than he’d ever been alone with Peter. It was as if being reamed out for screwing up had settled him down somehow.

Abruptly, Peter realized that was exactly what had happened. Hell, Elizabeth had shoved it in his face a few times—He’s afraid of the collar. He wasn’t afraid of it in the abstract; he expected that if he did something Peter didn’t like, Peter would hurt him.

He felt sick.

“Hey, are you okay?” Neal asked, interrupting his thoughts.

And that was proof that Neal really did feel better, if he was speaking without being spoken to. “Yeah, I’m fine.” He glanced over. “Are you? I mean—this is all pretty new for you.”

Neal turned toward the window. “Yeah. Listen, I really am sorry about the thing with the bond. I didn’t know.”

“I know. The first week in a new job, everybody makes mistakes.”

“Not in my line of work. Former line of work.”

Right. In Neal’s experience, rookie mistakes could get you and your friends arrested. And he’d been running scams since he was fifteen. He’d literally never had a legitimate job. In some ways, Neal was very, very young. “Well, that was then,” Peter said. He gave Neal the same advice his father had given him before his first day at his first job. “Do your best, and don’t make the same mistake twice.” His father had also added, “Show up on time,” but since Peter was his ride to work, Neal had that part covered.

#

Elizabeth was standing in front of the open refrigerator, staring at the contents, when Peter and Neal came home. They really had to go to the market; she didn’t see anything that looked like it could be turned into dinner. “Hi honey, Neal. I’m thinking takeout.”

Neal peered around her shoulder. “Hm. Let me wash my hands, and I’ll see what I can do.” He went up the stairs, seeming almost jaunty.

Peter leaned against the counter. “You were right.”

“Honey, you should just always hold that in your mind. What have you seen reason about now?”

He pointed up at the ceiling, then at his neck. Ah. Neal’s collar. “I screwed up,” he admitted.

“He seems better,” she pointed out. “Did you fix it?”

“By accident. He…did something stupid. I yelled at him. Now he’s happy.”

Elizabeth connected the dots. She was relieved, too, although probably not as much as Neal was. Peter hadn’t directly said whether he’d used the collar on Neal yet, or if he planned to. She hadn’t asked—if there was something that ugly in her husband, she didn’t want to know. “What did he do?”

“Conned Jones into signing a vital piece of evidence out of the lockup for him.”

That did sound bad. “What did he do with it?”

“Sat at his desk and looked at it with a magnifying glass.”

That did not sound so bad. “And?”

“And identified the forger.”

“And this is what you yelled at him for?”

Peter opened his mouth; then they both heard Neal coming down the stairs. They put the conversation on hold.

Neal breezed into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He unwrapped a chunk of cheese and sniffed it gingerly. “Okay. I can make this work.”

“You don’t have to cook for us,” Peter said.

Neal hesitated. “I know.”

“We can get takeout.”

Trust Peter to miss the point. Neal wanted to do something for them. Looking a little dejected, he started to put the cheese back.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I want to see where this is going. Anyway, I think it’s Neal’s turn. Do you think you can find everything you need?”

“Yeah,” Neal said quickly.

“Yell if you need help. Don’t give Satch any cheese; it makes him gassy.” She shooed Peter out of the kitchen, following him when he went upstairs to lock up his gun.

“I don’t want to treat him like a houseboy,” Peter said, once they were in their room with the door shut. “Especially not….”

They were still on that? “So you’re saying that cooking dinner for the other people you live with is somehow degrading? If I had realized you felt that way, the last ten years would have been very different.”

“You know that’s not what I meant. It’s just….”

“He lives here,” she reminded him. “He’s not a guest, and he’s not a servant. This is his home. And did you even consider that maybe he likes cooking?”

Peter clearly hadn’t. He cooked, if she asked him to, and even volunteered if she was busy or had a hard day, but he did it because somebody had to, not as a source of pleasure. El did more than her share because she did like it. Sometimes it was creative and fun, and even when it wasn’t, it felt good to feed the people you loved. “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. Again.”

“Like I said, just hold on to that thought. Now,” she picked up the earlier conversation. “Why did you yell at Neal for finding an important clue? Isn’t that what he’s there for?”

Peter tried to explain. She had to ask several follow-up questions before it was clear—it was one of those things the FBI was fussy about.

“He didn’t get it, either,” Peter said. “I don’t know why he decided to sneak around behind my back—maybe just to see if he could. And he shouldn’t have been able to,” he added crossly.

“I hope you weren’t too hard on Clinton,” she said. “Neal can be very convincing, you know.”

“I was exactly hard enough on Jones.”

They went back downstairs. Peter took Satch for a trip around the block, and then they watched TV, ignoring the intriguing smells and sounds—the clatter of a whisk against a bowl, a muttered, “Oops,” and the occasional snatch of whistling—until Neal told them dinner was ready.

He’d set the table, too, and folded the napkins into flowers. Dinner was a quiche—that made sense; they had eggs and milk, and of course the cheese—which he’d already cut and plated, with a slightly overripe pear sliced and arranged in a little fan on each plate.

“Quiche?” Peter muttered.

“Don’t worry, honey, you’re still a real man.”

Neal looked quizzical.

“A book that came out when you were a toddler,” Peter explained. “It was called Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche.” He sat down and poked at his serving with his fork.

“Huh.”

“I think it’s the name,” Elizabeth said, slipping into her chair. “It sounds sissy. If you’re a Neanderthal.”

“In England, they call it ‘egg pie,’” Neal said, sitting down too. “I guess it’s more butch that way.”

The quiche was surprisingly good, especially considering they didn’t have any bacon, spinach, or mushrooms in the house. “Is this salmon?” She vaguely remembered that there might have been a can of it gathering dust in the back of the pantry.

Neal nodded. “I’ve had quiche with smoked salmon in it—I figured this would work.”

“It does.” The flavor was unexpected, but good. “Where did you learn to cook?” Peter’s mention of Neal as a toddler made her wonder what his childhood had been like. She pictured him wearing a suit and picking pockets on the playground, but that couldn’t be accurate.

“Oh, here and there. Sometimes you don’t want to be seen in restaurants—or you have to save your pennies. ‘A human being should be able to cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.’”

“Is that a quote?” Peter asked.

“Probably. Something a friend of mine used to say. There’s more to the list, but I don’t remember it all.”

“Clean a bathroom,” El suggested. “Wash clothes. Get a baby to sleep.”

Peter gave her a concerned look. They had decided, with some reluctance, that children didn’t fit in their lives, but she knew Peter felt guilty that the nature of his job was a major factor in the decision. She smiled back at him, and he said, teasing, “Drive a stick shift.”

Elizabeth stuck her tongue out at him; that was something she had never learned to do. “Accept a compliment.”

“Win at cards,” Neal suggested.

“Lose at cards,” Peter said significantly.

Elizabeth stepped in to stop them going toe-to-toe. “Build a fire.”

“Oh, good one,” Neal said. “Um…communicate with someone when you don’t speak the same language.”

They kept going for several more rounds. As the conversation drifted to other topics, Elizabeth wondered if Neal had played this game with the “friend” he mentioned, and if so, what they put on their lists. Did Neal Caffrey think that, for example, every human being should know how to hot wire a car or short-count a cashier?

They had long ago polished off the last of the quiche when Satch went to the back door and whined.

“It’s really late,” Peter realized, looking at his watch.

“Time flies when you’re having fun,” Elizabeth said. “Thank you for a lovely evening, Neal. She stacked the plates. “We’d better wash these up quick and go to bed.”

#

Outside, Satch started barking. In a way, it was good timing—both Burkes were up to their elbows in soapsuds, so it was easy for him to say, “I’ll get him,” and slip out.

But they really had had a nice evening, and Neal hated the idea that if Satch was barking at the same “cat” as last night, and they got caught, the Burkes would think he’d run the whole dinner scam for that reason.

“Easy, Satch, settle down.” Neal caught him by the collar and wrapped one hand around his muzzle, silencing him.

A figure stepped out of the shadow of the neighbor’s carport. “There’s a mockingbird in the park.”

“Moz, I don’t have a lot of time, and we’re taking a big risk here.”

“What was I going to do, not come? Can I see it?”

Neal leaned over the fence to let him get a look at the collar. “Can you pick it?”

“No. No way.”

“Where’s Kate? Why isn’t she here? No, wait, I shouldn’t have details. Just, is she okay?”

“In the wind,” Moz said. “As far as I know, she’s okay.”

That stung. He had been careful not to give the Feds enough to make anything stick against her, at considerable cost to himself. He had said he wanted her to move on with her life, but he was still a little hurt that she actually had.

“I’m sorry, man.”

“It’s for the best,” Neal said. It was, really.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded. “Yeah—if you’re ever in a position to choose, take prison. But I’m okay.”

Mozzie held out his hand and, when Neal shook it, palmed something off on him.

Neal palmed it back. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Listen, thanks, but…don’t do this again. It’s too risky.”

“Okay. Au revior, mon frère.”

Neal nodded, and watched Mozzie fade back into the shadows before turning and taking Satch back to the house.

When he got there, Burke was standing just to one side of the back door, where his body wouldn’t block the light from inside. “Who’re you talking to?”

Oh, shit. “Nobody.”

“Who was standing in my yard, thirty yards from my wife? ” Voice and expression indicated that he was not playing around.

Neal understood now that Burke wouldn’t hurt him every time he made a mistake, but protecting his family was another matter. “Havisham.” He was pretty sure the Feds had nothing to hang on that alias, and if he was wrong Mozzie would never forgive him, but he couldn’t let Burke think he’d allow anything that would put Elizabeth in danger. He would recognize the name, and he knew ‘Havisham’ was nonviolent.

“One of your accomplices.”

“A friend.” Sure, he was that too, but.… “My best friend. He just wanted to see that I was okay.” Burke would understand that, wouldn’t he?

“What was he going to do if you weren’t?”

“He offered me a cyanide capsule,” Neal admitted. “I didn’t take it.”

Burke shook his head and muttered, “Havisham. That lunatic is your best friend?”

The danger seemed to have passed. Maybe Burke knew more about ‘Havisham’ than Neal realized, or Mozzie would have liked. “Yes.”

“He’d come to less federal attention if he stayed away from the conspiracy theory websites,” Burke said.

Neal sort of hoped Mozzie did turn up again somewhere, though—Neal ought to pass along that bit of intel, as well as let him know the Havisham identity was compromised.

#

Peter was a little worried about what Neal would get up to now that he wasn’t afraid, but he behaved himself all day on Friday. When they took their first shift surveilling Hagan, he observed, “This is not what I expected the FBI surveillance van to be like,” and spent most of the time complaining about the décor, but Peter couldn’t really fault him for that. Back in the office, when they were going through property records again, he asked, “Do you guys check storage unit rentals when you do this?”

“Yeah,” Peter said. “Why, does something point to him doing this in one?”

“No, it was just a thought. He wouldn’t necessarily need a lot of space. But he would need plenty of electricity, and running that size of a generator would attract attention. So, probably not.”

When they discussed the weekend surveillance schedule, Peter offered to take Saturday morning, to get their turn out of the way.

“You’re doing surveillance on Saturday?” Neal asked.

“Criminals don’t take weekends off, and neither does the FBI.”

“Oh, I know,” Neal said. “I’m just surprised. About Saturday.”

Peter couldn’t imagine why, but decided not to worry about it.

On the way out for the day, Peter saw the bespectacled bald man lurking again. He darted off into the rush-hour sidewalk traffic when he saw Peter watching him. “Havisham?” he asked Neal.

“Yeah.”

For a conspiracy-theorist whackjob like Havisham to show his face near the FBI building, not once but twice, took some powerful motivation. “He must be a very good friend.” Peter would have been more worried, but everything he had on Havisham indicated he was harmless, unless you were, say, a minimally-secured valuable work of art or evidence of an alien autopsy.

“Yeah, he…cares about me a lot.”

They got into the car. “It’s not a good idea for you to be sneaking around having contact with criminal associates.”

“I know, and I tried to tell him that, but he must not have gotten it. Or he’s really worried about me. This--” Neal pointed to the collar “—has to freak him out pretty bad.”

One of the things Peter knew and admired about Neal was that he was deeply loyal to his inner circle. It was one factor that led him to believe this arrangement would work out—Neal had some concept of right and wrong, just calibrated a little differently than most people’s. Using that against him by keeping him from seeing someone that was obviously important to him didn’t sit well.

On the other hand, Havisham was exactly the sort of contact Neal would need to play out Peter’s nightmare scenario of running cons from the middle of the FBI. “If Havisham wants to see you, he can come to the house and knock on the front door,” Peter decided. “I’ll supervise the visit, so it’s all aboveboard. I’m not going to extend that invitation to everyone you know, but I can cope with Havisham.”

“I can’t really see Havisham knocking on a Fed’s front door,” Neal said, “but I appreciate the gesture.”

The next day, when Peter got up to get ready for his shift in the surveillance van, El and Neal were already up to something elaborate in the kitchen, which seemed to require every pot, pan, and mixing bowl in the house. El had done a major grocery-store run on her way home the last night, and they looked to be using about half of what she’d bought.

El turned a complicated stirring operation over to Neal and gave Peter a kiss. “Good morning.”

“Morning. I hope that isn’t breakfast; we’ve got to get going.” Whatever it was didn’t look like it was even close to being ready.

“No, that’s for later. I’ll get you a bagel.”

Neal was barefoot and in an apron over a black turtleneck, with traces of flour on his slacks. “You need to get ready to go, too,” Peter reminded him.

Neal and El exchanged a look. “Honey, do you really need Neal today? Just to sit in the van?”

“I hate the van,” Neal added.

“He hates the van,” Elizabeth echoed. “And he’s helping me here.”

Peter considered. It was true that there wasn’t really any need for Neal’s skill set for this morning’s work, but he was going to be away for several hours. Neal could get up to a lot of trouble in a few hours.

But so far, he had been very good. And it was hard to resist the two pleading expressions that El and Neal turned on him. “You’re not going anywhere?” he asked El.

“Nope.”

“Okay.” He took Neal’s remote out of his pocket and put it on the table. He pointed at Neal. “You, behave yourself.” He turned to Elizabeth. “And you, don’t let him get away with anything. I’ll be on my way back around noon, one at the latest.”

He ate his bagel on the drive in, and took his place in the surveillance van, relieving an agent they’d borrowed from another team for the night shift. There was also a technician there to help run the equipment, since Jones and Berrigan were working other shifts. His name was Luis; Peter knew him slightly.

“No Caffrey today?” Luis asked after they had been sitting for about half an hour.

“No, he’s helping my wife with something.”

“You trust him with your wife?”

Neal flirted with Elizabeth constantly, but Burke was sure it didn’t mean anything. He flirted with everyone. He flirted with Satch. But he didn’t want to try to explain that to an acquaintance, so he said, “I trust my wife.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean that. Of course your wife wouldn’t cheat on you with Caffrey. But he’s a con; he might not give her a choice.”

“He’s nonviolent.”

“Well, you’re the expert on Caffrey.”

“Yes,” Peter said. “I am.”

Luis picked another topic the next time he decided to start a conversation.

Nothing happened on the stakeout—Hagan didn’t leave the apartment; hell, he was probably still asleep. The only surprise was that Berrigan turned up early, a little after eleven.

“Hey. I thought you had a hot date last night.”

“Turns out it wasn’t so hot,” she answered, taking a seat. “I was in bed—alone—by ten.”

“That’s a shame.”

“I’ll get over it. I didn’t have anything better to do, so I decided to come in early so you could get home to Mrs. Burke. Somebody might as well get something out of this weekend.”

He wasn’t going to argue with that. As he collected his car and headed home, he considered calling El to tell her he was on his way, but decided to make it a surprise. Peter leaving work early hardly ever happened, unlike the reverse. He let himself in the house, calling, “Honey, I’m ho--”

The kitchen was a disaster area. There was a bag of flour laying in the middle of the floor, a split open along one side, looking like it had exploded all over the place. Several bowls, an open carton of eggs, and a dripping electric mixer were in disarray on the counter. “El? Neal?”

There was no answer. He jogged into the other room and up the stairs. “El? Elizabeth!”

She wasn’t up there, and neither was Neal. He went back to the kitchen, fighting a surge of alarm. He hadn’t looked for a note. Everything could still be okay.

There was no note, and the remote to Neal’s collar was still sitting where he had left it on the table. He remembered Luis’s insinuation.

Sure, the Neal Caffrey he knew wasn’t violent, but prison could change people. Desperation could change people. Neal wouldn’t hurt people for money, but for safety, freedom?

Sometimes Peter grasped one of Neal’s scams in a single flash of insight, a Eureka moment—usually just after Neal had pulled it off. Usually it thrilled him, but not this time.

Get them to trust him. Get Elizabeth to like him, feel sorry for him and take his side. Complain about the van, and con Elizabeth into suggesting he stay home alone with her, and probably to think it was her idea.

Then Havisham shows up. Neal gets El to let him in, using the “Peter said I could” scam that already worked on Jones. That El already knew worked on Jones, and hadn’t lead to anything she considered serious consequences.

And then—Neal still had the collar on; Peter would have been notified if he didn’t, but if he had a hostage, and an accomplice who could threaten to hurt the hostage even if he was incapacitated, the collar was…not neutralized, but less of a factor. Especially if the hostage was someone the person holding the remote, the person who would be first on the scene, would rather cut off his own head than see hurt.

Peter snatched up the remote and ran back to the car, pulling up the collar’s tracking data on his phone. They hadn’t gotten far yet—less than a mile. Thank God for Berrigan’s date going badly. He dropped the phone and slammed the car into reverse, backing recklessly out of his parking space. Once he was pointing in the right direction, he picked up the remote, cranked the intensity up to nine, and held the button down as he drove.

#

“All these people driving by must be thinking, ‘Someone should take that nice clean dog away from those filthy hobos,’” Neal said.

They had wiped the flour off their faces, and some of what was on their hands and arms had come off while they were washing Satch, but their clothes and hair were still covered. Neal, since he was wearing black, looked even worse than she did. Earlier in the day, Neal had admitted to his self-consciousness about being seen in the collar. Hence the turtleneck, apparently, but it didn’t really help; it just made him look like he had a very large, very geometrically shaped goiter. Elizabeth thought he was probably right, though, that it wasn’t the first thing anyone would notice just at the moment.

Still, they had to get Satch cleaned up first. He had been at point-blank range when the flour bag hit the floor, and he was caked with it. And they could hardly wash him in the tub—that much flour going down the drain would clog up the pipes. Luckily, she remembered that the car wash not too far away had adapted one of the bays into a dog wash. It was even close enough that they could walk, and not get flour all over her van.

“You can have the first shower when we get back,” Neal said. “I’ll start cleaning up the kitchen.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s my fault…I did say ‘toss me that new bag of flour.’” Peter would have known better than to take her literally, but Neal had no way of knowing how hopeless she was at sports.

“But it’s not my anniversary,” Neal pointed out.

He had a point. “All right, if you insist.”

“I wonder if we can salvage enough flour to finish the crepes.”

“I don’t know. We can have Peter pick up another bag on the way--” She stopped abruptly when Neal gasped. “What’s wrong?”

He raised his hand toward the collar. “It’s okay. It’s just—this happened before, I just need to--” He dropped to his knees, choking back a scream.

Elizabeth fumbled for her cell phone. Thankfully, Peter answered on the first ring. “Peter, it’s Neal. He--”

“I’m on my way,” he said.

“No,” she said. He would still be in Manhattan, and it would take far too long for him to get here. Neal was getting worse by the second; as she watched, he doubled over and vomited. “There’s something wrong with the collar, it’s really bad. I have to get it off him--”

“What?” Peter said.

Neal lurched onto his side. “His collar’s going off, and--”

“He’s not hurting you?”

“Of course he’s not—Peter, what the hell did you do?” she screamed. Neal was convulsing at her feet. She threw the phone as hard as she could, into the street, and knelt next to him, scrambling to pull down the turtleneck and yank uselessly at the collar.

Peter arrived a moment later, slamming the car to a stop and jumping out, leaving the engine running and the door agape. “Neal! Oh, God, I am so sorry, Neal.” He looked at her, desperately. “El--”

She slapped him, as hard as she could.

“I thought he was hurting you!” He reached for the collar, tugging at it the same way she had. “It’s off, I turned it off as soon as I realized. Neal, it’s okay.” Another convulsion racked Neal’s body. “This shouldn’t be happening.”

“You think?” Elizabeth roared.

“No, I mean--” He got out his phone and dialed. “Prisoner 05671358. I gave him a collar correction, and he’s having some kind of seizure. What? Nine, I think. I don’t know. Too long.” He listened for a moment. El could hear the voice on the other end, sounding bureaucratic and unconcerned, although she couldn’t make out the words. “That can—the fuck it can. What do I do? El, where’s your phone? Call an ambulance--”

She ran into the street for her phone, but it was completely smashed. When she got back, Peter had his hand on Neal’s neck. “Yeah, it’s beating. His pulse is really fast--” It was a different tinny voice on the other end of the phone now. Peter looked up at her. “They got me the prison doctor on the line now; he says he’ll be all right.” Into the phone, he said, “Look, this was a mistake, a really big mistake. He doesn’t deserve this. What can I--”

The doctor started to answer. El leaned in to try to hear what he was saying, and Peter switched the phone to speaker. “—just have to wait it out. The seizures have stopped?”

“Yeah,” Peter said. “He’s not conscious--”

“That’s probably for the best. Make him as comfortable as you can, and let him wake up on his own. There will be muscle soreness from the convulsions—you can give him an OTC pain reliever.”

“Okay,” Peter said.

“I’ll give you my direct number; you can call back if you have any other questions.”

Peter found a pen to take down the number, writing it on the inside of his arm. She’d have been happy to scratch it there in blood.

But this wasn’t the time to be angry with Peter; she could do that when the immediate crisis was over. She helped Peter shift Neal into the backseat of the car and rounded up Satch, who fortunately hadn’t gone far. She loaded Satch into the front seat and climbed into the back with Neal, easing his head into her lap.

She stroked his hair and spoke to him gently, not really thinking it would help, but sure it couldn’t hurt. By the time they got to the house, he was breathing a little more easily. She let Peter carry him up to bed, then firmly shut him out of the room while she got Neal undressed, wiped off as much of the flour as she could, and re-dressed him in his pyjamas.

Then she tucked him into bed, went downstairs, and very calmly told Peter she wanted a divorce.

#

Peter was on his hands and knees sweeping flour into a dustpan when El walked into the kitchen. She was covered in streaks of damp flour, her hair in disarray, but her voice was absolutely level when she said, “I want a divorce.”

“What? El, you’re upset, we’re both upset--”

“The man I love would not do that to anybody.”

“I thought he was hurting you,” Peter said. He’d already told her that, but maybe it hadn’t sunk in.

“Even if he was. ”

She was absolutely serious, Peter realized. She believed, at least, that even if the hysterical conclusion he had jumped to had been true, she wouldn’t have wanted him to do it. “Then I’m not him.” He dropped the dust broom on the floor with a clatter. “Because—this was horrible, it was a mistake, and I regret it more than I have words for, but if he really was hurting you, and I was sure, I would do it again. I’d do it to myself, if I was hurting you.”

“Then do it! ” Her icy calm broke and she sobbed, hugging her arms around herself. “You think finding out your husband is a monster doesn’t hurt?”

Peter reached for her. She pulled away for a moment, then collapsed into his arms, crying against his shoulder. He rubbed her back as she sobbed, saying, over and over, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

After a long time, she sat back on her heels, wiped her eyes with a floury sleeve, and nodded.

Ten years of marriage allowed him to read that as permission to attempt to explain himself. “First of all, I had no idea it would be that bad. I thought it was—like the dog ones.” When Satch was a puppy and barking all the time when they were out, causing the neighbors to complain, the first trainer they went to had tried to sell them an electric anti-bark collar. They had insisted that the trainer take it out of the packaging so they could put it on their arms and see what it felt like. They had both agreed it wasn’t something they wanted to use on their baby, and had gone looking for another trainer, but for a human being, who could understand what he’d done wrong and why it was happening, Peter thought it was within reason.

“But you’d do it again,” Elizabeth reminded him.

“If he was hurting you. If I was sure. To stop him, not—not to punish him, not to make him suffer, but if it was the best way to stop him, yes. But that’s the only way I’d do it, now that I know.” The likelihood of that happening was so remote that it would have been easy just to lie and say no, never, no matter what, but he and El were always honest with each other, about the things that mattered, and this mattered. “Can you live with that?” he asked, half-afraid to hear the answer.

El picked up a few grains of flour with her fingertip and rubbed them between her finger and thumb. “If he was hurting you, and I was sure, and it was the only way to stop him—I wouldn’t,” she said. “Can you live with that?”

“Yes,” he answered, without hesitation. He couldn’t imagine El doing that, and wouldn’t want her to.

He wondered if that realization was supposed to change his position on the issue. Maybe, but after examining it from that angle, he still felt the same way. Maybe it was because enforcing the law was his job, maybe because bringing Neal into their lives was his idea and his responsibility, maybe because he was secretly a sexist pig, it was right for him to do it, and not for El.

“Okay,” she said. “I…I can too.”

They cleaned up the kitchen, and Elizabeth allowed him to explain what he thought had happened. “I can’t believe you’d think Neal could do something like that,” she said when he had finished.

“I—panicked. I was already nervous about leaving him here with you, and then I got home, and the kitchen looked like a crime scene, and I couldn’t find you—I did check for a note,” he added belatedly.

“We didn’t think to leave one. I was sure we’d be back before you got home.”

“You said you weren’t going anywhere. If you had, I would have reminded you that you had to take his remote with you.” He held up his hands quickly. “I am not blaming you. I take full responsibility for this. I’m just saying, there were details that made it look like something bad was happening.”

“I didn’t remember the remote until we were at the end of the block,” Elizabeth admitted. “It did cross my mind to go back for it, but I didn’t want it, and I knew I wouldn’t…now I wish I had taken it.”

“Where did you go?” Peter asked. “What on Earth possessed you to cover the kitchen and yourselves with flour and then take the dog for a walk?” His mind had been occupied by more important questions for a long time, but now that Neal was as okay as he could be, and he was fairly sure he wasn’t on his way to divorce court, he had to wonder.

Elizabeth explained. Peter could picture it—Neal throwing the bag of flour, it blasting them, the kitchen, and the dog like a very gentle bomb, and both of them laughing like loons. It would have been hilarious if not for what had happened afterwards. What he had done afterwards.

And the decision that taking Satch to the dog wash was the first thing to do in dealing with the mess was completely reasonable—Peter appreciated their thinking about the plumbing. Peter realized he had been half-hoping that the impetus for the situation was some sort of zany scheme that Neal cooked up. Not that that would even begin to excuse what Peter did, but it was worse knowing that Neal was completely, one-hundred-percent blameless. El had made a couple of minor mistakes, Peter had made a huge one, but Neal had done absolutely nothing wrong, and he was the one who had suffered.

“I don’t know how I can even begin to make this up to him,” he said, looking down at the floor.

“Honey,” El said, looking at him with honest pity in her eyes. “You can’t.”

#

Every part of his body hurt. For a moment, he wasn’t sure where he was. In a hotel bed, being ministered to by Kate after a brutal beating by someone they’d conned?

No, Kate was gone. Prison, right. People beat you in prison. Except prison didn’t have fluffy pillows.

His chin clunked against the collar, and he remembered. All of it. Taking Satch to the dog washing station, remembering Burke had told him not to leave the house, but figuring the worst he’d get was a talking-to. Then the collar, and how he’d tried to pretend to Elizabeth that it was all right, but only being able to hold it together for a second or two.

Then things got a little fuzzy. Burke had been there, and there was a lot of yelling. Yelling and pain. Elizabeth had been upset.

He had thought, in the tiny space of time that he was able to think, that the collar must have been switched back to automatic again—maybe Burke had done it before leaving the house. But that didn’t make sense—you didn’t get corrections that strong on automatic, and that whole assumption had been based on Burke not being there.

Burke had been there.

He felt his eyelids prickle, and started to take a deep breath to calm himself, stopping when that action brought a fresh wave of pain. He closed his eyes and turned his face into the pillow instead.

At least Burke was letting him sleep it off, here in the nice soft bed they gave him. It had been a hell of a lot worse waking up face-down on concrete with his hands cuffed behind his back, and forced onto his feet as soon as he was even remotely capable of it. That was…that wasn’t nothing. Maybe it meant he could take his licks and be forgiven.

He drowsed, sometimes half-awake, sometimes fully asleep. He next woke when the door to his room opened.

Looking up was an effort, but he managed. Burke.

“Neal,” he said.

“Agent Burke. I’m…really, really sorry. I…could you, tell me what I did, please? I’m just, if I could know where I crossed the line…leaving the house, I’m guessing leaving the house, but if I could be sure….”

“Neal.” Burke suddenly got a lot shorter, his face nearly level with Neal’s on the pillow. “It was a mistake. A really terrible mistake.”

His voice was terribly gentle, and Neal could only think of one reason for that. Bringing him here had been a mistake, and Peter was sending him back to prison. “It wasn’t. Peter, I really, really want to stay with you. I want to be good. I swear I’ll do better—you don’t have to let me live here; you could keep me at the FBI and just have me work with you. That would—I mean, that would be so much easier for you, and it’s—it’s hard to remember I’m not a real person, when I’m here. I swear to God, Peter, I swear on, on Kate’s life, I’ll be good, I will, I’ll do everything you say. Please don’t send me back.”

“Oh, God, Neal, that’s not what I meant.” Peter’s voice was thick, and his hand settled on Neal’s back. “Of course you’re staying. I meant…shocking you. Hurting you. That was a mistake. I—misunderstood some things, and I was wrong, and I am so, so sorry.”

Neal ran that over in his mind a couple of times to make sure he was understanding it right. He risked a glance up at Peter. He was crying; that’s why his voice was all funny. “You’re not mad at me? I get to stay?”

“Yes,” Peter said. “I’m not even remotely mad at you, and you get to stay.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much.” Peter was still patting him, and even though he hurt, it felt good, having Peter’s hand on him, being gentle. No one had touched him gently in years, unless you counted shaking Mozzie’s hand last night.

“Neal…you have nothing to thank me for. You didn’t do anything wrong. This was entirely my fault. You—you had a seizure. I shocked you hard enough to give you a seizure.”

“Yeah, I get those,” he said absently. Peter wasn’t mad at him. He was going to stay. The pain was—incidental. He’d feel like shit for a day or two, but things would go back to normal.

Peter’s hand stilled. “You’re epileptic?”

“What? No, no, just with the collar. Some people get them with the higher-level corrections. Lucky me.”

“You’ve had…that’s happened before?”

“Yeah. At the beginning.”

“The beginning of what?”

“When they put the collar on. They had the prison doctor check me out; it’s not dangerous, just…scary.”

“When did--”

“Peter.” Elizabeth was standing in the doorway.

“We can talk about it later,” Peter said. “All you have to know right now is, you didn’t do anything wrong, I’m very sorry, and you’re safe. It’s not going to happen again.”

Elizabeth came into the room and knelt down next to Peter. “How are you feeling, sweetie?”

“Relieved,” he said. “Like I was run over by a truck, but really, really relieved. Peter isn’t mad at me, and he says I can stay.”

“Oh, Neal, i>honey.”

Now she was crying, too. He never wanted to make Elizabeth cry. He searched for something to lighten the mood. “Betcha this is the worst one yet.”

“Worst what?” Peter asked.

“Anniversary. We never even finished making dinner.” He tilted his head to get a better look at Peter. “We were making crepes, and chocolate mousse, and…some other stuff, and I was gonna buzz off to my room so you could have some privacy. You usually remember the day before and call in favors to get reservations somewhere, but it was way too late to get a convict sitter, so…Chez Caffrey.”

“As if I didn’t feel bad enough already,” Peter muttered. “El, I suppose it pales in comparison to everything else, but I’m sorry about that, too.”

“You are one sorry son of a bitch today, Peter Burke,” she said. “Don’t worry about that for a second, Neal. Our anniversary isn’t important. We’ll have another one next year.”

Peter looked strangely hopeful at that.

“Do you want some Tylenol?” Elizabeth asked. “The doctor said you could have some.”

He looked at Peter. “Can I?”

“Yes. God, yes. Of course.”

Elizabeth left the room for a moment and came back with a glass of water and two pill bottles. “Actually, I have a few of these Percocet left from when I had dental surgery—do you want some of those?”

That had a better chance of doing him some good than Tylenol, but.… “I’d better not. It says right there on the label, it’s a violation of federal law, and we’ve got a Fed in the room.” It looked like everything was going to be okay, but he didn’t want to push his luck.

“Peter, turn your back,” Elizabeth said.

“I’m not a narc,” he said instead, sounding insulted. Odd, there must be some sort of rivalry there that Neal didn’t know about. He took the prescription bottle from Elizabeth and shook out two tablets.

They helped him sit up, and Elizabeth gave him a glass of water, and Peter gave him the two tablets.

“These are Tylenol, right?” he said, trying to wink at Elizabeth and ending up blinking instead.

“Yes,” Peter said.

He was strangely thirsty, and after taking the pills he gulped down the entire glass of water. “Okay, now I have to go to the bathroom.”

Peter helped him in there, but left him alone for the actual business, which he was thankful for. At the moment, a simple piss felt like the most complicated con he had ever orchestrated.

Afterwards, Elizabeth asked him if he thought he could handle eating something.

“Yeah, I could try.” He knew he’d feel even worse tomorrow if he didn’t, and Percocet on an empty stomach could make him nauseous. “But I don’t know about the stairs.”

“We’ll bring you a tray in bed.”

“Mm. I hate eating in bed. I know it’s supposed to be decadent, but it’s just…messy.”

They settled on the office, where Elizabeth ensconced him on the futon with a folding table in front of him. The office was interesting—not in its own right, but because he hadn’t had a chance to explore it yet, since it was right next to Peter and Elizabeth’s bedroom. He barely managed to keep from making that observation out loud; something about the moment, him hurting, them taking care of him, was strangely intimate, and gave him unprecedented impulses to be honest without thinking about it. It wasn’t the drugs, he knew—he felt a little dopey, but he could still lie when he felt dopey.

It was an ordinary home office, the kind where it was clear not much work was actually done. There was a battered filing cabinet and a flat-pack desk with an old desktop computer on it. There were a couple of framed posters on the walls—Monet’s Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, that dorm room cliché, and Van Gogh’s Room at Arles, the first version, the one they had in Amsterdam.

“That’s my favorite,” he said, when Elizabeth returned.

She glanced at the plate in her hand. “Dry toast?”

“No, that,” he said, turning his head to look more obviously at the poster. “You know he painted three versions of it? That one’s my favorite. I had a postcard of it when I was a kid. It has the best colors.”

“I’ve always liked it, too,” Elizabeth said, setting the toast in front of him and curling up on the futon beside him. “I got that poster for my dorm room freshman year.”

“Good taste. But Water Lilies is overrated.”

“That one was actually my roommate’s, but she didn’t pack it, so I took it with me.”

That struck Neal as hilarious, and he was trying to laugh without hurting himself when Peter came into the room, carrying a small bowl of chocolate mousse, which he put on Neal’s tray table.

“Peter, did you know your wife has a stolen Monet in your home office?” he said gleefully.

Peter looked at it as he sat down in the desk chair. “It’s a poster.”

“Yahbut, she stole it. It was left unattended and she walked off with it. You’re outnumbered now; there’s two of us art thieves here and only one Fed.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ve been outnumbered since the day I brought you home,” Peter said.

“We should plan a heist,” Neal said happily. That was his very favorite game, even better than Things Every Human Being Should Know How To Do.

“Hm, well, there is a painting of a dinosaur I’ve had my eye on. By Susan Gable, a very promising young artist in the third grade. It’s in Yvonne’s cubicle at the office.”

That wasn’t quite as exciting as Neal had in mind—he’d been thinking the real Room At Arles, which he wouldn’t actually steal because the version he liked belonged to Van Gogh’s estate and that would just be wrong, but it was well within scope for the game. And Elizabeth liked it. When you couldn’t actually give someone something, it helped to pretend. But Elizabeth probably hadn’t played this game before, so he went along with it. “Oh, so we have an inside woman on the inside! That makes it almost too easy.”

“Oh, but she can’t even suspect I’m involved,” Elizabeth said.

They spun an elaborate plan in which Neal was hired by Elizabeth as a receptionist, then after two weeks very publically fired for office supplies and break room refrigerator pilferage, making him an obvious fall guy when the painting went missing. She’d be sure to demand his keys back, but he’d switch them for dummy keys during the handover, and then he’d come back at night to finish the job.

“Then, the next morning, before anyone notices it’s missing, you switch out the security camera tape--”

“There isn’t a security camera,” Elizabeth protested.

“That’s no fun,” he said. “Let’s say there is. You switch it out for an old one we prepared in advance—I know a guy who can alter the date stamp, piece of cake. Then when Yvonne reports the theft, you can say, oh, sure, it must have been Jean-Michel the pilfering office boy, but there’s no proof so nobody can make it stick.”

“You’re French, in this scam?” Peter asked.

“Uh-huh. Visiting the States during my gap year, only I ran out of money so I had to get a job so I can fly home.”

“I gave you the job because I felt sorry for you,” Elizabeth improvised.

“Yeah, good, that covers for me not being a very good secretary. Then, hm, we need to do the handover.”

“I come to the youth hostel where you’re staying to confront you about the theft,” Elizabeth suggested.

“Oh, yeah, and I’m already gone, but you convince them to let you search my room—it doesn’t matter that there’s not a good reason; just be wealthy and indignant and they’ll let you. And I’ll have hidden it…mm, how big is it?”

“Eight and a half by eleven. What about in the drop ceiling?”

“Yeah, that’ll work. I’ll put it in a bag so it doesn’t get insulation on it. And you’ll wear a big coat, so you can carry it out under that. And then…hm, we don’t have to fence it, since you stole it because you love it.”

“Right. We’ll just have to find a good place to put it, where Yvonne won’t see it if she comes over, but I can look at it whenever I want.”

“Yeah, how about…behind the frame of the Water Lilies. That way both of your heists are in the same place; there’s kind of a pleasing symmetry.”

“It’s the perfect crime,” Elizabeth said.

Mozzie would like her, he thought. They both had the same penchant for needless elaboration. “We’ll do it as soon as I get this thing off,” he said, poking at the collar.

It was the wrong thing to say; a shadow passed over Elizabeth’s face.

“Oh, no, no,” he hurried to reassure her. “It’s just, like ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ Something you say. ‘We’ll do it when…’ and then something that’s never going to happen.” He picked up his chocolate mousse. There was a spoon, too, but it seemed very far away, and he just licked the bowl instead. “This is very good. At least we managed to finish something. Did you guys have any?”

“Not yet,” Peter said.

“You should. It’s, uh, Julia Child, out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. How come it isn’t forgery if you cook something somebody else cooked before?” It suddenly seemed like a very profound question.

“Because…food is temporary,” Peter suggested. “You’re supposed to eat it. Nobody’s going to believe that’s the exact bowl of chocolate mousse that Julia Child cooked.”

“Oh, okay, so it’s perishable, and that’s like dating it, so it’s a reproduction-not-a-forgery?” He considered. “What about pickles? Pickles can keep for hundreds of years. They dug up a pharaoh’s pickles.” He wasn’t sure if that was actually true, but it sounded plausible. “Is it illegal to counterfeit Egyptian pickles, Peter?”

“I’d have to look into that.” Peter sounded amused.

“We should do that one next,” he said. “The Egyptian pickle caper. Not now, though, I’m—I think I’m a little stoned,” he realized.

“Just a little,” Elizabeth said.

“Those are some powerful Tylenol,” Neal observed, and giggled. “Maybe Peter can be in on the next heist. I can find a job for a drug traf-traffer, uh, guy who gives you drugs.”

“Maybe,” Elizabeth said. “Right now, I think it’s time for art thieves to go to bed.”

“Yeah, okay.” Elizabeth helped him get up. “You are so nice.” He hugged her.

She hugged him back, stroking his hair.

When she let him go, he hugged Peter, too, not wanting him to be left out. It was bad enough he was a Fed couldn’t be an art thief with them. Peter went stiff for a minute before hugging him back. “Yeah, you’re nice too,” Peter said.

They helped him into his room, and Elizabeth honest-to-god tucked him in, complete with a kiss on the forehead.

“Neal.” She hesitated.

“Hm?”

“How can you—Peter. You’re calling him by his first name—you never did that before, and you started even before you were stoned—and hugging him. How can you possibly forgive him for what he did?”

He’d been worried she was going to ask him something he was too stoned to answer properly, but that was easy. “Nobody’s ever been sorry for hurting me before.”

#

Late in the morning on Sunday, Neal came tottering down the stairs, with Elizabeth hovering a few steps below him as a spotter. Peter knew he had been awake for a while—El had taken him breakfast up there—and figured he probably wanted a change of scenery.

Peter had looked in on Neal several times when he was sleeping, but had kept his distance since he woke up. Neal had been bizarrely, miraculously easy with him last night, when he had every reason to be both pissed off and terrified, but Peter wasn’t expecting that to last. The whole mess had to have been traumatic—first being shocked, then the seizure, then thinking Peter was going to send him back to prison—and he thought that on some level, Neal had just put it aside, hit the re-set button and pretended they were back where they had been the night before, until he had the strength to deal with it. Peter didn’t deserve the reprieve, but it hadn’t been for his benefit. So he had sat and watched Neal and El joke around, occasionally participating, and thinking, this is what it could have been like.

It was what he had wanted, hoped for, when he’d first thought of bringing Neal home—Neal happy and playful and one of the family. He’d thought it would take Neal a while to adjust, to realize that having one place to belong was better than running around the world committing crimes, one step ahead of the law. But they’d love him, keep him out of trouble, and take care of him when he needed to be taken care of—Peter had fondly imagined Neal sustaining some minor injury and them coddling him beyond reason.

Peter had never imagined that he’d be the one to hurt him.

Elizabeth helped Neal get settled in the armchair that had, in the short time he’d lived here, become his spot in the living room. “I’ll make you that French toast, okay?”

Neal nodded. “Thanks.”

She patted his shoulder and left for the kitchen.

For a long moment, they both sat, avoiding looking at each other. Peter thought there ought to be a loudly ticking clock in the background, to underscore the uncomfortable silence.

“Peter.”

He was almost crushed with relief at hearing his name, normal and ordinary in Neal’s mouth. During the chase, and when he wrote from prison, Neal had always called him “Peter,” but since the collar, Neal had usually avoided addressing him at all, sometimes resorting to an “Agent Burke” that Peter had—wrongly, he now knew—read as sarcastic. He’d only called him “Peter” when he was terrified and begging. “Neal. I’m really, really--”

“—sorry,” Neal finished for him. “I remember. I…I have to know. What did you think I was doing?”

It was the last thing Peter wanted to tell him, but he had a right to know, so Peter explained, simply and honestly, making no attempt to minimize the scale of his error.

Neal went pale. “Peter, I would never. That’s…I’m actually hurt that you could even think that. I know there are…things you can’t trust me with, but I thought you knew me better than that.”

“I was wrong,” Peter said.

“I’ve never—I’ve never hurt anybody, it’s like, my signature. And I adore Elizabeth. I wouldn’t. Even if I thought it would work.”

Peter hadn’t realized it was possible for him to feel worse than he already did. Neal wouldn’t, just like Elizabeth. Maybe she should have married him instead. “I didn’t think it through. I panicked, and I thought—I thought maybe you could be desperate enough. I know you’re not violent—I wouldn’t have brought you here if you were. I just…I fucked up. I was wrong, and sorry isn’t good enough, but it’s all I’ve got.”

“Well,” Neal said unsteadily. “Do your best, and don’t make the same mistake twice.”

“I won’t. I swear,” he added, echoing Neal, as Neal had echoed him. “On Elizabeth’s life.”

The ghost of a smile twitched at the corner of Neal’s mouth, and Peter got up and went into the kitchen to help his wife make breakfast for the collared felon who was a better man than he was.

#

Elizabeth couldn’t forgive Peter as easily as Neal seemed to. She still loved him, she knew they would get past it somehow, but she couldn’t look at Peter without seeing Neal on that sidewalk, without thinking about the women who were married to mobsters and concentration camp guards, and how in God’s name did they live with themselves? How did they face that across the breakfast table, and fall asleep next to it at night?

Peter wasn’t in that league, she knew that. He had had a reason—not a good reason, but a reason—and she believed him when he said he didn’t know how bad it would be. But he wasn’t who she thought he was. Her gentle, loving Peter, who cooked pot roast and sang badly in the shower, who had stayed up all night, the Thanksgiving when Satch was a puppy and he ate the entire carcass of the turkey and made himself sick. But every time she spoke to him, she had to think, “What would I say if he hadn’t done it, if I didn’t know?”

Neal didn’t seem to have that problem. His body language was very stiff, but she thought that was mostly the physical pain. And when he and Peter spoke, there were a lot of awkward silences and meaningful pauses, but he was nowhere near as politely terrified as he had been that first night.

She wondered what it said about him, that actually being hurt by Peter was easier for him than fearing that he might. How did that happen?

Neal’s final words before falling asleep last night gave her an ominous clue—no one has ever been sorry for hurting me before. Who else had hurt him? When, and how badly? She couldn’t ask; he might think that he owed it to her to answer, even if he didn’t want to.

After the French toast, she asked him, “What do you want to do? Watch some TV? Sit outside?”

“I think I’d better take some more Tylenol and lay down,” he said, and at least he didn’t turn to Peter and ask if he was allowed.

“Do you want the, uh, special Tylenol?” Peter asked. “There’s one left.”

“I was going to save that so I can sleep tonight,” Neal said.

“We could get you your own prescription,” Elizabeth suggested. “I’m not sure where….” Their own family doctor would probably agree, but it was a Sunday. The ER might have some reservations about giving narcotics to a felon. The prison doctor Peter had talked to yesterday?

Neal made a small, dismissive gesture. “Nah. I’ll be a lot better tomorrow. It’s not worth the hassle.”

“Neal,” Peter said. “It’s not a hassle. We’ll get you what you need if we have to drive halfway across the state.”

“I meant for me,” he said. “Getting dressed and getting in the car and having some stranger poke at me—I’d rather just wait it out.”

“That’s fine, sweetie,” Elizabeth said. “Whatever you want.”

She helped him up the stairs and waited outside while he went into the bathroom. When he finished, he hesitated in the doorway. “Do you think you could--” He tugged at the collar, pulling it down the small fraction of an inch he was able to. “There’s kind of a burn, where the leads were. Is there something we can put on it? It hurts when, uh, when the collar rubs against it.”

“Sure,” she said, trying to be as matter-of-fact about it as Neal was. She found some anesthetic cream and had Neal sit on the edge of the tub while she applied it and used tweezers to slip a gauze pad between the collar and his skin. He had switched the control box, or whatever they called it, around to the other side, so she supposed there was no way it could interfere with the function of the collar—and anyway, if the Department of Corrections had a problem with it, they could kiss her toned, curvaceous ass.

“Thanks,” Neal said when she was finished. “That helps.” He offered her his arm, and she helped him back up.

“Anything else?” she asked him as he stretched out gingerly on the bed. “Anything at all? If you’ve always wanted a pony, this would be a good time to ask.”

He smiled ruefully. “There’s only one thing I want, and nobody can give it to me, so…I’m okay.”

She left him alone, closing the door gently behind her. Peter watched her as she came down the stairs. “There’s…there isn’t any way you can get the collar off, is there?”

“Absolutely none. It’s not just me that gets called if it’s cut. With me as an--” he swallowed hard. “—inside man on the inside, I could maybe buy him ten minutes before the Marshals show up at his last tracked location. But that’s not enough, not even for him, and when he gets caught again…he would have absolutely no one to protect him.”

That hadn’t been what Elizabeth had in mind, but she was glad to see that Peter was taking this deeply, that he realized that doing right by Neal was more important than the Bureau. “What about—getting his conviction overturned, or a pardon, or whatever they call it?”

“His conviction can’t be overturned because he’s guilty. Even if I…I don’t know, admitted to falsifying evidence against him, or something, there’s too much evidence against him, evidence that other people saw before I did. And he confessed to a lot of it, when he saw how close we were to his accomp—to his friends. He knew that if we had him put away for good, we wouldn’t devote as much resources to the rest of his crew. He gave us a lot, to keep them out of trouble.” Peter shook his head, dismissing that option. “A pardon is…theoretically possible, but I don’t have any pull at that level. There would have to be a reason—not that this isn’t a reason,” Peter added hastily. “But it’s not a reason I can put into a petition to the President of the United States. He wants to keep working with me, he says he does, and he’s—he’s going to do a lot of good work. If he’s instrumental in a high-profile case, or I can point to a long list of cases we wouldn’t have solved without him, I might be able to get him a pardon, or a reduction in sentence, or something, eventually. But it’s not something I can just do.”

She hadn’t really thought it was, but she had to ask. “It’s the only thing that could possibly make this up to him.”

“I know,” Peter said. “But it’s not within my power.”

“What about—I know the collar is supposed to be tamper-proof, but what about the remote? Could you do something so it doesn’t work? Put, I don’t know, super-glue in the mechanism, or something?”

“No. They did consider the possibility of a con getting his hands on the remote and disabling it. It’s as secure as the collar. It’s—it’s in the lockbox with my gun. I have to carry it when we’re at the Bureau, but that’s where it stays when we’re at home.”

It wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough, but it was all Peter could do, and she accepted that.

#

Neal was lying in bed, paging idly through a critical biography of Cezanne that some hack wrote before he was born. He had assumed that the art books were Elizabeth’s; had even fantasized, when he began to believe that this was all real, that maybe they had picked them up in a used book store or something, just for him. But the truth was even better: the lightly-penciled marginal notes, leading toward some long-ago term paper, were in Peter’s handwriting.

Peter had, at some point, taken a course called “Art Hist. 350: Post-Impressionism to Cubism.” And had written what Neal gathered was a pretty terrible analysis of Cezanne’s influence on Picasso. In the face of this delightful discovery, Neal had long ago given up on the main text, and was now skimming for Peter’s notes.

“‘Art as an emotional ejaculation’—Peter, you have hidden depths,” Neal couldn’t resist teasing him when he appeared in the doorway.

“I was trying to impress this girl,” Peter sighed, coming into the room and kneeling down next to the bed, the way he had the day before. “She was an art history major. I got almost enough credits for a minor.”

“Then what happened?”

“She found out about my career plans.”

Neal supposed that made sense. Normal people didn’t completely trust law enforcement—a fact he had used to his advantage more than once. They expected that the police would be there for them if the house was broken into or their car was stolen, but the rest of the time the law was just standing in the way of simple pleasures like speeding and smoking a joint and cheating on their taxes.

They looked at each other for a moment before Peter changed the subject. “Do you want to stay home from work tomorrow? You can; I just have to think up something to tell them.”

“I’ll be all right.” He realized, with some surprise, that he actually wanted to get back to the job, to figure out how they were going to catch Hagan. “The second day after, it just feels like you overdid something the last day—I won’t want to do any heavy lifting, but I can sit at a desk and think about stuff.”

“Okay,” Peter said. “But if you want…I don’t know, time to yourself, or something, I can arrange it. I can’t leave you here by yourself, but if El has to work, I can…sit outside in the car and pretend I’m on a stakeout.”

That was actually kind of sweet. “I’d rather have something to do, really. There is an occasional interesting moment amidst all the tedium, there at the office.”

Peter smiled faintly and nodded. “There’s…something else we have to talk about.”

Neal’s mouth went dry. “What?”

“You, um…some of the things you’ve said, it sounds like you’re saying you’ve had a seizure before, from the…collar.”

Neal moistened his lips with his tongue and nodded. “Yeah. I probably should have told you about that, but I figured you’d have, I don’t know, gotten a memo or something.”

“No memo. And it’s not your fault. But…I need to ask you some questions about what happened.”

Despair gathered in his gut. That was the last thing in the world he wanted to talk to Peter about.

“It doesn’t have to be now,” he added quickly. “When you feel up to it. But…this isn’t prurient interest; professionally, I need to know.”

Neal nodded. He supposed that was fair. “It’s okay. I’m ready.” He wasn’t, but he wouldn’t ever be, and he’d rather get it over with.

“When did they put the collar on you?”

“Um…it was Monday when they brought me to you, right?”

Peter nodded.

He counted shift changes in his head. “I think it must have been Wednesday night, Thursday morning, somewhere in there.” He had been in solitary—he’d gone completely ape-shit, when they told him they were collaring him; he vaguely remembered literally climbing up a wall trying to get away—and it was always hard to keep track of time in there. The guards were supposed to make a count every three hours, but sometimes they skipped it, or did extra ones if they thought something was up. He’d been asleep, when they had banged the door open and dragged him out to put the collar on.

“When, uh, when did you have the seizure?”

“The first one was a couple of hours in.” He hoped Peter didn’t ask him what he had done to get it; that was getting close to the things he really didn’t want to talk about.

“You had more than one?”

“Two. The other one was the next day.” He decided he ought to explain how he’d been stupid enough to get another correction like that, when he knew what would happen. “The first one, they had been working on me for a while, and I thought that was why it got so bad. And I had to know, so I played along, managed not to get any corrections for a few hours, then tried something big.” He was sure that stunt had made the rest of the training period harder than it had to be, since he had shown them that they couldn’t really tell if he was broken or not. In retrospect, it had not been remotely worth it.

“You were getting corrections every few hours for four days?” Peter’s voice was dead level.

“I was getting them every couple of minutes for a lot of it,” he admitted. He wasn’t scared. When Peter was mad at him, he yelled, and that wasn’t what he was doing. He decided to volunteer a few details, to steer the conversation further away from the things he didn’t want to talk about. “It was bad. That’s why I was so wound up the first couple of days here—they got to me. There were a lot of head games, and I couldn’t really tell which way was up.”

“Understandable. I didn’t—I didn’t know about any of that. I thought they just put the collar on and brought you over to me. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have…I’d have told you it wasn’t going to be like that, with me.”

“I wouldn’t have believed you,” Neal said. “Head games, remember?”

“Still, I wish I had tried.” Peter let that rest for a moment, then said, “Did you have any other medical emergencies when you were there?”

“No.” He didn’t suppose vomiting counted; he had done that a lot.

“And they…you mentioned a prison doctor. They got you medical attention?”

“Yeah. I mean, kind of. He checked me out and said I wasn’t going to die.”

Peter nodded. “That’s all they were legally required to do. What about—what did you do, when they shocked you hard enough to give you a seizure? What were they punishing you for?”

“The first time, I told the guard to go fuck himself.” He saw the next question coming a mile away, but couldn’t think of any way to stop it.

“Hm, that’s…he could say he didn’t know you’d react that way, since not everybody does. What about the second time?”

And there it was. He closed his eyes.

“Neal. Whatever it was, I don’t blame you; I’m not going to be upset with you or think you deserved it. I—if it was something like the first time, there might be an excessive force case in it.”

“There isn’t,” Neal said.

“You might not—the regulations are very specific. Were you cuffed at the time?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you couldn’t have been a clear and present danger--”

“Jesus, Peter, I tried to bite the guy’s dick off, okay?”

Peter stared at him in horror. “What—what was the guard’s…genitalia…doing within biting range of your mouth?”

“What do you think?”

“You need to tell me.”

“No, I don’t.” Peter obviously knew what he was implying; there was no reason to make him spell it out except to humiliate him.

“Neal—as soon as you feel up to it you’re going to sit down with an agent from the civil rights division, and you can give them the rest of your statement. But for me to be your outcry witness, you need to say the words.”

The rest of his statement? He hadn’t realized he was giving a statement. Even though Peter had told him—professionally, I need to know. He had thought—he wasn’t sure what he thought. That Peter needed to know as Neal Caffrey’s handler. He hadn’t realized that he was giving a statement to Agent Peter Burke as a victim.

“I know it’s hard,” Peter said. “I promise you, I won’t think any less of you, and I will get justice for you. But you have to say the words.”

Neal wanted badly to believe him. “Nobody’s going to care. It happens all the time.”

“I care. I will find somebody in the civil rights division who will care.”

“Peter, I don’t want—I don’t want to tell people about this. It’s not—it’s over, I just want to forget it.”

“This will be kept confidential,” Peter said. “Only agents involved in the case will know about it. They…people at work are going to notice that you sat down with a civil rights division agent, and they’ll probably guess that it’s about a color of law abuse, under the circumstances, but the details are not going to be gossiped about around a water cooler. Not by anyone who has a continuing desire to live. That’s a promise.”

“What’s a color of law abuse?” It sounded like it had something to do with racial discrimination, but that couldn’t possibly be it.

“Abuse of authority by someone in law enforcement,” Peter explained. “It covers excessive force and…situations like this…but also false arrest and fabrication of evidence.”

Maybe he could plant a rumor that he was trying to get one or more of his convictions overturned. But still. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to think about it. He just wanted it to be over. “Do I have to?”

“No,” Peter said promptly. “It’s entirely your choice whether you want to go forward. I’m not going to be mad at you if you don’t, and, and they are not going to get a chance to do anything like this to you again. But.”

“But,” Neal said glumly.

“You’re not the only felon to leave that particular prison in a collar. You said that this happens all the time, and you’re probably—I’m sure you’re right. And you don’t like people being hurt. You’ve given up a lot to keep people from being hurt. And it’s not fair to ask you to give up anything else, so I’m not asking. But there it is.”

Peter, he realized, was offering him the chance to do the right thing. That was not something that anyone had ever asked of him, or had ever thought he was capable of.

And Peter already knew. Peter was the one person in the world he most wanted not to know, but, even though he hadn’t said the words yet, Peter already knew. Neal swallowed hard, feeling the collar pressing against his throat. “He was forcing me to suck his dick,” he said.

Peter bowed his head. Where he was sitting, it looked like he was saying his bedtime prayers. When he raised his head, he said, “Thank you. You’re—you’ve been very brave.”

He didn’t feel brave. Brave was…rappelling down a wall with a stolen painting inside your shirt, or eating gas station sushi. He felt ashamed and exhausted and a little bit sick.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Peter said, and Neal suspected he was going off a script, something he’d learned in a class a few years after he’d written that term paper on Cezanne. What you say to somebody who’s been…. “The people who did it were wrong, and there is nothing you could have done that makes this your fault.”

Neal nodded. That was what you said. And he knew Peter believed it, and Neal…Neal believed it, but he also knew that it was a risk you took when you chose to be a criminal, and a lot of people would see it that way.

“That’s everything I need,” Peter said. “For the…to get the ball rolling. Do you want to…talk about it, talk about something else, be left alone…?”

He didn’t want to be alone, but he also didn’t want to have Peter looking at him for the next few minutes, or—God forbid—Elizabeth. Talking about something else was the most appealing option, but he needed a few minutes of privacy to get his head together.

He could say he needed to go to the bathroom, freak out in there for a few minutes, then come out and talk to Peter about Cezanne. Except it still hurt to move. Maybe he could skip the freak-out, or do it silently, invisibly, and very, very quickly.

“It isn’t a test,” Peter said. “This is about—what you need.”

He could send Peter downstairs for something, something that would take a few minutes. A cup of tea, like in a British novel, heals all wounds. That way, he could get his few minutes, and Peter would be back. He wouldn’t even have to say he wanted to talk to Peter; he could just start talking about Cezanne or something, when he arrived with the tea. He’d get what he needed, and nobody would know exactly what that had been. Perfect con. He opened his mouth to say it, then realized.

He didn’t have to con Peter to get what he needed. If Peter knew what he needed, he wouldn’t use it against him. He could get it just by…asking. Peter had said he was brave before; if he did this, he really would be. “I’d like you to—give me a few minutes, then come back and talk to me about Cezanne,” he said in a rush.

Peter nodded and said, “Okay,” as he got to his feet, like it really was that simple.

#

Talking about Cezanne, it turned out, didn’t really mean talking about Cezanne, which was fortunate since Peter didn’t really have anything to say about him. Instead, Neal needled him for a while about almost completing an Art History major to impress a girl. “What about Elizabeth?” Neal asked after that. “What stupid thing did you do to impress her?”

“Put her under surveillance,” Peter admitted.

Neal loved that, as Peter had hoped he would. “Oh, my God,” he said, when he was done laughing. “And that worked?”

“Eventually, she took pity on me.” Peter explained about the robbery at the gallery where she had been working, and how he had kept mentioning an Italian restaurant, but not actually asking her out, until she made the first move.

“Man. I know what that’s like, though. Half the stuff you caught me for, I did to impress Kate. Trying to make every con bigger and better than the last one.”

“I wondered about that,” Peter said. Some of the crimes had seemed unnecessarily showy. “It was a courtship display.”

“Yep. I’m a peacock.”

“More like a bower bird,” Peter said.

“What’s that?”

“The males build these elaborate structures called bowers to impress the females. Huge, compared to the size of the birds. They decorate them with all kinds of stuff—flowers, feathers, shiny things—that the most successful ones get by stealing from other males. The theory is it started as a way for females to judge who was a good provider, but the evolutionary mechanism went haywire and now they all completely overdo it.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what it was,” Neal agreed. “I wonder if any animals use the Peter Burke courtship strategy—stalk her and look pathetic.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Yeah, they probably all went extinct.” Neal went silent for a moment. “Kate’s…not on the FBI’s radar, is she?”

It was a question Peter would have refused to answer, if it hadn’t been for what he’d done yesterday. But he owed Neal. “She’s not currently the subject of an active investigation,” Peter said cautiously. “I have her flagged in the system, so I’d be notified if she was. She, ah. Either she hasn’t made contact, or she’s better at it than Havisham.” He didn’t have a right to ask, so he didn’t make it a question.

“It’s for the best,” Neal said, sounding like he was trying to convince himself. “I…when it was clear I was going to go down for life, I told her the best thing would be for her to go straight, settle down somewhere and remember me fondly.”

“If that’s what she did, she’s safe,” Peter said. He couldn’t promise Neal that the FBI wouldn’t go after Kate if they had a reason to, but he could reassure him on that point. “If she’s still committing crimes, or starts up again, she could end up the subject of a new investigation, and there wouldn’t be anything you or I could do about it. But if she lays low….I personally suspected, and still do, that you took more than your share of the rap to protect your--” He bit back the word “accomplices.” “The rest of your people. But the prosecution was happy to accept your version of events.”

“Sure they were,” Neal said. “They got to put me away for good. It’s easy to get people to believe you if you’re telling them what they want to hear. Perfect con,” he murmured.

Far from perfect, considering how much it had cost Neal. “You got what you wanted. If that’s what happened.”

“Hypothetically,” Neal said, “I’m grateful you didn’t convince the prosecution to see it your way.”

“Hypothetically…I didn’t try very hard. I did my duty,” he added. “I told them what I thought. But my job was to bring you in. After that…was somebody else’s job.”

Neal nodded, like that made sense to him, but Peter wasn’t sure he really grasped the fine line Peter had walked. Between knowing that real justice wasn’t about finding somebody to take the blame, versus feeling that it was Neal’s choice to make as a man, and respecting him for it. But Neal changed the subject, saying, “Who was the best con you ever caught? Apart from me,” and Peter decided not to try to make him understand.

By the next morning, Neal did look better. He was moving naturally, his color was good, and he seemed only a little subdued. “You sure you’re up for this?” Peter asked anyway, knowing that Neal was capable of seeming okay even if he still felt pretty bad.

Neal hesitated. “Oh, you mean going to work? Yeah, I’m up for that.”

“The other thing will take a few days to get up, anyway,” Peter said. “And we can delay it if you’re not ready.”

“What other thing?” Elizabeth asked.

Neal shot him a panicked glance and shook his head, slightly but sharply.

“Confidential,” Peter said. “It’s a work thing.” He knew Elizabeth would still be suspicious—he talked to her about work things all the time, particularly work things involving Neal Caffrey. But it was not his to tell about.

Neal gave him a grateful nod.

“Confidential means confidential,” he said. “But if you do decide you want to talk about it, I’m sure Elizabeth is here for you.”

“Of course, honey,” Elizabeth said. To him, she added, “He’s not in trouble—you’re not making some kind of a report about what happened Saturday, are you?”

“No, it’s nothing like that.”

Neal distracted her, not too subtly, by asking for more juice and telling a story about a legendary con who stole an orange grove.

#

In the car on the way to work, Peter said, “You know….”

“What?”

“You could, if you wanted to, file an excessive force report against me. There’s a chance—a small chance—it might even stick.”

“And then what happens to me?” Neal asked pragmatically. He knew that even if Peter wasn’t whole-heartedly sorry for what he did, and was vocally willing to do it again if the situation called for it, he would still be better off with him than he would be with a lot of handlers.

“Nothing,” Peter said. “The worst I’d get would be a disciplinary notation in my jacket. They wouldn’t reassign you.”

“Totally worth it, then,” Neal quipped. It was a relief to know that nothing would happen to him if Peter got a noble and self-sacrificing bee in his bonnet, but the idea that his suffering was worth so little stung.

Peter nodded. “I know, but if you wanted to pursue it, I would tell them exactly what happened and insist on consequences. I thought about turning myself in, but it would come out that El took you out of the house without the remote, which is probably what they’d consider the only real violation in the whole scenario.”

“Absolutely not, then,” Neal said. “I don’t want to get Elizabeth in trouble.”

“They wouldn’t do anything to her,” Peter said. “But she might get taken off your list of authorized handlers, which would make life more difficult for all three of us, since she wouldn’t be able to be alone with you.”

“Yeah, that would be bad. Don’t worry about it. I know you feel guilty, but there’s no point throwing yourself on your sword.”

“That was what I ended up thinking, too, but I wanted you to know it’s your call.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

At the office, it was a little bit weird to see that everything was exactly the way it had been on Friday. Not only had so much happened over the weekend that it felt like much more than two days had passed, but in his world—his old world—you worked on a job until it was finished, then took a few days off and started the next one. You didn’t stop in the middle for no particular reason other than that the calendar said it was time. And if you did have to leave a con and come back, for example if someone was hurt or the heat was on, something would have changed by the time you picked it back up.

Here, they did have a morning meeting to discuss what Peter called the “progress of the case,” but it turned out that was code for “review what we did on Friday, and talk about how we didn’t learn anything new over the weekend.”

Neal expected to be given another pile of printouts to go through looking for any sign of Hagan’s name, but Peter surprised him with another assignment. “We’re just about done checking records for his name. Jones and Berrigan, when you’re not in the van, you’ll review past cases where he was a suspect and look for known associates or aliases and run searches on those. Neal, you’ll look at unsolved cases where he wasn’t identified as a suspect, but that fall somewhere within his profile. Look for anything you get a sense he might have had a hand in.” It wasn’t clear whether Peter had planned all along to give him that job to do, or if he had found something more interesting for him out of guilt and pity, but either way, Neal would take it.

As they left the meeting, Berrigan said, “How was the weekend? You seem….” She trailed off, perhaps realizing there was no way to end that sentence that wouldn’t embarrass him.

“Better? Yeah, it was okay. Did some settling in.” Which was completely true, if you allowed a little wiggle room on the definition of “okay.” He definitely felt more settled. “Peter’s kind of in the doghouse; he forgot about their anniversary.” Also true, except for the implied causal relationship between the two clauses, and a little gossiping about the boss was a good way to establish rapport with co-workers.

Berrigan smiled. “That’s kind of surprising.”

“Yeah, you’d think the guy who was smart enough to catch me would be more detail-oriented. I guess he saves it all for the job.”

A clerk showed up with two file boxes on a hand truck. “Caffrey?”

“That’s me.” He shifted the boxes onto his desk.

“I’d better let you get to it,” Berrigan said. “See you.”

“See you.”

#

After the morning meeting, Peter went into his office, shut and locked the door, pulled the blinds, and opened the package he’d ordered from the weapons lockup. Time to do what he should have done long before this.

Inside was a spare collar and remote, required to be kept on hand in case the impossible happened and an ASP prisoner assigned to the FBI managed to damage or disable one. He entered the authorization code to put it into testing mode.

He positioned the control box across his right hand, the leads of the correction mechanism pressed against his palm. With his other hand, he adjusted the intensity dial to two and pressed the button. The jolt tore through him, and he involuntarily jerked his hand away from the control box, an option Neal hadn’t had.

He changed the position, putting the control box face-up on the desk and pressing his hand on top of it. Then, guiltily, he caught his breath before continuing.

Another option Neal hadn’t had.

By pressing his left forearm over his right wrist, he managed to keep from pulling his hand away from the box. But he could barely manage to tap the button, much less hold it down the way he had on Saturday. “Don’t be a coward, Burke,” he muttered, and turned up the dial.

He managed to hold it together up to level five. Six was a nightmare. Tears streamed down his face, and he would have screamed if he hadn’t started biting his upper arm somewhere around level four. He barely tapped the button, but the pain lasted much longer than the shock, stretching out into what seemed like forever. When he looked at his palm, there were two small, round blisters forming, where the shock leads had been.

“Okay,” he told himself. “Three more.” If he had done this before—if he had had the decency to do for Neal what he had done for his dog, and find out what the collar was like before putting it on him, he could have stopped whenever he wanted. But now he had to see this through. He turned the dial up to seven and put his hand back on the control box.

He sat with his thumb over the button, his left arm pinning his right to the desk, and the meat of his bicep clenched between his teeth, and he couldn’t make himself press the button. He tried. Several times he told himself, okay, now, but the signal never made it down to his thumb.

After about ten minutes, he deactivated the collar and remote, dropped them back into the box, and sent the package back down to the lockup.

#

It was enlightening, reading the files and seeing how a con looked from the other side. There was nothing in there that he’d been involved with—he checked—but he did see a few that he’d heard about, and learned that one old acquaintance consistently overstated the value of his heists when talking shop.

In a few hours, he had culled out four files to take to Peter. “Great. You can tell me about them over lunch,” Peter said. “Now, it’s chili day.”

So he was finally going to see the famous FBI cafeteria. It turned out to look an awful lot like the cafeteria in any office building of similar size—molded plastic chairs and posters about workplace safety and the Heimlich maneuver. Peter asked for a bowl of chili, extra crackers, and a side salad, and after looking at the other options—a row of cellophane-wrapped sandwiches that looked like they had been made several weeks ago—he said, “The same.”

Peter led him to what must have been his usual table, and Neal managed to slip into the chair that let him put his back to the wall. He was comfortable with Peter and his team, but there were a lot of people here he hadn’t met yet, and he felt a little like a cat burglar in a room full of Federal rocking chairs.

While Peter glanced over the files he had chosen, Neal tasted the famous FBI chili.

“Good, huh?” Peter asked.

“Mm,” Neal said. It tasted pretty much like diner or cafeteria chili to him, but maybe he was missing something. He wasn’t really a chili guy. “It’s better than prison chili.” Chili day in prison wasn’t much fun; even putting aside the guys who thought flatulence or references to same were the height of wit, there were still the guys who had a special, secret chili recipe that was, naturally, much better than the prison version, and who couldn’t stop talking about it. Discussions could get heated.

“Good to know. So why these cases?”

“I don’t know,” Neal said. There wasn’t anything obvious—no Goya, nothing from Spain or the 1940’s, nothing involving intrinsically worthless vintage books. “Something about the style.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“I can try.” He took back one of the files and read through it again, trying to home in on the details that had made him think, yeah, okay, maybe this one. “It’s…a very detailed setup, that took a lot of time, and a lot of leg work,” he said. “Which is like the Goya—he had to figure out what book to use for the paper, and go around quietly collecting copies without driving the price up too much, and find somebody who could produce the ink, get his hands on a vintage printing press, engrave the plates. And—that’s another similarity. Both of these jobs have a lot of pieces that you wouldn’t find in the same skill-set. They were both run by somebody with a lot of patience and a wide network. I’m not saying it’s definitely the same somebody, but it could be. There aren’t a lot of people in this guy’s league, and one of them’s sitting right here, so the odds are good.”

“Okay, that makes sense. What about this one?”

They worked through the other three files.

“Good work,” Peter said. “These are solid leads. Make a list of names and locations, and give it to Jones and Berrigan to search in the databases. Then—did you get through both boxes?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll have some more sent up to you.”

Back at his desk, he made the list and took it to the other agents’ office. Jones was there, holding a sandwich in one hand and typing with the other. “Working through lunch, huh? You know, that’s been linked to obesity and high blood pressure.”

“Did you want something?” Jones asked.

“Yeah. Here’s some more names for you and Agent Berrigan to run.”

“Did Agent Burke tell you to bring me this?”

“Peter’s exact words were to give it to you and Berrigan, but I think since she’s not here, he’d find it acceptable to just give it to you. But if you’re concerned about it, I can wait until she’s back from lunch.” He looked around. “Where does she go for lunch? I didn’t see her in the cafeteria. It would be nice to find some little gem of a bistro within walking distance of the office.”

“We’re not friends, Caffrey,” Jones said. “The new act isn’t funny, and it isn’t cute, and it isn’t going to work on me.”

That stung a little bit. He was very good at “affable new guy at the office.” He held up his hands in mock surrender and said, “Okay. We’re not friends. Never said we were. Do you want this list, or not?”

“I’ll take it.” Jones snatched it out of his hands, and as he left, Neal heard him calling Peter to check if he had really sent Neal with it.

Oh. This was about him conning Jones on Friday—something Neal had nearly forgotten about. Well, he had other things on his mind.

Peter had been pretty mad; Neal would bet some of that had spilled over onto Jones, especially since Neal had been so quick to name names. The world turned on its axis as it occurred to him that what he had, at the time, thought of as ratting out a Fed to another Fed was, in a way, ratting out a co-worker to their mutual boss.

Never a good idea to do that, unless you were nearing the end of the con, even if you had something to gain. Considering the circumstances, he wasn’t going to beat himself up over it, but now that he knew he didn’t face an exponentially higher penalty for his mistakes than Jones and Berrigan did for theirs, he’d avoid doing it again.

#

By late afternoon, Jones and Berrigan had managed to use Neal’s information to find something useful.

“We have a list of locations,” Jones reported as they gathered in the conference room, passing around copies. He’d only brought three, so Peter slid his between him and Neal, so they could both look at it. “The first column is addresses associated with known accomplices or aliases from cases where Hagan is known to have been a suspect.”

“Most of these look like apartments,” Neal observed. “He won’t be printing the bonds in an apartment—the equipment isn’t quiet, and it requires an industrial power source.”

“Obviously,” said Jones. “The ones with asterisks are industrial locations. Diana looked into them.”

She picked up the thread, explaining, “Most of them appear to be being used for legitimate business operations now, from what I could find in the computer. They have new owners or lessees who don’t appear anywhere in the system.”

“Well, yeah,” said Neal. “They would have stopped using those places if they had the slightest hint you were close to them.”

“We’ll still have to check them out,” Peter said. “What about the second column?”

“Those are from Neal’s leads,” Berrigan explained. “A lot of apartments there, too. There’s also a house in Queens that, judging by the property assessor’s map, looks like it’s far enough from the neighbors that he could run a press without attracting attention. The owner, Timothy Dugan, was suspected in the Thai bearer bonds case, but nothing ever stuck. Since he owns the property, he could arrange to have the necessary electrical work done—he could say it’s some kind of home workshop.”

“He could,” Peter agreed. “We’ll put that one near the top of the list.”

“There’s another one I like,” Berrigan continued, “but it’s a little more tenuous. An alias used by a minor player in the case involving the forged ‘previously unknown’ Hogarth print turns up on the phony board of directors for a shell corporation based out of Guatemala. That shell owns two warehouses, an industrial loft, and a vacant lot in various parts of New York. I know, there’s no way to know if the two cases really are connected, and it looks like Hagan is the main player in this case, but….”

“Which alias?” Neal asked.

“Chuck Monaghan. That was the name on the paperwork for the mailbox where the--”

“Etching fluid was delivered,” Neal finished. “Yeah, that was the guy I thought might be Hagan in that case. If it was, that was toward the beginning of his career. I’m thinking he didn’t have the capital to set up any major jobs on his own at that point, so he joined that job as technical talent, engraving the plates, and used his cut to get himself established on his own.”

“Good,” Peter said. That was the kind of thing they needed Neal for; the rest of them didn’t know what the career path of a master forger might look like. “I want to check out those locations and the house in Queens. Anything else that belongs on the short list?” He looked around at his team; nobody volunteered anything. “Then we’ll start with those today, and if we don’t find anything, we’ll make another pass through the list tomorrow. Jones and Berrigan, you can have the Bronx and Queens; we’ll take the locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Report in to my cell if you find anything worth calling about; otherwise, you’re free to go home afterwards and we’ll meet in the morning.”

They checked out the vacant lot first—Neal protested that they wouldn’t find anything there, and Peter privately agreed, but told him they had to be thorough. Anyway, it was the closest.

“I told you,” Neal said, when they stood at the edge of the vacant lot. “What were you expecting, that he set up a tent for the printing press.”

“You never know.”

The industrial loft was deserted and showed no signs of recent industry. Graffiti, bits of melted candles, broken bottles, and other detritus suggested that its most recent uses had been squatting or illicit partying. To his surprise, though, Neal spent a fair amount of time wandering around looking at the floor, the walls, and even, Peter thought, the piles of trash, rather than simply noting the absence of an active printing operation and immediately beginning to complain.

“You finding something?” Peter asked after a while.

Neal was, at that point, looking at an expanse of graffiti consisting of a crucifix, a woman’s face, the words “RIP” and “Thug Life,” and a set of dates. He turned away from it. “That guy has a good eye for composition. No, here,” he said, pointing at something on the floor with the toe of his shoe. “These marks look like they’re about the right size for a Conrad C-25, which is a nice combination press for small six-color process runs, easy to modify for unusual paper stock. But if anything, it was stored here—you wouldn’t run it in this dark corner; it would be too hard to get the colors right.”

“Show-off,” Peter said.

Neal shrugged. “Warehouse?”

The warehouse was active, with a running electric meter and new locks on the doors. Neal put his ear to the door. “Do you hear that? Peter?”

“Hear what?”

“Kind a rhythmic shh-shh. That’s a press.”

“A Conrad C-25?” Peter asked.

“I can’t identify them by sound,” Neal answered, sounding like that would be ridiculous. “But come on. It’s Hagan—or ‘Chuck Monaghan.’ He’s running a printing press in there. He’s printing the bonds right now.”

“How long will he be doing it?”

“A multicolor print shop as complicated as the Goya? Test proofs, ink formulation, perfection registration—he’ll be running it for at least a couple of days.”

“Good.” Peter got out his phone. “Diana? No? We did. Yeah, it’s the warehouse by the docks. Come back to the Bureau—we’ve got to find a way to get in there.”

When he hung up, Neal was looking at him quizzically. “I could pick the lock,” he suggested.

“If we break in, nothing we see will be admissible as evidence,” Peter explained.

“Knock on the door and pretend we’re looking for a lost puppy?”

“We have to get in legally. With a warrant.” Peter herded Neal back toward the car; it wouldn’t do for Hagan or his accomplices to step outside for a smoke break and find them hanging around. “What, did you think all those times we didn’t catch you were because we had no idea where you were? It’s not enough to know; you have to be able to prove it.”

“We know,” Neal argued, as they got into the car. “Hagan is Monaghan, Monaghan owns the warehouse, and he’s running a printing press. What more do you need?”

“The link between Monaghan and the warehouse is the only part of that we can prove. We don’t have any proof that Monaghan is Hagan—your impression of his ‘style’ doesn’t count—and we also don’t have proof that Hagan is the one who forged the bond we saw.”

“I thought you believed me,” Neal said, in an injured tone.

“I do. I am on board. We still need proof.”

#

Back at the office, they started working through how to get a warrant. Neal’s suggestions, toward the beginning of the meeting, showed that he apparently thought the problem with the “lost puppy” idea was its lack of sophistication.

“How about this. We run off a flyer advertising a rave at an address that almost matches the warehouse—transpose two digits or something. Diana and Jones get dressed up, and start poking around, with the flyer. Make sure you take some glowsticks—do they still use glow sticks at raves? Anyway, either you get in, get out, and report back, or they catch you and we come in after you--”

“Neal,” said Peter. “It doesn’t matter how elaborate the deception is, it still isn’t lawful entry.” He thought this was one part of the operation where Neal wouldn’t have anything to contribute, but rather than say so bluntly, he went to his office and got a book on warrant law. “You should read this.”

Neal took it off to a corner of the conference room; Peter wasn’t sure if he was actually reading it or just sulking. Jones and Berrigan resorted to combing through the FBI databases for any shred of evidence linking Hagan to the Monaghan alias. Peter ordered a pizza.

When it came, Neal put down his book and joined them. “Okay, how about this.” Peter braced himself for another illegal scheme, but Neal said, “What if I find the CH signature on the Hogarth forgery? Do you still have a copy?”

“I’m not sure if it’s still in our evidence room here or if it got sent to Washington,” Peter admitted. “And yes, that would be something that would help get a warrant. Except….” He almost didn’t want to mention it.

“The thing with the bond,” Neal sighed.

“Yeah. If we use it as the basis for a warrant, and the possibility of tampering comes out at trial, the warrant could be invalidated, and any evidence we obtained using that warrant would be thrown out as--”

“Fruit of the poisonous tree. Yeah, I read about that. Damn.”

“So we have to make the connection between Monaghan and Hagan some other way.”

“Yeah, okay. I get it.”

After a few minutes’ break to scarf down pizza, Neal went back to his book, and the rest of them went back to chasing down leads. An hour or two later, Berrigan came in with a fresh pot of coffee. “If we’re pulling an all-nighter, we’d better have some of this.”

“Thanks,” Peter said, accepting a cup. Berrigan was nearing the end of her probationary period; she wouldn’t be fetching coffee much longer. The thought reminded him of Neal, and he looked over to the corner. “Jones,” he said slowly. “Diana. Has anybody seen Neal?”

“Last time I saw him, he was on his way to the bathroom, but that was a while ago,” she admitted.

“Oh, shit.” Coffee was suddenly superfluous as adrenaline flooded his system. Peter first checked the places Neal could legitimately be—his desk, the men’s room, the break area, Peter’s office, Jones and Berrigan’s. He wasn’t—naturally—in any of those places.

Peter was surprised, though, when he went down to the evidence room and the lights off and the door lock apparently un-picked. He ran through the room anyway—he wouldn’t put it past Neal to lock himself inside and do what he needed to do with the lights off.

But he hadn’t. Reluctantly, Peter took the collar remote out of his pocket. The indicator light was red, indicating that Neal’s collar was out of range of the remote.

Anywhere in the building he’d be within range. Peter called the conference room. “Diana. He ran. Pull up his tracking data; I’ll be right there.” The laptop would be able to pull more detailed data than his phone, and anyway, he had another use for his phone right now.

Running to the conference room, Peter called home. “El?” he said frantically.

“Peter?” she said sleepily. Right, it was the middle of the night.

“You don’t know where Neal is, do you?” He didn’t think it was likely, but he had promised, on Elizabeth’s life, not to make the same mistake again, so he had to check.

“He isn’t with you?” She no longer sounded sleepy.

“No. He’s not in the building.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” she told him.

“I won’t,” he promised. “But I have to be the one to find him, and I have to do it fast.” The collar being out of range of the remote for too long would trigger first a call to him, then, if he failed to satisfactorily explain the situation and/or bring the collar and remote back within range in a reasonable amount of time, an alert to the Marshals and Department of Corrections.

Peter would lie for him. If Neal had done something only mildly boneheaded, like slipped out to take a walk or meet Havisham or something, he’d cover for him, say that Neal was on an authorized errand. They were working late; they all needed decent coffee and, he didn’t know, toothbrushes, so he’d sent Neal out to Starbucks and an all-night drugstore.

But he had to find him fast.

Peter ran into the conference room, where Diana was standing hunched over a laptop. “Boss,” she said.

He slowed, his mouth dry. “What?”

“He’s at the warehouse.”

Time slowed. “Fuck.” Not all white collar criminals were as nonviolent as Neal; God only knew what Hagan would do if they found him poking around.

“Looks like maybe he knew Hagan a little better than he let on,” Jones said.

“Maybe not,” Diana said. She had picked up the Warrant Law book, abandoned on the arm of the chair where Neal had been sitting. “Look.” She showed him the page it had been left open to.

The chapter was headed, “Exigent Circumstances.”

“Oh, Neal, you fucking idiot,” he said, already running. The other two fell in behind him.

Once they were in the car, Berrigan said, from the back seat, “It will…work, won’t it?”

“Yes,” Peter said grimly. “Provided I swear under oath that I didn’t authorize him to go there, it’ll work.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Exactly.” And then it would be on record that Neal had gone off on his own, without authorization. It would definitely work for the case, but it would drastically reduce his options for protecting Neal in a Corrections investigation. He could try making the argument that Neal was obeying the spirit of his sentence, since his actions were aimed at helping the FBI close the case, but it might not fly. If he couldn’t get the situation under control fast, Neal was taking a huge risk of being given more restrictive ASP sentencing conditions, or even being sent back to prison.

He should have lied and said that the initials on the Hogarth forgery would be exactly what they needed; that way, Neal would still be here working on that, instead of pulling this stupid stunt to…what? Redeem himself?

Peter bit back a vicious impulse to turn to Jones and tell him this was all his fault. It wasn’t; he knew that. There was plenty of blame to go around. This, Neal should have known better than to do. And Peter should have kept a closer eye on him. Instead, he slammed his right palm against the steering wheel and said, “We’re going to need backup. Use your own phones; keep the tracking data up on mine.” He gave them names of agents he knew would follow his lead at the scene.

The other agents met them there. “Gentlemen—ladies—my collared felon is hiding in this building.” He held up his phone to show the tracking data. “I’ll go after him; I expect him to come quietly. Stand by to assist if necessary, and keep your eyes open for any other criminal activity occurring in plain view. What we have here is an exigent circumstance.” The people whose faces he could see clearly appeared to catch on.

They burst in, the other agents yelling, “Freeze! Federal Agents! Get ‘em up in the air!”

There were stacks of Spanish Victory Bonds, in various stages of completion, piled around a printing press. Peter picked one up on his way to a glass-walled office where Neal was sitting on a desk looking smug. He unlocked the door as Peter approached.

Peter slammed into the office. “What the fuck were you thinking?” he demanded, grabbing one of Neal’s wrists and snapping a handcuff onto it.

“Peter, I—lost puppy, legal version, that’s—I thought you’d understand.” Neal, at least, no longer looked smug.

“I do,” he said, cuffing Neal’s other wrist in front of him. “It was still stupid. Look meek, and don’t pick those until we’re in the car,” he instructed.

He kept one hand on Neal, who was doing a very good meek, as he supervised the other agents in collecting the plain-view evidence and detaining the suspects for questioning. There was plenty of evidence, and Neal confirmed that one of the detainees was Hagan.

A secondary backup team arrived. Peter told Jones, “Take over things here, and you and Diana catch a ride back with somebody when you’re done here. I have to deal with Neal.”

Neal’s “meek” was so convincing that Peter started to worry that he was really scared, until, as they stepped outside, he whispered, “Want me to fake a collar correction?”

“No.” He opened the passenger-side door and ducked Neal’s head as he got in. He got out his handcuff keys on his way around to his own side of the car, but by the time he got in, Neal already had the cuffs off. Good. He took them back. “This was the single stupidest thing you have ever done.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“That’s not the point. Do you have the slightest idea how much trouble you could have created for yourself?”

“Peter, I knew you’d catch on. I trust you.”

“That’s nice, but--” His phone rang.

“Agent Burke?”

“Yes?”

“This is Department of Corrections Prisoner Tracking.”

He put the call on speaker, motioning for Neal to be silent. He wanted him to hear this.

“We’re showing Prisoner 05671358 out of range of his remote for almost an hour. Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” Peter said. “There was a misunderstanding. I’ve got him now.”

“Let me just refresh the data—okay, yes, I’m seeing him within range now. Sorry to bother you.”

“No problem.” He hung up. “If that call had come in before I noticed you were gone, I would not have known to cover for you in time. They would have sent Corrections officers after you, and they might have gotten here first. There’s more than one remote that works on that thing.”

“I knew that was an outside possibility,” Neal admitted. “But I knew you’d be right behind them, and you’d be in time to see the plain view evidence.”

“I’d be in time to see you convulsing on the ground for the second time in three days!”

“Look, I know, but it was my screw-up that meant you couldn’t get the warrant--”

“That was not just your screw-up. It was yours, and mine, and Jones’s. I should have made sure you knew the rules for handling evidence, and he should have remembered them. And even if it was all on you, it’s not necessary or right or fair for you to take that kind of risk just to take down a forger. We’d catch him some other way, or we’d catch him the next time.”

“It worked,” Neal said stubbornly.

“It worked. Don’t ever do it again.”

“You’d have done it if you were me.”

“No, I wouldn’t have.”

Neal reached over and took Peter’s right hand off the steering wheel, turning it up so he could see his palm in the streetlights. “Yes, you would.”

He hadn’t wanted Neal to know about that; he hadn’t done it so that Neal would know or be impressed or understand how sorry he was. “It’s not the same thing.”

“What level did you get up to?”

“Six,” he said. “Barely.”

“I would totally have pussied out at five.”

“Not if you were me you wouldn’t have.” He wasn’t going to let Neal distract him from impressing on him the absolute urgency that he never do this again. Nothing he said seemed to be making much of a dent, so it was time to pull out the big guns. He took out his phone and called home.

“Peter! Is Neal okay?”

“Yes. He’s right next to me in the car.”

“Thank God. What happened?”

“I think he’d better explain that to you.” He passed the phone to Neal, saying, “Elizabeth.”

“Hi,” Neal said sheepishly. “No, yeah, I’m fine. Completely fine. Peter handcuffed me and wouldn’t let me pick them until we got to the car, but that’s all.” He listened for a moment. “Oh, well…what did he tell you about why we were working late? Right, the warehouse. I’m getting to it. So I was reading up on warrant law, and I realized that Peter could legally go in without a warrant if he was pursuing me in there.” He tried to sound as if it was all a big joke, but as he listened, and Peter heard Elizabeth’s angry, distraught voice coming from the phone, his expression grew serious. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize he’d call you. I didn’t mean for you to worry.”

It was obvious Neal had never been married, if he thought saying that would help matters.

“I did not mean that. I didn’t think--”

It almost sounded like he never had a mother, either. Peter mouthed the next line, “Damn right you didn’t think, mister!”

“Peter couldn’t be in on it, or it wouldn’t work, legally. Yeah, okay, that’s…that’s a fair point.”

That was a slightly better strategy, but still a rookie mistake. A woman who had seesawed from being out of her mind with worry for you to being righteously pissed off at your stupidity was not interested in your ability to rationally see both points of view. Complete, abject capitulation was what was called for.

“I know, but it was my fault…did he tell you about how I conned Jones into getting the bond out of evidence for me? That’s why--” He listened as Elizabeth yelled down the phone some more. “Okay. Yes, I…yes. I promise, I’ll never do anything this stupid ever again. I’m sorry.” He looked over at Peter. “She wants to know if we’re coming home.”

“It’ll take us a couple of hours to process things at the Bureau,” Peter said, glancing at his watch. “We’ll see her for breakfast and then get some sleep.”

Neal relayed that information, then listened and said, “She says, we will also be there for dinner.” A pause. “I’m supposed to emphasize that that is not a question.”

“Yes’m,” Peter said.

Hanging up the phone, Neal informed him, “You fight dirty.”

“When it comes to your safety? Damn right I do.” He accepted his phone back. “She cares about you, kiddo. We both do.”

Neal looked out the window for a moment. “‘Kiddo’? You do realize I’m thirty years old, don’t you?”

“Twenty-nine. And you have the mind of a child.”

As they pulled up at the Bureau, Neal said, “In the interests of full disclosure….”

“Oh God, what now?”

“I stole this out of Diana’s purse.” He handed over a Metro card.

Peter handed it back. “Great. You give it back to her.”

“Oh, good. I can do that without her ever noticing.”

“You can, but you won’t.”

#

There wasn’t much for Neal to do back at the office. He wasn’t allowed to help help question the suspects, naturally, and most of what the others were doing with the evidence seemed to be filling out copious amounts of forms identifying exactly what everything was and where they had found it. Not something he was exactly dying to do, but he was bored enough that he’d have done some, if they let him. He wound up finishing the warrant law book and picking up another one on rules of evidence from Peter’s office, making a mental note to be sure to tell Peter he had it so it wouldn’t be stealing.

It wasn’t until almost dawn that he had a chance to talk to Diana. He did have unsupervised access to her purse several times before that, but he decided he had better give Peter this one, and waited.

“Hey,” he said. “That was good, you know, finding the warehouse.” If she hadn’t had a hunch about the Chuck Monaghan shell corporation, they would still be stuck.

“Thanks.” She smiled. “It was a real team effort.” She continued more seriously, “You know, Peter was really worried when you ran off like that.”

“I know. I already heard about it from him and Mrs. Burke. Speaking of.” He handed her the Metro card.

She looked puzzled.

“I…borrowed that, from your purse. I’d pay you back for the fare, but, you know.” He wasn’t exactly allowed to carry money. “I’m sure Peter would if you asked.”

She shook her head, more in exasperation than refusal. “I wondered how you got to the warehouse so fast.”

“That’s how. I…didn’t take anything else.”

“Good.” She glanced down at her purse, but didn’t check inside.

When they got home, Elizabeth hugged him, then held him out at arm’s length and said, “Do you have any idea how worried I was?”

“I do now,” Neal said, which was apparently an acceptable answer, since she didn’t start yelling at him again.

They went into the kitchen where Elizabeth dished up fruit salad and big slabs of a frittata full of ham, mushrooms, and cheese. “In case you’re wondering,” Peter said, pointing at his plate, “this means that she was too upset to go back to sleep after I called and said you were missing.”

“I am so sorry,” he said again. “I’m really not used to people worrying about me.” Kate and Mozzie, sure, but they were usually with him when he was getting into trouble, and if not, they didn’t find out about it until afterwards. And they understood that there were risks to the life they chose, and the job had to come first.

“He knows that because I’ve done the same thing over him more than once,” Elizabeth told him.

“Yeah, well, I never plan on doing something that I know could mean I never come home,” Peter said. “Sometimes events get out of control fast.”

“I get it,” Neal said. “Really, I do. I’ll think things through more.” He meant it. He couldn’t promise that he’d never do anything to make Peter and Elizabeth worry –like Peter said, events got out of control sometimes. But he’d include the certainty of upsetting them in the risk/benefit analysis next time.

“Do that,” said Elizabeth.

He’d apparently groveled enough. Elizabeth asked some questions about the case, and congratulated them for closing it. “Not so bad for your first week.”

“It’s hard to believe it’s only been a week.” Neal had had busier weeks before, but time moved very slowly in prison; a simple job like, say smuggling in some contraband and trading it for something else, could take a month.

“A lot’s happened,” Elizabeth agreed. “Anybody want more? No?” She stood and started stacking the plates. “You boys should get some sleep.”

“Come with me?” Peter asked her.

“I can’t; I have two client meetings this morning.” She leaned down and kissed Peter. “Love you.”

“Love you too.”

Neal hadn’t thought he was particularly tired—having 7 o’clock in the morning still be part of the night before was not exactly a rarity in his experience—and he paced restlessly around his room for a few minutes, getting changed into pyjamas and looking for something to read. But as soon as he sat down on the bed, the reality of having been awake for twenty-five hours hit him, and he fell almost immediately asleep, and stayed that way until mid-afternoon.

Waking up, he confronted his closet. That Peter and Elizabeth had gone to a seized property auction and buying his clothes no longer seemed sinister, but it was still very weird to think about. How long did it take for a felon’s personal belongings to make it to auction? How long had they been planning this? How many other people had bid on his clothes, and had they been stuck in mixed lots with other criminals’ clothes that they then had to throw away?

However it worked, the process had left Neal with a somewhat impractical wardrobe. He had a half-dozen custom-cut suits, two sets of evening dress—white tie and black—a few sport coats and slacks, and armloads of hand-sewn silk ties and tailored shirts, plus one black cashmere turtleneck that was currently covered in flour. What he didn’t have were any ordinary puttering-around-the-house clothes. He had owned some, but maybe they hadn’t been sent to the auction, or the Burkes hadn’t recognized them, since Neal had never committed any crimes while wearing them. His original socks and underwear had also not resurfaced, but someone, probably Elizabeth, had bought him a few packages of those.

So, feeling faintly ridiculous, he put on slacks and a dress shirt to go downstairs to do his laundry.

Elizabeth had told him that the washing machine was in the basement, so he stuffed his things in a pillowcase and took them down there to sort. Deciding to start with whites, he studied the dials on the machine carefully, chose the appropriate settings, and added the detergent. Closing the lid, he pressed the button to start the cycle.

Nothing happened. Or almost nothing—the machine hummed for a moment, then stopped. He adjusted the dials and tried again.

Nothing. After a few more minutes of trial and error, he reluctantly went upstairs. “Peter?”

He was sitting in the living room, doing a crossword puzzle. “Yes, Neal?”

“There are a few gaps in my knowledge base,” he admitted.

“Self-preservation and respect for the concept of ownership?”

“I can’t figure out how to work your washing machine. I’ve never used one that doesn’t take coins before.” He’d always either schlepped to the laundromat or sent it out. In prison, the machines took tokens instead of currency, and your other option was trading another inmate to do it for you, but it was basically the same setup.

“Did you turn the water on?”

“Hm?”

Peter stood up. “I’ll show you.” Downstairs, he showed Neal where there was a pair of faucet handles, helpfully colored red and blue, just behind the washing machine. “If you leave these on, the only thing stopping the water from coming out is the mechanism inside the machine. Eventually, the pressure weakens the hose and it breaks.”

“I’ve never heard of that.”

“It’s a homeowner thing,” Peter said. “Some people leave the water on all the time, but after the first time you flood the entire basement, you learn not to.”

Neal turned the faucets on and repeated his earlier procedure. This time, it worked.

“We’re in business,” Peter said.

“Is there anything I need to know about the dryer?”

“You know where the lint trap is?”

“Uh—here?”

“Then you’re good.”

#

 

The next day at work, Neal seemed surprised that they weren’t going to immediately start working on a brand-new case. “The day after you steal, say, a bag full of diamonds or a priceless work of art, is it time to start planning the next criminal enterprise?” Peter asked him.

“Of course not. You still have to fence it.”

“Exactly. And now we have to give the prosecution what they need to convince a judge and jury to buy that Hagan committed this crime, and if possible all the other ones we suspect him for.”

“Wow.” Neal rolled his eyes. “That was really patronizing. You think I’m not capable of understanding anything unless it’s couched in a criminal metaphor?”

Peter immediately felt bad. “No, I don’t think that. I’m sorry, I--”

“Peter. I’m messing with you. Ease back on the guilt thing a little bit. I’m on board; what do I do?”

Meticulous construction of a case was not exactly Neal’s forte, but Peter found some paperwork he could proofread, to keep him occupied.

Not long after, Hughes called Peter into his office. “How’s Caffrey doing?”

“He’s doing great,” Peter said. “He was a huge help on this case, which you’ll see when I finish my report. He’s working well with the team, even fitting in well at home. My wife loves him. He’s going to be a real asset to the Bureau.”

“His duties are considerably outside the scope of what’s usual for a collared felon—particularly one so newly released.”

“Yes,” Peter agreed. Handlers tended to use collared felons for menial or at best light clerical work—sweeping floors, fetching coffee, making copies—and occasionally shake them down for insider information on known associates or criminal methods. Neal, on the other hand, was performing many of the same duties as an agent. “He’s very intelligent and has an extensive understanding of a variety of types of white collar crime. He also demonstrated through his correspondence with me from prison, as well as in the Hagan case, that he’s willing to use that understanding to assist the Bureau.” He had already explained that in his proposal to be Neal’s handler, but he felt it was worth repeating.

“And that’s working out well.”

“Yes.”

“I see. So what’s this I hear about you and a dozen other agents pursuing him into a warehouse that happened to be full of forged bonds?”

Peter had been hoping for a little more time to put exactly the right spin on that one, but he had given the explanation some thought. “Doing things the legal way is a big adjustment for him. We were trying to work out how to get inside the warehouse, and I had him doing some background reading on warrant law. He worked out that that would do it.”

“Did you authorize this operation?”

“No. But his heart was in the right place. He was sincerely trying to help. There have been consequences.” Peter was sure that forcing Neal to explain himself to Elizabeth counted as severe consequences.

“Hm. And this chain of custody violation with the initial evidence—his heart was in the right place then, too?”

“Yes. That was a misunderstanding, and his evidence was instrumental in identifying the forger. He’s trying very hard and he knows better now.”

“I certainly hope you’re right. You’re the one who’s been working closely with him, so, I trust your judgment.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“However, I also need to be able to trust that you can control him. If anyone can, it’ll be you—you’re the one who caught him. But right now, how it looks to me? You’re still chasing him.”

Peter couldn’t deny that—he had been one step, if not more, behind Caffrey when each of the incidents occurred. He did believe that Neal wouldn’t make those particular mistakes again, but there were plenty of others he hadn’t made yet, probably some that Peter couldn’t even begin to anticipate.

“So what’s your plan?”

Peter knew, had always known, that the usual way of managing collared felons, with rewards and consequences, wouldn’t even begin to work on Neal. He’d resent it, and a resentful Neal couldn’t be bullied into doing the kind of creative work that Peter expected of him. The only way was to keep developing the rapport that they’d built up during the chase and while Neal was in prison, to make it clear that they were still playing the old game, just on the same side now.

But that was not what Hughes wanted to hear. He could probably get away with saying something vague, like that he was going to be more careful or supervise Neal more closely. But if Neal ever did end up in serious trouble—if he made a mistake that Peter couldn’t cover up for in time—they would need Hughes able and willing to say that both Peter and Neal were putting in the effort to make this work. Hughes wanted to hear about consequences, so for Neal’s own good, Peter had better tell him about some.

He ran through the list of available options and finally said, “I’ll put him on line-of-sight for a week.” At Hughes’s skeptical look, he added, “At least. Then we’ll see how it goes.” As consequences went, it barely qualified—many collared felons were on line-of-sight restriction all the time, and almost any other handler would have had Neal on it from the beginning, at least until he gave some evidence that he could be trusted. “He gets into trouble when I’m not watching him; this way, he has an idea, he has no excuse not to run it past me before doing anything.” The more he thought about it, the better he thought the idea was. Neal had always—except for a few days last week—wanted his attention. This way, he’d have as much of it as he could handle.

Hughes considered that for a moment and said, “And where is Caffrey now?”

“At his desk,” Peter said, hoping that he was.

“And is his desk in your line of sight right now?”

“No, sir. Going.”

Neal was not quite at his desk, but was at the desk of one of the clerks, apparently trying unsuccessfully to flirt.

“Neal. My office. Bring your stuff.”

Neal gathered what he was working on from his desk and followed him up to his office. “What’s up?”

“Word got back to my boss about your little stunt Monday night.”

“Oh. That’s…bad, isn’t it?”

“It could be worse. We agreed that closer supervision is in order. You’re on line-of-sight for at least a week.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“It means that you’re to stay in my personal line of sight at all times.” It actually meant that Neal had to be in the line of sight of an authorized handler, but he didn’t think giving that responsibility to Jones or Berrigan would be fair to anyone.

“Come on, Peter, that’s ridiculous.” Neal sounded like he couldn’t quite believe Peter was serious.

“I’m not arguing with you, and it’s as inconvenient for me as it is for you, but that’s what we’re doing.”

“Am I allowed to go to the bathroom?” he asked sarcastically.

“If I go with you, sure.”

“That’s not the least bit humiliating.”

“You also get to come along when I go to the bathroom,” Peter pointed out.

“This just gets better and better. Where am I supposed to sleep?”

“It only applies when we’re at work.” If it was really a punishment, it should have been all the time. But Peter was looking at it as a preventative measure, and Neal behaved himself at home. Also, Hughes had no way to know what went on between them outside of work.

“Okay, so you haven’t gone completely insane, but I still can’t believe you’re doing this to me. What’s Elizabeth going to say?”

He didn’t, quite, mention Saturday, and Peter didn’t either. “I am doing this to you. Elizabeth, if you choose to tell her about this, will probably agree that I’m being completely unreasonable and mean. Doesn’t matter. This is work, and here, if you want to go over my head, it would have to be to Hughes. I don’t recommend it.”

Neal looked, for a moment, as if he was about to demand that Peter escort him over there to do just that, but finally took himself and his work into a corner to sulk instead.

Peter shifted the position of his computer monitor so that he could see Neal out of the corner of his eye while he was looking at it, and checked his email.

Yesterday, before the Hagan case had started moving so quickly, he’d put out some feelers that he was looking for a competent, compassionate, and discreet agent in the Civil Rights division. He’d already gotten several responses. Most mentioned the names of agents who specialized in other areas of the division, like hate crime and human trafficking. A couple mentioned names of agents who worked color of law cases, and a few others gave names but didn’t specify. Several also asked for more information on the case.

Peter wrote a few quick replies, explaining that it was a color-of-law case involving a collared felon, then looked up the named agents in the internal directory. He wrote slightly longer replies to the messages that had mentioned agents with the appropriate expertise, asking for more background on them.

Then he looked at Neal, who took a moment to glare at him before forcefully turning a page, and remembered what was really going on the last time he thought Neal was sulking. “Is there something I’m missing here?”

Neal looked up for a moment, then back down at the file he was reading, as if he was considering refusing to speak to him at all. Finally he said, “Missing where?”

“In why you’re so upset about this line-of-sight thing.”

“I’m not upset; I’m pissed off.”

“Okay.”

“You think there has to be some obscure reason why you treating me like a two-year-old would be a problem for me?”

“I’m not treating you like a two-year-old. I’m treating you like a collared felon under my custody, which is exactly what you are.”

“Oh, so you’re saying you didn’t have a choice?”

“Yeah, I had a choice. I could have stuck you in a cell downstairs for a week, or made you work in handcuffs.” Or other things he didn’t even want to mention. “This is what I chose. You want me to reconsider?”

Neal slumped in his chair and looked away. “I thought we settled that. I thought we were good.”

Peter couldn’t tell if it was a deliberate display of vulnerability or the real thing; for the first time, it occurred to him that Neal might not be entirely sure either. Deciding to take it at face value, he went around to the front of the desk so they could talk face-to-face. “Yeah, so did I. Then I realized my boss wants to see me doing something about it.”

Neal looked enlightened, and much more cheerful. “Oh. So this is--”

“This is not a con. Hughes is right, that I haven’t been supervising you closely enough. This way, something comes up, you don’t have a chance to act before we talk about it. Everybody else here has college coursework in law or criminal justice, plus twenty-one weeks at Quantico. You’ve read two books. There’s a lot you don’t know.”

“Yeah, okay, I get that, but this? Not letting me out of your sight? Does not help with that.”

“It’s my job to keep you from making mistakes. And I not only have to do it, but because of last week’s screw-ups, I have to be seen to be doing it. If the question ever comes up, ‘Is Burke actually handling Caffrey or just running around after him cleaning up after him?’ we’ll need Hughes to be in a position to say, ‘Yes, absolutely, he’s got him under control.’”

“It’s still sounding like a con to me.”

“It’s not a con. It’s taking something that has to be done—me, watching you, and keeping you from making mistakes—and we’re doing it in a particularly obvious way to have a desired effect on the people watching.”

“So…it’s a little bit of a con.”

“Fine. It’s a little bit of a con. But I am dead serious about you staying in my line of sight while we’re at work. You slip away from me when I’m not looking—even if nobody else is looking either—and I’m putting you in cuffs. You pick them, you’re in a cell. I am not joking.”

“Total commitment to the role. Got it. Define ‘at work.’”

“We’re in this building, or it’s normal working hours, or we’re performing work duties of any kind.” Peter carefully examined the statement for loopholes. “Or in any situation that a reasonable person would understand as being ‘at work.’”

“What situation could that possibly be, that doesn’t fall under one of the first three categories?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out when you slip away from me.”

Neal looked as if he was about to be offended, then said, “Okay, that’s fair.” He paused. “The whole week?”

“The whole week,” Peter confirmed. “This Tuesday to next Tuesday.”

“Are you sure you don’t mean the week as in ending Friday?”

“Very sure.”

Neal shook his head in what was now, apparently, mock exasperation, and picked his file back up.

They got through the day. After lunch, Neal unbent enough to pull a chair up to a corner of Peter’s desk and work there, instead of hiding out in a corner. They worked out where they had to stand in the men’s room so that Peter could keep Neal in his line of sight without watching him piss or staring at him while he was himself pissing.

By Wednesday, Neal had figured out that the line-of-sight restriction really punished Peter as much as it did him—possibly more, given Peter’s determination not to take advantage of his authority. By afternoon, he was manufacturing errands in different parts of the building. Peter agreed to the general orientation to the highlights of the other floors of the building—something he probably should have done already—the investigation into whether any of the other vending machines were better-stocked than the nearby ones, the tour of the internal library, and the visit to the file room to review sign-out procedures.

He was determined, however, to draw the line somewhere.

“—no, I’m just saying, I think I’d have a better understanding of the functioning of the Bureau once I’ve had a look at the electrical plant.”

“Maybe you would,” Peter said. He couldn’t entirely rule it out. “I’m not convinced it’s a level of understanding you actually need.”

“Well, neither am I, but it could come in handy. You never know.”

That was exactly the problem; you never knew what Neal would do with information like that. “I don’t think--” His phone rang. “Hold that thought.” He picked up. “Agent Burke.”

“Pete, how you doing? It’s Jake.”

Jake had been in his class at Quantico, and they’d kept in touch, the way you did—drinks if they happened to be in the same city at the same time, and Peter was pretty sure Elizabeth and Jake’s wife exchanged Christmas cards. He was also one of the people Peter had contacted on Monday. “Doing fine. How are you and Molly?”

“She’s great. Redecorating the house. You know how it is. What about Elizabeth and that dog of yours?”

“El and Satch are fine, too.” Crap, what was Jake’s kid’s name? “And Karen? She must be, geez, she must be in junior high now.”

“Yeah, my little girl’s getting breasts and going on dates with pimply-faced boys I can’t trust. It’s weird.”

“We don’t have that problem with Satch,” Peter noted.

“I guess not. Listen.” Jake’s voice grew serious. “This color of law case you’re working on.”

“Yes,” Peter said, trying not to give anything away. Neal was sitting right there—and, damn it, would be sitting right there for every phone call he made for the next four business days—and the last thing Peter wanted to do was make him think about it during the work day.

“The collared felon—it’s your guy? Caffrey?”

“Uh-huh.” Neal was already watching him, alertly, like he knew something was up.

“Then I’m guessing it’s not about false arrest or falsification of evidence, since you’re the one who put him away.”

“That’s correct,” he said, trying to sound like this was any business conversation with a friendly colleague, and they had just shifted from the “catching up” part to the real reason for the call.

“Pete, are you trying to keep whoever’s in the room with you from knowing what you’re talking about?”

“You read that one right.”

“Just checking. I may be barking up the wrong tree here, but is it by any chance a sex assault case?”

“Yep.”

“All right. Good. I mean—you know. I have a name for you. Agent Lisa Nelson. She’s based here in Chicago, but she travels around quite a bit. She’d be a pretty good person to talk to regardless, but for the last couple of years she’s been trying to uncover systematic abuses by corrections officers in the ASP program.”

“Sounds like it’s right in her wheelhouse.”

“Good. I mean--”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You wanted compassionate and competent; Nelson can definitely deliver that. Very good with victims, very determined not to let this sort of thing slide. Discreet, you’re going to have to lean on her for. This lawyer she’s in cahoots with has her shopping for a star witness.”

“That’s not so good for us.” This Agent Nelson was going to think she had finally found the right store when she met Neal; he was attractive, personable, and well-spoken: the perfect star witness. Except that he didn’t want to be one.

“She’s solid,” Jake said. “She’ll try to talk him into it, but she won’t drag him into the spotlight against his will.”

“That sounds perfect, then.” Neal could stand up for himself when it came to persuasion.

“I’ll have her get in touch. Is it better if she calls you at home?”

“Yeah, that would be better.” There, he’d have to keep Elizabeth from overhearing anything Neal didn’t want her to know, but he could always take the phone into the bathroom and shut the door.

“Okay. Good luck. Say hi to Elizabeth for me.”

“And to Molly and Karen for me.” He hung up.

“I really feel that it’s my duty to mock you, and possibly the training program at Quantico, and the FBI in general, for how bad you are at having a phone conversation without letting on what you’re talking about. But it’s probably more important for me to hear what you found out.”

“He recommended an agent to take your case,” Peter said, relieved that Neal had raised the subject and accepting the implied parameters, that they weren’t going to talk about what happened, just what was going to happen next. “Let’s check her out.”

Neal came around to his side of the desk and looked over his shoulder as Peter brought Nelson up in the directory.

The profile showed her degrees—Bachelor’s in Poly Sci with a women’s studies minor, Masters in Criminal Justice—and her history of assignments. She’d been with the Civil Rights division from the beginning, starting out in the human trafficking unit and switching over to color of law after a few years.

“Chicago,” Neal said. “Is that a problem?”

“I figured you’d be more comfortable giving your statement to someone who doesn’t work in this building,” Peter explained.

“Yeah, thanks. I didn’t realize that was an option.”

Normally it wasn’t—individuals making a color of law abuse report were supposed to start with their local office—but using back channels to make sure that a case you had a personal stake in got to the best person for the job was an acceptable bending of the rules. Peter thought about trying to explain the distinction to Neal, but decided it wasn’t the time. “She has a special interest in this sort of thing.”

The profile didn’t show much, so Peter opened up Google and typed in the name. There weren’t a lot of results that pertained to the Lisa Nelson they were interested in, which was good. Her name appeared in a few lists of agents being recognized for superior work or length of service, with slightly longer articles in what must have been her home town newspaper, but they were padded out with details about her childhood and background information on the FBI, not details of specific cases.

There were a few in-depth articles about a case from her days in the human trafficking unit, where a group of immigration officials had coerced trafficked women into having sex with them in order to keep from being deported. That must have been what motivated her to switch over to color of law.

“She looks pretty good to me,” Peter said. “What do you think?”

“I’m not the best judge of Feds, but I guess.”

Peter explained. “The commendations show that she does good work, but she doesn’t get written up in the papers every time she closes a case, which means she’s not in it for the publicity. There’s a coherent narrative to her career—her educational background show that she was probably planning from the start to work on human trafficking, and she switched for a good reason. She isn’t being shunted around from one unit to another because she can’t be bothered to specialize or can’t get along with anybody or anything like that. She looks pretty good on paper, and Jake’s met her in person and he’s a decent judge of character. Should I set something up?”

Neal hesitated, then nodded. “Sometime after next Tuesday. I’m not doing this with you staring at me.”

“Fair enough.”

#

By Friday, Neal was getting desperate. All day, he had to keep up the pretense that he was having fun with the restriction of remaining in Peter’s sight at all times. He understood why Peter was doing it—both levels of reasons. He even, to an extent, agreed with them. He wanted to stay out of trouble; he was glad that Peter was trying to protect him. He was even glad that Peter played along with his repeated attempts to use the restriction to needle, harass, and inconvenience him.

But at the same time, the constant undercurrent of this is for your own good, I’m doing this to protect you, you’re my responsibility, blah, blah, blah was more than a little oppressive. He wasn’t a child or an idiot. He had been solely responsible for himself and for his own choices since he was fifteen years old.

Except that the collar meant that he couldn’t be. He was dependent on the Burkes to feed, clothe, and shelter him, and on Peter for his basic physical safety. He appreciated that they were trying to treat him like that wasn’t the case, like they were some version of a normal family and not a con and his handlers, he really did. He knew it could be a lot worse.

But there was only room for two adults in the script they were playing from. Peter was the firm but loving father, Elizabeth the caring, emotionally expressive mother. That left him the frustrated adolescent.

There were times when he liked it—to an almost embarrassing degree. The home-cooked dinners, the worrying about him, the way they seemed to find absolutely no contradiction between the two beliefs that Neal was constantly likely to screw things up and that they would always be there for him.

It really was nice, and he was humbled and grateful that they had made a place for him in a life that was, face it, basically perfect. But he was a grown man, and the thought that he’d be spending the rest of his life as the Burkes’ surrogate child was horrifying.

He felt like an ingrate just thinking it. By the time dinner was over each night, he was exhausted from spending ten or twelve uninterrupted hours playing the Beav to Peter’s Ward Cleaver, and wanted nothing more than to hide in his room. But doing so meant that Elizabeth thought something was wrong, and not only did he really not want to worry her, but her worrying brought more of the concerned attention that he loved and hated at the same time.

He couldn’t tell her what was really wrong—she and Peter were both doing their best, and he was, God damn it, grateful for it. There wasn’t any way to say, yes, I realize this is the least-worst way that we could possibly proceed from the basic parameters of the scenario, but there are still times when I hate it. Elizabeth would cry, and Peter would remind him that he was in this situation because he was a criminal and he had no one to blame but himself. (And, he thought, when he was out of the room they’d probably switch roles.)

So, on Friday, convinced that if he didn’t have a chance to have an actual conversation with someone who wasn’t named Burke he’d go completely out of his mind, he sat directly in Peter’s line of sight while he mentally composed a message to Mozzie, worked out a substitution cipher in his head, and then wrote the message in cipher.

In plain, the message read:

Havisham—
Feds are still treating me well, don’t worry. Remember that time we were stuck in the hotel room in Orly? New game: if it were possible to do the thing we both want most, how would we do it?

PS, the Fed says you can knock on the front door.

Hopefully, that was cryptic enough to not be a problem if it fell into the wrong hands, but clear enough that Mozzie would know what he meant. In Orly, they had been stuck pretending to be ordinary tourists for a month, under so much heat they didn’t dare run even the most basic cons to keep their hands in. Neal had been stir-crazy, ready to risk almost anything just to do something. Mozzie had brought him back from the brink of self-destruction with the Planning a Heist game. Now Neal was proposing a Planning His Escape game. He had no illusions that they’d ever come up with a workable plan, but it would help to pretend. The salutation and postscript together would tell Moz that Peter had seen him at the house and knew about the Havisham identity.

Mozzie hadn’t made contact since last Friday—he must have finally believed Neal when he said he was all right and that he really shouldn’t come by the house. But Neal also knew he’d be back—he’d show his face, just so Neal would know he wasn’t alone. And Neal was about eighty, eighty-five percent sure he’d do it on Friday. If they’d had a chance to set it up, Moz would have gone for something more elaborate—some sort of shifting schedule based on phases of the moon, or days where the date was a prime number—but Moz could do the classics, too.

Neal folded the note up very small and hid it between his thumb and palm as they left the building. He told himself that it was just fine if Moz wasn’t there—he’d make contact sometime, and Neal could either save the note or write a new one. But as they stepped out onto the sidewalk, he couldn’t help thinking, Come on, Moz, don’t leave me hanging now….

Moz didn’t. He was on a park bench across the street, dressed up as a homeless man. Thank God. Now Neal just had to get him close enough to pass the message. When he saw that Moz was watching him, he deliberately stumbled into Peter.

“Hey. You okay?” Peter asked, steadying him.

“Yeah. Crack in the sidewalk.”

Moz got up and started shuffling across the street, on a rambling course that Neal plotted would intercept with theirs just before they got to the car. Good; he hadn’t been totally sure if Moz knew which car Peter’s was.

As he walked, Moz was occasionally asking a passerby for some spare change, and Neal hoped he wouldn’t try it on them; it would just be embarrassing. Fortunately, he was smart enough not to try it. He tried out his plea on someone else as they passed, and Neal dropped the note into one of the shopping bags Moz was carrying.

It was a very clean drop, except for the minor detail that Peter knew exactly what Mozzie looked like. “You know, you could have just gone over and talked to him,” he said as Moz hurried away.

“He’d have bolted,” Neal said, which was true, but not the real reason. Writing the coded message and figuring out how to pass it had taken hours, hours during which he felt almost like himself. He was starting to understand the appeal of needless elaboration.

#

“I don’t know, honey, he seems like something’s bothering him,” Elizabeth said. Neal had retreated to his room shortly after breakfast, saying he had some reading he wanted to do.

“Things are a little boring at work,” Peter said, his voice muffled because his head and shoulders were in the cabinet under the kitchen sink. “Wrapping up the last case, you know. It’s making him a little squirrelly. He’ll probably feel better Wednesday or so. Maybe Thursday.”

“Why? What’s happening on Wednesday?”

The slight hesitation before Peter said, “Nothing,” told her all she needed to know.

“The confidential thing that you can’t tell me about is happening on Wednesday?”

“If it was, I couldn’t tell you that, either. Hand me that bucket.”

She handed him the bucket. He took his head out of the cupboard and did something complicated with his hands, his face contorted with effort, and there was a sort of messy gloop.

Peter’s hands emerged from under the sink holding the drain trap, which he waved in her direction saying, “That’s why it’s draining slow,” while she tried not to look at it.

“Ew. Take that outside.” She closed the cupboard door so Satch couldn’t stick his nose in whatever had glooped into the bucket, and followed Peter out onto the patio, where he was washing out the sink trap under the outside faucet. “You’d tell me if there was anything wrong, wouldn’t you?”

“Don’t,” Peter said. “Don’t pry into this, don’t try to make my feel guilty for not telling you, and don’t try to figure it out. If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”

“Okay.” Elizabeth would just have to trust Peter on this one.

He turned off the water and said, “The other thing that’s going on is that I’ve had to be a little more strict with him at work, just so it’s clear I’m not condoning how he ran away to the warehouse Monday night. We talked about why I’m doing it and he understands, but it’s kind of irritating—for both of us. I can officially ease up on him on Tuesday, if he manages to get there without doing anything completely insane.”

That was reassuring—it sounded like Neal had a few little things bothering him, not any one big thing. Work being no fun and Peter acting like a big grumpy bear were both good reasons for him to be a little subdued, let alone whatever the thing on Wednesday was. “Will he? Make it to Tuesday?”

Peter came back inside with the sink trap in hand. “I think so.” He knelt in front of the sink and stuck his head in the cupboard again, groping around him for the wrench. “I’m trying to figure out something interesting he can do on Monday; that should help. Maybe I’ll let him pick out a cold case to play around with.”

Elizabeth smiled. For years, the cold cases that Peter played around with had always involved Neal.

Peter was still under the sink when someone knocked at the door. Peter started to emerge, but she said, “I’ll get it.”

At the door was a short, mustached man wearing an old-fashioned tweed overcoat and a very obvious toupee, carrying a vacuum cleaner. “Good afternoon, ma’am,” he said in a loud, stagey voice. “Have you heard about the Ortek 2000? It is the latest development in carpet-sweeping technology.”

“We already have a vacuum cleaner we’re pretty happy with,” she said.

“Pretty happy? The Ortek 2000 will make you orgasmic. Allow me to demonstrate.”

Just before things got really creepy, Peter came out of the kitchen. “Havisham,” he said, then called up the stairs, “Neal!”

“Peter?”

“He’s a friend of Neal’s. Make him stay in the living room; I have to wash my hands.”

She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to stop Havisham if he tried to leave the living room, but fortunately, he didn’t look like he was planning to try. In fact, he looked more like he was thinking of bolting from the doorstep. “Come in,” she said, stepping back. “Please don’t demonstrate the vacuum cleaner. I’m Elizabeth.”

“Maurice Havisham,” the man said.

#

“Neal!” Peter’s voice boomed up the stairs.

What now? Neal put down the book he’d been trying to focus on and put a pleasant expression on his face.

He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t to see Mozzie, wearing the ridiculous toupee and wire-framed glasses that appeared on Havisham’s driver’s license, facing off with Elizabeth inside the front door. “Havisham,” he said, hurrying down the last few stairs. “This is a surprise. Um, Elizabeth, this is Gordon Havisham, Havisham, Elizabeth Burke.”

“Maurice,” Mozzie said testily.

“Right, sorry, I forgot about the moustache.” Mozzie had used the name Maurice Havisham for a travelling vacuum cleaner salesman scam years back, before they had even met, wearing a very good false moustache and a very bad toupee that was almost, but not quite, the same color. The idea was that the mark would recognize the toupee and conclude that Havisham was pathetically bad at deception and therefore couldn’t possibly be, say, selling third-rate Chinese vacuum cleaners as high-end German engineered ones. Gordon Havisham had come later, and was mainly used for online purchases that would be inconvenient if traced back, so Mozzie didn’t really have a disguise for him.

“I knocked on the front door,” Mozzie said.

“I…see that,” Neal answered.

Abruptly, Mozzie put down his vacuum cleaner and threw his arms around him. Neal cautiously hugged him back, then, when Moz stepped away, casually checked his pockets. They contained exactly the same things that they had contained before, nothing removed or added. Apparently Mozzie had just felt like hugging him.

“Would your friend like to sit down?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yeah, sure, okay,” Neal said. Moz seemed reluctant to step away from the door, and insisted on bringing his vacuum cleaner with him like some sort of talisman of protection, but eventually came the whole way into the living room and sat on the couch.

“So,” Moz said stiffly. “How are things?”

“Okay,” Neal said.

“I presume the Feds aren’t keeping you in a dungeon, since you were upstairs.”

“Right, no dungeon. More of a guest room. It’s nice.”

“Bigger than the room at Orly?”

“Smaller, but I do have access to the rest of the house.” Neal wasn’t sure where Mozzie was going with the question—maybe he was just trying to figure out what Neal had intended by the reference in the note.

“Ah. That helps.”

“Yeah, it does.”

Peter came into the room, touching Elizabeth on the shoulder and saying, “Okay, I’ve got this.” He came around and sat in a chair across from Neal and Mozzie. “Here’s how this is going to work. You.” He pointed to Moz. “Skulking around my house at night is a good way to get shot. Don’t do it again. And you.” He pointed at Neal. “If you decide to invite a friend over, give the rest of us some warning.”

“I just passed along your message,” Neal said. “I didn’t think he’d actually come.”

“Of course I came,” Moz said indignantly.

“I appreciate it.” Appreciating Moz didn’t bother him the way appreciating the Burkes did. Maybe because the worst Moz could do was not come.

“And,” Peter continued, “I’m in the room while you visit. You can ignore me if you want to. I don’t care what you get up to when you’re not in my house,” he added to Moz, “but I want to be able to testify under oath if necessary that Neal wasn’t planning cons in my living room.”

“I accept your terms, Fed,” Mozzie said.

“Great,” Peter said.

There was a long, awkward pause. “So,” Neal said. “The, uh, Ortek 2000, now.” It had been the Ortek 1000 the last time Mozzie used the vacuum cleaner salesman persona, and it looked like the same cleaner, but Moz had scraped off the 1 and stenciled on a 2.

“Yes, it’s the latest model.”

Neal had no idea what that was supposed to mean. Maybe Moz was still pretending to be an actual vacuum cleaner salesman. “So how’s…things?”

“Fine. I’m not at liberty to discuss anything I’ve been doing.”

“Right. And you probably don’t want to hear about how I helped the FBI put away a bond forger.”

“Not unless you want to break my heart, no.”

“He had it coming, but that’s what I figured. Okay, so let’s plan a heist.”

Moz turned an incredulous look at Peter.

“It’s fine; I’ve played this game with Elizabeth.”

“Right,” Moz said. “Lure me into a false sense of security, and then the Feds will copy our plan and frame me for it. No, thank you.”

“A counterfactual, then,” Neal suggested. “What about…Marie Antoinette’s pearl necklace?”

“How is that counterfactual?”

“We’ll steal it before Louis XIII gave it to Queen Anne on the occasion of the birth of Louis XIV. It’ll never become part of the crown jewels of France.”

“That’s pretty counterfactual,” Moz admitted. “But without the history, it won’t be particularly valuable.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Neal said. He shrugged. “Birthday present for—Elizabeth.” He had nearly said Kate, but that was over.

“You’re going to give Mrs. Fed a stolen necklace?”

“A stolen necklace that in an alternate timeline where we didn’t steal it, belonged to four queens of France.”

“Oh, all right,” Mozzie said. “Shall we take the time machine as read?”

“Please.” If they didn’t, Mozzie could spend hours trying to figure out how to build one. “Contemporary accounts suggest that security within the Palais Royale was dubious at best, once you got inside the palace walls, so our best bet is probably to gain access by posing as courtiers.”

“Okay, so we’ll need period costumes.”

“We can get those from historical re-enactors. Letters of introduction, preferably checkable. We can use historical records to identify two men of appropriate rank who are about the right ages but never got anywhere near Louis XII’s court.”

“From one of the outlying provinces,” Moz said. “Alsace, maybe. That’ll help explain our accents.”

“Right. And we’ve come to court to look for wives.”

They had gotten as far as being accepted as French noblemen in the royal court when Elizabeth came into the room, carrying a plate of carrots and pita chips surrounding a plastic container of hummus. “I thought you boys might like a snack.”

Mozzie turned to Neal and mouthed, Seriously?

Neal shrugged and took a chip. “Thanks, Elizabeth.” He supposed he should be glad it wasn’t milk and cookies—Moz would have insisted on checking her for an on-off switch.

“Do you want something to drink? We’ve got Coke, milk, beer…I could make a pot of coffee….”

“A beer would be great,” Neal said, wondering if he’d actually get one. “Havisham?”

“No, thank you, I don’t want any of the mind control drugs that you’ve clearly already administered to my friend.”

“Sorry,” Neal said to Elizabeth.

“It’s okay—I just figured out who you are,” she said to Moz. “Peter always called you ‘Bernardo.’”

“Hmph,” Moz said.

Bernardo was a very old, very burned alias of Moz’s. “Peter told you about—him?” Neal asked, not sure what name to use now.

“He told me about all your adventures. Hang on.” She went into the kitchen and came back with three beers, handing one each to Peter and Neal and keeping one for herself. She sat on the love seat next to Peter and drew her legs up under herself. “You don’t look anything like a Bernardo.”

“That’s on purpose,” Neal said. “For face-to-face jobs, you want an alias that people will subconsciously think, ‘Yeah, that guy looks like a Nick Haldeman,’ or whatever.” He took a sip of the beer—yep, he still didn’t like beer—and pointed the neck of the bottle at Moz. “He only ever used Bernardo for phone and online work, and for that it’s better if it doesn’t match, so anybody that ever tries to put a face to the name will be starting with wrong assumptions.”

“And you’re still going to try to deny the mind-control drugs?” Moz asked. “Sitting here telling the Feds all our tricks of the trade?”

“Elizabeth is an event planner, not a Fed,” Neal said. “And I’m sure Peter already knows how to pick an alias.”

“Yep,” Peter said.

Moz cleared his throat. “Back in the court of Louis XIII….”

“We’re stealing Queen Anne’s pearl necklace,” Neal explained to Elizabeth. “We’re in the palace, but we still need to find a way into the royal bedchamber.”

“I am not disguising myself as a charwoman again,” Moz said.

“Fair enough,” Neal said. “What about disguising one of us as a priest? No, never mind, that wouldn’t work; a seventeenth century priest wouldn’t bless a purely secular object like the necklace.”

“Why don’t you just seduce her?” Elizabeth suggested.

“That could work,” Neal said. “I’ve seduced royalty before.”

“Uh, we stipulated that we’re going to steal the necklace before Louis gives it to Queen Anne,” Moz reminded him.

“Oh, right.” Neal shrugged. “Okay, I’ll seduce him. There were rumors,” he added.

“There were also rumors that he had syphilis.” Moz made a face.

“So? We have the time machine; once we return to the present I’ll get some penicillin. I think this could really work. You know that psycho-historical theory that courtly love was really about sublimated homoerotic relations between men?”

“I do read,” Moz answered.

“Well, if it’s true, I can probably get him to show me where the necklace is as part of the foreplay. And then—okay, if it makes you more comfortable, I’ll slip him a roofie instead of actually going through with it.”

“That is a slightly less foolish plan, yes. How on earth will you manage to administer the drug?” Moz asked, giving a meaningful look to the bowl of hummus and the baby carrot that Neal was now eating.

“Ring with a hidden compartment, glass of wine.” Neal grinned. “It’s a classic.”

Planning the rest of the heist was easy. The getaway was particularly simple, since all they had to do was make it to the time machine before the king woke up and noticed the necklace was gone. “It’ll be a mystery for hundreds of years,” Neal said. “The Queen’s missing necklace. Maybe it’ll become a bigger legend than the other version.”

“We’ll do it as soon as I get the time machine built,” Moz said.

Suddenly, both Neal and Moz found it difficult to look at each other. Neal studied the label of his beer bottle, while Moz pretended to examine something on the side of his vacuum cleaner. It was different, Planning a Heist, when they both knew they’d never plan a heist together again. Different and sad.

Elizabeth stood up. “I’ll give you guys some privacy. Peter?”

“I’m staying here,” Peter said. “Neal knows why.”

Once she was gone, Neal ventured, “What about the big one?” careful to keep the same casual tone that he’d used for the necklace game. “We haven’t done that one in a while,” he added as a distraction, hoping Moz would know what he was talking about and Peter would assume they were talking about ancient history, some old game they had been playing for years, and not current events. “Any new ideas?”

“We can’t make any more progress on that one unless we have the plans,” Moz said.

“Hm. Patent office?”

“As if they’d be stupid enough to file the real plans,” Moz said.

“Point,” Neal agreed. Moz generally assumed that the government was lying about everything, but the patents on the correction collar was one topic where he might actually be right.

“Is there any chance our inside man could make a copy?” Moz asked.

“He doesn’t have that kind of access.” He hadn’t been allowed to so much as check the weather on an FBI computer, much less use any internal government systems. And the hard copies, if any existed, would be at Corrections, not the FBI. “And it’s not the kind of place where people go to lunch and leave their workstation logged on.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“If he plays it as a long con, deep undercover, maybe eventually he’ll have more access.”

“I’d worry about him going native,” Moz said.

There wasn’t much Neal could say to that—he was sure Moz thought he had gone native already. Maybe he had. “You have a better idea?”

“I’ll keep thinking about it.”

Not long after, Moz decided it was about time for him to go. They stood and Moz hugged him again; this time, Neal was fairly sure he felt something being dropped into his pocket. “You should thank them,” he said to Moz in an undertone.

Moz looked startled, but said loudly, “Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Fed, for just brainwashing my friend and not actually torturing him.”

“You’re welcome,” Peter said.

Elizabeth came back into the room. “You’re going? Well, it was nice meeting you, Maurice…Gordon…Bernardo…. Come back again sometime. Don’t forget your vacuum cleaner.”

Moz went back to the couch and picked up the Ortek 2000.

“Thanks for coming,” Neal said, squeezing Moz’s arm. “See you again sometime?”

Moz took a deep breath and nodded.

“Great.” He glanced over at Peter. “Is there a number he can call, or…?”

“Yeah, he can call the house,” Peter said, reciting the number. “Hang on, I’ll write it down.”

“No need, I have perfect recall,” Moz said. “I’m not giving the Feds my number.”

“Sure,” Neal said. “But you can get a burner phone to use for this, right?” He knew Moz would do more than just that—he’d probably get the phone, but keep it in a rotating series of locations that were not his storage unit or any of his safe houses. Maybe a bus station locker one week, inside a hollowed-out book at the public library the next. That made it okay, somehow, that what he was about to say next felt like they were a couple of thirteen-year-olds setting up a date. “Just call, before you come over, and make sure we’re here and…” And Peter didn’t have anything better to do than supervise them when they talked. “Everything.”

Moz nodded, and tapped out the code for Next week—Saturday on his leg, like he couldn’t bear to just say it.

“Weekends, I think, are usually good, unless something happens at work.”

“Yeah,” Peter confirmed. “We’re usually here weekends.”

Moz punched him on the arm, which was weird because he was not a punch-you-in-the-arm guy, picked up his vacuum, and left.

Neal wandered into the kitchen, where Elizabeth was poking around making vague gestures in the direction of dinner. He dropped his beer bottle in the recycling and said, “So. That was Havisham.”

“He seems…nice. He’s a good friend?”

“The best.”

“I don’t suppose I should ask what his real name is.”

“I…don’t actually know,” Neal admitted. “He once said he didn’t have one, but I have no idea what that means. ‘Havisham’ is fine. Do you want some help?”

“If you want to. I’m thinking something with the frozen shrimp and that broccoli that’s about to start getting yellow. Maybe stir-fry?”

“Sure,” Neal said, reviewing the contents of the spice cupboard. “How do you feel about ginger?”

“Love it.”

“Good.” He got out the broccoli, two carrots, a knob of ginger, and the cutting board, and started chopping. “I don’t think he’ll ever call you anything but ‘Mrs. Fed,’ though,” he said, returning to the subject of Mozzie.

“Does he really think we’re giving you mind control drugs, or is that some kind of a joke?”

“Hard to say,” Neal admitted. “If he does, it’s not anything personal.”

“Right, he’d think any federal agent and his wife you were living with were feeding you mind control drugs.”

“Exactly.”

While Neal chopped vegetables and mixed up a ginger sauce, Elizabeth put on some rice, deveined the shrimp, and explained how they were absolutely not supposed to put fat of any kind down the drain, because Peter had cleaned out the trap earlier that day and it was disgusting. “Something glooped,” she said. “Into a bucket.”

“I don’t even want to know.”

“Neither do I.”

Dinner was delicious, and Elizabeth opened a bottle of wine, some kind of line apparently having been crossed in regards to allowing the felon to consume alcohol, and consuming alcohol in his presence. The bottle was nothing special, a sweet Riesling that stood up pretty well against the gingery sauce, but it was much better than the beer. Neal had two glasses, and explained to Elizabeth that he and Mozzie had stolen the pearl necklace for her birthday.

“It’s not until October,” she pointed out.

“That’s okay; we have a time machine.”

It had been a long time since Neal had had anything to drink—over four years, to be specific; he did not care to drink anything fermented in a Ziploc bag—and by the time he retired to his room and took out Mozzie’s note, he was a little tipsy. Even though Moz had thoughtfully written it in a substitution cipher only one position off from the one Neal had used for his, he had to use pencil and paper to work it out.

The note consisted primarily of a catalog of coded words, phrases, and gestures that Neal could use to indicate the degree and nature of his distress, and the action he wished Mozzie to take. It started off fairly simple: when Moz asked how he was, “Fine” was to indicate, “I have not been subjected to any atrocities in at least a week,” while “Okay” meant, “My suffering is bearable,” on up to “Getting by,” which translated to, “I would like a cyanide capsule.”

After that, Moz provided a list of women’s names he was to work into the conversation to indicate exactly how he was being mistreated, from Janice (“They’re starving me”) to Ermintrude (“Psychological torture involving insects and/or arachnids”). Then a list of cities corresponded to desired interventions—American cities if he wanted action taken immediately, European if Moz could take a few days to develop an approach. The list was fairly short, including “Bring food,” “Bring medical supplies,” “Take Mrs. Fed hostage to ensure your humane treatment,” and “Cyanide capsule.” The only one Neal thought he might need was “Provide emotional support,” (Chicago and Orly, respectively). Moz suggested that Neal work on expanding the list, since he wasn’t sure what else Neal might want.

Finally, there was a series of gestures and signals that he could use to indicate various problems if the Feds prevented Moz from visiting or Neal from speaking. Moz indicated that he would watch Neal’s arrival at the FBI building from an unseen location every three days, starting Monday, for these signals. That was a surprise—Neal had never seen Moz near the Bureau in the mornings; maybe he really did have an unseen location to watch from.

Fortunately, this time Moz also included a deactivation code that he could use if he deployed any of the code words or signals accidentally, or wanted to use the code words in their plain meanings. Moz must have learned something from the time Neal had a cold and every time he sneezed in Moz’s presence, Moz thought he was asking for a change in the getaway arrangements. He’d come up with eight new backup plans before they figured out the misunderstanding.

The message concluded with, Anything you need, I’m here for you. Love, Havisham, which, after the rest of the message, didn’t tell Neal anything he didn’t already know.

#

Monday morning on the way into the office, Neal didn’t see Mozzie, but stuck his hands in his pockets in the “all is well” signal anyway. He felt a little like a kid playing spies, but Moz, he knew, was taking it absolutely seriously. It helped.

Midmorning, he finally got a break from proofreading Jones and Berrigan’s paperwork and reading up on FBI procedure, when Peter had a box full of cold case files brought up and suggested he pick out something interesting to, as Peter put it, “play around with.”

“‘Play’?” Neal asked, opening the box. Now he was playing detectives as well as spies, great. Over the weekend he’d been promoted to legal drinking age, but now apparently he was twelve.

“Work on when we’re not busy,” Peter said. “Sort of a side project. Everybody has one—for a long time mine was tracking down this art forger named Steve Tabernacle.”

“I was your hobby?” Neal asked, not sure how to feel about that.

“Hobby. Passion. Labor of love.” Peter shrugged. “Do me a favor, though, and if there’s something in there that you did that we don’t know about, pick something else.”

Neal expected that the box would be full of insignificant cases, given the heavy-handed point Peter had been making for nearly a week now about how Neal couldn’t be trusted, but to his surprise, there were some fairly substantial things in there. It wasn’t like they were giving him the Gardner heist or anything, but there was a decent selection, even after he eliminated the jobs he’d heard about from the people who did them. He settled on a small but well-executed theft of antique clocks from the Frick, that had happened the year before he first came to New York.

“Any special reason you picked that one?” Peter asked, looking over his choice.

“I’ve never heard of it,” Neal said. “So that means it wasn’t anyone I know. And whoever it was is really good.”

He spent the rest of the day reading the case file and learning how to fill out the forms to request additional documents not included in the brief. “You mean they’re actually going to give me a report on the security at the Frick, just because I asked for it?” Not that Neal was a stranger to getting things he shouldn’t have by asking, but usually the person he was asking didn’t know he was a criminal.

“Technically, I’m asking,” Peter said, taking the form and signing it at the bottom. “And I’m sure they’ve changed a thing or two in the last ten years.”

“Still.”

The next day after lunch, Neal was finally allowed out of Peter’s sight again, and celebrated by going to the bathroom all by himself, getting a drink of water, and reuniting with his desk. He gave it a little pat, wondering if it had missed him, and settled his files and pens back into the drawers.

#

Peter kept an eye on Neal from his office—after a week, it was strange having him out of his sight, and he didn’t completely trust Neal not to do something crazy just to show he could. But after a few minutes of wandering around, he sat down at his desk and got to work.

Peter decided he’d better follow Neal’s example, and managed to concentrate on work until Agent Berrigan came up to his office. “Hi, Boss,” she said.

“You don’t have to call me that anymore,” Peter reminded her. He’d gotten a heads-up about the new position she’d been offered along with the paperwork confirming her new rank this morning. The only question was, was she here to tell him her decision, or ask his advice? “Special Agent Berrigan. Congratulations.” He should have sought her out to say that, and would have if he hadn’t been distracted by keeping Neal under wraps for the last few hours of his line-of-sight restriction.

“Thanks. I, ah…I decided to take it. The position in DC.”

“We’ll be sorry to lose you here, but I understand. It’s a great opportunity.”

“It is. I’m sorry to leave, but….” She trailed off.

“This stage in your career, it’s best to go where the work is,” Peter said. “Well. When do you leave?”

“They want me to start a week from Monday, at the latest.”

“Finish out the week, and then take a week to move,” he suggested.

“That’s what HR recommended,” she agreed. “If that works for you.”

“Yeah, it’s…fine. So…Mortoni’s. Thursday, the whole team plus Elizabeth?” Elizabeth had an event on Friday, and she’d been there for their first dinner at Mortoni’s, Peter not being thrilled with the visual of a male, married special agent taking his attractive, young, female probie out for a swanky dinner. Now, he supposed they could get by without a chaperone, but El liked Diana, too.

She nodded. “That sounds great.”

#

At the end of the afternoon meeting, Peter stood up and assumed a serious expression, like he was about to make an important pronouncement. Neal had a moment’s panic that he was going to announce that Neal was once again allowed out of his sight, which was silly, since Peter had never exactly told Jones and Berrigan that he wasn’t.

Instead, Peter said, “Special Agent Berrigan has reached the end of her probationary period, and she is also leaving us to take a new position in DC,” and Neal recalled that right, the entire universe did not revolve around him. “Congratulations, Diana.”

Jones said, “Congratulations,” and Neal echoed him, since apparently that was what was expected. He hadn’t realized that Diana was going to be leaving, and the news felt like his already-small world getting even smaller. Jones was still holding a grudge over Neal having conned him last week, so Diana was his best ally in the office. Plus, he liked her. She didn’t go out of her way to either pity him or put him in his place because of the collar. She talked to him, but wasn’t afraid to smack him down if she thought he was being obnoxious.

Peter continued, “So, dinner at Mortoni’s, Thursday after work, on me.”

“Nice.” Jones grinned.

Neal had never heard of Mortoni’s, but judging by Jones’s and Berrigan’s expressions, it was some kind of big deal.

“You’re free, then?” Peter asked him.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Jones said.

“Neal?” Peter asked.

The only reason he could possibly have been asking was to make the point that Neal was included in the invitation—his after-work plans were always “whatever Peter’s doing.” Neal had an impulse to point out that no, he wasn’t exactly free, but resisted it. No need to ruin Diana’s big moment by carping on an unfortunate word choice. “Yeah, sounds great.”

The meeting broke up, and Neal left too, relishing in now being able to be somewhere Peter wasn’t. He said to Diana, “Can I pour you a celebratory cup of really bad coffee?”

“Sure, thanks.” She came over to the machine with him.

He poured and carefully added two sugars. “So you weren’t a Special Agent before? Am I reading Peter’s unusual emphasis on those words right?”

She nodded. “I was a probationary agent until yesterday.”

“Is that a big deal?” he asked, passing her the cup and starting to pour another one for himself.

“It basically means you got through your first two years in the field without screwing up particularly badly. The DC position is kind of a big deal.”

“I’m sure you’ll do great.” He sipped his coffee. It really was terrible. At least the instant coffee you got in prison hadn’t been sitting on a hot plate for five or six hours by the time you drank it. “Mortoni’s, is that some kind of FBI tradition?”

“A Peter tradition,” she answered. “Solve your first case as a probationary agent, and he takes you to Mortoni’s for a steak and a Johnnie Walker Blue. Apparently it’s what his mentor did when he was a probie.”

“He is such a sap,” Neal said. “It’s a nice place?”

“It’s a very guy place,” Diana said. “Lots of wood paneling and leather upholstery. Good steaks. I think it’s supposed to be a sort of Today you are a man, son, thing.”

“Ah,” Neal said, raising an eyebrow.

“I’m pretty sure I was his first female probie,” she said. “And yeah, I did give him points for not being afraid to get girl-cooties on his male-bonding ritual. I don’t think he took Mrs. Burke along with his other probies, and it felt a little like my parents taking me out for a birthday meal, but it was good.”

It was obscurely comforting to know that someone else got that “playing parents” vibe from Peter and Elizabeth. Maybe it wasn’t personal. “Good luck in DC. I’ll miss you.”

“Still a lesbian,” she reminded him.

“I know. Just, you know.” He supposed he ought to say it. “Thanks for treating me like a person.”

“I’m a black, lesbian woman in the FBI,” she said with a wry smile. “I know a little bit about not being treated like a person.”

#

“Agent Nelson.” Peter shook her hand. The Bureau had set her up in an unused office down on the 17th floor, something he appreciated. If Neal was visibly upset entering or leaving the room, he’d be glad to be on a floor he didn’t spend much time on.

“Agent Burke.” She took a seat and gestured for him to do the same. “You’re Mr. Caffrey’s handler and the outcry witness?”

“Yes.” Neal had been growing more and more anxious all day, and was eager to, as he put it, “get this over with,” but Peter had insisted on giving his statement first, so he could be absolutely sure Nelson was the right person for Neal’s case.

She asked a few preliminary questions—how did Peter know Neal, what was his position with the FBI—before getting down to the business at hand. “When did he disclose the rape, and what did he say?”

Peter couldn’t stop himself from flinching at the word. He gave the date and approximate time, continuing, “I had just found out that he suffered two seizures resulting from collar corrections during his training period. I asked him about the circumstances. He indicated that the second one occurred because he resisted during the sexual assault.”

“Do you remember his exact words?”

As if he could forget them. “‘Jesus, Peter, I tried to bite the guy’s dick off, okay?’”

She wrote that down. “And this was the first time he mentioned the assault?”

“Yes. The only time. He didn’t want to tell me any details, and I didn’t press him.”

“That’s fine. How much time had passed since the assault when he reported it?”

“We talked on Sunday night, and it would have happened…Friday of the previous week. Nine days. There was no chance of physical evidence at that point, and he…wanted some time, before making the statement,” he added, feeling that he ought to offer some explanation for why he had waited so long to arrange this meeting.

“Yes, I understand. He’d been in your custody for six of those days?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea why he waited so long to disclose?”

“Yes,” Peter said. “He didn’t trust me. He was afraid of me, actually. I was his arresting officer, and I was the one that got him into the Alternative Sentencing Program.”

“But after six days, he did trust you?”

“Yes. We…had a rapport, from when I was working his case. He was pretty rattled by the training, and, you know. I didn’t know about any of it, so I wasn’t as reassuring as I could have been the first few days. He’s—was—a con artist; I thought he was pretending to be traumatized.” It sounded extremely stupid now that he said it out loud. “And I think he thought I had some idea about what they did to him at the prison, and didn’t care. We got it straightened out.” He wasn’t sure if the story would make more or less sense if he explained what he’d done on Saturday, but Neal insisted he was going to leave that out of his statement, and if Peter described it and Neal denied it, Neal’s credibility would suffer, so Peter kept his mouth shut.

“But you believe him now?”

“Yes. About this, absolutely. He…said it happens all the time and nobody would care. I encouraged him to make a statement. I hope I did the right thing.”

“It’s going to be difficult,” Nelson acknowledged. “There’s a perception that males who are sexually assaulted within the correctional system ‘deserve’ it. It helps that Mr. Caffrey is young, good-looking, and—frankly—white. He doesn’t have any sex crimes on his record, does he?”

“No. All nonviolent—art theft, forgery, theft by deception, fraud.”

“I’m curious--how did he rack up a 124-year sentence with all nonviolent crimes?”

“Volume,” Peter said. “And his refusal to accept any deal that involved implicating his best friend or his girlfriend.”

“That helps,” Nelson said, making a note. “He was processed through Attica?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve investigated some similar cases from there, but I haven’t been able to prove anything yet. Mr. Caffrey is, on paper at least, the most credible complaining witness so far. It’s possible that thanks to his coming forward, we’ll be able to get justice for the other victims as well.”

“That’s what he’s hoping for.”

Peter went back upstairs to get Neal, who got up from his desk chair immediately when he saw Peter.

“You ready for this?” Peter asked as they got in the elevator.

Neal nodded, reminding Peter of the scared little nod he’d used to answer almost any question during those first few days. “I keep thinking what Havisham would say.” Peter was about to point out that, from what he knew of Havisham, he’d be supportive, when Neal continued, “If he knew I was about to voluntarily tell the unvarnished truth to a Fed.”

“Oh, well,” Peter said. “You can blame it on the mind-control drugs.”

#

By the end of his statement, Neal felt wrung out. Agent Nelson didn’t ask too many questions about the basic mechanics of the act, which he was glad of, but she wanted a lot of other details—times, places, names, and, when he explained that ASP corrections officers didn’t give collared felons their names, any identifying details he could remember. Thanks to the reading he’d been doing, Neal understood why she had to ask. She’d be checking his statement against duty rosters and sign-in logs, security tapes of when they’d transferred him from one holding area to another. The more details she could verify, even if they weren’t important details, the more credible his statement would be.

But he tried to think about those four days as little as possible, and exerting himself to remember things like what had happened in which room, and which guard he’d heard call another one “Charlie” meant that he remembered other things, too.

Finally, Nelson said, “Do you have anything else to add to your statement?”

Neal shook his head wearily. He was pretty sure he’d dredged up everything, down to the color underwear that the guard had been wearing. (Blue.)

“If you think of anything else, you can always contact me.” She gave him her card. “Mr. Caffrey, I’d like to thank you for coming forward about this. I know it wasn’t easy.”

He ought to say something noble, or else make a joke, but he was too tired, and just nodded.

Leaving Nelson’s borrowed office, he wondered how he was going to make it through the remaining hour until it was time to go home. Maybe he could hide out in Peter’s office.

When he got to the elevators, though, Peter was sitting on the bench there, waiting for him. He had his briefcase open next to him and was doing something with a file, but when he saw Neal, he dropped the file into the case and snapped it shut. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Neal said.

“You wanna go home?”

“Yes,” he said, profoundly grateful.

Peter had brought Neal’s coat down from their floor, and held it up for Neal to put on. He ought to have been offended—what, he was three now? But this was one of those times when being treated someone who needed to be taken care of struck him as deeply, deeply kind, and somehow appropriate. Neal slipped his arms into the sleeves and Peter settled his coat on his shoulders, squeezing them as he did so.

On the way to the car, Peter didn’t ask him how it had gone, and didn’t try to distract him by talking about something inconsequential, either. But Neal could feel in Peter’s silence that he was ready to follow Neal’s lead—he’d listen if Neal wanted to talk, but he wouldn’t pry.

Neal had had about enough of talking for the moment. In the car, Peter turned on the radio, and they let someone neither of them knew chatter inanely about weather, traffic, and sports.

When they got home, Elizabeth took one look at him and said, “Oh, honey,” before pulling him into a hug. In short order, he was curled up in the armchair in the living room, a glass of wine in his hand and Satchmo’s big, drooling bowling-ball head in his lap.

#

Elizabeth hoped her husband bringing Neal home absolutely shattered wasn’t going to become a regular feature of their lives. He looked almost as bad as he had those first few nights, scared and impossibly young. Now, though, he slumped into his chair in the living room, looking like it was a relief to be there, and looked up at her and Peter, as if they would know what to do next.

There, that was the difference. This time, he knew they were on his side.

“Want a beer?” Peter asked him.

“Wine,” Elizabeth said. Neal nodded gratefully. Neither of them actually knew what to do next, but at least she knew that much.

When she went into the kitchen to pour a glass, Peter went with her. “He’ll be okay,” he said, squeezing her shoulder. “He just had a rough day.”

Elizabeth nodded. She felt as though knowing what had happened would make it easier to figure out how to help, but pushed that feeling aside. Peter’s absolute insistence on Neal’s privacy in this matter was a bright, shining arrow pointing directly at one answer, and she scrupulously avoided following it to its logical conclusion. If Neal didn’t want her to know, then that was how she would help, by not knowing.

That, and comfort food. She took Neal his glass of wine and saw that he had Satch to pet, then put a big pot of water on to boil and started grating Gruyere, Cheddar, and Parmesan.

“Mac and cheese?” Peter asked, when he saw what she was doing.

“He’s from somewhere in the Midwest, isn’t he?”

“We think so.”

“Then, mac and cheese.” It wasn’t a good time to ask Neal what his mother used to make, and the odds were good for macaroni and cheese.

It turned out to be a good guess. Neal perked up a little as they ate, but not so much that Elizabeth thought he was straining himself to put on a show for them. She talked a little about the ASPCA silent auction job she’d gotten as a direct result of the smashing success of the heart disease dinner, and Peter about the new agent they were sending to take Diana’s place, a woman named Cruz.

“They give you all the double minorities, huh?” Neal said when he heard the name.

Peter frowned. “I’m sure it’s not like that,” he said. “An agent is an agent.”

“Yeah, that would be why. I kind of got the impression from Diana that not everybody thinks that.”

“He’s right, honey,” Elizabeth said. The FBI talked a good game when it came to gender equality, but she had seen the statistics, and knew that only about five percent of agents were female. And Peter really didn’t care about race, and was at ease working with female superiors and equals, but he had fretted adorably about the dynamics of mentoring a female probationary agent, wondering if assigning her the usual probie grunt work of fetching coffee and files would seem somehow pointed, or if she’d be completely comfortable alone with him in the surveillance van at night. He wasn’t unique in worrying about those things, but a lot of men would blame the woman agent for their discomfort, as if she ought to have had the courtesy to be born with a penis so they didn’t have to think about it.

“He’s right—you’re right—I never get to be right around here,” Peter groused.

“You get to be right all day at work,” she pointed out.

“You think that, huh?” Peter shook his head ruefully.

“Well, I hope you get a nice quiet one for Agent Cruz’s first case,” Elizabeth said.

“I don’t,” Neal muttered.

“I’ve got a mortgage fraud case I’m going to take off the back burner, if nothing comes up first,” Peter said. That was good, mortgage fraud never involved Peter getting shot at, and it usually meant he came home on time. To Neal, Peter added, “You have the Frick case for when mortgage fraud doesn’t hold your interest.”

“Frick case?” Elizabeth asked.

Neal explained, brightening a little as he did so. “It was a really clean job; it’s going to take me a while to even figure out how they did it.”

“The file already says how they did it,” Peter pointed out.

“Yeah, but it’s wrong. No way did this job rely that much on coincidence.”

They bickered about it for a while, Neal gradually losing all but the last traces of his haunted look.

When they had just about finished, Elizabeth said, “Ten years ago, huh? We would have still been living in that crappy apartment.”

“Yeah,” Peter agreed. “We’d started house-shopping, but we hadn’t found anything we liked yet.”

“We found lots of things we liked,” she reminded him. “Just nothing we liked and could afford.”

“Newlyweds,” Neal said, rolling the stem of his wine glass between his fingers. “I was in Chicago about then. Taking classes at the Art Institute and running street cons.”

“I didn’t know you went to art school,” Peter said.

“Well,” Neal said. “Sneaking into classes. Lectures were pretty easy, but the studio classes took some doing. One professor actually nominated me for a scholarship.”

“Would you have given up crime if you’d gotten it?” Elizabeth wondered.

“Hm? Oh, it wasn’t a full scholarship, just a thousand dollars. Wouldn’t have made a difference. Anyway, I’m sure if they picked me for it, they’d have taken it back once they realized the registrar had never heard of me. Maybe they did; I stopped hanging around there about then. Too much chance of getting caught, since I was attracting attention.”

Neal was probably the only person in history to have to drop out of college because he was doing too well.

“I’d do it differently now,” he added. “Find a student who wanted the piece of paper but didn’t want to take the classes—there are plenty of those, rich kids who think they’ve got nothing to learn, but their parents will only pay their bills if they’re in college and making decent grades. I could do the work while he paid the tuition and got the grade. It might take more than one mark, but I could do a whole degree that way.”

“Actually going to college, as yourself, wasn’t an option?” Elizabeth asked.

“No. For various reasons, any one of which alone would have been sufficient.” He poured himself another half-glass of wine. “Very good inspiration for a thief, being surrounded by people who have more than they deserve and don’t appreciate it. I was a better criminal than I would have been an artist, but I was better than most of those kids.”

He tried to keep his tone light, but Elizabeth could tell it was an old hurt. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He shrugged. “After that, I came to New York, met Kate and Havisham, and rose to the top of my chosen profession. Not too many people that can say that.”

Peter said, “Well, there’s nobody else who can say that of the two most significant bond forgeries of the decade, they committed one and solved the other. So you have that, too.”

“Yeah,” Neal said, sounding surprised but a little pleased. “I guess I do.”

#

“You weren’t kidding,” Neal whispered to Diana as they filed into the lobby at Mortoni’s. In addition to the promised leather upholstery and dark wood paneling, there were hunt prints and an honest-to-god taxidermied fox mask and brush. He could see how a very young Peter would have been awed by the place; for Neal’s part, he had been in the English men’s clubs it was trying to imitate.

“Burke, party of five,” Peter told the hostess.

She looked over the group of them. “Ah….”

“My wife will be joining us shortly.”

“Of course, sir. And all five will be dining?” she asked, looking at Neal.

“Yes.”

“I see.” She examined the reservation book for a moment, pen in hand, frowning slightly, then decisively crossed something out and wrote in something else. “This way, please.”

She took them to a small private room off to one side of the main dining room, which Neal had the distinct impression was not what Peter had reserved. Fine by him—he’d gotten more comfortable going out in public, remembering that most New Yorkers wouldn’t be caught dead gawking at anything as mundane as a collared felon, but a collared felon in a nice restaurant was a different matter.

They were seated at a circular table, Neal with Diana on one side and Peter on the other, the chair to Peter’s other side left open for Elizabeth. Menus were distributed. The selection was heavy on the steak, with saddle of boar, chicken, and lobster tail rounding out the options.

“What’s good here?” Neal asked, wondering if he should choose one of the few things that wasn’t steak, since “steak at Mortoni’s” apparently had a special meaning he wasn’t entitled to.

“I usually get the Porterhouse,” Peter said. “El tried the lobster once; it wasn’t spectacular.”

That was helpful. The waiter arrived, asking, “Will you be waiting to order when the rest of your party arrives?”

“Yes,” Peter said. “But as soon as my wife gets here, you can bring us a bottle of champagne and two Johnnie Walker Blue, straight back.”

“Yes, sir. Anything else from the bar?”

Peter glanced around. “Don’t be shy.”

“I’ll have a Scotch, too,” Jones decided.

“Yes, sir. The Walker Blue?”

“Not unless he’s paying for it,” Peter said, with mock aggression.

“Black is fine,” Jones said. “On the rocks.”

“And for the lady?” the waiter asked.

“One of the Walker Blues is hers,” Peter said. “But make it two of the Black Label.”

“Two Blue and Two Black?”

“Right,” Peter confirmed.

Elizabeth arrived a few minutes later, apologizing. “Sorry—I had a client I could not get off the phone. Were you waiting long?”

“Just a few minutes,” Peter assured her.

“Good.” She kissed Peter’s cheek and sat down, picking up her menu. “Congratulations, Diana.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Burke.”

The waiter arrived with the drinks. “Blue straight back for the lady, Black rocks for the gentleman, Blue straight back and Black straight back for the host. Bottle of Champagne, and…five? Glasses.”

“Yes,” Peter said. “I’ll pour, thanks.”

“Are you ready to order?”

“Can we?” Elizabeth asked. “I’m starving.”

Everybody else agreed that they were ready. Elizabeth and Diana both asked for the Porterhouse; when Jones did too, and Peter didn’t object, Neal decided the steak must not be significant. “Make it four of a kind,” he said. “Porterhouse, medium.”

The waiter didn’t stumble this time, just said, “Yes, sir,” and “And for you?” to Peter.

“Porterhouse again,” Peter said. “Five of a kind; somebody must be cheating.” Everyone laughed, the way one did when the boss made a bad joke. After the waiter left, Peter poured and handed around glasses of Champagne. Then he gave Elizabeth a pleading look.

“It’s your show, honey,” she said, patting his arm.

Peter stood, raising one of his glasses, the Walker Black. “Diana, you came here with a great deal of potential, and I’ve seen you mature into an excellent agent. We’re sorry to see you go, but wish you the best of luck and a long and successful career. To Special Agent Diana Berrigan.”

“Hear, hear,” the rest of them said, raising their glasses and drinking. It was fairly good Champagne—American, Neal thought, but Peter hadn’t skimped on it.

Diana tipped her glass of Johnnie Walker Blue in Peter’s direction and said, “Thanks, Boss,” before she drank.

Peter picked up the second glass of Walker Blue and plunked it front of Neal. “And to Neal Caffrey, for a very successful first case, and many more to come. Welcome to the FBI, Neal. Good work.”

Neal was stunned. Including him in Diana’s party, sure, that was just Peter being decent, showing that Neal was part of the team. This was something different. The Johnnie Walker Blue did mean something; Jones hadn’t gotten one—not today, anyway. A Peter tradition, Diana had called it. And Peter couldn’t have gotten through most of an Art History minor while being completely ignorant of symbolism.

He had absolutely no idea what to say, until he remembered that the point of ritual was to give you something to say when you didn’t know what to say. All he had to do was copy Diana. “Thanks, Peter,” he said, tipped his glass, and drank.

The formalities over, they fell into talking about normal things—cases, moving, the difficulties of finding a decent apartment near DC. Neal sipped slowly at his drink, making it last. He wasn’t normally much of a Scotch man, but this one tasted pretty good.

End

Chapter 2: Janice and the T-Men

Summary:

In this DVD extra, some agents from the Treasury department borrow Neal for a few days. They aren't very nice, prompting an unlikely teamup to ride to the rescue.

(In this one, Neal's situation is pretty bad, but is not described in graphic detail--the focus is on the rescue.)

By the time they let him stop for the day, Neal was cross-eyed with exhaustion and low blood sugar, and numb from the shoulders down. Breakfast at home at Peter and Elizabeth’s had been the last time he’d eaten. Then he’d ridden in the backseat of a car for five hours, his hands cuffed behind his back. A couple of hours out of DC, the two Treasury agents had stopped for lunch and a bathroom break, but they hadn’t let him out of the car, or brought anything back for him. Peter had extracted a promise that the agents wouldn’t give him any collar corrections while Neal was in their custody, and they sure were sticking to the letter, but not the spirit, of that prohibition.

He’d figured they would have to uncuff him when they got to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, but they just shoved him into a chair and pushed his head down over the documents they wanted him to examine. If he asked, they’d reposition the documents for him or hold up a magnifier, but they weren’t, they said, taking any chances. They weren’t too keen on letting him use the bathroom there, either, but after he’d asked about ten times, with increasing desperation, a clerk took pity on him and showed them the case law that suggested it would be considered cruel and unusual if they didn’t. They cuffed his hands in front of him for a few minutes in the men’s room, and he’d thought he might die from the pain of the blood rushing back into his extremities.

Neal was almost glad to be back in the car again; at least there he could close his eyes. The ride to the hotel was shorter than he would have liked. It seemed like only a few minutes before Agent Luther—the junior man of the pair—was opening the car door and barking, “Out.”

Getting out of the backseat of a car when you were exhausted, dizzy, and had your hands cuffed behind your back was not easy. He nearly face-planted on the concrete floor of the parking garage, saved only when Luther grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, saying, “Clumsy little shit.”

“Yeah, you try it,” Neal muttered.

“Shut up.”

The two agents flanked him and marched him to the elevator. When the doors opened, before he even had a chance to react, one of them gave him a shove that sent him stumbling inside.

It was a pretty ordinary hotel, a Marriot or a Best Western, something like that. The way the day was going, Neal figured he wasn’t going to get his own room, and he was right. It looked like he might not even be getting a bed; the room only had two, and both agents were there with him.

“Neal,” Agent Flores said.

“What?”

The agent kicked his legs so that he fell on his knees, saying, “I won’t tell you twice.”

“It’s my name, you fucking idiot,” Neal said. “You could at least make an effort to be clear.”

“Kind of sounds like he’s not hungry now, either,” Luther said.

“Guess not,” Flores agreed.

Neal thought he was probably supposed to apologize, or beg, or something, but he wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction. This would be over soon. The two agents left him kneeling on the floor by the door while they ordered room service and took turns showering.

After the two of them had finished dinner, Flores’s phone rang. “Flores. Yeah. Sort of. Yeah, he did the work. He’s got a hell of a mouth on him, though. Uh-huh. Hold on.” Flores approached him, tapping something on his phone. “Your boyfriend wants to hear your voice. You even think about complaining to him, you’re not eating tomorrow, either.”

“Yeah, okay.” Neal was sure that if he could get Peter to understand how badly the Treasury Agents were treating him, he’d be home in time for breakfast, but he’d probably only be able to get a few words out before they cut the call short. Peter was likely to think he was just bitching, like he did about the surveillance van or Peter eating deviled ham in his presence. He was never going to mock Mozzie’s complicated system of distress signals again, even in the privacy of his own head. If only Peter knew it, this could all be over in a hurry.

Flores pressed another button and held the phone up to his ear. “Hey, Peter,” Neal said.

“Neal.” Peter sounded tense. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Just tired. Long day.”

“Uh-huh. Behaving yourself?”

“Yes.”

“All right; I’m sure you’re not having a good time, but you’ll be home tomorrow night. Just cooperate and get through it, okay?”

“Yeah, I know. Anything new there?” he asked, wanting to keep Peter on the phone a little longer.

“Not really. Havisham called.”

“Oh yeah?” Neal said, having an idea. “Listen, if you hear from him again before I’m back, tell him I’m okay and he should tell you about Janice.”

“Okay,” Peter said uncertainly. “I don’t think I will; I told him when we were expecting you back.”

“Yeah, okay. How’s, um, how’s Elizabeth?”

“Good. She sends her love.”

“Thanks.”

“Wrap it up,” Flores interrupted.

“Listen, Peter, I gotta go.”

“Okay. See you tomorrow. El’s going to make those little chickens you like.”

“That sounds great. See you.”

 

#

“Not so good,” Peter told Elizabeth, as soon as he hung up with Neal, before she even had to ask how he sounded.

She shook her head. “I wish….”

“Yeah, I know.” The Treasury Department had been asking to have Neal look at various things for months, but they refused to bring the documents to New York, and Peter had kept putting them off, not wanting to make the long drive, to deal with Neal an unfamiliar environment, to take time off their own cases. But last week, they had gotten really insistent, to the level that Hughes’s boss had told him to make it happen, and it was just their rotten luck that Peter was scheduled to give court testimony that week. Not to appear would have meant a contempt of court charge, and refusing to accept Treasury’s alternate plan, releasing Neal into their custody for two days, would have landed them all in hot water. Two Treasury agents had picked him up Monday morning, and would be delivering him back to the house Tuesday night. “I checked his collar history. They haven’t used it.”

“They’d better not have.”

Peter figured that if they had, El would be in her van heading down the Jersey Turnpike right now. “He’ll be home tomorrow,” he said, promising Elizabeth, himself, and Neal, down there in DC alone.

#

Neal spent the night shackled to the handicap grab bar in the hotel room bathtub. It was a testament to how badly the previous day had gone that he had actually feared worse—that he might be left propped up on his knees in a corner all night. They had used riot cuffs and one of those supposedly-unpickable bike locks. Neal had never bothered learning how to pick one, not having any need of a secondhand bicycle, but given eight hours of privacy, he bet he could have figured it out. But part of Peter’s deal with the Treasury guys was that they could use the collar if he became violent or tried to escape—which Peter had said, pointedly, would not be happening anyway—and he strongly suspected that picking the bike lock would count as trying to escape, even if all he did was get out of the bathtub.

In the morning, they put the cuffs back on, with his hands in front of him so he could use the toilet and brush his teeth. He’d taken off his tie the previous night, during a similar brief interval of relative freedom, and found that there was no way he could put it back on with his hands cuffed.

“Caffrey! Get your ass out of there.”

He shoved the tie into his jacket pocket and left the bathroom. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m certainly well-rested and ready for another day of assisting the United States Treasury Department,” he said brightly.

Either the two agents’ sarcasm detectors were off, or they had gotten a good enough night’s sleep to be more tolerant than they had the day before. They left his hands cuffed in front of him, and on the way out of the hotel, Luther gave him a stale glazed doughnut from the lobby continental breakfast.

He ate it on the way to the car, in about four bites, which turned out to be a good thing, since they cuffed his hands behind him again before shoving him inside.

Now his hands were cuffed behind him and sticky.

The rest of the morning at the Treasury Department was the same as yesterday, looking at documents with his hands behind his back, identifying the flaws in forgery after forgery. One of them, he was pretty sure, was an example of his own early work. He couldn’t remember if that one had been included in the charges he was tried for, and couldn’t bring himself to care. The agents took turns leaving for lunch, while he worked straight through.

Somewhere around the fortieth or fiftieth document, they put a c-note down in front of him. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Benjamin Franklin is facing the wrong way. If you’re down to that, it’s time to give me back to the FBI. They have real work for me to do.”

They made him look at twenty more painfully obvious forgeries, including an E-series savings bond printed in black and white. The exercise took just long enough that they got stuck in rush hour traffic on the Beltway leaving DC, a fact that the Treasury agents seemed happy to blame on him. “If we’d left by three like we planned, we’d be in Pennsylvania by now,” Luther said as they crawled up 695.

“Yeah, well, if the fucking con wasn’t such a fucking smartass, we would have left at three,” Flores told him.

Once they finally were in Pennsylvania, the two agents stopped at a fast-food place. This time, Neal wasn’t surprised to be left in the car. He had, after all, had that doughnut, and it was only about twelve hours ago. He leaned against the partition separating the front seat from the back, to take some of the pressure off his bound hands, and tried to sleep.

He jolted awake when Flores’s hand smacked against the plexiglass next to his face. “Get back.”

Neal sat back. They had brought food with them, but didn’t offer him any. They must have decided to eat in the car to make better time—a concept he heartily approved of, but the smells of grease and salt made him even hungrier than he had been.

“How much further?” Luther asked as they got back on the road.

“Two and a half, three hours to New York, then another hour and a half back to Trenton.”

“Jesus. It’ll be almost midnight before we get home. Why don’t we stop in Trenton, sleep in our own beds, and take the con home in the morning?”

“Where’ll we put him? My wife’s not going to want him in the house with the kids.”

“My brother-in-law’s with the PD. He’ll let us stash him in a cell.”

No, no, no, no, no. That was a bad idea. Very bad. He was supposed to be home tonight; Elizabeth was making Cornish hens. “The deal was two days,” Neal said.

“Nobody asked you,” Flores said. To Luther, he said, “Call Simpson, make sure it’s okay.”

Luther got out his phone. “Sir? Agent Luther. The borrowed FBI asset took a lot longer to finish the work than we planned on, and we’re about an hour and a half outside of Trenton. We’d like to stop for the night and return him in the morning. Yes, sir, the local police will provide a secure location. Yes, sir. Thank you.” He pocketed the phone. “He says as long as we have him back by the start of the business day, the Fibbies can’t really complain. We’d have to hit the road at, what, six?”

“Yeah. Let’s do it that way,” Flores decided.

“Your deal with the FBI also doesn’t include transferring me into anyone else’s custody,” Neal pointed out.

“Yeah, keep complaining, shithead,” Flores said. “That’s worked out really well for you so far, hasn’t it?” To Luther, he said, “Make sure your brother-in-law finds him some really nice roommates for the night.”

“Failure to keep from harm is a color of law abuse,” Neal said. “Peter will destroy you, and your brother-in-law.”

“Fucking you in the ass is a color of law abuse, too, but I bet that doesn’t stop him,” Flores answered. “And if you don’t sit the fuck back in your seat and shut the fuck up, you’re going in the trunk.”

Neal sat back and shut the fuck up. Right now, he was out of options. Maybe, if they did put him in a cell with other prisoners, he could get someone to make a call for him, tell Peter what was going on. A guard—not the brother-in-law—or an arrestee who was going to be let go that night. Maybe. He still had his watch on, not that it did him much good behind his back. He could use that as a bribe.

If not, he’d survive the night. He’d be at the FBI building by 9 AM. That was, what, ten hours? Eleven? He could handle anything for eleven hours, he told himself.

Except that it had already been over thirty-six hours, and he wanted to be home. His head hurt, his arms hurt, he couldn’t even feel his fingers, and he had to piss again. Maybe he’d at least get a chance to do that in the Trenton jail.

#

“Has Neal been returned from his government-sanctioned abduction yet?” Havisham asked as soon as Peter picked up the phone.

“No. We’re expecting him any time.” Dinner had been slowly drying out in the oven for over an hour; he and El were dancing around the idea of going ahead and eating, and saving Neal a plate. Peter had managed to put aside his worry over Neal’s circumstances for most of the day, but the later Neal was the more his worry crept back. “This is probably stupid, but did you and Neal ever set up an activation phrase? Like a code, if one of you is in trouble and can’t speak freely?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny,” Havisham said cautiously. “Why?”

“He said something weird…does the name ‘Janice’ mean anything to you?”

“What were his exact words?”

Peter tried to remember. “I told him you called last night. He said if I spoke to you again before he was home, I should tell you he’s okay, and ask about Janice.”

“Damn it. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” Havisham hung up.

Peter stared down at the phone. Havisham was worried. Did that mean he should be, too? The “Janice” thing obviously meant something to him—but then again, Havisham still wasn’t convinced, after over six months, that Peter and Elizabeth weren’t secretly mistreating Neal and/or feeding him mind-control drugs.

The phone rang again. “This is Burke.”

“Have Mrs. Fed make sandwiches. At least six. And a Thermos of coffee.” Havisham hung up again.

“Honey?” Elizabeth came in from the other room.

“Havisham,” he said. “Both times. He’s on his way, and he wants sandwiches.”

“What for?”

“I have no idea. He thinks something’s wrong with Neal. I don’t know if he’s right, but….”

“We don’t want to risk it. Any particular kind of sandwiches?”

#

Flores released the cuffs from his wrists, and Neal brought his hands up in front of him. He was surprised to see that they were only slightly swollen; it felt like he had two catchers’ mitts on the ends of his arms. Sharp, stabbing pains reassured him that he did still have some form of sensation in his fingers. “Hands down. Cross your wrists.”

Neal did so, and Flores put on a fresh set of riot cuffs, pulling them snug.

Luther came over, accompanied by a man in a police uniform. “Sam says we can put him in cell two.”

“Where’s the thing?” the policeman said.

Flores handed him the remote. “Be careful with that; the Feds’ll be real upset if you lose it.”

Sam pressed the button; Neal jumped at the shock. It was only a level-one correction, but it had been almost a year since he’d had any at all.

“Heh,” Sam-the-policeman said. “That’s pretty handy. Wish they all had these.”

“You’d better not do that again,” Luther said. “His regular handler doesn’t want us messing around with the collar.”

“All right,” Sam said reluctantly. “Let’s get him put away so you can get home to Doreen.”

They took him to a small, individual cell and shoved him inside. It was private, and had a bunk and toilet; he supposed he ought to consider himself lucky. “Just leave him in there,” Luther said. “We’ll be back for him before six.”

They left. Neal sat down on the bunk, waiting for enough feeling to come back into his hands that he could get his fly open. Given the choice, he’d definitely rather be home eating Elizabeth’s Cornish hens.

#

“Very good,” Havisham said, unzipping the duffel bag he carried. After putting Elizabeth’s saran-wrap-covered plate of sandwiches inside, he rummaged through the refrigerator and added several bottles of water and juice, some baby carrots, three apples, and a lump of cheese to his bag. “You have the Thermos? Let’s go.”

“Where exactly are we going?” Peter asked.

“I don’t know; that’s why I’m here. Use your Orwellian surveillance device to find out.”

It took Peter a moment to untangle that Havisham expected Peter to take him to wherever Neal was. “They should be on their way back here with him,” he said, getting out his phone. He hadn’t thought to use the tracking data to find out where Neal was, and had nearly forgotten that that was a feature of the collar. Peter always knew where he was anyway, so he never used it. “He could be here any minute.” He got the application up on his phone. “Here. He’s in Trenton. That’s only about an hour and half away.” Faced with Havisham’s paranoia, Peter began to think his worries were exaggerated. Neal couldn’t come to any serious harm spending two days in the custody of two Treasury agents. Peter didn’t doubt that he was unhappy, but they couldn’t treat him too badly and expect him to do the work they’d borrowed him for.

“Good, then if they are heading this way, we’ll intercept them in forty-five minutes.”

Before Peter could respond, his phone rang. “Burke.”

“Agent Burke, this is Agent Flores.”

“Yes. We were just wondering where you were with Neal.”

“We had some delays. We’ll return him to the FBI building by 9 AM,” Flores said.

“Like hell you will. That was not the deal. Put him on the phone.”

“He’s not available right now.”

“Where is he?”

“We’ll have him back to you by 9 AM.”

“What did you do with him?”

“See you tomorrow, Agent Burke.” The line went dead.

Peter looked up from the phone. “Okay, we’re going to New Jersey.”

#

 

They wound up taking Elizabeth’s van. None of them wanted to stay behind, and Peter’s Taurus would have been crowded for four adults on the way back. Elizabeth drove, while Peter sat in the passenger seat, alternating between watching Neal’s tracking data on his phone and leaving an increasingly frantic series of voicemails for the Treasury agents.

“What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why they aren’t just bringing him back the way they said they would.”

“I don’t know,” Peter snapped. “If they would answer their damn phones, I could find out.”

“We’re all worried about him, honey,” El admonished him.

“I know. Sorry.” Peter checked the tracking data again. “It’s still showing he’s in Trenton. They just said they were delayed…he’s probably fine.”

“Hah,” Havisham said from the back seat. “Note my scorn. It’s been over twenty-four hours since you spoke to him. They could have done anything by now.”

“They’re Treasury agents, not the Men in Black,” Peter said. “All right, if these guys won’t pick up the phone, I’m trying their boss.”

Havisham had to be convinced something was really wrong, Elizabeth knew, to willingly get into a vehicle with “The Fed” and “Mrs. Fed.” And Peter, while he tried to insist that Neal was probably okay…well, he was in the car with Havisham. She was operating on less information than either of them, but if they were both worried, she was worried too.

Eventually, by making use of FBI resources, Peter was able to get the home number of the superior of the two Agents who had Neal. “Simpson? This is Agent Burke. Yes, I know exactly what time it is. Your men have taken it upon themselves to break our agreement—with all due respect, sir, you don’t have the authority to authorize it personally. I’m his handler. No, that’s not acceptable. I’ll be retrieving him personally in—ETA?” he barked.

Elizabeth realized the last question was addressed to her, and glanced at the GPS. “About twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes,” Peter repeated. “I want an address. Well then, you have twenty minutes to get one; if I haven’t heard from you by then, I’ll start with yours. Yes, I do. 1135 Crowder Lane. Because I’m the FBI, that’s how.” He looked over at the GPS. “Eighteen minutes, now.” He hung up. “He personally authorized his agents to leave Neal in an unspecified secure location and return him first thing in the morning.”

“Of course he did,” Havisham muttered.

“They were telling the truth that he wasn’t with them when they called,” Peter continued. “And Simpson didn’t even bother to ask where they left him, or in whose custody.”

Peter’s phone rang less than five minutes later—Simpson must have been strongly motivated to make sure Peter didn’t show up at his house in the middle of the night. Elizabeth couldn’t blame him; Peter was clearly furious. “Burke. Yes.” He leaned over and entered an address into the GPS. Peter’s voice went icily cold. “If I were you, I’d see to it that they’re expecting me. You’ll be hearing from me later.”

Havisham leaned forward. “What?”

Peter looked first at her, then back at Havisham. “Trenton City Jail.”

Elizabeth pressed down on the accelerator.

#

Neal lay on his back, his bound hands resting on his chest. He knew he should sleep—Peter would take him home as soon as he could tomorrow, but it might not be right away. Anyway, the time would go faster.

But. The frequent clang of cell doors, the rattle of keys as the guards walked past, the voices raised in argument and the moaning from the drunk tank all made it impossible to forget where he was. In jail, with the collar around his neck, and the remote in the hands of someone he didn’t know and absolutely could not trust.

It wouldn’t be for long. Less than ten hours, if the Treasury agents stuck to the new agreement better than they had to the old one. And the Treasury guys’ boss had said the FBI couldn’t complain if he was back by the start of business tomorrow—that meant that if he wasn’t, they could complain. And Peter would certainly complain. More than that, he’d come looking for him.

In a worst-case scenario, Peter might be stuck at the courthouse until four or five tomorrow afternoon. They were an hour and a half from New York, add in a little time for traffic, and Peter would be here no later than seven. Twenty hours. Cake. And maybe—probably—if he did have to be at the courthouse all day, Peter would send Jones or Cruz or somebody down to fetch him. No matter how dedicated the Treasury agents were to the project of screwing him over, it would be less than a day, probably a lot less, before he was home. Absolutely not any more.

#

Leaving Elizabeth and Havisham in the van, Peter badged his way into the jail. Simpson had, at least, had the basic self-preservation to alert them he was coming, and it didn’t take much explaining before the desk sergeant was personally escorting him back to the cells. “He’s been real quiet,” the sergeant said. “I think we could have handled him for a few more hours. On the left, there.”

Neal was in a one-man cell, at least, lying on the bunk with his eyes closed and his hands cuffed in front of him. “Neal.”

Neal sat up quickly, a genuine smile lighting up his face. “Hey, Peter! You’re early.” He started to stand up, then wobbled and sat down hard on the bunk.

Peter had no idea what he’d meant by “you’re early,” but had more important things to worry about. “Open the door,” he told the sergeant, and as soon as it was unlocked, he stepped inside, getting out his handcuff keys. Neal’s suit was rumpled and his shirt collar open and tie-less, but Peter couldn’t see any obvious injuries. “Are you okay?” he said, sitting down on the bunk next to him and reaching for his hands.

“Yeah, exactly.” He held up his hands. “They’re riot cuffs; you have a knife or something?”

“Get me something to cut these,” Peter told the sergeant.

“Sure. We keep ‘em at the desk.” He waited.

“Go get them,” Peter said, enunciating each word carefully.

“Oh. Yes, sir.” The sergeant scurried off.

Peter examined the cuffs. They were tight—they had to be, to keep Neal from slipping them—but not quite tight enough to cut off his circulation.

“It’s okay, they’re not as bad as the ones last night,” Neal said. “I’m, uh….God, my head really hurts. Do you have any food?”

“In the car,” Peter said, thankful for Havisham’s weirdness. “Elizabeth and Havisham are there too.”

“Wow,” Neal said. “That must have been weird.”

“Little bit,” Peter agreed, checking Neal over for injuries.

“I’m not hallucinating, am I? You get hallucinations from not eating.”

“You’re not hallucinating. You haven’t eaten?”

“I had a hotel lobby doughnut this morning.”

“That’s it?”

“Since yesterday morning, yeah. Didn’t M—uh, Havisham tell you about Janice?”

Peter realized that Neal had very nearly let Havisham’s real name—or at least the name Neal knew him by—slip, but felt it would be unfair to take advantage. “Not exactly. I gathered it was a distress signal, from his reaction.”

“Yeah. Are we waiting for something?” Neal looked around vaguely. “Because if you aren’t a hallucination, I’d like to go home now.”

#

Peter held onto him as they made their way out of the jailhouse. Neal regretted it—people already had the wrong idea about how it was, between him and Peter—but he wasn’t sure he could stay upright on his own. The police officers wouldn’t have let him walk out in the custody of a hallucination, but Neal couldn’t quite rule out “dream.” If he woke up back in the cell, he would probably cry.

In the parking lot, Elizabeth’s van was lit gently from within by the dome lights, a beacon of warmth and safety. The side door slid open as they approached, and Moz reached out to help him in. Elizabeth had left the engine running, and as soon as Peter was in and slammed the door behind him, she put the van in gear and started driving. “You missed your calling as a wheelman,” he told her, as Peter climbed over him to get into the front passenger seat.

“Wheel-woman,” she corrected him. “I guess gender-neutral language hasn’t come to your profession.”

“Not yet. Which is weird; I know some great woman cons.”

Moz retreated to the back row of seats—he must have wanted to keep his distance from the Feds, even if they were temporarily allies—and passed a duffel bag over the middle-row seat back to Neal. “The supplies you requested.”

He hadn’t specifically requested supplies—they had a code for that, too, but he hadn’t wanted Moz making contact on his own and getting them both in trouble—but he was unsurprised to see that the bag was full of food. He drained a bottle of water, ate three sandwiches as fast as he could swallow them, and drank another bottle of water before pausing for breath.

“Coffee?” Moz asked, holding up a Thermos.

“Please.” Food and water had helped, but caffeine would clear away the last traces of his headache. Moz handed him the Thermos, but his hands were shaking too badly to get the lid off, so Moz took it back and poured him a cup, steadying his hands as he took the first few sips.

“Thank you,” he said to Moz. “Thanks, Elizabeth.” He knew she must have made the sandwiches; they were on the kind of bread the Burkes bought.

“You’re welcome.” Elizabeth took her eyes off the road to glance back at him. “Didn’t they feed you?”

“No,” Neal said, unwrapping another sandwich and taking a bite.

“They gave him a doughnut,” Peter said grimly. “One doughnut, the whole time they had him.”

“Can they do that?” Elizabeth’s outraged tone was gratifying.

“I assume the doughnut was this morning?” Peter asked.

Neal mumbled, “Yes,” around a bite of turkey and cheese.

“Then yes, they’re probably going to get away with it. The regs say you can’t go more than twenty-four hours without feeding a prisoner, under any circumstances, but less than that, there are a number of ways to justify it.”

Neal wished he had known that—the threat not to feed him today if he complained to Peter must have been an empty one. Now that he thought about it, Luther and Flores had backpedaled each time they were told that what they were doing skirted the edge of official impropriety, relenting on both the bathroom issue and on putting Neal in a cell with dangerous people. “I need a book on this, so I know for next time.”

“There isn’t going to be a next time,” Peter said.

“You didn’t have a lot of choice about this time,” Neal reminded him. “Let me guess—they probably aren’t allowed to put me in the trunk of the car, either.”

Peter swiveled around to look at him. “They did that?”

“No, they just threatened to.” He finished the sandwich and selected an apple. It would have been much less effective as a threat if he had known they couldn’t do it without getting in trouble.

“Quelle surprise, ” Moz said. “This is why you shouldn’t get mixed up with Feds.”

“Not having huge amounts of choice, here,” Neal reminded him. “Anyway, Peter’s okay. Look how he came and got me, even though you didn’t actually tell him about Janice like I said.”

“You said I should tell him?” Moz asked.

“Yeah.”

“See, Fed, this is why I asked what his exact words were.”

“Sorry,” Peter said. “I didn’t realize the code was that elaborate.”

“And here I thought you knew Havisham pretty well,” Neal said.

“Excuse me,” Moz said, offended.

“Well enough to know that he would be prepared for any and all contingencies,” Neal continued, remembering his promise that he wouldn’t mock Mozzie’s code ever again. “Because he’s an excellent friend and very thorough.”

“Thank you.”

“Although,” Neal added, “unless I forgot one, we need to add something to cover keeping me in handcuffs for excessively long periods.”

“It might fall under Christine,” Moz suggested.

‘Christine’ was stress positions; Neal supposed that examining documents with his hands behind his back qualified, now that he thought about it. “I guess. And they came pretty close to ‘Matilda,’ too, but that hadn’t happened yet when they let me talk to Peter.”

“‘Matilda’?” Peter asked.

“Sleep deprivation,” Neal said, ignoring Moz’s frantic head-shaking. “But they didn’t actually stop me from sleeping; they just didn’t make it particularly easy.”

“Burning a perfectly good code right in front of me,” Moz said. “And you say they haven’t brainwashed you.”

“If I’d brought Peter in on it before I left, today would have gone a lot differently,” Neal pointed out. “It’s lucky you decided to call.”

“That wasn’t luck; that was well-justified suspicion.”

“Either way, I’m glad you did.” Moz wasn’t wrong, after all, about the likelihood of Feds mistreating him, just about Peter doing it. “And that Peter passed along the message.”

“Hmph,” Moz said. “Maybe he’s not completely useless. For a Fed.”

“I’m touched, Havisham,” Peter said.

“Don’t get used to it.” Neal couldn’t tell which of them that remark was meant for, Moz was definitely addressing him when he continued, “He may be all right now, but they’re really only loyal to their own.”

“Neal is my own,” Peter said sharply.

“He is not,” Moz said. “That’s exactly the kind of imperialistic, fascist, paternalistic--”

“Guys,” Neal interrupted. “Can we not do this right now?” He was feeling a lot better than he had been a little while ago, but he wasn’t up to the mental gymnastics of sorting out what he could say to placate Moz and Peter at the same time.

“Sorry,” they both said at once.

“Thanks. I appreciate your overcoming your differences to work together on this one. Is there any more of that coffee?”

Moz poured him another cup, and he leaned against the window, sipping at it slowly.

When Elizabeth parked behind the house, Moz rabbited off almost instantly, after checking to make sure there wasn’t anything else he could do for Neal. Peter and Elizabeth both helped him out of the van; Neal let them, even though he was fairly sure he could do it under his own power now.

“Where’s his bag?” Elizabeth asked.

Peter shook his head. “Didn’t get it.”

“Still in the trunk of the Treasury guys’ car, probably,” Neal said. They had put his overnight case there when they picked him up yesterday morning, and he hadn’t seen it since. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ll make sure they bring it back,” Peter said.

Neal didn’t argue—he wouldn’t have pressed the point, himself, but if it was something Peter felt like he had to do, he didn’t mind.

As soon as they opened the door, Satch barged through, barking and sniffing circles around them. “Hey,” Neal said, patting him as he paused to sniff up and down Neal’s trousers. “Yeah, I had kind of a busy day, but I’m home now.”

“Satch, go lay down,” Elizabeth said. He gave a last, reluctant sniff and ambled off toward his dog bed. “Neal, what else do you need?”

“A shower and out of these clothes, first,” he decided. “Then I might want to eat some more.”

#

Neal came downstairs about twenty minutes later, dressed in silk pyjamas and a bathrobe. He looked substantially better—there were still dark circles under his eyes, but he had neatened himself up a little and seemed fairly chipper.

Not that how he seemed meant much—hiding his feelings was second nature to Neal. Being sent back to prison with the collar on was the one thing Neal was openly terrified of, and while jail wasn’t prison, it was close. “Are you holding up all right?” Peter asked him.

“Yeah,” Neal said briskly. “I knew you’d come for me, Peter. It was unpleasant, not…scary. I knew you wouldn’t leave me there.”

It sounded to him like Neal was trying to convince himself as much as Peter, but if that was where Neal wanted to leave it, Peter would take him at his word. “Okay. I—you’re right that I might not be able to stop you from being lent to another agency, but we’ll figure something out so this can’t happen again.” He wasn’t sure what, exactly, but something.

“Okay,” Neal said. “I’ll fill you in on Havisham’s code, just don’t tell him.”

“Sure.” That would only help him find out faster if Neal was being mistreated, though; it wouldn’t prevent it. “You still hungry?”

“I could eat.”

Elizabeth had used the time to re-heat what was supposed to have been his welcome-home dinner in the microwave, so they sat down to Cornish hens with wild-rice stuffing and green beans almondine. “Wine, Neal?” Elizabeth asked.

“Half a glass,” he decided. “I’m going to bed as soon as we’re done here.”

“Good idea,” Elizabeth said, pouring and handing him a glass. “Hon, do you have court again in the morning?”

“Yeah,” Peter said. He wasn’t looking forward to getting up in less than six hours to head in, but Neal had managed to do his job today under worse conditions, so he wasn’t about to complain. He didn’t want to drag Neal in with him if they could avoid it, though. “What’s your morning like?”

“I’ll cancel my morning meetings. I’ll have to go into supervise the setup for the Grosvenor Industries event, but that’s not until two.”

Peter nodded. “Give me a call. I might be done by then—if not, can you drop Neal off at the courthouse?”

“Sure.”

“Why, yes, now that you ask, I would like to take the morning off, thank you,” Neal said.

“Sorry,” Peter said. He knew that Neal was touchy about having the few decisions that were legitimately his to make taken away from him, and it was understandable that he’d be touchier than usual today.

“No, it’s okay. I shouldn’t have—really, you two figuring out how to take care of me without consulting me is the last thing I should be bitching about right now. These last couple of days, that could have been my life. I’m lucky to have you guys.”

Sometimes, like when Neal was complaining about the surveillance van or Peter’s failure to find a case exciting enough to suit him, Peter wished he’d show a little recognition of how good he had it, a little gratitude. That feeling always evaporated instantly when Neal actually did.

“We’re lucky to have you too, honey,” Elizabeth said.

Neal smiled wanly and ate some more chicken.

“We are,” Peter said. “What you’ve done for my solve rate alone is more than worth putting up with you.”

“I know you like me,” Neal said. “But having a felon in your spare room can’t be the life you’ve always dreamed of.”

“No,” Elizabeth agreed, “but having Neal Caffrey in our lives is something we’d wanted for years.”

“Really?” Neal asked.

“Really,” she said.

“’Cause I’ve been trying to imagine that conversation for months. ‘Hon, how would you feel if I brought a criminal home to live with us?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know, did you have a particular one in mind?’”

“Oh, honey,” Elizabeth said. “It was more like, ‘You caught Neal? How soon can I meet him?’”

“You only think she’s joking,” Peter said. “No ‘Congratulations, Peter, that must have been very impressive detective work,’ just, ‘When I can I meet him?’”

“You had been telling me all about him for four years by then,” Elizabeth pointed out. To Neal, she added, “I wanted to come visit you in prison, but Peter thought it might be a red flag on the alternative sentencing application.” She was sugarcoating it a little; what Peter had actually said was that it would look like she and he were having an affair, and that Neal was using her to manipulate Peter into getting Neal released into their custody.

“I’d have liked that,” Neal said. “If I’d known, I’d have written to you, too. Getting mail in prison is, like, the best thing.”

That felt like a twist of the knife; Peter had enjoyed Neal’s letters, and had found his tips professionally useful, but he hadn’t written back.

“It wasn’t that bad,” Neal continued. “Prison, I mean. Once you figure out how to deal with the people—which took me about two weeks for the inmates, another month or so for the guards—it’s just bad food, uncomfortable furniture, and boredom.”

Neal, Peter knew, had dealt with the people by becoming known to the inmates as a guy who could get things done, and to the guards as a guy who never quite crossed the line into doing anything they had to take notice of. They knew he was pretty much the New York Stock Exchange of contraband, but he never got physical and always kept his activities just hidden enough that they had plausible deniability. Plus, he got along with just about everyone, and regularly acted as diplomat between various factions, helping to smooth tensions over before they erupted into violence. Of both inmates and guards, many liked him, and the rest considered him no threat and potentially useful.

“But it wouldn’t be so easy with the—” Neal touched his collar. “Anyway, this is much better.” He smiled brightly, like he was trying to sell them a used car.

There was proof that Neal was more rattled by the previous two days than he wanted to admit. He hadn’t fished for reassurance that they were going to keep him since the first few weeks he’d been with them. “Better for us, too. It was too quiet here without you last night.”

“Aw. I love you too, Peter.”

His tone was teasing, but Peter felt a funny, fluttering twist in his gut at the words. It was true; he did love Neal, and so did El. They didn’t use the word, telling him instead that they liked him, cared about him, worried about him, because there wasn’t any way to make a declaration like that safe. They couldn’t defer it by saying that they loved him like a son—although, sometimes, it was easier to treat him that way, slotting him into the only category that even halfway fit. He was only himself, Neal, the same was that Elizabeth wasn’t a check-mark in the box marked “wife”; she was El, and only El.

Neal started to look uncertain, as if he thought he’d crossed a line. Well, he had, but it wasn’t one Peter was upset with him for crossing. “Yeah, well, would I have gone on a road-trip with Havisham if I didn’t?”

Neal smiled, genuinely this time. “Greater love hath no man.” He drained the last sip of wine from his glass and stood up. “I’m not helping with the dishes; I’ve been held captive by hostile government agents for two days. Good night.”

“Good night, sweetie.” Elizabeth stood up to, and Neal bent his head so she could kiss his forehead, something she did when Neal was particularly charming or particularly woebegone.

“Good night. See you tomorrow, Peter.” He scratched Satchmo’s ears and started up the stairs.

#

Neal smiled thoughtfully to himself as he made his way up to bed. Peter and Elizabeth, they really were one of a kind. Two of a kind?

A straight flush, maybe. Living in a Fed’s spare room wasn’t exactly the life he had dreamed of, either, and he couldn’t exactly say that having them in his life was something he’d wanted for years, but…now that he had them, he was glad he did.

Chapter 3: Homage

Summary:

Elizabeth's birthday is coming up. Neal has some trouble coming up with a present, since Peter won't let him steal or forge anything. (This one's pretty much 100% fluff)

“El’s birthday’s coming up,” Neal said. They were on stakeout, in Peter’s car for a change instead of the surveillance van, watching the apartment of the suspect in their latest case.

“I know,” Peter said, raising the binoculars to his eyes. The light in the suspect’s living room had just gone off, but—yes, there was his bedroom light going on. It didn’t look like he was going anywhere. “I don’t forget her birthday—when I start seeing Halloween decorations everywhere, I know it’s time to start thinking about it. Why, do you have any ideas?”

“For you? No. Don’t you?”

“Dinner and some form of jewelry. I know, I’m boring.” Peter knew that Neal’s idea of appropriate gifts for a beloved tended toward the epic—he had worked the cases, after all. His courtship gifts for Kate had included a Fragonard, a sapphire the size of her hand, and a one-of-a-kind designer dress valued at over a hundred grand.

“Nothing wrong with the classics.” Neal considered. “As long as you put some thought into it, and don’t just grab the first thing you see with an opal in it.”

“I have been married to her for eleven years; this isn’t my first rodeo.”

“Napoleon gave Josephine a red and black opal called the ‘Burning of Troy’ to declare that she was his Helen,” Neal remarked. “Now that would be a birthday present for a woman born in October.”

“You may not steal Napoleon’s opal for Elizabeth’s birthday,” Peter said. “Or any other occasion.”

“It’s been missing since World War Two anyway,” Neal answered, as if that was the most important reason he couldn’t. “But I was thinking—I’d like to give her something; she’s been so great to me. And I can’t really afford to buy anything good.”

“You may not steal anything for Elizabeth’s birthday.” He had been joking before, but now it sounded like Neal was working his way up to suggesting just that. “Or give her anything that you previously stole, or that anyone else stole on your behalf.” Peter could sympathize, really. The only money Neal could even begin to consider his own was the $12.50 a week “miscellaneous expenses” line item in the payment the Bureau made to Peter and Elizabeth for his keep. He didn’t even have free access to that—collared felons weren’t generally allowed to carry money—but Peter told him he could draw on it when he wanted something. They covered all of his necessities, so he didn’t spend it all every week, but even the full amount he had coming to him couldn’t begin to pay for one of the extravagant gestures that Neal loved.

“Wasn’t planning to,” Neal said. “But what I was going to ask is going to sound a lot more reasonable now.” He frowned. “Or maybe a lot less. I’m not sure.”

Peter was almost afraid to ask, but if Neal’s idea was completely insane, it was probably better to know. “Try me.”

“Well, I was thinking I could paint something for her. If that’s—I mean, it’s kind of a gray area, in terms of my sentencing conditions. The kind of paint and canvas I can afford couldn’t really be considered tools of forgery, if you think about it.”

Now that he had asked, Peter was surprised it had taken months for Neal to raise the question of whether he was allowed to paint. It was perfectly reasonable for a well-behaved collared felon to have hobbies, but the problem was that there was considerable overlap between Neal’s hobbies and his crimes. Framing the request in the context of Elizabeth’s birthday was a master stroke—Peter would have felt like a jerk denying Neal the simple and more-or-less legal pleasure of painting anyway, but once he factored in how thrilled he knew Elizabeth would be with the gift, he really didn’t have much choice at all. “I’ll have to keep an eye on you while you’re working on it.” There was a lot more to forging works of art than just slapping paint on canvas in the right arrangement, after all. As long as he made sure Neal didn’t have the opportunity to age the paintings or fake provenances, they’d still be within both the letter and spirit of his sentencing conditions.

“That’s more than fair,” Neal said. “So I can do it?”

“Yes, you can do it.”

“Thank you.”

“What are you going to paint for her?”

“I was thinking the Room at Arles. We both like it, and I can check the details on the poster--”

“Whoa.” Peter held up his hand. “No, you are not forging a painting for El.”

“I was going to sign and date it,” Neal said, in an injured tone. “With my name and the current date, I mean.”

“No.”

“Art students copy the masters all the time.”

“You are not an art student; you’re a convicted art forger. That’s not even a gray area; that’s—are you completely insane?”

Neal hunched his shoulders and looked out the side window. “Fine. It was just an idea. Forget I said anything.”

Great, now his feelings were hurt. “The idea is fine; you can still paint her something. Just paint something original.”

“I can’t. I’ll just, I don’t know. I’ll scrape up enough money for a bottle of wine or something. Havisham can recommend something that’s under-priced.”

“I’m sure she’d like it if you painted her something.” Neal spending his limited funds on a mediocre bottle of wine, on the other hand, would just make her feel bad.

“Yeah, well, I can’t, so.”

“I’m not giving you permission to forge El a painting, no matter how much you sulk.”

“I’m not sulking.”

“Yes, you are. What’s the problem with just painting something without copying?”

Neal fidgeted for a moment. “Copying’s what I’m good at. My original work is all hopelessly derivative.”

Peter pounded his forehead once, lightly, against the steering wheel. Was Neal being deliberately dense? “Derivative is fine. There’s nothing illegal about derivative.”

“I know it’s not illegal,” Neal said, irritated. “I wanted to give her a Van Gogh, not some third-rate….” He trailed off.

Now Peter felt like he had a better handle on the problem: Neal didn’t think that what he could do was good enough for Elizabeth. Looked at in that light, his impulse was almost sweet. “Look. Your…former lifestyle has skewed your sense of scale. Normal people do not expect a Van Gogh or part of the crown jewels of France for a birthday present.”

Neal glanced over at him, then back out the window. “I just think she deserves nice things.”

“I completely agree. She deserves the nicest things we can give her. But you don’t have to give her one of the ten nicest things in the entire world.”

“Well, see,” Neal said, “when you’re me, the nicest things you can give somebody are the nicest things in the entire world.”

“Not anymore,” Peter reminded him.

Neal sighed. “Yeah, that’s the problem.”

“You’re thinking about this all wrong,” Peter said, with a flash of inspiration. “When you steal somebody a present, part of the gift is the story, right? That you risked your life and your freedom to get it for them?”

“Yeah,” Neal said. “It’s the thought that counts, like they say.”

“Exactly. Now, do you actually think that El would enjoy having something that she knew you risked getting yourself in trouble with the law to give her?”

Comprehension dawned. “Maybe not,” Neal allowed.

“Definitely not. But she will appreciate it if you do the best you can within the law and your sentencing conditions.”

Neal slumped down in his seat, having one of his teenager moments. “So you think she’d rather have a Neal Caffrey than a Van Gogh, huh?”

“I think she would love a Neal Caffrey.”

“Okay.” Neal sighed. “We’ll try it your way.”

#

Either Neal had never noticed how expensive paint was, or it had gotten a lot pricier in the last few years. Probably a little of both—even in the Chicago days, when he’d sometimes had to make tough choices about paint versus food, there had been more flexibility in his budget than he had now. He had planned on just buying white, black, and the primaries and mixing his own colors, but even that way, he was going to have to go further down the price scale than he wanted to. And he hadn’t even looked at brushes yet. He might have to—he couldn’t even think it without wincing—get some kind of starter set that offered basic colors and brushes for one low price.

“Problem?” Peter asked, wandering over from where he’d been playing with a display of jointed mannequins.

“Yes,” Neal said. “Any chance of an advance on my allowance?”

Peter glanced at the shelf tag under the Old Holland display and winced. “I don’t know; how much do you need?”

“How much can I get?”

Peter shrugged and looked at a display of big tubes of student-grade paint for five bucks apiece. “I take it this kind isn’t good enough for you?”

“Not unless you want me to suffer, no. I was thinking more along the lines of these,” he said, indicating the Chroma Archival section.

“How many of them?”

“These,” Neal said, picking up large tubes of titanium white, true black, French blue, Arylamide yellow, and Napthol red. He’d have preferred cadmium red, but it cost more.

“Okay,” Peter said. “What else do you need? That’s only sixty bucks; you’ve got like a hundred twenty-five. ”

“Thirty-four fifty,” Neal said morosely. They didn’t let him carry his own money—he never asked whether that was Peter’s rule or the Department of Corrections’; it didn’t really matter since he never went anywhere without Peter or Elizabeth anyway—but he kept the tab in his head. Much more accurately than Peter did, apparently.

“What have you been buying that I don’t know about?”

“What do you know about?”

“That,” he said, knocking Neal’s fedora askew on his head. “Your Amazon order last month. Hair gel. That screaming monkey thing you got from the street vendor to scare Jones with.”

“Two haircuts.” El had taken him for those, but Peter had known they were going. “Three macchiatos, a cinnamon dolce frappucchino, and two issues of NY Arts.” Those, Peter had put on his credit card, so he definitely knew about them.

Peter shook his head. “I forgot about your magazines. Haircuts are a necessary expense, and I pay for your coffee. You’ve got ninety-five dollars.”

“You said you wouldn’t pay for any coffee drink that cost more than five dollars,” Neal reminded him. “Apparently it’s a matter of principle. And my haircuts are covered, but not hair gel?” That didn’t make sense; you had to pay for haircuts in prison. Of course, there they were only five dollars, plus a little something from the commissary if you wanted the barber to make any kind of an effort.

“Your hair gel would come out of the household budget if you’d deign to use anything they sell at the grocery store,” Peter said. “And I may not have been completely serious about the coffee.”

“Oh. I would have been making very different beverage choices for the last several months if I had known that.”

Peter winced. “New rule: any coffee drink over five dollars, you pay the difference.”

“That’s more than fair,” Neal agreed. “Okay, so, ninety-five dollars.” He briefly re-evaluated his paint choices, then decided to stick with what he had and get some half-decent brushes and a small bottle of linseed oil.

In the canvas department, he had another decision to make. “Over time,” he said, “it’s cheaper to stretch your own canvases. If you’re going to be doing enough to use up the roll.”

“Yes,” Peter said. “I’m only letting you do one painting for the entire rest of your life, because, as you know, I am that cruel.”

“Just checking.” Neal selected a good-sized roll of canvas. He had chosen his paints figuring he’d be doing more painting after El’s gift, but he hadn’t been sure if Peter would have to be talked into it.

Peter paid for his stuff, without mentioning that Neal was now $13.67 in the hole, and they left the shop. “Let’s just put this in the car; there’s a jewelry store on the next block.” As they walked, Peter said, “By the way….”

“Yes?”

“You’re not putting one over on me.”

“Glad to hear it. What am I not putting over on you?” Neal was never sure whether to be flattered or insulted that Peter seemed to always think he was up to something—on the one hand, it meant he didn’t think Neal was completely domesticated, but on the other, it meant he didn’t trust him.

“Don’t think I didn’t notice how your gift for Elizabeth also gets you something you want. I noticed; I just don’t object.”

Oh, that. That was so obvious it was barely even a con. “That’s what I figured.”

“It was very well-played, but I probably would have said yes if you’d just asked.”

“Good to know.” He’d occasionally experimented with just asking Peter and Elizabeth for what he wanted, but for something this big, he’d assumed that Peter would need some kind of an excuse.

Peter’s jewelry store turned out to be one of those tacky chain places; as soon as Peter said the words “my wife’s birthday,” the clerk started showing him one overpriced cliché after another—pearl necklaces, manufactured diamond tennis bracelets, and of course lots and lots of opals. Neal stood back, carefully keeping out of arm’s reach of any of the shiny things. There was nothing in sight that he wouldn’t be embarrassed to be accused of trying to steal.

“What do you think about this one?” Peter asked, showing him a sapphire and manufactured-diamond tennis bracelet.

It was probably the least horrible of the things the salesman had shown him, with oval sapphires joined by s-links embedded with diamond chips. “It’s pretty,” Neal said. “I bet her mother has one just like it.”

Peter turned back to the salesman and shook his head. “Maybe earrings?”

The earrings were no better, and eventually, Peter gave up. “Okay,” he said as they left. “Jewelry’s a bust. I need a new plan.”

“Hm,” Neal said. That particular store was definitely a bust, but he wasn’t so sure they had to rule out jewelry entirely. “Let’s try in here,” he said, indicating an antique store. If you were going to go classic, you might as well go classic.

The shop had two jewelry cases near the register; Neal took a moment to admire a pair art-deco onyx cufflinks that would perfectly complement one of his favorite ties. Very reasonably priced, too, but he didn’t think Peter would be willing to advance him four months’ worth of allowance. Neal could just hear him saying, “You already have cufflinks,” as if that mattered.

He focused on the women’s jewelry. “Does she like cameos?” There was a nice Art Nouveau coral stick pin. “That one would look nice on her gray coat,” he said, pointing.

Peter frowned. “She’s not so into pink.”

“It’s not pink; it’s coral. Okay, how about that one—the sardonyx Athena with shield and spear.” He wasn’t sure about the shape—it was a stark rectangular broach—but the warrior goddess would suit Elizabeth.

Peter asked the shop attendant to get it out, and glanced surreptitiously at the price tag. He shook his head slightly. “A little out of my price range.”

The shop attendant put the piece back in the case, glancing at him and then back at Peter. “Are you looking for something special?”

“Just looking,” Peter said, bending down to examine another piece.

“Birthday present for his wife,” Neal said confidingly, giving her one of his best smiles. This was the sort of place where it was a good idea to say that, where you weren’t dealing with some hack on a commission. She’d probably ask what Elizabeth liked, maybe show them some things she had in the back and hadn’t put out yet, giving them a good deal because she hadn’t had time to clean it up and price it yet.

Instead, the woman turned her face away pointedly, clutching the lid of the display case like she wanted to close it, to protect her merchandise from him, but wasn’t quite willing to shut it on Peter’s head.

It wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, but every time it was like missing a step at the bottom of a staircase, his foot meeting empty air where he expected solid ground. He had always been good with people. It wasn’t just a job skill—although it was certainly that—it was part of who he was. He was handsome and charming, and just about everybody he took an interest in was a little happier without really knowing why.

Not anymore.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked away. He should know better by now, really. Eight and a half months, he’d been collared, marked. Eight and a half months of damn near every stranger he tried to speak to pulling away like he’d poison anything he touched.

He’d get used to it, eventually. Had to—it was going to be this way for the rest of his life.

“How about this one?” Peter asked, holding up a reverse-intaglio pendant. Forget-me-nots, the color of Elizabeth’s eyes.

“Nice.” He looked at the price tag—cheaper than the awful tennis bracelet. “It’s a good deal if it’s Victorian, not so much if it’s repro.”

“Can you tell?” Peter asked.

“I’ll need a loupe and better light.”

“It’s real,” the store owner said.

Peter glanced over at her, noticing her hostility for the first time. “I’ll have my friend look at it, if you don’t mind.”

“I mind,” she said.

Peter stared at her for a second, then tossed the pendant into the case, where it clattered against a big, ugly gold bracelet. “Right. And I’m not interested in it anyway. Come on, Neal.” They left quickly, Peter’s strides sharp and short. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Not your fault,” Neal said, even though, if you thought of it in just the right way, it was. Peter had been the one to catch him; if not for him, Neal would be able to talk to shop owners and steal their jewelry if he felt like it. “And you can’t really blame her.” He was, after all, a jewel thief. Among other things.

“Yes, I can.”

They got in the car. “You could go back and look at it yourself,” Neal suggested. “I can tell you what to look for.” It didn’t seem fair to either Peter or Elizabeth to give up on a great present just because a clerk was rude to him.

“I’ll be taking my business elsewhere,” Peter answered.

“She’d like it,” Neal pointed out.

“She wouldn’t like the story it comes with,” Peter said. “We’ll find something else.”

#

It wasn’t until the next week, when Elizabeth had an evening event, that they had a chance to get Neal’s painting studio set up. Neal’s bedroom wasn’t really big enough for him to paint in, and anyway, it was the only place, in the house or outside of it, that was really his own. Since Peter was going to have to pop in on him randomly and frequently to make sure he wasn’t forging anything, it made sense to give him a separate painting area where Peter could check up on him without violating the one bit of privacy he had.

Fortunately, they had the whole third floor of the house that they barely used. When he and Elizabeth bought the house, they had thought, vaguely, maybe, one day, children? Nursery on the second floor, where their bedroom was, certainly, while the children were small, but when they were teenagers, old enough to want their own space, they could move upstairs.

It hadn’t happened that way, so the three tiny, interconnected rooms on the third floor were just used to store the Christmas decorations, pieces of furniture that were too ugly to use but too good to throw out, and mysterious boxes of junk that everyone seemed to have. “There’s no heat up here,” Peter remembered as they went up the steep, narrow stairs. “But there is electricity. We’ll get a space heater. Remember to turn it off when you’re not up here, and don’t leave anything flammable near it.”

Neal gave him the exact eyeroll that Peter would have expected from one of the teenagers they had never had. “Okay.”

The middle room had the smallest amount of stuff in it that they’d have to move, but it also didn’t have any windows. Neal examined both of the other rooms before declaring that the light was better in the room that faced the street.

“Okay,” Peter said. “Step one—let’s move all this crap.”

“Actually….”

“What?”

“Can I have that desk from the other room?”

The desk was Elizabeth’s from college, and it weighed about six and a half tons. On the other hand, Neal was going to need something to put his paints and things on. “Yeah, okay.”

So step one was unearthing the desk, which had several strata of flotsam piled on and around it. “What is all this stuff?” Neal asked as they shifted the boxes.

“I don’t know,” Peter said, peeking inside the box he was holding. “Old school papers, in this one. You’ve got books from when El was a kid. I think I saw the punch bowl we got for a wedding present somewhere. Just…stuff.” He shrugged.

Neal shook his head as if the notion of having rooms full of stuff that was neither useful nor valuable was a complete mystery to him. Maybe it was.

With a great deal of huffing and puffing, they managed to get the desk moved into the front room, positioning it just to one side of the window. Neal sat down on it to catch his breath. “You have any old dishes or anything up here that you don’t care if they get ruined?”

“Maybe,” Peter said. He couldn’t remember if they’d given away the dishes from his bachelor apartment or brought them up here. “Why?”

“I’m going to need something to mix paint on. If not, I can get some paper plates or something.”

“There might be—we’ll keep an eye out for them.”

They didn’t find the dishes, but during the moving operation, Neal located a cassette player, a lamp, and some bookends that he asked if he could have. Peter agreed, with a strange sense of reverse déjà-vu. When they’d bought the house and moved in, he had thought about how one day their kids might go poking through Mom and Dad’s old things, looking for necessary items or cool retro stuff for their first apartments.

And now here he was, helping a collared felon furnish an art studio in his attic.

“You okay?”

Peter realized that he hadn’t moved in over a minute. He picked up a box. “Yeah, I was just thinking.”

“About anything in particular?”

“These were going to be our kids’ rooms, if we had any.”

“Oh.” Neal looked down at the floor. “You know, if you don’t want me up here--”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just funny how life turns out.”

“Oh, that one,” Neal said. “Yeah. I always figured by the time I turned thirty I’d either be in prison or living on my own personal Mediterranean island.”

Instead, they’d celebrated his birthday with cake at the Bureau and dinner and a few presents at home. Better than prison, certainly, but not exactly a Mediterranean island. “Only you,” Peter said, shaking his head.

“Well, I was almost right.” Neal grinned and shifted the last box into the other room. “Okay, I think I’m all set.”

“Yeah.” Peter looked over the room. “Are you going to need an easel or anything?”

“I’ll put Havisham on it,” Neal said. “He’s always asking if he can get me anything.”

“I don’t think that’s the kind of ‘anything’ he has in mind.” Whenever Havisham visited, he always looked significantly at Peter before repeating his offer to get Neal ‘Anything you need—anything at all.’

“Probably not, but he’ll come through for me,” Neal answered. Peter envied his confidence. Havisham was pretty obviously horrified by Neal’s cooperation with ‘the Feds,’ but his support for Neal never wavered. He’d even joined them for Neal’s birthday dinner, although he’d refused to eat or drink anything he hadn’t brought himself. If the circumstances were reversed, and Peter was, for some reason, assisting criminals, against his will but not apparently fighting it much, he wasn’t sure anyone would stand by him as faithfully as Havisham was for Neal.

Well, El, of course.

“Are we expecting him this weekend?” Peter asked.

“Not sure. He’s out of town for a few days. Doing what, I have no idea,” Neal added virtuously.

“I wasn’t going to ask.” He’d better not ask if the easel was likely to be stolen, either. If it was, it would be untraceably so—Havisham was not stupid—so he might as well preserve his plausible deniability. “If you’re all set here, I’ll….”

“Yeah, I’m gonna—” Neal gestured as if to suggest that he had unspecified things to do up here.

Peter left him to it.

#

Neal crumpled a sketch in his hands and tossed it over in the corner with the others. Elizabeth’s present was proving even more difficult than he had expected. He had managed to track down a reverse-intaglio broach, similar to the pendant Peter had decided not to buy, on eBay. Peter had ordered it, and it would arrive in just enough time for them to come up with something else if it turned out to be poor quality once Neal got it under a loupe. So that was good.

But had Peter returned the favor? No. When asked for suggestions on what to paint, he’d only repeated that Neal wasn’t allowed to copy anything, and added the additional prohibition that he was also forbidden to paint Elizabeth naked—which Neal would not have done anyway.

Well, maybe for Peter’s birthday.

So far, he’d sketched several still lifes, two New York cityscapes, an impressionistic take on the FBI building, and—in desperation—a portrait of Satchmo, after the style of George Stubbs. None of them satisfied him. All were derivative—which Peter had said was okay—but even worse, they were meaningless. He might as well just paint something that would match the drapes.

The faux-Stubbs was the best of the lot. Stubbs’s celebration of the 18th-century rural aristocracy gave the juxtaposition of style and subject a twist of wry humor, the gentleman’s hunting companion turned 21st-century chowhound and foot-warmer. If Neal could put him, say, on the couch, but somehow manage to convey the sense of Stubbs’s landscape backgrounds, he could bring the viewer in on the joke….

It still didn’t seem right for Elizabeth’s birthday. And anyway, the connotations of ‘here’s a picture of the family pet’ were a little too grade-school for his liking.

But…he could be on the right track. In all of the previous efforts, he had been trying to come up with something that wasn’t derivative—but honestly, if he hadn’t managed to develop an original style in the past 30 years, it wasn’t going to happen in the next week and a half, either. Derivation was his style. With the Stubbs idea, at least he was embracing it. If the style he emulated was part of the meaning of the piece, it was homage, not imitation.

He’d been going about this backwards. He couldn’t just pick a subject and start drawing. First he had to figure out what he wanted to say, and then find a combination of style and subject that said it.

Suddenly, this project was both a whole lot simpler, and a lot more terrifying.

#

“Well?” Peter asked. Elizabeth’s broach had come in that day’s mail, and Neal had been standing by the window with it and a jeweler’s loupe, murmuring happily to himself, for the last fifteen minutes.

“Oh, it’s great,” Neal said. “Madagascar crystal, eighteen nineties or so, sharp detail. The mounting’s not original, but the mother-of-pearl is appropriate for the period. Here, look how fine the etching is.” He held out the loupe and broach.

Peter looked. “Nice. And he painted inside the lines, too.”

“Ha. That’s actually harder than you would think, with something that small. And you have to do it backwards, since you’re painting on the back of the crystal and viewing from the front.”

“Is that so,” Peter said, running through his mental register of cold cases for any unsolved crimes involving painted Victorian jewelry.

“I looked into it once, when I heard about a piece that was worth over 50K. That much, for a lump of quartz that the buyer knows is a lump of quartz? Kind of irresistible. But it turns out reverse intaglio is basically un-forgeable.”

“How’s that?” Peter was surprised to hear Neal admit there was something he couldn’t forge.

“All of the value comes from how well done it is—how elaborate the design, how tiny it is, the depth of the etching. Materials and provenance are basically insignificant. It takes years to learn the technique, and if you master it enough to make something that can pass for a valuable piece…it is a valuable piece, even if you admit you just finished it last week.”

“So you never bothered learning it because it was…too honest?”

Neal shrugged sheepishly. “When you put it like that....Actually, it’s a little too fiddly for me. Days on end hunched over a high-strength magnifier; not really my style.”

Peter slipped the broach back inside the little baggie the eBay seller had shipped it in. “Now I just have to find a box to wrap it in.”

Neal nodded. “Got your dinner reservations made?”

“Yes.” Elizabeth had casually mentioned last week that Yvonne had recommended a new Italian place; Peter had caught the hint and called for a reservation the same day.

Neal nodded and looked at him expectantly.

“What?”

“Who are you leaving me with? I’m hoping for anybody but Cruz.”

Peter blinked. “Nobody. You’re coming with us.”

Neal shook his head. “Peter….”

“What? It’s her birthday; it’s not a date. Our anniversary, yeah, we’ll work something out for that.”

“You realize that by the time your anniversary rolls around again, it’ll have been over a year since you and Elizabeth have gone anywhere just the two of you?”

“That’s….” Absolutely true, Peter realized. Elizabeth liked Neal—they both did—but that might be pushing things a little. “Yeah, I should take her out sometime, but she’ll want you there for her birthday.”

“Okay,” Neal said. “If you say so.”

“I do say so.”

But Neal was, apparently, still worried about it. A couple of hours later, Jones came into his office and said, “I’m supposed to tell you that I’m free to convict-sit on Friday night so you can take your wife out for her birthday.”

“Thank you, but that’s not necessary.”

“Good, because I’m not actually free.”

“Then why did you say you were?”

“Neal started talking about how you hadn’t had a night alone with Elizabeth since you got him, and the next thing I knew Lauren and I were flipping for it.”

Peter wondered how Neal had manipulated the coin toss—surely they both knew better than to let him flip it or call it, but he couldn’t see Neal taking a 50-50 chance that Cruz would win. “Well, I won’t stop you from honoring your wager, but you can pay up some other time, when you actually are free.”

#

“How many candles are you planning to put on it?” Elizabeth heard Peter ask.

“She’s thirty-five, isn’t she?” Neal asked.

“Yes, but you can’t put thirty-five candles on it; that’s ridiculous.”

“You put thirty on mine.”

“That’s different.”

“If you don’t hurry up, I’m going to start opening presents without you!” Elizabeth called to the boys in the kitchen. The presents were in a small pile on the end of the dining room table. She had a fairly good idea what two of them were—the small box wrapped in silver paper was obviously jewelry, from Peter. And the smell of paint, linseed oil, and turpentine from Neal’s new lair in the attic, combined with Peter’s insistence that she not go up there, left very little room for doubt about the general nature of his gift for her. The medium-sized, flat package from her mother was—she weighed it in her hand—very light, probably a scarf, or something like that.

“Look, just put three there, and five there,” Peter said. “Hon? Where did you put the matches?”

“In the junk drawer,” she called back.

The shoebox-sized parcel wrapped in brown paper and kitchen twine was the real mystery. She figured Peter must already know what was in it, or else he would have called the bomb squad when it appeared on the dining room table.

She heard Peter slide open the drawer next to the sink. She shook her head. “Not the miscellaneous drawer—the junk drawer.”

Finally, Peter found the right drawer. She heard a match strike. “Ow, damnit—get the lights.”

Neal popped into the dining room and turned out the lights.

Finally, Peter came into the dining room, carrying a cake ablaze with candles and sheepishly singing, “Happy Birthday.” She had told him many times that he could skip the singing if it embarrassed him that much, but he always did it anyway.

She blew out the candles—in one try, thank you very much—silently thanking Peter for talking Neal out of putting 35 of them on.

“Did your wish come true?” Peter asked.

“I guess so; you’re still here.” The one time since their marriage that her brother had happened to be in town for her birthday, he’d feigned vomiting at that little ritual; Elizabeth was glad that Neal at least had more class. “The cake’s beautiful, Neal.” Actually, it was a little lopsided—apparently, there was something Neal couldn’t do perfectly—but she knew he’d worked hard on it, and the lettering was very good.

As she cut the cake, Neal handed around small glasses of white Ravat. El had never been sure about wine with cake, but the crisp, slightly sweet wine went perfectly with the rich, dense pumpkin spice cake.

After the cake had been eaten and raved over, it was finally time for presents. The one from her mother was, as predicted, a scarf—silky and soft but, unfortunately, pink.

“Here,” Neal said, passing her the shoebox. “This one’s from Havisham.”

“I checked it out,” Peter said. “It’s fine. Weird, but fine.”

Much like Havisham himself. “That’s so sweet. He didn’t have to.”

“He likes you,” Neal said. “It was the Trenton thing that won him over, I think.”

She unwrapped the box. It was a shoebox, but far too heavy to contain shoes, which was probably a good thing. She couldn’t imagine what kind of shoes Havisham would pick out for her. Underneath the lid, nestled in tissue paper, were… “My very own night vision goggles. How thoughtful.” She’d probably get more use out of them than the pink scarf, anyway. With them, she might be able to discover what Satch found so fascinating to bark at down at the end of the yard at night.

“The finest Russian military surplus,” Neal said. “He was worried you might already have a pair.”

“I did not,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll wonder how I ever lived without them.”

“They have a million uses,” Neal agreed. “Some of them even legal.”

“I’ll be sure to thank him next time he comes over.” She’d write a note, but if Havisham had a mailing address, she didn’t know it.

Peter handed over the jewelry box next, rubbing the back of his head and smiling nervously. “It’s, uh. Well, I hope you like it.”

The pretty painted broach was a bit of a departure from the kind of thing Peter usually picked out. He did have good taste in jewelry, but his instinct seemed to be ‘When in doubt—get something shiny.’ “It’s lovely.”

“Matches your eyes,” Peter said.

She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Thank you. Is it an antique?”

Peter said, “1890’s,” and Neal explained the technique used to create the broach, in great detail, confirming her suspicion that Peter had not chosen it entirely on his own.

“Yes, Neal may have helped a little,” Peter admitted.

“Peter helped with mine, too,” Neal said. “Team effort all around.” He slid the last package over to her.

Elizabeth was not entirely sure what she was expecting, but when she tore the wrapping paper off the canvas, she found herself thinking both, Yes, of course and I never would have guessed.

“Peter wouldn’t let me copy the real one, but he said derivative was okay.”

The painting was Neal’s bedroom, and it was also Van Gogh’s Room at Arles. The details were all those of the real room upstairs—the details she had chosen when she fixed the room up for Neal, before he came—but painted in Van Gogh’s simple lines and rich colors, with his dizzyingly intimate perspective.

“It’s wonderful, Neal. Thank you.”

“Told you she’d like it,” Peter said.

Neal cleared his throat, looking shyly embarrassed. “Van Gogh said, in a letter to Theo, that ‘looking at the picture ought to rest the brain, or rather the imagination.’ I think he meant that, looking back, he realized he was happy there.”

“Yes,” she said. “I think so, too.”

End

Notes:

Sexual assault: Neal was raped in prison. Offscreen, but he talks about it in the fic.

Prisoner abuse: The premise of the story is inherently abusive, and the story explores this. Peter does some of it, and is very sorry.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of Collarverse