Chapter Text
“So Aisha knows a guy…”
Carlos Alverez was a decently smart man. Not like his Jake, not that Jake knew he thought of him as ‘his Jake’, but smart enough to know that if Clay walked in the room with an opener like that, blood would be shed soon.
“Or rather, Aisha knows a woman who met a guy and they exchanged numbers and at any rate, he’s got a crew going out in Portland and they said they’d be down with helping us take out Max. Apparently it’s what they do.”
“Exactly how far are we trusting Aisha’s friend of a friend?” Pooch asked, not looking up from the feeds Jensen got him of Jolene and Pooch Jr. “Excuse me, acquaintance of an acquaintance.”
“Yeah, boss, I don’t know about this. Gimme a few days to dig up some intel.” Jensen used his startlingly effective puppy eyes on their leader.
“Fine. Name’s Elliot Spencer. The crew is a company called Leverage Inc. You have three days to find minefields, then we go to Portland.”
Cougar went back to stripping down his least favorite rifle to fix the annoyingly long time it took for the second bullet to snap into proper position. He let Jensen’s chatter sooth the demons in his head as he filed at metal with a jewelry file.
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Meanwhile, in the back of a popular Portland brewpub, Hardison was throwing his hands in the air.
“Dead. D. E. A. D. I don’t know what you want me to say, baby. The clients Elliot’s brought in are dead, deceased, are no more. This is an ex SpecOps team. They got blown outa the sky by a missile.”
“Creepy.” Parker threw a pretzel at Elliot’s head. “So are you the Ghost Whisperer now?”
“No! And I don’t know that it’s Clay’s team; that may have been a cover story. Aisha al-Fadhil isn’t exactly a woman you cross examine.”
“Did you have sex?”
“NO! Parker, Jesus. You can’t just ask a guy that! And I’m pretty sure Aisha eats the men she mates with. At least kills them.”
“You do realize your go-between is wanted in 37 countries for smuggling, murder, general shit involving bombs, terrorism, etc.?”
“I never said she was a nice lady, I said she had a loose string in a CIA cover-up that resulted in multiple fatalities.”
“So when are the Zombie SpecOps unit getting here?” Parker hopped off the counter.
“Four days.”
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“Guys, we’ve been hacked.” Not a sentence Hardison ever expected to say.
“Who?” Parker, his rock, calm and steady as his heart rate went through the roof. “CIA, FBI, that smelly Chaos guy?”
“Girl, you wound me, as if Chaos could ever get through my security. No, it’s a new player, well, relatively new. Came on the scene two years ago, but he’s good. I almost missed it, and he disabled the search-and-destroy protocol that should have nuked his system. NSA has a profile on him, which we now have. No known name, no known address, bounces his feeds all over the globe. Tends to take large quantities of money from the same kind of people we target and then he’s gone.”
“What name did they give him?”
“What?”
“Law enforcement gives nicknames to the guys they have no real data on. I’m the Ghost in like three languages, The Black Cat in Spain, and for some reason I’m Krampus in Germany.”
“See, you’re sharing, I like this.”
“Me too, now what’s his nickname.”
“Er. Petunia?”
“Ok.”
“Kinda a sissy name for a hacker with that much ability,” said Elliot. “I mean, he got through us.”
“He tends to send emails to his victims saying ‘Go Petunias’. No origin point, just a random email to let you know your ass is now broke.”
“What’d he take?” Elliot asked.
“Our past years’ worth of files.” There was a breath of ‘oh shit’ shared between Elliot and Parker. “And our names.”
“Are we running?” Parker asked. “I like Portland.”
“I just got the brewpub’s menu balanced, dammit Hardison!”
“I don’t want to run either, man, I have a set up here where I can deal with this, I just need time.”
“One more job, then we decide. The Zombie SpecOps team is coming in a few minutes.”
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“Jensen, hurry up!”
“Sorry boss, had to change.” His faded tee-shirt from Bolivia had been replaced and this one was an even more eye-searing shade of pink, with the familiar logo of the old one. “I made a boo-boo and I want to be upfront about it. Honesty is the best policy and all.” Then he started rambling about watchdogs and cookie crumbs and the new movie coming out and how hot the leads were.
“Jensen!”
“Yeah boss?”
“Did your,” Clay ground his teeth. He was a grown ass man he was not saying the word ‘boo-boo’. “Mistake, do anything that might make them shoot us?”
“Not if we don’t shoot first. Elliot Spencer doesn’t like guns, Alec Hardison can’t use them, and Parker prefers a Taser. Also, forgot to note in the official briefing, Parker has a rep for being crazy, but she’s taken, and you’re taken, and please don’t get us all killed.”
“Duly noted, now get your ass in that brewpub.”
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“Franklin Clay, former Lieutenant Colonel with the US Army until what shall be referred to as the Bolivia Incident, presumed dead.” Clay stuck a hand out to the rough looking man in a plaid flannel shirt.
“Elliot Spencer, former Army Ranger, retrieval specialist.”
The two men sized each other up and Jensen darted around Clay to the openly staring black man.
“Jake Jensen, or JJ, or just Jensen.”
“You ASSHOLE!”
Instantly Cougar was between the two men and his hand rested easily on the hilt of a knife holstered on his belt.
“Carino, usually it takes longer than this to get people yelling at you.”
“I kinda hacked their systems. Just a little.”
“Si.”
“Cougs, my man, how would you feel if someone slightly adjusted everything in your rifle case? Not much, just enough to show someone had gone through it?”
“Ah.” He turned to the black man, still visibly seething. “Do not kill him, por favor?”
A slim blonde woman wrapped an arm around the man’s waist. “Does this mean we don’t have to move?”
“Yeah, no totally, you guys stay put, all that stuff was for one time viewing to brief the team, and it’s destroyed now. I had Cougs put a clip in the hard drive. I threw it and he shot it out of the sky; it was awesome.”
“Did you know that the NSA calls you Petunia?”
“Really? That’s awesome! It’s my niece’s soccer team, they’ve made finals the last two years, shoe in again this year.”
“Yo, man, I think we may have just induced the apocalypse by introducing him to Parker.”
“Si.”