Chapter Text
Fall, 2017
The Phoenix Foundation, Somewhere in Los Angeles
Most people think it’s a think tank
Phoenix Foundation Director Matilda Webber wasn’t alone when she arrived in Mac’s room in the clandestine organization’s state-of-the-art medical center. Samantha Cage followed her like a stretched-out shadow, slipping into the room and standing at the right far corner of the bed while Matty moved to the left side, where the short woman wasn’t looking over Mac’s feet to see his face. “How are you doing, Blondie?” Matty asked as an opening salvo, as if she was just there for a social visit.
Mac gritted his teeth as he shoved himself more upright, so he was sitting under his own power for a conversation with his boss, and not leaning against the pillows on the tilted head of the Phoenix Med hospital bed. “I want to go home.”
“Do you?” Matty asked in a tone that implied great skepticism. He was definitely not expecting her to fire back this quickly. He thought she’d try the sugar approach first. “Your home is still a crime scene, Mac, so you know that’s off the table.”
Mac swung his feet out of the bed. A pain like fire shot up the right side of his chest, splitting the buzzing numbness, and he couldn’t keep himself from hissing. It had been seven days since Murdoc shot him, and something like six-and-a-half since Cage pulled him off the hunt for Jack, and nearly two since Matty decided he was well enough to chew him out for almost dying of blood loss in the Phoenix parking garage.
Matty’s dark eyes followed his movement like lasers, cataloging every move, every reaction, every microexpression that he couldn’t control well enough. She didn’t make it this far in the intelligence world without learning how to read a person, even when that person was a trained clandestine agent. Mac met the challenge in her eyes. “Why? We already know who took me. We already know who took Jack. But Murdoc didn’t take him from my house, so there’s nothing we’re going to find there to help.”
Matty continued to give him a level look. “We can’t know that for sure. Murdoc took you from your house, and we still don’t know how much time he spent there. Would you risk losing a crucial piece of evidence that might point us in the right direction?”
Mac flinched, looking away, and his eyes landed on Cage, still standing by the door, arms crossed. Cage kept her poker face on, but he saw the way she watched him, like she was looking for the cracks. As if it wasn’t obvious. The psychopath who’d kidnapped and tortured him had kidnapped his partner first. But unlike Mac, Jack hadn’t escaped. Phoenix had run down all its best leads while Mac was stuck in medical and Jack was still missing. They hadn’t found any clue where he might be, or even evidence that he was still alive.
Mac’s voice was raspy when he replied. “That’s low, Matty.”
The only success he’d had in influencing anything in the last week was in refusing to be transferred from Phoenix’s in-house medical center to a better hospital. He didn’t care if Phoenix’s doctors weren’t Los Angeles’ top specialists. They were good enough, and they knew him. As long as he was in Phoenix med, he was as close as he could get to the investigation. He wasn’t even sure if this success was that much of a success since Phoenix was easier to secure. At a hospital, Matty would've had to have assigned him two guards.
“Would you rather I sugar coat the truth and spoon feed it to you, Mac? I don’t have time for that, and you don’t want it. I’m going to ask for you to do me the favor of not trying to leave AMA. You don’t want me to pull agents off this case to chase you down any more than I do. I think we can agree on that.”
He’d already considered, and discarded, doing exactly what she was suggesting, for exactly the same reasons. “Yes, Matty.”
“Good.” Her voice softened, and she leaned against the corner of his bed, looking suddenly a lot more tired. “Now what’s your plan B?”
Mac blinked at her. He did have a plan B, he just hadn’t expected her to ask for it so… bluntly. In the almost-year since Matty joined the Phoenix, the only time he’d seen her off her game was in San Francisco, and even then, it had been brief flashes of grief breaking through her Directorial facade. But when he looked closer, he could see dark circles under her eyes, only partly hidden by makeup, wrinkles on her blouse that spoke to long hours without attention. The situation was getting to her, too. “I, uh. I could stay at Jack’s place?”
“No,” Matty said immediately. “I don’t want you alone. And that doesn’t mean that you’re rooming with Bozer. He’s coming along as an agent, but he’ll be the first to admit he can’t stand between you and Murdoc. Go home with Cage if you insist on going. But not until Dr. McClane releases you, which is not going to happen today.”
Even Cage’s brows rose at that, but she didn’t object to being voluntold to take Mac home. But it isn't the worst idea, and even if Cage hadn’t been on the team very long, she’d earned his trust when by giving him a lot of leeway after she realized he’d been shot. She wasn’t a pushover, and she had been concerned, so it wasn’t that she didn’t care if he lived or died.
It had more or less worked out. He couldn’t even fool himself into thinking he could have gone on any longer than he had. He didn’t even remember how he’d exited the parking garage, and very much suspected it was horizontally.
He didn’t remember the two days after that, either. Just hazy flashes of memory smudged out by anesthesia and pain medication. It had been nine days since Murdoc took Jack, and the only help he’s been able to give was reading other agents’ reports, suggesting avenues to investigate, and listening in on comms, which Matty provided access to on day four, without him even having to ask.
He gave Matty a tight nod and pulled his lips up into a ghost of a smirk. “I won’t make you send someone to chase after me.”
“Good.” She turned to go, then turned back. “I will give you access to the daily update that the lab writes up for me. Read them. I want your brain on this.”
Mac shook his head. “Daily isn’t enough, Matty. I want access to the running log.”
“No.” She held up her hand to forestall Mac’s inevitable protest. “I will tell you—I promise that I will tell you immediately—if we find anything. But I need you healed, Mac. Jack will need you healed, as soon as we find something. I want you recuperating like it’s your job.”
Mac blew out a frustrated breath.
“And don’t bother with the wounded puppy look. I know Jack and Bozer buy it every time. That’s another reason I’m putting Cage in charge of you.”
Mac’s eyes slid up to meet Cage’s and then away. It was disconcerting how well she saw through his shell, in spite of having known him for less than two months. Grudgingly, he nodded. Matty might be guessing how exhausted he was based on his medical records, or average recovery times, or maybe just guessing. But Cage wasn’t fooled, and he didn’t think she’d let him hid the truth from Matty twice.“Fine.”
#
If Matty was surprised when Cage pushed Mac’s wheelchair into the war room in time for the 5pm briefing two days later, she didn’t show it. It was always hard to tell if Matty was just good at hiding her reactions or was actually five steps ahead of everyone else. Maybe someone in Phoenix medical had ratted him out when he’d argued Cage into rolling him to the war room instead of telling him, for the hundredth time, that he needed to rest.
Cage pushed him up even with the glass-top coffee table and then hovered beside him, arms crossed in a way that did nothing to hide that she clearly thought this was a bad idea.
Matty pulled a series of images up on the big screen from her tablet. The first was the fifth grade teacher who’d tried to murder him and Cage. They’d ID’d him as one Henry Fletcher the same day Mac recovered his school district employee photo from a heat-damaged print. At first they’d assumed he was a potential target, but it had shortly become clear that he was hiding a secret life of his own. One that involved some pretty hefty weaponry and a whole bunch of aliases.
On the screen, the space around the photo on the screen filled with more pictures of the same man. He wore different outfits, some labeled with the date and location, some clearly ID photos from different times and places. “We don’t know his real name,” Matty said, turning away from the screen. “So we’ll stick with Henry Fletcher for now. We’ve identified him in over two dozen official databases, border crossing records, and airports over the last ten years. Oddly, there’s no identifiable pattern that links him to any killings, high-profile or otherwise. That stumped our techs for a while, until we expanded their search.” The images moved aside and each was joined by a snippet of a news article or police report. The room was quiet as they absorbed the information. Every one was about a missing person. A few reports mentioned bodies found years later. Others were still missing. Matty gave them all time to digest before she continued. “I think we’re looking at a fader. If you want someone to go out with a bang, you hire Murdoc. But if you want a target to just fade away, you hire someone like Fletcher.”
A fader. Mac had heard of the concept, but successful faders were rare. They’ve never dealt with an assassin who flew as far under the radar as Henry had been doing. Someone who made his victims disappear as thoroughly as if they’d simply faded away, leaving their friends and family in limbo, never knowing what happened.
Murdoc, who specialized in making his victims into messages, was an entirely different sort of evil.
“Do any of these records tell us where he’s gone?” Cage asked.
Matty’s mouth was set in a line. “No, I’m afraid not. We lost the trail after he ditched that cell phone.”
“We’re not giving up,” Riley said, a statement that was also a question.
“This remains a priority.” Matty met their eyes in turn, landing on Mac’s last and staying there as she continued. “But until we’re able to develop more leads, some of the resources I pulled will be returned to their standing assignments.”
The pained note in Matty’s voice was genuine. No doubt there. She only let Jack get away with as much as he did because she trusted him as much as she did. But her words were a punch to the gut. Somehow Mac managed to keep his voice level. “So Jack is our priority, but we’re pulling agents off looking for him?” Mac took a breath. “It’s been a—a week, Matty.”
“We can still salvage a few of the other ops that I put on hold. This is important—we’ll pull them back again if we need to. But I can’t have this many people idle while we track down our next leads.”
Of course she couldn’t. Phoenix had enough jobs come their way that Matty already had to pick and choose which they took on. They were always important, always worth the time and risk. It was the nature of what Phoenix was and the gap it filled within the intelligence community.
But it hurt. People were just going back to their normal jobs as if nothing had happened. As if a known psychopath hadn’t captured a Phoenix agent. As if Jack’s life didn’t depend on them finding him.
If there was someone to find. They didn’t know if Jack was alive or dead, if he’d been buried in a shallow grave or moved out of the country. Murdoc had disappeared without a trace after shooting Mac.
And now Henry Fletcher was also gone without a trace, too. Slipped through the Phoenix dragnet like water through a sieve.
Fading away is exactly what had happened to Jack. He’d simply… disappeared. DNA samples from the chair and floor of the room Mac had been held in had verified Murdoc’s claim to have tortured Jack in that room before Mac was moved into it. That part of his tale hadn’t been a lie.
But what about his claim to have killed Jack?
“Mac?” Cage’s voice was pitched low.
He looked up, realizing that the briefing was over. Bozer and Riley were heading out to… somewhere. He’d missed exactly where. At least they were still working the right case. So was Cage, although without a trail to follow, she was playing the waiting game.
“Ready to go back upstairs?” she asked.
Suddenly Mac was so exhausted that he could only slump back against the seat of the wheelchair and nod.