NICK
John glared at him. “It appears the case you wanted to close was your own. That’s what I get for having a drug-addled, over-caffeinated felon in my office.”
As if on cue, their phones both buzzed, reminding Nick to take his meds.
“I really want to get off the meds,” Nick admitted. “I just don’t trust my own brain right now. Brain damage, drugs ....the other night was probably the most terrified I’ve ever been. Even when that whole mess happened at Riker’s, part of it was still a game. It was awful, but I don’t remember feeling actual fear until you were there in the cell and I thought I was dying.”
“It’s called PTSD, Nick.”
Nick rolled his eyes. “I know. And for me, it lasts a week or two and I get insecure and shaky. I don’t resist arrest or start sobbing because I might be murdered. I’ve never felt like my own body wasn’t under the control of my will before, ever.”
“Ever been that close to death before?”
“Not emergency-surgery-close,” admitted Nick.
He looked out the window, realizing for the first time that he really had almost died. He shivered. Recovering was proving to be slow, and painful on many levels. But he was alive.
“Doctor told me after I was in a car wreck that our nervous systems tend to know when we almost die, and act to protect us even when we don’t want them to,” said John.
Nick grinned. “You were swerving in the middle of intersections for like a month after that.”
“It was a week! If that.”
“I was being kind when I said a month,” countered Nick. “It was more like three.”
“Keep it up and I’ll chain you to that desk,” said John, hurling a paper clip at Nick.
“Ohhh, scary,” said Nick, tossing his head with a defiant glare and taking a sip from one of the three cups of coffee. Kelly’s. She had good taste. “The desk’s so tiny, a Pomeranian could walk it.”
“Didn’t you say you were going to close a case today?” said John. “Get to work.”
Nick did close a case, sort of. He established that a new art forgery was the work of the same person WC was already investigating for insurance fraud.
Then Curry walked into John’s office. With coffee. John and Nick exchanged a sideways look of mirth and thanked him. Nick sipped from espresso cup number four, and was shocked to discover that it was the best of the lot.
“Where’d you get this?” asked Nick. “It’s superb.”
“From a place that doesn’t enjoy being frequented by criminals,” said Curry.
“You’re bringing me coffee from now on then,” declared Nick.
Curry gave him a dry look with his eyebrows arched, the closest thing to a smile that could be expected. “I wanted to tell you I just spoke with AUSA Werner. She said the NYPD signed the papers. You’re no longer at risk of an arrest warrant, and I can stop authorizing thousands of dollars a day on your special babysitting squad.”
Nick tried not to whoop, and let out some sort of mutant yelp instead. John burst out laughing. “What the hell was that?”
Nick bit his lower lip. “Maybe I have had a little too much coffee.”
“You think?” asked John.
Curry gave John the dreaded finger-point. “I need to speak to you in my office. Alone.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Emotionally Compromised
JOHN
Daniel handed him a set of airline tickets. “DC Art Crimes wants you, Wash, and Corsich out there tomorrow to assist with a case.”
John took the tickets and flipped through them. “What about Aster?”
“Assign him a temporary handler.”
John tensed. “We should ask a doctor if he can fly and bring him along.”
Curry shook his head. “He’s not allowed to leave the state. I checked.”
John sat heavily in the chair across from Daniel’s desk. “I can’t leave Nick right now, let alone with someone he doesn’t know.”
Curry gave John a sharp look. “Aster doesn’t have to come in to work while you’re gone. But you do have to go where the Bureau sends you.”
“Daniel - please. You know that -”
“That he’s an adult and a very capable one at that. Nick Aster can survive for a week without you. If you two are so emotionally compromised that you can’t manage this, I really am going to have to pull you out of the field.”
John stood and forced a professional expression onto his face. “I’ll be on the plane tomorrow.”
NICK
“Who, Theo?” said Nick, impatient.
“Special Agent Dan Fisher.”
“What did you get on him?” asked Nick. “Quick, John’ll be back any time.”
Dan Fisher’s dark secret was easy enough to find. He’d been an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay and one of the first group of FBI agents to file official reports revealing that detainees were being tortured by military and CIA interrogators.
Fisher had been certain that the FBI's public release of the damning reports would end it in a super-storm of public and international outrage. Instead, it caused a brief stir in the press, and business went on as usual.
A serious player in Saudi terror started to confide in Fisher, and shared partial details of a high-level meeting protocol. Then a military contractor made the not-at-all-insane decision that the smart way to handle a cooperating witness was to torture him. The information the detainee had given Fisher proved correct.
The information he gave his torturers led thirty people to die in an attempted sting in Pakistan, and Fisher started drinking.
Fisher's job was threatened by the administration and he was sent home shattered at the realization that the US didn’t really care. He left behind detainees, some of them innocent, some of them teenagers, to be tortured.
His career had become about that guilt, and his resentment of the public’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the abuse of prisoners.
Theo noted that as Nick had suspected, Fisher’s approach to building cases tended less towards justice for the victims and more about making a political point.
“Thanks, Theo,” said Nick after listening intently. “Sounds perfect. What about that activist, Marion Day?”
“Exactly what it says on the tin. My kind of woman, although the cynical might say she favors less journalistic fact-checking and more manipulative interpretation to lure the blinded masses to the correct conclusion,” said Theo.
“But she can’t be easily smeared by the NYPD PR guy? LeBlanc?”
“Nope. Law-abiding citizen, stuck the city for half a mil after a riot cop took out her knee during OWS. Standard-issue passionate liberal Internet activist, stays off the front lines now and in front of lines of php.”
“Perfect. Gotta go.”
Nick controlled a shiver when his finger hovered over the send button on his anonymous email to Marion Day. Politics was the arena where vicious and usually incompetent, easily manipulated novices played at quasi-legal cons because they were too scared of prison to just do it for real.
It was a scene he detested, but he’d have to dirty his hands this once.
JOHN
John went out to the bathrooms in order to conceal his frustration.
Damn it Nick, would you stop playing okay? It just screwed you.
Office Aster was cheery, debonair despite the bruises, and of course, well enough to come to work. Nick was a good enough actor to pull it off, too. Daniel had been too supportive of Nick to have made this move until he was convinced Nick could handle it and wouldn’t be at risk from the NYPD.
Nobody else there knew it’d taken enormous effort and pain for Nick simply to make it out of the house, or from the car to the parking garage elevator and in to the office. Nobody else knew how recently and completely he’d been enveloped in intense trauma.
Nick wasn’t even ready to go back to his own apartment yet, let alone being ready to face being left alone with a new handler.
But it was happening.
/>
It was time to think of the safest, kindest, most understanding agent in the building and hope to every deity known to mankind that he could also somehow control Nick Aster at his most vulnerable and hardheaded.
JOHN
“Congratulations on getting yourself clear of an arrest warrant,” said John in his most insincere voice. “Real smart move.”
“I thought so,” said Nick, his expression angelic. John could swear the guy was this close to batting his beautiful blue eyes.
“Didn’t even think of running it by me.”
“Come on, John. You’re genetically obligated to tell me I have to seek justice, and by justice you mean legalized revenge.”
“Well -- what --” John threw up his hands. “Okay, when someone abuses their authority to nearly kill my best friend, maybe it’s not so out of bounds to want them to pay for it.”
“You ever heard of Judo?” asked Nick.
“What -- of course I have.”
“It turns the force of your opponents own actions against them.”
“You a Judo expert now?” asked John sarcastically. Nick might be tough, but a skilled fighter he was not.
“Well -- no,” admitted Nick. “But in prison, there’s a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to fighting. Even if you’re only defending yourself you can get totally screwed. There might have been a time or two someone came at me and I got out of their way so they could take a nice tumble down a metal staircase.”
A strong tickle of unease was building; John’s Aster-sense was tingling.
“What are you planning, Nick?” he asked in a warning voice.
“Planning? Why would I be planning something?”
“Well, your little Judo lesson just backfired on you,” said John.
Nick’s innocent look didn’t quite conceal his worry.
“Nick, DC Art Crimes is working an important case. Wash, Kelly, and I are all being sent there.”
Nick looked fascinated. “Can I come?”
John shook his head. “I already asked. No field trips for you. You can’t leave the state.”
Nick tensed, his face frozen. “John. What’d you do?”
“I ....didn’t send you back to prison, you gotta give me points for that ....”
“So who’s - going to be my handler?” Nick couldn’t hide his anxiety.
“Guy named Neil Kasdan.”
Nick stood abruptly, and tried to hide a mix of pain, fear, and betrayal.
“A stranger.” He quit trying to hide it. “John, I can barely walk.”
“You get to meet him first. If you’re uncomfortable, we’ll work something out. But this is a smart, kind guy who’s wanted to work with you for a while now.”
“He wants to work with me?” Nick perked up a little at that.
John grinned. “Thought that’d endear him to you.”
Nick didn’t smile, and he was gripping the chair arm with fingers as tense as claws.
“Nick,” said John softly. “I said I couldn’t go. But the upshot is that Curry is worried I’m emotionally compromised where you’re concerned. If I don’t do this, we probably won’t be allowed in the field together any longer.”
Nick gave him a baffled look. “Why would he think you’re emotionally compromised?”
John glanced around the office, made sure his door was tightly closed, and there was no surveillance equipment turned on before he made a dangerous but irresistible retort.
“Oh, I dunno. Maybe because I sleep with my criminal consultant?”
Nick erupted in a mutant snicker-snort of mirth that made John laugh out loud. Espresso and narcotics were a magical combination.
“Because I screwed up the response at Rikers,” said John. “Not determining you’d been stabbed, and letting you walk out instead of throwing you on an ambulance was a huge error on my part. One that nearly killed you.”
Nick tapped his pen on the desk with dizzying speed, and yawned. “You did the right thing. I think - it might have killed me if you’d been cold and efficient like I was some traffic accident victim, or handed me over to that paramedic and sent me away in an ambulance.”
“I almost killed you,” said John. “That’s the bottom line.”
Nick looked down. “I needed the comfort and protection of a friend, desperately. And - just put yourself in the position of having been victimized as completely as I had. I wasn’t sexually assaulted. But I was beaten, so deliberately and punitively it almost made me cry. I was so dazed and hurting I was trying to grab handfuls of the floor. Imagine lying on a floor completely helpless while strangers cut all your clothing off and leave you naked on cement. Then - everything that came after. Imagine how important it would be to you to walk out proudly instead of being carted off as a broken victim.”
“Jesus, Nick-”
Nick met his eyes directly, his face grown-up and dead serious. “What you did, holding me in that cell and letting me walk out on my own, was not an error. If there’s anything to the idea that sometimes people choose to fight and live or give up and die....you made the right call.”
“Thanks, Nick,” said John.
“Thank you,” said Nick simply. “And if going to DC is what it’ll take to get you clear of this, go to DC. I’ll be fine.”
Please let that be true.
“Then let’s meet your new handler.”
An expression of fear crossed Nick’s eyes. “New temporary handler.”
“Yep,” John reassured him. “An’ if you try crawling into bed with him, very temporary.”
A grin sneaked onto Nick’s face. Nick’s fingers were still buried knuckle-deep in faux leather, and what wasn’t bruised looked pale. John felt horrible, and lamely patted him on the arm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Nick & Neil
NICK
Neil Kasdan was about Nick’s height, chocolate-haired, fit, and walked like he preferred exploring a room rather than barging into it. He was decent dresser, his boring but high quality dark navy wool suit and FBI white shirt elevated by a snappy royal blue and aubergine color-blocked silk tie.
His expression was curious, and he had a kind, concerned face. He was no older than Nick, but carried himself like he was, aged by responsibility. He broke into a smile when he saw Nick, and raised his hand as if to wave.
“Hi, Nick.”
Nick smiled back, relieved. This was no domineering bureaucrat. “Hi, Neil. So ....does everyone go around telling you to kneel? And pretending to knight you? Always wanted to meet a Neil and ask that.”
Kasdan shook his hand with an endearing grin. “Uh, no. And please don’t start giving John ideas.”
“Already got ‘em,” said John. “Thanks, Nick.”
Nick stuck his hands in his pockets and pretended to study Kasdan. “You do have a sort of British-aristocrat look going on. I can see it.”
“Nope. German Jew with a slight crush on Arthurian legend,” said Kasdan. “So is it bad form given the circumstances to say I’m excited to have a chance to work with you?”
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” said Nick, bowing slightly. “What is it you want from me?”
Kasdan raised his eyebrows for a second at the cynical wording of Nick’s question. “Not much. Mainly I’m after your soul, and your firstborn child.”
“Back taxes?”
“Those too,” said Kasdan. “I work in Cybercrime. We have a certain overlap with Art Crimes, White Collar and Missing and Exploited Children.”
Oh. Nick looked away at the wall. Just ask it. “Will I have to look at -- pictures?”
“Child pornography, you mean?”
Nick nodded.
“No. I’d have a pretty rough time with that myself. Most of my cases are scams, phishing, and other forms of online crime.”
Nick’s shoulders sagged in relief. “I’m not a tech wizard hacker,” he warned.
“Don’t need you to be,” said Neil. “We got guys for that, good ones. I just could use anothe
r brain -- two heads are better than one and all that. I’ve got a couple tricky cases involving fake gemstones....”
Nick’s interest picked up. Jewelry could be fun.
“Whatta you think, Nick?” asked Kasdan with a sober note in his voice. “Can you trust me to call the shots for a couple days? John’s warned me I have to feed you good espresso, and I know you shouldn’t be at work yet. If you aren’t comfortable with the arrangement, you can go home and rest until John gets back, and my only role will be to monitor your anklet and bring you chicken soup.”
Broken Blue Lines: Love. Hate. Criminal Justice.: An FBI Crime Drama / LGBT+ Love Story Page 18
