Craning his neck to look out the window, still holding the phone to his ear, Castor peered down into cold emptiness.  For a moment, he remembered facing the gaping abyss in his dream and subconsciously drew in his shoulders, but said nothing.  He looked over at his brother, who was absorbed in the information he was attempting to receive from his laptop, holding onto its side with one hand as the helicopter began to descend, barely brushing past invisible trees and brush. 

     “There’s no… ****ing… connection!!!”, he shouted as they touched ground, kicking the seat angrily.  “Where the **** are we?  Why can’t I get a goddamn connection?  Cas….”.

     “Quit whining.  You’re starting to piss me off.”, Castor muttered as he tried reaching various numbers in vain, not willing to accept that they were cut off from civilization, at least for the moment.

     “We’re just gonna hang here until the storm passes.”, the pilot shouted over his shoulder as he shut off the engine and lights.  “Ain’t no signal out here anywhere… looks like it’s just an open field.”.  Unlocking one of the doors, he stuck his head out and looked around.  “Everything’s starting to ice over.”.

     “So… what… we’re just gonna sit here and freeze to death?  We can’t take off if there’s ice on the blades, but we can’t sit here and freeze either!”.  As he spit out these last words, he became quite aware of the panic in his voice, reedy and shrill, and forced himself to gain control.  Glancing over at Pollux, he saw the first glimmer in fear in his eyes.  For all his intelligence and skill, he never did work well under stress.  He grabbed his brother’s wrist tightly to get his attention and smirked confidently.  “It’s cool… we’re gonna be cool.  I just tweaked for a second, but it’s the whole ****ing mess back in Dublin… I’m still not right, you know?”.

     Pollux locked eyes with his brother and nodded calmly, but his hands – now twitching and curling in his lap like poisoned spiders – gave him away.

     “Cas… what time?  Is it time?  It’s gotta be time…”, he sputtered, his lips beginning to pull cruelly over his front teeth.  “I put ‘em in the bag… the bag… in the back…it’s time.”.  Taking one of his gnarled fists, he rubbed it over his face in a circular motion, and a low whine pulled itself from the back of his throat like a caged animal about to break free.

     The pilot was watching both of them with curiosity and growing fear, fiddling with the controls and looking for any excuse to get away.  “I’ll get your bag!”, he said and jumped out the door without closing it behind him.  Castor kept a tight grip on his other arm, grimacing in sympathy as he watched the pilot’s shadow outside heading towards the rear of the copter.  After what seemed like hours, he returned with the duffel bag, the same one he had taken with him to Vitória.  Castor snatched it from him and unzipped it with one hand, and after fishing around in the dark he pulled out a bottle and rattled it… only six pills left.

     “Bro….”, he whispered, reluctantly letting go of his arm just long enough to open the bottle and shake out some of the medication.  “Here… it’s time…you need water?”.  Without waiting for an answer, he pulled out a water bottle from the bag and passed it to his brother, who stuffed the pills in his mouth and swigged it down in seconds.  It was more of a mental pacification than anything, at least for the first few minutes… he held the bottle up to the window, and in the pale moonlight he could barely make out the prescription label.  “Qaxinipam”, in smudged typeface… one of various medications that he took every few hours.  He was so dependent on them that he never needed a watch… he knew what time it was based on which trip he was riding at the moment.

     As the minutes rolled by, the storm began to dissipate.  Now the hail had diminished to a light dusting of pebbles bouncing off the blades and windows, but streaks of lightning could still be seen in the distance.  Pollux breathed heavily, rubbing his hands together and blowing on them.  “It’s August… August… and it’s cold as all hell in Ireland.  I hate it here… ****ing hate it.  There’s nothing of value for us here, material or otherwise.  Now the feds are crawling up our collective butthole…”, he muttered, with an almost childish tone, as he turned on his laptop.  Castor leaned his head back against the seat and waited for the pilot to finish his cigarette.  At length, he summoned the nerve to jump back in, and upon realizing the freak show had drawn to a close, turned to face both of them.

     “Looks like the storm took a turn.  You might get a signal now.  Try your phone.”, he suggested, nodding his head towards Castor.  He took the phone out of his breast pocket and beamed when he saw those wonderful little bars across the top of the display.  Turning to Pollux, his face awash with green and white electronic glow as he focused on the display, he pondered over the probability that she would still be wearing the bracelet.  Nestled within the stones was the microphone, the one he pulled off her chest when they left the hotel in Brazil.  It was cleverly disguised, under thin bands of filigree woven between the emeralds and rubies.  At the time, he intended to use it as a tracking device in case she tried to escape, but soon it became all too obvious that they would never be apart.  It was that final thought that drove a knife in his heart and drained him… he thought they would never separate, not once he’d found her and taken her away, not once he’d proven he was irreplaceable and made her life complete.  She had no idea just how much effort he’d put forth to get closer to her, and now she had been cruelly taken away from him.

     And it wasn’t my fault… he did it.  He shot her… he knew she was there, and he pulled the ****ing trigger and shot her.

     “I got it… I got the signal back… Cas?”

     Castor rubbed his eyes roughly with one hand, forcing the tears to subside, but couldn’t bring himself to look at his brother.  Instead, he blithely nodded and tried to stare out the window, but a gentle nudging on his shoulder tore his efforts away.  He finally looked over to see his brother, holding up an earpiece with a mischievous half-smile.  “There’s quite a conversation going on… I think you need to hear this.”.  After fitting it in, he strained to listen… at first, he heard a strange, rhythmic, metallic pumping sound.  Then, two voices… he didn’t recognize one of them, but the other made him flinch angrily and gnash his teeth.  He was there with her… he didn’t know where they were, but he had taken her away.  As the two agents spoke in hushed tones, broken by intermittent light static, his stomach rolled and churned with fury.

     “Sean… you knew when this all started that it was…”, he struggled to find gentle words, “not the usual game plan for the situation…”

     “I know that, Marcus!  I know!  You don’t have to tell me that!!”, he spit back, embittered by his shame and growing fear. 

     “Why did you have to get her involved in this?  We should have gotten her out of there when they landed in the Canary Islands!!”.

     “We were so close… I thought… I thought that if she could have held out just a little longer…maybe we could catch him in the act…” 

     “The act of what?  Being a glorified gofer to a two-bit fake diamond smuggling scheme?”.  Marcus breathed laboriously, covering his face with his hands before looking squarely at his partner.  “Castor Troy is not a violent criminal.  He’s just a pawn.  That’s all!  That’s all he ever was!”       

     “He was the one link in the operation we could get our hands on, Marcus!”

     “But that doesn’t justify allowing an agent to be used as a hostage to pull him out in the open!”

     Sean slammed the safety gate down on the hospital bed with a rattling thud and leaned close to his partner, barely restraining his frustration.  “That was never the original plan!  I had every intention of getting her back!  At the first sign of trouble, I was gonna move in!  But… things just kept moving along… I felt like I was getting closer… and it’s not like she was suffering.”.

     “Sean…”.

     “Oh, come off it, Marcus!  You heard the tapes!  You heard everything that happened between them!”.  His last words took on a sharp, snide, lecherous tone.  “If we could have gotten her to take his **** out of her mouth for five seconds…”.

     “STOP IT!!!”, Marcus hissed wildly, pointing a thick finger at Sean in absolution.  “No more… not another goddamn word… about any of it.  As far as everyone on the team is concerned, Heather was in on the plan.  She knew what was going on the whole time.  That’s what you believe, that’s what I  believe…  and if we’re all lucky,”, he added, his voice slowly smoothing out, “she’ll start to believe it as well.”.

     “What are you saying?”.

     “Sean… look, you didn’t hear this **** from me, alright?  This does not leave the room, under any circumstances.  Do you understand?”

     “Yeah, Marcus… yeah…”

     A loud sigh, then a pause, pregnant with trepidation.

     “You’re a good agent.  A damn good agent.  What happened was a little sloppy on your part – I’m not gonna pull any punches with you on that.  But we still need you on the team, and I don’t want to see your tactics being called into question if there’s things that can be done to work around it.  Word hasn’t leaked yet… as far as anyone knows, it was friendly fire.  Nobody knows why she was in that hotel, and nobody needs to know.  I can pull a few strings… and from this point on we can say that you both were following the same game plan.”

     “You’d cover this up for me?”

     “Hey, don’t think I’m doing this just for you… you ain’t that special, Archer!”.  The words, spat out dry and brittle, could have shattered on the floor.  “This is for me as well… I need all the agents I can get right now.  You have a wife and kid at home, and so do a lot of other guys out there, and we cover each other.”  Another pause, and for a second Castor thought he heard the gate being rattled rhythmically… softly.  “So we walk out of here, we don’t discuss it any more than we have to, and if we play our cards right, when she wakes up she’ll believe everything we tell her about what a big hero she is, and all will be right with the world.  Do you read me, Archer?”.

     “Yeah… yeah, I do.”.  His voice was raspy, disbelieving.

     Castor gently pulled the earpiece away from him and tossed it over his shoulder.  A sudden calm, gentle but insistent, washed over him.  “Bro?”

     “Yeah, I’m tracing it.”, Pollux replied with a giggle in his voice. 

     “I’m feeling very sociable at the moment… there’s something special in the air.  It’s almost… magical.  I’m ready to make a few new friends.  How about you?”.  Pulling a package of Tic-Tacs out of his pocket, he popped one in his mouth and cracked his knuckles.  Outside, there was only the moonlight, but the past few hours had taught him to embrace the darkness.