Dan & Tyler 2 - Wintergreen (12 page)

"Uh…" Dan was lost for the right words. Congratulations didn't seem appropriate when Tyler looked in the mood for murder, his hands clenching into fists and then relaxing, over and over, as Tyler's emotions looked for an outlet. "That's good."

Tyler's eyes met Dan's, blank and vague for a moment, as if he wasn't sure who Dan was. Okay, that could just stop any time now. In the three days since he'd jolted Tyler out of his self-imposed solitary confinement, Tyler had been almost back to normal, working fewer hours, eating without an abstracted frown on his face, sleeping without restless twitches that woke Dan every single time. Dan had been on the radar again, and he didn't plan to let Tyler slide back into treating him like wallpaper.

"Good?" Tyler echoed. "Yeah, it's good." A muscle in his jaw tensed. "God, this is going to kill Cole, though. He's the one who hired him."

 

Dan groaned, the sound piteous enough to get him Tyler's full attention. "Look, make your mind up; are we cracking open a beer to celebrate, or do you need a hug? I'm lost here."

 

"It's complicated," Tyler began.

Dan rolled his eyes and stood with an ill-tempered shove of his chair. Complicated. Where had he heard
that
before? Complicated, secret, need to fucking know… he was sick to death of all the bullshit Tyler and the distant Cole kept dishing out. It all seemed to land on him. "Just tell me."

Tyler calmed down the way he usually did when Dan was worked up. "Sorry. I'm just -- all this time. Jesus, I never thought I'd--"

"Just tell me," Dan said, close to snarling it. "Right." Tyler glanced down at the table, frowned, picked up a jigsaw piece and slotted it into place, even though for him the puzzle was upside down.

Dan closed his eyes and kept them closed. He'd been looking for that piece for ages. "I'm trying to remember that I usually like you," he said. "It's getting difficult."

"Cole wanted me to find someone who's been warning targets and getting agents killed," Tyler said, his voice echoing against the darkness Dan stood in. "I was getting nowhere. Six possibilities and I'd narrowed it to two, but that wasn't good enough. We had to be certain."

Darkness wasn't that exciting -- or calming. Dan opened his eyes again. Tyler looked slightly less manic, his hands loosely clasping the back of a chair. Agents killed didn't sound good, even if part of him wasn't all that sorry that their targets had escaped. They might have been evil, but a bullet out of the blue splitting your skull open… that wasn't a good way to go. There had to be better, less final, ways to deal with people like that. He'd said as much to Tyler one night and gotten a cold glare for his trouble.

"And now you are?" Dan raised his eyebrows. "Certain, I mean?"

"Yeah," Tyler said heavily. "I made the connection between him and the first hit that went wrong, and after that it all just fitted together like your puzzle here." He looked at the pitiful amount of pieces that Dan had managed to connect and grinned unexpectedly. "Except better."

"There are pieces missing, and the box top is torn, so half the picture is missing, too," Dan said with a haughty tilt of his chin. "I'm working under a handicap here."

 

"So was I," Tyler said.

 

Hurt, Dan blurted out, "If you mean me being around--"

Tyler shook his head and reached across the table to take Dan's hand for a moment, his thumb brushing back and forth over Dan's palm in a silent reassurance or maybe an apology. It was a gesture that Tyler wouldn't have made in the early weeks of their relationship, when sex was about the only time that Dan felt he was allowed inside Tyler's space. Whenever Dan noticed a sign that Tyler was finding it easier to show affection, he wondered how many he'd missed that were just as sincere but less obvious. "No. Nothing to do with you. It was just that, given who the six were, all agents, there was never going to be a happy ending. An agent turning on his own like that, betraying his country and getting people he knew killed--"

"Killed? What happened to them?" Dan shivered. "No, don't tell me." He'd cheerfully snacked on popcorn and chips through some gory slasher movies in his time, but that was different; when you saw someone getting ripped up on those, you knew it wasn't real.

"I wasn't planning to," Tyler said. "One of us with nightmares is enough." "But you've found him?" Dan said, caught up in Tyler's subdued elation now that he understood
- finally -- what had been going on. "You're going to nail that scum, right? He's not on the run or heading for a Caribbean island with the money he made from selling people out, is he?"

"No. Cole's watching all of them, and if one dropped out of sight, he'd have told me."

Tyler sounded positive about that, but Dan couldn't see himself sleeping well until whoever it was that Tyler had identified was locked up somewhere. He didn't let himself dwell on the very real possibility that a man like that would disappear quietly into a grave somewhere, not a cell.

"How come you're telling me about it now?" He walked over to the coffee pot with his mug and sloshed in liquid that had been kept warm far too long. "Want some?"

 

"Only if you're making fresh."

 

Dan sniffed his mug. Paint stripper grade. "Yeah, I think I will." He glanced back at Tyler as he began to rinse out the jug. "So?"

Tyler shrugged and got the coffee beans out of the fridge, the two of them falling easily back into a rhythm that had been lost over the last few weeks. "So now it's over and it doesn't matter about keeping you out of the loop. It's still not something I want you even thinking about when you're with anyone but me, but there's no reason not to tell you the basics, I guess."

"I won't mention it, I swear," Dan said over the rush of water as he rinsed out the pot and then filled it. "Got to tell you, though -- you could've told me this weeks ago and saved us both a lot of fighting."

Tyler used the time it took to grind the beans to think that over, the harsh clatter filling the kitchen with sound. "Maybe."

"'Maybe,' he says." Dan rolled his eyes and gave Tyler's ass an exasperated slap as he passed, getting a glare back with zero force behind it. "There's no fucking maybe about it. If I'd known what was happening, I'd have stayed off your back. Hell, I'd have been nagging you to work more, not less, and if you'd used me to bounce ideas off, I could've been--"

"My Watson?" Tyler grinned as Dan gave him a baffled look. "Sherlock Holmes' sidekick."

 

"What I was going to say is that I could've helped."

 

The amusement left Tyler's face. "It's not the way I'm used to working, Dan, and to be honest…"

"You don't think I'd have been much use," Dan said, filling in the gap accurately judging by the defensive expression on Tyler's face. "Thanks. You know, I get tired of being good enough to fuck, but that's about it."
"Stop using your insecurities as a way to make me feel bad," Tyler said evenly. "You weren't cleared to know what was going on, you had zero background on the situation and the people involved, your computer skills are limited to finding free porn, and bringing you up to speed in the hope that you could analyze the data and make a logical leap that took me way too long -well, it was risky, and I'm not sure it would've paid off."

Dan opened his mouth to reply to Tyler's comprehensive list of his inadequacies and found himself floundering between indignation and a grudging acceptance of some of what Tyler had said. "Yeah, well, maybe it would have."

The lameness of his response gave Tyler the perfect opportunity to score, but Tyler just said, "If there's a next time, and I hope to God there isn't, it's going to still be like this; you in the dark and me being an obsessive asshole. Cole's never going to okay you being told anything, and I'm not sure he's wrong about that."

"I just -- I want to be part of your life," Dan said haltingly. "Sex is about the only time we connect, and there's got to be more than that to us."

 

"You've got to be kidding me," Tyler said, and yeah, he did look genuinely baffled. "There's plenty between us or I'd have kicked you out a long time ago. The sex isn't
that
good."

 

"Very funny."

"I mean it," Tyler said. "No, not about the sex. We get along and you know it. The problem right now is that even before Cole showed up, you were bored out of your mind. You don't take to being idle very well. It's going to be interesting to see how soon you get tired of traveling, even though you think it's what you want more than anything else."

"I
do
want to go places," Dan said. He gave Tyler a suspicious stare. "Is this your way of canceling the trip?"

"No fucking way," Tyler said succinctly. "We're heading out as soon as Cole's wrapped this one up, and that's a promise. I just want you to think about what happens when it's time to settle down again. You need a job."

"So do you." Before Dan had shown up, Tyler, as far as Dan had been able to work out, had lived on food from his garden and spent his spare time reading. The man had plenty of money saved up; most of it was invested and doing okay, but it didn't mean that retirement in his mid-thirties would suit him.

"True enough. So we both think about it." Tyler eyed the slowly rising level of coffee in the pot and then walked away. "I'm going to start the process of telling Cole what I found out."

 

Dan wasn't sure what that involved -- a simple phone call or e-mail was probably out of the question for security reasons -- but he didn't bother asking for details he wouldn't get. See? He was learning.

 

***

Telling Cole who his mole was in a way that couldn't be tracked or understood if it was, well, that wasn't difficult. Each of the six possibilities had been assigned a random number -- Drew Sturgis' was 26 -- and Tyler just went to a random page online, discarding a few until he found one that was suitable, counted until he reached the 26
^th
word in the sixth paragraph, and sent Cole an e-mail with the URL and the word.

It was a method they'd used before, and since the assigning of numbers had been done in a snowy field, in whispers, the six numbers memorized, never written down, it was safe enough. Even if Sturgis was somehow monitoring the e-mail account that Cole had set up anonymously from a public computer -- not likely -- the e-mail that Tyler had sent equally anonymously wouldn't be much help. The page was an earnest plea for people to compost more, and the word was 'earthworms.'

Now, he had to wait for Cole to see the message, do some counting, and -- well, Tyler wasn't sure what Cole would do after that. Cole would want to talk to him, ask him questions, ask him if he was sure… but Cole would also want to move swiftly to take Sturgis in for questioning.

If Tyler had gotten it wrong, pulling in Sturgis would alert the real traitor and blow the whole investigation, but Tyler knew that he was right.

Sturgis. Young, late twenties, six-two, with a thick shock of strawberry blond hair and bright blue eyes, handsome enough to turn heads, well-dressed and well-spoken. Being noticeable like that wasn't ideal in their job, but Sturgis used it to his advantage. Then, when it was time to work, contacts and dye, subtly shapeless clothes and a slouch blurred his attractiveness, muted it until he could slip by, part of any crowd. If you knew how, and all of them did, changing your appearance rarely involved anything major in the way of props. It was all in the attitude.

Tyler wondered how much of Sturgis' confidence would survive being arrested and questioned, the consequences of discovery only too well-known, even if arrogance and over-confidence would have made Sturgis certain that he'd never be caught.

You could dress it up poetically by talking about numbered hours and sand trickling through hourglasses, but the cold facts were pure prose; when Sturgis had been wrung dry, he'd die. No judge would grant clemency for this -- though Tyler doubted it would ever get as far as a court case.

"But it won't be me pulling the trigger," he muttered as he moved away from the computer to stare out of the window, driven by a need to monitor his surroundings that was too ingrained to ignore. "Not this time."

"Tyler? Do you still want that coffee?" He turned his head. Dan was in the doorway, hovering as if he was unsure of his welcome. Tyler smiled at him, and Dan smiled back, an uncomplicated happiness shining from his eyes.

It wasn't over; the fallout from this would cloud the air for months with repercussions and security threats, but it wasn't Dan's problem and, Tyler realized, it wasn't his, either.

 

With a momentary flash of sympathy for a distant Cole -- because it was most certainly
his
problem -- Tyler walked over to Dan and into the hug waiting for him.

 

"Hi," Dan whispered into his neck, arms tight around Tyler. "Welcome back."

 

***

It took two days for Cole to call, after Tyler had followed up his e-mail with a succinct summary of his proof, by which time Tyler was on the verge of driving to D.C. to throttle his former boss. He didn't dare risk making direct contact himself; he could think of a dozen possible complications when it came to taking Sturgis, and that was without even trying.

He waited, kept a gun within reach when he slept, and during the day wore one in a shoulder holster that Dan eyed with appreciation tinged with wariness, telling Tyler that he looked scary but hot. Tyler wasn't sure which adjective he found most incomprehensible. It was a gun; he wasn't planning on shooting Dan, so there was no reason for him to look frightening, and as for the supposed hotness of the leather holster, it made him sweat, chafed his ribs, and was as much a part of his outfit as his shoes. Hotness, in the sexual sense at least, just didn't come into it.

Tyler suffered through six calls from people trying to sell him items he didn't want, one from Anne, who wanted to speak to Dan first, before, finally, late in the afternoon, he heard Cole's voice in his ear, saying his name in a weary rasp.

"Cole. Thank fuck you called back. What took you so long?"

 

"I've been busy. And I miss the days when you used to call me 'sir' and treat me with some respect."

"Yeah, I miss them, too," Tyler said insincerely. Dan scrambled for the remote and paused the DVD they'd been watching, leaving Bruce Willis frozen, flying through the air as a car blew up behind him, the screen filled with flames and pieces of flying metal. Tyler nodded a thank you and then felt real gratitude as Dan patted Tyler's knee and left him alone, taking his iPod into their bedroom and closing the door. Tyler wasn't sure that Dan would actually turn the iPod on, but he appreciated the gesture.