When Buffy had worked with these disks the first time, she had kept in the back of her mind that, one day, she might be the one hacking back into them. Which made the going easier, but it was still definitely slow. She intentionally hadn’t written down any passwords, although a few were still rattling around in her brain, and despite knowing exactly what codes she needed to input in order to read the files, she still had to actually type them in. Which took time.
Time, she kept screaming mentally at herself, that she didn’t really have. That Spike might not have.
If everything were to work out exactly as she wanted it to, she would give a select number of these files to the head of the investigation into Angelus’s organization at the FBI, a sniveling little weasel named Snyder. In theory, if she didn’t give THAT much evidence against Spike directly, especially considering he’d been the one to gather the information, he could get out with minimum jail time,—months, hopefully, instead of years.
Buffy alternated between this train of thought, mentally berating herself for her stupidity in fleeing from the hotel when Gunn accused her of Giles’s murder instead of sticking around to try and explain, and wondering when she’d suddenly stopped acting like a responsible agent, and started being a renegade looking to get a wanted criminal minimum jail time.
Despite her rampaging thoughts, the blonde continued to work diligently at her computer, smiling when she glanced up and saw Willow’s face contorted in a familiar, concentrated way as she worked on her own stack of disks.
Suddenly, a knock sounded at the front door, and all the color drained from Buffy’s face.
“I’m…I’m going to hide,” she said quickly, paranoia setting in. “What if…God, I’m sorry, Willow, if they found me—“
“Buffy, it’s okay!” Willow insisted, heading towards the door. “I know who it is.”
Despite the woman’s attempt to calm her down, Buffy’s hand immediately curled around the gun she had tucked into the sofa cushions next to her.
And when Xander entered the house, she pulled it out and pointed it directly at him.
“What are you doing here?” She spat. “So you actually work for Angel? God, and I trusted you!”
“Buffy,” he waved his hands in front of him, eyeing the gun in her hands. “Calm. Callllm thoughts. I am not working with Angelus, okay? I’m here to help.”
“How did you know where I was?”
“Well, I didn’t. Not really,” he shrugged. “Funny enough, it’s not actually about you. I’m here for Willow you’re just…a wonderful bonus.” His smile was goofy, yet uncertain.
“Huh?” She lowered the gun, and Willow unfroze and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Willow is my girlfriend,” Xander explained. “Remember how I recognized you when you first came to work for Spike?” Buffy nodded. “I realized just a few days ago, I had seen a picture of you and Will from some school dance or something, that’s where I knew you from.”
“Okay…” Her mind was reeling.
“Willow called me earlier, I’m here to help. Oh, and I brought snacks!” He held up a grocery store bag.
“You’re kind of forgetting the most important part, Xander,” prodded Willow.
“Oh, yeah, right,” he laughed awkwardly. “And I’m LAPD.”
“Again, I say huh?” Buffy knew she must look comical, with her jaw literally hanging open and her eyes wide in shock. Like a cartoon, probably.
“I’ve been undercover with Spike for two years.”
“I…oh my God,” Buffy sat back down on the couch as her knees began to wobble. “Why didn’t I know this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, why wouldn’t my bosses know there was another person undercover there? Isn’t that the kind of thing the FBI should know?”
Xander laughed. “Yeah, I think my division is pretty protective of what we see as our turf. We didn’t want to give up our hand. And hey, not like your people came to us to say they’d be sticking agents in our town. Rude, really.”
Buffy was quiet as she absorbed this totally unexpected information. “God, Spike had three people undercover and he didn’t know it. That’s…pretty funny,” she started to giggle inappropriately, laughter cased by stress and fear and shock, but as it bubbled up and threatened to become uncontrollable, Xander’s next words cut it off at its knees.
“No. Spike knew I was a cop.”
Buffy knew once again she was in cartoon face, staring at him disbelievingly. “Run that by me again.”
“He knew. Knew when he hired me. So I guess I wasn’t so much undercover as under…sheet? He was working with us, we were giving him a deal.”
“But…but—“
“But that’s probably shot to hell now that the FBI has him.”
“We do?” Her expression was hopeful. “He’s alive?”
“Well, when my people and the ambulance you called got to the warehouse he was gone, so I think that’s what probably happened. Unless Angelus took him…”
Her face fell again. “There’s no way you could find out?”
“I could try. My unit’s been taken over by some tiny dictator named Snyder, ordering us around like we’re his little slaves and giving us no information in return. Some of the people from my unit are looking into your boss’s murder—Giles, right?---and I’ve been assigned to, well, help Gunn find you.” At Buffy’s tensing shoulders, he said quickly, “But I won’t. I mean, I found you. But I won’t tell anyone. Not until you do what you need to do. And I’m here to help.”
Xander blushed as Buffy smiled at him gratefully. Willow chimed in, “Can I suggest sleep? It’s late, and we’ll get a lot more done tomorrow after we all get some rest.”
Buffy opened her mouth to protest, to insist that they work through the night, but all at once crippling fatigue hit her, and she could do nothing but nod weakly.
Willow quickly set up a makeshift bed on the couch, but despite the comfort of it, it took a long time for Buffy to even approach the oblivion of sleep.
There was a certain feeling gnawing at her chest, and she realized as she laid on the couch and stared at the ceiling that it was the sensation she felt whenever she knew she was forgetting something, but didn’t know what. Like when packed for a trip, and knew something was missing.
When she finally fell asleep, the swirl of thoughts and worries in her mind bled over into her dreams. Visions of blood and guns and codes and crystal and Spike looking up at her from on the warehouse floor and Gunn with that hard look in his eyes and her own face, tear streaked and broken, flashed in her mind as she slept restlessly. That gnawing feeling continued, and she only hoped that daybreak would bring her the knowledge she knew she was missing.
“Okay, so what do we know?” Willow asked, glasses on, pencil at the ready to take notes.
Buffy had awoken to the smell of freshly brewing coffee and the sound of waves crashing on the beach outside. The three were situated around the kitchen table, ready to dive right in and work out this puzzle they were faced with.
“Not a lot. We know Angelus must have figured out Gunn and I were agents, and either killed or sent someone to kill Giles. And he set me up for it. Don’t know why, though, or how, really. How would he have found out? And how would he have gotten my necklace?”
“What about your phone?”
“Caleb took it from me on the way to the warehouse, I remember he hit a couple of keys. Must have called Giles then. OH! And he probably got my necklace then, he pulled me by the hair. Could have done some slight of hand, taken it off.”
“But he died in the warehouse, we found his body, so he must have left it in the car, and someone else picked it up.”
Buffy nodded, Willow scribbled frantically, and Xander took a sip of his coffee.
“The autopsy on Giles should be done this morning, I’ll be able to find out time of death. How long between when you and Gunn left the warehouse, and when you got to the crime scene?”
Buffy’s brow furrowed. “An hour and a half, maybe? Two? Gunn would have gotten there in a half an hour, probably, depending on traffic.” Her frown deepened. “And we were in the warehouse for maybe an hour,. So that gives someone about an hour and a half to get the necklace and plant it.”
“But who?” Willow prodded. “And why?”
“Who, probably just a minion. The why is pretty simple,” Xander said. “Just to get Buffy out of the way for awhile. Probably keep suspicion on her so people might think she falsified all that evidence?”
“That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense though,” the blonde mused. “I mean, why kill Giles and frame me, when they thought they had me captive at the warehouse?”
“Sort of …I don’t know, backup?”
“I guess,” she mused. “Something just doesn’t seem quite right.”
“Well, hopefully Lockley and Finn have some more information I can pass on.” At Buffy’s blank look, Xander explained, “Kate Lockley and Riley Finn. The two cops investigating the murder. They’re good people and good cops, I’m guessing you as the perp won’t hold up for very long.”
“Here’s hoping,” said Willow. “Once we’ve opened up all the disks, and Buffy’s cleared, she can go to her boss, right? And get Spike a deal with them.”
“Yeah, just because my unit made a deal with them doesn’t mean the FBI will stick to it.”
Their voices faded away as Buffy concentrated on that sick, unsettled feeling deep within her. There was something. Something she wasn’t getting, something that she needed to remember. Then, she did.
“I’ll head off to work—“ Xander was saying when she bolted upright.
“Fred.”
“Hmm?” He turned to her, curious.
“Fred. Fred ran from the warehouse when Gunn and I attacked. But Forrest was outside guarding it. How did she get past him without him seeing her?”
Everyone sat in silence for a moment.
“Buffy, I know what you’re thinking, but really, Fred wouldn’t betray Spike. She’s as loyal as they come.”
“Then explain how she got past Forrest. She couldn’t have. He had to have let her go willingly.”
Silence again.
“But why?” Willow asked. “I mean, from what Xander’s told me, Fred practically worships Spike. She wouldn’t be secretly working for Angelus, would she?”
“Maybe she wasn’t, not really,” Buffy said, jumping up and beginning to pace. “What if, what if Angelus thought she was working for him? So she could keep him off Spike’s back, for the most part.”
Xander nodded. “Possible. She always did seem to have a ton of knowledge about what Angelus was doing. I just never really thought about it before.”
“How much were you involved with their plans?”
“I wasn’t, really. I was there in sort of a…supervisor capacity. I did what Spike asked, but I don’t think he really trusted me enough to let me in totally.”
Buffy started to respond, when a bullet whizzed by her head and into the fridge behind her. She dropped to the ground instantly, and Xander tackled Willow to drag her under the table.
“Shit, shit, shit, how did they find you?” he growled as more bullets decorated the kitchen’s walls. He peeked up over the edge of the table and out the window when there was a lull in the gunfire. “Okay, there’s one car, two shooters. Will, your car is in the car port, right?” The redhead nodded, eyes wide with fear. “Okay, if we get to there we can get out.”
“I’m so sorry, Will,” Buffy moaned. They then heard a pounding at the front door. Buffy reached up and grabbed her laptop, disks and gun, shoving them back into Spike’s backpack on the ground near her.
Without speaking, all three kept low and raced towards the door to the outside.
“Xander, give me your keys,” Buffy demanded once they’d entered.
“What, why?”
“You two go.”
“Buffy, no!” Willow protested vehemently. “You can’t stay here, that’s suicide!’
“It’s not, I swear,” she promised. “I’ll be right behind you. I’m waiting till they get into the house, then I’ll run out to Xander’s car and get them to follow me, not you. I can lose them easily. You have my cell number?” The two nodded, but Xander opened his mouth to protest her plan. “You know I can’t come with you, if anyone saw us together everything would be over. Just go, call me when you find out…when you find out anything.” She quickly shoved a few disks at Willow, who frowned. “Just in case,” she explained.
The sounds of the front door being broken down reached the trio. “Okay, let’s go,” Xander said, tossing his keys to Buffy and pulling Willow towards the car. They jumped in and sped off, and Buffy sprinted for the SUV on the street once she saw them clear the corner. She could hear the sounds of the two men yelling from inside once they caught sight of her, but she was too quick, jumping into the car and driving off as they made their way back to their own vehicle.
She glanced in the rear-view mirror, shocked to see that the two unfamiliar men weren’t following her. But she realized why when she glanced back at the street in front of her. Quickly, intentionally, a red truck pulled out. Buffy recognized the driver as Forrest, with an evil grin on his face, before their cars smashed together, her head hit the steering wheel, and everything went black.
[Reviews - 468]
-
Table of Contents [Report This]
Chapter or Story |
Chapter or Story | 
Chapter or Story
Has been viewed 4049 times
- Text Size +
-
Table of Contents [Report This]
Chapter or Story |
Chapter or Story | Chapter or Story - Text Size +
Author's Chapter Notes:
Phew, this part was hard to write, let me tell you. I'm a bit nervous about it, actually. It was originally supposed to be two chapters, but the website wasn't letting me post last night (because the fic used the word "curl", finally realized), so I combined the next two chapters. Thank you so much for all your reviews, and even just for reading. I can't believe how high the read counts are every day! I love hearing all your theories about what the heck is going on, so if you have any guesses, let me know!