[Fic] International Relations

[kittydesade]

Title:International Relations
Fandom: Night Watch/Human Target
Characters: Tiger Cub, Guerrero
Word Count: ~28,000
Rating: PG-13
Summary: When children who have yet to make their Choice go missing up and down the West Coast of the United States, the head of the Moscow Night Watch sends Tiger Cub to help the Americans investigate. Her encounter with the assassin Guerrero seems to be a coincidence, but the deeper she goes into the investigation the fewer coincidences there seem to be.
A/N: Written for scifibigbang and beta'd by the ever-tolerant kikibug13


"You didn't tell your friend about the Night Watch."

She had to raise her voice a little to be heard. The small man had taken them out to an overpass where he said they would be able to meet a contact of his who would know anything about human trafficking, if there was anything to know. Tiger Cub doubted that he would know anything about the trafficking of Others, but at this point any lead would do. The San Francisco team didn't seem to have anyone on their staff who was older than sixty, which possibly had something to do with this being the newer part of a new country.

No, the reason didn't matter, but their combined lack of experience did. For the seventeenth time she wondered what in hell Boris Ignatievich had been thinking, sending her out there, instead of calling on someone with more experience or asking one of the more local watches to take part.

"You didn't tell your friends about our operation."

Tiger Cub shrugged. "They're not my friends." Which was true, though that was as far as she was prepared to go with him. Alisa was Day Watch, and the rest were Americans.

"Well, Winston isn't my friend. He's my friend's employer." The man's tone was mild enough, his expression friendly and calm as he shrugged with his hands still jammed into his pockets. Still, the world of emptiness in the words told her that his disclaimer was more true than hers.

A couple of trucks roared past on the overpass. She could tell why he liked it; not that many people could stand the noise. Moscow was noisier than this. At least when you listened like she did. Or when you listened like he did, which was interesting. Paying attention to everything and filing it away for future significance and to figure out where it fit in later. Then again, she knew he was a dangerous man. Perhaps from the moment she'd laid eyes on him.

And still completely impassive. He was either not so close to his friend that his friend's job was of any concern to him, or he knew his friend well enough not to consider this job important to his friend. Hard to say exactly which it was.

"All right. So he is not your friend, you trust your friend with this but not Winston. Is there anyone else you wish to bring in on this mission?" Was there anyone else she was going to have to explain this to? He wouldn't blame her, or he had better not, if her tone was a little testy.

He only shrugged. "No. No one else." Did the man never rattle?

Tiger Cub took a breath, let it out again. This wasn't her specialty. At all, Semyon was usually the one who talked to new people, or Anton, or anyone but her. "Our leader, Boris Ignatievich, did not tell me much about this assignment. Usually he does not send us out of Moscow, not often out of Russia, never to the United States. But he also has access to information about the probabilities of the situation..."

Guerrero's eyebrows shot up. "The probabilities of the situation?"

"Yes, the probabilities of the situation. He must have seen some advantage to placing me here, as Alisa's boss must have seen some advantage to placing her here. Either that or she was the perfect counter to me, or..." Tiger Cub shrugged. His eyebrows stayed up, which was the first even slightly amusing thing she'd ever seen him do. "What?"

"You just do what you're told, go where you're told, do what you're told to do and don't ask questions?"

She shrugged again. "The answers never make sense until it happens. Anton is sometimes able to understand what they are trying to do before they decide to show their hand but, yes. I go where I'm told, and I do as I'm told. So far, I have not regretted it."

It was clear that he disapproved of that. But then, she disapproved of him, so she supposed that was fair. "Do your bosses place any restrictions on how you complete this mission?"

"Only the restrictions all Light Others operate under." And she ran him through a very brief summation of what they were permitted to do. As she had expected, he didn't like it.

It struck her, then, that he would have made a very good Inquisition agent. He had all the emotional depth of a cracker, but he had considerable skills and everything she knew about him hinted at a great deal more. In any case, he would not have made a good Light Other.

"Some of those could be problematic," he muttered. "What were you planning on doing when you landed here?"

"Well," her tone dropped sarcasm like an anvil on his toes. "We had intended to speak with our counterparts here and figure out what they had been doing about the problem, but that was aborted..."

"I noticed."

"... so we had to proceed at the meeting you were witness to with considerably more suspicion than we were used to."

The corner of his mouth twitched upwards. She knew why. She could hear herself speaking in the kind of formal diction with which authority figures and policemen demanded to see identification papers. Her back was stiff to the point that her shoulders were starting to ache and her hands felt heavy and clawed. He was rattling her, and he knew it.

"You are an incredibly infuriating man, you know."

Now he grinned, but still said nothing.

"If the San Francisco offices of the Watch, either Watch, have not come up with anything, then we expand the search. We look to see how widespread this is, if there are any patterns, if there are any..." curses. Warlocks. Unauthorized users. "People, familiar signs from when this has happened before. Not," she added, shaking her head. "That anything like this has happened before, not this big."

"Are you scared?"

Tiger Cub gave him a glare that would have softened most men. "Of course I'm scared. Wouldn't you be? The fate of hundreds of children is in the hands of myself and a few others. I don't want that kind of responsibility."

He pulled himself off the hood of his truck where he'd been leaning, tilted his head and stared at her through the glasses, pale blue eyes and pinprick pupils in the light. It was not comforting. "Huh. At least you're honest."

She pushed a hand through her hair and shook her head. She'd had enough of this. "Do you want a drink? Where do you go for a drink around here?"

Guerrero laughed. She was too tired to fight with him. "Come on, I know a place. Nice quiet place. We can talk some more there."

"Wonderful."




"I take it back. This is a catastrophe."

After that little spiel of hers he'd called Chance, he'd had to. Just so he wasn't the only one suffering a broken mind, here. All these restrictions, all these rules... it was worse than working with Winston. And while from the sound of it he could always take her friend Alisa on the runs that were, well, less than legal, he wasn't sure he trusted the dark-eyed bitch. Something about the way she looked at him made his skin crawl.

And now he was perched on the back of Chance's couch, poking at leftovers and grumbling to his old friend. Winston, for a wonder, had gone home.

"It's not that bad."

Guerrero gave him a flat look over the rims of his glasses. "It's a pain in the ass, dude. They've got this complex system of rules and what they can and can't do, and some of the things they flat out can't do, and other things they can do if they give favors to the other side, like points they collect."

"And are all of these things that they can't do things you're going to try and make her do?"

More grumbling, more stabbing at the leftovers. Chance had a way of taking all the fun out of borrowing trouble. "It's more than just the rules, it's also their boss."

"This guy who thinks he can see the future." Chance snorted, and Guerrero agreed with him. Although it made more sense than most so-called prophets that these old men could only see the future as it was at the moment, he still didn't believe it.

"I don't know about seeing the future, but it wouldn't be the first time a few good analysts have set themselves up as prophets. Get to know a bunch of people, get to know what they'll do, make some educated guesses. If they're right often enough..." he shrugged, spread his hands and let the sentence trail off because it was self-explanatory. Chance knew what happened next.

"... they get to be prophets. Also by manipulating the people around them." And his voice was steady, which was something at least, although Guerrero still shot him a quick look just to make sure he was thinking clearly. Neither of them were all that good with manipulative old bastards, but Chance was by far the worst.

"Pretty much. She said openly that her boss is a manipulative bastard who's willing to do some pretty nasty things to his people to get the information or results he wants, but she doesn't think this is one of those times."

Chance came around the table to lean on it, palms on the edge. "She doesn't think this is one of those times." Guerrero nodded. "She doesn't think..."

"I know. I didn't suggest it to her, dude, but..."

"You think he could be playing her. That even if we get the full story out of her..."

"We're not getting the full story. I told you."

Chance scrubbed his eyes a second. "You did. Great. Just great." There was a moment while they both brooded over the situation in silence. "I guess the chances are he's not actually running some kind of game, since it doesn't sound like he leaves Moscow."

"That she knows of." Guerrero sighed, slipping noiselessly off the couch and moving to dump the empty tupperware into the sink. "No, I think this is legit. I think the missing persons case is real, I just think that him sending her out here when she's probably one of the least suited for it is ..."

"Some kind of con."

"That he's probably running on her. Which isn't going to make our jobs any easier, but..."

"... at least we know."

"Exactly."

Another silence. Guerrero pulled his phone out and flipped it over in his hand a couple of times before finally dialing the number she'd given him. Chance threw him a look of inquiry, to which he shook his head. "Hey, dude, what's ..." His mouth twitched at whatever it was she said on the phone.

"She doesn't like you calling her dude, does she."

No, she didn't. She'd called him rude names in Russian under her breath when she thought he wasn't listening, or maybe she'd forgotten he understood. He found it funny. "You got all that on the computer?" Another pause. "Well, bring it on over, we'll go over it together. Yeah, bring your friend, too, if you want."

Chance's eyebrows rose even further. "Bring her friends?"

"Why not, dude?" Guerrero shrugged after he got off the phone. "The more minds we have on this, the better. And it's not like we're dealing with our usual kind of case, here, I don't think the old rules apply."

Then he ignored Chance's grumbling. Winston was the most paranoid among them as far as the building in the Tenderloin went, but that didn't mean Chance wanted strangers on his turf. Guerrero negotiated the terms of their arrival and then looked over at him. "What makes them any different than any other client, dude? They're coming over for an interview and a debriefing."

"Leave her briefs on," Chance advised. "The whole magic thing? The part where they're into all kinds of things we don't even begin to know how to understand?"

"Then we'd better get them over here to explain it to us in smaller, slower words so we'll understand?"



"No, I don't understand. Why are you doing this again?"

"Worked for your FBI girl, didn't it?" Guerrero shrugged. The white boards he'd snagged were at least big enough to get everything organized, with the map in between them. California on the big map, with a smaller map of the United States to one side. He'd started putting pins in the kidnapping sites, noting the clusters down and dodging the irritated complaints of the Watch-people, who'd gone through this already.

Tiger Cub remained silent, watching him. It seemed to be her usual approach in meetings; stay silent, take in information, come up with questions and conclusions when she had something more certain.

Not that that was familiar at all.

"We already went through this," Mick slapped his hand on the table, impatient. "We looked at the clusters, there is no central location in any way equidistant to..."

Guerrero rolled his eyes and ignored him. On the left hand white board he started writing down a list of the locations. "All right, what do we know about these places?"

"Common denominators," Chance added, as Mack fell silent again. "They don't all have to be close to one central location, just close enough to some place where these people feel safe."

"Places where children can be stored." Alive or dead, but Guerrero didn't add that last part. "They're taking these kids to somewhere where they feel safe, which is probably close to where they've been for years. Decades."

"Centuries," Alisa pointed out dryly. He had been trying not to think about that. "So what..."

He finished writing up his lists and went over to his bag, pulled out stack after stack of printouts and tossed them down on the table in front of everyone. "Factories, hotels, hostels, schools, empty buildings that have the facilities to house lots of people without drawing attention by large water bills, large electric draw. The San Francisco people can go over those to see if there's anything that stands out in their mind, or if any of those seem likelier than any others with your..." He wiggled his fingers. Voodoo powers, whatever it was they did.

Tiger Cub frowned, sat back and gave him a considering look. He ignored her. "Car rental places that have standing orders out for two or more vans. They don't want to risk drawing this kind of operation down onto any legitimate business."

"And with that said, that's a list," Chance nodded as Guerrero handed out the second packet of lists. "Of all the small businesses that are equidistant to three or more clusters of kidnappings that have vans, or have reasons to have vans. They need a way to keep and transport kids, especially in a hurry, especially kids they don't have time to build up a trust with."

"That also applies to fleets of SUVs, but vans are easier because they don't have windows you can see screaming kids wave out of."

Guerrero watched their eyes glaze and clear. They really weren't used to this kind of thing, he realized. "Kidnapping small children isn't like kidnapping an adult, especially not if you want them alive. You can't use drugs without running the risk that they're allergic, unless you have full access to their medical records..."

Chance snorted. "And if we knew they had that, we'd be looking at a lot narrower of a suspect pool."

"You want to investigate this like a kidnapping case, like the police." Alisa spoke up, possibly restating the obvious, but Guerrero ran with it as though she was giving him the opportunity to explain to everyone else. "You want..."

"You all have been taking your usual approaches and getting nowhere. And by the looks you're giving here, you've never tried this before. So, this is what we're going to try." No questions. No invitation to ask questions.

And none of them did. In fact, most of them turned to looking at the lists, which was somewhat of a relief to Guerrero. He'd forgotten what working with a bigger team was like. Tiger Cub came up behind and next to him while he was digging through his bag for the last data set. To his irritation, she didn't say anything for a while.

"What," he finally said, not turning around as he found the papers and flipped them onto the table.

She folded her arms over her chest and canted her head to one side. "This is more helpful than I thought you would be."

"It's not rocket science, dude. It's conducting an investigation. You guys don't have the experience we do because..." He left it there and just shrugged. Because they were used to doing things with magic, which the other side was now anticipating. Because, if she was right, they were born long before the age of modern investigative procedure. Any one of half a dozen reasons. Because they were all just kids, or at least she looked like one. Because half of them were from a different country and the ones who were here, none of them had any experience with this kind of thing.

"You think they're hiding from us with our methods, so we have to use other ones to find them."

Guerrero gave her a pointed look. "I think there are kids in trouble, and we better get to finding them."

To his surprise, she didn't challenge him, but turned back to the papers and started looking. He had the feeling it would be one of the few things he wouldn't get challenged on.