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It's the first op they've let Benji plan--he's done bits and pieces before, but never planned out an entire operation, start to finish--so none of the others are particularly surprised when, partway through, things start to get a little strange.
Their objective is an American, James Samuelson, head of Arminad Industries. They have IMF intel that Arminad has, among other slightly-less-than-legal dealings, been supplying weapons to various paramilitary groups across the Middle and Far East. There are no clear ties to Samuelson, though, and without that intel no arrests can be made. A quick look through even Arminad's official finances shows that the company is being held together basically by the sheer force of his will, so any hint that Samuelson has knowledge of the arms deals would be enough to arrest him and have the company fall to metaphorical pieces. That's why they're here: to get that information, either directly from Samuelson (which, granted, is unlikely, but stranger things have happened around Ethan Hunt), indirectly from Samuelson or someone around him, or from the highly-guarded Arminad servers. It's actually a far less dangerous mission than the last few the team had undertaken. Brandt and Jane had both sat back and sighed with something like relief when it had been explained at the team briefing. Brandt had even smiled. Ethan had sat there with that creepy intense look he got sometimes, thinking, and then he had finally announced: "I think Benji can handle running this one."
Brandt had stopped smiling. Jane had given Ethan an inscrutable look. Benji had laughed--"Ha, right, good one"--until it became clear that Ethan hadn't been joking. "What, you're serious? I actually get to plan an op?" Benji had been asking, semi-seriously, to run something for ages now, but it had always been more complicated than any of the others (or he himself, if he was to be completely honest) were comfortable with, given that he is the most junior field agent on the team. But this time it's simple, several fairly foolproof angles of attack. Even with how secretive Samuelson is, this mission is way less impossible than their usual impossible missions.
So Benji draws up plans and backup plans and backups to the backup plans. He covers all their entrances and exits. He picks code-names. He nervously lets Ethan double-check his setups. They know all the players and everything is choreographed. Samuelson is holding a charity auction in a suburb of Boston, attempting to clean up Arminad's name a little, and there may or may not be a deal going down during the proceedings. Brandt and Jane will dress up and tail Samuelson, attempting to identify any potential buyers there using the IMF's fancy contact lenses. Meanwhile, Ethan will be next door, rappelling from the roof into the server room at Arminad's local headquarters via a series of air ducts and placing several bugs on the Arminad servers that will allow them to check existing transactions and monitor any further ones. (The stairs would work just as well for Ethan's point of entry, but there would be an extra layer of security on the server room when entering from the outside, and Benji knows how much Ethan likes rappelling into things and air ducts.) And Benji will, of course, coordinate things via comms from the van.
He's actually pretty proud of the code names this time. He's gone with Roman gods: Ethan is Jupiter, Jane is Juno, Brandt is Mercury, and he is Apollo (which ties in nicely with the rewatch of BSG he's just finished, although he doesn't expect anyone else to get the reference).
So they've got their bases covered several different ways, and everything is going great until Samuelson actually enters the room at the auction. There's a pretty, dark-haired woman on his arm that none of them recognize. She wasn't in any of the briefing material and she's standing too close to him for her to be a stranger, and the team's comm's crackle as she draws closer.
Brandt scowls as he says, his voice low, "Who is she and why can I hear every word she's saying in my earpiece from across the room, Apollo?"
The woman looks up at Brandt's voice, her eyes scanning the crowd, and he ducks for cover behind one of the evening's items up for auction, a medium-sized vase being displayed on a fancy pedestal.
In the van, Benji is blinking in surprise and tapping frantically at his keyboard. "Scrambling comm frequencies," he says, and the others brace for the screech of static they know is coming. None of them like these new comms, but only Benji is allowed to be picky about the equipment the IMF issue them. At least they have warning this time, unlike that time in Peru. After a moment and one long, unpleasant noise, Benji announces, "Okay, whatever just happened, it shouldn't happen again. Can one of you get close enough to ID this mysterious woman?" One of them makes a small affirmative noise, and about thirty seconds later, Benji's laptop has data from Jane's eyeballs. "Running her through our database now..." He can hear the others waiting impatiently as the woman is matched against IMF files on various facial data points; none of the others like the low whistle of astonishment Benji lets out as the computer pops up a multitude of matches. "Either she's part of a set of criminal octuplets or she's wanted as a lot of different people." He reads off the name of the most recently-active match: "Sophie Devereaux."
"Who is she?" Ethan asks. His voice strains a little as he continues through the ducts, the tone that the rest of the team knows means he's currently upside-down.
Benji scrolls through the profile. "Scammer, grifter, con-artist. Looks like she's taken a lot of money from a lot of powerful people."
"So what do we do?" Jane asks. Benji waits for Ethan to answer, until he realizes that he's the one in charge of the op so he's the one who has to decide.
"She's not the objective," he says after taking in and letting out a deep breath. "Don't get in her way, but don't get taken in either. I'm going to see if I can figure out what she needs the comms for. You guys go on ahead. Keep on blinking at all those folks with too much money." Brandt snorts, but nobody argues. He turns down his team's comms in his right ear, low enough to still be audible not overwhelming, and pulls a spare earpiece out of his big briefcase of supplies. He sets the input to mute on this one, sets the output to their original frequency, and begins to listen in.
"--swear I heard something," the original voice, Sophie Devereaux, is saying. "There's someone else here with earpieces."
"She's right, Nate, I heard him too," another voice chimes in, this one low and growling, like the sort of guy who'd give Ethan a run for his money in a dark alley.
"I heard two of them!" a third voice adds, this one a woman, obviously not the Nate referred to earlier.
"Hardison," a fourth voice says, "Can you figure anything out? Trace their comms?" This voice is male, both authoritative and a little sheepish at once.
A fifth voice responds. "I'm working on it, Nate, but all I'm getting is static. If there's someone here with comms, he's using way better tech than we've got. I'll need some time."
The fourth voice--Nate--sighs. "Alright, well, keep your eyes open for anyone muttering under their breath. Parker, how's it going next door?"
The woman who is not Sophie Devereaux grunts once--oh god, just like Ethan's upside-down voice--and responds, "I'm getting there, but these air vents suck. So dirty! And I think they have raccoons."
There is a silence as everyone processes this statement. On his IMF comms, he can hear Ethan edging closer to the server room and the others continuing to edge closer to the crowd surrounding Samuelson. Parker's voice clarifies: "There's all kinds of weird thumps and scratching noises in these vents."
Benji swears to himself and keys the volume back up on his IMF comm. "Jupiter, be careful, there's someone else in the ducts."
"What?!" Ethan hisses, but Benji has already moved on. That problem is so thirty seconds ago.
Instead, he is cross-referencing lists of Sophie Devereaux's known associates with the names he heard the group using. Interestingly, this pulls up a string of inactive INTERPOL warrants that may actually match the group he'd been hearing exactly: Nathan Ford, a former insurance investigator turned basically thief; Alec Hardison, a computer hacker who wouldn't really be out of place in IMF's technician pool by the look of it; Parker--just Parker--a thief whose warrant supplies her with an almost impossible amount of skill; and Eliot Spencer, a man whose career description appears to just be "violence." He forwards the pictures from the warrants to the teams' phones, saying "These should be the people we're looking for. Let me know if you get any matches. I'll see if I can triangulate their positions based on their comm signals." He taps at his keyboard, pulling up a three-dimensional map of the two buildings they've got agents in and running the available comm data through one of his special algorithms. He plots where Jane, Brandt, and Ethan are and waits a few seconds until five more points appear. "Okay, Jupiter, there is a woman in the ducts, but it looks like she's a few levels above you. Proceed carefully." Ethan murmurs acknowledgement, and if Benji wasn't so busy he'd bask in that trusting noise for a moment. As it is, he tries to pin down the others. "Alright, two of them are on the auction floor, presumably one of whom is Devereaux. Not sure which one the other is. Mercury, there's another one near you in what looks like the staging room, where they're keeping the lots for the auction, if you're in a position to go check that out. And the fifth--" He trails off as he hears pounding on the van's back door.
"Chaos," a voice says through the door, "If that is you in there, I am gonna have Eliot tear your arms off Chewbacca-style."
Benji carefully removes his gun from its holster and opens the door. The man outside--Alec Hardison, if the warrants are to be believed--shuts up quickly when he sees the IMF-issued handgun pointed at his chest. "Shit, Nate, we have a problem."
In Benji's ear, Nathan Ford replies, "What is it, Hardison? What's going on?"
Hardison doesn't respond, just looks at the gun and the stare Benji's giving him.
"Can someone please tell me what's going on?" Jane's voice is low and worried, though she tries to keep the concern off her face. "Devereaux looks really spooked."
As Benji opens his mouth to respond, Brandt cuts in. "I've found him. Spencer's in here; must be Ford on the auction floor."
In Benji's other ear, he hears the voice he hadn't IDed (presumably Eliot Spencer) say, "A guy just wandered in here muttering to himself. Pretty sure he's got an earpiece."
"Hardison, what is going on?" Ford's voice asks again. Jane spots him on the auction room floor when Devereaux excuses herself from Samuelson's company and goes to stand with him instead. Both of them look very nervous.
"Looks like he's got a gun," Spencer continues, and in Benji's other ear he hears Brandt say, "Looks like he wants to fight." Benji can almost see the little frown on Brandt's face. His mind wanders for just a second as he pictures the fight (god he has to stop doing that) and then he barks into his comm, "Do not engage. I repeat: do not engage."
"What?" Brandt is a little breathless, his fist fight voice. He's kept his gun holstered, but he and Spencer have started seriously trading punches. "I can't really--"
"Call off your man," Benji says to Hardison, gesturing with the gun he still has aimed. Hardison cocks an eyebrow, and Benji explains, "At least until we figure out what the hell is happening here." Into his comm, he says, "Holding pattern, guys. Just trust me here."
"Eliot," Hardison says carefully, echoing Benji, "Back off. Holding pattern while I figure out who this guy is who's pointing a gun at me."
The outcry from the other team's comms is immediate and immense, and Benji would swear he hears one last thump from Brandt's comm before Spencer says, "Okay. I backed off. This guy is IMF-trained, Hardison. We are in the middle of something way bigger than we thought."
"What?" Brandt says, trying to hide his surprise.
"What, it's a very distinctive fighting style!" Spencer says, and that's the last thing Benji hears before he removes his and Hardison's unscrambled earpieces.
"Who are you people?" Hardison asks, staring hard at Benji.
"Come on," Benji snaps back, "I think the man with the gun gets to ask the questions." He pats down Hardison to make sure the other man doesn't have a weapon and returns his own to its holster, apologizing slightly as he does so. "...that sounded a lot less like something a Bond villain would say in my head than it did out loud. But, yes. Answer the question. What are you and your team doing here?"
So Hardison sighs and explains: their team, Nathan Ford's team, helps people the law forgets. They'd been approached by a woman who'd had an important scientific discovery stolen from her by Arminad and Samuelson. She wanted her blueprints back, that was all, to help people, and if Samuelson looked bad in the process, well, that was just a bonus. "So he's auctioning off a fake antique, 'authenticated' by our people, while Parker's getting into the servers to steal back the blueprints and wipe the rest of his files," Hardison finishes.
"Okay, no, none of that is going to work at all." Benji frowns. He explains to Hardison, in as little detail as possible, about the arms deal and the info that they need; even while Hardison had been talking, Jane had IDed two more of the contacts they're hoping Samuelson makes this evening. "You can't destroy his credibility now, and you certainly can't destroy his servers behind you. If he gets arrested now, Arminad goes down, we lose our leads, and the weapons will vanish--not literally, of course, but get absorbed into the black market to end up god-knows-where."
"Yeah, man, that sounds like the opposite of good. What can we do to help?"
"Look, really, I understand that your client's important, but--what?" Benji has already launched into his speech when his mouth catches up with his ears. "You want to help?"
"We're not the bad guys. We want Samuelson to come down, however that happens. If you give me my earpiece back, I'll let my team know we're changing plans."
So Hardison takes his comms back and explains the situation to his team of con-men. Benji turns to the wall and speaks quietly into his own earpiece. "How much of that did you guys hear?"
"Enough of it," Jane responds. "We have to fix this auction, and fast. Like you said, we can't have Samuelson losing credibility now."
There's a pause, where Benji realizes they're waiting for him again. His brain works for a moment, until finally he sighs and says to Ethan, "Jupiter, any ideas?"
Everyone starts talking at once; Benji only manages to get a word in edgewise to let them know he's switching them back to their original comm frequency for better collaboration.
They all get the screeching noise this time. Brandt bites back a smile at the way Spencer flinches and hisses "Damn it, Hardison!" into his earpiece
"C'mon, man, that wasn't me!" Hardison complains.
"Okay," Ethan says in his take-charge voice, addressing both teams at once, "What needs to be done to fix this auction?"
"We have one fake piece, just one--" Ford says, sounding for some reason apologetic, "But it's a doozy."
Jane scans the objects on display in the main room, and Brandt turns around, looking at the items lined up in the staging room. Simultaneously, they realize: "The painting." The painting is the centerpiece of the auction, a newly-discovered treasure from one of the Dutch Masters. Losing it from the auction won't completely kill the evening, but it will be a disappointment for many of the buyers.
"We have to get the painting out of here," Devereaux confirms. Jane stares at it, not liking the idea.
"And if we expose it as fake, we have to make it look like its being false isn't his fault," Ford agrees. There's a pause, then he offers, "What if we stole it? If this guy's going down for something bigger soon, what will it matter?"
"That...isn't really how the law works," Benji responds, but Ethan cuts him off, saying that they don't have a lot of choices. "Okay, we'll figure out how to steal a painting from the middle of an auction where it's being sold with no one noticing. Simple enough. Jupiter, how's it going on your end?"
"I'm almost to the server room. I thought you said there was someone else in the--oof."
"Hello!" says a cheerful voice on everyone else's comms. Only Ethan can see the blonde who's just dropped on top of him. "You must be Jupiter. I'm Parker. That's not a code name." This last is whispered conspiratorially.
"Nice to meet you," Ethan replies, sounding slightly squished.
"How much time do you think you need in the server room? We want you guys to be done there before we make any moves here," Ford says. He is trying not to obviously pace on the auction floor, standing close to Devereaux and Jane.
"I'm--we're close. Five, ten minutes tops. Maybe a little bit longer if there's something you need off the computers while I'm in there."
Hardison swears. "Right, I need to modify the code on Parker's phone." He looks at Benji. "You gonna shoot me if I try to leave?"
Benji makes a disbelieving face and shoos the other man out of the van. "So, how do you propose we steal this painting?"
"We could probably cut it out of the frame, if no one was watching," Jane begins, looking at the painting from across the room. It's big and won't be easy to transport. It also won't be easy to get close to it without anyone noticing.
Next to her, Ford lights up. "Nope. We just walk out with it."
"Right, because that's likely to work," Brandt says.
Ford shrugs. "With enough people of the right sort of build, we could walk out of here with anything we wanted."
Jane can see the realization dawning on Devereaux's face. "The fire alarm."
Ford is wearing a self-satisfied grin, and Jane wonders how these people work with this man and don't want to punch him all the time. "Yes, the fire alarm." He explains: the auction is being held in a very old community building, and because of its historic nature, it is lacking in the sort of safety systems that would be necessary to sufficiently protect the pieces Samuelson has up for auction in case of fire. Samuelson's brilliant idea--maybe influenced a little by Sophie, Ford admits--was to hire some of the suburb's volunteer firemen and train them in valuable item transport and removal. The firemen had all been vetted by Arminad's in-house security firm (except Spencer, who had a fireman's ID badge as part of their original plan) and were well-trained in the procedure of what to do in case of a fire here. Each item had a fireproof storage container being kept nearby. If the alarms went off, each item was to be placed into its container and safely transported to an armored truck that Samuelson has waiting outside. "So we trigger the fire alarm, grab the painting, and just leave with it. There are probably four boxes in here about that size, so nobody will know what exactly we're walking out with, and given the amount of stuff, we'll probably have five minutes to be gone with it before they're able to take full inventory."
"Who's 'we'?" Brandt asks, although he's afraid he already knows the answer. He'd seen that painting when they walked in, had admired its ornate and heavy-looking frame.
"You managed to land some blows on Eliot Spencer; surely you can hold your own against a painting," Devereaux says. Brandt doesn't like her cheerful tone of voice.
"I'm not a vetted volunteer fireman," Brandt protests, but Spencer, still standing next to him in the staging room, waves his protests away.
"All you need's a badge and a purposeful walk," he says. "And I just got you a badge."
"That's not--" Brandt says, but Spencer has already clipped the badge onto his coat. Brandt's still staring after the fireman whose badge Spencer had so easily lifted. "I'm a little overdressed, I think."
"Okay, Parker, I have the code updated. I'm pushing it to your phone now." Hardison's voice cuts across everything else. "You don't need to change anything, just connect it to the computer like I showed you before."
Parker confirms and confidently shoves her phone at Ethan. They are poised above the air vent that opens down into the server room. Ethan isn't sure what to make of this gesture. "We don't both have to go down there, and I have no idea how to do whatever it is you're doing." She makes a quirky of course sort of face. "Mine's just plug and play."
Ethan sighs and takes her phone. "Just--?"
"Plug and play," she repeats.
"Guys, it looks like the auction is starting," Spencer says under his breath, watching the security guards who have started moving items out of the staging room.
"We still have some time. They'll save the painting for last," Ford says, but he doesn't sound too confident. So they wait while Ethan lowers himself into the server room, uses Parker's phone, and plants Benji's digital bugs. Jane and Brandt make the most of their time, continuing to send IDs of the people in the auction room to Benji's laptop. The original plan had been for Ethan to exit the server room on foot (the door is much easier to open from the inside) and leave the building through the front door, but he and Parker had decided there would be much less chance of them both getting caught if they exited the way they came in. He tugs on the cord suspending him from the ceiling and is reeled back up into the ducts. "Okay, I'm out. We should be able to get down in whatever confusion you guys are causing down there."
Benji is sitting in the van with his finger over the "trigger the fire alarm" button (which isn't really a button so much as a series of hacks he'd put together while he was waiting for Ethan to finish) and he double-checks that everyone is ready before he pushes it.
"Wait," comes Hardison's voice, presumably from his own similar setup, "You got this?"
Benji sighs. "Yes, I 'got this'." The words sound a little ridiculous coming out of his mouth. "Mercury? Juno? You guys set?"
Brandt and Spencer are standing nonchalantly near the painting. Spencer already looks the part, handy in jeans and a plaid shirt. Brandt has stowed his gun with Jane and his suit jacket somewhere, tucked his tie into his pocket, and rolled up his long sleeves in an attempt to do the same. "Nobody's going to get to that painting before us, Apollo," Brandt says through a clenched-teeth smile.
"Okay then!" Benji puts his finger down on the enter key, perhaps a little too gleefully.
Inside, panic erupts. Brandt and Spencer look around like they're surprised by the alarm, pretend to notice the painting, and ease it off its display stand into the waiting fireproof case. Around them, auction-goers are scattering. Samuelson spots them and actually speaks to them, saying "Yes! Go! Get everything outside!" before attending to the rest of the collection in the staging room. Brandt ducks behind the case he's holding so Samuelson doesn't see his face, while Spencer tries not to grin too much.
As they exit the building with the painting, Brandt grunts, "Where are you guys parked? This thing is stupid heavy." On cue, Hardison pulls up with his van.
In the parking lot, Ford turns to Jane, an apologetic expression on his face. "Look, we're going to meet up at a little bar in Boston called McRory's after this. Once you're debriefed, or whatever it is you have to do, you should come join us. Let us give you what information we have. We want this son of a bitch to get arrested almost as much as you do."
"That...couldn't hurt," Benji says, answering for everyone else. It is his op, after all.
So once they've looked over the data Jane and Brandt collected on the people from the auction--four positives on buyers, all of them promising--and verified that the bugs Ethan planted are hard at work scanning Arminad's financials, the team heads to McRory's. "At the very least, I have to give Parker her phone back," Ethan says, turning the smartphone over a few times in his hands. In the excitement of the escape, he'd forgotten to hand it back. Benji starts to say that they could probably learn a lot from the phone if Ethan would just let him--but these people, thieves though they are, did help them.
The bar says it's closed when they arrive. Jane stands, annoyed, on the small patch of sidewalk in front of the door while Benji tries the handle and peers inside. "Locked," he says, but he steps away quickly when Ford comes to open it.
"Come in!" he says, ushering them inside. He offers official introductions for his team, pointing to each of them in turn. Sophie is seated at the bar by a nearly-empty glass where he had obviously just been sitting. Hardison is shouldered up against the wall in a too-big booth. Eliot is at the bar getting beers, but he slides into the booth across from Hardison. Parker is exiting the bar's back room, toweling off her face and hair. Ethan had done the same earlier, during their debriefing, attempting to remove the surprising amount of dust he'd accrued in the ducts. And Nate closes the door behind them and settles back into his seat at the bar. "Sit down! Have a drink! What can we get you?"
"Beers all around, I think," Ethan says, and no one disagrees.
Jane takes a seat next to Sophie at the bar. Ethan sits carefully next to them both. Benji flops down next to Eliot, probably a little too casually, and Brandt sits opposite him. Parker drops the towel on a nearby table, making a small pouting noise and sliding into the booth behind Hardison. She sits on her knees facing Hardison's booth, leaning over the back and putting her chin on his shoulder.
"So," Parker says, "Do you guys have names? Do you know each other's names?! Or is it always code names? Because that'd actually be kind of cool."
Benji glances at Ethan, who sees it and nods slightly. "I'm Benji," he says, extending an awkward hand for an awkward handshake.
"Aww, like the dog from all those movies?" Parker says, leaning forward even farther to reach Benji's hand.
"Uh, sure?" Benji responds. He's not entirely sure what's happening.
"Just go with it," Eliot says to him quietly. Then, more loudly, he says to Brandt, "What about you? You got a name?"
"Yeah," Brandt says, taking a sip of the beer Nate has put down on the table for him. "It's Will."
From the look of it, Benji nearly chokes on his beer. "'Will'?"
Brandt shoots him a look. "Yes, Benji, I have a first name. You can even use it occasionally, if you'd like."
Benji just stares at him. Neither one notices the smiles the other three are exchanging.
At the bar, Nate is asking Ethan and Jane some questions. "So, who are you people, exactly? What is it that you do?"
Ethan says nothing, just raises his chin a little bit--a small, defiant gesture. "I could be asking you the same thing, Mr. Ford."
"That you could," Nate says, laughing to himself, "That you could."
"I still don't understand how this all worked out," Brandt is saying to Eliot. "So many things there didn't make sense."
Eliot shrugs. "You work with Nate Ford for this long, you get used to having about fifteen different exit strategies." On a TV above the bar, the local news is showing footage of a woman who may be Sophie being led away by the cops, arrested for art forgery. This image is followed by a short interview with Samuelson himself. He is making it very clear that he is the victim here, that he and Arminad had no idea they were being fooled. Brandt stares hard at the TV and then back to Sophie, who is sitting at the bar and laughing. "We had the arrest footage done up ahead of time. We know some people in the Boston PD," Eliot explains. "Originally, that arrest footage should have been followed up by Samuelson's, but there was a change of plans."
Meanwhile, Benji is having a separate conversation with Hardison and Parker. "So we'd tracked these drug cartel bigwigs to a little town in Peru, right? There's a wedding they're all attending. So I'm in the Peruvian equivalent of the surveillance van, and the rest of the team slips into the chapel. But as soon as they get in there, I start intermittently picking up the church service on our comms. Turns out the drug-smugglers had helped install the sound system in the church and used some high-quality parts."
Hardison lets out a low whistle. Parker asks, "So what did you do?"
"What could I do?" Benji responds. "I had to switch the frequency before anybody accidentally spoke up. Unfortunately, this meant that they got that static thing with no warning, and--"
"This isn't a funny story, Benji," Brandt cuts in, scowling in a mostly-serious way.
"It wouldn't be funny if any of you had been hurt, Will," Benji shoots back, "But you're all fine and the mission completed successfully, so the story of how the noise on your comms made you shout out right as the minister said, 'Speak now or forever hold your peace' and then you had to try to explain yourself in semi-broken Spanish is actually objectively funny."
Brandt mutters to himself as everyone else at the table starts to laugh--but Benji's right, it is a good story, and he can't resist chiming in with some details of his own.