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Neal was on a flight to London that night.
He hadn't seen Mozzie in person, just spoke to him briefly on the burn phone that he found at their drop site. It would have seemed a casual conversation about wine to any outside observer, but the code words were there, the ones that said there's danger and I'm going away and I'll get in touch when I land somewhere and Take care of yourself. Mozzie would go underground. They'd check their drops. They'd get back in touch.
He never said Peter's dead. They didn't have a code for that. Some contingencies they'd never thought to cover.
***
He walked through airport security carrying a briefcase with the contents of Ellen's box inside.
As far as Neal was concerned, the papers could burn. Ellen had died ... Peter had died ... for wood pulp and ink, the faded traces of crimes committed thirty years ago. He didn't give a damn about the proper chain of evidence, about paper trails and due process. He and Mozzie had their own ways of making those responsible pay for what they'd done.
But Ellen and Peter would both have wanted it all done according to procedure. They wouldn't have wanted revenge. They'd have wanted justice.
He knew that and because of that, he was prepared to guard this briefcase with his life.
On top of the real papers, there were a handful of papers June had supplied from her home office, enough to satisfy anyone who merely glanced inside. Of course, if the TSA decided to go through the briefcase, they'd find some very strange, suspicious documents, enough to warrant detaining him at the very least unless he could concoct a good cover story.
But he was a young, handsome, clean-cut white American in a suit, who smiled in all the right places and said all the right things. They ran his suitcase briskly through the metal detector and didn't even ask him to open it.
Thank God for profiling, he thought bitterly as he walked to his gate.
***
The flight from New York to Heathrow Airport was seven hours. It was only after Neal settled into his seat, as the passengers around him rolled down their windowshades and prepared to sleep, that he realized he'd brought nothing at all to entertain himself. He hadn't even thought of it. He knew he probably ought to sleep. He'd left New York at nine p.m. and he'd be getting into London at nine a.m., with a five-hour time difference and a whole day ahead of him -- a day in which he'd better be alert and able to think on his feet. But he was wound up like a Swiss watchspring.
He checked the movie listings, found them impossibly banal, and tried reading the in-flight magazine. He was in first class, and the flight attendant discretely brought him the glass of red wine he requested. The passenger beside him, an elderly lady with a Parisian French accent, turned off her reading light and pulled a blanket over her.
Neal read a page of restaurant reviews four times before finally conceding that he couldn't retain any of it. He put the magazine back and crooked a finger at the flight attendant for another glass of wine.
Great, he was going to get into Heathrow drunk and depressed. That was a wonderful condition in which to call Sara and inform her that he'd need a place to hide out for a while because all the law enforcement agencies in the U.S. were hunting him.
He was going to have to tell her Peter was dead.
He hadn't called Elizabeth before he'd left. This was one of the many thoughts chasing itself around and around in his head, like a lab full of rats whose maze walls had been lifted so that they could do nothing but scurry, scurry, scurry forever.
What did a person say in that situation, though. They didn't make condolence cards for this. I'm sorry your husband is dead because of me.
He'd floated through the last few hours. His emotions were somewhere far away, locked down as tight as he could make them. Now there was nothing to do until he landed, nothing to keep him distracted but thinking and planning -- and thinking was the one luxury he dared not allow himself right now.
Because thinking always, inevitably, led back to Peter.
He tried to sleep and when he closed his eyes, he thought of meeting Peter in prison, all those months ago.
Did you get the birthday cards?
He thought of the quirk of Peter's smile, that little half-exasperated, half-amused expression that seemed to be reserved only for Neal.
His throat tightened as if someone had wrapped a steel band around it. No more of that, he told himself, but now he couldn't help wondering what Peter's last few minutes had been like. Had Peter blamed him?
He'd never had a chance to say he was sorry.
Maybe Peter wasn't dead. Maybe it was all a government conspiracy. Mozzie would say so. Neal had never seen a body. The government's reach was great -- they had fingers everywhere, and Peter had friends in high places. Peter and Hughes could have cooked something up together. And Elizabeth, Elizabeth would have to be involved, because thinking of Elizabeth believing Peter dead when it wasn't true was too sad.
Thinking of Elizabeth at all was too sad.
You're in my house, on my couch, with my wife. ... And now you're petting my dog.
It had been so easy back then. Complicated, yes -- but also easy, because there was nothing to lose. He'd played the gamble and if it paid off, well, he'd won. If he lost, then he hadn't lost anything important. There were other angles to try.
And slowly, over the years, there came to be so much to lose.
So much to lose.
Peter's bad jokes and tasteless ties and terrible sandwiches.
Peter's quick mind and clever insights and big heart and that uncanny ability he had to always, always see beyond Neal's obfuscations to the truth under them, past the brilliant cons and the slippery lies to the all things Neal meant to say, all that he would have said and all he would have done if he wasn't fucked in the head and his father's son and a felon who disappointed every person who was ever stupid enough to rely on him.
Because that was the thing about Peter, that he saw who Neal would have been if not for all of that, and even though Peter fucked up sometimes too and let Neal down, on the whole he'd treated Neal like that other person, the person Peter sometimes seemed to think he was, the person he might have been in that alternate reality where he wasn't ... him.
And then he'd made a mistake and he'd lost all of that and he didn't know what he could do, what he could ever do to make it up, to get it back.
Because there was no more ... no more of any of those things. No more of Peter's forgiveness, over and over, even when he didn't deserve it.
No more Peter. Ever again.
He turned his face to the window and fought as hard as he could to cry silently, swallowing the hot salt taste of his tears. He gave himself that: a few minutes of silent grief, searing his throat and his eyes, burning all the way down to his soul. Quietly, so quietly, so that no one in the first-class cabin noticed, no one who might later say to a police officer Yes, that man was crying on the flight to London, isn't it strange?
Then he began to lock it down. He started with the meditation breathing exercises that Mozzie had taught him long ago -- he'd never been terribly good at it (and neither, to be honest, was Mozzie) but he did the breathing and then he began one of the mental games that he sometimes played with himself. When he landed in London, he wasn't going to be Neal Caffrey anymore. He was going to be someone different. His passport said Nigel Blaine -- he wasn't a Nigel, really wasn't a Nigel, but that was kind of the point -- and he began to carefully build up Nigel's history and personality.
Nigel Blaine wasn't grieving. Nigel was actually going to London to conduct business. Nigel had been engaged, quite briefly, to a young woman who worked as a stunt double for an actress on a dramatic series which was filmed in New York and had been recently cancelled after a brief run on NBC. No, he wasn't going to mention the series, because even though things had ended between them, he was still on good terms with the young lady and Nigel Blaine was no name-dropper.
Nigel was something of a playboy, really. Nigel didn't get attached. Nigel's parents were both still alive, and he was on quite good terms with them, thank you. He called home perhaps once a month or so, had a brief conversation. He had friends, certainly, the sort of friends that he went out for drinks with, and didn't miss terribly when they weren't around.
Nigel Blaine was probably kind of a sociopath, but he was a cheerful one.
Neal could feel his body shifting -- if he were standing, it would be more apparent -- because Nigel didn't stand like Neal and his body was slowly rearranging itself for Nigel's body language, which he was figuring out in a process that was partly conscious and partly automatic. Nigel had a confident tilt of the head. Nigel wasn't clutching the armrest in a death grip like a drowning man. Nigel was vaguely annoyed with himself for not purchasing a paperback in the airport gift shop (Nigel was fond of thrillers, and he'd been looking forward to the latest James Patterson) but ah well, he'd get some rest instead.
It's like you're an alias savant, Peter had said -- someone had said about him once, and it was probably true, he thought. He was good at it. He always had been.
It might be all he had, but he was god damn good at it.
***
When he arrived in Heathrow he found a text message from Sara waiting for him: Meet me at bag claim.
He saw her through the crowd, waving to him. She wore a striking green dress that set off the fire in her hair. It was hard to believe he'd only seen her two days ago; it seemed as if a lifetime had passed. Neal hugged her, and he didn't mean to lean into her, but somehow she ended up propping him up for a moment.
"Neal," she whispered into his hair, "I'm so sorry."
He couldn't face sympathy now, especially not when he was wearing Nigel's face and Nigel's unshakeable optimism. "Not your fault."
She started to say something, then backed down. "Baggage?" she asked, her eyes searching his face.
"What I have with me." He hefted the briefcase.
She had a car already, a tiny zippy thing. Neal tried not to notice when she nearly veered to the wrong side of the road.
"How much do you know?" he asked her.
"I got a text message last night from a blocked number letting me know I needed to pick up 'Nigel Blaine' from the airport."
Well, so much for not getting Mozzie involved.
Sara glanced at him. "It wasn't hard to figure out who that was," she added, "especially after seeing the news."
Some of the air went out of his lungs. He couldn't tell if it was relief or something else. At least he didn't have to tell her. "So you've seen the news."
"Neal, it's all over the news -- well, not the local news, but I do read CNN's website. A senator is murdered, and his accused killer dies a day later --" She sucked in her breath and took a hand off the steering wheel to press it to her lips. "Neal, I am sorry. So, so sorry. I don't know what to say."
"Just drive," he said tightly, because they were wandering across the center of the road again.
"I don't understand why you're here, though. Why did you have to leave New York?" She gave him another quick glance. "If you were running, I wouldn't expect you'd come here."
He tried not to let it sting. "I'm not running. Well, not really. It's this." He hefted the briefcase. "We had to get it away from the FBI's reach. If it didn't stop with Pratt's death, then it goes higher than we'd ever guessed."
"So you can't enter the papers officially into evidence or they might go missing." Sara didn't miss a trick.
"Yeah. I'm going to make copies and send them back, but we had to get the originals out of the U.S."
"You can work at my place," Sara said. "I don't have an apartment yet -- well, a flat, I should say -- but the company is putting me up at a very nice hotel. I have a full office setup in my suite."
She couldn't stay -- she had to go in to work -- but she dropped him off with a quick kiss on the lips and told him to charge anything he wanted to her room.
The solitude was more pleasant than company would have been. He thought about taking a nap, but was still wired on an unpleasant jangle of nerves, like the letdown from a con gone very bad. He poured himself a glass of wine -- it might be morning in London, but it was still night as far as his body was telling him, and he hadn't managed to sleep on the plane. Then he spread out the papers from Ellen's box and began the slow, painstaking work of organizing them. Sara had a scanner/copier in her home office, and Neal soon had papers spread around the floor of both the office and the bedroom, dozens of neat piles annotated with post-it notes.
He hadn't really gone through the papers the first time, just skimmed for the name he really wanted to see: James Bennett. This time, he wasn't looking for anything specific, just seeing what was there.
And there was a lot. Evidence against Pratt ... James ... and a number of other names, mostly unfamiliar to Neal. But he'd be willing to lay odds that at least some of them had gone from the police department to positions of responsibility and authority elsewhere, as Pratt had done.
Ellen was right: it wasn't just one or two dirty cops, but a whole network of bribes and corruption, a filthy system where cops who stayed clean were shut out of the chain of promotion, and those who were willing to play the game were rewarded with money and power. From Neal's perspective, the actual amounts of money being tossed around (even allowing for inflation) were pathetically small, impossible small. These were people selling their souls for a few hundred dollars here and there. But these weren't people used to thousand-dollar hamburgers and penthouse hotel rooms with a beautiful city view. These were people who'd grown up in working-class neighborhoods, who struggled to pay their rent and worried about being able to send their kids to college. And so they took the first steps on a dirty downward road that would end, thirty years later, in the system that had left Pratt and Peter dead within two days of each other.
***
By the time Sara came home that evening, Neal was half-drunk and couldn't remember the last time he'd slept or eaten. Sara took one look at him and dragged him out to dinner at a nice Indian restaurant tucked into a side street a few blocks from the hotel.
Neal picked at a very nice lamb korma and drank most of another bottle of wine. He ended up bursting into tears in the middle of a story Sara was telling about her new secretary's wife -- to Sara's horror, but no less his own; he realized later that Sara's anecdote reminded him of Elizabeth, but at the time he had no idea what was happening. He was too drunk, exhausted, jet-lagged and miserable to even explain it to himself, let alone to her. He went to the bathroom to get himself together, the room started spinning and he ended up throwing up what little he'd managed to eat. Sara marched into the men's room without embarrassment, dragged Neal out firmly but gently, and took him home.
No, not home; home was across an ocean. But somewhere.
She stroked his hair while he cried, and left him alone in the bathroom when he was sick again, and then she made him drink some water and eat some toast, and put him to bed.
He woke up hung over and humiliated and wishing he didn't remember as much of last night as he did, but also oddly clear-headed. He was still grieving and lonely and desperately, impossibly homesick, but he could think again. He could put it all away in the same place where he put Kate's death and Ellen's death and all the other things in his past that he didn't want to examine.
Sara was already at work, but she'd left a note on the couch that said "For God's sake EAT BREAKFAST". The last was underlined three times. Her company credit card was on top of the note.
Neal, to his own surprise, even managed to smile a little, and he went out to find a restaurant that was serving breakfast.
***
After buying some clothes to replace the suit he'd been wearing for two days -- Nigel Blaine's clothes, which mean cheaper and tackier suits than he'd normally opt for -- Neal spent that day getting the rest of the papers copied and organized and packaged up nicely into a box for shipping.
"I'm trying to think where I should have this shipped from," he said to Sara over dinner. "Wales?"
"Are you seriously going to Wales?"
"I've never seen Cardiff," Neal said.
In the morning he took a pleasant two-hour train ride to Cardiff, had the box shipped to Diana -- well, technically to one of Mozzie's mail drops, with instructions to pass it to Diana -- and spent the afternoon wandering around like a tourist.
It should have been fun. He liked traveling, liked seeing new places. There was no anklet. He could do anything he wanted without answering to anyone.
But it wasn't any damn fun doing it by himself. He wished Sara had been able to come. He wished his brain would stop inserting Mozzie or Peter's comments on the scenery. When he realized that he was subconsciously waiting for Peter to call and tell him to get back in his damn radius already, he gave up and went back to London.
He took the train back in stages, just in case the British authorities had been alerted to his "escape". Not that he was trying terribly hard to hide; shacking up with a known former girlfriend was hardly subtle. All his instincts kept telling him he was doing escape wrong. He firmly squashed them. He wouldn't stay with Sara very long; he was putting her in danger of being arrested as an accessory (not that she seemed to mind). Just a few days. Just long enough to get back on his feet and make a plan. Even though he should probably be gone tonight, if he were truly altruistic ...
I destroy everything I touch, he thought bitterly. Walking disaster Neal Caffrey, that's me.
But Sara waved off all his guilty attempts to talk her into letting him move out, and took him out to dinner instead. Over veal milanese, she said, "I got an interesting message today. From Mozzie, I think, although it's always hard to be sure. Possibly it's some sort of virus."
She showed him the message, a seemingly random assortment of numbers. Despite himself, Neal grinned. It was always fun to have a challenge. And right now, he could use the distraction.
After dinner he and Sara pored over it until they finally managed to crack it. The message was a book code, using page/line/word from A.B. Tattersall's Scorpion's Cry, which Sara had just purchased at Waterstone's two days before.
"I probably don't want to know how he knows I have this, do I?"
"No, you probably don't."
The message read: Meet tomorrow 2 p.m. and there was the address of a coffee shop in Covent Garden.
Sara and Neal exchanged a look.
"I'm sure that Mozzie's presence will improve this situation immeasurably," Sara said. Then she kissed the tip of Neal's nose. "But if he gets that look off your face, he can even stay here. For a while."
"What look? I don't have a look."
"Yes, you do," Sara said gently, and her kiss was long and lingering this time. When she went to bed, she took him with her.
***
The coffee shop was generic and trendy and not really Neal's kind of place, which was what he supposed made it a good meeting place. He'd dressed as Nigel in a rather cheap suit, and wore a hat pulled down over his eyes.
Hey, how come you never use disguises? Diana's voice came to him, out of the past. Neal couldn't even remember now what he'd answered. Some quip about not having to check if his mustache was on straight, he was fairly sure.
He tipped the hat a little farther down.
It was possible this was a setup rather than a message from Moz, but Neal really didn't think so. The whole thing was very much Mozzie's style. If he hadn't been the one who sent the message, then someone had profiled Mozzie to an extent that made Neal's skin crawl -- and made him terrified for his friend.
He told himself that Moz was a big boy and could take care of himself. Still, he had precious few people left to protect. Elizabeth would have every one of Peter's FBI friends looking after her. And he was here to watch Sara's back. But Moz was on his own.
He's raised paranoia to an art form. If anyone knows when to cut and run, it's Mozzie.
Neal took a deep breath and slipped into the coffee house on the dot of two.
There was absolutely no telling what Moz would be wearing, although a conspicuous hat was a likely guess. Neal did a quick scan for odd headwear, strange toupees, and/or bald heads, then when nothing clicked, gave a more careful look around. His attention was snagged by someone near the entrance with his back to the door, but it wasn't Mozzie, and Neal was so set on looking for a Mozzie-pattern that all he got was a vague sense of "familiar" until the person turned his head and looked at him.
It was Peter.
Neal staggered and almost fell.
Peter moved swiftly and smoothly to catch him by the elbow. "Sorry, sorry," he said in an undertone, and it was Peter, it had to be Peter. Neal would know him in a dark alley blindfolded; he'd know him if he was drunk or half asleep. "Come here and sit down, okay?"
Peter maneuvered him to a chair and Neal simply came, half-limp and wobbly. Right now Peter could have led him straight off a cliff and he'd have gone, mostly because his brain had nothing, nothing at all for this situation except stunned disbelief.
"Are you okay?" Peter asked, looking into his face with a sort of half-amused and half-worried expression that was indelibly, 100% Peter.
He couldn't be here. Peter wasn't here, in London, because Peter was dead and Neal had lost his mind.
Neal jerked his arm out of Peter's grasp.
"Hey," Peter said, catching him to stop him as he tried to get up.
"You asshole," Neal managed in a low undertone.
Peter's face did a complicated dance between irritation and worry and empathy, finally settling on some weird combination of all three. "Are you going to sit down and hear me out, or do I have to chase you all over London?"
"Sitting," Neal muttered, and he sat and crossed his arms and glowered.
Peter sat, too. "Neal, listen," he said, leaning forward. "I can tell by the way you're acting that you didn't know -- that you thought -- Look, don't blame Diana and Jones. They told you the truth, at least the truth as far as they knew it."
"Oh great, so you're lying to everyone, not just me."
Peter's mouth flickered from a twist of familiar annoyance to a half-fond grin. "Do you intend listen to my story or just glare at me?"
"I can do both," Neal grumbled, slouching lower in his seat.
Peter sighed and reached for his coffee. "Believe me, I wouldn't have gone this way if I'd had other options. It's the best of a lot of really bad choices. El knows I'm not dead, and so does Hughes, and we called my parents as soon as we could. But I've blown up a lot of ... well, no use worrying about it when I can't change it, I guess."
The awareness slowly dawned on Neal that Peter looked not just tired, but completely exhausted, as much as Neal had been for the last few days. And he was probably jet-lagged too. Neal began to slowly uncoil from his defensive position. "Did Hughes set this up?"
"Good guess," Peter said. He lowered his voice. "He believed that I wouldn't last long in prison -- that certain people had a vested interest in making me quietly disappear. I think he's right. So we took the choice out of their hands. And now I'm legally dead and in hiding. We thought getting me out of the country for the time being would be best."
Even from the bare bones of it, Neal could guess at some of the rest. This seemed like a gesture of startling desperation coming from two men who had been chanting the mantra Work within the system ever since Neal had known them. For Hughes to suggest this and Peter to go along with it -- rather than, say, protective custody or WitSec -- "How high up does this go?"
"High," Peter said tightly. "I understand you've got names."
"I do. Back at Sara's. I sent copies to Diana, but they must have crossed in transit with you."
Peter nodded. "It's awkward doing this long-distance, especially since we haven't been able to trust electronic communications. It'll be easier now that you and I are in the same city, and on the same page."
"Just how paranoid are we being, exactly?" Neal asked.
Peter groaned. "Mozzie level. Don't say anything."
"You had Moz pass me a message."
"Yeah, he was the only person I could think of who might be able to get it to you undetected. He's also the one who got me fake documents for the flight. I hate to say it, but he's the reigning expert at sneaky ways to avoid government scrutiny."
"Is it really that bad?" Neal asked quietly.
"According to Hughes, Pratt has -- had -- buddies in the NSA and the State Department. Yeah, it's that bad." Peter glanced over his shoulder and rose from the table. "In fact, I've probably stayed here too long."
"What next?" Neal asked as they stepped out onto the street. He angled generally for the nearest Tube station.
Peter gave a small laugh. There wasn't much humor in it. "This is probably going to sound crazy, especially coming from me, but I hadn't thought that far ahead. Ever since this runaway train jumped its tracks, I've been living from one moment to the next."
"I know exactly what you mean."
Peter snorted. "Yeah, but that's pretty much business as usual for you."
"Not anymore."
"Hmm. Maybe not."
"So you're saying you basically have nowhere to stay."
"Yet," Peter said. "I have some cash, and a credit card Mozzie swears is untraceable, which I'm reluctant to use because God knows it could be tied into some mobster's Swiss bank account and the last thing I need is to compound my current stack of offenses with another felony --"
Neal grabbed a fistful of Peter's jacket and pulled him in and hugged him, hard. Peter was so startled he shut up. People jostled them as the stream of pedestrian traffic broke around them.
"I thought you were dead," Neal said into Peter's shoulder.
"I know," Peter said softly. He cupped a hand around the back of Neal's neck, and held on. "I know. I'm sorry."
"You better be," Neal said, and let him go reluctantly, but kept hold of his arm. There was a part of him that hadn't quite adjusted to Peter being here, being alive; that part of him wanted to hang on just in case Peter evaporated into smoke as soon as Neal let go. "Okay, so now we've got that worked out, let's get you back to Sara's place."
"I don't think that's a good idea. We should stay apart --"
"Peter, she's got a giant suite with a Jacuzzi. And you look like you're going to fall asleep on your feet. I'm not sending you off to wander around a strange city until you crash under a railroad bridge or something. Then," Neal said, "once you've slept and had something other than coffee, we can look through the papers from the box and see if you spot any names you recognize. It's like nonstop paperwork. You'll love it." He became aware that Peter was grinning at him. "What?"
"Nothing, just -- this is probably jet lag talking, and I'm sure I'll hate this entire situation again after I've slept, but right now I feel like we can take those bastards on and win."
It took Neal a moment to get himself together enough to speak in a nearly normal tone of voice. "Team Caffrey-Burke? Of course we can."