Mozzie’s safe-house was a basement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen that smelled like old newspapers and cheap incense, and he had been awake for thirty-one hours straight.
That was not unusual.
Mozzie ran on crisis adrenaline and conspiracy theory the way normal people ran on caffeine and sunlight.
What was unusual was the feeling that had been prickling at the base of his skull for three days now, the shape of a problem he couldn’t quite name.
Neal was off.
Not wrong.
Not compromised.
Off.
The difference was subtle: a half-beat delay in a laugh, a coffee order that used to be black and was now with room for cream, a new stillness in the shoulders when he was thinking.
Small things.
Things a casual observer would never notice.
Mozzie was not a casual observer.
He had been Neal Caffrey’s partner in crime and brother in paranoia for six years, and he knew Neal like a safecracker knows a combination: by feel, by sound, by the slight resistance of the tumblers.
The combination was different now.
The numbers were the same, but someone had oiled the mechanism.
He sat at a folding table covered in maps and burner phones and the accumulated debris of a life lived off the grid, and he tried to make the pieces fit.
Neal had refused the extraction.
That was the first break from pattern.
Not refused it angrily or fearfully.
Neal had never been afraid of anything in his life, which was itself a problem, but refused it calmly, like a man already sure a better offer waited somewhere else.
There was no better offer.
Mozzie had checked.
The entire network had checked.
No new fences, no new patrons, no quiet whisper of a job that could compete with the Kate extraction.
Neal was turning down the only exit for a reason Mozzie couldn’t see.
The second break: Neal was forging.
Not for money or escape, for bait.
Mozzie had seen the bond ring on the desk before Neal had bothered to hide it, and he knew quality when he saw it.
That bond was museum-grade work, the kind of forgery that took focus and patience and a still center that Neal had always had but that seemed, lately, denser somehow.
More present.
A man who was planning to run didn’t spend eight hours on a single forgery.
A man who was planning to trap something did.
Mozzie didn’t like the implication.
The door to the apartment opened.
Neal stepped through, bringing a gust of street air and the particular energy of a man who had just done something decisive.
He sat down across from Mozzie without preamble.
“The Suit bit.
The bond’s in evidence.”
Mozzie set down the burner phone he’d been pretending to study.
“And now we wait for him to follow it to nothing, because there’s no crime attached to that bond except the one you committed by making it.”
“There’s a crime.
I just don’t know what it is yet.”
“That’s not a plan.
That’s a hope.
Hopes don’t get people out of the country.”
Neal leaned back in the chair.
The motion was Neal’s: the loose-limbed ease of a man who owned every chair he sat in, but the stillness underneath it was new.
Neal Caffrey had always been in motion, even when sitting still.
This version was different.
This version watched.
“I need a different kind of favor,” he said.
“Not the running kind.
The staging kind.”
Mozzie felt the prickle intensify.
“I’m listening.”
“There’s a boatyard in Brooklyn.
Williamsburg waterfront, tucked behind the storage warehouses.
I need a car parked there at a specific time, keys in the visor, a full tank, no plates.”
“A car.
A boatyard.
No plates.” Mozzie folded his arms.
“This sounds like the beginning of a plan that ends with someone getting on a plane.”
“It ends with someone getting off a plane.
There’s a difference.”
“Kate’s not going to leave with a car, Neal.
She’s going to leave with a flight.
Adler’s people have her staged for travel within days.
I can feel the window closing from here.”
“I know.” Neal’s voice was quiet.
“That’s why I need the car.”
Mozzie stared at him.
The prickle became a knot.
Something was happening behind Neal’s eyes that he couldn’t read, and Mozzie read people for a living.
“There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Many things.”
“The thing about Kate.”
“The thing about Kate is that I’m going to keep her alive.
That’s the only thing that matters.
The rest is architecture.”
Mozzie stood.
Walked to the window.
Checked the street below by habit, clear, and turned back.
“If I do this — if I stage a car at a boatyard with no plates and no paper trail — I need to know the shape of the whole thing.
Not the details.
The shape.”
Neal weighed it in silence.
When he spoke, his voice was different, slower, deliberate, like a man choosing each word from a set of options.
“The shape is: I can’t go to her.
The anklet makes that impossible.
So I have to make her come to me.
The boatyard is where she’ll be.
The car is how she’ll get inside the radius.
That’s the shape.”
“The radius is two miles, Neal.
She’s being held across the East River.
You can’t even see the boatyard from here.”
“I know.
That’s why I need you to be my eyes.”
Mozzie felt the knot tighten.
Neal had never asked him to be eyes before.
Neal had always been the one in the field, the one running the con, the one whose face was in the frame.
Mozzie was the support: the network, the alibis, the man in the shadows.
Being asked to step into the light wasn’t a compliment.
It was a warning.
“If I do this,” Mozzie said slowly, “and it goes wrong —”
“It won’t.”
“—if it goes wrong, I need a contingency.
A day you vanish and I can’t reach you.
A way to clean the trail without knowing where you landed.”
Neal studied him.
The look was unreadable, not the usual Neal calculation of angles, but a deeper assessment, Neal reading something written on Mozzie’s face in a language only he could translate.
“Build it,” he said.
“Build your contingency.
If you need it, it’s because I can’t answer.”
“Neal—”
“Build it.
I’m not going to need it.
But you’ll feel better having it, and I need you clear-headed.”
Mozzie wanted to argue.
Wanted to push until the Neal he knew came back: the one who talked too much and trusted too easily and never, ever sat this still.
But he didn’t.
Because the one thing the drift hadn’t changed was that this was still Neal, and Neal had never steered him wrong.
Not once, in six years.
“Williamsburg waterfront,” Mozzie said.
“I know a body shop near the bridge.
They can have a car ready by tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow night works.”
“Anything else?”
Neal stood.
The motion was fluid, unhurried.
“Coffee.
Black.
I think better when I’m caffeinated.”
“Your coffee order is black with room for cream.”
“That was yesterday.”
Mozzie watched him leave.
The door closed with a soft click, and the knot hardened into a permanent weight in his chest.
The coffee order had changed.
So had something else.
Something he couldn’t name, couldn’t trace, couldn’t do anything about except file it under watch and start building the contingency Neal had told him to build.
He pulled out a fresh burner and began setting up the fail-safe.
It was, he reflected, the least Mozzie thing he’d ever done for Neal, preparing for the day his best friend disappeared without a goodbye.
But Neal had asked for it, and Mozzie had never been able to say no to Neal.
Not once, in six years.
hey — quick one before you close the tab.
if the cliffhanger is killing you, the future already exists.
you just need a ticket through.
see you in the next loop.
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P.S.
— in a parallel timeline, the rest of this story runs completely free on unwrittenrealm.com.
just saying.
that timeline also has more chapters.