Chapter Text
By the time Nate has made it to the building, only breaking a few traffic laws on the way, he’s figured out what’s going on, at least as far as he can tell.
Sophie is with the CEO in the executive offices on the 20th floor, and she’s safe. Either the CEO hasn’t caught on to the con that’s being run, or he’s actually not the one at fault. Either way, Sophie is capable of grifting her way through on her own for as long as she needs to.
Eliot is with Sterling on the 10th floor. He’s probably still stuck there with Sterling being an annoying, inconvenient asshole, but at least he should be okay.
Hardison is on the 15th floor with the VP, who is definitely mixed up in something and probably actually responsible for what they thought was the CEO’s fault, and who also managed to get her hands on a gun and has shot Hardison. If Nate were still a praying person he would be praying desperately that wherever Hardison was shot, it wasn’t somewhere critical.
And Parker is on the roof and seems to have been kidnapped by the head custodian, of all people. Nate’s been putting pieces together and he’s beginning to suspect that the custodian is mixed up in something entirely separate from the mess the company’s involved in, something that they all missed somehow.
As Nate pulls in haphazardly, he spots a helicopter lifting off from the roof of the building. Dammit, Parker’s probably on that. What kind of custodian has access to a helicopter? Well. That’s a problem for later, at least; he’s not going to be able to follow a helicopter in his car. Hopefully they’ll still be able to track her.
Nate bluffs his way in and makes a beeline for Eliot first. When he makes it up to the tenth floor, he finds a very angry, somewhat dazed Sterling, but actually no Eliot — Eliot must have gotten himself un-stuck in the time it took Nate to get over here. Nate shouldn’t be surprised.
He finds his way to the server room on the fifteenth floor by following the trail of unconscious security guards. By the time he barges in, the VP has been knocked out, a disarmed gun lies on the floor, and Eliot is crouched on the floor next to Hardison, applying pressure to a leg wound that’s bleeding enough to be worrisome. Hardison is muttering something about how the hell Eliot does this, which at least means that he’s alive enough to be complaining.
Eliot looks up sharply when Nate comes in, hands still busy with the blood. “The others?”
“Sophie should be safe. Parker’s been kidnapped.” Hardison swears and tries to grab for his computer, which is lying, possibly broken, on the floor a ways away.
Eliot knocks his hand down. “Dammit, Hardison, not now. We need to get you out of here and somewhere with a real first aid kid. We’ll find her, but we can’t do a damn thing if you pass out from blood loss first.” The look that passes between their eyes is so intense that Nate almost feels like he’s intruding.
They get Sophie. They take Hardison home. They patch him up. Hardison pulls up Parker’s shoe tracker, even loopy on pain meds and with one leg immobile. Eliot launches a one-man assault on the facility and gets her back with a bit more violence than Nate has seen from him in a while. He doesn’t ask whether anyone ends up dead.
It turns out that the vice president was working under the CEO’s nose to cover up the deaths caused by their product. The CEO, while not necessarily a good man, was at least less complicit than they had thought. It takes a bit to spin the con in order to take down the vice president instead, but the work they’ve done already helps. They bring the company to its knees and bring their clients justice.
The custodian, meanwhile, turns out to have been working for a drug-smuggling gang. Parker had walked in on their illicit drug handoff on the roof and they’d kidnapped her without much forethought. Eliot wreaked enough havoc getting her back that it didn’t take too much more to bring them down, but they ruin the gang thoroughly anyway and metaphorically beat them to a pulp.
They’re all going to be okay.