8.9

Fritz closes the door to his office behind Austin and Finn as they enter, his hand lingering above the handle for a moment as though he isn’t sure whether to lock it or not. After a few seconds of consideration, he leaves it as is. His office seems somehow more homey than Cillian’s was, with a plain, wooden desk covered in stacks of paper, stationed at an angle that presumably looks out into the lab when the door is actually held open. The walls are peppered with picture frames housing photos of mainly landscapes - Fritz isn’t present in any of them. Finn and Austin take seats in front of the desk, Austin in a folding chair, Finn in a wooden chair that looks identical to the one Austin was handcuffed to.

“Did you take those?” Austin asks Fritz, nodding at the photos.

“Oh, uh, yeah.” Fritz smiles a little sheepishly, lowering himself into the threadbare office chair behind his desk. “I minored in art when I was getting my undergrad.”

“They’re nice,” Austin says.

“Oh,” Fritz says, “thanks.”

The three men lapse into silence, then, each one clearly wondering who’s going to be the first to bring up the elephant in the room. Austin glances between Fritz and Finn. Finn was supposed to be the buffer between me and the other people down here. Why isn’t he asking anything? Does he want me to do it? He could at least say something, if he wants me to do it.

“When’s the last time you saw Abbott?” Austin asks, finally. He glances at Finn out of the corner of his eye and finds no sign of displeasure, no signal not to continue.

“Years ago.” Fritz leans forwards, balancing his elbows on the desk and running his hands through his hair, making it stand on end in a completely different direction than before. “We’ve been out of contact since he abandoned Project Circe.”

Austin raises an eyebrow. “Project Circe?”

“The drug trial,” Fritz explains. “After the cave-in, Abbott was convinced that the DPR would find out what we were doing, and raid the facility. He packed up and left in the middle of the night. Actually, before we noticed his things were gone, we were pretty sure he had just disappeared. We’d had a problem with subjects vanishing and - well, that’s neither here nor there, I guess.”

“Do you think he still remembers how to get down here?” Austin asks. Assuming there was a chance for him to sneak onto the DPR campus before the word was out about him being the one who stabbed Jacob. Although the entrance down here is in a pretty remote place. I don’t know that anyone would notice he was on campus, if he wasn’t in any of the main buildings, even if they knew to look for him.

“I’m certain he does,” Fritz says, nodding. “We made trips in and out of here all the time, and getting in is much more straightforward than getting out.”

“Is he here?” Finn asks, before Austin can get another word out. His voice is serious, almost urgent, and he’s leaning forward in his chair, his eyes boring into Fritz.

Fritz blinks bemusedly at Finn. “What?”

“Is. He. Here,” Finn repeats, slowly. “Did Abbott come down here to hide, with the rest of you Project Circe lot?”

“No. No, of course not.” Fritz’s good eye is narrowed, and his gaze never wavers from Finn’s face as he answers. “Why would he be here? None of us would help him, not anymore.”

“Are you sure about that?” Finn asks. Austin can see how tense his body is, the tendons in his neck tight. “Because if you’re lying -”

“I’m not lying,” Fritz says, in a tone that makes Austin think that he and Finn have already outstayed their welcome in the small office.

“Fine.” Finn leans back in his chair, holding his hands up, palms out in surrender. “You’re not lying, then. Where else would he be, if he’s not here?”

“How would I know?” Fritz asks, straightening up indignantly. His voice is raised, but still at a controlled volume that would be hard to hear through the door, unless someone pressed their ear right up against it. “I don’t even know where he went after he left Project Circe! He just left the rest of us down here to get arrested, or stuck in another cave-in, and the next I heard of him was a few years ago, when he started working at the DPR again!”

So that’s why none of them would help Abbott if he was down here, Austin muses, thinking back to Fritz’s earlier comment. He basically left them for dead. Can’t say I blame them for any ill will that’s still going around.

“Can you think of anywhere else he might be?” Austin asks. “Anywhere at all?”

“No,” Fritz says, shaking his head. “No. I’m sorry. He was - he was secretive. He only ever told me what he thought I needed to know.”

Austin worries at his bottom lip with his teeth, thinking. Something Richard said in the hospital room has been bothering him. Maybe Fritz will know. Even if he and Abbott weren’t close, I’m sure they saw each other more than Richard and Abbott did.

“Is it…” he begins, and then stops, waffling over how best to word the question. “Is it like Abbott to stab people?”

Finn gives him an odd look. “What do you mean?”

“I talked to someone who worked at the DPR, the first time Abbott was there,” Austin says, judiciously leaving out that the “someone” was his dead father. “He said that Abbott wasn’t really the type to hurt anyone on his own, or even threaten violence. Was he still like that, when he worked with you?”

“Well,” Fritz says slowly, “the experiments we did…they hurt people.”

“But did Abbott ever hurt anyone?” Austin presses. “Did he ever hurt anyone himself?”

Fritz looks down at his desk, and Austin can almost see the gears in his head turning as he thinks. After a long moment, he shakes his head.

“No. I never saw him hurt anyone, or threaten anyone, on his own. You said - you said he stabbed the Department President?”

“Yeah,” Finn says.

“That doesn’t sound like Abbott,” Fritz says, almost perfectly parroting Richard’s sentiment from earlier. “But what do I know? Maybe he’s changed.”

There’s a knock at the door before Austin or Finn can respond. All three men startle, their attention snapping towards the unlocked door, but none of them get up, or call out. A second knock comes quickly on the heels of the first, and Fritz stands up behind his desk. Finn catches Austin’s eye, and presses a finger to his lips.

“Hello?” Fritz says.

“Hey,” a voice from outside says, reedy and unfamiliar to Austin. “I heard some busybodies are poking around, asking questions about Abbott. They with you?”

“Yeah,” Finn says. Austin shoots him a sharp look that he either ignores, or doesn’t notice. “Door’s unlocked, you can come in.”

The door handle jiggles briefly, before the door opens just wide enough for a tall, thin woman with short, unnaturally maroon hair to slip into the office. She looks Austin over with mild surprise, and Austin stares defiantly back at her, eyebrows raised.

“Nat, meet Austin Jones,” Finn says. “Austin, Nat Buranek.”

“So Dallas found you, after all,” Austin says, more than a little surprised.

“Dallas?” Nat frowns. “Haven’t seen him.”

“What?” Finn starts to stand from his seat, and Austin does the same, sensing that they’re going to be on the move fairly imminently. “He said he was going to go look for you. Another agent went with him. They’re not with you?”

Nat shakes her head. “No. I didn’t even know he was around.”

Abbott? A yawning pit opens in Austin’s stomach, and he clutches at the back of the folding chair to steady himself. No. Let’s not jump to conclusions. Dallas and Rainer being AWOL could mean anything - you don’t know for sure that it’s Abbott trying to get the jump on you. But if he is down here, he has to know the place a lot better than you do. He’d know how to set an ambush, especially in this area, that used to be DPR property. And if he almost killed Jacob over a disagreement, what the hell would he do to two of the people hunting him down for arrest?

“We have to find them,” Austin says at last, his voice a growl from between clenched teeth. “Now.”