Case 25 - Back in 2014

LA: <Events before The Rookie S1E12, Modern Family S9E13, SWAT S1E10>

NY: <Events 99 before Brooklyn S5E11, Suits S7E12 & 1.5 years after Castle S8 finale, around the time of Law&Order: SVU S19E12>

Ben watched a young girl in her early twenties cry in an interrogation room with Lieutenant Benson. Rosa stood next to him with a small frown.

"It was self-defense. The DA shouldn't press charges," Rosa eventually asserted, more for herself than for Ben.

"I'll use up all my goodwill with the press if he does. Just to paint him as a monster," Ben mumbled with a grim look.

The SVU detectives had taken Ben and Rosa to a penthouse in Lower Manhattan to free the first of the five girls from her captivity. Yet, while doing so, the captive finally snapped, got hold of a weapon during the raid and discharged the entire magazine, wounding two officers and the CEO of a logistics company specialized in operating container ships that was given the girl as a gift.

Benson left the interrogation room with an uneasy expression and opened the door to the room where Ben and Rosa were watching.

"She recognized you on scene, and she asked for you," Benson explained while looking at Ben with searching eyes. "Are you up for it?"

"Yeah," Ben confirmed after a deep exhale and handed Rosa his weapon.

Inside the interrogation room, the girl slapped him twice before starting to hysterically sob in his arms.

<Cast: [special guest star] Bruna Marquezina as 'Alessa' Yashar>

"Deixaste-me! Porque é que me deixaste!? [You left me! Why did you leave me!?]"

His Portuguese wasn't fluent enough outside understanding the gist of what she accused him off, so he whispered back in English, "I'm so sorry. I couldn't leave my post to search for you... and then I was assigned another mission... by the time I was back in LA, you were long gone..."

Benson's deep frown made way for a saddened expression.

"How did you get caught, Bruna?"

All the people present lifted an eyebrow, except for the girl and Ben. According to the file, the Brazilian girl's name was Alessa, not Bruna. So Ben clearly still kept things hidden from them. Benson especially would confront him as soon as possible as she narrowed her eyes, watching the interaction between the two.

"I... tried getting Nadia out as well. But she doublecross me and alerted Martin... all I could do was throw away the phone you give me so you are safe," Bruna explained angrily, still with her head buried in Ben's chest.

"So that's what happened," Ben pondered out loud with a wry smile. "Nadia died at the hands of Bär not much later... she had gotten a bit of an attitude when Martin started favoring her a little... the death might have been an accident, but the beating she took was horrifying..."

The girl in his arms finally looked up.

"Thank you. I'm glad to hear it," Bruna whispered with a sweet smile that sent shivers down Benson's spine as she looked Ben in the eyes.

Ben himself shook his head with an indredulous smile and countered, "You might not want to say stuff like that to police officers..."

"I was sold as pretty bird for Palert and suffered over a year in that penthouse with no way out, no way to contact anyone and that pig complaining about his wife every time he 'visited' me," Bruna spat with a vicious tinge. "And him touching me..."

Ben shook his head and patted her back reassuringly without knowing what to say.

"Think about your future now that you're out of there," Ben whispered in her ears and exited the room with Benson when Bruna finally calmed down.

"You wanna explain?" Benson asked in a standoff-ish manner.

"Bruna is too manly a name for a racist pig from Germany, so he renamed her and a few others. Whenever I met her in private, I called her by her real name so she wouldn't lose sight of her real self. I was also the reason she hid that she was Jewish for obvious reasons, which is why I made sure nobody knew her last name 'Yashar'. Her father was a Mossad agent or something along those lines or so she says..."

Benson visibly relaxed, "Tell me the real names of the other girls."

"The others here in New York have their correct name in the file," Ben explained with a sigh.

[Flashback: LA, Fall 2014]

Clad in an unbuttoned Hawaii shirt, a white tanktop, a sports cap and sporty sneakers, Ben sat sweating in a lone container north of San Diego, south of Los Angeles, near the Californian coastline along the Interstate 5 going to Los Angeles.

A generator with a battery hooked to a solar panel outside the container powered up a small setup that Ben was currently wiring up.

Cameras, computers, routers, backup routers, network equipment of all sorts. Ben was putting it all together so that this new temporary trade hub would be safe from robbers. Or rather, free from letting people get off scot-free from robbing Martin Kraft.

He was all alone out there with just an old touring bike and the news to keep him company. Some lunatics drove a $3.4mil Lykan sports car, with only seven, now six, of them existing in the world, between three skyscrapers in Abu Dhabi, and lived.

Just as he finished and started placing the cameras and wiring at the correct places, Ben's phone rang.

"Yes."

"*Fuchs. Wir haben Käufer für die Hollow-Points. Sie sind auf dem Weg zu dir. [We already got buyers for the hollow-points. They are en route to you.]*"

"Martin... ich mach IT. Ich bin kein Verkäufer... [Martin... I do IT. I'm not a salesman...]" Ben complained as he brushed sweat off his furrowed brows.

"*Glückwunsch zur Beförderung. Enttäusch mich nicht. [Congratulations on your promotion. Don't disappoint me.]*"

The call dropped, and Ben stared at his phone for a while, clenching his fists.

A minute later, he got a message with the load he was about to sell off and the money he was expected to receive. It was much more than just a box of bullets, and Ben didn't like it one bit.

Ben called Special Agent Ford on a burner phone, but the call didn't connect.

"Fuck."

Reluctantly, Ben started preparing the expected merchandise while cursing under his breath the entire time.

An hour later, Ben heard the sound of cars closing in on him. Ben cursed some more. Martin made him sell to a whole gang while alone.

He grabbed a Desert Eagle and put a SIG Sauer P320, a staple in the White Front, as a backup-piece in the back of his pants.

[Plot of (Fast &) Furious 7 / won't become regular guests on this fic, but a friend made me sit through 2 of these movies and I noticed they were from around LA... I couldn't not include them in some capacity]

"You the Kraut we gettin' our bullets from?" A loud-mouth rudely asked as he stepped out of a muscle car.

"I might be. Are you the...," Ben held up his phone, pretending to have to re-read the order and show off his Desert Eagle in his holster, "Toretto crew?"

"More like family," a woman with hispanic descent corrected.

"Don't go tellin' some racist nutjob our business, Letty," the black man who talked first chided. "Man, couldn't we have gotten our hardware from some brothers instead?"

"Dom got the contact from Nobody. This is the best we can do," 'Letty' explained as she sized Ben up and down.

"Okay white man. Where's the merchandise?"

"Where's the money?" Ben asked, brushing against his weapon's grip.

He was outmanned and very likely outgunned by 3 people. Two black men, a white man and the latina.

The white man threw a small baggy his way he got from the trunk of a muscle car. The one the latina had driven here.

"Place a single bullet in a weapon and point it my way, I'll shoot my way out of here," Ben explained as he threw a key to the white man in the group. He pointed at a camera on top of the container and continued, "Take a single box before I finish counting and the White Front will put you on their hitlist."

All four buyers tensed up a little so Ben sheepishly added, "Sorry. Not my policy."

Ben had seen plenty of buys so far, so he had copied Martin's usual lines.

As he counted the money, which was a first for him, Ben heard the small group argue and learned their names.

Tej, Roman, Brian, and Letty. They were gearing up for something... or rather someone. Someone who apparently had no scruples killing droves of people to get to this peculiar group and someone they called Ramsey.

"You people might want to stop discussing these things where eyes and ears could be everywhere," Ben advised with a raised brow as he walked over to them. "I put everything you wanted on that trolley. You can push it out to your trunks."

"Wow, great customer service," 'Tej' quipped sarcastically.

"Friendly neighborhood nazi gun salesman," Roman added with a laugh and shoved Tej.

"Fuck off, Roman," Tej countered and flipped him off.

Brian looked at Ben with furrowed brows and started moving boxes of bullets and the few machine pistols Ben had in his inventory.

"You a good shot?" Brian asked and as an intimidation factor, Ben took out his big pistol and shot a rock sitting on a boulder a good distance away without looking.

"Show off," Brian mumbled and continued packing their purchase with Tej and Roman.

"What's your name?" Letty asked as she hawkishly watched Ben put away the gun.

"They call me Fuchs."

"And what do you call yourself?"

"... not Fuchs," Ben volunteered after a short deliberation.

-----

After finishing up the sale and his work for Martin, Ben followed the group with the help of a GPS chip Martin put in all their merchandise. Along the way, he tried calling Special Agent Ford again, which didn't work yet again. After that, he put a letter for his FBI handler in the mail detailing all that happened recently and with the group 'Toretto family'.

Usually his stunt as an undercover cop would have ended the moment he illegally sold weapons to those four, but extenuating circumstances and the fact that he was working federal, not local law enforcement meant he was okay. Or so he hoped.

Following along on his bike, Ben eventually arrived near a graveyard.

Taking out his spyglass, he counted six people. The four from before as well as another woman in her twenties and a tall, buff, ball dude. They distributed weapons among themselves.

"This isn't my job," Ben whispered under his breath in clear distress. "I can't call Grey, Ford isn't picking up... people are gonna die..."

Ben picked up a phone he had stolen from a biker near the post office earlier and called the Calfornia Office FBI tip line.

"I have reason to suspect that a man named Deckard Shaw is about to have a serious gun fight in downtown LA with a group called the Toretto family. They armed themselves with armor piercing bullets."

Ben immediately hung up, fished out the SIM card and broke it in two.

Two hours later, Ben followed three cars in the streets of LA from a safe distance when he heard a helicopter above him.

"What the flying fuck?"

Ben immediately stopped the bike, held up a pedestrian, got his phone, and called that in, too.

A blackhawk military copter with armed missles in LA airspace. This was much bigger than he thought.

As he drove away from the random, cursing LA citizen, Ben saw that the three cars had split up, so he followed a black Nissan Skyline from the group at random and drove a little closer.

The military chopper followed them for a moment until Ben saw with wide eyes that it dropped an armed drone. As it started hovering over the river slowly and the engines started warming up, Ben stopped on the bridge, took out his Desert Eagle, and took a shot at it.

A lot of people started honking, driving erratically, and giving Ben grief, but he took a second shot instead since his first only clipped the body without doing any damage. The second shot ricocheted off the multi-directual engine, leaving it to stutter for a short moment but doing nothing to stop the drone.

It started gaining altitude, and he stopped shooting the drone.

Aiming up into the air with a .50 AE bullet was a surefire way to ruin someone's life in case he missed. And missing a moving target like a drone was all too easy.

He was still a cop at heart.

Ben adjusted the bandana covering his face below the open visor helmet and started driving again.

During the ensuring car chase with a drone involved, Ben weaved between traffic until they were on a bridge and the drone caught up with their target, the Nissan Skyline he had been following.

The military drone opened fire with an onboard machine gun into oncoming traffic, and the Nissan lowered its chassis to fit below a truck carrying large steel piping.

Since it didn't stop firing, the truck driver was quickly hit and lost control over his car. As the load started swerving left and right, slowly losing control over its cargo, Ben grit his teeth and stepped on the gas to overtake the truck narrowly before the cargo started falling off of it.

In the mirror on his handlebar, Ben saw almost a dozen cars crashing into the dropped pipes.

"Fuck!" Ben cursed loudly and stopped the bike to rescue the people out of the cars.

He pulled several people out of the totaled wrecks after using a phone he found in the first car to call for several ambulances.

As he pulled out the belt of a person with a crushed leg that wouldn't stop bleeding to triage it, his own phone started ringing.

"Yes," Ben answered with gritted teeth.

"*Unsere Kugeln die du heute verkauft hast sind in dem Krieg in Downtown LA verwickelt. Bleib der Stadt fern bis ich dir eine neue Mission erteile. [Our bullets you sold today are involved in the war in downtown LA. Stay away from the city until I give you a new mission.]*" Martin ordered and hung up.

"Fuck you, Martin," Ben spat and finished administering first aid on the bleeding driver he pulled out of a car.

A good ten minutes later, Ben got back on his bike after the first ambulance arrived and pointed out the worst cases to the EMTs.

He opened the app to track the GPS of the trackers in the bullet cases and followed them again.

When he arrived, all Ben found was a burning wreckage and one of the other's cars driving off while the drone chased it. His first instinct was to follow the car, but then he saw Brian running off with a bullet-proof vest.

Curiously, it read 'FBI' on it.

Ben wanted to get the drone out of the sky, but he decided to follow this Brian guy instead. First, the apparent FBI affiliate ran around rather aimlessly checking if parked cars had keys inside. But then he suddenly started bolting in a direction as if he heard a new order.

Eventually, he saw Brian entering an abandoned high-rise of a bankrupt food company in a warehouse district, so Ben got off of his motorbike and followed the man equipped with the bullet-proof vest and made his way into the building.

Suddenly, there were sounds that clearly weren't made by just Brian, so Ben took out his gun.

He found a special OPs team of about four fully concealed men led by an asian man tattooed all over in a gun fight with Brian.

Judging that the special OPs team was behind the drone, Ben grabbed a paint can and threw it with a shout, "Flashbang!" and leaned from his cover.

Using his SIG instead of the high caliber Desert Eagle, Ben shot four times, taking out two of the mercenaries with a double-tap each. Just then, Brian rolled across the room on a little foot trolley, emptying the magazine of his rifle into the group of men.

"Can't believe that worked," Ben muttered under his breath after seeing the mercenaries shield their eyes because of the 'flashbang'. "I'll make that my signature move..."

After the member of the Toretto family vanished under a shutter door, Ben was left alone in the abandoned shopfloor with just the asian leader still standing.

"Who the fuck are you!?" The man shouted, but Ben dodged his line of sight to shoot at the downed men.

The living mercenary emptied his own assault rifle but used that time to run away following Brian.

Ben, in the meantime, took out an earpiece from one of the dead men and checked the body for an ID.

He didn't find one, of course, but he learned that the mercenary leader named Kiet was supposed to stop Brian from engaging the cell tower to start some sort of hack their group was apparently trying to engage over the earpiece.

Making sure he didn't leave behind any evidence like fingerprints, Ben started heading for the roof where the cell tower probably was.

He found a staircase but quickly backed out of it again when both Kiet and Brian started crashing down from the very stop, wrestling on top of the unhinged door they kicked down from the top.

After passing him, Ben quickly ran down after them.

Brian was kicked into a room, and Kiet hurried behind him to give him some more kicks. While Brian was clearly trained in US army CQC, as in kick-boxing with an emphasis on hooks and grapples, Kiet was trained in Muay Thai and Karate with plenty of kicks and knee kicks.

Kiet knew Ben wasn't a friendly, but Brian hadn't yet decided what he was.

He kept up his guard until Ben landed his first front kick right into Kiet's knee. With a *crack*, the mercenary dropped to the ground and screamed in pain.

"Fucking idiot watching my hands like that," Ben cursed and took out his pistol.

He tried shooting the man point blank to disable him since Kiet took out knife after knife, throwing them at him, and Ben didn't want to bleed and leave behind evidence.

Kiet dodged the first shot by rolling to the side. With super human reflexes, the mercenary with the disabled leg dodged four more shots until two hit both of his arms. But just then, Brian creeped up behind the man, hooked a cable to the man's bullet-proof vest, and kicked a heavy wooden spool down an elevator shaft.

"What an embarrassing showing," Ben whispered to himself and holstered his gun. A gun which he would toss the barrel of at the next chance he got.

"You a friendly?" Brian asked guardedly.

"Get to the cell tower and work with your team to get that fucking blackhawk and the drone out of the air," Ben advised and started heading downstairs. "Civilians are dying in droves over the war you brought to these streets."

"You're pretty alright for a racist!" Brian shouted, and Ben cursed under his breath some more after Brian instantly recognized him from his voice, but he didn't look back to catch up with the Toretto family member.

With the training Ben thought this Brian guy likely received, it was no wonder that he recognized Ben even with the bandana covering his face.

Ben reached his bike again, and just as he wanted to look if any of the GPS trackers were still live, an explosion rang not far from where they were. He immediately drove in its direction in an effort to help out where he could.

Another explosion rocked the windows on the busy street, and people started fleeing in the opposite direction. Eventually, Ben saw the military chopper once more.

It was hovering above a four level parking garage, so Ben looked around. Across the street, there was a building roughly as high as the parking garage, and it looked relatively empty.

He quickly scaled the building after kicking open the entrance and urged the residents in the staircase to flee the building and get away from there as quickly as possible.

On the roof, he took cover near the ledge and took out his Desert Eagle. He reloaded the magazine to its full 10 shot capacity with bullets from the bike's box.

Taking a deep breath, Ben aimed at the helicopter that started shooting missles at the parking garage. Since this thing was likely heavily armored, he didn't bother trying to shoot the cabin or the body but aimed for the rotors, especially the top one. The small one at the back would be needed to steer the heli away from the buildings, and he wanted to minimize civilian casualties and unneeded colateral damage.

The first two shots did no damage. Another missile hit the garage. The next two shots hit the axle holding the heli's blades, but except for a loud ring and sparks upon impact, nothing happened.

Ben took another four quick shots just as the blackhawk turned in the air, but before the gatling gun mounted on the side of the aircraft could take aim at him, machine gun fire from the street next to the garage started raining on the military vehicle.

These four new shots managed to do some damage. The heli started shivering in the air as it started losing altitude.

The machine gun from the ground started peppering the slowly descending helicopter, and Ben saw a bullet rip through the pilot after it finally managed to penetrate the bulletproof glass.

Ben took out the magazine and started filling up the eight missing bullets of his Desert Eagle as he ran down the stairs to look for people he could help.

His first step was the burning, crash-landed helicopter but he changed his mind when he saw a buff tall guy different from the one he saw at the cemetery earlier in the day shooting everyone inside the helicopter after dropping the machine gun he held in his hands and taking out a giant Smith&Wesson revolver.

Instead, Ben ran inside the destroyed garage but found no injured people.

Until he found a man stuck under a slab of concrete.

"Oi! Get me out, mate!" The man shouted impatiently.

Ben ran closer, found a steel rod to try and lift it when suddenly he rolled to the side.

The bald dude from the cemetery who Ben suspected to be the head of Toretto family swung a giant wrench at his head.

"Yo! Chill out! I just want to help!"

"That man is not worth helping," the bald guy argued in a deep voice.

"No man deserves to die suffocating in a pile of concrete," Ben shot back with furrowed brows.

"He's the reason this whole town is in flames," the bald dude countered.

Ben's hand immediately shot to his holstered pistol as he stared at the stuck guy with hatred in his eyes but he didn't take it out in the presence of the man standing between him and the alleged boss of those mercenaries.

"I take back what I said. There's special exceptions for peoplelike you to choke to death," Ben spat angrily. "You're the reason I had to drag a fatally injured kid out of a burning car back on that bridge, you monumental cunt!"

"Oi, I didn't make you do anything," the stuck guy mockingly returned. "Also, Jakande brought those missiles and the drone, not me."

The tall buff dude who shot down the helicopter and killed everyone inside joined them with his revolver pointed at Ben's head, "You alright, Dom?"

"Yeah, much better than Shaw over there," Dom explained as he pointed to the stuck guy.

"And that dude?" The man pointing a gun at Ben's head asked.

"Just a good samaritan at the wrong place, Hobbs. Put down the gun," Dom argued, and Ben started to retreat.

He had already done and interacted with more people than he wanted to initially.

He slowly backed away and ran out of the garage.

On the way, he came across the four guys who bought the bullets from him, including Brian, who had followed him here, as well as a fifth pretty tag-along who was clutching a computer. He had seen her at the cemetery earlier.

Brian nodded at him, but Ben didn't engage even as the others looked at him, not quite sure if they knew who he was. Ben jumped on his beaten down touring bike and drove away to another site of an explosion to see if he could help.

Seeing the ambulance, Ben gave up and drove back to the container he set up earlier in the day. He bought some food, a blanket, and enough to drink for two days of staying low at a gas station outside Long Beach.

Back at the container, he immediately burned his clothes, especially the bandana, so that nobody could identify him through them. Then he disassembled the guns and polished the barrels since he couldn't replace them in this barebones logistics center in the making. A deep polish with a hard-enough brush would still result in different forensics and the possibility that a found bullet couldn't be linked back to his weapon.

Early the next day, Ben woke up on the table he was sleeping on because cars drove up to his container home. He turned to the monitors and found a van with a trailer parking near him.

Roman and Brian got out, and Ben heard them talk.

"Man, you's crazy for gifting this beauty to a nazi," Roman argued hotly.

"I don't think he's what we think he is. I told you," Brian countered with a sigh and moved toward the trailer. "Plus, he totally saved my life. And a bunch of other lives that would have been on us if he hadn't."

"The racist with a conscience, man," Roman quipped with a shake of his head. "Still can't wrap my head around it."

They unloaded the bike, and Roman curiously asked, "Is it really okay to gift a BMW bike to a German? Does that make us racists? No, are Germans a race? Can a brother like me even be a racist?"

At that point, Ben cautiously opened the container and walked outside with guns drawn, though he pointed it down to the ground.

"Excuse me? What are you doing here?" Ben asked, and both men turned around.

"You saved my life. And you drove that busted down, rusted bike. As a gesture of goodwill, you're getting an upgrade - even if I don't know what it is you were doing last night. It's clear to me that you were on the right side for the right reasons," Brian explained. "And this beauty here is definitely an upgrade. A BMW R1200 GS in carbon grey. 125 horses, 1170ccm. We found some nicer brakes for you, put in a nicer shock suspension, did a little something something to the clutch for faster reaction time, and upgraded the filtration system for better acceleration."

"Yeah, man. Totally lost on you, so we also put a switch here near the tank where you can swap back into fuel save mode in case you wanna drive like a grandpa," Roman mocked with a shit-eating grin. "Not everyone's made to race. Get it? Cus' you a racist."