A/N: Well, here we are once more! "Aristotle's Mistake" is the third instalment of Bella and Jasper's adventure. It is definitely NOT a 'stand alone' fic. Jasper hates loose ends – we all know that by now. They make him nervous. And he's left a lot of loose ends floating around out there. It's time to TRY and tie them all up! While he's trying to do THAT, Bella's trying to adjust to living with the family again. You can imagine how well THAT'S going. There's a lot of 'ensemble' stuff in this one, featuring the Cullen Family Players.

Once again, JaspersDestiny is onboard as my Super Beta. And, once again, she has my many many thanks. If I ever win the lottery, she'll have an all-exense paid World Tour, too!

Chapters will most likely be going up on Tuesdays. Usually. This one, obviously, is an exception. Blame it on vacations ending and the impending return to work.

Things I know nothing about: How things work at the FBI. I'm totally with Quincy on this – all my information comes from the X-Files.

Chapter 1

"Christina! You're back from Mother Russia! How was the homeland?" Quin yelled, popping out of his office when he saw her walk by.

Chris Vilkas sighed. Quincy Anderson: geek extraordinaire, seer of aliens behind every assignment, annoyer of superiors, and her sometimes partner. She still couldn't believe he'd made it into the FBI, let alone through all the subsequent training. Especially when she knew for a fact that he'd actually put on his application that Fox Mulder was his hero and main reason for wanting to become an agent.

They actually let the man carry a gun. It boggled the mind—Christina's mind, anyway.

"For the hundredth time, Quin, I'm not Russian. My parents were Czechoslovakian." She rolled her eyes, even if her back was to him, preventing him from appreciating the action. She'd really been hoping he wouldn't be around. It was almost midnight, for God's sake. It should have been safe for her to just come in, drop off her shit, and crawl home for at least 24 hours of much deserved sleep. And maybe a hot shower...with real soap and shampoo. "And that has got to be the worst attempt at a Russian accent I have ever heard. You sound more like Bela Lugosi in Dracula."

Quin cackled. "I must be channelling him, or something. Look, you won't believe what I've got to show you!"

"You're right. I won't believe it. Whatever it is, I won't believe it. I never believe it. Look, Quin, as much as I love you and your theories, I am really tired right now. I've just wasted an entire month crawling around the slums of Moscow, tracking down false leads, with the KGB following my every move. Do you know how hard it is to work while you've got that creepy feeling that your every move is being watched?"

"There isn't a KGB any more, Chris," he pointed out.

"Whatever." She grunted and dumped her bags on the floor, kicking them under her table. She'd sort them out tomorrow. Or the next day. "Whatever they're calling themselves now. Eyes on me the entire damn time! No wonder people think Russians are paranoid, if that's what it's like living there. And all for nothing. Dead ends... Every single lead was a dead end. I just wasted a month of my life."

Her words seemed to sidetrack him from whatever he'd been so eager to tell her, and she smiled to herself. Crazy as her partner was, when he could focus on it he was really good at his job. "What about that Italian connection?"

"The deadest lead of all, literally. Which is a pity, since that one might have been real. I actually stopped by Volterra on my way back to the States, just to confirm what I'd been told. The whole place was nothing but a burned out, gutted ruin. The locals weren't very helpful either. Whatever happened was recent, within the last couple of years. I couldn't get permission to go in and see what—if anything—was left."

"That doesn't usually stop you," Quin said, looking at her thoughtfully.

"In this case, it did. The place looked ready to collapse. And I'm pretty sure if it had collapsed on me, the town elders wouldn't have been too upset. I'm also sure they would have neglected to mention it to anybody. No, I just took some pictures and came on home. We're going to have to go about this from a different angle. But not before I get my vacation."

"That's actually part of what I've got to show you," he said excitedly, grabbing her hand and trying to drag her back to his office.

She yanked her hand away. "No, you don't have to show me. You don't have to show me anything right now, Quin. I'm going home, I'm taking a shower, and I'm sleeping for the next few days. As soon as this shit is wrapped up, I'm taking some of that vacation time that I'm owed. Some place warm and sunny with a beach." She stalked off down the hall, not slowing or looking back at him even when she reached the elevators.

"Don't be packing those bikinis just yet," Quin murmured, watching her disappear through the doors.

~AM~

Three days later, Christina appeared back in the office feeling like a new woman. She really had gone home and slept for almost 24 hours. She hadn't even needed a sleep aid. The fact that she had been in a real bed for the first time in a month—her bed, on top of it—was all the drug she'd needed. After that, she'd treated herself to a day at the spa, followed by a much needed appointment with her hairdresser. To top it off, she'd spent an afternoon shopping. Now, after a morning locked in her own office sorting out the information from her trip and preparing her preliminary reports, she felt ready to tackle anything—including whatever her crazy partner so desperately wanted to show her.

"Okay, Quin, show me your aliens," she said, leaning against his door. "You've got exactly 25 minutes before I'm due upstairs for my debriefing."

His back was to her as he worked at one of his computers. "Actually, they aren't aliens. They're...well, after you see it, tell me what you think they are." He turned to wave her over and choked. "Oh, my God! You cut your hair! Why would you cut your hair?" He looked shocked.

"Because I felt like I'd brought home way too much of the Moscow streets trapped in it." Her hand went up almost unconsciously to feel her short blond hair. Once down below her shoulders, it now barely brushed the tops of them.

"But, but...I liked your long hair!" he said.

"And if you were my lover, I might have taken that into consideration," she said sharply. "But you're not. Now, show me the aliens before I change my mind and tell you I'm only watching work-approved videos."

"Oh, but that's the beauty of this one, Chris," he said, turning back to his computers. He didn't sound nearly as enthusiastic as he had previously, though, and Christina knew it would be a while before she was 'forgiven' for her new hairstyle. She sighed internally. She'd suspected for a long time that Quin harbored some sort of crush on her, but this was the first time he'd ever shown any truly outward sign of it. "It is work-related. In fact, it's directly related to our current assignment."

"Our current assignment? When did we get a current assignment? I thought my assignment was wrapping things up, and then I was getting a break…"

"Yeah, well, things changed while you were gone. You heard about the fall of Heriberto Hidalgo's empire in northern Mexico?"

"No details, just that there had been a major shake-up."

"Yeah, well, that's putting it mildly."

"Normally this stuff falls under Mexico's jurisdiction. Do they think there is some sort of a U.S. link? Or was he tied to that mess I was following up in Moscow?"

"Well, the Mexican officials aren't being too cooperative right now, to put it mildly again, but yeah, we have reason to believe there might be some sort of a U.S. connection. Seems like Heriberto was into more than just drug and weapons trafficking—"

"Human?"

"Will you stop interrupting me? You only have 15 minutes left before your meeting, and I want you to see this! And, yes, human trafficking. When it all went down a few months ago, a lot of the human cargo managed to escape, and a lot of those folks were American."

"Well, that's great...and now they're free. Happy ending for some. What does that have to do with us?"

"Just...watch." He spun the large flat screen in her direction and hit the play button.

"Now, this footage comes from Heriberto's compound, El Coyote, in Nuevo Laredo. Obviously, it occurred before it became the burned out hole in the ground that it is today. There's no date on the footage, but based on the fact that these people turned up on the streets of Nuevo Laredo soon after the compound was destroyed, we're assuming that this took place fairly shortly before said destruction occurred."

Chris nodded absent-mindedly, waving at him to be silent while she watched the scene unfold. There was no sound, but at the distance it was shot sound wouldn't have been helpful anyway. She didn't need sound to know she was looking at a large group of people milling around aimlessly in what appeared to be some sort of large compound. The shot showed the edges of buildings, but not enough of the actual buildings themselves to get any useful information. It was some sort of security camera, then. The people seemed to be appearing from the direction of one of the larger buildings, but in general, after appearing in the compound, they just wandered about.

"Why aren't they all just leaving?" she asked softly, puzzled. "I'm assuming these are the trafficking victims?"

"They were all pretty whacked out when the authorities started picking them up. They showed evidence of having been drugged for a very long time. Some of those folks had been missing for two years or more, and some of them indicated that the gates to the compound were closed and locked when they were first released. It was—is—a real mess. Just watch. There, at the right of the screen..."

Christina watched. Two figures appeared on the screen. They were tall, male, had light colored hair... It was difficult to tell at this distance, and the footage was black and white, but she would guess they were both blonds. They seemed to argue for a moment before the shorter one turned and walked away. The taller one grabbed his arm, and then the shorter one swung around and punched him. The taller one let him go, and he continued toward the crowd of milling humans. After a moment, the first one lunged after him and tackled him, landing a couple of punches before apparently scooping up a handful of dirt and shoving it in his face.

"What the hell...?"

"Just watch..." Quin whispered.

The figures jumped up, but the argument seemed to be over. The shorter one started wiping his face with his shirt, and then suddenly he turned and lunged at a nearby figure.

"Oh, my God..." Christina gasped, simultaneously stepping back from the screen and leaning further in to look closer. "Is he doing what I think he's doing?"

"If you think he's just ripped that dude's throat out, then yes, he appears to be doing what you think he's doing. Now, just watch. It gets better."

The crowd milling around might have been drugged, but not so drugged that they didn't realise something was very, very wrong. Christina watched as panic ensued in the group of people. The first figure appeared to step towards the...attacker, but then stepped away again when the man stood up before lunging at another person—an older woman this time. Christina couldn't really blame the taller man. She wouldn't want his attention turned on her, either, and it didn't look as if he was armed—or maybe he was, and he just wasn't all that bothered by what was happening. Although, it did appear that he'd tried to stop the attacker at the beginning...

She watched in shock as the man continued attacking people, obviously killing them as their bodies were dropped lifelessly to the ground when he was done doing...whatever he was doing to them. Her mind immediately went to the thought that he was feeding—feeding off them before discarding them. His companion made one more attempt to approach him before retreating with his hands raised in the universal signal of surrender. He turned and walked back through the crowd of people, who were now clearly more than a little panicked. A woman appeared—long straight hair, probably also blond, based on the light color. She approached him, and the two began arguing and gesturing at their companion, who continued to attack...and feed.

Christina's mind refused to accept that. That was not what she was seeing.

After arguing for a couple minutes, the woman stomped off towards the other man, who was now crouched over his fourth victim. She grabbed him by the ear and dragged him upright, shaking her finger at him. Christina didn't need sound to imagine what was being said.

It was surreal.

For a moment, all three figures conferred before the attacker disappeared from the screen to the right, the woman disappeared to the left, and soon the released victims seemed to be drifting in that direction. The tall man continued to stand where he was, not moving.

Really not moving.

Not moving in a really, really creepy way. Suddenly, though, he, too, turned and disappeared from the screen.

Disappeared really, really fast. Christina swore she didn't even see him move. One moment he was there and the next he was gone. Creepy. Definitely creepy.

The woman soon reappeared and began to almost herd the people back towards the left. Presumably, she'd opened whatever gate had been keeping them in before. It was like watching someone herd sheep—or chase chickens, really, was more like it.

The two men reappeared, and the attacker now wore different clothing.

How nice, Christina thought, he's cleaned up. The two men spoke for a few moments before the attacker left again. The woman now appeared, having cleared the crowd from the screen, and she and the tall man spoke for a few minutes. The man gestured in the direction that the attacker had disappeared. He rejoined them a few minutes later, they talked again, and then he walked off again.

Christina would give a lot to know what they were saying.

After he disappeared, the man and woman remaining set about cleaning up. That was the only way Christina could describe it. They went over to the bodies laying in the dirt, and they each picked up two, one in each hand, effortlessly.

"What are they?" she whispered.

"You're only now asking that?" Quin whispered back.

They both lapsed back into silence. Soon the couple—as Christina now thought of them—appeared again. They now had a black truck and appeared to be waiting—presumably for their friend, the attacker. The woman pulled out a phone and handed it to the man, who fiddled with it for a moment before bringing it to his ear.

"Did we try tracing—" Christina began.

"No luck there," Quin answered.

"How about a close-up of the number he was—"

"The angle was bad."

"Okay...shhhhh!"

Quin smirked. Finally he had something that caught her interest.

With the phone call complete, the woman got into the truck in the driver's seat. The attacker suddenly appeared next to the truck, and the two men talked for a few moments. Soon, however, the attacker was looking around the compound, and a second later he was looking right at the camera. He raised his hand and pointed at the camera, and the other man turned to look, too. The attacker opened the truck door and rummaged around inside before coming out with an assault rifle. He pointed it directly at the camera and the screen dissolved into static.

Christina stumbled back from the computer screen.

"That was some nice shooting..." she said, dazed at what she'd just seen. Her mind was having a difficult time processing it all.

"Especially at that distance," Quin agreed. "Don't you have a meeting to go to?"

"Shit!" she said, looking at her watch and running out the door.

~AM~

To say she was distracted during her debriefing would be an understatement. Luckily, her superiors apparently were able to get everything they felt they needed from her before dismissing her—but not before they made sure that she was aware of her next assignment.

Oh, she was aware all right. It was difficult to get the video Quin had showed her out of her head.

"What the hell was that?" she demanded, entering Quin's office and slamming the door behind her. "Was that some sort of a joke?" It had to be. Quin was playing her. It wouldn't be the first time he'd pulled something like this.

"That, my dear Chris, is our next assignment. Didn't they tell you upstairs?"

"Well, yes...but I thought it was some sort of set-up, something you'd faked, put together...you know, as some sort of a welcome home present."

"Oh, no. In fact, I'm hurt that you'd even think that."

"Whatever. Remember the whole 'the president is an alien' thing back in 2000?"

"Yeah, well, that was funny. You can't deny that. But, no, this isn't a joke. Heriberto Hidalgo's cartel has fallen, and it seems like these three might have had a large hand in it, especially since, you know, within an hour of the presumed time of that video his entire compound was nothing more than a large smoking crater on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, and nobody has seen or heard from him or any of his higher-ups since then."

"Then where did we get the video?"

"Actually," Quin chuckled nervously, "NBC."

"What?"

"Yeah, copies of the footage seemed to arrive simultaneously at several of the large networks here in the States about two weeks ago. Anonymously. Hand delivered. No prints. Actually, only NBC, CNN, and FOX even bothered to look at it. CNN and NBC contacted us immediately. FOX started playing it immediately, and so did the Mexican networks that received copies. After we saw the tape, we contacted several other stations, who checked around and found that they had also received copies. The original copies are all now in our possession, but of course—"

"It's out there in cyberspace now," Christina finished. The information age made their job both easier and harder. It had gotten to the point that you couldn't take a step or breathe without it being documented. It also meant that every step you took could be altered digitally and manipulated at will.

"Is it real?"

"As far as our boys can tell, yes. It has not been altered or tampered with. And we have other videos and pics now that sort of lend it credibility."

Christina sighed and collapsed in a chair. Visions of herself lying on the beach, drink in her hand and shades over her eyes, were fading rapidly. "Okay, show me what you've got."

~AM~

Close-ups of the two men as they turn to look at the camera immediately before destroying said camera gave them decent but blurry head shots—decent enough for "Have you seen this man?" posters should they end up going that route, which at this point they weren't. There still wasn't enough proof that they weren't Mexican nationals, let alone from the U.S. As things currently stood, it was still an internal matter for their neighbors to the south, unless it could be tied somehow to someone or something this side of the border. Right now their job—and that of their support team—was to make sure that it wasn't tied to any activities by U.S. groups.

"Do the photos trigger anything in our database?"

"Nope, not so far. We're still looking," Quin said. "Right now, though, they appear to be new players."

"New sick players," Christina said. "What the hell was that one guy doing?"

"You know what he was doing," Quin said quietly.

"I know what it looked like he was doing," Christina corrected him. "So, what, we need to be on the look-out for an up and coming drug lord who hires hit men that like to eat people?"

"Well...maybe a drug lord who likes to hire vampires. And he wasn't eating them."

"That is stupid. And you can stop right there with your supernatural bullshit, Quin. If this comes onto our territory, we are looking for a killer who has his own way of doing things. Maybe he just thinks he's a vampire. God knows there are enough of those freaks running around these days. Have any of the survivors—escapees—been interviewed?"

"Most of them are still hospitalized, at least the ones that were from the States. We've taken statements, such as they are, from most of them. They all seem to corroborate each other. They were kidnapped—from vacation, from work, but all, apparently, taken from south of the border—and held captive. Their time in captivity is blurry, at best. They weren't outright abused, necessarily, but neither were they well cared for. Kept drugged most of the time, kept in cages communally—evidently in one of those large warehouses you can see at the edge of the video. We have satellite pics of everything from before the compound blew up. We knew the man was trafficking guns and drugs but, to be honest, there were never any signs that he was moving people, too. Of course, we've only really been watching him closely the last couple years, and according to when all these folks went missing, they've been held there longer than that. Some of them went missing three and four years ago."

"Really? That seems odd. Doesn't seem very...um, economical, business-wise."

"Very odd. But it gets better! There used to be a lot more of them, according to some of the more...alert ones, but their captors early on culled the younger, more...um, 'nicer' looking victims as they would arrive at the warehouse. Those folks were never seen again."

"Don't need to wonder too much about what happened to them," she muttered.

"No, not really. We have a couple people trying to trace down leads on that end. But the rest of the people...well, it's really odd. No demands were ever made. No ransom demands were sent to families or employers. And they aren't your usual sex-trade victims. They're all fairly healthy, sure, but we're talking middle aged men and women here...or people that were, to put it bluntly, not in their physical prime, let alone attractive. Their captors never really interacted with them. There were only one or two guards in the building at any one time. They were kept virtually sedated the entire time. Able to care for themselves, but barely. Fed regularly, but if they got sick they were removed. In fact, evidently people were regularly removed from the cages, and those that were never came back. They're all pretty terrified, just relaying what little they remember. And if you do end up talking to them face-to-face, tread carefully when talking about their captors. They go into hysterics and start screaming stuff about 'red glowing eyes'." He watched her expectantly, waiting for her reaction.

She sighed. "I'm going to be running up against your little green men at every turn with this job, aren't I?"

"Pretty much," he said smugly. "And, hey, don't forget what you saw with your own two eyes—those two in the video picked up two bodies each and carried them effortlessly, one in each hand."

"Yeah," she muttered, "but I'm sure they weighed a lot less after having all their blood drained out."

Quin didn't reply, but his smirk let her know that he'd heard her.

"All right, what else do you have?"

"Okay, we made a few calls down to Laredo and talked to the cops to see if anything interesting had happened on our side of the border during that time frame, and...bingo! This is from The Red Roof Inn in Laredo, taken the evening before the compound exploded over in Nuevo Laredo—which, by the way, happened just after dawn."

He hit a button and Christina leaned in to watch the screen intently. The quality was extremely poor but it told her enough.

"Evidently, the folks on the third floor called the manager to complain about a group of three people causing a disturbance. A fairly destructive disturbance, at that. The police were eventually called in, but the troublemakers had left by then, after causing some major damage to one of the rooms and threatening several of the guests that had tried to intervene. A copy of the surveillance camera footage was provided to us...but as you can see, it's fairly useless."

Fairly useless, yes. It was an outdoor camera, facing the parking lot, and the quality was grainy and jerky. It showed three figures racing across the parking lot and getting into a Toyota Prius. The car was then driven across the median strip into the parking lot next to the hotel before it disappeared from the screen.

"By the time the police came back out, the car was gone and they were unable to follow it. But look!" He backed the video up and did a close-up on the figures as they crossed the lot. "It's our three from the compound."

Christina nodded. "Could be, could be..."

"It is," Quin insisted. "We faxed the hotel manager the blow-ups we got from the camera in the compound, and he confirmed it. The shorter man—the one doing the eating—is the one who rented the room. He was alone when he rented it, but later the manager saw both him and the taller man down in the lobby. It stuck out in his head because," now Quin was smirking, "the shorter one—our attacker—had come down to complain that the bed in his room was broken, and the manager was pretty sure it hadn't broken on its own. The man rented a total of three rooms on the third floor, but the manager only remembers ever seeing two people."

"Any additional footage?"

Quin shook his head. "Unfortunately, no. They wipe the drive each evening if there aren't any complaints from the night before. And they only record at night. Just a couple of outside cameras. It's not a real high-end joint, you understand."

"How about a name? If he rented rooms, he had to have had a name."

"He had a name, all right. Jack Bauer."

Christina dropped her head to the desk and banged it a couple of times, hoping it would help. "A real funny man."

"Oh, yeah."

"What else?"

"Well, it turns out Jack Bauer had been checked in at The Embassy Suites across town a few days earlier, but he only stayed two nights before checking out. And The Embassy Suites does keep their surveillance footage longer. So, here we go..."

Quin hit a couple buttons and then another scene appeared on the screen. "I've already edited out all the stuff we've deemed useless, but it's available in its entirety for you to watch later. Here we go—Mr. Bauer exiting the elevator into the lobby."

"That's not the same woman that was in the compound?" It came out as a question. This woman was short, too, but her hair was long and dark. Her head remained down, however, so Christina couldn't be sure.

Quin shrugged, pausing the video. "She could be wearing a wig, I suppose. But, no, we don't think it's the same woman."

"Who is this?"

"No clue. The only time we see her is in this one set of videos. To be honest, we assume that she's just a...um, prostitute."

"Never assume!" Christina snapped. Although, the way the girl was dressed, it probably was a good guess.

"I know, I know! But we never even get a good face shot of her. And, believe me, the team has combed over the rest of the videos. Anyway, shall I continue?"

"Please do."

"Okay, fast forward a bit...and we have a shot of them in the hotel bar. The lighting sucks, I know, but it's clear our Mr. Bauer is here to meet—surprise!—another woman."

Christina watched as the three interacted at a table in the otherwise empty bar—or, rather, as the man and the new arrival interacted. The first woman, with the long dark hair, kept her gaze to the ground and was ignored, for the most part, by her companions. The new arrival appeared to be Hispanic, also female, fairly young, and well dressed. They conferred for a bit, and then the woman left.

"Well, that's it. I actually spoke to the bartender a couple days ago. He vaguely remembers that night. He couldn't hear what they were saying, but he said the whole group made him nervous. Mr. Bauer checked out two days later."

Christina snorted. "The bartender probably didn't want his throat ripped out! Okay, so...we have Mr. Bauer meeting with a clearly Hispanic woman, and a few days later we have Mr. Bauer at the scene of a soon-to-be destroyed Mexican drug cartel leader's compound, with some questionable activities in between. I admit, it sounds suspicious...maybe...given that we know how certain things ended. Were you able to trace down anything to one Mr. Jack Bauer?"

It was Quin's turn to snort. "Of course. He apparently sprang to life from thin air the moment he checked into The Embassy Suites in Laredo."

"Of course. How about that car—the Prius? Anything on it?"

"The team is working on that."

"Is there any sign—any at all—that this could be tied to a group here in the U.S.?"

"So far, no. None of the groups we're watching have shown any indication at all that they're involved in this."

"So, either we're going to wrap it up fairly quickly and it'll be all Mexico's problem or we're going to find out that there's something major going on right here at home under our noses that we knew nothing about."

"That pretty much sums it up. You sound almost like you want it to be their problem."

Thinking back to the first video he'd shown her and the grisly outcome some of the people in it met, she shivered. "Yeah, I think for once maybe I do. What about you?"

Quin considered the question for a moment. "I think I want to find out what's really going on here," he finally said quietly. Then he brightened. "But hey, in the meantime, are you up for a trip to Texas? You said you wanted sun."

"Yeah, so not what I had in mind. Let me go home and pack."

"Better hurry!" Quin said. "Our flight leaves tonight at 8."