Author's Defense: Some of you are worried about Booth and wishing this author will let you see how he's doing. Right now, he's still in the hospital as this is only the second day since he was shot.

Meanwhile, there are at least three other good stories out there now that might cover Booth's experiences in prison: FaithinBones has Maximum Security, Delia84 has Pieces and AmandaFriend has The Lies in the Truth. (I'm not reading them yet to keep my mind clear for writing this one but if you're not reading those stories yet, you definitely should! All three are excellent writers.)

As for this tangled story, Booth is in the hospital, Brennan has ideas, and Max has a story to tell. We are officially AU, starting now.

FBI Note: IAFIS stands for Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Most states run their own AFIS databases but they can choose to submit fingerprints plus profiles on arrested suspects to the FBI in hopes that a hit from another state will help identify an unknown criminal or a perpetrator who left fingerprints at the scene. WitSec stands for the Protected Witness Security program operated by the US Marshalls. Most protected witnesses are criminals who testify against criminals who are bigger and badder than themselves in exchange for immunity from prosecution for their own crimes.

~Q~

Arabesque

A complicated decorative design made with many lines that curve and cross each other.

6. Confessions

Saturday
12:26 hours

"Listen to me carefully."

He said it so sharply that she was compelled to obey.

They'd gone out into the rural byways, skimming along country roads until he stopped just short of Dulles at Little Difficult Run Stream Valley Park. (Possibly one of the oddest descriptions ever applied to a single geographic entity, causing Brennan to wonder what in its history had caused the small park to accumulate so many names.) With Christine happily playing a few feet away, the two adults shared a blanket spread out under overhanging trees.

Between them a hasty lunch purchased at a small Mom-n-Pop diner was set out, but only Max and Christine had eaten any of it. Brennan picked at the crumbling, stale bread, knowing her father was right about the need to feed her body and mind but her heart refusing to release a path into her stomach. Anything she attempted to eat stalled about halfway down.

Not being able to see Booth, especially, had her innards twisted into knots. Awake or asleep, every time her eyes closed images of him bleeding scratched under the lids and the only thing that ever changed was the level of light in her nightmares: sometimes it was dark with the stink of cordite drifting around them and other times harsh florescent lights turned his face faintly green while careless strangers sang Karaoke in the background.

"Can't I just call the hospital," she begged for the third time that afternoon. What if Booth was awake and worrying about her? What if he needed her? What if they were lying to him the way they'd lied to her? The fears wormed through her mind, spinning cocoons large enough to shove every other thought aside until all that remained was her growing worry over Booth.

"We've been over this: you can't call in until we know it's safe. For now I've got someone checking on him for you. If he's awake he'll get the message that you're okay."

"Who is it, Dad?"

"Someone I trust."

Once again that's all he would say, and she knew it was futile to push any further because he had yet to yield any more than that. Finally giving up, she'd tossed away the picked-over sandwich and sighed. "Fine then, I need to talk to Angela and Sweets."

And that's when Brennan's father had spoken so sharply that he grabbed his daughter's full attention.

When she looked up at his sharp directive to listen, Max spoke again. "You are not to trust anyone inside the FBI."

"I know, Booth already—"

"Tempe."

She stopped, letting the words fall away unfinished. It was rare that he took that tone of gravity with her, the only times being a long-ago message on her answering machine warning her to stop looking for him, and the night when he informed her Pelant had found him at the flower drop. Both times he'd warned her of life-threatening danger with that dire pitch and now he was doing it again.

"No one."

Swallowing down a gush of bilge shooting up from below the constriction near her heart, she tried to understand what about mentioning Angela and Sweets had brought this sudden seriousness about. "Not even Caroline?"

Acclimating to such an extreme level of paranoia was proving rather more difficult than she'd expected, almost like evolving backwards. When she met Booth she didn't trust anyone. For years Brennan had been urged to open up, trust more, develop relationships and now that she had done so it was not easy to reverse the progress. Her father pursed his lips, gazing upwards into the leafy canopy that ensured no digital monitoring from satellite cameras while he answered. "Not even Caroline, but not for the same reasons."

"Well then, what reason?"

"The time may come when Ms. Julian has to prosecute Booth. The less she knows about our activities, the more useful she is to us."

"How could Caroline working against us possibly be useful?"

"Well, just knowing one decent person is on the inside is reassuring, don't you think?"

Brennan gaped at her father, flummoxed that he could be so glib about a death penalty murder charge. That was the harsh reality Booth was facing, a potential death penalty if the charges of murder went to trial. Recalling Caroline had prosecuted her own father (and nearly won), Brennan couldn't imagine why he would propose they take such a risk with Booth's future. Caroline was too good, too talented. No, they wanted a lesser lawyer taking up the FBI's case against her husband, Brennan was certain of that.

But when she said it out loud, her father shook his head in disagreement. "If it goes to trial, you want Caroline Julian to prosecute him. She'll play by the rules, that's something we can count on."

Nodding slowly, considering, she accepted his decision with a sigh. "What about Sweets?"

Max settled himself down, an oddly relaxed pose as he propped on one elbow and avoided her question with a peculiar comment. "Two months ago Booth came to me with some concerns."

What had happened two months ago... Brennan's mind flew backwards, stumbling over proficiency exams and Booth's stellar performance. He'd tested as exceptional, (at her urging to try for more than merely adequate because she knew he was exceptional and thought it high time the FBI acknowledge what a fine agent he'd always been). His score in the ninety-eighth percentile was 'genius range,' and Booth had come back the proud holder of the FBI's equivalent of a MENSA invitation. They wanted him to head up a field office opening soon in Germany.

Then had come news (from Sweets) that the FBI was reviewing Booth's military records, and Booth had grown restive.

Reluctant.

Worried.

And this subtle reminder came courtesy of having asked her father about trusting Sweets.

Sensing her confusion morphing into caution, Max help up a hand and held her off. "Someone in the FBI was looking over his military records and he was worried about the promotion he was being offered. Well somehow, Booth made a connection between ... certain events. He looked me straight in the eye, Tempe, and asked me something point blank."

"What did he ask?"

"I'll get to that later."

Eyes narrowing, she shifted into a position that would permit her to glare at him more fully. "I'm tired of secrets, Dad!"

Weariness pushed the words out so slowly she had little choice but to accept them. "So am I, Sweetheart."

A breeze shuffled the branches overhead, shimmering sunlight around them in their shifting patch of shade. She shivered, wished she'd have thought to pack some of her own clothing before running from a house that was no longer hers. I didn't think that far ahead, Brennan mourned. I didn't think that I'd be leaving for the last time...

Her breath caught as she replayed that night. Booth had certainly thought ahead, had procured and stored C-4, and had sent her straight to her father.

It must have become evident in her eyes, the realization that Booth and her own father had colluded somehow, and somewhat recently. Leaning forward now, Max spoke urgently. "I can't tell you everything, and for the same reason you can't tell any of this to your friends. If you care about them..."

"Lie to them?" Bitterly, she laughed because it was all coming full circle. "The way you and Mom lied to Russ and me?"

"Yes, Baby. The way I've lied to you."

Lies of omission...

Her whole life was built on his lies, and twice she'd endured the falling apart of Max Keenan's house of cards.

Up and away, she scrambled up off the old tatty blanket that had materialized from the back of their stolen car. Max had lifted a late-model Toyota Camry, the second most popular car on the road (making it blend in) and third most frequently stolen car in the nation (most typically they were stolen for parts, so police would start looking in known chop shops, not obscure parking lots). But he'd also taken care to pick a family car, complete with a car seat and picnic blanket.

Her father was nothing if not resourceful.

Her father, the thief. Her father, the conman. Her father, the killer. Liar. Fugitive. Savior.

Wiping tears and storming forward toward the trees, she stopped in front of blurry brown bark and looked up to delicate green needles spreading overhead like lace. Some of the needles on the tips of the branches were so soft and yellow she knew they were freshly sprouted, this year's growth. The tree itself she recognized from an ancient injustice: Socrates, sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens, had died by ingesting hemlock. (Not this kind of Hemlock but somehow this tree had acquired the same name.) Some historians speculate he was scapegoated because of his association with the Thirty Tyrants, a ruthless oligarchy that had briefly overthrown Athens' democracy and systematically destroyed anyone opposing them.

Fingering the coarse bark she considered powerful heads tucked into various crevices, a rule of the few. Over two thousand years later history is repeating itself: there is an oligarchy hidden within our Federal government, and it destroys anyone opposing it.

Her father had tangled with it in the past, when they had murdered an agent and framed a civil rights activist for the death. It was the same case that sent her parents into hiding, the same case that had restored the truth to her, a case that had, in many ways, cemented her partnership with Booth.

It was the first time he'd been accused of misconduct and cast out of the FBI.

Damn it.

She couldn't stop thinking of Booth. I can't do this without him, but he's lied to me.

Booth and her father. "We didn't want this for you..."

Tears spilling, the pain growing, and grip of terror that had never once let go of her since the Congressional hearing now whispered paranoia in her head. She needed Booth, his heart and intestinal instincts, but all she had was suspicion and lies. No one to trust but her father, telling her Booth had asked him a question.

Point blank, like shooting a gun.

What did he ask?

Booth, what did you hide from me...?

Hearing a step behind her, a small snap from a twig crushed, she turned to find her father's pained face and placating hands. "Tempe..."

"What did he ask you?"

The hands fell, no longer reaching, because he was looking down at them. Palms up, fingers loose, Max studied the tips and then looked back at his daughter with an expression she couldn't quite name. Pride, of a sort, but also the same sort of reverence that Booth often wore when entering a church. "He asked me who burned me."

The fingers wiggled again.

Booth had used such terminology once, long ago on a case with a confidential informant. "Who burned you?"

"He knew I'd been an undercover agent."

Under ... cover. Brennan's battered mind attempted to assemble the verbal clues and found it difficult without first overturning a rather fundamental premise. "You were a bank robber, Dad. I saw the arrest records..." Trailing off as her father's question from an hour ago struck her mind, she made the connection.

"...and yet you never wondered about the lack of fingerprints."

When Booth finally arrested Max Keenan for the murder of Robert Kirby, no fingerprints were found within the FBI's files or databases. No fingerprints were anywhere — she recalled Booth complaining about it.

Her world spun.

"Your Booth is an intelligent man, Tempe. He suspected as soon as he saw Ruth and my arrest records because there weren't any fingerprints in them. But he knew ... He knew when my prints didn't turn up anywhere in IAFIS."

Knew what? Unnerved now, she shifted a step backwards and demanded an explanation. What did a lack of fingerprints cause her partner to know? And why hadn't he said anything in all these years?

"That someone had either removed them from the records, or planted the criminal records in the first place."

In so many ways he was right. This man standing before her was not the man she'd known in childhood. She couldn't help the bitterness enveloping her questions. "Well? Which was it?"

"Both." He shrugged, giving her a sheepish smile. "Deep cover, it required a forged criminal history."

"Even Mom?"

Wincing, Max glanced away. "That happened afterwards, after someone burned my cover and killed Gus Harper."

"I don't understand, Dad. Why did Mom have a criminal record if she wasn't a criminal?"

"They give you one chance to go along with it. If you turn it down you're shut out but if you try to shut them down..." He shook his head, knowing Booth's fatal mistake was the same as his own, the same as many a good man or woman forced to make a choice between power, survival or honor. "I tried to blow the whistle, just like Gus Harper and that was the end of me. Since I still had some friends, I was lucky to get a warning they were coming after me, just like they came after Booth. I wanted to leave, leave your mother and you kids safe and just get the hell out of there but she refused, just like you refused to abandon Booth."

Proudly he smiled, remembering his brave wife and their brave daughter. "So I made a phone call, the last one I ever made as a law-abiding citizen. The guy who arranged my cover offered to make one up for my wife on the sly. And then, we ran."

Incredulity kept her silent for so long that Max finally ran out of words and Temperance Brennan realized she had run up too many questions in such a short span to even settle on the first one. Still, somehow the word "Who...?" spilled out, and incomplete though it was, Max took it as being worthy of pursuit.

He prompted her. "Who, what..."

"Who burned you?

Brennan thought back to the man Max had killed in her apartment, an Assistant Director of the FBI. Robert Kirby had been a former Marine Sniper and an agent with the ATF back in 1978. And Kirby was the one who had fired Booth right after taking a shot at Russ. "Was it Kirby?"

"No. It wasn't Kirby."

Well then, who else... The old pair of murders returned to her recollection, because right before Kirby — whose murder she was barred from investigating — there was another.

"Was it Garrett Delaney?" The former FBI agent was found burned and symbolically posed, 'spilling his guts' on top of a safehouse known to harbor FBI informants. Despite the nearly identical methods of death and dismemberment, she knew her father had never been charged with that prior murder. And why not, for wasn't an identical MO reason enough to charge him...? "You killed him too."

He sighed, rubbed his nose. She recalled Booth teaching her to spot tells in suspects, body language that suggested untruths. Max rubbed his nose (a Pinocchio move) but didn't implicate himself. He remained silent.

"Booth arrested you for murder, Dad. Why would he do that if he thought you..." It didn't make sense. She closed her eyes, leaning back against the poisonous Hemlock.

"He wanted to give me a chance to mend things with you. And, I guess, he hoped I would come out with it at my trial, that I would have to tell the truth to defend myself."

But he hadn't broken his silence. All through the trial, Max Keenan sat stoic like Socrates.

"The fact that I didn't? Well. That told Booth the man who burned me was still alive."

He's still alive.

Still heading the hydra.

"Who is it?"

"Tempe..."

"This man has destroyed my life at least twice! I think I have the right to know, Dad."

"I don't know who he is. There were so many, and at least one of them was working with the WitSec program in the US Marshalls. That's how they found out we'd forged your mother's criminal records."

Witness protection, U S Marshalls... She gasped.

Memories once again blasted through her, of a sniper and a US Marshall; of protected witnesses killed by a sniper who claimed he'd been set up. A sniper who operated by changing his identity. And another man who killed in order to draw attention to the FBI's most notorious protected witnesses and seemed to accomplish complete identity changes on a whim, even when held in FBI custody. One of them had died but the other was still alive. "Dad..."

Noting his daughter's sudden horror, Max turned to quickly spot Christine safely playing among the pebbles. "She's fine," he soothed.

"No, there's ... there's someone I have to talk to."

"Who?"

Jacob Broadsky, but not yet. No, first they had to get Foster's files ripped open. The answer had to be in them, and Brennan was certain that her friend Ethan Sawyer's code would prove to be the encryption key.

"Angela, first. And then, maybe, Sweets." She started to push past him, intending to pack up and return to work. Now. Immediately.

But he held her back. "No."

"Dad..." She growled it out, her own furious warning. Things were coming together and she thought, at last, there might be a way to confirm the identities of the men who'd come to kill Booth. Broadsky might know them, or their names might be in the encrypted files. Either way, she intended to overturn absolutely everything because Booth needed her.

Urgency pounded so loudly inside her that she barely heard what he said.

"Not Sweets."

This was what had set off the warning in the first place.

She stopped, shocked like electric current, because she'd wondered about it.

Rubbing his brow tiredly, Max blinked again at the Hemlock tree that had been supporting his daughter's weight. "I don't know who the ringleader inside the FBI is. But I'm afraid that your friend Sweets is working for him."

Uneasily, she bit her lip and looked down at needles littering the floor beneath her feet. Needles, Haldol, Sweets.

Experiments, lies.

No. Trying to force the suspicions back, Brennan reminded herself to proceed logically. Look for evidence, build a case. There's evidence that he's innocent. Drawing a steadying breath she pinned her father with a piercing gaze and challenged him to provide evidence of guilt. "Why would you think that? We've known him for years. He lived with us. He loves Christine."

Seriously, he grabbed her arm and held her still. That tone was back, the warning one. "Booth. Booth is the one who warned me to keep you away from Sweets."

~Q~

Author's Note: I know some of you will hate me for implicating Sweets but there is a very damning pattern that needs explaining. Hopefully Sweets has a good explanation but for now, Max has suspicions and he's not trusting anyone connected with the FBI.

Episodes referenced:
The Woman in Limbo
The Judas on the Pole
The Knight on the Grid
The Bullet in the Brain
The Future in the Past

Update on the Delay:

I know it's been ages! It's not writer's block so much as a huge time crunch, and Fan Mail came first. This story is on an unofficial hiatus while I'm finishing Fan Mail, which means I'm still taking notes and tinkering on plot in the background. In fact, I've already completed a couple of chapters beyond this one. My goal is to get a fewe more chapters of this story completed and then once Fan Mail is done I'll start posting again. Once you see another chapter go up, know that Arabesque will continue uninterrupted until finished. Total projected is about 12 chapters.