Cut and Run 3 - Fish and Chips

when they reached dry land, but he had also expected a trip home, a nice shower, and some new clothing first. But there hadn’t been any detours from the waterfront to the Bureau office. They were to be debriefed ASAP.
    Ty sat at one of the interrogation tables — on the wrong side. They were bringing in someone to cut the ring off his finger while he wrote up his report, but they also wanted an agent to speak to him, which was unusual. He was a little nervous that he and Zane had missed something or fucked up somewhere, especially since Zane had been conducted to another room for a separate debriefing.
    He tried to tamp down the nerves as he finished up his brief synopsis of what had happened on the ship. He signed the bottom of the report and pushed it away, taking a deep breath to calm himself.
    The door opened, and he exhaled slowly as three men entered. SAIC Dan McCoy smiled at him and held the door open for one of the lab techs and Special Agent Scott Alston, who trailed behind him.
    “Grady. Good to have you back,” McCoy greeted as he seated himself across from Ty.
    The lab tech rolled out a piece of gauze and extracted a pair of sharp utensils that looked like a cross between scissors and a prop from Hellraiser . Ty swallowed on an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. The last set of utensils he’d seen rolled out in an interrogation hadn’t been used to cut metal. He cleared his throat and looked away quickly, giving the tech his left hand so the man could cut the silver ring off his swollen finger.
    He met McCoy’s eyes as the tech began trying to work one side of the wicked scissors under the ring.
    “Turned into a real shitstorm, huh?” McCoy said with a sympathetic smile.
    Ty snorted. “You could say that. What the hell happened, anyway? There were people trying to kill us left and right!”
    “Yes,” McCoy replied slowly, nodding. “We stepped in it. Sorry.”
    Ty stared at him incredulously. “Sorry?”
    McCoy shrugged. “It looks like you two never really got into the eye of the storm. You were more like… the cows who got tossed around on the outskirts.”
    Alston snorted and tried to cover it with a cough and a hand to his mouth.
    Ty glanced between them with a frown, unamused. “I’m feeling more like a goat on this one, Mac,” he growled.
    McCoy held up his hands in surrender. He had a small dossier in one. “We had no way of knowing all this was going on.” He slid the file across the desk to Ty. “There were four different groups at play. The feds, the Guardia di Finanza, Vartan Armen’s hired thugs, and a fourth group that appears to be antiquities dealers from Dubai. Where they came from, we have no clue, but they’re the ones who were trying to kill you. I mean Del.”
    “Why?” Ty asked dubiously as he opened up the folder.
    “There is a tenuous connection between them and Armen’s end of the business, and also between them and Del Porter, whose real name is not Del Porter,” Alston told him. “Apparently the thieves planned to take over the smuggling ring by force. Having all three members of the ring — Vartan Armen, Corbin Porter, and Lorenzo Bianchi — in one place made staging a coup pretty easy.”
    “From what we’re getting in interrogations, it appears their intention was to put each of the men out of commission somehow and then take their places at the final meeting on Tortola. Targeting Del — I mean you — was intended to keep Corbin on board the cruise ship with his injured husband. They were going to let the Guardia di Finanza take care of the Bianchis. And it’s anyone’s guess what their original plan was for Armen.
    “When they realized they weren’t going to maim you so easily, they went for hardcore and tried to kill all of you.”
    “Awesome,” Ty said sarcastically as he looked down at the typed documents. Everything Alston and McCoy had just told him was in there, and there was more.
    Those men would be locked up for a long time as authorities kept adding to their laundry list of crimes.
    Vartan Armen’s body had been claimed by Turkish nationals, and they had departed on a flight to Istanbul. The Bureau was working with the Turkish government to investigate Armen’s business, but it was slow going.
    The day after the final chase, a maintenance man had found the FBI backup team locked up in a grocery storage room in the hold. They were tired, supremely annoyed, and seriously wired on pastries and sodas, but otherwise unharmed.