AN: Heavy spoilers for 1.17, Ruler. Please do not read if you haven't seen it yet. (And come back when you have, pretty please with paperclips on top?)

CIA BASE OF OPERATIONS

CLASSIFIED LOCATION

'Gonna keep burning the midnight oil, Carpenter?'

Nikki took a long drink of coffee from her Thermos and smirked at her co-worker, CIA Agent Matthews. He was the last member of the taskforce she was on (which had been put together to finish taking down Chrysalis' mysterious organization) who was still awake.

'I'm the best on a keyboard, Matthews, and my best work's all done at night.'

Matthews just shook his head.

'All you hacker-types are the same…' He got up and stifled a yawn. 'Well, I'm off to bed. Night, Carpenter.'

'Good night, Matthews.'

She let another half-hour pass, seemingly working hard, waiting, just to be sure they were all asleep, before she opened up a secure messaging channel that she'd encrypted herself, her posture and expression not changing in the slightest as she did so.

She read the single unread message.

You know how we feel about failure.

There was a file of intel attached.

A disavowal of four Phoenix Foundation agents. A retraction thereof.

Extra charges added to Thornton's rap sheet.

Internally, she swore, but didn't let her feelings show on her face.

That hadn't been the plan.

Mac, Jack and Riley were supposed to stay disavowed. They were supposed to wind up in prison, powerless and neutralized.

They were the biggest threat to the organization.

More specifically, Mac was the biggest threat to the organization.

He was Mac. There was no-one else like him. He could do things no-one else could.

She knew that intimately, so her organization knew that intimately, of course.

His skills had played into their hands and served their plans well earlier, but now, they were a threat that had to be neutralized.

(You could catch a fly with honey far easier than vinegar, but the fly could still escape the honeypot…especially if the fly's IQ was over 160.)

And Riley was one of the few in the world who might have the skills to crack her encryption, and she'd seen first-hand what Jack could do.

Besides, he'd follow Mac (and probably Riley too) through the seven circles of Hell.

That alone made him too big a threat to ignore.

They had to be neutralized. They were supposed to have been neutralized. That had been the plan.

Bozer was never supposed to have been there.

They were never supposed to have access to his skill set. (Which she had grossly underestimated.)

She swore internally again.

Matilda Webber was supposed to run a tighter ship, hold the line and enforce the rules more than Thornton had.

Her history with Jack was supposed to set her (somewhat) against him. She was supposed to take issue with Mac and the way he did things. She was supposed to, at the very least, put Riley on probation, and to be utterly bewildered as to what to do with Bozer, since his qualifications were shaky at best, and probably just stash him in the lab, keep him unseen and unheard.

That was supposed to cause tension between her and the team.

She was not supposed to send Bozer out into the field on this mission, even if it had seemed easy and straightforward (so they'd have their guard down), nor was she supposed to squander a precious favour to toss them a lifeline.

She could hazard a guess at how and why she'd been won over.

They couldn't control everything, even if they tried to. There were too many variables, too many factors you couldn't control.

Matty Webber's god-daughter's murder, for one. That had been a curveball and had almost certainly thrown a spanner in the works.

And Matty Webber had always been a little unpredictable and hard to peg.

And they'd, in hindsight, underestimated Bozer. Really underestimated Bozer.

And (Nikki cursed in her mind again) Mac was a walking miracle.

Pulled off the near-impossible pretty much daily.

(With, she now very clearly understood, better than she'd ever had before, the help of his teammates. His friends.)

You could never plan for that.

Mac was always terrible at sticking to plans. He was also impossible to plan for.

Anything involving him was impossible to plan for.

She really should have known that. (She did know that from experience.)

She took another sip of her coffee, taking a deep breath. Mentally, she ordered herself to pull herself together, and wrote out a reply.

Too many unknown variables; couldn't control and plan for them all. I know better now. It won't happen again. I haven't been made, they clearly still buy it.

She got a reply a few minutes later.

See that it doesn't happen again and that that doesn't change.

With a minute nod, she replied again.

Acknowledged, boss.

AN: I just had to write this quickly. I just had to! And yes, Nikki's remark about her best work being done at night has a double meaning, and her thoughts about Mac/anything involving him being impossible to plan for are also meant to be open to interpretation.

I really enjoyed 1.17, Ruler, in particular, those Mac and Bozer moments!

And I'm in two minds about the return of the Thornton/Chrysalis storyline. I've got two running theories:

1. The obvious as they all said in the episode – she set this up months ago to take them out.

2. The less-obvious: Nikki (and the organization) are the ones who did this, as I've postulated here – they set up Thornton, and they're still pulling the strings. I mean, the intel was CIA, Nikki is CIA, the Dutch politician was blackmailed by a woman calling herself Chrysalis…

If you'd like to read my case for both theories, please just ask in a review/comment/PM. Regardless, I guess we shall see! (If 1.18 is the Hawaii-Five-O crossover, then we've got 4 episodes left to tie this storyline up, assuming it isn't in the crossover, so I assume that it's going to be the season finale.)