Up to his same old habits, Michael sneaked out on a sleeping Fiona for a clandestine meeting with his "old friend" Jason Bly (CSS agent) at a roadside diner. All of his team had told him NOT to make contact, then NOT to meet with the guy, but he did it any way. After test sparing a bit, Bly revealed that he had been tasked with investigation into Card's murder and so far he had discovered that Card wasn't as good as the CIA thought and that he needed Michael's cooperation so he could offer a "deal." At least that's what he called it; but, it was nothing more than Michael turn himself in and Bly would see if he could maybe do anything. His only rationalization was basically "do a favor for your friends and family" and told him that Olivia Riley had already captured Sugar and secreted him away somewhere unknown from even the CIA. The police that Bly had called (to protect his ass) sounded their sirens and Bly handed Mike a burner phone that he would contact him on later (huh?!) Needless to say Fiona was waiting up for him to have one of her "discussions." For once, however, it was a calm, mature conversation where she told him: "You wouldn't accept this fate for any of us, why are you willing to accept it for yourself?" She extracted a promise of no more talk about anything that puts you behind bars.
Their exit plan from Miami was to hire onto the crew of a cargo ship. Somehow Riley discovered their plan however and appeared on the dock just as Mike and Sam were handing a wad of money to the Union Rep who was telling them that their original ship had been "red flagged." Their lookout, Jesse, called to say a suspicious truck had just pulled in. They caught the weasel trying to making a surreptitious phone call from his pocket – probably as a bug to Riley – and saying that the CIA had port reps from Miami to Pensacola looking for them. They ran out the back door but Riley's team captured Jesse then came after them too. One of Riley's minions, Dean Hunter, garbed out in his SWAT armor and looking mean, shot directly at Sam as he was starting a car. Michael was able to take him down, capture him and escape even though Sam was mortally wounded. With blood dripping off his hands and short of breath he told mike he was
"just peachy Mike." Then he continued that he was
"just grazed" and it was
"nothing that a six-pack won't fix." They went back to the safe-house they were using and when they saw Sam both Fiona and Madeline went ballistic. Sam continually demanded they not take him to the hospital and focus their efforts on rescuing Jesse from wherever Riley had taken him.
One of the first things they did – right after blaming Mike for
"letting this happen" – was to tell Sam to
"Shut up! Nobody's leaving you." Madeline found that Sam had been lying, the bullet went in and didn't come out. He still persisted in saying
"Aw, come on Mike. I've cut myself deeper than this shaving." They needed Campbell, Fiona's EMT ex-boyfriend, so Fiona called him in while Mike tried to interrogate Hunter. Unfortunately, Hunter saw through the
"prisoner's dilemma" ruse and claimed
"I would take a bullet before I would turn on a friend. Do you think Porter would do the same for you?" When Campbell arrived he did take charge admirably; but, when Sam offered
"I know it's bad," he told him
"No honestly, it's worse than that." He, rightly-so, told Sam he needed emergency surgery but Sam refused. He told Campbell
"You listen to me pal. I’m not leaving. You try and save me here and fail, only one guy goes down. You call it in, it's gonna' be four!" After trying most of the techniques he knew, Mike decided to tell Hunter the truth about Card. However, he was pretty much as close-minded as Riley. He responded
"I've seen how Riley operates and this is a whole new ballgame." Fiona saw that Mike was trying to pull up some information on Hunter to use against him then decided to take the situation into her own hands. She went to the smug asshole, pointed her gun at him and described how she was completely different than Michael about hurting people and threatened to give him a "nine millimeter tracheotomy." Hunter calmly offered to help them get Jesse back in a prisoner exchange and unexpectedly Mike agreed in order to get Fiona out of the room. Before she could completely go bonkers, Mike calmed her by saying he had noticed that Hunter had secreted a piece of metal from a table. His plan was to let him get free in order to hack into the phone line and call Riley – which they could then trace.
Riley had taken Jesse to her off-the-grid "safe-house" for interrogation "by any means necessary." When it was obvious that Jesse wasn't going to talk she sent one of her burley goons in to beat him up. Eventually she went in to make threats and taunts. Even though he had been seriously beaten he told her
"Seriously? Wow, I am so disappointed in you now. You're supposed to be like this legend and you're coming at me with a good cop, bad cop play? Boo!" She continued the ruse and he offered
"OK, good cop. Dazzle me with your offer." She responded with erasing all of everything from his record so he could go back to his old job with CIFA having a clean slate – otherwise, she said,
"I'll find a nice dark hole somewhere to throw you into. You may see the sun again, you may not." She told him that she didn't believe there was nothing that would cause him to turn on Michael, then said that she had the complete file of a confidential informant involved in the murder of his mother from back when he was nine. Apparently Jesse had tried for
"ten years, six lawyers and thirty-seven requests" to get the file un-sealed, but without success. She even brought in a blue file and waved it at him claiming she had gotten it as part of a terrorist investigation. Instead, Jesse offered to give himself up and sign a full confession to get at the file but she refused. She, with great drama, said that the offer only lasted
"as long as it takes me to light this cigarette." In her arrogance she mentioned that his mother would want him to do it. That was the last straw for Jesse and he shot back:
"you don't get to speak for my mom… she would have said 'you never turn your back on your family.'" All she could do was click out her cigarette lighter and continue her charade by flouncing out of the room muttering
"that was such a bad decision."
Sam wanted Fiona to tell him what they had planned for
"GI Joe in there." She refused but his struggles started his wound bleeding again. Hunter did cut himself loose from his zip-ties and was able to hack into the phone line while Michael's voiceovers described how to do it. He was able to make the call using some head-phones and an electrical plug with dramatic music in the background. He told Riley everything about his trip to where he was being held with Fiona counting the number of seconds they'd been on the line. Schmidt had a scrambler on his phone line so Michael got his "three-towers" lock before Riley got her trace and they terminated the line. When they went into Hunters room with guns drawn he still had one last play. As he got up, he threw some kind of plastic ball at the overhead light and burst it for a distraction. He was able to take down both Mike and Fiona but not Sam who came up behind him, gun drawn.
"Next time," he gasped,
"just tell me the damn plan!"
With there new found coordinates, Michael was able to easily spot Riley's safe-house by all the fancy armored vehicles and new security shutters on an abandoned auto-parts store. Fiona instantly came up with a plan and went to Campbell asking him to obtain some "Sufentanil." He balked at first but when she told him their plans to rescue Jesse he reluctantly agreed. Miraculously he was able to obtain a carton-load of a controlled substance without a physician's prescription and Fiona went to meet Mike. They tapped into the buildings air vents and used
"a hospital vaporizer… to turn the liquid sedative into an aerosol and dilute it with a solvent gas." The AC unit began pumping the vapor into the building and Riley's people started dropping just as she was planning their search in the perimeters that Hunter had given her. She ran to the back room to get Jesse and go out the back door, but Mike had driven his car in front of the door so she couldn't get out. Riley was pissed that the door wouldn't open and her pistol shots didn't help. With her final gasp she called for backup at
"124 West Elm". After everyone was unconscious, Mike and Fi needed to immediately breech in and administer the "inverse" medication before they all got overdosed and died. They zip-tied everyone and Fiona gave the reversing agent to everyone except Riley. Mike demanded that she give it to Riley too; and after a bit of drama, she did. Jesse recovered and stumbled over to the blue folder that Riley had taunted him with only to find that it was completely filled with blank sheets of paper. The sirens wailed in the distance so they all had to scramble into the car and leave. Bly called at that very moment to say that he had just heard
"Olivia Riley and her entire team was attacked." Hearing the sirens, he told Mike
"you need me Michael. You need me now more than ever."
Back at the safe-house Madeline was distraught over Sam taking a turn for the worse. His
"pulse is weak and the pills Campbell gave him aren't working – he's burning up." Fiona said that there was a doctor in Coral Gables, who had gotten into some trouble and lost his license, who they could take him to. She claimed that she could get them there in ten minutes instead of the usual twenty. In the back of the car Mike was trying to keep Sam awake and said that they
"would do whatever it takes." Sam breathlessly confronted him:
"Ah Mike, just stop. Enough of this 'do whatever it takes' crap. That's your problem see? It's the stuff that you're doin'. You've got good reasons for things, but… you do enough bad things, you become the bad guy. Don't do it Mike. You're heading down a dark path, brother." He demanded that Mike look him in the eye and keep his promise.
"You swear to me that you're gonna' make this right." Michael did.
