Part Two - Five Weeks Later

Megan lurched through the freighter's hatchway, hot on Don's heels. She stumbled to a stop as she spotted Don and David leaning over Colby's still form doing CPR.

"Oh, damn."

She spun around and took off running for the top deck. Colby needed help and NOW! She ignored the fear that clawed at her soul and twisted her stomach into a knot. She had to; she didn't have the time to do otherwise.

She made the top deck less than a minute after leaving the stateroom, not that it didn't feel a whole lot longer. "I need a medic!" She hollered.

Coast Guardsman medic Jessica 'Jessie' Lewis looked up from her bandaging of the HRT's medic, Tim Ryan's, arm. "Over here!"

"I've got an agent down with two others doing CPR on him." Her words came out in a rush but Jessie and Tim understood her perfectly.

"Go. I'll be fine." Tim said, pulling his arm away from Jessie.

She nodded. In one smooth movement, she stood, collected her field kit and the basket used to transport the injured. "Led the way."


It was exactly as the agent had said. One down, two doing CPR and mouth-to-mouth. She came over and put her kit down, getting Don's attention. He stopped and touched David's arm. Startled, David stopped, glaring at Don but giving Jessie a chance to check for a pulse. Agonizing seconds ticked past. David, obviously thinking she was taking too long, leaned over Colby to start CPR again.

"No, I've got a pulse. Stop compressions." She barked at him, holding out one hand.

Those were the sweetest words Megan, Don and David had ever heard.

With David's help, Colby was transferred to the rescue basket and then carried out to the hovering chopper outside. Her field kit slung across her body, Jessie snapped the hook from the cable onto the basket, then climbed onto the basket herself, balancing on the edges and holding onto the cable.

"UCLA." She said, before the basket was lifted into the air.

Megan stood with the others, watching the slow trip up, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand. "Please, please, please, be okay." She murmured.

When the basket and Jessie were safely on board and the chopper was gone, she looked over at David and Don. Neither looked good at all. David was positively ashen and was leaning against the bulkhead. Don, the 14-year veteran, had developed a greenish tinge around his face.

//You can not fall apart, Reeves.// She reprimanded herself. //Fall apart later.//

"David? You need to sit down for a moment?" Megan asked. She had never seen him look so bad, at least while standing up.

He shook his head. "I'm going to help the HRT." He pushed off the bulkhead and headed toward the aft of the freighter, his steps none too steady.

Megan closed her eyes for a moment, then turned to speak to Don but he wasn't where he had been ten seconds earlier. "Don?"

//Crap. I need homing beacons for those two.//


Don had watched the little Coastie medic and David haul Colby's nearly lifeless body out of the room, Megan fast on their heels, he had even followed but the second the rescue basket was inside the big orange helicopter, Don had returned to where they'd found Colby. This stateroom, common room, what ever it was – //torture chamber// whispered a voice in the back of his mind – was a crime scene and clues as to what happened to Colby had to be here.

There were empty glass syringes on the table close to where Colby had been restrained; along with several tiny vials of…he couldn't even begin to say the names of the drugs. He could, however, make sure the hospital knew about them and, after dropping them into a plastic evidence bag, placed them in a pocket on his vest. He heard a crunch under his foot and looked down, spotting a video camera on a tripod, one of those digital camera jobs, lying on the floor. Curious, he picked it up and saw it was still recording.

"What the hell?" He stopped the recording and hit play back. First image nearly made him spit in disgust. Colby walking into the room and greeting someone like a potential friend, or coworker. He zipped forward, then had to stop and go back, watching as Colby allowed himself to be disarmed. Something had transpired but he wasn't going to rewind to see what it was. An unknown male voice's next words caught his attention.

"He's a triple agent, Dwayne. He's been feeding us lousy intel and spying on us for the FBI for the last two years. May I have the phone, please?" Mason Lancer stepped into the frame and Don couldn't believe how polite the man was as he took the phone from Colby's hand. Nor how calmly Colby gave over the only lifeline he had to the world off this damn cargo vessel. The very phone he had probably used to contact Charlie and he just gave it up. "How long were you planning on playing this? All the way through to China?"

"If I had to." The cold certainty in Colby's voice sent a shiver down Don's spine and he found himself looking for a chair. He hit the fast forward and stopped the recording again when he saw the man he now knew to be a master spy for the Chinese approached a now restrained Colby with a syringe in his hand. Don didn't catch all of what Lancer said, but what he did say made him ill.

"A non-lethal dose of tubocurarine. What it does is paralyze the muscles and depress the respiratory capabilities. Creating what I've heard described as the sensation of slowly drowning." The expression on Colby's face was painful to see. He was clearly having trouble breathing, his chest moving in jerky motions even as the tendons and muscles on the side of his neck popped out and his coloring worsened.

Don hit the fast-forward and stopped when he'd spotted Lancer moving away from Colby – once more brandishing a syringe. //This guy just doesn't know when to quit!// He thought to himself but, then again, from the looks of things, Colby wasn't about quit either. //Damn, Colby, what the hell? Are you really that deep into your cover – even at this late date – or are you just that damn stubborn?//

This time, it was Colby's voice that issued from the recorder first.

"It also causes hallucinations and loss of mental and physical control." How could Colby be so damn composed about what Lancer was doing to him?

"Good." Lancer sounded just like one of Don's college professors when a student had responded with a correct answer. "Then you'll know what to expect." Don didn't immediately hit the fast forward, he was glued to the tiny screen – condemned to watch his agent, the man he thought had betrayed him and his country, like a bystander watching a car accident. He didn't look away, he couldn't, even when the Grand Mal-like seizures ripped through Colby's body and he started trying to dodge something that only he could see. But he never made a sound. Don stopped the tape, feeling the bile rise in his throat. He wasn't sure he could watch the rest of the recording, but he knew he had to.

His hands shaking, Don had trouble reading the control buttons on the still unfamiliar camera, but he finally found the control he needed and sent the visual record into a fast forward once more, stopping it when he saw Lancer drop out of the frame suddenly. "What the…?"

Carefully stepping the footage back a few frames at a time, Don hit the 'play back' button when he saw everyone in the room react to something outside. "This is the FBI! Cut your engines and prepare to be boarded!" The announcement barely recorded on the tape, but it sent Lancer into action; he immediately loaded another syringe. Don stepped back a few more frames and focused his attention on Colby. There was a small smirk of relief on his face just after the boarding warning sounded, but when he looked back at Lancer, his expression was a study in bitter disappointment and utter helplessness.

Dwayne Carter's voice suddenly cut through to Don. "What are you doing?"

"What I said I'd do." It was calm, deliberate and Lancer plunged the syringe into Colby's shoulder and Colby's eyes clenched shut in pain. Don nearly jumped out of his skin when a gun fired too damn close to the camera's mic, but Lancer went down – his hand flying off the syringe still stuck in Colby. Then the thug Don himself had shot coming into the room fired a shot toward the left of the camera's pick up and Carter's body dropped across the field of vision. The man who'd shot Carter suddenly dropped – no sound here – the first shot from Carter had overwhelmed the microphone. Don stopped the tape as he saw himself come into the room.

He lunged to his feet, barely restraining the urge to throw the camera against a wall; they would need to show it to someone. Just who, Don wasn't sure at the moment, but everything on the tape was proof that Special Agent Colby James Granger had gone far above and beyond his sworn duties to bring down a real spy and traitor.

"Don?" Megan's voice echoed through the room. She had come looking for him.

He took the compact camera off the tripod and shoved it, damnable recording and all, into a watertight evidence bag and then into another one of the pockets on his tactical vest. He turned to see her stepping through the hatchway. "Yeah, Reeves?"

"You okay? Physically anyway?" she asked.

"No new holes." He didn't want to look at her just yet. He was trying to get his stomach and his emotions under control.

"Don?" She came over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "Look at me."

He shook his head and pushed past her to gain access to the outer hallway and, in a few precious seconds, the railing of the ship. Taking deep breaths of sea air didn't help. For the first time in over 14 years, Don tossed his cookies at a crime scene.

Megan had followed him and witnessed his disgrace. "Don? Oh, God...Don, what happened? What's wrong?"

He didn't answer for a few minutes, wanting to make sure he wasn't going to blow chunks again before wiping his mouth off and shaking his head. "Son of a bitch taped everything, Megan. What he said, what he did to Colby-- What Colby didn't say. Even when Lancer stuck the poison in his shoulder, Colby never cried out."

Megan had placed a hand on his back while he'd been heaving, and it was through that simple contact that he felt the behaviorist shudder. Don turned around, his back to the rail and sank down to sit on the deck. She squatted down in front of him, looking at him until he met her eyes. "We got here in time. You know that."

"Yeah, but we should've been faster. Why did I ever think, ever believe that Granger - of all people - could possibly have been a double agent?"

She almost smiled. "Because you're very good at your job and you followed the evidence, that's why."

Don leaned his head back against the bulkhead under the side rail, not caring that he cracked his head on the steel. "I should've followed my gut. I knew there was something off, something not quite right, almost from the very moment Charlie told me Granger's name was on Ashby's list."

"You crack your head open and you're on your own." Megan said. "Although with that thick skull of yours-- You want to play the 'I should've' game, go ahead. Not that it's going to make a dime's worth of difference." She shifted her body and sat down beside him, her back also braced against the rail bulkhead.

"It will to me, Megan." Don reached down and clutched the camera through the pocket of his vest. "I didn't watch the whole thing but Lancer was pressuring, torturing, Colby for a long time. Like he knew he could do what ever he wanted to do and no one would ever know. And I nearly let it happen." He stopped, taking another deep breath as his stomach threatened to explode upward again. "At least what's on this tape will clear Colby's name, even though it'll probably cause an international firestorm. I just hope the investigative panel can stomach watching the whole thing."

She almost smiled again. "They're going to, even if we have to stand there and make them."

Don smiled. For some reason he got a very clear image of Megan standing before the panel, her gun in one hand and the other on the throat of the chairman. "Just make sure they watch the tape, Megan. But...but don't ask me to let you see it until we know Colby's going to be okay." The thought of his next task immediately loomed large in his brain. "Oh crap."

"What? Don, what--?"

He slid over onto one hip, pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and started to dig for a particular card. "Chief Granger." Was all the explanation he gave her as he found the man's business card; If Megan was to run her own team one day, this was a duty he hoped she never had to perform.

Her eyes widened. "Oh..." was all she said.

Pulling his cell phone out, Don was relieved, and oddly disappointed, that he had good signal strength, even this far out from shore. "Megan, call Wright and see what he can do for the Chief. We need to make sure he's here when-" //Yes, 'when' not 'if,// "-Colby wakes up."

She nodded and pulled her cell phone from her pocket. She stood and walked a distance away and dialed. Don looked at the card and punched in the number for Cascade Idaho's Police Department. The phone rang twice on the other end before someone picked up.

"Cascade PD, Doris speaking, how can I help you?"

"Chief Granger, please."

"One moment."

"Granger."

"Gigi...it's Don Eppes."

"Don, it's good to hear-- Oh crap. What's wrong?"

Don took a deep breath, released it. "Gigi, Colby's been hurt. It doesn't look good."

"Hurt? How? He's in lock up!"

He swiftly prayed for strength and just as quickly as he could, Don gave Chief Granger a very fast, and incomplete, sketch of all that had happened in the last 12 hours, ending with: "Colby's being airlifted to UCLA Medical Center. Megan's on the phone with the director to get you down here as quickly as possible."

Just as he said it, Megan handed him a hastily scribbled note. On it were the words –

FBI Jet, Cascade airfield. Taking off now, flight time ETA one and a half hours.

"Don," Chief Granger's voice came over the phone, grabbing his attention again. "Just how bad is it? And, please, don't sugar coat it."

"Gigi . . . it's bad. He's worse than he was when Mad Hattie got a hold of him." How does one tell the father of an agent that the agent had been...for lack of a better term...tortured to death? Literally? "The Director is sending the Bureau's jet up to Cascade, it'll be there in three hours."

The sigh from the Cascade end sounded as if Chief Granger suddenly had the weight of the entire universe on his shoulders. "Thank you, Don. I'll let Cat know and then I'll meet the plane."

"All right. I'll be there when you land."

"Okay and Don? Keep an eye on him until I get there."

A sad smile crossed Don's face. //It's all my damn fault!// "You know I will." He ended the call before Gareth could say anything else. Megan was handing him her phone as he stood up. "What?"

"Director Hoffman wants to talk to you. He doesn't sound very happy."

Don scowled. "The Director knows where--" He bit his tongue, it wouldn't help anyone, least of all Colby, to get fired by mouthing off to the Director of the LA Field Office. He took the phone from her and, just because he could and the most the man could do was chew him out when he got back to the office, he closed it, effectively hanging up without talking to the Director. Megan's eyes widened and she shook her head.

"I've got other things to deal with right now." Don defended his action, handing the phone back to Megan. "Where did David go again?"