A/N: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

Solitary 5.0

Chapter Two

A Strong Man

He liked Karl Kraus, the Austrian journalist and aphorist. He had read two of his books while he was in prison. Sure, he was glib…but that was the nature of an aphorism, wasn't it?

OK, what's that thing that Kraus says about how a weak man has doubts before he makes his decision and a strong man has them afterwards? He got that right, didn't he? Only I'm more scared silly….

The man who called himself Warden piloted the pickup slowly along southbound suburban streets, keeping pace with vehicles around him, conscious always of his identity as a member of the pack, the identity that would prevent him from standing out.

After a few blocks he turned in at the parking lot of a big box electronics store. He cruised up and down the rows until he found a parking space between two larger vans. Maneuvering the pickup between the vans and sliding the transmission into Park, he released the catch on his seatbelt, sat back, and drew his first full breath since he left the lawyer's house.

A strong man.

Ein starker Mann, as Kraus would call him….

He reached behind him to the gym bag he had brought solely because he wanted to ingrain the habit, and not because he planned an abduction that day. He fished around among its contents until he found the blue hard-shelled container, much like a glasses case, only larger, nearly eight inches square. Inside this case he kept all of his fake facial hair. He had been collecting the stuff for years now, one of the few true indulgences in his carefully restricted life. Glaring at himself in his rear-view mirror, he peeled away the extravagant muttonchop whiskers, a perfect match for his hair, with a touch of gray for extra verisimilitude. He replaced them in the case beside the eyebrows he had chosen not to wear.

Once he had disposed of them and the enormous glasses, he took a comb from his pocket. Peering into the rear-view mirror, he parted his hair on the left and combed the idiotic-looking bangs back tidily. He observed his new look critically. Now, he looked more like a salesman or an accountant than a hirsute would-be terrorist.

He turned in his seat and pulled the cord out of his back pocket. He had never used anything like the tranquilizer before. He had intended to practice giving injections, to study the effect of the drug. To look it up, for God's sake, in the PDR or at least online. What if the guy died?

But the lawyer was still breathing. Snoring a little, actually, head thrown back, limp against the window.

Right, but if he wakes up, who knows what kind of FBI tricks he has learned? I can't watch him and drive too.

Warden turned even further in his seat. As quickly and efficiently as he could, he relieved the lawyer of his nylon jacket and draped it over the back of the seat. Pity the jacket didn't have the FBI initials on it, too, like the billed cap that was still lying on the floor of the garage. Boy, what a great souvenir that would have been—but, no. It wasn't about souvenirs.

It was about justice.

He tied the man's hands together with the length of cord, then secured them to his upper legs. He draped the jacket back over his prisoner's lap and chest, covering his hands. Then he groped around behind the seat until he found a—well, it was meant as a pad for the seat of a chair, but it could serve as a pillow. He wedged it between the window and the lawyer's cheek. God, but he hated to touch the man! He could smell the evil on him, but it had to be done.

He settled back in his seat, rebuckled his safety belt, and pushed the gearshift back into Drive.

~ o ~

Penelope did not immediately recognize the Caller ID, so she just said, "Garcia, Analysis."

"Agent Garcia," a vaguely familiar female voice said in a low and confidential tone, "It's Jess Brooks, Aaron Hotchner's sister-in-law."

"Oh, yes, of course—"

"This will probably sound silly, and I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation, but I'm here with Jack at Aaron's, and Aaron isn't here. They were going to camp in the back yard, Aaron and Jack were, but Aaron is just gone. The van is here and the garage door is—" Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Jack will be back from the kitchen in a second and I don't want to alarm him, but the van is here and the garage door is wide open and Aaron's cell phone is on the floor with no battery in it. And that just isn't like Aaron."

Garcia frowned and touched her earpiece as though a closer connection would give her more information. "How long ago was this?"

"I don't know. We just got here, and…oh, hi, sweetie!" Jess's tone shifted as she addressed her nephew. "What kind did you decide on? Banana-strawberry? Oh, yum! Can you go back and get me a blueberry? And a spoon of my very own? Awesome!" Again her voice dropped into confidentiality. "I was out in the yard, and the tent and tarp are on the picnic table and they're pretty wet, so my guess is it's been fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe even half an hour."

"We're on it," Garcia said, trying to keep the grimness and tension out of her own voice. "You just stay calm and take care of the little guy. I'll have an army there before you know it."

And the Navy. And the Marines. And the fucking Power-Puff Girls. Everyone….

~ o ~

"What?" Derek Morgan fairly shouted into the phone. "Oh, man, this can't be happening again! On my way—have the rest of the team meet me there. Garcia, hang with me a minute, OK?"

Abandoning his nearly full shopping cart, he pushed his way through the gridlocked evening checkout line, oblivious to the annoyed glares of the shoppers he jostled in passing. In a matter of moments he'd sprinted across the front of the store and was out the door, running to his car.

As he climbed into the SUV, he tossed his cell phone into the passenger seat, letting the Bluetooth link inside take over the call once the motor roared to life.

"Give me the address, Baby Girl. I know Hotch's new place isn't that far from his old one, but I haven't been out there yet." Actually, he knew, none of them had. If Hotch'd been private before Foyet, he was positively off the charts now. No house-warming this time, and rumor had it he'd bent the rules far enough to run a thorough background check on every adult male within three blocks before he'd committed to the closing. Fool me once….

"8723 Westbrook Heights, Arlington, sending to your GPS now," came Garcia's voice over the speaker. The dash map lit up, one red dot indicating his present location, another his destination, with a yellow line indicating the fastest route between the two points. "I texted the others, flash alert, responses from all but Ros—no, wait, he's on board now too." No teasing or lightheartedness in her tone this time—the Foyet nightmare was far too fresh in all of their memories.

Morgan threw the Pilot into reverse, nimbly avoiding a heavy Hispanic woman walking past, and peeled out of the parking lot. "And notify the—"

"—local P.D.," Garcia finished the sentence for him. "Done. They're putting out an APB on Hotch, and a BOLO for an older-model blue truck with a camper cap."

"Truck? Camper cap?"

"I haven't been sitting on my hands, Morgan; I'm getting direct video feed from the security company Hotch uses. He showed up on the passenger side of an older-model blue truck, correction, blue Ford F-150 with a gray camper cap."

"You are amazing, girl. I just thank God we've got you in our corner." He squeaked through the tail-end of a yellow light and gunned the SUV up the on-ramp to the Custis Parkway. Fortunately, Morgan lived in Falls Church, only about five miles from the quiet Arlington district that was now home for the second time to his boss.

Uncharacteristically, Garcia failed to even acknowledge his compliment. Man, she's really in the zone. Put one of us in danger and she zeroes in on task like a sniper.

"Better send out a team of evidence techs, too, just to be on the safe side. I'll call you back as soon as we're all on scene and have something to report." He thumbed the "off" button and struggled to focus his attention on the road.

Jesus Christ Almighty, this is crazy. This just can't be happening.

~ o ~

The rain was falling again, splattering fat droplets with ever-increasing regularity against his windshield. Warden peered between them, searching for the logo of the apartment complex he had scouted out three weeks before. His idea then had been to use the parking lot as a staging area, because it was adjacent to the car wash he had identified as probably the best place to grab the lawyer, and because it had exits in three directions, onto three separate streets.

Well, won't need the car wash now …

There it was, Dartmouth in the Cedars, a midmarket scattering of three-story buildings with cream-colored brick walls, lots of half-dead trees, and consistently bad line-of-sight between the units and their assigned Dumpsters, which he supposed was meant to be a good thing: no trash receptacles interfering with the residents' views.

He steered the pickup over to the worst-located grouping of Dumpsters in the bunch and parked. Climbing out, he walked to the rear, slipping a pair of inexpensive driving gloves onto his hands as he did so. With four quick movements he collapsed the fake camper cap that was constructed from six pieces of plastic-coated particle board.

He felt a tiny pang of regret as he disposed of the pieces. That particular bit of camouflage had taken him nearly a month to create—he was not much of an artsy-craftsy sort of guy—but he no longer needed it. Like the FBI billed cap, it was just one other thing that had to be jettisoned to ensure success of the main operation.

Three large potted palms lay on their sides in the truck bed. Warden lifted them upright and secured them in position, draping their pots with tarps and utility rags. He peeled the stick-on Michigan tags from the truck's rear, exposing the Pennsylvania plate. He balled up the peeled plastic tape and pitched it into the Dumpster with the discarded plate and the particle board.

Finally he groped around under the tarps and located magnetic signs advertising a fictional Altoona landscaping company. He affixed one to each of the truck's doors, then he stripped off first his gloves, and then the brown corduroy shirt, exposing a mottled pink tee shirt with the logo of an Atlantic City casino. A billed cap, the imaginary landscaper's logo embroidered on the front—needlecraft was included in Warden's skillset; he had spent several satisfying evenings in his recliner in front of the TV with his sewing supplies beside him and the History Channel on the screen—and his new look was complete. There was another cap as well, one that matched his own. He carried it back to the cab.

The lawyer appeared not to have moved while he was occupied, but Warden did not intend to take any chances. Slipping his keys between his knuckles so that the metal tips protruded, he leaned in from the driver's side and poked at the lawyer's ribs a couple times, not hard, but firmly.

Nothing but a mechanical exhalation escaped him. He was still out cold. Warden arranged the second cap on the lawyer's head, tilted forward and to the side as if to facilitate napping. He admired his results for a few seconds, then turned around and buckled up.

He started up the engine again and exited the parking lot on another side, merging smoothly into northbound traffic this time.

~ o ~

Morgan, Rossi, and Reid stood in Aaron Hotchner's driveway, arms crossed and expressions grave as the high school girl across the street repeated her story.

"I saw, like, everything," she said, her eyes still wide with excitement. "I saw Mr. Hotchner come out of his garage with a big bunch of stuff, and the guy with the truck, he was driving down the street slow, like he's looking for an address or something, and then I guess that the guy in the truck waved at Mr. Hotchner, Mr. Hotchner nodded back, like saying 'Hi,' you know? Then Mr. Hotchner went around to his back yard, and the guy in the truck went over there," and she nodded nervously at the house next door, "where the Martinez family used to live, you know?

"And like a couple minutes later the guy with the truck pulled into the Martinezes' driveway and he and Mr. Hotchner got in the truck. And it looked to me like Mr. Hotchner was walking kinda wobbly, and I thought maybe he got sick, you know? And the guy who was driving the truck, he was smiling, he seemed real nice, like maybe he was helping him? Like maybe Mr. Hotchner got sick or injured and he was gonna run him over to Urgent Care or something?"

Morgan tried not to glare at the girl. "And you saw no weapons?"

"Huh? No! The guy from the truck, he had a 'do on him like a total dork, you know? But I didn't see any weapons at all. He just had, like, a stick, you know? I thought maybe he was picking stuff up on the grounds at the Martinez place."

"A stick?" Rossi echoed. "How did he hold it?"

The girl shrugged helplessly. "Like a stick, you know? Nothing special." She mimed holding something low in her right hand, near her hip, holding it more like a knife than like a stick or a hand gun. She held her hands ten inches apart. "It was about like yea, you know, just a plain old brown stick."

They thanked her and sent her back to the homework she had been doing on her family's screened-in porch.

"It just doesn't make sense," Rossi rumbled. "Aaron is an insanely high-risk target for one single UNSUB to take on. A senior federal agent, ex-SWAT, armed and observant—"

"Not armed," Morgan said. "I just got his combination. Both weapons are in his gun safe. And Garcia's techs have confirmed that nobody named Aaron Hotchner has visited any clinic or emergency room. No middle-aged white John Does, either."

Reid continued to watch the teenaged girl cross her parents' lawn. "Where are we on getting their security footage?" he said, nodding toward the girl's house.

Morgan glanced over his shoulder at the property in question. "Should have it soon. Husband isn't home, wife wasn't sure who to call or how to go about getting it."

Rossi refolded his arms. "OK, look, I'm the UNSUB. I know that Aaron's likely to be missed immediately—which he was—and a guarantee that the full force of the Bureau is gonna come down hard to get him back." He ran his fingers through his hair. "Could this guy do anything else wrong? But he pulls it off—" He shook his head. "And practically nobody knew we were home from Wisconsin yet, let alone that Hotch was planning to camp out with Jack tonight. And one guy took him out? One single guy?"

"Nobody saw a second person, let alone a second vehicle," Reid confirmed. "Prentiss and I have been all up and down the street." He nodded toward the curb. "He was parked over there, almost exactly where JJ's car is parked now.

"Everyone who remembers seeing it agrees it was a dark pickup with a light-colored camper cap. From there on, we start getting into 'eye-witless' territory. It was black, it was blue, it was dark blue. The cap was gray, it was silver, it was white. But everyone agrees it was only the one white guy, thin, in a brown shirt or brown short jacket and blue jeans. But he was tall, he was short, he was medium. His hair was brown or blond or gray. He had a beard or he had a beard and a mustache, or he had big bushy sideburns. Everyone agrees that he wore black-rimmed glasses."

"But with no weapon…do you think he made a threat, maybe to Jack, or the neighborhood, or—" Morgan asked. He didn't finish the thought. If someone had threatened the Team, it would have hit Hotch as hard as threatening his blood family.

"Wouldn't surprise me in the least," Rossi grumbled. "That would certainly give him an edge, trying to force compliance out of Aaron—"

"Got it!" JJ said, jogging out of the house with her iPad engaged. "Garcia's shooting it over to Kevin for further analysis, but here's the truck—" She turned the iPad and displayed a Ford F-150 of uncertain vintage, but probably from the mid-nineties. The camper cap was gray and silver. "And here's our UNSUB—" She flipped to a closeup of the truck showing its driver, a man of middle age wearing a corduroy shirt in a brown so light it was almost butterscotch. He wore heavy black-rimmed glasses and sported a luxuriant set of muttonchop whiskers.

As they watched the security camera footage, the man drove down the street twice, looking up and down the block. He checked his watch, consulted some papers that he picked up from beside him on the seat. He peered up into the sky as though wondering when the light rain would stop. At no time did the man demonstrate any particular interest in the Hotchner residence. If anything, he paid more attention to the vacant house next door. He seemed more like some random contractor preparing for a meeting with a potential customer than anything else.

"He's good," Morgan conceded. "Got to be a pro. Any luck yet getting the footage from the house next door?"

Jareau's shoulders lifted, then dropped. "We located the owner's representative, local lawyer, says the system is only intended to identify vandals, so a limited field of vision, and it only takes a few frames every minute or so. He's on his way down to unlock the place and give us access."

The four of them exchanged glances. If the victim had been someone else, if Aaron Hotchner had been there as part of their team, he would have had the attorney sweet-talked into giving them instant access half an hour ago.

Morgan's phone sounded. He glanced at the faceplate. "You're on speaker, Baby Girl."

"Kevin has worked his magic," Garcia said. "It's a 1997 Ford F-150, Michigan tags," and she read off the number. "Tags belonged to the late Ramona Blankenship of Adrian, Michigan, and supposed to be on a 2006 Ford F-250. Ms Blankenship died last winter, carbon monoxide poisoning. Her daughter in Cleveland inherited the truck—hang on, getting input from Sonia, we have every tech in the building on this, I swear—Ms Blankenship's daughter still owns the truck, although it has Ohio tags now. She says the Michigan plate is still in her garage. She just went outside and checked.

"Within eight minutes of the abduction, I have that vehicle showing on six southbound traffic cameras, then it drops out of sight. Anderson is working with Virginia State Police to blanket the areas…."

As she spoke, a black hybrid pulled into the adjacent driveway. An elderly man in a suit and tie emerged and waved uncertainly at them.

"FBI?" he called.

Four sets of creds came out, not that he could read them at that distance. "Steinvogel," he told them. "I'll pull the security cam footage for you."

Morgan turned moodily back toward the interior of the Hotchner garage, where Aaron's green soccer-dad minivan stood. He looked at the dusty floor and at the disturbances in the dust, disturbances that Bureau techs were photographing with several alternative light sources in hopes that more data would become visible.

He turned again to his teammates. "If this was a pro," he said, "then this is not a one-man operation. And you know what that means."

Reid nodded, always eager to answer any question, even one for which everyone already knew the answer. "A criminal enterprise," he replied. "An almost unlimited number of extra vehicles, even decoy vehicles. On the plus side, a criminal enterprise pays its participants, and paid participants can be turned. We just have to figure out which criminal enterprise Hotch has angered, and we're on our way to a solution." He glanced back and forth among his comrades. "And while it can be argued that the Bureau annoys every criminal enterprise, the BAU has a narrower window of criminal enterprises it interferes with. Most of our targets are individuals."

"Potentially something," Gus the evidence tech announced. Gus was constitutionally the kind of tech who doubted everything, who took nothing for granted. From Gus, "potentially" was practically "for damn sure."

"What have you got?" Rossi asked.

"Couple things. The cell phone was wiped but it still has some partials on it. Lab already has it. And this—" Gus displayed a tiny piece of metal on the palm of his gloved hand. "Battery for the cell, found it over there, practically under the left rear tire. Probably too small for a useful print, but you just never know. And then there's this."

Gus gestured at the dusty poured concrete floor, then called up some alternative-light-source images on his digital camera. "See here? Hotchner's a twelve-and-a-half, we've got his shoe prints all over here, but we've also got four full prints and seven partials of a work boot, size nine. It's a reasonable inference, given the way it appears both over and under Hotchner's prints, that it's from our guy's feet."

Every little bit helped. "Brand name of workboots?" Morgan asked. He could see no footprints at all with the naked eye, but he knew what kind of magic the techs could do with different types and angles of light.

Gus shrugged. "I shot it over to the database guys," he said. "Should have something in the next couple minutes."

The UNSUB might be good, might be a pro, but it was unlikely he would think to change his footwear. Nobody could think of everything.

Reid studied the floor of the garage. "The cell was there?" he murmured, indicating a spot on the floor. "And the battery there?" He squatted in the driveway and studied angles. "I think the UNSUB threw it," he said. "I don't see how it could have wound up there naturally." He squinted up into the high-intensity lights the crime scene techs had set up.

~ o ~

Hotchner's sense of hearing returned before anything else: the sound of windshield wipers on high speed, the thundering of rain on the roof of the vehicle as it bounced along a poorly maintained surface.

Truck. Blue truck. The whole lunatic situation came back to him, a piece at a time. The man with the glasses and whiskers, the man with the needle and the cattle prod. The man who had threatened to hurt Jack and Jess. Who had lied to him. Or so he said.

He opened his right eye. His vision was partially blocked by a pillow of some kind that had been inserted between his cheek and the window. Yellow floral something. Ahead was a two-lane rural road, barely visible as dusk descended; the truck's wipers were no match for this downpour.

He took stock carefully, slowly. His jacket was gone—no, it was arranged across the front of his body. His hands were restrained. He tried to move them; they seemed to be fastened to his thighs. He still had his hat. No, wait—he tried to roll his right eye upward and to the side without moving the rest of his face. Probably thanks to lingering effects of the sedative he'd been given, it was trickier than he'd thought it would be—nope, the bill of the cap was gray-blue, not the deep navy of his FBI cap.

"Good morning, sleepyhead," said that annoyingly prissy voice. "Let me just pull over, and I'll help you get back to sleep."

He thought that he had moved only slightly and very carefully. Apparently as he awakened, his breathing pattern had changed, and his captor had noticed it. But, no. How could he have heard it over the hammering of the rain, the frantic chick-chock-chick of the wiper blades?

"You jerked when you woke up," the UNSUB informed him, as if he had read his mind.

Control freak, he reminded himself. Freak, period. Said I couldn't talk without permission. No sense in trying to fake still being asleep. Might as well do this on his terms.

He turned to confront his captor and was surprised to see that the heavy glasses and extravagant sideburns were gone and his hair was combed differently, changing the general shape of his face. It wouldn't fool Garcia's facial recognition software, but it could fool human witnesses.

He is clever, organized, educated. Remember this. Use this.

Aaron took a slow, steadying breath, then said, "May I speak?"

"Well, good for you!" his captor replied, almost jovially. "You remembered the rules! Certainly you may, at least for a moment."

Several questions were topmost in his mind. He wondered how many he would get away with asking. "Where is my son?" he asked.

"I have no idea," the UNSUB told him. "The last time I saw him was last weekend when you and he did the grocery shopping."

His words took Aaron's breath away, but he tried to keep his tone casual. "How long have you been following me?"

The UNSUB smirked. "Oh, off and on, for the better part of a year. Intensively, just since April." When Aaron looked at him the smirk broadened into a maddening Cheshire-Cat smugness. "I gather that spotting surveillance isn't your specialty, either."

Hotchner said nothing.

"Then the two of you went to the library and the Olive Garden with your sister-in-law and her current boyfriend. Bill Hammer, is it? Hummer? The one who just had the cast removed from his right wrist? He must be the Olive Garden fan, because when he isn't with you, you usually go to Red Lobster."

Aaron inhaled slowly and let air out. The guy's name was Hamrick, and Aaron had checked him out from here to next Thursday because he no longer trusted anyone. And, yeah: Bill hated Red Lobster so much that he always offered to pick up the tab if they would go to the Olive Garden instead.

How could I possibly have missed this guy trailing around after me?

"But he's all right?" he asked, still desperate for reassurance.

His captor seemed to snicker. "Little Jack? Unless in your absence he has Captain-Crunched himself into a sugar coma," he replied. "Or his auntie's boyfriend is as thuggish as he looks. But they are in no danger from me. You have a very sharp little boy there. Polite. Observant."

As a father, Aaron felt his heart swell to hear his son praised in those terms. As a prisoner, he felt a stab of fear at the observant part of the assessment. Did his captor consider Jack some kind of danger?

And then there was the creepiness of polite and its implications.

This bastard has spoken to my son?

Before he could formulate a way to ask yet again about his son's well-being, his captor said, "I don't hurt innocents. Your son is safe with his Auntie Jessica, and they have probably long since discovered your absence and called for help. The cavalry has surely descended by now. Your Team, your merry little federal band of obsessives—ah, here we go…."

The truck bounced into a gravel driveway that Aaron had not even seen through the dark and the storm, and came to a halt in front of a squat white-washed building, probably a long-defunct gas station. While there were no longer any pumps on its small concrete apron, a rusty metal Pennzoil sign flapped noisily in the wind above a door whose glass panels had long since been replaced with plywood.

The man behind the wheel of the truck flicked on the overhead light. "Let me help you get back to sleep," he said again, his voice soothing.

"I don't want to go back to sleep," Aaron said, and he sounded petulant even to himself. He tugged uselessly on his bonds. "Who are you?" he asked. "What do you want with me?"

His abductor reached down between his legs for something under the seat. He withdrew a small case, which Hotchner belatedly recognized as the case where the drugs had been kept. "You may call me Warden," he said. "What do I want with you? Why, only for you to pay for your crimes." He filled the hypodermic and turned slightly in his bucket seat. "Hold still now." He jammed the needle into Aaron's arm and depressed the plunger. "And for now I need to you to shut up and go back to sleep. We have a long journey ahead of us."

Hotchner tried to fight the drug although he knew it was a pointless effort. Within just a few seconds the world had started going warm and gray and fuzzy. He tried to say something, he wasn't sure what, and he drifted back into unconsciousness.