"Sir, please, I'm asking you for the last time, the wallpaper is just fine," the nurse on duty in the hospital waiting room back in Harrisburg chided Adrian, who was obsessively fiddling at the seams.

"This is all wrong," the detective mumbled softly, flicking away at the edges, "Got to correct it, got to do something..."

"Sir, I'll have to inform..."

"LOOK DON'T BOTHER ME!!!!" Adrian yelled at her. The nurse, stunned, stepped back and left him alone. Adrian thumped his head against the wall in despair. He felt so helpless and miserable.

The last three hours had been the second most excruciating of his life. Sharona had at least been able to stop the bleeding from the wound, but Julie had remained unconscious up till the point the ambulance had mercifully arrived. She'd been in emergency surgery for the last two hours, and Adrian didn't know how much longer he could take the suspense without coming apart. Worse, he deeply feared how Natalie was going to take it if things did not go well. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted she was still at the window she'd been kneeling by without moving for the last half hour, still praying intently. He had a strong feeling this was exactly how she'd reacted when she'd gotten the letter that Mitch was not coming back.

Speaking of Mitch, the detective saw him rematerialize next to his wife, looking solemn. He put a misty hand on her shoulder and rubbed it reassuringly. Natalie seemed to ease up a small bit from this act of comfort. Not wishing to disturb her, Adrian raised his hand towards Mitch and gestured him over. "You've got to do something," he whsipered frantically once they were face to face, "Please, bring her out of it safely, none of us can go on without...!"

"It's not my decision to make, Monk," Mitch shook his head, "If it's her time, there's not much else that can be done. What I'm doing now is all I can do."

"But there's got to be something!" Adrian picked up the chairs in the waiting room and shifted them around, not noticing or caring that in his despair he was leaving them crooked, "It can't end like this! Not like this! If she can't...!"

"Adrian, who are you talking to?" came Sharona's equally stressed-out voice behind him.

"Uh...my, myself," Adrian quickly spun and flashed an innocent smile. He looked over his shoulder to see Mitch had gone back to comforting Natalie, which the detective guessed was better than doing nothing at all. His former employee stared at him suspiciously. "Maybe you need testing as well," she said with a long, helpless sigh, "I don't know how we're going to make it through without..."

"It's my fault," Benjy spoke up from behidn her. His mother spun. "Why you?" she asked, concerned.

"It was my idea to go there; I put her in harm's way," he admitted tearfully, "I'm bad luck, everyone around me gets hurt: first the maid, now her..."

"Oh don't you dare think that," Sharona hugged him close, "This is not your fault at all. You're the sweetest, most wonderful child anyone can wish for. Why don't we go down the cafeteria and have something to eat? I think we need to get away from all this right now."

She led him off towards the elevators. Adrian slumped back into the middle chair in the row nearest to the operating room doors and stared miserably straight ahead. The suspense of waiting was clearly having an darker effect on the rest of the group as well. Disher was staring ahead as well, not even noticing the magazine in his lap, while Stottlemeyer had been pacing in the same tight circle for the last half hour, openly sobbing for only the fourth time that Adrian had known him. His father hadn't even bothered coming up, looking too shocked to be able take it. He'd been down in the cafeteria all this time with a similarly morose Ambrose, although Adrian suspected he didn't really have an appetite for anything at the moment.

There was a shuffling into the seat next to him. "You should know I ran the shooting angle into a standard radius algorithm," an equally distant Charlie told him, "Any news?"

"None whatsoever," Adrian said without turning around, "I'm getting worried now."

"Well if it's any comfort, Don's searching Big Round Top for the shooter's location," the mathmatician told him, "Given the diameter available from the distance the bullet traveled, we narrowed down the possible field to an area of about three square miles. I just hope I'm not off on...the situation being..."

He put his head in his hands. "I never understand how the criminal mind works," he admitted slowly, "It's like a foreign set of logic, why anyone would want to do something like this. To get a glimpse into this mind is frightening. There was this one time the F.B.I. office got shot up. For the longest time I didn't want to be..."

Adrian held up his hand to silence him, as the doors to the emergency room were now swinging open. The surgeon whom he recognized as the one who'd been assigned to Julie shuffled out. The waiting room went deathly quiet. "Mrs. Teeger?" he called out.

"Yes!?" Natalie charged right up to him, "Please tell me she'll live, please give me some good news...!?"

"OK, the good news is, we were able to extract the bullet without any problems, and it doesn't appear to have damaged any vital organs," the surgeon told her, "Unfortunately, we can't be sure that side effects won't surface, so I'm afraid she's going to remain in a medically-induced coma until we have the chance to..."

"That isn't good enough!" her mother seized him suddenly by the collar, "I can't live without her, do you understand me!? I want to know for sure she's all right, so get back in there and fix whatever needs to be fixed, right now!!"

"Mrs. Teeger, did you even hear me!?" the surgeon looked very worried for his own health, "There's not much else we can do at the moment that...!"

"I DON'T CARE!!!" Natalie bellowed, shaking him hysterically, "GET BACK IN THERE AND HELP MY BABY!! GIVE HER SOMETHING, ANYTHING, OR I'LL RIP YOU LIMB FROM LIMB, YOU (she used a rather strong phrase to describe the surgeon, one Adrian would not have thought her capable of saying under any other circumstances)!!!! I SWEAR TO GOD I'M NOT JOKING!!! NOW DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING!!!!!!"

"Nurse, help me!!" the surgeon screamed the nearest one. The nurse took one look at the situation, and waved frantically to some passing orderlies. These men rushed forward and pulled the still shrieking Natalie off him. "I think she needs some medical attention of her own," he instructed him, taking deep breaths, "Several ccs of tranquilizers, full dose."

The orderlies hauled the sobbing Natalie down the hall. Adrian note a somber Mitch following them, unnoticed by anyone else. He stat back down in his seat, amazed that for once he was taking a situation more maturely than she was.

The ringing of the elevator heralded Don's arrival in the waiting room. "What's the news?" he breathlessly asked his brother. Charlie related to him what the surgeon had just said. Don breathed a sigh of relief. "I wanted to say, good work on the radius bit," he commended him, "I found the shooter's location. He was atop a hemlock on the top of Big Round Top."

"Fifty calliber rifle?" Adrian guessed. This would match the wound he'd noted Julie had received.

"Yep," the F.B.I. agent nodded, "Found the casing. But the bad news is, whoever did fire it, Monk, he is a psycho. Check what he wrote after he fired."

He held up a photo he'd taken. A chill ran down Adrian's spine as he saw the shooter had written the words ISN'T FEAR WONDERFUL? in the snow. "Three sets of footprints," the detective pointed at the trails visible in the snow, "The one on the left is the freshest one; the snow's looser around it. That's all I can tell you from that." His head slouched forward into his lap. "There's got to be something we're not seeing here," he lamented, "Some lead we didn't pick up. What, I don't know."

"Well there is one way to go," Don told him, "Since we've got an Afghan rebel in custody, we might as well talk to someone who's an expert of Afghan rebels."

"Now, you, you do keep your office nice and clean," Adrian asked Don. They were back in the computer lab at Gettysburg College, where Charlie was setting up a live video connection back to F.B.I. headquarters in Los Angeles, "I, I can't go through with this is the place isn't clean."

"The janitor does it twice a day," his associate told him, "So nothing for you to worry about, Monk."

"Here we go," Charlie announced as a new screen popped up on the computer. An African-American man sat at the monitor on the other end. "Don, what's happening?" he told his superior upon noticing the call was from him, "Say, is that Monk with you there?"

"Yes, hel, hello," Adrian waved at him, "You, your tie isn't quite right there."

The man glanced down and quickly straightened it out. "David, put Colby on," Don instructed him.

"Uh,..." the man's brow furled, "Are you sure I can't..."

"I said put him on," his boss told him in a firmer tone, "We've got something here in Gettysburg that requires his knowledge."

"Right, sure, I'll get him," David looked someone disappointed. He stepped out of frame. Adrian winced as a much sloppier-dressed man sat down at the other terminal. "I, I can't work with him," he said, turning away, "I think the other guy'll be just fine for what we need."

Don ignored him. "All right, Colby, I've got a Taliban gun-running operation going on over here," he informed the newcomer, "If you know anything at all about Abdul Hassan al-Waziri, tell me."

"Abdul al-Waziri?" Colby looked very thoughtful. "So you do know something?" Adrian had picked up the inflection of familiarity in his voice.

Colby looked around his cubicle, as if he didn't want anyone to know he was going to say whatever he knew. He took a very deep breath. "Abdul al-Waziri has been helping arm the Taliban through American leaks since we went in," he said slowly, "Duane Carter was one of his primary suppliers."

"Damn him," Don growled, slugging the desk, "He just loved selling the whole country out to everyone. All right, how long did he do it, and who else was involved?"

He gave his subordinate a very piercing glance. "Look, I don't know all the specifics," Colby said with a defensive edge, "At the time I didn't have a clue what he was up to; he went out at night and told me he was going on top level reconnaisance work. This was before he saved my life, so if I'd known then he was collaborating with the people we were supposed to be fighting, I would have turned him in then and there. Carter stole weapons from supply depots around where we were stationed and handed them over to al-Waziri at convenient times, for thousands of dollars per weapon. After he was arrested, I thought he'd confess everything, but apparently he took that plot to the grave."

"The, the coffee pot behind you, it's an inch higher than it should be, can you fix it?" Adrian asked him, taking care not to look directly at the uneven Colby.

"No, sit down," Don told Colby as he started to rise up, "If this is as big as you say, it couldn't have just been Carter working with this guy. He said nothing to you about any of his fellow contacts at all?"

"He mentioned the name Scorpion a couple of times, but I never met the guy or knew anything else about him," Colby emphasized every word carefully, "Look, Don, you can trust me on this, I swear; now that Carter's dead, I have nothing to hide about him."

Don put a hand over his face. Adrian could tell he wasn't entirely sure whether he believed everything he'd been told. "All right, in that case, I want you and everyone else to run a check on everyone Carter may have been in touch with over the last six years," he told his subordinate, "The moment you find anyone who looks the least bit suspicious, I want to hear about it."

"What's going on over there, Don?"

"What's going on is Carter's replacement's sending al-Waziri weapons right here; a girl just got shot over the whole thing," Don said wearily, "This is very serious business, and I do sincerely hope you're not keeping anything from me now, because if you are, you might be right back in hot water."

"It's the truth, I swear on my life," Colby all but pleaded him, "I'll have everything I can find before the day's out, promise."

"See to it," his superior said. Once Colby disconnected, he gave the table another hard whack. "Damn you, Carter, damn you," he grumbled out loud.

"Old friend?" Adrian asked.

"He only spied on us for the Chinese," his associate related to him, "Colby was his best friend, so when it looked like the two of them...you don't want to hear the whole story, Monk."

"They were implicated together, so you're not entirely sure if you can trust his word on it," Adrian had already figured it out, prompting the brothers to stare at him in surprise. "It's, it's a blessing, and a curse," the detective said, "Well, if Carter's dead, where can we look next?"

Don's cell rang before he could answer this. "Eppes?" he greeted the caller. He all but fell backwards out of his chair in shock from what he was being told. "And you have no idea how it happened!?" he demanded, "All right, we'll be right there. Big trouble, Monk," he told the detective, "al-Waziri escaped; they have no clue how he got out."

Adrian sighed in frustration; their only palpable suspect was gone. "This is shaping up to be lousy day," he grumbled, straightening out the computer cables leading into the hard drive, "I'll call everyone else, see if anyone's emotionally up for it."

"What should I do?" Charlie asked his brother.

"You've still got that paper with the code?" Don inquired. When Charlie held it up, he said, "Crack it. We need to know what they're trying to tell us before anyone else gets hurt."