Aubrey walked in the second morning in a row with her hand intertwined with Derek's. While they still received less stares than the day before, it was clear it was going to take the office time to adjust to not only an inter-bureau relationship, but one that included Derek Morgan.
When they got to their desks, Aubrey asked Spencer, "Hey, where's Elle?"
"She got assigned a custodial interview by Hotch late last night. She shipped out soon after," Spencer said, typing away at something on his computer. Aubrey scoffed, obviously offended.
"I wonder why she got a custodial by herself. I still have to have a chaperone," Aubrey said bitterly as she opened up her e-mail and started running through the motions of a regular office day. For now, JJ's desk lay clear of any obvious cases for them to work on, and Aubrey was thankful for the break. Perhaps it was better she didn't get the custodial.
As if reading her mind celebrating the break, JJ walked in and said, "Guys, meeting room."
Aubrey sighed. "Seriously? I was just getting used to being able to finish my paperwork."
JJ smiled timidly and said, "You might be interested to know that we've got a hostage situation. Metting room, now."
Aubrey, Spencer, and Derek all quickly stood up from their desks, walking together toward the meeting room. Derek looked over at his girlfriend and saw the smirk on her face, replicating it with one of his own as he asked, "What's got your mood changed?"
"Justice at last. Elle gets a custodial, I get a hostage situation. I'll take my straw any day," Aubrey said as she slipped off of Derek's desk and led him into the meeting room, where JJ ran a security tape from the train showing the UnSub and his victims, including a police officer dead on the floor with a bullet in his chest. Aubrey pressed her lips together.
"Can you move it back a few frames?" Spencer asked JJ, regarding the video. She did as he asked, and he told the rest of the room as the screen froze on a particularly unappealing expression, "He has severe facial ticks, which are usually caused by longtime use of psychotic medicines."
"So, what we got?" Gideon asked, interrupting the flow as he usually did. He studied the screen as JJ filled him in, telling him it was a train on Texas. He froze and said, "Elle."
"What about... ?" Aubrey trailed off, laughing. "You're not telling me Elle is on that train, are you?"
Gideon pointed to the screen, to a blurred profile that, when pointed out, Aubrey recognized as her friend and co-worker. She whitened considerably, regretting her earlier words, as Gideon told the rest of the crew, "Wheels up in 20. Make it quick, we need to get to Texas."
They did as he commanded, making it onto the plane and listening almost the whole way to Spencer shouting off random facts and examples of people with intense psychosis. Aubrey felt her eyes beginning to roll into the back of her head from boredom, but she made herself focus for Elle, if not for anything else.
When they landed, they made connection with the agents from the Dallas field office that were already at the train's location, who claimed that the only contact that they had from the UnSub was a request to speak to a 'higher authority'. After they got off of the phone with the Dallas field agents, Aubrey, who had volunteered to climb into the far back row of the SUV with Spencer, spoke up.
"Is there any possible connection to religion? Like, is he asking for the Messiah to walk up to the window and save him?" Aubrey asked.
"There was no religious mention. I'm thinking he simply means someone higher up in the government," JJ said honestly.
"Then let's not disappoint," Gideon said, turning to Hotchner, who was driving the car. "Turn on the sirens and pull in there like you deserve the front row seat. Make people move out of our way, and get as close to the barrier as possible. We'll show him some higher authority."
Hotchner did what Gideon said, flipping on the lights and sirens as they pulled up to the crime scene. They all got out of the car, receiving a warm welcome from one of the Dallas FBI field agents.
"I'm Agent Frank Moretti, head of the Dallas FBI field office," he said, holding out his hand to each of the BAU members for them to shake. "We haven't had any changes- all hostages are still safe, and no additional contact. If you all would like to make your way to the mobile command center, we can discuss how we would like to go about for the 3 hour contact."
"If you excuse me, I just wish to have a few words with the SWAT team leader," Hotchner said.
Moretti nodded, pointing to a cop car. "He's stationed out behind that cruiser. If the rest of you would follow me..."
JJ left the group to go talk to some press that had begun to show up, essentially shooing them away while Spencer, Gideon, Aubrey, and Derek followed Moretti into the command center.
"The number we called earlier is written on the paper next to the phone," Agent Moretti said, taking a seat at a chair in front of the only computer in the room. The phone was hooked up to an elaborate system, like the ones they used for ransom calls that could be muted, traced, and warped any way they wished. "I called him earlier and told him I was the highest authority, but he didn't believe me."
"First off, this man is a paranoid psychotic. His whole delusion is based on lies, fueled by lies, and fearing lies. Second off, the higher authority wouldn't come to him, the lower level. He has to come to us," Gideon said slowly. Aubrey looked up at the screen feeding live security footage from the train, and saw the UnSub grab one of the women by the hair, forcing her down the aisle toward the phone.
"He's on the move," Aubrey said as everybody else's eyes moved up toward the screen, watching him push the woman down to the ground. They watched her shake with sobs as the phone began ringing. Gideon gently pushed past Derek and Spencer as he picked up the phone.
"Yes?" He asked simply. They could hear whispering from the other line, and Aubrey could also hear the echo of her own heartbeat in her ears, the command center had fallen that quiet.
"He wants to know who you are," the woman said shakily.
"Tell him I'm someone that can resolve the situation," Gideon said, cool, calm, and collected like always. They heard the woman relay the information, then more of the whispering, presumably from the UnSub telling her what to say. Aubrey kept her eyes on the screen, her hand on her cell and ready to dial Hotchner if anything went wrong. She looked over at Spencer and found him focused on the UnSub, studying every movement and every twitch.
The woman piped up again. "What part of the government do you work for?"
"I never said I worked for the government," Gideon said. Aubrey felt her stomach churn as she put herself in the woman's shoes. To hear Gideon's calm voice would give Aubrey the sense that he was apathetic to her situation, if she were freaking out as bad as the hostage was. She wanted to reach out and tell Gideon to be more gentle, but she knew it was an act for the sake of catching the UnSub.
They watched as the UnSub's mouth moved rapidly, hearing him over the phone line asking her if they worked for various parts of the government, naming each branch. She cried out in fear and he turned, looking over to Elle, as they heard the word 'FBI'. Gideon let slow smile cross his face, an almost proud smile of the psycho making the right conclusion.
"Are you FBI?" The woman asked, sounding a little hopeful.
"He can ask me himself," Gideon replied back smartly. Aubrey squeezed her cell phone, biting her lip with concern at the same time. They saw the woman hand the phone to the UnSub, who snatched it from her.
"Tell me who you are, or this agent dies," the UnSub said.
"You know who I am," Gideon answered back, with an almost self-satisfied smile on his face. It was moments like those where Aubrey saw a definitive line between the Gideon who had become like a father to her since her own father's death, and the mess he had become that he hid so well.
The UnSub's voice bounced her out of her own thoughts.
"If you're the higher authority, then you can have it removed," he said, almost pleading. Aubrey forgot about her own problems, forgot about the hostage's anxiety, forgot about anything but the single word the UnSub had spoken: it. Like working through a 1000 piece puzzle, Aubrey began figuring out which pieces went where and what fit together.
Gideon shook his head as if the UnSub could see him. "It'll take some time."
"I want it removed, now," the UnSub said, lest desperate this time and more commanding. Derek stepped forward- to do what, Aubrey didn't know. She felt the concerns of Spencer, Derek, and Moretti rising, while Gideon kept his game face.
"You know it can't be done that quickly. Goodbye."
They all looked over at Gideon in surprise, with concern etched on their faces as the desperation of the UnSub became clear. He yelled at Gideon, bringing him back to the phone with the promise, "One hour. You have one hour to remove it, or I swear to God, I'll kill every agent on this train."
He hung up the phone, silence consuming the command center. Moretti, impatient as he was not being a BAU agent, asked almost rudely, "It? Do you know what it is?"
Gideon shook his head, admitting defeat. "No. But I got us one more hour to figure it out."
Aubrey looked over in concern at the screen, where the UnSub was cradling his own head. One of the hostages, a tall, ethnic looking young man who the UnSub had hit with the butt of his guns not thirty minutes before and was being tended to by the older woman, stood up and said something to the UnSub that provoked him. The older woman stepped in the way, grabbing the UnSub's arm and turning it over. Aubrey squinted, getting closer to the screen.
"What do you see?" Gideon asked, obviously already knowing the answer.
"Scars. Deep wounds, by the looks of the scars that have formed. The skin is puckered, meaning stitches," Aubrey said, counting them. "About five in all."
"So, what's he trying to dig out?" Hotchner asked, having moved in when Aubrey was intently watching the security screen earlier.
"Many psychotics and fanatics believe that the government is always watching them. Some of the crazier ones believe that microchips have been implanted in them to do so. I think he's trying to dig out a microchip put there by the government," Spencer said. Aubrey knew that if the case had been different, she probably would've cracked a smile. She couldn't even feel the corners of her mouth twitch now.
"So, how do we go about this?" Derek asked.
"We play along with his delusions," Hotchner said as if it were obvious. "Reid, what can you tell me about delusions when dealing with psychotic patients?"
"They're very dependent on the patient- personal traumas, fears, experiences all factor into what they imagine is happening to them," Spencer said, admitting, "If we can't find out who he is, there's a very slim chance we'll be able to play into his delusions."
As if answering some unspoken prayer, Derek's received a call from Penelope, who had used her face recognition system to label each hostage as well as the UnSub. After doing some research on each respective person, they found that Elle was locked in a train car with a psychotic ex-physicist, his psychiatrist who doubled as an author on psychological issues and treatments in her spare time, a paper product salesman, an unemployed woman, and the young man who had been expelled from his college after drinking and driving and crashing into the school library.
"Well, we certainly aren't the winners of the year, now are we?" Aubrey asked drily. "I was really hoping there'd be a Jason Gideon-James Bond hybrid on there."
"So, now we need to focus on how to remove a microchip that isn't there," Hotchner said just as drily as Aubrey's previous comment. She watched anxiously as Josh Patel, the drunk, stood up and obviously tried to make a petition with the UnSub before Dr. Deaton moved in and sat him back down. She looked back over to Hotchner, but he was mainly focusing on Spencer, who was pacing in the command center.
"His speaking is lucid, which means his thoughts are also pretty organized even though he's having delusions. His thoughts are organized within that delusion," Spencer said, almost in his own world like he usually was.
"He knows that the micro chip is in his arm. We can't say that it's in his back or anything, which means he'll be watching whatever incision we do make," Aubrey said.
"Why can't we just convince him that it's somewhere else?" Derek asked, sounding almost tired. Spencer brightened, gaining everybody's attention.
"We could fake it." When everybody looked at him with blank expressions, he picked up a coin from the desk beside him. "We could do a little trick of the palm, a little slight of hand."
"You're saying we should perform a magic trick on the UnSub?" Derek asked for clarification, sounding very dubious. When Spencer nodded, and Hotchner, Gideon, nor Aubrey disagreed with Spencer's idea, Derek sighed and stood up. "Alright, teach it to me."
"No," Spencer said, sounding adamant. Aubrey rose her eyebrows in surprise, as did Derek. It was a change of pace for Spencer to be putting his own against Derek. "I've been learning this my whole life, we only have thirty minutes."
Aubrey smiled, seeing for once the confident Spencer in a different way. Whereas he usually shone only in presenting facts and stats, he really hid away his want to do more behind that. Aubrey remembered meeting Spencer the first day she came into the BAU, and how he could barely meet her eye or shake her hand. Now, here he was, insisting on putting himself in danger despite Derek's protest.
Aubrey stepped forward and put her hand around Derek's bicep. "Let him go."
Derek looked down at his girlfriend in protest, but Gideon nodded as well. Hotchner and Derek rushed Spencer off to get him prepped for the train, while JJ re-entered and she, Gideon, and Aubrey sat down to do more research on the hostages and the UnSub, finding out he was a world-renowned physicist who had once worked for the government, and who later had a mental break and had been institutionalized for the last several years.
His outing on the train was his first since he had been institutionalized- his stressor.
Gideon sighed, saying, "Let's make the call."
He walked over to the phone, JJ and Aubrey waiting anxiously to see what the UnSub would do. They looked up at the screen to see him pointing a gun at his doctor, but the minute the phone began ringing, he walked to and answered, "What?"
"Everything alright, Dr. Bryar?" Gideon asked casually, as if he were calling up an old friend.
Dr. Bryar sounded like he was going to cry. "I want it out."
"I'm sending two technicians in to remove it," Gideon assured him.
"No!" Bryar shouted, sounding almost fearful. "One. One technician."
"It's a delicate procedure, it requires-"
Bryar cut Gideon off, insistent. "No! Only one, or every agent on this train dies."
Gideon sighed, sounding like he was talking to an overeager child now. "You've got to relax. You've still got twenty minutes."
"Not anymore. I want it out. Now. Right now. Now!" Dr. Bryar shouted as he hung up the phone. Gideon let it rest for a few seconds, and Aubrey bit her lip again nervously. Although the original plan had been to send Derek in with Spencer, she knew that Spencer would have to go in alone by himself now.
But wasn't that she wanted for him? For him to succeed on his own, for him to realize that he could trust in himself?
Derek and Spencer returned to the command center, where Derek strapped him up in a bulletproof jacket, telling him not to take it off, not to make eye contact with Elle, and to suspect that SWAT could shoot at any time without his prior knowledge, running through the checklist like an older brother making sure his younger brother didn't get beat up at school. Aubrey watched silently with Gideon as Spencer answered each of Derek's questions thoughtfully and correctly, even making a joke when Derek told him to play into the guy's fantasy.
They walked outside to Hotchner, who handed Spencer a microchip to test his slight of hand with. After failing a few times, Gideon, who was obviously just as nervous as the rest of them, said, "I'm pulling the plug."
"No, no, no," Spencer said quickly, desperate to appease. "I can do this. I am just not used to it being this small. Usually whatever I'm flipping is bigger."
"Just relax, Spence, okay?" Aubrey said gently, shooting a look to Gideon to keep his mouth shut. "Do it a few more times. You've done this a million times, it's just a different size. Adjust."
Spencer tried one more time, and was able to flip it successfully from his fingers to his palm. He did it a few more times to make Gideon feel better, and finally was given the go from Hotchner and Gideon, who was quick to add, "You take out the chip, and you get out of there, am I clear? Say you've got guidelines or something to follow with the higher authority. Do not stay on the train."
"Yes, sir," Spencer said, turning on his heel as he walked toward the train.
"See you when you get back," Hotchner said to him, earning a thankful but fearful smile from Spencer, who continued his trek toward the train.
"You know, if anything, he's the perfect man for the job," Aubrey said thoughtfully. Hotchner and Derek looked over at her curiously, Gideon keeping his eye on Spencer. "He's nervous. A field agent wouldn't be. A technician would, though."
"Yeah, well, let's hope it subsides for at least a little bit so he can complete his trick," Hotchner said. Aubrey walked up next to Derek as he put his arm around her waist, both of them watching anxiously as he entered the train. Derek led Aubrey back to the command center, where they watched through the cameras with JJ and Gideon as Spencer took out the micro chip successfully. However, he didn't leave the train right after like Gideon had commanded him to.
"What is he doing?" Gideon asked angrily. "I told him to leave the train!"
"Something's wrong," JJ pointed out. "Spencer looks like he's stuck, mentally."
"No," Aubrey said, shaking her head. "That doesn't happen. Not to Spence."
Gideon reached over and called Bryar, watching as Josh stood up again, spouting off something as he passionately gestured. Dr. Deaton went to intercept him again, but somehow, for some reason, Bryar just snapped, standing up and pulling the trigger.
Deaton covered her stomach, blood seeping through her fingers. Gideon cussed and Aubrey let out a little gasp as Deaton fell back, Josh looking guilty and sick as he held her. The paper salesman reached over and tried to help, Reid rushing back as well as Bryar went to answer the phone. When he answered, Gideon quickly collected his cool.
"What happened, Bryar?" He asked.
"I'm so tired of fighting you," Bryar answered tiredly. "It all ends today."
He hung up the phone, and turned back to his hostages, taking a seat on the bench across from Elle and rocking back and forth. Gideon cussed again as JJ sent Aubrey an inquisitive look. She answered JJ's unasked question by saying, "Bryar's revealed his end game. He's going to kill himself, and the hostages."
JJ looked back to the security screen with renewed alarm, watching as Spencer talked to Bryar, who then responded by turning to the phone and shooting it, breaking the contact he had with the team. Gideon pulled a hand over his head, obviously concerned about all of the hostages' safety, but now even more so involved considering Spencer was involved.
"We're going to have to send in SWAT," Gideon said. Hotchner nodded and left to go inform the leader.
"Gideon, we can't sent in SWAT. Those hostages will die," Derek said as Aubrey looked on in concern.
"If we don't do anything, those hostages will die," Gideon clarified. He watched with alarm as Bryar stood up abruptly, his gun pointed toward Spencer this time. They watched as Spencer stood up, advancing toward Bryar with his hands raised, obviously trying to talk to him. Gideon looked down at his watch and said, "This has been going on for too long. I'm going in."
"Gideon..." Aubrey said, trying to stop him as he rushed outside, walking toward the train. Aubrey, Derek, and JJ turned their attention back to the security screen, watching as something forced Bryar down and Spencer struggled with him on one of the train's benches.
Then, they heard the gunshot.