A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: We're now officially just about halfway through this story! To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

Solitary 5.0

Chapter Twenty-Five

Measurable Movement

Early in the morning of July 2nd, the 49th day of Aaron Hotchner's captivity, Bren Hawthorne was sitting in a patch of sunshine in her kitchen with the day's Jumble and Sudoku in front of her and her mobile phone within reach when a truck rumbled up their gravel driveway. Letting her reading glasses on their beaded chain drop to her bosom, she rose from the table. She thought about waking her husband, but before she could make a decision, she saw him clattering down the stairs, already dressed in jeans and workboots.

"Roberto?" Ted called out to their visitor.

"That's me," the man called back—which, due to his hearing loss, of course, Ted didn't catch the first time, so there was some shouting back and forth before Ted was convinced nobody was there to rob them or buy a horse. At least he hadn't charged off and grabbed his gun.

Bren watched her husband pocket a sweet roll and start out the back door. "What's up?" she asked.

"Joe's generator," her husband replied casually, as though she should know what he was talking about. "Guy's here to deliver and install it."

"Generator?" she echoed. "But the stable's wired!" Her husband, though, had already vanished out behind the house to meet with this Roberto person. She sighed her exasperation and walked over to the window that looked out over the vegetable gardens and the stable.

For three years the Hawthornes had cared for Joe's horse and kept the rooms over the stable for his exclusive use. In return, McAfee picked up the electrical tab for the stable, which was wired and billed separately from the main house. Did this mean that he'd be renegotiating his arrangement with them?

He's certainly acting oddly these days, Bren thought, and not for the first time. They were delighted to see him more often, but he seemed to spend a lot more of his time out walking in the woods for hours and hours. When he came into the house, he seemed distracted and weary lately. She knew that McAfee pushed himself hard, juggling a dozen responsibilities and interests. Maybe he just needed to shut down and do nothing for a few days.

Or maybe he's depressed.

It was hard to imagine the man they affectionately called "Sarge" having any psychological or physical conditions—he'd recently turned sixty, but looked and moved like a man ten years younger—but how else to explain that this year, for the first time since they'd met him in 2004, he'd be giving Gettysburg a miss. The anniversary of the battle was this weekend, and Bren and Ted had spoken of little else this week.

Joe McAfee was actually going to pass on Gettysburg observations! That was almost unthinkable. The man born and reared in British Columbia was a rabid amateur Civil War historian. Gettysburg, Antietam, and Appomattox were centerpieces of his year.

She made a mental note to ask Ted whether the financial arrangement with Joe had changed, and took her place again in the sunny breakfast nook with her puzzles.

She was three numbers into the Sudoku—Friday's was always fiendish—when the phone rang. She thumbed it on and said, "Carol?"

Her old sorority sister who taught constitutional law greeted her cheerfully and the two women spent a few minutes chatting before getting to the reason for Carol's call.

"That list you emailed to me?" she said. "The scans?"

Bren perked up. "Yes? Make any sense of them?"

"Well, yes," said Carol. "Once I cracked the code of the awful handwriting. I think somebody's playing amateur detective."

"How so?"

"Well, all ten of those columns represented federal prosecutions in the mid-nineties," Carol said. "Eight were from Baltimore, the other two were tried in Albany. Only other thing they all have in common is Aaron Hotchner as lead prosecutor. All but the earliest, and he was second to the lead in that one. But he's never listed except in the place where you wrote him in."

Bren's brow furrowed. "Why does that name sound familiar to me? I mean, other than as the lead in—"

"The FBI agent?" Carol prompted. "The one who was kidnapped back before classes let out? It's been all over the news, but then I know you're not that big of a TV watcher."

Bren Hawthorne had a vague memory of some coverage back in the spring about a missing federal agent, one of those interchangeable grim-faced white men in suit and tie who made up the bulk of Washington power. "He's still missing?"

"They're still looking for him," her friend said.

"You'd think he'd be dead by now, though," said Bren. "Like Jimmy Hoffa, right?"

"Well, I shouldn't say anything," said Carol. "They aren't talking about it to the media, but my baby sister's a federal judge in Virginia—she's the 'L. Emerson' in the Trafford prosecution, so she knows him, she's worked with him—and she says that the FBI knows he's alive and he's being held prisoner somewhere. Whoever has him, they forced him to write to them, I guess with a list of their demands or something. She couldn't give me any details."

It's a puzzle, Sarge had said. A mystery.

"So—whoever made that list—" she began.

"Exactly! They're working up a list of potential suspects!"

~ o ~

On Friday evening, the second of July, as most denizens of Quantico dispersed in hopes of an uninterrupted holiday weekend, Agents Rossi, Reid, and Anderson hunkered down in a vacant office with flyaway stacks of notes and a twelve-pack of Coke. Morgan would have been there too, but this was his weekend with Jack, and nothing would interfere with that sacred trust.

It had been a long and frustrating day, with a series of budgetary consultations—translation: lectures from Strauss—as their centerpiece.

"—quick review here," Rossi was saying. "Just a fast, fast look at everyone who's been on our radar the past few weeks, because every time I move somebody to the 'Cleared' pile, I get this spooky feeling that I've missed something, and I move them right back."

"You have to stop second-guessing yourself," Anderson said gently. "You tell us not to take it personally—"

"But this is personal," Rossi barked. "The man's my best friend, and he's been through the goddamn wringer this past year. And I know that 'private prison' sounds like, oh, jail cell with bars, orange jumpsuit, three squares, but for all we know he's in a coffin under somebody's goddamn bed and whipped twice a week. You know what these people are like!"

He ran his fingers through his hair. "OK, category one, BAU UNSUBs convicted, but currently not in prison."

Anderson, who preferred to work with five-by-eight color-coded cards, slipped the rubber band from a short stack of purple cards. "Ready?"

Rossi clicked his pen open. "Go."

"Grabner," Anderson said. "Compassionate release, last stages of liver cancer. Verified as in his hospice since April. There's just no way on him."

"Friends and family," Rossi prompted. "Anyone among them mad enough to go after Aaron?"

"He has a wife and a grown son and they both agree he's guilty. And we're a long, long way from Beaverton, Oregon. We'd have a trail of travel data by now."

With a mournful air of finality like that of someone inscribing the name of a recently deceased relative in the family Bible, Rossi drew a line through Grabner, J. M.

It felt as though he were snipping away a strand of some evidentiary lifeline that might bring Aaron Hotchner back.

They're right, I'm losing all my objectivity.

He closed that notebook with a decisive slam. "I shouldn't be making this call," he confessed. "Anderson, which bunch do you think we should be working on for final elimination?"

"The lookalikes," the agent replied without hesitation, hefting a slightly thicker stack of blue cards. "We keep coming back to them, and they're eating up a lot of our time. Plus they look like him, duh. The sooner we can put the rest of them to bed, the sooner we can use our resources elsewhere."

"I can start with those," Reid said. As always, he paged through his notes. With his memory, he didn't need to do this, but he always did anyway, almost as if he wanted to fit in. "My first pick off the lookalikes list has to be Patterson. All those anger issues, and a long history of problems with authority figures."

"The biggest problem with Patterson," Rossi replied, "is that he sprained his ankle on May 9th . He was still on crutches on the 14th."

"He faked it," Reid suggested. "It's an elaborate alibi. A sprain doesn't show up on X-rays; he could go to the ER and fake the symptoms and then he has what looks like an unbreakable alibi."

"Plus he doesn't really look that much like Furface."

Reid gave a one-shoulder, negligent shrug. "Several studies of the leading facial recognition software have concluded—"

Rossi didn't think that he could handle another lecture tonight. "Let's set him aside for the moment," he said. "McAfee. Damn, but he looks like Furface. Yeah, he's ten years older, but he doesn't look ten years older. He looks fifty, not sixty."

Anderson paged through his own notes. "McAfee is a non-starter. I got some top people from outside his area and we trailed him around for six days, and it wasn't easy. The dude's always on the go—but he never got anywhere near any place where he might be keeping a prisoner."

"What do you mean, any place?" Reid asked.

Anderson flipped a page over. "He went to public places. His college. The learning center. High schools. Meetings in public venues like church basements, restaurants. One was in a small town police station." He looked up and grinned. "We actually kinda liked that one, thought a police station was about the last place you'd look to find an unofficial prisoner—but no go. They didn't even have a holding cell; they run 'em over to the county seat."

Rossi looked over his own list of the peripatetic Joe McAfee's travels between 4:22 PM, June 19th and 10:22 PM, June 25th and felt his heart sink. "I think JJ was right about this guy," he said sadly. "If he's our UNSUB, he's working with a group."

"Or a Time-Turner," Anderson said helpfully.

Reid looked up. "What's that?"

Rossi shot a warning glare at Anderson. "Don't. Just—just don't."

"I'm looking at the list of contacts for McAfee," Reid added. "Academics. Therapists. Social workers. His alibi for May 14th is an internationally-known historian, the guy who wrote—"

"A guy who also owns a blue Ford F-150 truck," Rossi said heavily. "Admittedly, it doesn't run, but—damn, I really want to pin this on him. He's too damn perfect. He can't be the guy, so…he has to be. "

Anderson and Reid regarded him silently for a moment, then Anderson said, "You've been spending way too much time with Agent Hobbes-Gutierrez."

"Maybe we need a new category," said Reid. "One for 'only if this is a group.'"

"I'm all for that," said Anderson. He fished a new pile of five-by-eight cards, buff this time, from his briefcase. Then he selected a blue rubber band and snapped it around them.

"Wait—wait," Rossi said. "You color-code those, too?"

"What, my gum bands?" Anderson asked innocently. "Doesn't everyone?"

Even Reid gazed distractedly at the agent for a few seconds before shaking his head slightly and saying, "OK, Urbanski. Dave, you vetted that one, right?"

Rossi gave a small private smile. It tickled him that the most junior agent in their unit had, largely on the basis of these after-hours Hotch Project meetings, finally begun to address him by his first name.

"I did, and we still come up with the beard problem. It was a van dyke, looked kinda satanic on him, frankly. No photographic proof, but anecdotal evidence from associates indicates that he didn't shave it off until Monday the 17th." He held up the photo. "No dark van dyke beard on Furface."

"Fake beard?" Reid said hopefully.

Good God, Rossi realized. He can't let anyone go, either. We both need to get off this project.

~ o ~

"Hands," Warden said that Friday evening.

It was as if there had never been any progress in their relationship, as if every sacrifice, every hard choice Aaron had ever made had been for nothing. So far, it had all been short, snapped questions and demands. Aaron had tried to engage the man's gaze without success.

When there was no direction specified Aaron stuck his hands out the window, one on each side of the red restraining rod. This time, Charpentier attached the cuffs himself and moved over to the door.

Three faint snicking sounds and the door opened—but there was no Warden, at least not at first. When he did enter, he trailed behind him a thin dark gray strand of cable, like that used for bicycle locks. Without so much as an acknowledgement of Hotchner's presence, he pulled the cable into the cell and attached it to one of those seemingly random hooks that protruded from the metal walls.

Aw, shit.

In the earliest days of his captivity, Hotchner had studied those hooks, unable to keep himself from envisioning various restraint and torture devices that UNSUBs he'd studied had used to keep their victims cowed and compliant. Gradually he'd realized that Warden profiled as a man with no interest in that kind of control.

Now he wondered whether he'd misjudged the man.

Or had there been a change outside—out in the real world that Aaron found harder to picture with every passing day? Was the Team getting close to him?

Mouth dry, he said, "Permission to speak?"

"No." Charpentier satisfied himself that the cable was connected properly, then left the cell again.

Aaron bent slightly, trying to catch sight of the man outside, but before he could locate him, Charpentier was back.

"Face the wall," he commanded, "and stand completely still."

His hands fisted with tension, Hotchner obeyed. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. Slow, deep, even, quiet breaths.

Show nothing. Feel nothing. Miss nothing.

Warden came up behind him and reached up. Something hard but flexible encircled his neck and he stiffened.

"Completely still," Warden warned. "This is nothing to fear."

Aaron chose to continue to believe him. He stood motionless as something clicked into place behind his head, a sort of collar. Something else clicked into place on the collar.

He felt sick. A leash! Jesus Christ, a leash?

His hands fisted so tightly that his nails dug into his palms.

Warden was gone again, leaving the door wide open.

And then he was there at the window, gazing up at Aaron with those impenetrable blue eyes. He reached into the pocket of his slacks and withdrew the handcuff key. Without a word, he unlocked the manacles and removed them from Aaron's wrists.

"Just one moment," Warden said in a calm voice.

"Permission to—"

"No," the man said. "Hush." He moved away from the window again. Now he stood in the doorway. "Over here," he directed. "Move along the cable. Move slowly; don't tangle it up. The floor is uneven out here, much more so than it is in there."

'Out here'?

As though in a daze, Hotchner moved away from the window. His collar was attached to the cable by a thinner cable that extended for about six feet and ended in a ring that could slide freely along the larger of the two lines.

Heart thundering, trying desperately to disguise his anxiety, Aaron Hotchner left the metal cell for the first time in 49 days.

For the first time, he stood in the anteroom, an enormous cavern. It had to be at least ninety feet long and forty feet wide. For the first time, he saw the scissor-gate of the elevator that opened out only a few feet from the little metal box that was his cell. From out here, it looked positively minuscule, like a child's gunmetal-gray block abandoned in the middle of the room.

Beside that hateful little window with its red rod were a squat little bookshelf, a cheap plastic parson's table holding the boom box and its scattering of CD cases, and an easy chair that was upholstered in deep blue.

A few powerful lights shone from pale metal structurals about fifteen feet over his head, but beyond that was darkness that could have continued on for ten feet or thirty or forever. The open area disoriented and disconcerted him. He felt something peculiar against his face—air currents, it's just air currents, Slick—and he looked over at Warden, who stood silently about ten feet away from him with his hands in his pockets, just out of his reach as long as he wore the leash. When Aaron looked at him questioningly, the man nodded off to his left, Aaron's right.

He turned and saw that the heavier of the two cables ran in through an open barred door into the cage-like structure he'd glimpsed from his cell—cage-like, hell; it was a cage, a huge construction with steel bars on three sides and ragged rock for its back wall. It was forty feet long and twenty feet wide, with a twenty foot barred ceiling.

He looked again at Charpentier for confirmation and the man nodded again. "I can't give you an exercise yard," he said, almost shyly, "but this may allow you a little more activity while I'm here."

The floor was really uneven once he got a few feet away from the poured concrete apron that surrounded the cell for perhaps ten feet. Beyond that, it was just bare rock, relatively horizontal but nothing like a floor.

He made his way slowly to the cage, peering into the unaccustomed dim light. Beyond the cage door, the floor was again poured concrete. He could make out a card table, a folding metal chair, a small plastic cooler, a heavy exercise mat, and, holy crap, an old-style manual treadmill.

He hesitated at the threshold, frowning at something else he saw just beyond the exercise mat. "A pickaxe?" he said aloud.

"Feel free to take out your aggressions on the back wall," Warden said with what might have been a chuckle. "Who knows? Maybe you'll mine a little anthracite."

Hotchner stared at the wall. "Northeastern Pennsylvania," he said.

"Much anthracite is mined there," Warden said approvingly. "Obviously you paid attention in school. About 40% of the national production—but it won't do to start making unwarranted assumptions.

"Stop, please," he added, his tone more authoritative, after Aaron had entered the cage. "Close the door behind you."

When it had closed, Warden pressed a remote—the man loves his gadgets, doesn't he?—and the thin cable fell away from the collar around Aaron's neck.

"I'll be back in a couple hours," the tidy little man said. "There's water and fruit juice in the cooler. Unfortunately, there are no bathroom facilities." Without waiting for Hotchner to say anything, he spun on his heel, engaged the play function on the boom box, and headed for the elevator.

Every time I think I have the little bastard figured out….

Hotch stripped off his cardigan and picked up the pickaxe. As the music—Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun," possibly the last thing in the world he expected to hear—sounded its first notes, he swung the axe hard against the stone.