Disclaimer: see chapter 1
A/N: Merry Christmas everyone!

37. Hope against Hope

Charlie's mind was still a sigma-algebra made up of an unclear number of chaotic systems when he was being led back into his cell. It was still working feverishly, still pondering, still analyzing the consequences in order to figure out if he hadn't made a mistake after all.

He hardly noticed the door falling shut behind him and neither had he paid much attention as to how his kidnappers had reacted to his refusal. Only dimly did he remember the long silence that had followed his rejection and Rosenthal's calm voice. Unfortunate. Very unfortunate indeed, he'd said, now Charlie remembered, and only now did those words make shudders run down his spine. Maybe he'd made a mistake…?

But he'd hardly had a choice. Granted, he hadn't read the contract that Rosenthal had put in front of him – he'd really had no nerves for that – but he didn't doubt for a second that his signature would have meant his complete destruction. He would have surrendered himself to them completely, would have been in their hands once and for all without any hope to be released and they wouldn't even have committed a crime by doing so. No, it was beyond a doubt, he could never sign that contract.

Besides, if he had consented to the collaboration, there was a high likelihood that sooner or later he'd be forced again to make calculations that would ensue the death of numerous innocent people. There was no way he could do that, there was no way he could live with more murders on his conscience. There was no way. And this time, he would even know what he was doing… He was sick at the mere thought.

So collaboration wasn't a viable alternative. Still… He had recognized Larry's car, he'd recognized it beyond a doubt, and the numbers of the license plate that he'd been able to decipher had matched the ones of Larry's vehicle, too. But it couldn't be, right? Larry… he just couldn't –

Charlie thought he was going to be sick, but instead, his eyes just filled with tears. He tried to hold them back with the palms of his hands, but that only increased the nausea and the head-ache. He was sure his head was going to explode. He just couldn't go on like this, it was all too much…

It was just like it had been with Don.

Charlie forced himself to take slow and deep breaths. It had sufficiently worked during the interrogation, so it had to work now. He just had to think rationally. The only explanation for what had happened was that his kidnappers had once again lied to him. There could be no other explanation. They'd told him that Don was dead too, but it hadn't been true, it had been a lie, so this too had to be a lie.

Maybe it was a composite photograph? Or maybe they'd stolen Larry's car and let it crash against a tree without anyone sitting in it? It had to be something like that, because it couldn't be, he just couldn't believe, he didn't want to believe that these men would actually have gone so far, that they would have hurt Larry, that they would have… No. No, they'd fooled him once before and they wouldn't hesitate to do it again. All their goings-on down here were a horrible game of lies and deceptions, all being aimed at confusing him so much that he couldn't determine anymore what was true and what wasn't. He wouldn't give in, however, he wouldn't give this game up for lost, because he was sure, he was so sure that it was all just pretend…

But could he be sure enough?

They'd threatened to harm Amita. With that, all this wasn't just a game of lies and deceptions, it was a game of life and death. Of course, he was relatively sure that they'd faked it all – but what if he was wrong? What if his kidnappers would act on their threats – then what? Sure, with his rejection, Charlie had pulled an ace from his sleeve they hadn't been ready for and he was still having a good chance now to continue this game. However, he realized that he'd pushed his luck too far. Risking Amita's life was too high a stake even with a probability of winning of 99 per cent.

Charlie broke out in cold sweat. It didn't matter whether or not these CIA terrorists had deceived him – in any case, he'd made a mistake, a gigantic mistake, and all he could do was hope that it wasn't too late to make it undone.

He bolted to the door of his cell and pounded against the hard metal with his fists as though his life depended on it. Somehow, it did, because without Amita, there was no going back to the life he'd once had.

"Hold on!" he screamed on the top of his lungs. "Let me out! Let me out! I consent! I CONSENT!"

When they finally opened the door, the bottom side of Charlie's fists already sported ugly bruises, but he didn't even feel the pain. All he could feel was fear, that immense fear inside him.

Breathing heavily, Charlie was standing before a blond man who was looking a bit too fit for Charlie's current taste and looking a bit too grimly, too. Charlie was relatively sure he was called Patter, but since at their 'conversations' it had only been them who'd asked the questions, that was about everything he knew about him.

"You wanna collaborate?" The voice was cold and dry without the slightest amount of emotion.

Charlie's heart was beating in his throat. "Yes," he managed to say past the lump his larynx had become and noticed that his voice didn't sound like him one bit. Maybe this was a mistake after all?

"Hey, Dan!" Patter called out, and at the other end of the corridor, Rosenthal appeared, a quizzical look on his face. Patter grinned. "The doc changed his mind."

Charlie could see a diabolical glimmer in Rosenthal's eyes. And maybe his mind was just playing tricks on him – he knew his senses had been acting up for some days now – but his voice made him think of the madness of a cracked up scientist. "Take him to his office."

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Not even an hour after Don and Megan, also David and Colby arrived at the investigating team's makeshift headquarters. It was a log cabin at the north-western edge of the national park, in Montana. Just like Megan and Don before them, they were quickly briefed about the current state of affairs: they didn't know exactly how many criminals they were dealing with up here, but the investigating team had been able to figure out that Wellman had met up with two other men, probably other members of the group of kidnappers. In any case those two men were agents with the CIA and they had been in contact with John Doe as well. Prior to coming here, Don's team had tried to reach those two agents, but the CIA either didn't know where they were or they didn't want to tell them. Bottom line was that they couldn't interrogate the two of them, a 38-year-old called Daniel Rosenthal and a 36-year-old named Wayne Taccone. It was suspicious, however, that these two had been working together for nine months now, as the other team had been able to figure out in a downright war of bureaucracy.

"For nine months… that means that it could very well be the same group Charlie was with last fall," David mused.

"What are they working on?" Megan wanted to know.

"That's something the CIA wasn't willing to tell us," Jeffrey Blake replied, the leader of the team that was in charge of searching for Clifford Wellman. "Just like they weren't willing to tell us who else was part of this project. They say it doesn't have any relevance for our case."

"Maybe it does now," Colby interjected. "I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I think it's not that unlikely that those guys, whatever they're working on, used Charlie to help them, so whoever else was involved in that project is probably part of the kidnapping group."

Megan shook her head. "That's more than unlikely, Colby. Whatever they're working on, they're still working on behalf of their agency."

"Yeah, and their agency is the CIA," said David, who'd apparently decided to support his partner's theory.

"So what? Just keep your conspiracy theories to yourselves for a bit and start thinking. Can you imagine that the CIA would actually sanction the kidnapping of a well-known math professor?"

"Well, maybe –"

"This isn't helping," Don curtly interrupted Colby. He'd only listened to his colleagues' discussion with half an ear, directing his attention towards the map before him instead. It showed a more or less detailed overview of the Yellowstone National Park. If they were on the right track – and Don refused to doubt that – then Charlie was somewhere here in this vast area. They just had to find him.

"Alright," David said after a short pause. "So what do we know?"

"Right," Megan interposed, "how did you even figure out that Wellman and those other two are somewhere up here?"

"We didn't," Mitchell O'Hara said. He was a relatively young agent of Blake's team, which was completed by Karen Teeger and Juliet Disher, who were both in their late thirties. "He did."

Mitchell pointed at something – or rather, as it turned out, at someone – coming up behind Don's team. The four agents turned around and for a dumbfounded moment weren't sure whether they could really trust their eyes.

Ian Edgerton was the last person they would have expected to see up here.

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Charlie's forehead was covered with sweat. Not because of exaggerated exertion. Rather because he was afraid they would find out any moment that he wasn't doing anything at all.

Sure, he was trying to give the impression of actually being willing to deliver the kind of data the CIA terrorists were asking from him. They'd given him the same assignment as last fall with the same lies, even though Charlie didn't know why they were still going to the trouble of lying to him. They had to realize that he was well aware of their unlawfulness, although they probably had still no idea how much he remembered, that his memories had increased, both in number and in depth. If Charlie wasn't mistaken, his memory was completely back now, or at least almost completely. And he was glad about that, somehow, he was. Even though there were certain memories he could have done without, and even though he realized that all those memories were of no help to him now.

For example, he remembered very well what steps he'd taken last fall in order to get the result they'd been looking for. However, he also knew that he couldn't repeat those steps now, not when he knew that his calculations would lead to the death of innocent people.

On the other hand, he couldn't retract his earlier consent either, thereby putting Amita and all the others at risk of further attacks. The mere thought of them – especially of Larry – and of the danger he was exposing them to was driving him crazy. He had to know how Larry was, he just had to, but nobody would give him an answer, even though he himself had shown his willingness for cooperation.

But then again, he hadn't done more than that, for of course he hadn't provided them with any results yet, and he didn't plan on ever doing that. He was stalling for time. Until now, that had gone rather well. However, he knew that it couldn't go well forever. Something had to happen, as soon as possible, he had to get out of here somehow. It didn't seem as though he'd be able to do that on his own, even though his kidnappers seemed to have slackened their safety precautions a bit since his consent; in any case he could detect no indication that he was being watched here in his 'office'. Still, he couldn't think of a way to ever get out of here without outside help. All he could hope for was for Don to finally find him, that he and his team would come and get him out of here, that all this would finally come to an end, that he'd finally find out what had happened to Larry…

Charlie knew that his hope was irrational. He knew that no one could have survived an accident like that. Still, he was hoping so much that it was just another one of their deceptions, that his kidnappers had just staged it all, that Larry was still alive. He forced himself to firmly believe in his hope. He couldn't allow himself to get broken by his guilty conscience again. This time, he had to stay strong, no matter how impossible that seemed to him, he just had to maintain a clear head.

And continue believing in his hope that Don would find him.

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With his usual nonchalance, Ian approached the small group. "Agent Eppes and his entourage!" he called out to them when he was still a couple of yards away. "Didn't you bring your math genius this time?"

The four of them were staring at him as if he came from another planet. Granted, Ian too was surprised to see them here, although he would never let that show. He was just returning from another useless scouting expedition and couldn't figure out for the life of him what Don's team was doing up here. Alright, maybe they weren't making real progress in their search for Clifford Wellman, but even if their A.D. had decided to send them reinforcements, he would have, one, told them about it, and two, not chosen a team from L.A., right? So something had to be going on, and slowly, a suspicion was awakened in Ian's head, for he couldn't miss the expression on Don's face that had ensued his greeting. Well, shit, he thought while the suspicion was consolidated, seems as though that was a fairly indiscreet question.

"What happened?" he demanded an explanation for this circus, a certain amount of alarm in his calm voice.

Don was still staring at him with this empty gaze. At his next words, it became apparent why. "Charlie's disappeared. We assume he's been kidnapped by the same people you're looking for."

It didn't happen often, but this was one of the moments in his life when Ian Edgerton didn't know how to react. Sure, at the beginning he and the mathematician hadn't really seen eye to eye, but in the end, they'd somehow managed to reconcile their very contrary opinions. They respected each other and Ian was even inclined to consider Charlie a friend – a distinction not many persons in this world could adorn themselves with.

So he just had to hope it hadn't become one person less during the past few days.

"Alright." Good. At least on the outside he could maintain his cool façade. "Details," he demanded.

Colby was assuming the task of explaining the situation to him. Too bad he started before he seemed to be clear on what to say. "Alright… so do you know that contrary to what we thought, Charlie didn't die last October?"

Ian nodded. "Of course." It was part of his job to always be up to date and he'd taken a special interest into the progress made in the case around the death of Charlie Eppes, and this particular stride of progress had filled him with more joy than all of the previous ones combined.

"Okay… But you don't seem to know that last week Monday, he was kidnapped again, probably by the same people that had held him captured last fall. At least that's what we think. We believe that the three people you're looking for belong to this group of kidnappers, Wellman, Taccone and Rosenthal. We know that since he turned up in Nebraska last November, Charlie has been watched by a nurse in their pocket. She was murdered, probably by the same group, probably because she knew too much. She had contact to one of the kidnappers, who apparently identified himself to her only as John Doe, who, in turn, has been in contact with Wellman. We found out that you're looking for him, and that up here we might also find two other guys who have been in contact with John Doe, namely Taccone and Rosenthal. And if we're lucky, they're holding Charlie captive somewhere here in the park."

Ian raised his eye-brows and looked into their faces one by one. "You would consider yourselves lucky if he was here?" he asked in his lapidary manner. "You do realize that this area is huge, don't you?"

Colby actually managed something akin to a smile. "That's why we have the best tracker of the North American continent on our team."

"Only of the North American continent? Don't insult me, Granger." Ian guessed that he was fooling no one with his mock casualness, although he wasn't sure whether they had any idea as to how worried those news made him. He did know, however, that panic wouldn't do them any good now.

"So did you find anything or not?" Don's impatience showed itself by increased irritation.

"I wouldn't say so," Ian replied matter-of-factly, but then noticed the expression on his friend's face. "Sorry, Don." He turned back to the whole group. "We've only been here for three days. It took quite some time to take up Wellman's trace and we only found out Monday that the three of them have to be hiding somewhere up here. There's even some nice video footage from one of the grocery stores in the area that proves that they're here, or at least that Taccone is. But we know that Wellman wanted to meet up here with him and Rosenthal. Unfortunately, those bastards are pretty careful. You know that two days ago, it was raining the entire day, so the earth was sodden and we should have been able to see their traces fairly easily. We searched a big area around that grocery store, but we couldn't find anything, not a single trace. It seems as though they're lying low until they consider it safe to come back out of their hiding-place."

"But how can they do that?" Colby asked. "They need food, don't they? And if I got that right, they're getting that from that grocery store, so why can't we just watch that?"

"That won't work," Blake replied. "We went through the store's security tapes of the past two weeks and we could find Taccone only once in them, that's all we could find. We assume that they pick a different grocery store each time."

"And if we simply watch all stores that come into consideration?" David asked.

"Forget it, Sinclair," Blake said. "One, I should think they stocked up pretty well on everything they need so that they have to come out as little as possible. And two, the area is just too big to cover every store that comes into consideration. You have to keep in mind that we're still looking at an area of about 130 square miles within which they may be hiding."

David frowned. "Isn't the park much bigger than that?"

"It is," Blake said, "but we tried to narrow the search area down based on the sighting of Taccone. We assumed that they would want to avoid travelling by car, thereby avoid running the risk of getting into a checkpoint, and we also assumed they would want to make the trip to and from the store within one day, so within about 14 hours at this time of year. With an average walking velocity of at most three miles per hour, considering the terrain and the length of travel time, that would give them a maximum walking distance of 42 miles per day, so we should be looking for them within a circle that has the grocery store as its center and a radius of 21 miles, which would give us an area of about 130 square miles."

Ian noticed the painful expressions on the faces of his friends, but wasn't sure whether they'd been elicited by the result Blake had confronted them with, that is by the sheer vastness of their search area, or by how much Blake's explanation reminded them of Charlie. Yet there was a big difference between Charlie's voodoo and this, because Blake's explanation was comprehensible.

"We tried to estimate the numbers relatively highly," Karen Teeger added, "the length of travel time and the walking velocity, to make sure not to exclude their hiding-place from our search area. However, we could still be wrong with our assumptions and they might be in a completely different part of the park, which would be very bad luck indeed, for the entire Yellowstone spans an area of almost 3,500 square miles. If our assumptions are right, however, they should be somewhere within this circle."

"Which still shouldn't get your hopes up," Ian warned his friends. "Technically we're still confronted with an area that is far too big to search, at least within a reasonable amount of time, that is before they decide to look for another place to stay. Besides, you should be aware that this isn't the part of the park that's preferred by those pseudo adventurer tourists. The terrain is pretty rough for the most part, there are hardly any hiking paths and it's easy to lose orientation."

"Alright," Don cut him off, apparently having heard enough bad news for one day, "so what do you say we should do now?"

Ian shrugged. "Go on with the search."

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Gradually, leaden tiredness was descending upon Charlie. The clock in his computer told him that he'd been sitting in front of the screen for eighteen hours now pretending he was doing something. Even though his mind didn't need to work much doing that, his body and his taxed nerves were still longing for rest, for sleep…

Once again, he let himself submerge in the imagination that his computer would be connected to some sort of network, any sort of network. He wouldn't have expected his kidnappers being so stupid to connect the devices they were working on to the internet, thus risking being located or hacked, but he'd still hoped to be able to get into some other network from here, into anything at all, to do at least something useful. His computer, however, wasn't even connected to their internal network, and he knew why. That was the mistake they'd made last fall. They'd cut him off from the world outside, just like they were doing now, and just like now, he hadn't even known where he'd been. All the clocks had been set on Eastern Time, but Rosenthal had told him right from the start that this didn't mean anything. However, unlike this time, he'd been connected to the internal network last fall, and with some hacking tricks he'd learned from Amita, he'd been able to browse through data and files they'd never wanted him to see, data and files that had confirmed his horrible suspicions.

This time, he didn't even have access to that, so virtually all possibilities were spoilt for him. He really had no other hope but Don.