Fitzpatrick's words impacted him heavily, pushing John back against his chair. The force was enough to knock the air out of his lungs and he nearly shattered, realization and disbelief coming together in his brain like fire and ice. His eyes darted in the direction of the closed office door. There were two heavily armed USSF kids standing right outside, the prospect of the help they could give making him bold, but Fitzpatrick caught the look.
"I would think very carefully about your next move there, chief," he said darkly. The smirk he had carried on his face moments ago slid away to be replaced with a cold, calculating stare. John decided he preferred the smirk. There was something unhinged hiding behind those eyes now. Something the man before him had somehow managed to keep hidden from him all this time.
"Did you take Carrie, Fitz?" John asked, somehow finding his voice. Rage tinted the world around him red again. Betrayal sucker-punched him right in the gut, again and again.
John dug his fingernails into the leather of the chair, knuckles white and skin stretched taut till he thought it might split. He was fighting against a primal urge to strike. And the urge was strong. Strong enough to wind the muscles in his body up tight in anticipation of attack. It was taking over his entire frame, but John knew he couldn't risk it. Not after what Eddie had said.
Those words still echoed around his skull. They knocked together inside his head along with ideas of what he could do to the man in front of him with bare hands and pure rage, given the chance...
Fitzpatrick rose from the desk. "This is not at all how I wanted this to go, John."
John bristled at the use of his first name. The man had no right.
"It's important to me that you know that."
"I'm having a hard time understanding any of this at the moment, Sean ." John used the word like a blade, but without the desired effect. Fitzpatrick's eyes merely sparked again with that wild something from before. John flinched slightly under it and the barely checked potential it held... Perhaps poking the proverbial bear in the zoo was not the best idea at the moment, though his fingers still tingled with the desire to do so. The yearning for violence was clashing viciously with his need to protect Carrie at all costs.
"No, you're right, Sheppard," Fitz said with words devoid of emotion. "You deserve an explanation and I'm going to give you one, but not here. There's a caretaker's cottage at the edge of the base near the cemetery. Do you know where it is?"
John remained silent, analyzing the situation with the quick precision even 18 years out of uniform couldn't dull. Battle plans formed then failed in his mind. In such close quarters, he was at a disadvantage. Fitzpatrick had him outmatched in both speed and strength. His neck would snap like a twig beneath those big beefy paws before he ever got a punch in. But maybe if he made just enough noise before he died, maybe the USSF soldiers on guard would get wise to what was happening inside...
There was only one problem with that plan. The bastard most likely had Carrie. And that changed the rules of the game entirely. If he fought then failed, there was a very real chance the former SEAL would kill Carrie anyway. Fight wasn't an option. Flight, not much better, but it was apparently his only choice.
"This only works if you use your words, John. Do you know about the cottage or not?"
"I do." His voice was shaking.
"Good. You meet me there in one hour and I'll explain everything. But, if you say anything to anyone, or if anyone so much as tries to stop me from leaving this base, Carrie Sinclair dies. And just in case there's any doubt in your mind that I don't have her..." Fitzpatrick fished something white and rectangular from the back pocket of his pants and threw it into John's lap. "There's my proof."
John broke his death stare with the former SEAL to glance down at it. It was a plain white envelope, bulging slightly with its contents. Uncementing his hands from around the edges of his chair, he lifted it from his lap.
For a moment, John tried to hide the fact that his hands were shaking, but decided in the end that he didn't care. Let Fitzpatrick see. Let him think that he was terrified. The fact that they shook with unbridled rage was his and his alone to know.
John fished several script-covered sheets of paper from the envelope and unfolded them slowly in his lap, recognizing the handwriting as his own loopy lettering. It was the goodbye note he'd left in his cabin for Eddie and Carrie to find.
This was Fitzpatrick's proof that he had been there. He'd been in John's home... Invaded the sanctity of that place... Put his hands on Carrie...
"If you fucking hurt her..." The pages crumpled in his grip.
"No," Fitz snapped, cutting John off before he could go on. "No talking; not here. You've got one hour, Sheppard."
Fitzpatrick turned towards the door. John shifted forward in his chair. If he planned his attack just right he could use all the fury coursing through his veins and go for the jugular. End this right here and now. ...Or he could miscalculate and not only kill himself, but Carrie as well in the process.
Uncertainly froze the blood in John's veins. The viscous fluid pumped sluggishly now through his extremities, weighing them down and making him question his own abilities. The hands still shaking in his lap were old now. What power did they have over the youth and madness of stronger men?
Fitzpatrick paused with a hand on the doorknob and turned dead eyes back towards John. "Remember what I said. Tell anyone, bring anyone with you to the cottage, and I will not hesitate to slit that pretty little bitch's throat. Do I make myself clear?"
"Crystal."
John was the master of rage. He'd been immersed in its redness for 18 odd years and he put all of it behind his eyes then. He lifted those eyes to look once more at Fitzpatrick, but the man didn't even flinch.
This was not going to end well.
"One hour, John." And he was gone.
John let the sheets of paper and their finger-shaped creases fall from his hands and down onto the floor. He listened as Fitzpatrick chatted amicably with the guards stationed just outside the door before moving off. He'd been given 60 minutes to come up with a plan that hopefully kept Carrie alive, and he spread those minutes out in his mind, trying to decide how best to use them.
If this were a war and he were fighting against the enemy hordes, John would start thinking about a way to ambush them. Preemptive strikes had always been kind of his thing, but he wasn't fighting this war with a battalion of men at his side. If he went for help, if he brought Rodney and Lorne into all this, Fitzpatrick would kill Carrie. There was no battle when innocent women and children were ducking through the crossfire. That was just a massacre.
Unless, of course, those women and children had guns. They'd had guns in Afghanistan... but John didn't have time to think about all that right now.
John drew a hesitant hand up towards his earwig then stopped. If Fitzpatrick had a way of listening in on the comms then this would be over before it even began. He dug the earwig out of his ear instead and placed it on the desk beside him. Right next to the pizza box that was still lying open on the tabletop like some sort of sad reminder that life had once been normal.
But what was normal now?
Fitzpatrick had very nearly murdered Carson. He was ready to kill Carrie next. The former SEAL had all but admitted to everything, and John was wracking his brain for a reason why.
But even more perplexing than all that was the fact that Fitzpatrick had allowed him to live.
"This is not how I wanted this to go, John. It's important to me that you know that."
If the former SEAL's intention was to lure John out to that cottage to murder him just like he had all the other ATA gene carriers, why had he let such a perfect opportunity slip through his fingers a moment ago? Fitzpatrick had him dead to rights, but instead of attacking John right then and there, he'd walked out of the security room with an order for John to meet him in an hour at the old abandoned house near the edge of the SGC cemetery. It just didn't make any sense. There was something more going on here. Something big that John was missing, and he couldn't help but worry that he was digging into something he shouldn't.
But regardless of what might be going on below the surface, Fitzpatrick had promised answers and John was going to get those answers, come hell or high water. The question was, how was he supposed to defend himself against a man he was pretty sure could have put even the most seasoned of MMA fighters in the hospital? That man had bested him time and time again in the ring... but in doing so had also given John the occasional hint as to what he could use to bring the big, burly Irishman down.
What had he said in the sparring space that day? Bantos fighting was not about who was bigger? It was about focus and discipline. Two things John sorely lacked at the moment but was going to need to find soon, or else in less than an hour there was going to be a massacre 100 yards away from the headstones that marked the places where the SGC had buried his friends. All John had in his arsenal at the moment was the quicksilver anger sluicing through his veins, eradicating anything in its path. But Fitzpatrick had even made a comment about that, that day in the training rooms:
...blind anger might put you back on your feet in a firefight, but it sure as hell won't save your ass.
What John needed to do was think strategically. Needed to get inside this guy's head and try to figure out what made him tick. Maybe get a few steps ahead of him. Only that was practically impossible now because everything John thought he knew about Sean Fitzpatrick was apparently a complete and utter lie.
The massive yet introspective former Navy SEAL that had been training him had morphed suddenly into this unhinged something right before his eyes. He was menacing and dangerous, and he had a sharp edge to him that John couldn't afford to underestimate. He could remember sensing it that first day they'd met in the training facility. It was back now, and with a vengeance. And John was finally starting to see it for what it truly was. See how it spoke of murder and madness.
No, there was no doubt in John's mind that Sean Fitzpatrick wouldn't hesitate to kill Carrie if he tried to go off-book. That realization had John abandoning every pathetic plan his panicked mind tried to provide.
John formed his hands into shaking fists and brought one down hard on the desk, making the pizza box jump.
Fitzpatrick could have easily just killed him a moment ago, but he hadn't. He let John live. The former SEAL had answers to give. So maybe what John needed to do was arm himself to the teeth and just head out to that damn cottage in - he checked his watch - fifty-five minutes. Maybe bullets could end what his aging hands could not because John didn't care who this guy was, no one was bulletproof. You could have all the anger in the world burning away inside of you, and all it would take was one careful shot to the center of the forehead to end it forever.
Bullets to the head put periods at the ends of sentences, not ellipses. John Sheppard was done with ellipses.
Unclenching his fists from the angry balls he had formed them into, John glanced down at his palms. The white skin pinked back up instantly but the little crescents left behind by his fingernails welled with blood. Two weeks ago he'd held a rifle in these very hands and stared down the barrel of that gun at a buck. Two weeks ago he had crumbled beneath the weight of remembered memories and had been unable to squeeze that trigger. Now, thanks in part to Fitzpatrick himself, John would not be running into that same problem again.
The SEAL's own actions were about to be his own undoing. He'd helped build John's defenses back up, and now he was going to be crushed beneath them... if the force of John's ferocity didn't kill him first.
John rose from his chair.
He needed a weapon. He also needed to ditch his security detail somehow and figure out a way to get out of the mountain without anybody noticing.
Shit.
How was he supposed to manage that? Lorne had the place practically on lockdown, but if John didn't get out to that abandoned cottage near the edge of the base soon, Fitzpatrick was going to do the unthinkable.
John left the security room and made off down the hallway toward nowhere in particular. Indecision painted everything around him pale and grey. He searched in agitation for inspiration in the washed-out colors around him. He needed to figure out a way to lose the two men following behind or everything else would fall apart around him.
But as with everything else in his life. Fate decided to intervene.
Just as John was about to round a corner, someone wrapped their hand around his forearm and yanked him into a nearby room. John had to fight to keep his footing as Evan Lorne slammed him up against one wall. His guards were hot on his heels, but one swift motion from Lorne had them moving on down the hall without comment.
"Lorne, what the fuck are you doing?" John demanded, trying to push the man away roughly. But Lorne wouldn't budge.
"Shut up for a second!" the Colonel hissed and put a finger to his ear.
"Roger that," Lorne said to someone John couldn't hear. His own earwig was still lying on the desk back in the security office. "If anyone spots him again, let me know. And for heaven's sake, don't follow him! This guy is special forces and he'll spot a tail from a mile away. Lorne out."
John was still being pinned bodily against the wall by Lorne's arm and the Colonel finally stepped away to release him. "Sorry, Sheppard. But I had to stop you before you went and did something stupid."
"Why did you stop me, Lorne?" He couldn't do this. If Lorne demanded answers from him, he wasn't going to be able to give them. And if he had to fight to be allowed to leave, he wasn't going to hesitate. His only hope was that his friend would forgive him someday.
"I was listening the entire time," Lorne said. "Well, to your phone call and what Fitzpatrick said, anyway," he admitted and John tried not to sag against the wall. This was exactly what Fitzpatrick had told him not to do. "I got back here as fast as I could. Why didn't he just kill you?"
"You're asking me?" John exclaimed, shoving Lorne back a few steps with hands he hadn't meant to raise in anger against his friend. "Why did that asshole do any of it? Why did he try to kill Carson? Why did he go to Blue River and kidnap my friend? None of it makes any fucking sense! And if I don't go meet him alone in," he checked his watch again, "forty-five minutes, he's going to murder her!"
John pushed away from the wall, making for the doorway, but Lorne grabbed him roughly by the shoulders and pinned him back against the wall again. John balled up a fist, ready to throw the first punch in his desperation to get away, but a figure running through the door and screeching to a halt beside them broke through the red haze that had descended down around him again.
"What'd I miss?" Rodney panted and Lorne stepped back and away from John again.
"Sheppard here was just about to run off and do something stupid."
"Christ, you told McKay!?" John groaned.
"Of course I told McKay!" Lorne shot back angrily.
"Of course he told me!" Rodney scolded at the exact same time. "And something tells me I showed up just in the nick of time."
Rodney was looking back and forth between the two of them, expecting an explanation. With a scowl and arms folded over his chest, he looked a bit like some irate parent that had just pulled his two sons out of a fight.
"Brigadier General Sheppard here was just telling me how he plans to go meet a psychopath alone at the edge of the base with no backup," Lorne fumed, anger still licking up the sides of his neck, painting the skin there red.
"You guys don't seem to understand what's going on here right now!" John practically roared, reopening the wounds on his palms as he dug fingernails back into them. "He has Carrie and if I don't show up there in a little less than an hour, he's going to slit her throat. You heard him, Lorne! If I tell anyone, if I bring anyone with me, she's dead!"
They weren't getting it and John didn't know how to make them see. There was no time to make them see!
"So what were you planning to do, Sheppard. Huh?" Rodney asked, choosing a side. It was apparently going to be two against one. "Were you just going to waltz in there all by yourself without a plan? Just hope that it goes your way? Leave it to you to go off all half-cocked. Diving in headfirst without even stopping to think first!"
"If I don't show, she's dead, Rodney. End of story. I don't need any more reason than that to dive in headfirst."
"We get it, John. Sheesh. Damsel in distress. Caveman mode activated. Me Tarzan you Jane. Check." Rodney said as he rolled his eyes and John had to resist the sudden urge to haul off and smack him. Sometimes his friend just didn't know when to shut the fuck up.
"That's not funny, McKay," John replied with his words instead of his fists like he had wanted to.
"No, I know it's not, Sheppard, and I'm sorry. But you always do this! You take everything on yourself and completely ignore the fact that you have all these friends around you who would be willing to die for you!" Rodney pointed a finger at him angrily but dropped it a moment later as his face softened. "Look, all I'm saying is, let's stop for a second and try to think this through rationally."
"Somehow I don't think 'rational' is a word in Fitzpatrick's vocabulary," John bit back sarcastically, trying not to let what Rodney said penetrate the fog of his anger. "He tried to poison Carson. He's killed how many people now? I need to go meet him."
"Can you even hear yourself right now?" Rodney bellowed, blocking John's way before he could even think to make a break for it. "It's like talking to a brick wall with you! Would you please get your head out of your ass for one minute and stop playing Rambo long enough to listen to the plan Lorne and I have come up with?"
But John just shook his head. No one else was going to die because of him. No fucking way.
"But he has Carrie, Rodney," he croaked out, not caring how the words came out if they helped to get his point across. "If Fitzpatrick even thinks for a moment that I brought back up, she's as good as dead. I can't risk it."
"You don't have to, John." It was Lorne who spoke and John looked over at the Colonel who had otherwise been quiet through most of John and Rodney's argument. "McKay and I have an idea."
"You and McKay, huh?" he asked. A little of the bluster drained away from him. While Rodney McKay Plans did tend to lean toward the more ludicrous, even John had to admit that, every once in a while, the scientist managed to come up with something pretty ingenious. And if Lorne had gotten on board with it, then maybe it was worth listening to.
"Alright," John eventually said with a heavy sigh, hoping he wasn't about to make the biggest mistake of his life.
"You get five minutes."
Exactly twenty minutes later, armed with a new state-of-the-art earwig Rodney promised no one could detect, John rocked the jeep he was driving down the narrow access road leading to the base cemetery.
It was dusk. The sun had begun its slow descent in the west behind him, already tucked behind the bluish-purple tip of Cheyenne Mountain.
The road John was traveling down was pockmarked with deep depressions gouged into the gravel by the constant freeze-thaw of the snow. The massive vehicle he was piloting swayed as he 4-wheeled it over them faster than he probably should have. It was unseasonably warm outside as well and for several feet out from either side of the roadway, the snow had receded just enough to reveal the muddy shoulders and brown dead grass on either side of the road.
The color seemed to match his mood.
John white-knuckled the steering wheel, wondering the whole time if he was being watched and if Fitzpatrick would ever suspect what they were up to.
"I don't like this," he said out loud and Rodney chortled in his ear. "Yeah, I got that the first twenty times you told me."
"You do realize what's at stake for me here, right?" One of the jeep's wheels caught a particularly nasty depression in the roadway and John's stomach bottomed out for a moment as he was knocked about in the cab.
"Yes, yes, prince charming. I'm well aware of how guilty you'll feel if Ms. Sinclair is harmed. Or how willing you are to throw down your own life in exchange for hers, and blah blah blah! You need to relax. There's no way he sees this coming."
"I still don't like it," John said. "He's smart McKay, and we gotta assume smart enough to think we might try something like this."
Rodney sighed in his ear. "You know, Sheppard, there are studies out there that show increased anxiety levels can actually lead to better performance in the field."
"Not really helping, Rodney."
"Well, then how do you feel about dad jokes? I heard this one the other day…"
"How about you just stop talking and let me drive," John suggested, not really ready for a world in which Rodney McKay told dad jokes. Madmen he could handle. But not that. "Fitzpatrick is definitely going to know something is up if he sees me pull up to the gate jabbering to myself."
John could already see the cemetery spreading itself out at the base of the hill he crested. The little cottage sat beside it, just inside the perimeter fence for the complex, looking forgotten and forlorn. The warmer evening air was mixing with the cold radiating up from frozen ground and fog was starting to form again. This time around, however, it wasn't the misty fog of morning. It was more like the heavy and oppressive haze from a horror movie. It meandered down from the mountain and across the ground to curl up over the headstones dotting the landscape. John nearly shuddered, despite the warmer temperatures. For all he knew a stone would be erected in the middle of that haze for him someday soon, if this asinine plan of theirs failed to work.
They couldn't attack this problem in a conventional way and even John had to admit the plan that Lorne and Rodney had come up with was a pretty good one. In fact, he should have thought of it himself, considering. It would certainly help them to circumvent any surveillance Fitzpatrick might have put into place. If they were careful, if they played their cards just right, then maybe this whole thing didn't end the way John's tired mind kept trying to suggest it might as the cemetery loomed ever closer.
The headstones before him rose from a thin sea of undulating white like ghosts from their graves. It all felt so ominous, like some portent of doom. John normally didn't believe in such things (and maybe he still didn't) but the anxiety and adrenaline highs of the past few hours were making him loopy where he needed to be clear. Carrie's life depended on that focus. As did his own. If things didn't go according to plan, then this was it for him. And if this was it for John, then there were things he needed to say.
"Hey... Rodney?"
There was a crackle of static in his ear. "We're not doing this."
"You don't even know what I was gonna say," John said around a smothered half-smile.
"Right. No idea what you could possibly be thinking driving up on that nice spooky cemetery."
"McKay..."
"Just save it, all right? Tell me later after all this is over. Better yet, wait until Carson finally wakes up and tell us both."
"Rodney, buddy, this is important." The voice on the other end of the connection stayed silent as John mustered his courage. "Teyla was wrong."
He said it quietly and wondered for a moment if the scientist would remember their conversation in the lab all those days ago. If he would understand what John really meant. Rodney's continued silence said it all.
"I'm gonna go radio silent now," John finished with a hint of finality in his voice. He had just pulled the jeep up in front of the cemetery gates on the crunch of cold gravel. "Sheppard out."
John threw the jeep in park and then sat back in the driver's seat. The enormity of what he was about to do washed over him suddenly like the fog creeping down the mountainside to cover everything it touched in a blanket of surging white. It was like the world was as unsettled as he was but he'd run out of time to try and figure things out. The timetable couldn't be altered - not now, not ever - and he pushed the door beside him open with a shoulder. A damp wind pushed it back in on him slightly as if urging him to just stay inside. But John couldn't stay and jumped out of the jeep.
"Good luck, John," a small voice said quietly in his ear, but he didn't dare risk a reply.
The caretaker's cottage Fitzpatrick had directed him to sat fifty yards or so away from the base's perimeter fence. Floodlights affixed to the tall chain-link fence had snapped on in the twilight a few minutes ago on the sizzle of wet circuits. Their pale illumination was casting strange, spiked shadows across the snow beneath his boots. John realized it was just the barbed wire topping the fence. Keeping in for once what they had always meant to keep out, he thought to himself and then shoved the dark thoughts aside. He had to keep moving.
There was no driveway up to the cottage and John trudged through a slushy mix of melting snow and suckling mud toward his destination, already sweating from the exertion. He was decked out from head to toe in tactical gear so familiar he half wondered if the past 18 years had been nothing more than a dream. Some waking nightmare he'd been having while traversing the vast arctic terrain of some unpopulated planet with Ronon. But Cheyenne thrusting up from between rolling foothills a few miles to his left didn't let that thought linger for very long.
John adjusted the tac vest secured snugly around his torso with a quick tug. The familiar weight of his sidearm in it's holster thumped reassuringly against his thigh. He had his old friend the P90 clutched in his clammy hands, though he highly doubted Fitzpatrick would let him keep it for long. In case that happened, John had several other implements strategically hidden on his person. His last resorts should all of this end badly. His last desperate attempts at exerting some kind of control over an already out of control situation.
As John walked, jumbled thoughts tumbled through his already crowded brain. Fitzpatrick was luring John out there with the promise of providing answers. That fact alone made everything about this entire operation seem off. The former SEAL was taking a huge risk by sticking around. He was practically begging John to show up with guns blazing. But something was giving Fitzpatrick confidence that his plan was going to work, that he would be getting out of this alive, and John wasn't entirely sure holding Carrie over his head was what was giving him that confidence. There was something else, something John was still missing. Those thoughts kept sending his brain into a frenzy of conjecture.
But one thing was for certain. Sean Fitzpatrick was smart - murderously so - and John was going to have to be very, very careful.
Glancing down at his watch, he picked up the pace a bit. He was due at the cottage in less than five minutes and had to resist the urge to start rambling to Rodney again in his anxiousness. His fingers tingled every so often, reminding him that he was far from alone. John tried to pull some comfort from that. Their plan was a good one, he kept telling himself. It was going to work, and as the dilapidated shack emerged from the thickening fog in front of him, John held tight to that last glimmer of hope before the mist closed in around him completely.
The caretaker's cottage wasn't very big. Maybe 800 square feet not counting the parts of its second story that were sagging precariously in on themselves with decay. Firelight flickered out through carelessly boarded-up windows he didn't dare risk looking through just yet. Smoke rose idly up from a hole in the roof where John imagined a chimney used to sit before it had collapsed. In fact, its broken bricks lay scattered near the side of the house; a decaying skeleton of its former shape slowly being exposed by the receding snow.
From a distance, John couldn't help but draw parallels between this place and his own little cabin sitting forgotten and empty in the Wisconsin wilderness. If he died he wondered if Eddie might take care of the place for him. Maybe head out that way every so often to revisit the memories of a man that had slipped in and out of his life like a whisper. Would Carrie go back too, if he managed somehow to get her out of all of this alive?
For a moment John could almost imagine the porch he walked up onto was his own. It even had a light like his used to have. A porch light that never had been switched on because, for 18 years, John had turned his nose up at power. Power had brought him nothing but desperate years of grief.
Bowed porch steps creaked beneath John's boots as if in sympathy, shattering any illusion he had of home. He mounted them carefully, aiming for stealth. As much as Fitzpatrick outmatched him in age and strength, John still had a lifetime's worth of military training to fall back on. Training that had taught him how to approach an enemy in absolute silence. To slit his throat in the dark and then disappear back into the night without ever having been seen. To be the name guards cursed when they entered the room the next morning and found themselves out of a job.
See, he could match Fitzpatrick in ruthlessness on the battlefield. There were just a few things he needed to do first.
He was trying to take John Sheppard, the man, into a firefight where he needed John Sheppard, the soldier. That unforgiving Air Force Colonel who lay curled and unused at the base of his spine just waiting to be revived. Twenty years ago it would have been like flipping a switch. Today it was harder than he expected, especially with Carrie thrust into the middle of it all. That made it personal and John struggled to find his balance in all the madness. Knowing all along that if he failed, the cost would be as terrible to him as that day in the sky with the Wraith.
John approached the swollen 2x4s nailed crudely together that made up the cottage's temporary front door, and wondered absently where the original might have gotten to. A padlock had been used to hold the door shut at one time but its thick metal had been shorn through crudely with bolt cutters. Its mangled remains had been left to dangle from a rusty hook just beside the door. The wind picked up again, gathering speed as it whipped down from the mountain side to lift the hair at the back of John's neck and rattle the twisted metal against the doorframe.
Taking a breath and closing his eyes for the briefest of moments to center himself one final time, John put a steady hand out and slowly pulled the door back to enter the cottage muzzle first.
The light in the decaying shack was smokey and it took John's eyes several seconds to grow accustomed. The house was one massive great room with a loft that disappeared into darkness above a huge stone fireplace at the far end of the room. There were two chairs sitting in front of the fire blazing away in the grate, too close to the flames to be comfortable. The occupants of those chairs were both hooded and bound. John could tell immediately that one of the figures was Carrie. The other one appeared masculine in stature, but that was as far as John's observations could take him.
He took one lurching step forward but then made himself stop mid-stride. He could feel eyes on him, watching his every move from above. If Fitzpatrick was on the upper level waiting to take him out, John would be making himself an easy target. He couldn't risk just striding across the open room, bold as brass.
Sticking to the shadows, John raised his P-90 up closer to his face, trained it at the dark spaces disappearing above, and made a mad dash across the wooden floor of the cottage. He came to a stop in a crouch right beside Carrie's trembling form. This close to the wall, he was no longer visible to anyone lurking above.
Carrie flinched as John drew near, but that was a good thing. The fact that she was quaking beneath the reassuring hands he put on either one of her arms meant that she was still very much alive.
"Carrie, it's John," he whispered and lifted the hood carefully away from her face. Carrie was pale, but her eyes were bright.
Sweat from the heat of the fire had plastered dark strands of hair to the sides of her face and neck, but it was those eyes that sliced right through him. They were full of pure fear and he knew in an instant that he would never forgive himself for letting Fitz bring her here. Exposing her to this. This world of his that was full of nothing but madness and blood.
Pushing all of that aside, John held Carrie's sweat-damped face between his trembling palms and put the promise of rescue there behind his eyes. "I've got you."
Carrie was gagged. Bending forward, John began fumbling with the complicated knot at the base of her skull, listening all the while for any signs of an approaching Fitzpatrick.
Carrie let her forehead rest against John's shoulder as he worked. He let his cheek fall against the side of her face as he struggled with the unyielding knot. There was something wet splashing against his skin and he urged his fingers to work faster to free her, eventually giving up to go for the small pocket knife he suddenly remembered was in the breast pocket of his vest. Idiot.
But a deep voice rumbling to his left froze John mid-reach.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you."
The voice washed over him in an icy wave, bringing with it remembered snippets of nearly forgotten conversation; secrets he'd spilled to a traitor.
The heavy footsteps on unstable boards cut through the sudden silence in the cottage. Not even the crackling fire or John's own heartbeat in his ears could breach the sudden stillness that descended on them as time itself held her breath.
Rising from his crouch on the floor, John pressed a kiss to Carrie's dampened brow, slipping something small and metallic into one of her bound hands discretely as he rose. Their eyes met for a fraction of a second and John could see that Carrie understood.
Her eyes quickly filled with fear again. For a moment, John wanted to reassure her that he would do everything in his power to get her out of this alive. Only that wasn't the kind of fear she was showing him. Carrie was telling him to be careful; more concerned with his safety than her own.
John tried to offer her something resembling a smile as he slowly turned around to face the man who was picking his way cautiously down a rickety set of stairs that appeared to be little more than a glorified ladder.
Sean Fitzpatrick was moving carefully and leveling such a gaze at John that he instinctually stepped in front of Carrie. The former SEAL finally reached the main level and smiled.
Fitzpatrick had a Kevlar vest on. Where John's was pocketed with compartments for all manner of gear needed for off-world missions, Fitzpatrick's was simple and plain and he held a beretta loosely in one hand. His trigger finger was idly tapping the side of the gun, not curled around the trigger like it could have been, but John still secured his own P-90 closer to his side.
Fitzpatrick had that look in his eye again. The one that made John's skin crawl. Made him want to mow the bastard down with automatic weapons fire until he was as dead and as cold as Carson could have been. But it was what the man had clutched in his other hand that had John rethinking that particular plan.
"You've had enough experience with these to know what this is, I'm guessing?" Fitzpatrick inquired coldly and John stared at the device the former SEAL held out for him to see. The light was impossibly low, but there was no mistaking what it was.
"That's a dead man's switch," he said back, just as coldly, trying to hide his agitation behind a false front of faked bravado. This was going to complicate things...
"We heard, Sheppard. Get him talking. Find out what it does. We read three distinct energy sources in there with you," Rodney's worried voice came through on the earwig. John had nearly forgotten his friends were still on the comms.
John pulled in a breath and tried to wipe everything going through his mind away from his features lest he give something away.
"What's it for?" he asked.
"Not what you think," Fitzpatrick said coyly with a glint in his eye, "Well, that's not entirely true. I've wired this place and the chairs they're sitting on have enough C4 strapped to the bottom to successfully relocate this cottage to the moon. So I would seriously reconsider any ideas you're getting in that head of yours about trying to overpower me."
"Alright buddy," John placated, lowering the muzzle of his P90. "You've got my attention now. Tell me what's going on here."
"What's going on here, John," Fitzpatrick began, setting John's teeth on edge again with the use of his first name, "is that your buddy Eddie seriously screwed up my timetable and now I have to speed things up. Things are sloppy now, and I don't like sloppy."
"Timetable for what, Fitz?" he asked, but the former SEAL either didn't hear the question or chose to ignore it.
"Fuck, John! This wasn't how any of this was supposed to go!" The man standing before him seemed to collapse in on himself. Shoulders slumping, he let his head fall forward to shake it sadly. If John had thought for one second that he might be able to secure the switch in time, he would have taken his shot right then and there. But when Fitzpatrick looked back up at him again, John stopped short and was glad he hadn't made his move.
Fitzpatrick looked... unhinged, and the frantic firelight surrounding them wasn't doing him any favors. It gave the illusion of something sinister hiding just below the surface and John had a funny feeling that if that man's exterior began to crack, there was no stopping the madness from just clawing itself up and out into the open.
John increased his grip on his gun and Fitzpatrick saw. "You don't believe me, do you?" The firelight glinted dangerously on the blackness that had taken over his eyes.
"Then why don't you try explaining some of it to me, Fitz?" John asked cautiously. "Because all I see right now is a guy who kidnapped two people, tried to murder my best friend last night, and has been poisoning anyone with the ATA gene. Maybe after that we can get back to whether or not I believe one single thing that comes out of your mouth."
Fitzpatrick appeared stricken almost and stumbled forward, looking as though he was desperate to start defending his actions to John. Only he stopped short. Something like uncertainty flashed across his face, clashing with the madness still lingering there. He flicked suspicious eyes over to the twin windows on either side of the front door. He was looking for snipers, John realized. Well, if fate had any love left for John at all, one was in position right now.
"Lose the P90," Fitzpatrick said, raising his own gun to train it at John's chest. "Now! I'm not having this fucking conversation with you with a gun pointed at my head."
Irony not lost on John, he clenched his jaw and started lifting the strap of the weapon up over his head. "How about we both lose the guns?" he suggested, but Fitzpatrick just shook his head.
"I don't think so, Sheppard. Drop it now, or I put a bullet through your skull and then one through your whore."
That wild something was back in Fitzpatrick's eyes and John shot his hands up quickly in surrender. The former SEAL seemed unhinged, flitting from one extreme emotion to the next in the blink of an eye. It made him unpredictable and John very nervous.
John leaned over to carefully place his P-90 on the ground near his feet. When he rose again, he put his hands up in surrender. "Ok, let's talk."
"Do you think I'm an idiot?" Fitz snorted, raising his gun so that it was now pointed at John's head. "The vest goes, too."
John had no other option but to comply. Once it was on the floor next to his gun, Fitz gave the order for John to kick both across the room and into the shadows. He did as he was told but memorized exactly where they were skittered off to in the dark. When the time came, he would know where to look.
"Alright, Fitz," he said, putting up his hands. Without his tac vest, he felt vulnerable and exposed. "You've got me here and I'm unarmed now. What's next, buddy? A bullet between the eyes?"
"It wasn't supposed to happen this way," Fitzpatrick said again.
"You keep saying that," John said. "So explain it to me. Tell me what's going on here."
"They came after me, too. Did you know that?" Fitzpatrick said instead of answering. "Right after it happened. They sent someone to my house. My house, John."
"What are you talking about, Fitz?" he asked, but his brain was already in overdrive, trying desperately to make connections as comprehension flitted at the edge of his understanding.
"I always wondered if your buddy McKay ever came across my name in his investigation after the war," Fitz went on, ignoring the question again. "Not that he would have known it was me. But who knows? Dr. McKay is a pretty smart guy and I knew it wouldn't be a good idea to tip him off. At least, not before I finally stopped the Atlantis expedition for good. Though I guess we'll never know now, will we?"
Fitzpatrick's comment cut through the din of John's jumbled thoughts. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Gas, John! Isn't it fabulous? Canisters of cyanide gas hooked up to the mountain's main ventilation system just waiting for me to let go of this switch." He held said switch aloft in the air. "And you know what's funny? Once you understand what I've done, you're going to be begging me to let you set them off yourself!"
John wasn't quite sure what to make of the words coming out of the former SEAL's mouth. Where was the level-headed psychologist who had helped John work through some of the most traumatic moments of his life? The man standing before him now was manic and seriously just suggested that John would be on board with another round of mass murder.
"Who the hell are you?" he forced out, realizing immediately that getting angry might not be the best idea. The fire beside them flared higher as if feeding off the rage that ignited behind Fitzpatrick's eyes.
"You tell me, John. I gave you enough clues to figure it out."
But the theory rolling around in his brain just couldn't be true. There was no way in hell.
"Come on, Sheppard. Don't make me regret letting you live." Fitzpatrick moved further into the room, propelled forward by the power of his own madness.
John coiled in anticipation of moving forward to grab at the switch. He held his breath waiting to see if anyone had the kill shot yet, but nothing happened. His fingers twitched with the urge to raise his hand to his ear, pissed beyond measure that Rodney's voice remained resolutely silent in his head. He needed to know what the plan was so he could go after that switch if anything happened. The lives of everyone in that mountain depended on it now.
"We're searching the base, John. Just keep him talking," a frantic voice finally rang out. John tried desperately not to react to it.
"Not even a guess?" Fitzpatrick said darkly, raising the pistol to point directly at John's forehead again.
He froze, unwilling to put into words what his brain had finally settled on.
"Time's up, Sheppard. It's now or never."
"You were the kid in the chair at Area 51," he said, hardly believing the words even as they poured from his own mouth. "You were the one who destroyed all those Hive ships with me."
"There you go," Fitzpatrick sneered with a vicious upward twist of the corners of his mouth. "See, I told you there was hope for you yet."