Commencement

Chapter 15

"Morgan!"

The head of the shadowed figure whipped in Reid's direction.

"Reid?"

"Is it really you?"

"Kid, I can hear you, but I can't see you. Keep talking to me, Pretty Boy."

Reid shook his head in confusion.

Am I hallucinating? Have I lost too much blood? Is this what it feels like?

Because it felt like he was having an out-of-body experience, as though he'd mentally conjured up the help he so desperately needed, and his subconscious had reflexively gone to his personal paragon of strength.

"Kid? Reid! Talk to me, Kid!"

Then he heard another familiar voice, and another, one male and one female.

"Reid!" "Spencer!"

If he was hallucinating, it would go down as one of the most welcome hallucinations in history, his own personal oasis in a desert of despair. Even if it seemed crazy, Reid couldn't resist going along with it.

"I'm here, in the woods. I'm trying to get to you, but….oomph." The breath knocked from him, as he'd moved in haste, and tripped on the protruding root of a tree.

He might have been silenced, but his short sentence had apparently been enough for the others to zero in on his location. The blinding beam of a flashlight caught him as he still lay sprawled on the floor of the forest.

"Reid!" It was the female voice this time. Both concern and relief were intermingled in Emily's tone.

The two men flanked him, and helped him to his feet, and all three new arrivals took stock of their colleague. David Rossi, holding the flashlight, ran it up and down the figure of the tall profiler.

"You're injured."

"I'm fine. Where's JJ?"

Hoping, despite what his wavering logic told him, that they'd somehow already found her and gotten her to safety.

Emily became even more alarmed than she had when she'd first laid eyes on him.

"You mean she's not with you? Where is she?"

Still holding on to Reid, Morgan could feel the shift in his friend's weight.

"We need to sit you down, Pretty Boy." Doing so, as he spoke. "You hit your head?"

"What? No, I …." Rubbing at his occiput. "I think a beam hit me."

"A beam? You mean a branch?"

"No, a beam! From when the building exploded!"

The three newly-arrived profilers exchanged glances, not sure whether their injured colleague was confused, or whether they simply had no understanding of what had transpired here.

Emily stepped into her unit chief role, recognizing the need for more information.

"All right. Dave, get Garcia going on finding out about an explosion within…." Looking at Reid, "….two miles of our location. Morgan….I know…"

I know you don't really work for me anymore.

"Just tell me what you want, Princess."

I want both of my agents back, in one piece. Both of our friends.

She almost asked him to call out the local office to assist in the search, but then she remembered that he didn't have any real standing to do so.

But I can deputize him, can't I? Can a unit chief do that?

She thought it unlikely, but decided they were in one of those situations where it would be better to apologize later than to ask permission up front.

"I'll need your help with the search. And…"

Nodding her head in the direction of their younger friend.

I need you to keep him calm, and safe.

Understanding, Morgan responded with a single nod of his head.

Emily gave one more order before getting started.

"Rossi, call out the search. And we'll need medical."

Reid had been silently watching and listening, but he was not about to be sidelined, no matter his condition.

"I don't need medi.."

She cut him off. "Yes, you do."

As he opened his mouth to protest, Emily put up a hand to stop him.

"I get it, you want to find JJ first. I'm not going to argue with you about that. But what if she needs medical?"

Reid's mouth closed again, on a subdued, "Oh."

Emily gestured to Morgan. "Let's get him off his feet before he falls over. We need to hear the rest of this story."

The brawny former profiler was tempted to just carry his friend in his arms, but knew that wouldn't go over well. So he supported Reid in limping toward the open door of the SUV, and assisted him in sitting on the edge of the seat.

"Okay, from the start, please," encouraged Emily.

If this was related to the case they thought they'd just put to bed, there was obviously much they'd missed. And if it was something completely different….

Maybe this isn't the last day of the BAU after all.

Reid wasn't happy about being interviewed, not with JJ still missing. But he realized their friends would need to know as much as possible if they were going to be able to help. So he launched into an abbreviated version of the explosion, and why they'd been at the building in the first place, and what they'd deduced as they'd awaited rescue, and then tried to rescue themselves. Fortunately for his audience, they'd both been schooled in Reid-rapidspeak, and were able to follow the story, even with the words coming at them with such an accelerated pace.

"And then I heard JJ call out, and I heard gunshots, and I ran, but I fell, and by the time I got near the edge of the woods, I saw you. Except I thought it was them, so I stayed hidden, until I saw Morgan."

Directing his next words first to one, and then the other. "What are you doing here?" and "How did you know where we were?"

Emily replied first. "Garcia finally got a response when she pinged your phone. She'd been trying for almost two days."

"Which is why I'm here, to answer your question. Garcia called me, all upset, told me you two were missing, 'on the last day ever of our beautiful BAU' (making finger quotes). This is only three hours drive from me, so I jumped on the highway. Couldn't have something happen to my old friends on their last day."

Reid sent a small smile to the man who would always feel like a brother to him.

"Well, thanks. And I'll thank you even more when we find JJ." Thinking a moment. "She had my phone, so she could signal me when to move forward. She must have gotten back into cell range, if Garcia got a response. Which means…"

"I wish," said Emily. "Garcia's been pinging right along, trying to zero in on your position, but the signal disappeared again."

Reid frowned. "The battery was pretty low, even though we did our best to conserve it. Maybe it ran out. Or maybe…"

"Or maybe she turned it off, so they wouldn't see the light," offered Morgan, as Rossi joined the group. The most experienced profiler hadn't heard the whole conversation, but he hadn't needed to.

"Or maybe our girl was smart enough to turn it off, to conserve the battery, so she could turn it back on when they've taken her wherever they've taken her."

Eyes met, and glances exchanged, all around. JJ was obviously intelligent enough to have done as Rossi suggested. But they all knew the odds of survival once one has been abducted from the original location.

Reid did his best to spring up, but only succeeded in falling into Morgan.

"Hold up, there Pretty Boy. Where are you going?"

"We don't know that she's been taken…..we need to look for her! I heard gunshots, remember? If they shot her, why would they take her? What if she's lying in there, somewhere, hurt? What if she's bleeding out?! We have to look!"

The outburst left Reid both physically and emotionally exhausted, and it took only two of Morgan's fingers to push him back down onto the seat.

"You're in no shape to go anywhere, Kid, and the last thing you want is to distract us from looking for JJ, right?" Knowing exactly how to gain his friend's cooperation. "I'll look for her."

"So will I," added Rossi. "And pretty soon we'll have a whole search team, not to mention some daylight."

Emily caught her young agent's eye. "All right? Let them go and look for JJ, and you and I can stay here and work the profile, just in case she's not here."

Reid sent grateful eyes around to each of them, nodding slowly.

"You're right. You're all right. Sorry, I'm just not thinking straight."

Morgan patted his friend's arm. "Don't worry, Kid we'll find her."

Watching as the others moved out of sight, Emily turned back to Reid.

"Okay, let's go over this thing with Linda again, okay? But slowly, for this mere mortal."

Before Reid had a chance to answer, Emily's phone buzzed, and drew her eyes to the screen.

"Garcia." Then, answering the call, "Go ahead, Garcia."

"Oh, my God, I can't believe they're even alive! Look at your phone!"

Emily held the screen so that both she and Reid could see. There were two satellite photographs side-by-side, showing before-and-after shots of the shattered building.

"How did…." began Reid, but he was cut off from the other end of the phone.

"Oh, my poor addled genius! Did you forget Madame Penelope sees all things?"

"But.." Knowing that satellite map images available to most people weren't updated all that often. But he was taking to Garcia, after all. "Never mind."

Emily was still taking in the photo. "Never mind is right. Who cares how she got it? Look at it, Reid! Penelope's right, it's a miracle you two survived!"

It did look that way, from above. But Reid stuck by his initial assessment, made from within the building.

"It was set up like a demolition. Something designed to weaken the whole thing, so it would fall in on itself, without creating a big blast radius of debris around it."

"Does that make a difference? You still could have been killed, if you'd been close enough to the explosives, right?"

"It makes a difference to the profile."

"How so?"

"I think the explosives were already set, maybe part of an insurance scam, or maybe to try to destroy something specific that's in the building. We'll get a better idea of that when we're told exactly where the explosives were."

"But, if it was for insurance, why do you think they were hunting for you?"

Reid realized he'd left out several important steps, and hurried to fill them in.

"We…I…think that Linda purposely sent us here, on a fool's errand. We'd stayed with her until her husband arrived, and then she made a show of worrying about getting some papers dropped off here. We felt bad for her, and we had time, so we offered to drop them off."

Emily caught on. "Which means she knew you would be in the building. But did she know about the explosives? Or was she just too truly distraught to run her own errand?"

"We wondered the same thing, until she came back with her partners. I still don't have all of it. I mean, it's pretty clear she wanted us to come to the building. But were we supposed to be witnesses to the explosion, or…"

"Or victims of it." Emily understood the dilemma. "But didn't you say you'd reworked the profile? That you think the unsub we caught was actually a partner of Linda?"

"I think he might be submissive to her. It's just like one of the first cases I had with Gideon. We thought the woman was a victim then, too. But she was actually the dominant."

Emily hadn't been around for that case, but she could imagine the complexity of it.

"And you think that Linda was actually the link among the victims right along."

Reid nodded. "She was at the courthouse when each of the victims were there. She was working her way up a perceived power ladder."

"Needing to dominate the women as much as she had the men," mused Emily.

"Exactly. And now I'm worried that she sees JJ as the next rung in the ladder. An FBI agent, beautiful, smart, accomplished."

"Everything Linda wants to be, and isn't."

He didn't have to spell it out. The profiler in each of them followed the trajectory of their theory to its natural conclusion, to a near-inevitability that terrified them.

"We have to find her, Emily!"

Reid's other beautiful, smart, accomplished colleague lasered her gaze onto his.

"We're going to."