*************************************Part 2

Part of Duncan MacLeod wished Amanda had come with him. After all she was the expert at sneaking into and out of an amazing array of different places without the owners of said places ever knowing she had been there. But then if Amanda had come along, it could have easily been both of them sitting in the same cell in a not so abandoned monastery in rural Slovakia waiting to see just what their captors had planned. And he was too much of a gentleman to wish that on any woman.

It had all seemed so simple back in Budapest. After a few false leads, he had finally managed to contact Olivia and Istvan even as they moved quickly through the area trying to track down the people who had tried to kidnap the girl Lidia. Then two leads had turned up almost simultaneously. Since they could bluff their way through Albanian and Duncan could not, they were off chasing someone named Georghe through the streets of Tirana, leaving him to make his way through the exburbs of Bratislava. Which for some reason, seemed to be overrun with a large cross section of European and American homo sapiens supremacists.

And then the Friends of Humanity killed him while he had been trying to figure out just what role they played in Lidia's near kidnapping. Which would not have been so bad if he had not come back to life while they were trying to hide the body. So now he sat in the monk's cell, trying to figure his way out of the maze and wondering why the Friends kept referring to him as a substitute for someone called Logan.

*******************

Forty eight hours after the NASA attack, Joe stood in the back yard of Methos' safe house grilling up a dinner of brats and hamburgers. He always had known the Old Man was good at fading into the woodwork, and the choice in safehouses was no exception. The small cinder block house was one of many hunting cabins and trailers scattered along the fringes of Ocala National Forest. Few people lived in the area year round; it was expected that the hunting camps would only be used on weekends and for the odd weeklong hunting trip during game season.

"Done yet, Joe?" Adam stuck his head out the kitchen door.

"Just about. I'm more than ready to get back into the air conditioning." He gave the brats one more turn on the grill.

"Good. I think we're all more than hungry. I talked to Scotty earlier on the disposable cell phone I picked up at the gas station. After everything settled down at the Cape, he got home safely."

"Good to hear that." Joe liked the retired engineer. He declared the meat done, cleared it off the grill in favor of a clean plate, then took it back into the house.

In short order, the three escapees sat down at the small kitchen table to dinner. At first, the house was quiet as people devoured their meal, but the conversation started up again as Adam cracked open his second beer.

"I figure I'll check my answering machine after we're through. See if MacLeod has turned up anything. Of course, this being Duncan, he's probably too busy righting all the wrongs in the world to leave a message after the beep."

"He can be rather good at keeping in touch, actually. The difference Tessa made with that is amazing, if you'd heard how he was about that before he met her."

"Missed that volume, I guess." He looked at Lidia, who was listlessly picking through a bag of potato chips. "Doing alright there?"

"I am tired of running, and tired of being scared, and just want to go home and be safe."

"We're working on that. The people who are trying to figure out what went wrong for you, they've been doing what they do for a long time, and are very good at it. Things will work out." Joe said.

"Yes, but there must be something to do other than running and thinking of being scared."

"So you've got dish washing duty then." Adam said, starting to clear the table. "I'm off to the living room to check on the news reports on tv."

*************************

After a day of fast talking, string pulling, and the review of countless security camera tapes the Air Force had let Jean, Scott, and Xavier go home to Westchester. Looking back, their interrogation at the Cape had been the easy part. Now came the challenge of trying to track down the criminals who had disrupted the shuttle launch even though they didn't have a way of gathering evidence from the crime. Or at least a way of gathering evidence directly.

"How's it going?" Jean asked.

"Getting into the NASA video footage wasn't too bad. Tricky if you're just a garden variety hacker, but even if I wasn't on the team that wrote their security software, not too bad for me." Graham Davies, Xavier's School Class of 1992, leaned back in his chair in front of the computer console as he chewed a claw. "Good thing I only use my talents to help the good guys."

"You always said that the good guys paid better." She teased her old friend, who had always been willing to drop every one of his paying gigs when Professor Xavier's team needed the services of their on-call hacker.

"Or at least the good guys have way cooler toys. Not too many Cray supercomputers showing up on the black market like you've got here. And they're so much more fun to play with than what I've got back in Maine."

"And since you've gotten into NASA?"

"Running all kinds of neato image-matching on the aforementioned Cray toy. You know I never really thought much about clothing until I dated a girl who was a real clothes horse back in college. Label this, label that. It's still a pair of jeans, right? But turns out different will put a seam here or a pocket there, and if you can identify something as a Ralph Versace or a little known military boot manufacturing company, then you can find out who sold what to who and maybe turn something up. Worst case, they're wearing Levis, and there is no way of tracing ther because there are twenty million ways to get a pair of 501s. I'm shooting the moon here, but if you can get a match for a supplier, you just might be able to follow the supply chain down to the bad guys. Same thing with helicopters, or military watches or other things in the picture." Graham paused to scratch an itchy bit of mauve fur under his own watchband.

"Anyways, that sort of match is a long shot, but if you've got the computing power, why not do it? Another thing to match is faces. Turned up five matches of faces between the cameras here, and the videos from the attack at FOH attack at the Hiroshima Carp baseball game a couple years back, and four matches from the Hungarian Parliament bombing last year. Some of them were the commandos, but a couple were just faces in the crowd, and that's too much of a coincidence."

"So let's see them." Jean said. Graham hit a couple keys, and the images came up. The first couple were men dress shirts. The next one brought up a face that she had seen not too long ago, Adam Pierson's young friend. "Stop. I met her at the Cape. She was introduced to me as Lidia." In the Florida picture, she stood next to Scotty the engineer, dressed for the heat in a short skirt and sleeveless top. In the Hungary picture, she was more formally dressed in a suit and heels, sprinting down a corridor her id badge on a lanyard whipping behind her.

"Good call on the id badge." Jean hadn't realized she had spoken out loud. "Looks like she had some sort of clearance to be there. And if there's clearance, there's a paper trail for that clearance. Give me fifteen minutes, maybe a half hour so I can see what I can find on her. Gotta give a call to a friend who actually speaks Hungarian, and I assume it's still dial 1713 for a secure outside line here?"

"Yes. And I expect you want me to stop hovering now, don't you?"

"You always did know me so better than Angie did. Guess that's why she's an ex-wife."

Jean walked out of the computer lab. She did not know what to make of Lidia. In her brief contact with the girl, Jean had felt no outward hostility about mutants projecting from her, just a tiredness that was easily chalked up to a hundred different things that could be as simple as a hangover. But Lidia had been with Adam Pierson Towson, who had been heavily involved with the Friends of Humanity at one time, and who definitely had his own agenda for mutant-human relations. And Adam had definitely learned how to hide when he chose to. As soon as they had gotten back from Florida, they had tried to trace both Adam Towson, high school French teacher, and Adam Pierson, sometime paramilitary commando, and had found nothing other than carefully constructed lies. Cerebro could not find him. Even the address on the business card he had once left her was nothing more than a mail drop. She walked outside, taking a couple laps around the mansion and watching a bit of the pick-up basketball game the students always seemed to have going after class. Then her watch beeped, remending her to check up on Graham, who had a tendency to go off on tangents if left unsupervised too long. There needed to be focus if the X-Men were going to be able to stop the friends from attacking again.

"So what do we have?" She asked Graham as she walked back in the door.

"What we have is one Lidia Vadas. According to Attila," Graham said.

"Attila?"

"Yeah, my friend that translated for me. Naming your kid Attila in Hungary is kind of like naming your kid Michael here. According to Attila, your Lidia is a twenty two year old university student who was working in Parliment this summer. Mainstream political party, nothing controversial there, not like some of the nutbars you get in the European parliaments. At first, she seemed like any other bright eyed-college kid. Then there was the bomb plot. Go back on the cameras, and she leaves the building fifteen minutes before the bomb is supposed to off."

"So she could have been one of the bombers."

"Could have been, but it's a little bit fuzzy. The night after the defused bomb, the police logs show someone called in about a fight going on in the hallway of her apartment building. The fight was was over by the time the cops got there, so it got recorded as a generic noise complaint-no follow up. Three days later, one of Lidia's friends calls in a missing persons report on her."

"Still, it doesn't rule it out she was working for the Friends all along, and left when it looked like the police might be on her trail."

"Except for one thing. We got into her medical records, and she's got a standing prescription for Tanmorset from her doctor. Now granted Hungary has a better medical system than a lot of places, but Tanmorset one of the most expensive anti-migrane drugs on the market. I ran a check, and it's extremely rare for it to get improted or sold into the country. You of all people should know what else Tanmorset ges used for."

"It's a pain reliever that actually works for telepaths. Everything else tends to disrupt a telepath's ability to shield out the thoughts of others." Jean had been one of the people unlucky enough to be part of that medical trial and error proces. "So she could be an innocent mutant caught up in it all. On the bright side, if she is a mutant, the Professor could find her with Cerebro."