*
"I don't understand." A bewildered Ted led Jack and Vivian into his apartment, motioning to his modest furniture before taking a seat opposite the agents. "Why are you asking about Janet?"
Vivian and Jack exchanged glances.
"Ten years ago, Samantha Spade left home, moved to New York City and changed her name to Janet Leblanc. Samantha Spade and Janet are the same woman," Vivian told him, blunt words softened by her gentle tone.
Disbelief crossed Ted's features, and at his skeptical look, Jack handed him two photographs.
"That's Samantha at seventeen, and that's a computer generated picture of Samantha now."
Color drained from his face. "She lied," Ted whispered after a moment, and in his voice Jack detected only hurt, no anger or resentment.
"She lied because she thought she had to," Jack told him firmly, and the younger man nodded slightly.
"Samantha.." Ted tested the name for the first time, and crossed his arms over his chest. "If it's been ten years, why are you looking for her now?"
"Her mother brought her case to us," was Jack's response. "She's looking for answers."
"Who isn't?" Ted observed quietly. "I'd like to help, but I've told you all I know. I have no idea where she is at the moment, and I don't know when she'll be back."
"Okay. Can you tell us which apartment is Samantha's?"
"Right across the hall," Ted answered, dropping his eyes to the pictures once more before handing them to Jack.
"Like I said, she'll be at Table of Contents tomorrow afternoon."
"Thank you." Vivian offered a warm smile as the two stood and left Ted's apartment.
"Poor kid," she mused as the door closed behind them. "That's some heavy news."
"He'll be alright." Jack was preoccupied with Samantha's door; closed, heavy, and wooden, it was still a barrier, but he was finding it hard to believe that they were so close. Her personal space, where she ate and slept and sometimes sat by the window just watching the city..it was all only two feet from him.
Vivian checked her watch. "It's late, Jack. We should call it a night, head over to Table of Contents tomorrow. There's no telling what time she'll get back."
Jack didn't want to call it a night, wanted to sit in front of Samantha Spade's door until her return or search the gridwork of blocks she was wandering at this moment, but he knew Vivian was right.
A final, fleeting glance at her door was all he allowed himself as he turned and slowly followed Vivian down the narrow hallway.
He could hold on until tomorrow.
*
"Sydney Harrison. Grabbed in the elevator on her way into work this morning."
Jack looked up sharply as Van Doren entered his office, spouting facts and tossing a file on his desk. He raised a hand to slow her.
"We're still on the Spade case," Jack reminded his boss, gesturing to the papers spread in front of him.
"No, Jack. Sydney Harrison's abduction takes precedent over a ten-year old case." Van Doren's firm tone left no room for argument, but Jack couldn't stop himself.
"We are this close to closing her case. All I need is the rest of the day. Her mother's waited ten years, Paula. I can't bring her within arms reach only to pull her away."
"Sydney Harrison, Jack. Now. Samantha Spade isn't going anywhere."
She may be, was his desperate thought as Van Doren left him with Sydney Harrison's file.
*
Breaking the news to the team wasn't half as hard as this was going to be, Jack knew, approaching the silent Janet Spade.
She sat in a hard plastic chair, eyes down and unfocused, gripping her purse fiercely. As he approached, she looked up, and a tremulous smile crossed her face.
"Is she here? Are you going to bring her here now?"
Jack closed his eyes briefly before shaking his head. He bent to Janet Spade's level and forced himself to hold her questioning, hopeful gaze.
"Mrs. Spade, we've had to put Samantha's case on hold. A woman was abducted this morning, and we've been instructed to concentrate on her whereabouts."
The older woman looked at him with glassy, round eyes and a perplexed expression on her face, and Jack noticed that her hands had begun to shake.
"I don't..I don't understand. What about Samantha?"
"We're going to find her, Mrs. Spade. We are. I'm so sorry it won't be today."
Jack wanted her to hit him, to yell and spew obscenities, because anything would have hurt less than the quietly broken nod she offered, a subtle drop of her head that screamed of resigned acceptance and a lifetime of disappointment.
*
Vivian had taken Samantha's picture down from the board and replaced it with Sydney Harrison's, Jack noted with a mixture of bitterness and relief. He, at least, would not have to perform the final act of giving up, of allowing her to remain, for the moment, wandering and lost.
So he sat and tried to concentrate on Sydney Harrison, because she, like Samantha, deserved to be found.
Danny and Martin were on the way to search Sydney's house, while Kathleen and Vivian spoke with Libby Coulter, Sydney's assistant.
That left Jack to respond to her partner when he received an email asking for $687,000 in return for Sydney's life.
It was a little over two hours later that Martin informed him of the location for the ransom drop.
Table of Contents.
*
He had sent Danny in and he had weighed the outcomes as he balanced the decision in his hands. It was never easy to point the finger at an agent under your command and shuffle them off to a duty you couldn't be sure would guarantee their safe return. But when the decision came, he had picked Danny and he had been confident in that conviction.
He watched with binoculars as they moved around the store, waited for the inevitable.
He hadn't told Ted and he didn't know why, but in the chaos, he supposed, the frenzy to secure the drop and prepare everything, the young man whose trust in a woman he'd considered a friend had been broken, a woman Jack hoped he wouldn't see through his binoculars, a woman he'd passed by in mere inches more often, he supposed, in the last few days than he knew -- that young man hadn't been foremost and he figured surprise was for the best.
Why alarm him if there was nothing to alarm him about?
But when he reminded Libby she'd forgotten her bag and the nervous woman faltered and blinked and probably hoped Danny would usher her out and smile and assure her nothing was wrong and she'd be home by dinner tonight, Jack knew what he'd been expecting had been exactly what happened.
He blinked in frustration and upset; the task of negotiating a hostage situation suddenly wearing on his mind before it began. Years of training had prepared him, years of the real thing, even, and he could run through the tactical aspects of the negotiation in his sleep, but the people always changed; the people were what defined any situation.
And when he brought his binoculars up for one last look before the blinds were closed tightly by the lunatic with a gun against prying Federal eyes, Jack caught a close-up glimpse of the one face that he'd been hoping he wouldn't see.
But in that moment, he had his purpose.
He had seen Samantha Spade.
*
"Agent Taylor's in there?"
Jack nodded as he cradled the phone, covering the mouthpiece with one hand as he listened to the repitious ringing on the other end.
"Agent Taylor and about half a dozen hostages."
He fumbled for the words.
"And Samantha Spade."
Her gaze flickered and hardened.
"Samantha Spade? Jack --"
"Let me do this, Paula. I've got Danny in there and Samantha -- I've been working this case for too long. Let me fix this, let me find Sydney Harrison, let me get Samantha back."
She hesitated for a moment, prepared to argue, until she met the resolve in his eyes and nodded cautiously.
The ringing stopped and a voice answered and he felt the way you feel when you get on a roller coaster, strap in, the ride starts, and you know you're in too far to leave. You can't walk away.
*
You take your victories, no matter how small, whenever you can get them. When the boy and his mother left the store under a tent of S.W.A.T. officers, Jack took the victory and swallowed it, let it linger in his mouth before pushing it aside and focusing on the broader task at hand and that was securing the release of all the hostages.
He watched Martin speak to the mother, ask her questions about Barry and his mental state, how fragile and loose and quick to anger he was. When she spoke of his attitude, of his gun and the way he waved it around without thought of where the bullets it deceptively hid in its barrel could land, Jack cringed at the possibilities. He didn't want to think where one of those bullets could go, didn't want to think of the name it could erase from the whiteboard as Martin looked at Jack and held his gaze, uncapped the marker, and wrote 'Samantha Spade' on a whiteboard for the second time in less than a week.
She had come alive only to be a name once again.
*
She sat near Ted and tried to decipher the thoughts behind his fear. He wasn't looking at her like he usually did, and though circumstances would certainly call for a change in demeanor, she knew something had happened to him before he'd come to work today and she wished she could ask him about it.
If only because she couldn't count on seeing him alive on the outside.
They had exchanged names and Ted had looked at her strangely then too, so had the cute guy in the hoodie who'd walked in with Libby -- Danny, she remembered. That was his name -- Danny. It rolled off her tongue easily and she caught something in his face as well she couldn't understand -- like he knew her.
Like it went beyond that -- like they could've been good friends once, once in a different life perhaps, a different time with different circumstances. She liked the way the name felt and thought maybe if they walked from this she could call him by his name and he could say hers and they could meet beyond the circumstances that had brought them here today and become friends -- the kind of friend she'd only recently found in Ted.
The kind of friend you waited your whole life for. She felt a connection to Danny and wondered about his past -- wondered what had shaped him and where he'd been and if he'd ever lost himself once.
Danny started speaking about the Twin Towers and Samantha's gut twisted. She remembered where she'd been and it bothered her still, bothered her always. She could see the nightmare in her sleep.
They took turns describing how it had affected them and she wasn't sure she wanted to describe what she'd seen, but she spoke anyway.
"I -- I got there when the second plane hit. And I saw them -- people falling. Just -- just falling. I ran before they came down -- I - I didn't know what to do, I just...I just..., " she paused, her voice cracking, "I just ran..."
Ted's face fell in sympathy and Danny smiled sadly in support. She listened as Barry spoke of his wife and his loss and the tear fell unbidden down her cheek and she let it fall and fall...and fall.
Seemed things were always falling.
She wondered about Danny and the man she had met that rainy night and how they all fit together and why they had all found each other in the ways they had -- what was meant by the meetings and what they needed to know about each other. She wondered how things would've been different if she hadn't left that night. But she couldn't digress a fate she had fallen into so completely, and only hoped she could find herself when she left this place. She had been gone for far too long, she thought...far too long to even exist.
She had built her dreams once -- she had built them as castles in the air.
She had kept a secret place in her heart for her dreams to go and she had forgotten to live.
*
With each ring that went unanswered, Jack's heart hammered a little harder and the air in the room grew heavier.
It wasn't Van Doren's weighted stare or the fact that Martin and Kathleen hung onto his every word and movement.
It was that responsibility for the lives of Samantha Spade, Danny Taylor, Sydney Harrison and others fell squarely on his shoulders and on the fragile line of wire connecting him to the one man who held their fate in his unsteady hands.
"Who's this?"
"Jack Malone, Barry. The mother and her son, thank you for that."
"Yeah. I'm still waiting on my helicopter, Jack."
"We're working on it. These things, they take time. Meanwhile, do you need anything else? Food, water?"
"Just my helicopter. Soon."
The line went dead.
*
Samantha's eyes were trained not on Barry Mashburn but on the black phone he gripped in his right hand. It was her anchor, the voice on the other end her lifeline. She looked at Danny, who was intently focused on the one-sided interaction. They all were, silent, leaning forward, riding the fragile wave of hope, but the look on Danny's face held a subtle difference. He appeared to be processing, weighing Barry's clipped words against what may have been said on the other end.
Samantha wondered too, wondered what kind of magic the mystery voice had worked so that Cheryl and Kyle were granted precious freedom from this sweltering prison.
Ted was looking at her, glancing from Barry to her face and back again, and it unnerved her. She tried to question him with her eyes, but his face was unreadable.
As Barry hung up the phone, her heart dropped. The sudden click and dead silence that followed again marked the end of their only connection to the world that somehow continued turning even as they sat, captive and still, together but so alone.
*
He had to try again. Jack didn't know yet how far he could push this man, didn't know his limits or much about him at all, but he knew Danny and, in a strange, deep way, he knew Samantha, and that was enough.
"Hello?"
"Barry? It's Jack."
"I told you, I want my helicopter. That's it."
"I know, Barry. I know. We're getting everything together. The thing is, people might work quicker if you let someone else go or gave us Sydney's location. We're doing everything we can here, but that kind of news, it could give people a jump, you know? Get them moving."
"I just gave you two people, Jack. Two."
"I know. I'm not going to forget that, Barry. I just think it might be best for all of us if you let someone else go."
"I want my helicopter. You're not getting anything until I know for sure it's coming."
Barry dropped the phone onto its hook, and without a second's hesitation, Jack dialed again.
*
The phone began to trill, and Samantha's breath caught in her throat as she saw Barry's head swing wildly toward it.
"I told him.." the man raged under his breath, and then his eyes met hers before she could look away.
"You. Answer the phone. Tell him if he doesn't have my helicopter, I don't want to talk to him. And..and that I'm crazy, and I'm going to start shooting if I don't get it soon."
Blood pounded in her ears so hard she could barely make out his request or what followed, only an emphatic "Do it!" that drove her from her seat on the floor to the counter, her shaking hand poised over the telephone.
"Hello?"
*
The frightened female voice sounded so far away, and yet, there was something familiar about it. Libby Coulter, Jack thought at first, but no, the lilt, the quiet timbre..this was..
"Who am I speaking to?" He kept his own voice quiet, soothing, hoping to erase some of the woman's fear.
*
'Samantha Spade' was poised to fall from her lips, and she didn't know why. It had been so long, so long since she'd heard the name spoken or said it herself, and yet it almost choked her to reply to the man on the other end.
"This is Janet Leblanc."
*
This was Samantha Spade. Van Doren's head shot up and her eyes caught his and he knew, knew he had a task and a duty to protect and serve, and yet all he wanted was to walk into that bookstore and walk out with her.
"Um, Barry says..Barry says he's crazy and if he doesn't get his helicopter, he's going to start shooting."
"Okay. I'm Agent Jack Malone. Listen closely, alright? Libby, Danny, Fran and Ted. The other man, is there any way you can tell me his name?"
*
Samantha swallowed hard, looked at Barry who was watching her intently, and Richard, who was moving quietly, slowly, along the floor. Danny, it seemed, was trying to watch both her and Richard, and Ted, Fran and Libby sat as still as they had before.
She was on her own.
"He's crazy, he really is. Richard--no, Barry..oh, damn it, I'm sorry, I'm just, I'm just so scared and I can't think and Barry, he says he's going to start shooting.."
"Richard. Got it. Thank you."
Richard had stopped his movement for the moment and Barry was glaring at her.
"He wants his helicopter," were her next words, her voice almost shaking in relief. "He wants his helicopter and we all really want to get out of here, okay?" It was a quiet plea.
"You did good," Jack told her softly. "Tell him the next time I call, I need to speak to him. We're going to get you out of there."
Even amidst his sincere promise, Barry's heavy stare and the weighted silence that took over as she replaced the receiver, Samantha had time to realize that Jack had never once called her by name.
*
TBC...