Darkness surrounded him, thick and black and almost palpable. His wrists ached where Harry had tied him to the pipe. It was some kind of water system that ran throughout the interior of the cold warehouse along the walls. His hands were tied together above his head and to a horizontal piece of pipe set so high he almost had to tiptoe. Harry had used rope and tied the knots tight. Neither the pipe nor the knots showed any sign of give. Logan's shoulder muscles were burning.

Ten feet away, his captor paced, muttering incessantly under his breath in a language Logan didn't recognize. He didn't bear the man any malice personally; he understood that Harry had a problem and that he'd been off his medication for weeks. But that still didn't mean Logan appreciated being at the mercy of a paranoid schizophrenic.

"Harry," he said again. "Let's talk about this."

The man spun on him, the impressive Magnum in his hands shaking. He was twitchy and unstable, and his movements were a jittery cluster of tics and minor convulsions. He made Goren's barely controlled gesticulation look smooth and deliberate. "Nothing to talk about!" he blurted. "They're out there – you're one of them, I know it – I'm not gonna make it, might as well blow us both to hell!"

"Harry, calm down." Logan was trying to control his own breathing. "Please. Nobody's going to hurt you."

"Liar." The man's eyes flicked from side to side. Logan saw sweat beading on his forehead – incredible considering that the temperature was in the early sixties. "You want to kill me, you all want to kill me –" He stopped abruptly as Logan's cell phone, which lay on the ground between them, began to ring.

Logan and Harry stared at the beeping object in equal surprise. "Turn it off," Harry ordered, waving the gun. "Make it stop!"

"Answer it," Logan said. His heart was thudding like the beat to a trance song. "Pick it up and answer it, Harry. It can't hurt you."

Harry inched nearer to the phone. Leaning down, he prodded it with the muzzle of the gun. It kept ringing. Gingerly he picked it up in his left hand and flipped it open. "Hello?"

"How did Logan end up in a hostage situation?" Eames was asking Barek. In the distance, her partner was on his phone. Vaguely, she wondered, Who would he be talking to at a time like this?

"Beat cops," Barek said harshly. "They misjudged the whole thing, said a crazy man had four or five people hostage in a warehouse and he was threatening to send the place sky-high. We got here, Logan went in to defuse the situation and that's when we realized he didn't have anyone in there with him. He was talking to himself the whole time."

Eames whistled softly. She felt unsteady on her feet. "Oh man."

"Yeah." Barek wrapped her arms around herself and turned back to the warehouse. It was eerily silent.

"I'm going to say this one more time, Weaver." Goren's voice was low and measured, the deadly soft tone he used when he was too angry to outwardly display his temper. "We are not the enemy. It is not as you believed. The medicine was good for you, it suppressed the changes to your personality. You should not have stopped taking it."

On the other end of the phone, he could hear quick, sharp breaths. "You have to undo it, you have to fix me!"

"It's a complex procedure, Weaver. We cannot do it here. You have to come back to the laboratory." Goren closed his eyes. Mike. "We can reverse the process, but all bets are off if you terminate the hostage. Do you understand?"

"Why should I believe you?" Harold Weaver's voice was rising into a high, panicky whine. "You're all liars, all of you! Look at what you did to me, you turned me into a – into a –"

"Weaver." Goren cut him off. "Shut up. If you want us to fix you and put you back in that hellhole of an apartment, you need to do two things. Are you listening?" There was relative silence in which Goren could hear only panting and fitful mewling noises. "Good. First, you need to sign a strict confidentiality agreement. If you tell anyone about what was done to you – and we mean anyone – we will find you wherever you are and you will never be seen again. And second, you need to release the hostage."

"He's one of you, I know he is," came the feverish reply. "Why should I listen? Why shouldn't I kill him?"

"Because if he dies, we will not kill you." Goren's voice had dropped a few more notes to a poisonous hiss. "We will take you back there and do things to you that you can't even dream. And if you kill yourself before we can get our hands on you, we'll bring you back from the dead. We can do that now, you know. There's no escape."

"Escape..." Harold Weaver breathed the word lovingly, like a prayer.

The phone went dead.