Jack's lips were a tight line, slashing across his face. Carter's face was emotive of exhaustion, and even Teal'c looked somewhat worse for the wear. Daniel had been missing for fifty-three hours, long enough for him to be taken to God only knew where.
The lead on Rachel Mayers had been completely fruitless. It was almost as if she had never truly existed, clichéd as that may have sounded. Their records on her – as well as additional information that Sam had been able to hack her way into – indicated nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing, aside from the near-invisible paper trail of promotions and transfers which indicated that the NID had been subtly maneuvering her into position for little over two years.
The result was that the apartment she was listed as occupying was, according to the neighbors, the home of an older graduate student who was studying abroad for several months. The Colonel's clandestine use of a few Special Ops skills had revealed a completely uninhabited set of rooms, devoid of any signs of life or occupancy, save a vivacious colony of ants.
Her car, left in the SGC's parking allotment, was registered to one Susan Rousch and completely empty. Desperate, Sam had searched for Susan Rousch and turned up two very interesting facts. The first was that the Susan Rousch currently listed in the government's files pertaining to Social Security had the same picture as Rachel Mayers' official military file. The second was an obituary for Susan Rousch, former inhabitant of Gouldsboro, Pennsylvania. The slight irony was more painful than funny, at this point.
And that point had been roughly fourteen hours and thirteen minutes ago, Sam noted, staring at her watch. They – none of them, including, she suspected, General Hammond – had gotten any sleep. Jack had made several wasted attempts to contact Maybourne, with no results. General Hammond had apparently pulled at every string he could reach, and quite a few he couldn't, and had turned up nothing. Teal'c had probably been the most frustrated, unable to do anything but gently probe the people in Colorado Springs in an effort to find out anything. He had known the effort was futile before he began, but each of them had a need to do something.
Daniel had been quite effectively snatched, from right under their noses. There wasn't a member of SG-1 who wasn't feeling the burden of guilt, the weight of hundreds of mental if only's.
"Also, Private Dawlish, who was found dead outside the storeroom in which Major Thurman was discovered, was stationed to be guarding the NID operative during that time block. I believe that Mayers killed him while freeing the prisoner. But that doesn't explain what he why he was found in such close proximity to the heart of the situation with the Abaasy."
After delivering her report, Sam fell silent. The four of them were ensconced in the briefing room, going over their options. Which were limited, with doubtful effectiveness.
"What is your opinion on that, Major?"
Sam answered the general carefully. "I'm unsure. The only possible scenario I could work out involves Mayers killing Dawlish and then bringing him to the storeroom, or perhaps luring him there before killing him. Private Xang, who is recovering in the infirmary, doesn't recollect anything unusual occurring before he was knocked unconscious. If Mayers did kill Dawlish, she would have had to do so after Xang was incapacitated, after Thurman and the Abaasy entered the storeroom, yet before we showed up. The timing would have to be very precise, which suggests that Mayers either had foreknowledge of the Abaasy's movements and goals, or they were working together. Unfortunately, we won't know that until we find Mayers, and to do that we first have to find Daniel."
That was the crux of the problem, and though some would have put Mayers and the traitors, as well as the implications of a second infiltration into the SGC, as priority over finding a missing linguist who wasn't technically even a member of an SG team anymore, Sam refused to do so. They could deal with the NID when – not if – they got Daniel back.
"There's got to be something we can do!" Jack finally burst out, slamming his palm down on the table in overflowing frustration. Brown eyes were fiery with thwarted anger.
"On the contrary, O'Neill," Teal'c spoke up unexpectedly. "There appears to be nothing we can do at this time."
"I don't buy that, T," the Colonel snapped. "There's always something."
Something occurred to Sam. "Sir," she said slowly.
"Carter?" the Colonel's eyes were begging her to have found a solution, and she glanced away, unable to look him in the eye as she disappointed him.
"I think that our best course of action right now would be to more fully research Rachel Mayers, and her alias, for information," Sam said quietly. Jack's face fell, and she ignored the crushing disappointment in his eyes. "There are several things that just don't fit together neatly about her background, and I'm curious to see where the trail leads us. It's quite possible that, given a little time, we can find someone higher within the NID to lean on."
"Time is one thing I don't think Daniel has," Jack snapped, but he ran his hands over his face in exhaustion and then quietly apologized. "Sorry, Carter."
"Sir," she acknowledged, and he nodded.
"General?"
Hammond's face was drawn, and he nodded slightly. Jack stood, and the three remaining members of SG-1 exited the briefing room. When they got to Daniel's office, Sam sank down on the couch while Teal'c stayed just inside the door. Jack moved over to the linguist's desk, bracing his hands on the tabletop. "Ok, Carter, I want you to find out everything you can. With luck, we'll get a lead on these bastards. Teal'c, you're with me."
"O'Neill?"
Jack calmly answered the Jaffa's unspoken question. "It's not like Maybourne not to pick up the phone when I call. He likes it when I owe him one. He may be a rat bastard, but he's slightly more principled than the rest of these slimeballs."
Teal'c raised a loquacious brow, expressing his disbelief more eloquently than Sam would have been able to, under the circumstances.
The Colonel grimaced, hearing his own words. "Yea, I know. But something's not right there, and I've got to do something."
Teal'c agreed with a silent bob of his head. Sam stayed at her computer, fingers stilling on the keyboard as the two men headed for the door.
"Colonel?" He halted before exiting, and looked back. In that moment, desperation was mirrored in three sets of eyes. "Good luck."
He nodded, and seconds later Sam was left alone in her lab, doing her own version of digging.
As she researched, Sam found out more and more about Susan Rousch, and when dates started to match up, her suspicions seemed more solid than pure fantasy. Susan Rousch had been raised as the Protestant daughter of a loosely Protestant father and Orthodox Jewish mother. Her parents were still happily married, with three other children. Susan had been the third child of the four, and had been briefly married and divorced before her car had hydroplaned during a thunderstorm and rolled down an embankment into a river. The body had been unrecognizable, and there had been a delay, a small mix-up, when the police obtained dental records that had confirmed her death.
In light of that, Sam firmly believed that Rachel Mayers was Susan Rousch. The NID were very good, but not everything always went to plan in the real world. Right now, Sam was thanking God for Murphy's Law.
Speaking of which . . . . with a small frown, Sam cursed herself for not seeing the obvious right away. Daniel had been hijacked while in the vehicle, not forced into one. But even so, someone had to have seen the car go. Someone had to have seen something. And while eye-witness reports were prized, their reliability was somewhat in question.
So Sam pulled up satellite imaging of the base, scrolling through the records of pictures in the hopes of seeing something. In the six-hour time slot in which they had determined that Daniel was missing and probably kidnapped, only seven cars had left the base. They had been lucky – the recent foothold situation had required many people to work late or double shifts, resulting in a large number of SGC personnel electing to stay the night at the base rather than risk driving while exhausted.
Four of the seven were easily tracked as airmen who were regular workers on duty today, but even so, Sam called the General and he agreed to her request for a quiet, non-invasive search of each premises. Both were more than aware that it would probably turn up nothing, but it never hurt to try.
Hanging up the phone, Sam looked up as someone tapped on the door before waltzing right on in. It was the colonel, followed by Teal'c. Sam glanced at the clock and was astonished to find that they'd been gone nearly four hours.
Despite the coffee and food he was bearing, the colonel did not look pleased. Nor did Teal'c.
"Any luck?" Sam asked hopefully.
"No joy," the colonel replied succinctly. His drawl was laden with displeasure. "We found Maybourne. Unfortunately, he had no idea what we were talking about. Apparently whatever this is, goes up to the inner circles of the NID and nobody's talking."
Sam sipped at the hot coffee and closed her eyes in bliss. She didn't have the kind of relationship that Daniel did with the beverage, but she did enjoy a caffeine rush every now and then. "Find anything?"
Swallowing, Sam warned, "It may turn out to be nothing."
Jack perked up considerably. "Whadja find?"
Sam explained about Susan Rousch, and brought the colonel up-to-date on the satellite tracking that was taking place. "I'm looking into the three other vehicles that left the base. One is a van that was doing a short supply run to NORAD. The other two are a station wagon and four-door sedan, respectively."
"Such information seems promising, Major Carter," Teal'c interjected.
Sam shrugged. "I don't know. Whoever we're dealing with knows a good deal about covering their tracks, and Daniel's been missing for nearly sixty hours, and everything we've turned up has been a dead end."
"Follow it," Jack ordered brusquely, and Sam nodded crisply, recognizing the order.
For the next forty-minutes, the colonel hovered over her shoulder and meandered about her lab as she painstakingly traced the routes of each vehicle. The van returned to its supply route, and Hammond agreed to send SF's to stop the van and search it, and also to check along its drop-off points for any unusual activity. The two cars, likewise, seemed to meander before returning to various points – one a motel, the other, a small home in Colorado Springs.
Sam frowned. So far, the SF's had turned up nothing, and while Hammond agreed to send them out to the remaining locations, she could hear in his voice that he thought the effort would be fruitless. By this time, they were looking for a trail, knowing that Daniel could have been moved over a dozen times in the duration of their search. Frustrated, she went through the painstaking process again, and it was a full hour before she saw it.
It was a tiny mistake, the blurring of one frame, its slight misplacement in the screen, which tipped her off. Frowning and rubbing at exhausted, strained eyes, she peered more closely at the screen. Jack jumped on the motion, coming over to prop himself on the desktop next to her. Teal'c remained within kel'no'reem, but reverted to a lighter state to comment, "Have you found something, Major Carter?"
Sam typed quickly, in-putting queries and adjusting the frame image until she was sure of what she was seeing – which was, all in all, slightly perplexing. "Yes," she finally responded. Teal'c moved to the screen, and Sam pulled up the preceding image. "Look at the quality of this picture," she said. Without giving either man a chance to respond, she pulled up the second picture. "It's hard to see, but the quality of this picture is slightly worse, and no amount of focusing or enhancing the pixels has cleared it up any."
"What does that mean?" Jack was impatient.
"The only thing I could think of that would distort these pictures like this would be if a second signal was received at the exact same moment as the first. In that case, the computer would register two signals, but only the stronger one would be recorded as a picture. In this case, I monitored the signal strength to determine the fluctuations in what should be a regular sine curve and -"
"Carter?" Jack prompted her to get to the point, already.
Sam sighed. "I think that the NID created a satellite signal recording of the normal comings and goings of the base on a regular day and then projected that up to the satellite surveillance system, overriding the images of what was really going on."
"Is there any way you can -"
Sam bit her lip. "The NID signal is only slightly stronger than the actual one – strong enough to be clear, yet weak enough to avoid most notice. I could probably parse out the intruding signal and recreate with digital imaging a general idea of what actually happened, but that will take time. In the meantime, there's an easier way that might at the least give us some general boundaries for the search, and something more to go on."
With that, Sam delved back into the computer, absently answering the Colonel's question as she did. "How? Well, I'm going to search for a frame similar to this one, later in the sequence, which would indicate signal normalization. The length of time the NID needed to conceal their activities from the satellite should give us a rough idea of how far they needed to get Daniel away before they felt it safe to stop interfering with the signal. They would want to keep that time as short as possible, because the longer they kept it up, the lower the probability that their actions would go unnoticed."
"Ah."
Sam crowed in triumph when, a mere ten minutes later, her trained eye found the frame she was looking for. Within a space of ten minutes, she had run some calculations and come up with a number. "Fifty-two minutes," she announced.
Just under an hour, which meant that traveling at top speed . . . Sam dove for a map of Colorado which she had pulled out in the vague hope that she might be able to trace the possible routes if she got an idea of direction. Seizing a nearby marker, she placed an emphatic dot on Cheyenne Mountain, and then yanked out a ruler. Carefully scaling, she drew a circle with roughly a one-hundred mile radius out from the SGC.
"That's a lot of ground," Jack mused.
"It's the maximum distance that they would have been able to cover in this time without coming to the attention of the local police," Sam replied. And she should know.
She'd checked.
"So whatever they needed to do, they did in fifty-two minutes, which probably extends from the moment Rachel Mayers -" Jack practically spat the name in disgust –"contacted her superiors that she was prepping for the snatch."
Sam looked at the map, and was crestfallen at the amount of space they needed to cover. She looked at Jack, letting her expression ask the question for her.
"Now," Jack responded, letting his eyes drift to the map, "Pick a direction. We're going scouting."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Wow, yea, I got guilt. (shrugs, embarrassed). Sorry about the call I put out into the void last chap to see if life-forms would respond. I recently received a review which accused me of falling into the pit of predictability, and while normally I would just sort of snicker and move on, I have felt of late as if I was teetering on the edge. Lack of response was sort of convincing me that perhaps people were saying, "Ah, I can see where this is going, catch you on the flipside" sorta thing. Was just in need of some reassurance (sheepish grin). Sorry 'bout that. But hey, 'twas a wonderful motivator, no?