First of all, welcome to Faceball-92 and NicAlenaV (reading 20 something chapter of this in one go, I'm impressed!).
Now, I guess you all have a feeling as to how this story is going to proceed…
When she stood up, the need to get away from the screen now gone black winning over the energy draining out of her, the crowd of people once again opened up to let her through. She didn't run, she kept it reasonably together and simply walked out like Loker had done not so long before, but with her chin up and a defiant look that dared anybody to ask if she was ok.
Nobody approached her, and Gillian went for the only place that could give her any sort of relief at that moment. However, once she got to Cal's office, she realised she hadn't accounted for how being there without him and knowing what had just happened to him, not knowing if he'd ever be back, would make her feel. Because of that, despite the initial desire of being alone, when she heard footsteps approaching Gillian was actually kind of glad that her needs have been apparently ignored. She turned around, not surprised to see Reynolds on the door, trying her best to greet him with a less than distraught expression.
"I'm ok," she said, but couldn't push herself to look at him. "I just need a minute."
"How about more than one?" He suggested. "Gillian, I appreciate you and Cal shared with me more than necessary when this started and I know that some things are none of my business..but you need to take a break."
"What do you want me to do Ben? Go home, take a bath and have a glass of wine?"
She sounded irritated and Reynolds was all for it; if he could make her lose it, yell at him or anything of the sort, he would have been happy.
"How about staying out of the lab?" The agent offered. "I know you don't like it but right now there's nothing you can do. We have the tech, we have the support, we have resources out there looking for them."
"You think because I'm not Cal I'm ok with just sitting around and doing nothing?" Gillian quipped back, then walked over to Cal's desk, still messed up and carrying the signs of his fight with Warton, then picked up the phone. "If so Ben, you've been away from us too long."
Reynolds wanted to reply, to explain that there was plenty she could do that didn't necessarily involve putting herself through a painful situation, but before he could do it she was on the phone with Loker, instructing him to connect the feed from the lab with Cal's office. Then he watched as she picked up the monitor, cracked but still working, and set up so that she could control the computer. Reynolds knew where that was going, and wasn't at all surprised when the big screen on the wall lit up and a freeze frame of the video they had just seen came up.
"Gillian-"
"Can they trace it?" She asked, quite aggressively. "The signal for this, were they able to track it?"
"No," he had to admit. "All the phones were tapped but we weren't ready for something like that. We're hooking that up as we speak, so the next time-"
"So we agree, there will be a next time." She nearly barked at him, then used a remote to fast forward to the end of the video, pressing play and unleashing the images and noises of Cal's ankle being shattered and of his reaction to it. "This is just the beginning."
"We'll find him."
"How?"
"We just need time. Warton made mistakes before, he's not infallible." He stepped closer, honestly considering taking the remote away from her. "We know he's going to get in touch again, and this time we'll be ready to-"
"Get in touch? This is how you call it?" She rewinded a little and froze the image on the Warton's look of sheer satisfaction and happiness right before the last blow. "He's getting off on this, and he's not gonna stop until we find him."
"Foster, I know you're worried and scared for Lightman. I am too, plus everything else." it was obvious that he meant the guilt they all felt, the blame they put on themselves. "But that," he pointed at the screen, "it's not gonna help you."
"And how is this helping me? You standing here instead of being out there doing your job?"
Her voice was still somewhat under control, but Reynolds started to think that maybe pushing her wasn't such a good idea anymore. She was tired and scared, on the defensive and yet aggressive, but being Gillian Forest she was hardly going to lose her cool. And she was never, ever going to turn a blind eye and stay out of it if there was anything she could do to feel less than useless.
"I'll go check what they found." He gave up eventually, knowing there was no reasoning with her, then he left the room and went back to the lab.
He should have known how bad things were when Gillian hadn't picked up on his lie. It was true that they didn't expect a video to come instead of a call, but he couldn't say the same for the part in which he had told her they were going to be ready for the next one. His team was scrambling to understand how that had been possible, and the only thing they had come up with so far was that Warton must know a thing or two about muddling his digital tracks. Granted, it hadn't been long since the video had come in, but the initial feedback wasn't promising. Still, one thing they had been able to determine was that it wasn't a recording.
That little detail gave him something to think about, and he started with some simple maths. It had been roughly twenty minutes past noon when they had lost Cal, and the video call had come in roughly two hours later. With those numbers in mind, Reynolds approached someone from his team and asked him to establish a radius starting from the house in Clinton, calculating how far someone could have gone from there in any direction in that time frame.
It wasn't much but it was a start, and he suddenly understood Gillian's need to do something, anything, to feel helpful. Still, when the radius came up on the screens, much wider than what he had thought, Reynolds moaned painfully to himself. That was a lot of ground to cover, especially when they didn't even have a car description to look for.
The agent huffed and grabbed a chair, sitting down and positioning himself in front of one of the screens now displaying a big, way too big, map. Ready to do his job as Foster has kindly suggested.
A couple of hours later, they had just about started to agree on parameters to identify potential hot spots or rule out areas that would not make for a great hideout. His training was telling him that Warton would have probably avoided densely populated areas, opting instead for something more isolated where someone arriving and unloading a person out of the trunk of a car wouldn't have attracted any attention in the early afternoon. Reynolds doubted he would have tried his luck at kidnapping another family, and had a feeling that wherever he had gone he didn't plan on doing much coming and going now that he had one of his two targets. He'd probably be looking for a place without many street cameras around, somewhere where noises such as the shriek he had heard coming out of Cal's mouth would not create any alarm.
No matter how many criteria and theory they came up with however, the possibilities were still endless. In order to narrow them down, Reynolds had gotten a couple of agents to work with Loker and check Ward and Warton's files again, hoping they could find in there some other places that might have had a significance to him. In all honesty, Reynolds didn't expect that avenue of investigation to account for much. He had thought about what Foster had said earlier, wondering if Warton hadn't made it easy for them to track him down in Clinton hoping to catch them off guard, and he started to think there might be something to it. Warton had arrived in DC weeks before showing up at Cal's place and now they knew he had been making himself at home at the Wagner's residence since Friday night, which left many days in which he had probably prepared whatever he planned on doing, especially after deciding to ditch Rodriguez's directions.
Reynolds was just about wondering if they shouldn't talk to her again, to see if she had provided Warton with an initial place to stay that they could check, when a coffee cup appeared in his sight. He looked up and found Loker, offering the item with a pale face and a very serious expression.
"Thanks," he said as he took the mug. "What's wrong Loker?"
"You mean, besides everything?" The young man chuckled nervously, then looked around and sat in front of him, lowering his voice. "Foster has been locked up in Lightman's office for hours, watching the video in loop."
"I know," the agent whined, shaking his head. "She shouldn't put herself through that."
"We should say something. Make her…stop."
"I tried, she wasn't having it."
Loker nodded knowingly, figuring that might have been the case. Then they stayed silent for a while, sipping their coffee and looking around at the senseless chaos of a room full of people busy doing anything to mask the fact that they were achieving nothing. Someone behind them was rewatching the video, which had been broken down frame by frame and was being analysed by a series of techs and experts. Loker caught a glimpse of it and immediately looked down and away, then over at Reynolds who instead seemed to be forcing himself to watch.
"You should give it another go," Loker suggested then. "For her own sake."
"Why me? She didn't listen the first time, I hardly think she would now."
Loker gave him a strange look, one that Reynolds wasn't equipped to understand.
"I know there's a lot I haven't been told about this," the young man said then. "I'm ok with that, I am surprised they've been so upfront about most of it from the beginning…and quite frankly, more than once I wished they hadn't. But there's something else. Now, I don't want to know what it is but I think they told you." He stopped to sip his coffee, leaning back on the chair. "Besides, she's not your boss so she can't fire you."
Reynolds grumbled something, staring at him with an annoyed look. Eventually however, the agent pulled himself up from the chair and patted Loker on his shoulder on his way out of the room. He stopped by the breakroom where some staffers had arranged for food and beverages to be brought in, then he filled a plate with some of it and walked over to Cal's office once again. While approaching he heard Cal's scream of pain coming from the room and clenched his jaw, wondering exactly how many times that had played over the past two hours.
The door of the room was open, Gillian hadn't bothered closing it probably knowing that nobody would have come to disturb her anyway. She didn't give any signs she heard him come in, and only registered his arrival when he stepped in her peripheral view. At first she gave him an annoyed look, but then she noticed the food he was carrying and her stance softened a little. She wasn't necessarily hungry, most of her physical needs seemed to be on hold, but seeing junk food and coffee did stir something in her.
Gillian sighed, temporarily resigned, then took the items from him and sat down in the armchair. She ate and drank a bit, occasionally glancing at Reynolds who took place on the couch, smirking when she saw him looking up at the frozen images on the wall.
"Are you here to tell me I should stop doing this?" She asked then.
"Loker's idea," he quipped, glad to see that she at least seemed calmer than before. "You do know I have five people dissecting that video?"
"Good, the more the merrier."
"It doesn't have to be you, Gillian." You of all people! "How many times are you going to watch him getting hurt and give Warton the satisfaction of getting to you? I'm pretty sure you understand he's torturing the both of you like this."
"Because that's what he thinks will happen, and he doesn't expect me to be able to take it." Gillian answered with such confidence and lack of hesitation that Reynolds had to wonder if watching the dreaded video in loop really was all that she had been doing. "Warton set this up for us, for me, to watch. He's daring me to watch, he doesn't think I could do it once let alone many more times. He thinks it would be too much for me and that I will run away from it, but he's wrong. He's going to make a mistake, leave something in here that he will think I'll miss because I am not watching. And that's why I have to be the one doing this." She stood up again, taking a small slice of pizza from the plate he had brought and going back to the screen, rewinding the video once more. "And that's how I am going to get him," she concluded, then took a bite of pizza and pressed play.