(The Doctor in the Photo)

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I don't own Bones.

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Unable to get home before Booth, Brennan worried that she wasn't doing all she could to support him. The fact that Homeland Security Deputy Director Wayne Kitchen was the CIA's person of interest had been a blow to Booth and try as she might she couldn't leave work before he did. As soon as possible, she left for home and once she was there and parked in the driveway she noticed that the lights in the living room were off.

Leaving her car, she hurried up the walk way to the front door, entered the house and found it dark. The only light she could see was the light above the stove in the kitchen. Turning on a few lights in the hallway and the living room, she hurried down the hallway in search of her mate. Not finding him in any of the rooms, she checked the man cave and found it unoccupied. Her worry growing, she opened the back door, stepped out onto the patio and found Booth sitting on a chair facing the back yard. A bottle of Scotch was resting on the ground at his feet and he held a glass in his hand. "Are you alright?"

"No . . . no I'm not." Booth had tried to reconcile the fact that the man whom the CIA was concerned about was Major Wayne Kitchen and he was failing. "I don't understand. He's a hero. He earned a silver star during Operation Desert Storm . . . he saved my life and now . . . and now . . ." He couldn't finish his thought.

"And now it looks like Kitchen may be involved in the murder of Gale Storm, possibly Congressman Abbot." Brennan moved a chair next to Booth and sat down. "It's possible he's committed treason . . . Just because he was a good man once doesn't mean he's a good man now."

He knew she was right, but the man was the Deputy Director of Homeland Security. He worked in the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers Division. "It doesn't make sense. None of this makes sense." Booth moved his glass to his lips and drained the amber liquid from the glass.

"I'm sorry that you're in pain, Booth." She knew that Booth loved his country and his loyalty to the Army was strong, but now she feared that the betrayal of Wayne Kitchen might lead Booth down a path he shouldn't take. "You're not responsible for Wayne Kitchen's actions. If he has done the things we think he has done, then he is the antithesis of the things you believe in . . . Yes, he was a hero and he saved your life, but you don't owe him any loyalty if he has betrayed the things you value."

He didn't say anything for a while. Finally, he placed the glass on the ground next to the bottle, clasped his hands, leaned forward and sighed. "I was on a mission . . . we were looking for an Iraqi General in the Republican Guard. An informant had told us where he might be, and I had orders to end him if I could . . . My spotter, Rick Metcalf and I found the General where we were told he'd be, but the village he was in had too many soldiers in it. It was an armed camp . . . We couldn't get close enough to do our job, so we aborted the mission. We were on the way back to our unit when we were captured. We were in enemy territory, a lot of Republican Guard were around and we tried to stay out of sight, but I guess someone spotted us . . . we were captured and taken back to the village we had just left . . . They beat us." Booth stopped. The memory of that beating had never left him. As horrifying as his father had been to him as a boy, it was nothing compared to what had happened to him as a prisoner of war.

She could hear the thickness in his speech and Brennan knew that her mate was upset. Placing her hand on his knee, she tried to stop him from speaking about his ordeal. "You don't have to talk about it, Booth. I understand what you went through."

Even though she was sitting next to him, he didn't hear her. He was thousands of miles away in a war that never seemed to end. "They wanted to know why we were there, where my unit was. We didn't talk. Metcalf was beat unconscious. They fractured his skull. It's a miracle he wasn't killed . . . After a while they threw us in a room without windows. I'm not sure how long we were there . . . an officer came back after a while. He had two men tie me to a chair and he tipped it over. The officer took off my boots and socks and . . . and he laughed. The bastard used a hose and beat the bottom of my feet . . . it hurt like hell and I screamed. I couldn't help it."

"Of course, you couldn't help it." Brennan gripped Booth's knee trying to connect to him. "The pain was probably excruciating." She remembered seeing his x-rays a few years ago. She had known then that Booth had been tortured.

He was still mentally in Iraq and didn't hear her. "He took a steel rod and broke my right leg . . . I wanted to kill him. I wanted my hands around his neck and I wanted to kill him, but I couldn't do anything. When he broke my leg, I passed out and when I woke up, Major Kitchen was leaning over me. He gave me some water . . . I was so thirsty, but I could barely keep it down . . . my feet, God my feet . . . his men got me and Metcalf out of there. I don't know how they found us, but they did and they saved our lives . . . Kitchen visited me before they moved me on to Kuwait. He told me that he wished he'd found me sooner, but he knew that I would be alright . . . He saved my life and now . . . now I have to go after him. I can't let him get away with murder and treason." He closed his eyes and shook his head. "I have to do my duty."

She moved her chair closer to Booth and placed her around his back. "Yes and I'll help you, Booth. I'm here to help you."

Booth heard her and sat up. "Yeah . . . Danny was in Desert Storm too. He was CIA, but he served his country and this situation has to be bad for him too . . . We'll do our jobs. We'll all do our jobs. Gale Storm deserves justice . . . Kitchen was in high school when Augustus Harper was murdered by Kirby. He wasn't old enough to be part of Kirby's deal, so I'm not sure what the connection between Kitchen and Congressman Abbot is, but we're going to find out. Abbot was part of Kirby's clique and we've been trying to tie that in to what happened to Gale, but we were wrong to do that . . . This is something else. Somehow, Gale found out that Kitchen was committing treason or had committed treason and he was looking into it before he passed it on to his bosses. Since Gale monitored Russian blogs and web sites that tells me that the information came from something he'd seen doing his job. I need to talk to Danny and get him involved . . . We need to have another meeting with Angela and . . . everyone. We've been trying too hard to connect all of this to Kirby and we need to stop. Abbot is part of this mess, but his connection to Kitchen is the key. Not Kirby."

"I agree."

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Danny handed the file over to Booth and shook his head. "These are the blogs and websites that Gale monitored. We've had people pouring over these sites trying to pinpoint what set this whole thing off, but we haven't had any luck so far. We know that two of the blogs have gone silent since Gale died and everything in those accounts were deleted. I had someone try to go through Gale's emails, but . . . this is embarrassing . . . two months of his emails are missing. They've been deleted from the Company server and it wasn't done by Gale. They were deleted the day after he was murdered. That shouldn't have been a problem since everything is backed up on our servers, but . . . the backups don't exist . . . they were backed up, don't get me wrong, but they don't exist now."

"Damn it." Booth took the file and flipped it open. "You have a traitor at Langley."

"No shit!" Danny's boss had been on top of the problem since they had found out about the missing emails, but so far they hadn't found out who had destroyed them. "I have a specialist looking into it, but he said it might take a while. He's been working on it for a couple of months . . . fucking computers."

Booth wasn't a fan of computers either. "If you need help, I have a genius computer expert working with me."

"Angela, yeah I know." Danny rubbed the back of his head. "I'd like to get her help, but I can't. This is an internal problem and she doesn't have security clearance. My tech says it's possible we may not recover anything. Whoever killed Gale made sure to destroy his proof about Kitchen. I wish Gale had come to us when he found whatever it was he found. He'd still be alive and Kitchen would be in prison."

After he rolled the file in his hand into a tube, Booth turned and walked away. "I'm going to find the proof, Danny. If Kitchen is a traitor he isn't going to get away with it. Not on my watch."

Danny was counting on that. "Good. If you need anything else from me, let me know."

"Yeah, your house is a mess, Danny. I think it would be better if you found the emails and anything else that was deleted and who deleted them. Find your traitor at Langley and we'll work on Kitchen. Maybe we'll find out what the hell is going on."

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They met at The Library Express on K Street. They sat at the table in the corner of the reading room, one reading a newspaper and the other reading Brennan's latest book. Talking quietly, Pete laughed when he got to page 83. "Oh my god. If this is what she does in her bedroom then her boyfriend must be worn out."

"Hey, you're talking about my daughter." Max was not prudish by any stretch of the imagination, but he didn't want to talk about his daughter's sex bits in her books. "Why'd you need to see me?"

Pete stared at the page while talking to his friend. "I nosed around in some places I probably shouldn't have and found a way into a certain agency's server. The funny thing is that I did it with the help of a hacker."

Max shrugged his shoulders. "Okay." He didn't know a lot about computers, but he hoped Pete was careful.

Amused, Pete chuckled. "The hacker is someone that works at the Jeffersonian."

"Angela." Max shook his head. "She's pretty smart, but she's playing a dangerous game if she's messing around with CIA computers."

"Have you told Tempe or Booth about what I found out so far?" Pete glanced around the room to make sure no one was close enough to hear them.

Speaking quietly, Max kept his eyes on his newspaper. "No. How can I? If I mention it to either of them then it might make Tempe mad enough to cut me out of her life. She doesn't trust me as it is and me nosing into this case might be the last straw for her. She doesn't understand that it's being done to protect her, but . . . I don't know. I was thinking of sending an anonymous email from the library."

"Yeah, emails aren't anonymous. You have to have an email address to send an email. Sure, if you know what you're doing you can use an untraceable address and bounce it through a bunch of servers around the world, but you don't know how to do that and any email you send from the library would be tracked back to where you sent it from." For someone as intelligent as Max was, it astonished Pete just how little Max knew about computers. "Instead of risking hacking a Federal Agency's computers, I hacked into Angela's server and I found out that she knows a hell of a lot about what is going on. In fact, she found out about Wayne Kitchen, William King and Donald Chute . . . Angela is a damn good computer expert, but she isn't as good as I am . . . anyway, I left a surprise on her server. She should find it soon enough and when she does she'll have the proof they need to go after Kitchen. By the way, Angela needs to wipe her history every day, but she isn't doing that. Someone needs to talk to her." Pete chuckled. "When this is over, I might do it."

Surprised, Max looked at his friend. "You found something?"

"Yeah, it bugged me that a man like Gale Storm supposedly had some kind of proof of treason on Kitchen, but he kept it on his computer at work and nowhere else. From what I understand someone tore up his office looking for stuff too. I don't know if they found anything or not, but what he had on his computer must have been devastating . . . Hell, If I'd been him I would have had copies everywhere as an insurance policy. But then again, I know what a good hacker can do to a computer. I mean, his computer at home was wiped clean and a few months of emails and documents disappeared from his computer at work. He was looking into treason. He should have opened his mouth and told his bosses. What he did was just plain stupid and he set himself up to be murdered . . . anyway, supposedly some experts are looking into how Gale's emails and documents disappeared from his computer and from the backup servers at Langley, so I decided to take another route. Remember I said that I would have copies everywhere? Well, that made me think and I looked at Word documents, PDF files, images . . . stuff like that on his cousin's computer and on his ex-wife's computer. Gerald and Gale emailed each other a lot. They sent the normal crap friends and relatives send each other, but I decided to treat everything Gale sent to Gerald as important no matter how innocent it looked especially if it was sent the last few weeks before he died."

Max was fascinated. "Isn't Gerald Storm part of the staff at the embassy in Germany?" Wasn't Pete risking a lot doing that? "Their computers are probably being monitored by the CIA or something like that."

Pete shrugged his shoulders. He didn't feel like going into how security was set up at embassies. "He doesn't live at the embassy . . . don't worry it. Anyway, they're both into bird watching. They have birder lists that go back to when they were kids. Gale's list is smaller than Gerald's but they both were into nature and hiking and stuff. That being said, I started to look at the pictures of birds that Gale sent Gerald that he'd seen on his hikes around the country and I found a very weird anomaly. Gale sent Gerald a picture of a crow . . . A crow? Come on, every birder worth his salt has a crow on his or her list pretty early in their collection." He paused and made sure Max understood how important that was. "It's common as dirt."

"Yeah, I get it." Max wondered where Pete was taking him. "So, then what?"

Amused, Pete knew that his long story was starting to annoy Max. "So, I looked at the picture and found out it was using more storage space than one picture should be using and it blew my mind. Gale hid a file in an image file. It's a cool trick. The image file functions normally. Even if someone was snooping around in Gerald's network and he found the image of the bird he'd just see a bird. Nothing sinister about a crow . . . anyway I separated the file from the image file and I found what Gale had on Kitchen. I won't go into details unless you want me to."

Max shook his head. "Gale hesitated using whatever it was. Do you know why?"

"Yeah, I do and he should have just showed it to his boss and let him make the call." Pete pursed his lips. "I consider it a smoking gun, but I guess Gale wanted more. He didn't need more. Well, I found it and Angela will see it soon enough. I think Kitchen will be in jail for a very long time. By the way, I found the same picture on his ex-wife's computer, so Gale had tried to make sure he had access to copies if he needed them."

"What about King?" Max wanted William King to fall with Kitchen. The man was a terrorist and his company needed to be destroyed.

He knew that Max was loyal to his country even if he was a con man and a murderer. "They'll have to go after King some other way. The proof I found only pertains to Kitchen."

"Damn." Max was puzzled about one thing. "Why send the image to Gerald and not tell him about it? How was he supposed to know that the image was special?"

Pete laughed. "It was captioned, 'The crow commands, the captive must obey. Judge not what you see, but what I say."

"Pretty vague."

"Yeah, well, Gale couldn't exactly say this picture contains proof that Wayne Kitchen in Homeland Security is a traitor. I think he was counting on someone checking any emails he sent to family and friends if it went bad. All it took was someone like me who's suspicious as hell to see that the crow picture was special."

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