Disclaimer: I do not own Criminal Minds and intend no copyright infringement.
Meanwhile in the living-room, Reid was having one of his light bulb moments. "Oh, no, of course…", Morgan heard the young doctor say while still staring down the barrel of the gun. "I don't think we're looking for a chessboard after all. Look at these paintings. This here on the right shows Eilean Donan Castle with its prominent tower – in many chess sets, the rook resembles a tower. The man on horseback right in front of it could be Alexander II, the castle's founder. A knight… Now, if we take the f7 and e4 as ordinate and abscissa…"
"We've got ourselves a problem here…", Morgan stated flatly as he was walked into the living-room with his hands up. Everyone froze. They all realized within seconds that the gun the man was holding was capable of firing teflon-coated ammunition.
"Continue speaking!", the skinny, rather short man who was aiming at the agent commanded, his hand shaking but the finger nevertheless on the trigger. "I want to know what you found out!"
"If he did that, it would be suicide. You would have no reason at all to keep us alive. You would kill us all", Rossi replied, trying to buy them some time. They were not far above ground. Henry Milton apparently didn't like curtains. Outside it was dark and the apartment was brightly illuminated. Maybe someone out on the street would look up, see the backs of three men holding up their hands and call 911. The agent really hoped some nosy neighbor was on duty tonight.
As it turned out, nosy neighbors were not around, but luckily two FBI agents who had been trained well…
Rossi's words resounding in his ear, the man's facial expression changed in a split second from determined to puzzled and back. This interplay of emotions was hardly perceptible, but Rossi noticed it with great interest: "He is not… But how did he get…?", he wondered silently.
"I need to know what you found out!", the man yelled. "Need", not "want". The alteration in his choice of words made the senior agent think.
Reid decided to dive into a complicated explanation: "If you take the numbers 7 and 4 as ordinate and abscissa – both words, by the way, were already used by the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes whose Latin name was Cartesius, that's why today the rectangular coordinate system which is defined through two axes is also often called the Cartesian coordinate system…" He droned on like this for another two or three minutes, carefully avoiding the information the man was waiting for.
Practically drowning in this torrent of words, the attacker finally lost his patience. Waving his gun he tried to interrupt Reid and make him come to the point: "Tell me… tell me what…", he stammered, his voice shaking and small.
Hotchner and Prentiss, who had been listening in from the balcony, took his hesitancy as a sign that he was losing focus and decided to kick in the balcony's door, weapons drawn. Glass broke, the agents shouted, Morgan unsuccessfully tried to wrestle the gun away from the man. Things like that sometimes happened: The agent was a close combat specialist but once every blue moon opponents were lucky and made just the right move in just the right second.