Chapter 5 – Codes and Planning
The door opened several boring hours past dawn, and Daniel sat up with alacrity, wishing he'd put on the shirt they'd left him as part of his change of clothes. Lizaveta strode in followed by her men. She walked up to Daniel and looked down at him. "Get some clothes on, Dr. Jackson," she ordered. "I will wait downstairs."
She left, but the guards didn't, and Daniel glared at them. "Get changed," said the one who'd spoken to him the night before. "Or we will have to take steps."
Daniel grimaced, grabbed the change of clothes, then walked over and stepped into the water closet. It was a pair of black pants and a black t-shirt. With some difficulty, he changed into the pants and underwear inside that confined space. Exiting, he pulled on the shirt. One of them handed him a comb and Daniel neatened his hair. "Care to tell me why the concern with my appearance?" The man snatched back the comb without speaking. "I'm guessing not, then," he said, shrugging. That turned out to have been a very bad idea. He bit down on the groan that threatened to escape him.
They took him down to the narrow room below where a chair had been set up about ten feet in front of a video camera on a tabletop tripod. Lizaveta was waiting, and she studied him critically as he reached the bottom of the stairs. Turning to one of the guards, she said, "Someone fetch him a long-sleeved shirt. Those bruises won't do." The guard left and Lizaveta picked up a sheet of paper from the table. "Read though this, Dr. Jackson."
Daniel raised an eyebrow at her, but looked at the page. It was clearly a script for him to read on camera. He scanned it quickly and shook his head. To secure his safe return, they had to give this organization two samples of every piece of technology that had come through the stargate along with whatever technical details they'd managed to learn from them.
Lizaveta had turned away, so she didn't see his reaction. His guards guided him towards the chair but didn't make him sit down yet. Lizaveta was messing around with the camera. The guard returned with a dark jacket, like a windbreaker, and held it out to him. Daniel handed him the script and pulled the jacket on. It wasn't worth fighting over.
"Sit down," Lizaveta said, coming out from behind the camera. Daniel obeyed, carefully not leaning back in the chair. "Give him back the script." Daniel took the sheet of paper and looked bemusedly at it. "All right, Dr. Jackson, just look into the lens of the camera and read what that paper says." He saw the red light on the camera begin to flash, indicating that it was recording.
With a bland smile, he ripped the paper in half and then in quarters. "I'm not reading this script. For one thing, it's a lot of nonsense, and for another, it's not even good English."
In the silence that followed this declaration, you could have heard a pin drop. Daniel dropped the torn pieces of paper and they sailed to the floor. "What do you mean, you will not read it?" Lizaveta asked, her voice full of menace.
He leaned towards her, exerting himself to be persuasive. "Honestly, Lizaveta, do you think that piece of propaganda is going to make any more sense coming out of my mouth?" he asked. Her lips tightened. "Being straightforward will work considerably better, and they'll buy it a lot more readily than me spouting about how honorable my captors are in less than perfect English."
"If you wish to rephrase the message, feel free to do so," she said, her voice dripping with icy sincerity.
"Well, and I'm not making your demands for you. If you want to make demands, you're going to have to make them yourself."
Her eyes narrowed and she walked towards him. "You will say what I tell you to say." Hands came down on his shoulders and thumbs dug briefly into his back. He could feel the muscles of his face tighten, and he grimaced to keep from crying out. "I have the power of life and death over you," she said softly, leaning down over him. The man behind him kept his hands on Daniel's shoulders.
A flutter of unease threaded through his gut, but he kept his composure. "Not if you want my government to cough up anything. You kill me, they'll hunt you down. It's pretty simple."
"I want you to say what our demands are, Dr. Jackson. That isn't so hard, is it?" When he didn't immediately respond, thumbs dug into his back again, and he tried to jerk away. The man behind him pulled him firmly against the chair's back. He couldn't help it, this time, he cried out. "Dr. Jackson?"
"I won't," he growled. "And the more you have that goon hurt me, the less likely I am to agree to anything at all."
She took a step back and nodded at the man behind him who removed his hands from Daniel's shoulders. "Fine. You have to read from this, however. It's not negotiable." She handed him a copy of the front page of the current day's New York Times. "Look into the camera and read the top article."
He looked down at the newspaper and thought hard. This could be his only chance to send any kind of a message to Jack and the others. He scanned the article she'd ordered him to read. It related to the presidential race. He sorted through the words and then looked up. He read the article through, pausing and stumbling like he was nervous, and reading some words wrong while enunciating all the words he got right very precisely, hoping devoutly that the message would get through. He looked up periodically as he read, then when he was done.
She turned off the camera and one of his guards grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet. He hung onto the newspaper until someone snatched it out of his hands. Then they pushed him towards the stairs.
Thus far he had only seen these four people in the building. If he was lucky, he could evade them and get outside. Once out there, he wasn't altogether sure what he'd do, but it was better than sitting here doing nothing and getting beaten for it.
They weren't holding onto him for once, so he darted forward suddenly and flung open the door that led out of the room towards the stairs. He went running down them as fast as he could, catching the newel posts to swing around the corners. He heard running footsteps behind him, and yells. As he reached the top of the last flight of stairs, the door at the bottom burst open. Two men came in, AK-47s pointing at him. Daniel tried to stop, lost his balance and tumbled down the last flight of steps.
When he came to rest, he lay on his back on the floor, his ankle aching, his back screaming, and he was staring up at the muzzles of a pair of AK-47s. Lizaveta forced her way through the men that surrounded him and said, "Put those away. Anyone who shoots him will answer to my father." The guns disappeared, and ungentle hands rolled him onto his stomach and bound his hands behind him again. They yanked him up to his feet. "Take him to his room," Lizaveta ordered.
He had trouble walking. His right ankle didn't want to support him, but he didn't think it was broken or even sprained. Just twisted. They dragged him up all four stories and dumped him in his room. There he pounded his fists on the floor and growled. He wanted to go home! If they really thought they could get even half of what they were asking for, they were on some serious drugs. There was no way in hell the US government was going to hand over alien technology to an unknown foreign organization.
They'd have to find him and get him loose or he was in serious trouble.
And he had it wrong. She wasn't someone's girlfriend, she was someone's daughter. Great.
Jack looked over the men and women gathered in front of him. He wished he had Teal'c, but for some reason the general didn't want to send a guy with a snake in his belly to roam around a foreign country. Go figure. He did have SG-2, and Feretti ran a good solid team. He had Lt. Tamika Jones and Captain Andy Myers from SG-8. Sumner was here as well, but only for advice. He and the rest of his team were on medical stand down.
"Okay, we're going to start out by trying to work with the Russian authorities. The president has gotten us some contacts in the Russian military, but we don't know who is and isn't in the know with regards to the stargate, so you need to remember to couch everything you say in terms that won't reveal more than we're permitted to." Nods all around the room. "I'm going to cede the floor to Captain Myers because he's the only one here who has actually seen the character who grabbed Daniel."
Jack walked over to lean against the wall by the door. Myers' story was met with a great deal of discontent from the members of SG-2. Feretti, in particular, looked ready to slam his fist through a wall. Jack sighed. They had so little to go on that if the Russian government persisted in remaining uninvolved, he didn't know what they were going to do.
There was a knock on the door and Jack looked up at Myers. "Hold it for a moment, captain," he said. When they were all silent, Jack opened the door. Lt. Colonel Davidek was standing there with an envelope. "Can I help you, colonel?" he asked.
"I have some information for you. I don't know what it is, but it was sent over from the Pentagon to your attention."
Jack took it and retired to a desk at the back of the room. "Go on, captain. Let me get a look at this."
Myers started taking questions and Jack pulled the CD-Rom and some papers out of the sealed envelope. He popped disk into the computer and it started playing.
First it showed Daniel looking into the screen. He was sitting in a chair with black clad men standing behind him. His posture was stiff, and not just with tension. There was a set to his mouth that bespoke both anger and pain. He began to read from the newspaper in his hands, first the date and the name of the paper then the article. There was something odd about his manner, though. He kept pausing, and occasionally stumbling over words. He was acting nervous. Jack shook his head. There was no doubt in his mind that it was an act. He knew Daniel too well . . . when he was really nervous, he behaved very differently.
After the newspaper article, the screen froze on the image of Daniel looking into the camera. Over this a female voice issued a series of demands that were patently ludicrous, and making the threat that if the demands weren't met, Dr. Jackson would be killed. Then the screen went dark.
Looking down at the other papers that had been in the envelope, Jack grimaced. There was a note from Hammond explaining that the demands couldn't be met. No surprise there. An authorization from the president to show this video to the Russian government if they got obstructionist. And two copies of the news article. One of them was the actual article, as it had appeared in the New York Times. The other was a blow-up with some words circled, others crossed out with an arrow to the margin to a different, often similar word written there. With that was a note.
We believe that Dr. Jackson was attempting to send a message in code by the way he read the article. Unfortunately, we can't quite figure out what he meant by it. We're hoping that you, with your superior knowledge of Dr. Jackson, may be able to work this out where we can't.
We have also passed it along to the SGC, where General Hammond will have some of the personnel look it over.
Jack shook his head. He stood up and walked to the front of the room. The puzzle could wait till later. "Okay, people," he said. "We have now received a ransom demand for Dr. Jackson. Suffice it to say, the government's not going to pay it, which just heightens the urgency of our little task here."
"Well, hell!" Sumner growled. "What do they want?"
"Alien tech."
"Is this the Russian government?" asked Feretti incredulously.
"I don't believe so," Sumner said. He looked over at Jack who nodded. "At least not openly. Frankly, the more I think about the way he acted, the more I think Stanislav wasn't aware of most of what was going on."
"Well, what we've got is Daniel reading yesterday's New York Times at us on a video, and possibly inserting a code as he reads. We still don't have the foggiest clue where he is, but this video may give us the leverage we need to get the Russian government working with us."
"That would be good," Sumner said.
Jack nodded. "So, we're heading out late tonight. We will proceed to the embassy, where we will stay while the ambassador and I get things worked out with the government."
"How does Dr. Jackson look?" Myers asked.
"Unhappy," Jack replied. "Real unhappy." He looked around. "Are you all clear on what your assignments are?" There were nods and a few scattered 'yes sir's from the group. "Very good. Dismissed."
They got up and filed out, all except Sumner. "Jack, I'd like to apologize again for –"
Jack shook his head. "It's not your fault, Marshall," he said. "From all I can tell, you did everything by the book. God, for once it sounds like even Daniel did everything by the book. Sometimes you just can't win for losing."
"True enough, I just – well, none of us likes to lose a civilian under our command, but there's something about misplacing Jackson that's just worse."
Jack nodded. "I know what you mean."
Sumner gave him a quick grin and shook his head. "No, I don't think you do, Jack. I really don't think you do." He patted him on the shoulder and left the room.
Baffled, Jack shrugged and went back to the desk to look over the notes on Daniel's 'code.' After several hours, he sat back and stared at the page. Great. Daniel was being held by crazy non-government types someplace where there were a lot of trees. That narrowed things down significantly. After all, there were only so many places with lots of trees in Russia. Jack thumped his fist down on the desk to vent his frustration. It wasn't even fair to be annoyed with Daniel. That he'd gotten any message out at all was extremely impressive.
Maybe combined with the name Metzov, this would yield them some useful information. Taking the CD and the papers, he left the conference room and headed back to his own quarters where he wrote down his own interpretation of the message Daniel had sent. He was just about to get up and find a security envelope to send it back to the Pentagon when there was a knock on his door. He walked over and opened it. "Carter!"
"Sorry it took so long, sir. There were weather-related delays."
"No problem," he replied. "The plane doesn't leave here until late tonight anyway. How did Teal'c take it?"
She grimaced. "Badly, sir, but he understands why it has to work this way."
Jack frankly wished they had him. He was . . . the three of them worked together very well. "Well, we've got about four hours before our plane leaves. Do you want to get some sleep?"
Carter shook her head. "No. They e-mailed me the notes on the little message Daniel put together, but I haven't seen the video."
Jack blinked. "You can't figure it out without the video," he said. "Daniel keeps looking up and giving those intense looks of his, like 'get this, damnit!' I don't know how you'd figure it out without seeing them."
She nodded, her lips tight. "You have it, right?"
He beckoned her further inside. "Let me show you." He popped it into the computer and let it play through. Carter stood beside him, arms crossed, staring at the screen.
"He's in pain, isn't he?" she asked after it was over.
"You picked up on that, too, huh?"
"Yeah." She shook her head. "In my notes, it says he clearly hasn't been damaged, but you can't see any of his skin."
"It says that?" Jack exclaimed. "Who wrote that?"
"I don't know," she replied. "Not General Hammond, I'd lay odds."
"No, Hammond would see right through that facade Daniel puts on."
Carter looked down at her notes, then up at the screen, which went dark after a few more seconds. "So, he's being held somewhere in a forest by a bunch of lunatics who don't seem to be affiliated with the government."
"Exactly." Jack handed her his interpretation and she nodded. "I was about to put this in a courier envelope to get it back to Hammond."
"Oh, I've got a faster way, sir," she said. Slipping into the chair in front of the computer, she rapidly typed the words into an e-mail, did a few arcane things involving toolbars and drop down menus, then sent it. "General Hammond should have that popping up on his desktop as we speak."
"Has anyone ever suggested that you were an overachiever, Carter?"
She gave him a sly grin. "Once or twice, sir. I used to get accused of skewing the curve in physics classes in college."
Jack shook his head. "That's not overachievement, Carter, that's genius. Different issues."
She rolled her eyes. "So, what do we have planned?"
"We fly to Russia. Ambassador Wilson and I bust some heads till they agree to help us. We find Daniel. We beat some brains in, and then we go home."
Carter took a deep breath and shook her head. "That plan may need to be fleshed out a little, sir, but I think it's got the key points covered."
"I'm glad you like it," he said. "So, why don't you get a little rest, I'll get the rest of our operational details worked out, and we'll be on a plane to Russia in . . ." He glanced at his watch. "In about three hours."
"Yes sir."
Jack closed the door behind them and headed down to General Gehrig's office to make sure all the equipment and personnel he'd requested would be ready.