Said the Spider to the Fly

by San Antonio Rose

When the Machine gives its team the number of John Reese's old friend John Sheppard, neither man is prepared for the tangled web of hidden agendas and hidden identities they're about to uncover. The Trust has brought a Wraith to New York to sell to Elias. But not even they have as much control of the situation as they think.

1. Threat Assessment

A/N: Many thanks to KayValo87 for unsticking me on points of POI canon that I either hadn't seen yet when I started writing or had misconstrued, as well as for a few dialogue suggestions and brainstorming help, and as always to jennytork for being beta and cheerleader, even though she knew only one of the canons involved. Thanks also to kalliel for weighing in on the title (this fic did not want to be titled, I swear) and to mific for the art and a further beta pass!

This story goes AU for Person of Interest in the second half of Season 1, roughly between "Wolf and Cub" and "Blue Code," and slightly AU for the Stargate franchise in the first half of SGU Season 1. I've stuck with surnames for both Reese's and Sheppard's POVs to avoid confusion between the two Johns; I've also used "Gen. Carter" and "Det. Carter" where necessary to distinguish between Sam and Joss.

The story is complete in five parts; I'll post a chapter a day. (However, if you can't wait, the whole story is posted now on AO3.)

---

Said the Spider to the Fly
By San Antonio Rose

Chapter 1
Threat Assessment

February 2012

"Finch, please tell me you've got something," John Reese pleaded as he trailed his current charge, Col. John Sheppard, through the streets of New York City. Sheppard was on one side of the road; Reese was half a block behind him on the other side for safety. This was one of the rare cases when Reese hadn't dared to get close enough to clone the hard drive of his charge's computer, and Sheppard's phone seemed to operate on a completely different system from the rest of New York because Reese hadn't been able even to attempt to force-pair it with his own—not that it mattered now, since a wiretap had forced both Reese and Finch to get new phones. Thus, nearly twenty-four hours had passed without Reese being able to get any more intel as to why Sheppard was his current person of interest.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Reese," Harold Finch replied through the earwig in Reese's right ear. "The security of the records relating to the deep space telemetry project to which Col. Sheppard is assigned is truly formidable. I suspect there's an air gap, and I may not be able to get beyond it."

"What do you mean? I thought you could hack anything."

"This project is one of the few to which I was not granted access while building the Machine," Finch said, sounding nettled. "Whoever built their system clearly had access to some of the finest minds in the world. Without prior access, I don't have a digital trail to follow back into the maze."

"Look, Sheppard knows me," Reese insisted, pressing a point he'd made as soon as Finch had told him that the Machine had produced Sheppard's Social Security number as the latest in a long list of people about to be involved in violent crimes. "We ran some ops together in the late '90s, long before I joined the CIA. I can't get any closer without—"

Just then, Sheppard stopped, turned, looked straight at Reese, and started weaving his way through the crowd toward his pursuer.

"Mr. Reese?" Finch asked.

"He's seen me," Reese reported, doubling back to the nearest alley. "Find me a way out of here."

"Just a moment."

"I may not have a moment, Finch!"

"I can't do this instantaneously!"

Reese prayed to a God he wasn't sure was listening that Sheppard was at least not among the many people who wanted him dead for real. He ducked into the alley, made for the nearest cover—

WhreeeePOW!

The world went red for an instant before it went black.

Consciousness returned with a jolt and the stinging of ten thousand nerve endings long ago damaged via torture by electrocution. With it came a massive headache. The way his muscles jerked as he came to revealed that he was lying on what felt like a ship's bunk.

"Easy," Sheppard's voice said from somewhere nearby. "Your first time gettin' stunned takes a little while to get over. Not that it gets that much easier after the first time, but at least you know to expect the hangover."

So wherever Reese was, Sheppard was there, too. At least he hadn't lost his charge. He hoped that was good. Now that he had a moment to process, he realized that he'd twisted as he fell and had caught a glimpse of Sheppard's teammate Ronon Dex pointing a really big gun at him. Had that been a stun weapon of some kind? Was Dex there now, ready to shoot him again if he made a wrong move?

Reese sat up gingerly and only then opened his eyes. He was in a featureless room that could have been a cabin on any ship or sub in the US Navy, although he didn't hear the drone of engines or feel the motion of waves. There were four bunks hung from the walls, two on his side and two on the opposite side where Sheppard was sitting. And between them stood four metal chairs around a metal table, on which lay a clipboard and pen. Dex was not present, which Reese hoped was a sign that they trusted him not to hurt Sheppard.

"So it's 'Reese' now, huh?" Sheppard continued. "Well, at least people can still tell us apart."

Reese couldn't suppress a soft amused snort at that. Sheppard always had been pretty good company for a zoomie and an officer... similar sense of humor, for one thing, not that most people these days realized Reese had one. They didn't look as much alike as all that—Reese was taller and had blue eyes to Sheppard's hazel; Sheppard's hair was wilder, and his ears were pointed—and they'd held different ranks in different branches of the service, but their sharing a first name and being somewhat similar in height, bearing, and complexion had caused some confusions back in the day.

"Where am I, sir?" Reese asked. He knew that technically, Sheppard was no longer his superior, but old habits die hard.

"Secure undisclosed location. And don't worry, I left Ronon in New York. We need to talk."

"About?"

"Why you were following me, for one thing."

"You're in danger, sir."

"The whole damn planet is in danger, Sergeant."

"No, I mean you personally."

"You know any more than that?"

Reese closed his eyes and rubbed at his aching forehead. "No, sir, not yet."

"'Cause I do."

Startled, Reese looked at Sheppard again.

Sheppard stood and picked up the clipboard. "I need you and your friend to sign this NDA. Then we can tell you the rest of the story."

Reese shook his head. "I'm not signing anything."

"We're not reporting this to the CIA, believe me."

"What's to stop me from just walking out of here?"

"Curiosity. You wouldn't be the operator I knew if you didn't have a million questions, like what I'm doin' in New York and how the hell I made bird colonel buried at McMurdo."

"I know you're not at McMurdo, sir," Reese admitted grudgingly, rubbing his forehead again. "You're at Cheyenne Mountain, working on some..."

"Deep space telemetry project," Sheppard finished. "C'mon, you don't believe that, do you?"

No, Reese didn't believe it. He'd smelled a deep cover story the second Finch had uncovered that part of Sheppard's record—for all his smarts, Sheppard had never shown any interest in the space program before 9/11, and afterward everyone in Special Forces had been preoccupied with stopping terrorists in the Sandbox. He'd heard vague whispers about Cheyenne Mountain, too, nothing anyone could prove, but wild rumors about alien technology and people coming back prematurely aged.

"Sign this," Sheppard said, waving the clipboard before putting it back on the table, "and I'll tell you the whole truth, 'cause you're gonna want in on this for more reasons than keepin' me alive." He started for the door but paused with his hand on the doorknob and looked back. "Oh, and cell phones don't work out here. Your friend won't be able to find you unless we bring him in."

Reese glared up at him. "If you hurt him—"

"Relax." Sheppard opened the door. "I'm not in the habit of beating a guy up before I ask for his help." And he left, locking the door behind him.

Reese sighed heavily and pondered the pen on the table. If he took it apart, he could pick the lock easily and be out of this facility in no time flat. That would in fact be the most sensible thing to do, given the givens. But then he'd lose contact with Sheppard and have to find some other way to protect him, which might not be so easy under the circumstances. Finding a way back to New York might prove tricky, too, since he didn't know where he was; his faith in Finch's capabilities was greater than Sheppard's, but all technology had limits, even GPS. NYPD Detectives Joss Carter and Lionel Fusco might not be much help, either, even if he could contact them from here.

And... yes, dammit, he was curious. Why had the Machine given them Sheppard's number? How did Dex's weapon work, and why was it so different from tasers and other commercial stun guns? What was really going on at Cheyenne Mountain? Why hadn't Finch been able to find a digital trail for Sheppard, Dex, or either of the other two people who'd been seen with him, and why did only one of them, Dr. M. Rodney McKay, have a discoverable identity? (It had taken considerable eavesdropping to get even the names of Dex and the woman with the group, Teyla Emmagan, who seemed to be Sheppard's wife.) How had Sheppard, whose career had been derailed after he'd defied orders and gone on a doomed rescue mission in Afghanistan, not only recovered from being exiled to Antarctica but been promoted twice in eight years? And why, when most of their numbers didn't even recognize the danger they were in, did Sheppard claim to know exactly why someone would want him dead?

What the hell was going on?

Reese's mind was still whirling, the faster the more the headache lifted, when he heard footsteps in the metal corridor outside—two young people with normal gaits and one person with a familiar prominent limp. Eyes widening, he stood as there was a buzz and the door opened to reveal two airmen escorting a very startled Finch.

"We'll be back in a minute with some coffee," one of the airmen said as the other ushered Finch into the room.

"I don't drink coffee," Finch replied absently.

Reese hesitated for a moment, then volunteered, "Sencha green tea, one sugar. Black coffee for me."

"Er, yes, sir," said the airman, and he and his companion left, locking the door behind him again.

Reese crossed to Finch's side in two quick strides. "Are you okay?"

"Yes, thank you," Finch answered, still sounding dazed, and let Reese steer him into one of the chairs at the table. "I... don't know what happened. There was a bright flash of light, and then..."

"Red?"

"No, white, and I think I heard some sort of chime. When it passed, I was sitting in a room down the hall."

"Dammit."

Finch looked up at him then, blue eyes back to their usual sharpness behind his glasses. "I'm uninjured, Mr. Reese. This turn of events merely took me by surprise. I suggest we turn our attention to finding out what our captors want from us."

Reese sat down with a sigh. "Sheppard said he wouldn't tell us anything unless we sign that." He pushed the clipboard toward Finch. Yet as he did so, the words on the top line suddenly caught his eye: Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement.

Finch's eyes darted back and forth as he read over the paper. "This is far from a standard government NDA," he murmured. "In exchange for our binding agreement not to disclose any information we learn here, Col. Sheppard agrees that neither our identities nor any information we provide will be used outside... Homeworld Command?" He looked up and blinked in confusion.

"I've heard that name before," Reese murmured back. "Just in passing, no details. Something about a terrorist attack at a secure facility outside DC where some senator managed to prevent a dirty bomb going off but exposed herself to a lethal dose of radiation to do it."

"I don't remember hearing about that."

"Kept it out of the news—I only heard about it through back channels, partly because I was out of the country at the time. I think officially she died of aggressive cancer."

Finch nodded slightly, clearly thinking hard. "Well, like it or not—and I do not—it seems we have almost no choice but to trust Col. Sheppard in this. Wherever we are and however we got here, I think it highly unlikely that we can escape with any sort of ease, and the fact that they found me in a place I had personally secured against surveillance proves that they'd be able to find us again at any time."

"You think Fusco or Carter..."

"No. They don't know that location"—meaning, Reese presumed, the abandoned library Finch had turned into his personal command center. "We've only met with them elsewhere in Manhattan. They can't tell what they don't know, and they can't have been followed to us there, either. And you haven't been there in days, so it shouldn't have been possible to triangulate my location solely from yours." Finch paused. "And there's still the matter of the violent crime in which Col. Sheppard and Dr. McKay are to be involved."

Reese frowned. "The Machine gave us McKay's number, too?"

"Early this morning. I was just confirming it when you called."

"How does he even have a number? He's a Canadian citizen."

"Legal residents of working age receive numbers for tax purposes. But I'm no closer to finding out more about him than I am about Col. Sheppard."

Reese sighed heavily.

"So as I say, we seem to have very little choice in this matter." Finch picked up the pen and signed the form with one of his many aliases, then pushed the clipboard and pen over to Reese.

Not at all happy but itching to get his questions answered, Reese read over the NDA, finding it just as Finch had described. Sheppard had already signed it, and he was one of those rare men whose word was his bond. Reese hesitated a moment longer, then picked up the pen and signed.

As if on cue, the door opened to reveal Sheppard holding a tray with three steaming cups on it. "C'mon," he said. "Let's take a walk."

Reese and Finch exchanged a look, stood, and filed out into the hall. Finch accepted his tea with a stiff nod of thanks; Reese added half a smile to his nod and saluted Sheppard with his cup before he drank. It was good coffee and cleared his head.

Sheppard raised his own cup in return salute before handing the tray to one of the airmen and leading the way down the hall, drinking his coffee as they went. Now and then, they were passed by other airmen, all in standard flight jumpsuits; nothing in the featureless hall gave Reese any indication of what this place was. The airmen were in Air Force flight suits rather than Navy, though, which ruled out the idea of their being on a ship or sub, and the unit patches bore a logo he didn't recognize and the word Daedalus, which also didn't ring any bells.

"Where are we going?" Finch finally asked.

"Wanna show you the other reason you can't just walk outta here," Sheppard replied and turned a corner, leading them toward what looked like some sort of observation area with floor-to-ceiling windows on each side that looked out over a dark space. "Take a look," he added as they approached the windows, gesturing toward the left side, where something was glowing.

Finch and Reese turned—and gasped.

The glowing thing was Earth.

"How... how high..." Finch stammered.

"High Earth Orbit," Sheppard answered. "Beyond the range of any GPS satellite—even the CIA can't find you out here. Welcome to the SS Daedalus."

---

18 Hours Earlier

"He's still out there," Ronon reported, watching out Sheppard's hotel room window from an angle that made him less likely to be noticed by Sheppard's tail. "On the roof across the street, takin' pictures and talkin' into some kinda radio like ours, except no mic."

"Not an external one, anyway," McKay replied distractedly. "It's a high-end wireless earwig, definitely not standard consumer issue."

"Can you trace who he's talking to yet?" Sheppard pressed, leaning over McKay's shoulder. "ID or location? I'll take either one at this point."

"I'm working on it!"

"You've been sayin' that for five hours, McKay! I thought impossible challenges only took you five minutes!"

"Look, whoever's on the other end has got more layers of encryption on his system than Janus put on his secret lab. If I do this wrong, he'll discover the hack in about two seconds and shut everything down."

Teyla was in peacekeeper mode. "John, I thought you said this man was your friend once."

"Was being the operative word," Sheppard answered. "Not that we were close; he was a Green Beret while I was in Air Force Black Ops, so we only worked together on joint missions. But the CIA scooped him up about a year after we left for Atlantis, and according to the reports Landry got us, he went rogue and then disappeared last year until he turned up here as some kind of vigilante. I don't trust Mark Snow's version of events, but I don't know if I can trust this 'John Reese' persona, either. That's why we need to find out who his handler is. If he's being used by the NID or the Trust, we have no guarantee that he's even in control of his own actions."

"You mean Goa'uld, like what happened to Caldwell?" Ronon asked.

"Goa'uld possession, za'tarc brainwashing, Replicator nanites... lot of possibilities," McKay said. "Hell, he could even be a Replicator."

Teyla shook her head. "I already asked Col. Caldwell to do a scan. He said Reese has a normal human life sign."

"Doesn't rule out other possibilities until we can get 'im under a med scanner," Sheppard noted grimly. "Nanite-built clone wouldn't look any different to the sensors on the Daedalus. And the za'tarc detector's not supposed to leave the SGC."

He hated this. John T. had been a good guy; they'd saved each other's lives more than once. But how much of John T. was left in John Reese—and what lies would the CIA have told him about Homeworld Command, the NID, or the Trust? Why had he become "the Man in the Suit" now, and what had put him on the trail of Sheppard and his team? Did he even know about the Wraith?

Earth was supposed to be home. Anymore, it just felt like yet another planet crammed with potential enemies that they had to defend against known enemies, despite the possibility of being knifed in the back while they did so, because the alternative was far worse.

McKay's laptop beeped negatively at him, and he slumped backward with a groan. "I've gotta eat before I try again. I'm already getting lightheaded."

With a grimace, Sheppard realized just how long it had been since his hypoglycemic friend had eaten. "Sorry, Rodney. I'll go get us some pizza."

"Sure you wanna do that?" Ronon asked, somehow managing to make his continued stare out the window pointed.

"Hey, if he moves, we'll know he's trailing me rather than us. Besides, we're close to a switch-over point between two cell towers. A moving target might actually be easier for McKay to hit."

McKay muttered something about paranoia and accepted a power bar from Teyla.

Sheppard ignored him and grabbed his jacket. "If I'm not back in twenty, alert the Daedalus."

"We will," Teyla replied and kissed Sheppard goodbye before he put on his motorcycle helmet—the comm system of which was adapted for subspace—and left while his teammates surreptitiously put on their subspace radio earpieces.

He was barely to the elevator when Ronon's voice said in his ear, "Sheppard. He's moving."

"Guess he's after me, then," Sheppard replied and punched the down button. "Still need to find out why."

"Perhaps we should ask Det. Carter," Teyla suggested as the elevator car arrived. "I'm looking at Snow's report; he said that she became uncooperative after Reese escaped from the hospital parking garage."

Sheppard stepped inside the elevator, punched the button for the first floor, and considered what he'd read about Det. Carter, who'd been investigating Reese until he saved her life when one of her confidential informants was suborned by an up-and-coming mobster. "I got a hunch she was uncooperative because Reese left bleeding."

"It doesn't say that."

"Teyla, with the CIA, you have to read what's not on the page."

She paused as that statement sank in. "Ah. Rather like dealing with the IOA, then. So when it says 'exchanged fire'..."

"They had a sniper on the roof and he failed. Probably didn't miss, but the wounds clearly weren't fatal."

"Should we contact Det. Carter, then?"

"No. The fewer people who know we're on-world, the better, and she's on the CIA's radar." The elevator dinged, and Sheppard exited toward the garage. "Besides, she won't have the information we need."

"Well, I won't get it this way, either," McKay interrupted. "Reese hung up while you were in the elevator. I can't patch us into a call that's not in progress."

Sheppard rolled his eyes. "Patching into the call can wait, Rodney. First we need to know who he's calling and where that person is."

"He's got, like, twenty layers of encryption on that end, and I'm barely through Layer 10!"

"I will be back with pizza in twenty minutes, I promise."

"Hey, maybe we should get Zelenka to find the location," Ronon suggested. "Like how he found the Attero Device that one time, remember?"

Sheppard remembered, all right—that had been one of the most terrifying incidents in the first five years of the Stargate Program's mission to Atlantis. When McKay and Dr. Daniel Jackson had discovered a secret lab belonging to an Ancient named Janus, the presence of people with the Ancient Technology Activation gene had somehow activated a core component of the Attero Device, which created a subspace disruption that not only destroyed Wraith hyperdrives but also caused active Stargates to explode. For some unknown reason, Janus had left a subspace homing link between the component and the main device, which in the intervening millennia had been found by another alien race that hated humans and Wraith alike. The scouts they'd sent to retrieve the component from Atlantis had surprised McKay and Jackson in the lab and kidnapped them, so Dr. Radek Zelenka had had to perform some incredibly complicated calculations to trace the subspace signal to its offworld origin so that Sheppard could rescue the missing scientists and shut down the Attero Device before the Wraith could destroy the lab with a kamikaze run.

"Yes, I don't think isolating one wireless signal out of millions is going to be as simple as identifying a unique subspace signal," McKay replied.

"Why not?" Sheppard countered. "Guy's got his GPS signal masked, right? But that doesn't change the mechanics of how cell phones work. The signal still has to originate at a transmitter somewhere and terminate at a receiver somewhere else. And the transmission pair has to be uniquely identifiable, or else every call would bleed into every other call, worse than the old party line system way back before switchboards."

"Well... yes. Hm."

Sheppard raised the kickstand of the motorcycle he was sharing with Ronon for the time being, mounted, and started the engine. "Look, it won't do any harm to get a fresh pair of eyes on the problem," he said as he backed out and rode off. "Send Zelenka the location data you've got now. He can work on that part while you take a break. At the very least, it'll narrow the area Caldwell has to search to the nearest cell tower."

He was exceptionally grateful at the moment that Col. Caldwell and the Daedalus had been close enough to return to Earth at the same time Gen. Landry had recalled Sheppard and his team to deal with a new threat involving some mix of the NID and the group of rogue NID agents known as the Trust. Since SGC personnel bore identifying subspace trackers implanted under their skin, Caldwell had offered to monitor the life signs of Sheppard and his team and watch for anyone who might be following them. That was how they'd discovered Reese within the first hour of his tailing them—tailing Sheppard, apparently. Why him specifically was still anybody's guess.

The pizza run ended up taking only ten minutes and was entirely uneventful. Sheppard caught a glimpse of Reese—well, of a man in a black motorcycle jacket and helmet—just at the edge of his peripheral vision when he came out of the pizza parlor, but Reese seemed content to watch and follow, and Sheppard pretended not to know he was there. He wasn't ready to lose Reese quite yet.

After supper, Ronon closed the curtains and McKay resumed picking through the layers of security on the number Reese had called, while Zelenka, safely ensconced behind multiple firewalls of his own at Stargate Command beneath Cheyenne Mountain, worked on tracing the cell signal through its physical pathway rather than through cell company records. By ten o'clock, Zelenka had pinpointed the other end of the call as coming from an abandoned library in Manhattan, where Caldwell confirmed the presence of one life sign and enough electromagnetic energy to indicate the presence of multiple computers. The place was EM shielded to a degree, enough that most Earth tech would be repelled—but not so thoroughly that Caldwell thought the Asgard transporter would have trouble getting a lock on the person inside.

"This life sign at the library had better not turn out to be a squatter," Landry warned from Homeworld Command at the Pentagon when Sheppard called to report.

"All the computers were removed from the library when the city shut it down, sir," Sheppard replied. "Whoever this is, I don't think he's just a random bum."

McKay finally managed to get through the last layer of encryption and set up the audio capture shortly before midnight. Seconds later, the handler called Reese.

"Finch," Reese answered, the same smooth, quiet baritone Sheppard remembered from decades earlier. "Are you getting anywhere with this?"

"Nowhere much," a nerdy-sounding nasal tenor replied wearily. "Neither Col. Sheppard nor his companions have had a significant online presence since 2004, and I can't find any publications under Dr. McKay's name since the late '90s. It's like they just dropped off the face of the earth."

Sheppard allowed himself an amused smile.

Reese, on the other hand, was annoyed. "How the hell am I supposed to protect Sheppard with no intel on the threat?"

That got the attention of everyone in the room.

"Have you observed anything useful yourself?" the handler—Finch—asked.

"Well, they're not in New York to go sightseeing," said Reese. "McKay was on the computer the whole afternoon, so it's a working vacation, whatever that means in this case. So far, no suspicious characters anywhere close to Sheppard or to the hotel. But I could really use some indication of what their business is so I know whether I'm looking for gangbangers, Feds, or professional hit men. Don't think there's a deep space telemetry conference here in town this week, so why are they here?"

"I am trying, Mr. Reese, but the data you've recorded for me so far has been a dead end. The cell phones, in particular, appear completely alien to anything I've ever encountered before. And the hotel wi-fi is almost totally unsecured, but they don't appear to be using it."

In the middle of the sound of Reese sighing in frustration, there was a single distinct beep.

"What—" Reese started to ask.

Finch didn't give him time to finish. "We've been compromised! Destroy your phone!" The call ended, and seconds later both signals were lost.

McKay swore bitterly and sagged in defeat. "All that work, and now—"

"We didn't cause that click, did we?" Teyla asked.

Sheppard shook his head. "No. Somebody else musta tapped the signal, probably from Reese's end."

"NID?" Ronon suggested.

"Most likely, them or the Trust."

"But we got nothing out of that," McKay complained. "Just one name, Finch. And that's probably not even his real name!"

Sheppard put a hand on McKay's shoulder. "We heard enough, Rodney. We can stop worrying about Reese and whoever Finch is and start worrying for them."

Ronon frowned. "You wanna read 'em in?"

"I think we have to. Somebody else is already onto 'em. And if Reese sees his mission as protecting me... like he said, he needs better intel to be able to spot the real threat."