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Warning! There are spoilers through mid-season six and a teeny outbreak of badly translated profanity in Spanish coming up. If that offends, avert your eyes, please!

From Here to Alternity I: Canon minus A Major: The Truth, the Hole (in the) Truth, and Sins of Omission

Previously in From Here to Alternity I: Canon Minus A Major:

"Please don't take this the wrong way, George, Colonel Jake" Agent Anderson continued, "but what the hell were the two of you thinking?"

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"So, Tina," Tapping sneered from his lounging spot against the opposite wall. "Got anything you need to tell your trusted partner?"

Agent Anderson's tired brain raced back over the interview she'd just left. Yes, the door had been open the entire time. Crap.

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Hallway, Administration Building

Grand Canyon National Park, AZ

Downtime Day 12, late afternoon

"Tapping –"

"Not. Here."

"Okay," Chris acquiesced. "Where?"

Agent Michael Tapping clenched his fists spasmodically and pivoted towards the front of the building. He couldn't talk to her, couldn't look at her right now without wanting to wrap his long fingers around her throat and squeeze until this body snatcher told him what she'd done with the partner he trusted. He could hear the tap-tap-da-tap of the imposter's high heels trot in the rhythm his partner used to keep up with his longer legs. As they neared the front door, a ray of sunlight caught the copper highlights in his partner's hair and the brisk, brilliant smile that she used to thank a ranger for holding the glass front door for them, but it had to be a mistake. This just couldn't be real.

His best friend, his colleague, his partner of four years wouldn't drag him out into the desert on a hopeless case she'd taken as a favor to some general. It just wasn't possible that she'd deliberately get him assigned to a case three time zones from home that would be buried in the classified archive section before it ever got solved.

And lie to him about it.

He walked faster, pumping his arms as if he could outrun this truth if he just sped up a little, didn't look back, closed his eyes and ears and –

"Mike." Her soft command stopped him mid-stride. He almost stumbled into their car before bracing his arm on the roof and catching his breath. He wouldn't look at Chris as he unlocked the sedan and slipped into the driver's seat. After a long moment, she climbed in beside him and gingerly closed the door. Silence coated the interior of the car and rose to fill the space between them.

Tapping fidgeted behind the wheel. He looked up to the cloudless sky, then over to the mostly full parking lot, and finally back at the dashboard. His simmering temper was cooling into a disappointed sludge of betrayal, and he didn't want that. He didn't really want to ask his partner how deep the sins of omission went, how often she'd used the bureau for her own ends. This wasn't how it was supposed to be.

He'd been less than enthusiastic four years ago when his partner-and-mentor finally retired and Human Resources assigned him a tiny chick from Profiling with about half his experience. She may have been human, but he had his own resources, thank-you-very-much, and he had better things to do than break in Little Miss Shrink. Tapping saw himself as a new version of the old-fashioned G-man with a gun, a badge… and a modem. He was an enthusiast for all things technical and complicated, and he had a reputation for straight shooting bluntness second only to his by-the-book integrity. He and his old partner had been sent all over the country to attack corruption and e-crimes, and he'd be lying if he disavowed all ambition to retire in twenty years as the FBI Director. Then some genius in personnel saddled him with the redheaded stepchild of the Profiling Department who needed field experience to get a promotion. And then he'd heard about her early career and the black marks on her record that six years in profiling hadn't been able to erase. So, no, it hadn't been love at first sight.

But Chris was okay for an egghead. She didn't try to get him to talk about his nightmares, his potty training or how he felt about his mother, and she worked hard to keep up with a partner twice her size. He was more accurate on the firing range, but she was surprisingly lethal in hand-to-hand. She credited growing up military with a clutch of fiery siblings with teaching her that quick and dirty was the best way to fight. And they complemented each other. She could coax the most hardened wise guy to reveal information, and the victims' families who had complained about his lack of feeling seemed to eat out of her hand. Their case resolution statistics were consistently impressive and he'd come to depend on her insight into the minds of people while he hacked the minds out of their computers.

And then came the test. Her superiors in Profiling wanted her back to oversee a new project, and she was considering coming in from the field just as soon as they finished this undercover case. The Mesarin crime family was thisclose to giving them crucial information that would lead to the indictment of their entire upper echelon. Unfortunately, Chris' 'boss' in the family chose the wrong side in a bloody feud and she had been ambushed in a general purge of his lieutenants. She'd been shot and stabbed nearly to death and he was sure that if she ever got well enough to return to active duty she'd choose a safe, cushy desk job in Profiling over field work with him. But his partner was tougher than even he knew, and she'd gotten right back out there with him as soon as she was able. They'd never said much about it, but he knew she'd picked him over Profiling and it cemented his faith in their personal and professional interdependence. He'd have sworn on a stack of FBI Manuals that she didn't have a lying bone in her body… but he'd apparently been wrong.

Tapping put the key into the ignition and turned on the air conditioning to dispel the heat and the silence. His face was uncommonly immobile, and the betrayal in his eyes could just stay there. An hour ago he would have backed her honesty against the Director himself and the sudden knowledge that she was manipulating their partnership for her own ends rocked him more than a sudden earthquake would've.

"I have to know," he said quietly. "And I don't want to know. I just… Why?"

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Agent Christina Anderson consciously made her hands and face relax. Arguing for the better part of a day, then defying respected friends she hadn't seen in too long after seeing that damn tape had her wound up to a fight-flight-or-burst-into-tears peak. She wasn't going to overinterpret Tapping's every facial twitch to plump up the unease and anger she already felt. She was not going to give in and cry as she hadn't been able to after seeing Sam fall to the ground in blood-soaked exhaustion, probably poisoned by the knife that had cut and sliced and stabbed and –

She breathed deeply through a suddenly tight chest. Her flashbacks had receded with counseling and physical therapy, because she was strong, dammit – physically and mentally. Watching four people gang up on an old friend felt far too much like the three man hit team she hadn't been able to fight off for long, but it wasn't the same. Sam hadn't been shot when multiple stab wounds didn't kill her. Sam hadn't lain there, bleeding out, hearing the sirens fade in and out as the cavalry rode to the rescue. The operations, the physical therapy, the trial – all those were Chris' memories. She was an experienced enough psychologist to recognize the consequences of imbuing a victim with her pain rather than dealing with it herself. And an experienced enough agent to know she needed to put her anguish away until she got through with this case.

Chris wasn't back there in the aftermath of Mesarin, she was here in a car with a pissed off partner and a dreaded complication. Tapping's eyes stared at a point a few degrees past her shoulder as he contemplated… whatever he was processing through that nimble brain of his. He would be angry and hurt and nasty about it, and then she'd talk him around like she always did, right? Right. She watched the tense set of his shoulders and willed hers to relax. She needed to get a hold of herself if she intended to have this discussion.

Tapping's voice caught her attention before she was really ready to talk. "I have to know," he said quietly. "And I don't want to know." He turned to look at her while his hands still clenched the steering wheel. "I just… Why?"

"Why what?" she countered softly. His angry gaze snapped up to hers and she defused him as best she could. "I'm not trying to be sarcastic, Tapping. I honestly want to know which part you're asking about. Why did I get this case or why didn't I tell you I had a connection to it?"

His humorless laugh chilled her as much as his rigid spine. She didn't think she'd ever seen him this upset. "Why did you throw away four years of trust by lying to me? Let's start with that one."

"I didn't lie to you," she returned calmly. She locked her temper inside a lead-lined, fireproof, triple deadbolted box deep within her chest. She clenched her hands inside her jacket pockets and willed her expression to blandness.

"What do you call it then?" Something ugly lurked behind Tapping's ire and Chris deliberately didn't pursue it.

She took one hand out of its black silk prison and ran it through her hair in a familiar gesture of exasperation. "I call it doing a favor for an old friend who asked for some perfectly reasonable help."

He snorted in disbelief, but allowed her to continue.

"Believe it or not, this wasn't supposed to turn into the case of the century, Tapping." Her hand lay carefully flat against her black trousers, with only the tiny flash of white at her knuckles to show her tension. "I wanted to come out here, see what I could find to set my father's old friend's mind at ease, and go home after finding no evidence of desertion or foul play. That's all."

It was her partner's turn to react as his hands took a too careful grip on the gear shaft. "And what if you had?" Her blank look made him elaborate. "What if you had found evidence of desertion or foul play? What then? Would you have just swept it under the rug and let your old friend take care of it?"

Her teeth were self-gritting. Who knew? She pried her jaws open to spit her answers back in chunks of icy disdain. "I wouldn't. Have let. It go. I wouldn't have had to let it go. Because I know George Hammond. General Hammond wouldn't send me out here after the kind of officer who needed a whitewash."

Tapping faced her with an unrepentant expression. "Is that so? And I'm just supposed to depend on your standards of behavior to prove that?"

Chris frowned in puzzlement. This wasn't the direction she thought he'd take, and she wasn't precisely sure how to defuse him. She responded carefully, "Major Carter was kidnapped and we have proof."

"And what if you didn't? What if she really had deserted or sold out and it was your responsibility to bring that evidence back? Could you have done that? Or would you choose to let your father's old friend keep his illusions? Would you have just managed to forget the inconvenient facts if I didn't know all the particulars?" Tapping's doubt ripped through her control the way that his anger hadn't been able to.

"You know me better than that, Tapping!" she snapped. "Regardless of where the evidence leads or what the job asks, we do it. That's the way we've worked together for the last four years." Her firm tone matched the set of her mouth and her upright posture.

"Maybe I don't know you better than that, Chris! You didn't tell me anything about asking the director for the case! And what about letting me come here with no warning about the military advisers and your good friend, their commanding officer? That's not the way we've worked together for the last four years, Agent Anderson." Tapping's lanky frame was coiled into fraught stillness as he kept his eyes on hers. His voice went low and deathly sincere. "I don't know exactly how your partnerships worked before, but I can't work with someone I don't trust."

Chris shuddered as she realized where he was going with this. For most of the ten years since her first partnership had dissolved, she'd managed to avoid discussing the exact circumstances behind Special Agent David Turner's dismissal from the Bureau and subsequent criminal conviction. Tapping had been her first field partner since David and he'd eventually come to see in her the real agent behind the rumors about the disgraced agent's infamous ex-protégée. He'd come to have faith in her honesty and now that faith had been damaged. She let out a slow breath. No matter how much he'd disturbed her with his angry doubt, he deserved answers.

"I grew up knowing the Hammonds and the Carters; our families were very close. My father was career Air Force like George and Colonel Jake, but most of that career was classified." She kept her voice level, letting no hint of old emotions color her expression. "I can't tell you exactly what happened, but when I was a teenager my father was KIA. My mom and my sisters and my brother and I never knew what happened. I tried for years to find out, but I got the official stonewall every time. And … it ate me alive."

Her eyes went hollow and dark remembering those times. She knew the bare bones of her explanation sounded melodramatic, but she had no intention of discussing depression, rebellion and eating disorders with the man beside her. It was all behind her now and she intended to keep it that way.

"They found a way to answer my questions that didn't compromise any of us. Or security. It was the worst time in my life… and they made it go away. I owe them more than I can possibly say, Tapping. I'm sorry I didn't tell you everything from the beginning, but I honestly never thought it would be an issue." Her solemn face begged for his understanding.

He couldn't find it in himself to give it.

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"There didn't seem to be any reason to mention a tenuous connection I had with the victim ten years ago." Chris saw the light of battle reignite in her partner's eyes and knew she'd stepped in it. As of ten seconds ago they'd only had some unresolved issues. By admitting a connection directly with Sam, she'd crossed the line from 'dubious integrity' to 'enemy of the state' in her partner's mind. And it was all David Turner's fault.

Actually, it was all the NID's fault, and if she ever found the operatives who had set her first partner up and tainted her professional life with their slime trail…

"I thought the only connection here was with an old friend of your father's," Tapping bit out. "Are you, the agent in charge, admitting that you have a relationship of some kind with the victim of a crime you volunteered to investigate? Sounds like 'using Bureau resources for personal purposes', if I remember the letter in your personnel file correctly. Funny how that crops up again here."

Chris bit the inside of her cheek to keep from responding to Tapping's assertion. David Turner, the agent who showed her the ropes for the entire two year probationary period all agents had to undergo, had been removed from the Bureau on trumped up charges of fabricating and destroying evidence. The NID officials they had investigated were better protected than either agent knew. Once David had been put on trial, Chris had defied orders – and common sense – and kept pursuing the investigation that had brought her partner down. She had gotten off with a reprimand in her professional file about 'using Bureau resources for personal purposes' and a transfer out of the field into the Profiling Department. Her doctorate in psychology was better suited there, anyway, but Chris had never managed to escape the whiff of evidence tampering that had clung to her first field partner. It never mattered in Profiling, where they were responsible for finding the reasons behind the evidence rather than collecting it, but in the field that reputation could be crippling.

"Does this have anything to do with the way you're just rolling over and giving up all our evidence? Are you colluding with the victim's superiors in allowing a spurious claim of 'national security' to restrict Bureau access to inconvenient evidence?" Her shaggy, unsure partner of a moment ago was replaced wholesale with SuperAgentByTheBook Michael S. Tapping, Federal Bureau of Investigation. His four years of faith in her melted away as if they'd never existed.

"Don't blow this out of proportion, Tapping," she snapped. "I knew the victim as a child, but I hadn't been in contact with her for years. Her commanding officer was an old friend of my father's who wanted someone to look into her disappearance. Following up on a missing persons case is hardly a misuse of Bureau resources."

Tapping started to make a comment about the evidentiary implications, but Chris cut him off. "And there's no evidence of guilt here for me to hide! She's not guilty of anything; someone kidnapped her! It's not like there's a huge conspiracy here! General Hammond had information that Major Carter had intended to visit this national park on her journey. It was the only clue they had. The San Diego Police, who were running the Missing Persons investigation, would be completely unable to search the park until the case had entered FBI jurisdiction anyway. It would eventually land on some agent's desk. Rather than let it be buried under routine inquiries for a week – and that only after the locals to exhausted their leads and asked for help – he called me and asked me to look into it immediately."

Both her hands were resting silently by her sides now almost at a form of attention. Her voice was calm and cool, her face was composed and relaxed, and the fire of helpless frustration burned in her blue eyes. She knew he'd twist this into something horrible, but she made herself accept the coming storm with grace and poise. This whole escapade had been her sacrifice to repay men who had done more for her after her father's death than she could ever explain. If it was becoming less a sacrifice of her time and energy and more a human sacrifice, so be it.

"So what you're admitting to me is that you deliberately and with full knowledge used the resources of the Bureau for personal reasons? You conspired with a member of the United States Military to use a civilian organization to locate evidence that has now been concealed under the heading of 'national security' even though the investigation is nowhere near complete?" Tapping's smooth, subtle questions were neither.

Chris tried for one last stab at her longtime partner's sense of proportion. "It's not like this is completely beyond the pale, Tapping. Someone would have had to investigate sooner or later. I just helped move the timetable up a bit and asked the director to assign me to it rather than some random agent. The evidence would be classified either way."

His touchy side pounced instead. "So you admit that you went to a superior within in the Bureau and asked for a special assignment under false pretences? An assignment that violates several of the regulations of professional ethics? Only think if your personal feelings for the victim had led to us missing or burying crucial evidence of foul play or even a less than savory motive on the part of the missing officer! Are you claiming to be completely objective on the matter of classifying the evidence, or are you willing to just take your old friend's word for it that this material is a matter of 'national security'?" His scornful tone made the last five words a deadly insult.

And right then she knew that her career was in jeopardy. Her sin of omission could not be overlooked by the part of Michael Tapping that had been insistent on finding some proof of treachery on the major's part. Even if he would assent to working with her again, she'd never be able to overlook his subconscious focus on the greater glory of Michael Tapping to the detriment of her professional integrity and Sam's chances of rescue. Chris took a deep breath and let her expression harden into a professional mask even Michael couldn't see through. "This conversation," she stated calmly, "is over."

She opened the car door, stood up, closed it firmly and walked away. It wasn't as easy as it should have been.

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Video Surveillance Monitoring Room, Administration Building

Grand Canyon National Park, AZ

Downtime Day 12, half an hour later

Ranger Robert Alvarez fairly danced into his de facto office with an unaccustomed grin breaking over his face. This was, hands down, the best he'd felt in days. He grinned widely and surveyed his domain, trying to figure out the best way to set this room to rights again.

He hadn't gotten past 'remove extra monitors and tables' on a mental to-do list before his plan ran into its first complication. He sashayed up to the person holding her head in her hands over the table he planned to remove and tapped her gently on one hunched shoulder. She jumped and looked up at him with a too-calm face and mournful eyes.

"Agent Anderson, what's the matter? Are you okay? I thought you'd be jumping up and down right about now." Alvarez tried to decide if there was a new wrinkle in the case or if she was just too tired to be ecstatic.

She snorted and straightened her spine. "And why should I be jumping exactly? We've been here for days and I've managed to get the evidence classified and confiscated, destroy my partnership doing what I thought was right, and get roughly nowhere in trying to find the missing woman." Her bitterness flavored the very air around her.

"Wait. What?" Alvarez's honest confusion and indignation wafted across her tired face and she looked at him with more interest. "Didn't he tell you !"

A suppressed tingle of investigative instinct ran through her like a shudder. "Didn't who tell me what?" she asked softly.

"That rat bastard!"

"Alvarez?"

"Your partner, Tapping. Hijo de puta!"

"Deputy Alvarez!" she snapped. Not that she didn't think Michael was a son of a … gun right now, but whatever Alvarez wasn't saying yet was vastly more important.

He took a deep breath and answered. "We found the van owners. It's not some whackjob with a grudge. It's a serious lead."

Her silent shock pulled more gentleness from Alvarez than he thought he could feel for any FBI Agent right now. He responded quietly, "the van has a connection to a federal agency. We have a good lead on the people that took Major Carter. I thought Agent Tapping went to tell you."

"You tell me," she demanded.

Gulping, he complied.

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Author's Note: So, love it? Hate it? Wouldn't give it CPR if it collapsed in front of you? Drop me a line and let me know what you thought of this installment and any guesses you have for what happens next. Please Review!Messages from readers arethe best remedy for writer's block known to... me. REVIEWS make me do the chair hula. And, ya know, re-inspire me to work on the next chapters. Stupid writer's block. Please and thank you to everyone who commented on the last installment - I really appreciate your feedback.

As usual, TREMENDOUS thanks to technetium for the beta! You rock! You roll! You answer your email! ;-) Special extra-gooey gratitude for noticing the little head-scratcher in the upcoming chapter that inspired me to rewrite this and make it loads better.

And chocolate chip happys to my editrix, who'll never read this on the web anyway. ;-)