A/N: We're in the last stretch now of things now. Thank you for reading and reviewing. Part of the dialogue below's taken from 'Children of the Gods.'
Chapter 23
Northern Minnesota
10 October 1995
The dirt track was barely visible under the overgrown grass. The wheels of the car crunched it way through the path, finally stopping where the track ended.
"We're here."
"That it," Sam said at the same time, shutting down the engine and feeling herself slump with the fatigue that threatened to overcome her despite it being the early hours of the afternoon.
They had taken turns at the wheel, spending the last twenty hours or so on the road, only stopping for rest at motels and pit stops in several diners located in the middle of nowhere.
For the moment at least, they were safe.
It was what Hammond had promised and she intended to hold him to it.
"Hell of a drive," Jack commented and stepped out of the car. "Especially the terrain towards the end."
From where she stood, a small log cabin sat at an angle from the driveway, its entrance partially hidden by undergrowth that had gone untended. Sam squinted to see a small dock behind the cabin, barely visible from the overhang of the trees in the front porch. It led out to a rippling pond, flanked on one side by medium-height balsam poplar trees. The pallid afternoon sun was peeking out, its weak rays lending the body of water a blue-green hue.
She inhaled raggedly, the cool air of the afternoon sweeping the scent of pine forests into her lungs. "It's beautiful, you know," she told him with a smile, "I can only imagine what it's like all done up."
"Glad you like it, Carter, but I really can't take credit for anything here," he answered her distractedly, already trudging through the undergrowth towards the cabin.
She was right behind him when he stopped in front of the door, looking over the condition of the wood and the chains that wound around its handles.
"Let me try this," Sam suggested and stepped around him, taking out her pocketknife as she set to work.
He shrugged and moved away to give her some space. Involuntarily, his eyes moved to the spot where Sean O'Neill was buried under the poplar trees, just several paces away from the dock, at the place he seemed to have loved most.
"Got it."
Jack turned back to see her pulling the chains and the locks away, raising his eyebrows at how she deftly had handled those. He gestured inside. "Good. I was gonna say 'Ladies first'."
He grinned at her answering snort and stepped in after her.
The musty scent tingled their noses, the open door letting in a shaft of light that illuminated cloth-covered furniture and dust-stained windows in a living space that looked bigger than they expected. To the right, a small corridor lined with cobwebs led to what looked like two bedrooms and a small kitchen.
Decades-old dust dispersed as they walked further in. The floorboards creaked under their footsteps, the sound unnaturally loud in the ringing silence.
She went to the windows and threw them open without much difficulty. Immediately, the autumn forest breeze rushed in, causing the covering cloths to flutter.
"So, what are we looking for?"
"Some kind of storage closet, hidden openings in walls, that sort of thing," he admitted sheepishly, running his hands along the walls.
She spied an opening to the right. "I'm going to check that out."
Sam followed the small corridor, then turned left into the first bedroom. Half the room had been taken up by a double bed with a bare mattress and a pile of folded quilts covered by an inch-thick layer of dust. Left completely bare of other furnishings, there was an unobstructed path to its larger windows that offered a partial view of the pond's smooth surface.
She walked towards the window, took in her surroundings through the dust-stained glass, then walked out.
In the second bedroom, a tiny bed stood at the corner of the room just beneath a small, stained window, flanked by a dresser and an empty Formica shelf unit. Several metres up, the patterned wallpaper had been forcibly torn from the ceiling and walls. Only a few useless strips that hung in curled rolls remained.
A child's bedroom.
Had it been his?
"I'd almost forgotten what it was like up here." His voice interrupted her out of her musings.
Jack stood at the threshold of the door, his face more open than she could ever remember.
"Do you miss it?"
"You can't really miss what you don't really remember much of."
"What do you remember?"
He shrugged. "Lots of fishing, lots of walking, lots of sleeping."
She walked up to him, stopping just a step away from him, then traced her fingers down his shirt. "I like seeing this part of you, Jack O'Neill."
The warmth of her palms zinged straight through to his shirt; it was enough to interrupt the flow of his breathing. He asked, if a little unsteadily, "Which part are we talking about exactly?"
He was almost disappointed when her hands fell away and she started laughing.
When she quietened down, all she did was to take his hand and lead him outside. "Come on, let's get our supplies out and ready for the night."
Northern Minnesota
11 October 1995
She was busily clearing the remnants of breakfast when he decided to take another look inside, going back to the room that he had slept in all those years ago.
Between them the previous day, they'd cleared the cobwebs and the dust as best as they could until twilight fell, airing the place until nightfall so that the cabin looked more lived in. But they had been hesitant to spend the night in that dusty room, and had chosen instead to set up a tent under the clear night sky as their temporary lodging until the cabin could be cleaned out properly. Dinner had consisted of unrecognisable food in an MRE eaten with some god-awful instant coffee mix in front of a small fire, where they sat talking until the fire snapped and died out when their logs collapsed.
It hadn't exactly been as appalling as he'd thought it would be, despite the state the cabin was in. In fact, he would have been a lot more bitter without any electricity and any decent water supply outlet had she not convinced him that a shared bath with water slowly heated over a fire was exactly what they needed.
Jack smiled at the memory and ran his fingers over the wooden bed frame, wishing he could remember more of that period of his childhood than he really did.
In the face of such unexpected tranquillity, Jack wished he had sought to maintain the cabin when his grandparents had left it.
But it wasn't too late, he thought, because…because tomorrow was slowly starting to matter again.
If they came out of this alive, he vowed he would overhaul its interior, make it liveable again, making the place he would escape to whenever he could, a symbol of the new life he'd be carving out and living after Charlie. And if Carter were willing and he hoped to god that she would be – not that he knew if she felt the same way he did – she'd agree to be by his side every step of the way as he got it ready.
Because it now meant so much more than a simple overhaul of a broken building.
For five minutes, he stood unmoving, his thoughts eventually meandering down the darker path to the last days of Sean O'Neill, wondering if he'd got it all wrong after all. Had his grandfather taken all his secrets to the grave, leaving no trace of the tragedy that had befallen him?
Unbidden, a fuzzy memory hovered at the edge of his consciousness, then surfaced and crystallised into an image of clarity.
It was a recollection of the toys he'd kept hidden under the floorboards of this very room, a method he'd discovered for safekeeping. A secret that he'd felt comfortable sharing only with his grandfather.
An experimental press of his boot heel into the spot of his old hiding place shifted the floorboard upward. He knelt to set it aside, his eyes widening at the sight of the old toys still tucked against the edge of the neighbouring board. G.I. Joe stared up at him, the action figure that fronted the rest of his paraphernalia. He took them out gingerly, feeling their familiar shapes.
But underneath them lay a heap of yellowed papers carefully wrapped in clear plastic, protected against the erosive elements of time and change.
His astonished shout brought Sam running into the room at full-speed, nearly colliding into his rigid back.
Then he turned to her with the papers in his hands, and her mouth dropped open in shock.
They had settled comfortably on the dock with the papers between them and a fire burning comfortably in the background.
"Ready?" He asked.
She nodded mutely, taking up the first few sheaves of paper.
July 19, 1959
I came to know someone today entirely by coincidence when I went for a walk in the park. Maj. Luke Cowan of the USAF, a nice young chap who had been given a medical discharge barely four months prior. To my amazement, I learned that he had served in the initial reconnaissance efforts in New Mexico, Roswell, in an incident that had taken the world by storm.
As two retired military men, we got on well, spending our time drinking whenever we met, recounting our Air Force stories. He told me the most wondrous things.
My two-year-old grandson would have loved his stories.
December 20, 1961
I hadn't seen Luke for nearly ten months. He finally appeared today, looking haggard and weary. When asked how he was doing, he simply shook his head and said that his family business was doing well. Too well for him to get sufficient rest.
We didn't talk much, and as we parted ways, I wished him good luck.
September 12, 1962
No one has seen or heard of Luke Cowan for weeks. It is as though he never existed, his identity erased from the face of the Earth. The only people who remember him are his wife and children. According to them, he had simply walked out on a cold night in January to take care of some business and never returned.
Am I supposed to let the disappearance of a good friend just pass me by?
October 16, 1963
I took the liberty of looking up Luke's friends and acquaintances. Their replies were similar: Luke had long stopped joining them on regular bridge and poker nights. He had apparently severed all contact with them a few months before his disappearance. No one even knew the business that he had to take care of.
February 28, 1964
Mrs Cowan and her children held a private funeral for Luke today. After nearly a year-and-a-half of futile searching, Maj. Luke Cowan was officially declared dead.
My search for the truth has thus far, led nowhere. I've exhausted all of my contacts.
But I received a call today, an anonymous call. I was ordered to call off my enquiry into Luke's apparent death and was told that a sum of ten thousand dollars had been already been wired into my bank account. This is an unforeseen opening.
Marie is frightened. For all of us, and especially for our young grandson Jonathan whose parents have recently divorced.
November 15, 1964
Tullus Inc.
The oil conglomerate that was responsible for wiring that generous source of income, although I imagine that for a company that size, this is probably nothing but peanuts to them.
But Tullus Inc., after months of meticulous searching, doesn't seem to exist. It is a shell company, fronted by a group of directors who also do not exist in the US records of births and deaths, registered to a ghost address in Fremont County, Wyoming.
August 20, 1965
Nine months! It took me a period of nine months to obtain several account balances of Tullus, Inc. through means that Marie would never approve of. She always thought that I was indulging my love of reading at the local library.
Set-up in 1952, Tullus, Inc. began with a set-up amount of USD $2,000,000, receiving a subsequent constant cash flow of USD $3,500,000 in the years 1953-1963, increasing exponentially to an annual USD $7,500,000 from 1964 onwards.
The sources of the funding remain obscured to me. The entries of each deposit are marked out completely, but I know that the money trail leads out of the country, which I suspect is created by a myriad of corporations, firms and individuals owning offshore accounts. As they fall under offshore jurisdictions, information regarding these accounts can only be given out in the case of criminal investigations or if a court order has been handed down.
How is this company connected to Luke? What had he done?
It had been two years and I fear I am no closer to getting to the bottom of Luke's disappearance.
She found Jack several paces away from the dock leaning against a tree, oblivious to the slight drizzle that was starting to blur the Minnesotan landscape into a patchwork of browns, reds and greens.
He was staring at the spot where his grandfather was buried, seemingly lost in thought.
She simply stood some metres behind him, unsure if he wanted company, observing his hunched posture framed against the trunk. She let her eyes flutter close against the force of the droplets, relishing the feel of it against her skin.
"You can barely see the outlines of his grave," he said without turning around. "There used to be a small stone marker. But even that's gone."
She stepped up to him, her eyes drawn to the spot where the grave was. Inadvertently, the memory of another time, another gravestone floated to the surface of her memories. "When my mother died, I visited her grave everyday. Sometimes twice when I could. It was near where we stayed at that time, and I always felt closer to her when I was there. I'd imagine she was looking down, listening to me. But life…went on. My visits got less frequent as the years went by, and often I wonder if I'm dishonouring her memory by not seeing her as often as I should be doing."
Her personal disclosure was met by silence. But when he turned to her and placed a hand briefly on her shoulder in commiseration, she felt the tension leave her muscles.
Jack didn't respond immediately, his resignation morphing into weariness. "I don't know what to think," he told her frankly. "When this all first started, I…I thought…fucking hell," he scrubbed his face, not entirely sure how to go on, "I never imagined that it would turn out like...like this."
It was more than surprising to hear that admission from him. But she knew that feeling well, having lived everything off-centre for the past month.
"Like you'd end up sleeping with a woman you were supposed to kill, running for your life, before discovering that your grandfather was involved in a plot and murdered for it?"
He flashed her a grateful, sideways grin for her wry attempt at humour, recognising it for what it was. "Yeah, something like that. Tends to give you some perspective when you find yourself living in a soap opera."
"I know what you mean," Sam sighed, the humour gone as quickly as it came. "Of all the events in my life, even breaking my engagement doesn't even come close to this."
The revelation hit him in the face like an unexpected slap. "You were engaged?"
"It tends to happen. Try not to look so surprised," she replied dryly with a smirk, an expression that he thought didn't quite really suit her. "He was another officer, a black-ops guy. He was…charming and…liked control. And…maybe…maybe I really do go for broken men," she continued part-self-deprecatingly and part-jokingly," though I didn't quite think you were one when we met."
Jack raised his eyebrows in amused disbelief, only to realise that her voice had taken a turn for the unpleasant.
"Now that I think about it, it seems like I never learnt my lesson, didn't I?"
He instantly knew what she was referring to. Back that night in the barracks in Lexington, where he'd unwittingly learnt about the reckless imprudence of a teenage boy who had nearly destroyed her fragile self-esteem.
"Sometimes I think we don't," he said hesitantly, his dark eyes meeting her blue ones unflinchingly, "then we pay for it in ways we never thought we would."
It still astounded her to witness the openness that he showed at unexpected times, as though he now allowed that underlying sadness and to a lesser extent, that debilitating self-recrimination surface more easily after he'd actually told her about Charlie and Sara during that cathartic night in the beach cottage. But where a persistent ache of hopelessness seemed to have constantly assailed him before that, it now looked as though it had been tempered by a rising cautious optimism in the past two weeks.
Then that look was gone as quickly as it had appeared, so swiftly that she thought she'd imagined it.
"The paper trail would be cold by now," Jack briskly continued, now focused on the subject matter at hand.
She took a second to re-orientate, to realise what he was talking about. "He left more than his diary entries," she pointed out. "And Hammond has more contacts that he could reach more easily. Which could get him further than your granddad ever did. We should show him all that you've found."
They escaped into the dryness of the cabin just as the onslaught of water became a deluge that poured over the dock in streams.
It merely took a quick call through a secure line to Washington to convince Hammond that there was indeed something of importance he should look into as soon as they returned.
When Jack terminated the call, he found her staring at him or rather, through him, as she contemplated the twist in events, that bewildering change of direction that had come so suddenly when Hammond became a recent player in a lethal game of Russian roulette.
Anxiety and perplexity were clearly written on her face.
He'd recognised the familiar desperation that had overtaken her when they were on the run. It was an identical emotion that had him questioning the sanctity of life in an Iraqi prison, and one that had propelled him to ponder what a bullet through his head would have felt like.
He knew all too well that they were leaning on each other only because there had been no one else they thought they could trust. But this thing that existed between them…it was still all so new that sometimes he forgot how to breathe, marvelling at how she didn't seem to mind handling damaged goods.
Then again, she had confessed to a penchant for fixing broken people.
Betrayed by the very institution around which she had built her life, he'd seen the carefully constructed façade of Captain Carter break down and watched how she had to learn to become someone else, become that woman whom he now knew as Sam.
But what did it mean now that they seemed to be taking tentative steps back to an organisation that had callously cut them free?
It was giving him a headache just thinking about things. Not that he was ever good at this sort of...stuff that was better reserved for the other half of the sexes.
Her voice pulled him out of his sombre musings. "What're you thinking about?"
With an effort to push away the thoughts that were more distressing than he cared to admit, he replied good-humouredly with an exaggerated sigh, "What makes you even think I'm thinking? That's your department."
It brought a chuckle out of her, and a knowing glint in her eyes.
Deep affection shone from her blue gaze – something he'd never thought he deserved or ever would see again – that turned from concerned to heated in the next moment.
It made his own breath hitch when she brought a tentative hand to his face, smoothing his hair until her fingers rested lightly on his neck. She leaned into him, her wandering hands prompting his own to stray down her sides.
Their lips met again and again, stirring anew the embers of a recently-quenched fire.
Hungry and wanting. Soft reassurance turning into blazing need. Taking all they could from each other, not knowing what tomorrow would bring.
Suddenly frantic, he backed her into a window, lifting her up onto the sill.
She matched his desperation, pulling his undershirt out of his jeans and tearing away his jacket with a roughness that made a small, feral smile appear on his lips.
He stood between her thighs, the heat of him throbbing against her jeans-covered legs. Suddenly impatient for the barrier of clothing to fall away, he tore open the zipper closure of her pants without much difficulty, then undid his own.
The wicked look he loved returned to her face as she swung her legs around his hips and pulled his head down to hers.
He welcomed it, willing himself to get lost in her arms.