I do not own the characters, except for Anja because she is my child and I love her.
"Got anything, Ri?" Jack asked for what seemed like the billionth time. Riley turned to Jack in annoyance.
"As a matter of fact, yeah," she replied. "I was just about to call you over. Two people were found wandering on the side of the road, saying that they'd been mugged. The cops found their car, which had tires shot out. That was a little suspect, so they brought them to the station to get their statement, but they ran their plates. I've had a program running, scanning anything with the partial plates I got from the security camera, and-"
"And their shot-out truck matches?" Jack finished.
"Exactly. Plus the fact that the people they brought in were a man and a woman-"
"Which matches the profiles of our two missing hackers!" Jack said in excitement.
"Good work, Riley," Matty said. "Guys, go pick them up."
"The cops aren't gonna just give them to us, are they?" Bozer asked.
"You really forget who you're working for, don't you?" Jack asked with a smirk and a wink, already moving towards the door.
0-0-0
Scorpion and his waitress girlfriend were waiting in the Phoenix Interrogation room. Riley stared at them through the screen hooked up to the camera inside the room. "That's Scorpion," she confirmed.
"Well, according to the facial rec we ran on them, we've got Tristan and Sylvia Peterson," Matty countered.
"Wow, so much less exciting. I woulda gone with a name like Scorpion too," Jack said with a grimace.
"We can talk about his naming choices after we get him to tell us where MacGyver is," Matty said. "He wasn't with them when they got picked up, which means they probably already gave him to their third party seller."
That made Jack's stomach sink. He began to move towards the door, but Matty stepped in front of him. "Uh uh, Dalton," she said. "You can't go in there."
"Matty, I can get them to talk," Jack insisted, not believing that Matty was benching him.
"You're gonna go in there all Jack Dalton style, and even if they talk, we wouldn't be able to trust what they tell us."
"That's not true!"
"Jack." Matty's voice was firm. "Do not fight me on this. That never goes well for you." Without waiting for Jack to argue again, Matty turned and walked into the room alone, sealing the door behind her. Jack stared after her in anger.
"What are we doing here?" Tristan asked as the black-haired woman stalked in. Matty didn't respond, but she stared at the two of them.
"Who were you working for?" she asked quietly.
"What are you talking about?" Tristan asked innocently. Matty's eyes narrowed. She tossed a file down on the table.
"We know who you are," Matty stated as Tristan and Sylvia began leafing through the papers, eerily similar to the way the Borcheks had earlier.
"You can't confirm any of this," Tristan said, though he seemed quite shaken.
"Oh, I actually can," Matty said. "I've got someone who knows what you look like, and they've confirmed that all of this is you."
Tristan looked confused. Before he could put the pieces together that it was Riley who gathered all the information, as well as being the witness Matty was talking about, the director of the Phoenix continued speaking.
"You're looking at minimum of ten years for your hacking alone," she said. "That's before you add in kidnapping, and selling of stolen US information to foreign buyers."
At that, Tristan looked much less comfortable, and he traded looks with Sylvia. "Okay," he finally said. "We had someone offer a lot of money for us to deliver Vadim Borchek."
"Only it wasn't Borchek," Matty said.
"Yeah, we found that out when we made the trade," Tristan admitted.
"Where did they go?" Matty asked, not letting her anger and worry for Mac show on her face.
"Man, I don't know," Tristan said, suddenly becoming very whiny. "They took him, shoved him in the back of a van, shot out our tires, and left. They didn't even pay us."
"I'm sure it was a terrible loss," Matty said, sarcastically. "Where did they take him?"
"I'm serious lady, I don't know!" Tristan insisted. Matty stared at him, trying to gauge whether he was telling the truth or not.
0-0-0
Jack paced around the room he was waiting in, which very quickly began grating on Riley's nerves.
"Jack," she said finally, turning around in her seat. "Matty knows what she's doing. She'll get them to talk." Her words didn't seem to do much to calm Jack down, so she added, "Why don't you go check on on Anja? It's been awhile since we've updated her. We should let her know that we got the people who drugged her."
Jack didn't look too happy about it, but he finally decided to listen to Riley. "Fine," he grumbled. He turned and stopped his way out of the room, glancing back and giving one last withering look to the hacker and his girlfriend on Riley's screen. He grumbled again before he left, stalking towards the war room where they'd put Anja.
When Jack reached the war room, he stopped and took a deep breath, trying to calm himself down. Finally, he reached out and grabbed the knob, pushing the door open.
"Okay, Anja," he said as he walked in the room. "Got good new and bad-" He stopped short when he suddenly realized that the room was empty, and he was talking to no one. "Anja?" After double checking to make sure that she really wasn't in the room, maybe hiding behind the couches or something, Jack stepped out of the room and grabbed a nearby girl walking through the hall.
"Hey, hey," he said, pulling her over. "You didn't happen to see where the girl in this room went, did you?" he asked. The agent shook her head apologetically and gently extracted herself from Jack's grip. Jack asked a few more people, but no one had seen where Anja had gone. Jack was trying to stay calm, but he'd lost Mac, and now Anja was gone too. He pulled out his phone to call the Russian, but paused when he saw that he had three missed calls, as well as a voicemail from the woman himself.
He began listening to the message she'd left him, and his eyes widened as he heard what Anja had to say. He turned around and booked it back down the stairs towards interrogation. He knew where Mac was.
0-0-0
"You sure we should not be moving?" Anja asked, looking at MacGyver slightly skeptically.
"They've got at least one car," Mac said. "Even with our headstart, they'd catch up with us too fast. We need to even the playing field a little bit."
"And we will do this with pinecones?"
Mac chuckled. He knew how crazy he sounded. "That's the idea," he confirmed.
The two of them were sitting behind a large tree, waiting and listening for any sign of the Russians coming from the service road that Mac and Anja had indeed found, just like Mac had figured they would. Suddenly, Mac heard the distinct sound of tires going over loose rocks, as well as the gentle rumble of a car engine.
"Here they come," he said quietly, pulling out two rocks he'd found that would work fairly well as a flint. "Remember: the minute we throw them, we have to run," he explained for what Anja felt was the thousandth time.
"I know, MacGyver," she promised him. She held up the sap-drenched pine cone. "Aim for under van, yes?"
Mac nodded. "Right. The sap will keep the fire burning when it flies through the air, and once the fire hits the van, it won't be long before-"
"Kaboom," Anja finished.
"Kaboom," Mac confirmed with a smile.
They waited a few more moments until the van appeared in their vision. As soon as it came into view, Mac nodded at Anja, and the both stood up and began tossing flaming pinecones at the approaching vehicle.
When the flaming projectiles hit the ground, the Russians did exactly what Mac wanted them to do and stopped.
"Time to run," he said quickly, grabbing Anja's hand and pulling her behind him. They'd hidden themselves a decent ways from the road, enough to give them some semblance of a headstart, but bullets were faster than either of them. As they began running, a loud shot rang out, and Anja let out a cry as she fell to the ground.
*hides behind bulletproof glass* PLEASE DON'T KILL ME!
So uh...what did you think? :D
Also, the next update may take a few days. I've been super swamped with work and catching up on shows, and I haven't had as much time to write as I've wanted, so it may take a little longer to get the next update up. Not too long, just a couple extra days at the most, but just as a warning :)
Lemme know what you think!