"After him!" Ms. Marple snarled. "He doesn't know this area. We can't let him escape!" She advanced on McGee, fire in her eye. "I should kill you."

McGee steeled himself. Damn, but his leg hurt, and it hurt all the more the closer that those ham hands came to applying more pain! "But you won't," he made himself say calmly. "You need me. You need me in case you do find him," he went on. Odd way to plead for your life, Tim. Wouldn't Tony be laughing his ass off if he heard me? McGee offered a crooked smile. "Of course, I'm also the only one who can handle the computer that he was using. Or am I mistaken that the bunch of you wouldn't know a gigabyte from an Ethernet cable?"

Ms. Marple stared at him, calculations whirling inside her head. McGee had seen sharks with more warmth in their face than this woman.

Ms. Marple continued to regard the situation, fury giving way to cold hard decision-making. "Go," she ordered her people. "Find him. Eppes has seen us, each and every one of us. If he identifies us to the authorities, we can be executed for treason," she told them.

It was more than enough incentive. All of them wheeled on a dime and dashed up the stairs, heading toward the outside world to track down one missing genius.

Then Ms. Marple turned back to her captive. "You have one hour," she told him, "to convince me that you're worth more alive than dead. After that, I will be cutting my losses. I leave you to imagine what that entails," she added as she locked the door behind her.

Numbers had always been the overriding priority in Charlie's life, but the mind-numbing bliss of setting foot to ground, step after step, had been a certain joy in itself. After a long run, distance calculated to the nth degree and then correlated to the time spent, he always felt as though he was one with nature; that he was the wind. Healthy minds, healthy bodies had been the mantra of one of his professors, so long ago that he couldn't remember which one—or had it been his father?

At the moment, the identity of the speaker was unimportant. Charlie blessed the hours that he'd spent honing his body. Perhaps it hadn't been to the same extent that he'd exercised his mind, but that was water under the bridge and the quantity yet to be estimated. The real test would be whether or not he was able to escape from his captors and, equally as important to Charlie's way of thinking, if he would be able to summon help in time to save the NCIS agent whose Penfield façade had been unmasked.

True courage, that was what Special Agent McGee had displayed. It was courage as great as Charlie's brother Don possessed; cut from the same mold. McGee had insisted that Charlie escape, leaving the NCIS agent behind, in order to protect the country. Don would have done that, Charlie realized. David and Colby would, too.

And now it was time for Charlie to demonstrate that he could do the right thing as well, and not in an ivory tower. It was time to show that while Don and his team were listening to Charlie and his numbers, Charlie himself was paying attention to how the real heroes got the dirt off of the streets. Charlie's task now was to get to a source of help so that he could send back reinforcements to rescue McGee.

The neighborhood that he found himself in just barely qualified as suburban. The houses were huge, and Los Angeles would easily put four houses or more onto each lot that he dashed past. This was an area with a lot of money, Charlie realized, especially considering that the D.C. area was as expensive as any in the country. The roads themselves were paved but there were no sidewalks and no indication that anyone wanted any. This was territory for the obscenely rich who wanted their space and who could pay to have it.

A shout echoed from behind; his escape had been discovered! Charlie shook forth another spurt of speed, cursing under his breath. They'd hoped that he would have at least another five minutes before anyone at the house would realize that they were missing a valued 'employee'. Someone on the floor above must have heard the commotion, quiet though they had been.

No help for it now. Charlie hadn't a clue as to which way he ought to head, no idea in which direction lay help. He'd settle for anyone in authority, even a beat cop with a radio to call in a report of a crazy lunatic babbling about secret codes and national security.

He scanned the horizon frantically, searching for help. There was no one. Ms. Marple had picked her hideout well, Charlie realized bitterly. Even an escape attempt such as this had been anticipated. This wasn't a place with a meter maid on every corner or even a snitch to phone in a tip for a reward of a sawbuck. Charlie could run for a mile or more before he saw a face not associated with his captors.

There wasn't anything he could do about it; Professor Eppes hadn't been consulted as to the location of his captivity. His only option: run!

No, wait…he had choices. There were alternatives. Charlie put his feet on automatic and began to rank the possibilities in order of probability of success. He could try to knock on someone's door: low success rate. Most of these places were likely empty during the day, and anyone who was home would simply shriek in fear at the thought of armed kidnappers bearing down on them. Nope; that was out.

He could run straight down the street; also with a low chance of getting out of this alive. His captors had guns, and the speed of the average bullet fired from even a low velocity handgun would be at least 180 meters per second. Charlie tossed a glance over his shoulder; those didn't look like handguns being lugged along by his pursuers, and the speed of the bullets was more likely to be in the neighborhood of 2300 meters per second, which meant that Charlie could expect—

Yow! Charlie darted to one side, feeling more than hearing the tiny projectile whistle past his ear. Okay, better think a little faster. Put those genius brains to work before someone puts a new hole in my head. Charlie cast around frantically for a ploy that would give him more lifespan than the half life of a meson, and found precious little.

Trees, he decided, abruptly changing direction. Just in time, too—another bullet almost gave him a new part in his hair. He yelped, and darted toward his new objective: the heavily forested ground beyond the last mansion. The underbrush would slow him down, but it would also slow down the pursuit with the added advantage that the bullets would be stopped by the trees.

It wasn't a good option, but it was his best. Charlie dashed into the forested acreage, feeling the fallen twigs snap beneath each frantic step. An angry shout from behind told him that it had a good effect; the pursuit also recognized how difficult it would be to stop him, now that the trees blocked any line of sight bullets. The foliage would help to cover his tracks, would shield him from view, and Charlie's chances of escape were increasing with every step. The twigs were noisy, but that didn't matter. The men behind him were just as loud, and their own heavy treads covered the sounds from ahead. If they were to stop to listen, Charlie would simply move that much farther ahead.

There was a break in the trees, and Charlie tried to see what it was. Whatever it was, wasn't good. A break in the trees would give the pursuit a wonderful chance to take aim at the broad side of his back—no! It was a streak of luck!

It wasn't just a break in the trees, but a slender river. It was a river with flowing water, something that he could swim and move out of the area much more quickly. It was wet, and it was cool, and it represented a better chance of escape than anything he could see. The water had carved a slender embankment into the rocky soil, leaving a three foot cliff to dive from.

Prism effect: the change in medium—in this case, from air to water—leads to a distortion of light secondary to refraction, thus reducing the probability of accuracy of target shooting by a percentage directly correlated to the diffraction coefficient of the media involved.

Which meant that not only would the water carry him away much more swiftly, but if he swam underwater then their aim would be off as well. No time to wait: Charlie dove into the water, feeling the chill ram through his entire frame. Liquid rushed around him, carrying him down and then upward for another gasp of fresh air.

It wasn't until after the shock of the cold water wore off that he realized that it wasn't the cold water that he felt.

He'd been hit.

Gibbs stared at the map dotted with yellow marks. There was a pattern there, but damned if he could pinpoint it to an exact location and he could tell just by looking at him that Eppes felt the same way. Not one muscle jumped, but there was tension coiled in those nerves. "We can't wait," he realized.

"How far away is this?" Eppes was thinking the same thing: get physically closer, so that when the answer came in they'd be ready to pounce.

Professor Penfield adjusted his position around the map, peering at the same yellow marks. "You didn't put this one in the right place," he complained. "Do I have to do everything myself? Here, give me that computer. You're too slow, man!" he told DiNozzo. "There's a man's life at stake here, and you're pecking away at this keyboard as though you were swimming underwater." He snatched the laptop from where DiNozzo was trying to enter the locations that they'd identified earlier in order to use the map spread out over the table.

The rest of the two teams were spread around the edges of the room, fear seeping from them like jelly oozing from a broken jar. Ziva's face was expressionless, but Gibbs expected nothing less from the Mossad agent. Of the FBI team, Sinclair too kept his emotions in check—a good man to go undercover, Gibbs thought. A good man to have at his back. The other one—Colby Granger was the name—him, Gibbs wanted on his offensive line protecting the quarterback. Flanking the enemy would be another good use of the agent's skills, with DiNozzo on the opposite flank.

Gibbs made the decision. "Get Abby up here," he ordered. "Professor Penfield, when you have an answer—any answer, no matter how vague—you tell Abby, and Abby will get it to us. Move out," he commanded.

No one needed a second invitation.

Down to the wire.

That was the phrase: down to the wire. There were worse things in life for a writer to leave this world with, McGee tried to tell himself. To go out with a cliché on his mind was—

Who was he kidding? A cliché? He'd rather go with a terminal case of writer's block, which was what was going to happen in…McGee glanced at the clock on the wall. Three minutes. That was all that was left of the hour that Ms. Marple gave him after they discovered that Professor Eppes had escaped.

With my help; let's not forget that, McGee told himself. Single-handedly, McGee had just saved a substantial portion of the free world. By removing the genius portion of the kidnapped booty from Ms. Marple's grasp, he'd prevented them from decoding the message that would tell the highest bidder when and where to take possession of whatever was coming into the United States to wreak havoc and fear. McGee wouldn't let Professor Eppes tell him what it was—if McGee didn't know, it couldn't be tortured out of him.

Wow. Torture. McGee hadn't even put anything like that into his fiction, let alone face it in real life.

This was real life. This wasn't fiction, a story out of his imagination, where torture could be erased with a single brief paragraph detailing an hour or two with the friendly folks at the local emergency department. This wasn't a fairy tale where Timmy McGee was going to crack jokes about a broken wing in a sling.

This was fuckin' real. And if he didn't want to believe it, there was a huge hole in his leg to remind him of just how real it really was. It was a hole in his leg that hurt to the point that he was unable to think, unable to even make a pretense of working on the little laptop with its little spreadsheets with blinking letters dancing from cell to cell. Not that it mattered; Professor Eppes had stored his data under a password that McGee didn't know. 'You can figure it out if you really need it,' Eppes had said, shortly before McGee had set him free. 'That will protect you, if anything can. They won't be able to retrieve the code analysis without you.'

McGee morosely tried to inspect his wound from a distance, fearing that any attempt at physical manipulation would wrench a scream from his vocal chords. He couldn't see much under the ripped pants, but the angry redness seemed to suggest that the thing was already infected. If this goes on much longer, gangrene will set in.

Who am I kidding? I'm not going to live that long.

McGee glanced at the clock one more time.

His hour was up.

Cold.

He wasn't even shivering any more. He was well beyond the point where he had the strength to tremble.

How had he gotten to this state of affairs? Professor Charles Eppes was a world class mathematician, raking in the honors and accolades along with coming up with a few earth-shattering theories along the way. He'd just flown in to deliver a lecture to some of the world's top minds, for heaven's sake! Ending up a bullet-ridden corpse floating in a creek simply wasn't commensurate with his overall place in the scheme of things. It flew in the face of cosmic justice. It was…humiliating.

It also hurt. Not too much, and that would have frightened him if he'd had the energy to be scared. The cold creek water had numbed him to the point that he couldn't even tell where he'd been hit by whichever bullet or bullets had done the deed. It was the cold water that had done the numbing, Charlie told himself. It couldn't possibly be the fact that his life's blood was seeping away to mix invisibly with the creek water.

Don would find him. His big brother had always looked out for him when they were kids. Sure, they'd drifted apart, but they were family, right? Yeah, they were in different fields, but both were making the effort to connect. They didn't talk much, not about feelings and relationships and stuff like that, but they didn't need to. Don would find him.

Who was Charlie kidding? Don could pull in all the help he wanted—probably would. That code that Charlie had been working on was worth more than Charlie himself—but there was precious little to point anyone in this direction. It would take time to traipse through these woods, hunting for a damaged mathematician. One generally didn't find mathematicians in the forest. No one would ever think to look for Marshall Penfield in these surroundings.

Penfield. Without Charlie there to defend his research, Penfield would run free in his attempts to debunk the Eppes Convergence. Penfield's rebuttals in the academic journals would go unchallenged—Amita was a superior mathematician in her own right, but her area of expertise was combinatorics—and the world of math would be wrongfully steered away from Charlie's contributions.

I have to stop him. I have to stop Penfield from setting the academic community back by a decade or two, if not more!

Charlie grabbed onto a passing root extending itself into the creek, and hung on.