Mac made his way down the dark, dank passage, hazarding a small flashlight from his earthquake preparedness bag that Jack and Bose both teased him about. Okay, so maybe he'd never actually needed it because of plate tectonics but right now it sure as hell felt like the ground was crumbling away under his feet.

O'Neill had Jack, ostensibly had DXS, and least in part. And the man had a massive ax to grind with Mac and his friend, say nothing about the place O'Neill assumed he worked. At first Mac wondered why the man might have made that assumption. He'd quit ages ago.

Then he realized that since it was unlikely O'Neill had been watching him the whole time, it would have been easy to assume he worked at X-Com. He was there all the time, hung out with Jack, with his friends from the lab. A few times with Nikki.

And following him was no guarantee they'd have found his home. The house was still in Harry's name. His car was still registered in Humboldt County to the cabin's address. And he frequently rode with Jack, crashed at Jack's place. Besides, they were out for everyone who took down their LA operation, not just some skinny blond bomb nerd O'Neill no doubt remembered as much less physically and emotionally capable than he was now.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked the number, then answered, "Gimme good news, Eggs."

A moment of silence. "Okay … I've got eyes inside."

"And that's not just good news?" Mac asked, nearly slipping in the brackish water of the drainage pipe that ran near DXS's parking garage. It was slick with algae. He hoped it was algae anyway.

"I wasn't able to get anybody through official channels."

"So who'd you get?"

"Vis is on it. She says if you don't get your dumb ass killed you owe her Penny Parker's phone number."

Mac had to snicker. "Tell your sister to quit hitting on my exes, wouldja?" He turned a corner and thought he could see the ladder that led up to the sub basement near the explosives lab. He cringed a little as he felt the water slosh into his boots. "She got anything useful?"

"Whole place is more or less on lock down. But she's only made about twenty bad guys. Problem with getting official help is none of the distress signals have gone up, so to speak. From the outside, without Vis hacking the system, all's quiet."

"Jack?" Mac asked, now at the bottom of the access ladder.

"One of the interrogation rooms," Miles answered flatly.

"And?" Mac prompted, restraining himself from getting legitimately sharp with his friend.

"He's being Jack. Giving people as much shit as he can when they're in with him and catching naps when they're not. He's a pro, Mac," Miles said gently. "He's in the fifth room on the left side of the eastern hallway."

Mac nodded. "Okay. I guess I'm going in. I'll try to set off some alarms or something so you can maybe get us some official help to get everybody out. I'm gonna try to get to Jack first though."

"I should maybe mention … I called Elliot, too."

Mac frowned. "I'm seriously hoping we aren't gonna need a coroner here, Eggs."

"Yeah, well … if his MD was all Elliot had going for him, I'd save calling him in for when my dumbass buddy loses his health insurance after he gets shot. But it's not. Our Dr. Mathers is a man of many talents. I'm pretty sure he can help."

Mac shrugged like Miles was there to see it. "Well if he shows up and manages to get in here, I'll hope so I guess. Text if Vis gets eyes on anything else I need to know. I'm going in."

Without waiting for Miles reply, Mac ended the call and started up the ladder bolted to the wall, cursing his slippery boots. The manhole cover was heavier than he expected it to be. Well, not exactly. He knew exactly how many grams it weighed (or at least had a pretty good idea). He just hadn't thought it would feel so heavy, or scrape across the ground so loudly.

Fortunately, the sub basement was dark and empty. He took the flashlight from between his teeth and shined in around, trying to orient himself and decide what to do next.

"You're probably going to want to use the duct work," a familiar voice observed from the shadows off to his right.

Mac jumped and spun toward the voice. "Dammit Elliot! You just about gave me a heart attack."

Elliot smirked. "If spies weren't sneaky, no one would call us spooks."

Well, that explained a few things. Mac sighed quietly. "So, duct work?"

Elliot nodded. "There's not a lot of men in O'Neill's crew. But they're good. Sweeping the whole building in patterns with crossover, about ten minutes from start to finish. Really difficult to move without being seen. And I have plenty of training, not to mention a fair amount of natural talent, that helps me do that. You, on the other hand, are a lab tech with big feet."

Mac glared at Elliot but it didn't have much heat. He wasn't exactly the world's most graceful guy and he knew it. "Probably right," he conceded. "I think you're too big to crawl around up there with me though." Elliot was tall and reasonably broad across the shoulders.

"I'm going to get into the control room and sound the alarm as soon as you and Jack are clear. Hopefully this crew will rabbit the minute they know their cover is blown rather than trying to keep the facility hostage."

"You'll get grabbed doing that ... and they are definitely not afraid of taking prisoners," Mac protested.

"No, I won't. This is what I used to do, Mac."

"But you don't do it anymore?"

"I do if the price is right and I like the motives behind the money. Or if I've got a friend in over his head," he grinned tilting his chin in the direction of the repair access ladder in the corner and training his own dim flashlight on it. "Go get Dalton before these assholes get impatient."

Mac nodded and made his way over to the ladder. He was going to have to implement strict no climbing policies in all future endeavors. He looked up. Only about twelve feet. He sighed. Elliot was right. They needed to get a move on.

0-0-0

Jack was of two minds at the moment. On the one hand he hoped Mac had the good sense to just call the cops or something and stay well away from here. On the other he wished Mac was there with his Swiss Army knife or at least a couple paper clips so he could get Jack out of the cuffs currently biting into his wrists.

Jack wasn't much of a lock pick on his best day. He had little patience for close work like that. He saved his fine motor skills for behind a scope. Mac on the other hand, Mac liked that sort of thing. Picking locks, building models, miniaturizing tech. Jack wondered vaguely how often the kid had gotten himself in trouble with the restless need to build and destroy as a little kid. He suspected a fair amount.

He blinked several times. The wandering thoughts were probably a sign that his head butt of the jackass who'd locked him up in here hadn't been as well placed as he thought, because now that he'd noticed, he was pretty damned sure he had a concussion. Yep, the slight nauseas rolling in his midsection, slight halo around things bathed in the overhead light.

Well, he couldn't blame the headbutt entirely. A couple of those guys had knocked him around pretty good. Granted it was because he'd managed to twist free of the hold they had on him. He'd been damned close to sounding the alarm, too.

This crew had been smart and hit early in the day. They'd also gone to the executive level first. Thornton had managed to text him before they'd confiscated her phone. Without a building full of employees, it couldn't have been too difficult to lock down all five floors. Mostly they'd have had to hit security and the overnight skeleton crew in Medical. As far as he could tell, they hadn't killed anybody yet.

Jack had been in the elevator when he'd received Thornton's warning. It had been too late to just get the hell out of the building and get help on the move, but not too late to get off on the main floor and try to get to the building's security control room. He was one hallway away when he got clobbered from behind.

Jack rolled his head around, trying to loosen up his neck. He was stiffening up from the fight and O'Neill's encouragement to cooperate. He'd been cuffed to this chair for a while now and the shallow knife wound next to his left shoulder blade was aching with the steady beat of his heart. It hadn't bled for long, so he knew it wasn't too serious. And it had been worth it to get the word out to Mac. Or, so he hoped.

Boy O'Neill had been pissed he hadn't just played along and gotten Mac to come in. Like threatening him was going to get him to betray that kid. First of all, he was the kid's Overwatch. Not officially, not anymore.

But as Jack teased out the details of Mac's life, he realized he didn't really have anyone else. And he hadn't in a very long time. Even Bozer was more of a little brother, sometimes a project. Bozer had physically stood up for Mac a few times when they were younger, but Mac had done his part to help Bozer out. A lot, if Bozer's veiled references to their past were any indication. He knew Mac's mom had passed, that his father had left at some point. Kid didn't have anybody left to look out for him.

Jack thought darkly that if the kid came over here, with whatever the hell the Mac equivalent of guns ablazin' was (which Jack assumed meant maybe a second swiss army knife or something) he was legitimately going to tan his hide. Unless he brought the goddamned National Guard with him. Then maybe Jack would forgive the kid for letting himself get pulled back into this.

While O'Neill had to know Mac wasn't the reason his LA operation got taken down and his latest terrorist hidey hole raided, he'd clearly focused on Mac as the guy to pay back for it. Of course, it was possible they thought if they took Mac, they could flip him and get one seriously talented genius bomb nerd out of the deal. Wouldn't happen. Jack was positive Mac would die before he'd help those guys. But that didn't mean they weren't crazy enough to try.

Of course knowing Mac like he did, he was more than half sure the kid would show up here, trying to play the hero with no proper training, no real gear, and no backup. The hell of it was, Jack grumbled to himself, that Mac all on his own with just his brains had a better chance of putting an end to this situation than most full tac teams Jack had ever worked with.

Jack frowned. He could hear something. Footsteps? These rooms were pretty well insulated, you couldn't usually hear someone coming down the hall. Couldn't be that. Then there was a funny sort of scraping sound and dust fell onto the metal table in front of Jack. He squinted up at the ceiling in time to see one of the tiles slide aside and the object of his half affectionate half rueful thoughts dropped out of the ceiling and onto the table.

"Mac, what the hell are you doin' here? I tried to warn you off!"

Mac smirked as he jumped down next to Jack and got out his pocket knife to go to work on those cuffs.

"It's good to see you, too, Big Guy."