'I can't believe you punched him,' Connor said, as he kept his eyes on the screen, pressed right into my side as we sat with matching keyboards in front of the detector.

'Can't believe you were standing in the window the whole time watching,' I returned.

Connor winced. 'I didn't mean to,' he said, 'I just sort of found myself there. And you two were yelling, so, most people were staring.'

'We weren't yelling,' I argued.

Behind us, Nick huffed in contradiction.

'For the record, I didn't know you could punch like that,' Connor said, 'it was kinda awesome. And he definitely had it coming after…'

'You know I punched an ankylosaur once, right,' I quickly interjected before Nick could have sensed there was anything more to that story.

'Really?' Connor returned in surprise.

'Broke my knuckle.' It was why my third metacarpal phalangeal joint on my right hand was much deeper in my knuckle than the rest. It was still noticeable when I properly looked at it.

'You don't think it was a bit harsh though. Do you?'

My gaze dropped momentarily from the screen and– had the reason involving my action been anything to do with me I might have agreed– but surprisingly the rage I'd needed to finally give in to that temptation and lay him out had stemmed from my feelings for someone else.

'You don't know what he said, Con.'

'What did he say?'

I just shook my head.

I heard Connor sigh and looked somewhat suspiciously across at him with his sudden change of behaviour. His fingers stopped clicking across the keyboard and he looked away from his screen to glance around.

'Connor?'

'Sorry,' he said, though he had no need to apologise for anything, 'is anybody looking? It feels like I can feel…'

Nick leant forward, his face cutting through between us and his arms coming to rest around each of our shoulders. 'Nobody knows what we're doing, Connor,' he said calmly. 'They have no reason to be suspicious.'

'And we're not doing anything wrong,' I pointed out.

'So relax,' Nick finished. 'Stop looking so guilty.'

'Sorry…' He flexed his fingers. 'My hands are shaking.'

I gave a few final taps at my keyboard before I sat back. 'I'm done,' I said, 'it's over to you Con.'

He nodded, eyes trained on his screen and without blinking he inputted his final layer of code into the program edit and as the system check started to load, the window on the screen closed. 'It's done,' he announced, 'both parts. No one's gonna know a thing about this until it turns around and bites them.'

'Okay,' Nick agreed. 'Let's find out where this trail leads.'

'I thought a dramatic setting might be appropriate.'

I didn't care; my butt was so numb and my bones so sore from sitting on the stone so long that I was just about ready to kill him so that I had something to use as a cushion.

And I needed a pee.

I thunked my head back against the pew behind us and stared at him.

'Why?' Nick responded, 'were you hoping for Divine intervention.'

'No,' I answered for him in a whisper. 'He thinks this is gonna be like the end of Shanghai Noon and he's Caucasian Jackie Chan.'

Connor frowned in annoyance back at me. 'Why would I want to be Jackie Chan?'

'Connor no one watches Shanghai Noon and wants to be Roy O'Bannon. Come on.'

'That bit at the end when he holds out his arms and all the bullets– I'm not going through this again.'

I paused, bit my lip again out of boredom and followed the patterns in the stones up to the ceiling. 'Is this a good time to talk about Rex?' I suggested.

Connor turned his head to me. 'Anna!' he hissed in a whisper.

I saw Nick frown. 'What about Rex?'

'You better hope Caroline hasn't hurt him,' I said.

'Why does Caroline know about Rex?'

Connor shut his eyes in exasperation. 'The thing is, me and Caroline… we sort of…'

'Broke up,' I offered in assistance.

'…yep.' Connor agreed.

'She's stolen him.'

'Oh for…'

I met Connors gaze, before I finally leant forward again to peer around him and look at Nick, just quickly, just to check how he was reacting to this. If he was gonna swing at Connor I wanted to make sure I could slide out the way first. But it seemed he was only passively confused which was a big relief.

'What?' His mouth hung open, his lips moved before any proper words came out, and finally he managed to string a sentence together. 'What kind of girl lets you split then steals your lizard?'

My lips curled up into a smile.

'Um…' Connor responded slowly, 'well she doesn't actually know how special Rex is.'

'Well, what if she gives him to someone who does?'

'You're right, yeah.'

'Or worse, what if you get him back as a handbag?'

And as dark as the joke was, I had to snatch a hand over my mouth to mute my laughter because we were trying to be quiet. Connor groaned, and I quite agreed, but one look at Nick and I was gone. And trying to tell myself that it was a serious situation and I couldn't be laughing only made it worse.

'Okay,' Nick finished, 'okay, but seriously Connor, get him back before Cruella does anything.'

Connor nodded. 'I will, absolutely. Don't–' He suddenly cut himself off as the sound of the wooden doors at the back of the church swung open.

We froze, sinking further down as though we hadn't already made sure we were all completely hidden even Connor's hat behind the pew.

Nick straightened, I peered around Connor as the footsteps of the soldiers echoed up through the silent church. I saw his eyes go wide.

'What?' I questioned. Nick didn't respond. 'Lester?' I asked. Again, there was no reply.

Beside me, Connor popped his head up, blinked, then ducked back down again. 'It's not Lester,' he said.

I cocked my head.

'Jensen,' Nick hissed.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. I couldn't believe it. I hadn't even noticed that the shock had stuck me to the cold ground until Nick was suddenly up, striding across in front of us towards the aisle of the church.

'You.'

I jumped up to follow after him.

Jensen merely quirked an eyebrow at us, 'where's the anomaly?' he asked in concern.

'There isn't one.'

Jensen frowned and waved his arms about in confusion. 'Then why are we here?'

'That's a good question. I'll give you 10 seconds to answer.'

Slowing to a stop behind Nick, I studied Jensen's expression. He wasn't an actor. He wasn't in anyway good at covering his own reaction to anything that he wasn't in control of. Jensen could spin people, he could spin an image and talk his way through anything, and anything he said he could get people to believe but, with himself it was different.

'Nick...'

'The alarm was fake,' Nick said, 'the only way you could have known about it was by creating a diversion between the detector and your own computer.' He reached back into the waistline of his jeans. 'Who are you working for?' He pulled out a gun.

I felt the gasp tear through me at the sight of him. And it was suddenly something I recognised, that a man with a look in his eye like that was holding a gun at someone who hadn't done anything wrong.

I suddenly couldn't breathe. I tried to say his name again, to alert him to the fact that I thought I was choking but I couldn't speak.

'I don't know what you're talking about,' Jensen responded. 'All I know is that I was told to bring as many men as possible to this address to deal with a high priority anomaly.'

'Who told you that?'

'I'm not very good at talking with a gun in my face, put it down and we'll discuss this rationally.'

'Answer the damn question.'

'Put the gun down!'

'I said who sent you!'

'No! No! Stop it! Stop it right now.' My own voice had startled me– maybe the others too because Nick jumped and reeled around to stare at me. But I couldn't find it in me to give anything back to him because in all honesty I had just about one second left to stop him before I wouldn't be able to love him anymore. I would never be able to stop comparing him to my father. 'We all know you aren't going to fucking shoot him so put the gun down Nick! Or I swear to god…'

His expression softened, the realisation clearing through his eyes and his arm dropped back down to his side.

'Sweetheart–'

I held up a hand. I didn't need an apology now; I just needed an answer. 'Who was it?' I said with alarming amount of strength and control to my voice. 'Who sent you here, Jensen?'

He adjusted his tie. 'Leek.'

I locked my gaze with Nick's. 'We've got to get back to the A.R.C.'

I was strangely relieved to find Lester alive; we'd been told what had happened to him practically as we came through the door. We found him sitting at the table in out kitchenette staring into space.

I had no doubt he'd probably surprised himself with his actions.

Nick stood behind me and leant back against the wall, and I could feel his gaze burning into me as I spoke to the medic then took over the administration of Lester's first aid.

They had already brought down a trolley from the medical bay, and I started by pulling on a pair of latex gloves before I picked up a cotton ball and soaked it in chlorhexidine.

As I dabbed at the cut on his chest with the antiseptic and listened to him try to restrain the hisses of pain, a sudden wave of unexpected sympathy for him washed over me, and rather than just patching him up in silence and sending him on his way, I found myself trying to distract him. 'Funny,' I said in a tone that didn't match the sentiment, 'I would have put money on you being done for, you know.'

He looked up from the gash and frowned at me. 'Is that supposed to be a compliment, Miss Havisham?' he asked.

I shrugged a shoulder. 'Well, now that you've had your first Near Death Experience you're a member of the club. We could have just as easily been wheeling you away in a body bag. So welcome,' I responded, just as the antiseptic ran into his wound and he hissed again, 'it sucks,' I added informatively, 'you're gonna love it.'

'Good god, I'm not going to have a scar, am I?' he asked.

'Just a flesh wound,' I answered, 'light one, at first. Probably fade over time though. You're not even going to need any stitches– which is a shame; stitches are my favourite, I'm very good at them. Anyway, you should consider yourself extremely lucky. In fact, I don't really know how you managed it.'

'You saved my life you know,' he said.

I frowned. 'How can that be true; I wasn't even here.'

'Well, the reports… I've read every single one of them you know, even if I haven't had to ask you about all of them, including the cross–analysis studies you did on the future predator. It all has to cross my desk, which is bloody annoying most of the time but I never would have known I could blind it with loud noises if it weren't for you.' He kept his gaze down at his chest, following my hands as though to insure I was doing the job correctly. 'And then, the mammoth: it'll attack predators if it senses danger,' he repeated back to me. Then, looking off somewhat forlornly like he resented the sentiment, he sighed. 'I think that thing might be growing on me.'

I swallowed my amusement. 'Hmm,' I responded.

His brow furrowed. 'What?'

'Oh, nothing,' I dropped the cotton ball in a dish on the instrument tray and reached for a plaster patch, 'just that whole thing I said about the mammoth, completely made that up,' I admitted. 'I think you might be growing on him too.'

I pressed the patch to his chest and felt him exhale an exasperated sigh. 'Great.'

'It's nice to know that you trust me,' I added, as I finished adhering the edges of the plaster to his undamaged skin around the wound and took a step back.

Lester rolled his eyes. 'Well I absolutely do not anymore.' He stood up, pulling his shirt closed over his chest and doing up the buttons. 'Any ideas how I should explain this to my wife?'

'What are the chances that she's actually going to see it?' I tried to return reassuringly, because I didn't want to add the anxiety on top of the injury. 'I didn't think anyone had sex after 50.'

Totally unamused, he sent a steely glare my way. 'I'm 37,' he said.

Oh. 'You need a holiday.'

'Miss Havisham…'

'Tell her a whiteboard fell on you,' I said.

'A whiteboard?' he repeated incredulously.

'They're really heavy. If one actually toppled it would squish you flat. Haven't you read the risk assessments? And they could get you any time, not like some creature from the future. Yeah. Good one.'

Again, he rolled his eyes. 'Right, thank you. Any ideas why Leek would go through such trouble to kill me?'

I pulled off the gloves and threw them onto the trolley. 'He was probably a theatre kid,' I said.

Lester had definitely had enough of me. He turned towards Nick– who had been so quiet I'd genuinely forgotten he was standing there– and sighed. 'Professor.'

'Hmm?'

'Any credible theories?'

Nick pushed himself off the wall and stepped out towards us. 'I think that was just the icing on the cake,' Nick admitted. He started walking back towards the hub and Lester and I followed him. 'I mean surprisingly I think there's something bigger than just you going on here.'

'Ah, I see,' Lester responded, 'first I'm a traitor, now I'm insignificant, you two are really trying to hurt my feelings.'

'No,' Nick disagreed, 'if Leek wanted to kill you, he could just have hurled you down a lift shaft.'

'But he didn't,' I said cheerily, like that was any consolation.

'He studied the anomalies.'

'He worked out how to control the future predators.' I reached the doors to the hub first and held them open to allow them both to come through behind me.

'Doesn't sound like just a petty grudge,' Nick said.

'So, what does he want?' Lester asked.

Nick hummed, agreeing with the question rather than giving a dignified answer.

'Don't know,' I concluded.

Lester finished tying his tie and put it carefully back beneath his suit jacket. 'You know, my kids are really pestering me for a pet,' he said, as he nodded his head towards Manny's enclosure. 'If you can't find a home for it…'

He walked away.

I looked around. The hub was just as busy as usual, there were scientists and soldiers milling around at workstations and moving back and forth from offices, and it seemed so mundane that it was difficult to believe that Lester had been attacked in here only half an hour ago.

The only thing out of the ordinary was the van that was park in the room at the bottom of the ramp. That was where the creature had come from–

I heard a sharp inhale– the first indication I had that Nick wanted to speak to me– and I turned my head, but there was a long pause before any actual words followed. 'You're still quite cross with me, aren't you?' he said.

'No,' I replied, 'I'm not cross at all Nick, I just…' It was more seeing him like that that had genuinely frightened me, because Nick wasn't anything like my father and that was brilliant but back in that moment, back in that church I'd suddenly seen him standing there in Nick's place.

And it was the simplest of actions. It was just the way he was holding that gun.

That one moment of trauma was so deeply engrained in my head that similarities poked through too easily just so that the darkness was never fully extinguished whenever I started to feel somewhat whole again.

'Got it!'

We both brought our head's around at the sound of Connors voice but, not wanting to him to feel like there was anything else I had to say to him before he knew everything was okay, I reached out to grab his hand and pulled him with me. The others came out from different places around the room and started to gather around the detector.

'I need a password,' Connor said,

We stared up at Leek's closed file on the screen like there would be some clue up there. Connor tried a word, but his first attempt was unsuccessful.

'Predator?' Connor guessed aloud. He tried again but there was no dice.

'Mother's maiden name,' Jensen suggested, 'people always use that.'

'Murphy,' Lester supplied. But that didn't work either.

'Connor,' I said, 'stop, come on. Let's think for one second. We can work this out, alright?'

Jensen frowned. 'How can you work out a password,' he asked, 'it could literally be anything.'

'It's just inference and deduction,' Connor answered.

'No human action is ever truly completely random, even the roll of a dice can be predicted with an advanced grasp of the mathematics of probability mapped onto a thorough apprehension of human psychology and the known disposition of any individual can reduce the number of variables considerably,' I finished. I stepped up behind Connor's chair and put my hands on his shoulders. 'Leek think's he funny, right?'

'The sat nav thing,' Connor immediately responded explanatorily.

'Exactly. We know it's gonna be some sort of pathetic joke. It's got to be something we know.'

'How'd you know that?' Jensen questioned.

'It's just the way that Leek's mind works. He's predictable, and smart, but not smart enough to realise he's predictable and not nearly smart enough to out–smart us.'

'We once guessed 7 different passwords in a minute,' Connor explained, 'just by knowing certain things about that person.'

'Number 1 is the who,' I said quickly, 'it obviously does help if you know the person really well, but we can do it without that. Number 2 is what.'

'What it's for,' Connor elucidated, 'chances are a password you use at work is gonna be different for the one you use for stuff at home.'

'Now it's not always the case, because people are sheep and if they're gonna have to create their own password rather than using a computer generated one it's going to be something they're familiar with because otherwise they'd never remember.'

'And username depending. People use different passwords depending on whether or not it requires a username or email log–in. Know a man's email password and you can control his life.'

'This isn't email.'

'So, it won't be very long.'

'Number 3 is the when,' I continued.

'We once guessed Tom's Myspace password just because of his obsession with Sliders– which was a really good–'

'A really bad–' I corrected, 'TV show–'

'–it had Gimli in it!'

'Connor that series was so problematic,' I stressed. 'Not just the way it represented and treated those female characters but the whole contrivance of exotic matter that is able to support the incredible pressure of an electrical field of an Einstein–Rosen–Podolsky Bridge is utter fabrication that is just laughable.'

Connor nodded. 'Well yeah,' he said, 'obviously.'

'Anyway,' I continued, 'for some reason Tom was obsessed.'

'It was years later that we hacked in, but knowing his obsession at the time he made an account told us everything we needed to know.'

'Number… what? 4?'

'The where,' Connor stated. 'People look around for inspiration, picture of a dog on your desk, poster on the wall, something out the window could all inadvertently become your go–to password for the next 10 years.'

'Okay,' Lester said, 'that's all very clever but what is it? What's his password?'

'There's one more thing.'

'Number 5,' Connor said.

'Why.'

'Why?' Lester repeated.

I nodded. 'This has all been some massive joke to him, hasn't it? He's been loving every second of it, and he isn't finished with us yet, not by a long shot.'

'How do you know that?' Jensen asked.

'Because he thinks he's funny,' I said. I paused for a moment, staring right at the detector, before it came to me. 'It's Anomaly.'

'What?'

'Anomaly,' I repeated.

'It's way too obvious,' Connor agreed.

'Exactly.' Connor started typing but slowed before the word was completed. I looked to him. 'Connor?'

'You said he wasn't done. What happens when I unlock this file?'

I paused. 'I don't know,' I said. 'But we don't have any other way of finding out where he is or what damage he's already done.'

'If he knew we'd guess the password this is a trap.'

'No,' I returned. 'This is the golden idol and we're gonna spring the giant ball and run like hell.'

Out the corner of my eye I noticed Nick jump up from where he'd been crouching beside Leek's van, and he whipped his head around to us. I met his gaze questioningly but had no time to ask what he'd seen before he was already blurting it out. 'It's a bomb,' he said.

'What?' Connor returned.

'The giant ball is a bomb,' he repeated, 'and it's under this van.'