Part 4

Tuesday - 15^th August (morning)

Part of the promised long wait was taken up in the climb to the limestone platform. The complaints from Jack's knees did not improve his temper.

When he and Sam finally reached the top, they found Teal'c sitting several feet to the left of the cave entrance, serenely occupied in kel'no'reem. As soon as they appeared, he rose to greet them.

"There has been no sound from within the cave during my time here," he said softly. "It may be that he sleeps within the cave, in which case, a stealthy approach may apprehend him without further difficulty."

Jack gave him a 'pigs-might-fly' look. "Like this mission's been a real walk in the park so far? He's had all the luck. Why should anything change now?"

"With respect sir, I don't think luck has a great deal to do with it," Sam said with an encouraging smile and trying to add a more positive spin to the situation. "He's only kept ahead of us because he obviously has a plan - a plan which makes use of information he has that we don't. When Captain Janosz and the others get here, his advantage will be greatly diminished if not negated altogether."

Her C.O. was looking grimly unconvinced. She tried again. "Besides, if he's relying on luck, that won't last for ever. The longer he runs, the more likely it is that it'll run out and then we'll have him."

"Appreciate what you're trying to do, Carter, but I have a bad feeling about this."

"Ah."

She realized that it wasn't just the truck. He was blaming himself for not having noticed the switch - feeling that if he hadn't been riding Daniel quite so hard, had been more considerate of his comfort zone - he would've noticed immediately that his friend had changed, that something was wrong. All this was his fault. Maybe he was even thinking that the loss of his truck was some sort of divine retribution. She suddenly noticed that he was looking at her quizzically, head tipped to one side.

"How do you manage to cram so much meaning into one syllable, Carter?"

"Sir?"

"Oh, never mind. Let's check out these 'novice' caves - see if he's left us any clues."

Daniel wasn't sure about trusting Harry to take over the planning. He had to tell himself this wasn't N.I.D. Harry, any more than he was criminal mastermind Daniel. Harry had trusted enough in the differences between him and his counterpart to bring him into his own home rather than turn him in - for escaping custody if nothing else.

Further on the plus side, Harry was far from stupid, and he was batting on his home ground.

"Ok, I'm listening. What's the plan?"

"First, you give me a list of the most prominent items in the storage room— "

"I can do better than that. I'll draw them for you. I'm an archaeologist remember. Drawing artefacts goes with the territory - as it were."

"Good. 'A picture is worth a thousand words,'" Harry smiled. "Now, allocosms tend to associate fairly closely with similar ones, so I'll go to the A.P. Chamber and check a few things - the log records of your arrival-cum-failed departure, who was on duty and so on. Then I'll begin searching through the allocosms with a view to targeting the background details from your drawing. Once I find something close, we can narrow it down together."

"What do I do while you're doing that?"

"Stay here - and try not to eat me out of house and home. If the phone rings or anyone comes to the door, ignore it. You're not here, ok? If you need to contact me, here's my cell 'phone number," Harry said, writing it down.

"Ok."

"Oh, and don't shave."

"Huh?"

"Well, I notice from the five o'clock shadow, that your whiskers grow pretty quickly. It'll help to disguise you. I'll fetch a police uniform for you too. Full beards aren't allowed but a tache and goatee would be fine. If any questions are asked, then... um... you've been selected to join the S.C.I.D., which means you're from out of state, and you're learning on the job, shadowing me, ok?"

"Fine," Daniel nodded. "You might like to bring a razor back with you as I'll have to shave partly."

"Will do."

"And thanks, Harry," Daniel smiled.

"Don't thank me too soon. We're not out of woods yet by any means..."

"Nevertheless, I appreciate all you're doing for me."

Teal'c entered the cave system first. It was possible, though unlikely, that their fugitive was lying in wait, ready to shoot anything silhouetted against the opening. Teal'c therefore entered at a crouch, keeping one eye closed and shining the light from his P90 on the ground. He would have preferred not to use a light - a.k.a. target - but needed not to lose his footing.

There was a short entry tunnel which led into an ovoid-shaped cavern some twelve feet high at its highest point, and maxing out at about fifteen feet long and nine feet wide. Inside the cavern, Teal'c squatted down, switched off the light. He opened the closed eye which was already adjusted to darkness, and looked around, listening carefully.

In the distance was the sound of water tumbling over a cascade and the softer rippling of a stream not so far away. Within the cavern itself was the incessant irregular counterpoint of drops of water splatting on wet rocks and drips plipping into small pools.

There was no indication of life, however - no movement, no breathing, not even the sound of troglodytic creatures skittering across the rubble strewn cavern floor.

Once he was satisfied that he was alone, he turned his light back on and shone it around the cave. The beam illuminated a number of slender stalactites whose calcite crystals sparkled as light passed over them. The rocky floor, with an infilling of sediment, was more or less flat. There were patches of rubble in places and humps of not-quite-stalagmites. The rest looked wet, muddy, and therefore slippery.

Diagonally opposite was a shapeless area of darkness which he took to be the access to the next cave in the system. With nothing more to discern, he hit the comm. unit and summoned his colleagues.

Inside the cavern, they swung the beams of the big flashlights around. There were clear footprints across the muddy floor to the opposite exit. Teal'c confirmed that, although limping, he had been moving at some speed.

"Guess he wouldn't bother to disguise his tracks at this point," Jack surmised.

"Indeed. There would be no point if we have been able to follow him thus far. He has also made no attempt to lay a false trail. If he knows these caves well, he will no doubt be making best use of his advantage in getting as far away from us as possible, and as quickly as possible."

Jack nodded. "Makes sense. Ok, let's have a look at that other 'novice cave.'"

There was a bit of a scramble over the debris clogging the floor of the narrow passage into the next cave. This was slightly bigger and taller than the preceding cave. It had a number of longer, thicker stalactites dangling from the ceiling, some joined together like organ pipes. Some had joined up to form glittering columns with the stalagmites below them. Most of the slender ones had been broken off at about the height a youth could reach. The matching lumpy and slippery stalagmites beneath them made it necessary to watch where one put one's feet.

The floor generally was much more uneven than the first cave. There were three exits from the cave including the one they had entered by. Both the other exits had footprints around them. Most of the prints were not a match for the sneakers Jackson had been wearing, but there were a couple of matching prints at both sites.

"Clearly he was still taking some evasive action," Teal'c said. "Whether this is because he is close enough to detect our presence, or merely has a devious nature, I am unable to ascertain, but I suspect the latter to be the case."

"Yeah," Jack mused. "Our Daniel can be a devious little shit on occasions."

"Sir?" Sam said sharply, again instilling a wealth of meaning into the single word.

"Aw, I didn't mean it like that, Carter. I'm just as worried about Daniel as you are."

"Yes sir." She didn't sound convinced.

O'Neill was already on a hefty guilt trip over the whole affair. To assuage his unforgiving conscience, he'd made a vow to himself that he would fix whatever had gone wrong with his team. Now, he was wondering how he was going to fulfil this vow. Even if they did get their Daniel back, was it even possible? If they didn't...

He shook his head as if to rid himself of the very idea of losing Daniel permanently, and checked his chronometer.

"Ok kids, let's get back to the great outdoors and see if the expert spillikins have arrived yet."

Left to his own devices in Harry's apartment, Daniel looked around for something to do to pass the time. There was the television of course, but he was naturally drawn to the bookcase. You can tell a lot about a person from the books he has. Rather to his surprise, the bookcase - large bookcase - was well stocked.

As expected, there was a whole shelf and more given over to hefty tomes on criminology and jurisprudence. There were also a number of 'who-done-its,' though fewer than he might have expected. Although, thinking on, maybe they were the literary equivalent of a busman's holiday.

His seemed to have a particular fondness for history. Besides a large quantity of historical fiction, there was quite a collection of non-fiction too. Interesting. Daniel pulled one out at random - A History of the United States of Lakota by Takoda Chankoowashtay. And blinked. Surely not?

But the illustrations on the dust jacket were clear enough. True, a lot of street names were different here, but Colorado Springs was still Colorado Springs and Denver was still Denver. Somehow he'd expected that the great U.S. of A. was still the U.S. of A.

Intrigued, he sat down on a reclining chair, kicked off his— or rather, his evil twin's shoes, and plunged in. It was fascinating. The Native American population was much bigger here, contributing much to the early history. They had befriended and traded with the Valsungs, the equivalent of the Vikings, much as they had in Daniel's reality.

Later, in the twelfth century C.E., other north-eastern Europeans, notably Britons, had come over and settled amicably too. It was a big country with plenty of room and resources for all.

Centuries of peace had been disturbed by a series of invasions by the Iberians bent on plunder. The Britons, with whom they were at war, had driven them out of their enclaves in the south, and wrested back much of what they had plundered. There followed later waves of settlers from the east - mainly Dutch and Flemings whose language was similar to English which became the lingua franca. It was around this point that his lack of sleep, combined with the comfortable chair caught up with him.

Harry found him spark out when he returned in the middle of the afternoon. He carefully removed the book from Daniel's slackened grasp and, approving the choice, laid it down on the coffee table beside the chair. Although he didn't want to hang around too long, he figured that, as his guest liked coffee, Daniel might appreciate a mug when he woke him up. He was a little surprised to find that he was now thinking of him as Daniel.

He went through into the kitchen and made some instant which had been acceptable before. He then thought that Daniel might like a bite to eat too, and set about making a quick sandwich. Bread buttered, he turned around to take some meat from the 'fridge. And found himself almost nose-to-nose with a bleary, tousled Daniel muttering "Coffee...?".

"Jesus, Daniel!" Harry yelped, "Don't creep up on a guy like that! You coulda ended up dead."

He waved his knife under Daniel's nose. Daniel looked at it and blinked. "With a butter knife?" he asked, bemused.

Harry snorted. "Or given me heart failure..."

"Oh. Sorry. Just following my nose," Daniel muttered. He picked up the mug and chugged back the contents while Harry finished his sandwich making.

"Ok, let's go back into the living room and I'll tell you what I've found out, then we'll head in to the Mall.

By 1230 hours, the search of the cave system had turned into a major operation. All the known exits were under guard and a couple of helicopters with thermal imaging equipment circled overhead. There was no way the S.G.C.'s cuckoo was getting out undetected, but there was some concern that the interloper could well be dying - or dead -from hypothermia by now, according to Captain Janosz.

"It's likely that he's poorly equipped for caving if he had to bunk off quickly." Janosz said, reporting in to S.G.-1 who were camped outside the entrance off the rock platform.

"We're still gonna want the body," Jack insisted, "'cos if I don't see it, I'm not gonna believe it."

"He'd have to be Superman to survive for long in this cave system wearing only everyday clothing, and he's been in there - how long? - eight hours? - ten?"

"I don't care. This is Daniel we're talking about. Ok, not our Daniel, but it seems likely that this one knows this cave system, possibly quite well since he made a bee-line for it once he gave us the slip—"

Jack broke off as his 'cell phone rang.

"O'Neill. ...... General? ......... What? No! ...... Shit! You have to be kidding me. ... No, General, I appreciate that ... Yes sir ... He did? ... How? ............ I see. I will, sir."

He slipped the 'phone back in his pocket and kicked a broken piece of branch with some venom. "Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn! Shit, fuck and buggery!"

He raised Major Pierce on the 'comm as Sam looked on in wide-eyed concern. "Scale down the operation, Major. He's almost certainly not here. O'Neill out."

"Sir?" Sam prompted.

"That was Hammond. Before Daniel's bank got round to actioning our instruction to lock down Daniel's account, someone drew four hundred dollars out of an A.T.M. in Sedalia at 09.15 using Daniel's credit card, and a couple of hours later, removed fifty thousand dollars out of his account. In cash. Seems the brass-faced bastard even went back to Daniel's apartment for a shower and a change of clothes!"

"Didn't we post a guard outside the door?"

"Yeah, Carter, we did. They're now in the infirmary. The 'janitor' got the drop on one while the other was taking a comfort break... He got taken out shortly after."

Sam's shoulders sagged. Teal'c looked more than usually grim. "It would seem that he is well ahead of us, O'Neill."

"Indeed, Teal'c. Indeed..." came the morose reply.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7