CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Considering that there had been an attempted assassination of the president and a successful assassination of the vice president, it did not surprise SG-1 that they were subjected to an extra thorough search before they were allowed to enter the White House.
"Sorry about the frisking," Hayes apologized. "Everyone around here is kind of paranoid right now."
"That's understandable," Jack said.
The president turned to Daniel. "Thank you for agreeing to come out here. I don't know if it'll do any good, but since the investigators have had no luck finding out who was behind this, I figured it was worth a try to let you have a crack at it. I thought about checking Bob's computer myself, but decided to wait till you got here."
"I hope I can help, sir," Daniel told him.
SG-1 and the president went to Kinsey's office. Figuring it was the best place to start, Daniel went to the desk. He laid his hand upon it and closed his eyes, focusing his ability. Scenes marched though his mind, bits and pieces of the past month of Kinsey's life. Daniel tried to control them, to limit them to what he was seeking, but he was only partially successful. And then a single scene popped into his mind, one that made him gasp and jerk out of the vision.
"Daniel?" Sam inquired. "You okay."
"Um . . . yeah, I guess so, as okay as I could be after hearing someone talk about murdering me."
"What did you see?"
"Kinsey was arguing with someone on a cell phone, insisting that I needed to be killed to prevent me from finding out who they were. From the little I saw, the person he was talking to said no."
"Hmm. That's interesting," Jack said. "So whoever Kinsey was in bed with, they didn't want you dead."
"But that must mean that it was Kinsey alone who arranged that hit on Daniel," Sam reasoned.
"I got another image of him sending someone a text message," Daniel said. "I think it wasn't all that long ago." He looked down at one of the drawers. "It's in there."
"What is?" Jack asked.
"The cell phone."
Jack immediately tried the drawer, but found it locked. "Anybody got a key for this thing?"
"I can get in, sir," Sam told him.
"Um, I'm not up on all the legal stuff, but shouldn't this be done a little more . . . officially?" Daniel asked.
Hayes nodded. "Good thinking, Doctor Jackson. We wouldn't want some slick lawyer to get anyone off because the evidence was thrown out of court."
The president requested that one of the men leading the investigation come to the office. He was presently at the White House, questioning people.
The man, whose name was Philip Harrison, arrived a few minutes later and was introduced to SG-1.
"We have reason to believe that there is evidence in that drawer," Hayes said. "The drawer is locked, but Major Carter here was just about to pick the lock."
"Since this is, technically, your house, Mister President, that shouldn't be a problem," Harrison said.
It didn't take Sam long to get into the drawer. She stood back to let the investigator look inside. He slipped on a pair of latex gloves and picked up the cell phone everyone else already knew was inside.
"May I?" Sam asked. "I already kind of know what we're looking for."
Harrison gave her a pair of gloves, which she put on. He then handed her the phone. She went straight to where the record of sent text messages would be.
"There's a message here telling someone to check their email. It's the last one that was sent." Sam looked at everyone. "It was sent three days before the assassination attempt at Camp David."
All eyes went to the computer.
"He couldn't have been that stupid, could he?" Jack asked. "What am I saying? Of course he could."
They went to the computer, and Sam booted it up. Not surprisingly, a screen came up asking for a password.
"Try Oscar," Jack said, remembering the password Kinsey used last time. Unfortunately, it failed. "Okay, so he wasn't a complete idiot. He changed his password." Jack looked at Hayes. "Any idea what it might be, sir?"
"None, I'm afraid."
"Try Mozart," Daniel said.
Not questioning how he knew the password, Sam tried it and found it to be the right one.
"How did you know that?" Harrison asked.
"Lucky guess," Daniel replied.
Hayes smiled slightly. "Bob's favorite composer was Mozart."
Sam went straight to Kinsey's email client, but found no suspicious email messages in any of the folders, not even the trash.
"Well, if he used this computer, either he deleted all of the messages or he used Webmail," she said.
"Webmail? You mean like Hotmail?" Jack asked.
"Yes, sir. I'm guessing that's what he did. I don't think that even Kinsey would be dumb enough to send messages to a hit man using an email address that can so easily be traced back to him."
"So, if he used one of those Webmail things, how do we find out which one?"
"With many of the Webmail services, you can easily enter in bogus information so that no one knows who the email address really belongs to. However, when someone creates an email account, the Webmail service records their IP address. We could request the records of all the most popular services and see if any of them have Kinsey's IP address associated with one of the email addresses."
"That could take a while," Harrison said, "although having the request come from the president would speed things up considerably."
"Well, I could always hack into their records," Sam said.
"No, don't. We need to makes sure that anything we find is admissible in court." The investigator turned to Hayes. "With your permission, sir, I'll get busy on this."
"Sure, Phil."
Harrison got the IP address from Sam, then left the room.
"Carter?" Jack said.
"I'm on it, sir." Sam got her laptop. It had almost been confiscated by the men who searched SG-1, but the president had told them to let her keep it.
"Am I correct in assuming that we're not waiting for legal access to those records?" Hayes asked, amused.
"I don't think we should, sir," Jack replied. "We need to jump on this as quickly as possible. But don't worry. No one but us will ever know Carter did this. She's very good at covering her tracks."
Sam got busy hacking into the first Webmail service she chose to try. She was going to try the biggest ones first, then, if that yielded nothing, she'd go on to some of the lesser known ones.
As luck would have it, she struck pay dirt on the second one she tried.
"There it is," she said.
"Okay, now what?" Jack asked.
"Now that we have the email address, we go to the login screen and enter it in. I'm going to assume Kinsey used the same password as he did for his computer."
Sam's assumption proved to be right, and they were soon in Kinsey's mailbox.
"What's this?" Sam murmured.
"Find something?" Jack asked.
"It's a failure notice saying that an email couldn't be delivered. It's possible that the email service for the recipient was temporarily down. This could be a big break for us, especially since I can see that previous emails are quoted in the one that couldn't be delivered." Sam started reading the email, beginning with the earliest dated message at the bottom. After just a few seconds, she let out a gasp. "Oh my God."
"What?" Jack came around to look at what Sam was reading. When he read it himself, he started cursing. "That slimy little snake. And I mean that in the worse possible way."
"What is it?" Daniel asked.
Sam met his eyes. "The president wasn't the only person who was supposed to die last Sunday, Daniel."
It didn't take the archeologist long to figure out who the other target was. "Oh."
Sam's gaze returned to the screen. "Kinsey sent an email to the assassin Sunday morning, demanding an explanation for why the hit man failed to kill both the president and the person he refers to as the second target. The hit man replied a while later with the explanation of how you saved the president." She returned her eyes to Daniel. "He then explained that his second shot did hit the intended target."
Daniel looked at her in surprise. "That bullet was meant for me, not the president?"
"Apparently so, but you can bet that the first bullet had the president's name on it," Jack responded.
"Kinsey sent a response, telling the hit man that you just had a minor wound," Sam said. "He was obviously ticked off and wanted to make sure the assassin knew that he screwed up twice. But the email service the hit man uses must have been down for several hours, and Kinsey was sent a failure notice."
"So, the assassin did not receive the final message from Vice President Kinsey?" Teal'c questioned.
"No, he would have gotten it eventually if the service was down for less than five days. Kinsey received a notice from the Mailer-Daemon that the email address had transient non-fatal errors, which can happen if the mail server you're sending to is temporarily down."
"Mailer demon, Carter?" Jack questioned, eyebrows rising.
"Mailer-Daemon, sir, D-A-E-M-O-N. It's a program in a mail server that delivers messages to recipients. This one tried for four hours to deliver the message before sending the notice to Kinsey and saying that it would keep trying to deliver the email. When the Mailer-Daemon sends such a notice, it includes a copy of the email it's been trying to deliver, which, in this case, luckily for us, had the quotes of the previous messages in it."
"That's why they killed him," Daniel murmured. Everyone turned to him inquiringly. "They didn't want me to be killed, and Kinsey went behind their backs and tried to get rid of me anyway. They must have found out."
Jack almost smiled at the irony. Kinsey had tried to have Daniel killed to protect himself, and his actions resulted in his own death.
"Well, we have the email address of the assassin, which is also a Webmail service, but it probably isn't going to do us much good," Sam told everyone. "I could get the guy's IP address and trace what Internet Service Provider he's using through it, but you can bet that all the info the ISP has is bogus."
"Right now, the assassin is the least of my concerns," Jack said. "He was just doing a job he was hired to do. We need to go after the guys who were in on the attempted assassination of the president."
Sam looked through Kinsey's mailbox. "Well, there are no other emails here. It looks like he cleaned out all the folders, including the Trash. So, we're not going to be able to get the email addresses of anyone else."
"What of the cellular telephone?" Teal'c asked. "Perhaps there is some record of calls Vice President Kinsey made."
Sam nodded. "You're right." She started checking the log of calls made, thankful that Kinsey hadn't deleted it. "There's one phone number here that Kinsey called quite a few times. I can find out who it belongs to." She got back on her laptop and soon had the name and address the number was registered to.
"How much you wanna bet that's fake, too?" Jack said.
Daniel was staring at the phone, a little frown on his face. "I wonder."
Jack looked at him. "What?"
"I was thinking that, if I called that number, maybe I could see the face of the person who answered."
"You've never tried anything like that before," Sam said.
"No, but I already know that I can see people and things that are far away. I saw you when you were stranded on the Prometheus."
"The problem is that, if we call that number, it might alert them to the fact that we're on their trail."
"So, we'll use a payphone and pretend we got a wrong number," Jack suggested. "It's worth a try." He turned to the president. "It's up to you, sir."
"I say go for it," Hayes responded.
"Okay, let's go to a phone outside the DC area, just in case these guys trace where the call came from."
SG-1 was taken to a payphone outside a restaurant in Maryland by the man who had picked them up at the airport. They decided that Sam should be the one to make the call since her voice would be the one they'd be least likely to recognize.
As Sam dialed the number, Daniel focused his abilities on seeing the person who answered the phone. He had his ear pressed against the receiver so that he could hear the person's voice.
The call was answered by a man after the third ring. "Hello?"
"Yeah, is Bert there?" Sam asked in a nasally voice.
"You have the wrong number."
"Oh, sorry. My apologies."
A click on the line told her that the man had hung up. She looked at Daniel, whose eyes were still closed. "Daniel?"
The archeologist's eyes opened. "I've got him."
"Yes!" Jack crowed. "Way to go, Daniel! Come on. Let's get back to the White House."
"Daniel did it, sir," Jack told the president in the Oval Office a while later.
"Excellent. Doctor Jackson, you are a wonder. So, what now?"
"Well, as far as we know, the NID has been clean for a while now, but there are still dozens of ex-agents who are unaccounted for," Sam replied. "We can do a search of the NID database of all former employees who left or disappeared within the last two years. Hopefully, this guy is one of them."
"And if he isn't?" Jack asked.
"Then we can check to see if he has a criminal or military record. If that fails, too, we may have a problem. There's the DMV, but that database is so huge, it would take a very long time to go through it, even using a program that would do the searching for us."
"Then let's hope we don't have to resort to that."
As it turned out, they didn't. Daniel identified the man as Frank March, who had worked for the NID until two months before Agent Barrett began his house cleaning operation there.
"He must have suspected what was going to happen and decided to get out before it did," Sam guessed.
"Okay, if we arrest this guy, he'll probably clam up and never give us the names of any of the people he's working with," Jack said, "so I say we put a tail on him and watch him for the next few days. Tap his phone, bug his house, the works."
"If we can find him," Sam remarked. "He might have gone underground like a lot of the people involved in the rogue operation did."
"Can you check on that?"
Sam got back on the computer and found out that March was living at the same address as when he worked for the NID.
"We need to get something that belongs to him, Jack," Daniel said. "I might be able to see something more."
"Right."
"The question is who can we trust to do this?" Sam wondered. "We really don't know who is involved in this. There could be people in the government, and there's no doubt that there are some in the military."
"There are some people in the intelligence community that I have absolute trust in," Hayes stated.
"People you'd be willing to reveal the Stargate Program to?" Jack questioned. "Whoever does this is liable to find out sooner or later, if they listen in on phone conversations."
"Yes, I would, though a couple of them are going to find it hard to believe."
"Then I guess we all have some work to do."
The next morning, after Frank March went to work, SG-1 did a little breaking and entering into his house. Actually, no "breaking" was involved. Daniel's teammates found out that he could unlock a deadbolt in three seconds flat – after he told them what the alarm code was.
Once they were inside and the alarm turned off, Jack, Sam and Teal'c got busy planting bugs all over the house and in the phones. Meanwhile, Daniel wandered around the place, touching things. He wasn't getting anything useful, that is until he touched a keycard he found in the desk drawer. He was instantly bombarded with images of people and places. He saw people in a lab manufacturing some kind of blue gas and putting it into clear canisters. He saw others with devices that were clearly of alien origin, and still others with what looked like rockets.
"Guys! I found something!" he called. His teammates came into the room. He held up the keycard. "I think I found the mother lode."
"What did you see?" Jack asked.
"A building with labs of some sort. They were making some kind of gas. It was fluorescent blue."
Sam frowned. "That sounds like it could be Methyl Phosphonofluoridic acid. It's a nerve gas, extremely deadly, kills in seconds."
"Oh, this does not sound good," Jack said. "Who would they be planning to use that gas on?"
"I don't know, but there was a whole lot of it," Daniel told him. "And I saw rockets, too."
"Rockets?" Sam's expression became extremely worried. "Sir, if they detonated rockets filled with that gas over a densely populated area, they could kill hundreds of thousands of people."
"Okay, this just got a whole hell of a lot more serious," Jack said. "Daniel, do you have any idea where this place is?"
The archeologist shook his head. "No."
Sam looked at the card. "There's no insignia or any other information that would tell us where this key is used."
"Then I guess we have no choice but to watch and listen in on this guy for a while and hope that he gives us a clue about where this place is."
"There is another option," Daniel said softly. His teammates turned to him. "I couldn't see where the place was by touching that keycard, but there's a good chance that I could get more from March himself."
"But to do that, we'd have to arrest him, which would reveal to the group that we're on their trail," Sam pointed out. "They might destroy everything and go into hiding."
Jack smiled faintly. "No, there is another way."
Frank March shut and locked the front door. It had been a long day. It had been necessary to remove all references to Kinsey's involvement in the organization just in case the investigators discovered the vice president's part in the assassination attempt on Hayes. There was now no evidence left that Kinsey was ever involved with them. March could only hope that Kinsey had been smart enough to cover his own tracks.
They didn't know yet what they were going to do to enable their plans to be carried out. With Kinsey dead, assassinating the president would be pointless. Some in the organization had argued against killing the vice president, but he had proven himself to be someone they couldn't trust. He'd deliberately tried to have Daniel Jackson killed even after being warned not to do so. That had shown that they couldn't count on Kinsey doing what they told him to, which could cause more trouble later on. He was a liability that needed to be eliminated.
So, with Kinsey gone, gaining control of the Stargate Program would be next to impossible. The only way left would be to kill Hammond and Colonel O'Neill, then somehow get somebody on their side in command of the SGC. The chances of that working, though, were very slim.
There was still the option of getting hold of Osiris' Al'Kesh. With it, they wouldn't need to have control of the SGC.
After dinner, March did some work on his computer, then decided to go to bed. Within fifteen minutes, he was asleep.
The man's sleep was interrupted rather suddenly two hours later. Strong hands were holding him down, a third slapping his cheek lightly. He looked up to see two familiar faces looking down at him in the darkness.
"Ah. Hello, there," Jack O'Neill said. "Sorry to disturb your beauty sleep." He turned to the man who was holding March down. "Get him up Teal'c."
March was pulled out of the bed and tied to a chair with padded strips of cloth that would leave no marks. He saw Major Carter standing in the corner of the room.
"You won't get anything out of me," March declared.
Jack smiled nastily. "Oh, won't we."
Just then, a fourth figure appeared. Daniel Jackson stepped forward, blue eyes piercing into March's.
"Hello," he said cordially.
'Oh, shit,' March cursed silently. He began to struggle, though he knew it was pointless.
Ignoring his fruitless attempts to escape, Daniel came up to him and touched March's shoulder. The archeologist's eyes closed, and an expression that was somehow both peaceful and intense filled his face. March did not know what Jackson was doing, but he had no doubt that it would lead to SG-1 discovering the secrets of the organization. He also knew something else. Robert Kinsey had been right. They should have killed Doctor Jackson.
Daniel remained unmoving for two or three minutes. Then his eyes opened.
"Well?" Jack inquired.
"I know where it is," Daniel replied. He stared at March coldly. "And a whole lot more."
"You won't get all of us," March declared defiantly. "The moment they find out that I've been compromised, they'll destroy the records and go deep underground."
"Well, now, that might just be true," Jack said, "if they knew you'd been compromised. But they're not gonna know that." He looked over his shoulder. "Carter?"
Sam stepped forward, and March saw that she had a hypodermic in her hand.
"What is that?" March asked, feeling a tiny frisson of fear.
"What was that, you mean," Jack replied. March could now see that the syringe was empty. "You see, we've actually been here for a while. We sprayed you with a wee bit of knockout gas, just enough to keep you out for several minutes. Then we injected you with a nice little drug that will probably be making you pretty sleepy soon. Oh, it also has another effect. You won't remember any of this. All you'll remember is going to bed last night. Oh, and, in case you're wondering, the injection sight is in a place you'll never notice."
March was silent for the few minutes that it took for the drug to put him to sleep. He was untied from the chair and put back in the bed. SG-1 removed all traces of their presence in the house and left. Soon, they were on the road.
"So, what's next, sir?" Sam asked.
"Now, we make use of all the info Daniel got. We watch that facility he saw, and, if it looks like they're going to do something with that gas, we come down on them hard."
"They won't be doing anything with the gas yet, Jack," Daniel said. "They can't."
"What do you mean?"
"It isn't nerve gas. It's symbiote poison." The archeologist's eyes met Teal'c's. "They were planning on releasing it on Goa'uld controlled worlds and killing all the Jaffa."
The former First Prime's jaw tightened, a look of anger in his eyes.
"They must have figured that, if they wiped out the Jaffa, the Goa'uld would be powerless," Sam said, feeling a little sick at the thought of all the Jaffa who would have been murdered, including those in the rebellion.
"This must not be allowed to happen," Teal'c growled, looking like he was ready to rip someone's throat out.
"It won't, T," Jack assured him. "They'd have to have a way to deliver the poison to the planets, which is something they don't have. This explains why they want the Stargate so badly."
"It also explains the attempted theft of Osiris' Al'Kesh," Sam added. "With it, they could have flown to the various worlds, although that would have taken a while."
"I don't think that was their plan, Sam," Daniel said. "I couldn't tell what their exact plans were, but I got the impression that they somehow intended to take the gate."
"Well, whatever their plan was, it's not going to happen," Jack stated. "We've got what we need to stop them."
"I just hope we catch most of them," Sam said. "I have a feeling that this operation is a lot bigger than we thought it was."
"I think you're right, Sam," Daniel agreed. "There is something else I learned, something that explains what Kinsey said before he died. They call themselves The Trust."
