Life, Jack O’Neill was certain, wasn’t supposed to be like this. He felt as though he’d been sleepwalking for years, tied to a job he was good at but didn’t really like.
It had been a lifeline, of course, back when he’d been so close to the edge of the abyss that he could stare down into it and wonder just what it would be like to use his service weapon, and he couldn’t have said what had stopped him. The recall to active duty, unexpected, had thrown him a rope in many ways—at least it had given him a reason to get up in the morning, even if in the end nothing had come of it.
He remembered Catherine Langford enthusing about some young genius who was going to come and revolutionize their thoughts about that big stone whatever-it-was they’d been landed with, but the genius had never arrived. Jack had been stuck there, in a mountain full of geeks; apparently geeks who also weren’t that good at their jobs. None of them had been able to figure out what the thing was, the thing that had later turned their preconceptions of the universe on their heads, and they’d been left to find out by accident.
Still, at least it had got him out of the house and away from all those memories. Maybe it had been that, as much as anything else, which had almost made him take that fateful step. Being there, surrounded by memories he couldn’t talk about with anyone, not even Sara. Back in the saddle again, away from a house where every corner reminded him of Charlie and all the things that would never be, the urge to kill himself just wasn’t as strong. Jack had seized on work as an excuse not to go home and by the time it was clear that work wasn’t going to give him much to be going on with, home just wasn’t home any more.
The Air Force had been happy for him to carry on being in charge, though, and Jack had stayed there ever since, even when General West was found other things to do—guardian of the secrets of the universe, as they’d later discovered. Not that anyone had known that was the case at time, or at least not until someone calling himself Apophis had come through the device and changed their world forever.
He’d been unlucky though, that particular Goa’uld—the hostages he’d taken were tougher than they looked. One of them had not only been able to figure out how the whole chevron thing worked, she’d also been able to escape and make her way back to the Chappa’ai and then back to Earth. Her sudden arrival, disheveled and half scared out of her wits regardless of the use she’d made of her unarmed combat training, signaled the beginning of a new phase for the Air Force. A beginning Jack O’Neill was well placed to exploit, considering his own background in special ops and the fact he wasn’t actually doing anything else he’d need to be pulled away from.
So, in short order, Jack had found himself reporting to another general, one he’d never met before—who seemed like a guy who had his head screwed on okay—and getting together a team to head out into the unknown. Which seemed like old times, really, particularly once he’d been able to pull a few strings he wasn’t sure were still effective and get a couple of his old unit back.
They’d gone out there, exploring the universe, and kicked some butt while they did it. Sure it wasn’t always pretty, and one of their early missions had cost him a good man and a good friend in Charlie Kawalsky, but Jack was certain they’d done more good than harm. They’d also brought back all kinds of gizmos that were shipped off to Area 51, things that looked like props from Star Trek, and that was all part of the mission parameters as well from early on. The aliens—they called themselves the Goa’uld—had all sorts of nifty things just the thought of which made Captain Carter’s geeks at Area 51 wet themselves. Who was Jack O’Neill to deny them that?
Unfortunately, as time had gone on they had to import some geeks of their own as well, even though Jack didn’t particularly want to give them houseroom. The first time something they’d brought through had blown up in a Marine’s face, taking half his head with it, Jack had realized the error of his ways. This stuff was dangerous, if they didn’t know what it was, since they had a tendency to just grab whatever they could.
And that was where Rothman and his team came in. One of them would be on hand to cover any trip through the Chappa’ai, on the other end of a video link to give a running translation of anything with symbols on it, to avoid what had happened before. They’d noticed, after all, before the explosion there were marks on the thing that had blown and the thought was that they must be some kind of hazard warning.
When stuff was given the all clear, which had been pretty successful up to now, Rothman’s geeks would also check it over, cataloguing stuff until they had a pretty good collection of pictures covering things they’d accumulated along the way. Always useful when the science guys figured out what something did and wanted more of them, if they had a kind of visual shopping list for reference.
There was something about Rothman, though, that set Jack’s teeth on edge every time the two of them were in the same room. It wasn’t that Rothman didn’t know what he was doing—there was no way Jack could fault him for that—but the incessant sniffing just got to him. It was like nails down a chalkboard, after only moments of Rothman being in the room, and so he tried to avoid the scientist as much as he could. Which wasn’t too difficult, considering they were only scheduled to meet four times a year, barring major problems in some shipment back to Earth.
So far, so good. Jack had been able to avoid Rothman for a couple of months and all was well in his world. The teams going off world were doing good work, bringing back lots of fodder for Area 51 with minimal casualties, and everyone from the Pentagon down was happy. And if they were happy, Jack O’Neill was happy; that was how it worked.
That was probably why he wasn’t prepared for what happened that afternoon. Jack certainly never encouraged Rothman to come to his office—whenever they met, Jack always made a beeline for Rothman’s corner of the world. That way he didn’t have to try and get the other man to stop talking and leave; he could just get the hell out of there himself whenever he’d had enough.
To cap it all, Rothman didn’t even bother to knock, just came right on in like it was the most commonplace thing in the world for him to be in Jack’s office in the first place.
"Colonel," he gasped. Rothman paused, bent over with his hands on his thighs as he tried to catch his breath again. Had he run all the way from his lab? "Colonel, you have to see this."
This, it turned out, was a crumpled copy of the National Enquirer. At least it was crumpled now, from being grasped in Rothman’s sweaty hand, and Jack took it from Rothman more than a little reluctantly.
"What am I looking at?" Jack asked, peering at what appeared to be an article about the secret conspiracy between aliens and the makers of Pringles chips.
"Not that," Rothman said. He reached out one hand, but Jack took a step backwards almost instinctively. "The other side. The headline says something about ‘a mysterious robbery’."
Jack turned the paper over. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Rothman continue to gasp for breath, the odd mottled shade of his face giving him more than a little cause for concern.
"Sit down before you fall down," he said, trying to figure out just what it was that had Rothman so riled up.
There was a photo, blurry enough even before Rothman had got his hands on it, but Jack could see now why Rothman had reacted the way he had. Except that he wasn’t sure it was really good enough justification for charging into his office without knocking. Jack decided he’d deal with that another time, some time when Rothman didn’t look like he was about to have a cardiac arrest in the middle of Jack’s office.
He’d seen something like that before. Not the vase itself—or at least Jack thought it was a vase, he tended to tune out the specifics when the archaeology members of the geek squad were on a roll—but definitely the markings on it. He had no idea what they meant, except that he was certain of one thing. Those symbols were Goa’uld; no matter what it said, that always spelled trouble.
The jar was finely made, the workmanship some of the best that Daniel had ever seen—the gold markings on it were unusual, though, resembling no script that he recognized. They gleamed in the light, the sinuous nature of the symbols tantalizing him with their lack of meaning, frustrating him when he wanted to know what they represented. It was one of a pair, this one with the head of a dog, the other with the head of a human being. Two of the usual set of four, with no sign of where the remaining ones might be. No clue to where these particular jars had come from either, since they’d arrived at the Oriental Institute by a circuitous route with no supporting paperwork to give their provenance.
Daniel finished unwrapping the second jar, setting the second one beside the first on the bench. If only they had the complete set, what a find that would be for the museum, but that was never likely to happen now; nobody had ever reported finding other artifacts with script like this. Daniel was certain that kind of news would have traveled fast in the small community that was Egyptology.
A noise, outside in the corridor, made him turn.
"Hello?"
No answer. Daniel turned his attention back to the jars, picking up the camera. He finished taking photos of the jars together, then of the Imsety jar on its own, before putting the camera down and starting to wrap that one up again. He took photos of the Duamutef jar then, before he began to wrap that one as well, in preparation to returning both jars to storage for the time being.
There was that sound again, from right outside the door this time. Daniel put the half-wrapped jar down on the bench and crossed to the door, opening it. The dimly lit corridor outside was empty, no sign of anyone between the door to the storage area where he stood and the elevator at its end. There were other doors leading off the corridor, but they were usually locked and Daniel had no intention of searching the place.
By the time he heard the sound for a third time, it was too late—the next thing he knew, Daniel found himself on the floor. His head felt like it had been split apart. He reached a shaky hand to his scalp, surprised to find it wasn’t covered in blood though the way his head hurt, he knew it had been a close thing. Another inch or so and he could have been looking at a fractured skull instead of just a headache.
The room spun as he stood, using the bench to pull himself up, the ceiling seeming to swoop down as he straightened. Daniel’s stomach rebelled too, his breakfast threatening to make its presence known again, but he took a few slow breaths and that particular feeling subsided.
The first thing he noticed was that the jar was gone. Not the Imsety jar, which was apparently still in its box, and not the department’s expensive camera either—a prime target for a thief, he would have thought, and much easier to dispose of than the canopic jar that had actually been taken—but the other jar. Its discarded wrapping material lay on the bench, with no sign of the Duamutef jar itself.
He didn’t known who had hit him. Thinking back to the blow, Daniel couldn’t even have said with any certainty whether his assailant had been male or female. At least the number of people who had access to the storage area, or legitimate access at least, was relatively low and that should help.
Daniel picked up the remaining jar, slung the camera’s strap over his shoulder and headed for the door. He didn’t want to risk his assailant coming back to finish the job, or realizing there was another canopic jar to take and returning for that one. The police could sort this out, that was their job, and now he needed to get back to his office and report the theft.
Once he’d got rid of Rothman, which had taken more doing than usual, Jack started making plans. He still had a few contacts in Illinois, which would probably turn out to be useful, and he was certain he’d need to talk fast when he got up there. What little he’d been able to gather, both from the newspaper reports and from local law enforcement by routes Jack didn’t wish to discuss with anyone, told him there was little chance that this would be a straightforward situation.
The canopic jar—Rothman had insisted on telling him the technical term, despite the fact he could probably discern Jack had little or no interest in it at all—had been in the custody of the Oriental Institute. This wasn’t going to be the kind of case where someone had something they shouldn’t but still there were usually ways of bringing pressure to bear about keeping all of this quiet. Apart from the theft already being in the National Enquirer, of course. At the end of the day, the Oriental Institute was a big name place and Jack would have to work carefully, otherwise he’d be out of there sooner than he could say Tutankhamen.
It hadn’t been too difficult to hitch a ride on a military transport plane heading north, though. And Jack was used to traveling at a moment’s notice, so it wasn’t like it had taken him long to pack. His team weren’t scheduled to go off world for another ten days, this particular rest period the fruit of a busy few weeks for his team. They’d found themselves under fire on their last mission, Ferretti picking up a torn ligament in his knee as he’d dived for cover, and Jack was reticent to take a replacement whenever he didn’t need to.
General Hammond, for once, hadn’t seemed particularly interested in pushing him back into the field and had okayed his trip to Chicago with much less problem than Jack had anticipated. In fact, Hammond had seemed pleased Rothman had brought this whole thing up, citing it as evidence that the imposition of the geek squad—though he hadn’t called them that, since the general never did—had been a good idea all round. Jack wasn’t sure he’d go that far, but he had to agree they might have missed this one and, if not for Rothman, who knew what trouble that might cause them all in the longer term?
It was puzzling, though. As far as Rothman knew, there’d been no evidence of anything else being discovered on Earth with those kinds of symbols. Or at least, when Jack had quizzed him about it, joining him reluctantly over a cup of coffee in the commissary, Rothman had been pretty sure nothing had ever been found. He’d heard rumors, or so he said, of something big that might fit the bill being found in Central America, but whatever it was had been on a boat sunk in a tropical storm off the coast of Florida along with its discoverer and nobody had so far managed to locate the right wreck.
This canopic jar, supposedly one of a pair currently in the possession of the Oriental Institute, was unique. And that had Jack’s interest piqued, against his better judgment. In his experience, unique was rarely good. So this time around, his mission was to get in there, have a look at the surviving jar and get the hell out again, preferably with the remaining jar in his possession. If he could persuade the good people at the college in question to hand it over to the Air Force, no questions asked.
And if he couldn’t, if they refused to play ball with him in a reasonable manner, there were always alternatives. It had been a long time since Jack O’Neill had done a little breaking and entering in the name of his country, but he was certain that it was pretty much like riding a bicycle, something you never forgot how to do.
Still, what chance was there that a bunch of academics couldn’t be persuaded somehow to do the right thing when their country asked them to?
He wished Isobel would stop fussing over him, like a hen with just one chick. The headache had subsided within a couple of hours, though Daniel knew he’d been lucky not to have his head cracked open by the blow—it was just good luck that meant he’d been turning at the time the blow landed, so the impact had been a glancing one instead of straight on. He’d folded anyway, crumpled to the ground with the same force as if he’d been well and truly pole-axed, which was surely the aim of the person who’d hit him.
Whoever that was. Whoever it was who’d stolen the Duamutef jar, for whatever reason they’d done such a thing. He couldn’t figure it out, even though Daniel knew nothing quite like it had ever been discovered before. It was an exquisite piece, so in some ways he could see the attraction, all that white alabaster and gold—in remarkable condition too, even though it had been buried for a couple of thousand years, give or take a few centuries.
At least he still had pictures of it, even if he didn’t have the jar itself. Daniel pulled the file from his desk drawer, spreading the pictures out across its surface like a hand of cards. Exquisite indeed, and the loss of it cut like a knife.
As he picked up first one photograph, then the next, Daniel wasn’t all that certain what was worse—to lose the canopic jar, or the manner in which it had been lost. It was quite possible it was on the way to some private collection, a place where it would never see the light of day again and nobody would get to appreciate it, or study it. Even now it might be gracing some millionaire collector’s private cabinet of curios, somewhere in the Middle East or in one of the former Soviet republics.
Wherever it was, Daniel was certain that its true value wouldn’t be appreciated. Not its monetary worth, though that was substantial as a result of both its unusual nature and its fine condition, but its worth to the academic community. How many things had been lost to archaeology because one person decided they had a monopoly on things that would otherwise enrich the academic community beyond their wildest dreams?
Daniel sighed, raised one hand to rub the back of his neck where he could feel a knot of tension forming. It had been a long week, one way and another, and the robbery had pretty much put the cap on it.
First there had been the problems with plagiarism, with one of their apparently most promising students turning out to be substantially less promising than anyone had thought. Then the difficulties over funding for the next financial year, which threatened the scope of courses the department might be able to offer. An argument with Steven, the latest in a long line of bitter wrangling, had Daniel feeling like the week couldn’t get much worse. Then, of course, it had.
"Professor Jackson?" That was Isobel, who else could it be?
"What is it, Isobel?" Daniel asked, shuffling the photographs back into some kind of order and replacing them in the folder. "I didn’t want to be disturbed."
"Are you feeling all right, Professor?" she asked. Isobel was standing in the doorway, but Daniel knew that even from there she could probably see how tense he was. At least he had only bumps and bruises from his encounter with the burglar; otherwise she’d probably have refused to let him out of his sight. "I could get you some coffee," she continued. "And don’t forget, you have that appointment at four."
"Appointment?" Daniel flipped open his diary, scowling at the indecipherable mark he’d left there, the mark that was supposed to tell him who he was due to meet that afternoon. "I can’t read my handwriting," he admitted, after scowling at the scribble for a moment.
"You remember," Isobel said. "That Air Force colonel. The one who phoned. O’Neill."
What was the Air Force doing sending a colonel on a trip to some university’s archaeology department anyway? The message they’d had was vague: something about O’Neill needing to speak with him and that nobody else would do.
"Right. And coffee would be great. Thank you."
Isobel closed the door quietly. Daniel stared at the closed door for a moment, wondering just how she managed that—whenever he tried, the lock would always refuse to engage, making the door creak. Maybe she’d been a spy in her earlier life—secretly he called her Miss Moneypenny, which he had a sneaking suspicion was something Isobel would probably quite like the idea of, if she’d known.
So, what was the Air Force doing, paying him a visit? While he’d always had a thing for men in uniform, that hadn’t been a taste Daniel had cultivated in a long time, and he was certainly much more discreet than to think his past had come back to visit him that way. All he could do was to wait for four o’clock and see just how he could help Uncle Sam.
They didn’t keep him waiting long, but then Jack hadn’t expected they would. Of course, he’d decided not to pull out the big guns—the dress blues—because it was going to be hard enough to explain away the presence of an Air Force colonel on campus anyway without the rest of the world knowing he was there. Still, a couple of phone calls from General Hammond and Jack had found himself sitting in a comfortable room while he waited for the relevant professor to show up.
He’d read up on the guy on the plane here, or at least as much as he could find that wasn’t written in academic gibberish. Jackson was relatively young to be the effective head of such a prestigious department, but he seemed eminently qualified if the long list of articles and books included in the biography Jack had been given was anything to go by. Not that he knew a great deal about how academia worked—while he’d done his Masters like a good career officer, Jack had never bothered to try and get his head completely around the concepts of status and tenure in the world of the academic.
The door opened and Jack resisted the urge to look around. Instead, he studied the wall behind the desk, eyeing the row of ornate certificates that covered a significant portion of it and watching the palely reflected image of the man who’d just entered. Professor Jackson moved with the grace of an athlete, something Jack hadn’t expected; an economy of motion that marked him out as someone completely comfortable in his own skin, which wasn’t too common in the people he encountered.
Totally and utterly in control, in this environment at least, Jack decided. Jackson rounded the end of the desk, then sat nonchalantly in the big chair that occupied the space on its other side.
"What can I do for you, Colonel?" he asked, with no preamble at all.
Jack studied him for a moment, immediately liking what he saw. The professor looked like someone who’d worked hard at some point in his life, but there were laughter lines at the edge of his eyes and that, along with the warmth Jack saw in his face, made him feel immediately at ease. His eyes were sharp and blue, bright with both intelligence and humor.
"It’s what I can do for you, Professor," Jack replied, sitting back in his chair and crossing his legs as if he had all the time in the world. It was a definite act—if Rothman was right and the artifact that had been stolen was Goa’uld, they were all in more trouble than he cared to explain to anyone.
"Really." Professor Jackson smiled at that, and then reached over to pick up the telephone. "Can I get you anything?" he asked, as one long finger pressed a button that had to lead straight to the scarily efficient-looking secretary who had guarded the door. Jack shook his head. "Could I have some coffee, please, Isobel?"
Jack heard the response from the other end, or at least he thought he did. He could pretty much imagine what it was, anyway—the secretary looked like the kind of woman who’d mother their employer half to death. Jack wondered what happened when it was Professor Jackson’s birthday, and then decided that was probably too awful to contemplate, if his experience of seeing his father’s secretaries in action was anything to go by.
"Now, down to business," Jackson said, leaning back in his chair. "How about you tell me why the Air Force is suddenly so interested in what we do around here and cut out all the macho posturing bullshit?"
The air between them now had a definite chill to it. The whole "head of department" thing wasn’t looking like such a mystery any more, not now Jack had seen the shark lurking beneath the otherwise placid-looking waters.
"If you insist, Professor," Jack said. He considered for a brief moment, before deciding that honesty—or at least as much honesty as Professor Jackson’s security clearance allowed—was probably the best policy. "It’s like this …"
There was a sharp rap on the office door and they both stiffened at the sound. In Jack’s case, he could blame long years of military training and service, but the professor had reacted with startlement and he wondered what that was about. Too many digs in politically sensitive places, maybe, where Jackson had seen and experienced things he wasn’t ever supposed to?
"Come in," Professor Jackson called. The door opened and the secretary entered, carrying a small tray. On it was an ornate brass coffee pot, a sugar bowl and two small coffee cups. "You may change your mind when you smell the stuff," Jackson said, turning his attention back to Jack.
"Okay," Jack agreed, reluctantly, not sure what he was letting himself in for. He wasn’t that much of a coffee drinker, but that was probably due to the god-awful brew the Air Force described that way. When he got around to grinding the beans himself, once in a blue moon, he liked the resulting coffee just fine. "Consider me persuaded," he continued, when the professor began to pour the dark liquid into one of the cups. "Though that looks a little too much like engine oil for my tastes."
"Sugar, then," the professor said, pushing the sugar bowl in his direction. "No milk." The secretary—Isobel -had left the room, closing the door quietly behind them as Jack watched Professor Jackson pour another cup of the night-black liquid. He reached for the cup, his fingers momentarily brushing Jackson’s as he took the small vessel from him. "Help yourself."
Jack busied himself adding sugar, aware all the while of Jackson’s gaze on him. The other man was ostensibly blowing on his own coffee, but Jack could feel that he was being studied—for a man who made his living studying things that were long dead, Professor Jackson seemed to have a healthy interest in the living as well.
"Now, you were about to tell me what you’re doing here." Jackson’s voice brought Jack back to the realization he was about to put a fourth spoonful of sugar into the cup and, considering its size, that was probably a recipe for disaster. "Isn’t that right?"
"I was," Jack agreed, replacing the spoon in the sugar bowl with exaggerated care. "Thanks for the coffee," he said.
"You’re welcome. And stop stalling."
If there was anything this reminded Jack of, it was those long days of counterintelligence training—learning how to interrogate and be interrogated. Jackson was wasted in academia, when he had a potentially healthy career extorting the truth from people in front of him if he only made the switch some time soon. His gaze was direct, honest, and it made Jack feel that he had to be honest as well, which wasn’t all that common a reaction on his part.
"It’s a matter of national security, Doc," he said. Jack couldn’t have said what drove him to that kind of flippancy, but somehow it seemed to come easily when he was facing the professor. Maybe he figured Jackson would like the challenge of making someone talk, even though he wasn’t in the interrogation business just yet. "I could tell you …"
"But then you’d have to kill me?" Jackson interrupted, finishing his sentence. "Oh, please."
Jack watched the professor take a mouthful of coffee, wondering just what the oily liquid tasted like without sugar, what the other man’s mouth would taste like as a result. Damn, where had that thought come from? It had been a while since Jack’s libido had swung that way and he certainly hadn’t expected some academic to make it swing. Not that Jackson was just any academic, after all. But that wasn’t what he was here in Chicago for, even though now he thought about it, the idea just couldn’t seem to leave his mind.
"You have something," Jack said, deciding to be a little more serious before Jackson had him thrown out of here by his secretary. That Isobel looked like she worked out, regardless of the blue rinse, and Jack had no interest in being bounced by her. "Something dangerous."
"Everything we have here is a couple of thousand years old, at least," Professor Jackson said. "What could be so dangerous about that, Colonel?"
"Trust me," Jack said. "I can see how this would be hard to swallow, but it’s true." He couldn’t see any sign that Jackson had been injured, but if the police reports were to be believed, the professor was the one who had tangled with the thief a few nights back. "Who’d be robbing your department, if it wasn’t the case?"
"We have valuable artifacts here. There’s a healthy black market in antiquities, if you know what you’re doing …"
Jack took a mouthful of the sugar-coffee concoction he’d created, winced at its sweetness and put the cup down on the desk.
"But the thing that was stolen," he began. "The canopic jar." He watched Jackson’s response to that, amused despite himself that the geek had clearly thought Jack wouldn’t know the technical term, and glad now that Rothman had told him what it was. "It’s like nothing anyone has ever seen before, right?"
"A lot of things we find are unique," Jackson said. "That just means we haven’t found one like it before, not that it was the only one ever made."
"That’s irrelevant." Jack leaned forward in his chair, still more than conscious of Professor Jackson watching him closely. "Now, I need to see the other one in the pair."
Daniel wasn’t quite sure what he’d expected, but Colonel O’Neill hadn’t been it. He could probably have coped with the abrasive attitude, if the colonel hadn’t been watching him with such interest, dark eyes alive with a promise of something Daniel didn’t particularly want to name. Because naming it was dangerous, particularly now that he’d managed to work his way to being department head. Not that once, in his younger and more foolish days, Daniel Jackson would have turned down the invitation he saw clearly written there.
Now, though, he was all business. And if Daniel kept telling himself that for long enough he might just believe it.
He also didn’t ask how O’Neill apparently knew so much about canopic jars, because he wasn’t interested in what the other man knew or didn’t know. At least that was the attitude Daniel had decided to take, for the sake of his own health and well being, and that was that. There was no reason, unfortunately, not to at least let O’Neill have a look at the other jar—it was a relatively reasonable request, even if the source was an unusual one. He couldn’t see how it would hurt to humor the Air Force.
He hadn’t been down to the storage area since the robbery, and it had lost none of its creepiness in the meantime. Daniel reached over to flick the switch for the electric light as the two of them emerged from the elevator, noting that yet another bulb had blown in the already dingy corridor that led to the storage area.
"Nice," O’Neill said, from beside him.
Daniel wasn’t quite sure why O’Neill had insisted on accompanying him, or indeed why he’d agreed to it, but the two of them were there now. In some ways, he had to admit the other man’s presence was reassuring—there was a calm competence about O’Neill that set him at ease. Unexpectedly so, considering how the man’s cockiness back in Daniel’s office had riled him.
"We aim to please," Daniel said. When O’Neill said nothing, though he could tell he was being watched, Daniel led the way down the corridor. "Over here."
He pulled a set of keys from his pocket and flicked through them till he found the right one.
"How many people have access to this area?" O’Neill asked.
"Not many." Daniel thought about that for a moment. "Faculty members, of course. The archivist. Janitorial staff." He quickly totted up the total in his head. "Less than a dozen, I’d say."
O’Neill looked thoughtful, though in the dim light it was hard for Daniel to say just what was going through the colonel’s mind. What business was it of his, anyway? The police had already been down here, fingerprinting and photographing to their heart’s content, and everyone who had a legitimate reason for being here had been interviewed.
"Come on," Daniel said, letting the door swing open. He gestured for O’Neill to lead the way. "Light switch on the right," he said, as the colonel headed into the darkened room ahead of him, apparently without any hesitation.
The lights, once they flicked on, were brighter in here. The room itself was just a row of shelves, stretching out into the shadows and up toward the ceiling. Every shelf was crammed with boxes of all shapes and sizes, only the labels telling what they contained—assuming that the person who read them understood the notations that were used.
"All this from grave robbing?" O’Neill asked, from the middle of the room. Daniel ignored his comment, heading straight for the row of shelves that held the box with the other canopic jar. "Last time I saw something like this, it was at the end of Indiana Jones …"
"You won’t find the Ark of the Covenant here, Colonel," Daniel said dryly. "Here, hold this." He deposited a box into O’Neill’s arms, suppressing a grin at the cloud of dust that suddenly surrounded the other man. "This is what we came for," he said, removing the box that had lain below it. "You can put that one back on the shelf now, if you don’t mind."
O’Neill did as he was bid, then tried not to make a meal of brushing the dust from his suit. He didn’t strike Daniel as a vain man, but he guessed all those years of military spit and polish probably rubbed off in the end.
Removing the lid from the box he’d chosen, Daniel began to unwrap the layers of packing material around the canopic jar. O’Neill came over to where he stood, a calm and quiet presence at Daniel’s shoulder, but one Daniel tried his best to ignore.
"Here it is," Daniel said, when the last layer of packing had been removed. The jar’s gold decoration gleamed as he turned it carefully in his hands. "Spectacular, isn’t it?"
"Worth killing for?" O’Neill asked, quietly.
Daniel tried not to think of what had happened only a few nights before, the stealthy approach of the person who’d struck him such an unexpected blow, and the sheer terror he’d felt as he lay there on the floor, anticipating another blow. He couldn’t help the way his hands tightened on the jar, despite his usual care when handling something that was so valuable in so many ways. O’Neill had seen it, he was sure of that, and Daniel chided himself for showing that reaction—the colonel didn’t strike him as the kind of man who’d appreciate weakness in anyone.
That was probably why, when it came, the touch of O’Neill’s hand resting on Daniel’s shoulder unexpectedly, meant that he hardly knew what to think any more.