Signal Strength

"This Frank Morgan, who claimed he was from Hyde. He came after you, didn't he?" She had stopped at the door of the pub, as a thought occurred to her.

"How do you know?" Hunt answered suspiciously.

"Just a feeling."

"Not good enough. I need to know what you know."

The Controller sighed. She felt like an idiot not having put things together sooner. And even though she knew she probably shouldn't be telling these men too much, she also knew that they had already been dragged into the whole mess and deserved to know what was going on. She just wondered what, if anything, any of them would be able to do about it.

"Morgan had a daughter, Amanda. She wanted to follow him into, um, law enforcement, but he didn't feel like she was up to the task."

"Smart man."

She gave Hunt a sour look. It was that kind of attitude that had caused so many problems in the first place. Finally she continued, "Regardless of what he thought, she was determined. So she went through the training program and was finally given her first field assignment. Sam was her partner."

"Well, there was the problem," Ray snorted.

"Morgan agreed with you on that point then." She paused to give Ray a glance to see how that statement went down. He rapidly averted his eyes from her intense glare. After an uncomfortable pause, she continued. "It wasn't considered a particularly difficult or dangerous assignment, and no one, except for Morgan, was worried what might happen."

"The investigation was going nowhere, and the officer in charge decided to pull the plug on it. Sam was reassigned and Amanda was left to tie up a few loose ends." Her voice trailed off.

"So," Hunt finally snapped impatiently, "what happened?"

"No one really knows for sure. Amanda Morgan disappeared without a trace and was never found. An independent investigation was mounted without success. No one really knows for sure what happened to her. All I know is, after she vanished, Frank Morgan went on a personal vendetta against Sam Tyler, trying to prove that he was an unfit officer so he could have him removed and prosecuted in the case. It appears to me that he followed Sam here...and is trying to punish Sam and anyone associated with him."

"But what does that have to do with us?" Chris asked pensively.

"Don't you see? Morgan thinks that Sam took away his family, so he's going to try to take away the people Sam loves from him."

*********

"I've been waiting for you, Sam."

They turned towards the voice from behind them, Sam straining to see the face he knew must be in the shadows.

"What do you want from me? Why are you following me like this?"

"You really don't remember, do you? What you did to me? What you did to her?"

A sudden memory shot through Sam's head, painful, like white hot metal pushing into his brain. "Amanda."

"Ah, you do remember."

"I remember her. Working with her. But I did nothing to her."

"Oh that's true. You did nothing, nothing at all. Nothing to help her, nothing to protect her. You didn't even stay and help her finish her first case, did you?"

"That had nothing to do with me. I left because I was ordered to, I was reassigned."

"Oh, and is that why you abandoned Maya, too? Left her to be kidnapped by a killer?"

"What do you know about that?" Sam snarled, jumping towards the voice in the shadows.

Morgan laughed sarcastically. "You really are quite experienced at doing nothing, aren't you, DCI Tyler? You left Amanda, you left Maya, why you even let a gun-toting psycho walk into your squad room and shoot young Annie, here, didn't you?"

Annie started at the comment, at his knowledge of what had happened in a different time and place, at the offhand manner in which he referred to someone being shot, at *her* being shot. She shook her head. Had she been shot? What was going on?

*********

"Nelson, I need your help."

Nelson leaned across the bar towards the controller, beckoning her to come closer. "Do you suppose it would be better to talk about this somewhere else, eh?" He eyed the detectives behind her nervously.

"There's no time to be wasted. I just want to know one thing. Do you still have your transporter?"

*********

"I tried so hard to kill you, you know, Tyler, but you just wouldn't die. Do you know, Annie, why you're still alive? It's that lovely necklace that you're wearing, the one he gave you. It's what they use to travel to their assignments."

Annie looked down at the pendant around her neck, fingering it nervously.

"Yes, child, that's the one. It has an interesting little feature. It monitors the wearer's vital signs, and if it detects a life threatening state, it will immediately transport the wearer to safety. When I sent my man into the squad room to shoot you, for instance, it detected the trauma and transported you back to the Hyde base. By deconstructing and then reconstructing your very molecules, the bullets you took are no longer there. Quite an amazing technology actually. I still don't fully understand it myself." He glaced down at the pin stuck to his jacket lapel.

"But I do know this much. It can only transport the wearer to safety when there is an active beacon to follow. And how hard I worked to have those beacons turned off after I had him where I wanted him! Do you know how long it took me to stage the whole thing? All of the research I had to do in the databases, just to create an incident that would be serious enough to convince the program to send in an investigator, keeping him there long enough for them to believe the investigation was a dead end, making sure the beacon was turned off? Luring him onto that road, timing the turn, and then, seeing him standing there! Oh, that was just too good to be true. I had been completely prepared to die myself that day, simply ram him head on, but there he was, just standing in the road, like a dream come true." Morgan's voice trailed off, he stood looking towards the ceiling of the hospital room.

"It was you? You ran me down in the road? On *purpose*?"

"But you wouldn't die, would you? I couldn't believe my eyes when I stopped and got out of the car. I wanted to see you, I wanted to see you suffer and die for what you did to my Amanda, but you didn't die. You just disappeared, and I couldn't believe it. I knew I had turned off the return beacon at the base, but it took me months of further research to figure out that the advance logistics team had already activated the beam for your next assignment. I didn't tell them what had happened, I just knew I had to come back there and make your life as miserable as you made mine. You took my little girl away from me, and now I'm taking her away from you."

A single shot rang out before Sam could move.

**************

"Well, Mr. Evans? Are you prepared to file your report?"

"Yes, sir."

"And all personnel are accounted for?"

"The cleanup and logistics teams have returned with Morgan's body. They found this on the floor next to him." Evans held out a small lapel pin for the supervisor to examine. "His transporter. He removed it for some reason."

"He wasn't planning on coming back."

"Or he simply wanted it to all end there. Whatever the case, he wasn't wearing it when he was shot. I don't know how he did it, but Hunt arrived on the scene at exactly the right time and took him down with one shot. Saved Tyler's life."

The supervisor shook his head. He had never seen so many tangled timelines in all the assignments he had handled. "So what was Hunt doing with a transporter?"

"He told me he borrowed it from Mr. Nelson, sir."

"We've found Nelson, now, have we?"

Evans shuffled nervously. "Well, he was in 1973. When we managed to return everyone there to sort the situation out, he apparently took his transporter back and went on his way. I don't really think he wants to be found, sir."

"Well, then Evans, by all means, don't look for him. What about the rest of them?"

"It seems that Hunt and his team want to join the progam now, sir. Now that they know about us, it seemed prudent to move them to a different timeframe, for a while anyway. Somewhere in the 1980's, I understand. The Controller volunteered to stay with them. For training purposes, of course."

"Of course." The supervisor smiled at the thought of her in the field. He doubted that training was the real purpose, but who was he to question her motives? "Tyler and Cartwright?"

"They've been moved to an undisclosed time and location." Evans clutched the pendant Sam had turned over to him in his hand, reluctant to hand it over to the supervisor. "Neither of them retained transporters. As far as anyone is concerned, they are now living a linear timeline in the normal stream of time." If there was such a thing, he added to himself.

"Well, then, Controller Evans, if you are satisfied that everything is taken care of, I'll leave it to you to file your report and close the cases."

"Thank you, sir."

***********

Evans sat down slowly at the controller's desk, fiddling with the small pendant that had been in his pocket. He didn't think he would turn it in, not quite yet. Everything should be fine, but he thought he would hold onto it for a bit longer, just in case.

He leaned forward and keyed the communicator. "All clear, controller?"

There was a brief crackle of static, then the controller's voice. "All clear from here."

"Then we are declaring this case closed. This is Hyde base, signing off."

"Roger that, Hyde. Over and out."