Page 47 of Yankee in the Wind

“I need a bite too,” Jack admitted and walked toward the table.

Lilly followed him, but before Jack reached the table, he suddenly stopped, and she almost bumped into him.

“Jack?”

He didn’t reply, merely stood there. Lilly walked around him, and gripped his forearm, when she noticed that he stared straight ahead, his chest heaving now.

“What’s wrong?”

“Shit,” Fox let out and rose. “Let go of him!”

Lilly instantly took her hand off Jack’s arm, stunned by Fox’s sharp words.

“He’s having a premonition. Don’t pull him out of it,” Ace warned. “He needs to see it through the end.”

Surprised and at the same time curious, Lilly looked at Jack. His face twitched and his eyes moved as if he was reacting to something. She had never thought about what it would be like to see him have a premonition. When he’d had a nightmarish vision during his sleep, she’d shaken him to come out of it, and now she wondered whether she shouldn’t have done it. Perhaps he would have seen more, had she not tried to wake him.

All of a sudden, Jack swayed, and it looked like he would fall forward, but Ace had already gripped him to steady him.

“Thanks, thanks,” Jack said breathlessly.

Nobody said a word. Clearly Ace and Fox knew that he needed a few seconds to find his bearings.

“I’m good,” Jack said, then straightened his shoulders. “But we’ve got a problem.”

“What did you see?” Ace asked.

“The big MRI machine, the one in Thomas’s video. If Deja was right when she said it would fry somebody’s brain, then we have no time to lose. I saw them strapping a guy into it. They were starting the scan. At five p.m.”

Lilly’s gaze shot to the clock on the wall. “That leaves us only three hours...”

“And there’s something else,” Jack added with a look at Ace and Fox. “I’ve seen the guy before. Black, mid-thirties, shaved head, fit. I think he’s one of us.”

“Fuck,” Ace hissed and charged to the computer room, Jack on his heels.

Fox snatched his sandwich, took a big bite, and hurried after them. Lilly followed them, not hungry anymore. She hadn’t been able to save Thomas, but if she could do anything to help save the next poor soul from suffering irreversible brain damage at the hands of this Mr. Smith, she would do it.

Michelle, Phoebe joined Lilly as she hurried after the men.

“All-hands-on-deck,” Michelle said.

In the computer room, Ace had already pulled up a file with photos and names and was projecting it onto the big monitor on the wall.

“What is that?” Lilly asked Phoebe who stood next to her.

“A list of all Stargate agents,” she murmured.

Lilly watched as Ace scrolled through the photos, while Jack fixated on the monitor. She recognized several of the men: Fox, Ace, Thomas, and Jack—the old Jack, the way he’d looked before the plastic surgery.

“Stop!” Jack ordered and pointed to the monitor. “That’s him, that’s the man they’ll strap into that machine.”

“Jay Garner, Code Name Tiger,” Ace read. “Okay, everybody, we’ve got very little time. Phoebe and Lilly, get the van assault-ready.”

“Assault-ready?” Lilly echoed.

“Phoebe will show you. Michelle and Fox, find a way to speed up the process of cross-referencing any power surges with the routes of vans large enough to have moved the equipment; Jack, you and I will do manual cross-checks of everything the computer spits out from the searches. Let’s do this. Clock’s ticking.”

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