Phoenix Field Agent
Posts: 1,889
Joined: 11 Jan 2006
Gender: Female
Country: USA
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Season: season 3
Episode:Passages
Vehicle: Jeep
Jacket: Black leather
House: House boat
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As promised to Turtle (and anyone else who might be reading), here's part two.
Happy Hour with Jack Dalton Part Two
Rated: PG
“Idiots! You grabbed the wrong man!” The lead man shouted as he watched the surveillance camera focused on a small, empty room where Jack Dalton lay, still passed out.
“How were we supposed to know? It was pitch black in there! We couldn’t see a thing!” The more talkative of his men said.
“He was sleeping on the sofa,” the more silent, brooding man said.
The leader sighed and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “All right, fine,” he said. “Let’s just forget it. There was no way to anticipate that he’d have company.”
“What do we do now?”
The leader’s icy, catlike, cunning grin spread across his face again. He adjusted the collar of his starched shirt. “Well, we’ll just have to do what our attorneys did for us during the most intense days of the scandal,” he said. “Damage control.”
They entered the room where Jack Dalton was being kept, the sound of the door opening stirring him. He groaned, regretting regaining consciousness, his head feeling as if someone had kicked it in with a steel-toed boot, the slightest movement causing sharp waves of pain and sparks of light to explode in front of his half-open, blurred eyes.
“Hey Mac, how about an aspirin?” He asked groggily, struggling to sit up, fighting the nausea and dizziness that threatened to make him vomit again, his throat raw and dry.
As he opened his eyes more fully, he realized he was no longer inside MacGyver’s house boat. Instead, his sore, exhausted body was on an unforgiving, cold, and hard concrete floor, and he was surrounded by blank, drab walls. At first, he thought he was in prison, and he wondered if his drunkenness the night before had escalated into some kind of disturbance in which he had participated that landed him there. He began to worry that he had never ended up at MacGyver’s house boat, that maybe it had been a hallucination brought about by the large quantities of alcohol he’d ingested. The lights in the room seemed unnaturally bright, and he squinted, trying to reduce the piercing, painful effects they had on his sensitive eyes. He squeezed them shut and held his flushed face in his hands, taking deep breaths and trying to restore his dulled, drained senses.
“Look, I don’t remember much, but whatever I did last night, I’m sorry,” he said between his hands. “Can I get out of here now or call a lawyer?”
“I don’t think so,” a stern voice said above him.
Jack heard the shuffling of several feet and he looked up at the source, squinting again against the harsh light. There were three men standing over him, all dressed well in silk suits.
“You’re not cops,” he said.
Growing impatient, the leader yanked him off the ground, pulling out a gun and pointing it at Jack’s temple.
“Hey! Easy!” Jack said, wincing, feeling he might faint from the sudden movement, the bare room spinning wildly.
“Who are you?” The leader asked.
“I could ask you the same thing,” Jack said.
The leader smacked him hard across the cheek, causing his head to loll limply with the force of his blow. His cheek throbbed, adding to his pain and the room briefly went black.
“Listen, I grow tired of games quickly,” the leader said, clamping his hand around Jack’s neck, pushing him harder against the wall and yanking him up even higher. “Now, I’ll ask you again. Who are you?”
Gasping for air through his constricted throat, Jack tried to speak.
“J…Jack…Dalton,” he managed to squeak, his face turning beet red from the lack of oxygen.
The leader flashed another eerie, unsettling grin. “That’s better,” he said, releasing Jack, who slumped to the floor, coughing violently and almost retching. He clutched his throat and doubled over in pain. “You’re a friend of MacGyver’s, aren’t you?”
Jack looked up at the man, his face creased with pain. “Maybe,” he rasped.
Not satisfied with the answer, the leader kicked him in the side, causing him to roll onto his back, coughing again.
“All right, take it easy! Jeez,” he said. “It’s bad enough I have a hangover without you beating me up.”
The leader raised his eyebrow. “I could make it even worse,” he said.
“I’m sure you could.” Jack tried to position himself so he would feel more comfortable, but his entire body was a mass of agony. “Anyway, what’s this all about?”
The leader smiled chillingly. “A few years ago, your friend MacGyver decided to take it upon himself to investigate my business practices,” he said.
“Oh, yeah? And what exactly is your business?”
“Baxtrum Chemical Corporation.”
Jack studied the severe man with the cold eyes and the sinister grin. “You’re Robert Baxtrum,” he said. “Sure, I remember you know. You were all over the news.”
Robert’s disturbing, unpleasant grin appeared again. “It’s nice to know my fame counts for something,” he said. He glanced at his two cronies. “These are my associates, Tom Hilliard and Mark Dawson. They went down in ignominy with me, thanks to your…friend.”
“You were illegally disposing your chemicals,” Jack said, glaring at him in disgust, “polluting the oceans. As if that wasn’t enough, you decided to swindle your employees with insider trading and dummy corporations. If you ask me, Mac did the world a favor by helping to expose you for the fraud you are.”
Mark and Tom were about to attack Jack on behalf of their boss, but he held up his hand to stop them.
“Anyway, how did you get out of prison so soon? Weren’t you guys supposed to be serving a 20 year term for securities fraud?”
“We got out on good behavior,” Robert said, smirking. “You see, when you have a decent attorney, media celebrity, and enough money, you don’t have to be held accountable for anything in this country. You could say I almost got away with it. Almost. Until the IRS confiscated my property and my reputation as a businessman was ruined beyond repair.”
“So, why kidnap me?” Jack asked.
“My intention was to kidnap MacGyver,” Robert said, glaring at his associates, silently reprimanding them. “You were accidentally taken in his place.”
Jack fought the impulse to make another wisecrack about their ineffectiveness, not wishing to be hit again. Instead, he smiled, trying to charm his way out of the situation. “Sounds like you don’t need me, then,” he said. “You probably wouldn’t mind just letting me go.”
Mark and Tom laughed. Robert remained stony. He reached down and grabbed a handful of Jack’s leather bomber jacket, forcing him up from the ground again. “Oh no,” he said. “It won’t be that simple, I’m afraid. It turns out I do need you, after all. You’ll provide great leverage. With you, I’ll still get MacGyver. It’s assured.”
***
“Jack?” MacGyver asked, searching the house boat after finding the pile of blankets on the unoccupied sofa. “Jack, where are you?”
Concerned he might have wandered off in his drunken stupor, MacGyver went outside, searching the area for his friend.
“Jack?” He called out, looking everywhere, walking up and down the docks. He found two fishermen nearby. “Did you happen to see a man with a thick mustache walking around here?” He asked them.
“No, we didn’t see anyone like that,” one of them said.
“Thanks anyway.”
MacGyver continued searching the perimeter of his house boat, including his porch and his jeep. He found nothing. Discouraged, he began to head back to his house boat. He heard the phone ringing inside and he ran to answer it, hoping it was Jack with an explanation for his disappearance.
“Hello?” He gasped, slightly out of breath from running.
“We have your friend Jack Dalton,” the ominous voice said on the other end.
Dread filled MacGyver. He dropped his head and closed his eyes, imagining all kinds of scenarios whereby Jack had encountered trouble this time. He remembered the night before when Jack was rambling on about a new contract he had for his floundering business Dalton Air and how it was going to net him a substantial sum of money. Could these people who held him be a party to that contract?
“What do you want?” He asked.
“No questions. If you want him back, you’re going to have to come looking for us. We’re located on Sequoia Drive. It’s a private drive, with only one house. To give you a clue, we’re not inside that house. We’re somewhere else near there, but you’ll have to figure out where. See you soon, MacGyver.”
The line went dead, and MacGyver hung up the phone with a slightly shaky hand.
“Jack, what’s going on?” He asked out loud to himself. “What have you done this time?”
***
Following the anonymous caller’s instructions, MacGyver drove his jeep up Sequoia Drive until he arrived at a high, closed gate blocking the rest of his way. Stopping, he got out and examined the gate, pushing on it and discovering it was locked. Debating whether or not to pick the lock or scale the gate, he decided to climb it, not wanting to waste any time finding Jack, swinging his long body over the top and sliding down on the other side. Looking ahead, the road narrowed into a driveway, thick, unwieldy, moist foliage enclosing around it as if it hadn’t been driven on for years, the vegetation overtaking it. It blotted out the sun and created a dark, haunting, and primordial landscape that appeared untouched by man. MacGyver began walking up the overgrown, winding driveway. It seemed to continue for miles until he reached the house, and when he did, he noticed that it appeared just as abandoned and neglected as the rest of the property, the windows dark and vines twining around it as if trying to drag it into a grave. It sprawled across a high cliff overlooking the ocean, it immensity and fading luxury giving it a forbidding, austere appearance. He never understood the need for so much living space, and it looked less like a mansion than a prison, so close to the edge of the cliff that it looked ready to topple into the ocean below in a suicidal leap. He remembered the caller telling him that Jack wasn’t inside that house, but he wondered if they were there and were just trying to divert his attention so they could move Jack elsewhere while he went to look for him on the grounds.
Checking the house first, he looked in the filthy windows, trying to see inside. It appeared empty, but he picked the lock to the front door open anyway. Contrary to the dilapidating appearance outside, the inside of the mansion seemed clean and unused, like a new house, the musty odor and a few faint outlines of furniture on the carpet the only indicators that it had been lived in and unlived in for a few years. The floorplan was massive, and if Jack were being held somewhere inside, he could be anywhere.
“Jack?” MacGyver asked, his voice echoing unnaturally through the silent, cavernous house. “Jack, are you in here?”
He waited and heard nothing in response. The mansion was truly deserted. Turning back towards the door, he returned outside. A thick fog had settled oppressively over the property, obscuring everything, swallowing it up, yet it also seemed to make the surrounding area seem even larger and more overwhelming.
“Jack!” MacGyver called out into the chilly, damp air.
He looked around, the fog and the vastness of the property disorienting him. He didn’t know where to begin looking, and every minute he was aware that Jack was in danger and counting on him. Pausing and listening to the sounds of the waves crashing and the distressed cries of the seagulls, trying to calm himself, MacGyver stepped back, and when he did, the soles of his shoes scraped against something that was harder than the rest of the sodden ground beneath him. Looking down, he noticed that he had brushed away some of the dirt covering what appeared to be stonework. Crouching and brushing the rest of the dirt away, he found that the stone was a large slab, but it seemed to have a door-like shape to it, including a handle. It was cleverly disguised to blend in with the rest of the ground. MacGyver pulled it open, surprised to find it less heavy than it looked. When he peered inside, he found a stone staircase leading down into some kind of secret, hidden, underground tunnel system. It could have been merely been a wine cellar, but MacGyver didn’t think anyone made so much effort to conceal something like that. Whatever was in that bunker, it had to be something more important, something the former occupant of the mansion didn’t want found. It was the perfect place to keep Jack, and MacGyver understood what the caller meant by not being in the house, but nearby.
“Don’t worry, Jack,” he said. “I’m coming.”
Carefully, he began to descend the steps, slowly pulling the false stone door closed behind him. The caverns appeared to be natural, carved over millions of years and tamed by man’s ingenuity, dim lighting throughout the tunnels indicating they were wired for electricity. MacGyver proceeded with caution, looking all around him, making sure he wouldn’t be ambushed, not sure what to expect. The tunnels were more elaborate than he first suspected, leading in all different directions like the hallways in the mansion. It was as if it was an underground extension of the mansion, a subterranean twin, proving just as challenging and confusing as its man-made counterpart, a maze that he had to figure his way out of in order to reach Jack. He looked down each corridor, sometimes coming to a dead end and having to turn around, only to find himself facing another wall of stone. As he progressed farther into the structure, he began to hear voices. Relieved but still cautious, he peered around a craggy projection of rocks to get a closer look. He saw two men in the distance, neither of them Jack. There was a small room carved out of the rock nearby, the door closed. He wondered if that was where they were keeping him. Planning on a way to surprise the men and get inside that constructed room, MacGyver began to approach it stealthily.
A click from a gun stopped him. Cringing at being discovered, he turned slowly to face the direction of the sound. He saw a man holding Jack, the gun pointed at his head. Although his hair had turned even more iron-gray and his features seemed more weathered than when he last saw him, MacGyver recognized Jack’s captor immediately, his brutal stare and mirthless grin seared in his memory as the face of a remorseless man consumed by his need for fortune at all costs.
“Welcome to my labyrinth, MacGyver,” Robert Baxtrum said.
To be continued…
 "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer."
--Henry David Thoreau
brains+brawn+beauty+personality=MacGyver
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)- I just had to check this title out! I must admit- it is pretty perfect for a fanfiction title! 
