Elle burst from the interrogation room, her cheeks flushed with anger and shame. Damn that bastard. Damn him! How could she have let him get the advantage?

Her fury nearly bowled over Prentiss, who stepped back to avoid the heavy door as it banged open and shut. She was, as Hotch had ordered, ready to take over in an instant. She wore her best suit – which cost twice what Elle's did – and her every hair remained effortlessly in place. With case files in hand, she should have immediately swooped in to recoup the embarrassing failure.

But she didn't. She spoke. "Elle."

Greenaway came up short, but didn't turn around. She clenched her fists to hide their furious trembling. "What?" she snapped. There was a lecture coming, she just knew it. The last person she wanted to hear it from was Little Miss Perfect.

She heard those fine, patent leather shoes take a single quiet step nearer. The gentleness of the voice that followed startled her from her sulk. "You know none of us believe that. Right?"

Elle peered at the older woman out the corner of her eye. Sincerity radiated back. Emily Prentiss could fake and hide many things, but her candor was not one of them.

"No one on the team…" Prentiss paused, seemed to reconsider her words, and cleared her throat to start again. "No on in the Bureau believes that you acted in anything other than self-defense. You didn't take the law into your own hands. We all know that."

For a moment, Elle's mind left the hall and wandered back through time and space. She saw the dark house she'd occupied for the ruse, saw the headlights pull up outside her window, saw them go dark. She heard the front door open and saw William Lee peer in. She felt the gun in her hands, smelled the oil and gunpowder, heard the sound of the shot.

Then she was back. She deflated, shoulders going limp. "I could never do something like that."

"I know." Prentiss took another step closer, until they were almost near enough to touch. If she'd been anyone else on the team, Elle knew that Emily would have laid a hand on her shoulder. She'd burned too many bridges between them to earn such a kindness now, but the thought was there. "He's just trying to rile you up."

Greenaway sighed and shook her head, hair rustling as she cleared her muddled thoughts. "He'll rile you up, too." She turned to Prentiss and gave her a single nod. "Be careful."

"I will. Thanks." Emily's perfectly painted lips twitched into a confident smile. She returned Elle's nod, then turned on her heel and strode into the interrogation room.

When the door to the secondary meeting room opened, Rossi glanced up from the many case files and raised a salt-and-pepper eyebrow at Greenaway. "That didn't take long. What happened?"

"Don't ask." Elle tossed her files onto an open chair and took in the room, which had been transformed into a mini-gallery of all things White Knight. Evidence boards lined every wall. File boxes and folders covered the table. It was a complete mess, and yet Ross was the only other agent to be seen. "Where's Morgan?"

"In with Hotch." Rossi gestured vaguely towards the interrogation room, then went back to thumbing through autopsy reports. "Still observing, most likely. They'll be in there a while."

Greenaway frowned. Hotch's obsession with Gideon came as no real surprise; after all, he'd known the man and then been targeted with a corpse in the kitchen. But Morgan…hm…

"Did Morgan know Gideon? Before?"

Rossi glanced up again, regarding Elle carefully. He'd been retired by the time Morgan came on board, but she knew that he – like Gideon – kept tabs on the BAU even in his downtime. He'd been a friend to Hotch in the early days. He knew almost everything.

"Not that I know of," he said, pushing the stack away and busying his hands with another. "But I'll bet he still feels like he owes the bastard for bringing Hotch on board."

Ah. Gideon had been the one to coax Hotch out of the courtroom and into the FBI. Years later, Hotch used those legal skills to present a superior – who had attempted to block Morgan's BAU promotion on account of his race – with the detailed threat of an anti-discrimination lawsuit, which scared the bigot into submission. Without that, Morgan could have been barred from the position he'd more than earned all because of an 'old boy' who couldn't accept change.

"Those two don't like being indebted," continued Rossi, "especially not to people like Gideon. Can't blame them for that, but it doesn't matter too much in the end."

Wrong. It did matter. No Gideon meant no Hotch, which mean no Morgan and, more than likely, no Greenaway either – his glowing recommendation had no doubt made her transition from Sex Crimes a hundred times smoother. Hotch knew talent when he saw it, no matter what the old guard said. He'd made the BAU better than it had ever been before. When you looked at it that way, they all owed Gideon for bringing him in.

We don't owe him shit.

Elle bit her tongue and turned her attention to the evidence boards so Rossi wouldn't see her fury. The first thing she found there was a map. It always chilled her when they pinned up a map of the entire United States. In high school, she'd had one just like it on her bedroom wall, full of push-pins marking all the places she wanted to visit on the open road. Now, all she could picture was the twenty or thirty serial killers hiding their bodies along that vast road network at any given time.

On this one, Gideon's murders were picked out using color-coded flags. Green covered the initial dozen of eight years ago, twelve bodies spread across fifteen states and the length of the continent. Blue marked the second spree, fifteen more victims found up and down the east coast in the last three weeks. A single red flag in Virginia stood out as an anomaly. It marked Hotch's apartment and the remains of George Foyet.

Elle drew on her memory of the case and picked out the three pins designating the dumping grounds of Frank Breitkopf's many scattered limbs. During his own reign of terror, scattering dismantled bodies along the freeway had been one of his favorite methods; by crossing state lines, he'd hidden his body count so well they were still piecing together the fragments of his victims.

But that hadn't been Gideon's purpose. He never hid anything, not even a fingerprint. He spread Frank around to give the sadistic bastard a taste of his own medicine.

Elle could almost relate. Almost.

Stop that.

She pursed her lips and forced herself to shut the empathy down. She was not like Gideon. She would never be like Gideon. She would not become a monster.

She turned from the map to check the standard-issue wall clock that hung at the back of the room. It was half-past one. She sighed. "Two hours left."

"If that," said Rossi with a shake of his head. "Hope JJ can keep the press in line. With a high-profile case like this, the Director'll want to get him out for the cameras the moment they're ready to strike."

Greenaway sighed and sank into a chair. "What a pain."

"We have more than enough to put him away," continued Rossi, though his dispassionate tone betrayed how he felt about that. "He'll never see the light of day once the courts are through with him. Whether we get all the answers or not, this will all end today."

Except that it wouldn't. Rossi could feel it in her gut. This was no end game, no way for a criminal mastermind to go out. There was no climax, no finale. It just…stopped. After a decade of plans and plots, Gideon would never end it like this. He was too historonic. There had to be something more.

Rossi knew it too, but there was nothing they could do. With nothing else to go on, all they could do was scour the records for anything they'd missed and wait to see what happened next.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

No clock hung in the interrogation room, but Prentiss heard one anyway. In their sullen silence, Gideon's fingers fell against the tabletop in the familiar rhythm, counting out the seconds with patient aplomb. It made for an odd technique. Most killers, in Emily's experience, would have gone for the lub-dub of a pounding heart. But Gideon chose to count the time. Was he waiting for something?

She filed the thought away and turned to her digital watch, careful to keep its face out of Gideon's sight. She'd been there ten minutes, sitting without a word. That was long enough.

Gideon stopped tapping. When Emily glanced up, he was smiling at her. "Got the time?"

Prentiss tugged her sleeve over the watch, denying the man what he wanted. It was a dominance play, establish her control. She knew it. He knew it. She knew he knew and he knew she knew. That shared knowledge transformed this interrogation into a chess game, both thinking three moves ahead. The one who kept the lead would take the win.

Emily opened her case file. She slid it across the table until it bumped into Gideon's hands. "Tell me about Frank."

A dozen glossy crime scene photos spilled onto the table, unhooked before entering for exactly this effect. Most were dark and grimy, stained with violent red. Severed limbs scattered the floor of a burnt-out camper. A single gunshot to the temple betrayed the C.o.D. An abandoned arm, found two states over, clutched a white knight in its rotting hand.

Gideon's face remained black as he looked over the shots. He shook his head and pushed the folder back to Prentiss. "You already know what happened to Frank."

"I want to hear your side," said Emily, forcing the file back until it stuck in the space between them. "What happened out there? How did you know he was in West Virginia? Why cut him up after he was already?"

Gideon shrugged and said nothing, refusing to either gloat or refuse credit. His guilt was no question. There'd been substantial evidence, from blood to finger prints to the severed ear found in his abandoned car. All of it had been deliberately planted, to lead to him.

He glanced up again, looking not at her but at the top of the one-way glass. Prentiss pulled her folder back and casually reorganized the photos, deciding to jab in from another direction.

"They put you on medical leave after the death of your family." The slightest disgust flickered over Gideon's eyes. "You suffered a major depressive episode, so they kept you under watch and set up psych evaluations every week. But you know how to cheat those."

"As do you, Agent Prentiss."

A shallow blow. Of course Emily could circumvent psych tests. She'd learned how even before she joined the Bureau. Nothing about that was unusual, not in the BAU.

"So once you fooled the psychiatrist into think you were stable, they lowered the observation to protective duty, and that's when you slipped away…"

"Off to the mountains to track down Frank, yes, yes. Obviously, you know it all. You are wasting time."

Gideon spread his hands with a dramatic sigh, as though throwing his frustration onto the table. The gesture was mild, put-upon and retrained. He held up a hand to stop Prentiss before she could press on.

"I assure you, agent, that everything you need to know about Frank Breitkopf can be found in either that file or in his. There are more important things to discuss now."

In five seconds, Emily weighed the value pre-offered information with the symbolic loss of control that came from letting him lead. Finding it worthwhile, she set the folder aside. "Fine. What's on your mind?"

Again, Gideon's eyes flickered to the window. Was he looking at Hotch? No, the gaze was too high. So what did he want?

"Can you guess, Agent Prentiss, what I intended to do after I finished with Frank? Originally?"

'Originally' meant he'd changed his plans. The use of a euphemism indicated that he'd distanced himself from his crimes. Repeated use of her name and title attempted to establish rapport.

Prentiss folded her hands, mirroring Gideon's comfortable posture. "No," she said. "Though I assume you planned your escape to the letter."

"On the contrary. I fully intended to return to DC and turn myself in. Figured I'd let the system take its proper course. But then I realized…it's already run its course. And it's failed."

Emily took a slow breath, masking her disgust and sick anticipation. Jason Gideon was a mission-based killer. A vigilante. This would be his manifesto.

Other killers would have dropped their masks by now, letting their true selves shine through. But Gideon's face remained calm. It occurred to her that this may be his true self: calm, measured, always calculating, and completely without remorse. The thought made her feel ill.

"You know," he said, with the warm candor of a college professor addressing his class. "Normal people consider those like Frank to be monsters. To them, they're demons. Animals. Boogiemen, lurking in closets. But you and I – this whole team of ours – we know that's not true. They're not monsters. They're a disease, and we are their cure."

Unbidden, Prentiss remembered the recordings she'd seen of Gideon lecturing on profile techniques to the young cadets of the FBI. He'd used exactly this tone, pacing before a slide projector, never turning an eye to the horrors splashed onto the wall. This was how he'd first appeared to Hotch and to countless other trainees. He'd been a leader. A mentor. A friend.

"The work we did here – that you all still do here – it's good work. But it's out of date. Strains of the disease have evolved beyond the BAU's capacity to treat. So I evolved the treatment to match."

It took all of Prentiss's self-control not to start picking her nails – a tick she'd picked up years ago to deal with nerves. "So what you're saying is, you wanted to eliminate the killers that we couldn't reach."

Gideon beamed. "Exactly right."

Something didn't add up. Emily selected another file from her stack. "Then why target Agent Hotchner?"

Gideon frowned. "I never targeted Hotch."

"You left a body in his apartment."

The killer laughed. It sounded warm, but Emily shivered.

"The Reaper? No, no, that was a gift. The BAU made me, you're like family. It's only right to keep an eye on family and to protect them when needed. That's why. I protected Hotch the same way that I protect you, Emily."

All of Prentiss's three-moves-ahead thinking ground to a halt. She stared. "What?"

"Oh?" Gideon quirked his head with child-like curiosity. "You didn't hear about Ian? You should call your friends at Interpol. They'll tell you."

For all of a second, Emily sat frozen in shock, hardly able to believe her ears. Then she bolted to her feet and dashed out the door, cellphone in hand.

"What the hell was that?"

Of course, it was a rhetorical question. Hotch had no better way of knowing the answer than Morgan, but it relieved the younger agent somewhat to voice their mutual confusion.

On the other side of the glass, Prentiss had gone ramrod stiff. Her knuckled turned white, clenching the table's edge. Morgan could see her shoulders tremble. A second later, she bolted, leaving the case files behind. Hotch darted past Morgan to follow her into the hall. Derek lingered just long enough to catch a final glimpse of Gideon – the arrogant dick – grinning at the window without a care in the world.

Morgan gave chase. He and Hotch emerged to find Emily fumbling with her phone. Beneath her make-up, she'd gone pale as a ghost.

"Prentiss," said Hotch, closing the distance between them. "What happened in there?"

Emily nearly dropped her phone. Her jumpiness unnerved Morgan more than anything. This woman had once volunteered to take a brutal beating in a hostage situation to save a child services worker the same fate. She'd faced down murderers, rapists, and psychopaths without blinking and eye. Hell, she'd interrogated sadistic torturer-killers in that same room a dozen different times and always walked away without a hair out of place. Yet, one line from Jason Gideon left her rattled.

Morgan curled his hands into fists and stepped to Hotch's shoulder, scanning Emily's eyes for answers. "Who's Ian?"

Emily tightened the grip on her phone, pulling it in protectively. "I…I can't tell you."

"Why not?" asked Hotch.

"It's classified."

Mentally, Morgan cursed. If he never had to deal with government secrets again, it would be too soon.

"Look," said Prentiss, before Hotch could press for more info. She glanced up at the clock hanging above their heads. "I need you to make a call. As soon as I know more, I'll tell you, I swear. Just...trust me. Okay?"

Hotch fixed her with his thousand-yard stare, the one that always made Morgan feel like his very soul was being scrutinized. Emily matched him measure for measure. With a nod, Hotch let her go.

Morgan let out the air he hadn't realized he was holding. His hands curled into fists, nails digging into his palm. He wanted to kill that gray-haired son of a bitch. Gideon had disrupted Morgan's team, putting Hotch on edge for weeks and taunting them with his damn state-hopping. He'd dug his fingers into old wounds and threatened two of the strongest women Morgan had ever known.

He had, in short, messed with Morgan's family.

Nobody messed with Morgan's family.

Derek took a deep breath, reigning in the old instincts that urged him to beat that smug bastard into a pulp. He glanced Hotch to find his team leader looking back, Out of everyone, Hotch had taken this case the hardest. He needed to know that they all his back.

"You want me to go in again?"

"No." Hotch looked at the wall clock that Prentiss had checked a minute before. His brow furled in thought. "He's waiting for something."

Morgan raised an eyebrow and lifted his gaze to the clock. The motion felt familiar. He'd seen it somewhere before…

It dawned on him: Gideon. This was what he'd been doing the whole time. Another clock, exactly like this one, hung in the observation room. It always had. Gideon couldn't see it, but he knew it was there.

"The tapping," muttered Morgan, working through his thoughts out-loud. "He was counting seconds. And he kept asking for the time even though he knew we wouldn't give it."

"He's waiting for something and he wants us to know it."

"But what? What the hell could he do from in here?"

"Hotch!"

Both men turned at the call to find JJ rushing towards them with quick, professional strides. Unlike Prentiss, who could hide her feelings with a mask, Agent Jareau channeled her nerves into a vibrant energy that would have made her glow on screen. Only the slightest loss of breath as she caught them betrayed how afraid she really was.

"I just got a call from the Arlington police. They found another body with Gideon's signature."

On instinct, Hotch reached for a case file but it hadn't been shipped. His brow wrinkled. "They're sure?"

"Positive. C.o.D. single gunshot wound to the head, same caliber as the others. A chess piece was found in the right hand. A white knight."

"When was it found?"

"An hour ago."

Morgan groaned. This was not looking good.

"Could it have been dumped earlier?" asked Hotch.

JJ shook her head. "Based on traffic patterns, it couldn't have been there more than ten minutes before it was found. The M.E.'s put the tentative time of death at ten-thirty this morning."

"While Gideon was turning himself in," said Morgan with a sigh. He ran a hand over his shaved head and looked to his boss. "Hotch, you know what this means."

They all did. Hotch sighed.

"Gideon has a partner."