Major General Jack O'Neill walked stiffly into his Alexandrian townhouse that Friday afternoon. His body on automatic as it went through the rituals of locking the door behind him, kicking off his shoes, hanging his visor on the coat rack, and tugged at his tie as he made his way to his living room.
Working on the tie he tossed his briefcase onto the coffee table in front of his couch and headed for the living room's liquor cabinet. Fumbling with the cabinet doors his trembling fingers closed around the neck of a fifteen-year-old whisky bottle and a glass.
Turning back around he walked stiffly back to the couch, set the bottle and glass down, and sat himself down on the couch cushions. Jack first shrugged off his jacket and tossed it over the back of the couch, the weight of the medals, awards, and ribbons so much that the jacket slipped off the back onto the floor with a muffled thump.
Jack took no notice as he uncorked the full whisky bottle and poured himself a generous serving. With a swiftness at odds with his, until then displayed stiff and automata actions, he tossed the whisky back and barely felt the burn as it traveled down his throat.
The neck of the bottle and rim of the glass chimed against each other as he poured himself another serving and then against the glass top of the coffee table as he set the bottle and glass down.
Forcing the trembling from his shaking fingers he reached for his briefcase and unlatched it. His emotions in turmoil and wishing desperately that he could control them as fiercely as he now controlled his body. How could she have…?
He opened the case and drew out the five by seven envelope that sat on top of the pile of work papers. He had always known that she was out of his league but this was a brutal twisting knife to his heart that almost made breathing difficult. He had been a fool to believe that it was really him that she… a thing for the lunatic fringe, obviously it was a thing for her COs!
With the envelope in his hand, he re-latched the briefcase and after setting it onto the floor, pushed it underneath the coffee table with his foot.
Still exerting precise control over his fingers he opened the envelope and drew out the collection of twenty photographs. He let the envelope flutter away in ignorance as he fanned the photographs across the glass top of the coffee table. That done, Jack methodically matched and sorted the images by the timestamps in their lower right corner into groups of three.
Dates that were all from this month.
That done he couldn't control the trembling of his fingers any longer as he hurriedly reached for the glass. Only the fact that he had only filled the glass to the halfway mark kept the whiskey from splashing over the rim of the glass as his shaking hands brought it to his mouth to drink.
The whisky burned down his throat once again and Jack squeezed his eyes shut tight against the sensation. But the tears that leaked at the edges were not from the whiskey burn but the rendering of his heart because of the pornographic photographs.
Photographs that graphically showed Samantha O'Neill having sex with Cameron Mitchell.
. . .
Jack awoke Saturday morning feeling like utter crap and his mouth tasted like something dead had taken up residence in it overnight. His misery wasn't help by the awkward stiffness which came from spending the night asleep on the couch and he had decided two decades ago that he was way too old to be sleeping on sofas.
His mind fuzzy about last night that had led to such a degrading condition and drinking binge, with a grunt of effort he attempted to climb to his feet and instead nearly rolled off the couch. A flailing arm that touched the coffee table halted his momentum and the touch of glossy photographs underneath his fingers and, even before his beery eyes could focus on the table, the events of yesterday returned in a torrent rush.
And as memory returned he wished he could have remained in a drunken stupor. How could she have betrayed him? How could he have been so blind to believe she really loved him?
Combined with the binge drinking of last night, the painful twisting of his heart had him flailing into a sitting position as he fought the urge to vomit until he was steady enough to get to his feet and make the sanctuary of the bathroom.
Jack hunched forward over the coffee table and the whisky glass set onto a photograph, to give himself a few more moments to fight his gag reflex. As he did so his slowly focusing beery eyes caught a detail of the distorted magnification of a part of the photograph the whisky glass was sitting on.
As his interest in what the bottom of the glass had isolated sharpened, his urge to vomit faded. Straightening from his hunched over position he picked up both glass and photograph and took another long look. After a minute he put both glass and photograph down and a little unsteadily, got to his feet.
Jack stood still for a few minutes to let the room stop spinning. Once he was certain his head wasn't threatening to fall off any more, he carefully made his way from the living room to his home office and began fumbling through the drawers. Finally finding what he was looking for, oddly shoved between two books of his small office library, he grasped the object firmly and carefully made his way back to the living room.
Sinking into the couch cushions Jack set the glass and empty whisky bottle onto the far corner of the coffee table and picked up the first photograph. This time as he examined the images he ignored the pornographic positions of Sam and Mitchell and just focused on his wife's body.
Slowly and meticulously he examined the photographs underneath the magnifying glass he had fetched. It didn't take him looking at more than three photographs again for him to confirm what the glass had shown him, but it was not until the last image was scrutinised with the magnifying glass that he allowed himself to wilt back into the couch in boneless relief.
His mind dizzy with heart mending relief and gut churning guilt. He knew her. Knew that she would rewrite the laws of physics and challenge the chain-of-command for him. Knew that even if she had not already done those things for him, that she was a woman who once she gave her word to 'love, honour, and cherish' would do so until death and beyond.
God… how could he even have believed for even a moment?
It wasn't his Sam.
The whisky glass he had first looked into had not only magnified, but isolated Sam's left thigh which was clearly shown as she rode Mitchell. In the picture her left thigh was smooth and blemish free. In truth he knew his wife's left thigh to be marked by a rather large plasma scar from her encounter with a Kull warrior. It was faint relatively speaking, but it was still noticeable and something that would have been shown on the photographs given their clarity.
But that mark and sign of battle was not the only one missing from his wife's body.
The other significant scar missing was the one on her lower abdomen where she had been knifed when the base had gone primitive back in the first year of the program. It had scarred rather noticeably after being infected which meant to this day she refused to wear bikinis to public beaches.
There were other identifying marks that he had delighted in acquainting himself with since their marriage, her coffee coloured freckles and intimately placed mole, but those scars…
The anguished pain in his heart was rapidly morphing into a cold burning fury as he reached underneath the coffee table for his briefcase.
No one attacked his wife.
No one.
Setting his briefcase onto the glass surface in front of himself Jack snapped open the latches and found his cell phone buried between work papers. His mind already racing a mile a minute he rose to his feet, punched numbers into the mobile device and as it rang, began striding to his bedroom to remove the uniform that he still wore.
Barely giving his aid on the other end time to answer, Jack snapped out his orders. "Davis, get me everything about Harvey Gold and Donald Mackay. I want to know everything, from where they went to school to what brand of toilet paper they use."
His aid affirmed the general's orders and after ending the call, Jack tossed his cell phone onto his bed and he stripped off his clothes to toss them into the laundry hamper. He would shower, eat breakfast, and then call his aid back to find out what the preliminary search of Gold and Mackay had dug up.
Chapter 3: http://akarswyll.blogspot.ca/2010/10/extortion-ch-3-short-story-jacksam-m.html
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