As everybody in the room turned to stare at her, Amy fought down the urge to turn around and run right back out of the door. She steeled herself. She'd faced scarier things than Marge while with the team. Right now, she couldn't think of any of them.

Squaring her shoulders, ignoring the stares, she strode across the room with faked confidence, pretending to be Hannibal. Nothing ever scared Hannibal. Amy stopped in front of her desk of the glowering Marge and then glanced down at the cardboard cup in her hand. She held it out with a smile, or rather a Smile, this time pretending to be Face.

"I brought you some coffee, boss."

Marge scowled even harder and tossed a copy of that morning's LA Courier Express across the desk to land with the front page facing up. The story she'd written lay in front of Amy. The story she'd waited until the last second to send down to the typesetters. Waited until all the senior staff had left. 'Nearly ready', she'd said as Marge asked for a progress report on her way out. And Marge had nodded and left, because she trusted Amy now. Trusted her to make the print deadline. Trusted her to write a good story.

"What I want to know," Marge said, voice quieter now, but no friendlier. "Is when you transferred from news to editorial? Because I don't recall signing anything about that."

"Editorial?" Amy put the coffee cup down on the desk, trying to ignore the fact they were still the centre of attention. A phone rang somewhere in the room, but nobody answered it.

"This," Marge picked up the paper. "This is not a news report. This is a goddamn love letter to Templeton Peck!"

Somewhere behind Amy, someone giggled. Amy winced. Bad idea. Marge shoved her chair to one side, the castors rattling, and glared past Amy.

"What do you people think this is, cabaret? Get back to work! Frank, pick up your damn phone!" Amy heard the newsroom bustle back into life, the ringing phone silenced.

Marge shoved the chair back into place, picked up the coffee cup and sipped from it, frowning at Amy. The scrutiny reminded Amy of being back in school, standing in front of the principal and her expression naturally fell into the one she'd worn then. The 'you can't possibly think it was little me that dropped that stink bomb in the faculty bathroom' expression.

"Take that 'little miss innocent' look off your face," Marge snapped. Amy looked more serious at once, seeing she wasn't fooling anybody.

"Right, come with me." Marge stood up and stalked off. Nervous, Amy followed. On the way out of the room, she glanced back at her desk and wondered who would be sitting there by the end of the day.

Marge led Amy into a storeroom, full of stationery and coffee room supplies and closed the door. She lit a cigarette and studied Amy again for a moment. Amy kept the serious look on her face.

"You sleeping with Peck?"

"What?" Amy's mouth dropped open and she stared. "Of... Of course not!"

"You sure?"

"I think I'd have noticed." A trace of sarcasm crept into her voice before she could control it, but Marge actually gave a small smile.

"I'll bet."

"Look, if I was sleeping with him, I wouldn't exactly be happy about him being in a hotel room with another woman, alive or dead, would I?"

Marge nodded. "What about the others?"

"I am not sleeping with any of the A-Team!" Amy raised her voice and regretted it, because she would bet at least one person had an ear pressed to the outside of the door. She'd hoped that denial would mollify Marge but it only made her frown more deeply.

"In that case, you've got no excuse." She dragged hard on the cigarette and took it out. "If you'd got yourself all love numbed then I could see why you'd let yourself be so... blinkered. But since you're not... Look, we've turned a blind eye, Eldridge and me, to some of your activities with the A-Team, because of the stories you were turning in. Eldridge has gone in to bat for you against the army a bunch of times. Yeah," she said when Amy stared. "Which he's never told you about. But he's protected you."

Amy looked at the floor, feeling ashamed suddenly of the harsh thoughts she'd sometimes had for her editor.

"But you've got to remember that you're supposed to be an observer. You may be in deep with those guys, but you've still got to keep your distance."

And I don't. Amy knew it at once. She protected the team when she reported on their adventures. She never mentioned Murdock, of course, she never put anything in a story that could help the military track them down. But did she go further than that? Did she omit things not simply to protect them, but rather to make them look better?

"If you've lost your objectivity, then... Well you've got to start asking exactly who you are."

Amy looked up as Marge dropped the cigarette butt and stamped it out.

"Are you a journalist, or are you a member of the A-Team? You can't be both. Especially not now. You must be able to see that this changes everything."

"Are you firing me?" Amy asked in a small voice.

"No." Marge shook her head. "Not right now. But you have to make the choice, Amy. If you can't report the facts about the A-Team, then you're not a reporter any more and you don't belong on this paper."

+-+-+

Hannibal and BA returned to the motel, to find Face and Murdock already packing up the team's possessions, ready to move on again. Hannibal knew they couldn't stay in one place for long, but on the other hand, if they were driving around the streets a cop could spot them at any time.

Leaving LA altogether was an option. But he didn't want to be away from the contacts he'd talked to during the night, in case any of them gave him some information he could use. They could just get Face and Murdock out of town maybe, while he and BA stayed here. But splitting up didn't appeal to him either. If someone did have a hit out on the team, then dividing their strength would not be a good plan.

Although Amy's story made Face and Murdock smile when they read the newspaper, they looked disappointed that Hannibal and BA had found so little out during their investigation. The four of them sat eating breakfast in glum silence.

"You know," BA said, breaking the silence eventually, making them turn to look at him. "I been thinking about something. Maybe we been looking at this from the wrong angle." He nodded towards Face. "We're thinking someone did this intending to frame Face. I mean Face in particular. What if it weren't Face they was after, what if it was Celia?"

"Not me?" Face said, frowned. "I don't understand."

"I do." Murdock spoke, slowly, tasting the idea. "You mean, Celia could have been the intended target all along and they would have used whoever happened to be with her that night as the fall guy?"

BA nodded. "Would mean it wasn't Celia who was in the wrong place at the wrong time." He looked at Face. "It was you." Face stared back at him. "Could have been anybody, but that night, just happened to be you."

"I could have just been a patsy?" Face said. "That's... I don't know. I don't know what to think about that. Colonel." He turned to Hannibal. "Does it sound plausible to you?"

Hannibal frowned. He'd not even considered the idea. They had so many enemies he'd just assumed Face must have been the target. Face was a member of the A-Team, who was Celia?

"Who would target her though? She's just an actress." Hannibal said.

Murdock waved a hand. "Some crazy ex-boyfriend or some nut obsessed with her. Or... well, who knows? We don't really know anything about her. For all we know she was a CIA agent."

"Murdock," Hannibal rolled his eyes. Face stared at Murdock and BA snorted.

"I'm just saying there could be a thousand and one reasons why someone might have killed her, and the real one could be something even I can't dream up."

BA nodded and said "yeah", then looked annoyed. Hannibal presumed finding himself in agreement with Murdock disconcerted him.

Hannibal knew they could be right and that just depressed him, because it made things a lot harder for the team to get to the bottom of. And the police wouldn't be looking for anything strange in her background. As far as they were concerned, there was one obvious suspect. Why look beyond the obvious?

"Okay, it's worth considering," Hannibal said. "Apart from the CIA bit, though I assume you're weren't serious about that, Murdock." He stood up. "Get ready to go. I'm going to call Amy and see if she has anything for us and while I'm on, I'll ask her to look up what she can on the - on Celia's background."

He left them tidying up the motel room and found a nearby payphone. Calling Amy's work number was risky, but with the van hidden away, she couldn't call them. He would keep the call short and be careful what he said. Neither Decker nor Lynch had succeeded in getting her phone bugged so far, but that could have changed.

"Amy, it's me," he said when she answered.

"Oh, hey. Um, you okay?"

Hannibal frowned. Her voice sounded rather subdued. Not in the sense of her being surreptitious, just rather glum. Perhaps she'd had as little sleep as they had. Hannibal desperately needed to find some place they could stay for a while, get a full night's sleep. Too old for this many all-nighters in a row, Colonel.

"Are you okay, kid?" His concern came through in his tone even though he tried to keep it casual.

"My boss didn't like my story," Amy said and he heard her sigh.

"Well we liked it." He grinned. "We liked it a lot."

"Right. Great."

It didn't sound as if that cheered her up much, but he didn't have the time to question her more closely.

"Listen, we've been thinking that someone needs to look more closely into Celia's background. In case she's the one this is all about."

"You mean you think Face wasn't the target?" Amy's voice sounded more animated then, intrigued now at this new angle to check out.

"It's something to consider. And I'll bet it's something the police aren't bothering to consider."

"I'm sure they'll be investigating her background." Amy's voice became colder, making Hannibal frown.

"Well, if you've got any contacts at the PD, see what you can get from them." He glanced around. Nobody on the street paid any attention to him that he could see, but he could hear a siren wailing in the distance. Maybe coming this way, maybe not. Time to move either way. "I'll call back later."

"Okay. Hannibal... Take care."

The line went dead. Hannibal looked the phone for a moment and felt nervous. Right now Amy could be their most useful ally, with the resources she had. But if she started having doubts and cut them loose...

No. No way. Amy was loyal to the team. He believed that one hundred percent.

+-+-+

Lieutenant Jack Turner, aged forty-seven and carrying enough extra weight to make his doctor scowl at him, walked up to his desk in the squad room. He pulled the trashcan out from under his desk and dropped in a copy of the LA Courier Express. Then he took the paper back out and this time shoved it in harder before kicking the can back under the desk. His doctor scowled at him about his blood pressure too. Damn quack should try doing this job for a month. Scowling himself, Turner sat down, and looked at the man sitting across the desk from him.

"Damn reporters." Turner said. The other man nodded, in apparent understanding. "Right," Turner went on. "Who the hell are you and what do you want?"

"Colonel Decker." The other man stood up and offered his hand. "I believe you're expecting me."

Turner sighed. Expecting, yes, but not looking forward to the arrival. He stood up and shook Decker's hand and both men sat again.

"You want some coffee?" When Decker nodded, Turner called across to a young uniformed officer. "Hey, Lyman, how about some coffee over here? Does a man have to die of thirst?"

"I've read over your reports," Decker said, when Turner looked back at him.

"Oh really?" Turner would like to get hold of whoever had handed them over. He couldn't leave this place for one damn minute. When they gave him this case he'd read reports too. The Army wouldn't give him Decker's reports, but he'd got hold of reports of local police and sheriff's departments that had encountered the team, and Decker. The former usually running rings around the latter. If this guy Decker thought he could waltz in here and start dictating, he'd soon find out different.

"Why haven't you started tailing Amy Allen?" Decker asked, his tone suggesting that only an idiot wouldn't be doing so.

Well, whaddya know. Here he goes with the dictating.

"She won't meet them. She's not stupid, neither are they."

"I assume you are at least tapping her phone."

"We're working on a warrant for that now." Decker gave him a condescending look. "Listen, Colonel." Turner paused a moment as Lyman placed two mugs of coffee on the desk. "Colonel, you already know damn well that getting a warrant to tap a reporter's phone is no cakewalk. If it was, how come you've not got one before now, since you're so sure she's practically in bed with these guys?"

Decker snorted. "There's no 'practically' about it."

"Right." Turner didn't want to imagine exactly what he meant by that. Amy Allen, and in his mind he growled the name, was a distraction. A friend and ally of the team she might be, but right now, she wouldn't lead them to Peck.

He rolled up his sleeves, warm already. Who had stolen his damn fan? Okay, no sense in grousing. His Captain had told him he had to work with this Colonel Decker. He hated colonels. World's biggest experts at getting people killed, he recalled from the old days.

"Lyman," he yelled again. "Where's the overnight reports of sightings? And find my damn fan."

+-+-+

Face and Murdock waited in their car, parked outside a grocery store. Hannibal and BA were inside the store, and Hannibal's car sat parked in front of Face and Murdock's.

Murdock glanced across at Face in the driver's seat and smiled as Face adjusted the baseball cap he wore. Murdock's cap. Murdock himself was bare headed.

"What's wrong with this picture?" Murdock said, half to himself. Face turned to him looking puzzled.

"Huh?"

"Nothing. How do you like the cap?"

Face adjusted it again, then took it off and ran a hand through his hair. "I don't know how you can stand to wear it all day."

Murdock shrugged. "Get used to it. I feel kind of naked without it now." He glanced at the door of the grocery store. "Wonder where Hannibal's got in mind for us this time."

"Maybe we should get out of the city."

"Maybe." Murdock said. "Is that what you want?"

"What I want?" Face looked at Murdock. "Is that all that's important now. What I want?"

"Well, yeah. I mean keeping you safe, till we work this out, that's the priority right now, obviously."

"Yeah." Face tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. "Protecting me." After a long moment, he spoke again. "What if we can't work it out, Murdock? What if we can't find anything that clears me?"

"We'll find something. But if we don't, well, I guess we come up with a plan. I know Hannibal's never wanted to flee the country, but if we had to, go abroad, so you can be safe, that's what we'd do."

He frowned at Face who just sat tapping the steering wheel again, gazing out of the windshield.

"Face? You okay?"

With a smile, Face turned to him. "Yeah. Just, you know..." He shrugged, and then sat back in the seat again. He glanced at his hand.

"Damn cigar ash." He popped open a foldout ashtray in the dashboard. "Look at this. Overflowing with Hannibal's damn cigars." He pulled the whole ashtray out.

Murdock watched him. Why did Face care about ashtrays at a time like this? Just distracting himself probably.

"Here, Murdock, empty it into the gutter would you?" Murdock started to wind down the window. "You're not going to bang it against the door are you?"

"Fuss, fuss, fuss." Murdock opened the door instead, to empty the ashtray, tapping it against the sidewalk to dislodge all the compressed ash sticking to it. "Geez, when did we last empty --?"

"Goodbye, Murdock. I'm sorry."

"What?" Murdock started to straighten up again, but a violent push sent him tumbling from the car to land on the sidewalk on his right shoulder with a bone-jarring thump. The car door slammed shut behind him and he rolled over as the engine revved.

"Face! No!"

Murdock lunged at the car, grabbing at the door handle, but couldn't catch it. The car roared away and Murdock hit the ground again, half on the sidewalk, half in the gutter. He yelled after the rapidly retreating car.

"Face!"