Chapter Text
Cuppa Joe – Would you like some stimulating conversation with that, Sir?
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Jon sat at a table in a local coffee shop, sipping a large regular dark roast coffee, and reading the newspaper. His apartment - his place of residence - was no longer the home and sanctuary it had been to him, or rather his full-grown counterpart, so he had taken to coming to the small café down the street, and nursing a cup of coffee on weekends. Some evenings they even had live music. Besides, as idiotic as it was, it made him feel more adult, sitting inconspicuously in the corner drinking his strong coffee and reading the sports section.
Some five months ago, Jon Kemp had been Jack O’Neill, a full bird colonel in the United States Air Force, working for a massive, top-secret military project, whose sole purpose was exploration through a piece of alien technology discovered in the desert of Giza around the turn of the century. This piece of technology was known as the Stargate, and was a large ring capable of establishing a stable wormhole between itself and any of countless others stationed on various other worlds throughout this and other galaxies.
Through a mishap of fate, Jack O’Neill had ended up getting cloned by a tiny grey alien, one of the same species as the Roswell Greys, who thought his genetic code could help in their species’ battle with infertility. His clone, Jon, had been imprinted with all of his knowledge and experiences, but had not grown past the maturity of a fifteen or sixteen year old. He had been on the verge of death before another Asgard, as the Greys were called, stepped in and fixed the flaws in his genetic code. Still, Jon found himself a clone - unwanted and un-useful to the world, not to mention 16 years old - and so had decided to begin once more on his life, starting in high school. Since then he’d been busy maintaining his cover, living on the shoestring budget the Air Force provided him, and generally trying to enjoy his second shot.
Someone with a large presence was looming over his table, which caused him to fold down the top of the Sports section to examine this person who deemed it necessary to interrupt him in his rest and relaxation. The man was tall and on the lanky side of athletic. Dark hair, round glasses just a bit too small, giving him a ridiculous look, accompanied by a blue shirt, tie, and dark slacks. It wasn’t so much that the man was large - he was tall - but that his personality seemed to fill up the general vicinity, giving Jon the unsettling feeling he wasn’t entirely prepared for, or in control of what was about to happen.
“May I sit down?” The man asked politely. He had a few folders shoved under one arm, a cup of coffee in the other hand, and a polite, detached expression Jon remembered Daniel using on the slightly feral inhabitants of other planets countless times. So this guy thought he was feral, did he? Maybe someone from the Air Force had sent him.
“Depends. Who are you?” Jon asked boldly. Advantage of being a teenager - nobody expected him to be mature or polite. If someone got a straight sentence out of him they were glad for it.
“Jarod Thomas. I’m with the State Department.” He responded as politely as his expression suggested he would. Jon shrugged and nodded towards the free seat. Deliberately, he folded his paper. If this guy planned on interrupting him, he better know he was displeased about it.
“May I ask the occasion?” Jon asked finally, sarcasm dripping. Mr. Thomas had settled in the chair, set his folders down, and pulled a coffee stirrer from his shirt pocket, which he used to stir his drink in a slow, steady figure eight.
“Actually, I was hoping you could help answer a few questions for me. Jonathan Kemp, am I correct?” The damned glasses. He couldn’t take this guy seriously. Jon nodded finally. “I’ve been assigned the task of looking into the death of your parents. Daisy and Thomas Kemp, if I’m not mistaken.”
Jon’s eyes narrowed nearly imperceptibly, and his nostrils flared slightly. Not a good line of questioning to be going into. The cover story they’d set up for him was as solid as it could be made. Birth certificate, social security, two dead parents and enough history to throw off most determined investigators. This guy might just be an honest employee of the country trying to tie up loose ends before the official investigation was closed, but he could also have been sent by the NID to suss him out or any other of a number of groups who could be intent on harming him or attempting to extract information.
“I don’t remember much. It was all a bit stressful.” He said quietly, finally.
“I understand,” Mr. Thomas said, genuinely sounding like he did, “but anything at all you could tell me would be helpful. We’re just trying to get some more detail to help flesh out the account. According to your file you were just a building away from the explosion when it happened.” Jon nodded, thinking furiously about looking deadpan or traumatized. Either would be acceptable. “Anything you can tell us about before or after would be helpful. Anything at all.”
“I don’t remember that much.” Jon spat furiously. His cover story said that he had been the child of a pair of negotiators working in the Middle East who had been killed in a bomb planted at a small restaurant in Tel Aviv. As morbid as it was, the remains had been so jumbled, they’d only been able to identify the dead by dental records and accounts of those in the surrounding area of those that had been near when the attack occurred. Except for conscientious government employees like Mr. Thomas, it was a good cover. Nobody would dispute that the couple reported near the café, and later reported missing, had been killed, and nobody argued with the state supporting their orphan.
He was called back to the present situation as the fellow pressed the matter, “Perhaps you could go back over it with me. Tell me everything you remember from a little before the attack onward.”
“How about no.” Jon suggested, scathingly. “I gave my written account four months ago. Go read that again.” Thinking that perhaps this would be a good time to escape this line of questioning, and in fact this conversation, Jon stood and shoved the paper into his backpack.
“I’m sorry if this is a tough subject, Jon, but I’m just trying to get to the bottom of who set the explosives which killed your parents.”
“Yeah, well if it’s taken you guys this long, maybe you’re not going to find them. I have to go.” Jon took his coffee and left the café at a brisk walk.
Jarod steepled his fingers and rested his chin on them. There was something the kid was hiding. Something he didn’t want discovered. Maybe he had been coerced by some part of the government. His financial support had been threatened, perhaps. He turned his chair so its back was to the wall and he was facing the populous of the café and spread out some of his files. One of them was in fact a small red spiral bound notebook with various cutouts taped and glued into it.
Three kids had been left without parents from the attack. Jon was the last he was investigating, trying to find some incriminating connection between the bombing and the Centre, which he had a hunch was involved somehow. He hadn’t yet found a reason, beyond their innate sadism and hunger for power, but he felt he was onto something with this last kid. He just didn’t react like the others had, not to mention the half-dozen files the Centre kept on him. The eyes looking out at him from the teenage visage were much older then the body suggested they could be. He made a note to look into financial supply and more background. Perhaps a psychological history.
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“Hey Daniel, this is your... nephew. I’m calling to tell you someone’s been asking about mom and dad, and I’m not real comfortable with that. Talk to you soon.”
Jon hung up the phone. Answering machine. Always so cryptic on the answering machine. Always cryptic on the phone, even. But Daniel would get back to him soon enough, if he wasn’t dead or captured by the Goua’uld, in which case someone else from the team would get the message when they got to his house to clean out and package things up.
Almost immediately he got a call back from a breathless Daniel. “Hey Jon, sorry. You called right as I got in. Doesn’t sound good.”
“No. Can you meet in a half hour? Maple Park by the swing sets.”
“Yeah, I guess. Sure. I’ll see you then.”
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“He just doesn’t feel right.”
“I’ll get someone to look into it, I guess.” Daniel shrugged. This cloak and dagger business was entirely out of his league. He’d have to get Jack involved, though he understood why Jon hadn’t contacted his adult counterpart directly first. None of the old team had kept in contact with Jon except for him.
“I never saw any credentials, either. It was weird.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Yeah. Well.... if you don’t hear from me in a few weeks, avenge my death, okay?” Jon suggested, sarcastically.
“Sure Jon. I’ll put that in the record.”
---
Jarod stared at the information he had accumulated. It was like chasing another Pretender. The facade of the story was completely set up. It was a few feet deep - the entire story - but after that there was just nothing. There was a doctor who swore Jon Kemp had been born in 1988 in Prague, and a few official documents insisting that Daisy and Thomas Kemp had traveled over the world working on various treaties and reform of governmental policies, but their names weren’t on any official documents from the time, and nobody officially involved could verify their presence let alone involvement.
Everything indicated that this kid had been made up, and his parents’ records faked, but for all he was worth, Jarod couldn’t come up with a reason someone would have done that. Someone of Jon’s age, even an escaped Pretender, would have had nowhere near the resources needed for such a vast cover for himself. And even odder, it appeared that as soon as the cover story was set up, he’d settled down to being a normal teenager, joining the debate team and hockey.
Another thing to reconcile was the Centre’s interest in the kid. They had five separate files, all alluding to something big - something important and potentially lucratively profitable - and all inexplicably linked to Jon and all created within the past six months. The Air Force looked like it was hiding something, as well. They had set up a supply of funds for Jon, but had tried to wipe out any trail back to them, and cut any and all connections.
His conclusions rounded out to that before last year, Jon Kemp hadn’t existed in the United States, or any of the European Union. Where the kid had been living before that? Who had he been? Jarod leaned back in his desk chair and fiddled contemplatively with a troll doll.
---
“You’ve got mail” The computer informed Jarod some time later. He had nodded off to sleep with the troll doll (one with day-glo orange hair and a mischievous look) resting on his belly, leaned back in the rather too comfortable desk chair. He massaged the side of his left knee on which his weight had been resting, and clicked on the e-mail.
It was a message to a sweeper team in Colorado informing them to pick up their package. Considering his recent avenues of research, Jarod could postulate on what that package was. Slipping a few key things into his bag, he trotted downstairs and started up the black sedan he’d gotten for the purposes of this pretend. Jon would be home by now. It wasn’t particularly far from the coffee shop to the apartment he lived in. Jarod glanced out at the traffic, and spun the car into a u-turn.
Plans and backup plans spun through his mind as he drove the relatively short distance to the large block of apartments. When he arrived, a beige van was already parked outside with another dark sedan behind it. A bad feeling settled in his gut.
---
Stupid goons. Stupid NID. GOD DAMNED ASGARD Jon was escorted outside of his apartment. They smashed his kitchen up, and ripped the drawers out of his dresser. He had just gotten everything properly set up and they had smashed up the place. Jack O’Neill, fully grown and matured, may have been able to deal with two or three of the goons with little trouble. They were large, they were strong, and they had guns. They didn’t have terribly much more going for them. But they were big, strong, and had guns. And Jon, though he went to the gym and was working on the tiny scrawny kid thing, was not large enough to deal with the five of them busting through his door and pinning him from five different directions in his living room with their pistols. So he did the logical thing, which he recalled his larger counterpart doing countless times on earth and alien planets. He surrendered.