Chapter 3 - Calculating

"What the hell just happened?" Eric Weiss asked. He had been listening to the radio feed with Vaughn in a CIA operations room.

"I don't know," Vaughn replied, trying to keep his voice steady. "Syd, you okay?"

He held his breath for the long, agonizing pause before she spoke, sounding a little disoriented. "Yes...no. Anna's here. She got the vials, and...."

He heard her pounding on the walls and door of the vault. "....Vaughn, I think I'm locked in here."

Vaughn barely flicked his microphone switch before blurting to Weiss, "Damn it." He turned the microphone back on. "Syd, do you have any way out of there?"

Vaughn could hear her beating on the door with something, her breathing a little heavier when she finally spoke. "I don't think so." Now, her voice held desperation. "Vaughn, I'm trapped in here, and I think it's below freezing."

The panicked glance he gave to Weiss belied Vaughn's calm words. "We need to get somebody, preferably a team, down there now. Tell them Agent Bristow is trapped in a refrigerated vault." Panic pummeled Vaughn's stomach as he touched the microphone switch, adding, "And see if we can get somebody in here that knows about...hypothermia."

Weiss yanked the phone nearest him from its receiver as Vaughn switched his microphone back on. "Sydney, we're going to get you out of there."

He glanced over at his friend as Weiss' voice grew louder. "No, you don't seem to understand. If we don't move on this right now we're going to lose one of our most valuable doubles." Weiss paused. "Well then pull them off! We can't afford to lose any more time."

Finally, Weiss seemed satisfied with the response he got. "Nearest agents are half an hour away," he told Vaughn, already in the process of dialing another number. "They're on their way now."

"Syd, we've got people on the way, but it's going to take a little while."

"How long?" Fear wasn't something Vaughn often heard in her voice, and the sound of it clutched at him.

"About half an hour."

"Oh." He could hear her begin to breathe more rapidly, but couldn't see the frightened look in her eyes as she glanced down at her arms and saw the beginnings of goose bumps on what had just recently been overheated flesh. 

Vaughn turned his attention to Weiss' phone conversation.

"It's going to be at least 30 minutes before we can get anyone in there." Weiss motioned to him to turn off his microphone, asking, "Can she give you a temperature, even an estimate?"

A temperature, Vaughn thought, means they're calculating how long she'll survive in there. The room seemed to spin slightly with that realization. "Syd, can you give us a temperature?"

"I don't know," she responded, voice shaky. "It's really cold, and there's a thin layer of ice over everything."

Weiss relayed this information into the phone, then glanced at Vaughn. His left hand was hovering over the microphone switch, shaking, while his right clutched the table's edge in a white-knuckled grip. Weiss' next words were quiet, almost a whisper. "I don't think he wants to know."

"That's Dr. Jenkins from medical," Weiss said, hanging up the phone. "She's on her way here, but she said really the only thing you can do is keep her talking."

Vaughn increased the tension in his right hand to the point where Weiss was waiting for either the table or some of the bones to snap under the pressure. Still maintaining his death grip on the table, Vaughn glanced down at the microphone switch and then back up at Weiss, his eyes leaking the pure terror paralyzing his mind.