Chapter One

"Don't waste words on people who deserve your silence. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can say is nothing at all." Mandy Hale

Hotch was sitting in his office approving case files and expense reports when a tall, lanky, red haired man walked in and sat down across from him. Hotch looked up and noted the FBI visitors badge. He stared the man down trying to ascertain who he was and what he wanted, but he couldn't think of anything.

"I need your help, Hotchner," the man finally stated.

"That depends on what it's for. I don't know you, but yet you've come in here, sat down, and acted like you have some major reason for being here. So, why don't you tell me what you need and then I'll decide if I want to help you," Aaron answered.

The man regarded Hotch for a second. He reached into a small case at his side and pulled out a file. He tossed it on the desk in front of Hotch.

"That file doesn't exist. The contents do not leave this room. Study it for a second and then let me know what you think."

Hotch arched his eyebrow at him as he opened the file folder. He sifted through the papers until his eyes found what the man knew he would find. Two words stared at him off the page. He immediately looked up into the green eyes of the man in front of his desk.

"She's missing?"

"Yes."

"How long?"

"We aren't sure."

"You aren't sure?"

"She went undercover several weeks ago. Her handlers lost contact with her in Germany about a week ago. Honestly, we don't know where to begin to look. We don't know if she is on the run or if she's been captured. We need your help."

"This is going to be easy," Hotch told him.

"I know. I've already got you cleared for whatever and whoever you want. Clyde told me to come to you. He said that you would know what to do. He told me that you could help me."

"Clyde Easter?"

"Yes," the man answered.

"What else do you have?"

"What do you mean?"

"This file doesn't tell me much. You are holding something back from me. What is it?"

"There is another agent that we would like to bring in to help you."

"Interpol?"

"Yes."

"Who is she?"

"Her name is Amelia Benton. She has been working the intelligence side of the case that Prentiss was working. They have never met in person, but she is the best thing to Prentiss for the case. Aaron, we need you to find Prentiss and close the case."

"Easter knew I would take the case because of Emily didn't he?" Hotch asked him.

"He had a pretty good idea that you would, yes."

"Where is this Agent Benton?"

"London."

"Will she come here for briefings?"

"I think that you might want to go to her."

"Doesn't fly?"

"Umm…well…she's not a regular agent. She is a little more…independent. She's the best at our counter-terror office. She is highly decorated and well trained. But, she isn't going to go willingly without meeting you and seeing what you are going to do about the case."

"Who does she report to?"

"Myself and Easter."

"Ah, I'll have to take a few minutes and get with two of my agents before I give you my answer. Can you give me at least an hour? Then, I'll give you my answer."

"Should I wait here?"

"That's fine," Hotch said.

He left his office and went into the bullpen. He looked at Reid. Motioning him over, Hotch told him to watch the man in his office and make sure that he stayed there. Reid nodded, but gave Hotch a quizzical look as he headed to the elevators. He pushed the number for the floor to Garcia's office and rode in silence.

Reid stood in the middle of the bullpen. Morgan and JJ came out of her office and stared at him. They watched him staring up at Hotch's office. Giving each other a look, they headed down to him. Reid looked at them as they stopped in front of his desk.

"What's going on, Pretty Boy?" Morgan asked him.

"Hotch has a visitor."

"Who?" JJ asked.

"I don't know. British Intelligence possibly. Hotch left him in there."

"Really?" Morgan asked arching an eyebrow in question.

"Yeah, and then he headed to the elevators."

"He's going to Garcia," JJ stated.

"Well, Pretty Boy, keep watch on him. Let me know the second Hotch comes back. I have a nagging feeling that we are about to get a case we aren't going to like," Morgan replied.

"Garcia," Hotch stated as he entered her office.

"Yes, my liege?"

"I need you to find out everything that you can on an Amelia Elizabeth Benton."

"Give me a minute," she told him as she typed away at the keyboard.

Hotch watched the screens. Information flew across them, but nothing was making any sense to him. He couldn't pick anything out that would help him.

"Okay, well, that's weird."

"What?"

"There is only one page. It's on the printer. Hold on a sec and I'll grab it," Garcia leaned back and snatched a sheet of paper of the printer in the back of the office before handing it to him.

"There are no pictures?" Hotch asked her looking over the paper.

"None that I could find," Garcia said.

"Keep looking. I'll be in the conference room. Call me immediately."

"You want me to do a 'thing'?"

"Yes," he said, taking the paper and leaving her office.

He headed back up into the bullpen. He avoided making eye contact with anyone there as he headed back into his office. He sat down behind his desk and set the paper that Garcia had printed out down on the desk.

"Okay, so I know nothing about this agent you want to give us. Do you want to fill in some of the blanks? You can start with your name and what her official title is," Hotch told him.

"My name is James Randall Mackenzie. Most of my teams just call me Mac. And, Amelia is a specialize agent. She works intel for us. She is hardly in field, but she is more than qualified. She is part of the team that was feeding Prentiss information while she was undercover. She was the primary on the intelligence. She knows the case as well as or better than Prentiss did herself. Prentiss' handlers don't even know what she knows," he stated.

"You knew that we would take this case, didn't you?"

"We hoped you would."

"Why are there no pictures of Agent Benton?"

"She worked for MI-5 and was attached to a SAS unit. In certain circles, she doesn't even exist. Let me see what you have," Mac suggested with his hand out.

Hotch handed him the paper and sat back. He watched the man before him, studying him, reading him as he looked over the paper. When the green eyes looked up and met Hotch's brown, Hotch realized that the man was legit and worried.

"You've gotten more than normal release. I assume that your technical analyst got more information because she is very adept at getting information from multiple sources. What else will you need to know?"

"You will sit in on a briefing. You will tell us everything that you know and we will find her. I am treating this like a counter-terror case as I assume that is what it is. We will have full disclosure. Is that understood?" Hotch asked him.

"I will give you what I can," Mac informed him.

"It better be enough. I want her back in one piece. And, I don't want to have to explain to the Ambassador what happened. That will be your job. You lost her."

"Agreed," Mac replied.

"Wait here. I'll come back for you in a few minutes. And, remember we are doing this my way or I'll just send you to Guantanamo. The choice is yours," Hotch threatened.

"I want her back, Hotchner. I want her alive and well. I want her to survive this."

Hotch nods at him, realizing that he is really upset about her being missing. He didn't know what he was going to tell the team, but he knew that he would ask them all if they wanted to go. He wasn't going to force it on them. It would be their choice.

He picked up his phone and dialed Garcia's office.

"Office of the Empress of Supreme Knowledge, how can I help?"

"Garcia, any news?" Hotch asked her.

"Nothing yet, my liege, but I'm still searching. Do you have something that can help narrow my search? Cause I got the kids working hard as they can?" Garcia asked him.

"No, I don't have anything. Come up here and send everything that you have to the conference room. Five minutes," he told her walking out into the bullpen. "Conference room, now."

Morgan, Reid and JJ looked at each other. They didn't need to be told twice. They grabbed their tablets and headed up to the conference room. They poured into the room and took their seats. He waited for them to sit.

"We are waiting for Garcia-"

"Here, my liege, please continue," Garcia said taking her seat and then took the remote.

"Early today we were given some information that you all may a little disturbing. Before I give what little I have in way of a briefing, I want you to know that nothing that is said leaves this room. Also, you will each have the choice in this case to join in or stay."

Morgan shifted uncomfortably. JJ turned to Garcia. She could tell that Garcia knew something that she wasn't telling them. Reid could feel the tension in the room but he couldn't figure out why. Garcia stared at the table. She couldn't figure out where to look and she knew more than they did because of her searches. Hotch waited for the initial shock to where off before he started to tell them anything.

"As you remember, Prentiss went back to Interpol. There has been some creditable traffic in the intelligence world for counter-terrorism and she needs our help. This is going to like the time we went after Doyle. There will be no official reports going into our system. Everything will be going to Interpol. This briefing will have never officially happened. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Reid answered.

Morgan stated, "Absolutely."

"I'm in," JJ said.

"Whatever she needs," Garcia told Hotch.

"Good. Now, I have to go get Agent Mackenzie. If you want something to drink, now is the time. Once he starts, we won't stop until he is done with his briefing," Hotch told them.

He left the room. Morgan got up and poured glasses of water. He passed them around the round the table and sat back down. He looked around the table watching his fellow agents.

"Anyone got any clue?" he asked.

"Garcia?" JJ questioned.

"I don't know what I know. Hotch came to me earlier and had me run a search. I was looking up some information on an Interpol agent. Other than that, I have no idea what it means."

Hotch came in before anything else could be said. Followed behind him was the tall red head from his office. Morgan sized him up as he came into the room. Garcia looked at him questioningly. JJ and Reid turned from the newcomer back to Hotch as he took his seat. The other man sat down beside him and Garcia.

"I am Agent JR Mackenzie or Mac. I am the Bureau Chief in charge of the London field office for Interpol. Currently we are working on counter-terror issues intermixed with crimes against children. Agent Emily Prentiss was in charge of a task force we called JTF Doppelgänger. At approximately, Nineteen Hundreds hours Greenwich, Interpol Agent Emily Prentiss went missing in the small town of Landshut. She was in country pretending to be major French buyer for goods you don't want to know about. She was exceptionally good at infiltration organizations to get what we needed to bring them down."

"That she is," Morgan quipped.

"She has been quite effective. Two nights ago she was to meet with an arms dealer that was trying to pass off old Russian nuclear materials. She went to the drop site to make the buy. She never made her rendezvous' point. We aren't even sure if she made the buy."

"She's been missing since the buy?" JJ asked worriedly.

"We don't know that. She failed to contact us at the appropriate time. When reports came back to my office stating that she wasn't reporting in, I immediately sent dispatches out to local police and other Interpol agents in the area. We swarmed the sellers and took them down. They had no evidence of her ever being there. It looks like she made it to the drop. We have no idea where she is, but we know that she had contact with one of our analysts."

"Who?"

"Her name is Amelia Benton."

"Do we have a dossier on her?" Reid questioned.

"Yes," Hotch answered and looked at Garcia.

Garcia pulled up the dossier on the monitor in the conference room. They all looked at it. They weren't sure what they were looking at but they knew that it was a sanitized personnel file.

"Is that it, Baby Girl?" Morgan asked.

"That is all I could find," she replied.

"Do you have more?" JJ questioned him.

"That is more than I got when I hired her," Mac told them.

"So how can this analyst help?" Reid inquired.

"She is Emily's Doppelganger."

"Excuse me?" JJ stated leaning onto the table, "What does that mean?"

"Miss Garcia, may I borrow your lap top for a second."

Hotch nodded at her. She pushed it over to him. He acquired an Interpol secure connection and pulled up Agent Amelia Benton's picture. He set it next to the dossier on the screen.

"She is Emily in a nut shell. She has been groomed for field work. But, sometime in 2011 or 2012 she was removed from field work. This order came from an outside agency and it was given the highest priority. I can't even see the file that tells us why."

"Late 2011, like Winter?" JJ asked.

"Yeah, why?"

"I know why she was pulled from field duty then."

"Why?" Hotch asked.

"That is when Elizabeth Prentiss when back to London as the Ambassador. It was when Easter started calling Emily again. It was when she found out that Declan had been taken. It had everything to do with Prentiss and Doyle. Who is this Agent Benton to Prentiss?"

"We don't know," Mac told her.

"I do," Reid stated looking at the picture harder.

"Who is she, Reid?"

"She is a Prentiss," he told them all.

JJ sat back in her chair and stared at the picture. She could see it. The same eyes, the same cheeks. The nose was wrong, smaller, not as pronounced, but she did favor Emily with an amazing about likeness. She could have been her younger sister or daughter.

"How old is Agent Benton?" Morgan asked.

"Twenty-five."

JJ gasped. She had the answers. They were right in front of her. They were on the page and her features.

"I know why she was pulled from field duty. It was the same reason that her files have all be crazy sanitized. Like even Garcia sanitized," JJ told them looking at the screen.

"Who is she, JJ?"

"She is the mistake she took care of when she was in Rome as a teenager."

"That's Emily's daughter?" Morgan asked looking back at the screen.

"Wait, Benton…Benton…that was the name of the guy who took her to the clinic."

"Only, I bet that if we asked the Ambassador, Emily never made it to the clinic. Matthew Benton was a family friend. He stopped her. Got her away from Rome. The Ambassador moved to Paris the next month. Emily was probably hidden away until the birth. Matthew took the child and raised it. He was a little older and from money in Rome. He had enough connections to hide the child's true identity."

"How the hell did you get that from this?" Morgan asked her.

"Look at her name."

"Amelia Elizabeth Benton," Reid stated.

"No, look at the mother's name."

"Amelia I. P. Benton," Reid read of the screen.

"Garcia, look up Italian names for Emily and Elizabeth," JJ told her.

"Emily turns into Amelia and Elizabeth into Isabella," Garcia told her.

JJ stood up and pointed at the screen. Her fingers ran over the name. She realized then, that Emily had always been protecting those who couldn't protect themselves, including her teenage self. She had given Matthew her baby to protect it because she didn't want it growing up like she did. She wanted her to have a better life, and what a better life she would have with an ex-pat living in Rome who had money.

"Amelia Isabella Prentiss Benton…Amelia I. P. Benton."

"She would do that," Reid pointed out.

"So what do we do now?" Morgan asked, his mind sufficiently blown.

"Now we go to Agent Benton and get her to help us bring Emily home."

"Where are we going?" JJ asked.

"We are officially going to visit the Ambassador per her request. We will be staying at embassy lodging while we are in London. Garcia, pack up whatever and I do mean whatever you might need for a field trip. The rest of you, two go bags, deep field and survival if you got it included with your field, and camera ready, flashy to the nines, go bag. We are about to go to the Ritz and find ourselves in a jungle. Wheels up in two hours."

They all left the conference room but JJ. She stayed and she studied the dossier of the younger woman left on the screen. She was smart, deadly, and proficient. Emily would be proud.

"Why did you tell us, Em? Why did you keep her such a secret? Who's her father really?"

"The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just have to find the ones with suffering for." Bob Marley