A/N: I'm not too good at MacGyverisms, so please excuse me if the science of my ideas is wrong! I hope they're not so far off that you lose interest.

MacGyver looked around the room, spotting both officers poking around randomly. "I wouldn't do that if I were you," he warned. "Unless you'd like for all of us to go 'boom'." Both officers abruptly stopped what they were doing and were left idle. They stood nervously switching their weight from foot to foot as MacGyver worked.

MacGyver reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out his Swiss army knife. He then reached into the cabinet under the bathroom sink and pulled out some dental floss and a small jar of extra hold hair gel, the seal still in tact. Steve shot him a bemused look. "Jack likes to keep a spare just about everywhere," Mac offered quickly. He pulled out a length of dental floss, using the gel to make a small, sticky ball at one end. He then unraveled about five feet of the string, cutting it with the knife, and laid the ball on the sink ledge.

He lifted his knife, opening up the blade and examining the trip wire on what he expected to be an explosive device. It seemed simple, really; the small piece of copper wire had been connected to the explosives inside the cabinet, then taped to the side of the mirror with a tiny piece of electrical tape. Once you opened the cabinet, the whole thing would explode. The trick was to get it off the mirror without changing the amount of pressure on it. MacGyver, realizing he only had one free hand, tossed the jar of gel toward Steve. "Rub some of this gel between your thumb and forefinger." Steve made a face at having that stuff on his hands, but a smirking MacGyver hurried him along with one smart remark: "What, like you've never used the stuff before." Steve bucked up and pulled out a good-size glob of the sticky stuff, liberally spreading it on his fingers.

"What do you need me to do with this?" Steve wasn't totally sure what Mac had in mind, but he knew that, to his chagrin, eventually he would be touching the bomb and praying that it wouldn't go off.

"I'm going to pry off the tape here so I can open the door, and I need you to grab the wire and hold it tight. Then I'm going to thread the end through this ball," he explained, holding up the mess of gel and floss, "and I'm going to need you to have a good grip on the wire while I do that." Steve gave a nervous grin as MacGyver asked, "You ready?"

MacGyver took the edge of the blade and slowly pried off the tape as Steve held the end of the copper wire with his sticky hand, trying not to think of the time he was in the hospital when a certain Ms. Sweeney pulled something that was for some reason eerily similar to this. When the wire was finally free, MacGyver carefully removed the tape from the wire and took a peek into the cabinet, left partially open by his dear friend the mad bomber. "Well, it's definitely a bomb," he declared, discovering several pounds of explosives packed into the small cabinet. "Steve, I'm gonna need a little more slack on the end of the wire."

"You want me to move my hand closer to the bomb? You've gotta be kidding me!" Steve saw that MacGyver was smiling, but he wasn't kidding. Carefully Steve grabbed the wire with his clean right hand, holding the tension as he slid his sticky left hand down the wire.

"All right, that's far enough," MacGyver said when he had about six inches to work with. "Now I just need you to hold the end out for me." MacGyver carefully threaded the very end of the wire through the hardening ball of goo, then wound a few more inches of wire around the ball, adding more gel little by little as he went. He worked deliberately slowly, letting each layer of gel dry before he added a new one, with the unfortunate added effect of Steve's nervousness increasing. He topped off the dried gel with the piece of electrical tape he had pried off the mirror. He then pulled the free end of the dental floss gently, trying to keep the tension at a level he assumed was about the same as what Steve was keeping on his part of the deal. He tied the floss securely to the towel rack, sealing off the knot with a little more hair gel. Then he went to testing the knot.

"All right, Steve, you can let go now."

Steve asked MacGyver, "Are you sure this is going to work?" Mac just shrugged his shoulders, his left hand quickly flying to his protesting right shoulder. Steve sighed resignedly and let go. All four men were grateful for the silence that followed, but Mac wasn't satisfied yet. "All right, you guys get out of here. I'm gonna take this thing apart."

"Mac, you aren't serious. You're gonna try to disarm this thing with one hand?"

"It'd be easier if I had someone to help me," he replied suggestively, taking the resigned look on Steve's face as an offer for assistance. "All right, this should be relatively simple. There seems to be just three different triggers."

"Three? Three different triggers and you call that simple?"

"That is simple compared to some of the things I've had to disarm before," he reminded Steve, trying to push his own memories of a dangerous cruise ship out of his mind. "Now, let's see, this trigger wire is going to have to wait. We should probably take care of the motion sensor first."

Steve looked at him, now significantly less nervous, curiosity filling his voice. "And how do you plan on doing that?"

"Well, if we take the door off the hinges and move it straight backwards, we won't break the beam so the laser won't sense the motion." I hope, he added mentally. "Then, once the door is out of the way, it's just a matter of unhooking the sensor from the explosive and then disabling the timer."

"A timer? And how long do we have to disarm that?"

"I don't know. I can't see it."

Mark cast a worried glance over the papers he held in front of him. Steve had actually asked for his father's help on this one, but for once Mark felt at a loss. "Well, folks, I think it's time we broke for the night. I can't think straight with the letters jumping up and down on the page like that."

Amanda and Jesse ignored the not-so-subtle hint and kept on staring at the files in front of them. "Good night, Mark," Jesse responded absentmindedly.

Mark chuckled and shook his head. "This is why I gave them keys," he thought, adding out loud, "Lock up when you leave."

Mark worked his way through the house, locking doors and windows as he went. Steve was still out at MacGyver's house, where Mark knew he would be watching all night, so he didn't bother going downstairs to say good night. Steve had left the case files for Mark, Amanda, and Jesse to review before he left for Mac's, hoping they'd be able to come up with something more than he had. Mark had tried everything he could think of: he put pins in a map where MacGyver had been attacked by Murdoc, he put the places in different orders, he put the methods through all the associations he could come up with - he had tried everything! Something had to be usable as a predicting pattern, but Mark just couldn't see it. He stood in the bathroom, staring at his reflection as he brushed his teeth, seeing not himself but the pinned map in the mirror. As he walked to bed he counted out all the attempted methods of murder, but he couldn't find a pattern. He drifted off to sleep, thoughts of dynamite and long falls haunting his dreams.

Jesse and Amanda continued to study the files as Mark slept. Finally Jesse scrubbed his eyes and took a long look at his watch, not believing the numbers. "My next 12-hour shift starts in about six hours. I already told Mark I wasn't planning on driving home. Do you mind if I sack out on the couch?"

"No, that's fine. I should probably get home. Colin took the boys overnight, but I have my own patients to see tomorrow." Amanda rose and began gathering her things.

"Well, at least your patients don't mind if you yawn in front of them," Jesse joked, filing the paperwork away in a messy pile in a single folder.

"Right, and I'm sure the nurses don't mind your filing system, either," Amanda rebutted, rolling her eyes toward the bulging folder. "Now I see how your apartment could be less appealing than this place."

"Well, maybe if I had someone to help me clean up…"

Amanda held up her hand and stopped Jesse mid-sentence. "Bye bye, Jesse," she said with a smirk on her face, leaving the room before Jesse could give an audible response. Moments later, the sound of Amanda's car starting floated unnoticed towards the ears of the young doctor, already sound asleep on the couch and dreaming of much nicer things than what was going through Mark's subconscious.

"That's one almost down," MacGyver announced as he passed off the detached cabinet door to the waiting officers' hands. "Now hold that very still." "As if they need me to tell them," he thought wryly, suppressing a grin as he saw the look of terror on the face of the younger, obviously green officer. He tried to change his expression from amusement to encouragement, but then he realized the effort would have been wasted since the officer - Officer B. Laifer - had his eyes dead set on the bomb and his hands locked in a death grip.

MacGyver turned his full attention back to the task at hand. "Steve, I'm gonna need you to do this for me; it requires the use of both hands." As Steve moved in front of the cabinet, Mac opened up the large blade of his knife. "Now, you see the green wire on the side there?" Steve touched the tip of the knife to the wire indicated. "That's the one. Follow it left until you find the microchip. Careful! Don't lean left, just move your hand!" Steve checked his subconscious lean before he hit the path of the laser. "There you go. Now, pop it out, but you're gonna have to catch it so it doesn't interrupt the beam before it turns off." Steve took in a short breath before performing the task, just barely avoiding setting off the motion detector with his arm.

"That's one down," Steve announced triumphantly. He tossed the chip into a plastic bag from his pocket, then moved toward the frozen Officer Laifer. "You can put that down now, Laifer." Steve had to physically remove the medicine cabinet door from the hands of the young man before he snapped out of it.

"Thank you, Lieutenant."

"Steve, we won't be needing these fine officers any longer, if they need to go report back or something." MacGyver could almost feel the tension in the room ease as Laifer took his leave. The other man, Officer J. Ewing, offered to remain, but Steve suggested he would be more useful keeping an eye on Laifer and escorted him to the front door. "And that's it for the trip wire," Mac declared just moments after Steve returned to the bathroom.

"How did you do that so fast?" Steve asked.

"Practice in 'Nam," MacGyver explained simply. "Now we've got this timer to worry about." He dug under the sink tossed a small box of gauze to Steve, nodding to indicate his arm. "You wanna tell me how that happened?"

Steve turned on the tap and wet some of the cotton pads, cleaning the small nick in his arm as he explained. "He had a blade on him and didn't like to be cornered."

Mac was splitting his attention between Steve and the medicine cabinet. He watched as Steve removed the wet, slightly bloody cloth from his forearm, noting that no new blood appeared. That's not bad at all, he thought, tossing a band aid at Steve. He turned his attention back to the timer.

Steve did the same a few moments later and read the small red numbers out loud. "2:52. Do you really think we can disarm this in under three minutes?"

"It looks like we're gonna have to. Let's see…" Mac wandered out of the bathroom, muttering to himself as he went. "Maybe, it could work…" He returned carrying several different magnets. "Gotta love electrical appliances; take a magnet to anything with a computer chip in it and it fries."

"Hopefully it doesn't take us along with it. Will it?" Steve asked. MacGyver shrugged his good shoulder, so Steve sought out some shelter for himself. "I love it when you're so confident," he muttered sarcastically from behind the bathroom door. MacGyver ran a small magnet shaped like a Hershey's kiss over the timer. When it continued counting down, he tried a magnet with a photo of himself and Mike when they began their climb of The Widowmaker. He kept trying the refrigerator magnets, but his supply was limited and apparently they weren't strong enough. 1:38. He finally resorted to pulling out the magnet from his old microscope kit and trying that. The polarized magnet was a little trickier; the first wave using the north end caused the timer to speed up to twice its normal rate. Waving the south end over it did not reverse the effect. MacGyver swallowed nervously, waving the center of the magnet over the timing mechanism. 0:46. A final swipe proved useless, and Mac slapped himself in the forehead. "Of course," he chastised himself as he raised the magnet once again. A touch of the magnet to the small box under the timer produced some effect: the timer blinked 0:34 once, twice, then turned off.

"Of course, the power source of the timer couldn't be in the timer itself. That would make life too easy for us, wouldn't it?"

"It makes death even easier," Steve commented dryly, emerging from his safe spot to check out the amount of explosive material packed into the small space. "I'll call this in, get the bomb squad out here."

"Isn't that what Laifer and Ewing are supposed to be doing?" One look from Steve was all it took for Mac to drop the tension of the past minutes and let out a small chuckle. "Right. I'll go tell Cheryl we're OK. Be careful, though, in case there are any more surprises lying around."

Steve nodded, not really paying as much attention to MacGyver as his cell phone. "Hey, it's me... Yeah, we're fine. Listen, we might have a houseguest tonight. That OK?… Can it wait until I get there? I've got a few loose ends to tie up here before we come back… All right, see you soon. Bye." Steve snapped his phone shut. He looked out to see the bomb squad suiting up and figured he should probably get out of there before he set something off.

MacGyver sat in the back seat of Steve's car, his hand to the back of his aching head. He lowered it when he heard Steve settle in and start the engine. "How's the arm?"

"It's fine," he answered MacGyver. Cheryl's head whipped around and Steve held his arm up for her examination. "It's nothing. Just a small cut. He mostly got my sleeve, anyway." Cheryl nodded, barely satisfied but saving that lecture for another time, and turned her attention back to the activity outside.

"Any idea when I'll be able to get back in my apartment and get some sleep?" His head was really starting to throb again!

Steve shook his head. "No, I don't know when they'll finish. It won't take them less than an hour even if they find nothing, but they can be there for five or six hours if they do find another surprise. You can sleep in the guest room at my dad's place for now."

"Thanks, Steve." MacGyver's head returned to his hand, his elbow resting on his knee. That drummer living in his brain needed to move out soon or he'd go nuts! MacGyver fell asleep and never noticed Cheryl get out of the car or any of the rest of the drive to the beach house. It took Steve's gentle nudging of his knee to get Mac's attention. He let out a groggy moan as his brain processed the fact that he had to get up and actually walk to the house. He hoisted himself out of the seat, Steve respecting his pride and letting Mac keep his independence, and followed Steve with his eyes only half opened in hope of keeping out the bright porch light.

"This must have been some late mail delivery," Steve commented, slightly irritated, as he picked up the errant piece of mail from the floor. "Those deliveries keep getting later and later-" He stopped in mid-sentence, flipping through the contents of the envelope.

"Who sent you the pictures?" MacGyver wondered idly, trying to make conversation.

Steve shook his head a little before responding. "I think it was Murdoc."

A/N: For those of you who have already read this section, I apologize for the oversight (if you noticed it!) and it has been corrected. Thanks for taking the time to help me out!