General Hospital spoilers: John Cates goes after Sam next?

We figured it would only be a matter of time on General Hospital before someone besides Anna (Finola Hughes) learned of the real reason why Jason (Steve Burton) has been gone for over two years. While under "normal" circumstances, Jason may have come clean to Sonny (Maurice Benard) by now, and we actually thought Anna would have told Carly (Laura Wright) in an attempt to get her to stop meddling in her Pikeman investigation, the big secret has remained one for months.

However, Sam (Kelly Monaco) recently decided to get to the bottom of her ex’s hiatus and enlisted Spinelli (Bradford Anderson) to help. Given her experience as a private investigator and Spinelli’s gifts with computers and hacking, the duo is likely to figure out what John Cates (Adam J. Harrington) and the FBI are holding over Jason’s head. But will they be able to do so without incident? After all, they are investigating the FBI and that can get downright dangerous.

Regardless of the personal risk, in the General Hospital episode airing on June 11, Sam and Spinelli pulled off a heist to get John’s FBI keycard to gain access to his FBI files. In doing so, Sam served as a distraction, purposefully running into John at the Metro Court swimming pool. She mentioned being a mother of two, having a troubled ex and said she was single. John likely has some knowledge of who Sam is given he’s blackmailing Jason, but the two share a few glances and smiles.

With all that being said, we can’t help but wonder if Sam is setting herself up for trouble. While she and Spinelli made sure to return John’s keycard without him "noticing," what if he did wind up noticing? Even if he didn’t see that anything was off while at the pool, it’s possible that in Spinelli’s hacking measures, he mistakenly left some digital footprint behind that John or the FBI detects, alarming them that someone other than John logged into his account.

Considering Spinelli is a top-tier hacker though, we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt of not having left a trail. But that doesn’t mean Sam is in the clear.

We can imagine a scenario in which Sam runs into John again, and once more makes herself a distraction while Spinelli attempts to gather intel. Instead of things going smoothly this time, there’s a hiccup that either exposes to John what the duo has been up to, or at the very least casts some suspicion on Sam. She could find herself in his crosshairs, prompting him to do some more digging into her background. Again, we think he should have at least some idea who Sam is, but with the FBI’s resources behind him, he could certainly do some more digging to find out more.

Should John do just that, he’d likely come across the fact she was convicted of the involuntary manslaughter of Shiloh (Coby Ryan McLaughlin) and was paroled. John could then remind Sam of her criminal record and levy a veiled threat about how much time she could serve for obstruction of justice or hacking the federal government. Given Sam still had kids she’s raising, she’d likely be rattled.

Although much of this is speculation, we can’t help but wonder if we’re on the right track here. We’ll have to keep watching to see. We'd hate to see a situation where Jason has to come to her rescue Sam with John as well. He's already pulling that hero duty with Carly.

New episodes of General Hospital air on weekdays on ABC. If you miss an episode, you can catch up on Hulu.