...in which a government agent finds it necessary to sever her last remaining tie to the life she left behind and a retrospective view of her extensive training experiences following her recruitment...
Canon Reference: flashback elements of 'The Baby' (episode 5.08, concurrent with as yet unrelated early events of 'Intersect' aka the Pilot, episode 1.01) and non-canon pre-series origin elements
Contents: Double-feature! Two chapters (Ch 2 & 3); one medium-length and one long (presented in several sections), 5,250 and 8,250 words, respectively - 13.5K of story, the rest is rambling; claim your favorite comfy chair, plan your reading, snacks and beverages accordingly and read one today and one next Monday if you prefer! I deemed Ch 2 too short (at a mere 5K) to leave it hanging between the behemoth of Ch 1 and the merely bordering on extra large Ch 3 - and I want to wrap up the prologue ASAP so we can get to Burbank...don't you? (two more prologue installments after this one)
A/N: I am overwhelmed by the good feelings from reviews, PMs and follows. Its, like, a quart of lutefisk worth of good feelings! Which I am assured is no small thing. It was somewhat of a relief to publish Ch 1 - now I can stop futzing with it. But I like to think it got better - if longer - with each revision and no chapter (in human history! - perhaps not, but definitely in this story) went through as many revisions as that beast. So maybe it's all downhill from here? Thank you all and I hope you find this installment as interesting as the first. I also hope everyone had a pleasant Mother's Day. With that in mind, the title of Ch 2 and its timing are - as they say - purely coincidental. (Additional story notes for Ch 1 - 3 at the end.)
Disclaimers / Easter Eggs: The author has derived no income or other profit from this work. No ownership or claim is asserted or implied to the characters or story of the television show CHUCK or the movie Tron in this or any subsequent part; additionally in this part no ownership or claim to any Warner Bros. Looney Tunes characters, Grosse Point Blank (a reader pointed out at least a conceptual parallel with the 'shakubuku' / baby scene from GPB in the last chapter as well, Thanks MVK!), MacGyver, Serenity, The Princess Bride (reaaaally obscure, novel-specific reference), Metallica's Wherever I May Roam (for really no more than four synonyms in a particular order) or Frozen (within these introductory comments) is asserted or implied.
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Part II: Rover, Wanderer, Nomad, Vagabond
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002: Mothers and Daughters
San Diego, CA; Wed Sept 19, 2007; 11:46 am
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The agent looked at the small, quaint house from the driver's seat of her sports coupe. At a home she had driven by so many times before but never dared stop at. At a front door she hadn't been sure she would ever walk through and had now resigned herself to the fact that she likely never would. At the fleeting shadows of a life she had left behind. Those hopes belonged to someone else now.
She rounded the car to the passenger door and extracted the baby and the car seat that held her from where they were wedged less than ideally into the passenger seat. She grabbed the duffle bag full of the essentials her mother had advised her to get and the other items she had been gifted for the baby from the rear floorboard and suddenly there she was. Standing on the front porch with her right hand clutched to her chest and her left grasping the railing was the woman she hadn't seen since she was seven years old. Since the night she had chosen adventure - a life on the run with her father - over a real childhood with her mother. Her mother had aged, of course, but was every bit as beautiful as she remembered.
Emma Carter stood rooted to the top step as though stepping down into the dreamworld in front of her would cause her to wake. She watched as her daughter directed a tight-lipped smile at her, rounded to the driveway and made her way up the sidewalk unwilling to test her footing on the front lawn given her precious burden.
She pictured her precocious little girl as she remembered her - with her blonde hair in pigtails, wearing Mary Janes with knee high socks. A version of her daughter existing only in Emma's memory who was not cradling a baby but rather two or three new prizes from the public library - ridiculously above her expected reading level - clutched in her tiny arms.
She tried to reconcile her with the statuesque blonde dressed all in black. A dissonant image of flowing blonde hair, a fitted leather jacket and impossible stiletto boots juxtaposed with a car carrier with its handle in the crook of her right arm and a pink bundle inside. A time-lapse avalanche in her mind attempted to fill in the gaps - imaginary images of all the versions of her daughter that had been lost to time.
She didn't know what to make of her wardrobe but couldn't stop her smile to see her daughter all grown up and even more beautiful than she had imagined. And her eyes welled with tears with the first validation she had with her own eyes in nearly twenty years that her daughter was alive. Her hand covered her mouth involuntarily as she waited to meet her little girl again. And her little girl's little girl for the first time.
The first phone call four days ago was a shock. She had restrained herself from asking the dozens of questions on her mind and helped her daughter soothe her baby to sleep. Her daughter had apologized but said she needed to sleep while she could - something her mother understood all too well - and a promise was made to call back soon. That second call came yesterday and offered little more explanation but even more surprises.
Mom, I don't have much time. There's only so much I can say right now but years ago I made some choices - joined a certain organization - and right now I'm just...I'm over my head. There are bad people looking for us and I can't do what I have to do with a baby. I wish there was another way but I need your help. I'm sorry but you're the only one I can trust with this. I'll see you tomorrow.
There had been no chance for Emma to speak after her initial greeting upon answering the phone. And too much promise in those last few words for her to process. She was going to see her daughter. Actually see her. The daughter who had rattled off all of that information as quickly as humanly possible and had hung up abruptly after Emma had responded simply, without pause or thought of refusing: "Of course."
Emma barely processed the noise of a bustling public place in the background while trying to digest the minimal information that had been conveyed. She had been waiting by the front window ever since. Last night she had pondered what it all meant before eventually falling asleep in the front room facing the street with her head resting on an arm that was limply draped over the back of the couch.
She had no way of knowing that her daughter had deliberately kept the first call limited to the innocuous topic of caring for a baby and the second cryptic and brusk call was carefully worded due to her knowledge of FBI call listening programs in the area. Especially calls with this point of origin. She just hoped monitoring in San Diego was still more focused on calls from across the Mexican border and calls from China were of more interest in San Francisco. Carnivore had been replaced by N.I. for monitoring the web and she knew they were experimenting with digital translation and tracking of voice traffic in major population centers as well. She needed to make sure her mother was expecting them but was being overly cautious not wanting to chance any key words that might be flagged on her mothers non-secure telephone.
But Emma was a clever woman who had spent years wildly speculating and she easily slid the puzzle pieces into a few theories that seemed to fit. Given her daughter's upbringing she could have meant mafia or some crime syndicate but with what little she knew of her daughter's final disappearance, Emma assumed that 'organization' more likely meant government. With the mention of 'bad people' she hoped it didn't mean she was involved with both in some kind of undercover capacity.
Either way, she was astonished at the path her daughter's life had apparently taken since she had fled with her father. And every day since when she had wished her little girl would just come home. Emma regretted that she hadn't been around as much as either of them would have liked just before her daughter ran away. She had buried herself in long hours of work and in her own studies. Trying in vain to forget what was lost and working tirelessly to build a new life once it was just her and her daughter.
But she had forgotten the importance of simply being present in her daughter's life. And of reassuring her daughter that she was not to blame for anything that had happened. She was always so smart and so mature and chose to put far too much responsibility on her own tiny shoulders. She knew her daughter blamed herself and wished she had told her as many times as necessary that none of what had happened was her fault.
Emma had been attending night school to finish her degree - in all honesty, inspired by her brilliant little girl - and one night while Emma's own mother had dozed in front of the television that little girl she so vividly remembered had simply disappeared. Emma had threatened to stop allowing the visits between her daughter and the girl's father when he became unable to or uninterested in holding down a regular job and reverted back to the grifter ways he had left behind years prior. And regretted it every day since.
There were occasional phone calls on or around major holidays and her or her daughter's birthdays and a few in between. If she pushed too hard or argued with her daughter's father she received a simple "I'm sorry, Emma." before he said he had to go and hung up. If she successfully fought that urge she would get an opportunity to hear her baby girl excitedly talk about their previous adventures but never their current whereabouts or activities. Nothing specific or her father would end the call abruptly.
She shared any scrap of information she could gather with the FBI agents assigned to her daughter's case. An attempt at a trace the second year led to a near miss by local law enforcement in South Carolina. And that had led to less frequent and more unpredictable calls that could not longer justify constant monitoring. The FBI never established a pattern from tracking down the origination points of reported calls that would allow them to anticipate her little girl's whereabouts. They were always two steps behind and sometime shortly after her daughter's fourteenth birthday the calls simply stopped.
There was no contact whatsoever from her daughter for five long years. She had hoped she hadn't gotten in too deep in one of her father's cons and gotten herself into some sort of trouble or hurt somehow. He had called on their daughter's eighteenth birthday as though he expected to find the two of them together. He was calling hoping to thank their daughter for something but she wasn't buying his story: witness protection, his record expunged, their daughter somehow separately relocated herself for reasons still unknown to either of them.
She tried to continue her search with the new information he had provided. The agents indirectly confirmed part of the story by informing her that they would no longer be able to assist her in her search. They had been blocked from further investigation of him as a suspect in a kidnapping or any other crime. They still had extensive information in their files of course, but had they attempted to replicate those earlier findings they would have discovered that the man they knew as Jack Burton no longer existed in any government database.
With what little she learned from him she had packed up and moved to the city where he and their daughter had last lived together and briefly employed a private investigator once settled in San Diego. She was surprised that she had found a scrupulous one when he informed her that he simply couldn't continue to take her money after two months of fruitless searching. Jenny Burton, as her daughter had once called herself, like her father, had disappeared from the face of the Earth.
Although she called to check for any new leads twice a year, the case remained forgotten for several years until a female DEA agent that the FBI agent in charge remembered as 'beautiful, but a real ball-buster' came storming in and warned that they should forget everything about her visit and their kidnapping suspect as he was part of a high-profile upcoming trial.
The Federal file clerk with her horn-rimmed glasses and hair pulled back in a ponytail who accompanied the DEA agent was timid and reluctant to make eye contact with anyone but she had presented all the required documentation to seize their files and the agents' case notes. Those files were the last government documents associated with either her daughter or the girl's father. Emma assumed it was part of his witness protection arrangement but now, if not for the few pictures on her wall, it was as though neither Jack nor Jenny Burton had ever existed at all.
She had hoped until two days ago that the rest of the story her daughter's father had told her was true and that her daughter was simply safely relocated to a new life. That she stayed away due to whatever concerns about her safety had driven her into hiding or old hurts. It seemed now that assumption had been partly true. A few vague phone messages over the ensuing years - often just several seconds of dead air - let her know that her daughter was alive. She assumed at the time that her daughter was breaking the rules of her relocation arrangement and would return when it was safe so she didn't push the issue. She had spent years living on the bread and water of these infrequent and brief contacts.
Yesterday's phone call cast cast at least some light on the subject. The timing seemed as though it couldn't possibly be right. She would have been nearly sixteen around the time she was relocated. What would any government 'organization' possibly want with a sixteen year old girl? She assumed her daughter had also witnessed some criminal activity and the government was keeping her safe. But then she had apparently later gone on to become an undercover agent of some kind. An ability to move in the same circles she had developed as her father's understudy likely put to work to stop criminals rather than to commit crimes.
Exploring the idea that she was an undercover agent of some kind she assumed there were similar rules about maintaining her cover so she didn't voice her questions about the nature of her daughter's job on these most recent phone calls. She wondered if even those brief calls had ever put her daughter at risk and assumed that was why so little was ever spoken.
She had fallen asleep on the sofa last night with the thought in her head that all that mattered then or now was that her daughter was still alive. But only now, seeing her here in the flesh, did she truly believe it.
When the strikingly beautiful and completely unfamiliar young woman carrying the baby finally reached the porch she started to say "Mom, I'm so sorry…" but was cut off by her mother's bone crushing hug. It was all Emma could do not to burst into tears. As she melted into her mother's embrace - the first purely loving human contact she had experienced since childhood - even as hardened as she had become her daughter wasn't much better.
She wasn't sure what resources Ryker still had at his disposal, whether there were any additional partners to assist in his pursuit of her or whether he was now already on the run himself. Maybe The Agency would remove the threat for her relatively quickly but maybe others would try to find the little girl and attempt to cash her in like a lottery ticket. She had to act based on her current knowledge of the situation - or lack thereof - and only her fear for her mother's safety made her able to break that embrace.
"There's so much I wish I could tell you but I have no idea whether they've picked up my trail. These are very dangerous people - and I have no idea who else might be involved. The longer I stay the more danger I put you in." The agent had double checked the paper trail many times in the past, utilizing her training to ensure that this was a connection that no one could make. She'd be damned if she let anyone use her mother against her as they had once used her father.
Her identity and her father's were still secure. Graham had kept his word but done a shit job of it. He had promised her father's safety and had chosen his usual methods for dealing with such problems. The clean slate he had promised apparently extended only to 'Jack Burton' and any new arrests would potentially tie to any number of other names. So she had long ago added a few layers of obfuscation to the official records associated with her father's true identity and any other aliases of which she was aware hoping to reduce his criminal footprint and the likelihood of him doing hard time if he were ever caught again.
Every time he had a scrape with the law over the past several years she had found a way to fix it. On the few occasions when they had spoken she never corrected him when he laughed at what he thought to be the incompetence of the police or his good fortune at getting off on various technicalities.
The agent hadn't used her real name since she had left home. Her interference over the years coupled with her father's falsifications of records during her childhood and the fact that her parents had never married had left no traceable connections that she could find. It would take one hell of an investigator to unravel the web of their lies.
She had even abused her powers, her official and unofficial contacts, some of the contacts and skills of her teammates at the time and her still sharp con skills to brazenly run a con of her own against the FBI. She walked into the FBI field office nearest the town where she was born and partly raised - with a teammate using her usual brand of shock and awe to run interference - and walked back out with every scrap of information concerning the investigation of her father for her own kidnapping. She later used the contacts of another teammate - herself an FBI agent - to call in another favor to erase any digital trace of him.
Her father had chosen this life. She could only protect him so much. But her mother was off limits and the farther she kept her from anyone who might want to use her for leverage over her con man father or the agent herself the better. She had never expected to use that disassociation to create a safe haven for someone else. But now that she needed that separation she didn't question her luck at having unwittingly already laid the groundwork. Even knowing what he knew, Langston Graham himself would have a difficult time making this connection if he cared to try.
"God sweetie, this is all so hard to believe. You're some sort of...what? Secret agent? You have a baby girl you need me to take care of. I'm so happy to see you...to see you both but it's just..." and with that Emma looked down at the baby girl in her daughter's arms, sighed deeply and paused before she smiled and asked "She's so beautiful. What's her name?"
The younger woman's icy persona was betrayed as she softened visibly, looked sadly at the little girl and absentmindedly played with one of the girl's curls. She thought briefly of the name she had been calling her if only in her own mind. "I'll leave that to you." she whispered with her gaze not leaving the baby girl's face. "Even I can't know her name. Or yours...you don't have to change it right now but you might have to one day. That way no one can make me tell them anything they could use to find her if we ever have to..." she trailed off.
She had thought this through thoroughly but was having some trouble with this aspect of it. The forever part.
She could isolate herself from the baby but she would have to rely on her mother's judgment to decide if the contingency plans she had written for her to memorize would ever have to be used. And what would happen if she were ever forced to reveal anything about her mother's identity or whereabouts? Or someone dug deeply enough and hard enough to find some connection she had missed? Any failure of her own could mean making her own mother choose between sacrificing herself to save the child or saving herself instead. Force her to burn down the life she had built in her absence to keep this little girl safe.
To face the same test of basic humanity the agent had faced herself just a few days ago and to her shame barely passed. She had no doubts about the outcome if her mother were faced with such a test.
If her mother followed her the plan she had written out the baby would never be traced - but her mother would always be her mother. It was a flawed plan. The only alternatives were to force her mother into hiding or to never tell a soul about her existence. To purge the memory from her own mind. Failing that, Emma Carter would have to vanish.
She wasn't about to fail her mother like that. She could do this. She had done this. Compartmentalism in the extreme. Lock it away with all of the other things she couldn't afford to think about. She began the mental exercise of erasing her mother from her memory. Just as she had an uncanny knack for slipping into another person's skin - becoming the cover - living the lie - she could manipulate the details of her own story. Any of her stories. Just another person that she once briefly was.
Maybe under torture, asked specific questions, it wouldn't hold up. But she bitterly thought that convincing herself that she had no mother wasn't a far cry from her actual childhood. And she was highly trained to resist such interrogation. The walls in her mind were going up easily but she had to get out of here. Now.
"There's some cash and more instructions I thought of on the plane. Some emergency procedures in the bottom of the diaper bag. An account I'll move some money into when I can so you can get what you need. A couple of old contacts you could use to get some documents."
She had chosen only the contacts she believed to still be on good terms with her father and she looked down and fought a feeling of inadequacy at the pathetic excuse for a diaper bag. The government issue canvas, olive drab duffle bag mocked her and only reinforced her feeling of how totally inept she would be as a mother. Luckily someone she knew to be a fantastic mother - one she had once foolishly turned her back on - had stepped up and the child wouldn't be subjected to that additional horror in her young life.
"Use dad's name not mine." Not any of mine she bitterly thought. "Start with Vinnie, he always liked you. Asked about you years after..." After I left.
She still couldn't face what she had done and here she was disrupting her mother's life again. Forcing her to deal with yet another act that would affect her mother's life far more than her own. And she was running away from her actions again.
She was such a coward. A child playing superhero. And she certainly didn't deserve this precious little girl for however long she could evade the hunters who would pursue them both.
Even the thought of trying to keep her - something that kept invading her thoughts even after she set their destination on San Diego - seemed selfish. A desperate ploy to inject some light back into her life. She started to move to leave - to return to the shadows -and Emma tore herself away from staring at the little girl she was now holding in her own arms when she noticed the physical chasm that had formed between them and realized what all these instructions were leading up to.
"You aren't leaving already? I just found you again. This is your home too. It doesn't have to be this way." Her heart swelled at her mother's plea and the idea that she was still welcome here in her Mother's new home after running away so long ago. But she knew the risks and she knew the reality of the situation. That door was shut forever and she was still running - she would probably be running forever. She didn't have a home.
"Mom, I've thought a lot about this and…and, I can't stay. Because for both of you to be safe well I…I can never see you again. When the CIA recruited me I was on the run with Dad and we changed our identities so much that they never knew you existed. And we can't let them find out about you now. No one in the world knows my real name besides you and Dad. You should be safe."
Even though Director Graham thought he knew her real name, her father had long ago used every shady trick and contact he knew to evade law enforcement including blackmailing a man responsible for processing court mandated changes into providing modified birth records in a way that looked like a simple filing correction. They had avoided the common mistake of retaining her true birthday and later he had bribed someone else to make a similar change to change her name again and make her older on paper, only changing the year of her new birthday. He had found one lie but not the other, certain that he had dug deeply enough to best such common criminals.
She had personally erased any remaining record of her former self when she destroyed every piece of evidence from the FBI's case against her father and the references to her other self contained therein. The friend who had helped her with that particular caper had, uncharacteristically, not even tried to peek. She had just smiled and said it would ruin the mystique.
She still had some secrets - even from Graham. She made a mental note to make sure that job had been done thoroughly and in a way that would survive the scrutiny of any government agency. Erase the child she once was from existence. Sever the last tenuous link between her and her mother despite the improbability of someone ever discovering her birth name. She was almost startled when her mother spoke.
"When you were a little girl all I ever wanted for you was a normal life. But you went off with your father and he was never one to…" Emma sighed as that thought trailed off. She didn't want to belittle her daughter's father. After all she had chosen a life with him all those years ago and stayed with him throughout her childhood. Now was no time to question why she had never come back. She thought she knew her daughter - or at least the little girl she once was - well enough to guess anyway and wished she herself had behaved differently in those final days. Had somehow made it OK to stay.
Emma was surprised that her daughter described her recruitment as occurring when she was still with her father. And the slip her daughter had just made referring to the CIA - accidentally or deliberately confirming her speculation as to the true nature of her government service - had just explained why she hadn't reached out as an adult.
She was as practical as her daughter and realized now that her daughter's sole focus was on her safety and that of the baby in her arms. Realized that there was no exaggeration in her daughter's concerns and that her daughter intended to lead whoever was pursuing her away from here.
Her younger self had always wanted to be a superhero - as likely to don an improvised cape as a tutu. Occasionally both. And apparently now she was one, complete with supervillains and other dangerous foes. Emma had no choice but to trust that she knew what she was doing and was good at what she did or she would never have found her way back to her. But she was awed at her daughter's choice to paint the target on her own back to save the baby girl in an act of maternal selflessness. Even after eighteen years of uncertainty she had never thought she could be this frightened for her daughter. Or this proud.
There were so many things that Emma wanted to tell her - the things she had hoped for her daughter's younger self - but time was getting short. In the few conversations she had with her daughter's father over the past few years she had learned more than she wanted to know about what that life had entailed. And what it had not. "You just...you never got to go trick-or-treating or play on the soccer team or ever get to go to prom or homecoming. I just wish I could have given you at least some of that."
The agent smiled at her mother but didn't specifically respond. These were old regrets and there was nothing that could be done for it now. "Don't forget this. It's important. The instructions tell you all about it. Burn them once you've learned them and always - always - keep a fresh battery in it."
She handed her mother the beacon disguised as an old-fashioned silver rattle that looked somewhat like a small door knob or drawer pull. Demanding a rush job on that particular modification from one of her underworld contacts in Bangkok - utilizing a remote-activated beacon pilfered from her mission gear - had been an interesting conversation.
"Umm, she likes to be wrapped up in a blanket. It helps her sleep. And the sound of the rain, she likes the sound of the rain. And I've noticed that car rides…"
"It's OK." her mother said softly, trying to infuse her forgiveness of every perceived wrong her daughter may have blamed herself for as she resigned herself to watching her daughter disappear again. "I'll take good care of her."
Emma trusted everything her daughter had told her and her reasoning for leaving so quickly. She was taking small steps away from her as she spoke - slipping away again - but something was preventing her from turning and leaving.
"Yeah, I know...I know..." Maybe there was something that could be done for her regrets. Not for herself, but for this little girl. "Umm…"
"Yes?"
"Going to prom and soccer games and all of those normal things that you wanted for me? Will you just make sure that she gets them?" The hardened CIA agent was barely holding it together. She hadn't thought about that night in a long time. The first time she ran away, her father had returned her with no one the wiser. The second time she had insisted that she just couldn't stay any longer. But now, with her whole world gone pear shaped, she finally knew for certain that night eighteen years ago her seven year old self had made the wrong decision.
"Of course I will."
"Thank you."
And as she looked one last time at her mother and at the baby girl in her arms, the agent knew the girl would be safe and happy here. Knew that this time she had made the right choice. Some things were still worth saving and no matter what her mother ultimately named the little girl, the child would always represent the same thing to her.
Hope.
Cruelly, it seemed to Emma, her daughter was gone. Perhaps forever this time though she would never stop hoping that she would one day return. A few minutes at the threshold of her doorway was the extent of the reunion for which she had been waiting nearly twenty years.
Emma Carter briefly lamented the fact that her little girl had grown up to be so much like her father and she would likely never know anything real about her. And she looked down at the pink bundle in her arms, certain that she was looking at her own granddaughter.
At that same moment, as she sped away and continued the mental exercise of excising every scrap of information about her mother from her mind, Emma's daughter realized she had said nothing that would prevent her mother from coming to that conclusion.
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003: Gifted
Multiple Locations - Primarily Harvard University (Cambridge, MA) and Boston, MA; Jun 1998 to Apr 2001
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Annabelle Harvey had a gift. To say she picked up languages easily was like saying Mozart picked up music easily. A certifiable hyper-polyglot, if the experts ever agreed there were such a thing, she worked diligently with CIA language instructors as well as multiple language departments of Harvard College. If she kept her current pace she would finish her college career with an unprecedented triple major in Slavic, Romance and Germanic Languages and Literatures in just three years.
She loved it. She loved the learning on its own merit and likened it to the cons she would run with her father and the many roles she would play. She had self-taught a few languages in her youth but here in a more structured educational environment the process was accelerated exponentially.
Through the travels of her youth, she had mastered multiple dialects and regional accents in English and had a substantial head start on the Romance languages having voraciously studied Spanish and French both in her own haphazard way and in the multiple schools she had attended as a child in her travels with her father whose own Spanish was limited and unconvincing.
She had managed to self-teach both spoken and written Russian fairly well out of random curiosity and a bit of spoken German, Polish and a few others had also slipped in there along the way. Gifts from people she had met - Annabelle's many previous incarnations absorbing every interaction. The first thing she felt she had truly contributed to her father's cons had been looking out for double crosses from her father's business partners as they spoke in their native tongues behind his back while she lingered in the background. Saving his skin more times than either of them cared to count. Protecting him from the shadows.
With mousy brown hair almost always pulled back into a ponytail or up into a sloppy bun and sporting particularly unstylish horn-rimmed glasses and generally frumpy, ill-fitting clothes her intellect was her only remarkable feature. Her father had fostered her gift for mimicry, encouraging her to observe and emulate the inflections and dialects of those around her. And their travels had exposed her to all types of people such that she was able to get by passably in all six of those languages prior to her recruitment.
After some introductory training on maintaining the persona of Annabelle, she entered Harvard off-cycle in the summer of 1998 and there she refined her Spanish, French, German, Polish and Russian somehow compressing the equivalent of two years of study in each into a summer. It was mostly filling in some blanks and by the fall, other token elements of her training adjusted their minimal expectations and intensified considerably. This reduced her blistering pace somewhat but she focused on various regional nuances of the languages she already knew and soon added Czech, Italian and Swedish.
She had also taken on Chinese, Thai and Arabic purely with CIA instructors with an eye toward becoming conversant but not necessarily fluent as she would never pass as a native. Her surprising proficiency was making them evaluate ways she could be made to pass as a native. The information her CIA instructors drilled into her about the nations whose citizens spoke the various languages she was learning would have been more than enough to complete at least one additional degree in International Studies and fool any native unless she accidentally claimed to have once been a neighbor or schoolmate.
Even ignoring the vast amounts of information about cultural norms and regional dialects she incorporated, her instructors at both the CIA and Harvard were amazed at her ability to process the learning of multiple languages simultaneously. It was simply unheard of. To the point that she was called away on multiple occasions for various brain scans while conversing or translating on the fly in any of the languages she had learned. She was told this would help the CIA more accurately identify recruits capable of learning multiple languages. It was a knack she had always had - it just seemed to her that it had intensified since she had joined the CIA's advanced training program.
She had been put through a full week of tests to evaluate her overall health and fitness with an off-the-charts showing in mental acuity, a dismal performance in basic marksmanship (following some basic firearms training), a passable proficiency at basic self defense and as part of testing for various vaguely-described and unnamed research projects. These results had later been used to coordinate her training upon which she had already been extremely focused. She surprised herself with her proficiency in many areas and their methods had seemed to noticeably improve her ability to absorb, retain and recall information.
The Agency had intervened on her behalf to significantly modify the required core curriculum. She didn't regret losing the quantitative and science requirements. As brilliant as she was she always had little interest in those subjects. She also wondered if she was the only person at Harvard who would not be required to satisfy any sort of Moral Reasoning requirement. She had already read most of the required texts recreationally anyway.
She had laughed at this exception considering a certain so-called 'moral flexibility' was one of the traits Deputy Director Graham cited that made her a good fit for what he needed in an agent. He had never explained to her that actually obtaining a degree was completely superfluous to his plans for her. Graham had also arranged for his recent batches of recruits to bypass all psychological screenings. Annabelle would have failed them all spectacularly.
Annabelle's story was that she aspired to be a linguist for the UN. She secretly entertained the fanciful notion of becoming a teacher one day. Like her mother.
She didn't socialize much and was rarely seen on campus during what should have been her downtime. She looked at least as old as most of her fellow students but Graham had worked his magic such that her credentials declared her to be eighteen when she first enrolled.
Her father had worked his less elegant brand of magic several times over prior to that. The unintended result was that no one, with the possible exception of the man who had recruited her, realized she was only sixteen years old when she first arrived at Harvard and barely sixteen at that. Sixteen and, with her recent regrettable high school experiences, completely unprepared to interact with other college students much less deal with the impossible workload she had undertaken.
There were many discussions amongst the faculty that they shouldn't allow such a heavy workload and should encourage her to participate in more social activities as no one ever remembered seeing her outside of class. When the topic was raised to the Dean he replied that a significant donor was acting as her benefactor and wanted to ensure that she studied as many or few languages as she liked.
With the largest endowment fund of any university in America by far it was never clear why one particular donor carried so much weight but Annabelle continued to express her desire to press on with her studies. She knew better than to say differently and said it with a smile. Graham did his part and, for his trouble, ensured that the Dean's brother in law received a very favorable early parole arrangement.
No one knew where she went when she wasn't on campus but when she was there her work ethic was unmatched. She had been warned that failure to achieve her training goals could result in any number of unpleasant repercussions up to and including termination of her candidacy with an ominous emphasis on the word 'termination'. Or worse in her opinion, reassignment to training for a lesser role.
They needn't have bothered. She was driven to accomplish something everyone around her seemed to consider impossible simply because it was impossible. She found that she could hide from the unpleasantness of her recent high school days by throwing herself into something she was truly good at.
She was the darling of her professors despite her awkward demeanor, reserved nature and having become even more withdrawn over the past six months - even as she gradually abandoned her scholarly appearance for something more alluring - but Annabelle would never actually complete a degree of any kind.
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Lydia Blake was a daredevil prodigy. The last weekend of every month Lydia travelled to various locations - an entirely new one every few months. Most of this began in November of 1998, well after Annabelle Harvey arrived in Cambridge. For the first several months these weekends were mostly spent on the salt flats of Utah driving vehicles of all types beyond their limits in tactical driving training. Despite her true age she had possessed a driver's license for well over a year. One acquired from a friend of her father of course, that also matched her vehicle registration under a name other than Jenny Burton.
Although she should have only been recently allowed to operate a vehicle that was one of many rules she and her father had ignored. She had been driving their cars since she had been tall enough to do so relatively safely - since the summer she turned twelve. Now she got her chance to drive every type of commercially available vehicle under the sun. Everything from big rigs and dump trucks to high-performance sports cars and motorcycles. She had a gift for it and one thing was immediately apparent - fast was her default setting.
For a few months after that she spent those weekends at Fort Rucker in Alabama learning to fly all manner of helicopters. Primarily Hueys and Blackhawks. Here she was an Army lieutenant with yet another name. Very little emphasis was placed on actual flight time. Her emphasis was on 'bug out and put down' and a few evasive maneuvers. She wasn't being trained to transport fellow agents per se. She was being trained so that in an emergency she could take the controls and get herself and any mission related intel or other materials she might be carrying - and any teammates or friendlies if reasonably feasible - out of a hot zone and subsequently set the bird down safely.
Helicopters eventually gave way to the same sort of paranoid thinking but for light aircraft and business jets at Vance Air Force Base near Enid, Oklahoma. Flying T-1A Jayhawk and T-6A Texan training aircraft. And Lydia briefly gave way to another name and another rank in a different military branch. She really wanted to get into a T-38 but there was no justification for learning to fly a supersonic trainer. She was preparing for aircraft she might encounter on missions and a fighter aircraft was simply not considered likely.
The likely scenario was described with the more palatable euphemism of 'in the event of an emergency'. Creating such an emergency by killing or incapacitating all on board was a possible reality they did not yet think she was prepared to face.
The pattern was broken up occasionally with other specific trainings. The first of which occurred in an aircraft hangar at Reagan International Airport in June of 1998 in her first days after reporting to accept Graham's offer. Figuratively signing her life away as there had been no actual official record of her - only a highly classified 'ghost file' accessible by a mere handful of people in the entire US Government. This was months before Lydia even came into existence - long before the salt flats and the air bases. Even before Annabelle Harvey arrived in Cambridge.
It was not her favorite - focusing on manipulating and maintaining her appearance for various covers. They had pulled directly up to a large isolation chamber in the center of the hanger where she could come and go and try on new faces without being seen by most of the people present.
She had been so excited about having her braces removed that she hadn't noticed the looks exchanged between the two dental technicians. Although perfectly qualified for the work, they had never actually seen a recruit with their teeth still in braces.
Though her smile was now by any definition perfect, she had hoped they would fix her teeth. She had been teased mercilessly about her big front teeth and had never really accepted that she had grown into them and that her smile was among her best features.
But they finally convinced her that none of her teeth were too big or too small and that her smile was unique enough to be intriguing but hard to specifically describe as a potential identifying feature and wouldn't need to be modified. Even so, ten years of being reluctant to smile only aided her ability to school her expression and hide her true feelings. A skill equally as valuable in her new career as it was on a con.
A half dozen beauticians next went to work on her in turns with a few similar reactions. Some had experience making underage girls look inappropriately alluring in previous fashion industry experience and were unfazed. Others were less jaded and more protective of her. For her part, having just turned sixteen upon reporting to the address Graham had given her she was equal parts intrigued and uncomfortable.
She couldn't have imagined how much there was to a beauty regimen. One of the more protective cosmetologists helped her compile a running list of instructions for skin and hair care routines and other grooming reminders. The session was much more instruction than any kind of pampering but never having any friends to do this sort of thing with other than trying to emulate a few older acquaintances she found it completely overwhelming.
Her hair was cut, finger and toe nails cut and polished and stripped again, every part of her scraped or peeled or waxed or plucked. She was taught how to apply makeup to varying effect and how to properly apply a wig and some prosthetics. Her hair was restored to her natural blonde correcting the effects of the boxed color that she had recently used in an attempt to fix an equally unfortunate bleach job.
She was pleasantly surprised with what the experts could do to her appearance after they removed the braces from her teeth and coifed and manicured and otherwise beautified her in every possible way. The hair stylist was briefly left alone with her while teaching her to properly apply a wig and a few ways to wear her now lustrous, long blonde hair.
The stylist had signed what seemed like dozens of non-disclosure agreements and had a vague idea what was going on here from gossip by some of the others who had done something like this before and the frightening security presence. She was trying to stifle her earlier reaction to the young girl in her chair, her vivid imagination concerning the complexity and security of the operation and the various possibilities such a beautiful girl might be being prepared for.
She let the girl's hair fall naturally with its simple wave and leaned in to whisper the only piece of advice she dared "Just don't go growing up too fast, hun." before turning the girl around in her chair to face the mirrors.
She bit back her snarky response to that as the chair turned, thinking vaguely that she grew up a long time ago. But she was completely unprepared to see herself like this. As she should have been. A pretty young girl with minimal makeup and a perfect smile.
She looked like her mother.
She had barely a moment to process the unfamiliar beauty staring back at her in the tri-fold mirrors. She sat stunned in the glaring lights with her eyes locked on those of a beautiful young woman she didn't know. One so different than the one who had been picked on mercilessly for the last year and a half. One who disappeared again as a few of her attendants returned and focus turned to hiding or altering that beauty and her true face in various ways to take on the specific appearance of multiple identities.
A bookish student named Annabelle who would soon be attending one of the most prestigious colleges in the world. A gothic outcast named Sloan who would frequent a few training sites near to but separate from Annabelle's world. A red haired daredevil without a name who would later become a young woman named Lydia. They each had their parts to play and were added to her portfolio along with many others. After a weekend of instruction and with the right materials she could become any of them in minutes. There was no room left for the girl she should have been.
Months after this shocking reveal certain decisions were made based on the observations and recommendations of her instructors in Boston and Lydia came to life for those specialized driving and flying trainings. Her basic martial arts training had revealed untapped potential and her expectations had been significantly modified. Later trainings were even more physically active in nature.
She was sent for paratrooper training - starting with basic recreational skydiving and rapidly advancing to Military Free Fall training including both HALO and HAHO jumps. The adrenaline junkie in her loved the HALO jumps. She was also trained in advance dive techniques. Again starting with a recreational approach to SCUBA diving, to advanced rebreathers and DPDs and, finally, unassisted free diving to world record standards. All while wearing high-tech cat suits or wet suits and custom goggles that monitored every possible physical and neurological response.
Some were harrowing like her modified Level C SERE training - a special session she attended with no other candidates - or simple practical adjustments like her trainings on long-range and heavy weapons that could not be accommodated in her usual shooting facility. Some were less exciting but no less useful, like combat medical and tactical communications training or working on her hot wiring and lock picking skills. She was already a decent car boost and proficient with a pick-and-wrench but she could now drive off in most cars inside of a minute and crack simple locks in just a few precious seconds. With a full kit, her lock picking would make her the envy of any legitimate locksmith but she minimized her usual tools to a few reliable, multifunctional ones.
She was also taught how to bypass or otherwise defeat state-of-the-art electronic locks. Sometimes with proper equipment, sometimes with decidedly low-tech, improvised tools. MacGyvering they called it after an old TV show she had seen a few episodes of when she was little. Similar treatment was given to alarm systems including hacking and looping video surveillance.
She was an innovative thinker but also a deliberate planner and her instructors were impressed with how quickly she absorbed the principles of strategic and tactical assault planning and how well she applied them. They shouldn't have been - thinking two steps ahead had been how she had kept her father out of jail and above ground her entire childhood.
On occasion she was taken to a medical facility where a small army of technicians put her through various tests and full body and brain scans while she sparred with single or multiple opponents to evaluate the toll her training had taken on her body - typical of any agent training they assured her. In early 2001 she was sent for abdominal surgery to preventatively remove her appendix and address a potential hernia. She had been laid up for two weeks and used the time to learn Portuguese. Or at least the foundations - Annabelle would be fluent in no time. Otherwise, up until around that time, it was all go all the time.
Lydia loved that one weekend a month. In fact, Lydia only existed that one weekend a month - when she wasn't adopting a cover within a cover. She was fearless and all her instructors agreed that she had a surprising knack for any and all of the crazy maneuvers they trained her to execute. On wheels or wings the girl could fly and she became a master of every possible manner of incursion and evasion.
According to public records, Lydia Blake succumbed to smoke inhalation in an accidental house fire in Portland, Oregon on April 12, 2001.
Of all the places she had travelled for her various trainings Portland was not one of them.
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Sloan Gershon possessed an unexpected gift. She was graceful and fluid in her movements which, with the right training, were translated into brutal and lethal. She had danced as a young girl and loved it but grew tall and lanky early on and was discouraged from seriously pursuing it both by her instructors and her father.
Her instructors said they considered her long, lean physique atypical for a dancer but she knew it was more that she was just a little bit clumsy and awkward as she adjusted to the rapid changes to her body. Her father deemed it an impractical skill that was too difficult and expensive to pursue while changing towns every few months.
People in this affluent neighborhood gave her a wide berth with her jet black hair styled in a shoulder length bob, dark makeup, strategically ripped clothing, and a small nose ring in her left nostril - a real one - her one small, short-lived rebellion against all of the structure imposed on her life. Besides her instructors, the only person who interacted with her was a young woman named Wendy who worked at a nearby coffee shop.
Every Wednesday and Friday afternoon and most Sunday mornings, Sloan waited there pensively contemplating the latest learnings of her other selves - nursing a black, unsweetened coffee - like her father used to drink - prior to attending her training in a small nearby dojo attached to a vacant store with blacked out windows.
Like Annabelle, she had always had a gift for mimicry but Sloan's training emphasized the physical aspects of that gift. Her assessments had revealed a number of poorly executed but still effective judo and aikido throws and restraints. Gifts from her father - or more accurately an associate of her father - in case she ever needed to 'get out of a jam'. Her uncanny ability to almost perfectly mimic the movements of her instructors allowed her to easily correct the form of the few moves she already knew once she was properly instructed on the principles of leverage they relied upon.
Her proficiency was entirely unexpected. It was not the reason she had been recruited. New and more instructors were brought in after five months - what had originally been intended to be the end of her 'foundational' training period - and plans were made to experiment and expand her training with specialized paramilitary trainings under different identities once per month. Most of these would be based upon the trainings required for the Air, Maritime and Ground branches of the Special Operations Group of the CIA's Special Activities Division and conducted at private training centers. And thus, Lydia Blake was born.
After some early successes, Sloan's instructors quickly learned to follow her suggestion that she first be allowed to observe moves from the side, standing in a designated spot in the corner of the room against the wall between the dojo and the adjacent vacant space. She often returned to the mat with the new skill at least roughly duplicated and sometimes nearly perfected and focus turned to seamlessly incorporating it into the skills she had already mastered.
Sloan found the addition of striking techniques viscerally satisfying and the force she was able to generate with her long limbs was devastating. She may have been too tall to be a ballerina but - when it came to inflicting damage - she was made for it.
Another five months after the decision was made to significantly expand her martial arts training it was her sole female instructor who inadvertently planted the seed in her mind. Xiuying's specialties were Wing Chun and Krav Maga, two close-quarters fighting styles with very different philosophies. But it was when she watched Sloan fight in more open styles that she first noticed Sloan's ability to efficiently and naturally chain moves together.
Compliments were rare in the dojo but Xiuying quietly made the spontaneous observation in her native Mandarin that Sloan was "a creature of extraordinary grace" who "moved like a dancer." Sloan was the only person present who heard and understood what Xiuying had said. She smiled slightly but was met with only a curt nod.
Sloan considered the possibility for a few weeks before attempting to convince her instructors to supplement her training by including ballroom dance. She argued quite logically and unemotionally that dance was the childhood training that helped her tie her martial arts moves together so fluidly and would be a useful infiltration skill in its own right.
In May of 1999, when her instructors agreed and told her they had received approval to allow three hours of dance instruction every two weeks, Sloan simply nodded and maintained a stone faced expression. Outwardly, the supposedly eighteen year old agent in training was impassive; inwardly, the still sixteen year old girl squealed with delight.
Every other Wednesday her dance instructor, Keith, would pick her up at the coffee shop and take her to a nearby studio two blocks away where she sometimes worked with other older recruits but usually just with Keith. He was classically handsome with a strong jaw, dark blue eyes and wavy hair. He was tall and lanky with broad shoulders that made his thin frame seem even more tapered. Tall enough that they fit together well when she wore the heels to which she eventually grew accustomed.
The adrenaline junkie and the scholar had other outlets. In those activities she found fulfillment and accomplishment. But this was a glamorous and elegant representation of the lifestyle she hoped to lead soon. It was the one pure joy in Sloan's militantly regimented life.
She intensified her focus on her combat training to ensure the privilege was continued and after eight more months her training expanded into weapons - various edged weapons, sticks, staves and firearms. She was already a deadeye with a knife; at least a knife with which she was familiar. Another gift from her father who seemed to know every concealed weapons law in the United States and a brief but educational stint traveling with a carnival.
This skill was not a surprise to her instructors having been advised of it by the man who had recruited her but her ability to adapt it to other skills was a welcome surprise. She learned to quickly assess and throw with pinpoint accuracy any rigid object with a pointy end. Escrima sticks were similar enough to close quarters knife fighting and the Bo was an entirely different animal but proficiency with both was desirable because reasonable approximations of both weapons could often be found just lying around.
Firearms were a different story. Her father had told her the old adage "Don't point a gun at anything you don't intend to kill" and it had the intended effect - making her frightened of even being near a gun. He had always said they cause more problems than they solve and if you see that a mark is armed get away as quickly as possible. He hadn't always heeded that advice himself but did often change their plans to back away from cons on unexpectedly armed marks - when they could afford it.
The vacant store and the dojo had a sound proof range in their shared basement where she worked with pistols and a few assault rifles. She was tasked with breaking them down, cleaning and reassembling until she could do it blindfolded with the components of three different unidentified weapons in a jumbled pile in front of her before she ever fired a shot. She persisted and - despite the kick and the sound which had both scared the hell out of her the first few times - her accuracy was improving when she didn't think too much about the damage the bullets could do to a real person.
Keith hadn't known what to think of the 'Goth chick' sent to him for ballroom dance instruction. After the first few sessions she had lightened up on her makeup and ditched the nose ring at Graham's insistence (though it left a barely noticeable, easily concealed scar) and it had become obvious to him how young she was. And how interested she was.
Never given any time to socialize with college classmates or fellow trainees on her crash courses and with all of her male martial arts instructors being grizzled veterans of various armed forces at least twenty years older than her, Keith wasn't just extremely attractive, he was also the only reasonably viable option for any romantic interest.
After six months and a dozen classes, one day dancing a tango she had feigned being swept up in the moment and tried to kiss him. Keith pulled away slightly and locked gazes with her for an uncomfortably long time before asking how old she was. She persisted in returning his stare and lied.
"Twenty" she said when, in truth, she had turned seventeen five months ago.
Upon first meeting her, he noted that she was undeniably beautiful but then all of the recruits he had seen come through this facility were. But over time two key differences became apparent: First, she had already outlasted any of the prior women sent to this brutal training program by far and most of the men. He himself had only lasted four months before being considered 'capped out' in terms of his potential. And second, she clearly had no idea, or at least acceptance, of how remarkably beautiful she was. Even so, he had a baby sister older than Sloan. It wouldn't be fair.
He studied her for a moment longer and then told her "You're a good liar but you'll have to be better. I'd hate to see you die." Keith was a good man but he also knew they were being watched. Sloan was actually enjoying her training and he knew she still had no idea what she had gotten herself into. He was ten years her senior even if she had been twenty. He suspected she was barely eighteen when they had started working together six months ago not thinking that an underage recruit was even a possibility.
Sloan was embarrassed at the aborted kiss and more than a little disappointed. She had been secretly plotting that moment for a month. But she hid all of that behind her best con artist smile, took a guess and asked "So, who is she? Wife? Girlfriend?"
"Neither." he smiled back "But you are very perceptive."
"So...it's not that there isn't someone in your life but you aren't together. Why not?" she continued to pry.
"The life of an agent is...difficult...sometimes. It's hard to actually have a real relationship. Especially for female agents." He paused as he considered how much to reveal of what was yet to come. "Its completely unfair but they have a harder..." they were interrupted by the ringing of Keith's phone. He checked the display and excused himself to answer it. When he returned he was polite and his usual smiling self but he was also all business.
Keith never brought it up again and she never tried anything again. When they were alone she tried to ask him questions about life as an agent but he would only vaguely respond and emphasize that there was a lot she still had to learn and that he hoped she would be OK. He tried to limit their discussion to social graces and etiquette but she shared some vague aspects of her past and her hope to redeem herself through her service as an agent.
Eventually Keith shared some of the tamer stories of his time as an agent that he hoped would provide some valuable lessons. Graham and his people had been watching and had warned him not to scare her off in any way. But Keith had come to think of her as a little sister and worried at her naiveté. He never voiced his concerns to her about why she was still here - constantly training - when she was already, according to her instructors, one of the most proficient martial artists they had ever trained.
One Wednesday, after a year and a half of twice-monthly dance lessons, Frank, her Jujitsu and Aikido instructor, was waiting at the coffee shop. Her face dropped as he held out a cup containing her usual coffee order - one of the sugar free vanilla lattes Keith had introduced her to - and told her to come with him. She knew not to question her instructors but her instincts were buzzing and her swirling thoughts drifted to how he knew her usual drink and, randomly, mused that all of her male combat instructors were named Frank or Steve regardless of ethnicity.
Frank ducked into the locker room briefly and when he returned he stated very calmly "We're discontinuing your dance sessions. What do you think we should focus on instead?" They were in a position where 'Frank' knew the cameras couldn't see her face and as he turned to walk the same direction as her he whispered "K.I.A." and discreetly slipped her a small piece of paper folded in half. There had been a longer letter in Keith's spy will that Graham had intercepted. But Keith had known Frank for a long time and had addressed the letter containing the innocuous note - and a patently false story about its meaning - to him. Frank knew from the choice of paper alone who it was really for.
"I'm not sure. Can I go change and we can discuss it?" Sloan had managed not to react on the dojo floor and retreated to the locker room with the note clutched tightly in her fist. K.I.A. Somehow, she naïvely had not even considered the fact that Keith was also a field agent and was off doing dangerous things in between their sessions. She felt the tears threatening and a pressure rising in her throat as she smoothed out the crumpled corner of a breakfast menu from her - their - usual coffee shop and slowly unfolded it. There were only two words.
Stay Alive.
The tears dissolved into anger as she wondered why he couldn't have followed his own advice. She splashed cold water on her face and focused on stilling her shaking hands before she changed and went back out to where Frank was waiting.
"Shooting." she said without prompt and without pausing as she passed where he was standing and walked toward the stairwell to the basement shooting range. She had no idea where to direct her anger or who was responsible for Keith's death. But for the first time in her life, Sloan felt the urge to kill someone.
Every other Wednesday became additional time on the shooting range and her anger intensified. Her training schedule had been scaled back somewhat when injuries to sparring partners and instructors became frequent occurrences as her fighting style had become vicious. She and her instructors had created a fluid and brutal combat style that emphasized her speed and leverage against larger, physically stronger opponents.
Her once perfect form was compromised somewhat by her newfound savagery when angry - which seemed to be all the time now. It created holes in her defense but the overall effect had become even more deadly. The addition of bladed weapons to her unique hybrid hand-to-hand style had evolved into something one of the 'Steves' enthusiastically described as "the Tazmanian devil covered in razor blades".
Over those six months her shooting had become lethal and she never worried again about what a bullet could do to flesh. If she ever pointed a gun at someone it would be because she intended to kill them.
After a few months, the unseen team of scientists in the vacant store next to the dojo declared that they had gathered all the data they needed from the martial artist - the perfect template for future trainees. And the transition from artist to fighter was what Graham had been watching for. Now that the young woman was no longer so easily mistaken for a young girl, they were ready to move to the next stage of her training.
Sloan Gershon didn't come in for coffee on April 11, 2001. The dojo closed the next day and the only trace of her ever existing was the woman at the coffee shop. When an Agent performed a follow up assessment Wendy spoke of the goth girl whose edge had softened a bit over those three years would simply regurgitate what Sloan had mumbled to her a few days prior when Sloan informed her that she was going away: it was 'something to do with a boy'.
It was what Sloan had been instructed to say but Wendy hoped the boy in question was the tall man who had stopped coming around several months ago. Every other Wednesday had been the only times she had seen Sloan smile.
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Harvard University; October 2000
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Annabelle Harvey hadn't been informed of any funeral arrangements for Keith but really hadn't expected to be. She had thrown herself into her studies in an attempt to hide from the unwelcome and unacknowledged emotions threatening to cripple her but the CIA seemed to have conspired to reduce the workload of all her incarnations.
Sloan's training sessions were more maintenance and brief, extremely intense sparring sessions at this point with Sunday sessions shortened and Friday sessions removed completely. Lydia had only been called upon once in the last three months and only two training missions for additional identities had come up during that time. Annabelle had been focusing on combination accents - accents of the native speakers of one language while speaking another language - and various dialects of previously studied languages. She had not added any new languages to her repertoire since the summer. She was getting anxious and felt a need to fill her time when one of her professors introduced her to a young woman named Amber Reynolds.
Amber was average height, with a curvy figure, long chestnut hair and bright green eyes. She was an outgoing sociology major taking French as an elective because she had always wanted to visit France. Amber was 22 and approaching her graduation but didn't want to drop the class and admit defeat. She had asked her professor who among the students in his classes might be able to help her and, of course, Annabelle's name sprung to mind.
They scheduled their tutoring sessions for late every Friday afternoon, became better acquainted with each other and after a few sessions Amber invited Annabelle to go clubbing with her. It quickly became something of a work-hard, play-hard habit. A habit that soon spread into the weekend and eventually more nights than not.
Annabelle confided what she could in Amber. Nothing about her real purpose at Harvard nor where and how she had spent every hour of what would have been a typical college student's free time over the last two and a half years but about her insecurities and parts of her history. Her ugly duckling phase, her treatment in high school and her complete lack of social life to date. And her sorrow over the death of someone she could now reluctantly admit that she had seen as more than a friend even if his heart had belonged to someone else.
Amber listened patiently and urged her to embrace life rather than dwell on death. Annabelle was a stunning young woman now - or was when she planned on a night at the clubs - and Amber understood the awkwardness of never having been the subject of male attention and suddenly being capable of turning every head in a room. Amber encouraged her, pushed her to get out and live, introduced her to people until Annabelle was much more comfortable introducing herself, and listened to plans, anxieties and stories of first kisses and first everything-else through a four month whirlwind of everything Annabelle had not previously experienced in her young life.
Amber only had two rules: don't do anything you don't want to do and do absolutely everything you do want to do.
Annabelle was just so incredibly tired. Tired of the endless training and studying, tired of the anxiety over what was to come, tired of grieving her dead friend and tired of dwelling on her own likely similar fate. She eventually decided that, since she had the opportunity, she was going to live a little while it was still possible. With no clear mental picture of her future, she focused on the present. She allowed herself to become lost in the pumping bass of the clubs and the physical exertion it brought with it. She had lost one dance partner but found many others. It wasn't much in the way of a tribute of any kind but it did make her forget for a while.
Being roughly halfway between her eighteenth and nineteenth birthdays Annabelle was underage but even a fake ID was never required. Alcohol flowed freely and later Amber started offering her little pink pills to help them keep dancing until the club closed. She initially refused, eliciting a simple shrug from Amber, but eventually relented on occasion.
Amber wasn't interested in relationships, pointing out to Annabelle that they would both be moving on soon and didn't need any puppy dogs dragging them down. Annabelle was secretly amused by just how accurate that sentiment was. Nos morituri te salutamus, she morbidly thought in her less guarded moments.
She was vaguely aware that all of this training was building up to some kind of end. One likely resulting in a drastically reduced life expectancy. But she felt unburdened in these moments - fueled by loud music, alcohol and other relatively mild drugs and the attentions of her dance partners. It wasn't long before she was following Amber's lead and leaving the club with the eager and undeniably attractive men they had met there. First as a wingman and soon thereafter working up the nerve to choose a lucky few to escort her home with admonitions from Amber to not do anything she wouldn't do. Which was a remarkably low bar.
She did as much or as little with them as she wanted at that particular moment in time. Her first was tall and lanky, sweet and funny. She chose him deliberately because he seemed to think he had no chance with her and she was pretty sure she utterly broke his heart without even meaning to. But she knew she was on borrowed time and had no future to offer. A few never bothered her again and she never met up with any of them more than three or four times over no more than two weeks. Amber supplied the script for the more persistent ones as well - something she now realized would likely be true as long as she was a part of the world she was being trained to join: I'm just not looking for anything serious right now.
Her general exhaustion was impossible to hide but it was infinitely better than the vague depression she had felt herself slipping into prior to meeting Amber. Even so her instructors noticed the change and told her to get her shit together. That she had her fun and it was time to get back to work. In late February she did her time in hospital and in mid-March her assignments increased again. Sure enough, Portuguese was easily mastered and she cut her and Amber's outings back to their previous Friday only schedule.
She and Amber's Friday evenings became more sedate, Amber told of her plans to travel to France after graduation but Annabelle was vague about her own plans. Annabelle had been told by her instructors to be ready...that she had excelled thus far and they were nearly done with the appetizers and ready for the final stages of her training as an Agent.
Annabelle's concerns about how to cut ties with her new friend were preempted when Amber told her she had to devote more time to catching up on her report for a major research project she was working on for a psychology course. Annabelle still occasionally saw her in passing around campus but Friday night dinners had thankfully been replaced with cramming for courses and Amber seemed to only return Annabelle's few messages with messages of her own when Annabelle was unreachable during her training. The two simply slipped out of each others' lives.
Annabelle Harvey died April 12, 2001 struck by a drunk driver in a Super Duty pickup truck a few weeks before her commencement. Her yellow, convertible Volkswagen Rabbit - bought from a girl in California three years ago according to public records - was obliterated. Mangled beyond recognition. The remnants of the vehicle had caught fire and Annabelle surprisingly had no available dental records but the distinctive vehicle was widely known to belong to her.
The college honored a request by her patron for no remembrance or special mention out of respect for the privacy of Annabelle's similarly fabricated family but she remains something of a legend amongst the faculty.
Amber Reynolds disappeared the same day and has no record of ever attending Harvard University.
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York County, VA; Sat Apr 14, 2001 5:55 pm
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What with one thing and another, three years passed.
Annabelle, Lydia and Sloan had kept quite busy - Sloan training in between Annabelle's classes and study sessions and vice versa. Both gave way one weekend per month to Lydia and her driving, flying and tactical assault training. For some training missions she was someone else entirely. In all her guises, she loved the learning itself and being so good at something and felt a rush of pride when she contemplated that she was being groomed for an important role in bringing justice to the world. She may have missed out on some of the experiences her fellow students enjoyed but it was a sacrifice she was willing to make for the greater good. To be something better.
It wasn't exactly fulfilling but she was glad that she had been granted a brief period when she had been able to create a tiny pocket universe where she had attempted to squeeze the most fun and life affirming activities she was comfortable with allowing herself into the little time that she had available before becoming a non-person. She decided then and there that would be the extent of her self-indulgence. In the male dominated world of espionage she had worked too hard and sacrificed too much to allow anyone any indications that anything she achieved was done on her back.
Nearly every waking moment of her life had been scheduled for her over those three years. Punctuated by occasional simple missions under a variety of aliases limited to simple reconnaissance and surveillance or stealth infiltrations (which she prided herself as being quite good at but preferred to think of more honestly as burglaries).
After some of these missions she was required to report to Graham himself at his official Langley office and review her development. There she assumed her 'Alpha alias' of Sarah Walker. The name he had granted her upon her recruitment was the most seldom used of her recurring identities but also drew no attention when she was there or at his other office in DC. She assumed her various covers perfectly and these 'trial missions' whetted her appetite for the life of adventure that Deputy Director Graham had promised.
After a short flight, a car with a driver who refused to speak or respond to her picked her up at the airport late that afternoon. There was an ominous, unsigned handwritten note on the back seat saying simply: Time to earn your keep.
Two days after the deaths of Annabelle Harvey and Lydia Blake and three days after the disappearance of Sloan Gershon, two months shy of her actual nineteenth birthday, a by-all-accounts twenty-one year old woman with shoulder length hair - its natural blonde muted to a light brown - named Stacy Mills arrived at what outwardly appeared to be a run-down complex of farm buildings in rural Virginia.
The more traditionally recruited candidates reported to the nearby, more widely known CIA training facility less-than-affectionately referred to as The Farm.
This highly classified and seldom utilized secondary training location seemed a better fit for that name but this location was reserved to sequester recruits for special projects. It's official operational designation was a 10-digit number but those few trainees sent here almost all independently came to refer to it simply as The Facility.
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END OF LINE
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A/N2: Story Notes (aka 'I should start a blog')
There was a lot about seductions in Ch 1 but it is so heavily leveraged and alluded to in S1 I wanted to establish some boundaries and expectations right from the off and let people decide for themselves if they can stomach it rather than blindsiding anyone later. Spoiler Alert: I never intend to portray Sarah as engaging in an extreme seduction but I didn't want to simply declare it so or artificially insulate her from such things. Once its introduced there are many potential treatments and now you have seen the bare bones of most of them. It's an abusive concept and will always be treated as such.
Ch 2 begins to dispel the notion that any mother would knowingly 'allow' her daughter to run around the country with her known con man of a father (more on this will be gradually revealed but not for a while after the prologue). Canon gently encourages us to assume that Sarah (completely unnamed here) kept up at least some contact with her mother prior to these events and told Emma about Molly's full story off-camera - or at least clarified this plausible misconception - but I treat neither as true. In honor of Cheryl Ladd (of Charlie's Angels fame), yes, that was an implied CATs sighting.
And Ch 3 covers another purpose of this prologue - to address how (and later why) she is so highly trained. A side effect was addressing some lingering fanon assumptions (based on old NBC website 'spy dossiers' - since removed / redacted (snicker)) that create the impression that Graham dropped a prized recruit off at Harvard for four years with some spending money and all expenses paid and let her have a normal college experience out of the goodness of his heart. (The CIA is/was known to recruit extensively at Ivy League schools but we later found out even in canon he got his hooks into her much earlier.)
I have seen the concept of an 'Alpha alias' floating around before but I've only ever seen that particular term first used by atcDave on the Chuck This forum so credit goes to him for that!
The FBI's packet sniffer 'Carnivore' (later renamed the more palatable DCS1000 but doing exactly the same thing - ostensibly differentiating between Internet communications that can and cannot be lawfully intercepted) and its commercial replacement, NarusInsight (N.I.) could/can be used to monitor email and other Internet traffic. The idea of somehow less-lawfully extending such a thing into intercepting or analyzing voice communications is pure speculation on my part.
Finally, I emphasized Sarah's youth during her training ad nauseam to provide anchors to my complicated timeline spanning nearly three years and three different primary training identities. I'll be glad to finally start calling her 'Sarah' rather than referring to her by four different names in Chapters 1 & 3 and no name whatsoever in Chapter 2 but in the case of her age I am not taking liberties with canon (much).
The closest thing to a canon birth month is actually in a file on Gertrude Verbanski's desk ('Bearded Bandit'; episode 5.02) - although Sarah never explicitly confirms it and the report goes on to state (if you press 'pause' and can read upside-down - a handy spy skill I possess) that they have zero confidence that anything in the report is accurate - so I tweak it by a month for two inconsequential reasons. (You won't notice the first one until I gift wrap the second one in a few chapters.)
Assuming Gertrude and I are close - not personally, but on this topic - Sarah is nine months younger than Chuck (eight if you choose to believe Gertrude) and, based on events of 'Cougars' her father must have seriously tweaked her records. I declare it was to such a degree that even Verbanski Corp. didn't completely unravel the truth.
I emphasize all this because most fans do not immediately realize that if the dates basically hold up, even in canon, despite presumably being a high school senior or how old anyone thinks she is, when Graham recruits her she is still fifteen years old.
(As a side-note - to a side-note, I suppose - I've always found it odd that Chuck's 'quarter-life crisis' birthday party - occurring last night as of the events of Ch 2 - is actually his 26th rather than 25th. Apparently 104 is the denominator. It reminds me of Daffy Duck as Robin Hood with his 'buck-and-a-quarter quarterstaff'...)
SERE is Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training. Level C is for captives more 'likely to be exploited' but with POW status that a disavowed spy is unlikely to have.
See you in two weeks for another double-feature!