A/n: In response to the reviewers who asked for a quick update- I present chapter 2.

Witness Protection

Chapter Two

On the drive from the city out to Langley, Sarah rehashed the events of the weekend. Seeing the Tron poster at Steve's apartment was just the final straw, she had been having reoccurring dreams that had been bothering her. Dreams of a guy that looked like Steve but she knew it wasn't. The dream was always the same. She's standing at a remote airfield. The wind's blowing her hair across her eyes as tears stream down her cheeks causing strands of hair to stick to her face. She's holding both of his hands as she watches his tears fall as well. As this mystery guy prepares to board a military jet, he kisses her and she doesn't want him to stop. They cling desperately to one another before he pulls away, the reluctance in his eyes was so tangible, she could feel it in her heart. He says before turning to the plane. "Will I ever see you again?" And then she says through the tears, "Not if we've done our job." She always wakes up then feeling as though she had called out a name but she can't remember what name she had just screamed, only the nebulous echo lost between frantic heartbeat.

She would not have thought so much about it, putting it off to too many romance novels, but now, with everything else she knows, she's come to believe that her dream is not just a dream but something that actually happened. Who is he, how long has it been, where is he and does he know about her? She has too many questions that have no answers.

And somehow the CIA is involved, even though nothing about them masterminding this elaborate charade makes sense. She knows it's possible to tamper with memory. But she has never heard of them doing it to one of their own without their consent.

She feels as though she is incomplete and it isn't just the mystery man. She feels as though there is a huge piece of her missing and it feels like an important piece.

On top of that, she missed having Kelly to talk to. But Kelly was an analyst on a long term deep-cover assignment providing Intel for another agent. There was no way to contact her without jeopardizing her mission and possibly even her life. But that in itself was an unexplainable detail. Kelly was her analyst. Why would she have been assigned to someone else? Unless Sarah was on a long term assignment that didn't require an analyst, which was never the case with her…until recently, Kelly would not have been assigned to someone else before Sarah had the chance to at least know about it.

Sarah parked her red Mustang convertible in her assigned spot, walking across the parking lot into entrance C. She walked up the wide row of concrete steps and went into CIA headquarters.

The pristine floors and walls of the building almost gave off the sterile feel of a hospital as she listened to her high heels tap against the multi-colored marble floor and echo against the walls. The walls were bright white and looked as though the painters had just put away their ladders.

She absent-mindedly went through the numerous security checkpoints without speaking to any of the personnel there, her ID badge speaking for her. She entered the center elevator in the row of five and asked the person standing by the console to press the second floor button. The elevator had four other people in it and she noticed that no one was paying attention to her or anyone else in the elevator. Standard procedure for CIA personnel, she thought. You mind your own business or you might wind up in a shit storm.

She walked down the main corridor then took the first hallway to the left until she came to her office on the left side. She stood in the hallway outside and looked in at the small office. Her eyes moved over to the name on the doorway outside. "S. Walker". As she looked at her name on her office door, she felt empty and was reminded of the hole in her life. She knew as sure as she knew her name that something was missing. She had spent the weekend documenting the irregularities that she had discovered since she returned from her last mission. Her memory is clear up to the point where she had just learned that her boyfriend at the time and just gone rogue. But that's when things get fuzzy. And it stays fuzzy until about two months ago.

Before, when she was seeing Bryce Larkin, she hadn't spent two weeks in this office in seven years. But now, she spends all of her time here. It left her feeling unsatisfied.

She walked inside and sat down behind her neatly organized desk. It had been almost two months now since she had been out in the field. And that was a creampuff assignment. She actually asked the director of agent affairs if she had performed unsatisfactory, she had been concerned about her lack of field time. She realized now that for some reason, they were keeping her here…to keep an eye on her.

Her last mission lasted a couple of months and was a surveillance job, but that was one of the irregularities. Her recall of the mission was spotty at best. When she first realized this, she went to her mission notes and pulled the file. It was definitely her handwriting. She remembered some details of the report but it was fuzzy, as though many years had passed and she had lost the details to time. There were other irregularities that she could not explain as well, leaving her very unsettled.

She regretted now going to the Director about her concerns with her memory. He had sent her to see the shrinks and they had convinced her at the time that it was probably just stress related and that she should take some time off to relax. But that could have done nothing but alert them that she was experiencing something out of the ordinary.

Although she refused the offer at the time, she had every intention of taking advantage of some vacation time now. But rest and relaxation was the last thing on her mind. She felt like a pawn in a chess game and she didn't like the feeling.

She picked up her phone and dialed a familiar number and waited for the recipient to pick up.

"Miss Davis, I would like to speak to the Director today if he's in." Sarah listened for an instant and then responded.

"10:30 is fine. I'll see him then." She hung up and looked at the pile of mission reports that she had been given to review for errors and sighed deeply. She really didn't care for this kind of work. But she took a deep breath and pulled the first from a large stack of folders and began to read.

At precisely 10:30, Sarah knocked on the door of Director Kemmett's office.

"Come in."

"Hello, Director, is this a good time?"

"Ah, Walker, yes come in, come in."

"Thank you for seeing me, Sir."

"Sit down. What's on you mind Agent Walker."

"I've been thinking about our last conversation, Sir, and I would like to change my mind about that time off."

She watched as the director's expression became guarded. "That's great. Where are you planning on going?"

"I don't know. I've thought about taking Steve with me to some private get away or I might just go somewhere on my own. I've not made up my mind yet."

"So you and this Steve are still seeing each other?"

"We had a date last Friday."

"That's great, Walker. I guess you two are hitting it off then?"

"I would say that last Friday was unforgettable for me and for Steve."

"I'm happy for you, Walker. You have to balance you life with your work. You've been told to do that in the past. I'm glad you're finally opening your horizons."

"I'm definitely doing that, Sir."

"Good, good."

"So, the time off is okay?"

"Absolutely, take a couple of weeks if you like."

"I was thinking ten days but if things go well with Steve and me, who knows, I might just stretch it into two weeks."

"Like I said, feel free to do it. You deserve it after all of your service. When do you want to start"

"I would like to start tomorrow, if that's okay?"

"You bet…have a good time and forget about this place for a while."

Sarah stood and smiled at the director. "Thank you, Sir," she said and turned and walked out of the huge office, closing the door behind her.

Had she been able to see the Director once she left, she would have seen him make a call.

"Sarah Walker was just in my office asking for some time off. How consistent is that with her new profile?" He listened for a moment. "Equivocal is one of those words I don't like, Doctor. Nevermind, I'm not taking any chances. I'll put an additional tail on her."

Sarah used the rest of her morning for planning. She made sure to appear as normal as she knew how. What perplexed her was that she wasn't really sure what normal was.

Her problem as she saw it. How do you uncover classified information from the CIA when they obviously don't want you to find out? She had an idea but to pull it off would take some serious cash and even a bigger set of ovaries. She knew she had to assume that she was under surveillance of some kind. So she acted accordingly.

At 12:15 p.m. she left her office, got in her car and drove back into the city to a little Chinese restaurant over on the Northeast side.

She found a parking spot and went inside. She found a seat over by the kitchen which was lucky for her because the place was busy. But it offered an unobstructed view of the front door. She would be able to spot an agent, no matter how they tried to disguise the fact. First of all, she was one of only a handful of non Chinese people in the establishment. Unless the agent who was following her was of Chinese descent, she would spot him in an instant.

When the waitress came to take her order, Sarah said, "Is Madam Le in?"

The waitress eyed her carefully, definitely assessing this situation.

"It's okay, she will be happy to see me. Tell her Sarah Walker is here."

The waitress left without another word and in about thirty seconds an older woman came out to take her order. "What would you like today?" she said very seriously.

"Just bring me your special." Sarah sat the menu down as she spoke.

The waitress tore off a copy of the bill and laid it on the table. Sarah waited until after she had left and then reached for the bill. Underneath it was key, an ordinary room key.

Taking her purse with her, she stood and made her way back through the kitchen, avoiding the glaring eyes of the workers scurrying around the kitchen. The open flames of the huge grills made her perspire just walking through. She ducked under the row of pots and pans hanging from the ceiling. She held her breath as the smell of newly killed animals was pungent. She finally began to climb the stairs in the very back of the restaurant. At the top of the stairs was an apartment building. She went to the room that had been reserved for her for over seven years now, used the key to unlock the door and stepped inside.

She hurried over to the closet and pulled out a duffle bag and carried it to the bed where she opened it up and pulled out seven large stacks of bills and a handful of driver's licenses and passports. She stuck the ID's inside her purse without looking at them. She quickly counted the money and stopped at one hundred and seventy thousand dollars. She threw the rest back into the bag. She knew that she was forfeiting the cash but she didn't have the room to take anymore with her, due to the size of her purse. She pulled out a 9 millimeter and looked at it. With reluctant hesitation, she put it back in the bag as well. She was operating outside of the CIA's sanction but she would not be firing a weapon at another agent. She quickly scribbled a note and left it with the bag and pulled out a stack of money and left it on the bed. She knew that it would be read as soon as she was out of the building.

She left the room and hurried back to her table in the restaurant. Hopefully, if she was being tailed, they had waited outside in their car and not chance coming in and being seen.

As she settled into her seat, her food was brought to her immediately. She ate about half of it and left without another word to anyone. She left cash on the table for the food but nothing else.

Driving back to Langley, she decided to keep the cash on her, she didn't want the CIA to have the opportunity to go through her car and find it.

She smoothed out her clothes after parking and walked back into the building.

She forced herself to breath easily and smile earnestly at the security personnel. There was a chance that they would ask to go through her things.

As she walked through the metal detector, it went off and she wondered if she had made a mistake carrying in the large amount of cash.

"Step over this way Agent?"

"Walker," she said and held up her ID badge.

"We're going to need to search your bags, Agent Walker," the guard said.

Sarah was at a loss as to how she would get out of this. But just as the guard came up to her, another employee stepped up to the detector. Sarah looked around and found something that just might work. It was the magnetic holder for the employee newsletter. Just as the employee stepped into the gap, she threw the small magnet across the floor into the opening. At the same time, she faked a sneeze so loud it was comical and told the guard how sorry she was as she began to wipe the front of his chest.

The guard stepped back in shock.

Just as the man stepped through the machine it too went off.

"For crying out loud, if we have to search everyone coming back from lunch, we're going to have a long line backed up," the security guard said still preoccupied with the front of his shirt.

"Yeah, look at the number of people coming up the stairs now," Sarah said. "Here, you want to look through here?" She held up her purse to the guard.

He looked at it and then to the people that were headed his way. "No, go on. I gotta call the calibration service."

Without another word, Sarah had her things packed up and was walking towards the elevators when the group of people began walking through the metal detectors with no problem. By that time, the guards had forgotten about Sarah.

That afternoon, she found what had set off the metal detector. It was a tracking device. Sarah theorized that the calibration of the metal detectors were set on the low end of the spectrum and with her other bug in her ID card it was too much and set off this particular detector. She made a mental note to go through the detector she had used when she left the building.

For the first time in her career, she did not do her best while performing CIA work. In fact, she pretended to be reading the files that sat at her desk. What she was really doing was mapping out her strategy for going off the grid. She guessed that if she could get out of the city for more than four hours without the CIA knowing she had ran, she had a chance to actually break free of the net they had around her.

She had come to realize that it was there. She couldn't see it but her instincts screamed to her that it was there.

She made it out of the building without further alarm and drove home. She would wait until late tonight to make her move. So until then, she would do everything she remembered doing since she had come back from her last mission.

If she had ever really been on that mission, she didn't know what to believe at this point.

So she went about gathering her clothes so she could throw them in her mission bag when the time came, she was just packing to go on vacation in case there were eyes on her and she was pretty sure there were. But as soon as it was time for bed, she turned out the lights and put her things in her mission bag. At about ten o'clock she heard a car pull up outside her apartment and knew that that was her ride. She waited five minutes and then looked out her front window. Sure enough, parked in front of the building was a Toyota corolla, she guessed about a 2004 vintage. It would be perfect for driving her off the grid. She lay on her bed until about midnight and silently thanked Madam Le. She didn't know it at the time, but when she had agreed to help the Chinese woman's son escape from a Chinese prison seven years ago, while on another mission, she would have a mother's undying gratitude. Sarah had purchased the room as a safe room that even her employer was unaware of. Oh they were aware that she had one, they just didn't know where. All agents have them. It is a necessity in this line of work.

She snuck out of her apartment and quickly loaded up the car and began to drive south, out of the city. If she was lucky, the confusion about her going on vacation may work to her advantage and she just might make it off the grid.

As she drove down I 95, she began to wonder just what it was that she was running from the CIA for. Surely, it wasn't some romantic notion of a lost love. Why would the CIA care about that, unless it was another agent…maybe a foreign agent.

She shook her head and stopped this train of thought. The first thing she would have to do is successfully make it off the grid, set up a base of operations and then see if she could find someone who could help her hack into the most secure database on the planet. She laughed humorlessly as she wondered if she had set her objectives just a little too high.

By sunrise, she was only a couple of hours away from Atlanta but was afraid she wasn't going to stay awake for much longer. Besides, the worst thing she could do was draw attention to herself by getting into an accident.

She found a small roadside motel and caught a couple of hours sleep. She hoped that with luck on her side, the best espionage agency in the world had not turned their attention to her as of yet. The more time she had before they did, the better her chances.

Only as she lay on the broken down bed in a broken down motel that she had paid cash for, did she stop to consider further why the CIA would want to keep her from finding out who this man was…and, why would they go to such extremes to remove the memories of one of their own.

She was missing something…something big.

A/N: I am considering giving reviewers additional information. Sort of like working notes for each chapter. Some of which may hold clues to future events. I'm not sure if that would enhance or detract from the story. If you have an opinion, I wouldn't mind hearing it.

AKA