A/N: Sorry for the long delay between chapters. this one starts right after the cliffhanger, so it might be a good idea to re-read if you need to. Without further ado...
Chapter 6:
"What?" Chuck said, a hint of panic finding its way into his voice.
"Don't you have an escape plan?" Sarah demanded. "You always told me to have an escape plan."
She grinned. "And I'm gratified to know you were paying attention. Of course I have an escape plan. Come on. Is your boyfriend always that easy?"
Sarah shrugged. "Well..."
"Ew, not what I meant, girl!"
Chuck blushed furiously, and Sarah grinned at him. They followed Sarah's not-quite-stepmom up the rear stairs to the top floor, through another room stuffed with antique junk, and past a heavy door. She turned and hauled the door closed behind them, putting all her weight into it to get the door moving. The door shut with a dull 'clong'-ing noise and the surprising Not-Janet spun a wheel to seal it shut.
"Wow," Chuck said. "You have a roof-submarine?"
"What are you talking about? It's a panic room."
"Oh. Um. Forget I said that. But we're not panicking are we? Well, okay, I might be panicking, but-"
"It's just the terminology."
"Oh. Um. Forget I said that too," Chuck said. "I'll just be over here, not making a fool of myself if that's okay with everybody?"
Sarah flashed a grin at Not-Janet, who rolled her eyes. "So, I assume the plan does not involve us trapped in the panic room? Just doesn't seem like a very good plan."
"Hang on, shh," Not-Janet cupped a hand to her ear. "Okay, I don't hear any police helicopters. We should be okay." She turned to what looked like a skylight and yanked a cord. A rope ladder fell down along one wall, and Not-Janet climbed quickly. The skylight swung open after a little fiddling with Not-Janet's keys, and Chuck and Sarah followed her up the ladder onto the roof. "Keep low," she said. "If they spot us we're sunk."
The three fugitives practically crawled to the edge of the roof, where Not-Janet had stacked a pile of planks. With whispered instructions, she let them know the plan.
The brownstones were close enough together on Not-Janet's street, that they should be able to use the planks as makeshift bridges. The only problem with the plan was that NYPD was working on surrounding the house, and the few quick glances over the edge of the roof revealed the tops of several officers' heads. None of them were looking up just yet, but that could change any moment.
Chuck and Sarah levered one of the planks out across the gap between the roofs, and Not-Janet beckoned Sarah to go first. "You're probably the lightest of us. I'm not sure the board will take your boyfriend's weight." Chuck held the end of the board and leaned over the edge to keep watch.
"Clear, go," he whispered, and Sarah scampered across, arms stretched out to her sides for balance. On the other side she dropped down to hold the far end of the board.
"You next," Not-Janet said.
"What if the board-"
"They're after me, not you. Just go. This is my fault for not keeping a low enough profile," she said, and pushed him toward the edge. Chuck waited until there were no police directly under and crossed himself before walking the plank, muttering to himself under his breath the whole time. "Don't look down. Don't look down." Sarah grabbed him and pulled him down beside her.
"Since when are you afraid of heights? " she said, then louder to her dad's ex. "Come on."
Not-Janet shook her head.
"They're through the door," she said. "Hear that? Stay down, I'll cover for you," and Not-Janet kicked the end of the board-bridge clean off her roof. Sarah grunted and tried to hang onto her end of the plank, but it slipped free and tumbled between the brownstones. "Good luck," Not-Janet said, and turned, raising her hands.
Sarah laid down on the sticky tar-paper roof and hauled Chuck down beside her. Shouts came from the other roof, and Sarah seemed to shrivel in upon herself. "NYPD! Don't move! You're under arrest!"
Chuck brushed a tear from her cheek. "She'll be alright."
"No. She won't," Sarah whispered. "She gave up."
"That's not what-"
"No, Chuck. She did. I could see it. She just gave up. She could have made it across before the cops made it to the roof."
Chuck folded her up in his arms.
"Promise me something. Don't give up. Whatever happens."
"I promise."
They stayed up on the roof for more than two hours, before the activity at Not-Janet's brownstone died down enough for them to slink away. Luckily the occupants of the house next door were off at work. Sarah and her lock-pick set made short work of the lock on the roof-access door, and they helped themselves to lunch out of the refrigerator and a suitcase from the upstairs closet. Chuck left a note and some cash along with a promise to mail the suitcase back..
From there, Chuck and Sarah -or Rick and Jordan Morrisson, as their new IDs named them- found a cheap hotel and planned their next moves.
"We're going to need a lot more money," Sarah said. "It's just a fact. If we're going to actually find this U-boat, we're going to need a boat equipped with a good sonar suite, diving supplies, all that stuff. I know that's the step after next, and we've kind of been living hand to mouth lately. But we need to start planning ahead. That's not gonna cut it anymore."
"You want to risk using our actual accounts?" Chuck said. "I mean, a one-off hacking I'm okay with, especially when we'll be making good on it, but it sounds like we're talking..."
"Well, I don't know exactly, but probably a couple hundred thousand at least."
Chuck whistled softly. "Wow. We start getting into six figures, even if I cover my tracks we up the profile substantially. If we tried hacking it, it'd get noticed, maybe even make the papers. We don't want that."
"And two hundred may be on the low end. It might need to be more," she said. "Depends what the market on used boats the size we need, is gonna be. It might be half a million if we have to go big, or the seller doesn't like haggling."
"Um." Chuck said. "So, yeah. If we're moving that kind of money it should probably actually be our money."
"As long as you can keep from attracting unwanted attention while we do it."
"I might be able to, but let me think about it for a while?" Chuck said. "I don't want to mess up and bring the feds down on us, and hi-speed money laundering is a new playing field. I can probably get at least some cash out of our accounts, but keeping it off the radar, and untraceable is gonna be tricky."
"Okay," Sarah said. "It doesn't have to be completely untraceable. It just has to hold up long enough for us to find this U-boat and figure out what's really going on."
"So, what, a couple weeks?"
"If it's much longer than that, we might as well just pack it in and go on the run."
"Can't, no giving up, remember? You made me promise. Besides," Chuck said. "I don't like losing any more than you do. It'll take me awhile to do the research into banking laws."
"In the meantime, I'll book us some bus tickets."
"Really?"
"It's that or renting a car..." Sarah said. "And renting a car requires a credit card. Plus, we can try to steal a little extra sleep on a bus ride, while one of us would have to be driving if we rented a car. We'll need to be as fresh as we can when we get to DC. I'll go grab us some bus tickets, and some different hair dye, you start digging into the money situation with that big sexy brain of yours."
Chuck grinned. "You only love me for my parietal lobe," he said.
"What?"
"Part of the brain that works on maths," Chuck said.
"Really?"
"I don't actually know. I heard that somewhere. Probably not true, now that I think about it. I think it was Wikipedia." His grin banked hard into a frown. "Why hair dye?"
Sarah produced their new IDs. "Gotta at least try and match the pretty pictures," she explained."Now you get to be the redhead."
"And what'll you be?"
"It's a surprise."
"It's green, isn't it? You're going to dye your hair green."
Sarah rolled her eyes. "No. Weirdo."
"I don't know what was supposed to be so surprising about you being a dirty blonde," Chuck said when Sarah got back with the hair dyes. "I mean, I knew that all along. Baaaaa-zing."
"Har har," Sarah said, bobbing her head in the direction of the bathroom. Chuck helped her through her shift from redhead to somewhat mousey brown-blond, and then let Sarah plaster over his dyed-blond hair with vivid red. Sarah dumped a handful of water down the back of his shirt and Chuck leaped away from the sink, trailing red dye and dripping everywhere.
"Agh! Traitor!" Chuck said. "This means war!" He yanked the showerhead down and turned the water on full blast. Sarah's eyes widened and she shook her head. "Don't you dare..."
Chuck considered for all of a second, before he turned the water on her in retaliation.
Later, as they lay in each others arms in the tub, Chuck reflected that, on balance, being on the run from the CIA (and God only knows who else) wasn't all that bad, as long as he had Sarah.
The trip down from New York to DC, where the old National Archives building was located, went... undisastrously. Saying it went well would have been a stretch. It went, though, and as fast as a four and a half hour bus ride can go. Mercifully, both Chuck and Sarah managed to get a little sleep, but only after a seemingly interminable period of crying babies, over-loud fratboys heading back from a weekend in the big city, and other assorted annoyances. The sun was just coming up when the greyhound bus pulled into the bus terminal in DC and Sarah prodded him awake with an elbow in the ribs. Chuck yawned heavily. "Have a nice nap?"
"It was okay," Chuck said. "Except somebody kept trying to play footsie with me and kept waking me up."
"Huh," Sarah said innocently. "Wasn't me. Maybe I should be jealous."
"A likely story, Walker. I'm on to you."
Sarah winced and leaned in. "Morrisson, remember," she said in his ear, and Chuck grimaced apologetically. They bumped foreheads gently, and then a voice intruded, "Come on, lovebirds, I ain't got all day." Chuck and Sarah retrieved their bags and headed out of the bus. Chuck splurged on some new clothes for both of them, since their plan involved him pretending to be a stuffy World War II scholar on a hunt for some obscure bit of background data, he got a tweed coat with leather patches on the elbows, which somehow Sarah found sexy, and nearly got them in trouble in the changing rooms. After the close call at the Burlington Coat Factory, they bought a cheap used car. So cheap in fact, that Chuck was briefly scared it was 'hot', though Sarah reassured him on that front after a quick check of the VIN numbers against the registration documents. They could afford the extravagance, since Chuck was pretty sure he'd nearly figured out a way to covertly smuggle a sizable chunk of change out of their savings accounts to a probably-mostly-untraceable Swiss bank account. They were down to only a couple hundred in small bills each at that point, but it was enough that it should see them through the next day or so before Chuck expected their new credit cards to show up express mail at a DC area Wells Fargo.
Sarah dropped Chuck off four full blocks away from the National Archives building where all the old navy records from World War II were kept. It was a huge square building with the neo-classical facade that a lot of government buildings in DC had adopted, with the white limestone construction and the pillars. Chuck called it paranoia, but he was unable to argue with pouty-Sarah for very long, and agreed to leg it the last half mile. Sarah found a parking spot and stayed back and watched him through the scope of the sniper rifle they were still toting around in a golf-bag from the altercation in France. She was careful to make sure no one was nearby and slouched in her seat around the scope to make it less obvious it was the sight off a rifle. Something wasn't right, that nagging paranoid suspicion wouldn't let go. Sarah started up the car and she circled the huge building, coming at it from another direction, once Chuck had disappeared inside with no obvious ill-effects. Traffic was bad, since they were just down the street from the Capitol building, and then it all really hit her at once. She'd been to DC one time on a con with her dad, back when she was thirteen or so, but they'd stayed well away from the memorials and the larger police presence they commanded.
She parked another couple blocks back, and scanned the main parking areas and the approaches to the Archives that were visible from her new parking spot. There were a fair number of commercial lots nearby, since the Archives, like a lot of things in and around Pennsylvania Avenue had, what might be considered historical significance. National monuments had never really tickled Sarah's fancy. It was all just dead plain white stone as far as she was concerned. It was the people that made the stories live and breathe, and in this case, it was her and Chuck that were important, not the Lincoln bedroom or the Taft extra-wide bathtub or whatever.
She bit her lip and decided against risking the scope again. There were probably Secret Service around, and despite her precautions the first time, it wouldn't be a great idea to be subjected to a 'friendly interview' with the Service when she had a pair of illegal rifles in the trunk of her car. Chuck had been inside for a couple of minutes when she spotted the surveillance team.
She finally spotted three people sitting in a parked sedan a hundred yards away. Sarah squinted, and then dug out her phone. The rifle sight was too conspicuous, but her phone camera had a zoom function better than a lot of dedicated camcorders. She couldn't quite make out all the details, and she didn't recognize the dark-haired woman in the driver's seat or the two men in the back seat. The pile of cigarette butts laying in the street next to the rear passenger window, however was a dead giveaway. Stakeout, they screamed to all of her conman instincts.
So, she wasn't paranoid after all. It was cold comfort, especially when, on the screen of her camera-phone, the woman barked an order and the two men got out and headed across the street and into the Archives after Chuck.
Sarah snapped pictures of the two men, trying to get their faces, but the angle was wrong. She sent Chuck the pictures with a text saying told you. And then hit his push-to-talk button.
"Any idea who the guys are?" he asked.
"Not really, other than that one of them's a smoker," Sarah explained briefly about the woman giving them their marching orders and the cigarette butts. "But I can't get a clear pic of her."
"Wow," Chuck said. "You'd think people would get the hint. I think I've seen that cigarette thing on TV half a dozen times."
"Well, you remember that whole 'this is your brain on drugs' thing from the eighties, right? Nicotine's at least as addictive as heroin."
"Fair enough," Chuck said. "So, what do I do?"
"You get a look at the files we need?"
"Not yet. My cover's holding up so far, but... oh, crap I'm getting the stink eye for answering my phone."
"Well, you've probably got a little time. They've still gotta find you."
"Yeah," Chuck said. "Gotta go." It wasn't like there were a lot of hiding places. The woman who he'd pitched his fake History dissertation to with the fake Georgetown Student ID Sarah had whipped up last night, glared at him. Chuck shrugged an apology. "Sorry about that. My advisor calling with another couple of documents I should look for while I'm here. And thanks again for fitting me in on such short notice."
"We had a sudden cancellation," she said, "Otherwise the wait would have been at least a couple of weeks."
She gave him a pair of latex gloves so that he wouldn't damage the documents. Chuck thought that was a little overkill. He had an old copy of Moby Dick that was twenty years older than these reports, and it held up fine to the oil in his skin. But, then again, his book collection wasn't open to the public, and Chuck figured it couldn't hurt to be courteous. As soon as she was out the door, Chuck hit Sarah up on his cell phone. "Anything else on the bad guys?"
"Not really. I don't want to change positions right now for a better angle and risk tipping off whoever she is."
"Good call," Chuck said. "Any ideas how we should work on getting me back out past her? Or these two goons?"
"Working on it. I got an idea, at least. It's not a plan yet, though."
"Okay. Great. Keep me up to date?"
"Definitely."
"Okay, let me get to work in here."
There was an entire cart of boxes, full of files that the research assistant had trudged into the room for him. Chuck scanned the box and grimaced. He was glad he'd splurged and got the best cameras available when he'd been building his and Sarah's cell phones. Chuck waded into the boxed reports, not really bothering to read anything except the labels on the boxes. Time was crucial, so he just grabbed the box with the closest dates to when Decker said the U-boat was sunk, and started flipping through reports as fast as he could, snapping pics with his cell phone as he went.
From the little he picked up just by osmosis if nothing else, Chuck figured he was taking useless pictures of irrelevant documents. He tried to narrow the search, and found a couple of likely files, which included after-action reports from destroyers. He matched the name of one up with the date he was looking for. Chuck started flipping and snapping faster.
His phone buzzed. "Yeah, Sarah?"
"More goons just arrived. They're taking orders from the woman too. Looks like these ones are circling the building so you can't use the far jumping out at you?"
"Maybe. I don't exactly have time to read all of these."
"Just stuff the likeliest file down your pants," she suggested. "We need to get moving in a hurry. About that plan you were asking about? You're not going to like it." She explained on for a few moments.
Chuck slipped out of the research rooms and off toward the restrooms with a handful of file folders-hopefully the right ones-under his coat. His hands were starting to sweat. It was just so... juvenile. He glanced both ways to make sure the coast was clear. Then, he pulled the fire alarm and ducked into the ladies' room. It was, thankfully deserted, and he barricaded himself in a stall. Sitting up on the top of the toilet hunched over so that his feet didn't show under the bottom and his head didn't poke up over the top wasn't as easy as the movies made it out either.
The archives were the kind of building where a fire alarm had to be taken seriously, even if it was hooliganism. With the number of paper records housed in the place, fire was a real danger, but standard sprinklers could ruin the archived documents just as easily. Chuck hoped it wasn't going to be like in the da Vinci code where they sucked all the oxygen out of the place. They hadn't thought ahead to have scuba tanks smuggled in ahead of time.
After a minute or two someone ducked into the ladies and shouted. "Everybody out, we've got to evacuate the building until the fire department clears everything up."
Procedures, bureaucracy. Why had he ever complained about them? Chuck waited until the building safety marshal or whatever took her leave, and came out of his hidey-place long enough to steal the fire extinguisher. It had enough heft he could maybe use it as a club if it came to that.
Sarah hadn't told him all of the plan, but she was supposed to come get him, and it'd be a few minutes at least before that happened. He went back in the stall, got the files out and glanced at them, getting caught up a little in the history of it and everything.
Chuck blinked and glanced at his watch. Five minutes had passed. Was that enough time for the fire department to arrive? The alarms were still blaring, but somehow he'd managed to tune them out. He heard the hinge creak and peeked out of his hidey-stall, fire extinguisher in hand, and tensed when the fireman spotted him. Crap.
"Hey there, good looking. Is that a fire extinguisher in your pants or are you just happy to see me?" the fireman said in Sarah's voice and pulled off her helmet. She turned and flipped the lock on the door.
"What? But that doesn't even make any sense. It's not in my pants. It's in my hands."
"Yeah but the joke doesn't work that way," Sarah said. "'Cause I obviously see that it's a fire extinguisher."
"But-"
"We don't have time to get into this," Sarah said. "Take off your pants, quick."
"Buwhaaa?" Chuck said. "Sarah, this is hardly the time for that kind of..."
"Oh my God, guttermind!" Sarah said. "I borrowed the fireman getup to sneak in past the woman still on surveillance detail outside. We need to switch clothes so they don't recognize you coming out. Seriously? We don't have time for you to dissect my one-liner but you think there's enough time that there's going to be sex? Come on." Sarah took the moment to doff her firefighter's coat and shrug out of her suspenders.
"Hey. Cut me a little slack. The venn diagram of the times you've said 'Chuck, take your pants off, quick!' and the time times we've had sex is just a circle; there's no point that doesn't overlap.
Sarah rolled her eyes at him. "No time," she said. "Especially not for you to defend yourself with the nerdiest of all possible diagrams. Take off your pants, now." Sarah kicked out of the fireman pants and Chuck blinked and froze, staring at her bare legs.
"Why don't you have any pants on under there?"
"Because, I'm gonna wear your clothes out of here, and you wear the fireman outfit. We're wasting time. Get moving."
"Okay, fine," Chuck said, heading back into the stall and closing the door, dragging the fire-extinguisher along the linoleum behind him.
Sarah rolled her eyes again. "Really? Like I haven't seen it before?"
"It's not you I'm worried about. Those legs of yours are highly distracting. I don't want to get fixated and lose my balance and accidentally put my foot in the toilet or something else out of a Farrelly brothers movie."
Sarah considered this for a moment, before she shrugged and went into the neighboring stall and tossed the fireman pants over the divider in on top of him. "Hey!" Chuck protested.
"Make with the pants," Sarah said. "My feet are getting cold." She decided against throwing the fire-fighter boots over the stall wall, and shoved them in underneath. Chuck flipped his pants to hang over the wall and Sarah grabbed them and reeled them in. She only had one foot in her borrowed pants when someone thudded into the door.
"It's locked," a voice said, barely audible through the door. Someone shushed the first voice, and Sarah grimaced. Obviously not firemen. They wouldn't have been worried about whoever was in the ladies room hearing them. In fact, the firefighters would be yelling for them to come on out and evacuate, since the all clear had yet to be sounded.
"Grab everything" Sarah whispered, "hurry, get up."
"Oh, crap..." Chuck muttered. Silenced gunshots aren't exactly silent under the best of circumstances, and indoors, they're not really mistakable for anything other than what they are. They're quiet-er than regular gunshots, especially when using slower, subsonic, ammunition so there isn't actually a tiny sonic boom accompanying every pull of the trigger. But even a dinky little twenty two caliber makes a pretty good thwack when fired. The two men out in the corridor had more gun than that, and even with what had to be excellent suppressors and subsonic rounds there were distinct, if muffled, cracks. Three quick shots, and then a couple seconds later, the door creaked on its hinges. Chuck's breath caught in his throat. He could hear their dress shoes clicking on the linoleum, he could practically feel their eyes as they ducked to look under the stalls and try and see his and Sarah's shadows. Juggling his new fireman's coat and the boots and his fire extinguisher were giving him enough trouble that he didn't want to deal with how to fight off a gunman or two at the moment. But, what choice did they have? At least he'd managed to get his suspenders up and in place.
"We know you're in there," the first voice said. "Why don't you make this easy on us. We have orders to take you alive, if possible, so let's not be stubborn. Okay?
Chuck could feel his grip on the fire-extinguisher faltering, and he cursed mentally as he shifted his grip and lost hold of one of the boots. It thumped to the linoleum, and Chuck let out a sigh. "Ah, hell," he said. "No point being a sore loser I guess." Hopefully that'd be enough for Sarah to guess he was trying to lull them. "We'd probably better give up."
Chuck dropped the rest of his fire-fighter gear and shifted awkwardly atop the toilet so that he had the fire extinguisher up on his shoulder.
He stepped down and carefully set his feet. In just his socks footing would be important, he didn't have time to try and put the boots back on, or wriggle out of his socks entirely. With his free left hand, Chuck slammed the bolt clear on the bathroom stall door. He waited, and let them make the first move. The door swung in, and Chuck moved. He surged half a step forward and brought the fire extinguisher down off his shoulder, turning his hips slightly. He'd guessed right, the gunman had used the tip of his silencer to push the door in on him. Which had it out front and vulnerable. The end of the fire extinguisher cracked the gunman's wrist and his suppressed pistol went skittering across the linoleum. Chuck recovered, grabbed the fire extinguisher in both hands and punched it forward like a spear, or a pool cue and pinged the metal right off the stunned and reeling gunman's forehead. The man went down and Chuck scooped up the pistol ready to turn it on the second gunman, but Sarah had obviously been thinking along the same lines.
Even as Chuck was taking care of his gunman, Sarah had grabbed the top of the stall door and vaulted over it, landing with all hundred twenty-five pounds of her body behind a flying knee to the side of the unfortunate second gunman's neck. He went down like a sack of potatoes and Sarah landed astride him, fist cocked for a thoroughly unnecessary elbow to the face. She kicked the man's gun away almost as an afterthought. Chuck stopped the gun with his foot and stared at her.
"Wow," Chuck said.
"I told you you should start coming to class with me," she said.
"No, not that," he said. "Just... never really noticed how vulnerable that position leaves me..."
Sarah remembered the fact that she wasn't wearing any pants, blushed, and held out a hand for Chuck to help her to her feet.
"What do we do with these two?"
"Depends who they really work for," Chuck said. Sarah nodded and started to bend over to check their wallets. Chuck cleared his throat. "Better let me do that. You should put on some pants."
Sarah snorted and returned to the stall while Chuck made a quick search of the unconscious-he made sure Sarah's was still breathing-gunmen. "So did we just assault federal agents? Please say no."
"Well... if they were CIA, I'd think carrying badges would kind of be out of the... idiom, wouldn't it? No government IDs at all. No drivers licenses even. Actually hang on... business card. But it doesn't say the company name. Just says Internal Security Contractor. And an O."
Sarah finished buttoning her pants. "Let me see?"
He handed over the card and she frowned at it. "Huh. Weird. Kind of looks like that ring from... what was it from that movie you made me watch with all the hairy-feet guys?"
"The Lord of the Rings?" Chuck said, and shook his head. "Hobbits don't carry this kind of hardware." He gestured with one of the guns to demonstrate. "What are the world's Tolkien fans coming to," Chuck said, mildly disheartened.
She rolled her eyes. "Whatever. Maybe it's a ring, not an O. Or something. Anyway, finish getting dressed. Those two are gonna be missed pretty darn quick. Or found. And standing over two bodies with guns in our hands would take a little bit of explaining."
"This is never going to work," Chuck whispered from behind the face-shield of his fireman's helmet. "They're gonna know how many men they sent into the building."
"Will you stop being such a worry-wart if I promise to put out later?" Chuck, staggered and nearly dropped her.
"Don't say things like that when I'm carrying you out of a phony fire alarm at a National Landmark," Chuck complained. "Headfirst down a flight of stairs is not the way I want this story to end."
"Took your mind off it, didn't I? Just stick to the script," she said.
A uniformed policeman spotted them. "Everything alright?"
"She fainted," Chuck said, keeping it short, and striding back toward the fire-truck as if he did this kind of thing all the time." The cop nodded and ignored them after that.
The rest of the firemen that had responded were still inside, it seemed, other than one man in the driver's seat, who asked the same question the police officer had. Chuck gave him the same answer, and went back to apparent invisibility. Chuck let Sarah down at the rear of the fire engine and stared at her. "How'd you know that would work?"
"Please, give the average male of the species a good 'damsel in distress' narrative and they never think twice about it."
"I never would have thought you'd suggest casting yourself in that role," Chuck said.
"Well, not in real life," she said airily. "But this is theatre."
"Really, I thought it was criminal mischief and impersonating a municipal employee."
"Tomato, tomahto."
Chuck rolled his eyes at her and doffed his fire helmet and rubber turnout coat. "Okay, what's next?"
"Hopefully all this activity pulled our last watcher out of position, and we just walk to the car and drive away," Sarah said. She peeked around the edge of the fire engine. "Looks good."
Chuck felt an itch between his shoulder blades as they walked across the street, but they made it to their waiting car without anyone shouting an alarm. Somehow the car-door closing seemed to poke a hole in him and let the tension drain out, even though he knew there was a fair to even chance that they had been spotted.
"So, what's this woman look like?" Chuck said. He opened the glovebox and retrieved the pair of pistols from the pockets of his fireproof pants, put them inside and spotted the rifle-scope. He turned it over in his hands and arched an eyebrow at Sarah.
She didn't point, merely bobbing her head. "Blue sedan hundred fifty yards up on the left."
Chuck turned craning his neck and using the scope as Sarah pulled a u-turn. He only had a couple moments to try and catch a glimpse, but it was enough.
He sat back in his seat, the rifle scope slipping between his fingers to the floorboards as the shock hit him. "Oh my god," he said. "Mom?"
TO BE CONTINUED...