On The Farm
Author: Anime Ronin
Summary:
Disclaimer: I do not own Jake 2.0, Covert Affairs or Splinter Cell and am making no money off of this.
AN:
1
She knew he was there from the way that the air flow in her office deviated just a bit and she could only think of two people could sneak into her office like that without raising some kind of an alarm. "Sam."
'Sam' smiled at her and nodded in return, "Lou. It's been a while." He stood a little over six feet tall, he was still fit as a fiddle and, aside from the stubble that decorated his face she knew that he could have passed for any agent instructor of any covert branch any day of the week. She knew that the NSA preferred their people to be more clean-shaven.
"It has. What brings the legend back to his old stomping ground?" Deputy Director Louise Beckett asked with a smile as she fully looked up from her paperwork.
"Your kid." Sam wasn't overly talkative, she knew, and getting more than a few words out of him at any one time when the situation wasn't dire was difficult.
Louise paused. Her kid? "What?"
"Foley."
Ah… "Jake? What about him?"
"Rumors fly around at warp ten, Lou, and I've heard a lot of them with the kid. He's green as grass and you've got him out on ops he has no reason to be on."
Louise sighed, feeling a familiar headache forming. Most of these headaches were caused by Jake these days… "Jake was never a field agent, Sam, but circumstances beyond our control necessitated that he be made into a field agent."
"Yeah, the nanites."
"Where did you hear about them? _WHAT_ did you hear about them?" Louise asked, her tone glacial.
"The same stuff everyone else has heard," Sam said with a shrug. "Point is, Lou, I'm not here to poach the kid from you. I'm offering to train him."
This brought her up short. "What? Why?"
"Because his mission rating is so low that it's dangerously pathetic. Yeah, he gets the job done… eventually, but how would you like for him to get the job done right the _first_ time?" Sam asked, sitting down in the chair across from her unasked.
Louise had, of course, heard about Sam's recent doings but didn't have the clearance to know everything. Regardless, he was one of the _best_. He was old school, a former SEAL, an intelligence officer at the Pentagon, and a one-man covert ops team par excellence. And he was offering to teach Jake. "What's the catch?"
Sam smiled at her. Good. She was learning. "He'd be out of your house and under my control for the duration of the teaching, Lou. I'm not knocking what you're trying to do for the kid but I think that you can't separate yourself from him, nor can his teachers. I'll just be giving him the basics for now, stuff that any raw recruit would have to do."
This made her relax just a little. "You mean The Farm."
"If he can't pass there, you know that he doesn't have _any_ business out in the field." Sam said with a nod.
Louise grimaced. Sam had a point. Worse, she knew that he knew it. "Jake's a good kid, Sam, and I wouldn't want to hurt him because of it."
"So you'd rather see him killed because one of his ops went south quicker than usual?" Sam countered ruthlessly. "I'm not asking for anything unreasonable, Louise."
"No, but you're asking for something you're not cleared to ask about. More importantly, you're asking for something I don't know the end game to. Okay, so Jake gets trained and he becomes one hell of an agent; then what? Is he going to get poached by Echelon?"
Now it was Sam's turn to grimace. How in the hell did she know about Third Echelon? Or was she just fishing? He'd forgotten how hard it was to play poker with the woman. "You know I can't talk about it, Louise."
"Well until you can talk about it, no sale, Sam."
"I'm trying to do you a favor, Lou."
"And I know how the game is played, Sam. Don't insult me."
Sam looked at her for a moment before he nodded. "Alright, if that's how it's going to be… I'll see you around." Leaving, he had a smile on his lips. He wasn't mad; it was counter-productive to get angry. No, he'd just have to do things a different way…
(Training Facility B)
Jake hit the ground with a dull thud and a grunt, having fallen from only two feet, but it was about the one hundredth time that day that he'd fallen and he was too worn out to do more than grunt anymore.
"Jake, you have to concentrate. This isn't like hopping over a low wall," Kyle Duarte, former field agent and Jake's primary instructor to the tradecraft skills, said with a sigh as he slowly let himself down from the wall he'd been climbing up. The exercise itself was a simple one, catching oneself on a ledge, but it was hard on the fingers after a while and Kyle himself didn't remember his arms, back and shoulders hurting this much when he'd learned it. "You have to anticipate and not go stiff like you were."
Jake finally found the energy to roll over and sit up, wincing as he did. His shoulder was killing him… "Kyle, you make it sound like this is going to happen a lot."
"It happens more than you think, Jake, but you've been lucky so far. Trust me, it doesn't get any easier as you get older," Kyle added with a mutter, rolling his own shoulders.
Jake was about to object to Kyle's comment when a noise caught his attention, causing him to look up. A man was above them and rather calmly shuffling along the edge of the ledge on his fingertips, something that made Jake's fingers hurt just watching, but then he curled his legs under him a little and kicked away from the ledge, falling quietly and landing with a soft 'thump' between him and Kyle.
Jake was slightly in awe over this. Kyle… wasn't. "Son of a bitch. What are you doing here, Fisher?"
"I was just hanging around and thought I'd drop in."
Silence greeted this comment for a second and then Jake groaned.
"What?"
"Seriously? It was a bad joke."
The man shrugged, looking entirely unapologetic, "I thought it was funny."
"I don't," Kyle said with a growl. "So what are you doing here, Sam?"
"I was just watching and I've gotta say I'm not impressed. I mean it's taken you... what? Two months to get to this point? I can do this stuff in my _sleep_."
"Jake's not a SEAL, Sam, and he's just learning."
"And you're taking it easy on him. Any other teacher would have kicked his ass out of the program by now because they were not ready. So why haven't you? Orders? Or maybe you just feel sorry for him?"
Jake's temper started to rise a bit. He'd had enough of people feeling sorry for him...
