A/N: First let me say that the twist of the story in this chapter took me by surprise like I imagine it will take you. But I hope you agree with me that it is a good chapter. I anticipate hearing from you with some anxiety.
Let me say that I wil probably be posting every other day as I need more time to develop this story as the confluence of storylines makes for a more complicated effort.
Thank you for the reviews.
Witness Protection
Chapter 9
Sarah heard his voice and could hear the difference between the man now speaking to her and the man she saw in Washington State. Her mind attempted to wrap itself around the difference in his demeanor when he snapped her out of it.
"Goddamnit Walker, did you hear me?"
"Yeah, I heard you, I'm just …where do you want to meet?" she asked, realizing there was no place to go with her original thought. As she waited for his response, in the flicker of an eye, she saw the fight that she had with him in the CIA conference room.
And then immediately she flashed on a new memory of the four of them in the CIA conference room. Only now, he was not the angry argumentative man he had been, he was a broken man. He had not been gone no more than five minutes when he walked back in. The difference was that he was all agreeable to the plan. Sarah recalled looking at him with some worry not knowing what could have caused such a change in his behavior.
She couldn't recall exactly what she had been advocating that he had been adamantly apposed to, but now he said he would do it. Do what, she thought as her fragmented memory continued to torment and frustrate her. But that piece never came back to her, at least not now. It was a matter of time before it all came back but the sifting through the bits and pieces was frustrating.
In her mind's eye, John Casey got up from the table and left the room, leaving a piece of paper lying on the conference room table. Sarah picked it up and looked at it. It was a communiqué from French Intelligence. As soon as she began to read, she understood why he had changed his mind.
Ilsa was dead.
She understood why he agreed to the procedure now. What better way to forget about the pain. Have it erased. That's when she realized that this had been her idea. Or, if not her idea, at least she was agreeable to it. She was brought back to the now by her partner.
"Somewhere remote," he said. "I had one hell of a time getting out of McChord with my skin on my back."
"Come down here, I've got a good setup for now." Sarah said it before she thought. Did she trust him? Suddenly, she was filled with doubt. She wanted to trust him, but it was difficult for her.
"Where are you at?"
Sarah took a deep breath and thought that she must have trusted him to spend three years with him.
"Gulf Shores, Alabama. Ask for Sally at the Deli, everyone knows where I live."
"I'm on my way. I'll be there in a couple of days." The phone went dead without him saying goodbye. Somehow Sarah thought that that must be the way he was.
She settled in and waited for John Casey to arrive. She had mixed feelings. First, she was anxious to learn what she could about her relationship with Chuck and the rest of her life for three years. But she was nervous about working with another person. She had gotten used to being alone. Would she and John Casey be able to work together. Sure we can, we did it for three years, she thought.
She wished she could talk with Chester, she enjoyed the respite her banter with him gave her. But she sighed deeply as she remembered that he was out of touch as he called it. He wouldn't be available until the weekend so she was just going to have to make do being alone.
So she had two days until her old partner showed up at her door. There was not much she could do at this point anyway. No preparations needed to be completed. No detailed planning needed executing. She just had to wait.
Easy, right?
Wrong.
Sarah learned something about herself in those two days that she did not know. She didn't like to be alone with herself. It made her uncomfortable when she had no distractions to keep her mind from wondering where it wanted to go. To keep the internal dialogue that played like a broken record. A record that she kept the volume so low with the distractions of her life as a spy, that she didn't notice the topic of conversation. But those distractions were gone.
To drown out that dialogue she turned on the TV for the first time since she had arrived. She surfed through the channels once and then twice not finding anything that interested her. She threw the remote at the other end of the couch and threw herself on it as well.
She started listening to the dialogue as she lay with her head slightly hanging off to the side.
Why would I be in favor of this drastic action to protect Chuck? What does that say about the circumstances, she thought.
She fought the obvious answer but her mind came up with it just the same. It suggests that I had fallen for him and that I was willing to do anything to protect him…even erase part of my memory, memories of him. That had to be it. It all made sense. She was in love with him and for some reason, they could no longer protect him. So they went to the ultimate witness protection program. Not only assuming new identities in Chuck's and Casey's case but removing their memories at least in Casey's case, she thought it was more likely for Chuck as well.
That had to be it, she thought and smiled. Finally, this constant ache that she felt could be explained. It felt good for her to understand. It felt good to know that she could love another. But her euphoria was short lived. Because another fragment of her memory picked this exact time to return.
She sees herself and Chuck sitting at a fountain. He has a very serious expression on his face.
"I want a normal relationship, Sarah. And we both know that Sarah Walker will never be normal," he says.
He dumped me? She thought. We had something that could have been special and he gave up on us.
She went from euphoric to devastated in that moment between thoughts. Now she truly understood the nature of the ache she had been feeling in her chest. She hadn't lost him at the airport…she lost him at the fountain.
As she thought about it, a soft truncated sob escaped from the deepest part of her emotions, from the very place where her ache had lived. She tried not to allow another one from escaping and she was successful only by holding her breath. But like workers struggling valiantly to hold the swollen and rising river within the levee, once the water passes the zenith of the dike, the floodgates are opened. So it was with Sarah Walker.
She cried hard, racking sobs of anguish as the water poured over the earth and she realized why she must have agreed to the procedure as well. Her and Casey, what a pair having their memories altered to escape the torments of lost love. What a fine pair of spies we are.
She cried for so long that her ribs began to hurt with each dramatic intake of air, and then again, with the exertion of her sorrow.
She had no sense of time as she lay on the couch having cried all that she could cry. Her mind was too numb that the dialogue she had been forced to listen to was now silent.
She watched the ceiling as she lay on her back on the couch. But she didn't see the ceiling, she didn't hear the TV as it continued to play and she hadn't felt the damp t- shirt she wore. Damp from tears.
It was in this cocoon. This environment of isolation that she heard the words to a song as it played on the TV. Something about them drew her attention from where it had been to the object she had dismissed not that long ago.
She had to force her mind to recognize the meaning of the words.
I don't want to wait in vain for your love.
I don't want to wait in vain for your love.
I don't want to wait in vain for your love.
She sat up and began to watch the show. She had digital cable so she was able to rewind the show from its beginning and watched it with interest.
As far as she knew, on this day in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Sarah Walker watched from beginning to end, her first romantic comedy. As the story unfolded, she found herself able to identify with the two leads. The idea was that for every person there was that one perfect person in the world for you. A "soul mate" if you will. And for a lucky few, some are destined to be with each other, even if they tempt fate.
After Sarah watched the movie, Serendipity, she began to wonder about soul mates, and destiny and love. Things she rarely allowed herself to consider. Part of that internal dialogue that she kept in the background.
Obviously, Chuck was not her soul mate. The thought made her sad. She had pieced enough of her broken past together to know that she had been in love with Chuck. That was now painfully clear.
But just like the male lead in the movie, when he thought he had lost his soul mate, all he could do was go on. That's what she had to do…go on. Take one step and then another until before she knew it, she was walking again without trying.
That's where I am right now. Learning how to walk all over again. She would walk until her ache was gone.
Sarah was reminded of the lyrics to the song.
I don't want to wait in vain for your love.
That's what she had been doing. Waiting in vain for Chuck because if the truth were known, he probably didn't even know Sarah Walker existed.
She took a deep breath and steeled herself against the decision she knew she had to make. With no illusions about the difficulty of what lay before her, she mentally began to think of Chuck as someone that she used to love. She had no idea how long it would take until her heart agreed. But she knew that until she took this step, her heart would be waiting in vain for Chuck's love.
So Sarah waited for Casey to knock on her door. In one respect, the two days seemed like a lifetime as Sarah finally tuned into her thoughts, her internal dialogue. She learned some things about herself. Some good, some not so good. But things that needed to be known. And as she learned these things she began to deal with them. To grow…to mature.
So when Walker opened the door after hearing Casey's knock, she watched as his expression twisted into a sardonic smile.
"Well Walker, are you ready to find your boy toy?"
"Only if he needs to be found." She didn't react to his terminology.
Casey saw the difference in her and recognized her pain from the familiarity of it. But there was another question that needed to be asked because he struggled with the answer himself. "And what about Sarah Walker…is she ready to be found?"
She smiled and stood out of the way so he could enter. "I think so," she said and closed the door.
