A/N1 Forward.
Thanks for reading. Thanks for the reviews and PMs. Glad to know folks are being pulled along by the story!
Don't own Chuck.
ACT IV
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Broken, and Still Breaking
Beckman finally took a breath.
She had safely relocated the Team to a VA hospital run by a former NSA employee, a man Beckman trusted. He'd gotten out of DC, out of the spy life, and moved laterally, as it were, in the government. She hadn't talked to him in a long time, but that, other than making asking for favor awkward, was all to the good: no one would likely connect the two of them. He had a lab in the hospital basement that was currently unused. Its occupant had run out of grant money and had to shut down for a while. There were also a some unused, medically out of date rooms down there. While not appropriate for patients, they would serve to provide places to rest for everyone.
Casey, Carina, and Ellie were with her. Morgan had been worried about Alex, so he had gone to find her and bring her there.
On the way to the hospital, seated in Casey's Crown Vic, Beckman had done some thinking. Her thoughts had turned to Madeline.
Not, this time, out of romantic suspicion, but a different kind of suspicion. What kept repeating in Beckman's head was Madeline's volunteering of the idea that there was something in the faulty Intersect that Sarah had, and something in the pristine one Chuck had, somethings that together pointed to something major.
Lots of somethings there; Madeline had been vague, either out of ignorance or deep policy. But at the time, Beckman, tired and jealous and worried about Sarah, hadn't really thought hard about the idea. It had stayed in her head, though, and now she was beginning to think Madeline had mentioned the idea for a reason, not just as a silly notion connected to a mythological device.
No, Beckman thought, what if Madeline knew about the Intersect, and believed this piece of information, but could or would only supply it sideways, not acknowledging it for what it was?
But why? Why tell Beckman something in such an...indirect way?
Because telling it directly would be tantamount to admitting that Madeline believed that there was an Intersect and that she knew crucial details about it.
Still, while that would have been galling to Beckman, it wouldn't have been shocking. Whatever else was true about Madeline, she was good at what she did and she had the money to hire the best people. If Fulcrum and the Ring had learned as much as they had about the Intersect, it wasn't shocking Madeline knew about it too.
Beckman wanted to kick herself. She thought about Madeline eating the poundcake. A clever distraction at least, a way of making what she was saying seem less...important. Dessert spy chit chat.
But Madeline was not the chit chat sort, really. And she had taken some pains to say what she had said, had done it (Beckman now realized) artfully.
Beckman grabbed the printout of the article about Rebecca Franco. What was the line? Franco had crucial intel: that's what it said. Why put that in the article? Why mention confederates in Burbank?
And then it clicked over.
Because Madeline is sending a message. In complicated stages. Sarah knew something that mattered, something that was in the faulty Intersect but not the pristine one. But its significance was only clear in relation to something in the pristine one.
Puzzle pieces that together showed something that apart could not be seen. Beckman was sure she was right. She was sure the coffee shop line and the lines in the article were mutually implicating. Madeline was involved in this, whatever this turned out to be. And the line in the article was meant to make the right reader stop and think. Beckman had stopped and thought. She was the right reader, the intended reader.
She grabbed her laptop. She sent an email to Madeline, employing a cipher they had both used long ago, in their spying days. The email read like a check-in between friends, but Madeline would understand what it really said: I've figured it out, Madeline. We need to talk privately. Soon. She sent it.
At about the same moment, Morgan arrived with Alex. After Morgan introduced Alex to her, Beckman looked at him. "Morgan, I know you aren't Chuck, but I also know you have some hacking skills." Morgan tried unsuccessfully to look innocent. "I need your help." Morgan gave up and nodded.
ooOoo
The dumpster Sarah had parked beside was itself beside a gas station. Not a new, shiny convenience store/gas station, but one of the old cinder block buildings, housing a small office and a couple of vending machines, and a garage with a lift in which repairs could be done. A business of a kind almost gone.
When no more tears would come, Sarah pushed herself away from Chuck. Without looking at him, she managed to rasp out that she needed the bathroom. She got out of the car. When she got to Chuck's side of the car she stopped and looked back at him through his window.
"Stay in the car." She mouthed the words. She saw him smile through his worry. She wasn't sure what he was smiling about, but the smile made her feel worse than she had before, and she hadn't thought that was possible.
The dumpster obscured the bathroom doors from view. Sarah had noticed that from the car. The sign that read Women could be seen from where Chuck was seated, but not the door to the bathroom itself.
Sarah went in. The floor was damp; she hoped it was from a recent mopping. The bathroom stank, the odor of the deodorizer thickly mingling with the odors it failed to mask.
The sink was small, chipped around the edges. Damaged. Like the redheaded woman staring at her from the mirror. Her emotions were spent; she had nothing left. She had never had anything to give. Her life had been about taking.
She looked away from her reflection, down into the stained porcelain of the sink, once white. She must once have been unstained, innocent. But she had a feeling she had not been able to remember that time, not even when she had her memory. Something had gone wrong. Terribly wrong. Only someone broken could have had the history Chuck had recited to her. What had gone wrong?
And then came a tidal wave of memories-her childhood crashed over her and washed her away. She held onto the sink to keep from drowning.
Her father. A con man. Her mother, gone, absent. Games, at first, fun, challenging. A father's pride in his precocious, beautiful blonde daughter, clever beyond her years. But too clever not to catch on. And then the decision to go on doing what she knew was wrong, because it was the only way she knew to hold on to her father, to her life, such as it was.
New towns. New cons. New marks. "Create trust without feeling it yourself. That's the key. Normally, trust creates trust. Don't give in. Learn how to make them trust you without trusting them at all. It's hard, but you are clever, Sam. Tell them to trust you, and mean it, but not the way they think."
"I don't want to do this anymore, Dad; please don't make me do this. Do what you have to do. Leave me alone." She held out her hands, pleading.
"But I need you, darlin'. You're the ace up my sleeve, my secret weapon."
...
Langston Graham. Standing in front of her. An offer of a new life and another chance for her father.
Yes, ok. I will. She held out her hands, surrendering.
…
I broke a long time ago.
That good man in the car. My husband. He didn't say anything. He held me even after he knew I was a horror. I can't keep him, even if he is still willing to stay with me. The earth itself won't let me have him. I have stained it with too much blood.
I need to leave him. Now.
There was a knock at the door.
"Sarah?"
Chuck. She huffed, irritated with him for a second. "I told you to stay in the car."
"Um, yeah, about that. We have a history of me disobeying that order from you." She did not respond. He said nothing more. She wished she had some way of seeing him without him seeing her. She needed to see him.
He spoke again, entreating. "Don't go, Sarah."
How did he know? He knows me. He loves me. But he didn't know me, not until a few minutes ago. His love can't be real, or, if it is, it can't last. My past terminated our future.
"Sarah, don't go. I can't do this without you."
"Do what, Chuck?" Her voice rose, sounded strained, desperate.
No response. Silence. Then, at last: "Life."
ooOoo
Archeus unwrapped the garrote from around the old woman's throat. She was well and truly dead, a homeless person now worldless. Archeus took a moment and surveyed her handiwork.
She had met the woman in an abandoned building near the motel where the woman spotted the Bartowskis. The old woman thought this in-person meeting meant she would climb the ladder in Archeus' network. But the only ladder the old woman climbed, if she climbed any, was Jacob's Ladder. Still, the old woman had noticed that Sarah Bartowski had cut and colored her hair, gotten the license number, the make and model of the car, and its identifying feature: a dent in the rear driver's side.
Archeus rolled the heavy bootlace she'd used to garrote the old woman into a tight circle, then dropped it into a plastic bag, and then the plastic bag into the black leather doctor's bag she brought with her. She took off her gloves and put them in the doctor's bag too. It was all done methodically but efficiently, quickly.
Archeus had paused for a second as she took off her gloves, struck by the beauty of the coral pink polish of her manicure. Incongruous. Her hands, tools of death but ever so delicately, gracefully ornamented. Nature, coral pink in claw today, if still red in tooth.
She smiled to herself, the smile an uncoiling snake. An onlooker would have wondered at how a face of such dark beauty could be devoid of human presence. Soulless. Animate but empty.
Archeus' network of homeless men and women had been alerted to the details about the Bartowski's. That invisible army would not fail her. It never had. She would know where they were soon. Then she would finish them. And then…well, and then she would begin her postgraduate work, and become immortal. Not just be comparable to great assassins of the past, but to become the one to which they are compared.
ooOoo
Sarah was fighting not to open the bathroom door and rush into Chuck's arms. She wanted to do that. But how could she? Still, her plan to separate from him here was not going to work. She would have to stay with him for a while longer.
She wanted to be in his arms. That was what her heart wanted, heavy in her chest, ponderous, aching for him. Who knew she could love like this? It was news to her. The little she could recall of Bryce, Cabo, did not compare. She'd been genuinely fond of him; she hadn't been just sleeping with him.
But she had fooled herself into thinking that the fondness had potential, a vector, that it could become, was, in fact, moving toward something else, becoming or moving toward what she was feeling right now for Chuck.
She now knew, and she must have known it in Burbank, that her fondness for Bryce existed in a different dimension of feeling than what she felt for Chuck. Had things been different, she could perhaps have become fonder of Bryce than she was. Perhaps. But that fondness could never have become love, become what she felt for Chuck.
No more than an apple could ripen into an orange.
"Sarah?"
"I'm not going, Chuck. Give me a minute, sweetie." Sweetie. She was hopelessly gone where this man was concerned. How could she go? She couldn't go. She had to go.
I am broken. Irreparable.
And leaving him will break me completely.
ooOoo
Archeus knifed her car carefully into an empty parking spot across the street from the gas station. Her homeless network had picked up the car a while ago, and the Bartowski's had done her the service of stopping here for a strangely long time.
From her car, Archeus could see Chuck Bartowski standing outside the woman's bathroom door. She was surprised by seeing him. He was more attractive than she had thought when she saw his photograph. Tall. Worth climbing, if not for the need to kill him.
Apparently, Sarah Bartowski was in the bathroom. Were they fighting? Really? On the run from both the good guys and the bad guys?
No, Archeus thought, looking more closely. Chuck was not angry. He was worried, heartsick.
Archeus considered shooting him right then. She could shoot Sarah when she came out of the bathroom. It was obvious that there was no exit but the door. But this was not a controlled circumstance, and this was not to be a quickie.
No. Not a quickie.
She wanted to draw this out, lengthen it, ennnn-joooy it.
The only problem was law enforcement or the CIA or NSA finding them and mucking things up. She'd let Huntaker know to redirect the search to San Diego, claim that they had been positively identified there. That should give her the time she needed to enjoy this fully. To luxuriate in it, a bloody bubble bath.
Foreplay before consummation.
She could wait. She had them now. Slowly, slowly, a little at a time. A blade inserted millimeter-by-precious-millimeter. The pleasure had begun. She would ratchet it up in small increments.
She would kill Chuck with Sarah watching. And then she would kill Sarah while staring into Sarah's eyes, watching her life run out of them, blue like water. It would be...delicious.
Archeus licked her lips.
A/N2 Geez, I'm creeping myself out a little over here...
But this is kinda crazy fun, huh?
By the way, Archeus was my last Ludlum motif, my counterpart to his Carlos in The Bourne Identity. From here until the end, it's just us, folks.
Tune in next time for Chapter 14, "Vows and Constants".