What if the Intersect had been...different? What if its negative effects had been much more immediate, plaguing Chuck from the get-go?
Bryce believed in Bryce Exceptionalism. That was the only creed he took seriously. 'I' is a palindrome. The same forward and backward, the only letter in the alphabet worth serving. Not USA...
There's no 'u' in 'Bryce'. But there is in 'Chuck'. Or there was.
Brown saw the mole reflected in his computer screen blurrily, then he slumped forward, his forehead on his keyboard.
Larkin had promised Depak he would be rewarded for his service when Fulcrum won. That Fleming was now...out-of-service...made Depak even more important.
"And we already have a chopper waiting; we can be there before anyone else. I think we are the cavalry. We've got to stop him." Mary's voice turned acidic. "He doesn't get to hurt anyone else. Larkin doesn't get to hurt anyone else. Ever." She looked at her husband, her eyes aflame. "Let's go, Stephen, this is the ripple effect of Volkoff, of Tuttle. My mission. Still. I want to finish my mission, and then I want…" She stopped.
Stephen sought out Carina. "Do you think you can take Ellie, Devon, and Morgan back to the Meat Sciences lab?" Zondra started to protest but Stephen went on. "We need Zondra's knowledge at Rushmore. I saw some devices in the lab I can scavenge to create a suppression device, I think. It's a stop-gap, but better than nothing, if we need it."
Chuck Amuck
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
(Dis)(Re)Orientations
Chuck, Sarah, Zondra, Casey, Stephen, and Mary were sardined in Casey's car, everyone sitting bodkin. Chuck was not complaining. Sarah was turned, her body pressed tight against his, one arm around his shoulders, the other reaching up to his ear, her index finger tracing it slowly, again and again. Her head was on his shoulder and he heard her repeatedly inhale him, take a deep breath of him. He did the same to her, the scent of her perfuming his thoughts themselves. He squeezed her more tightly against him.
How could his life have become such chaos and yet make better sense to him than it ever had before? The answer was in his arms. Sarah.
He had been smitten - more than smitten, devoted - from the first eye contact in the Buy More. Yes, the Intersect had complicated the scene a moment later, but his desire to look back as he ran from the store had been operative from the beginning. The entire time she chased him, he desired to look back, really was looking back at her - at her and for her. That desire had been constant since that first eye contact. He had submitted to it at the Tarzana house, after Mount Shasta, after Carina's, at the MoPop. He had trusted her from the get-go.
Well, there was that moment at the Greyhound Terminal. -True, but I was ignorant there, but not really mistrustful, inconstant. Or if I was, my trust only wavered; it did not fail. Carina righted me and then Sarah came to MoPop - and I was finally, completely a goner. She kissed me and she killed me. Just like she said. Even if I claimed I lived through it.
He was still holding her earlier comment in his mind, considering it: her comment about the future. She had mentioned the future before, but somehow that moment, in its playful intimacy, loomed largest in his mind. He did not know what pet name to give her - 'Babe' and 'Snuggles' had both been ruled out, and Chuck had to admit that was too bad: he liked them both, particularly 'Snuggles'. But she was right; that wouldn't do. She was not the Ice Queen anymore, but neither was she Snuggles. Not that she wouldn't snuggle; she would and she was good at it, although she preferred silent snuggling. A spy thing, probably.
The future. He needed to get the damn Intersect out of his head. The renewed chance that it could harm him was frightening. But he was still determined to fight against Bryce, to stop Fulcrum's plan. He was running a risk, he knew, but he was not going to let Sarah, or his Mom or his Dad, any of them, run that risk for him. The Intersect was functioning differently. That was obvious. He had flashed - although that now seemed hardly the right word - on Bryce's plan just as his Dad had guessed it. He was sure that they were right about what Bryce was going to do. The question was whether or not they could stop it.
The flash had seemed like a memory - but a memory he knew was not a memory. That feeling of finding the unfamiliar familiar seemed to have replaced the grinding gears and blinding pain of his earlier flashes. So far, since Bryce showed him the slides and he lost consciousness, Chuck had felt better, much better; the pain in his head was gone. Still, he was wary. Even his dad did not fully understand the Intersect. What was his dad's word? Unravel. It could all unravel. Not just his head, his mind, but his life, his life that was itself making sense for the first time since his mom had left, for the first time since his dad had left, for the first time since he found Bryce and Jill together. He was reclaiming his head and his life - and all because of the woman pressed tightly against him.
Sarah felt Chuck squeeze her, and she reveled in the feeling, pressing herself still more tightly to him.
She reveled in their ardent intimacy - despite the overarching tension of the moment. She had never been so close to another person. He filled her completely. Her mind and her heart. He had all five of her senses working overtime - full, each in its own way, with the presence or the memory of Chuck. She could still taste his kiss, given just before they got in the car. She could feel him, see him, hear his heart beating, and she could smell him, he was scenting her clothes, her life, her. She loved it, that scent - it had lulled her in his bed in Burbank. It both oriented and excited her in equal measures now.
She was worried about him, about the Intersect. Just when she thought they could breathe, expect to be rid of the thing before it harmed Chuck, it had revealed itself as still a threat. She wanted to live away from threats - at least the threats of the spy life. She was sure that what she wanted was Chuck, first, and a home with him, second. They could let life and nature take their course from there. God, that sounds good. Chuck, home, life, and nature. She could maybe find a job working with kids, special needs kids again. Doing that had been a heart-opening experience for her.
Her fondest wish as she held Chuck there in the car was for a life in which her heart was open. Open to him and open to life, to life, to love, to learning, sharing herself, all of herself, with him. Her heart no longer locked inside herself, her own detention center, bound in chains of self-disgust, lonely past all belief, certainly lonely past her own knowing.
They needed to get this done: get done with Bryce, with Fulcrum and then with the Intersect, so that she and Chuck could really begin, really begin the life of her imagination.
She closed her eyes and rested her head on Chuck, relaxing for a moment, and she let her imagination run away with her.
She was so thankful for the mission that had sent her to him. She was happy, despite the circumstance. She never imagined for herself such high-wrought happiness.
Casey glanced to his side. He was driving the car, and Stephen and Mary had ended up in the front seat with him. Zondra was in the back with Sarah and Chuck. He glanced in the rearview, at the couple. Less Sarah and Chuck, two, than Sarah-and-Chuck, one. He grunted internally. Good for them. I'm hoping for something like that too. One.
But then he glanced again at Stephen and Mary. Despite the crowding, they seemed completely separate. Not just two, but two apart. Mary, in the middle, was seated closer to Casey than to her husband, turned toward Casey, as if she were afraid of making bodily contact or eye contact with Stephen. Stephen, by the door, was turned and looking out into the settling darkness, his neck almost hidden in his shoulders, his right hand clutching the door's armrest. Casey had never seen so much unhappiness in so little space.
Mary was struggling - struggling to breathe, to control her racing heart.
Stephen was beside her and she wanted to touch him. Her body yearned for contact with him. She tried to keep space between them, even if it meant there was no space between her and Casey. If she touched Stephen, she had no idea what would happen. In the dark, for days, weeks, months - who knew how long exactly - she had touched him in her mind. She had replayed the scene of their first meeting and of their first time making love so many times that she had begun to lose her ability to distinguish the memory from fantasy. It was both, really. A past she desperately wanted to re-live, to get right this time. But how could she trust herself to do it? Did all that suffering in the dark, all that yearning in the dark, change her? As far as she could tell, she was the same old Frost, no warmer. She wanted to be part of her kids' lives - but would they allow it? Would they want her if she remained what she had been, if she was at best an occasional visitor and not really, still not really, their mother? What she had done to them, done to Stephen - who would, who could do such a thing except for a woman hopelessly broken, irreparable.
Irreparable. That was the word. She was worse than damaged goods; she was five feet and a few inches of scorched earth. Nothing could grow or change in her, not now. She had taken life many times; she had given it twice; she could never sustain it, in herself or anyone else. She shattered hearts, her own included. She could not mend them. Touching Stephen would be a mistake. It would make leaving that much harder when the time came. Better to keep a distance between them.
Stephen looked out the window, grasped the door. But he was attentive only to his wife beside him.
He knew that he had never really understood her. He had let himself make assumptions about who she was, how she felt, what she needed, and he acted faithfully on those assumptions. But so many of the assumptions were wrong. He had thought she could leave the spy life behind, make a clean break. But he did not know very much about her spy life, about her past, and he had been frankly afraid to know much. That it was...unsavory...was not a secret, but he gave her no invitation to tell him, to share that part of her life with him, so that he could be responsive to her real needs as she struggled to put it behind her. He knew she did, for a time. And he knew that even when she went back to the life, she tried to fit it into their married life, not her married life into it. Yet, he had not reckoned with the cost of all that, and he left her to pay it on her own.
He had trapped her and himself in a contradiction. He believed that she had changed and that she couldn't change. He had somehow convinced her of it too. He saw her as two women - a spy who could not be trusted with his heart, or even with her own, and as his wife and (eventually) the mother of his children. Yes, she had kept secrets. But he had, in a thousand little ways, whispered to her by his actions that he did not want to know. He wanted her to share herself with him and not to share herself with him, to keep a part of herself distant from him. He had in effect rejected a part of her, and so rejected her, in the midst of his overwhelming desire to keep her. It was no wonder, looking back, that she had been driven to...what she had been driven too. It was not wholly his fault, no. But he had to bear some of the blame. He had chased her down in Barcelona - or she had let him catch up with her. It doesn't matter. When he found her, he was uncompromising. He would have her back: but on his same contradictory terms.
He did not know if he could forgive what she had done. He was better than he was before, certainly better once the Intersect stopped playing it over and over in his head, better when he could imagine her other than as draped in blue light inside La Sagrada Familia. They had never been any good at talking to each other. He laughed internally, bitterly, at a memory: Morgan once had told Stephen that Stephen and Mary were "crappy at communicating". At the time, the comment had irked Stephen. A mere boy overstepping his bounds. But that mere boy had been right. All this misery was the result of an inability for two people in love to trust that love and so to trust each other, to entrust their felt words to each other. Maybe he could not forgive her, but what happened on that beach was partly engineered by him: he drove her into an unendurable corner then was shocked when she found an unimaginable exit from it.
I just want to tell her I love her. And then listen to whatever she wants to say in response - if anything.
He looked silently out the window. He would find his chance. And if he did not, he would let her go. They'd hurt each other several lifetimes' worth.
Carina wheeled the car into the parking lot across the street from the Meat Sciences Lab.
She was oddly jumpy - especially since there was no reason to think this should be difficult. They needed to grab some things, Ellie knew which ones, and get them to the car. The only real problem was logistical: how to get them across the street without drawing notice. But nothing they were after was large, and Stephen said only one was heavy. They had Devon for that.
One reason Carina was jumpy was that she knew she had been entrusted with people that she was not only coming to like, but people who mattered a great deal to Sarah and to Zondra. Carina shook her head internally, not wanting anyone to notice and ask - but while Sarah's attraction to Chuck was no mystery at all to Carina, Zondra's to Morgan was.
Morgan did not seem to be Zondra's style. Back in the CATs days, Zondra and Sarah had never been as eager for companionship as Carina and Amy had been. In fact, although the competition the women was complicated and unending, it was particularly so between Zondra and Sarah. Zondra had, in her way, idolized Sarah. She upped the ante on her bitchiness as an attempt to match Sarah's iciness. It never worked.
Sarah was simply closed, unreachable. Zondra instead was aggressive, sometimes downright mean. A botched imitation. It was as if someone had tried to reproduce the Ice Queen but in molten lava. There were similarities but the medium was of the wrong sort. Zondra was incapable of Sarah's deep withdrawals, of her hiding inside herself, of Sarah's impassiveness. Carina could mimic those features of Sarah's better, really, than Zondra could - though again the medium was different. So the fact that passionate Zondra had fallen for someone - and obviously, she had - was not in itself surprising. That Morgan was the someone, that was surprising. Still, Carina was happy to give Zondra and Morgan the benefit of the doubt. Zondra was far, far from a fool. If she believed she had found something in Morgan, Carina believed it was there.
Another reason Carina was jumpy, reluctant as Carina was to admit it to herself, the primary reason, really, was that she was frightened for John. That was a new experience. Of course, she had been concerned about the safety of her fellow DEA agents or of the other CATs on missions. She had never felt this deep, pervasive fear before. John was a remarkable agent and a remarkable soldier - she knew that. But anything could happen, anything could go sideways. And Carina did not want that.
For the first time in her adult life, she was hoping for no improvisation, nothing impromptu. She wanted everything to go according to plan. She wanted John to come back to her and she wanted to welcome him back to her.
She had come on this trip to see the Ice Queen in love; she was getting more than she bargained for. A lot more.
Bryce had gotten spooked. That did not happen.
It had, though. He could not shake the feeling that Chuck was still alive - even worse, the feeling that Chuck was coming, that Chuck was going to somehow interfere with the plan. That was crazy. Chuck was dead. Dead. Absolutely cold and dead. Maybe he had had Chuck on his mind for too long, maybe he was too much in the habit of thinking about him.
Because, truth be told, he thought about Chuck often, all the damn time: Chuck was his nemesis. It was a frustrating thing - to have a nemesis who had no idea he was your nemesis. Who did not want to be anyone's nemesis. That had been Bryce's fate. He had tried again and again to try to stop hating Chuck, to replace the itching, burning hatred with the chill indifference of contempt. He never managed it. Always, the itching, burning hatred. Always that stupid, open, honest face, those damn kind eyes. Always the remembrance of Chuck's uncomplicated, genuine and generous friendships. Always Chuck's obvious love for his parents beneath whatever momentary frustration or anger or desire to hate them he had. Always that same un-self-serving willingness to help, to take others seriously, sometimes more seriously than they could or would take themselves. Even that moron, Morgan! I should have shot Morgan before I left Bozeman, just to make sure he did not further pollute the human gene pool.
So Bryce made a spooked phone call.
He had three men still on campus at MSU. Bryce had planned to use them tomorrow or the next day, to 'clean' the Meat Sciences lab once his plan unfolded.
They were on campus to watch over the President (a loyal Fulcrum man but no agent, a money man not a gunman), and their cover was as maintenance men. Bryce called Vincent Smith, the ranking Fulcrum agent, and ordered him to take the other two men and check on the Meat Sciences lab. He told them they would find Bartowski's corpse there, and that they should go ahead and get rid of it. He wanted them to report to him in the morning. By morning, everything on Rushmore should be finished.
Vincent Smith mopped his forehead with an already damp handkerchief.
Vincent was no coward but Bryce Larkin...made him...nervous. Larkin was not wildly insane or unpredictable, but he was too sure of himself for Vincent's taste, given to showy grandstanding instead of the steady, daily work that insured success, even for spies. Larkin should have just killed the guy he left behind in the lab, as any sober, workaday spy (like Vincent) would have done. Besides, Vincent hated the Meat Sciences lab. He was a vegetarian, contemplating the transition to full-frontal vegan, and he could not enter that building without seeming to smell the innocent, spilt blood of bovines, without hearing that Smiths' song, Meat is Murder playing in the steak-haunted hallways. He wanted to get in, dispose of the corpse - the requisite acid was in the maintenance truck - and get out of the scene of so much senseless cruelty.
He checked his pistol and his men checked theirs. He nodded at them. "In and out, men, in and out. Let's not dally."
Carina was unplugging the final machine Ellie said they needed. Devon had one in his arms, Morgan another. Ellie was ready to pick up the one Carina was unplugging. She bent down, trying to pull harder on the plug, and she heard a voice, male, not Devon's and not Morgan's.
"Put up your hands! Where is the body?"
As she stood, she heard Morgan ask in a steady voice. "Are you guys looking for some body?"
Aboard the 'copter, Zondra wondered about Morgan and recollected the day she had spent with him, and hearing about him. She felt good about it all. Particularly about Morgan's willingness to step up and take...matters...into his own hands. She was unsure what it all meant. A few days ago, she had thought she was going to complete her Red Test and join Sarah Walker as Graham's Enforcers. She had wanted that from back in her CATs days, but wanted it more, and for a different reason, after those days. But then she had not been able to do what Graham ordered. True, she had been stopped - Morgan - but she acknowledged now that it was never going to happen. She could not have killed Ellie Bartowski in cold blood.
That was a few days - and a lifetime ago. She had since found Morgan, reunited with Sarah and Carina, and found them changed. Sarah was not the Enforcer any longer. She was in love with Chuck. Carina seemed taken with, and taken by, John Casey. Zondra did not know if 'love' was the right word for what Carina felt, but it was starting to seem like the right word. Carina and 'love': not a twosome I ever expected where she was concerned. It's actually less a shock, I see now, to combine Walker and 'love', particularly now that I have met Chuck. And the word 'love, while not a word she was ready to use in relation to herself and Morgan, was on her mind, a stranger word in a strange land. Or maybe not so stranger and strange. Changes were afoot. She was looking forward to having a chance to see what came of what she and Morgan started in their hotel room that morning.
She was eagerly looking forward to that. To seconds. And thirds. That was a first.
The helicopter landed in the Black Hills, outside of earshot from Rushmore.
Sarah put her phone away. Brown was still not answering. She was beginning to worry about him. It would have been good to have his help, to have him available. If not before or during, then after all of this. She hoped he would be available then. He had managed to get two jeeps to the landing site; he must have arranged it before he became incommunicado.
They quickly got out of the helicopter and into the jeeps. The night was clear, the moon heavy and bright. Sarah drove one jeep, Casey drove the other. They waved thanks to the pilot as they pulled away; he would be waiting there for them. The moonlight allowed them to forgo headlights.
As had been true on the drive to the airport, they rode along in silence. When they got as close as they dared, they stopped. After they got out and geared up, Stephen spoke. His voice sounded strange there in the dark.
"Okay, Zondra's told us that there's an elevator - the main entrance. And that there are also ventilation shafts up near the top. There's a path up, rough and obscured but traversable. Sarah, Zondra, and Mary will go up: they're most likely to fit into the shafts. We will give them some time, then Chuck and Casey and I will approach the tunnel leading to the elevator. My hope is that we can pinch Bryce between us. The women from above, the men from below."
Zondra laughed quietly. "Morgan would have enjoyed that sentence."
There were smiles in the dark. Everyone relaxed a little. "We have to try to do this silently. I don't know if that will be possible. It's more likely possible for you," he motioned to the women, "than for us...And, yes, Morgan would've liked that too...Anyway, we will wait. Sarah, text Chuck when you are in position." She nodded.
Chuck walked to her and took her in his arms. "I love you, Sarah, be safe, please."
She kissed him quickly. "I love you too."
Sarah looked up in time to see Stephen and Mary share a glance, but Sarah did not know what it meant and was unsure if they did.
She led Zondra and Mary away, in the direction Stephen had pointed out. They found the path and started up it. They had flashlights but they walked by moonlight. The path rapidly became steep and uneven. Sarah realized that Zondra and Mary's injuries, while improved and improving, were slowing them. She allowed herself to move on ahead, reconnoitering but kept careful tabs on where they were behind her.
After a long, exhausting climb, Sarah knew she must be near the ventilation shaft. Zondra and Mary were a distance behind her. She stepped up, past a tall, jutting rock that obscured her view.
She saw the ventilation shaft. Sarah also saw Jill Roberts, seated on the ground next to the opening of the shaft, a pistol in her lap. Her head was down. She had not noticed Sarah. Sarah trained her pistol on Jill.
"Jill Roberts, I presume? I don't think we've met. I'm Sarah Walker."
Jill's head snapped up. Sarah could see moonlit tears on Jill's face. Jill raised her hands, and replied, tired and galled. "Walker? Jesus, goddamn blondes on both ends of my shit day."
A/N: Tune in next time for action atop and inside of Abe Lincoln's head. (There's a sentence you don't see everyday!)
Lots of folks out there reading silently. Love to hear from you. Leave a review in the box or send me a PM. Doesn't need to be anything fancy.
Chapter Theme: Family of the Year, I'm the One