A/N: More conversation. Brace yourself.

Nothing Like A Train

Chapter Twenty-Four: Channeling the Void

"The damned spot? Blood?" I ask, surprised by her allusion to Shakespeare given that I made one silently as I entered a few minutes before.

Mom nods. "And not just imagined or metaphorical. Too real, too much. Blood. Pain." She looks at her hands again, squeezing them into fists.

"You see, Hartley came to work with us...and everything was...fine. Except," she pauses and her tone shifts, "Hartley was ambitious. He wanted, maybe even expected, to find a way up the CIA ladder. He wanted to eventually trade the field for a desk, and his desk for a larger desk, culminating with the Director's.

Her lips compress, flatten. "But he was not just professionally ambitious. He was...personally...so. He fell for me early at UCLA. He never said anything to me — and Stephen was oblivious — but I knew. I never said anything to the Director; the team functioned well. Well enough. And I never said anything to Stephen; he liked Hartley and I knew Stephen, when not oblivious, could be jealous. Stephen and I got married that next Christmas. Hartley accepted it: he attended the wedding. But the frustration of his personal ambitions with me flamed his professional ambitions with the Company. He began to see the Intersect, Stephen's research, as his way of climbing the ladder, a computerized leg up, as it were. A short cut to the big desk."

She pauses again and looks at me, then at Sarah, letting her gaze linger for a second. "I still said nothing, even though I could see the signs of Hartley's ambition, or...obsession." She shakes her head. "During that time, since Hartley was there, the Director used me for occasional, short-term missions. Usually seduction missions…"

"And Dad was okay with that? You said he was jealous." I ask the question immediately, make the comment, before I think about either.

Mom shifts her gaze to me. She shrugs. "I told Stephen early on that my telling him about my mission with him would be the only time I violated protocol. From then on, my missions were secret — from him as well as everyone else but the CIA. I'd become...I was becoming...the Director's favorite, and I told myself that anything I did on missions was...permissible. What Stephen didn't know wouldn't hurt him."

I finally understand that shrug, the empty pragmatism of it. "So, you…?" — I don't say it, there's no need to say it, it speaks itself in the air. We all hear it.

Mom braces, sits up. "No. No, Chuck!" She falls back. "I won't say that no hands...or lips ever trespassed...mine or a mark's, but no, I never slept with any of them, for all that I made them hunger for it and expect it, demand it, in some cases."

I blink. Sarah's seduction missions, the one's I witnessed, rush back to me. The torment of them. My Dad may not have known exactly what my Mom was doing but he must have suspected, and suspecting, without knowing, would be worse. He knew what her mission with him had been. I relive the moments when Sarah was on Lon Kirk's yacht, the moments when she went below, and I did not know what was happening...

How could Dad have stood it?

"The Dance of the Seven Veils?" I say the words and hear Sarah gasp quietly, see her turn her head to me. Mom hears and sees Sarah too. I hadn't aimed the remark at Sarah: the phrase just leapt to mind and I...sort of spat it out.

"So, Sarah's danced too?"

I reach for Sarah's hand, mouth I'm sorry as she looks at me. I am sorry. It's just that hearing this from Mom has unmoored me. I feel like I'm at sea, seasick. Queasy. The floor undulates; the machines hooked to Mom seem to rise and fall. Steadying myself, I make sure my imagination is out-of-gear, clutch depressed.

Sarah gives my hand a squeeze and nods at me, smiling tightly, lifting me as she answers Mom "Yes, and Chuck and I have talked about it. No more of that for me, no matter what."

Mom gives Sarah an incredulous look. "Sarah, I'm sorry, but you know that absolute restrictions like that don't work, can't work, don't last, can't last, in the spy world. The spy world and morality are mutually exclusive. Everything gets relativized, a means to an end. Heartless consequentialism aping morality. Everything gets dumped into some utilitarian bloomery, smelted into utter shapelessness…"

Mom takes a breath, her voice galled. "The spy life will not tolerate real human attachments, meaningful relationships. Husband, wife, son, daughter, friend. None matter. It's just 'The Greater Good' — real human attachments don't matter. Real human beings don't matter. You stop thinking and acting as a particular human being, this woman, here, now, wife of Stephen and mother of Ellie and Chuck, and start channeling the Void…"

Mom's intense bitterness returns, settles on her.

I step between the women, in front of Sarah, but feel Sarah's hand on my shoulder, soft yet insistent. She moves beside me, stands there, nodding.

"I know, Mary. I do. As far as...Dancing goes, I never dropped all the Veils, but the pressure, the temptation, to do it... The unspoken...permissions, expectations. But I did other things. Bloody, deathly things." Sarah's voice is quiet but firm, self-castigating. "Chuck and I, we've talked about it. I was a different woman before Burbank." Sarah stares at Mom and adds, even more quietly, "Channeling the Void: I know what that is. My Director, Graham, taught me how…It took Chuck...to change the channel — for good."

I put my arm around Sarah and pull her close to me.

Mom grimaces, responding to her pain more than my gesture. "I've done...bloody things too. The codename, Frost, stuck for a reason. So, you've changed, Sarah?"

"Yes, Mary, I have." There's no doubt in Sarah's voice. "I wasn't sure until...maybe until Prague, the last few weeks...but I'd changed long before I was sure I had changed. It just took me a while" — she glances at me, gives me her shy smile — "to catch up with myself…"

Mom holds Sarah in a hard stare for a long time, then relents. "I wish I never had," Mom offers grimly, "Maybe you'll have better luck than I did."

The three of us are quiet. Bleep, beep, bleep.

"So, Dad married you knowing — but also not knowing — what you did on missions?"

"Yes. When I got pregnant with Ellie, I stopped all the other missions and only worked the protection detail. Hartley was still working with us, although at that point he started doing short-term missions away. Stephen's research was making headway, slowly. The situation went on like that for a while..." Mom drifted for a moment then recollected herself. She goes on, picking up speed, tugged forward by the story.

"...A couple of more years. At the time, Stephen was working primarily on what he called 'Foolproof Covers'. The idea was to use the developing Intersect technology to create a cover, a legend, for an agent, and then to 'implant' it. The cover was to be foolproof because the agent would not have to memorize anything. The FC's details would be retrievable much like memories but without any memorization.

"Around the time I got pregnant with you, Chuck, Stephen thought he was ready to try experimenting with small-scale, partial FC's. At that point, he was being funded more by the CIA than by UCLA. Hartley, primarily in hopes of speeding his too-slow-to-suit-him advancement, secondarily, I think, as an attempt to impress me, volunteered to be Stephen's subject for the first experiments. Stephen balked.

"I don't know why, although I believe now that Stephen had finally caught on to Hartley's long-standing interest in me. I think Stephen was hoping Hartley would leave the team if Stephen refused. But Hartley didn't. Instead, he went to the Director and persuaded the Director that he should be the subject. Stephen had no real choice."

"The initial implant was small-scale. Not so much a cover as an alias with a brief backstory, kind of like a bit character in a play. It worked like a charm and with no discernable side-effects. Hartley seemed fine. He urged Stephen to expand the FC, add to the backstory, the information being implanted. Stephen balked again. Again, the Director told Stephen to go ahead. So, he did. Another worked-like-a-charm success. Hartley was ready for a full FC. But up until then, the partial FC's Stephen created had been...harmless. Not good aliases, exactly, but not bad guys, bad aliases, either. But the FC Stephen created next was a full one, and an FC of a bad guy, a terrorist.

"Stephen was a computer scientist, not a psychologist; it didn't occur to him that the change from an FC of a harmless person to a harmful one was going to be more difficult than just adding information. None of us realized it. I was at home with Chuck and Ellie on the day of the implantation."

Mom's narration slows. Dread occupies her face. "At first, it seemed like a success. But then it became clear that something was...wrong. Hartley couldn't certainly separate himself, his actual memories, from the implantation. At first, he knew it. Stephen kept him in the lab and worked with him."

"You see, the FC's were supposed to be impermanent, to be 'absorbed' by the mind of the bearer, and to disappear after a determined period. 48 hours had been the time limit on the partial ones and it was supposed to be the limit on the full one. But Hartley's did not disappear. It strengthened. Hartley got worse and worse. Less and less able to tell something was wrong. He was becoming more and more the FC. He started to believe the legend. Stephen did everything he could think of but he could not stop what was happening.

"I did not know what was happening until Stephen called. He thought that maybe Hartley's feelings for me would bring Hartley back, creating the needed psychological separation between himself and the FC. I got the neighbor girl in Tarzana to watch you and Ellie, and I went to the lab. At first, he seemed to respond to my presence, to be influenced by me, but then he didn't. He seemed to go mad. Hartley looked at me the way that I know he was always tempted to look at me but never did, out of respect for me and Stephen. He grabbed me there in the lab — in front of Stephen. But it wasn't Hartley, really, it was the legend, the FC. He ripped my blouse open and I had to fight back. Stephen joined in. Hartley was strong and out-of-his-mind. I got loose from him, ran to Stephen. Hartley bolted from the lab.

"Stephen called the Director. He had to at that point, and local teams were scrambled, but Hartley was never found. The search went on for months, but he was not so much as seen. He'd just...vanished.

"Stephen blamed himself, his failure to foresee what would happen. The Director just wanted it forgotten and wanted Stephen to get back to work. After a while longer, he did. They did not send a permanent replacement for Hartley. They just sent in a series of agents. Stephen worked without further experiments on human beings.

"Or so I thought. — Anyway, a few months later Hartley's body, his remains, were found in a burnt building in England. They identified him by dental records. The Director closed the book on Hartley."

Mom pauses but she is not done.

"Stephen went back to work. But so did I. I began to want to be in the field again. Fewer seductions, more terminations. I would kill a man and fly home and tuck in my kids.

"Stephen blamed himself for Hartley still, and I felt responsible too. Stephen buried himself in work and I took care of you and Ellie — except when I was away. Things between us grew strange. Stephen started pressuring me to tell him about my mission and to just quit.

"He began to fight with the Director. I was sure he was no longer sharing the entirety, the heart, of his research with the Company anymore. We ended up after a few months in a kind of married detente. We loved each other, and loved you and Ellie, but we couldn't seem to find a compromise. Stephen felt like I put the Company ahead of our family. I felt like he cared more about the research than about me, that he was trying to force me to choose between my family and my job. I started going on missions more frequently. Stephen buried himself more deeply in his work. Little by little, we lost touch with each other even as we continued to live together, to care for you and Ellie."

Mom stops and I see that she is greyer than before. The talking exhausts her but she goes on.

I can remember this part of the story a little now, remember her frequent absences, the constant cleaning, the long silences between her and Dad. It had gone on forever, it seemed. I was a kid; I did not recognize unhappiness. I just thought families were happy. All of them. Mine.

She goes on. "And then one day a new player appeared on the international scene, an arms dealer. There'd been rumors about him, about a man working his way up, ruthless, driven by limitless ambition. He got a reputation in the Far East, slowly, and then moved west, slowly, eventually setting himself up in Moscow.

"He was shadowy, always working through drones and intermediaries, screened, mysterious. He managed never to be photographed. Once installed in Moscow, he was untouchable. Shielded unofficially by the government, in a building, in a compound, too well-guarded for direct attack.

"He did not just sell weapons, though, he also sold terror, bloodshed. He supplied extermination efforts with the necessary equipment, small-scale genocide. His name began to pop up constantly. Alexei Volkoff. He was at the top of the CIA's list, but no one could get close to him. A couple of agents who tried simply vanished.

"And then one day he slipped. A photograph was taken, grainy but clear enough. After receiving it, the Director sent it immediately to us. It was Hartley Winterbottom. Or rather, it was Alexei Volkoff — the legend had claimed the man, created a new name for itself.

"Stephen wanted to go after him himself, to try to find a way to meet him, reason with him. I knew that wouldn't work. I'd seen his eyes in the lab and he was crazier now. I told Stephen he had no business in the field. He'd just get himself and maybe others killed. The Director seconded my view. But then I found out that Stephen had told the Director about Hartley's...interest in me. Stephen had tried to use it to get rid of Hartley, to justify his initial refusal to use him as a subject.

"The Director contacted me and suggested I undertake a version of the mission Stephen proposed for himself, except to undertake it as a termination mission. The CIA had, in effect, created Volkoff. No one could know that. Everything connected with Hartley had been destroyed, all the records. The Director thought that Hartley's feelings for me might be used against Hartley, Volkoff. I agreed, despite Stephen's bitter protests. I just couldn't stay. We weren't right. I was antsy, anxious, all acrawl inside. He blamed himself for Hartley, maybe blamed me too in some way, and I blamed myself. I should've worried more about Hartley as part of the team, worried more about Hartley as Stephen's subject. Hartley's ambitions and his feelings for me. Everything had gotten twisted around. I told Stephen goodbye, Ellie, and then I read Chuck a bedtime story, and — I left my family in the dark.

"The Director put out the word that I — Frost — had gone rogue. I went to Europe and started trying to attract Hartley's — Volkoff's — notice. It took months. I had to do...things to make it seem my rogue status seem believable. I made sure that word got out that I was for hire, but expensive."

She stops and thinks about her own words, frowns. The machines bleep. I've been so caught up in the story, my stomach so unsettled, I'd lost track of everything but my arm around Sarah and Mom's words.

"Weeks went by, frenetic travel. I stopped calling home. I just...gave myself over to the Void. I even stopped reporting to the Director. I started to feel rogue — not just from the CIA, but from my life, myself. The weeks became months, and I began to get signs that Volkoff was interested in me, feelers, contacts.

"I'd never been in deep cover for so long. I had no anchor; hell, I had no rudder. My marriage was...stalled. I was personally adrift if still nominally, professionally on-task." She glances at me, a blush under her pallor, her tone shamed. "I stopped thinking as...living as...a married woman, a mother. I was only a spy, nothing but a spy. I couldn't be both anymore — if I ever was.

"I heard that Stephen was looking for me, so I went darker, deeper. Volkoff wasn't the only one with identity issues."

I know there's a lot she's not saying now; things I neither want to hear nor imagine. I feel Sarah's hand rubbing my back softly. We are afraid to look at each other, so we just look at mom, who is looking again at her hands.

"Finally, the call from Volkoff came. A meeting was arranged. I was no longer sure I was a CIA agent, but the mission was all I had, the only narrative that gave the way I was living, what I was doing, any sense. I went. I half expected him to have figured it out, half expected him to kill me, and I was ready with an elaborate set of lies if he let me live long enough to tell them. But when we met, I knew the situation was...not what I expected. Hartley was Volkoff. He did not remember me, not as such. I was no part of the FC that now supplied Hartley's past. But it was clear that Hartley was, in some way, still in there, and still attracted to me. Volkoff hired me on the spot. I was in, inside, after all those months outside, alone.

"I was better off outside. Hartley had become a monster. Volkoff was a monster. The FC had overridden Hartley, or all but Hartley's darknesses and demons. Hartley was too ambitious. He coveted another man's wife. But he was certainly no monster: he was just a flawed man. Volkoff was like something from one of your comic books, Chuck. Apparently sane but not sane. He knew, knows, no limits.

"But his old Hartley obsessions remained. He created and funded Fulcrum and the Ring to disrupt and defang the CIA. And now he had me within his reach. I thought that maybe, slowly, I could turn him, bring Hartley back. He was oddly gentle with me, most of the time. But, as he grew to trust me more and more, or what with Volkoff functions like trust, I could see the look in his eyes, the one Hartley had in the lab when he attacked me. But that was also the most he had seemed like Hartley. The more he was focused on me, the more his...feelings...were involved, the closer he seemed to being able to see past the FC, to find himself again.

"He started...courting me. I knew where it was all headed but I wouldn't allow myself to acknowledge it. I just told myself I was saving him — and saving lives: he listened to me, I could moderate him if not stop him — and I let things...play out. After it happened, I shut myself in my room and cried for hours. Then I found a safe place and I called Stephen and I told him...what had happened...tried to explain it."

She glances at Sarah and me for a split second, then glances away. "Stephen listened and then told me he did not want to know about my missions anymore. I guess that was the end between us, as husband and wife. I understood. But we worked together. I started piecing together Volkoff's growing empire. I stopped his plans when I could, moderated them when I couldn't, and Stephen did in effect become a spy. He disappeared, left the grid, became Orion. He worked against Volkoff and Volkoff's people, even as he kept working on the Intersect, taking it in a new direction — one you know about, Chuck. I kept trying to find Hartley inside Volkoff, and when he and I were together, I thought I would, eventually. But when we were not, the Volkoff identity always reasserted itself.

"My life became a nightmare. I was in an impossible place. Torn between three men: my husband, the man I realized I still loved and who I had abandoned, betrayed, Hartley, the man who was and wasn't there, but who I wanted to find, and Volkoff, the monster, whose every touch was cadaverous." She trembles head-to-toe again.

"Volkoff must've realized the effect I had on him, because, although he could not give me up, he only came to me once in a while, he could not stop and he did not stay, but he could not wholly give me up. Many times I thought about killing him, even about killing myself — but if I wasn't innocent, Hartley was, or at least he was guilty of nothing for which he, as Hartley, deserved a bullet. His compound became my Purgatory, a place for atonement even if none could be had. I had nowhere else to go."

Mom looks at me and for a moment, I see vulnerability in her eyes. "I can't explain it, what I did, what Stephen did, but we were somehow trying to make it right. We stayed in contact, although it was dangerous for me. As I said, we worked to limit Volkoff's damage, trying to find a way to take him alive. But he rarely left his headquarters, the building you were in, Chuck, and when he did, except on a few occasions when there were many guards, I never accompanied him."

"And Dad knew...knew what you were to Volkoff, Hartley?"

Mom nods exactly once, almost imperceptibly. "I told him after the first time. It nearly broke him. It did break me, I just never let him know that. I destroyed the best thing in my life for reasons...well, reasons I don't fully understand." She shrugs another time, that characteristic shrug. "I told him that I was no longer his wife, given what I'd done. He told me I was. I'm not. I'm not fit to be his wife or your or Ellie's mother; I'm a shipwreck of a woman. But at least I stayed afloat long enough to save you."

She pauses, shifts on the bed, her voice sounds less confessional as she starts again, more professional. "Stephen shifted gears with the Intersect after Hartley. He wanted it to be a learning tool, but he reconfigured it so that it did not come packaged with an identity as the FC's did. But you know about the Intersect. What you don't know is that Stephen contacted me when he knew you had it. By that time, Volkoff had known about the Intersect and Orion for a while, and he was, through The Ring, using Fulcrum to find it. We were terrified he would discover you, and so I worked here, in Moscow, and Stephen there, in and around LA, to keep you invisible to Volkoff, to frustrate Fulcrum and then The Ring. We'd succeeded until you came to Europe."

"The woman scientist, the one at the Yurt, Dr. Kilgari, she was, well, not Ring, but Ring adjacent. She'd done work for them before. When she realized what you were Chuck, what the Intersect was, she saw dollar signs, millions of dollar signs. She intended to take you and sell you to the highest bidder. I gather that she tried to use Sarah to capture you but that Kilgari underestimated you, and you turned the tables on her. She sent her hired men to find you but had no luck. She had heard of Volkoff and she tried to set up a meeting. He would have simply killed her for daring to demand a meeting if she had not said 'Intersect'.

"And so she undid all Stephen and I had done to protect you. Volkoff has enormous resources. He was well behind you but he sent out waves of people to check around the stops of the Trans-Siberian. When Volkoff figured out where you were, he would have killed Kilgari then, but she convinced him he needed her technical expertise to make you all you could be.

"The rest you can probably guess. I worked until I talked Volkoff into letting me lead the mission. He had no idea of you as my son. Except for a few selected missions, purged of personal data, Stephen long ago wiped my CIA files clean. The CIA thinks I'm dead. They're not wrong. Not exactly." She rests her gaze on me, cool and blue. "I should be. I expected to die on the roof."

"About that," I say carefully, "how did we escape?"

"Stephen reprogrammed Volkoff's system, the building's internal security. I gave him access to it in Kilgari's lab; you saw me. He set the cameras to go off in sequence, to keep us invisible. Of course, he did not know what I...expected to happen. He thought he was helping us both escape."

I take the thumb drive out of my pocket again. "And this...is the key to Volkoff."

She nods. "If you can find the lock…"

"What does that mean, Mom?"

She hears me say 'Mom' and I see her eyes brighten a little. I don't think she expected the title after her long, unpleasant tale. She takes herself to have forfeited it.

I still feel sick, but my earlier Ah, Souldier-mood has somehow persisted beneath my nausea. I don't understand her; she doesn't understand herself. She lost herself. But I am through being angry with her. I've found her. I ache for her, feel vicariously her deep, gnawing misery.

"Volkoff's computer can only be accessed via a spoken code and the code has to be spoken at a particular place, in front of a particular computer terminal. Stephen figured out the code but we've never been able to find the place, the terminal. If you could find it, and plug that in, it will destroy Volkoff's system, not just the computer system but the real-world one too: it will extract all his contacts, operatives, suppliers. It will give you The Ring, for example, and who knows what else."

"And you have no idea where the terminal is?"

"No, it's Volkoff's most closely guarded secret. The only thing he ever told me about it, beyond the general description, is that it allowed him to control the wild East."

I lift my head. "What were his exact words, Mom? 'The wild, wild East'?"

Mom: "Yeah, yes, now that I think of it. Yes."

Shifting my weight from one foot to another, I speak: "I'm almost certain I know what that means." I look at Sarah. "We need to talk to Beckman."

Mom looks at me, lost.

I step to her and kiss her clammy forehead, touch her flushed cheek. Exhaustion encircles her head like a dark halo. "Rest now. Let the drugs do their job. We'll keep you safe." She looks at me, frowning, then nods, lets her eyes close.

Sarah is watching me expectantly as I turn from Mom. I take Sarah's hand and we leave the room.

A/N: A long conversation that may seem of excessive length and fuss (and mortification), given the prior pace (and tone) of our story, but it provides a necessary weight for our two main characters and deepens themes that will matter as we close. Chuck has been remembering and reclaiming his past but it still needed to be recontextualized, because he systematically misunderstood it.

How about a review?

— Zettel