CHUCK vs. THE NO-WIN QUESTION CHAPTER 9: Business and Pleasure 9...

Mojave Training Center, California, 10:30 p.m. local time...

Sarah Walker walked through the main doors of the Mojave Center, and there was little external sign to reveal that she was utterly exhausted. Her pace was steady, her features calm, there was little to indicate the fact that she was in fact forcing herself to keep walking straight by force of will. She knew that it would take only a few moments for her to be asleep once her head landed on a pillow, but until then she had to keep up appearances for her students.

What had started out as a fairly routine desert survival training exercise had begun to go sideways within the first hour. A round dozen trainees had been left to find their way back to the Center, over several miles of desert. Though they were not informed of this, the trainees were being remote monitored as they traveled. The first incident had happened when a trainee had attempted to take a 'short cut' by climbing down a steep ravine slope into a dry wash, and then climbing up the opposite slope. She had almost made it. She had been three-fourths of the way up the far side when she had put a foot wrong, twisted an ankle, and slid back down the slope to the bottom of the dry watercourse, breaking an arm in the process.

Getting her to safety had turned out to be an involved exercise, the dry riverbed was narrow and there was no room to bring in a helicopter and no convenient way to use a jeep or van. They had been forced to lift her out on a pallet and use what amounted to a crane to lift the pallet to the top of the ravine. Sarah had barely finished supervising the rescue operation when word came that another student had run into trouble.

A trainee had been doing well, making good time, and gotten careless. She had paused to rest in the shadow of a stony outcrop, and received several bark scorpion stings. Under the best of circumstances, that was a painful and difficult result for a healthy adult, with symptoms often lasting several days. Unfortunately, as with any natural venom, some individuals were especially sensitive, and this trainee turned out to be one such person. She had gone into convulsions, and required immediate urgent care, she was still in the critical care facility.

At that point Sarah had decided to abort the entire exercise, but her decision had been overridden by the senior supervisors, and the exercise had gone on. In spite of Sarah's best hopes, another trainee had made an error in her dead reckoning, and ended up going off the admittedly very (intentionally) faint trail, and in all the confusion from the earlier mishaps, the tracking had lapsed and they had lost track of her. The trainee had at least kept her head, when she realized she was lost, she had called in, only to find that she had managed to get into a dead zone. Rather than wander around in confusion, she had stayed put and waited for rescue. By the time they had located her, it was almost dark.

By that point Sarah had been able to get the exercise canceled. It was obvious to her that her trainees were going to need more work before they were ready for this exercise, even after the wounded recovered. By the time all the trainees were squared away, and Sarah had managed to find a few minutes to eat a cold dinner, it was pushing ten p.m.

By the time she finished the last bite of the cold Salisbury steak, cold mashed potatoes topped with cold congealed gravy, and cold carrots, together with Cole slaw that was no longer cold, her already unpleasant mood had turned into something more sharp-edged. She was not quite sure who or what she was angry at, but anger was bubbling away inside her, like an electrical potential seeking a path to ground. Which might explain exactly what happened as she reached her temporary quarters.

The training center was currently hosting several groups from different branches of the JIA, and as a result most of the facility was overcrowded. Additional modular residences had been set up, what amounted to small trailers, the permanent staff of the training facility even referred to the temporary housing as 'the trailer park'. Sarah could not care less what it was called, all she was thinking about just then was a hot shower and then some sleep.

Sarah walked the short distance to the trailer park, letting the cool of the desert evening soak into her, deliberately doing the breathing exercises that she used to moderate her anger. Sarah had struggled with a slightly volatile temper ever since she was her daughter's age, and she had learned ways to manage that temper, ways that usually worked. Sometimes, though, her various techniques were insufficient. Especially, she mused, when she was not quite sure exactly what she was angry about.

Well, that's not entirely true, Sarah mused. I know some of the reasons. My team bungled the day's training, they weren't ready and I didn't realize how much they weren't ready. Sloppy. I hate sloppy, especially in me.

Sarah was self-honest enough to admit that the training failure that day was merely the salt on the dish of anger, though.

My father...in Moscow. Moscow. What the flaming Hell is Dad doing in Moscow?! Russia?! Could he possibly be in a worse place to be working the grift? Maybe North Korea or Kazakhstan? Or Mordor?

In spite of herself, a smirk crossed her face at that last thought. Before she had met Chuck Bartowski and Morgan Grimes, it would never even have occurred to Sarah Walker to read The Lord of the Rings. She still remembered the night she had finally sat down to read the fantasy story that her lover and her friend so loved. It had not been long after her wedding to Chuck, and she had expected it to be heavy going, when she had opened up The Fellowship of the Ring. Truthfully, she had only agreed to read it as a concession to her then-husband, she had believed that she could slog through it. So at eight p.m. one evening she had opened the first installment of the trilogy, and indeed, it had been hard to get into...at first.

By nine-thirty p.m. that night, she was following Frodo and his friends on the Barrow-downs, and realized that the story had become at least a little more interesting than she had expected. By the time she had reached the lonely, frightening journey through the wilderness, haunted by the Ringwraiths, she had been lost in the story, and she had ended up reading until four a.m. and still had trouble putting the story down. She had ended up reading the story obsessively over a weekend and then re-reading it.

As she had read, she had become fascinated by the eerie, insidiously tempting power of the One Ring. It had occurred to her that everything she had ever been taught in her line of work, everything her father had taught her as a con artist, everything she had learned at Langley about pragmatic assessments and necessary evils...was exactly what the One Ring fed on.

The One Ring would have devoured me alive, Sarah recalled realizing as she read the story. Frodo endured it until the last possible moment before he finally failed. I wouldn't have gotten out of the Shire before the One Ring owned me. Me, Casey, Carina, Bryce, Beckman, Roan, any of us, really. Everything we are and do would make us helpless against it. We specialize in lies and deception, trickery and deceit, murder and mayhem. Betrayal is our stock in trade. Hand any of us that damnable Ring and we'd be puppets on its strings in a few days or weeks.

I remember thinking that the only spy I knew who I thought might have held out, for a while, against the One Ring was my Chuck. Well, and maybe Cole might last a little while, not nearly as long as Chuck. The rest of us would be Boromir without the last moment repentance.

She remembered being sobered by that realization, it had stuck with her ever since she had read the story, and it had affected her thinking afterward. It would have been too much to say it changed her life, but had definitely changed her perspective.

Not bad for a geeky fantasy story about Elves and Orcs, Sarah mused. Her momentary distraction faded, though, as her thoughts returned to her father.

Dad is always so confident, he never doubts himself. 'Con means confidence, you know that!' The trouble is that Dad is a natural born gambler. No matter how good a gambler you are, no matter how many times you win, it's still true that if you keep going back to the crap table eventually you lose everything. Sooner or later you zig when you should have zagged, stay put when you should run or run when you should stay put. Sooner or later...and Dad is playing with some of the meanest, most murderous bastards on the planet right now. They're got a long reach and no sense of humor where their money and power are concerned.

Sarah saw her 'trailer' as she rounded the last corner, and quickened her pace as she contemplated a shower and bed. By long habit, she examined the area around her living module for signs of trouble, it was an automatic reflex. Even as she did, her mind went back to her father.

Russia. RUSSIA! How did Dad even end up there? What is he doing there? What kind of con would he be running? And on who? There are so many possibilities, all of them bad! And he's got a new girlfriend? A con woman? Will Dad keep his head dealing with her if he's emotionally compromised? And...and...

The truth was that it was not her father's mysterious new love interest that haunted Sarah most, though she was certainly worried and concerned (she refused to acknowledge even to herself that she might also be slightly jealous of her father's attention). No it was a different woman. A woman who came very close to being the bane of her existence, she mused sourly. Wild Card herself.

Sarah let out an unladylike snort as she thought about that code name. Wild Card?! Give me a break. The mysterious, exotic, glamourous Wild Card...like she's some sort of superspy. She really knows how to work that scam. Just pay no attention to the conniving, treacherous, murderous, greedy, manipulative, deceitful, skanky little witch behind the curtain!

Sarah sighed. Admit it to yourself, Sam. You're afraid of what she will do. How did she even meet my father? What have they done together?! Chuck said they've worked together many times over the years, and I never suspected a thing. But why would I? Dad and I go months at a time without any contact, and we don't tell each other what we're doing, at least not usually. Why would I suspect that Dad and that...that...that damned...skanky...bad enough that she's still got my Chuck half-beguiled, does she have to have my father too?!

To her surprise, and dismay, she felt tears in her eyes.

What the Hell is the matter with me?! she asked herself, as she blinked back tears. A moment later, her momentary inexplicable urge to cry faded, as her former anger resurged. That anger was still simmering a moment later, as she approached the door to her 'trailer'.

It was then that she saw motion in the darkness near her trailer, and her emotions went onto the back burner as Sarah shifted into combat mode. She grabbed for her gun, only to have it kicked out of her hands by a second figure who came out of nowhere from her left!

Sarah's exhaustion had vanished, as adrenaline flooded her body. She felt almost unnaturally alert as years of training and practice kicked in, turning the tired woman into something else, something potentially lethal. Sarah whirled and connected her fist to the masked face of her second assailant, who fell back, giving Sarah a moment to turn and duck under a blow from the first figure, landing a hard elbow to the ribs of her assailant as she did! The elbow impacted hard enough to bring a cry of pain from the figure, who was dressed and masked in black from head to toe. The sound of the cry was high enough to confirm what Sarah had suspected from the slight build and modest height of her opponent, her attacker was female.

In the dim lights of the residential section, Sarah could see that the other figure was slightly taller than the first, and similarly clad except that it was all white. Sarah was turning to face the white-clad figure when she felt arms go around her and realized that the taller white-clad opponent had managed to get behind her. One arm was trapping her throat and the other grabbing for Sarah's knife holster. Sarah brought a booted foot down on the foot of her assailant, followed up by another elbow attack to the midsection and forced the woman (Sarah had felt breasts press against her back when the White attacker had grabbed her) back.

Sarah dropped as Black came out her, and Black and White were momentarily entangled, giving Sarah time to get inside the door of her residence module. The hiding spot where she kept her spare gun was too far away to reach with Black and White right behind her, and White kicked the door open before Sarah could secure it. Sarah flipped herself over the 'bar' into the kitchenette, pulled open the cutlery drawer, and as White came into the main room a knife whistled past her masked face, to embed in the wall next to her! Sarah wasted no time, following up with another thrown knife as Black came in as well, and forcing Black to drop to one knee to avoid being impaled!

Sarah grabbed two more sharp cutting knives and was about to throw them when Black threw up her hands, and White pulled off her mask, revealing the familiar red hair and impossibly perfect features of 'Carina Miller'. Beside her, still on one knee, 'Zondra Rizzo' had pulled off her own mask as well.

"UNCLE!" Zondra cried. "We surrender!"

"Speak for yourself," Carina laughed. "I'm simply calling for a truce!"

"Passcodes?" Sarah demanded.

"Victor Charlie Sierra Rook Three," Zondra said, rising to her feet and rolling her eyes slightly.

"Victor Charlie Alpha Arcta," Carina said, giggling slightly. "Now put down the damned knives, Sarah! You know it's us!"

Sarah paused, breathing slightly harder, and lowered her blades back into the drawer.

"Not smart, girls," she said with a shudder as the tension drained away. "Two on one? We never did two on one ambushes in the old days!"

"Sure we did, Sarah," Carina said, a smirk on her lovely face, as she pulled the knife from the wall beside her. "Remember Alexandria? And Juneau?"

A smile crossed Sarah's face. "Okay, we didn't usually do two-on-one ambushes in the old days."

"We thought you'd be expecting something like this," Zondra said, as she walked over to join her friends. "But really, Sarah? You weren't holding back with those damned knives! Didn't you get word that we were coming?"

"Not a hint," Sarah said, opening a cabinet and pulling out a bottle of port wine. As she opened it, she added, "Not that that surprises me, this day has been an absolute charlie foxtrot. I wouldn't be surprised if the message is sitting in the stack somewhere at the main building waiting to be read. Sorry about the knives, girls, I guess I was in kind of a crappy mood and I let myself get carried away. I think I knew it was you two as soon as I saw you."

"I'm supposed to be the unpredictable one, Sarah," Carina said with a smile. "Remember the roles!"

"Remember that I hate surprises," Sarah retorted, but a laugh bubbled up with the quip. In spite of herself, she was feeling a little better. Along with Ellie Woodcomb, the two women in the room with her were easily her dearest friends in the world, and it felt good to see them again.

"We have a problem, Sarah," Carina said, as Sarah filled her glass with wine. "A problem that needs the three of us to handle."

Sarah poured wine for Zondra, and then a little for herself. Not too much, though, she wanted to keep a clear head, and sometimes booze kept her from sleeping well. Her bed seemed to be calling out to her.

"Is this 'our' problem as in the three of us...or 'our' problem as the Senior CATs?" Sarah asked, sipping her wine.

"Probably both," Zondra said, sitting down on one of the stools at the 'bar' that separated Sarah's current tiny kitchenette from her by-no-means spacious temporary living room.

"CAT Squad Six made their move on the smugglers in Rio," Carina said, leaning against a wall and taking a sip of her wine before continuing. "They'd spent two months working the situation, they had scoped out the leadership, identified the chain of command, pinned down most of the ring's facilities, and they moved on the leaders. The assault was perfectly executed, a dawn raid that should have caught a dozen heroin smugglers in bed or otherwise occupied."

A sinking sensation was forming in Sarah's stomach. "And what happened?" Sarah asked, though she suspected that she already knew.

"The same thing that's happened four times this year so far," Zondra said, her face grim. "Nothing. Nobody was home. The computers were erased, a lot of them had their hard drives and mass storage media removed or destroyed. The paper records were gone, or burned to powdered ash that had already cooled by the time our team moved in. Not a trace of a human being anywhere other than our own girls. The place had been abandoned for at least 36 hours by the time Squad Six breached it."

Sarah was not surprised by this development. Dismayed and disgusted, yes, but not surprised.

"So our mystery leaker strikes again," Sarah said with a sigh, pouring herself another glass of wine. She resolutely vowed that this would be her last one, it was too late, she was too tired, and she did not need a hangover the next morning! To say nothing of the possibility in her mind that she might need to drive later in the night before bed.

"Five times now," Zondra said. "Five times this year! Twice in South America, once in the USA, once in Spain, and once in Singapore."

"There can't be that many people who would have knowledge of all five operations," Sarah said, "other than the three of us, of course."

For a moment Sarah, Carina, and Zondra looked uncomfortably at each other, then Carina broke out laughing, joined a moment later by the blonde and the brown-tressed woman.

"Let's not do that again, girls," Sarah said.

"Amen," Zondra replied, raising her glass toward Sarah. Sarah raised her own glass and they 'clinked' the vessels together before sipping their wine. "Amy played us all for suckers for too long!"

"But besides us, there are fewer than ten people in our organization that would have reasonable access to information about all five blown missions," Carina said. "And all ten check out. There's not a trace of anything suspicious about any of them, and it would be pretty hard for any of them to leak so much information without being caught."

"What about our communications system itself?" Sarah posited. "It's supposed to be super-secure, the best the CIA and NSA can put together, but even so, nothing is perfectly secure."

"That would explain three of them," Carina nodded. "But the Singapore operation and the Buenos Aires op were planned entirely on-site, without any resort to the communications system."

"That leaves our bosses," Sarah said reluctantly. "If the leak is there, that would explain everything."

The three of them looked at each other wearily.

Once upon a time, the three women in Sarah's living module had been three fourths of the original Clandestine Attack Team. From the time the first CAT squad had been organized, Sarah, Carina, Zondra, and Amy had been trying to figure out who had named the organization, they were certain the name had been picked to create the acronym, and the acronym had caused them enough grief over the years to irritate them all. Unfortunately, that particular piece of intel remained elusive, even after eighteen years.

Organized in 2002, the original CAT squad had proven to be stunningly successful in their time. The original fourth member, Amy, had proven to be a turncoat, and had eventually been outed, long after the initial C.A.T. squad had broken up as a result of Amy's secret machinations. The CATs had been successful enough, in their time, however, that the highest echelons of the JIA had always been interested in fielding them again. Or rather, fielding more of them again.

So it was that in 2015, the decision had been made to create a network of CAT squads, trained and led by the original three, now designated as the 'Senior CATs'. The Senior CATs had recruited women, trained them and fielded them into new four-woman squads, and the 'new CATs', led by the Senior Three, had proven to be a very successful project since 2015. By now there were over 36 'new CATs', along with support staff, organized into nine squads. Sarah was at Mojave Center in the process of training recruits to eventually add three more teams.

Each of the Senior Three personally supervised (currently) three of the nine Squads, though they led the entire organization as a group. CAT Six, the group that had just engaged in the blown Rio operation, was under Carina's immediate supervision, in part because they had been dealing heavily with drug smuggling and related matters, which fell comfortably under Carina's expertise, given her time as a DEA operative.

"If it's one of the higher ups," Zondra finally said, "we're going to have the very devil of a time tracking the leak, to say nothing of plugging it. The leaker can hide behind security clearances and need to know, and we would have a hard time even figuring who to suspect, much less investigate. And we wouldn't dare move against the leaker even if we knew who it was unless we had rock solid evidence."

"We wouldn't even be able to narrow down who would have the necessary knowledge," Sarah sighed. "We wouldn't be cleared to know."

"I've got more good news," Carina said. "Some of the intel CAT Six gathered over the months before they launched their failed assault indicates that the heroin smuggling ring they were trying to suppress is more than it first appeared. Several of the members of the operation are former Gentle Hand people, including we think at least two of the leaders. There are also some nasties who used to work for Volkoff Industries as well. The team leader of CAT Six thinks the drug ring is branching out into assassination for hire and sabotage work as well."

The conversation went on for some time, as the three of them considered various possibilities for identifying their leaker, and plugging the leak. Eventually, exhaustion forced them to call a halt, somewhere near two a.m. Since Mojave Center was already overcrowded, Sarah invited her friends to sleep over in her living module, which they accepted. The main furniture in the tiny living area was two sofas, which was convenient if nothing else. Sarah's tiny bunk was not much more roomy than the sofas, for that matter. It was certainly true that all three had slept in far worse conditions.

"So what's Ellie doing, Sarah?" Zondra asked as she stretched out on one sofa. "Last I heard rumor put her in Italy."

"Still there, I think," Sarah replied. "But I couldn't get much out of Chuck the last time we talked."

"You can't call her directly?" Carina asked.

"Not right now," Sarah replied. "C.I. is in the middle of something fairly nasty over there, I think. It's keeping Ellie pretty occupied."

Ellie Bartowski-Woodcomb was not officially a member of the CAT organization, of course. She was a private citizen who was a partner in a privately run intelligence and security organization. None of that had kept her from becoming close to Sarah, Zondra, and Carina over the previous several years, to the point that she was regarded as an honorary CAT by the Seniors. She had worked with the Senior CATs and gone into the field with them more than once...and the four of them had occasionally engaged in epic partying, too.

Not quite the way we would have when we were all still twenty years old, though, Sarah admitted to herself morosely, as she thought about Ellie. Though we certainly painted the town red in Vancouver last year!

A smile crossed the blonde's face as she recalled that night, followed by a rueful grimace as she remembered the hangover the following morning. Somehow she did not remember the hangovers being quite so bad when she first became a CAT. Ellie had vowed never to drink vodka again, Sarah recalled. Her own hangover had been worse than Ellie's, and far worse than she remembered from similar nights of partying with the CATs in 2002 and 2003.

Must be my imagination, Sarah mused ruefully. It can't possibly be that I was twenty then and I'm almost forty now!

A meeting room in Washington D.C. 2:15 a.m. local time...

"How bad was it?" General Linda Conroy asked, as she met with several of her immediate NSA secret branch subordinates. "And how bad will the cleanup and coverup have to be?"

"Very bad, General," Mr. Andrews said. The man had not slept in over twenty-four hours and he looked it, there were dark circles under his eyes and he needed a shave. He was still a focused professional as he made his report, however. His job often involved thirty hours days.

"The breakout was an inside job, General," Andrews said. "From our preliminary investigation, it looks they've been planning this for months. The Bureau of Prisons has checked their records and at least six guards that have been working in the prison for at least the last six months don't match their records. Probably the real men are dead, certainly someone managed to slip in 'ringers' to occupy their places during the last few personnel rotations.

"Which of course implies," Mr. Andrews went on, "that someone is in a position at BoP to influence personnel assignments and has access to the relevant information that the 'special' prison. Which scares the devil out of me. We're going to need to vet everyone at BoP who knows about Ebony One, and who is in position to do anything with the knowledge, and we'll have to do it without revealing that Ebony One exists."

"If it ever gets out that we're maintaining a secret prison on U.S. soil," Major Donnings said, "the PR hit is going to be a sheer nightmare. It'll be the worst disaster since MKUltra!"

The CIA representative, who had been quiet up until now, said rather sharply, "That was widely misreported, it wasn't anything like the crazy stories in the media."

"Yeah, it was worse," Major Donnings said. "And it was a CIA baby, you guys give the intel community a bad name, you know?"

"This from the organization that keeps a permanent stable of assassins seconded from the military," the CIA man retorted, a wry grin on his face. "Should I remind you that the official mandate of the NSA is signals intelligence and cryptography? If the public knew what was hidden inside No Such Agency, I think it might make quite an impression. Oh, and should I look up the Uniform Code of Military Justice and what it has to say on illegal orders? Tell me, how do you guys pick out the military guys who you can be sure will interpret that liberally enough to be useful? And what happens if you guess wrong and find out after he knows what's going on?"

"ENOUGH!" Conroy snapped. "This is unprofessional and unproductive. We have a Situation to address and we will address it! Both of you, silence. Colonel Andrews, go on with your report."

"Anyway," Mr. Andrews said, "what it boils down to is that someone orchestrated the first successful mass break-out from Ebony One since it was set up. Up until now, only two prisoners ever got out of Ebony One without permission, one was a captured CIA agent who turned out to be part of FULCRUM, a woman who escaped when she was taken out of the prison to take part in a field op. The other was a man who managed to break out single-handedly against all odds a few years later. But they were the only ones out of hundreds, over the course of twenty-five years.

"But now we've had an actual mass escape," Andrews went on. "We had six people get out this time, and they left quite a few dead and injured guards and other personnel as they did it. To make it worse, we have no idea who orchestrated this, and whoever that someone was, he's damned good. This was meticulously planned, carefully prepared, and most of their plans survived contact with the enemy."

Conroy sighed. Andrews had been right, this was going to be a sheer nightmare to hide.

Ebony One was a prison, a super-secret prison. It's location was well known, in fact, it was hidden inside a normal Federal supermax prison. It was staffed by picked Bureau of Prisons personnel who were prepared to keep their mouths shut about what was, after all, an illegal prison. It was used only for the most sensitive prisoners, prisoners either too secret to be openly tried, or who had to be hidden from the elected government itself, or who might need to be 'traded' or interrogated without interruption. Ebony One was the destination for a number of high ranking FULCRUM and Ring personnel, as well as more than a few Volkoff operatives. It also housed JIA operatives who had betrayed their organizations, or otherwise broke rules that were not negotiable.

Now they were going to have make up explanations for what had happened, and why, and for the deaths of the BoP personnel, and the material damage. The explosions had hardly been something that could go unnoticed, and the escapees and the rogue 'guards' had been extracted by helicopter, of all things. Radar had tracked the choppers into the mountains, where the contact had suddenly been lost.

Conroy would have liked to believe that they had crashed, but they could hardly assume that, and she knew too well how unlikely that was. They had almost surely changed to other transportation somewhere in those mountains, and vanished into the night.

"Do we have a breakdown on who escaped?" the CIA man asked.

"Oh, yes," Conroy sighed. "Some of the ones we'd least like to see out again, in fact."

Conroy pressed a button, and a list of names appeared on the display screens above the main table.

'AMY' IDENTITY REDACTED

THOMAS DELGADO

AUGUSTO GAEZ

PRISONER #48 IDENTITY REDACTED

PRISONER #54 IDENTITY REDACTED

JONAS ZARNOW

"Wait a minute, two of these people are so secret even we can't know their real names?!" Donnings exclaimed.

"I'm afraid so," Conroy replied. "The Committee considers their identities to be too 'sensitive' to release, even to this august company. I can tell you that the woman listed as 'Amy' is actually a former Federal agent herself, we're keeping her identity because revealing it could reveal some other still-active personnel in sensitive places. But she's not so important in and of herself...or that's what I would have said before this breakout. Somebody thought she was important enough to extract."

Of course that might be for Gaez's sake, Conroy mused. If the Intel I saw is accurate, he and 'Amy' are an item, or have been. Somebody might have grabbed her to keep Gaez happy, if they want Gaez for something. Or maybe she's a lever to control Gaez, put a gun to her head to get Gaez to cooperate. Or both. We don't know who did this so we can't even made an educated guess as to what he, she, or they want with these people.

"What about the other ones, the numbered ones?"

"Those are absolutely not available," Conroy said. "All you can know is that it's a man and a woman. He's probably the single most secret prisoner in Ebony One...or at least, he was that. Now he's the most wanted fugitive of the JIA. She is not much less restricted. And no, I can't tell you if they are associated with each other, or not. For what it's worth, I argued in the Committee that this information should be available, but I lost the argument."

"I don't see a pattern here," the CIA man said, looking at the names. "I'm familiar with the unredacted ones, of course, and I'm read in about 'Ms. Amy'. But I don't see why someone would go to so much trouble to break out this specific group of prisoners! Gaez is a former terrorist for hire, he ran the Gentle Hand organization a decade ago, and he rarely operated inside U.S. borders. What does he have to do with a scientist selling information to the North Koreans, like Zarnow, or a FULCRUM op like Delgado? What's the overlap?"

"I wish we knew," Andrews replied. "Right now we're still figuring out the breakout, we don't have a clue who organized it, how, or why. Absent that, anything we speculated about the prisoners would be just that, speculation. Your guess is as good as anyone else's what they wanted these six people for."

"In the meantime, we need to start deciding who needs to be immediately informed, and how much they should be told, and who we have to keep in the dark," General Conroy pointed out. "We need that list ready by noon tomorrow."

Mojave Training Center, California, 12:30 p.m. local time...

Sarah ached for sleep, but she also knew that she would never be able to properly rest until she looked at the packet from Carmichael Industries. So after Zondra and Carina were asleep, she quietly left the trailer, heading to the main building whereupon she retrieved the package from where she had concealed it. Instead of going back to her assigned living module, currently occupied by a sleeping Zondra and Carina, Sarah drove out into the desert in a van.

As she drove, she considered whether to tell her friends about the little surprise the CIA had implanted in her arm. She had known about it for days now, and done nothing, because she was not yet sure what was best to do. She hated the idea of that damned transmitter implanted in her arm, beeping away her location and identity to anyone with the right receiver and software. It was so patently stupid an idea! Yet somehow it was just exactly the sort of thing she would expect the desk-bound 'experts' at Langley and elsewhere, people with no field experience at all, to dream up. It made sense...in an imaginary-world kind of way.

Of course they assume that the CIA and the NSA will be the only ones who know about it, Sarah fumed as she drove. And of course they keep us in the dark since we don't 'need to know'. And oh, of course, it's oh so useful as a way to make sure they still have a control on us, isn't it? We're walking around transmitting our identity and location all the time to anyone with the right equipment, makes it really hard to go rogue or sneak around behind our bosses back, at least as long as we don't know about it?

Sarah paused to wonder if Zondra or Carina or both had such implants already. Even if they did, they might well not be aware it, she would still be blissfully ignorant of the transmitter in her arm except that Carmichael Industries had detected it when she was 'spying' on her family from the beach, and informed her.

So much for secrecy, Sarah mused savagely, as she slowed down to avoid some rocky outcrops. It was a very dark night and there were no lights around to aid her, and she had her own headlights turned off to avoid attention. She was driving by virtue of high-end 'starlight' goggles, which was dangerous and slow.

The JIA 'experts' plan to keep this a deep dark secret, since if it leaked, it would of course reveal every CIA and NSA op, every deep cover agent with an implant, everybody, almost at one fell swoop, the more so because they don't know they they're transmitting and have no way to turn it off if they did! But their precious secret has already leaked, Chuck and Ellie and at least some of their senior people know about it already, heck, it already gave me away to them when I was sort of spying on them! Sooner or later, other people are going to know. 'A secret is a secret until one person who doesn't have a reason to conceal it learns it.' That exaggerates it, but sooner or later this is gonna be an open secret, and probably sooner! C.I. knows, who else might already know?

Sarah's next thought was a snarl. I'll be SHE knows. She's a nasty, treacherous, lying little sneak who won't keep her hands off other women's ex-husbands, but she certainly has a knack for finding out things she shouldn't know! Heck, for all I know Chuck and C.I. might have found out from Wild Card! Or he might share the information with her...I doubt it. If she didn't already know, I don't think Chuck would tell her, she buys and sells information, after all. But if she doesn't know now, it won't be long before she does. It's only a matter of time before this is common knowledge in the shadow world.

But what to to do about it?! I'm not even cleared to know about it. If I try to complain or protest about it, that'll reveal that I know and my bosses'll want to know how I found out. I could get it removed easily enough...heck, a shot of local anesthetic and I could probably dig it out myself without too much trouble...but then I'd have to explain how I found out about it and why I removed it! Should I tell Zondra and Carina about it now? Of course I'm going to tell them! But then what do we do about it?

That was a problem for the next day, Sarah concluded. For the moment, she had other fish to fry, she was so exhausted that she knew she could sleep in the van without any trouble, and she wanted to go to bed desperately. But she also knew she would not be able to rest properly until she reviewed the information Chuck had sent her.

Sarah selected a spot in the desert outside the main area, a spot she knew occupied a blind area in the surveillance network. She knew that spot was blind because she had personally blinded it.

She triple checked the area for privacy and security, made sure the van was sealed and locked and that the security features were engaged, and then she opened the packet from C.I. As she had expected, it contained pages and pages of hard copy, all apparently covered in line after line of total gibberish. It was a C.I. cypher, and one she could convert in her head from practice, to her the pages might as well have been written in clear English.

She read quickly, because she knew that the 'paper' on which the information was printed would begin to oxidize the moment the packet seals were broken. Already, the edges of the gray 'paper' (actually a complex material with a molecular structure that was a C.I. trade secret) were turning black at the edges. Within thirty minutes, the sheets would oxidize to a pure black color, and another ten minutes would see them disintegrate into fine powder.

Sarah did not need nearly that much time to read and assimilate the contents.

TO BE CONTINUED...