A/N: Still deciding whether to continue this.
Jeux Sans Frontières
Chapter Two: If Looks Could Kill...
Stanford Campus/Spring Break 2018/Monday Morning
More explosions of sand. More muted spits.
Chuck veered again, still running toward the dunes and toward the densely green jungle he could see beyond them. The shots were coming from behind him, to his right — or it seemed that way. He had the pistol in his hand and glanced at it as he ran. A small box of text floating beneath it read: M&P M2.0/10 + 1 Capacity.
Adrenaline swamped him. He sped up, an all-out sprint, all but forgetting he was running in place in the Gates Building computer lab. His heart was thumping and he was gasping.
He reached a dune and crouched down.
The explosions and spits seemed to have stopped. Unsure how to interpret that, Chuck started running again, choosing a path toward the jungle that kept dunes between himself and his best guess as to the shooters' location.
He made it to the edge of the beach and plunged headlong into the dense jungle underbrush.
He slowed, desperately trying to find a path, some break in the vegetation that would allow him to make out his surroundings. He was overwhelmed by mottled greens and browns — as if the very air around him had turned camouflage. He made himself stop and breathe and listen, straining to hear over his ragged, gasping breaths, hoping his ears could tell him something his eyes could not. He did not hear more shots, but he thought he heard distant shouts from the beach, several voices. He plunged forward again.
He kept running. His lungs were bursting, aflame. He could see the vegetation clawing at him but could not feel it. Forward, deeper in. And then he saw it ahead: a clearing in the jungle.
It took him a second to realize the clearing was a road — rather, a two-wheeled path leading deeper into the jungle, cutting diagonally away from him. In the clearing was a jeep — a muddy, olive-drab Willy's M38. Chuck recognized it from M.A.S.H. re-runs before he saw the small floating box of text that identified it.
In the jeep, contorted in the passenger seat, was a woman.
Chuck ran to the jeep and clambered into the driver's seat. The engine was running. Chuck turned to the woman: he could see a large red stain on the lower front of her shirt. Her head was down, her dirty, black hair hiding her face. Chuck was about to reach out to her when she lifted her head, turned her face toward him. Her eyes were blue and glazed, only half-focused.
"Drive, Charles!" she rasped, "drive!"
He knew her face.
Before he could process the recognition, he heard shouts from behind him, from the jungle.
The woman slumped down with a final whisper, her hand on his shoulder before it dropped limply: "Drive!"
Chuck dropped the pistol into his lap and took the wheel. Grabbing it seemed to throw the M38 forward.
He turned the wheel to avoid a tree on the edge of the road and a moment later the M38 was whining deeper into the jungle.
Chuck drove. It took all his attention to keep the M38 from crashing into trees or underbrush.
As he tightened his grip on the steering wheel, the M38 sped up, as he loosened his grip, it slowed down. The woman seemed unconscious or dead. His eyes could not settle the issue. All he knew was that she had slumped farther forward.
He was torn between his desire to distance himself from his pursuers and his concern for the woman. She seemed to know his name. He did not question the fact that his apparent name in SpyCraft was his actual name. He drove on grimly.
Finally, after hurtling along the road for several minutes, he relaxed his grip on the wheel. The M38 slowed. When he released the wheel, the M38 stopped. He reached for the woman, pushing her back in her seat carefully. Her head lolled to one side and he could see her face again.
It was the face of the Norse Warrior Princess. Chuck blinked and used one hand to rub his eyes, but, when he looked again, it was her face. Her hair was black, not blond, wild and dirty, not in a tightly gathered ponytail, her face was smudged with dirt and blood, she wore no glasses. But it was the same face that had chilled him outside the Gates Building.
Her eyes opened a little, and she moaned softly, one hand moving to her abdomen, to the blood on her khaki-colored shirt.
"Charles, keep going...You are what matters, the mission is what matters...I don't...matter."
Her head fell to the side. He could see that she was still breathing, shallow and fast. He leaned toward her, whispering urgently. He could hear his voice echo slightly in the headset.
"What's the mission? Who are you?"
She did not answer. He grabbed the wheel and the M38 jerked forward.
John Casey stood in his SpyCraft lab coat, watching a large screen.
The screen displayed what the geek, Bartowski, was seeing, and it allowed Casey to hear what Bartowski heard. Just a moment before, one of the technicians had opened the door and let Casey's new partner, Sarah Walker, into the small room.
Walker was standing beside him and he saw her deep frown when she recognized her face on the monitor.
"Black's your color," Casey offered with a pointed grunt.
Walker did not react. He watched her out of the corner of his eye, but all he saw was her frown disappear and her face become the impassive mask it had mostly been during the week he had known her.
She spoke after a moment. "Fucking programmers at the Langley thought it would be funny if I were in the game." Her freeze-dried tone warned Casey against continuing.
Casey had replaced the NSA agent originally assigned to Operation Spycraft. That agent, Carina Miller, had been reassigned. Casey was not told why, he was simply shoehorned into Miller's place. Walker appeared wholly unimpressed with him. He hated to admit it, but he did want her to be impressed with him.
Walker was a legend in spy circles, especially for someone so young. She was CIA Director Langston Graham's deathly handmaiden, his Ice Queen. Casey was unsure how much of the legend was true and how much the product of busy spy tongues, but there was no doubting her competence or her distance. He had heard her name whispered in intelligence hallways regularly for a few years but lately, he had not heard her name as often. He had been surprised to find her heading Operation Spycraft.
But the woman herself was not surprising. She was all business, as hard to read as an Egyptian hieroglyph. He had been able to make nothing of her thoughts or feelings about the mission. He had been able to make nothing of her personally, except that she seemed to radiate cold at will.
He looked back at the screen, hearing Bartowski's voice for the first time. The idiot stopped to check on the woman. Jesus!
"What's the mission? Who are you?" Bartowski's voice, pleading.
Casey thought he saw Walker stiffen, but if she did, it was all but imperceptible.
Walker turned from the screen displaying Bartowski's game to another, smaller screen displaying Bartowski's vital signs. The headset allowed them to be tracked. His heart rate was high, his blood pressure too.
The technician who had opened the door joined them and commented, gesturing at the small screen, the moving blips.
"All his vitals are in the expected range, given his VR situation. He's not in bad physical shape. As was expected, he's got a thin line, psychologically. He almost believes this is really happening to him; he's nearly forgotten it is a game. He's filling in the game's gaps. The guy has a steroidal imagination."
Walker nodded, frowning again. She turned to a third screen, one from which no sound was coming. The scenes on it shifted, although all were similar, various cityscapes. "So, this is the game the others are playing?"
The technician nodded. "Yes, the other twenty-four are at various points in the dummy version. Only Bartowski is playing the smart version."
"And how long," she went on dispassionately, "until the download?"
"It depends on Bartowski's gameplay — but it should not be long now."
The three of them watched Bartowski's screen, hearing the sound of the gunning M38 engine.
Casey shook his head. Why the hell put that relic in the game? Why put Walker's dark doppelganger in the game? The only things worse than spies with guns are spies with computers!
Bartowski drove the M38 into the jungle for several more minutes, looking at the woman beside him repeatedly. The jeep bounced into another clearing, a larger one, and a small, thatched hut stood in the clearing.
Bartowski stopped the car and got out, shoving the pistol in his pants and running around to the woman. He lifted her carefully from her seat and carried her into the hut, through the open door. He put her down and began to lift her shirt.
On the screen, the woman opened her eyes. "There's no time, Charles; I'm as good as dead. I can't be saved. Get out of here. Leave me your pistol. Maybe I can slow them before...you know."
"Wow," Casey muttered, "she even sounds like you, Walker, except, you know, human."
Walker fastened her eyes on Casey and he immediately regretted speaking. He looked back at the screen but he could feel her continued glare.
Chuck heard what the woman said but he ignored it. "What's your name?"
The woman gave him a strange look. "My name? Charles, what's wrong? Take the jeep. The tank's full. Get to the airfield." She paused. "Go. The briefcase is in the plane, — but I couldn't leave you…You can leave me behind. You have to. I'm done for. But not the briefcase; you can't leave it. The mission, Charles."
She stared into his eyes, her eyes fully focused for a moment, suddenly warm and deep. "You can fly the plane. I want to die knowing you lived…"
She lost consciousness again.
Chuck leaned her back against a wall of the hut. He looked around. It was empty inside, a dirt floor, no windows. Just the light from the door.
He lifted the woman's shirt, careful only to bare her stomach. Using his sleeve, he had nothing else, he wiped at the blood. It was coming from a puncture wound, a knife wound, that looked deep. It was seeping blood. He thought of his pockets and pushed his hands into them. In one, he found a small pocket knife. He cut his sleeve off and cleaned the wound better, carefully.
He heard the sound of an engine in the distance and checked outside, but of course, he saw nothing.
Not yet.
"What's the moron doing?" Casey muttered, not quite under his breath. "He needs to get out of there. That's what the simulations said he would do."
Walker stared at the screen.
Chuck pressed his rolled-up sleeve against the woman's wound, then pulled her shirt down over it, the shirt tight enough around her waist to keep his sleeve in place.
The sound of the approaching engine was getting louder. He looked at the woman's face for a long moment. If she was still breathing, he could not tell it.
"I can't leave you here. I can't." He carefully picked her up and took her back to the M38, carefully placed her in the passenger seat.
He ran around the back of the jeep and jumped in. The engine was still running. He squeezed the steering wheel and drove away from the hut.
"Shit," the technician said. "He was supposed to leave her there. The game's not set up to continue with her in it. It may glitch. It will glitch, eventually." Casey saw the technician glance nervously at Walker; he had turned as white as his lab coat.
Walker was staring at the screen. She did not see the technician's glance.
As the jeep roared away from the hut, she finally asked, in a muted voice. "Why would he do that? The mission is what matters. Fool!"
Chuck saw the airplane before he realized he was seeing the airfield. It was literally a field — a long clearing of low-cut grass. The plane was small, single-engine. As he looked at it he saw a floating box beneath it. Cessna T210M. It was on one end of the long clearing, propellor toward the distant end.
Chuck let go of the steering wheel abruptly and the M38 skidded to a halt. He put his arm in front of the woman, holding her in place. Then he jumped out, ran around to her, and lifted her from the seat. He carried her to the plane and, working feverishly but deliberately, he got her inside, strapped in a seat. He saw a briefcase beneath her seat.
He could hear the engines behind him again, louder.
Casey could not help himself. He leaned toward the screen. "C'mon, moron! Get the hell out of there!"
"He needs to open the briefcase," the technician hissed, "it's what he does in the simulations. He can't just fly off, knowing nothing."
Casey looked from the technician to Walker. She was still staring at the screen.
Chuck took a moment to check the make-shift bandage. The wound was still seeping but it was not bleeding fast. He'd helped his sister enough with her med school homework take that as a good sign.
He reached up and brushed the woman's dirty hair from her smudged face, staring at her for a moment. He looked again at the briefcase, then again at the woman. He listened to the still-louder sound of engines.
"Well, you said I can fly this thing…" He closed the door on her side of the plane and ran to the other side. He climbed in and started the engine. The propeller began to spin, eventually becoming nearly invisible. Chuck grabbed the yoke and squeezed. He glanced at the instruments but was unsure what he was seeing. The plane lurched forward and began to pick up speed.
A visual display appeared that labeled the instruments and provided instructions for take-off. He read the instructions quickly.
He heard the engines behind him arrive. He glanced through the small rear window to see two other M38s coming out of the jungle not far behind him. He heard the crack of rifles. He squeezed the yoke tighter and the plane sped up, eventually beginning to lift. A moment later, the plane was in the air.
Casey looked at Walker. She tore her eyes from the screen and shot the technician a look that could kill, baleful and blue. The technician shrank from the look.
Walker spoke through tight lips. "Bartowski saved the woman. But we need him to look in the briefcase, at the document. Can the game cope with the change long enough for this to work as it is supposed to?"
The technician shrugged nervously, growing even paler. "The game learns as it goes on. There's some plasticity. I'm just not sure."
Casey turned back to the screen.
Bartowski had one hand on the yoke — but with his other, he had reached under the woman's seat. He pulled the briefcase out from under it, maneuvering it past the woman's legs. He stood it in his lap and used one hand to open the latch.
"Shit," the technician said again, "he's not supposed to see it while he's in the air. The simulations…"
"...Weren't worth shit," Walker intoned, stealing the sentence from the technician. "Bartowski's no damn program; he's not one of us. He doesn't play to win."
Chuck opened the briefcase a little and, after checking the instrument panel again, he peeked inside. All he could see was a paper-clipped document.
He let the bottom of the briefcase fall into his lap and he pushed the top back. The document inside had 'Top Secret' typed across it several times.
He fished the document out of the briefcase, put it in his hand on the yoke, and then, holding it in that hand, he used the other to close the briefcase and put it behind his seat. He moved the document from his yoke hand to his free hand.
He glanced at the woman.
Casey spat. "Christ, Bartowski, look at the damn document, not her!"
The technician's eyes were big, straining; he nodded at the screen as if to compel Bartowski to read.
Walker stared.
The screen suddenly went black.
Walker jerked. "What the hell?"
Chuck blinked, his vision suddenly dark, dim. He could not see the woman, the blue sky, hear the plane's engine.
He was still standing on the bull's eye in the Gates Building computer lab. But his VR headset was broken on the floor at his feet, a wisp of smoke rising from it. Before him stood Lou.
Lou! Lou?
Glancing around them at the other gamers, all in headsets, she put her finger to lips.
"Come with me if you want to live," she whispered. She grabbed his hand and yanked him toward the rear door of the lab, the one behind the podium and below the Welcome to the World of SpyCraft! banner.
Chuck, still blinking, let Lou drag him out of the exit.
A/N: And we're off…?