A/N: We begin our final lap.
Jeux Sans Frontières
Chapter Twenty-Five: Ripples and Riptide
I was scared of dentists and the dark
I was scared of pretty girls and starting conversations
Oh, all my friends are turning green
You're the magician's assistant in their dreams.
Awooo
Awooo
And they come unstuck
Lady, running down to the riptide
Taken away to the dark side
I wanna be your left-hand man
I love you, when you're singing that song and
I got a lump in my throat 'cause
You're gonna sing the words wrong
There's this movie that I think you'll like
This guy decides to quit his job and heads to New York City
This cowboy's running from himself
And she's been living on the highest shelf
— Vance Joy, Riptide
The elevator slowed, stopped.
Stephen stepped to the side, giving Mary command of the doors. She was the spear's tip; Stephen came behind. It had always been like that.
"Ready, Stephen?"
"Yes, Mary." He heard her breathe out slowly.
The doors slid open quietly and Mary's guns moved from vertical to horizontal. Two men stood in the hallway near the elevators and two more flanked a door at the end of the hallway. Mary stepped out and her guns each jerked and spit once. The two nearest men fell before they could get to their guns.
Stephen jumped to the side, dividing targets for the men at the end of the hallway, complicating their decisions. It didn't matter. Although they managed to draw their guns, Mary killed them both before either could pull the trigger.
A few seconds, four dead men. Mary would be unhappy about Stephen's self-exposure later, he knew.
Mary took one more step, — stopped. She fired again and the camera above the door at the hallway's end exploded into sparks and flames.
As planned, Stephen immediately raced past Mary, rushing toward the door beneath the smoking camera. If Charlie could be trusted, he would open the door.
He did. It swung open. Charlie held it and looked out.
Behind him, a man lay face-down on the floor, unconscious or dead, and beyond the man stood Delta, Fleming, and Manoosh Depak. Depak, one eye black, his face bruised and his lip bleeding, had a gun in his hand, holding it without conviction on Delta and Fleming, but neither of them was paying attention to him.
They were both staring past Stephen to Mary, at Mary. Columba's reputation was known to them; the four bodies in the hallway reinforced it.
Stephen reached Charlie and Charlie brandished a laptop. "It's all there — and more," Charlie said quickly, glancing nervously out at Mary.
"What have you done, Max?" Delta whispered at Charlie. She looked lost. Fleming was pale; he was struggling not to be sick.
"Something I should have done a long time ago," Charlie said to her earnestly. "Rectifying a mistake."
Mary marched into the room, her guns down, smoke curling up from them. She looked tranquil, contemplative. When she spoke, her voice was clipped, urgent. "Get moving, Stephen. Guards will be here in a minute."
She took aim at the man on the floor.
"Don't," Charlie pleaded, quietly but quickly. "I tranqed him. He's not any part of this now."
Mary kept her posture but turned her head and looked at Stephen. He looked up from his task and nodded to her. She frowned deeply but changed the position of her arm, aiming her at Fleming and Delta.
Stephen was hurrying around the room. It was a large, ozone-smelling room, white, one wall entirely computers. State-of-the-art. Fleming's Pivot lab. On the wall of computers, Stephen stuck several small but powerful explosives, already primed and ready. Fleming became paler.
Stephen looked at Depak, who was watching Stephen, now that Mary was watching Fleming and Delta. "Enough to completely destroy it?"
Depak, surprised to be asked, looked at the explosives and nodded after a moment.
He and Stephen exchanged a regretful look, then Stephen moved to the other side of the room and stationed two more explosives there for good measure. He gave Mary a signal.
"On the elevator, now. Hurry, or I leave your corpse behind." She spoke to Fleming and he swallowed hard. Then she looked at Delta. The two women stared at each other for a moment, then Delta looked down.
"The elevator," Mary repeated. "Move!" Delta and Fleming started out of the room. They passed Stephen and Charlie, and then Charlie followed them out. Depak came along, the gun still in his hand but it was clear he was no longer sure what he was doing with it. Stephen took it from him.
The group moved into the hallway. "Okay, Stephen," Mary said, "I'll be there."
Stephen gave her a long look. She returned a tight smile.
"Okay, everyone, on the elevator." Stephen waved the gun he had taken from Depak.
Mary parted with the group and went out a fire door on the side of the hallway. Her running, descending footsteps echoed into the hallway before the door closed behind her.
Stephen got on the elevator after the others were on it. He counted to himself, counted to twenty, then he pressed the button for the basement.
The group rode in electric silence. Stephen took a radio transmitter from his pocket.
The elevator went down and down. Stephen could imagine Mary racing down the steps.
He trusted her, trusted her timing. She had a brilliant mind for tactics and strategy, and the gut instincts and lightning reflexes to realize the tactics and strategy.
When the elevator dinged its last, reached the bottom, Stephen hit the button on the transmitter. The elevator car trembled as the doors opened and a distant boom sounded.
Four Pivot agents stood at the ready in the basement, guns out and pointed at the group. The agents felt the tremble, heard the blast. It distracted them for a heartbeat.
That heartbeat was their undoing. Mary burst through the fire door, death in a flying trenchcoat, guns spitting, rushing their flank, completely surprising them. Stephen managed to fire once and miss before Mary killed them all.
Mary ran to the doors; she was panting. "Get out now!"
The group ran out and Mary led them to the van Stephen had parked there, positioned there.
She opened the side and Fleming, Delta, Charlie, and Depak got in. As they did, Mary ran around the front, the driver's seat. Stephen shut the door and jumped in the passenger seat.
The van tore out of the basement and onto the street, then slowed. Stephen looked up. Black smoke poured out of a window far up the building and black enough to be seen against the darkening sky.
Jill Roberts had left Depak bleeding in Fleming's lab. She left pissed.
She had hurt him for a while, hurt him fast and slow, expecting him to break at any minute. Hell, he expected himself to break at any minute! But Depak had not done as expected — he hadn't broken. Delta and Charlie had looked away. Fleming watched.
Of course, Pivot had expert interrogators, professionally cruel people with fine surgical tools and knives. One was coming and would arrive during the night. Depak would break. But Jill was eager to know what was happening in Burbank. Damn it!
She'd gotten a text from Alpha informing her that he and Beta had set up and were waiting for Bartowski to find Walker. Jill had driven back to her cleaned apartment and turned on her laptop, pulled up a program, and began tracking Bartowski's phone. It was stationary at a hotel near the airport. That must be where Alpha and Beta were too, somewhere nearby.
As she always did, Jill worried about Alpha, her twin brother. They were not identical twins, and Alpha had undergone various 'softenings' at the hands of Pivot plastic surgeons so that he no longer resembled himself very much — or his twin sister at all.
She had sat in the apartment for an hour, darkness gathering, the light blinking. And then it started to move. It left the hotel and began traveling north on the I-5. Jill grabbed her phone and texted Alpha, asking what was happening. She got no response.
The light continued to move. Jill waited but Alpha still hadn't responded. She called his phone, despite knowing that would make him angry. No answer. The light continued northward.
Frustrated, Jill clicked on the TV. A moment later, a news bulletin interrupted the broadcast. A building downtown was on fire, murky scenes of smoke and flames. Police and firemen were at the scene. Jill watched in shock.
It was the building that housed the Pivot lab, the building where she'd left Depak and the others.
Jill ran immediately into her bedroom and threw open her closet door. Exit strategy. The already-packed suitcase stood hidden in the rear. She grabbed its handle and rolled it back into the living room. She stopped and looked at the TV again. She shut her laptop and put it in the side pocket of the suitcase. A tablet was on the desk too, and she shoved it into her purse.
She left the apartment, left the TV on, left the Jill Roberts of the last two years behind.
Sarah had pulled off the I-5 and retrieved the remaining go-bag from her trunk.
A first aid kit was inside. She did what she could with her wound.
Alpha's bullet had hit the side of her abdomen and gouged it badly. It was bleeding but she did not think the bullet had done serious internal damage. It hurt as much as any wound she'd suffered, however, making her dizzy and nauseated. She knew part of her pain was emotional, and that exhaustion, deep exhaustion, made it seem worse.
She needed better medical care and she needed rest. She felt like she could sleep an eternity, like she had been awake at least that long. But she could not have sleep, not yet.
Back on the road, she drove toward the blinking light on Lou's tablet. In the dark, she parked the car at the rest area and she found the phone where Carina had hidden it, atop a vending machine.
Sarah put the phone in her pocket and then went into the bathroom. It was deserted, and she used the sink to wash the wound and re-bandage it.
She got back in the car and headed north.
The pain became too much less than an hour from Palo Alto. If Sarah drove any further, she risked passing out. Sarah stopped and held herself together long enough to rent a room at a hotel.
She took her things and the go-bag inside but left the door unlocked. Using a plastic cup from the bathroom, Sarah washed down a palmful of aspirin out of the medicine kit, and then she climbed painfully onto the bed, putting her gun beside her, and propping herself up on a pillow.
She looked down. Her bare feet were dirty and bloody. Luckily the hotel desk clerk had not noticed.
The tablet showed the blinking light no longer moving. The phone being tracked lay beside it, Chuck's phone.
Sarah picked it up and entered the passcode. She knew it of course and smiled bitterly at herself because she did. She swiped through the photos, struck by Chuck's good eye for photography, but also by his almost spy-like reluctance to appear in any photograph. The album was devoid of selfies. Sarah was both made happy by that and disappointed by it. She'd have enjoyed seeing photos of him.
She left his photos and went to his music. She knew so little popular music that most of the song titles were unfamiliar. But she saw one she knew. Vance Joy, Riptide. It was a song she'd heard occasionally on the radio. She turned it on.
She put the phone down beside her and sighed.
She spoke aloud to no one as the song began to play. "Come on, Jill. I'm waiting. Let's get this over with, one way or the other, one of us or the other."
Jill sat in her car, looking at her tablet. She was using it to track Chuck's phone.
The light had stopped moving again. Jill was becoming frazzled, almost frantic. She'd had no communication from Alpha, none from Beta. She'd stopped earlier at a sports bar and gone inside. One of the TVs had still been showing footage of the explosion. But the reports of the explosion were now mixed with confused comments about deaths on the scene, deaths by gunshot, not from the explosion. Reporters were obviously frustrated, stymied, in their attempts to get additional clarity about what had happened.
Looking at the tablet, Jill decided that Chuck's phone was her destination. She wanted to believe the phone was with Alpha, that Chuck was with Alpha, that Beta had established control over Chuck. — But if that were true, Alpha would have contacted her, especially if, as she now believed, no one was left to contact at the Pivot lab.
She estimated that it would take her forty minutes to reach the phone, assuming it did not begin to move again. She checked her own phone. Still nothing.
She took out her gun and put it on the seat beside her, then she pulled out onto the I-5.
She spent too long making this happen to let it all far apart now.
Delta, Charlie, Lou — even Fleming, even Alpha — they were all replaceable. But not Bartowski. Finding that phone was the first step to finding him again.
She would find him and take him to another city. There were other Pivot labs.
Carina had driven off the I-5 and onto another road, away from the interstate.
She'd found a motel and got two rooms. She and Casey helped Ellie get Chuck, unseen, into one of the rooms. He was still unconscious, mostly, but he'd begun to murmur, to mumble, to stir.
Ellie wet a washcloth and wiped his face. She began to talk to him. Casey got Carina's attention and motioned for her to follow him outside.
Carina closed the door. She stood in front of Casey on the cracked sidewalk. The light outside the door buzzed and blinked, a noisy slow strobe-light.
"What is it, John?"
"Carina, I'm with you. I'll say it just this once. But what's the plan? I didn't want to ask in front of Ellie."
Carina shrugged. "Not sure I have one. I'm hoping that Ellie can bring Chuck around, or that Sarah did."
"But even if he becomes Bartowski again," Casey asked, "what do we do? Graham isn't going to just allow us to roam the countryside with his prize. And I doubt Beckman will be pleased to hear about it."
Carina stood for a moment, her hands in her back pockets. "I don't know, John. It's a goddamn mess, has been from the beginning. Sarah took the plunge and we're all caught in the ripples. All I know is that I told Sarah I'd give him a chance. That's what I'm going to do," her voice softened and she looked into Casey's eyes, "what I want to do. Technically, we aren't rogue. We've got Bartowski."
"Now you're splitting hairs, Carina. Graham will split us like hares. — We don't intend to give Bartowski back to the CIA."
"No. Let's give Ellie a chance. Give Chuck a chance. Maybe together we can figure something out, make Sarah's sacrifice worthwhile."
Casey shook his head. "Walker's not the only one who plunged."
Carina reached out and touched Casey's cheek, smiled at him. "Paddle, John, just paddle."
Chuck opened his eyes.
His vision was cloudy, filmy. He blinked several times. He thought he saw black hair, familiar, then red hair, familiar, then blond hair, familiar. Beneath all the colors of hair the same blue, blue eyes.
And then he saw green eyes, familiar — family. Eyes like his own. Ellie's eyes.
Ellie, his sister, was sitting on the bed next to him. But he did not know where that bed was, where he was, where Ellie was.
"El?"
"Chuck?" Ellie whispered his name.
"Where are we?" He jerked, started to sit up.
"I'm not sure, Chuck. But we're safe, for now." She gently pushed him back down on the bed. "Do you remember anything about the last couple of days?"
"Couple of days?" Chuck tried to recollect. His mind felt strange: like someone had shaped his thoughts in a new direction. He couldn't quite shape them back. Like someone else had been living in his mind.
And then an image came to him. Sitting beneath a tree, a picnic. Lou. Beta.
Pain spiked, blurred his vision. Ellie went out of focus. Beta. Mission.
"Where's Sarah Walker?" Ellie looked at him, her eyes concerned. His voice sounded wrong to him and obviously to her. Flattened, inhuman.
"What's wrong with me, Ellie? My head's...not right. It's...distant..."
"What do you mean, Chuck?"
"I don't know. I just...My mind. It's not mine. — But how could it be anyone else's?"
Ellie took one of his hands. "Don't freak out, Chuck. Don't panic. You're awake, you're aware. Give yourself some time."
The door to the room opened and a redheaded woman walked in.
The redheaded woman. The dancer. His dancer.
But no — it was not her. Not the same eyes.
Ellie turned her head to the woman then back to him. "Chuck, this is Carina Miller."
The redhead gave a small wave. "Hey, Chuck!" And then a large man came through the door. Chuck knew him from some...SpyCraft!
The game. I was playing in that tournament!
And then it all flashed back to him. The game, the black-haired woman. Her blue eyes. His attempt to save her. But she was the blond-haired woman from the door to the game, the same, the same blue eyes. The Nordic Warrior Princess. Sarah Walker.
The name burned his mind like a branding iron.
Sarah Walker. The mother of lies. Bitch. My dancer.
He saw Lou, the cart ride, the library. The soup kitchen. Horseplay Farms. Charlie and Delta. Lou. Peach Amaretto Jam and biscuits. A picnic. Lou. A gauzy yellow dress, almost see-through. Reading Finnegans Wake.
...the humptyhillhead of humself...The great fall of the offwall…
He was Humpty Dumpty. He'd had a great fall. Read something — and then nothing.
Nothing but the mission. Sarah Walker.
Chuck shook his head violently. Ellie leaned toward him and grabbed his shoulders. "Stop, Chuck. You aren't going to make this better that way. Please, calm down."
"I feel like I'm going...like I am… crazy, Ellie. What's happened to me?"
He saw the redhead put her hand on Ellie's shoulder. "Let me talk to him, Ellie. If he wants to know what happened to him, he should really know, know it all, from the beginning."
Miller looked over her shoulder at the large man then back to Chuck. "This is John Casey. He'll help me tell the story, stop me if I get it wrong. Ellie knows some of it, I think, but not all."
Casey stepped to Miller's side. Miller took a deep breath and started. "This all began months ago…"
The aspirin had not reduced Sarah's pain by much, but they'd reduced it enough, dulled it enough for her exhaustion to pull her under, an irresistible riptide of sleep.
Beside her, the tablet blinked.
She slumped to her side as she slept, slumped away from the tablet, her gun, Chuck's phone. Music kept playing.
Stephen glanced at Fleming and Delta asleep on the hotel room floor. A tranq dart was visible in each.
Charlie looked at Delta for a moment, then at Mary. "Was that necessary?"
Mary shrugged. "I've wanted to shoot Fleming forever, and more permanently. But we need to work, and we don't need to worry about them. — Tell me again what you did to Chuck, to my son!"
Manoosh, who was sitting on the end of the bed, a towel of ice held to his face, raised his other hand and spoke up softly around the towel. "I'd better tell you what I did to him too."
Stephen's eyes narrowed as he looked up from the laptop Charlie had given him.
"You? Just how many people have had their damn hands in my son's mind?"
Manoosh's one visible eye looked unhappy. "I'm sorry. I was trying to help him, help Sarah Walker."
Stephen and Charlie spoke as one: "Help Sarah Walker?"