A/N: Welcome back.
Jeux Sans Frontières
Chapter Twenty-Six: Draw?
Strange love
Strange highs and strange lows
Strange love
That's how my love goes
Strange love
Will you give it to me?
Will you take the pain
I will give it to you?
Again and again
And will you return it?
There'll be times
When my crimes
Will seem almost unforgivable
I give in to sin
Because you have to make this life livable
But when you think I've had enough
From your sea of love
I'll take more than another river full
Yes, and I'll make it all worthwhile
I'll make your heart smile
— Depeche Mode, Strange Love
Jill parked her car, her nerves tingling, her breath coming fast.
She'd driven around the hotel lot with her lights off after finding it. The two working light poles in the lot provided enough illumination for her, unsteady, but enough.
She studied the cars, one hand around the steering wheel, one hand wrapped around her gun. The tablet on the seat beside her blinked. The steady light that indicated her location was now superimposed on the blinking light that indicated the location of Chuck's phone.
Although she'd gotten no response from Alpha or Beta, she kept hoping they were the ones with the phone, that they had retaken Chuck, that she would find them here.
Too bad about Chuck, really. I did like him. I should've slept with him. I wonder what that long body would have felt like in mine? — Damn Walker and her interference. Why should Beta have all the fun?
And then Jill froze, reflexively punched her brake but luckily did not skid or make undue noise.
She saw a car she knew — Walker's car, damn it, the one Walker'd been driving in Palo Alto. Walker.
Walker might have Chuck, she might not, — but it was hard to imagine her without him. Not Walker. Perfect record Walker, by-the-book bitch.
Jill tried not to consider what Walker's presence meant for Alpha. Beta too, although that was not as much of a concern, not really a concern at all. Just scorekeeping. But if Walker were here, with Chuck's phone, and probably with Chuck, then Walker had probably evened the score with Jill.
As Jill checked her gun, carefully screwed in the silencer, she gritted her teeth.
Time for the tie-breaker. If Walker killed Alpha…
Jill had parked a distance from Walker's room. Or the room Jill took to be Walker's room.
The damn tracker could not be precise enough to be sure. The room was the only one in which the blinds glowed faintly — a light was on somewhere in the room. Walker's car was parked near the door.
Jill reached up and turned off the interior light of her car, got out, and into a crouch. and pushed the door closed gently, waiting for it to click. When it did, she began to worm her way, still crouched, toward the room. When Jill got to Walker's car, she started to stand, to look inside but noticed a succession of shiny black marks on the pavement.
Liquid drops.
Jill put her index finger into one and tasted it with the tip of her tongue. She knew the metallic tang of blood. Walker was injured. Good, Alpha, good. Jill stayed crouched and trailed the drops with her eyes. They led to the door she had targeted. Walker is in that room. Jill's gut was certain. The drops were large enough, frequent enough, to suggest a serious wound, one that likely would hamper Walker. As Jill's eyes continued to adjust to the low light, she noticed a bare footprint in a depression full of loose cinders. It was beneath Walker's driver's side door.
Jill shook her head, unable to glean anything from it. Though difficult in her crouch, Jill took a deep breath. She listened carefully for several seconds. The night was still. Passing cars on the roadway, the buzz of the lamp posts.
She breathed out and worked toward the door. She listened again, her ear against the door, just below the height of the knob. She heard music, faint, but music. She shook her head again.
Walker did not listen to music. Walker was a woman devoid of tastes, incapable of recognizing, much less caring for, life's finer things. A philistine with a CIA badge — but then all the CIA were philistines. The hysterical thing, Jill thought, is that Walker wanted to turn Chuck into a robot when she was one already, that Graham wanted a robot when he already had one.
The bare footprint and the faint music made Jill pause, but her certainty that Walker was in the room increased, it did not decrease, despite the strangeness of the footprint and music. Jill was about to step back, to fire into the lock, when she recognized the music, the song. It had started over and she recognized the intro. It was a song Chuck liked and had made Jill listen to repeatedly. Vance Joy's Riptide.
Of course. Walker's got Chuck. She's playing the music to calm him.
Jill took a moment to recalibrate.
She was not going to simply rush the room. Chuck was too valuable to get caught in a crossfire. She would fire into the lock, as she planned before, but she would not go in guns ablaze. She'd have to take a second — a potentially deadly second — to be sure she'd separated Walker from Chuck, to be sure she killed Walker but left Chuck unharmed.
Clear about what she was planning, Jill took a slow, deep cleansing breath, lifted her gun, and squeezed a silent shot into the doorknob and an immediate second into the frame beside the knob. She followed her shot with a long step, putting her shoulder to the door. It swung inward.
A light was on in the bathroom, bathing the room in a fluorescent glow.
In a split second, Jill had scanned the room. No Chuck? No Chuck! On the bed was a gun and a phone, Chuck's phone, playing Riptide. Jill fired repeatedly into Walker, asleep beneath the covers.
Some superspy. Die, bitch.
A sudden sting in her shoulder, Jill felt a sudden nuclear sting in her shoulder, — and then, almost immediately, another in her leg. The nuclear stings were so deep they seemed to have originated inside her. Another sting in her elbow and her gun went flying. A spray of blood and bone.
Pain swallowed her, bone-deep, excruciating. She cried out but only for a second.
An iron hand clamped over her mouth and Jill caught a whiff of fruity shampoo. "I'm a hard kill, Roberts."
Sarah forced herself to wake up.
She checked Chuck's phone. She had not been asleep for long. She was shakier than normal but more steady than she had been before she slept.
She got up and looked at the bed, then she took the pillows and arranged them beneath the sheet, putting them where she'd been a moment before. She picked up the tablet and put it in the nightstand drawer.
She turned off all the lights except one in the bathroom and she pulled the bathroom door partially closed so that the shaft of light fell just beside but no on the pillow figure beneath the sheet.
She went to the room door and opened it a crack, looking outside. No cars, no pedestrians, no one. She got her go-bag and dug another gun out of it, along with its silencer. She put the silencer on the gun.
She left her other gun on the bed, beside Chuck's phone. Riptide was playing on repeat.
Sarah opened the door just enough and slipped outside. She climbed into her car, into the back seat. She noticed that she'd left a trail of blood into the room earlier.
She got in the back and pulled the door closed. She stretched herself out on the back seat, grimacing at the pain. She touched her wound. It did not seem to have started bleeding seriously despite her exertions. The pain made her eyes cross. She bit her lip.
She was parked far enough from the nearest lamp post for the backseat to be dark.
Fighting back pain and returning exhaustion, Sarah made herself focus on having Chuck in her arms earlier. This was for him, her last mission.
A moment later, Sarah heard a car circling the lot but saw no headlights.
Roberts.
Sarah moved in the back seat, a slight movement, making sure she could move when the time came, that pain would not slow her too much.
She was ready.
She waited.
Mary grabbed her gun in a flash and pointed it into Manoosh's one visible eye.
He blinked into the barrel as if it were the end of a telescope.
"Tell me what you did, Depak, and why would you be helping Sarah Walker?"
Manoosh held up his one empty hand in a don't-shoot gesture while still eye-to-barrel with Mary's gun. "Because she was plotting to save him, and she asked me for help."
Mary glanced at Stephen and Charlie began to laugh, quietly at first then more loudly. "Walker? You're kidding!"
Charlie glanced at Mary and squelched his laughter, shrugged in apology. "I know this is serious, and I know I'm on your grace here, Mary, but if that's true, about Walker, it's...it's the irony engine driving this mess. The woman we've all taken ourselves to know, to understand, the one predictable agent, is the one we all are ignorant of, the one we all misunderstood. The one we could not predict."
Charlie leaned down and faced Manoosh. "Why did Sarah Walker plot to save Chuck?"
Manoosh lowered the damp, icy towel and tried to look at them all with both eyes, despite one being nearly swollen shut. "She fell in love with him, I believe. On paper. He has no idea about it."
Mary gave Stephen a shocked look and sank on the edge of the bed. "Goddamn." Stephen clapped his hands but it was not clear, not even to him, what the action meant.
Charlie shook his head and smiled, whistled a low, musical whistle. "Sarah Walker loves Chuck Bartowski. I knew he was a resistance fighter." Charlie shot a look at unconscious Fleming. "So much so that he was resisting without knowing it. Active while passive — the Bartowski Variant of the Pirc Defense — yield, then attack." He glanced at Mary, Stephen. "And you two. Like my parents. Attack. Counterplay, counterplay."
Stephen attended to Charlie but returned Mary's look.
Manoosh watched them all and gazed again at Fleming and Delta unconscious on the floor.
Stephen stared at Manoosh, took a step in his direction. "Tell us. Tell us the whole story, what Walker did, what you did, and why."
Ellie listened to Carina's story, watching Chuck closely as Carina told it.
To her surprise, Chuck, despite his exhaustion — and bewilderment, occasionally, by what he was hearing — listened patiently. He did not speak. But he seemed clear, comprehending. He seemed like Chuck, Chuck on mute, but Chuck.
He listened to a tale of his own life that was not his own, a story he could not tell.
Carina started with the day of the tournament, and then worked forward, reversing into the backstory as she went along, where backstory provided needed information or interpretive context.
The bare bones of the story, and some of its flesh, Ellie had learned from Sarah herself. As Carina talked, it became clear to Ellie that Ellie knew more about the details of Sarah's paperwork-plunge than Carina did, although Carina had the outline right, had witnessed the outward and visible signs of Sarah's inward and spiritual combat.
When Carina explained that plunge to Chuck, he boggled and stared.
He leaned forward and he spoke: "You're kidding me, Sarah Walker, the Norse Warrior Princess at SpyCraft, loved...loves...me, Chuck Bartowski? She wished me luck when I went in to play."
Chuck did not sound horrified, only incredulous. Ellie softly pushed him back on the bed. When he settled again, Carina used the pause in the tale to ask Chuck a question after glancing at Casey. "Chuck, someone hacked the CIA, saw Sarah's file. Was that you?"
Chuck looked perplexed and then he nodded. "I remember doing it, hazily. But the file — that I remember clearly." His tone was somber; for a moment, he wore Sarah's file on his face.
Carina nodded. "I ask because you need to understand — I'm not saying forgive, mind you — you need to understand that file to understand what Sarah did and didn't do after falling for you, her sins of commission and omission.
"She fell for a man she believed was beyond her reach, out of her league. As a person. Good where she was bad. Though she's never told me so explicitly, she'd only known one kind of life, such as it was, and she did not know how to be without it. I watched her struggle, and struggle to camouflage her struggle, for weeks and weeks.
"Sarah's the best but you were too much for her, you and SpyCraft together were her first loss, and it was a rout. — But here's what I know, Chuck. She was never going to let them successfully program you, Chuck. Even if she didn't know it, I did. She was playing the long game, with Graham and with herself.
"She had a plan and she'd have saved you, as she has saved you, is working to save you now, if a tad tardily, from the CIA and Pivot."
Chuck looked at Ellie and Ellie nodded. "It's true, Chuck. I saw what she was willing to do for you."
When Carina finished, Ellie added to the story, telling him most of what happened from the time Sarah showed up at the apartment door.
Chuck shook his head. "I tried to terminate her. Programmed me did?" He looked nauseated, and Ellie knew he'd have to struggle with that later, pay for it — right now it was more a form of words than a fact. "I sort of remember her, in the shower," he blushed, the embarrassed red odd on top of the earlier, nauseated green, "I remember her with blond hair and with black but always blue eyes.." He swallowed hard. "So, she's out there, Sarah Walker's out there, wounded, a woman I never knew and never met but who loves me, and she's hunting Jill Roberts, a woman I knew but never met, a woman who never loved me, a woman who betrayed me?"
Ellie nodded and looked at Carina. Carina cleared her throat. Her voice was tight; she was blinking rapidly. "It's not quite right to say you never knew her Chuck, never met her. Do you remember a red-headed dancer the night Jill broke up with you?"
Chuck nodded, his eyes shifting, remembering. "Yeah. I do. Blue eyes."
"That was Sarah. She'd told Jill to break up with you, and she felt so miserable about what was happening to you, so responsible for your misery, that she risked everything to comfort you, — and to comfort herself a little, too. I suppose."
Sarah heard scuffing steps near the car.
The parking lot had cinders in it, on top of the pavement, and in low places, they'd gathered into cinder puddles. Sarah remembered them near the car, sticking to her bare feet.
The scuffing steps reached the car. Jill was on the other side of the passenger door, then on the other side of the driver's door. Sarah heard her move toward the motel room door, and Sarah sat halfway up, stifling a sigh of pain. Jill was listening at the door.
Sarah knew she was hearing Riptide.
Jill stepped back and leveled her gun at the door. Sarah waited, every nerve alive, every muscle primed for motion. A beat, another beat.
A spit. Sarah pushed the door open soundlessly. Her body a weapon, sharpened and honed — she commanded it as she might wield a piece of weaponry. It obeyed. She was out the car door, her own gun up, in an instant.
Jill rammed the room door with her shoulder. The door swung back with her. Jill stopped, took a split-second to orient herself, and Sarah used it to train her gun on Jill. Jill began to fire at the decoy.
Sarah began to fire at Jill. Surgically: gun shoulder (right), upper thigh (left), gun elbow (right), a lightning-fast triangle of damage.
Sarah ran through the door, grabbed Jill from behind, hand on Jill's mouth, catching Jill as Jill sank, choking off Jill's cry of pain.
Sarah used her foot to kick at the door; it closed it as far as it would go.
Manoosh finished his story.
The room was silent. Mary turned to Charlie. "Now, you. We know a bit from before, your phone conversation with Stephen. Remember, I'd be happiest to just shoot you."
"I know; I believe you. You left that poor bastard on the floor in the lab, remember, the one I'd tranqed?" Charlie's tone was cautious but angry.
Mary nodded. "It's a deadly game. High stakes. Some resolutions are lethal."
"All of yours, I think," Charlie intoned before turning away from her. Mary glanced at Stephen darkly; he shook his head.
Manoosh gulped. He knew Charlie'd just been allowed to live.
Mary glanced at Stephen. "So, what Depak did, will it work?"
Stephen glanced at Charlie. "Maybe. It sounds like Chuck resisted the Pivot programming. That may have been Manoosh's failsafe, or Chuck himself, or both. But resisting it and overthrowing it are not the same thing. We need to find him."
"Find Walker and you'll find him since he's hunting her."
Mary shook her head, frowning eloquently. "Our son, our gentle boy, is out there stalking a killer, a killer who loves him. A killer who loves him. My God, Stephen, we stayed away all these years to protect them, and this is what happens?"
Charlie looked at them both. "Apples don't fall far from trees."
Mary gave Stephen an earnest look, but a frightened look. Fear was a stranger on that face. "I think it's time we called our daughter."
Sarah propped Jill in a straight-backed chair, the one from the small table in the room.
So far, no one seemed to have heard what happened. The only loud sound had been the sound of the door, but that had been brief. The door was closed enough not to draw attention.
Sarah had rammed a washrag in Jill's mouth before she propped her in the chair. Sarah steadied her gun on Jill as she used her other hand and one foot to tear irregular strips off the bedsheet.
It took a moment, and Jill's eyes rolled in pain and fury as it was done, but Sarah bound Jill's wounds. She could not stop Jill's blood loss entirely, but she slowed it.
Sarah's own wound was bleeding again, burning, a sticky inferno in her side. She sat down on the end of the bed, facing Jill.
"So, you're Pivot. — No, no need to answer." Jill's eyes rolled, the whites showing. Sarah knew that the pain, especially Jill's exploded elbow, had to be intense, unbearable. Jill would not be conscious for long.
"All this time, Jill, and you were working against me, against Chuck, you hateful bitch. I should have known, should have smelled you, your double-agent stink, but I was...distracted. Otherwise engaged."
She paused and shook her head. "But you now know what I can do when I am not distracted. I've been off my game, and I'm leaving the game, — but I'm game, and I've got game. — Remember that on cold nights when that otherwise lifeless elbow aches like an overgrown toothache."
Tears ran out of Jill's eyes.
Sarah had little more to say. Sick of it all — she was sick of it all.
She ached and she burned and she yearned to sleep, for an eon's sleep.
She stood and pressed her silenced barrel against Jill's right knee. Jill's eyes stretched in horror, animal terror above streaking tears "I killed Alpha earlier," Sarah told her.
A different kind of pain showed in Jill's eyes, added pain.
"You know, double-agent and all, secret-stealer and all, you never guessed my most important secret, Jill. So, I'll tell you, here at our end. While you were pretending to fall for Chuck, I did. I love Chuck Bartowski. Love's the wildcard in every deck." Sarah smiled ruefully and lifted the silenced barrel from Jill's knee.
Sarah limped across to the room phone — the dismal place still had room phones — and dialed a special CIA number. When a connection was established, Sarah spoke only the motel address and room number then added. "Jill Roberts is here. She's a Pivot double-agent. Her car is in the lot; all the proof you'll need is there. Oh, she's going to need quick medical attention, or she'll be dead."
Sarah hung up the phone, then pulled the cord from the wall. Quickly, she tied Jill's feet together with the cord, cinched it tight. She faced Jill. "Goodbye, Omega. I'm done."
Last mission. Done.
Jill screamed furiously, piteously into the washcloth, but the sound did not carry far and it did not tempt Sarah to further mercies.
A/N: Nearly finished.