A/N: The end of our story, the end of Book Four: Mate?
Jeux Sans Frontières
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Aftereffects (Part Two)
Days pass
And this emptiness fills my heart
When I want to run away
I drive off in my car
But whichever way I go
I come back to the place you are
All my instincts
They return
The grand façade
So soon will burn
Without a noise
Without my pride
I reach out from the inside
In your eyes
The light, the heat
I am complete
I see the doorway
To a thousand churches
The resolution
Of all the fruitless searches
Oh, I see the light and the heat
Oh, I want to be that complete
— Peter Gabriel, In Your Eyes
The day after Chuck left the ranch, Ellie was sitting on the porch, drinking iced tea.
The phone rang. She put the tea down and answered it, immediately knowing it was her mother. The call began in her mother's usual business-like manner.
"Ellie, sorry not to return your call until today. We've been busy."
Ellie didn't ask.
"Did Chuck go? Were you right?"
Ellie sighed. "Yes, Mom. He's hunting Sarah."
Mary mirrored her daughter's sigh. "Stephen thought you were right, given what you've told him and what Deepack's been telling him."
"Do you know where she is, Mom?"
"Yes, Ellie, we do." Mary was matter-of-fact but did not volunteer the location.
"Why not just tell him?"
Mary's tone was settled. "Because this is something he has to work out for himself: decide who he wants to be and who he wants to be it with. If he wants to be the man he'll be with her, he needs to choose that, and he needs to show her."
Ellie shook her head although Mary could not see it. "Could he really be in love with her?" Ellie still found the notion bizarre, despite ample proof in Chuck and his behavior.
"Yes, he just doesn't know it yet. Stephen believes he fell for her when the night they danced."
"But Jill had just dumped him. How could he fall for someone else that night?"
"Or in a night?" Mary noted. "The heart's an irregular organ."
Ellie accepted that, especially given the source.
"What's happened to Deepak since he left here, Mom?"
"He's starting his own software company. We...gave him a hand, but he'd been saving money, it turns out."
"And Charlie, Delta?"
"Charlie left for Paris and Delta went with him."
"Do you trust him with your secret?"
"Yes — Stephen does, anyway, and so I'm willing to. I've never operated much in France, anyway. Charlie doesn't want me to start."
Again, Ellie didn't comment.
Mary went on, her tone warming. "Look, Ellie, we're sorry we haven't made it to the ranch yet in person, that we've been reduced to calls. But at least we've gotten to talk, to you and to Chuck. We do want to see you."
"Any chance you will be this way soon?"
"Soon, Ellie, but no promise of when. We have one more thing we have to do. But your father keeps telling me that we can't go on doing this much longer, and as much as I hate it, he's right. My reflexes are slowing, my recoveries take longer."
"Can a woman like you quit, Mom?"
Mary was silent for a beat, then answered. "If she has the right motivation."
Ellie wanted to believe her.
Chuck knew Sarah was there even before he saw her.
It made sense, the place made sense: a ranch, a horse rescue in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan — Second Time Around.
Chuck pulled the battered trench coat he'd been wearing as he worked his way across Canada tight around him, stood the collar up against the cold, fall prairie wind, lowered his hat. Everything was a shade of gray: the sky, the ground, the barn.
Monochrome.
He walked quickly to the barn and through the door below a neatly hand-painted sign that read Office. Inside, the small room was warm, an old wood stove in the center of the room radiating warmth. An older man sat at a small desk, writing. He looked up when Chuck came in. Chuck closed the door quickly, so as to keep the wind out. The man put his hands palm-down on his papers, making sure they did not blow around. It was a practiced gesture.
"Help you?" The man asked, curt but not unkind.
Chuck pushed his hat up, let go of his coat. "I'm looking for someone, a friend of mine. She works here."
"Who's that?"
Chuck crossed from the door to the stove and put out his hands to warm them.
From there, he could see out of the small window above the man's desk. A group of riders was approaching the barn.
"Her name's Sam, Sam Thorp. She works here, doesn't she?"
The man nodded. "She does. Out leading a group of kids on a ride. Should be back…" the man stood up, pushing his chair back from the desk with the backs of his knees and peering out the window, "...oh — in just a minute. That's her group now. She's in front."
Chuck stepped closer to the window, looking over the shorter man.
The group of riders was closer, and Chuck could see the lead rider. She sat tall and graceful in the saddle, the heavy, muddy duster around her hiding her, but long red hair blew underneath her cowboy hat. She was riding an Appaloosa, its face and neck black but its body white with black spots. She frequently turned to check on or speak to the riders in line behind her, almost all of them, as far as Chuck could tell, older kids or teenagers. None seemed comfortable in the saddle.
"She's teaching them to ride?"
"Yes, that group. More experienced kids she takes out for overnight rides, teaching them survival skills, camping, that sort of thing. She's good. Folks here are very fond of her, and the kids are crazy about her. — You're from the States?"
Chuck nodded. Sarah — Sam — was close enough for the blue of her eyes to show beneath her hat. The man was watching Chuck look out the window.
When Chuck noticed, the man smiled. "Friend, you say?"
"Yeah, and it's...been a while since we last saw each other. — Can you tell her I stopped by? My name's Mike. Mike Garner. Please, tell her I stopped by. Her old dance partner. I'll be at Flint, the bar downtown, at 8 pm tonight. Can you tell her that?"
The man looked puzzled. "They'll be here in a minute, and it won't take her long to get herself and the group dismounted…"
Chuck shook his head. "I'm going to go. I…" he gave the man an apologetic look, "...now that I'm here, I'm not sure she'll want to see me. I'm not going to force things; I'll let her decide."
The man gave Chuck a sympathetic glance. "Alright, son, I'll tell her. Mike Garner, right? Flint at 8 pm?"
"Yeah, thanks. Her old dance partner."
"Good luck, Mike."
Chuck lowered his hat, pulled his trenchcoat tight, and slipped out, careful to keep the barn between the arriving riders and himself.
He drove back to town slowly, the engine of the old truck he bought near the border pinging and clicking. The heater worked better than the engine, and he turned it on. The Saskatchewan gray swallowed him and the truck as he drove away. He'd seen her, perhaps for the last time.
The symmetry of that struck him: this had started with her seeing him without his knowledge. Perhaps it would end with him seeing her without her knowledge.
He'd been hunting her for four long weeks.
In the time before that, on the ranch, after he woke up and came to himself, deprogrammed, he'd spent a lot of his time lost in his memory of her file. At first, he'd simply thumbed through it, as it were, repelled but fascinated.
Before long, though, he began to wonder at the woman both revealed and hidden in the remembered pages, the mission logs. He began to study her missions, her.
Although deprogrammed, the skills implanted while he was programmed remained with him, even increased. They changed his relationship to the file — he could see it from a spy's perspective, from her perspective, at least in part. And so day-by-day he became a specialist on Sarah Walker. Replaying her missions as he dug post holes, painted, tended cattle, and played with Sentinel. The sheer number of her missions baffled him — he wasn't sure how she did it — kept up the pace for so long. Like a basketball player watching a film of another player he'd have to play against, Chuck began to understand her patterns, dribbling, driving, shooting. He began to see how she worked, how she thought.
How she felt.
So, when he started to hunt for her, he had clear ideas about what she might do, which direction she might go. She'd once used an old, no-longer-licensed doctor near Bellingham, Washington, below the Canadia border to save the life of a mark who refused to go to the hospital. The more Chuck thought about it, the more that seemed a likely destination. It was a long drive for a wounded woman, but Sarah had proven how incredibly strong she was over and over. And the distance would have made it a more attractive destination, since it would have put her at a distance from California and all that had happened in Palo Alto, in Burbank, and in between. It would also put her in a position, once stronger, to jump the border, as she'd done on two other missions.
Chuck had worked his way slowly north-by-northwest, Texas to Washington, driving the ranch's truck. He'd shifted to the identity that had been waiting for him at the ranch, Mike Garner, UT computer science graduate, unemployed. His story was that he'd taken a year off after finishing college to travel around. He had enough money to last him for a while, but he picked up temporary, odd jobs where he could to help with food and gas.
Chuck guessed right about the former doctor near Bellingham, a man named Powell. He was an old, gray-bearded man who lived in a modest farmhouse. He'd lost his practice to alcohol, and though he'd recovered, he would never practice — legally — again. But he helped friends and neighbors with minor injuries, cuts, scrapes, and burns, all for barter: food, chores, etc. It took Chuck a couple of days, three visits, and a heap of chores around the farm, to get Powell to talk.
"Yes, Mike, the lady was here. She spent a couple of weeks with me. Her wound would not have been so bad had it been tended to immediately, but I gather she was...active...with it for a good while, and, though she doctored it competently herself, it was infected by the time she got to me. And she was as exhausted as any human woman I've ever laid eyes on. She slept most of that week like a stone. I...um...had some penicillin around. Enough. We got her...disinfected and rested. But as soon as she was strong enough, she left."
"Did she say where she was going, anything that might help me find her?"
Powell stared at him hard with rheumy eyes. "Why do you want to find her?"
Chuck wasn't sure of the answer. "I can't explain it. I just need to find her. I'm not going to harm her."
I did that once and can't shake the memory of it, the beauty of her standing in the shower, wet and warm, and the horror of what I did, the knife, the black poison.
The doctor weighed Chuck's words. He nodded slowly, staring even more carefully at Chuck. "Mike, are you Chuck?"
Chuck jerked and Powell smiled. "I thought so. In her fever, before I got the infection under control, she had quite a lot to say about you. The most I've ever heard from her in my two encounters with her. Her unconsciousness is as eloquent as her consciousness is taciturn. — Are you sure she wants you to find her?"
"No, I'm not," Chuck said, letting the answer to the question of names be implicit. "But we...things between us are unfinished."
Powell nodded slowly again. "All I know is that she mentioned going north."
Chuck jumped the border that night, leaving his truck behind. He spent a couple of cold nights in the deep forest before he navigated, by compass, to a small town. He found the truck he was currently driving in a salvage lot.
It would run, barely, and the man sold it to him for almost nothing. He'd nursed it along as he continued the hunt, sleeping in the back in a heavy sleeping bag when it was not too cold, sleeping in dismal hotels when it was. He guessed wrong about where she would go once across the border and wasted time goose-chasing. He'd lost her.
But then he'd remembered a mission that had not taken place in Saskatchewan but had taken Sarah through the area, Saskatoon In a following debrief at Langley, she'd made an uncharacteristically personal comment. "It's beautiful there, the open prairie. Open. No corners, no shadows. On a clear summer day, everything's visible, nothing invisible."
Chuck headed to Saskatchewan, losing days here and there to truck repairs (he was becoming a decent shade-tree mechanic) or to the need to find work, extra cash.
His beard grew thicker but he lost weight, lanky to lean. His conviction that he was doing what he ought to be doing grew too; it did not weaken or waver.
Once in Saskatchewan, he risked a call to Ellie. She provided the last clue. She'd never told Chuck about the first conversation, on the phone, she'd had with Sarah, never told him that Sarah had called herself Sam. The name Sarah had loomed so large in Ellie's mind after they met face-to-face, that the alias was forgotten. She had remembered it and, asking around, the name led him to Second Time Around.
At 7:30 pm, he was sitting in Flint, the bar downtown. It was close to his hotel. He'd visited the night before and liked it. The food was good, the drinks too. A sign had said there would be a band tonight, and there was. They were setting up as Chuck entered.
He steered for a booth in the corner and sat down. A waiter came to the table and handed Chuck a menu. "I'm waiting for someone. I'll just have a beer — something on draft, local."
The waiter nodded and walked away. Chuck watched the band finish setting up, tuning, sound-checking. In the middle of it, the waiter brought the beer.
Chuck sipped it. It was good. He checked his watch. 7:50 pm.
The band started playing. Slowly, the bar began to fill. One person, then two, three, four, more began to dance on the black and white squares of the dance floor. Couples twirled, embraced. Chuck listened, tapping his foot, but keeping his eye on the door. 8: 00 pm arrived along with a second beer.
Chuck had spent the afternoon supine on his hotel bed, studying the ceiling, trying to decide what to say. Seeing Sarah earlier in the day had stirred him deeply, so deeply he could not articulate it. He kept remembering the threat he'd sent her while programmed, the paper target with her name written on it. The image reached down to the stirred depths of him. She was still somehow his target, his mission. It was like his life had been aimed, and aimed at her. He wasn't sure what that meant — but he was sure it was true. He wondered if it stretched back, past the programming, all the way to that dance at the frat house the night Jill dumped him.
The night he danced with Sarah without knowing her as Sarah. That night, that dancer had never left him, despite the fact that his drinking had rendered the night soft-focus, indistinct. He'd hoped to find her from the time she left him mysteriously at the dance.
He had found her. But he was not sure she wanted to be found. 8:10 pm. So much had happened, so much that was so bizarre. She plotted against him — in a way. He'd plotted against her — in a way.
She'd not really plotted against him; it wasn't really him who'd plotted against her.
It was all so...so…
8:15 pm.
He looked up from his watch, from his sinking feeling, to see Sarah walking quickly across the dance floor to him. Her red hair was in a long braid. She had on a short black dress and black cowboy boots. Her coat was over her arm.
Her face was hard to read.
She reached the table, hung her coat on the side of the booth and Chuck stood up.
"Mike?" she said quietly, just audible above the music.
Chuck nodded. "Sam?"
Sarah nodded. "Want to dance?"
Chuck nodded again. "Yes, very much..."
Sarah's face broke into a wide smile. Her blue eyes were already dancing.
Chuck immediately knew how to articulate what stirred the depths of him. "...I'd love to."
Mary put the binoculars down. Sarah had just entered Flint.
Mary's heavy coat was zipped all the way up and she was holding the binoculars in gloved hands. Beside her, Stephen was bundled up too, gloved. He'd been studying the door with his naked eyes.
He looked at his wife. "Well, he found her. Impressive, you know. And she showed up."
Mary's eyes became speculative and warm. "You Bartowski men. You won't be denied, will you? You're like candy glaciers, sweet and slow and unstoppable."
"We have a thing for difficult women."
Mary's face wore a rare vulnerability. "I'm sorry, Stephen."
He shook his head then nodded toward the bar. "Do they have a chance?"
"Did we?" Mary asked softly.
"No."
"Did it matter?"
"No." Stephen shook his head decisively.
Mary unzipped her coat and retrieved her gun. She emptied it of shells. She put it and the shells in the glove compartment. She gazed into her husband's eyes.
"Take me back to our hotel, Stephen, and make love to me."
Stephen kissed her, glanced at Flint once more, smiled, shook his head, and started the car.
The End of Book Four: Mate?
The End of Jeux Sans Frontières
My thanks to Beckster1213, JohnnyRayChandlett and WvonB for some pre-reading.
I've marked this complete but may write an epilogue. We'll see how responses go.