A/N: More of our little story. (Hey, two chapters in a day. Hotel Detective updated earlier.)
Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy vs Spy
Chapter Five: Impaled
These ordinary words/
Come to mean/
Everything.
George Oppen
Fragment 19a
Sarah looked up from her toes in the sand. Chuck did too, at the same moment.
Their eyes rose together, locked together. Chuck looked away.
Sarah's tongue was in her mouth. It was. It was there, hers to command. But she could not fashion words. She was mute. But Chuck, Chuck, was silent too.
She saw in his eyes something that looked like foreign matter, something alien to those eyes as she had known them: a grudge. His eyes were as distant from her as they had been when he was in the parking lot, across the sand, the night before.
The speargun in his hand, his hand around its handle, was and was not aimed at her. She could not read his intention in its angle. But the spear itself, its sharpened gleaming tip, was unmistakably real, an instrument of harm.
Chuck continued silent.
Wait, Bryce!
Without thinking, Sarah twisted on her beach towel, looking behind her to Bryce's station.
Bryce's head was down on the picnic table where he had been seated. His broad straw hat covered his head like a sheet over a corpse. Beside Bryce on the picnic table was a woman in a tiny two-piece bikini, Barcelona red, the color of her fingernails, her toenails. A pair of sandals sat on the table beside the hat. The woman had a hat on, red too, and she rested her elbows on the table, her red-tipped fingers interlocked and obscuring the bottom of her face. Above her fingers, she had on very dark, very large sunglasses. For a woman so close to naked, she was unidentifiable. It might have been Amy, it might not.
The woman carefully moved one hand away from her face, sliding the other over it, and she waved at Sarah or Chuck or both, not by moving her elbow and forearm, but just with her fingers.
The gesture was unfamiliar, and, in context, macabre.
Sarah twisted back around. Chuck was squinting a bit. He was standing just beyond the shadow cast by Sarah's beach umbrella.
"Is he…?"
"Dead?" Chuck shook his head. "I don't think so. At least, that wasn't the plan. Sorry to decommission your mission husband — or one of them. — I guess I was one, once, too, wasn't I?"
The question was not wistful. It was an accusation. He narrowed his eyes. "For the good ol' CIA, I guess you're willing to have multiple husbands, all at once. What is that? It's not polygamy...oh, it's polyandry, right?" He looked at her hands. "Guess you can't wear the Anderson ring and the Weston ring at the same time. And you didn't wear mine for long. We never had a honeymoon, did we? Ours was over before it started."
Sarah put Bryce out of her mind. Shaw too.
She did not know when she might get another chance to talk to Chuck. He seemed like he was receding from her even as he held his ground.
"Chuck, it's not like that. Not like the suburbs, when we…"
"What? We what? Nothing happened in the suburbs, so if it's not like the suburbs…?"
"No, Chuck, that's not what I mean. I mean nothing is going on. There's nothing between me and Bryce, nothing between me and Shaw."
Chuck gave ground: he backed up a step. "You mean you chose nothing...over me?"
Shit. Sarah had fallen into the same mistake she had made with Ellie. Chuck's face flushed. "You know, if you'd chosen Bryce over me, that would've been bad — I know because I lived believing that for months. But it would've made some sense to me. I lost to the man you consider the better man." The word 'better' had never been so bitter. "But I lost to no man. No one. You just didn't want to be with me. And that's worse somehow...being jealous of nothing, but still..so damned jealous. Chuck loses again — to the empty air."
Chuck closed his mouth and his jaw worked; she could hear his teeth grinding. Blinking, he blew a breath out of his nose.
When he spoke, his voice was thick. "So you never answered my question. Are you here for a visit?"
The question made no sense. Chuck stared at her, then glanced up, past the umbrella, toward the picnic area. Sarah started to turn again. There was a whisper sound and the spear from the speargun impaled Sarah's towel, between her knees.
Her voice trembled. "Chuck?"
Chuck put the goggles back on with one hand. They were sun-colored, orange, again. His eyes were hidden.
"Tell Beckman, tell Shaw, I'm coming for the Intersect." His voice dropped, a threatening whisper. "Believe me when I tell you, Sarah."
He walked past her. She let him go. The spear has missed her, been intended to miss her. But she felt speared to the sand.
She was too empty to move. Nothing held her down.
Two Weeks Later
Sarah ended the call with Beckman.
The Project had lost Chuck and the woman, — his partner, Sarah added reluctantly.
And the earlier chatter had dried up. Everything was confused and confusing. Sarah was not sure if they were chasing Chuck or if Chuck was chasing them.
She had no idea how to understand the change in Chuck. She had replayed the scene at the beach over and over in her head. It hurt every time but it left her lost every time.
The man who had talked to her had been Chuck and not-Chuck. The things he said seemed Delphic, obscure. He had shot a speargun at her. Missed. Intentionally. But the very act seemed like a form of self-betrayal on his part. And the banked anger, the depth of his resentment, the grudge he bore against her: it was all chilling. She had dreamt several nights of orange eyes perched above her, passing judgment, and red claws embedding themselves in her flesh.
She banished the memory.
Bryce, it turned out, had been tranqed. He had let the woman walk right up to him, assuming she had been drawn to him, and she had jabbed him in the shoulder. Shaw had taken great delight in Bryce's failure, and kept calling him 'Needlepoint'. Bryce was ashamed, professionally embarrassed. He blamed Chuck, not the woman. And he seemed to blame Sarah too.
Sarah had been talking to Beckman about Casey.
He was back in Burbank. Ellie had been making trouble, demanding to see her father, to see Orion. Beckman had recalled Casey from Vancouver, where he had still been hunting Amy, and sent him to Burbank to watch over Orion and Ellie — and Devon. Beckman was unsure whether Chuck's threat somehow reached to them, but she had other reasons, first and foremost, the Ring, to worry about Orion on the loose. In DC, Beckman had Orion closely monitored.
It seemed unlikely Chuck would threaten his family (unlikely — it should have been unthinkable) but it was not unlikely that the Ring might try to use them against Chuck.
Unless Chuck was working for the Ring. Ring a Ring o' Roses...we all fall down.
Sarah's thoughts were going in circles. The ache in her chest would not go away and now it was accompanied by a constant ache in her head.
Chuck, what are you doing? What happened to you? How could it have happened in a few months? Did I hurt you so much?
Sarah thought of Ellie's term: Hiroshima. Sarah had not understood the blast radius of her exit, the horror of the fallout.
Bryce was sick of Shaw. Sarah was sick of them both.
Shaw seemed increasingly...sick. Sarah had mentioned that to Beckman too, but she was having a hard time getting Beckman to take it seriously.
Having the upgraded Intersect seemed to have made Shaw a junkie, an action-junkie. He went into withdrawal when nothing was happening, like an engine idling that could not shut off. And they had spent two weeks with nothing happening. Shaw had idled and idled.
They had waited in Miami for two weeks after Sarah talked to Chuck, expecting him to return or contact from the Ring. But nothing happened.
Shaw tormented Bryce and broke pencils. Bryce spent more and more time in his room. And when Bryce was not in the Weston's room, Shaw spent a large portion of his time surveying Sarah.
Sarah shook her head and sighed. Beckman wanted the new Intersect to succeed, wanted to believe that she had been right about the Intersect, that its true host was a spy, not a...Chuck. Sarah knew that was wishful thinking, but Beckman was not ready to surrender her wish.
The hotel pool looked inviting, but Sarah was not about to put on a bikini again around Shaw. She put her phone in her pocket and trudged back to the Weston's room.
She used her keycard in the door. Inside, Shaw was standing near the door, a package in his hand. He glanced up at Sarah. "This just arrived by courier. For you." He handed the package to Sarah.
Her name and room number were typed on a label affixed to the wrapped box. The box was otherwise unmarked. Sarah shook it. Something inside moved but it was impossible to tell what. Sarah tore open the package. Shaw backed away.
Inside was a plain plastic box. Sarah dropped the packaging and turned the front of the box to her. She opened it and felt dizzy. Swoony. She stared, powerless to stop. Shaw, interest aroused, stepped closer so he could see. "It's just an old charm bracelet. Junk."
And so it was. Not junk — but a charm bracelet. The one Chuck had given Sarah and that she had taken to DC, the one she could not part with though she knew it was wrong for her to keep it. It had been for a real girlfriend — those had been Sarah's words.
It had been in the jewelry box on her dresser. Back in her DC apartment. What is it doing here? What's this mean?
A/N: Thoughts?
Things will begin to clarify themselves a bit in the next chapter, whenever I get around to it.
Oh, and I will respond to comments soon. I've been buried in grading and online teaching.
Stay well and stay well away from others!
Zettel