A/N: At 'home' in DC…
Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy
Chapter Seven: Lemony
Sarah's ears were still ringing. Ringing. An audible accompaniment to her feeling of spinning.
The meeting with Beckman had boomed, supersonically. Shouting, both ways.
As a petty punishment for it, Beckman delayed Sarah's trip to her apartment, sending her instead to another part of the NSA building, where Bryce and Shaw were waiting.
As Sarah walked down the long hallway, the ringing in her ears was cried down by Bryce and Shaw, arguing.
Bryce: "I can't help it if I can't remember her. I sort of remember the red bikini, the hat, but it was down, and her head was down. Then she tranqed me, a twilight tranq. I don't remember anything clearly until later, when Sarah was trying to wake me."
Shaw: "Shit, Needlepoint, I thought you were a superspy. Man enough for Walker once. You're barely passable as a spy. — A spy doesn't think with his dick, Needlepoint."
Bryce: "Call me that again, and I'll turn the Intersect into the Outersect. And talk about me! You're a moony supercomputer, all floppy disk. Walker doesn't want you; she'd never want you."
Shaw: "I don't care if she wants me; I don't care what's going on inside her, as long as I am."
Sarah walked in and the two men shut up immediately. She put the file Beckman made her take to them on the table. "Beckman wants you to look at this. It's a list of people known or suspected to have Ring ties, people that live in or near DC. If Chuck is Ring, or tied to the Ring, somehow, and if he's here, he might contact one of these people.
"I've got a copy of my own. We reconvene here tomorrow morning to start working our way down the list. Beckman's out of ideas. Unless we get lucky, the next move is Chuck's.
"And if I ever hear the two of you discussing me like that again, I will shoot you both where you stand. Bryce, just in case I haven't been crystal clear: We are done, never to begin again. Shaw, no, absolutely not. I found you creepy before you became the man-machine."
Sarah turned and left.
The two men started grousing at each other under their breath.
Sarah took a cab home.
Mercifully, the driver left her alone.
In the meeting with Beckman, Sarah had finally just admitted it: she loved Chuck. Beckman started to pick up the phone, to end Sarah's role with the Intersect Project.
Before, the call would have been what Sarah wanted — an excuse to quit. But not now. Before, she would have gotten on a plane to Burbank and thrown herself upon Chuck's mercy, and upon Chuck himself. Now, there was no mercy to throw herself upon, no Chuck.
If she was going to be anything to Chuck, it would be as a spy, not a woman. She needed to stay on the Project. Whatever exactly Chuck had been trying to tell her, it was clear that he was focused on them, on the Project, the Intersect. To help him, she needed to remain on part of the Project, remain with Bryce and Shaw, as distasteful as that was. Mission husbands. Jesus...
Sarah forced Beckman to hang up the phone by uttering one name: Montgomery. Sarah had heard the rumors, gotten them from Bryce, who, predictably, had been enough of a favorite of Montgomery's at the Farm to have become a drinking buddy later. Deep in his cups, Montgomery waxed eloquent about...Diane. About how hot she could turn a freezing Berlin night. Sarah quoted Roan about that as Beckman hung up the phone.
Beckman detonated.
Sarah had not backed down. She had firmly insisted on Beckman's hypocrisy. Not just hypocrisy of the past, but the present: Sarah knew that she was still sleeping with Montgomery, and was still attached to him. Bryce had told her. Sarah cited the fact. Beckman stared at Sarah, livid. Sarah stared back.
"You know, Diane. We're both women. We both are or were spies. We should understand each other. You did the 49B. You knew that Chuck and I cared about each other…"
Beckman shook her head. "I trusted you to know not to cross the line, Walker."
"I tried. I kept trying. I crossed dozens of lines, state lines, to keep trying. But it didn't work. Tell me you don't understand."
Beckman's lips were a flat, furious line; she did not respond to that. "I will not tolerate this insubordination. Are you threatening to blackmail me?"
"No, of course not. I'm just reminding you that we are more the same than different. And I should tell you: I am clear that whatever my feelings were...are...for Chuck, he doesn't return them, not anymore.
"If you are convinced that Chuck is our enemy, convinced, then go ahead, throw me out of the Project, but if you aren't, you may need me, my...connection...to Chuck, even if it now runs only one way. I still know him better than anyone, even than his sister, I think. You NEED me..."
Beckman picked up a pen from her desk and tapped on the file in front of her. "Okay, Agent Walker, I will leave you with the Project for now. But, never, never, NEVER speak to me like that again!"
Sarah approached her apartment door cautiously.
She examined it carefully before slowly inserting the key in the knob. After one more glance along the door's edges, she turned the key.
Inside, the apartment looked as it had before she left. Sarah left her suitcase by the door.
The apartment looked as it had before except for one thing. The few dishes she had hand-washed and left in the small plastic drainer to dry were gone. She walked to her kitchen, after shutting her apartment door, and she opened the cabinet.
The dishes from the drainer were stacked neatly atop the other dishes.
And then she turned and looked at the apartment again.
It did look the same — and it did not. It gleamed. There was a subtle fragrance of lemon in the air. Someone had dusted the apartment.
Sarah was at best an indifferent housekeeper, and, depressed as she had been before leaving for Burbank, she had done little in the apartment for months.
But now the wooden tops of the end tables and coffee table were mirror-like. She opened the cabinet beneath her sink; the can of lemon Pledge she had stored there for nearly a decade, almost a collectible, was missing.
She found it in the trash.
She went down the short hallway. The bathroom was spic-and-span, the toilet water blue. A fresh roll of toilet paper was on the dispenser, oriented correctly.
Her bedroom was in perfect order: the bed made, everything picked up, folded, put away. The surfaces gleamed in it too.
One surface, in particular, drew her eyes: the dresser. The jewelry box was open. The charm bracelet was not there; it was in her suitcase. She walked slowly to her dresser, her eyes fixed on the jewelry box. When she reached the dresser, she looked inside.
The box was not empty. In it, in the very center where Sarah had kept the bracelet, was another new charm.
A skull and crossbones.
Sarah wheeled, feeling suddenly as if she was about to be attacked. But the apartment was empty. Lemony but empty.
She turned around again and, her hand trembling, picked up the charm. She sat down on the bed. She turned the charm over. Blank.
Seized by suspicion, she stood and went back to retrieve her suitcase, wheeling it into the bedroom, then putting it on the bed. She opened it and took the bracelet out again. The Eiffel Tower charm matched the skull and crossbones, made by the same hands or the same production process.
Sarah had been to Paris many times. The first time was the one that she did not want to remember but could not forget — not that the other trips were full of pleasant memories. But that first trip: her Red Test.
The first step on a long, dark path...
She looked back at the charms, the Tower and the skull and crossbones, looked at them not as two independent charms but as one set of charms, as joint, not disjoint.
My Red Test! Chuck knows about my Red Test. But if he knows about that, he probably knows…
...everything.
Chuck had been wrong. Ellie too, in her way.
Sarah had not chosen nothing over Chuck: she had chosen his ignorance of her over her possession of him. It was no wonder there had been a grudge in his eyes. He had thought he knew Sarah. Sarah knew he did not know her. But he knew her now. Oh, God, he knows me now. All this misery and he still knows!
With a cry, she fell face-forward onto her bed.
After a moment, she realized the comforter smelled laundry fresh.
A/N: I didn't expect to write on this today but…
Thoughts?
Thanks to Neil Horne and Beckster1213 for some pre-reading and discussion of the story.