A/N: More story. Time to fasten your seatbelts, we're heading into the thick of it.
Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy
Chapter Fourteen: Missionary
"You know?" Sarah and Ellie both asked at the same time.
"You know?" Bryce chimed in a second later.
"Yes," Orion said, his tone still doleful. "I've been in contact with Chuck...sort of."
"Sort of?" Sarah said, her voice rising in pitch; she didn't care to modulate it. She saw Bryce look at her, a cloud pass over his face.
"Yes, we've not talked face-to-face. It's been online. He set up some kind of pipeline, secure, for texts between us. They come to my phone. After I've seen them, they disappear. I've tried, I can't trace them. No digital breadcrumb trail. It's like communing with the Beyond."
"What's that mean? You don't just mean that you can't trace the texts." Ellie leaned toward her dad. Sarah heard and wanted to echo the question but she ached, ached too much to speak. He's got it, again, but he doesn't have me. He doesn't seem to want me anymore. His eyes...The visor. He saved me...but not for us…For the sake of our past, not our future…"
"No, I don't just mean that. The Intersect Chuck has is not mine. I mean, mine is part of its history...but it's not mine anymore. It's the Ring's and it's...mutated...metastasized."
Sarah shook her head, swallowing the ache like bile. "Mutated?"
"Think about what I told you about the corruption of Shaw's upload, the extra programming. The Ring's Intersect is lousy with extra programming. It's not just accessible, usable, it is executive, commanding. It gives orders. Chuck hasn't just been given information, skills — cycling, I guess, for example — he's been programmed, given orders."
"Like a robot?" Bryce asked, himself leaning toward Orion.
"Yes, except Chuck is still...in there...able to resist. But the Ring doesn't know that."
"How do you?"
"He told me. He contacted me when I was in Burbank with you, Ellie. That was the first I had heard from him since he disappeared. We didn't talk much after I left," Orion glanced at Sarah, "so I don't know how all this happened exactly. But he's managed to give me a skeletal account. I've been trying to figure out how to help him…That was the point of all those talks in Burbank, Ellie."
Ellie leaned back. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Chuck told me not to tell anyone," — another glance at Sarah — "he can't take the chance anyone will give him away…"
"But there's more. The Ring version also came with something they didn't intend. Chuck knows their plans, some of them, anyway, their plans for Shaw.
Ellie started to speak but Sarah cut her off. "So, does Chuck have it all, everything in the CIA and NSA files?"
"I guess so, Sarah," Orion said, his gaze sympathetic. He knows all about everything. But his head is about to burst. Fighting the programming is...monumentally exhausting. He can only overcome it...climb out of it mentally...for short times. I think it's killing him…"
The picnic table was silent as a tomb for a moment.
"How did he get it?"
"Your colleague's a double-agent. Amy. She got Chuck to drink at a club and took him to a back room and...did it to him. Then they faked the abduction…They're partners now — or she's his handler, I guess. He's had to do missions for them. She's been posing as his wife."
Mission wife. Oh, God…
Sarah did not want to know anymore. "Missions?" she asked, unable to stop herself.
"Chuck has to play along, fake that he is under their control. It's the way he gets some...freedom. Like today. And he has someone helping him, someone on the inside...but he won't tell me who it is."
Ellie stared at Sarah and Sarah stared back. Neither spoke.
"So, what's Chuck's plan?" Bryce asked.
"He's working his way up the food chain. He's supposed to meet with the person-in-charge soon. He doesn't know who that is, yet."
"The Ring leader?" Ellie muttered.
Orion gave her a bitter smile. "Yes, that was my term too."
"I got a text a while ago. The Ring was...overjoyed that we Intersected Shaw. They have a plan. A bomb in our midst. The fuse has been lit. Today's upload. Chuck didn't know in time to stop me.
"The hope is to use the confusion and mayhem Shaw causes to do...whatever it is they plan to do. They haven't uploaded that...plan...into Chuck yet, but he's to be the tip of the spear. That upload is due...soon. I don't know if he can withstand more programming, though…"
Orion reached into his jacket pocket and took out a watch, put it on the table.
"This is the same brand of watch they are using to track Chuck. He's figured out how to...manipulate...the one they gave him, to make it give false readings. I need to get this to him. It has a device embedded in it, a governor, that will help him.
"But it's a stop-gap. I don't know how much time...how much life...or sanity...it will buy him. We have to get it to him. I haven't slept. I've been working on it since getting to Burbank. If Beckman knows, she'll put a kill order out on Chuck. She will. Chuck said he has a mission in DC to do with Amy. We need to find a way to get the watch to him."
Orion dropped his head, depression and exhaustion rolling off him in waves. "The sins of the father…"
Sarah tried to focus through the ache, the images, her heart hurt so much she wanted to open her chest, rip it out. "What do we know about this mission?"
"Nothing yet. But I'm expecting another text...today or tomorrow."
"I think Chuck knew Amy was a double-agent. At some point, before she knew he had done it, he figured it out. He chose to let her do this to him, to let the Ring do this."
"Jesus," Bryce exhaled, then looked at Sarah. "Just Chuck, huh?"
Everyone else stared at the two of them. Sarah dropped her head, wiped at her eyes. Orion looked at her. "Chuck's meeting with you in Miami was a test to see if he was under the Ring's control. Whatever he did there seemed to convince them. They were listening..."
Sarah thought about the spear gun, the spear. Impaled. "They don't control what he says, does, completely?"
"No, but he's like a rat in a maze. He can move freely but within preset limits. Amy wanted to see how he would react to you."
"So, she was there, it was her at the beach?"
"Yes. She tranqed Bryce."
Bryce dropped his head. "Shit."
"They expect Shaw to kill Sarah. Do you think he survived that crash?"
Sarah shrugged, answered in a still, small voice. "He survived a three-story fall...Who knows what he's capable of?"
Orion nodded. "They don't have any real control over Shaw, as far as I can tell. But they think the...loop will ensure what they want, at least keep us busy, looking over our shoulder. Shaw will eventually decide that not just Sarah has to die, but the people who ordered Eve's death...The Company. It's logical — if I can use that word — the logical progression of Shaw's obsession."
"But Graham's already dead." Bryce.
"Yes, so now…"
Orion's jacket buzzed. He pulled out his phone. "It's a text from Chuck."
Orion read from his phone's screen. "Official dinner tonight. CIA Director Holt and Beckman. Event on national intelligence. Amy and I will be there, disguised. I am to kill Holt and Beckman too."
He handed Sarah the phone. She looked at the words, read them again, then they vanished.
"Shit. We've got to stop this, and get Chuck the watch."
She tried to push all her personal disorder down, to think in terms of the mission. "We need to get me into that dinner. We can't warn Holt or Beckman. Bryce, you will be my backup, you and Orion and Ellie..."
Later
Sarah stood in front of the mirror in Bryce's apartment's bathroom and looked at herself. She had on a black wig and heavy makeup, a black formal dress, high heels. A pair of glasses. She and Ellie stopped to buy them on the way to Bryce's.
Ellie stood beside her, gazing into the mirror.
Bryce was in the living room, waiting.
Sarah dropped her gun in her black purse, beside the watch, and snapped it shut. Her dress had a long slit on the side, and above it, she had her knives holstered in place.
She looked at Ellie in the mirror.
"Dressed to kill, Sarah," Ellie said flatly, a mixture of faint disapproval and dominant worry on her face. "Are you sure you can do this?"
Sarah nodded. "Yes." Her voice wavered but her lips compressed into a hard line.
"We don't know, Sarah...Chuck and Amy...what he's had to do…"
Sarah sighed. "It doesn't...it can't matter. Chuck made his choice, made it from the options I left him. There's a sense in which this is all my fault, Ellie. I left him alone...in so many ways."
Ellie did not disagree. "Well, choices have consequences. Yours have. Dad's have. Chuck's have. Mine have. I should have talked to Chuck, made him talk to me. But I didn't. I let him wallow.
"Maybe I even wanted him to, a little. I blamed him...for bringing you into our lives...my life. For making me think you were...that you could be...my friend. I didn't want to argue with him and I didn't want to hear him defend you. And that was before I knew what you were."
Sarah turned to look at Ellie directly. "I wasn't lying about wanting to be your friend, Ellie, even if I never really was. I wanted that life in the suburbs with Chuck. Fantasized about barbeques with you and Devon. Breakfasts, nights. And more. A life without a gun…"
"So why not make it happen? It was in your grasp. Chuck was free, free of the Intersect. It was all there for the taking."
"But I didn't think it was there for me, Ellie. I thought it was there for the woman in the fantasy, not the real woman…Who wants to barbeque with an assassin?"
"My brother, evidently. But then, he was never...normal."
"But that's what he wanted, Ellie, normalcy."
"No, Sarah. No. Why can't you understand this? He wanted normal with you, not normalcy itself. What is that, anyway? A shitty abstraction."
"But he didn't want me to be an...agent."
"No, I'm sure he didn't. But that's because he wanted to come first with you, the way you came first for him. Can't you see that he wanted you to choose him? Not the Intersected Man, not national security, not the 'Greater Good'," Ellie made scare-quotes with so much force it was like she was slicing the air, "and he thought you wanted that too. Until you left."
Sarah slumped. "Is it possible to have a choice you don't know how to make?"
"I don't know, Sarah," Ellie said, "is it? Maybe the problem isn't ignorance, maybe it's a lack of will…"
"I've always been good at making the hard choices, Ellie."
"Yes, for a mission, not for yourself." Ellie turned and walked to the door of the bathroom. turned. "It's time to make some damn choices, Sarah. But don't get my brother killed while you work it out."
Bryce called to them from the living room. "We have to go. Get into position..."
Sarah walked behind Ellie into the living room. Bryce gave Sarah an appreciative look, then turned away.
"Any word yet on whether there were fatalities on the freeway today?" Sarah asked him.
He looked back at her. "No, all the information I can gather mentions only the resulting traffic jam and minor injuries. No hospital has any records of a patient named Shaw or matching his description.
"Goody," Ellie muttered, "as if this party wasn't likely to be crazy enough. Now we have to worry that Frankenstein will crash it."
"Monster vs. monster," Bryce muttered, smiling weakly.
"Fuck you, Bryce," Ellie and Sarah said in unison.
A/N: Thoughts?
Chapter soundtrack: The Brothers Martin, The Missionary