A/N: Sorry this took so long to get out. One of those chapters that every time I look through it I find things to alter. Finally just said enough. Thanks to Aerox the Beta wizard who blazes through these chapters at lightning speed, and still manages to catch pretty much every time I write a weird sentence or forget how commas work. (Which is a bigger problem than one might think...)

Chapter 4:

Chuck felt his stomach lurch as if someone had just slugged him. His eyes widened and he bounced to his feet, snatched the phone right out of Sarah's hand and hit disconnect. He held the button until the phone shut down, then pried the back off and removed the battery and sim card.

"Chuck, what the hell?" Sarah demanded.

Chuck gestured with the halves of her phone in either hand. "I don't think they had enough time to trace the call. To know where we are."

Her eyebrows went up. "Uh... okay. Wasn't that why we were calling though? So they could come help us out?"

"Bryce and Graham are probably the only people at the CIA who would ever believe us."

"What? That doesn't make any sense."

"Think about it. Somebody you never heard of comes and tells you they got kidnapped by a deputy director of your agency, to find a sunken nazi U-boat, and then a bunch of dudes came in and shot him and tried to take you away. But then your girlfriend saved you and now you're on the run after a moped chase through the back alleys of Nice?" Chuck said, placing Sarah's deactivated phone on the bed and serving his own phone the same way. "I lived it and I don't believe it. Not only that, but they then namedrop two recently deceased CIA employees, one of whom is the big boss man himself?" He started pacing, Sarah watched wordlessly as that all sank in. Then he stopped and cursed, kicked the bag with the guns in it. "And this. You beat up a CIA agent pretty good, right?"

Sarah winced. "Yeah. He's definitely in the hospital for a couple days at least."

"And... I think I grabbed my gun off the one that killed Decker. At the time I was just reacting. It was the closest weapon I could find. But now... God. Plus, I threw that pistol at the one SUV, and it's probably got our fingerprints and the guy you beat up's. Ballistics will match that to two dead guys in the street! French police will be gunning for one or both of us for murder, at least unless those guys turn up on some terrorist watch list and they figure we did them a favor."

"So, what you're saying is we're screwed."

"Right to the wall," Chuck said. "And it's not just the French we've got to worry about. When the CIA gets word about Decker being dead and starts putting the pieces together, they'll be looking for us too. Although, we've maybe got some time until that happens. Not a lot of time. The police were already on the way to the scene when we left. They'll be able to ID Decker's body pretty fast I'd think. Then the French version of the CIA, whoever they are-"

"DGSE," Sarah chimed in. "What? My dad reads Tom Clancy, they were just lying around through my formative years."

"Okay, DGSE will want to inform our guys what happened," Chuck went on. "They'll have police reports of the blonde and the lanky guy on the moped making their escape."

"But probably not our names."

"CIA will make that connection. They may not have a trace on our location, but our 'private number' with the phone company isn't going to slow them down at all. They've probably got your name already, and they'll check air travel records."

"Assuming they don't have your meeting with Decker in some kind of database."

"We've got to get out of France ASAP, then."

Sarah nodded. "I don't disagree, but that's easier said than done. Our passports are as good as waving a sign," Sarah said. "For the good guys and the bad guys too, whoever they are."

Chuck grimaced. "I guess our best hope is that international cooperation, even between allies, finds some hiccups."

"Are the French still our allies?" Sarah said. "Didn't we tick them off pretty good renaming French fries or something?"

"Among other things," Chuck said. It was a small ray of hope. "I don't know how we get out of this, even if we make it out of France before the CIA starts hunting us. They are going to be hunting us at some point. Being on the run for the rest of our lives doesn't sound like too great of a plan."

"Without proof we're the good guys, they're just going to lock us up and throw away the key. So we get proof," Sarah said. "Of all of it. The U-boat, the guys who killed Decker..."
"I was afraid you were going to say that. How the hell do we do any of that?"

"One thing at a time, like chopping down a tree. First, let's just concentrate on getting out of France, then we can worry about figuring out where the U-boat is and recovering the plutonium and catching the bad guys. Even the first of which is going to take more than our three grand in traveler's checks."

"Which have our name on them and are extremely easy to track."

"If CIA thinks we killed Decker, they'll be coming after us anyway; if we just exchange them for cash and then go off the grid we might be okay."

"And on finding that U-boat, we're going to have to crack into naval archives. I don't even know where those would be, much less how to go about getting access."

"What about Casey?" Sarah said. "Maybe we can play the NSA off against the CIA?"

"He stopped returning my calls after I tried to get him to fix that parking ticket... I think he changed his number."

"Great," Sarah said. "I need new clothes. You do too. We can't go back to our original hotel room, and trying to get on a plane in our swimsuits would be pretty freaking suspicious."

"And we'll have to change our appearances somewhat. Hair dye at least, for both of us."

"Ugh, I hate dyeing my hair," Sarah said grumpily. "But I see your point. Actually, we should check to see if we made the TV news first before we go about doing that."

Chuck nodded, and flicked on the old analog set, and they sat on the edge of the bed together.

They flipped channels for a while, until they found a local news station. The building where Decker had been killed was recognizable, but only just. It was engulfed in flames, smoke billowing up in a thick black pillar. Fire engines, European versions looking slightly odd to Chuck and Sarah's American eyes, were having difficulty combatting the blaze. "Crap. What does this mean?"

"For us?" Sarah said. "Probably that we've actually got some time. The police and fire department have got to be stretched thin, so going out for disguise supplies isn't as risky. It might even mean that we've got a lot of time. You understand any of the broadcast?"

"A little," Chuck said. "Oh, it looks like the commando guys thought fast. Or at least, the news people are reporting only gunfire, no confirmed fatalities so far. So they took their own guys into the building, or something. I don't know how they escaped. Police aren't reporting any arrests at this time."

"Damn, that's impressive, all of them got away?"

"Seems that way," Chuck said. "Okay, I'll go get us some new clothes. I'm less conspicuous than you in just your bikini bottoms and that shirt. There's gotta be like a French equivalent of Target, right?"

"Probably," Sarah said. "You want to risk putting our phones back together to check?" Chuck frowned for a moment, bent down to look at the phone jack. "What's up?"

Then opened his fanny pack. "Not a problem. We'll just use dial up."

Sarah raised an eyebrow and stared at him for a moment, when he produced a length of cable. "I think I can take the socket apart and wire into the phone jack with my ethernet cables. This is why our phones have that adapter, remember?"

"You take spare ethernet cables with you to the beach," Sarah said with a grin. "And yet you protest when I call that thing the nerd-pack."

Chuck huffed sulkily and pulled out a tiny screwdriver set to begin work. Sarah just watched it all with that same bemused grin. Finally Chuck glared at her. "What's so funny?"

"Nothing. It's cute," she said. "Any luck?"

"Yeah, let me just put the battery back in," Chuck said. He turned on his phone. And hooked his makeshift ethernet/phone lashup together.

"So?"
"Give it a second, I'm having to set up a proxy server as I go. Okay, ISDN connection is a go. Loading now... there's uh... an Auchan? They call it a Hypermarket, if Google translate isn't letting me down. Looks like they've got all kind of stuff."

"I thought you knew French," Sarah teased.

"For that, I'm going to get you bright purple hair dye," Chuck said. Sarah crossed her arms and stared flatly at him. He rolled his shoulders self-consciously, then came back and waggled his eyebrows. "Or maybe this silk lace bustier?"

Sarah blinked. "You're kidding."

He flipped the phone screen so she could see.

She chewed her lip for a moment. "No, too expensive. We're on a budget."

"Right. Anyway. There's one up north of the big freeway, E74 or whatever it is. Probably have to call a cab though. Ooh, Decathlon. Sounds like a sporting goods store. That's probably good to hit too. These flip-flops aren't really doing it."

"Yeah here, this ought to help out," Sarah said, digging her wallet out of her purse to pool their resources.

"You think I should risk trying to cash in all the travelers' checks? Looks like there's a bank in this same shopping center."

Sarah chewed her lip. "I don't think so. Wait until we run out of ready cash," she said. "I've got a couple hundred Euros, and my emergency prepaid card."

"Your what now?"

"My in-case-I-have-to-go-on-the-run prepaid card."

"And you're just mentioning this now," Chuck said.

"It's not exactly a platinum card Chuck. It's five hundred extra bucks. Probably mostly untraceable, but not gonna get us very far."

"Probably-mostly untraceable?"

"I paid cash in Miami for it," she explained, "so it's only a risk if somebody is looking closely, specifically at that particular Auchan store's credit card receipts. Then they'll see a purchase via a pre-paid card with a point-of-sale from Miami. Where someone sufficiently devious might conceivably remember we were briefly a while back. But my name isn't attached to it anywhere. I suppose taking the thing out to its wildly improbable conclusion, a sufficiently dedicated search might find me on the little corner bodega's security tapes. If they don't recycle their tapes once a week. That was like two or three months ago. So, probably mostly untraceable, but not certainly untraceable."

"God you're cute when you do that, you know?"

"Do what?"

"The nerdy criminal vibe." Sarah rolled her eyes and shoved the card at him. "So, your two hundred, plus the card, plus my six hundred. That'll get us started on some new clothes. Maybe some suitcases so we look less suspicious to the guy downstairs when we check out?"

"Yeah. Good idea. I'm thinking I might have a plan for passports when you get back. Here, take the hat," Sarah said. "Just in case the police do have a sketch of you they haven't released yet. I wish you could take your phone."

"Too risky. Maybe I'll pick us up some burners; we can use their sim-cards in our cPhones. Oh, and um... I'm going to need your sizes... my usual MO when buying you clothes, 'get you a size zero and a receipt,' isn't going to work this time. If we're potentially on the lam, I don't want to have to make several trips."

Sarah blinked in surprise. "Wait, you want to know my bra size. That's why you're blushing right?" Then grinned evilly. "You got a measuring tape in the nerd-pack? We should be sure we get this right."

Chuck's blush deepened, which of course only made her grin wider.

"Actually, yes. I do," he finally said, producing it.

And of course, one thing led to another, and it was another hour and a half before Chuck got around to calling that cab.

With a spectacularly more-comprehensive-than-necessary set of Sarah's measurements in-hand, Chuck made his way across town. It was only a couple miles of absolute distance, but traffic was snarled up with the continued attempts to put out the fire. The pillar of smoke was visible from the back of the taxi, and the driver spotted Chuck watching it.

"It is nothing to worry about," the driver said in English with only a faint accent. The man probably got enough tourist fares to keep him in practice.

"Yeah?" Chuck managed to keep his voice steady. "You know what's going on?"

"Building caught fire. Probably someone dropped a cigarette. The old buildings, some of them don't- how you say- uh, diffuser pour-" the cabbie took one hand off the wheel to make a weird fiddly gesture.

"Oh, fire extinguishers. Sprinklers."

"Oui," the cabbie snapped his fingers. "Many of the old buildings don't have built in automatique fire sprinkler systems. So, the tiniest spark, et whoosh!"

"That really doesn't make me feel better. I'm staying in one of those buildings..."

"Ah, desolait. Peut-être you should look into different lodgings."

"I just might do that," Chuck said.

"Oh, here we are."

"Thanks. Um, do you mind waiting? I shouldn't be too long."

"I'll leave the meter running," the cabbie said.

"Oh," Chuck said. "Then I'll be that much quicker." He lit off for the so-called Hypermarche. It was a bit of a culture shock, even though it was similar in function to an American style Wal-mart or Target. He went to the menswear section first, and grabbed a couple changes of clothes. Shoes were a little trickier, because he didn't know how European sizes worked. But he persevered, and with a little help from a salesperson, got him and Sarah squared away with good solid hiking boots. Next he went to get Sarah some clothes, which was when things took a turn. It wasn't like a guy buying clothing for a woman was unheard of, but even in the States he always got fumble-footed awkward. The language barrier didn't help. "Uh, hi. Parlez-vous l'anglais?"

"Oui?"

"I need to get some clothes for my girlfriend, but... um, the measurements she gave me aren't in metric, and I forgot my phone?" He could have done the math himself, but time was literally money with the cabbie waiting outside.

"Ah, oui. I can help," the woman said, producing a pocket calculator. Chuck blushed and reluctantly handed over the list of measurements.

"Um, you can just ignore most of that. The first few numbers are the actual..."

But the ladies' saleswoman was already fighting a grin. "Mon dieu. She certainly wanted to make sure you got this correct, didn't she?"

He managed to fight the worst of the blushes, he thought, despite the woman's continued needling as she helped him pick out clothes for Sarah. His explanation that their bags had been lost at the airport seemed to satisfy any curiosity she may have had. But she seemed to take inordinate glee in pooh-poohing his attempt to buy Sarah simple functional sports-bras instead of full-on lacey lingerie.

"You'll thank me, later," the saleswoman said, slipping an expensive silk negligee and garter set into the cart without asking.

Chuck sighed and nodded, and finally got away from the pesky saleswoman. He considered waiting until the woman wasn't looking and ditching the fancy underwear, but finally decided against it. He already had the mental image forming in his mind.

Chuck grabbed a pair of hair dyes almost at random, only deciding to make Sarah a redhead at the last moment, when he remembered her saying something about brunettes that one time.

Of course the girl at the checkout had a similar knowing smirk as the first saleswoman while she scanned in the items, and Chuck began to fear that it might really be possible to blush oneself to death.

Chuck stopped and dropped off the clothes with the cabbie. He'd only gone through a couple hundred euros re-equipping them with clothes, and the Decathlon store was calling.

He took a quick lap of the sporting goods store, collecting a few odds and ends that they might need. Compass and canteens and a little survival kit, and a pair of those survival bracelets Sarah had provided the time they'd found themselves stranded on a seemingly deserted island. He couldn't quite reproduce Sarah's entire emergency kit from their adventure in the south China sea the year before, if only because Decathlon didn't sell flare guns or machetes. They did, however, sell golf clubs, and more importantly golf-bags to take on planes. It was another drain on their limited funds, but Chuck took the chance and bought a set of the cheapest clubs he could find, and a hard sided golf club travel-bag. He'd been thinking about how they were going to get back to the States a little himself, and the clubs just might help in that regard. He almost forgot and had to run back from checkout over to the luggage section to grab a cheap duffelbag for their trip to Decathlon went through another big chunk of their ready cash, and he decided to take a risk. He popped over to the bank and exchanged his travelers' checks for cold hard cash. Judging by the TV coverage they'd seen so far, the local cops weren't looking for them yet, and they needed the operating capital. Chuck wasn't ready to risk a withdrawal from any of his bank accounts, since the CIA probably had access to records of US banks. If the locals did start looking for him and Sarah, hopefully this would be where they dead-ended.

He made small talk with the cabbie, which he would later be utterly unable to recall, and got dropped off two blocks from the hotel, right where the cabbie had originally picked him up. The man offered to help him unload the purchases, but Chuck managed to dissuade the man with a generous tip. If not for the money from the travelers' checks, that would have cleaned him out completely.

It was a long two-block trudge with the golf bag and duffel slung across his back.

Sarah merely raised an eyebrow when he returned. They hadn't discussed the golf bag ploy, or his unilateral decision about the travelers' checks, and he expected a fight, or at least an argument. "You cashed in the travelers' checks, didn't you?" she said almost before he finished setting down his purchases.

"Um... yeah. How'd you know?"

"Math," Sarah said. "Two or three days clothes for each of us, plus shoes, and the bag would have taken about half our money. Add in the golf clubs, and you wouldn't have any money to pay for the cab ride back."

Chuck shrugged. "Sorry, I'd have called, but..."

"No. I get it. It's a risk, but I get that we need operating capital. But could you explain the golf clubs, please?"

"Camouflage," Chuck explained. He took the sniper's looted bag and extracted the two halves of the M4, stuffing them down between the golf clubs. "Seemed like a shame to leave the firepower behind.

"How is that going to get past airport security?"

"Something you said before this whole thing blew up. We should charter a private plane back. Security is looser for those. We basically walk direct from the cab to the plane. Customs doesn't x-ray anybody's luggage."

"You sure about that? We might be better off leaving the guns behind."

"Where somebody can find them and link us to them and pick up our trail. Young obviously rich couple off for a weekend golf trip, we'll be beyond suspicion."

Sarah chewed her lip. "I don't know. Make sure you're right about the no x-ray thing. Sounds like a loophole they'd have closed a long time ago to stop drug smugglers."

"They've got those dogs trained to smell drugs," Chuck said. "Not guns. At least I don't think they have gun-sniffing dogs. But I'll check. Oh, did you figure out how to get us new passports?"

"Yeah. But you're not gonna like it. It's probably a bigger risk than smuggling the guns in this." She punctuated it with a backhand to the golf bag, then explained on and Chuck grimaced.

"I don't like it," Chuck said, crossing his arms. Sarah rolled her eyes.

"Told you so, didn't I? But it's our only shot. You just don't want me flirting with guys in a hotel bar."

"Well, that, and all the pickpocketing your plan involves," Chuck said.

Which was how they found themselves in a much nicer tourist hotel just after sunset, Sarah with newly-dyed hair in one of her changes of clothes, lounging at the bar. Chuck, now an awkward-feeling peroxide blond, was seated at a table off in the back, with a decent view of the bar to back her up if she needed it. But if she did need it, they'd both pretty much just be doing a sprint for the door. They couldn't afford to be caught. He hoped she knew what she was doing.

Sarah stayed at the bar for more than an hour, chatting amiably with the men who swooped in and bought her drinks, trying to pick her up. A couple of times, she approached couples, and from across the bar, he could make out the accents she adopted, trying to drum up conversation with her 'fellow New Yorkers', and 'fellow Minnesotans' and 'fellow Texans'. After what seemed like an eternity, Sarah threw her drink in the latest pickup artist's face, shouldered her purse and stormed out of the bar. Chuck hadn't seen her pick any pockets at all.

He waited a few minutes for the ruckus to settle, before following her up to their room, and stared in consternation for a good fifteen seconds.

Sarah sat cross-legged in the center of the bed, surrounded by a circle of passports.

"Um... wow," Chuck said. "You're really good at that. I didn't see anything."

She shrugged. "I think I was five when my dad started teaching me," Sarah said. "It's sometimes a struggle not to take your wallet when you're not looking. Or are distracted by kissing me. Old habits, you know?"

Chuck grunted. "So, how does this help us? These people are gonna discover their passports missing at some point, right?"

"Yeah, but most of the couples I lifted from are here for at least a week," Sarah explained. "That's why I took the risk of approaching them and chatting them up, so I could get a feel for their departure schedules. Chances are, they won't think they were stolen when they first notice the passports are missing. First they'll check with the front desk, thinking maybe they left them somewhere, and try to retrace their steps. And then they'll go search their bags and rooms top to bottom. So, call it at least a couple hours from the point where they even notice the things are missing, which probably won't be for a couple days. So, we've got a built in grace period if we move fast. I'm pretty good at doctoring passports, so once we take a couple of bad passport photos of ourselves, we should be able to head out. How much is our charter going to run?"

"More than we've got," Chuck said glumly. "I think I'm going to have to go black hat, at least for a little while."

"Black hat?"

"As in hacking. The passports give me a pretty good shot at gaining access, but I'm kind of hesitant to start phishing for these people's credit card numbers."

"You can do that?"

"In theory. I've never actually done it, you understand. But I know how, if just from being the guy trying to stop it from happening at the other end."

"Isn't that risky?"

"Well, we're already breaking a bunch of laws, right? What's a little wire fraud added in. If it makes you feel any better, I fully intend to pay them back once we can safely access our bank accounts again. So really, we're only borrowing the money."

Sarah shook her head. "Yeah, that doesn't make me feel any better. I can just see you trying to explain that to the Gendarmes' cybercrime division."

"I'll be careful," Chuck said. "And it's not like we really need that much money. Maybe twenty grand is all."

Sarah's eyebrows rose. "That's all. Like twenty grand isn't a lot of money?"

"Well, it isn't when you're talking about hacking," Chuck said, then went on thoughtfully... "It's really all just moving ones and zeroes around, when it comes right down to it. In fact, I could always just steal the money from other hackers... but I'd need a better computer system before I'd want to go up against anybody with a chance of defending themselves."

"Hang on. Time out," Sarah said. "Weren't you the one giving me all that guff about stealing from mobsters a couple months ago in Miami?"

"Most hackers don't have guns, Sarah," Chuck grabbed the bedside phone. "And besides, my nom-de-guerre has a reputation to uphold. If I tell them I'll get it back to them, they'll know I'm good for it, plus a little interest. Might not even have to do any stealing."

Sarah shook her head. "The hacker as loan shark?"

Chuck shrugged. "Welcome to the twenty-first century. Sorry I had to drag you here kicking and screaming." He gathered his phone and his fanny pack.

"What are you doing?"

"Going downstairs to see if this place has a business center PC I can use."

TO BE CONTINUED...

A/N: Thanks also to everybody who's been reviewing this story, please keep them coming. I need validation! Just got my latest rejection letter from a publisher.

:-(