A/N: Perhaps next, Jack Burton will offer Dimitri Semenov the purchase of ownership of Chuck. Why not? He doesn't own that either.
A/N2: I have taken us to the CIA's Memorial Wall once before in this story. Just days before this chapter is being posted, on May 23, 2022, the CIA put two more stars on the wall. Condolences to the families of the fallen officers. There are now 139 stars. As we know, in real life, it's a dangerous job. "People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." (A quote attributed to George Orwell.) I think something similar can be said regarding the men and women of the clandestine service.
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Sarah had been relatively quiet on the drive home from their dinner with her dad. Chuck hadn't tried to encourage her to talk about it. He understood that it had been difficult for her and knew that she'd discuss it with him when she chose to. Or not.
Chuck was already in bed, sitting up with his laptop on his knees and his back against the headboard. Sarah came into the bedroom from the bathroom smelling of minty toothpaste and wearing boyshorts and one of his tee shirts.
Chuck said, "About dinner..."
"I know," she said, sitting on the bed next to him. "I've been sulking. It's just that it was a hard conversation to have with him. And I didn't even get to the fact that he made a seven-year-old girl into a criminal accessory. Eventually, I'll have to bust on him for that too. And taking me from my mom...shit..." She shook her head as she contemplated further discussions with her dad.
"All so true. I figured you'd talk about that when you wanted to. But that's not what I was about to say."
"Ok. What's up?" She scooted under the covers next to Chuck.
"I looked up Semenov. The guy your dad is about to defraud. He's a pretty tough guy. Dangerous."
"Ok," said Sarah.
"Late 80's he was in the KGB," said Chuck.
"Shit," said Sarah.
"Worse. Stationed in Dresden," he said.
"And that's worse why?"
"With Putin," he explained.
"Oh, shit. Well, that explains how he got the gas business from the corpse of the USSR. Putin may have stepped down as President, but even with Medvedev in power Putin still seems to be calling the shots. If Semenov is an old homie, Putin would take good care of him."
"Yeah. Exactly. Semenov is totally connected in the Kremlin up the political wazoo. And that gets me to the next part. The Agency has an asset in Semenov's orbit. One of his advisors is working for us. Dude named Boris Bondarev. One of his right-hand men. Code name Badger."
"You went into the CIA files?"
"Yeah. Semenov's history itself is open source, but I dipped my toe into the IC stuff to see if there was anything interesting there."
"Well, that's something interesting. Who's his handler?
"Dude named Averbuck. Oscar Averbuck. Out of Warsaw. You know him?"
"Yeah. Not well, but I met him once a few years ago on a mission. He was in Oslo at the time. Seemed like an ok guy," said Sarah.
"Ok. So, first question. Do we warn your dad that the guy he's looking to rip off could probably get him iced by the GRU or somebody?" asked Chuck, referring to Russian military intelligence.
"Oh. Well, obviously we wouldn't alert him to Badger. But Semenov's history..." Sarah paused to think. "I'll call him in the morning. I … well, I worry about him. He probably doesn't need the warning. I'm sure he checked him out..but still."
"Of course, you do. Of course. Now the question in reverse. Do we tell Averbuck that Bondarev's main man is going to get ripped off?"
"Weellll...I could see several ways Bondarev could use it to his advantage," she said.
"Yeah. He could be the hero of the story to Semenov. Thwart the fraud and save his boss the money. His stock rises internally," said Chuck.
"Right. But …." Sarah paused.
"But that puts your dad at risk," said Chuck.
"Yeah, it does. It's risky enough as it is. I'd hate to make it even more dangerous for him."
"I understand. I mean, we could kill the con entirely, but there might be blowback to him," said Chuck. "Not to mention the damage that would do to your relationship with him."
"Yeah. Without the CIA asset there, we'd probably just let things play out. So, the only real question is whether the existence of the asset changes our calculus."
"Exactly," said Chuck.
"Let's sleep on it, Sweetie."
"Ok. Sounds like a plan."
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The next day
Carina sat with in the straight-backed chair with her new prothesis attached to her leg. Her crutches were off to the side. A pair of parallel bars about waist height stretched out in front of her for about six or seven feet. The far wall, at the other end of the parallel bars was mirrored and she looked at her buzz cut hair. It was coming in well, although where the scalp wound had been the hair was growing out snow white.
Britt Hughes, standing nearby, was incredibly proud of Carina. Britt's style of encouragement with any of her patients was to mix cheerleader with drill sergeant. In this case, all the compliments were honestly earned. Carina was working as hard as any patient she'd ever worked with and the results spoke for themselves. She was way ahead of any sane schedule for her acceptance and use of the prosthetic leg.
"Ok. Here's what's next," said Britt. "For your whole life you knew where you were in space without thinking about it too much..."
"Proprioception," said Carina.
"Uhhh, somebody did the reading," said Britt with a grin. "Your brain is hard wired to know where your foot is without too much confusion. Now, we have to train your brain to know where your prosthetic foot is. But all the old wiring won't work any more, because part of the wiring is now missing. You have to come to the same understandings, but based upon the feelings you get from the socket connection on the residual limb. Not easy, but far from impossible."
"Ok," said Carina.
"But that's not all. Eventually, we have to use the proprioception to allow you to do a series of controlled falls onto the prosthetic leg. That's what you are doing when you walk. You move your center of mass forward and shift a leg to create a new base of support in front of you to keep your balance. Then you do it again and again. But to do it safely, you have to know where your center of mass is and what that feels like in the socket. You with me?"
"Yeah," said Carina.
"Ok. Stand up and grab the bars. We are going to spend some time just moving your center around and seeing what that feels like in the socket. It's got to be second nature to you. Eventually, no thinking involved at all."
Carina stood, without putting too much weight on her prosthetic, grabbed the bars and got to work.
'If Virginia Hall can do this, so can I,' she thought.
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Bryce stood in the hot sun on the roof of the building, pistol in hand. He looked across the small street, but seemed to find nothing on the nearby roofs. The sound of the rifle shot was still echoing around the buildings when Bryce staggered, red liquid seeping past his fingers on his otherwise white shirt.
He dropped his pistol from lifeless fingers and fell off the roof. It was a forty-foot drop to the street below.
"CUT," yelled Jeff Barnes. "One more take, please, folks. Get him cleaned up."
Bryce pulled himself off the pads and got to his feet as the crew came over to get him ready to do it again.
Barnes turned to the cameraman and said, "Medium shot this time. Not a close one. I don't want to see his face. He's a decent stunt guy, but a shitty actor. He looked bored while getting shot."
The cameraman grinned and said, "Sure thing, boss."
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Zondra Rizzo looked through the floor to ceiling windows of her large penthouse apartment in Santa Monica, overlooking the beach. All things considered, she'd lived with worse covers.
She poured herself a glass of wine and took it out to the balcony. Sitting herself in one of the outdoor chaise lounges, she watched the waves roll in for a few minutes. But then she put down the wine and got to work.
She picked up the script on the top of the pile and began to read. Her cover boss, Lisa Mattock, was expecting her to have gone through the entire pile by their meeting tomorrow afternoon. Mattock had told her to flag anything that looked interesting.
She smiled a little bit. Yeah, there were worse covers.
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Gino's was a small pizza place with cozy booths and decent pizza.
Sarah, Chuck, Morgan and Lou were in one of their booths and had just poured out most of a bottle of Montepulciano. Two pizzas were on the way, a large vegetarian (no olives) and a large meatlovers.
Chuck said, "Ok, you two. Spill it."
"What?" asked Morgan.
"The two of you look like your dog just died. What's the matter?" said Chuck
Lou said, wrinkling her lips with a look of distaste, "Yeah, well. I have news to share. My dad asked me to manage his new hotel in New York. To get it up and running. Take it through the whole set up phase. It was a tough decision, but I decided that I'm going to do it. I'm moving at the end of September."
Morgan looked equally unhappy. "We talked about it. We're going to try to maintain a long-distance relationship. Which is probably gonna be sort of hard, but it's worth it."
"Oh, wow. Well, I'm happy for you, Lou, but sad for us. It's a great opportunity, but we'll miss you," said Chuck.
"Yeah, we will. But your folks will be happy, I think. New York's not Rome, but it's closer than LA," said Sarah.
"I'll miss you guys too, but, yeah. And it gets me back into the hotel business, which dad has wanted for a while now. Ever since I left Rome," Lou said. "Morgan and I figure we'll try to meet in Chicago or something when we can."
Sarah flashed back to her very first night with Chuck, when exactly the same sort of thoughts were passing through her head. She reached out and took his hand, relieved that such foolish ideas no longer had a place in her life.
"Frankly," Morgan said, continuing Lou's thought, "we're still just figuring it out. It's still new for us."
"We talked about having him come with, but he couldn't do that to Jackie."
Morgan looked especially uncomfortable. "Well, Jackie has been really good to me. He took a big chance to hire me. I don't want to just walk away from him after all that he's done. He seems to be leaning on me a lot lately."
"How so?" asked Sarah. "More than usual?"
"Well, sort of." Morgan pulled at his beard nervously. "He's got me doing some stuff I haven't been doing before. I've had to do the schedules for the whole staff for the next two weeks. And let me tell you, that's a lot harder than it sounds. You not only have to make sure you have the right coverage, but you have to make sure everybody gets enough hours and doesn't tip over into too much overtime. It was like doing a really complicated puzzle."
Lou put her arm around her boyfriend and gave him a one-armed hug. "And tell them about the online thing."
"Oh, yeah. He signed me up for an online course in bookkeeping. He wants me to help him keep the books for the restaurant. That's really hard too."
Chuck started to laugh. "Ok, dude. Let me get this straight. Ok? Since you've been there you've cleaned the bathrooms, been a dishwasher, a busboy, a waiter. He sent you to bartender school to be a bartender. You've been the chef. He's sent you out shopping for the food and supplies, and now he's got you doing the paperwork like scheduling and keeping the books. I get that right?"
"Yeah, I guess," said Morgan.
"So, you've done pretty much every job in the place," said Chuck with a grin.
"Except one," said Sarah with a matching grin of her own.
"What?" asked Morgan.
"Manager," said Sarah. "He's grooming you to be the manager, Morgs."
"Me? Manager? I couldn't...I mean, I don't know how..." started Morgan.
Lou said, laughing, "O. M. G. I'll bet they're right, baby. Jackie probably wants you to manage. Isn't he always making noises about retirement? Cutting back his hours? I'll bet he wants to put his feet up and let you run the place."
Morgan continued to look doubtful, but he was clearly thinking about it.
Their food arrived and they began to eat.
"So, Lou, talking about retirement and letting a manager run the place, what are you going to do with the sandwich shop when you go to New York?" asked Sarah.
"I'm going to have Tony manage it for me. He's almost doing it now anyway," said Lou.
"And your apartment?" asked Sarah.
"Sublet for a while. At least until I know if I'm coming back or not," she said.
"Speaking of coming back, I know the holidays are busy season for hotels, but I hope you can still make the wedding. We'd really miss you if you got stuck back east," said Chuck.
Lou, around a mouthful of pizza started to laugh. "Nothing could keep me from that wedding, Chuck. Nothing. If I was on Mars I'd find a way to get back for it. I am soooo looking forward to it."
"Excellent," said Sarah. "You can watch Morgan marry us."
"And I'm going to do the best marriage that anyone's ever done," said Morgan with pride and confidence.
Pouring out the last of the second bottle of wine, Chuck said, "I'll drink to that."
Sometime later, they were driving home in Sarah's Porsche. Emma had borrowed Chuck's car and taken Molly to visit an old friend of Emma's in Lake Tahoe. The plan was that she'd come back when Jack had cleared out of LA. On Emma's to-do list was shipping her own car from Pennsylvania to Los Angeles. And selling her house in Ardmore. And getting a new house in Los Angeles. And getting a job (if she wanted it). And...and...and.
"How do you think Morgan will deal with a long-distance relationship?" Sarah asked.
"I don't know. He's grown so much in the last year. The old Morgan would have messed it up, for sure. Like immediately. This new and improved version? I don't know. Even for a solid mature responsible person, it's a lot. And, I'm not sure …. I'm not sure they are..."
"In love?" asked Sarah.
"Exactly. I'm not sure they are really in love. I think they are happy together and enjoy each other and stuff, but ...I don't know. You remember a few months ago when we were telling him...well, Devon and Ellie and him... about the spy stuff and Devon asked if you and I were real? And Morgan said he knew we were because of the way you look at me? And he said Lou never looks at him that way. You remember that?"
"Yeah, I do. I felt warm all over about that description of how I look at you. That everyone can see how much I love you. But ...well, I also felt bad for him. That that sort of love was missing between Lou and him. I felt bad for them both. If they aren't the right ones for each other, maybe they should move on and find the perfect fit...I don't know. It's hard."
"It's like you told your dad last night. The joy of the connection with the other person. Of needing the other person as much as air." He chuckled. "Although you said it better."
"It's so true, though. I do need you that much."
"Me too you. Good thing we're getting married, then, huh?" he said.
She squeezed his hand, looked at him with love and said, "Really good thing."
They drove in silence for a while until Chuck said, "I'm going to miss Lou, though."
"Yeah. Me too. I've gotten to like her a lot. Even if I wasn't crazy about her at first."
"Really? Why not?"
"Don't you remember how I met her?"
"It was in the Buy More," he said, still confused.
"Yeah. And you were hugging her and I came in and you told me she was my competition," said Sarah with laughter in her voice.
"What? No, no, no. She was thanking me for fixing her phone. And I meant for lunch. Competition for lunch...I..."
Sarah was really laughing by this point. "I know. It was only for a second. Didn't take me long to realize she was after Morgan anyway. But for that one second though...oh, mama. I was going to stuff her tiny little self into the glove compartment of the Nerd Herder."
"Sarah, I would never..."
"I know that now. Hell, I knew that then. It was only for a second that the green-eyed monster took me over. But what a second that was."
"Yikes," said Chuck. "Now that is someone I never ever want to meet."
"I knew my nerd was a smart man. Speaking of which, my smart man, where do you want to go for your birthday dinner?"
They spent the rest of the ride home discussing this or that fancy restaurant.
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A/N3: I admit that I've left realism aside with Carina's recovery. In real life, the physical therapist will likely work with an amputee for months before moving to the prosthetic. Carina's recovery in New Day is arduous and exhausting for her, but way too rapid to be realistic. I fall back on the fact that canon has a computer in a guy's head, so give me a break. She did promise to dance at the wedding. And we know she's going to be front and center at Sarah's bachelorette party.
A/N4: What do you guys think? As usual, I'd love to hear from you.