A/N: As I said, this will be a longer arc.

The Missionary

He thought he was the King of America
Where they pour Coca Cola just like vintage wine
Now I try hard not to become hysterical
But I'm not sure if I am laughing or crying
I wish that I could push a button
And talk in the past and not the present tense
And watch this hurtin' feeling disappear
Like it was common sense
It was a fine idea at the time
Now it's a brilliant mistake

— Elvis Costello, King of America

Chapter Eighteen: The Flowing Present

Chuck stared out at San Diego, not really noticing any details, his mind full of the mission, the missing baby. The responsibility of it seemed like a weight on his chest and he was doing whatever he could to make himself think like an agent.

He glanced over at Sarah. He wondered what she was thinking but was unwilling to ask.

She seemed to grow visibly more efficient, reserved, and armored as they drove. At the beginning of their drive, at a stop light, he had noticed her looking at her own hands, but she had glanced up as the light turned green and given him a tight, not unfriendly but still non-committal smile.

He now recognized her transformations, the process of becoming or unbecoming (both?) that took her from Sarah Walker to Agent Walker. He recognized the process, but he did not understand it — and he did not understand the distance between Sarah Walker and Agent Walker.

He thought about El Compadre yet again, her seduction of him on their date, their 'date', or whatever it was. She might have been under orders, but he was almost certain he had dinner that night with Sarah Walker, that it was Sarah Walker, and not Agent Walker, who kissed him outside the restaurant, a kiss he could not forget, a kiss his dreams were made of. But it had been Agent Walker who put the gun to his head. He had seen her transform in the back seat.

What did it mean that it had been Sarah Walker and not Agent Walker in the moonlight?

He wanted to ask her about that night but he couldn't seem to get himself to do it. He dreaded what she might say about it, dreaded being told that it had been Agent Walker all along, that Sarah Walker had just been the cover, the honeypot.

And that I was nothing more than a lanky, starry-eyed Pooh.

Oh, bother.

He felt a slight, heady blush in response to his own thoughts, and decided he needed to exit his head.

Sarah's reluctance to talk about the night suggested what she had to tell him would make him unhappy. Unhappier. He decided to leave it alone.

They drove on for a while. He focused on the GPS and the surroundings, supplying her directions about turns.

"How much farther do we have to go?" Sarah asked, glancing at her phone resting on his leg.

He looked down to check.

"Another couple of miles. What do we do when we get there?"

Sarah was silent for a moment, then: "You stay in the car, at first. Let's make sure no one's around but the parents when you go inside. The fewer people who get a look at you, the better. If local law enforcement has anyone still around, I'll talk to them, and send them on their way. Stanfield's put us in charge. I'll text you when you should come inside.

"In the meantime, look around — from inside the car — and see if you notice anything. You never know what the Intersect will respond to." She grinned at him cautiously. He knew she was thinking about the ad page that took them to Mattress Bob.

Chuck allowed himself to smile back and felt better when he did.

What had Stanfield called the two of them? A natural team.

Sarah had been trying to summon focus as she drove, but she found Chuck beside her, the sight of her phone on his leg, and the still-present memory of her hand there, earlier, in the helicopter, to be hurdles.

She recalled touching him the night of their date, more intimately, and she tried to fight off any careful exploration of that tactile memory. She wanted him; she knew that. But even if he were responsive to an advance — God knows, he's not — she had her mission to perform and the best thing for the mission was: to focus.

Playing Tell and Show with Chuck had done more for Sarah than reconnecting her viscerally with some of her mission memories. It had revealed something to her about the way she experienced time and memory: she experienced them both as internal to her missions. Strangely, between missions, she had been outside of time, beyond the reach of her memory. Of course, that wasn't strictly true. The clock ticked, and if someone had asked about the past, she could have answered. But she ignored the ticking — and no one asked, especially not Sarah herself. She tiptoed past any reminders, plotted against any need to recall. It was no wonder she never seemed to have any time off — the little she had she refused to inhabit.

But the last few weeks in Burbank had been…timed. She knew she was twisting the word, but it was true. She felt like she was somewhere and somewhen — like she was spatiotemporally located, present, for the first time in her life.

"There it is, that house," Chuck said, interrupting Sarah's reflections.

She looked ahead. The house was modestly sized but lovely. It was white with black shutters and a brick red door. The lawn was neatly tended, with some simple, tasteful landscaping. Sarah was immediately drawn to the house, déjà vu. She shook her head at herself; she had never been to the house before, although she had been to San Diego.

Vaguely, San Diego was home. She and her father had lived in San Diego for her sophomore and junior years of high school. It had been the longest they had stayed in one place, and the closest to a home she had known with her father. But they had lived on one side of a narrow duplex in a decidedly less affluent neighborhood. This neighborhood did not flaunt wealth but it was obvious that the people in these homes were financially comfortable.

She parked the car half a block from the house and shut off the engine. She and Chuck studied the house from that distance.

There were no patrol cars, no signs of police. A couple of cars passed but they both seemed to belong to the neighborhood; neither driver paid any attention to the parked car.

Sarah reached over and took her phone from Chuck's lap. He jumped and yelped softly. She blushed and murmured an apology. He nodded and stared at the screen of his own phone as if he could find no other place to anchor his eyes.

"Okay, I'm going inside. Stay here and try not to look suspicious, but keep your eyes open." Sarah got out and closed her door, annoyed with herself, and a little with him, about the inadvertent slapstick with her phone.

She walked quickly to the house. When she got to the door, she paused, looked around, then quickly texted Beckman. Then, Sarah knocked on the door.

"Hello," a woman's voice called cautiously through the door, "who's there?"

"It's Agent Sarah Walker. Your father sent me and my…partner to help you. I'm assuming he described me?"

"Yes," Sarah heard contact made with the door and saw the peephole darken. A moment later, the door opened a crack, and a single eye reddened by crying looked at her again, blinking, considering, recognizing.

"Hello, — Agent Walker. The police told us to be careful…" The woman opened the door enough for Sarah to step inside and she did. "...But Becky said you'd be unmistakable."

"Becky?" Sarah asked.

The woman, Skipper Sarah assumed, smiled a weak, watery smile. "General Beckman. That's what dad calls her," Skipper smirked, "behind her back, and I guess I just picked it up." The woman straightened herself and put out a hand, "I'm Skipper."

Sarah smiled at the woman, trying to project sympathy. She wished Chuck were beside her. He was better at this sort of thing, at emotional connection, reassurance. Skipper was tall, almost as tall as Sarah but not quite as curvy. She had reddish-blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, above a worn Pomona sweatshirt and jeans.

"Hi. My partner is still in the car. I'll have him come in shortly. He's studying the neighborhood. Are you the only one here?"

"My husband, Rob, and I, yes. The police officers got a call and finished up a few minutes ago. I'm assuming that was…"

"Becky?" Sarah offered.

Skipper nodded.

Footsteps interrupted the conversation. A tall man, athletic but older than Skipper, his temples showing a little gray, matching his gray sweater, walked into the room. He was carrying a pipe in his hand, recently lit. Sarah could smell the tobacco a moment after he reached them.

"Agent Walker?" the man asked of both Skipper and Sarah simultaneously. When Skipper nodded, the man looked at Sarah. "I'm Rob. Thanks for coming. Travis said you were the best."

"Travis?" Sarah asked, then understood. "Oh, General Stanfield. Thanks, we hope we can help."

Rob's face was stoic. "I just stepped out back, into the garden, for a smoke. Anything to calm my nerves."

"I understand. Let me bring my partner in." Sarah texted Chuck. She turned to the couple. "So, did you have any warning, of any kind, that something was wrong before the baby…?"

"Natalie," Rob said.

"Right, before Natalie was taken? I mean anything, even if it seems too trivial to mention?"

Skipper shook her head. "I can't think of anything. I've been busy with her. She's just started solid food…" Skipper's voice choked off and Rob stepped to her, put his arm around her, "...and she was just starting to sleep through the night. To laugh, play peek-a-boo."

Chuck knocked on the door and Sarah opened it. He walked inside. Sarah marveled at how quickly he took the situation in, the couple. His greeting was perfectly pitched, sympathetic but confident.

"Hi, I'm Chuck. Um, Agent Chuck. Does that ice cream truck that just went by, down the block, does it frequent the neighborhood?"

Sarah realized she had heard distant calliope music. Skipper nodded. "Yes, although I can't keep up with the schedule if there is one. It's in the neighborhood a couple of times a week lately. It's a neighborhood full of kids. The truck started coming maybe a month ago?"

Rob nodded, agreeing with Skipper.

Sarah noticed something about Chuck, the way he was holding his head. "What is it, Chuck?"

"The ice cream truck went by, but it did not turn on its music until it passed this block, and reached the intersection. I managed a look at the driver," he gave Sarah a significant glance. "May we look at Natalie's room?"

"Sure," Rob said, "but the police have been over it almost literally with a fine-tooth comb." He stepped away from the door, down the hallway, and the group followed him.

Although the house seemed larger inside than it had outside, it was not a large house. It was one story and the baby's room was at the back of the house, just down the hallway from Rob and Skipper's room.

The house was decorated in what struck Sarah as Anti-Mattress Bob style. Everything was harmonious, tasteful, brightly colored. It gave the appearance of happily housing a happy family.

Natalie's room was very bright, the walls a blue-white and dotted with framed pictures of animals. Rob pointed to it and let Sarah and Chuck go in while he and Skipper went to the kitchen. "There's coffee," Rob said, a fact and an offer.

Chuck nodded. "Love some, please."

Rob and his wife left to make the coffee. Sarah moved close to Chuck as she surveyed the room. "What did you see, Chuck?"

"The driver, the ice cream truck, he's in the Intersect. He works for the Sinaloa Cartel as an enforcer. He probably wouldn't be in the Intersect if the Cartel were not known to dabble in arms and to be suspected of terminating several US intelligence agents over the years. I don't think there's a chance he just happened to pick up an ice cream side hustle and end up on this particular street."

"No," Sarah said reflectively, agreeing, "no chance. But what would Sinalao be doing involved in this?"

"I don't know, but I got the number of the truck and the company. The Sweetery." Chuck turned in the middle of the room, looking it over carefully. He shrugged, frustrated, feeling time slipping by. "Nothing triggers the Intersect here. Our best bet may be to follow up on that truck, the driver."

Rob and Skipper came in, carrying coffees. The coffee was in paper cups. "Sorry," Rob apologized, "the police dirtied all our cups and we haven't had time to wash them."

"Actually," Sarah said, taking hers as Chuck took his, "we can't stay. Chuck is suspicious of that ice cream truck, the driver. So, we're going to follow up on it. We will just take the coffee with us."

"Do you have a lead?" Skipper asked, breathlessly, tensing all over, "the police, I could tell they had no idea."

"We do, but I don't want you to get too excited. It might lead to nothing. That's how things often go."

Chuck took a quick sip of his coffee, then he looked at Rob. "Rob, what do you do for a living? General Stanfield didn't say."

"I teach at SDSU, medieval lit, department chair. Skipper works as the administrative assistant in the department, at least she does when not on extended maternity leave."

"I had a difficult delivery with Natalie. I'm only now beginning to feel like myself." She burst into tears.

Rob hugged her. Sarah looked at Chuck. "Please hurry. We know that the longer…" He trailed off.

"We're going to go, and we'll work as fast as we can," Sarah told them softly "We'll be in touch with the Generals, and they will be in touch with you. Thanks for the coffee."

Rob kept his arm around his wife and they went back to the door. "God's speed," Rob said as he let them out.

They walked to the car and got inside, putting their coffees in the console holders. Chuck took out his phone. "The HQ of The Sweetery's not far from here."

Sarah started the car. She gave Chuck a look. "The HQ of the Sweetery? That doesn't sound very sinister."

"That guy — Jose Cardenas is his name — is plenty sinister. He earned his job as an enforcer." He studied Sarah for a moment.

"What?"

"In your files, in the Intersect, that's how you're sometimes referred to, in interrogation transcripts: Graham's enforcer."

Sarah looked away. "It's not a job title in the CIA, Chuck."

"No," he said, as she pulled away from the curb, "but it isn't meaningless, either."

Sarah did not respond.

Enforcer.

Sarah had not thought about that word, that description, for a long time. She had heard it whispered in Langley. She knew that it was connected to her reputation, her longtime status as Graham's favorite, particularly for missions whose outcomes he had a personal stake in.

She had been his enforcer. Playing Tell and Show had not unearthed that term. Perhaps Chuck had deliberately avoided it until now. She wondered how she would ever really earn Chuck's trust when his head was so full of what she had been, so full of her past. In some sense, he remembered it better than she did. He was more willing to face it than she had been — than she had been until recently, when she had, because of Chuck, begun to tiptoe around in her own history.

Few things in it bothered her more than her indentured servitude to Graham — but she had changed that, given herself a mission, and she was working out its parameters. They were for her to determine, not Graham.

She was her own woman, no one's enforcer.

Her own woman.

A woman.

She hadn't thought about herself that way in a long time, taking ownership of the notion, taking it to heart.

For years, she had known herself only as an agent, not as a woman.

Being a woman, that's terra incognita.

Chuck turned to Sarah. "We should report what I saw to Beckman."

"Yes, we'll call her as soon as we get to The Sweetery."

"We're basically there. It's just a block ahead," Chuck pointed.

"Okay, you call her while I get some supplies from the trunk."

"Supplies? You mean a gun."

"Yes, Chuck, I mean a gun. I'm not walking into The Sweetery unarmed."

The Sweetery was a dump.

It was mostly a parking lot that held four ice cream trucks, two in obvious disrepair, and parked near the fence that wrapped around the lot. A garage stood at its center

Chuck nodded subtly in the direction of one of the trucks next to the garage.

Sarah had one of the pistols from the trunk in her purse. She pulled the purse up her shoulder, closer to her, as they entered the lot. She carefully placed herself a half-step ahead of Chuck and on one side, so that she could easily interpose herself between him and the garage or the truck he had indicated. But nothing happened, no one showed.

The garage main door was down, the door that would allow trucks to enter, but a regular door was next to it, and an Open sign was wedged on the inside of the window, its top leaning back from the door, as if it were only half-hearted about what it said.

Sarah knocked at the door. A moment later, a man came to the door. Sarah gave Chuck a side-eyed look but he shook his head. It was not Jose. The man was Asian-American, wearing thick glasses and a patchy effort at a mustache. He looked at them dully through his glasses and the door window. The accumulated thickness of glass seemed like a hurdle to his vision. But, after a blinking moment, he opened the door.

"Can I help you?" His English was perfect, obviously better than his vision. He was still blinking. Sarah felt strangely out-of-focus.

"Hi," Chuck said, surprising Sarah by being the first to speak. "Our daughter bought an ice cream from the man who was driving that truck," Chuck gestured at the truck he nodded at earlier, but he did not turn to the truck, "and he was so nice to her that she went on and on. We left her at our house with my wife's mother," Chuck put his hand on Sarah's forearm, an intimate gesture, "and since we were going by, we wanted to stop and praise the driver in person."

The man stopped blinking. "The driver of that truck?" he asked, his tone slightly incredulous.

Sarah was still stuck on Chuck's words: 'our daughter', 'my wife's mother'. She had not expected him to improvise a cover, much less that cover, although she thought it was natural enough for him to think of Rob and Skipper and improvise from there.

"Yes," Chuck affirmed, "that one. Our daughter described it, down to the crooked clown head on top and the dent on the back panel."

"Well, that truck was just out. The driver left a few minutes ago. But are you sure? I have to say, I'm thinking about firing him. He never sells anything. I've had complaints of him driving past groups of waiting children…"

Chuck glanced at Sarah. "We'd like to thank him in person. Any chance he'll be back soon?"

"No, his shift ended. He won't be back until tomorrow."

Chuck shrugged and faced Sarah. "That's too bad, honey." He turned back to the man. "We're leaving town later tonight and we wanted to give him something."

Chuck patted his back pocket, his wallet, with a significant pat.

The man understood. "He lives a few blocks from here, I think. I can get the address if you want to go to that much trouble..?"

Sarah smiled at Chuck, rubbing his shoulder. "Let's find him, honey. We have some time before we need to go to the airport. You know how much I like the personal touch."

Chuck surprised her by leaning forward and pecking her cheek. "I do know. — Can you give us the address?"

The man waved them into the office, and he went to the heavy wooden desk. He pulled out the large bottom drawer and retrieved a manilla folder. "I suppose I shouldn't give you this, but, hell, I'm in ice cream, not the government. And I think he could use the money." He opened the folder, turned a page right-side-up, blinked at it, then copied information with slow, deliberate printing on a small, yellow Post-It. "I have to say, — this surprises me. Maybe there's hope for Abundio after all. I didn't think he had the right personality for the truck, any personality, for that matter. Gotta move the clown's smile to your face, you know? — You may not only give him a few bucks, but you may also have saved his job."

He handed Chuck the Post-It. "There you go."

Chuck took it and shook the man's hand.

As they got back into the car, Sarah congratulated Chuck. "That was good back there, Chuck. Completely believable."

He frowned. "Thanks, I guess. I just channeled an event from my childhood. A super hot day. Ellie bought ice cream from a truck once when we were young. Or she meant to. The man gave her and me ice cream; Ellie forgot her money. My dad found out that evening and he called the company to praise the driver. He was kind like that, then. I just went with a version of the story. Turned me into Dad and you into Mom."

"Well, it worked; it was completely believable. What's the address?"

Chuck handed her the Post-It and put the address in his phone.

On the drive, he had been weighing his lie to the man at The Sweetery.

The story he told Sarah was true; he modeled the lie on an event from his childhood. But calling Sarah his wife, touching her in the way he had, kissing her, and her touching him, it affected him.

General Stanfield's natural team.

But Chuck knew about Sarah, knew her file. She had been — with the frustrating exception of Bryce, and one other exception — a loner. That fact about her was underscored over and over in many CIA psych evaluations, and by the missions in her files.

She worked alone. Besides Bryce, the one other exception to her loner status was a brief period when she had been part of an all-woman team, codename CAT Squad. That had ended in spectacular disaster, mutual accusations, suspicions, and, apparently, settled hatred.

Chuck had been surprised, almost day-by-day by Sarah's behavior at Appocalypse, even when he had been at his most resentful and bitter. She had been a good teammate; they did make a good team. Even that first night, even after all that happened between them, the tensions, they had saved General Stanfield.

He wondered again about Tell and Show, about Sarah's willingness to play. He was beginning to understand that Sarah had lived in a flowing present, that she had trained herself to keep from facing, acknowledging her past.

But doing so must have come at the cost of an immense strain, an unremitting effort to keep memory at bay. A person could not live like that without it surfacing in the person's life, without manifesting as some sort of disruption.

He wondered, though, if it had surfaced in Sarah's. He had not noticed it; she seemed so composed.

She had to be a woman of unbelievable willpower.

The apartment building that Abundio — Jose — gave as his address looked like a building described in a Dicken's novel, dark, ramshackle, leaning slightly away from the street out of dilapidation.

Its vertical challenge reminded Chuck of the Tower in Pisa or the bent Open sign on the door of The Sweetery.

They had just parked the car when Chuck saw Jose exit the building, carrying a duffle bag. A massive, all-black SUV slipped to the curb, its windows dark, and Jose jumped into the front passenger seat. The black car seemed like a whale that swallowed Jose, Jonah-like.

Sarah pulled back into traffic a few cars behind the SUV.

"Not a car that belongs to the neighborhood," Chuck noted.

Sarah nodded. "No, definitely not. I have a bad feeling about this. But we'll have to wait for them to stop, and even then, I'm not sure it makes sense to make a move on the SUV. I can't tell for sure how many are in there. I don't know how they can see out of it."

It became clear that the SUV was heading south. After twenty minutes, she knew in her gut it was heading for the border — and with no sign of stopping. Sarah was tapping on the steering wheel with her thumbs, thinking, but also showing her frustration.

Sarah glanced at Chuck. "Call Beckman, put her on speaker. I'm pretty sure we're crossing the border, and I need her to make that happen without incident. I don't think the baby's in the car. I think she's already across the border. With any luck, Jose or Abundio or whoever he is, that car will lead us to her."

Chuck dialed the number. He looked at his watch as he waited for an answer.

He heard Rob's voice in his head. "Please hurry…"

A/N: Action aplenty in the next chapter. See you then. Drop me a line of encouragement if you're enjoying the story.