CHAPTER ONE
Broken Silence
She knew the drill.
Hell, she had perfected it, internalized it so thoroughly that calling it a drill seemed a misnomer. It was just her: who she was, what she did.
The rifle was assembled, the scope attached. She'd checked the sightlines before, chosen her spot deliberately. The window in front of her was broken, the pane largely gone. Much of it was on the floor in shards that managed to grind noisily and annoyingly beneath her crepe-soled shoes as she bent over, as she arranged herself around the rifle, as she embraced it.
She was no stranger to the embrace of a rifle. To other embraces, the embrace of a man, she had grown a stranger. That had briefly been false five years ago or so. She had an affair with a partner, Bryce Larkin, but it had ended. A couple of years later, she'd been given a strange assignment in Burbank, California — the protection of a CIA asset named Charles Bartowski. She'd hoped they were going to have more than she had ever had, that they were going to be a real couple. But that hadn't worked out.
She didn't like to think about that, about Burbank or Bartowski. But she did, now and then, in the small hours of lonely nights or at quiet times of measured stress, like this one, during cool vigils with a firearm. Bartowski had managed to get himself promoted, asset to agent, after she had been reassigned. They had not interacted much after that, although both were CIA agents. She has asked — demanded, really — that they never be partnered. He had avoided her or at least her gaze the few times they were simultaneously in Langley.
He hadn't spoken to her since she had been reassigned. Not a word in person, not a call, not a text. Absolute silence, a vacuum.
She breathed out slowly, sighed, shaking her head to clear it. She checked both the bolt and bolt handle of the rifle. It was ready. She was ready. The glass beneath her feet made a grinding sound again as she shifted her weight slightly, and she ground her teeth in frustration at the sound. No one could hear, she knew, but her own deeply internalized desire for perfection made her curse the shards, her shoes.
The only good thing about the shards was that they covered the floor of the deserted room she was in, a room she was sharing only with spiders. No one could sneak up on her from behind. Not that anyone would. The building was deserted. She was sure of that. It was just her and the spiders. And the rifle.
Peering through the scope, she could study the room in the building across the street. She stared into the room, brought closer to it, almost inside it, by the magnification of the scope. The room was in a once luxurious hotel that had fallen on hard times. Scanning the room with tight movements of the rifle, she could see the threadbare furniture and decorations, and they all had a sad, faded glory, a faded glory made sadder by the dull inward glow of the grey Seattle afternoon sky.
She closed her eyes and recalled the picture of her target. A high-ranking Fulcrum agent. She would know the man when her scope revealed him. He was scheduled to appear in the hotel room in another couple of minutes.
Once more, her long, agile fingers danced along the rifle, a final check, ending with the safety. She clicked it off. That sound was for her the signal to set everything else aside and wholly to become the rifle she embraced. When she pulled the trigger, her intimacy with the rifle would be complete.
She regulated her breathing, and she could vaguely feel her pulse as it slowed, as it always did, just before she slipped her finger from trigger guard to trigger.
She'd submitted paperwork for a vacation, something she'd only done once before — an ill-fated trip to Cabo with Bryce. But she'd finally done it again. It had been approved. The CIA Director hadn't even blinked at the paperwork, had just muttered under her breath about hell freezing over.
Pull this trigger and you are on vacation. Three months off.
She had no exact plan. She intended to finish her mission, go to the airport, and buy a ticket on the spot, choosing from the Departure Board. She'd buy clothes and necessities once she arrived wherever she decided to go.
She was a trigger pull from someplace warm, or maybe someplace cold. She was a trigger pull from someplace else.
She tightened her finger slightly, felt the resistance of the trigger.
She leaned in, peered through the scope, and felt a metal barrel come to rest against the back of her neck.
"Click the safety back on, Sarah. If you do as I say, no one will die here today. Safety."
It was impossible. She couldn't have flanked herself in that room, crossed that floor silently. And if she couldn't have, no one could have.
It was impossible.
"Sarah? — Do as I ask, please?"
Please?
I know that voice.
AN: A story that assumes the outline but not the detail of Seasons 1 and 2. A quiet little novella.
