CHAPTER TWO
Alienation
Sarah reversed her finger, trigger to the trigger guard. Her rifle felt foreign in her hands suddenly, the forming intimacy with it destroyed: it was alien to her, repugnant. She clicked the safety on, and the sound seemed an echoing gong.
Blinking, trying to sort herself, she exhaled. After a moment, she relaxed her shoulders, lifted her eye from the scope. The pressure of the barrel against her neck eased. She raised her hands into the air, letting the rifle tip up on its tripod. She heard no more sounds from behind her.
"Bartowski?" she asked without turning around.
"Walker," was the terse reply, an answer and something more. She could never remember him calling her anything but Sarah. Maybe he had moved to last names as she had, to create distance. They were no longer on a first-name basis with one another.
The barrel was removed from the back of her neck.
Sarah rotated slowly. She considered an attack, but the situation was too strange, too novel, for her to know what to do. And she wanted to see him. It had been a year since they'd last crossed paths in Langley, crossed paths but not words. He had barely acknowledged her — a curt nod and he disappeared down the hallway.
The year had changed him; she was unprepared for what she saw. When she had known him in Burbank, he had been, despite his age, his late twenties, still in so many ways a boy. The man who stood before her was a man from whom all boyhood had been burned. He was leaner but stronger, the muscles in the forearm of the hand that held his gun were defined, ropes. His gunhand was statue-still.
He wore dark suede desert boots, black jeans beneath a black sweatshirt, and he had a navy watch cap on his head. His eyes brimmed with shadows, and their hazel was obscured. He wore a frown, perhaps the most striking piece of his wardrobe change.
She blinked at him and felt something in her chest somersault or cartwheel — anyway, her heart went ass-over-head. She heard herself gasp quietly.
Just below the watch cap, on Bartowski's right temple, was a thick, angry red scar. It extended up beneath the cap; she could not tell how far. It added fierceness to his shadowy gaze.
He seemed to be unable or unwilling to move. He just stared at her, his obscured eyes fixed on her.
"Sorry, Walker," he said at last, after they had stared at each other for a lifetime, "I can't let you do this, kill that man."
Sarah's mind raced. Bartowski, the man she had known in Burbank, the boy-man, was as good a man as she'd ever known. His appearance, his actions, had to have an explanation other than the obvious one.
"Has the termination been canceled, the order lifted? No one contacted me."
He did not move for a moment, did not react, then he shook his head. "No, the CIA has not canceled the hit. I am canceling the hit."
It was her turn to stare at him. She tried to match his self-control, his immobility, but the insides of her were still circusing, tumbling, and hand-springing. She wanted to touch him more than anything she could ever remember wanting.
As she stood there, staring, she realized how miserable she had been since Burbank, and how completely she had dissociated herself from that misery. Despite her desire to be immobile, she swallowed thickly: the backs of her eyes burned.
"You are? You're Fulcrum?" She spoke the words as if she were her own ventriloquist's dummy.
He nodded exactly once. Then he pointed with his gun at her right leg. "The knives there, show them to me, and put them on the floor, carefully."
He knew her habits from Burbank. She dropped her arms and then bent down, lifted her pants leg. Her hands were shaking. They never shook. Her pulse was racing, off-the-charts, laps at Le Mans. She pulled her pants leg up to her knee, exposing the knives strapped to her calf.
She thought she heard him sigh and she glanced up, unable to keep from it, but his frown had deepened; that was the only change. She loosened the strap and carefully removed the knives, dropped them on the floor amid the shards of glass.
She stood.
"What are you doing, Bartowski? This is crazy! You aren't a double agent. You shouldn't be a single agent."
For the first time, he moved involuntarily, jerked. Sarah heard her own words again as if they had echoed in the room, but they had not.
"What I should or should not be is not a topic on which you're invited to provide input, Walker." As he spoke, his eyes on her, his gun trained on her chest, he reached into his jeans pocket with his other hand. The movement gave Sarah an opening, but she did not take it. She just stood there, looking at him.
He pulled a device from his pocket. She focused on it but had never seen anything like it before. Shadows gathered more thickly in Bartowski's eyes and then she heard a small popping sound, felt a deep sting in her chest.
She looked down. A small dart was embedded in her, heart-high. She lifted her head in disbelief. The room went all rubbery, from grey abandoned building to brightly colored bounce house. Her feet melted beneath her and she thought she heard, as the rest of her melted, — she thought she heard Chuck's voice. "Welcome to your vacation, Walker," but it might have been a voice in her head.
