A/N: A minute of reverie.


CHAPTER SIX


All The Way to Reno


Sarah slowly put her hand on Bartowski's chin and pushed him up, away from her, his stubble scratching her palm. He had said too much for her to take it in all at once.

Reno.

Bartowski let her push him away. He stood and stepped back. She rocked the chair forward and stood herself. She turned away from Bartowski and walked to the side of the porch.

Reno.

She had gotten the call from her dad on a Friday, freshly back from a mission.

In fact, now that she allowed herself to think about it, revisit it, she had gotten the call a week after encountering Bartowski in Langley, the last time she had encountered Bartowski there.

She had cloaked the sequence from her consciousness, and that, not obedience, was her real gift, no matter what Bartowski said.

Her cloaking enabled her obedience.

Jack had called; he was in Reno; he was in trouble. He had crossed the Reaper, Reno mob boss Walton Litz. Litz was not called The Reaper as an ironic joke, or because of his Death-like features. He was a man who ended people. Jack tried to explain it all to Sarah on the phone, another exercise in his endless self-justification. She barely listened. All she paid close attention to was the address he gave her. She was upset before he called, on her way to visit Carina.

Her encounter with Bartowski had occurred just before she left on her mission and she had not recovered from it.

She had been distracted for that entire mission, her normal focus eluded her. The encounter had been brief: Bartowski, after nodding, disappeared down an adjoining hallway, but the encounter had left Sarah disoriented and demoralized. Every encounter with him had done the same, but for some reason, this one had gone deepest.

Funny — each time she encountered him, she realized, she soon either called or visited Carina, talked to her. She had never thought about that before.

Her encounters with Bartowski had been rare enough, spaced out enough, for Sarah to miss her own pattern. Encounter Bartowski, talk to Carina, repeat. Of course, she had missed it — cloaking was what she did best.

And she had made it easier to miss by never actually telling Carina what prompted the calls or visits, what the talks were always really about.

She had not gone to see Carina until after Reno. She had gotten the call from her father and flown immediately from DC to Reno.

When she arrived at her father's address, a cheap hotel on the dim edge of town, far from Reno's flashing downtown lights, her spy instincts quickened. Two cars in the dumpy lot were slumming, far too expensive.

No one was in the lot.

A tall man stood on the top of the exterior steps in a suit that matched the two cars but mismatched everything else.

Sarah automatically altered her gait, deliberately stumbling, giggling aloud, and she ran her hand into her hair, the gesture a way both of suggesting that she was drunk and of mussing her hair. She slipped the hand from her hair to her blouse, undoing the top several buttons. Luckily, she was in a short skirt and heels, so, after the changes, and a tug on the skirt to shorten it more, she fit the part she had chosen without thought: a tipsy Reno call girl.

She started up the steep, high stairs toward the man, slowly, her hand on the handrail as if to keep her balance. He was between her and her father's room — she could see the door, open a crack, down the landing behind the guard.

She had no weapon, no way to carry one on the flight, no time to buy one after landing. She was going to have to make do without. As she got near the man she could see him staring at her legs. She gazed into his face, giggling again, letting go of the rail, pretending to wobble, then balance herself.

"Say, am I lucky! Lonely, a little lit, and with a handsome, suited man standing, just waiting on me." She lingered on her l's and slurred her s's, let her hand drift to her open blouse, let her fingers open it wider, ensuring her cleavage was in clear view.

Simultaneously, she let her shoulder bag slip down her opposite shoulder and caught it in her hand. He leaned forward as the result of her wobble and craned to improve his view, and she swung her heavy leather bag, heavy with her travel essentials, up and caught him full in the face.

She did not anticipate what happened next. He stumbled backward, caught his foot on a step, slipped to his side, and fell across the railing and down onto the concrete below — into an empty parking spot.

He landed soft and wet.

Sarah did not allow herself to react — or to look for more than a second. She instead kicked off her heels on the top step and sprinted barefoot toward her father's door, the only sound the soft slapping of her feet on the landing.

Lowering her shoulder, she slammed into the door. It crashed inward. She burst through the door and mapped the scene in a split second. A light was on but it was as if the bulb were red. A man dressed much as the man outside was standing over the end of the bed. Her father was seated on it, his face bruised and swollen and bloody. Saliva dripped from his badly split lips. Another man, gaunt, grinning, was seated in an armchair, watching. He spun his head toward her, his Yorick smile vanishing.

The man standing at the end of the bed had his pistol backward in his hand, to pistol-whip Jack. The pistol had a silencer on the other end, foretelling Jack's end.

Sarah swept toward the standing man as he snapped toward her. She fisted the handle of his pistol and wedged her finger into the trigger guard as she crashed into him. She shot him in the groin. He slumped, moaning, lost his grip on the pistol. She pivoted and shot the seated man in the head. Litz died with a trace of his death's-head smile still ghosting his face.

Without pause, she spun back to the other man, kneeling on the carpet, and shot him in the head. He fell to the side limply, a bag of bones.

Jack was staring at her, their whites and terror showing in his blackened eyes. She saw him gag, dry heave, catch himself, clutch his stomach.

"Get up, Dad! Now!"

As he stood, she shoved the gun in the waist of her skirt.

She grabbed her Dad's shoulder and propelled him out of the room, his legs stiff, resisting. He looked green beneath his bruises.

Sarah clicked off the light and closed the door. Miraculously, no one was on the landing, no one was in the lot. No one alive, anyway.

She pushed Jack to the stairs, let him gather himself as she shoved her feet in her heels, then they went down the stairs and got into her rental car.

"Did you rent the room in your name?" she asked Jack as they got inside. For a moment, he seemed to recover. "Who do you think I am?" Sarah was tempted to tell him she had no idea but she did not respond.

Jack said nothing else to her, although he stared at her a couple of different times as she drove him to the nearest bus stop. Stared at her like a stranger. She bought Jack a ticket, got as much money out of an ATM as she could, gave it to him, and put him on a bus to San Francisco.

She buried the gun at the edge of the desert, drove to the airport, and boarded a plane to DC. Three unsanctioned kills cooled on the ground below as the airplane climbed.

The Reno police were unmotivated. Their investigation wasn't even perfunctory. The killings were chalked up to mob-on-mob violence and they quickly moved below the fold on the front page of the local papers, to a later section, and then into old news oblivion.

It had been like her mission in Budapest, except the life she saved was not innocent, except she was not on a mission. Except her father had seen her kill, expertly, mercilessly.

She returned to DC and went straight to Carina's, holed up there until the Director called with her next mission.

Reno.

She faced Chuck. He held the gun in his hand as if concerned about her silence.

"If you know about Reno, Bartowski, then you know that threatening my father is no growth enterprise."


A/N: Thanks for the comments.