Monsters Chapter 2
Not a Hero
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters from 24. Fauve is a character created by Aragothwinelfblade and used with her blessings. Thank you for letting me play with your friends.
Chloe let herself slip out of The Zone. Crowe T. Robot, a year old KH12 just left North Korea and was over the ocean on his way to Japan. She rubbed her eyes and disconnected the feed. If she spent any more time staring at satellite photos she would get cross eyed. Chloe didn't really expect to find Jack tonight. It was an awful big planet but she had to do something. She glanced up at the clock. "Shit! Gotta be at church in forty minutes!" Chloe wasn't really in the mood for church but she made a promise to Father Mike and Chloe kept her promises. He was a trusted friend and God knows she didn't have very many of those left.
She dashed into the bathroom. No time for a shower, wet washrag to her face and armpits, some quick swipes of deodorant. Quick look in the mirror, nothing fancy, a little lipstick, brush her tangled hair and bind it into a ponytail. Chloe stepped into the bedroom and looked at the black dress draped over the chair. She was starting to hate the damned thing but Angie's funeral was this afternoon and she didn't want to change. While slipping on the dress she looked at the pistol still lying on the floor and hesitated. No, not today. She just remembered to feed the cats before rushing out.
Chloe felt very vulnerable sitting in the church pew. She hated carrying her pistol and now she hated not carrying it. She felt like terrorists were going to come popping out and attacking her any second. This was ridiculous. Most people don't carry guns and their lives are perfectly normal. Why was she always afraid? Then Father Petrowsky looked directly at her during the intersessions and offered "For all the lost people trying to find their way home." And Chloe chanted with the rest of the congregation "Lord hear our prayer!" He remembered her and Jack!
In the parking lot after Mass Chloe decided to call her old college roommate on her cell phone. 'Fauve will know what to do,' she thought, 'maybe she can bring my craziness back down to an acceptable level.' The phone rang several times before it was picked up. "Wha?" came a sleepy voice clearly irritated at being woken up at 11:30 on a Sunday morning.
"Fauve, it's me Chloe, I need to see you."
"Chloe! Are you all right?"
"Yeah, no, I don't know. Things have been really bad. A lot of my friends just died. I'm really scared almost all the time. I think its PTSD.
"OK I'll see you…"
"Not your office, you know how much psychiatrists offices creep me out."
"I know! I wasn't going to suggest that. Come on over to my house and we can talk."
"OK."
"And I'm going to have to charge you. I can't afford to do Pro Bono work anymore."
"How much?"
"One gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Not the cheap stuff either, the good stuff. And I want you to loan me your Buffy and Angel DVDs."
"All of them?"
"Not all at once. Bring the first season of each over. When I'm finished I'll return them and pick up the next season."
"Oh, all right. I'll be over in about forty five minutes."
After a stop at the ice cream place Chloe went back to her apartment just long enough to grab the DVDs and leave. As she pulled out of the parking lot she didn't notice the blue Ford Escort that started up and began following her.
Fauve must have been looking out the window because her door opened before Chloe even got to the porch. The small Hawaiian woman with the wildly multicolored hair looked over Chloe's dark rimmed eyes, pale face, and black dress. "My you're looking… uh festive."
"I got a funeral this afternoon."
"Oh, I'm sorry! Anyone I know?"
"No, a woman from work. Just had a baby. She thought she could both save the world and watch her son grow up. Silly little thing, I treated her like crap."
"Come on in honey, we'll talk about it."
A few minutes later they were sitting in the kitchen over dishes of ice cream. Fauve leaned back in her chair, "So tell me what happened."
"First of all there are to be no records of this. Nothing on paper, nothing in your computer."
Fauve made an X on her chest, "Cross my heart."
"First I need to apologize to you for that big argument we had about Spencer. You were right. I was wrong. He was even worse than you said. I don't think I really ever loved him but I wanted to. I wanted him to love me. I don't want to go through life without ever having a man really love me."
"Well I hope that bastard got what he deserved!"
"He got fired. He betrayed me and my fellow agents. He just thought I was an easy lay and a way to get information from my computer. Some people died because I trusted him. It was all my fault! But since he thought he was working for the president. Hell! He was working for the president. We let him go. But you never let down a fellow agent! Whether you like them or not you stick together!"
"He got off a little too easy. I'll have to think up something a little more imaginative."
"No! I don't want to spend any more energy on him. He's not worth it. Let's just let him fade away. Besides he's not the real problem."
"Half the people I care about were either lost or killed in one day all for the dumbest evil scheme in the history of evil schemes. 'Let's sell nerve gas to terrorists. Nothing bad could ever come from that! And while we're at it let's betray the terrorists. Who ever heard of a terrorist ever holding a grudge? And if we can prove terrorists have poison gas then some how people will give us free oil!' Not even I'm crazy enough to make sense of it. A retarded chimp could come up with a better plan."
"Of course part of this brilliant plan involves killing Chloe O'Brian! I started the day off finding a bomb in my car. It was about the nicest thing to happen to me all day. Things went downhill from there! I got arrested twice. Some of my best friends were murdered. Jack disappeared and is God knows where probably being tortured. And now I'm having nightmares, cold sweats, paranoia, and panic attacks. Father Mike thinks its PTSD."
"It sounds like it." Fauve said sympathetically, "So who's Father Mike?"
"My confessor."
"You have a confessor? That sounds like fun! Can I see him?"
"No, he's an old man. I don't think his heart can handle your confession! Besides you're not even Catholic."
"I know, I just like to brag." Chloe made a face at her. "But getting back to your condition you've been through quite a bit. There are some drugs that can help you relax and get some more sleep…"
"No! No drugs, nothing that would affect my brain chemistry! Without my brains I'm nothing."
"The effects would only be marginal."
"Marginal gets people killed! No drugs!"
"OK, we'll do without the drugs. We also have psychoanalysis, group therapy, and controlled exposure to stressful conditions where you are in total control the whole time. Let's start with your paranoia, how bad is it?
"I've started carrying a gun."
"Are you packing heat now?"
"No, I left it at home. I went to church without my pistol and it felt like I was naked."
"So you know how it feels to go to church naked? I've always wanted to do that but I'm too chicken!"
"Heathen!"
"But seriously, the fact that you were able to leave it at home shows that you are recovering. You should get better with time. After all your job doesn't actually involve shooting people."
"Actually it does, I have killed people and hurt innocent people."
"Oh Chloe."
"You don't know what it's like in my world. It's an awful place and we sometimes have to do awful things. I'm not really sorry for anything I've done but I'm not the same person you used to know."
"Chloe, I don't know what kind of terrible things you've had to do but I do know that you're a good person and you'll always be a good person."
"Not for very long. I'm probably going to die soon." Fauve got a shocked look on her face. "I want you to find good homes for my cats. You can also have first dibs on the stuff in my apartment. Not the car though. I'm leaving it to my nephew."
"Chloe! You're not thinking of doing something foolish are you?"
Chloe rolled her eyes, "I'm not suicidal if that's what you mean. I just ran a statistical five year program on my computer and if I keep working at CTU I only have a 31.77 percent chance of being alive five years from now. That leaves a 68.23 percent chance of me kicking the bucket."
"It can't be that bad!"
"CTU-LA opened in 1993, not that long ago. Come over some time and I'll show you our Wall of Remembrance. Then I'll show you our other Wall of Remembrance because the first one is full."
"I'll come over there tomorrow morning and together we'll hand in your resignation to that insane asylum!"
"No, I can't quit, they need me."
"Bullshit! I know you think that the United States of America can never survive without little Chloe tapping on her keyboard but I think if we survived two world wars we can survive you quitting!"
"It's not that simple! I've got to do this!"
"Look! If you want to be a patriot fine! Go to the FBI, CIA, or some other agency! Go join the Air Force and they'll give you a cute uniform! Just get out of that hell hole!"
By this time both women were standing up shouting at each other. Fauve was gesturing wildly while Chloe kept her arms crossed tightly across her chest. "Fauve! It's not the same! You have no idea what's really going on out there!"
"Chloe! I love you and I'm not just going to stand by and watch you die!"
"You don't know what kind of monsters we have to deal with! Someone's got to stand up to them and stop them!"
"So I'm going to lose my best friend because you want to be a hero!"
"I'm not a hero! And I don't want to die! I'm so scared I'm about to pee my pants but this is important!"
"So what's so great about your crappy job that's worth dying for!"
"If you could have stopped the Pearl Harbor attack by dying would you? Or 9-11? How about the bombing of Hiroshima? Would you die for a city?" That hit a sore spot. Fauve had been very active in the anti-nuke movement in college. " And if not could I live my life knowing all those people died so I could spend another 40 years in an apartment full of cats eating microwave popcorn? Is that really a life? It's like I'm trapped."
Fauve had tears on her cheeks "So when you die, what happens then? The whole world goes to hell?"
"If I die someone else will replace me. If they die someone will replace them."
"Well at least take a vacation!"
"Not til we find out what happened to Jack. Besides there's something else I'm working on. If I told you about it I'd have to bore you to death but it's important. But I won't go until I find Jack. That's nonnegotiable."
"OK, as soon as you find Jack. Don't make me kidnap you because I will!"
Chloe's purse chirped and she pouted at it.
"Just ignore it honey."
"No, it might be important." Chloe fished out her PDA. "O'Brian, this better be good."
…………………….
Chloe's face blanched, "Oh my God!" She opened her laptop and began typing, "OK, I've opened a connection. Download everything we got to me." Her fingers flew over the keyboard. "If they came in from the highway they must have gone by that Walmart. Send someone there to see if any of their parking lot cameras cover the street. Mueller hasn't been here long enough to piss anybody off that bad. Find out what he's been doing in Boston. I'll need passenger lists from every flight from Boston in the past five days along with airport car rental records. Also they might have stolen a car from long term parking, get security tapes of cars leaving and scan the license plates. I have a program code named Daisy Duck that will compare passenger lists with license numbers and look for discrepancies. No! It's not Daisy Duke! It's Daisy Duck! DELTA UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO Duck! Doesn't anyone know who Daisy Duck is?"
Fauve chimed in "Is there anything I can do to help?"
Chloe covered her transmitter, "Yeah! Shut up! OK Mueller's car was abandoned. Make sure LAPD doesn't touch it until we get there."
Fauve kept quiet. She'd seen Chloe in these moods before and didn't take the rudeness personally.
Chloe was in The Zone now. Information was processing through her brain rapidly as the facts came in. A new replacement field agent from Boston had gone dark. She'd only spoken to him once when he first reported in and didn't like him. Peter Mueller had asked her to dinner when she knew from his records that he was married with his wife still in Boston for a couple of weeks. Chloe didn't like womanizers. She had enough of that crap with Morris and told him off loud enough to draw grins from around the room. Since then they had only exchanged angry glares. But he'd gone dark a few hours ago so CTU sent an agent to his house to check up on his two children and the babysitter. The children , Veronica age 9 and Paul age 5 were gone. Whoever took them didn't need the babysitter Amy King age 16 so they took her down into the basement and killed her with a…Oh Dear God! A blowtorch! No no no no no. Chloe moved her laptop to make sure her friend couldn't see the body. 'Fauve can live in her world and I'll live in mine.' Feelings of terror and rage welled up inside her, 'Stay calm! Stay in The Zone!'
Fauve watched her friend work for 10 more minutes and then Chloe shut her laptop, tears glistened in her eyes. "That's all I can do here. I've got to go back to CTU. Something bad has come up. Sorry about what I said, I'm such a bitch. Can you do me a favor and go to Angie's funeral? 1st Baptist Church on Elmhurst at 4:00. Tell them you're a friend from CTU. They should think someone from there cared. And for God's sake wear a wig! It's a funeral not a circus!"
Fauve nodded, "Ok I'll go."
As Chloe walked out to her car she heard a noise behind her, before she could turn around she felt a gun muzzle press into her kidney. "Go around to the side of the house!" a gruff voice commanded her. Chloe went to the side behind the tall bushes Fauve had planted. She was pushed against the wall and expertly patted down. The man pulled her car keys and ID out of her purse and tossed the purse under a bush. "Let's go."
Chloe now saw his face and recognized Agent Mueller.
"OK I'll go to dinner with you. Don't be so pushy."
Agent Mueller took her out to her car and opened the passenger door. "Get in and slide over behind the wheel." He climbed in beside her and handed her the keys. "Now drive."
"Where to?"
"Just drive."
Chloe took off down the street. The gun was aimed steadily at her temple. "Do you mind aiming that thing at my heart? I kind of wanted an open casket funeral." The gun lowered a few inches.
"I'm sorry Agent O'Brian, I'm so sorry. They have my kids!"
Chloe's finger wandered to the backside of the steering wheel. Disguised as a Phillips screw head was a small button she called her "Panic button" She had it installed her self and no one at CTU knew about it. At least, no one who was still alive. Depressing it would set off an automated distress call to the CTU mainframe with GPS coordinates. Tactical teams would be activated and LAPD would be notified. They would be picked up in a matter of minutes. "What do they want?"
"They want you Agent O'Brian. They want to exchange you for the children. Otherwise they'll kill them like they did the babysitter."
Chloe's finger gently caressed the button. If she pushed it she would be safe, Mueller would be taken into custody and two small children would get what Amy got. Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! She had no illusions what these monsters would do if they got a hold of her. They would love to have a federal agent. They would chew her up like a wad of gum and spit her out when they're done. Amy King was a rush job. They would take their time with Chloe. Probably days, she would die alone, screaming, surrounded by monsters.
'Would you die for a city? What about two strangers you've never met?' Her finger paused over the button and then withdrew. "Put the gun away Peter, I'll make the exchange. We'll get your kids back." She wanted her voice to come out brave and confident but it sounded more like a croak. Her ears turned pink with embarrassment. Now Mueller will know what a coward she was. Her heart was pounding and her stomach felt like a lump of concrete. She knew now she could never be a hero. Heroes don't get this scared.