разведывательное

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My plan B was risky. Unnecessary. And led me into trouble.
I really lost track of what was going on at home. Most of my old friends from CIA or Division are either dead or retired long ago. I couldn't just walk into Langley and tell them my story. They wouldn't have believed me.

Chloe got me the address of the only CIA affiliate I could think of: Kate Morgan.

It was a shot in the dark. I thought she was still in London - actually I only wanted to talk to her. It surprised me to hear that she had left CIA after London. And it surprised me even more that she was back in the states, in Pittsburgh. That was worth the ride, it only took me five hours to get there. It was already dark and in the evening when I arrived at the address that Chloe had given me.
I don't know what went on inside her head, when she saw me through the spy hole after I rang the doorbell. I'm pretty sure she went to open the door with a gun in her other hand. I do that as well. People like us do it like that.
She didn't open at first, though I guessed she was there. Probably she thought I had come to kill her, after what happened to Audrey.
It's her fault.
But it's also mine. I won't blame her any more than I blame myself.

I showed her the empty palms of my hands, standing in front of her door, hoping that she'd see it. She finally did, and opened up.

She was afraid to talk, even to look at me, at first. Not even the gun that she hid from me, behind the door blade made it better. I didn't even have a gun on me that I could have threatened her with.

After she finally let me in, I started telling her what I knew.

Thirty minutes later, they already were at the door, having surrounded the house: Langley. Of course they wouldn't just let her go. They kept watching her every step - and I tapped into their perimeter as well. I must admit that I wasn't even too sad about that. Kate couldn't have helped my anyway.

They took me with them, to their local office, for questioning.
I sat in the room with a young officer who listened to what I had to say. Agent Wilson. He did not believe one word of it, I guess. Maybe he thinks I want revenge on whoever tortured me and now I'm making this all up. If he only knew!

I can't prove anything. I can't prove that she didn't die in London. I can't prove that she's alive and held by the Chinese. I can't even prove that I was in China. To all the US intelligence services, I was officially 'a Russian prisoner' who they hadn't expected to be free at all.

I must be careful: they could at any time hand me back to the Russians. Not officially, of course. But I guess the CIA would be pleased with having a person at hand who they could secretly treat to the Russians in return for someone more valuable. Nobody would ever notice or charge them.
I'm not of any value to them now, it seems. Thank god, Chloe sent me a copy of my presidential pardon. That got me out of there again - for now. I guess they wouldn't respect that pardon, if it came in handy for them.

I'm sure they're keeping an eye on me. For now, I let them.

I have no proof that Audrey is still alive. When I told the guy to exhume her casket for a DNA sample of whoever they buried instead of her, he almost laughed. No way, he said, not the President's daughter. You did some very great things for our country, way back in the past, Mr. Bauer, and that's the only reason why we're still talking.

But while they're officially showing me a half-assed approach to this all, I'm sure that in the background, somebody is doing something. They would never tell me what they are really doing. But they have to do something now. At least check if my story could be plausible.

I took a cheap room somewhere here in Pennsylvania for the night. Even though they brought me back to the street in which Kate lives, to let me get back to my car -which they surely searched in the meantime- I didn't ring at her doorbell again. I wouldn't know what to talk. I wouldn't want to bring her into any kind of a situation in which she'd feel obliged to offer me to stay. Seeing her face again reminded me of so many awful details of this day that I can really do without it.

I took my bag with me, took a shower and now I'm lying at the bed in my motel room, staring at the ceiling, then at the dark TV screen, out of the window and back at the ceiling.
I'm really tired but I can't sleep. To sleep feels like to betray Audrey. I have to get her out, I can't waste any time. This is nonsense, but it is how I feel right now. Wasting my time with something like watching TV is even worse than sleeping. I switched it off again after only a few seconds. There's nothing interesting on the news anyway. I couldn't care less about health care budget or disloyal politicians.

Where is she? I don't know

Did she make it? I'm not sure.

Is she alive? I hope.

It's time to do something which I haven't done in over six months. I take out the phone and google her name. There are lots of pictures of her on the web, of when she accompanied her father to official events or foreign state visits. She was a member of the White House family. Her life had been open to the public.
When I first heard about Heller's campaign, still during the primaries, I started to read the news before going to bed. In the two years before London I always went to sleep like that: reading the latest news about Heller, hoping to find her on some of the pictures as well. I often did.

She looked happy, on most of them.

That bootlicker Boudreau was with her, on some of them. I never liked him. Why didn't I? Was there a real reason or was it just the fact that these were pictures where he was holding hands with my girl? I have to admit that Audrey looked happy whenever he accompanied her. When he was there, she looked happier than when she sat alone, somewhere on a stage, behind Heller. I guess he gave her a feeling of safety, one that she desperately needed. He was there for her. I wasn't.

I fucked it all up. I fucked up my own life, twelve years ago, when I raided the Chinese embassy. Everything went downhill from there. I lost her, I lost my identity, I lost my freedom. My decisions killed Paul. I made her hate me. I broke her heart and trust.
There's no single day in which I don't regret having done all these things. I could add so many more mistakes to this list. It seems to be an endless list.

As I scroll through the pictures, I mainly stick to the ones that only show her, not Heller, not Boudreau. The douche is now under house arrest, for treason - he will be, for the next fifteen years. Quite a harsh sentence, I guess, but I won't complain.

How would my life have turned out to be if I hadn't made all these mistakes? What if I had stayed with her, all the time? I could have laid down my arms and stayed out of all the trouble. Probably I would have kept working with her, at DoD. Maybe I would have later even joined Heller's staff. I could have lived in Washington with her, for all these years, instead of traveling the world, always on the run from somebody else.
I could have married her.
We could have had children. A family.

I fucked it all up.

The phone still in my hands, I finally fall asleep. Like always, in the years before London.

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