A/N: The third chapter of five.
Maintenance
Chapter Three
Harbinger
"Mary Bartowski?"
Rita's mind broke the surface of sleep, gasping for full consciousness. She could not believe it: she had been played.
Not by Chuck — by his mother.
Not only had Mary Bartowski shaken Rita's tail, she had evidently doubled-back and tailed Rita, and so discovered that Rita had not only been with Chuck on the terrace but that Rita had been in his room. More than Mary said was obvious in Mary's tone — although 'blond whore' was obvious enough.
Mary blinked as if each blink resisted her impulse to squeeze the trigger and finish Rita. Mary was still wearing the olive drab coat, but she had a scarf tied around her head. Camouflage.
Although it caused Rita to almost cross her eyes, She checked Mary's gun. A silencer barrel, a muffler of death, pressed into her forehead. Mary could execute Rita, leave a single bullet rattling in Rita's brainpan, and walk calmly away, no disturbance until Rita began to decompose, to stink, many hours after Mary had gone.
Mary's posture told Rita that this was not the first time Mary had a gun to someone's head, performed an execution. Rita knew the posture from the inside well enough to recognize it from the outside. A practiced killer. Mary would execute Rita if that's what Mary deemed necessary.
Rita had squeezed triggers out of such necessity, although not for a long time.
Rita shifted her eyes from Mary's gun to Mary's eyes and suffered the occult sensation of a mirrorless look into her own eyes.
She now knew the final vision of those she had executed.
I deserve it. It had to end this way. Live by the sword, die by the sword. An unmarked star etched in a wall in Langley — that's all I was ever going to be.
No, maybe I'll be a happy memory for Chuck — someday. Better than a star in Langley.
Mary smiled slowly, bitterly, her eyes narrowing, a murder of crow's feet gathering in their corners, "That's one name I've used. Years since I've heard it, Sarah Walker."
Rita blew out a breath very carefully. "You know my name?"
She's a spy, Chuck's mom is a spy. No wonder he couldn't find her.
Mary gave Sarah a cadaverous stare. "I know that name." Mary paused. "I doubt you know your name."
Sarah — drop the Rita now, it serves no purpose, Mary knows 'Sarah' — had never felt so helpless.
Her current predicament was proof of how much Chuck affected her. She had dropped her guard completely, so completely that she had not noticed she had done it. The last of it dropped to the floor with her panties in Chuck's room, and she did not put it back on.
Sarah had left Chuck's bed physically but not psychologically. The whole time she was with him, she kept thinking of herself as a spy in deep cover, thinking of herself in terms of her cover name, Rita. But she had not been Rita, had not been acting like a spy, other than during the brief tailing of Mary, and she'd obviously bungled that, underestimated her opponent. From the time Sarah accompanied Chuck to the Hotel Pulitzer's terrace, she had acted like — like a woman, human, not a spy. She had walked home as a woman, hardly aware of her surroundings, lost in taste and scent and memory, in the gentle ripples of a watershed night.
Ripples. Zero situational awareness. Replaying Chuck above and behind and beside her.
Mary Bartowski was clearly a spy, clearly, and, despite having seen her son, Mary had remained a spy, remained nothing but a spy.
Or had she?
Sarah's head was beginning to ache, the gunmetal pressing hard and cold into her skin.
"Tell you what, for simplicity, call me Sarah and I'll call you Mary."
Mary nodded, sneering. "You don't look like a Rita."
Sarah hazarded a small smirk in response. "You don't look like a mom."
Mary laughed scornfully. Her laughter sounded raspy; it made her eyes colder.
"True. I'm no mom, except in the sense that I squeezed a couple of squealers out, once upon a time. I'm nobody's mother otherwise."
But you're here, Mary Bartowski. Worried about your son. She's trying to sound harder than she is.
"How do you know me?"
Mary sneered again. "I don't know you. Who knows you, Sarah Walker? I mean other than my son — but he only knows you in the biblical sense. Maybe Langston Graham knew you before he put that gun to his head? This would be a fitting end to his protege — a bullet to the brain of both mentor and mentee. Full circle, in two meeting red circles, right?"
"You know about Graham?"
That was a secret, the suicide. The official story was different. Death by natural causes. Quickly hushed, a new Director posted in haste. Controlled. But Sarah knew the truth — she saw Graham's slow descent into madness.
His death had changed her career path. Terminations stopped. Deep cover assignments increased. Sarah sometimes thought they would have liked her to disappear, the blond vestige of Graham's bloody reign as Director, a time the US government generally and the CIA particularly wanted to be forgotten, buried. Worked to bury.
The few other agents who had been close to Graham — if 'close' was the right word, and it was not — were also reassigned, relocated out of DC, kept busy. Or they were dead.
Sarah did not suspect foul play, but she knew their deaths were not mourned. The current Director was only too glad to etch those stars into the wall, as he would be Sarah's star.
That's what my life's become, an empty wait to be transformed into a nameless star.
Nameless.
Sarah still carried those Graham years inside her, deep scar tissue, even if she resisted the memories. Those years had sapped her, stolen so much.
"I know. I know a lot, Sarah Walker. I've known of you for a long time. Shit, you might even say I was you before you were you."
"CIA?"
"Once, and for a long time, but not recently."
"I don't understand." Sarah did not.
Mary pushed the barrel harder against Sarah's forehead. "Who gives a shit? I'm here to make sure that you stay the hell away from my son." Mary's eyes softened, warmed, just for a second, at that final word.
But they hardened and cooled again instantaneously. "He's done nothing to deserve a damnation like you."
The maternal flash in Mary's eyes touched Sarah.
She responded quietly. "We agree about that, Mary. I left. I left him in the hotel. No note. He can't find me. As you said, he doesn't know who I am. Rita, no last name. I didn't tell him enough for him to figure anything out."
Mary pressured the barrel harder still against Sarah's forehead. "You've done him enough harm already. And just spending time with him could result in Coosur taking note of him."
Talking about Chuck — about leaving him — made Sarah's chest hurt worse than her forehead, an ache, abyssal, made it almost impossible to breathe. She could have been in his bed, Chuck inside her, making slow, warm love to him, welcoming the day, instead of in her own cold bed, gun to her head.
Sarah spoke., trying to ignore the ache "You know about Coosur, about Javier?"
"Ears to the ground, Walker. No choice."
Sarah did not know what that meant. "Okay, but Chuck's safe. He brought me a note from an informant, Henri, but Chuck wasn't tailed to me. No one followed him."
"Like you would know. You were so eager to bed my son you started sloppy, Walker, and you stayed sloppy afterward. For his sake, I hope you were better in between."
"He's a grown man, Mary," Sarah said blushing, ridiculously, with a gun to her head.
"That you would know, I guess. — Stay away from him. Stay away or I find you again and I force you to stay away."
Sarah's chest kept hurting, the pain sinking deeper and deeper. Her forehead hurt too, the barrel felt like it was cutting into her skin.
She'd had enough.
Her arm flashed out and grabbed Mary's arm, yanking it to one side, turning her body as she did it.
The gun coughed but it missed Sarah.
Sarah twisted Mary's wrist so violently that Mary dropped the gun. It thunked on the carpeted floor harmlessly.
The pain of the twist was so severe that Mary gasped and stepped back and tried to wrench her arm the other way, to relieve the pain.
But the step back was a mistake, Sarah got her foot on the ground and rolled up out of the bed. Mary's momentum was moving her the wrong way and Sarah used it against Mary, pushing her into another rapid step back and then another to keep from falling. Her third step was not rapid enough and she fell backward.
Sarah landed on top of her. Mary cried out but stifled herself.
Sarah speared each of Mary's shoulders with one hand and leaned her weight on the older woman. Involuntary tears showed in Mary's eyes.
"Bitch," she hissed, "Should've killed you. Fuck. Getting old, getting soft."
Mary bucked underneath Sarah but, despite Mary still being strong, she was not strong enough to unseat Sarah. Sarah was larger, younger.
Sarah gazed down at Mary, their relative positions now reversed. Sarah wondered if Mary thought of her targets, executions.
"I'll get up, free you, if you don't try anything. Try anything, and Chuck's mom or not, I'll hurt you again, worse than before."
"My damn wrist's broken."
"No, it's not. It'll be sore, but it's not broken. I'll get up — and then I'm going to get your gun. Don't move. A kick hurts worse than a punch or a twist. I'm not sure your ribs could take it, old woman."
She glared down into Mary's eyes and Mary finally nodded, the 'old woman' ringing in the room. Sarah jumped acrobatically to her feet (she was not that old, not yet) and, without turning her back on Mary, retrieved the gun.
She aimed it at Mary, backed up a step, and sat down on the bed. The gun did not waver in Sarah's practiced hand.
Mary sat up with some labor, rubbing her wrist. Her scarf had fallen from around her head to around her neck. She gave Sarah a withering look. "You're good. Now what, bitch?"
"Now, we talk. I don't understand — I told you that — and I don't like not understanding. You were CIA, but you aren't anymore?"
Mary kept rubbing her wrist, a profound frown on her face, deepening by the moment.
Sarah thought Mary would refuse to answer questions, go stony, but then, surprisingly, she answered. "Not for a long time." She drew out the word 'long'. "And there was no official resignation, and it all happened slowly, over a long time," she drew out 'long' again, "so I can't give you an exact date, but it's been years. The CIA declared me rogue, excised me from the files. Graham did that."
Sarah shook her head. "I'm still not understanding."
"As I said, I used to be you, Walker. Terminations, deep cover. The best of the best. I worked for Graham's predecessor, Dillard."
Mary grew silent and sat for a long time. The moments seemed elongated to Sarah. Mary wrestled with herself. She stopped paying any attention to Sarah. Her eyes were focused, but inward on the past, not outward on the present. She pulled her knees toward her, attempted to wrap her arms around them, and they cracked. She frowned again. "I used to be able to do that, used to be flexible. Quick. I work out and it helps but time's not just a thief, he's a goddamn sadist. Impossible to maintain yourself."
She said that and was silent, rubbing her knees and glaring at the floor.
When she finally started talking again, it was more to herself than to Sarah; she was shaking her head at herself — disappointment, disgust.
The words seemed to be forced from her, not offered voluntarily, the words the painful by-product of unfamiliar but irresistible memories. Sarah could tell images were playing in Mary's mind.
"At a certain point, after five years, I was done with the CIA or thought so. I had met a man," she gave Sarah a significant, dangerous look, "and I decided a leopard could shed her spots, retract her claws. But I didn't quit; I took a leave of absence. A fucking leave of absence.
"That indecision was the harbinger of things to come." Mary stopped rubbing her knees, shifted uncomfortably on the floor.
"Dillard left me alone for a while. I got pregnant and had Ellie. About six weeks after that, Dillard got an urgent message to me. I called him. He needed me. No one else could be trusted, could do the job." She smiled bitterly. "Always use the ego as bait. So, I went. I left my daughter with my husband, Stephen, lied about what I was doing, and I went on a termination mission. Fresh from giving life, I took it."
She stopped, not rubbing her wrist but holding it, looking down at her hands. "I kept working after that. Not at the same pace as before, but anytime Dillard needed me, me in particular. I lied to my husband, and to my child as soon as she was old enough to be lied to. I cooked Christmas dinner and executed a man on New Year's Eve. I didn't want to give up my family but I couldn't give up the CIA, the spy life. Being the best. I was only a so-so wife and mother, but as an agent, I was the best." Pride sounded in Mary's words for a moment, then faded. "I had Chuck but kept working, kept lying. Stephen — he suspected, of course. At the time I didn't understand it, but I now know he never confronted me because he knew what choice I would make, eventually did make. He lived in constant fear of me leaving, never returning to him. That fear came true."
Sarah was unsure why Mary was sharing all this. And then Sarah knew. In talking to Sarah, Mary was talking to her past self. I used to be you.
Mary was now deep in her story, determined to tell it, caught up in it, talking to Sarah and herself, talking at once to her past and her present. Meeting herself full circle.
"Dillard called again. Chuck was little. Another mission only I could do. Deep cover. But with a twist." She looked at her wrist again, at Sarah. "He saved the twist for after I'd been inserted. I was in deep cover, intended to infiltrate the innermost circle of a Russian arms broker. The arms broker, Volkoff, ran through mistresses the way he ran through ammo. He had certain tastes — blonds, athletic, young. The CIA had gotten an agent close to him, someone posing as a pimp, maybe we'd now say as a sex trafficker. The trafficker showed him my picture, on Dillard's order, and Volkoff liked my picture, me. — By the time I knew what was going on, the full plan of my insertion, I was on the ground in Russia.
"When Dillard told me what I was expected to do, I balked. Volkoff's mistresses had very clear duties. Actually, there was only one duty. Service Volkoff. I said I wouldn't. Dillard said I would or I would be done, done in the CIA."
Mary paused and shifted on the floor, her movements clumsy since she could only use one hand to help. She scooted to a chair and pulled herself up. She sat down, breathing heavily.
For the first time since Sarah saw her on the street, Mary looked her age. Mid-sixties? She was still a handsome woman but the years, and the spy life, had left her careworn. Her wrinkles seemed more deeply etched than they had on the Ronda.
"Thanks for the help," Mary said flatly.
"You're the one who snuck in here and put a gun to my head."
Mary nodded. She looked down then re-started, a weariness in her tone.
"You can guess the rest. My ego was bait again. I could do the job, find a way to keep Volkoff at bay until I had what Dillard needed, the key to Volkoff's arms network. How I was supposed to keep him at bay when alone inside what was basically a military compound was never clear. I just kept telling myself I would, I'd come up with something. The threat of losing my job mattered more to me than the probability of losing everything else. Everyone else. I accepted. As I said, you can guess the rest."
"You serviced Volkoff. Eventually. You went native. You fell in love with him."
"No!" Mary said, sitting up straight, her teeth bared and eyes flashing. "No. I never loved that bastard. But he knew how to break people. It was his specialty. My reluctance, my delays, intrigued him. He studied me. Like Dillard, he figured me out. He used me against me. Stopped trying to bed me and began to treat me as a trusted advisor. I got involved, climbed the ranks. And by the time I'd become his good right hand, his second in command, I was also underneath him most nights. At first, I told myself it was for the sake of survival, then later that it was for the sake of bringing him down, and then even later for the sake of I don't know what. I just stopped telling myself anything at all and night-by-night became the woman I was pretending to be. He broke me softly and in super-slow-motion; I was broken and cheating on my husband before I let myself understand what I was doing.
"When I did understand, I realized that half Volkoff's bed, and my position as his second, that was all I had. I didn't love him but I surrendered everything for him. Because I loved myself more than my husband, more than my children." Her palpable self-loathing colored Sarah's apartment.
Sarah felt a chill but ignored it.
Mary stopped talking and leaned back in the chair, gazing at Sarah, relocating to the present, no longer seeing Sarah as herself. Her tone shifted.
"This man's world is cruel generally to old women, but it's especially cruel to old-women spies. Maybe it's because old women tend to be invisible, but old-women spies are doubly invisible. They vanish even before age erases them." Her words were simply stated but they were double-layered, both a report and a caution.
"I had enough of Volkoff — in every way — after a few years. But I was trapped with him; a trap I helped construct, helped maintain. I was old for him even at first. He grew tired of me and when he pushed me out of his bed, he pushed me down the hierarchy I had climbed. I never loved him — but I positively hated him after that. When it was clear that I no longer mattered, I realized I had nothing. I had lost my family, my Agency, my world had shrunk to my half of Volkoff's bed, and I lost that. Dillard was gone and Graham was running the show, intent on writing me out of the CIA's story, a standing kill order against me — he declared me beyond salvage. He was probably right."
She shook her head, dwelling on the phrase, smiling coldly at herself.
"I poisoned Volkoff in his compound, fully expecting to be executed by his new second, Stoyanov but Volkoff's death unleashed a massive internal war for dominance among his lieutenants. Stoyanov won, but in the fog of that war, I managed to escape. But I had nowhere to go. I drifted from place to place, doing whatever would get me the money I needed to eat."
Sarah listened closely. Mary's identification with Sarah was affecting Sarah. It was Mary's past but it might be Sarah's future. "So, that's how Volkoff died. No one ever knew. The Agency assumed Stoyanov assassinated him."
"No," Mary said simply, "it was me. From hell's heart, I struck at him — and I killed him, took him down." Her voice was soft and savage.
"I wanted to go back to the States, just to see the kids, just from a distance, but Graham's order kept me away. I was worried that I might get Stephen and the kids caught up in it all somehow. Graham was on one side of me and Stoyanov was on the other. Once Stoyanov was in control, he started hunting me. I couldn't risk making him aware of my family.
"After a while, I drifted here, to Barcelona. I put my skills to work. I created a network, an invisible spider's web of old women that stretches over the city, shore to hilltop. Using it, I started freelance work. Pretty much anything, larceny, and garden-variety spying, infiltration. I've managed to keep myself alive, to keep an apartment.
"But I also keep tabs on law enforcement and government intelligence activity. People talk around old women, tell them anything. Sometimes keeping up makes me money, sometimes it keeps me alive. I've known you were here since a few hours after your arrival, Rita."
Sarah nodded. They sat and stared at each other, living mirrors reflecting one another's past or future.
Mary stood. She used her arm and winced, shot Sarah an angry glance. "If you understand me, Sarah, then I will leave. Remember, I'm not just one old woman. My ladies kept tabs on you all the way to Chuck's hotel, all the way back here.
"So, I'll know if you approach Chuck again. He's had a hard life, and, as I understand it, the one time he fell in love it crashed and burned, but he lived. You, by contrast, would almost certainly be the death of him. Even if you didn't mean to be. Take my word for it. My husband would tell you if he were in his right mind."
Sarah stood too. "Mary, you're not the first spy who lost herself in deep cover. It happens. It's like a complex version of Stockholm Syndrome. You begin to identify with your marks. Dillard should never have inserted you like that; that was crazy, cruel."
Mary gave Sarah a sour, skeptical look. "I could have said no. I could have stayed home with my husband and children. Worked to be a better wife and mother. Dillard was a son-of-a-bitch, but I made my own whore's half-bed and got myself kicked out of it.
"Just leave my son alone. The way looked at you on the terrace. You had seduction training at the Farm, I assume. He was probably in love with you before you bedded him. I imagine when he wakes to find you gone, he's going to feel like he underwent open-heart surgery, his ribs cracked wide open."
Sarah's chest had not stopped aching and it now ached unbearably. Her eyes stung her, making it hard to see Mary clearly. Mary moved — but toward the door, not toward Sarah.
"Keep that," Mary said, gesturing at the gun, one corner of her mouth quirking up as she shrugged. "There was only one shell in it anyway."
Mary's comment had just ended when the door to Sarah's apartment opened. A canister, hissing, and smoking, bounced into the room. "Gas, Walker!" Mary dove from the door.
Sarah recognized the gas. She started toward her window and crumpled just before she reached it. She turned, on her knees, and aimed at a figure stalking toward her in the smoke. She pulled the trigger; the gun was empty.
She could not move. Her vision darkened. She felt rough hands on her, turning her over, and then she was looking into a gas mask, the face obscured by the exterior gas and interior condensation.
She saw another figure standing over Mary, the figure's arm diagonal, Mary's body unmoving
Sarah heard two sudden coughs from a silencer. The sound seemed distant.
Dark silence swallowed her.
Sarah woke up tied tightly to a chair, gagged. The ropes were eating into her wrists, her ankles
Eating into her in the dark.
She could see nothing. Nothing. She blinked but it did not help. Other than the limits of her own body, the ropes, the chair, she had no sense of space. She might have been in a closet or a coliseum or suspended in a distant constellation.
She had no sense of time, of how long she had been unconscious. The irritation of the ropes suggested she had been bound for a while.
"Hello, Rita," Javier said, striking a match and lighting a cigarette. His face glowed orange and hard. The light showed Sarah a basement room, large, mostly empty.
He shook the match and the darkness returned, gathered thickly around the furious orange end of Javier's cigarette.
Sarah smelled strong Turkish tobacco. Javier smoked only when angry.
"But I suppose I should not call you Rita. I should call you Sarah. And you are going to tell me things. About that dead old woman, about Chuck Bartowski, and about the CIA."
Rough hands suddenly grabbed her from behind, from the dark. Javier's cigarette glowed more brightly in front of her. She tried to cry out but the gag, foul-tasting and wet, swollen in her mouth, prevented it.
She felt a large needle prick her shoulder.
"Take a moment, Sarah, let the medicine do its work, and we will begin."
Sarah struggled against her bonds but fruitlessly.
They killed Mary.
Javier knows about Chuck.
A/N: More in a week or so.
I finished my Christmas story, Her Gift, if you're interested in reading it.