NOTES: Craspon comments that Sarah seems more worried about her father than the fact that she had a daughter she isn't seeing, and Chuck seems unconcerned by her absence. Don't worry, it is not quite what it seems. Remember, so far we've only seen about two weeks of their life since the big barbecue that opened the story. The barbecue was on Mother's Day, by the way, which I neglected to mention in chapter one, but is important.
Sarah is very much a part of Charlotte-Mary's life, and Wild Card likewise with Stephanie. Right now, during this current period, they've both been away for a while. Sarah hasn't seen Charlotte-Mary face-to-face for nearly six weeks, and Wild Card has not been with Stephanie for just a little longer. But that is something of an exception in their lives. Remember Sarah told Chuck that a mother could 'get kind of desperate' not seeing her child in that long, she's not used to that! There are reasons (which we'll see soon in this story) why both mothers have been heavily occupied lately, and both moms have been on the phone with their children regularly during this period, too.
As for Sarah worrying more about Jack, remember that Charlotte-Mary is safe at Carmichael Estates, at least for the nonce, as are Sarah's mother and sister (and that's a story in itself). Her father, on the other hand, is in Moscow, running a con on people who are part of Putin's immediate circles. That means Jack is potentially in a lot more immediate danger! So naturally Jack is most on Sarah's mind right now, Sarah knows all too well what could happen to him if things go sour there! Trust me, if Charlotte-Mary were in Moscow, you'd see Sarah reacting to that, probably violently.
Just on the off chance that somebody doesn't know, 'Selena Kyle' is the real name of Catwoman, from the Batman comics and movies.
[] represents German in this chapter.
CHUCK vs. THE NO-WIN QUESTION CHAPTER 13: Old Business Part 1...
Carmichael Estates, 10:30 a.m. local time...
The combined Bartowski/Woodcomb house, on the western end of the peninsula that was Carmichael Estates (well, that was part of Carmichael Estates, anyway, the property extended well past the peninsula) contained many rooms besides the purely residential and recreational areas. There was a private office in each wing, one for Chuck Bartowski, one for Ellie Woodcomb, and those private offices were usually open only to their owners and his or her sibling.
Just now, Chuck Bartowski was sitting in his own private office, contemplating the phone call he was about to make with distinctively mixed feelings. Part of him was dreading the complications that would inevitably follow from what he was about to try and set into motion. Another part of him, he admitted to himself, ruefully, could hardly wait.
Chuck had admitted to the senior staff at the JIA complex in Los Angeles that he had 'a contact path' to reach Wild Card. He supposed that was true enough, if 'having a contact path' was defined as 'knowing her private phone number'. A phone number that was one of the most closely guarded pieces of information in the shadow world.
Finally, he punched that particular number into the keypad, and waited as the call went through. He knew that this particular call, to that particular number, would pass first through the private cell-relay of Carmichael Estates, where it would be extensively enciphered and 'spoofed' and variously doctored before passing into the standard communications networks. The process would reverse on the other end, using both hardware and software to ensure privacy. A call from California to Russia, a wonder of the modern world.
"Yes?" a male voice answered. Calm, cool, neutral, a slight British accent. Chuck knew the man who was speaking, and he smiled slightly at the contrast between that refined voice and the imposing physical figure who spoke it.
"Hello to you too, Niles," Chuck said. "Would you be good enough to inform Ms. Kyle that Mr. Wayne is calling?"
"Indeed?" the voice of Niles returned, sounding even drier than usual. "Might I ask what...Mr. Wayne...is calling about? Ms...ah...Kyle is currently asleep."
"Really? Selena is asleep at 9:45 in the evening?" Chuck asked dryly, knowing the time difference from long habits. As if, she's been a night owl as long as I've known her! The only way she'd be in bed asleep at 9:45 is jet lag or sick list. "That's rather unlike her. But by all means, if you think she would prefer to wait until morning, you needn't wake her."
"I will-" the sound of Niles' voice was suddenly interrupted as Chuck heard a familiar female voice in the background.
"What is it, Niles? Who's on the private line?"
"Ah, it's...ah, 'Mr. Wayne', Ma'am."
Chuck smiled to himself. He knew Niles Foxe, the dignified majordomo of Wild Card's inner circle, from past encounters, and he knew that his employer's 'playful' side sometimes disconcerted the man. Of course, it did not pay to be too amused, Niles Foxe was former SAS and something of an English version of John Casey, only with less levity.
"Why didn't you tell me?! Give me that phone! And leave me alone for a little while!"
Chuck heard a door shut on the other end.
Chuck smiled again, as that oh-so-familiar female voice, throaty, flirty, teasing, filled his ear again, this time loud and clear since she had the phone in her hand, "Bruce? Is that you?!"
"Who else knows this number, Selena?"
"Only my closest, most trusted boyfriends, lovers, and worshipful fanboys," 'Selena' replied, laughing. "How did you get it, Bruce?"
"Have you forgotten who you're talking too, my dear Selena? It's my job to know these things!"
Chuck could hear the laughter in her voice. "Am I going to have to purge your agents from my staff again, Bruce? I've specifically asked you to stop making me do that!"
In his mind's eye, Chuck could see the impish expression on a beautiful face as they taunted each other.
"Nobody ever made you do anything you didn't want to do, my dear Selena," Chuck replied.
"How I wish that was true, Bruce," the woman known across the shadow world as 'Wild Card' replied, more seriously.
"So...how are things in Moscow, Selena? Stolen the Tsar's crown jewels yet?"
"The ones in the museums or the ones that disappeared in 1917?"
"Which would give you more pleasure to steal, my dear?"
"What makes you think I don't already have the missing ones now, Bruce?"
"They've been missing since 1917, my dear. If I recall correctly, you were born a few years later. Of course you could always use the time machine...no, I'm sorry, I was thinking of Carmen Sandiego, not Selena Kyle. Sorry for the confusion."
"How do you know Carmen Sandiego isn't just me by another name?" Wild Card asked, and Chuck could hear the smirk in her voice as she spoke. "Maybe I steal famous landmarks under that name! I'm very deceitful and tricky and underhanded, you know."
"Indeed I do know," Chuck replied with a laugh. "From painful experience! But seriously, my dear Selena, Wayne Industries has a business proposition for you. Are you alone?"
"Alone and secure," she replied seriously. Then she added, the teasing note back in her voice, "Really? A business proposition? Just business?"
"Afraid so, my dear. Well...then again..."
The giggle that came through brought back a thousand memories. In all the years that Chuck had known her, that giggle had remained unchanged...and it still did to him now what it had done to him so many years before. He felt his heart race a little at the sound of her laughter.
"Seriously," Chuck said, setting aside his momentary distraction, "I really need to see you, in person. This isn't something that I want to trust even to my phones."
"Seriously, as is something seriously wrong?"
"Could be," Chuck said, the incongruous image of endless fields of wilted, ruined wheat in his mind. At first blush it might not seem like a serious matter, compared to some of the things he had dealt with in his life, but with it came an image of hungry, desperate people, and suddenly it seemed very serious. "Seriously wrong enough to need us to meet face to face, and soon."
"Wait, it's not about-is she-?!"
Chuck knew the sudden note of alarm in her voice, and what it meant. That particular tone meant 'Stephanie'.
"No, it's not that," Chuck hastened to assure her. "Don't worry, our little budding paleontologist is fine, Selena."
"Good to hear," Wild Card replied, sounding relieved. "I can't leave Moscow right now, Mr. Wayne. This damned business in Moscow is at a touchy stage, if I back away now it'll all fall apart!
Chuck sighed and said, "Well, I guess I'll have to come to you, then. What I need to talk to you about shouldn't take long, but it really needs to be face-to-face."
"What's so important, Bruce? Can't you even give me a hint?"
"Well...it involves wheat."
There was a silence on the other end for a moment, and then her voice came back, stone serious. "Oh my. So that's it. I guess we really do need to meet in person, at that. And you probably do need to come to me. You see, what I'm doing in Moscow also involves...wheat."
Okay, I guess that confirms that the JIA intel was right, she does know something about that rogue agent and the bioagent. Otherwise just my mentioning wheat wouldn't have gotten her attention so quickly.
"And does this also involve Tony?"
"Yes," Wild Card replied. No teasing, no archness in her voice. This was serious.
Terrific, Chuck mused. Whatever's going on in Moscow involves the black rust fungus, which half the intelligence agencies in the world are chasing, and Jack Burton's involved in it too! Now I've got to tell Sarah something, without setting off World War III.
"All right," Chuck said. "I can be in Moscow in a couple of days, when and where can we meet? Somewhere we can speak freely and safely, of course."
"That last is easier said than done in this city, Bruce. The Soviet Union is gone but the KGB lives on by other names."
"I have faith in you, Selena. If anyone can give the FSB the slip, you can!"
"Thanks, I think," Wild Card replied.
A few minutes later, the time and place for the meet was set up, and Chuck was about to let her go, when she said, "So how is my favorite little paleontologist? What's she doing?"
"Well, just a couple of days ago we took her to the museum and showed her the dinosaur, she's been obsessed with seeing it since you told her about it."
"Did she enjoy it?"
Chuck laughed. "Are you kidding?! Talk about cloud nine, I think she's still dreaming about it when she sleeps! It's all she's talked about for the last two days!"
"Oh, I wish I could have been there! Do you suppose that she'd want to visit the museum again, with me, when I can get free?"
Chuck laughed. "She's already nagging me to take her back to see the DINOSAUR again, Ms. Kyle. I think having you go with her to see it would have her walking on air."
"Oh, it won't just be her! It's been too long since I was with her, I can't wait for the conference when I can see her again! It's been two months! Two months! You are still planning to bring her to the general conference, aren't you?!"
"Of course," Chuck replied. "But you don't have to wait. You know you can see her any time you want, Selena. Just drop by the Batcave."
A long frustrated sigh was clear from thousands of miles away. "I want to soooo bad, Mr. Wayne. I can't break away right this minute, but I'll have it wrapped up soon, and then here I come!"
"She'll be glad to hear that, Selena."
The two spoke, indirectly, about their daughter for a few more minutes, and then, just as Chuck was about to let her go, she said to him, "By the way, Mr. Wayne, I still want to know how you and Tony Rogers met! I can't get anything out of him about you, he just laughs and changes the subject! And why does he call you 'the schnook' and sound respectful when he does?"
"Can't tell you, Selena! It's classified super-duper-extra-special-double-Top Secret! Besides, if I told you, you'd sell it!"
"If you tell me, I'll keep it secret for a very reasonable fee," Wild Card said with a teasing laugh. "If I figure it out on my own, then I can sell it or charge you full price to keep it secret! Wouldn't it be better to just tell me now?"
Hoo boy, World War III if I do that, Chuck mused.
"Sorry, but I'm not authorized to reveal that information at this time," Chuck said.
"Oh well, don't say I never offered you a better deal, Bruce! See you in a couple of days!
After the phone call was over, Chuck started making arrangements to be gone for a few days, wondering as he did how he was going to keep World War III from breaking out amid his various loved ones when the truth came out.
The Nielsen Apartment Building, Greater Los Angeles, 9:35 p.m. local time...
The usual supposedly-inoffensive soft music was playing as the elevator whisked Sarah Walker to the seventh floor of her apartment building. In fact, it was so inoffensive that she was barely aware of the background sound, most of her mind on her own issues.
There were certain advantages, Sarah mused, as the elevator reached the seventh floor, to being probably the single wealthiest CIA agent alive. One of them was that she could afford to maintain an entire floor of her apartment building in reserve for her own use. Not that she needed so much space for herself, but holding the entire floor, with all four apartments, in her name, was useful for security purposes, and it gave her the other apartments for use if she needed them for guests. She kept apartments ready for Carina and Zondra and Ellie, in case they might be needed on short notice. If Chuck and/or Charlotte-Mary was visiting overnight, other arrangements were made, her own apartment was quite suitable for that.
Not that her full wealth was visible to surface inspection. She made no secret of the fact that her divorce had left her with substantial wealth, but the full measure of that money was well-hidden, she hoped even from the CIA and the IRS. Sarah had learned quite a bit about how to move money around in secret during her career, partly from her formal training, and partly by off-the-books instruction from various bankers and money men who had owed her favors. She had used that knowledge to grow the money from the divorce settlement, and she hoped, to hide most of it from the various elements of the Federal alphabet soup.
Especially the IRS, Sarah mused to herself with a smirk. The CIA and the NSA are dangerous, but the IRS is scary!
On paper, Sarah Walker had a lease on the entire seventh floor of the slender needle that was the Nielsen Apartment Building. The Nielsen was a tall, modern apartment tower located in one of the nicer areas of Greater Los Angeles. In reality, Sarah owned the entire building outright, albeit through a shell company that did not have any of her regular aliases anywhere in its ownership chart. The building was a slender structure, no more than fifteen years old, ten stories tall and with only a few luxury apartments per level.
She could still recall her shock, when the divorce had been finalized, and she had learned from the lawyers that the stranger who was somehow magically her husband had insisted that half of their net wealth was hers. She would have been entirely prepared to walk away with nothing but her freedom, at that point in time, but Chuck Bartowski did not operate that way. The wealth had been given to both of them as a wedding gift, and Chuck Bartowski had insisted that half of it was rightfully hers. She had learned this when the lawyer informed her of it, since at that time she had been avoiding any contact with the man, and it had shocked her to her core. Why would he do something like that?!
Of course it was half of a fraction of the Volkoff money, because at that time much of that wealth was cut off from them, but half of a fraction was still a huge sum of money. It had been numbing to realize that she was suddenly a wealthy woman, rich enough to do almost anything she wanted, on a purely individual scale, and it had left her even more puzzled and confused trying to understand the man she had almost murdered, and who had been her husband in this strange new life she found herself trapped within.
Then, of course, when she had eventually regained the memories that Quinn had so brutally and agonizingly suppressed, Sarah understood all too well what kind of man would do something like that.
It would never even have occurred to Chuck to try and cheat me out of my half of the money, Sarah thought to herself. It wouldn't even have entered his mind. But there's no way the woman I used to be could have grasped that. I didn't have any context to grasp it with!
Her mind went back to the day she had actually met Chuck, and her surprise when he had spent so much time and effort helping that man recreate his daughter's lost performance. It had left her entranced and puzzled at the time, because it was so alien to anything most of the people in her world would ever do. Even the best of them, and some of them were very, very good people, simply would never have thought to do what she watched that Buy More nerd and his herd do that day. It that was same inner core of caring that would, five years later, cause him to let her walk away with millions of dollars that he could equally easily have kept from her.
Why the Hell didn't I contact him when I regained my memory? Why did I wait?! One phone call would have been enough, one lousy phone call. That's all it would have needed to keep him from looking twice at her!
It was a rhetorical question that she asked herself, Sarah knew why. She cursed herself, for what must have been the millionth time, for thinking at that time that it was a good reason. In retrospect, Sarah saw the months of delay before she had finally made contact with Chuck again as possibly the greatest mistake of her life. The reasons that had seemed so compelling in the middle of 2012 now seemed to her foolishness and cowardice and perhaps no little overconfidence.
I thought he'd be waiting for me, as long as it took, Sarah mused, fighting back a sudden tearful impulse. I didn't realize that he had reached his limits on waiting, until it was too late.
Night had fallen outside, but her apartment was well-lit and welcoming as she stepped inside. As was her habit after an adult lifetime in the shadows, her first action was a quick 'walk through' to assure herself that her home was as she had left it, that no unauthorized personnel had been present, or worse, were still present. Then she slipped off her high heels, and fixed herself a (very mild) drink and sipped it, as she looked out the window at the cityscape of Los Angeles.
Zondra and Carina had reported back, and while Zondra was 'clean', Carina had confirmed that she, too, had one of the new rectrans implants, this one placed in her abdomen. She was unsure how it had been implanted, but Carina had her strong suspicions. A few months earlier, Carina had experienced a nasty incidence of appendicitis, and had been rushed into surgery to deal with the problem.
Sarah remembered her own worry about her friend at that time, but she had come through the surgery without difficulty and she had recovered quickly. It had seemed like a relatively routine surgery and recovery, it was not as if appendicitis had not befallen countless other people before Carina Miller.
Now Carina was not even certain that she had ever even had appendicitis.
Could be true either way, Sarah mused. Carina might have had a real bout of trouble, and the CIA took advantage to 'tag' her, or it could be they induced the symptoms somehow as an excuse. If it was fake they'd go ahead and take her appendix anyway to make it look real, so its absence would prove nothing.
Sarah knew without being told what Carina Miller's first impulse had been upon confirming the presence of that transmitter in her belly. There was no doubt in Sarah's mind that Carina would have wanted to track down the surgeons who had operated upon her and 'discuss' the matter with them. Sarah could not blame her friend at all, but she also knew that they dared not do anything that open just yet. They had to move very carefully, since it was the higher ups of the alphabet soup doing this, and they were not technically even supposed to know about it.
We need to get access to Carina's medical records, Sarah mused. The real ones, and see if she ever really had appendicitis at all. One more thing on the to-do list!
In the meantime, she had composed the message she wanted to send to her father, and entrusted it to Chuck for delivery. The thought that the message would be going through Wild Card, that she was relying on her to communicate with her own father, left an angry cold sensation in the pit of Sarah's stomach.
Four billion women on Earth, Sarah mused sourly, as she sipped her drink and gazed out at the famous city-scape. Four billion women, and he picked her to fill the void I left. Could he possibly have picked someone worse? Well...maybe my mother. Or Heather. Hmm...would Heather be worse? I'm not sure.
Sarah found her mind going back to that horrible day in 2012 when she had discovered that Chuck and 'Wild Card' were an item. The memory was seared into her mind, even after seven and a half years, it was as if it had happened the day before. It had been right after that incredible business in the Tyrol region of Austria, in late 2012. Sarah had finally met Chuck face to face again...in the middle of a charlie foxtrot of a pile up of intelligence agencies, private companies, lone operators, and agents from a dozen different national, corporate, or private factions that had been shooting at each other, and she had found herself in the middle of the whole mess when she had finally run into Chuck once again. It had been the first time they were face-to-face in over ten months, and it had been in the middle of an ongoing firefight.
They had seen each other often over the following weeks, but mostly their conversations had been 'professional'. She was not been blind to the irony, remembering how badly Chuck had wanted to talk about personal matters, even in the middle of ongoing operations, back when they were trying to recover the weapon from Stromberg, with Carina, during that ghastly period just before and after Chuck's farcical 'red test', or in other incidents in the old days. In those earlier incidents, she had been exasperated and frustrated, but now the shoe had been on the other foot. Sarah had wanted desperately to talk to Chuck about their personal situation, and Chuck had been up to his neck in operational details for the 'new' Carmichael Industries, and an ongoing field operation during which her nerdy amateur spy had been amazingly professional and focused.
Sarah remembered seeing that Chuck had changed enormously during their months apart, in confusing ways, though from time to time she could see clear signs that her nerd was still very much alive and present underneath the 'Charles Carmichael' alias that had become so real-seeming. That had been one of the many things she had so badly wanted to talk to Chuck about, as soon as she could find a chance to be alone and safe with him so that they could really talk.
But though there had been many encounters over the weeks of that disastrous operation, they had mostly been very professional. Mostly, but not entirely. Even seven years and some months later, Sarah still blushed and felt warm at the memory of a sudden kiss in the middle of a heated conversation, the feeling of his hands on her arms pulling her close...she had known in that moment that Charles Irving Bartowski, changed or not, was still very much not over her! He had promised her then that they would talk, really talk, as soon as the madness was over.
But that had been a brief moment, and they had no more time to talk just then, the shooting had started again moments later. But when it was all over, Sarah had found herself remaining behind in Innsbruck, and she had had another fateful sudden, and unexpected encounter with her nerd...and someone else...
...the new-fallen snow was crisp and white on the mountains to the north, the air almost motionless. The early evening air was filled with the sound of Christmas music, sung in German, or Bavarian-German, or sometimes English, and cheerful crowds were milling through the Christkindlmarkt. The steady snow that had been falling earlier had mostly stopped now, though the overcast skies promised more to come, and a steady flutter of flurries was still coming down. Few people seemed to mind, though, if anything the flurries added to the cheerful mood that seemed to fill the air over Innsbruck.
The air was chilly but not brutally cold, but even so Sarah was glad for her heavy coat and thick insulated pants. The lack of wind made what would have been an unpleasant cold merely a Christmas-like chilly.
The crowds moved through the market, blissfully unaware of the lethal secret warfare that had so recently been waged in their city. The Austrian government and the various foreign governments who had been involved, including the United States, had reached a quiet understanding entirely out of the public eye, the private players involved had been bought off, were dead, or had vested interests in not revealing anything.
Sarah was not really thinking about the horrendously screwed-up, twisted, insane business that had just gone down over the previous weeks. Most of her mind was on her personal affairs, and particularly a certain man that she had, much to her current regret, divorced. The divorce had been a decision based on amnesia, but she knew she had compounded it by failing to immediately work to heal the wound as soon as her memory returned. Looking back, her reasons seemed less compelling than they had months earlier.
Sarah knew that Chuck was angry. That much had been obvious as soon as she had seen again a few weeks earlier. She supposed she couldn't blame him: ten months with no word, nothing, with many of those months being after he had learned that she remembered everything. She knew it would not be easy to get past that, not once she saw the look in his eyes when they finally met again. She wanted so badly to explain, but it was not something that could be covered in a few words while they were cowering behind cover and being shot at!
She smiled. She had finally cornered him in a brief quiet moment and he had agreed that they badly needed to talk, and that kiss! Whoa. It had been too long. But he had gone back into his professional mode moments later, as the shooting had started again. But he had promised they would talk when the operation was over and they were safely back in California, and Sarah had taken heart from that.
The Carmichael Industries people had flown out of Innsbruck the day before. Sarah was planning to head for California herself in a day or two, as soon as she finished cleaning up a few things for the CIA in Innsbruck. It was routine after-operation work, and it left her time to wander through the Christmas Market in the calm evening. She relished the chance to think after the chaos of the previous weeks. She wandered through the city, pausing to look at the River Inn for a while, strolled through the stalls and shops that dotted the city, and took in the galaxies of Christmas lights and the bracing sight of the towering, snow-covered Alps that rose above the city. There was something reassuring in their very bleakness, a majesty that seemed to transcend the petty affairs of humans.
She had been in contact with Morgan and Ellie for much of the time since her memory had returned, of course. She knew that too probably added to Chuck's anger, and again she found it difficult to fault him for it. Zondra and Carina had certainly told her in no uncertain terms that she should expect nothing less, Sarah mused with self-deprecating humor. She was in a tolerably decent mood that evening, Chuck's promise that they would talk had lifted her spirits.
Ellie's role in the 'new' Carmichael Industries was a shock, though! Sarah had certainly never expected to come on her sister-in-law (well, technically her ex-sister-in-law, she mused) actually being trained as an agent by Chuck and Casey, or actively taking part in a field operation! Ellie still had a lot to learn, but it had been obvious that the potential was there, when Sarah saw her in action. Sarah shook her head in amazement at the very thought of Ellie as an agent.
She also knew that Morgan and Ellie both thought that there was something going on with Chuck that he was keeping from them. From the way they both dodged the subject when they had spoken, Sarah was pretty sure they both thought there was a woman in his life. Which worried Sarah enormously, but at the time time, she knew Chuck was not over her. Not after that kiss! Not after their conversations in the mountains. Chuck was hiding something, she knew it, but his reaction to her earlier was reassuring. Maybe there was some interloper involved, but Sarah had known Chuck for six years. She had been his handler, his lover, they had been married, after everything that they had been through, Sarah was fairly confident she could vanquish whoever was moving in on a man she still considered hers, divorce or not. Her rival would have known Chuck only a short time, after all, she could hardly match Sarah's knowledge, or Chuck's emotional investment in her. Sarah was determined that if there was another woman making any sort of play for Chuck, she was going to reclaim her place! One more reason she and Chuck needed to have that long safe talk!
In the meantime, it might not hurt to get a Christmas present, a peace offering of a sort, she mused. She had been wandering through the stalls and shops for a while, looking for something that was just right, she had seen a few possibilities, but nothing that exactly expressed what she wanted to say.
So intent was she on her shopping that her situational awareness lapsed a little, and she actually bumped into another shopper by surprise as she came around a corner too fast! She started to apologize, and her breath caught in her throat as she realized that she had just plowed into Chuck Bartowski!
["I'm so sorry,"] Chuck started to say in fairly good German, ["I should have been-"]
He broke off, then said, "Sarah!" in English, she knew he was startled out of the Intersect-flash state that had enabled him to speak in German.
Unlike most of the previous times that she had seen him over the previous month, Chuck was dressed neither in formal clothing nor field gear, but in a pair of plain denim jeans, a pullover sweater, and snow boots. She had seen him dress like that once or twice before during their time in Innsbruck, though during those times he had also worn an old flannel coat against the cold. She knew he had owned that coat for years, but rarely wore it in the usually hot-to-mild climate of Burbank. Today, though, for some reason he wore no coat.
It was chilly enough today that she wondered why had no coat on, but most of her attention was on what he was saying.
"Chuck?!" she gasped. "Oh, I'm sorry, I-what-I thought you had gone back to California!"
"I, uh-I stayed behind when the others left," Chuck said. He was babbling like his old self, and suddenly Sarah grinned at seeing her nerd acting like her nerd. "I mean you can see that, I shouldn't need to tell you that, obviously you can see that I'm here, but I still had something-what-Sarah, I thought you had left! Not that I'm saying I wish you had left, it's just that I was told you had left-"
"I'm flying out the day after tomorrow," she said, interrupting his stream of nervous spiraling babble. Snow flurries were falling all around them, and the air had that quiet sense that snow brought as they spoke. "Chuck, why are you still in Innsbruck?"
"Oh, just-uh...I mean I was just-the Christmas displays! That's it! I always heard about them and I wanted to see them!"
"Same here," Sarah smiled. "I was doing a little shopping."
Chuck was looking distinctly nervous, and Sarah had a sudden suspicion that Chuck's nervousness was about more than just seeing her again with the problems hanging over their head.
"Well, I don't want to keep you," Chuck said, "I'll let you get on with your shopping-"
"Why don't we walk together?" Sarah asked slyly, stepping closer and smiling up at him.
"Oh, I don't want to be any trouble, you've got errands to do, I'm sure, and I-"
Sarah's suspicions were confirmed. For some reason, her presence was making Chuck nervous, and not in the same way that it had in their earlier encounters since they met again.
"Chuck," Sarah demanded, intentionally putting a little 'handler' into her voice, "is there something going on here that you're not telling me?"
Normally, that tone brought an obedient reaction from Chuck, but this time his features seemed to harden slightly hearing it. Still, his nervousness showed through.
"What would that be?" Chuck asked. "I mean why would you think-"
"Chuck," Sarah heard an excited-sounding female voice call out, as a slender figure emerged from between two food stalls, walking quickly toward Chuck and holding what looked like some kind of pastries as she added, speaking between bites of food, "you have got to taste these lingonberry kiachl-things! Hmmm...they are to die for-"
She fell silent as she suddenly saw Sarah standing there, and for a moment the three of them were motionless, speechless, it was almost as if Time had stopped. Sarah recognized the woman instantly, of course. She was shorter than Sarah, but still slightly taller than average for a woman. Her accent was definitely American, and she was casually clad like Chuck in jeans, boots, and a sweater, though she also had on a flannel coat over the sweater for extra warmth. The same flannel coat, Sarah realized, that she had seen Chuck wearing a week before, that had hung in a closet in their home, suddenly Sarah knew why Chuck had no coat on in the chilly weather.
She was slender, with long straight hair that flowed down her back, hair so brown it was almost jet black, hair dotted now with flakes of snow. Chocolate-brown eyes, a face that could only be called beautiful, even with hot fruit jam and powdered sugar currently on her nose and lips from the pastry she had been messily eating. A face Sarah had not seen for over three years, but a face she recognized instantly.
"Jill," Sarah whispered.
Sarah came back to the present, the memory fading as she looked down at her empty wine glass. The newly-fresh memory of that horrible day in December of 2012 combined with the knowledge of where her father was and who he was with, and brought on a sudden impulse. Before she caught herself, Sarah hurled the empty wine glass against the bullet-proof material of the window, and it struck hard enough that it shattered into tiny fragments on contact, the sound sharp in the quiet of her apartment.
TO BE CONTINUED...