NOTES: Yes, as several people have guessed and I'm sure more suspected, 'Wild Card' is a code name that the FBI originally assigned to one Jillian Roberts, escaped prisoner and eventual criminal mastermind. The code name stuck and became a common reference among a number of intelligence agencies and police organizations because it fits so well. Not that very many people know her real name, but lots of people know about her and her organization.
Yes, Jill is Stephanie's Bartowski's mother, and Sarah's rival for Chuck's attention and affection. But realistically, was it ever in that much doubt? I said it was a woman from the show, and it had to be someone who had enough emotional hold on Chuck to manage to even be a serious rival to Sarah. There were only ever two or three even semi-reasonable possibilities, and Jill was always the most likely. Of all the women Chuck showed an interest in during the five seasons of the show, Jill was the only one who was ever a serious threat to Sarah's hold on his heart. Lou was too late, by the time they met Chuck was already entangled in the shadow world, ditto Hannah. Either one could probably have made the pre-season one Chuck happy, but by the time they met him he had changed into someone else, and the shadow world was too dangerous for him to risk letting them get close. Maybe under other circumstances Carina could have done it, but she never really got the chance, and she is Sarah's friend. She might very well sleep with Chuck, I think, but it's hard to picture her trying to actually steal him away completely (though I can easily picture her teasing Sarah about intending to).
But Jill? She's got years of emotional entanglement with Chuck, going back to when they were both 19. She knows Chuck as well as Sarah does, in some ways better (and in other ways not as well, of course), they're both huge nerds with a lot of common mundane interests, they're both already hopelessly entangled in the shadow world, so that factor doesn't play in as it does with Lou or Hannah. It's easy to see, watching Chuck and Jill in Chuck vs. The First Kill, that they're not over each other, even if Chuck is also in love with Sarah. Now, if not for Quinn, Sarah would have won it hands down, in fact she had won it, but Quinn blew everything up, Sarah waited too long, and Jill had another shot...and she took it. But that story will have to wait for the prequel, because it's very complicated and messy.
In the pilot episode of Chuck, we see Langston Graham with a female military officer running the NSA, played by Wendy McKenna, but we're never given her name. In my world, that person was named Wendy McKee, and was Beckman's predecessor as head of the secret branch of the NSA.
So...onward.
Dialogue within \\ indicates Russian.
CHUCK vs. THE NO-WIN QUESTION CHAPTER 13: Old Business Part 2...
JIA Joint Headquarters, Washington, D.C., 9:20 a.m. local time...
Brigadier General Linda Suzanne Conroy (USAF) had been head of the secret branch of the NSA for less than a year, and chairwoman pro tem of the Coordinating Committee of the JIA for about the same amount of time. She had succeeded General Diane Beckman in both positions, and the 'pro tem' attached to the chairwomanship was pro forma, the same theoretical limitation had been applied to Diane Beckman's title for several years. When the Beta Intersect AI was destroyed, General Beckman had become the de facto chairwoman (Conroy flatly refused to refer to herself or Beckman as either 'chairman' or 'chairperson', they were women!) of the Coordinating Committee for the following eleven years, and if her position was never theoretically permanent, few dared cross her and few imagined she would be removed against her will. This fear had been well founded. General Conroy was one of the few people who knew just how well founded that fear was, and how dangerous a person Diane Beckman was.
Which might help to explain why, when her chief deputy informed her that Diane Beckman had arrived to talk to her, Conroy ordered her admitted immediately, even though her predecessor was retired from the military and the intelligence game...at least as much as anyone ever retired from the latter.
Though they were only a few years apart in age, the physical contrast between the two women was notable. Conroy was taller than average, 5'10" in her stockinged feet, with a cap of curly hair, grey and red strands competing for dominance. Beckman was tiny by comparison, her expression severe, her hair a different shade of red. Still, her diminutive size in no way reduced the aura of authority the older woman projected as she walked into the office as if it was still her own.
"Hello, Diane," Conroy said respectfully.
"Spare me the pleasantries," Beckman ordered. "Why wasn't I informed about the Ebony One breakout?"
"Well, for one thing," Conroy said reasonably, "you're retired and no longer cleared for such information. How did you find out that about that?"
"Spare me the bullshit, too," Beckman snapped. "I still have my sources, and they keep me up to date. But it took days before I found out, and I should have been informed immediately, and we both know why. Furthermore, I'm told that Prisoner #54 was extracted. You should have informed me about that immediately and personally, Linda!"
Conroy swallowed nervously. She had been hoping to keep Beckman in the dark about that.
I should have known better, Conroy admitted to herself.
"It's not just him," Conroy admitted to her predecessor, former mentor, and former friend. "It was both of them. They extracted him and #48 as well."
Beckman's eyes widened slightly.
"What are you doing about it?"
"Everything I can," Conroy said. "Which I must admit is not much at the moment. We still have no idea who is behind this or why or how."
"You know he'll be coming after me," Beckman said, her voice level and steady. If the prospect frightened her, she showed little sign of it. Conroy had to admire Beckman's steely self-control, in spite of herself. "You should have informed me that same day. Now they've had time to cover their tracks."
"The Committee is divided," Conroy admitted. "Half of them are paralyzed with fear of all this going public, and the other half are split between wetting themselves with fear of what might be behind this or impulsive overreactions. I've managed to keep a lid on for now, but they might yet do something crazy!"'
"There's no chance, no chance at all, that they extracted them by accident along with someone else they were really after?"
"None," Conroy said. "They went straight toward the appropriate cells, they knew exactly where they would be and it went off like clockwork. They knew who they were after.
"So they knew Langston Graham is alive," Beckman said thoughtfully. "And General McKee, as well."
One of the deepest, darkest secrets of the American intelligence community, shared by only a handful of officials at the very center of that intricate web, was that the former director of the CIA, Langston Graham, had not died in the explosion that had destroyed the Beta Intersect AI complex back in 2008. Oh, he had come very close to dying, that explosion had been impressive. But he had survived, and he had been deposed in what amounted to a 'palace coup' orchestrated by Diane Beckman, and held as a secret prisoner ever since. With him was Beckman's predecessor as head of the secret branch of the NSA, General Wendy McKee, who had also been deposed by Beckman a few months before that incident with the second Intersect AI.
Linda Conroy was one of the handful of people who did know those facts, in part because she had helped Beckman to carry out the secret (and highly illegal) coup.
Not that they had any room to talk, between the two of them they had twisted the law into a pretzel and they were frankly out of control. They were both tied to the inner core of FULCRUM, not that we knew that at the time. It took a near-miracle for Diane to bring them down, without bringing us all down with them!
And now they're both loose...
"FULCRUM never completely died," Conroy finally said. "We both know that."
"Too well," Beckman agreed severely. "But I had hoped that we had mortally wounded it when the Ring was destroyed. It might limp along for a while, and it looked as if that was happening. But..."
"But you think we were wrong, and now so do I," Conroy admitted. "FULCRUM has obviously survived and at least partially recovered. It's almost certainly them who were behind the Ebony One jailbreak, for that matter. The whole operation has all their hallmarks."
"We should have killed them both," Beckman said, apparently heedless of the automatic recording devices in the office. Conroy was sure that when the discussion was over, all those recorders would have to show for this conversation would be static. Beckman would not be speaking so freely if she did not have confidence that she could do so safely.
"But the Committee always resisted that," Conroy nodded. "Looking back, that might mean FULCRUM influence even then. If they really have renewed their full extent of penetration, that would explain how they could carry out such an extraction so smoothly. To say nothing of why we're being hamstrung now with foot-dragging and interference from our own ranks trying to investigate this."
"We need to make a list of who has to be told, and quickly," Beckman said to her former subordinate in a voice that suggested that retired or not, she expected her orders to be carried out. Under other circumstances, Conroy might have protested...but not now. Not in this situation.
"Are you going to tell Carmichael?" Conroy asked, knowing that Beckman had a more civil relationship with Carmichael than most of the intelligence community did. "He brought them down before."
"Oh, I'll tell him, all right," Beckman said, then smiled slightly. "And he'll say 'I told you so'."
A CIA-affiliated medical complex in Austin, TX, 1:25 p.m. local time...
The woman who walked into the lobby and strode up to the front desk looked as if she thought she owned the clinic, and the expression on her beautiful face was one of impatience. Every man in the room noticed her immediately, though she was clearly a mature woman, she retained the beauty of youth and combined it with the poise of maturity. The woman's curly dark hair was set off by the grey dress she wore, a dress that clung in all the right places, and had a hemline that in fact several inches too short to really qualify as 'office appropriate'.
"What do you mean, you don't have the paperwork?" the brunette demanded, "it should have been here days ago!"
"I'm sorry ma'am," the flustered young man behind the desk said, torn between trying to figure out how to mollify the woman with the complaint about the bill she claimed she should not have received, and also trying not to notice how much cleavage the woman's dress was showing. Within a few minutes, most of the rest of the reception staff was equally occupied. While most of them were women, they too were somewhat distracted by the brunette's outfit and attitude, if only out of irritation with her.
"Zondra's got 'em occupied," Sarah whispered to Carina, as the blonde and the redhead slipped into the building through a side entrance. "She should be able to keep them busy for a few minutes, anyway."
While the clinic was affiliated with the CIA, it was still a private facility, and its personnel were not CIA officers or agents of any sort, but doctors, nurses, and clerical staff. It was the work of moments for Sarah and Carina to disable to alarms on what should have been a locked entrance, and by now even the doctors and nurses had been drawn down to the uproar in the lobby. They would only have a few minutes, but that ought to be all they needed.
They made their way into a currently-empty office, and Carina began working to bypass the security (such as it was) on the digital records, while Sarah riffled through the hard copy in the cabinets.
"Got it," they both said almost in unison, and laughed.
"Looks like you really did have appendicitis, Carina," Sarah said, looking down at the papers in her hand.
"Files here say the same thing," Carina nodded, gesturing at the screen. "But it also mentions that there was a change of surgeons at the last minute, the man scheduled to take my cute little appendix out got called away on an emergency call at the last moment, and they had to bring in a guy from another facility to finish the surgery. Says his name was Dr. Ben Travers, fifty bucks says there's no such person. They certainly never said anything to me about the switch!"
Both women looked at the picture on the screen, showing a doctor, with ID badge, probably in his late thirties. Sandy hair, green eyes, and built well for a doctor.
"No bet," Sarah nodded. "That's how they did it. Your having a hot appendix was just a convenient opportunity that they took advantage of to plant that little surprise in your belly, just like me being sliced in that fight in Poland. Damn it, it makes me want to track someone down and smash his teeth in!"
"At least we have a face, if not a real name," Carina said, as she downloaded a copy of her files from the computer onto a memory stick. "I must admit, he's kind of cute for an unethical weasel. We'd better wrap it up, we're pretty close to the edge of our time window!"
Getting out was no harder than getting in had been, even allowing for covering their tracks. A few minutes later, all three Senior CATs were speeding away in a rental car, making for the airport.
Naples, Italy, 9:15 p.m. local time...
\"So when might my companion and I contact our embassy?"\ 'Arkady Agapov' asked Elaine Carmichael, as they sat together across a small table in a comfortable room somewhere in the urban confusion that was Naples.
\"That depends on whether you're prepared to cooperate with us in a small venture,"\ Ellie replied in Russian.
\"Come now, Ms. Carmichael,\ Agapov said, \"we both know how this is played. It's not in either of our interests to drag it out."\
\"You're right, of course,"\ Ellie replied smoothly. \"One way or the other, we're going to have to turn you over to your people. But we both also know that there are various 'acceptable' ways to go about that, and some of them are much more pleasant than others.
\"We already know that Mrs. Nachera was an asset,\ Ellie went on, \"and that the attempt to take control of Nachera Shipping was based on the fact that you had an asset in place already. But why is the SVR bothering with trying to take over an Italian shipping company in the first place? Answer me that, give me an answer I can believe, and we might expedite contact with the Russian Embassy."\
Agapov hesitated. Ellie waited, keeping her face as expressionless as she could, though she found the entire situation to be immensely frustrating.
Between the now-cooperative Francesca Nachera, and the things they had uncovered using what they told her, Ellie and her people now had a fairly good picture of the 'what' that had led Mr. Nachera to hire them in the first place. For some reason, the Russian Federation's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, had decided to infiltrate and take control of a shipping company with links and connections in southern Europe and Turkey and the Levant. They had wanted one that was not too big and not too small, with regular runs across the region and a home base on the Mediterranean Sea.
There had been many possible candidates, in cities as far apart as Cartagena in Spain, Marseilles in France, and Tel Aviv in Israel. The Nachera family firm had been chosen mostly because of the lucky break (from the Russian point of view) that they already a long-term asset inside it, married to the head of the company.
Mrs. Nachera had been recruited in university, back in 1971. At the time, Communism had held a Romantic appeal to many young people in many Western countries, and the KGB had recruited a naïve and idealistic Francesca when she was only 19 years old. They had used her sparingly, and with a certain amount of consideration, and her handlers had been clever enough to hold her emotional ties even when the Soviet Union collapsed and took the revolutionary idealism of 1917 into history's trash bin.
When they had approached her about the project, the plan had been to intimidate her kin into letting the SVR, in the guise of organized crime, move in and take over. The plan would have left neither her husband nor any of her other relatives in any physical danger, though they would have lost control of a family business that had been in the Nachera family for generations. When her husband and sons had proved harder to sway than intended, the plan had escalated into an abduction, but by then Mr. Nachera had hired Carmichael Industries, and they had frustrated the abduction. The decision had been made to remove Mr. Nachera permanently in hopes of swaying his sons afterward, but again, C.I. had frustrated that plan as well, and turned Mrs. Nachera in the process.
Shortly after that, C.I. operatives had performed an abduction of their own, capturing Agapov and his bodyguard, Svetlana Bortnik. At that point, things became sticky and complicated and frustrating for everyone concerned.
Though C.I. had frustrated an abduction and an attempted murder plot, both certainly criminal acts, they had done so by means that were no more legal. Further, even if they could have turned Agapov and Bortnik over to the Italian authorities, the resulting embarrassment and public revelations would have led to the SVR retaliating in kind. It would rapidly have escalated into a blood bath, and everyone involved knew that.
There were certain unwritten, but definite, rules that governed interactions in the shadow world. Just because activities were illegal did not mean that they followed no rules or restrictions at all. Indeed, sometimes the unwritten laws were the ones one could least get away with breaking.
Agapov had not been roughed up, drugged, or otherwise coercively interrogated. He had been connected to a high-end physiological analysis system to test for truth, those were not perfectly reliable, but the ones used by the intelligence agencies were fairly accurate, and the C.I. versions were more so. Agapov had been reasonably cooperative, answering their questions readily enough. So far, so much in accordance with the unwritten rules.
In the meantime, Svetlana Bortnik had been less cooperative, more inclined to 'clam up', in the American idiom...until Mary Bartowski had entered the room with her for a brief discussion with Casey. Ellie still remembered watching that scene on the video screen, it had been deeply disturbing in an innocuous kind of way.
Casey had known Ms. Bortnik from several previous encounters, going back over several years of his service with the NSA and Verbanski's company. When describing her to the rest of the C.I. senior personnel, Casey had said, "Think of her as a Russian Sarah Walker, and you won't be too far wrong."
She had more or less lived up to that, it was obvious that she respected Casey, but not that she was particularly intimidated by him. Of course she knew as well as Agapov did that they had to return her more-or-less intact and unhurt, but even so, few people were totally unaffected by John Casey's glower. She appeared to be one of them, however.
Then Mary Bartowski had come into the room...and the 'Russian Sarah Walker' had blanched pale, her eyes widening, and Ellie had seen her lips form the word 'Frost'. John Casey and his threats, implied or explicit, did not scare her, but a momentary sight of Ellie's mother left her shaking in her seat and struggling to control her tells. A few minutes later, Bortnik was cooperating willingly. Mary had not threatened her, not implied anything, she had mere walked into the room to speak with Casey for a moment...and just the sight of her had totally shattered the control of a 'Russian Sarah Walker'.
What exactly went on during those years when she was under cover in Russia? Ellie asked herself for what might have been the millionth time. Mary Bartowski had never really discussed it in any detail with her children, and Ellie was torn between intense curiosity and an uncertainty about whether she really wanted to know.
But either way, Mary's contacts in Russia had certainly come in useful over the last few days!
Mary had called in some of those contacts, and learned some things about the operation against the Nachera company...and what she had learned did not match what Agapov had said. In fact, some of the people Mary contacted, people in very high positions within the Russian intelligence community, claimed to have no idea that there even was any kind of operation going on against any shipping companies in Italy. Mary was fairly sure that her contacts were being truthful.
Yet Ellie and her people were fairly sure that Agapov and Bortnik were also telling them the truth. On balance, they suspected that someone in the SVR chain of command had set this operation into motion, without orders or approval from the highest levels, and that Agapov and Bortnik (and the others involved) had simply been executing their mission orders. Which was, from Ellie's point of view, both good and bad. It was bad in that it added additional complications to the situation, it was good in that it meant that there was a chance they could at least resolve their client's issues without taking on the entire Russian state in a hopeless battle.
Which brought them to the meeting Elaine Carmichael was current having with their oh-so-cooperative prisoner, Mr. Agapov.
Agapov shrugged and admitted that he really did not know why the SVR was interested in the Nachera lines, only that they were. Ellie had expected that answer, and more or less believed it, in light of the other things they had discovered.
\"What do you want?"\ he asked.
\"We want you to cut all ties with Mrs. Nachera,"\ Ellie said. \"She's of no further use to your organization as an asset, and she's no longer a liability, either. Everything she could leak has already leaked. Cut ties and close the file."\
\"That wouldn't be my final decision to make,"\ Agapov commented.
\"Of course not,"\ 'Elaine Carmichael' agreed equably. \"But we both know that as her handler, your recommendation will carry a great deal of weight. Probably enough to settle the issue. We want no further contact, and no prejudicial action on your organization's part, of any sort. Let her go."\
\"So she lives happily ever after?"\ Agapov asked, raising one eyebrow sardonically.
\"That would be her business, not yours,"\ Elly said to him calmly, hiding her anger behind a practiced poker face.
Happily ever after? Ellie thought to herself. Hardly. She and her husband are divorcing, after 45 years of marriage. I suppose I can't blame him, she was planning to murder him, after all! Her children are not speaking to her, it's entirely possible she'll be alone for the rest of her life, though I think she might repair her relations with her kids eventually. But there's no guarantee. But at least maybe we can give them the chance.
\"I assume you want more than just that,"\ Agapov said. \"Or you wouldn't be taking this much trouble. You could have lodged that demand by phone with my superiors."\
\"Yes, we want something else,"\ Ellie said. \"In fact, you should be receiving a phone call any moment now, which is why we're returned your phone-"\
In that exact moment, his cell phone rang. He looked at her with a nod of appreciation at her timing, and answered it, and spoke for a few moments, and then listened. He listened for quite some time, and when the call ended, he looked at his captor with a new...not exactly respect. More like recognition, or wary deference.
\"That was one of my superiors, as I'm sure you know,"\ Agapov said slowly. \"I am instructed to consider you my Agent in Charge for a new operation. I take it that the SVR and Carmichael Industries are about to engage in a joint action?"\
\"That's the plan, Mr. Agapov,"\ Ellie said, smiling slightly. \"Get ready, the transport to take you and Ms. Bortnik to the Russian Embassy should be here within the hour. You'll be briefed more extensively there, but I think you and your associate should be prepared to travel."
After Agapov was escorted out, Ellie took out her cell phone, and called Casey. "Stubborn Mule, White Gold here. The game is on."
"All right," she heard Casey reply. "I'll pack my bags, and tell Mary and the others to do the same. Moscow here we come! It's been a long time since I visited Commie City, this is gonna be fun!"
TO BE CONTINUED...