A/N For the benefit of those who don't know, there's a Facebook group for Chuck Fanfiction, and we'd love to have some new members.
"That's the beauty of it."
"It's a tricky language."
"At least I am not a traitor."
"We'll see."
Castle...
Chuck rested his head against his hands, rubbing his eyes tiredly. It wasn't as rude as it sounds. "You know, Carina, while we do call them 'cleaner teams' they aren't really expected to have to clean anything."
"They clean up our messes on someone else' turf," corrected Casey. "Not someone else' mess on ours. They have to sanitize both trucks thanks to you."
The answer was a few seconds in coming, since Carina was using a sat-phone from a great distance away. "Hey, it wasn't my alley. If Gaez had spent five minutes cleaning it–ever–there wouldn't be a problem now. He left all that s-tuff there, it's only fair he take some of it away."
Chuck dropped his hands and glared at the phone. "In his pants?"
Delay. "Don't worry about it, Chuckles, he'll be fitted for an orange jumpsuit before you know it. Then they can burn those pants. And the shirt. I think they can salvage the tie."
"Uh-huh," said Casey, pretty sure he knew what she'd done with the tie. "What about Amy?"
"She gets a jumpsuit too."
Chuck smirked. "I'm hearing undertones of 'and a life in solitary if there's any justice at all, party that, bitch' in your voice."
Carina sounded impressed. She didn't hate smirkers as much as Sarah did but she couldn't see this one."You have very good hearing."
"Thank you."
"I meant what about the betrayal," said Casey. "Who was she betraying, and who was she betraying them to?" Not that he was against opening that can of worms, but he needed a different set of weapons first.
Carina's voice was almost unrecognizable in the static. "No firm idea, but it sounded like Gaez, with Sarah a freebie. Amy wouldn't have known that was Sarah, I almost didn't and I had a picture."
Casey drew a line through one of the options on his decision tree. Amy as lover/protector was out, so what was she instead? "Sarah knew her right enough."
"We were all on a team together, the CATS. We broke up because we suspected a mole, but we couldn't determine who it was."
Grunt #34, 'Mystery Solved'. "Hence the concussion." He started adding more branches to his tree.
"I said I was sorry, but they still wouldn't let me ride in the truck to get any more out of her."
"Like her intestines," said Casey. He hated a lot of things, but traitors most of all, and Amy was a multiple traitor.
"They probably wanted her to survive the trip," said Chuck. "This surprises you?"
A slightly longer pause than light-speed lag would account for. "Do I have to be honest?"
"You're representing your country in an official capacity."
"You're no fun. Fine, I'm not surprised, but I hope she has a really big headache."
"Most people do, from that brand of wine," said Casey, who knew it well. "But they usually drink it first."
"So, toxic waste dumps aside," said Chuck, trying to wrap things so he could get back to work, "You caught a terrorist-for-hire, uncovered a traitor, and saved Orion some work. He was all for digging into the whole CATS debacle, to save the wedding. Now he doesn't have to."
"If he's really all that anxious to dig into that mess, there is something he can do for me..."
The woman in black looked up as the door banged open on the landing above her. "I've got movement on level 9," said the guard. She looked down and saw her shadow in the alarm lighting.
She leapt down and opened the door to the floor below. She should have time to lose herself in the offices here before the guard on this level could get–"Stop right there!"
She didn't, pulling back as the tines of a taser pistol embedded themselves in the wall behind where she'd just been. God-dammit! What the hell kind of a guard rotation are they on? If that guard had been any more experienced she'd be down and twitching right now.
She should have aborted.
No time like the present.
The first step in her abort plan was to attack. The guard's taser was discharged. It would be no threat to her until he removed the cartridge and either attacked her with it as a contact weapon or swapped in a new cartridge. Or he could drop it and use a different weapon.
She attacked him before he could do any of those things, his position given away by the loud clicking of the weapon. She was faster, smarter, more experienced, and more desperate, and he stood no chance against her. He had a gun to go with the taser, but he never went for it, and neither did she once he was down. Clearly they wanted her alive and relatively unharmed, and she would be a fool to force an escalation. She took the taser and popped the cartridge. A contact weapon but better than nothing.
Now she just had to get out.
On a plane somewhere...
Her phone went off in mid-flight. An attendant rushed up the aisle. "I'm sorry, miss..."
Rebecca Franco stared at her, and she shut up, backing away. Rebecca took the call, in violation of all airline safety protocols. Sue her. "Da?"
Volkoff didn't bother with a 'hello'. "He's supposed to be dead."
Rebecca continued in Russian, just in case. "If I had just been facing those buffoons he calls killers, he would be. There was an assassin in the alley, and the police behind her. I could do nothing except leave as they fought each other."
In Moscow...
Frost looked over at Alexei, reaching out to mute the phone. "Her?"
Alexei shrugged. His assassins in the Americas were all male. He left the puzzle to Frost as he unmuted his phone and turned his attention back to his newest employee.
Mid-air...
"You could have killed him."
Rebecca looked around, but apparently no one on this flight spoke Russian. "I wanted to play with him first. Make it look...personal."
"I didn't want it to look personal."
"Yes you did, you just didn't want it to look like you. I would have made it look like me. Let those fools in the ETA–"
"Eyes forward, Miss Franco," said Frost.
Rebecca's tone needed no translation, causing several within earshot to shudder. "I have killed people for speaking that way to me."
Moscow...
"Need I remind you you both work for me?" asked Alexei. He paused a bit. Frost sat still in her chair, the phone silent. "Much better. Now, Rebecca...dear...upon your return you are not to come back to this office. Instead, you will go to this address–" Frost worked her phone for a second and nodded "–and wait there for new instructions."
"Yes," said Rebecca in her darkest tones. "Sir."
"She's going to kill you," said Frost, as soon as the call disconnected.
"It sounded to me like she wants to kill you," said Alexei.
Frost stood up, a lot to do and never enough time to do it in. "She's like an armed and hostile three-year-old."
Volkoff laughed. "I should send her to America," he said. "She'd fit right in."
Orion looked up as his equipment pinged with an incoming message. From Sarah. He sighed. Even a good go-between was still a go-between, and he had little enough contact from his wife as it was. Oh, well, sauce for the goose...
Speaking of geese, here came a message from Charles. "Hello son."
"Hey Dad, we just finished a debrief with Carina–"
"I just got got another communication from Sarah," said Orion. "It's about the Black Hats." He thought he heard an echo from his speaker. "Excuse me, did you just say it was about the Black Hats?"
"Yes, did you?"
"Amazing."
"Fantastic. Yes, we were talking about Amy–"
"About Amy? Isn't that amazing?"
"Fantastic..."
Speaking of geese...
"What do you have for us, C?"
The question was civil, the tone was less so. It implied that once their objectives were achieved the apportionment of the spoils might be reevaluated.
"Your advice to spread our net wider was very good," said Clyde Decker, ever so tactfully. "We found our missing crime scene about as far from London as you can get and still be in Britain."
"Which was where?" asked B.
"Somerset, on the Welsh border. An obscure manor with of no significance whatsoever, except that on the night of a masked ball fundraiser, a few days ago, the lady of the manor was gunned down while taking care of her horse."
Perfect silence reigned. Decker sat back calmly to wait.
"A horse?" asked E.
"Correct," said Decker snidely.
"What makes you think–?"
Decker broke in with gusto. "Did I mention that the killers of the unfortunate young lady were also found on scene? They'd been gunned down where they stood, from behind. The one with the two bullets in his head was eventually identified as one Boris Kaminsky."
"Volkoff's lieutenant?"
"I feel it's safe to say no. Not any more."
"Who was this lady?" asked A.
"On paper she was Miss Vivian MacArthur, equestrienne and very little else."
"Kaminsky wouldn't have gone after her if that's all she was."
"True," said B. "Kaminsky also wouldn't have killed her. She was no threat to him, especially with a team there. It's unprofessional."
"So is Walker," said C. "That leaves Vivian or the horse, and I doubt it was the horse."
"So Vivian is the on-paper ditz she appears to be?" asked A.
"I can believe that," said B. "But afterward? That wasn't Walker. She would never have taken Kaminsky and his men down to the ground like that."
"Not unless she had all the answers she needed, and wanted everyone to think it wasn't a pro hit," said E.
"So Vivian isn't the on-paper ditz she appears to be," said A.
"Oh, she's a ditz, all right," said C. "She just isn't the ditz she appears to be. Forensic evidence indicates an item taken from around her neck post-mortem, and photographic records indicate a locket of some kind, worn almost continuously."
"A secret caretaker," murmured B.
"Whose locket?" asked A.
"Unknown at this time. Both the locket and Walker vanished from the scene."
"So you still don't know where she is."
"I didn't say that," said Decker. "Have any of you been following the news out of Interpol lately?"
The lady in black slammed into the back stairwell, alarmed but who would notice with all the alarms. She ran up a few flights, getting out her grapple and launcher. The clip was already hooked to her belt. Just fire, zip, and she'd be gone.
She leaned out over the railing, but the angle was bad. These stairs were too close together. She climbed up on the railing to get a straight-up shot.
As she fired her grapple upward she heard a door bang open. "We got him, control!"
Get this, your sexist pig! She triggered the retractor on the cable.
He fired his taser.
One prong went into the armor on her back. The other prong went into her leg. Current arced through the muscles of her lower back and legs. She stiffened, throwing her self off balance, clutching the grapple gun desperately.
The guard, not seeing the grapple gun, dropped his taser when he saw her start to fall and ran to grab her legs. His additional weight on the line pulled the grapple loose from its mooring up above. The intruder's upper body continued to fall, bending at the waist, but the legs were facing the wrong way and wouldn't bend any more. The intruder tipped forward, pulling the guard off his feet. He hollered his bloody lungs out for help, hearing it coming up and down the ladder and doing his best to hold on until it reached him.
The intruder's upper body slammed into the railing on the stair below and went limp.
The address they'd given her was that of a rundown restaurant. A seat had a bottle of bad vodka and a note, offering Alexei's compliments. She sat in the seat and drank the vodka, waiting for contact. Her phone rang and she gratefully put the glass down. "What am I doing here?" she asked politely.
"Good evening, Rebecca," said Volkoff. "Tonight you will be playing a little game of mousetrap, in which you play the part of both mouse and trap. You will notice across the street a moderately high building, a perfect vantage point from which to spy on the very building in which you are sitting. Someone is in fact spying upon you right now, little mouse. Your job is to go across the street and spring the trap."
"What is the trap?"
"You are."
"Is the spy expected to survive this trap?"
"No. I'll be watching, too, so make it exciting. Have fun with it."
Rebecca Franco raised her gun and crept up on her prey, tall, brunette, female, standing by a window staring down at a place she no longer was. The woman must have seen her reflection in the glass, since just as she fired her weapon her target moved, kicking the pistol from Rebecca's hand as the bullet made a hole in the window. "Sloppy," said the brunette. "Are you the best he's got?"
"Guns are sloppy," said Rebecca. "Hands are better."
The brunette attacked, and Rebecca fended off her assault with ease. "Who are you?"
"I am not a priest, too bad for you," said Rebecca.
"Why is that?"
Rebecca smiled. "To make your peace with God, before you fall." She launched an attack of her own, driving her opponent around the room. Rebecca saw her employer and his men standing by the exit.
"I said I'd be watching, I didn't say from where." Volkoff picked up the fallen gun. "I'd offer to finish her for you, like a gentleman, but I suspect you'd only offer to kill me in exchange, so..." He waved. "Have at it."
Rebecca obliged him.
The leather-clad brunette staggered back, trying to stay away from the painting equipment stacked in the center of the room. Her attacker wasn't giving her any chance to put up much of a fight. Punches and kicks, mostly kicks, came in quick succession.
She punched her black-haired opponent in the face, sending her glasses flying, and got a hard-shove in return. She fetched up against a window with a hole in it, a wall of them the only thing between her and an eighty-foot drop to the ground below. The flurry of kicks stopped, and she glared at her attacker with undisguised loathing. "Is that all you got?"
Her enemy looked her in the face, her irises like little mirrored circles in her eyes. Zondra couldn't help it, she flinched. The black-haired attacker reached forward and grabbed her jacket, her shirt, and pulled her forward into a solid right cross that sent her reeling against the glass. It shattered and she fell.
Rebecca paused to catch her breath, then stepped forward to look down, seeing her enemy on the grass far below. Volkoff came up to stand beside her. One strong push could have killed them both. "Well done." He patted her shoulder fondly "Come on, let's go home."
Down below...
The fallen brunette–Zondra to her friends and "You!" to her enemies–waited until the trucks had gone away, leaving her shattered corpse to be discovered by some unfortunate passerby. She rolled over and looked up, at the window-washer's trolley hanging motionless from the roof of the building. She hadn't noticed it but Sarah had, and told her the plan right under the eyes of the enemy. They both knew she could handle a forty-foot fall easily, and she had, twice.
Zondra felt at her chest, and the sore spot underneath the data drive Sarah had slipped inside her bra, even as she sent her falling to her 'death'. All the details of her new mission, background, projections, covers. Under the eyes of the enemy. That girl was dynamite.
She was so glad they were friends again.
Yesterday, in Brazil...
Zondra stood up from the body of the man with the knife, as his target, the black-haired woman, approached. She was watchful, but not hostile. The woman seemed familiar, and any enemy of Gaez' could be a friend of hers. "Who was this?" she asked.
"Volkoff's assassin, sent to kill me once I did his bidding," said Rebecca, kicking the knife from his hand and away from herself.
Zondra raised her gun. "You work for Volkoff?" Why would Volkoff want to kill Gaez?
Rebecca raised her hands, wiping at her eyes, and Sarah looked back. "No," she said in her light voice. "I don't."
Zondra lowered the gun. "You're no traitor."
"No," said Sarah, "And neither are you. They're taking Amy away as we speak." She took a deep breath, staring down at the body of the assassin. "Which is too bad, because I could use a good traitor right about now." She flicked her eyes up, blue eyes, not those horrible yellow things, and smiled. "You busy?"
A/N2 A lot to do in this chapter, threads to end, plots to begin, and a bit of whimsy just because. I hope you'll tell me what you think because this is really hard and it's nice to hear.