A/N: Maybe we'll take a poll on the FB page where folks can say who they would like to see owning Chuck. After the last arc, I'm pretty sure I won't poll very well at all.
A/N2: Welcome to the twenty-fourth arc of our story. I'm calling it the Szell arc. It is very loosely based on Chuck versus the Baby (Season 5, episode 8). Aw, who am I kidding? Other than the fact that it concerns Ryker's (and his backers') search for Molly (Bora), it has practically nothing to do with canon.
A/N3: In story time, the Baby events have been simmering in the background for a few months (February into July, 2008) and I've been dribbling out bits and pieces over many chapters. I thought it might be helpful to give a bit of a recap of what we know so far and to remind everyone of who these players are.
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RECAP: Istvan Szell, the third richest man in Hungary, seems to want Bora Kossuth, known to us as Molly O'Donnell, dead for some reason. He is pressuring a spy from the Információs Hivatal (the Hungarian equivalent of the CIA) named Jozsef Fodor to accomplish that task. Fodor has arranged for his niece, Anna Horn, to work in the offices of Andor Farkas, the lawyer for the Kossuth estate. (Fodor murdered the woman who had held the job previously.) Anna has agreed to alert her Uncle Jozsef if any promising leads develop in the search for Bora. Although there have been multiple calls regarding sightings of the baby, none of the callers knew of Molly's birthmark and the sightings haven't led to her being found (notwithstanding a large reward). Meanwhile, Emma, Sarah's mom, has taken Molly away from their home in Ardmore, Pennsylvania to parts unknown.
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Budapest, Hungary
Anna was relieved that she worked in one of the newer office buildings with decent air-conditioning. The sirocco was blowing up from the Sahara into Europe and the whole continent was baking. It was uncomfortable coming to work in the morning, and would be again going home in the evening, but while she was at work it was perfectly fine.
The phone on her desk rang.
"Farkas úr irodája," she said. [Mr. Farkas's office.]
A woman with an American accent asked, "Do you speak English?"
Anna said, "Yes. I do."
"Is this the lawyer's office? To get the reward for the baby? For finding the baby?"
"Yes, Ma'am. But I'm afraid Mr. Farkas is on a conference call at the moment. Would you like to leave a message and he can call you back when he's finished?"
Ignoring what Anna had said, the woman continued. "I think I found the baby. She's...well, I think I found her. How do I get the money?"
"Ma'am, we have had many callers about the child in the last few months and all of them have been mistaken so far, I'm afraid. There's a birthmark, though..."
"Yes. Of course, that makes sense. The birthmark. It's shaped like a heart and is on the back of her right thigh. I saw it at the store."
Suddenly excited, Anna said, "Ma'am, thank you. Hold on for a moment, please. I'm going to interrupt Mr. Farkas."
"No. I have to go. I'll call back," the woman said. She sounded nervous, as if someone else came into the room. The line disconnected.
Anna pushed a few buttons on her computer and listened to the call, which had been automatically recorded. It was a clear recording. This was the first caller who knew about the birthmark. She could hardly wait to tell Mr. Farkas.
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[Conversations in this scene occur in Hungarian.]
Budapest, Hungary
It was a few hours later. Mr. Farkas had been very interested in the call they had received. He asked Anna to forward it to their contact at the Rendőrség, the national police. She had done that and the policeman had told her to let them know when the woman called back.
With that done, she called her Uncle Jozsef using the phone he'd given her. He answered the phone on the third ring, announcing, "Jozsef Fodor."
"Hi, Uncle Jozsef, it's Anna."
"Well, hello. My favorite niece. What can I do for you, little one?" He sounded cheerful as always.
"You know you always want to know if anything happens in the search for Bora?"
Suddenly much more interested, he said, with a chuckle, "Of course. I'd love to claim it's just my position as a civil servant that..."
Anna started to giggle. "You mean a spy, Uncle," she said.
Uncle Jozsef pretended to be annoyed at that, "...You'll make me lose my job throwing that word around and I need the pension, my dear. What I was going to say is that I'm as curious as anyone else and hopeful to find the poor little thing safe and sound. The difference is that my organization can actually do something about it."
"That's why I called you. We got a promising call today. An American woman. Or at least speaking American English. She knew about the birthmark."
"Really, Anna? Is this the first? The first call that knew about the mark?"
"Well, it's the first we've received here. I don't know what the police have, but it's the first one we know of."
"Can you send me the recording? I'll get it to the police for you."
"Oh, I sent it to them already. They just told me to call them if the woman called back."
"Lazy beggars, they are. I'm glad you sent it to them," he lied, "but it's going to be much more useful for us to get it."
"Sure, Uncle. Here you go," she pulled up the recording and her uncle's contact information.
"One moment, Anna. My work email has been acting funny lately. They are running some new security protocols. Please send it to this email instead." He gave her a new email address to use. A few moments later he said, "Wonderful. I have it here. Thank you, Anna. Now let's see if we can bring little Bora home to people who love her."
"Bye, Uncle Jozsef. Good luck."
"Thank you for your help, dear."
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[Conversations in this scene occur in Hungarian.]
Budapest, Hungary
Fodor knocked on the door of the apartment in a rundown Budapest neighborhood. The plain gray buildings had been built during the time of the Communists and were ugly utilitarian structures, rapidly falling apart. This door was like the hundreds of others in the building.
Then he knocked again. Then he knocked again.
Finally, an unshaven and wild haired young man opened the door to him. "Fodor? Why are you getting me out of bed at the crack of dawn?" A noisy air-conditioning unit in the window struggled valiantly with the heat.
"It's after 11AM, you worthless piece of shit. Get up, Gregor."
"So early? Ugghhh," the man tried to close the door on Fodor, who easily muscled it open and pushed his way inside, closing the door behind him.
"You have to do something for me," Fodor declared.
"Always, I have to do something for you. Why should this time be any different?" the younger man said, shuffling across the untidy apartment to the kitchen. He looked over his shoulder and asked, "Coffee?"
"Only if the cups are clean," said Fodor with a little trepidation.
Gregor gave a short bark of laughter and got the coffee started. That task done he came back into the room and said, "Give me a moment to pee and wash my face." He headed to the door on the other side of the large room.
"And your hands," said Fodor.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," said Gregor on his way out.
A couple of minutes later, he was back, looking more awake.
"What's up, Jozsef?"
Fodor handed the man a thumb drive. "This has the recording of a phone call that came into the lawyer for the Kossuth estate. I want to find out where it came from."
Gregor got his computer working and plugged in the drive. Together the men listened to the call. "Why not just wait for the woman to call back?" Gregor asked.
"And what if she doesn't?" Gregor just shrugged and grunted in response.
"What's the number at the lawyer's office?" Fodor told him.
"Ok. Just a second," Gregor got up to go to the kitchen. "How do you like your coffee?"
"Black, one sugar, please," Fodor responded.
Coming back with coffees for both of them, Gregor sat back at his computer, putting his coffee mug down beside it.
"OK, I've hacked into the phone company. The call definitely came from the United States, western part, but I can't tell more than that."
"Oh, come on, Gregor. You've done better than that for me in the past," complained Fodor.
"Yeah. I have. But this is a landline call. Different system. Best I can do is the western US. But I have another idea. Did you hear the background noise when the woman was speaking?"
"No, not really," said Fodor. "My old ears aren't as good as your younger ones."
Gregor replayed the recording at a higher volume and slowed it down. He isolated the piece he wanted to listen to carefully. At that volume they could tell that there was a radio playing the background as the woman spoke. It sounded like American country music. Just as the woman caller said she would have to call back, the station announced its call sign -
"KRAI"
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[The conversations in this scene occur in Spanish]
Coban, Guatemala
Kiernan Ryker sat on a stool next to the bar and sipped a beer. It would be his only beer for the evening. After closing time, he would drink for real, a good bit of a bottle of gin. The beer was a mere prop to make the people he was observing less nervous. It didn't make good business sense to have the customers too nervous.
He watched as the young women flirted with the men around the bar and eventually took them upstairs one by one. After a half hour or so, the men would come back downstairs, satisfied with the business arrangement and the services they had received. They would pay Galina and leave. After a little while longer, the young woman would come back downstairs and the process would start over. It usually began at about 8PM and lasted until 2 or 3 AM when the last customers would stagger out.
His job was to be the muscle for the whorehouse. Galina had hired him when she heard about his situation. Galina Lenkov, Russian ex-SVB agent, and now proprietress of this whorehouse in the middle of nowhere, had taken pity on him. She knew the gnawing fear that went with being the subject of a termination order firsthand. Together, the two of them could hide out here and hope no one would notice them.
It's not like the police were going to bother them. The ones who weren't regular customers were paid to look away. And Ryker's job was easy otherwise. The occasional drunk to be thrown out. The occasional payment dispute. He'd been there almost a year and only once had a knife pulled on him. The man had regretted it. Sometimes a bit of discipline for an unruly woman, but Galina generally handled that herself.
Ryker sighed. Stuck in the middle of nowhere working in a whorehouse. Only a year ago, he had been a rising star in the CIA. Chief of Station in Budapest. And now his entire life was shit. And it was all due to that fucking bitch Sarah Walker. When the opportunity presented itself, he was going to kill her. He wouldn't do it quickly. No sniper's bullet for her. She would suffer a long, long time before he allowed her the mercy of death. That Carmichael man wouldn't even recognize what was left of her body when he was finished with her. Or maybe he'd kill Carmichael first and make her watch. Make her watch as he died screaming and only then start on her. He smiled slightly to himself. That was a nice thought.
His hatred of Walker was legitimately earned, he believed. But she wasn't the only one he hated. That prick Fodor wouldn't give him even a portion of the money he'd earned. Some money at this point wouldn't erase the termination order, but it would give him many more options for living a comfortable and relatively safe life.
It's not like he completely blamed Fodor. The operation had been completely messed up. First, the men he'd hired to kill the Kossuth family had left the baby alive. And then, when he'd sent in Walker to kill those men to eliminate his connection to the family's murder, she'd found the baby living and refused the kill order. Just fucking refused. She was supposed to follow orders, Godammit. She was the fucking Ice Queen. The deadliest assassin in the CIA's roster. And she'd just told him to fuck off. When he confronted her about taking the baby, he'd barely escaped with his life. He rolled his shoulder. The Bulgarian underground doctors had done a fine job on it and he was back to full fighting form. And then the bitch's report to Graham, whatever she'd said, had resulted in his termination order. He'd changed his appearance by shaving his head and growing a beard, but that was a pretty meaningless effort. Facial recognition wouldn't be fooled by that level of disguise.
So here he was with nothing. No money but what Galina gave him and what he'd saved in his offshore accounts. Many contacts afraid to deal with him. No prospects. Always looking over his shoulder. If he didn't get an ulcer, he'd probably drink himself to death. The only thing he could do was keep an eye, from a distance, on Walker and see if she made contact with whoever had the baby. Not easy to keep an eye on Walker, though. He was afraid to personally spend too much time in the States himself, for fear of being recognized. And Walker was totally switched-on. She'd catch sight of casual surveillance in a heartbeat. And if she didn't, her partners would, this new super-team she was running with...Carmichael and his people. His few remaining contacts in Langley were telling him to stay the fuck away from them if he wanted to keep breathing. Telling him that this was the elite of the elite of the elite. So, he had to make do with the rumors and gossip he could pick up from old friends who would, sometimes grudgingly, still talk to him. There was nothing about Walker having a baby anywhere around her.
So, obviously, she'd done the smart thing last year and dropped the baby with someone and then stayed the fuck away. The way Ryker figured it, he'd underestimated the bitch. When told to kill the baby, she'd figured out instantly that her mission into the mansion wasn't sanctioned and therefore the value of the dead baby. And she'd been pissed at him for not cutting her in on the upside...for just treating her like any other stupid CIA drone and trying to get her special services for free. If he'd had to do it all over again, he'd have just been upfront with her and offered her a few hundred thousand to hit the mansion. He'd been penny-wise and pound-foolish. But it was too late now.
The night was ending and he watched the girls clean up. Galina came over and gave him a kiss. She said, "I'm heading into the office. Give me about five minutes and then send in Renata. I need to talk to her."
"OK," he said. He waited a few minutes and then told Renata to head into the office to see Galina. The young girl, still a teenager, looked at him with alarm and started to shake with fear. He knew what she was going to do before she did herself. By the time she tried to bolt through the door to the street, he was already two steps ahead of her. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her whimpering to the office to face Galina. The other girls looked on with a variety of expressions, everything from boredom to hatred, but fear predominated. He slammed the door behind the girl and stood with his back to it.
He had just heard the first scream from Renata when his phone rang. The burner phone to Fodor. They had been in touch with each other every few weeks since the debacle in Budapest. Just keeping each other up to date on any intel about the missing Bora. Ryker rarely enjoyed the calls. Fodor had been quite critical of Ryker's judgment in matters of the selection and employment of subcontractors.
"Yes?"
"We have a lead on the baby. I'm giving you an opportunity to finish the job you got last year and finally earn the money we discussed."
"Thank you, Jozsef," said Ryker.
"The child was spotted in the States and we got a call. The caller hung up before we could get a number or an address, but in the background there was a radio station playing. Call sign KRAI, a country music station in Northwestern Colorado. Town called Craig. About nine thousand people. Shouldn't be too tough to find a new baby in a town that small. Go find that fucking baby and kill the little bitch. And remember we need the body as proof and for a DNA test. Drop it off at the Hungarian consulate in Los Angeles. I'll make sure it gets the needed attention."
"My pleasure, Jozsef. My pleasure."
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A/N4: The men hunting Molly (Bora) are smart and ruthless. But they are not smarter than Chuck and they are not more ruthless than Sarah and Casey. It's not even close. Stay tuned.