A/N: Another shorter chapter, revealing more of Carina's exciting past and Chuck's personal motivation.
Chuck Versus Agent Insanity - Part II
Chapter XVI
Mingle With The Beasts
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Diego Garcia, The Calm Beach, on the inside rim, 17:15
'I talked to my father, Sarah,' Chuck started hesitantly. 'I mean, I needed to know whether this new Intersect, … this new version, if it can be removed, you know... whether I have this option before I decide ...'
'Oh ….' Sarah's voice was trembling, ' … and? What did he say?'
'He didn't know this time, nobody knows. With these new functions, … skills, … where more, other areas of the brain are involved, the motor functions, he just couldn't say. Nobody knows actually as he has talked to the creators of the new Intersect skills.' Chuck shook his head. 'So …'
'But...' Sarah interrupted, 'if they were able to remove it, Chuck, what would it be?'
'Well, if I had the choice, it's still the same, ... Intersect it is, Sarah,' Chuck gently smiled at her, 'it gives me purpose, after all these years.' Chuck swallowed hard. 'And we can be together, with you still having your career,' he flashed his softest smile at her, 'it's probably the best that could happen to us …'
'Yeah, yeah, maybe you're right.' she smiled back at him. 'I hope it's going to work when you need it.' she went on hesitantly.
'Actually, it does,' Chuck firmly said. 'First time it got activated was when you were in danger, … uh remember, … in the Intersect room? Then I went into this intersect mode when Casey was badmouthing you, then when Carina was testing it, pretending to be an enemy agent, and finally, when Ellie and Devon were in danger. So …'
'Yeah, yeah,' Sarah said, pondering on something. 'Maybe you're right.'
'Loook!' Chuck yelled, pointing at the water in front of them, 'Looks like a shark, … don't you think?' He was pointing several hundred feet away, exactly where the shallow waters ended and the sea was suddenly turning dark blue. 'I think it's a fin, uh … you know over there.'
Sarah reached for her back pocket and pulled out a small device, her hi-tech spy equivalent of binoculars and focused on the spot Chuck was pointing at. Then she turned to Chuck and smirked.
'Here, look for yourself.' She said while trying to contain her smile. 'It's indeed and shark fin, but a very special one.'
Chuck took Sarah's spy binocular and struggled to focus on the spot even though he had used it a couple of times before.
Yeah, it looked like a fin but it had an inscription on it.
'What the … ?' Chuck had started trying to read it.
'It's Casey's special underwater, scuba-dive, anti-shark, gear. Essentially it's a shark costume on the outside, Chuck.' Sarah explained, still smirking, 'It's one of his hobbies, you know, … mingle with the sharks.'
'I see,' Chuck nodded, 'I wonder what the inscription on this fin says but the letters are too damn small..."
'I can tell you, Chuck,' Sarah interrupted him. 'It's "Mad Frog"' she smiled awkwardly. It's one of his code ...' But Sarah couldn't continue as she saw Chuck staggering, while still watching through the binoculars.
'Chuck, did you flash?'
'Mad Frog, huh?' Chuck said after recovering, 'I see. It's more than just his first code name, during his very first covert operation.' Chuck said confidently. "Everything's here.' He pointed at his head. This new Intersect seems to know everything.' He smiled and focused back on Casey's fin.
'Oh, my God!' he yelled again. ' Sarah, I can see too more shark fins approaching Casey's from 11 o'clock!'
He turned to Sarah, breathing heavily now. 'We got to go there and help him.' He started unbuttoning his shirt.
Sarah couldn't help chuckling. "Calm down, super agent. Casey is well-prepared for such encounters.' She said while still smirking. 'And besides, by the time we get there, very little would be left of him, were he not able to protect himself. He has a high power ultra-sound device and other gear, don't worry. After all, the whole point of this exercise is to mingle with the beasts.'
Chuck looked again through the binocular device and focused on the colonel-turned-shark again.
'Well?' Sarah inquired.
'I can see now three shark fins moving together, en block, I guess … unbelievable!' He shook his head. 'They seem to be playfully zig-zagging there. Is he going to kill them?' Chuck asked.
'Oh, so you're now worrying about the poor sharks, dontcha?' Sarah thought to herself, still smiling.
'No, I told you, he's just into mingling.' she said instead.
'I wonder how they might communicate there,' Chuck wondered loudly. 'They seem to me like a playful bunch now, judging from their movements.'
'I have no idea, … grunting maybe?' Sarah offered, raising her brows.
Xxx
Same time, Diego Garcia, the Restricted Area in the South of the atoll
Carina and Ziva were sitting at a table outside the top secret facility they had used for the Beckman's interrogation, having some coffee.
Carina sighed deeply and stared at the plants all around her. The facility was buried deep into an abundance of tropical foliage, so densely packed that it could make the Amazon jungle green with envy.
Carina didn't realize that she had just sighed real deep.
'What … what's with you?' Ziva asked. 'Since when do you have personal problems?'
'Damn you Ziva!' Carina exclaimed to herself.
'Personal problems? Nooo, it's the inaction here, all this babysitting of Beckman,' she said dismissively. 'It drives me crazy.'
'But it's our first day only!' Ziva raised her shoulders. 'How …?"
'I know.' Carina interrupted her. 'Still, I can't just sit and watch all this melodrama going on and on and on ...'
Carina cursed to herself for letting Ziva have a glimpse into her real state of mind.
She had hoped that dealing with the mafia enforcer, Vinnie, would finally do it, give her the closure she so desperately needed. Since Vinnie confirmed her suspicions that somebody outside the US was the real boss, pulling the strings from thousands of miles away and ultimately responsible for the murder of her family, Carina got in fact even more restless. No closure, nothing. If anything, she felt angrier than before, if that was possible anyway. She was now really worried that somebody would finally detect her private problems. Somebody as perceptive as Ziva, or her boss, Austin Fitz-Hume would definitely pick up on something amiss with her.
'You know you can share with me,' Ziva smiled at her awkwardly. 'I can see that something is bothering you, something well beyond the hiatus that we have here, on this paradise island. The fact that you wouldn't enjoy your stay at such a magnificent place, even for a second, tells me something.' she smirked. 'Babysitting or not, this op is of highest, highest importance, and your mind is in fact somewhere else.' Ziva shook her head.
'Oh yeah?' Carina retorted. 'Do you want to talk about you and your father? Or maybe this Italian hunk, what was his name, Tony, huh? Love, love, love!' She theatrically waved her hands in circles at Ziva.
'What!' Ziva jumped up. She was about to say something when she realized that her face was reddening. 'That's nonsense, everybody knows we can't stand each other!'
'Of course, of course, and you fight all the time.' Carina shook her head.
'We are a great team and everybody cares about each …' Ziva tried to protest.
'Just shut up Ziva! As you see, you're not the only one who has personal problems. So just shut up, okay!'
'Wow! Somebody really has personal issues,' Ziva thought to herself. 'So your love life sucks as well, huh?' she shook her head. She was in no mood, however, to either talk about her father or Tony.
Before Ziva was about to say another thing, Carina exclaimed, pointing at the reddening clouds above her, 'Look, how beautiful they are, I wish we were on the beach to enjoy the sunset now!'
That was undoubtedly the stupidest thing she had ever said, in her entire life. Well, all she wanted now was for Ziva to stop blabbering. The Israeli agent had turned into such a yenta ever since she left the Mossad and became an American. And she needed to concentrate.
Her target was hiding somewhere in Italy. He, or maybe it was a woman, it occurred to her for the first time now, this capo di tutti capi, was so good, so devious, that he'd been able to stay undetected for decades and pull the strings of at least one powerful family in the US. And who knows what else. He must have solid, very solid connections throughout Italian intelligence and God knows how much more. Most importantly, Carina didn't know anything … anything about him. Once the news about Vinnie's disappearance had reached the capo he or she must have taken extra precautions, changing appearance, hiding places, means of communication ....
And she didn't know anything about his family either so that she couldn't even try to set a decent trap for him. The capo must have sent people to investigate Vinnie's disappearance and she should be sniffing around there, in El Paso, eventually track him down. Instead of being stuck on this island, in the very middle of nowhere.
No, she quickly ruled that option out. First, his enemy was too careful and even if he had sent people to investigate, he must have taken all precautions afterwards, surely cutting off all connections to these people.
For some reason, Carina was still thinking of her enemy as a HE.
Carina's solution, her way to find him, lay somewhere else, she could sense it in her guts.
Another possibility, it occurred to her, was to use herself as a bait, but only as a last resort, if she couldn't find him any other way. So far, however, she hadn't even started to actively search for him.
Or maybe the capo was already after her, had somehow already tracked her down or something? Even better, she told herself, grinning inside. If he was that smart and capable, maybe he deserved to win.
If not, sooner or later she'd have him in her net, in her hands.
Instinctively, Carina put her right hand on her chest, a subconscious gesture of self-assurance. And as it had happened so many times before that, she felt, between her fingers, the tiny locket that was always on her neck. It was her only real friend, the only ally she'd ever had.
Checking out on Ziva, who had closed her eyes and had her feet up and resting on the table, Carina pulled the locket out again. She just couldn't resist it, just feeling it again between her fingers was giving her strength, resetting her motivation.
She stared at it, as so many times before, thousands and thousands of times in fact, ever since she had found it in one of the many boxes the FBI people had taken from her parents' house after they were killed.
Made of pure gold it was obviously hundreds of years old.
Even when she saw it for the first time, as a 9-year old, scared to death and still in shock, she had realized that it was from a very different era. The small Sandra had opened the locket. There was an old, very old, black and white photo of a woman, probably her mother's great grandmother. The locket was so stylish, so beautifully engraved that little Sandra had just hung it on her neck and it became a part of her ever since.
One day, when she was still at high school, while playing with the locket in her hand, Sandra had realized that the photo wasn't strictly following the concave inside of the locket's bottom. There had to be something under the photo, she thought. The old photo, now yellowish paper was so solidly stuck however that it would have been impossible to remove it without damaging, actually destroying it.
Sandra hadn't hesitated even for a second. She went to a photo studio and asked for a high quality, large copy of the woman displayed in the photo and the same day, when she was back home and alone, she carefully scraped it off. A coin-like plate, a very, very old, golden one emerged in front of her wide open eyes. Sandra was looking at another face, masterfully engraved on it, this time male, head was short-haired, almost bald. Sandra had remembered she had several encyclopedia volumes at home, all from her mother and decided to check for an Italian who might look like the face from the coin.
It took her less than two hours to find the painting, a very famous one. It was a male portrait made by Santi di Tito. The image on her coin was exact copy of the painting. Niccolo Machiavelli. The man, she learned while reading the article attached, was a symbol … a very bad one. One filled with political cynicism, keeping the power at any cost, using any means necessary, deception, manipulation, … instigating fear, horror. Although referred to as a great political philosopher, his name was considered to be an equivalent of evil at the same time.
Why would her mother have and keep a hundred years old locket with the image of Machiavelli? Was her mother a descendant? They all were?
Slowly, step by step Sandra/Carina had discovered the whole truth about her genealogy back to the fifteenth century. It led her to a noble woman, not Machiavelli's wife, of course, but one that clearly had an affair with Machiavelli. It was a widely speculated affair.
Once Sandra found out about the coin, she went through her mom's paraphernalia that was still in the attic. She had found several key-chains there. One of the keys stuck out and Sandra soon discovered it was from a safe deposit box from one of the New York branches of a big bank. When several years later she finally got her hands on the box in the bank vault and opened it, she couldn't believe her eyes. There she found yellowish sheets of paper, a manuscript in Italian, obviously about a hundred, hundred-fifty years old. It was accompanied with a translation in English. The English papers were about 30 years old or so she thought. It seemed that her mother had started delving into their family history.
Art of Manipulation, she had read in Italian, by Niccolo Machiavelli. No date, which was very strange. There was no such work officially ever published by him.
When Carina read the manuscript she was already 24 and had six years of experience as an intelligence operative. Going through Machiavelli's principles of manipulating she couldn't help chuckling all the time. It was the mother of all deja-vu's for her. What he had preached was what she was already practicing. She didn't need anybody to teach her that. It was obviously in her genes. She didn't even need any DNA or other documentary evidence. She already knew what she owed her talents to … her genetic make-up.
She was really fascinated to read Machiavelli's personal story and realized that he actually had a mediocre, unsuccessful political career. He was just a really great theoretician.
Carina, on the other hand, was a natural in implementing it into practice. Every time she needed something from somebody, she had always been able to get it. And now she needed her skills more than ever before. The enemy was extremely powerful, and obviously so careful that nobody throughout the US government had even heard about the US mafia being manipulated from the outside, by somebody who preferred to stay in the shadows and just pull strings here and there.
Carina slapped her forehead. 'Oh, my …!'
'What,' Ziva had jumped up, 'what's the problem?'
'Uh, nothing, I just forgot I had to make a phone call,' Carina lied, 'sorry, Ziva, 'I'm gonna get back to the communication unit. I need to make a really important phone call.' She jumped up and rushed back to the building behind Ziva.
'Oh, my God,' Carina exclaimed again to herself while walking along a corridor. "The capo had the same modus operandi like her; manipulating people from the dark, hiding and pulling people's strings, and always taking extra precautions. The capo was de facto another version of Carina. Could it be that he or she was another Machiavelli? It looked like a long shot to her, but if that had been the case, she could think of ways to get closer and eventually identify the secretive capo. If not … well, she would try other ways to look for him.
Xxx
Poor Carina had no idea what she had come up against. Fifteen thousand miles to the North, North West, in Northern Italy, not one but three Machiavelli descendants had gathered in one of their underground facilities near the small Italian town of Laives.
They were all pouring through Vincenzo's files, computer and everything else, reports from all of their sources. Nothing, none of their assets throughout the US government had any knowledge whatsoever what had happened to their witness protection agent. That was extremely troubling.
Carla Machiavelli, 47, a successful fashion designer and a philanthropist was sitting behind a large desk and checking computer files. Her official surname, the one that she used publicly was different of course. She was the brain of the current clan, and apart from running the secret business, was indoctrinating and teaching her daughter and nephew, preparing the next generation of Machiavellis.
Her twin brother, Marco, was general with the Italian military intelligence, and currently head of the tech support division. It was the perfect position for him as he had access to almost all encryption systems within the Italian government and from there the ability to tap communications, obtain information many government officials would prefer to never see the light of the day. Now, Marco was talking on the phone, explaining why he couldn't report to work all week.
Her younger brother, Giacomo was reading a file, sitting in an armchair several feet away from his sister. He was essentially … nobody. Nobody knew him, anything about him. He was just the backup Machiavelli, in case something happened to Carla and Marco. He was supposed to be inactive most of the time.
But not now, all three had gotten together and were trying to figure out what had happened to their witness protection asset and if there was any kind of danger emerging for their operations in the US. It was a mystery and they didn't like it at all. The only kind of things they liked were those they had 100% control of.
Their working hypothesis was that a secret US agency had taken Vinnie, presumably because they figured he was working for somebody.
People and families with grudges against Vinnie were last on their suspect list for the obvious reason. It was a very low probability for a single person or private group to pull such a stunt without leaving any traces for the law enforcement.
Still, Giacomo was going through possible personal grudges from Vinnie's past. The folder of Carina's granddad, Carlo Falcone, and his entire family was stuck in the middle of one of the piles next to Mr. Nobody. Sooner or later, he was going to get his hands on it.
Xxx
A/N: As always, I'm so very grateful to NickyR for her help, which is particularly important since English in not my first language.