A/N Not a lot to work with here. Most of this opening was Chuck acting like the foolish figure the producers wanted us to think of him as. Since he wasn't that foolish, I'll have to come up with other stuff.
"You're my good luck."
"Do it and be done."
"I got the Red Test."
"I'm kicking her out and keeping her stuff."
A finger pressed the elevator button. A pair of eyes looked upward, watching as the elevator started down. A hand reached toward a gun, uncomfortably snug, tucked into the waist of a pair of pants at the small of the back.
The elevator door opened, revealing an empty box, The person who called it stepped inside, pressing the button for the fifth floor. When the doors finally closed the weapon came out with no small amount of relief to the wielder.
The elevator didn't stop until it reached its occupant's destination, and only then did the gun go back into hiding, just in case. The door opened on an empty hall, and the weapon came out again, not aimed but ready to become so. Feet moved silently over cheap carpeting, approaching a particular door. No light showed beneath, a quick swipe with a rod indicated nothing on the other side, blocking a light.
In a building across town…
The elevator dinged, and the man getting off of it looked neither right nor left, like a man who knew where he was going and what he was going to do. Beyond a ritualistic checking of bar codes, so easily faked, no one interfered with him in any way, until he got where he was going.
Between the door and the body there was a morgue attendant. Not literally, or she would have died faster. The optimal resolution to the problem she presented, also far more elegant, took a little maneuvering first, but he achieved his objective, a moment alone with Hunter Perry.
In the hallway…
The cheap lock on the doorknob was no match for a CIA-issued electronic lockpick, light changing from red to green with ludicrous speed. It made a noise, but the agent on the outside could do nothing about that except move quickly and out of the line of fire. A flash-bang would have been the textbook approach, but the place had too many unknowns and the target had had too long to prepare. Hand twisted knob and knee hit door, as the agent went in and down and the gun came up.
The agent scanned the dark room, stepping inside and closing the door on the light from the hall. The bathroom smelled faintly of vomit. The agent scanned the room with the pistol's laser sight, pulled the door shut and stepped past it, to check the rest of the space.
Nothing. No one. Not even a sheet-covered shape on the bed, or worse, two sheet-covered shapes. Not that Sarah expected there to be.
A little while ago, in between here and there…
Sarah called from the car, unable to remain standing still any more.
"This is Shaw." His usual bland tones were even more bland over the phone.
"Is Jones with you?" She added an extra helping of direct and demanding, in lieu of banging his head against a table.
He didn't seem to notice. "No, she's not. I last saw her on her way to meet with Carmichael."
A 'meet' that he'd arranged. "Was it your idea to give him a Red Test?"
She could practically hear his eyebrows go up. "Who else?"
At the morgue…
This was not how he'd planned to meet, although it would have eventually been the manner of their parting, just as Perry was supposed to take care of his own middleman. Zevlovsky was dead, shot rather than stabbed, but for some reason Perry had missed their own appointment.
No matter. The gun went back into the case, and the magnetic field generator came out. He'd retrieve the package just as easily, and without all the sound effects, or the puke.
In the hotel room…
Sarah tucked the gun back where it belonged as she turned on the lights. The closet was empty, so were the drawers. No suitcases, no trash. The bathroom had no toiletries, nothing personal, just a damp washcloth that had the vomit smell.
Sarah pulled out her phone. "Casey, she's gone."
"Roger that," said Casey, sitting in his bedroom, where all of his surveillance and communications equipment had been moved. Normally he would have had it in the living room, but as a 'disgraced and cashiered ex-agent', that would have been hard to explain. On the downside, the people it was done to fool were not likely to visit, and Casey now was forced to spend most of his time in the bedroom. On the upside, he now had a lot more room out in the living room for his bonsai, and his sadly-reduced gun collection. "I'll get on the horn to the General, get a search started."
"You do that," said Sarah, sounding annoyed. "Any sign of Chuck yet?"
Another benefit of the bedroom view was that Casey could see Bartowski's windows, which were dark and had been since he took up watch. Half the equipment in the room was tasked with detecting any of his signals. "Would have told you if there was," Casey said, setting up a comm channel to the boss. General Beckman had given him her personal line for the duration of the mission.
"Switching targets."
"Thought you might," said Casey. They both were, since now it would be Casey's job to search for Jones' image on some outbound platform somewhere. "Good luck."
Sarah smiled. I am his luck.
The Ring agent stood there in the morgue, staring at the gel-covered blue metal capsule he'd just pulled up out of Perry's stomach, momentarily contemplating the nature of greed. Perry's greed, that he'd choke this down for money, suffer it to be dredged out of him for money. That he'd betray his agency for so little. He deserved to die for that alone. Betrayal should have a loftier purpose, not even betrayal at all really.
A setting of things to rights.
He lifted his phone to his mouth. "Package recovered."
Outside the hotel…
The guy at the desk was no more aware of her leaving than he was of her presence. Sarah checked the elevator on the way up and the stairs on the way down, seeing the remnants of an aged security system that was most likely there for show. This place wasn't the sort to trade on either security or privacy. She scoped out the space behind the desk and saw very little monitoring going on, nothing worth stealing footage over.
Her Porsche had one very special attribute, that no one, other than possibly Chuck, knew about. She would not abuse it. She would baby it, cherish it, even as she appreciated its abilities and put it through its paces. She wouldn't drive it while she was mad, or even slap the steering wheel in a fit of pique. In spite of her annoyance at the less than optimal outcome of her mission so far, she drove like a normal crazy person, and not an upset one.
'Less than optimal'? Who said stuff like that? Oh, yes…
"Who else?" said Shaw.
At least Shaw hadn't been trying to evade. That would have just gotten him an extra helping of 'extreme prejudice'. "I just need to know who to kill. The Red Test has been discontinued. Ordering one now is the same as murder."
"I set it up, Agent Walker. Either Chuck or the Intersect killed a man, I needed to know which. A test modeled on the Red Test seemed to me the best way to find out."
It had seemed something else to her. "Or get Chuck killed."
"A possibility, but unlikely." She wanted to be able to reach through her phone and strangle him for that blithe dismissal. "Chuck is extremely capable and unpredictable. My expected outcome, however less than optimal it might have been, was that he would take Perry into custody."
"What would be so bad about that?" It seemed like the best of both worlds, to her.
"Because it would simply be Chuck doing what Chuck does. I'm trying to get beyond the baseline, which is difficult with an agent of his caliber. This was not a red test, Agent Walker. Chuck was not ordered to kill his target. Neither was he ordered not to."
She'd said "Chuck wouldn't" before she remembered that for her purposes, Chuck had. And Perry would too. Perry almost did.
Daniel Shaw may not have been one to smirk, at least she'd never seen one on his face, but she could hear it in his voice, an unspoken 'exactly', as if she'd fallen into a trap. "In which case he would have had to resort to the Intersect, my second most-likely outcome. Also sub-optimal, for a number of reasons, but at least we'd have known where we stood. The actual outcome, the optimal one, was my least expected."
"Mine as well," Sarah had said, although she doubted they had the same idea of its optimality. As long as he believed Chuck had done what he'd done, that was the important thing. With Jones' building coming up, she had neither the need nor the desire to hear any more of Shaw's voice. "Walker out."
One reason Sarah drove so fast, aside from getting where she wanted to go quickly, was that she had to focus on the road and getting there in one piece, with no capacity available to ruminate. Now, driving away from her non-encounter with Jones, trapped behind the wheel with nothing else to do but ponder, Sarah's doubts popped up like street signs and she pondered them, driving on autopilot. Shaw believed Chuck had killed, she knew that belief was false. Each was satisfied with matters as they stood.
Or she had been.
What would have happened if she had not been there, to provoke the Intersect into having that response? Would Perry be alive now? He had been down, disabled, Chuck could have taken him in exactly as Shaw had expected. Then she had been literally dragged into it, a test condition that Shaw had gone to great lengths to control, to remove from the equation.
That was twice, now, that Intersect had engaged, ultimately killed someone, to save her. Just her? Possibly. The next proper test would be to try again with other hostages, but there must be no further tests, at least not from Shaw. He would not be satisfied until Chuck was either killer or killed, and either one was unacceptable to her. Sarah wiped away something on her cheeks, tickling as it flowed. She looked at her hand, the liquid there.
She'd closed her hands often, in her life, life slipping between her fingers like star systems, like… tears in rain. Then Chuck had put into her hands the one thing she would not close them on, his own heart, and she'd held them open until now…Now, closing them felt wrong. She would have to again, she was sure, this life practically guaranteed it. For that sacrifice to have meaning, though, it would be to ensure that no one else (Chuck!) would ever have to experience, to know, to feel what she would feel.
No one needed to know that.
Sarah pulled into the lot and parked her car next to another. Lights were few and far between, but the Moon was bright. Somewhere out there she could hear the sound of water, bringing things in and taking them away again. She slipped off her shoes, and stepped out onto the sand.
It was cool under her feet, unsteady footing, but she was used to that. She had a rock to hold on to, now, and she sank to her knees behind him, wrapping her arms around him.
Chuck relaxed into her embrace, letting his head loll until it touched hers. "I knew you'd find me here."
His thinking spot. Of course he would come here after a night like tonight. "Always." Never again. She tightened her grip. "I will always find you."
A/N2 This is not the way I thought this story would go. I originally thought Sarah would take Casey's place, shooting the mole. Hopefully I can figure out where this story is going before it gets there. I hope you'll drop me a line and tell me what you think of this rewrite so far.