Thanks to baylink, my beta-reader on this chapter. Feels good to have the band back together.
All mistakes are my own.
Casey stared through the driver's side window of his car. His throat rumbled a long guttural promise that Bartowski would pay dearly for this.
Things had seemed to be heading in the right direction. The NSA team had made terrific time from Stanford to DFW. General Beckman was none too pleased that Bartowski had faked out Casey so thoroughly, but she re-channeled her exasperation to good purpose. Rattling the right cages secured clearances for a priority vector and an immediate landing.
That still left plenty of flight time to suss out where Bartowski had gone. Tracking him out of the airport had been a trivial matter. Security camera footage showed him coming off the plane, walking through the terminal and getting into a cab. A quick phone call to the cab company and a casual mention of some INS agents visiting the dispatch center got Casey the address where the cab dropped him off.
Then things started to go wrong. The destination address was a mall seven miles from the airport, so the cab could have dropped off Bartowski any number of places around the property. Another threatening phone call encouraged the dispatcher to get specific details from the cabbie. Casey was chagrined to learn that the drop-off point was a Buy More.
It was an entirely plausible destination for a Buy More employee looking for whatever support he could get, but given the Stanford episode, it reeked of another deception. Unfortunately, this was their only lead, so they had to investigate it. Thornton was tracking down security footage from the mall property to see whether they could get independent verification that Bartowski was ever there, while Hale and O'Leary were checking into recent cab and bus pick-ups in the area. That left Casey, uniquely knowledgeable in the inner workings of a Buy More franchise, to actually go to the store.
Casey's eyes bored into the all-too-familiar green and gold lettering. He hated what he had to do. He hated even more that Bartowski was making him do it.
Unable to put it off, Casey got out of his car, dragging his black zip-up jacket with him. He shrugged into the jacket as he crossed the lot, providing a fair measure of concealment for the combat gear beneath. He wasn't taking anything for granted any more.
He strolled through automatic doors into the Buy More. The doors shut behind him. Another rumble resonated in his throat as he surveyed the store.
This Buy More was almost identical to the Burbank branch. A ridiculous array of electronics and appliances beckoned, laid out to best inspire conspicuous consumption in the store's patrons. Casey's nose filled with heavily processed air laden with the scents of heavily processed products – plastic, styrofoam, glass, circuit boards. Once, he had romantically associated the smell of a Buy More with capitalism. Now he just associated it with boredom and useless crap.
Speaking of useless… A familiar-looking cast of characters loitered near the centrally located Nerd Herd desk, as if expecting people to mistake proximity to the desk for productivity. Casey started towards them. Predictably, when they saw an actual customer approaching, most of them remembered more important things that needed doing and scattered.
Casey approached the lone remaining Nerd Herder. White shirt, gray tie, cheap pants, sycophantic demeanor. Yeah, Casey had seen his kind before.
"Welcome to Buy More," the Nerd Herder said. "How can I be of assistance today?"
"I'm looking for somebody. Chuck Bartowski. Know him?"
"You're looking for Chuck?"
Casey wouldn't have been more surprised if bin Laden emerged from hiding to open a series of McDonald's franchises. "Yes. Where is he?"
"Hang on." The Nerd Herder headed towards the break room.
The back of Casey's neck throbbed. He wasn't sure what he would do when Bartowski walked out. Casey hadn't planned for the possibility that Bartowski might be found this easily.
It turned out not to be an issue. From the back of the store, the helpful Nerd Herder returned with somebody who clearly wasn't Bartowski, unless he'd found a way to disguise himself as a short, vaguely plump woman with coppery hair and a black skirt. Her Buy More name tag identified her as Holly, the Nerd Herd supervisor for this store. On the opposite side of her shirt from her official tag was one of those generic "Hi, my name is" stickers that Casey had to slap onto his chest when he attended a formal NSA function. On the tag was written "Chuck".
Casey couldn't wait for the explanation for this one.
"Hi, I'm Holly," she said in a perky tone.
"Are you sure?" he asked pointedly.
She laughed. "Pretty sure. You're here as part of the geocaching event, right?"
"Um, yeah."
"Are you sure?" she asked with a playful grin.
His agent's instincts told him to keep things vanilla until he understood what the hell was going on. "I'm looking for Chuck. I had reason to believe I should ask for him here."
"This is the right place, but you seem confused. I would have thought Chuck would have explained what geocaching is."
"Let's just say that Chuck didn't explain a lot of things."
"No problem. In geocaching, you're given various GPS coordinates that lead you to different locations. At each location you find another clue. The first one to reach the last location gets the prize."
Casey decided not to tell her what would happen to the 'prize' when he was caught. "That sounds about right."
"You found your way here, so here is your next clue." She pulled a thin slip of paper from behind the pocket protector in her shirt pocket and handed it to Casey.
He looked at the paper. All it contained was a phone number: 863-370-1090.
"Can I expect a lot more people?" she asked.
"Probably not." He had a sobering thought. "Am I the first one here?"
"Nope. You're second. But don't worry; you're not far behind your competition."
"Blond woman?"
"Nope. Tall guy in a suit. Didn't seem to be enjoying the game too much either."
Great. Somebody, maybe Fulcrum, maybe CIA, had beaten him here. Either way, that opened up a whole new world of things to deal with. "I guess I'd better get going then. Thank you for this."
"No problem. Good luck!"
Casey decided not to offer up a snide remark as he turned and walked away. He would take all the luck he could get at this point.
Just inside the automatic doors, he stopped. He dialed the number on the slip of paper and put the phone to his ear. After one ring, the call went to voice mail.
"Hi there!" Chuck's voice said cheerily over a slight buzz of background conversation. "If you're listening to this message, you're actively involved in the game Where In the World Is Chuck Bartowski? At this point, you've successfully followed me to the metropolitan Dallas / Fort Worth area. Congratulations! If you're hungry, I've heard Chuy's serves particularly good Tex-Mex, or if you're looking for something more upscale, you might want to try the Mansion at Turtle Creek.
"Now, I realize most of you would rather find me than a good meal. Don't take this the wrong way, but I would rather most of you not find me, because I suspect you have some fairly unpleasant things planned. I'm afraid that leaves us at a bit of an impasse, but keep your eyes peeled. It wouldn't be much of a game if I didn't offer up some clues along the way.
"Thanks for playing, and let's be careful out there."
*beep*
Casey squeezed his phone shut. He fought the urge to keep squeezing until the phone broke.
Oh, how Bartowski was going to pay for all of this.
A spy needs to be prepared for contingencies, the most basic of which is a quick departure. Take walking into a restaurant. The first thing most people look for are the daily specials or a person they are meeting. The first thing an agent looks for is the back door.
The same goes for leaving a city. Rule number one is always, always know your exit strategy. This can be trickier on longer-term assignments where a sudden departure seems less and less likely. It can be tempting to relax. However, a good spy never forgets that everything can change in an instant, and takes advantage of the extra time to plan and refine additional escape routes.
That's why, at any given moment, Sarah could outline five different plans for leaving Los Angeles, down to the weapons and even the outfit she would need for each. She could recite the eleven items she needed to collect from her apartment and specify which of those items belonged on her person and which could go in a bag. Most importantly, she had practiced her strategies enough to know how long it would take to exit her apartment for the last time. Her worst time was six minutes and forty-three seconds, including a change of clothes and the time it took to destroy the contents of her burn box.
Sarah opened the door to her apartment and put her chosen plan into action. After a few minutes of efficient movement, she was about ready. She finalized her outfit, strapping a sheath of throwing knives into the small of her back and sliding on a versatile fitted white blouse. Three quick tugs closed the zippers on her bag. She slung the bag over one shoulder, grabbed her still-smoking burn box and walked over to the door. As she put her hand on the door knob, she checked her watch, just as she had in so many practice sessions. She had bettered her worst time by thirty-seven seconds, more than acceptable.
She used the extra time to take a last look around. The apartment was formal, almost coldly so. Sarah always chose an apartment like this one, as a comfortable apartment was more difficult to leave. This wasn't a home; this was a place she slept while on a mission.
Still, she found herself wondering a bit wistfully if she would ever see it again. There were memories here, some of them fond, some of them not so much. A few involved Bryce. Most involved Chuck.
She was grateful that she didn't need to say goodbye to the latter memories yet. Item number twelve, Chuck's birthday card, was safely secured in her bag. Despite how she'd botched things by not telling him about the watch, he still trusted her. Hopefully she'd be seeing him soon, and then maybe the two of them could figure a way out of this mess.
Her face lit up as she firmly closed the door, excited that – unlike so many other departures – the closing of a door didn't mean the closing of a chapter.
Casey climbed back onto the NSA Learjet, looking for some excuse to vent his frustrations. Unfortunately, Agents Hale and Thornton were both feverishly pecking away at keyboards at their computer stations, while a flat-screen monitor on the front cabin wall showed Agent O'Leary doing the same in Maryland.
"Talk to me," Casey said. "What do we have?"
"I think the cabbie is lying to us," Thornton said. "He swears up and down that he dropped Bartowski off near the Buy More, but I can't find his cab on any of the mall's video footage. Should I bring him in?"
"Where is he now?"
"Downtown Dallas."
Casey pictured a map of the area and did some quick math. If traffic was bad, it could easily take 30 minutes, one way, to get to the cabbie. Bartowski would be long gone before they got answers. "Ignore him for now. What else?"
O'Leary looked down from the monitor. Her mass of wavy brunette hair blended in with a dark background, leaving only freckled pale skin and light green eyes to the casual glance. "There are five Stanford alumni from Bartowski's era living in the Dallas / Forth Worth area. One is vacationing in the Maldives, one is in Atlanta on business, and one is at home. We're still trying to track down the other two."
"Keep at it. What else?"
Hale spun his chair around to address Casey. His rounded crew-cut and physique gave testament to his military background. "Only one cab service picked up a fare at the mall in the last hour. The cabbie claims the fare was an old lady, and the destination address is an adult care facility about three miles from the mall."
Finally, something that could be eliminated. "Anything else?"
"Three different bus lines have stops around the mall. One goes back to the airport, one heads east into North Dallas, the other north to Farmer's Branch."
"Tell me about the phone number."
Hale said, "It's a Google Voice account – a free service designed to ring and text all your phone devices from a single number. The area code is from Florida, so it's obviously meaningless."
"You're probably right, but don't rule anything out. Tracking Bartowski is going to be different than any other pursuit you've done." Casey thought about Holly's description of geocaching. "Could there be GPS coordinates hidden in the phone number?"
"Interesting. 863-370-1090, right? The only combination that really makes sense is 37 degrees 0 minutes north, 109 degrees 0 minutes west." Hale brought up a tool on his monitor and dutifully typed the numbers in. The map auto-zoomed lower, centered around a graphic emblem at the center of the map. "It's in Colorado."
"Where?"
A couple keystrokes later, the position was further isolated. "The intersection of highway 160 and an Indian road near Four Corners Monument. Could be directions to a meet-up."
"Maybe. For now stay focused on how he would get there." Casey rubbed his face. Bartowski wasn't missing a chance to lay down some kind of trail.
Casey thought about the Google Voice account some more. "Can you figure out where the account was last accessed and any phone numbers tied to it?"
"Sure, but I'll need something official from General Beckman. Google doesn't hand out that kind of info willingly."
"You'll get it." Casey turned to the monitor to address O'Leary. "The phone message – any luck with the background noise?"
She said, "One of the techs made a recording of the message and removed Bartowski's voice. We can hear two men speaking in low voices, but the only words we could clearly make out were 'crossing the chasm' and 'tent pole event'."
"What the hell?"
"We also heard a call-out for an 'Iced Single Venti Mocha, No Whip'."
"Great. He was at a Starbucks. There will only be a couple hundred of those in the Dallas / Fort Worth area." He thought about that for a minute. "How many Starbucks are within five miles of the airport?"
O'Leary gazed off-camera, checking her monitor as she tapped at her keyboard. "Eleven, including two in the airport. Expand the search to ten miles and there are twenty-eight."
"How many within two miles of the mall?"
She tapped at her keyboard. "Three."
"How many–"
"Sir?" Thornton said.
"What?"
"You're going to want to see this."
Thornton commandeered the left half of the wall monitor by shrinking the video feed of Agent O'Leary to fill only half the screen. A list of credit card charges appeared, all made by Charles Bartowski, all within the previous five minutes.
Amtrak, $106.35
Amtrak, $53.20
Dallas Area Regional Transit, $50.00
Enterprise Rent-a-car, $87.19
Fort Worth Transportation Authority, $50.00
Greyhound, $49.12
Greyhound, $35.51
Southwest Airlines, $319.88
Superior Rent-a-car, $95.46
The list increased in length even as the team watched, each record inserting into the list with a soft beep. The list auto-sorted by company and cost.
"What is he doing?" Thornton asked.
Casey fit together the pieces in his head. "Bartowski has two choices – make no mistakes so that we can't track down the clues, or make a lot of noise to keep us busy. He knows we'll need to track each of these purchases in case he uses it."
O'Leary asked, "But what if it's all noise?"
Casey gave her a grim smile. "That's what's smart about it. He could hop in a cab and pay cash, or he could be trying to conserve cash by using his credit card one last time. We need to check all of these out."
The three other agents stared at Casey, overwhelmed by the task in front of them. Two more soft beeps indicated two more purchases had registered.
"Let's go, people," Casey said. "That list isn't getting any shorter."
One of Chuck's burn phones vibrated again. He was surprised at just how many people had called into his Google voice account. At least he had no delusions about how many people were after him.
He checked the list of phone numbers in his small notebook. A little help might get him a list of the people following him. A little ingenuity might allow him to set up some rudimentary tracking on the cell phones from the list. With any luck, none of it would be necessary. He was close to getting away now.
The Dallas area was starting to feel a little crowded. It was time to leave.