Usual disclaimers. No rights to any characters portrayed and this is neither the real world nor a Disney Princess tale.

May 2004 – Paris

Over the two past years, the CAT Squad had managed to shock many people in the world's intelligence communities with what they had achieved. Even though Langston Graham and his cohorts had tried to cover it up and deflect credit for what they were doing to other people and groups that they controlled, enough senior people in the intelligence agencies saw their achievements and knew who was responsible. It was actually Graham's man, the CIA Station Chief in Paris, who had come up with the tag that the serious people in the intelligence communities of the world knew them by though, because he whined so much about the Three Bitches of the Apocalypse that everyone heard, and it was taken up as an accolade rather than the derogatory term it was originally coined as.

Even though they were officially CAT Squad only, they (primarily Sarah, but Carina and Zondra too at times) were given side missions as well, so Sarah was still maintaining the top mission count in the CIA. The problem was that these side missions usually involved cleaning up Graham's messes, assassinate someone here, bring someone back into the fold there, seduce intel he wanted out of someone, so Sarah acquired another name, Graham's Enforcer.

What little down time they had was usually spent clubbing, or relaxing on the beach somewhere on the Mediterranean or in South America . They generally went as a group, except when Carina and Amy were going off picking up guys of course. When those two picked up guys to go home with, Sarah and Zondra would usually just head back to the apartment. At first Sarah had thought that Zondra might bat for the same team, because she never paid any attention to men beyond evaluating them as threats, but when she asked one night when they'd been drinking, Zondra just said that she'd met very few men who could be trusted, so she wasn't about to consider them anything but a threat until she believed that she could.

That told Sarah that she had had an event in her past that was traumatic enough to utterly destroy her trust in men, but she kept it to herself, because they all had their demons. For that matter, Sarah knew that it must have been something that happened in the four years since she left the Farm that was behind Carina's need to always find a guy to sleep with, because she hadn't been having those screaming nightmares she had all too often now when they were back at the Farm, but Carina wasn't ready to tell her about that, not even when she was holding her to get her out of them. Working out Amy on the other hand was easy, she was just a slut.

Amy served nothing more than a support function on the team, because there was no way that she could ever measure up to the ability and experience of her three team mates or be trusted with anything critical. Whatever slant Graham and everyone else tried to put on it to depict them all as bimbos who were of little use for anything other than seduction missions though, Sarah, Zondra and even Carina had solid reputations with the men on the ground, and people knew what these three remarkable women had achieved. Even ordinary agents listened when the men of the elite Special Operations units gave respect to anyone outside their units, and it was made clear that those three were respected by those men.

That was why when the CATS started, it was mainly the men who operated at the sharp end who knew of Carina as anything other than the disposable fuck toy that the DEA generally used her as, because the people who had her sent on the missions that Graham wanted her on didn't bother looking into what she actually did, and the ones who organised the missions weren't about to do anything to aggravate those above them, so they just kept sending her out as ordered. Most ordinary agents had never gotten to talk to the Special Ops elite who recounted tales of what a force of nature this woman could be in combat because they never operated at that level, but she did. While she was part of the CATS though, the Special Ops guys let others know the name that Carina was known as to them, the Red Menace. To be sure, that name referred to a lot more than just her combat abilities, but in no way lessened the respect they had for her and they dealt with anyone who used the more common derogatory name of 'Man Eater' for her quite harshly because that was not a name that was used with any respect intended at all.

In general, Graham and the people who sided with him tried to paint the CATS as nothing more than the Man Eater that most saw Carina as and the Bimbo that Amy was, but the people who the intelligence services relied on knew the truth of the matter.


In the early months of 2004, things started to go wrong for the CATS, because they started finding the places they were hitting empty, or worse, with an ambush waiting. The team was heading up a major task force made up of agencies from around Europe and the US to take down an organisation known as the Gentle Hand by then, so at first the suspicion was directed at the other people on the task force. That suspicion appeared to be substantiated when Amy, of all people, supposedly caught out two men who were attached to the task force's Milan base with suspicious deposits to their accounts. Unfortunately, as the person on the scene, she'd interrogated the two men herself and they both died before Sarah, Carina or Zondra, who were the CATS' experienced interrogators, could get there. They had questions about the whole 'finding the traitors and have them die under questioning' thing, but her excuses were believable and those deposits in the men's accounts made a compelling argument, so they accepted her version of the events.

They realised that those two men had not been the only source of the betrayals (if indeed they had been involved at all) though when the failed missions showed no sign of diminishing. Someone else had to be the traitor and they needed to track them down before they lost too many more men. This of course made them look at Amy more closely, and Sarah's best CIA tech connection recommended a NSA hacker who was far better than anyone else he knew to trace back any records and get proof of her guilt, the Piranha.

Sarah didn't know how Tommy had managed to get an elite NSA hacker to agree to do a job for the CIA, but she wasn't about to argue, because the guy came back with results faster than she would have thought humanly possible, and had dug deeper than she had expected as well. What this Piranha found was that, as well as the extremely large deposits into Amy's accounts on an off-shore tax haven just after every major betrayal of the team, another account had been set up in Zondra's name with less money going into it, but the amounts going into that account were still big enough to be believable to be payoffs for the traitor on the team.

Zondra went ballistic when she found out that she was being set up to take the fall for this and wanted to kill Amy, but they convinced her to hold out for a bit so that they could bring the traitorous bimbo down. It was Carina who pointed out that they wouldn't have stopped at the fake accounts, they would have almost certainly planted other evidence as well, so with that they went through everything in Zondra's room with a fine toothed comb. They found what they were looking for hidden in the heel of one of a pair of boots that Amy had 'borrowed' from her months ago and Zondra hadn't realised had been returned.

The incriminating evidence was a miniature transmitter that they knew would prove to be how the Gentle Hand had been notified of where they were going to be raiding next. They hastily called in support from the SOG and other Special Ops groups that they knew they could rely on for their next raid, because planting the transmitter on Zondra said that the Gentle Hand were setting up a final confrontation.


The warehouse that they were hitting on that raid was massive, and Sarah, Carina and Zondra had to work to keep their apprehension about the fact that they knew that they were walking into a massive trap from showing. As soon as they and the know support team were inside, that trap was sprung, but the force that targeted them was far bigger than anything they had expected. Amy disappeared as they all dove for cover and called for reinforcements.

They lost a quarter of their support team before they even reached cover, and with the other side well emplaced all over the warehouse and up in the rafters, they kept losing more of their people as they couldn't find cover that would protect them from all the angles the shots were coming from.

As soon as she thought that there was no way that her team mates could escape, Amy started taunting them. "How does it feel to know that stupid, useless little Amy outsmarted all of you, you fucking bitches?" They all confirmed that they were recording this. "You bitches have taken all the glory and made me into no more than your gofer the entire time we've been working together, but now I'm calling the shots! I guess I should thank you Zondra, if you hadn't sent me to Milan to be your delivery girl back in February, I wouldn't have met Augusto. That meeting changed my life, because now I've got myself a man who is strong enough to protect me from both you lot and Graham! I didn't have to think twice when he asked me to help him bring you down because of the damage you were doing to his organisation, and I've told the Gentle Hand about every raid you had planned since then." She actually giggled when she paused. "Oh I'm sorry, I meant to say that Zondra told them about all your raids, you see the evidence of that is all over the place, so all of your wonderful friends will be spitting on your grave after this Zee. It's such a pity that my body was totally obliterated in an explosion, but I'm sure I'll enjoy the hero's funeral that I'll be getting, along with Red and Blondie. Speaking of which, it will be better for you two if you don't make Augusto's boys kill you, you see they've been quite looking forward to having fun with you before you die, so they'll do unspeakable things to your bodies if you deny them their fun. After all, they can't do too much to Zee before she dies after she's been working with them now, can they? No, her body has to be found full of bullets from one of your guns because after you realised that she was the traitor, you shot her yourself."

The battle was raging all around them all the while that Amy was going through her diatribe, and the fighting was heavy enough that the Gentle Hand didn't realise that it wasn't shots from the warehouse floor that were taking out their snipers in the rafters, it was other snipers from outside the building. The Gentle Hand's forces only started to realise that something wasn't going their way when they started to get picked off by snipers from the rafters, and then another force broke in through the main doors of the warehouse. The ones who had laid the trap for the CAT Squad knew what Augusto Gaez would do to them and their families if they failed to carry out his orders, so as soon as the new force burst into the warehouse they charged the ones they'd been sent here to eliminate.

Just before the new teams burst into the warehouse, Amy had worked herself up so much in her taunting of Zondra and the others that she stepped out from behind cover so that she could see their reactions. The M4 in Sarah's hands was no sniper rifle, but at the hundred or so yards distance between her and Amy, it may as well have been, because the full auto burst she released at her blew her head Amy's head apart.

That was when the Gentle Hand charged them, and Sarah realised that she'd just about emptied her last mag for the M4 on Amy because the bolt stayed open after the very next shot. She dropped the M4 and engaged her attackers with her S&W but she knew that the situation was hopeless, until one of the men who'd just broken into the warehouse charged in front of her and engaged the ones who were heading for her. He took a lot of hits, but he took them all out before he collapsed. The rest of the Gentle Hand's people were down in minutes but the medics had dragged him behind cover and were working to stabilise him by then. When Sarah went to make sure that her saviour was still alive, he smiled up at her and but didn't get out more than. "Sam..." before he passed out.

The medics and officers assured her that they'd let her know how Agent Mills was doing, but they had to get him into surgery immediately it they wanted to have any chance of saving him. With that, she almost pushed them out the door.

That news about Agent Mills took a while to get to her, because the CAT Squad operation was cancelled immediately and they were recalled to D.C. to face the inquiry over what happened. When she arrived back in the States, she was surprised by a call from Tommy to say that his friend had heard about what happened and had moved the money from those accounts in the tax haven to another one that the team could use to get away if this inquiry went bad. Tommy also passed on a package of information which showed Amy's trail of activities from when she was contacted by the Gentle Hand in February up until she died in the trap she'd help set for the rest of the team.

Graham and his cronies were rather angry when the other agencies who the team had worked with in Europe and South America insisted in being involved in the inquiry, citing their knowledge of the activities leading up to the final battle and the loss of their operatives in the task force's clashes with the Gentle Hand to force the point. Many people sitting on the inquiry were quite bemused about Graham's outright refusal to accept, or even consider, Amy as the traitor. His position was easier to understand when he finally admitted that she had been his plant on the team to watch the others, but the other agencies didn't let up on hammering the overwhelming evidence that it was his person on the team who was the traitor.

June 2004 – Washington D.C.

In the end, due to Graham's power and the support of his cronies in the DEA and FBI, the other agencies couldn't stop him breaking up the CAT Squad so that Sarah, Carina and Zondra were all reassigned with black marks on their records for failing to spot the traitor they had been working and living with almost twenty four seven.

Carina went back to the same type of missions she'd been doing before for the DEA where her skills on her back were more used than anything else (though she had more support from the other agents at least after what had come out during her year on the CAT Squad). When Zondra went back to the FBI, Graham's cronies got her stuck on much lower profile cases than she'd been handling before, so her career development was pushed back by several years. Sarah was dreading what Graham would come up with for her, and what she got was as bad as she expected.


Bryce had learned his lesson at the Farm, so as soon as he was assigned to be a field agent, he started cultivating the administrative staff, because they were the ones who could make him look good. Whenever he was in D.C. he worked overtime to keep the office staff happy (which of course meant screwing them senseless), so that in turn they would ensure that the reports on file for any missions he was associated with cast him in a very good light.

Graham didn't really give two hoots about what sort of agent Larkin was, so long as his performance was good enough to provide justification for the size of the investment they had in him. The problem was, while his mission reports all showed him as a great agent, the scales were rather light on the side of showing tangible benefits accruing from his missions.

As he happened to be reviewing Larkin's file while they were winding up the inquiry into what happened with the CAT Squad, Graham came up with an idea. Given that Walker's ledger was the strongest of any agent in the CIA in terms of what she'd brought to the Agency in comparison to what it had cost to train her, there was no-one better to make Larkin's ledger look more acceptable. Walker's ranking would take a hit while improving Larkin's, but that suited Graham just fine, it would just give him an excuse to keep her away from assignments that might let her build herself up any more than she was now.

Any sane person would have been disturbed by the evil smile that grew on Graham's face as he considered another aspect of this. Larkin was arguably the worst in the CIA (some thought the United States) in considering himself God's gift to women, and men if the rumours were true, so he'd screw anything that stayed still long enough. Walker had been aggravating him for seven years now with her refusals to screw who he told her to. Yes, she'd shown the results to prevent him from punishing her for that so far, but this could well be his chance to finally force her compliance.

Graham put together his plan fairly quickly. Yes, a mission within a mission, that's it! They suspected Larkin's loyalty and he had some of the CIA's most critical information in his head. They had to know whether he could be trusted with those secrets, as the security of the nation was at stake. The investment to create him as the top agent they had and his family's connections were too much to eliminate him without proof, so her job was to get close enough to him to get that proof. That should work hopefully, because with the way Larkin's mind worked there was no way she would be able to get close to him without sex. With any luck, after being plowed by Larkin for a year or so, maybe she'd loosen up on the sex thing and do what she was told, the stories about Larkin said that he was almost as good as he thought he was in that respect at least, so they may be able to get some value out of all those millions they spent on him that way.

When Walker and Larkin were called in to be told that, as the CIA's best agents, they would be working together, Larkin wasn't making any attempt to cover up what was on his mind as he looked at his new partner, in fact Graham was surprised he wasn't humping her leg. Walker, on the other hand, was the consummate professional she always was, though Graham didn't miss the fact that her hand never strayed too far from her leg where reports said she usually carried some of her knives.

Graham asked Walker to stay back when the meeting with the pair of them was done, implying it was about her previous assignment. She got the point straight away about what he was demanding of her and refused, but he laid out all of the arguments that he'd been polishing ever since he came up with the concept for this, and finished with her biggest weak point. The techs had compiled a number of images which had been made up to show the best approximation of what her mother should look like now, but all of them were obscured just enough to prevent getting a clear look at her face and he threw them across the desk at her. "If you don't care about your country or the Agency, do you care enough about your mother to do your duty? If would be a shame to eliminate the best analyst and planner the CIA ever had, but if you refuse to do your duty, she will pay the price."

It was very similar to when he'd used this against her before she started with the CAT Squad, Sarah was tight lipped and emotionless as she slowly nodded to say that she understood, but Graham could read in her eyes that she'd kill him for this if she ever had the chance. He tried not to let the shiver of fear that passed through him at that look show, but he made a mental note to upgrade his protective detail.

Larkin was waiting outside when she left Graham's office, and he all but pounced on her, and he was about as subtle as a fart in a phone booth when he insisted that they should have dinner and then spend some quality time getting to know each other if they were going to be working together. For all of the extensive training he had been given at the Farm and while he was at Stanford though, Larkin didn't pick up on the fact that she'd brushed him off like any other mark. Her first stop was Jane Bentley, because she needed someone to cry and vent to, and Jane was the only person in D.C. that she trusted enough to do that with.


Between her connections and holding down the Assistant to the DDO's position for nearly six years (she'd finally been formally made the Deputy Director of Operations when Graham stepped up to become the Director of the CIA the previous month), Jane knew more about the agents in the CIA than anyone else, and she knew that there was a marked difference between the reports on file for Larkin's missions, and what agents who were on those missions reported. What she told Sarah about other agents being abandoned and sold out when they were working with Larkin didn't do anything to make Sarah feel any better, though the reports that Agent Mills was stable and was expected to make a full recovery in time did.

They agreed that there was nothing that Sarah could do to get out of this, so the best she could do was try to get the intel that Graham wanted while keeping Larkin at arm's reach as much as she could. Jane was also quite aware of Larkin's reputation of trying to screw any woman he met, but Sarah had worked that out from the fifteen minutes they'd been in Graham's office and the fact that he'd slept with both Carina and the Bimbo on one of the CATS missions in South America that he'd been involved in, so she knew that she probably wasn't going to get out of it without having sex with the pig, all she could do was try to keep that to an absolute minimum.

Sarah managed to avoid spending much time with Larkin before they left on their first assignment by using the excuse that she was running around, trying to catch up on all the things she hadn't been able to deal with for the two years that she hadn't been to the US as she'd been based out of Europe. She also managed to use the 'you know as an experienced agent that we need our rest to be on top of the operation' card to get them allocated separate beds unless they were on a high visibility mission where that would have telegraphed the issues, but even so, she had to follow through and have sex with him two months into the assignment to carry out her 'mission within the mission'.

That was when she got the confirmation that Graham had just set this assignment up to force her to sleep with Larkin, because when she went to him with proof that Larkin would sell out the Agency and the country if he was offered enough, but he didn't know anything that was worth selling, Graham just insisted that she hadn't delved deep enough to be certain of that and refused to let her out of the assignment.

So she had to go back to work with Larkin and hold off his advances as subtly as possible. In a way, the fact that Graham kept sending her off on solo missions between the 'Andersons' missions was good for her, because it meant that she wasn't having to spend that time fighting Larkin off.

That bolt hole that the Piranha had set up for them was awfully tempting, but Graham was still holding Mama's safety over her head, and if any one of them needed that more than the rest, it was Carina. She and Zondra had been horrified when Carina finally broke down and told them about the missions that gave her nightmares nearly every night, unless she had someone to hold her. They couldn't believe that she would go back to that after they broke up the CATS, but she insisted that it wasn't as bad as it had been before, because the serious agents had listened to the Special Ops guys and they did what they could to reduce those aspects on missions that they were on. She also pointed out that Graham would throw his resources behind hunting her down if she left, so everything had to be bullet proof before she tried. She did promise that if it got too much for her, she'd run, but until then, she insisted that they leave the bolt hole there and try and build the money and the other resources that they'd need up for all of them.

Between them, they established safe houses and caches of what they'd need around the world. With their backgrounds and how they'd been forced into the CIA by Graham, Sarah and Carina had already been getting money together and building the frameworks for this before they came back together in the CATS, so they built on these, also creating pipelines they could all use to get in or out of the States without being seen.

One thing that they'd done with the assistance of Tommy and the other techs who they could trust (Tommy said that even the Piranha had helped on some parts) was to create secure, untraceable communications mechanisms so that they could get in touch with each other in case anything happened. Sarah used some of the mechanisms that her mother had set up for her to keep in touch as the framework for this, but she added redundancy so that they wouldn't lose touch due to a simple problem like the one that made her lose touch with Mama.

The most amazing part was the bit that Tommy said the Piranha had done, because they all had ordinary looking phones that would work anywhere cell phones would work around the world, but only if the right keys were input, so if anyone else tried to use them, they acted like ordinary phones. They also had extras of these hidden in their safe houses and caches around the world so that they could get replacements if they were lost or broken on a mission. This was part of what helped Carina keep going, because being able to talk to Sarah and Zondra when she needed to helped keep the demons at bay.

May 2004 – Pasadena Ca

When Tommy had contacted the Piranha about helping some operatives who were in a bind, there was no question that Chuck would help, because even though they worked for his Aunt, he, Casey and Ellie had been backed into corners by traitors before and he knew what it felt like to be hung out to dry. The problem was how to do it without his rule loving Aunt finding out. Chuck didn't believe that his Aunt had ever done anything other than what she was told, even when she'd added Jeff and Anna to the team rather than bury them in a black site somewhere, she was being told what to do, though it was by Chuck those times. So Chuck had to get this done without her knowing, but luckily he could show her at least 80% of what he was doing, and she still wouldn't have a clue.

Once he had dug out and supplied the financial information they needed, he stopped to think about the position that they were in, and decided to dig deeper, because they were going to need extra proof when the shit hit the fan, so he started back tracking from the point where Amy's accounts were set up until he had communications log evidence of when she started talking to the Gentle Hand people, then he turned around and followed the trail from there to the end, collecting evidence of all electronic communications and any indications he could find of physical communications as well. When Tommy (or Khan as he was known in hacker circles) told him that the agents were being dragged back to the US to come before an inquiry that was sounding more like a witch hunt, Chuck cleaned out the accounts that had been set up, as well as the account that the funds had come from, and set up a new account at a different tax haven to transfer the money into, sending all of the access details to them via Tommy so that they had resources available in case they had to break and run.

Chuck's interest was piqued in these agents, so he looked them up, but he couldn't find any references at all to Rosalia Zambetti, Anja Lundgren or Elana Truffaut other than in connection with this CAT Squad that they were on. That was part of the reason he agreed to help when Tommy asked him about unobtrusive, unbreakable and untraceable communications devices that would work just about anywhere, because he knew it was for them and he was intrigued. The challenge of creating something that most thought was impossible was the rest of it, and in the end he needed to get his Dad's help to get them working the way he wanted.

Afterwards Dr Dreyfus actually asked him to come up with more challenges like that to stretch his father, because getting into the challenge to make the phone deliver what Chuck was after had kept Stephen lucid for two weeks, which was the longest contiguous period he'd managed in the last twelve years.


The family did have a bigger worry through this period though, making sure that Bry would live and nursing him back to health. He had come far too close to dying when he saved that woman from the CAT Squad in the Warehouse Battle, and his initial adamant statements that he was certain that he'd seen Sammie, from her resemblance to Emma when she was young, earned him a pile of brain scans because Ellie was worried about why he was imagining these things. People who'd dealt with the CAT Squad said that Elana Truffaut was a tall, beautiful blonde woman in her early twenties, so they just put it down to him seeing her when he was saving her and getting mixed up between the pain and drugs and near death experience afterwards.

What they really couldn't work out though was why Bry never give up on that shallow bitch of a wife of his until she really shafted him. He had come back, a hero and almost dead from his wounds (why the intelligence community had had to fight, and eventually use the inquiry as the medium to shame Graham into granting him the Distinguished Intelligence Cross for that was another bone of contention), and all she did was say. "I can't take this any more." and divorced him, taking their daughter Kim away from him. The fact that Lenore was remarried to a sleazy businessman within a month and a half said that she'd already been screwing him while officially 'separated' from Bry (and probably before that, truth be told), but that wasn't the worst of what she did, the worst was how she and her new husband did their best to stop Kim from seeing her father while he was recovering.

There was no doubt that Kim was her father's daughter, because she usually found a way to slip out and get to see Bry. When they found that her stepfather had forcibly restrained her one time he caught her slipping out, he got a visit from a furious Ellie and Casey. Ellie told him on no uncertain terms what she would do to him if he ever laid hands on her honorary cousin, or tried to stop her seeing her father ever again, and the coward was so afraid of her that he called 911.

His smug smile as the place was swamped with police cars due to his 'donations' to the local County Sheriff quickly disappeared when Casey and Ellie produced their FBI IDs and paperwork to show that they were there to look into the complaints of inappropriate handling and false imprisonment that were reported by his teenaged stepdaughter Kim Mills, who he was trying to stop go see her war hero father in hospital. That changed everything, because it didn't matter what the Sheriff had told them about looking after this 'very important businessman', there were enough fathers, divorced fathers and veterans among the police who responded to turn the tide then and there.

The police demanded to talk to Kim and when they heard what she had to say, especially the fact that her mother had divorced her father when he came home shot to pieces and then married this sleaze just over month later, they told her stepfather the same thing Ellie had, and added that they'd be checking in with Kim regularly to make sure that she was OK. Kim's mother Lenore tried to say that these weren't real FBI agents, they were just friends of her ex-husband, but she realised that she'd screwed up as soon as Casey and Ellie turned around and insisted that the police check up on them.

Once the police had confirmation that Casey and Ellie were indeed genuine FBI agents, Ellie decided to use this to get what Kim wanted after she had had a quiet word to her. With Kim's confirmation, Ellie and Casey pulled the officer in charge aside and got the police's agreement for them to take Kim into protective custody and their assistance to gather up whatever Kim wanted to take with her. By the end of the day, they had also lodged a submission on Bry's behalf for sole custody of Kim, with Emma, Ellie, Casey and Jeff standing in to care for and protect Kim until her father was on his feet again.

Lenore and Stewart, her new husband, fought the custody case in court of course, but they made the mistake of trying to argue that Bry would not be able to look after Kim properly because he was a CIA operative. Roan, in his Herman Goldstein guise as the family's lawyer, came back with the evidence that Bry had in fact been discharged from the Agency on medical grounds soon after his wife divorced him, and then turned the legal resources of the Federal Government loose on Lenore for breaching the agreements she'd signed guaranteeing that she'd never divulge any of the official secrets that she'd learned as the wife of a CIA field operative, because the fact that Bry was a CIA field operative was one of the biggest secrets she'd been told. Needless to say, Bry won sole custody and Kim's request not to see her mother or stepfather was enforced with a restraining order against them.


There was a very good reason why Roan played a lawyer so often, that being the fact that Herman Goldstein the up and coming legal eagle was who he had been before he joined the CIA. He'd kept his bar qualifications up in a number of states around the country so that he could legally act as a lawyer when required and his skills at manipulating people made him an excellent lawyer, so he never lost a case. The law firm of Goldstein, Cohen and Marks might have be a fabrication, but Herman Goldstein wasn't.

It didn't take long for Kim to settle into the school in Arcadia that Ellie and Chuck had gone to once she'd moved into the house in Arcadia. Emma was listed as her primary care giver but Chuck, Ellie, Casey and Jeff (as her 'cousins' and 'uncles') normally dropped her off at the school and picked her up until Bry was up to doing it himself. The school had been worried that they were acting totally paranoid with the way they hovered over Kim, until Lenore and Stewart proved that they weren't by turning up at the school with 'guards' to try and take Kim back a couple of months after she started at the school. They all ended up in prison for that because what they did was demonstrably more of an organised kidnapping attempt than a breach of the restraining order.

Part of what helped Kim settle in was the fact that Casey's daughter Alex was close to her age and going to the same school. Kathleen and George (the man she'd married when Alex was two and a half) didn't have a lot of money, so when Casey asked if he could pay for Alex's education at the best schools that were close enough for her to stay at home, they'd readily agreed as this would be best for Alex. The fact that the schools in Arcadia were the best in California was a large part of the reason that Ellie, Chuck and Emma had been relocated there, so it was an easy choice to have her go there.

Since Chuck finished at Stanford and they moved back to Arcadia, much of Casey's time with Alex had been when he was dropping her off or picking her up from school, and if Casey couldn't, Chuck, Jeff, Emma or Ellie were always available. Having Casey and the family looking after Alex whenever they could had also given Kathleen the opportunity to go back to work full time again so that she could get her career back on track. This meant that after Kim joined the family, she and Alex spent a lot of time together and they got along great, so they quickly became best friends.

The only thing that tempered the family's enjoyment of how happy the two girls were were their thoughts of another girl Kim's age who they'd been looking for in vain for over ten years, ever since her mother found out that she hadn't died at birth as she'd been told, but rather she had been taken away at her father's orders to be raised by another woman. Ellie and Chuck were desperate to find their little sister, and the rest of the family were committed to finding her as well.

As soon as Bry was back on his feet, he joined Casey and the others at Shamrock Security (he worked with Charlemagne and Shiloh as well of course, but he was primarily part of Shamrock). He bitched and moaned at the way the rest of them enforced Ellie's instructions to ensure that he stayed on light duties, but he was bright enough to understand and accept that his healing would progress better if he followed Ellie's rules.

Quite aside from anything else, Chuck had been keeping up the image searches and references to the Ice Queen, Shanti or Graham's Enforcer. Around the middle of 2002, after she should have finished university, he got worried about how all the hits he was getting for the names Sammie was known by suddenly dried up, but after a few months references to the Ice Queen started popping up again, and then images started coming in from the spy satellites that were covering the more important parts of Europe, and he even started seeing references to Shanti and Graham's Enforcer from some ops. He was getting far fewer hits than he had been before, but he had evidence that she was still alive and presumably OK, so he'd take that.

This happened again two years later, but after that she was apparently being associated with an agent referred to as 'Graham's Golden Boy', which Chuck wasn't too happy about, because the references to him weren't flattering at all.


Working with Larkin wasn't as bad as it could have been, well he never stopped coming onto her of course, and she knew that Graham had set up a few of their missions so that she couldn't avoid having sex with him because they were being watched by their targets, but he was quite capable as an agent as long as she did all of the planning and hard work and stopped him from going off script. That last was the hardest part, but Sarah had had two years experience of keeping Carina's improvisation in line, and compared to Carina Larkin was easy to handle.

The longer it got from when Graham had last set things up to force her to sleep with him, the worse he got though. He was screwing every woman he could the entire time, but he seemed to have it fixed in his head that it was his right as her partner and cover husband to have sex with her, so when she held him off he got quite argumentative and behaved like a petulant child on missions, pushing the displays of affection way beyond what was acceptable or believable and starting fights in public when she rejected him.

Early September 2005 – near Kharkiv, Ukraine

Matters finally came to a head on a mission in the Ukraine. It was supposed to be simple, get access via a party at a warlord's dacha and use the usual processes to explain a couple going off to find somewhere quiet for a bit of 'alone time' to get into the safe in the warlord's office. Once they'd snatched the intel they were sent for, they'd slip out, call for a retrieval and be out the country within a couple of hours, simple.

Of course, nothing is simple when Bryce Larkin thinks he can use the situation to get what he wants. Once again, he pushed the displays of affection far beyond anything that was acceptable in public and almost got them thrown out of the party when the other guests complained. That at least did give them the opportunity to find somewhere quiet, because it was obvious that they were going to have a massive fight and Sarah didn't have the feign her rage at his behaviour. Even the men at the party had been rooting for her as they'd been outraged at the way Larkin had been handling her like a common street whore in front of their partners, their wives for many of them. This was an insult to them, and most of them were looking forward to extracting their own retribution on the pig later.

It took Sarah longer than it should have to get into the safe and get a copy of the intel that they were sent for, because Larkin wouldn't shut up about how she had to come around and be his partner properly. He tried to blame her for all the issues that they'd had, claiming that she was constantly throwing him off balance by leading him on and then rejecting him at the last moment, as well as not going along with the displays of affection on missions.

Sarah tried to ignore him, because killing him like she desperately wanted to would blow the mission. As soon as she had the intel and everything was back the way it had been she took off, thinking that the only thing that was going her way was the fact that no-one in the dacha that night would question her storming away from the bastard, so if they were seen with him following her anyone would read it that way.

The problem was, Larkin even managed to screw that up, because when they were found and challenged by the guards because he wasn't keeping his voice down, he pulled out his pistol and opened fire on them so they both had to dive for cover. The ensuing firefight was fast and furious, and it was all Sarah could do to avoid being hit while she tried to thin out the numbers of the greatly superior and better armed force at the other end of the corridor, so she wasn't focussing on anything but them.

When she realised that she was more than halfway through her last magazine, she turned to ask Larkin whether he had a spare mag, but he was gone. A quick look over her shoulder caught him glancing back with a smug grin as he disappeared around the corner, and she knew that he had abandoned her to be killed by the guards.

She turned back to the guards, trying to pick the best moment for a good death, when there was a lull in the firing while a number of them were apparently changing mags. Sarah seized that opportunity to grab a small but powerful flash-bang grenade from her clutch purse, arm it and throw it at the guards at the other end of the corridor. The timing was perfect, as it went off just as the ones who had changed mags started firing again, so it hit them with maximum effect. Sarah had clapped her hands over her ears, closed her eyes tight and buried her face in her thighs as the grenade went off, and she had managed to block just enough of the effects for her to be able to keep her wits about her, grab her pistol and clutch purse and bolt (OK, stagger) off in the same direction Larkin had.

It only took one peek around the corner to confirm that Larkin had taken the car they came in and left her there, and she knew the guards would recover too quickly for her to be able to get a cab or steal a car, so she took off on foot. The hotel they were staying at was less than two kilometres away, but it took her well over half an hour to get there, because she had to take cover whenever the warlord's soldiers went past, which happened all too often for her liking.

When she finally reached the hotel, she saw their car parked in plain sight right at the front door and the warlord's soldiers carrying her bags out of the hotel, only her bags. It was obvious what Larkin had done, he'd driven straight here, dumped the car right outside, grabbed his bags and called for extraction, so he would be on his way out of the country by now. The only question was whether he'd intentionally screwed her over and done his best to ensure that she got caught, or he was just covering his own arse and didn't give a shit what happened to her. Her memory of the look he'd shot her as he abandoned her told her that it was the former.


That was neither here nor there at the moment, she had to get out of there before anyone saw her, so she ran. As she crept through the dark back streets and lanes, trying to get as far as she could from the warlord's dacha and the hotel, she was evaluating her situation, and one of her first agendas was to get clothes that were less noticeable than the eye catching evening dress she was currently wearing. She checked the backyards as she passed, and managed to liberate clothes that fit her well enough and would blend in far better from a few clothes lines, she also lucked out in finding a pair of boots that fit her among the row of shoes that were lined up at the back door of one of the houses she passed.

Eventually she holed up in a cowshed on the edge of town, the evening dress, stilettos and clutch purse buried in garbage bins that she'd passed along the way. The contents of the clutch purse were spread through the pockets of the jacket she was wearing now, and it was when she was emptying the purse that she discovered that Larkin had managed to lift the device that she'd copied the mission data onto from her clutch purse while she was occupied with the guards. Of course, that was why the bastard had been so smug as he ran out on her, he had what they came for.

Sarah activated the untraceable function on the special phone Tommy's friend had supplied before she called for an extraction. Even though she knew that Larkin had taken the mission data and abandoned her, she wasn't expecting the response she got from the station chief they were reporting to for this mission. Once she'd told him what happened, he informed her that her story was the exact opposite of the lead agent's, who was currently being extracted with the mission data. He then went on to tell her that they couldn't endanger the primary extraction by sending someone for her now, so she'd have to go to ground for twenty four hours before they could extract her. He was also rather insistent that she give him her current location.

Given that Larkin would be out of the country by now, she knew the argument that she needed to wait where she was for twenty four hours was total bullshit, and that in turn meant that the only purpose for him to be demanding her current location was to give her up to the warlord so that the warlord could get rid of her and clean up his mess for him. As soon as she worked that out, she disconnected and started moving again.

A whispered call to Zondra, because she had more European connections, got her working on an off the books extraction option while Sarah snuck onto a truck that was headed in the direction of the border, just not the one that most people would expect her to be heading for. She had had to change trucks a few times when they pulled into truck stops on the trip down from Kharkiv in order to keep heading in the right direction, but it had been a surprisingly comfortable trip, laying on top of the sacks of vegetables and the like in the back of the trucks. Come morning she was in another town over five hundred kilometres away and getting confirmation of the details from Zondra about being picked up by a transporter who she'd used to get key witnesses out of a bind before.

Sarah gave Zondra the details of three of the clean passports that she'd had hidden in the lining of her clutch purse to make the travel arrangements, and Zondra confirmed all her measurements for the clothes that the transporter would be bringing with him. When she finished the call, Sarah found a place where she could get some rest in relative safety, and settled down for the day, thanking whoever was up there that it was a Sunday, so everything was closed.

First thing Monday morning, Sarah cleaned herself up as well as she could at the sink in the toilet of the offices she'd holed up in, had an unappetising but filling breakfast made up of the last of the vegetables she'd lifted from the trucks she'd been travelling in just over twenty four hours before, and then headed down to where she was supposed to meet the transporter early, so she could get set up in a position where she could watch the meeting point without being seen by anyone.

At precisely the appointed time, the big black Audi that had been described to her rolled up and stopped at the meeting place. Zondra had warned her that this guy was a stickler for his rules and would leave if she didn't turn up within what he regarded as an acceptable period, so Sarah delayed just long enough to confirm that he hadn't been followed before she came forward.

When she came forward to exchange the challenges and responses, it was obvious that while the man was ex-military, it was 'ex' in name only. He relaxed a fraction once they'd identified each other, but not much. Once he had accepted that she was who he'd come for, he handed her the bags with clothes, shoes etc and suggested that she get changed back wherever she'd been hiding, as that would almost certainly be more comfortable than trying to do so in the car, she nodded her thanks at that and took the bags.

When she looked in the bags, she reminded herself to thank whoever had organised this, because as well as the clothes that she'd expected, they held fresh underwear, packets of wet wipes, cleansing gel and deodorant, tooth and hairbrush, makeup etc. She stuffed the dirty clothes and boots into the bags, as they'd have to be disposed of. Deciding that the hair and makeup could wait until she was in the car, she quickly got herself cleaned up and dressed in the clean underwear, clothes and shoes and headed back to the car.

Aside from a curt "Seatbelt please." as she got into the car, the transporter didn't say a word until they were on the road. Even then, it was mainly confirmation of the details to ensure that no errors had been made in the communications via Zondra and his organiser. He didn't appear to have an issue with her having the coffee and pastries that he'd brought for her and fixing her hair and makeup as they talked, the only thing that was anything like an issue was that he insisted that she strip and dispose of her pistol before they reached the Moldovan border, and as that was less than half an hour from where he picked her up, she had to do that pretty much straight away. The clothes and boots that she'd been wearing were also disposed of along the way, but any papers to identify her as the woman who had been at the dacha outside of Kharkiv had already been disposed of in garbage bins at the truck stops where she changed trucks on that first night.

Once they were across the border and out of the Ukraine, the transporter relaxed a little and enquired as to how she was holding up. While they didn't go into any great detail, he got the gist of what happened and his reaction said that being betrayed by people you depend on was something he'd definitely had experience of. Frank was a good listener, and talking to him as they drove across Moldova and Hungary and into Austria relaxed her, so she was in a much better frame of mind by the time he dropped her off at Vienna International Airport with her luggage.

At the airport, she disposed of the passport she'd been using so far, and then had a shower and got changed before she used the second passport to claim the e-ticket that was waiting for her. She was flying business class for this leg of the trip, and she didn't relax until they were in the air and well on their way. After that though, she slept most of the way to Mexico City, because this was the safest she'd felt in days. In Mexico City, she changed identities again before she flew on to Tijuana, and then disposed of that identity as soon as she left the airport.

Once she was at their safe house in Tijuana, she bought some groceries and settled down to work out what she was going to do, because the only thing she thought that she could say for sure was that she'd been burned by the CIA.

A/N: Yes, I realise that I've railroaded the story line of the Taken series here, but I never liked the idea (much less the reality) of girls being taken by white slavers, and never liked his wife's character in the movies either for that matter, so getting Kim away from her and the slimy businessman she married so she can be safe and happy works for me.

The agents all have a back story, so who's to say that Roan's isn't that he was studying to be a brilliant lawyer before he became a brilliant spy?

BTW: I thought it would be fun to lob something infrom left field to see whether people are paying attention. Yes, Mary is the girl's mother, but Stephen isn't the father, she became pregnant when she was raped by Volkoff after she went in to recover Hartley. Volkoff had the baby taken away at birth to be raised to be the heir to the Volkoff empire. Ellie and Chuck's little sister is, of course, Vivian Macarthur (after all, they never said in the series who Vivian's mother was, did they?) This won't be the only skeleton to come out of the family's closet though.

The mission that ended Sarah's partnership with Larkin was based in part on my old Exit Strategy one-shot. The start of the next chapter will be based on parts of this and similar scenes from CVN and Sleepers as well.