A/N: More story.


Patriot Tours


Chapter Four: Intersection


December 22


Sarah huffed to herself, lower lip pouting, blowing her uncombed but nearly dry hair off her forehead. She was still wearing her bathrobe, seated on her couch.

She had been in her apartment for days and remained under the weather, out-of-sorts, maybe worse than she had been when she had arrived back from France.

When she had visited Graham in Langley, he had been angry with her at first, annoyed that she had apparently gotten so close to Marcuse only to lose him. It was unclear what had happened, and why Mathilde had been executed, but it seemed likely that she had been a link to Marcuse that Marcuse could not allow. Graham had stood when she entered. He growled at Sarah for a moment but then stopped. She was puzzled by his action but then realized the mood that had been on her since Arcachon was still on her, even there, in Langston Graham's sanctum sanctorum, the slow-throbbing, cold-blooded heart of Langley itself.

Sarah did not fail often. But she never let failure settle on her, or compromise her, especially not around Graham. All her life she had been immune to after-moodiness, or at least she had been able to outrun it. She straightened her back and tried to reclaim her edge, the glint in her eyes, but she could feel the hopelessness of it. The sag of her shoulders she could straighten but they simply settled immediately back into place. The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant's bent shoulders. The line had sounded in her head, debris lodged there from a high school English class, a line that had touched her then and did so now. She felt like she was sinking into a swamp of resentment and disillusion.

Back in high school, she'd had a dream, a dream of normalcy, a dream of falling deeply in love, a devoted husband, and a happy family, a dream that might seem negligible to most teenagers, but to her, living as she had lived, it was as distant and sparkling and precious as any dream of being a princess.

In fact, it was her princess dream.

Graham had noticed her sagging shoulders and her dull eyes. He hid his claws and ended his growl. He assessed her for a moment, then made a placating gesture, clumsy and unpracticed.

"You've been working hard, working fast, for a long time. You…need some R&R, some downtime."

Sarah stared at him. In the past, he had never suggested downtime and had refused it to her the few times she had requested it near the beginning of her career — when she had not yet steeled herself beneath the weight of what she had become and was becoming, had not yet grown numb. But now Graham was offering downtime to her, unasked. There had been no hypocrisy or strategy in her bent shoulders; she had not realized her posture, or, apparently, its eloquence. It spoke above her will, and betrayed her unhappiness.

Graham continued, warming to his own idea, clearly surprised by the way Sarah looked, her comportment. "Yes, yes, take some time for yourself. I assume you destroyed your CIA phone before leaving Bordeaux?"

Sarah nodded. She had smashed it in the bathtub just before she left the Rue de Lurbe for good.

Graham picked up his desk phone, punching a sequence of buttons. "Tech? Graham. I need a new field agent phone for Sarah Walker, immediately. Be sure to have it programmed and at the door when she leaves. Oh, and she'll need a new laptop." He looked a question at Sarah. It too had been smashed in the bathtub, the hard drive hammered beyond salvage. She nodded.

He hung up the phone.

"Take some time, Agent. Bordeaux's done. We'll find Marcuse again. Today's chatter has him linking up with a new terrorist cell, but we aren't sure who or where." He pursed his lips in annoyance. "Although, as to the where, Barcelona seems likely," he added, but with a shrug.

Sarah again straightened herself. "I have contacts in Barcelona. I know the city. Let me get a shower and sleep. I will be on a plane tomorrow morning." But she could tell that her normal energy and push were not present; her tone would not congeal into a resolution.

Graham again assessed her. She could tell he was tempted to take her at her word. But he finally shook his head, her tone winning over her words. "No, no. Take some time for yourself. Go do something. Have you ever seen the sights, actually visited DC?"

Sarah had signed the papers joining the CIA and entered the Farm on the very same day. Like a sudden, decisive plunge into an ice bath. Graham sent her on her first mission on the day she was to have formally graduated from the Farm. She did graduate but without ceremony. She had been on a plane to Patagonia when the ceremony took place, missing it.

Missing things was the hollow substance of her life. Her princess dream was the tragedy of a dream. Enormous and empty.

She shook her head at him, finally finding her voice, her throat tight. "No, I've only seen the sights as I've gone past them. Except for Langley. I shower and sleep in DC; I don't live here."

Graham frowned, displeased — but the frown changed in a moment, a tincture of a smirk added to it. "Not sure that Langley counts as a landmark visited, Agent. Besides, you've never had the official tour here have you, the one the visiting civilians, the tourists, take?"

"No, sir, I've never been a tourist, here — or anywhere, except as a cover," Sarah admitted quietly.

The smirk left Graham's smile. "Well, be one. Take some time, say, until after the New Year. See the sights, be a tourist, and enjoy the holidays."

With that, Graham sat down. Sarah knew that was her dismissal. She left Graham's office and Langley, picking up her new phone and laptop on the way out of the building.

And now she was slightly stir-crazy in her apartment, the depression, resentment, and disillusionment gnawing at her, scurfy, leprous.

The first few days after her return she had slept, a stone, not aware until she had the time to rest just how sleep-starved her body was. She rose to go to the bathroom, heat canned soup and slurp it down, then she returned to bed. But since then, once she had thoroughly slept, she had been sitting, sitting, watching TV, and ordering her food. Not another can of Campbell's Tomato Soup. She had not wanted just to vegetate in her apartment, the one live plant among the other dead ones, but she had nowhere to go, no one to see.

Her father was out there, somewhere, but she had no notion of where, and no way to contact him, at least not immediately. Her one friend — if, indeed, a friend she was — a woman named Carina, a DEA agent —and she was not answering her phone. She was likely in deep cover, as Sarah had been. Carina was almost as often in deep cover as Sarah. All things considered, Carina's absence was probably a blessing. Carina's free-time preoccupations were not Sarah's. Sarah felt empty enough without adding frantic, sweaty clubbing — blinding light and deafening music — to her nights.

And Carina was as empty as Sarah, Sarah knew, but Carina distracted herself with a dizzying whirl of appetites and desires, momentary distractions that never added up, did not even tend to add up, to any lasting satisfaction. Lives like Carina's and Sarah's were not built to provide lasting satisfaction, no matter how often solemn bromides about the Greater Good were served up by Carina's boss or by Langston Graham.

Sarah had been sitting, eating, watching the Hallmark Channel — sitting. Almost every other movie was a princess movie. At one level, she contemned the movies, scorned them, but, at another, she ached during them: they actuated a visceral longing in her, touching close to her sore, sorely neglected heart, close to dreams she had spent five years ignoring and hoping to forget but was still ignoring.

So she sat, watching, torn between sneering at the movies and tearing up at them. A box of tissues among the to-go cartons on her coffee table and sofa helped her keep score, revealing that tears outnumbered sneers.

But she could not face another day of Hallmark, another day of self-division. She needed to get out, do something, divert herself. Her only human contact since her CIA driver had dropped her at home were delivery people. But she never actually talked to them, except if it was necessary when paying them. But usually, they left the food by her door.

She pushed the tissues and boxes off her new computer and turned it on.

She exited all the dedicated CIA programming and went instead to the internet, to Google, and put in the words:

Museum near me

She would be a tourist.

A tourist. Get outside, even if it was cold, see people, even if they were strangers, and look at objects worthy of being looked at, even if she knew nothing about them.

Join the human race for at least a few hours, be part of the crowd.

Normalcy, or some approximation of it.

She ran her eyes down the Googled list of museums, looking for one with guided tours, thinking of Graham's advice, and she saw The Smithsonian.

That seemed promising, really promising. The Smithsonian. She felt herself smile, her facial muscles protesting after days of disuse.

She blew out another breath and reserved a tour for later in the morning, then got up to put on her clothes.

A day out without a gun.


Chuck entered Patriot Tours with Jill.

They had lagged behind the others in their group, Grayton, Irwin, David, and Sheila so that Jill could talk to him.

She had been patient since his failure to respond to her offer in his motel room the night she slept there. But her patience was running thin. She was growing annoyed with Chuck again, with his foot-dragging, as she called it.

"We're running out of time." She had said that a couple of times, part command, part warning.

They had gone out on planned dates, the two of them, on each of the three Saturdays since they had arrived in DC. The weeknights had proven too busy to allow time for much socializing, and Fridays somehow became group nights, all six of the tour guides going out to dinner together.

Sundays had been rest days, usually involving sleeping in and then watching football as a group of six, with pizza and beers.

The dates with Jill had gone well.

Chuck knew he was attracted to Jill. In many ways, she incarnated the woman he had always imagined for himself. Brunette, brainy, talkative, and a free spirit. She shared many of his interests, including sci-fi and fantasy novels, games, music, and movies. A surprising number of his favorites among those were also her favorites, and conversation with her had assured him that she really had read those books, played those games, listened to that music, and seen those movies.

Everything seemed right, promising — and yet something was wrong, unpromising. Not much, just a little, but a little he could not seem to ignore. He could fall in love with Jill, but he feared it would be the kind of love he had fallen into with Alice. Sweet, heady but, ultimately, revocable love. The humiliation Chuck felt after Alice's break-up with him had eventually yielded to a clearer, fuller response, and he knew now that Alice was not the woman he had been looking for. And Jill was much like her.

On paper, Jill was perfect; in person, imperfect. And he could not privilege theory over practice. Chuck did not want to fall into revocable love again, a love that was little more than a child's, a sex-charged puppy love. He wanted to fall into irrevocable love — a grown man's love for a grown woman, profound and abiding, a love of the woman herself, and not of some set of traits she happened to have, or some checklist she happened to satisfy.

And so Chuck had kept himself and Jill stationed on a romantic razor's edge, not willing to commit to a relationship with her but not willing to rule one out, either. It was possible that he was wrong about her, that what felt like revocable love might transform into irrevocable love, caterpillar to butterfly. It was possible. She was so attractive. And so Chuck was giving a relationship with Jill, and giving Jill, a chance. But he was not going to sleep with her if revocable love was all he felt for her. He had made that mistake with Alice and he bitterly regretted it. He was not a man for whom love and sex, irrevocable love and sex, could be made to uncouple, except at the cost of his self-respect and happiness.

Chuck yawned as Tammy went through the morning routine, talking about the weather, the sizes of crowds expected at the various visits, and so on.

Each day's tour began for the guides the night before, when Tammy handed out files on each of the students who the guides would be responsible for the next day. It was typically a group of five or six students. Their files contained the applications that they and their parents or guardians had filled out, recent photographs, brief questionnaires filled out by the teachers with whom the students wrote their grant-winning essays and copies of the essays themselves. The guides, Chuck and Jill and along with the others, were expected to read over the material the night before and to arrive the next morning with names and faces memorized, prepared to talk with each student about his or her particular essay, or at least to mention it and praise it in relevant ways. That was expected to happen sometime during the day, and it often happened over the box lunch at The Smithsonian. The idea was for each student to feel, rightly, that he or she mattered to Patriot Tours, that his or her essay was worthwhile, and to be validated (and, Patriot Tours hoped, inspired) by having high-achieving college students discuss it with them, take it seriously.

Although it made for long days, Chuck was willing to admit that Patriot Tours' idea was good. While not every student responded positively to the guides, most, almost all, did. Most left feeling good about themselves, justified in new ambition, often talking aloud about the possibility of going to college, often asking about the colleges represented by the tour guides as possible destinations.

But Chuck was nervous, more than usually nervous, about the group of students he had today.

Tammy had pulled him aside when she handed him his files last night and talked to him in her office.

"Chuck, Jacob and I both believe that you are the best of our Tour guides right now, maybe the best we have ever had. Your students love you and give you the highest ratings. A number of teachers and parents have called us to tell us what a strong impression you made on their students, their kids. "

"So, as is the way with bureaucrats," her congratulatory smile became apologetic, "I am going to punish you for your merits. Tomorrow, we have a group of five students coming, all from H. D. Woodson High School. Woodson is rated as one of the worst high schools in the area. For various reasons, the students coming from Woodson are coming on the same day. We normally discourage that, but the Woodson principal asked if we would allow it, and even more, allow them to all be part of one group. A smaller than usual group." She paused. "We agreed. They'll be your group, Chuck. Three of the five are…behavioral problems. There're notations to that effect on their applications, notifications provided by the parents." She paused again, her manner gaining additional seriousness.

"Obviously, you aren't to mention anything about that, to the students or to anyone else. But it's only fair to let you know so that you are prepared and can respond appropriately. They're all smart, a couple of them are gifted, we think. Wait until you read the essays."

"But they will likely push you, Chuck, mistaking you for a push-over. Stand your ground. I've watched you, Chuck. Under all that smiling, California diffidence is a confident, competent man. Good luck tomorrow."

She patted his shoulder, the pat professional but also personal, and walked out of her office, her glance telling him the meeting was over.

He had pored over the files that night, making sure he had the five students fixed firmly in his mind. And Tammy was right. Two of the essays struck Chuck as the best he had read since he started as a guide. And all of them were good, very good, factoring in differences in age.

Maybe Woodson High wasn't so great — but these particular Woodson students were.


A few minutes after arriving at the office, Chuck was standing, steaming coffee in one hand, waiting for his students, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

He was surprised when he saw an older, run-down van pull to the sidewalk outside the office. On its side was an amateur stencil: H. D. Woodson High School Warriors.

The driver, a tall, thin man, his height lessened by his age and stoop, got out and came around, opening the side door. A moment later, five students were standing on the sidewalk in a loose group, staring into the windows of the office.

Chuck decided to go outside and meet them. He had not had any group arrive like that. Usually, students arrived with their parents and were ushered inside by them, and their goodbyes said in the warm office.

But these students were still standing on the sidewalk, in the cold, their breaths billowing, and the driver seemed at a loss. No parents were present.

Chuck walked outside without his coat, just carrying his coffee, and he waved at the group. "Woodson High! Welcome to Patriot Tours, folks! I'm Chuck, your guide. I'm from California."

The tallest of the students, a handsome black boy with broad, powerful shoulders, gave Chuck a long, skeptical look. "Christ, it's one of the Beach Boys!"

A smaller girl, younger, with red hair and freckles, laughed and added: "I thought they were all dead! Surfing accidents." She shook her head. "There's never a good Tsunami when you need one."

Chuck laughed along with the students and the driver.

The tall boy Chuck recognized as Gammon Moulder. Even as a sophomore, he was an All-City football player, a linebacker, and an All-City basketball player, a forward. His test scores outran his grades, and he exasperated his teachers with his lack of effort. He seemed to think that being an athlete and being a student were incompatible. But he had written one of the two essays Chuck admired so much,

The younger girl, thirteen, the freckled redhead, was Corday Diskin. Her teachers said she was typically silent, except for her lacerating sense of humor. She was a straight-A student, but a loner, keeping other students away by silence or by sudden, biting attacks, insult comedy. One of her teachers had called her a pint-sized, female Don Rickles. Chuck had to look up Rickles to understand the reference. Corday was the writer of the other essay that Chuck admired so much.

The other students were Tim Maxwell, standing in between Gammon and Corday, a spindly, curly-haired boy one year older than and one grade ahead of Corday. He was wearing a faded Flash t-shirt and corduroy pants worn at the knees. His tennis shoes were untied. Next to him, behind Corday, was a lean, attractive girl, plain-faced but wearing a leather jacket with skulls painted on it. She was Natalie Constance. She had laughed at Gammon and Corday's exchange, but her eyes had lingered on Gammon almost the whole time, except for a brief, dismissive glance at Chuck. Beside Gammon, next to Tim, was a lovely girl with delicate features, dressed in a sweater that read Woodson High Cheerleader. She was looking at Chuck with a quiet intensity, a smile in her eyes that did not register on her lips.

The driver nodded to Chuck, his chin dropping toward his chest. "Well, I'm leavin' them with you, Mr. Bartowski. Hopin' you have a good day." His tone was not optimistic.

Gammon watched the driver get back in the van and pull away, as did the others, then he faced Chuck.

"Why the hell would someone leave California in December to lead kids around monuments in cold-ass DC?"

Chuck wasn't sure how to answer, trying to get some sense of the group dynamic. It was clear that the group was taking its lead from Gammon. Gammon, Corday, and Tim (surprisingly) were the students who were behavioral problems.

"I've not seen much snow, thought I would see what it's like," Chuck volunteered.

Gammon shook his head as if looking at a pitiable fool. "I ain't never been tortured, but I ain't in any hurry to see what it's like. I figure any intelligent person can recognize that water-boarding sucks, without trying it out."

Natalie snickered, but the others simply watched and listened. Tim's face reddened as if he was embarrassed, but Chuck could not tell if Tim was embarrassed for Chuck, for Gammon, or for himself. Or for them all.

"Come inside, out of the cold. Gammon's right about the weather," Chuck said, hoping a concession might lessen Gammon's open hostility.

The group straggled behind Chuck. He could see them straggle in the reflection in Patriot Tour's windows, but he did not look back. It was going to be a long day; he could feel it.

A few minutes later, during which his relationship with the group had not thawed, despite the warmth inside, he led them back out of the office and onto the bus.

First stop, The Smithsonian.


Sarah was annoyed.

She stood in the lobby of The Smithsonian, tapping her foot. Pissed.

The tour she had arranged online had been canceled at the last minute, her guide overcome by a sudden stomach bug. All the other guides were allotted to other groups for the next couple of hours.

The short man at the front desk, after telling her all that, pointed out that she might be able to join another tour, but that he would have to ask when the group arrived.

"They should be here in a minute or two," the short man explained. "Actually, it's several groups of students." He double-checked a clipboard. "But one of the groups is smaller than usual today, so you might be able to join them."

Sarah stopped tapping her foot and thought about returning to her apartment, to Hallmark and princess movies, but as she did, the door opened and a tall, handsome man led a group of mismatched students into the lobby. He had been saying something to the group behind him, but only one of them, a girl in a red, black, and green Woodson High Cheerleader sweater, seemed to listen

Nonetheless, when the handsome man turned around again, he noticed Sarah. He smiled at her.

Sarah's life had not been devoid of the smiles of others. She had been smiled at many times — sometimes sincerely — but no one had ever smiled at her like that: the sun making its inaugural appearance after the words, "Let there be light!"

The smile was at once ardent and creative.

And for the first time in weeks, the Arcachon drizzle in Sarah's soul ceased. A slight tremble of impossible recognition ran through her; she had never seen the tall man before but she seemed to hear music as she looked at him, as if from a distance, regal fanfare.

She turned to the man at the front desk. "Is that the group?"

The short man nodded, relieved by her no-longer-pissed tone. He was obviously afraid of her but also obviously not entirely sure why.

"Yes, the leader's Chuck Bartowski. He works for Patriot Tours. They're here with groups every day."

Sarah smiled. Patriot Tours? "Ask Mr. Bartowski if he'll have me, please."

The man nodded again and motioned to Mr. Bartowski.


A/N: So our cast of characters is assembled, the players in place.

Thanks to Smatterchoo and MicroGirl1225.