Interlude: The Marriage Proposal

Charlie "Silent Chuck" Cummings always smirked when he heard Liam Neeson say that line in that move, "I don't have money. But I have a very particular set of skills," because it was true. Charlie also had a very particular set of skills, acquired by years of training and experience. But a fat lot of good they did him when his action group had been disbanded and he had to look for real work. He found a job as a rent-a-cop – private security for people who needed (or thought they needed) private security. But the job was boring as hell and he could feel his skills and conditioning atrophying away while he watched over rich assholes and even richer whack-a-doodles.

Take his current client, for instance. The chick was good looking enough – sexy as hell, as a matter of fact. But she was whack-a-doodle, crazy as a loon. And it there had ever been one lesson that made total sense to Charlie, it was: Never stick your dick in crazy. The sex was wonderful but the payback was a bitch. Guaran-damn-teed. So he watched over her from a distance and kept the interaction to a minimum, thus earning the nickname "Silent Chuck" from the client's people.

Which was funny, because his teammates had called him "Silent Charlie" because he could get to any sentry and neutralize him without being heard. Back in the old days.

To be fair, unlike most of the other asshole clients he'd protected, this client actually seemed to need watching over. She received death threats nearly every day. Wherever she went – and she always seemed to be on the move, travelling from one of her sanctuaries to another – there were threats of violence, and sometimes riots. One time there had been a sniper but the sniper had been an amateur, and therefore stopped before any shots had been fired.

Charlie didn't understand his client or her religion or whatever she did, but then he didn't really need to understand those things. All he had to do was keep her safe. Which is what he did and he did it well. The bullshit he ignored because crazy was crazy, even if it did pay the bills. But she – Kara Lennier – was kind of scary, too. Sometimes she looked at him and said things and there was no fuckin' way she could know those things.

It freaked him the fuck out when she did that.

Like that time they were walking to her car, and she stopped and looked at him. She said, "I have a message for you." Like he wanted to hear a message from her God or whatever. Christ, what was he going to say?

She said, "Research 3.0 will be coming on line soon. Prepare to be recalled to active duty."

Just like that. Out of fuckin' nowhere. He just stared at her. Prepared to be recalled to active duty. It was like all his wishes wrapped-up in a special breakfast burrito and served piping hot with the world's best fuckin' coffee. Prepare to be recalled. To active duty. Active duty.

"What does that mean?" he finally managed to ask.

She shrugged. "No idea. Just a message for you. Do you understand it?"

He said, "I understand the words but I don't understand what it means. How did you know about that stuff?"

She smiled at him. "I don't know about that stuff, Chuck. I just do what God says and that's my life."

Kara was crazy and the message from God was crazy, and it didn't matter to Charlie anymore. He didn't care about the source of the message. He just wanted it to be true. So the next day he started up PT again, and whenever he could he got to a gun range and started to get the old skills back. Because Kara was crazy but he wanted to have his old job back in the worst way.

And then one day a few weeks after that she stopped for a second and he could tell she was listening to something, because that was the look he used to get in the action group when orders were coming in on the earwig. But Kara didn't have any earwig (he had checked) so he didn't really know what was going on. Maybe she was hearing the voice of her God or whatever.

And then she told the driver to take them to an address about 15 minutes away, and it turned out to be a military surplus store. But Kara didn't want any military surplus stuff. She told the fatass owner she wanted the commo gear in the back office safe, the stuff he wasn't supposed to have, and then he went for a gun from under the counter. But fatass was slow and so Charlie got to the gun (a subcompact Sig Sauer that fatass probably couldn't have hit anything with anyway), and then fatass was looking at Kara, scared out of his fuckin' mind, because Charlie was around back of him and had him in a sleeper hold and everything was going gray for fatass. Maybe fatass should start praying to Kara's God or whatever right about now, because he was going bye-bye.

Kara said, "Stop it, Chuck. That's enough." So he stopped before fatass went night-night but he kept his hold on him because, as far as Charlie was concerned, people who pointed guns at clients had lost any trust or respect they may have been due.

They walked in the back and Kara moved some stuff, and there was another room that had been hidden, and they went inside and there was the safe. Fatass said something about not opening it and what were they going to do about it? But Kara just smiled and waved him off, and then went right to the safe and just fuckin' opened it. She turned the dial like she know the combo and, after a minute, she fuckin' just opened the fuckin' safe. Like a pro. Like a member of his action group would have, after receiving good intel.

So his religious leader client was a goddamned safe cracker, in addition to everything else. That blew Charlie's mind, right there.

Inside the safe were familiar items. Frequency-agile commo gear with encrypted burst transmit/receive capability. A bunch of earwigs. Throat mikes. Kara took it all and then looked at the fatass who was about to piss himself. "Thank you for your contribution." And then they left fatass there and quickly walked to the car and they were gone before fatass could get to another gun.

But they didn't go back to the local sanctuary. Instead, Kara directed the driver to yet another address, which turned out to be a high-tech electronics company. They went into reception and there was some guy with a golden skullcap on, which meant he was a member of Kara's golden rule cult. But the guy had a nice suit on and the security guy at reception seemed to kowtow to the dude, so maybe the whacko was a big executive here.

The big executive in the gold skullcap escorted Kara and Charlie into the building. They headed toward some kind of electronics lab, where more people in lab coats awaited them. Kara handed the commo gear to the bigwig and he handed it to the lab coat people, who seemed to know what to do—even though they didn't like it. They kept looking at schematics and stuff on their computer screens, and shaking their heads like whatever they were doing was never going to work. But the bigwig in the gold skullcap was watching them (when he wasn't watching Kara with something that looked like awe on his face), and they did whatever it was they were supposed to do. After a couple of hours they hooked the commo gear up to a couple of machines, and they seemed satisfied that their work passed whatever tests they had run. Then they handed all the gear back to the bigwig, who handed it back to Kara. And then she handed it all to Charlie.

"This is yours now," she said. "Put one of the little thingies into your ear and turn on the whatever-it-is after we get back to the car. You know what to do." And he did and they left that place, after thanking the bigshot executive who passed it off like it was no big deal.

"The least I could do for you," bigshot said as they walked out. "You changed my life."

Kara kissed him on the cheek, which seemed to be more payback than he could have ever imagined. And then they left.

In the car, Kara directed the driver back to the local sanctuary as Charlie tested out the commo gear. In his ear he heard a voice, "Research 3.0 on line. Are you receiving?"

Charlie spoke quietly into the throat mike and said, "Affirmative. Awaiting orders."

Kara was ignoring Charlie as she spoke to her people, who had been a bit hurt that she had left them in the car for the previous stops. Kara soothed their feelings, since she wouldn't have wanted to be treated that way. She apologized and explained that, once again, she had been following God's will, and now it was time to get back to Church work.

Charlie was having an entirely different conversation. His earwig said, "You are on standby. Continue current assignment. Your protectee is very important. Continue to protect, continue to prepare for deployment, and await further orders."

Charlie was disappointed at being relegated to standby status, but, hot damn, he was back on active duty! So he tried to be patient as he awaited further orders.

The orders came but they all involved training. Go to this local gun range and fire 100 rounds with this weapon. Go over there and do an urban paintball competition. Go run 10 miles before 6 AM. Enter this marathon. Take that hike. Go to that dojo and ask for Sensei Whatever and see what happens. Charlie followed his orders and he could feel the old skills returning. His client, Kara, smiled indulgently when he asked for time off and she accepted a substitute security force until he could get back to her.

Meanwhile Charlie looked at Kara with newfound respect. Sure she was still crazy and still running around with that cult of hers, and she still claimed to hear her god, but damn she had actionable intel and she got stuff done. Stuff that helped people out. Stuff that got Charlie back on a team. He was willing to forgive her a lot because she had gotten him back where he belonged.

Then one night she told him they were going to sleep together, and she opened her robe and Charlie forgot everything about that rule he had been following, and the sex was amazing. And then it happened again a few nights later. Soon it was just accepted that Kara and Charlie would be spending the night together, every night, and if Kara's people didn't like it (and some didn't) that was too bad for them.

One time this church bigshot tried to tell Kara it was bad for the church's image, and she just shut him down. "Did you think I was a virgin?" she asked the asshole. "I lost my virginity at 15 and I was having sex with a different guy nearly every week before my accident. If you think I need to pretend to be something I'm not, in order to help the Church, then you are sadly mistaken. This Church is founded on reality and on one Golden Rule, not somebody's perception of sin and sinner."

One night, laying in their bed all sweaty but smiling, Kara whispered in his ear (the one without the earwig in it) that her God had told her that it was okay to have sex again, and that Charlie was the person she was going to have sex with. He didn't know what to say to that. By this time he had figured out that she did hear a voice, and that voice told her what to do. Kind of like his earwig. But in her head. Charlie decided it was okay. It didn't matter why she chose him. Any voice that got him laid this spectacularly was a voice worth listening to.

Another night, another post-coital conversation: This time Kara told Charlie she was pregnant with his daughter. He freaked out for about a minute but he quickly came to the realization that he needed to deal with the situation, to do the right thing. So the next day he went to an ATM to check his balance, and he was shocked at how much money he'd accumulated on this assignment. Good pay and no expenses, he thought. Then he went to a jewelry store and found a nice ring; one that was not too flashy but nice. A ring that he thought she would like.

That night he proposed on his knees in their room and she said yes. And he knew then that he loved her, despite her crazy religion, and that he would always be there to protect her and their daughter—at least until he was taken off standby status.

And she cried happy tears and he cried happy tears, and he thought he heard a voice in his ear say "Good man" but that couldn't have been right because Research 3.0 didn't work like that.