A/N: More of our Christmas spy tale.

The Light of The World

Chapter Two: Paradoxes

My feet have grown numb from standing in the cold, the slush.

Or maybe it's the effect of a photograph becoming animate before me and trading code phrases with me.

Angel and star.

Angel. Come to think of it, Buffy's vampire love was named Angel. I remember. A vampire with a soul, forced into conscientious awareness of the weight and horror of his long, bloody past. That's why I didn't watch more of the show — now that I think of it. As I watched, I began to wonder if I was more like Buffy or more like Angel. The baby reminded me that I had a soul, and a CIA agent with a soul is almost as much a metaphysical paradox as a vampire with a soul. A zombie with a soul.

As Chuck tugs me gently through the slushy street, I try again to sort my monsters.

Before I've sorted them, we enter the door of the Urania, stepping into the hum and warmth inside. Chuck holds the door for me.

I had been so lost in thought waiting for the meet, for Carmichael, that I never noticed that the Urania is both a bar and a bistro. The odor of food and coffee fills the air. Dark wood dominates the interior, hand-tooled and shiny from frequent use and daily waxing. A clock ticks in the center of the wall behind the bar, flanked on each side by expansive mirrors, the mirrors fronted by long glass shelves, displaying bottles of liquor. Booths line the walls and tall tables with stools crowd the floor, many occupied, mostly by couples. A good place for our cover. I try to ignore the clock.

Chuck leads me to one of the tables and pulls out a stool for me. I climb on it, peel off my gloves, and he, after taking off his gloves, helps me take off my coat. Also good for the cover.

Except it doesn't seem like he does it for the cover; he just does it. No one's ever done that for me out of simple courtesy. Bryce did it now and then as part of our cover as a married couple, the Andersons. My marks sometimes did it as an attempt to impress me, hoping to help me take more off later, softer things. But Chuck takes my coat as a simple gesture of respect. Perhaps I should object to that but I don't find it objectionable. Much to the contrary. Respect is a reaction I rarely inspire. Particularly in men. Fear, that's more my metier. Discomfort. I suppose other Company agents respect me but they also treat me as if I am a leper, as if I am carrying a deadly disease, as if parts of me might fall off. Fear. One of them, during a happy hour in a DC bar, not knowing I was there, behind him — I never attended such gatherings so it was natural for him to speak freely — called me a killer's killer. I overheard him. Not my happiest hour.

Chuck folds my coat attentively, puts it on an unoccupied stool, then takes his coat off. Under it, he has on a dark green turtleneck sweater and black slacks. I notice that he's wearing black leather hiking boots. He takes off his cap and his hair is different, different than in the photograph. It's shorter, shorn of curls. I'm disappointed and pleased at the same time. The curls were sweet but the close cut also suits him, makes him look older, and accents his height somehow. It hints at an inner strength the photograph hid. He folds his coat too and stacks it on top of mine.

He's careful to fold his jacket and to place it so that the right-hand pocket is accessible. Spy stuff. Always have a weapon within reach.

I don't. I couldn't carry one on the plane and I did not have time to obtain one after I landed. It feels strange, naked, to be on a mission and unarmed.

Naked with an armed Chuck.

I shift on my stool in order to shift my thoughts. Thoughts like that are not my habit.

Especially not accompanied by images, as that one was, warming images.

Chuck nods to the bartender and the man comes to the table. He gives Chuck a careful glance then stares at me as I unwind my scarf. I'm wearing a V-neck red sweater and jeans, high boots. He takes me in and slips his eyes back to Chuck, trying to gauge our relationship. Chuck catches the subtle eye movements, and he steps toward me and puts his hand on one of my knees.

The bartender's body language changes, hopeful to resigned.

Chuck does not give the man a chance to speak; he orders in perfect Swiss German. I would mistake him for a local if I did not know that he was an American. He orders two coffees, then asks about food. The man tells him that the bar specializes in tapas. Chuck nods, asks a couple of questions, then orders the large tapas combo. The man nods and leaves the table, but he stares at me in the mirror as he walks away.

Chuck notices that too and shakes his head.

There's a weariness about Chuck that surprises me. The face in the photo was boyish. His face now is less boyish. It's not just the hair; it's his eyes, the faint dark circles around them, the just-noticeable lines around his mouth.

"Tapas?" I ask. "In Zurich? If you're hoping for what we might get in, say, Barcelona, you're going to be disappointed."

He removes his hand from my leg and looks at me for a moment as if he's trying to adjust to me as I've been trying to adjust to him. But he has never seen me before, not even a photo, so far as I know. The Director might have supplied him with one, or given him a description, and maybe the picture was an old one, showing me younger than I am now, or maybe the description was inexact, flattering, or unflattering. But he looks at me long enough to induce a fidget in me. I don't fidget. But I do. I adjust myself on the stool, reach down and tug on one boot pointlessly but so as to be doing something other than being looked at.

"I'm not especially hungry," Chuck tells me (in English) when I sit up straight. "I do want the coffee. I'm cold. Maybe I'll want some of the food by the time it arrives. I agree — Swiss tapas sounds less than promising. Like German burritos. But I wanted to make sure we had a claim to this table for a while." He pauses. "I assume you don't have a room yet?"

The question throws me, even as I smile at his burrito comment. I imagine a goose-stepping burrito with a Hitler mustache. I use my smile to wonder what he is really asking. Spies are all subtext.

But there's no undertone of suggestion in his words. Still, I can't get Bryce and Ryker out of my mind. I wonder if Chuck is more like Bryce or more like Ryker. How does he want to use me?

I'm accustomed to being regarded as a tool, a means to an end. My dad, Graham, Bryce, Ryker. A pattern. I do what I'm told. Except for that Burbank mission.

I've worked alone mostly. Most of my career. For a few months early on, I worked as part of a four-agent team, all female. That's ancient history.

But more recently, and for more than a year, I was Bryce's partner — and lover. For one mission in Budapest, I was Ryker's asset.

My relationship with Bryce was complicated. Spies with benefits.

Ryker needed me to extract the package, the baby, and then turn her over to him so that he could, in effect, sell her.

Bryce eventually left me and disappeared into deep cover with no explanation, no warning. And Ryker vanished after I escaped with the baby, and I still expect that he and I will have a reckoning

Anyway, I wonder what Chuck wants from me and how he intends to use me.

I'm here because he asked for me, I'm almost certain of that. His legend line outside implied it somehow. But I also remember him taking my coat and folding it. Respect.

I don't know what to make of him.

"No," I say, "I don't have a room. You say our cover is — "

"A couple," he interjects softly, now sitting and leaning toward me. "So, I have a room in our cover names at the Park Hyatt, near the city center. But there's another room reserved too, in the name of Ginny Merton. I don't expect surveillance inside the hotel, especially if we sell the cover outside, so you can stay in that room. I'm not going to force you to sleep with me — that is, in a room with me, when it is unnecessary."

Bryce would not have given me this out. An extra room. He'd have insisted that someone might be watching inside the hotel, might come to our room. In fact, he did insist on that during our first Andersons meeting.

I feel conflicted. "You're not the sort who plans for every eventuality?"

The bartender arrives with two large, heavy mugs of coffee, steam rising from them as if they were tiny active volcanoes. I quickly take one and wrap my cold fingers around it, glad of its warmth. I sigh without meaning to.

Chuck's quick, responsive grin warms me inside. He picks up a mug, mimicking my two-handed hold, and he sighs too.

He's not making fun of me, he's joining me. For some reason that pleases me even more than the gesture with my coat. No one ever cares how I feel.

Including me.

But he does.

Except he doesn't answer my question, so I ask another. "So, do people call you Charles, Agent Carmichael?"

He shakes his head. "No, Chuck. I know that doesn't sound like an agent's name. It sounds more like someone who works at a Gas and Sip."

Or a Buy More.

"You can call me Chuck or Charles. Either one works for the cover. You are Susan Black, I'm Charles or Chuck Black."

"Chuck Black. That's a row of hard k speed bumps." I exaggerate them as I say them. "Okay, what are the Blacks doing in snow-white Zurich?"

I glance outside. Snow is still falling, wet and heavy and I sip my coffee. It's good. Dark and subtly chocolatey. My feeling of dreaming returns. How is this possible?

"The Blacks," Chuck says quietly, "are here because Charles, an international banker, has business with Credit Suisse. Important business. Important enough to get him inside, into the holy of holies of Swiss banking. Once inside…" he waves his hand in lieu of continuing.

"What?"

"That's Need to Know, Mrs. Black, and husbands sometimes have secrets from their wives." He smiles but the smile is tight, like outside when we met.

I smile back tightly, mimicking him. "Not the best ones."

He nods in silent acknowledgment of my point.

"The best ones are not Company men," he observes.

It was my turn to nod.

I go on. "But if I don't need to know, why am I here, what I am to the mission?"

"That'll become clearer later. I promise. For now, I need you simply to pretend to be Mrs. Black. Tomorrow, we will spend some time in the best stores and spend big money, make a splash, and be sure we are noticed. When I go inside the Credit Suisse the next day, on Christmas Eve, I want them to believe that you are my wife, and for you to be allowed as far inside with me as possible."

"Into…the holy of holies?"

"You know the reference, right? The special part of the temple into which only priests could enter?"

"I don't know the reference but I have a sense of the phrase from context."

We sip from our mugs at the same time. As far as I can tell, he does not realize I know who he is.

Who he was.

Another round of sips.

He's oddly patient for an agent. Bryce would've been marching me to the hotel already. Ryker would have wanted to go somewhere and begin detailed planning. Chuck seems happy enough with his coffee and me, sitting here.

A waiter, not the bartender, comes out with a two-story tray full of tapas. The waiter names the dishes: pimientos de padrón, shrimp in garlic and oil, a cheese plate, an olive plate, and bruschetta. The smells are overwhelming and my stomach rumbles. Chuck does not seem to notice. He takes an empty plate and hands it to me, then starts giving me small servings of each item.

I decide to push on him a little, not really expecting direct answers but hoping to learn something by the nature and pace of the evasions.

"It's funny. Most agents I at least know by name. But I don't know yours."

He looks at me again, that same long look. It makes me fidgety again. How does he do that? I take a bite of the pimentos and am surprised that they have not been served hot. They still taste good — but they are certainly not equal to Barcelona's. I glance back up from the plate to Chuck and he is still looking at me.

"I haven't been an agent all that long," he finally offers. "So, it's not that surprising that you haven't heard my name."

Now I look at him. If that's true, it makes all this hard to explain. In effect, though no one has said so explicitly, he is the Agent in Charge. But why would he, a junior agent, take the lead over me? I'm not only the senior agent — I'm guessing we're nearly the same age biologically, except I am much older, ancient, the Sphinx, existentially — but I am arguably still the best agent the Company has.

This time, he fidgets, presumably thinking roughly the same thing I am.

Legend, he called me.

He shrugs. "I'm a bit more secret than most secret agents." He picks up his mug and drinks from it, using it as cover from my look.

What does that mean? Whatever it means, it rings true.

I try to recall what Graham told me about Burbank. He outlined the mission but, now that I recollect, he was coy about the details. Bryce, rogue, had stolen some computer program and emailed it to Chuck. Graham believed Chuck was involved in the theft, but even then, I doubted it. Not just because of his photograph, but because of what Graham said about Chuck's known history. Kicked out of college, he worked for five years (no vacations, no promotions) at the Buy More. Five years. No spy loves deep cover enough, no spy is committed enough to spend five years in a Buy More.

Better to be the love toy of a Greek army battalion.

And Bryce, good spy that he was, would never have planned that far ahead. Bryce was good in the moment, intuitive, good at improvisation, and seat-of-his-pants, but he wouldn't plan. Maybe he couldn't. Planning clashed with his dashing self-image. When we were together, I did the planning. The dashing do not plan. I assumed if Bryce sent the program to Chuck, there was another story about why. Bryce and Chuck were not a team; Chuck was not involved. Those curls in the photograph were not criminal curls.

For a while, around that time, Langley's scuttlebutt was focused on the notion of a computer-aided superspy, and I wondered if Burbank was the source of that rumor. But a computer-aided superspy is a fantasy. Still, Chuck Bartowski is in Zurich and he's a spy and he's the Agent in Charge and that's a hell of a lot in two years. I want to understand it but asking means giving up the only advantage I have — knowing who he really is. I decide to keep my only advantage for now and to live with the mystery.

"Being a secret secret agent — is that like being a killer's killer?" I finally ask when I see him looking at me again. His eyes no longer glint; they seem like they've softened, the warm coffee melting them.

He shifts on his stool and begins to make a plate for himself. He notices I've left the olives on mine but eaten everything else. I ate it as I was thinking. He leaves another question unanswered. "You were hungry. You look tired. I know you haven't had much time to rest, and that you had a long flight."

I spoon some more shrimp onto my plate, nodding. "I am tired. And as you must know from the Farm, in our work, rest is a weapon."

He looks at me as if he is hearing that for the first time, processing it, but then he nods. "Right, rest." He finishes his coffee in one long swallow. For some reason, my comment seems to have made him nervous. I notice that he's eaten all the olives from his plate and all the olives from the tray. I pick up my plate and offer him the olives, one rolls on the plate toward him. He grins and takes them, tilting the plate a bit to corral the unruly one.

"Not an olive girl?" he asks as he puts the plate down.

No one's called me a girl of any kind, even interrogatively, in years. It feels sort of nice, like a splash in the fountain of youth. "No, not an olive girl. Pickled things generally aren't high on my list of favorites, except for pickles, believe it or not, but only on or with sandwiches, burgers."

He nods but not just politely. Attentively. Like he's now making lists of what's on my lists.

The waiter comes by and offers to take the tray and we let him. Chuck asks for more coffee. I put my hand on the top of my cup. No more for me; I want to sleep. Chuck's right, I am tired. I yawn as if to prove it.

Chuck's ready grin shows up again. "My consistent, predictable effect on beautiful women. I induce yawning."

It's not that I haven't been called beautiful before, but for some reason that I don't try to work out, Chuck calling me beautiful makes me blush. He notices, and the corner of his grin quirks up, a hint of a smirk at my reaction.

"Oh, you think I'm beautiful?" I ask in a flirting tone, a tone I have only ever used on missions, with marks. I never used it with Bryce. Nothing that belonged to the grammar of romance was part of our relationship, not even the sex. Surprising, now that I think of it, how Bryce managed to combine dashing with unromantic. Abstractly and hypothetically, I would have thought that combination impossible.

But Chuck — for some reason, despite the oddness of the meet and my still not fully understanding the mission, — Chuck exudes romance. Exudes it involuntarily, graciously. His green sweater activates the green tint of his hazel eyes. His quick smile has nothing calculated in it. He seems kind — and kindness is a weakness in a spy, a vice, not a virtue. It seems like a virtue in him, a strength. He just doesn't seem like a spy to me, less so moment by moment. But he is. Here he sits. He spoke perfect Swiss German. We have a mission. The Director sent me to him. Here I am. A girl with a boy.

I frown at my own thought. It came with images, like my naked thought.

What's wrong with me? I'm the mistress of myself on missions. Wayward imagings, unlikely thoughts, blushing? Is this what it was like to be a normal teenager?

I was never a normal teenager. I was hardly a teenager at all.

Chuck misinterprets my frown. "I do think you're beautiful, but I'm sorry if it was unprofessional of me to say that. And that wasn't me trying to change the plan for tonight or anything. Really. It's just — I had heard how beau — "

He stops and shakes his head at himself. "Sorry, I'm trying to break my spiraling habit."

I laugh. For the first time since he arrived, he seems like the man in the photograph, as if the version in the flesh and the version on the film overlapped. Except for the curls. This is what the photograph suggested to me, how I read the man in it, and why I thought he was not Bryce's partner, though he might have been Bryce's victim.

From experience, I know that Bryce had made patronizingness into a damned art form, his signature attitude, a self-congratulatory mix of light concern and heavy condescension.

It suddenly occurs to me — how can I be having this thought for the first time, now, here? — that Bryce and I never had any chemistry, that he never appealed to me as a person. Yes, he was handsome and exceedingly well-made, and women all wanted him. I saw many women shift on their chairs in that tell-tale way when he walked into a room. But past that, there wasn't much to him. No hidden depths. No secret part of himself that he shared only with me. No mystery. I'm not sure he had an inner life at all, now that I think of it. He had less of an interior than most houseplants. No soul. Not like Angel.

Not like me. That's what the baby did to me. She made me aware that I had a soul.

And then I realize something else: Bryce had happened and kept happening because I was so lonely, because, back then, I did not even have my own soul for company.

I force my attention back to the conversation.

"A bad habit for a spy. Your life depends on never oversharing. Undersharing, that's the game." I give him a significant look as I finish the comment, since, despite his short spiral, he's been undersharing with me, and he knows it. His face gives that away.

"Right. Look, let's settle the bill and get a car to the hotel." He seems to be making a decision as he speaks, changing his mind. "Once we're there, I'll tell you more about the mission, I promise. As much as I can."

I sense a reluctance in him but I cannot identify its source.

He pays and we put on our coats (he helps me with mine) and gloves and leave the Urania. The snow still flies outside, but now darkness is settling in. The snowflakes seem like moving stars in the night. Christmas decorations are up, now alight, and so more noticeable in the dark than they were in the day. I am tired but I feel relaxed. Warm in the cold.

I think I trust Chuck Bartowski. Even if he is Charles Carmichael.

This time, I reach for his hand — for the cover.

A/N: I plan to post Missionary's next chapter before I return to this story, so I will likely not be back to this until around the New Year.

Merry Christmas and/or Happy Holidays! Happy New Year!