A/N: Sarah enjoyed her stroll and the frolics during and after it, but now she's faced with the real reason she's in Zurich, the true story. Her mission is not a CIA mission. (It's Prague in reverse, sort of.)

The Light of the World

Chapter Nine: Yesterday and Tomorrow

One word rings in my head. "Steal? You, Chuck?" I look at him and squeeze his hand.

He shakes his head. "Well, I don't know that anyone can steal himself or herself. But that's what Graham told me early on. He told me I was the property of the US government. He meant his property."

"Graham could be an ass," I offer, shaking my head too, but not quite sure what to say about my former boss, "and no person is property." He never called me that but he treated me that way; I understand Chuck.

He stares at me for a moment and I can tell he's thinking, reflecting on my words. That reluctance shows itself again.

I pull him close to me and press his naked body against mine. "Just tell me, tell me it all." I'm prepared for whatever he needs to say. The last twenty-four hours have been a reckoning. I feel stronger than I can remember.

He nods, sighing, staring at the baby blue teddy he slipped off me earlier. For a second, my memory slips back into it and then out of it, Chuck's hands strong and searching — but I make myself focus and look at him and not the lingerie, reining in my imagination.

"To understand, you have to understand something about me, something I doubt Graham told you about me. He judged me a loser…"

He looks back into my eyes and I nod. "Yes, when he told me about you before I turned down the assignment, he made that clear. He didn't use that word, but he smirked about Stanford, the Buy More, living with your sister, five years — "

"I figured," he breaks in, his tone sharp, but he's reacting to Graham, not me. He shifts on the bed.

"It was clear from the start that Graham thought I was…nothing. Only a…container…for his precious Intersect, human Tupperware." His bitterness surprises me but, as I said, I understand it. "But I wasn't nothing, Sarah. Certainly not Tupperware. I admit I had a…bad stretch…after Stanford, although calling five years a stretch might itself be a stretch — but I was an honors student in high school, a National Merit Scholar. Hell, I was a Mensa member."

I don't know what that means but I'm guessing it's a club for smart people. And Chuck, I'm realizing and have been realizing, is smart, smart way before the Intersect.

"I won a full scholarship to Stanford and I was on the Dean's List every term there, including the one in which I was expelled. I was on my way to being anything but a loser. I could have made a fortune in programming. My Stanford profs expected it.

"Despite my bad stretch, I was never a loser, I had potential. I just got…derailed. And Graham should have known that. I just needed the right motivator, and the Intersect and then Casey and then Rye — that was my series of swift kicks in the pants.

"It took time to shake off the lethargy, but I woke up. Rye's death really did it. After that, Casey started helping me learn to be a spy; he thought I needed to know if I had a chance of staying alive. He didn't let on to Graham that he was teaching me."

"What about Beckman? John Casey was NSA, not CIA."

Chuck looks at me. "True, but after Rye, Graham forced Beckman out of the picture. Casey was temporarily reassigned to the Company. Not Company technically but answerable to Graham. Then Graham sent this…woman…after Rye died, Agent Forrest, a real — "

"Bitch," I say fiercely. I immediately picture her in my mind, a blonde smirk. Forrest and I go way back. We were at the Farm together. And she was at that DC bar when I was called a killer's killer, and she stared at me when the man said it. Provocation and jealousy intertwined in that stare.

She always wanted to be me. She wanted to be a killer's killer and I didn't but I was the one who finished first in our class at the Farm. She never forgave me for being better at spying than she was, especially when she knew I did not love it deep down as she loved it.

I guess from her point of view, I took what she wished for but without really wishing for it myself.

It must have seemed like I didn't deserve it.

I didn't. And she should have been careful what she wished for.

"Yeah," Chuck says, breathing out his agreement softly and I am sure a long story hangs on that breath, but I don't ask and I volunteer no more about her.

"After Forrest, Graham made do with Casey, although there was constant friction. Casey kept training me as he could — secretly. He was the one who first called me a secret secret agent. After Graham died, Beckman took over for a while, until McDonald got installed and up-to-speed at the Company. But McDonald did not send anyone new; she left it just Casey and me."

He pauses and gazes at me. "What would have happened if you had said yes to Graham? Come to Burbank?"

I wonder too but I don't say so. I only shrug. "I'm here now, Chuck. I'm with you."

I have the strongest feeling that I would have ended up in his arms, in his bed, although I wonder how long it would have taken me there. The time since Burbank, since I said no to Graham has changed me and the changes took time; they occurred so slowly that I didn't know how deep they were until the last two days.

If I had gone to Burbank, I would have driven Chuck crazy. And myself too. I can't imagine not loving him but I can imagine fighting it, fighting myself. Tormenting us both.

He winces a little and gives me a look of entreaty. "Don't commit yourself yet. I still haven't explained tomorrow, what I'm doing." He pauses and then continues, resuming.

"Bryce showed up soon after McDonald took over. He hadn't died as Graham and everyone thought." He glances at me. "Company cleaners, double agents, you know them as Fulcrum (I nod — I've had brushes with Fulcrum agents) reported him as dead but substituted another body for him. They revived him, rehabbed him, and thought he was one of them. Fulcrum planned for him to download their updated, retooled version of the Intersect, but he escaped, and stole it instead." Chuck laughed grimly. "The second time Bryce stole the Intersect."

"Bryce intended to download it himself, and McDonald was going to allow him to do it — so the Company would finally have the Intersected spy it always wanted, instead of an Intersected loser, Intersected me.

"But Fulcrum attacked — during my sister's wedding, believe it or not — and I ended up downloading it while Bryce…" He stalls, "while Bryce got shot, killed. For real this time. The second time I downloaded an Intersect that Bryce stole."

I listen, sad for Chuck but not so much for myself since I long ago made my peace with Bryce dying. The change of date doesn't change that. I'm sorry he's gone but none of what Chuck has told me changes the fact that Bryce is gone or changes what happened and didn't happen between us.

Meeting Chuck has made me aware of how much didn't happen between Bryce and me.

Chuck stays silent for a few seconds. So I speak. I don't want to dwell on Bryce so I push the conversation subtly in another direction. "You said Bryce told you about me before he died?"

Chuck lifts his eyes. "Yes, but I knew about you already. See, Casey was training me secretly, but I wasn't passive anymore, I wasn't just waiting and taking orders and training with Casey. After Rye died, I started doing my own thing, using my skills, my hacking skills. I'm as formidable with a computer as you are with knives."

A hacker. This is news to me but I don't find it shocking. It makes sense. Computers are a part of him — in all sorts of ways. The computers in our hotel room, Chuck's use of them.

It fits.

He isn't a loser. He's won me.

"The Intersect supplied information on you when I first heard your name from Casey. That, and the respect in his tone made me curious. The photographs of you. So, I started hunting for more information than was in the Intersect. I hacked the Company — "

"You did what?!" The audacity of it shocks me but even more that he's speaking of what he did as a success.

He smiles slowly and sheepishly. "I hacked the Company. Deep, all the way to Graham's private files. Not just the ones he kept for the Company officially, but the ones he kept for himself, basically, his personal notes, a kind of journal, files he thought were hidden, untouchable. But this loser touched them."

Touched me. "That's how you know so much about me?"

"Yes, the Intersect had most of the mission stuff. And Casey told me some things. He knew a lot about you and especially your reputation. Spy scuttlebutt. But I had to hack into the Company to find personnel files, evals, that sort of thing. And then I had to hack into Graham's files to get to the truth."

My chest tightens. After a moment to recover, I ask: "The truth?"

He gets up from our bed and walks to the window, facing it. It's grown dark out but I can see snow falling in the glow of Zurich's outdoor lights. Chuck's lean and beautifully naked body standing next to the open-curtained window makes my body respond, making me forget my own question. As consciousness is harnessed to the flesh. I try to ignore my body and listen to the answer.

Chuck stares out the window. "Graham was dirty, Sarah, corrupt. He used the Company and his agents for his own purposes, masquerading as if he were doing the country's business, but taking every chance to profit himself in power and prestige — or in cash."

"He used his agents?" I reach for the sheet hanging partly off the bed and pull it around myself. I'm suddenly cold.

Chuck doesn't respond, so I ask what I want to know. "Did he use me?" I know Graham used me in one sense, his Enforcer, a tool, a weapon. But I thought it was for the Greater Good. For my country Did he use me instead for his own gain?

Chuck faces me and I see the reluctance. Fully visible. He's not hiding it now.

He did not want to tell me this and he's been dreading it.

"Yes, he did. Several missions he sent you on were unsanctioned, the marks or targets people in Graham's way, threats to his plans, not to US security."

Chuck rattles the code names for a dozen or so of my missions and my heart sinks lower with each one. I've worked hard to forget them. As I remember them, I also remember that I had faint suspicions during them — or I should have. They had seemed… gray somehow…but I thought it was me, a failure to control myself and remain in that abstract and hypothetical frame of mind that I used to keep myself from myself, to keep missions at arm's length.

Chuck gives me a moment and then he goes on, his voice soft and sympathetic.

"He worked hard to fool you, Sarah. To keep you from finding out what he was doing. He knew you had limits, lines, even if you didn't recognize that about yourself.

"But there were other agents who knew and who profited along with Graham, who were on his private payroll, benefiting from his open black-ops checkbook. ."

"Ryker!" The name pops into my mind with sudden total certainty.

Chuck nods once and tightly.

"Yes, there were a few others but most of them died in the Intersect explosion with Graham. Ryker didn't. He wasn't there. He'd vanished by then.

"Ryker was Graham's go-to agent for personal missions, Graham's junior partner, sort of — but Ryker, as you know, was a blunt instrument. No ethics, zero impulse control, no regard for collateral damage, wantonly cruel. And he otherwise was not your equal as a spy; he could not match your skill set. And so Graham kept you close but not too close and kept you in the dark and on the move, never letting you rest, reflect, so as to make sure you never put together what he was up to. He needed you to do what Ryker couldn't.

"To make it harder for you to discover what he was doing, Graham made sure most of your missions were sanctioned — legitimate. He mixed in the unsanctioned ones here and there, never back to back, doing all he could to keep you from understanding, seeing a pattern. A few of your missions were part sanctioned, part unsanctioned. As I said, Graham mixed things up to mix you up.

"He kept watch on you by frequently meeting with you face to face — that made everyone in the Company regard you as his golden girl — but also by requiring all your psych evals to go to him first. He bugged your phone and put you under surveillance occasionally between missions. He was watching for any sign that you suspected — and he would have had you terminated, floating face down in the Potomac, if you had said or done anything that made him worry at all…"

"I was too stupid to see it," I say, turning my face away from Chuck. "I refused truly to face what I was doing and so I was oblivious to what he was doing with me."

Chuck comes back to the bed and sits down and takes my hand. "Sarah, no. I know how Graham recruited you. He deliberately stepped into the role your father played in your life. Graham knew what he was doing; it was all calculated.

"He manipulated you from day one and you were too young and too vulnerable to defend yourself. He made sure you felt indebted to him, for saving your father, for saving you. He hoped to bring you on board, after the Farm, to let you know what he was doing, and make you complicit, but he found out, to his annoyance, that you were not as malleable as he believed. You had limits and lines. You needed to believe what he told you about the Greater Good. It was how the Company seemed worth serving, worth the sacrifice of yourself.

"Ryker didn't give a shit about the Greater Good; he only cared about Ryker. He was like Graham in that way and you weren't."

It's strange to hear my life told from Graham's perspective. It shames me and angers me.

The cold-hearted bastard.

"Hold on, Chuck. Something doesn't make sense. If Ryker worked for Graham, what happened in Budapest? Graham didn't know about Ryker's plan, I'm sure of it."

"No, you're right, he didn't know. Ryker was freelancing. He wasn't making money from Graham at the pace he wanted. Ryker asked for you because he knew what Graham knew: You were the better spy." Chuck pauses before the next word. "Deadlier. He wanted you as muscle, to do the wet work. He talked Graham into sending you by misdescribing his plan and the situation. When it was over, Graham punished Ryker's ambition by forcing Ryker out of the Company, ending him as an agent. But Graham kept Ryker on his private payroll, kept using him, but entirely off-book. Ryker vanished into the shadows."

I nod, listening, understanding my own history differently. "What did Graham make of what I did, saving Molly, stealing her away." I hear my own use of 'steal'.

"On one hand," Chuck says, "Graham was pleased you'd foiled Ryker, because it kept Ryker in his place, dependent on Graham. But on the other hand, he was worried by your show of independence. In the past, on missions, you'd changed the script here and there to protect innocents, but you'd never just gone off-script altogether and written your own part, your own dialogue. But you did with Molly. And then you refused Burbank — the first time you refused an assignment.

"That was when Graham became very suspicious of you and gradually drew back from you and used you less often and gave you sanctioned but humdrum assignments. He could tell from his meetings with you and from your psyche evals that your heart was even less in it than before and he worried it was because you suspected him."

I listen and shake my head. "I didn't. I should have known the business with Ryker was some sort of snarl, should have worked it out, but I was so preoccupied with Molly and Mom and then I found out about Bryce — I never thought it through. I just moved on. Leaving Molly with Mom had been so hard; I tried not to think about her or Mom."

Or the clock ticking inside me that I was suddenly hearing. But I don't say that to Chuck. What I say instead is: "But I don't understand. If you knew Graham was corrupt and knew about Ryker, why would you decide to become an agent, agree to go to the Euro Farm?"

Chuck nods his head in acknowledgment of the question. "Right. I need to explain that. At a certain point, thinking about Graham and Ryker and you and Casey and Rye and Forrest, thinking about Graham calling me property, I realized that the only way out was through the Company. I needed to make it seem like I was on board. When McDonald took over, she initiated a quiet cleanup of the Company, tidying Graham's messes and burying his abuses. Initiating a new regime. She's not exactly corrupt, as far as I can tell, but she belongs to the Company, heart and soul.

"When I downloaded the new Fulcrum Intersect, I downloaded skills, spy skills, as well as intel. Those new skills knitted onto Casey's secret training and qualified me almost instantly to be an agent. A good one. But I didn't let on. I made it seem like I had the skills but that they were raw and that I needed training — like I couldn't control them. I knew it was likely that they'd move me somewhere to do training, and that would mean less danger to my sister and her husband. It would give me my best chance to run, and I could run best if I knew how the Company worked and saw it as an agent sees it. So, when McDonald suggested training, I pretended to be all-in, although I hated to leave Casey. We're friends, I think."

I finally notice that Chuck has started to sound like an agent as he's told me all this, the jargon, the manipular view of other people. It's no wonder McDonald believed him. He understands my world as well as or better than I understood it. But he's somehow remained outside it, and his manipulations have been to save himself and the people he loves. He seems to be including me in that group. He brought me here to save me, to give me the chance to save myself.

"So, how are you financing all this, Chuck? You need money to run."

"Yes, I do." He looks at me carefully, gauging my reaction. "We do." I nod. He smiles and goes on. "I found Graham's private account, one of them, and I've tapped into it. Graham's dirty money is funding his property's escape. There's an irony in that I like, poetic, even. So, to go back to what you asked a while ago, I don't really think I'm stealing. I'm just using my back pay. But the money's also yours too, Sarah; he used you to get it, risked your life over and over."

I'm catching up with all this now, beginning to see it as Chuck does. "And the three-zero account. It's Graham's too?"

"Yes, his big account. Millions in cash and more in diamonds in a safety deposit box. But the account, like all three-zero accounts, is not in his name. The only identifier is the number I have to write down several times, the 'signature' that has to fool the graphological scanner."

"And you think you can do this because the Intersect will let you mimic handwriting the way you mimicked McDonald's voice?"

Chuck nods. "Yes, exactly. That's the hope."

"But you're not sure it will work?"

"No, I'm not. It's not supposed to be possible, but then I am an impossibility. Machine Man."

I have a feeling that's a reference I'm missing but I let it go

"So you brought me here to help you liberate Graham's ill-gotten gains?"

He huffs a laugh. "Well put. Liberate. Yes. And I was planning on splitting the money and diamonds with you but now I'm hoping we can…share it. Run together." It's a request and a question.

Vertigo envelops me for a second. I've been Company for so long. But I turned my back on orders to save Molly. To save an innocent. And Chuck is innocent too, even if his innocence is complicated. I steady myself. I find my resolution's already formed. Neither of us asked for this life, the spy life. Neither of us volunteered. We had this life thrust on us.

We could have a future, free somewhere from missions and covers. We could be together. Together tomorrow. And after tomorrow.

I lean close to him so that my gaze and his interpenetrate. "Why do you want me to run with you, Chuck? Am I your muscle?"

He grins at me, mischief in his grin. "Well, Ryker wasn't wrong to want you for his mission in Budapest, not in the abstract, and, you know, hypothetically. But he was wrong in fact."

He slips his hand from mine and puts it, warm, against my bare breast, cupping it and then running his thumb teasingly along its underside.

"But I don't want you as muscle, not as an agent. I want you as a woman." He looks at me as a man and I feel the look reach deep inside me, to an antediluvian layer of myself. "I want you as the woman you are. It would break me to part now. It feels like I've waited forever for you."

The same. I feel the same.

I lean toward him and I kiss him. When the kiss ends, I simply say yes. There's still a lot to learn but I've heard enough.

Then his hands are everywhere and I want them everywhere and I say so and we forget about yesterday and tomorrow and we memorialize tonight.

A/N: More soon. Love to hear from you.