A/N: Me: Again, with the ownership of Chuck? Also, me: Shut up. It never gets old.
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"Hi, Mom," said Sarah.
Emma looked at her beautiful daughter and tried to put all the love she felt in her heart into her eyes. "Hi," she said softly, stepping forward to wrap the younger woman in a tight hug, cheek to cheek. She was too emotional to trust herself with words, so she just held on to Sarah. Sarah started to cry a little, and that set Emma off as well, both women hugging and crying. "Oh, baby, I love you," whispered Emma.
Sarah had a little speech planned, but found she couldn't get the words out. "I love you too," she managed to say into her mom's shoulder. Her heart was soaring. Her mom still loved her, even after everything she'd done.
Chuck just looked on silently, smiling softly.
Molly looked up at her mother crying and started to cry herself. Unlike the grown-ups, though, she was not interested in crying silently. Tugging on her mom's pant leg, she howled her displeasure, saying "MA, MA, MA."
Sarah and Emma pulled apart and looked at each other for a moment with smiles, Emma rolling her eyes. Both women turned and smiled at the little one. Emma bent to pick up Molly, wiping the tears from Molly's cheeks with her fingers. "No, no, little muffin. Don't be upset. I'm happy. I'm happy, not sad. Molly, this is your sister. Her name is Sarah. She's your big sister."
Sarah had wiped her own tears away and rubbed Molly's back. "Hi, Molly. I'm so happy to meet you. I brought you something." Molly stopped crying as Sarah took a stuffed animal from the shopping bag at her feet. "It's a unicorn. See?" Sarah said, smiling at the little girl, "It has a horn here." Sarah pointed at the horn.
Emma said, "Oh, look, how pretty. Isn't it pretty, Molly?"
Molly took the toy from her big sister and hugged it to her chest, but still turned away shyly.
"Say thank you. Say thank you to Sarah," said Emma.
"Ank u," said Molly.
"Mom, this is Chuck," said Sarah, with a gesture.
Emma gave him a sweet smile and said, "Ah, yes. The famous Chuck. Ellie's brother. The man who won my daughter's heart. I've really been looking forward to meeting you. Hi, Chuck, I'm Emma." Her voice was soft and kind and gentle.
"Hi, Emma. Nice to meet you."
Still holding Molly up in a hug, Emma tried to hug Chuck one-armed, but it was a little awkward. They all laughed a bit and ended up in a three-way hug.
"It's still early. Bea has made a fresh pot of coffee. Why don't we go around back to the patio and sit. You two must be tired from traveling."
Williamson's men had come around and assembled in front of the house in a loose grouping. Bill said, "I'm pulling my men out now. It's been our pleasure."
Thanks and good-byes were shared with the bodyguards. Chuck made a mental note to add a very sizable gratuity to the final payment, to be shared among the men and women who had protected Sarah's mom and little sister for the last six weeks.
Chuck, Sarah, Emma and Molly went through the house towards the patio out back. There was a fenced-in pool and deck to one side of the lawn. The sun was shining, but the temperature was still pleasant enough. July, almost August, in Florida can sometimes be uncomfortably warm. But the breezes off the water kept it pleasant. The quiet waters of the Gulf stretched away to the west beyond the green lawn. It was an altogether beautiful setting.
Off to the side on the grass was an area with some toys for Molly.
There was a big table outside and, on a side table, was a pot of coffee on a warming tray and coffee cups. Emma paused by the coffee, still holding Molly on her hip. "Coffee?" she asked.
Sarah said, "We got it, Mom. You sit with Molly. Would you like some?"
When Emma declined, they got their coffee and sat at the table with her. Chuck pushed the newspapers aside with his forearm and put down his coffee cup. He saw the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Miami Herald. There was a legal pad with notes sitting on top of them.
Molly fussed a bit in her mom's arms and Emma said, "Uhhh, honey. You want to play? Ok. I'll be there soon to play with you. Ok?"
Molly toddled away on uncertain legs to the play area. Emma watched her as she went across the green grass. Every once in a while, Molly would look back at her mom to get the love and support she needed, and Emma was watching to give it. Molly keeled over a couple of times in her unsteady journey, but each time she did, she looked back at her mom and saw a big smile. The little blonde-haired girl smiled happily and toddled across the lawn to her toys.
Emma turned back to Chuck and Sarah. She said, "I really, really want to talk to you both. Get to know you, Chuck. Hell, get reacquainted with my grown-up daughter. I really do. But first, I need to know that Molly is safe. I don't want to be all business, but I have to understand. OK? I've seen the news and I've figured out some of what is happening, what you've done, but not all. So, first of all, is she safe?"
Her voice had changed. It had gotten a little deeper and stronger. Chuck knew that she had been the CFO of a small insurance company in Philadelphia before Sarah asked her to take care of Molly. Emma had taken an immediate leave of absence at that time. Chuck felt he was speaking with Ms. O'Donnell, the serious businesswoman, and not Emma, Sarah's mom.
Sarah said, "Yes. So far as we can tell, Mom. She's no longer in danger. Not anymore."
"Ok, good. Now, please humor me. I need to understand what just happened. Chuck, pass me my glasses and the pad, please."
Chuck slid them over. She put on her glasses and looked at the pad. "Ok," she said, "The newspapers have a ton of backstory. Here's what I think I know, but correct me when I'm wrong.
"Janos Kossuth returned to Hungary after the fall of the Communist regime in the 80's and, almost immediately, was the richest man in the country. He died and left his vast business empire, estimated to be worth about one and a half billion dollars, to his only child, his son Istvan. Istvan, with his young wife and child, didn't want to sell his dad's businesses to any of the potential buyers. He wanted to keep them and run them himself. The corporate machinations to pressure him into a sale got pretty serious, but Istvan still refused."
Addressing herself to Sarah, Emma said, "Istvan and his wife were murdered. The really crazy thing is that the killers of Molly's parents were, themselves, killed moments later. All the forensic evidence reported by the Hungarians indicates that the entire gang, twenty-seven men, were killed by a single actor. That's, of course, insane. No one person could do that. So, we're going to leave that part of the story alone."
Sarah was relieved that her mom gave her a pass on that bit. She may never know what her mom may suspect about Sarah's involvement, but it would be quite the leap of logic to make the assumption that Sarah was the actor she mentioned. At least Sarah hoped so.
"Anyway, somehow, you found Molly...I'm not going to ask you how...and brought her to me to keep safe. Meanwhile, in Europe, the men who wanted to buy the businesses were in a very bad spot. If Molly had died with her parents it would have been one thing, but there was no body and no blood from the baby. The dead parents' will had left everything in trust for their daughter until she turned twenty-five. And the trust has the stipulation that the companies would not be sold during that time. Farkas, the lawyer and trustee, seems to be a totally incorruptible and very tough guy and refused to breach the terms of the trust no matter the pressure brought. A few months ago Kapp, the German industrialist, sued in Budapest to break the trust and that suit seems to be going nowhere. Szell had publicly bemoaned the impediment of the trust but didn't try to break it legally. Now we know why."
Emma looked at her notes. "Could they have moved to have Molly declared dead? Given the mayhem in the Budapest mansion, it would be reasonable to conclude that she was dead. Everybody else was, after all. They could, but without a body, it takes nine years to have someone declared dead under Hungarian trusts and estates law. So, Szell was stuck. He couldn't get his hands on the companies legally and he couldn't find Molly. When he did, he'd have her killed. But as he said in the recording, he needed the body, or he'd have to wait another eight years.
"So, let's get back to Molly and me. I've had her since last August. In February, Ellie met me in the doctor's office to tell me that you, Sarah, were now with a team. You were with Chuck, her brother. She described them as the most incredible team of people on the planet. Enough to give nightmares to their enemies. And you and your team were going to go after the people who wanted to hurt Molly.
"Nothing happened for a few months. And then, again at the doctor's office, I got an envelope with a message from you. You want me to be ready on a given morning to leave with Molly and stay away for weeks. So, I do. We're here and we are protected by some very serious people with a lot of guns. It would take a platoon of Marines to get to Molly with the security here in the mansion.
"Now, I've played a lot of chess, Sam...Sarah, sorry about that. I know that you always protect the King as you move to the offensive. Molly is the King. Take her off the board, and the game is over. I knew that when you moved us here under guard, it meant you and your team were going on the offensive against the devils who wanted to hurt her."
"Yes, Mom. That's exactly right. But you were here longer than we had anticipated. Some other...work, interfered with our timing. We had only planned for a few weeks," said Sarah.
"It's fine, dear. It's not exactly an uncomfortable place to stay after all," Emma waved a hand at the blue water behind her. "So, how did I do?"
"You were dead right on all points, Mom," said Sarah.
"Ok. Good. Well, I had a little bit more information than the newspapers, but so far just about everything I told you I read in either the Times or the Journal. So, now we get to my questions to fill in the blanks that I don't understand yet.
"There were at least four men interested in buying the Kossuth companies. How did you narrow it down to Szell?"
Chuck said, "That was actually Sarah's idea. Whoever hired the killers would have had prior knowledge of the murders. He would expect the stock of the Kossuth companies to drop in value after that happened..."
"So, you looked for short sellers, people betting on a drop in the value of the Kossuth stock," said Emma.
"Exactly," said Sarah. "Chuck went into the systems of the top ten brokerage firms in Europe. He found fifteen short sellers. When Chuck punched through all the corporate entities, they were all owned by Szell. He'd taken fifteen short positions on the companies in the days before Molly's parents were murdered. He tried to disguise what he was up to with shell companies, but Chuck got through those. None of the other prospective buyers for the companies did that."
"Those shell companies can be pretty well layered to make the real owners hard to trace back. And you got that information. Yes, I guess that fits with what happened yesterday. You must be quite the computer genius, Chuck."
"He's the best in the world, Mom," Sarah said with a serious tone.
Chuck shrugged modestly and made a quiet "paaahhh" noise.
Emma continued, nodding. "I think that might be right, actually. Once you knew it was Szell, you still had to set him up for that conversation with Fodor. How did you arrange that?"
"We knew he wouldn't be working alone. He had to have henchmen. We started to leave messages with Farkas's office and the Hungarian police about sightings of the baby, but never mentioned the birthmark. That's what they were using as an indicator that the person had actually seen the child. Otherwise, they'd just be chasing thousands of leads all over the world. We wanted to see where the information went. For the most part, Farkas's office just reported it to the police and all the sightings seemed to dead end there. It looked like that avenue wasn't going to pan out."
Sarah continued, "So, Chuck started to map Szell's phones, especially the burner phones."
Looking at him with intelligent eyes, Emma said, "Ok. Please explain that to me, Chuck."
"I found where Szell was and had the nearby cell towers send a ping. As Szell moved and the phones moved between cell towers, I could make certain conclusions that the moving phones belonged to Szell and were carried on his person. Digging into the phone company data, I could ID which of the ones he carried were burner phones paid for with cash. Untraceable..."
"Except by you," said Emma.
"Except by me. Once I had identified the burner phones he carried with him, I set up an algorithm to run a trace back on any other burner phone that he called or that called him. I was tracking them between cell towers and overlaying it on a map. Then I started to run those locations of those phones using the same program. This isn't sci-fi. The NSA does this all the time. Anyway, one of those phones that was in touch with Szell's phone was a burner that spent a lot of time at the headquarters of the Információs Hivatal, the Hungarian CIA. Now that didn't shock me too much. He's got a ton of people bribed on his payroll. But it did make it hard for us to trust the Hungarians. That's how we found Fodor. To our surprise, mapping the cell phones we found that they were together every single Friday afternoon. Together in person."
Sarah took over the recitation. "Stupid tradecraft for a spy to be predictable, but Szell wasn't a spy. If Fodor knew better, he didn't share that guidance with Szell. Anyway, when we realized that, we began to plan how to get them to talk about the killings and let us record them doing so.
"And Sarah noticed something that I hadn't seen. One of the burners used by Fodor called a burner at Farkas's office. We looked into it and discovered that Farkas's secretary is Fodor's niece. That led us to think that a real tip to his office, picked up by her, would be shared with her uncle," said Chuck.
"No coincidence that his niece worked there," Emma said.
"No. The prior secretary in that position died in an accident. She fell in front of a train. We think Fodor pushed her to open the job up for his niece," said Sarah.
Emma sighed and said, "Makes sense, I guess. So, you could pass along a tip to Farkas's office, picked up by Fodor, and watch Fodor and Szell talk about it on a Friday afternoon?"
"Yes," said Sarah. "We had to make some educated guesses on the timing. Early enough in the week for them to figure out the puzzle we set and not so late that Fodor would miss the opportunity to tell Szell in person when they met on Friday. We had some contingency plans in place in case they weren't following the clues fast enough. As it turned out, though, those plans weren't necessary. Fodor and his team proceeded right on schedule."
"Ok," said Emma. "Let's talk about the team that actually went to kill Molly. Tell me about them." Chuck knew that Emma was much more pleasant to deal with than Beckman, but he really did think the two of them would have gotten along pretty well. Both understood how to conduct a debriefing.
"It was the man who arranged for the massacre in Budapest. He missed killing the baby and was still trying. Fodor contacted him with the lead we had dropped on him through Fodor's niece and he...the killer...went out into a town in the middle of nowhere to kill a baby with a team of four others."
"Why the middle of nowhere?" asked Emma.
"Two reasons. A new baby in town would be notable and they would be able to pick up the location we wanted them to have with some elementary spy work. And with a small town it's child's play for us to follow the team and see what they were up to. No crowd to get lost in," said Sarah.
As Sarah said 'child's play' Emma turned to look at Molly, playing happily on the lawn. She looked back to Sarah and Chuck. "Ok. What happened to them?"
"They walked into a trap. They didn't walk out of it," said Sarah.
"They are dead?"
"Very," said Sarah.
"Good. I'm glad. Your team?"
"Friends," said Sarah.
"Any of them hurt?"
"No, Mom. My friends are very good at what they do," said Sarah.
Emma smiled coldly. "Good. The next time you see them, tell them I said thank you," said Emma.
"I will, Mom," said Sarah.
"Will they get in trouble for the ...for what they accomplished?"
"No," said Sarah.
"Ok, good. So, you took out the killers with a trap someplace out west. Let's head back to Hungary. You knew Fodor and Szell would meet on a Friday afternoon. How did you know where?"
Chuck said, "We tracked the phones. All last fall and through the spring they met in Szell's Budapest mansion. Come the summer, Szell moved to his mansion on a lake outside of town..."
"Lake Balaton," said Emma.
"Yes," said Chuck. "We discovered that they met in the same room each time. A sunroom off to one side of the mansion."
"Ok. No one in the media has any idea how you were able to record them," said Emma.
"Thirty-year-old tech, actually. DARPA invented dragonfly drones in the 70's. Sarah can make one of those little babies flit around like crazy. She can probably fool a real dragonfly. I boosted the capabilities and the audiovisual stuff, but that's that. I experimented for a while with trying to build a transparent drone, but it never worked well enough."
"You'd need the windows open, though," said Emma.
"It's freaking hot in Hungary right now. And their AC wasn't working. Just the right thing to get the windows open," said Chuck with a small smile.
"Lucky," said Emma, smiling a little herself at that point.
"The AC at the house was computer controlled," said Sarah with a smile of her own.
"Ah," said Emma. "And with the doors open and the dragonfly drone feeding you the conversation...you were in a truck around the corner?"
"Fishing boat on the lake. I had the drone. Chuck had control of the feed and where it was shared. Casey, the last member of our team was piloting the boat."
"And protecting us from random bad guys," said Chuck.
"I want to meet Casey someday and thank him," said Emma with a smile. "So, your friends killed Fodor's team and your team recorded Szell's frustration and anger at Fodor and broadcast it far and wide."
"Yes," said Sarah. "And we're not done. From Atlanta airport this morning we released all of his files on the people he's bribed. We expect it to make a big difference to the way the prosecution operates. They already used it to get a change in the justice handling Szell's case. And we aren't done. He had a lot of stuff on his computers that's going to be grist for the prosecutors' offices. He will be ground down to nothing."
"In several countries," said Chuck.
Emma started to laugh. "Well," she said. "You know what? I think Ellie was 100% right. You and your team took on one of the richest, most ruthless men in Europe. And you destroyed him completely. Completely. Some dead. Some as good as dead. And the most important thing is that Molly is safe. No one is gunning for her anymore. Thank you. Thank you, your teammate Casey and your friends." Emma put the pad down on the table and took off her glasses to lay them on top of the pad.
Her personality seemed to change in a heartbeat. She smiled at her daughter and her daughter's soon to be husband. A sweet, loving smile. And she said, "Come on. It's time to play with Molly. She's been very good and I'm sure she's getting bored by herself."
With a smile, Chuck took a gulp of his coffee and stood up. "Let's go."
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A/N2: A short sale is when, in its simplest form, you borrow a stock from your stockbroker and sell it. You pay the broker interest for the loan of the stock. At a later date, you buy the stock on the market and return it to the broker. Your hope, and the bet you placed, is that you can buy it for less than you sold it for earlier and keep the difference as profit. In other words, you've made a bet that the stock will decline in value. With the prior notice of the impending murders, it would have been a safe bet for Szell. Of course, if the stock rose in value you're fucked.
A/N3: Sarah didn't inherit her brains from thin air. We never got to learn too much about Emma in canon. But I have decided that, in addition to being a loving mother with questionable taste in men, she is also a serious, smart, no-bullshit professional woman. We got to see that in this chapter.
A/N4: Merry Christmas, for those who observe the holiday. And peace and happiness and good health to all of you, whether you observe Christmas or not.