A/N: Ownership of Chuck. Sort of obvious. No?
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Greene Center for the Homeless, Los Angeles
Booker and Chen sat on the floor of the bare concrete room. The room looked as if the construction had been interrupted before the room had been finished. There were unpainted cinderblock walls and no windows. No furniture. No nothing. A single bulb in the ceiling hanging from the wires supplying the power. The light switch inside, near the door. They supposed they could control their environment enough to choose to sit in the dark, but neither of them seemed interested in that. They were in a part of the shopping center farthest from the facility for the homeless, much closer to the theater complex portion.
Their weapons and cell phones had been taken away. Even the multitool that each man carried had been removed, as it had the potential to be used as a weapon.
By unspoken understanding, they sat with their heads close together, quietly whispering to each other. Both understood that the men who took them, as spies, were likely listening in to any conversation they might engage in. Other than terse commands, their abductors had been silent and ignored their questions.
"Ok," said Booker, "these guys are flat out insane."
"No shit," said Chen. "Abducting two cops at gunpoint off the streets of LA..."
"With long guns, no less," agreed Booker. "Barely even trying to hide it."
"One thing's for sure. We are in a world of trouble. Guys who would pull this shit won't hesitate to smoke us," said Chen.
"Yeah, in a minute. Luckily, Mauser is on his way with the cavalry."
"Yeah. And Chuck and his team know where we are too, so that's good," whispered Chen.
The men were silent for a few moments. Then Booker whispered, "Think they're going to try the brain thing on us? The one that's killing all the homeless guys?"
"Probably. Seems like a waste of two healthy bodies to just shoot us," said Chen.
"So, they will probably have to move us somewhere, right?" He gestured around the empty room. "They're not doing it here."
"Yeah. So?"
"So, if we get a shot, we try to make a break for it then. When they are moving us."
"They'll probably send a team. Outnumber us at gunpoint. Might just be a quicker way to die, dude," said Chen.
"Yeah. You're probably right," said Booker with a sigh.
"I figure we try to stay alive until help arrives. Unless the perfect opportunity presents itself, I think we should just be compliant."
"And if the chance arises, though?" asked Booker.
"We savage these motherfuckers," said Chen. The men grimly bumped fists and settled down to await rescue.
They had been sitting there for almost an hour when the door opened. An attractive blonde woman stood in the doorway with a pistol pointed at them. She didn't say anything and just looked at them both with a somewhat appraising eye. For whatever reason, her gaze made both men uncomfortable.
After a few moments, she said to Booker, "You. Up." Booker got to his feet. "I'll come back for you later," she said to Chen. Once Booker was past her in the hallway, she closed and locked the door with the other detective inside.
She knew enough about holding someone at gunpoint that she didn't come within striking distance of Booker. Staying well back, she gestured down the corridor and Booker began to walk in the direction indicated. She said, "Turn right." Sometime later, she said, "Turn left."
The empty corridors were somewhat spooky and their footsteps seemed to echo off the walls. Empty storefronts and silent escalators gave the appearance of one of those "last-man-on-earth" horror movies.
They passed a door and she stopped him just beyond it. She unlocked it and pushed open the doorway, stepped back and gestured for him to go through. Booker entered the room to find it as bare as the prior room he'd occupied with his partner, except for a single metal bedframe with a mattress on it.
The blonde woman closed and locked the door, keeping him at gunpoint. She had a little smile playing on her lips.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"Booker. Luke Booker," he said.
"Hi, Luke. I'm Sylvia," she said. "Now take off your clothes, Luke."
Booker looked at her in honest disbelief. "Aw, you're shitting me. Aren't you going to offer to buy me dinner first?"
"Very funny. Take off your clothes now or I will shoot you in someplace that won't interfere with your performance."
"Fair warning, Sylvia, my performance might not be up to my usual standards. I'm a little nervous, to be honest. It's the gun, you see." He gestured to the weapon in her hand with a half-smile and a shrug.
"Oh, I think you'll rise to the occasion, Luke. I'll even bet on it. You see, life is uncertain. We could be dead tomorrow. We have to take our pleasures when and where we find them. And, to be honest, Luke, I find them right here and right now. So, take off your clothes and let's get cracking."
"Yes, Ma'am," said Luke, still looking at the gun.
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Brad White said to Mauser, "What the hell do you think you're doing, Mauser?"
"What does it look like I'm doing? I'm bringing in another candidate for a test run," growled Mauser, as two men in white lab coats manhandled the unconscious Bryce Larkin into the room.
The room held a heavy medical chair bolted to the floor, bright lights on stands, various machines to measure the responses of the subject in the chair, and a large screen in front of the chair. There were cameras focused on the chair, allowing the scientists to observe the subject. The room was otherwise bare.
"Another candidate? That's the member of the Carmichael team, for God's sake. The one who was with you. You know the Sachem's orders. We aren't supposed to kill those agents. He wants them alive," argued White.
"I know, I know. To find Orion. Best shot at finding Orion, he says. I got that. But first of all, Larkin was one of us and betrayed us. Killed a good friend of mine, Tommy Delgado. Fulcrum has a special hatred for this bastard. Secondly, he learned about this operation here. He heard the detectives I assigned ID Ned. You want to shut the whole thing down? All the time and money that went into this? You told me yourself we're getting close," said Mauser.
"We are getting close. But the Sachem's going to be really pissed when he finds out, Mauser. That's gonna be on your head. I'm not taking responsibility for that," said White.
"Listen, White, Larkin already has one intersect in his head. He downloaded the one in DC last year. It didn't seem to work, but it didn't kill him either. So, the one we give him today either works or not. If it does, Sachem will forgive us both. If it doesn't, I'll take Larkin's body and make it look like he got killed in a car accident or a mugging or something. The Sachem won't even know. No harm, no foul."
White was silent for a while, thinking. "Ok. That sounds like a decent plan, Mauser. And, to be honest, I'm really curious to see what happens to Larkin with the prior intersect in his head. Obviously, he will be special. Let's get started then."
As Bryce came awake, he was being manhandled by at least three men into a chair of some kind. As he was still a little groggy, his wrists were strapped down to the arms of the chair. His whole body felt like it had been beaten with a baseball bat, but he withstood the temptation to groan.
He opened his eyes and saw three men around him, with a few more men and women behind them. They wore white lab coats with the Fulcrum insignia over the left breast.
A man bent down to strap one of Bryce's legs to the chair. Bryce kicked out and hit him in the throat with the toe of his shoe. The man fell back, gasping and writhing on the ground, trying to get air through his damaged trachea.
Bryce was immediately punched in the face a few times. He spit some blood out and grinned at the men who had hit him.
"You hit like a girl," said Bryce to one of them.
As two of the men wrestled Bryce's legs into straps on the chair, the man he'd insulted came around to the front and punched Bryce in the stomach, hitting only the man's hard stomach muscles.
"Fuck you, Larkin," growled the man.
"Promise?" asked Larkin, with a sneer.
Suddenly, Mauser was in his face. "Hey Larkin. How you doing?"
"Mauser. Military intelligence. That should have been the clue, right? That's where you were recruited to Fulcrum, huh, dude?"
"Smart boy, Larkin. Yeah. My buddy Tommy Delgado opened my eyes to the rot in this country. Rot we are going to fix," said Mauser.
"By wasting a bunch of helpless, desperate people? Homeless guys just looking to survive until tomorrow? That's proto-fascist, dude. Not something to be proud of."
"You know what they say about making an omelet, Larkin. We'll be trying again with you, though," said Mauser with a grin. "See if a second intersect will do the trick."
"Yeah, listen. About that..." said Bryce.
Mauser hit Bryce backhanded, splitting his lip. "Don't want to hear it, you traitorous asshole. Tommy trusted you and you betrayed him."
"He got picked up by the folks hunting Fulcrum. They took him and killed him," said Larkin.
"No body," said Mauser.
"Write a letter of complaint, dude," said Bryce.
"But you did betray him. You were one of us and you switched sides. Back to Graham's lot," he said.
"Naw. I never switched sides. You just shouldn't have trusted me to begin with. Sort of bush league of you guys, to tell the truth."
With his legs strapped down, the men pushed Bryce's head backwards against the back of the chair and lowered a metal ring onto his skull. He tried to fight against it, but was overpowered. With the turn of some butterfly screws, his head was painfully immobilized.
A grinning soft-faced blond man approached with clamps to hold his eyes open. "Hi, Mr. Larkin. I'm afraid this is going to be very uncomfortable. You see, once the intersect images start, you will have no choice but to keep your eyes open. The first thing the intersect does is override the ability to look away or close your eyes. But...you understand, we have to make sure you see it in the first place. If you don't, no intersect download, and that's the whole point here."
As the man was none-too-gently prying open Bryce's eye, Bryce said, "You know your intersect is fucked up, right? How many are you going to kill? Bunch of brilliant scientists you think you are with your fancy lab coats and neat Fulcrum insignia. Hey, did you get someone's wife to design that insignia for you guys? Cause it looks sort of lame. You know the coat doesn't make you smarter. You know that, right?"
"Smart enough to capture you, Larkin," smirked White.
"Doesn't occur to any of you to go back to basics and try re-writing the code, huh? Fucking idiots. The government's intersect didn't work, but at least it didn't kill anyone."
A man came into the room from the doorway and spoke quietly to Mauser, who said, "Oh, you're fucking kidding me. Jesus Christ. That woman is out of her goddamn mind." He turned back to White and said, "Don't start on Larkin until I get back. I want to see this."
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At gunpoint, Booker stripped. Once he was naked, the woman named Sylvia smiled widely and said, "Oh wow, you are jacked. This is gonna be fun. Now, Luke, take your handcuffs from the belt of your pants and handcuff yourself to the bedframe."
He clipped a cuff to his wrist and was about to clip the other one to the frame when she said, "No. Not like that. Feed it through the bars and clip the other wrist.
Booker did as he was commanded.
"Good. Now lie down on the mattress." He did. She put the gun on the floor and began to strip herself. Booker had to admit she had a decent body. Under other circumstances, he might even be enjoying himself. But these were not other circumstances.
On the bed, the now-naked blonde woman started at the bottom and crawled up his body slowly, savoring the feeling of her skin rubbing on his. She reached his chest and, straddling him, took one of his nipples into her mouth, her other hand massaging him, intent on arousing him to action. Well, she was arousing him to action, all right.
With his knee, he nudged her in the butt, pushing her up his body until her lips were at his. She grinned and said, "Now this is more like it. Relax and enjoy, Luke." Her breath was warm on his face.
Suddenly, his knee pushed much harder and her head slammed hard against the bedframe. Both his hands, cuffed to the frame, grasped fistfuls of her hair. She began to try to push away, but he was much, much stronger than she was. Holding her head steady, he smashed his forehead against the bridge of her nose, feeling a crunch. She bucked against him and pushed as hard as she could to get away, but he headbutted her a second time. Her struggles became weaker. He hit her a third time, headbutting and pulling her head toward him at the same time to increase the force, and she collapsed unconscious.
He pushed her head up so he could look at her. She was definitely out cold, her nose wrecked and bleeding. Using his legs, he kicked her naked body to the floor. Standing up, he pulled the bed across the room toward his clothes. When he got to them, he managed the somewhat awkward task of flipping the bed over so that his hands were close to the ground and his jacket.
He found his keys in his jacket pocket and unlocked the cuffs. With his hands free the first thing he did was to take the woman's gun from the floor and check it. Loaded. Round in the chamber. Safety off. He didn't recognize the specific type, but it had the word Beretta on the frame.
He rolled the blonde onto her stomach and clipped a cuff to her right wrist and the other one to her left ankle. Then he took his tie and tied her left wrist and right ankle, effectively hogtieing her. He considered gagging her, but decided against it. With her nose destroyed, she'd be breathing through her mouth. He didn't want to run the risk that she would suffocate with a gag in her mouth. He just hoped they were far enough away from her friends so that any screams for help wouldn't be heard.
He used her blouse to wipe her blood from his face and then quickly dressed. Once done, he checked the woman's clothing for anything useful. He took two spare magazines of ammo for the pistol, a set of keys, and a large folding knife. He also took her cell phone. There might be useful information that could be used as evidence against her and her fellow conspirators.
As quietly as possible, he unlocked the door and cracked it open. The corridor was empty. Gun in hand, he began to head back to Alan. The thought of escaping on his own and leaving his partner didn't enter his mind for a moment.
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A/N2: Thanks to my dear friend Steelejay, who once again helped me to noodle past a sticky plot point in this chapter.
A/N3: Love to hear what you guys think, as usual. Thanks for reading along thus far, my friends.