NOTES: Once again, I note that I have not abandoned the story, in spite of the long gaps between updates. Real world time is not as plentiful as I might wish. I also made an error in the original version of this chapter and had to repost it the following day to correct it.

Dialogue and thought between ++ indicates French.

CHUCK vs. THE NO-WIN QUESTION chapter 30: Dark Dealings 3

Buy-More #1, Moscow, Russian Federation, Friday, June 5th, 2020, 7:00 a.m. local time...

"The good news is," Ellie said, looking at her brother severely as she did, "the X-ray shows no sign of skull fractures or other bone damage. There doesn't appear to be much brain swelling, either. You were damned lucky on that score, Chuck!

"You've got plenty of bruises and scrapes, and I hate to think how you managed to get that bruise across you ribs, it looks like somebody was pounding on you with a baseball bat!"

Chuck smiled ruefully, laughed a little, and winced as the laughed pained that very bruise.

"Not a baseball bat," Chuck said, "a piece of heavy metal scrap. Before the blast two days ago, I was in a fight, I had this goon who had pinned me down and was beating on me with a metal bar. He'd have finished me if Jill hadn't stopped him."

His momentary amusement faded, and he shivered at the memory of being dazed, looking up at the huge agent above him, seeing that broken bit of metal from the damaged car about to crash down on his head. He had been seconds from death and he had known it, and then the metal bar had stopped still as the sound of Jill's gun reached their ears.

Ellie looked at him for a moment, and then she said "Well, the bruises will all heal, and like I said, Little Brother, your very hard head is still intact."

Chuck breathed out a sigh of relief, and said, "OK, Sis, then what's the bad news?"

"No question about it, you have a serious concussion," Ellie said, sitting down on the counter of the makeshift treatment room that she and their agents had created in one of the underground rooms beneath the Buy-More. The toes of her flat shoes were just above the floor where she sat. Chuck was sitting shirtless on a hospital bed that had been moved into the room during the night. Their personnel had worked an amazing task during the night, by the time Chuck, Ellie, and Mary had arrived at the Buy-More, they had found that two rooms in the underground area had been outfitted with a hospital bed, various items of medical equipment including X-ray gear, and a number of medicines and other medical supplies. It was not quite a hospital suite, but it was an amazing result for one night's work.

Chuck, Ellie, and their mother had made their way across the city to the Buy-More shortly past dawn. Ellie was still adamant that Chuck should not be driving, and he knew she was right. He felt steadier, and a little better, this morning than he had the night before, but he was still shaky and unsteady on his feet, and sometimes dizzy.

Ellie had checked his vision and hearing, his reflexes, she had given him a serious of mental challenges to test his mental response time, she had checked his blood pressure, examined X-rays of his skull and spine, and Chuck knew she did not entirely like what she found. At least the splitting headache of the night before had receded, at least for the moment.

Now Ellie had just finished examining him, and Mary was sitting in a chair to one side listening closely.

"The best treatment for a concussion," Ellie went on, "is rest and sleep. That's probably most of why you feel a little better this morning than you did last night, you managed to get some rest last night. You need more, and if I could work my will, I'd have you on a plane for California before the morning was over."

"But that's not practical," Chuck nodded. "Not under the circumstances."

"No," Ellie agreed, reluctantly. "But listen to me very carefully, Little Brother, because I mean what I'm saying: you are on light duty. You'll probably have to take some part in this operation before it's over, if only because we're so short handed and hamstrung by the communications problems. But I want your part in all this to be the bare minimum! Keep the running and jumping and climbing to a minimum, if I find out you've been doing any of that it had better have been a matter of life and death!

"I want you to avoid using the Intersect as much as you reasonably can, too. I mean that especially on the physical applications, but even the mental uses are stressful and right now you don't need that strain.

"With a little luck, you might be on the mend in a day or two, and back to more or less normal in a week or three," Ellie went on. "But that depends on you not being stupid and compounding the problem by overexertion, and getting plenty of rest. I want a full night's sleep every night, and don't hesitate to nap during the day if a chance presents itself. You've been very lucky, and you should recover completely unless you get stupid. So don't do stupid, Chuck!"

"OK, OK," Chuck said with a smile, "I hear you."

"You'd better do more than just hear me, Little Brother! You'd better damn well be listening, too!"

At that moment, an agent/green shirt stuck his head in the door, and said, "Ms. Carmichael, they've started the operation!"

Ellie and Mary looked upset and irritated by the interruption, and Chuck knew instantly why. From the time he had first awakened at the hotel, and his sister and mother had bundled him into a car to take him to the Buy-More, he had known that there was something going on that they did not want him to know about. He had known because they had been a little too obvious in keeping him away from televisions and radios, they had refused to let him listen to the car radio coming over, and he had known because he was well-attuned to Ellie and he knew she was hiding something. He and his sister had been a set, the two of them against the world, since they were both children, and he could usually just feel when Ellie was hiding something from him (and vice versa, as he knew from experience).

"OK, what's going on?" Chuck demanded. "You've both been trying to keep me in the dark about something all morning. What 'operation' was he referring to?"

Ellie looked as if she wanted to dodge the question, but Mary said, "Somebody is firing a rifle into the crowd from the top of a building in the city, Chuck. It's all over the news, we didn't want you to know about it because you don't need to be stressing out. After what happened with you and Jill a couple of days ago, the whole city was already on edge, and this has the local authorities totally freaking out.

"But whoever is doing it has captured one of the junior CATs," Mary went on grimly. "They made a point of letting the news cameras get a look at her, dangling from the rooftop. The CATs are going in to try and rescue her and deal with whoever is behind it."

"The CATs are-SARAH!" Chuck exclaimed, jumping to his feet. His first impulse, to run for the door and track down his ex-wife, collapsed moments later, as his body failed to back up his mind's intentions. He had not covered six feet before dizziness overcame him and he had to catch himself on the counter. He held himself up with his arms on the counter, struggling against a wave of nausea and managing to keep himself on his feet...barely.

"CHUCK!" Ellie snapped, as she and Mary got their arms around him and helped him stagger back to sit on the bed. "This is just exactly what I meant about 'doing stupid'!"

Chunk sank onto the bed, his stomach roiling, his head spinning, and the headache that had been dormant until now came roaring back with a vengeance. It was humiliating, but he knew his sister was right.

"This is why we didn't want you to know, son," Mary said, sounding both sympathetic and stern. "I know you're worried about Sarah, but right now, there's nothing you can do for her. You can't even run across this room, Chuck, much less take on FULCRUM agents, and we all know that's probably who is behind this.

"Remember what I taught you, back in 2012," Mary went on, as Chuck's symptoms receded, leaving him gasping for breath. "You have to know your strengths and your limitations, and you have to make you decisions on what is, not on what you want. Right now, you're helpless and you would be a liability if you were there, and that's what is." *

Chuck closed his eyes, remembering incidents in his early years as an agent, incidents where he had rushed in without thinking about consequences, and how close some of those incidents had come to disaster at times. He remembered how decoding that captured device had alerted Sydney to his presence, and how rushing in heedlessly had ended with Shaw framing him and his teammates and then eventually leading to Shaw killing his father. He remembered how easily Hartley, or Volkoff as he had been then, had fooled him into trusting him. He remembered...and felt the bitter taste in the back of his throat as he did.

So learn from your mistakes, Bartowski! You're in no condition to go running in to help Sarah right now, the best thing you can do to help her right now is to do nothing at all. Damn it.

"What are they going to do?" Chuck asked, having regained his breath and accepting, however reluctantly, the reality of his situation.

"We're not sure ourselves," Ellie said. "Our last contact, except for the signal that they were starting their operation, was over an hour ago."

Chuck sat on the bed, his stomach twisting with a sensation that had nothing to do with his concussion.

Somewhere in Moscow, Russian Federation, Friday, June 5th, 8:30 a.m. local time...

Morgan Grimes was trying very hard to keep from making any sound.

This was a more complicated task than it might have been, because his legs were aching, his shoulders were aching, and his back was hurting, all from the strain of holding very still in a constant position for too long. To make it worse, he was almost numb with exhaustion, having had no more than an hour of sleep in the previous twenty-four hours. He had not eaten in days, and he was all too aware that the slightest mistake at this point could be his last.

After he had escaped from the SVR the day before, Morgan had lost himself in the crowds. He knew the authorities would be looking for him, so he had to be careful not to show his face more than he could help. He had years of experience at this sort of thing by now, and he had been taught by John Casey himself, but still, there was only so much one could do. He had managed to steal some new clothes and a small amount of money, but he was still all too recognizable.

Once he had figured out where in Moscow he was, more or less, he had started trying to reach one of the Buy-More stores. All the high level CI personnel had the addresses of the various Buy-More facilities memorized, and it had not been hard to lay hands on a city map to apply the knowledge. Unfortunately, Morgan had found it more difficult to reach any of the Buy-More sites than he had anticipated.

Not only was he on the look out for Russian government personnel, but Morgan had noticed that there were quite a few other agents out and about. Some of them he recognized from past meetings, or intel files. Others he had spotted simply from long experience as an agent himself, he had learned how to spot the little 'tells'. Something was up, and he was in the dark. He had no idea if it was associated with whatever had caused the Russians to try to arrest the CI team, but if not, it seemed like a peculiar coincidence!

Since Morgan did not know what was going on, it had seemed prudent to avoid all the agents he spotted, even ones who might ordinarily be more or less 'friendly'. After all, the same agent could be an ally on one operation, and an enemy on the next one, depending on which government or organization they worked for, and what was going down. Lacking information, Morgan knew it was best to play it as safe as possible.

The necessities of that had slowed him down as he had made his way across the city. Eventually, though, as he had drawn close to Buy-More Site One, he had risked stepping into a sidewalk cafe to buy a roll and some coffee to ease his empty stomach. While there, a group of agents had arrived for some kind of meet, leaving Morgan more or less trapped in the back of the cafe until they left. He had had taken a seat in the back, kept his head down, and pretended to read the newspaper he had bought. Newspapers were wonderful camouflage, Morgan knew. It was so easy to keep one's head down over the paper, and pretend to read it.

Would be even better if I could actually read Russian, Morgan had mused sourly as he pretended to read.

Every few minutes, Morgan had glanced up, casually checking to see if the 'meet' was breaking up, and looked out the window. It was just luck that he had happened to be looking out the window in time to see another agent, one he knew, walking by on the sidewalk outside!

Lone Wulf! Morgan had thought in shock. What's he doing in Moscow?!

As Morgan had watched, he had seen something else: Lone Wulf's hand going to the back of his neck, as he whirled...and fell.

Tranq dart, Morgan had recognized. He had seen them in action all too often, he had been the subject of them from time to time, he knew the signs.

Morgan had thought fast. He could risk going outside, risk being recognized by someone in the cafe, or he could sit pat and hope Lone Wulf could handle whatever was going down on his own. It was a risk either way, and there was no way to know for sure what was best to do. After a moment, Morgan had picked up his paper, folded it, and walked as casually to the front door as he could manage, doing his best to keep his face away from the agents gathered for their meet.

Nobody showed any sign of noticing him, and he had breathed a sigh of relief as he made it outside. He had seen Lone Wulf bundled into a pickup truck, and making a snap decision that he hoped he would not regret, Morgan had dashed over and managed to catch a hold on the back of the pickup, and pull himself into the bed as the truck started moving.

The ride had been fairly short, and Morgan had managed to jump out and conceal himself beneath the truck when it stopped, before men in the cab had emerged, carrying the still-unconscious Lone Wulf with them into the tall building. Morgan had risked following as soon as they were out of sight, and he had managed to trail them through the empty corridors and levels of what turned out to be a closed-for-the-night bank.

Morgan had concealed himself in a closet, and listened to the comings and goings of the men who had captued Lone Wulf. To his surprise, most of them were speaking English and with American accents. As he had listened, he heard a word that had sent chills down his spine: 'Fulcrum'.

Morgan had had no idea what was going on, but he knew a fellow CI operative was a prisoner not far away. All he had been able to do was wait in concealment, for what had turned out to be hours, until finally the others had left the area and Morgan had dared to creep out of his hiding place. Some careful, judicious spying and hiding had revealed to him where they were keeping Lone Wulf, but reaching him had looked difficult.

Lone Wulf was in an office that they had locked, safety tied and still unconscious (after repeated doses of sedative). Morgan could get to a room down the corridor from him, but he was guarded in the corridor and there was no plausible way to reach him, at least not by that route. After thinking about it, though, Morgan had realized that there was a way, it was just that it was a way that had made his stomach hurt just from contemplating it.

They were on the ninth floor. There was a narrow ledge outside the window, and the window could be opened. Morgan had realized that if he could slide down the ledge, he could reach the window of the room where Lone Wulf was a prisoner, and potentially reach the man that way. Just thinking about trying that made Morgan nauseous, but there had appeared to be no other way.

Morgan Grimes was not particularly afraid of heights, as such. That is, he was no acrophobic. Just being in a high place, by itself, did not unduly bother him. When they had been younger, Morgan had occasionally teased his best friend because Chuck was slightly acrophobic. But it was one thing not to be irrationally afraid of heights. It was another thing to be indifferent to them in dangerous situations.

But wrack his brain though he might, Morgan had not been able to come up with a better option, and so, after working up his nerve, 'Michael Carmichael' had slipped out the open window and onto a narrow ledge, over one hundred and fifty feet above the street below.

Morgan had crept along the ledge, back to the wall of the building, resolutely refusing to look down, inching along until, after what seemed like an eternity, and was in fact over half an hour (because he had to move so slowly and carefull), he had finally had come to a stop beside the right window. Just getting that far had felt like a major accomplishment under the circumstances, but he had still had a long way to go do achieve his goal.

To Morgan's delight, the window into the office where Lone Wulf was being held could be opened and was not even locked. To his dismay, there were men in the room with Lone Wulf. They came and went, and sometimes they both left at once. If they both left for long, Morgan could risk trying to get in, but he had to have a few moments.

There had been little to do but wait, crouched on the ledge in the pre-dawn darkness, nine stories above the street, his arms and legs and back aching, exhausted, hungry, thirsty, terrified...and waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

Rain had come through in the night, but fortunately Morgan had been on the sheltered side of the building, and the wind and rain had actually not affected him much. The worst of it had been the rolling thunder and flashes of lightning, the bolts had come nowhere near him, but it was still a terrifying experience to be clinging to the side of a building under such circumstances!

As painful and terrifying as the wait was, a certain sour amusement had come over him at one point, as he remembered his excitement and fascination at learning that his best friend was a secret agent. Somehow, imagining being such a thing had never included picturing hunger, thirst, terror in the morning darkness, or aching limbs.

At last the rain had passed, and then a rosy glow in the west had spoken of the coming of dawn. Now long after that, Morgan had heard the shooting start.

The shots had been coming from the other side of the building, facing the main street, and the men in the office had finally left long enough for Morgan to open the window and slide into the office with a gasp of desperate relief, that turned into a gasp of pain as he fell face-first onto the carpet!

His legs had long since gone numb crouched outside, and now he had trouble standing. Shakily he managed to get to his feet, wondering why things like this never seemed to happen to Chuck.

Lone Wulf was still unconscious, but starting to stir, it must be time for another dose of sedative, Morgan mused. He managed to get the ropes off his wrists and ankles as Lone Wulf opened his eyes and blearily managed to whisper, "Morgan?"

"Shhh!" Morgan hissed harshly. He made a silencing gesture, and Lone Wulf nodded in understanding. Moments later, Morgan had the last of the ropes off, and Lone Wulf staggered to his feet, helped by Morgan, himself still none too steady. The two men were about to try to get out the door when they heard the sound of footsteps approaching, and they exchanged a panicked glance as the office door began to open!

A clinic in Paris, Friday, June 5th, 2020, 10:30 a.m. local time...

It was looking to be a beautiful day, Dr. Noemie Duplantier mused to herself cheerfully, as she worked her way through the dense morning traffic. The clinic at which Dr. Duplantier was currently employed was on the outskirts of Paris, but her apartment was closer to the center, and her route to work was flowing against the tide of the morning traffic. Still, she had plenty of time, her first major task of the day was not scheduled until well past eleven.

With a little luck, Duplantier thought to herself, as she finally pulled into the parking garage of the clinic, we might be able to successfully transplant that neoheart. Dr. Deschamps said he thinks he's isolated the rejection factor that keeps the host from integrating the cloned tissue. Or at least, he says he's isolated it. Sometimes I wonder if he lets his enthusiasms get ahead of his scientific detachment.

Duplantier emerged from her car, locking the door behind her as she did. As she walked toward the clinic, enjoying the mild morning sunlight and the gentle breeze, most of her mind was on the days' work ahead of her. A few passing males glanced her way appreciatively as she walked. At 46, with shoulder-length chestnut hair and a figure she worked hard at the gym to maintain, she was able to turn male eyes easily enough. Most of the time she rather enjoyed being able to do that, but just then, though, her mind was elsewhere.

Duplantier crossed the nicely appointed lobby, nodding politely to the receptionist as approached the front desk. A fingerprint scan and the insertion of her ID card into a slot on the desk confirmed her identity, and the receptionist waved her through. She went over to a pair of elevators, her heels clicking on the marble floor as she did, and as she reached the elevators she nodded to the security guard standing to one side.

The security guard might have raised eyebrows in certain people who knew how to spot certain little signs: he was in superb physical shape, he was more alert than most corporate security guards, and of course someone who knew how to spot it might have noticed that he was armed with a heavy automatic pistol under his suit jacket. Duplantier paid this no mind, as she was quite used to it.

In the elevator, she inserted her ID card into a slot in the panel, and then she punched in a twelve-digit code on a keypad below the main panel. The elevator began to descend, and it continued to descend for several minutes. When it came to a stop, the doors slid open into an underground complex hidden below the clinic above, a complex that very few people knew about.

A short walk down a corridor, past two more heavily-armed guards, brought Duplantier to a sealed door. The door was recessed into the wall, and three metal bars, each three inches high and an inch thick, lay across the door, locked into slots on either side of the frame.

Once again, she inserted her ID card into a slot on a panel and entered another twelve-digit code, and the metal bars slid aside. A motor then opened the door, which was itself a heavy sheet of tempered steel three inches thick. In spite of its immense weight, the door opened inward slowly but smoothly, well-oiled armored hinges making little sound as it did.

Anyone observing this door would have been able to recognize that it was designed more to keep something in rather than out.

The laboratory behind that door was well-equipped with many intricate machines, some of which would have been familiar to most biological scientists, and some of which would have been very strange. Large transparent tanks of liquid were present, the liquid semi-transparent and thick, and with...things...moving inside the tanks.

+"About time you got here,"+ an older man said from where he sat at a computer terminal. +"We've already started the experiment."+

+"I'm no more than five minutes late, Paul,"+ she said patiently. +"You weren't supposed to begin until eleven."+

+"There was no reason to wait,"+ Dr. Paul Leandre said petulantly.

Duplantier walked over to observe a human figure strapped to a hospital style bed. The man strapped to the bed was unconscious, but trembling against the straps even so. He was nude, and there were tubes leading into recently-stitched incisions in his chest.

+"Is the heart beating?"+

+"Yes,"+ Leandre replied distractedly, most of his attention on the display screen on the terminal, which was showing huge amounts of information about their 'test subject'. +"So far, there's been little sign of rejection, but it's early yet."+

Duplantier nodded. They had been attempting to perfect a process of cloning organs, as separate units. Based in part of the ground-breaking work of the long-missing Martin Kowambe, they had been able to successfully clone living hearts in vitro, but attempts to implant them in the original cell donor usually ended in the agonizing death of the subject. In theory, the cloned tissue should have been genetically a perfect match for the donor, but in practice something usually went wrong.

Occasionally, it worked well. Duplantier remembered when they had been tasked to save that cute American, what was his name...Larkin. Yes, she remembered, Bryce Larkin. Back in 2007, the man had been rushed into this facility by their FULCRUM masters, barely alive. She had not been given the details, but someone very good with a gun had used it on the man, very effectively. It had been a major project just to keep him (barely) alive as they transported him to Paris.

Larkin had been their first great success. His body had responded to their experimental treatments amazingly, they had cloned tissures from Larkin's barely-alive body, implanted them, and the grafts had 'taken'. The experimental drugs that encouraged tissue regeneration had done so, enabling Larkin to pack months of healing into weeks, and without the side effect of various cancerous tumors that had happened in other test subjects.

They had been able to bring Larkin from three-quarters of the way through death's door back to essentially perfect health in less than two months. A recovery that would normally have taken a year or more, if it had been possible at all, had happened in weeks. Even more amazingly, Larkin had emerged from this process both physically and mentally stable. Most of their other test subjects, even the apparently successful ones, had had...problems...afterward, especially mental issues and psychological instabilities.

In subsequent years, they had struggled to understand what was different about Larkin, why their experimental processes had worked on Larkin so perfectly, when they usually either failed or worked only imperfectly. Eventually, they had had another chance to work on Larkin as a test subject...but that had ended very strangely.

Today they were making yet another effort to find the problem with their process. Their subject today was an abducted university student. They had taken him in a bar while he was drunk, and left evidence that he had been killed in a car crash. Then they had cloned their prisoner's heart, creating a beating, functioning duplicate heart, and now came the acid test: they had removed the man's original heart and implanted the cloned organ, and were waiting to see if this time they had found the 'x' factor that had let the process work with Larkin.

So far, the subject was still alive, hours after implantation. However, his vitals were beginning to deteriorate, and his core body temperature was falling for no reason they could discern. It was becoming obvious that something, yet again, was going wrong.

+Oh well,+ the French doctor thought to herself in resignation, as their involuntary patient's vital signs suddenly went totally haywire, +there's always the next time.+

"He's waking up,"+ Leandre said.

+"That makes no sense,"+ Duplantier replied, looking at their 'patient' who was indeed beginning to show signs of stirring. +"He has enough sedatives in him to knock out a gorilla!"+

+"Look at the vitals!"+ Leandre said.

Duplantier looked at the display screens, and as Leandre had said, the brainwaves and other indicators indeed indicatred that their prisoner/patient was regaining consciousness.

+"It must be something unexpected about the process that's counteracting the sedation!"+ Leandre said, sounding excited for the first time since they had begun. +"Make sure all the sensors are in place and recording, we need to monitor this!"+

Duplantier was already rushing to obey, aware herself of the importance of gathering data on such unexpected developments. As she did though, a thought entered her mind in spite of her best efforts to suppress it.

+"If he wakes up,"+ Duplantier said, as she made sure the computer was recording everything the sensors were detecting, +"he'll be in considerable pain..."+

Leandre shrugged, +"He was going to die in a little while anyway, and even if that wasn't true, we were going to kill him. So what difference does it make? Just make sure the sensors are working, while he lasts we need to make sure we get everything!"+

Duplantier was a professional, and she had been doing this for years. She was mostly able to block out the look on the subject's face as his eyes had opened. The horror and fear and confusion in his still-drugged gaze as he had taken in his situation, the straps holding him to the table, the tubes and wires running into his chest, the sensor-wires passing through incisions all over his body. She was able to continue her work even over the sound of his screams as the pain had penetrated his waking mind. She had a job to do, and a higher purpose to serve, so she blocked all such extraneous distractions out.

Mostly.

As it happened, they did gather a substantial amount of data, in spite of the patient's screams and struggles against the straps after he awakened. By the time he was dead, they had filled several hard drives with collected biological data, and Duplantier repeatedly assured herself that this would serve a greater good. As she sat at a table in the lounge area later, sipping a glass of straight vodka, she reminded herself that sacrifices were necessary sometimes. She had been doing this for a long time, and she knew how to block out the irrelevancies.

Somehow, though, that did not entirely banish the memory of the look on the subject's face in his agonized final hours. She supposed she should have been used to that sort of thing after so many subjects and so many years...but sometimes she remembered things she would rather forget...and sometimes she had nightmares.

Los Angeles, California, Friday June 5th, 2020, 3:03 a.m. local time...

As the sound of her smartphone ringing penetrated her sleeping mind, Rhiana Jameson reluctantly opened her eyes and let out a soft curse. As she sat up in her bed, her body protested, she had only been asleep for a few hours and she most definitely did not want to get up out of her warm comfortable bed. She had arrived back in Los Angeles after a business trip late in the afternoon, and by the time she had reached her apartment, eaten a late dinner (if one could call a frozen spaghetti meal heated in a microwave that), taken a shower, and slipped gratefully at least into her bed, it had been well past midnight.

Now, only two and a half hours later, she found herself awakened by a phone call. Phone calls in the late hours of the night were rarely good news, and she was a little nervous as she picked up the phone. Her immediate fear, that it was some sort of bad news about her family or other acquaintances, was eased when she saw that the called ID showed that the call was from an unfamiliar number.

Probably a damned wrong number, Jameson thought sourly, as she answered the call. I'd lay odds whoever it is will be drunk, too. Why I couldn't have a halfway-decent night's sleep I don't know.

The voice on the other end did not sound drunk, though. It was a male voice, and when she heard the words she stiffened and her irritation was replaced by a mixture of nervous anxiety and focus.

"Your Uncle Stephen wants to talk to you, Rhiana," a male voice said calmly. The voice was calm, neutral, pleasant, no accent at all that could be placed. "Meet him at his favorite bar at the usual time."

That was all, and the caller hung up without waiting for a reply.

Rhiana Jameson looked at the phone, and wondered what on Earth could cause her masters in FULCRUM to want to contact her just then. She had been acting as a long-term sleeper, and it had been over a year since she had heard from her superiors.

She sighed. Like it or not, her masters had called, and she had to respond. The code phrase had told her when and where to meet her FULCRUM contact, and as she converted the code into a place and time she sighed. She had been planning to spend the following day, her first Saturday back in Los Angeles in a month, with her son, but now that wasn't going to bne possible. Unless...

It was no use trying to get back to sleep now, Jameson knew. She would have to think up an excuse for canceling her day with her son, but maybe they could still get together on Sunday.

Jameson looked over at the table beside her bed, where a picture of her son, who currently lived with her ex-husband, rested. She picked it up and thought wistfully of her plans with her twelve year old son, Keith Neil.

Oh well, Jameson thought, maybe Sunday.

To be continued...

* Mary is talking about events post-finale that have not yet been revealed.