"When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her." – Oscar Wilde
The Dark and the Damned
19 OCTOBER 2007
ABANDONED WATERFRONT WAREHOUSE
00:06 PDT
For the second time in less than thirty hours, Chuck's knees hit the ground—hard. He bit his lip to hold back the scream. What emerged was a high-pitched sort of whimper, barely audible to anything but dogs.
Carina landed next to him with a grunt, which somehow made him feel better about his own reaction.
He couldn't see at all—they'd stuffed a cloth bag that smelled oddly of peaches over his head back in the alley. They'd loaded him into a car, driven him away. He'd tried to focus on which way the car turned, but when he had no idea where he was to start out, it had been pretty hopeless. All he knew now was that they were in some sort of big, echo-y space, and he'd been stumbling over gravel.
The bag was whipped from his head, light flooding in where there had been only darkness before. Chuck shut his eyes and cursed. "Argh!"
The guard who'd removed Chuck's bag did the same for Carina. She merely smirked. "Thanks, toots."
Chuck bit his tongue over a plea that Carina please stop antagonizing the guards—the fifth, by his count. Thankfully, the guard didn't backhand her. And maybe, Chuck realized as the guard merely shook his head and stomped out, he watched too many movies. Not everybody hit women, after all. His life wasn't Prison Break.
Though come to think of it, he'd give his left foot for a full-body tattoo that would lead him out of this situation.
But since he had only his wits and a loose-cannon ex-DEA agent, Chuck sucked in a deep breath and made himself look around. The guard had dumped him and Carina on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, right in front of a bright light of some sort. Construction light, Chuck deduced after a second. It made things difficult to make out. The room became a series of blobs and smears until he wiggled around so that he had his back to the light. Now he could see the grimy floor, untreated and unwashed concrete walls. The industrial, musty smell gave it away.
An abandoned factory of some type? He and Carina had been left in a smallish room, with only the light for company—aside from the guy cowering in the corner, that was.
"Who're you?" Chuck asked, blinking away the last of the light-spots.
But Carina beat the man to it. "Ah, Fidget. I thought I recognized the stench."
The man turned the color of wax. "You don't understand," he babbled, his words tumbling over each other. "Please, Carina, you don't understand—they threatened my family!"
Carina laughed hollowly. "You don't have family. Unless they're breeding slime these days and nobody told me. How much did they offer you for my name, Fidge?"
"That's privileged." Fidget coughed, a deep, wracking noise that indicated he'd been rabbit-punched a few times. He was a small man, on the thin side of emaciated, his eyes huge, blue, and without focus behind fish tank lenses. A shock of black hair waved every which way about his head. Everything about him screamed perpetual motion. His palms twitched, his fingers drummed limply against the dirt floor, his knees jerked, his shoulders shrugged, his feet tapped Not hard to figure out where he would get the nickname.
But a safe expert would be required to actually crack a safe or two, wouldn't he? As far as Chuck understood, that required a steady focus and even steadier hands. So how on earth did the chronic twitch manage to spin a dial, much less grip the handle to open an actual safe?
The rational part of his brain chimed in—what did it matter? He was in some mysterious location, his hands tied, with a safe-cracker and a trigger-happy ex-DEA agent, and somewhere in this huge compound, there was a drug lord just waiting to kill not only them, but Chuck's new teammates as well. If they showed up.
He probably hadn't used the phrase "uh-oh" this much in his entire life.
Carina and Fidget's conversation hadn't ebbed. "For crying out loud, Fidget, you're not a lawyer. A girl just wants to know how much she's worth on the open market these days."
"Carina," and Fidget coughed again, "a girl like you knows to the penny how much she's worth. What is the going rate these days for a quick fu—"
"Hey!" Chuck's head snapped up. "There will be none of that talk here!"
Both Fidget and Carina stared at him as though he had followed in Zaphod Beeblebrox's footsteps and grown an extra head. "Where on earth did you find this guy?" Fidget asked Carina.
"Believe it or not, stalking his ex-girlfriend." Carina eyed Chuck, almost uneasily. The fury at Fidget had snapped something inside of him so hard that he had heard an audible click. Suddenly, the room—which had been perfectly ordinary a few minutes before—crunched inwards, the walls physically grinding as they moved. He struggled to pull in air.
Carina tilted forward so that she could bump him with a shoulder. "What are you doing?"
Chuck gritted his teeth and stared at the floor, determined not to give in. In some part of his mind, he knew that the walls hadn't actually moved, but every time he blinked, they were just a little bit closer…
"I'm trying not to freak out," he said, measuring his words evenly. He'd found it stereotypical in the movies whenever crazy people rocked back and forth, but the motion kept him grounded, made him focus on the floor instead of the walls closing in. The dwindling oxygen supply. The thousand voices screaming so loudly in his head that millions of words just became one never-ending scream. The moisture coating his entire body. He bit the inside of his cheek. "See," he said, his voice distorted by the mouthful of cheek, "if I can hold off the panic attack until Sarah gets here, then I can watch her kick your ass for first attempting to kidnap me, and then actually getting me kidnapped!"
He expected some sort of bored rejoinder, but instead Carina studied him intensely. "You're agoraphobic and ochlophobic, aren't you?"
"What?"
"In the car, you flinched every time somebody walked by."
He had? This was news.
"When did the home office start hiring analysts with agoraphobia?" Carina mused, mostly to herself.
Fidget, however, still heard. "You're an analyst?" he demanded of Chuck. "For who?"
Chuck ignored him. "Carina! Ex-nay on the over-kay uff-stay!"
"Dude, I can speak pig Latin."
Like Chuck, Carina ignored their twitchy little friend. "They would weed out that sort of thing, which must mean you developed this recently. On the job. And—oh, my God, you're Bunker Boy!"
"What?" Chuck abruptly forgot all about the compacting walls.
"What?" Fidget echoed a second later.
"You helped Sarah and me out on an op. In Dubai." Carina regarded Chuck in a whole new light now. Gone was the leer—in its place was an appreciative gleam no less dangerous to Chuck. "You hacked a bank remotely, helped us get in and out without any casualties. As I recall, you put a smiley face icon up every time we passed a screen."
Chuck remembered the job, from about sixteen months back. It had been one of the few times he'd answered the phone to Sarah Walker instead of Bryce Larkin. He'd assumed at the time that she was working with Bryce on the mission, but apparently not.
Also, that bank had been a heck of a lot of fun to hack.
"Yeah, that was me," he said.
"Dude, you hacked a bank?" Fidget wanted to know, his eyes even bigger than usual behind the lenses.
Chuck glowered at him. "That's classified."
"Sarah finally got you out of that bunker, huh?" Carina smirked.
"No, actually I'm a hologram. Lifelike, isn't it?"
Carina chuckled, shaking her head so that the strands of red fell away from her face. "Either way, it explains a lot."
"What does that even mean?"
The door opened. Both Chuck and Fidget winced. Carina yawned. The guard who entered carried a folded-up newspaper under one arm—it was evident he was in for a long haul of guarding the prisoners.
"Did your boss get his diamond back?" Carina asked. "Hope my partner didn't go out and pawn it off for Lakers tickets. She likes tall, sweaty men."
Their new guard settled into a chair in the corner, a wide grin on his meaty face. "Just keep talking, sweetheart. I've got nothing but time."
Chuck put his head between his knees and closed his eyes. By now, Peyman had to have reached Sarah, either through his phone or through Carina's. They hadn't taken his watch off—who on earth would suspect that his watch was also a tracker?—so Casey and Sarah had to know where he was. Where were they? Assembling a task force? Coming in by themselves? Or would Sarah show up with the diamond and hope for the best?
At the rate he was going, he should have stayed in the bunker, where it was safe.
Ellie's face flashed through his mind. The way she'd hugged him, nearly suffocating him, because she couldn't believe he was there, standing in the same parking garage, and not dead. The way Morgan had clung to him in the Buy More. Even the way Jill had waved at her neighbor before going up the stairs and disappearing into her building.
There was no way in hell he should have stayed in the bunker.
If Carina or Fidget noticed that he'd stopped freaking out, neither commented. Carina kept up a stream of cleverly-disguised insults with the guard. Chuck figured both were probably enjoying it. Hey, more power to 'em, he figured, and focused his attention elsewhere. With the guard present, Fidget cowered against the wall, his head jerking back and forth while his body convulsed, a tyrannous and untamed surge of movement.
Chuck edged closer to him. He might not like the guy—he'd sold out Carina, after all—but they were all just hostages in this situation. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Sure, why not? Not like I got anything else to do."
"How on earth have you ever cracked a safe in your life?"
"Give me a safe to crack, and I'm in the zone. I feel it. Everything else? Poof—gone." Fidget actually looked a little bit giddy. Chuck could practically see the dial spinning right before the other man's eyes.
"But doesn't the shaking get in the way?" he asked.
"What shaking?" Fidget's head lolled to one side, twitched back straight.
Chuck stared. Maybe it was appropriate that a safe-cracker would be a few digits short of a full combination. It certainly fit in with the mess that the rest of his life had become. At length, he cleared his throat. "Ah, never mind."
Fidget tilted his head, his eyes tracking to the ceiling and back. "Hear that?"
"Hear what?"
"Someone's coming."
Across the room, Carina and the guard fell silent, the guard rising to his feet. Whether it was at Fidget's announcement, of if they'd heard something too, Chuck didn't know. He strained his ears, positive that Fidget must be half-bat—
The door opened.
It wasn't rammed in by a rescue task force, kicked open by a hero, slammed open by a vengeful Sarah or Casey. No, the door merely opened, calmly, revealing a silhouette that Chuck knew well. He opened his mouth to speak—
The guard went for his gun. He didn't even get his hand to the holster before there was an odd spitting noise.
Two patches of red blossomed across the front of his T-shirt.
The reek of cordite seared the air.
Chuck watched it all in some absurd slow-motion. In the movies, gunfire propelled a man through the air, sent him soaring. A swell of dramatic music—bang—a short flight, a literal dead drop. But here, in this dirty room, the guard merely crumpled, a tower imploding in on itself, body bouncing as he hit the floor. He almost looked like he was sleeping, save that his eyes were wide open and, because of the way he'd fallen, staring right at Chuck. Chuck gazed back, cold seizing his entire body. He felt his gorge rise, but it froze, like the rest of him, suspended in one perfect moment of hell.
I just watched someone die. The thought bounced through the empty recess that had once been his skull. I just watched my best friend kill somebody.
Carina, evidently much more used to death than Chuck, climbed awkwardly to her feet. "Should have known it was too good be true. You look good for a dead man, Bryce."
Bryce Larkin made no reply. He merely holstered the gun, his movements mechanical, and stepped past the man he had shot, heading for Chuck and ignoring all others in the room. Something in his hand glinted.
A knife—not unlike those preferred by his ex-partner.
Instantly, Chuck forgot about how bizarre it was that his best friend could be there at all. Thoughts of the dead man fled his mind. He scrambled backward across the floor, scuttling like a crab, eyes glued to the knife. "What?" he demanded, panic raising his voice. "A gun is too good for me? Gonna stick a knife between my ribs instead?"
Bryce's steps faltered. "What? No, I'm not going to kill you, Chuck. I'm here to get you out of here."
"Why?" Perhaps it was an absurd question to ask when he was on a dirt floor with his hands bound by drug lord captors, but he didn't care. His brain was whirling too fast for anything to process. "You didn't have to kill that guy, Bryce! Sarah's coming to rescue me, it's fine."
"Sarah's the one that got you into this mess." Bryce rolled his eyes and leaned around Chuck, cutting the cable ties with one easy flick.
"Was it absolutely necessary to shoot that man?" Chuck demanded, wincing as circulation flooded back into his hands. "Bryce, he could've had kids, a family—"
"C'mon," Bryce said, hauling Chuck to his feet in one easy motion. He headed toward the door.
"Forgetting something?" Carina drawled.
"Oh, right."
But instead of helping Carina and Fidget out of their own bindings, Bryce pulled out the gun. The silencer, a lethal, frightening tool, seemed to stretch for miles. Chuck's stomach roiled—and threatened to upend itself again when Bryce pointed the gun right at Fidget's head.
Chuck goggled. "What are you doing?"
On the floor, Fidget let out a laugh, his head bobbing to a tempo only he understood. "Knew it was going to come to this."
Bryce kept his eyes and his gun trained on Fidget. "I'm eliminating a problem. Wait outside if you don't want to see this, Chuck."
"No!" Chuck flung himself forward with more passion than finesse. Even if Bryce had taught him all about grappling while at Stanford, skill wouldn't have helped. The man was a lifelong gymnast, for crying out loud. Chuck's mass hitting him, though, was enough to throw him off.
He fell on the gun arm, knocking it sideways. He caught a glimpse of Fidget's pale, startled face, staring in terror—
The gun went off, the reverb ricocheting through Chuck's chest—
The shot went wide, missing the safe-cracker by a foot.
Bryce grabbed Chuck's shoulder and tossed him aside. "The man betrayed government secrets to a drug lord and endangered you and the others. He's too much of a risk."
"Then throw him in prison!" Chuck stepped between Bryce and Fidget. He had no idea where all of this bravery had suddenly come from. He had no love for Fidget, but nobody deserved to go like the guard currently pooling lifeblood all over the floor behind Bryce. "He's a hostage here, just like me, just like Carina. Killing him is no answer."
Bryce glared at Chuck. It was a cliché to think it, but his friend had developed killer's eyes, too bright, too blue, too jaded. Chuck's heart broke a little to see it. He swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing.
"Sorry to break up the party, boys," Carina said, drawing their attention to her. She'd managed to cut away her own bonds and was now holding the dead guard's gun, her eyebrows high. "Maybe we should escape now, yes?"
To Chuck's everlasting relief, Bryce holstered the gun. He tossed Chuck his knife as he moved to the door to check out the hallway situation. "Cut him loose. You owe my friend your life, Fidget. He's a better person than me. Just remember that when the next high bidder comes around."
Fidget whimpered. Though that may have been Chuck, busy cutting his ties. It gave him a bad moment—Sarah's bloody wrist and her flinch made Chuck dizzy to the point where he had to shut his eyes and take a deep breath—but he managed without any damage this time. Fidget immediately popped to his feet, rubbing feeling back into his hands.
They left the room and the guard behind. Chuck had been in strange raiding parties during his D&D days, back when Morgan had been fond of playing oddly-named min-max characters, leaving Chuck's rogue or mage with the world's weirdest sidekicks. None of that came close to the general freakishness of prowling through an abandoned warehouse with an ex-DEA agent, a rogue CIA agent, and the twitchiest criminal on the planet. Carina seemed insistent that Chuck stay right behind Bryce, while she kept close behind him, forming an agent sandwich. Fidget the Doomed kept up the rear.
"Quiet," Bryce hissed when Chuck stumbled over a piece of rebar.
Chuck glared. They were moving quickly through a series of abandoned hallways, hallways that had once been the site of industry, with wide doorways that led to storage rooms. Patches of wall had been eaten away so that moonlight could filter in and light the world in a silver gradient. Beams of it fell over Bryce's broad shoulders and perfectly coiffed head as he led the way. The guy even dressed like James Bond for a rescue mission.
No wonder Sarah had been with the guy.
Chuck quashed that feeling before it could truly take hold and poison the rest of him. Now was not the time. Bryce was here to rescue him—Chuck shouldn't resent the guy, even if he had betrayed his country, screwed with his ex-partner's plans, and sent his best friend into a nauseating spiral of doubt and danger. Okay, maybe he could resent the guy a little. Every time Chuck closed his eyes, the dead guard's slack face threatened to overpower him, after all. He kept his eyes open.
"Alahi and his guards are in the main bay, between us and the exit," Bryce whispered, stopping the group right before they could round a corner. All four of them flattened against a wall. "I got past them once, but—"
"Need a distraction?" Carina offered, tilting her head away from the wall so that she could see around Chuck.
Bryce nodded once, tersely.
"How many?"
"Six, plus Alahi."
"Piece of cake." Carina's smirk deepened—Chuck could barely make out the edges of her in the moonlight, but somehow her face remained perfectly lit. It was like magic. "Can I borrow your knife? I'm feeling like a knife fight."
"What is it with you and Sarah and knives?" Chuck asked as the knife exchanged hands. "You're like the sisterhood of the traveling blades or something."
"Not now, Chuck." Bryce glanced around the corner again, checking for any guards. So far they'd gotten lucky. "I've got a vehicle about two kilometers southeast. Rendezvous in fifteen minutes, or we're leaving you behind. You're clear—go!"
Carina skulked away, dragging a silently-protesting Fidget with her. Bryce waited until they'd vanished out of sight and down a stairwell before he turned to Chuck. "You stay right behind me, got it? I'm going to get us out of here, but you have to do exactly as I say."
"Okay. Wait a second." Maybe it was the dead guard or just general shock, but Chuck's brain finally reminded him just how strange this situation was. "Why are you here, Bryce? You're supposed to be off the grid."
"I am—I'm keeping an eye on you." Bryce peered around the corner, but sighed. He turned back to Chuck, having come to some sort of decision. "I don't trust—"
"Sarah?" Chuck interrupted. "Why not? Sarah Walker is possibly the best thing that ever happened to me. She got me out of that godforsaken bunker."
"And got you captured in Greece," Bryce pointed out.
"We weren't traitors. We would've had to turn ourselves in eventually."
Still, Bryce glowered. "And then they stuck you with John Casey, of all people. I don't trust him. He's a burn-out, an old-school killer."
Even twenty minutes before, Chuck would have agreed. But now he drew himself to his full height, his face going to stone. "I trust him. They made sacrifices to be here, so that I could have something of a normal life."
"Don't ever trust anybody, Chuck. Rule number one of being a spy."
Chuck couldn't help it—he rolled his eyes. Maybe it was two dangerous situations two nights in a row, or maybe it was the certainty he felt that he was about to spend his third night in the hospital, but he was suddenly very, very cranky. He glowered at Bryce. "I trust him," he repeated, enunciating each word. "Just like I trust Sarah."
For a long moment, Bryce didn't say anything. "Just watch your back, Chuck. That's all I ask. I won't always be here to bail you out."
"Fine." Chuck bit the word off. "Can we escape now? Casey and Sarah will be here at any moment."
"Fine." Bryce's expression mirrored his. "Remember—do exactly as I say."
"You and Sarah are eerily alike with your orders."
"Shut up, Chuck."
"See? That's what I mea—"
Bryce slapped a hand over his mouth, holding his free hand up, his index finger higher than the others. Somebody was coming. Both men flattened themselves to the wall again. Chuck's heart began to hammer against his ribcage when he heard the approaching footsteps. Another guard? Was he coming to check on the prisoners? Had they been busted?
The footsteps grew louder. Chuck began to sweat harder. He could feel Bryce tense up—
The guard rounded the corner.
Bryce struck like a snake. Just a blur of black and white and suddenly the guard had an arm wrapped around his neck, and Bryce's face visible over his shoulder. Movies made choke-holds look easy—well, easy for the choker, not so much for the chokee. This wasn't the case in real life. Both Bryce and the guard turned red almost immediately, grunting and struggling. The guard's arms jerked like a broken puppet's as he scrabbled for a grip, trying to dislodge Bryce. His eyes bulged; veins popped out along his forehead and neck. Bryce's face contorted into an awful grimace, but he kept his grip over the guard's mouth, muffling any noise.
Chuck saw the guard go for his gun and instinct yanked him forward. Stone cold killer or not, Bryce was his best friend. He couldn't let some thug shoot Bryce in the face. He grabbed the thug's gun before said thug could.
He discovered two things he'd forgotten from Officer Candidate School five years before—guns were heavy. Even more than that, they were weighty with implications. You didn't buy a gun because you wanted to make friends. You bought a gun to put holes in things, gaping, gruesome holes that would bleed all over the floor and—Chuck willed the image of the dead guard away from his mind. What now? Did he point it at the guard? No, he might hit Bryce.
Better to just hold onto the gun and let Bryce do his thing. It looked like the shorter man was winning, anyway.
Indeed, the thug went slack. Bryce staggered back, but didn't let the man fall. Undoubtedly, it would be like felling a tree in the middle of a busy square. No way others wouldn't hear.
"Get his feet?" Bryce panted, still holding the unconscious thug.
Chuck stared at the man's purpled face. "Is he dead?"
"No, but he'll have one hell of a headache. C'mon, his feet, Chuck!"
Chuck dithered for a moment about where to put the gun, but after checking that the safety was on (he remembered to do that much at least from OCS), he shoved it in the back of the waistband of his jeans and hurried to grab the man's feet. It wasn't easy, even with Bryce helping, to get him into one of the abandoned rooms. For one thing, the guy was heavy. "What does this guy eat, anyway?" Chuck groaned as he and Bryce steered around a doorway. "Dark matter?"
"Sure feels like it," Bryce said. They set the man off to the side and returned to the hallway. Before they could head out, though, Bryce turned to Chuck. "From this point on, keep your mouth shut, okay? Are you going to do that, or am I going to have to knock you out and haul you out of here in a fireman's carry?"
"Eerily like Sarah," Chuck repeated, but he nodded his acquiescence.
"Well, c'mon, then." Bryce pulled out first his silenced gun and then a second, chambering a round. "Stay close."
They crept out into the hallway and hurried through to a staircase. At the bottom, Bryce held up a hand again. Pause. Chuck obeyed, his heart jolting in his ears. He flattened himself to the wall once more.
Bryce started to peer around the corner—
Gunshots. Close, close gunshots. Even without the oversaturation of violence in TV and the media, Chuck would never mistake that noise. Every moment of the beach outside of Athens was burned into his brain, especially the gunshots that had sent sand ricocheting everywhere. It sounded louder, more echo-y in such a big warehouse.
The air came to life with noise—shouting, possibly Peyman and his men, return gunfire. Feet pounding as bodies dove for cover.
Who were they shooting at? Carina? Or had Sarah and Casey and the rest of the cavalry arrived? Chuck squeezed his eyes closed and sent up a short prayer to any listening deity. Please, please let Sarah be all right. Oh, and Casey, too. Chuck might not like the guy much, but he didn't wish him dead anymore.
More gunshots, puncturing the noise level with their shock.
"Sounds like Carina's sticking to the plan," Bryce said, inching closer to the corner. He peered around and nodded once, as the cacophony continued. "They're all the way on the other side of the room. We're going to go in low. Stay out of sight."
"Bryce, you may or may not have realized this in all of our time together, but I happen to be lanky of build. Getting low may be a problem." Chuck's voice came out panicked, breathy.
Bryce rolled his eyes. "Chuck. Get low, or get dead. Hear me?"
Put that way…Chuck nodded hurriedly. "Got it."
"Okay. On the count of three—one, two…go!"
Bryce dove forward, doing an impressive roll that landed him perfectly behind a set of crates ten feet away. Though he knew he was more likely to trip over his own shoelaces, Chuck prepped himself to follow—
The bullet slammed into the jamb two inches from his nose. He fell backwards, his arms windmilling. Thankfully, he hit the wall before he could crash to the ground.
Bryce peered around the crates, searching for the shooter. He waved urgently at Chuck. Come here.
Chuck shook his head. That bullet had been far too close to his head for comfort.
Bryce gave him a look. It's safe.
Like hell it is! Chuck mouthed back.
As if to prove his point, a new spate of gunfire rattled the walls, peppering the space between Chuck and Bryce. It was a smart-ass move, but Chuck raised an eyebrow at Bryce and folded his arms.
Bryce held up his index finger. Stay.
Chuck crouched down, not sure if the bullets could penetrate the wall behind him and unwilling to find out. He peered into the main bay of the warehouse, trying to make out details in the murky darkness. Storage crates lay in piles on a dirty concrete floor. He could see patches of the wall torn out, missing, rusted through. Moonlight trickled in along the left-hand wall, closest to Bryce and him. He could make out shapes in the dark, on the other side of the room by what he presumed to be the exit. Peyman Alahi's men, obviously, crouched behind crates, facing something on the right wall. Carina. He couldn't see her, but he figured that was where she had to be.
He watched Bryce as the other man leaned around a crate, trying to spot his enemies in the dark. The instant he poked his head around, gunfire rattled once more. Bryce scowled and fired off two shots.
No screams of pain, so he obviously missed.
Footsteps clattered behind him—the stairs! Chuck spun just in time to see a pair of feet round the landing, knees appearing as the mystery person headed down the bottom flight—
He took off running not for the main bay but for the hallway behind the staircase. It didn't matter that Bryce had insinuated that there was no exit this way. He had to get away, away from the gunfire, away from the guard. There was no possible way he could take on a guard. He wasn't Bryce Larkin, who could shoot somebody in cold blood one moment and choke somebody the next.
So Chuck sprinted, not even sparing Bryce a look. He stumbled over rebar, bumped his shoulder into the wall. Grunted. He didn't look back, not even to check if the guard was following him. He just ran, stumbling through what felt like a thousand hallways. Details blurred. He dodged in and out of moonlight, just wanting to get away from Bryce, from Peyman Alahi and his men, from Carina.
His brain caught up with the rest of him. There were no footsteps behind him. Had the guard completely missed him? Or had Bryce taken care of that guard, just like the first? Chuck forced the images out of his mind before they could overwhelm him. Now was not the time to freak out. Taking his chances, he slowed and ducked back into an alcove to gather his breath.
Now was the time to—to do what? Go find Bryce? And head straight for the gun battle? No thanks. Of course, the battle stood between him and the exit, squashing all hopes of just sneaking away and forgetting everything that had happened. Should he stay put, wait for Sarah and Casey to come and find him? They could trace him by the homing device in his watch, so really, it was only a matter of time until one of them came and saved the day.
But what to do until then? He was a reject spy with a computer in his head. If any of Peyman's men overtook him, he was as good as a dead man. Added to that, they could probably hear him panting and wheezing three miles away. He leaned back against the wall, gulping in oxygen. As he did so, he felt the gun he'd taken from the unconscious guard nudge against his lower back.
With shaking hands, he pulled it out.
It wasn't large. More like the pistol Casey preferred to the silver monster Sarah carried. Even so, it fit perfectly in his hand in a way that made him vaguely ill.
But Casey and Sarah had made it perfectly clear. He was the Intersect. The thing in his head was to be protected at all costs. But how far would that go? Would he be forced to shoot somebody? Maybe he could Book it and take out a few kneecaps—as if his aim were remotely that good—but could he really shoot a man?
His gun hand wavered. His watch blinked red.
Wait a second—what? The watch served as both a communications and a homing device, but what on earth did a blinking red light mean?
Footsteps in the hallway. His heart jolted and began to speed again, while his breath scraped harshly. He forgot all about his watch and willed his hand to stay steady on the gun. He didn't necessarily want to shoot first and ask questions later, but if that wasn't Bryce coming back for him…
He inched around the corner, gun at the ready.
It was a close call as to who was more startled. Chuck, his nose, the foot that came within two millimeters or breaking said nose, or Sarah Walker.
In the dimness, he saw her eyes go wide at the last instant. She tried to throw the kick—and would have landed flat on her butt if Casey, prowling right behind her, hadn't grabbed her arm at the last second. He tossed her unceremoniously back on her feet. She landed like a spring and immediately latched onto Chuck, grabbing his arms just above the elbow. "Are you okay? Are you hurt?"
He nodded, almost dumbly. They'd arrived, was all he could think. Now that Sarah and Casey were here, things were going to be better again.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, Bartowski?" Casey snatched the gun from his limp hand and glowered as he checked the chamber. He stuffed the gun into his own waistband.
"I took it from a guard," Chuck said, his voice distant.
"We had rules. We discussed these rules in depth. And the rules state that you are never to touch guns until I've trained you and given you my written and explicit approval—"
"Not now, Casey." Sarah nudged both of her partners back into the alcove and began to check Chuck over to make sure he hadn't been winged without knowing it. "Where's Carina?"
Chuck pushed her away. He was sweaty, and gross, and dirty from sitting on the floor. Until he'd showered for about three weeks, nobody should touch him. "We split up."
"She left you alone?" Sarah's eyes promised death for her former partner.
"No. She left me with—with Bryce."
Interestingly, the mention of Bryce Larkin's name had similar effects on both agents. All of the worry vanished off of Sarah's face so that her expression became more like Casey's constant angry mask. "Bryce is here?" she demanded.
"Y-yeah, he came into the room and killed the guard, got us out of there."
"What did he want?"
"To rescue me, apparently. He didn't seem like your biggest fan, Casey. Or you, Sarah."
"Probably because the last time I saw him, I was trying to put a bullet right between his eyes." Casey said. He cocked his gun. "Well, either way, time to end this."
"No!" Sarah grabbed the back of Casey's tactical dress uniform before he could stalk away. "You need to get Chuck out of here and to the car. He's our number one priority. I'll go after Bryce. I know how he thinks, and he'll be looking for Chuck."
"Walker, if you think I'm letting a compromised agent go after her scumbag ex-partner on her own—"
Sarah jerked Casey away from Chuck and said something under her breath, so low that Chuck couldn't hear. For a moment, it looked as though Casey might protest, but he nodded once, curtly. "Fine. But if I find out this is just you and him working together to screw us over—"
"It's not." Sarah flicked one glance at Chuck and slipped away into the darkness. He told himself that the look hadn't been a silent good-bye, but he wasn't entirely convinced.
Before the poisonous thoughts could take hold again, Casey grunted and moved past him, facing the dead end.
Chuck cleared his throat. "Pretty sure there's not a door that way—"
Casey put his boot through the wall. He kicked again for good measure, forming a decent-sized hole. "Follow me."
"Wow, yeah. Sure." Why hadn't it occurred to him to kick a hole in the wall? Oh, right. Chuck would have broken his foot.
It wasn't a perfect solution—Chuck had to squeeze to make it, so he had no idea how Casey had done it, and the squeeze jarred the bruising on his torso, making him see white flickers at the edges of his vision. But he stumbled through the wall and coughed out the drywall he'd accidentally tried to ingest. They'd kicked through to another room, not unlike the one where he and the other hostages had been held.
Casey kept a grip on the spot where Chuck's shoulder met his neck so that he was essentially dragging the nerd through the warehouse. He led with his gun, his footsteps making no noise as they headed for an exit, any exit—
Not that it mattered. Chuck stumbled along like a frat boy recovering from a three-day bender. If there was somebody in the building that didn't hear, he would have frankly been amazed. Not that he cared. He didn't, really. Casey and Sarah were here. They'd take care of everything. The panic attack could finally commence. A numbing sense of apathy descended over everything, buffering him from even his senses so that he experienced a tasteless, colorless world through a tunnel. Almost like popping a couple of quarters into those binoculars down at the Pier and watching the world go by—
"Keep it together, moron," Casey said, shaking Chuck's shoulder. "You can have your panic attack when we get out of here. Until then, keep it together, or so help me, God, I'll—"
They reached a corner. Casey held Chuck in place so that he could check. When the coast proved clear, he turned. "Pain," he finished. "Lots of pain. Now, move it."
Chuck decided maybe he should listen. He might not feel it now, but Casey's concept of "pain. Lots of pain" would probably leave bruises, which would ache when feeling returned. He bit hard on the inside of his cheek and was absurdly pleased to feel it—until it started to hurt. "Ow."
"What now? Actually, never mind, I don't want to know."
From the sound of it, Casey was hauling him closer to the main bay of the warehouse, where the gunfight was still ongoing, if a bit slower. The rapid bursts of gunfire had become random gunshots ringing out every few seconds, one at a time. Chuck wondered where on earth they kept their endless supply of ammunition—this was honestly getting a bit ridiculous. He kept his head ducked forward, trying to make as small a target as possible, and stuck close to Casey—not that the other man gave him much choice.
They met another hallway, made a turn. Chuck hoped Sarah was okay. Had she found Bryce? Were they making out—in the middle of a gun battle? The logical half of his brain scoffed. Sarah was professional. She'd do her job. And her job was to bring Bryce Larkin in for being a traitor. Even a traitor that had attempted to save Chuck from Peyman and his men.
"Wait here," Casey said suddenly, halting Chuck. Without even a warning look to make sure the CIA agent would obey him, he took off, gun held at the ready. Chuck squinted into the darkness—there was something on the ground about twenty feet ahead. Something that looked suspiciously like a body.
Morbid curiosity forced him forward as Casey knelt by the body to check for a pulse. Chuck blinked and he himself was standing over the body. "Who is it?" he hissed at Casey.
The other man jumped and whirled, gun up in the ready position. When he saw that it was just Chuck, he lowered the gun with a grunt. "What part of 'wait here' was too complicated for you, moron?"
But Chuck was too busy gazing at the body on the floor. A convenient patch of moonlight from the quarter moon lay right across a pair of unfocused blue eyes, staring from beyond the confines of life.
As luck would have it, the flash hit him then.
He came back to reality only because Casey snapped his fingers in his face. Instead of replying to the gruff, "You okay, Bartowski?" he stared down at the body at his feet. "Stopping Bryce didn't do a damn bit of good," he whispered, his voice hollow.
And kneeling down, he reached out a shaking hand to close the eyes of one Chaim Isaiah Bernstein, known to the world at large only as Fidget. Were it not for the gory void in the middle of the man's forehead, he would have looked at peace.
Chuck knew better. "Not one damned bit of good," he said for good measure.
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