Thursday, September 30, 2010

Chapter 25: Chuck and Sarah, Moose and Squirrel

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny." – Isaac Asimov


Moose and Squirrel, Chuck and Sarah

18 NOVEMBER 2007
ESTATE OF SERGEI EZERSKY
01:27 PST


"That's it," Chuck said. "I'm convinced. This guy is evil."

"Still no access?"

"What the hell's taking you so long, Bartowski?"

Chuck wriggled so that he could touch his finger to the button on his earpiece, activating the comm. It was hard to move around in such a confined space, and he banged his elbow because of it. It made him a little grouchier as he answered Casey's demand. "This guy has the security system from hell, okay? Actually, no. Satan wishes he had a system like this, if only to keep the politicians out."

"Uh-huh. You promised me ten minutes. It's been fourteen. Why aren't you through yet?"

Casey just seemed to get more and more impatient by the day. Or, Chuck thought, he had since the intel disk lost to Bryce at Stanford had shown up in Casey's prized Crown Vic, taped to the steering wheel, two days before. The car was at the NSA cleaners', the disk was on its way to DC, and the team was currently running an op on the Malibu estate of one Sergei I. Ezersky. Well, that wasn't entirely accurate. Casey was fuming in the back of a van a block away from Ezersky's estate while Sarah and Chuck were back behind the estate at the security console, doing their damndest to break into said estate.

It wasn't going according to plan.

"Am I going to have to call the local Nerd Herd to get this done right, Bartowski?" Casey went on. "Get your ass in gear!"

"He's working on it, Casey," Sarah said. She was standing watch over the console, which was a waist-high, silver box that Chuck could half wriggle into. She wore coveralls and a gimme cap that declared her a city worker. Even though she had a clipboard (and a very handy gun), Chuck didn't actually think the disguise was all that necessary. No city worker was going to be lurking on an upper-class Malibu street after one in the morning on a Saturday night. Especially not a city worker that looked like Sarah Walker. It made him feel less guilty about stripping his own coveralls to the waist so that his black tactical suit showed through. He was buried in the security console from the waist up, trying to literally hack it from the inside. It had taken a blowtorch and some creative thinking to get that far, even. Sergei Ezersky really seemed to care about his security.

"Well, tell him to work faster."

Chuck rolled his eyes and tweaked a wire to the device he'd cobbled together. Even though they were on a severe time limit, he pushed himself out of the console and sighed up at Sarah. "No offense," he said after he'd shut off his comm link, "but I'm starting to regret that you won the coin toss to be the one to go into the estate with me. He really doesn't wait very well, does he?"

"Shh." Sarah gave him an aggrieved look and pointed at her open comm unit.

"Hey, Casey," Chuck said at it, and ducked back into the console.

"Hey, CIA, here's an idea: this goes faster if you quit making googly eyes at the blonde and get your bony ass in gear!"

It would go faster without a pissed off NSA agent buzzing in his ear the whole time, but Chuck knew better than to point that out. So he activated his comm unit and started humming Old King Cole.

Sarah booted him gently on the ankle. He shrugged.

Another two minutes ticked by, every second tolling in his ears like an insane gong. Their intel on Ezersky placed him out of town and the estate empty, but every moment that it took him to bypass the security was a moment in which they were in danger of being discovered. Another moment that they were out in the open, with all of that space and danger and the possibility of bullets and bad guys and gunfights and—

Sarah kicked him again. His breathing didn't slow. She was the one most in danger, standing out there without even a Kevlar vest to protect her.

A second later, he felt her kneel down next to him, and lean into the console. Even though the box was open, save for some computer wiring and the access screen inside, he was already taking up most of the space. Sarah joining him pressed them close together, but she didn't seem to notice even when he tensed. Her face just over his, she placed a hand over his headset mic. "Keep it together."

Chuck's breathing obediently slowed. Sarah waited ten intense, throbbing seconds, her eyes burning and glinting in the reflection of the mini-laptop he'd wedged into the console with him. She dared him to look away.

He couldn't. Especially after the first couple of seconds had elapsed and he realized that she was now pushed against him far more intimately than she'd ever been before, a tight fit in such a confined space. Sure, there had been that cuddling in the hayloft when she'd used him as a human pillow, but it didn't match this sort of bodies pressing together, lines and limbs perfectly matched. Heat, a searing red burn, started roiling through his middle, seeping outward to his limbs and fingers and toes.

"You good?" Sarah asked.

Chuck didn't trust his throat to work with all of the saliva suddenly pooled in his mouth, so he nodded.

"Good." Sarah tried to wiggle out. It didn't quite work: she ended up elbowing him in the ribs and smacking her head on the top of the console. They both swore.

"What's going on out there?" Casey demanded.

"Nothing—"

"Dropped something—"

Sarah managed to extricate herself from the console without further disaster. His whole body on fire, Chuck took a deep breath and wondered what the hell that had been about. Sure, it had held off a panic attack, but still—what the hell? Why had Sarah done that? Right now, she was "Mission Mode Sarah," as Bryce had coined it when Chuck had been the tech support to the Larkin-Walker Wonder Team: focused, tense, less playful than usual. But none of that explained why she would just break her guard duty to come inside and climb on top of him like that, even if it had stopped a panic attack.

He forced himself to focus back on the matter at hand. His research on the system had pointed out a glitch in the OS, but a very minor one that shifted and varied depending on the user specs. It was taking him a lot longer to find than he'd anticipated, which was more than evidenced by Casey's growls.

"Are you any closer?" Casey demanded. "Because another five minutes and I'm scrapping this op."

"I told you it was going to take some finessing—"

"Five minutes."

"Casey, it's not a magic solution, I can't just snap my fingers and—oh, got it."

"What?"

"Just a couple of—yep, we're in." Chuck booted up the programs he'd installed on the laptop for just this purpose and twisted around so that he could set his watch. "Everybody ready?"

"Ready," Casey confirmed to the van. "Call signs only at this point, team."

"All right, gear up, Sa—ah, Guinevere, we've got thirty minutes, starting…now."

He hit the return key on the laptop and pushed himself out of the console. He blinked up at Sarah. "How'd you—whoa. Do you have powers of super-stripping because, geez—"

"Hurry up." Sarah, her coveralls gone and replaced by the skin-tight burglary/tactical suit beneath, pulled a balaclava down over her forehead. Chuck stumbled as he kicked free of his coveralls. They were going in light, with only a few weapons between them, the computer gear Chuck would need, and a lightweight rope. Together, they headed through the darkness.

"You ready for this?" Sarah asked as they skirted the high wall surrounding the estate.

"I think so."

Sarah gave him a skeptical look.

"Yeah, well, you know, my wall-scaling days aren't that far behind me, you know." Chuck pulled the balaclava down over his face. When Sarah stopped at the pre-arranged breach point and knelt, cupping her hands together, he raised both eyebrows. "Uh…"

"C'mon. We don't have a lot of time, and I can handle your weight. This way, you can pull me over." Her eyes met his and left no room for resistance, so Chuck just gave a micro-shrug, stepped into her cupped palms, and managed, on the first try, to grab the top of the wall. He yanked himself up, grunting, and immediately slithered around on his belly to help Sarah up.

She simply leaped, grabbed, and pulled herself up. She lowered herself just as quickly over the other side, apparently trusting that Chuck would follow. He landed a great deal more clumsily and glanced around the well-manicured lawn, all rolling hills in the darkness, before he took off after Sarah.

"You said no dogs, right?" he asked, just in case. It seemed like no huge estate like this should come without dogs.

"No dogs."

Ahead of them, the house loomed, the light stucco walls gleaming despite the darkness. The lights had been snuffed since the master was away on a business trip in Paris, so there was only the automated lights in the Olympic-sized pool lighting them from below as they ran across a terrace and through an outdoor kitchen.

"Bourne," Sarah said as they ran, "we're at the house. How long until—"

Chuck leaned around her and pulled open the back door.

"The doors are open?" Sarah finished, and gave him a wry look through the balaclava.

"Unlocked them from the console," Chuck said.

Sarah led the way into a foyer more opulent than any he'd ever seen. Not that Chuck had had much opportunity to visit—or burgle, in this case—the homes of the wealthy, but he still figured that this place had to be pretty swanky, considering. Darkness shrouded the entire room in purple, moonlight silvering everything in a gradient. During the day, the place must flood with daylight, but right now, everything from the raftered ceiling to the marble floors felt echo-y and empty, and vaguely wrong. Of course, that could have more to do with the fact that he and his partner were currently dressed like cat burglars…and there was that little breaking and entering thing to contend with. They had false IDs and badges just in case, but the principle remained.

"Computer's up on the second floor," Sarah whispered, pausing at the entry into the rest of the house. "This way."

The house opened up from the foyer into a huge expanse of space. Tall ceilings, airy rooms. Of course, the interior decorator had seen fit to fill the space with as little as possible. Chuck caught glimpses and impressions of rooms, all unfilled with minimalist and Spartan furniture, only a few throw rugs to warm up the cold flooring. There was no personality in the house at all. Had they broken into the wrong house? He hoped not. That security system had been hellacious to crack.

"In here." Sarah checked a room, deemed it clear, and pulled Chuck in. The room—larger than the entirety of the Bachelor Pad—contained only a desk and a computer.

"Seems to like the bare approach, doesn't he?" he asked, yanking a palm-sized, flat object out of the holster at his waist. "You'd think a toymaker would have more clutter, right? Kind of like the king in 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,' you know?"

"I'm sorry, Chitty Chitty what?"

"You never saw that movie growing up?" Chuck knelt by the computer so that he could affix the cloner to its side. When he glanced over at Sarah, she had her back to him, watching out the doorway. He shrugged and got back to work setting up a little stand and transmission dish that could both be folded down into smaller items for convenience. "Probably for the best. I still kind of have nightmares about it."

Again, no answer.

Chuck hooked the cloner into the computer through a Firewire cable, hooked the transmitter dish up to both, and touched his comm unit to activate it. "Hey, Ca—Bourne, how's it going?"

"Where are you?"

"We're in the room, and I've got the cloning device all set up. You ready in there?"

He heard the tapping of fingers on a keyboard. "Assuming you've done this right."

"Let's just assume when it comes to computers, I'm awesome, and leave it at that. Now, hit that key I told you to hit, and let's do this thing."

Casey let out a little grumbling, growling noise that translated assent.

Chuck leaned down and flipped a small switch on the side of the cloning device. He hit a secondary timing function on his watch, noting that they still had twenty seven minutes before his hole in the security system closed. "Transmitting now."

"Downloading," Casey said after a couple of seconds. The device would create a mirror image of Sergei's hard drive that Chuck would be able to crack on his own time, rather than worrying about computer security while they were on the estate. There had been no outright indicators in Sergei Ezersky's financial data or schedule that he might be part of a super-secret underground government group, so chances were, they were on a wild goose chase tonight. But it was the only lead they had until Bryce decided he was tired of playing a ghost.

So Chuck sat back and prepared to wait for the data to finish being sent to a laptop he'd set up in the van. As he did so, and Sarah kept her vigil at the door, he studied the room. It was so…boring. Empty. It made absolutely no sense, he thought again, that a toymaker lived here. Toymakers were supposed to be eccentrics, fascinated by the odd and the absurd. As an eccentric, Sergei Ezersky was just a complete disappointment.

Chuck caught something out of the corner of his eye and frowned. "Hey, what's that?"

Sarah didn't glance over. She had her gun out, at rest but still ready to fire. "What's what?"

"I think there's something in the floor over here." Curious now, Chuck rose to his feet and crossed to the far corner. He ignored Sarah's warning not to touch anything—there wasn't anything to touch besides the computer and he'd already pawed all over that—and knelt, his gloved hands tracing a minute crack in the floor. The crack spanned along until it intersected with another, which in turn moved perpendicular and met a third. That led to a fourth, finally forming… "A trapdoor."

"What?" Sarah finally looked away from the door. "I told you not to touch anything!"

"It's a trapdoor," Chuck repeated, his voice breathless. "The man has an honest-to-God trapdoor in his house! Ha! I knew he couldn't have been that boring!"

He felt around for a catch.

"Chuck!" After giving the hallway one final glance to apparently make sure assassins hadn't discovered them, Sarah hurried over. "What part of 'don't touch anything' did you not—"

"Oh, c'mon. Don't tell me you're not curious."

"The plan is simple. Let's stick to it—"

"The blueprints for this house said nothing about a trapdoor. And c'mon, if I'm really Sergei Ezersky and part of some mysterious and ambiguous government group, where am I going to hide my secret information? A computer out in the open or a secret room?" Chuck gave her one final "get real" look that he wasn't sure she could see through the balaclava and twisted the handle he'd jimmied out of the floor. The door opened easily.

"One condition," Sarah said.

"Name it."

"I go first." When Chuck opened his mouth to protest, Sarah held up a finger. "You've got the computer in your brain. I don't. Ergo, I go first."

Chuck sighed. "Fine."

Sarah hit her comm button. "Bourne, change of plans. Stargazer found a trapdoor—we're assessing the situation."

"Fine. Transmission's at forty-seven percent. Make it fast. And don't get shot."

"Thanks for the tip, Bourne."

Sarah and Chuck glanced down through the trapdoor, pulling their goggles down over their eyes as they did so. Even with night-vision, the trapdoor's contents didn't reveal much—just a dark hole with a metal ladder leading down. Chuck switched his goggles over to heat vision. It seemed to keep the same ambient warmth of the rest of the house. He glanced over at Sarah, who was painted in hot reds, yellows, and oranges, an interesting look for her. "Ladies first."

"Get your gun out and keep it out until I get to the bottom," Sarah said. "You cover me, and then I'll cover you."

"Sometimes literally," Chuck said, and Sarah gave him yet another aggravated look as she hurriedly switched off her mic. Or at least he thought it was aggravated. It was kind of hard to tell with the facemask and the goggles.

He cleared his throat as Sarah climbed down into the floor. "What was up with that?"

"What?" Her head and shoulders disappeared below the floor. With heat vision still on, he could watch her body, colors slithering over each other like a kaleidoscope, as she climbed down the ladder. He saw the colors shift again as she looked up at him. "Are you looking out or are you watching me?"

"Oops, sorry." Chuck dug out the tranq gun and pointed it toward the door.

A few seconds later, he heard, "Okay, it's all clear—wow."

"What is it? What's going on?"

"Um, just get down here and see for yourself."

Chuck glanced once more toward the door and holstered the gun before he scrambled down. "The thing, back there. In the console. You kind of climbed on top of me. Why did you do that?"

"Transmission's at sixty-seven percent," Casey, who couldn't hear them, said.

"Thanks." Sarah hit the off button on her earpiece. "Chuck, is now really the time?"

"I was just curious—whoa." At the bottom of the ladder, Chuck turned, and froze. They had descended into a room that wasn't terribly large, just long. Heat-vision gave him readings: the room's depth, width, height, ambient temperature. It was, simply put, a vault of some type, the floor lit up with the gentle glow of light panels, ringed by uniform shelves that lined each wall. Tiny pinpricks of heat glowed red at equal distances on the shelves.

"It's light enough in here, you don't need the goggles," Sarah said.

Obediently, Chuck pushed them off of his eyes. "I knew it!" he said once he'd blinked a couple of times. He stepped away from the base of the ladder and into the vault, ignoring the hand Sarah put out to stop him. "I knew this guy had to have something interesting about his place!"

Robots. His geek brain nearly let out a yodel at the sight of them, lining all of the shelves in neat rows. They were present in all forms and sizes, categorized by size and type. The larger robots sat on the bottom shelf, shaped like animals: dogs, cats, a T-Rex, a Triceratops, some Velociraptors.

"Well, he obviously likes dinosaurs," Chuck said, ignoring the fact that he was stating the obvious. He crouched down to poke at a lifelike Brontosaurus.

Sarah grabbed his wrist. "What are you doing?"

"I—"

"Do not touch anything."

"But—"

"You said if he had data on Fulcrum, it would be down here. Let's find it and get out of here." Sarah's tone said what her words didn't: and quit acting like a kid in a candy store.

"All right, all right, yeesh." Chuck rolled his eyes and backed away from the dinosaurs. He moved deeper into the vault, eyeing the shelves at shoulder height that contained the medium-sized robotics. These looked almost like the demented crossbreed of rabbits and grasshoppers. They had rectangular bodies, topped with heads shaped vaguely like coffee beans. Made of a black matte metal, they sat on powerful haunches, wide-toed feet. They should have looked angular and evil, but smooth lines all over their torsos, faces, and snouts mellowed them somewhat, possibly aided by the fact that their ocular lights weren't glowing. Chuck resisted poking one to see how solid it was only because he knew Sarah would smack his hand if he did.

"I think all of these are on," he said, though the robots weren't making any whirring noises that signified power.

"Why do you say that?"

"Heat sensors were picking them up. I'd say they're motion activated, but they don't seem to react." Chuck waved a hand in front of one of the robo-rabbits just to be sure. He turned to check the creatures on the top shelf, which looked a bit like Princess Leia's thermal detonator with legs and minus the gold lamé paint.

"Look out!"

Instinct made him duck mid-turn. He felt the breeze of something whoosh right over his head, ruffling his hair as it passed. He dropped to one knee, whipping the tranq gun out and ready to take down all manner of assassins, security personnel, or ninjas.

There was nothing there.

"Wh-what?"

"Chuck!" Sarah launched into a slide to steal third, landing right next to him. She yanked him down and pointed. "Look up."

"Holy—"

At some point, a panel in the ceiling had slid open. It must have done so silently. Chuck figured that being taller than most of the population, he really had the market cornered on knowing what was happening on most ceilings, so the room must be well-oiled among other things. That wasn't the important part. No, that would be the robotic arm that extended from the ceiling without even the telltale whirring of gyroscopes and motor functions. It was painted a dark orange, almost a burnt sienna, and the hand at its end was a three-pronged tool.

Some kind of robotic Igor? Either way, it swayed above their heads, unable to reach low enough to attack either of them again.

"That," Chuck breathed, "is so cool!"

Both he and Sarah jumped when words rumbled through the room, the deep bass rattling the light panels below their feet. It took Chuck a second to realize that the reason he couldn't understand the words was that they were in Russian.

"What's it saying?" he hissed at Sarah.

"Shh." She listened intently for a second. "It wants us to identify ourselves."

"You, uh, know the Russian word for 'friend,' right?"

"I know a lot more than that." Sarah toggled her comm on. "Bourne, we may have a problem."

"What did the geek do now?"

"The trapdoor led to some sort of lab-slash-storage facility, and the room knows we're here."

"The room knows you're there?"

"It's asking us to identify ourselves."

"My suggestion, Guinevere? Lie."

"Gee, thanks. No way I could've come up with that one on my own. How much do we have on the transmission?"

There was a pause as Casey checked the screen. "Eighty-six percent."

"All right. Leaving comm open."

Chuck leaned over to whisper to Sarah, though he was pretty sure the room could probably pick up all audible words. "Maybe you should answer the disembodied voice, since my Russian is limited to imitating Boris and Natasha."

Sarah gave him a blank look.

"You know, Moose and—you know what? Not really the time."

Sarah evidently agreed. She let out a spate of Russian so quickly that Chuck's eyebrows went up. The voice demanding their identity stopped mid-sentence, falling so abruptly silent that Chuck jumped.
Nothing happened.

"What'd you say?" Chuck asked, glancing around to make sure no other robot arms had descended from the ceiling. The one that had almost taken his head off at the neck stopped swaying gently.

"I identified us as friends of Doctor Sergei Ezersky, and that we intend no harm."

Chuck glanced around. "Uh, Sarah, not to point out the obvious, but we're in a room full of robots. I'm not exactly worried about us being the ones to do harm."

"Not sure if you've noticed, but I'm pretty damn dangerous."

"You know what? I think I got that. Why isn't it saying anything?"

"I don't know. I'm not the computer guy here. Why isn't it saying anything?"

"Um, maybe it's analyzing?"

"God," Casey grumbled from the van, "the CIA has never made me want to shoot myself in the head quite this much before."

Chuck felt that was a bit unfair, as he was quite certain he'd annoyed Casey far more on many other occasions, but he didn't say anything. It didn't matter, anyway. The room began talking again, the light panels once more flickering and rumbling.

"Voice print isn't a match," Sarah said, her lips tightening. "I think it's time—"

She froze. Across the shelves, one by one, little lights began to switch on. The chest lights on the mid-sized robots all glowed blue, their little eyes lighting up with green. Chuck felt a very severe sense of uh-oh begin to spread through his middle. Along the bottom shelf, the dinosaurs remained silent and lifeless, but the twenty or so middle-sized robots more than made up for that loss.

As one, every single robot on the middle shelf turned its head.

Forty little green lights narrowed in on Chuck and Sarah.

"Wow," Chuck said despite himself. "It really is just like in the movies."

Bad idea, he thought a split-second later when forty little green lights slowly turned a very scary shade of red.

"Chuck?" Sarah asked.

"Yeah?"

"Run!"

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