Asking for Trouble
22 NOVEMBER 2007
SUNNYVALE APARTMENTS, FOURTH FLOOR
15:17 PST
Don't make eye contact. Remain as inconspicuous as possible.
Chuck was grateful that he'd thrown on a hat for the pre-feast festivities at Ellie's apartment. He'd planned to change into a nice button-down shirt and slacks later for the meal, but a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans had sufficed for watching football with Awesome and for…wrestling in the kitchen with Sarah.
And now really wasn't the time to get distracted.
He was supposed to be picking somebody's pocket, after all.
Oh, dear God.
Chuck deliberately relaxed his walk to a stroll as he rounded the corner and started to head toward the man retrieving his keys outside Jill's door. No need to draw attention to himself, he thought, by walking like a freaking Cyberman. Though Sarah hadn't said as much, he figured that in picking pockets, distractions had to be controlled. Distract only how you want to distract.
So he grabbed his phone out of his pocket and started to thumb a text message as he walked. He pretended he didn't see the guy in the hallway until it was too late and he'd already knocked the binder to the ground. "Oh, dude," he said, hoping his voice wasn't too loud. He couldn't hear himself over the rushing of his own heartbeat in his ears. "I'm so sorry! Here, let me help."
"I've got it." The man snatched the binder out of Chuck's hands quickly. Too quickly.
"Sorry, man," Chuck said in his best "California Bro" voice, the male counterpart to Sarah's Valley Girl impression. "Like, really, sorry."
"Don't worry about it." The man looked pained.
"'Kay." Chuck popped up to his feet and walked away, deliberately muttering under his breath and hoping it wasn't as obvious to the other guy that he was sweating profusely. He forced himself to keep up the act all the way to the elevator and through the ensuing wait for the elevator car to arrive. It seemed to eons, though he knew it probably wasn't more than ten to twenty seconds.
Only when he was completely out of sight did he collapse against the back of the elevator and draw in huge gulps of air like a drowning man. Oh, dear God, he repeated, blinking sluggishly as the doors began to trundle close. Had he really just done that? And gotten away cleanly?
"Hold the elevator!"
Crap.
Chuck felt more sweat sprout, coating the first layer already present. His eyes cut desperately to the Close Door button, but his finger shook as it hovered. Don't draw unnecessary attention to yourself, his brain scolded.
He stuck his other hand in between the doors, forcing them to open again. Jill's intruder climbed into the elevator with him, and didn't even bother to thank him. Well, that was a bit rude.
The ride down to the ground floor took ages longer than the wait for the elevator. Chuck imagined entire civilizations being born, going through depressions, golden ages. The rise and fall of entire empires. Stars erupting into life. Supernovas. Black holes. He kept his stare firmly on the screen of his phone, though he was sure he was just typing gibberish. He was in the same elevator with a man he'd pickpocketed. What did he expect? Shakespearean verse?
In his haste and terror, he accidentally sent an actual text message winging off into the ether, and hoped it wasn't to one of the bosses' numbers he kept in his phone.
The elevator continued to sink slowly, slowly down. Chuck didn't dare outright look at the other passenger, though he sneaked plenty of glances at the man with his peripheral vision. Did he look angry? Unpleasant? Or was Chuck projecting?
What the hell did this guy want with Jill's binder? Did Jill know him? Was he a coworker, a fellow grad student? He looked more like he might be a professor, except his urbane suit with its matching pocket square didn't exactly shout anything professorial. Chuck's eyes drifted over to the binder. What was in there, anyway, that it had to be picked up on Thanksgiving?
The man looked up and Chuck's eyes cut back to his cell phone in panic. But the man was only checking his hair in the mirrored doors of the elevator. Even though he was handsome, it probably didn't equate to the two years he'd just scared off of Chuck's life.
Chuck clutched his phone tighter and prayed for the world's longest elevator ride to end. So much for being inconspicuous. His hands were shaking so obviously that he didn't know how the whole world wasn't staring at him. And the sweating really wasn't helping matters.
When the car touched down on the ground floor, Chuck held in a breath of relief only through sheer force of will. He wasn't sure his legs would work, as his knees had turned to water, but he was able to follow the other man out of the elevator without walking like a puppet with jerky strings. He considered it a success, especially since the man didn't cast him a second look on the way out of the building.
To put some distance between them, Chuck stopped by the mail slots and pretended to dig for his keys. The instant the man left, he let the relieved breath gush out, and sagged partially against the wall. One quick glance around to make sure there were no security cameras later, he pulled out his prize.
Damn it.
He hadn't snatched the wallet. Instead, he'd grabbed the stranger's cell phone. Though phones could tell more about a person than a wallet, they were also infinitely easier to track. He should just page through it, wipe his fingerprints, and leave it somewhere like the elevator so that it would look like the man had dropped it.
He swiped his thumb over the touchscreen and frowned.
Now that was interesting. Chuck knew some people locked their phones, but this looked like pretty heavy security when a series of images popped up across the screen. Not exactly congruent with somebody who would be going through a grad student's apartment on Thanksgiving. Of course, something had been off about the man from the first glance. Maybe the suit put him on edge. Chuck wasn't sure what it said when a pocket square matched a shirt perfectly.
He should just drop this, but…
Five years later or not, he still cared for Jill. He owed it to her to make sure that she was okay. So he shrugged and pulled the phone's battery out so that it couldn't be tracked. He slipped both pieces into his pocket. He'd figure out how to hack it later, or visit Morgan for a burner or a GPS jammer or something.
Maybe he should wait for Saturday or Sunday. Tomorrow was Black Friday, which meant so much potential for things going horribly, horribly wrong. Chuck scowled as he left the apartment building, his prize heavy in his pocket. He couldn't ask Sarah to pick him up a burner phone without arousing suspicion, and he didn't want her to know he'd used her pickpocketing lessons on a complete stranger. The same thing went for Casey, which only left Ellie or himself.
But Ellie was frowning at him when he climbed into the car. He paused as he reached for his seatbelt. "What? What is it?"
"This!" She reached over and yanked a white sheet out of his jacket: the letter. "You didn't deliver it?"
"Oh." He'd completely forgotten the letter in the terror and thrill of lifting the stranger's phone. "Uh, right. I decided that it was enough that I'd written it."
Ellie squinted at him.
"Really, El," he said, holding both hands up in entreaty. "What's the use of disrupting her life now? I wrote the letter, got my closure, and I don't need to make her go back five years when she's moved on."
"You got your closure." Ellie's skepticism alone made it a question.
Chuck forced himself to nod his head. "Sure. It feels great."
He could tell she wasn't buying it. The critical doctor's eye would have picked up the fact that he was sweating, and that his knuckles were slightly whitened. There were probably a thousand other tells he didn't know about himself that she had already categorized. It was why he'd never been able to play poker with her. She simply saw too much.
But she sighed now. "Fine, okay. You got your closure. Either way, it'll take time, so there's no reason to expect a miracle." She tossed the letter back on his lap.
Chuck picked it up and slid it back into his jacket pocket. It didn't seem as important as it had all morning, now that he had some sort of mystery to solve. In a strange way, it was like getting closure. He'd left her behind to go to Basic all those years ago—and he knew she hadn't been happy that her boyfriend was leaving—and now he could do her one last favor even though she had ended things. And it was a much better parting gift than some stupid letter that he probably hadn't written well, anyway.
But looking at the way his sister held the steering wheel in a death grip on the way home, he figured it wasn't a good time to ask if she'd maybe go grab a few things from an electronics store for him. So Chuck remained silent.
23 NOVEMBER 2007
SAN LEANDRO MEMORIAL PARK
07:29 PST
Maybe most of the world was flocking to retail hell, or they were just sleeping, but whatever the cause, the park behind Chuck's apartment—normally a hub of activity and runners even at 7:30 in the morning—was all but deserted. Chuck didn't mind. Even though he could run a mile and a half comfortably by now, he was nowhere near Sarah and Awesome's pace, and he didn't like having an audience.
Another benefit of having the park mostly to himself was that he didn't need music to keep him from focusing on people and space and the thousands of problems that came with both. He'd set up a playlist during his first week of jogging, but some days, he didn't like turning his iPod on. Something about the sound of his own breath, labored and ragged toward the end of the run, made him feel better than any song ever recorded. Like he was actually accomplishing something. More often than not, he left his earphones in so that people wouldn't be tempted to talk to him, but he focused more on the sounds from inside his own head.
Today, he had felt comfortable avoiding even the earphones, which meant he heard her coming.
Sarah didn't speak as she came up behind him on the path, instantly matching her pace to his (much slower) jog. She gave him a nod, merely a little forward jut of the chin, and they both concentrated on their feet or the path ahead. She hadn't brought the mp3 player he'd set up for her, either. Had they both been expecting each other? Chuck raised his eyebrows, questioningly.
"Creatures of habit," Sarah said, smiling. "Plus, that was a lot of turkey yesterday."
"But really, really good turkey." They made the turn onto the main straightaway that would take them around the park, speeding up a little. Chuck shoulder-bumped her. "I was right, right?"
Sarah grinned as she adjusted her path to compensate. "I know better than to doubt you about Ellie's cooking by now."
"Though the pies were really, really good, too. It was funny how everybody didn't want to eat the lemon meringue because it looked too pretty. Where'd you learn to bake a pie like that?"
"CIA baking school."
"Man, that would be so awesome if it were really true."
"How do you know it isn't?" Sarah grinned over at him and fell quiet. A quarter mile passed in comfortable silence, letting Chuck focus on his stride. He knew Sarah had drastically reduced her own pace, but he forced himself not to mind because it felt nice having somebody to run with. Like they were just normal people, hanging out in the park before work. Not that either had to go into the office today. Sometimes it was great being an employee of the government. Beckman and Graham couldn't force them to work, though it was hinted strongly that they should probably spend at least a couple of hours in the office.
Chuck decided he was going to ignore it. He had other plans.
Beside him, Sarah cleared her throat. He glanced over. "What was up with Ellie yesterday?"
"Oh." Had it been that obvious? "Um, right. She was displeased with me because I didn't deliver the letter."
"You wrote it?"
"Yeah, a couple nights ago. While playing 'Call of Duty' with Casey."
Sarah's stride slowed just for a second. "You got Casey to play a video game? Willingly? And without breaking his thumbs?"
"One, that would defeat the purpose, and two, yes. He had a good time once he figured out how to use the controller, too." The memory made him grin.
Sarah seemed to take a minute to absorb that, staring at the ground as they ran along, switching from sidewalk to cedar-chipped path to cut across the park toward Chuck's apartment. They would do another round of the park before their run was complete. "So that's where you went yesterday? To deliver the letter?"
"What, you weren't sitting at your computer, tracking my every movement?" Chuck smiled to remove the sting from his words.
"Ha." Sarah flicked a glance at him. "Why didn't you deliver the letter?"
Because I was too busy stealing from some random stranger with a terrifying amount of security on his phone, Chuck thought, not looking at her. She a scary ability to read his mind when she chose. "Didn't need to," he said, keeping his eyes on the path. "It was enough that I wrote it."
He felt her watch his profile for a minute, but she just seemed to shrug to herself and focus back on her run. "Okay. Do you feel better now?"
"I feel less like crap, but I don't know if you'd necessarily call it better."
"Small steps, Chuck. Small steps."
Chuck gave her a half-smile. "One step at a time?"
Sarah cuffed him on the arm, a gentle swat. Chuck was grateful that the conversation lapsed, as his breath grew heavier and his throat took on a sickly sandpaper feeling that meant he was becoming winded. He'd told Dr. Anton the truth: Sarah wasn't the type to judge. But it was still a matter of pride that he keep up without tremendous difficulty. He forced his breathing to stay even, pulling in air through his nose and puffing out through his mouth. Sarah, next to him, seemed like she was hardly even breathing hard. Of course not. This was probably like a brisk walk to her.
In fact, she nudged his arm, and her eyes sparkled. "C'mon. Let's go faster."
"You're trying to kill me."
"You're strong enough. Just keep up." One last grin and she took off. He yelped and sped up. Even on his best days, he would never outlast Sarah, but he did have the benefit of incredibly long legs. He should at least get some use out of his lanky build.
So he put on an extra burst of speed and—finally—passed her. He let out a whoop and threw his hands over his head.
Sarah laughed, catching up easily. "Nutball."
They settled into a pace that was quite a bit more taxing than their earlier jog. "Of course. You weren't just letting me win, were you?"
"Chuck, you're like six-four and you're fast. You won on your own power."
"Fantastic. Then you'll excuse me for a sec?" Without waiting for a reply, Chuck slowed to a walk and put his hands on his waist, gulping in oxygen. Sarah stopped ahead of him, walking in circles until he caught up. "Sorry." His voice was now hoarse.
"Why are you sorry?"
"You're not done with your run yet, you shouldn't wait for me." Chuck waved, making little shooing motions with one hand while the other stayed on his waist. "Go on. I'm sure you've got another marathon," he took a deep breath, "to cover while the rest of us all lie in bed like the lazy slugs we are. Move it."
"Ha. I'm not going anywhere." Indeed, Sarah matched her stride to his yet again. "I ran a few miles before you got out here, and I'll jog home from here, too. I'm fine."
"If you say so."
"I say so." They started the last circuit of the park as a cool-down, and Sarah glanced at him out of the side of her eye again. Chuck could tell by just the angle of her head that she was studying him. He hastily wiped some of the sweat from his face. "You've come a long way since you started running," she said.
"All three weeks of it?"
"Seriously, Chuck, it's impressive."
He didn't really think so. Running was something to add to the Tai Chi and the weight lifting. It helped him rein in his mind and keep his emotions that much more controlled so that they wouldn't spill out everywhere and ruin everything all the time. At the rate he was picking up new activities, he would simply be able to function because he wouldn't have time for anything else.
It was depressing at the same time as it was comforting.
Sarah disappeared behind a tree and reappeared on the other side with a water bottle. "Didn't want to carry it," she said as he raised his eyebrows. "Nobody's in the park anyway."
"You're a brave woman."
"Occupational hazard." After she'd taken a long pull, Sarah handed him the bottle. They continued their slow walk toward Chuck's place, passing the water bottle back and forth.
"Chuck, is something else going on?" Sarah watched him as she took a long gulp from the water bottle. She wiped the bottom half of her face on her T-shirt, exposing a few inches of smooth belly skin.
Chuck stilled for half a second. Did she somehow know? Had she figured out that he'd stolen a complete stranger's cell phone?
How?
He bought a second by taking the water bottle and drinking deeply. If the cell phone led to something dangerous, he rationalized, he would have to tell Sarah or call the police, but until then, this was his foolish expenditure. He'd prefer to keep his odd bit of thievery to himself, unless it panned out into something that required help.
So he shook his head. "Nothing out of the ordinary, no."
"Okay." Sarah took the bottle back, drank, and capped it. She tossed it from hand to hand as she studied him one last time. He made sure to carefully meet her eyes; whatever Sarah saw there seemed to tide her over, for she shrugged. "I'd better get a move on."
"Yeah. Things to do, people to karate chop, poor innocent dummies to beat up."
"Actually, I'm going to sleep. Sometimes working for the government has its benefits."
"Sarah Walker actually sleeps?"
"Even robots have to recharge, right?"
"Yes," Chuck said, nodding sagely. "And dream of robot sheep."
"As long as they're not robot rabbits." Sarah shot him a grin of the dazzling variety, gave him a high-five, and jogged off toward her apartment. He watched her go, trying to fight off his guilt. He hadn't needed to tell Sarah about lifting the cell phone and his suspicions that Jill might be in trouble. They weren't joined at the hip, after all. He could make decisions for himself, and if he wanted to pry into Jill's life, that was his business. Well, his and Jill's, but Jill wasn't here, and what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her.
Still, a trickle of guilt made his chest hurt as he turned and made the trudge to his apartment.
23 NOVEMBER 2007
RADIO SHACK (NEAR BUY MORE)
15:35 PST
"I was surprised you called, man." Morgan hopped from one foot to the other and swung around, never one to stand still. By all rights, the bearded man should have been exhausted, since he'd told Chuck that he'd been forced to show up at Buy More at three a.m. to work outside crowd control. But Chuck had already hauled him away from bothering the worker by the Zune display, stopped an X-Box versus PS3 round of fisticuffs before it could start, and had prevented the aforementioned Zune worker from filing a sexual harassment lawsuit. Morgan looked like he could happily keep up the string of calamity for hours. It probably had something to do with the fact that he'd had a Red Bull or four at Chuck's place before their trek to Radio Shack.
But there was no way Chuck could handle an electronics store on Black Friday by himself, and telling Casey and Sarah about his activities with Jill's stranger's phone was simply not an option.
Chuck didn't look up from the two amplifiers he was studying. "Yeah?" he asked. "Why's that?"
"You've been a ghost lately, man!" Morgan poked at a coil of wire. "I had Donkey Kong all set up and ready to go the other night and then you poofed."
Chuck felt a flare of insult. "Poofed? Excuse me, I have never 'poofed' in my life."
"Semantics. You stood me up. And it was not cool."
"I know, I know." Chuck frowned. "I'm really sorry about it, too, but I just—I have this new client with…insane expectations." He felt a bit sick that it was so easy to come up with the lies that would explain all of his actions, but even if he wanted to tell Morgan about his strange life with the CIA, he couldn't. He'd spent the past week and a half dealing with the fallout of telling Ellie, who could theoretically provide something to the team. Or, realistically, Sarah had spent the past week and a half dealing with said fallout.
If he told Morgan, he imagined that Sarah would instantaneously develop Village of the Damned-like abilities to destroy him using only the intensity of her glare.
So he smiled apologetically, hoping Morgan would buy the act. "I gave myself an impossible deadline because it's a client I want to keep, so, again, I'm sorry. I'll make it up to you, I promise."
As he knew it would, Morgan's face shifted from mutinous to only slightly-miserable. "Yeah, yeah, I understand," Morgan said, rolling his eyes and kicking his heel against the toe of his other shoe. "And you know, if you ever need help with anything about that…"
"Thanks, buddy."
"No, I mean, you should probably ask somebody else. I unfortunately lack the skill set."
"It's the thought that counts," Chuck said, grinning. He dropped the amplifier into his basket and shifted his way into the next aisle. The morning had been spent researching GPS and cell phone jammers on one monitor while Schnookie McSarahkins ran rampant through the southern hemisphere of Athinei on the other screen (Sarah had yet to best him at their computer hacking game). He'd drawn his own set of plans just going off of what he knew the local Radio Shack had, even though he knew it was possible that he could spend hours designing a GPS jammer for a two-minute hack in the end.
Either way, the drive to know, to make sure that nobody was messing with Jill, was simply too strong to ignore. So he needed to gather the materials and build the thing. The problem lay in that gathering said materials included facing crowds. A lot of crowds. He'd called Morgan, hoping his Buy More shift ended early enough to make him a wingman. It hadn't, but Morgan had come anyway.
"So what are you making? You never said."
"GPS jammer. Well, actually, call blocker and GPS jammer." Chuck spotted another item on his list and dropped it into the basket. He moved on to the next aisle, Morgan following.
The other man's brow wrinkled a bit. "Can't you just buy those ready-made?"
"Sure. But this is cheaper."
"But you can expense that."
"To whom? I own my company." Besides, he didn't want Sarah and Casey wondering why he needed a ready-made jammer, even if it would come in pretty damn handy in the future. If he brought it up, he'd have to tell them about the fact that he'd stolen some stranger's cell phone.
He'd pass, thanks.
He finally located the last item on his list and, basket full, made his way to the check-out. Morgan followed. "What are you even trying to jam, anyway? Don't you do computer security? Like software?"
Chuck had to think quickly. "The client's, ah, paranoid, and he wants me to hack his cell phone for him to see if his security's good, but he's going to try and track it at the same time."
"Whoa. Crazy, dude."
"Yeah." Chuck set his basket on the counter and smiled at the clerk, grateful that it wasn't the clerk from the Zune incident. He pulled out his wallet and thumbed through the twenties he'd picked up from the ATM.
Morgan leaned around him to poke through the basket. "What kind of jam you using?" he said.
"Shh!" Chuck hissed, and shot the clerk an innocent grin. She rolled her eyes, but the fatigue of Black Friday sales either ensured that she wouldn't care, or she hadn't actually heard Morgan's comment.
Morgan, meanwhile, was undeterred. "You're using raspberry, right?"
"What?"
"Because it's a sacrilege to use anything but raspberry, you know."
"Morgan, I—" Chuck finally caught the reference and broke off with a laugh. "Yeah," he said after a minute. "It's raspberry."
"Good."
23 NOVEMBER 2007
CASTLE: UPSTAIRS
17:56 PST
"Good news!" Morgan plopped into the visitor's chair in Chuck's office and immediately swung his legs over the side of the chair, completely at home. "We're just inside the delivery radius for the Bamboo Dragon."
"Are we?" Chuck raised his head from his project, skeptical.
"Well, we were once I promised the driver an extra five with the tip. Speaking of which…" Morgan looked pained.
Chuck had to laugh. "This one's on me, yeah."
"Awesome." Morgan turned his attention back to his PSP.
Because Morgan had elected to go back to Castle and keep Chuck company while he worked on the jammer, only one monitor sat on Chuck's desk, and the building once again resembled a normal office building. The retina scanner was hidden by a gold Pacific Securities LLC sign next to the front door, Sarah's desk was a clean expanse of wood, and there wasn't any weaponry, automatic, semiautomatic, or even sharp, lying around, though Chuck had made sure that Casey's door was locked. Morgan had been to the office before, so the urge to explore probably wasn't present, but Chuck didn't trust the shorter man not to wander.
Scary things lay beyond Casey's door.
He hunkered over the jammer, which was already starting to take shape. It would take most of the evening to build and an hour or two more to perfect and tweak, but Morgan seemed happy to just thumb away the time on his PSP. It was just like high school, Chuck thought as he twigged a wire and set the soldering gun in its holster, only Morgan wasn't playing a GameBoy and he wasn't working on some science fair project for a good grade or a scholarship. Instead, he was trying to figure out if his ex-girlfriend had somehow attracted the attention of bad men.
So maybe it wasn't anything like high school.
He knew he was being ridiculous. Jill Roberts, graduate student, was a sensible woman. The thought that she'd gotten involved in something less-than-kosher was downright absurd. And attracting shady attention? She was the girl next door. She was sweet, and charming, and so incredibly smart.
If he couldn't bring himself to actually drag himself out of the car and talk to her every time he drove over to her apartment, he could at least do this for her.
"Hey, wow, are you, like, reciting Macbeth in your head or something?"
Morgan's voice drew him out of his concentration on the half-finished jammer. He blinked. "Huh?"
"You looked really grim there for a minute, dude." Morgan frowned at Chuck. "Everything okay? Something you need to talk to Dr. Morgan about?" He drew a box in the air with a finger. "The doctor," he said, and flipped an imaginary sign, "is in."
Chuck shook his head to clear the haze. "I'm okay. Just concentrating."
"Okay, dude. If you say so." Morgan squinted at him one last time, but returned to his PSP.
Chuck had to smile at that as he reached across his desk for one of the paper towels he'd stacked up in the corner so that they would be on hand just in case. "What time did you say," he started to ask, but froze midway through his sentence.
The Scooby door swung open.
It had squeaked, back when they'd first moved into the building, but Chuck had grown so frustrated during one of the data dumps that he had attacked the door with WD-40. He couldn't help but be grateful for it now, especially since Sarah stepped halfway out.
"What'd you say?" Morgan didn't look up from the PSP.
"Uh—" Chuck blinked heavily a few times. Behind Morgan, Sarah froze, her gaze locked on Morgan. She looked around, seemed to judge it unsafe to run for the exit, and crept backwards into the depths of Castle again. "Uh, yeah, I wanted to know when they said the food would get here."
"They said half an hour." Morgan tilted the game, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth as he tried for more HP. "Maybe longer. They're kinda busy on Fridays."
"Uh-huh." Chuck waved frantically for Sarah to shut the door.
She gave him a pointed look, her eyes swinging to the back of Morgan's head—what is he doing here?—but she obeyed.
This time, the door creaked.
"What was that?" Morgan asked, lifting his head.
Chuck's fingers spasmed on the edge of the desk, but he gave Morgan his best innocent look. "What was what?"
"You didn't hear that?" Morgan twisted around in his seat, but the Scooby door had closed fully. Apparently finding nothing out of place, he faced forward again. "Weird."
"The building makes strange noises sometimes," Chuck lied. "It gets a little creepy late at night."
"Maybe you have a ghost. I definitely felt like we weren't alone for a minute there." Morgan put on his "clairvoyant" face, an expression Chuck also remembered well from high school. "It'd be cool having a ghost."
Chuck just nodded, wondering exactly how he could get Morgan out of the room long enough for Sarah to escape. His eyes fell on the mini-fridge in the corner, and he sighed. It really was unfair, what he was about to do. "Hey," he said, hating himself, "you want anything to drink? I've got Red Bull and Mountain Dew and—"
Morgan shot straight up in his seat. "Why'd you say that name?" he demanded, scowling. "You know what that name does to me!"
"Oh." Chuck feigned surprise and injected real apology into his manner. "Oh, man. I'm so sorry. I forgot, I swear—"
"Whatever. Now I gotta pee." Morgan rolled his eyes as he stalked out of the room and headed toward Castle's upstairs bathroom. The instant he'd left the office, Chuck leaped to the Scooby door and wrenched it open.
"Sarah!" he hissed into Castle. "He's gone!"
He heard footsteps on the stairs and a second later, Sarah's head, followed by the rest of her, popped into view on the stairs. She gave him an aggravated look as she squeezed by him. "What is he doing here?"
"Hanging out. What are you doing here? It's Friday night."
Sarah's eyes cut down to the floor. "Ah…Ellie."
A grin blossomed across Chuck's face. "Don't tell me bad-ass super-spy Sarah Walker is afraid of my big sister."
"I'm not." Sarah glared. "I just—she wanted to go shopping."
"I thought you liked shopping."
"I do, but—what's that?" Sarah tried to lean around Chuck to get a good look at the jammer in pieces on the desk, but Chuck swiftly side-stepped, blocking her view. She frowned at him. "What are you working on, Chuck?"
"A new project. I don't want to jinx it." Chuck felt sweat, sweat that had nothing to do with crowds or open spaces or new social situations, begin to slide down his spine. Indeed, Sarah's frown deepened. "I'll tell you all about it if it works, I promise. But unless you want another three hours of Morgan calling you Miss Romanova, you'd probably better flee."
"God, don't remind me." Sarah gave him one last swift and suspicious look, and dashed from the room. Chuck didn't blame her. Morgan had been almost as happy to see Sarah as he had the Thanksgiving turkey the day before. Chuck imagined that Sarah hadn't minded the references to her Halloween costume…for about the first hour or so.
She had also timed her exit well. Not twenty seconds later, Morgan wandered back in, still drying his hands on his pants. He paused in the doorway to sniff the air appreciatively. "Is it just me or does it smell like apples in here?"
Chuck laughed uneasily as he headed back to his desk. "Must be just you," he said.
As he hunkered back to his project, he allowed himself one last regret that it was growing easier and easier to lie to the people he loved, even if Ellie and Awesome knew some version of the truth. Before he could really get into the self-recrimination of that thought, however, a loose connection on the jammer grabbed his interest, and he slipped comfortably into work mode, content to ignore both Morgan and his own nagging doubts as he set to work on the device that would maybe let him help out his ex-girlfriend.
24 NOVEMBER 2007
CASTLE: UPSTAIRS
03:02 PST
One last connection…and done.
Immediately, tension filtered out of Chuck's neck, trickling down out of his shoulders. He let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding in and reached up to peel off the magnifying goggles. He set them on the desk with a weary thud. His watch had beeped the hour at him, but it just didn't feel like three a.m. Unless it was, he thought as he sagged back in his chair, giving himself just a moment to rest, three a.m. on the morning after he'd gone through a condensed week of finals and run a marathon. There was no inventor's high to ride now, nothing but his own weariness, a low-grade tension headache, and pains throughout his neck and shoulders. He should be sleeping.
Instead, he pulled his out phone and set it on the desk. Time to test it, he thought, and see if he really was as good at inventing as he hoped.
First, though, he removed his watch and set it in Sarah's office, as far away from the jammer as he could. He'd designed the jammer to have a very narrow radius, possibly even smaller than his desk space, but if the GPS in the watch suddenly went offline, Casey and Sarah would be alerted. He didn't think either of them would take kindly to the fact that he was trying to hack a total stranger's cell phone, and the fact that it was three in the morning would probably just send Casey into apoplectic fits of rage. For a soldier, Casey sure didn't take well to loss of sleep.
He returned to his desk and took a deep breath. "Please don't let this blow up in my face," he prayed to the wiring, gaming, and inventing gods. He squeezed one eye shut, just for good measure, and flipped the switch.
No explosion.
"Well, that's a relief," Chuck said needlessly, opening both eyes. He checked a couple of the connections to make sure that he hadn't screwed anything up, took a deep breath, and finally worked up the nerve to pick up his phone and check the bars in the corner.
No service. It had worked.
Chuck felt only a narrow sliver of the exultation he should have been feeling, to have an invention go from the page to a complete success in less than twenty-four hours. Sure, he had just modified some plans he'd found on the Internet and had given them his own touch, but still, turning a device on and actually having it work correctly the first time? That rarely ever happened.
He stared at the lack of bars in the corner of his phone. Should he keep going? Ride this inventor's wave as far as it would travel until he crashed? He might have, in the bunker, but then, his bed had almost always been literally in reach. If he stayed at Castle overnight, Casey might question him.
He would have to return to the cell phone tomorrow. Carefully, he began to pack up so that he could go home and crash. Jill probably wouldn't get home from visiting her parents until Sunday, so he wouldn't have to start keeping an eye on the place until then. In the meantime, he had Sergei Ezersky's computer to break and a cell phone to hack. It was going to be a long weekend.
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