Room for Trouble
25 NOVEMBER 2007
HEARTBRAKE HOTEL (NEAR PIUTE, CA)
13:01 PST
"I think they got the name wrong," Chuck said, squinting at what was left of the sign for the Heartbrake Hotel. Either there had been a nuclear attack that had struck in a very contained area or rabid badgers had attacked the single-story-high, blue motel sign in a very specific fit of rage or revenge. Most of the neon letters had either fallen off or had been gnawed off by said badgers, but the faded outlines remained as ghostly remnants of the hotel's former glory.
When that glory had been, Chuck had no idea. The Heartbrake Hotel was smack in the middle of a juxtaposition between "nowhere" and "miserable." It was in a field. A dusty, dirty, desert field twenty minutes from the nearest life form or civilization, which hadn't been all that impressive to start. The hotel itself was a single-story building, stretching lengthwise along a parking lot that contained only their stolen minivan and an ancient El Camino. The hotel also looked like the building that time had not only forgotten, but had kicked in the face a few times, and stomped on for good measure.
Chuck was positive that he was going to get all manner of venereal diseases merely by looking at it. He was surprised there wasn't an hourly rate listed anywhere on the badger-eaten sign.
"Or maybe it's a pun," he went on, blinking at the misspelled sign. "Like, brake here for a good heart-to-heart? No, that doesn't make any sense."
Both of his companions ignored him: Sarah because she was scoping out the outlying landscape, and Jill because she hadn't said a word since Sarah had tossed her cell phone out the window forty-five minutes before.
"Yeah," he said, mostly to hear himself talk. "It doesn't make any sense. You're right, Chuck. That's because you're so smart."
No response from Jill. Sarah's lips curved up at the corners, but she kept up her watch. "Okay," she said, climbing from the minivan. She leaned in to talk through the open window. "Nobody followed us."
Chuck and Jill glanced around. They could see nothing but dust and desert for miles. To call Sarah paranoid at that moment would have been an understatement.
"Chuck, wait here with Jill. I'm going to get us a room."
"Okay." Chuck waited until Sarah had approached the hotel's questionable office before he sagged back against the seat. He didn't look at Jill. She was still quiet, but Chuck figured that had more to do with Sarah than anything else. Mission Mode Sarah could get a bit abrupt, whether it was while driving a zigzag pattern to lose any pursuers, or arguing with him whether they should go through the McDonald's or the Burger King drive-thru. "I guess this wasn't how you meant to spend today."
She made a "No kidding" noise.
"But you're safe now," Chuck said. He was starting to sound like a broken record, he knew, but Jill didn't seem to want to talk about the Fulcrum people that had used her, and he couldn't really think of anything to say. He'd spent a few weeks sitting outside her apartment, but when faced with her alone in a van in the middle of nowhere, it was as though his vocabulary withered.
"Are you sure that…" Jill trailed off and shook her head. "Chuck, what happened to you? Where did you go?"
"What?" Chuck twisted to look back in the backseat. Jill had grown more frazzled and frantic over the past couple of hours. She didn't handle stress well, Chuck remembered. Around finals, Jill had always turned into an almost unrecognizable wreck. Right now, he was seeing echoes of that, but there was nothing to suggest that she'd had a complete break with reality. "I didn't go anywhere. I'm right here, Jill." He spoke the words slowly.
"Five years ago," Jill said. "You didn't go to Poland, like you told me at the game, did you?"
"I didn't go anywhere." Unsurprisingly, while it hurt to lie to Morgan, it was easy to lie to Jill. Go figure, Chuck thought.
"You never wrote back."
"Because you dumped me," Chuck said before his brain could stop his mouth. He was surprised that his voice sounded resigned rather than bitter or furious or anything else on that end of the emotional spectrum. But then, he'd spent his morning in a trunk and had survived his own execution. Now he was the next best thing to a fugitive while Sarah and Casey figured out how much of his identity had gotten out.
He was bound to be a little tired.
"What did you expect me to say?" he went on. "Good letter, your dumping skills are just top-notch? You dumped me, Jill. It's not exactly protocol to respond to a letter like that with anything but maybe the finger. Unless I want to come across as a whiny bitch."
Jill blinked hard a couple of times.
Oh, right. Chuck Bartowski of the Stanford days hadn't talked like that. Chuck scrubbed his hands over his face. "I didn't mean that," he said, then considered. "Actually, yes, I did, but I didn't."
"What happened to you, Chuck? What have they done to you?" Jill grabbed the driver's side headrest and pulled herself forward, a scowl etched into her face. "Did Sarah get you involved in something?"
"Sarah? What? No. Why would you even think that?"
"Oh, I don't know, Chuck." Jill's voice turned waspish. "Maybe it has something to do with the fact that today alone I've seen her kill four men that told me they worked for the government, break into an ATM, and steal a car. That sort of behavior doesn't worry you? She's probably in there right now flashing her tits at the hotel manager to get us a free room. And she made me throw my phone away."
Chuck turned fully in his seat. "Don't ever talk about her like that again. Sarah saved both of our lives today," he said, his voice barely audible. His whole body was vibrating like a plucked string, but his face and voice remained absolutely calm, a direct contrast to the ugly and black miasma boiling through his midsection. "In case you haven't realized this, Jill, they were going to shoot us in the head. I don't know what they told you, but these were not good guys. These were very dangerous people."
"Good to know you're buying the company line."
"Company li—Jill, did you happen to miss the part where they put us in a trunk? That is not a sign of a good person! A good person puts groceries in the trunk, not people!" Chuck glared. "Sarah threw your phone out the window because we're off the grid. And for the record, I got into this and then met her, not the other way around."
"And how do you know you can trust her?"
"Because."
"That's not a very logical reason."
Chuck turned again so that he was facing the front of the car. "I don't have to explain myself to you," he said, and paused, waiting for the guilty conscience to strike. It didn't. He didn't owe Jill a thing. She'd cut those ties years before, which meant he no longer owed her a single thing on this godforsaken earth.
Except, his brain nagged, for the part where she had been used by a shadowy government organization that he was tasked with tracking down. They had been using her grad student research, probably threatening her, all the while telling her they were—
"Wait a second," Chuck said, setting aside his anger as a new thought occurred to him. "Those men told you they worked for the government?"
The abrupt subject change seemed to throw Jill off-stride, for she frowned at him. "Yes," she said. "They told me they worked for the CDC, and that you and Sarah were terrorists."
"That's ridiculous," Chuck said. "I'm not a terrorist, I work for—"
"Ahem."
Both Chuck and Jill looked over; Sarah had arrived as silently as usual. She folded her arms over her chest and gave Chuck an unreadable look, one eyebrow slightly raised above the other. Though Chuck shrank back against his seat, expecting a scold, Sarah only said, "C'mon, we're in room thirteen."
"Oh, that's a good sign," Chuck muttered.
"Here's the key." Sarah tossed it to him as she climbed into the driver's seat. "You two go inside while I pull the van around the back. Give Casey a call."
"Are you sure you don't want to call him?" Chuck asked, hope in his voice.
"He'll have cooled down by now."
Chuck gave her a look.
"Maybe," Sarah conceded. "But do it anyway."
"Yes, Mom." Chuck climbed out of the car and jerked his head to indicate that Jill should follow him. The gun he'd taken from Matching Pocket Square rubbed against his lower back. In addition to freaking him out, it would probably give him a rash. He'd wanted to ditch the gun, but Sarah had been adamant. They had no idea what they were facing. They had no idea if Fulcrum knew who they were, or if Fulcrum was tracking them and Jill, or even what sort of danger they were all in. Until they knew something for sure, Chuck was to be armed at all times.
His little fiasco with the stalking was growing more and more serious every time he thought about it. Casey had already secured Awesome and Ellie at a safe-house. The hotel would serve as the rendezvous later because he was going into protective custody until they got a lid on the situation. He was also trying not to think about it. Sarah would be there. Both Casey and Sarah had mentioned they would stay with him every step of the way. Sarah had seemed calm about it. Casey had grumbled.
Dust swirled up on the walkway as he and Jill trudged to the room's door. Though it was November, the heat from the surrounding bleakness was almost uncomfortably warm. He unlocked the door and went in before Jill. If there was something waiting to jump out at them in the room, it was only chivalrous to provide the larger target first.
There was nothing in the room. Well, nothing alive, he amended, wrinkling his nose. The smell alone told him something had died in the not so recent past, but he could see no evidence of a corpse on the room's stained and spotted carpet, nor was there a dead body under the bed. The bathroom held a few cadavers, but those were of the insect variety. Perhaps the interesting patch of mold in the corner was alive, but Chuck doubted it. The interior decorator should probably have been shot for the garish bedspread and curtains, but that was a crime against fashion, not a murder.
"I wouldn't touch anything. You might get hepatitis," he told Jill as he picked up the room phone. He listened to the options before he dialed. Casey had given him the number to a burner that Fulcrum wouldn't be able to trace. As a precaution, he'd written the first six digits on his hand, but Sarah had hit a bump while he'd been writing, so the three looked like a nine.
He wondered why he hadn't just told Sarah the number. She had a damn near photographic memory anyway.
While the phone rang, Chuck picked up the room service menu. It bore the date 1971 in the corner. He put the menu down.
Casey picked up the phone. "Casey."
"No, I'm Chuck," Chuck said automatically.
If it was possible to strangle somebody through a phone-line, Chuck would have been peeling Casey's fingers from his neck. For the first time, Chuck saw the benefit of being in a hotel in the middle of nowhere.
25 NOVEMBER 2007
HEARTBRAKE HOTEL ROOM THIRTEEN
14:21 PST
"My whole life is about to change." Jill's voice, quiet and logical, cut across the silence that had fallen over the hotel room. She didn't look up from where she was sitting on the edge of the bed—a brave move, Chuck felt, as he wasn't sure anybody had washed those sheets during any of their lifetimes—huddled forward as though if she could make herself as tiny as possible, her words wouldn't be true. She seemed unbelievably fragile.
Sarah let the window curtain fall back into place. She had taken up the vigil as soon as she had come into the room, standing with her back to the wall and peering sideways out the window, a gun in her free hand. "Yes," she said now. "It is." There was empathy in her words that made Chuck shift his eyes toward her. She didn't look at him, however, focused as she was on Jill. "Plans are already underway to escort you to a safe-house where you'll be protected until the Marshals can furnish you with a new identity."
"Provided I tell you about what I know about Fulcrum, right?" Jill asked without looking up.
Sarah turned back to the window. "It would expedite the process."
"And expedite just how fast Fulcrum breaks through your security of whatever mysterious ghost organization you're from, and shoots me in my sleep?"
At the desk, Chuck sat up a little straighter. That was an incredibly dark statement.
Sarah didn't seem at all fazed by it, though. "My team isn't Fulcrum," she said, her voice almost bored in its calm reassurance. "I've vetted every single member myself."
Jill scoffed. Sarah turned slightly, an eyebrow raised. Jill's chin went up.
"Suit yourself," Sarah said after a few seconds of hard eye contact. "But you've got better odds of surviving with Chuck and me than you do without."
Better odds of surviving with Sarah, Chuck corrected silently. If somebody hung around him too long, they were bound to end up kidnapped, facing a bomb, knocked out by insane robots with tiny darts, or stuffed in a trunk and shipped off to be executed. He'd seen a Stormtrooper fight an Ewok with better odds. Of course, Sarah had been present for three of those events, so the odds weren't exactly great with her, either.
Still, they'd lived through their crazy misadventures. So there had to be something said for that.
Jill, though, apparently had nothing to say. She remained silent and hunched forward on the bed.
"Nobody's going to break security and kill you," Sarah said, and turned back to keep watch out the window. "I mean what I say."
"She does. She's always very careful about what words she uses," Chuck agreed from the only chair in the room, speaking up for the first time in awhile. He had been absorbed with not thinking about how close he and Sarah had come to dying. His way of doing so had been to review the latest Call of Duty compound level specs that Morgan had designed to take on the Large Mart crew. Unless he missed his guess, Sarah's was to keep a paranoid watch for Casey, who wouldn't arrive for at least another hour. Jill, he didn't know. She had been quiet.
All thoughts of video games vanished now. At Sarah's pointed glance, he moved over to sit beside Jill. He didn't put an arm around her or touch her. It didn't matter that they had been intimate or had biblical knowledge of each other, or however the term went. She was simply no longer in the group of people he felt comfortable touching. Sarah would be a better candidate for this sort of thing, Chuck thought desperately. She knew exactly when to squeeze his wrist, or pat his arm or his knee, or even when to simply bump him with a shoulder.
Jill didn't seem to know that, for she leaned toward him. Chuck refrained from jumping back only through steely resolve.
"Tell us what happened to you today," he said, deliberately not looking at Sarah. "Let's just start with that, okay?"
It took a minute for Jill to start speaking, and when she did, she addressed the floor. "Lawrence got me out of bed," she said.
"Lawrence?" Sarah asked.
"The leader. The one who was going to—the one who had his gun pointed at you."
"Black sweater?" Chuck asked, just to be sure; all of the thugs had had guns pointed at them.
Jill nodded. "He pounded on my door at like six in the morning." She looked down at her purple-striped pajama pants and her sleep T-shirt. "He wanted to know why I had two ICE agents tracking me."
ICE agents? Before Chuck could open his mouth and ask why they would think that, he caught Sarah's signal. It was only a twitch of the hand, but from her, it might have been a shout.
Drop it.
Oh, right, he remembered. Behind their driver's licenses and other IDs, all of the Prometheus agents carried around ICE badges instead of NSA/CIA identification. Lawrence and the other Fulcrum agents had thought that he and Sarah were Sean Fitzgerald and Jaime Winter, as Sarah Walker was supposed to be somewhere in Africa, and John Casey was…Chuck couldn't remember.
"I told him I had no idea," Jill said, going on. She hadn't noticed the unspoken communication between the spies. "I mean, I'm fifth-generation Californian, so I was pretty confused until Lawrence showed me a picture of you, Chuck. He said that you had been tracking me, and that you were trying to steal my research. He called you a terrorist. He said they'd run a background on you and that you were a double-agent."
"I really hate the words 'double-agent,'" Chuck said.
"So are you?" Jill looked between them. "Agents, I mean? Do you work for ICE?"
"It's a little more complicated than that," Sarah said, and resumed her vigil out the window. "But for the time being, you can go ahead and assume that. Go on with your story."
Though Jill eyed Sarah for a few seconds longer, she nodded and licked her lips. She took a deep breath and continued, "I told Lawrence that you were nobody, Chuck. Nobody important, just some guy from my past."
That one hurt a little.
"I didn't want Lawrence getting the wrong idea," Jill went on quickly, noticing his flinch. "I told him you were maybe checking up on me, that you weren't involved in the government stuff, but they said somebody was tracking my phone with a government satellite."
Sarah gave Chuck the hairy eyeball. Chuck immediately tried to shrink to a smaller size. As he was over six feet tall, it didn't work so well.
"You used a satellite, Chuck?" Sarah demanded through her teeth.
"Di—Dave wasn't using it! And I was doing it to protect Jill!" When the women gave him varying looks, one skeptical, one mystified, Chuck barreled on. "I was delivering a letter to your place," he explained to Jill, "on Thanksgiving. And I saw Lawrence coming out of your apartment, and he seemed like a bad dude, so I grabbed his cell phone."
He heard Sarah's quiet hiss of breath and figured she probably had yet to forgive him for that one. He hurried onward.
"There was some pretty heavy encryption on it, but I didn't fl—he wasn't in any of the government databases, so I got a little worried. I was worried, that was all." Chuck said the last part to Sarah who, though she was staring at a fixed point out the window, had obviously tensed. "And I should have gone to Sarah about it before she came to me, and Lawrence and his guys jumped us."
"They said they were just going to scare you," Jill said.
"What?" Sarah asked.
"When they put you in the trunk. Lawrence dragged me out to the car, and he said they were taking the two of you to the desert to scare you a little before they handed you over to the authorities. They said it was only right since you were terrorists, and you'd betrayed our country. They were only going to scare you."
Chuck didn't believe that for a second. From her posture, it seemed Sarah agreed. If Lawrence had only intended to frighten them, Hollywood had missed out on a terrific actor. The man's eyes had spoken of every intention of murder. "Why did they bring you along when they were just going to, uh, scare us?"
"I don't know how their minds work!" Jill rocked forward, possibly in agitation. She looked miserable and bedraggled, still curled inward protectively. Inexplicably, the butterfly barettes in her hair caught a patch of sunlight through a slit in the curtain, and glittered. "This is the most I've seen of them, really. They're not very hands-on. Lawrence approached me and a couple of my classmates awhile ago. He claimed that I would be doing my country a great service."
"You weren't," Sarah said bluntly. "That man was a traitor."
"Sarah, maybe we should go a little easy on her?" Chuck gave Sarah a significant look. It hadn't been Jill's fault.
Jill, on the other hand, shook her head. "No, she's right, Chuck. I should have checked. I should have done more than trusted them blindly and—oh, my God." Jill's hands flew to her mouth, and she went roughly the color of parchment. "My research—they were taking myresearch to do bad things to people—oh, my God."
"You couldn't have known," Chuck said, awkwardly patting Jill's shoulder. She'd begun to shake, which made him nervous. He looked to Sarah for guidance, but she was studying Jill intently, one hand still wrapped in the dusty curtain.
"When did they first approach you?" she asked.
Jill lowered her hands and took a deep breath, trying to pull it together. She was still shaking. "Two years ago."
"What month?"
"December."
"How did they approach you?"
"What do you mean?"
"How? Where? Was it in your office? Did they contact you by phone? At home?" Sarah flicked a glance out the window and returned her gaze to Jill, who took another deep, bolstering breath.
"It was in the lab," Jill said. "At school."
"How many of them?"
"Two. Lawrence and Agent—Agent Wilkes."
"How did they introduce themselves to you?"
"They said they worked for the CDC."
"Are they paying you for your research?"
"I get a stipend every month. It's not a lot, but, you know, grad student here."
Sarah opened her mouth to fire off the next lightning round of questions, but Chuck lunged forward almost comically, hands thrown up. "Whoa, whoa, what's up with the twenty questions on speed?"
Sarah raised an eyebrow at him. Even if they hadn't seen each other every day for the past two months, he would have been able to translate the look: do you have something better to do?
Chuck had to admit that he did not, but the questions felt a little harsh.
"It's okay," Jill said, dropping her gaze back to the floor. She'd been leaning back, away from Sarah, but she curved forward now. "Maybe I should write this down, like a testimony? If it will 'expedite the process' and keep me safe?"
It took a moment for Sarah to nod her agreement. "Good idea. I don't think this is the type of motel that comes with that in the room. Chuck, why don't you go out to the van and see if there's a pen and paper in there?"
Chuck gave Jill an awkward pat on the shoulder and rose to his feet. "I'll be right back," he promised rather uselessly, and headed outside, jerking his head at Sarah. She followed him.
"What?" she asked as she closed the door behind them.
"I know this seems like a silly thing for me to point out, but you know how much danger there is between me and that van? It's all the way around the building, and we know my track record for these things."
"Chuck?" Sarah kept her eyes on his even as she carefully reached around him and pulled out Lawrence's gun. She pushed it into his hands. "There's a reason I wanted you to hang onto this."
"Even so." The weight of the gun, as always, dragged against his hands, too heavy for such a small object. He pushed it back into his waistband and forced his face to grin at Sarah, though the reminder that he was now a gun-carrying member of Operation Prometheus sapped most of his humor. He bolstered it with a feeble joke. "Think of the track record. It's bad. Like, 'Star Wars Christmas Special' proportions here."
"And yet you're still breathing." Sarah shook her head at him, returning the smile. "On a scale of one to ten, how much are you freaking out right now?"
"Factoring in the fact that we were almost executed in the desert, and now I'm sharing a hotel room with my ex and my partner?"
Sarah smiled.
"Four," Chuck said.
"Then you're fine. Just, ah, hurry. I'm not saying you should run, but—hurry."
"Yes'm." Chuck turned to go, but spun around again before Sarah could go into the hotel room. "Ellie and Devon are okay, right?"
"Casey got them to the safe-house first thing. He'll have set them up with food, water, wine, whiskey, whatever they need. The house is off the grid. It's safe."
"How do you know it's really safe?"
"Because I set it up." Sarah rubbed his arm once, elbow to shoulder. "While I was setting up Castle. I paid cash for it, put a fake name on the lease."
"Do you ever sleep?"
Though that made Sarah smile, she continued, "Even Casey didn't know about it until today. And the instant we get Jill to the Marshals, either Casey or I will go get them. Don't worry. Prometheus won't be split up."
"Okay." Chuck took a deep breath. "That four is now a three, but I still feel like I should point out the foolishness of me going to the car alone."
"You've got a gun. Go on." Sarah smirked and pushed her palm against his upper arm, possibly to propel him forward. Or at least she tried to. Chuck had already started to turn to go again, his joke delivered, so Sarah's hand swiped across his shoulder and down one shoulder blade. It threw her off balance enough that she had to step forward. Since Chuck had frozen at the first touch, he had stopped in the middle of his turn. Sarah's corrective step put their faces mere inches apart, the front of her body flush up against his side.
They stayed stock still, two partners trapped in some absurd dance in the middle of a sunny November afternoon. One of them should have leapt back with a laugh, delivering a smiling apology, but neither moved. Instead, there was nothing but the kick of the breeze, whistling slightly as it rustled dust along the corridor formed by the overhang and the rusted pillars, the heat of midday, the sound of his breath, oddly loud, and her. From this distance, he could see the fine detail of every feature, freckle, and pore. Her eyes had a pattern in the blue-grey like rich marble. He could see the patrician arch of an eyebrow, the curve of her cheek.
What the hell was he doing? He should step away. Instead, he wanted to move closer, to crowd against her. He wanted to put his hands up on either side of her face, and just rub the side of his thumb against her cheek, to know if the skin felt as soft as it looked. She looked vital. She shouldn't have. They were in the middle of the desert, they had survived insurmountable odds. He could see the stress pulling at the corners of her eyes and lips, but she still looked so amazing and steady and present.
"Chuck." Sarah barely moved her lips, but he heard the word clearly. Somehow, they had started to lean toward each other, like some gravitational force was tugging them close. Sarah's expression hadn't changed, but her shoulders were heaving, as though she was having a hard time drawing breath.
He was feeling somewhat breathless himself, actually.
"Yes?" he asked. He didn't dare move. He wasn't sure if he could.
"Either move," she said, her eyes locked on his in a way that might have been significant, "or don't."
That was an odd thing to say. Chuck almost squinted at her, wondering exactly what she possibly meant by that. The way she said it, the slight tilt of her head on each word, the fact that her eyes were so hot on his they were burning, it all seemed telling. He opened his mouth to ask what she meant, but belatedly realized that he was between her and the hotel room door.
"Oh," he said, blinking away his stupor. "Oh, right. I guess I should get out of your way, right?"
Sarah actually gaped at him as he shuffled sideways to give her access to the door. It wasn't a mildly startled look, or a surprised expression, or even perplexed. This was the very picture of shock. In about two seconds, her jaw would drop.
Now he did squint at her. "Sarah? Are you okay?"
She put her palm to her forehead and rubbed her hand down her face. "I…yeah. You make my head hurt, that's all."
Concern sprang up. "What's the matter?"
"Don't worry about it." Sarah dropped her hand and gave, of all things, a little laugh. "I should know better by now. Go get the pen and paper, Chuck, and hurry, will you? I've left Jill alone too long."
"O-okay." Chuck would have liked to press the issue, but Sarah's face had shifted back to some facsimile of Mission Mode Sarah. He could argue. He had a chance of winning said argument. But Sarah was right: they had left Jill alone too long. So he gave Sarah a salute and trotted away. His system still felt a bit disconnected, as though he'd just surfaced from deep-sea diving or stepped out into a bright day from a dark room, but he shook it off.
Sarah's paranoia had evidently rubbed off on him enough that he kept an eye out as he rounded the corner of the building, one hand on the hilt of the stolen gun. There was nothing but dust and a few scrubby patches of yellowed grass. No, Chuck corrected as he moved to the minivan Sarah had carjacked from a Park'n'Ride parking lot, there was a tumbleweed blowing across the dust a few feet away.
He took a few seconds to watch it tumble.
There was a small notebook, squashed by time and circumstance, under the passenger seat. It bore a picture of a unicorn, pink and sparkly, on the cover. Not exactly the most appropriate thing in the world for a testimony, but Chuck pocketed it anyway. As he did so, something on the floor glinted at the corner of his eye, so he bent to get a closer look.
One of the licenses Sarah had lifted off either a dead or unconscious man had lodged itself between the seats. Chuck picked it up and studied it carefully, half-expecting to flash now that he was calmer. Nicholas Goldfarb didn't look like a Fulcrum agent. He looked like a history teacher, or somebody's mild-mannered uncle.
He had pointed a gun at Sarah's head this morning.
And Sarah had killed him for it.
Chuck pulled open the sliding door and sat on the van's floor for a minute, still staring at the license. History teacher, he thought again. He glanced at the address, height, weight, and eye color, all of the information innocuous. Innocuous, he thought again, but this man posed a threat. He'd posed a direct threat to Sarah, and for years, he'd posed a threat to Jill.
Nicholas Goldfarb, Chuck mused, and memorized all of the information on the license. There was certainly no way to know the face of your enemy, he mused, not in the game that he and Casey and Sarah were playing. There was only hope that you saw him coming, and that you had plans put in place that would let you escape. Or you shot first. Whatever.
And your life could change just as easily as somebody dragging you out of bed one morning.
Chuck dropped the license in his pocket, next to the notebook. Jill's life was going to change. She would go into witness protection, but there would always be that need to look over her shoulder for an enemy she probably wouldn't recognize. Until they knew if his own situation was contained, Chuck's life would also change, but the need to look over his shoulder wasn't a new one. Where would they relocate the team? He could only hope for someplace warm. After freezing for five years in Siberia, he should have requested somewhere tropical and warmer than Burbank.
Sarah might have appreciated the chance to wear a bikini. Given her exercise outfits, she seemed averse to a lot of clothing, so the tropics would have suited her.
And now was not really the time to be thinking about Sarah in a bikini.
Either move, or don't. That was a strange thing to say to a guy blocking your way. You're in my way, Chuck, made a lot more sense, as did I need to get inside, but you're stopping me, so maybe you should step aside?
And while he was on the subject of Sarah, why wasn't he freaking out more? Chuck wondered it as he watched the tumbleweed frolic across the field. He'd watched Sarah take out six guards. When Bryce had shot one guard, he'd almost had a breakdown on the spot, and he and Bryce certainly had loads more history together than he and Sarah had. Instead, Sarah had used the guards' own weapons to kill or injure all of them and instead of hyperventilating or running away, he was sitting calmly on the floor of a stolen van, out in the open, while inside, Sarah waited, guarding his ex-girlfriend, who would soon be on her way to witness protection.
By all rights, he should be curled up in a ball, able to do no more than whimper.
Of course, he thought, frowning and kicking at a rock in the dirt, there were differences. He'd genuinely thought Bryce was a traitor at the time. And today, Sarah had saved both of their lives, and he'd had plenty of advance warning since Sarah had told him the plan. Bryce was a deadly spy, enigmatic to the ends of the earth. Sarah was constantly there, just being patient, or amused, usually touching his arm or rubbing up against him or…not acting like a federal agent should, Chuck thought.
But maybe that made sense. Sure, he and Sarah had had kind of an unorthodox beginning, what with having been on the run from good guys, bad guys, and Chuck's phobias. That probably explained it. They were partners, but they were friends, too. He trusted her enough to put his sister's life in her hands, after all.
Ellie had to be freaking out right now, too. Chuck wished that he could call her, reassure her that things were going to be okay, but it was better to communicate as little as possible until they knew more. Phone calls could be traced. People could be followed; somebody could attack Ellie and Captain Awesome.
Sarah had said they were safe.
He couldn't imagine being Jill right now, having to trust people who wouldn't give her their real jobs or identities. Chuck trusted Sarah completely, and he was still nervous about what would happen with Devon and Ellie. He couldn't imagine how Jill felt about herself, or her parents or…
Jill hadn't mentioned her parents.
That was a little odd, Chuck decided as he picked up a pen from the floor. He pushed himself to his feet and shut the sliding door. If an evil government organization had been threatening him, he would do nothing but freak out about Ellie. And he knew Jill was just as close to her parents. They'd used to joke about it all the time at Stanford, how Jill was always reluctant to leave home because she missed her mom, or playing golf with her dad.
Had it just not occurred to her that Fulcrum was a threat to those people?
No, Chuck had asked Sarah about Ellie and Awesome in front of her. With the way Jill's mind worked, and he knew this well, she would have jumped to the logical conclusion: wondering about her own family.
So why hadn't she?
Something began to whisper at the back of his brain, a voice that couldn't be ignored. When he had seen Jill in the second car, he had assumed she was there because they were teaching her a lesson. He had assumed that Lawrence was taking her research against her will. What if…
Chuck dropped the pen.
Jill hadn't been used by Fulcrum.
Jill was Fulcrum.
"Oh, hell," Chuck breathed, and began sprinting. He'd left Sarah alone with a Fulcrum agent, and she probably had no idea. His long legs tore up the ground in huge strides. He didn't stumble or trip. He didn't dare, not when Sarah had no idea that she was alone with the enemy. He raced around the side of the hotel and sprinted at the room, full-tilt. About twenty feet away from the room, his survival instincts kicked in. If he raced to the door, and Jill hadn't attacked Sarah, the CIA agent was likely to shoot him.
She'd regret it, but that didn't matter. Chuck really didn't want to get shot today.
He skidded to a halt and, panting hard, crept toward the hotel room. When he saw Sarah giving him a puzzled look through the window, his heart gave one single bound of relief.
Until he saw Jill over Sarah's shoulder, holding the heavy hotel phone over her head and poised to strike.
"Sarah, look out!"
Jill swung.
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