1 FEBRUARY 2008
’SKI/WALKER RANCH
08:40 PST
Why on earth Chuck had decided to lick a dumpster, he had no idea, but given the way his mouth felt when he clawed his way out of the haze of sleep and into wakefulness, he had apparently indulged himself in a few of Los Angeles’s finest waste disposal systems. He groaned and ran his tongue over his teeth, wondering just how the fungus had managed to infect his mouth and grow so fast over his canines and molars.
Of course, it was then that the headache hit him. And the nausea followed gleefully in its wake and socked him right in the stomach.
Right then, Chuck Bartowski wanted to die.
He didn’t care how. Quickly, slowly, it didn’t matter, as long as it ended. His brain shoved against the back of his eyeballs so hard that he could all but feel pressure building in his ears, which also ached as if somebody had been yanking on them all night. The throbbing came in waves of intense pain, slightly less intense pain, agony, misery, agony again, and back to the intense pain.
What the hell had the Russians done to him?
He groaned, and quickly stopped when that proved to be a Bad Idea. The groan felt like a jackhammer shoved at the point where his skull met his neck, turned on full force. It only made him groan again, which turned out to be a vicious, vicious cycle that reinforced his desire to simply end his life on the spot.
The spot, a stray thought slipped in, that smelled really nice. Like grapefruit and vanilla and cinnamon, scents that shouldn’t really blend well, but somehow did. It was familiar in a way that would have made him smile if he hadn’t felt so downright miserable. It reminded him of...Sarah.
Chuck’s eyes snapped open.
Yet another Bad Idea. He groaned. It wasn’t the spotlight used by a torturer or an interrogator, but regular sunlight, he was pretty sure. He was also positive that that innocuous sunlight had burned his corneas right of his eyeballs. Why the hell the gods of the sun had become so vengeful against him, he had no idea, but maybe he had pissed in Apollo’s Froot Loops yesterday. It wasn’t like he would be able to remember if he had or not. He could remember nothing but his own name, the intoxicating scent of Sarah, and the pain.
Speaking of Sarah, if she was anywhere nearby, as the scent would indicate, she might be feeling just as miserable. That meant she might need his help. That thought was the only thing steady enough for him to grasp, and quite possibly the only single thing on the planet that could convince him to open his eyes again.
When he did, he immediately wished he hadn’t, but there wasn’t any way he could take the knowledge back.
He was in Sarah’s room.
More specifically, he was in Sarah’s bed. And when he looked under the covers, it got worse: he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Or pants, he realized a second later. He was in Sarah’s bed, in his boxer shorts, and he had no memory as to how he could have possibly gotten there. Panicked, he looked around, bloodshot eyes scanning everything for some kind of clue, anything that would tell him what had happened. The room painted a grim picture: he could see tuxedo shoes—in his size—beyond the foot of the bed, looking like he’d just kicked them off, there was a man’s dress shirt folded over the desk chair, but on his side of the bed, there lay his undershirt and a pair of dress pants, strewn across the floor.
“No,” he moaned, pushing his hands against his face and scrubbing them over his hair. It was more than nausea making him want to throw up now. “No, no, no, no.”
There was no way the gods would be so cruel. No way anything would be so malevolent as to let him sleep with Sarah Walker and then not remember a thing about it.
“Haven’t I been tortured enough?”
Evidently the answer to that one was no because just as Chuck asked, the door opened, and Sarah strode into her own room, wearing nothing but a towel and some of the water leftover from her shower. She pulled up short, and a huge smile broke out over her face. “Hey! You’re awake.”
Chuck looked from her face, wreathed by the hair dripped onto her shoulders, down her arms, his gaze settling on the knot of the towel between her breasts. It took a mammoth effort, but he hauled his gaze back to her face and offered her a weak smile. “Hi.”
“Good morning.” She crossed around to his side of the bed, brushing her hair over one shoulder, and sat down. “Ready for another round?”
Chuck felt the blood drain out of his face and the nausea double. “An-another round?”
“Yeah. I think you are. Here.”
It took everything in Chuck’s willpower not to scramble backwards in surprise when Sarah reached out. Instead of grabbing him, however, she picked up something from the nightstand and handed it to him. He looked down at the glass of water, baffled.
“I’ve been trying to force water into you pretty regularly since you showed up last night,” Sarah said, smiling at him in a way that the amount of oxygen in the room drop sharply. “At least you’re no longer babbling about Kevin Costner.”
“What?”
“You’ll probably want to take these, too.” Sarah picked up his hand and dumped a few pills into it. “I fished them out of Ellie’s medicine cabinet—she swears it’s a perfect hangover cure, and we’ll have to take her word for it. I don’t drink much, myself.” She reached out again, but this time it was to stroke his hair. “You look pretty rough.”
“Sarah, did we...” Chuck licked his lips, which felt chapped and dry and as though he’d spent the last few years in a desert. The action only reminded him that his entire mouth tasted like sewage. “Did we...”
“Have sex?” Sarah’s eyebrows went up. “No, we didn’t. And you don’t look at all upset about that.”
When she gave him a hurt look, he shoved himself up so that he was sitting up straighter, nausea be damned. He nearly sloshed water everywhere. “No, no, it’s not like that. I just—I don’t remember a single thing about last night, and I’d be the disappointed one because I’d prefer to remember my first time with you, but not in like a bad way or anything, like I’m awful in bed or because our having sex is truly the thing that triggers the oncoming apocalypse, but—”
He broke off because Sarah leaned forward and kissed him. Before he could figure out where he should put his hands—Sarah wearing nothing but a towel was like a veritable pit of vipers, and he hardly felt like Indiana Jones this morning—she leaned back and wrinkled her nose. “You need a breath mint. And a shower. Yuck.”
“Sorry.” Even though his stomach wanted to twist itself inside out at the mere thought of adding anything to it, he popped the pills into his mouth and drank down half of the water glass. “Um, if we didn’t sleep together, I suddenly feel that the question ‘Why am I in nothing but my boxers?’ is quite a bit more relevant, then.”
“You overheated in the middle of the night, so you took off your shirt. And then your pants.” Sarah gave him the evil variation of her grin, her eyes obviously raking over his exposed chest and shoulders. “For the record, I didn’t mind.”
And now, on top of everything else, he was blushing, damn it.
“That leads me to my next extremely relevant question: what the hell happened last night?”
“You played video games with Casey, drunk-dialed me, and tried to shoot your foot off with one of Castle’s new guns, so I brought you over here to keep an eye on you. Nothing happened between us.” Sarah paused, her eyes rolling impishly as she gave a pert little shrug. “Well, nothing much.”
Even though he imagined it would only make the migraine pounding his brain to dust worse, Chuck wanted desperately to remember what exactly “nothing much” meant. All he could remember, though, were patchy, blurred memories, like his brain had forgotten how to focus.
“Oh,” he said.
“If it makes you feel better, I let you be the big spoon,” Sarah said, patting his knee, which was still covered by the duvet.
“Uh, thanks.”
“No problem. Now, c’mon, get up. You’ll feel more human when you’ve had a shower, and neither of us is going to get anything done today if you keep trying to look down my towel and giving me ideas.”
Chuck blushed harder.
1 FEBRUARY 2008
’SKI/WALKER RANCH
09:12 PST
Sarah was right, but then, in Chuck’s experience, she was very rarely wrong. The feel of the hot water pounding against his skull had been torture at first, but Ellie’s miracle hangover cure had begun to kick in pretty quickly. By the time he emerged from the shower, he felt less like an amorphous blob of agony and nausea and more like something vaguely humanoid. He got a good look at himself in the mirror and wondered, not for the first time, if Sarah was possibly insane for wanting to be anywhere near anything that looked like that. His eyes were more red than brown, his skin had a pallor only a zombie could love, and dark circles punched out from under his eyes like glorious shiners. He could only hope there wasn’t any need to video-conference with Washington, as they might drag him in for testing to figure out why the Intersect had died and been resurrected by Dr. Frankenstein.
Sarah had laid out one of his Stanford shirts in her room, and an old pair of jeans that must have been from his pre-Bunker days. They’d been baggy then, but they fit pretty well now. His physique had changed, thanks to the daily workouts. A ritual, he thought as he rubbed a hand over the day’s growth of stubble on his chin, he would just have to skip today.
His Dr. Frankenstein theory hadn’t been far off, judging from the way Sarah looked up from her coffee mug when he wandered into the kitchen and said, “It’s alive!”
“Ha, ha,” Chuck said. He got an old Buy More coffee mug down out of the cabinet and turned, jumping when he nearly ran into Sarah. “We’ve talked about this and how you need to make a noise when you walk. And hi.” The last was added because Sarah wrapped her arms around his neck. She gave him a much longer kiss than the one in the bedroom, pressing against him until he completely forgot where he was. “What was that for?”
“You look better.”
Chuck turned to pour himself a cup of coffee. “Apparently Ellie’s magical hangover cure works, though I have to tell you, it’s got nothing on the power of your smile.”
“Aww,” Sarah said, and kissed his cheek. “You really are feeling better.”
Chuck wiggled a hand from left to right. “I feel less like something somebody threw in a dumpster, at any rate. I had to borrow your toothbrush.”
Sarah returned to her place at the kitchen island. “That’s okay. To be clear, though, you used the blue one, right?”
Chuck’s head shot up. “What? Your toothbrush isn’t the white one?”
“You used the white one?” Sarah gave him an incredulous look.
“Oh, God, did I use Awesome’s toothbrush? Oh, man, that’s so gross.” He felt like rinsing his mouth out a few dozen times. “I just assumed, since the white one was the one set off to the side, that it was yours, since Ellie and Awesome wouldn’t mind having their toothbrushes together and—you’re messing with me.”
Sarah finally let loose the smile that seemed like it had been building throughout his entire babbling statement. “It’s possible.”
Chuck gave her a sour look as he sat next to her at the island. “Uh-huh. Speaking of Ellie and Awesome, where are they?”
“Sleeping. They got in around six this morning. And Casey woke up an hour or so ago and headed back to the Bachelor Pad to get ready for work.”
“Oh.” Chuck frowned. In the shower, he’d remembered a little more about the night before—nothing about Kevin Costner, so he had no idea why Sarah had mentioned him—and Casey’s story about Ilsa. There had been so much pain and sincerity in the words that Chuck had been too drunk to understand at the time. “How’s he doing?”
“He’s hungover,” Sarah said, her voice dry. “I wouldn’t mention Jim Beam, Ilsa, or ‘Call of Duty’ to him today, if I were you.”
“Got it.”
“You’re also relieved of flashing today.”
“What?”
“I got Ellie to write you a doctor’s note before she crashed.”
Chuck stared at Sarah for a full thirty seconds before he could connect his brain to the words that needed to be said. “You just think of everything, don’t you?”
“It’s my job to handle the details.”
“And to be kick-ass and amazing?”
“What can I say? My résumé is impressive.” Sarah leaned over and kissed him again. She tasted like coffee, not at all unpleasant. “And I enjoy being good at what I do. But don’t thank me yet. Just because you can’t flash doesn’t mean you’re spared from the boring task of going over financial records and monitoring surveillance.”
“Beats flashing with a headache. Sarah, seriously, thank you.”
“Finish your coffee. We’ll grab some Danishes on the way to the office.”
“Awesome.” Chuck grabbed the empty mugs and rinsed them out in the sink before following Sarah out the door of her apartment. “Just for the record, your toothbrush is the white one, right?”
1 FEBRUARY 2008
CASTLE: DOWNSTAIRS
13:26 PST
By mutual and silent agreement, Chuck and Sarah left Casey to his own devices. The other man didn’t leave his office, save for a forty-five minute trip to the dojo to beat the ever loving daylights out of Frank. Chuck checked periodically on Castle’s security feed, but apart from an annoyed expression that wasn’t too far from his default look, Casey didn’t appear any different.
“I’m bored,” Sarah said, walking into his office and plopping into the spare desk chair.
Chuck looked up from the financial records. He’d been drinking water like a man dying of thirst, and it finally felt like it was kicking in—or at least, the text on the computer screen felt less like it was trying to punch him in the eyeballs at any rate. “Want me to entertain you?”
“I don’t know. Has your dancing improved?”
“Sorry, I charge extra for that.”
“I have a feeling you’d be worth every penny.” Sarah let out a peal of laughter when Chuck gave her a sour look. “No, I’m good, I just felt like telling you I was bored.”
“Ah. Well, thanks for the news flash.”
“No problem.” Sarah swung her feet up onto the desk and leaned over her legs to tap a few keys on the second keyboard. The second set of monitors, which Chuck wasn’t using, sprang to life with the feed from the Grand Saville. “You don’t mind me in here, do you?”
“Not at all.”
“Good.” Sarah leaned back. “Poke me if I fall asleep.”
“Gotcha. Nothing exciting from our Russian buddies?”
“Their hangovers are worse than yours. Most of them have been asleep all morning.” Sarah leaned forward again, this time to grab the pretzels Chuck had been munching on and had consequently forgotten. “Any luck on the financials?”
“Definitely some sketchy characters, but I can’t really confirm anything from the financials. I’m starting to think they may just be here for a wedding. You’d think they’d pick some place a little more tropical or picturesque.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean, this group can clearly afford something much nicer, if they’re staying at the Saville. Why not Fiji or something?”
“Maybe Ilsa doesn’t want a beach wedding.”
“I guess. But that’s the weird thing.” Since Sarah looked comfortable, and he could use a break anyway, Chuck pushed his chair back to prop his feet on the desk. He reached over and snitched a few pretzels from the bag. “All of the wedding guests seem to be from Victor’s side, not Ilsa’s. In fact, I did some searching, and she doesn’t have any family.”
“None at all?”
“It’s like she didn’t exist before Rome.” At least, he thought it was Rome. Casey’s story about meeting Ilsa was still a little fuzzy thanks to the amount of alcohol imbibed at the time. “No records whatsoever.”
Sarah tilted her head, obviously considering this. “The government, try as they might, doesn’t keep the best records, especially since Ilsa is Eastern European. Though she hooked up with an NSA agent there, and that would definitely put her on their radar and could account for them knowing about her at all. And as far as your guest problem goes, I don’t know, I think when you date somebody, your friends might become mutual?”
“Oh, so Morgan is your best friend now?”
“No offense to Morgan, but God, no.”
Chuck smiled. “So you admit it’s weird that Ilsa doesn’t have anybody of her own attending the wedding?”
There was a long pause, and it looked like Sarah might have wanted to say something else, but she eventually shrugged. “Okay, maybe it’s a little strange.” When Chuck put his feet back down on the floor and scooted up to the desk again, she raised her eyebrow at him. “What are you doing?”
“I’ve learned that if something feels weird it’s usually because something’s weird. I’m going to check on Ilsa’s story. Keep an eye out for Casey.”
“Oh, now I get to play look-out? Do you want me to give you a signal if he’s coming?” Sarah sounded amused. “Make a bird call or something?”
“Yes. Or the signal could be, ‘Casey’s coming.’”
“I think I can remember that. What exactly are you checking?”
“Hospital records. Casey said she woke up two months later in a hospital with no memory, right? Surely there’s got to be a record of that.” Chuck pulled up a grid-search on Groznyy and narrowed it down to the hospitals that might have taken the bombing victims. It took a few minutes for his translation program to work, and he was able to sift through the records. “What’s Jane Doe in Russian?”
Before Sarah could tell him, however, the computer beeped. His search had found a hit. “Never mind, got her. Wow, the translation program really doesn’t like this file, hold on a second.”
Sarah had put her feet on the floor and was peering at the file. “Switch back to Russian?”
“Sure.” A few keystrokes later, Chuck sat back. He might have been in Siberia for years, but the Cyrillic text looked like medieval runes to him. He doubted that Sarah was reading about freezing hexes or ancient prophecies, though.
“That’s weird,” she said.
“What is?”
“The words are Russian, but the syntax is French.”
“Maybe she had a French doctor?”
“No, anybody with that vocabulary would use at least some Russian syntax. I think we should run Ilsa’s picture through the Interpol database.”
“What?”
“Just a hunch.”
Since Sarah’s hunches hadn’t ever steered him wrong, Chuck set up a facial recognition search. The program he was using on Interpol wasn’t quite...copacetic to international relations, but Digital Dave had programmed it, so Chuck wasn’t too worried. “What do you expect to find?”
“Casey’s previous work, before he took the job of guarding the Intersect facility and then you, was traveling to a lot of hotspots and war zones. AP photographer going to all of the same hotspots, that makes sense. But an AP photographer engaged to a Russian crime lord?”
Chuck nodded slowly. “Yeah, the coincidence warnings are going off, I see what you mean. Of course, Ilsa is pretty, so I could see...” When Sarah swung her chair around to face him with a quiet stare, his eyes widened. “Not that, you know, she’s my type. I’m just saying that by, ah, human standards, she’s very...aesthetically well put toge—oh, geez, that doesn’t work either and I think is just really making it worse. You know what, it’s time for Chuck to code something.” He very quickly applied himself to the keyboard.
“You know, you can say she’s pretty. I won’t mind.”
Chuck didn’t believe that for a second. He looked away from the keyboard to shoot Sarah the puppy dog eyes he knew usually worked with her. “You’re prettier.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I am in no way trying to dig up out of this hole I seem to have dug for myself, no.”
“Uh-huh,” Sarah said again, but a smile broke out over her face, and Chuck was sure if the cameras weren’t watching them, she would have kissed him then or at least messed with his hair. Today she just shook her head and turned back to the monitor. “Your cousin Grigory’s ordering room service.”
“Fourth cousin,” Chuck said. “That man, by the way, has arms of steel. Being bear-hugged by him was like actually being hugged by a bear and—oh, hey-yo, we got a hit.”
“Ilsa’s in the Interpol database?”
They heard the footsteps approaching as Chuck opened the file, and both of their heads jerked toward the security feed. Casey had a thick manila envelope in hand and was heading right toward Chuck’s office.
“I’ll distract him,” Sarah said, springing out of her chair. “You look at whatever’s in that file.”
“Got it,” Chuck said, and Sarah hurried out.
He heard Casey pull up short. “What are you doing down here, Walker? I thought we agreed that you wouldn’t play with the nerd on company property.”
“Nothing of the sort is going on, Major Casey.” He could all but hear Sarah roll her eyes. “I was using the spare monitors in Chuck’s office.”
“Right.” Casey’s tone said he didn’t believe her in the slightest.
Chuck tuned them out. He had to bypass a few security levels to see whatever it was in the file, which made him pause—just who the heck was Ilsa that she was this heavily guarded?—but in the end, they were no match for him. At the final barrier of security, however, he paused, searching for something he wasn’t sure he was looking for. The computer seemed...glitchy. He sent his results of that step into a translation program to print off and focused on getting past the last bit of security around Ilsa’s file.
And when he opened it, his eyes widened.
Thirty seconds later, he stumbled into the hallway. “Guys, you’re never going to believe this. Ilsa’s not who we thought she was.”
“Ilsa?” Casey’s face immediately hardened. “My Ilsa?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. I meant oui.”
“You’ve got three seconds to explain, Bartowski, before I take my foot and shove it up your—”
“She’s French. Even more, she’s a French spy.”
“What?” Sarah and Casey both asked.
“Check it.” Chuck scrambled back into the room so fast that he would have tipped his desk chair had Casey not grabbed the back at the last second. Chuck sent a rapid-fire string of commands into the computer, enlarging Ilsa’s file across all of the monitors. “Yes, she’s of Bosnian descent, but she was born in Paris and her parents still live there. She’s ex-military, served for four years before she transferred to the DGSE and has been a deep-cover agent for them ever since. The file mentions you, Casey.”
Chuck could practically hear leather crinkle and snap under Casey’s hand as he continued to grip the back of the seat. “It does?”
Sarah had apparently found that part of the file already, though, because she was leaning forward. “Only that she had to be extracted because the bosses believed her compromised with an American, suspected to be either NSA or CIA.”
“So it really sounds like she didn’t have a choice. Chances are, she didn’t even want to fake her death in that bombing,” Chuck said, looking back at the NSA agent.
“Shut up.”
“Shutting up.”
“The French are after Federov? What does the Directorate want with him?” Sarah asked.
Chuck cleared a monitor for his own use and began a grid-search on Victor Federov’s activity on French soil. It only took a few seconds for the search to begin finding hits. Rather than bother with the translation program to take its time, he sent that to the monitor in front of Sarah. “He was a suspect in some mob-style killings in ninety-three,” she said. “Charges dropped. Drug trafficking charges in ninety-four...ah, that’s probably it. They think he’s behind the bombs on those commuter trains in Lyon back in ninety-six.”
“That’s it,” Casey said, and pulled out his cell phone.
“What are you doing?” Sarah asked.
“Alerting the bosses that we’ve got a foreign operative acting on US soil without jurisdiction and getting her ass on the first plane back to Paris.”
Chuck exchanged a glance with Sarah as Casey dialed. “Isn’t that a bit...harsh?”
“Harsh, Bartowski? She lied to me. She should consider herself lucky we’re not sending her back in handcuffs. Yes, hello, Major John Casey for General Beckman. Yes, I’ll hold.” The last was said into the phone.
Chuck’s computer beeped as the program he’d set to work on the code around Ilsa’s file spat out a translation. He opened it, scanned the read-out, and said, “Oh, crap.”
Casey put one hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. “What is it now?”
“There was a—there was a glitch in Ilsa’s file when I hacked it, sort of like a digital footprint of somebody who was there before me.” Chuck swallowed hard. “He was sloppy, but he got through, but not before the computer tagged him. The ID tag belonged to Ivan Veduska. I flashed on him yesterday. He’s an associate of Federov’s.”
“They know she’s a spy,” Casey breathed.
Sarah glanced between Casey and Chuck. “I’ll go start the car.”
1 FEBRUARY 2008
GRAND SAVILLE HOTEL
15:02 PST
As much as Casey wanted to burst into the hotel lobby in full tactical gear, guns blazing, Chuck and Sarah’s voices of reason won out, and the team strode into the Grand Saville with only side-arms and tranq guns. Well, Chuck corrected as he followed his teammates, he and Sarah strode; Casey’s walk was more like the prowl of a caged animal, despite all of the space in the Grand Saville’s airy, atrium-like lobby. Casey’s face was like the inside of a thunder-cloud, and Chuck half-expected that the other man was hoping somebody would mouth off at him, so that Casey would be justified in taking a swing. Chuck kept silent. He wouldn’t be on the end of that first punch, not with his head still in a vise with the last bits of hangover.
“Ilsa’s up in her suite,” Sarah said, checking the surveillance on her phone. “She’s alone. Casey, do you want to handle that, or coordinate with the FBI team?”
“I’ll take Ilsa.”
“Okay, I’ll deal with the FBI. Chuck, you’d probably better stay with Casey.” Sarah’s tone contained the unspoken part of her request: and keep him calm.
Chuck shot her a look—like that’s going to happen—but hurried to keep up with his roommate as Sarah broke off toward the hotel suite the FBI had commandeered for the stakeout.
“You my watch-dog, Bartowski?” Casey said as they boarded an elevator. “Going to keep me from saying something I’ll regret?”
“Do I look suicidal?” Chuck said, making sure he was out of reach. Casey didn’t hit him, though he did make one of those subsonic noises Chuck feared above all. The nerd decided not to try his luck again. “What happens if we run into one of the Russian guards?”
“Well, fourth-cousin Sascha, I suppose that’ll be up to you.”
“Oh.” Chuck straightened his shoulders and tried to look Russian. When they stepped out into the hotel hallway, a short man with a bandaged thumb immediately pounced.
“What are you doing here? You’re not authorized to be here.”
Chuck borrowed a page from Sarah’s book and adopted a disdainful sneer. “I am here to visit my fourth-cousin Grigory. I believe you may know him as the Butcher?”
The guard’s eyes widened. “My apologies! Would you like me to escort you to Mr. Keylov’s room?”
“We can find it without your help, thanks.”
Before Chuck could move around the odious guard, however, the sentry slapped a hand on his chest, halting him in place. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your names.”
That could be problematic, as Grigory hadn’t shouted a family name when he had greeted Chuck the day before. But remembering how Sarah handled these problems, Chuck raised his chin, stared down his nose at the guard and said, “Sascha Klebb.”
Casey coughed.
“And this is my associate, Boris Badenov,” Chuck started to say, but Casey’s growl, again subsonic, again scary, made him finish up with, “ski. Boris Badenovski. Now, are you done interrogating us or would you perhaps like to know what we had for breakfast as well?”
“No, no, sir.”
Cowed, the guard stepped asid, and Chuck gave him one last haughty look as he swept past, Casey following. The instant they rounded the corner, Chuck let out the breath he’d been holding in a gush. “Holy crap. I can’t believe that worked!”
“Yeah, well, keep your voice down, moron.” Casey looked as though he was a bit put out that the ploy had worked, obviously spoiling for a fight as he was. But he shot Chuck a look. “He’s really called the Butcher?”
“It sounded ominous.” Chuck shrugged.
Casey snorted.
“What? Butchers cut things. With knives. My girlfriend aside, that’s the definition of ominous. Here’s the suite. Uh, how are we going to do this?”
“We knock, we tell the frog to get the hell off of U.S. soil, our job is done.”
“Simple, elegant. I like this plan.” Chuck took a deep breath as Casey knocked on the door of Ilsa’s suite. What would happen now, he suspected, was the reason Sarah had told him to go with Casey. The look on Casey’s face told Chuck that the other man would have no problem whatsoever causing an international incident or five.
“One moment,” a woman’s voice called through the door. A few seconds later, they heard footsteps near. “Is that you, Victor?”
Casey waited until the door had opened. “Wrong boyfriend, sweetheart,” he said, and Chuck had to admire his opening line. Until, that was, he turned and discovered that Ilsa must have just gotten out of the shower. As in, his stunned brain informed him, she was wearing nothing but a towel. There wasn’t much time for follow-up commentary, as Casey shoved Ilsa back into the room with one hand and hauled Chuck inside with the other. He slammed the door closed behind the three of them. “Hello. Or should it be bonjour?”
Ilsa’s face immediately fell into stony lines. “Hello to you, too, John. Or what is it you go by these days?”
“He’s still Casey,” Chuck said, figuring he should be helpful and concentrate on something besides looking at Ilsa’s legs or chest. The towel revealed quite a bit of both. He kept his gaze firmly on Ilsa’s face. “Also, I’m Chu—Charles Carmichael. I’m a coworker of Casey’s.”
Ilsa looked less than impressed. “NSA, too?”
“Uh, sort of. It’s complicated.”
“Sounds like it.”
Chuck was getting desperate. “Look, would you mind putting on some clothing or something? Please? Not for my sake, but my girlfriend’s probably on her way up and she’s...” He felt that it was understandable when he trailed off. He had a hard time describing Sarah on a good day, with her mercurial moods.
Casey made a noise in the back of his throat. “Get dressed. Your flight’s in an hour.”
“My flight?”
“DGSE needs permission to operate on American soil, sweetheart, and you don’t have it. Ergo, buh-bye.”
Instead of getting angry, as Chuck half-feared she might, Ilsa went pale. “What? No! You can’t do that! Not when we’re this close—”
“Should’ve thought of that before you came into my territory.” Casey folded his arms over his chest. “And for God’s sake, you’re disturbing the nerd. Put something on.”
“You can’t do this to me, not now. I just need a little more time—”
“They hacked your file,” Chuck said. “Your Interpol file.”
“How do you know that?”
“Well, because I hacked it, too.”
Ilsa’s eyes widened. “You did what? My file is private, you had no right!”
Chuck threw up his hands in frustration. “Don’t you think there are slightly bigger priorities here?”
“Watch it,” Casey warned, grabbing Chuck by the shoulder and jerking him back. Annoyed now, Chuck bit back the instinctive question, wondering why Casey was the only one that got to argue with Ilsa, and fell silent with a nod. “Ilsa, the nerd’s right. If your cover’s blown, we need to worry about that.”
She relented with a nod, though she understandably didn’t look too happy about it. “How much time do I have?”
“Uncertain. They don’t know we came to see you, but we do need to move.” Casey’s hand hadn’t left his gun since they’d come into the hotel room, and Chuck wasn’t sure if it was for Ilsa or because of her. Before Casey had snapped at him, he would have said Casey was intending solely to intimidate the Frenchwoman. Apparently not. Even the Tin-Man had gotten a heart in the end, after all.
“Do the nerd a favor and put some clothes on,” Casey said, moving away from the door and grabbing Ilsa by the arm. “Chuck, keep an eye out. Let me know if anybody’s coming.”
“Ten-four,” Chuck said, and pressed his face to the peephole.
Behind him, he heard Ilsa say, “You can turn around now, John.”
“I know better than to let you out of my sight and it’s not like it’s nothing I haven’t seen before, sister.”
“I’m not your sister.”
Before Chuck could really process that thought and all of its sticky possibilities, his phone blared Sarah’s ringtone. He in his pocket. “Hey, Sarah.”
“Have you found Ilsa?”
“Yeah, we’re in her room right now. She’s, ah, changing.”
“Okay. I’ve got an FBI team standing by on the sixth floor. Will you have any trouble extracting Ilsa?”
The green-eyed girlfriend monster never surfaced, thankfully, and Chuck breathed out a sigh of relief. “We’re okay right now,” he said. Louder, he added, “As long as Casey doesn’t cause any international incidents with the French, that is.”
“I heard that, Bartowski.”
“Good, I meant you to. I’m not the one watching some poor, defenseless woman change.”
“You’d better not be,” Sarah said.
“I just said—” Belatedly, Chuck broke off, realizing that only danger lay ahead on that path. He cleared his throat. “I’m not, for the record. Got my back turned and everything. And also for the record, we’re okay. We got past the guard just fine, and once Ilsa’s finished changing, we’ll join you on the sixth floor.”
“Okay. Turn on your tracker.”
“I hate that thing. It eats up my battery.” Still Chuck drew his phone away from his ear and enabled the program that would allow Sarah’s phone to track his location to within three feet. “Okay. It’s on.”
“Good. Now, hurry.”
Chuck hung up. “What’s the story here?” he asked, still keeping his face plastered to the door and the peephole. He had a feeling if he turned around, there would be two government agents mad at him for different reasons, and Ilsa of course. “Like, what do we say if we run into Ivan the Terrible Hall Monitor again?”
“Could just shoot him,” Casey said.
“And the helpful suggestions now, perhaps?”
“We shoot him quietly. Where’s Walker?”
“Sixth floor stairwell. She says she’ll meet us there.”
“Good. Let’s move it, Frenchie.”
“Va te faire foutre!”
“Man,” Chuck remarked, who didn’t know French, but did know what an insult sounded like in any language, “if that’s the way you two talk to each other regularly, I have no desire to hear what pillow talk might sound like.”
This time, he had both of them glaring at him, but neither said anything, thankfully, as they shouldered their way past him. He brought up the rear, closing Ilsa’s hotel room door behind him. Ilsa hadn’t packed a bag, which he supposed was a good thing, as it might give their going on the lam away. Casey’s quasi-dead ex-girlfriend was actually very pretty, he reflected, not for the first time. When he’d flashed on her initially, it had been sort of a shock, though it shouldn’t have been. Hadn’t he cracked to Sarah a time or two about how attractive Casey was?
Wasn't it strange, the turns life took?
They made it most of the way down the hallway, though he could feel his own shoulders tightening with every step that brought them closer to freedom and a clean getaway with Ilsa, and he could see Casey likewise tensing. Ilsa, for her part, was probably the best at keeping up appearances of the three of them, for she looked completely unaffected by all of it, though Chuck did see her glance at her watch once, almost nervously. They rounded the final corner; Chuck could see the door to the stairwell, where Sarah and her team no doubt waited, though he couldn't see her face in the window. He had exactly two seconds to wonder why before his phone rang with the Red Alert sound effect from the original Star Trek TV series.
Casey pulled up short at the noise. Chuck, however, reacted immediately. He lunged forward and shoved Ilsa to the side, right into an alcove that led to two hotel rooms. Then he whirled, tranq gun up.
He was just quick enough; the minute he turned, Victor Federov, Cousin Grigory, Ivan the Terrible, and three others rounded the corner.
And they were all holding semi-automatic rifles.
“Oh, hell,” Casey said for both of them.
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