52 — The Return of TX-1138

Hell is other robots. — Matt Groening


4 FEBRUARY 2008
EZERSKY MANOR VAULT ROOM
15:47 PST

Chuck stared at Sergei Ezersky. And when the proper neurons and synapses that would have informed him how this situation worked refused to fire, he stared harder. It did nothing.

“You’re not the only one,” Andy said helpfully from where he was handcuffed across the aisle, a little ahead of Chuck. “I am also very, very confused. What the hell is going on?”

“You just said you’re Sergei Ezersky, really?” Chuck continued to stare. “Really?”

“What?” Sergei Ezersky drew all five foot four inches of himself up, giving Chuck an affronted look. “Why would I lie to you? Who are you?”

A crazed Russian toymaker should be disheveled, Chuck thought. He should wear a crazy vest and a pince-nez eyeglass, and he should carry some kind of walking stick with an odd carving for a handle. Something kooky. Anything. Sergei Ezersky, on the other hand, barely had an accent. Sure, his hair resembled Albert Einstein’s, but that hardly made up for Chuck’s months of wondering what the man looked like as they made one Google search after the next, trying to get a good look at the elusive Russian toymaker.

“He’s Chuck Bartowski,” Bryce said with a sigh, sounding annoyed.

“Bryce!”

“Wait,” Andy said, looking between Chuck and Bryce. “You two know each other? What’s going on?”

“I work for Chuck,” Bryce said.

“You do?”

“Shut up, Chuck.”

“Well, that’s not a very nice way to talk to your boss,” Chuck said, now puzzled.

Bryce gave Andy and Ezersky a long-suffering look. “Chuck and I were roommates in college. When I say I work for him, I mean I helped him found his company. We run computer security. Well, Chuck does.”

“And what do you do?”

“I keep an eye on Chuck.” Bryce tugged at the handcuffs chaining him to the shelf.

“Not very well, apparently,” Ezersky said, and both Chuck and Bryce gave him dirty looks. “Perhaps you two could care to enlighten the rest of us as to how you became involved in this little problem?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps you could care to enlighten us to what the problem actually is,” Bryce said.

“What he said,” Chuck said.

“Gentlemen in masks broke into my home this morning and locked me in this room. I do not know what they want. I do not know what they came for, nor have they answered my repeated demands that they tell me anything.” Ezersky gave a very serious frown. “I do not recognize any of them. And some time ago—I apologize that I cannot be more exact, but I do not have my watch—they brought two of you down here and chained them up with me. I knew nothing until you arrived, and I know even less, except that some stranger has been trying to mess with my security.”

He scowled at Chuck.

“Well, that’s nice,” Chuck said. The story had been vague despite Ezersky’s precise way of speaking. Also, not helpful at all. “So, no idea who’s behind this? Any of you?”

Bryce shook his head.

“None,” Andy said. “They snatched us from the restaurant and nobody’s said a thing. I didn’t know you were following us, Chuck.”

“And attempting to crack my security,” Ezersky said.

“In the name of good! And to be fair, it was really tough to crack.”

This clearly did not help Chuck’s case. He hunched his shoulders a little, trying not to glance too often at his watch and think about just how horribly Sarah was going to murder him, and focused instead on Andy and Bryce. “Are you okay? When I saw them grab you at the restaurant...”

“I’m fine,” Andy said, though he looked pale.

“Why did you follow us?” Bryce said, widening his eyes briefly at Chuck, probably to warn him to be careful. About what, Chuck wasn’t sure. “And how? You’re not supposed to get involved in this side of the business!”

“What was I supposed to do? Guys in a scary van grabbed you off the street!”

“You belong behind a computer screen, Chuck, not in a—” Bryce made a big show of looking around. “Wherever the hell we are.”

“In my vault,” Ezersky said through his teeth.

“Why do you have a vault? There’s nothing in here but us. Were you robbed?”

“Of course not!” Ezersky gave Chuck yet another affronted look.

Chuck personally didn’t think that it was actually too much of an impossible concept, given that at least two people had cracked the security at the Ezersky Manor that day. “Then why is your vault empty of everything except four men handcuffed to shelves?”

“Do me a favor, Mr. Bartowski. Please shut up.”

At least he’d said please. Chuck was grateful they’d handcuffed him to the rear of the vault, where the other men would have to twist to look at him. And none of them actually were doing so—Bryce was staring resolutely at the door, Andy at the ceiling, and Sergei Ezersky at a fixed point in front of him—which let Chuck twist his watch face around and look at the screen. Two of the blue dots on it were close together, and two were still roaming the estate. Casey and Sarah hadn’t broken into the house yet.

Oh, good. More time until they tried to kill him. Hopefully, Sarah followed the instructions he’d typed into his iPhone before he’d tossed it at her. Otherwise, this plan wasn’t going to work and it would be time to move to Plan B. As he was now handcuffed inside a vault that should have been full of robot rabbits and robotic toy dinosaurs, Chuck would have no idea what Plan B was. If Casey was behind it, it probably involved shooting “a lot of somebodies.”

At least, like Chuck had always told Sarah, the NSA agent was consistent.

Chuck leaned forward, toward Andy. “So you don’t have any idea what’s going on?” he asked. Apparently this bothered Ezersky: the other man rolled his eyes, and Chuck wanted to point out that Ezersky didn’t have the market cornered on exasperation. After all those months of looking into Ezersky and Krolik Enterprises, meeting a non-eccentric toymaker was an extreme letdown.

“None,” Andy said. “Do you?”

“No.”

“But we’re about to find out,” Bryce said, and the others looked at him.

Before Chuck could ask how he knew, he heard it himself: footsteps. Not from the ceiling of the vault, which was where he would expect any others to come from. No, he heard these footsteps behind him, where there was nothing but wall.

Warily, he turned. His eyes nearly popped out of his head when four lines appeared in the wall like some sort of science fiction special effect. His rational mind told him it was likely panels shifting to blend in perfectly with the rest of the wall. And it was neat. The four cracks joined at the corners to form what was obviously a door.

“What the hell?” Andy asked.

“What?” Ezersky appeared completely unaffected. “It is a door. You have never seen a door before?”

“Your secret vault has another vault?” Chuck said, sounding a little breathless even to his own ears. That was why, he figured, nothing had shown up on the surveillance video. Not only did Sergei Ezersky’s house have a secret room, it apparently had an entire secret floor.

He was suddenly willing to forgive Ezersky quite a lot of his testiness.

The door slid open with the same hissing puff Chuck had heard on every single episode of Star Trek ever filmed, and Chuck forgave Ezersky for the rest of it on the spot.

That was, until his brain caught up with him.

Behind him, Andy gasped. “Piers?”

Ezersky said, “Faulkner? What the hell?”

Bryce appeared not to have any reaction whatsoever.

Piers Faulkner, Andy Kohlmeier’s boss and the man Prometheus was investigating closely, stood in the doorway, perfectly lit from a red light behind him. Chuck hadn’t liked him at the birthday party they’d crashed. At the time, he’d attributed it to the fact that the man had been hard-core hitting on Sarah.

But maybe he’d been wrong. By all appearances, Piers Faulkner might just be a douche-bag in general, and an evil one at that.

“Hello, Andy,” Piers said, adjusting his glasses. “Sorry about the accommodations. You understand, though.”

“No, I really, really don’t,” Chuck said.

Faulkner glanced at him and dismissed him just as quickly. “And you brought guests. How charming.”

“What the hell is going on, Piers?” Andy asked.

Ezersky wasn’t one to be left out, either. “What are you doing in my house? Release me at once!”

“No can do, Sergei.” Piers folded his arms over his chest, giving Bryce a once-over and ignoring him as easily as he’d dismissed Chuck. “We have a problem, gentlemen.”

“You think?”

“Andy, you should know better.”

“Piers, have you gone insane? If this is some kind of joke, it’s really not funny. Did Clancy put you up to this? Is he here?” Andy looked around the room as though somebody had materialized. But it was only the four of them, handcuffed into helplessness. “What is going on, Piers?”

“What’s going on is that, like I said, we have a problem.” Piers looked around at each of them. “Two interlopers, one who has been spying on my company for months.”

His gaze landed on Bryce. Bryce stared back without saying a word.

“The other who was about to be paid to spy on my company.” Now Piers glared at Chuck. “Whatever you did to compromise the perimeter security, Mr. Bartowski, that was a nice trick. But you should be more careful in the future.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” Chuck said. He didn’t dare glance at his watch. Faulkner’s men hadn’t seen it as a threat, and he had no intention of tipping them off now. Not when Casey and Sarah were probably so close.

“That is, of course, provided we let you live.”

“Damn,” Bryce said. He let out a low whistle and tilted his head, almost sarcastically. “You really do know how to monologue. I’ve come across some monologuers in my day, Mr. F, but you sure take the cake.”

Faulkner outright ignored him. “The rest of our problem,” he said again, as though he’d never been interrupted at all, “lies with you gentlemen.” His gaze fell on Andy. “I told you when I brought you over from Austria there were things you wouldn’t understand and that you were to ignore them.”

“Evidently,” Andy said, his jaw tight.

Piers turned to face Ezersky now and folded his arms over his chest. “And you. You were supposed to deliver the Heidelberg Project two months ago.”

Ezersky rolled his eyes. “Would you rather I deliver a faulty program? There are glitches, and your original timeline was unrealistic, even for a man of my brilliance.”

Chuck exchanged a quick glance with Bryce over the term “Heidelberg Project,” as that was one they hadn’t come across in all of their research into Krolik and Ezersky.

“Then how do you explain this, Mr. Ezersky?” Piers gestured. A man in all black fatigues and a tactical helmet came in from the secret door. He handed Faulkner a file and Faulkner delicately removed a single sheet of paper. “Seems the Ukrainians think they’re in a bidding war with Kanichen, Mr. Ezersky.”

Faulkner held the sheet to the light. “I told myself that there’s no possible way somebody so upstanding as Mr. Ezersky would encourage a company like Kanichen to fund his research only to turn around and undercut the company by selling his research to a group like the Ukrainians.”

“It is possible, Mr. Faulkner, that you are believing fiction made up by the Ukrainians in order to create dissension, as they say, in the ranks.”

“It is,” Faulkner said. “But with this encrypted communiqué, my men—the same ones Mr. Kohlmeier over here nearly incriminated, by the way—think otherwise. And I trust those men far more than I trust you. So you see my problem.”

“Talk, talk, talk,” Bryce said, rolling his eyes. “We’ve all got problems, Faulkner. What are we really doing here? Please don’t tell me you’ve abducted us solely to talk us to death. There are kinder ways to get rid of people.”

“Guard,” Faulkner said.

Without missing a beat, the guard stepped forward and pistol-whipped Bryce. Chuck recoiled, the handcuffs cutting into his wrists, at the sound of gun handle meeting skull. “Hey!”

“Shut up, Bartowski, or the same thing happens to you.”

Chuck opened his mouth to protest, but Bryce, all but dangling by his own handcuffs now, grunted. “Do what the man says, Chuck.”

He didn’t want to, but he didn’t have much of a chance. Chuck risked a glance at his watch; Sarah and Casey, he determined, couldn’t get there fast enough. But the blue dots on Chuck’s watch interface were still outside the manor. The guards must be getting in the way.

“Mr. Faulkner, I would in no way betray your company for the Ukrainians, of all people,” Ezersky said, still sounding offended. “I am a man of honor.”

“I seriously doubt that, which is why you’ll stay right where you are until we’re through.”

“Through with what?” Chuck asked.

Bryce hissed.

Faulkner didn’t say “Guard” this time. He merely inclined his head toward Chuck. As the guard neared, Chuck tensed, but the pistol-whip never came. Instead, the guard kneed him hard in the solar plexus. Chuck grunted and went forward hard enough to hurt his wrists, but a pistol-whipping would have been much worse.

It apparently didn’t stop him from being Chuck, though. “Was that it?” he said, wheezing a little.

“Guard,” Faulkner said.

The second knee to the stomach hurt worse. “I was being sarcastic,” Chuck wheezed as he saw stars burst at the edges of his vision. “Get a sense of humor, will you?”

“Shut up,” Andy told him. “Look, Piers, let these two go. Your problem is with me and Ezersky.”

“No. I need a demonstration,” Faulkner said, “and they’ll do nicely, I think.” He pointed a finger at Chuck. “One for the money and,” the finger turned toward Bryce, “two for the show. Really drives the point home.”

Oh, God, Chuck thought. He really is going to kill us in front of Andy and Ezersky like some old-school Bond villain. How...cliché. And yet, still terrifying.

“What? Piers, no!” Andy strained against his bonds. “You can’t be—what the hell has gotten into you? Please, this has to be a joke, right?”

“Not even gonna happen, Faulkner,” Bryce said. “Won’t be some demonstration for you.”

“Ditto,” Chuck said.

He checked his watch. The blue dots were at the front door of the manor. He glanced up at the trapdoor once. Soon, they’d be there, and Sarah’s watch would provide just the necessary EMP blast that would disable the lock, a process Chuck had started with his own watch. Hopefully, the plan would work the way he hoped and he’d be able to distract everybody in the room so that Sarah could sneak in silently and take them out.

Faulkner eyed them. “Guard,” was all he said.

Chuck flinched as the guard headed his direction, but the man kept walking—and pistol-whipped Bryce again. Bryce fell onto his knees.

“This is tiresome. Guards!” Faulkner shouted this at the roof rather than the door that was still behind him. “Now,” he said to the room at large, “let’s see if I got my money’s worth when I hired this company. I tell you, you get so much more out of the private sector.”

“Not Fulcrum?” Bryce asked, one eyebrow going high.

Oh, God, Chuck thought, they’re going to pistol-whip him again.

Faulkner only smiled. They heard the unmistakable hiss of the trapdoor opening in the ceiling and then the clatter of combat boots on the ladder rungs. Two men dressed like the first guard—one of whom had captured Chuck outside—were soon standing by the ladder.

“Take these two upstairs,” Faulkner said, pointing at Chuck and Bryce in turn. “Be careful. The handsome one might have trouble walking.”

“Which one’s the handsome one?” Chuck asked, though he’d always felt that one was rather obvious. If the guards had come through the house, Sarah and Casey had probably had to find somewhere to hide, which meant they’d been delayed.

And if they took Bryce and Chuck upstairs, his whole reason for being a decoy had just become moot. Sarah really would kill him.

“If you’re referring to me,” he said as the guards stopped in confusion, “you don’t need to worry about me. I can walk just fine, no thanks to Señor Horrible over here.” He jerked his head at the pistol-whip-happy guard that was still standing by Bryce, and prayed that he wouldn’t suffer the same fate.

Faulkner just looked bored. “Feel free to rough up the ugly one, too.”

“Hey!” Chuck said. The blue dots on his watch were right over the trapdoor, he saw. Which meant that—surely enough, his watch started blinking red. “I think that’s rather completely unfair, don’t you think? I may not be handsome in the classical sense, but some might consider me as having raw appeal, you know? Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks, you know what I’m saying?”

Testiness spread over Faulkner’s face. “On second thought, just hit him.”

Oh, God, please don’t knock me out, Chuck thought. He braced himself for the pistol-whip that he knew he surely couldn’t avoid. His thumb crept towards his watch, pushing the small red button at the very bottom.

The guard hit him. It wasn’t the butt of a handgun, but damn, it hurt like hell. And Chuck made sure to scream good and loud, dignity be damned.

He made sure to scream just loud enough, in fact, that nobody else in the room could possibly have heard the subtle hiss of the trapdoor unlocking itself and sliding open as Sarah disengaged the lock.

It happened quickly when it happened, thankfully. Chuck, reeling, straightened—and Sarah’s upper body popped through the ceiling upside down. He had a split-second to react before gunshots rang through the room like concussive missiles. He yelped.

Two of the guards weren’t nearly so lucky. His ears were still ringing when their bodies hit the floor. He looked up to see Sarah’s eyes widen before she was yanked upward and out of sight.

“After her!” Faulkner ran past Chuck for the back door of the vault, slamming his shoulder into Chuck as he did so. Chuck wheezed.

The minute the remaining guard was up the ladder, Bryce was beside Chuck, reaching for his handcuffs. “Bryce? You were free this whole time?”

“Take this, get Andy loose.” Bryce shoved a handcuff key into his hand and moved to deal with Sergei Ezersky.

Dazed, a high-pitched whine from the gunshots still making his head hurt, Chuck did the same. Two guards were down, several more still roaming the estate, and Piers Faulkner had gone through the secret door. His brain categorized everything, already formulating a plan—and Sarah and Casey dropped through the trapdoor.

“Wh-what?” Chuck asked, drawing up short. “C-Casey? Sarah? How’d you get past—”

“One guard? Piece of cake, moron. What in Sam Hell is going on, Larkin?”

“Faulkner,” Bryce said, coughing. Blood was pouring from a wound on his forehead, Chuck saw now. “Looks like inter-Fulcrum politics gone wrong. Nice of you to show.”

“Are you okay?” Sarah asked.

Bryce put his hand over the copiously-flowing cut. “Just dandy.”

“Good, hold on a minute.” Sarah walked straight up to Chuck. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, just a little roughed—”

“Good.” She then punched him in the arm.

“Ow!”

The hits didn’t stop coming, but this time Chuck only let out a wheeze because Sarah hugged him too hard. “Don’t you ever do that again,” she said, mostly against his shirt.

“Who are you people?” Ezersky asked.

Sarah pulled back from Chuck and blinked at him. “Who are you?”

“No time for that now. Casey, Sarah, Piers Faulkner is our Fulcrum mole. He went through there.” Bryce pointed at the door—or what had been a door the minute before. It was smooth wall now.

“Maybe you should get that head-wound checked, Larkin—”

Ezersky placed his hand, shaking ever so slightly, against the wall. Instantly, the four lines reappeared and formed a door.

“What was that, Casey?” Bryce asked.

“Shut up. Take Bartowski and get him and these other yahoos out of here. Try not to get yourself kidnapped again. C’mon, Walker. I need a second.”

“Stay with Bryce. Don’t get shot,” Sarah said, pointing at Chuck. “We’re talking about this later.”

“Can’t wait,” he called after her. To the others, he said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

It took them a minute to escape, as they had to strip the guards of weapons. And when Bryce swayed before he could reach the ladder, Chuck insisted on going first. He had one brief and terrifyingly realistic vision of himself getting shot in the head before he peeked over the top of the trapdoor into the room beyond, but the other guards hadn’t arrived yet.

It would be a fitting tribute to Graham and Beckman if their precious Intersect took one to the head, wouldn’t it?

He scrambled off of the ladder and over to the wall just inside the door, the stolen pistol from the guard raised. Anybody coming in wouldn’t see him until it was too late. Perhaps he’d learned more tactics from playing Call of Duty with Casey than he had originally thought.

Andy had to help Bryce up the ladder; the spy was swaying, his eyes glassy. Sweat had sprouted, mixing with the blood flowing from the cut above his eyebrow.

“Doing okay, Bryce?”

“I’m fine. Sure you know how to use that thing?” Bryce nodded at the gun in Chuck’s hands.

“Point and shoot?”

“Point and shoot. Take lead? I don’t know how fast my reflexes are, but I’ve got your back.”

“You have an overwhelming amount of faith in me.” Chuck realized he was probably the only person who knew the layout of the Ezersky Manor. Of course, they did have Ezersky himself with them. “Sergei, with me.”

“I don’t think—”

“You want to watch your old employer shoot a couple of people in the head to teach you a lesson?” Bryce asked. “Do what the man says. Andy, you mind?”

“I’ve got it,” Andy said, grabbing Bryce’s left arm and pulling it across his shoulders. “We’ll follow you, Chuck. And if we get out of this, you’re totally getting a raise. Also, I plan on quitting.”

“Good move. Let’s go.”

It felt weird, as Sarah and Casey were the ones that took point on their raids, but now it was him casing the room, using the same hand signals to communicate with his team. Once more, he was taken back to Call of Duty, though he knew better than to make that comment. Bryce might think it was funny normally, but the aching head might get in the way of that.

Chuck led the way down the stairs. Every foot gained felt like an eternity, with his heart in his throat. Had Sarah and Casey caught up to Piers Faulkner? Were they okay? Would they all make it out of this one alive?

At the base of the stairs, he signaled for the group to halt so that he could check the corner. The entryway wasn’t far off, but the first floor of the Ezersky Manor was a veritable maze of interconnecting airy rooms with tall ceilings and excellent lighting. It was beautifully decorated, but a tactical nightmare, as the minimalist decor didn’t allow for much cover, and there were several entrances and exits for each room. Chuck pulled up his mental map of the place to figure out if there was a better route, decided there wasn’t, and opted to go for it.

He made it two steps.

The sound of something squeaking behind him made him whirl, gun raised. It wasn’t an enemy guard, though. Ezersky had opened some kind of panel in the wall very similar to his secret door in the vault.

“Hey!” Bryce and Andy, stumbling like a couple of drunks thanks to Bryce’s possible brain damage, pulled up short. “What are you doing?”

Ezersky reached into the wall, and Chuck’s blood ran cold. Nestled in the other man’s hand was one of the very same roborabbits that freaked Sarah out.

“What the hell is that?” Andy asked.

Chuck surprised himself by taking a shooter’s stance and pointing the handgun at Ezersky. “Put that back,” he said in a voice that didn’t sound like his own.

Sergei gave him a strange look, the roborabbit still in hand. It was a little smaller than Chuck remembered, but other than that, every detail was perfectly etched into Chuck’s mind. “You know what this is, young man?”

“I know exactly what that is. Put it back.”

Ezersky’s eyes narrowed. “I intend only to allow them to hunt down Faulkner.”

“And my girlfriend and my partner are in this house, too. No way in hell are you releasing that. Put it back.”

“Why do I get the feeling,” Andy asked, “that there is so much more going on that I don’t know about?”

“We can explain later,” Bryce said. “Let’s move.”

“Not until he closes and locks that panel,” Chuck said, still pointing the gun at Ezersky.

The Russian rolled his eyes and made a big show of shutting the panel door and placing his hand on the wall next to it until the lines retracted. “There,” he said. “Happy?”

A gunshot answered him.

“Holy frak!” Chuck jumped back, expecting blood to spurt out, but a small hole appeared in the very same panel Ezersky had just closed. Chuck spun, searching for the enemy.

Two things happened at once.

Bryce hit him like a linebacker going after the star quarterback.

Another gunshot pierced the air.

Chuck felt Bryce jerk once against him, something like a seizure. They hit the wooden tiles with a thud that had the air escaping Chuck’s lungs in one rush. “Stay down!” Bryce said as Andy and Ezersky hit the deck, too. Swearing, the spy half-crawled, half-hauled Chuck to a wall. They flattened themselves against it, hiding out of the shooter’s range.

“Why,” Chuck said, panting, “does it feel like we’ve done this before?”

“Because we have?” Bryce wiped away the flow of blood from his eyes and checked the clip in his gun. “Warehouse in October, remember? I thought you were going to wet yourself.”

“Thanks, Bryce.”

“Oh, relax, I’m just kidding.” Bryce winced.

“What? What is it?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing.” But Bryce flinched again, his hand going to his side. “Okay, maybe I got shot a little.”

“A little?”

“Chuck, is now really the time?”

“No, but honestly, you’re either shot or you’re not and a little is kind of misleading, don’t you think?”

“I think he’s in the next room,” Bryce said, evidently going with Casey’s usual tactic of ignoring Chuck. Bryce was clearly gritting his teeth now, though that could be attributed to either the multiple blows to the head or the bullet wound. “Probably calling for backup.”

“Perfect. Any way to draw him out, do you think?”

“I don’t know. These guys are pretty good. I don’t think throwing a rock is going to distract him for long.”

“We could send one of the TX-1138s in,” Ezersky offered from where he and Andy were hiding behind a modern art statue.

“The whats?”

“I was just holding one before Mr. Bartowski made me put it back.”

“The roborabbit?” Chuck asked.

“Yes. That would take care of the problem rather admirably, assuming you don’t point a gun at me again.” Ezersky’s glare could slice through diamonds.

Another volley of shots echoed through the house, making Chuck and Bryce exchange a look. It appeared their shooter in the other room had started emptying his clip at random, trying to draw them out. “What exactly do you have against the TX-1138, anyway?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“What’s the TX-1138 do?” Bryce asked Ezersky.

“It carries a dart that incapacitates any it views as the enemy,” Ezersky said, like that was a perfectly normal thing to have in one’s house. When you were a crazy Russian toymaker with an attitude problem, Chuck figured, it probably was. “We can unleash it and let it deal with our friend in the other room.”

“Until he plays Rabbit Hunt,” Chuck said under his breath.

“Sounds good to me. Well...” Bryce trailed off with another flinch as they all looked up at the single bullet hole in the panel. “On second thought.”

Ezersky gave a long-suffering sigh similar to the ones Bryce had been giving Chuck the entire time and reached over, placing his hand flat against the wall a couple of feet to his right. Another panel slid open. The roborabbits were painted with blue stripes this time, but that wasn’t what immediately struck Chuck.

“Holy convenient wall panel, Batman.”

“Yeah,” Bryce said, his breath strained now. They cringed when the shooter in the other room let out another spate of gunfire. “No kidding.”

“Would you two silence your yapping for one moment while I work?” Ezersky said, rolling his eyes at the pair of them. Chuck and Bryce glared, but Ezersky merely shook his head and reached into the wall panel. A green light blinked on the roborabbit that he pulled free of the cabinet. Ezersky set it on the floor in front of him, pressing his thumb to the top, and turned it so that it was facing the room with the other shooter.

Chuck, Andy, and Bryce watched it wiggle in place for a second on its haunches. When it sprang, Chuck’s finger twitched on the trigger.

The guy in the other room had it worse, though. A few seconds after the roborabbit hopped out of sight with a sproing, they heard, “What the?”

The puff-hiss of the TX-1138 dart firing would forever be embedded in Chuck’s memory, no matter how patchy the events of that night breaking into the Ezersky Manor were. Chuck closed his eyes.

“Ow! Son of a bitch!”

Ezersky’s shoulders began to shake. “Classic,” he said in a low voice, and Chuck realized that the Russian was laughing.

“You are a twisted, twisted man,” Chuck said.

In the other room, the puff-hiss sounded again. It was followed by the clap of a single gunshot.

Ezersky frowned.

“Guess your inventions aren’t exactly bullet-proof,” Chuck said.

“No matter.” The toymaker simply reached into the cabinet, repeated the process he had gone through with the first roborabbit, and sent a second combatant into battle.

The gunshot came faster this time. Ezersky’s frown deepened.

An idea hit Chuck. He glanced at Bryce, noting the beyond-unhealthy pallor, and called up a mental map of the place that was so clear, it almost felt like an intersect flash. “Send them all in,” he said.

“What?” Ezersky reared up like an offended rooster, his wattles practically quivering. “I will not sacrifice—”

“Just do it. Give me half a minute. Bryce, keep an eye on these two.” Chuck started to slide for the room’s other door.

Bryce reached out with the hand on his uninjured side to grab the back of Chuck’s shirt. “No way,” he said. “I’m not letting you go in there alone.”

“I’ve got it,” Chuck said. “You stay put and bleed on the wall some more.”

“If you get killed, Sarah’s going to skin me alive, and then Casey will use me for target practice.”

“Then I’ll try not to get killed. Thirty seconds,” Chuck told Andy and Ezersky. Moving as silently as he could, he crept along the wall to the other door. The way the Ezersky Manor was laid out, there wasn’t really a way to get to the front door without the gunman getting a clear shot. But if the gunman was distracted, Chuck might be able to get inside while he was distracted and take him down. How, he had no idea. He’d come up with something.

This was, of course, on top of the fact that he would have to dodge any roborabbit poison darts while he was at it. He didn’t know what the blue stripes on the little creatures meant, but he hoped it wasn’t because the poison in them was derived from some super-deadly South American frog or something. That would suck.

His watch vibrated just as he reached the doorway. He slid around the corner before he activated the mic. “Sarah? Casey?”

“Where are you?” Sarah asked. “Are you okay?”

“We’re pinned down in the front room.”

“How many shooters?”

“Just one. I’m working on getting us past him right now.” Chuck crawled along a narrow hallway, done up in the mission style popular to Southern California. The open doorway to the other room with the gunman was about five feet ahead on his left. “You and Casey okay?”

“Lost, but we’re fine. This place is a labyrinth.”

“Lost Faulkner,” Casey said, sounding annoyed. “We’re heading back to you. Stay put.”

“Sure,” Chuck lied. “Hold please.”

Cautiously, he peeked around the corner. By his mental count, Ezersky and Andy should be releasing the rest of the roborabbits in about two seconds, which meant...

Right on cue, the first mechanized assault rabbit hopped into the room and was summarily dispatched. Chuck used the opportunity to study the room: the gunman was stationed at the back of the room, diagonal to Chuck’s current spot, where he had a clear vantage point of both doorways. Between him and Chuck lay two different places Chuck could hide, though it would be a stretch from the second spot to where the gunman was stationed. Behind the gunman was the hallway that led to the front door and to freedom.

“Dammit,” Chuck said. Why did the guy have to be competent? It would be almost impossible to sneak up on him without the roborabbits. With the aid of tiny little jumping robots of death, it was only slightly suicidal, and he’d promised Bryce he would try not to get killed.

He was really hoping he wouldn’t have to break that promise today. Sarah had enough reasons to want to kill him. Dying would just make it worse.

“What the—” The gunman’s voice rang through the room, and then Chuck heard it: sproing. Sproing. Sproing. His army of tiny little robots had arrived.

He shifted to a runner’s stance, not an easy thing to do with the stolen gun in his hand. When the volley of shots started, he let out a split-second prayer and went for it. Two steps and he was behind the recliner.

He heard the click of the gun slide, signifying an empty chamber. In the echo of the gunfire, the huff-piss of the darts shooting at the gunman from the miniature robots sounded oddly subdued. But the sproing could be heard loud and clear as roborabbit after roborabbit took to the skies to take down their enemy.

Chuck almost felt bad for him. Almost.

He peeked around the edge of the recliner to see the man yanking a dart out of his arm. When the man reached for a spare clip, two more roborabbits sprang at him. He reloaded, aimed, and the carnage began anew.

Chuck used the opportunity to slide for home plate behind a divan where his hiding spot was no longer in the gunman’s line of sight. He crouched there, flinching with every new shot, and trying to psych himself up. The gunman faced away from him, nailing one roborabbit after the next with a sense of accuracy that made all of the saliva in Chuck’s mouth dry up.

Now or never, Bartowski, Casey’s voice told him.

Chuck sucked in a deep breath. When the gun went off again, he leapt to his feet, stumbling only a little. The guard turned another roborabbit into a skid-mark on the tile. Chuck circled around behind him, eyeing the two roborabbits left. They were motion-activated, so if the other man was astute, one of them switching its aim to Chuck could give him away.

He needn’t have worried. The minute he stepped behind the security guy, the other man took out the second and final roborabbit. Chuck had to suppress a wince for Ezersky—who had to be spitting mad—even as he raised the stolen gun to the back of the man’s head.

“Don’t move,” he said quietly.

The guard froze. “You’ve got some nerve.”

“Not really. Drop the gun.” A glance told Chuck that the guard had been hit a few times. He didn’t envy the guy the case of hallucinations and heat stroke he would have later, provided these weren’t the super-poisonous darts. “Do it. Now.”

“All right, all right.” The guard lowered his left hand away from his two-handed grip on the gun, and started to lower his right to put the gun on the ground.

“Slowly!” Chuck, who had seen Casey and Sarah do this too many times to count, took a step back, keeping his gun trained on the guard’s back. “Move slowly, now.”

“Fine.” The guard muttered something under his breath that probably wasn’t very complimentary to Chuck. The nerd hardly cared. Every muscle in his body was taut with the same tension that made his heart pound and kept his mouth dry. The last time he’d held somebody at gunpoint, he remembered, that somebody had attacked him, and then had ended up dead—almost by his hand—seconds later.

It wasn’t the time to think about Leader.

But maybe he should have thought about history repeating itself. Because the guard, gun almost lowered to the ground, jerked toward him suddenly. Chuck’s aim shifted automatically, instinctively following Casey’s lessons.

The guard never jumped at him. He got halfway through his turn—and promptly collapsed to the ground in a puddle of Italian suit and shoes. Chuck was left, his chest heaving, pointing at nothing but empty air.

“Chuck?” Sarah’s voice cut through his shock. He looked around, but she wans’t there. It took a few seconds for him to realize that Casey and Sarah had arrived, but they must be in the other room. “Chuck, are you okay?”

He looked up toward the room where the others were still hiding from the gunman. “Uh,” he said. “Yeah, I’m—it’s clear.”

Sarah immediately appeared in the doorway, Andy and Ezersky behind them. Sarah’s eyes went wide as they traveled from Chuck’s face to the body collapsed in front of him on the floor. “What—”

“Roborabbit juice,” Chuck said, lowering his gun when he realized he was flagging Sarah. “He took quite a few hits before he went down. Ouch. You guys okay? We’re all good here, except Bryce. He’s a little shot.”

“Casey’s seeing to him.” Sarah strode toward Chuck.

He immediately flinched away, putting an ugly waist-height statue between them. “Are you going to hit me again?”

“I considered it, but no.”

“Oh, okay.”

She twisted his ear instead. “What part of ‘Stay put’ was unclear?”

“Ow—ow, still attached to that, Sa—oof.” Would she ever hug him like a normal person, Chuck wondered, and not a heat-seeking missile? “No sign of Faulkner?”

“None, and the guards are all taken care of.” Sarah let him go. Now, she was scowling, obviously annoyed with anything and everything having to do with Faulkner and the Ezersky Manor. Unfortunately, the scowl only made the exhaustion on her face far more evident. “This place is a damned maze. What twisted genius designed it?”

“That,” Sergei Ezersky said, stepping forward and straightening his vest, “would be me. And who the hell are you?”

Chuck cleared his throat. “Ah, Sarah,” he said, “I’d like you to meet Sergei Ezersky. Ezersky, this is my girlfriend Sarah.”

Sarah looked between Chuck and the slightly testy Russian toymaker across from them, brow wrinkled. “Okay,” she said. “Now I’m confused.”

4 FEBRUARY 2007
EZERSKY MANOR
16:12 PST

Chuck stared at the front of Ezersky Manor, admiring the adobe brick and the rounded red shingles, but more focused on just how oddly normal it looked. Of course, it had seemed ten times scarier with armed guards roaming the manicured lawns and a potential client—a client no more, as Andy Kohlmeier looked far too shaken by today’s events—held hostage inside its walls. Now it was simply a pretty-if-somewhat-ordinary mansion that held an entire secret floor, as well as scattered wall panels full of roborabbits that shot could-be-poisonous darts.

Simply, he thought. Heh. He really was a terribly big nerd because despite all of that, all of the drama that had gone down inside and the fact that they had let some kind of high-level Fulcrum agent get away, he really did think the whole idea of a secret vault and a secret floor was cool.

Sarah and Casey had called for government back-up and for an ambulance for Bryce. The latter had arrived first and the paramedic were inside with Bryce even now, trying to stop the blood flow, Chuck imagined. He’d worried about Bryce during the shoot-out, but the other man had made it seem okay.

When Sarah had gotten a good look at Bryce’s wound and had cursed roundly, Chuck figured it was less okay.

That was why he was staying out of the way, standing on the Ezersky Manor lawn. Andy sat on the front steps of the house nearby, still the color of wax and unwilling to talk to anybody. Chuck had no idea what the other man was thinking and truthfully hadn’t even tried to probe. The whole situation was a mess. Instead, he’d simply collected Becky the mini-computer from Sergei Ezersky’s security console and had taken himself off to the side, out of the way of any government crews that might be coming and any paramedic rushing to save Bryce’s life.

The front door opened, making Chuck and Sarah, a few feet away on her cell phone with Beckman and Graham, look over. Sergei Ezersky crossed the lawn to him. Sarah wandered away, probably wishing to keep her conversation private, though she stayed in sight. “I do not like having so many people in my house.”

“I don’t blame you,” Chuck said.

“I also don’t like it when visitors come to call and leave bullet holes in my walls and furniture. I like it even less when they destroy my property, Mr. Bartowski.”

Chuck hunched his shoulders inward a little, but straightened up quickly. “I didn’t shoot any of your roborabbits.”

“TX-1138s.”

“Okay, Lucas.”

A line creased the space between Ezersky’s eyebrows. “What?”

“You mean, you didn’t do that on pur—you know what, never mind.”

Ezersky went quiet for a minute and shook his head. It was a reaction Chuck knew well: people had been doing the same for his nerdy references for most of his life. He ignored it.

“I am not talking about today,” Ezersky said.

The temperature outside dropped a little. Chuck hoped Ezersky didn’t notice his instinctual twitch. “Uh, I’m sorry?”

“My house was broken into before, Mr. Bartowski. They stole nothing that I can discern, and there is no video surveillance from that night. In fact, they broke all of my cameras.”

He had? Chuck didn’t remember doing that.

“A bug in the system,” Ezersky went on, staring at the house rather than at Chuck. “It wiped out my camera system, so finely tuned. I only just now got around to updating the systems. They weren’t even online yet.” He sounded disgusted.

“Oh.” Well, that explained why the cameras had been turned off.

“But whoever visited me, they would have met my TX-1137s. A prototype yes. But effective. And their visit helped prove that the TX-1137s were ready to go—until they were destroyed.”

He and Sarah had shot a lot of the roborabbits. Chuck almost felt guilty, but he remembered the terrifying way those things had hopped after him, never stopping, always advancing. “Why even build them? They don’t even have little robot hands. And why rabbits?”

“I find rabbits very soothing. What I don’t find soothing is people trying to break through my security.” Ezersky met and held Chuck’s gaze, now beyond disgusted. “I’ve no proof, Mr. Bartowski, but I know you broke into my house before. And when I prove it—and I will—you will get my bill.”

Chuck turned to look at the driveway, where several dark SUVs were now ambling along. When he turned back to the house, the front door opened to admit Bryce’s stretcher. “Honestly, Mr. Ezersky,” he said. “I think you’ve got bigger problems.”

“Like what, young man?”

“Like prison,” Chuck said, and walked away, toward the house. The paramedics weren’t sprinting for the ambulance, which told him that they had at least stabilized Bryce’s condition. The relief that spurted through him wasn’t enough to counter the sick feeling that had sat like a lump in his stomach since he’d first seen the blood on Bryce’s shirt. He waved to Sarah to let her know the paramedics had come out. She gave him a two-fingered salute.

He nearly sighed yet again. They still had a lot to talk about, and he wasn’t looking forward to that conversation.

He trailed the paramedics and stretcher to the ambulance. Bryce’s eyes were open and unfocused, pale against his even paler face, so that his hair seemed almost black.

“Is he going to be okay?” Chuck asked the paramedic.

The paramedic woman spared him a glance. “He’s stable. We’ll have to wait until they run some tests on him to know more.”

“Oh. Okay.” Chuck stood back, feeling a little helpless as Bryce was trundled into the ambulance by two paramedics, his head and arms flopping about in response to the jostling. As they were locking the stretcher into place, their radios crackled to life.

“Lynn, Mike, need one of you here. Code three!”

Whatever code three was, it sounded serious from the way the paramedics reacted. Chuck quickly stepped to the side as one of them—Mike—raced by him to help the other team. The other paramedic, Lynn, finished locking down the stretcher by herself, checking Bryce’s vitals and hooking him up to various things so that they could make the transport to the hospital.

Halfway through, she looked up. “You’re not Chuck, are you?”

“Uh, I am. Why?”

Lynn jerked her head at Bryce. “He’s asking for you.”

“Oh. Um, can I...” Chuck gestured at the ambulance.

“Sure, come on up. I need to check on something up front. I’ll give you two a minute.” Lynn climbed past the partition that led to the front seats, true to her word. Chuck climbed into the back of the ambulance, bumping his elbow against the side and cursing roundly. It was a small space inside, which should have comforted him, but instead he mostly felt awkward and helpless.

Bryce’s eyes were still unfocused when Chuck settled on the little bench next to him. Up close like this, he looked even worse.

“Hey, buddy,” Chuck said, gingerly touching him on the shoulder. “I’m here. You doing okay?”

“Chuck.” Bryce looked in his direction, but not directly at him. As an effect, it was appropriately spooky. Chuck had to remind himself that Lynn had said Bryce was stable, even if his friend did look two steps away from death. “Need to...need...to...”

“Need to what, Bryce? Whatever it is, I’ve got it. You should just rest.” Chuck forced a smile. “Plenty of pretty nurses where you’re going. Even Bryce Larkin needs energy for that charm of yours.”

“No.” Bryce shook his head, his skin the color of bleached bone underneath the gauze covering his head-wound. It made his hair stand up in funky shapes. “No, it’s not that. Need to...Chuck. Need to thank you.”

“Bryce, it’s okay. There’s no need to thank me. You would have done the same for me.”

It obviously took some effort, but the other man seemed to force himself to focus. His eyes cleared a little. “No,” he said. “Nobody is as good as you are, Chuck. Nobody else would have forgiven me. Thank you...for that.”

Had he truly forgiven Bryce for blowing up the Intersect compound and sending him the program? Chuck supposed he had, though the other spy had caused Sarah more nights of sleeplessness and pain than Chuck cared to think of. “Bryce, it’s okay,” he said again. “Don’t worry about it. You need to rest and relax or the paramedic is going to come after me.”

“Nobody is as good as you are,” Bryce said again. “You should hate me.”

“Bryce, I don’t hate you. Please, let it go. Relax.”

“I’d hate me,” Bryce went on, staring at the ceiling. “Anybody else would hate me. But Chuck...”

Chuck looked up at the front of the ambulance, where Lynn was on the radio with somebody, probably the dispatcher. She seemed reasonably distracted and Bryce obviously wasn’t going to rest until Chuck put his fears to rest. So he leaned close. “You had to send the Intersect somewhere. I get it, buddy. I do. National security was at stake. It’s all good. Just be easy, okay?”

But Bryce’s eyes focused again and he turned his head slightly, giving Chuck a queer look. “’M not talking about that.”

“You’re...not?” Chuck’s eyebrows went low over his eyes as he tried to puzzle out what Bryce could possibly be referencing.

“No. No, no, no.” Bryce shook his head, emphatic now. Whatever drugs they’d given him in the house, they must be pretty damned good. The other man seemed unfocused and unhinged in a way that Bryce Larkin would never allow himself to be. “Thank you for forgiving me about the bunker.”

Everything inside of Chuck stopped. He and Sarah had mentioned the bunker occasionally, as it was an embedded part of their history together (he more often than Sarah, but he understood that). To hear the word from Bryce’s mouth just seemed foreign.

“Nobody else would have forgiven me. Hell, I wouldn’t have forgiven me. But you did, Chuck. That’s why you’re a good person.”

“Bryce,” Chuck said, his voice even and slow, “if you’re talking about not visiting me more, it’s fine. You were busy. I understand.”

Please, his brain pleaded, please let this be about guilt over not coming to see me more. He didn’t think he could physically or mentally handle the alternative that Bryce might have had something to do with—no. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. Bryce was his friend. Bryce would never have done anything to get him trapped in a bunker in the middle of Siberia for years.

Bryce was his friend.

“No,” Bryce said, and Chuck’s world plummeted. “Not talking about that. S’my fault. All of it. S’why I wanted you to know about Omaha. So you’d know, and you do, and you forgave me. S’why you’re the best.”

And with that, he drifted off, either to sleep or unconsciousness as the drugs finally took their hold on him. Leaving Chuck alone in the ambulance with a paramedic named Lynn and the inescapably heavy knowledge that nothing in his world would ever be the same again.

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