4 FEBRUARY 2008
EZERSKY MANOR
16:38 PST
He felt like an old man when he climbed out of the back of the ambulance, so that Mike and Lynn could drive Bryce Larkin off to the hospital, where he would be treated for a possible concussion and a gunshot wound to the side. The sun, though it was heading towards dusk, felt too bright; he squinted, half-raising a hand to fight off the glare.
They’d immediately woken Bryce up after he had fallen asleep so that the man existed in some sort of twilight haze. Chuck understood how that was. He was in a haze himself—mentally, at least. Physically, he felt old. No, ancient. His joints creaked and groaned with every movement. He was no longer nearly thirty but nearly three hundred, stuck with the guise of a much younger man but the soul of an elder.
Bryce Larkin had gotten him assigned to Bunker 77142135. Bryce Larkin had been the one to ensure that Chuck Bartowski would spend five years away from society, would flinch every time he faced open air and crowds. Bryce Larkin had ensured that Chuck Bartowski, never very average to begin with, would never feel normal again.
Bryce Larkin was supposed to be his friend.
Bryce Larkin had screwed him over for life.
Somehow, Chuck found his way to the front steps of the wide, wraparound front porch. Andy sat a few feet away, but he was doing a good job of ignoring everything that went on around them. Like Chuck, his world had been rocked hard today.
Like Chuck, he’d probably carry some scar of it with him forever.
Chuck sat down and stared at the lawns around him, but he saw nothing.
Bryce had gotten him stuck in the bunker.
Bryce had gotten him out of the bunker.
It had been Bryce all along.
“Chuck?” Sarah’s voice came from above him. Chuck turned his head, his eyes tracking until he found his girlfriend. He didn’t know what expression he had on his face, but it must not have been anything that would trip her off. She was standing on the front porch above him, nibbling on her lower lip. Something was up. “Casey and I are running a manhunt to find Faulkner.”
Chuck blinked and nearly asked who she was talking about before his brain kicked back in. Oh. Right. Piers Faulkner, the reason they were at Ezersky Manor at all.
“Beckman and Graham want us to lead the teams for that. We think you’ll be safer at home.”
Safer. Like in a bunker somewhere.
“Oh,” Chuck said.
“So we’ll have an agent escort you back and stay with you.”
“A bodyguard.”
“Right. But only until I can get there. I’ll be staying with you tonight.” Sarah bit her lip again, and Chuck broke through the old man haze enough to realize something might be up. “Do you think you could wait up for me? We need to talk.”
He didn’t know how much more he could take today. But the haze made him nod his head.
Something in the movement must have tipped Sarah off. Her entire expression changed from apprehensive to suspicious. “Chuck? Is something the matter?”
“I…” Chuck cast a helpless look over at where Andy sat in silence a few feet away.
Understanding, Sarah reached down and wrapped her hand around his elbow, pulling him to his feet. “C’mon, it’s a pretty day. Let’s take a walk. Get away from the madness for a little while.”
Chuck nodded again. His bones creaked as he walked beside Sarah. As a result, he limped a little in a way that made Sarah’s brows knit together in concern. She clutched his arm tighter until they were out of earshot of Andy and Sergei Ezersky, on a little path that led through a grove of palm trees. Some distant part of Chuck admired the geometric patterns the bark made as it crawled its way up to the palm fronds so many feet overhead.
“Chuck, talk to me,” Sarah said. “What’s going on? Is it about Bryce?”
A hollow, barking laugh emerged before Chuck could stop himself. “You could say that, yeah.”
“He’s going to be fine. The gunshot was a through and through, and according to them, it missed all of his major arteries. He’ll be in rehab a few weeks and—that’s not what’s bothering you.” Sarah turned Chuck to face her; he went without protesting, though he continued to stare at something far beyond her. He wasn’t sure how he was feeling, except that it was deep and complicated. There was also the ineluctable knowledge that once this odd fog cleared from his brain, the world was going to look very different.
Inside the fog, though, it was safe. Safe and confusing.
“Chuck, what’s going on? You’re starting to scare me.”
“It was Bryce,” Chuck said.
“What?”
“It was Bryce.” He was repeating himself. “He wanted to talk to me and the paramedics were busy, and they were okay with it, so I got in the ambulance, and he thanked me.”
Sarah looked wary now. “For what?”
“For being a good person. For forgiving him.”
“But you have, haven’t you? You haven’t said anything about what happened in September lately. I thought you’d just forgiven him.”
“It’s not about September.” It should have been amusing that their minds went to the same place first. A sign that they spent too much time together? Or just a sign that they were a couple able to finish each other’s sentences already? “About the bunker.”
“About the…oh.”
“For years,” Chuck said as though she hadn’t spoken at all, “for years, I thought I had been stationed there because I was some kind of spy-reject. A failure or a screw-up or something. But I never was, was I?”
“Chuck…”
But Chuck twisted away from her. The fog had begun to dissipate. “I busted my ass when Fleming told me about the opportunity to help my country. Here was the purpose I was looking for. Sure, I thought the Army was an odd fit…”
“Chuck.” Sarah stepped in front of him again, blocking his view of whatever it was he had been looking at. “What happened?”
“Bryce happened. He thanked me for forgiving him about getting me stuck in a bunker. That’s why he’s been giving me all of those cryptic clues about Project Omaha.” Chuck closed his eyes. He wanted to punch something. He also wanted to cry, though he’d never give in to the second option. He wasn’t a crier by nature. Neither was he really the type to punch anything, but it would have felt so good at the moment. He forced all of that back, deep down inside. “Couldn’t tell me about it himself, but he wanted forgiveness. Go figure.”
“Project Omaha,” Sarah said, horror in her voice. “The menu in Greece.”
“We were right about one thing: Bryce left it there for me to find. And he’s also the reason I am the way I am today. Lucky me, right?”
“Bryce got you stuck in the bunker,” Sarah said, sounding like she couldn’t believe it. She probably couldn’t, Chuck figured. He barely believed it himself, no matter how much damned sense it made. Bryce was his friend. Friends weren’t supposed to do things like this to each other. Friends were supposed to help protect each other.
“Maybe he had a reason,” he heard himself say. “But apparently, I’m not a screw-up.”
“I never thought you were,” Sarah said.
“Well, that’s one of us.”
Sarah hugged him, hard, and held on. “I’m sorry,” she said when he finally hugged her back. “I’m so sorry, Chuck. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
“How could you have?” Chuck closed his eyes again and held on. It hurt less.
“I’ll deal with this,” Sarah said. “I’ll talk to Graham and Beckman, get Bryce reassigned somewhere else. You won’t have to see him again.”
That wouldn’t cure anything, Chuck knew. But he just nodded his thanks and leaned against her, taking what comfort he could.
4 FEBRUARY 2008
THE BACHELOR PAD
19:02 PST
“I’ll be fine,” Chuck told Sarah and Casey for the third time. He was sitting on the couch at the Bachelor Pad, watching Casey and Sarah deck themselves out for a manhunt. Faulkner had been spotted at Union Station, though he’d just as quickly vanished. It would be a long night of searching the rail-yard for the agents, it looked like. “I’m a big boy, guys. You can leave me by myself for one night.”
Casey turned to Sarah with a See? expression. Sarah, however, had a stubborn look in place. “I don’t think you should be alone. We can tell Beckman and Graham that you came along as tech support—”
“Leave the nerd, Walker,” Casey said, rolling his eyes as he pulled on a borrowed FBI Kevlar vest. “He’s not a fragile flower. He’ll be fine.”
“Now you’ve jinxed it,” Sarah said, scowling. She checked the clip on her backup Smith & Wesson. “Are you absolutely sure, Chuck? We’re working with the same team from Friday. They took a real liking to you.”
“I’ll be fine,” Chuck said for the fourth time. “I’m not even all that angry anymore. I’ll drown my sorrows in too many video games and stay inside the apartment, I promise.”
“That’s a double-jinx,” Sarah said sourly.
“And if you turn out to be right, Bartowski and I will let you tell us ‘I told you so.’ Now, c’mon, Walker. Say good-bye to your boyfriend. The team’s waiting outside.” He nodded at Chuck as he pulled on his leather jacket over his vest.
“Fine,” Sarah said, looking distinctly unhappy about the prospect. With Casey waiting at the door, she tucked the S&W away and crossed to Chuck. He gave her a peck on the cheek. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“I am your girlfriend. I expect to be said good-bye to properly.” Sarah wrapped her hand in his collar and gave him a much longer kiss. “There. That’s better. Last chance to—”
“No way. You’re doing this manhunt without me, Walker. Go on.” Chuck put his hands on her shoulders, turned her around, and push-walked her to the door and to Casey. “Happy hunting, you two. I’ll think fond thoughts of you as I’m killing Nazis or aliens or something. Bye.”
He shut the door behind them and waited until he heard their footsteps recede. In truth, he was probably better off going on their manhunt with them. They worked best as a team, something even the bosses acknowledged. But he was so, so tired of keeping it together, pretending to be normal for Casey and Sarah’s sakes. Sure, Sarah understood, but Chuck wanted a few hours to himself to really think. Bryce Larkin had gotten him stuck in a bunker for years. There had to be a reason for that, and the reason was buried firmly in the Phillip Dartmoor file that had sat on his computer desk all weekend, ignored by him.
It was time to stop ignoring it and face it.
Well, first, it was time to take a shower. He still had some of Bryce’s blood on him, and he had sweated pretty heavily—flop sweat and sweat from running around the Ezersky Manor. Chuck went upstairs to grab fresh clothing, deliberately not looking at the manila folder on his desk. In the shower, he let his numb brain remain empty.
Bryce had gotten him stuck in the bunker.
After the shower, he dressed and nuked himself some dinner, and took that upstairs with him. He turned on his computer to let Schnookie McSarahkins run around the kingdom of Athinei for awhile without him, stuffed his mouth full of Ramen. The folder sat in front of him, unopened.
“Come on,” he told himself. “Man up.”
But he didn’t move for the folder. Instead, he finished every bit of Ramen, slurping up the rest of the broth from the bowl. He went downstairs, took off his watch and washed his dishes, put them in the drying rack. He eyed the Playstation as he put his watch on. When he did so, he noticed that the face was still actively showing Sarah and Casey’s locations, now at Union Station. He needed to check something in the wiring he’d noticed while fixing things up at Madame Cotillard’s earlier.
No time like the present. So Chuck pulled out his watch-fixing kit, fixed the wiring problem with a little solder and ingenuity. He set the watch on the coffee table to cool where he would see it before he tried to leave the apartment again. Then he looked around for something to do.
It was only after he had spent ten minutes organizing the video game boxes in alphabetical order by genre that he finally acknowledged it was time to stop avoiding the problem. With a sigh, he rose to his feet and headed upstairs. The file folder hadn’t moved. He sat at his desk, turned off the monitor where Schnookie was doing a long and thorough inspection of the inside crook of her elbow, and finally opened the file folder.
It didn’t feel heavy, which surprised him. The first few pages were typical: government departments, some of the information redacted, personnel files for one Phillip Henry Dartmoor. This information, Chuck had looked over so many times that he had practically memorized it. So far, there was nothing new in Dartmoor’s file that Chuck didn’t know.
Chuck turned the page and his eyebrows shot up. “Okay,” he said aloud. “That’s new.”
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY.
Phillip Dartmoor, Active Duty Marines, rated E-5, Staff Sergeant Stationed in the Afghanistan, Killed in Action, two months shy of his twenty-fifth birthday. The military profile Chuck had pulled up on him had given him all of that information. It hadn’t, however, mentioned that Phillip Dartmoor had been stationed at first Fort Bragg for two months, and at Lackland Air Force Base for six months, prior to the TDY on which he’d been killed.
Chuck turned the page.
PROJECT OMAHA, JOINT INTELLIGENCE. It bore the CIA’s logo, some detail lost due to the graininess of the photocopy Casey’s contact had procured, as well as a case file number. TOP SECRET/EYES ONLY was stamped across the entire page. No wonder it had taken Casey’s contact so long to get this information.
Chuck turned the page again. A list of mission objectives sprang up at him. He only needed to see the word “subliminal” and “mental data capacity” to know.
Holy frak. Project Omaha had been some branch of the Intersect project. Chuck read on: the participants in Project Omaha were young men and women, tested across the country for aptitude, subliminal data retention, military knowledge, fitness, and a number of other factors. Twenty-six candidates were pulled from all over the country, all of them below thirty and most of them active duty military.
A tingle ran up Chuck’s spine. Fleming’s CIA contact had had very specific orders for him: sign up for the Army. Get in shape, prepare to go through Basic Training and then Officer Candidate School. He would receive further orders upon graduation.
They had been grooming him for Project Omaha.
After the mission objectives began the pages and pages of testing on Phillip Dartmoor. His initial application for Special Duty, his aptitude levels, reports from his Physical Fitness Tests going all the way back to Basic. His subliminal data retention rate was high, almost as high as the rate Ellie had tested Chuck at a couple months before in Washington D.C. He’d scored straight A’s in the classes he’d taken on the military’s dime at a local college. His fitness was top notch.
He was the perfect candidate.
The testing numbers changed when Omaha began. Phillip Dartmoor remained the perfect test subject for the first few weeks, then medical reports of migraines and nosebleeds began to populate test results with terrifying frequency until Dartmoor was dismissed from the project and given a month’s leave. He was deployed five weeks later.
The page after that showed the autopsy results: two gunshots to the chest, another to the lower leg. A protest, and Dartmoor’s unit had been sent to suppress the riots. It seemed legitimate to Chuck, if terribly sad.
Following that, though, were the eyewitness reports, three from other soldiers in Dartmoor’s unit and one from a bystander. Each told about how a flash-bang grenade had gone off, startling the members of the unit. Dartmoor had gone absolutely still, his eyes rolling about in his head like he was having some sort of seizure. But the man hadn’t started seizing. Instead, he’d stopped moving altogether, then had turned and fired the entire magazine from his M16 into the crowd and at his fellow troops.
It had been his best friend—another man in his unit—who’d had to shoot him while he had been reloading.
The best friend had been honorably discharged from the Marines and according to the Omaha Project files, paid handsomely to keep quiet. The file didn’t say what had happened to the others.
Phillip Dartmoor was posthumously diagnosed with a form of schizophrenia that Chuck couldn’t pronounce.
Abruptly, Chuck pushed the file away from him, feeling sick. He was absolutely positive that Phillip Dartmoor had never suffered a day of schizophrenia in his life. Phillip Dartmoor had had some sort of Intersect.
And it had turned him into a monster.
How many other branches of these sorts of projects were there? Was he really the only Intersect running around? Chuck gripped the edge of his desk and forced himself to breathe, in and out, while he considered all of the possibilities. Graham and Beckman had made such a big deal out of the fact that he could contain the Intersect without any trouble and that he could be treated like a workhorse to assimilate and filter data. And if there had been other projects like Omaha, maybe there was a reason for that. Maybe there was something different about his brain and the Intersect.
Maybe he would go crazy and lose it after a bright flash like Phillip Dartmoor had.
Resolutely now, he turned on both monitors, minimized Schnookie, and opened up every computer safe-guarding app he had created over the past few months. It wasn’t quite a Faraday cage, but it would have to do. The last thing he wanted the bosses knowing was that he was looking deeper into the history of their precious Intersect project and stopping him before he could find out the salient details.
He flipped back in the file until he got to Omaha’s case number. Typing that into the search engine made a few warnings pop up; Chuck moved around each one with ease, rolling his eyes at the laxity of the government’s security. Finally, he pulled up the full report on Omaha, something he had been loath to do. No matter how careful he was now, Digital Dave’s team would find him.
The report started out the way the papers in Phillip Dartmoor’s file had. The names of the doctors and project lead were all redacted for their own privacy. But there was a list of participants and their statuses.
Chuck printed that out and pinned it to the former Where’s Bryce Larkin? board, now called Project What Now?
He found Phillip Dartmoor’s name on the list, tenth out of nineteen participants. Twelve of them had been KIA, three were in various psychiatric hospitals, and the final two were deceased due to unrelated medical conditions. Chuck checked on these. He didn’t personally consider a bullet to the head much of a “medical condition” so much as a “cover up for a conspiracy.”
Bryce had saved his life.
Bryce had put him in the bunker.
On the desk, his phone rang. Chuck walked over and hit the speakerphone button. “Hey, Dave. Took you awhile.”
“What are you doing, Chuck?” Dave sounded panicked. “You’ve tripped three of my alarms in the past fifteen minutes alone. I’ve got people calling me, out of their minds panicking because there’s been some kind of terrorist attack.”
“No terrorist. Just me. It’s fine, Dave.”
Now, aggravation colored Dave’s voice. “If it’s fine, why didn’t you get clearance like a respectful person would have?”
“Would have taken too much time.” Chuck copied the entire file to an encrypted folder on his hard drive. “Okay, I’m out of there. You can kick me out of the system.”
“What the hell was so important you had to interrupt ‘Stargate’ night at the O’Connor house?” Keys clicked on Dave’s side of the phone line and not two seconds later, an “Illegal Unauthorized Login Attempt” window flashed on Chuck’s screen. He acknowledged it, cleaned his cache, and closed the browser window. “Is something going on?”
“I don’t know,” Chuck said truthfully. “Thanks for calling and not sending the men in black after me.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time I had knowingly committed treason for you or your girlfriend,” Dave said. “Please don’t use whatever information you just stole to blow up a building, plane, or person, okay? My reputation really can’t handle it, and killing is bad.”
“Can do. Thanks, Dave.”
“Night, Chuck.”
After he’d clicked “End” on his phone, Chuck walked over to the Project What Now? board and began tacking other things to the board about Phillip Dartmoor.
Why, he wasn’t sure. He studied the files, hoping some analyst had slipped and had forgotten to black-line a scientist’s name. None of it overlapped the timeline from the original Intersect project files Beckman had sent over, being created years later. He could find no connections, unsurprising since he couldn’t find any names beyond the P and O codenames from the original Intersect files.
Thinking really hard about it didn’t make him flash on Project Omaha again. He had only what he’d accessed during that first flash in Greece and then on his maybe-related flash upon arriving in Southern California. Though what Whiskey, Tango, and Foxtrot had to do with that, he didn’t know.
Nineteen participants. Twenty-six letters of the alphabet. It didn’t really fit all that well.
Frowning, he returned to Phillip Dartmoor’s file. That could have been him, Chuck thought. If Bryce hadn’t done…something.
So what had Bryce done? And how had he known about Project Omaha in the first place?
Chuck sent Dave a text message heads up and broke past the firewall again. The other man had to be tearing his hair out by now, but Chuck had to know. He’d buy them a cruise. Or a trip to Disneyworld as payment. Dave would grouse about it being hush money, but in the end, he’d back Chuck up.
Chuck’s own military file was easier to access than it should have been. He printed it out, closed the system, and tacked the information sheet next to Phillip Dartmoor’s.
Their scores were close. Dartmoor did better overall on fitness, but Chuck’s aptitude and data retention rates scored in the higher percentile. Chuck frowned. If he had done better in fitness, he would have surpassed Dartmoor completely. But his fitness scores at Basic were abysmal, barely passing and—
Wait, that wasn’t right.
Chuck’s frown deepened as he stepped away from the board and opened his closet. He rooted around on the top shelf until he found the box Ellie had brought over a couple of weeks before, a box that contained some of his memories from Stanford and the few things he had brought home from Basic. Ellie had kept it even when she had suspected he might be dead, and it was important to him, so it must be in there somewhere. He dug around until he found it: his Physical Fitness Excellence badge. Doing so well on the PFT had nearly killed him, so the badge was a mark of pride.
Defiantly, he pinned the badge next to his file.
“Guess I know how Bryce did it,” he said, rolling his eyes. Five years in a damned bunker all because of poor physical fitness, a hacked score.
He owed Bryce his life.
He had to remember that.
Bryce had gotten him stuck in a bunker. For five years.
He owed Bryce his life.
His phone chirped; a text message from Sarah. She was checking in, probably making sure he hadn’t lost his mind and really was drowning his sorrows in video games like he’d promised he would. Chuck gave the Project What Now? board a sardonic look before he texted back that he was just fine.
Angry, confused, a little terrified, and twice as determined as before to get the Intersect out of his head, but he was fine.
He wondered if Bryce was still stable at the hospital, if the tests had revealed that he’d survive. Would Chuck wake up tomorrow and feel differently about Bryce? The information about Project Omaha painted a stark picture, a snapshot in time that proved to Chuck one thing: nothing good could come from having the Intersect in his head. It hurt to flash sometimes. Would migraines and nosebleeds follow?
And as long as the thing in his head belonged to the government, so did he. And so did, he realized, Sarah. She wouldn’t leave until he left. Hell, even Casey had made noises that he’d stay as long as Chuck did, and Ellie and Devon were probably the same way.
Chuck had to get them all out of this. Somehow.
He made Dave’s blood pressure shoot through the roof again by breaking the security a third time and downloading a few more classified files. Eventually Dave was going to pass his activity up the chain and Chuck would receive a chewing out like nothing else from the bosses, but he hardly cared about that right now. All of these were dumped in his encrypted folder, backed up on a thumb drive, which went in his pocket and wouldn’t leave his person unless it was forced off of him. He also backed them up in an online drive and added extra security measures there. It was paranoid, but he didn’t care.
He got another text from Sarah, a report that they hadn’t found Faulkner anywhere in Union Station, though they’d gotten a hit on the GPS in his car a few miles away. They were en route to check that. Chuck made a joke about some video game he hadn’t played in a couple of years in reply, and received a smiley face in return.
It felt like lying not to call Sarah right away and let her know everything he’d found out. But she already knew the most important part, that Bryce had gotten him stuck in the bunker. The rest could wait until she got there later.
He read over files until his eyes began to ache. Then, and only then, he leaned back, stretching out his shoulders and lower back. The Project What Now? board was absolutely covered in pieces of paper that had been circled and marked with red sharpie so that it looked a little like Chuck had bled all over the board. Maybe he had. He shook his head at that absurd observation, grabbed his empty water glass, and headed downstairs to get a refill. It would be a long night before Sarah would get there and they could talk. Absently, he wondered if he should take some snacks out to the agent guarding the courtyard.
He forgot about all of that when he reached the bottom step of the circular staircase and blinked at his living room. “Andy? What are you doing here?”
Andy Kohlmeier, standing right in front of the computer desk in the living room, didn’t move or even acknowledge his presence. Chuck blinked a couple of times, wondering if eyestrain could really cause mirages, but Andy remained there, standing at parade rest. Not looking at Chuck.
Something began to crawl up Chuck’s back and his neck. Something was not right here. “Andy?” he asked again, stepping slowly into the living room. “What’s going on? Is something the matter?”
He took a step toward the other man, though every instinct screamed that something was wrong. And that was when he spotted the movement in the corner of his eye. He froze for a second and then slowly turned.
Standing in his kitchen, looking completely at home save for the gun in his hand, was Piers Faulkner. Chuck’s stomach turned inside out at the sight of the man. Andy continued to stare forward like some automaton, ignoring both of them completely.
“Delta,” Piers Faulkner said, stepping around the kitchen island and smiling at Chuck. “How nice of you to finally join us.”
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