55 — Ignition

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will. — Mohandas Gandhi


4 FEBRUARY 2008
SAN LEANDRO MEMORIAL PARK
23:25 PST

Chuck never stood a chance. The minute something grabbed his ankle, he was hauled from the tunnel. He let out a shout and threw up his arms up to protect himself.

It turned out to be a good move. Andy let go of his leg and tried to drive a fist right into Chuck’s stomach; by sheer dumb luck, Chuck lashed out, knocking Andy’s fist away. His other hand, the one clutching the rock, swung up on its own accord toward Andy’s temple.

Andy blocked him, grabbing Chuck’s elbow. If there had been murder or at least anger in his eyes, Chuck might have handled it better. But Andy’s eyes were completely blank of everything. Chuck struggled hard against Andy’s grip on his elbow, but the other man had a grasp like a gold digger clutching a diamond ring. Chuck heard himself actually whimper as his entire body bucked, trying to get away. He reached out blindly with his free arm, grabbed a handful of cloth, and yanked.

Andy, caught off balance, went forward. There was a loud crack when Andy’s forehead met the top of the tunnel. His head snapped back, his grip loosening for a fraction of a second. It was all Chuck needed. He kicked out, knocked Andy’s feet out from under him, and scrambled backwards through the tunnel. By the time he reached the other side, Chuck had managed to right himself. He stumbled to a sprint and ran. It was the panicked flight of prey, but that was what he had become.

He didn’t even have a weapon anymore. He’d dropped the rock. His hands were shaking too badly.

It took him a few steps to notice that something was different. He could hear Andy behind him, getting to his feet. But every other time he’d been scared before—and there were plenty of those times throughout the life of Operation Prometheus, far more than the bosses and his partners would prefer—every other time, the world had blurred and shifted so that only select details broke through the haze of his own perception. He could remember some details vividly, while entire spans of time were fuzzy in his brain.

But right now, it wasn’t like that. Right now, he noticed everything. Right now, he could see every finite detail in the trees as he ran past, the way the leaves twitched and rustled against each other. Other details were murky because it was dark and the park didn’t have the best lighting, but his sense of hearing wasn’t hampered by the dark. He could hear the way his feet hit against the grass. He felt the cold of the February chill against his skin, and the soul-searing agony every time his left leg touched down, aggravating what was probably his enflamed knee.

He could feel in minute, precise detail just how fast his heart was racing.

And he heard, or maybe he sensed, the sound of Andy behind him, coming up. It was like experiencing the world in high definition when he’d been stuck with standard for years.

He didn’t know what it was, but his throbbing knee aside, it was kind of awesome. Or it would have been awesome, if he weren’t on the run for his life from an empty-eyed madman.

Chuck didn’t have a hope of outrunning Andy, not when the other man had that single-minded resolve and shoes on his side. There wasn’t any chance of winning in a fight, either. He was already envisioning the many ways Andy was going to hurt him, and the sheer, unending amount of pain, as Andy’s footsteps gained on him.

His imagination seemed to still be stuck in standard definition. If he survived, he’d be grateful for that fact later.

The second Andy was right on his tail, though, Chuck did something unexpected: he waited for Andy to make the grab, and stopping abruptly, threw his upper body forward. Andy went flying like one of Spider-man’s foes. Chuck, thrown off-balance by the sudden shift in weight, fell to his knees.

He watched with a sort of sick, detached horror as Andy’s body flipped over like some kind of deranged toy. He hit a tree trunk with a hard thump.

Andy, or Foxtrot, or whoever he was, lay on the ground for a second, obviously stunned.

Maybe he’d done it, Chuck thought. Maybe he’d—

Andy climbed to his feet. The movements were as mechanical as everything else he’d done since coming into Chuck’s apartment, but they were slower now. Clearly, he was injured, even if his mind didn’t acknowledge the pain. But when he came out of the trance or whatever it was holding onto his mind, turning him into a robot, he was going to be in for an ugly surprise.

Assuming this was actually a trance and not just Andy’s core personality. No, Foxtrot’s core personality. Andy Kohlmeier had never existed. Or had he?

Chuck took a step back, warily. He’d broken the Project Lincoln trance. It was possible that Andy or Foxtrot could do the same thing, right? Right? The other man wouldn’t stop chasing him in this Lincoln trance, possibly until and even after he was dead. And if he chased Chuck into public, would he stop because there were bystanders around?

“Andy,” Chuck said, his voice hoarse. “Andy, c’mon, this isn’t you. Stop this. Don’t do this.”

Andy finished climbing to his feet. His head moved about, his eyes tracking until they landed on Chuck.

They didn’t change. Andy moved forward. He was definitely walking slower, but his steps were as sure as ever.

Chuck nearly wet himself. “Andy,” he said again. His voice was a little stronger, which was good because all he could hear inside his head was Run, moron! ”Andy, you’ve got to be in there somewhere. Don’t do this, you don’t want to hurt me. This isn’t you. You’re not a killer.”

Though, Andy might have been. Chuck had no idea. He didn’t even know the guy’s real name, after all.

“Please,” he said, holding his hands up in entreaty. “Don’t listen to Carver. You can shake this, we can take him down together, we can make this right—”

He saw something in Andy shift—not emotionally, but physically—the other man’s hips moving and his arms coming up. It happened in absurdly slow motion. Chuck knew before Andy had even finished throwing the punch that the other man was going for his solar plexus again.

Chuck moved, too, in that same weird slow-motion. His hand, still raised in a plea, cut down, like he was trying to slam a basketball toward the ground. He knocked Andy’s punch aside. His other arm went up for balance.

Andy struck out and grabbed Chuck’s raised hand at the elbow. He twisted and in a move that was too fast for even Chuck’s new senses, locked Chuck’s arm behind him, stepping around Chuck. Pain shot all the way through Chuck’s side as Andy pushed down hard on his elbow and shoulder, forcing him to a prone position.

Chuck struggled down halfway and surprised Andy by dropping all the way to his knees. He turned in the same direction Andy had pulled his arm, dug one foot into the ground, and half-tackled Andy. It was sloppy and it wrenched his arm like nothing else, but it caught Andy unawares. They both tumbled. Andy’s grip loosened enough for Chuck to pull his arm free.

He lurched up, scrabbling for purchase in a brief but furious wrestling match. Somehow he ended up kneeling over Andy, his knee on the other man’s stomach, hand trapped under Andy’s leg even as he used his other forearm to hold Andy down. “Andy—no! Stop—”

Andy freed an arm. The right hook caught Chuck at the base of his jaw and sent him flying back. His entire world flickered and went red as a dentist drill drove a hole straight through his brain. He screamed.

The odd hypersensitivity only intensified the pain. It was like getting hit in the face with a concrete truck.

He lay on the ground, positive he was mostly dead. It was the partially alive part that was worse. When Andy grabbed him by the front of his shirt, now torn and bloodied, Chuck didn’t fight back. He couldn’t. All he could see now was a blurry version of a too-clear world. Everything in his body ached. What wasn’t aching was throbbing. And what wasn’t throbbing or aching had been stabbed by a knife that some sadistic devil had gleefully twisted. He felt like somebody had dumped kerosene on him and tossed a match. His skin was all but crackling and peeling under the heat of flames he couldn’t see.

Andy put him in a headlock.

“Good work, Foxtrot.” Carver’s voice appeared first. Chuck struggled to focus his streaming eyes so that he could see the scientist, who emerged from behind a tree. The gun in his hand was unmistakable, even with Chuck’s vision cutting in and out. “It seems Delta’s time away from us has been…detrimental to his programming.”

Chuck spat a bloody wad on the ground. His entire face burned. “Go to hell,” he still managed to say, though each word quaked through his head, reverberating again and again with painful echo. The world wavered between black and clear. “Both of you can go to hell.”

“Tsk-tsk,” Carver said, stepping closer. “Language, Delta.”

Chuck’s reply turned the air blue. It only made Carver give a small smile.

“Yes,” he said. “We have so much work to do. You’ve learned so many bad habits in your years away. That would be the fault of your handlers, I expect. And Agent Larkin.”

“Wh-what about Bryce? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Foxtrot, a little gentler, if you please. We don’t want to damage the goods even more than we already have.”

“What about Bryce?” Chuck asked again, straining forward. Andy, listening to Carver’s commands, slackened his grip, and Chuck almost moved to attack, but his knee crumpled at the last second. Andy caught him before he hit the ground and pulled him to his feet again.

This made Carver frown. “Foxtrot,” he said, “on second thought, deliver Jack from Sally’s care.”

Chuck had a split-second to wonder why Carver had pronounced the word “deliver” so strangely—he’d accented the first syllable oddly—before Andy wrenched his arm behind him in a hold. He whimpered. “Uncle! Uncle! Wha-why are you doing this?”

“It’s not for your sake, Delta, don’t worry.”

“I—ah, ow.” Andy, behind Chuck, only cinched his grip tighter. “If it’s not for my sake, then why?”

“The pair of you might have been my brightest pupils, but you always needed a little more encouragement than the others.” Carver wasn’t looking at Chuck, but at Foxtrot behind him. His eyes were glittering with something like malice—madness, Chuck realized through the haze of agony searing down his leg. He’d thought Carver was insane before, but he never realized just how much of a psychopath he was dealing with.

And this psychopath was the one holding all of the strings to Chuck’s existence as a very scary meat puppet.

“Isn’t that right, Foxtrot?” Carver asked. “It’s your fault I had to make an example out of Tango. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, sir,” Andy said, his voice entirely emotionless.

“Make an example of…” Chuck started to say, but the sudden headache slammed into him harder than Andy’s fist ever had. He blinked and he was standing not in a clearing in the middle of a Los Angeles park, but in a field, in the cold, in the middle of nowhere, at dawn. A woman lay on the ground, a small, neat hole in her head.

There was blood on the lenses of her rimless glasses.

Kneeling over her, looking stricken, was the very same man holding Chuck back now. His name wasn’t Andy. It wasn’t even Foxtrot. It was Gunnery Sergeant Garret Kohl, who’d been dishonorably discharged from the Marines—or would have been had he not volunteered for Project Omaha…and then Project Lincoln.

Just like now, Carver stood in front of both of them—Tango, Foxtrot, Chuck, the others—holding the gun.

Chuck no longer felt the inferno of agony. He was suddenly very, very cold. Whatever denial there had been about all of this happening, that this couldn’t be real, that this wasn’t his life, there was none now.

“You utter bastard,” he said. He strained against Kohl’s arm-lock, though he had no idea what for. There wasn’t anything he could do, not with Carver pointing that gun at him. It didn’t matter. Chuck still struggled. “What the hell have you done to us, you bastard!”

“Foxtrot!” Carver snapped.

Kohl applied pressure to Chuck’s shoulder and elbow again, forcing him down. He cried out in pain, especially since he’d landed on his left knee, but he continued to fight, twisting, straining away from Kohl. Carver. Carver had done this to them. He needed to stop Carver.

For Tango’s sake. For Kohl’s sake. For his sake.

Kohl forced him to the ground. Chuck just fought harder.

“Delta, control yourself,” Carver said.

“Rot in hell,” Chuck said, even though Andy was pushing his face into the ground. “You took my life away, I’m not letting you do that to me again!”

“Oh, Delta, Delta, Delta.” Still holding the gun up, Carver knelt—not too close to where Chuck struggled on the ground, but near enough. “You always were the most idiotic of them all, weren’t you? Too bad I’m smarter than you. Oh, and,” now his eyes gleamed with that unholy madness that made Chuck’s insides freeze, “I think I’ll go to the fair this May.”

Instantly, Chuck stopped fighting. It wasn’t like the world stopped or ceased to exist like it had earlier, when he had run for the staircase and obviously hadn’t made it. No, calm drifted over everything, like somebody had gently drawn the curtains. The fight drained from Chuck’s muscles and so did most of the pain. It felt pretty nice. Everything felt good again, good and calm, and he could possibly lie like this for hours, at peace—

You’re being controlled, moron.

Well, at peace except for Casey’s voice, which was rather annoying no matter what state of relaxation Chuck was in. He liked the other man, he really did, but Casey could get rather gruff. And right now was peace-time.

“Go away, Casey,” Chuck mumbled, and his mouth tasted like dirt. Why was that?

Oh. He was on the ground. Andy had been shoving him into the ground. Well, that was rather silly.

If you don’t fight, he wins.

So what?

So you won’t see your girlfriend or your sister or the gnome ever again.

“Get him to his feet.” Carver’s voice cut through the torpor a little. Chuck’s body still felt light and heavy in turns. He vaguely realized he was no longer being crushed into the dirt, but standing on his own two feet. His left leg hurt.

Peace-time had to end. But why? It felt so nice to just drift…

No.

It wasn’t Casey’s voice this time, Chuck realized, but his own, coming from some place inside him that he hadn’t really acknowledged, even though he’d known it was there the whole time.

No. End this, Chuck. Only you can.

He wanted to ask: but how? How can I do that when the world is drifty and things only hurt a little bit and there’s a madman with a gun and his mindless little minion?

You have once. Figure it out, moron.

Okay, that was Casey’s voice again. Maybe his head a little too full.

It was hard to concentrate when his thoughts were sliding over one another, interrupting and slipping away like they were coated in Teflon. He knew he was being walked somewhere—where, he couldn’t determine, for that thought eluded his questing fingers—with Carver walking backwards in front of him, the gun aimed at his chest, and Andy gripping his shoulder and elbow. Chuck had to break away from them, no matter how good and numb everything felt right now.

He had broken away once. What did that mean? This weird peace-time was…it was something Carver had done to him, with the words about—about… Chuck couldn’t quite remember. But it was important. For some reason, it was important that he fight, that he remember the tranquility was a bad thing.

Carver will kill everything you love. He threatened to, once before.

Even in his dopey state, Chuck knew that was a bad thing. He struggled to hold onto the idea, though it slipped and skidded through his mental fingers. He should be frantic, but instead everything felt like it was floating on a breeze. He needed that to stop. But how? Wait, he’d broken something Carver had done to him, hadn’t he? When was that?

Chuck stumbled. The world turned red around the edges as he jarred his bad knee. But the second Kohl pulled him to his feet, serenity began to spread through his body once more. He felt it coming on in a wave, and the part of him that wasn’t trapped in softness struggled harder. He’d kicked Carver’s machinations once before. Recently, his brain pointed out. He’d done so recently.

When he’d woken up at the computer.

But how?

A flash, Casey’s voice whispered. So flash, moron.

How? Chuck asked again to the world, but the world didn’t reply. Flashes weren’t things he controlled; he looked at screens and the information that Beckman and Graham sent, and sometimes the flashes hit and sometimes they left him alone. He was not in control of the Intersect. The Intersect controlled him.

Just like Carver.

“This way, Delta.” Carver’s voice was fuzzing in and out like an old radio receiver. Chuck felt his body turn as Kohl guided him in a new direction. He trudged onward, thinking like a drunk, whose thoughts wouldn’t connect; they were vital and important and almost lovely, but razor sharp, too. “Foxtrot, once he’s secured in the car, clean yourself up and kill Agents Casey and Walker. The sister, too. Time we made good on that threat.”

He’d forced himself to flash once, but when had that been and wait a second—had they just—

The Santa Monica Pier. For a split-second, it was like he was really there, though he knew he hadn’t gone anywhere, that everything in his head was a happy fog that felt nice and almost clean after years of doubt and fear. He could taste the cotton candy on the air—kill Agents Casey and Walker? What the—listen to the crowds of families, enjoy the sea breeze; think about the bomb and the madman behind it all. Laszlo Mahnovksi. Now there was a name, though Chuck had no idea why anybody’s parents would name their child Laszlo and—he had to stop Carver.

A map of the Santa Monica Pier. An aerial map. He couldn’t let Kohl near Casey or Sarah, they’d never suspect that Andy Kohlmeier was actually—he’d flashed on the map. At the Pier, he’d been running after Sarah, watching the way her ponytail bobbed up and down with every step, and he’d been thinking about the map, and he’d flashed but it was on something in his head—

Chuck flashed.

It wasn’t a full flash, not one of the ordeals that would leave his head feeling a little too tender for comfort. It was, at most, a reprise of the very same flash he’d had on the Santa Monica Pier, just a map and some structural specifications.

It was enough.

The fog cleared. He had a split-second warning to brace himself before the sensation returned: not just the weird high-definition vision and hearing, but the pain, oh, the agony of it, in his jaw and his leg and his ribcage and his arms. He gritted his teeth hard, which only made his jaw hurt more, but it kept him from whimpering. It kept him from giving himself away.

They were still near the apartment, but halfway across the park. Carver really was going to take him away, Chuck realized. His body went icy cold when everything finally processed: Carver would take him from his life, would put him in some permanent trance. He would kill Casey, Awesome. Ellie. Sarah. And he’d probably come back and clean out Morgan, half the Buy More, and some of Burbank just for the hell of it.

Casey and Sarah had no idea what was coming for them if Chuck didn’t do something and even worse, Ellie…He couldn’t think about that. If he thought about that, his brain would stutter to a stop and then he wouldn’t be able to stop Carver. And he had to stop Carver. He had no choice.

Could he escape? No, if he ran, and he suspected he wouldn’t be able to run far with the way his leg was literally quivering every time his foot touched down, that wouldn’t solve anything. He had to neutralize Carver somehow, make it so that Carver wouldn’t be able to give Kohl or him any of those orders. So he had to neutralize Carver’s voice.

And then he had to get Carver far away from him for forever and—

One thing at a time, Chuck. It was Sarah’s voice that cut through his terror now. The fear receded the tiniest bit.

So he had to take out Carver’s ability to command him. That meant a jab to the throat very much like the one he’d given Carver earlier. He ran down the list of moves he’d seen Casey or Sarah do. The problem was that most of these were frontal attacks and Carver was not only too far out of Chuck’s reach for a simple lunge to surprise him, he was also facing away, leading Chuck and Kohl across the park. To where, Chuck still didn’t know.

He could risk the lunge. But was that smart, with his leg like this? He’d have to break away from Kohl in the process, since Kohl still had his elbow. It was easy to startle a regular guard with normal, human emotions. Kohl wasn’t like that, though. Whatever phrase Carver had used on him, it had returned him to that blank slate from earlier. It was a pure and total stab in the dark, but Chuck guessed he wouldn’t startle easily enough for Chuck to neutralize Carver.

Chuck had been up the creek without a paddle before, of course, but had it ever been this hopeless? He couldn’t afford not to do anything. But what the hell could he do?

Use the weapons you have on hand, Casey had always said.

He had no weapons. All he had was the Intersect that Bryce Larkin had saddled with him, and no self-defense lessons. He didn’t even have his watch or his cell phone. The only weapon he really had was himself. Yeah, that was a big help. The only reason he was a weapon was because somebody had turned him into one.

Except…

He wasn’t the only weapon here. He’d heard Carver giving Kohl orders, using the code-phrases. Audio triggers. After all, the last thing he remembered from before he’d woken up at the computer in the middle of a flash had been Carver’s voice. So Carver controlled the Lincoln soldiers through the use of his voice. But what if his voice changed? Voices changed due to sickness, sometimes aging. Surely a man like Carver would have thought about that.

Something spurted through Chuck. It almost felt like hope. Carver wouldn’t have trained his victims to respond to his voice alone. That was why he’d pronounced the phrase so oddly when he had controlled Kohl earlier. So nobody would accidentally set off one of his victims unknowingly.

Triggering Kohl to go against Carver would be almost too easy—except, Chuck realized, that Carver could simply deploy another control phase and set Kohl right back on Chuck.

Chuck would have to make it count. Otherwise, everybody he knew would die. And he only had one chance to make it work. What had Carver said to Kohl? Deliver Jack from Sally’s care? He’d pronounced “deliver” oddly, too. Chuck wasn’t entirely sure what the phrase was meant to do, but it was all he had.

No, he realized. He had more than that: he had the joint-operation-enabled Intersect belonging to the C-I-Friggin’-A. The same Intersect that he had unwittingly used to save his own butt earlier. It had told him a list of code-phrases. He just had to pick one and hope for the best.

He wanted to collapse into the sidewalk and simply cease to exist, his leg and his body hurt so bad, and he was so scared that the world didn’t even seem like it was in color anymore. He almost wanted to cry.

Instead, he indexed the flash in his brain, bringing up the list of trigger commands. They didn’t seem to be associated with any of the seven agents that had been conditioned by Project Lincoln, which made things look somewhat hopeful. Possibly. He deliberately picked the one that sounded the most innocuous.

Carver was a fan of irony.

And when they made a turn on the sidewalk, out of the view of the apartments to their left—Chuck’s apartment building—he made his move. He gritted his teeth hard, threw the last of his sanity to the wind, and dropped to his knee. He let out a scream—it was like kneeling on a hot stove—but used his body to wrench Andy down. When the other man tumbled, Chuck lunged forward, ready to whisper the phrase.

“Don’t move.” The sound of the gun cocking was unmistakable. Chuck looked up slowly, fearfully. Carver had gone beyond affably and indulgently amused by his antics. The scientist looked downright pissed. “Freeze, Foxtrot. They really have taught you more bad habits than I thought, haven’t they, Delta?”

“Go to hell,” Chuck panted, breathing shallowly to avoid screaming.

“Get a new phrase. Foxtrot—”

Chuck screamed, cutting off Carver in mid-sentence. While the other man blinked at him, Chuck threw himself down on the concrete and whispered, “Rewind that to the fourth frame and stop, please.”

He said it with a lisp, like the Intersect said to.

“Now, if you’ve quite finished being a drama queen,” Carver started to say, “I think it’s time to—Foxtrot? What are you doing?”

Andy Kohlmeier, aka Foxtrot, aka Garret Kohl, simply climbed to his feet, pulled out his gun, and unloaded an entire magazine into Dr. Carver of Project Lincoln. Chuck stared in dazed horror as the silencer jerked with each new shot.

Carver hit the concrete.

Kohl switched to a full magazine, discarding the empty cartridge on the ground. He turned to face Carver—

“FBI! FREEZE!”

Kohl turned, the gun already going up. But the woman, or at least the blurry outline of the woman racing toward them, didn’t wait. She fired. The sound of the gunshots that followed after Kohl’s silent and brutal takedown of Carver seemed unnaturally loud. As was the sound of Kohl’s body hitting the ground just like Carver had only instants before.

4 FEBRUARY 2008
SAN LEANDRO MEMORIAL PARK
23:37 PST

“Agent Bartowski, I really think you should go to a hospital.”

“I’m fine,” Chuck said, though he knew he wasn’t. He’d never been fine and he never would be again, but he didn’t know what to do about that, so he treated it like the dead bodies on the ground: he ignored it. Everything but his body felt better that way. Sure, there was a feeling similar to hysteria building up beneath his sternum, which might erupt out of him in the form of a fit of unstoppable giggles or screams, but if he just ignored it and stared ahead, he’d be fine. Most likely. “I just need to lie down.”

“I don’t think so.” Agent Virginia Grey, the FBI agent Sarah and Casey had planted in the apartment courtyard before they had left, grabbed him by the shoulder when he would have wandered off. She had a large knot swelling near her hairline on the right side of her forehead, but she looked concerned—for him. “At the very least, you have a concussion. And you shouldn’t be standing on that leg.”

He was a weapon. He’d killed a man, and he was a weapon.

“I’m fine,” Chuck said again.

“Please, the paramedics will be here soon, and I think that you need to see a doctor—”

“I can wait inside for one,” Chuck said.

“No, I can’t leave the scene and take you to your apartment, not until the police get here, and I need to contact the ops leaders. Please, just sit down, you’re starting to scare me.”

“You’re the one with a concussion. I didn’t hit my head that hard. And I’ll sit down inside,” Chuck said, and shrugged off the grip she had on his arm. He stepped over one dead body, skirted around the other, and wondered if he should probably feel anything about that. He figured he should, and that he would later. But the second Agent Virginia Grey, thinking Chuck was in danger, had woken up and had mowed Andy-Foxtrot-Kohl-Kohlmeier down with three shots to center mass like any well-trained Quantico agent… From that moment, it was like Chuck was back in the peace-time Carver had forced him into with the trigger phrase.

Right. Because he could be controlled with a trigger, just like a weapon. He was a Manchurian Candidate. He was Jason Bourne without Matt Damon.

He was an assassin.

Like Sarah and Casey were assassins. But Casey and Sarah made that choice, they had the training and the willpower to do whatever they needed to do in the name of good and government.

Chuck…didn’t.

He took the elevator up to his apartment, limping with every step. He was bleeding—he knew he was bleeding, and he could feel the blood, sticky and warm, mixing with rapidly drying sweat and pain. However he felt, and he felt plenty bad, he knew he looked worse. If any of his neighbors wandered out of their apartments, they would scream.

They didn’t. He let himself into the apartment, looked around in a daze for any other mad scientists—Carver was dead, the man who controlled him was dead—lurking in the corners to beat the hell out of him. There weren’t any. He’d promised Grey he would sit down, so he took the nearest seat and just collapsed into it like all of the muscle and sinew in his body had wilted past their expiration date.

The coffee table was splintered—he could see Kohl over him, kicking and kicking, while Chuck fought—and the furniture overturned. The apartment was cold and he didn’t know if it was fading adrenaline—going down the zip-line, running barefoot in the—or just the fact that it was February.

The world twitched in and out, like a TV signal from a bad antenna.

He closed his eyes, but all he saw was Kohl’s slack face, never flinching as he shot Carver, the trigger Chuck had used to end another man’s life. He opened his eyes and let his vision focus and blur. Time passed.

When he blinked, he was staring at the computer screen on the desk. They didn’t use this computer much. Casey occasionally checked emails and Sarah worked on it whenever she was at the Bachelor Pad “keeping an eye on Chuck,” but Chuck never gave it much thought. Absently, not really thinking about it, he reached over, tapping numbers into the keypad.

A panel in the floor opened at his feet, revealing Sarah’s back-up service piece. Oh. Right. He’d forgotten that was there.

Would that have helped him? It would have killed Carver and Kohl more quickly, certainly. But would he have pulled the trigger?

His hand was shaking a little, quivers all up and down his arm, when he reached into the desk and picked it up. Still heavy, he thought vaguely. He pointed it at the door.

Carver was dead. Kohl was dead.

Chuck lowered the gun and placed it on the desk, frowning at the smudges of blood he left on the hilt. Sarah would be annoyed that he was bleeding. She’d be mad about the gun, too, but she’d be angrier that Chuck was dripping out parts of the Chuck she liked—loved? Adored?—so much all over the place.

He told himself to stop, but the blood kept dripping. With a shrug that made his head sing and his leg scream, he wiped his hand on his pants. He looked at the computer screen and then away. The ambulance Agent Grey had called would probably be there soon and so would Casey and Sarah. Another ambulance, only this time it would take Chuck away the same way it had taken Bryce earlier that day.

Was Bryce still alive? Did he know? A frown pulled at Chuck’s face, or it did until he remembered that his jaw was throbbing. He looked at the gun on the desk. Why did Bryce even matter anymore?

Why did anything matter anymore?

Chuck looked at the screen again. Files, he thought. Always files. Beckman and Graham sent them. Casey and Sarah reviewed them. Chuck flashed on them. Carver told him to hack them. The government told Chuck to code them. The Intersect told Chuck to decode them.

What the hell did it matter? Tomorrow there would just be another new file with another new terrorist in it with another new mission to run and another set of ridiculous orders to follow and it was all crap, absolute crap, and—why was Sarah’s name on this file? The words were like a gust through the fog, clearing away the haze and allowing his eyes to narrow and the synapses to begin firing again. Subconsciously, he picked up the gun, his hand tightening around the hilt. If somebody was out to hurt Sarah—

But it was about Project Lincoln.

What? Why would Sarah’s name be on something to do with Project Lincoln? Chuck switched the gun to his left hand so that he could scroll up to the top of the document—the same one Carver had been in the process of getting him to delete in the weird Lincoln-triggered-trance—and see the objectives and title.

An interoffice memo, he saw. The CIA eagle was all but sneering at him from the top of the page. FROM THE DESK OF LANGSTON GRAHAM, DIRECTOR, CIA.

Some official language followed—Eyes Only, Top Secret, the usual bureaucratic bull crap—but Chuck’s eyes cut very quickly to the only important line of the memo.

Please note for the record that Walker, Officer Sarah, has been read into Project Lincoln operations, Level Echo and adjust her pay accordingly.

Chuck looked at the date.

17 October 2007.

Slowly, he put the gun down. Everything stopped hurting. There was no rushing in his ears. There was no agony in his knee, no bright taste of pain in his mouth. The pounding in his skull had ceased completely. So had most of his thoughts, so that there was nothing but silence in his head. He couldn’t even feel his pulse, which had slammed pain through him with every heartbeat a second before.

Sarah had known about Lincoln.

Sarah had known about Lincoln.

Sarah had known about him. She had known about what people could make Chuck do with a simple turn of a phrase. She had been briefed and paid accordingly to know that he was a sleeper assassin.

She had known.

She had kept it from him.

She had let him walk around in his everyday life, let him walk around his sister and his friends and people that he trusted, people that trusted him, and she had known everything. The entire time. From the day he’d come back to Burbank, she had known.

Calmly, far too calmly, Chuck pushed himself away from the desk, leaving the gun and everything it meant—Sarah’s gun—behind him. He hobbled to the couch and pulled off the cushions. His hands were shaking, but he still couldn’t feel anything as he ripped out the padding under the cushions, revealing the box Casey didn’t think he knew about.

Getaway money. Still feeling nothing, Chuck flipped the latch and one by one removed every single passport. He didn’t look at Sarah’s picture in any of them.

He didn’t know what he would do, but he knew it would be bad.

She’d known.

He took out the blocks of money—Euros, dollars, Yuan and Yen—and set it on the same coffee table he’d been knocked over earlier. Then he replaced the passports that didn’t belong to him and loaded a few of the trinkets from the floor around the coffee table back into the box to simulate its weight. It took very little effort to replace everything on the couch where he’d found it. He walked upstairs and collected the crumpled pictures of Ellie and Morgan he had kept sewn up in his parka for all of those years in the bunker. Those went into his pocket. He grabbed his shoes and fresh clothes.

After he’d dressed with particular care to his leg and damaged torso, he crossed to the side of the bed where he’d once created a small cave for sleeping purposes, blocking off the rest of the room. It hurt like nothing else to lower himself to the floor, but he did so, hissing air through his teeth. He unearthed the old shoebox of his Magic the Gathering cards and selected the Prodigal Sorcerer, sliding that into his pocket. Though getting to the floor had hurt, it had nothing on climbing back to his feet. He grabbed the wall to keep upright as dizziness and pain made his vision tilt.

Then, knowing the ambulance would be there soon, knowing that if he couldn’t face a picture, he wouldn’t be able to face the real thing, he loaded the money, all of his passports, and—without looking at it—the picture frame from the computer desk into the bag he’d left lying on the floor upon coming home earlier, and walked out his front door.

She had known the entire time.

By the time he heard the scream of the ambulance siren, he was already driving away, and his leg hurt.

Chuck ignored both and kept driving. He didn’t know how long he drove, just that traffic lights and stop signs and everything blended together. Scenery passed by in a blur where pieces of it seemed oddly stuck in that new high-definition that had become his vision, but time passed in great forgotten chunks. At some point, he stopped at a park and ride lot and swapped license plates. At some other point, he ordered coffee through a drive thru. He filled up his car with gas.

None of it mattered.

Sarah had known the entire time what he was. She had lied to him, had looked him in the face and had completely lied to him when they were supposed to be partners and to trust each other and she had known.

Chuck drove away into the night. They would be pissed, but they had to understand that he couldn’t come back. He’d used a man to kill another man, just a simple turn of a phrase, and another man was dead. And somebody could do the same thing to him, and Sarah had known and had still let him wander around, at any second a danger to everything he loved. And even though he had promised he wouldn’t, he left.

It was better this way.