May 2007
The beta version of the Intersect was up and running. And Art Graham, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, thought that it was damn well about time.
Over two and a half years since the thing had been proposed. Graham wasn’t a man who was used to waiting for results. When he wanted results, he got them right now, or heads rolled.
But that was the least of his concern right at the moment. What concerned him was Northern Ireland.
After thirty-five years of direct rule from the British Crown, a power-sharing agreement had been hammered out for the Irish to take control of Northern Ireland. Democratic Unionist Ian Paisley and Sinn Féin leader Martin McGuinness had been selected to be the leaders of this experiment.
However, some hard liners in Northern Ireland weren’t happy with it. “Can’t believe we have to share power with the bloody Prods,” they’d say. “McGuinness? Fookin’ traitor,” they’d say.
And so, when the CIA got wind of an extreme right wing faction of the IRA that had decided it would be in their best interests to send McGuinness to meet his maker, Director Graham thought that it might be a good idea to stop them. The President fully agreed.
The two agents he had before him were his controversial “A” team, his first-string, the varsity – deep-cover operative Sarah Walker and field agent Bryce Larkin. They’d essentially been on probation for most of the last year, and with good reason.
What Graham couldn’t understand was how Walker could so thoroughly make a mess of the Brazil mission, then get shot down by Hizbollah, and then, turn around and eliminate Alexander Litvinenko so skillfully that the world was convinced that Russia’s FSB had done it. She was an enigma, but according to the psych evals he had seen from Walker’s most recent evaluation, it seemed that she was also starting to lose it, if ever so slightly.
But that’s what happened to deep-covers after a while, and Walker had been a deep-cover for over four years now. When one of the staff psychologists had suggested to Director Graham that perhaps it would be better to separate Walker from Bryce Larkin – both professionally and personally – he had replied that he was fairly certain that it was Larkin who was largely keeping Walker from coming apart at the seams.
So, when Graham had heard that Walker and Larkin were beginning to have problems in their personal lives, he grew somewhat concerned. Something had to be done, but before that something was done, he needed them to complete this mission.
“It seems that an extreme right-wing splinter group from the Irish Republican Army has decided that Martin McGuinness is a traitor to the glorious cause and must be eliminated,” Graham said by way of introducing the mission. “Needless to say, should they be successful, Northern Ireland would almost certainly turn into a hellish maelstrom of terrorism, and that is not in the best interests of the United Kingdom, and therefore, of the United States.
“Now, the political climate in the U.K. right now is such that they cannot send in a team to eliminate this threat. However, we tend to keep our secrets somewhat better than they do. That’s where the two of you come in.”
He handed each of them a small LCD computer – God, he was going to miss the tradition of tossing manila folders on the desk. “This is the mission brief,” he said. “Your targets are Rodney Carrington, Padraig McNeil, Seamus Sullivan, and James O’Halloran. Your mission is very simple – eliminate them quietly.
“All our intelligence on them – including what pubs they frequent, who their girlfriends are – or, in Sullivan’s case, his boyfriend – even what size shoe they wear, should you get really creative with your elimination methods. Any questions?”
Neither agent had any, though Graham saw look of concern cross Walker’s face. “Dismissed,” he said.
“Um, I’ll catch up to you in a minute, Bryce,” Sarah said, letting him go. She stayed sitting in her chair as Larkin departed the office.
Sarah looked at Graham. “James O’Halloran. Relation – or coincidence?”
Graham nodded. “I knew that was going to come up. He’s his younger brother.”
Sarah leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “Director Graham, Mike O’Halloran has been like a family member for my entire life. How exactly am I supposed to go to Ireland and put a bullet in his younger brother’s head?”
Director Graham looked at her curiously. “It’s your job, Agent Walker. Are you starting to have second thoughts about your job?”
Sarah looked back at him. “Yes, sir. On every decision I’ve had to make since the disaster at Santa Anita Air Base.”
Graham shook his head. “Walker, that was a year and a half ago. You have to let it go.”
“How am I supposed to let it go?” she asked, her voice indicating a little bit of despair. “My decisions were responsible for the deaths of over 10,000 people!”
“You just DO, Walker,” Graham replied. “You cannot hold onto things like that, because if you do, then you end up like John Casey, a burnout flying a desk.”
Sarah looked back at him, her piercing blue eyes suddenly making him feel a little uncomfortable. “Where do I draw the line between being an agent and a human?”
“I don’t have an answer for you, Agent Walker. That’s something you have to figure out for yourself.”
Four days later found Bryce and Sarah in Belfast, County Antrim, Ulster Province. They were being housed at the Hilton Belfast – “Again with the great digs,” Bryce said, most pleased.
His exuberance lasted all of about thirty minutes, before Sarah insisted that they get down to the business of planning their mission. Bryce thought they should take out the four Irish Republicans one at a time. “Set them running scared,” he said. “Make them make stupid mistakes, and run right into our hands.”
“Won’t work,” Sarah replied. “If they’re running scared, that makes one of them more likely to do something TRULY stupid like, I don’t know, blowing himself up as McGuinness drives by.”
“So you’re suggesting we take them out all at once?!”
“Absolutely,” Sarah said convincingly. “If they all go at once, there’s nobody to tell any tales, nobody to warn anybody else.”
“So what were you thinking? Car bomb?”
Sarah shrugged. “Maybe. Or a direct assault, catch them all playing cards or something. It’s relatively simple to take them all out at once.”
Bryce shook his head. “I just don’t know,” he said. “It just seems like it would be simpler and take a lot less planning to do them one at a time.”
Sarah sighed. “Bryce,” she replied, “this is what I do. The first time I assassinated somebody, you were all of three months out of Stanford.”
Bryce’s eyes widened. “I really didn’t need to know that.”
“Bryce, I’m just trying to convince you that I know what I’m talking about here.”
Bryce shook his head. “I’m not sure that I believe you.”
“Fine,” Sarah shot back, starting to get a little irked. “The Belgrade Eight? That was me. The KGB network in Prague? Also me. Any number of dead people in countries around the world for the last couple of years, I had something to do with a good number of them.”
Bryce looked shocked. “Un fucking believable,” he muttered. “At least we all know you didn’t do Alexander Litvinenko.”
For all her training, Sarah had made the mistake of letting her guard down around Bryce, and so when he said that, her face went red and she refused to look at him.
“Wait, no,” he said in disbelief. “There’s no way! The FSB took him out! Tell me that the FSB took him out!”
Sarah didn’t say anything.
“YOU KILLED ALEXANDER LITVINENKO?!” Bryce roared, jumping to his feet. “You told me you were SICK! You told me we were in London on VACATION! And yet, the whole purpose of us being over there was for you to kill a man who was for all intents and purposes an INNOCENT?!”
“Bryce…”
“Don’t ‘Bryce’ me!” he spat. “What else have you lied about, Sarah? How many men have you slept with since we’ve been together?”
When she didn’t answer right away, what little was left of his control went right out the window. “HOLY FUCKING SHIT,” he shouted. “I have been one hundred percent faithful to you, and you’ve been out screwing around behind my back?!”
That was a bridge too far. Sarah’s head whipped up, fury blazing in her eyes.
“It was my JOB, you fucking prick!” she hissed. “After two and a half years as a field agent, I thought you would have come to understand the meaning of ‘anything at any time’! Clearly, however, you have NOT!”
That was the final straw for Bryce as well. “I very goddamn well understand the meaning of it! I just thought maybe you’d decided to figure out an alternative, but clearly I was blinded by the pretty looks of a WHORE!”
And that was when Bryce tried to hit Sarah. He brought his arm up, the back of his hand to her face, and was preparing his downswing, but anticipating his move, she grabbed his arm and twisted, flipping him over on to his back. He landed on the ground with a THUD, the wind knocked out of him.
Sarah stood over him, murder in her eyes. “Get the FUCK out,” she whispered. “Don’t you DARE come back until you GROW UP.”
After she threw Bryce out, Sarah sat by herself in the dark hotel room for a very long time, not doing anything.
What am I doing with my life? she asked herself. Once upon a time, I was a brilliant student. Yeah, I was a bit of a slut. So?
And it was thoughts such as this that had caused the CIA’s psych eval team to start to believe that she was losing it a bit. The fact that she was having second thoughts about not just her mission, but about everything – her life, her job, even her boyfriend.
Especially about that son of a bitch, she thought bitterly. Who the hell does he think he is?
After about an hour, she turned on the television, looking for something to watch. Nothing. Nothing intelligent, nothing that would captivate her attention.
Finally, in frustration, she grabbed the LCD computer and started going through the intelligence on the four men. It turned out that on that particular night of the week, they liked to get drunk at a pub known as the Lowney Arms.
A floor plan of said pub was included with her intelligence. Sarah looked it over, determined that there were only two exits – the front door, and the back. Ordinarily, she’d storm the front door, and have Bryce cover the back.
No matter. She decided that if she was going to be taking out political dissidents, she was going to be dressed to kill.
Opening up her suitcase, she pulled out a dress she had planned to wear if she and Bryce went out – a simple blue dress, buttons down the front, and a built in belt at the waist. Slipping into it, she added a pair of black flats and a sapphire ring she had received – well, long before she had ever been Sarah Walker.
She completed the ensemble with a long grey trenchcoat. It might have seemed a little odd to an American observer, but it was a slightly chilly night, and besides, what better to hide weapons under?
And did she ever hide weapons. Her old Colt 1911 in one side, a Desert Eagle .44 in the other, and more knives than Emeril Lagasse would EVER have in his kitchen.
Leaving the hotel, she caught a cab to the Lowney Arms. It was a bit of a hole in the wall in a less-than-wonderful part of Belfast, and the cabbie actually asked her three times if she REALLY wanted to be here before she convinced him that yes, she did.
When she walked in the door, every eye in the place turned to look at her. She was unfamiliar, and unfamiliar was a threat. She became even more threatening when she pulled out her two handguns.
As her handguns appear, so too did guns in the hands of half the people in the pub, all aimed at her.
“Aye, and it’s not me that ye be wantin’,” Sarah said, her Irish accent not quite up to Father Mike’s standards, but close enough. “It’s those four scoundrels in the corner, they’re plottin’ to send Marty McGuinness to meet Jesus!”
She pointed at a booth in the back corner, and immediately, every gun in the room swung toward the four men sitting there. Yep, that was them. Rodney Carrington, Padraig McNeil, Seamus Sullivan, and James O’Halloran. O’Halloran looked so much like his brother that Sarah hesitated for a moment, irrationally thinking that it might have actually been Father Mike.
But then, the four bounded up, guns drawn, and began running for the back door. Sarah took off after them. Carrington and Sullivan were unlucky enough to be in the back, and with a gun in each hand, Sarah put a bullet through each of their hearts. They dropped to the ground, dead before they hit the floor.
McNeil and O’Halloran escaped out the back door, and Sarah followed in hot pursuit. Bursting through the door, she realized she was in a small parking lot, and the two men were nowhere to be seen.
They had been lying in wait. McNeil leapt out from behind a parked car, and O’Halloran jumped from around the corner of the building. Sarah was surprised, but it takes more than surprise to defeat a trained CIA deep cover operative.
As they tried to ambush her, Sarah aimed her Colt at McNeil, putting a bullet into his very surprised face as she reached out and smacked O’Halloran in the face with her Desert Eagle. As McNeil fell to the pavement, she heard O’Halloran stumble behind her.
She turned to face him, just as he stood and looked toward her. He lunged, and for just a moment, she hesitated, feeling a fleeting sense of guilt over what she was about to do to the younger brother of her priest, her recruiter, her mentor.
But that fleeting sense of guilt disappeared as she remembered what the man wanted to do to Northern Ireland. Her Desert Eagle came up, releasing a forty-four caliber slug directly into his heart.
He froze, a look of disbelief on his face. He actually remained conscious and on his feet for nearly a second, before falling to the pavement with a heavy thud.
Turning, Sarah saw what was clearly a closed-circuit camera on a light pole. Approaching it, she raised the Colt, and fired. The camera sparked and blew apart.
When Sarah returned to the hotel, she knew instantly that the room was not empty. She went in, gun drawn – but it was only Bryce.
He looked like a whipped puppy. As she lowered her gun, he swallowed hard. “There’s no excuse for my behavior earlier,” he said softly. “I let my anger take control of me, and you don’t deserve that. You were only doing your job, and you’ve always been respectful toward me. I don’t know why I let myself get that out of control.”
Sarah sighed. “It happens, Bryce, because you don’t have an outlet for your anger, your feelings of guilt, of hurt. You have to find that outlet, or you go mad. Trust me. Look what happened to John Casey.”
Bryce nodded. “I understand, but it’s worse than that. There is absolutely no reason I should’ve treated the woman I love like that.”
Sarah looked down, and nodded. “You’re right,” she agreed. “But there’s no taking it back.”
Bryce stood, and placing a hand under Sarah’s chin, lifted her face to look at his. “Please,” he pleaded. “Just give me another chance.”
Sarah slowly blew her breath out. “I never said I had given up on you, Bryce,” she replied. “I’m not ready to give up on you. But our relationship has to change, somehow. It’s something we need to talk about.”
“We could talk about it right now,” Bryce said.
Sarah shook her head. “Not right now. I just finished our mission.”
Bryce raised his eyebrows. “Wow.”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “Right now, I think the best thing for us to do would just be to get on the airplane and fly back to the US.”
Bryce nodded. “Okay.”
Even as Sarah let him embrace her, though, she couldn’t ignore the nagging feeling in the back of her mind – the one telling her that their days were numbered.
Author’s note: For those of you who thought that the assassination of the last two Irish Republicans sounded familiar, it’s because it’s my take on Chuck’s flash at the end of the pilot, when he sees Sarah take out two people on camera, and then shoot out the camera. This is referenced in Chapter 12 of “Chuck vs. the Bright Side of Life.”
And as far as the Lowney Arms – well, Lowney’s a good Irish name, and it happened to be my paternal grandmother’s mother’s maiden name. Yes, I’m a good Irish lad myself, with at least one member of the IRA dangling from my family tree like a hornets’ nest.
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