Chapter 2: Seventy-Two Hours
[Washington, D.C. — September 21, 2007, 6:30 AM]
The first bank opened at seven. I was standing outside at six-forty-five, dressed in clothes that fit too well because Bryce Larkin owned exactly three outfits and all of them screamed federal employee trying not to look like a federal employee.
Bryce's primary account held forty-three thousand dollars. His operational discretionary fund — buried under two layers of shell accounts the Agency pretended not to see — held another sixty. More than enough.
I pulled twenty from each, spread across six withdrawals at four institutions over two hours. Cash went into a gym bag I bought at a sporting goods store three blocks from the safehouse. Paid cash for that, too.
By nine AM, I'd opened two accounts under names that existed in the CIA's ghost roster — identities built for deep cover operations that had been shelved or completed. Bryce's memories gave me the access codes. The Agency's own bureaucratic inertia guaranteed nobody would flag dormant cover identities being reactivated. Not for weeks. By then I'd be gone.
Storage unit in Arlington. Rented under the name of a dead man from a closed operation in Prague. Cash deposit, no ID verification — the kind of place that survived by not asking questions. I stocked it over two trips: medical kit, changes of clothes, three thousand in mixed bills, two prepaid phones still sealed in plastic.
Second cache: a bus station locker in Silver Spring. Smaller. Emergency use only. Cash, a phone, a set of car keys for a vehicle I'd buy tomorrow.
Third cache: I kept that one mobile. A go-bag in the trunk of a car parked at long-term parking at Reagan National. If everything else failed, if the other caches burned, I could reach Reagan and disappear into the airline system before anyone thought to check departure manifests.
---
[September 21, 2007, 2:15 PM — Public Library, Georgetown]
The email was the critical piece.
Canon Bryce had panicked. Sent Chuck a raw data dump — the entire Intersect, no context, no explanation. Just millions of encoded images that rewired Chuck Bartowski's brain and turned a Buy More employee into the government's most valuable intelligence asset.
I sat in the Georgetown Public Library, using a terminal that wouldn't trace back to any agency system, and drafted something different.
The primary payload was the same: the Intersect files, compressed and encoded. That had to happen. Chuck getting the Intersect was the foundation of everything — Sarah's assignment, Casey's cover, the team that would form around a guy in Converse sneakers who was too kind for the world he was about to enter.
But I added a secondary file. Encrypted separately, layered beneath the Intersect images so that Chuck's enhanced brain would absorb it subconsciously without registering it as distinct data. The message was simple: Bryce sent this because he trusts you. He's coming back.
Not a manifesto. Not an explanation. Just a seed — something that would sit in Chuck's subconscious and germinate. So that when I reappeared months from now, the version of Bryce Larkin that showed up wouldn't be the one Chuck expected. The seed would make him hesitate before slamming the door.
Would it work? I had no idea. The Intersect in the show operated on rules the writers made up as they went. But the theory was sound, and theory was all I had.
I queued the draft. It would send automatically when I triggered it from the facility's network during the heist. One button. The email that starts everything.
My stomach growled. I'd been running since before dawn and hadn't eaten since a vending machine granola bar at six AM.
---
[September 21, 2007, 3:00 PM — Franklin's Diner, Dupont Circle]
Eggs and toast. Coffee that tasted like it had been brewed during the Clinton administration. I sat in a booth by the window and watched people walk past who didn't know the world ran on secrets.
A woman pushed a stroller. Two men argued about the Nationals' bullpen. A kid dropped his ice cream cone on the sidewalk and his mother bought him another one without hesitating.
In three days, none of this would change for them. The Intersect would transfer, Chuck would become an asset, Sarah and Casey would set up their covers in Burbank, and the spy world would keep spinning beneath the surface of the normal one.
I wasn't part of the normal world anymore. Hadn't been since the truck crossed the median. But sitting here, watching steam curl off bad coffee, I could pretend for eleven minutes. That was how long the eggs took.
The toast was good. Thick-cut sourdough with too much butter. Bryce Larkin probably ate egg-white omelets and drank green smoothies. I ordered a second round of toast and didn't feel guilty about it.
---
[September 22-23, 2007 — Various Locations, Washington D.C.]
Two days of preparation. I'll compress this because the details matter less than the pattern.
Day two: I acquired the car for the Reagan cache — a 2003 Honda Civic, paid cash from a private seller in Alexandria who was happy to skip the DMV paperwork. Registered it under one of the ghost identities. Parked it in long-term. Dropped the go-bag in the trunk.
I verified patrol rotations at the Intersect facility from a public park across the street. Binoculars bought at the same sporting goods store. The rotations matched the briefing documents within a three-minute variance. Good enough.
I tested Bryce's combat training — not the memories, but the body. Muscle memory was embedded deep. This body knew how to fight the way my old body knew how to type. Shadow-boxing in the safehouse, I moved through combinations Slade Langston had never learned but Bryce Larkin had drilled ten thousand times. Not elegant. Not movie choreography. Functional violence — the kind the CIA teaches when they want you to survive, not perform.
Day three: Fulcrum. This was the part that kept me up at night.
I knew things about Fulcrum that no one alive should know. Tommy Delgado's cell in LA — names, safe houses, operational patterns. The embedded agents inside Langley. The chain of command that led up to Ted Roark's tech empire. I knew which operations would succeed and which would be dismantled, which agents would defect and which would die loyal.
All of it was from a TV show. None of it had been verified against reality. And this world wasn't a show — it was a place where bullets killed people and intelligence agencies employed thousands of analysts whose entire job was noticing when someone knew things they shouldn't.
I couldn't use all of it. Not yet. Using too much, too fast, would flag me as an intelligence source that didn't exist in any database. I had to be surgical. Feed information through channels that made sense. Expose Fulcrum agents through Sarah once I made contact. Handle the rest personally, one thread at a time, over months.
A mental target list. Tommy Delgado at the top. He ran the LA Fulcrum cell — and in canon, he was a pattern-recognizer. An analyst who compiled evidence. The kind of enemy who wouldn't come at you with a gun. He'd come with a dossier.
I filed the list and moved on.
---
[September 23, 2007, 3:47 PM — CIA Safehouse]
Eight hours until the Intersect facility's night shift began.
Everything was in place. Three caches loaded. Two fallback identities active. The email queued and ready to fire. The car parked at Reagan. The patrol rotations confirmed.
My watch ticked. Bryce's watch — a Breitling that probably cost more than Slade Langston's first car. I stared at the second hand and did the math.
In eight hours, I would walk into one of the most secure intelligence facilities in the Western hemisphere, steal its most valuable asset, send it to a civilian, and try not to die in the process.
The facility blueprints covered the table like a surgical map. Every entry point marked. Every camera angle calculated. Every guard position logged.
I picked up the CIA badge — the one that would get me through the front door and into the server room where the Intersect lived. Bryce Larkin's photo. Bryce Larkin's clearance level. My face now.
I clipped it to my jacket, and the second hand kept ticking.
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