Chapter 13: The Amateur
[Buy More Parking Lot, Burbank — October 11, 2007, 3:12 PM]
Morgan Grimes was built like a fire hydrant and moved like one too — low to the ground, surprisingly solid, impossible to ignore once you noticed him.
I'd been watching the Buy More from a new position. Not the Civic — I'd rotated vehicles three days ago, renting a grey Nissan Altima from an off-brand agency in Van Nuys that accepted the David Callahan license without running it through the system. The Civic sat in the motel parking lot, too many hours logged in the Buy More's orbit to risk continued exposure.
The Altima was parked at the strip mall across the street, between a nail salon and a sub shop, angled to give me a clean sightline through the Buy More's front windows. Binoculars stayed in the glove box. At this distance, with the storefront glass and the fluorescent interior lighting, I could see movement and posture without needing magnification.
Chuck was at the Nerd Herd desk. Three-twelve PM on a Thursday — peak customer traffic, the store humming with after-school foot traffic and early-weekend browsers. He was helping a woman with a laptop, bending over the counter to point at something on her screen. Normal. Controlled. The picture of a competent retail employee doing his job.
Then his head snapped up. Slight freeze — two seconds, maybe three. His fingers pressed against his right temple. A flash. Something in the store environment had triggered the Intersect. A face, a product logo, a keyword from the woman's conversation. The triggers were unpredictable — the Library's files on Intersect activation patterns confirmed that the system fired on associative connections the host couldn't control.
The woman looked at him. Chuck's mouth moved — sorry, headache or something similar. She nodded. He resumed helping her. The mask settled back into place.
Thirty seconds later, it happened again. Another flash. This one longer — four seconds. Chuck's whole body stiffened. His hand gripped the counter edge. The woman frowned. Started to ask a question.
Morgan materialized.
Not literally, but with the practiced speed of someone who'd been watching his best friend's back since elementary school. He slid between Chuck and the customer with the easy charm of a man who'd never met a conversation he couldn't redirect. His mouth moved — rapid, animated, probably some tangent about a product feature or a store promotion. The customer's attention shifted. Chuck had five seconds to recover behind Morgan's social camouflage.
He used them. Pressed both palms flat on the counter. Breathed. Straightened up. By the time Morgan steered the customer toward the home theater section with an anecdote and a grin, Chuck was functional again.
I'd underestimated Morgan Grimes.
The show had played him for comedy — the well-meaning buffoon, the best friend whose primary narrative function was creating complications through enthusiasm and poor judgment. Ninety-one episodes of Morgan stumbling into spy situations, misunderstanding contexts, and providing the comic relief that balanced the show's thriller elements.
Watching him in person, stripped of laugh tracks and editing, I saw something different. Morgan Grimes wasn't an idiot. He was a man with precisely one priority — Charles Irving Bartowski — and every skill he'd developed in twenty-five years of life had been oriented around that priority. He could read Chuck's moods from across a room. He could manufacture distractions in the time it took most people to register that a distraction was needed. He lied to authority figures — Big Mike, corporate visitors, anyone who might threaten Chuck's stability — with a fluency that bordered on professional.
In a different context, with different training, Morgan Grimes would have made a decent intelligence operative. Not the shooting-and-fighting kind. The reading-the-room, managing-the-asset, keeping-everyone-alive-through-social-engineering kind.
My kind. From the life before this one.
I filed the assessment. Morgan would matter. Not yet — his arc in the show didn't intersect with the spy world directly until later seasons — but the raw material was there. When the time came to expand the circle, Morgan wouldn't need to be recruited. He'd already recruited himself. He just didn't know for what.
---
[Buy More Parking Lot — October 11, 2007, 4:40 PM]
Big Mike's voice carried through the store's front doors when a customer propped them open to haul out a flat-screen television. Not words — just volume. A baritone bellow directed at someone on the sales floor. The Library cross-referenced the acoustic profile against Buy More personnel files — unnecessary, but the system was getting faster at auto-matching, running comparisons I hadn't requested. Growing. Developing habits.
The bellow was directed at Lester Patel, based on the pitch and trajectory. Some infraction involving the Blu-ray display, if the frantic arm movements of the thin figure scurrying across the sales floor were any indication. Jeff Barnes trailed behind, moving with the bovine indifference of a man who'd long since stopped distinguishing between workplace crisis and Tuesday.
Chuck laughed.
I caught it through the open doors — a genuine sound, surprised out of him by the spectacle of Lester's retreat and Jeff's serene non-reaction. A real laugh. Not the controlled smile he wore for customers, not the reassuring grin he manufactured for Ellie when she asked how his day was. This was involuntary. The kind of laugh that erupted from a man standing in the middle of absurdity and finding it, against all odds, funny.
The Buy More was chaos. It was understaffed, poorly managed, occupied by a workforce that ranged from competent (Chuck, marginally Morgan) to baffling (Jeff, whose personnel file the Library had flagged as statistically improbable). And it was, in its ridiculous way, the only normal thing left in Chuck Bartowski's life. The one place where the Intersect didn't define him. Where he was just the Nerd Herd supervisor who fixed computers and dodged Big Mike's temper and shared the break room with people who had no idea the world ran on secrets.
I missed that. The simplicity. Not of retail — I'd never worked retail in my previous life, and the consulting world had its own brand of soul-crushing monotony. But the simplicity of being nobody special. Of walking through a day without calculating operational security, without querying a mental database for threat assessments, without remembering that the body I occupied belonged to a dead man.
The last time I'd had a morning that simple was the one before the truck crossed the median. Coffee. Email. A call with a client about restructuring their accounts payable department. Mundane. Forgettable. The kind of day you don't appreciate until you can't have it anymore.
I turned the thought over once, then put it away. Nostalgia was a luxury. It consumed bandwidth I needed for the operation.
---
[Buy More Parking Lot — October 11, 2007, 5:15 PM]
A silver Lexus pulled into the lot at five-fifteen. Ellie Bartowski climbed out — tall, dark-haired, with the focused energy of a woman who'd spent her day saving lives and was now transitioning to saving dinner. She walked into the Buy More with the purposeful stride of someone who knew exactly where her brother was and exactly how long she'd need to extract him.
The Library offered her file: Eleanor Faye Bartowski. Medical student, top of her class at UCLA Medical. Raised Chuck after their parents disappeared. Engaged to Devon Woodcomb. No intelligence connections. No security flags. The most aggressively normal person in Chuck's orbit, and therefore the most vulnerable.
In the show, Ellie had been kept in the dark about the spy world until season four. The lies Chuck told her — the missed dinners, the mysterious injuries, the evasive answers about his "new girlfriend" — had been played for dramatic irony. The audience knew what Ellie didn't. The comedy came from the gap.
Watching it live, the gap wasn't funny. It was a wound that reopened every time Chuck flinched at a question he couldn't answer honestly.
Ellie emerged with Chuck in tow. He carried his messenger bag over one shoulder, his posture relaxing incrementally the way it always did when his sister was present — like her proximity was a signal that the spy world couldn't follow him here. A false signal. But one he needed.
They walked to the Lexus. Chuck opened the passenger door, paused, and looked back at the Buy More. Just for a moment. A glance that swept the parking lot, the storefronts, the street beyond — the habitual scan of a man who'd spent three weeks learning that anything could be a threat and nowhere was truly safe.
His gaze passed over the grey Altima without stopping.
I exhaled.
Protecting Chuck meant protecting them. Ellie. Devon. Morgan. The constellation of civilians who orbited a man carrying the most dangerous intelligence asset in the Western hemisphere in his skull. Sarah and Casey could shield him from bullets and bombs. Nobody was shielding him from the slow erosion of lying to the people he loved.
That was a different kind of protection. The kind that required being close enough to matter.
The Lexus pulled out of the lot. I gave it a three-minute lead, then started the Altima and drove back to the motel.
Tomorrow, I'd ask Sarah to broker a meeting. It was time to stop watching from parking lots and start doing the work that mattered.
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