Okay, this is my first Covert Affairs fic, and I pretty much just took a bunch of the awesome quotes from episode four (No Quarter) and expounded on them. Quotes in italics are flashbacks using the lines from the show (I took six pages of notes for all my favorites). Anything in bold is supposed to be the thoughts of the main person (in this chapter it's Auggie). I know at the end we're to assume he went home after Joan told him he passed his polygraph, but for this fic I have him staying in his office till Annie gets home. With so many details from the show, I'm bound to have messed up somewhere, so please be kind when you find those discrepancies!
I watched all four episodes like, two days after the fourth one aired. As soon as I "met" Auggie in the first episode, I caught the Annie/Auggie bug that's going around, and will hopefully never leave. Auggie is my favorite character EVER, and that's saying something, because I watch a LOT of tv and movies.
Okay, I'm done rambling. There should be at least three other chapters, all revolving around this episode and using quotes from the episode. Enjoy! ~Jed
August Anderson sat in his darkened tech booth in the DPD office, a blank expression on his face and a Gripmaster in his hand. He squeezed the device in a slow, steady pace in an attempt to control his anger. Truth was, he was pissed, absolutely fuming over the day's events. It had started off fine enough—Annie finally landed in Switzerland, safe and sound and comparing him to an oversized, slobbering canine. Suddenly she spotted her contact and ended their banter.
Then he heard about the explosion.
On the outside he remained calm, for the most part. Things like this happened every now and then within the agency, although with Annie it seemed to be a regular occurrence. He mentally recited the protocol for going to ground, prayed that that was exactly what she was doing and waited for her to call.
Inside, however, he was a bit freaked. He'd liked Annie from the moment she walked through the door on her first day at Langley. And that was before she'd said she liked Mingus. Truth was, she had spunk. She was determined, tenacious and, oddly enough, honorable and honest. She hadn't even asked the obvious question of how he'd lost his eyesight—so obvious a question that he'd delivered the story before she even had a chance to ask. No, she wasn't curious as to how he'd been blinded. Annie Walker just wanted to know about the headphones—completely overlooking the fact that he was blind and instead, just wondering how the headphones could help him complete his work.
Complete his work. Like finding her, for instance, when she went off the grid. He had breathed a huge sigh of relief when she called him after the explosion.
"Hey! Are you alright? The bomb—" The bomb could have killed you.
"I'm fine. I think. Have you ever tried to disguise a government-issue titanium case on the run before? I can assure you, it's not easy."
"Alright, so you've got the package. Which one?"
"Mine, ours."
"And your twenty?"
"Downtown. On foot. On my way to the Turk's. That's still the backup, correct?"
"That would be our backup, yes."
"They wanted a briefcase. Think it might be time to read me in on what I'm carrying here?"
Yeah, that'd be nice, seeing as you nearly died for it. "That information has not gone vertical yet. Tell me what happened with the pass. Did you establish a visual with the contact?"
"Yep. Both of them."
"Both of them?"
"Seems like orange wristbands and metal briefcases are all the rage in Zurich, Auggie. It's getting hard to tell who's on my team out here."
"I am, okay? I'm on your team. I'm with you all the way home."
He'd promised her. He told her he was on her side, that he'd be there for her until she set foot back on American soil and came back to Langley. And then he'd broken that promise, all because of Arthur Campbell's paranoid hunt for the Liza Hearn leak.
He thought back to the last time he'd spoken with her today.
"If you were Mossad, where would you stash your briefcase?"
"Hold on. I'm pulling his 201 up now…Alright, Eyal Avine, three years IDF, Field Intelligence Squad. And two years with Mogav in the Golan Heights before becoming Mossad in '98. Uh oh. Wow."
"What?"
"You said this guy tried to kill you?" Haven't you had enough of that already, Annie?
"Yeah, with a piano wire. Why?"
"This guy was with Kidon for five years. A hard squad—assassinations, kidnappings. This brush pass seems way beneath his pay grade."
"And yet it's not beneath mine?"
"I don't see anything in his file. Maybe he's a burnout case, or a drinker."
"Yeah or maybe he just pissed somebody off somewhere. You know he's the kind of guy that likes to piss people off. 'A Mossad man and his package'—have you ever heard anything so ridicu—whoa my god."
"What?" Don't tell me someone's trying to kill you again. I can't take three attempts on your life in one day. Tell me it's something completely innocuous.
"Uh, nothing. Just tell me you're working on getting me home."
That I can do. "I'm working on bringing you home." I already told you I'd bring you back here.
"Okay, is it possible this guy's a double agent? I mean, are we even sure he was my contact in the first place?"
"Well, you can send me his picture and I can try to match up his ID."
"Hoh—I can send you a picture, but, uh, not sure it'll work for ID purposes."
"All right, listen, they want to know where you dropped that briefcase. We're going to send someone to go pick it up." He knew what her next words would be, and the tone she would use to deliver them.
"I can still complete the mission. I mean, I can't stand this guy, but I can still make the pass."
"Annie, this is not a reflection on you. This is standard operating procedure." But I'm proud of you, for still wanting to finish this, for not giving up.
"Of course, okay. Oh my go—what are you doing?"
He heard her cry of shock and then the phone went silent. His heart rate picked up a few beats per minute and his ears strained to hear her voice.
"Annie? Annie?"
He immediately dialed the communications center.
"Yeah, I need a reverse cell look-up on Walker's phone." He could hear chatter in the background but drowned it out, focused on finding Annie.
"All right, you four, report to polygraph."
"No, I've got the last known location. I just need to know if it starts moving."
"Let's go Anderson. Step to."
He recognized Bill's voice, one of Arthur Campbell's goons.
"Look, I'm sorry, this is gonna have to wait."I can't leave an operative stranded in the field.
"Now."
He knew he had no choice. So he ran to Joan.
"Joan, will you call off Arthur's attack dog? I'm trying to re-establish contact with Annie."
"Leave the intell with me, we'll make sure someone fills the gap."
What? "I don't understand."
"It's a company-wide directive, everyone's coming under scrutiny.
So? Just because someone's overly suspicious, he has to leave his post mid-mission and abandon an operative to take a stupid lie-detector test?
"Are you ready yet, hot shot?"
Seriously, he didn't act like he was better than everyone else, did he? Was it just because he'd been allowed to keep his job after losing his sight that people like this guy are so snippety with him? He walked off toward polygraph, extremely pissed, and prayed nothing happened to Annie while he was gone.
Which brought to mind the other reason he was currently squeezing the heck out of the Gripmaster—the polygraph test. He couldn't believe they'd pressed the issue of his blindness so much. He was already furious over having to leave his post to do the stupid test, and then they pushed him even further with the questions they asked him.
"I'm going to ask you a series of questions to act as a control sample. Is that okay?"
Really? It's not like we haven't done a dozen of these before. He didn't feel like being falsely civil at the moment. "No, it's not okay. You wanted the truth, correct?"
"Just answer the questions please. Your name is August Anderson?"
"Yes, but my friends call me Auggie. You can call me August." Get this over with and let me go back to work.
"Yes or no, please. You were born in Glencoe, Illinois, is that correct?"
"Yes."
"Okay, you lost your eyesight while with special forces in Iraq. Is that correct?"
He sighed. Come on—there are other base questions you can ask. Do you have to go immediately for my sight? Just for that… "I'm sorry, you'll have to be more specific."
"You were in Tikrit?"
"Yes."
"There was an incident, an explosion."
"Yes."
"And now you're blind."
"No, I'm not." Here it comes…
"You're not?"
He sounds like a character in a movie, just found out the hero he has in cuffs across the table from him isn't actually blind and powerless…right before his captive breaks his bonds and turns on him.
"What does the machine say? I spent twelve months down on the Farm. I did my SERE training at Fort Bragg, and I have four mean-ass older brothers. You don't think I know how to lie well enough to beat that thing?" I shouldn't be stuck here.
"Are you happy with your current position as field ops support?"
"Yes."
"Have you requested more field responsibilities?"
"Once or twice."
"Yes or no."
"Yes." That's why I have to get Annie back—she understands my need to be out in the field. She took me out there and didn't care about what Joan would say.
"Are you frustrated with your superiors' decision to keep you on the bench?"
"Well yes, but I think that's understandable." You try getting field work into your blood, then losing your vision and being forced to sit on the sidelines. I think you'd be a little frustrated too.
"Do you believe in the concept of a greater good?"
Come on already. Get to the point. "Yes I suppose."
"And do you believe you're qualified to be the self-arbiter of that?"
"What are you getting at?"
"Let me rephrase. Do you think that there's a part of you that wants to punish the agency for what happened to you?"
This is what they dragged me in for? This is why they pulled me away from finding Annie and bringing her back home? I can't believe it. "I don't believe this—There is an operative out there, somewhere, in the cold, alone and in danger and every second I am spending here twaddling with you is a second I am not helping her to get back home. "I'm with you all the way home…I'm working on bringing you home." So, let's cut the psychobabble and just ask me the question you want to know. Did I corrupt the Zurich exchange? No."
"That's not what I want to know."
"It's not?" Really?
"Are you the source in the Liza Hearn leak?"
"What?" You're kidding me. That's why I'm here?
"Are you Liza Hearn's source?"
"No. Are we done now?" I'm out of here. You sidelined me for this stupid purpose and now I have no way of knowing if Annie's okay, or if I failed her because of you.
He passed the test, of course. He really wasn't even too concerned about the whole Liza Hearn problem to begin with, and then Joan came up to him and told him the news as if it was something he was worried about.
"Auggie. Good news. You passed your polygraph. You'll be back at your desk tomorrow morning."
"Imagine that. See you tomorrow."
Yes, imagine that. As if he was supposed to be pleased about getting back to work tomorrow. Tomorrow could have been too late for Annie. What good would there be in going to work tomorrow if she were dead tonight?
He shuddered at that thought and squeezed the Gripmaster a few more times. He'd received word that she was on her way home and had left a message for her, even trying to inject some of his normal humor into it. Joan had told him to go home and get some sleep, but he knew Annie would be coming back to Langley before heading home herself, and he wasn't about to leave her again.