Been playing over at Harrycon lately, but thought I'd come back and see whether anyone missed me in here. ;^)
The 'greater good' excuse always infuriated me, so I thought I'd make that the underlying theme for this one. Strangely enough, Chuck hates it as much as I do here. This is AU of course!
NB: There are a couple of rough paragraphs at the end.
Usual disclaimers, please read, no rights to any characters portrayed and this is neither the real world nor a Disney Princess tale.
Mid-December 1999 – Somewhere in the Middle East
The team stayed as far away from Mowgli as they could in the C17's cargo bay, because they knew how dangerous he could be and most of them had never seen him this angry before. The young man in question was pacing like a caged tiger looking for something to rend limb from limb as an angry dialogue raged through his head.
'Greater Fucking Good? She's my Aunt for fuck's sake and she's still trying to pull that card to make me do the things I'm unwilling to do? No wonder Mom ran away from that fucked up family when she was fourteen!'
He stopped to draw a breath as he grimaced. 'Not that that did her much good! She took off on that mad Russian's yacht, looking for adventure, and she sure as hell got that! Getting herself picked up by the KGB at fifteen and made to choose between passed around the SPETSNAZ barracks until she was dead, or become an operative for them, not much of a fuckin' choice there!' He shook his head. 'And then she gets selected to be sent back to the good old U S of A as a sleeper before she was seventeen? You couldn't write this shit!' He knew that Mom was a perfect mimic and wouldn't have had any trouble outsmarting just about anyone, even as a teenager, but convincing the KGB that she was Tatyana Leonova from Leningrad when they took her in after they caught her stealing from senior party members, being trained to be one of their most capable operatives and selected to serve as a high importance sleeper when she was still sixteen? 'For fuck's sake! Then they got her into Georgetown University, where she of course shone, as Mary Conrad and made sure she was recruited by the CIA while she was there.'
Another thought made him snort. 'I'd have loved to have been there to see the DCS's up and coming star Lieutenant Beckman's face the first time she ran into her big sister as the CIA's Agent Frost out in the field in the mid seventies! Auntie Di probably spat out that stick she normally has stuck up her arse when she realised who she was!' He was getting off the spiral and starting to calm down by then and had to concede that Auntie Di had come through for him and Ellie when Dad went off the rails after Mom got set up by the CIA and sent back to Russia when he was nine, even if she did make use of the skills and abilities that they'd inherited from Mom and Dad rather liberally.
The others relaxed a little as they saw Mowgli calming down, and when Baloo went over to talk to him they thought the danger was past. Mowgli looked up when the jump light lit up to say that they were closing on the drop zone and barked at them to gather around. "The parameters for this mission are changing…."
Baloo cut in. "The Colonel's orders…." but Mowgli cut him off. "Who is command of this mission?" Baloo glared at him and growled. "You are Sir." Mowgli nodded curtly. "Don't forget that again! Right, as I said, the parameters are changing for the mission, new intel shows that there is a significantly higher number of civilians at the target site than was previously believed, so we aren't going to stand back and blow the site up. Any Combatants are to be engaged and taken out, but squads one and two will be coming in with me when I breach the target site here. We'll extract any relevant intel and blow their systems, records and armoury, then we can get the hell out of there, hopefully with minimal collateral damage." He looked around. "Any questions?"
No-one but Baloo would even think about arguing with Mowgli, he might look like a kid but he could easily handle any two of them and they knew that he'd earned the rank and medals that some of them had seen, because they'd all been on some of the missions where he had done so, so aside from a few questions as to details, they trusted him to achieve the mission objectives and get them out OK, like he always did. As they jumped though, more than a few of them were laughing, as only Mowgli could remap the entire mission on the fly between the warning and the drop signal.
As usual, the mission went off just as Mowgli said that it would, even with the last minute change, and they got out with serious intel and two high ranking prisoners that they wouldn't have had if they'd just blown up the facility as per their original orders. Of course, that was ignored when Mowgli and Baloo were being screamed at in the office of Colonel Diane Beckman when they returned to Fort Meade.
After twenty minutes of this, the young man cut her off. "Excuse me Ma'am, but I've got an exam in Palo Alto this afternoon, may we be excused so that I can get back in time for that, please?"
His Aunt screamed and spat out. "You're getting more like your mother every day!" He just shrugged and she came around the desk in tears to hug him. "I swear you took ten years off my life when I heard what you did!" She sniffed back the tears and went on. "There's an F-15E waiting on the tarmac at Andrews and the flight plan and refuelling arrangements are in place. You both have your Air Force IDs and flight suits?" They just nodded, so she hugged him again and indicated that it was time to leave. The look she gave the older, larger man known as Baloo however promised that they'd be having a different discussion when her nephew wasn't in earshot and he tried to repress a shudder, because everyone in that damned family was dangerous. He was just glad that there wasn't more than the two sisters, the kid and his sister, he didn't think the country could handle any more, hell the world couldn't handle more.
At Andrews AFB, the guard at the gate had waved them through before he realised that that Major Conrad had actually looked like a kid, but he shrugged to himself, the two pilots were in a senior Air Force Colonel's limo, with Colonel Beckman's staff, so if there was something wrong with the guy they would have picked it up.
Once they'd done the walk around on the F-15, they climbed in, with Major Coburn taking the driver's seat, and the speed with which they ran through the check lists without missing or shorting any of the steps drew appreciative nods from the ground crew, as usual these pilots knew how to get a jet in the air quickly and efficiently.
When they were up to altitude and speed, Casey told Chuck to try and get some rest so he would be ready for his exam when they got back. Chuck agreed and Casey snickered as he turned off the intercom ten minutes later so he didn't have to listen to his snoring. They landed at Travis AFB and transferred directly to the heli that took them straight to the Stanford University Hospital Heliport, so they had plenty of time to get back to the apartment, lock away their credentials, weapons and equipment and get cleaned up before Chuck's exam.
Mid-December 1999 – Palo Alto
The guy who headed out for his exam looked normal enough, a tall, lanky kid with curly brown hair and a goofy grin. Charles (Chuck) Bartowski, was a scholarship student who usually lived off campus with two friends of his dead parents and helped them out with their business, so he was always disappearing with them on jobs. No-one ever went there or questioned this because his 'Uncle John' was a big scary dude who's demeanour screamed ex-military, and that discouraged anyone from getting too close.
The ones who were closer to Chuck knew that he had a sister, Ellie, back in L.A. who was studying to be a doctor, but that was as much as anyone knew. Any questions about what happened to their parents made Chuck shut down, so most people just presumed that they'd been killed in gang violence or something like that in L.A. and quickly changed the subject. There were a few who kept prodding though, and one of the worst was Chuck's official room mate and self proclaimed best buddy Bryce Larkin. Larkin was a trust fund jock from back east, and no-one could work out why he kept pushing so hard to hang out with a scholarship kid like Chuck who didn't appear to be interested, even going so far as to set him Chuck up with a friend of his, Jill Roberts.
Of course what most people didn't know was that the family had investigated both Larkin and Roberts thoroughly and knew that they'd been selected by the CIA's recruiter at Stanford in their sophomore year, Larkin had been accepted into the program but Roberts supposedly didn't make the cut. What Chuck and Casey couldn't work out was why Roberts hadn't given up on the girlfriend thing when she was dropped from the CIA's program. Strangely enough, Casey was the one who was more inclined to go along with Jeff's suggestion that Roberts might have actually fallen for Chuck and that's why she stayed, while Chuck was still sure that there was some agenda behind her actions. Of course, Chuck had been subjected to his father's ever crazier conspiracy theories until he was eleven, so distrusting anything to do with the government was pretty much ingrained, and what he'd done for Auntie Di since then hadn't done anything to dispel that. At least having Roberts after him for sex all the time meant that he didn't need to go out partying for stress relief when things got a bit much for him, so the so-called relationship wasn't a total loss.
Coming back from the exam, Chuck got changed and got down to work, because while he and Casey had been off for a couple of days on that mission, they'd only had Jeff there to work on their analyst and tech workload and dear old Auntie Di didn't stop sending work just because they were off on a mission, oh no. The fact that Auntie Di was well aware that Chuck and Ellie had inherited the same family trait as she and Mary had of needing very little sleep meant that she had no compunctions about giving them enough work to fill the extra hours.
They did have another team down in L.A. but Ellie's workload at UCLA medical school and Caltech was heavier than Chuck's was and the CIA had Uncle Bry off on missions rather more than the DCS & NSA had Casey away, so Auntie Em was handling much of the workload there and as neither she nor Ellie had the same technical focus, all the technical jobs tended to come to Palo Alto unless Chuck's father was lucid enough in D.C. to take some of them on.
The fact that USN Lieutenant Commander Charles Carmichael and USAF Major Carol Conrad were joint commanders of the Joint Defense task force that was responsible for Y2K issues for all of the Defense Department's critical and security related systems just added to the fun, because Commander Carmichael and Major Conrad were, of course, two of the four military identities (USN Lieutenant Charles Carmichael, USAF 1st Lieutenant Carol Conrad, USA 1st Lieutenant Philip Bowman and USMC 1st Lieutenant Stefan Danko) that had been created for Chuck in 1993 when Auntie Di Created the special DIA and DCS groups to make use of Emma, Ellie and Charlie's talents.
Three elements had made the Y2K job a nightmare. The first was the fact that the line that was supposed to put everyone at ease in the initial teleconference. "I'm looking for this to be done and dusted within six months, because all the internally developed systems will have followed the guidelines and used four digit year codes, so we only have to check the externally sourced software." was met with a horrified silence, and when he growled "If anyone knows of internally developed systems which don't follow the guidelines and are using two digit year codes, they better speak up now!" what hesitantly came out was that most of the systems that they knew of actually used two digit year codes because it was simpler, so he had to double the size of the task force and get people checking and re-writing that part of the code on all the internal systems, as well as checking the externally sourced systems and getting the vendors to fix the damned code.
The second was only having Jeff in the know in the task force that was was spread across the country, so they had to be very careful dealing with everyone else, and the third was having to deal with a very talented hacker who went by the handle of the Lotus and who was piggy backing on the accesses to fix the problem to get into the systems and having fun playing around in the systems once she was inside. This led to another argument between Chuck and Auntie Di after Chuck had caught her because she was determined to put the girl (who was the wayward daughter of a Taiwanese diplomat) in prison, while Chuck was arguing that she hadn't done anything malicious or accessed classified information and she would be more value working for them than rotting in a cell somewhere.
Auntie Di was less than cordial when she reminded him that this was sounding a lot like the arguments that he'd used to keep the Piranha and Roscoe out of prison, and it didn't improve the situation when his reply was. "You were never going to throw me in prison, and haven't I been proven right about Jeff? You know I'm right about Miss Wu as well!" She wasn't about to admit that she knew he was right, and therefore she was bound to give in to him sooner or later, so she tried to stare him down. When that didn't work she sent him away and started people working on putting what he wanted together.
This became another thing to be sorted out over the Christmas break, because when Miss Wu was dragged to D.C. by Casey to be threatened by the Colonel Ironpants, she was given a choice, prison or unquestioning obedience to the head of her Cyber Security Group. If she chose the latter, she could continue going to Caltech but would be moving into their safe house in Arcadia with two of the team and working for Commander Carmichael from there. Needless to say, she'd be constantly monitored and if she ever spoke a word of this to anyone, she'd be in prison before she had a chance to spit.
Anna was under no illusions that the she had any options other than what she'd been told, and was rather worried that if she didn't chose the option that this scary little woman wanted her to, the scary big dude who had brought her here would make sure that she disappeared. She looked from one to the other for a minute as she tried to work this out, the 'work for me' option sounded too crazy not to be the right one, so she looked the old bitch in the eye and said. "I'd like to work for Commander Carmichael Ma'am!" The Colonel nodded and went over all of the necessary details with her, had her processed and sent her back to California with Casey.
After the last exams for the Autumn Quarter were done, Chuck, Casey and Jeff headed down to the house in Arcadia for the Winter Break, Casey and Jeff in the Charlemagne Technical Services 'work' van and Chuck on his Harley. In previous years they'd headed across to D.C. so that Ellie and Chuck could have Christmas with their father, but it was at best 50/50 as to whether he'd be lucid enough to recognise them and it was almost guaranteed that he'd get upset and make a scene about the fact that their mother was stuck in Russia with Alexei Volkoff, so they gave up a couple of years ago. The fact that Roberts always went home for Christmas with her family took care of one of the dramas anyway.
Of course, it was different this year, as Anna Wu was being added to the family. When her exams were done she packed up and got ready to move out of the dorms. That scary dude turned up with another guy in a van and they took her and all of her stuff to the house where she was told she'd be living in one load. She greeted the other guy as Commander Carmichael, but he and the scary dude, Major Casey, just laughed and told her that she'd be meeting the Commander at the house.
At the house, she was introduced to a nice older couple, Emma LaBelle and Bryan Mills, and told to call them Emma and Bry. She was also introduced to a guy about her age and his older sister, Chuck and Ellie Bartowski. She'd seen them around Caltech and she asked Chuck if he'd been caught like she was, he just grinned and said. "Not exactly."
Anna didn't know what was going on and was starting to get worried, so she almost begged him to tell her, asking. "Chuck, do you know where this Commander Carmichael is? I've got to report to him! What's he like, he's not like that old bitch that I had to see in Washington is he?"
Chuck burst out laughing. "Anna, relax! You've already reported to Commander Carmichael, and no, he isn't much like Colonel Beckman."
Anna just looked confused, so he held out his hand. "Good to have you on board Lieutenant Wu, I am your commander, Lieutenant Commander Carmichael. You will normally report to Major LaBelle as I'm normally based up in Palo Alto."
Ellie burst out laughing at Anna's expression. "Chuck, that was cruel! Anna, as cruel as he's being, everything that Chuck just said was correct. It's normally just me and Auntie Em here, well and you now, and Auntie Em runs things. Before you say too many things about Colonel Beckman, I should warn you, she's actually Chuck and my Aunt, but yes, she can be a bitch when she wants to be."
When Anna had come down from her panic attack after she heard that that scary bitch in Washington was the Aunt of the cute guy who now controlled her future and the girl she would be sharing a house with, they explained that up until now the Cyber Group had consisted of Chuck and Jeff, and as Chuck said, they were normally up in Palo Alto with Casey. When Bry was between missions, he lived at the house as well. Chuck knocked Anna for a loop again when he told her that she probably knew him as the Piranha.
Ellie laughed at her awed expression and said that Jeff did that same thing when he joined after Chuck caught him, at Anna's confused expression she told her that Jeff had been the hacktivist called Roscoe until Chuck tracked him down and Casey arrested him.
Casey snorted and made a crack at Chuck. "I thought you wanted her because she's some sort of genius Bartowski, are you sure you got the right skirt?"
Watching the scary bastard become immediately contrite when he was chided by Emma for that comment was an interesting experience, and helped Anna settle down, which in turn made something else pop into her head. Turning to Chuck, she asked. "Commander Carmichael, why did you call me Lieutenant?"
"It's Chuck, Anna, I only use my rank when it's necessary…."
He was cut off by Casey muttering. "Yeah, or when you re-write the entire ops plan just before we're about to jump and pull rank to shut up anyone who questions it!"
Anna found that Chuck could be pretty scary when he snapped back at Casey. "Because experienced officers are supposed to know better than to question their commander when they only have a short time to brief the team before they're inserted, Major Casey!" Casey's apologetic nod and "Yes, Sir. Sorry Sir" was a surprise to Emma as well, as she'd never been on an operation like that with them, and hadn't seen Chuck in action, but Chuck was back to answering Anna.
"And your military identity has now been established, you're Air Force Second Lieutenant Anna Wu, attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency's Cyber Security Group."
Ellie tossed him the packet that she'd gone to retrieve when Anna asked about her title and Chuck caught it and handed it to Anna before continuing. "As we've said, the rest of the group is me, a Navy Commander, which equates to a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force, and Jeff, who's a Navy Lieutenant, who's the equivalent of an Air Force Captain….."
Emma cut him off. "Don't forget about Major Conrad and Lieutenant Daniels Chuck. Anna, providing that this Y2K business goes off OK, Chuck's Air Force co-commander for the Group will also be promoted to Lieutenant Colonel by the end of the first quarter next year."
Ellie looked from Emma to Chuck, and when it was obvious that neither of them was going to finish this, she decided that she would. "What neither of them is apparently going to tell you Anna is that Chuck is also Major Conrad, as well as Major Bowman of the Army and Major Danko of the Marines. As Casey let slip before, we do other types of operations as well, and Chuck, Casey, Jeff, Uncle Bry, Auntie Em and myself all have multiple military identities for doing different operations."
Anna looked at Emma, instinctively knowing that she was the one who could be relied on, and was reassured by her nod.
While they were upset that Ellie and Chuck's mother was trapped in Russia with the CIA's psycho creation and their father was in D.C. but off the planet half the time, it was Auntie Em's daughter Sammie who they missed the most when they were together. Her father had run off with her when she was seven, and while she'd called whenever she could for a few years, they hadn't had the technology to trace the calls back then. Unfortunately they'd all had to go into hiding after Stephen (Ellie and Chuck's Dad) ran off in ninety three, so Sammie didn't have a number to call Emma on any more, and they'd lost touch with her.
Chuck and Emma had kept up the search for Sammie ever since, but it seemed that whenever they got a lead on her and her father, he'd change their identities and they'd disappear again. When that happened they had to start over from where they had disappeared. It was a frustrating and disheartening process, but Sammie meant more to Chuck (or rather Charlie, as he dropped back into Charlie whenever he thought of the girl he grew up with) than anyone except Ellie, and she meant everything to Auntie Em.
Sammie still sent letters to the mail drop that they'd set up in the early days to let her mother know that she was OK (or alive anyway), but Emma hadn't managed to talk to her little girl in six and a half years. Sammie's letters were how they found out that Joe, her father, had managed to get himself arrested again a year and a half ago, and she'd given enough hints for them to know that she'd been trapped into working for the CIA at the time. Chuck and Jeff had gone deeper into the CIA's systems and records than anyone else had ever managed before or since in their attempt to locate Sammie, they had access to things that only the top few in the CIA knew about, but with all of that, they couldn't find anything that pointed to Sammie. Later letters indicated that she'd gone to university, so they expanded their search to include the universities across the country, but they hadn't found anything that matched her there either.
It was only in the bunker in the house in Arcadia that they risked having evidence of their real lives on display, and the walls were plastered with medals, citations and pictures that most of the world wouldn't have believed were possible, like the citations that both Ellie and Chuck had received when they piloted the SR71 that Auntie Di had arranged as a twenty first present for Ellie by using the family's political and military connections back in February at well over Mach 3, records to show that they'd both successfully completed Special Forces and SEAL training and had participated in and performed well enough on missions to be officially accepted to wear the insignias. There were other certificates in Hebrew and Cyrillic that said that Chuck had also done the same with Israeli's top special forces units and the GRU's SPETSNAZ, and pictures that showed them in training and on missions to back all of this up. The medals and citations were for all of the 'family', so as well as Ellie and Chuck, Casey, Jeff, Emma, Bry, Diane, Stephen and Mary were represented.
These 'merit walls' tended to make the bunker feel more of a family room, so they normally worked down there when they were together for the holidays. The also used the secure communications there to have AV links with Mary and Stephen, and Auntie Di when she couldn't get away to come to L.A. to see her niece and nephew in person. They had thought that having a new member in the household this time would have limited how much time they spent in the bunker until they were sure of her, but the truth had come out when she first got there and they got enough of a read on her to decide that they could trust her, so on her first time in the bunker, they let Anna take the time to check them out and ask the inevitable questions.
While she was most interested in Chuck's section, she found the section under the birth certificate for Eleanor Mary Beckman quite interesting. It was obvious that this was Chuck and Ellie's mother, because it was it was next to the section for Diane Beckman, who Ellie had said was their Aunt, it was the large section in Cyrillic under the American birth certificate, with tags showing in English that it related to Tatyana Leonova from Leningrad and she was part of the KGB that confused Anna. Then there was another American birth certificate for Mary Conrad with her degrees from Georgetown, certificates to indicate that she was a full CIA Agent and had been awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Cross, the paperwork for her marriage to Stephen Philip Kowalski and the birth certificates for her children, Eleonora Mary Kowalski and Charles Philip Kowalski (both of whom were two years younger than Eleanor Faye Bartowski and Charles Irving Bartowski). Then, in 1990, the records for their mother stopped.
She was glancing at Ellie and Chuck, wanting to ask if she died but not thinking that she could when Ellie spoke up. "No, Mom isn't dead, she's in Russia. She was sent to Russia by the CIA to retrieve a very important target, but she was set up to be killed by the people Dad was working for as they saw her as an impediment to getting him to create what they wanted him to. What they didn't realise was that as far as the KGB was concerned, she was their sleeper who they'd sent here in the sixties to get embedded in the CIA and work her way up. The KGB vouched for her so she wasn't killed, but the one she was sent to retrieve had actually been turned into Alexei Volkoff, the psychopathic arms czar that he was supposed to be playing, and he demanded that she stay with him. The CIA people here made another play and sent details of her family to Volkoff in an attempt to prove she was playing him, but he still wouldn't kill her, he just held us over her head to make her stay, so that's where she's been stuck for the past eleven years, in Russia with a psychopath."
Anna looked uncertainly at the wall. "But how..."
"The sleeper?" Anna nodded. "From what she and Auntie Di told us, Mom was rather wild and ran away from home when she was fourteen. You've met Auntie Di so you should be able to work out what the family's like. There was a, well what served for a Russian playboy back then, the filthy rich and decadent young son of a highly ranked party member, here with a big fancy yacht at the time and Mom apparently went to him and… convinced him that he wanted her around, so he promised to take her to Europe with him. The problem was, word had gotten back to the party about what the playboy was getting up to and his father had been punished for his actions, so the yacht had been called straight back to Leningrad. Mom slipped away before she could get caught up in the mess that was waiting for the guy with the yacht and managed to get an identity created for her in the name of Tatyana Leonova. I guess I should point out here that Mom's a genius, Dad's the one who most people call a genius but Mom's right up there with him, so within a few months she was building a good life for herself. She decided that there would be better pickings in Moscow than in Leningrad so she headed down there, and she was doing really well, until she was captured stealing from senior party members and was taken to the KGB. The KGB were really impressed with what she'd accomplished and wanted her working for them, so they offered her a choice between being tossed to the animals in their SPETSNAZ Brigade to do whatever they wanted to her until she was dead, or become an operative of the KGB, it was an easy choice so she joined the KGB."
Ellie waved at Chuck's section of the wall. "Mom blitzed everyone in the training like Chuck did and her standing in the KGB shot up, so before she turned seventeen she had been selected to be inserted into America as a sleeper, getting into Georgetown as Mary Conrad and making sure that she caught the CIA's eye. The CIA took the bait and she repeated what she did in the KGB, quickly becoming their top operative. She made a name for herself in the intelligence community and ran into Auntie Di back when she was a DCS operative, so they reconnected. She also worked with Uncle Bry, who was one of the CIA's top SOG operatives and field agents, and Auntie Em, who was their top analyst. Then she was assigned to protect the CIA's most important asset, Dad. They fell in love, got married when she found out she was pregnant with me, and had the brat three and a half years after me, so that's the story how Eleanor Beckman became Mary Conrad, the KGB sleeper."
She looked at the wall and continued. "I may as well tell you about Dad while we're here. He was a tech genius at MIT and the government and big business were all courting him. He swallowed the CIA's spiel and came over here to set up his labs in a secret facility north of L.A. and get started on his projects. He was building whatever technology the CIA wanted, and the more he did, the more they demanded. Abut a year after I was born they brought up what they really wanted, the replacement for Project MKUltra mind control program, which they'd supposedly scrapped when they finally accepted that they couldn't do what they wanted with drugs. The CIA had already had someone trying to come up with a way to program the human brain to do what they wanted, but that had been a total failure, so they handed what they had over to Dad and told him to make it work. Dad's team managed to get what they'd been trying to do working, and it could theoretically imprint a different personality and memories onto a subject. Dad and Uncle Hartley wouldn't allow it to be tested until they were sure that the effects could be reversed, but in nineteen eighty they were confident enough for Uncle Hartley to demonstrate it, and for half an hour he became a very convincing Russian Mob boss, Mom said that his accent and mannerisms were perfect and he knew the subject matter like a native. At the end of the half hour, Uncle Hartley turned back into himself and asked whether it worked."
Ellie looked at Harry and they shook their heads at each other, but he waved to her to continue. "Unfortunately, the Director of the CIA had ordered the project stopped, so they couldn't present their findings, but the CIA boss of the project had seen Dad's notes on what other possibilities this technology could have, and insisted that he get that working. They called it Project Omaha, and Dad and the other team members were spending most of their time on it, but the problem was that none of the test subjects could handle it, anyone they tested it on ended up brain dead, or just dead. Dad refused to allow any other testing until they were confident that it was safe, and Graham, the guy running the project agreed, but he forced Dad to accept other people onto the team. When Charlie was eight, Mom and Dad found out that they'd been testing the Intersect, that was what Dad called it for some reason, on subjects behind Dad's back and Mom threatened to go to the Director of the CIA to get it stopped."
"Soon after that, some other Directors supposedly came to Graham with an urgent need to insert someone into the Russian arms trade. Graham somehow talked Uncle Hartley into being the subject again and Dad and Uncle Hartley worked on the program until they were confident that they had multiple triggers that would cause the program to terminate on demand, and if all else failed, it would automatically terminate after six months. Uncle Hartley loaded it to test it but they couldn't terminate it, and the personality had been corrupted so that he wasn't just arrogant and aggressive, he was a psychopath. They sedated him and Dad demanded that they call it off until they'd fixed Uncle Hartley. Graham refused, saying that it was an urgent requirement and there was too much at stake, they'd send someone in to retrieve him when the program terminated after six months. Six months later Mom went in to retrieve Uncle Hartley, but the program didn't terminate, and I told you what happened to her."
"Dad went off the rails after that, the plan to get rid of the roadblocks so he'd concentrate on the project had ruined him. Graham wouldn't release him from the Omaha project so Dad decided to do what he could to finish it so he would be free to go after Mom. He was obsessed, he ignored us and everything else to work on the Intersect all the time. About six months after Mom went back to Russia, Dad left his workroom at home open when he went off to get something and Charlie went in to see what was more interesting than him. He saw a blinking prompt on a stack of screens and hit enter out of spite. The problem was that it was the program that Dad was working on, and that activated it. When Dad got back, he found Charlie frozen solid, staring at the screen and he thought he'd destroyed him by leaving the door open, but all of a sudden Charlie came to and asked Dad why he was crying. Dad couldn't find anything wrong with Charlie and thought that that meant that that version was safe, so he came up with the crazy idea that if he loaded it into himself he could troubleshoot it and get it working that much quicker, so he did. The problem was that he was wrong, it only appeared to be safe for Charlie, and it started effecting Dad just about straight away."
Ellie looked at Chuck again and he reached over to squeeze her hand, he knew that this was hard for her. She took a breath and continued. "Even though he could feel it effecting him, Dad still had the stupid idea that he could get it working properly, so he kept loading data into it and trying to use it, and he kept getting worse faster. After a year or so, he finally accepted that it would destroy him before he could get it working and he contacted Auntie Di to get her to promise to look after us, then he disappeared. Uncle Bry grabbed us and got us away from the house and Auntie Di and Auntie Em set up new lives for us, living with our Aunt in Arcadia after our parents had died. A bit after that, Auntie Di came up with the proposal for the three of us to work as analysts for her and when we agreed, set up the groups under her in the DIA. They tracked Dad down a couple of years later, he hadn't made any headway in fixing himself, but he had come up with a governor device that suppressed the Intersect activity, kept him lucid about half of the time and stopped, or at least slowed, the deterioration. Auntie Di used our family connections to get him placed with a top psychiatrist who's been working with him and keeping him a secret for the family's sake ever since."
Anna looked at her wide eyed for a while, wondering what she'd managed to get herself into, then remembered her manners and thanked Ellie for telling her their story. She hesitated, but waved to the pictures and citations for the flying and special operations missions, asking. "How did you get from being Analysts to all of this?"
That made Ellie smile as she looked at Bry. "Mom, and Uncle Bry. Mom was training us and Sammie..." she saw the stifled curiosity on Anna's face at the new name. "Sammie is Auntie Em's daughter, her father took her away when she was seven and we've been looking for her ever since, We know that the CIA has her now, but we haven't managed to find her yet. Anyway, Mom started training all of us when we were toddlers, running and tumbling, then little athletics and gymnastics, then martial arts and the other skills of agents. She'd progress us to the next level as soon as we could handle it so we progressed quickly. By the time Charlie started school he could take on two or more kids twice his size because he was trained and they weren't. Uncle Bry joined in the training when he was here, and Auntie Em taught us analysts' skills as soon as we could handle them too. We kept up the daily exercise and practice, but after we moved here to Arcadia and started school, we were giving up and staying at home so Uncle Bry picked up our training again."
"When he found out just how much natural aptitude we had for these things, he pulled some strings with buddies he trusted in the military and intelligence circles to get us more serious training and so did Auntie Di, the better we did, the more training we got." She waved a hand at the walls. "As you can see, we got a lot of training, Uncle Bry organised for us to go on some so-called safe missions to build our confidence and we were requested for more after that, so we became regulars on special operations and intelligence missions. We did well, and we started getting promotions and medals, Auntie Di added Casey into the team to have our backs on missions, and after Chuck tracked Roscoe down and Casey nabbed him, Jeff was added to the team as well, and you have too now."
Anna looked a question at Bry and he nodded to confirm the story, so she looked around the team she was now part of, thinking. 'What have I gotten myself into?'
The armoury in the bunker was like a wet dream for Casey and any other special ops weapons fanatics, because it had the best special operations weaponry from around the world. Quite a bit was Russian and Israeli, but the best of the best from the rest of the world was there too and the focus was on function, not standardisation, so they had 9mm assault rifles, 10mm Auto pistols and sub-machineguns, large calibre sniper rifles, M32 grenade launchers and the like. Most would have been shocked by how familiar Chuck and his sister were with the contents of the armoury, and how effectively they could use it.
The person the family was missing didn't have any family to support her though, as she was spending her second Christmas break since she'd been grabbed by the CIA at 'The Farm', immersed in intensive training again. She cursed her stupid father every time she thought of him, because she wouldn't be here if he hadn't yet again let his ego override his pathetic excuse for a brain! And she wished she'd killed that black bastard Graham the moment she saw him, if she had had any inkling of just how evil he was…. well she liked to think that she would have been able to override her beliefs that unnecessary killing was bad and done the right thing then…. They'd certainly tried to condition her out of those beliefs over the past year and a half. She tried to tell herself that she didn't know how many people she'd killed in that time, but knew that every detail was in there, if she was brave enough to face up to it.
Sammie's core identity now was Sarah Lisa Walker, she didn't know whether Graham had been trying to be cruel or kind when he kept her real middle name for the identity. Her other two identities at Harvard also used versions of Sarah so that she wouldn't get caught out, responding to the wrong name. She was told that the records for the other names would be amended to Sarah Walker once the final exam results were in, so that all of her degrees would be issued in the name of Sarah Walker.
They had had to use the Jenny Burton name when she was first enrolled to make use of her education transcripts from her last highschool, but she certainly hadn't been sad to see the Burton name go, because it just brought back memories of why she was there. As soon as she'd been accepted into the system at Harvard they'd changed that into the three names being used for her three majors in the schools of business, law and languages. She would have laughed if she'd known that Charlie was currently completing degrees at Stanford, MIT and Caltech under three different names too. It was also a given that Sarah Walker would never be allowed to revert to her real age, because it was easier for the CIA to make use of her if she was supposedly of legal age, and it made her accomplishments easier to swallow to boot.
Sarah had actually enjoyed some of the extra training that she was put through, learning to fly helicopters, all sorts of small planes and transports, business jets and jet fighters, that was cool, as was learning to handle all sorts of performance cars and bikes and being trained by the CIA's SOG guys in what they did (it had gone well after the others saw what she did to the first couple of guys who thought that she should be giving them something for the privilege of that special training). Of course, there were other parts of her special training that turned her stomach, being taught to torture and mutilate targets to get information out of them as quickly as possible and being forced to learn all sorts of sexual acts gave her nightmares most nights. It was the sick anticipation on Graham's and her 'trainers' faces that haunted her nightmares even more than the acts themselves, and meant that she had to force the memories down far enough for her conscious mind at least to forget about them, to allow her to continue to function.
Sarah Walker was officially an agent by the time she went back to Harvard for her Sophomore year. She was still being trained in many fields that most agents never would be, but her official training was over. Much like Chuck, she lived off campus with her 'Aunt Jane' and helped her out with her business, so they kept disappearing on jobs. The similarities would have made sense to anyone who knew what they were, because it was the perfect cover which allowed a young agent to fit in as a student while disappearing on missions all the time. Sarah was also known by a code name most of the time, but her's had originally been created by the male trainees and agents who she'd frozen out when they tried to make moves on her. She didn't mind being called the Ice Queen though, as it reminded her of the Frost Queen, what mama and the other adults in the family had said that Auntie Mary was called when she was an operative.
Another thing that she froze people out about was when anyone at Harvard asked what had happened to her 'Uncle Frank', who she'd been living with when she first started there. She'd gritted her teeth and forced herself to put up with her first handler's looks, comments and touches until he got drunk one night and came into her room to try and force her to give up what he believed he was due from her. Her call for medical assistance was carefully timed so that while he was alive when the CIA's medics arrived, there was nothing they could do to save him, and she'd stared Graham down as she told him that anyone else that tried to do that to her would get the same treatment. After that, she wasn't too surprised when her next handler turned out to be a woman, but she was surprised when Jane Bentley told her what the deal she'd made with Graham was, and that no matter how much of an insult she considered a babysitting job like this to be, she'd do whatever it took to turn Sarah into the best agent she could be.
She also told Sarah the facts of life about this world she was being dragged into so that she could protect herself as much as possible. When she first got there, she sat her down and asked whether she was a virgin. When Sarah said. "Yes." she told her that sooner rather than later she was gong to be in situations where she would have to have sex. While Graham hadn't come out and said that, she read that from what they were discussing when he was telling her what her role was to be. Her advice was to go out and find someone she liked, or was attracted to at least, and make sure that her first time was on her terms, not anyone else's. Sarah hadn't wanted to believe that this was true, but she knew that she already trusted Jane more than she did Graham, so she did as she suggested. She had to get herself drunk to do it, but she found a nice boy at a party, someone who reminded her of Charlie actually, and they fumbled their way through their first time together.
It wasn't a wonderful experience, but she was glad that she'd followed Jane's advice, because less than a month later, the 'training' started and she was sent into two situations where she had to submit to men at the target site or be killed before she turned seventeen. If she hadn't listened to Jane, every thought she had to do with sex would have been associated with being violated. After the second one of those missions, she went to Graham and told him that if she was ever in that situation again, either she or every man at that location would be dead. Graham was about to tell her that she'd do as she was told or her parents would pay, but he read the conviction in her eye and realised that she wouldn't back down on this, so as she had too much potential to throw away on an issue like this, she wasn't given any more of that training and she wasn't knowingly sent into a situation where where the only two choices were submit or die again, a lot of her missions were intentionally borderline after that and they became quite messy when she was dealing with the issue, but he was prepared to accept that for the agent she was becoming. The advice that Jane gave her formed the foundation of Sarah's trust in her, and she never gave her any reason to doubt that trust.
One thing that Sarah made sure she kept out of the letters she sent to Mama's mail drop whenever she could do so safely was any mention of what she'd been trained to do, or what she was doing on missions. The thought of somehow getting back to Mama (and Charlie) one day was what kept her going, but she couldn't bear the thought of how Mama would look at her if she had any idea of what she'd become. That thought made her cry herself to sleep all too often, after she'd made sure that any recording devices had been disabled, of course.
A/N: This is the basis of the idea I had for my next story in the Chuckverse, if there's any interest.