Life and Times of the Puppet Master.
Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters portrayed.
Sweet Water Alabama 1966
Seventeen year old Otis Jeffries watched with a grim face as the two cheap coffins were lowered into their side by side graves. This was the second lot of folks that white boys had taken from him and he vowed to himself that this time he was going to do something about it.
As he stood by the graveside Otis thought back to the night he watched his real parents die, ten years back. They were coming back from the dance and he was in the back of his daddy's truck as it bounced along the road. He saw headlights coming up fast and called out to his daddy, seems his daddy didn't like the looks of that 'cause he put his foot down, but their old truck was pretty much held together with baling wire and it didn't make no difference. The car caught them up quick and the white boys were hanging out the windows and bashing on the side of the truck, Otis hid under the sacks in the back and couldn't see what was goin' on but then something crashed into the side of the truck and their truck went flying right off the road. Otis was thrown out the back of the truck and ended up in the bushes, but when he looked he could see their truck down the road a ways, all smashed up. The car had pulled up next to it and the white boys got out, laughin' and callin' out things at his ma and pa, and he heard his daddy shout something at them that must have riled them up because one pointed near the truck and said something, then another one pulled out a lighter, lit it and threw it at where the first one pointed. The truck went up in flames and they all stood around and laughed while his ma and pa screamed, they didn't pile back into their car and take off until after the screamin' had stopped. Otis hid for a while longer after they left, then got up and tried to walk back the way they'd come, he was pretty sure his arm was broke because it HURT, but he tried not to cry as he kept goin' down the road.
He only got as far as a farm a few miles back, the folks there took him in and looked after him, and they had looked after him until a few days ago when two white boys robbed the bank where they were getting some money out, then shot everyone in the bank at the time to make sure that there were no witnesses.
This time Otis didn't have to worry about trying not to cry, as he wouldn't cry again, but he was goin' to do something about it. While people around the town weren't goin' to talk to the cops (not that they were bothered anyway, no white folks were shot), they did talk to him, so he managed to get descriptions of the two, which led to findin' out their names, and then he found them. He took his papa's old shotgun from the farm and went up to their house the night that he tracked them down. One came out on the porch as he walked up, but he didn't to get out more than "What do you want boy?" before the first barrel blew a hole in his chest and threw him back inside. Otis followed right after and the other barrel took the other one's head clean off as he tried to get his gun out.
After makin' sure nobody was goin' to come check out the gun shots, Otis went through the house, collecting all the money that they'd taken from the bank job and their other heists, any guns and ammo he could find, along with food and drink and anything else that caught his eye. He took it all out to load it into the old 50's Chevy out front and started the car to warm it up before he went back in with a gas can, splashin' the gas all around and backin' up to the door before he got out a match, struck it and threw it into the room. The house went up like his daddy's truck as he ran to the car and took off.
As Otis headed North he decided that he liked this car, it didn't look like much but boy did it go, must have been a bootlegger's car that they used for getaways. The fact that the car didn't look like anything worth havin' was good (a black man drivin' a fancy car wouldn't have got 50 miles before he was stopped), so he just kept on headin' North in it and tried not to do anything to attract attention. He slept in the car and ate what he'd taken from the house (and the farm) as long as it lasted so that he didn't have to stop anywhere or deal with folks any more than necessary until he was well out of Alabama, just stoppin' for gas when it was getting' low.
He knew that he couldn't stay as Otis Jeffries, the fact that the bank robbers who had just killed his folks were dead and their house burnt down (and the old farm was deserted) meant that his name would be headin' up the wire by now for sure. His folks had been good people and didn't let him hang out with the bad crowds, but he'd seen them types around and knew what to look for, so he'd chased down the people he needed to get new papers a few times on his way up North. He'd also learned himself to talk like an educated Northerner by listenin' to the radio and copyin' what they were sayin' as he went along (his papa always said that you didn't need book smarts to be smart, and he knew new names wouldn't do him no good if he still talked like an Alabama dirt farmer). By the time he got to Pennsylvania he decided that he'd gone far enough and tracked down somebody serious enough to get him solid papers for an identity that he could stick with. It cost him a fair pile of cash, but that was how Otis Jeffries, a 17 year old uneducated dirt farmer from Alabama became Langston Graham, a 22 year old recent law graduate from Vermont (the real Langston Graham had tried to welch out on a bet with the wrong people and got himself quietly dead and buried, but no-one told his folks or the cops that and he was a similar size and look to Otis so it should be OK as long as he didn't hang around Vermont too much).
He set up accounts in banks in towns and cities around the state in the name of Langston Graham and deposited nearly all the money he'd taken from the white boys, organised his new driver's license etc, but when he did that he brought himself to the attention of the authorities, so he got "his" draft notice. Given that he'd already gotten wind that the hunt was still on for the black who had killed the two white boys back home, he decided that the army would be as good a place to hide as any and went in for his induction.
As the war in 'nam was heating up, it wasn't long before he was sent over there, and he found that he was damn good at most things that mattered in the fighting. He could find Charlie and fight as good as anyone (and better than most). He was also real good at pretending to be a good soldier. As a result of that he got to be a corporal almost immediately, a sergeant soon after that, and then it was only about eight months more before he got a field commission when he took over the assault on a major Viet Cong stronghold and led his men to victory after their officer had died heroically in the fighting (dumb white boys who got in his face were easy to get rid of, smart white boys required a lot more care and effort, and that one had been smart, he saw the holes in "Langston"s story and had started to ask difficult questions). Lieutenant Graham was very good at strategic and tactical planning, had proven himself in combat and had shown himself to be frighteningly effective at extracting information from prisoners, if he was white he would have been slated for big things, but the colour of his skin meant that he'd probably gotten as far as was goin' to, in the "regular" army at least. That was why when Langston got a visit from the spooks about a year after be made lieutenant, he was interested to hear what they had to say. When they offered him a job out of the army with a chance of advancement, as a smart man who knew when to jump, he took them up on their offer.
Langston spent another four years or so in Vietnam and Cambodia doing whatever dirty jobs the CIA required of him before he was extracted back to the States for bigger things. His time in country with the CIA had given him the opportunity to study up on who he was meant to be, so by the time he went "home" he was able to fool just about anyone. (It also gave him time to educate himself and plan out what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go.) Once he was back and based in Langley he started to put his plans into action, he'd made a name for himself in Asia, but when he came back he showed them that he could be far more ruthless and effective than he'd ever been over there, he was a man on a mission and anyone who stood in his way was eliminated (usually figuratively, but literally on those occasions that required it). He was unofficially known as the CIA's head of black ops, and was feared because that tag was quite accurate, in his day Langston Graham was a very dangerous man in the field. With the fame and commendations he was accumulating, Langston made sure that he got himself attached to the most secret and highest profile assignments because they gave him access to the resources and information that he wanted to make use of in the future.
One area he found fascinating was genetics, back in WW2 Hitler's 3rd Reich had tried to create the perfect soldiers, but the science to do that properly hadn't really been ready then, thirty years later genetics was becoming a real science and he was planning on using it as part of his long term objectives. He managed to organise to get extensive testing done on the most promising recruits and agents and there was one young woman who showed considerable promise, but unfortunately they didn't have any male agents (or analysts or anything else) who would be suitable matches for her as yet, so he filed the information on her away while he pursued his other plans and goals. The genetics issue was a long term plan, so he could afford to wait for the right opportunity.
By the time he was nominally 30 (actually 25) he had became the youngest deputy director in the history of the the CIA, because he had the reputation of being utterly ruthless and never failing to achieve the objective, regardless of the cost (the fact that most of his peers knew what happened to those who stood in his way didn't hurt, either). His new status gave Langston access to a lot higher level intel than he'd ever had before and thereby furthered his plans admirably. He kept currying favour with those above him and building networks of useful people who were loyal to him (it was well known in certain circles what could happen to you if you weren't loyal to Langston Graham, so smart people were). A lot of the old school didn't pay much attention to the black upstart, but more astute eyes could see the indications that he was slowly building an empire, and that he was being quite particular about who he was using to build it, this man was going to be a force to be reckoned with and anyone with any brains knew that it wouldn't be safe to underestimate him, or to get on his bad side.
In 1976 Langston got wind of something that looked like the opportunity that he'd been waiting for, there was a technological genius who'd just finished getting his degrees at MIT and he'd fallen for the spiel that the CIA recruiters gave him hook, line and sinker (luckily they had sent recruiters who knew how to deal with scientists, so they offered him the opportunity to work on new and interesting things (hinting at serious cutting edge science) rather than trying the old "your country needs you" spiel, of course he jumped at the carrot they had dangled in front of him). Looking over what this Stephen Bartowski had done to date, he was something that Langston seriously wanted to get under his control, because the man was a god when it came to delivering technological innovation. Langston jumped in to get control of this project (not too hard to do given the amount of influence he was capable of bringing to bear) and set about putting together the team and resources he needed for the job. He had selected the agents and started sending out the allocation orders when he realised that this was the very opportunity that he'd tabled a certain agent for, so he recalled one allocation order and replaced it with Mary Knutsson.
Once Bartowski had been engaged, Langston arranged for appropriate computer and electronic lab space and facilities to be allocated on the Stanford campus, and for all the security and surveillance systems to be installed in the lab and his on-campus living quarters before he arrived. The protective detail allocated to Bartowski, personally, was four agents (Knutsson and three others), while another team of six provided round the clock coverage for the lab itself. Any vetting and clearance functions for personnel potentially engaged to work with the project or collaborating with the project in any way would be farmed out to the main California offices. As soon as Bartowski arrived Langston insisted on a full and very comprehensive medical for him, some of the CIA doctors questioned the nature of some of the tests that they were being required to conduct (not in front of Bartowski, of course, they knew better than that), but were just told very tersely to do as they were ordered without any further questions. The doctors didn't get to see the Deputy Director's reaction when he saw the results of those additional tests and the analysis that was supplied with them, if they did they would have been rather disturbed by the gleam in his eye and the evil chuckle that emitted from him as he realised that his plans should work out even better than he had hoped for.
When Bartowksi got to see his lab, at first he was like a kid in a candy store, but that enthusiasm waned very quickly as he he realised that he'd be in lock down and under constant supervision without contact with the outside world pretty much 24/7. After Knutsson had been installed as Bartowski's lab assistant and shadow, Langston watched the tapes of how Bartowski interacted with Knutsson and was smugly pleased to see that he'd called it just right, the whole sexy geek slash girl next door vibe that he'd had specified for Knutsson had snared him completely. Listening to their discussions confirmed that they got on fine, and he fostered that by ensuring that Knutsson was left out of the loop when Bartowski was being pushed and prodded into doing things that he didn't want to do, making her the one who reacted on his behalf. Once they'd bonded, the next element of the process was to push her until she dropped, to give him the opportunity to enforce the requirement for them to live together.
They were kept waiting a few weeks for off campus living quarters to be "acquired and secured" (when in fact they'd been set up before Bartowski even got there from the East coast), and Langston actually enjoyed tormenting the two of them to make them agree to the living arrangements and sleeping together "for the cover", even though no-one saw them in their place. This was part of the reason that the other three on Bartowski's personal protection detail were men who he had recruited to his cause before this project, as they would turn up unannounced and let themselves in at all hours to catch them out if they weren't sleeping together (Knutsson tried that in the first couple of weeks, sleeping on the couch to avoid forcing the situation on Bartowski), which gave him more opportunities to threaten to get rid of her and replace her with someone who would follow orders. These additional threats to remove Knutsson were enough to get both of them to comply with his orders and go along with the arrangement he required. He laughed at the fact that an agent as good as Knutsson didn't investigate enough to find all the hidden cameras etc in the apartment after he told them that they weren't under surveillance in the apartment (other than audio in the living area), at first she may have been too exhausted to notice (he'd kept overloading her with extra hours until they moved in), but he was miffed that he never had a chance to use the story that he prepared about rival factions in the CIA trying to keep an eye on his project, or to play the aggrieved party because of that.
Anyway, he didn't have to wait too long, as Knutsson was pregnant before the end of 1977. He was actually impressed that Bartowski had the balls to be prepared to give his ultimatum to ensure that they'd stay together and have the baby, he didn't think he had it in him (stronger men than the geek had buckled before they stood up to Langston Graham but Bartowski had done so a number of times now, there was more to the man than that enormous brain of his), but it wasn't necessary as they were playing into his hands anyway. The tests run by the obstetrician he sent Knutsson to (and the ones done when the baby was born) showed him that his plan had apparently worked well, the baby showed signs of having all the best attributes of both Mary and Stephen Bartowski and having more potential than either parent.
Langston kept piling requirements onto Bartowski and he kept delivering (maybe there was something to this new positive reinforcement crap that they were spouting nowadays, it seemed to work with ones like Bartowski anyway, now that he was happy with his family). When a CIA scientist proposed the idea to program agents and save all the time and money needed to train them, he knew that if anyone could come up with something to make that work, it would be Bartowski, so soon after the baby was born Bartowski had the Intersect project piled onto his plate. Sure enough, Bartowski was getting mileage on the project over time, it wasn't progressing quickly, but he WAS getting movement in a field where everyone else said it couldn't be done (what was that poster he had up in the lab? Difficult delivered next week, the Impossible may take longer). Of course, the bleeding heart tried to stop the project because a few (well all, actually) of the early test subjects were made brain dead and had to be disposed of, but he'd swallowed the explanation he gave him that they'd recovered with treatment and were happily living somewhere else under witness protection, so that was OK. When he'd demanded a demonstration of a function that he'd been told that they'd managed to get working about three years into the project, what they showed him and the other guests he'd invited was impressive, that bumbling Englishman that Bartowski had talked into coming over to work with him loaded the program and became a brash, overbearing Russian who was perfectly convincing for an hour before the program terminated and the Englishman came back.
About a year and a half after the "Agent X" (as they'd called it) demonstration, the Bartowskis had another baby (a boy this time), and the tests on the baby looked as good as the ones on his older sister had, so that part of his plan was going well. What wasn't going as well was the Intersect project, and others that were ethically questionable (like the DNA targeting weapon), he had no way of proving it, but he was sure that Bartowski was dragging his feet on those projects that he didn't think were right, so Langston started inserting people that he could control into the projects to keep tabs on them. Unfortunately, the ones that he could control weren't anywhere near Bartowski's level, so they couldn't tell him whether the slow down was deliberate or not, having those others in the lab did speed things up a little, though, so while he let Bartowski get rid of the ones who didn't add anything to the project, he kept pushing others in. The one who was the most fun to add was Ted Roarke, the fat bumbling fool thought he was a genius and a lady's man, but he had a reasonable reputation in the field and the fact that Langston had lots of rather explicit pictures of him with women attached to powerful and dangerous men (usually stupid daughters and bored wives) meant that he had total control over him. Bartowski's history with Roarke (other than that they had partnered on projects at MIT) wasn't on record, so Bartowski's reaction to the man was a surprise. Langston didn't care that Roarke had tried to steal credit for Bartowski's work at MIT, all he cared about was that he owned Roarke and the man was too much of a coward to try to cross him, so he told Bartowski that as long as Roarke was contributing to the project he was staying on the team. Langston wasn't at all upset, though, when he heard that Mary Bartowski had broken Roarke's wrist and nose when he made a move on her and grabbed her butt, he pissed himself laughing at that as soon as he got off the phone.
The happy Bartowski family did present issues for Langston's plans for the Bartowski children, though, so when the girl was thirteen and the boy was nearly nine he decided that he had to break up the family to get them under his control. That Englishman, Winterbottom was still on the team and working with Bartowski, and he was a close friend to both Bartowskis, so they would do what they had to to save him if anything happened to him. That little snippet of information formed the nucleus of Langston's plan, he engineered a situation whereby he "needed" to insert someone as an arms dealer into Eastern Europe for a month or two, and as the role had to be presented perfectly, an agent playing the role wouldn't work, it had to be the Intersect persona program. He convinced Winterbottom that as he had already used the Agent X program successfully, and there was no time to vet anyone else for the program, he needed him to be Agent X again. Once Winterbottom agreed, he and Bartowski jumped onto making the amendments to the initial Agent X image to fit the current requirements, and Langston called Roarke in for a little chat. Roarke never changed his ways (of course), so Langston had an ever increasing portfolio of material to use to control him, but he had recently acquired something that would make Roarke do anything he told him to. There was currently a mob boss combing the west coast to find the one who got his under-aged daughter knocked up, and Langston had a pile of very clear 8 x 10s that showed Roarke doing that very thing, the pictures showed very clearly who the two parties were and what they were doing, along with the lines of coke on the bedside table. Langston showed Roarke the pictures and then told him what he changes he needed him to make to the new Agent X program were, and Roarke scuttled off to do his bidding.
Of course Roarke screwed up the changes, but for Graham it was pure synchronicity, what was supposed to just be breaking the program exit options was so much more. Roarke had screwed up the core personality, so brash and overbearing became a violent psychopath, and the "mild attraction" that they'd coded in for Mary Bartowski to make it easier for her to get close to him became a total obsession, he did get the breaking of the exit options right, though, none of those worked at all.
Once Mary Bartowski had infiltrated Volkoff Industries and it was obvious that the Agent X program was not finishing, Langston arranged for Volkoff to be advised that Mary (or rather, Frost, her CIA codename) was a CIA plant. He had enough faith in her ability as an agent to talk her way out of getting herself killed (he didn't want her dead, just out of the way long enough to get her children under his control), but he hadn't factored the obsession into the mix, so when the time came they'd probably have to destroy Volkoff to get her out. When Stephen Bartowski came to him, frantic to find out what had happened to his wife, he told him those parts of the truth that suited his story, she hadn't managed to cancel the Agent X program and someone had tipped off Volkoff that she was CIA, adding that nothing had come though about her since then with the implication that she had been killed.
What Langston hadn't counted on was how that would affect Bartowski, the plan was to have him distracted and bury himself in his work so that he (Langston) could insert people to gain control over the children under the auspices of "looking after them", but Bartowski fell apart and refused to allow anyone around their children other than him. Bartowski only came into the lab while the children were at school, and while he worked from home when he was there, his output was nothing compared to what it had been before. About a year after Mary Bartowski disappeared into Volkoff Industries, Bartowski started becoming erratic, his output picked up a little but he was all over the place, then about a year and a half after that he just disappeared. He'd left notes for the CIA saying that he'd be back when he had sorted things out, and warning that there would be dire consequences if his children weren't left alone (backed up by fatal "accidents" happening to any teams apparently making any overt moves towards the children), but no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't find any trace of Stephen Bartowski.
Langston arranged for some "housekeeping" to be done to the official records, to remove or redact all mention of Mary and Stephen Bartowski and insert a few that indicated little more than Frost had gone rogue and Orion (Stephen) had gone off the reservation, he also had everything that was in the workroom that Bartowski had at the house cleared out and taken back to the lab, in hope that it would help the Intersect project progress. Aside from that, he arranged for the Bartowski children to be watched from afar and went on with his other plans.
In the meantime Langston concentrated on his master plan, slowly building his empire with those who met his standards and looking for the best of the new meat. A few years back something had come across his radar that looked quite promising, a woman who had been captured when her partner screwed up a con and then ran (leaving her holding the bag) had been recruited (or rather forced) to work for the CIA as she showed incredible ability as an analyst. She was brought in for projects 3-4 times a year and then returned to her family (she had a little girl) for a while. The thing was, she'd disappeared and dropped off the radar about five years ago after her partner disappeared with their daughter, but because of her ability she and the partner had been kept on the watch lists in hope of re-acquiring her (or acquiring the daughter when she was older if she showed anything like the same ability). Nothing had shown up about the woman as yet, but the partner and the daughter came up on the radar a few years back, so the agency had been keeping an eye on them. The interesting thing was that the daughter had appeared to have taken over her mother's planning and organisation roles in her father's cons years before she became a teenager and was doing a good job of it, so it looked like she did, in fact, follow in her mother's footsteps.
Langston Graham didn't play the game right in front of him, he kept his eye on the big prize, so just as he was watching the Bartowski children and planning on how he was going to make use of them, he kept his eye on this girl and how she developed, as he could see her fitting into his plans quite nicely.
Now if he could just track down Stephen Bartowski and recover him, he could get his other projects back on track, as even with all his notes and development work, the rest of the team was hardly making any progress at all.
A/N: OK, I've gone soft and given the arch-villain of my Chuckverse some events which could explain (not excuse, but explain) why he turned out the way that he did, and how he got to where he did.
NB: I expect that some will be offended by the vernacular used and the attitudes depicted for the early parts of the timeline in this story, I believe that if people check they will find that the language I have here is relatively accurate for polite society in the USA through the '50s, '60s and '70s (and later in some parts of the country), and the attitudes very much applied to some (not all) whites through that period. Not saying that I agree with it at all, IMHO it was disgusting, but to the best of my knowledge that's the way it was back then.