I didn't go into 'the other thing with Jill' yet, Chuck just saw something in her eyes that told him that she was putting on an act. FWIW, the storyline on her here is that Jill is still Fulcrum in this world. Her original mandate was to get close to Chuck and recruit him to their cause as the bright young star at Stanford, but she was told to switch her efforts to Larkin after he was identified as the Omaha candidate. I'm not sure at this point whether Jill will come back into the story as she was always a waste of space as a character for me.

Nah, I still don't like the douche or the blonde Bimbo! ;^)

NB: Derogatory references to orientation only apply to the Bryce Larkin character, they don't apply to anyone in real life.

Usual disclaimers, no rights to any characters portrayed and this is neither the real world nor a Disney Princess tale.

September 2001 – Pasadena

Ellie's plans for Chuck's 20th birthday party and Chuck and the others' plans to get their cover businesses up and running were all forgotten a week and a half into September, as the news that went around the world on the eleventh made many people forget what they'd been planning. The impact on some was for an hour, others for a day, and others it would effect them for the rest of their lives. While the news of the attack on the twin towers broke over them like a wave, the other attacks didn't have the same impact after they'd confirmed that Diane, Roan, Stephen and the other people they knew in D.C. were OK. It took them longer to find out that a couple of the people they worked with and were friendly with (you couldn't exactly call people friends when you could never let them see your face or hear your unaltered voice because there was no way that they wouldn't spot that you're ten to fifteen years younger than your identity, or risk that they might recognise a long term fugitive from the CIA or famous operatives like Casey and Bry) had in fact been in the towers when they went down.

Every other job they had was put aside to work on hunting down and evaluating information relating to the attacks, even Casey and Bry dove into tracing the information. Someone who only saw Ironpants and didn't know Diane Beckman well enough to see past the mask would have believed that she was basking in the acclaim and power that was coming from her small unit delivering two thirds of the actionable intel coming out in the wake of the attacks, but Diane was breaking inside. She knew, and had been friends and family with, people who had been lost, and she couldn't get the image of the rest of the men, women and children who had fallen to this out of her head either.

Luckily, in the wave of shock and anguish that followed the attacks, no-one paid that much attention when people didn't turn up for classes, or even work, so they were free to devote all of their time to investigating the matter, passing along any actionable intel as soon as it had been confirmed. Even on the first day though, there was an undercurrent of suspicion growing in the intelligence community, because the powers that be were ignoring the valid intel they were being given and ordering investigations to go in other directions without any evidence to support their decisions.

Chuck, Casey, Bry, and even Ellie were being sent off on missions within a few days after the attacks, though half of Bry's missions were as part of the CIA contingent. The problem was that they were always being sent in the wrong direction, so while they saw a lot of action, added to their medal counts and gained promotions from their parts in these missions, they found nothing to do with what they were supposedly there to look into, because they were in the wrong place for that.

By the time the initial reactions to the attacks had settled down to become part of the War on Terror, their groups had a notably higher profile than they'd had before the attacks, because anyone who knew anything recognised that they had been the ones who had managed to locate information that no-one else could. With the increased interest in their groups, they had to expand, so Diane, Emma, Ellie and Chuck had to go through the process of interviewing and selecting suitable people to bring in. With the new people spread around the country, and some overseas, it wasn't too hard to set it up so that there was no face to face communication, other than with the newly minted Brigadier General Diane Beckman.

All of their new and expanded groups were bundled into what was now semi-officially known as the Special Projects Group. There were more than a few questions about why a shiny new one star General was meeting with the National Security Advisor so often, and no-one bought the line that they were just two friends meeting for drinks much of the time (quite aside from anything else, no-one believed that Ironpants had any friends). There were also questions about how Navy Commander Charles Carmichael was promoted to Captain and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Eleanore Bardot was promoted to a full Colonel before they were even halfway to the minimum time in grade in the aftermath of 9/11. Neither the fact that both of these officers were part of the new General's command, or that their questions had been shut down without any explanation by the Secretary of Defense sat well with most of the people asking.

While he was sick about what had happened, Chuck was of two minds as to whether he liked the changes to what they did as a result of that. While on one hand, he liked being able to delegate the boring grunt work to someone else on his teams, having to manage a diverse group of people around the world was proving rather more difficult than he'd imagined it would have been. It wasn't getting to Ellie quite as much, but then she was more used to handling groups of people from her university and research projects.


While Chuck and the others were getting used to the changes in their lives. Sarah was settling into her last year at Harvard. Like them, she was being sent away on missions a lot, but many of these were still the same bullshit missions that Graham had been sending her on from the start. Jane was working to identify areas where Sarah could extend her capabilities with extra training while also filling the role of Assistant to the Deputy Director for Operations, because under the deal she'd made with Graham, after Sarah left Harvard and became a full time agent, she would be taking over as the next Deputy Director for Operations.

The DDO wasn't the biggest role in the CIA, but it was one of the most important, and she'd seen too many field agents die because the person filling the role of the DDO was a political appointee who didn't understand what went on in the field. She knew that she could manage the CIA's operations better than any of the DDOs she'd worked under to date, including the current one.

May 2002 – Cambridge Ma

Jane wasn't at all surprised when Sarah graduated summa cum laude on her Law and Languages degrees and magna cum laude on her business degrees, because she knew how brilliant this girl was. They'd gone through a rough patch while Sarah had been doing her final exams, because she was in tears about losing the connection to the woman who had looked after her for three and a half years, and she'd grown very close to. Jane sat her down and told her in no uncertain terms that they would not be losing contact with each other, because she had already been setting things in place to ensure that it was generally known that she was Sarah's mentor in the CIA.

She explained to her that it was an established tradition in the CIA that older, more experienced agents mentored promising up and coming agents and helped them deal with the situations and roadblocks that they encountered. While there were no formal rules associated with this, all of the old school believed in the mentoring system, so even Langston Fucking Graham wouldn't be able to keep them from communicating without more questions and backlash than he'd want to deal with. Sarah calmed down after that and they spent a couple of days setting up all of their communications channels. This proved to be a good idea, because as soon as Sarah had finished her last exam, Graham had her dragged straight off to Langley to send her off on her first assignment as a full time agent, they hardly had enough time to say goodbye.

Waiting in Graham's reception area, Sarah Walker was anxious about what Graham was going to assign her to, given that the vast majority of the hundreds of assignments he'd given her over the past three and a half years had been essentially 'go there, screw the intel out of them and kill them'. She also knew that the only way she'd avoided punishment for not actually screwing the intel out of them was the fact that she'd just about always brought back whatever intel they had, killed them as ordered and got away clean, so she'd had pretty much the best record of any field agent for the past three years at least.

Jane had warned her that Graham would almost certainly have her reporting directly to him so that he could keep her under his control, and he wasn't likely to back down on trying to force her to use sex in most missions, because he seemed hard wired on that issue, so she'd have to be careful about how she handled him and not let herself be backed into a corner.

When she was called into Graham's office, she sat down and waited for Graham to speak, but when he started to go off about her failure to follow orders she politely pointed out that her record of number of missions and success rate was right up there with the best, quoting the stats that Jane had made sure she memorised that proved that she'd completed at least three to four times as many missions as other agents and had a success rate that was at least thirty to forty percent higher than anyone else.

Graham tried to catch her out, but he knew those stats as well as she did, so in the end he threw a file at her and cut the meeting short. "I don't have time for this Walker! You've been assigned to an inter-agency task force that will be primarily be operating in Europe and based in Paris initially. Your flight leaves in two hours from Ronald Reagan, your ticket is waiting at the airport." He have her an evil smile. "And if you screw up in any way on this assignment, well I don't think I need to remind you what will happen, do I?"

Sarah shook her head, tight lipped and he barked "Get out! And you better not miss that flight!"

She didn't say a word, just nodded, stood up and walked deliberately out of the room. As soon as she was out of sight of his receptionist she started hurrying though, because she was already late to check in for an international flight and she had to get her things from the hotel before she could go to the airport. Luckily, her things were still packed at the hotel and the CIA had made all the arrangements for the room, so she made the cab driver wait while she ran in, grabbed her bags and rushed out again, throwing her keycard at the man on the counter and calling out her room number and that she was checking out as she ran past.

It was less than an hour before departure time (if Graham had been telling the truth) by the time she reached Ronald Reagan Airport, but she charmed the pants off the guy at the ticket counter to get him to find out for her which airline her booking was with and was checked in and through to the departure lounge just in time for the first class boarding call. She broke off the string of epithets she was directing at Graham in her head to snort, that was one thing at least that had worked in her favour, by throwing her on a plane at the last minute (the records showed that her ticket booking had been arranged over half an hour after he kicked her out of his office), the only ticket they could get was a first class one. With that old bastard, she was sure that she would have been flying coach if he could have organised it.

As she accepted a glass of champagne and relaxed, she reflected on the call she'd made to Jane on the way to the hotel to tell her what was going on. The way Jane was shouting and the language she was using actually managed to embarrass the cab driver, because what Sarah could see of him was going red as he listened in. When Jane had calmed down a little, she told Sarah that this didn't change anything, she was still her Aunt Jane, her mentor, and she was still going to be there for her whenever she needed her, they'd just be on different continents until this assignment finished and she came home. With that thought, Sarah settled down to read the information pack that Graham had thrown at her, thinking when she finished that the coming home part might be a while.

May 2002 – Paris

Arriving at Orly rather more relaxed and refreshed, Sarah got through customs easily enough by charming the customs officers and was soon in a taxi on the way to an apartment that she was to be sharing with the other agents on the team she was assigned to. When she let herself into the apartment, it had been trashed, which implied that they had either been burgled, or she was sharing the apartment with party animals.

She spun around, looking for something she could use as a weapon, when she heard a pistol being cocked behind her, but taking in the naked redhead who was looking at her over the sights of the pistol, she wasn't sure whether she felt relief or dread. She quirked a smile at the face she knew from before she had gone to Harvard as she said. "Hey Red, how about getting rid of the gun and putting something on?"

The redhead put the gun up, but aside from that made no move to do either as she asked. "Blondie? What the hell are you doing here?"

"It appears that we're working together, but as we discussed at the Farm four years ago, I don't swing that way so could you please stop advertising that the carpet doesn't match the drapes and put something on?"

The other woman grinned at her. "As I told you then, don't knock it until you've tried it Blondie! You can make the coffee while I get dressed." And with that she turned and headed back into the room she'd come out of.

Sarah shook her head and headed for the kitchen, hunting around until she found the coffee and started a pot percolating. The redhead came back out twenty minutes later looking as if she'd just stepped off a catwalk and grabbed a cup of coffee, taking a few sips before she looked at Sarah and asked. "So what's this about us working together?"

"Well I presume you've been told that you're on an inter-agency task force that's based here?"

She nodded. "Then the fact that we're both here says that we're working together."

The redhead grinned. "Well when you put it like that, it's so obvious!"

Sarah rolled her eyes and asked which rooms were free. The other woman hesitated and said. "There are specific room assignments because the wardrobes have already been stocked with a selection of outfits for each of us, wait here, I'll go get the paperwork." With that she hurried off to her room.

When she brought back the paperwork and Sarah looked through the files to see which was her room, she froze….. "This isn't the name I've been assigned for this mission, it's my regular identity."

The other woman nodded, not looking happy. "Same! I don't know what they're playing at, but they seem determined to expose our identities to each other. By the way, Carina Miller, DEA, nice to meet you."

Sarah shook the hand she offered. "Sarah Walker, CIA, charmed…. Look, I don't know about you Red, but I don't like the idea of everyone knowing who I am, how do you feel about not telling the others who we are?"

"Works for me! I sorta know and trust you Blondie, but as far as I know I don't know these other two… So yeah, a girl's gotta keep her secrets, doesn't she?"

With that agreed, they showed each other their files and had a look at who their team mates were. Zondra Rizzo was FBI and seemed to have been in the business about as long as they had, with an impressive record, but Amy Rogers was CIA and while she was around the same age as the rest of them, she appeared to be pretty much fresh off the Farm. Knowing what most male agents were like, they were relieved that there weren't any staying in the apartment, but wondered whether there was another apartment for the male members of the team.

While they were having a discussion about what an arsehole Graham was for making her run for the plane like that when the start date for the assignment wasn't for another week and a half, Carina stopped and apologised about the state of the apartment. She explained that she hadn't been expecting anyone else to turn up yet, so she'd decided to make the most of the place and have a few parties while she had it to herself. Sarah waved that away and suggested that they get changed into something more appropriate and get the place cleaned up.

They were pleasantly surprised to find that they fell straight back into the easy camaraderie that they'd had when they went through their initial training at the Farm five years before, and talked about their time there as they cleaned. Sarah had clearly been the best at everything while they were there and most of the male recruits had resented being shown up so badly by a girl, but Carina had challenged and stretched herself by trying to keep up with her, and as a result she had come in second in most fields, nowhere near Sarah but still well ahead of everyone else. They both remembered that the other had been driven for some reason while they were there, but neither of them was comfortable enough to admit what that was yet. It was also obvious that Carina wasn't ready to discuss the circumstances under which she'd been 'traded' to the DEA when she left the Farm.

They spent the next four days sightseeing and shopping, generally settling into Paris, but their developing friendship and potential working relationship took a hit on the fifth morning when the guy that Carina had brought home the night before came out while Sarah was making herself breakfast and started mauling her. His screams had Carina running out in time to see the guy on the floor, desperately trying to get away from the woman who was advancing on him with a carving knife, so she grabbed him by the hair to drag him to the front door and throw him out. She said "Wait!" to Sarah, then ran back into her room, quickly throwing some clothes on and grabbing his clothes before running back to the front door to yank it open.

The guy was standing right at the door, bashing on it and demanding that they let him in. Carina kicked him in the family jewels and then her knee broke his nose and threw him back as he folded. One of his Italian shoes did a bit more damage to his face when she threw his clothes at him, and he pissed himself in fear at the cold menace in her voice as she said that if he ever came anywhere near her or her friend again she'd kill him.

Carina slammed the door and went back to talk to Sarah and try to repair the damage. When Sarah started talking about finding somewhere else to live because she wasn't going to take being attacked by her leftovers ever again, she begged her not to and promised that she'd never bring a guy back to the apartment again. It took a while longer, but Sarah eventually agreed to give it a try, saying that she was out if that ever happened again.

That was the environment that Zondra walked into later that next day. Both Sarah and Carina had learned to rely on their ability to read people in their lives on the wrong side of the law before they fell into the CIA's clutches, and after talking to her for a while they both were confident that they could trust Zondra, so they showed her their files, as well as her own and Amy's.

After confirming that Zondra Rizzo was indeed her regular identity rather than the identity that she was using on the assignment, Zondra agreed that there was something wrong with the fact that someone apparently fresh out of the Farm and untried like this Amy was being teamed up with the three of them. It didn't make sense, they were putting proven three hard hitters together with….. what?

While they were pondering that, Carina brought up what had happened that morning and the agreement she'd reached with Sarah, and Zondra was all for it, saying that she'd kill any reject who thought that she was his for the taking just because he had been allowed in, and then she'd do the same to the stupid slut who brought him in.

The three women spent the next five days bonding, and finding more and more reasons why it was logical that they would have been teamed up together, because their records since they joined their agencies were similar (Sarah avoided mentioning how many she'd killed and Carina avoided mentioning how many she'd fucked for the job, but they had all successfully completed a far higher number of dangerous missions than anyone else in their respective agencies in the past four years), which once again raised the question of what the other one had been assigned to the team for.

Given their shared affinity for dangerous missions, it was no surprise that the three of them had more than a passing acquaintance with the SOG, HRT and military special operations teams from the missions they'd done with them. Therefore, it was also no surprise that they started swapping Mowgli stories that they'd heard, because Mowgli seemed to be the poster child of Special Operations. Carina got some good mileage out of the military Special Operations stories, like the one where he'd taken a Hokum and used it to take out an armoured cavalry company to cover the escape of the rest of his team.

Sarah one upped her with the SOG guys comparing her to Mowgli and wanting to see who would win if they competed, but Zondra won, because she'd actually seen him! She told the story about a major FBI operation that had the HRT and military special operations teams brought in because the crime family they were trying to take down had hired a mercenary army to keep the authorities out. The special operations guys had some experimental transports that looked like a cross between a plane and a helicopter, and funny little unmanned helicopters that they were using to check out the roof of the building.

"Apparently those little unmanned helicopters had somehow showed them that the doors to the roof were booby trapped and they couldn't be disabled from the outside, so they came up with another way of getting a force into the top floor of the building. One of the helicopter/plane things went up and hovered outside the top floor. They were sending a live video feed from out of the back of it when someone opened up with a machinegun and shot out the glass wall in front of them. What happened next shocked everyone watching, because some guy came running past the camera flat out and jumped across the twenty foot gap to land in the conference room with the window shot out. The guy had a light line attached to him and he quickly slung it around something solid before using it to drag a heavier line across and secure it. As soon as he had it secured, a much bigger guy slid down the line and then the SEAL platoon went down after him. Once the SEALs were all down, they released the line and the SEALs secured the floor while someone deactivated the booby traps so that the rest of the Special Operations guys could come in from the roof. They swept through the building and attacked the mercenaries from behind, which in turn allowed the Marines take them out."

"It was only afterwards that we found out that that crazy bastard who'd made that jump across the gap into the conference room eighteen storeys up, disabled the booby traps and secured the servers for the FBI to take them over was Mowgli, and the big guy who went next was apparently his partner, the guy they call Baloo. I wanted to meet this guy because… well he's a legend, but I couldn't get anywhere near him. But here's the bizarre thing, with the SEALs, Special Forces, Marine Recon guys, even Baloo, it didn't take more than one look to recognise what they are, dangerous! This guy Mowgli, who's supposed to be the baddest motherfucker of the lot though, he looks like an ordinary guy. He's tall and fit, yeah, but he just looks like a nice, cute young guy that someone like Carina would love to deflower, it's bizarre!"

That discussion on went late into the night, because Sarah and Carina wanted to cry bullshit until Zondra offered to get the videos from the operation to prove it to them.

On the night before their assignment was supposed to begin, Sarah made the point that maybe someone else had realised the same thing as they had about this Amy, seeing as she hadn't turned up, and Carina and Zondra agreed that that looked like the case. A bit after midnight though they were proven wrong, because the woman in question came in, giggling and talking loudly with a couple of French guys. The other three women burst out of their rooms with pistols in their hands, but when they saw the bags they realised who she was and disappeared the guns before the newcomers saw them. Carina quickly ducked back into her room to put something on while Sarah and Zondra went to tell the Frenchmen to leave, because no guys were allowed in their apartment.

Amy started loudly telling them that they had no right to tell her what to do and that her friends were staying, but she shut up when Zondra slapped her hard enough to make her head spin. The smell of her was enough to turn their stomachs, because she smelled so strongly of sex and sweat that it was a good bet that she'd spent that last few days doing nothing but screwing nonstop. They would have thought she'd been held prisoner and pack raped if it wasn't for the fact that she was hanging onto the two guys and insisting that they stay (later finding out that they'd picked her up at the airport lowered their opinion of her even more).

The Frenchmen were apparently smarter or more sober (or both) than Amy was, because they read the very real threat coming from the now three dangerous looking women glaring at them and scarpered before they got hurt.

When they were gone, Zondra grabbed Amy and said. "Listen up sperm bank, because I'm only going to tell you this once! The number one rule of this apartment is no guys! If you bring a guy back here we'll get rid of him, and then you, and no-one will find your remains! Now we've got to be at the embassy for the initial meeting for this assignment in about eight hours so go and have as many showers as it takes to stop you smelling like a fifty cent whore who made a few grand on Labor Day and then go to bed. Do not make any noise to keep me awake or I will hurt you!"

Amy went to indignantly tell her that she couldn't say that to her, but shrank back when the look Zondra gave her told her exactly what she'd do to her if she said a word. Zondra pointed to the one closed bedroom door. "That's your room, go!" Amy quickly dragged her bags into the room and closed the door, the last they saw of her was her terrified face as the door closed.


In the morning, it appeared that while she had done something about the reek of sex, Amy had either become braver or forgotten what was said the night before, because she started telling them what her rules were for this apartment, until the looks the other three gave her almost made her have to go and change her panties, because these were scary bitches! She didn't appreciate it when she asked what was for breakfast and Carina said. "Whatever you make for yourself, just be sure to clean up after yourself or else!" This wasn't looking like the sweet gig she'd been told it would be at all!

At the Embassy, the new Station Chief proved to be a sleazy political appointment who was apparently harbouring fantasies of a sexy spy harem as he leered at them. Sarah, Carina and Zondra were all dressed in attractive but businesslike skirt suits. Amy, however, was in a rather short, tight cocktail dress. When she came out wearing that and five inch stilettos, Zondra had told her rather bluntly that she looked like a whore and to go and get changed into something businesslike. Unfortunately, when they checked her clothes after she whined that this and evening gowns were the only sort of things she had, they found she was telling the truth, so as they didn't have time to get her anything decent before the meeting, they had to go in with her looking like a hooker and fuelling the slug of a Station Chief's fantasies. They swore that she'd be getting herself a more suitable wardrobe before they went back to the apartment.

The meeting was an endless string of good news/bad news scenarios. They started out with the news that the four of them were the only permanent members of the team, no guys. Amy pouted at that but the other three breathed a sigh of relief. Then he took great delight in telling them the clever name that he'd helped select for the team, the Clandestine Attack Team Squad, the CAT Squad! While Amy tittered at that, the looks he was getting the other three made him hastily move things along, how could women that gorgeous be so scary?

This was how the meeting went for over an hour before he brought out their first mission details to instruct them how to carry it out. Director Graham had given him strict instructions about how to handle this lot, especially that uppity blonde bitch. He told them that the men they were going after were too highly placed to disappear, so the usual tactics he'd been told about for two of them would not be condoned. He then went on to tell them that they would gain the targets' confidence by becoming their live-in girlfriends and doing whatever they said, so that once they had gotten themselves properly established inside the organisation they would be able to feed any intel they obtained back out through the other agents that he'd have in place for that purpose.

He thought that they were taking this better than he'd told to expect, not realising that three of the women in front of him were ready, willing and quite able to rip him apart and ensure that his death was a quite long and excruciatingly painful process at that moment. Sarah just looked sat him and calmly said. "No."

He exploded. "What do you mean, 'No'? Don't you ever try to talk back to me! You work for me and you will do exactly what I tell you to do! I've been told all about you and I can assure you that I won't put up with any of your antics girl!"

She smiled grimly at him. "Oh, you've been told all about us, have you? I don't think so. Do you have any actual agents with real experience attached to this station?"

"Of course! This is the premier station for all of Europe!"

"I rather doubt that, but be that as it may, go and ask those agents about the Ice Queen…." She paused and glanced at Zondra. "And il Martello di Dio."

"You don't give me orders girl! I can see that what I was told about your insolence was only half of it, you will do exact….."

The look she gave him when she cut him off with. "Do it….Now!" loosened his bowels and he scurried out of the room to get the Hell away from that suddenly terrifying bitch.

This creature wasn't what had been described to him, so while he was out of the room he did as she said and asked the agents attached to the station about the two names that she'd said. What he was told left him white and shaking, what was that bastard Graham trying to do to him? The agents hadn't known much about 'il Martello di Dio', but the few stories they did have were frightening. They had plenty of stories about the Ice Queen though and they were totally terrifying! On Graham's word, he'd been looking into the face of death and ordering her to become some cheap drug trafficker's fuck toy. How was he going to get out of this with his balls….Fuck that, how was he going to get out of this alive!

He was still white when he went back into his office, and he refused to look them in the eye as he apologised profusely and said that the information he'd been given on them was wildly inaccurate and the instructions given on how to deal with them had been totally inappropriate. Sarah cut in and asked what in fact he'd been told and he flinched as he said that he'd been told that she was just an uppity bitch with delusions of grandeur so he had to show her who was boss and force her into submitting to whatever he said.

He pissed himself at the menace in her chill voice when she spoke after that. "Well you know better than to try that now, don't you Station Chief?" He responded with an ardent. "Yes! Yes Miss Truffaut, I won't speak to you..." When he saw two of the others react to that he amended his words. "I won't ever speak to any of you like that again!"

Sarah, Carina and Zondra looked at each other as they realised that he had only ever referred to them by their cover names for this assignment, so Sarah asked to see all the files on them and their mission rather firmly. He wasn't about to cross her now so he scurried over to the safe to grab all of the files and bring them back.

Amy was stewing when the other three women ignored her as they went through the files, other than to slap her hand away rather forcefully when she went to grab one of the files.

When the redhead looked up and asked the Station Chief. "These are all the files?" he leapt to assure her that they were, he might not have heard any direct confirmation that she was as dangerous as those other two bitches, but the look of her said that she was.

He watched the three bitches of the apocalypse silently communicating, then the blonde handed the files on the four of them back to him. The fact that there was no names mentioned other than the cover names they'd been assigned for this team meant that there was nothing that could be used against them in there, so they were happy for him to hold onto them. Then she waved at the mission files.

"We'll take these so that we can plan and execute our missions properly Station Chief. We will advise you when we are moving on the targets, when we need assistance, and the outcomes when we are successful. I strongly suggest that you don't tell Director Graham anything about us other than the outcome of our missions, and don't listen to anything else he may say about us. Director Graham obviously has an issue with me at least and has apparently attempted to turn this into a punishment assignment for me. As I believe you now understand, it would be a very bad idea for you to attempt to assist him in this."

They wound up the meeting at that and went to gather the intel and equipment they needed from the Station personnel.

Amy wasn't an idiot, she knew as well as the Station Chief that there was a lot that Graham hadn't told her about these women she'd been sent in here to spy on and sabotage, and that most of what he had told her had obviously been lies, so she asked the agents about the two names that Sarah (she wasn't about to ask for a surname) had told the Station Chief to ask about. What she was told terrified her, because she'd apparently been sent in here to undermine a group of women who'd killed more people than the plague!

She wasn't about to do anything actively against them, not knowing what they really were, but she couldn't afford to openly go against Graham either. He'd told her what he'd done to one female agent who tried to defy him about five years ago, and as much as she loved sex, being forced into that, over and over on every mission…. no, she had to be careful how she handled this….

November 2001 – The Farm

Larkin was furious, he'd shown them on the missions he did after 9/11 that he was a real agent, he'd done a damned sight better than the so-called experienced agents he'd been working with, if he did say so himself, but they just sent him straight back here to go back into training when they were done. They even marked his record with some shit about failing to show proper respect to the fallen.

He knew he wasn't handling this as well as he could have, he was doing pretty good at the physical aspects of the training, at least matching any of the other recruits, but it was never good enough in the eyes of the trainers….

He shook his head at that, he definitely should have done his homework before he tried to work the trainers who thought they were alpha males the same way he had the Professors at Stanford. If he had he would have known that offering sexual favours to men in this environment was as good as putting your head on the chopping block.

Even if they were inclined that way, they weren't about to allow any chance of that getting out in an environment like this, so all it got him was repeated beatings if anyone thought that he'd looked at them the wrong way. He probably would have had a fatal accident if the word hadn't come down that he was someone's Golden Boy who was slated for something important, so he was just mockingly referred to as 'the Queen' whenever other recruits couldn't hear and subjected to beatings whenever they felt like it.

That was something else that he couldn't understand, no matter how well he'd done, the trainers would just laugh at him and tell him that he hadn't matched the 'other Queen' and to go again. He wanted to tell them to fuck off, but straining to do better generally hurt less than the beating he'd get for talking back. But the thing was, if they reviled him for being a Queen, why did they all appear to revere this other 'Queen'?

One thing was obvious though, he wasn't going to get through this and get to Project Omaha if he played the game by their rules, so he revised his plan and started working the administration staff at the Farm. Even they had to be handled a lot more carefully than anyone at Stanford though, because they'd seen plenty of others trying to work a way around the system, so he had to move slowly to avoid giving the game away. Not that there was any great hurry, because the only news that ever came through from Project Omaha was that there were more delays.

Bryce had another incentive to get through this though, because he'd been contacted by someone who knew he was the Omaha Candidate with an offer. From what Fleming had told him, being the successful Omaha Candidate would put him at the top of the food chain as an agent, he'd live the high life, all those other bastards would bow down to him and he could have any of those beautiful female agents he'd been drooling over, from then on, the only cock getting sucked would be his!

While that sounded pretty good though, this other offer from a private organisation was far better. They were offering him ten million up front and anything he asked for if he brought them the result of Project Omaha once it had successfully been loaded into him. Let those other saps worship God and country, his loyalty was to Bryce Larkin! So he hadn't needed any time to think it over, he'd promised to contact them as soon as he had it loaded. Now he just had to get out of this damned spy school.

He had to make sure he wasn't caught, so it took him months to get the admins to the point where they'd agree to start modifying his records for him, and even then he couldn't afford to take anything but small steps, he'd have to get to the point where he was close enough to passing a given course before they put in a passing grade for him into the system, and then some time after that he'd get them to amend the results to show that he'd smashed it. He couldn't find out who this other Queen that the trainers were measuring him against was, so he had to make guesses about how high to push his scores to show on paper at least that he'd beaten him, without making them so high that alarm bells went off. The trainers just presumed that the powers that be were getting impatient and progressed the Queen as soon as he improved enough to get through, because they knew that he had actually passed their courses and in fact surpassed most of the other recruits with the extra motivation they'd given him by then, they were just using the expectation that he outperform the Ice Queen to punish the little bastard, to make him keep chasing a standard that they knew he could never achieve.

The non-physical courses were at once both easier and harder, some he got through OK, others he struggled in, but it was easier to seduce people into giving him passing grades for them, and then he'd get the admins to alter the scores to what he believed he deserved.

All up, it took Larkin eighteen months to get through the farm and show something like the scores that were expected of him. Some of the people running the farm knew for a fact that the little tool hadn't earned the scores that had been recorded for him but, much like the trainers, they just presumed that someone above them had organised it so that their 'Golden Boy' looked good coming out of the Farm. Truth be told, they all just wanted to be shot of him, so they didn't say anything. Their parting words might have been congratulatory, but Larkin was bright enough to get the message never to come back.

Larkin didn't care! He was finally back on track, heading to Project Omaha to make his way to his rightful place on top of the heap.

November 2002 – Undisclosed Location for Project Omaha

While no-one would tell him where Project Omaha was based, from the uniforms and facilities there and what he'd seen from the plane, he was on a military base somewhere close to D.C. Larkin wasn't worried about that, as he was certain that he would have worked out a way to get word out to his friends when the time came.

What he was worried about though was that these scientists wouldn't accept anything at face value and wanted to check everything (or rather, confirm the results as they were so fond of saying). Luckily, they decided to first put him through months of training intended to maximise his image retention abilities as they still hadn't finalised the coding of the Intersect, as the program was apparently called, to their satisfaction.

As a result, he spent his days working on variations of Fleming's Subliminal Imagery module and other spy stuff, as well as exercising and sparring. Luckily he could hold his own as far as the athletics and sparring went and there was no scoring on the other lessons he was going through, so the only thing he had to worry about was the Subliminal Imagery crap. The way he saw it though was that they were giving him the means to get on top of this. If Bartowski could have aced this test without any serious training, after all the exercises he was working through, he must be able to top him.

After about four months of this, the scientists decided that they were ready to try Intersect tests, so they had Larkin do the Subliminal Imagery test again. When he only scored in the mid-eighties on the test, they wanted to know what the hell was going on, and made him do it over, and over, and over again. The best result he could get was in the high eighties, and that was just because he'd made some good guesses on the ones he had no idea about.

This of course lead to serious questions about the discrepancy in the results. The CIA went straight to Stanford to find out where Fleming was and drag him in to explain, but the people at Stanford swore that they had no idea where he went after he left in 2001, so the CIA started searching for him electronically. The very few people at Stanford who knew what had happened to their erstwhile professor were keeping tight lipped, because that Bartowski business had done them enough damage, if it ever got out how many students Fleming had used falsified records and the promise of assistance to pressure into providing sexual favours to him over the years, they'd be ruined! The number of underaged students that Fleming had preyed on made it even worse, because he seemed to have liked the young ones even more. Special Agent Harris had handed over copies of all of the recordings and altered records for all the students that Fleming had scammed into having sex with him over a two and a half year period, and the university people were horrified. To be fair, some of them were horrified at what Fleming had been doing, but others were only thinking about what would happen to them if the families of those and other students ever found about it.

As a result, George Fleming had been buried in prison, with a 'clerical error' altering his name enough to ensure that he wasn't found. He was supposed to be in there for long enough for any of the students he'd preyed on to be long gone and then released, but some of the other prisoners had overheard the people from Stanford shouting at him about forcing underage girls to have sex with him and word quickly got around the prison that he was a child molester. Men in prison appear to hate child molesters more than anyone, possibly because they can't protect their own children from them while they're locked away, and that made Fleming a target. He was shivved to death about three months after he got there and cremated under the name that he was in there as, so George Fleming was gone and the CIA would get no answers from him.

When they couldn't find Fleming, and no matter how many SI tests he did, Larkin couldn't get higher than the mid to high eighties, they looked into the reasons for his score dropping. They debated whether the year and a half of intensive training at the Farm may have caused it, but that idea was discarded when it was pointed out that he'd been out of that for over four months. In the end, it was the lies that he and his family had made up to get him out of Stanford before the truth could catch up to him that was accepted as the answer, because they'd gotten doctors' reports to say that multiple blows to the head with some sort of blunt object had caused head trauma and that was why he was being rushed back East for specialised treatment.

The neurologists that Project Omaha consulted argued that head trauma could indeed result in the lower results that they were seeing here, so they sat down to debate whether they should proceed or not. The Omaha scientists argued that if the candidate had the capacity, they should load the Intersect and do what they could to get it working. Graham and other senior CIA people on the other hand looked at the humungous investment that they now had in Larkin (especially if you included the two years' that Project Omaha had been pushing to get the Intersect working for him) and his results from the Farm, which were outstanding on paper at least, and overruled the scientists. The decision was made to send Larkin into the field and make use of his exceptional skills, in hope of getting some value out of the investment they had in him.

So, in March 2003, Bryce Larkin became Director Graham's newest field agent Golden Boy.

A/N: 9/11 was a surreal experience for me as while I wasn't in America, I was working for a large American corporation that was rather unpopular in the region that the attackers were presumed to be from, and as the people responsible for physical security in the company couldn't be found, I had to handle it.

When I first saw the news, I actually believed that someone had made up something to get the same effect as the panic that Orson Wells created with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast, because I couldn't accept that it was real, but unfortunately it was real.

I was lucky I guess, as the serious impact on me only lasted a day, the big bosses backed up all the calls I'd made when no-one else would, I didn't lose anyone I knew over there and my world went back to normal afterwards, but I doubt if I'll ever forget that day.

NB: According to GT, "il Martello di Dio" means "The Hammer of God".

BTW: Yes, the funny experimental helicopter/plane things are V22 Ospreys, they were doing military trials for nearly twenty years before they were accepted, and helicopter drones weren't common usage until well after that.