Hey, hey, hey. What's in your head,
In your head,
Zombie, zombie, zombie?

As usual, no rights to any of the characters, blah, blah, blah.

Sarah wondered what she'd gotten herself into, proposing to add Jeff to the CI family, well, not really, but she hadn't thought about the fact that most of the hard work would be on her. As far as his clearances went, his long, long list of misdemeanours and the fact that his mother was in the middle of a long prison sentence didn't help, but the fact that all of his deviant acts were overt, public and very well known did. Who said that Youtube was good for nothing? (The reasoning regarding things which could be used to compromise what you have access to is that overt acts are of less use for leverage or blackmail, it's the dirty little secrets that you're trying to hide that can be used against you.) Still, it made it a tough gig and took rather more effort. She also needed to give him a makeover to fit into the image that they were trying to present for Carmichael Industries, Buy More nerd or sleazy rock star chic didn't wash, so she took him to get his hair properly styled and an entire smart casual to formal wardrobe overhaul, he looked like a new man when he came back. The fact that Jeff felt/acted more professional and involved due to the makeover and the confidence they were showing in him resulted in a side benefit, it wasn't quite as amazing a transformation as Devon's getting him clean, but there was a notable step up in his approach to things and his output, apparently Jeff had even more potential in him than they'd realised.

As they'd known, there would be a delay before they could get Jeff working on any classified projects, but they could, and did, start him on commercial projects that didn't require clearances. This way, he could take some of the load off Chuck and free him up for the secret squirrel jobs that he was uniquely qualified for. One of the first projects that Jeff was put onto was analysing and back tracing the intel that Casey sent over from Europe, where he was winding up his engagement there. What they were looking for was to trace the shipments and dealings of the arms and drug smuggling operation that Casey was working on shutting down from the records that they'd grabbed.

Jeff had been making good progress through the next couple of weeks, and they'd been feeding information back to Casey a few times a day, whenever they had a large enough package to be of use to him. He was dredging up the routes, entry and exit points and storage locations for the various items that the target was shifting, and Casey's team was watching and/or raiding those locations to get further detail. There was just one thread through what he was analysing that was stumping him, the secrecy and obfuscation used on this was far more than anything else the organisation was involved with. He didn't want to bother Chuck, but he wasn't getting anywhere so to opened a video chat channel to ask him whether he had any pointers on what he could do to get past the blocks he was finding. What he wasn't expecting was the look of shock on Chuck's face when he mentioned the name associated with this thread, and the fact that Chuck literally sent his chair flying as he jumped up and ran across from his office. The second he arrived, he bodily pushed Jeff out of the way and was frantically hunting through the records on Jeff's computer, and that was what he was doing as Sarah arrived about 20 seconds later, anxious to know what could make her husband change into the desperate creature in front of her now.

In less than a minute, Chuck had gone through every reference and instance of Orion on Jeff's computer and stepped back, berating himself as he paced back and forth across the office. "No, no, no, how could I have been so stupid?" "If we'd thought of this then we could have recovered him!" This went on for 5-10 minutes and Jeff and Sarah (and Alex as she'd run over as well when the commotion started) stared at him, worried. Sarah finally got him to stop him pacing by standing in front of him with her hands on his shoulders as she looked him in the face, asking "Chuck, honey, what is it, what is this about?" He looked stricken and on the edge of falling apart and had trouble focussing on her as he repeatedly pointed to Jeff's computer, trying to form the words. "Orion, Orion is Stephen Bartowski, my father." Sarah looked into his eyes, gently asking "But I thought your father was dead?" Chuck nodded "Yes, Shaw killed him, but we never recovered his body from the Ring, and they've done this before." Now Sarah was getting really worried, she thought something had pushed Chuck over the edge. "Done what?" "Brought people back, they did it to Bryce and Shaw." Sarah had tears in her eyes as she tried to get through to him, convinced that he had lost his mind. She got him to settle down and lay down in the conference room and then called General Beckman, as she had no-one else to call.

When the General came on, she was shocked to see the woman she knew to have been one of the most lethal assassins on the planet totally distraught, and crying her eyes out, so she asked her what was going on. Sarah tried to catch her breath and explain that something had pushed Chuck right over the edge, because he thought his father had come back from the dead. At this the General's demeanour changed instantly and she leant forward, cutting through the tears with a harsh demand for details. Sarah choked out what Chuck had said, trying to understand what the General was asking. Once she'd finished, the General composed herself and then looked at her, saying "Chuck isn't necessarily wrong, Sarah, the Ring had the technology to revive people who had been killed, they brought Bryce Larkin back when they thought he had the Intersect, and also brought Daniel Shaw back after Chuck killed him to save you." At that, Sarah looked up at her in shock. "Chuck killed Shaw?" "Yes, Shaw was going to kill you, that was about the only thing that could push him to do that, he wouldn't do it to save himself, but for you he will." "What I'm saying, Sarah, is that believing that the Ring could have brought his father back after Shaw killing him doesn't make Chuck crazy, and as his father was the only one who could create the Intersect, they would have gone to any lengths to revive him. Can we talk to Chuck?"

Sarah went to get Chuck up and take him to her office to talk to the General, ignoring the looks and questions from Alex and Jeff. They were on-line to the General for about an hour, as she waved off anyone who tried to interrupt with appointments and important calls, winding up with her commitment to give any support necessary to track this matter down, in hope that the indications were right and his father had been revived. When they got off the call, Chuck looked much better, but was worried, as he knew that the government would try and drag his father back into making the intersect for them, given that Chuck had destroyed what they thought was the last copy of the Intersect in the DARPA labs. (Not knowing that he'd downloaded it into himself to diffuse the bomb at the concert to save the General and the thousands of other people at the concert.) They held each other for a while and then, back in a state to deal with things, he went back to Jeff's office to apologise for getting physical with him and acting so crazy, explaining that Orion used to refer to his father, who he thought was dead, so he sort of lost it. He asked Jeff to send him copies of everything relating to Orion and went back to his office to get to work. In the meantime Sarah went to Alex to give her a similar explanation, in order to relieve the tension and keep them out of something which was likely to get VERY dangerous.

They got Casey on a secure line to fill him in on the situation, between them they agreed that it wasn't time to let Ellie know, not wanting to give her any false hope until they knew what was going on, and that Mary could be filled in by the General if she chose to. Given that his mother was still in the CIA and had the same mindset, they weren't sure that she would place family interests over the agency's, while they would do whatever it took to get his father back and try to keep him free, they weren't so sure about his mother. Casey offered to come back straight away, but it was decided that it would be better if he stayed there, as the trails seemed to indicate that Orion had been shipped to Europe before what they had so far went cold, so if there was an extraction to be done, it would almost certainly be over there. When they broached the subject of bringing Alex into the matter (explaining the story they'd told her so far), they were surprised when he suggested that they should, as they'd expected that he'd want to keep his daughter away from anything as dangerous as this, given the type of people who would be after anyone involved. Sarah went to get her and she was brought up to speed with the story of Orion and the Ring's ability to revive people after they were killed. Alex was constantly looking from Chuck to her father's image, unable to accept what she was being told was real, but knowing that they wouldn't make up something like this, especially given how she'd seen this devastate Chuck when he discovered it.

Chuck was like a man possessed as he traced all the leads relating the Orion, Jeff had done a good job, but he didn't have the resources, skills or desperate focus that Chuck had. What he dug out was that it appeared that the Ring had apparently revived his father and then placed him in stasis to ship to their labs in Europe, possibly because they had more resources over there, but probably also to get him away from the arena where Chuck had more opportunity to track him down, given that Chuck was the only one who could find him before. The problem was that Team Bartowski took down the Ring just after that by capturing the Ring Elders and exposing their schemes to the intelligence community, so the recipients for the Orion shipment disappeared.

Given the mercenary nature of the the organisation that the Ring used to smuggle Orion into Europe, they decided to sell the package off to the highest bidder. They didn't really understand what the package was, but the name was circulating and creating a LOT of interest, so they put out feelers for interested buyers and brokered a deal. Chuck had to get into their systems and/or records to get the full information, but it was looking like Orion went to an Eastern Bloc country, possibly the Ukraine or Russia. For all the US tried to keep the Intersect quiet, people talked, and it was relatively common knowledge in the intelligence community that the Intersect existed and what the nature of the things that could be done with it were. Therefore, most of the organisations in the intelligence community were very interested in getting their hands on Orion, to try and have the intersect for themselves.

So, Chuck was now at the point where he really needed to head to Europe to get to the arms smuggling organisation that Casey was looking into, so that he could get access to the records to determine where his father went, but he had a quandary. There was no way Sarah would let him go into that situation without her there to protect him, and he wasn't about to let her get into that situation herself, especially now that she was pregnant. Working out how to get to the information to save his father and keep his wife safe at the same time, that was going to be the hardest part of this.