Over next few days the computer equipment Beckman promised began arriving at Chuck's company. Logan and Chuck wasted no time in adding the new hardware to the server racks and bringing them online. Casey and Sarah remained with the rest of the crew at the house while the two brainiac's were doing their nerd work. Casey tried on several occasions to remain in the sub-basement, only to be dragged out each time by Ellie and taken to the house. The fact she'd kicked his ass when they first met played a major role in his decision to leave. Sarah didn't know how or when it happened but after a few days she had revealed her entire past to Ellie and Chuck and felt much better for it. Sarah noticed that even Casey started to relax while at the house when he showed up on the pool deck decked out in board shorts carrying a glass of scotch and smoking a cigar, that Sarah was sure originated in a banned country. The women were harder to figure out for Sarah or maybe it was the whole Logan sleeping with all five of them that had her confused. She was barely able to handle a one on one relationship, let alone the convoluted one those six had going on. She knew it wasn't just a ruse either. In the three nights she'd spent at the mansion, she'd seen Logan making out with all of them. Then she had the unfortunate experience of walking in on three of them having sex in the living area when she went to get a drink during the night. They merely paused their activity until she fled the room in panic.

"Hey Ellie? You were in a hurry to get Chuck a girlfriend yet you're single, what's up with that?" Sarah and Ellie were relaxing beside the pool enjoying the afternoon sun sharing a bottle of wine with Ellie. Ellie was currently on a three-day break from the hospital.

"I had a boyfriend for years, then Chuck got hurt," Ellie said taking a sip of her wine. "between visiting him at the hospital, then coming here during his rehab and both our shifts at the hospital things kind of fell apart. We had a few minor dust ups over Logan as well. I never took Devon to be the jealous type but live and learn I guess."

"I'm surprised with you being a doctor, you didn't send Chuck to a rehab facility after his injury." Ellie gave Sarah a confused look before smiling.

"I'm sorry. We introduced you to Logan's crew but left a lot of their back story out. Karen is a surgeon, who transferred to West Side after they started working with Chuck on his rehab. Claire is a physical therapist; Olivia is a massage therapist, which can in handy during the first few months. Riley and Nicole are personal trainers who worked with some big-name athletes. He got better and more personal care here than he would have in any clinic. Patients recover quicker when they're in familiar surroundings with loved ones. Plus Chuck really wanted to train with Logan."

"Can you blame him?" Sarah asked with a gleam in her eye.

"Not really, Devon was a work out freak and he'd occasionally give Chuck grief for not working out. Chuck didn't want Devon to train him when he recovered, fearing Devon would be to critical of his progress, it worked out well for all of us in the end. When we get mom back I'll consider jumping back into the dating pool, I'm good for now." The ladies smiled to themselves when they heard Casey sigh when he took his normal chair behind them.

"Still don't want to see us naked, John," Ellie said.

"Just being polite," he replied.

The next two weeks went by agonizingly slow for the team, they would be making their move to extract Frost in a few days. Chuck started the demise of Volkoff two days prior to the extraction by draining and freezing Alexi's accounts. Casey gathered the team in the operations room to explain the final plan using the large map was projected on white board hanging on the wall. As he gave his briefing he traced the routes on the white board.

"With the hints Chuck gave his mother, Volkoff's most likely avenue of approach will be south on the Leninsky highway then turn on to the Krimsky heading west to the park. The main entrance is located along the Moskva where they will enter the park on the north end. This road runs parallel to the Moskva and has the best view of the river. This is the entrance we concentrate our efforts on," pointing to the map. "Each of the others will be manned by the NSA strike teams. We will also have roving patrols scattered throughout the park in case backup is needed. Any questions so far?"

"I think you covered it very well Casey," Chuck said.

During that previous weeks there were quite a few communications made between Frost and Ellie to relay the plans as they were made.

All the plans were now in place and it was time for Beckman to get involved. She mobilized three of her best European teams to Moscow and explained to them in very vivid detail what was going to happen and the repercussions if they screwed up. She then arranged for hotel rooms not far from the pickup point and finally the NSA plane to get them there and back. The only question left was, would Frost get to the extraction site?

Volkoff Headquarters

To say Volkoff was pissed would have been the understatement of the century. He was absolutely livid when he was informed his assets were being drained at an alarming rate and those not diminishing were frozen. He called on his right hand man, in this case a woman, Frost.

"Frost my darling, we need to go down to the bank and see if I can unfreeze my MONEY!"

"Alexi relax please. I have an idea, before we go to the bank let's stop at Gorky Park, you know looking at the river calms you down. We can't have you killing the bank manager can we?" Frost said while placing her hand on his arm.

"You're right as usually, let's go my dear I'll call for the car." It didn't take long for the car to arrive in front of his building. The couple plus a few body guards in trail vehicles were on the way to the bank via Gorky Park. Frost knew this could be her only chance to get away and began to worry because Volkoff being with her could complicate the extraction.

Gorky Park

The three member NSA strike team that would be backing up Chuck's team stationed themselves well back from the extraction site, but not far enough away that they couldn't be there in less than twenty seconds. The rest of the teams were deployed around the park at the other entrances to the park. Two Mercedes were parked with motors running next to entrance to the park off the main road yet close to the river. Claire and Riley were the drives of the cars, their job was to crash into the limo and make it immobile. The rest of the team including Beckman were scattered near the entrance playing tourists. The limo came down the street and began its turn into the parking lot, Claire pulled out of the spot she was in and collided with the front door of the limo removing one of Volkoff's body guards from the equation. Claire got out of her car shouting in French at the driver. The body guard in the passenger seat exited the car followed by Volkoff who had his gun drawn and the anger was pouring off him in waves. He was yelling something in Russian, but no one could understand him. Frost, knowing she was near the extraction site, took this as her opportunity and jumped out of the car and sprinted to the back of the limo and into the park. The second Benz quickly pulled out, passed the limo and pulled up to Frost. Riley yelled out "Frost get in the car."

At the same time this was happening the two cars that were following Volkoff's limo pulled up to the chaos and stopped. The men jumped out of the cars with their guns drawn. It turned out to be a bad move for them, they no sooner exited their cars when they were gunned down by Casey, Sarah and the rest of the team.

"Who the hell are you people?" Frost yelled drawing her own weapon and pointing it at the driver of the car that pulled up alongside of her.

"FrostyEFB is waiting for you and we don't have much time so get in the fucking car!" Riley yelled back. That was all it took for Frost to jump in the car, before the door closed it pulled away.

Volkoff was pointing his gun at Claire and the body guards had theirs out as well all pointing at Claire, three shots rang out almost at the same time. Chuck's round hit the body guard closest to him, Ellie hit the second one and the General had the honor of taking down Volkoff. Both body guards fell over dead with half their heads missing and Volkoff was on the ground clutching his hand. Casey ran over to Volkoff and hit him with a tranque dart before cuffing him. Chuck, Ellie and Beckman lowered their weapons when it was clear to them that there was no other threat. When the rest of the team and the NSA strike force heard the shots they ran to the scene guns drawn and at the ready. In the few seconds it took them to respond the threats had been dealt with.

"Nice Shot Ellie. General I see you haven't lost a step, nice shot as well."

"Thank you, Chuck. Tell Riley we're ready."

Back in the Benz Frost was trying to get some answers. "Who are you with? CIA NSA?"

"My, my you are in a hurry Mary Bartowski," said Riley looking over at her passenger where she saw the look of shock on Mary's face at her comment. "Chuck and Ellie will explain it to you when we meet up. They should be finished with Volkoff by now, I just have to wait for the call. To answer your question we work with the NSA as contractors, more like mercenaries, if you will."

"Chuck and Ellie are here?" Mary questioned with hope in her voice as a tear made its way down her cheek. "How soon before they finish up?" as if on que, Riley's phone beeped indicating a text was received.

"That was Chuck, he said, bring our mom home. Ready to see your kids?"

"You have no idea," she sighed and relaxed for the first time in as long as she could remember. It was just a few minutes later when the car pulled up the curb where Chuck and Ellie jumped in and the car sped away.

"Well done people, let's get the hell out of here. We meet at the plane as discussed, wheels up in an hour. Remember to use different routes on the way back, be careful of any tails, let's move," commanded the General.

The siblings were quiet for a few minutes taking the sight of their mom, it was the same thing she was doing to them. Ellie was the first to speak "I've missed you so much mom. We both have."

"I missed you guys as well. It's been such a long time and you guys aren't little any more. I've missed so much of your lives."

"You really have, mom. We have to debrief you on anything Volkoff related when we get to NSA headquarters, then we'll have you flown back to California and brought to our place," stated Chuck.

"Why the NSA and not the CIA? I was working for them at the time."

"Simple really, we don't deal with the CIA. Graham was made director of the CIA. He is one of the people you asked for extraction and he did nothing except let you rot," Chuck snarled.

"You guys didn't become spies, did you? I learned the hard way it can ruin your life."

"Nope," answered Ellie with a smile. "We're better than that. Between Chuck and Logan, they can hack into just about anywhere, plus they're both good at writing code. This allows them to predict when something might happen so we can cut it off before something happens most of the time. We also don't do infiltration missions that will take months. We go in, plant some bugs and get out. People talk about all kinds of things inside their homes and they eventually give us something we can use."

"You guys seem to have a handle on things, but we need to get back in there and get the information on Hydra from his computers," Mary stated firmly.

"No, we don't mom. You just heard Ellie say how good at hacking we are. Before this started, I hacked his systems and placed a small program inside his server. When his servers backed up and rebooted a small flash of the bios/CMOS took place. All it did was leave an open a port for us to get to the drives. Before we left to extract you we had about eighty percent of the data stored on them downloaded. That's when we froze his accounts and began emptying them as well. When we get you back to our place we'll explain it all in great detail."

"Are you sure you're not spies?"

In another car Sarah and Casey pulled out behind the car carrying the Bartowski's. "Casey, have you ever seen a better planned and well executed mission than this one?"

"I can't say that I have. Your boyfriend called it down to its end game. I'm used to getting a mission, doing the planning and going in."

"Same here. They did so much prep work and when it started we had nothing to do for two weeks, yet we were on the mission. All the information they gathered enabled you to put together the extraction plan. Look at today, we had enough back up to take Volkoff's headquarters by storm if we needed to. Normally I'm on my own, but today if the shit hit the fan we had help and a lot of it. "

"You remember when we first met?" asked Casey. "I was pissed I was going to be babysitting a civilian. That's why I had the attitude I did. Then Ellie knocked me on my ass. I still can't believe that happened. They may be civilians, but they are well trained. After that they made us part of the team. They trusted me enough to plan the extraction which was a shock to me. Logan let me look over some of the reports they kept on their missions to catch the Fulcrum scum. Its interesting reading."

"I haven't seen any yet, can you give me the cliff notes version?"

"They are masters of deception, lying and manipulation. Between all of them they only have twenty kills, that's it. I'll give you one example of how they work. They located a Fulcrum agent and hacked into his computer to get his email address, then they started corresponding with them. They made up an agent file in the CIA data base as a cover, which of course checked out. Soon they arranged a meet saying they wanted to defect to Fulcrum. At the meet Chuck posed as the agent. Ellie and Claire walked in acting as lovers. This caught the eye of the agent and as soon as he took his eyes off Chuck, Chuck tranqued him with a low level dart so he looked hammered. He escorted him outside into a van and off they went, no one was the wiser it happened. They got in and out and none of the people in the restaurant knew what happened. It was perfect."

"Just like today then," Sarah commented. "From what I have seen so far is they set the rules of engagement and their patient and wait for the right time to strike. Since they have a long list of suspects, they can afford to take their time. Casey, if they were that good before Chuck got the intersect, how good will we be now?"

"That I can't answer. I can tell you that I want to stay on this team no matter what. It's only been a month for us, but I can tell these people are special. I've known the General a long time and it takes a lot to impress her, and these people did it."

"I get the same feeling. Not only that these people are nuts. They have absolutely no fear of death, none, zero. Crazy I tell you."

"You do realize your boyfriend is leading the crazy train? And Ellie, that broad is bat shit crazy. I've been hit hard before but she knocked me on my ass like it was nothing. And the look in her eyes was scary."

"I'd like to continue this conversation, but I have to get some sleep." Sarah said as she closed her eyes. Within the hour the group was on board the NSA jet heading back to the states. Most of the team was asleep while Chuck was busy doing his report, Ellie was chatting with her mom when Chuck's software alerted him someone was trying to hack into his system, a name flashed on the screen, Orion. The intersect kicked in and identified Orion as the creator of the intersect causing an internal debate on whether to let him in or not. He asked his mom if she had any more information on Orion, "Hey mom, did you have any contacts that went by Orion?"

"Orion?" her face paled slightly, "when I first met your dad, his code name was Orion."

"Ok then I'll see what this wanna be wants." Chuck allowed Orion limited access to his computer. The screen did some funny stuff and the words, I KNOW WHO YOU ARE popped up on it.

Chuck typed back, now we're even.

What? How?

Easy, you're not as good as you think you are. Your signature is inside your code.

The screen formed a face of x and o's. You're in danger son.

And you must be ...?

I'm your dad.

You may be my dad, but you stopped being my father when you split because you were too much of a coward to save mom. Well guess what? I got her out and it only took three weeks. Instead of using the resources you had at hand and trying to get her out, you ran like a scared little child.

I did it to protect you and Ellie. I didn't want this for you

Well thanks for nothing. When I was in the hospital for nine months, paralyzed from the neck down did you contact me? No, what would these people want with a broken man? Nothing that's what. So who were you protecting after I got hurt? Mom? You and Graham left her to rot, so screw you. If you want to see me, man up, show your face and stop hiding behind the matrix look. To find out where I live contact Beckman. Oh by the way your system will crash five seconds after I say goodbye. The only reason we're talking now is because I allowed it. You may have been good in your day, but right now this line from the Charlie Denial's band song the Devil went down to Georgia, "I told you once, you son of a bitch I'm the best there's ever been."

Orion sat in his trailer in Barstow and gaped in awe at what was said to him. Then his screen flickered before the system crashed costing him everything.

"Who was that?" asked Mary.

"Dad. I told him to contact Beckman if he wants to see us again."

"Chuck you shouldn't have done that. He never wanted any of this for you guys."

"He tried that stick with me and it didn't work. We understand why you left, you were doing your job and got stuck. He just left. He had several options, one was for him to take us with him to keep us safe and two work for the government." He held up his hand to keep his mom from jumping in, "his running didn't stop them from completing the intersect did it? Did it stop me from getting the thing stuck in my head? No on both counts. It didn't stop us from doing what we are doing now. The only thing he did was leave boxes of stuff for us to look through which we used to find you."

"Now that I'm back and after I get debriefed, I'd like to help you guys out if I can."

"I'll talk to Ellie and see what she says. We don't operate the way you did mom. We don't have secrets from each other, it's our no lies no bullshit policy. We work as a team all the time, there is never a mission without back up. No extended or seduction missions either."

"That limits what an agent can do Chuck."

"Mom, we're in 2008. Part of the problem with the old way is you guys stayed in place so long that after the take down people would remember you. Logan and I can hack into anywhere we want. Once we get a lead on someone it's easy to get them alone or out of the house. Then we grab them and then get the Intel we need. No one ever really sees us. Over the last eight months we have almost decimated Fulcrum. We should be able to take them out within a few months. We also found out they are part of another organization called the ring. We're going after them next. Graham doesn't know anything about what we do other than the missions that come out way from the Intersect, so don't tell him."

A month later the NSA, Beckman to be exact, was the talk of the intelligence community. She had been given an almost limitless pocket from which to draw money. Thanks to the information she was getting from the LCE group, gleaned mostly from Volkoff's servers, arms dealers around the world were being taken down. The arms dealers in friendly countries were arrested while the ones in countries that may have ulterior motives to the governments, suddenly had a terrorist label placed on them, followed by a drone strike that put a quick end to their operations. On the rare occasion the arms dealer and his organization couldn't be located, their funds suddenly dried up. LCE had taken down most of Fulcrum, not by killing or arresting them, that would come later. They did it by choking off the money train. No former agent wants to work for nothing. Beckman hoped as the money dried up the rogue agents would go off on their own and join up with the ring. This give LCE the information they needed to track the funds of the Ring.

On the other side of the intelligence fence was Graham, who's once shiny star was fading, was falling further and further from grace as his agents were having little to no effect on the rogue groups of spies. He tried in vain that Walker was his agent but was slapped down by Beckman because she had operational control and Walker was on loan to her. Graham needed a last-ditch effort, a hail Mary if you will, to redeem himself so he sent who he thought was his best agent, Bryce Larkin, to get Walker back from under the General's control, hoping their prior relationship would be enough to entice her to come back. Bryce accepted his assignment with glee hoping to get Sarah back and to make a bigger name for himself.

During the same month, Frost remained back east working with the NSA. After she'd been debriefed and given a clean bill of heath by the medical staff, Beckman required Frost be given a full physiological work up before she would be cleared to return home. It would also give Mary a chance to observe how her children's teams worked from a distance. Frost's inside information added another layer in bringing down Volkoff's empire, she had personal contact with several Americans whose business dealings with Alexi were less than favorable to the country over the years. Mary and her children video chatted every night except when they were on a mission.