A/N Chuck is really quite unfair to Morgan in Bearded Bandit. In S4's opening episode Morgan followed Chuck into Volkoff's factory, and only applauded Chuck taking out a horde of gunmen at once. I'm not surprised Morgan felt a little betrayed. One could even make the argument that if Chuck hadn't been constantly stopping Morgan they might have won.
"Do we have another mission?"
"There are some acts even I don't want to get caught in."
"You gotta be careful what you ask for."
"For the team!"
Ellie Bartowski-Woodcombe was in her office reviewing the latest scans when the call came in. Her monitor lit up in shades of gray, but she'd know those shifting tones anywhere. "Hi, Dad, glad you're here." And she was, strangely enough.
After the whole tracker debacle, Stephen stayed on his best behavior, taking baby steps back into her good graces. "What can I do for you, Eleanor?"
"I can really use your help interpreting these scans." Ellie moved a number of windows onto the monitor.
"What's happened?" said Orion, his voice tense.
"Nothing, Dad, or maybe something, I don't know," said Ellie. She expanded a window, the twisting ring becoming a tangled skein of someone's thoughts. "I have no baseline."
"What do you mean, no baseline?" asked Stephen, pulling up Manoosh's algorithm for regularizing the waves. "You've been scanning Chuck for months."
Ellie shook her head. "These aren't Chuck's. They're scans of Manoosh."
Orion didn't bother with all the questions in the middle. "What did he upload?" Couldn't be the whole Intersect, Ellie would know what arrangements to make in that case.
"Just the skills."
"How many?"
"All of them."
Stephen felt a stab of dismay. Hartley had experimented on himself too. "He's your expert–"
"He doesn't think globally, Dad. He thinks of these scans as art." Which had been a very good thing, once, He'd saved Chuck's life and mind when he noticed what the rest of them couldn't. "Any one skill, yes, he's the expert, but not all of them, with the necessary data, over this long a time."
Orion sighed. "I'll do my best, sweetheart, but the skills weren't my doing."
"It's not the skills but the framework I'm worried about, and that is your doing," said Ellie, "And mine, and I can't help but feel that there's something very wrong with–"
Suddenly her watch started beeping.
"What's that?" asked her father.
"Chuck's emergency alert. Dad, I have to go."
"No you don't." The monitor split into two panels, one of which was full of frenzied activity, and the other showed the inside of Carmichael Industries' secret base. Ellie felt a stab of déjà vu, but this time when the upset blonde walked by she wasn't carrying a rocket launcher, so that was something. "Sarah, what's happening?"
On the screen, Sarah lifted her head and scanned the room. "Ellie? Where are you?"
"I'm on your left," said Ellie, and Sarah turned her head, looking vague. After a moment her gaze sharpened and Ellie knew she'd spotted the camera. "What's wrong with Chuck?"
"We don't know," said Sarah. "He's only supposed to be on a food run with Manoosh. He was getting antsy."
"Who, Chuck?"
"No, Manoosh. He's been getting pushier about doing the missions, lately. At first I thought it was just him wanting to play with his new toys, but now I'm not so sure."
Ellie glanced at the gray box. "You think something could be wrong with Manoosh?"
"Long term, yes." Then Sarah shook her head. "But Chuck would have called."
He did. "Unless he can't," said Ellie. "Do you know where they are?"
"Yep," said Casey, behind Sarah. "Coordinates are–"
"Plotted on screen one," said Orion.
Casey grumbled a bit, but eventually said, "Thanks." The screen resolved into a map of the city, with two dots on it.
"Where is that?" asked Carina.
"What are those two dots?" asked Casey. Only Chuck had a tracker–three of them–and they would have registered as one.
"Well, for the first part…" said Stephen, and the image shifted, got smaller, as the map expanded to include their own location, a third dot, but the other two appeared to have merged into one.
"Why so far?" said Sarah.
"That's no deli," said Carina, suddenly. "That's location one. Orion, can you pull in?"
"What's location one?" asked Casey, as the mapped swelled again, the merged dots separating. One seemed to be moving, according to the coordinates, while the other was stable, just outside the outer wall.
"Remember when Karl left," asked Carina, "We gave him one of my experiments as a combination 'thank you' and 'going-away' present, you know, 'thank you for going away'? Well, Chuck had me load it up with tracking nanos, so we could track it even if he ate it." Things got real quiet all of a sudden. "He might have!" She pointed to the unmoving dot. "Looks like he threw it away instead, the bastard, but he must have gone back to his office first."
"Wait a minute," said Casey. "Are you telling me that we really are getting a signal off a bran muffin?"
Lock-picking. Recon. Ninjitsu. And a good bit of hide-and-seek where, Chuck had to admit, the smaller guy had a real advantage. "Manoosh," he whispered, head down and gun high, "What do you think you're doing?"
"What do mean, 'what am I doing'?" Manoosh whispered back. "I'm doing what you would do, going after the bad guy, protecting the team." He slipped around the corner.
Chuck followed, joining Manoosh behind a low rail. "Getting yourself killed is not helping the team."
"No one's gonna get killed," said Manoosh dismissively, scanning the room. "There's the office. I'll watch your back, you hack in and get the evidence we need to put him away, so Wesley will be safe."
Chuck scanned the room, too. A big one, with lots of entrances. "I don't know, Manoosh, a building this big has to have a lot of guards."
"How many guys did you beat in Volkoff's factory that time?"
"A lot," said Chuck, "But I had Carina with me."
"Well now you've got me, and I think the Intersect might make me at least as good as Carina," said Manoosh, a little put out. "Especially against the kind of goons this guy is likely to have."
"You're assuming," said Chuck.
"Assuming what, that this guy's goons aren't gonna be trained up to Volkoff standards? Seems like a pretty safe bet to me."
A single goon wandered into the room, on his usual rounds. His weapon wasn't ready as his dle gaze swept the room, seeing only what he expected to see, completely missing the two intruders.
Manoosh gestured. See what I mean?
Chuck gestured back. Be gentle.
Manoosh handed Chuck his gun, and vaulted the rail.
A black Porsche roared down the road, treating the Virginia highway system like it was a racetrack with only one car on it. No one even tried to pull her over. The word had already gone out, the Porsche Blonde was in hot pursuit.
While Carina called Davis from the back seat (of course), Casey made a call of his own from the front seat. "Alex? Are you and your guest still enjoying your dinner?"
"Yes, Dad," said Alex' voice over the speaker. "We were just wondering where to go next."
"You might want to stay there a while longer. Ask the waiter for the special dessert menu."
Alex dropped the pretense. Her voice went hollow, as she put the phone on speaker on her end as well. "What's going on, Dad?"
"Dumb and Dumber decided to buy some diamonds without us."
Alex didn't respond immediately. When the phone spoke again it was with Wesley's voice. "Tell them to stay out! It looks like an office building, but if he thought something was up my brother could lock that place down like a fortress. No one could get in or out."
"Thanks for the warning, kid," said Casey caustically. Now the second half of the team would be completely cut off from the first half, rather than right there in the thick of it with them.
Sarah snatched the phone and took it off speaker. "Yes, thank you, Wesley, we'll take it from here. Alex, if you don't hear from us in an hour I suggest you take him back to your place." She tossed the phone back in its owner's lap. "You really are an ass, Casey."
"Not as big of an ass as you," said Carina.
"That's the sort of thing we need to know during the planning stage of an operation, Bartowski. What good does it do us to tell us now?"
"'Take him back to your place'," came a mumble from the back seat. "Right in front of Daddy Dearest?"
"Maybe none," admitted Sarah.
Casey turned his head. Slightly. He wasn't sure what he'd see back there. "She meant the FBI, Miss Phone Sex!"
Like I can do real–Nope, not thinking it. "I knew that," said Carina loudly, and then whispered into her phone, "We'll pick this up later."
"But he's a civilian," Sarah continued, remembering what happened to the last few civilians who got mixed up in their business, her foot pressing harder on the accelerator with each word, "And he's wounded, and he's a civilian, and his brother is out to kill him, and did I forget to mention he's a civilian."
"We got it, we got it," said Carina. "His brother's out to get him, no need to go on about it."
"And we need a plan," said Casey, "Preferably before you get us there yesterday."
"Oh," said Sarah, easing up on the gas.
"Make up your mind, Casey," said Carina. "Weren't you just saying you wanted to know all this stuff yesterday?"
Nuts! On the outside, all he said was, "Time travel's cheating."
"Chuck!" called Manoosh from the outer room. "A little help please."
Chuck selected every one of his little scripts in the current folder and dropped them onto the desktop, clicking 'Enter'. Neither elegant nor timely, they would still get the job done, copying everything onto a remote server. Once activated, the first thing the programs did was remove all signs that the processes even existed, but he didn't stay to watch them go. He pulled his fob from the port and ran out of the office to help his partner.
Manoosh was facing five to one odds at the moment, but one of those five had his back to Chuck. Several tranq darts later the odds were zero to two.
Manoosh looked at the guns in Chuck's hands. "That's cheating, don't you think?"
"Um, no."
"Come on, Chuck, we did two on five on stage, it wasn't that hard."
"All right, a) they took me by surprise, and b) I didn't have a tranq gun on me at the time," said Chuck, holding out the weapon. "But believe me, if I had, those six guys on stage would have been down before they would ever have gotten with hitting distance of anyone on my team. There are no bonus points for elegance here. We're here to win, and that means sometimes you break things."
"You sound like Casey," said Manoosh with disgust. "Grunt, grunt, achieve the objective, smash, smash."
Nobody talked about Chuck's friends like that, not even another of Chuck's friends. "You know, it's easy to sneer at Casey as long as you have a Casey to sneer at. But you know what, I don't see Casey around right now. And guess what, we have an objective we need to accomplish, so yes, listen to me grunting."
A goon leapt into the room, screaming and screeching, flashing two katanas like some modern-day samurai. In seconds, Chuck saw the pattern of the swords, and raised his gun to put a dart in the guy's neck the next time it was clear.
Manoosh hit his wrist, and the gun went flying. "You know that whole Indiana Jones thing was ad libbed, don't you, Chuck? And in the second movie he lost his gun, remember? And you know why that happened?" Manoosh stabbed a finger at his friend's face, which Chuck did not break off and hand back to him. "Because guns are easy to lose, Chuck."
"Hey!" said the guy with the swords, and they turned to look at him. "You have to admit it was a funny bit though, both times."
"Admit this!" said Manoosh, leaping to the attack. Chuck raced to get his gun back, hopefully in time to stop Manoosh from getting too chopped up. Just as he found it someone screamed, high and shrill. He turned and aimed, but only Manoosh was still standing, the swordsman writhing on the ground, his hands and lags clenched tight, but apparently too late.
Manoosh looked at him with scorn. "We're Intersects, Chuck. We're better than that."
Armed men ran into the room from every entrance, automatic weapons ready. Manoosh tensed, but none of them made any attempt to get close. Karl Sneijder walked into the room, gun in hand. "Always the critic." He screwed a silencer onto his gun. "So no doubt you will agree with me that the prequel trilogy is far superior to the original."
Manoosh's eyes started to flutter, but Chuck was only a little less surprised than Sneijder when he collapsed. "Good shooting," said Karl, indicating Chuck's gun. "So. Did you bring me my brother?"
Gertrude Verbanski sat in her office, dealing with matters that she hadn't had to deal with in years, and she wasn't happy about it. Agent Charles' little mistake at SAFE, her own mistake, was costing her dearly, in contracts lost and/or late nights and advertising in order to get them back. They had the pockets and they had the people, which she'd hoped their clients knew by now, but their loss of face was a cruel reminder of how short people's memories were. Even her current clients were trying to renegotiate their rates.
She could have been in Germany, shooting and being shot at, something fun. Or the occasional late night meeting with–no, the middle of a war is no place for romance, and Gertrude Verbanski was very good at finding wars to be in. Even as the tactician in her handled the small stuff, the strategist pondered the best response to this attack on her position.
So when her phone rang she was in no mode to be very nice to the person on the other end of the call. "Miss Walker? It's kind of late to be trying to jump ship but for an agent of your caliber I'll make an exception. What can I do for you? "
From the sound coming over the phone, 'Miss Walker' was moving at high speed. "You can call me Mrs. Bartowski, Gertrude, or the deal's off."
"What deal?"
"The one I'm about to propose."
The tactician in Gertrude gave way completely to the strategist. Carmichael, Charles, whatever name he went by, he was famous for his deceptive plans, but Sarah wasn't Agent Charles. Was this a ploy, or a chink in their armor? CI had a lot of high cards. After that unplanned demonstration, no one believed Agent Charles' blithe 'no relation' comments, and really, why was he trying to fool people anyway? This was a business that thrived on reputation. What kind of deal would Sarah feel she had to offer? "I'm listening."
The proposal was short. The implications were…vast. Gertrude wondered if Sarah even knew what she was asking for, or if her years in government service had left her blind to private sector considerations. For the first time in days Gertrude felt like smiling. "Why, Mrs. Bartowski, I do believe we have a deal." And she would back this one up with enough guns to make it stick.
She hung up. Then she smiled.
Manoosh rattled the cuffs securing him to the chair. "I can't believe you knocked me out, when I had him just where I wanted him."
"I didn't knock you out, you knocked yourself out, just because he dissed Star Wars."
"Okay, a) everyone with half a brain knows that the prequel series doesn't even deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the original, and b) what makes you think I'd trust anything you said now, Mr. Dart Gun?"
"Hey, in case you missed it, most of this mess is yours, Hong Kong Fooey, the guys I hit just fell down. And what do you have against dart guns anyway? Five minutes ago it was crossbows–"
"It's not like dart guns are any improvement–"
"Shut up!" bellowed Sneijder, and his hostages stopped talking. "You two whine like schoolgirls."
"Sexist," muttered Manoosh.
"And a fortunate one at that," said Karl, raising his gun dramatically. "I only need one hostage to get my brother back, and I might have had a hard time deciding which of you to kill."
"Everybody picks on the artist," said Manoosh.
The lights went out. on the inside. From the outside, harsh blue lights blazed through the windows, illuminating both ceiling and floor as the roar of a helicopter passed overhead.
Karl didn't have time to lower his blast shields again, or regret raising them in the first place, before armed and hooded figures crashed through the glass on all sides. He couldn't tell friend from foe in the dark, but the intruders had no problem, and red dots appeared on the faces of all his men.
Manoosh pulled at his cuffs, to no avail. The room was full of art and he was stuck sitting!
The lights came on. "Drop your weapons," said Gertrude, the only unmasked commando in the room. Karl turned, and she shot the gun out of his hand. The bullet ricocheted, striking a pedestal, making it wobble. Gertrude reached out absently to steady the vase on display, as she said, "Next time I shoot something that matters."
Karl nodded to his henchmen and they surrendered, Gertrude stalking forward to clap the boss in irons herself. "There are just so many people who would love to get you inside one of their little windowless rooms, Karl." As her forces took him away, she turned to Sarah as she unmasked and said, "And I get to collect the bounties from all of them."
"Bounties?" asked Chuck, as he was being uncuffed.
"Sure," said Gertrude. "I'm not above a little pro bono work, Mr. Carmichael, especially for a colleague of your reputation, but I prefer to get paid for my efforts." She gestured casually toward the exit. "Karl there was quite a high-profile target."
"You certainly deserve it," said Chuck, sticking out a hand. "There's no one I'd rather have at my back than your firm."
She shook his hand firmly. "Thank you, Mr. Carmichael, you're very kind."
"Only the truth," said Chuck.
Gertrude Verbanski turned away to oversee the clean-up. "John?" she said, with professional cordiality. "Always a pleasure." He looked good in her uniform. Really good.
He grunted an equally cordial acknowledgement. Range time tonight.
Once out of the room, she said to her cameraman, "Edit that last part out."
"Chuck, she was filming all that," snapped Carina, not surprisingly the fastest at taking Gertrude's uniform off, handing her gear to one of the men who'd stood enthralled as she did it.
"I certainly hope so," said Chuck. "Be kind of a waste if she wasn't."
"You planned that?" said Sarah with a dangerous tone to her voice.
"Not the getting captured part," said Chuck quickly. "But yeah, we did step on her toes back at SAFE, so it was a reasonable expectation if we had to call her at all. Taking Sneijder as a client just meant it was sooner rather than later. And we got Sneijder's data, which is much more important than the man himself. You see, Manoosh, that's how it's–" He looked around. "Where'd Manoosh go?"
Outside Sneijder's office…
He'd come to her out of the dark, asking about a job. She had a position open in Signals for a man of his talents, she'd bump somebody to make one if she had to, but he wanted a combat role. She laughed in his face.
He didn't take that well. She almost fell to his attack from sheer surprise, but combat reflexes saved her, and she held him off, far too easily. A-Squad responded instantly to his attack on their boss, and now A-Squad was in need of medical assistance. The little man asked again about a combat role, not even breathing hard.
"Impressive, Mr. Depak," said Gertrude Verbanski. "Most impressive."
