A/N I guess there should be an author's note here but I have no idea what to put in it. Just like the story.

The CATS were on the prowl. Actually they were on the hunt, saving the prowling for later, after they found what they were hunting for. Or is it the prowl before the hunt? Anyway, they were on the move, to a destination that shall remain nameless.

"What's the fastest way to get to this secret lab?" asked Carina loudly as she flounced her way down the busy sidewalk in an upscale urban environment.

"The way I drive, or the way you drive?" said Sarah.

"I'm driving," said Zondra, holding up the keys.

Sarah nodded. "Better buckle up."

"I don't understand," said Amy, trying to keep up. "What kind of idiot would try to pull a fast one on the greatest team of ninja assassin catburglar spy thieves in the Western hemisphere?"

"You forgot seductresses," said Carina, for some reason. When they reached their snazzy spy getaway vehicle she got in the passenger seat, as always. She had a thing for leg room.

Zondra growled in the back of her throat as she took the wheel, but with her mouth shut it didn't make as much noise as it might have. Plus the roar of the engine as she started the car drowned it out.

Sarah heard it, though. She heard everything. She leaned forward, bracing her elbows against the backs of the seats in front of her. "You are aware that seductresses don't actually have sex, right?"

Carina's hair flipped out of sheer habit, as her head turned toward Sarah. "They don't?" she asked, in a tone that signaled that she was not in fact aware any such thing. Then she realized she was staring right down her partner's cleavage. It was, um...

"Nope," said Sarah, leaning back. "They just lead the mark on with a promise, take whatever he's got, and then drop him." She crossed her legs.

"Wow, you're good," Carina whispered. She faced forward, staring down into all that legroom contemplatively. "Hm. Maybe that's why Roan kept failing me. I thought it was my technique."

"Oh, I'm sure your technique was flawless," said Sarah, buckling herself in.

"All that practice," added Zondra. The car pulled away from the curb, already faster than the posted speed limit.

"Okay, so I'm a bad seductress," snapped Carina, slammed back into her seat by the g-forces.

"I'm tempted to say 'you suck', but-" said Zondra.

"But she won't," said Amy placatingly, "Because you'd probably take it the wrong way."

Carina snorted, and started laughing. Sarah smiled. Even Zondra radiated an aura of reduced hostility.

Amy looked around the car. "What?"

It seemed right to Chuck that the love of Casey's life should be an old battlewagon named Gertrude, even if it was just a car. Unless it was named after someone. If it was, he didn't want to meet her.

"Do we have to bring everything?" whined Morgan, loading yet another high-caliber weapon in the back seat.

"What's the matter, Grimes, real weapons too much work for you?"

"It's just that it's so much easier on Call of Duty, you know? And it's not like we have any ammo for most of this junk, anyway, Sir Shootsalot."

Casey bent practically double and got in Morgan's face. "Don't call my girls 'junk'."

"You call your guns girls, Casey?" asked Chuck, safe on the other side of the car.

"He sort of has to," said Morgan, dropping his burden into a foot-well. "If he treated them like the phallic symbols they obviously are, we could say that Casey's gun was unloaded, or that he was shooting blanks..."

Casey loomed. "And I could say 'roadkill'. Still can."

"Shotgun!" shouted Morgan.

Casey popped up his head, looking around for some lost and lonely forgotten weapon, and Morgan scurried out from under. By the time Casey remembered that they didn't have a shotgun, Morgan was in the passenger seat, with the door locked. "That was low."

"But tactically sound," said Chuck, looking forward to a long drive wedged between them. "He's just playing to his strengths."

"You know," said Carina, "If this were a TV show, we'd be there already, but continuing our conversation as if no time had actually passed."

"We're here," said Zondra, turning the car with no appreciable loss of speed into a large doorway and gliding to a well-oiled stop next to a small plane.

"Wisconsin already?" asked Amy, popping her door with the rest of them. "You do drive fast."

"Just the airport," said Zondra. "Wisconsin's only about an hour's flight away from here. We should be in and out long before they can scramble a pack of agents to investigate."

Sarah stopped and looked around the cavernous and implicitly-empty space.

"What?" asked Amy.

"Did anybody else just feel a chill run down their spine?"

"Nope," said Amy.

"That was just from Zondra saying 'in and out'. Believe me, I felt the same-mmpglph."

"None for me, thanks," said Zondra, her hand clamped tightly over the lower half of Carina's face. She let go and walked away quickly.

"I was about to say...Just now?" asked Carina.

"Yes."

"No."

"When, then?"

"Earlier," said Carina with a maddening lack of clarity. "Seduction lessons. I was thinking maybe I needed to take the course again and I suddenly felt..."

"I saw quivering," said Sarah. She saw everything. "But you always look like that when you're thinking about seduction lessons."

"Different kind of quivering," said Carina. "Not the good kind."

"The bad kind?" deduced Amy.

Carina shrugged. "Didn't say that."

Amy looked dubious. "How many kinds are there?"

"I don't want to know," said Carina suddenly, moving toward the plane. "Let's just get this job over with."

"Are we there yet?" moaned Morgan plaintively. "I have to go to the bathroom."

"What's the matter, Grimes?" asked Casey, increasing speed, but not to find a bathroom. He passed a restaurant, a shopping center, and a construction site with a few Port-A-Potties in the back, in fact. "Can't hold your water for an hour?"

"I can hold my water," said Morgan. "It's my grape soda I having just the littlest, tiniest bit of trouble holding."

Casey steered the car over the roughest, bumpiest parts of the road. "Maybe you shouldn't have drunk that last case."

"Careful, Casey," said Chuck, closest to the action and watching his partner nervously. "You wouldn't want him to let loose in here, would you?"

"I'd kill him." But he relented and pulled onto a smoother part of the road.

"Then you'd have to clean it up yourself."

Grunt. "Probably not worth it." He stopped on the shoulder. "Out, Grimes, find a tree or in your case a very, no, scratch that, just a large shrub and take care of your business."

"Casey-" said Chuck as Morgan popped the door and started hobbling away.

Casey shouted into Chuck's ear and out the open door. "And hurry it up, my trigger finger's itching."

Chuck winced. "Casey?"

"What?"

Chuck pointed at the orderly rows of similar-looking trees. "It's a Christmas tree farm."

"So what, no one's gonna know." Still, Casey looked around a bit nervously, like someone might be writing his name on a 'naughty' list somewhere.

Suddenly they heard a dog barking. Chuck looked over at the sound. "Here he comes. And with Morgan managing to keep in front of him."

Casey wasn't looking. "Nothing's hanging out, is there?"

"Nope." Chuck leaned over with his long arms and closed the door.

Casey pressed a button and dropped the window. This was unfortunately a maneuver they'd practiced all too often, as the paperwork for letting their partner get mauled by local wildlife was heinous. As Morgan jumped into the open hole Casey pulled away and sped off, leaving the dog to snap at Morgan's legs in frustration. Only when the legs vanished inside and the window rolled up did it give up the chase. Casey watched in the rearview mirror as it stood there barking at them. "Good dog."

"Are we nearly there?" asked Carina, settling down in the copilot's seat. "Zondra's complaining about her trigger finger again, and Amy's bustling about, doing bicycle duty. It's creepy. Have you ever bustled in your life?"

"Not about that," said Sarah, who had in fact found a few topics worthy of a bustle in her life. She rarely remembered why, after the shameful fact of it. "Something wrong with that girl."

"Useful, though," said Carina. She dropped her volume to whisper-level. "Otherwise I'd have to do it."

"You can't tell me you don't like bicycles," said Sarah. "I've seen the one you have mounted, and I do mean mounted, in your bedroom." Unfortunately she had to keep her hands on the wheel, otherwise she could have added some hand gestures.

Carina smirked, but Sarah wasn't watching so she let her live. "You make it sound so dirty."

"That's on you," said Sarah. "I was just saying the bike is pristine, so you must be pretty diligent about the maintenance."

Carina looked out the window, at the ground so close by. It wasn't like they wanted to be on anyone's radar. "I take proper care of all my...appliances."

"You make it sound so dirty." Sarah was pretty sure she practiced.

"That's on you. But it's like the song says, filth is in the mind of the beholder."

"Of course you would know a song that says that."

"Shall I-?"

Sing it for me? "No."

"Okay," said Carina. Then she leaned in close. "Don't know what I'd have done if you'd said yes. I can't sing for shit."

"Fine," said Sarah, not regretting the wasted opportunity. The downside of watching Carina forced to try to sing would have been listening to Carina try to sing. "Then you can go back and tell the others we're coming up on a landing site within range of our target. Now that the bikes are all prepped it's time to get 'em all dirty again."

A battered and beaten Crown Victoria sat, completely inconspicuously, in the empty parking lot of a closed gas station on a deserted street, not far from a large building with a fence all around it. The driver's finger's drummed on the wheel as everyone inside stared at the target. "Alright, Bartowski, what can you tell us?"

"Come on, Casey, it's not like I know anything. That didn't come out right."

"I don't know," said Casey, "Seemed pretty dead-on to me, like a case of in nerdo veritas." he grabbed the binoculars from Morgan's hands, pulling him half over Chuck's lap dragging at the strap still looped over his neck. "Okay, let's try this a different way. What don't you know about this dump?"

"It started out life as a pudding factory-"

"Oh, God," said Morgan, "Every single person in there must be starving by the end of the day."

"Grimes..." Casey gave the building a close-up once-over through the binoculars.

"What? It was a pudding factory! The whole place has got to reek."

"Turns out it was cheaper to make pudding in a different country, so when the pudding people left for greener pastures, the building became mostly a warehouse for other things, including hay, compost, and most recently, horse manure. Government took it over after the fertilizer shortage a few years ago cleared the place out."

Morgan slumped. "Probably doesn't smell like pudding then."

"Everybody in there must wear gas masks 24-7," said Casey. "Including the rats."

Morgan grabbed for the glasses, possibly eager for a sight of rats with little gas-masks, and started scanning.

Chuck shook his head. "The facility is located underground. The building is just a front, or in this case a top, and a defense mechanism, especially if the bad guys are downwind."

"Even so, a bunch of lab coats walking in and out with head gear on would get noticed, even in this dump," said Casey. "Gotta have a back door somewhere."

"Guys, guys," said Morgan, looking up the road, "We've got rubies incoming!"

A/N2 I have no idea where the Christmas tree farm came from. From the song 'Smut' by Tom Lehrer:

"All books can be indecent books though recent books are bolder,

For filth (I'm glad to say) is in the mind of the beholder..."