A/N For the benefit of those who don't know, there's a Facebook group for Chuck Fanfiction, and we'd love to have some new members.

This chapter has taken a long time, hasn't it?

"Someone's been protecting her."

"I did it all for her."

"She's your mother, son."

"You're gonna need to write this down."

"Hey Casey," said Chuck brightly, as Casey came down the stairs to castle. "Enjoy your weekend?"

Grunt. Step. "Outdoor environment..."

Step. "Lots of cigars..."

Step. "Open bar..."

Floor. "And lots of idiots with an endless appetite for stories about bigger idiots." He made a noise with his mouth that wasn't exactly a grunt, as he crossed the floor to the main ops table. "Yeah, I guess you could say that." He stared distrustfully down at a paper-wrapped parcel in his favorite chair. "What's this?"

"A gift from the Generalissimo," said Sarah. "Cigars to replace the one you gave him." Casey growled appreciatively, and sat in the next chair over. Sarah pressed a button. "General? Whenever you're ready." Seconds later the monitor lit with General Beckman's office, and the General herself. She was busy writing something, her presence at the moment making this an official meeting, but not one that she was running.

"So what do we got?" asked Casey, acting as Beckman's proxy. "Anything on Volkoff from that stuff Goya sent you?" He put a hand on his package, stoking it lightly.

"Ehhh, not from the documentation," said Chuck, watching Casey's hand. "Volkoff is too smart to leave breadcrumbs, even if Goya isn't. Good thing for us Turrini wasn't thinking like a spy." He pressed a button and the bottom of the screen loaded with photos of a woman, looking very much a cat to Goya's mouse.

Casey called up a small screen closer to his face, for a closer inspection. "Who is she?"

Chuck felt the pressure of Sarah's foot against his leg, under the table. He pulled his hands away from the keyboard, the sudden absence of typing noises drawing Casey's attention. Chuck looked at Casey directly, not his computer. "She's Volkoff's right-hand man, the agent negotiating the sale, and...my mother."

Beckman put her pen down, fully attentive to the meeting. Casey studied the photos more closely. Not really seeing a lot of resemblance there. "Your mother works for Volkoff?"

Head shake. "My mother works for the CIA."

Beckman seemed dubious, which was understandable. "She's a spy?"

"Surprise?" said Chuck.

"No, not really," said Casey. "Your father was Orion, seems kind of inevitable, really. Like father, like son?"

"More than you know," said Sarah, covering for Chuck while he hunkered down behind his screen. A picture went up, of a younger version of the same woman, the sort of image used in official government records. "Her code name is Frost. Orion's backing her."

Now Beckman looked downright displeased. "On what?"

"Her last, final, one-more-and-then-I'm-out mission." The two NSA officers winced.

"With Orion involved? No wonder she's been missing for twenty years," said Casey. He looked at Sarah, not Chuck. "So our mission is overlapping hers?" He didn't sound happy. That would give her mission precedence.

"Worse," said Chuck, not looking up. "Her mission is overlapping ours. Dad was trying to contact us when we contacted him."

"Meaning what?" asked the General.

Chuck looked up at her tone. He sort of had to. "Meaning that Dad told her about us, me, the Intersect and everything, and now she wants us to backstop her mission too. Apparently she needs to be in three places at once, or, and I quote, 'bad things will happen'."

Casey glanced at his superior. "Who defines bad?"

Chuck shrugged. "After twenty years on the case I'd say she does."

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

"Blue team, fall in!" Morgan ran for his position like he'd been training for the last few weeks. No one wanted to be last, especially not him. As the newest, rawest recruit he'd been getting a lot of s...tuff dumped on him already. All in good fun, of course, part of the whole squad dynamic. He knew the drill from all his game playing, a benefit of the many hours of practice he brought to the table. This time around no one was last, or several people were last together, depending on how the sergeant chose to look at it.

This time he looked pleased. "Ladies and gentlemen, we have a mission."

In Castle...

Twenty years on a CIA case. Not good enough for Casey. "General?"

"Are you sure Goya's documents are of no use?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Chuck, more briskly. "Physical locations exist, with no paper trail to connect them to Volkoff. No bills of lading, no manifests, no accounts. Wherever he keeps his books, it's beyond even my father's ability to find. That's one of the missions they need us for, me in particular."

Beckman nodded. The Intersect made Agent Bartowski a formidable cyber-specialist. "Given that we have nothing to go on of our own, it would probably be best to follow her lead for now. What are the other places your mother needs to be?"

Sarah took over. "Orion sent us a set of documents he called the Kaminski file." Up went a picture of Kaminski himself. The picture of Frost that Orion had included in it was kept unrevealed, since it was a bit too revealing. "Boris Kaminski is, or more likely was, a lieutenant of Volkoff's who has apparently struck out on his own." More pictures went up, of some obviously dead people.

"Volkoff won't like that," said Casey, noting Volkoff's own name in the descriptions of the victims. "I'm guessing one of the places Frost needs to be is wherever this Kaminski character is."

"You'd guess wrong," said Chuck. "Volkoff has assets he uses for this sort of thing, and he's given Frost orders to use them. We need to stop those assets, deal with Kaminski, and assist Frost with her efforts inside Volkoff's HQ."

That was three. Keeping the CIA's name out of it would have made it four, but it was a given most of the time. "Assets, huh? Sounds like a team to me," said Casey. "We could be stretched pretty thin."

"Did Agent Frost give us any specifics on these assets of hers?" asked the General.

"Sure," said Chuck, and he put a picture up on the screen, three rough-looking thugs, looking at home in a war zone somewhere. "Packard, T.I., and Mackintosh," he said, adding a few labels, but he stopped at Casey's chuckle.

"I stand corrected, General," said Casey. "We won't be stretched thin at all. I can use the LA field office on this one."

"I thought you said their peak performance was in watching Agent Walker swim."

"And I stand by my statement," said Casey, ignoring Sarah's sudden blush. "But they should be competent enough for this job." He gestured contemptuously at the screen. "I threw these goons into the stockade myself, and they've been coming after me ever since. I could put a Beastmaster on Craigslist and they'd be here tomorrow."

"You think you can pull them away from Volkoff for revenge?" asked Chuck. "They have to know what Volkoff does to people who do that, they're the ones doing it. He's got to have more than one team for that."

"I know that, and you know that," said Casey. "Those guys, maybe not. Revenge probably wouldn't overcome their good sense, if they have any, but I've got something more potent than revenge to count on, to get them to come after me."

"What's that, Colonel?"

Casey held up his hand. "Greed."

"You call your hand Greed?" asked Chuck. "What's the other one, Envy?" The General and Sarah, caught by surprise, couldn't quite hold back ladylike snorts of amusement.

Greed clenched into a fist. "Shut it, Bartowski. It so happens the reason I threw those clowns in the stockade was because they turned on me, while we were busy stashing a pallet of Iranian gold in a rigged bunker."

"They turned on you?" asked Chuck.

"That was stupid," said Sarah.

En route...

Morgan sat in the back of the truck as it bounced and rolled to wherever it was going, his rifle held in the approved fashion, even if it was just a glorified flashlight with a sound card. He turned to Bravo Six and shouted, "So what's a special?"

Six kept his voice down as much as he could and still be heard. "A mission with no parameters, like they don't know what's going on before they send us in," he said bitterly.

That sounded like a normal day back at the buy More. For a second Morgan wondered what poor slob had taken over for him, but decided he didn't want to know. His new job was much more fun. "We hate those?"

"We hate those," said Six. "The customer has a cause and maybe Verbanski has to care about it, but we don't. My loyalty is to you and to him and to them, and to her. You know what we like? Missions where we know what the hell's going on before we walk in the door, so we can set 'em up and take 'em down with no losses. We like missions where we don't have to make it up as we go along. We like missions where everyone gets a chance to play."

War isn't a game, moron, growled Casey in Morgan's ear. "And how many of those do we get?"

"Not enough," said One, who didn't mind a little grumbling as long as he could turn it to good advantage. Like Grimes was doing. "And even if we did, you know what they say about battle plans."

"Yeah, I know," said Morgan. "So this sort of training mission is a good thing?"

"Sure, if you look at it that way," grumped Six. "Spoilsport."

One sat back, satisfied.

In Castle...

Grunt. "Greed makes smart people do stupid things, like watch my gun when I'm going for my knife. Not enough true patriots in this world, I'd rather deal with them any day, even if they're the enemy. Point being, Those yahoos want that gold, they need my hand to get it."

"Let me guess. Crappy non-biometric handprint scanner?" asked Chuck.

"It was 1999, in the field, so don't get all tech-snob with me," said Casey.

Chuck rolled his eyes. "Fine, fine."

"That said, yeah, it's a crappy non-biometric handprint scanner. They wouldn't need the rest of me, which would suit all four of us just fine."

"Well, that gives us the basics of a plan, provided you don't go around leaving full hand prints anywhere." Not that Chuck thought for a moment that this group would go for a covert method like that. Mackintosh was an electronics specialist, and could possibly beat Casey's security, but he'd be outvoted by a guy who liked to beat people up, and a guy who dealt with explosives.

Casey shrugged. "Too many hand scanners in this line of work. I do a full sweep of the entire apartment every other weekend, but I can do another one tonight, no problem. After that I have a few cockroaches to squash. What are you gonna be doing?"

"Kaminski's going to England, so I'm going to England..." said Sarah.

"And I'm going to be figuring out why she's flying to England," said Chuck. "And after she's done whatever she has to do there, the rest will be up to mom."

"And you, unless you want your significant other to spend the next twenty years in Russia. Like father, like son."

Agent Carmichael raised his head, pinning Casey with his gaze. "Call it incentive."

Somewhere out in the boonies...

Blue team disembarked from their trucks in good order, and gathered around their leaders in the dark of a wooded area. "All right, team, I have some particulars for you now," said the sergeant.

He gestured over his shoulder. "In these woods is a suspected separatist compound. Somewhere in that compound is a man, this man..." He held out his tablet so everyone could see the face of the target. "His name is Colin Davis and he's a terrorist. he has with him the code for a computer virus that can destroy the world in under a minute."

"Who makes these things up?" muttered someone unidentifiable.

"Quiet," snapped the sergeant. "The narrative doesn't have to make sense as long as our orders are clear and achievable. We just have to get the virus-"

"The Doom virus," said Morgan, playing along.

"Close, but they're calling it the Omen. Our orders are to find davis and capture both him and the Omen."

"Piece of cake," said Bravo Six.

"The cake is a lie," said the sergeant. "Out there in these woods is Red Team, and they're looking for the same damn thing, so lets hustle people."

Morgan got to hustling, keeping his inner monolog to himself. Red Team, he misquoted. Why did it have to be red Team?

Alex' team.

A/N2 It'll be a miracle if I can make this work. A comment of support would be nice.