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.
"Enjoy your weekend?"
"Who defines bad?"
"Greed."
"The Doom virus."
Morgan Grimes moved his foot forward cautiously, trying to maintain his squad's line of advance. Damn woods. This was so much easier in the urban environments, where there weren't, like, a zillion twigs just waiting to snap the second you put your foot down. He used the toe of his boot to clear a little space, and shifted his weight forward.
Snap!
"Bang! You're dead," whispered Swan in his ear.
Having her hovering over him didn't help. The Force (if by 'Force' you meant a temptation to have a quote accidental misfire unquote) was strong with this one. He hopped up onto a convenient stone. No twigs there.
Snick, went the inconvenient pebble.
"Bang, you're de-ead," Swan whispered in a sing-song fashion.
"Cut that out," he growled. Easy for her to mock, she was walking in all the places where he'd just crushed the twigs.
"Okay," she said, far too agreeably. "Next time it'll be Six who buys it."
Nuts! thought Morgan, unable to come up with a counterargument because there wasn't one. And I don't even know what that means! He leapt off his rock to a patch of bare earth, and moved forward soundlessly into the woods.
Elsewhere, in Burbank...
"Can't I just post a Beastmaster on Craigslist?" asked Casey. His plan had the virtue of simplicity, and with the LA office types that was important. They were good at 'simple'.
"We need Volkoff's team to move fast," said Chuck, busy working his own part of his father's scheme back in Castle. 'Faster than an Internet sale' being implied. Regardless of the product.
"You have no idea how fast those things move, do you?" said Casey. "I'm just saying that the whole 'fake my death' thing sounds like a play from one of Grimes' videogames, is all." Complete with a fake funeral, not to mention his uniform. Some rituals should be sacred. He looked around the church he was in and saw it decorated for a lie.
"Okay, a), ask your daughter how she feels about Morgan's strategies..." said Chuck.
Nuts! thought Casey, unable to come up with a counterargument because there wasn't one. Even the swing over the bottomless crevasse (really just a 20-ft drop, max) had worked, including the kiss on the cheek 'for luck'. Their luck, anyway. He still wasn't sure what it was for himself.
Chuck, unable to hear Casey's internal monologue (which consisted mostly of grunts anyway), kept up his own. "And b) your obit will have a lot more keywords for whatever search algorithm they have running on you. Not to mention I don't even know if there is a Craigslist in England, or Russia, or wherever the hell they are."
Neither did Casey. "Got me there." And Macintosh would have a search running on him, and a soon-to-be-cremated vault key would bring them running. "I don't know, it just seems like a bad TV plot device."
"It is," said Chuck, who watched a lot more TV than his partner. "It's also a good TV plot device. Tropes are tropes for a reason."
"Yeah, to get the plot moving before the first commercial break," said Casey. " If they're not used cleverly the marks will see the third act coming a mile away."
"This is clever..." Chuck sounded insulted.
"I'll take Packard's word for that." Casey ended the call, pondering ways to be clever.
Sarah Lisa soon-to-be-Bartowski ambled through the airport concourse, waiting for her low-grade commercial flight to England. Somebody's midnight flight across country, however necessary and successful it may have been to his mission, to her survival, had to be paid for, and the bill had ultimately come out of the CIA's quarterly transportation budget, so...she had to coach it.
All things considered, it was the least she could do. Chuck had seen more potential in it, but then, when didn't he?
One debarkation lounge started filling with people, a reasonably happy noise, and she paused to drink it in. Then she saw it. Some happy husband with his happy family made the mistake of checking his wallet once free of the crowd, a giveaway to every sneak thief. Of course there was one, a young man standing by the window where he had no business being, who had been pretending to watch the plane. It's where she would have been, once upon a time, or her father. Not his favorite technique, but he'd do it, if he was low on cash and needed to make a quick score. She pulled out her phone and quick-swiped it to take video. She watched the young man merge with the crowd, make his pass, do his pull. She sent an email.
On his way out the door, the young thief saw a beautiful blonde rush in, right past him. She brushed by him, not seeing him at all. An easy pull, if he'd had a chance to scope her out first. A hot babe like her, he would have taken his time with that.
Sarah kept her love-filled expression on her face as she bypassed the happy husband, slipping the wallet she taken from the thief into his jacket pocket. Once past him she must have seen that the object of her affection wasn't there, because her face fell and she turned around, walking out of the lounge, one face among others.
As she approached her own destination, the embarkation lounge for her flight to England, she saw the thief being frisked. Airport security found no wallet, of course, but that didn't mean anything, since these punks sometimes worked in teams. They had video proof of this guy, caught in the act, and they'd get any of his accomplices, you bet they would.
Sarah went into her lounge and sat in one of the hard plastic chairs, waiting for her flight to be called. She picked up a magazine and started reading.
In DC...
Clyde Decker stood up from the moderately comfortable chair he'd been sitting in when the aide said, "The General will see you now." About damn time, too. He had better things to do than play courier.
He opened the door and carefully shut it behind him, but could take no more than a step into the room before the General herself was up and out of her chair. "Agent Decker. I've heard of you." Her tone of voice betrayed no indication whether that was a good or a bad thing.
His reputation wasn't earned for courier service. "General," said Decker, neutrally. He tried for another step.
"Some top-level information has come into our possession," Beckman continued, picking up a drive from her desk. "Rogue nukes in our own backyard. The immediate threat has been dealt with, obviously I can't say how, but the follow-up is more your bailiwick than ours, so I'm passing it along, in the spirit of inter-agency cooperation." She walked over and handed it to him.
He accepted it with all due solemnity, not a smirk in sight. Those were the best kind. 'Our bailiwick', my ass. Federal agencies played in each other's sandboxes all the time. They got nothing. "Thank you, General. Naturally, anything we're able to glean from it will be passed back in the same spirit." Just to rub their noses in it.
"I know it will," said Beckman, her smirk matching his in every way. It had taken Chuck an hour to determine the data was valueless. She wondered how long it would take for the rest of the CIA to figure that out. "Good hunting."
It was a polite dismissal, but still a dismissal. "Thank you, General. I'll see myself out."
In the woods...
Alex McHugh stepped forward into a cleared space she'd made for herself. Snap. Dammit, she'd missed something. After a brief pause, she snapped, "Well?"
"Uh...bang, you're dead," said the man behind her.
She growled, in her dainty, feminine, Casey-esque way. "I swear to God, Harris, if you're staring at my ass again, the next bang will be real, but it won't be me who's dead." She turned her best dainty, feminine, Casey-esque glare on him, and he paled. "Do we have an understanding?"
Harris cleared his throat. "You're delaying your team's advance, recruit."
What Alex wouldn't have given to have Swan within arm's reach, for so many, many reasons. Not Harris, for one. "Good." She kicked a rock, sending it crashing into the bushes and dead leaves.
Harris was staring at her face. "Bang. You're dead."
Alex smiled. "Better."
Much later, on a secure conference call...
"Damn bitch wouldn't let me get two steps into the room," fumed Decker. He couldn't plant a single bug. Sure, she probably had her office swept a couple of times a day, like he did, but they might have gotten something.
"Your reputation must have preceded you," said A. "What was on the drive?"
"What I expected," said C. "Goya's files, documents concerning the acquisition of the nukes from Volkoff. Must have been something she held back, 'inter-agency cooperation' be damned. Our analysts haven't found anything useful in the information provided so far, and we all know they won't, but Walker and Casey are both off the radar. There's only one known name from the LA branch, and they're traveling in."
"The LA office?" said A with a laugh. "I think we can discount them."
"What's Bartowski doing?" asked B, never one to chuckle. It was unprofessional.
"No idea," said Decker. "He's burning up the bandwidth but he's put up full shields. We can't get through to see what he's working on."
"He's a Buy More geek," snarled E.
"He's a Buy More geek with the Intersect in his head and agent's training," said Decker. "The good thing is, if anyone can slip past Volkoff's defenses it'll be him."
"It's getting on my nerves," said E, who liked all his rows and columns to align just so. Only in his dark dreams did chaos run free.
"There's a bonus right there," said C, who may have needed E for his expertise but made no claim to like the man. They weren't in this business to like each other. "I'm not happy about it myself, but if we could predict how he'd do it we wouldn't need him."
"It's not enough to watch the target," said B. "When Bartowski gets there, we need to know what tools and allies he's picked up along the way."
"We will," said Decker. "There's only one archivist that Beckman trusts with Bartowski's reports. He thinks he's secure in his underground fortress, but I'm going to prove him wrong, and he'll never even know it."
Sarah was flipping through the magazine idly, when a woman sat down on the other side of the magazine table. She also sorted through the stack of magazines, but without finding anything of interest. Glancing at the photos Sarah was herself glancing at, the woman asked, "Are you done with that?"
Apparently surprised, Sarah slapped the magazine closed. "Oh, yes," she said with a smile, handing it over. "I call this sort of thing 'wedding porn'. I could never afford the dresses they show here."
"Obviously not," said the woman, noting the twist-tie on Sarah's finger. She flipped open the magazine, swiping the chip out that Sarah had slipped in, putting it into her own pocket as she talked. "Still, a girl can dream, I suppose?"
"Oh, I do," said Sarah, and laughed.
The woman, lacking any rings on her finger, rolled her eyes. "Gee, never heard that one before." Just then, the announcement was made to commence boarding. The woman tossed the magazine down. "Have a nice flight," she said, and walked away.
That night...
"You ready, Dad?" asked Chuck. "I'm about to go in." Her scanned his clothes, ratty gear from a secondhand store.
"Of course I'm not ready, son, what father could be?" said Orion. "Until you open a crack for me you'll be in there on your own. If I didn't need some of the tools I know they have here, I'd never have told you about this place."
"Don't worry about me, Dad, the Piranha eats geeks like these for breakfast."
"While the Piranha is busy eating geeks, just you make sure that Agent Carmichael is prepared for all the guys with the guns, otherwise Sarah will be the Piranha and I'll be the little fish."
"Not gonna let that happen, Dad." Chuck got out of his vehicle, locked down with every CIA trick going, since he wanted it to stay intact in spite of this neighborhood. He ducked into an alley between two old factories, and put on a ratty hat and hoodie to match the clothes, before sliding up to a rusted door.
Someone opened it, not at all careful about hiding his weapon.
Chuck had no problem looking a little nervous. "Hi," he stammered, "I'm here about a job?"
A/N2 Let me know what you think of it.