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.
Not sure I like the name Asteris for my version of the virus the Collective built. It describes the result, certainly, but gives a totally misleading idea of the methodology.
"Don't tell me you're growing a sense of humor now."
"It'll eat through any defense, given enough time."
"That's why I needed you."
"I got the stones."
Castle, several hours ago...
Given that her best team was located in California, General Beckman was well-used to waking up early, but it was so late in California that this barely counted. Even so, her final email to Chuck, indicating that all was in readiness, was a bit...brusque. It was still a go-ahead, though. "All right, Dad, let her rip."
"You're sure you want to do this, son? This could take a while."
Time that could be better spent doing other things. "White-hatting black-hat code? Metamorphic black-hat code? Against my own work? You bet. Everyone who needs to know knows." Even Manoosh was on board, the only one with a hope in Hell of understanding Chuck's defensive coding from a cold start. He'd been told to look for any intrusions but not told anything else.
"Including the guy on the inside of your shield?"
Chuck thought back on the email chain and laughed. "According to the General, you would have thought Fitzroy built the shield on his facility himself, the way he puffed up after she called it the most secure shield in the government."
A small 'hmp' sound came out of the speaker. "Releasing the Asteris now. Does she know you built it?"
Upbeat mood completely gone. "She's not exactly aware that she has the P-man working for her, and I'm not sure I want her to find out. The Intersect has been unexpectedly helpful that way."
"Not to mention that the Piranha is better known for doing what this virus is supposed to do, than he is for building the shields."
A virus to do what he did, used by people without any sense of responsibility. Chuck shuddered at the thought. "I told them they needed better shields, and I told them how. Let them pay some deserving coder for the work, if they could have found one." He wondered if Manoosh was seeing anything yet.
"Since they couldn't find you."
Like he'd give them a mailing address. Not enough cutouts in the world to make that safe. "Or pay me. It's not like I could have cashed a check made out to 'the Piranha', you know." Why didn't Spiderman just jump up onto the ceiling to prove he was Spiderman? Wouldn't that have been enough proof of identity for that stupid teller?
Not that any of that would help him. What was his superpower, coding? Unlikely a teller would know enough about that to recognize the Piranha. He'd be the Piranha. Why waste time as a teller?
"With great power..."
Chuck knew the line, the greatest line in the history of comic books. "Yeah, I know."
"More importantly, Sarah knows."
Not exactly. "Well, she knows some of it."
A good bit later, in DC...
Clyde Decker sat in an office, making faces.
It would have looked pretty strange to anyone coming in to look at him, but no one did. No one knew about this connection point except him, and the empty office in a parking sublevel of a mid-grade office building that he had to travel an hour to reach, even though it was only a short walk from his actual office.
The room was empty of anything except him, the chair he was sitting on, and the connection itself. No desk, nothing to write with. No notes were ever taken. There wasn't even a speaker, since that could be overheard. Instead the signal went straight to an earbud that was synched to the connection point. Taking out the earbud activated the connection protocols, which, if not answered within a very short time, caused the connection to self-destruct.
The faces were optional.
Decker sat in the chair, his eyes closed. He preferred to visualize his partners and himself sitting together in a darkened room, their faces in shadow. B and A sat to one side, an empty chair and E on the other.
"Agent G's mission was accomplished in a completely professional manner," B was saying, which accounted for the eye roll. C imagined him blocky and solid, just like his voice. The head barely moved. "All the chips were recovered, all the operatives neutralized."
What she'd done to the Belgian and his men was all well and good, but..."Kicking a man out of a gondola hundreds of feet over rocky terrain may be 'neutralizing' him, but it's hardly what I'd call 'professional'," said Decker, looking at the lump to his left. 'Professionally' speaking, he should have been captured, tortured, interrogated extensively, and then kicked out of a gondola hundreds of feet above rocky terrain.
"Normally I would agree with you," said B, his voice unruffled. Clyde dreamed sometimes of hearing it ruffled, but that would have to wait until their goals were achieved. "However, according to Agent G, the man's constant mindless chattering-her phrase, not mine-would have rendered any of our interrogators mindless themselves."
"Water under the bridge at this point," said A. Clyde imagined him leaning forward, trying to dominate the meeting. "The chips are what matter. Having acquired them, the question is, are we ready to use them?"
"We are not," said B. "D's department is falling behind, despite C's and my best efforts to keep them properly focused and motivated."
"They don't respond well to threats and boredom?" sneered E. "Who would have guessed?"
"D, one could assume," said A. "Perhaps I should take them in hand. I've been known to turn around a flagging department or two in my time."
"That's what I was threatening them with," said Clyde.
His visualization of A smirked. "Of course you were." As if even Clyde was and should be afraid of him.
Clyde, not being a fool, did fear him. Or he had, until Bartowski came along, and probably would again once Bartowski was dealt with. Somehow. "Bartowski is becoming troublesome," he said, picking up his own part in the report. His visualization of A sat back, diminished. "While we can't claim to know, the possibility is high that de Smet's auction was dug up by the Intersect. We would expect de Smet himself to be of interest to the CIA in general, but this action targeted the diamond, an object of no operational significance."
"Could they have known about the...?" asked E, for whom diamonds were always of significance.
"Unlikely," said Clyde, "Since they didn't put any kind of a chip in their fake, not even a tracker, and they only brought one. Instead they sent a buffoon who didn't even have the basic knowledge to carry out the mission, so it was clearly laid on at the last minute." Always a good thing for them. People were much less careful about those things. "Our own uses for the chips should be a complete blank to them." If he necessary he could suggest a few false leads to muddy things up.
"Clearly they were following their own agenda. This 'Rebecca Franco' went for the simplest and fastest entry point to Volkoff's empire." B sounded almost admiring of her professionalism.
"Where she cracked our whole operation with Gaez wide open," said Decker.
"He was already prepared to do that," said B. "Agent Walker simply filled in as his feet on the ground."
"Nothing simple about losing Amy."
"A small price to pay, compared to losing the chips," said A, leaning forward again. "A delay that even plays into our hands. I will speak with D's teams, get them moving. When Bartowski finally brings Volkoff to us, we will be ready for them both."
Volkoff Industries, tea-time in Russia...
"I can see where you needed to put a bullet hole in the glass first," said Alexei, waving a biscuit around as he talked. "You're an excellent fighter, but it's really just a question of physics. A slip of a thing like her, pushed by a slip of a thing like you, probably would have just bounced, without that hole." He chuckled. "Yuri could have thrown her through two of them."
With lots of acceleration, instead of basically falling with style. Sarah looked at her hosts, saw Frost's pained expression and turned to Alexei. "Yuri?"
"The Gobbler!" said Volkoff maniacally, clenching a fist in front of her face.
'Rebecca' didn't flinch, and Alexei's face fell slightly. "Why is he called that?" she asked.
"Because he gobbles," he said sulkily, but he quickly recovered his earlier humor. "People, in this case. He'd take bites out of them as he was pummeling them into the ground, or tossing them through a window."
"He was also seven feet tall and very strong," said Frost less dramatically. "They only managed to capture him because the building collapsed before he could get away." She ate a slice of peach. "He was Alexei's bodyguard for the longest time."
Past tense made Sarah less tense. "Will I meet him?" she asked, not looking forward to it.
"Not without a ladder and some tweezers," said Volkoff with a laugh. He waved at the ceiling and Sarah looked up, seeing nothing.
"Not here, of course," said Volkoff. "My office." He leaned in close. "You're not the only one who can accept an apology, my dear."
'Rebecca' smiled. "Then it is a good thing I never apologize."
Castle, several hours later...
"You do good work, son."
"Thanks, Dad," said Chuck, yawning. "It looks like it's about to give up the ghost, though. I'm just glad Manoosh caught it. Looks like I need to make the alarms more conservative."
"The least of our worries."
Of greater concern to Chuck was how penetrable the Vault had to have been before he'd gotten to it. Still, the Ring wouldn't have put all their stuff into it if they'd thought it was that badly compromised, so that held out hope for any operations they'd eventually have to take against them. Suddenly he got an email.
"And we're through."
"I only got a terminal alarm," said Chuck, reading the email. "Not nearly good enough." They could halt the attack, sure, but it would be better to catch the bad guys. He'd have to create a false trail into a tar pit. Hmmm...
"It might be for this," said Orion. "Remember this virus is slow. It still has to drain the data and transmit it back through however many hoops it had to go through to get there in the first place."
Right. Tar pits later. He sent a quick note to the General, and one to Manoosh, thanking him for his effort and telling him he could stand down. "They'll want the whole thing." That would be a lot. More than long enough for Fitzroy to shut down the servers, but they might still get some random bit of goodness out of there before he did.
"Getting files." A pause. "Not using the standard encryption schemes."
"Send everything you get to me," said Chuck. They got the Ring's data, without the Ring knowing about it. Something to cheer, but no way his father should be reading most of that stuff. "I've got decryptors for Ring phones, as well as Otto von Vogel's decryption key. I should be able to come up with something."
Verbanski Corporation...
"Hey, Alex, nice job!" said yet another passing colleague, as she made her way down stairs at last. Alex McHugh just shook her head at the silliness of it all. She hadn't done anything, and they weren't congratulating her for anything she did, other than her relationship with Morgan. She was there and he wasn't, so she collected his praise.
Her boyfriend was the hero of the hour.
Everybody in Blue Team was being given the royal treatment, but Morgan's idea to stagger the guard routine using a computer program was considered the biggest of the big deals. No one cared where he got the program from, it was his idea. Verbanski herself said so.
The speaker in the stairwell made a note, loud enough to be heard over combat training, but not so much here in the stairs where it tended to echo. "Attention, everybody," said the boss lady herself. "I just heard from the hospital, Blue Six is out of surgery and in recovery. The only injuries were to his face, so nothing major, although I'm sure some of you might disagree." Alex shrugged to herself, standing on the stairs. His face was okay, but he was aware of it, and that wasn't okay.
Gertrude continued, "Leave any cards in the mail room, as usual, although he'll probably be back before we can deliver them. We'll be having the usual ceremonies as soon as he can participate. Verbanski out." Alex resumed her descent.
Things were pretty chaotic, up above, and it took a while for the activity to become anything like routine. Former-corporal Swan had been known as the Viper, but not for the same reason now as she was then. Then she had used attraction like a poison, but now...now she just used poison. She had been sent to the same hospital as Six, but either there had been no updates to her case or Verbanski wasn't bothering to pass them on. It was mainly a police matter anyway, but the police, knowing Verbanski's reputation and wanting to keep on her good side, were working with the area experts in the search. They had to check everything for possible booby-traps, anyplace Swan was known to have been. No one was allowed to get back into their regular spaces until those spaces had been checked and cleared. Alex, like most of Blue Team and others who had had particular dealings with Swan, had been kept upstairs and questioned about those dealings. Extensively. So she hadn't noticed the delay.
Fortunately there weren't many floors for anyone to check. The ductwork, only used for training, and this certainly counted. The holodeck, where Swan came out of the ductwork, the floor she ran through, and the stairs she used. Not much, unless your office was on one of those floors.
Alex' office, really just a desk in one of them, was on the holodeck. She'd gotten it, ironically enough, for having defeated Swan in combat. That fact had not been missed by anyone, and her space had been marked for special attention, just as she herself had been. Her office-mates were not among those congratulating her today.
The sweepers were still busy with the vent to the ducts, but that wasn't anywhere near her office so she just gave them a wave and continued on. The others she shared the office with were already at their desks, complaining about how the sweepers had messed everything up, but really how could they tell?
"So, they finally let you go?" asked one of them unnecessarily.
"Yeah, they seemed to find the idea of naked unarmed combat between two females interesting for some reason."
Heads turned. "You mean the police, I hope."
"Of course. Our people have seen me naked, and they've seen me fight." Verbanski didn't want her teams distracted by body issues, and put a bit of effort into making them go away, with varying degrees of success. Corporal Harris was much more interested in her when she was dressed. "No one had any footage so the police wanted all the details."
Eye-rolls all around. "Uh-huh."
"Whatever." Alex moved past them to her own desk, still as orderly as when she'd left it the previous day. Well, almost as orderly. One of the sweepers had nudged one of her files out of its perfect alignment with the file folders below it. She reached out to nudge it back into place, and a photo slid out.
What was a picture of Mr. Casey doing in a folder on her desk?
A/N2 There's poison, and then there's poison. I hope you'll tell me what you think because this is really hard and it's nice to hear.