A/N (1) Previously on Chuck versus The Journey: The mission briefing finally revealed that a loose a-bomb is somewhere in the US, and our team should take care of it.

A/N (2) I don't own Chuck, and I don't own that bomb.

A/N (3) In our last chapter before they embark on the mission, we'll take a look if the "moron" has some tricks up the sleeves that may earn him a bit of respect from his colleagues.

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We're caught in a trap
I can't walk out
Because I love you too much, baby
Why can't you see
What you're doing to me
When you don't believe a word I say?
We can't go on together
With suspicious minds (suspicious minds)
And we can't build our dreams
On suspicious minds
"Suspicious Minds" (Mark James)

Chapter 6: Sarah vs. The Piranha

"That looks like magic!" Carina exclaimed, turning her head back to the others with beaming eyes showing how much impressed she was. They all stood in the van that had transformed into a magical kitchen the moment Chuck sat down at the computer and checked out the hotel computer systems. Although Carina was right behind him, leaning against his chair, both of their hands on his shoulders, he was unmoved by her presence and fingers occasionally stroking his neck, devoting all his attention to the screens in front of him.

"That's why I wanted him to have a look," Bryce explained. "I noticed something I couldn't figure out. Chuck was always the better coder, the better hacker, and generally a wizard with computers. Good we have him on the team."

Carina was genuinely stoked. "That's my Chuckles!"

Sarah felt a soft shock over Larkin giving Chuck credit and admitting that his former buddy, a nobody without any training and history, was better than the best male agent, highly educated, including specialized courses in information technology system analysis and infiltration. Bryce had never admitted anything that there was someone better than him at anything at all. Once more, she realized that she had been a welcomed lover, but certainly not a confidant, and not someone who was trusted enough to share personal thoughts. She stared at Bryce.

Was it convenient for you that I warmed your bed? Did I ever play any serious role as a woman in your life? Sarah asked voicelessly.

She knew at least the answer to the second question for sure. She treated their affair while it lasted exclusively, yet Bryce never had many scruples to satisfy his needs elsewhere as well. Sarah shortly closed her eyes. While she had tried to establish a real relationship, she too had never felt secure enough around Bryce to tell him her secrets, so why should she be resentful that he did the same? She schooled her features and put on her professional mask like a veil.

In the meantime, Carina watched in wonder as Chuck's fingers flew over the keyboard. There was an elegance, supreme control, and fiery improvisation that would have made Arthur Rubinstein proud. The music played was silent, and its effects reverberated on the screen only. The main tempo was prestissimo, although Chuck was tinkling along in rubato as well, changing the speed of his keystrokes depending on the flow of the digital music only he could hear in all those characters streaming across the screen. He often fell in a hesitant ritardando, waiting for the orchestra of incoming bits and bytes giving him his cue. Then, through an accelerando reaching a fortissimo, the pinnacle of the play arrived. But there was hardly a pause before the melody began again.

Carina pointed at Chuck's hands and turned around to the others with a fascinated expression that morphed into a frown when she saw Sarah's face that looked like chiseled out of stone. She dismissed a biting remark that was on her tongue and turned back to Chuck's work.

Windows popped up, spitting out lines of code like lava from a volcano, closing again when Chuck had gained sufficient information. Other boxes opened swiftly - some seemingly aggressively devouring large parts of the screen, others almost shyly sneaking into a corner of the monitor. It was like a chaotic ballet whose meaning only the gifted like Chuck could understand.

"Why didn't anyone tell me how great he is before?" Carina whispered.

"You don't understand anything anyway about computers," Casey growled. "You wouldn't see the difference between him working and playing Tetris."

Carina wiggled her head without taking her view from Chuck.

"Casey, you would look like a damn fool if you bet on that, because I've played Tetris before. But I liked the other one better, that old one, the munchie-munchie."

"Pac-Man!" Chuck muttered without looking up.

"Hey, he's still with us!" Carina said and lowered her head to talk in his ear: "I'm honestly proud of you, Mr. Carmichael. That looks pretty cool and pretty sexy what you're doing."

After a pause for effect, she added aloud: "And what exactly are you doing?"

Everyone snickered. "Hey, at least I admit that I have no clue," she said. She raised her right hand and rubbed her thumb gently over the tips of the other fingers. "But I can feel it if someone is good at something, and Chuck is mighty good."

Sarah stood between Casey and Bryce and was at a loss for words. There was a tightness in her throat. She rarely complimented Chuck on his feats or skills, but as Carina demonstrated, it was a cinch.

Simply tell him. Smile in wonder. Touch him to express your appreciation. Let him feel that you believe in him.

Ah, there it was: Feelings. The forbidden game. Carina mastered that so well.

On the other hand, she is not his handler.

There were no restraints, requirements, or definitions for Carina on how to interact with Chuck. The situation weighed on Sarah. If only she could be in Carina's place right now. She could have her hands on his shoulders, she could stroke his neck and play with his curls - and she would make sure that he would be affected. She pushed these silly longings away. It was mission time. Besides, she would not bestow him with compliments after he made such a disconcerting remark about her dress earlier.

"This is strange, Casey," Chuck said, slowly chewing the words as if he was still trying to grasp something. The ex-Marine took one step forward and bent over to watch the main screen.

"See, there-" Chuck interrupted himself. "No, I think it's better I start at the beginning."

He brought up the usual observation screen.

"I hacked the hotel's system. It was weakly secured, so that was a no-brainer."

"Brute-force attack?" Larkin asked.

"Brute-force attack sounds great to me!" Carina chimed in, but Chuck replied undeterred.

"Actually, no. The system is still running the old WPA security certification. Not that the new WPA2 would be impregnable, but it would have taken more effort and time than WPA. I counted on a few facts, like: People are simple and use weak passphrases, like names of spouses, pets, birthdays, places, combinations thereof, and other easy to hack stuff."

Sarah's eyes darted to Bryce, but he was listening to Chuck's explanations. She got a little warmer in her dress and made a mental note to change her password from "Chuck1981" to something more sophisticated.

Chuck was as comfortable with computers as Michael Jordan was with a basketball, and it showed in his confidence. Both Sarah and Carina were drawn to him. Gone was the nervous nerd, replaced by a determined man fully knowing his skills.

"I checked what router they use, and it was, luckily, a common cheap one, and luckily again, they are using the SSID as the basic salt; there are ready-made rainbow tables out there for that, and I used them successfully."

Chuck sensed that everybody but Bryce had no idea what he was talking about.

"In layman's terms, the plain-text passphrases are encrypted using a basic random value as a starting point, which is called the basic salt. A now older standard used the name, or SSID, of the network, as that starting point. The SSID has a max length of 32 characters and has to be easy to read as it serves as an identifier for human users, not only for the software – so it takes seconds to find it out. That's not delivering a lot of security. So there is a clever way of reducing the time to find the password out by using tables, hm, let's call it look-up-and-translation tables, which contain pre-made data, depending on the system you want to hack. In a nutshell, they translate the garbage of an encrypted, hashed password into plain text. These are called rainbow tables. And that's what I did, and we're in."

Everyone nodded in appreciation but Sarah. She was still coming to terms that her cover boyfriend was way more than a nerd or a freak. Chuck continued.

"They have a series of cameras in public areas, like the lobby or the elevators. I am feeding these cameras into our system. Casey, you can switch through these as you would switch through our own cameras. The nice touch is that the hotel has an insert where the camera is located, so in those cases where it is not obvious, you still precisely know what you're looking at."

Casey nodded contended as he watched at the screen where Chuck presented how easy it was to hop through a series of cameras.

"Way to go, Bartowski!" he lauded, managing to praise and grunt at the same time. Carina smiled softly, and even Bryce seemed pleased. Sarah looked at Chuck's curls and wondered why she never really noticed that side of Chuck. She knew he wasn't bad about tech-stuff, but the skills he was displaying right now seemed disturbingly above what she and everyone else in the agency had expected – except for Bryce, who paid close attention but wasn't surprised. Possibly it was time to re-evaluate the asset. And Carina was right: To see him in charge was cool and sexy. As she listened to him, Chuck dropped a bomb as casually as he talked about the weather.

"While I hooked ours into their system, I realized that there is another external user who is tapping the Palacio del Mar almost the same way we do."

"Jesus Christ!" Casey exclaimed. "So, they can see us as we can see them?"

Chuck turned his face to him, grinning.

"I said they do it almost the same way. I can see their identifier, which, before you ask, is a meaningless string of characters and numbers, because they hacked straight into the hotel system, the same way I did, but also access the camera server application directly, using that external id. For a difference, I do not access the cameras using our own identifier. I implemented a piggy-back approach. I use the ID of the employee in the back office of the hotel desk, so the server does not record our external user ID."

"Pretty clever, Bartowski!" Casey praised, putting an appreciative hand on his shoulder, but pulling it back swiftly as Carina's hands still were there.

"If you use an employee's ID, wouldn't they notice?" Carina asked tentatively, probably not wanting to sound too stupid.

"That's actually a good question," Chuck replied, cranking his head back and smiling approvingly. Carina rewarded him by lightly stroking her fingers on his neck, and Chuck took it in stride again. With the whole team around, he seemed to feel safe about how far she could go.

"Carina, that is not an IT environment where users have access to log files and would possibly check those. The employees count on the system working properly and couldn't even open the logs. They won't notice us using their user IDs and cameras. And, as I hinted, the management that ordered that system certainly went for low cost and not high security."

"Isn't that a mistake?" Carina asked.

"Absolutely. But you know, greed is a driving factor. But don't tell anyone outside this van how easy it is to hack most systems. I'd bet a considerable amount of my fat hourly wages that even the company doing the tech support will not touch the log files unless there are obvious problems. And my little sniffing around won't cause any."

"You're still a wizard to me, even if you say it's easy," Carina insisted.

Now Bryce cut the one-step distance to Chuck and stepped to his right side. He was intrigued but cautioned him.

"Chuck, that's all OK, but will it become a problem when the employee whose ID you're using is offline, as in, not at work?"

Chuck faced him with a grin nearly as broad as the Cheshire Cat. "You should know me better, Bryce! The hotel has an electronic timekeeping application. Their room cards are also used to register their attendance, come-and-go. It's like a digital time clock, you swipe your card through at a terminal when you begin your job, and again when you leave. Of course, Mr. Larkin, I accessed that database too and wrote a small script that changes the employee whose ID we use every time someone goes off work, or to be technically exact, goes offline."

Larkin shrugged his shoulders and said to no one in particular: "That's why I have him sitting there!"

Sarah followed the repeated commendation silently and somehow abashed. Chuck had earned more praise in a few minutes than she gave him in an entire year. The emotional distance she kept from everything had made her hard towards everything. A good job was something that was expected. There was no need to praise someone for doing something he was ordered to. But, apparently, even her agent colleagues seemed to think differently.

Sarah was proud of Chuck's work, but there was no need to applaud. She wondered if her views were too demanding, but she had lived by such standards almost all of her life.

Bryce followed what Chuck was doing for a couple of seconds before he asked: "I don't assume we know who the other external user is or where they are?"

Chuck made a cautious face.

"No, Bryce, you're right about that. They are coming in via WLAN, so they probably have to be close to the hotel just like us, but that's it. I don't want to try to hack them, as they might notice. They've been smart enough to hack their way in, and we have our own schedule. I just can't sit here as long as it takes."

"Yes, that was the right decision," Bryce confirmed. "I can follow you so far, but what is it you thought is strange?"

Chuck raised a finger in the air, which certainly was not needed as he had everyone's attention anyway.

"OK, having explained all that, the other external user is not only tapping the existing camera circuit, but they have several cameras that are not on the hotel's list. Have a look."

Chuck hit a few keys, and the agents' alarmed and bulging eyes saw live feeds from various rooms. "The hotel would never install cameras inside guest rooms. So it seems whoever our friends are, they set up cameras in half a dozen rooms, however they managed that."

"That means they have access to the rooms and probably even have their own room!" Carina stated, and Casey added: "It kinda mirrors our own mission. That adds a whole new dimension."

"Mirrors?" Sarah interjected as she sensed she missed something about the mission. "Yes, darling," Bryce replied, "Our analysts have selected a couple of suspicious guests, and our agents installed a handful of secret cameras which Casey can check from here. It's a proactive measure, and we might not gain anything from it, but the timetable allowed us to bug a couple of rooms."

"You have access to these, uhm, alien cameras too?" Casey asked incredulously.

"Yep!" Chuck answered the question, popping the 'p'. "As you can see! Our friends are pretty clever and use the hotel system to channel through their cams, but they did not expect us, because that way I can access these non-hotel-cameras as well."

"That's damn good!" Casey added with emphasis. "Do we know which rooms?"

Chuck sighed. "Unfortunately, not immediately. I think I could trace these, but I would need some time to do so. But what I did was transferring all the settings and scripts to the surveillance unit in your room, so you'll have the same access there."

Bryce shook his head and made his decision.

"No, Casey, be happy with what you got. It's much more than we expected. We should be moving because I want us to go in with the main crowd. OK, let's go!"

Casey eventually drove the van to the back entrance of the hotel, where the two couples left. Carina followed Chuck, and as she exited the car, she turned back to Sarah and hissed loud enough for everyone to hear: "You're a rotten mess, Walker. You could have said at least one single word how great your boyfriend set up our surveillance."

"She's not my girlfriend, she's his wife!" Chuck quipped humorlessly, and Bryce's rather loud and pointed clearing of his throat ended the conversation.

From there, it went according to plan. Within minutes, they stood in the main elevator, going down to the ground floor as if they had come from their rooms.

Realizing that he soon would be on his own with Carina, Chuck fell back into being intimidated by her and her outfit. Entering the lift, she reminded him that they were married, so it would appear strange if he avoided looking at her all evening long. In comical despair, Chuck asked, "Yeah, but did I have to have so much to look at?"

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A/N (4) WPA: It's been a while since I was involved in security issues so bear with me if anyone remembers better how it was about 15 years ago. I took some liberties and simplified some things, but it was a significant concern for larger companies that the old standards were comparably easy to hack.

A/N (5) Things like switching users when a user gets offline are no-brainers once you have access to the relevant data. And certainly are mostly used for completely legit reasons as well.

A/N (6) The reference to a David Carner story in the previous chapter is from his "Chuck and Sarah vs College". Go ahead, find it, read it and be happy.

A/N (7) Thank you all for your reviews and thoughts. Keep 'em coming, don't send 'em to NBC, send 'em to me!