Chapter 2: School Daze

There have a few minor changes with early names and such in the first chapter, but nothing significant.

Usual disclaimers, no rights to any characters portrayed and this is neither the real world nor a Disney princess tale.

Chuck had always avoided the over-privileged trust fund jocks like Larkin back at High School, so he hadn't seen how they just expected to get everything they wanted as their due. That was why he couldn't understand how Larkin could straight out blackmail him when he asked him to cover for him when he was staying with his girlfriend who'd been traumatised by being attacked in her dorm room by a gang of serial rapists, and then act as if he was doing him a favour by holding up his side of the deal.

Unfortunately, Chuck had his mother's temper and he was having a hard time holding it in as he stormed out of 'their' room to go see the girls. Anna had seen him like this often enough before though and knew that he had to do something to let off steam or he'd blow, so she didn't ask any questions when he asked to borrow 'her' car, she just handed him the keys, asked him to be careful with a kiss and shut Jill up when she went to say something. She had to explain that kiss to her girlfriend after he left, but Chuck had been her best friend and anchor since she met him over six years ago, and in many ways he meant more to her than her girlfriend of four years did. While she loved Jill and would hate to lose her, she wasn't prepared to lose the world she'd gotten to be part of thanks to Chuck.

As part of that explanation, she drew her over to the window to watch him drive off. Luckily the street was deserted at that moment, because Jill watched in shock as the Lancer got up to at least a hundred miles an hour in the short distance it took to get out of sight. Once it was gone Anna sat her down to explain that as wonderful as Chuck was, he had one hell of a temper, and someone must have done something to make him really angry (she had a good idea who but didn't say). She told her that Chuck was a drift racer, and a damned good one, but he was on probation so if he owned a car the cops would be all over him. When he was like this though, the only thing that could calm him down was to take a fast car up into the hills and let off steam (or a mission, but she wasn't going into that, because for all her intelligence, Jill was too much of a ditzy valley girl to trust with their secrets). That was why she'd gotten the Lancer and let him modify it, so he would be able to let off steam up here where he couldn't borrow Ellie's Summit. She nodded at the look Jill gave her at that. "Yeah, Ellie let him modify her car too so that he could get a release when he needed it, mind you we've had a lot of fun with it too because that little car of her's is damned fast now, and so is my Lancer as you just saw."

Jill was still dubious about that kiss, but accepted Anna's promise that there wasn't anything like that going on between her and Chuck. Anna conceded that they had had sex before she met her, but that was what convinced her that she wasn't into guys, because she knew that if it didn't work with him, it wouldn't work with any guy. She also admitted that she'd experimented with the other girl in their group back then too, but she and her family had up and left town, left the country actually, straight after that, that was why she'd been so tentative with her at first.

That incident helped them keep things under wraps actually, because Chuck was also doing degrees at MIT by distance learning as Charles Carmichael, and he had to be there for some sessions and exams. Auntie Di set up supersonic jet ferry flights (F111s, F15s, F16s and later F22s for his Karol Zaleski Air Force Pilot identity and F5s, F14s and F18s for his Charles Carmichael Naval Aviator identity) between San Francisco and Boston whenever he had to be at MIT so that he could get back and forth across the country quick enough, and they often used the letting off steam excuse to explain the times he took off in the Lancer or on his Harley for that. They also used that sometimes when they had missions, but they had to be more creative when Anna was part of the mission, and for the times when Auntie Di scheduled flights for her to keep her hours up (Anna was a Naval Aviator too as Anna Wang, and an Air Force Pilot as Enye Fan, while Ellie's main pilot identities were Eleanora Zaleska as a Naval Aviator and Eleonore Charlemagne as an Air Force Pilot, Mary's were Naval Aviator Maryam Krieger and Air Force Pilot Marie Lestrange and John's were Naval Aviator Martin Harris and Air Force Pilot Alex Coburn, all five of them had Army Aviator and Marine Naval Aviator identities as well, but those were mainly for helicopters and the like). Auntie Di was organising similar ferry flights for Ellie because she was still doing degrees at Harvard too.

At least all they had to come up with to explain why Anna was working with Chuck and Jeff at the house was that Chuck had used what little was left over from the settlement after they bought the house to get his Harley, so they needed to work to pay the bills and Anna was working with them to pay her and Jill's share. Chuck, Anna and Skip had been making extra money 'hacking for profit' when Jill came into the group (Anna, Skip and Lou were the school's resident nerds when Chuck first arrived in Arcadia and they clicked with him pretty much straight away, but they'd wanted in when he tried to stop their questions about the work he was doing by saying that he was just making a bit of extra money by doing hacking jobs for people his uncle knew. Being as bright as she was, Anna soon worked out what the family really did from what they were working on and Lou and Skip didn't take much longer, which led to them being formally accepted into the Special Projects Group, working with Chuck, in their early teens), and they'd always worked together at Chuck's house because his family never asked what they were doing, so it was easy enough to spin this as an extension of that. The fact that Jill could never understand their 'techno-babble' as she called it and usually didn't hang around when they started talking that way had always made it easier to cover up what they were actually doing.

While Skip, and Jeff when he joined, were very much a part of the cyber and to a lesser degree analysis side of the group though, they never got into the physical side of what they did the way that Anna did. As soon as she found out that Chuck and Ellie were into martial arts too, she wanted to be part of what they were doing, and even if she wasn't quite up to their standard she was good enough to keep up, so they gave in and got her included in the special operations and operative and flight training that Chuck and Ellie were getting. Mary and Bry gave Skip and Jeff enough combat and weapons training to make sure that they could look after themselves and they learned how to handle all the vehicles that the group used, they even learned how to fly some of the planes and helicopters they commonly used and were certified on them, but they weren't part of the more serious training and didn't do more than field support on missions. Skip's role expanded a little after Chuck, Anna and Jeff went to Palo Alto though because he was the only one they had left in Los Angeles on the cyber and tech support side.

Larkin was bright enough to see that what Chuck did to stop the dorm rapes when he first came to Stanford had made him well liked and respected among the female and gay friendly parts of the university population, so while he rarely let him out of his part of the deal that he'd blackmailed him into, he did throw himself into playing the role of Chuck's bestie who he shared a room with most of the time, and made a point of dragging Chuck and his girlfriend and gal pal into the nerdier groups on campus with him. While the idea of being Bryce Larkin's bestie turned Chuck's stomach, this act did help shore up the stupid cover he was forced to live with, so he played along in public, and most of the time he was alone with Larkin too (luckily Larkin's narcissism was strong enough for him to swallow the act, and the times that Chuck couldn't keep it up, he just put it down to being out of sorts because of his hormonal girlfriend because someone like Larkin never took the time to understand women's issues, so he took that at face value).

The benefit of this charade was that Chuck could live at the house with Jeff, Anna and Jill nearly all the time, which in turn meant that he was free to go back to putting in at least six or seven hours' work a night (both he and Ellie had inherited their mother's trait of rarely needing more than an hour or two's sleep as well as her eidetic memory, so working twenty or more hours a day wasn't too difficult for them), and this helped them catch up on the group's backlog of work fairly quickly.

Hacking into the phone and power companies' systems to cover up the unusually heavy phone and power usage for a household of four people was child's play for Chuck (literally, he was only ten when he first did it for their house in Arcadia), and it meant that he, Mom and Ellie could be continuously connected by phone and computer while they worked together through the night. They'd usually have Auntie Di and Auntie Em (and Jeff, Anna and Skip) on as well for a few hours a night up until Auntie Di dropped off to go to bed, and then she would come back on a few hours after Auntie Em and the others dropped off when she got up in the morning in Washington. While working this hard would have wiped out 'ordinary humans' as Auntie Em liked to say (because it pissed off Mom), it wasn't really a problem for them (the Terminators as she called them, usually misquoting the movie after she'd had a few drinks 'The Terminators can't be reasoned with, they can't be bargained with… and they absolutely will not stop. Ever!', which Mom and Ellie said just proved that she spent way too much time watching those silly movies with Chuck).

As gruelling as those hours were, it was the only way they could keep up with the workloads that Auntie Di threw at them to ensure that the Special Projects Group stayed at the top of the heap for the intelligence groups. As the whole family knew though, Chuck's first priority was the search for Sammie, it was the first thing he looked at when he got up and the last thing he checked before he went to bed. If for some reason he wasn't at home, he'd call either the house in Palo Alto or Arcadia to check for any new hits.

All in all, this setup worked quite well for them, Chuck, Ellie, Anna and Skip were doing well in their degrees at Stanford, MIT, Harvard and UCLA, the Special Projects Group was staying on top of the intelligence game, and he and sometimes Ellie and Anna were going with Uncle Bry, Mom, Uncle Roan and John on special ops and intelligence operations with the SEALs, Special Forces, Marine Recon, Rangers, DIA, FBI, CIA, ATF, US Marshals, DEA, Coast Guard, it made for an exciting and rewarding life.

Down in San Diego, Jenny Burton wasn't having anywhere near as good a time. She'd wanted to fly under the radar for this final year of high school, and also dissuade her father from trying to talk her into 'just one quick job', so she totally changed her look before she enrolled at the school. She got god-awful braces put on her teeth (real ones, which couldn't be removed without a dentist), just about ruined her hair making it look terrible and threw out any nice clothes she had to get the dorky band geek look locked in. The way she saw it, if she was hidden away among the nerds, she'd be ignored by the popular crowd, and her final results when she came out on top when they graduated (as she fully intended to do, to get her best shot at university), it would be less of a surprise too.

The problem was that that didn't work out the way she planned. She fitted in with the overachieving nerds fine (Charlie, Nora and Uncle Stefan had prepared her well for that and it sometimes made her homesick for that house), and she was near the top of all her classes from the start without much effort, but the popular crowd didn't ignore her the way she'd planned, they made sure that they made her life hell. That bitch Heather Chandler was behind it, but they all bought into it, especially that pig Dick Duffy!

She was pretty sure she knew what Chandler's game was, because while she was a horrendous bitch and slag, she was actually fairly smart, so she was almost certainly trying to ensure that she got the number one spot and got to be valedictorian without having to work hard for them. Jenny could see her prodding that pig Duffy into harassing her, and quite likely if that didn't work raping her as well, so that she'd leave the school, which would of course leave the way clear for her because none of the other smart girls would risk getting in her way after they saw what happened to Jenny.

It wouldn't be hard for Chandler to get Duffy to do something like that either because it was just the sort of thing he'd do if he thought of it, if he could think. She really couldn't understand how he made it onto the football team, because he was so dumb she was surprised that he could run without tripping over his feet, or more likely his tongue as soon as he saw a girl in a tight shirt or a short skirt. That was one thing she was glad of with her current look, all her clothes were so baggy you could hardly tell there was a girl under them so most of the jocks ignored her, but that wouldn't stop Duffy once Chandler wound him up, he'd go after old Missus Smith in the lunch shop if Chandler got him going and asked him to.

She wasn't worried about being able to stop Duffy, between what Auntie Mary had taught her as a kid and what she'd gotten others to teach her over the last eight years she could handle him easily, but she doubted that she'd be able to do so without someone seeing it, and she probably wouldn't be able to stop herself damaging him when it got to that because the pig made her so angry, and either of those things would put a black mark on her record and probably make the cops look at them. That would be enough to ruin her plans of getting to university, because her father had spent just about all the money they'd made so she was going to need a scholarship to get into university and with only one year to do it, she'd have to stay squeaky clean to get one.

Jenny was handling the situation fairly well, she'd backed off enough for it to look like she wasn't at the top unless you knew about everything else she was doing behind the scenes, and a little gentle persuasion with the teachers 'Please don't tell the others, they're so mean to me when they get jealous!' was enough to keep that under wraps. Chandler looked smug when she thought that she'd scared her enough to take herself out of contention, but at least she'd stopped prodding Duffy to go after her so that was working. Then, just as the end was in sight, with only two months to graduation, her father screwed her over!

Her internal dialogue as she drove past their house with hardly a pause after she saw all the ATF and over government cars outside was brutal. 'You didn't really expect him to keep his promise did you? Idiot! You were so fuckin' stupid to ever give him the chance to screw you over like this! You should have just left without a word, you know he wouldn't have been able to find you if you'd done that!'

This went on until she reached the spot where she was hoping to find one of their emergency money caches, if her father hadn't cleaned the last of them out yet she'd collect whatever was left and do what she should have done last July, set herself up with a decent family and finish high school. She was surprised to find that the money was still there, but just as she was about to take it and go she heard a noise.

She spun and threw the knife she'd just used to open the box the cache was buried in with one smooth motion, but the moment she saw who was standing there, she regretted throwing to scare the man rather than kill him, because it was Mister Graham, the one who'd been Uncle Stefan and Auntie Mary's boss, and Mama's too sometimes from what she heard Mama saying to them when she was supposedly asleep.

From the way Graham was talking, he obviously didn't think that she'd recognise him, which presumably meant that he didn't know that she'd acquired Mama's eidetic memory, possibly that he didn't know that Mama had one for that matter. Unfortunately, Graham was bright enough to realise that his banter wasn't working and cut to the chase, she was going to work for him because he had her father and he'd make sure he suffered if she didn't do exactly as he said.

Once again, he read more than she wanted from her reaction, because he saw that the idea of her father suffering didn't bother her that much so he upped the ante. "If you don't care what happens to your father, what about your mother? We've made sure she doesn't go anywhere since your father took you away and we caught her trying to go after you! Didn't you ever think to wonder why you couldn't find her or the Jaworskis? Unlike your father, we need to keep her in good enough shape to work, but there are plenty of ways to punish her without effecting her ability to work!"

The smug, self satisfied smile on his face said that he knew he had her then, and he proceeded to tell her exactly what she was going to do. She was going to go back to the house and she'd be staying there with CIA handlers until she graduated, as valedictorian. She'd be going to one of the Ivy League universities back east…. "Harvard, I think!" and she'd do damned well there or her mother would pay. As well as her academic requirements, her handlers up until she graduated would be preparing her for the three month intensive boot camp she would be doing between her high school graduation and starting at Harvard. She'd have another handler at Harvard, and she'd meet every target she was given in her extra curricular training as well or her mother would pay…

When he finished he looked at her. "Do you understand what is required of you or do I need to use your father to convince you? I realise that your mother is a better incentive but I don't have her right here like I do your father."

He just smiled again as she bit out "Yes, I understand." because he could see that she desperately wanted to kill him, and could probably make a good attempt at it, but she was too afraid of anything happening to her mother to risk it.

Just to twist the knife a little more, Graham buried any official mention of Jack Burton's arrest and conviction, but made sure that word got around town about it so that the popular crowd would make her life a living hell at school, as well as her handlers making her life a living hell at home. She was working harder than she ever had before to try and keep Mama safe, but she was worried about what Graham's retribution would be after she put the male handler through the door when he came into the bathroom while she was having a shower and tried to attack her, he was just replaced though and Graham didn't say a word about it. The female handler actually looked as though she felt guilty about not having prevented the bathroom incident.

Jenny did derive some small satisfaction from the reactions of Chandler and the rest of the popular crowd when she swept the floor with them, topping every class to become valedictorian, and the independent auditor their parents insisted come in to expose her cheating couldn't find anything to dispel the evidence that their children were obviously inferior to her. Unfortunately she got a phone call from Graham to remind her what would happen if she gave the speech that she wanted to, so she just gave a short cookie cutter speech and walked off the stage.

She was immediately hustled into a car and driven straight to the airport to be put on a plane to Virginia, where she spent the next three months getting into shape and learning all the core tools of the trade for a spy (though that went much further than they'd expected because she already knew quite a bit of the subject matter, and mastered what she didn't faster than any other recruits could too, so she was well into the advanced subjects by the time she went to Harvard), and was given a total makeover to make her into this 'Sarah Walker' who Graham had told her she was going to be from now on when he caught her. It was obvious that Graham wasn't pleased when he saw that the new look they'd come up with was actually a slightly older version of the real her, because he'd wanted to force her to turn into someone else, but he had to accept that forcing them to make permanent changes to her appearance when Samantha Blake's true look would ultimately serve him better would be counter productive, so he just turned and walked out. Sarah knew that he'd find some way to make her pay for the triumphant smile she couldn't hold in at that point, she just hoped that he wouldn't take it out on Mama.

The family were forcefully reminded of Chuck's temper after he got home from his first year at Stanford, because he exploded one night when he was going back over full results of the searches he'd been running for Sammie, trying to find something he'd missed. For all the danger of dealing with him when he was in this state, Ellie was in his room almost before the remains of the cup he'd thrown across the room hit the floor. Unfortunately she couldn't decipher what it was on the computer screen that had set him off, so she had to wait for him to calm down enough to tell her. When he did, she turned to look at Auntie Em, and that look was enough to have Auntie Em with them at the screen in seconds.

What Chuck had found was, for want of a better description, a hole in the results of the searches for Sammie. His search engines had discovered the indicators that Chuck had coded them for, but there was nothing there, as if the information had been carefully removed. When he saw that he started digging deeper, and even for him, looking for what isn't there was difficult, but eventually he found what had been removed. Back in April, an inept conman by the name of Jack Burton had gotten himself caught by the authorities down in San Diego, but it wasn't the local cops who caught him, it had been a federal agency operation. This was what convinced Chuck that he was on the right track, because Uncle Joe had always been lazy, so nearly every identity that they'd found for him in the last nine years had the same initials, JB. Then there was the fact that people had been talking about him being taken by the ATF and FBI, but there was nothing in their systems about it and the man had had an eighteen year old daughter who mysteriously disappeared straight after she gave her valedictorian speech.

Chuck was sure that this was Uncle Joe, and more importantly Sammie, but the big questions were how did they both disappear, separately, and why was there nothing in the ATF and FBI records. Unfortunately he was pretty sure he knew the answer to that last question, and that didn't bode well, because everything was pointing to the CIA. He got into the CIA's systems without too much trouble (as if they could keep the Piranha out!), but he couldn't find any references to Sammie or the arrest there either, so he looked for Uncle Joe in the one place he'd be if he was still alive, the prison systems, and at last he found something.

Auntie Di's point that him going in to rip the answers and throat out of Uncle Joe wouldn't help them, and worse, it would just tip off whoever had Sammie, her niece! that they were searching for her was valid if not tactful, so Chuck backed down and conceded that John, as the only one they had in the country that the CIA wasn't hunting for and the most likely to keep his temper was probably a better choice, then he almost threw John out the door to go and do it.

Unfortunately, when John went in as an FBI Agent to question Jack Burton in prison, he didn't any useful information out of him, and he almost lost his temper with the douche. They'd told him that Joe Blake didn't give a shit about anything but himself, but John was still shocked when Jack made it clear that he neither knew nor cared what had happened to his sixteen year old daughter, his only agenda was finding a way to get himself out of there! In the end, John just got up and left before he killed the bastard and tipped off the CIA, exactly what the Colonel had been trying to avoid when she sent him in to talk to the douche.

Seeing the hope fade from Chuck's face when he told them what he'd gotten from Burton almost made him go back and kill the bastard anyway.

Once she got to Harvard, she didn't have any time for anything but work, because she had three majors, Law, Business Management and Languages, and her extra curricular training workload was even higher than her official workload was. That didn't bother her so much though, because throwing herself into the work like that gave her less time to worry about Mama. What did bother her was her handler, because although the man's cover was as her father, she knew from the way he was always watching her and touching her that it would only be a matter of time before he tried something.

That time came when the university broke for Christmas. Sarah was due to head off early the next morning for another intensive training session over the break (after all, she had no family or anyone else, so she had no reason to stop working), but she was woken in the middle of the night by him jumping on top of her and tearing at the tank top and boy shorts she was sleeping in. In a straight fight she could have taken him easily, but he was over twice her weight and was using that advantage to pin her down as he ripped off her boy shorts, so she had no choice but to kill the bastard. After she called it in she got dressed, and then started shaking, because she was terrified of what Graham would do to Mama for this.

When Graham arrived though, he just looked at the corpse with disdain then turned to her. "This won't be a problem with your new handler, but if you ever do this on a mission there will be serious ramifications! I don't think I need to tell you what that means, do I?" Sarah shook her head, terrified for her Mama, and he nodded and walked out.

They cancelled the Christmas training session because the spin doctors had to stage the scene whereby an ambulance was called when her 'father' had had a heart attack, but the paramedics were unable to resuscitate him so he was pronounced dead on the scene. They took his body 'home' for the funeral, but when she came back she had her Aunt Jane come to stay with her. Aunt Jane was her mother's sister-in-law and a widow, so she and the family had agreed that she would be the best one to look after Sarah now that her Daddy was gone.

Sarah had to agree that it was better, not having to worry about being attacked every time she turned her back on her handler, but there were other issues with this Jane Bentley. Jane made it quite clear from the start that she regarded this babysitting assignment as an insult to her ability and record, and told her that she'd only agreed to take it because Deputy Director Graham had promised her a much better position as soon as she'd graduated from Harvard and was accepted as a full agent, ultimately the Deputy Director of Operations position. She also pointed out that as what she wanted was purely conditional on Sarah achieving everything expected of her, she would be pushing her harder than she'd ever been pushed before to make sure that she did.

For all her hard arsed approach though, Jane was doing quite a good job of training Sarah, she'd been a very accomplished operative and she knew what worked and what was fluff, she also knew many of the pitfalls that were waiting out there for operatives, especially for women. When Sarah told her what had happened with her first handler and that she was still a virgin, Jane was quite passionate as she told her to lose her virginity on her terms, to go out and find some nice boy to have her first time with, or even better find nice boys to have her first few times with, so that her memory of her first time wasn't of some disgusting pig that she was forced to submit to. Sarah couldn't bring herself to ask but after a while Jane nodded. "Yes, I am talking from personal experience, my first time was at university. I'm pretty sure I was set up by the bitches from the sorority I was pledging for, but people kept feeding me drinks at a frat party until I was too drunk to stand and then they took me upstairs, I think at least two or three of them had me before some of my girlfriends found me and managed to get me out of there. The next time was after I'd started as an agent though, and my memories of that pig are almost as bad as that frat party, so yes Honey, please believe me when I tell you that you want your first few times to be on your own terms so you aren't forced to live with those types of memories all the time."

Sarah cried in earnest for the first time since she was a little girl after hearing Jane's story, but even though she knew that it was good advice, she still had to get herself a little drunk before she could go through with it when she found a nice boy at a party a couple of months before her seventeenth birthday (her real seventeenth birthday that is, because she was supposedly eighteen going on nineteen). And even though it didn't effect her quite so much afterwards the second time, she couldn't help wishing that the face she saw when she opened her eyes was Charlie's, because that was how she'd gotten herself through it, closing her eyes and pretending that it was Charlie.

She was grateful that she'd taken Jane's advice when she was sent back to the Farm for part of the three months until her second year at Harvard started though, because Graham forced her to go through some very specific 'training' there that was so bad he'd had to threaten her mother several times before she'd go through with it, and the idea of remembering that every time she time she thought about sex horrified her. Having regret that her first time wasn't what she wanted was bad enough, being that disgusted every time she thought about it would have been so much worse.

The unparalleled success of the Special Projects Group was what gave Auntie Di the pull she needed to give Ellie (and Chuck) an incredible experience for Ellie's twenty first birthday in February Nineteen Ninety Nine. They knew that she was up to something when she turned up with a string of oh so subtle black SUVs and told them all to get their Air Force dress uniforms on, so they weren't too surprised when they headed up through San Fernando on the way to Edwards Air Force Base.

They were surprised when they got onto the base and saw the plane that was waiting for them though, because it wasn't the F-15 they'd been expecting, it was an SR-71! The SR-71 was of course the dream ride for pilots like them and they'd both made sure they qualified on the SR-71 simulators at test pilot school, so Auntie Di knew that Ellie would love it. She also knew her god daughter well enough that she just smiled and showed her the flight orders when Ellie dragged her off to one side to beg her to find some way to set it up so that Chuck could get to fly it too, because she already had it set up for USAF Major Eleonore Charlemagne to pilot the plane on the outbound leg to McConnell Air Force Base, and USAF Captain Karol Zaleski to pilot it on the return leg to Edwards after refueling. As the SR-71s were being retired in a couple of months, she'd also managed to get authorisation for them to test the craft's limits on this flight. Ellie hugged her, in tears as she thanked her, for knowing that she'd want Chuck to share in this as well as organising this incredible experience for her.

It was just as incredible as they'd expected it to be to take a plane to the edge of space and push it beyond Mach 3, and on the way back to Arcadia Auntie Di gave Ellie a framed certificate which recorded the fact that USAF Major Eleonore Charlemagne had flown the SR-71 (AF Ser. No. 61-7980/NASA 844) at a recorded airspeed of Mach 3.36 with the time, coordinates and altitude of where that speed was logged, and gave Chuck a similar certificate saying that USAF Captain Karol Zaleski had flown the same plane at Mach 3.45, with the details of when and where that was logged. Neither these nor the pictures of them in front of the SR-71 could be displayed where anyone else could see them of course, but they went up on the wall in the bunker with all their other certificates and pictures that had to be hidden from the world.

Larkin got more demanding about Chuck helping him about half way through their second year, but while Chuck was tempted to tell him to shove it, he grudgingly accepted that the act that Larkin was putting on was keeping the people monitoring him for the DIA's Cover Bureau off his back, and they were still hiding from both Graham and Volkoff, so he gave in to the douche's demands.

Hiding from Volkoff became a higher priority after June Two Thousand though, when they saw a report about an elderly woman, Dorothy Winterbottom, being tortured and killed in her home in Somerset, England. With the infallible memories that they got from their Mom, Ellie and Chuck weren't likely to forget the fact that Winterbottom was Uncle Hartley's name, that he had been English, or what she told them when they were older that the monster Uncle Hartley had been turned into did to her, so they started looking into the woman's murder.

This was where it got complicated, because it turned out that another woman, Elizabeth McArthur, had been tortured and killed in very similar circumstances the night before Uncle Hartley's mother was, and when they investigated her, they discovered that she had returned from Moscow with a baby girl called Vivian McArthur in Nineteen Ninety One, but she had listed the father as 'unknown'. On top of that, her autopsy showed that she'd never had a baby. The woman's daughter was missing, and the most anyone could tell the authorities was that she was away at boarding school somewhere.

To Ellie and Chuck, there was no question that this girl was the missing sister who had been taken from their mother at birth, but their mother didn't want to discuss the matter. While Ellie and Auntie Em tried to talk to Mary about it, Chuck, Jeff and Anna were trying to locate what school payments had been made to for Vivian's education, or any record of her attendance in school computers in England and Europe, and Auntie Di sent Uncle Roan to England as soon as she could get a jet organised, because this was what he was the master of, charming information out of people. She also got the orders cut for an F-15E to be readied for a run to England or Europe.

Ellie and Auntie Em finally managed to get Mary to concede that her daughter was not responsible for what the one who fathered her did, and that as she had been taken to England just after she was born and there was no evidence that Alexei Volkoff had set foot in England since then, there was little chance that she had been influenced by him. Indeed, the fact that her foster mother had been tortured to death like Uncle Hartley's mother implied that she had been hiding the girl from Volkoff and his people. As far as the nature versus nurture argument went, there could be no part of Volkoff in the girl's genes because Volkoff was nothing but an imprinted personality, so genetically she was a combination of Marjan Zaleska and Hartley Winterbottom and she'd always said that Hartley had been much like Stefan, so that would not be a bad thing.

By the time Ellie and Auntie Em managed to convince Mary to accept her daughter, Chuck had found evidence that an almost nine year old Vivian McArthur was attending a girls' boarding school in England, and after a long and teary phone discussion with Chuck up in Palo Alto, Mary and Ellie left to fly the F-15 to England.

Vivian was as bright as they'd all expected her to be (how could she not be, with two brilliant parents?), so her mother and sister had little trouble getting her to accept who they were. Luckily they had Roan there to talk the school into releasing Vivian into her family's custody, but the obvious resemblance between Mary, Ellie and Vivian helped there too.

As soon as they got Vivian out of the school, they spirited her out of the country, flying her back to America in the C-37A that had brought Roan to England before Volkoff and his minions could find her or any traces of her (Ellie had to fly the F-15 back to America, but that helped get her flight hours up anyway).

Mary and Ellie had used Russian names and accents at the school and told them that Vivian was being taken back to Russia where she had been kidnapped from, and a phone call to Chuck was all it took to create electronic records that showed that Vivian McArthur had been on a privately owned Yak-40 heading back across Europe, up to the point where the flight records terminated after it crossed into Belarus. Records of the ownership of the jet had also been wiped from years back and there were a few bankrupt and defunct businesses in the deleted links so there was no way to find what happened to it after that. While he was at it, he also deleted all records of Vivian McArthur from the school's computers to prevent anyone else locating the school the way he had.

When he was done, all the available evidence pointed to Vivian being taken back to Russia as the school had been told, and someone in the old Soviet Bloc professionally wiping the records there to prevent her being found. The point of this was to try and convince Volkoff that someone in his own organisation had grabbed his heir, to either kill her to prevent her taking over from him, or groom her to be their puppet, and Volkoff was paranoid enough to swallow that hook, line and sinker.

Vivian had inherited Mary's eidetic memory and other talents like Ellie and Chuck, so she had no trouble picking up an American accent and remembering that her name was Vivien Leigh Bartowski (because Vivien Leigh's birth name was actually Vivian Mary Hartley and using a movie star's name wouldn't be questioned much in Los Angeles) and she was eleven now for school. Anyone who asked what her story was was told that she was Mary and Emma's niece and her parents had been killed in a car crash, so her aunts had gotten custody of her. The beauty of this story was that it was both easy to remember, and most people would shy away from asking too many questions because it was a painful subject.

It was quite a change for Vivien, to be living in a loving home with her real mother and sister, Auntie Em, Uncle Bry and Skip there most of the time. Her mother, Auntie Em and Uncle Bry gave her the same kind of training that Ellie and Chuck got, but learning from them was a lot more rewarding and effective than the lessons she'd been made to take in some of the same types of things so that was no problem, and she was learning so much more now.

And as well as having a mother and sister, she had a brother! Chuck was coming down most weekends now to get to know his little sister, and Auntie Di couldn't really complain because he was still working, just in Arcadia instead of Palo Alto. But of course she had complained about how much time he was wasting, spending six hours or more driving each way. Chuck was pissed off that she said that getting to know his little sister was wasting time, so he told her to get him a Pilatus PC-12 (he was in mission mode so he automatically specified that plane as the best fit for the situation as he was used to these planes from operations around the world and they were a large single engine single pilot plane with good range, speed and capacity that could operate from short dirt strips but they weren't so unusual that they'd attract too much unwanted attention) if his time was so bloody valuable, because he could save at least five hours each way by flying but the Learjet couldn't use the short Palo Alto airstrip, and it required two pilots anyway. He mainly said that to shut her up, but in late August he was sent to the Pilatus plant in Colorado to get certified on the improved special operations version of the PC-12 Eagle they were developing which Auntie Di had had rebuilt and recertified from a damaged early PC-12 with the help of Uncle Roan's silver tongue. While there were some very interesting features added to the plane, the primary difference as far as flying it was the glass cockpit, so it wasn't long before he was flying it back to Palo Alto.

NB: The actual Terminator quote was "Listen. Understand. That Terminator is out there. It can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with...it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear...and it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead."