Yeah, I know that people will be screaming about something in this chapter, all I can say is that it's the most sympathetic depiction of him you'll find in one of my stories, ;^)
Usual disclaimers, no rights to any characters portrayed and this is neither the real world nor a Disney Princess tale.
As soon as Anna and Jill finished their final exams, Jeff, Anna and Jill packed up, put the house on the market and went home to Los Angeles. After spending over four years together in Palo Alto, moving back to their families' homes was hard for Anna and Jill, all the more so because Jill's parents were asking questions about just who was Chuck's girlfriend, because they'd heard something about Jill being with Chuck at Stanford? The situation got worse when Jill stopped answering any of their calls and Anna went to see her to find out what was wrong, only to be told by her parents that she'd gone to New York about a job opportunity.
They couldn't find any record of her in New York when they tried searching for her, and Anna was getting ready to run off to New York to hunt her down on foot if she had to. Anna hurt Chuck for the first time when he tried to point out that they had a much better chance of finding her using the resources that they had at their disposal here, because she snarled at him that that had really worked for him, finding his precious Sammie, hadn't it? He just looked at her, then turned and walked out without a word, but they heard his bike bellowing off up the street a few minutes later. Anna fell apart when she realised what she'd done, and he wouldn't answer his phone so she could tell him how sorry she was. When Chuck came back in the early hours of the morning, she was sitting in the living room, waiting to apologise, but he just took her by the hand and they went to bed to hold each other.
Anna got a letter from Jill a month or so after she disappeared to explain what had happened. Apparently she hadn't been telling them the truth when she said that everything had gone to plan with Larkin, as she'd managed to get him to wear a condom the first time, but not the second or third times. She hadn't gotten AIDS from him though, she'd gotten pregnant. She'd hadn't known what the signs of being pregnant were, so she didn't work out that she was until the foetus had developed to the point where the books she read said that it was a person. The thing was, she'd been raised as a strict Catholic and while being a homosexual was regarded as a sin she still believed in what she was taught, so she had decided that this was god's punishment for her having sex outside of the sanctity of marriage and would be keeping the baby as her penance. She'd gone to someone she knew through her family who had offered to support her through the pregnancy and give her somewhere to raise the baby. After the baby was born, she was hoping to make a new life for the two of them somewhere that everyone who she'd let down couldn't find her. She finished by saying that she'd asked someone to post this letter well away from where she was to prevent anyone finding her, and that she was hoping that Fulcrum would leave her family alone if she just disappeared.
Anna broke down when she read that letter, asking why Jill hadn't trusted that they could deal with this together. That was probably why she reacted the way she did when her own parents started pressuring her to settle down with a good Chinese boy instead of running around with her wild American boyfriend. Her response to that was to go upstairs, pack a few bags, grab her laptop and leave, telling them that she'd get someone to come and get the rest of her things. When she got to Casa Bartowski, she asked if she could stay in their guest room until she found herself a place, but Chuck just took her bags and led her to his room as she was obviously in no state to be by herself at that point.
They laid on the bed, holding each other and talking about Jill and what they were going to do until Ellie came up to get them for dinner. All the women came up to hug and kiss Anna and tell her that she was staying here, then they settled down to dinner. Their mother shook her head at Ellie when she tried to wind up Chuck about the fact that as the only male in the house he was even more of a minority now, and asked. "Have you two decided what you're going to do? I expect that you've started making plans at least?"
Chuck grinned at Anna because he'd told her that one of them would bring that up straight away. "Yeah Mom, we're going to use Charlemagne Computers Etc and float a few more cover businesses so we can switch and change when we need to. The plan at the moment is that Anna will be the head of Lotus Security Systems, I'll be the head of Piranha Security & Technology, Skip will head up Novatech Industries and Jeff will stay as the head of C C E. We'll mostly offer consulting services, though we'll do some technical services as well. We're thinking of getting premises…."
Anna gave him a look at that "We are?", but he just nodded and continued "I'm thinking with living quarters now" (shooting a look at Ellie) "in Pasadena, because we can be close to the tech business area, and also close to Caltech for our post grad studies. If we do this right it will also give us another location to run our operations out of, because the Echo Park apartments are too open for that."
(When Ellie finished medical school and started at the Westside Medical Centre, the Cover Bureau had insisted that she needed more appropriate accommodations so they organised an apartment for her in Echo Park. They went in and bought the other apartments there afterwards, putting some of their people in them and improving the security systems, but none of them were really happy about Ellie staying there because it was too exposed, so she was home more nights than she was there. The Cover Bureau had also tried to insist that she start up a relationship of some sort, arguing that a beautiful young woman like her being unattached would attract too much attention. She was on the verge of telling Mom they were flying to Washington so she could tell them exactly what she thought of that idea when the solution fell into their laps…. Ellie and Skip had been hanging out together at UCLA and Skip hooked up with one of her classmates, Jethro, well his name was actually Devon Woodcomb but he was thick as a brick and when Mary called him that in an exasperated moment and everyone else took it up, he locked it in by embracing it as an endearment. Jethro was too afraid of his parents back east to come out of the closet so he tried to act all macho, going on about extreme sports and coming onto women all the time. The situation where he and Skip hooked up actually came about because Skip had to intercede to save him from serious damage when he was stupid enough to come onto Ellie and wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. He drove most of them, even Skip, around the bend most of the time with his stupid comments but he generally made Skip happy. When he started at Westside with Ellie and Ellie got that 'suggestion' from the Cover Bureau though, Skip used Jethro's fear of his parents' reaction to convince him that pretending to be in a relationship with Ellie would help cover things up, just like Chuck was covering for Anna and Jill. The fact that he and Skip were living in one of their apartments at Echo Park too made it easy enough to pretend that he was with Ellie instead of Skip when they threw parties there, and John, Bry and Mary were intimidating enough to dissuade people from dropping by when they felt like it, the security measures they'd added which kept non-residents out of the complex helped with that too.)
Chuck watched his mother do the mental shift from Mom to operative as she considered that last, nodding. "Yes, it would be good to be able to spread things around a little."
Anna's anguish and anger over how Jill had left her took a while to get over, but settling into her new life as part of the family helped. Her own family were quite shocked the day she turned up with a team of agency removalists (including John) to get the rest of her things, and she made sure that her mother got the message when she handed her a cheque which the attached note showed covered everything they'd spent to send her to Stanford, and the cost of her car as well…. that she was paying back whatever they'd spent on her to ensure that they no longer had any claim over her, because as far as she was concerned they were no longer part of her life! As she was about to leave though, Anna stopped and turned back, wanting to lash out.
"By the way mother! Chuck isn't my boyfriend, he's my best friend. That's all he ever has been or will be, even though he's by far the best man I could ever hope to meet, because I'm a lesbian! Chuck and his family have supported my choices in this for over seven years now without question, even though my own family never would!" With that she stormed out, with a smirking John Casey following her, but she broke down in the car when John said "Good for you" and gently asked if she was OK, crying on his shoulder. When she'd recovered enough she kissed him on the cheek, giving him a look of thanks before they drove off.
Her parents never cashed that cheque for some reason, whether her mother tore it up to cover up what it meant or they were trying to apologise, but Anna never contacted them to ask why, she just left the money sitting in her account until she had a use for it. They also didn't know that she'd legally changed her name to match her Navy identity of Anna Wang and got Stanford to reissue her degrees in that name, so their daughter Anna Wu didn't exist any more.
Even though she'd said that she didn't want to be found, they did start a search for Jill, adding it to the search for Sammie. They still hadn't any luck with that search, but something else had been catching Chuck's eye over the past few years, an increasing number of references to an exceptional young CIA agent who was only ever referred to as the 'Ice Queen', as in that time she'd apparently completed far more missions than anyone else with an unparalleled success rate (and a frightening kill count), and comments about her were usually around the fact that the bitch was stunning but inhuman, and that no-one could stand up to or match her because she was a robot. These stories intrigued Chuck, because they conjured an image in his head of a beautiful, deadly cyborg (something his mother and Ellie said just proved that he watched way too much sci-fi, but Auntie Em, Viv and Anna were kinder about), so he'd added any references to the Ice Queen to his searches as well.
They looked around Pasadena for something that would make suitable premises for 'their' offices (Anna still used air quotes whenever she said 'our offices' because Chuck was the only one putting any effort into this) until Chuck found a property with a fairly large two storey warehouse building that took up three quarters of the block on the edge of a nice residential district, the property also included a smaller, single storey building going across that end of the block with quite a large yard and they all agreed that it suited their various purposes quite well. As a warehouse, the ground floor of the main building was more than double height, so with another high ceiling floor above the building was about fifty feet high. The buildings were vacant and run down, but structurally sound, as the owners had basically been hanging onto the property to sell to developers when the market came up enough because the location was good and it was quite a large block, in fact it was literally a city block as it was over 45 x 180 Metres with roads running right around it. Once Chuck had confirmed that everything was above board, he used the tricks Uncle Roan had taught him over the last ten years or so to talk the price down to about fourteen million for an immediate sale, transferring the money the day they exchanged contracts to close the deal quickly before they could reconsider. Anna was a little surprised by the way he did that, because she'd been tied up keeping Jill in the dark about their other activities and they'd never really discussed money matters, so Chuck laid it all out now.
As far as the money she knew about went, they'd sold the house in Palo Alto for a profit, and with the extra they'd made from investing the money, the original false arrest settlement had netted them over three million. After Uncle Roan's fee came out of the defamation settlement in May they had thirteen and a half million more there, and the salaries for the majority of what had grown to nearly fifty senior officer identities that made up the core Special Projects Group over the past ten years had been going into a fund that was sitting at over thirty five million now, because they'd been pushing promotions (with the associated pay rises) through the system for all of them as soon as possible and using the information they acquired to invest that money rather well. So between those accounts they had over Fifty Million left in what was essentially their expenses accounts after he paid for the property in Pasadena, and as she knew, the slush fund that they used for paying arms dealers and the like on missions normally had at least Forty to Fifty Million in it to keep up their reputation of having a large mob behind them, but those two were only a small fraction of what they had.
What they'd never had the chance to go over was the fact that whenever they cleaned out the ones they took down on missions, like that sleazy arms dealer they got the F Fives off in Ninety Eight, he punted the money they took into their off-shore accounts. They had taken nearly a Hundred and Forty Million off that particular arms dealer, which had covered the nearly Hundred Million he'd had to spend setting up the defense contractor to deliver on Auntie Di's new project over the previous ten months, those accounts always kept going up and down like that.
Chuck explained that while he was the one who got the money out of the country and into their accounts over there, he, Ellie and Auntie Em managed their off-shore holdings together. They normally maintained around Two to Three Hundred Million to cover big outgoings like setting up the defense contractor or really big deals in their off-shore ready funds, and had another Two or Three Hundred Million invested to bring in money to cover the cost of their operations. Auntie Di knew that they had the money to do what they wanted but usually agreed that it was better if she didn't know the details of what they had or where it was.
Anna laughed at that. "Well I suppose that explains why no-one else looked worried when you were talking about buying business properties in Pasadena!"
After Chuck told her how much they had to use, Anna was less surprised when she saw the extent of his plans to renovate the building, as he was cladding the entire building in armour glass two way mirrors (which was actually armoured glass, capable of handling impacts from over 30mm rounds), this cladding effectively added another floor to the building height as it extended five metres past the roof line, and the design included active defence systems as well as the armour glass and other passive defence systems. The roof was reinforced so that it could safely support CH-53Es if necessary (even though the only helicopters they were planning to have use the roof as a helipad for the foreseeable future were their own MD 600 and A109), splitting three quarters of the ground floor into two levels and making two basement levels. The ground floor would nominally be taken up by five businesses, Lotus Security Services, Piranha Security & Technology, Charlemagne Computers Etc, Novatech Industries and Shiloh Security Storage, with apartments above them, as Chuck had decided that the bigger building would be more believable with several business offices and the storage business, and he had plans to expand their operations down the track. There was another feature of this property which had made it even more attractive for their purposes when they discovered it, because it must have been used for illegal purposes at some point as there were at least a dozen escape tunnels going out from the basements of the buildings which mostly terminated under commercial properties now, so part of the renovation plans was to shore these up, carefully clear the outer ends of these tunnels and conceal and secure both ends of the tunnels.
The family was amused about Chuck's 'modest' business plans, but conceded that everything appeared quite logical and sound for their operations, so Auntie Di arranged for the appropriate government contractors to come in and start working on it. They were all working from home (Arcadia or Echo Park) while the building renovations were proceeding, but referrals from people who knew them from the hacker world and Stanford (and Auntie Di and Uncle Roan quietly directing people their way) resulted in their reputation spreading quickly, so quickly that they had to start thinking about bringing even more people on to handle the workload.
Chuck and the others' plans to get their cover businesses up and running were all forgotten a week and a half into September, as the news that went around the world on the eleventh made many people forget what they'd been planning. The impact on some was for an hour, others for a day, but others would have to deal with its effects for the rest of their lives. While the news of the attack on the twin towers broke over them like a wave, the other attacks didn't have the same impact once they'd confirmed that Auntie Di, Uncle Roan, Dad, Dr Dreyfus and the other people they knew in DC were OK. It took them longer to find out that a couple of the people they worked with and were friendly with (you couldn't exactly call people friends when you couldn't afford to let them see your face or hear your unaltered voice because there was no way that they wouldn't spot that you're ten to fifteen years younger than your identity, or risk that they might recognise a long term fugitive from the CIA or famous operatives like John and Uncle Bry) had in fact been in the towers when they went down.
Every other job they had was put aside to work on hunting down and evaluating information relating to the attacks, even John and Uncle Bry dove into tracing the information. Someone who only saw Old Ironpants and didn't know Diane Beckman well enough to see past the mask might have believed that she was basking in the acclaim and power that she was accruing from her relatively small unit delivering two thirds of the actionable intel coming out in the wake of the attacks, but Diane was breaking inside. She knew, and had been friends and family with, people who had been lost, and she couldn't get the image of the rest of the men, women and children who had fallen to this out of her head either.
Luckily, in the wave of shock and anguish that followed the attacks, no-one paid that much attention when people didn't turn up for classes, or even work, so they were free to devote all of their time to investigating the matter, passing along any actionable intel as soon as it had been confirmed. Even on the first day though, there was an undercurrent of suspicion growing in the intelligence community, because the powers that be were ignoring the valid intel they were being given and ordering investigations to go in other directions without any evidence to support their decisions.
Chuck, John, Uncle Bry, Mary, Anna and even Ellie were being sent off on missions within a few days after the attacks, though half of Uncle Bry's missions were as part of the CIA contingent. The problem was that they were always being sent in the wrong direction, so while they saw a lot of action, added to their medal counts and gained more promotions from their parts in these missions, they found nothing to do with what they were supposedly there to look into, because they were in the wrong place for that.
By the time the initial reactions to the attacks had settled down to become part of the War on Terror, their groups had a notably higher profile than they'd had before the attacks, because anyone who knew anything recognised that they had been the ones who were managing to locate the information that no-one else could. With the increased interest in their groups, they had to expand to meet demand, so Diane, Emma, Mary, Ellie and Chuck had to go through the process of interviewing and selecting suitable people to bring in. With the new people spread around the country, and some overseas, it wasn't too hard to set it up so that there was no face to face communication, other than with the newly minted Brigadier General Diane Beckman.
All of their new and expanded groups were bundled into what was now widely known as the Special Projects Group. There were more than a few questions about why a shiny new one star General was meeting with the National Security Advisor so often, and no-one bought the line that they were just two friends meeting for drinks much of the time (quite aside from anything else, no-one believed that Old Ironpants had any friends). There were also questions about how Navy Commanders Charles Carmichael, Eleanora Zaleska and Emmeline Boudreaux came to be promoted to Captains and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Marie Lestrange was promoted to a full Colonel in December 2001 once the initial flurry of activity after Nine Eleven died down, because Carmichael and Zaleska hadn't even been halfway to the minimum time in grade. Neither the fact that these officers were all part of the new General's command, or that their questions had been shut down without any explanation by the Secretary of Defense sat well with most of the people asking.
When Auntie Di and Uncle Roan suddenly turned up at the house unannounced for Christmas in 2001, Chuck was suspicious, all the more so when Auntie Em snapped at her sister. "Stop playing games and bring them in Di!"
That made the others turn and look at the cars they had come in, to see the door open and a face that they hadn't seen in nine years. Lou Palone had been part of their original four musketeers up until she and her family suddenly disappeared without a word to anyone and it was discovered that they had moved to Israel. But Lou wasn't alone, because two little girls got out of the car with her, they looked to be about eight years old, and were apparently twins and obviously related to Lou because they looked like smaller versions of her.
Chuck could see the knowing smiles on the faces of the older members of the family out of the corner of his eye, but Ellie appeared to be as confused as he and Anna were. They could see Lou saying something to the girls, and then she took each of them by the hand and led them up the path.
The only thing stopping Chuck and Anna running to greet Lou was the girls, because they couldn't work out what the hell was going on here and didn't want to frighten them, so they waited for her….. But as it was, Chuck almost fainted when Lou reached them and said. "Lottie, Charlie, this is your Papa!"
The dam burst then and everyone was greeting her and the girls, then they went inside to hear the story. Auntie Em and Ellie would get the story later because they took the girls out the back to play, along with Viv and Auntie Di and Uncle Roan's daughter Josie, as some parts of this story weren't likely to be suitable for children.
What not even Lou had known back at the start of Ninety Three before they disappeared was that her father was in the process of finalising arrangements for the family to emigrate to Israel, because he saw the loose and easy ways of America as a threat to his children growing up as good Jews. Both of Lou's parents were well respected scientists who observed the requirements of Judaism, so Israel was eager to get them.
When they discovered that their thirteen year old daughter was pregnant, and she wouldn't say who the father was, or more to the point, refused to confirm that it was Charles Bartowski because it was obvious to everyone who knew them knew how devoted she and Anna Wu were to the boy, Lou's parents (mainly her father) decided to put an end to this immediately so her mother took her and her two brothers to New York that very night while her father stayed to pack up and sell the house.
The twins were born in Israel, and after considerable pleading and a little blackmail her mother managed to convince her father to let Louisa name her own children, so they were named Charlotte and Charlene after their father, or more commonly Lottie and Charlie. When they were alone, her mother asked why she refused to admit that it was Charles when she was asked, and she confessed that she'd been afraid of what her father might have done to Chuck if she confirmed it then, because he was so angry. She'd also confessed that Anna had also experimented with sex with Chuck, but they'd both discovered that no matter how much they loved Chuck and how good what he did for them felt, sex with him, a man, just wasn't right for them, so they'd experimented with each other as well, and that was where they found what was right for them. This was a shock for her mother, to find out that her little girl was not only a mother at thirteen, but a lesbian as well, but she loved her no matter what, and her beautiful granddaughters of course.
They agreed that her father and brothers weren't likely to be very understanding though, so they kept Lou's preferences a secret between them, but while the twins were officially recorded as Lou's daughters and treated as such inside the family, to everyone else they were her sisters. Lou finished her story with the fact that she'd gotten into the Talpiot program and was doing her military service when Auntie Di and Auntie Mary contacted her back in May.
That made everyone turn and look at Auntie Di, so she started her part of the story.
"When Roan and Anna dropped the little bombshell that Charles had been having sex with Anna and Louisa when he was eleven…." She stopped at the shocked look on Lou's face. "Oh I'm sorry Louisa, Anna only found this out when they were at University herself. You see, when we created Eleanor and Charles' new Bartowski identities in Ninety One we made them older to help hide them, twenty seven months older in Charles' case, so he actually turned twenty in October..."
Lou kept staring at her in shock so she picked up the story again to take attention off the poor girl.
"Anyway, when they dropped that little bombshell, I suddenly remembered how devastated Charles and Anna had been when Louisa suddenly left without a word just after that, and it occurred to me to wonder whether the two events were related, so I asked some friends in Israeli intelligence to make some enquiries for me, and sure enough they came up with the information that Charlotte and Charlene Palone had been born to Louisa Palone about six months after the Palone family arrived in Israel, and their father was recorded as Charles Bartowski, a citizen of the United States of America. I confirmed that Louisa was single and unattached and working in the Talpiot program… congratulations on that by the way Honey because I know how difficult it is to get into the program..."
"Anyway, we knew that Charles would want to know about his daughters, but Mary and I agreed that the choice had to be Louisa's, so we flew to Israel to talk to her…. You lot never told me how uncomfortable those damned F Fifteens are, especially on long flights like that where you need to have things sticking into you, if I'd known that I would have taken a few more days and gone on a civilised plane!…. So…. Louisa was angry that we'd even question that Charles should know about his daughters, but after she'd calmed down enough to discuss it, she said that while she'd love to bring the girls back so the family could be together, she still had another four or five years of her military service left..."
She snorted at that. "You should have seen her face when Mary pointed out that we had a prior claim to her, because United States Air Force Major Louisa Palone had been one of our's since Ninety Two…. But it still took us months to get the Israelis to accept the validity of Louisa's Air Force commission and therefore our prior claim and release her from the IDF and it only got harder after Nine Eleven, and her father was trying to stop her taking the girls out of Israel as well. We eventually got everything signed off by the Israeli government so they were cleared to leave and sent a C Thirty Seven A to bring them home, and that's where we are! We don't know about her father and brothers, but Louisa's mother will be coming over to see them as often as she can, we've told her that we'll pay the fares."
Chuck and Anna were looking more than a little shell shocked, and Lou was looking very pensive until Chuck came out of it enough to gather her and Anna into his arms, and after a teary release of emotions, they went out to be with the girls, who were getting to know their Aunt Viv (who was only 2 years older than them) and Josie (3 years older). John had brought Alex (4 years older) and Uncle Bry brought Kim (2 years older) for dinner to meet the girls, so it was a lively affair.
They had found out about Alex back in Ninety Five when Chuck was checking records relating to John's original name, Alexander John Coburn, and discovered that the fiancé he'd had to leave behind when he was made to fake his death to start over as John Casey in a black ops group had had a baby girl in August Eighty Nine and had named her Alexandra Johanna McHugh after her father. It was thinking about Emma that convinced him to see them actually (as Kathleen was married now), because he realised that it would have been a slap in the face to her to have his daughter there in Los Angeles and not make an effort to see her when Emma and Chuck agonised every day about not being able to find Sammie.
It was John who was slapped actually, several times, and John found that Kathleen still had a strong right, but once she'd calmed down enough to listen, she found that she could accept his explanation on the basis of the man he was and the fact that he hadn't known anything about their daughter. Alex was twelve now, and John saw her whenever he was in Los Angeles (he hadn't missed the fact that he spent a lot more time here now and tried to let Colonel Beckman know that he appreciated it without either of them admitting that they knew what he was talking about).
After dinner, Di, Roan, Josie, Bry, Kim, John, Alex, Ellie and Jeff all went to the Echo Park apartments (at least buying out the whole block have them plenty of rooms), while Lou took Ellie's room and the girls took the spare room at the house. No-one was really surprised when Anna and Lou came out together in the morning, and Lou was the only one surprised when Chuck pushed a pile of paperwork across for her to sign at the breakfast table. When she just looked at him he spoke. "I'm sorry Lou, I'd just presumed that you'll be living and working with us….."
The others laughed when they saw the temper that they remembered. "Well of course that's what I want to do Chuck! I want our daughters to get to know their father! But what's this Novatech and why the hell do you want me to sign these papers?"
Anna was shaking her head at Chuck with a smile, and he realised that they hadn't explained what was going to Lou, so he took her up to his room to show her the business and building plans for what he wanted to do. When they entered the room, Lou looked around with a smile, because aside from the bigger bed and updated technology, it hadn't changed that much in the last nine years. They'd gone over most of the details by the time the girls appeared in the doorway, as they'd followed the laughter, they loved the look of the building where their Papa said that they'd be living half of the time at least, but they did a perfect synchronised valley girl "EWWWWWW!" when their Mama told them that this was the room that they had been conceived in.
When everything reopened after Christmas, Louisa Palone was officially listed as the head of Novatech Industries, and Lottie and Charlie were going to the same school as Viv, the same one both of their parents went to up until Mama went to Israel too.
By the time El Castillo (their building) was finished, they'd settled into a comfortable setup, Chuck, Ellie, Anna and Lou and Vicky Dunwoody would have apartments in El Castillo, but stay at the house most of the time to be with the family. Ellie, Jeff, John, Bry, Skip and Jethro and Rick Noble all had apartments at Echo Park, but Bry especially was rarely there. Rick and Vicky had been added to the team by Auntie Di after Nine Eleven because she insisted on beefing up the security with the family and team expansions, so they would be working with the team at El Castillo.
When 'El Castillo' was finished, Mary had made a few more phone calls to stock its armoury to Chuck's requirements, and the new armoury was rather more extensive than the one at the house (especially with what Chuck wanted for the building's active security systems). Even though the others had seen, and had had some input into the plans for El Castillo, they were still awed and amazed when they actually saw how it had come out. The five businesses shared the computer and electronics labs out back, plus the engineering lab for Novatech. They'd settled on Piranha coming under Chuck's umbrella while Lotus was Anna's, Charlemagne was Jeff's, Novatech was Lou's now and Shiloh was Skip's, so they were each the 'boss' of one of the businesses in the building.
As no-one but them got to see the inside the secure garage that took up the remainder of the ground floor, and the different segments were screened off from each other, they brought their large collection of assorted vehicles in from the storage facilities around the city that they had been salted away in. There were a fair number of apparently (but not really) ordinary cars, vans, bikes and the like in there, but there were also millions of dollars worth of supercars, classics and limousines that they maintained to use on missions. (That was the official reason anyway, a good number of these had been collected or built by Chuck for his, Ellie and Anna's use, and John and the others as well to a lesser degree. Taking down dictators and drug and arms dealers and other major crime figures on a regular basis gave them access to their fabulous toys as well as their fortunes, so when he found something he particularly liked he'd often add it to their collection, using the network of identities that he maintained in that world to ship them back to LA.) That was the official reason for having the A109 and Learjet too, maintaining the image with an executive helicopter and jet, but they were both fun to fly and the Learjet was useful for getting around the country.
As amazing as the ground floor was, the 'Dungeon', as Anna had named it (they couldn't argue the logic, as it was only logical for a castle to have a dungeon underneath it) was far more so. For a start, there was the armoury and range on the bottom level, B2, along with the gym, dojo, pool and a plethora of other things. On the upper level, B1, they had the operations centre, meeting rooms, medical centre and whatever else was expected in a base of operations, plus a quite comfortable two bedroom apartment tucked away in one corner, as well as a far more serious computer lab than anything upstairs, enough that Caltech would have been jealous of what they had there.
Of course, the Bananas in Pyjamas posters that Ellie put up in the Dungeon raised more than a few questions, as did the 'Cuddles Avenue' prefix that showed up for access to the Dungeon levels by the private elevators located in the 'executive bathrooms' on the ground floor, but no-one outside of their groups ever saw those. All up, between purchasing the property and the 'renovations' to create the facility, El Castillo had cost over twenty million, Diane had organised allocations for five million for improvements to her group's facilities while the rest was paid for by the family.
Most of level 2 was empty and unfinished, they'd done all the structural work and laid in the plumbing, wiring etc, but everything else was being left until it was needed. Level 3 had been fitted out as a number of quite nice apartments, and Chuck intended to move into the one he'd designed for himself when he had the chance, but he was staying at the house half the time to be with the girls. Anna and Lou had an apartment there too, but when they were there during the week they had to take the girls to school, gymnastics, dance classes and the like in Arcadia.
The way Chuck had set the systems up in El Castillo, they could access their profiles from anywhere in the building, so he could, say, start something in his office and pick it up in his apartment or down in the Dungeon. There was one window that he had constantly running and accessed quite often, the one that displayed the search engines that were running for Sammie, Jill, the Ice Queen, 'Graham's Enforcer' and the 'Golden Boy'.
About a year after they left Stanford, references to two new players in the CIA started popping up, one, who seemed very much like the Ice Queen, was referred to as 'The Enforcer' or 'Graham's Enforcer', while the other one was referred to as 'The Golden Boy' or 'Graham's Golden Boy'.
The more reports about the Golden Boy he saw, the more questions were raised. The Ice Queen and the Enforcer were obviously hell on wheels, capable of doing just about anything, but while the references to the Golden Boy were usually positive, especially from women, the evidence listed for his missions appeared to contradict them, because while his official achievements were generally impressive, any agents working with him showed up as markedly below than their normal performance and many of them were also listed as being injured or killed.
That was why it made even less sense when he started seeing references to the Enforcer and the Golden Boy working together, why would Graham shackle one of his best operatives with something like that? He saw that they were achieving good results together, but what they were achieving together wasn't up to what the Enforcer had been doing on her(?) own, so he couldn't understand why Graham would do that. Everything he'd been told and remembered about Graham said that he was an evil bastard, but he'd never seen any indication of him being stupid, and this definitely appeared to be stupid.
Another thing that bothered him was the fact that references to the Ice Queen seemed to have stopped around the time the Enforcer and the Golden Boy were teamed up, had she been killed on a mission somewhere? He didn't really understand it, but that possibility upset him, as he'd always had this thought in the back of his mind that he'd like to meet this woman, because she sounded incredible. Then... about two years later... there was a sudden spike of new reports about the Ice Queen, with comments about her being free of the tool and back to kicking arses and taking names again, and Chuck had to laugh at himself about how ridiculous it was to feel so relieved when he saw that.