Baylink keeps doing great beta work, and then I go and change things after the fact. All mistakes are mine...

Information was the lifeblood of any good agent. Information was power. Used properly, it was a currency to be traded, a tool to provide leverage, or the deciding edge in a mission otherwise doomed to failure.

In Sarah's world, people understood the value of information. The moment somebody else learned a secret, that person became a threat to be neutralized. So every agent quickly learned to handle his arsenal of secrets like the loaded weapons they were – with caution and respect, kept carefully concealed. It became second nature. Information about an agent couldn't be used if nobody else possessed it, and people unaware of a threat couldn't neutralize it.

A harder lesson was that many secrets had a shelf life. Some secrets became less useful as the information grew stale. Other secrets gradually devalued as more people learned them. The most dangerous secrets were like time bombs, where a key person was almost certain to learn the secret and, when they did, everything would blow up with unpredictable, usually spectacular consequences.

Apparently the timer on the watch's secret read all zeros.

Sarah stared helplessly at Jay, realizing what her inaction had done. When the Fulcrum agents had arrived that morning, of course Chuck would have felt like he had to run. He wouldn't know who to trust. If she had come clean sooner…

Jay's quiet voice shook her from her thoughts. Her mind registered the sounds, but not the words. "I'm sorry?" she asked.

"Are you all right?" Jay asked again, genuine concern on his face.

She realized she had let her emotions show, and in front of a stranger whose help she needed, no less. Her baseline smile snapped quickly into place. "Of course."

Surprisingly, Jay laughed. Her eyes narrowed. "What's so funny?" she asked.

"Nothing. It's only … Chuck told me that I could trust you, but also that you were a terrific liar. I couldn't understand what he meant until just now."

A half-dozen emotions coursed through her, ranging from hurt to anger. She had no time for any of them. She needed everything that Jay knew.

Time to work.

"All this must have been a lot to take in," she said.

"Yeah, I'd say so."

"How much did he tell you?"

"Not much. Casey's an agent. You're an agent. Chuck knows some things that could be dangerous in the wrong hands."

"Very dangerous," she said.

"Is that why you two set up the boyfriend-girlfriend thing? So you could protect him?"

She saw a chance to build a little sympathy. She gave a rueful little laugh and said, "Something like that. I thought we had at least become friends."

"He must believe that, at least a little."

"What makes you say that?"

"He could've made this much harder for you."

Harder? Chuck had avoided her after he discovered the device. He had disappeared while Fulcrum agents were on the loose. He had up and left after she had dared to open herself up to him. While she was glad that there was something that explained Chuck's behavior, part of her ached. The last twenty-four hours couldn't have been any harder.

With some effort, she kept a smile on her face and forced herself to focus on what Jay had said. "How could he have made this harder?" she asked.

"He wanted you to come talk to me."

"How do you know that?"

"Chuck left a text message for me to send if you didn't show up here."

"What message?"

Jay pulled his phone from a front pocket of his jeans. As he spoke, he fiddled with the buttons. "I was supposed to give you ninety minutes from when Chuck left. If you didn't show by then, I was supposed to send this message to you. He knew you'd track me down at the store. Here."

He passed the phone to her. Chuck had apparently typed the message in a serious hurry, lacking his usually impeccable capitalization and punctuation. The message read 'FIND Morgan + Ellie tell thm what they need to hear'.

A sick feeling grew in her stomach. Once before, on a rooftop helicopter pad when he was to be moved underground, Chuck had asked her to make things right for Morgan and Ellie once he was gone. Was he calling in that one last favor, thinking he would never return?

Sarah handed the phone back, making no effort to hide her puzzlement. That didn't make sense. Maybe Chuck didn't feel like he had a choice, but if he truly didn't trust her, would he really ask her to do something that was that important to him? And if he trusted her, then what was the point of all this?

What was she missing?

She didn't know. But Jay might.

"You're a good friend for helping Chuck out like this," she said. "Most people would have run."

"Chuck told me it would be better for me if I stayed. He said I'd just look guilty if I ran."

"True, but that didn't stop Chuck from running."

"Yeah, well, he's been doing this since before yesterday afternoon. I'm only here because I found the chip. I decided my best chances were to try to get a clean slate by telling the government everything that I knew."

"Did you really tell me everything?"

Jay hesitated. He had a decent poker face that he put up in a hurry, but that initial instant told her there was more there.

Out of habit, her tone became insistent, almost hostile. "We had a deal. You told me that you'd tell me everything."

"I did."

"There's something you're not telling me. What is it?"

"I can't tell you what you want to know.

"What do you think I want to know?"

"Where he went."

"Why can't you tell me?"

"Because I don't know. Chuck wouldn't tell me. He said that what I didn't know couldn't get me into trouble."

That made sense. Chuck wasn't about to put his friends in any danger if he could help it, and giving them any information would certainly do that.

Unfortunately, if Jay didn't know where Chuck was, she had nothing to help her find him. She would put out a BOLO on the car, but it wouldn't help. In his own way, Chuck had already told her the car was a dead end by leaving the note. If he had known that she would look for it, he would have taken steps to keep the car from being found.

It couldn't end here. There had to be more.

"Did he tell you anything else? Anything at all?"

Too late, she realized her mask had slipped again. She hadn't been the cool, collected agent when she delivered that last plea. The forcefulness had been the same, but it had clearly been driven by a different need than an agent seeking her asset.

Jay thoughtfully stared at her. She had the strangest feeling that he was weighing her words, assessing her in some way. She felt like she were on trial, but she had no idea for what.

"Jay, please," she said. "This is really important."

"For Chuck? Or for you?"

"For Chuck. He's in real danger."

"The way he left, it seems like he thinks the danger might come from you."

"No. It's my job to protect him."

"Is it just your job?"

She had expected to be asked about the kind of danger, so his question caught her off guard. She stared blankly at him as she considered her answer.

Part of her tried to believe it was just her job. Things were so much simpler that way. Follow orders, follow protocols, finish the job. However, that ship had long since sailed, and she knew it. The job may always come first, but it wasn't just about the job. It hadn't been for a long time.

Her agent training told her to dissemble, but her experiences with people like Ellie and Morgan had shown her that dishonesty didn't work very well in Chuck's world. And this might be her last chance to find him.

Sarah did something she rarely did – she let her defenses down. "No," she said. "It's not just my job."

For a long moment, the two just stared at each. A mix of consternation and despair churned in her chest. She was just about to plead with him once more when he rendered his verdict. "Text him," he said.

"I've tried. He won't respond."

"Text him the words 'Jay is in the clear.' You'll get an answer."

Sarah felt a sliver of hope. She pulled out the phone and sent the message.

Minutes passed, each one a tortuous eternity. Unwavering in his confidence, Jay wandered back behind the register to organize some paperwork.

Finally, she felt the phone vibrate in her hand. Chuck's face appeared with a tremendous grin. She tapped a button to open the message. "Meet me," was all it said.

Meet him? Where?

Another riddle, but one Sarah was glad to have.

The corners of her mouth turned upwards. She shared her grateful smile with Jay, and was surprised how good it felt when he smiled back.

"Keep busy, Bartowski," Chuck muttered to himself.

He glanced around the small café. Blessed with a free WiFi connection, Chuck was trying to get some work done. However, between his worries about Sarah and his worries that government agents or splinter group radicals would storm the place at any moment and grab him, it was tough to stay focused. But he needed to bear down. He had so much to do.

His fingers danced across the keyboard of the small but surprisingly powerful laptop. Right now, the machine couldn't be traced back to him. He knew this for certain because he was the one that refurbished it. He had scrubbed it clean and rebuilt it from the ground up.

The laptop wasn't so much stolen from the Buy More as put on a deferred schedule of payment. Chuck had submitted a request to the employee purchase plan, which took money directly from an employee's next paycheck to pay for in-store purchases. Big Mike easily took two to three days to process forms under the best of conditions, and to buy even more time, Chuck had buried the request in a pile of paperwork that Big Mike had been avoiding. Technically, the computer didn't belong to Chuck yet, but he would have plausible deniability if Big Mike decided to make a stink about it.

Chuck hated the need for the games, but he needed a clean system. Some agent could get clever and figure out a way to trace a computer with ties to him. He could forgive himself if he wasn't a good enough agent to pull everything off, but he wasn't going to change who he was, and he certainly wasn't going to be out-nerded. The computer was one fewer thing to worry about, and these days one fewer worry seemed like a significant victory.

A much bigger victory was that, with Jeff finally sent away, all of Chuck's friends and family should now be safe. No doubt various agents would come nosing around to ask their questions, but they'd quickly figure out that Chuck had been smart enough not to tell them anything. Soon enough, the only trails left would lead government and Fulcrum agents alike out of Los Angeles. Part one of his plan was almost complete.

At this point, thoughts of Sarah distracted him more than anything. Since he had left the Buy More that morning, he had second-guessed and third-guessed and sixteenth-guessed how to handle her. Had it really been only a day ago that she had kissed him outside the Weinerlicious? So much had changed. Or had it?

He sighed heavily. That made seventeen.

He typed in a few more words and fired off the carefully-crafted email, then toggled to the spreadsheet of his master plan once more. A substantial number of the color-coded cells had been changed to strikethrough font to indicate they had been completed; he did the same with the email. A quick check of the clock confirmed that he had time for one last critical to-do before he left. He pulled out a pay-as-you-go cell phone and punched in a number.

The phone rang three times. A female voice answered. "Hello?"

"Is this Miss Gwendoline Yeo?"

"Yes."

Chuck grinned. "Nice alias."

There was a long pause at the other end. "I'm sorry, you must have the wrong number."

"Don't hang up, don't hang up! This is Chuck Bartowski."

Another long pause. "Chuck. I didn't expect to be hearing from you again. How did you find me?"

"I had a little help. Listen, I need a favor."

Chuck hurriedly explained what he needed. He hadn't been sure whether the woman would be willing to help him, but because of their past, she owed him one. She was almost eager to repay her debt.

With a relieved sigh, he hung up the phone. That was one more ally on his side.

This wasn't a time to be chintzy about calling in favors. Uncollected debts did a dead man little good.

The GPS transmitter in Chuck's phone had been disabled, so Sarah needed help from the CIA to track down its location. Her contacts were able to determine the tower that Chuck's cell phone had used to send the text message to her. That had narrowed the location to about twenty square blocks.

Normally, that wouldn't have been enough to track a person down, but Sarah recognized the general area and had a hunch. She parked her Porsche a few blocks south of the Santa Monica pier and walked down towards the sand. This was the beach where Chuck had gone to gather his thoughts after the events of their 'first date'. This was where Chuck and Sarah had talked in the light of the early morning sun.

This was where Sarah had told Chuck to trust her.

She stopped at the edge of the parking lot, steadying herself against an aluminum signpost as she took off her athletic shoes and socks. Lacing fingers into the heel of each shoe, she walked out onto the beach.

To her left, a lonely gull emitted a plaintive cry as its beady eyes alternately scanned the ground and water below. The bird hovered on updrafts spawned by the warmth of the midday sun, aimlessly shifting to the left or right at the mercy of the changing currents. The same wind threw Sarah's hair back across her shoulders and forced her to squint a bit as her eyes searched the beach. Glittering crystals of sand clung to her toes the way she clung to the hope that she would soon find Chuck.

A solitary figure sat staring at the water. The profile was familiar, but it wasn't the one Sarah was hoping to see. Wondering what that meant, Sarah took the last few steps and sat down.

"Hi, Morgan," she said.

The bearded man, still clad in his Buy More green polo and khaki pants, had Chuck's iPhone cradled in both hands between his bent legs. He didn't respond, instead choosing to watch another wave crash onto the shore. The ocean breathed its unmistakable perfume of salt and seaweed and countless other components, unique like a fingerprint. The heady mix stirred memories so powerful that, for a moment, Sarah forgot why she was there.

A shake of Morgan's head shook Sarah from her trance. "Chuck said you'd find me after I texted you," he said. "I didn't believe him."

Her heart sank. Part of her had hoped that Chuck might be nearby, but Morgan's words had pretty much dispelled that idea. Not knowing how much Morgan knew, she decided to keep things simple. "Lucky guess. This place means something to Chuck and me."

"He told me. You ended up watching the sunrise here on your first date?"

"That's right." Sarah let her face break into a slightly wistful smile at the memory. "What else did he tell you?"

Morgan finally turned towards Sarah, regarding her with eyes far more thoughtful than usual. "Not much. Just that you'd find me."

The words felt like an odd echo of something Chuck had said to her in this very spot.

"There's nowhere I can run, is there," Chuck said.

"Not from us," Sarah replied. Sensing the emotions churning in Chuck's chest, she said, "Talk to me, Chuck."

If only he were here to talk to her now. Why had Chuck brought her here? Was it merely a delay tactic? Was it some kind of poetic reference to that first night, a pointed reminder that she had asked him to trust him? Or was there some other message she was missing? "Talk to me, Chuck," she whispered under her breath.

Perhaps feeling the need to fill in for his friend, Morgan took a deep breath. "As close as I am to Chuck, I don't pretend to understand him, especially not lately. Take this morning for example. What he asked me to do makes no sense. But do you know why I did it?"

A twist of her head told him she didn't.

"Because he always, always puts other people before himself. I may not always understand how - and this one definitely falls into that category - but Chuck Bartowski always puts the people he cares about first."

Sarah couldn't help but feel a little slighted. After all, Chuck was supposed to care about her, too. "Where is he, Morgan?"

Morgan looked almost excited that she didn't know. "He didn't tell you either? I mean, of course he didn't. You and I, we both have a bond with Chuck. It's a little different; you have the whole sexual intimacy thing, but–"

"Morgan!"

His expression turned apologetic. "Sorry. I get a little carried away sometimes." He turned back to stare out at the water.

She couldn't help but smile a little smile. Morgan was more than a little strange at times, but he grew on a person after a while. Like mold, Casey had once said when she'd suggested the same thing.

She said, "So why do you think Chuck set all this up? He went through a lot of trouble, and it must have been important if he gave up his phone."

"Sarah, there are times when that boy is one tough fortune cookie to crack. The only thing I got? Chuck must have had a reason he wanted you to talk to me."

She tried not to think about the text message Chuck had given to Jay. She so badly didn't want it to be that Chuck just wanted her to talk to Morgan, to make it OK that he was leaving.

In an effort to redirect the conversation, she said, "You really have a lot of faith in Chuck, don't you."

"I trust him with my life. This was nothing."

"Even though he wouldn't tell you why."

Something about the comment resonated with Morgan, because he stopped his pensive examination of the ocean and turned towards Sarah. "Just because Chuck and I are best friends doesn't mean that we can't have a few secrets."

She eyed him carefully. "That seems like an odd sentiment coming from you."

He gave a guilty little chuckle as he glanced down at the sand between his legs. "Well, those are Chuck's words, not mine. He reminded me of that this morning, actually. But as I've been sitting here thinking about it, and he's right. It's fine to have secrets, as long as there's a good reason for them. As long as we have each other's best interests at heart."

"So how does Chuck's leaving without telling me anything have my best interests at heart?"

"I don't know."

She pulled up a handful of sand and watched it slip away through her fingers, eluding her grasp much the same way Chuck's plan was.

"What I can tell you is that whatever reason Chuck has for not including you has nothing to do with not caring about you."

She got lost in the forest of negatives. A nervous little laugh escaped her lips. "What was that?"

"You mean the world to him, Sarah. The way he talks about you, the way he looks at you ... there's no secret there. It's completely obvious."

She couldn't deny the quivering excitement that Morgan's words triggered deep in her chest. Still, Chuck was gone, and the question remained unanswered. "So why didn't he just tell me?"

"There's really only two possible explanations. The first is that we just don't understand what he's doing, which in my experience is very possible."

"And the other?"

His eyes fixed on her. "You've done something to lose his trust. But that can't be it. What could you possibly have done to lose Chuck's trust?"

A child's shriek triggered her agent's reflex, and she involuntarily looked up. A particularly large wave crashed down onto the shore. The frothing remnants of the wave attacked the little girl's sand castle and scraped the sand clean of any evidence that it had once been there. The girl stared down at the sand in bemusement.

Morgan took one more look around the beach, and then he looked over at Sarah. "Well, you'd better get going."

"Going?"

"You need to catch up with Ellie before she heads off to the hospital for rounds."

Sarah stared at Morgan.

"Didn't I tell you?"

"No, you didn't," she said, working hard to keep an even tone.

Morgan accepted his oversight with remarkable nonchalance. "Chuck told me that, if you found me, you should go talk to Ellie at the apartment."

"Did he say why?"

"No, but Chuck always has a good reason."

She agreed. However, it had taken her nearly 40 minutes to drive down to the beach, and it would be another 30 minutes before she could make it to the Echo Park apartment.

Again, she found herself wondering whether this was all nothing more than some kind of delay tactic. Chuck could be getting further away from her with every second that passed.

Casey's cell phone rang as he shut the door to his apartment. The display read 'Private Number'. He flipped his phone open and pinned it between his cheek and shoulder as he struggled out of his jacket. "Casey here."

"Hello, Agent Casey," a familiar voice said.

"Representative Jennings." Casey was suddenly all too aware of the throbbing at the back of his neck. His jacket smacked into the leather recliner.

"How are we feeling?" Jennings asked.

Casey's mouth curled into a wry smile. "A bit ticked off, to tell you the truth."

"Understandable, I suppose."

"You suppose?!"

Casey's gut clenched as he forced out words that still felt so wrong to say. "We're on the same damn side," he said. "I'm Fulcrum now."