Tuesday night, 10:43 PM EST, approximately the same time Chuck and Sarah met at the hotel

CIA Director Langston Graham liked working late at night. It suited him. The building was quiet and his calendar was clear, and while half a world a way it was daytime and things of note were happening, here he could attack his work without distraction.

Also, on nights like tonight, he could turn out the lights and stare out his window, with a glass of bourbon in his hand to take the sting out of what he had to do next.

His eyes roamed the rooftops. In the distance, the Capitol stood out, taller and more brightly lit than the intervening buildings. Tomorrow Congress would reconvene and continue their debates as if the fate of the free world depended upon their grandstanding and posturing. But while Graham respected the debates and what they stood for, he knew the most important battles were fought behind closed doors, out of the public eye.

Graham took a long drink. The amber liquid burned his lips, his tongue, his throat. It was time.

He rolled his chair closer to his L-shaped desk and clicked a trio of small buttons, each tap of his finger turning on a set of lights around the room. After stealing one last sip from his glass, he set it on the desk pad so he could pick up his phone receiver and dial an internal number. "Fifteen minutes," he said to the answering voice, and then he set the receiver back into its cradle.

Satisfied, he pushed the intercom button on his phone. "Jeanine, would you come in here please?"

"Yes, Director."

Graham released the button and tilted back in his chair. A moment later, the door to his office opened. Jeanine Hadley entered, wearing her trademark chignon bun in her hair and a form-fitting black skirt so long it might as well have been a pair of pants. Her stern outfit couldn't hide her unconscious grace as she closed the door and crossed to her favored spot halfway across the room, clasping her hands in front of her as she waited for his instructions.

For nearly ten years Jeanine had been his assistant, ever since he had been forced out of the field by a leg injury and become an assistant deputy director. As he had climbed the ranks, he had brought her along, both because she was terrific at her job and because she had been the wife of his old partner. Greg Hadley had been one of the CIA's best. His death had hit both Jeanine and Langston hard.

"Thank you for working late," he said.

"I know it's important, Director."

His eyes inspected her. Nothing. There was nothing there, no sign he should have caught, no tell to give her away.

There was no hint of her betrayal.

As quietly as his low rumbling voice allowed, he asked, "Why, Jeanine?"

"I'm sorry?"

"I know that you've been passing information to Fulcrum."

A long moment passed. At first her expression was static. Then, her lips pursed and her eyes turned flinty. "Good," she said. She couldn't have made the word more hateful if she had spit on the carpet.

Her vitriol took him aback. He had expected protests, denials, maybe even pleas for forgiveness. Instead, Jeanine stood in the middle of his office, pulling the bobby pins from her bun and shaking out her coarse brown hair as if just getting home after a long day.

Still, her underlying bitterness gave him hope. He needed answers. If properly provoked, she might provide them. "Why did you do it?"

After her arms finished tousling her freed hair, they settled at her sides. Her gaze settled on him.

He said, "If this is about Greg–"

"Of course it's about Greg." Her lips pressed together in self-recrimination.

Graham studied her. Greg's death was six years ago, but she was as angry as if it had just happened. She wanted to talk. He just needed to push the right buttons. "You blame me for Greg's death?" he asked. "You've worked for me for a long time, long enough to know that sometimes agents don't return from missions."

"I've worked for you long enough to know when you're fishing for information."

"Was it because he came out of retirement for the mission?"

He gave her a moment to respond. She stood in stony silence.

"Were you just jealous? Did it bother you that he still put his country before you?"

Her eyes fixed on something over his shoulder.

He leaned forward. "You know, many people would call what he did noble, and call your anger misplaced, maybe even a little selfish."

There was no change in her facial expression, no shift in her breathing patterns.

Time to change gears. "I know you don't want to hear this, but Greg's return to the field was inevitable.

That got her attention. Her eyes flared as they fixed on him again.

"If I hadn't offered him that particular mission, he'd have come to me for one eventually."

"You don't know that!" she said.

"Actually, I do. I've seen it more times than I can count. Agents can't just flip a switch and stop being agents. After a few years on the job, the need for excitement, intrigue, even danger becomes ingrained in them. It gets into their blood. Many agents try to quit the field, but they always come back if they have the choice. Greg was no different. All I did was give him a push."

Her face twisted, agonized. Twice she started to say something and stopped, only to resume the fight with herself, a battle she was clearly losing.

Graham suppressed a grin as he watched her will crumble. He had her. She just didn't know it yet.

After another minute or so of vacillating, she caved. She said, "About a week before Greg left, the two of you had an argument in our home. What was that about?"

"That was between him and me."

"Our study isn't soundproofed quite as well as your office. I heard enough to know that Greg didn't want to go."

"I won't deny that I put pressure on Greg to come back. That's my job. But it was always his choice."

Jeanine strode across the room, parallel to the front of his desk, glancing sideways at him as if she was an attorney cross-examining a witness. She had given up all pretenses of keeping quiet and instead was starting to work towards something, probably some dream scenario she had played out in her head a hundred times. He would go along with it for now. Anything to keep her talking.

"Why Greg?" she said. "Why not somebody else?"

"Greg was the best agent for the job."

"Somebody younger wouldn't have been better? Maybe somebody who hadn't been out of the field for three months?

"No. I needed Greg. He gave us the best chance of success. I thought he could pull it off."

Jeanine stopped. In a voice quiet as distant thunder, she said, "I read the mission file, Langston."

"How did you..." He stopped himself. Of course she would have found a way to read the file, even though he classified the report far above her clearance. She knew enough people at the agency to make it happen. Hell, Fulcrum might have made certain the file landed on her desk. A foolish mistake, in hindsight.

She turned towards him. "I read why you selected Greg. You didn't want him because he gave you the best chance of success. You wanted him because he minimized the consequences of failure."

"Minimizing risk is just as important as maximizing reward. Sometimes it's more important."

"Odds of success: twenty-nine percent. Odds of survival: forty-six percent. Those were your calculations, Langston. Sending Greg on the mission doesn't strike me as an exercise in minimizing risk. In fact, sending him seems pretty damned cold-hearted."

He matched the intensity of her glare with his own. "I don't have the luxury of being sentimental. Yes, the mission was a long-shot, but the potential upside was enormous. I needed Greg, retired or not, so I tapped him for the mission, and he agreed. If you don't like the decision he made, that's between you and him, not you and me."

"Except that you never told him the whole story. You never told him the truth about why you selected him for the mission. And since Greg can't be here to call you on that, this is very much between you and me."

Graham said nothing for a long moment, and then shrugged. "What do you want from me, Jeanine? Nothing I can say will bring Greg back, and even if I were given a chance to do it over again, I would do it the same way. My decisions don't just affect a single agent; they affect hundreds of agents, so I do things by the numbers."

She circled towards the open end of the L-shaped desk. "I know. You do things by the numbers. The problem is, the numbers as you presented them said to scrub the mission. You sent Greg anyway. So what I want is to hear you say what the mission file doesn't. Tell me what was written between the lines. Tell me what you didn't tell my husband."

Damnit. He had tried to steer things away from this.

Her shoes whispered in the carpet with each slow step. "I'm surprised. It can't be that difficult to say the words. Not for somebody who doesn't have the luxury of being sentimental. Not for somebody who is only concerned with numbers."

A sickened feeling, very faint but undeniably there, crept into his stomach. He had become so adept at suppressing guilt that he had almost forgotten what it felt like.

"I already know. I just want to hear it from you." She stopped to one side of him. She spun the chair so he faced her, and leaned down, resting her fists on the chair. "Tell me, Langston. Tell me what you didn't tell Greg."

On some rational level, Graham knew there was a reasonable explanation. Graham's job was to protect the country, to do the best he could with what he had. If that meant sending an agent in the twilight of his career on a long-shot mission, that's what Graham did. But with her standing next to him, looking down at him, he couldn't seem to justify it.

Her knowing smirk was tinged with disdain. "That's what I thought." She stood up, turned and walked away.

The words erupted from him. "It was all he had left to give," he said to her back.

She froze. She balled a fist so tightly that she actually winced. Slowly, so slowly, she relaxed her hand with a relieved sigh and turned to face him. "That's right. Even the best agents didn't stand a much better chance of succeeding, so the only way to get the mission approved was to reduce the potential cost to nothing. That meant an agent no longer with the agency. Sending Greg was like playing with house money. If he succeeded, it's a big win. And if he died, the CIA didn't lose a thing. Is that about right?"

Graham didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say.

"You feckless thug," she said. "Greg was your partner, your friend. He gave twenty years to the CIA, and when he retired, you told him that you respected his decision. But you didn't. You couldn't help yourself. After all the sacrifices he made, after all the two of you had been through, rather than letting him have his retirement, you had to keep taking until he had nothing left."

He shoved his guilt aside. "Enough. I need to know everything you told Fulcrum."

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Director."

"If you think I was heartless about your husband, what do you think I'll do to you?"

She ignored him. She stared vacantly at the base of his desk and started to hum tunelessly. He frowned at the odd behavior. He really didn't want to order the torture of his admin to find out what she knew, but he was running out of options, and time wasn't on his side.

A respectful knock pulled his eyes away from her. "Come," he said. The door opened. Two agents in dark suits loomed in the doorway, a brown-haired man with a mustache and a woman of Middle Eastern decent. Graham simply nodded. The agents came over and stood on either side of Jeanine.

He said, "You got a lot of good agents killed."

Her eyes flicked up to him. "So did you."

Jeanine drew herself up to her full height, her body swaying unsteadily. Beads of sweat clung to her forehead. Her eyes lost focus; she squinted, trying to see Graham, and then giggled.

Something was wrong.

She raised her right fist, palm-side up, and looked down as if fascinated. One by one, she opened her fingers. Small trickles of blood ran between her fingers from three punctures in her palm, caused by the three black hairpins still sticking out of the wounds. The skin around the wounds had turned a bright, sickly orange.

"Anything else before I head out, Director?" she asked, as she had done thousands of times before. Then she collapsed, slumping in the hands of the flanking agents. They eased her to the ground. The female agent checked for a pulse and started CPR, shouting instructions to her partner. The words were nothing more than muffled gibberish to Graham. He stared blankly at Jeanine, at the wife of his dead friend, as her life drained away by the actions of her own hand.

The important battles were fought behind closed doors. And there were casualties.

Thirty minutes later, after building personnel had taken the body to the morgue and made some effort to remove the blood from the carpet, Graham sat alone in his office, lights off, glass full, trying to make sense of it all.

Jeanine's betrayal had made one thing painfully clear – while he might operate strictly by the numbers, other people did not. That led to unexpected, unpredictable behavior. Greg never would have wanted Jeanine to join Fulcrum, to help tear down what he had dedicated his life to building up, yet Fulcrum had played upon her emotions until she betrayed everything held dear by her late husband.

He had forgotten just how powerful a tool emotion could be.

This kind of thing was exactly why matters of the heart had no place in the intelligence game. Family, friendships, and lovers were nothing but weaknesses to be exploited, and Fulcrum was proving far too adept at exploiting those weaknesses, among others. Going forward, he needed to remember to factor in those kinds of possibilities into his thinking.

The truth was that he had gotten lucky. He had spent the past year knowing the CIA had leaks at the highest level, but he had never suspected Jeanine, not until his computer had gotten infected by a nasty computer virus that had somehow gotten past the layers of CIA network security. The regular IT staff determined that it had gotten to Graham's computer from an email sent by Jeanine, but beyond that they were stumped. They had never seen anything like it.

Almost on a whim, he had contacted Jeremy Cushman, a supposed computer whiz he had forcibly drafted into his IT organization, to see if he could solve the riddle. Cushman had somewhat abashedly reported that he had written the virus back when he had helped Chuck nab a Fulcrum cell. The virus had infected a computer used by a Fulcrum agent, and he had later sent Jeanine an email requesting information. Graham had verified her involvement when he made the locations of Tommy Delgado and Lizzie Shafai known to her; Fulcrum had broken them out less than twenty-four hours later.

Finding Jeanine was his first break in forever, and it could not have come at a better time. The virus had helped identify Jeanine as well as several other CIA agents as working for Fulcrum. Cushman was still sorting it all out, but the damage they had done was enormous. The good news was that the virus had identified the worst leaks, so Graham could finally start getting his house in order. Unfortunately, to do that, he needed help, and people he trusted were in short supply.

He set his glass down, pulled open a desk drawer and extracted a pair of manila folders. He set the two folders side-by-side on his desk. After proving that Jeanine was working for Fulcrum, his faith in everyone had been shaken. He had been forced to consider everyone a potential traitor. Even so, he couldn't have been more shocked at what one team had turned up.

Slowly, as if afraid the contents might bite him, he opened the folder on the left. Inside was a series of eight-by-eleven time-lapsed photographs from Monday afternoon; he paged through them. They showed Agent Walker sitting in Chuck Bartowski's lap, kissing him, staring into his eyes, running her fingertips along his face. Unless Bartowski's acting had substantially improved overnight, that kiss was more than just for cover.

Graham opened the folder on the right. Inside was a similar set of photographs, this series showed Agent Casey exiting his car and looking around before entering Drew Jennings' home.

It was all a mess. Agent Walker knew the perils of a field agent becoming romantically involved with anyone, let alone an asset. Since she had yet to mention this wrinkle in any of her reports, that left her motives unclear, but none of the possibilities were good ones. As for Agent Casey, Drew Jennings was suspected to be aligned with Fulcrum, so Casey could be joining him or investigating him. None of it really proved anything. All Graham knew for sure was that he couldn't trust either agent with any kind of certainty.

Too many questions and not enough answers. That wouldn't be the case for much longer.

He picked up a photo to stare at a happily grinning Chuck. Graham's mouth spread into a cunning smile of his own. His plan would help him learn the truth of things soon enough, and one way or another, the loose ends would be tied up.

I seem to be saying this kind of thing a lot this year, but sorry for the long absence. Real life is a pain sometimes.

I know many of you have been waiting to find out what happens to Chuck and Sarah next - that chapter is written and beta-approved, and will be posted in the next couple of days.

Special thanks to Frea for beta-reading the first part of this section and keeping my characters from monologuing. All mistakes are my own.