Had to make some minor changes to the first chapter because I found that I'd contradicted myself a couple of times. Biggest changes are that Chuck's Navy rank is Commander, not Lieutenant Commander and they all have multiple identities in the military.
Usual disclaimers, no rights to any characters portrayed and this is neither real life nor a Disney Princess tale.
Christmas 2000 – Arcadia Ca
It turned out to be remarkably easy for Anna to settle into this amazing group. Chuck and Jeff gave her the background she needed to start working on the tech jobs that she'd be handling with them, and over time they expanded the information she needed. Emma, Ellie and Chuck did the same for the other analyst work that she'd be working on. Casey, Chuck, Ellie and Bry trained her in mission skills and the physical side of things in case she needed to assist or protect herself (as it was probable that she'd be coming along on missions to do the tech work down the track), and they were pleasantly surprised to find that she was already an expert in several disciplines of martial arts.
They also taught her advanced driving skills, and she found that the dorky little '93 Eagle Summit Wagon that she was going to be driving was in fact a rocket ship. She laughed at Chuck when he told her that she was going to be taught high performance driving in what looked like a shopping cart, so he showed her just what it could do, and then explained that it had a works rally spec Lancer evolution drivetrain underneath it, adding that it had been tweaked a bit on top of that. Chuck explained that this had been the original one that they had had built, and as they had an updated version of it based on a '96 Summit Wagon up in Palo Alto, they left this one in Arcadia in case they needed inconspicuous fast transport when they were working from home.
When they were talking about the cars after Chuck and the others had gone back to Palo Alto, Ellie laughed. "Yeah, Auntie Em's and my '99 and '93 Impreza wagons and Uncle Bry's '97 Stagea Wagon are pretty much the same thing. Auntie Di may not be warm and fuzzy all the time, but she does what she can to make sure we can get ourselves out of trouble in necessary. Chuck works out what he wants and where to get it done, and then she pushes it through."
Anna found that the hardest part was living two separate lives, the student and the hacker/spy in indentured labour to the government, but she had a bit of experience in that anyway, as she'd been hiding her hacker life from everybody before. She also had to concede that it was her own fault that she was owned by the government now, and she shuddered to think about what could have happened if anyone but Chuck had caught her. This wasn't a bad life anyway, she was comfortable, the work was both rewarding and exciting, and Ellie, Chuck and Jeff were friends, while Emma was like a beloved Aunt if not a mother figure. Casey was scary, but the man was a soldier through and through and he was fair, and not exactly unfriendly.
Emma quietly told her why Casey came to L.A. at odd times, explaining how Chuck had discovered and let him know that he had a daughter from the life he'd left behind when he'd been coerced into joining the spy world. She was wistful as she told the story about how they'd had to push him to let his ex-fiancé know that he was alive and why he'd faked his death. His daughter, who had been named after him, had decided that she wanted to get to know him after she started school and he'd tried to be there for her as much as possible, so now whenever Alex wanted to see him, he'd come down from Palo Alto.
When Anna started working with the group Chuck, Emma and Ellie had to temper Diane's expectations about how much workload she could add onto the team for Anna, pointing out that unlike Chuck and Ellie she did need sleep and that they couldn't load work onto her while she was trying to learn the ropes without giving her a breakdown and blowing her cover as a student. When Diane argued that Ellie and Chuck had been doing it since they were kids without any trouble, they in turn pointed out that they'd also been trained for this life since they were toddlers, while Anna was trying to go through that training phase now, and keep up her life as a student at the same time. Diane grudgingly agreed to back off and not throw extra work their way with the expectation that they would advise her when Miss Wu was ready to take on a full workload.
January 2000 – Arcadia Ca
After the video conference was finished, Emma and Ellie took Anna upstairs for a few drinks to get over the traumatic experience, and decided to explain to her why their little group had such a heavy workload. Ellie looked at Emma, but Emma waved to her to do it with a smile. Ellie shook her head but turned to Anna. "OK, I know that you don't have the highest opinion of Auntie Di, and your view is quite valid in some ways, but on the other hand some of her demands on us are also justified. You know how we've all got multiple military identities to cover the type of work we do?" Anna nodded, wondering where this was going. "Well according to the official records, those identities are all real people and they're all on the Defense payroll, that's how we fund our operations here. Before you came along, our group was officially made up of twenty one people, made up of two First Lieutenants, two Captains and seventeen more at Major or above. With your three identities, we now have twenty four people on the books, so we have to be putting out enough work to justify having that big a group. While our various Agent identities are associated with the military identities, they are largely separate and we have work to do for them as well. That's why Auntie Di works our arses off, to maintain the cover that we are in fact legitimate groups of that many people and prevent anyone from looking into us too closely. Of course, we have also created a lot of short cuts that make all that easier to keep up."
Anna looked at Emma in disbelief, but she nodded to confirm what Ellie had said so she looked back at Ellie. "You've been doing the work of twenty one people, on top of the ridiculous course load that you and Chuck are doing, and whatever you do on outside missions and jobs? How long have you been doing this?"
Ellie shared a look with Emma. "Twenty one ordinary people, yeah. We started in early Ninety Three... Initially it was only supposedly eight, two identities each for Auntie Em, Uncle Bry, Chuck and me, but Casey joined us and the scope expanded so it had gone up to eighteen within six months. Chuck started getting into the hacking and building a name for himself as the Piranha in Ninety Four and Auntie Di worked out who the Piranha was and formalised the Cyber work as part of our scope in Ninety Five, then he caught Jeff and we added him into the team in Ninety Six, that's when the numbers went up to twenty one. With the exception of Uncle Bry, our identities all started as Lieutenant or Captain equivalents. When Uncle Bry had his Army rank of Major reinstated, his Navy and Marine identities were created and set to the same level as well."
Anna looked like her head was going to spin. "So what are you all up to now?" Ellie glanced at Emma and she nodded. "Aunty Em is a Major equivalent for all three of her identities. Uncle Bry is an Army Colonel and Lieutenant Colonel equivalent for the Navy and Marines, Casey is at Major level for all four of his identities, Chuck is at Lieutenant Colonel equivalent for his Navy and Air Force identities and Major for the other two, I'm an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, Major equivalent for the Navy and Army and a Marine Captain, and Jeff is a Captain equivalent for his Navy identity and First Lieutenant for the other two. You're starting at second Lieutenant equivalent for your three identities."
Anna shook her head at them. "What the Hell have I gotten myself into?" Emma raised her glass in a toast with a smile. "Welcome to Ironpants' Shadow Agency!" Ellie frowned at that. "You know, I'd object to you referring to Auntie Di like that if it didn't fit her so well Auntie Em."
January 2000 – Cambridge Ma
When Sarah returned to the apartment she shared with her 'Aunt Jane' after the Christmas break, Jane took one look at her and asked. "How many did you kill?"
Sarah gave her a glare and spat out. "None!"
"OK, how many did you put in hospital then?"
"Just two, they thought that they'd be able to handle me and keep me quiet between them."
Jane shook her head. "I know it's hard, but you know it's better for you that you didn't kill them, no matter how much they deserved it. Graham will have less justification to come after you this way. Are you OK?"
That just got a shrug. "I have to be, don't I? He knows where Mama is and if I don't do as he says he'll go after her."
"I still think he's playing you, those pictures weren't clear enough…."
"I can't take that chance! If there's even a chance that he can get to Mama, well I can't risk it!"
Jane drew her into an embrace. "I know, I'm sorry Honey, I just can't stop hoping that you will find a way to get out of this before it destroys you, before that bastard destroys you."
Sarah pulled back a little to look a question at her and Jane gave her an exasperated look. "Of course I swept for bugs! Who do you think you're talking to?"
The younger girl tried to laugh. "Hey, you're the one who keeps telling me not to trust anything or anyone!"
"Yeah, well, I think you can trust me to make sure it's safe before I start talking about that bastard. And for that matter, you're the one who's so adamant that you can trust your Auntie Mary and Ellie and your Charlie!"
Sarah nodded with a tear in her eye. "I just wish I could find them, if anyone could find Mama it would be Auntie Mary..."
"And you want to see Charlie."
She nodded again. "And I want to see Charlie….. So much."
Jane hesitated, she didn't want to take away one of the only two things the girl was hanging onto, but she also didn't want to see her devastated if she ever managed to find her wonderful Charlie and he wasn't what she'd built him up to be in her mind either. "It's been ten years Honey, he was only a kid when you knew him, what will you do if he's turned out like the rest of them?"
Sarah shook her head adamantly. "No. Not Charlie, he wouldn't!"
Jane had to laugh at her unfailing faith in someone she hadn't seen since she was seven and he was eight. "Well when you find him, you know you have to bring him to me to check him out, because I don't believe anyone can be as perfect as you think he is!"
Sarah nodded again and Jane sent her off to get changed before they sat down to talk, because Graham had of course already scheduled missions for her. These were the standard type of missions that he assigned the girl, use any means necessary to get the information out of them and then kill them. And of course, the information was always 'extremely critical' and over half of the marks had records for doing nasty things to young girls. That bastard was still trying to break her, he kept setting her up with marks like this, and the damned information never turned out to be anywhere near as important as he said it was.
She'd tried to find this Mary Kowalski that Sarah kept talking about, but the only references to Kowalski that people had managed to track down for her had been in the most heavily redacted files she'd ever seen. Set off alarms all over the place when they were accessed too, the friend who'd looked them up for her had to do some serious tap dancing to talk his way out of the bind he found himself in when people came asking about that, he'd used up all the escape mechanisms he'd been saving up for when the shit hit the fan too. She'd never be able to ask him for a favour again, and she owed him big time for all the shit she brought down on him. Maybe if Sarah stuck it out long enough after she left Harvard and Graham came through on what he promised, she'd be able to make it up to him then.
But if Sarah was right about these people, they might be able to help her find her mother and get both of them the hell away from all of this. They sounded too good to be true, but this girl was brilliant and she'd said that this Mary Kowalski had taught her all of her core skills, if so she could be right, because Sarah had been better trained and more capable at sixteen than over ninety percent of the competent agents that she'd seen.
Sarah had had another name for her 'Auntie Mary', the Frost Queen. That seemed to tie in, because there had been an Agent Frost who was a legend, supposedly blitzed every record at the Farm and in the field, the only woman ever to be awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Cross, but while the stories about Frost were everywhere, tying to look up anything about her set off similar alarms to Mary Kowalski. Which, come to think of it, did imply a direct link between the two.
Sitting in the bar waiting for the mark on her first mission after she came back to Cambridge, Sarah reflected on the fact that by constantly trying to force her to have sex with the marks, Graham had turned her into an expert in her second most hated skillset, torture. She'd sworn to herself that she wouldn't screw any of these dregs of society and give Graham the vicarious enjoyment and satisfaction of having forced her to give in and do what he told her to, so she'd had to make sure she could get the information out of them other ways, and in the last year, she'd gotten very good at the alternative. Those marks more often than not didn't survive the experience, but she had to kill them anyway and from the information Jane dug up on them, she was doing the world a favour. She wasn't sure what it said about her that killing people was only the third least liked thing she was expected to do for her job though, well the second if you restricted that to what she was actually prepared to do.
As she was thinking that, a rough hand was dragged down her back in what was presumably meant to be the ape's version of a caress before squeezing her arse hard. She turned to give him a smouldering look through her lashes. "Aren't you supposed to buy me a drink first handsome?" The face that lit up eagerly at the implied submission when she said "first" was a match for her mark of the evening. OK, time to go to work!
June 2000 – Arcadia Ca
By the time the summer break came around, they'd organised training slots with both the CIA's SOG and the FBI's HRT for Anna. Between Casey, Bry, Chuck and Ellie, Anna went in better trained than half of the men there. She didn't have the field experience, but that was the point of sending her, to try some real world scenarios to stretch her and bed in the skills she'd learned from them.
Anna came back from the SOG training with a sort of Jungle Book name of her own and some interesting stories about Mowgli, Raksha, and Shanti. She was taken aback when Chuck pounced on her and demanded to hear everything she knew about this Shanti. Ellie tried to calm Chuck down and then explained to Anna that the Jungle Book names had originally been started back in Chuck's Special Operations training and were generally only used for them. Chuck was Mowgli, she was Raksha, Casey was Baloo and Bry was Bagheera, they'd called her Rikki because Bry had told them she was connected to them when he brought her in, which begged a question as to why they would have given some other woman a name which was associated with them.
Ellie, Emma and Chuck were looking at each other while Anna was repeating everything that had been said about this Shanti. Hearing that this tall brunette girl had looked younger than Ellie when she went through the training and she had beaten just about everyone except for Mowgli's record was quite interesting. The fact that the SOG guys had been saying that they'd love to see a contest between Mowgli and Shanti because they had a very similar style was even more so. Anna watched them getting more and more excited and hopeful and realised who they were hoping this Shanti was, Emma's daughter Sammie. This was confirmed when Chuck ran off to start searching for details of any the women who had been given SOG training within the last twelve months and search for the name Shanti in the CIA's systems.
Even Casey was backing away from Chuck after he'd gone through the CIA's systems and found that they'd been cleaned of the name that this 'Shanti' had been registered under for the training. Nothing was left of where the request had come from, and where the reports had gone to afterwards were all gone. All that existed was a record of the presumably throw away name, some comments in private communications about Shanti and a handful of images in private galleries that were tagged as Shanti. Chuck collected copies of all of these.
Chuck showed the images to Emma to get her confirmation of what he already was sure of, that this was Sammie. There was little doubt that the hair and eye colour weren't real and she'd done other things to alter her appearance as well, but the mannerisms and comments about her all screamed that this was Sammie. After he broke a few things in a fit of rage over finding her and then immediately losing her again, Chuck cheered up, because at least they had proof that she was alive and fit and healthy. (He and Emma were also relieved to read about what she'd done to those guys who'd tried to make her give them a little appreciation. They wouldn't have turned their backs on her if she'd screwed every guy there, but knowing that she didn't give it up to any guy who demanded it made them fell better.)
Watching him, Anna shook her head, she was attracted to Chuck (well as much as she'd ever been attracted to a guy, they didn't normally hit her buttons), as he was brilliant, funny, kind, caring, and the biological prerogative of being drawn to the top dog certainly applied, because Chuck was definitely 'lo mejor de lo mejor' (hey, she had made her home in Southern California now, so learning Spanish was almost a pre-requisite, and Russian was too in this family for that matter). What she was seeing here though was that no other woman would ever have any chance with him, Emma's daughter had quite literally been his childhood sweetheart and she still owned his heart completely, there didn't appear to be any chance of that changing. This made Anna anxious to meet this girl, because she wanted to see what it was about her that had earned this kind of devotion, she jealous of the ability to do that, truth be told.
Bry went to talk to the SOG guys who'd been there back when Shanti went through training, and while he didn't get a whole lot more than what Anna had been told and Chuck had gleaned by sifting through everything on the CIA systems, he came back with the strong conviction that she was definitely Sammie. He also came back with the satisfaction of having hurt those ones who'd tried to press her for sex and the promise that if any of them saw her again, they'd let him know.
Having news about Sammie meant that Chuck went into the final year of his degrees much happier. He still had the ridiculous workloads, not to mention having the missions, job and completing three majors to balance out as well, and he still had to fly back and forth across the country in supersonic jets to get to the sessions at MIT and meetings in D.C. (well, he didn't mind that part actually), but he had proof that Sammie was there, and he had pictures of her now! He was running image recognition searches pretty much non-stop now, and they generated hundreds of false positives daily, but he didn't mind going through them, because about once or twice a week he'd find an image that might be her, and he'd add it to the file before delving into the location where it was captured to see if there was anything more.
April 2001 – Stanford University
In the last couple of months at Stanford, Chuck's bestest buddy Bryce Larkin showed his true colours. Larkin had kept up the act pretty well actually, he was a manipulative son of a bitch and it hadn't taken Chuck long to confirm that his family had pulled strings to ensure that he was sharing a room with the most brilliant of the scholarship students to carry him through his degrees, but aside from getting testy that Chuck was rarely there to help him, he hadn't given away his agenda too much. The thing was, as well as leeching off Chuck and the other brighter students that he managed to con or seduce into helping him, Larkin had fallen back on the tried and true 'trading favours for grades' to ensure that he got through. He didn't care if the teachers were male or female, he did whatever he had to to get them off and make sure he got the grades he needed.
Professor Fleming, one of his easier marks and the CIA's recruiter at Stanford, had made some bullshit Subliminal Imagery module a mandatory component of his course late in the final year, and when Larkin turned up for one of the weekly 'counselling' sessions he'd been having with him for the past two and a half years after that, Fleming was almost bouncing off the walls. This made Larkin suspicious, because Fleming didn't normally get like that until after he had worked his magic on him, so he asked what was going on.
Fleming waved a sheet of paper that Bryce recognised as the stupid Subliminal Imagery test that they had just done. "This! We've been looking for years for someone who could progress Project Omaha but no-one has ever come close before this! Finding the Omaha candidate will be my ticket to get onto the most important project that the CIA has, that anyone in the government has!"
"George, what are you talking about?"
"This! Weren't you listening? The purpose of the Subliminal Imagery test is to screen potential candidates for Project Omaha. The scientists who originally created the technology insisted that the minimum retention threshold for it to work properly was ninety two percent. We've never had anyone who came close to that before but your room mate Bartowski scored over ninety eight percent retention! When I bring him in I'll be able to get out of here and take my place on a real research project again, one that's more important than anything I've ever been involved in before, I'll be a real scientist again!"
If the old fool wasn't talking out of his arse, this project sounded important enough to be a major stepping stone for him. "What does this Project Omaha do George, what's the objective?"
Fleming laughed at him. "Do? It will create a super agent who makes everyone else obsolete! Once it's loaded into Bartowski and he's been trained, they'll give him the very best agents for his support team and they'll handle anything important. Any other agents will be relegated to grunt work, or gotten rid of."
Oh yes, this was meant for him! Now he just had to work out how to get Fleming to swap his results for Bartowski's. "What did I get in that test George?"
Fleming waved dismissively. "Something in the eighties, nothing that could be used for the Project."
He started to object half heartedly when Bryce unzipped him, but his objections dried up quickly as Bryce knew they would, he'd been refining his technique for over ten years to get money out of his father's friends and no-one was better than him at this! Even in the state of euphoria that a session with Bryce always left him in though, Fleming refused to swap the test results, so Bryce went with his go to move, blackmail. Showing Fleming that he had videos of everything he'd done with him and every other student that they'd coerced into giving into Fleming in the last two and a half years, plus records of the altered results before and after Fleming's sessions with them did the trick, and before he left Fleming's office, Bryce's results had been swapped for Bartowski's and the notification that Bryce Larkin had scored over ninety eight percent retention on the Subliminal Imagery test had been sent off to the CIA.
They also had the framework for the plan to get rid of Bartowski, it would take a little longer to get everything in place for that, but Bryce was eagerly awaiting Bartowski's devastation when he lost everything over this, he'd have no chance of getting his degrees and his reputation would be gone, and they'd wipe him out when they reclaimed the scholarship money too, Bartowski would be totally destroyed, there was no way he'd ever recover from this!
He smiled as he thought about what would be the cherry on top, Roberts. He'd thrown her Bartowski's way back in Freshman year when he was trying to get him on-side and they'd been together ever since. Everyone in Robert's circles was certain that Bartowski was going to propose to her before they graduated, and that Roberts was going to say 'yes' because Bartowski was brilliant, so he'd be raking it in as soon as he hit the market. That made this part of his plan simple, he'd start seducing Roberts now and make sure that he timed it so that Bartowski walked in to see him fucking her brains out just after he'd lost everything else in his world, maybe he'd do it in Bartowski's bed... yes, that would be a nice touch!
Oh, this was perfect, with any luck Bartowski would be so broken that he'd top himself then and there! Bryce made a mental note to set up cameras to capture everything in the room. The sex tape with Roberts could prove useful down the track anyway, as she had good prospects herself and her family was quite well connected and influential, but if he could get footage of Bartowski killing himself in despair, that would definitely become part of his hall of fame!
While he was planning the final kick in the balls for Bartowski, he and Fleming were setting the main event, framing Bartowski for cheating and getting him kicked out. Fleming altered Bartowski's results on exams for the past two years to make it look like he'd stolen the best exam results from Fleming's files and had copied them for the exams. Bryce planted those stolen exams under the mattress of Bartowski's bed and set it up for Campus Security to come in and find them when he reported that his room mate had been acting strange lately and he thought that he may be on drugs.
Fleming brought in more grant money than anyone else in his department, so when he told his department head that Bartowski's exam results matched the stolen exam papers that were found under his bed, they just called Bartowski in and told him that he'd been found guilty of cheating, so he was being expelled from the university and his scholarship had been cancelled, without any investigation or due process. Fleming couldn't understand why Bartowski didn't seem worried when they added that if he didn't pay back the scholarship money he'd received within six months, it would become a criminal matter.
Chuck went back to the room he shared with Larkin, suspecting that this wasn't over yet, and walked in to find Larkin screwing Roberts in his bed, just as Larkin had planned. What Larkin hadn't planned though was Chuck punching him out, breaking his nose, and his jaw in two places and then standing over them, with Roberts pinned down by the now unconscious and bleeding Larkin and demanding to know how long this had been going on and who else she'd been screwing while she was with him.
Roberts burst into tears. "No! I never cheated on you Chuck, not before this! Bryce called me over to tell me that you'd been caught and thrown out for cheating and he was comforting me and….. I don't know how this happened, honestly Chuck! One minute he was comforting me and the next we were here, you have to forgive me! Please don't throw away everything we have for one mistake, I love you, you have to give me another chance!"
Chuck was relieved, he'd still have to get all the blood tests done of course, but if she was to be believed, at least she hadn't been screwing half the guys on campus, and this gave him the excuse he needed to break this off before he left too. There was something else though, she was good but he could see traces of something behind her expression, she was up to something here. Keeping the disgusted, broken expression on his face he shouted at her as he grabbed both of them by the arm and dragged them to the open door. "What, give you another chance to screw the next guy who catches your eye? I don't think so! We're through! You can stay with this piece of shit, you're made for each other!" With that he dumped the two of them in the hall, naked, and slammed the door, locking it.
It didn't take him more than ten minutes to throw all the clothes and things he kept in the room into his bags, collect his laptop and posters and retrieve the cameras that they'd installed to record what happened in the room, as he'd never trusted Larkin. He'd also retrieved the camera that Larkin had set up to record what happened on his bed and removed the recordings and everything else from Larkin's laptop, before he used malware to wipe it and dumped a pitcher of water over it to fry it.
Chuck opened the door to find Roberts trying to cover herself and Larkin looking about dazedly, trying to work out what happened. Chuck threw the camera that had been set up to record his bed at Larkin's head and asked. "What were you making the sex tape for Larkin? Was it for your spank bank, or were you planning on using it to blackmail Roberts? By the way, your computer seems to have had an accident!"
With that, he picked up his bags and stormed out, while Roberts scurried into the room and slammed the door. She didn't bother looking at Larkin when she came back out a couple of minutes later, mostly dressed, and ran off.
There hadn't been anything of any great interest other than the recordings of Fleming with Larkin and other students from his office and the records of students' altered results on Larkin's laptop, but those, and of course the recordings of Larkin planting the stolen exams under his mattress to be found by Campus Security made most of the case they needed to get his expulsion overturned, the rest was the logs of Fleming altering Chuck's results to match the stolen exams that Chuck took off the Stanford systems.
Under normal circumstances, it would take time for an investigation to be completed into anything of this nature, so Chuck, Casey and Jeff packed up, let the apartment go and headed back to Arcadia. A month after Chuck had been expelled, he went back to Stanford, with Bry as Senior Special Agent Martin Harris, and Auntie Di's partner, CIA Agent Roan Montgomery as Chuck's lawyer Herman Goldstein, senior partner at Goldstein, Cohen and Marks.
June 2001 – Stanford University
They'd created a solid image and history for Goldstein, Cohen and Marks and Martin Harris was Bry's 'real' identity as an FBI agent, so there wasn't anything that Stanford would catch them on. Bry went in with all the subtly of a sledge hammer, throwing down with the proofs that everything that had been used to expel Chuck had in fact been fabricated by Larkin and Fleming, and that the department head who had expelled him had done no investigation and ignored the processes that he had been legally required to follow, he'd just expelled Chuck on Flemings' word. Faced with the proof that they were up shit creek and facing serious legal issues, the university reversed the expulsion and cancellation of Chuck's scholarship immediately, and offered him the opportunity to take his exams at his convenience so that he could graduate with the same standing as he would have before this unfortunate business.
The university officials were taken aback when Chuck said he'd take them then and there, because he'd moved away immediately after his reputation had been ruined and it would be difficult to come back to Palo Alto now, but they scrabbled to get it set up immediately, hoping that this would give them a chance to get out of trouble in this business. Bry and Roan stayed with the officials, going through all the details of the evidence and how the university had failed to comply with its legal responsibilities in this matter.
They were still there when Chuck returned a couple of hours later. The officials asked whether he wanted to schedule a day to come back to do the exams, presuming that he must have given up on them, but he shook his head, saying that they were all completed. While shocked, one of the officials was sent to get the results of the exams while they worked through the rest of it. Roan pointed out that his client had changed his name as soon as he left Stanford to try and get away from the stigma attached to the scandal of the way he was expelled and requested that Mr Bartowski's degrees be issued in his new name, Charles Carmichael, handing over the paperwork to show that the change of name was legal. They fell over themselves agreeing to this.
After that, Roan smiled to himself, because he was going to enjoy this part! With that, he went into the matter of compensation for loss of reputation and loss of potential earnings from Mr Bartowski's unlawful and very public expulsion for cheating. He presented numerous newspaper and on-line reports about Stanford's bright young star Charles Bartowski being caught cheating and expelled for that as evidence of this. When he presented a claim for six million dollars compensation for this, the university rejected it out of hand, saying that it was preposterous, he was getting his degrees and he'd already changed his name to get away from any stigma attached to the matter.
Roan looked a question at Chuck and Chuck made a show of grudgingly agreeing to something, so Roan nodded and took back the paperwork for the compensation claim. The university officials were taken aback at that and couldn't believe that they'd won that easily. "So that's it? You're withdrawing your claim?" Roan shook his head and grinned wolfishly as he presented the paperwork for a new claim of twelve million. "Not at all. I really must thank you gentlemen, you see Mister Bartowski, sorry, Mister Carmichael, here is an honourable young man, and he didn't want to see the university disadvantaged for the failings of a few individuals. That was why he insisted that I halve the compensation claim that I proposed to lodge on his behalf. However, as I am handling this case on the basis of my fee being a percentage of the settlement I obtain for him, I managed to extract a dispensation from my client. This was that if, and only if, you rejected the extremely fair compensation claim that he asked for out of hand and refused to consider it, he would agree to allow me to proceed with my original proposal, which is what we will now be doing. So..."
Roan spent the next hour going through the detailed earning projections for Stanford's brightest young star in possibly decades, against those of an unknown Stanford graduate with the type of results that they knew he was capable of. He also pointed out that, while Chuck had changed his name to get away from the bad publicity and slurs now attached to the Bartowski name, his sister was not in the position to do this, so by defaming Chuck, they had also adversely effected his sister's reputation and prospects. The university's legal representation were urgently whispering at the officials to pay the twelve million before they decided to up their claim, because they had plenty of evidence to support a much bigger claim than that, and kid's lawyer had already told them them he wanted to push it as high as he could to increase what he got out of this.
They left Stanford that day with Charles Carmichael's degrees (his results had been at least as good as he'd been shooting for before this business blew up in his face), and the assurances from the university to both his lawyer and the FBI that they would provide suitably glowing references to any university that he chose to do post graduate studies with and confirm that it had been proven that the charges of cheating levelled against Mr Bartowski were totally false and he'd since obtained his degrees without revealing the name he was now using if they received any enquiries on the matter. They also had confirmation from the bank that the twelve million dollars had been transferred into Goldstein, Cohen and Marks' account. Even though they'd given the university leave to spin it so that it was them who had discovered the discrepancies and made good of their own accord, the university officials only just managed to avoid swearing at them, or openly saying. "Don't darken our doors again!"
They waited until they were on the Air Force C-21A and headed for L.A. before they burst out laughing, because the Dean of the university had looked as though he was about to have a heart attack when he had to authorise the payment of the twelve million. When they landed at the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport, Roan came back to the house in Arcadia for a while to see Emma and Ellie because as Diane's partner, he'd been part of the family since Ellie and Chuck had been relocated with Emma after Stephen's disappearance, and he'd been 'Uncle Roan' to Ellie and Chuck since then.
Roan Montgomery wasn't the warrior that Bry, Mary, Casey, Chuck, or even Ellie were, but he was still one hell of an agent. Roan could charm or coerce almost anyone into or out of almost anything. As he'd just proven at the university, when the full frontal approach won't work, he was the one who could achieve the objective. He was also the one who had taught Ellie and Chuck these skills, because charm wasn't a skillset that Bry or Casey were able to utilise well, in fact he'd failed Casey twice in the class that he taught on the subject at the Farm, Infiltration and Inducement of Enemy Personnel, or Seduction School as it was commonly called. Anna didn't know what to make of Roan at first, but she soon took the others' lead and relaxed into accepting his easy charm, and she was calling him 'Uncle Roan' too by the time he left.
Roan also gave them a bit more information on Sammie, and something else to search for, because when he saw the images they had from the SOG training she did, he was certain that she'd been in one of his Seduction School classes a couple of years back. What he recalled was a reserved girl who's performance had been absolutely brilliant, saying that she was one of, if not the most accomplished and talented student he had ever had in that class. He also said that it was almost as if she'd been training for that all of her life, and Emma sadly said that she had, basically, explaining that Joe, her father, was also a master of that. She added that he had been teaching her those tricks from when she was a little girl, and he would have been grooming her in the tools of the trade for the eight and a half years that she was with him after he took her away.
Emma broke down at that and Bry took her in his arms, while Roan told them a few other things about her from the class, pointing out that she'd rejected any and all advances or gestures of friendship that had been made to her outside of the class exercises and that she appeared to embrace the name what all of the males and many of the females in the class were calling her, the Ice Queen. Roan added as an aside that he also recalled hearing that name bandied about in certain circles over the past couple of years, so she could well be still known as that. As soon as Roan left, Chuck rushed off to start searching for the Ice Queen in the CIA's systems and databases.
That search returned a lot of hits, many were comments from bitter male (and female) agents who she'd shot down when they tried to seduce her, but even more served to record the meteoric rise of a talented new agent who outshone just about everyone else. The fact that most of her many, many, missions were two or three days in duration at most and the only times she had had longer missions were aligned with school breaks tied in with the fact that Sammie was still in university according to the letters she still sent to the mail drop every month or two. Chuck added searches for references to the Ice Queen to the on-going image searches he was doing, and he eagerly dove into in-depth searches whenever the results of the two searches intersected.
Within a week of the settlement with the university, they had pointed a number of prominent and controversial media outlets at Stanford, with the suggestion that they enquire as to developments in the Bartowski cheating case. The resulting news and gossip reports loudly proclaimed that Charles Bartowski had been proven innocent of all of the charges that had been used to hound him out of the very field that he had been poised to set ablaze once he finished at Stanford, conveniently ignoring the fact that they had been the ones who'd been eagerly reporting those charges and comments as soon as they heard the juicy gossip that the bright young star had been caught cheating. Chuck had had his applications for post graduate studies at Caltech as Charles Carmichael accepted by then.
As they were all going to be working out of L.A. now, it was agreed that it would be better to have a base for their cover business away from the house, to avoid drawing attention to the house in relation to their missions. Given that both Chuck and Anna would be studying at Caltech (Anna was still an undergrad, but Chuck would be a post-grad), it was quickly agreed that the the best location for the business would be in Pasadena, and they went hunting for a suitable property.
Much of Pasadena was still a rough place, they were talking about a gentrification project that would clean it up and bring up the values, but they hadn't even got the planning off the ground, let alone started anything, so there was a lot of real estate in need of tender loving care there that could be picked up quite cheaply. This meant that it was just the right time for them to be looking to pick up a property to run the business out of.
After looking over the currently available options, Chuck, Casey, Emma, Bry and Ellie agreed on a warehouse with an office/storeroom floor above it and a basement. Having government connections and being able to make immediate payment drove the price down even further than the current level of the weak market and they picked it up for a song. Diane organised for rather special government contractors to come in and do some very specific refurbishments to the building. Their first task was to significantly upgrade the physical security and add security systems. The next was to convert one end of the building into what were officially the offices for two businesses, Charlemagne Technical Services and Shamrock Security. After that the remainder of the ground floor was made into Shiloh Secure Storage.
While they were doing the ground floor, the core work was done to refurbish the office/storeroom level above and the basement level below, including installing all the utilities to allow them to be fitted out relatively quickly and easily. They also reinforced the roof so that it could be used as a helipad for MH-53 Pave Lows. Chuck and the others didn't argue, and nor did they ask questions, when Diane told them that she'd gotten all of the core work funded by the government, so all they had to cover was fitting out the offices, storage area and basement.
August 2001 – Pasadena Ca
When they moved in, Jeff was listed as the official owner of Charlemagne Technical Services, while Casey owned Shamrock Security and Emma owned Shiloh Secure Storage. While they worked together on all the cover businesses, Casey and Chuck's offices were in Shamrock and Jeff and Anna's were in Charlemagne. The office in Shiloh was generally empty as it had no external customers, they just used it for their own storage and so the building looked used. Actually, the majority of what was stored in there was their growing collection of luxury and performance cars and bikes that they'd acquired from various government agency (DEA, FBI, ATF and the like) seizures to use on missions, as well as their 'work' cars and vans.
When word got around that Chuck was back in town, they got enough calls to make Charlemagne and Shamrock look like viable businesses. Their customers went right back to when they were first relocated to Arcadia, the cover life that Auntie Di had had set up of two teenagers forced to move in with their maiden aunt (who was just getting by) when their parents died meant that, to keep up appearances, they had to get jobs to help out. Even though he was supposedly thirteen, Chuck was still too young to get any 'real' job at the time, so he took the 'odd job' route. Those 'odd jobs' quickly turned into a form of mobile technical repair business, with the supposedly sixteen year old Ellie driving Chuck around and helping out (while she wasn't up to the higher level technical tasks that Chuck could handle even at eleven, she was quite capable of handling general technical repairs and installations). This also saved Ellie from the type of crap she would have most likely had to deal with as a beautiful girl in the type of places that would have taken her on at sixteen without a work permit.
The name Charlemagne's Repairs started out as a crack that Ellie made at Chuck (Charles the Great's Repairs), but people liked it and identified with it, so it stuck. In late '93 when Chuck supposedly turned fourteen and could therefore 'legally' work, Casey came in as a friend of the family with a van and permits for both Chuck and Ellie to work with him, and Charlemagne Technical Services was born. Like Ellie, Casey was fine with doing general technical repairs and installations, so he did the majority of the jobs, with Chuck and Ellie working on jobs after school. Charlemagne did enough business to show how they were getting by OK, and in '96 Jeff joined them as another 'friend of the family' to expand the business.
It was well known that the business was based on Chuck, so Casey and Jeff's decision to pull up stakes and move the business to Palo Alto when he went to Stanford in late '97 was believable to most folk. Ellie having a scholarship and working part time with Emma (who'd started her own consulting business in '93) also made for a believable scenario, so their cover lives were solid.
There wasn't much in the way of technical services on offer around that part of L.A. and most of the people they'd used to do work for had had to turn to the Burbank Buy More's 'Nerd Herd' for technical services. That hadn't worked out well for them, so when people heard from Anna (who'd been doing jobs for some of their old customers on behalf of Charlemagne) that Chuck and the others were moving back to L.A. permanently, the calls started coming in. This was also part of the impetus to get a property to operate the business out of, as they had enough of a customer base for it to hold up as a legitimate business and support the cover.
If they didn't have to keep their Defense roles secret from anyone outside of the family, none of them would have needed to work outside of what they were doing for their defense and intelligence groups, because they were paid well enough to live quite comfortably. Quite aside from that, even after buying the Pasadena property and paying for the fitting out of the building, with the settlement from Stanford they had well over twenty five million available to them, and their investments were growing that by at least 10 – 15% each year.
Of course the stupid, self important bureaucrats in the DIA's Cover Bureau didn't know anything about that, and they were a problem because they had enough brass behind them to be able to force the family to keep playing out their stupid scenarios of a struggling family still trying to recover from the situation they'd been in when Ellie and Chuck's parents died eight years before, even though Emma, Ellie and Chuck had already proven that they were quite capable of leaving that behind on the basis of what they'd achieved.
The Cover Bureau had also latched onto those reports about Chuck being expelled from Stanford for cheating and used that to try and force them to stay down in the minimum wage slot, ignoring the fact that the follow up reports showed that he'd been cleared of those charges and allowed to get his degrees. The way that Ellie ripped into them for trying to interfere with her career in medicine by applying their fucking stupid and invalid restrictions to the entire family, even though Chuck had already been cleared probably didn't help. Luckily Chuck had buried the identity of the landlords and the connections between Charlemagne, and Shamrock and Shiloh deep enough that, as far as the Cover Bureau could determine they were just renting one office in the building, which their cover business was enough to support.
Meanwhile, Bryce Larkin was at the Farm, bemoaning his fate. After the incident with Bartowski, when he managed to get back into the room and found that his laptop was destroyed to the extent that he couldn't get anything off it, he remembered Bartowski's comment about a sex tape and panicked, because he didn't know whether he had just been talking about the camera pointed at his bed, or he had actually seen what was on the laptop before he dumped the water over it and fried it.
What Fleming had said about Bartowski not seeming worried about being expelled also seemed to indicate that he had something up his sleeve, so Bryce and his family had called in every favour they could and used an excuse about him needing to go back East urgently for specialised medical treatment due to complications arising from the blows to the head that were inflicted by Bartowski to get projected results posted for his final exams and his degrees issued early on that basis. As soon as he'd left, the CIA's techs had scrubbed every reference to him except for his final results and degrees that were kept on file from Stanford's systems, so he pretty much disappeared. By the time Stanford discovered this and went to his family, he'd disappeared to them as well. To all intents and purposes, Bryce Larkin had ceased to exist outside of some code name classified files at the CIA that very few people could access in May 2001.
When he left Stanford he was supposed to go straight to Project Omaha to get a start on the grand career he had waiting for him though, not to go to the Farm for six to twelve months of torture training! Apparently, the ones working on Project Omaha systems hadn't managed to finish them yet, so the powers that be decided that the time would be best spent getting the Omaha candidate through all the physical aspects of his training. With that thought in mind, they sent him to the Farm and told the people running the Farm to push him through the system.
Unfortunately for Larkin, they also told them that they had a lot riding on him, so he was expected to beat the Ice Queen's scores, and the way he pissed people off with his attitude and overblown opinion of himself as soon as he got there meant that the word went around quickly that the people at the top expected him to be better than the Ice Queen or else. As a result, Larkin was in constant pain from the day he arrived, and for all the way he flinched when he saw the state he was in in the mirror, nothing was more bruised than his ego.
A/N: According to Google Translate, 'lo mejor de lo mejor' is supposed to be Spanish for 'the best of the best'. But I'm sure Sev will correct my Spanish as usual. ;^)
NB: Larkin isn't gay per se in this story, he'll just screw anyone and everyone to get whatever he wants, be it an objective or gratification. So not gay, just an indiscriminate man whore.
