Sorry, I just realised that I screwed up my calculations on how long it was since Sarah got dragged into the spy biz. I must have been using '97 when Chuck started uni, not '98 when Sarah was grabbed by Graham in my head, so those references have been adjusted, sorry.

Well we're back to the starting point of the series, and it only took me 48,000 odd words. ;^)

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

Anna looked around at state most of the family were in and suggested that they move downstairs and have this discussion over a drink or ten, a suggestion that everyone readily agreed with. When they stepped out of the lift though, Sarah just stopped and stared, because they had come out into a rather impressive operations centre, with screens everywhere. Anna grinned at her and said. "Welcome to the Dungeon."

The basement of the building that had been known as El Castillo ever since they had it 'remodelled' was like the main warehouse level upstairs, in that it covered the entire building floor plan and was thirty feet high, so two thirds of that area had been split into three levels, while the last third was given over to a high tech urban combat range that was three hundred and sixty feet long, forty feet wide and thirty feet high.

They all had to maintain their weapons skills, and given their civilian covers, they couldn't afford to be seen doing what they did at public ranges (not that there were any ranges around L.A. that offered what they needed anyway), so they created their own private range that was up to their standards. They still had to use outside ranges (usually military) for the sniper rifles, grenade launchers, missiles and the like of course, but their range was enough to keep up their skills with their regular weapons.

The lounge where they were going for a drink was in the middle of the top level, and the wall between it and the range was made of several inches of laminated armoured glass, so much of what went on in the range could be observed from there safely. They also had controls to operate the range from up there, so they could set each other against the range for a bit of friendly competition. The way Sarah was standing at the glass, looking out over the range, they knew it wouldn't be long before she would be trying it out, but she allowed Chuck to lead her to a couch and settled down beside him.

Jeff called out to ask Sarah what she wanted from the bar that went along one wall. Sarah called out "Absinthe!", thinking that she'd throw him with that, so she was shocked when he delivered a tray with everything required to properly prepare the absinthe ready as he and Anna were doling out drinks with a practised ease that said that they'd been professionals at this at one time a few minutes later.

As they were starting to relax, Sarah brought up the thing that had thrown her when she arrived. "What's with this place being a fucking fortress?" The rest of them just waved to Chuck to explain, as he had designed the defences. "Well it basically came down to the fact that our group started to gain a much higher profile after nine eleven, and that was only going to increase. We've doubled or more the size of the group three times since then to cope with the extra work coming in. Anyway, we decided that we needed to have a separate base of operations when Casey, Jeff and I moved back to L.A. in two thousand and one to avoid drawing too much attention to the house so we started looking for a suitable building. We found and bought this building and Auntie Di said that we should do it right from the get go, so I designed the defences for El Castello with input from Ellie, Uncle Bry and Casey, along with the other changes we wanted made to the building."

Sarah nodded, but asked. "El Castello?"

"The building is nominally owned by Castello Property Developments which, like Shiloh Secure Storage which officially takes up most of the building, is part of the La Mancha Corporation. La Mancha also owns a number of other development and investment companies around the country that make enough money to hold up as viable companies."

"Wow, you've really thought this out!"

"A lot of it was Auntie Em, there was a reason she was the best that the CIA ever had, she's absolutely brilliant!"

Emma waved that away. "Don't be ridiculous Chuck, you know as well as I do that most of this came from you and Ellie, the children of the two smartest people I know have definitely surpassed their parents!"

Sarah broke in. "While I could listen to this all day, and I fully intend to do just that once we've gotten past this current mess and I've managed to convincingly fake my death and disappear from the CIA, we have to get past this mess first. If you give me what Larkin sent to you Char… Chuck, I can get it to Graham and close this down before it gets too messy. I'll tell him that you were too busy to open it and I got you to give it up without any trouble at all. Also that you're too well known and liked to die or disappear without a lot of important people asking questions….So the sooner you give me the information he sent you, the sooner I can come back to you…. Come back to the family!"

She knew that something was wrong when she saw the smiles at her slip of the tongue warring with worried and embarrassed looks. "What? What's the issue here?"

Chuck looked at her. "Well…You see. Ican'tgiveyouwhatLarkinsentmebecauseit'sgone!"

"Would you like to take a breath and then try again, but in English this time?"

"I can't give you what Larkin sent me because it's gone."

"What do you mean it's gone?"

Jeff cut in. "It's gone because the genius here opened an unusual and unexplained email without checking it first."

Chuck turned and glared at Ellie then. "Well I probably wouldn't have if Ellie and Anna hadn't taken me out to get me drunk and roofied me!"

Sarah surprised herself as much as anyone else when she shrieked. "What? You roofied your own brother? Ellie, that's so wrong!"

Ellie looked stunned. "What? No! That wasn't what it was about! He's just been so uptight for ages, he doesn't do anything but work nonstop and won't talk to anyone about it. So when Anna suggested yesterday morning that we take him out and make sure he's loosened up enough for him to stop turning down all of those girls who are always hitting on him….Well with how I was feeling about what she was doing to me at the time it seemed to make a lot of sense..."

Anna bit out. "So it was all my fault was it? Thanks a lot El!"

Ellie kissed and made up with her before continuing the story. "So I got some Rohypnol from the hospital and we convinced him to come out clubbing with us. I know what drinks get him drunk quickest, so we were pouring them down him, and added the Rohypnol when he was too drunk to notice. It worked to a degree, he loosened up and was having fun dancing with a bunch of girls, until some of them got insistent about taking it further and he blew up. He worked out what we'd done then and came charging over to start screaming at us….."

She looked at Chuck with remorse before she continued. "We never realised why he was always working so hard, but we found out in the middle of the dance floor last night. He charged up and started shouting in my face. 'Did you really think that roofying me and getting me to fuck a pile of brainless skanks would be enough to make me forget about Sammie? Why the fuck do you think I work all the time? To try and stop worrying about her and what's happening to her, especially now that she's with that Golden Boy! It's nice to see what you really think of me Sis!' Then he looked at Anna and said. 'Looks like I can't depend on friends or family!' and turned and stormed out of the club. It took us a while to get out of the club, because Anna grabbed some of the Rohypnol and downed them with half a bottle of tequila to try and make herself forget the look on Chuck's face when he said that to her so it was hard to get her to leave the club and come home with me."

Ellie looked at Chuck before she continued. "By the time we got back here, Chuck was unconscious on the floor in his office and his computer was fried. We took him downstairs so that I could use the equipment in the medical centre to examine him..." Sarah tabled the 'medical centre' for a future discussion. "But aside from increased brain activity, there was nothing out of the ordinary and he seemed fine, so we left him there. I gave Anna something to counteract the Rohypnol and alcohol and we stayed in our apartment..." Sarah made another mental to follow up the 'apartments'. "So I would be here in case anything happened overnight. Jeff was the one who looked into what happened to cause this, so he can probably explain it better."

Jeff started by looking at Chuck. "Sorry Chuck. I should have realised that you'd never do anything that stupid without something making you. Anyway, I checked the logs and an email with a massive attachment came through a while after Chuck went clubbing with Ellie and Anna. The reason it went through was because the virtual machine that was handling the security checks was destroyed when it tried to open the attachment to check it, it was the virtual equivalent of what happened to the computer in Chuck's room. When I tried to look at the email on the mail server, the virtual machine that handled that function was also destroyed the same way, so we don't have a copy of what was sent left..."

Sarah looked terrified. "We can't tell Graham that! He won't believe that it's just gone and he'll have Chuck brought in and questioned until he's dead….." She broke off as Chuck shook his head.

"It's not gone Sarah, it's in here.." He tapped his temple. "I don't know how it happened, but the human interface component of the Intersect wasn't scrapped from the Intersect code like it was supposed to be a couple of years ago. You see the CIA has been running something called Project Omaha for over twenty five years. The object of that project was to put a massive database of government and other information into an Agent's head, so they would have all the information they needed at their fingertips. The reason I know about this is that Dad was the lead on creating it. The problem was, every test subject this was tried on, bar one, was made brain dead or died when they tried to load it into them. Dad was the only one who ever survived it, and it drove him crazy."

Diane cut in at that point. "Steve wasn't the only one who survived it Honey, you did too, a might better than your father did at that. You didn't forget that, did you?"

He looked at her, confused, for a moment and shook his head angrily. "Shit! Yes I did!"

Ellie rushed to reassure him. "Don't worry Sweetie, it's probably just a temporary effect of the alcohol and Rohypnol and the Intersect all on top of each other. You haven't noticed any other effects today have you?"

He glared at her. "Aside from the splitting fucking headache I woke up with this morning and haven't gotten rid of yet you mean? No."

Diane jumped in in an attempt to head off the argument between the siblings. "As Chuck said Sarah, the Human Intersect code was supposed to scrapped about two and a half years ago when the CIA was forced to accept that the Intersect was a joint Project with Defense, because Stephen had told us what happened to the other test subjects. As soon as I was put in as co-director with Graham, we engineered it so that my people found the test subject data and forced a change of direction for the project, so that the Intersect code was modified to work in a computer, rather than a human brain. That was a relatively simple task as that was how the code was largely developed, and then it was fed into a translator program to work with the brain functions."

She glanced at Ellie and Chuck. "We created a massive database and ran the Intersect code on that system. It didn't deliver answers as effectively as Emma, Ellie and Chuck, but with the massive amounts of information being fed into the system that could be queried for connections, it helped provide subjects for our and other teams to look into. That version of the Intersect wasn't anything like what Graham had envisioned, but it was actually delivering something useful, which was more than Project Omaha ever had. That, and the information about what had happened to the test subjects being leaked, meant that Graham's complaints were overruled, and development and testing of the Human interface portion of the Intersect was banned. All of that code was supposed to be scrapped, but obviously the CIA slipped it back in when we weren't looking."

She stopped and looked at Chuck. "Have you been getting any flashes of information from the Intersect Chuck?"

Chuck nodded, but had a few sips of his whiskey before he replied. "Yeah Auntie Di, including things that aren't supposed to be there. You, Uncle Bry as Bagheera and his military IDs, Auntie Em as her military IDs, Jeff as Roscoe, Anna as the Lotus and Rikki, Ellie as Raksha and her military IDs. It's also got me as the Piranha, Mowgli and my military IDs, and Sarah as the Ice Queen, Shanti and hundreds of different names. On one hand the Intersect is obviously working, but on the other hand it can apparently circumvent all of the measures we and Graham have tried to use to cover our tracks. Given that, it's damned good news that it looks like Dad was right about the fact that I'm most likely the only one who can really use this thing the way it was meant to be used."

Sarah looked horrified that Chuck had seen what she'd done under all of the names that had an image attached to them, but he reached over to squeeze her hand, saying. "It showed me what all of us did Sarah, not just you."

She was still sitting there, rigid, so he put his arm around her and pulled her into him, whispering into her hair. "You're not going anywhere, we'll work this out together, as a family." She nodded and leant into him, but started talking.

"What are we going to do then? If I tell Graham that the Intersect is in your head, he's going to insist that I bring you to him!"

Chuck looked up at the others, asking for suggestions with that look as he spoke. "Well we can drag it out a little to give us time to work something out if you use the excuse that I'm more than a little socially retarded. You know, I insist that we go out as a group the first time so that you don't get the wrong idea and Ellie gets a little drunk and warns you that if you hurt me that way that skank that I was going to marry back at Stanford did, she'll track you down and operate on you without anaesthetic…." Sarah twisted around to look at him at that.

"You were going to marry your girlfriend at Stanford?"

"No, but everyone thought I was, because Jill was quite a catch, brilliant, beautiful and from a prominent family and I was a brilliant scholarship student with big things in his future, so in nearly everyone's minds it was a match made in heaven. The beauty of this is that it's all easily verifiable, as it's common knowledge that I caught my room mate and supposedly best buddy Bryce Larkin screwing my girlfriend that everyone was sure I would propose to before we graduated in my bed, and I haven't been out with any women since then."

"Wait a second! I was told that you knew Larkin from Stanford, but he was actually your room mate and best buddy?"

"Once again, not my best buddy, but that's what everyone thought. Now, it would probably help for us to engineer running into some of our more prominent clients while we're out. We have quite a few big name customers, including the Chief of Police and Mayor's families, and that will help sell the fact that too many questions will be asked if I just disappeared…."

Diane spoke up then. "Those are good points Chuck, but we still need something stronger than that to deal with someone like Graham. We really need something that will stand out enough to prove the value of having you stay in place here with handlers, especially if we're going to sell the need for people at the level of Sarah and John to be those handlers."

Ellie could see that Chuck was panicking about just how they were going to pull that off, so she tried to offer an olive branch. "We can look into that later, why don't we just try to relax tonight? We can go out to dinner, we'll call it Chuck's birthday dinner and Sarah can tell Graham that she came here straight from the airport late in the day and used the story of panicking about the dead laptop because it had all of her references and everything else she needed to get a job on it, and Chuck insisted she come along with the group because he fell for her looks and 'new in town and don't know anyone' line. The rest of her story will be that when she found out that she effectively crashed his birthday party, she insisted that he let her take him to dinner, just the two of them, and of course he gave in, because it's been over four years since he's been out with a girl and he couldn't say no to someone like her. She had to go back to the shop anyway because Chuck didn't have the bits he needed to fix her laptop and he couldn't get them until tomorrow, and when I found out after dinner and going to a club afterwards that she hadn't gotten herself a hotel room yet, I insisted that she spend the night in our guest room because it was too late to get a room by then..."


Sarah and the others were all nodding, these suggestions would set up a strong foundation for the type of operation that they all wanted, providing Chuck could come up with the thing that they were avoiding talking about at the moment, an event big enough that Graham couldn't ignore the value of it. Once they had the idea of where they were going to with this, Bry, Jeff and Anna went back upstairs to deal with their business workload (which a nasty virus from a malware site was increasing at the moment) and make a few discreet phone calls to arrange for them to accidentally run into some of their most prominent clients while they were out in hope that it would help Chuck impress this girl he'd just met and who he was quite interested in. Just about all of their clients liked Chuck and knew the stories from Stanford and that he hadn't had a date since, so most of them jumped at the chance to help him impress this girl he was interested in.

With the decisions made for the path they were going to take, Chuck moved into the operations centre and began searching the commercial, military and other information and news feeds in hope of finding something that would provide the trigger he needed to identify a significant incident. While he was doing that, Emma and Ellie gave Sarah the tour and story of El Castello. In the course of this tour, before she went back upstairs she saw the incredibly well equipped medical centre, the incredible operations centre where Chuck was, the electronics labs and workshops, and the holding cells, interrogation rooms, gym, pool, training rooms and armoury on the bottom level.

Ellie grinned at the way Sarah's eyes lit up when she was shown the armoury, because it was three to four times the size of the armoury in the bunker at the house and it had a lot of gear that the impressive 'old' armoury didn't. To take her mind off what was in front of them a little, Ellie suggested that Sarah give the range and a few of the weapons a try, and set her up with 5.56mm M4 and 9mm AS Val assault rifles, 7.62mm SVU-A, 9.3mm SDK and 12.7mm VKS sniper rifles, 9mm MP5 and 10mm MP5/10 submachineguns, and a 10mm Glock 20 to try against her favourite 9mm S&W 5906. She also gave her one of the OTs-38 Stechkin silent revolvers to try out.

Sarah spent the next hour putting thousands of rounds through the various weapons, and came out with her eyes shining and a more thorough understanding and appreciation of their rather unconventional weapons choices. She also loved that range of theirs! Sarah was very impressed with the suppressed weapons that the family obviously used extensively (which in turn gave her insight into the way they operated) and couldn't believe just how quiet that silent revolver was. She was rapidly re-evaluating her family, and was having a hard time getting her head around the fact that the already high standard she seen them at as a little girl was now being raised considerably.

After she'd had her fun, more fun than she'd had since she was training with the SOG guys actually, Sarah sat down to talk to Ellie about what Charlie and the rest of the family had been doing while she was conning, seducing, torturing and killing her way around the world. She wasn't too surprised to hear that Ellie and Chuck had been getting into Intelligence missions from late ninety three and special operations training and missions since ninety four or ninety five. Ellie told them how Uncle Bry, Auntie Em, Casey, Auntie Di and Uncle Roan had been teaching them about their specialities since early ninety three.

The thing that hit Sarah the hardest was when Ellie told her that her own father had been a CIA agent as well, but he'd become a conman after he was taken off active duty and relegated to low level functions because his performance had been deemed too erratic to be trusted when she was four or five. When he took her and disappeared when she was seven, the CIA had put him on a watch list but wrote him off as not worth the expense of tracking him down.

The story was that they only had him arrested in ninety eight to try and use her as bait for her mother, but apparently when Graham saw her and realised that she represented a perfect melding of her mother's incredible intellect, memory and attractiveness, and her father's impressive physical capabilities, he decided that he was being presented with the opportunity to create a younger, more malleable and controllable version of Frost, and he jumped at the the chance of having something like that at his disposal.

That prompted another question that Sarah had been thinking about. "What was Mama talking about when she said that Char...Chuck mastered computers to look for me?"

Ellie snorted. "That was pretty much it in a nutshell. When we agreed to work for Auntie Di, she got us any equipment we asked for, and Chuck asked for a pile of computer equipment and serious communications links. He was already pretty handy with electronics because he emulated Dad, trying to make him proud of him, but he kept running into roadblocks when he was locked out of systems that he wanted to look for you in, so he taught himself how to get around all of those roadblocks. What it comes down to Sarah, is that you are the real reason he became the Piranha, one of the top hackers in the country, if not the world, because he was determined to find you and wasn't going to let anything get in his way. Auntie Di didn't find out about what he was doing until early ninety five, and when she did… well she wasn't going to pass up adding a top hacker to her group's capabilities, so she added a Cyber group that was officially made up of his Navy, Air Force and Army identities at the time and started pushing more work his way. That group expanded in ninety six when he added Jeff, again in two thousand when he added Anna, and really expanded at the start of two thousand and two and a couple of times since then when they had to recruit more people to meet the growing workload."

Sarah stared at her. "So I'm responsible for the creation of the hacker that they've all been looking for for the past twelve years?"

Ellie grinned. "Yep, pretty cool, isn't it?"

Sarah had to laugh at that. "Yeah, I guess it is"


By the time they finished with the tour and discussion, it was time to go and start getting ready. Ellie looked at Sarah and asked. "Are you going to use Chuck's apartment, or one of the spare ones?"

Sarah knew that there was a question Ellie wasn't asking in there, so she just came out and said that. "What are you getting at Ellie?"

"If you use Chuck's apartment, we both know you'll be in bed together tonight. Personally, I think that that would be a bad idea if you want the two of you to go somewhere in the long term. If you're really here for the long run, you'll be better off getting to know each other again first. Look, you're going to hate me for saying this but Chuck's my baby brother and the only real family I have left. If this is really just an assignment to you, please get it out of your system and give him a chance to get over you so that he can try to find a life elsewhere."

When she saw Sarah take that in and break down, Ellie had her answer, and she rushed to embrace her. "I'm so sorry Sweetie, but I just had to lay it out! I want you back, to stay, as much as anyone, except Auntie Em or Chuck of course, but if you aren't planning to stay, please just get it over with and release him. You heard him earlier, he hasn't had a single real relationship in his life, what you two had when you were kids was as close as he's ever come. He dated a few girls in high school and stayed with that skank Roberts for most of the time he was at Stanford to keep up appearances, but he kept what he did with them to the bare minimum and he never gave anything of himself to any of them. Any time he wasn't working, he was searching for you, so if you aren't going to stay, please tell him that so he can try to start living. I love Mom, Dad, Auntie Em and Di and Uncle Bry, I do, but Chuck's the only family I really have, I need him to be OK, so if he isn't going to be with you, I'm begging you to release him so he can find someone who might make him happy."

The next ten minutes or so were taken up with Sarah screaming at Ellie, the gist of which was "How could you say that to me?" By the end of it, they were both tearfully apologising to each other, and Sarah took the spare apartment next to Chuck's to get ready because once they'd had a chance to talk it over, she understood and accepted Ellie's points.

These apartments were pretty incredible too. A second level had been added above the Charlemagne and Shamrock offices, and that had then been split into four cozy but nice two bedroom apartments. Chuck, and Ellie and Anna, had the two end apartments, with the second bedrooms set up as their formal military offices. This meant that they just had to head upstairs when they were required to have a video conference for their 'real' jobs, Chuck and Ellie also spent most nights working in these offices as well. With less light and a fraction smaller, the other two apartments weren't quite as nice as theirs, but they were still quite comfortable.


Chuck had laid a detailed trail to show that Sarah had in fact been in Cambridge Massachusetts when she took Graham's call, and she had flown straight to LAX as soon as she concluded her business there and got onto a flight. Ellie had taken Sarah down to LAX to pick up a Porsche Cabriolet from the rental company there just after the flight that she was supposed to be on got in. With Chuck setting it up, none of Graham's people would be able to find a hole in the story, as he had cell tower logs, hotels, car rentals, on-line flight bookings, everything needed in place to hold up the story that Sarah would be telling Graham. The biggest risk was that Graham had had someone try to trace the call before Chuck worked his magic on the system, but Graham had obviously been desperate to get Sarah to get the mess Larkin created under control, and he'd been demonstrably relieved when she answered the phone and confirmed that she was alive, so they thought they were safe there.

At the restaurant, they had a big table that would take at least ten people, because they knew that Casey was on his way back from Washington, hopefully Graham wouldn't find that out until the morning. Diane wanted to be there of course, but she had to stay and deal with Graham. Aside from her, Mary, Stephen and Roan though, the whole family was there.

Sarah had met her step sister Kim and Casey's daughter Alex at the office before they headed to the restaurant, and they were all laughing around the table. As arranged, they 'ran into' a group of their biggest name clients at the restaurant and Sarah was introduced to them as someone who would hopefully be around for a while. Things were a little tense when Casey arrived, because he and Sarah only knew each other as rivals and adversaries, but it was his daughter Alex who slapped him down and made him behave.

It made Sarah's night to see John Fucking Casey being owned by a teenage girl, because no-one had ever managed to make that man back down before in her experience. The best part of the night for her though was how right it felt. She was sitting between Chuck and her Mama, Ellie was on the other side of Chuck and they spent the time talking and laughing. Alex and Kim were lecturing their fathers to behave while Ellie was lecturing Chuck and Anna was being totally inappropriate. Emma and Jeff were enjoying the company, and the fact that they weren't being targeted in any of the lectures.

Sarah was pulled away by a call from Graham during dinner to inform her that Casey had left Washington. She told him that she couldn't talk because she was currently out with the target and his family as it was apparently his birthday and they'd invited her along because she turned up at the shop with a sob story just before they closed. She pointed out that she couldn't refuse the invite to the birthday dinner without damaging her chances of getting close enough to him to retrieve what Larkin sent him, so she was going to try to talk him into letting her take him on another date which was just the two of them.

She assured him that she'd managed to damage a laptop enough to ensure that she had to go back to the shop the next day, so she'd have time to get closer to him tomorrow, and on their date. She also told him that they'd have to be careful how they handled Bartowski because she was introduced to the Mayor and Police Chief of L.A. and their families as friends and customers when they ran into them at the restaurant. Graham was of course pissed off that she hadn't gotten the information before Casey headed for L.A. and worried about the high profile people Bartowski knew, but he had to concede that she couldn't push any harder without raising suspicions, so he let it go with threatening her and her mother if she didn't get it before Casey.

After dinner, Emma, Bry, Casey and Jeff took the girls home while Chuck, Sarah, Ellie and Anna went to a club. While they made a point of avoiding the club they'd gone to the night before, they did run into some of the women that Chuck had been dancing with, and they weren't at all pleased to see that this admittedly absolutely gorgeous blonde bitch had obviously gotten far further with him than any of them had. It didn't take long for the women's voices to get loud enough for all of them to be thrown out. They all agreed that they'd been seen enough to support the story they put together, especially as they'd also run into the children of other prominent clients and introduced Sarah to them, so they just went back to El Castello.


That night, Sarah was very aware of the fact that Chuck was just next door, but she had to agree that Ellie was right, if she went to him tonight they'd just end up in bed and she didn't want this to be be fast and furious, she wanted it to be for the long haul. She'd been waiting for sixteen years to get back to Mama and Charlie, waiting a little longer wouldn't hurt.

About three in the morning, Chuck found the event that he was pretty sure would give them what they needed. News reports about General Leland Stanfield talking at the Pacific Security League Conference that night at a downtown L.A. hotel triggered an information flash from the intersect that showed that someone had advertised for the conference to be blown up when the General was on stage, that a very competent Serbian Bomber had accepted the contract to do it, along with the plans for the hotel and bomb, schedules showing when the General would be on stage etc.

As soon as she got up in the morning, Sarah went straight out and knocked on Chuck's door to ask whether he wanted to go and have breakfast with her, but he said that he was just making breakfast and invited her in. Sitting at the table talking to Chuck, Sarah did find it a little strange how comfortable she was, considering that the tank top and boy shorts she'd slept in covered less than the sexy secretary outfit she'd been wearing the previous day (her spur of the moment idea had been to check with Chuck and then go have a shower and get dressed), but it seemed the accepted breakfast attire, seeing as Chuck was only wearing boxers and a T-shirt.

The domesticity of the scene made Sarah choke back a contented sigh before Chuck heard it, but she had to laugh to herself about the fact that the traditional image would have had her in the kitchen, not her man. That last thought brought her to a sudden stop, Charlie wasn't her's, not after sixteen years and the life she'd been leading, especially with the men she'd seduced and had sex with because she was required to for the job. The fact that it wasn't her choice didn't change the fact that she could have killed them or died to avoid it, and she hadn't. Sarah was spiralling and didn't even realise that she was crying until Charlie, Chuck or whatever he was calling himself now was kneeling in front of her, wiping her tears away.

"I told you yesterday, we've all had to do it. I had sex with girls at high school and Jill Roberts at Stanford to keep up the cover of Chuck Bartowski, up and coming tech genius, and I've also seduced and had sex with women on missions when that was the only way to get the intel we needed. I even had sex with the daughters of a Columbian drug lord one time to get him enraged enough to miss the fact that we were slipping away with all of the young girls they had been holding for ransom. He didn't notice because he was raging at and shooting his own men for screwing his niñas, as that was what I convinced them to tell him. They were close to my age and they were very willing participants, but I did use them for the mission. How is what you had to do any worse than that?"

"How did you know what I was thinking about?"

"The guilt and shame on your face were the same as when you were telling us about that yesterday. Uncle Roan may be an incorrigible lothario, but he knows his business better than anyone and he's been training me since I was eleven."

She put her arms around his neck and hung on for grim death. He wrapped his arms around her, and it was the only time a man had ever held her when she was dressed anything like this and hadn't tried anything. When he gave her a gentle kiss that was all about love and caring and nothing to do with passion or desire, there was one word shining through all the shit in her head. "Home!"

He gave her another squeeze and kissed her on the forehead before going back to making their breakfast. To get her mind off what she had been thinking about, he started talking about the plans to bomb the Pacific Security League Conference. He brought up General Stanfield and the other notables who would be there, and she agreed that that sounded like what they'd been looking for.

Chuck called Ellie and Anna to come down to get their input on the idea (as Ellie was just as good as he was at this side of things and Anna was no slouch either). Ellie took in how Sarah and Chuck were dressed and raised her eyebrow slightly. Sarah caught that and blurted out. "No! I came to ask Chuck if he wanted to go out for breakfast this morning but he insisted on making our breakfast here!" That got her a slightly relieved nod from Ellie.

Ellie knew Chuck better than the others, so when he'd laid out what he'd found and planned, she asked him what Auntie Di's thoughts on the plan had been. Chuck talked them through what points Auntie Di had brought up, and there wasn't much of significance that they hadn't already discussed, but Ellie knew that he never went into anything with just the surface plan, so she asked what background plans he'd put in place.

That was going to be easier to show than tell, so they went to Chuck's office to do that. When Sarah walked into the office, she just stopped and stared. Except for the multiple screens, the desk and the wall behind it looked typical of a high ranking military officer's, but the other walls were covered with certificates and citations and pictures of medal awards, promotions and induction ceremonies with a lot of very important people and the like. With anyone else, she wouldn't have believed that these were all real, but she was coming to believe that anything was possible with Chuck.

As he brought the information up, Chuck explained the purpose and where it had been slipped in. The girls were angry at first when he explained that he'd removed any record of Charles Bartowski getting his degrees from Stanford under another name, even though he was cleared of the false cheating charges, so it looked like he was a loser who just gave up. Ellie's mind worked much like Chuck's though, so she asked what else he'd set up, laughing as he showed them the psychiatrist reports about how fragile he had been ever since he failed to get his degrees and walked in on the girl he was about to propose to having sex with his room mate in his bed.

Sarah turned on her and demanded to know what was so funny about Chuck being portrayed in this way, but Chuck reached out to take her hand in an attempt to calm her down. He just shook his head and said. "You can." when Ellie asked. "Are you going to explain this to her?'

Ellie shook her head and turned to Sarah. "What my evil genius of a little brother has been doing is setting up the guarantee that Graham will have to assign you to work exclusively with him, and that he won't be able to assign you any seduction missions. As he mentioned yesterday, he hasn't been seen with any women since Stanford except for me, his sister, Anna, his well known lesbian friend, and two young daughters of family friends. Therefore, with quite a few people seeing him with you last night and tonight, looking happy, friendly and even a little romantic, word that he's been seen with you will be spreading very quickly, especially with those other bitches from last night whining about the fact that he wouldn't do anything with them but was all cozy with you on twitter, facebook and instagram. Those psychiatrists' reports are saying that Chuck has been nothing more than a rather rickety house of cards ever since he was betrayed by Larkin with that frame up job he did on him, and then had the even bigger betrayal of finding Larkin screwing his almost fiancé in his bed, so even a whiff of any further betrayal would almost certainly cause a total break down and render him useless."

She shook her head again with a smile. "Most of this is for after you guys save the day tonight… "

At that she stopped and looked at Chuck. "I presume that, you being you, you had Auntie Di contact the ones in charge of security for the conference and they wouldn't really do anything to act on the warning because we had nothing but a rumour to give them?"

He nodded. "Of course!"

Sarah looked from one to the other. "What are you talking about Ellie?"

Ellie smiled at Chuck. "No matter how much is riding on this for us, Chuck wouldn't put all of those people at risk without at least making an attempt to get the conference cancelled or moved. The fact that we're still running with this is the proof that those warnings were basically ignored, if they had acted on the warning he would have found something else to use. They might tighten the security a bit more, but the Serb's one of the best in the business, that won't be enough to stop him…. Anyway, as I was saying, most of this is for after we use tonight to sell Graham on the fact that Chuck can provide the best value by staying out in the world, and that too many highly placed people would be asking questions they don't want asked if he suddenly disappeared. The purpose of this is to lock you into the team, and prevent Graham from assigning you missions that involve seduction in any way, shape or form. Sometime tonight, while you're being monitored, Chuck will admit to you that he's seen information about you and your missions under a pile of different names, and tell you enough names to prove that. He'll also tell you that he doesn't care about that, and we both know that the sincerity of that statement will come through because it's true. We'll also need you to assure him that he can trust you at some point after that. Graham won't like the fact that he's seen enough in the Intersect to recognise you under whatever name you use at all, but he'll see the fact that he's obviously fallen under your spell as proof that you've got him under your control. That's where all of this comes in." She waved at the screen.

"When they're negotiating the terms of the joint operation that Graham is going to be made to swallow tonight, Auntie Di is going to bring out this information that her analysts had discovered, and use that to demand that you be dedicated to this project and are never assigned to any outside or seduction missions, because if Chuck ever found out about that, it would destroy the trust he'd placed in you. According to all these psychiatrist reports, that betrayal would destroy him, and in doing that, disable our only access to all of the intel that our and our allies' intelligence communities have been combining in the Intersect Database for the last two and a half years, because CIA Agent Bryce Larkin, the same Bryce Larkin who had almost destroyed Charles Bartowski with what he did at Stanford, had destroyed all of the Intersect computers, databases and records when he stole the Intersect. What Graham won't know, of course, is that Auntie Di will be filling in the the Director of National Intelligence, and through him the President, on all of this tonight…."

Ellie paused. "I'm sorry Sarah, we should have told you about the history of our groups before this. You see, Auntie Di has been reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense since the mid-nineties, when the achievements of our groups caught his eye and he called her in to explain how they could do all of that. That's why the Secretary of Defense has known about and approved our multiple identities and activities since then, as has the President. Of course they don't know that Chuck and I are around fifteen or sixteen years younger than all of our identities, but as they met us when we were teens, they do know that the ages must have been adjusted. After nine eleven, our groups were expanded and our profile increased to the point where Auntie Di was also reporting to the National Security Advisor on Intelligence matters. They developed a good working relationship and friendship and kept up their contact when the then National Security Advisor became the Secretary of State."

"That meant that when the Director of National Intelligence position was created earlier this year, he was briefed by the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, National Security Advisor and the President on the importance of the Special Projects Group, and Auntie Di began reporting directly to the DNI rather than the National Security Advisor on Intelligence matters. What this means is that Graham has no idea that Auntie Di has rather more influence with the DNI and the President than he does, and they will listen to her when she presents all of this information to them later tonight. That way, she'll go into that meeting tomorrow with you, Casey and Graham with them in her pocket, and probably watching the meeting. She'll push Graham into the position where he will refuse to give up the right to assign any missions he likes to you and that's when Auntie Di will either call in the DNI, or he'll step in himself to protect the integrity and access to the Intersect data, and that's where that proposal comes in." She pointed to what was up on one of the screens.

"Auntie Di will probably have to do a bit of tap dancing to explain to them how her people had come up with the mandate to create the Human Intersect Project, completely outside of the current lines of command in the intelligence community so quickly, but she'll probably be able to explain that away on the basis that it's basically just a modification of the existing Special Projects Group mandate. What this mandate does is put all members of the Human Intersect Project under the sole command of Auntie Di, as the Director of that project who in turn only reports to and takes orders from the DNI and the President, so once she manoeuvres Graham into the position where he insists that you will do whatever he tells you, whenever he tells you, as a CIA agent, the DNI will come in and force him to permanently assign you to the Human Intersect Project."

"In there you'll retain all of your authority as a… oh nice Chuck, CIA Special Agent and will be officially attached to the only CIA group that's authorised to operate within the United States, but you will not be under the authority of anyone in the CIA and you can't be recalled to the CIA unless the Director of the Human Intersect Project and the DNI officially sign off on it. Casey will also be attached to the Human Intersect Project, in addition to the Special Projects Group. Analyst and support functions are going to be provided by the Special Projects Group, which will tie the two groups together and let us use our existing military and agency support agreements. OK, Chuck's also put himself into the HIP as a Field Analyst, which will get around a lot of the bullshit that's attached to being a civilian asset, and add another pay cheque to the family income."

Something else had caught Ellie's eye, but she decided to let that be a surprise for Sarah when this panned out. Sarah might have seen it, but she looked a little lost in the tsunami of information that she'd been hit with.

With the knowledge that they had the foundations in place for what they were going to do, Ellie suggested that Sarah go and get changed into something a little less distracting so that they could get through what they were supposed to do today, reminding her that she needed to organise the accommodation that it had been too late to sort out the previous night. Seeing both Ellie and Anna hug and kiss Chuck before they left, Sarah decided that it would be OK for her to do the same, but that made her want to stay a little longer, so she asked what the divider along one wall was for.

Chuck grinned. "The gym. This is my main work room, so I spend much of the night in here. We've got the main gym down in the Dungeon, but having some gear in here means that I can have a bit of a workout while I'm thinking through a problem. As this is my Special Projects office for video conferences, that can't be out on show, so we put the divider there to give the impression that the office could be opened up for bigger meetings."

Sarah nodded as that made sense, thanked him for breakfast and left with another kiss to go out and get a place to stay. As this was all going to change soon, she just booked herself into a nearby hotel for a few days.


When Chuck turned up at the hotel to pick her up in the Summit Wagon, Sarah almost laughed at it, but she stopped and had a good look at it, knowing what this family, her family, was like and saw the same things that Ellie had seen on her Lancer. As they were being monitored, they just kept up light conversation on the way to the hotel where they were having dinner, right in front of the conference rooms where the Pacific Security League Conference was being held. Chuck had inserted a reservation for a specific table that he could watch both the main doors and the service entrance from, and Casey was in a bar nearby in the hotel so he could crash the party on the pretence that he'd been following Chuck to get a chance to grab him, but held back when he recognised Walker with his target.

Sarah was a little surprised when Chuck didn't raise the points that Ellie had been talking about over dinner, but trusted him to bring them up at the right time. They kept the discussions in line with what would be expected in view of the fact that CIA and NSA analysts were listening in, but Chuck could see that Casey was going to be paying for the way he was baiting him and Sarah over their earwigs when she wasn't being listened to.

As the time for General Stanfield to take the stage drew closer, Casey gave up on the digs and said that they had to get in there, because the bomber must have set up the bomb earlier or come in some other way. They were just dawdling over dessert, so it paying up and leaving was quick and simple, even with Chuck trying to pay as the guy.

Casey intercepted them outside the restaurant and told Chuck that he was coming with him, showing Sarah the pistol he had ready under the jacket draped over his arm when she went for her bag. Casey kept up the type of dialogue expected of him. "Bartowski, we know that Larkin sent you the files he stole, but if you cooperate and hand them over you might still get out of this OK."

"I. I can't! The files are gone! I opened what he sent me to see what the bastard had to say for himself and I saw all these images. I must have passed out because the next thing I knew I was on the floor and my sister was trying to wake me up. My computer was totally fried, so I had no way of working out what he sent me, but ever since then I keep seeing strange things when I see or hear something on the news or something…."

He looked at Sarah. "That's why I suggested we come here, sorry, I saw things about a security conference here tonight when I saw this General on the news, like the plans for the hotel, the plans for something that looked like a bomb and some European guy, from Serbia I think, so I thought if I saw him I could tell the cops and get him stopped….. Wait, that's him, the Serbian guy who just went into the conference, we have to stop him!"

With that, he wrenched his arm out of Casey's grasp and ran for the doors of the conference room. When he burst into the room he was immediately covered by a dozen guns and he froze. Sarah and Casey burst in moments later, but they had their agency credentials out and were waving them around to identify themselves. When they'd been accepted, he growled. "Where's the guy who just came in here?"

The security team pointed at Chuck. "No! The one who came in before him!"

When they said. "No-one else has been in here in the past twenty minutes!" he turned to Chuck and growled. "What are you playing at Bartowski?"

Chuck answered him distractedly as he searched the room. "He has to be here somewhere, and if I let you take me away there'd be no-one to stop him…. There! There he is!"

Unfortunately, in the heat of the moment, Chuck had forgotten that Casey wasn't his only audience, and as he blurted that out and pointed to the server who was heading for the door rather quickly, the security team shouted at him to stop. This, of course, didn't do anything good, and he just reached for something in his pocket. Thinking that he was reaching for a gun, they opened fire at him, and put him down, but Chuck didn't think it was a gun he had been going for.

Chuck ignored the body that he knew would now be laying in a rapidly expanding pool of blood as he projected the path the Serb was taking in reverse to work out where he came from, and that was when he saw the large covered food cart. He ignored the others as he headed for the cart, but when he opened the top of the cart, and then the laptop that was nested in among all the wires there he heard them exclaiming. "Fuck!" in unison with him, because the sixty second timer on the screen was almost half gone.

Even though he had a good idea what would be in there, he parted the hangings that covered the main body of the food cart and heard another dismayed "Fuck!' from Casey and Sarah, because the rest of the cart was absolutely packed solid with what was undoubtedly extremely powerful plastic explosives.

Chuck returned to the laptop up top to try and find some way to disarm the bomb, because there was no way to evacuate the room, let alone the hotel, in thirty seconds. Unfortunately the setup had been made as tamper proof as the Serb normally made his bombs, but then Chuck noticed something else, the laptop being used for the arming mechanism was a Prism Express, a common cheap laptop that he recognised because they'd seen piles of them in the past few days as their design was particularly susceptible to the Irene Demova virus that was currently going around due to the low level overrides built into them.

That gave him a desperate hope and he jumped to get into the laptop, then connect it to the hotel's WiFi and start a browser window, searching for Irene Demova and opening the site that he knew was serving the virus. The counter was down to seven seconds when the screen started to get scrambled by the virus and it took another four or five seconds before the laptop shut itself down.

They all held their breath for the next thirty seconds or so, only letting them out when it seemed safe to assume that the bomb wasn't going to go off. Chuck accepted the none too gentle punch to the shoulder and gruff. "Don't puke on the C4!" from Casey for what it was, relief at not being blown up. He and Sarah were also clinging to each other in relief to be alive, because the three of them knew better than anyone just how close they'd come to not being alive.

A/N: Not much action in this one sorry. As the name says, a good part of it is meant to lay the foundations of what's going to happen when they have the meeting to have determine what the Intersect team is going to be.