CHAPTER 14

"So you're definitely sure about this right?"

"I think it's already too late to go back now," Chuck said walking around the table to his seat on Casey's left, across from Sarah. "Harry Tang's already got the job. It's not like we can just send him away."

The agents shared a look that had Chuck's brow rising.

"Can we?" He swiftly shook his head. "You know what, it doesn't matter. I can suffer through his reign for a few months or something."

Sarah handed them each a sheet of paper. "This is just a brief outline of how I think this could work. I'll expand it once we've got a better grasp on exactly what we want."

Chuck saw it was mostly about the roles each of them would have within the company, the kind of space they should look for and ways to have it earn an income beyond the government funds given for use as a cover.

His sigh drew the agents' attention. "If we're going to make this work I should probably get my degree, huh?" Looking resolved he continued, "I guess I can sign up for night classes or online classes to make up the last few credits."

When he looked up he saw the agents exchange a look, only this time the message exchanged wasn't obvious so he just felt like he'd said something stupid.

"We can look into that," said Sarah, "but it might not matter if we run it with Carmichael. Then it won't matter if you have a degree or a GED because Charles Carmichael will have whatever we need him to. If your sister or anyone who knows you asks, we can just say you're using an alias since there's a risk of hackers looking into you."

"Ha, yeah," Chuck said staring at the paper with newfound interest. That was when an idea came to him and he asked, "It wouldn't just be us, right?"

"Less people involved the easier it will be to maintain cover," said Casey. "Why?"

Chuck tapped the page he placed on the table. "Who's answering phones?"

Casey waved his hands. "We have hands."

"I meant like a receptionist or something. Someone trustworthy but maybe not involved with everything. To be there and handle basic stuff like appointments while we're busy."

Sarah glanced at Casey before asking, "Why do you ask? Do you have an idea?"

"Well," Chuck began, "there's this girl-"

"Girl?" Casey repeated, his gaze on Sarah the moment the second syllable left Chuck's lips. Her only reaction was a slight rise of her brow.

Realizing they read his hesitation as interest in the girl rather than the actual fear of even mentioning her, Chuck shook his head. "I heard about her from one of Ellie and Devon's friends. They mentioned this girl, raised by her mom and was working while going to college. Maybe we could help her out, even if it's just a few days a week or something."

Pride colored Sarah's smile as she nodded. "We could vet her. You remember her name?"

"Nope!" Chuck exclaimed, sitting up when he saw Sarah put pen to paper and realized the minute he said the name Casey might connect the dots, and he wasn't ready to have that talk with him yet. "You know what though, I'll look up the restaurant and maybe Casey you can head down and check in on her."

The panicked tone confused Casey, who shrugged. "Sure, but let's not count our chickens before they hatch."

"Good point!" Chuck's laugh was a bit forced as he looked back at the paper.

"Is something wrong, Chuck?" Sarah asked, leaning forward, her eyes meeting his imploringly. "You seem nervous."

"I can't screw this up," he said without thinking. After taking a breath he looked to them solemnly as he realized he meant it. "The last ten years, maybe even my whole life, has been defined by failure. I don't want to mess this up, not when it's so important. It's not just me dealing with it if everything goes wrong. Your covers are on the line. Maybe more. I just… I need to make sure I do this right."

"We won't screw it up," Sarah said with a smile that could have cheered him up even if he wasn't inordinately happy she said 'We'.

Nodding, Chuck looked between the two asking, "So what about Morgan's case?"

"Nothing solid," Casey said putting a file on the table. "This is everything I could find."

Looking through it Sarah frowned. "That's it? A couple of on scene interviews?"

"Detectives I talked too were clearly spoken to and warned to keep quiet," Casey said sitting back. "They probably got to them right away, told them not to bother with following it up."

"Did you ever follow up with them?"

Seeing Sarah turn to him, Chuck suddenly wondered how he should answer. Easy way would be to just make up an excuse and avoid it, but they were putting themselves on the line for him so he decided to take a chance and start toward a bigger truth.

Chuck sat up, taking a breath and holding the table. "Um, it depends on how you mean, I suppose."

"What… What the hell does that even mean?" Casey groaned, rubbing his forehead. "How the hell is that an answer?"

Chuck gulped, looking between the two. "I may have. you know, followed up on my own."

Sarah glanced at Casey, who looked as confused as she was. "What do you mean? Did you run your own investigation or something?"

"Kind of, but it never got far. Detective Comics and Sherlock Holmes are fun to read but don't help as much as you think," Chuck said with a weak laugh before clearing his throat. "I meant more I followed up on their investigation on my own." Seeing both stare at him he said clearly, "I hacked their database to find their files on the case."

It was almost amusing to see the surprise coloring the agents' faces, at least until they swiftly turned to contained anger for Casey and a stoic frown for Sarah. "You hacked in the LAPD's case files?" Casey said slowly while grimacing.

"I knew they were lying," Chuck said sinking into his chair. "I wanted to know if they were just lying to me or if it was bigger than that."

"Chuck," sighed Sarah, "that's a serious crime."

"And so is covering up the murder of a seventeen year old boy," said Chuck, "but someone still did it and the LAPD were part of it. Maybe someone high up told them too or someone forced them too, but they still let it happen. They're supposed to be the good guys, but they covered up his murder. I won't feel sorry for breaking the law when the people who are supposed to protect them are breaking worse ones."

Casey grunted, sitting back and squeezing the bridge of his nose, clearly unhappy with the complexity of what was happening. It was easier to deal with designated bad guys than cover ups involving law enforcement. "When did you do that?"

"A few times after it happened, but after the third or forth month with no changes in the file I gave up." Chuck sighed, sitting back with his arms crossed as he stared at the table. "Those pictures you brought me the other day, I saw all those years a go. The guy who did it was never there. If you look, the file says he might have had a shaved head but he didn't. The description is all wrong.

"He was about my height now, just a bit taller than me then, like less than an inch if I had to guess. He had a high hairline, dark brown hair, a long face, squared chin with no cleft. His eyes were blue and had a kind of thickish nose but it went off to the right slightly. He didn't have a beard at the time but who knows about now. His eyebrows weren't very thick but not thin either. He would be about your age, Casey, not much older and not younger. There wasn't anything that stood out about him. He wore a suit with no tie and the gun he used was a Glock, same as the other guy who was in a brown suit."

The agents shared another look before Casey said, "If there was a good cop there they must have been glad to have you as a witness."

"I've had a lot of time to remember it." Chuck tapped his elbow, looking away from them as he said softly, "I had nightmares about him for a long time."

Sarah leaned forward against the table with a sympathy coloring her eyes. "Do you still have them?"

Chuck shook his head. "No. Last one I had was a couple months after Stanford. I-I was in a bad place and thought about giving up the few good things in my life just because I was so miserable. After the first couple months I only had the dream when I had a really bad day, but there hasn't been any since that day."

"What was the dream about?" asked Sarah, sounding almost as if she didn't want to know.

"Dumb stuff," he said with a dry laugh as he raised his head to them. "I was on the pier, Morgan gets shot and no one around us notices the guys shooting them. My parents were usually there looking upset or disappointed in me, then leaving. Sometimes they got shot, or Ellie was there too, but usually it was just them leaving because they were disappointed with me. Guy only killed me once or twice, and that was early on when I stayed up for about three days."

Despite their grim expressions he said with a shrug and jovial tone, "Helped me remember his face though, and we know my recall is pretty good so I doubt it's skewed by anything too much."

Seeing the empty humor on his face, Sarah wanted nothing more than to go over and hug him, but kept herself on her side of the table and nodded. "Maybe we can get someone to sketch it and run that through our Databases."

"The real question though," Casey said with a grunt, "is why the hell he was after you, and why he thought you had some connection to Orion. I could understand now, but what the hell was your tie to Orion back then?"

"I don't know. I'd considered maybe it was just a wrong place, wrong time kind of thing, but there's no way that's possible now, right? It would be too big a coincidence to have them ask me about him ten years ago and now I have the Intersect."

"Maybe it has to do with why Bryce sent it to you," suggested Casey.

Sarah sat back in her chair, brow knit in thought before she looked to Chuck. "You were seventeen, right?" When he nodded she thought back on her own recruitment while in high school. "Were you a good student?"

Casey snort-grunted. "You need to ask that?"

"Pretty good, why?"

"Maybe you were being scouted." The idea made Casey grimace and look at her.

"Scouted for what?" asked Chuck.

"I don't know." Sarah shrugged. "CIA, maybe? Or some other group we don't know about. For all we know Orion was part of some private organization and was scouting you as a potential recruit. They might have thought you were involved through that."

Chuck suddenly remembered the note in Graham's file about him recruiting people at a young age. "You really think the CIA might have been scouting me?"

"You wouldn't be a bad choice," Sarah said with a somber smirk. "Clearly good with computers if you hacked into the LAPD without getting caught."

"Young enough to be molded. Plus the usual background." When they looked to Casey he explained, "Parents out of the picture. Sister off on her own. You were isolated. Easy pickings. All they have to do is send someone to hold out the candy for you and you follow them to the van where they mold you into one of them."

"Candy? Really?" Sarah rolled her eyes at the implied comparison.

"It's always different, but with someone like you they had a lot of options, Chuck," the sympathy on Casey's face was surprising. "Come with us and we'll help you find your parents. We'll prove you don't need parents. We'll be your parents. We'll give you a career where you can use your skills and become better than anyone in the world. We'll train you so you can make your parents regret leaving you. Come with us and make your sister proud. Come with us so you don't burden your sister, forge your own path. Join us and we'll pay your sister's loans and put her through the best schools. All the usual stuff short of holding you at gunpoint and forcing you to join them."

"Until we know more it's pointless to speculate," Sarah said before Chuck could think on it more.

"You're right." Chuck sighed, looking over the page Sarah had given them. "Better to focus on this for now. At least we can control this."

Sarah filled up a few pages with notes for Chuck's business before leaving, Chuck walking her to the courtyard before heading in to Ellie's. With no bugs in his room he was able to use his laptop to run his searches, letting them run in the background as he did some Piranha work.

All the work he'd done days before Halloween had become known as The Piranha's Feeding Frenzy as it was the most he'd done in so short a period. However most of that was him blowing off sources he'd been building since three months before her got the Intersect. The Triads and traffickers were all him stumbling onto them thanks to the mission with Mei-Ling and her brother. Now he had to find more targets, gather evidence and build his plan of attack, which couldn't be rushed.

When morning came he was surprised by how at ease he felt. He didn't have everything he wanted, there was so much more he wanted, so much he wasn't sure about, but he felt almost content as he made his way to the Buy More.

It was around midday when Casey motioned for him to head to the theater room and without thinking he commented upon seeing Beckman and Graham on screen and sitting beside Sarah, "Wow that new high def screen sure shows every wrinkle."

Beckman's head snapped up as Casey told him quietly, "They can hear you."

Sarah held back a laugh as he looked from Casey to Beckman. "What-Twinkle. Every twinkle… In her eye," he finished almost sing songy while plastering on a smile that swiftly crumbled beneath the stoic stares. "Eyes."

Closing the file on her desk, Beckman brought her hands together, ignoring him. "We have a situation. A CIA asset has gone missing. We've had no communication from him in two days."

Watching the asset's image appear on screen Chuck sat forward gaping. "No way."

"What?" Sarah asked sitting forward. "Did you flash?"

"No, I don't have to. That guy was my professor at Stanford." Sarah and Casey shared a look as Chuck stared at the screen until he seemed to catch up. "Wait, asset? My professor at Stanford was a spy?"

"The CIA recruits on campuses across the country," Sarah explained. "Professor Fleming is a company scientist, not an operative."

"This is our last communication from him," Graham said before Fleming's recording played, identifying himself as Glass Castle, talking to Black Coat. It almost sounded like a gunshot near the end, but since they couldn't find him Chuck imagined it was more likely a door slamming.

Lifting her chin off her fist Sarah asked, "Do we know what intel he copied?"

"We don't," Beckman answered.

"He's handled many sensitive projects for us over the years," Graham explained, "and any leak could prove devastating."

"How can we help?" asked Casey.

"Fleming has contacts in LA," Graham said looking over his glasses. "If we can find him you can extract him."

Apparently having had enough of the pussyfooting around, Beckman practically snapped toward the camera declaring, "We'd like your help on this, Chuck."

His eyes had been downcast, half paying attention to the screen, but rose at the plea. "Look, I-I-I really don't think I'm your go-to guy on this one."

"You're knowledge of Fleming and Stanford is key here," said Graham. "We only have his official reports. You have a personal connection."

"Yeah, I do have a personal connection, a very bad personal connection," Chuck said rapidly. "Look you guys have the file, okay? You know all about Fleming and what happened to me. The guy kicked me out of school."

Sarah turned to him. "Professor Fleming is one of us." She saw him start to speak but then stop himself. With a glance to Casey, Sarah said softly, "You did ask to help us more."

Letting out a breath, Chuck nodded. "Okay. I don't know how I'll be any help with this, but I can try."

They went to work pulling up Fleming's files and doing their usual searches, leaving Chuck to finish up and head home where he ran into Awesome and his frat brothers throwing a ball around the courtyard. Turning down the offer to join them for the Standford UCLA game, he made his way inside and pulled out a box of his old Stanford stuff.

Seeing the picture with Bryce from their frat made Chuck's stomach turn. He could still remember Bryce telling him he did it to himself, as if he was somehow to blame for him framing Chuck. He tossed it aside when he saw his old ID, picked it up and flashed on himself.

It made him drop the box and rush over to Caseys where he and Sarah were looking into Fleming, saying as soon as the door opened, "I'm in the Intersect."

Casey practically pulled him inside and closed the door before releasing him and making his way back to the computer he'd been working on. Sarah was sat on a stool beside it frowning. "What did it say about you?"

"Just my college records. Could this have something to do with the whole Orion thing?"

"That was before Stanford," Sarah said shaking her head. "If that's as far as the records went then they're probably separate."

"Could it just be because I was in Fleming's class?" Chuck asked turning to them. "If the Orion thing is separate, then maybe Fleming just has all his students in here."

"Or maybe he was looking to recruit you," said Casey. "All I said yesterday still applied in college, but now you had a potential desire for revenge to manipulate."

"We can't really know until we find Fleming," said Sarah.

Chuck nodded. "Okay. Let's do that."

Turned out that wouldn't be easy as Fleming was being hunted by some crossbow wielding assassin.

It was the next day when Chuck overheard Anna suggesting to Jeff and Lester that they could hire someone off Harry via 'accident' and when Casey arrived Chuck asked if he was the 'reasonable' guy she knew. It was almost frightening how interested in the possibility of killing Harry he seemed. Thankfully that wasn't his purpose for arriving, instead telling him they'd found Fleming and were bringing Chuck along as a friendly face.

It felt pretty good to be brought along on a mission, even if it was to watch from the car and mostly because he was familiar to the target. Still, he hoped it was a sign of change.

And as seemed inevitable after being told to stay in the car, he found he couldn't as he spotted the professor walking past the Herder in a hat. When he got out and called to him the professor fled, but stopped when Chuck shouted his code name. He seemed oddly pleased to see him, thinking he was with the agency and even giving him a code phrase.

But then when he asked why the CIA had a file on him at Stanford he lurched forward. It wasn't until he felt the crossbow bolt sticking out of his side that he started to panic.

"No, no, no," he said falling back to the ground as the professor held out a page for him to give to Bryce Larkin, but Chuck looked to the house and yelled, "HELP! PLEASE!"

Seeing another bolt pierce the page, Chuck turned and saw the Icelandic assassin approaching, sliding another bolt into the bow as he pulled the paper from the grass. Chuck wanted to do something, to hit him and stop him, but the professor was on top of him unconscious and he was already on the ground.

He felt absolutely pathetic as he held his one free hand up and pleaded, "I'm nobody, I swear!"

Hearing Casey and Sarah burst out of the front door, Magnus fled before they arrived, leaving Chuck to wince as the agents arrived to find him stuck under a half dead professor. They pulled him off and called for medics, telling him to head home on his own while they secured the site. He felt like Charlie Brown walking to the Herder with his head hung low and shoulders slumped all the way to his bed where he sat on the end with his head in his hands having not only failed to help anyone yet again, but having stalled things by asking the professor his question instead of securing him and then making a fool of himself. At least Fleming wasn't dead.

He was mortified when Casey and Sarah came through his window, but apologized for stalling Fleming and ruining things again. He almost snapped in frustration of not remembering the numbers on the page he gave him, but then after speaking to his sister realized exactly what they were thanks to the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He didn't remember the numbers, but he knew the location of Bryce's drop spot. The problem was he had to go back to Stanford to show them.

It might have been fun taking Sarah to Stanford if he wasn't expelled, she wasn't his CIA handler, and they weren't there because they were looking for an assassin. It felt like everywhere he looked was some reminder of some of the worst days of his life. Maybe that was why he didn't bite back on his comments about Bryce betraying more than just him even if it hurt Sarah.

They found Fleming's disc in Bryce's drop off spot, but Magnus and his men arrived and Chuck fled as he was told, meeting up with Casey and Sarah. When they had a moment he checked the disc, which turned out to be a list of student recruits including Bryce and himself. While Sarah told him not to click it Casey looked almost eager as he suggested the opposite, at least until the bullets started flying and Chuck fled again.

Thanks to the code phrase Fleming told him he managed to call in the cavalry and hide under a desk before Magnus entered the room he was in. He managed to avoid him until a dark haired, olive skilled student recruit arrived, dropping Magnus with a kick and knee to the face.

With the job done and a few thanks to the cavalry, Chuck and Sarah went to meet with Ellie and Devon to sit through the game. The disc in his pocket felt heavy, like it was burning a hole through his thigh.

The only thing to take his mind off it the entire time they sat in the stalls was whenever Sarah would bump his shoulder with hers and smile at him, reach over to hold his hand or just lean into him, sliding beneath his arm. It felt bittersweet. A petty side of him felt good seeing the flickers of envy on a few people's faces, but he was more torn between enjoying the feeling and knowing it was all for the cover. The affection he saw in her eyes most likely wasn't anything more than what he feared, even if some part of him still held out hope that there was more to it than she'd admit.

Of course they wouldn't let him keep the disc, but thankfully Sarah agreed to let him check his file. He was baffled seeing Bryce vehemently argue against Chuck becoming a spy, a part of some Omaha Project, and convincing Fleming to help him frame Chuck.

Watching Sarah leave he could only frown. Even he could tell she was holding back tears, her emotion clear on her face. It felt like the first time he ever saw a glimpse at her mask cracking. Leaning back in his chair Chuck couldn't help but sigh in defeat.

Even dead, Bryce held her heart more than he ever could.

Maybe it was hopeless.

AN:

When Casey talks about the CIA's recruiting and Sarah says it's pointless to speculate that's hopefully a letting people know I haven't forgotten she's got a loyalty and duty to the CIA. She's not abandoning it just yet.

I'm also considering a one shot or short series based on the idea of Chuck being recruited super early like is suggested here, but dunno if I'll get around to it so don't hold me to it. If anyone else wants to try go for it! Just let me know so I can read it, please.

Oh, and just as a heads up. Lou arc happens next chapter, which condenses those episodes.