Usual disclaimer for the land of litigation, no rights to any characters.
The search engines were starting to make mileage on the BGRU hunt, they'd tagged images of Ricky and Vicky in the same vicinity as Jane Bentley and Manoosh Depak, so it appeared that the location of BGRU's Intersect efforts may have been determined. Given that Chuck, Sarah and Casey were all well known to them, Carina and Mary were the ones who took the trip up to Chicago to try to tap into the word on what they were doing. If Shaw and Laszlo happened to turn up when they were there, they didn't know Carina or Mary either, so they should be safe from being made by them. If there was any chance of getting Manoosh away from the others, he was the obvious weak link, so Carina may be able to get some intel out of him (just keeping it to flirting), hopefully being able to send him back none the wiser that he'd been manipulated.
Chuck pointed out that if Shaw did turn up, it may actually help them narrow down the location, as even before the whole undead thing, Shaw was extremely egotistical and had to be the one calling the shots, so Shaw would almost certainly end up making a scene if Jane Bentley, a mere woman, put him in his place, telling him to shut up and do what he was told. Given that he was far less stable now than he was before, if Bentley, a mere woman, went all boss lady on him and put him down like the minion he was (and that was almost guaranteed for Bentley), he was pretty sure that Shaw would go ballistic and act out, hopefully making enough "noise" for them to flag and track them down. Casey laughed about what a time Bentley would have if and when Shaw and Laszlo DID turn up, as they were both completely out of their trees, Chuck and Sarah thought about that and looked a little horrified and amused, as one of them was hard to handle, the idea of those two in the same space was a bit terrifying. While Mary and Carina were still en-route to Chicago, the system got another hit that further supported the idea that they were right about BGRU being there for the Intersect, because Dr. Jonas Zarnow was also in Chicago, so they sent his details through to them as well with a background of what he did to explain what his focus was.
An unrelated hit showed up that had Sarah wanting to go back to San Diego, Heather Chandler, they may have finished things on a better note the last time they saw her, but the fact that she'd been broken out of prison indicated that she had gone across to BGRU, so she was on the other side, and truth be known, Sarah still harboured quite a bit of resentment for all the barbs she'd been throwing at Chuck (and her). So, Sarah really wanted to kick her butt for that, but it was also possible that she could make her see reason/appeal to her better side (such as it was) to turn her and get some useful information out of her about BGRU in exchange for getting her out of the way before the shit hit the fan.
As they refined the search parameters, they were getting more hits, and were steadily building better maps of the probable BGRU people's locations, at this point it appeared that they were primarily gathered in 40-50 locations around the world, with 6-7 of those apparently being major centres. Once they had that to work with, Chuck and Stefan got to work on trying to identify the locations of the offices and where the BGRU people were living if possible. They also concentrated on the identified areas in their search for computer systems and portals, because if they could find those, they could really start to make some headway on this.
Their investigations weren't going anywhere near as quickly as they had on previous operations, the people running BGRU were obviously very good, and were being very careful. Because of that, and the fact that they obviously had their hooks into most of the intelligence community (they couldn't have inserted substitutes and removed the people they wanted from prison without leaving a trace if they didn't pretty much effectively own the organisations running the prisons already), Carmichael Industries and the select group that they could trust enough to work with had to be very careful about who they engaged or shared anything with. To a large degree, their hands were tied, and that was obviously BGRU's plan. Clara's custody hearing had apparently been meant to tie them up for ages with appeals and counter appeals, so as soon as that was concluded (far earlier than their adversaries had wished, they were sure), they'd launched the campaign of separate distracting and delaying tactics in an attempt to keep CI away from any real investigating work. Given the way they appeared to be targeting CI, it looked like they were worried that CI were the ones who would be able to track them down and/or interfere with them, but coming after the Clan didn't make CI think of backing down, it just made them all the more determined to take them down.
Given the fact that BGRU was obviously going to a lot of effort to throw CI off its game, they stopped to discuss the probability of whether Jill had been more than just a head case ex with Chuck's child and and Bryce was more than another head case ex who'd played along because he wanted another shot at Sarah. The way Bryce had been when Chuck and Zondra confronted him, he really hadn't been sufficiently mentally competent to mount the investigation that was needed to track them down. Therefore, now knowing what they'd tried to do with Clara to throw everyone off balance, it was a distinct possibility that the whole thing with Jill and Charlie had been another exercise perpetrated by BGRU to put the CI team off their game. Jill may well have been following the motivations that she told Casey and Carina (they were trained interrogators and she wasn't stupid enough to risk what they would have done to her if they thought she was wasn't telling them the truth), but Bryce wasn't functioning well enough to locate them at that point on his own, so someone else must have supplied the information through him to bring her to them, (and possibly planted the suggestion to go to them for money) it was looking more and more likely that they'd been in BGRU's sights for a while now.
With Mary and Carina in Chicago chasing the Intersect team and Sarah and Alex in San Diego chasing Heather Chandler, Casey was getting nervous about how exposed they were, he knew that Chuck was more than capable when he was on the spot, but he still had moral issues with killing, and Casey himself wasn't 100% since he got shot up the way that he was, that left Zondra as their best resource to protect them. Therefore he arranged for Josie to move into their place as well to boost their security capability (part of the reasoning being to protect Josie as well as protect the others, as she was exposed out there by herself), and quietly arranged though the General to get one of his old teams stationed with them for the duration (after screening all of them carefully, being burned once by someone he'd trusted was enough), they were brought in at night and housed in the bunkers, so hopefully no-one else knew that they were there.
While the others were hunting the BGRU people, the team back at Castle Carmichael kept chasing the on-line records (and looking after the kids). They were progressing at a crawl compared to the way things normally went for the team, but they were making some headway. They were still getting hits on the remainder of the flagged potential BGRU members, and they'd managed to locate some of their facilities so they started collecting all of the utilities records for those properties to map out the probable function and usage of the properties. By this process they managed to locate the first of the BGRU portals. It didn't take long for Chuck and Stefan to get past the controls and copy all the data off the systems inside of that portal, erase any sign of their visit and get out again. Cracking the encryption on the files they extracted was the closest thing to fun that Chuck, Stefan and Ellie had had in the last couple of weeks as the encryption keys were all hidden in logic puzzles, and the Bartowskis LOVED puzzles. Once the encryption on the files was cracked, they settled down to start working through them, and in the space of a few hours they'd gotten further ahead than they had in the month and a half that they'd been chasing this matter.
Sarah and Alex had only been in San Diego three days when they located Heather Chandler, then they settled in to watch her, track her movements and note who she was dealing with. As hoped, they identified at least nine other potential BGRU members from monitoring her meetings, and also determined the location of their office and at least four home addresses (including her's), all of which they relayed back to Castle Carmichael to flesh out the BGRU model that they were building. That intel, though, while important, wasn't the primary reason for watching her, the primary reason was to ascertain how likely they'd be able to turn her, and from the miserable and lonely expression she wore most of the time she was alone, maybe it wouldn't be that hard. They watched her and gathered intel for five days. Sarah had Chuck and the kids missing her (almost as much as she was missing them) and it was hard, because this was the longest that she'd been away from them since she came back after that night at the beach, but she didn't bail on missions before they were finished, so she was going to complete the mission before they went home.
When Heather came "home" that night to her apartment, she immediately knew something was off and went on the defensive, but was strangely relieved when someone turned the lights on and she found herself facing Sarah and another younger woman, both holding pistols on her. The other woman looked confused when she greeted Sarah as "Jenny/Sarah", so she obviously wasn't up on the whole story, maybe that was something she could use. Sarah had her remove her weapons and leave them there before walking to the chair in the middle of the room to sit down, then held her pistol on her as the other woman put her's down and came across (without getting in Sarah's line of fire) to carefully secure Heather to the chair. When Heather tried to distract Sarah by engaging her while Alex was securing her, Sarah just smiled and said "Soon". Once Heather was secure and Alex had returned to her previous position (again without crossing Sarah's line of fire, she was properly trained), Sarah introduced Alex and asked Heather if she remembered Casey, when she nodded she smiled and told her that Alex was his daughter. That made Heather turn to stare at Alex in shock, which in turn prompted Alex to angrily ask why everyone reacted that way when they heard that Casey had a daughter (leaving little doubt that she WAS his daughter by the way she growled the question). Sarah smiled and soothingly told her that her father had spent a LONG time building a reputation that he was an unrelenting machine, pretty much like the terminator (without the accent), so the idea that he had a softer side and had children (especially a pretty daughter), well it was a bit of a shock to most people.
With that Sarah turned back to Heather and decided to get something else out of the way, turning to Alex and communicating what she was doing with a look before she put her weapon down and pulled a picture from her purse, then walked over to Heather (also keeping out of Alex's line of fire). If Alex thought Heather looked shocked when she heard that Casey had a daughter, she re-evaluated what shocked looked like when Sarah showed her the family picture of her and Chuck sitting with their four children, Heather looked up her and blurted out "You're a mother? You have FOUR kids?" Sarah smiled and nodded, saying that it was great, she gave Heather another chance to look at the photo, taking in how happy they all were, before turning to return to her seat across the room. As she put the picture away and picked up her pistol she answered Heather's questions, saying yes she was still with Chuck and things were going great, telling her (after a small delay) about losing her memories and the fact that she had most, but not quite all, of them back now, and the rest of the banter. Heather's eyes held a genuine sadness when she told her about the memories, so it looked like there may be some hope for her. Sarah smiled to herself as she remembered, again, Carina's speech about Chuck being a virus who infected people with his goodness, maybe Heather had been infected enough for this to work.
Sarah started the discussion (it was too cordial to be called an interrogation) about the new organisation that Heather was involved in. Neither of them was new in the game, so they didn't waste time on threats, promises or evasions, Sarah just offered to do the best she could for Heather if she gave them real information that was of use to them, and Heather accepted that and answered her questions honestly. She didn't know who was at the top of the organisation (which didn't have a name, so Sarah smiled and said that they'd have to keep calling it Bad Guys R Us, Heather grinned and asked who came up with that, saying "Figures" when Sarah responded with "Chuck, of course"), but it was filled with the old CIA and other agency heavy hitters, many of whom had been released from prison or were supposedly killed to get them off the radar, but quite a few were still holding their positions in the agencies. She provided some names that they hadn't known about, and confirmed many that they'd flagged as probables for the organisation. She also told her that they'd absorbed a lot of Volkoff Industries when they were shut down and broken up (something that they hadn't known).
When Heather proved to her that she was co-operating, Sarah got Alex to release her, but they still sat out of reach with their weapons as they talked. Heather also provided a viable exit strategy, as there was still a lot of bad blood with the old Volkoff crew, so they'd already tried to kill her a few times. Therefore, they obtained a suitable corpse, staged a car bombing that would eliminate most of the DNA evidence, and salted pieces "thrown" from the blast with enough of her blood etc to convince most that it had been her who was in the car when it blew. With that, they headed back to L.A. in Sarah's Odyssey, Heather baulked when she saw it, telling her that she never thought she'd sell out THAT much, but Sarah just smiled mysteriously and said "Not everything is as it seems". As they drove, Alex pulled up a picture of Sarah's Shooting Brake on her phone and showed it to Heather, telling her that this was Sarah's other car, which got the response of "Now that's a real car!" Sarah smiled at that and checked around for any sign of cops as they got off the freeway, asking whether everyone was strapped in before flooring it. After seeing the way that the "minivan" handled the winding roads at well over 150 MPH, Heather conceded that maybe it wasn't an embarrassing soccer mom machine, after all, which just got a grin from Sarah.
They got in that night, parking next to the "HIS" Odyssey in the garage (Heather just looked from one to the other, asking "Really?", getting another grin in response), and put Heather in one of the holding cells in the bunkers, the team leader down there told them that she'd be well looked after, when Sarah looked at him, he assured her that Heather would be properly and well treated, which got a nod from her before she left. After a proper catch up with Chuck and the kids, She filled Chuck and Casey in on what she'd gotten from Heather so far, and they updated the BGRU models with that. Chuck also brought them up to date on how things were going in Chicago, they hadn't had much luck as yet, but Laszlo had also shown up, so they had a working team there to look into Intersect issues, and they'd narrowed down their location a smaller area of the city, at least.
The search engines kept getting more hits, when they saw him, Chuck, Sarah and Casey all immediately recognised Mr Colt in the image that popped up on the screen, a man that large was rather hard to miss. He appeared to be part of a protective detail, so when Chuck determined the subject of the detail he went to the keyboard to zoom in on him, thinking that the man was big himself, given that he wasn't dwarfed by Mr Colt. Chuck looked back to the screen as it zoomed in on the man in question but when they saw his face they all froze, he was supposed to be dead! Chuck mechanically went to the keyboard to type in instructions to send one of the SonicStars to D.C. for a pick up ASAP, and initiated a video link with General Beckman. The General looked up and started to ask what was so important, but Chuck cut her off to tell her to get to the airport, they were sending SonicStar for her and they needed her down here straight away. She just looked at him, stunned, and took in the looks on all their faces, asking "I'm not going to like this, am I?" Chuck just said "No" and terminated the link. She sat there, staring at the blank screen, knowing that this had to be beyond bad, she had never seen Chuck Bartowski behave like that, and his wife and John Casey were two of the most accomplished and courageous agents she'd ever known (or heard of for that matter), so for them to be standing there, openly shocked and afraid, well she didn't know what to think. With that, she picked up the phone to call for her protective detail to get her to the private area of the airport ASAP.