For the children who having been paying attention, I'll explain (again) what the Intersect is in "my" world (and what it was explained to be in the series that some of us watched). To everyone else, sorry, but it shouldn't be more than two or three paragraphs.

Usual disclaimer, no rights to any characters portrayed, yada, yada.

There was a bit of a panic in the family when they suddenly realised that they'd almost missed making the arrangements for Clara's fourteenth birthday party with everything else that was going on, so they all leapt into action to get everything done in time (under directions from General Ellie of course) luckily Ellie had over a quarter century of party planning under her belt and she was on top of it. This also gave them the reason they needed to bring Auntie Diane and Uncle Roan down for a private chat, so that worked out well, they just sent one of the SonicStars to DC to pick them up.

When the day of the party came, Charlie and his brothers did what all good men do in those circumstances, they ran away and hid from the mob of teenaged girls that took over Castle Carmichael. Other than the boys' hasty retreat, the party went well, and it was great to have some sort of normality in their lives after all the stress that they'd been under for the past year and a half at least. When the other guests had left, Chuck, Sarah, Stefan, Ellie, Casey and Josie took Diane and Roan down to the bunker for their talk.

Chuck started by explaining that Stefan and Ellie had developed the new "Bartowski Intersect" and that everyone except for the kids had a version of that loaded now, and they were all doing well. He went on to talk about the benefits that they'd found with the new intersect but Roan apologised and asked how something that was supposed to be a database of intelligence information could do any of these things, so Chuck went back to explain (with "help" from Stefan and Ellie whenever they felt the need to correct anything he told Roan) what the Intersect, and especially this version, actually was. First he clarified the concept that it was a computer that resided and operated in the host's brain, rather than in a piece of hardware like a normal computer, and that meant that it was made up of the "software" and interfaces that actually did things, and the data that the software used to make up the instructions, this wasn't fundamentally different from any other computer. He also explained that yes, the first versions of the Intersect had been primarily an intelligence data storage/data mining tool, but they'd introduced the action element in the 2.0 version, and this fed motor control commands to the body so that the stored functions (martial arts, weapons and firearm techniques or whatever) could be performed by the host, even when the host had no knowledge of how to do those things outside of the Intersect. Here he held up a finger and said that that was the key to the changes that they were getting now, as to do that, the Intersect "software" had to have an interface to the body's control systems in order to send the commands for the body to perform these functions.

He then got onto the "Bartowski Intersect", explaining (with a lot of "assistance" from Stefan and Ellie) how they'd relied on Ellie's Neurology expertise to rework all the interfaces between the Intersect and the brain and the body's control systems to allow it to operate in a more natural and efficient manner, so that everything felt a lot more natural, and worked faster and more effectively (At that point he gave a wry grin and said "Believe me, it's a hell of a difference.", Roan looked at him in confusion, so Diane told him that Chuck had had versions of the Intersect in his head for the past sixteen years or so. He'd been the only person in the world hosting the Intersect most of that time and no-one else had ever been able to handle the Intersect the way that he could. That, of course, just made Roan stare at Chuck in shock. And with that, Chuck went back to his explanation.) What they didn't realise at first was that the differences that Ellie implemented to the way that the Intersect interfaced with the body's control systems meant that the interfaces were at a much lower level than the previous intersect versions had used, so as well as being more natural and far faster (as they didn't have to negotiate through all sorts of higher functions and logic processes to send the commands, they essentially plugged directly into the core body control system), they apparently triggered the body's repair mechanisms at that low level. Here he stopped and asked what Roan knew about legitimate reports of faith healing? Roan just said "Not much Charles." and Diane unconsciously shook her head, as she had been into new territory for most of Chuck's explanation, too. She'd only paid attention to what she was being told about the Intersect working, or not working, for most of the time that she'd commanded the team, so she was only now coming to understand how it actually worked and was hanging every word.

With their responses he went on, bringing up news reports (and some scientific reports) on how on many occasions people had apparently managed to defy scientific and medical "truths" to overcome debilitating or life threatening conditions. This was normally referred to "faith healing" or "miracle cures", but in fact it was triggering the body's innate ability to heal itself. The body still held the core ability of lower life forms to regrow or repair just about any part of itself, it was (by his theory, at least) the "higher functions" of the brain that got in the way of the body doing this, and that was what he believed was happening when the Bartowski Intersect interfaced into the body's control systems at such a low level and triggered the body's repair mechanisms to rejuvenate the body. He looked at Ellie then to, essentially, ask her opinion on this (as he hadn't run this past anyone, he was making up as he went) and she slowly nodded, deep in thought, saying that it made sense from everything she knew. Then he went on to explain the affects on speed, strength, flexibility, fitness etc that they were all seeing and feeling, and got Casey to explain the significant differences that he and Mary were feeling in regard to the previous damage they had to their bodies from the lives they'd led. Once the show and tell was done he told them that they had no idea of what the long term affects of this Intersect would be, they may well burn out within five to ten years, they didn't think that that was likely but it was certainly possible as obviously no testing could have been conducted as yet. With that, he asked them whether they'd like to take the chance on this, telling them about the DNI version that Stefan had put together, which was primarily based on the core interfaces with some basic self defence and other functions loaded into it (though additional functions could be loaded if required, the shell was there, just not the functions to act on it). They looked at each other for a few seconds before looking back at Chuck to say "Yes!" together, so they organised for them to take the tests while they were there. There was little doubt that they would be viable, given that their daughter was a strong candidate, but they still needed to know the probability of whether it was safe before proceeding.

After they cleaned up the disaster zone that Castle Carmichael became in the party and sent Diane and Roan back to DC on the SonicStar, they went back to investigating BGRU and Quinn's current exercise. They were now seeing some hits on movement from the BGRU locations that Quinn had been visiting most often, to LA, which implied that the "elders" or council meeting that they'd found out about was still on track. With the seniority of the ones coming to the meeting, they were being even more cautious than they had been with the rank and file soldiers or operatives that they were bringing in for the attack against Carmichael Industries, so there was no more than one a week who was moving, and they were taking circuitous routes to get there. Of course, they all travelled with protective details, so that made it easier to identify and track them (if they'd gone under the radar, alone, it would have been easy to lose them). This also meant that they could identify most of the upper echelon of what was left of BGRU given that they were coming together for the meeting where Quinn wanted to demonstrate his credentials for leadership by wiping out the biggest danger to their organisation, Carmichael Industries. With the cautious approach they were taking, it should take at least two months for all the "elders" to gather in LA for their meeting (which also fit into the dates that they'd seen), which gave CI nearly that long to get organised. As with the initial investigation into and purge of BGRU, CI had suspended taking on any new work until they got this out of the way, so that they could concentrate on the BGRU remnants. Therefore, they were all working full time on chasing and analysing any and all intel they could get on BGRU and the key individuals in play at the moment.

Half of the family were getting confused and concerned about the look of palpable hate that came across Sarah's face whenever Quinn's image came up on the displays, so eventually Casey quietly took them into one of the conference rooms to explain that it was Quinn who'd used the Intersect to torture her and wipe out her memories of her life with Chuck and all of them, then used her confused state and a fabricated case file to send her back in to steal the Intersect glasses and kill Chuck, and anyone else who got in her way. She'd been fighting it, but what he was telling her all the time via the files and the earpiece that he was using to communicate with her through actually fitted into her life before she met Chuck far better than her actual life over that period did, so with the constant prompting from Quinn (he was a master of manipulating the situation to match his story and could think fast on his feet, so whenever she was faced with something that didn't match what he was telling her, he'd quickly give her an explanation that the Pre-Chuck Sarah could relate to), she almost killed Chuck a couple of times, and a few others as well, but eventually when he was facing her in the house that they were going to buy and she was about to shoot him, she saw their names carved there and remembered when they, she, carved them, so she couldn't kill him then (though he almost died anyway as he'd leapt in front of her and took the bullet when Quinn tried to shoot her).

Anyway, she got enough evidence from various sources to accept that what Chuck was telling her about their life together was true, but what Quinn had done to her head via the Intersect had separated all her feelings from the memories, so while she could remember some events from their life together, and was experiencing some confusing feelings when she was with Chuck, she couldn't really feel the love that they'd had together, so she left to find Quinn and kill him for destroying her life. After a while she came back to get Chuck's help in tracking Quinn down, and he'd convinced her to let him go with her to help her, so they chased Quinn to Europe but he got away because Chuck didn't shoot him (no, he shot my helicopter with my own damn gun instead) and then they were hauled back to Burbank and locked up. After they got back to Burbank they had another chance at Quinn because he came back recover a component that he needed for the Intersect glasses from the General (nodding to Josie), but when they cornered him on the roof of the Concert Hall Sarah was stuck in the old protocols and shot him when he pulled his gun, which meant that Chuck then had to use the Intersect glasses to load the intersect in order to disarm the bomb that Quinn had planted in the Concert Hall that was full of thousands of people. After that was finished Sarah left again, they thought for good, but Chuck managed to track her down at their beach and somehow convinced her to let him help her find her way back.

And that was why Sarah hated Quinn so much, he'd deliberately destroyed her and Chuck's lives to get the Intersect glasses because he believed that he'd been cheated out of the Intersect when Larkin sent the Intersect to Chuck, and that it was meant to be him who had the Intersect. At that point Casey said that they'd have to Alex about how Sarah found her way back, because he'd left after the Concert Hall and abandoned them. "No you didn't!" came adamantly over the conference room speakers. Emma looked up at the security camera with a faux stern expression and said "Young lady, I know that you were taught that eavesdropping is not proper behaviour, have you forgotten all your manners since you left home?" The answer was "Sorry Mom, I just happened to see you lot in there and was listening to see whether Casey was going to tell you bullshit, like he just did. He left to follow his own life after he'd helped us at the Concert Hall (against orders), and after that he was honouring commitments he made with.. in Europe (when she realised that Kathleen was sitting there too), he didn't abandon us, it was me who abandoned the family. The only thing that could, did, save me was the fact that Chuck refused to give up on me no matter how much I pushed him away, just like he has for our entire life together over the past sixteen years." After that they could only hear her sobbing and Emma looked at Casey with a question in her eye, he pointed and mouthed "control room", she nodded and squeezed his arm in thanks as she passed him, going to comfort her daughter.

By then they had over a hundred BGRU names that they had identified in LA, not including the dozen "elders" who were on their way, or already in LA. The hundred or so names that they did have were probably about half of the manpower that they had there, and almost certainly only a fraction of what Quinn had planned to use in the operation against CI, but they'd been pushing Quinn into a corner, so when the day came he'd move with whatever he had on hand. They were intercepting snippets of communications that showed that Quinn and the others on site were getting a bit desperate, as they could see that things weren't going to plan (though so far there was no indication that they'd twigged that they were being manipulated into the situation that they were in, so it appeared that Chuck's plans, at least, were panning out the way he wanted, and they thought that things weren't going their way due to a string of unrelated events).

Part of the problem for Quinn and co was the fact that they'd shut down the CI offices and moved their non-armoured vehicles into the CI secure parking facility (except Sarah's Shooting Brake, she wasn't being separated from that), to give them room to bring the armoured (and armed) SUVs stored there out to Castle Carmichael, so now they had the eight Odysseys, eight SUVs and Sarah's Shooting Brake at Castle Carmichael, that was plenty of secure transportation for the family, plus the fifty strong strike team they currently had housed in the bunkers. Given that they did this all before Quinn and co decided that it was safe to commence active monitoring of the CI offices (a few weeks before the planned meeting), BGRU was suddenly running around in a panic because the targets that the whole operation were based on had, effectively, disappeared.

At this point Chuck, Sarah, Casey and some of the others who were known as CI (mostly Mary and Carina) started popping up and disappearing again in other parts of LA, well away from Castle Carmichael and the office, to draw Quinn's people in that direction. They had acquired a couple of commercial buildings and a few houses over that way and would be making it appear that they were in fact located there, but it wouldn't do to make it too easy to find them after they were ghosts, so they'd just let themselves be followed a bit at a time before they lost their tails. Let them think that they were homing in on them, but make them work for it so it was more believable. It was actually fun to play with Quinn's people this way, let them think they had the upper hand and then just disappear, only to turn up in front of them as they were frantically searching. The fact that they kept changing cars was also putting Quinn's people off their game, and convinced them that CI was trying hard to keep under wraps.

So they played the shell game with them for a few weeks, letting them find one of the buildings and a couple of the houses, taking out a few of the teams following them to make it look like they were seriously trying to keep their location a secret. All the while the team kept running the searches to nail down the location of the BGRU people and the movements of the "elders", they had the nearly all the BGRU personnel (around one hundred and sixty) and all twelve of the "elders" confirmed for one building, they'd identified optimal sniper/support positions and would have Alex and Josie up there as snipers with a two SSWs and a strike team support person each (the two SSWs were so that they could switch and have the support guy reload the thumper's ammo and replace the batteries if they used more than five rounds of 50mm, as the thumper rounds would be used to breach the building and create access for the sniper hits). Stefan and Jeff would be feeding security camera footage with precise position and angle data to their targeting systems so that they'd be able to see into the building to shoot, as well as doing the other technical support functions from the safe room back under Castle Carmichael, and Kathleen and Emma and all the kids were in there too.

That left eight of the CI people (including Ellie) and forty eight strike team members to go in and take the building, all the BGRU people and especially the dozen "elders", and their prime focus of course would be Quinn himself. The inside team would split into four, Chuck and Carina, Mary and Ellie, Sarah and Zondra, and Casey and Heather, each pair would be backed up by a dozen strike team members. The plan was to sweep through the building as quietly as possible, cleaning out the smaller fish as they went. Chuck, Sarah and Ellie should be able to recognise anyone who was worth holding for questioning, they'd be secured and everyone else would be eliminated. Casey and Heather were the only team that didn't have someone with a full Intersect, so they'd have to rely on memory and the image recognition software running on their mobile nodes (the cameras on their AR glasses were always feeding video to the computer), and the area they had was also the least likely for high value targets. Chuck and Sarah's teams' objectives was the "council" meeting, they swung in from opposite directions, taking down any BGRU personnel (except for the value items) as quietly as possible as they went. They met at the council room, ensured that they had recharged their tranq dart magazines, then Chuck, Sarah, Carina and Zondra breached the room and tranqed everyone in there inside ten seconds.

Sarah walked up to Quinn's unconscious body and stood over him, literally shaking with her need to destroy this monster who had almost destroyed her and killed Chuck. Chuck went to her and wrapped himself around her, drawing her into his embrace, she held rigid for about 30 seconds before she let herself melt into his arms and started sobbing. Chuck locked eyes with Carina over her head and nodded to the door, they'd discussed this scenario so she quickly organised for all the tranquillised baddies to be bound and gagged, left a guard of four from the strike teams outside the door, then she and Zondra each took an eight man team and rejoined the clean up operation. Carina also contacted Josie and Alex and told them that they didn't need to be quiet any more, so they started ripping through the building with the thumper rounds to clear any resistance ahead of their people. Josie and Alex's support helped make quick work of everyone else left in the building, and it was over within fifteen minutes.

Once that was done all the captives were transported to one of the commercial buildings that they'd acquired and locked down in holding areas (watched over by the strike team to ensure that they stayed alive until the CI team was ready for them) and then they began the interrogations, starting with the council. It was going to take quite a while, as they had over fifty subjects to get through. The interrogations were split up between Chuck, Sarah, Casey, Mary, Carina and Zondra, with Chuck and Sarah taking the "elders", and Quinn.

While all that was happening the building was swept for any remaining personnel and (more to the point) to collect any resources that could be used to gain intel on BGRU, computers, communications equipment (to scan the logs and trace the communications), paperwork, anything that could be of use in tracking down the BGRU sites and personnel. They left Ellie, Heather, Josie and Alex with half the strike team to get that done, blow the building and get out before the Police or emergency services turned up, it didn't feel good to leave them there like that, but they had to interrogate the senior people while there was a chance, as they had the most valuable intel locked away in their heads. Blowing the building was risky, but given that the police would probably have been getting reports that a war was going on, there was a reasonable chance that the explosion would be put down to rival crime families trying to wipe each other out, or something of that nature.

Sarah got Quinn, she couldn't be denied that, but Chuck was in the room with them to control the situation if needed. Sarah remembered what happened with the Ring Director and conceded that she'd probably need Chuck to prevent her from killing Quinn before they got everything out of him, and she needed him to be there for her anyway (just as he always was). Quinn and the others started out cocky, but they quickly found out what Sarah's "instructors" had found when Chuck tracked them down, that what was in the Intersect on "enhanced interrogation" went far further than any of them could have imagined in their worst nightmares. Yes, everyone talks as the maxim goes, but when faced with those techniques they told EVERYTHING. Sarah started out with the old favourites on Quinn, fingers and toes and other appendages, but that wasn't enough to get everything out of him, nor did it do justice to what he took from her and almost managed to make her do, so she gave in and accessed the Intersect's Little Shop of Horrors. She tried a number of the methods in the book of secrets, and it turned out that strong Acid applied internally (and externally for that matter) was apparently what it took to make a man like that really talk, though she found that she needed to repeat the questions several times, as towards the end what came out wasn't usually words. Eventually, after a day and a half of constant interrogations, they had well over a hundred hours of recordings to go through and all of BGRU's "best and brightest" (well the ones there, anyway) were eliminated. The building had been mined to be a convincing "accident", and to ensure that all DNA evidence would be completely eliminated. They watched from a safe distance while the building went up then went home to have several showers and try to wipe the last couple of days from their memories.

Over the next week they tried to mop up the BGRU operatives who weren't in the building at the time and jumped into working through the intel they brought back from the building, and the interrogation transcripts to track down the other BGRU sites and personnel before they went to ground. As soon as they confirmed any intel it was fed to the General's trusted team via an excessively secure link to an equally excessive secure facility for them to co-ordinate with the President and his "team" around the world to get the operations commenced ASAP. By the end of the two week operation, according to the reports received they'd managed to wipe out approximately three quarters of the BGRU remnants, so hopefully they were down to a couple of thousand leftovers of BGRU out there.

With the big push done, they went back through everything in an attempt to determine whether they had missed anything in their rush to mop up everyone possible. This time it took a couple of months, checking and re-checking everything, and yes, of course they'd missed some items, they had numerous leads to follow up on other resources, some directly related to the sites they'd hit, others apparently separate, but it didn't appear that they'd missed anything that was too major. They also had to start working through all the resources that had been recovered in the mop up operation around the world. More worrying were the indications that some of the mission reports, at least, appeared to have been doctored or fabricated, as they were getting hits from their on-going searches on BGRU personnel who were supposedly terminated in the mop up operation. Obviously BGRU still had hooks into the governments and intelligence organisations around the world, including the USA, as some of the ones who weren't supposed to exist any more were in the USA, at that they were a little dejected, was this ever going to be over?

On a lighter note, Diane and Roan came down to have the DMI loaded, and spend a couple of weeks with Josie and the family. The DMI load and optimisation went smoothly for both of them, and they were most of the way to being acclimatised by the time they left, but the time to spend as an extended family was the best part of it for everyone else, they had two teenagers in the family now, and the rest of the kids were closing fast on that age, so there were lots of "family" activities they they could now do without leaving anyone out, it made it a fun couple of weeks while they largely blocked out their "real" lives and enjoyed themselves.