Usual disclaimer for the Land of Litigation, no rights to any characters portrayed.
One thing was immediately obvious when they started looking for information about Graham's "heirs", they had never imagined that information could be so hard to find. To start with, what was left of BGRU was hiding so far underground that they were having trouble getting anything useful on any part of their organisation, and the heirs were obviously the most closely guarded secret that they had. If Chuck was a betting man he would have bet that rather less than 1% of the BGRU remnants had ever heard of the heirs.
Chuck was working on the theory that the only reason that they were seeing the "heirs" at all was because some of the elders were trying to use them for political mileage in their bids for leadership. That didn't bode well for the heirs once the leadership had what they wanted, but considering who their father was, it was difficult to get too worried about them, being the sons of a monster didn't automatically make them monsters, but the chance that they'd follow in his footsteps was enough to wish them gone, to protect the world.
It was the fact that the heirs were ghosts that made tracking them so very difficult, they didn't have names, origins, anything, and no-one seemed to know about them. Even in China, where they should have stood out so much, they couldn't find any mention of them, the only times that they had appeared was when BGRU was moving them, and they happened to be caught on camera. They had the best luck with the first one that they found (the heir apparent, as it were, as he was obviously the eldest). Given the failure of their on-line investigation to yield any real results, Zondra and Heather went down to South America to do the ground work for the investigation the old fashioned way, because two attractive women looking for the men who had "run out on them" without giving them what they'd promised, that could often get answers in some circles. They trolled the markets, hotels and party scenes and slowly gathered enough clues over a period of three or four months to backtrack the man and his retinue to the villages where he grew up, but the woman who had given birth to him (obviously a surrogate mother) and her husband had died in a car accident over twenty years ago, and the people who took him in after they died were also killed when they were caught in a cartel shoot-out about ten to twelve years later, after that he lived by himself.
It was obvious that the people behind this were trying to ensure that nothing was left to track him, or who was controlling him, but they hadn't planned for the level of investigation that Clan Carmichael could mount. Chuck, Stefan and the rest of the team back home were chasing all the electronic records and transactions that existed in regard to him and his erstwhile "parents". The electronic records were sketchy but they showed that the payments had come from shell accounts that were difficult to back track through, in the early days at least, but they managed to trace some payments back to Ring or BGRU accounts over the past fifteen to twenty years, and were trying to identify the authorisation for those payments to find files related to them (they were only just now beginning to realise how paranoid Graham really was, he hadn't trusted anyone apparently). While they were in South America, Zondra and Heather charmed their way into (or broke into) the physical records for anything they could find that was related to the families or the boy/man himself. When they managed to locate and acquire his medical records from the doctors who had looked after him for most of his life (and he had needed a lot of medical attention), they were an eye opener. The medical records appeared to support the theory of genetic defects, as he had so many things wrong with him that it was a wonder that he was still alive, and he wouldn't be without nearly constant medical attention.
Zondra and Heather spent similar amounts of time tracking down some of the other heirs that they located in South America and Eastern Europe, and what they managed to find painted a very similar picture, surrogate mother, her and the "father" were killed when the boy was 7-8 at which point he was taken in by another family, and the new "parents" died as well about ten years later. Obviously the determination had been made that these ages were the key points to separate them from the people that were raising them and that that was somehow significant in their development, but no standard medical theories seemed to support that (except for the first one perhaps, on the basis of the 0-7, 7-14, and 14-21 key learning age periods), so it was just another part of the mystery. They also dug up enough medical records on the others to show that their health was nearly as bad as the heir apparent's. At least with a few other data points they had a better chance of mapping out the process that was being followed and confirming the patterns, but unfortunately that still wasn't leading them to the key information of who exactly they were and why everything was under such tight secrecy (unless Graham WAS just a paranoid lunatic, but if he was he'd been that way for over thirty years, and it would have been hard to go as far as he did like that).
When the girls tried to track down the ones that had been located in China, though, they almost came unstuck. They never knew whether it was because they stood out more in China or the watchers were more diligent there, but they hadn't managed to find much information before they became the hunted themselves and had to run, only just getting out with their lives. So they came home after well over a year of punting around the world on their investigations to find that they had a hard time settling into the "quiet" life in Castle Carmichael again, even though they could admit that it was good to be home with the family again. They did get something out of the girls' misadventure, at least, apparently China was where they needed to focus their efforts to track this matter down. The nature of the teams that came after them made it quite obvious that something there was being guarded very professionally, and the fact that some of the heirs were also located there was not likely to be a coincidence.
Of course, being back with the family did have its upsides, sixteen months made a lot of difference with the kids growing up as fast as they were, Molly was almost finished College, Clara was nearly out of her teens, Charlie and Susie were almost eighteen, Yvonne, Zack and Wendy were in their mid teens and even Sarah's babies, Jaqui and Piotr, were almost teenagers now. Molly was the only one who looked pretty much the same as she had when they went on the assignment, and while they didn't say anything in front of them (of course), the six Bartowski children (Ellie had changed both her's and Clara's names back to Bartowski after the divorce was finalised and Jill had named Charlie Charles Bartowski from birth) made the other three girls (and just about everyone else) look positively ordinary in comparison. (Zondra and Heather joked between themselves about the fact that Charlie and Zack were so gorgeous that they would have loved to further their "education", if they didn't know what Carina and Sarah would do to them, but if they'd known how many (of both sexes and all ages) had been prowling after Clara, Charlie, Yvonne and Zack (and Jaqui and Piotr for that matter) over the past eighteen months, they wouldn't have considered joking about it. Things had gotten to the point where even Ellie supported them carrying weapons at all times, and Chuck and Stefan had come up with a much smaller, lighter hideaway pistol (only 14cm long and with a pair of tube magazines for up to a 14 shot capacity that pretty much fitted into the hand) that they could carry covertly to protect themselves. The hideaway pistols were so handy and effective that everyone carried one pretty much constantly after that.) The girls did join Josie and Alex in going out partying with Molly and her girlfriends from college (Ellie had bowed out of that scene as she wanted to set a better example to Clara), because Emma and Sarah had long since decided that Molly was old enough to make her own choices, and therefore wouldn't blame them for leading her astray when they went wild with the college guys that they picked up on those nights out.
Now that the girls were back, they could fill in the blanks on what they'd found when they were chasing down the heirs, the reports were useful, but interactive accounts of what they saw and found managed to fill in the gaps where a written report didn't quite answer the questions. Mind you, the reports that they'd sent in gave the team back home a lot to work on, and allowed Chuck to formulate the additional searches (based on the medical conditions that they shared) that let them confirm that the heir apparent and the other heir over twenty had both apparently succumbed to their conditions (hardly shocking, give their level of health). The most obvious explanation was that the strain of being dragged away from their homes and paraded around the BGRU upper echelon in an attempt to garner support for leadership bids was too much for them and killed them early. The medical condition searches also uncovered 5 - 10 other probable heirs (on the basis of medical condition and descriptions) who had also died in recent years from similar conditions, and several other possible heirs who may be still alive.
One thing that was puzzling was that all the "heirs" appeared to be male, but they had basically put that down to Graham's well known misogyny, and the prevalent attitudes among the types that made up BGRU (and most of the intelligence community for that matter), as well as the engrained culture in the parts of the world that the "heirs" had been found in. Girls were generally considered worthless by these types, so they just presumed that any girls that had been born were just left with their surrogate mothers and forgotten about by Graham.
With the extra details that the girls had discovered, they had far more to search with now, so they were getting more potential hits, but as with the looser parameters on Graham's image searches, this meant that they had thousands of probable false positives to filter out if they were to get a better grasp on the situation. The indications were that the operation began in South America, but the focus moved to Eastern Europe after that, and finally to China, and from what they could see to date, China was still the focal point for the operation. That, in and of itself, created serious problems, as they had far less leverage in China than they did anywhere else. They had a few contacts in the party who owed them for what they'd done for them in the past, but it was the largest and strongest communist regime in the world, and they couldn't just come and go like they could in other countries, that restricted their actions quite a bit. So the team ran their searches, filtered the results and followed up on anything that looked like a good lead, and ever so slowly, they built the picture of Langston Graham's "heirs", this was going to be a long, drawn out process.
Throughout this process, Clan Carmichael maintained a state of readiness to handle what was thrown at them, everyone, including their "civilians" and the kids, did daily workouts and training to keep in top shape and keep their skills honed (it took Zondra and Heather well over a month to get back up to speed, but they did). Chuck and Sarah watched their kids training and sparring against the others and shared a troubled, sad, look, they were supposed to be kids enjoying themselves but instead they were facing up to some of the best warriors out there and holding their own. They watched their 13 year old daughter take down Carina, who was among the best out there (and enhanced/boosted by the BI to boot) and realised that Graham's super spy breeding program had succeeded, they'd both been used to create the ultimate soldiers/spies. Something else occurred to them as well, too, they had been used to breed the ultimate warriors, but the family had also created the ultimate Intersect, which boosted anyone beyond where they were (even more so if they were compatible with the Intersect), so when their children were old enough to take the Bartowski Intersect safely, they would be unstoppable, so they had indeed created what Graham had been planning for four decades, but the laugh was on him and the empire that he wanted them to serve, as they were dedicated to taking it down, just like the rest of the family.