A/N1: Aaaaaannnnnd I still don't own Chuck. Even after so many chapters. Crazy, right?

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Vincent Smith stood waiting. And then stood waiting longer. But, he wasn't at all surprised or the slightest bit impatient. Roark was never on time for a meeting. But Smith had been trained in the military and being on time was embedded into his psyche hard and fast. He could no more be late for a meeting than he could violate any of the other moral pillars according to which he'd lived his life. But Roark was different and expected other men to wait for him. Wealth seemed to do that to people, in Smith's view. He thought it was likely to be some petty reaffirmation of the man's self-importance.

He'd been waiting for fifteen minutes past the scheduled appointment time when the Sachem walked into the room. The man was dismissing the gaggle of young courtiers behind him with a rude wave as he crossed the threshold into the office. One of the men on the outside closed the door, granting Roark and Smith privacy.

While Smith was wearing a dark suit and tie, admittedly unusually formal for Southern California, Roark wore a colorful Hawiian shirt and a baseball cap. Obviously, the man was flaunting his wealth and his status granting him no need to conform. It was yet another non-verbal signal to everyone around him that he was the alpha dog.

"Well?" asked Roark without preliminaries.

"Vanished," replied Smith.

"What do you mean, vanished?" asked Roark.

"I mean the sniper team is gone. The best one we had. Gone without a trace. I checked the nest we had rented for them for the hit and it was empty, as if they'd never been there."

"But you know they were there," demanded Roark.

"Yes, Sir."

"So goddamn Carmichael beat us again," snarled Roark. "Son of a bitch." He slammed a hand down on the desktop. "Fine. You win, Smith. No more attempts to assassinate the Carmichael team. Every attempt has been a disaster and left them laughing at us. We send teams against them and they are massacred. We put bombs in their cars and they somehow know about it immediately. We put a sniper team out to take them from a distance and the team vanishes. Fuck. They are way more tactically proficient than we are, that's pretty fucking obvious. Ok. We adapt and move on. We'll come up with another way to identify Orion."

"Yes, Sir."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

"Ok. Morning, guys. Let's get started. Everyone's got something to say about Roark and his businesses. I'm going to get us started with Rachel's team," said Chuck.

Unlike the last time, when they all met in Castle, this morning they had borrowed one of the larger conference rooms in the Studio's offices, making for a much more comfortable meeting. They intended to use the large screen along the far wall. Like the last time, the extended team was all present. Coffee and water bottles were in front of them, but most of them also had tablets or laptops. Other than Colt, it didn't seem anyone was eating the proffered donuts.

Rachel held a computer tablet in front of her and said, "Right. Ted Roark. Here's what we know, some of it is public and some came from Jorge and the FISA warrants we got.

"Theodore Roark was born January 23, 1949, making him 59 years old. He was born in New York City to wealthy parents, their only child. His dad was prominent in the garment industry at the time. Ted was a prodigy from an early age. The schools of New York weren't equipped to deal with him. He was accepted as a genius and, even in those days, educators understood the need for special treatment. Throughout 1960's he zoomed through school. He graduated early from high school and made it to MIT and managed to finish both undergrad and grad school very young. By the time he was 21, in 1970, he'd been enrolled at Cal Tech in the PhD program.

"It seems he was not only brilliant, but was also ambitious and not above cutting corners. We know from Chuck's dad that at least a part of his PhD thesis was cribbed from Stephen's ideas. In any event, when he graduated, he took his brand-new doctorate out of California and went back to New York heading to Poughkeepsie. There, he got a job at IBM with their computer design teams and stayed at Big Blue through the 1970's.

"While there, he canvased his father's rich friends and rounded up some capital to start his own business. By 1981 he had enough capital to start Roark Instruments. He started the business with the development of cash registers for the retail trade. While it was an immediate success, he was also sued right away for patent violations. He hired Sullivan & Case, one of the country's top firms and very expensive. The guy suing him was buried in legal fees and couldn't afford the fight. He ended up settling for pennies on the dollar of what he thought he was owed.

"That paved the way for the future of the company. He's in litigation all the time. Fighting with anyone and everyone. Using the largest, smartest, most expensive law firms with the meanest sharks in the business. Just about always patent litigation. Fighting over the rights to various inventions that he either accuses people of stealing from him or he's accused of stealing from them. Again, matches what Stephen told us. Right now, he's got sixteen pending suits at various stages. Honestly, he's a litigator's wet dream. Hook up with him and you know you'll be able to afford that house at the beach within a few years. He still uses the most expensive lawyers out there. And, just to say, the myth that the most expensive guys are idiots is just a myth. They are very smart people and not to be underestimated.

"Anyway, he bought out the original investors, his dad's friends. Of course, with litigation involved in that transaction too. The gossip is that he's estranged from his parents at this point, but we can't confirm that. In 1992 he did an initial public offering and raised enough capital to expand RI tremendously. Throughout the '90's, RI was growing like crazy. Unlike a lot of companies, he didn't limit his focus to either hardware or software and went with both of them at the same time.

"For the hardware, he was building all kinds of computers, laptops, mainframes, personal computers for home use or office use. Some avionics. Some medical systems. We even have one of his mainframes downstairs. As to the software, he's mostly been creating specialty apps for limited purposes like medical uses. But he's about to unveil a brand-new operating system, RIOS, to rival Microsoft's Windows. I'm going to let Jorge talk about that in a moment or two.

"By this point, Roark is one of our tech billionaires. His company is one of the top tech firms in the country and is selling to everyone and everything. He is on TV and is on magazine covers and is quoted far and wide as a wise voice for the future of technology. As Tevye says in Fiddler on the Roof, 'When you're rich, they think you really know.' Anyway, he's a prominent personality.

"As to his personal life, he never married. He's been seen on the arm of various women over the years, but nothing seems to have stuck. There's a bit of quiet rumor that he's gay, but no more than you get for any man who's never married into his '50's. Could be he just has other priorities. Dunno. But, beyond that, no real social life. Goes to the usual functions and smiles for the camera. Donates to charity. Likes the opera. So far as we can tell, he's got no friends … no real friends anyway.

"Here's the weird thing. No politics. He donates pretty much equally to both major parties. His public statements aren't in any way political. Just the usual anodyne platitudes after 9-11. No hint that he's leading and funding a movement to overthrow the government and the constitution. From all his public statements, he doesn't seem to give a shit. Of course, this could be his own way to send us off the trail and hide his real intentions. We can't tell.

"His corporate empire, though, has been under investigation for a while from multiple angles. The IRS has had a slow burn investigation for years. Like so many of these companies and moguls, he pays only a tiny amount in taxes. The cleverest tax lawyers and accountants are in his employ to minimize what he has to pay. They are supposed to get him close to the legal line, but not cross it. Well, the IRS seems to think he may have crossed it sometimes. Same with the SEC, which has been checking him out for securities violations. Since we've found out that he's the Sachem though, both of those investigations have been quietly moved to the front burner. My team also found some questionable sales to foreign countries of some dual use tech and alerted the Commerce Department. That investigation is just ramping up as we speak.

"The investigations. Yeah. No one knows just how widespread the Fulcrum infiltration is, so we are doing everything we can to keep these things limited to as few people as possible. It's leading to some long hours for the men and women working on it, but that really can't be helped. We can't let Fulcrum know that we are on the trail. What you spies would call 'operational security' is a constant focus, and, honestly, a challenge. Just my judgement, but I think there's enough smoke here that Roark is going to go down. Even without the Fulcrum stuff, he's been cutting too many corners for too long.

"That's it guys. That's the story of Roark and RI. Any questions?" Rachel concluded.

Casey said, "If there were so many investigations already ongoing, how come they are only heating up now?"

"The FISA warrants. The stuff we were able to collect from that and hand over to the investigators was gold. They couldn't have gotten it on their own and didn't have probable cause to ask a judge for a straight up criminal warrant. The FISA warrants were broad enough to get them past the tipping point," said Rachel.

"When will those investigations reach a crucial stage?" asked Marco.

"They are being handled as a priority. My team is helping as much as we can. I can't tell you the earliest they will be ready to indict, but no one is going to do anything like a public attack on RI until Chuck and Sarah pull the trigger."

"What kind of penalties are we talking about?" asked Billy.

"Depends what individuals we can prove anything against. If we can get the evidence, we could be talking about decades as a guest of the government. The problem is, with a huge organization, not everyone is involved in every decision. Getting someone's fingerprints on something illegal is hard. At very least the corporation will face penalties, but that's just money," said Rachel, shrugging.

"What is it folks say? I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one," said Zondra with a sardonic grin.

Everyone nodded.

"Roark visit any hookers?" asked Leo. "Like Smith?"

"Not that we could tell," said Rachel.

"Gotta be getting his ashes hauled someplace," griped Leo. Rachel shrugged.

Rachel said, "Ok. If there are no more questions, Jorge wants to talk about the new operating system."

Jorge spoke up. "Thanks. So, I've hacked into the mainframes at RI and retrieved the source code for RIOS, the new operating system they are releasing next week. Roark Instruments Operating System. All the hoopla and marketing and publicity and presales add up to a very big deal. Knowing what we know about Roark, it's been freaking me out. He's a really bad guy and the idea of him putting his own software into so many computers around the world for the first time is really bad. I haven't had time to go through it, but I'd really like someone to go through it line by line. If it's got a virus or something, we have to spike it. The risk of cyberterrorism is just too extreme. This guy and his buddies could really fuck up the world."

"Really good. Makes sense, dude," said Chuck. "I'll get a half dozen of my guys from CI to crawl over it. If there's something hinky they'll find it."

"Great, Chuck. Thanks," said Jorge. He handed Chuck a thumb drive with the RIOS source code.

Chuck said, "OK. Fitz, you want to tell us about the RI campus in Ventura?"

"Sure," said Fitz, pulling up a map of the facility on the screen at the end of the room. "Designed and built by RI in 1994 after the IPO, it was considered state of the art at the time. Seventy acres. Fifteen buildings. A jogging trail. Picnic areas. All the super-duper amenities to make it an attractive place to work. Most of the buildings are support and supplies and a gym and stuff like that. But here," he used a laser pointer to highlight a building. "This one seems to be the R&D facility. No surprise there. We've seen the plans though. There is a whole wing of the building that is separated from the rest. Here is where the normal work they are doing," he pointed to an area of the building, "but here" pointing to a different area, "is a section with stuff going on we can't figure out."

"The intersect?" asked Sarah.

"That's our guess, but we don't really know. If it's not the intersect, it could be the Fulcrum operations," he said.

"Or both," said Zondra.

"Exactly. We know Fulcrum is working on the Intersect. This would be a natural place to do that."

"A lot of people around, though," said Rachel. "Maybe not the most secure place they could find."

"Guess that's true too," admitted Fitz.

"That makes sense," said Rachel. "Ok. My team will put together a list of other properties owned by RI. Hell, not just owned, but leased, licensed, subleased, whatever. Any properties they have use of anywhere, through any of their shell corps." She turned to Jorge and said, "Can you write a program to collect the electric usage of those spots based on the records of the local utility company? If there's a hotspot or something with crazy usage, that might be a hint."

"Yeah, no worries. I can do that, Boss," said Jorge. "Might take a while, though."

"It does, it does," she replied, giving his arm a squeeze.

Jackson asked, "How's the physical security at the campus?"

Fitz said, "Ok. Normal for a corporate campus. Nothing to hold off a full-blown attack by a trained force, but probably enough to deter industrial espionage."

"OK," said Chuck. "Mike, what did you guys find about Roark's residence?"

"Homes all over the place. Seems to have an apartment or a house in a dozen different cities around the country and around the world. Here in LA, he's got a penthouse apartment downtown in an otherwise pretty unremarkable high-rise. The real mansion is out near the Ventura campus. On the water, three acres. House is twenty thousand square feet. Tons of space for a single guy. Like the RI campus, security is tight, but pretty vanilla. Nothing too imaginative. If the word comes down to take out Roark in his sleep it won't be a heavy lift."

"Not on the agenda for the moment," said Chuck, with a tiny frown and a shake of his head.

"Any sign of the Life Guards? The guys supposedly protecting the Sachem?" asked Zondra.

"They could be the security at either the campus or his apartment, but they aren't obvious," said Colt. "From what we can tell, these guys are just rent-a-cops."

"Ok," said Chuck. "So, now we've gotten a good handle on the man and the task ahead of us. The job now is to figure out what we do next. And I have some ideas."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

A/N2: Come back next week for Chuck's ideas on how to go after Roark. Bit of brainstorming with the teams. Let me know how you guys think this one is going, if you don't mind. I do love to hear from you.