Chuck vs The No Win Question

by HC68

It's a beautiful summer day in 2020, and Chuck Bartowski and his family and friends are having a gathering and an outdoor barbecue. But trouble is brewing between the two most important women in Chuck's life. Can Chuck navigate the perils of the No Win Question?

16. Chapter 16: Miscommunications

CHUCK vs. THE NO-WIN QUESTION CHAPTER 16: Miscommunications...

A secret location, 6:01 a.m. local time...

Langston Graham finished the last few bites of a breakfast consisting of bacon and sliced potatoes, mushrooms in an Alfredo sauce, cheddar cheese and hot fresh coffee. Every bite was as delicious as the first, he felt as if he was actually dining on freedom. Freedom, and more than freedom.

Nothing hurts, Graham mused, as he swallowed the last mushroom, savoring the taste. My head is clear, nothing hurts, not even any scars left! It really worked!

The explosion that had destroyed the Beta Intersect AI, so many years before, had spared Graham's life...barely. He still wondered even yet what strange fortune had enabled him to survive when so many of his best personnel had been instantly killed. Sometimes he toyed with the idea that it might have been Providence, or Destiny, but he was a practical man, and he was not sure that sort of thinking was wise or healthy. Most likely, Graham mused, it was simply that he had been standing near the center of the enhancement chamber when the self-destruct charges detonated. The blasts had come from all sides, but some of the force had been spent by the time it reached him.

If it had been destiny, it might have saved his life, but it had hardly spared him otherwise. He had been burned, bruised, bones had been broken, his snapped fibula had protruded past torn muscles and ligaments, his faced had been burned beyond recognition. By some miracle his eyes had survived unhurt, his vision was undamaged. That was in its own way a mixed blessing, though, because it had permitted him to see himself in mirrors often enough in the years immediately afterward to realize that his own mother, had she still lived, would have had difficulty in recognizing him after the explosion. The surgeons had repaired the damage enough to permit him to live, but the scar tissue had been disfiguring. There had not been a day afterward in the Ebony One prison that had been entirely without pain. His vital organs were undamaged, but his skin was ravaged and scarred and his muscles had healed badly.

Beckman took advantage of the scar tissues to help conceal who I really was, Graham remembered, fury rolling through him. It still left him feeling humiliated that Beckman had 'played' him so completely. He had thought she was under his influence, that he was manipulating her, all through the period from Larkin's initial destruction of the Alpha AI and the detonation of the sabotage strike on the Beta.

All that time, Graham mused, as he finished his wine, and I never suspected for a moment that she was playing me, that she had taken down Wendy, and was working to undercut me. It's so obvious in retrospect, I can see how she was working me, she would pretend to be stupider than she was, echo my own thoughts back to me so subtly that I didn't even realize that she was playing to my ego. I was actually grateful that General McKee had apparently died, I didn't have a clue that Diane had taken her down and imprisoned her. Damn that woman! How could she possibly be that slick?!

In retrospect, he understood what had happened when the Beta AI was destroyed. FULCRUM had not sabotaged the Beta AI. Beckman had. The 'FULCRUM thanks you' message that flashed just before the Cipher had triggered the chain reaction was misdirection, in case anything went wrong with her plan. The actual explosion had been produced by the self-destruct charges installed in the Beta mainframe by the NSA and CIA. There had to be a way to make sure the huge machine and its vast resources could not fall under enemy control, after all.

The cipher, when retrieved by Walker, Casey, and Bartowski, had naturally passed through multiple hands before it was installed in the interface module. It would have been, and in fact had been, trivial for Beckman and her technical team to modify the hardware and software in the Cipher, so that when he had attempted to actually use the Beta AI, a signal had gone out to trigger the self-destruct charges.

It was, he had to admit to himself, very clever...no, it was beyond clever. Clever was shallow, careless, it often miscarried. What Diane Beckman had done was one of the most impressive instances of Machiavellian manipulation Graham had ever encountered.

She sabotaged the Beta AI herself, or rather, she had her minions rig the cipher to do what it did. The FULCRUM message was a false flag, to throw off suspicion if things went sour. She knew I was planning to Intersect-enhance several of the best of my personal agents, she even appeared to support that plan. She knew me well enough to know I would want to be there to watch it happen, too. Galling as it is to admit it, Beckman read my ego like a book!

It was perfect, it went off like clockwork, Graham admitted to himself. Several of my best, most loyal operatives, my inner circle of personal agents, were killed. I survived, barely, by the skin of my teeth. And afterward, she discouraged efforts to reconstruct the Intersect AIs, while I sat in a cell at Ebony One under a false name and number. Hell, her plan worked so well I have reason to be grateful I was even allowed that much existence afterward!

The rage rose up to choke him for a moment, but Graham took a deep breath and forced it down, compartmentalized it, locked it away. Graham was a practical man, and he knew that unfocused rage was a liability.

But once he had awakened in that prison cell, Graham had quickly put together the truth. He was no fool, and he had plenty of time to think and ponder in the steel cube that had become his world. He had had plenty of time to remember and analyze, and to come to understand. Once thing he quickly realized was that Beckman, for all her success in playing him and arranging his downfall, had still not had quite everything her own way.

It made no sense for Diane Beckman to expend effort to keep him alive, to feed him and hold him in that cell. The only possible practical reason to do so would be for interrogation purposes, and no interrogation efforts had ever been made, beyond some perfunctory questioning. The fact that she did keep him alive, and made no apparent effort to use him for anything, told Graham that he had allies still alive in the intelligence community, some of his people were still active in high places, keeping Beckman from finishing what she had so efficiently started.

This had been confirmed within six months of his imprisonment, when a guard who was actually a FULCRUM member had made contact with Graham in his cell, and begun to brief him. Subsequently, though they could not yet extract him, FULCRUM had kept him well-informed of events beyond his cell. He had been informed of the downfall of FULCRUM and the Ring, and the other subsidiary organizations of the Ring, and he had known that FULCRUM lived yet, it's inner core intact and beginning to regenerate with the help of other 'deep' groups. Langston Graham had been involved with FULCRUM for decades, he had been connected to their activities since the early 1980s, and from his cell, he had continued to help direct the re-emergence of the new, improved FULCRUM.

Unfortunately, Graham mused, first the necessities of maintaining his place in the intelligence community, and then the fact that he was locked away in Ebony One, had prevented him from taking a direct supervisory role, leaving that task to that incompetent jackass Ted Roark. Roark's cluelessness and ineptitude in turn had led to the utter, total clusterfuck that was the decision for FULCRUM to issue falsified orders to an unsuspecting Bryce Larkin to take out the Alpha Intersect AI.

From that moment forward, events went out of control. Larkin's initial action in destroying the Alpha AI and sending the core of the Intersect database to Bartowski had seemed like a containable event at the time, but it had been like the first dropped pebble the starts the avalanche. The subsequent chain of events had just kept getting bigger and bigger until it ultimately resulted in the downfall of the Ring Elders and most of their subsidiary groups, and had come all too close to actually bringing down FULCRUM itself. As it was, FULCRUM had survived by the narrowest of margins.

Graham had also been kept informed, while in his cell, of the activities of a growing legend in the shadow world, one Charles Carmichael.

Graham snorted, as he put on his tie and left his quarters. Who would have believed that that idiot Bartowski would prove to be so much his parents' child?

When the best of the best of his personal agents, Sarah Walker, had informed him of who Bryce Larkin had sent the Intersect to, he thought he had recognized the name. it had sounded vaguely familiar. It had not been until he looked up the name that he realized that the dead-end underachiever in the Buy-More nerd herd had actually been the son of Stephen and Mary Bartowski themselves. Graham had never actually met either one, but he had certainly heard of them during the late 1970s and the 1980s, when they had become something of a legend in the CIA, widely known as being among the best of the best.

He had been stunned to realize that this incompetent ne'er-do-well was the son of the legendary pair, and at first he had been sure that this could not possibly have been coincidence. That was part of why he had not issued Walker termination orders that same day, in fact, though he had said nothing about it to Walker. Later, he had become convinced that it must had been some bizarre coincidence, because Bartowski was so utterly inept and incompetent...and yet. And yet.

And yet...somehow Bartowski had begun to use the Intersect database effectively. He had proven to be an effective team with Walker and Casey, sometimes a disconcertingly effective player indeed.

Shipping that diamond to us, that took nerve, Graham admitted to himself with a smile. And he managed to uncover the existence of FULCRUM way before I was ready for that. And somehow he compromised Walker, I still can't believe he did that! She was my best, the one agent I was certain was beyond such trivial emotional distractions...and Bartowski proved me wrong within a few weeks of the start of the assignment. Oh, I didn't see it right away...but looking back I doubt she'd have carried out a termination order any time after the first few weeks.

Graham recalled with sour amusement his own plans, before Bartowski had come into the picture. He had fully intended Sarah Walker to be one of the inner circle of agents he meant to 'enhance' with the Intersect. In fact, he had envisioned Sarah as being, eventually, his right hand in his overall operations, and likely his successor. He had been molding her in that direction almost from the moment he first spoke to her in that woodlot, the day she had come close to throwing a knife into his his chest. Bit by bit, he had been shaping her into his weapon and his shield...and Bartowski had undone years of patient, painstaking work, apparently in a matter of weeks and months.

Graham had come to realize what was happening, and that Bartowski had compromised Walker and to a lesser extent Casey, soon enough, though. Upon that realization, Graham had begun immediate plans to terminate all three as soon as the Beta AI was on-line and they no longer needed Bartowski's abilities. Beckman had seemed to be in complete accordance with this plan, all the while working to subvert it.

In his cell, Graham had heard reports smuggled in that had told him, to his disbelief, of Bartowski's growing list of accomplishments and the shadow he was starting to cast across the secret world. The downfall of the Ring and the near-extinction of FULCRUM had left Graham shaking his scarred head in wonder and anger, the news of the fall of Volkoff Industries had left him simply amazed. He did not know all the details, but he knew enough.

The stories kept getting bigger, and stranger. Word was he had married Walker (a concept that Graham found dumbfounding), brought down Augusto Gaez, survived a divorce from Walker to found his own private company that had in turn grown into a legend. Apparently his older sister had joined him, and become an agent as well. The stories he had been told by his FULCRUM contacts had become almost unbelievable, but he was assured of their accuracy. Apparently the Bartowski Brats, as he privately thought of Charles and Eleanor Bartowski, now had a near-monopoly on cutting-edge Intersect technology, both for human application and, rumor had it, other uses.

At last the time had come for his extraction, and then FULCRUM's own cutting-edge technology had come into play. The cellular regeneration techniques that had been used to save and revive Bryce Larkin after Casey first shot him, and later to save and restore Daniel Shaw, had been used to heal the damage to his body, regenerate his skin, knit his muscles back together properly. His face was normal again, the scars were gone. He felt genuinely good for the first time in over a decade! It was tempting simply to revel in the mere absence of pain.

Not to mention being able to look in the mirror and not wince, Graham mused. Egotistical and petty, but it's so. Sun Tzu would advise me to know myself and know my enemy, and knowing myself means recognizing my own foibles. I have an ego, my pride motivates me but sometimes betrays me. Beckman used that against me, I need to be on guard against it, and being on guard against it doesn't mean pretending it's not there when it is there.

There was much to be done. If FULCRUM was to achieve its full potential, under his leadership, several necessary things had to happen, and one of those things was removing the Bartowski Brats from the equation as a threat. Given his choice, Graham would have waited a little longer before moving against the Bartowski's. Patience was a virtue, and a little more time would have let him weave the net more perfectly.

Unfortunately, circumstances in Russia were forcing his hand before he was ready.

Oh well, Graham thought, as he walked purposefully through the corridors of the underground facility, the enemy always gets a vote. Sun Tzu would also advise me, 'the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing'. I would have preferred if the the Bartowski's had not gotten so close to Project Persephone so soon, but they have. If our intel is accurate, Chuck Bartowski is stumbling around the edges of it, and he's on his way back to Moscow, and his sister is on her way to Moscow now too. So be it.

We'll just have to make sure that things go our way when they get there.

Graham arrived at the suite of offices where the senior administrative and command personnel of FULCRUM worked, and waiting for him was a nervous man named Kyle Marcos, one of the chiefs of the technical department.

"Are your people ready, Marcos?" Graham asked.

"Yes, sir, but do you think that this is really wise?"

"I think so," Langston Graham said quietly.

"But this could reveal one of our most valuable hidden resources," the aide said nervously. "Once the various major players realize that we can do this, most of its value is lost."

"True," Graham said, his deep, gravelly voice as calm and serious as ever. "On the other hand, if we do this right, they might simply be left confused, and not immediately realize that we caused it. Even if they do eventually reach the right conclusion, though, I believe that the potential payoff is worth the risk."

"But, what if we need this capacity more later-"

"I have made my decision," Graham rumbled. His voice was no louder, but the look he favored the aide with was laden with meaning. "Implement the Bell Protocol."

"Yes, sir," the aide said, nervously, as he scurried off.

Graham sighed. It was an old problem, in military and intelligence work. One had a useful asset, human, mechanical, informational. But to actually use the potentially useful asset meant potentially revealing that it existed, allowing others to take countermeasures. Sometimes it was simply in the nature of the asset that it could only be used once.

That was not technically the case with the Bell Protocol. In theory, it could be used repeatedly. But in practice, there was a good chance that at least some of their enemies would put the pieces together later, and reach the correct conclusions. The question was: would the payoff now be worth the possible price later?

Graham had ruminated over the situation, and he thought that the answer to this last question was 'yes'.

Graham also knew that the aide he had just sent scurrying would always choose to 'wait', partly out of native caution, but partly also out of a fear that there might be a better time later. Of course, it was possible he was right, but Graham had no intention of holding back. If he was right, a tremendous opportunity was in the process of revealing itself, and he intended to take full advantage. If they could neutralize the emerging threat to Project Persephone, then FULCRUM's long term plans might advance by several years in a short time.

Graham walked into the communications center, which was an unassuming room given its significance. The chamber was about twenty-five feet wide, and perhaps twenty feet front-to-back. Several desks hosted multiple interconnected laptops and desktop-style computers, and other electronic paraphernalia. It could have been a work room for any number of technology companies, the only really unusual feature was a series of very large display screens along the front wall. The back wall was transparent, and behind the protective layer of polymer plastic was a mass of complex electronics.

Technicians sat at the desks working on various activities. The air was chilly, the room temperature set more for the comfort of the electronic systems than the human occupants.

One incongruous touch, compared to a normal technical center, was the presence of blue-uniformed armed guards at the entrances. Another difference between this room and most such facilities was that this one was over 100 feet underground, but there was little visible sign of this to be seen inside the center.

Graham walked over to look up at one of the display screens, which showed a Mercator projection of the world, with the familiar distortion that made Alaska and Greenland look as if they were larger than South America. More interesting was the thick patterns of shifting lines that linked the major cities and other important sites. Those lines displayed the flow of information and data around the world. Some of it was voice conversation, telephone calls and television signals, most of it was raw machine data. An especially bright and thick line linked New York City and London.

Computer data linking Wall Street and the City in London, Graham mused. Financial transactions millisecond to millisecond.

The aide who had been objecting to the plan stepped forward, after conferring with several of the technicians. He quietly spoke to Graham, his voice lost amid the beeps and chilly quiet of the communications center.

"Sir," he said to Graham softly, "if you're sure about this, we're ready to go."

Graham handed the man a list of specific items, and said, "Implement as soon as ready."

The aide took the list to one of the technicians, who looked at it, and began tapping furiously on his keyboards. A few minutes later, several of the other technicians were also involved, and on the main displays, the world-maps vanished, replaced by intricate lists of numbers, and interacting patterns of color and shape that resembled abstract art, and were actually visual 'maps' of the active world-wide communication networks.

There was little visible sign of the results of all the activity by his technical staff, but this was to be expected. Not all weapons were flashy or immediately destructive. Sometimes, the subtlest weapons could be the most devastating in effect, Graham mused to himself.

'All warfare is based on deception', as Sun Tzu observed so long ago, Graham mused. But deception can take many forms. Let's see how Bartowski and his merry band of misfits deals with a little of my kind of deception.

Naples, Italy, 7:30 a.m. local time...

"Ma'am," the chief of her Security detail reported, "we've finished sanitizing the site. Everything is packed up and ready to go."

"Thank you, Steve," 'Elaine Carmichael' said to her subordinate. "We'll leave for the airport in thirty minutes."

"Yes, Ma'am," the thirty-something said as he left her hotel room.

Ellie looked around at the room that had been her home away from home for the previous two months. It was a very nice suite, but she doubted if she would miss it. A large part of her was longing to spend more than a day or two at a time in her house in California.

Maybe when we get this mess cleaned up, Ellie mused. She turned back to the bed where her suitcase was waiting, and spent a few moments double-checking that everything was packed away. She had learned from Sarah and Carina and Zondra how to pack and unpack quickly, what to leave in the bag and what not to, it was second nature to her by now. She could get by with the contents of a single suitcase without difficulty, after years of doing so.

Most of the CI team in Italy was now about to head either for home or for Russia, depending on their work. They were leaving a detail behind to make sure the Nachera's were still safe, and watch for any attempt by the local SVR groups to go back on the deal. Casey had left one of the younger Security men behind for that task, Ellie suspected, because he and Cosimo Nachera's youngest daughter seemed to be getting on rather well. Ellie had long since realized that there was a Romantic living somewhere deep inside John Casey's cynical self.

In the meantime, she, Casey, and some of their senior team were heading for Moscow, to work on rooting out the people who had initiated the apparently rogue operation against the Nachera's. They would be working rather cautiously together with the SVR themselves, who wanted to root out whoever it was using state resources for their own ends. If this worked out well, the SVR might well end up secretly paying CI handsomely for the effort, but that was only part of Ellie's motivation. She had a nasty suspicion about what was going on, a suspicion that touched on one of the main reasons she and Chuck had founded, or refounded, Carmichael Industries in the first place.

Which was why she had made the decision to proceed with the temporary alliance with the Russian intelligence service, and head to Moscow, without consulting Chuck first. If she was right, time might be of the essence. She did, however, send a detailed report to CI HQ, with orders to forward it to Chuck ASAP. She had hoped to catch Chuck himself at HQ, but he was apparently currently out himself on a rather secretive errand.

Fine, as long as they get the report to him, Ellie thought.

"Ready to go?" Casey said from the hotel room door.

"Sure," Ellie replied, scooping up her suitcase.

"Let's do this, then," Casey said with a grin. "Commietown, here we come!"

Carmichael Industries Headquarters, Carmichael Estates, CA, 11:00 p.m. local time...

The communications control center was quiet at that time of the evening, but as always, there was a staff in place keeping track of CI activities around the world. It might be late evening in California, but it was morning in Europe and, as the song would have it, it was certainly 'five o'clock somewhere'. The world as a whole never slept, and so neither could a world-spanning operation like Carmichael Industries.

"Did you sent White Gold's report on to Gold Star?" the supervisor asked the duty technician. "And that priority message from Goldengirl?"

"Yes, sir," she replied. "About thirty minutes ago, and we received confirmation that he received them both ten minutes later."

"Good," the supervisor said. "Nice to have everything going smoothly."

The Hotel Gagarin-Tolstoi, Moscow, Russian Federation, 10:00 a.m. local time...

Chuck closed the door of his hotel suite, after tipping the busboy handsomely, but not too handsomely, the goal was good will, not to be particularly memorable, being either too cheap or too generous was not advisable. Chuck wanted to be remembered as just another American traveler in Moscow on business. His suit was expensive but not ostentatiously so. His shoes were neatly polished, his tie subtle and color-coordinated with his outfit. His 'cover' as a sales representative for an American corporation was carefully backed up. It was in fact the same cover that he had used on his previous visit to Moscow a few weeks before, when he had unexpectedly encountered Jill and Jack Burton working together.

Chuck walked through the suite, making sure he actually had the place to himself. A surreptitious scan with a device disguised as an electric razor indicated no active microphones or cameras. Satisfied for the moment, Chuck went to the bedroom and put his suitcase on the bed.

Damn but I hate suits, Chuck mused, as he opened the suitcase, unsnapped the top, and began removing a few items that he would need while in Moscow. He was not planning to be in town long, but it might need several days, depending on how things worked out.

He was becoming worried as he unpacked, because he had been expecting to hear from Ellie long since. By now, she should have sent an update on what was going on in Italy, and he had not received it. Under the circumstances he did not want to risk calling CI HQ himself, because it could compromise his cover.

Don't freak out, Chuck, he advised himself. Ellie's a professional, she has been for years. Probably it's just a glitch, or there's some perfectly reasonable explanation. Don't borrow trouble.

Still he worried. Something was nagging at him, something was teasing at instincts developed in thirteen years of this insane life he was caught up in. He could not quite shed the sense that something was wrong.

The nagging worry was made a little worse by the communications blackout over the CATs. Rumor had it that General Conroy had activated a mission and put a communications blackout over CAT activities, but that was the last Chuck had heard on his most recent general report. While on one level it was a slight relief to have an excuse not to tell Sarah just how much danger her father might be in, another part of him always got antsy when Sarah was incommunicado. That had presaged so many disasters and problems in the past that was never at ease with it.

I'm probably working myself into a fit over nothing, Chuck thought to himself, but I might just make an excuse to drop in on the CI substation in Moscow and call in. That's part of why we have the substations, after all, and their disguise gives me a perfect excuse to use them.

Chuck double-checked that his tranq gun and nine millimeter were still concealed in their hidden compartments, and called down to the room service number to order some dinner.

An airliner flying from Berlin to Moscow, at about that same time...

A person who knew her might not have immediately recognized Sarah Walker, as she sat in her aisle seat aboard a plane winging its way from Berlin to Moscow. Her long golden hair was bound up in a severe style that made her look both older and colder than she actually was, and it was in fact not currently golden, either, instead being dyed a washed-out brown. Brown contacts concealed her blue eyes.

Nor would her ticket have shown that name anywhere. She was flying under an alias, a different alias than the one she had used to fly from London to Berlin, which was different again from the name she had used to fly from New York City to London. Of course, yet another name had been on the ticket that had taken her from Los Angeles to New York City.

Sarah was trying to keep her thoughts focused on the mission before her. Distractions could be lethal in her business, 'keep your head in the game' was not just useful advice, it was a life-or-death imperative. Yet Sarah Walker was a human being, with human emotions, for all that she had spent much of her younger life trying to pretend otherwise. Much of her mind, in spite of her best efforts, kept drifting back to her father.

Another part of her mind was fretting about whether her message to Chuck had reached him yet. She had called Chuck when she learned the Dr. Zarnow was free, but her message had missed him, he was already in the air heading for somewhere that CI HQ could not reveal. She had called her daughter, and found that this time, no verbal manipulation would get anything useful out of Charlotte-Mary. Her daughter was apparently getting 'wise' to her tricks, Sarah mused in with a mixture of resentment and self-deprecating humor.

I should be proud of her, and I sort of am, Sarah thought. But I really need to talk to her father!

She had composed a coded message for Chuck, and sent it to CI HQ, and the communications team there had promised her that it would be immediately forwarded to him. She knew Chuck employed a very professional team, so Sarah decided that there was little use in worrying. Yet she worried anyway.

Sarah would have worried far more if she had known that even though CI HQ had received a confirmation that Chuck had received his messages, he had in fact received none, and sent no confirmation at all. Her worry might have escalated toward panic if she had realized that a revived and once-again-powerful FULCRUM had managed to interfere with communications, subtly but effectively, to prevent Chuck Bartowski, Ellie Bartowski and her team, and Sarah from knowing that they were all either already in Moscow, or converging rapidly upon it. Her panic might have reached epic levels had she realized that the man who was leading FULCRUM in interfering in their communication was none other than her old mentor and master, Langston Graham.

But Sarah was blissfully unaware of any of this, as she slipped into an uneasy sleep aboard the plane.

TO BE CONTINUED...