A/N1: Dr. Jill Roberts definitely does not own Chuck.
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Dr. Guy LaFleur said, "If I may introduce my assistant, Dr. Jill Roberts." A beautiful brunette with large oval glasses who had been in conversation with a uniformed police representative turned around to face the Carmichael team for the first time.
"Chuck?" asked a shocked Jill Roberts.
"Jill?" asked an equally shocked Chuck Bartowski.
"Jill?" gasped an equally shocked Sarah Walker.
Casey was slightly slower to catch on and Zondra had no idea at all what was happening at first. As it turned out at that instant, no one was looking at Bryce Larkin. Even if someone had been, the observer would have had to be exceptional to notice his initial reaction to Jill Roberts, which flitted across his face for only a mere instant and was gone – soul deep vicious hatred. It was immediately replaced by a bright charming smile of welcome, friendship and greeting.
"Jill," Bryce said joyfully.
The woman looked at Bryce with confusion and said, "Bryce?"
"Um...Hi, Jill," said Chuck.
"Hi. What are you doing here, Chuck?" she asked.
"My friends and I do some work for the government. In these circles, I'm known as Charles Carmichael. Here, please, let me introduce the rest of my team." Turning to the others he said, "Guys, this is Jill Roberts...Dr. Jill Roberts, sorry. We knew each other at Stanford. Jill, this is Agent Sarah Walker, my partner and my fiancé." Chuck's voice was strong and confident after his initial surprise had worn off.
Jill, clearly trying her best to keep up with developments repeated "Fiancé?" in a bit of a stunned voice.
"Yes," said Sarah with a hollow smile, waving her ringed left hand in the air. "Good to meet you, Jill." Unlike her boss, Jill didn't seem to have trouble shaking hands, or maybe she was just on autopilot as the unexpected developments built on each other.
Chuck said, "Colonel Casey."
Casey shook her hand brusquely and said, "G'afternoon, Doctor."
Chuck said, "And Agent Zondra Rizzo."
Zondra, who had picked up Sarah's vibe without the need for words, shook with Jill's silently, but made a point with her grip of trying to break at least one bone in the other woman's hand, making Jill wince, eyes wide with surprise.
When Zondra was done trying to hurt her, Bryce stepped forward and gave Jill a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek, "Hey, Jill. Great to see you again. You look like a million bucks." His handsome face was joyful at the serendipity of seeing her again, his eyes sparkling.
"Bryce. Um, hi," she said. She had a hand fluttering around her hair, but didn't seem to be able to decide what to do with it.
LaFleur watched the interactions with surprise and said, after a pause, "Well, good to know you'll be working with old friends."
Chuck turned back to LaFleur and said, "Yes. Jill, Bryce and I were friends at Stanford. But we haven't seen Jill in several years now."
Malone's voice bellowed around the room, "Now that Carmichael and his team have arrived, let's get started. Find some seats, guys."
The table filled quickly and Jill and LaFleur ended up right across from Chuck and Sarah, the rest of Team B taking seats on the wall behind the table. Casey made the short run to the side of the room and came back with bottles of water for the team. At the table, Sarah made sure to sit on Chuck's right side. Making a point of not looking at Jill, Sarah took Chuck's right hand with her left on top of the table, leaving her diamond ring prominently displayed on top of their joined hands. Without actually looking at the other woman, Sarah could sense her eyes upon her hand and the ring, which satisfied her for the time being. Meanwhile, Sarah could sense Chuck making a conscious effort to ignore Jill (given their history, an incredibly hard thing to do) and concentrate on Malone and the briefing. She squeezed his hand to let him know she understood what he was dealing with. He gave her a quick small smile of thanks in return.
Malone, at the front of the room, said, "Alright, ladies and gentlemen, let's get started. In a pre-dawn raid this morning, an unknown force attacked the NIAID facility in Bethesda and made off with the only existing samples of a virus known as the Iblis Strain. They killed fourteen men and women in the attack. I'm going to ask Agent Statler of the FBI, who will be leading this investigation, to explain to us what we know."
Malone sat down and Statler stood up. "Here," she began, "is the composite footage from the security cameras at the Bethesda facility. No sound, of course."
She began to run the footage on a large screen in the front of the room. It began with the guards starting at something they seem to have heard. "We believe they are reacting to the noise of twin bombs in the basement of the building, which severed the phone and cable connections to the outside world," said Statler. As they watched, the guards in the lobby tried to use their cell phones and then died while holding their ground against an overwhelming force. The men attacking were dressed in black combat fatigues and wore balaclavas, making facial recognition analysis impossible. They were heavily armed with a variety of military small arms. Different cameras picked up sequentially as they moved through the building, killing wantonly as they went. The men and women assembled in the room watched the screen as the attackers took the stairs to the correct floor and blew open locked doors with explosive charges. They seemed to move like an elite military force which had practiced the attack on a mock-up of the facility dozens of times – no hesitation, no confusion, just a deadly choreography. At the lab itself, after killing the occupants, the men breached the refrigerated door to the virus storage unit with a small charge on the side of the door, rather than the front of the door. Statler paused the video and said, "Our explosive technicians were very impressed by this one. They blew open the door and damaged none of the glass inside. To say it's a neat trick is an understatement."
"It's why the charge was placed to the side, Jenny," said Chuck.
"Oh?" asked Statler. "How so, Chuck?"
"It looked like a tiny shaped-charge. The force of the blast would have been shearing and not perpendicular to the contents of the unit. Basically, it was designed to miss the glass," he said. "A neat trick for sure, though. Without question, they had practiced it on models of the box they were breaching. Almost impossible to do it without practical experience."
"Thank you," said Statler.
She resumed the playback and they watched the man carefully take five glass vials, pack them in a padded armored container and leave. The men turned and followed him out of the building and back into the trucks out front. The last images were of the trucks driving away.
"Nothing from traffic cams?" asked a man in a State Police uniform.
"No. Disappeared," said Statler.
Malone said, "Thank you, Agent Statler. Dr. Lafleur, can you tell us what they took?"
LaFleur stood up and addressed the room. "The Iblis Strain is a derivative of the influenza virus. Influenza, commonly called 'the flu,' is a major focus of our work in Bethesda, protecting the nation against the virus as it mutates year to year. Globally, the flu kills over half a million people every year. More if there's a serious pandemic – the last one of those was the Russian flu in 1977. We spend a great deal of time working with this virus, changing its genome, testing what it might do in the future. Messing around with the genome is called gain of function. We hope to be able to predict how the virus will react to given situations so we can better defend against them.
"Within that gain of function work, we developed this particular virus, which we call the Iblis Strain..."
Sarah leaned over and whispered something into Chuck's ear. Chuck nodded. She made a point of not looking at Jill as she did so, but she mentally scolded herself. This woman should not be on her mind during this briefing.
LaFleur continued. "The gain of function on this particular virus strain was extraordinary. The communicability tripled. The lethality increased a hundred-fold. It's a very bad virus. Very, very scary. We have no direct evidence of what it might do to humans, but among the animal testing we did do, it was off-the-charts dangerous and deadly."
Chuck said, "What are we talking about, Doctor? End of the world kind of thing? What can this do in the real world if it's released?"
LaFleur paused and said, "No. The R-zero for this virus, according to the computers, is very low. An infected person won't infect too many others. The lethality is too high to create a global pandemic or something like it. From the moment someone is infected, they have about an hour to live."
"Shit," was heard from more than one person in the room amid some general rumbling.
"Sorry, Doctor. What is R-zero?" asked Sarah.
Jill decided to step in to answer the question. Her boss sat down. "It stands for the Basic Reproductive Number. Within a set of basic parameters, how many people would an infected individual in turn infect? Less than one means the virus dies out and a pandemic is impossible. The higher the number, the bigger the problem. In the case of the Iblis Strain, while the lethality is incredible, the R-zero is less than one. Of course, in an enclosed environment, like a plane for example, the spread would be horrific, but on something else...a college campus say, the infection would burn out quickly. There's no latency period where an infected person feels fine and walks around infecting others. Those infected would die, but the onset and death would be so quick that they wouldn't have a chance to infect too many more people before their infection was contained."
"Thank you, Dr. Roberts," said Sarah.
"Of course, Agent Walker," said Jill.
"Ok," said Chuck with a sigh. "Just so I can recap here. You guys took the flu virus, pretty dangerous in its own right, messed with its genome to make it more communicable and exponentially more deadly, then named it after Satan – right, Iblis is the leader of the demons in the Koran, right? Satan. Do I have that right? And now it's gone missing with some vicious killers?" When he was met with silence, Chuck said, "What the fuck, guys? It didn't occur to anyone that this was a bad idea? Might not work out perfectly for all concerned?" He flailed his hands a bit at the possibilities.
"Well, in hindsight...," said LaFleur.
"I'll bet," said Bryce from behind them. There was a general chuckle around the room as law enforcement types quietly expressed their agreement with the Carmichael team. Although many would have loved to have the freedom to express themselves as freely as Carmichael's people did, they knew they didn't have the juice with the political establishment to step on any toes. Carmichael and his guys were understood to be special, maybe a bit privileged even. There was no jealousy among those men and women, as the respect for the Carmichael Team was hard earned.
"Ok," said Sarah. "Dr. LaFleur, how would the vials they took be stored? Where could the bad guys be keeping them?"
"Any household refrigerator. The virus doesn't have extraordinary requirements for storage."
"But if not refrigerated, it dies?" Chuck asked. "If it comes down to room temperature?"
"Yes," responded LaFleur. "Eventually."
"So, in order to disburse it, they would have to take it from the fridge and move immediately to the site of the disbursal. That's good to know," said Chuck.
The man from the WMD office said, "How would it be dispersed? If you wanted to kill some people, how would you do it?"
"It's an aerosol virus. Infection is by inhalation of droplets from an infected person, coughing, for instance. To kill more people? Feed it in liquified form into an HVAC system. That would work," said Roberts.
"Is it in liquified form now, of would they need a scientist to put it in that form?" asked Sarah.
"It's liquified now," said Roberts.
"Great," said Sarah with a sigh.
"It wouldn't get caught by the filters in HVAC systems?" asked the WMD man.
"Too small for the filters to catch. They'd pass right through," said Roberts.
"Vaccines?" asked the man.
"Years away at the earliest. We are working on some new techniques for creating vaccines more quickly, but even those techniques are at least a decade from any serious attempt," said Roberts.
"And anyway," said Chuck, "who would we vaccinate if we could?"
"Yeah, guess that's right, Carmichael," said the WMD man, nodding.
"Ok," said a man from DHS counter-terrorism. If Chuck remembered correctly, the man's name was Singh. "What's next?"
"We wait for them to contact us and see what they want," said Chuck.
"No good, Carmichael," said Singh. "The next contact might be a mass casualty event."
"It might be. Hell, it probably will be. And we should do everything we can to find them before then. But, don't be mistaken. They will contact us," said Chuck.
"How can you be so sure?" asked Singh.
"Because that was the whole point," said Chuck, with only a hint of frustration. "This was an inside job. One or more persons at NIAID were in on this operation..."
Jill said, angry, "Now wait one minute, Chuck..."
"Don't interrupt," said Sarah, firmly. Instantly, Jill fell silent, and noticed that Chuck hadn't even looked at her when she spoke, concentrating on the men and women at the front of the room.
"Given the inside nature, the thieves could have taken the virus at any time. Take it on a Friday night, we might have not even known it was missing until Monday morning. But they didn't. They did a violent smash-and-grab and killed fourteen people. Why do that? Why do something to draw that much attention? There's only one practical reason, drawing the attention was the point. So, we would all...every one of us in this room, freak out. Gotta be honest, it's sort of working with me at least."
"Your point, Chuck?" asked DNI Malone.
"They will be contacting us, Sir. They will be making demands."
Jenny Statler spoke, "Sir, the analysis of the FBI agrees with Carmichael. As he said, they may stage an event or two, but they will contact us with demands."
"I understand," said Malone looking down at his hands.
"If you're going to make a public announcement," said LaFleur, "I'm going to have to brief Dr. Fauci, my boss."
The DHS man said, "No public announcement. At least not yet."
Sarah said, "The fourteen casualties had families. We won't be able to keep it secret for ever."
Malone said, "Agreed. It's going to get out sooner rather than later, but we stonewall for now. Even to the families."
"Unless the bad guys release the news themselves," said Statler, with a shrug. "Just to ratchet up the pressure."
LaFleur spoke up. "Why do you think it's an inside job, Agent Carmichael? I trust my people."
"The evidence is pretty clear, Dr.," said Chuck. "They knew exactly what they wanted to steal. They took it and left everything else in place. They knew everything about the security situation at the building. Hell, they knew enough about the refrigerated cabinet with the Iblis Strain to have a special explosive charge ready for it. Let me ask you this, Dr. LaFleur, is there another virus in that cabinet that could have all of us here as concerned as we are? Something worse than the Iblis Strain they could have taken instead?"
LaFleur was silent for a few moments, and finally said, "No, Carmichael. No. There wasn't. That was the worst of it. Perfect for their purposes. And they knew that coming in. SHIT," he said, banging a fist on the tabletop. "You're right. It was an inside job." He pushed himself back in his seat, obviously (or apparently) upset at the revelation.
"Exactly." Turning to Agent Statler, Chuck said, "FISA warrants?"
"Yeah. DOJ is working on it now. Top to bottom," she said. "All things considered, I think we'll have them within a few hours."
"Ok if my team takes the top? I think the need-to-know is going to be tight on the virus itself. Any janitor will know the security systems, but the existence of the Iblis Strain will be somewhat more tightly held," he said.
"We hope," she said, giving him a small smile. "In the meantime, there's some other stuff we can focus on..." She proceeded to assign some more mundane tasks to several other personnel and government organizations.
She and Malone ended with a request for questions. After handling a few of them, the meeting broke up.
While Bryce made a beeline around the table to engage Jill, Malone and Statler sought out Chuck. "Jenny," asked Chuck, "can we bunk with you guys for the duration? Hang out in your offices?"
With a grin, Jenny Statler said, "You know, at this point I think it's best that we just assign you permanent offices here." She laid a hand on his arm and said, "You and your guys are always welcome with us, Chuck. We got you covered. You remember where my office is?"
"Thanks, Jenny. Yeah, we can find your office," he said.
Malone said, "What do you think, guys?"
Chuck said, "I think it's going to get much worse before we can find the virus. I think they will pull off one or two catastrophes before they contact us. Just to get us even more on edge."
Jenny said, "We'll have to contain them as much as possible, but Chuck's right. Sorry, Director."
Shaking his head, Malone said, "And we have no idea what they want."
"Peace on earth," suggested Sarah.
"Brotherhood among men," said Jenny.
"And women," said Chuck.
Jenny didn't respond verbally, but gave him a fist bump.
Malone made a sour face and griped, "Yeah, right." He quickly shook hands with Statler, Chuck and Sarah and said, "Next stop the White House. Have to brief POTUS. He's got his head deeply into the economic disaster right now. Believe it or not, I'll have to work to get his attention."
"Good luck, Director," said Chuck.
As Malone left them, Chuck noticed Jill hovering off to the side awkwardly. She had come around the table to talk to him, blowing off Bryce's attempt at re-connection.
She caught his eye. "Hi, Chuck. It's been a while. How are you? You look great," she said with a small smile.
"I'm great, Jill. Never better," he said with a smile of his own, taking Sarah's hand. "Other than trying to find your missing super-bug, that is."
"Oh, good, good. As you were being introduced, you know no one said what agency you are with," she said.
"Yeah. They didn't, did they?" he said. "Anyway, how are you? PhD, huh?"
"Yup. Virology from MIT. You remember I'm a California girl and I didn't much care for the Boston winters, let me tell you," she said shaking her head.
"Well, now you have the DC summers," he said.
"Ugh," she said.
Casey said, "Catch up with your old squeeze on your own time, Moron. We got work to do."
To Jill, with a small smile, Chuck said, "He's always mean to me."
Almost automatically, Sarah said to Jill, "Ignore them. They actually love each other."
"Casey's right, though, Jill. Another time. We've all got a lot of work to do," said Chuck. "Take it easy."
"Cup of coffee sometime, I guess," Jill said, hopefully.
"Count on it," said Chuck, beginning to lead his team away without looking back at her. Jill stood alone in the crowded room looking at Chuck and his team leave with an unreadable expression on her face. After a bit, Bryce turned back and gave her a friendly smile.
"Thanks," whispered Sarah to Casey once they were out of earshot of Jill.
Casey grunted once, meaning, 'you're welcome.'
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A/N2: I remember reading a newspaper report of a healthy man in NYC one hundred years ago (or so) getting on the subway in Brooklyn and being dead of the Spanish flu by the time the train reached Manhattan. Scary shit. By the way, for anyone interested, the Spanish flu didn't originate in Spain. Most of the world was under media lock-down because of the First World War. Spain, a non-belligerent, wasn't. The Spanish newspapers were the first to report the pandemic (which, arguably, started in the American Midwest) and the virus became known as, therefore, the Spanish flu. Spain is pissed off at the misnaming to this day (2/23).
A/N3: I know the story is getting to be (has gotten to be) ridiculous in length. I do appreciate all of you who stick with me. Thanks, my friends.
A/N4: What think you?