A/N1: I'm pretty sure ownership of Chuck is kept in a safe place.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Later that morning, the men and women reporting for work at the NSA facility in Crofton, Maryland were met by security guards who sent them home for the day. The facility was closed. Only a few had heard the rumors of the deaths at the similar facility nearby and for those few, they went home immediately and, if possible, hugged their children.

Crofton was an ancillary facility to the OAKSTAR project, pulling telecommunications data off fiber optic cables. Again, the email received by Beckman had threatened continued attacks on NSA facilities until the domestic surveillance programs were ended.

In the parking lot behind the Crofton building was a decontamination tent, vans, and cars. Standing around and waiting for the NIAID team to leave the building were Team B, including Bryce Larkin, looking bright eyed and energetic, notwithstanding a long night. With him were General Beckman and her man Berkley. There was another man with them who was introduced as Dr. Williams.

Dr. Jill Roberts, looking tired, left the building, having pulled off her hood and face mask. She held a black hard plastic case in one hand and came directly to the General. "Thank God, General. Today we got here in time. The virus was still contained. I've got it here. You and your people reacted well. Saved lives."

"Thank you, Dr. Roberts," said Beckman. "This is Dr. Williams, from the CDC."

Jill turned to Dr. Williams and said, "Yes. I spoke to Dr. Fauci this morning. He told me someone from CDC would be here to pick up the virus if we were able to recover it in time. Is that your understanding, Dr. Williams?"

"It is, Dr. Roberts," said the man.

"Well then, here you go." She handed him the case. "Your people read the data sheets, right? You'll take the required precautions."

"We will. Thank you, Doctor," he said.

"Jill," said Chuck. "Where did you find the virus?"

"It was in the HVAC room on the fourth floor. I had my guys leave the door open. I left the device in place for you. I only touched it to remove the vial. I assumed you would want to send in the FBI forensic people."

"Yes, thanks. We will," said Chuck.

"Any luck on the last one we found?" she asked.

"No. Strike out. No prints and it's made from some simple bullshit parts you can buy in any hardware store. Probably be the same for this one, but we have to check anyway."

"Sorry," she said.

"Yeah. Me too," he said, shaking his head. "This whole thing is frustrating as hell."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The next email was received only hours later, in the afternoon.

To: Beckman

From: Concerned Patriots

You don't seem to be getting the message to leave the American people alone. You are forcing our hand. This evening, we will strike directly at the heart of the beast. The Iblis Strain will be released in the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. These attacks will continue until you see the light. Any more death is on your head alone.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The NSA headquarters had been evacuated immediately, the security systems deactivated, and all computers shut down remotely. Dr. Jill Roberts and her NIAID medical team arrived at Fort Meade at 5:00PM, soon after the email was received, and unloaded their gear. A half dozen men and women set up a decontamination tent, in case it was needed. A crew of ten put on their protective equipment and prepared to head inside the massive building within an hour of their arrival. As before, several of them, Roberts included, had satchels on their shoulders with gear they thought they might need inside the building.

Dr. Roberts stopped to speak to General Beckman, who stood outside waiting for the results of their search.

"Two in one day, General. Hopefully, the FBI and Agent Carmichael will be able to put a stop to this soon. It must be so disruptive for you."

"We are accomplishing the mission, even with the impediments, Doctor. Thank you for your continued assistance."

"You're very welcome. I'll let you know what we find inside," she said. "Hopefully it will be like this morning and we'll be in time to interrupt the dispersal."

"Good luck," said the General.

Roberts and her people had decided beforehand to split up to cover more ground inside the massive building.

Roberts went down to one of the lower levels alone. The empty building was eerie and the sound of her footsteps echoed. She could hear her own breath through the respirators attached to the face mask. She followed the map in her head and turned into an otherwise closed section. With the security systems disabled, she was able to enter easily. She turned a corner, entering the computer room which was her destination, and was abruptly brought up short with surprise.

"Good evening, Jill," said Chuck. He was sitting in one of the computer chairs, his feet up on the desk in front of him. He wore jeans and a button-down shirt, and, of course, Chucks on his feet. His hands were behind his head. He looked thoroughly relaxed.

"Chuck? What are you.." she started to ask.

"You ever read Sherlock Holmes? For all the time we spent together all those years ago, I don't remember ever asking you that. Anyway, there was a story called The Adventure of the Silver Blaze. It's famous for the Holmes quote where Holmes says to a Scotland Yard detective, 'And then there's the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.' The other detective, not as smart as Holmes, of course, says, 'But the dog did nothing in the nighttime.' And Holmes says, 'That's the curious incident.' You see, Jill, sometimes, the absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence."

"Chuck, I have no idea what you are talking about, but you should be in protective gear. The virus..." she started to say.

"So, if you are going to murder someone and try to make it look like a suicide, it would be best if you made sure all your tees were crossed and your eyes dotted. Especially when a smart young FBI agent goes to take a look afterwards." Jill fell silent and just looked at him through the lenses of her facemask. "You see, on LaFleur's desk was his home computer. The same computer on which the suicide note was typed, of course. By the way, did you compose that masterpiece?" Jill remained silent. "Just saying, it was more than a little bit ham-handed. Every one of us looked at it and decided it was fake. Just a word of advice, when a suspect screams 'Don't look over there,' that's probably a good reason to look over there. Anyway, next to the computer was a half full glass of scotch. And here's the curious incident. There were no fingerprints from LaFleur on the glass. None. Now isn't that weird?" Through the mask of her protective gear, Jill Roberts just looked at Chuck silently. "Right? There should be his fingerprints on the glass if he was sitting there drinking while composing his suicide note. There were prints on the scotch bottle. LaFleur's prints were on the bottle, but nothing on the glass. As if someone else, wearing gloves maybe, had taken a bottle from his shelf and a glass from the cabinet. There would be his prints on the bottle, because bottles don't get cleaned before going back in the cabinet the way glasses do. Oh, we found prints on the glass, which turned out later to belong to his cleaning lady, but what matters is not the prints on the glass. What matters is the absence of his prints on the glass. Right? You see, that's the first anomaly that the FBI saw. And it led to a whole series of connected investigations, many of them computer based."

Jill reached up and pulled the hood, facemask and respirator off her head so she could look at Chuck more clearly. She dropped them on the floor at her feet.

Chuck began to shake his head. "Let me tell you, I was a pretty busy guy yesterday. It got so even I couldn't keep up with the computer workload of what had to be done, and done immediately, of course. Ticking clock, right? Before you had the chance to murder any more people. I had to reach out to Jorge, a smart friend from Langley, for another pair of hands. He came into town to the FBI office and joined me there to help out. Little field trip for him, I guess. Really nice smart guy and really good with computers. Anyway, the two of us spent most of yesterday afternoon working on various computer systems. Somewhat frantically, to tell the truth. After I saw you in Centreville, I really was going to go to Fort Meade, but when I got a call from the FBI agent looking into LaFleur's suicide Beckman diverted her car and dropped me at the FBI instead. Want to know some of what we found out?"

Jill looked at him silently without expression.

"Right, I'm going to take that as a 'yes.' I'm sure you're curious. Here we go. Someone remotely went into the camera feeds at LaFleur's condo building for the morning of the murder. The feeds were altered to erase two periods and replace them with looped footage. A five minute period between 2:45AM and 2:50AM and another one between 3:29AM and 3:35AM. During each of those times, the rear door to the building, the service entrance, was opened. Knowing the times to look for, and traffic was very light at that hour, we started to look at traffic cams. You'll never guess what was driving around then. A big black SUV. What's with you guys, anyway? Did you get a bulk rate discount on that style and color? Anyway, take a look at this still capture from one of the traffic cams."

Chuck took his feet off the desk and reached for a piece of paper which he handed her. It was a photograph of Jill Roberts in the passenger seat of a big black SUV. It was blurry, but clearly her.

"Doesn't prove anything," said Jill, expressionless.

Chuck put his feet back up on the table. "True. Want to hear some other interesting bits and pieces? The two young scientists who died in the Bethesda attack? The ones working overnight? They suspected you of doing something wrong. Something illegal. They weren't really sure what it was, but they communicated with each other by text and email (using their home computers, of course) about their suspicions. But you knew that, didn't you? You knew they were watching you. It's why you made sure they were both working that night, so they would die in the gunfire. But what you didn't know is that they had gone to LaFleur with their suspicions. On his computer was an encrypted file. It was a description of his own suspicions of you and his observations of what you were up to. He hadn't concluded anything by the end of the file, but he was looking closely. And then, the night after the attack, after I convinced him in the meeting that there was a traitor in NIAID, you and he spoke for almost an hour on the phone. What did he say that frightened you enough to murder him?" Jill was silent. "I don't know, but it was a fatal mistake on his part." Chuck shook his head sadly.

"We talked about how terrible it was that there seemed to be a traitor," said Jill, her voice as hard as her expression. "You still can't prove anything."

"You're right. If that's the best we could do, we'd have trouble in a court of law. But remember we got the FISA warrants signed yesterday, Jill. So, we could do more, a lot more actually. You have three cell phones. They're with you right now, in fact. Since about three o'clock this morning, I've owned all three. Everything you've said. Every conversation you had, either on the phone or in person, all day. I know them all, Jill. I've recorded them all. Including the conversations with your handler who calls himself, arrogantly if you ask me, Leader. Wonder how the Sachem feels about that designation? Bit presumptuous maybe?"

"How did you?...Bryce," she said after a moment's thought.

"Yeah," said Chuck. "I was in the suite next door to his. He handed me your bag with your phones into the hotel hallway once you'd fallen asleep. I did my stuff and gave it back to him."

"You sent him to seduce me. To take me to his bed and then betray me," she said bitterly.

"Nope. I asked him to get your phones to me without you knowing. He chose how to do it. He's too good a spy for me to tell him how to go about his business. And he's dealt with you Fulcrum assholes for a very long time now, remember," said Chuck.

"But you knew what he would do, and you approved of it," said Jill, with venom.

"Let's say I accepted it," said Chuck with a shrug.

"I'm disappointed in you. You've changed, Chuck. And not for the better," she said.

"Jill, you've murdered forty-five people in the last few days. Why don't we agree that, perhaps, neither one of us knew the other quite as well as we thought we did."

"It's not over. I still have the virus."

"Right. The last three vials," said Chuck.

"No. Four. I gave the CDC guy this morning a phony," she said.

"AAAAAGGGNNNN," Chuck made a loud buzzer noise. "Wrong. That's a bluff. Seriously, you're not very good at this, Jill. I spoke to Dr. Fauci last night and had him make that call to you this morning. Nice guy, by the way. He personally checked what you gave Williams. It was the real deal. Can't have you and your Fulcrum buddies wandering around with any more virus if we can help it."

"Shit. Here's the deal, Chuck. You are going to let me go or the virus I do have is going to be distributed in a way that will kill thousands. Simple math. One person to save many lives," she growled.

"Yeah. No. Not going to happen. You see, in addition to listening to you, I also tracked where you went today. Cell phones, right? Colonel Casey led my team and an FBI Swat team to hit the building in White Marsh and recovered the remaining vials. The hit went off while you were setting up the decontamination tent outside." Chuck took one hand down and took his cell phone from his shirt pocket, waggling it toward Jill, then putting it back. "I just received word that the remaining virus has been secured and all of your Fulcrum friends in White Marsh are dead and none of my friends got hurt. Clean sweep. We took Dr. Williams along to take control of the recovered virus and give it to Dr. Fauci. You see, you were so convinced that only you could safely handle the virus that you led us right to it when you went to collect the vial you used this morning. Tiny bit of arrogance yourself, maybe. And we know you didn't bother to bring any here with you tonight after all. Unnecessary for this part of the job. You'd already gotten what you and Fulcrum wanted."

"You don't know anything, Chuck. Or should I call you Carmichael?"

"I couldn't care less what you call me, Jill. Want me to call you Sandstorm?" Jill didn't reply. "Yeah. Whatever. Anyway, we now know that this whole thing was just to get to the intersect computers here." He gestured to the computers surrounding him. "You and your friends needed the latest research because Fulcrum's own work has been reaching dead ends and killing anyone you tried it on. My team and I shut down your little horror show in LA just a week or so ago. And I sent a nasty computer virus into whatever backup server you were using just to mess with you guys some more. So, Fulcrum needed to know what was going on with the intersect research here, but almost two months ago I ordered all the computers here airgapped to protect the data from Orion. Fulcrum was screwed. Now you needed to get in and get to the actual physical hard drives. You stole the virus and ran a demonstration or two just to get this building evacuated and the security systems deactivated. To get you inside. It's the only reason you staged this whole thing and killed all those people. Very smart, by the way, to tell Beckman to disable the computers remotely. Nice sense of security it seemingly imparted that you and your friends couldn't get into the NSA's databases. Not that you cared a whit about the NSA databases, of course. But that wouldn't do shit to the Intersect computers, which weren't remotely accessible anyway, and those were the ones you were really after."

"If you know so much, why'd you let me get this far?"

"Because despite everything, we didn't know who else on your NIAID medical team was Fulcrum. Anyone joining you here would have been in the same boat as you. But you came alone."

"Alone. Yes, I did. I came alone. And so did you. The thing is, you shouldn't have come alone, Chuck. You may be oh-so-smart, but that wasn't a smart plan at all," she sneered as she reached into the bag she carried at her side.

Just as her gloved hand closed around the handle of the pistol in the bag she felt the hard push of a metal gun barrel touching the back of her head.

"Go ahead, Roberts. Go for it," said Sarah, her voice holding all the warmth of the wind across the Arctic ice.

"Who ever said I came alone, Jill?" asked Chuck, who hadn't moved from his position with his feet up and his hands behind his head. His posture was relaxed, but his voice was flinty hard.

Neither woman moved. Sarah whispered, "Come on. Go for it. Maybe you can move faster than I can. Maybe my weapon will misfire or jam. You don't know. How about trying to spin and knock my gun aside before I can put a bullet in your brain? Worth a try, right? Come on. I'm begging you to try. I'm begging you, Roberts. Please try it."

Slowly, Jill took her empty hand from the bag and held her hands out in front of her.

"Too bad," said Sarah.

Chuck took his phone out, pushed a few buttons, and said, "Jenny, we're done here. She was alone. Send a team to take her off our hands, please. General Beckman will give you a guide to get to where we are."

He put down the phone on the desk beside him. The women were still standing unmoving and silent as statues, Sarah's weapon touching the back of Jill's head. An observer would have had to look closely to see that they were breathing. But Jill was staring at Chuck with hatred in her eyes.

Finally, Jill said, "Revenge, Chuck? Is that what this is? Revenge for me breaking up with you all those years ago?"

"Wow. What an incredibly self-centered thing to think. I hate to break it to you Jill, but not everything is about you. Not the way the world works. You're just not that important."

The silence resumed. Shortly, Beckman, Jenny Statler and Tony Mulia came into the room with two other agents in suits. As the room filled, Sarah said, "Gun in the bag at her hip, but I haven't frisked her."

Statler reached in and retrieved the weapon. Sarah stood back and let one of the agents frisk the woman.

Beckman moved to stand in front of Roberts and look her hard in the eyes. She said, "Agent Statler, as you take Roberts in please don't do the usual paperwork. There will be no trial. The Intelligence Community will be taking her off your hands shortly."

Statler said, "General, I'm sorry. I don't have the authority to do that."

"I understand. Director Malone is on the phone with Attorney General Mukasey as we speak. The authorization will be forthcoming." Beckman had not taken her eyes off Roberts as she spoke to Statler. "She will never again see the light of day."

Once she had been frisked and cuffed, the two agents took her by the elbows and began to turn her to take her away. She pulled free of them for a moment and looked hard at Chuck. He looked back at her without expression and remained silent. She looked like she wanted to say something, some dramatic parting statement or insult or something, but, in the end, she just turned and left silently with the FBI men.

"Phew," said Chuck, getting up from his seat. "Glad the IC is taking her, General. Be interesting to see what she can tell us about Fulcrum."

"If she talks," said Statler.

"She'll talk," said Sarah with certainty.

"Agreed," said Beckman. "Thank you all. And thank your teams for me. The nation owes a debt to all of you. Some brilliant investigation, deduction and strategy. Well done."

"It was mostly an FBI show, General. We were just happy to help," said Chuck.

Jenny Statler started to laugh. "Chuck, you really still have no idea how Washington works, do you? You're supposed to hog the glory, not give it away."

"Not my style, Jenny," said Chuck., with a smile and a shrug.

"It's why we love him," said Sarah with a smile, pulling him close to her side with one arm around his waist. "One of the reasons."

Beckman smiled a little smile and said, "Enough credit to go around, I think."

Chuck said, "Hey, join us for drinks at the hotel. It's on the government dime."

"Sure, Chuck. I can't afford the Hay-Adams booze on my salary, so I'd love to," said Jenny.

"Cool," said Tony with a grin.

"General, can we tempt you?" asked Sarah.

"Thank you, but no. I'm going to see to reactivating my headquarters. But enjoy yourselves. You've earned it."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Statler and Mulia settled themselves into the comfortable chairs in the Off the Record bar together with the five members of Team B, three of whom had been waiting for them to arrive from Fort Meade.

Everyone went around with the waitress and ordered drinks, making small talk until the drinks arrived. Jenny wanted to know all about the wedding plans and wanted to see a picture of the wedding dress. Bryce and Zondra, who had been listening to the conversation between Jill and Chuck, wanted to talk about that. Both expressed the opinion that Chuck had been pretty badass, a characterization which he humbly waved away.

Once the waitress returned with the drinks, Chuck raised his and said, "To new days."

There was a light chorus of "yeah" and "new days" as they clinked glasses.

Before she could taste her drink, Jenny's phone rang. Reluctantly, she looked at the screen and said, "I'm sorry. I have to take this." She got up to leave the bar and take the call on the street.

The others began to drink their cocktails. Moments later Jenny returned looking very shaken. "Tony, we have to go. Roberts never arrived downtown. The car was just found by Maryland State Police. Both of our men are dead and she's gone."

"Oh, shit," said Chuck.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

A/N2: And that's a wrap. The Iblis Strain is back in the bottle and safe. (Frankly, I hope they throw it in a furnace.) Jill Roberts is in the wind, for now. Carmichael and company have scored another victory over Fulcrum. Gotta admit, this was a fun one to write. Personally, I never bought Jill's whole "Fulcrum told me to break up with you" explanation from canon. As if a huge deadly spy organization is going to give a shit about the love life of some 21 year old recruit. So, I left that out of my little AU. Also, canon never gave us a Bryce and Jill meeting, so we never did see how he'd react to her in everyone's new circumstances. I think he'd hate her (even in canon, if it had happened). Sandstorm was Jill's Fulcrum code name, which Chuck would have learned by listening to her conversation with Leader.

A/N3: Did I fool anyone into thinking that, in New Day, Jill might be a good guy (or at least not a bad guy)? One of my friends did suggest that, but I had (and have) other plans for her. Let me know what you guys think, please.

A/N4: Jorge is Jorge Ribas, the smart techie computer guy who helped Chuck track down Bryce in London in chapter 121.

A/N5: In the first few weeks of covid, when everything was shut down in the extreme, I looked at the empty streets of my city and thought to myself 'Wow, any bad guys who wanted to do bad things would have a free run. No cops or anyone else around. If you wanted to rob a bank, this is the time to do it.' Anyway, that thought was the kernel that led to this arc.

A/N6: Next up, the 2nd Orion Arc. Let's go see how that one starts, huh?