As of 16 December, 2014, I don't own Chuck et al.

-o0o-

"Chuck," she said taking my hands in hers, "what if…" she looked up at me and said sincerely, "what if there's going to be a coup? What if…" she tightened her grip and continued, "what if someone is going to try and take over the CIA?"

-o0o-

"So," asked Lieutenant Turner, "That was when you decided to join with people you knew to be conmen, and break into Roake Enterprises?"

'Well,' I thought to myself, 'not at that exact moment, but….' before I admitted, "Um, I wasn't going to say it quite like that, but…. well… yeah, that was part of the decision."

She Spocked a single eyebrow at me. It wasn't fair, that. I'd spent years trying to raise just the one eyebrow, and all I seemed to be able to do was scrunch everything up. Everyone else on the planet seemed to be able to do it effortlessly.

"I was trapped," I explained, "as far as I knew, there was an NSA hit man hunting for me if I said anything, and the fate of the American Intelligence community rested on our actions."

"And," I added after a moment of reflection, and she gave me a sceptical expression, "I realize that that sounds much lamer now that I've said it out aloud, than it did at the time."

-o0o-

She'd suggested somewhere we could all meet up. The expression 'we,' evidently included Bryce.

I'm pretty sure I counted to ten, before I said as calmly as I could, "Nowhere I can think of. All I have now is work and home nowadays, thanks to your boyfriend. He's not coming to my home. A," I ticked off a single finger, "I simply don't want him anywhere near the place, it'll upset Ellie, and that's just not gonna happen. And B," up came finger number two, "if he comes to the Buy More, Morgan will see him, tell Ellie, and then we're back to square one," and with that, finger number two retracted back home.

She said, "How about…" her eyes searched off to her right while she thought.

'Oh, please don't say the beach.' I thought to myself. 'Not that. I need that. Not the beach…'

"How about…. um, the Buy More, there's a deep fried corn dog store just across the lot in the plaza. We could all meet there?"

"The Weiner…. ah…. Weinerlicious?" I asked incredulously. "That place?"

"Ever been there?" she challenged with a slight smirk.

"Well, nooooo…." I said hesitantly. I wasn't sure I wanted to go in there, just on principal. To be honest, I wasn't even sure what it was doing here in sunny, health conscious SoCal.

"I don't think anybody goes there," she intimated, leaning forward to me. She added with a slight grin, "It's probably a front for something; I can't see it making any money. But the point is, we could meet there, and no one would see us."

"…Jeff maybe…." I considered. The way Morgan told it; he'd deep fried a bag of Twinkies once. And by 'bag,' I mean the wholesale sized bag 'o bags. A man capable of that was capable of anything. Which was also quite probably the first time the word 'capable' had been used in a sentence that included Jeff in any way, shape or form. "And Harry." I added after a moment of reflection, "I think Harry Tang and the manager there, Skeeter? Jeeter? I think they're kindred spirits."

She dazzled a smile up me. "So, that means no one of any actual real importance, then."

God, I hadn't realized how much I'd missed that smile.

I also realized I was hooked all over again. I knew I shouldn't trust her. I couldn't trust her. She was a con-woman. By default, I should hate her. She was, all said and done, the girlfriend of the man I hated. The man who ruined just about everything good in my life, and betrayed me. Betrayed me for no real reason. I shouldn't just go along with her because she'd smiled and batted her eyes at me. I knew I should be strong.

I also knew I was also pretty much going to do whatever she wanted.

Smarter men than I have been made fools of, when they think with the wrong head.

Which, strictly speaking, was not applicable in my case. Stunningly beautiful as she was, I think I can honestly say my attraction to Sarah Walker wasn't sexual.

Um, well…. Not entirely. Okay, so there was an element of that. She was, and it was difficult to ignore, first and foremost, a girl.

The bit in The Iliad about Agamemnon or the other one, the brother, sending the thousand ships to go see if Helen wanted to come back home when she was ready, was starting to make sense to me.

But loving Sarah Walker was more than just a hot rush of blood.

-o0o-

I'd never really felt it before, but as soon as I saw him, I bristled up. It is a curious sensation, and I was hyper aware of everything. Sarah had met me in the lot, and we walked in to the Wiener-what's-it store. Some spotty faced teenager, Skeeter or Jeeter, I guess, was behind the counter, making it obvious he wasn't serving us. Bryce was sitting with the nearest wall at his back. The hot smell of near-flashover oil was omnipresent, and there was a strangely sugary smell, probably the burnt dogs that by the looks of things had been sitting in the warming trays since sometime during the year the Berlin Wall fell.

She was right, how could this place make money?

I was about to sit opposite Bryce, when I realised he'd sat where he had in some sort of power play. If I sat opposite, then I'd have my back to the door. So I sat on his right, sort of facing the counter.

Sarah sat opposite me. This 'not sitting with your back to the door' was a whole lot more complicated that it seemed at first glance.

"Chuck," he leant forward to me and said, "I get that you don't want to be here. I honestly didn't want you involved, when I found it was you."

See? That was one of the annoying things about Bryce; he could seem genuinely honest. Like that book on Murphy's Laws had said, 'Once you can fake sincerity, you've got it made.'

I went first, I wanted this all over, quick and business-like. "Can we give the computer, the drive and everything back? Let them know what you found?"

"Chuck," Bryce began in that damned reasonable tone of his, "When we… we took the prototype, they unleashed Casey. Not to retrieve, but destroy. Destroy both the computer and anyone who knew about it." Bryce shook his head slightly and half smiled, "He doesn't get sent to fix things. He breaks them. He's cold-school, all he needs is the barcode tat on the back of his neck."

Sarah flicked her eyes back-and-forth between us. I could see she didn't get the Hitman reference, but that we both did. I guess she wasn't a gamer, but then not a lot of girls were.

"Chuck," he continued, "the first opportunity Casey had, he shot the laptop. I would've been next. Actually," he leaned closer to me and told me, "I think he didn't care if he hit me or the laptop first."

He glanced at and gave Sarah a 'Bryce special' smile, "We're only alive because of Sarah and her driving." Bryce focused that smile onto me, "You should have seen her. She was like one of those old Roger Moore James Bond stunt driving scenes. Backwards down the stairs, a jay-turn, 'n everything."

From the way Sarah was smiling a faint blush into her lap, I figured he wasn't bullshitting.

"So, we need the other laptop from Roarke," he said. Way calmer than that little nugget should be said, by the way.

"Um, what?" I said, "Why?"

"Second opinion," he said, shrugging slightly. "A fully working version might give us better data, or at least corroborate the first one."

"No," I said, not liking where this was going.

"That way, we can go to Roarke, the CIA, everyone, and show them what's happening."

"There is no way I'm getting involved in this," I said.

-o0o-

"You know how cliché it is to pull up outside the building in a plumbers van, right?" I asked.

Bryce grinned, "Sometimes you just gotta honor the classics, Chuck."

I hate to say it. I mean I really hate to say it, but I hadn't realized how much I'd missed Bryce. But then he said, "Best if you stay in the van, Chuck."

Then again…..

Sarah brushed past me, her hand drifting from one of my shoulders to the other, said, "Chuck, see if you can't keep an eye out for us. Call me on my cell if you see anything, okay?"

I gestured to the couple of lap tops we'd hit with the magic Wi-Fi hack, "You want me to hack into the security feed of third largest software company in this solar system, and use their camera feed to watch over you?"

She grinned, and leant in close, "Yeah. You went to Stanford, right? Oh," she then intimated, "see if you can't do that loop the video thing they do on the TV, when spies do this sort of thing."

She kissed my cheek, and then left the van closing the door behind her.

I resisted the urge to touch my face where she'd kissed me, but I was very aware of the feel of her lips on my cheek. "Loop the video," I muttered to myself, "….right…. See if I can't do the loop the video thing…."

Well, first off, I was into their system. I remember reading Dad's old dog eared copy of Gibson's Neuromancer when I was about thirteen or fourteen. That book, as much as what dad did was why I got into computers and thence Stanford. In that, the image of the main character, Case, virtually riding a wire frame construct to enter a data structure had always resonated with me, probably because of the butterfly scene in Tron.

The reality of hacking into Roarke's security was more like just doing your on-line banking. Click here and enter your password. The trick was to have the icebreaker engine up and running way in the background first, chugging away with possible passwords.

That, and having a few alternate screens up and running, ready if the first one failed, and the ability to kill a failed screen before the 'Hi there! Something interesting is happening,' lights started flashing in the building whose loading dock we were parked in.

Have I mentioned my kidneys feel like they're doing loop-the-loops?

Laptop number one (reading from left to right) was nosing around under the skirt of the security systems. Laptop two was tracing the power network of the building and number three was acting as muscle for the icebreaker and as backup for the other two.

I let the security laptop look after itself, everything looked fairly normal. The power grid showed a massive amount of usage somewhere in the guts of the lower levels of the campus. And I do mean massive. Massive, like when Syndrome was holding Monsieur Incroyable in the electric shackles thing type of massive. The graphic of the power grid in that area looked like what I thought CERN's Hadron Collider would look like, just smaller.

The handshake ended after three attempts, and I was in to the security system. Okay, so 'looping the video' was a lot more complicated than just clicking 'record,' letting it roll for a minute and then electronically splicing the loop into the system. On t'other hand, that is in essence pretty much what I did. Oh naturally, there was a lot more to it than that. Modern security is way more than some guy in a rent-a-cop uniform half watching a video screen while he eats a donut. A lot more. There are motion sensors, thermal sensors, electronic locks and all that James Bond stuff.

But when you've got a CIA, or NSA, issued magic hack, some of it is pretty darned easy.

Okay, that brought me back to reality with a thud. I was sitting in a 'borrowed' van, using software of questionable, if elegant (insert modest cough here) legality while my compatriots wandered around inside a building they decidedly had no legal reason to be inside.

Suddenly it was a pucker factor of about seven point nine. For a terrifying moment, I half expected some large cop to open the door of the van and tell me the John Cleese line, "You're fucking nicked, sunshine."

My phone jarred me out of the panic attack by vibrating in my pocket. I sort of squeaked, and then saw it was Sarah calling. "Hi," I answered. Witty repartee, that's me.

'Hey Chuck,' came her voice. 'We're going to start on the lab we found the first one in. Can you see us?'

"Yeah," I replied, resisting the urge to finger wave at the image of them on the security screen. "I've got you." I was going to mention the 'Hadron' room, but I decided to hold off unless that became need-to-know.

On the security feed on-screen, I saw her activate her Bluetooth earpiece and hook it over her ear, so while she was doing that, I put the earbuds in as I plugged then headphones into my cell. I waited until I could hear the sound change to indicate it was working. As she pocketed her cell, I asked, "So, do you feel like a spy when you wear that?" She grinned in reply up at the nearest camera.

I checked the corridor on the other side of the next door, and realised I should be casting a wider net. I rolled my chair sideways to the spare laptop, now idle since the security one was in, and I wrote a quick and dirty algorithm that would keep Sarah and Bryce central, and the nearest cameras to them open in a peripheral ring of windows. The fiddly bit of the algorithm was to keep Sarah and Bryce as the central large window as they moved from camera feed to camera feed.

I tried to not feel smug after I got it working.

The motion sensors showed where the building staff were, and I contemplated setting up a similar algorithm to follow the nearest readings. Next time, I decided. And then realised that there wouldn't be a next time. I wasn't sure how I felt about that.

The target lab showed as empty of human occupation, and I told her so. 'Thanks Chuck,' she replied. I heard Bryce ask something, but I couldn't hear what, and then Sarah clearly reply, 'Chuck says it's empty.' He nodded to her, glanced over his shoulder up at the camera watching the door, and gave it a quick grin and then he slowly shouldered the door open.

-o0o-

The lab was a bust. I don't know if I was expecting the Roarke to be sitting on a bed of red velvet under a spotlight, or if Bryce had to reveal a stethoscope so he could listen to the tumblers of the huge hidden safe that wasn't there, but none of those things happened.

Both Sarah and Bryce looked around the room, and after a quick look, Sarah said, 'Chuck, it's not here. Um, is there…. is there….' Bryce said something not picked up by the Bluetooth, and Sarah nodded and said, 'I'm asking him. Chuck, can you bring up a floor plan. See if there's anywhere it might be?'

"Okay, I'm on it."

Floor plans, floor plans. The TV makes this look so much easier, and just quietly, far less kidney slash lower intestinal tract involved when they do it. It felt like that first time I watched when Riker led an away team to recover Captain Picard/Locutus from inside the Borg cube, claustrophobic. This was the only lab on this level, all the other levels above seemed to be just ordinary software offices.

"I don't suppose there's a conspicuous painting on the wall somewhere?" I half muttered.

'What?' she replied, clearly baffled. I could see Bryce turn around, and then clearly ask what I'd said. 'He said something about a painting. Chuck, what did you say?'

'Tell him, no, there's no hidden wall safe. Well, if there is, it's not hidden behind a painting.' I heard him say, as he continued, 'Or poster of Raquel Welsh.'

Sarah's lips clearly showed her shaping the words 'What the….' but she remained quiet.

"Well then, unless it's sitting on Ted Roake's desk up on the top floor, there's a chamber below that looks like the CERN Collider. Whatever it is, it's drawing a lot of power," I said, "That'd be my next bet."

When they got to the door to the Hadron room, I blocked the signal and Sarah picked the lock. If I was Ted Roake, I'd ask for my money back about that lock. I'd have to assume it was expensive, based on the size and how shiny it was, but Sarah opened it in seconds.

These days, the word 'supercomputer' gets bandied about with a certain careless abandon. The circular part of the power grid shown on the plans was, without a doubt a supercomputer. Or at least the core processing bit of one. It's been a few years since Stanford, but if memory serves, the technical term for this amount of processing was 'a shit load.' There may have even been an eff-word in that term.

'Holy bird f….' Bryce's voice carried to Sarah's Bluetooth, '…k Batman. Chuck, do you see this?"

I nodded, before realizing that he couldn't see that. "Yeah… um, yes. Tell him yes."

After a few moments, I realized that standing still, gawping like a tourist, was probably not the brightest idea while you were standing still, gawping like a tourist, inside the secure secret supercomputer room you'd just broken into, that was itself inside a building you'd also just broken into while one of your compatriots was still parked outside said building in a van full of incriminating evidence.

Sarah was brighter that all of us, and was moving to the right, saying, "Ahh, guys?"

They found it in the third control room. Okay, so I watch a lot of movies. I was both relieved and let down when Bryce simply just picked up the industrial looking laptop off the test bed, and it didn't set off Indiana Jones type booby traps.

They looked at each other, sharing a moment that didn't involve me, and then Sarah said, 'Chuck, that's it. We're on our way back.'

If this was a movie, this would be the time when the bad guys turn up.

-o0o-