AN: Not mine, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Chapter IV

Eight hours after they had arrived, Director Sherman watched Sarah Wa... Bartowski watch her husband work through a window in the doors. She was half-bent over, her chin resting on his shoulders, as he explained some of his findings to her. It was too damn obvious that whatever they had together was more real than he had been lead to believe. There was a good chance that the damnable Beckman was right, but he wasn't going to give up easy. He needed Walker back at the Agency. Recent reverses, both public and not, had made it clear that the form of team she was originally to have formed after Bartowski had uploaded the second Intersect was needed.

Threats those two had no idea about where emerging, and even though none of them was as dangerous as the Ring had been, yet, Sherman believed that it might get that bad.

He was even willing to offer Bartowski a job in the team. As much as he hated to admit it, even without the Intersect, he was a capable analyst. Getting Walker back into the Agency was worth any price, even her continuing to play happy families with the geek.

And even if that failed, he still had the ultimate trump card, and one that Walker wouldn't be able to resist.

At the moment though he needed them and their little company right where they were. Plans or not, there was the matter of a mole in a supposedly secure communications and intelligence gathering system, and much to his shame, his own investigations had turned up less than nothing.

It was then that Bartowski visibly tensed and indicated something on the screen, and seconds later, Sherman found himself barrelling back into the room.

"What is it, Bartowski?"

Chuck flinched, but turned in his chair.

"I think I know how the fake data was implanted."

"Could you tell me?"

Impatience wasn't a virtue for the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, but he had a job to do.

"That might take a while..."

"Try me."

The ice in his voice was unmistakable.

"Mount Weather is a Government facility, and even if it weren't, the technology in here belongs to you guys. You do things by the book, and because you do, you regularly shut parts of the system down for maintenance."

He paused for effect, but the look on Sarah's face made it clear that this might not be the best move. She may not know Sherman all that well, or at all, but she was very familiar with the type, and Chuck was once again reminded of how lucky they'd been with Diane Beckman.

"Regular being the key-word here. If it was my system, we'd do this irregularly, and at changing times. You seem to do it every Sunday to Monday for two hours between ten and midnight."

Sherman realized where he was going, and it was obvious that he didn't like to give Chuck due credit.

"So you're saying that this was when the false data was imprinted?"

"Partially. What this guy did, and let me say, it's an awesomely sneaky way to do it, is putting it in after the maintenance and security checks were done and signed off on."

Sherman frowned.

"Can you prove that?"

"No, but there's enough to get a lead. I know that's how he must have done it because you seem to be using a modified Banshee Linux, and he knows enough about the system to deactivate file verification. Hell, I do know enough to do this. It's not that hard."

"What he means is," Sarah continued for him, "that because it is so easy, the bad guy left behind something else."

She stepped aside to let Sherman look at the screen.

What was displayed there was access log for the system and the file that had been changed, and indeed, it correlated with the end of the maintenance period. Sherman had at first resisted Beckman's 'request' that CI be given access to really everything, those logs included, but now he was forced to eat his words, and he hated it.

"It's a beginner's mistake, really. Looking at the timestamps is... pretty basic."

Sherman was already busy writing down some information, so he missed the look of affectionate exasperation and, most of all, love on Sarah's face, and had he seen it, the following events could have gone differently.

But he hadn't, so instead he just gave them a curt nod before leaving the room to make a few phone calls.

At least that was what he tried, Sarah's next sentence stopped him cold.

"He's not the only mole you have."

Sherman turned on his heels.

"Why is that, Agent?"

Sarah ignored the 'Agent'.

"Because, Director, someone has to have shielded him a few years back. Chuck tells me the security sweep and the roundup of Fulcrum and later Ring Agents within the CIA and NSA was pretty thorough, and if he survived it..."

When she saw that Sherman was about to object, she glanced at Chuck, before turning back.

"My point is that one or two outlying Ring or Fulcrum Cells could have survived, because they were too damn small or insignificant, but something like this requires the specific backing of someone on the inside."

"Then why did they take so long to act?"

Sherman had a pretty good idea why, but he wanted to know if Bartowski did. Sarah saw, registered and faced the challenge.

"We do. Chuck thinks that they weren't sure how far we," Sarah circled her fingers, making it clear she meant the CIA/NSA "had penetrated the FulcrumslashRing network, and by the time they did there was nothing but keeping their heads down and hoping to not get noticed."

"If I were them," Chuck interjected, "I'd have contacted three or four of my best spies with some emergency signal and then kept low until we'd started focussing on Volkov. Whatever front they have must be freakishly good, because I have no idea what it could be. When we rolled up the last Ring operations we got everything that was on the list."

"Which is the problem, Chuck."

Sarah frowned, completely ignoring anything and anyone else in the room.

"It has to be something disturbingly large and it has to have been well-established. It takes time to establish this sort of thing. How long were Fulcrum and the Ring active?"

"At least since the early '90s." Chuck supplied before Sherman had a chance to.

"Their new front has to exist at least that long."

Sherman frowned. "So what you're saying is that there is a Fulcrum or Ring remnant that is still active and has the resources to maintain a mole inside the NSA and CIA?"

"What I find disturbing is that they had the patience to lay low until now. I don't like the timing of this at all."

Chuck was deep in thought, looking at his own feet with a frown, so he missed the quick look of guilt that raced across Sherman's face before he got it back under control. Sarah was puzzled, and decided to push things.

"How come?"

"Don't get this wrong honey, but announcing the existence of this mole to every security organ and spy in the country in a way that has basically forced the General to call us in at a time when you aren't exactly in top condition?" Chuck said with an apologetic smile. Sarah squeezed his shoulders with her hand to tell him that she didn't mind.

"You're right of course. And of course there's what happened at the vending machine earlier."

Sherman was worried when he saw the sweet smile she wore on her face that was accompanied by a steely gaze that made him glad that looks couldn't kill.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Well I'm sure, Director, that such a blunt and frankly brazen attempt to re-recruit me for the Agency couldn't have come from, say, your own office. You know how pointless it would be."

He was not yet prepared to give up on that, but decided to yield for the moment. Besides, Carmicheal Industries had proven to be surprisingly useful, he grudgingly admitted to himself, and he was not yet prepared to let that resource go.

"Of course, Mrs. Bartowski."

Sherman's suave and soothing tone of voice was one he'd used on scores of Senators on the Intelligence Oversight Committee, yet the message 'This isn't over' was passed between all three of them, but at the same time a temporary truce was reached, as Sherman was most of all a professional, as, he was surprised to notice, were both Bartowskis.

There was work to be done.

"So, what do we do now?" Chuck asked, "I don't see what we could short of going through the entrance logs for the facility and compare times."

"I'll have people..." Sherman paused, considering the circumstances coldly and objectively, "no, I will have them brought down by someone I trust and then you will look through them."

He gave thin smile. "I begin to see the wisdom behind why General Beckman insisted that you be brought in. You're probably the least likely set of spies to be compromised by anyone, even ignoring all that has happened."

In the end, events made the work they did over the next three hours redundant. The mole had received his orders no more than an hour ago via the emergency backup, and he was worried by what he'd been told to do, but like the other former Fulcrum spies that still roamed free, he was too dependent on the good-will of his handlers to not act.

Both at Langley and Fort Meade it had been made impossible to smuggle in explosives with acceptable risk after Graham had been killed in the 2nd Intersect room, so complete destruction of the room he had been told to target was impossible to achieve. Instead, he opted for a less direct approach. He knew that the opposition would manage to repair it soon, but when he had pointed that out to his handler, he had been told that a delay was more than enough.

He didn't like that either, so he decided to activate his failesafe before heading into work for the last time. He knew that he wouldn't be able to return there, as it was unavoidable that he used his security codes to get in. Objectively, he considered his chances of living for more than another four or five hours at best fifty-fifty, but he hated the CIA enough and was too loyal to his employers, even the true employers he wasn't supposed to know about to care much. His worries were about the chance that he was discovered before he got in.

But he wouldn't have had to worry. The sentry at the door was easily subdued without knowing who it was, and the body was lowered to the ground without making any sounds.

The room was not that much different from the old Intersect room on the surface, except that of course there were no monitor panels to show images in the white walls, and the centre-piece was a chair that, at first glance looked like a cross between a Dentist's chair and a virtual reality simulator. A computer terminal on a small, raised platform was the access point to the systems, and that was where the mole headed.

He inserted a device that looked like an ordinary USB memory stick into the appropriate slot and ran the software contained on it. It was decidedly non-standard, but it had only one thing to do. It spooled up the battery also contained in the device, and together with the power provided by the building and the systems in the room, it sent a power surge about three hundred times of what the curcuits were designed for through the room and especially the chair.

It was no surprise that the electronics literally melted, and by the time the smoke triggered the fire alarms, the mole had already left the room and was racing away to the emergency escape route he had scouted on his first week of starting his cover job.

But when he opened the hatch, the last thing he ever felt was the muzzle of a silenced gun against his neck.

tbc

AN: Sorry about the delay and relative shortness. Anyhow, if one of you were willing to act as a beta, I'd be obliged.