Thursday, September 30, 2010

Chapter 30: Borrowing Trouble

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent. – John Donne


Borrowing Trouble

24 NOVEMBER 2007
CASTLE: DOJO
08:32 PST


Even though he'd given himself an extra hour of sleep as a bonus for completing the cell phone jammer correctly the first time, Chuck found Casey working out in the dojo when he came in. The other man grunted a greeting from the bench press. Chuck nodded back, automatically moving to spot. There wasn't any need for either to speak as Casey finished out his set, wiped down the bench, and switched so that he could spot for Chuck. Even though it varied from his preferred routine, Chuck didn't want to mess with any feelings of solidarity from Casey, so he took some of the weight off of the bar and settled onto the bench.

"What are your plans for today, Bartowski?" Casey asked as Chuck shifted his shoulders to center himself onto the bench.

"You're asking for surveillance purposes, I'm guessing?"

Casey's shrug said it all: Why else?

Chuck spaced his hands out on the bar, took a deep breath, and began to lower and lift the bar. Casey had taken the time to give him a few tips a couple of weeks before (more in the form of "You're doing it wrong, doofus," than anything constructive), so he kept his movements fluid and controlled. His breathing stayed in perfect rhythm with the repetitions. He said, grunting more than anything, "You've got an easy day. I'm gonna work from home and crack that hard drive we stole from the Ezersky estate. There hasn't, ah, been any fallout on that, has there?"

"I've been keeping an ear out. Nobody seems to know who's behind it, and Ezersky's been pointing fingers at everybody. But, gee, no surveillance from that night means there's no proof." Casey's voice held a vicious smugness. "Well, almost no surveillance."

Chuck's rhythm hitched. "Oh, crap, did the robo-rabbits actually have cameras in them?"

"Nope. There's just one incriminating photo."

"Whew, because you know, I don't think the nerds would ever forgive me that I forgot my Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch and—did you say incriminating?" Chuck all but threw the bar onto its holster and sat up.

Casey chuckled as he dug into his pocket and pulled out his phone, thumbing quickly through the menus. Without a word, he handed the phone over.

Chuck could only be grateful that he had indeed put the bar away before he'd taken a look. His cheeks, probably flushed from the workout, no doubt drained of all color. "Ah, Sarah hasn't seen this, has she?"

"Nope." Grinning now, Casey took the phone back. The picture was of a grainy Chuck and Sarah, still in their masks, passed out on Sergei Ezersky's front porch. Casey must have snapped it while running in to grab the unconscious agents.

It might not have been an incriminating picture, except that Chuck had landed face-first…right on Sarah's chest. So it was a very, very good thing that she hadn't seen the picture, especially since she'd passed out before him. Even so, dread began to fill Chuck's midsection.

Casey snickered. "You annoy me too much and this may end up in Graham's mailbox someday."

The dread began to boil. "You wouldn't."

Casey admired the photo on his phone one last time and shrugged. "Eh, probably not. But, still, don't piss me off, CIA."

"What can I do," Chuck said, lying back down on the bench again so that he could return to weight lifting, "that would make you delete that picture?"

Something slapped against his chest. Confused, Chuck set the bar down and picked up the folded piece of paper Casey had dumped on him. He unfolded it: a requisition form for an in-car missile launcher.

"For the Crown Vic," Casey said, nodding when Chuck gave him a boggled look. "Higher-ups turned down my request, but if you did it, they wouldn't complain since you barely have any ammunition to your name anyway."

"If I fill this out, and you get your in-car missile-launcher, that picture vanishes forever."

"You press the delete key yourself."

"And you don't have any back-up copies anywhere?"

Casey actually looked wounded. "You don't think I'm a man of my word, Bartowski?"

Faced with that scowling mien, Chuck had no choice but to agree, hastily, that Casey was indeed a man most assuredly faithful to his word. In fact, he would fill out the form just as soon as he finished his work-out, and it would go off in the mail first thing on Monday morning.

"Good," Casey said. "And then you can get to work on that hard drive. Higher-ups want you flashing again as your main priority, so if you don't have it done by Monday, we're following other leads and giving that to the boys in Washington."

"Great," Chuck said, scowling.

"What's your problem now?"

"Nothing." Only, Chuck thought as he settled in for his final round of reps, that if the government didn't let him do his damned job, they had no room to complain in the future. He had yet to see the hard drive Bryce had fried when the other man had sent him the Intersect, and the government seemed to prefer him as just some humanized computer, staring at lists and pictures all day and flashing. It was like they didn't even have the most basic computer systems to filter all of his data sometimes. He set the bar down for the final time and sat up, scowling. "I'll get the drive hacked."

"Okay."

"I will," Chuck insisted.

Casey shrugged. "If you don't, the boys in Washington will. Whatever."

Like hell they would, Chuck thought as Casey, having finished his workout, left the dojo. "Gee, thanks for the support, Casey," Chuck grumbled after he'd left. He kicked off his shoes and moved to the center of the mat, hoping a long round of Tai Chi would help his suddenly vicious mood.

It didn't.

24 NOVEMBER 2007
THE BACHELOR PAD
09:52 PST


It pained him to take time away from the drive after making the explicit promise to Casey that he would hack it, but Chuck just couldn't forget the Jill problem. He was insane—he had to be, normal ex-boyfriends didn't do this sort of thing—but he still sat at his computer, making minor coding tweaks to the program he'd designed to create a mirror copy of Sergei Ezersky's hard drive. The new version would be set up to mine data from a SIM card. Run in conjunction with the jammer, the computer would grab all of the data without alerting anybody who might be searching for the cell phone and afterward, Chuck would let one of his bot programs take a whack at the SIM card encryption while he worked on the hard drive on another account.

He just had to finish the coding first. And it was killing him by inches at the same time as it was driving him forward.

He slouched while he worked, a bad habit that even years of Ellie hadn't been able to break. He could feel tension clinging through his neck and shoulders, pulling at his spine, but he ignored it, lost in the world of code. He barely registered the sounds of Nazis getting fragged from downstairs. It was accepted fact by now that he had created a monster when he had introduced Casey to Call of Duty 3. Casey probably wouldn't take to Modern Warfare quite as quickly (although Chuck had been wrong before), so he planned to wait on that one. A gamer wasn't built in a day, after all.

By sheer coincidence, Chuck typed in the last line of code just as Casey let out a belly laugh and a, "Heh heh. Always knew the French would be able to grow a pair if I commanded them."

A few seconds later, cigar smoke wafted up to the loft. Chuck reached over without looking and turned on the fan he kept for this purpose. His eyes kept scanning for errors—he changed around two values, deleted an extraneous null—while his fingers tapped and his left leg jiggled.

It looked right. Still, he ran a debugging program on it just to be sure, flinching when he spotted an obvious error. A couple of smaller errors were understandable and easy fixes for the most part, but he ran into a problem near the end of his code volley that took some creative thinking to get around.

Twenty minutes later, he took a deep breath, typed in an execute command, and pressed "Enter" before he could talk himself out of it.

Program complete.

Should he name it? Chuck frowned at the exe file, a random string of numbers and letters. He'd called the original Chuck-Hack, born out of the lack of originality he'd been feeling at the time. Maybe he should call the smaller version for cloning SIM cards Chack.

Okay, maybe that name needed a few tweaks. Or an entire overhaul, Chuck thought as he typed "Chuck Hack 2" into the name slot. He set it up to run and hooked his cell phone up to the computer. One deep breath later, he ran the program. If it worked, he would know soon.

Since he didn't want to start on the drive until he knew that the program could mirror the SIM card, encryption and all, he pulled up the Internet. Soon, he would know for sure if Jill was involved in something shady. The thought made him laugh as he visited Facebook and typed in Jill's name, scouting through the pages of Jills until he found her. He didn't have a Facebook account—he could only imagine just how wide Graham's eyes would bulge if the Intersect had its own Facebook page—but Jill did, and she didn't have much security enabled. Chuck frowned at that thought as he scrolled through Jill's friends, searching for Mr. Missing Cell Phone.

He probably should have done this before, he reflected, he'd spent an entire day building a cell phone/GPS jammer.

Though he scowled when he saw Jill's old roommate Sherri (and a side-trip through her page informed him that, much to his disappointment, she had not developed a weight problem, a hunchback, or even a particularly hairy mole), nothing interesting popped up on the search through her friends. None of Jill's friends matched the stranger Chuck had deprived of a cell phone.

The mystery continued. If Jill did know her intruder, she didn't know him well enough to be Facebook friends. That was decidedly odd.

Unless Mr. Matching Pocket Square simply didn't have a Facebook account. Whoever he was, the dude needed to get with the times, Chuck thought, ignoring the fact that he himself had no account.
Chuck Hack 2 beeped to let him know that the transfer of data from his phone was complete. Chuck toggled Jill's Facebook page onto the secondary monitor he'd decided he couldn't live without, and pulled up the hacking program.

Success, he thought for the second time, as all of his data from the SIM card, still encrypted, scrolled down the screen. He batted aside an absent thought that perhaps he should probably use his powers for good instead of evil, considering that he'd just cloned a government-issued CIA cell phone in—he checked the time—three minutes and twelve seconds.

"Go time," he mumbled to himself as downstairs, Casey snickered about the Frogs and Americans.
Chuck took off his watch and set that, with his cell phone, in the farthest corner of his room from his computer. Please, let it be far enough, he prayed, though he could probably explain any blip with the GPS on his watch as something having to do with working on his drive. The fewer times he had to lie today, though, the better.

He came back to the computer, hooked the phone up, prepped the program, activated the jammer. Yet another deep breath, and he connected the phone to its battery and turned the power on.

The sound of Nazi death continued on unabated. Casey hadn't been alerted.

Well, that was a relief. With Chuck Hack 2 happily chewing on the stranger's cell phone, Chuck leaned forward to focus on the Ezersky drive. There was no way he was letting some hotshot office geeks in Washington out-nerd him on this one.

24 NOVEMBER 2007
THE BACHELOR PAD
12:11 PST


So maybe the boys in Washington would need to out-nerd him after all.

Chuck pushed back from the desk and rubbed both hands over his face, pushing his fingertips into the hollows of his cheeks. The movement did nothing to stimulate any blood flow to his brain, give him new ideas, or, and he had hoped for this the most, erase the error message currently wreaking havoc across his primary monitor. Every item on his list of ideas to try was scratched out, the pencil lines through the words growing darker with frustration with every passing line. And since his last idea, a real Hail Mary anyway, hadn't panned out, maybe he just had to face the inevitable: the data was probably corrupted.

Chack 1.0 hadn't been as effective as he'd hoped.

Sergei Ezersky had, as they said, pwned him.

Definitely time for a Red Bull.

He pushed off of his chair, intending to go downstairs and grab one or two Red Bulls from the fridge. Instead, he changed direction mid-course and flopped face-first onto the bed. He laid there, one arm and one foot dangling off, and felt like beating his head against the wall a few times.

A moment or two later, he heard the game downstairs pause, the front door creak open, and quiet voices. And then came the footsteps on the stairs. "Chuck? Are you decent?"

"Unfortunately," he mumbled without lifting his head from the mattress. It came out as something more like a noise a zombie would make than an actual word.

"I'm going to take that as a yes." Sarah's voice sounded amused as she climbed the rest of the stairs. "How ya doin', Chuck?"

"Mmrgh," Chuck said into the mattress. He felt it dip as Sarah sat down on the bed, then a smaller rustle as she set something beside her. Two somethings, he corrected. He turned his head to look up at her. "I'm…blah. How are you?"

"I seem to be doing better than you." Sarah rattled a brown paper bag, one of two that she'd brought. "Turkey sandwich."

"Thanksgiving turkey?"

Sarah continued swinging the bag. "And all the sides, including mashed potatoes."

Chuck began to salivate.

"With gravy."

Since he didn't want to drool on the mattress—or in front of Sarah ever, really—Chuck sat up and turned, pulling one leg up so that his foot rested on his opposite knee. He took the bag from Sarah without snatching it, barely. "In fear of sounding too much like Morgan, I won't call you 'goddess,' but you should know I'll be thinking it."

"Okay." Sarah smiled and Chuck, his hand halfway into the bag, flashed back to the security console outside Sergei Ezersky's house nearly a week before. Back when Sarah had climbed in on top of him, their bodies close for that brief, titillating second. He felt his core temperature beginning to warm at the thought and shook his head. Again, he was tempted to broach the subject, but if Sarah wasn't going to bring it up, maybe he should just let it lie, or just forget it. There was more than a chance that Sarah herself had forgotten it, as Chuck's own memories from their trip into the Ezersky estate were blurry and patchy.

Sarah ducked her head to meet his eyes, drawing his attention back. Belatedly, Chuck yanked his gaze back up. Had he been staring at her lips? Oh, geez.

Indeed, Sarah gave him a strange look. "You okay?"

"Yeah. What, me? Psh." Chuck forced a laugh, and had to hope that the noise didn't sound as nervous as it did in his head. He cleared his throat, which dropped his voice down an octave, thankfully. "Yeah, I'm fine. Sorry, brain wandered. It does that when I'm stuck."

"Stuck?" Sarah pulled the second bag she'd brought with her into her lap and began unloading foodstuffs, all packed neatly in Ellie's Tupperware. Before long, she'd created a picnic, right there on his bedspread. "You're not using the weekend to play video games and veg out? Why not?"

Chuck shook his head, his mouth full of glorious turkey sandwich. "They're sending the drive to DC on Monday and my orders will change back to the Flashing Human Computer." He put on an electronic robot voice. "It sings! It dances! It flashes and bad guys fall down!"

Sarah laughed. "You're a lot more than that."

"Yeah, yeah, I know."

"And we've got all those other leads to follow. Uncovering government conspiracies isn't done in a day."

"It's a matter of pride," Chuck said.

"Oh?"

"Hacking that drive was my job. I should be able to do my job." Chuck frowned, and jumped when a bit of turkey smacked into his nose. "Hey!"

"Quit that," Sarah told him, crossing her arms over her chest and giving him a stern look. "No getting down on yourself. You got the drive cloned, you hacked the security, and you held your own against the thing we've agreed to never talk about again."

"We have, have we?" It shouldn't have made him smile, Sarah's obvious discomfort with the miniature robot rabbits they'd faced down in the vault, but he grinned. She readied another piece of turkey to throw at him in warning. "Fine, fine, it is now known as the Event That Shall Not Be Named. Though I have to ask: why do they freak you out so much?"

Sarah took a big bite of her own turkey sandwich and took her time chewing. "Small faces," she said, dabbing at the corner of her mouth with the inside of her wrist. "They're creepy."

"Uh-huh." Chuck helped himself to the mashed potatoes. Since it was Ellie's recipe, they were good enough to eat cold. "That's a little strange. Bad-ass CIA agent, freaked out by—"

"A little perturbed," Sarah said, giving him the look.

"Fine, a little perturbed by small faces." Chuck shook his head. "Just doesn't seem to fit."

"Yes, well, we're not cookie-cutter agents, Chuck."

"I didn't mean it like that. And before I can dig myself even farther into this hole, I'm going to change the subject." Chuck cast around for something to talk about, but came up blank. It was probably a sign of exhaustion, as he had never run out of conversational topics before unless faced with longer than twenty minutes of a glowering John Casey.

Sarah, as always, came to the rescue. "Do you want to talk about what you're stuck on?" she asked, watching him over her turkey sandwich.

Chuck gave her a puzzled look. "You know something about hacking?"

"No, but I'm a fantastic listener." Sarah moved a shoulder. "And it's not like I understand half of your…"

"Technobabble?" Chuck suggested.

"Yes, that. I don't understand half of it anyway, but I can help. I think."

Chuck scooped out a bite of stuffing as he considered the offer. Talking it out might help. Sure, Sarah didn't have the knowledge to function as a technical sounding board, but in the absence of another hacker…

"Well, it's like this," he said. "I think the data may have gotten corrupted, and if it's corrupted, there's very little I can do without having some sort of key to reference it against."

"Did you check the logs?"

"Logs?"

"The logs Casey attached to the mission reports? To see if anything did happen during the transfer?"

For an absolutely blank second, Chuck did nothing but stare. Then he let out an explosion of breath and crumpled forward until his forehead rested against the mattress. "Oh, my God! I'm an idiot! Why the hell didn't I think of that?"

Something ruffled the back of his hair, which was a little longer now that the buzz-cut had had a week to grow out. "See, sometimes you just need a different perspective," Sarah said, and the amusement in her voice was almost hidden.

Chuck slowly pushed himself back until he was sitting up again. A new perspective. Was that a sign that he should tell Sarah he'd used her pickpocket lessons for evil rather than good? She'd be pissed, but if he explained to her that he was legitimately worried about Jill…

No. She would think he was being paranoid, and she would probably be justified because he was wondering the same himself. He knew that Sarah hadn't liked the fact that he had been sitting outside Jill's apartment on his nights off, and he really didn't want to get into it with her now, not before he had something solid.

"You go check the logs," Sarah said, drawing him back to the conversation. "I'll clean up here."

"You sure? I mean, technically, you cooked, I should at least clean up." Chuck looked around the emptied Tupperware containers between them on the bedspread.

Sarah laughed and gave him a little shove toward the computer. "Go on."

His grin faded when he saw that the stolen cell phone had been sitting out almost in plain view, only partially hidden by his page of notes on the Ezersky drive. Swearing a little under his breath, Chuck scooped both the phone and its battery into his pocket. He dropped into his chair and logged into Castle's secure network right away, grateful that he'd left his computer on the public account. He would just work on hacking the cell phone after Sarah left. It shouldn't take long.

He scrolled through the mission reports until he found Casey's write-up of their break in at the Ezersky estate, known only as Location Echo in the reports.

"Wow," he said a minute later. "Casey even writes like a military officer."

"Watch it, Bartowski!" Casey called from downstairs.

"Did I say it was a bad thing?" Chuck called back.

He took Casey's grumble for grudging assent. The sound of Nazis dying resumed. Chuck went back to reading. A couple of minutes later, he felt more than heard Sarah come up beside him. "What's this?" she asked, picking up something from his desk.

"GPS slash cell phone jammer," Chuck said without looking away from the computer screen. "Built it yesterday."

"This is what you were working on last night? Why were you so hesitant to show it to me?"

Chuck's fingers paused on the keyboard. "I wasn't sure if it would work," he said at length.

Out of the corner of his eye, Chuck watched Sarah turn the device over and frown at it. It was about the size of her palm and pretty hefty, but the exposed wiring made it seem fragile cupped in her fingers. "Why did you build it at all? Castle has built-in cell phone interceptors already."

"I know. It was mostly curiosity, plus this one's portable."

"Oh. Hmm."

"Still needs a few tweaks, though." Chuck clicked to the next page.

"Uh-huh."

"I'll make one for you when I've perfected the design," Chuck went on, eyes never leaving the screen. He raised his voice. "And one for you, too, Casey!"

"Uh-huh," Casey said, echoing Sarah. Both spies upstairs heard something rather loud explode on the television, and the following snicker.

"Should probably modify it to run off of a car battery, too," Chuck said, mostly under his breath. "I'll have to switch up the output and the current to do so, but I can change that when—oh, interesting."

"Hmm?" Sarah asked, sounding distracted.

Chuck leaned forward, just to make sure that he was reading the report correctly. "According to these activity logs, we got the data finalized the other night, but the transmission was only at ninety-nine percent at the time, so it's possible that—what? What is it?"

Immediately, the scowl that had startled Chuck vanished as Sarah tore her gaze away from something over his shoulder. "What? Sorry, I was listening, I promise. Go on."

Chuck squinted at her, but decided to let it drop. "Uh, right. It's possible that the…missing portion here is the thing that's screwing everything up because it's part of the encryption on the drive. But I mean, the chances of it...I mean, it's one in, like, a bajillion." Chuck frowned and scratched the back of his head.

He didn't expect Sarah's quiet chuckle, so he glanced over. She got up from the bed and walked toward him. "You're telling me, the guy that got into a car accident with the Chinese mafia and then got kidnapped by proxy within two days of returning to Los Angeles is put off by the odds?" She smirked as she sat on the edge of his desk and looked down at him.

"You're right," Chuck said, feeling a mirroring smirk answer hers. "Never tell me the odds."

"Okay. I won't. But, maybe, do you think if there is a gap there, it can be filled?"

"Hm. I'm not sure. There's a lot of sectors that would have to be rebuilt even if one percent doesn't seem like a lot. That's assuming that yes, it's part of the encryption that we missed, but I could theoretically use a randomizer that would, given enough specs, I think, build that missing fragment. Heh. I used something similar on Sheik Al'abadazeera's computer system last year when you and Bryce were in Oman."

"Did you?" Sarah sounded amused now.

"Yeah. Unfortunately, the original code I used went the way of the Intersect Virus—thanks for that, Bryce—but…" Chuck went to pick up his cell phone from the spot it always occupied on his desk, but his hand met nothing but air.

Oh, right, he thought. "'Scuse me a sec," he said, popping up from the desk chair fast enough for Sarah to brace against the desk. He side-stepped around her and crossed to the corner where his cell phone and watch lay.

Sarah raised an eyebrow.

"I tested the GPS device and I didn't want you or Casey freaking out. That's why the watch isn't on my wrist."

"Why didn't you just call me and let me know?"

She had a point. "Ah, it was three in the morning," he said, since it wasn't technically a lie. He had tested the jammer at three a.m., but that had been at Castle. "I didn't want to wake you."

"Next time, keep the watch on and wake me," Sarah said, folding her arms over her chest.

"Me too!" Casey called.

"Yeah, yeah, yeesh." Chuck rolled his eyes skyward and hit a button on his phone. Sarah didn't seem to be in any hurry to leave. She sat on the edge of his bed, her arms folded over her chest as she watched him make the call. He ignored her and plopped into his desk chair as the other end of the line picked up. "Dave! Hey! Good news! You get to hear my voice on a Saturday."

"Nothing much unusual about that," Digital Dave grumbled from the other end of the phone line. "What can I do you for, Chuck?"

Five minutes later, Chuck hung up the phone and began to type furiously. "And that, my friend, is the wonder of dedicated tech support. He's sending over a copy of the code I need for that program, and he had a couple of helpful suggestions, which I will of course either follow or add my own tweaks to," he told Sarah without looking over his shoulder as he wrote. He wanted to get down all of Dave's ideas before he forgot any, but when there was no answer from the bed, his fingers slowed. He glanced over to make sure she hadn't left. The fact that she could move so silently made this a constant worry for him.

She was still on the bed, though she'd moved so that she was lying across it on her stomach, her feet up in the air and her chin propped up on her fists. The pose in no way matched the vicious scowl on her face.

"Uh, Sarah?" Chuck asked, waving his hand.

She jolted, as much as it was possible for Sarah Walker to jolt. Her entire body jerked just the slightest bit, her head snapped back, her eyes cut to him and to the floor in quick succession.

But not quickly enough, apparently, for Chuck turned his head. He blinked at his second monitor, which was still displaying Jill's Facebook page. Why on earth would Sarah be glaring at that? She hadn't seemed to dislike or like Jill especially at Stanford, and there was really no reason for such animosity…unless…no. It wasn't jealousy. That simply wasn't an option.

Slowly, he swiveled his desk chair around so that he was facing Sarah. "Uh, what's on your mind?" For her to be glaring so maliciously, it must have been a very bad thought or something to do with Casey.

She raised her eyes to meet his, and for once, they were completely unreadable. "Nothing," she told him, giving a cute little shrug. She tossed her hair a little bit.

He narrowed his eyes. He didn't believe that for a second. She hadn't even looked at Mei-Ling Cho with so much hate, and Mei-Ling had held him at gunpoint. "Really?"

Sarah's smile was of the impish variety, but he still caught undercurrents of discomfort and a desire to change the subject. She had also, Chuck saw, gone absolutely still, something she only did when she felt threatened. Well, okay, he amended, threatened with actual danger. Awkward social situations tended to make her squirm rather than still, but she was generally active and kinetic until Mission Mode Sarah took over. Then the federal agent gained control.

Chuck wondered why he was seeing the federal agent now.

"Had something on my mind," Sarah said, bouncing her shoulders a little. Chuck gave her the "go on" look, and she sighed. "Something bad."

"Must have been. Do you want to talk about it?"

"Don't you have a hard drive to crack?"

"Oh, right," Chuck said, remembering Sergei Ezersky's hard drive. He started to swivel his chair back around, but stopped mid-motion and turned back. "Are you sure you don't want to talk about it?"

"I had a nightmare a few days ago," Sarah said, rolling her eyes. "And I was just thinking about it. That's all."

"You sure?"

"Yes, Chuck, I'm sure." Aggravation hinted at the edges of Sarah's voice. It was time, Chuck saw, to drop the subject.

So he gave her the genial grin that usually worked to win people over. "Must have been quite the nightmare to scare big, bad Sarah Walker."

Sarah glowered at him. "Small faces," was all she said.

Chuck raised his hands in surrender. "Wow, okay, sorry. I didn't realize they scared you that much."

"Perturbed."

"Right. Perturbed. I'll, uh, just get back to work." Chuck hunched over the keyboard and began to type. After a few seconds, he heard Sarah sigh and get up off of the bed. He didn't flinch when she laid a hand on his shoulder, though his fingers slowed on the keyboard. Her hand was really warm.

"I'm sorry," she said after a second.

He waved a hand, but didn't look up at her. He wasn't sure why not. The pieces of the stolen cell phone weighed heavily in his pocket. "There's no need to apologize. It was a sore spot, and my bad for treading on it. So really, I'm the one that should be apologizing."

"And you don't need to apologize, either."

"So we're good?"

Sarah didn't answer for a moment. "Yeah," she finally said. "Yeah, we're good." She reached out and hit a button on Chuck's computer.

Before Chuck could squawk out a protest, Jill's Facebook page vanished. Maybe he should check his security again, if Sarah was so familiar with his computer. It might be time to retire Schnookie for a little while.

"It's really not polite to spy on people," Sarah said.

"Oh. Right." Chuck cleared his throat, his hand creeping into his pocket and clinking the cell phone pieces together. He had to go by Jill's building and drop that off soon. Maybe in the bushes outside. But now, he gave Sarah his best apologetic smile. "Sorry, I just..."

"I know." Sarah put her hand in her pocket as well. "I'd better get going. But first, Chuck…is something on your mind?"

"No," Chuck lied, deliberately forcing himself not to think about the stolen cell phone or the encrypted SIM card.

"Okay." Sarah vanished down the stairs.

After she left, Chuck stared in confusion at his secondary monitor. Even though it was now blank, the intensity of Sarah's glare remained. Maybe it had just been the resting place of her eyes while she thought about her nightmare, but the glare had seemed…awfully pointed.

He didn't have time to think about it, though. He had a hard drive to crack, and he had an encryption to break. Oh, right, and a cell phone to return to the scene of the crime, which he should probably get on soon. Chuck set his watch to give himself an hour with which to focus on the hard drive, then he would take the cell phone back. He would work on the encryption tonight, after he put in a few hours on the drive.

With that settled, he got to work with the program Digital Dave had sent him.

24 NOVEMBER 2007
THE BACHELOR PAD
14:05 PST


Before his watch could beep, something on his computer began shrilling, startling him out of his digital trance. He blinked heavily a few times and shook his head to clear the lines of code from it. What on earth?

Downstairs, the sounds of World War II had ceased. Casey had either gone for a run or he was at Castle, cleaning a random piece of equipment no doubt meant to kill, maim, or at the very least drop a grown man at a full run. Chuck had to appreciate that about Casey: whatever else he could say about the man, he always stuck to his guns.

Chuck's eyebrows scrunched together as he scrolled through his computer until he located the source of the beep. He'd placed a tracking satellite that he knew Dave wasn't using this weekend on Jill's cell phone, and had set the program to alert him just in case she decided to head back to the L.A. area early.

She was definitely on her way back from Sacramento.

That was odd. Chuck saved his progress on the Ezersky drive and switched over to his mirrored computer account. If Jill was on her way back, he needed to break that phone security. He figured she was probably safer in Sacramento, with her parents and extended family around, but she lived alone and Matching Pocket Square had keys to her apartment.

Who knew what kind of danger she was in? If she was in any danger, that is?

He set up a password scanner, let that run on one of the cloned copies of the cell phone while he attacked another copy manually. Why was Jill coming back early? She usually stayed at her parents' until the very last minute. Chuck and Bryce had always teased her about it at Stanford since whenever they'd headed to Mexico for Spring Break, Jill had always gone home. She was close to her family, especially her dad. Close enough that Chuck had been so nervous about meeting Dr. Roberts, he had almost spilled a full decanter of wine in the other man's lap.

The memory made Chuck frown and bring his attention back to the phone. He needed to get this done; he needed to know.

24 NOVEMBER 2007
THE BACHELOR PAD
20:24 PST


"Damn it!" Real frustration laced through Chuck now as he stared at yet another error message. Where the hell had he gone wrong this time? What the hell was up with the tech products of the world? And why the hell was he just sucking at everything he hacked this week? Was he going to have to turn in his nerd license? Were they going to revoke his membership to the Hacker's Club of America? He hadn't hit this many brick walls since he and Morgan had gone looking for girls willing to double-date for the junior prom.

The phone monitor beeped to let him know that Jill was about forty-five minutes out and stuck in traffic, but he still needed to move if he intended to ditch the phone at her building before she got back.
Grumbling under his breath, he grabbed the laptop he'd borrowed from Castle and began the process of transferring his files and programs over. It looked like he was no longer working from home.

24 NOVEMBER 2007
THE BACHELOR PAD
21:17 PST


Perhaps sitting in a car alongside a relatively busy street wasn't the smartest place for an agoraphobic, but it hadn't stopped him before, and there was no reason it should stop him now, Chuck thought. Except, he had to return a stolen cell phone to the scene of the crime, which meant that he would actually have to approach his ex-girlfriend's apartment yet again. Inexplicably, he felt the letter he'd written what seemed like ages ago crinkle inside his jacket.

He could still give it to her, walk away from this mess, wash his hands of all of this. She'd ejected him from her life, and Jill was a big girl. If she was in trouble, she could call the police just as well as anybody else.

But what if she wasn't able to? What if Matching Pocket Square was threatening her? Her family? What if she didn't know he was stealing things from her?

Chuck's fingers closed briefly over the letter. He couldn't say good-bye now.

He pulled on a pair of gloves and meticulously began to wipe the phone down. He didn't plan to turn it on. The amount of encryption on the SIM card meant that the owner would be able to track the phone even when it was turned off, so Chuck planned to wait to put the battery back in.

He peered through the passenger side window, trying to figure out the best place to leave the cell phone. There was no call for rain over the next few days, which meant he could abandon the phone outside, out of sight, without feeling too guilty. Thankfully, the evening was cool, which meant if he kept his hands in his pockets, the gloves wouldn't look too far out of place. He eyed the side of the building for security cameras, marked his trajectory, and climbed out of the car.

It was almost anticlimactic to leave the cell phone behind a trash can by the building's front door and return to his car. Every step felt laden with danger, building in a crescendo that ended…with nothing. Chuck slipped back into the driver's side of his car, and nothing happened. Nobody followed him. Nobody came rushing out of the apartment building to arrest him, there were no ninjas dropping off of skyscrapers to karate chop him into submission.

Hell, there wasn't even a pedestrian walking by to give him an odd look.

Chuck fired up the laptop and sighed as he checked his phone, which was still hooked up to Dave's satellite. Jill was about to get off of the Five and head over to her apartment. He'd already checked with Casey's thermal binoculars; there was nobody in the apartment, at least. Creepy Stolen Cell Phone dude had yet to return.

There was nothing to do but wait and work.

Three hours later, when the little red light on his watch began to blink, signaling that he was being pinged, he paid it no mind. He was a grown man. If he wanted to stay in his car and work all night, he had every right to do so.

Still, he couldn't help that a little sliver of guilt that sliced in just under his ribcage and sat uncomfortably against his chest all night.

25 NOVEMBER 2007
CHUCK'S CAR
06:42 PST


He'd only meant to rest his eyes for a second. A minute, tops. Maybe five, if he really needed it. So when Chuck closed his eyes at 3:36 in the morning, and opened them over three hours later, he was a little surprised. But it wasn't nearly as shocking as the fact that he wasn't alone.

Sarah Walker sat in the passenger seat. More pointedly, Sarah Walker sat in the passenger seat, and she had her gun on her lap. He blinked sluggishly. Sarah slammed the magazine into the gun with a little too much force.

Oh, God, the irrational part of Chuck's brain, the one hampered by lack of sleep and worry over Jill and about a thousand other things, thought. Sarah had gotten orders from the CIA to come kill him. This was where it ended. This was how it—

Wait a second. Sarah didn't want to kill him. Not after all of the work she'd put into him.

"Morning, Chuck," Sarah said without looking at him.

Okay, he should take that back. Maybe Sarah did want to kill him. He hadn't heard quite that much…frost in her voice before. Not even during the Acropolis Cold-Clock.

"S-Sarah?" he asked, a yawn catching him off-guard. "Wh-what are you doing here?"

"What do you think, Chuck?" Sarah checked the chamber.

The click of the slide popping back into place startled him. Chuck jerked forward, his hands spasming on the keyboard. "You're—you're not going to shoot me, are you?"

Sarah gave him a "What the hell have you been smoking?" look and tucked her gun back into her waistband. "No," she said.

Since she sounded almost regretful, Chuck eyed her. Other details seeped in: they were sitting in his car on Jill's street, the sun was peeking over the edges of the horizon, there were two cups of steaming coffee in the cup holders, and Sarah looked well on her way to pissed.

"Had some time," Sarah said, turning back to look out the window, "so I cleaned my gun."

"Okay, Casey." Chuck pushed the heels of his hands up against his eye sockets and yawned again. The laptop still in his lap slid a little; he grabbed it by reflex, but didn't shut the lid. "What're you doing here?"

"I think the more important question is, what are you doing here, Chuck?"

It was fairly obvious. "I asked first," Chuck said, surprised to hear petulance in his tone.

Sarah rolled her eyes. "Fine. I'm here because I'm your bodyguard, and you're being an idiot and sleeping in an exposed car on the side of the street. And by exposed, I mean unlocked. And by that, I mean, what the hell are you thinking?"

Chuck scowled. Something about the word "bodyguard," especially put in context with Sarah, just annoyed him. But even more, the feeling of being a chastised kid rankled deep. "I can do as I please, it's my downtime," he said.

"Not if it means putting yourself in danger."

"What danger?" Chuck deliberately swept his eyes over the mostly-abandoned street.

Sarah glowered. "You left the car unlocked. And it's not right, what you're doing." She paused; her scowl deepened, viciously, for the tiniest of split seconds. "You're stalking this woman, Chuck."

"I am not!"

He didn't expect her to scoff. "I'm sorry, sitting in a car outside her apartment all night, that's kind of the definition of stalking!"

Not if she's in danger, Chuck thought, but he just glared. "It's not stalking," he said stubbornly, crossing his arms over his chest.

"Oh, so you think it's healthy, what you're doing?"

To buy himself a second, Chuck grabbed the nearest coffee out of the cup holder and popped open the lid. Sarah had already put sweetener and cream in it. He took a long sip. "Probably not," he said at length. "But I can't…"

"Can't what?"

"I think she's in danger!" Chuck blurted out, and set the coffee down before he bobbled it all over himself. He took a deep breath and forced himself to look at Sarah, though he wanted to just keep glaring at his computer screen or at the steering wheel. It was hard to meet her eyes right now, for some reason.

The thought made his spine stiffen. He hadn't done anything wrong. He was an operative for the United States government. If he thought something was wrong, he had every right to investigate it. He should not be ashamed to look at his partner. So he added defiance to his glare. "When I was delivering the letter, on Thanksgiving, I was going to slide it under her door, but this guy came out of the apartment."

"So?" Sarah asked.

"So, there was something weird about him, and I think Jill might be in trouble."

"Did you flash on him?" Sarah asked, Mission Mode Sarah sliding into place.

Now Chuck did look away. "No," he said.

"Did he have a gun?"

"No."

"Then why did you think there was something off about him?" Sarah's eyes narrowed, but Chuck didn't look away from the steering wheel. "Unless…"

The laptop beeped.

"You're jealous!" Sarah breathed, gaping at him. "That's what this is about, isn't it? Jill's got a new boyfriend, and you're jealous!"

"What?" Chuck glanced briefly away from the laptop to give her a strange look. "I'm not jealous."

"Seriously? And what makes you think this guy is dangerous, again?"

"Because I stole his cell phone and he's got some crazy security on it, and he was using a key to get into her apartment, and I think he was stealing her research." Chuck tapped a few commands into his laptop, his brows drawing together. He must have hit a search command when Sarah had startled him awake, though what his computer was searching for, he had no idea.

"Wait, go back a second. You stole his cell phone?" Sarah's eyes went wide. "How?"

"Oh, I pickpocketed him." Chuck tapped a command to see what he had accidentally started searching for: a random line of code from the Ezersky drive. Well, that was useless. He moved to stop the search.

Only to yelp when Sarah grabbed his shoulder and yanked him back to face her. "You did what?" she asked. "Chuck, when I gave you that lesson, it was only to—"

"Only to what?" Chuck asked when she stopped in the middle of her sentence. He held his hands up in a surrender position. "And I must say, I'm very uncomfortable with you using violence on me right now, given that I just saw you tuck your gun away."

Sarah glared at him and reached back with her free hand to yank the gun out. But instead of pointing it at him, as he half-feared she might, she tossed it on the back seat. "There. Satisfied?"

"I really shouldn't be, since I know you've got at least twelve to fifteen knives on your person, but yes. Yes, I am."

"Chuck, you weren't supposed to actually usethe pickpocket lesson! What if you'd gotten caught and the guy had pressed charges?"

"Well, it's a moot point because I didn't get caught, which you should take as a compliment to your teaching skills." Rolling his eyes, Chuck turned back to the computer, and frowned.

The search had found one result.

That was odd. Especially since the result wasn't located in the Ezersky drive at all. In fact, it came from a completely different quadrant altogether.

What the hell?

"Are you even listening to me?" Sarah's voice, incensed now, cut in through his concentration. It sounded, he realized with a wince, like it hadn't been the first time she'd asked the question.

Still, he tried to hide the guilt. "Uh…yes?"

"Oh yeah? Then what did I just say, Chuck?"

"I…" He searched his brain, but apparently, his ears hadn't been saving any data. He gave her a helpless look.

She made a noise that was somewhere between a disgusted groan and a sigh, and flopped back against the seat, her arms crossed. "Figures."

"It's not that I wasn't listening, it's just that—well, there's something strange going on." Chuck abruptly turned his attention back to his laptop, ignoring Sarah's frustrated noise, and began typing. "The phone I lifted from the guy, Mr. Matching Pocket Square, it was pretty heavily encrypted, and I just accidentally did a search—which was your fault, by the way—"

"Yay me," Sarah said with absolutely no enthusiasm whatsoever. "Put the computer away. I'm taking you back to Castle."

"No, seriously, I think there's a problem here. The search found—"

"I don't care, Chuck. You can't keep stalking this woman!"

"I'm not stalking her! I'm protecting her!" Chuck looked away from the screen to give her a ferocious look. He hadn't meant to shout—he just wasn't the shouting type—but it hadn't even fazed Sarah in the slightest. She was glaring right back at him, her chin up and her eyes clearly spoiling for a fight. He squinted at her once and turned his attention back to his computer. "Will you give me two seconds to explain myself, please? God!"

"Two seconds, and if I don't like the explanation, I'm going to—"

"What? Knock me out and dump me in the back of an ambulance with your ex-boyfriend? Oh, wait, you've already done that!" Chuck's fingers flew across the keyboard as his eyes followed the cursor on the screen, trying to locate the source of the matching code on his laptop. "Listen, the guy whose cell phone I lifted—and don't even start with me, this is still my time—he had some pretty heavy encryption on it. Like government agency heavy."

"So?"

"So what's Jill doing with all of that? She's a biomedical engineering grad student." Chuck frowned as the monitor flashed the results at him. That couldn't possibly be right.

"So?" Sarah asked again.

"So it's a little weird that a guy with this much security on just a simple cell phone is going into her apartment and taking her binders." Chuck blinked at the words "MATCH FOUND" that kept insistently popping up on the screen.

There was an encryption code match between Sergei Ezersky, Russian Toy Robot Nightmare Maker Extraordinaire, and Mr. Matching Pocket Square.

How the hell?

Unless…

"It could just be a coincidence," Sarah said, but now she sounded dubious. "I mean, maybe he's her professor or something. The government hires professors all the time for research, especially in that field." She sighed. "Fine. Do you still have the cell phone? I can call in and get the tech department to get a look at it."

"Uh, I don't think we're gonna need that," Chuck said, his voice distant in his ears as he stared at the laptop screen. "And besides, not that it matters, I abandoned the phone."

"You did?" Now Sarah sounded annoyed. "Why?"

"Because it wasn't mine? And I said it doesn't matter." Chuck took a deep breath and swallowed, hard. He slowly turned to face the passenger seat, fear making his heart thump erratically against his ribcage. "Sarah, what the hell does Fulcrum want with my ex-girlfriend?"

Sarah jumped. "Fulcrum?" she demanded.

Chuck swiveled the laptop screen so that she could see it, the windows containing the code for the stolen cell phone and the stolen hard drive data side by side. "MATCH FOUND" blinked in bright red over both. "I think Beckman was right. I think Sergei Ezersky was Fulcrum, and I think whoever was taking Jill's stuff, I think he is, too."

"Holy shit," Sarah breathed, staring at the screen.

Panic made it hard to breathe. "So what do we do?" he asked, his breathing speeding up. "If Fulcrum's stealing stuff from Jill—Bryce said they're bad. They're very, very bad. Sarah, I can't let her—"

"I know, Chuck." Sarah pushed her hands through her hair, evidently composing and scrapping plans in her head. She looked at Chuck. "It's going to be okay. Don't freak out on me right now."

"Right." Chuck forced his breathing to slow, though his heart was still galloping. "Right."

"It's going to be fine. I'm going to go get Jill, I'll get her down here, and we'll go to a safe-house. Nice and easy, right?"

"Right," Chuck said for the third time.

"I want you to wait in the car, and have it all ready to go, all right?" Sarah grabbed his arm to ensure that all of his attention stayed on her and not on the words on the computer screen. "You can do that for me, right?"

He bobbled his head, but as he did so, his eyes cut to something outside the car. "Uh, Sarah—"

"Chuck, I need you to stay focused. You can freak out later."

"It's not that," Chuck said, and his heart stopped beating altogether. "I just, uh, think we have more pressing concerns at the moment." He lifted one shaky finger and pointed out the passenger side window, over Sarah's shoulder, out into the daylight.

Right at the barrel of the gun that Mr. Matching Pocket Square held.

"Oh," Sarah said.

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