Chuck vs. the NSA Agent 2/?

[fojee]

Chuck vs. the NSA Agent
by Fojee
Disclaimers in first chapter.

2/?

For an NSA Agent, it was easy enough to track down one Charles Bartowski, living with Eleanor Bartowski and Devon Woodcomb, both doctors, in an apartment in Echo Park in California. Major John Casey requested background checks for all three, plus the neighbors.

Bartowski’s file had him working at a Buy More in Burbank. Casey had parked outside the store, and ordered a couple of his men to go in and observe. “Do not engage,” he told them, and they all checked if their communicators were working. It was difficult to set up a wireless surveillance in an electronics store, because of tech interference, but he got some nerd on speed dial to hook him into the store’s security feed, so video was not a problem. Sound was a different matter; but then, he was trained to lip read.

For a second, he wondered if that was deliberate. Maybe this Bartowski was smarter than he looked.

And then he watched as Bartowski set up the sound and cameras so some guy can record his daughter’s little ballerina dance and pronounced his judgment. “What a shmuck,” 

 ---

Casey was used to approaching a target with a semi-automatic or a couple of incendiaries. Overkill was not in his vocabulary. This mission, however, required a more delicate touch. He jimmied the lock and entered the house in Echo Park, dressed all in black, with a mask over his face, an outfit he did not appreciate in the California heat. The security was laughable, no alarms blaring, no cameras or bugs recording his every move. It was so… normal.

“Not for long,” he muttered under his breath, quickly planting the bugs and cameras in optimal locations. He had studied the blueprints of the apartment so he finished in less than a minute, before heading to Charles Bartowski’s bedroom to collect his laptop. He had send Bartowski out with a call to the nerd herder for a repair, trusting his tech to invent something suitable for the kid to fix.  

He didn’t expect to see someone at Bartowski’s desk, hunched over the laptop, wearing enormous headphones that practically swallowed his head as he played some kind of game. You’re getting rusty, old man, he berated himself just as one Morgan Grimes, Best Friend, looked up and saw him standing in the doorway, hand going to the gun in its holster. Civilian, he had to remind himself, consciously letting go of his weapon. So he stepped forward, intending to give Grimes a love tap.

In a move faster than he expected, Grimes grabbed the laptop and used it as a shield, too late for Casey to pull back his punch. He probably cracked a couple of knucklebones as he dented the bottom of the laptop. And then the little pipsqueak dropped it. It crashed to the floor.

For a second, Casey contemplated crushing the other man’s windpipe for the sheer pleasure of hearing it make that exact same sound, but a settled for a fist to the jaw—which made him wince. Broken knuckles. Right. Grimes folded like origami and Casey took what’s left of the laptop, ripping the cord to Grimes’ headphones with a quick jerk. His techs could salvage data out of a microchip the size of a filling, so the data had probably remained intact. He hoped.

---

“What do you mean Hulk stole my laptop?” Chuck asked his best friend in exasperation.

“Well it was either that or a ninja. But he looked too big,” Morgan said with a mouth full of chips. “Does Hulk wear black, though? I guess he thought green would be too obvious. He’s going incognito.” He was watching Hulk, and gestured to it as if to accuse Eric Bana of laptop theft. “I should have asked for an autograph.”

---

“What do you mean it’s not there?” Casey leaned forward, making the little nerd sweat.

Douglas Hartinger, or Dog, as he was called, leaned back as far as his ergonomic chair let him. He was an NSA tech based in California and not a field agent, and was suitably nervous about working with guys like Major John Casey. So he turned back to his laptop and focused on the screen, fiddling unnecessarily with the cable connecting it to broken laptop he was hacking. He was used to working based on need-to-know information, so the parameters for his search were a little vague.

“I traced the e-mail from Agent Larkin,” he stuttered out. “And was able to retrieve the file, but it was empty. The attachment’s gone. I did find some coding of some modified Sweeper virus. It was also attached to the e-mail so it would delete the contents as soon as it was downloaded. It’s very elegant,” he said admiringly, though he shut up when Agent Casey growled.

“Nerds,” Casey muttered under his breath, thinking of both Larkin and Bartowski. He had uncovered their connection of course: roommates at Stanford. How long had they been collaborating? Bartowski and his apple pie life—nobody was that clean. He had to be hiding something.

He rubbed his chin, before sending off a quick message to the general. Enough pussy-footing. We’re bringing him in.

tbc