A young boy, just about to enter his teenage years, lay awake in his bed. It was almost midnight, but he was still up, reading a comic book under the tented blanket with the aid of a flashlight. His appetite for reading was voracious; he would often go through a book a day. Mostly he loved adventure stories, his favorites being tales of superheroes and spies.

An incriminating floorboard creaked ever-so-softly just outside his door in the hallway. He quickly shut off the flashlight and hid it under the covers with his comic. As the doorknob turned, he quickly lay down, assuming a normal sleeping posture for him. His parents, especially his mother, had caught him reading plenty of times because he was lying in an unusual position when they came to check on him. It had become something of a game to outwit them. He tried not to smile.

The door to his room slowly opened, a dim light from the hall casting a large rectangle on the wall opposite the bed. Through the ambient light, a slim female figure crept into the room, moving nearly silently across the floor of the hold house. The boy marveled at how adept his mother was at dodging the creaky parts of the floor; she was like a cat at times.

His mother gently sat down on the edge of the bed, carefully running her fingers through the boy's unruly hair. He thought he caught the sound of a faint sigh, but didn't dare open his eyes.

After a long moment, she said, "It's hard to say goodbye." She leaned down and gently pressed her lips to his forehead. Her departure disturbed neither the bed nor the suddenly ominous silence in the room.

When the door was shut once again, the boy leaned up on his elbows, puzzled at the words. What could she have meant by that?

He crept to the door, dodging the creaky floorboards just as his mother had and slowly slipped into the hall. A light from downstairs suggested somebody was awake; he carefully made his way to the top of the stairs and peeked through an opening in the banister. All he could see were the backlit silhouettes of his parents as they stood in front of the kitchen door.

His father's voice echoed up the stairwell. "You know you don't have to do this."

"And you know that's not true. They need me. You know I have no choice," his mother responded.

"What am I supposed to tell the kids?"

"You won't need to tell them anything."

"I think they'll notice if their mother just up and vanishes," he said wryly.

"Somebody will be here in a couple of hours. They'll inject me with something that will render me completely unconscious. Then they'll arrange the rest of the details."

A long silence followed. When his father spoke again, he sounded like his heart was breaking. "Please don't do this. I can't make it without you."

She put a comforting hand to his cheek. "Yes, you can. You have the strength."

Again, there was an uncomfortable silence. "Not without you, I don't," he said in a halting whisper, unable to look at her any more. He pulled the hand away and walked back across the room, collapsing into a chair.

Tears burned in the boy's eyes. He didn't know what was going on, but he could feel his family being torn apart. He crept back to his room as quietly as he could and climbed into bed. He cried for a long time, but sleep never really came.

Before the sun came up the next morning, he suddenly heard his sister bawling. It was a horrible, horrible sound. He leapt from his bed and ran downstairs, where a man wearing an ambulance driver's outfit was zipping up a bag on a gurney. His father was holding his sister close, but the act seemed to comfort neither of them. Tears streamed from his sister's eyes, while his father had a haunted look that suggested nothing would ever be right again.

Anger burned inside the young man as he stared at his mother being wheeled out the door in her artificially induced coma. As he helplessly watched his inconsolable father try to comfort his sobbing sister, he vowed to find the people responsible for this and to avenge the death of his family. All he could hear was the sound of his sister crying…

"Chuck?"

The voice brought him out of his memories. He reoriented himself; he was riding in the front seat of a red Corvette convertible, the breeze blowing through his hair on a beautifully sunny California costal highway. The sound of the engine, the spinning wheels, and the wind blowing across his ears created a pleasant white noise in his ears.

He looked down at the groundskeeper's suit he had slipped into in the tent. After injecting the CIA guard with a sedative, he activated the door to the dove cage. It had been a simple matter to slip out the back of the tent while everyone's attention was diverted. He had covered the twenty feet to the main building without anyone noticing before activating the NSA incinerator.

Chuck Bartowski was now dead.

He looked across at Bryce, noting the grin on his face. Bryce said, "I'm happy to report that the Intersect 3.0, along with their top scientist and likely all of your research, is no more."

Chuck allowed himself a wry grin. "That's OK; their research had a couple of problems that likely would have given them fits anyway."

While reporting his notions on image retention, Chuck had failed to mention a few things. Most notably, he had failed to mention that he had undertaken a series of mental exercises for the full five years while he was out of Stanford, not the three months he had suggested. That, along with a couple of other false leads, were likely to lead to fairly disastrous results for anyone attempting to load information into their minds.

Bryce had managed to obtain and share the CIA's original notes on the subject, but Chuck made a great deal of headway on his own. Actually, he was probably the world's foremost expert on the subject, especially now that Professor Fleming was dead.

When Bryce had been recruited to the CIA, he had quickly found out what they were recruiting him for. Bryce had a way of getting people to tell them more than they really should, and he quickly knew all there was to know about Project Omaha.

Bryce had no axe to grind with the CIA, but when Chuck suggested that they could be ridiculously wealthy inside of ten years, Bryce was quickly on board. Bryce wasn't long on scruples, and he always had an adventurous spirit.

After Professor Fleming's call to Chuck, the pair was tempted to allow Chuck to be recruited to Project Omaha. However, Chuck correctly suspected that the government scientists did not realize the full potential of the project, so they engineered the blow-up for two reasons: it gave Chuck time to research how to best prepare his mind to store the information, and to allay any suspicions because of their friendship when Bryce sent the Intersect to Chuck.

Chuck's mind was now full of 99 percent of the US government's classified database of secrets, including a set of intersecting data points that was no longer available to anyone but Chuck. At least, not until the Intersect 4.0 was built.

Soon Bryce would have his money. The pair had prepared aliases and a quiet little hideaway from which they planned to blackmail the American government for a ridiculous amount of money, just to keep the secrets hidden. If all worked out well, they would likely be looking at a nine-figure payout for staying hidden. And if the American government refused to budge, Bryce had enough contacts to help them make money in other ways.

Chuck had his revenge against the CIA. Not only was the Intersect destroyed, but he had severely compromised two of the government's best agents in the process. His carefully crafted persona was specifically designed to get Sarah and Casey to trust him, and even to help him to accomplish his goal. Their careers would likely be finished once the blackmail came to light.

He smirked at the irony. Sarah had asked him to trust her the night of their first "date", and consistently demanded his trust thereafter. She had been worried about the wrong thing: he completely trusted her from the start, especially because Bryce had fed him so much information about her. The problem was that she couldn't trust him.

They pulled off the highway and headed down to an inlet with a small harbor. They hopped out of the car and made their way across their dock, quickly preparing to cast off. Bryce stared a bit longingly at the car and the mainland, knowing he would likely never see either again. "I am going to miss a few things."

Chuck thought of Ellie and Morgan as he coiled up a rope and tossed it onto the deck. He had long prepared himself for this moment; he suspected both would understand if they knew the whole story. "Well, you know what they say."

Bryce grinned. "It's hard to say goodbye."

He reached out a hand and helped pull Chuck onto the deck, clasping Chuck on the shoulder. He quickly made his way to the captain's chair and, after a couple of quick checks, threw the throttle forward.

Chuck let out a whoop and raised his hands over his head in victory as the boat took off for the open sea.