II

Jack jolted awake in the shadowy dark. There was a moment of unnerving disorientation before the memory of his circumstances returned.

He was a captive of Irina Derevko. He remembered next to nothing of the plane crash that had brought him here, but if she was telling the truth about creating a fake body with Project Helix technology, then the CIA didn't know to be looking for him.

He was going to have to rescue himself.

Jack shifted position, and found that the wrist restraints that had bound him in earlier days had been removed. He wasn't sure how long they'd been gone; he had vague recollections of days of vomiting, possibly some kind of secondary infection or reaction to the drugs. But now the fever was gone and the dosage of pain medication reduced, and his mind was clearer again.

He sat up.

The wave of dizziness that swept over him was intense, and he had to grip the side of the bed and squeeze his eyes shut until it passed. The dark behind his eyelids seemed to move in hypnotic patterns, pouring in towards him like grains of sand.

He sat still and breathed for a few moments, then cautiously opened his eyes. There was a sharp, piercing pain at the base of his skull that made him want to flop back down and huddle under the covers, but he made himself stand up from the bed. There would be time for recuperation once he was free.

Jack shuffled across the room, disturbed by the depth of his own weakness. His mouth was dry, and his breath came in ragged pants, every step a lurch into nausea. By the time he was at the door his limbs felt heavy and his back was soaked in sweat.

He expected the door to be locked, but when he tried the handle it opened easily. He followed the hallway outside until he came to a side turning.

And found himself facing a warmly lit open-plan area, where Irina Derevko sat at a small wooden table, absently skewering bits of potato with a fork as she went through paperwork with the other hand. It was such a startlingly domestic picture, and so painfully reminiscent of Laura grading her students' papers in the house they'd shared decades ago, that he stopped dead.

"Ah, Jack," she said mildly, without bothering to look up from her paperwork. "Good to see you're feeling better. We need to talk."

Jack knew that he had three options. He could turn around and stalk back to his room. He could attempt to overpower Derevko and escape. Or he could sit down with her and find out what she wanted.

With the way he felt right now, only one of those was not guaranteed to end in a humiliating collapse. And of course, it was the one that he liked least.

"I trust you're a little more coherent now," Irina said calmly as he sat down. She poured him out a glass of water, but he didn't take it; not so much through fear of being drugged as the sure knowledge that his hands would shake if he tried to lift it.

It was dangerous to show weakness in front of this woman.

Jack's lips thinned. "If you mean am I even less susceptible to this ridiculous fiction you insist on peddling, then yes."

She huffed in dry amusement. "Jack, the day I'm idiotic enough to base a plan around pounding anything into your stubborn head is the day I retire from espionage." Her face grew more serious, as if she truly believed he could still be swayed by the appearance of sincerity. "It's the truth, Jack," she said earnestly. "We have a second child. I gave birth to her seven months after I was extracted from the US."

"And yet you're unable to produce this fictitious child, or any evidence of her existence," Jack said coolly. It was a transparent ploy. Irina had seen that he was reluctantly willing to work with her for Sydney's sake, and now she invented another lost daughter to try and hook him into assisting her schemes.

He refused to let his memory curve back towards those final months, spin shadowy delusions out of the half-recalled shape of a body in the dark and discrepancies in his wife's behaviour. He'd gone over those memories a hundred thousand times, and there was nothing in them to point to pregnancy that couldn't just as easily be explained by tension from an FBI investigation closing in and an upcoming extraction.

"Her name is Nadia," Irina said, and his heart clenched involuntarily. He didn't believe her story for a minute - but still, in another life, another world, he might have spent nights lying in bed with Laura, testing that name on his tongue as they murmured in low voices how to break the news to Sydney. "The KGB took her from me when she was born. I haven't seen her since she was less than a day old."

There was a desperate longing in her eyes... but Irina Derevko could put just about anything she wanted in her eyes. For ten long, foolish years Jack would have been prepared to bet his life that he saw undying love there.

And he wasn't about to let her fool him again. "And why would the KGB do that to one of their great success stories?" he said, raising an eyebrow.

Irina's face darkened. "Do you think I was given a hero's welcome?" she spat. "I'd spent ten years in America, married to an American, raising an American child. They didn't trust me."

"How distressing for you," he said flatly. His head was beginning to swim, and he squinted a little against the light and his suddenly blurry vision.

Irina pushed her chair back from the table with a scowl. "You should go back to your room," she snapped. "You look like you're about to faint." She strode away.

Jack would have taken more pleasure in the conversational victory if he hadn't felt like she was right.


The knocking on his apartment door stirred Vaughn out of deep sleep. He squinted blearily at the clock on the nightstand, and saw that it was after three. He staggered to the door in boxers and a T-shirt with his gun in hand, wondering if it was Renée with another mission for him. She didn't think twice about making him run on zero sleep, but she was usually more circumspect than to show up on his doorstep in the middle of LA.

He reached the door, and set the weapon aside as he realised it was a visitor from closer to home. "Sydney," he said, stepping back to let her in. Despite the hour, she was bright eyed and alert, almost bouncing with energy.

"Hey," she said, grinning at him. "Sorry, I was out jogging, and I ended up here and... I guess I should have checked my watch first, huh?" She gave a breathless laugh.

"That's all right," he said automatically. There was no point making an issue of her spending hours out jogging at this time of night - not least because there was nothing the LA night scene could offer that would be any match for Sydney Bristow. But there were plenty of other reasons to be worried about her. "I know today was hard-" he began.

"I don't want to talk about it," Sydney said, her expression dimming as she shook her head.

That would be fair enough... except Sydney didn't want to talk about anything right now. Vaughn set his hands on his hips, his forehead wrinkling. "Syd..."

She hooked her arms around the back of his neck and stepped into his personal space, smiling. "I can think of better things to do than talk."

"Syd-" he said again, but she kissed the rest of his words away, and really, it was three a.m. and it wasn't like he was going to be at his best at thinking up reasoned arguments anyway. Especially not with the way Sydney's hands were slipping down his body with definite intent.

He guessed they could talk in the morning.


The next day, feeling somewhat better rested and recovered, Jack made a more concerted attempt to explore the environs of his prison. He discovered it to be a sprawling old manor house, apparently largely unoccupied, and expensively furnished in a way that was elegant rather than ostentatious.

No one attempted to stop him from wandering the house, but he could see that the grounds were bounded by a tall fence and access controlled by guard posts. Had he been in a better state of health he might have considered the possibilities for evading the guards, but right now he was still dangerously weak and prone to fits of sudden dizziness. It would be foolish to waste a possible escape opportunity by pursuing it before he was capable of making good on it.

He didn't even know what country he was in, though an educated guess suggested somewhere in Europe. His last memory before waking up here was of being aboard a plane that had diverted over the Swiss Alps, and then what had seemed to be an explosion. Irina had alluded to the plane going down, which seemed plausible given that he'd definitely sustained a head injury. There were other aches and pains, too, all of which made themselves emphatically felt as he made his way through the house. He wondered irritably why Irina felt the need to occupy a house with so many rooms when he appeared to be the only one in residence.

Or almost the only one. In a room on the first floor of the house that was outfitted as a gym, he encountered the woman that he now knew as Katya Derevko.

"Agent Bristow," she said, her lips curving in a smile. "Good to see you were not... permanently damaged." Her eyes raked over him in a way that seemed unnecessarily lascivious given that he was outfitted in the baggy sweats that had been all Irina's people had provided for him. "I assure you, you would have had a much more pleasant time getting here if you'd allowed me to escort you from the Summit hotel."

That had been Irina's first attempt to capture him, some weeks ago. It perturbed him to know that whatever his former wife's intentions for him, they were not spur-of-the-moment opportunism but something planned out in advance. What kind of game was she playing?

Jack realised his mind had been drifting more than was advisable and pulled himself back to the current conversation. "I prefer not to accept invitations from parties who fail to declare their interests," he said, arching his eyebrows.

Katya smirked. "I think Irina's interest in you is entirely transparent," she said. "And I assure you, mine is the same."

Jack scowled. It was obvious that this conversation was going to take him nowhere he wanted to go. And his strength was flagging after so much walking around. "Tell your sister that whatever she means to achieve with her deceptions, I have no intention of cooperating," he said.

He made as much of a dignified exit as he could manage while limping tiredly.


Kendall was less than surprised to see that Sloane had apparently interpreted being grudgingly released from prison as unequivocal forgiveness. He was back to dictating policy like he ran the show - and worse, had an infuriating habit of sounding like his plans made perfect sense.

"I have a contact in Israel," he said. "A collector of rare texts. He approaches me through discreet channels whenever a Rambaldi piece becomes available. Several times, he has attempted to engage me in a bidding war with another party who is almost certainly a proxy for Irina Derevko." He pressed his fingertips together. "I believe that with the appropriate incentives, he could be convinced to divulge the details of his dealings with her organisation."

"Why is this the first I'm hearing of this supposed contact?" Kendall asked, and raised an eyebrow. Besides the damned obvious, that Sloane was about as close to on the level as a spiral staircase. The question now was whether he had a specific ulterior motive, or was just continuing his usual tactic of only doling out information when it would benefit him.

Sloane's expression remained mild. "My contact is an extremely cautious man," he said. "I've missed several rounds of our usual protocol due to my brief incarceration." He managed to load that term with the implication that it had been unnecessary and unjustified. "There's no way he'll accept an approach from me unless I go in person."

Convenient. Kendall scowled. "Oh, and let me guess," he said grimly, "he'll be frightened off unless you go alone." The ink on the pardon had barely dried. How much gall did Sloane possess?

Sloane settled back into his chair. "I believe he would see nothing amiss in me travelling with an assistant," he said with an airy smile.

"And who might you suggest for this task?" Kendall said sardonically. Sloane seemed to have their game plan all figured out. No doubt his next move would be to transplant himself into Kendall's office and start picking out the new décor.

"I believe Agent Bristow would be more than amply suited," Sloane said, casting a sidelong look at her where she'd sat silent for most of the briefing.

Sydney scowled, but directed her words to Kendall rather than Sloane. At least somebody recognised where the authority still was in this room. "Believe me," she said darkly, "he's not going to pull anything on my watch."

That much, at least, Kendall could feel happy signing off on. Sloane might persist in these delusions of fatherly feeling towards Sydney, but he was an idiot if he believed they would ever be reciprocated. The biggest danger in sending the two of them out together was that Sydney might finally snap and throttle the guy to death. And frankly that was a risk that Kendall was more than willing to take.

Yes, he could relax, knowing this mission would be in safe hands. If there was one person who could be trusted to keep a tight leash on Arvin Sloane, it was Sydney Bristow.


Jack woke again in the room that he stubbornly refused to call 'his'. He was a prisoner, not a resident, no matter how surface hospitable the conditions.

A prisoner as much of his healing body's current limitations as restraints set by his captors. He was appalled to see how much time had passed while he slept. Normally, even on those rare and unpleasant days where he had no work to accomplish, his body clock still snapped him awake with the regularity of an alarm. But now, despite the extra hours of sleep, he woke up sluggishly, with a gritty headache that insisted he still needed more rest.

He ignored it and sat up, pressing the heel of his palm to his forehead as a stabbing pain shot through his head. Nausea rose up in threatening waves before he forced it back down.

Still not miraculously recovered. While it had been entirely unreasonable to expect it, he was still irritated. He might well have to delay his escape attempt by another day. And every day spent in the company of the Derevko sisters was a day too long.

His bad mood only grew as his eyes fell on a set of papers on the nightstand that hadn't been there when he went to sleep. He wasn't sure if he should put their unheralded appearance down to Derevko stealth or his own dulled instincts failing to wake him, but either way, it rankled.

It was tempting, if childish, to ignore the file purely out of spite, but Jack knew better than to turn down any form of intel however suspect its source. He sat down on the bed and opened the folder, grimacing as he saw that the paperwork within was all in Russian. Worse, it mostly seemed to be poor quality copies of documentation that had been originally done on a cheap typewriter.

He puzzled for a few moments over what appeared to be an arrest report, or perhaps a request for detainment. The subtleties of linguistics were somewhat beyond him at present, it seemed, and he found himself getting bogged down trying to translate word by word instead of skimming the whole thing for context as he would usually do. With a scowl he set it aside, abandoning detailed reading in favour of leafing through the pages aimlessly, hoping for something to jump out at him.

There was a smaller packet shoved into the back of the file. He opened it up, and found it contained photographs.

The image of a young Irina Derevko that stared up at him hit him like a kick in the teeth. It was unquestionably Irina, not Laura - the hard eyes and dangerous stance an even bigger clue than the brutally short prison haircut. And yet she had the face and body of the woman that he so vividly remembered kissing goodbye on the fateful day of the crash. There was even an edge of bravado to her raised chin that seemed more like the wife he remembered than the ice cold creature Derevko was today.

He flicked hurriedly past the disquieting picture, only to find that the others were more of the same. They were dated, at first months apart, and then down to shorter intervals. The reason why someone would keep such a thorough record of a prisoner was obvious by the third picture. The swell of a subtle curve that grew over the following months into a hugely pregnant belly, distorting the line of an otherwise emaciated body.

Jack spread the photos out on the bed and stared at them all, registering both how similar and how different the woman in the pictures looked to Laura when she'd been pregnant with Sydney.

They could still be fakes. All of the documents he'd been given, no doubt written support for this eloquent sequence of illustrations, could very easily be fake.

But for the first time, he found himself wondering... what if they were real?