With slightly shaking hands Don took his wallet from his pocket and opened it. "This is the original photo." He held it out to Reddington. "You were blackmailed with my twin sister, but the baby in the picture in the watch - that's me." He hardly dared to look up. How would Red react?
For a while Red stared at the picture, that was so familiar to him, without understanding. It was the same picture. The same young, blond, enticing woman - but with TWO babies in her arms, while the photo in the pocket watch was cut in a way that only the child on the right was to be seen. Donald... was HIS child?!
But he had checked Ressler's background thoroughly when the young agent had appeared as his new pursuer. There hadn't been absolutely anything that would have appeared suspicious, familiar or strange. He had been surprised merely at the fact that such a young and at that time still quite inexperienced agent had been assigned to a major case like his - and on the top of it with the confidential order not to bring him in but to execute him. This had been done deliberately, Red realized, and his blood ran cold.
Both men looked up at the same time, looked at each other.
"What has happened to your sister?" Red asked. He had always expected to - maybe, maybe - meet a young woman with two missing fingers one day. A son had been beyond his imagination. Therefore, he needed a moment to get used to that thought.
"My mother said, she had died as a baby of the sudden infant death syndrome," Don replied. "This is the only photo of her. But... maybe it's not right at all." It was his main problem. - Everything seemed to be put into question suddenly. Everything he had believed to know about himself and his family seemed to turn out as a lie. Nothing he scrutinised with the certainty that he was Reddington's son could withstand.
Red saw the desperation in Donald's eyes, sensed how hard it had hit him to discover that he had been lied to all those years. Beliefs, motives, maybe even character traits, the reason why Donald was the agent in charge - everything had been manipulated.
"I guess, your alleged biological father was your hero," Red said softly. The flawless federal agent with the coastguard, John Ressler, who lost his life heroically during an incident at sea when Donald had been four years old, had what it took to be the perfect hero for a little boy. And now, Donald had to learn that his biological father was a criminal, a traitor.
"He was... but... it's possible that he never existed," Don said in despair. "Everything I know about him is what my mother had told me. And there's only one single photo of him. I don't bear the slightest resemblance to him. I have no own recollection of him. Sure, you don't remember much of what you've experienced as a toddler, but there are, nevertheless, a few flashbacks of certain events - and there is not one in which my alleged father would appear. I can't even remember the burial - supposedly with 'all honour' - although my mother said, I had been there. You would remember such an essential event, wouldn't you?"
"You probably would," Red agreed. "Nevertheless, you wanted to be like him, didn't you? And that's probably what they wanted you to want." It was so easy to manipulate children in a way that they believed in the end it had been their own idea.
"Probably. And my mother... I can't tell you anything about her." This knowledge had shocked Don most. "I don't know what she worked. She went to work sometimes, sometimes even in the middle of the night, but I don't know where she went or what she did there. Later I thought, it might have been something you are ashamed of telling your child - a erotic bar or something like that. But now I think... What if she was paid to get pregnant from you?!" Had she ever loved him at all? She hadn't been a bad mother but sometimes she had been rather impatient. Had it been only a mean to an end? Or had she been blackmailed, used, forced to be Reddington's honeytrap?
Red sensed what Donald was worried about, and it caused an inner pain. Was this unknown enemy really that heartless to abuse innocent children for his absurd game? "As far as I know, nature makes a woman to love her child," he tried to comfort Donald and took the younger man's hand. To his relief Donald didn't refuse. "Maybe she was in a hopeless situation."
"And if SHE is behind all this?" Don asked, and all at once he had the feeling that he had to suffocate, to choke by all these terrible thoughts. How could anyone make somebody have to do such horrible considerations about his own mother? "Sometimes she received strange phone calls," he recalled. "I don't know about whom or what it was about, but she often argued with someone. And - I never met any relatives of her. No grandparents, aunts, cousins, no one. No close friends. There were only normal people, y'know, neighbours, mothers of other children. I don't even know whether she really died in that car accident. Maybe she simply disappeared because her job was done for the moment."
Red knew that Donald's mother died - or allegedly died - when Donald had been about ten years old. No, she died, it came to his mind suddenly, in January 1991, shortly after he had abandoned his family and his country. Oh my God! For a child at that age there was nothing worse than to lose the mother. To think now, that everything might have been just a fake, had to be horrible. "I'm so sorry you were dragged into all this, because of me," he said, deeply moved, and caressed Donald's hands.
"It's not your fault," Don said and fought back his tears. "Somebody uses both of us as pawns in some kind of weird game - including the plan that I was supposed to hunt you down and put a bullet in your head! Everyone always urged me to become a cop, a federal agent, just like my alleged father, and then... I was assigned to that case. This is definitely no coincidence!"
"Do you know who assigned you to it?"
"No. Assistant Director Sherman, Cooper's predecessor, gave me the file but he said, I must have made an impression on someone high above. So it wasn't his decision." Back then, Don had been so proud of that he had been selected for such a major case, for such an important mission. Now he was horrified by the thought that he almost had killed his own father.
"Well, I would say, we were both lucky that I avoided you," Red said ironically. In fact, his blood ran cold while he was trying to imagine what would have become of his son if he had been successful. Whatever Donald might see in him - a criminal, a traitor - he would have hardly been able to live with the guilt of having killed his own father. "And, good Lord, I'm glad I saved you life," it occurred to him. If he had decided differently at that time, then HE might have been the one now who felt guilty.
"I had to think of that incident, too, when I saw the picture in the pocket watch," Don said. "Back then, I didn't think much about the fact that we share the same blood type - even if it is rare. A coincidence, I thought. But in connection with the photo... I... I took a used plaster from the garbage at that day and ran an anonymous DNA-test," he confessed. "I needed to be sure, and I didn't want to run it through our database... And it is really true!" He looked at Red in despair. Certainly, his relationship to Reddington had changed since Red saved his life, but he had never trusted him completely or loved him with all his heart. On the other hand, Red had treated him almost fatherly sometimes, so that Don had an imagination of how Red probably would have been as a father. To his surprise he hoped with all his heart Red wouldn't reject him but accept him as his son.
"I guess, I'm not exactly the father you wanted," Red assumed, still holding the hands of the younger man.
"And I'm not the child you wanted," Don replied and was afraid of the truth.
Red saw the fear in Donald's eyes, and for one moment it surprised him. Did Donald honestly want him as his father? He was like a symbol of everything Donald hated and detested. On the other hand, it was quite simply the natural wish of every child to be loved by its parents. No matter whether they were the worst people on earth. No matter how old the child was. And now, with the love of his mother in question, it was presumably important to him that his father at least didn't hate him.