Sydney woke up the next morning with a crick in her neck from sleeping in her armchair. She yawned and stretched and then looked at the alarm clock. 10:17. She gave a silent thanks to her father that he'd bought her more time before her fateful meeting with Sloane.
Some of the pages she had printed from her mother's journal had fallen to the floor during the night. Sydney slid off the chair onto the floor to pick up the scattered sheets of paper. It was then that she saw the name again. William C. Vaughn. Her heart nearly stopped. How was it possible her mother had known the name of Vaughn's father?
Frantically, Sydney tried to put the pages back in order. If her mother had written about murdering Vaughn's father…it would just squash any goodwill she'd felt towards her from the night before.
I do not know why I am committing these thoughts to paper. Perhaps it is to force myself to finally face up to the consequences of my actions. Before that terrible night, I never gave a second thought to what I was doing with my life. The people I had maimed or killed were unimportant to me. They were not flesh-and-blood human beings; they were simply obstacles to what I needed to do in order to be of service to my country. But now I realize that was just my excuse for rationalizing the fact that I was—plain and simply—a killer.
It was the last one who made me realize what I was. He stared right at me, his eyes never wavered from my gaze. Seconds passed, but they seemed like hours. I looked at his face. His eyes were a pure green, like pieces of polished jade. The nose was slightly crooked as if it had been broken when he was a kid. His hands were large. Maybe he had played football in high school, which would account for the broken nose. I saw the gold band on his left hand. He was married. Maybe he even had children. Try as I might, I couldn't help but picture a little boy with a straight nose and green eyes. Or maybe he had a dark-haired, brown-eyed girl like my Sydney. I tried to imagine what I would feel like if I knew I would never get to see Sydney again. How could I deprive a man of never getting to see his children grow up? How could I rob an innocent child of his father?
For the first time, my resolve faltered. Why was I doing this to myself? Why was I humanizing him into a person and not my victim? What was happening to me?
I didn't realize I had pulled the trigger until he crumpled to the ground. Tears sprang to my eyes but they did not fall as the gun dropped from my hand. Tentatively, I stepped towards the fallen figure, trying not to think about the fact that he had been a living, breathing human being just moments before. I felt for his pulse. There was nothing.
I suddenly felt an overwhelming need to find out who he was. All of the others…they had remained anonymous, which was how I wanted it. That way I could pretend they hadn't been real people who didn't have lives of their own and loved ones waiting for them to come home. But this one was different and I had to know why.
I reached out and searched his jacket. His ID was in his inside pocket. I flipped it open. William C. Vaughn. There was an official seal and the words "United States of America." He had been CIA. Like Jack, my husband. I tried not to think about Mr. Vaughn's wife. How she would react when she found out her husband was dead. It hit too close to home. I knew I would go crazy if I ever saw one of those overly solicitous agents standing on my doorstep, waiting to shatter my world.
I ran my fingers inside his wallet. There was a photograph. My breathing shallow and ragged, I forced myself to look at it. It was a picture of a woman and a young boy. She was young and blonde and pretty. Her features looked vaguely European. She was smiling as she hugged the grinning child, who looked to be about six years old. His sandy blonde hair stood straight up on his head and there was a big gap in his mouth where his front tooth should have been. A lump rose in my throat as I pictured that adorable little boy with tears running down his cheeks because his father was dead. It made me think of Sydney again and how I would never want to wish any of the pain and suffering that that little boy would soon be experiencing on her. I touched my finger to his face as if I could wipe the tears away.
I stared at them until I could stand it no longer. Just so that I wouldn't have to look at their happy faces, I turned the photograph over. What I saw there made me feel even worse.
Always keep us close in your heart, the words were written in a flowing, feminine script. In the bottom right hand corner was a small notation. "Michael – 6 years old – 1974."
I let out a great wail and the floodgates opened. I curled up into a tight ball and just rocked back and forth, sobbing and whispering, "I'm sorry, Michael."
The tears were rolling down her cheeks when Sydney finished reading. She was crying for Vaughn and his parents and those last few tortured minutes of William Vaughn's life. No one should ever have to experience the kind of heartache her mother had rendered upon those innocent people.
It was somewhat gratifying for Sydney to know that her mother had felt remorse for murdering Vaughn's father. It showed Sydney her mother hadn't been a cold-blooded killing machine, that she had suffered guilt at the taking of a human life, if only for that last time. But finding out how anguished her mother had been did not make her forget what she had done and it did not make her forgive.
Her insides were churning, the conflicting emotions she was feeling making her sick to her stomach. She knew it was wrong to have these feelings of hatred towards her mother—this woman who supposedly sacrificed herself in order to keep her daughter out of harm's way—but she couldn't help it. Vaughn's father hadn't been murdered by just any assassin; he had been murdered by her mother and that made her feel so much worse. She was bearing the guilt from her mother's deplorable acts and she knew those feelings would never go away.
Maybe it would have been easier if she had never known Vaughn. Sydney could have convinced herself that the man her mother had killed wasn't someone anyone missed. That he was just one of the nameless, faceless thousands who had died while serving his country.
But she knew. Sydney knew what that man's death meant to a person she cared about and was close to and if her mother was responsible for Vaughn's pain, then she couldn't absolve her.
To be continued…