VII

Jack had a strange sense of vertigo from the perspective shift in his perception of Arvin's motivations. He scrambled to reassess most of the last decade in the light of new information. He found it created a different picture to the one he'd had in his mind, although not necessarily a markedly more flattering one.

"I appreciate it may seem that my allegiances are shifting in the wind," Arvin said, relaxing back into his chair. "But I assure you, this change has been coming for a long time. My association with SD-6 has always been a means to an end." He took a sip of his wine.

The CIA wanted Jack to continue the pretence that he was fully loyal to Arvin, and act as if he had no insider knowledge of the deal they'd made.

The CIA were insulting Arvin's intelligence, a mistake Jack had no intention of perpetuating. And that meant he had the quite unfamiliar luxury of speaking freely.

"I used to believe there could be no worse motivation for a man to betray his country than mere mercenary greed," he said.

Arvin raised his chin, the edge of a smirk touching his lips. "Then you were naïve," he said mildly.

Of course, the true barb was yet to come. "But then-" and here Jack paused to gently swirl his wine, "-I never contemplated the idea of a man betraying his country completely incidentally in the course of pursuing antique curiosities."

Arvin's eyes narrowed to dangerous black. "Rambaldi's ideas are anything but antique."

Good. They were speaking plainly for the first time in ten years, perhaps longer. Which meant he could say exactly what he thought.

"I felt sorry for you, Arvin, when you were in disgrace," he said. "You took to Rambaldi like I took to whisky. It was your religion. I assumed-" he allowed a fraction of a sneer to show, "-that you took to international terrorism when that left you unfulfilled... but you never truly gave up on Rambaldi at all, did you? All this..." he spread his hands, encompassing the house, the SD-6 office, decades of their history, "was simply a convenient framework to support your personal quest."

Jack had realised that Arvin was using SD-6 as a means to pursue his obsession early on, but he had always assumed it was a confluence of interests, two goals that happily sat side by side. It had never occurred to him that Arvin could have engineered his entire association with SD-6 purely to pursue Rambaldi. The sheer arrogant scale of the machinations involved was at once hard to credit - and characteristically Arvin. He always played his games on a chessboard several times larger than anyone else thought to use.

"Rambaldi's future is almost upon us, Jack," Arvin said seriously. "The signs, the dates he prophesied... we have less than a decade to prepare for what's to come. We cannot afford to let his inventions fall into the wrong hands this close to the endgame."

That argument required the rather hefty supposition that Arvin Sloane's were the right hands. And others even harder to swallow. "And what precisely is it that we must prepare for?" Jack raised a querulous eyebrow. "The end of the world?"

"Perhaps," Arvin said simply.

Jack couldn't help a bitter laugh. "Do you have any idea how mad you sound?"

At that, Arvin chuckled himself, and smiled almost wistfully. "I've missed this."

"My contempt?"

"You. Being honest with me." His face sobered. "I can't deny that I was hurt, Jack. When I realised you were working against me. Oh, Sydney..." he gestured with his wine glass, "she's young and idealistic, and she sees things in black and white. But I thought you and I had an understanding."

Arvin had quite the impressive gift for pouring on guilt over people's reactions to wrongs he had committed himself. Jack kept his face impassive. "Our understanding ended the day you recruited Sydney to SD-6 without my knowledge."

Arvin closed his eyes and nodded slowly. "I see." He placed his empty glass down and regarded Jack seriously. "You saved Emily for me, and I'm in your debt," he said. "Everything I do, I do for her; for Sydney; for the world. Believe that."

Holding his gaze, Jack at least believed that Arvin believed that.

He just wasn't sure that was necessarily a good thing.


Vaughn was jittery by the time Jack showed up to meet him. Jack might have been proven not to be KGB, but Vaughn still wasn't sure that he trusted the guy. There were times when he seemed entirely too comfortable inside the lawless environment of SD-6. And his relationship with Sloane was hard to pin down. Were they old friends? Deadly enemies? Some complicated blend of the two?

There was one area, however, where Vaughn was sure that he and Jack were in perfect accord. He stepped forward as Jack entered the subbasement. "The FBI aren't releasing Sydney. They've convinced that she's the woman in the prophecy."

Jack's eyes flashed. "Then they must be... disabused of that notion." His tone of voice strongly implied that this might involve actual abuse.

Violence was tempting, especially after the day he'd had battling bureaucracy - without the slightest bit of help from their inter-agency liaison, the suspiciously absent Haladki - but as it happened, he had a better idea. He waved the typed up copy of the prophecy at Jack. "Well, I think this is our way to do that. See this line here: 'This woman will have had her effect never having seen the beauty of my sky behind Mount Sebacio'. If the FBI are taking this seriously, they're taking every line of it seriously." He had more experience than he wanted with Rambaldi followers and the interpretation of prophecy. "So if we can get Sydney to Mount Sebacio-"

"It will prove she's not the woman Rambaldi wrote about," Jack said, nodding encouragingly.

He was so used to the cultists' dogged adherence to ideas of destiny that it was almost a surprise to hear Jack accept his reasoning. "That works, right? I thought it made sense." He frowned. "Devlin's on board, but the FBI are stonewalling. He's put in three calls, but they're not taking it anywhere."

"We'll have to extract her and get her to Italy ourselves," Jack said. "But first we need to know where she's being held."

Vaughn grimaced. "Haladki would know. He's CIA, but he used to be FBI. I know he still has ties. Only trouble is he didn't show up for work this morning. Maybe if we could get access to his email account..." He spread his hands, knowing the impossibility of that.

"We have Sloane as a resource now," Jack said abruptly.

Vaughn wrinkled his forehead. "Sloane doesn't have access to the CIA's internal network." If he did, they'd have been so screwed by now it wasn't funny.

Jack met his eyes with that little twitch of the mouth he was learning to recognise as a Jack Bristow smile. "No. But if we have Sloane, we have Marshall Flinkman."

Sydney had often waxed lyrical about SD-6's tech expert, but honestly, Vaughn had thought she was talking him up, since so she clearly adored the guy. "He's that good?" he said sceptically.

"He's that good," Jack said, with a minor quirk of an eyebrow.


Marshall couldn't help but feel a little bit nervous.

Okay, so this wasn't really a field mission. More just an 'outside of SD-6' mission. He didn't even get to leave LA. But there was a clandestine vibe to the whole setup that was beyond his usual experience. Well, not beyond it, because the whole Credit Dauphine thing, that was pretty clandestine already, he lied every day about his supposed job at the bank. But this was different.

Mr Sloane had entrusted him with this job personally; very hush-hush, tell no one, all that conspiracy jazz. All that he'd gathered was that Syd needed help - no one had told Marshall she was even out on a mission - and fixing it required contact with the main CIA.

Hence the hush-hushedness. SD-6 was so far into black ops it was practically ultra-violet ops. The main CIA weren't supposed to acknowledge - or in most cases even know - that it existed.

And now Sydney was in trouble because of that.

"The FBI believe her to have been involved in a serious crime," Jack explained. "She cannot exonerate herself without exposing the existence of SD-6."

"Which would be bad," Marshall couldn't help interjecting. The CIA guy - Agent Vaughn - was giving him a frowny wrinkly foreheaded look as if he didn't think Marshall was being serious enough. He didn't know that babbling was how Marshall did serious. The more severe the situation, the more of his brainpower was dedicated to chasing the solution, and the less processing power he had left over to assess his words before letting them out.

"Which would be bad," Jack echoed, perfectly dryly. Marshall thought that might be sarcasm, but his ability to read non-verbal cues - calibrated for the big ones at best - was no match for the Jack Bristow scale. "However, Sydney herself is capable of retrieving further evidence that will prove her lack of involvement - if we can locate and temporarily free her."

"I gotcha," Marshall said, with a sideways smile. And this guy Haladki's emails could help them track her down. "Okay, so, Agent Vaughn, I'm going to use your login-"

"Don't look at any of the files," Vaughn said sternly. Marshall spread his hands.

"Hey, I know. I understand perfectly. Don't worry. I'm an expert at not looking at things. I do it all the time. I mean, I don't do it," he corrected. "See, sometimes, well, the big boys get computer trouble too, and even though I don't have high enough clearance I'm the only one who can fix it, so I have to kind of type with my eyes closed. Well, not with my eyes closed - I can do that, I practised, you've got those little... bobbles... on the keyboard, but it makes it kind of hard to judge the feedback - but, yes, I kind of read without actually reading what I'm reading, if you know what I mean. I mean, even Mr Sloane- should I be mentioning him?" He looked at Jack.

"You should be typing," Jack said, without expression.

"Got it. Got it. Multi-tasking," he pointed out. He stayed silent for a few seconds, but couldn't suppress a grin. "This is exciting," he said to Vaughn. "Hacking into the CIA." Vaughn didn't look entirely like he appreciated the thrill. "I mean, obviously not exciting. A challenge. As it should be!" Fortunately, a distraction presented itself. "Oh, look, I'm in."

"Already?" Vaughn leaned over his shoulder in disbelief.

"Well, yeah. You see, the difficult part of getting in to the CIA is actually, well, getting in. All their agents are properly vetted, so they don't really pay so much attention to the possibility of..." His explanation was interrupted by the fact that Jack Bristow had leaned into his personal space and stolen control of his keyboard. "Is it there?" Then, as the pointer scrolled down the screen, he saw it himself: 'Re: Bristow Transport'.

Uncertain whether this was one of the things he wasn't supposed to be reading, he looked up at Jack instead.

"Um, Mr Bristow?" He'd said this before, but perhaps it deserved reiterating; for some reason people didn't always catch everything that he told them. "I can stop this being traced back to Agent Vaughn, but this guy's going to know that somebody accessed his login." In an ordinary business, the incorrect 'last logged in' time could easily go unnoticed, but the CIA were trained to pay attention to things like that.

Jack's face was as solid as stone. "That will be dealt with if and when it becomes necessary," he said curtly.

Marshall shuddered, and decided he was very glad that he wasn't in Agent Haladki's shoes. Wherever the guy had disappeared to, he was probably better off staying there.


Sydney ran a weary hand through her hair as she paused just outside the door. She wasn't sure she had the energy to put on a perky face, so frazzled and jetlagged would have to do. Truth to tell, the flights to and from Italy had been the least of her worries. It was the mountain climbing, frantic escape from the FBI, and hours of captivity beforehand that had sapped her strength away.

She still couldn't believe that anyone was taking this stuff seriously. A five-hundred-year-old 'prophecy', based on a sketch that looked a little bit like her and bunch of physical measurements that probably fit hundreds of people? She might accept Sloane was crazy enough to buy into that kind of mysticism, but the FBI?

At least it was over now. They'd proved she couldn't be the woman in the prophecy. And now she could look forward to a glass of red wine, a warm bath, and hours of sleep.

And Will, apparently.

"He lives here now," Francie said, pointing sideways at him.

"More than you do, anyway," Will said, sitting up on the couch from where he'd been reclining. "Hey, Syd. Where've you been?"

"Customs," she said, with a sigh that didn't have to be faked at all. "It was a nightmare. Mistaken identity. They held me for ages."

"Airport security sucks," Francie said authoritatively. "Wine?"

"Oh, yeah." Sydney sank gratefully into the chair next to her as she poured a glass. At least neither of her friends seemed to have noticed that she'd come home bearing suspiciously little baggage for a trip of this length.

"I can't believe how hard that bank works you," Francie said. "Will said your boss is back at work already. Me, if I got shot in the ribs, I'd be riding those painkillers a looong time."

"He's allergic to morphine," Sydney said absently - a highly useful little snippet of information that she'd taken note of just in case. "You spoke to my boss?" she asked Will, alarmed.

"I sent him a card," he said with a casual shrug. "You know, 'thanks for dinner, and heroic bullet-leaping'. I was going to send it to the hospital, but they said he'd already checked out. Those bank people are crazy. I couldn't get your dad, either. I was hoping to get some comments for a follow-up article."

"Well... you know my dad and talking," she said, and felt guilty at Francie's commiserating snort. A whole lot of things about her dad were, if not forgiven, at least more easily understood after the double-whammy revelations about his CIA job and her mother, but she couldn't share any explanation for her softening towards him with her friends.

"Hey, Syd," Will said, waggling a hand at her as he sat forward. "I've been meaning to ask. Was your dad ever in the military or something?"

Okay, that question set off her warning bells. "My dad? I doubt it." She tried to pour in every ounce of the disbelief she would have felt a year ago.

"He was born in a little grey suit," Francie said, and giggled. She composed herself into a more serious face as she met Sydney's eyes. "Sorry." Then she cracked up laughing again.

"No, I was just wondering," Will said. "'Cause, you know, when Mr Sloane got shot, he was so... he was totally in control. Like he knew exactly what to do."

"Yeah, that's my dad," Sydney said. "Mr Take Charge. He probably reads 'what to do in a crisis' manuals in his spare time."

That much, she reflected, was probably even true of her real dad, not just the version of him she made up to show to her friends.

Fortunately, Will's odd line of questioning petered out, and the talk turned to more innocent things. Sydney kicked her shoes off and cuddled up in the corner of the couch, basking in her friends' company. At least she still had her safe haven where she didn't have to think about Sloane, or prophecies, or her mom, or any of that drama for a while.

It was good to be home.