XII

Judy noted the way Sloane poured himself a glass of water before answering her question. Not to evade it or hide nerves, but perhaps a means of asserting control, make his response appear a choice of his own instead of the answer to a demand.

"Sydney Bristow is... like a daughter to me," he said with a fond smile. Avoiding the main thrust of the question, but what he chose to focus on told her as much as anything at this preliminary stage.

"You feel that you've helped shape her into the agent she's become," she offered.

"More than that," he said, almost chidingly. "I knew her when she was a child. Emily and I often looked after her. She lived with us for several months while Jack was in jail."

Now that was interesting, not least because she was all but positive that Sydney had no recollection of any childhood relationship with the Sloanes. Not entirely surprising, given her age at the time and the trauma of being deprived of both mother and father in quick succession, but still, curious that Sloane hadn't tried to reopen that chapter after recruiting her. He'd also hidden the fact that her father worked for SD-6, at a time when he'd believed Jack Bristow fully loyal to him. Had it been Sloane's plan to try and build a new relationship with Sydney that was entirely independent of Jack Bristow?

She found his choice of words quite telling: Sydney had 'lived' with them, not 'stayed' with them. Not a guest, but a resident. Sloane, and perhaps Emily too, had taken Sydney in as a surrogate child.

Adopting a surrogate implied an unfulfilled need - and unfulfilled needs were her stock in trade. She cocked her head. "You and Emily never had children of your own?"

A fractional beat of hesitation that felt subtly different to his other measured pauses. "No," he said, and pressed his fingers together. "One of those things that just... never came to be." He shrugged and smiled wistfully.

Judy could tell that the lightness of the tone was a lie. But she also knew that pushing it this early was bound to be a very bad move. Better to let him believe he'd revealed nothing and relax into a more comfortable topic.

"Then Sydney must be very precious to you both," she said instead.

Getting to grips with Arvin Sloane's inner demons, she could already tell, was not going to be a one-session job.

Kendall couldn't say he would ever have been particularly happy with the idea of releasing Sloane for a mission, and that little display with the fake Keystone had made him even less so. "Why can't you approach these two black market traders alone?" he demanded of Jack.

Jack appeared to have swallowed something decidedly sour. "Pearce-Hamilton and de Saint Aubin have announced themselves retired from the business. Our best chance of persuading them to give up the location of the real Keystone is to appeal to them in the guise of old friends. Much as it pains me to say it," he looked like it physically did, "the approach is much more likely to be successful if it comes from the two of us together."

"Because they think you're..." Weiss waved a vaguely pointing finger, wide-eyed, and dropped it hurriedly at Jack's dark look.

"Yes," he said flatly.

Sloane and Bristow as a couple. What a thought. That was possibly even worse than the real-life pairing of Bristow and Derevko. And while Kendall knew - and was damn well going to keep believing even if he heard otherwise - that the two of them weren't screwing each other, the fact remained that there was more of an emotional attachment there than he liked. The psychiatrist issue wasn't the first time that Jack had argued Sloane's corner. He might couch it in terms of Sloane being a dangerous enemy, but if that was his sole concern, he'd be arguing for execution, not appeasement.

Jack Bristow didn't care about Sloane's Rambaldi knowledge... so he must care about Sloane. And while he was far too professional to do Sloane any special favours, he seemed to be inclined to treat him fairly.

Kendall did not believe in treating men like Sloane fairly. Men like Sloane had a habit of taking the tiniest bit of slack you gave them and fashioning a noose out of it.

No, he was not happy about this mission proposal at all.

"Derevko attempted to recruit Sloane once before," he reminded them. "Her agents managed to successfully interrupt our surveillance and steal him right out from under our noses. Back then, he believed his wife was dying and honouring his deal with us was his only chance to see her again. Now, he has no such motivation to return."

"Jack will be escorting him this time," Dixon said. He was one of the former SD-6 crew, but an excellent agent: solid, dependable, by the book. Kendall would have been much happier to have him holding Sloane's leash than Bristow. Jack Bristow might know the book inside out, but he still did what he damned well pleased. If Kendall ordered him not to let Sloane out of his sight, he'd obey that ruling until and unless he decided that he had a better idea.

"Sloane knows we have the Winter Sun," Sydney said, leaning forward. "The Keystone would be useless to him without it."

"And the Winter Sun is useless to us if he gets the Keystone!" Kendall countered.

Jack interceded. "If Sloane wished to prevent us uniting the two, he could easily have pretended the false Keystone was real and we would have been none the wiser."

Kendall didn't miss the subtle insinuation that Sloane had spotted something their own people would not. He ground his teeth. "Fine," he said curtly. He still didn't like this, but the logic was sound, and they needed that Keystone. He threw out his hands. "We send you and Sloane in as a couple."

From the disturbed faces both Sydney and Weiss made at the tabletop, he couldn't be the only one who considered that a bizarre note to end a meeting on.

Sydney studied the contents of the box Marshall had brought up from storage with a kind of morbid fascination. There were a pair of fake IDs in the names of Jules Wegner and Hector Levinson.

Her father was Jules. The photo must have been some years old even when the false ID was made, because he looked ridiculously young. His hair was slightly longer than she'd ever seen it, showing evidence of curls, and his face was thinner.

She skipped over the Hector ID with less interest - Sloane looked younger, yes, but what did she care about that? But there were other pictures, too. Some were surveillance shots of the two of them at café tables and in bars with their targets; others must have been intended as supporting evidence for the ongoing charade.

Those were the ones she couldn't help but stare at. Her father and Sloane posed together, looking happy in each other's company. The pictures spoke of a degree of affection, one that could believably be passed off as a romance but on the surface just looked like firm friendship.

And that was what nagged at her. Were these pictures created for the cover story, casual poses and fond smiles that slipped away as soon as the camera was lowered? Or were they genuine snapshots from personal albums, collected together to give a certain impression? The faded paperwork that accompanied them revealed nothing of their origin.

"I did not know your dad could make that expression," Vaughn said, lifting up one of the pictures to raise his eyebrows at it. "Or Sloane, for that matter."

"This is bizarre," Sydney said, shaking her head. She slid another out of the pile: her father and Sloane relaxing in armchairs with the blurred glow of a TV off to one side. Sloane drinking beer? That had to be fake. And yet... "This is my old house," she said. "I have photos of my mom and dad with this wallpaper."

"Hey, it was the seventies," Weiss said, leaning over. "I think everybody had that wallpaper."

"You think these photos are legit?" Vaughn asked her.

"I don't know." She lined them up on the desk in front of her. Snapshots of a relationship, possibly imaginary. "I know my dad worked with Sloane at the CIA for years before they joined SD-6, but..." Could they truly have been friends? Sloane claimed to have gone to her father's wedding and known her as a child - an idea that still gave her the shivers - but was the relationship he implied real, or just another of his delusions? Truth be told, she found it as hard to imagine her father having a close friend as she did it being Sloane.

"Well, I guess Sloane couldn't have started out as an evil genius, or he'd never have passed the psych tests to get in the door in the first place," Weiss said.

"That's exactly the kind of thinking that we don't like to see, Agent Weiss," Kendall said, striding in. "I'm sure Sloane started out as a happy little boy just like all the other children in the playground, but he is not one now, and we can't trust him."

"Jack will be riding escort on him the whole time," Vaughn said.

"That's not enough." Kendall braced his hands on his hips. "I want to run a secondary op, keep them both under surveillance while they're in the field."

Weiss straightened up. "You don't trust Jack?" he said, shooting Sydney an apologetic frown.

Sydney sat up too. "My father is-"

Kendall flapped a hand to quiet her. "I trust Jack fine. What I don't trust is Jack's judgement on this one. He's willing to entertain the idea that Sloane is on the level, and I for one am not. I want some extra eyeballs on him just in case he makes a move to neutralise your father."

"We're doing this without Jack's knowledge?" Weiss said, glancing between him and Sydney.

"Not because he's under suspicion," Kendall reiterated, "but because Jack argued against it, and Jack Bristow is exactly the kind of stubborn bastard who would slip surveillance if he thought it was hindering his mission."

She had to admit that was true. "So we run this completely behind the scenes," she said.

Kendall tilted his head. "If their op goes well, they will never even know that you were there."

Sydney had more than a few reservations about this idea. But she'd be lying if she said she didn't also feel a certain satisfaction at the thought of being the one to act behind her father's back for a change.

Arvin rose from his bed and approached the bars as he saw Jack arriving. He could read mixed motives into Jack's having him assigned a psychiatrist - an attempt to expedite his release, sincere concern for his wellbeing, perhaps a touch of mockery? - but on balance considered them most likely benign. Jack had never had enough faith in psychiatry to consider Barnett a particularly useful tool in interrogation, so attempting to dig further answers out of Arvin couldn't be his goal.

Just as well for Jack, as in his current circumstances Arvin found himself in possession of fewer of them than he would like. "Has Marshall been able to trace the fate of the real Keystone?" he asked.

It gave him a certain satisfaction to note that the CIA had adopted his SD-6 team wholesale for their Rambaldi task force. It was plain that they had no pre-existing agents of their calibre. He hired the best. If they had any sense at all, then they would soon give up this pretence of keeping him in an advisory capacity and put him in charge for real.

And then he wouldn't be dependent on Jack's charity for vital information.

There was a hint of subtle quirk to Jack's mouth that someone who'd known him as long as Arvin might read as wry amusement. "It seems that the substitution was the work of our good friends Arthur and Bertram."

Arvin smiled, a weight lifting off his shoulders in the relief of knowing that he hadn't been beaten to the Keystone by Irina after all. His memories of the missions they'd undertaken in their Jules and Hector personas were also pleasant. Their brief had been simply to cultivate an information-sharing friendship with the two men, which had proved to be little hardship: they were cultured, articulate men, interested in fine wine, good music and intellectual conversation rather than the more sordid pursuits of many others in the intelligence world. Arvin had considered himself to have rather more in common with them than he did with most of his boorish CIA coworkers, and he was fairly sure that Jack had felt the same.

Arvin had been young and foolish enough to be a patriot back then. But he'd still been glad when their superiors had ultimately decided that the two black market traders were better left free as potential contacts than hauled in for interrogation. At the time, he'd debated the merits of giving them a tip-off should the order have come down, and considered himself quite the daring free-thinker for it. Now, he found it laughable that he'd factored in the issue of disobeying the CIA's orders at all.

He'd long since learned that the letter of the law was meaningless, and the spirit of it was flexible. And this looked like a good opportunity to bend it. Field work would be a pleasant break from the monotony of his imprisonment - and an excellent way to establish his bona fides with the CIA. He was getting rather tired of the continued suspicion.

"No doubt they would be amenable to a friendly approach from Jules and Hector," he said.

"Agreed," Jack said. "I've secured your conditional release for the duration of this operation. I'll be functioning as your escort, and you'll be obeying my orders."

Arvin could sense the layer of dark satisfaction underlying the words, but smiled back anyway. Jack didn't understand that what he'd gained in nominal authority, he'd already given away by bringing Arvin in on the op without making him ask.

Jack had always been blind to how much the two of them needed each other. Arvin supposed that was why he himself tolerated a dependency that should have been a dangerous weakness. Jack would never take advantage of their connection, because to do so he would first have to acknowledge that it existed.

"I look forward to it," he said, smiling more broadly. "The two of us in the field together... it'll be just like old times."

Jack scowled.

"Bad day?" Francie asked, as Sydney came in through the apartment door and made a beeline straight for the wine.

Sydney already had an excuse on her lips when she realised, with a burst of astonishing freedom, that she didn't need to use it. She collected the wine and two glasses and went to join Francie on the couch. "You have no idea," she said.

"No. I probably don't," Francie said wryly, accepting a glass. "So how is life in the hi-tech world of Jane Bond, superspy - can I mention that?" she asked worriedly, eyes suddenly wide.

"In this apartment, yeah," Sydney said with a nod. "There's a bug killer in the lamp."

Francie's eyes widened still further. "Okay, we're not talking fly paper here, are we?"

Sydney grinned and shook her head.

Francie turned to look. "That lamp my Aunt Gracie gave me that I hate?" she asked incredulously.

"I figured nobody would look inside it," she explained.

"Nobody in their right mind would want to look at it," Francie said, and sipped her wine. "So tell me, sister, what goes wrong in the life of a secret agent? Ladder in your catsuit? Repair bill for your ejector seat? People trying to give you martinis that are stirred, not shaken?"

Sydney grinned, both at how off-base Francie's ideas were - and how much they really weren't. "Nothing like that," she said, tucking her hair back. "It's my dad."

"Ah," Francie said wisely.

"Seriously, I don't understand him!" she burst out. "How can he work with Sloane after everything he's done to us?" Not that Francie knew anywhere near the full story on that, but Sydney had given her and Will the Cliff Notes version of the crazy mess that was her working life.

"Your boss who saved your life but is also a bad guy, albeit possibly reformed," Francie clarified.

"Yeah - reformed like cuts of meat are 'reformed'," Sydney said. "He might have been moulded into shape, but he's not fooling anybody it's the real thing. I don't understand why my dad's willing to trust him."

"He and your dad used to be buddies, right?" Francie asked.

"Good buddies, apparently," she said, raising her eyebrows in disbelief. She tried to imagine her father and Sloane having the same sort of conversations she had with Will and Francie, or Vaughn had with Weiss, and it almost broke her brain. Her dad and Sloane, the best of friends?

No way.

Francie swirled her glass and contemplated it thoughtfully, then looked sideways at her. "Well, maybe after... what happened with your mom-" God, it had had hurt to explain the truth of that to her friends, tearing down the last vestiges of the childhood illusions that she'd thought she'd managed to kill off already, "-he just really wants to believe that he wasn't wrong about both of them," she suggested.

It was strange to contemplate - the idea that her father might be insecure, disturbed by his bad choices. Or maybe it was pride, his agent skills called into question by his failure to spot not one but two snakes in the grass. That sounded more like the man she knew. Her father never second-guessed himself about anything. He was always convinced that his way was the right way.

He was convinced he could predict Sloane - and if he was wrong, then letting Sloane out into the field could be disastrous. Kendall was right to put them both under surveillance. Her father might be trustworthy, but his judgement sure as hell wasn't. The past had proved that time and time again.

"I don't know," Sydney said, shaking her head as she put her empty glass down on the coffee table. "I just wish I had some clue to what kind of warped logic goes on inside my father's head to make him do the things he does."

"Amen to that," Francie said, and drained the dregs of her glass too.