XIV
Even after everything, he and Arvin still worked together in the field like a well-oiled machine. They'd always been able to read each other better than the agents around them, attuned to each other's subtleties.
Apparently Jack hadn't been quite as attuned as he'd thought.
He shook the self-recriminations away to focus on the here and now. Nadia was the priority. To rescue her, they needed the Hourglass - and they needed Arvin, alive and presumably not beaten to a pulp. For the moment, at least.
It was easy to acquire a tool kit and an appropriate-looking van: there was no logo to identify it, but that would pass unnoticed in the dark. Company uniforms would have been a harder trick to fake on minimal resources, but a suit and a laminated ID photo functioned just as adequately. As they pulled up outside the house, the alarms were already blaring.
They got out of the van together and approached the building, Jack naturally falling into position a pace behind Arvin. The Gold family were clustered outside in their sleepwear, the men apparently arguing over whether or not it was possible to kill the alarms manually while a small boy of about four or so tugged at his mother's hand, bawling.
A well-set scene.
Arvin strode confidently up to the matriarch of the family, a sturdy woman in her late sixties wearing a white flannel robe with all the dignity that she could muster.
"Serafina Gold?" he said, adopting a disarming Texan accent. "Mason Hayes, ALZ Security. This is my associate John Lovecraft." Jack nodded in acknowledgement, and they both flashed detail-free ID badges that wouldn't be easily readable in the dark.
"Oh, thank God!" the woman said, drawing herself up to her full height. She had the advantage of Arvin there, if only by a fraction. "That damned alarm has been going off for over half an hour! There's nothing on any of the monitors, but we can't shut the thing off. The girl from your office said you'd need to come out to fix it." The girl at the office would be Sydney, having intercepted the telephone alert that was supposed to go straight to ALZ's alarm receiving centre.
"Wiring fault," Jack said laconically, with an insouciant shrug.
"We've seen this issue before," Arvin said with a reassuring smile. Good cop, bad cop worked even better on field operations than it did in interrogations. "It's a component failure that triggers the system's anti-tampering defences. It's a simple fix, we can have it done for you in minutes, but we'll need to inspect all the units inside the house to find out where the fault is." He held his hands up apologetically.
"Oh, of course," Serafina said gratefully, ushering them inside. "The box is just under the stairs here..."
Arvin unscrewed the casing of the master control panel with professional ease, supposedly looking for faults while instead he assessed the nature of the setup. "And your reset code isn't working?" he asked, poking connections with his screwdriver.
"No, er, it's not doing anything." Serafina hung back, casting occasional twitchy glances at Jack as he lurked in a position calculated to be right at the unnerving corner of her eyeline. His main role here was as a distraction from Arvin's work. Jack could rewire an alarm system in a pinch, but Arvin had always had a better gift for electronics and mechanisms.
"All right, well, the problem's not here," Arvin said after a moment, replacing the casing. He turned to Serafina expectantly. "You have internal sensors upstairs? I'll need to take a look at all of those."
"Oh, yes, the gallery." Serafina stepped back, straightening her robe. "I have a very valuable art collection," she said pompously. "It's imperative that the alarm system be functioning."
"Seems pretty functional to me," Jack said, tilting his head to listen to the continued blaring.
Arvin smiled comfortingly as she gave Jack a look of distaste. "Well, just let us take a look at your setup and I'm sure we'll have the problem fixed in no time, Ma'am," he said.
At the subtle flick of her father's arm glimpsed through an upstairs window, Sydney shut down the signal generator she had aimed at the house sensors. A few moments later, the howling alarm finally cut out. She removed her earplugs and settled in to wait.
She saw Sloane and her father emerge and drive off in the borrowed van. Shortly after, the phone in her pocket started to vibrate.
She answered it without speaking; it was a brand new disposable phone and only two people would know the number.
"The door sensors are disconnected," her father's voice said in her ear. Hearing it again was almost enough to bring tears back to her eyes despite the curt, businesslike message. "Infrared detection is down, but the motion sensors are still live. You'll have to avoid the beams."
"Understood." She jabbed the phone off without betraying any of the emotion in her voice.
The last of the lights went out across the house. Sydney gave the family a further fifteen minutes to get back to sleep, then stole silently across the lawn.
The front door was no longer alarmed, but it was still locked. A few expert twists with an improvised lock-pick soon took care of that. She padded across the thick carpet and up the stairs, treading carefully to prevent betraying creaks. At the top, she could see the door onto the private gallery. It was protected by its own security keypad; she drew a screwdriver from her pocket and opened the casing. Inside Sloane had left two wires hanging loose. She touched the ends together and the display went dead.
She pushed the door open and stepped into the darkened gallery. Tall windows would fill the room with natural light during the day, but right now the only illumination was from the red beams of the motion sensors that formed a light cage round each of the exhibits.
Sydney scanned the room for the Rambaldi Hourglass.
It had central pride of place, though to her eyes it didn't look all that impressive. An hourglass bulb full of greenish-yellow liquid set inside a frame of glass tubes and burnished metal.
A frame that made it too large to slip out through any of the gaps in the network of sensor beams, no matter how she angled it. She could picture the possible rotations at a glance - no dice.
Unless she raised it up. There was no sensor beam preventing the Hourglass from moving directly upwards, but she wouldn't be able to get a suitable grip to lift it without her arm breaking the beams.
At least, not from her current position. Sydney looked up.
The angled roof of the gallery was crossed by wooden support beams - or rather, just beams, since she doubted they served any purpose beyond aesthetic. One of them passed almost directly over the position of the Hourglass. She drew her flashlight and played it over the lowest point of the roof at the far side of the room.
There wasn't enough gap between the beam and ceiling for her to wedge her fingers into... but perhaps she could wedge something else. Holding the flashlight in her teeth, she pulled out the screwdriver she'd used earlier, and a second one she'd been packing in case she needed a different type. She held them out in both her fists, inspecting the heads.
Hey, who the hell needed pitons?
Sydney ran over to where the beam was just within reach overhead and drove one of the screwdrivers in at the top with a hard thock. The wood, selected for its artsy weathered look more than structural strength, was yielding enough to let it dig in. She jammed the other screwdriver into the other side, and cautiously tested her weight, chin-up style, on the handles. There was an ominous creak, and she hastily swung her legs up to grip the hold of the beam with her knees.
She was going to have to do this fast.
Hanging on by one of her screwdriver pitons and the strength of her legs, Sydney pulled the right-hand screwdriver out and thunked it in two feet further along. She followed it with the left, then released her clamped knees and let her body hang down briefly before swinging her legs back up to grip again. The wood groaned in protest at the temporary increase in weight, and she winced as she heard it begin to splinter.
She made the next few handholds as hastily as she could, and looked down once she was over the Hourglass. She tried to stretch down to grab it while hanging on one-handed, but it was too far below. She grimaced. Only one way to do this, then.
Sydney swung her legs down, bending them so that she didn't kick through the sensor beams. Then she swung them back up, hooked her toes over the two makeshift pitons, and let go with her hands. She reached down and plucked the Hourglass out of the middle of the light cage.
Whether it was the extra weight, the movement, or just the odds catching up, that was the moment that one of her footholds tore loose from the wooden beam. Suddenly dangling by only one leg, she made a desperate grab for the screwdriver as it fell, snatching it out of the air half an inch before it broke the sensor beam.
There was no way to stop herself falling. Instead, Sydney used the momentum of her left leg swinging loose to throw herself sideways away from the motion sensors. She hit the ground hard but rolling and wound up on her back hugging the Hourglass.
She raised her head off the ground to look down at it. It was unbroken.
Mission accomplished.
She sprang back to her feet and slipped silently out of the gallery, leaving nothing behind to mark her presence but an empty display stand and the enigmatic sight of a screwdriver sticking out of the high roof beam.
Sydney met them at the rendezvous point, Hourglass in hand - not that either of them would have anticipated anything different.
Jack eyed the artefact dubiously as she handed it over. It looked like the objet d'art it had been displayed as, no moving parts aside from the liquid inside the bulbs and no obvious place to conceal a hidden mechanism. Rambaldi had, admittedly, been a master of non-obvious concealment, but nonetheless Jack failed to see how this device was going to lead them to Nadia.
Arvin, however, took the artefact with breathless reverence, turning it this way and that to study as if memorising its every detail. Jack found the look of awe that lit in his eyes thoroughly distasteful.
"You know how to use it?" he asked bluntly.
Arvin raised his eyes to meet Jack's. "I do," he said.
And then, without warning, threw the Hourglass down to smash on the floor. Sydney jerked as if to move forward, but Arvin held a hand up to stop her. As they watched, the droplets of viscous green liquid flowed together, reforming into a single perfect orb about the size of a baseball.
Arvin reached down to grasp it, the outer shell hardening in his hand. The inside remained glistening liquid.
Sydney folded her arms, resolutely unimpressed. "So what does that do?" she said.
Jack's heart ached with how much he'd missed her in the weeks that they'd been kept apart.
"It's a power source," Arvin said. "To a device that was at one point in my possession," he slid his gaze along to Jack, "but now, thanks to the NSA's lax security, no doubt resides in Irina Derevko's collection."
"I know the location of her storehouse," Jack said neutrally. He already regretted his emotionality in confronting Arvin earlier. Arvin had always been dangerously adept at reading people's motivations - at least, when they didn't conflict with his blinkered belief in his own benevolence. Jack had survived undiscovered as a double agent for so long simply because Arvin had failed to even recognise that any actions of his own could have put a strain on their previous friendship.
Similarly, Arvin would think nothing of the fact that Jack's outburst had revealed an unwise level of continued trust in him. He would have assumed that trust already regardless of evidence.
The far greater risk was that Arvin would recognise that he was not the only one Jack felt betrayed by. If he realised that Jack had fallen into the trap of beginning to trust Irina again, he wouldn't be able to resist twisting the knife. And that was one humiliation that Jack would prefer to keep private.
Not necessarily an easy task, when it seemed they were doomed to cross paths with the Derevkos again.
"What if she's moved the artefacts?" Sydney said. "She knows there's a risk that you'll lead the CIA right to her."
Perhaps... but Jack suspected Irina's assessment of his allegiance to the CIA was more cynical - and probably more accurate - than Sydney's. "She knows I have no wish to give the DSR opportunity to seize Nadia," he said. "And she has no reason to suspect I would have any personal interest in Rambaldi's devices."
The one advantage he had - he hoped - was that the last thing Irina would expect him to do right now was join forces with Arvin Sloane.
Another flight, another warehouse. The mechanics of missions were so often the same, no matter how personal the stakes. Sydney didn't raise a sweat over tranquilising the guards on duty outside her mother's storehouse.
She did, however, raise an eyebrow when her father walked straight up to the keypad and typed in an access code. "She gave you the codes?" she said. Exactly what had gone on between her father and mother during their search for her sister? She knew they'd made an uneasy truce before when her own life in danger, but that was just for the space of a single mission. This time they'd worked together for weeks. Had her father been a prisoner, or... what?
"She believed that she had me entirely fooled," her father said darkly, and strode on without leaving any pause for her to consider pursuing the question.
She wasn't sure she wanted to dig too deep into any of this anyway. Her mind kept getting stuck on the thought of her mother and Sloane. God.
Worse even than the disturbing mental images, worse than the further proof that her mother's love for her father really had just been a lie, was the terrible thought itching away at the back of her mind that refused to leave her alone. If Sloane was Nadia's father, then was he... could he also be-?
No. She wouldn't even think it. It couldn't be true.
But if Sloane had been thinking it, that might explain-
No. Sydney wrenched her mind back to the present.
As they entered the warehouse, she saw rows of Rambaldi artefacts, some familiar from retrieval missions and briefing files, others new to her. The great machine that stood in the centre could only be Il Dire. It was curiously unimpressive to her eyes, the fruits of years - centuries - of scavenger hunting reduced to a dormant collection of cogs inside a wooden framework. Without the puzzle and the mystique and the air of prophecy, it was just a very clever fifteenth century machine.
These devices meant nothing to her. Now that she understood what her mother had truly been searching for, they'd lost even their secondary importance as bait or a way to thwart the Derevkos' plans. All that mattered now was finding Nadia.
All that mattered to her. As Sloane followed her in, his eyes gleamed greedily at the sight, and he stood taking in the room's contents like a connoisseur of fine wine savouring the first subtle scent.
Her father had even less patience for his twisted pseudo-religion than she did. "The second part to the Hourglass. Where is it?" he said brusquely.
Sloane walked among the artefacts, clearly barely restraining the desire to stop and examine each one in detail. But after a moment, he halted with a faint frown and looked up at her father.
"It's not here," he said.
"It is not," an accented voice confirmed from behind them. "But it seems I owe Irina an apology for not believing her insistence that you would be. Hello, Jack."
Her Aunt Katya smiled at them over the barrel of her gun.