Part Twenty-One

Lauren Reed had been important, once.

Actually, she reflected, twice—she'd been important twice.

The first time was as a child, when, as a girl of six, she'd been identified as a potential vessel for Rambaldi's prophecies: her Russian lineage, the timing of her birth, her father's success in government and politics. The man's more elucidating writings were just being discovered, then; Rambaldi's timing, as always, impeccable. Her mother, shrewd Olivia, had presented her to the Cabal (William Vaughn was just one among many, then), and it was arranged that she would be schooled in England, trained in spycraft, and generally treated to the best. Treated as if she were special. And trained to loyalty.

She wasn't the only one, of course. There were a handful of little girls just like her, even a boy or two, all likely prospects, but she distinguished herself early. Never particularly appealing to her busy, "charitable" mother before the circumstances of her birth were classified as special, she was hungry to please. She was talented, and that endeared her to her teachers. And the more information the Cabal's higher-ups gathered about the Passenger, the more likely it appeared that she was, in fact, the child in question.

The Cabal had not been interested in the Chosen One. They might have been, except no one, then, knew she existed. There was only the Passenger. The Passenger, and Michael Vaughn.

Lauren fell in love with Michael Vaughn when she was eleven years old. She took one look at his picture—a grainy surveillance still from his after-school baseball practice—and she lost her breath, her heart beat fast, and she knew—knew—that this man was her destiny. He was what she was being trained for. She slept, nights, with his picture beneath her pillow and though there were other boys, other romantic feelings, even full-fledged love affairs, he was the one she always came back to. Her true love.

After graduating prep school she attended university while completing her training. By then William Vaughn was in charge of the Cabal, but she didn't know him yet. And wouldn't get the chance, not then. Because in her last year of study, six months before she would have been sent to America to make contact with Michael Vaughn, they discovered Sydney Bristow, calculated the high likelihood of her being the one they had been looking for. And Lauren was ignored.

Doors that had always opened to her before were suddenly closed. Those who had previously jockeyed for her company, in order to stand in the reflected glow of her importance, no longer had time for her. She was, suddenly, just another agent. A good one—not the best, but very competent—but nothing more. She was directionless; she lived for months in a haze of confusion, of fear—and of seething hatred for Sydney, the woman who had stolen her life out from under her, just by existing.

She'd almost adjusted—the hatred had eased into a tangy bitterness, and she was discovering the few but tangible benefits of the shift in her status—when the word came: Sydney couldn't be the Passenger. Because Sydney was dead.

And all of a sudden, Lauren returned to favor. Four months later, she was seated across from a Michael Vaughn who wouldn't meet her eyes as she questioned him, compassionately but firmly, for the agency, about Sydney. That was the part that she remembered most clearly: that he wouldn't answer her questions about Sydney. And it was then, sitting an interminable four feet away from him, the man she hadn't been able to stop loving, realizing he would never tell her about Sydney, about what he and Sydney had, realizing how much he had loved her, that she started to hate him, just a little bit. Over the next year she seduced him, married him. But she never stopped hating him. Because he never let go of Sydney, and she couldn't let go of him.

Sydney's return from the grave meant only that Lauren had another target for her antipathy. Nothing really changed—Sydney, or her ghost, had been there all along—yet it was different. Vaughn was different.

She let the Covenant recruit her because she was angry. She had the affair with Sark because she wanted someone who looked at her for a change. But that had backfired, of course, in a number of ways. Annoying. It would have been more than annoying—except she had other things to contend with. Because then there was Nadia.

Lauren always did what she was told—she was a good girl, a loyal operative, an obedient daughter. When they told her to go, she went. But that was over. Because all she got for her trouble was cast out. Forgotten. Since it had been determined with some measure of certainty that Nadia, not Lauren, was the Passenger, Lauren had become an angry person. When she stared at herself in the mirror, mornings, she did not recognize who she saw there. She didn't like herself anymore. But she couldn't help it. There was too much rage inside her, too many years of resentment.

And as she walked through the front doors of Bill Vaughn's current front company, head high, stride long, all those feelings flooded back to her twice as strong, stiffening her spine and making it difficult to keep her expression neutral. Behind her, Michael Vaughn and Nadia scurried to keep up. No one got in their way. She'd called ahead, of course. Informed them she was coming, and with whom. And for this brief moment it was as if everything was as it had been. Men and women moved deferentially out of her way. No one questioned her. The expressions on the faces of those she passed were full of fear and awe. But they weren't because of her. They were because of the guests she escorted. The Passenger—and the best hope the world had of surviving her.

As she approached the back office, a secretary—a burly, dark-skinned man in a black tie who, she had been told, typed 100 words a minute with hands that used to work a sniper rifle for a South African resistance movement—stood. "Ms. Reed."

"Is he in?" she inquired more politely then she wanted to.

"He's expecting you."

Of course he was. She turned to nod at Nadia and Michael (Nadia looked grim, almost sick; Michael's face was stormy, his brow unsurprisingly furrowed), then pushed through bullet proof glass door into the offices of her mentor, her father-in-law, a man she tried to hate but couldn't seem to separate herself from no matter how hard she might try: William Vaughn.

"Bill," she greeted him as he stood, then moved to the left so as to not block his views of his real interests—his son, and the Passenger. Together at last.

"Lauren, sweetheart," he returned absently as he came around the desk, attention already fixed on his son, arms open. Michael stepped into his arms stiffly, looking almost pained. His own arms barely touched his father's back, as if he wouldn't let himself (as if he couldn't believe it and as if he knew he shouldn't, both), even as Bill squeezed him, held it longer than felt really proper in mixed company, and then reluctantly let go.

He turned to Nadia. "And you, my dear . . . ." He took her hands between his own, and smiled at her, but Lauren could see the hesitance behind it: the uncertainty, the fear.

She's just a girl, Lauren wanted to scream, irritated. But she'd learned the bitter taste of jealousy well, those years she'd spent at Michael's side, and recognized it now. She was as jealous of that distance, that fear, as she was of the affection. More, maybe. Next to Nadia, Lauren felt ineffectual. Before, she had received that same wary respect, the kind Jack Bristow enjoyed, simply by existing. Now she worked for it, and too often came up short.

"Elena is dead," Lauren announced, to cut the greetings short. Nadia flinched as if burned, and Michael—poor, protective sap Michael, who once protected Lauren herself, and just as needlessly—shot Lauren a dark look.

No fool, likely as aware of her motives as she herself was, Bill said mildly, "You mentioned."

She pressed on, casually, "They want to know what she was working on."

Bill considered her then, eyes glittering, assessing—impressed, she thought. At any rate looking at her, finally, addressing her with the same attention he had been giving the others. Ah, his eyes said, as he smiled, a hard stretch of his lips that briefly turned his open, friendly, handsomely aged face into something calculating and cool and proud. A happy warmth spread through her against her will. He thought she had done well.

He thought she was still on his side.

"You were good to bring them to me," he said to her, and Michael interrupted, "We didn't give her the choice."

Bill smiled. "Son, I think you underestimate your ex-wife."

Michael's expression turned stony. "It wouldn't be the first time. Dad."

Lauren remembered clearly the early days of her and Michael's relationship: late quiet nights in bed with Michael's head pillowed on her naked belly as she ran her fingers through his hair, and listened. He didn't talk about Sydney—never talked about Sydney—but it was as if his silence on that particular subject made the rest of his thoughts too difficult to keep to himself. He'd speak for hours. About his mother, about his childhood, about college. And about his father. How much he'd loved him. How he wondered if Bill would have been proud of him, of the man he'd become. And how much he would have given to be able to know him as a grown man rather than a child. It had hurt her, not to be able to tell him, even as it had given her a pain-tinged thrill of vengeance: she kept his father a secret from him, as he kept Sydney a secret from her.

Now he had that chance—now he stood in front of his father, in front of the real Bill Vaughn, seeing him with adult eyes—and it wasn't what he'd expected. Lauren knew how he felt because she'd felt it too. Disillusionment. Pain. Irrational anger. The bite of it, of knowing Bill Vaughn for who he really was, still hadn't faded from inside her. The reality of him—the conditionality of his affection, the ruthless calculation behind the apparent sincerity and the easy smile—was too different, and too harrowing, for her to ever reconcile.

After Julian had released her from Irina Derevko's custody, she'd gone straight to Bill. She'd explained everything; she'd put herself on her knees before him, and appealed to him as his daughter-in-law, as his former protégé, as anything she thought would make a difference. She knew he'd be angry, but she thought he cared about her—the way Sloane, warped as he was, so obviously cared for Sydney. But the thing that saved her was not affection. It was the value she held as Elena's employee.

It came to her slowly, once she was out of the running and thus able to be told the Passenger's true destiny, what they had feared from her and now feared from Nadia: the Cabal had spent so much time coddling her, training her, ensuring her loyalty and wedding her emotionally to the one person capable of preventing her, as the Passenger, from reaching her full potential, only because it was the best way they could think of to disarm her. They would have just as willingly slaughtered the whole lot of them, all those innocent children they'd plucked from their homes on just a probability, if they thought it would have worked. (Destiny, they believed, could not be denied. Either Michael Vaughn would stop the Passenger or he would not; there would still, regardless, be a Passenger there to be stopped.)

Bill Vaughn, the man she had loved as a father, did not care about her at all. Only what she represented. And realizing that had derailed everything she'd ever been taught; knocking down that one support made the rest of the structure tumble.

Lauren still believed that, for the sake of the world in which they lived, the Passsenger had to be stopped, and that Michael Vaughn was the man who would do it. She just didn't care. She'd told Nadia the truth, because she knew it would bring her here, and that would hurt the two people who had hurt her the most, the father and the son—but because, also, the truth would make Bill Vaughn powerless. And he'd done nothing these last twenty-plus years but work to make sure, after Elena, he was never powerless again.

Nadia would demand the details of Elena's work, and Bill would supply them, would give her what she wanted, rather than risk losing whatever small hold over the Passenger he still possessed. And Michael . . . . She'd take care of Michael.

Lauren smiled. "If you'll excuse me," she said sweetly in the tense silence between father and son, thinking of Sydney Bristow and the company Lauren had overheard she was currently keeping, "I have something I need to take care of."

Hannah in security had always been something resembling a friend. Surely she wouldn't mind if Lauren borrowed her terminal, and her encrypted account, and a few seconds of security footage from earlier that morning. . . .