Disclaimer: same
A/N: Thanks for the reviews everyone, and enjoy Chapter 25!
OOOOO
Once the police left the area, Dixon called Jack. He relayed that Marshall had already tapped into the Italian police scanner network, and said that Sydney and Sark were most likely to be taken to La Fossa Prison.
"La Fossa?" Dixon questioned. The two of us were currently in his car, and he'd hooked up his phone to a small portable speaker unit so both of us could be in on the call. "I've never heard of it."
"Good thing, too," Marshall said. As usual, I could hear the clicking of his keyboard in the background. "It's a maximum-security prison about three hours outside of Rome. Middle-of-nowhere. Looks like the high-level Italian authorities are the only ones that even know it's there."
"Why take Sydney and Sark there?" I asked.
"Most likely, they ran their identities once they were arrested. Sydney, of course, has no criminal record to speak of, but Sark's information is all over the world," Jack answered. "They would red-flag him immediately and take him somewhere they knew he could be dealt with."
"Which means whatever they're looking for, it must be there," Dixon inferred.
"It seems likely that the explosion was a setup," Jack agreed.
"Okay, we're in," Marshall said suddenly. "Of course, I can't get any on-site surveillance without a tap into their independent network, but I have got some basic construction blueprints. It looks like there's a sewer access junction about three hundred feet or so off the prison itself – it leads right underneath. If I'm reading this right – and, of course, I am, I mean, it's in Italian but the premise of electrical and mechanical lines running through these access points is pretty universally understood-"
"Marshall?" Jack interrupted.
"Oh, sorry," Marshall apologized immediately. "Anyway, it looks like if you can get into the sewer you can get to an electrical junction box. We should be able to tap into the security feeds from there."
"Should be or will be?" I questioned.
"Will be," Marshall corrected. "I hope."
"All right," Dixon said, starting the car. "We're on our way."
OOOOO
Marshall managed to give us general directions to where we needed to crawl into the sewer and make our way towards the prison. I could just barely see the top of the building from where we were. Marshall had explained that, according to everyone that wasn't a part of the staff or very highly placed in the police system in Rome, everyone thought it was some kind of fancy outpatient resort for cancer treatment.
Dixon and I had exchanged our normal street clothes for black tactical gear, considering that we were trudging around in the sewer system and would soon be hacking into the surveillance system for a maximum-security prison. Besides that, neither one of us really wanted to have to sit around on a flight back to Los Angeles in clothes we'd worn through the sewer.
It was kind of a long walk, especially considering the darkness and the smell, but eventually Dixon pointed out that we should be getting close to the junction box. Jack had arranged our gear, of course, which came complete with transmitters that would allow us to reach APO. It was much easier than having to dig out the cell phone all the time.
"Merlin, you there?" I questioned, clicking my transmitter on.
"Yeah, Vaughn, go ahead," Marshall replied. I just shook my head at the way he continued to call people by their actual names over the com, rather than using call signs.
"We're about seventy meters in, still no sign of the junction box," I replied.
"You're almost directly under the switch room," Marshall replied, obviously calculating the distance easily and translating it onto the blueprint he had. "You should be close."
"Got it," Dixon said, seeing it against the left-hand wall. He headed for it, leaving me to set up the computer so we could see what was going on as well. "It's a standard IPX-node."
"Good," Marshall replied. "You should be able to splice the line and access the surveillance feeds."
"Doing that now," Dixon replied, pulling the box open with a screwdriver.
"Do it quickly," Jack added. "I don't like the idea of Sydney being in a maximum-security prison with Sark as her backup."
"Understood," Dixon agreed. I just nodded a little. As long as he thought she was Anna, and still believed she was the only one that could get to what they were after, she was at least safe from him. Of course, that didn't account for the rest of the things that could go wrong in there. "All right. We should be tied in now." I accessed the feed, seeing several images pop up.
"Yeah, we're hot," I stated. "You getting a picture?" I asked Jack and Marshall.
"Copy, it's coming through. See if you can isolate the women's block," I heard Jack instruct Marshall.
"Wait a minute, is that… Was that the women's showers?" I heard Marshall ask a second later. "No, that-that's men. Definitely men." I just shook my head a little. Finally, the image of Sydney popped up on the screen.
"There she is," I said quickly, not wanting Marshall to bypass it on accident.
"Wait a minute, she's in isolation," Marshall said after a moment. "You think that's part of the plan?"
"I sure hope so," Jack replied.
"Maybe they're waiting for something?" Dixon wondered aloud, looking at the feed over my shoulder.
"Maybe," I agreed.
"They've got to be. If they're here looking for something, Sydney wouldn't just be sitting there," Jack said after a moment.
"No, she's got to be waiting for Sark to do something," I said, watching the feed closely. I was beginning to wonder if this really was all part of the plan. Was Sark even here to begin with?
Suddenly, the feed fuzzed out.
"Marshall, what happened?" Jack asked before either Dixon or I could voice the same concern.
"Did we lose the signal?" I questioned.
"I don't know, everything just went wacky, we've been kicked out," Marshall replied, typing rapidly again to try and regain the tap into the feed. "It's like somebody else is trying to hack into the system."
"Sark," Jack stated.
"Is there any way to regain our tap?" I questioned. "We have to keep track of her!"
"Well, you could look for the alarm lines and then try to cross-wire them and get it on x-signal," Marshall suggested.
"You know what he's talking about?" I asked, looking over at Dixon who had already returned to the junction box.
"Fifty percent," he replied.
"You just have to be careful not to short-circuit the alarm wire, or the entire place could go into lockdown. Worst case scenario, cross the wrong wires and they'll know you're there," Marshall replied.
"Which wires am I looking for?" Dixon questioned.
"There should be two of them, both running out of the central power supply and connecting to different nodes on the circuit board," Marshall replied. "Unless it's customized, which we'll have to hope it's not."
"I've got them," Dixon replied. "Both gray, smaller, connecting to what look like T-1 access points."
"Okay, good, that's them," Marshall replied. "Basically, you have to cross-wire one of them with the main surveillance feed, which we already spliced so that's gonna be a little tricky."
"Which one?" I asked, glancing back to the fuzzed out picture before returning my attention to what Dixon was doing.
"Uh, well, I… I don't know," Marshall replied. "Obviously whichever line is running off a higher bandwidth is gonna be the one that would trigger the alarms. But, I can't see them, so I can't tell you which one it would be."
"Here," I said, getting to my feet and handing Dixon the cell phone. "Snap a picture of the lines and send it to APO. Will that work?"
"Yeah, that'll work," Marshall agreed. Dixon took the phone, quickly taking a picture of each line and sending them to Marshall. I heard him slide over to a different terminal, accessing his e-mail where Dixon sent them. "Okay, I've got them. It looks like the first one, the one on the left. That's the one you want to use."
"Are you sure?" Dixon questioned.
"Yeah – the port that it's plugged into is a basic modem bandwidth, and the other one is running off a T-1," Marshall answered. Dixon pulled the one on the left, waiting for a moment to see if any alarms really did go off. Finally, he cut the end of the wire, splicing it into the surveillance feed.
"Picture's back," Jack replied. "Good thinking."
"Let's just hope we can find her again," I said, going back to the computer. Dixon joined me a moment later, relieved that it had worked. Marshall clicked through to the isolation ward again, finding the room where Sydney had been before.
"She's not there," Dixon observed. "Sark must've triggered the doors."
"Keep going," I told Marshall. He started moving through the system again, scanning for any sign of Sydney. Dixon grabbed his cell phone, saying something about trying to get a contact in Rome that might be able to bail Sydney out if we couldn't find her.
"She could be somewhere that there aren't any cameras," Marshall said after a moment, continuing to cycle through the images. We were back at the beginning now, and still hadn't seen her. "I mean… There are places like that in prisons, right?"
"Nowhere pleasant," Jack replied gravely. Suddenly, the feed switched to an image of one of the lower-level stairwells. I saw Sydney run into the frame, heading up the stairs.
"Dixon, I got her!" I shouted over my shoulder.
"I'll call you back," he said, hanging up the phone and coming over by the computer. "Looks like she's heading back to the women's block."
"She must've gotten what she came for," I replied. "Maybe she's headed for extraction." Okay, this might work out after all…
The doors opened on the upper level again, letting Sydney back into the isolation ward. She ran to her room, where the door was already open. Marshall switched the feed to show that camera.
Sloane was waiting there for her.
Dammit, I should've known! That son of a bitch is in on this!
He got to his feet, saying something to her. Of course, there was no audio on the feed, so we didn't know what was going on. Sydney shook her head, backing up and trying to get out of the room.
Suddenly, he pulled something out of his pocket. He lunged at Sydney. She flinched, falling over onto the cot. It took me a second to realize it was a taser.
"Did she blow her cover?" Dixon asked, surprised.
"Either way, we have to get up there, now," I replied. Sloane closed in on her a moment later, before she could even really sit up, locking his hands around her throat. "Marshall, talk to me!"
"There's a grate to the isolation ward, about thirty yards ahead of you." I shot to my feet, nearly knocking the laptop into the water in the process, and ran for the grate.
"You'll never make it in time, we need to distract Sloane!" I heard Dixon shout behind me. I'll be damned if I don't make it.
I heard Jack saying something about the security controls, and I heard the alarms going off a second later. I climbed up the ladder, pushing the heavy grate aside and climbing up into the prison.
One of the guards spotted me almost immediately. Luckily, I caught him off-balance and a couple of good hits knocked him to the floor. I took off running, already knowing right where I was headed. I could hear fighting inside, hoping that Sydney was fighting Sloane off and we'd get the chance to either arrest or kill the bastard.
I drew my gun, stepping into the room. Sydney was fighting one of the guards off, and Sloane was nowhere to be seen. I shot the guard in the back, and he dropped to the ground. Sydney looked relieved to see me.
"You okay?" I asked her.
"Yeah," she said after a moment. "Let's get out of here."
OOOOO
The flight back was relatively uneventful. Sydney explained about the amulet that The Rose – apparently someone who knew of Rambaldi – was told to give to her. She said that, from the way he spoke, Rambaldi himself had told this man to give her the amulet. Dixon and I both agreed that it sounded ridiculous, but she seemed shaken. Dixon wandered off eventually, leaving the two of us alone.
"What's wrong?" I asked her. She shook her head a little, keeping her gaze locked out the window.
"He made me wonder," she replied vaguely. I waited for a moment, knowing that she would continue when she felt up to it. Finally, she looked at me. "The Rose. He said that, in the end, it's all just fate. That there's nothing I can do to stop them."
"Who? Sloane?" I questioned. She nodded a little, tears springing to her eyes.
"You were right about him," she finally said. "I shouldn't have trusted him, I shouldn't have believed him when he said he'd changed. I should have known better."
"You thought he had," I told her. "So did Nadia."
"She was right," she answered. "I convinced her to go back to him, and…" She shook her head, looking away again for a moment. When she turned her gaze back to me, I could see the pain in her eyes. "Vaughn, he killed her."
"What?" She nodded.
"He killed her. APO found her body the night we went to Ghana," she explained. "Her funeral was the day before Germany."
"God, Syd, why didn't you say something?" I questioned. She shook her head, wiping away tears.
"I don't know," she replied. "I guess I just… I felt so foolish for believing his lies. I felt like, after all that time he'd spent lying to me about SD-6 and about Il Dire and about Rambaldi… I should have been able to see through it this time."
"It's not your fault," I told her seriously. She nodded a little, but I could tell she wasn't sure whether she believed me or not.
"What if this whole thing was right?" she questioned. "What if Rambaldi was right? About everything?"
"Sydney, we know that's not true," I told her again.
"Not really!" she protested. "I mean, 'the passenger and the chosen one will battle and only one will survive'? Nadia is dead because of Sloane. I mean, that prophecy never said that we were going to battle each other. Everyone just assumed that was what it meant. What if it meant Sloane?"
"Is that what this guy told you? The Rose?" I questioned, keeping my voice quiet despite her outburst.
"No," she replied, shaking her head. "He said that the amulet was the beginning."
"The beginning of what?"
"Of the end of nature," she answered. "He said 'stars will fall from the sky and it will be the end of light'. I asked how to stop them from getting it, how to stop this from happening, and you know what he told me?"
"What?"
"He told me I can't."