Legal disclaimers: see earlier parts.
Disclaimers: see earlier parts.
The Last Day
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, one day ago
Nadia Santos was better than halfway convinced she was dead when she finally managed to swim her way back up through clouds of darkness to consciousness, only to find Jack Bristow sitting in a chair looking straight at her from the side of her hospital bed. Of all the things she'd ever hoped would greet her on her entry to a place of bright lights and happiness-if that was where she was going-she could do a lot worse than him, easily. But...she was fairly sure that there wouldn't be gently humming electric lights in Heaven, or the faint smell of bleach...
"Welcome back. How do you feel?" asked Jack, his deep voice just the way she remembered it. No, she definitely wasn't dead. If she'd been in Heaven, he'd have given her a warm hug to make her feel safe and let her know he cared. This was real life-and that would never happen.
"Like..." she managed, then had to stop and lick her lips, swallow to moisten a dry throat. "Like I've been having...a very bad week. You?" she managed, trying to block out the memories of helplessly falling out of the sky in a crashing aircraft. It wasn't easy, but she had to. There was a time and a place to deal with terrors like that-and that wasn't now.
For a moment she actually thought he smiled, only for his face to reset into the usual stone mask so fast that she actually had to blink to tell whether or not she'd seen anything. Still, even if he'd only opened up to her that much it was a start.
"I know exactly what you mean, but we need to move on. You have numerous laceration injuries, small cuts and severe bruising. You suffered a severe Concussion in the plane crash, but the Doctor tells me that since you've regained consciousness so quickly you shouldn't need to worry about that in the long term. You are also suffering from Whiplash as a result of the crash and, most importantly, your injuries, the loss of blood and traumatic shock of the events caused you to suffer a severe heart attack. You had to be resuscitated, before you ask" said Jack, cataloguing the abuse her body had suffered as though he was talking about someone who wasn't in the room or important to him.
"Thank you for that summation of all the ways I could have died, Jack. I take it I'm not crippled, at least?" she asked, hopefully.
"No. But you had to have extensive stitching of your wounds to close them all completely. The Doctor says that you will require plastic surgery where the tree branch nearly tore your leg off to remove what will otherwise be a considerable scar. He has prescribed a minimum of a weeks bed rest, starting now" replied Jack.
His expression suggested that he didn't care either way, but she knew him better than that after six months. He was a past master of keeping his thoughts to himself and cutting his feelings completely out of the equation, but that didn't mean he didn't care. It just meant he wouldn't risk getting hurt deep down where he lived, not ever again. That, given her total lack of family or trust in anyone around her both before and after she'd been recruited by Argentinean Intelligence for too many good reasons, she could understand.
She'd always trusted Sydney, for some reason, from their first meeting in Chechnya. She knew she could trust sweet Eric Weiss, while Marshall got starry-eyed around "his" Sydney's sister and would have hacked Langley if she'd asked him the right way. Vaughn was and always would be Sydney's man, but he was a solid professional and she knew he was trustworthy. She trusted Jack, but matters were always... complicated, where he was concerned. Sometimes she even trusted her father, a man who'd tortured his own long-lost child, though, so what did that say about her?
"I see. I take it that travelling back to LA to convalesce there is out of the question?" she asked.
This time, she knew she wasn't imagining it. He smiled.
"I didn't say that" he replied, carefully. "In fact, I have some suggestions to make..."
Abandoned industrial complex 50 miles east of LA
When Monica Messolina told her where they were going to be driving to, Sydney guessed that it would be a secure location. She wasn't sure who else would be there, what they would be doing there or why they would be there. She was of the opinion that she was being almost suicidally stupid, on purpose, by going with a woman she barely knew-as best she could tell, at the moment-to an unknown location without backup on hand, any bugs and, most important of all, with no one she trusted any the wiser as to where she was. But, she had to do it. What was on offer was worth the risk, if the information was good...
The abandoned warehouse was thirty feet high and twenty across, with intact glass in every high window, a side door for personnel and two main doors that could be rolled open and shut for vehicles at the front. Round-roofed, the walls were grey stone while the roof was steel. The structure was big enough to conceal a number of people and likely did, while being easily large enough to conceal weapons, explosives and even vehicles as well if necessary.
However, she couldn't pick out even traces of any tracks leading to and from the warehouse despite the dusty old tarmac road that was the only access and exit point. She couldn't see any guards, nor any sign of sensors monitoring the area and the approach. Either the people she'd come to see were so good at what they did that they had no reason to worry about security, they were too arrogant to care, or they had no reason to care. She wasn't sure which answer would be the worst.
She distantly noticed that it was starting to rain, raindrops tapping on her face and running into her hair. The wind was getting up, too. Her loose hair was being shifted by a now gusting wind as it strengthened around her. Dark clouds which had been threatening overhead since the late afternoon were starting to do far more than just look threatening now, she could tell that rain was going to come slashing down any second. Probably thunder and lightning, too. It seemed oddly appropriate, in fact.
The side door swung open as they approached, Monica parking the car by it. As they stepped out into the wild, Sydney remembering to shut the car window before she did, a familiar face appeared. Familiar in a sense, at least.
Cole.
He'd saved her life, now he was evidently part of an effort to save her mind-if that was the true purpose here. She wondered who else she was going to see she'd know.
Inside, a block of tables and chairs had been created to one end of an apparent engineering section. Two joined table and five chairs had been set up. Seated in one of the chairs already was-
She stopped so sharply she could have walked into a wall with less effect. Here eyes widened even as her jaw threatened to simply become unhinged as it dropped.
"ANNA?!" she exploded, almost spitting out the dark woman's name. That bitch was here?! This was...
"Hello again, Sydney" said Anna, her strong, musical voice floating out to easily cross the difference between them. "Welcome to your past..."
Washington, DC
Edward Norton McAllister, who had served his Government with distinction for most of the past fifty years, had just left his most recent briefing session with the President. He was inside an armoured Limo, surrounded by Secret Service guards in the middle of a three-car convoy with two motorcycle Outriders front and back. He'd killed with his bare hands in the line of duty, nearly been killed and run so many Black Books Ops that would never appear in the history books that nobody questioned his nerve or his self-control and skills under pressure any longer.
An old man on the very edge of Retirement, there was very little left that scared him. People didn't, no matter how monstrous or terrible, he'd seen the worst and lived to tell the tale with his sanity intact. Weapons didn't, he'd lost any fear of violent death almost twenty-five years before when he'd been shot for the first time and come so close to death that he'd tasted it. After that, he knew that he could die at any time-and that it was just a things that happened to everyone, one way or another, in the end.
But Jason Bourne, the Assassin, did. He did, because McAllister had been a driving force behind the resurrection of Project Treadstone in the first place and he'd seen first-hand just what this "new" Bourne could and would do. On top of which, old man Conklin had been so worried about the developing situation with Bourne clearly targeting former or current Treadstone staff and even Agents that he had practically Ordered McAllister to get his head down behind the parapet and stay there until he died of old age or Bourne was dead, whatever came first.
That wasn't how McAllister worked, though, if there was a battle to be fought he didn't duck and run, he went to find the enemy and slaughtered them or died trying-even asleep in their foxholes if it came to it. Of course, at seventy-four years of age he was hardly up to taking matters into his own hands physically if he had to, not any longer.
His hair was long gone, the once dark red wave lost years earlier. Dark brown eyes were still as sharp as ever, so was his mind, but his muscles were thin threads now and liver spots atop his head added to so many wrinkles his body resembled a rough map made him look even older than he was. His always-sharp business suit and perfectly folded tie were, as ever, in place. The silver watch which had kept perfect time for twenty years still ran flawlessly on his wrist.
He smiled briefly at a sudden thought which crossed his mind, a youthful saying one of the younger Cabinet members had quoted in a pathetic attempt to lighten the mood when they'd been discussing the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq in the War Room. "Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse" he'd said...
When the bomb hidden under a sewer plate in the middle of the road went off and tore his limo in half, shredding his body into small pieces in the process, McAllister was still smiling at the poor joke. When the rescue teams later found his still-intact head, they'd never know what could have been making him smile the moment he died.
/End of Chapter 28. All Reviews welcomed/.
