Part Thirty-Six
Hunger finally caught up with Sydney Bristow late that evening as she and Vaughn worked silently across the long dining room table from one another, each engrossed in their own subset of the digital images Sark's men had retrieved from the warehouse Nadia abandoned shortly after Vaughn's departure—shortly, Sydney assumed, after it was clear Vaughn had gone out for more than coffee and supplies.
"Looks like you've proved helpful after all, Mr. Vaughn," Sark had commented when the files came through.
"What are you talking about?" Vaughn sounded alarmed, and had pushed back his chair and gone around to look at Sark's screen almost before he'd stopped speaking.
"After I triangulated the location of your original phone call, I had a few of my men in the area do a sweep of the nearby buildings most likely to be housing you and Ms. Santos." Sark sounded distracted, as he presumably began transferring the files to a location where she, too, could see them, but the fury in Vaughn's voice caught his attention.
"You traced my phone call?"
"And I had you followed on your way to our meet, as well," Sark replied irritably. "Did you think I wouldn't attempt to authenticate your story? Last time we met you pointed a gun at our heads and the woman we had come to rescue knocked Sydney unconscious. Forgive me for suspecting the situation might be other than as you presented it."
Sydney had ignored the exchange—it wasn't the first instance of raised voices between the two of them that day, and wouldn't be the last. The things Sark did that barely fazed her anymore still put Vaughn's back up, and every time Vaughn reacted, Sark took it as an excuse to needle him further.
Eventually Sydney had suggested, none too gently, that one of them ought to try working in a separate room. They'd both ignored her, but had also abandoned the tiff they were in the middle of. And few minutes afterward Sark had left to take a phone call in the kitchen and didn't return.
An hour and a half later she took a stretch break and noticed her stomach felt particularly hollow. So she left her computer open and wandered into the kitchen to fix herself a sandwich—and, she admitted, to look in on Sark, who she'd gotten used to having across the table.
He looked up at her when she entered, and smiled faintly. "Hello, Sydney."
"Sark," she said, and smiled back. "How's your work going?"
"Slowly," he said, then admitted wryly, "though not as slowly as before."
His eyes had that sleepy look they got whenever he looked at a computer screen too long, and it reminded her of mornings in his bed. Not mornings like this last one, with her kind of sore and still tired and tense about going down and facing Vaughn, but better ones. If they'd been alone in the house she'd have gone over to him, maybe straddled his lap and lay her cheek on his shoulder, just to feel him, to feel comforted (and it was so much less strange now, thinking of "Sark" and "comfort" in the same sentence). But they weren't alone in the house. Vaughn was there. Vaughn, and all the memories of home and work that surrounded him like a cloud of perfume, too sweet, and so she just smiled again, tucked her hair behind one ear, and went to the fridge to pull out what she needed for her sandwich.
When she'd constructed something respectable—turkey and provolone slices, some lettuce, but no mayonnaise or tomato or pickles, too much trouble, too messy—she sat at the table with him and ate while he worked. Like this, she could almost forget Vaughn in the next room, and her sister out there, potentially being ridden by a power-mad prophet with a penchant for destruction.
"Penny for your thoughts."
Sark's voice startled her; she looked down at the sandwich in her hands and realized she'd been holding it without taking a bite for longer than she should have.
"Don't you mean a pence?"
"I'm a man of many currencies. Also, penny is the singular form of pence." He pushed the lid of his laptop closed, folded his hands over it, and waited.
She sighed, and put the sandwich down. "All this waiting around is torture," she said. "There's too much time to think."
"And you're a woman of action," he observed, and she turned her face to try to hide the uneasy flush that brought to her cheeks.
"I thought this was going to be it—Vaughn would know something, we'd rush off, and even if we lost . . . ." She shook her head. "What happens if we just . . . miss it? If—if Nadia unleashes some lethal, world-ending death ray and it's over before we even know its happening?"
He shook his head. "That's not the way it will happen. We'll know. We'll be there."
"Because the prophecies say so?"
"And because that's the way the prophecy-maker wants it," he said. "I'm personally more concerned we'll be unprepared when the moment arrives. These images have so far yielded absolutely nothing of use. Much like Mr. Vaughn himself."
Sydney nearly smiled. "You really don't like him, do you."
"Not in the slightest," he agreed readily.
"And not just," and didn't this feel vain, "because of me?"
"No," he agreed, "though that plays a part. I find his lack of control appalling, and his espionage skills—these past few weeks, perhaps, excepted—to be second-rate. He quite simply irritates me, on nearly every possible level."
"And you still brought him here, into your home."
He looked at her seriously. "For you, Sydney, I would bear far worse than irritation."
She wasn't sure quite how to respond to that, and so she picked up her sandwich again, and took a bite to buy time. She chewed slowly, and then swallowed. "Thank you," she said finally.
He nodded. And then he changed the subject, possibly as uncomfortable as she was with the serious turn. "Did you know your mother believed it was no accident that you were able to find so many of Rambaldi's artifacts?"
"Because I'm the Chosen One?" she chanced. Which was a far eerier idea now that she had managed to accept it might be true.
His lips curved, she assumed, at the irritation at her tone. "Well, yes. But her theory was that it wasn't your identity as the Chosen One that made you so good at it, but something else that made you both the Chosen One and so adept at locating Milo Rambaldi's . . . devices. Your genes."
Her eyebrows raised at that. "She thought it was genetic?"
"Apparently." He shrugged. "It's an intriguing theory, to be sure. Rambaldi was particularly interested in genetics. The Page 47 prophecy names genetic markers as the clearest method of identifying its subject. It's the way your mother—who shares those markers with you—explained her own successes."
"Come on, Sark. It's not like our DNA lights up whenever we're near something Rambaldi touched."
He laughed. "Our genes are the basis for everything about us: our intellect, our vision, our temperament. The way we see our world. In the right combination, perhaps they allow one to see things others do not. Perhaps they attune one to certain things."
"And if you're a prophetic genius with an interest in genetics who wanted to hide things for a couple hundred years, for one person in particular to find, that might be an effective—but insane—way to do it. I get it. But it doesn't help us find Nadia." She sighed, and finished off the rest of the sandwich. She'd barely tasted it, but her stomach felt better. "I should get back to work."
"You could work in here," he suggested casually.
She recognized that must have taken a lot for him to ask, and wanted to say yes, but, "It may not be smart to leave Vaughn alone too long, honestly. And since I'm the one less likely to rip his throat out, surprisingly, that means I get to keep an eye on him."
"Lucky me," Sark murmured.
She stood and took her plate to the sink, rinsed it, and set it down with the breakfast and lunch dishes. Someone would have to take care of those eventually; she was pretty sure Sark had dismissed most of the household staff (not that she'd seen them often even when they were around).
She was preparing herself mentally to walk back out to the dining room when Sark said, "Sydney," quietly and caught her arm. "Hold a moment."
"What's wrong?" she asked, seeing the pensive look in his eyes when she turned.
He looked startled at the question. "Nothing." He took her hand, pulled her toward him, away from the counter and through the open door of the dim pantry.
"What are we doing?" Sydney asked, feeling wary. This was a mood of Sark's she wasn't familiar with.
He was looking at her mouth, the heat of his body distinct in the small space. His attention made her breathing irregular and arousal murmur in her belly. Her breath came shallowly. "Let me kiss you, Sydney." His words were barely a murmur. "I haven't kissed you in so long."
She swallowed. "It's only been two days."
"A very long two days. Too long not to have tasted you." His hands were at her hips, moving her backwards until she felt the pantry shelves bump against the small of her back, the backs of her thighs.
She felt dizzy. He was so close to her, only a breath of space between their mouths, their bodies. Close but not quite touching, tension caught between.
"I won't unless you ask me to," he said. "Say it, Sydney. Ask me to kiss you."
She hesitated—why, she wasn't sure—and felt the leashed desire, building, trembling, the heat rising in his eyes and threatening to spill over into action, even anger.
Just before it did, just at the moment, she bit back a moan and gasped it, "Kiss me," and his mouth closed on hers, his hand coming up to brace the back of her neck as he pressed into her, tasting her tongue, bending her to him. She shuddered. Something about this—Vaughn just beyond the door, the darkness around them—made the sensations sharper, the taste of him more poignant. She shifted herself against him as if she were trying to fit herself into his flesh, and heard his shaky breath as he kissed her jaw, her throat, her lips again, thumb caressing the corner of her mouth, opening her for him to claim.
"Sydney, I think I found the—Oh."
Vaughn sounded stunned. She couldn't bring herself to turn her head, so she didn't know what he looked like. She'd pulled back from their embrace when she'd heard her name, felt Vaughn's voice sharp inside her, but the idea of looking at him made her queasy. Sark's hands rubbed up and down her upper arms, and she suspected he wasn't looking at Vaughn either.
Vaughn said awkwardly, "I'll—sorry." And then he was gone again.
Sark leaned his forehead against hers and let his breath out, then took a step back, studied her carefully, and adjusted the collar of her shirt. He cleared his throat. "You'll want to see what he was after." So strange—but so Sark—for his voice to be so neutral after what had just happened. She was still shaky, still yearning.
"I should," she said finally. "It might be important."
"Of course. Sydney—" He kissed her again, roughly, possessively, hand at the back of her neck. "Remember—" He hesitated, shook his head.
But she heard the words as if he'd actually said them: Remember who you belong to. Except that couldn't have been what he'd meant to say. Not really. Sark wasn't the jealous type. Right?
Vaughn was sitting stiffly at the computer when she reentered the dining room. "I didn't mean to interrupt," he said as stiffly as he sat, not looking at her.
She cleared her throat. "What did you find?"
"I, ah—I matched some of the sketches from the warehouse with Irina's diagrams." He gestured to his computer, and she moved around to where she could see the screen. The images in the separate windows were nearly identical, and she felt a spasm of excitement that had nothing to do with where Sark's hands had been a few moments before.
"It's not exact, but it's not far off. Particularly when you look at the mechanism that begins the reaction here—" He pointed.
Sydney bent close, squinting at her mother's notes. The feeling of having Vaughn so familiarly near her was secondary to the nausea that rose in her stomach. "Is that—isn't this the device Sloane used in Mexico?"
"Sloane, and Sark." Vaughn's lips were drawn thin. It was a conclusion he'd already come to, obviously. And one that only reminded him of Sark's . . . prior affiliations.
Her heartbeat spiked, but she kept her voice calm. "We should call Sark in, then. He'll be able to tell better than we will."
Sark's conclusion was the same—that this was the same device he and Sloane had employed at the embassy in Mexico City. His voice was grim as he described its functioning: the way it raised the temperature of water and fat molecules to burn living creatures from the inside out; the charred skeletons left behind, human lives marked in soot.
"But that's not our biggest concern, here," Sark said. "The original device was only designed to reach a short distance, perhaps 2,000 feet. This design, with the proper power source, would reach much further."
"How much further?" Sydney asked.
"Hundreds of miles, perhaps thousands."
There was silence, into which Vaughn frowned. "I don't want to sound like I'm undervaluing the lives that would be lost, but I thought we were talking 'utter desolation'—world-ending stuff."
"Thousands of miles in every direction, Mr. Vaughn. Including up, and down. Do you have any notion of the damage this could do to our ecosystem? To the water that collects beneath the earth? Not to mention the sheer energy that would be released. The rest of the world would not meet an immediate fiery death, but I daresay it wouldn't be far behind. At minimum, life on Earth would be irrevocably altered."
Sydney took a deep steadying breath and pointed to the left side of the sketch. "Is that the power source?"
"If I had to hazard a guess."
"It looks familiar."
"It should. I believe you destroyed the prototype in Taipai. Twice."
Of course. She should have recognized it right away; it was just that it had been years since she'd seen it. The memories came back clearly, though, now that she focused on them. The too-tight red wig, the blood dried on her mouth, the weight of the wrapped metal in her hands. And then the flood—God, the flood—running, the water chasing behind her, and Vaughn going under. . . .
Her eyes shifted to him just as he paled. "Sydney," he said, voice tight, "the virus."
"Whoever the heat blast didn't kill, the virus would," she said hollowly. Because the pulses of energy the Mueller device drove would heat and destroy the device as well, releasing the fluid inside.
"But there's an antidote," Vaughn said. "If we started producing it now . . ."
"Not enough time," Sark said. "Not near enough time. And even then we'd need a blood sample from each person infected in order to calibrate each dose correctly."
Sydney reached out blindly, and Sark's hand was there, gripping hers surely. She turned to look at him, and asked, "So what do we do now?"
He squeezed her hand, then released it to pull his cell phone from the inside pocket of his jacket. He hit a few buttons, waited a moment, then spoke, holding her gaze with his own: "I need you to find me every location in eastern Europe capable of housing a structure over 40 feet in diameter and 6 stories in height. Start with buildings held under the name Derevko, Elena. . . ."