Jack had never had to psyche himself up for an interrogation before.
He'd come to the prison last night to speak to a few of her nurses, the wardens, and the guards. He had permission to interrogate her, and they were going to start today, early. Earlier than the morning bells, give her less than ten minutes to dress and put her in front of him. She wasn't going to have any idea what was going on, and that's exactly how he wanted it.
"Just remember how perfect she was when she lied to us, Jack." Tony had warned him, "Inventive, scheming, she always had all the details. Don't believe her unless she's hooked to a polygraph machine." They'd set up a polygraph machine in the interrogation room, and he'd had to pull some strings, but there wasn't going to be anything on the other side of the glass except a camera.
He touched the door handle to enter the interrogation room and for a second he could feel Teri there beside him, wanting him to know how or why she died. She gave him the courage to go in.
Nina was dressed in white, standard issue prison uniform. They were a few sizes too big, and hung down low at her waist and the v reached to the top of her tank top. The sleeves would have covered her hands, if it weren't for the handcuffs. "Is she violent?" he asked the guard and the nurse as they moved to leave the room.
"Not generally." Replied the nurse.
"Then take them off." Jack ordered. Her eyes were downcast, watching the table, avoiding his. Her hair had grown although not by much, it was long enough to fall in front of her eyes, covering them from his view. She was much paler than she had been before, now it had almost an iridescent white tinge, it sucked the colour out of the room, like the fluorescent lights did. The nurse was protesting, and Jack ignored her, just ordering her to take the cuffs off again. The guard moved in and unhooked each cuff in turn, leaving them open, so she could be recuffed if need be.
Nina watched them leave the room, waiting until the guard was gone. As the door shut, she began to rub her left wrist, there was a scratch down it. Jack noticed her uniform slip down and expose the wound where he'd shot her, now a long jagged line down the side of her chest, where they'd opened her up, and a second down the centre of her chest where they'd cracked her ribs. He poured her a glass of water.
"Which would you prefer? Nina or Yelena?" he asked, taking off his jacket and putting it over the back of his chair. She didn't answer. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and Jack could see moisture gathered there, she was trying not cry. "You're upset, tell me, do you feel any remorse about killing my wife?"
She ran a hand across her face, the long sleeve absorbing any moisture. "You met her, Nina. You _knew_ me, how could you do it?" She shook her head, and scooped her legs up onto the chair, wrapping her arms around them.
She was a shell of whatever he'd known before. The nurses said she'd been psychotic, randomly violent when she woke up, she'd claimed it wasn't Teri, in the end, she'd been started on tranquilizers and antidepressants. Even if you hadn't known her before, you could tell she was medicated. It frustrated him. "Nina, look at me!"
She raised her head to slowly, he almost told her again. When she finally looked at him, she was unfocused, and blinking seemed to take forever.
"What happened that night at CTU?" he asked, finally sitting down. He was worried he'd get so exhausted trying to get her to talk, that she'd never say anything and he'd faint. Nina's eyes didn't follow him and he had to call her name again.
"I don't remember." It was a whisper, so quiet he barely heard it, and then the tears started flowing. She didn't make a sound as she wiped them off.
"You shot someone, Nina, I shot you - it was a pretty eventful night. You're telling me you don't remember?" Jack had violently hated this woman for the last three months, it had been easier that he hadn't seen her, but right now, he just wanted to stop her crying. It wasn't like all his earlier emotions were flooding back, it was just the emptiness. He couldn't hate this woman, he didn't even know who she was.
"She had a phone, there was....I don't know....a gun? A...something she said? I didn't know for sure. I don't..." She pressed a hand to her forehead and rocked it from side to side. Then suddenly, she looked up. "It wasn't Teri." She sounded sure of herself, holding his gaze, she'd stopped crying, the tears evaporating off her pale skin. For a moment Jack was mesmerised, was this his Nina? The one he thought he trusted, her sudden appearance surprised him.
The just as soon as she'd appeared, she went again, sucked back into the hollow of drugs. She put her head back down on her hands and sobbed, just the once. The rest of the tears were silent, dropping down faster and faster until he couldn't watch any more. "Stay with me, Nina." He couldn't tell if the exaggeration of each swing was supposed to be indicative of a 'no'.
He got out of his seat and walked around the table, he finally squatted down on the floor next to her, pulling her arms off the table so she had to look at him. "Nina." He said quietly.
She shook her head and moved to rest her arms on the table again, he held her wrists with one hand and with the other he pulled her legs round to look at him. "Look at me?" he requested, pleading with her.
She responded more to the tone in his voice than anything. Letting her gaze move from her knees to his face. "Was I really wrong? Jack, did I shoot Teri?"
Jack didn't know how to respond to her, she seemed so confused. She was still crying, the tears disappearing down her cheeks and darkening the uniform, pouring down her cheeks and chest. Jack studied the floor tiles as he thought about how to answer her. He wasn't even sure if he'd buried the right woman, he hadn't even seen her when he'd gotten back to CTU that night. It was conceivable she wasn't his wife, but he'd spoken to her only a few hours earlier. It was terrifying to think she was right. But they had tape of Nina speaking in Serbian on her telephone, calling herself Yelena, and as Tony had pointed out, she had always been a convincing liar.
"Jack..." He glanced up at her, his gaze resting on her collarbone for a minute. It was thinner than a pencil, protruding from her chest so obviously. He considered the angle she was sitting at, and then glanced down at her wrists, they were tiny in his hand, not a scrap of flesh around them, easy to hold in his one hand. He traced the scar on her wrist with his thumb, and was only awoken when she sniffed.
He couldn't interrogate her like this. Her body, the effects of the medication, it made him want to vomit. She didn't remember anything, she was lucid, fading in and out of being coherent and dissolving into mountains of tears. He stood up. "I can't interview you like this." He softened his wording, he walked around to his case and opened it up, tossing her a Kleenex from a little packet he only kept to wipe his hands off after checking the oil in his car. She took it and wiped her cheeks, saturating it in seconds.
He shut his briefcase and told her he'd be back tomorrow and then left the room.
-24-
The woman found in a ditch by the side of the road was Teri, the woman he'd buried was Yelena. "It might have been their escape plan." Tony's voice was coming through the receiver loud and clear despite the fact he was at the other end of the country.
"What do you mean?" Jack loosened his tie and got down on his knees to peruse the minibar. He needed a heavy drink after today.
"Well, think about it." Tony was framing a picture in his mind. "Yelena kills Teri, and some other random woman, and then they swap the bodies, leave Teri's out near where she had the crash to make it look like she died there, and put the random woman in the coffin. Meanwhile back in Belgrade, her family are swapping her medical records with someone else's to make it look like she was killed, to make you think that Nina's innocent, and that Teri was a spy."
It seemed viable, but in Jack's mind, it seemed like to complicated an escape route. In principle they were simple, quickly getting an operative off the hook so they could go on to do other things. "So in that theory, Yelena is Nina."
"That's the name she used on the phone call she made to Drazen." Tony said, as though his simple comment supported his theory. In some ways he was right, it did, but only to a certain extent.
"You've been reviewing the video footage?" Jack checked, reaching his arm behind the Dours whiskey for the Jack Daniels.
"Yeah." Tony replied, "just noon onwards."
"The call we nailed her for was at 11 o'clock though, wasn't it?" Jack didn't know why Tony would watch 12 hours of footage unless he had to.
"A quarter to, I was trying to see what else she might have done suspicious though." Tony explained, Jack levered the bottle free, and rose back onto his feet.
"Did you find anything?" Jack queried.
"She did plenty suspicious, but we spent most of the day hiding you from Alberta. I'm sure of what she was doing for most of it, but truth is, anything I thought she was doing for you, could have quite easily been for them." Jack nodded. It was a problem they had to contend with, none of this made any sense.
"Call Interpol and find out when they got those records for Yelena, see if there's anyway they could be false. Find out if Nina had any family fights, if she wasn't speaking to her family for a while."
"How far back do you want me to look?"
"Three and a half four years, start there and work your way back. It must have been before she joined CTU, maybe whilst she was at district, although I doubt it. Mason's known Nina most that time." Jack hated the fact that he had to trust him, but bottom line was that he was clean, at least as far as assassination plots went.
The other line clicked and Jack realised he was done with Tony. "Anything else?" Tony asked, as though he could hear the click.
"No, no, I'll give you a call at 7am your time, to find out what you've got for me." As soon as Jack clicked the receiver, the phone line switched over, and he heard a happy sounding Kim on the other end. "Hey, Sweetheart." He greeted her.
"Hi dad, I got your message. What are you doing in DC anyway?" She asked. He'd left a voicemail on her aunt's answering machine giving the number where he was staying in Virginia, and asking her to call later in the day.
"Some business with an old friend." Technically it was true. He pushed Nina's record to one side of the bed and grabbed a little magnetic chessboard. "You got your next move?" He asked, moving a few slightly wayward pieces back into the centre of their squares.
"Knight E3 to F6." She told him. He moved her piece, wincing as he collected his bishop off the board and stuck it to the underside, along with his rook and one of his knights.
"I taught you this game too well." He grumbled. "Pawn, G7 to F6." One little pawn was nothing to sacrifice for a knight. "How's your aunt?"
"Worrying about you." He heard his sister-in-law's voice call down the phone. She was probably sitting across the room from Kim, her voice was quite faint.
"Why is she worried about me?" He inquired of Kim, who was busy thinking about her next move.
"Well, she was saying it was cos you were going to be in our house all alone, not that long after mom, all alone, with nothing to do, and you've been upset recently...." Kim trailed off, she didn't take her aunt's comment seriously, and it was obvious from her tone.
"But now I'm in DC, I've got work to do." Jack said. It cheered him up to realise his wife's family still cared about him. "What's your next move?"
He heard a loud bang on the telephone line and jumped. "What was that?"
"I wanted to go outside, dad, there's something else..." She wanted some privacy on the phone line, "You know Sara's pregnant..." Sara was Kim's cousin, she was in her late-twenties living with a university professor she was seeing, and this was her second child. The first was three years old, Kim was the child's godmother, Sara and Kim got along that well.
For a second Jack's heart stopped beating as he wondered if Kim was pregnant. The last boy she'd been interested in was Rick, the kid who had gotten her kidnapped, but as far as he knew, he was off at college and Kim rarely mentioned his name anymore. "Kim?"
"When mom died, she was pregnant...I don't know if you knew...but, just looking at Sara, brought it all up, I told her and she said I should tell you. That you had a right to know." Jack felt a little short of breath, he thought about the innocent life inside Teri that had died. As though Teri wasn't already innocent, it made him feel light headed.
"Dad?"
"Dad?"
"I'm still here, honey." He said eventually, when his stomach had returned to his body.
"You okay?" She asked.
"I'm fine, it's terrible, honey, the whole thing is terrible."
"It would be nice, you know, to have a little baby wandering around, a brother or sister to play with?" Kim was fantasizing. For a moment he could imagine his grown daughter, sitting on the patio in the garden, wearing ridiculously low cut blouses and jeans, but looking so pretty as the sunset reflected off her golden hair and skin.
"Anything but this life would be nice right now Kim, but it'll be nice again." Jack philosophised.
He'd come to the prison last night to speak to a few of her nurses, the wardens, and the guards. He had permission to interrogate her, and they were going to start today, early. Earlier than the morning bells, give her less than ten minutes to dress and put her in front of him. She wasn't going to have any idea what was going on, and that's exactly how he wanted it.
"Just remember how perfect she was when she lied to us, Jack." Tony had warned him, "Inventive, scheming, she always had all the details. Don't believe her unless she's hooked to a polygraph machine." They'd set up a polygraph machine in the interrogation room, and he'd had to pull some strings, but there wasn't going to be anything on the other side of the glass except a camera.
He touched the door handle to enter the interrogation room and for a second he could feel Teri there beside him, wanting him to know how or why she died. She gave him the courage to go in.
Nina was dressed in white, standard issue prison uniform. They were a few sizes too big, and hung down low at her waist and the v reached to the top of her tank top. The sleeves would have covered her hands, if it weren't for the handcuffs. "Is she violent?" he asked the guard and the nurse as they moved to leave the room.
"Not generally." Replied the nurse.
"Then take them off." Jack ordered. Her eyes were downcast, watching the table, avoiding his. Her hair had grown although not by much, it was long enough to fall in front of her eyes, covering them from his view. She was much paler than she had been before, now it had almost an iridescent white tinge, it sucked the colour out of the room, like the fluorescent lights did. The nurse was protesting, and Jack ignored her, just ordering her to take the cuffs off again. The guard moved in and unhooked each cuff in turn, leaving them open, so she could be recuffed if need be.
Nina watched them leave the room, waiting until the guard was gone. As the door shut, she began to rub her left wrist, there was a scratch down it. Jack noticed her uniform slip down and expose the wound where he'd shot her, now a long jagged line down the side of her chest, where they'd opened her up, and a second down the centre of her chest where they'd cracked her ribs. He poured her a glass of water.
"Which would you prefer? Nina or Yelena?" he asked, taking off his jacket and putting it over the back of his chair. She didn't answer. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and Jack could see moisture gathered there, she was trying not cry. "You're upset, tell me, do you feel any remorse about killing my wife?"
She ran a hand across her face, the long sleeve absorbing any moisture. "You met her, Nina. You _knew_ me, how could you do it?" She shook her head, and scooped her legs up onto the chair, wrapping her arms around them.
She was a shell of whatever he'd known before. The nurses said she'd been psychotic, randomly violent when she woke up, she'd claimed it wasn't Teri, in the end, she'd been started on tranquilizers and antidepressants. Even if you hadn't known her before, you could tell she was medicated. It frustrated him. "Nina, look at me!"
She raised her head to slowly, he almost told her again. When she finally looked at him, she was unfocused, and blinking seemed to take forever.
"What happened that night at CTU?" he asked, finally sitting down. He was worried he'd get so exhausted trying to get her to talk, that she'd never say anything and he'd faint. Nina's eyes didn't follow him and he had to call her name again.
"I don't remember." It was a whisper, so quiet he barely heard it, and then the tears started flowing. She didn't make a sound as she wiped them off.
"You shot someone, Nina, I shot you - it was a pretty eventful night. You're telling me you don't remember?" Jack had violently hated this woman for the last three months, it had been easier that he hadn't seen her, but right now, he just wanted to stop her crying. It wasn't like all his earlier emotions were flooding back, it was just the emptiness. He couldn't hate this woman, he didn't even know who she was.
"She had a phone, there was....I don't know....a gun? A...something she said? I didn't know for sure. I don't..." She pressed a hand to her forehead and rocked it from side to side. Then suddenly, she looked up. "It wasn't Teri." She sounded sure of herself, holding his gaze, she'd stopped crying, the tears evaporating off her pale skin. For a moment Jack was mesmerised, was this his Nina? The one he thought he trusted, her sudden appearance surprised him.
The just as soon as she'd appeared, she went again, sucked back into the hollow of drugs. She put her head back down on her hands and sobbed, just the once. The rest of the tears were silent, dropping down faster and faster until he couldn't watch any more. "Stay with me, Nina." He couldn't tell if the exaggeration of each swing was supposed to be indicative of a 'no'.
He got out of his seat and walked around the table, he finally squatted down on the floor next to her, pulling her arms off the table so she had to look at him. "Nina." He said quietly.
She shook her head and moved to rest her arms on the table again, he held her wrists with one hand and with the other he pulled her legs round to look at him. "Look at me?" he requested, pleading with her.
She responded more to the tone in his voice than anything. Letting her gaze move from her knees to his face. "Was I really wrong? Jack, did I shoot Teri?"
Jack didn't know how to respond to her, she seemed so confused. She was still crying, the tears disappearing down her cheeks and darkening the uniform, pouring down her cheeks and chest. Jack studied the floor tiles as he thought about how to answer her. He wasn't even sure if he'd buried the right woman, he hadn't even seen her when he'd gotten back to CTU that night. It was conceivable she wasn't his wife, but he'd spoken to her only a few hours earlier. It was terrifying to think she was right. But they had tape of Nina speaking in Serbian on her telephone, calling herself Yelena, and as Tony had pointed out, she had always been a convincing liar.
"Jack..." He glanced up at her, his gaze resting on her collarbone for a minute. It was thinner than a pencil, protruding from her chest so obviously. He considered the angle she was sitting at, and then glanced down at her wrists, they were tiny in his hand, not a scrap of flesh around them, easy to hold in his one hand. He traced the scar on her wrist with his thumb, and was only awoken when she sniffed.
He couldn't interrogate her like this. Her body, the effects of the medication, it made him want to vomit. She didn't remember anything, she was lucid, fading in and out of being coherent and dissolving into mountains of tears. He stood up. "I can't interview you like this." He softened his wording, he walked around to his case and opened it up, tossing her a Kleenex from a little packet he only kept to wipe his hands off after checking the oil in his car. She took it and wiped her cheeks, saturating it in seconds.
He shut his briefcase and told her he'd be back tomorrow and then left the room.
-24-
The woman found in a ditch by the side of the road was Teri, the woman he'd buried was Yelena. "It might have been their escape plan." Tony's voice was coming through the receiver loud and clear despite the fact he was at the other end of the country.
"What do you mean?" Jack loosened his tie and got down on his knees to peruse the minibar. He needed a heavy drink after today.
"Well, think about it." Tony was framing a picture in his mind. "Yelena kills Teri, and some other random woman, and then they swap the bodies, leave Teri's out near where she had the crash to make it look like she died there, and put the random woman in the coffin. Meanwhile back in Belgrade, her family are swapping her medical records with someone else's to make it look like she was killed, to make you think that Nina's innocent, and that Teri was a spy."
It seemed viable, but in Jack's mind, it seemed like to complicated an escape route. In principle they were simple, quickly getting an operative off the hook so they could go on to do other things. "So in that theory, Yelena is Nina."
"That's the name she used on the phone call she made to Drazen." Tony said, as though his simple comment supported his theory. In some ways he was right, it did, but only to a certain extent.
"You've been reviewing the video footage?" Jack checked, reaching his arm behind the Dours whiskey for the Jack Daniels.
"Yeah." Tony replied, "just noon onwards."
"The call we nailed her for was at 11 o'clock though, wasn't it?" Jack didn't know why Tony would watch 12 hours of footage unless he had to.
"A quarter to, I was trying to see what else she might have done suspicious though." Tony explained, Jack levered the bottle free, and rose back onto his feet.
"Did you find anything?" Jack queried.
"She did plenty suspicious, but we spent most of the day hiding you from Alberta. I'm sure of what she was doing for most of it, but truth is, anything I thought she was doing for you, could have quite easily been for them." Jack nodded. It was a problem they had to contend with, none of this made any sense.
"Call Interpol and find out when they got those records for Yelena, see if there's anyway they could be false. Find out if Nina had any family fights, if she wasn't speaking to her family for a while."
"How far back do you want me to look?"
"Three and a half four years, start there and work your way back. It must have been before she joined CTU, maybe whilst she was at district, although I doubt it. Mason's known Nina most that time." Jack hated the fact that he had to trust him, but bottom line was that he was clean, at least as far as assassination plots went.
The other line clicked and Jack realised he was done with Tony. "Anything else?" Tony asked, as though he could hear the click.
"No, no, I'll give you a call at 7am your time, to find out what you've got for me." As soon as Jack clicked the receiver, the phone line switched over, and he heard a happy sounding Kim on the other end. "Hey, Sweetheart." He greeted her.
"Hi dad, I got your message. What are you doing in DC anyway?" She asked. He'd left a voicemail on her aunt's answering machine giving the number where he was staying in Virginia, and asking her to call later in the day.
"Some business with an old friend." Technically it was true. He pushed Nina's record to one side of the bed and grabbed a little magnetic chessboard. "You got your next move?" He asked, moving a few slightly wayward pieces back into the centre of their squares.
"Knight E3 to F6." She told him. He moved her piece, wincing as he collected his bishop off the board and stuck it to the underside, along with his rook and one of his knights.
"I taught you this game too well." He grumbled. "Pawn, G7 to F6." One little pawn was nothing to sacrifice for a knight. "How's your aunt?"
"Worrying about you." He heard his sister-in-law's voice call down the phone. She was probably sitting across the room from Kim, her voice was quite faint.
"Why is she worried about me?" He inquired of Kim, who was busy thinking about her next move.
"Well, she was saying it was cos you were going to be in our house all alone, not that long after mom, all alone, with nothing to do, and you've been upset recently...." Kim trailed off, she didn't take her aunt's comment seriously, and it was obvious from her tone.
"But now I'm in DC, I've got work to do." Jack said. It cheered him up to realise his wife's family still cared about him. "What's your next move?"
He heard a loud bang on the telephone line and jumped. "What was that?"
"I wanted to go outside, dad, there's something else..." She wanted some privacy on the phone line, "You know Sara's pregnant..." Sara was Kim's cousin, she was in her late-twenties living with a university professor she was seeing, and this was her second child. The first was three years old, Kim was the child's godmother, Sara and Kim got along that well.
For a second Jack's heart stopped beating as he wondered if Kim was pregnant. The last boy she'd been interested in was Rick, the kid who had gotten her kidnapped, but as far as he knew, he was off at college and Kim rarely mentioned his name anymore. "Kim?"
"When mom died, she was pregnant...I don't know if you knew...but, just looking at Sara, brought it all up, I told her and she said I should tell you. That you had a right to know." Jack felt a little short of breath, he thought about the innocent life inside Teri that had died. As though Teri wasn't already innocent, it made him feel light headed.
"Dad?"
"Dad?"
"I'm still here, honey." He said eventually, when his stomach had returned to his body.
"You okay?" She asked.
"I'm fine, it's terrible, honey, the whole thing is terrible."
"It would be nice, you know, to have a little baby wandering around, a brother or sister to play with?" Kim was fantasizing. For a moment he could imagine his grown daughter, sitting on the patio in the garden, wearing ridiculously low cut blouses and jeans, but looking so pretty as the sunset reflected off her golden hair and skin.
"Anything but this life would be nice right now Kim, but it'll be nice again." Jack philosophised.