"I don't think she's guilty." Jack told Tony.
"Tell me again after the polygraph." Tony rudely commented, listening to his superior over the telephone.
"She's not..."
"Remember how she used to lie to us?" Tony pointed out, "Jack, she was so convincing, you'd know she was lying but she didn't let up. You couldn't poke a single hole in her stories."
"She's not guilty, Tony, but I think she's trying to get me to believe she is." Jack was watching the footage of Nina on the video muted, watching her body language, trying to get any hints from it that he could. He'd done this thousands of times with Nina, whenever he couldn't find her to sit in on an interrogation with him, she'd come up to his office and watch the tapes, pointing out anything that caught her eye. She was a psychologist, a student of human behaviour, and a pretty good master of it. None of the things she pointed out to him as common flaws in people's lies stood out to him.
She had always kept something back, she'd always hidden a few reasons, she told him there were few tell tales signs that indicated lying from person to person, but the trick was to look for something a little more individual. See what their own person mannerisms were, and then watch them whilst they lied. She said, that if in doubt, get them to say something they know is true and then check them with a lie. The problem with that was, Nina hadn't lied to him. "Why would she do that?" Tony asked.
"I don't know, but it's what I need to find out. Look, go through the video tape again, decompress everything." Jack ordered him, pausing the video play back for a second to concentrate on Tony. "I want you to track Nina's movements for the entire day."
"Okay."
"I want you to track her movements for the entire day...fax them to me at my hotel. I want to know what she did, how long it took her." Tony agreed again, "Everything, Tony." Jack stressed.
"I'll get on it." Tony said and Jack hung up the phone, pressing play on the VCR remote again. Jack watched as Nina scanned pages of her bills, IRS reports, account statements, she had a worried expression on her face. She was looking for anything that shouldn't have been there, not thirty dollars, at Barnes and Noble, but three million from a nonexistent financial company.
-24-
The wires were connected across her forehead and chest, each one fed into a specific input of the polygraph machine. The interpreter had spent the last hour fixing the little wires in place, put each pad over a particular nerve or blood vessel, fixing it into it's own individual port on the back of the machine. Jack walked in just as he began the calibration questions.
"Is your full name, Nina Siobhan Myers?" asked the bland looking FBI agent, his pen poised over the sheet of paper. The lines on the machine moved back at forth, at what Jack was sure was an irregularly slow pace, and Nina answered.
"Yes." No frantic activity, but then they hadn't expected any.
"Are you 30 years old?"
Nina thought for a minute. "Yes." Jack didn't know when her birthday was exactly, and hadn't realised how much younger than him she was, nine years, but he knew she'd had one whilst they'd been together. He'd bought her a pair of earrings that she'd worn quite regularly at CTU, she wasn't allowed to wear any in this prison, part of the maximum security rating. Nina was probably the least dangerous in-mate here.
"Were you born at County General Hospital, Chicago?"
"Yes." She rubbed her eyebrow. Today's meeting had been postponed as well, the doctor at the hospital had decided to take her completely off another medication, and once again he'd been told she'd gone through terrible withdrawal yesterday. She didn't notice as a rivulet of blood made its way from her nose and down her fulcrum.
Jack reached into his pocket and passed her a tissue. She looked at it quizzically and he had to press it to her nose to stop a large drop running off and staining the shirt. She took the tissue, and once she'd seen the blood stain, wiped at her nose, leaving a smudged layer of blood under her nose.
Jack was a little bothered by how worried he was about Nina, by a jury of her peers she was guilty, murder, espionage, terrorism, treason. She'd been sentenced to jail for murdering his _wife_ but having visited her in jail, having seen what she'd become, he still hated himself. Even after so long, she still had an effect on him, he wasn't sure if the doubt he felt over her guilt was what allowed him to be concerned for her, or if he doubted her guilt because of it.
"Are your parents Leopold and Kathryn Myers?" The man prodded on, adjusting his bland tie.
Nina glanced down at Jack, who promptly got off the floor and took his seat across the table. "Yes."
"Of Chicago, Illinois?"
"Yes." She looked uneasy when she glanced over at Jack, he got the impression she wanted to be hard on him during their conversation, but passing her the tissue had probably endeared him to her a little.
"Is your brother Judas Myers?"
"Yes." The answers were coming faster now, and the polygraph interpreter leant forward to draw his lines and write on the graph at a faster speed.
"Aged 26?"
"Yes."
"Of West Dover, Vermont?"
"No." The polygrapher had deliberately asked a question to which the correct answer was no, they commonly did this towards the end of the calibration to check if the candidate had any differences in their 'yes' and 'no' responses. Many people did, but weren't aware of it, on a subconscious level they reacted differently to replying 'no' rather than 'yes'.
For Nina the needles remained constant. "He lives in Keene, New Hampshire."
The polygrapher looked over at Jack, "Does he have any children?"
"Yes, two." She replied.
"I'm satisfied I have a baseline." The polygrapher told him, and Jack nodded, opening up the file in front of him. He'd printed a list of questions he wanted to ask, but just in case he got off track, he'd put the video recorder on in the other room.
"Did you kill my wife, Teri Bauer?" he asked.
"Yes." The polygrapher drew a line on the page, he didn't say anything, but Jack could see from the motion of the needles that she was telling the truth.
"Did you do it for money?"
"No."
"Did you do it out of jealousy?"
"No."
"Why did you do it then?"
"A polygraph only works if you ask me yes or no questions." Nina corrected him, evidently having regained herself enough to point out his flaws again. "Ask me a yes or no question." She demanded.
"Nina..." He began.
"Ask me a yes or no question, Jack."
His temper escalated for a moment, and then he thought of a new line of questioning. "Did you kill my wife out of cold blood?"
She gritted her teeth. "Yes."
"Was it motivated by money?"
"No."
"Jealousy?"
"No."
"Did she do something to indicate she might have been working against CTU? As a threat to Palmer?" Jack watched her fidget for a moment waiting for her answer.
"No."
Out of the corner of his eye Jack saw the needles go mad, and he watched Nina bury her face in her hands. He could have ended the interrogation there. "Why are you lying to me?" He asked.
"Polygraph machines won't tell you which words out of a sentence are true, you can't expect..."
"Why are you lying to me?" He growled at her, getting up from the table and leaning over her, he could see the muscles around her eyes contracting, forming temporary wrinkles as she attempted to calm herself. He put a hand on her shoulder, wrapping his thumb around her neck and placing gentle pressure on the underside of her neck to encourage her to lift her head.
When she didn't respond he got angry, he pulled his hand away, and grabbed her wrists pulling her hands out from under her head. Her head flopped down before she recovered. She groaned, and tugged a hand back to her temples. He wouldn't let her take one.
She looked dizzy, her eyes opening and closing rapidly as she began to faint. She slipped off the side of her chair and fell to the floor, Jack held her hands tightly enough to break her descent, maneuvering himself around the desk so she could fall, and she was unconscious before she hit the ground. The polygrapher pressed a button in the machine, which detached the cables, and he knelt by her side, pulling them off one side of her forehead to let him feel her neck.
He found a pulse, as he expected, and asked the polygrapher to call the guards.
-24-
"Jack, where's my bath robe?" he could hear Teri ask from the bedroom. He made little effort to help her, prodding at the eggs in the frying pan with the spatula. "Jack!" She appeared in the doorway and he turned.
"You know, if you keep wandering around like that...I'm going to start hiding it." Jack warned her, taking a moment to appreciate his naked wife in the doorway before he turned off the heat and pushed the eggs to a back burner.
Teri folded her arms just under her breasts and took the towel off of her hair, she rubbed the long brown tresses between two sides of the towel, shaking off as much excess moisture as she could. "I've got class in forty- five minutes, Jack." She grumbled as he wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her to him, collecting the remaining water on his trousers and shirt.
"We've got time."
"Jack..." she warned him, kissing him just the same. She was distracted by the smell of food and pushed him quickly away, heading to the hob and the two half completed plates of breakfast. "God, this looks delicious." She collected a rasher of bacon passing it between her two hands until she'd cooled it significantly to eat.
Jack collected her forgotten towel off of the floor and draped it over the back of the kitchen chair, catching his wife from behind as she put the food back down on the plate. "You can't wander around naked like this."
"I know, I know, class..." Teri was graduating next month. She was on the last few weeks of her last term of college, completing her coursework for her masters. She didn't actually have classes, merely attending to get her professors suggestions for her already outstanding pieces. "I should be getting dressed."
"Or I should be getting undressed." Teri turned and kissed him for a moment before, as earlier, she rejected him for some food, this time sausage. He watched her, exasperated. "When does the horny stage of pregnancy begin?" He whined, watching as she started on the sausage off of his plate.
"I'm only just done with the morning sickness phase, Jack." She told him, holding half a sausage in one hand. She broke the egg yolk in the frying pan, dipping her sausage into it, and then took another bite. "The hungry phase is only just starting, let me enjoy this bit." She dipped the sausage into the egg yolk, and finished off the last of his sausage.
"Just tell me the horny phase isn't the last one." Jack complained, as once again she pushed past him, and collected the towel, hanging it over her shoulders to catch the water in her hair.
"I think it is...just about the time I get so big you're repulsed by me." She joked, smiling. Once again she folded her arms across her chest and Jack approached her, wrapping his arms around her to kiss her, "That, my darling..." he said in between kisses, "...will never happen."
Teri beamed, for now satisfied with his answer and he lowered a hand to the very slight bump, just above her hips. He ran a finger over her belly button. He kissed Teri once more before leaning down and kissing her stomach. "When Monkey grows up, they'll be able to blush as their parents kiss at their class plays."
She thumped the back of his head. "I meant when I'm fat, Jack, but thanks for that vote of confidence!" Jack had to check it was a good-natured move, her emotions were always erratic, and pregnancy seemed to have amplified the swings. He kissed the bulge once more when he was satisfied, and scowled as he noticed a line of dark pigment down her belly. It started at her belly button, and ended in her pubic hair.
"What's that?"
"Monkey as you insist on calling it..."
"That." He traced the line down her belly with a finger, drawing her attention to it.
"Dr Gellman says it's nothing to worry about, lots of women get lines of dark skin there during their first pregnancy." Teri explained, as her husband took a closer look at the line, like a selective tan, thousands of little dots of dark skin.
"What is it?" He finally settled to his knees, tired of hunching down. "Like a line where your skin is stretching?"
"Don't know, either way, Jack, he says its perfectly normal. Don't worry."
He nodded, and placed another kiss to her belly. "Perfectly perfect." He stood and smacked her lightly on her butt cheek. "Get dressed, you've got school, missy."
"That's Mrs. to you." She waggled her finger at him and then wandered off, back to the bedroom.
-24-
Jack rolled over, reaching out in the darkness for the hotel lamp, he fumbled around for several minutes before he found the switch, wincing as the light hit his eyes like a sharp pain. He grabbed a notepad and pen off the table before he retreated back to the bed, covering his eyes with the sheet and turning his back to the light.
When the tears from the light had been rubbed off his cheeks he unfolded himself from the duvet and took the lid off of the pen. In large letters he scribbled "Nina...Pregnant?" across the pad and threw it down on the floor by the bed. He hit the light's switch with his hand, harder than necessary, and rolled over to get back to sleep.
-24-
"Tell me again after the polygraph." Tony rudely commented, listening to his superior over the telephone.
"She's not..."
"Remember how she used to lie to us?" Tony pointed out, "Jack, she was so convincing, you'd know she was lying but she didn't let up. You couldn't poke a single hole in her stories."
"She's not guilty, Tony, but I think she's trying to get me to believe she is." Jack was watching the footage of Nina on the video muted, watching her body language, trying to get any hints from it that he could. He'd done this thousands of times with Nina, whenever he couldn't find her to sit in on an interrogation with him, she'd come up to his office and watch the tapes, pointing out anything that caught her eye. She was a psychologist, a student of human behaviour, and a pretty good master of it. None of the things she pointed out to him as common flaws in people's lies stood out to him.
She had always kept something back, she'd always hidden a few reasons, she told him there were few tell tales signs that indicated lying from person to person, but the trick was to look for something a little more individual. See what their own person mannerisms were, and then watch them whilst they lied. She said, that if in doubt, get them to say something they know is true and then check them with a lie. The problem with that was, Nina hadn't lied to him. "Why would she do that?" Tony asked.
"I don't know, but it's what I need to find out. Look, go through the video tape again, decompress everything." Jack ordered him, pausing the video play back for a second to concentrate on Tony. "I want you to track Nina's movements for the entire day."
"Okay."
"I want you to track her movements for the entire day...fax them to me at my hotel. I want to know what she did, how long it took her." Tony agreed again, "Everything, Tony." Jack stressed.
"I'll get on it." Tony said and Jack hung up the phone, pressing play on the VCR remote again. Jack watched as Nina scanned pages of her bills, IRS reports, account statements, she had a worried expression on her face. She was looking for anything that shouldn't have been there, not thirty dollars, at Barnes and Noble, but three million from a nonexistent financial company.
-24-
The wires were connected across her forehead and chest, each one fed into a specific input of the polygraph machine. The interpreter had spent the last hour fixing the little wires in place, put each pad over a particular nerve or blood vessel, fixing it into it's own individual port on the back of the machine. Jack walked in just as he began the calibration questions.
"Is your full name, Nina Siobhan Myers?" asked the bland looking FBI agent, his pen poised over the sheet of paper. The lines on the machine moved back at forth, at what Jack was sure was an irregularly slow pace, and Nina answered.
"Yes." No frantic activity, but then they hadn't expected any.
"Are you 30 years old?"
Nina thought for a minute. "Yes." Jack didn't know when her birthday was exactly, and hadn't realised how much younger than him she was, nine years, but he knew she'd had one whilst they'd been together. He'd bought her a pair of earrings that she'd worn quite regularly at CTU, she wasn't allowed to wear any in this prison, part of the maximum security rating. Nina was probably the least dangerous in-mate here.
"Were you born at County General Hospital, Chicago?"
"Yes." She rubbed her eyebrow. Today's meeting had been postponed as well, the doctor at the hospital had decided to take her completely off another medication, and once again he'd been told she'd gone through terrible withdrawal yesterday. She didn't notice as a rivulet of blood made its way from her nose and down her fulcrum.
Jack reached into his pocket and passed her a tissue. She looked at it quizzically and he had to press it to her nose to stop a large drop running off and staining the shirt. She took the tissue, and once she'd seen the blood stain, wiped at her nose, leaving a smudged layer of blood under her nose.
Jack was a little bothered by how worried he was about Nina, by a jury of her peers she was guilty, murder, espionage, terrorism, treason. She'd been sentenced to jail for murdering his _wife_ but having visited her in jail, having seen what she'd become, he still hated himself. Even after so long, she still had an effect on him, he wasn't sure if the doubt he felt over her guilt was what allowed him to be concerned for her, or if he doubted her guilt because of it.
"Are your parents Leopold and Kathryn Myers?" The man prodded on, adjusting his bland tie.
Nina glanced down at Jack, who promptly got off the floor and took his seat across the table. "Yes."
"Of Chicago, Illinois?"
"Yes." She looked uneasy when she glanced over at Jack, he got the impression she wanted to be hard on him during their conversation, but passing her the tissue had probably endeared him to her a little.
"Is your brother Judas Myers?"
"Yes." The answers were coming faster now, and the polygraph interpreter leant forward to draw his lines and write on the graph at a faster speed.
"Aged 26?"
"Yes."
"Of West Dover, Vermont?"
"No." The polygrapher had deliberately asked a question to which the correct answer was no, they commonly did this towards the end of the calibration to check if the candidate had any differences in their 'yes' and 'no' responses. Many people did, but weren't aware of it, on a subconscious level they reacted differently to replying 'no' rather than 'yes'.
For Nina the needles remained constant. "He lives in Keene, New Hampshire."
The polygrapher looked over at Jack, "Does he have any children?"
"Yes, two." She replied.
"I'm satisfied I have a baseline." The polygrapher told him, and Jack nodded, opening up the file in front of him. He'd printed a list of questions he wanted to ask, but just in case he got off track, he'd put the video recorder on in the other room.
"Did you kill my wife, Teri Bauer?" he asked.
"Yes." The polygrapher drew a line on the page, he didn't say anything, but Jack could see from the motion of the needles that she was telling the truth.
"Did you do it for money?"
"No."
"Did you do it out of jealousy?"
"No."
"Why did you do it then?"
"A polygraph only works if you ask me yes or no questions." Nina corrected him, evidently having regained herself enough to point out his flaws again. "Ask me a yes or no question." She demanded.
"Nina..." He began.
"Ask me a yes or no question, Jack."
His temper escalated for a moment, and then he thought of a new line of questioning. "Did you kill my wife out of cold blood?"
She gritted her teeth. "Yes."
"Was it motivated by money?"
"No."
"Jealousy?"
"No."
"Did she do something to indicate she might have been working against CTU? As a threat to Palmer?" Jack watched her fidget for a moment waiting for her answer.
"No."
Out of the corner of his eye Jack saw the needles go mad, and he watched Nina bury her face in her hands. He could have ended the interrogation there. "Why are you lying to me?" He asked.
"Polygraph machines won't tell you which words out of a sentence are true, you can't expect..."
"Why are you lying to me?" He growled at her, getting up from the table and leaning over her, he could see the muscles around her eyes contracting, forming temporary wrinkles as she attempted to calm herself. He put a hand on her shoulder, wrapping his thumb around her neck and placing gentle pressure on the underside of her neck to encourage her to lift her head.
When she didn't respond he got angry, he pulled his hand away, and grabbed her wrists pulling her hands out from under her head. Her head flopped down before she recovered. She groaned, and tugged a hand back to her temples. He wouldn't let her take one.
She looked dizzy, her eyes opening and closing rapidly as she began to faint. She slipped off the side of her chair and fell to the floor, Jack held her hands tightly enough to break her descent, maneuvering himself around the desk so she could fall, and she was unconscious before she hit the ground. The polygrapher pressed a button in the machine, which detached the cables, and he knelt by her side, pulling them off one side of her forehead to let him feel her neck.
He found a pulse, as he expected, and asked the polygrapher to call the guards.
-24-
"Jack, where's my bath robe?" he could hear Teri ask from the bedroom. He made little effort to help her, prodding at the eggs in the frying pan with the spatula. "Jack!" She appeared in the doorway and he turned.
"You know, if you keep wandering around like that...I'm going to start hiding it." Jack warned her, taking a moment to appreciate his naked wife in the doorway before he turned off the heat and pushed the eggs to a back burner.
Teri folded her arms just under her breasts and took the towel off of her hair, she rubbed the long brown tresses between two sides of the towel, shaking off as much excess moisture as she could. "I've got class in forty- five minutes, Jack." She grumbled as he wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her to him, collecting the remaining water on his trousers and shirt.
"We've got time."
"Jack..." she warned him, kissing him just the same. She was distracted by the smell of food and pushed him quickly away, heading to the hob and the two half completed plates of breakfast. "God, this looks delicious." She collected a rasher of bacon passing it between her two hands until she'd cooled it significantly to eat.
Jack collected her forgotten towel off of the floor and draped it over the back of the kitchen chair, catching his wife from behind as she put the food back down on the plate. "You can't wander around naked like this."
"I know, I know, class..." Teri was graduating next month. She was on the last few weeks of her last term of college, completing her coursework for her masters. She didn't actually have classes, merely attending to get her professors suggestions for her already outstanding pieces. "I should be getting dressed."
"Or I should be getting undressed." Teri turned and kissed him for a moment before, as earlier, she rejected him for some food, this time sausage. He watched her, exasperated. "When does the horny stage of pregnancy begin?" He whined, watching as she started on the sausage off of his plate.
"I'm only just done with the morning sickness phase, Jack." She told him, holding half a sausage in one hand. She broke the egg yolk in the frying pan, dipping her sausage into it, and then took another bite. "The hungry phase is only just starting, let me enjoy this bit." She dipped the sausage into the egg yolk, and finished off the last of his sausage.
"Just tell me the horny phase isn't the last one." Jack complained, as once again she pushed past him, and collected the towel, hanging it over her shoulders to catch the water in her hair.
"I think it is...just about the time I get so big you're repulsed by me." She joked, smiling. Once again she folded her arms across her chest and Jack approached her, wrapping his arms around her to kiss her, "That, my darling..." he said in between kisses, "...will never happen."
Teri beamed, for now satisfied with his answer and he lowered a hand to the very slight bump, just above her hips. He ran a finger over her belly button. He kissed Teri once more before leaning down and kissing her stomach. "When Monkey grows up, they'll be able to blush as their parents kiss at their class plays."
She thumped the back of his head. "I meant when I'm fat, Jack, but thanks for that vote of confidence!" Jack had to check it was a good-natured move, her emotions were always erratic, and pregnancy seemed to have amplified the swings. He kissed the bulge once more when he was satisfied, and scowled as he noticed a line of dark pigment down her belly. It started at her belly button, and ended in her pubic hair.
"What's that?"
"Monkey as you insist on calling it..."
"That." He traced the line down her belly with a finger, drawing her attention to it.
"Dr Gellman says it's nothing to worry about, lots of women get lines of dark skin there during their first pregnancy." Teri explained, as her husband took a closer look at the line, like a selective tan, thousands of little dots of dark skin.
"What is it?" He finally settled to his knees, tired of hunching down. "Like a line where your skin is stretching?"
"Don't know, either way, Jack, he says its perfectly normal. Don't worry."
He nodded, and placed another kiss to her belly. "Perfectly perfect." He stood and smacked her lightly on her butt cheek. "Get dressed, you've got school, missy."
"That's Mrs. to you." She waggled her finger at him and then wandered off, back to the bedroom.
-24-
Jack rolled over, reaching out in the darkness for the hotel lamp, he fumbled around for several minutes before he found the switch, wincing as the light hit his eyes like a sharp pain. He grabbed a notepad and pen off the table before he retreated back to the bed, covering his eyes with the sheet and turning his back to the light.
When the tears from the light had been rubbed off his cheeks he unfolded himself from the duvet and took the lid off of the pen. In large letters he scribbled "Nina...Pregnant?" across the pad and threw it down on the floor by the bed. He hit the light's switch with his hand, harder than necessary, and rolled over to get back to sleep.
-24-