"Doctor..." Jack chased the Doctor a few feet before the man turned and
realised he was being called.
"Yes."
"You're treating Nina Myers?" Jack had cornered him in the middle of the doorway and was holding the swinging doors open as he spoke. Unfortunately he'd chosen to stand in the path of the two and Jack couldn't move, lest the door swing back and hit him in the face. "Can you run some tests on her for me? I'm concerned she may be pregnant."
The doctor frowned at him for a moment, "Miss Myers?" The man had an air about him that let Jack to believe he hadn't been working in the prison long, he wandered off, leaving Jack to collect the clipboard off the end of her bed. He flicked through the chart. "Yes, yes, she is...it's why I've been taking her off all the medication Garber put her on."
"Garber..."
"Her previous doctor, he put her on a range of psychoactives, didn't check the admissions documents from the hospital in LA." He wrote a few notes on her chart and checked them off with the clipboard he carried, ready to move onto the next patient.
Jack rubbed a hand across his forehead. "How far along is she?" The doctor had replaced her clipboard in the hole by the time he asked, and had to retrieve it.
He flicked through several pages, until he found the ob-gyn's page to the report. "She's 16 weeks, the baby is developing slowly because of the medication."
Jack suddenly had all the mental images he'd had before Kim was born, of deformities, of stillbirth, it made him panicked. "Will the child have any permanent side effects?" He ventured, silently begging for a no.
"There's no way for us to tell yet, there are so many possible complications." The doctor wasn't being very reassuring, but then he had no way to know how worried Jack was, he was just a visiting prosecutor. Jack nodded, slowly and took the chart off of the doctor, inserting his thumb in the page where the doctor had referenced her pregnancy. His mental tape loop kept rolling, and red flagged something the man had said earlier, just as he headed back towards the nurses station.
"Doctor, you said that they found out she was pregnant when she was admitted to hospital in LA?" Jack checked.
"Yes...The report from the admitting physician is in her file." The doctor offered, turning his back to walk away once again.
"I'm sorry, doctor, is it normal for female patients to be tested for pregnancy?"
"Unless they're minors, yes...especially after high risk accidents, Miss Myers' fainting yesterday, blackouts, nose bleeds, they're all potential signs of pregnancy. Surgeons typically prefer to avoid surgery on a pregnant woman." The doctor explained, Jack looked as though he needed time to digest the information. "Is that all?" He asked, tucking the file into his body. He didn't want to turn away whilst he still had questions, not again.
"Yes, thank you doctor."
-24-
Jack took a bite of his sandwich and opened up his date book. The little black leather rectangle normally lived in his briefcase; his daughter only used it now, although there was a time when Teri had scribbled little messages to him inside. He rarely forgot an appointment, but she still had written them in for him. This years one was devoid of Teri's hand writing, very little of Kim's, and a few words written by Nina. Paranoid to the end, Jack had requested that she put any notes for him in his date book by hand, rather than load them electronically onto his palm pilot. The yellow ribbon was nowhere near the correct date, it was set two weeks back to where Kim had written 'Kim flies to San Diego - don't be late!' he moved onwards, trying desperately to recall today's date.
16 weeks. He flicked backwards through his diary, counting the pages, all the way up until number 16; it took him back to the middle of February. He wasn't completely out of the loop on women's cycles. He'd been married for twenty years. They normally ovulated during the last two weeks of it, and that would mean that the baby was probably conceived in the first few days of February or last few days of January. He knew she'd slept with Tony the night they split up, but even so it was too early to have been Tony's. Nina was pregnant with his child.
It took a few seconds for his revelation to set in. The repercussions of loosing Teri had been huge, but he'd never considered never having another child, as one of them until Kim had told him her mother had been pregnant. He had never thought of having another child, but here he was presented with another one.
His cell phone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out and answered it, knowing it would be Tony without checking the display first. "What did you find?" He'd called Tony as soon as he'd spoken to the doctor, although he hadn't divulged Nina's pregnancy to him.
"Not pregnant." Tony told him over the phone, "They checked, blood tests and urine, blacking out is a rare sign of pregnancy...anyway, she wasn't pregnant."
Jack could barely hear Tony's voice over the roar of the fountain behind him, so he rose from the bench and made his way across the plaza, back towards the town centre. The sounds of the children playing in the fountain and cascading water died away, "So the woman the ambulance collected after the car accident wasn't Teri." Jack surmised, "How far from the site of the accident did they find Teri's body?"
"It's less than a mile down the road - I can't believe no body came across it sooner." Tony muttered.
"So after Teri called the ambulance she could have been killed, they could have created the entire story of the amnesia to cover for her not knowing the intricacies of the last few hours." Jack shook his head. Now he was more convinced that ever of Nina's innocence. "She lied to me during the polygraph."
"About which parts?"
"Being guilty, she lied when she said that she killed Teri out of cold blood, and she lied when she said Teri hadn't done anything to threaten the unit."
"She would also volunteer to take a polygraph when someone accused her of lying." Tony reminded him, thinking specifically of the morning of her insurrection, when they'd been hacking into Jack's field assignment files whilst Alberta talked to him. "...Polygraph us if you think we're lying..." he heard Nina say in his head.
"...What, so you can stall some more?" He had thought at the time that Alberta had caught Nina.
"It's different to fool a polygraph to think you're telling the truth than to have it tell you're lying." Jack said to Tony. "How are those decompressed tapes coming along?"
"I sent them this morning, you should get them this afternoon." Jack nodded at the phone and looked around him, he was forming an interrogation profile in his mind. Nina would have been proud.
-24-
"Thought we'd watch a video together." Jack began in a faux-cordial mood as he walked in the interrogation room door. This time the room's sole inhabitants were the two of them a VCR and a television set. He slotted the tape in the VCR and pressed the play button, settling in a chair across the other side of the room. "I hear it's a good one."
"What's it called? And where is the popcorn?" Her words brought back a similar evening, reviewing an interrogation tape at her apartment one night, they'd completed their report quickly and turned in for the night.
"CTU bloopers reel, the Nina Myers tape." He proclaimed proudly, he watched as the camera footage chimed in, time and date, starting from when Nina had gotten back from the safe house. For most of the hours up until then, she'd either been working closely with Jack or Tony or Jamey, and whilst Jamey's loyalties hadn't been true to CTU, they doubted that Jamey knew of Nina, or that Nina knew of Jamey.
He alternated between watching Nina and the footage as they went through Nina's actions for the day. Her actions began to get more and more intriguing as they made it through the later hours Teri had spent at CTU, until he paused at her phone call.
"You called yourself Yelena on the phone." Jack told her, as the camera image froze over her head, looking down on her. When she didn't respond he prodded on. "Do you know who Yelena is?"
"Me." She whispered.
He stood up and tapped the corner of the screen Teri was visible in the distance, talking to Tony. "It's her." He tapped the screen again to exaggerate his point. "That's Yelena Drazen."
"That's your wife."
"That's Yelena Drazen. Why are you covering for her?" He queried. Nina was silent, unwilling to give up the pretense that she was lying. She had always refused to do so, spinning her web further and further, the difference between Nina and any other liar was she could keep hold of the initial thread.
Tony's work had been invaluable, he'd traced Nina's movements for the entire day, and she hadn't done anything questionable up until that point. He took a pile of photo quality screen captures he'd made from the play back. "This is you, sneaking around after her." He had pictures of Nina tailing Teri, being as sneaky as possible, but Tony had still caught it on the video footage.
Nina examined each picture as Jack threw them at her, one by one, increasing the pace with which he threw them at her, until they were just assaulting her, and she sat back in her chair. "I am the guy you tell, Nina." He said gently, sitting on the chair that he'd positioned as close to her as possible before the interview began.
"Jack..." She pleaded, avoiding his eyes.
"I am the guy that you have to tell." He told her again, forcing her to listen to his words.
"You are the guy who's wife I shot." She exclaimed. Standing up and pushing the photographs across the table, the Marshall looked through the glass window to the interview room and Jack shook his head, waving the guy off. "What should I tell you, Jack?" She pressed her back against the plate glass false mirror, and shut her eyes.
"Everything, absolutely everything, if you want to raise your child yourself." He couldn't believe that Nina knew that she was pregnant and was still acting this way.
Her eyes flew open, he was right, she had no idea. "What?"
"If you want to raise your child, to see it grow up, to have it know who its mother is - you have to tell me everything, Nina, or there's nothing I can do to protect you." He spoke from his seat, but immediately got up and walked over to her, keeping a good distance as she began to shake.
"Don't do this, Jack." She whispered, as a few tears escaped her eyes.
"Nina, if you..."
"Don't lie to me..."
"What? Like you've done to me?" He was yelling at her now. She was drug free, in a delicate state, but she'd been removed from the majority of the anti-psychotics she was on previously. The nurse may have asked him not to, but as far as he was concerned, she was fair game. He grabbed the polygraph results from the top of his case, and threw the papers at her, unrolling in her arms. She'd sunken to the floor, and the papers formed a Teepee over her knees, she looked disdainfully at them whilst Jack found the areas where the lines were erratic.
"Look at this...Did you kill my wife in cold blood?...Did she do anything to jeopardise CTU?" He held the two erratic areas in front of her face, gesturing wildly with the papers. "What did Teri do to make you question her? Why were you following her?"
He watched as his second in command battled with the decision in her mind, she'd wrapped her arms around herself and was hugging her stomach, sobbing quietly trying to bury her head on her knees, but he wouldn't let her. "You have to tell me, Nina. This child depends on it."
Still indecisive, Jack stood from the table, he collected his last resort from the case and tossed the last photo at her, it was an ultrasound picture, taken yesterday, whilst she was unconscious. The peanut shape that indicated her child was circled with a red line. "This child."
She looked at the paper, and began to wipe off her tears. "If that's Yelena," she sobbed, "What happened to Teri?" She asked.
"She was murdered earlier in the evening, replaced by a terrorist agent who'd undergone plastic surgery to look exactly like Teri." Jack told her, reasonably confident in the truth of his statement. "Nina, you have to tell me..."
Nina sobbed and looked up at him. She was terrified, and sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, he knees huddled up under her chin, her tiny arms wrapped around her legs. His concern for her was more paternal than anything else. She seemed so tiny, so feeble, he couldn't help but compare her mentally to a child herself. Something in her eyes told him she was about to break.
"She was different, after the accident, I know she had amnesia, but it went beyond that..." He'd so rarely heard Nina sound unsure, it scared him too. "She had a phone, I think....I don't know - Jack, I just..."
"Try harder, Nina, you're doing fine." He whispered, "I need you."
"She called someone, she called herself Yelena, she said things...I know she wasn't sure who she was but...Teri was giving them information."
-24-
"You still haven't told me why you lied." Jack pointed out to Nina as she left the ladies restrooms at the courthouse. She hadn't realised he'd followed her to the door, and was now nervous she'd taken so long.
Nina avoided the question, still reveling in being a free woman. CTU had presented a case for her, and she'd been exonerated, whilst the blame was still on 'Yelena Drazen' she'd been cleared as an alias. Jack had gotten a trial date for a week after he'd petitioned for it, so early that his daughter wasn't returning from her month long holiday for another few days. He'd cited Nina as an important member of his team, and the judge had been asked to move the trial as close as possible by a US senator and presidential candidate. "I'm starving, can we go eat?" She asked him, they made their way through the double doors towards the courtroom she'd emerged from ten minutes earlier.
Nina glanced over at Tony uneasily, stood in the doorway to the courtroom, fidgeting in his suit he looked dejected. They'd spoken briefly and decided that anything they'd had before had to be discarded, and despite the fact it was at Tony's urging, she doubted he truly wanted her to agree with him.
Jack didn't notice him, he led her past him along the corridor, to the security guards at the end. "I should get back to CTU." He told her, officially she had been reinstated at CTU, but she and Jack had agreed that she would return to work in a few days, start a fresh week so he had time to start the ball rolling to get rid of Alberta.
Jack pulled his sunglasses out of his shirt pocket, putting them on just as they stepped out into the sunlight. He paused in the middle of the sidewalk outside, and watched Nina squint at him. She was wearing a suit, black skirt and jacket, which she was rapidly undoing to avoid overheating. The breeze that tousled her hair was nowhere enough to cool her, and she shrugged off the woolen jacket. "You want to put that in my car, and we can find somewhere to grab something quickly?"
"Sounds like a good idea." She shut her eyes and turned her head up to the sun. The people flooding out of the courthouse were bowing around them, like waves around a pebble. A few hit, but the majority walked straight past.
Jack placed a hand at the small of her back and led her down the road, stopping at the front of his car and accepting her jacket. There were a few cafes around the courthouse, and they could easily walk from there, so he opened his car door and put her coat, and then his on the passenger seat. Nina was still smiling up at the sun, presumably having been shielded from it at prison. Whilst looking in the opposite direction, he was able to study her for a second.
The white blouse she wore only served to illuminate how pale and thin she was now. Her colouring had always been light, and she'd always been thin, but this worried him now. He could only make up the slight hump of her stomach because he knew it was there, but the loose blouse and the black skirt made it less noticeable. He hadn't told the court, and he doubted she'd told Tony, but despite her objections, he'd brought the information with him necessary to plead with it.
He rolled up his shirtsleeves and patted his wallet in his back pocket, and then joined Nina on the sidewalk, leading her, once again by the small of her back, down the road. They stopped outside a small street cafe, and he approached the hostess, asking her for a table for two outside. He had intended to stop further down the road, but having seen how Nina was enjoying the sunlight, he thought this place would be more appropriate.
"I have an apology to make to you." He confessed, taking off his sunglasses as he moved his head into the shade of the table umbrella. Nina didn't say anything, folding her arms on the table. "If we'd done this three months ago, if I'd paid attention to what you were saying back at CTU..."
"I was unconscious, Jack."
Jack shook his head. "We managed to get you prosecuted and sentenced whilst you were in a coma, because I thought you'd shot Teri, because I believed you could be a traitor."
"I could have been." She pointed out, raising a hand to rub her temples for a minute. The truth was that Jack was right, that he should have formed his case more clearly months ago, and he should have listened to her. If she wanted to blame him for a gunshot wound and coma, three months of prison, and possible deformities to her child, it would have been easy to do so, but she couldn't do that. "She was your _wife_ how could you expect her?"
It was the first time that she had ever spoken of Teri without a hint of disdain in her voice. Since their affair, there had always been a certain pitch in her voice that he hadn't noticed, and now she seemed to speak about her kindly. "Why did you lie to me?" he asked her. Nina stalled, collecting her glass of water and taking a long sip. "Why did you tell me that you were the traitor?"
Nina watched him as she took her sip, gauging whether he truly wanted to know. "She was dead, I was in jail. What did it matter if your daughter spent her life believing her mother was true? What did it matter if you thought that your wife loved you and wouldn't hurt you?"
"My wife did, she wasn't my wife." Jack pointed out to her, and then distracted himself from the painful memories with his napkin, folding it and then spreading it across the flat surface of the table.
Teri had died in a car accident, probably forced off the road, and then Yelena Drazen had taken her place. The keycard he'd been presented with early that morning had contained records of plastic surgery done on a male and female, and Yelena Drazen was the female, once the doctors had checked her out, she'd been taken to CTU, where she'd gathered information to help her father try and kill Jack. Nina had become suspicious, and tailed her, eventually finding out about the regular check in times and calling the Drazens with slightly false information. Just before midnight, she'd taken Yelena out to the parking garage to talk to her, believing her to be Teri, and shot her when she'd tried to escape.
Nina allowed him sufficient time to recover, amiably changing the subject, neither of them wanted to dig deeper into their recent past. "I have no idea what I'm going to do for the next few hours." She admitted. "Haven't been in the sun for a while, don't suppose that my swimsuit survived the auctions?"
Jack let out a short laugh. "Apartment searching, we can get you several papers, and see what we can find." Jack glanced down at his watch, taking note of the time. "You need to go to the bank." He told her eventually.
"What?" she asked.
"The Citibank across the road." He pointed it out to her, and she turned in his seat to follow his finger. "You've got an appointment with the manager, it shouldn't take long." Nina raised her eyebrows at him and slowly rose from her seat, after a few moments of cautious study, she walked out of the fenced area, and headed over to the bank.
Jack had made arrangements for the money removed from her bank accounts to be returned to her, deposited in an account managed at the branch across the road. The money had been transferred to a custodial account controlled by CTU, and he'd transferred as much as he could locate back across.
"Yes."
"You're treating Nina Myers?" Jack had cornered him in the middle of the doorway and was holding the swinging doors open as he spoke. Unfortunately he'd chosen to stand in the path of the two and Jack couldn't move, lest the door swing back and hit him in the face. "Can you run some tests on her for me? I'm concerned she may be pregnant."
The doctor frowned at him for a moment, "Miss Myers?" The man had an air about him that let Jack to believe he hadn't been working in the prison long, he wandered off, leaving Jack to collect the clipboard off the end of her bed. He flicked through the chart. "Yes, yes, she is...it's why I've been taking her off all the medication Garber put her on."
"Garber..."
"Her previous doctor, he put her on a range of psychoactives, didn't check the admissions documents from the hospital in LA." He wrote a few notes on her chart and checked them off with the clipboard he carried, ready to move onto the next patient.
Jack rubbed a hand across his forehead. "How far along is she?" The doctor had replaced her clipboard in the hole by the time he asked, and had to retrieve it.
He flicked through several pages, until he found the ob-gyn's page to the report. "She's 16 weeks, the baby is developing slowly because of the medication."
Jack suddenly had all the mental images he'd had before Kim was born, of deformities, of stillbirth, it made him panicked. "Will the child have any permanent side effects?" He ventured, silently begging for a no.
"There's no way for us to tell yet, there are so many possible complications." The doctor wasn't being very reassuring, but then he had no way to know how worried Jack was, he was just a visiting prosecutor. Jack nodded, slowly and took the chart off of the doctor, inserting his thumb in the page where the doctor had referenced her pregnancy. His mental tape loop kept rolling, and red flagged something the man had said earlier, just as he headed back towards the nurses station.
"Doctor, you said that they found out she was pregnant when she was admitted to hospital in LA?" Jack checked.
"Yes...The report from the admitting physician is in her file." The doctor offered, turning his back to walk away once again.
"I'm sorry, doctor, is it normal for female patients to be tested for pregnancy?"
"Unless they're minors, yes...especially after high risk accidents, Miss Myers' fainting yesterday, blackouts, nose bleeds, they're all potential signs of pregnancy. Surgeons typically prefer to avoid surgery on a pregnant woman." The doctor explained, Jack looked as though he needed time to digest the information. "Is that all?" He asked, tucking the file into his body. He didn't want to turn away whilst he still had questions, not again.
"Yes, thank you doctor."
-24-
Jack took a bite of his sandwich and opened up his date book. The little black leather rectangle normally lived in his briefcase; his daughter only used it now, although there was a time when Teri had scribbled little messages to him inside. He rarely forgot an appointment, but she still had written them in for him. This years one was devoid of Teri's hand writing, very little of Kim's, and a few words written by Nina. Paranoid to the end, Jack had requested that she put any notes for him in his date book by hand, rather than load them electronically onto his palm pilot. The yellow ribbon was nowhere near the correct date, it was set two weeks back to where Kim had written 'Kim flies to San Diego - don't be late!' he moved onwards, trying desperately to recall today's date.
16 weeks. He flicked backwards through his diary, counting the pages, all the way up until number 16; it took him back to the middle of February. He wasn't completely out of the loop on women's cycles. He'd been married for twenty years. They normally ovulated during the last two weeks of it, and that would mean that the baby was probably conceived in the first few days of February or last few days of January. He knew she'd slept with Tony the night they split up, but even so it was too early to have been Tony's. Nina was pregnant with his child.
It took a few seconds for his revelation to set in. The repercussions of loosing Teri had been huge, but he'd never considered never having another child, as one of them until Kim had told him her mother had been pregnant. He had never thought of having another child, but here he was presented with another one.
His cell phone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out and answered it, knowing it would be Tony without checking the display first. "What did you find?" He'd called Tony as soon as he'd spoken to the doctor, although he hadn't divulged Nina's pregnancy to him.
"Not pregnant." Tony told him over the phone, "They checked, blood tests and urine, blacking out is a rare sign of pregnancy...anyway, she wasn't pregnant."
Jack could barely hear Tony's voice over the roar of the fountain behind him, so he rose from the bench and made his way across the plaza, back towards the town centre. The sounds of the children playing in the fountain and cascading water died away, "So the woman the ambulance collected after the car accident wasn't Teri." Jack surmised, "How far from the site of the accident did they find Teri's body?"
"It's less than a mile down the road - I can't believe no body came across it sooner." Tony muttered.
"So after Teri called the ambulance she could have been killed, they could have created the entire story of the amnesia to cover for her not knowing the intricacies of the last few hours." Jack shook his head. Now he was more convinced that ever of Nina's innocence. "She lied to me during the polygraph."
"About which parts?"
"Being guilty, she lied when she said that she killed Teri out of cold blood, and she lied when she said Teri hadn't done anything to threaten the unit."
"She would also volunteer to take a polygraph when someone accused her of lying." Tony reminded him, thinking specifically of the morning of her insurrection, when they'd been hacking into Jack's field assignment files whilst Alberta talked to him. "...Polygraph us if you think we're lying..." he heard Nina say in his head.
"...What, so you can stall some more?" He had thought at the time that Alberta had caught Nina.
"It's different to fool a polygraph to think you're telling the truth than to have it tell you're lying." Jack said to Tony. "How are those decompressed tapes coming along?"
"I sent them this morning, you should get them this afternoon." Jack nodded at the phone and looked around him, he was forming an interrogation profile in his mind. Nina would have been proud.
-24-
"Thought we'd watch a video together." Jack began in a faux-cordial mood as he walked in the interrogation room door. This time the room's sole inhabitants were the two of them a VCR and a television set. He slotted the tape in the VCR and pressed the play button, settling in a chair across the other side of the room. "I hear it's a good one."
"What's it called? And where is the popcorn?" Her words brought back a similar evening, reviewing an interrogation tape at her apartment one night, they'd completed their report quickly and turned in for the night.
"CTU bloopers reel, the Nina Myers tape." He proclaimed proudly, he watched as the camera footage chimed in, time and date, starting from when Nina had gotten back from the safe house. For most of the hours up until then, she'd either been working closely with Jack or Tony or Jamey, and whilst Jamey's loyalties hadn't been true to CTU, they doubted that Jamey knew of Nina, or that Nina knew of Jamey.
He alternated between watching Nina and the footage as they went through Nina's actions for the day. Her actions began to get more and more intriguing as they made it through the later hours Teri had spent at CTU, until he paused at her phone call.
"You called yourself Yelena on the phone." Jack told her, as the camera image froze over her head, looking down on her. When she didn't respond he prodded on. "Do you know who Yelena is?"
"Me." She whispered.
He stood up and tapped the corner of the screen Teri was visible in the distance, talking to Tony. "It's her." He tapped the screen again to exaggerate his point. "That's Yelena Drazen."
"That's your wife."
"That's Yelena Drazen. Why are you covering for her?" He queried. Nina was silent, unwilling to give up the pretense that she was lying. She had always refused to do so, spinning her web further and further, the difference between Nina and any other liar was she could keep hold of the initial thread.
Tony's work had been invaluable, he'd traced Nina's movements for the entire day, and she hadn't done anything questionable up until that point. He took a pile of photo quality screen captures he'd made from the play back. "This is you, sneaking around after her." He had pictures of Nina tailing Teri, being as sneaky as possible, but Tony had still caught it on the video footage.
Nina examined each picture as Jack threw them at her, one by one, increasing the pace with which he threw them at her, until they were just assaulting her, and she sat back in her chair. "I am the guy you tell, Nina." He said gently, sitting on the chair that he'd positioned as close to her as possible before the interview began.
"Jack..." She pleaded, avoiding his eyes.
"I am the guy that you have to tell." He told her again, forcing her to listen to his words.
"You are the guy who's wife I shot." She exclaimed. Standing up and pushing the photographs across the table, the Marshall looked through the glass window to the interview room and Jack shook his head, waving the guy off. "What should I tell you, Jack?" She pressed her back against the plate glass false mirror, and shut her eyes.
"Everything, absolutely everything, if you want to raise your child yourself." He couldn't believe that Nina knew that she was pregnant and was still acting this way.
Her eyes flew open, he was right, she had no idea. "What?"
"If you want to raise your child, to see it grow up, to have it know who its mother is - you have to tell me everything, Nina, or there's nothing I can do to protect you." He spoke from his seat, but immediately got up and walked over to her, keeping a good distance as she began to shake.
"Don't do this, Jack." She whispered, as a few tears escaped her eyes.
"Nina, if you..."
"Don't lie to me..."
"What? Like you've done to me?" He was yelling at her now. She was drug free, in a delicate state, but she'd been removed from the majority of the anti-psychotics she was on previously. The nurse may have asked him not to, but as far as he was concerned, she was fair game. He grabbed the polygraph results from the top of his case, and threw the papers at her, unrolling in her arms. She'd sunken to the floor, and the papers formed a Teepee over her knees, she looked disdainfully at them whilst Jack found the areas where the lines were erratic.
"Look at this...Did you kill my wife in cold blood?...Did she do anything to jeopardise CTU?" He held the two erratic areas in front of her face, gesturing wildly with the papers. "What did Teri do to make you question her? Why were you following her?"
He watched as his second in command battled with the decision in her mind, she'd wrapped her arms around herself and was hugging her stomach, sobbing quietly trying to bury her head on her knees, but he wouldn't let her. "You have to tell me, Nina. This child depends on it."
Still indecisive, Jack stood from the table, he collected his last resort from the case and tossed the last photo at her, it was an ultrasound picture, taken yesterday, whilst she was unconscious. The peanut shape that indicated her child was circled with a red line. "This child."
She looked at the paper, and began to wipe off her tears. "If that's Yelena," she sobbed, "What happened to Teri?" She asked.
"She was murdered earlier in the evening, replaced by a terrorist agent who'd undergone plastic surgery to look exactly like Teri." Jack told her, reasonably confident in the truth of his statement. "Nina, you have to tell me..."
Nina sobbed and looked up at him. She was terrified, and sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, he knees huddled up under her chin, her tiny arms wrapped around her legs. His concern for her was more paternal than anything else. She seemed so tiny, so feeble, he couldn't help but compare her mentally to a child herself. Something in her eyes told him she was about to break.
"She was different, after the accident, I know she had amnesia, but it went beyond that..." He'd so rarely heard Nina sound unsure, it scared him too. "She had a phone, I think....I don't know - Jack, I just..."
"Try harder, Nina, you're doing fine." He whispered, "I need you."
"She called someone, she called herself Yelena, she said things...I know she wasn't sure who she was but...Teri was giving them information."
-24-
"You still haven't told me why you lied." Jack pointed out to Nina as she left the ladies restrooms at the courthouse. She hadn't realised he'd followed her to the door, and was now nervous she'd taken so long.
Nina avoided the question, still reveling in being a free woman. CTU had presented a case for her, and she'd been exonerated, whilst the blame was still on 'Yelena Drazen' she'd been cleared as an alias. Jack had gotten a trial date for a week after he'd petitioned for it, so early that his daughter wasn't returning from her month long holiday for another few days. He'd cited Nina as an important member of his team, and the judge had been asked to move the trial as close as possible by a US senator and presidential candidate. "I'm starving, can we go eat?" She asked him, they made their way through the double doors towards the courtroom she'd emerged from ten minutes earlier.
Nina glanced over at Tony uneasily, stood in the doorway to the courtroom, fidgeting in his suit he looked dejected. They'd spoken briefly and decided that anything they'd had before had to be discarded, and despite the fact it was at Tony's urging, she doubted he truly wanted her to agree with him.
Jack didn't notice him, he led her past him along the corridor, to the security guards at the end. "I should get back to CTU." He told her, officially she had been reinstated at CTU, but she and Jack had agreed that she would return to work in a few days, start a fresh week so he had time to start the ball rolling to get rid of Alberta.
Jack pulled his sunglasses out of his shirt pocket, putting them on just as they stepped out into the sunlight. He paused in the middle of the sidewalk outside, and watched Nina squint at him. She was wearing a suit, black skirt and jacket, which she was rapidly undoing to avoid overheating. The breeze that tousled her hair was nowhere enough to cool her, and she shrugged off the woolen jacket. "You want to put that in my car, and we can find somewhere to grab something quickly?"
"Sounds like a good idea." She shut her eyes and turned her head up to the sun. The people flooding out of the courthouse were bowing around them, like waves around a pebble. A few hit, but the majority walked straight past.
Jack placed a hand at the small of her back and led her down the road, stopping at the front of his car and accepting her jacket. There were a few cafes around the courthouse, and they could easily walk from there, so he opened his car door and put her coat, and then his on the passenger seat. Nina was still smiling up at the sun, presumably having been shielded from it at prison. Whilst looking in the opposite direction, he was able to study her for a second.
The white blouse she wore only served to illuminate how pale and thin she was now. Her colouring had always been light, and she'd always been thin, but this worried him now. He could only make up the slight hump of her stomach because he knew it was there, but the loose blouse and the black skirt made it less noticeable. He hadn't told the court, and he doubted she'd told Tony, but despite her objections, he'd brought the information with him necessary to plead with it.
He rolled up his shirtsleeves and patted his wallet in his back pocket, and then joined Nina on the sidewalk, leading her, once again by the small of her back, down the road. They stopped outside a small street cafe, and he approached the hostess, asking her for a table for two outside. He had intended to stop further down the road, but having seen how Nina was enjoying the sunlight, he thought this place would be more appropriate.
"I have an apology to make to you." He confessed, taking off his sunglasses as he moved his head into the shade of the table umbrella. Nina didn't say anything, folding her arms on the table. "If we'd done this three months ago, if I'd paid attention to what you were saying back at CTU..."
"I was unconscious, Jack."
Jack shook his head. "We managed to get you prosecuted and sentenced whilst you were in a coma, because I thought you'd shot Teri, because I believed you could be a traitor."
"I could have been." She pointed out, raising a hand to rub her temples for a minute. The truth was that Jack was right, that he should have formed his case more clearly months ago, and he should have listened to her. If she wanted to blame him for a gunshot wound and coma, three months of prison, and possible deformities to her child, it would have been easy to do so, but she couldn't do that. "She was your _wife_ how could you expect her?"
It was the first time that she had ever spoken of Teri without a hint of disdain in her voice. Since their affair, there had always been a certain pitch in her voice that he hadn't noticed, and now she seemed to speak about her kindly. "Why did you lie to me?" he asked her. Nina stalled, collecting her glass of water and taking a long sip. "Why did you tell me that you were the traitor?"
Nina watched him as she took her sip, gauging whether he truly wanted to know. "She was dead, I was in jail. What did it matter if your daughter spent her life believing her mother was true? What did it matter if you thought that your wife loved you and wouldn't hurt you?"
"My wife did, she wasn't my wife." Jack pointed out to her, and then distracted himself from the painful memories with his napkin, folding it and then spreading it across the flat surface of the table.
Teri had died in a car accident, probably forced off the road, and then Yelena Drazen had taken her place. The keycard he'd been presented with early that morning had contained records of plastic surgery done on a male and female, and Yelena Drazen was the female, once the doctors had checked her out, she'd been taken to CTU, where she'd gathered information to help her father try and kill Jack. Nina had become suspicious, and tailed her, eventually finding out about the regular check in times and calling the Drazens with slightly false information. Just before midnight, she'd taken Yelena out to the parking garage to talk to her, believing her to be Teri, and shot her when she'd tried to escape.
Nina allowed him sufficient time to recover, amiably changing the subject, neither of them wanted to dig deeper into their recent past. "I have no idea what I'm going to do for the next few hours." She admitted. "Haven't been in the sun for a while, don't suppose that my swimsuit survived the auctions?"
Jack let out a short laugh. "Apartment searching, we can get you several papers, and see what we can find." Jack glanced down at his watch, taking note of the time. "You need to go to the bank." He told her eventually.
"What?" she asked.
"The Citibank across the road." He pointed it out to her, and she turned in his seat to follow his finger. "You've got an appointment with the manager, it shouldn't take long." Nina raised her eyebrows at him and slowly rose from her seat, after a few moments of cautious study, she walked out of the fenced area, and headed over to the bank.
Jack had made arrangements for the money removed from her bank accounts to be returned to her, deposited in an account managed at the branch across the road. The money had been transferred to a custodial account controlled by CTU, and he'd transferred as much as he could locate back across.