Author's Note: I have attempted to make all the time periods match up, but if I have made any major mistakes, please email legalblonde2005@yahoo.com, and I will make the appropriate corrections.
Jack's turn.
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They're keeping me here overnight. There are four heart monitor patches taped to my chest and a cuff reads my blood pressure every five minutes. The television in my room is tuned to some inane sitcom, thankfully someone had the good sense to mute it. If I strain I can hear the conversation of the nurses at their station outside. The name on my chart reads Martin Woltham and it says I work, of course, for the state department.
The last doctor here threatened to keep me in restraints it I didn't stop insisting I should go home. This is ridiculous. There will be important debriefs going on all night and I will be strapped to a hospital bed flipping through channels waiting for one of them to miraculously turn into CNN.
I've been waiting almost twenty years for this night, and I will spend it alone.
Twenty years. Sydney was seven, Laura – Irina – was gone, and I had just been released from solitary confinement. Sloane called me to talk. We met out in the desert near the oil wells, a spot we had used with an informant once before. He proposed a plan, called it a business venture, and asked if I cared to join. He said he had made certain alliances, that there was profit and power to be gained if we could work in a forum not bound by the restrictions of the CIA.
I agreed. My disillusionment with my wife and with a government that had turned on me was more than sufficient motivation. We started out simply. I took early retirement from the CIA – something they were more than willing to give – and started working for Sloane.
But as the years passed I became as disillusioned with the Alliance as I had once been with the CIA. Sloane's baser instincts were becoming more apparent, and I had seen more of his ruthlessness than I care to think about.
Sydney was the last straw. We had set it up years ago – the CIA would contact her during her third year of college, recruiting her into a job as soon as she graduated. But Sloane, without consulting me, without so much as telling me, brought her in at 19. Nineteen. She was a child. I didn't even know about it until she was field-ready. The day Sloane told me was the day the last thread of my allegiance to him snapped. I covertly contacted an old friend from the CIA, saying I wanted back in.
That was eight years ago. Eight years, dozens of missions, hundreds of covert meetings and more lost lives than I care to count. Eight years, and I'm lying in a hospital bed on a Tuesday night recovering from my second trip to the conversation room in as many weeks. And SD-6 is gone.
The victory feels hollow, empty somehow. Partially it's the shock of it being over. But primarily it's Sloane. No victory over the Alliance is complete without a victory over the man who has held far too much influence over my life for far too long.
It's the ultimate irony. In what I hope will be his last act, he disappeared one week before we won the victory we've worked years to achieve. One week. It's possible I resent him more for that act than for anything he's done before. One week.
I have a daughter who is beginning to know me, a wife who's been given the chance to undo some of the devastation she has caused, and a career as a double agent that has just become one of the most successful in the history of the CIA.
And I am lying in a hospital bed, with four heart monitor patches taped to my chest.