Title: The Art of Retrospection
Author: agent otter
Summary:
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Alias is not mine. Damn. Neither is Bradley Cooper. Double damn.
Spoilers: Anything up through "Firebomb" is fair game, I suppose, though I don't think there's any major plot points given away or anything.
Author's note: I started writing after "Firebomb" but before "A Dark Turn"... because the new factors brought about in "A Dark Turn", which I don't much feel like dealing with, I'm going to keep the story in the current timeframe, and kind of make it an AU breaking off after "Firebomb". Hang in there.
Will Tippin was quite sure he'd never get used to the whole spy routine. When he'd left a message for Jack Bristow requesting a meeting, he'd expected a phone call, maybe an email. Something along the lines of "My office, 2pm." He really hadn't been expecting Bristow's response to come in the form of a carryout menu for Tong's Noodle World, shoved under his front door. It was a common practice in LA for take-out menus to be forced upon everyone in an apartment building, but there were none on his neighbor's doors, so he picked up the menu and took it inside. Ultimately, he decided that the highlighter used on one of the menu items indicated that should call and order it, so he did.
The seafood noodle soup came with a side of eggrolls and a note from Jack Bristow.
Benicio's, it read. 20 minutes.
The maitre 'd at Benicio's restaurant led him on a weaving path between tables, through the kitchen, and into a rear storage room, then left without a word. Will hardly noticed, because he'd caught sight of Jack Bristow, seated with utmost dignity on a folding metal chair, and looking none too happy.
"Thank you for meeting me," Will said. He shifted the thick file folder in his hands, trying to avoid staining it with the sweat that had suddenly broken out from his palms.
"I sincerely hope that this is an emergency, Mr. Tippin," Jack replied, nodding toward the second folding chair.
"Yes, it is. Well, sort of." Will sat at the edge of the seat, nervous and tense. "Last week," he explained, "Agent Vaughn asked me to research a project called Helix. You're familiar with it?"
Jack nodded. "Of course. I was in on the operation. Genetic restructuring."
"Right. Well, Vaughn's concern was that Sydney and this other guy, Agent Lennox, had looked at some records for the device that indicated it had been used twice: once on Agent Lennox, and once on somebody else. No one knows who."
"If you have something to report, Mr. Tippin, Agent Vaughn is the case officer--"
"That's just it, Jack," Will interrupted. "I found some stuff. Interesting stuff. In wiretaps I've been reviewing for another case that should've been totally unrelated to Helix. I think it indicates that Dr. Markovic, the guy who invented Helix, has been fine-tuning for some time. The one Sydney destroyed was his third version of the device, and the only version that ever worked. But it's not like he finished it a month ago; he's been testing it for some time."
"You think there were more than two uses on the machine?" Jack asked. He frowned, in his own subtle way, and leaned forward.
"No, I don't think that at all. I think that just using the Helix is a difficult and time-consuming process, and I don't think they would've been able to do more than two in this time frame. But I don't think Dr. Markovic used the machine on himself first. I mean, he'd already killed plenty of people in testing his first two machines; why commit suicide by testing something unproven on yourself? I think he was the second subject. And I think I figured out where the first duplication took place."
Will opened the file folder in his hands, and passed a photo to Jack.
"This is an estate called Le Petite Rose. It was owned by a French government official named Jean Luc Rave."
"That sounds familiar," Bristow said, frowning as he peered at the pictures.
"It should. Kendall's had me reviewing some of Sydney's mission records, which is how I found this. She went to Le Petite Rose late last year, to plant a bug for SD-6. On the way out she discovered some sort of medical lab in the basement of the building."
"Right," Jack affirmed, picking up the thread of the memory. "Agent Vaughn had been missing after Taipei, and she found him... there." Jack's voice trailed off to a mutter with the last word, and he met Will's gaze with new understanding.
"No one is sure what the lab was used for," Will said. "Apparently no one is entirely sure what happened to Agent Vaughn between Taipei and Syd's rescue. But the wiretaps she installed at the estate tell us a lot. I believe Markovic was based at Le Petite Rose at the time. I believe he was testing Helix there. I think maybe they wanted Sydney to find Vaughn down there. And I believe there's a possibility that Agent Vaughn might not be Agent Vaughn."
* * *
The third time it happened -- that day -- Weiss found them in a storage room in the depths of the Joint Task Force complex. Vaughn was pressed against the wall, his arms pinned down by a jacket not entirely removed, and Sydney was attacking his lips with all the ferocity of an invading Mongul horde. All Weiss had wanted was a new stapler.
"You guys realize there's security cameras in here, right?" he said.
Neither of them broke their embrace to respond, but Sydney waved a hand toward a small black box sitting on a nearby shelf. A signal jammer. A security team would probably be down at any moment to investigate the camera outtage.
Weiss sighed a heavily put-upon sigh, grabbed a stapler -- ah, shiny and new, still in the packaging! -- and made for the door, which was where he ran bodily into Jack Bristow.
"Ah, hey, Agent Bristow, how's it going?" he fumbled, pulling the storeroom door shut behind him and praying that his friends had heard him greet Sydney's father.
"Fine, Agent Weiss, thank you for asking," Jack replied, gruffly, his hand reaching around the other man for the storeroom doorknob. "Have you seen my daughter?"
"Nah," Weiss replied, a bit too quickly. "Nobody in there. Haven't seen Sydney. Maybe she's at lunch. You know how she likes that little coffee shop down the street. Have you looked for her there? I'll bet she's there."
Bristow stood back, stone-faced as always, and regarded Weiss for a long, tense moment. "She's in there, isn't she?" Jack asked. He watched Weiss swallow, hard, and had to curb the impulse to smile. "She's in there with Agent Vaughn, and they're making out like a couple of teenagers."
Another pause, then Weiss finally caved. "Um, yeah. I guess she is."
Jack was silent for a moment, staring beyond him at the closed door with a frown. The arrival of a pair of facility guards saved him from having to make a decision about breaking them up himself; he gave the two guards a nod as they passed, on their way to investigate the faulty storeroom camera. Then he took Weiss by the elbow, leading him back up the hallway. "I'll just have to leave it alone for now," he muttered. "But we need to have a talk, Agent Weiss."
* * *
Neither of them even noticed the tail until the third day, when the follower was forced to run a red light to avoid losing his target. Sydney glanced in the rearview, muttered a sarcastic, "Yeah, buddy, that light wasn't red or anything," and then realized that the driver of the vehicle -- the one that was carefully remaining two cars back -- was Eric Weiss.
Vaughn missed her gasp of surprise entirely; it had been difficult getting him up that morning, and he'd planted a long kiss on her lips before she'd started the car into motion. He'd declared, "You wear me out, Bristow," and slumped against the passenger-side door, where he'd fallen asleep. She glanced over at his sleeping form, then back to the rearview mirror and Weiss' car. His explanations could wait, she decided, but they'd better be good. She continued her drive, calmly and steadily, to the CIA building.
Weiss didn't follow her in when she parked in the CIA's underground structure; she suspected that he didn't realize he'd been made, and he was circling around the block a few times so his arrival wouldn't seem so suspicious. Sydney frowned, but shook the uneasy feeling off and leaned over to wake Vaughn with a soft kiss on the jaw.
"Time to work," she whispered, and he woke suddenly, eyes wide, lips frowning. "Something wrong?" She covered his hand with hers and ran her free hand through his hair, smoothing it a bit.
The frown turned into a smile, and he blinked at her with sleepy eyes. "Just a weird dream," he said. "It's nothing."
She smiled too, and nodded, reaching into the back seat and grabbing his laptop case for him. In the reflection of the passenger-side mirror, she saw Weiss' car pull into an empty space nearby.
"Meet me for lunch today?" she asked Vaughn, as he fumbled with his seatbelt. "There's something I'll want to talk to you about."
He nodded, not quite catching the serious timbre of her voice, and let himself out of the car. "I'm in a meeting until noon," he reminded, "but we can go after that."
"Don't you have a meeting this morning, too?"
"Yeah," he sighed. "Seven thirty."
She glanced at her watch, looked back at him and said, "It's seven twenty-nine. You'd better run."
He bit back a curse and raced for the front doors and the security checkpoint beyond, and he'd never even seen Weiss coming. Perfect.
"I think that may be the first time a friend has fled from me with such a look of terror on their face," Weiss said, stepping up next to Sydney and staying at her side as she headed into the building.
"He's late for a meeting," Sydney explained, and then she engaged Weiss in a comfortable pattern of small talk until they were through security and into the elevator. That was when she pulled out a small signal jammer to block out the CIA surveillance cameras and microphones, turned to Weiss, and asked, "Why were you following us this morning?"
Weiss may have been a desk jockey, but he'd trained with the rest of them, and he could lie with the best. "I didn't follow you anywhere, Syd," he said, and laughed a little like she was joking. "Mike would kill me if I was that hot for his girlfriend."
"Do not bullshit me, Weiss. You've been made and this'll be a lot easier if you come clean. You know what I'm capable of. And you know I'll do pretty much anything to protect him. So if you're even thinking that I'm going to drop the subject, that's a fantasy you can put away right now. Tell me what's going on."
He paused, gave her a sidelong look, then tilted his face up to watch the progression of floor numbers displayed above the elevator door. "We should talk to your father," he finally said. "He'll explain things to you."
She put the signal jammer away, and they walked out of the elevator smiling and laughing like two old friends. No one noticed that they made a beeline for Jack Bristow's office, and no one noticed the vice-like grip that Sydney had on Weiss' arm.
* * *
"You are both absolutely, certifiably insane." Sydney made the statement with the unshakeable conviction of poets and priests, but she clutched her briefcase to her chest, placing it like a protective barrier between herself and the two men before her.
"We don't know that it's true, Sydney," Jack reiterated. "But it's a strong possibility. And we didn't want to take any risks. We thought if we tailed him for awhile, made sure he wasn't making any suspicious movements, that we might at least be able to put him in the clear, rule him out as a double."
"Have you noticed any suspicious behavior?" Weiss chimed in. "Has he been acting strangely at all?"
Sydney scoffed at the both of them, her knuckles stark white against the black of her briefcase. "You're not talking about a few days here. You're talking about months. Do you realize what it would take to replace Michael Vaughn's entire existance and convince everyone who knows him that nothing's going on? Do you realize what it would take to make a double so perfect that he could fool me into his bed?"
Jack flinched, but didn't take his eyes from her. Weiss busily studied the wood grain of Jack's desk.
"Yes, Sydney, I realize," Jack said, his voice pitched low as he tried to soften what he was about to say. "It would take some time with the Helix, which they had. It would have taken thorough intelligence that they would've already gathered, if they knew who Agent Vaughn was, which all indications say they do. It would have taken drugs and interrogation, but they would've broken him, and they would've had everything they needed to turn a stranger into a man we would know."
"It wouldn't have fooled me," she said. She shook her head and scowled, but one tear escaped her eye, and then another. "I would know if it wasn't him. I could tell. This is absolutely ridiculous."
She stood and fled out the office door before either man had a chance to stop her.
"You think she'll tell him?" Weiss asked, miserably.
"No," Jack answered. "Sydney is a spy. She was made to keep secrets. And she won't want him to know that she's doubting him now."
"Jack... do you really think that he isn't Mike? I mean, we would know... wouldn't we?"
"I don't know, Agent Weiss. But I intend to find out."
* * *
Sydney was shaken, but she refused to admit to any lingering doubt. He was Michael Vaughn. Vaughn who had been there with her through ups and downs, pulled her through disillusionment, kept her going, gave her something to fight for. Michael Vaughn who kissed sweetly in the morning and then apologized with a smile for his morning breath. Michael Vaughn who could make her shiver just by running a hand down her arm. Michael Vaughn who could strip her down to the bone with a smile, who dragged from bed early in the morning to walk his dog, who put ketchup on everything and liked to watch the new Dragnet every Sunday night.
This was not a stranger. This was not a traitor. This was not an enemy.
She repeated the words to herself and she believed them almost completely. But the almost disarmed her, and she made a stop at the rotunda floor before heading to the conference room for a briefing. She found him at his desk, and she walked over, leaning on the edge of his desk and placing a hand over his where it rested on the computer mouse.
"Can we push lunch back to one?" she asked, and as he nodded and smiled, she searched his bright green eyes for any sign of alien life. His smile turned puzzled, and she leaned a little closer, whispered into his ear, "I really wish I could kiss you right now."
"I was just imagining taking you right here on my desk," he whispered back, and she laughed as she walked away toward the conference rooms.
He was Michael Vaughn, she thought. The real Michael Vaughn. But oh, God, what if he wasn't?
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to be continued
