Title: The Art of Retrospection (Chapter 4)
Author: Agent Otter
Rating: R
Disclaimer: JJ is my god. I worship at his temple.
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: For those who've had questions about what's going on, I kind of feel like if I need to write an author's note explaining what's happening then I'm a really shitty writer. Moving beyond my crushing insecurity, I hope that this chapter answers a few of your questions and/or does not suck too hard. I was doing some speed writing so I could knock out this chapter before heading out to spend a long, long, long night on location. (Gloat? Me? Nah.) If anything makes absolutely no sense, feel free to point it out.
The most disturbing thing about waking up in the custody of an unknown enemy, Vaughn decided, was not the pounding in his head, the throbbing in his chest where the tranquilizer dart had hit him, or even the sanitarium-style shackles that held him securely strapped down to the bed. The worst part was opening his eyes and seeing Sark sitting at his bedside, watching over him like a psychotic nursemaid.
"Ah, you're awake," Sark said, as Vaughn's eyes blinked hesitantly open on that unwelcome sight. Sark didn't seem too pleased by Vaughn's presence, either. He pulled a cellular phone from the inside pocket of his impeccable suit jacket, dialed, listened, and said only "yes, sir" before hanging up again.
The room was a study in rust and corrosion, and the only clean items in it seemed to be the cot that Vaughn was chained to and the folding chair that Sark sat in. The door was of the oversized rolling variety, and Vaughn assumed that he was in what had once been a storage room inside a warehouse.
Sark stood when the door behind him opened, and moved to the far corner, allowing privacy, and the sole chair, for the man who entered.
Arvin Sloane wore a lightweight cotton suit and a pleasant expression on his face as he sat down, crossed his legs, and folded his hands in his lap. He regarded Vaughn for a long moment, and then said, "How are you feeling? Lucid enough to talk?"
Lucid enough to kill you with my two bare hands, Vaughn thought, but he just watched the other man and waited.
"I must admit, you're a bit of a puzzle to me, Mr. Vaughn. The CIA updated their own internal most-wanted list this morning. Your name is on it. Right under mine, in fact. I wondered if you were intending to give me a run for my money." Sloane's smile wasn't sinister; it was downright warm, and that just made it scarier. "My sources tell me that you shot and killed Francie Calfo. I'm a little upset, since she was one of mine, but I've gotten over it. I'm more interested in hearing all about you, Michael. So why don't we start from the beginning?"
* * *
The funeral was on Saturday, and Sydney moved on Sunday. The CIA's relocation office had found her a nice two-bedroom apartment in a quiet neighborhood, one where the landlord had once been with the Agency and she could take Vaughn's dog, Donovan, with her. The Agency even provided her with movers -- probably the only ones in LA with high-level security clearance -- and Will and Weiss helped her unpack in her new apartment. She didn't take any of the furniture with her, but the antique picture frame, thoroughly cleaned by the technicians in the evidence room, was the first thing she pulled from a box and placed carefully on the mantle in the living room. Francie and Will's faces beamed back at her from the picture inside, but she managed not to cry.
Will found excuses to stay most nights with her for the first few weeks, and that turned into a few months, and eventually he just moved into the second bedroom. If he noticed that she jogged more than usual or that she took frequent scalding showers, he didn't say anything. His own grief for Francie was like a living thing, and a few times in his dreams he had his revenge on Michael Vaughn, but in those violent nighttime fantasies he never knew or cared whether the Vaughn he was killing was the real thing or the imposter. When he woke from those dreams he always felt sick to his stomach, and he lay awake, wondering whether the real Michael Vaughn also would've helped him get a job, given him advice, chatted with him over coffee early in the morning at Sydney and Francie's kitchen counter. Sometimes after those dreams, Will would be able to get back to sleep, and when he did, he always dreamed of Sydney, sitting alone on the end of a rickety dock, smiling and carrying on long conversations with the Vaughn who sat next to her only in her watery reflection.
He had dreams of Francie, too, but he never remembered them; only that they were horrifying, and he always woke up covered in sweat and panting for breath. He didn't like to think about them, and he never, ever talked about them.
The dog didn't help, either. Between Syd and Will he got plenty of attention, and Sydney took him jogging every morning, like Vaughn used to do. But the animal could sense the wrongness of his situation, and when they were at home he spent most of his time lying near the front door, waiting for Michael to come home. Sydney had joined him once, and Will had found her sitting in the hallway when he came home from work. She'd smiled up at him, scratched Donovan's head, and stood to let Will through. Neither of them mentioned it after that, but he worried about her, and she worried about him, and they both did a lot of frowning over forlorn little Donovan. They didn't talk about their doubts, though both of them had plenty, and they didn't drive each other crazy wondering whether Vaughn had been a double at all, if there even was another double, if things had been at all what they seemed.
Mostly they spent their evenings watching movies, leaning on each other, occasionally breaking down, and trying not to go slowly insane.
They were both doing fairly well with holding their sanities together, but Sydney broke first. It wasn't because of weakness, or because she was a woman, or even because she'd lost two people instead of just one. It was because, on a Monday morning, her father had walked over to her desk, handed her a thin oversized envelope, squeezed her shoulder, and walked away again.
There was only one photo inside; a slightly grainy black and white, probably shot from a distance with a high-powered zoom lens. The two men in the photo were handsome, bordering on pretty, and they both wore expensive well-tailored suits. The one on the right was turned to look at something that was out of the camera's eye, and his short blond hair was ruffled by the wind that had also snagged the edges of his jacket. Sunglasses covered his eyes, but she recognized him. The one on the left was known to her, too, though his hair was longer and flopping into his eyes, and he wore a layer of stubble on his jaw that wasn't quite a beard and wasn't quite five o'clock shadow, either. They might've looked like something out of a designer cologne advertisement, if there hadn't been a dead body sprawled at their feet, and a burning building serving as a backdrop.
Her breakdown was silent and uneventful, but something snapped in Sydney Bristow as she looked at the photo of Vaughn and Sark and the carnage that surrounded them. When Weiss approached to call her into a meeting, she barely heard him over the rushing sound in her ears. Doubt had disappeared. Someone had stolen her handler's face and was using it to destroy people's lives. Her life.
They would pay. Dearly.
The briefing room was unusually packed when she entered, guided by Weiss' gentle grip on her elbow. Her father was there, and Will, and Kendall, plus a dozen other agents she recognized from operations groups. Their names emerged rapid-fire from her memory, but she wasn't able to hang on to any of them. She sat down next to Will, and didn't even realize until he gently took it from her that she still had the photograph in her hand.
"We've gotten some intel on Sloane," Kendall said, calling the meeting to order by launching into it. The photo that was burned into her memory suddenly appeared on the monitors around the room, and Sydney felt surrounded. "These two men, believed to be in Sloane's employ, were spotted by a surveillance team in Ostrava in the Czech Republic. The building you see in the background used to be a plant that supposedly manufactured mining equipment. It was, in fact, a front for a French crime outfit called Le Syndicat. They're up and comers in the organized crime world, and they were actually using the warehouse for production of long-range ballastic weapons. We believe they were also holding a small number of Rambaldi documents, which is, we suspect, the reason that Sark and Vaughn paid a visit."
Sydney flinched. Weiss noticed. "Could we not call him that?" he interrupted, brazenly.
Kendall blinked at him with surprised and not amused eyes. "Call who what, Agent Weiss?"
Eric gestured toward the room's monitors and the photo still displayed on all of them. "Call him 'Vaughn'," he explained. "We don't think he is Vaughn, right? So how about we call him something else? Like, I don't know... 'Virgil' or 'Tito' or something."
Kendall stared until Weiss' eyes dropped back to the table in front of him, then continued as if there had been no interruption. "Sark and Vaughn," he said, "were at this location two days ago. The building is now destroyed and there were no survivors. The CIA asset who took these photographs reports that the men left with a small cylandrical case, which you can just see in Vaughn's left hand in this photograph. That case probably contains the Rambaldi documents, but it won't contain everything they're looking for. Intel indicates that two days before this strike, Le Syndicat moved a second, larger case to their main facility in Paris. We believe it contained maps leading to several artifacts. We also believe that it will be Sloane's next target."
"Unless we get there first," Sydney interjected, steel in her eyes.
"Yes," Kendall agreed. "Unless we get there first."
* * *
Jack Bristow was not normally bothered by reports. When he'd first started working for the CIA, at a bullpen desk in the main building at Langley, reports had driven him, in a quest to process them so quickly that they hardly touched his desk. Over the years, his tolerance to their presence had grown. These days, he rarely bothered with them at all.
But at the moment there were two things bothering him. The first was the thick report on his desk, containing ballistics, fingerprint matching, DNA testing, and equipment analysis. There were also crime scene photos from his daughter's bedroom, showing the corpse in repose, the blood-spattered walls. There were photos of the scattered equipment, half-crushed in a scuffle, when, supposedly, Francie had unexpectedly surprised Vaughn as he installed the surveillance devices. There were several things about those documents that made Jack uneasy. Mostly, he wasn't comfortable with the residue they'd found on Francie's fingertips. Just dust, the analysis team had surmised, probably from touching the overhead lighting fixture, where her fingerprints had also been found.
If she'd been in the one up on that stool, Jack thought, then she was probably the one installing the bugs. He wished, fiercely, that the analysis team had bothered to check Francie's eyes before she'd been interred. Jack had a feeling they would've found an anomoly.
The other thing that was bothering Jack Bristow, however, was a more serious matter. It was a steady stream of cryptic messages and coded communications, and it all seemed to be coming from within Sloane's organization. The first note had come via email, unencoded and unguarded, but disguised as a spam message. He'd nearly deleted it before the message within the message became clear.
HOT HOT HOT underage boys, it read. scoutmasters & young Boy Scouts In Compromising Positions!!! wet and wild at Boy Scout Camp and they're Sending the Pictures home to Daddy!!!!
Jack got the message: Boy Scout was compromised, but the younger agent was making the most of it, if the photos and intel that followed were any indication.
He only wondered how in the hell he was supposed to tell his daughter.
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to be continued
