Chapter Twenty-Three: Secrets Revealed

"I got the list of flights," Jack said, approaching his mother tentatively. She'd looked in on him a couple of times when he was obtaining the information; he was sure she'd expected him to gather it more quickly, but what the hell. It wasn't like he'd been trained as a spy or anything.

"Good," she said, taking the list from him and looking it over with a frown. "I'll have to call my father with this," she said, more to herself than to him. "I'm sure he has contacts in these places. I just hope he's working on this himself, and hasn't involved the CIA."

Jack looked at her curiously. Even now, he couldn't help wanting answers to the questions that plagued him. "Who is your father?"

Sydney looked at him, a flicker of a smile crossing her worried face. "His name is Jack Bristow," she told him. "He's an officer with the CIA. Retired, mostly, except for--" she paused as if unsure how much she should reveal. "What did your grandmother tell you? I'll want to tell him that when I call back, too."

"She told me about Dad being asked to leave the CIA." He watched his mother look away. As if she could avoid the memory by avoiding his eyes. "That the two of you came to work for her organization. That you betrayed her."

Sydney nodded, tears shining in her brown eyes. "Did she tell you what her organization does?"

"She said it's interested in power, wealth, and world domination," Jack said with a smirk. "I take it they're not exactly good guys."

Sydney let out a short burst of laughter. "Not exactly."

"Why-- um--" Jack bit his lower lip, unsure of whether to ask his next question. "Why did you and Dad go to work for her?" When his mother didn't answer right away, he pressed on. "To take her down?"

"That's what we said our goal was in the beginning." Sydney walked over to the kitchen window, gazing out into the night as if the darkness would provide her with some answers. "Later, what we were doing there became a little unclear."

"But you did take her down," Jack prompted.

"A decade later," Sydney said, but she didn't look terribly happy about the fact. "Mostly by accident. Mostly to save our own asses. My father approached us with a deal." Still she looked out the window instead of him. "We could turn ourselves in, tell him everything we knew about her operation. Or we could tell him nothing, and he'd find another way to bring her down, and when he did, we'd go to jail along with everyone else." She laughed again, a short, bitter little laugh. "Hard decision, huh? The only thing that made us even hesitate was the fear that your grandmother would manage to keep herself out of prison, that one day she'd come after you kids." She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was full of tears. "And now she has."

"Mom--" Jack moved to stand beside her, to put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off.

"Your father and I said we wanted to bring down her operation, Jack, but the truth is, we would have gone to work for Satan himself if it meant we could be together."

Jack stared at her, doing his best to comprehend the statement. "That's romantic, I guess."

"I guess," Sydney agreed. "And it's still the truth, even now. But I know now there are other choices we could have made. I could have stayed with the CIA, he could have chosen another career. We still could have dated, gotten married." She shrugged. "Funny how unclear that seemed when we sold our souls to the Organization. Funny how doing so seemed like the only choice."

"I'm sure you did what you thought was best at the time, Mom," Jack said, feeling a rush of compassion for her even through his anger at being left in the dark about her past for so long.

His words seemed to bring her out of her memories, bring her back to reality. "Yeah," she said brusquely. "Yeah, we did. What's the point of regretting anything, anyway? You can't change the past, right?"

"Right." The problem was, Jack still felt like he knew too little about his own past for that to even be an option.

"I need to call my father back," she said, looking down at the list of flight times in her hand. "Jack, is there anything else your grandmother told you that seemed important? You mentioned Sloane-- I assume the two of them are working together?"

Jack nodded. "Oh, and there was one more thing."

His mother looked at him expectantly.

"She mentioned something called the Prophecy."