* * * *
Jack was composed as he entered the interrogation room. They had done this many times before and he knew even before he looked at Sark what expression he would be wearing as well. Boredom. Indifference. A trace of patronizing amusement. And beneath it all - curiosity. That was what always intrigued Jack the most whenever they had these sessions. Although he knew that Sark's days consisted of the same dull routine with no end in sight, he was nevertheless surprised at the carefully hidden eagerness with which the boy approached every new interrogation. He was equally surprised by the wry cheerfulness with which he helped the CIA demolish the very operations he'd once worked to build and the odd sense of satisfaction he would almost swear that Sark radiated whenever he knew that he'd been able to provide vital information. He needs to be needed, Jack had concluded. And it didn't matter to him in the slightest who was using him as long as he was being useful.
"You know this isn't necessary," Sark said. His words were slow and carefully measured as he fought the drugs in his system for a few more moments of consciousness. "You know I'll answer anything you ask."
"I know," Jack nodded in agreement and waited for his head to drop. It didn't take long. Soon the attending technician indicated that the boy had entered the most receptive state that they could achieve. The boy, Jack thought as the technician made some final adjustments before leaving them alone. He still occasionally thought of Sydney as a child though he knew that he shouldn't. Sark was half a dozen years her junior and his open, guileless face did nothing to age him. It was little wonder, he mused, that he usually thought of the young man as a boy. He shook his head slightly, marveling at how much havoc this boy had wrought in so few years.
"Can you hear me?" he began at last. Sark nodded, eyes still closed. "Tell me your name."
"Sark."
No matter how many times they'd been through this, they always started here. "Your first name."
"Stephen."
"Where were you born?"
"Oranmore."
"Elaborate."
"Oranmore, County Galway, Republic of Ireland." Beneath the effects of drugs and hypnotism the clipped tones of his formal British education slipped away and faded into the faintest lilt of a softer brogue. Marshall had been pleased to learn that his original estimate had been so accurate.
"What is your mother's name?"
"I don't know," came the immediate reply.
"Your father's name?"
"I don't know."
Jack was unfazed by this initial blank wall. They had been here before too. "Who named you?"
"I don't know. I was very young at the time."
Jack realized his error and tried a different angle. Sometimes the boy's literal interpretations were as aggravating as a deliberate evasion would have been. "Who raised you?" he asked instead.
"Sister Katherine at St. Michael's until I was nine."
"What happened when you were nine?"
"Irina came." There was a ghost of a smile even beneath the chemical stupor. "She took me to a new school in London."
"What kind of school?"
Although they'd been through this a time or two before as well, this time Jack delved deeper. He already knew that Sark had been subjected to something much like Project Christmas for most of his childhood. Now he probed his relationship to Irina as deeply as he could. The deeper he dug, however, the more certain he became that the boy was entirely unaware of his true bond with her. He idolized her, saw her as a mother-figure, but never realized that she was indeed his mother. Jack wondered briefly if she was pleased at that. He wondered if she ever worried about what his reaction might one day be if he ever discovered the truth. Right now Sark was content to blithely destroy anyone or anything that the CIA requested of him, just as he had done for Sloane and Irina before them. Jack also wondered what he would be like if his considerable intellect and his void of conscience were focused by personal betrayal at a most fundamental level.
* * * *
"What the hell were you thinking?" Kendall stormed at him. "That little stunt of yours didn't tell us anything that we didn't already know or at the very least suspect. What were you looking for?"
"I thought I'd found a new line of inquiry," Jack said calmly. "It didn't pan out."
"What new line of inquiry? You didn't cover any ground that we hadn't gone over the first week he was here. There was nothing new in any of that."
Jack sat patiently. It was difficult to argue with a man who didn't yell back and eventually Kendall gave up, unsatisfied but exhausted. Jack returned to his office, studiously avoiding Marshall and his inquisitive glances, and locked his door. He placed the file folder with its bewildering contents on his desk and stared for an hour at absolutely nothing.
Sark was a psychopath. Charming and bright, eager to please and utterly amoral. He had been responsible for more deaths than Jack suspected he could even count. He was brutal and efficient and exactly what he had been created to be. He could also be unexpectedly ingenuous, frighteningly honest, and he was still so terribly young. He was not innocent, but it was apparent that neither was Sark entirely to blame for what he had become. Irina's careful manipulations had almost guaranteed that he had never truly been given a choice. Jack was too analytical not to recognize the uncomfortable parallels.
He wasn't certain how much later, but eventually he found himself standing in the observation room again. The boy was sprawled bonelessly on the small cot, sleeping off the effects of the remaining drugs in his veins. As Jack watched there was an interminably slow transformation from the chemically induced relaxation to an instinctive and habitual tension. Sark's legs drew up as he pulled his arms beneath him for warmth, tucking one hand under his cheek in an unnervingly childlike gesture. The guards hadn't bothered to cover him with the thin blanket that still lay neatly folded at his feet when they'd returned his limp body to the cell, and the closer he scrabbled to consciousness the more pronounced his shivering became.
When the guards' shift changed Jack realized that he had been staring at the small monitor for more than three hours. In all that time he had come to no new revelations, made no decisions about his next move. He had simply been watching the boy sleep while a thousand random thoughts ran unchecked through his brain. All questions and no answers. He rubbed wearily at grainy eyes and left the observation room as silently as he'd entered.
* * * *
It became an unwilling, almost unconscious ritual. An hour here, twenty minutes there. Ostensibly it was to refine his profile of Sark should Kendall or anyone else wonder at this new habit. It would have been difficult to justify had anyone pressed for results or even asked what precisely he expected to learn from watching the boy read or practice tai chi or fold careful and elaborate paper airplanes that soared beautifully and crashed into the glass walls without a sound. Jack wasn't sure that he could justify it even to himself. No idle curiosity had ever brought him to this cell when his ex-wife had occupied it. Now he was perpetually surprised to find his footsteps leading him inexorably toward it whenever he had a spare moment between meetings and missions. Marshall had tentatively attempted to approach him about Sark's new unofficial "status", but Jack had usually been able to deflect him. Usually...
"He doesn't know?" Marshall repeated, sitting on the edge of his chair as he leaned onto Jack's desk.
Jack shook his head. "She never told him."
"And you? Are you going to tell him?"
"There would be no point."
"Well... but..." the engineer struggled for words. "Don't you... Doesn't he deserve to know?"
"He deserves the cell he's sitting in," Jack replied sharply. Then he exhaled wearily and shrugged. "Beyond that... I don't know what purpose it would serve. I don't know that he needs to know - or that he would even want to."
"If it were me, I'd want to know," Marshall said. "But then again, I'm not him. Which is good because frankly I still find him a little scary. Well, a lot scary. He's not normal - no offense. Don't know why I said that," he rattled on quickly at Jack's aggrieved frown. "I mean it's not like you were the one who raised him to be the way he is, it's just... Do you really think he's better off not knowing?"
Yes, Jack thought. In some respects, he is. Most of Jack's profiling had been done months ago, before he'd known the truth himself. He knew that Sark was resigned to the belief that he'd been abandoned by some poor simple Irish girl who hadn't been able to cope with raising him. This belief paradoxically gave him strength; he was comforted by the knowledge that he had risen far above anything that had ever been expected of him. Would it be any comfort to him to learn that he had become exactly what was expected of him after all? Would it come as any consolation that he was not as alone as he'd always assumed - that he did have a family, indifferent to him though it was? Jack wasn't sure. Somehow he doubted it. But still...
"I don't know," he said. "I just don't know."
"What about Kendall?"
"No." On that at least he was more certain. This information changed nothing, Jack knew. It was even more irrelevant to the Agency than his prior relationship to Irina had been. It didn't affect Sark's value to them, what he could offer, or what he had done. It wouldn't matter to Kendall in the slightest who the boy's parents were. He was no leverage for or against Jack and just as unlikely to influence a woman who had already shot her own daughter. To the CIA this new little fragment of information would be nothing more than a footnote. And since it didn't matter, there was no need to further complicate the situation.
"Yeah, I guess not," Marshall's head bobbed in understanding. "Everybody already thinks your family is about as dysfunctional as it can get. It's probably best not to add ah... Sorry. So you're really not going to tell him? Sark, not Kendall. You're not going to let him know who he really is?"
"No," Jack said at last. He knew that the drugs which had loosened the inhibitions of Sark's tongue had done nothing to hinder his recollection of the latest interrogation. The boy was genetically predisposed toward a high intelligence and had been carefully groomed to ensure that potential was realized. With his analytical skills and little else to occupy his time, Jack knew that it would be sooner rather than later when he began to make some deductions about the nature of the more unusual questions. "I don't think it will be necessary."
* * * *
Jack was composed as he entered the interrogation room. They had done this many times before and he knew even before he looked at Sark what expression he would be wearing as well. Boredom. Indifference. A trace of patronizing amusement. And beneath it all - curiosity. That was what always intrigued Jack the most whenever they had these sessions. Although he knew that Sark's days consisted of the same dull routine with no end in sight, he was nevertheless surprised at the carefully hidden eagerness with which the boy approached every new interrogation. He was equally surprised by the wry cheerfulness with which he helped the CIA demolish the very operations he'd once worked to build and the odd sense of satisfaction he would almost swear that Sark radiated whenever he knew that he'd been able to provide vital information. He needs to be needed, Jack had concluded. And it didn't matter to him in the slightest who was using him as long as he was being useful.
"You know this isn't necessary," Sark said. His words were slow and carefully measured as he fought the drugs in his system for a few more moments of consciousness. "You know I'll answer anything you ask."
"I know," Jack nodded in agreement and waited for his head to drop. It didn't take long. Soon the attending technician indicated that the boy had entered the most receptive state that they could achieve. The boy, Jack thought as the technician made some final adjustments before leaving them alone. He still occasionally thought of Sydney as a child though he knew that he shouldn't. Sark was half a dozen years her junior and his open, guileless face did nothing to age him. It was little wonder, he mused, that he usually thought of the young man as a boy. He shook his head slightly, marveling at how much havoc this boy had wrought in so few years.
"Can you hear me?" he began at last. Sark nodded, eyes still closed. "Tell me your name."
"Sark."
No matter how many times they'd been through this, they always started here. "Your first name."
"Stephen."
"Where were you born?"
"Oranmore."
"Elaborate."
"Oranmore, County Galway, Republic of Ireland." Beneath the effects of drugs and hypnotism the clipped tones of his formal British education slipped away and faded into the faintest lilt of a softer brogue. Marshall had been pleased to learn that his original estimate had been so accurate.
"What is your mother's name?"
"I don't know," came the immediate reply.
"Your father's name?"
"I don't know."
Jack was unfazed by this initial blank wall. They had been here before too. "Who named you?"
"I don't know. I was very young at the time."
Jack realized his error and tried a different angle. Sometimes the boy's literal interpretations were as aggravating as a deliberate evasion would have been. "Who raised you?" he asked instead.
"Sister Katherine at St. Michael's until I was nine."
"What happened when you were nine?"
"Irina came." There was a ghost of a smile even beneath the chemical stupor. "She took me to a new school in London."
"What kind of school?"
Although they'd been through this a time or two before as well, this time Jack delved deeper. He already knew that Sark had been subjected to something much like Project Christmas for most of his childhood. Now he probed his relationship to Irina as deeply as he could. The deeper he dug, however, the more certain he became that the boy was entirely unaware of his true bond with her. He idolized her, saw her as a mother-figure, but never realized that she was indeed his mother. Jack wondered briefly if she was pleased at that. He wondered if she ever worried about what his reaction might one day be if he ever discovered the truth. Right now Sark was content to blithely destroy anyone or anything that the CIA requested of him, just as he had done for Sloane and Irina before them. Jack also wondered what he would be like if his considerable intellect and his void of conscience were focused by personal betrayal at a most fundamental level.
* * * *
"What the hell were you thinking?" Kendall stormed at him. "That little stunt of yours didn't tell us anything that we didn't already know or at the very least suspect. What were you looking for?"
"I thought I'd found a new line of inquiry," Jack said calmly. "It didn't pan out."
"What new line of inquiry? You didn't cover any ground that we hadn't gone over the first week he was here. There was nothing new in any of that."
Jack sat patiently. It was difficult to argue with a man who didn't yell back and eventually Kendall gave up, unsatisfied but exhausted. Jack returned to his office, studiously avoiding Marshall and his inquisitive glances, and locked his door. He placed the file folder with its bewildering contents on his desk and stared for an hour at absolutely nothing.
Sark was a psychopath. Charming and bright, eager to please and utterly amoral. He had been responsible for more deaths than Jack suspected he could even count. He was brutal and efficient and exactly what he had been created to be. He could also be unexpectedly ingenuous, frighteningly honest, and he was still so terribly young. He was not innocent, but it was apparent that neither was Sark entirely to blame for what he had become. Irina's careful manipulations had almost guaranteed that he had never truly been given a choice. Jack was too analytical not to recognize the uncomfortable parallels.
He wasn't certain how much later, but eventually he found himself standing in the observation room again. The boy was sprawled bonelessly on the small cot, sleeping off the effects of the remaining drugs in his veins. As Jack watched there was an interminably slow transformation from the chemically induced relaxation to an instinctive and habitual tension. Sark's legs drew up as he pulled his arms beneath him for warmth, tucking one hand under his cheek in an unnervingly childlike gesture. The guards hadn't bothered to cover him with the thin blanket that still lay neatly folded at his feet when they'd returned his limp body to the cell, and the closer he scrabbled to consciousness the more pronounced his shivering became.
When the guards' shift changed Jack realized that he had been staring at the small monitor for more than three hours. In all that time he had come to no new revelations, made no decisions about his next move. He had simply been watching the boy sleep while a thousand random thoughts ran unchecked through his brain. All questions and no answers. He rubbed wearily at grainy eyes and left the observation room as silently as he'd entered.
* * * *
It became an unwilling, almost unconscious ritual. An hour here, twenty minutes there. Ostensibly it was to refine his profile of Sark should Kendall or anyone else wonder at this new habit. It would have been difficult to justify had anyone pressed for results or even asked what precisely he expected to learn from watching the boy read or practice tai chi or fold careful and elaborate paper airplanes that soared beautifully and crashed into the glass walls without a sound. Jack wasn't sure that he could justify it even to himself. No idle curiosity had ever brought him to this cell when his ex-wife had occupied it. Now he was perpetually surprised to find his footsteps leading him inexorably toward it whenever he had a spare moment between meetings and missions. Marshall had tentatively attempted to approach him about Sark's new unofficial "status", but Jack had usually been able to deflect him. Usually...
"He doesn't know?" Marshall repeated, sitting on the edge of his chair as he leaned onto Jack's desk.
Jack shook his head. "She never told him."
"And you? Are you going to tell him?"
"There would be no point."
"Well... but..." the engineer struggled for words. "Don't you... Doesn't he deserve to know?"
"He deserves the cell he's sitting in," Jack replied sharply. Then he exhaled wearily and shrugged. "Beyond that... I don't know what purpose it would serve. I don't know that he needs to know - or that he would even want to."
"If it were me, I'd want to know," Marshall said. "But then again, I'm not him. Which is good because frankly I still find him a little scary. Well, a lot scary. He's not normal - no offense. Don't know why I said that," he rattled on quickly at Jack's aggrieved frown. "I mean it's not like you were the one who raised him to be the way he is, it's just... Do you really think he's better off not knowing?"
Yes, Jack thought. In some respects, he is. Most of Jack's profiling had been done months ago, before he'd known the truth himself. He knew that Sark was resigned to the belief that he'd been abandoned by some poor simple Irish girl who hadn't been able to cope with raising him. This belief paradoxically gave him strength; he was comforted by the knowledge that he had risen far above anything that had ever been expected of him. Would it be any comfort to him to learn that he had become exactly what was expected of him after all? Would it come as any consolation that he was not as alone as he'd always assumed - that he did have a family, indifferent to him though it was? Jack wasn't sure. Somehow he doubted it. But still...
"I don't know," he said. "I just don't know."
"What about Kendall?"
"No." On that at least he was more certain. This information changed nothing, Jack knew. It was even more irrelevant to the Agency than his prior relationship to Irina had been. It didn't affect Sark's value to them, what he could offer, or what he had done. It wouldn't matter to Kendall in the slightest who the boy's parents were. He was no leverage for or against Jack and just as unlikely to influence a woman who had already shot her own daughter. To the CIA this new little fragment of information would be nothing more than a footnote. And since it didn't matter, there was no need to further complicate the situation.
"Yeah, I guess not," Marshall's head bobbed in understanding. "Everybody already thinks your family is about as dysfunctional as it can get. It's probably best not to add ah... Sorry. So you're really not going to tell him? Sark, not Kendall. You're not going to let him know who he really is?"
"No," Jack said at last. He knew that the drugs which had loosened the inhibitions of Sark's tongue had done nothing to hinder his recollection of the latest interrogation. The boy was genetically predisposed toward a high intelligence and had been carefully groomed to ensure that potential was realized. With his analytical skills and little else to occupy his time, Jack knew that it would be sooner rather than later when he began to make some deductions about the nature of the more unusual questions. "I don't think it will be necessary."
* * * *