Chapter 4 – King Solomon

She turns around, there; a man with gray steel hair and ruthless expressions stood only a few steps away from her. She almost runs into an embrace with her father catching up on all the things they have missed. Her birthdays, holidays, and even her mission accomplishments.

He hugs her back though; with a tight grip he refused to let her go that moment. She separates and glares up at him with that familiar understanding smile. "Still as cozy as barb wire." She looks around his face and saw a small scar on the side of his forehead. She touches it slowly and questions it with a glace that he cannot deny.

"It was a guard with a passion of throwing rocks." He explains, she cracks a smile as usual. "How are you, Vaughn tells me that you will become a field officer. That's good."

"I thought you would be happy, but they still probably want to finish XJK835." He nods. They go into the living room where they both sit on the couch. She just stares at her father; there was a time where his gazes were soft and tame. Where is eyes weren't as hard as stones and still had the zest for living. His zest now was staying alive, not living it.  "How are you, Dad?"

"I'm fine. I hope you are the same, I realize this whole thing had been very hard for you."

Hard? Hard? He has to be kidding.

"Hard? Yeah, left to clean up the CIA's mess for six months without a word from you? Yeah, I say it's been hard." She says. His daughter was back, no longer the stranger that he had encountered so many times before. She had grown in he last two years, the nineteen-year-old girl he sent to help with a mission that would either make or break her career.

He didn't feel too disappointed when he found out that the mission failed. Sometimes you cannot control what the world makes out for you. He also believed that she understood the fine print better than anyone else. The mission was, for her, to find him and kill him. Not to hard, but when they treat her like an operations officer, expect her to do all of their dirty work; they got a little out of line.

It was painful to make his daughter go into a program of pain and suffering. But it benefited her in the most ways she could ever be helped as a child. She moved herself to Montana when she was only eight, first time she ever fully seen the snow. He could always remember how she would fidget in class, begging to go outside. Snow in July is never a moment to miss.

She was the prettiest girl at the school. The smartest and the most gifted, she had a talent for marksmanship. He saw that from the start and told her to work from there. She was taught the newest technology in weaponry where she would spend hour studying the gun anomy. Becoming familiar with the sounds of each trigger that was pulled. She scored best at distances and moving targets, so they decided most of her training sheltered in the work of assassination. But she was gifted as a child also.

Her schedule was already packed with advance algebra, biology, and all the other needs of a regular high school diploma. Then there were the necessary lessons, which the all the students learn such as language, tactics, and physical training. Then there were enjoyment lessons for the student, and Sydney was naturally gifted with music. Her fingers graced white and black ivory, the old piano in the music room was played everyday. She would compose and play until the night became dawn.

*

He remembers waking up from the winter storm they had almost every season of summer. The wind brushing along the snow trimmed leaves and making it impossible to see sometimes. He didn't know what possessed him to walk down to the music room. If there was a possibility, his soul could hear his daughter's music. The keys softly hitting as her pencil scratched the lined paper.

He saw her, still in her school uniform of a white blouse and black jumper. Her hazelnut hair rested on one shoulder as it brushed along at her movements playing the keys. He had never heard of a movement so greatly played, or that movement at all. He saw her stressing, then cramping in her hands as she skipped a note. She cursed for a movement and began to erase the paper she scribbled on.

"You shouldn't erase it." His words echoed in the bare cold room. She looked up frizzled and brushed her long hair behind her ears and onto her back. Even in the same building their time together were based on morning hellos and the weekly private tutoring in her homework. Still, there were familiar as strangers. "Sometimes perfection only comes from mistakes."

"It's not right. If it's not right, it must be erased." She began to scratch away. He came over and grasped her arm lightly. She looked up and starred questioningly or insultingly, he never could figure it out, as he took the pencil from her hand. He sat down and began to fill in the now faint music notes she once scribbled in.  He stood back in front of her and turned to the first page.

"Play it from the start." She responded by only playing the notes, or the ones she memorized on the white keys with devotion. She closed her eyes and let the music rule the throne she sat in that moment. He watched her face, filled with the innocence she once lost. Almost serene and peaceful when her head moved back and forth with the same effort as her fingertips as the grazed the keys.

She ended it, realizing the end scribbled fitted perfectly with the rest of the movement. When she finished, he only saw his daughter with the great gift of tranquility and poise. She was a lady, not a killer, not a soldier, and not even a spy. She was her daughter; she was the child of the mother and wife he once loved.

"That was beautiful. Just perfect." He never complemented her so. She only looked critical and unsure, unknown why this little piece of her time was so beautiful and not ever the practice runs or missions were. She looked back down at the keys and only saw who introduced her to them. How her mother sat her on her lap and placed her fingers where they needed to be.

"How could she do this to us? To betray you and leave me cursed? How daddy? How did this happen to us?" She questioned. He had to tell her after she found the Cyrillic print in her mother's books.  It had been a hard week, but it was better than he hoped for.

"I don't know, she wasn't the woman that we knew. She betrayed me because she was ordered to, because she didn't love me. The illusion seemed so real at the time, she seemed like the ideal woman to settle down with. It was me that was cursed for my foolishness. You were innocent, you…" He couldn't finish that sentence. He could feel his jaw tighten when his daughter's tears began to fall.

"I was cursed to be like her. I look like her, I speak like her, god, when I wake up all I see is her face in the mirror. I see a betrayer, I see an…It's too horrible to explain. I hate it." She pounded the keys boards shut and looked away. "Why did she have me if it was all an job? I was just a tool. A picture she could easily fit in. I was a cover."

"What I truly believe, even if it is foolish. I believed she wanted you, that she did in fact love you. I saw the orders through those books, the orders of your…termination. If she wanted you…dead she would have killed you as a child."

"Daddy? What was her name?"

"Laura Bristow…"

"No, she was Russian, she had to have a Russian name."

"Her name doesn't matter Sydney, it's best if you didn't know." He passed his fingers through her long straight locks and looked concerned at his daughter. "I am sorry for all of this Sydney, I'm sorry for what you have to go through."

"It doesn't matter daddy, as long as we are together."

Hearing those words, Sydney brushed away the tears. She still didn't love her mother anymore, and her father did want to spare her the hurt and the pain.

"So, I want to hear it again. Play." He opened the keyboard open again and watched and listened to the remarkable sounds of a child prodigy.

*

So, he looks again. After her knowledge of her mother, she had grown cold and harsh like any other CIA agent. Mostly like him in some ways, but don't help to know that she still wants to be an assassin. Of course, he couldn't tell her that her mother was a murderer. No child should know that, it was bad enough that she knew that her mother wasn't Laura Bristow.

"You signed the papers, you graduated, and you were a grown woman." Jack says with only a tighten jaw. He did not appreciate being blamed for his daughter's own reckless behavior. She was given an order, too bad for her she screwed it up.

"And you never once advised me of my contacts could ever be questioned. Did you? You led me to believe that this was only a small mission for me when it turned out to be a risk to me life." She patronizes.

"I got you out from that trial even if they called it a debrief." Sydney only suppresses a smug grin when she walks away.

"Listen up Agent Vaughn because this is going to be one hell of a reunion." She glances up at her father and then back at poor confused Michael, who was only caught in the middle. He was still thinking that Weiss should have been here.