Sitting in the briefing room of SD-6, surrounded by Sloane, Marshall, and Dixon, Sydney found herself doing the one thing she had been trying not to do all morning. Daydream about either one of the men who were suddenly so available in her life. She tried to push those unwanted thoughts out of her head and focus on Sloane, who was currently pacing at the front of the table.
"Sydney, I'm going to send you on this one alone. You'll be going to a techno club in St. Petersburg. There's a cell of the Covenant in the third sub-basement. I need you to get down there and hack into their system. I want to know if they were responsible for what happened in Zaire. Marshall will give you the op tech later."
Sydney tried to process the information Sloane had just given her, but all she could keep thinking of was her destination. St. Petersburg was the last place on earth she wanted to go.
Realizing the briefing had ended and everyone was filing out of the room, she tried to cover her distractedness. It didn't go fully without notice though.
"Are you all right, Syd?" Dixon asked as they left the room. "If you're concerned about not having backup on this mission, I can go tell Sloane that I should be put on it with you."
"No, Dixon," she said with a smile. "It's your sister's birthday. Go have fun and eat lots of cake for me."
Dixon nodded and walked off to talk to Marshall about the op tech for her mission. When no one was looking, Sydney threw herself down into her desk chair and put her head in her hands. She had no idea what she was going to do about this situation.
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One paper bag and a Joey's Pizza call later, she found herself face to face with one of the men she loved. And he wasn't saying anything she wanted to hear.
"You're coming with me to St. Petersburg?" she asked just to make sure she was clear about that fact.
"Yes. Kendall ordered it an hour ago."
"Isn't that a little dangerous? I mean, I am going on an SD-6 mission, not a CIA."
"Kendall weighed out the pros and cons. He thinks that you're going to need back up on this one. And since SD-6 isn't providing it, we will."
"I can handle this mission by myself." Sydney hoped she sounded convincing and that Vaughn couldn't tell her ulterior motives.
"I know that, Syd. But just trust Kendall on this one. If he thinks you need backup, then maybe you do."
She nodded and sat down on the desk she had been leaning on. "So, when do we leave?"
"In about an hour," he replied as he sat down on the desk next to her, reaching for her hand. Sydney was surprised at how natural this little motion was. It seemed so right for him to just reach across and grasp her hand. She smiled at him.
"What are you so happy about all of the sudden?" he asked her.
"This," she said, squeezing his hand. "It feels nice to just be sitting here with you, not pretending, not debating. Just being."
"It feels right, doesn't it?" He saw her smile beam even brighter. "You know. I didn't really like you at all when you first walked into the CIA. I thought you were this young hotshot agent who didn't really know what they were doing and only wanted to get what they wanted done."
"And I thought you were way too junior an officer to be my handler. You were always telling me what to do, never considering that maybe I knew what was going on a lot better and therefore had a better perspective on the situation."
Vaughn waited a beat and then said, "I still think you're a hotshot."
"Thanks. Thanks a lot."
He smiled at her. "But now I know that you might be a hotshot, but you're damn good at what you do. I've never seen anyone better."
"And obviously you've started to realize that I do know what's going on a lot better than you do."
"Hey!" he mock-yelled.
"It's the truth. I'm sorry if it hurts." Sydney finally couldn't help it. She let out a massive laugh. "We hated each other, didn't we?"
"You know what they say, though. It's usually the one you hate that you end up falling in love with."
Sydney didn't really know what to say to that comment. At this point in her confusion, she didn't really want the complication of Vaughn admitting that he loved her. And she also didn't want to have the conversation steered in the direction of Sark being one of the hated men in her life that she had fallen in love with. Granted, she didn't remember falling in love that well, but it still happened.
She took the coward's way out and changed the subject. "I went to see my mother again," she stated matter-of-factly.
Vaughn didn't comment on the abrupt subject change, and she thanked him silently for that. "Really? How did that go?"
"She actually opened up to me. It was actually kind of normal, if you look past the whole fact that she was in a prison cell. She told me she thought that I had to make a difficult decision to make these dreams go away. I don't know if I can believe her though."
"As much as I'm not a fan of your mother, she might be telling you the truth."
"But she's lied to me so many times before." Sydney looked over at him. "She lied to me about not knowing where I was in the past two years. She knew. Sark told her, and she knew."
Vaughn stared at her in shock. "How did she manage to find out when we didn't even know?"
"Because it seems, for whatever reason, that I wanted her to know where I was. And I wouldn't be surprised if my father had known where I was, too."
"Jack searched for you like crazy when you disappeared."
"For how long?"
Vaughn scrunched his face up in concentration. After a few moments, a look of dawning came over him. "For only the first three months. Then he seemed to pull off a little bit. You know, at the time I didn't think anything of it. But that was so uncharacteristic of your father."
"I must have gotten into contact with him by that time. That would probably have been the only reason he would have lightened up the search for me."
He squeezed her hand lightly. "We can sort this out later. Right now, we need to get going, Syd." He handed her an earpiece. "We had the tech guys make this up to fit your ear perfectly. No one will notice it being there at all. Put it in when we split up in St. Petersburg. You and I won't be able to see each other until after the mission is complete, so the ear piece will be the only communication we'll have after you leave my side. Kendall has us taking two separate plans for security reasons."
She nodded and stood up. "I'll see you in Russia, then." She leaned over and kissed him.
When she pulled back, she saw a look of worry in Vaughn's face. "What's wrong?"
"Why did that seem like a goodbye kiss?"
"Because it was, silly," she said with a laugh.
"No, I mean a more final kiss than that."
That comment made her pale. She had no idea why that kiss had been any different than the ones they shared before. But he was right. It had seemed a little more final than normal. Was her subconscious trying to tell her something?
"Don't blow it out of proportion," she teased. "I'll see you in St. Petersburg."
~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~
The techno music was blaring in her eardrums, but Sydney was trying to do her best to pretend like she loved it. On a positive note, at least she was wearing a knee-length dress instead of the tight little mini-skirts Sloane tended to have her put in. And she was walking hand in hand with the one man she thought she'd never be able to go out in public with.
"This is strange," he said, leaning in close to whisper in her ear.
"I know. You, me, together on a mission."
He laughed. "No. I mean this weird techno club."
Sydney smiled. Her smile wiped off as she recognized a man from across the room. He was looking right at them waving and shouting something.
"Vaughn, do you know that man?" she asked.
"He looks familiar," Vaughn answered after zeroing in on who she was referring to. "Maybe I worked with him on some assignment a few years back."
"But that's Sergei Ramanonov. He was one of my mother's best agents when she was in hiding under the Alias of the man. You should never have met him in your dealings with the CIA. His picture was classified Omega-17 during that whole prophecy scare. The only reason I know him is because of some intel my mother gave us a few weeks ago that caused Kendall to insist I get familiar with his face. Obviously, he had a hunch we'd run into Ramanonov."
She noticed Vaughn's face pale at her slight accusation. "Listen," he said, "I don't know how I recognize that man. We can figure that out later. But for now we need to focus on this mission. Give me ten minutes, and I'll be in place and you can activate your ear piece."
Sydney let him get away with the blatant subject change, filing it away to be discussed later when they weren't on a mission in Russia. Vaughn kissed her softly on the top of the head and began to walk away, presumably to the van outside that was acting as their base of operations.
Working her way onto the crowded dance floor, she couldn't shake the image of Vaughn's face paling out of her mind. Why was he so upset that she knew who that man was? Deciding that she wouldn't be able to focus on the mission properly without knowing, she pushed her way through the crowd intending to get to the van and ask him right then.
She subtly passed by the line of vision of Ramanonov's table, and what she saw made her stop in her tracks and hide behind a pillar. Vaughn was at the table talking with Ramanonov like they were acquaintances, like they actually knew each other. She couldn't understand what he was doing. He had said he was going back to the van. Why would he lie?
"This is not what I should be doing," she said to herself. "Not when I have a mission to concentrate on." With all her heart, she wanted to forget the mission and go demand Vaughn tell her what was going on. But in the back of her head, she knew the mission and what she was fitting for was ten times as great as her measly feelings. She would have to ignore Vaughn's bizarre actions for the time being.
She made her way to the bathroom and took a quick few breaths. After a few minutes of calming, she decided not to worry about this strange Vaughn/Ramanonov thing and just move on with the mission. Vaughn would have a perfectly legitimate explanation for her when she finally got around to asking him, she was sure of it.
She straightened the hemline and prepared to work her way down to the subbasement levels.
"Are you there, Vaughn?" she asked into her activated earpiece.
"Hanging on your every word," came the answer from her earpiece.
"Good. I have to go radio silent for a few minutes, just until I get into the subbasement."
"Acknowledged. Don't take too long."
"I'll try not to," she replied with a smile. "I want to have time to talk to you." Realizing he might take that as an odd statement to make in this situation, she added, "There's too much of St. Petersburg that I want to discretely see with you, to much I want to talk with you about."
She clicked her earpiece off before he could answer and made her way down a back hallway. Instead of turning into the bathroom hallway, she kept going. She prayed that she wouldn't run into anyone and have to use her patented drunk Southerner tactic to get out of it.
Within minutes she located the correct room but was frustrated to realize she had forgotten to figure out a way to get past the security locks. She was about to turn her earpiece back on and ask Vaughn for suggestions as to what to do when an arm reached around from behind her to swipe a key card through the lock.
"Allow me, Sydney," said an extremely familiar voice.
"I should have known you'd be here, Sark," she said without turning around to look at him.
"You ran out rather abruptly the other night. What made you cut your vacation time so short?"
She finally looked back at him as he gently put his hand to the small of her back and guided her into the now unlocked room. "I got a little scared," she admitted.
"Was it because of your dreams?"
She stared at him in surprise for a moment, forgetting that she had explained her problem to him earlier. "It was something I said in one of my dreams, yes. And the fact that I'm haunted by St. Petersburg."
"I think it's a little fitting," Sark said as he sat down at the computer. "I mean, you and me, reunited in the same place that you named our home for."
Sydney didn't respond to that comment. "Do me a favor, and don't say anything, don't move for a few seconds." She clicked her earpiece back on. "Vaughn. It isn't really secure enough for me to talk down here. I'm going to go radio silent until I get back up into the main club."
When she had heard Vaughn's affirmation, she clicked her earpiece off again and turned her attention back to Sark. He was sitting in the chair, smirking at her. "What?" she asked innocently.
"Your handler's here, too?" he said with a devilish grin. "This could be fun." Sark popped a disk out of the computer's drive, put another one in, and continued to type without losing his smirk.
"You thrive on trouble, don't you?"
He glanced up at her. "Yes, I do," he answered simply while turning back towards the computer screen. "And you know that."
Sydney glared at the back of his head. "The Covenant had nothing to do with the explosion at SD-6's facility in Zaire," he said while popping the second disk out of the computer's drive. "Here's some proof you can take back to Sloane."
Sydney reached out and took the disk. "What was on that second disk?"
"Nothing you need to be concerned with, love. It's the reason why I happened to be here. And that's all you really need to know."
Sydney accepted that short, general explanation and moved on to her next question. "And how did you know what my assignment was in the first place?"
"I have my ways of keeping tabs on you."
"Thank you," she said as she went to leave the room.
"Oh, Syd?" Sark called, causing her to turn back towards him. "You know that you're going to have to make a decision soon."
"Everyone keeps saying that."
"I can wait forever, but not if you're with another man."
"I know." She gave him a weak smile as the door swung shut behind her.
She went to start running down the hallway and away from the scene of the crime as fast as she could. But she didn't get far before she heard someone call her name from down the other end of the hallway.
"Vaughn!" she yelled when she saw who it was. "What are you doing down here?"
"The CIA got intel that Sark was going to be breaking into this cell, too, tonight. Your earpiece was off, but I really thought you should know. So I came down here."
Sydney cringed as she heard a voice from the doorway she had just exited. "That wasn't necessary, Mr. Vaughn. Agent Bristow and I have already run into each other."
Vaughn looked back and forth from Sydney to Sark in confusion. Before either one of the three could say anything else, a massive alarm started ringing through the corridor. Sydney grabbed both of the men by the arms and began to drag them down the corridor. They both followed silently sending glares the other man's way.
When Sydney had gotten them effectively lost in the exiting techno crowd's path and out of the club entirely, she pushed them over to a small alley. Vaughn was the first one to comment. "I just have one question. If you two had already run into each other, why is he not nursing some wounds?"
"Because sometimes you don't need violence to get what you want, Mr. Vaughn," Sark answered. "Sydney and I have an unspoken mutual agreement. She doesn't get in my way, I don't get in hers."
Vaughn looked over at Sydney to see if she was admitting this. "He wasn't looking for the same intel I was. It was just easier to let him get his and mine."
"You let him get your mission objective?" Vaughn threw his hands up in the air in exasperation. "I can't believe this. What the hell is going on with you, Sydney?"
"I don't know," she screamed back. "You both know I have no fucking idea what's going on with me right now. I'm trying to figure it out as soon as I can."
"How do you know the information he gave you is correct?" Vaughn asked. He tried to calm his voice as much as he could since Sydney was getting upset.
"I trust him," she admitted. "I don't know why. But I do. Now I'd love to stay here chatting about this all day, but the CIA does not want to see you and me with Sark, Vaughn. We need to get out of here."
Vaughn grabbed Sydney's arm. "Yeah, let's go. You can explain this more later."
Sark watched as Vaughn and Sydney ran away from him. He had never liked Michael Vaughn, a man he judged to be incapable of handling Sydney or protecting her the way she needed to be. And seeing her leave hand in hand with him made him want to go out and kill someone.
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The original plan was for Vaughn to drop her off at the Arbat-Nord Hotel and then come back in an hour to check into his own room. But seeing Sark by her side on the mission had changed all that. Together, he and Sydney walked into the hotel. She waited while he checked into a room that they made sure was on a different floor and in a different wing than hers.
She followed him without a word to Room 236 and immediately sat on the bed. After throwing down his bags, he leaned up against the dresser and the two of them just stared at each other.
"I don't know where to begin," he said
"I told you before. These dreams are really screwing up my mind. My intuitions are off. I can't focus on what's real." It was at that point that she finally noticed that he didn't really seem to believe what she was saying. "You don't believe me, do you?"
"You can't blame everything on your dreams, Syd. Part of what's going on is what you're feeling in the here and now. You wouldn't change your convictions just because of a few dreams you've had. Something's going on between you and Sark. It's plain as day. Anyone could see it."
"Nothing is going on between us, I swear." She could feel tears welling up in her eyes.
"You're lying to me. I know you too well to let you get away with that. Just tell me the truth. You love him, don't you? Sometime in the past few weeks, something changed between you."
"Yes, I will admit that something did change. He's become my friend, Michael. I've started to actually understand who he really is, where he came from. He's gone through a lot of the emotions I had growing up. I can relate to him."
"And you can't relate to me because I wasn't raised in a world of evil spies?"
"Do not blow this out of proportion," she warned.
"Out of proportion! Sydney, you're in love with the coldest son of a bitch in this world."
"I don't love him," she said. "I don't."
"Keep trying to convince yourself. I've seen the way you look at him and the way he looks at you. I lied to you back in the club."
Sydney almost gasped as she realized he was about to admit the reason he hadn't gone straight back to the CIA van. She thought she was going to have to go through a painful confrontation to get the information out of him.
"I was in that hallway for a good couple minutes before you left the room. I saw you two together in that room. I saw the way you acted around him."
Sydney looked up at him completely furious. Half her anger came from his disclosing the wrong lie and the other for the fact that he had lied to her. "You lied to me. For what reason?"
"Because I wanted to see if you trusted me enough to tell me that you ran into him."
"You should know by now that I don't like to play games." Sydney took a deep breath and continued. "And if brutal honesty is what you expect of me, then I want the same from you. What were you doing talking to Ramanonov tonight when you said you were going back to get into position?"
"Don't try to change the subject."
"I'm not. I just want you to answer the questions, and then we'll go back to talking about Sark. We need to talk about him, I know that. But there's something else I need to get out first and that's the issue of Ramanonov. I don't want to have this tension and lying between us anymore. So just answer my question."
"I worked with Sergei Ramanonov before you turned yourself in to the CIA. I was a double agent for your mother and for the CIA."
She looked at him in confusion. "I don't understand that at all."
"Your mother killed my father. I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that whoever the Man was, he had some connection with the death of my father. So I offered my services for a long-term undercover assignment in that organization. I was working under Ramanonov for over six months before my cover got blown, and I had to return to the CIA."
"So that's the only reason that Ramanonov knew who you were?"
"That's the only reason. And I swear to you, Sydney, I wasn't there long enough to know that the Man was actually Irina Derevko. Your mother."
"I believe you, but you're still holding something back," she commented. "Don't."
"Fine. I wasn't going to tell you because I thought it would hurt you too much to know. But I guess if I'm asking you to be completely honest, I should be the same. Back when you were only working for SD-6, I was present in a facility in Beijing, China. You were on an assignment to retrieve some artifact for Sloane, and the beginnings of your mother's organization caught you. I was working with them at the time."
"You were there when I was kidnapped," she said, understanding dawning on her face. "I had a dream that you were there when I was being tortured."
"I didn't know who you were at the time. I didn't even put the two things together until you had been working with the CIA and me for a month. And then, it didn't seem wise to tell you. I mean, you were such a loose cannon in the beginning. I was afraid."
"That's a lot to process," she admitted. "But thank you for being honest."
"And I ask the same of you. I had a good reason for working with the enemy. What's yours?"
Sydney felt herself stiffen slightly at his harsh words. She thought their conversation had reached a safer level when he was telling her about his deep cover assignment, but now they were back to the same tense atmosphere.
Vaughn sighed loudly. "I've seen the change in you since you spent that week with him, Sydney. You're not the same. I don't know what exactly is different, and if maybe I'm only seeing the effects your dreams have been having on you. But my heart tells me that in the end, it has nothing to do with your dreams. At least not directly. My heart keeps telling me that you love him."
"I don't. I don't. I don't," she yelled, covering her head with her hands.
"Are you trying to convince me or are you trying to convince yourself?" he asked.
Sydney talked through her hands and her tears. "I wish I could erase everything that went on that week I was gone. Every last bit of what occurred between Sark and I. What can I do to make you believe that?"
Vaughn's voice shifted from anger to a cold, distant tone she had never heard come from him before. "Did you sleep with him?" She looked up at him in horror, realizing that she might have said just a little bit too much. "Did you?"
"Yes," she admitted.
They stared at each other in silence for a few moments, Vaughn with the cold look still on his face and Sydney with tears streaming down her cheek. Finally, he stood up and walked over to sit next to her on the bed. She felt his arms wrap around her shoulders before she could even process that he had moved.
"Listen, Sydney. You might not want to hear it, but I love you. I love you like I've never loved anyone before. And I don't care how long it takes for you to straighten things out with yourself. I'm not leaving your side."
"Thank you," she whispered. Taking a deep breath, she stood up, shrugging off his arm. "That means a lot right now. I think that you and I should cool our heads a little before we keep talking about this." She gave him a weak smile, which he returned.
She opened the hotel room door and paused as she was about to step through the doorway. "This isn't goodbye. At least not for me."
"Me, either," Vaughn said from the bed. "You need to get some rest, Syd."
Sydney nodded her head and began to make her way to Room 403. The whole way she cursed Sark silently. She couldn't believe how he had almost single handedly destroyed her whole life. How could a man who claimed to care for her so much do something so hurtful?
If he had been in front of her that moment, she wouldn't have hesitated to punch him. She was happy to get a little reminder of how insensitive he could be. He had begun to get her to believe that he had actually changed. But the stunt he pulled and the way he treated Vaughn had made her doubt that.
Still trying to concentrate hard enough to keep from crying any more, she slammed her hotel room door a little louder than was necessary and hoped that no one would complain. She was supposed to be keeping a low profile, and the fact that she had just had a rather large, noisy fight with her handler and boyfriend hadn't really started her off on the right foot.
It wasn't surprising to her when she started pacing back and forth across the floor of the room. She was so mad at both Sark and Vaughn. This situation wasn't entirely either one's fault. It was both of their faults and hers.
She wanted to scream as the thought of Sark being so caring and kind to her kept creeping back into her mind. He had given her a considerable amount of help tonight in locating her mission objective. The words he exchanged with Vaughn were pretty snarky and cocky, but there wasn't anything out of the ordinary in that.
The memory of him saying he would wait for her forever crept into her head. She screamed in frustration and hit the wall forcefully. The only thing that accomplished was she knew she was still alive by the massive pain running up and down her right arm. She looked at the wall and saw a nail protruding out of it. There was a substantial gash up her right hand and arm.
Not caring to change out of her mission attire and cursing her stupidity, she flung herself on the bed. The tears came back as soon as she let her concentration slip and slowly drifted off.
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She found herself standing in the hallway that had been missing from her dreams for a long time. Why she was back to this starting point, she had no idea. Deciding she might as well get this over with, she tried the dark blue door.
It was locked.
Sighing, she figured she had chosen the wrong one. She couldn't even remember whose turn it was to play with her mind. The black door was only a little walk off, and she stood in front of it within seconds.
It was locked, too.
"What's going on?" she yelled to whomever was listening.
She wasn't surprised when her mother appeared beside her. "So, what are you trying to tell me now, Subconscious?"
"It's simple. You need to make a decision." Irina looked at her daughter in concern. "And you need to do it now before you lose them both."
Sydney didn't even have time to ask a question or even say a word. She felt her body get sucked back down the hallway. Helplessly, she watched scenes and objects from her previous dreams whip by her head. She was spinning out of control. And she had no idea how to stop.