Giving Sydney time to mourn her mother privately, Vaughn stepped outside
taking the SAT phone with him.
He punched the code into the keypad, hoping this time it would work.
"Base Camp, this is Boy Scout requesting immediate extraction. Do you read me, Base Camp?"
There was silence on the other end.
"Base Camp, do you read me?" Vaughn repeated, his voice edged with frustration.
"Boy Scout, this is Base Camp," stated a CIA operator over the static. "An extraction team has been alerted. ETA 10 minutes. We are rerouting you to an encrypted frequency so that you can speak freely. Stand by." There was a pause, and then the CIA operator returned. "Okay, connection secured. Go ahead, Agent Vaughn."
"Get me Jack Bristow!" Vaughn ordered.
"Vaughn," Jack stated, his voice strained. "What the hell happened?"
"Irina is dead," Vaughn answered flatly, his voice sounding hollow and defeated even to his own ears. "Sark shot her and escaped with a Rambaldi artifact. We think he is working with Sloane and may have been working with him for some time. We need to assume that Sydney's cover has been blown-- yours, too. Dixon should be alerted, as well."
There was long pause before Jack responded, and when he did, his voice sounded distant.
"Derevko's dead?"
Vaughn closed his eyes and swallowed. "Yes."
"Are either you or Sydney injured?" Jack inquired sharply, his voice regaining its strength.
Vaughn took a deep breath. "We're okay, but I need you to send a team to my apartment. Agent Weiss--"
"Dixon and I found Agent Weiss in your apartment shortly after Sark shot him," Jack interrupted. "He came out of surgery a few hours ago. He is weak, but the doctors are confident that he will make a full recovery."
Vaughn exhaled audibly. "Thank God."
"Is it your belief that Sark will deliver the prism to Sloane?" Jack asked impatiently, bringing the younger agent's attention back to the matter at hand.
"Not the prism," Vaughn answered, the sick feeling at the pit of his stomach returning. "A ring Irina saw Sydney wearing and identified as having once belonged to Rambaldi."
"Sydney hasn't worn a ring since she removed Daniel Hecht's engagement ring," Jack stated bluntly.
Vaughn lifted his eyes to the night sky. The constellations were bright against the inky expanse. He had imagined many different variations of this conversation with Jack--just not this one.
He cleared his throat.
"The ring belonged to me," he explained tersely. "It's been in my family for generations. I was unaware of the Rambaldi connection when I gave it to Sydney."
"YOU gave Sydney the ring."
"Yes."
There was silence on both ends of the phone as Jack processed this information and all that it implied.
"I see," he said quietly.
Vaughn had been prepared for the older man's steely anger, but the resignation and regret he heard in Jack's voice was far worse.
A stony silence ensued until Jack resumed the conversation, his voice brusque and cold.
"We're sending a chopper that will take you to the mainland," he stated curtly, as if none of the previous conversation had occurred. "From there, a plane will take you back to LA. I'll see you at headquarters."
He broke off the connection without waiting for the younger agent's acknowledgment.
Vaughn stared at the SAT phone for several seconds and then stood with the palm of his hand braced against the wall, his head bent.
When he went back inside he found Sydney still kneeling beside her mother's body.
"Syd, we need to go," he said gently, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Your father is sending a helicopter. It will be here soon."
She turned, and the look of tortured despair in her eyes tore at his heart. He opened his arms, and she lurched to her feet and stumbled into his arms.
Cradling Sydney's head against his shoulder, he buried his face in her hair and pressed her close despite the searing pain in his ribs. Unbidden, the image arose before his mind's eye of his father enfolding Irina in his comforting embrace only minutes before being killed by a CIA sniper.
Had his father felt the same rush of tenderness for Irina that he himself had felt for Sydney almost from the beginning? Did he too undergo the torture of attempting to explain the finer points of a complex counter mission to his asset while fighting the urge to take her in his arms and kiss her? And if he had, how could his son possibly reconcile this image with the devoted father and loving husband he had known as a child?
"There are many types of love, Mr. Vaughn," Irina had reminded him, and perhaps that was so, but at this point he found it impossible to analyze the complexities of Irina's relationship with his father.
Too much had happened too fast, and stress and fatigue had made him lose any real grasp he had on the passage of time. Was it really only this morning that he had woken up with Sydney naked and warm at his side, while the rain pattered against the window and the convent bells rang in the distance?
From outside came the whir of a helicopter drawing closer and landing on the grassy knoll behind the cottage. Two men dressed in SWAT gear knocked on the door of the cottage, which still stood ajar.
"Agent Vaughn? Agent Bristow? We need you to gather up your belongings and get into the chopper. We'll take care of the body," one of the agents stated.
Vaughn nodded. He let go of Sydney and began moving around the room, refusing to think, simply moving from one task to another. After he rolled up the Rambaldi documents and slipped the prism into his pocket, he gathered up their clothes and personal items, stuffing everything into his dufflebag, and finally turned to see if Sydney was ready.
She had not moved from the spot where he had left her, and was watching with deadened eyes as the agents zipped up the black bag which held her mother's body.
Gently, he drew her away from the sight and maneuvered her out the door and toward the direction of the helicopter, then helped her in. A few minutes later the agents carried Irina's body to the chopper and boarded themselves. Vaughn watched as his grandmother's cottage receded from view, the long grass which surrounded it bent in concentric rings as the helicopter lifted off and turned to head toward the mainland.
He closed his eyes, and images of Irina's blood pooling on the burnished floorboards and the bullet lodged in the splintered door frame rose up before him. He winced and tried to swallow the lump that formed in his throat.
The childhood home that had always been a haven for him was haven no more.
He put an arm around Sydney's shoulders, and she slumped against him. They did not talk at all on the short flight to the mainland, or en route to the safe house in Paris where they were debriefed and Vaughn's ribs were examined and re-bandaged. Agents then escorted them to an airstrip where they boarded a military transport plane, very similar to the one Jack had commandeered to get them out of Taipei. It was a nine hour trip back to LA.
Vaughn felt as if the inside of his eyelids had been rubbed with sandpaper, but as tired as he was, sleep would not come. Sydney, still in a state of shock, eventually succumbed to her exhaustion. He waited until she nodded off, and then got up and wrapped a rough red flannel blanket around her shoulders.
He paced the length of the plane, sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. They had come full circle--and what had changed? Everything and nothing.
He had thought he had been prepared for the confrontation with Irina, but he had been wrong. Nothing could have prepared him for looking into the enigmatic dark brown eyes of Sydney's mother, to see them shift from coolly calculating to anguished and tender and back again as she told them her story and the role his father had played in it. Now she was dead, and all the intel she might have provided them had died with her--including the location and contents of the second prophecy.
Had Irina's story simply been a ploy to gain their loyalty, or was the CIA really deceiving them? Could she really be the "Savant" mentioned in his father's diaries? He was in no position to sort the truth from the lies. He simply knew that he had failed Sydney. He'd convinced both Jack and Devlin that she would be safe on Île Mariette, all so that he could pursue his own notion of a romantic getaway. Jean-Luc Brochet had died as a result, so had Irina Derevko, and if Jack and Dixon had not gotten to the apartment in time, Weiss would have been a victim of his heedlessness as well.
He sat down on a crate and rubbed his eyes with his fists. White squares of light flashed across the dark screen of his retina, and he saw the choices he had made since Taipei spread out like the grid of a chessboard--every wrong move apparent.
If only he'd waited to give Sydney the ring...
If only he'd searched Sark for weapons, or had gotten a better shot...
If only he and Irina hadn't struggled for the gun...
Then he shivered, icy chills running up and down his spine.
The bullet which had struck Irina could just as easily have hit him, and it would have been his body instead of Irina's that Syd found when she regained consciousness.
Was it fate? Chance? Some sort of cosmic quid pro quo? His life in exchange for his father's? Irina's for his own?
Irina believed that he and Sydney were the ones Rambaldi spoke of in the second prophecy. What if all the choices he was chastising himself for had been fated? Would it make him feel any better to know that he and Sydney were merely pawns being manipulated in some cosmic game of chess?
"Don't--"he heard Sydney say firmly.
Startled, he opened his eyes to see her standing before him.
He shook his head to clear it, and watched as she sat down on the crate opposite him.
He thought he'd never seen Sydney look so exhausted. Her face was pale and there were dark circles beneath her eyes. She attempted a small smile, and giving her a weary smile in return, he reached out and took her hands in his.
They were ice-cold. He began rubbing them, his thumbs passing over her fingers, instinctively looking for something even his sluggish brain should know was no longer there--his grandmother's ring--the ring that was supposed to signify their future.
He thought about his grandfather taking the ring--Rambaldi's ring, a ring with untold, possibly apocalyptic powers--to a local jeweler to have it inscribed with a tribute to his young bride, and the full force of what had transpired swept over him.
"Syd--"he said in a low voice as his eyes lifted to meet hers. "I'm sorry-- so sorry. I never meant it to be like this--"
"Vaughn, don't--"she said more softly this time, reaching out to caress his cheek, rubbing her thumb over the stubble and looking into his haggard green eyes.
"If you were to ask me what I think about Rambaldi, or the possibility of a second prophecy, or whether I think we met by fate or chance, I don't know what to think. But none of that changes what I am about to say," She looked down, took a long breath, and their eyes met once more. "Je t'aime," she said, tearing up, her voice shaking now. "A ma vie de coeur entire."
She kissed him, and he pulled her to him, crushing her fiercely to his chest.
The plane touched down hours later in smog-filled LA. They disembarked just as two agents where lifting the black bag carrying Irina's body out of the cargo hold and transferring it to a gray unmarked van.
"Stop! Where are you taking the body?" Sydney cried, stepping between the men and the open doors of the van.
"Forensics," the shorter of the two men answered, "for autopsy. After that, they'll release the body and any personal belongings to the next of kin."
"I am the next of kin!" Sydney protested indignantly.
"Then you'll be hearing from the director shortly," the other agent answered curtly, clearly impatient to be off. "Please step aside."
Vaughn put a hand on Sydney's elbow, but she shook it off angrily, never taking her eyes off the two agents handling the bag which contained Irina's body.
Her eyes were steely. "I want to ride in the van--with my moth--with the body."
"I am sorry, that's against protocol," the taller agent stated irritably, giving Vaughn a hard look.
Vaughn grimaced and pulled Sydney aside.
"Syd. You're going about this the wrong way," he whispered. "We can get information through other channels. Let it go."
"No!" Sydney whispered back hotly. "I want to see where they're taking her. You know as well as I do they'll classify her death Omega-17. This may be the last time I see her."
Vaughn glanced at the agents, then at Sydney, and sighed. "Who ordered this autopsy?" he asked, raising his voice and turning to the other agents. "This woman died of a gun shot wound to the chest. This has been verified by our own agents in Paris."
"You'll have to take that up with the director. Now step aside."
The agent scowled at Sydney, and Sydney glared back for several seconds, then stepped aside and abruptly stalked off. Vaughn was forced to jog to catch up to her.
"I know who ordered the autopsy," Sydney seethed, as he reached her side, "and it wasn't Devlin. The person we need to take this up with is my father."
He punched the code into the keypad, hoping this time it would work.
"Base Camp, this is Boy Scout requesting immediate extraction. Do you read me, Base Camp?"
There was silence on the other end.
"Base Camp, do you read me?" Vaughn repeated, his voice edged with frustration.
"Boy Scout, this is Base Camp," stated a CIA operator over the static. "An extraction team has been alerted. ETA 10 minutes. We are rerouting you to an encrypted frequency so that you can speak freely. Stand by." There was a pause, and then the CIA operator returned. "Okay, connection secured. Go ahead, Agent Vaughn."
"Get me Jack Bristow!" Vaughn ordered.
"Vaughn," Jack stated, his voice strained. "What the hell happened?"
"Irina is dead," Vaughn answered flatly, his voice sounding hollow and defeated even to his own ears. "Sark shot her and escaped with a Rambaldi artifact. We think he is working with Sloane and may have been working with him for some time. We need to assume that Sydney's cover has been blown-- yours, too. Dixon should be alerted, as well."
There was long pause before Jack responded, and when he did, his voice sounded distant.
"Derevko's dead?"
Vaughn closed his eyes and swallowed. "Yes."
"Are either you or Sydney injured?" Jack inquired sharply, his voice regaining its strength.
Vaughn took a deep breath. "We're okay, but I need you to send a team to my apartment. Agent Weiss--"
"Dixon and I found Agent Weiss in your apartment shortly after Sark shot him," Jack interrupted. "He came out of surgery a few hours ago. He is weak, but the doctors are confident that he will make a full recovery."
Vaughn exhaled audibly. "Thank God."
"Is it your belief that Sark will deliver the prism to Sloane?" Jack asked impatiently, bringing the younger agent's attention back to the matter at hand.
"Not the prism," Vaughn answered, the sick feeling at the pit of his stomach returning. "A ring Irina saw Sydney wearing and identified as having once belonged to Rambaldi."
"Sydney hasn't worn a ring since she removed Daniel Hecht's engagement ring," Jack stated bluntly.
Vaughn lifted his eyes to the night sky. The constellations were bright against the inky expanse. He had imagined many different variations of this conversation with Jack--just not this one.
He cleared his throat.
"The ring belonged to me," he explained tersely. "It's been in my family for generations. I was unaware of the Rambaldi connection when I gave it to Sydney."
"YOU gave Sydney the ring."
"Yes."
There was silence on both ends of the phone as Jack processed this information and all that it implied.
"I see," he said quietly.
Vaughn had been prepared for the older man's steely anger, but the resignation and regret he heard in Jack's voice was far worse.
A stony silence ensued until Jack resumed the conversation, his voice brusque and cold.
"We're sending a chopper that will take you to the mainland," he stated curtly, as if none of the previous conversation had occurred. "From there, a plane will take you back to LA. I'll see you at headquarters."
He broke off the connection without waiting for the younger agent's acknowledgment.
Vaughn stared at the SAT phone for several seconds and then stood with the palm of his hand braced against the wall, his head bent.
When he went back inside he found Sydney still kneeling beside her mother's body.
"Syd, we need to go," he said gently, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Your father is sending a helicopter. It will be here soon."
She turned, and the look of tortured despair in her eyes tore at his heart. He opened his arms, and she lurched to her feet and stumbled into his arms.
Cradling Sydney's head against his shoulder, he buried his face in her hair and pressed her close despite the searing pain in his ribs. Unbidden, the image arose before his mind's eye of his father enfolding Irina in his comforting embrace only minutes before being killed by a CIA sniper.
Had his father felt the same rush of tenderness for Irina that he himself had felt for Sydney almost from the beginning? Did he too undergo the torture of attempting to explain the finer points of a complex counter mission to his asset while fighting the urge to take her in his arms and kiss her? And if he had, how could his son possibly reconcile this image with the devoted father and loving husband he had known as a child?
"There are many types of love, Mr. Vaughn," Irina had reminded him, and perhaps that was so, but at this point he found it impossible to analyze the complexities of Irina's relationship with his father.
Too much had happened too fast, and stress and fatigue had made him lose any real grasp he had on the passage of time. Was it really only this morning that he had woken up with Sydney naked and warm at his side, while the rain pattered against the window and the convent bells rang in the distance?
From outside came the whir of a helicopter drawing closer and landing on the grassy knoll behind the cottage. Two men dressed in SWAT gear knocked on the door of the cottage, which still stood ajar.
"Agent Vaughn? Agent Bristow? We need you to gather up your belongings and get into the chopper. We'll take care of the body," one of the agents stated.
Vaughn nodded. He let go of Sydney and began moving around the room, refusing to think, simply moving from one task to another. After he rolled up the Rambaldi documents and slipped the prism into his pocket, he gathered up their clothes and personal items, stuffing everything into his dufflebag, and finally turned to see if Sydney was ready.
She had not moved from the spot where he had left her, and was watching with deadened eyes as the agents zipped up the black bag which held her mother's body.
Gently, he drew her away from the sight and maneuvered her out the door and toward the direction of the helicopter, then helped her in. A few minutes later the agents carried Irina's body to the chopper and boarded themselves. Vaughn watched as his grandmother's cottage receded from view, the long grass which surrounded it bent in concentric rings as the helicopter lifted off and turned to head toward the mainland.
He closed his eyes, and images of Irina's blood pooling on the burnished floorboards and the bullet lodged in the splintered door frame rose up before him. He winced and tried to swallow the lump that formed in his throat.
The childhood home that had always been a haven for him was haven no more.
He put an arm around Sydney's shoulders, and she slumped against him. They did not talk at all on the short flight to the mainland, or en route to the safe house in Paris where they were debriefed and Vaughn's ribs were examined and re-bandaged. Agents then escorted them to an airstrip where they boarded a military transport plane, very similar to the one Jack had commandeered to get them out of Taipei. It was a nine hour trip back to LA.
Vaughn felt as if the inside of his eyelids had been rubbed with sandpaper, but as tired as he was, sleep would not come. Sydney, still in a state of shock, eventually succumbed to her exhaustion. He waited until she nodded off, and then got up and wrapped a rough red flannel blanket around her shoulders.
He paced the length of the plane, sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. They had come full circle--and what had changed? Everything and nothing.
He had thought he had been prepared for the confrontation with Irina, but he had been wrong. Nothing could have prepared him for looking into the enigmatic dark brown eyes of Sydney's mother, to see them shift from coolly calculating to anguished and tender and back again as she told them her story and the role his father had played in it. Now she was dead, and all the intel she might have provided them had died with her--including the location and contents of the second prophecy.
Had Irina's story simply been a ploy to gain their loyalty, or was the CIA really deceiving them? Could she really be the "Savant" mentioned in his father's diaries? He was in no position to sort the truth from the lies. He simply knew that he had failed Sydney. He'd convinced both Jack and Devlin that she would be safe on Île Mariette, all so that he could pursue his own notion of a romantic getaway. Jean-Luc Brochet had died as a result, so had Irina Derevko, and if Jack and Dixon had not gotten to the apartment in time, Weiss would have been a victim of his heedlessness as well.
He sat down on a crate and rubbed his eyes with his fists. White squares of light flashed across the dark screen of his retina, and he saw the choices he had made since Taipei spread out like the grid of a chessboard--every wrong move apparent.
If only he'd waited to give Sydney the ring...
If only he'd searched Sark for weapons, or had gotten a better shot...
If only he and Irina hadn't struggled for the gun...
Then he shivered, icy chills running up and down his spine.
The bullet which had struck Irina could just as easily have hit him, and it would have been his body instead of Irina's that Syd found when she regained consciousness.
Was it fate? Chance? Some sort of cosmic quid pro quo? His life in exchange for his father's? Irina's for his own?
Irina believed that he and Sydney were the ones Rambaldi spoke of in the second prophecy. What if all the choices he was chastising himself for had been fated? Would it make him feel any better to know that he and Sydney were merely pawns being manipulated in some cosmic game of chess?
"Don't--"he heard Sydney say firmly.
Startled, he opened his eyes to see her standing before him.
He shook his head to clear it, and watched as she sat down on the crate opposite him.
He thought he'd never seen Sydney look so exhausted. Her face was pale and there were dark circles beneath her eyes. She attempted a small smile, and giving her a weary smile in return, he reached out and took her hands in his.
They were ice-cold. He began rubbing them, his thumbs passing over her fingers, instinctively looking for something even his sluggish brain should know was no longer there--his grandmother's ring--the ring that was supposed to signify their future.
He thought about his grandfather taking the ring--Rambaldi's ring, a ring with untold, possibly apocalyptic powers--to a local jeweler to have it inscribed with a tribute to his young bride, and the full force of what had transpired swept over him.
"Syd--"he said in a low voice as his eyes lifted to meet hers. "I'm sorry-- so sorry. I never meant it to be like this--"
"Vaughn, don't--"she said more softly this time, reaching out to caress his cheek, rubbing her thumb over the stubble and looking into his haggard green eyes.
"If you were to ask me what I think about Rambaldi, or the possibility of a second prophecy, or whether I think we met by fate or chance, I don't know what to think. But none of that changes what I am about to say," She looked down, took a long breath, and their eyes met once more. "Je t'aime," she said, tearing up, her voice shaking now. "A ma vie de coeur entire."
She kissed him, and he pulled her to him, crushing her fiercely to his chest.
The plane touched down hours later in smog-filled LA. They disembarked just as two agents where lifting the black bag carrying Irina's body out of the cargo hold and transferring it to a gray unmarked van.
"Stop! Where are you taking the body?" Sydney cried, stepping between the men and the open doors of the van.
"Forensics," the shorter of the two men answered, "for autopsy. After that, they'll release the body and any personal belongings to the next of kin."
"I am the next of kin!" Sydney protested indignantly.
"Then you'll be hearing from the director shortly," the other agent answered curtly, clearly impatient to be off. "Please step aside."
Vaughn put a hand on Sydney's elbow, but she shook it off angrily, never taking her eyes off the two agents handling the bag which contained Irina's body.
Her eyes were steely. "I want to ride in the van--with my moth--with the body."
"I am sorry, that's against protocol," the taller agent stated irritably, giving Vaughn a hard look.
Vaughn grimaced and pulled Sydney aside.
"Syd. You're going about this the wrong way," he whispered. "We can get information through other channels. Let it go."
"No!" Sydney whispered back hotly. "I want to see where they're taking her. You know as well as I do they'll classify her death Omega-17. This may be the last time I see her."
Vaughn glanced at the agents, then at Sydney, and sighed. "Who ordered this autopsy?" he asked, raising his voice and turning to the other agents. "This woman died of a gun shot wound to the chest. This has been verified by our own agents in Paris."
"You'll have to take that up with the director. Now step aside."
The agent scowled at Sydney, and Sydney glared back for several seconds, then stepped aside and abruptly stalked off. Vaughn was forced to jog to catch up to her.
"I know who ordered the autopsy," Sydney seethed, as he reached her side, "and it wasn't Devlin. The person we need to take this up with is my father."