Chapter 2: En Guard - to ready yourself and your weapon for the fight.
The story continues in the now…
She called out the little boy's name. "Aaron, stay close honey, we've only got little while here and then we're going to the movies!"
She scurried about the Long Beach Aquarium, chasing after a small child. It was the little boy's birthday and as a treat they were doing what he wanted: the aquarium and the cinema.
Yep, great, she thought, it's sunny day out, so what are we doing? – spending it with the cold fish and then cooped up in the dark!
"Aaaaaron!" she sang his name as she snatched the scurrying tot back, playfully swinging him up and then landing him safely back on his feet as they went to look at another tank. It was full of Grouper Fish.
"Uh huh," she muttered into the tank "Grouper Fish: handsome as fish go but slow-moving and dumb."
She flicked a glance across at her husband who was chatting up a passing red-head some distance away and weighed him up. Yep, Grouper Fish.
From a shadowy recess, a blond young man observed she, the child and the husband. He stifled a very small yawn. Obviously capturing Dr Caplan was essential to their plans and they'd need the child as leverage, but why they were even bothering with the spouse? He'd only been watching for 15 minutes, but even he could tell the Caplan marriage needed CPR.
Another woman scurrying after a different small child crossed his line of sight. She shivered as she trotted across his gaze, pulling her jacket close about her, muttering, "why are these places always so cold?"
The blond watcher ignored her; the cold didn't bother him, he was used to it.
As his line of sight cleared he zeroed in on his quarry again.
As man and wife the two so obviously did not fit.
The husband was tall, dark and blandly handsome, dressed well enough in preppy casuals and exuding a practiced charm.
Reminds me of that wanker Vaughn thought the watcher in the shadows, his mouth quirking with a spasm of disgust.
The woman was small, thin, wan … spindly.
Nothing like Sydney Bristow then.
The watcher's impenetrable, blue-eyed gaze raked over her. He was attracted to the chic, those with élan, the alluring: there was none of that about her. She lacked even a sniff of style. Blue checked trousers that had shrunk in the wash, flat, clumpy shoes, a man's white cotton shirt, a worn, navy cotton jacket.
The watcher's mouth compressed: yep, one of nature's 'eccentric dressers'.
He distrusted the eccentric, he preferred those who were predictable, they were easier to control. A long while ago he had learned to value control. He had been given an ant farm as a child, and although he had been disappointed by it at first he had come to see how interesting it could be – you could control the ants.
He regarded her as she stood before a tank, her small oval face holding a faintly distracted expression, as though she were singing to herself.
Looks like the young Mozart on a bad day.
He reflected that she looked younger than her years. Although nobody knew her exact age - her family hadn't bothered registering her birth until a few years after the event – he knew that her actual birthday was suspected as being sometime in the first half of 1975
So, same year as Sydney Bristow.
He rolled his eyes to the ceiling in sheer self-annoyance. Oh for fuck's sake Sarkey, will you get your mind off that CIA Vestal Virgin and get it back in the game?
Mr. Sark, assassin, thief, espionage operative and about to become 'kidnapper', jerked his gaze back to the woman before him and projected his exasperation onto her. With her ill-considered, carelessly worn attire and messy hair, she looked like a wren that had been blown off-course in a storm. He looked her up and down. Yep, there she was, a card carrying genius – his mark, Dr Caplan – and she couldn't even do up the buttons on her jacket correctly. Sark eyed the couple perfunctorily and made up his mind: in the meat market of coupledom, the husband had definitely married down. He watched 'hubby' give the eye to a passing blond, who gave a smirking look back – yes, had married down and knew it. It was clear the wife had seen the exchange but for all her reaction her husband might have been someone just standing next to her in a check out queue. Sark wondered why they didn't just divorce. He knew that the man, woman and child before him weren't even a proper family. The little boy was the woman's four year old nephew. The man and wife could only fake a family.
Annoyed, he thought that nothing matched about the couple, not even their names.Sark knew that the wife had initially taken her husband's name – Caplan - but over time had gradually reverted to her maiden name. With his British background he was used to women who kept their husband's names and he reminded himself that he would have to call her 'Dodgson' and not 'Caplan' in his dealings with her. After all, just because one happened to kidnap a person there was no cause to personally insult them.
Her name was an issue anyway. Her teenaged single mother had never married the father – a local boy, name of di Malfi - so the good Doctor's name was that of her mother's family. Her first name was the real oddity though. Sark reflected that only the Americans could give a woman a boy's name – James. What the hell? Where did American's get these ideas from? The naming had even been intentional. When her grandfather had registered her birth, apparently the registrar had been confused by the local Cajun Bayou accent and had taken 'Jaime' to be 'Jamey' and had just written down 'James'.
Named by mistake and – he looked her up and down again – dressed by accident. What does she do, just put on the first clothes that fall out of the wardrobe?
The family group drifted across the gallery, moving into his close orbit before veering away. Glumly trapped with each other the married couple didn't notice him. He caught a snatch of their conversation.
"Look, I just feel as though I need time to find myself," moaned the husband.
"You wanna find yourself? – try looking in the mirror less and thinking more," snapped the wife.
Sark fought the urge to ever so quietly grind his jaw. Great, nothing like a noisy, fractious kidnap victim to make his day. From her records he already knew that she reputedly lacked the full deck on 'inter-personal relations'.
Well, at least that'll make a change.In his recent sojourn at SD-6 – running errand boy tasks for its chief, Arvin Sloane, even as they both schemed to take the organisation down from within - Sark had dealt up-close but not quite personal enough with Sydney Bristow, a CIA double agent within the ill-intentioned SD-6. He considered her as swimming in empathy; no, make that 'drowning'. In contrast, Dodgson reputedly had almost no filter between mouth and brain.
Tact was apparently an alien concept.
She worked at a cutting-edge engineering company – Neotech – and had once described the senior management as 'butt-monkeys who couldn't even butt-munch'. Nothing unusual there - except that it had been to a live-feed video at a glamorous company event.
Sark's hard blue gaze tracked them. He knew that the criminal organisation 'The Alliance' had once considered recruiting her as Technical Support to one of its SD cells, luring her in with their usual bald-faced lie that they were the CIA. However, she was seen as a disruptive factor and they had decided against it. Sark suspected something else too, the fear among them that she was so bloody bright that she'd have seen right through them.
Reading her file, Sark had been reminded of the SD-6 super-geek, Marshall Flinkman.
Hi. Welcome. Don't kill me.
Sark gave a dark chuckle when recollecting Marshall's first words to him; of course he wouldn't have killed Marshall, in a bizarre way he'd grown to enjoy his company. His gaze kept track of Dodgson. She reminded him of Marshall alright, but unlike Marshall, Sark suspected that the quick, mentally agile Dodgson – he wondered, what was that American term, 'snarky'? - had the potential to be a right royal pain in the arse.
The trio halted before a jellyfish tank with the boy tugging Dodgson's sleeve and she bending down on one knee, bringing herself to his level. They stared up together at the jellyfish as the child pointed at them and chattered.
Well, she's got enough empathy for the kid at least, Sark thought.
The little boy pointed out his favourite jellyfish – the one who'd come up to the glass earlier to say 'hello'.
"His name's Jello," his child's voice piped out.
A little boy who'd named a jellyfish, even though it probably didn't even know he was there.
Sark shifted uncomfortably against the wall.
Jello for a jellyfish.
He knew that only a child that young could be so literal. Children that young dealt only with the surface of things, lacking the comprehension that there could ever be any depths. He knew from experience how it rendered them utterly unquestioning.
He watched Dodgson link hands with her nephew, bending down awkwardly so that he wouldn't have to reach up too high. She laughed at something the little boy said, sounding suddenly ebullient, like an uncorked bottle of champagne.
Mr. Sark came to a decision, he'd leave the husband – Graham Caplan - but the boy was emotional leverage against his mark, the rather important Dr. Dodgson, so he'd take him. Something in him felt discomforted about that, and he revised: okay, he'd take the husband too, after all, someone had to take care of the boy whilst he worked on the aunt.
The snatching of the child was almost painfully easy. He'd split off from his aunt for no more than five seconds – all the time needed. When Sark had bent down to him, the child's innocent reaction was to grin and offer up a piece of candy from a crumpled packet. Sark winced in the face of the boy's sheer trust. Great. He was up against the ultimate weapon – a little kiddie armed with an undimmed soul and complete faith in the power of human goodness.
Oh just bloody wonderful. I set out as a professional assassin and now I've devolved into some kiddie-snatcher?
How did that happen?
Just when did I turn into such a creep?
