Chapter 13: Veney – a practice bout or mock combat.
A continent away, James and Sark landed at dusk at an utterly deserted airfield outside Moscow. There had been just enough daylight to get them down without landing lights. Good, thought Sark, they wouldn't have to wait too long before dark. They now had about fifteen minutes of half-light left. Sark wanted to wait until nightfall as then, when he blew up the plane, the fireball would be all the more easy to spot. He was counting on it.
They stood on the field, just the two of them. Sark was dressed in his customary black, his suit topped by a long, black duster that hung from him casually - like a cloak. James appraised him.
"You look like Dracula."
Sark looked down at himself, all dressed in black, elegant as the night, and sniggered. He looked up again with a sudden, stifled snort of laughter, "Hey, 'The Prince of Sarkness'."
"Jeez," James closed her eyes, "sometimes I swear that you are about ten."
Sark had high-handedly cuffed her to him, wrist to wrist. Even so, her fighting spirit in the aircraft seemed to have been spent and she seemed to have accommodated to him, or maybe she was just too exhausted to fight any longer? Either way, having been uprooted across two continents, she seemed somehow resigned.
In the dark of the airfield there was nowhere for her to run, but cuffing her hammered home her subordinate position. He wanted her to know exactly who was in charge here and how little option she had, he wanted her to know it and to accept it and to obey him.
He suddenly had an unsettlingly heightened awareness that the cuffs left their hands only millimetres apart. James seemed to have mentally drifted off elsewhere, but Sark … he didn't know why, but he suddenly couldn't wrench his mind off the fact that if he just casually flexed his fingers then he would have her small hand in his possession. After all, she was his captive, she couldn't stop him. He buried his thoughts. He was relieved when she spoke.
"How's Aaron?"
He'd known she'd want reassurance on that matter and had downloaded hi-jacked satellite surveillance into his mobile. He got the phone out with his free hand and powered up the pictures, they clearly showed Sydney Bristow carrying a sleeping Aaron off a plane.
"He landed in L.A. 2.00 p.m. Pacific Standard time today. He'll be back with his mother by now." He paused, wondering for a second whether to continue. "Did you ever wonder where I kept him?"
James froze slightly before replying. "No." The inference being, 'no, and I don't want to know'.
Sark ignored the inference.
"I kept him at Disneyland Paris in the care of a wonderfully competent French Nanny; she thought she was caring for the child of a couple who were on a second honeymoon. Apparently he had a terrific time."
She turned to him with a look of stunned disbelief.
Sark manfully fought back a grin of self-congratulation and then his mind tripped him up with an unexpected calculation: James Dodgson was quite good-looking in her own strange way. He lurched back from the thought. Fuck, where had that come from? Confused, unwilling to engage with the idea, he unconsciously translated it into something that he could deal with instead. Half laughing to himself he wondered: what were his chances of pulling James Dodgson?
Whatever they were, he'd always liked a challenge. Besides, if they were going to be together for quite a while, he might as well make the game interesting.
Whenever Sark played poker, he always played for real money.
Whenever Sark played poker, he dealt the cards straight away.
"The Disneyland Paris thing is entirely true." He spoke smoothly, his gaze enveloping hers, lazily folding her into him. "I wouldn't say it if it wasn't." He curved a smile and looked away slightly, biting his lip when returning his gaze to her, smiling almost bashfully. He knew damn well it made him look irresistible. Then he hit her with a full-on assault of pure charm. "I'm not a complete monster Dr. Dodgson. There are just times when I simply have to behave like one."
He was rewarded by the sight of James jerking her glance away from him in a sudden welter of obvious confusion. He snagged the inside of his mouth to keep the grin off his face as he saw her colouring red, elatedly remembering a term from his Public School lessons in competition fencing: first touch to me!
He smirked up at the night sky: Christ, but you can be a charming bastard when you want to be Sarkey!
James remained silent, trying to take on board the new information Sark had given her – trying to take on board this new Sark it presented. Sark sensed she was struggling with her thoughts and decided to take advantage: after all, that was what he did best. He flicked her a wickedly playful look. Yep, she was still wrestling with her confusion. Time to slide on in there Sarkey …
"Well, I notice you haven't asked about Graham." He slid her a teasing sideways glance, "not interested in what happened to him then?"
He saw her continue to look away – confused - her face blushing ever more scarlet. A grin kept tugging away at the corners of his mouth. His voice purred playfully. "Marriage not going as well as it might be is it?" He shook his head in mock concern, keeping the pressure up. "I mean, I do recall you inviting me to torture him for his infidelity at one point."
James looked across at him, feeling a combination of confusion and an affronted hurt. "What? It isn't enough for me to be kidnapped, I gotta give you my life story as well?"
Sark laughed. "Well, I'd be fascinated to hear it." He made a charmingly inept effort at Day Time TV sincerity. "Is there anything you want to share with us? Uncle Sarkums is listening."
James looked at him in disbelief.
"'Uncle Sarkums'?" She gave a jerky, nervous laugh at the absurdity. Uncle? He was obviously so much younger than she. Looking at him she felt her gaze sinking into his own as it shamelessly held hers and then, as someone who can suddenly feel themselves drowning, she tore hers away. She felt a strange rush of blood in her ears, a weird pulse in her throat - and then her mind self-protectively switched tack on her and she blurted out, "Oh okay, I admit it, that marriage of mine is totally over!"
As the words left her, it was as though she'd abruptly put down a heavy bag. She may have blurted out that truth as an effort to distract herself from something else she wasn't prepared to think about, but it was still a truth. It was as though her admission had expunged something, as though she'd finally exhaled a breath she had been holding ever since she'd first knew that the marriage had been a mistake.
God, what a relief to say it – even if it is only to Sark!
Actually, she realised it was very easy to say it to Sark, because apart from that Rambaldi crap he had so few expectations of her. She warmed to her theme.
"And the thing is," – now she had started taking she saw no reason to stop – "that I've asked him for a divorce – twice! Well, not so much asked as stood there in the driveway screaming I wanted one. Anyway, I never got very far, he'd always talk me round or just not talk about it at all, so we … I dunno … we just carried on being married." She kicked a pebble and mooted it to herself, puzzled. "It's strange really. I mean, deep down he doesn't even like me. You'd think someone was holding a gun to his head, making him stay married."
Regarding her profile against the darkening light, Sark idly decided that when this was all over he might just beat the crap out of Graham Caplan.
James looked at him sideways. "How the hell old are you anyhows?"
Sark wasn't blind-sided by the disconnected question. He didn't drop her gaze but held it with his and said slowly, "Oh, old enough."
James' gaze jerked away from his again as though he'd poked her with a finger. Sark was smirkingly sure that it was from embarrassment. She spoke up, still looking away.
"Why are you in this business?"
Sark caught his breath. Okay, that one had blind-sided him. He hadn't been expecting such a direct question. But then again, he was dealing with James Dodgson, what else could he expect but 'direct'? What could he say in response? I was sent to school at a very young age. Out of necessity one becomes self-reliant … and perhaps prematurely ambitious. I'm like anyone Dr. Dodgson, what I want is that which I never had. But what exactly was 'that which I never had'? Power? Control? Something else? He'd never really stopped to think. So what he said instead was, "Well, seeing how I'd been given the best education money could buy in lying, spying and mayhem, it did seem rather a shame to waste it."
His tone was debonair, amused.
James looked across at him and rolled her eyes. "Oh you are such a bullshitter! Are you actually trying to imply some school for spies?"
Sark gave a low, amused chuckle. He didn't mention Project Birthday. He didn't want to. He had learned not to allow himself to dwell on that part of his past, the part where he'd been robbed of his future; doing so just filled him with an uncomfortable guilty resentment toward Irina. Devotion and resentment: the two primary emotions he had for her, both warring on a battleground of guilt. Devotion because she'd saved him from Project Birthday, resentment because she was part of the reason it had existed in the first place.
Looking down at James in the dark of the abandoned airfield, he suddenly realised that she should have been an American version of himself: a Project Christmas child. Should have been, but hadn't. The slack attitude to registering her birth, the confusion about her age, her boy's name on a little girl's birth certificate, her haphazard schooling, it had all combined to one effect: in their search for special little children whose lives they could destroy, World Governments had missed her. She, unlike he, had slipped the net. He wondered, just how many more of them were out there, 'Project' candidates who'd escaped? Children who had gone uncaptured because their parents had been powerful and wealthy enough to resist, or had been so poor that they'd been off radar? Those protected by great privilege or great poverty: beyond reach or beneath notice? What about those who had been born before or after 'Christmas time', protected by an arbitrary few years either way? What about those children who had been scooped up but had been let go, deemed as 'not actionable' because they were seen as not ruthless enough? He supposed no-one would ever know.
James snapped him out of his reverie by indicating his mobile; looking down at her he saw that her face wore it's characteristic expression of screwed-up query. "Who's the woman in the picture, the one who helped Aaron?"
Sark looked at the phone in his hand as though surprised to still see it there. The image of Sydney had long since faded from the screen. He put the mobile away. Sydney Bristow? Who was she to him really? For some reason lately, he just didn't seem to care that much anymore.
"Who is she?" He shrugged politely, expressing an urbane indifference, "She's no-one."
He reached for a gadget in his pocket and pressed a button on it, and small pieces of destroyed jet rained down from a fireball that burst up into the black night sky.
Well, she's not exactly no-one, he thought resentfully, but right now the sainted Miss Sydney Bristow can eat my dust!
