Chapter 18: Giving The Blade - an intentional threatening extension of the arm and weapon designed to provoke a response that can then be countered.
Glaring at Agent Sydney Bristow a few days later, Kendall thought that Boot Camp was definitely where he wanted to put her.
He had hauled Sydney and Vaughn in for a further debriefing on their previous Swiss endeavour; just the three of them.
It had gotten bruising.
The missing magnetometer and the unresolved nature of the Caplan rescue hadn't been taken well at Head Office. Devlin had been addressing him Assistant Director Kendall, putting the stress on the 'assistant' part. It had been a message and he knew it: those above him were beginning to regard him as a man who possibly didn't deserve to go any higher. They'd brought in Jack Bristow as someone to ride shotgun on the entire Irina Derevko/Arvin Sloane/Rambaldi mess and now The Powers That Be were comparing him to Jack Bristow and finding him wanting!
Shit, he thought, all the years of service he'd given … the CIA didn't deserve his loyalty!
He had gone over the Switzerland debriefing again, particularly the precise circumstances of the Sloane extraction when Sydney's written report had referred to Sark shooting at her. Sark had shot Bristow's car off the road seconds after having hauled Sloane out from Bristow's speeding vehicle and across into his own. So that meant that when he'd pulled the trigger Sark was positioned slightly ahead of Bristow and only feet away. He'd been in a high pressure situation where it made total sense to hit the opposing agent, and he'd hit the car and not her? What was he, the world's worst shot? He'd been aiming for her head at point-blank range, but oops, he'd missed by three feet?
So Sydney was Irina Derevko's daughter? - big deal. Sark was a professional assassin allied with Arvin Sloane and Derevko was stuck in a cell and out of the game. Kendall guessed that Sark had been prompted by his own motivations, not someone else's.
He'd been prompted not to kill Sydney Bristow.
Kendall wondered just what the hell was going on between Sark and Sydney Bristow. And if anything was going on, wasn't it time he found out?
Sydney and Vaughn now sat across the table from him in an interview room, like the accused on some parole panel. He started flatly at them, projecting meaty disdain with the set of his heavy shoulders and his aggressively shaven head. They faced him in turn and he thought: could they have been two more different characters? Sydney had her back straight, chin up, gaze unyielding; she was angry but hadn't yet stepped over the line of actual insubordination. There could be no doubt what she was thinking though, you're beneath me, you bastard.
He knew where she got that look from alright, she wasn't her father's daughter for nothing.
Vaughn sat next to her, physically bigger than she, but somehow, in comparison to her, diminished. He sat with shoulders curled, chin tucked in, furtively looking up from beneath his brows, with, as Kendall thought of it, 'that fucking furrowed expression' on his forehead. Kendall felt himself grow irritated just looking at it. What was it with that? It set him off just seeing it! Then he got it. He recalled a paper on human facial expression that the CIA had seen as useful for limited interrogations. It had stated that furrow-browed anxiety, that anxious Kicked Puppy look, tended to invoke the common response of dismissive contempt. If a person wore it habitually, as Vaughn did, then that reaction toward them became ingrained in others.
Total fact.
Kendall actually felt himself brighten inside at the realisation. No wonder he'd never liked the self-pitying little fucker! He wasn't meant to, it was Mother Nature's way, she didn't want people mixing with the little wiener!
Kendall gave Vaughn a lip-curled look. He weighed him up: crumpled face, crumpled suit, crumpled self. Christ, the guy looked like a late-30's version of the snivel-assed kid who gets yanked into the Principal's office for a misdemeanour and then tries to wheedle his way out of it by saying someone else made him do it. What the fuck was Sydney Bristow doing with this guy? What was it, a passing case of low self-esteem or … was her telegraphed relationship with Vaughn – the whole office knew about it - a monumental cover-up for something else?
He ignored Vaughn and concentrated again on Sydney, taking up where he'd left off.
"So then, you couldn't have escaped with Sloane and the magnetometer?"
"No, he would have shot me."
"Who would have shot you Sydney – Sloane or Sark? I'm a little puzzled on that, your report seems slightly vague on that point."
Sydney increased her grip on her temper and forced herself not to blink. They'd been in here for half an hour, going over the same dead ground, and it was obvious to her that it was ground from which Kendall was determined to dig up a body. She decided that it was no longer just her imagination, he was definitely circling the issue of Sark. She stared flat at Kendall and hoped to God she didn't have a tell that he'd picked up on. She had already suppressed the one she knew she had: when she was insecure she had a habit of crossing her arms and pulling the sleeves of her jacket tight about her, as though it were a blanket. She didn't know where she'd gotten the habit from, but she knew she had it.
She fortified herself with an old trick: 'believe your own lies', that way you projected the truth. She told herself to hold on to the thought that as far as she and Sark were concerned there was nothing to suspect. She hadn't done anything, worse luck.
Nothing.Physical.Had.Happened … She.Was.Telling.The.Truth.
She blinked once and exhaled slowly, bringing her heart rate down. If Kendall – if the CIA – suspected anything between herself and Sark, suspected that she anything but flat-out despised him, then God knows what they'd do to her. They had locked her up once over a mere prophesy, what would they do in reaction to her dark fascination with a known Enemy of the State who was also a man with Rambaldi connections?
"Sloane," she replied, "Sloane would have shot me. He was in the back seat and he was armed."
"So Sark wouldn't have shot you?"
Sydney sent a note to self: breathing exercises Sydney.
"I never said that Sark wouldn't have shot me," she replied with controlled even-ness, as though dealing with a particularly stupid and trying child, "Sloane was in the car with me and he was armed. He was my main danger. I was concentrating on him."
"But Sark didn't shoot you either, did he?"
Fuck controlled even-ness! Sydney smacked both hands flat on the table top and stared hard at Kendall. Next to her, Vaughn jumped and instinctively dipped his chin even further and crossed his arms over his middle. He drew his gaze into himself, effectively trying to separate off from the exchange.
Sydney was too riled to notice that that there was no support coming from Vaughn.
"Sir, we have been over this repeatedly," the 'Sir' sounded nothing like a term of respect, "now what exactly is your point?" Her next statement reeked of sarcasm. "Are you implying I didn't try hard enough to get killed?"
She encouraged herself: You go girl! Call that bastard's bluff!
"My point, Agent Bristow, is that your report says Sark tried to shoot you. In my estimation, Sark does not try to shoot people. As a matter of choice he either shoots them, or he does not. So I would have thought that if Sark had tried to shoot you Sydney, you'd be shot. Yet here you are, unharmed. Strange, that although mere feet away from you when he pulled the trigger, that he met with what might be termed a conspicuous lack of success."
Okay, so the bastard's not bluffing.
Kendall carried on. "You ran Ops with Sark in S-D6, Sydney. Ops are intense situations. People bond on them. When you're trapped in a fox-hole with a guy and you're covering each other's backs as some other bastard tries to shoot you? - it doesn't really matter if you don't even like your fox-hole buddy; you forge a connection. So I'm asking you now, did you forge one with Sark?"
Vaughn gave a startled glance.
Sydney felt her heart grow cold. Oh Shit! At the first debriefing she should have just told them how he'd let her go in Switzerland and let them make of it what they wished. Now that option had been closed down on her. All she could do now was to carry on lying.
She bit out her words. "I do not have a 'connection' with Sark." Sydney saw Kendall look at her with a curl of disbelief about his mouth and she went on the attack. "Are you trying to suggest that I'd sit here and lie to you?"
"Well I don't know Sydney, would you? Seems to me you're capable of quite a lot of deception. You ran a double game for a year and didn't get caught, you've lead both your so-called best friends on with a string of lies about who you are, why wouldn't you lie to me?"
A sharp intake of breath seared Sydney's lungs at Kendall's statement - her so-called best friends. Words of genuine rage broke from her before she could stop them. "How dare you! How dare you drag Will and Francie into this!"
Kendall was having none of it.
"What do you mean, 'drag them in'? - because of you, they are in! Will Tippin got kidnapped, tortured and had his life wrecked because of you, and Francie Calfo has no idea that she's sharing a house with a magnet for life threatening danger and that she could get killed in the cross-fire - "
Sydney ripped across him. "Francie lives with me because she chooses to - "
Kendall ripped back. "Choice is only valid if it's informed! You have never informed Francie Calfo of the danger she runs daily in living with you, so you have never given her any 'choice' - "
Sydney heard a rushing sound in her head. She felt an almost hysterical anger. She wasn't going to listen to Kendall's implication that she was high-handedly risking Francie's life every day, and that she hadn't even given Francie any real choice about it.
" - so don't tell me you wouldn't lie to me about Sark!" Kendall finished.
Sydney felt a cool stillness descend. They were back on the topic of Sark. Mere seconds ago she would have given anything to get off it, but as an escape from what she saw as Kendall's vile and false implications about Francie, it was a relief to get back on to it. She forgot what Kendall had said about Francie, she refused to even think about it.
She looked briefly down at the table top and then looked up. A slight telegraph of uncertainty, as though she'd measured up all her options and had decided to come clean with the truth: okay, give them this as though it were the big secret.
"Sark once offered me a partnership." She let the words fill the air. "Maybe he thinks I'm still good for it – so why shoot me?"
Both men in the room were stunned. Partnership?
"What?" Kendall's bellow filled the room. "Fill me in Agent Bristow! Exactly when did this world shaking event take place?"
"During my recent mission to FAPSE Headquarters. He wanted to present me with a 'comprehensive offer'." She hoped desperately that her next sentence carried a sufficient weight of sarcasm. "Apparently Mr. Sark somehow 'truly believes' that we are 'destined to work together'."
"And your response was?"
"I turned him down of course."
Go Girl! Project that patriotic certainty!
"What did you actually say?" Kendall persisted.
Don't back down, give him the truth and make it sound so big he won't think there's an even bigger truth hiding behind it!
"I said that 'he was cute but I'd pass'." She continued smoothly, trying not to give either Kendall or Vaughn time to reflect on the implications of her words. "I did inform my Handler of the event."
After a second's delay, as though he hadn't fully understood he'd been dragged into the conversation, Vaughn jerked up, twisting to look at Sydney.
"What? When?"
Sydney's flicker of exasperation was utterly genuine, no need to hide behind Dad's inherited game-playing skills on this one.
"In the office that time, remember? I told you!" – well sort of, enough to get by if anyone should investigate.
"Well I don't remember it!"
Kendall interjected, trying to head off what he saw as the beginning of an embarrassing lovers' tiff. "Agent Bristow, what did you actually say to Agent Vaughn?" Sydney glared at Vaughn, not answering. "Agent Bristow," Kendall's voice grew firm, " I know you have perfect recall, now what did you say to Agent Vaughn?"
Glaring at Vaughn was Sydney's ploy for playing for time. In her mind was: oh shit, here comes the big one. Roll with it and hope you can come out the other side.
"I spoke to Agent Vaughn in the Rotunda" – yep make it sound as official as possible – "and I said that Sark had made me the offer and that I had turned it down. Agent Vaughn definitely heard me because he responded: Sark asked you to come work with him? To which I replied: Like it wasn't even a question, like it was a done deal. I went on to state that … in my opinion …" Go for it! She drove herself at her next statement like a rider driving an unwilling horse at a fence. "I said, Sark's like the good-looking guy in high school who knows how cute he is and won't take no for an answer."
Kendall was almost aghast. "You were flirting with Sark?"
Sydney slowly turned her head to look at him.
"Well hardly, if you recall, I was here whilst Sark was presumably in Russia at the time?" She waited a beat and then landed her big punch. "At that time, as I recollect, I was busily trying to flirt with Agent Vaughn."
Vaughn jerked a look at her. Syd? We agreed, no gossip about us!
Kendall glared at Vaughn. "Vaughn is any of is this on your record?"
Inside her head Sydney punched the air in victory. Kendall's past the flirting thing!
Vaughn's voice stumbled. "No: I mean, I don't remember. Maybe. I wasn't listening to her that closely!"
Sydney's explosion rent the air.
"What?" No need for any fakery at all this time.
Kendall closed his eyes. Sydney Bristow wasn't just Daddy's little girl, she was her mother's daughter too. Did she ever have fire! He didn't envy Vaughn one bit. Shit, was there going to be trouble in paradise tonight!
He weighed them both up. Bristow was off the leash with anger at Vaughn, who was about to get his ass kicked in a 'domestic' with his girlfriend. In his opinion Sydney Bristow and Michael Vaughn were totally unsuited to each other. The Bristow kid ran all over him without even trying. Kendall decided that as a couple he gave them three months, max, with a long messy tail off. Watching them, he knew that if there was anything to dig up then he wasn't going to get it right now and he had a lot better things to do than sit there and watch them spat. He ordered them both out of his office.
Immediately they were in the corridor Sydney and Vaughn had a hissed exchange.
"You were flirting with Sark?"
"I told you about it!"
"Well forgive me Syd, but unlike Sark and you I don't have the photographic memory thing going for me and I don't remember it all that clearly!" It was the nearest tone to 'snark' he'd ever used with her.
Sydney wasn't taking it from him.
"Oh really? And I thought it was because you 'weren't listening' at the time! What were you, distracted? Was I wearing a low cut dress?"
From behind his desk Kendall could see their silhouettes through the frosted glass. Even if he hadn't been able to just catch their hissed words, the shadow show of their body language would still have said it all.
Kendal's mouth quirked in annoyance. In his opinion Vaughn was just a milk-sop, a career apparatchik, he'd never be anything better than mid-ranking, he was nothing like his old man Bill Vaughn. But that Bristow kid? - she was tough. Thinking back on their bruising exchange, she was everything like her old man Jack Bristow. He almost admired her. Almost. But almost wasn't good enough. She could throw punches all she liked, she'd just coughed to the possibility of a partnership with Sark. There was something going on there, he knew it.
A quarter of an hour later Sydney sat in the privacy of a toilet cubicle with the seat lid down; it was the only place where you could be guaranteed not to be under office surveillance. She got her shakes under control.
Christ that had been close.
How did Kendall know that there was some thing between she and Sark? No, she reminded herself, he didn't 'know' he suspected, and there was all the difference in the world between the two. He could 'suspect' all he liked, but without proof he could not act.
She leant her head against the wall, blowing out a slow breath.
The row with Vaughn had helped dig her out of it. It had run cover with Kendall, and the sudden burst of genuine temper on her part had helped give a legitimate vent to her tension over having to lie. Their hissed exchange in the corridor had just been fall-out.
Or had it?
Things had taken a sharp dive between she and Vaughn lately. She hadn't been the same with him since her night of self-revelation, she'd been more physically distant from him. They'd had sex - Vaughn had not unnaturally expected it and she couldn't find a way to say no - but it had been strangely lacking in intimacy. She'd recalled reading somewhere that the one act that most prostitutes refused to engage in, no matter how much they were paid, was the simple act of kissing on the mouth. Kissing on the mouth was - more than any fuck or blow-job could ever be – a sign of true intimacy. Suddenly, over the previous couple of days, Sydney had found that kissing Vaughn on the mouth took an act of almost steely will. This morning as they'd left her home, when he'd bent to kiss her lips she'd instinctively moved her face away. He hadn't said anything at the time, but he had noticed. He hadn't said anything contrary over the last few days, but she knew that he must have noticed the recent change in her entire demeanour towards him.
She bent forward and clamped her hands to the sides of her head, as though trying to keep her thoughts in. Holy hell this whole thing is a mess!
Every instinct she had told her to get away from Vaughn, to get him out of her home, to get some space between them. It wasn't even a case of 'get away from Vaughn so you can go to Sark', she didn't even know where Sark was, she didn't even really know if she wanted to be with him, she just needed to escape Vaughn's constant nagging presence so she could get space to think. But … the thought struck her – maybe she couldn't get away from him? If she suddenly backed off now, forced him away, then would Vaughn, Kendall, everyone, start wondering why – why now? Would they start sniffing around the concept of she and Sark, and once they hit a critical-mass of suspicion would they act on it without proof? And then what the hell would they do to her?
She lowered her hands from her head and hunched forward again. The unpleasant statement that Kendall had made about her high-handed ways with Will and Francie's lives resurfaced. She swallowed. It was particularly un-nerving because Kendall hadn't been the first person to put that concept to her. If it had just been Kendall she would have fobbed it off, but her Dad had said same thing too.
It had been during one of their father-daughter blow-ups after each had revealed themselves to the other as an SD-6 double-agent for the CIA. Her Dad had said that she was selfishly endangering Will and Francie, using them as housemates and friends just because she couldn't stand to be alone. She recalled that her father's precise argument was that as a double agent in a dangerous game, to enmesh a civilian so closely in her life was an act of potential manslaughter. He had said that she owed it to people like Will and Francie to stay the hell away from them, that she should either restrict herself to relating only to those in the same game as she, or to have no close friends at all.
She recalled the shouted conversation perfectly. At the end, as she and her father had glared at each other, her father's unspoken question had resonated between them.
Haven't you learned anything from the murder of Daniel Hecht?
Sitting crouched in the privacy of the toilet cubicle Sydney's mind swerved sharply away from even the concept that she might be endangering Francie. Instead, she concentrated on another question: as Dad and Kendall had voiced such similar thoughts, was Dad talking about her behind her back to Kendall?
Right then 'Dad' was indeed talking to Kendall about Sydney, or rather Kendall was talking to Dad. Kendall had called Jack into his office for a private discussion.
Kendall prepped himself. A quick one-two punch to draw the bastard's cards.
"Jack, there's no way to dance around this so I'm just going to put it to you straight. Is your daughter having an affair with Sark?"
"Jeez Jack, we've really got to stop meeting like this. People are beginning to talk."
Half an hour later, Jack was a desperate man.
"Irina, I'm coming to you because there's absolutely no-one else I can talk to about this. I'm going to ask you straight: is Sydney seeing Sark?"
"Oh my God, is she?" Irina gave out a blurt of shocked laughter, drawing closer to the glass. She recovered herself. "Well if she is seeing him Jack, I can assure you that he does come from a very good family. Really, he would treat her like a Princess." She compressed her lips, suppressing a smile, knowing that Jack couldn't possibly get the joke.
Jack was aghast. "Can you hear yourself? Sydney and Sark? He's a thief, a deceiver, a killer, about the only label he hasn't got attached to his name is mass-murderer! Are you seriously suggesting that it might be a good thing if Sydney got mixed up with that?"
"Well, who would you prefer she were with? Michael Vaughn?"
Jack closed his eyes in exasperation – knowing Irina had hit a weak spot in his argument - and put an arm out before him, hand to the glass, leaning on it. The on-duty guard shifted nervously, his whole body language projecting anxiety – people weren't supposed to touch the glass, people were -
"What?" Jack jerked his head sideways and glared at him.
Man shook his head, holding his hands up in front of him. "Nothing Mr. Bristow."
Irina grinned at the guard's reaction and tried not to look at Jack's hand, his thick wrist and broad, flat palm pressed to the glass: mere inches away, but impossible to touch. The perfect metaphor for her husband.
Her husband. She wondered, did she really still think of him like that?
Before she quite knew what her words were going to be, she found her mouth speaking to continue their whispered conversation.
"I've said it before Jack, but really, he's not that different from you."
"Who, Sark? I work for the CIA, he works for Nefarious Inc."
"Oh please. I know you Jack Bristow, if you weren't working for the CIA you'd be running your own crime syndicate and dealing out merry hell to anyone who got in your way. Don't tell me you're a good man Jack, you just happen to be on the Government team."
"Irina! Don't tell me you actually want your daughter mixing with Sark?"
Irina looked obstinate. She knew it was good cover, Jack would be thinking she was being stubborn over Sydney's choice of potential boyfriends, he wouldn't imagine she was buying time to think about something else.
Jack knew about Page 47 of the Rambaldi Manuscript, but he did not know the truth about Page 48.
Given what she knew about those two Pages, they were tied together surely, Sydney and Sark? But … were they truly suitable for each other? Irina was aware that Sark had powerful sexual appetites, another 'Lazarey' trait, whereas Sydney could be downright prudish. Irina knew that when interested in a woman Sark indulged intensely in sex with her, and in many dark aspects of it, but he wasn't promiscuous though, not in the accepted sense. She knew that unless his interest in an individual was piqued he largely put his sexuality on hold, just using whores to burn off his tensions. Only when his interest was gripped by a particular person were his ravening appetites fully in play: in truth, sexually he either starved or gluttonously gorged. As to who had attracted him in the past, well Allison Doren sprang to Irina's mind: an operative he had worked with for a protracted period. But even with Allison Doren, Irina knew that his controlling, somewhat cold sensuality had never really let him open up to an emotional contact. Whether Doren had known it or not, indeed whether Sark had known it or not, it was almost as though he had treated that woman as the subject of a long series of sexual experiments.
Sark didn't have sex in a boudoir, he had it in a laboratory. Sex wasn't something he did, it was something he perpetrated.
"Is Sydney seeing him?" Jack's prompt jolted her out of her thoughts. "I've been asked some very peculiar questions about my daughter today, I've denied everything - "
"Naturally."
"- but I want to know, is she seeing him?"
Irina closed her eyes and opened them again and then gave a playful, catty grin; a Pirate Princess with a cutlass in each hand and flying under the flag of the Jolly Roger. "Is she seeing Sark? Not as far as I'm aware, Jack." Well, strictly speaking, that was true.
Jack took in her long-held blink and found himself issuing an almost playful challenge.
"Irina Derevko, did you just lie to me?"
Irina closed her mouth trying an suppress a grin caught between exasperation and delight. "No, Jack Bristow, I closed my eyes because, although to my knowledge Sydney is not seeing Sark, well … I …" she blurted out, hushed, "well, in some ways I wish she was."
"Irina!" Jack jerked his head to check if the guard had heard him. The man was obviously uncomfortable at Jack and Irina's conversation, at their close proximity, but he was out of earshot.
"Well who else is there?" Irina continued chidingly as he turned back to her.
"Some nice guy who'll look after her, that's who. The world's full of them."
"Yes, and the last one she met got killed because of it."
They both knew they were talking about Danny Hecht. A good man. Headed for the top of his chosen field. A worthy husband for Sydney, and gunned down in the crossfire between she and her alias life.
Irina continued. "And the current 'nice guy' – Mr. Vaughn Junior - will get her killed as she slows down to let him keep up with her! For heaven's sake, he's a mediocrity. Why is Sydney even with him?"
Jack broke gazes with Irina, his jaw gritting because he actually agreed with her. His gaze plunged back to hers as he began to explain.
"Essentially, Vaughn was the first man she met after Daniel Hecht's death. He was attentive, reasonably good looking, and …" Jack's logic clarified for him, "and unavailable because of their Handler/Field Agent roles. I think that was the key. At some level she knew she could safely indulge in a girlish crush on a man without feeling guilty about Danny Hecht, because she knew the job was going prevent her getting close to Vaughn and so she would never have to deliver on her flirting."
"What? Those are reasons? Oh please! - 'on the rebound' anyone? And those relationships never last," Irina carried on, exasperated, "this one might not last because she'll get killed!"
Jack snapped-to.
"Irina, Sydney is old enough to make her own decisions. We may think Vaughn is completely unsuitable, but there's not much I can do about it."
"Oh for heaven's sake, sure you can. You're her dad – ground her!"
"Mom?"
"What's wrong?"
Half an hour after Jack, Irina had another visitor: her daughter. Quite a busy day in the prison cell.
Sydney gave a half-laugh at her mother's words. "Nothing like a Derevko for getting straight to the point, huh?"
She knew she was partly stalling. Her feet had unthinkingly dragged her down to Irina's glass cell but her mind had yet to catch up to let her know what it was safe to say. She couldn't really be thinking of unburdening to Mom about Sark could she? That was crazy: what would Irina Derevko do with the information? But … Mom was the only one around who properly knew him … who could tell her things. Mom was the only one who could advise her.
There had to be another way, a way to consult her mother without tipping her hand to Irina Derevko. Sydney desperately needed advice. Her unresolved feelings about Sark were snagging at her. She feared that Kendall and others were closing in on her. She needed help. She needed to clarify.
"Mom, when you left - "
Irina's head jerked instinctively, as though she'd been slapped.
" – no, I'm not judging you, I just want to ask, when you left Dad and I, you didn't want to go, did you?"
"Of course I didn't!" For once in her life Irina Derevko did not have to hide her true feelings.
"But …" Sydney continued uncertainly, unsure of what she wanted to say, "I just want to know, if you didn't want to go, then," she jerked a look up at her mother, "why did you?"
The two women stared at each other. Sydney suddenly felt mentally detached from her surroundings, untethered, as though she were in danger of being blown away by the next strong wind. She had wanted to know about Sark, to obliquely discuss the quandary she increasingly felt at being caught in a possible tug between political expediency and what she might want as a human being. But now she truly wanted to know this thing too – had Mom wanted to stay?
Irina looked back at her daughter, unable to break her gaze. She was a proud woman, so how could she bring herself to say it, to say that she wished she had done things differently? Her voice stumbled. "Politics. Panic. Once I'd ran, I couldn't get back."
"Politics?""I was younger then Sydney, about the same age that you are now. You have to understand, part of me still believed I somehow owed The State my loyalty. Mother Russia. All my training." She leaned towards the glass, desperate for her daughter to comprehend what had driven her. "You must understand Sydney. People like you and I, spies, we're political animals. Our respective sides wouldn't let us out in the field unless they believed that our allegiance was utterly instilled into us. They couldn't trust us otherwise."
Sydney understood, she knew all about instilled loyalty, S-D6 had drummed it into her, she and everyone else they'd ever deceived. She knew then that when her mother had realised she was under direct threat of discovery, she had followed her training, the mentally easy thing to do, to do as you were told instead of thinking for yourself. She had followed her head and not her heart. Sydney feared her next question might hurt her mother horribly, but she needed the answer, and her mother was one of the few people who could ever tell her.
"Was it worth it, living your life in denial of what you felt? Did you always regret it?"
Irina managed to speak, a small, choked, squeaky sound.
"I never stopped loving you Sydney."
"And Dad?" Sydney's heart was in her mouth.
Irina looked up at her daughter. "I loved your father."
After Sydney had left, Irina managed to collect herself. Like Sark, a part of her mind was always on run-time, even when she didn't want it to be.
That conversation had not been entirely about she, Jack and Sydney. She was sure of it.
It had been about them as individuals certainly, but it had also skirted about the whole notion of conflicting interests, about emotional loyalties versus national ones. Sydney wasn't asking because of Michael Vaughn – there national and emotional loyalties went hand in hand – she was asking because she had a conflict to resolve.
Put it together with what Jack had said minutes before and was it a conflict about Sark?
Were Sydney and Sark finally swallowing their differences and edging toward some kind of union?
Irina knew they would have to sooner or later. After all, although many Rambaldi players knew that Sydney was Page 47, only Irina knew who was Page 48.
When she had seen the hidden picture revealed on the sheet, there had been no doubt of whom was portrayed there, that line of forehead, cheekbone and jaw, that shock of blond hair, the cobalt eyes. The DNA code enshrined in the page's design had confirmed it, but it wasn't necessary, it could only ever have been Sark.
The acknowledged Page 48 was a forgery she'd had created to cover Sark's tracks. The U.S. government forces had imprisoned Sydney for her prophesy involvement, Irina had no doubt whatsoever they would simply kill Sark.
It was strange, she hadn't even been surprised when she'd seen the page, she'd always somehow known … felt a connection with him.
She didn't fully understand the prophesied bond between the two – between her daughter and her protégé - but she was sure there was one. She had not been able to decipher the new page before she had been forced to hide it and hand herself in to the CIA. All she knew was that she detected, at a purely instinctive maternal level, that there was no threat to her child from Sark, instead only some positive interest, some instinctive willingness to support Sydney. She only knew that – that and one other thing. In the manuscript Sark was referred to by a title, a rather suitable one given his nature Irina thought, if a rather sinister one: The White Devil.
Irina found herself hoping that when Agent Sydney Bristow had questioned her on the costs of conflicting loyalties, that she had somehow given her daughter the right answers.
Right then, Sydney's heart and head were reeling. She'd been attacked by Kendall, Vaughn's suspicions seemed to be aroused, she felt trapped in a skein of lies and … when her mother had spoken of her father Sydney had been faced with the horrifying suspicion that some loves never died. Some loves were inescapable.
She was grateful to spend the afternoon sequestered in the relative safety of a Situations Update briefing where she could collect herself. Vaughn was among the packed meeting, but she could avoid his eye. Her father was there too and she looked over at him occasionally. He'd looked back once or twice with what she could only describe as an analytical, questioning expression hidden behind his habitual blank-faced stare.
She pinned a grin to her face as she stared back at her father. Was Dad up to anything?
Kendall was there but he was leading the briefing. He gave his typical verbal machinegun delivery on the changing picture in various hotspots. He eventually got on to Russia. He referred to a new, stunningly successful crime syndicate which had sprung up in Moscow, rumour was that it was headed by someone referred to only as 'The White Devil'.
Sydney jumped.
Sark!She knew it!
With all the force of the world's greatest covert Sark expert, she instantly knew it was him. It was Russia – a place she associated with Sark having first seen him there - the crime gang had announced itself on the scene with a stunning success ratio, a factor that was practically Sark's signature motif, and the alias, The White Devil, was the title of a Webster Jacobean Tragedy and had sheer fucking style written all over it!
Besides, there was something else, some other reason, some flickering instinctive knowledge … The White Devil … She fumbled for it at the back of her mind but the harder she chased it the more it slipped away until she lost it. She mentally shrugged. Whatever … she just knew itwas him!
She sat tense in her seat, head down, vaguely queasy. She was terrified of getting caught. Had anyone seen her jump? She covertly glanced about her, she didn't think so. She keenly tuned in on what Kendall was saying. What did he have to report about 'The White Devil'?
"Whoever this guy is, he's headed a series of swift, stunning coups and take overs - "
It's him alright, thought Sydney.
" - and is surrounded by secrecy. The rumour is that he's in partnership with a woman, though if that's true, no-one is sure of the exact nature of the role she plays - "
The words detonated in Sydney's head – a woman?
Someone pitched an idea, wondering if the White Devil alias wasn't for a man, but was actually for the woman herself, that there was no man? As they'd all been burned before by buying literally into 'The Man', that idea took hold and the debate veered off in that direction. Sydney didn't bother to listen, she didn't need to. With primitive certainty she knew she was right, she knew it was Sark. The discussion crashed on about her unheeded.
She felt numbed. Sark was with a woman? And it wasn't Mom, because she was downstairs … so …
Anna Espinosa? Maybe. Who else was there? She flicked through a list of names in her head, women with criminal connections, freelancers, rogue agents, and discarded them all. None of them was good enough not to be passenger compared with Sark, and Sark didn't carry passengers. Then a name came to her, a name so obvious that she didn't believe it – the name of the last woman Sark had been connected with as reported mere days ago in this very Situation Room – Dr. James Dodgson.
Sydney stilled, Dr. James Dodgson, a card-carrying, certified – some said 'certifiable' - genius. No danger of she being a passenger.
It can't be true!
Sark had hooked up with James Dodgson? Sydney didn't believe it, but then again there was the mysterious issue of how easy it had been to rescue the woman's family. No, Sydney still didn't buy it. No-one went from being an eccentric academic to being a super-criminal in under a week. No, if it was Dodgson then Sark hadn't hooked up with her, instead he'd hooked her!
The debate was ending and Kendall asked if anyone else had any ideas. Sydney jerked her head up and made to speak, but nothing would come out; it was as though her throat knew better than she what to do and had locked on her. The meeting moved on.
Sitting there, with her throat refusing to even voice a squeak, she abruptly realised that she had done. She had been faced with a split-second choice between Sark or the CIA, and she had unswervingly chosen Sark.
She was stunned.
She left the office early. Why not? - they owed her a ton of over-time! Besides, she had to get out, the whole issue of Vaughn, Dad, Kendall and now her elected secrecy over Sark, demanded that she get out and think.
On the way home she veered her SUV off the road to give herself time to be alone. If she got home early, there'd only be Francie or Will there. She looked about her through the windscreen and saw that she was on a sandy bluff overlooking the valley below. She knew the place. She was in the exact spot where she'd forced Sark off the road that time. Some unconscious radar had taken her right back there.
She was hit by a sickening thump of grief, fear and self-recrimination.
She stared blindly into space, her heart beating painfully against her ribs. She had just betrayed the CIA for a man she couldn't contact or control! She had just effectively betrayed her country. She had just wandered into a no-man's land between black and white, between angels and devils – a White Devil - and if it came to it, she could now be shot at by either side!
I betrayed the CIA and the nation!And then she remembered with crystal clarity the incident between them on this very spot. She gave an almost crazy half-laugh, bizarrely recalling the cars they'd driven when she'd shoved him off the road that time. Even their cars showed the gulf of difference between them! He chose to drive around in a defenceless open top sports coupe, she drove the nearest thing an apparent civilian could get to an armoured tank. To Sydney, right then their cars said everything about them. Sark's showed his verve, his confident assumption that his very quickness and speed of attack were the only defences he really needed, it showed his slick, snickering élan. She in comparison was enclosed, repelling all comers; she drove around as she lived her life – as though under a state of siege.
Something cracked within her. If only she had that time on this sandy bluff again, she'd change it all. She would have overcome her emotional cowardice and reached out to him, let him know it was safe to put his guard down. If only she had done that then, she could have spared them both.
She put her fists to her temples. If only!
Oh God, she didn't even know where exactly in the world he was, she might never be able to contact him! He could be out there right now committing any crime, however heinous!
She screamed at herself in her head.
If only I had done things differently! He wouldn't have been God knows where doing God knows what with God knows who, he'd have been here with me in LA, with a government more-or-less pardon and working, more-or-less, for the good guys!
If only I hadn't been such an arrogant bitch, he would have been safe now!Face clenched in grief, Sydney beat her fists against the steering-wheel.
When he'd tried to make her that 'comprehensive offer' at FAPSE, if only she'd just been less high-handedly dismissive! If out of the nearly 30 years of her life she had just given him three minutes to try and explain himself!
She hung over the steering wheel and burst into tears.
