Chapter 19: Camineering - a change in the line of threat or in the line of attack.

In the early hours of the morning that same night, Sark was alone in his private rooms in the Palace suite, leaning back against a bureau, jacket off, bare-foot, shirt loose, hands in his hair, almost despairing. He caught a reflection of himself in a far off mirror. Amidst all the chaos surrounding him he had time for one incongruous thought: I need a haircut.

A number of days had passed since he had shot James. Things in his syndicate had stabilised, he'd had the damage to the Palace salon cleared up and now used the place as his centre of operations. He had organised cold-blooded and highly profitable drug deals and weapons sales. He had engineered take-overs of bigger organisations which were further along the chain of criminal exchange, closer to the end-user and thus with greater profit margins. His take-overs had been leveraged not by money or junk bonds but by speed, ruthlessness and efficiency. The crime business was like any other: prey to those who were prepared, proficient and unimpeded by any sentiment. The expected counter-coup had arisen but by then his value had been so appreciated by his juniors that he hadn't even had to suppress it himself, his lieutenants had done it for him. With security established and the profits rolling in, their loyalty was assured.

He knew they called him The White Devil.

A wine glass and an opened bottle of Petreus lay on a table beside him, he ignored them. Truth was, he wanted something stronger, and because he wanted something stronger he wasn't going to allow himself to have anything at all. He not only had the pressure of the self-imposed situation with James to deal with, but now something else had happened.

Allison Doren had phoned.

Sydney had apparently come home early, utterly distraught, sobbing something startling about 'how she'd tried but she just had to break it off with Michael'. She'd clutched her cell-phone, jabbing Vaughn's number with shaking fingers … and had set up feedback whistling from the hallway wall.

The bugs Sloane had ordered installed in Sydney's home had been uncovered, and Allison, who had planted them, was worried that her cover was now under threat.

Sark had found himself torn. He had been suddenly furious at the incongruous thought that the bugging had evidently gotten in the way of Sydney dumping that loser Vaughn and part of him had wanted to snarl, well get out then. Bugging Sydney's a dirty business anyway - but he had not. He had instantly known two things. First, if Allison ran then Sydney would find out sooner rather than later that her best friend and house-mate Francie wasn't 'Francie' at all, but a clone of her.

Sloane had arranged to have Francie Calfo killed and replaced with a clone, the clone had done the killing. The clone was Allison Doren.

Secondly Sark knew that if Allison ran that that he would also lose 'Francie's' access to her boyfriend's - Will Tippin's - CIA connections which he had hoped to exploit for Irina's ends.

Christ, thought Sark, was Sloane genuinely a lunatic? Did he not see that if he ever wanted to bring Sydney over to him for his strange Rambaldi purposes, that murdering her friends was not the way to do it?

When Sark had heard that the woman cloned into Francie Calfo was none other than Allison Doren, he had thought his particular Hell complete. Allison. The woman who'd hurt him more than anyone else ever had, and now he was having to work with her again, when she was right next to Sydney with a knife at Sydney's oblivious back.

Fuck!

Allison had sent him electronic copies of the surveillance of Sydney. Gifts, she'd sniggeringly referred to them as, taunting him: I think they'll appeal to your tastes. When he had begun to play them he had seen what she meant. There had been coverage of Sydney and Vaughn having sex.

In his time with Allison they'd done pretty much everything: voyeurism, SM, bondage, role-play, sex clubs, anything Sark could imagine or devise, however dark. Sark saw himself as taking the same expedient attitude toward sex that he took to most other practical things: if he wanted something he coldly and calculatedly went after it until he got it. Even if it was bad for him. Especially if it was bad for him. Allison knew his tastes alright, but she had been wrong about imagining he'd be keen to watch the surveillance.

He hadn't watched the data download, well, not the sexual elements of it. He couldn't, he felt dirty, low, vile at even the thought of watching. He'd sped through those sections, partly looking away even as he did so, the fast-forward reducing Sydney's actions to jerky slapstick comedy, rendering them emotionally harmless. Instead he had found his attention caught by an observation of her, late at night, sitting in her kitchen. It had been puzzling, disturbing even. She had been alternately sobbing and laughing, pushing what looked like coffee beans around a countertop. To Sark's discomfort and alarm, she'd looked like she was having some kind of mini breakdown.

It had been a deeply unsettling thing for him to have to watch. Sydney Bristow, the pious, upright and unyielding Miss Manners of the spy world had been stripped to reveal a lost, confused, scared little kid? He had felt an illogical urge to reach out and touch the screen, as though to comfort her. He'd been deeply relieved to see her portrayed as walking about as normal in footage of the next day.

The memory of that had been one more factor in his decision not to allow Allison to run. Sydney still thought she had Francie. If Allison ran, Sydney would effectively have 'Francie' taken from her, and having seen the disconcerting surveillance, Sark now knew that Francie was a prop Sydney needed. He regarded Sydney as annoying, judgemental, immature, but still … he couldn't stop himself from liking her, he didn't want to be the one responsible for tipping her over an edge from which even she could not get back.

He'd told Allison that if the CIA were looking for a Sloane L.A. asset, then she should make sure they found one, effectively telling her to kill someone and make it look as though they were the infiltrator. He'd hung up, cutting the connection. He knew Allison would be furious at his peremptory hanging up. Well, let her, she was three thousand miles away and out on a limb, she'd have to do as she was told; for once.

Their mutual, intense sexual history had left each with a certain sense of the proprietary over the other. Sark resented hers over him, and he was bloody sure Allison resented his over her. There was no denying it though, with Allison he'd had the most insanely hot sex of his entire life.

Accent on the 'insane'.

He recalled her. She was a fucking bunny-boiler alright, but God … there was no getting round the fact that at some level he understood her.

The sex had been deliciously filthy throughout all the time they'd been together, that dark psychological delight never once letting up.

She was the only woman he'd ever let sexually dominate him, ever let totally reduce him to the level of a naked, gagged and bound sex-toy. It had been an unbelievable kick. He remembered the first time he'd let her do it, when he'd coolly decided to experience what it was like, for once, to be completely out of control, but within a relatively safe environment. Relatively safe, relative to say standing on top of a nuclear reactor which was about to go critical. Even now he could fully recall what the first time had felt like, the sheer switched on terror of being held helpless as she'd played with him. Eventually she'd started playing with knives - he knew she would, she loved them - not cutting him, but sinuously threatening to cut him. It had been one of the few times in his life when he'd felt completely alive, because he had suddenly known what it was like to fear.

She hadn't liked it half so much when he had gotten bored with his adopted submissive role and had reverted to type and turned the tables on her. It had been the other way round then, he'd held her completely bound and helpless and had done whatever he had casually fancied to her.

That was the kind of game he liked best.

She'd let him do it, thinking she might like it, but he had known her far better than she knew herself and had known that she wouldn't, and of course he had been right. He looked back on her: poor baby, she hated being told what to do, she so lacked any genuine power that she hated any external evidence of weakness because she knew it portrayed the actual truth. He had always known that all her strutting about wasn't an expression of confidence but rather an effort to hide her powerlessness from herself and from anyone else who might happen to be watching. He may have been a paid servant of Irina's, but Allison was a servant to many more, including to himself. She was the servant of a servant.

Having got her helpless, he'd left her with no option but to submit, and he had shoved her through every last one of her psychological red stop lights until she had. He'd shown far more mental cruelty in devising his torments for her than she could ever show in devising hers for him. He had promised her that he would and she should have listened, he always kept his promises.

He made a present of her - tied her with red ribbons - a gift from he to himself.

'Did I give you permission to close your eyes? No, I don't think I did. I shall have to remind you to behave Allison …'

In that one, far-off afternoon he had deliberately set out to wreck their relationship with a bout of utterly destructive sex. He knew why he had done it. They had been emotionally close, so close that he could see straight through her, straight through to the unavoidable fact that with her driven need to be on top, Allison Doren was always going to betray Mr. Sark at some point. He had seen the way she had loved dominating him, the way she had needed to do it, and had known that he had to wreck the relationship to get that hidden enmity out into the open so he could deal with it.

Next morning she'd come at him with a knife.

He'd been relieved really, with her deep-rooted resentment of him finally revealed, he could deploy that many more defences against it.

He had been right to think that she was always going to betray him, because later on of course he found out that she had. Just not in a way he had ever imagined.

That had been years ago.

They'd fucked plenty of times since of course, she liked it too much with him not to, even though she hated it. Sometimes he wondered if she liked it because she hated it. In any case, it was always with the undertow of resentment on her part and an amused wariness on his.

He straightened up off the bureau, pulling himself up out of his recollections of Allison like a swimmer rising through water who gently breaks the surface.

He stretched, slightly cramped, he knew he wasn't going to get any orthodox sleep that night. Years ago Irina had taught him a trick with circadian rhythms – all the benefits of sleep from just a few seconds of inner meditation - he'd get his rest that way. He knew that one of the reasons his men held him in increasing awe was his seeming ability to rise above such mere things as the need for sleep. They thought he was inhuman.

He was suddenly angry at a separate swathe of recollections about yet another woman. Almost growling, he stalked away from the bureau, crossed the room and flung himself into a deep armchair. He was still furious with James. Indeed his fury had hardened and transmuted; distilled into some heated venom that he felt as though he might spit at her.

Since she'd pulled a gun on him she was allowed nothing that could be used as a weapon – if she wanted to eat she did it with her fingers, if she wanted to drink, she could only drink from a paper cup. During the day she was manacled to her desk by a wrist and to her chair leg by one skinny, and by now very dirty, ankle. They'd bolted the chair to the floor. He told himself she deserved it; she'd hurt him with more than mere bullets.

Still hadn't stopped her snarking though.

"This organisation 'a yours actually gotta name? Ooh, I know, how 'bout 'Assassins R Us'? Nope, don't like that? Oh I know … got it!" She had moved her hand through the air in front of her, like someone tracing a banner headline: "Bodyguards Gone Bad!"

He now had the problem of how to force her to progress with the Rambaldi projects. If he didn't crack on and get a Rambaldi breakthrough that would panic the CIA into releasing Irina to go after Sloane, then Irina was stuck in L.A. for a very long time. He had already called Sloane to tell him that he had shot James, he knew he'd have to report it eventually and reporting it quickly had given him the maximum chance of smoothing it over, presenting it as a necessary step rather than some evidence of incipient chaos.

There had been a silence from Sloane, when the man had spoken he had sounded distinctly cold down the line.

Sark had used the liquid anger he felt toward James to explore all her sneering. Where or why had she learned that mode of response? During childhood? If so, what kind of fucked-up childhood had she experienced, to devise a strategy like that? He had ruthlessly ignored the inner voice which had whispered: one like your own. Was her sneering an armour, a disguise she wore to protect something more vulnerable and tender?

He had tested it.

"We're likely to be here some time, so when is your cycle?"

"Uh?" He had detected a stumbling pause and a blushing of her skin as she realised what he was talking about. "Oh, I get ya, when am I 'on the rag'? Dunno, never was much one for clockin' the dates, I just wait for Mother Nature to show me the red flag."

He had guessed the words were a display of vulgarity flung up as a defence, and had called her out on it.

"Really? Shall I buy towels or tampons?"

She had spat water all over the lap-top screen.

Sark had been secretly exultant. Got you!

He may have given up the disgusting threat to kill a child but he had found that he could get leverage in another way: James could be embarrassed, shamed and humiliated. He'd finally nailed the fact that her sneering demeanour wasn't a way of showing that she didn't care what people thought, it was a display that she did; otherwise why would she be so keen to prove that she didn't?

It was mean, it was nasty, it was cruel, but he recognised just what he intended to do. He was going to invent a whole new interrogation method designed just for Dr. James Dodgson: Humiliation 101. He was going to force her to engage in demeaning scenarios which were specifically designed for her to 'lose', and he was going to relentlessly rig the rules to make sure she did lose. Schoolyard Bullying the Sark way. He felt a fierce glow of what might have been pride at his newfound tactic. Almost a grim satisfaction.

Because I'm a clever bastard and she's crossed swords with the wrong man this time! She'll learn her lessons, I won't stop teaching them to her until she has.

He was going to take James apart and recreate her as something dependent upon him, as something he could use. Sitting, almost lying in the deep leather armchair chair, he kicked his legs out before him and bit his lip in vexation. And then, when I've kicked away all her props and given her nowhere to run except to me, I'll tell her I don't want her!

A fresh wave of wrath seized him.

Because she deserves it, the conniving cat! She's got it coming, damn her! She hurt me!

He took a 360 degree look about him, half a condescending check on the aesthetics of his environment and half his regular, subconscious, automatic radar-sweep for trouble. He was genuinely puzzled at what he detected: why was it that a place so grand suddenly seemed so squalid?

In Italy, Arvin Sloane cried soundlessly in his sleep, weeping with pain.

He would not remember the bitter experience when he awoke, when he wept with pain in his sleep he never remembered it – he only knew that there were times when he awoke fired with a certainty that a particular thing must happen. It was odd, he reflected, it was almost as though he'd been schooled to the recognition in his sleep, but he couldn't see how.

It particularly happened when he was in doubt over the issue of Rambaldi.

Sark's shooting of Dodgson had sparked doubts over whether he could create The Telling, because he needed Dodgson for that and now he had doubts over Dodgson because he had doubts over Sark.

When he awoke in the morning after his weeping, twisting night in Italy, Sloane felt fired by a certainty. It was time to fully acquaint himself with Dr. Dodgson's progress. There should be no doubt about The Telling, there should be no fear of failure because there could be no failure. It was not allowed.

He did not know why he felt that, he just knew that he did.

He made his arrangements. Sloane knew that he had god-like aspirations but still, he knew that he himself was only human. He had no intention of facing the much younger, stronger, faster Sark without protection. Having had hired someone he felt was equal to the task, he was content. When he awoke in the mornings subsequently, he felt refreshed, as though he had drifted, cosseted, through sleep.

In his waking hours he was concentrating on Sark: the boy was potentially a danger and sometimes dangers had to be dealt with.

Author's note: to see how Allison betrayed and hurt Sark, see Evoness' great Sarkney fic, Dark Knight.