Chapter 25: La Destreza - dexterity, skill, ability; the art and science of fighting.

Back in L.A. Jack was in his usual state of mind: suspicious.

What the hell was that boy Sark up to? And was Sydney involved in any way?

He didn't think for one second that his daughter had any active connection with the recent firebombing of the Vatican Embassy in Mexico City, even though she'd been there at the time of the neutron bomb going off. But she was his daughter and he'd more than picked up on her queasy distress during the firebombing briefing when Sark's involvement had been revealed. She had kept it well hidden, down to one blink and a swallow, but it had been there.

He had once darkly joked with himself that all Sark lacked from his resume was 'mass-murder'. Well, it looked like the boy had corrected that shortcoming.

Looked like it.

Jack had gone to Irina.

He'd hit her straight out with the firebombing incident, looking for intel. Irina's face had given her away, she was utterly stunned.

"No." She was shaking her head – rejecting the information.

For the first time in his life Jack Bristow saw Irina Derevko in denial and knew that quite possibly it was the first time that she had ever been in denial. He could quite clearly see that she had known nothing about it.

Well, get out of the river, lady.

"Still think that bastard's good enough for my girl, Irina?"

"He wouldn't have – he – you don't know him!"

"Well patently neither do you."

Irina's face was a mask of horrified disbelief. "It must be Sloane behind it!" Her eyes cast about at nothing, her mouth seemed to slacken and lose it's shape. Jack had never seen her so shocked. She seemed to gather herself and then looked at him with a desperate directness. "How's Sydney?"

Now that he had Irina Derevko on the back foot Jack wasn't giving up, he shoved hard. "Do you mean 'how is Sydney taking the news that her boyfriend's a mass-murderer'?" A sly needle, "why do you ask Irina?" and then the sucker-punch, "have you been setting her up to fall for Sark?"

Irina rocked but rallied. "From inside here? You over-estimate even my abilities!"

He ignored her attempted deflection. "I'm going to ask you once," he snarled, "is there anything going on between my daughter and that bastard?"

"If there is," she snarled back, "then neither of them has ever told me!"

Truth.

Jack turned on his heel and left.

Irina slumped to her cot, her heart hammering, black stars bursting before her eyes, she felt almost as though she was about to pass out. She could hardly take in the enormity of what Sark had done. She had known from Sark's signals that he was arranging for some threat posture on Sloane's part - but this?

My God – what's going on inside Sark's head?

Jack sat in his office, it's glass front giving him a good view of the Rotunda. He could see Sydney moving round like a trauma victim on medication and saw Vaughn sitting at his carousel with that vaguely pained expression that passed for thoughtfulness on his part. With a sudden, resentful viciousness the strength of which surprised him, Jack thought that someone should tell Vaughn that the expression just made him look constipated.

Jack was suspicious because the Echelon interception on the firebomb was another piece of coincidence he just could not swallow. The second one in as many weeks, the first having been that nonsense with the Caplan hostage rescue. He thought about it. Two incidents in two weeks … and the common denominator was that machiavellian brat Sark.

An Echelon intercept just when one was really needed? And one from the precise target area of their current mission, letting them know where to evacuate? And the thing was a supposed communiqué between two terrorists? The level of co-incidence was laughable. In his experience, terrorists didn't discuss their K-Mart shopping lists without using code – they certainly wouldn't have an upfront conversation about an impending mission over an unprotected channel!

"Terrorists', 'weapons of mass destruction', 'Rambaldi'; there had been enough information in that short burst to have given an analyst multiple orgasms. It was an orgy of evidence, orgies of evidence did not exist. Especially in … Jack thought about it … in one way conversations. He had reviewed the intercept, there hadn't even been any evidence to suggest it had been a two-way communication, it had almost been as though someone were talking to themselves … using Echelon to deliberately flare out a distress signal.

Sark?

Whoever had sent that message must have been on the spot at the time – the CIA had only been able to effectively evacuate because they'd known where the message had come from. Sark was on the spot at the time. Jack was betting that he was the only one there who knew what was going to happen. The little pisher knew about Echelon, he'd actually tried to steal an Echelon unit once, he knew how the system worked. If you wanted to get a last minute warning out, then loud hailing Echelon by using as many trigger words as you could cram into a compressed run-time would do it for you.

They had since tracked the little swine to Kandahar: Jack wasn't entirely sure that wasn't deliberate on Sark's part too, letting them know where they could find that bomb.

Sydney was about to be prepped and sent after it.

Was that kid playing a double game against Arvin Sloane? If so, Jack wondered whether he dared voice his suspicions on it. Information-wise Jack knew that the CIA was a sieve, and if Sark was running a double game then the fewer who knew about it the better.

Now that Jack was actively considering Sark, he realised that he had done a lot of back-brain calculation on the boy, had formed opinions on him without ever consciously realising it. He'd accumulated whispers of back-door intel on the deception-orientated brat, dark hints about an effectively parentless childhood and of being subsumed into some government project. It chimed awkwardly with Jack as he was very uncomfortably aware of the U.S. authorities' Project Christmas. He had formed an opinion on Sark's morality, or the lack of it. He suspected that the boy had been raised in a moral vacuum, that he'd been denied any template of 'good' or 'bad' upon which to base himself. He wondered if that partly explained his attachment to Irina, and then his even more unpleasant-seeming attachment to Sloane – was he at some level seeking some parental figure who could provide guidance? After all, having been reared in a morality-free zone didn't mean that the boy was without any intrinsic moral fibre, but rather that he did not know how to direct it. Jack had a sudden image of Sark as a wildly spinning compass needle, trying desperately to lock on to the moral version of a proper magnetic alignment but unable to find one.

He wondered, if he were right and Sark had – within the confines of the crazed world he functioned in – been trying to do the right thing recently, then did that mean that he had found some human lode stone to be guided by?

Well, Sark had better be careful if he were pulling a double game because he was up against Arvin Sloane. Sark was young and in comparison to Arvin Sloane he was inexperienced. In a straight power play shoot-out between Sloane and Sark, Jack was uncomfortably aware that his money wasn't on the boy to win. To put up a good fight yes, but not to win.

Jack decided to keep his thoughts to himself on the possibility of Sark double-gaming, because if Sark was up to something against Arvin Sloane, then the brat would need all the stealth he could get.

Two days later the brat was using all the stealth he had.

After Mexico he had not gone back to Russia as the White Devil, instead he was now poised on a hillside above the Rambaldi bomb's current location – in the Kandahar compound of a warlord named Kabir, a man who did not believe in divorce.

He was about to do something drastic. He was determined to prove to James Dodgson that she was wrong: that he could change.

Prior to leaving Russia he had locked James away under guard in a private Dacha, where Sloane could not find her in Sark's absence. She had been struggling, spitting, kicking with rage.

"Stop treating me like a goddamn parcel!"

He had not bothered to tell her that it was for her own good. Mr. Sark didn't do explanations. Instead, he glittered with a dark anger at her earlier rejection him. He had gathered himself together after his episode in the bathroom, refusing to depart from the only self he knew: Mr. Sark.

"You're staying here until I get back."

"You can't treat me like this! I'm a person!"

"No, you're property! You're an asset."

"I'm going to hate you for this!"

"You hate me already, remember? You made very sure to tell me so when you wished I was dead!"

He had phoned James after he had left Mexico, not giving details, explanations, excuses, but baldly stating that there would be a delay in his return. Snarling, she had spat that he'd better not be playing her.

He had half-laughed at her. "If I am, what choice do you think you've got?"

He flinched away from the memory, just thinking of her set off a seething anger in him, and right now he couldn't afford it. Right now he had to concentrate on the job in hand.

He had refused to think about Mexico and what he'd done there. He had suppressed the memory of it, because looking at it might kill him. He refused to engage in the game of shoulda, woulda, coulda. Whatever he should have, would have, could have, he hadn't. Instead he now focused and drove forward, morphing his hard anger into a concentration on his plan for fixing the mess.

Sark intended to blow the shit out of Kabir's compound and everything in it - bomb included - with air to ground missile strikes and daisy cutter drops. No fancy ground interception, no small assault troop incursion trickery, just complete erasure. With everything dead, he'd nip in to make utterly sure that the Rambaldi device was destroyed and then he'd leave. Sloane would never know what had really happened, and seeing how he already had his latest Rambaldi toy safely off the warlord – a segment of a Rambaldi page - he probably wouldn't care.

Sark had used three of the 20 million Sloane had transferred to him, following Sloane's sale of the firebomb, to engage an offshoot of the Russian air force as part of a mercenary manoeuvre.

The idea of destroying the warlord using the man's own money struck Sark as fitting.

He was in prone-position fifteen minutes before the night time air strike was due, camouflaged and kitted up with high calibre, long-range, sniper gear as much for viewing as for potential protection. He was the mission's ground spotter. He'd move back to a minimum safe distance in a few minutes.

A nice neat plan – not much to go wrong - until something did.

Viewing casually through his night vision sniper-scope, his body jumped slightly in his prone position at an explosion of activity in the compound. Two, no three figures, came lurching out amidst gunfire, carrying the bomb between them. One of them looked like they'd taken a long-time beat –

Sydney!

Even before he'd trained his sights on her face he knew it was her. From half a mile out in the dark he could tell her just by the line of her body, by the fall of her hair.

Sydney Bristow. He'd know her anywhere.

What the fuck is going on down there?

No time to think. Struggling to a half kneeling/half sitting position that broke his camouflage cover, he trained his sniper's rifle on the compound and began banging bullets into anything that moved that wasn't CIA. He wasn't greatly concerned with the two men accompanying Sydney who he thought were Dixon and … that fucker Vaughn! He drilled two bullets into a running man to expel his wrath. His over-riding concern was to get Sydney to safety. He could see the truck she was headed for and covered her access to it. As far as he was concerned, the other two agents could take their chances.

His heart was thumping in his chest, his veins singing with adrenalin. Amidst the confusion of the gunfight his deadly covering fire went undetected.

The only time he thought he'd been noticed was when Sydney had wrenched open the passenger side door to the truck and had faced a gun barrel pointed at her from one of Kabir's men who had simultaneously opened the driver's door. Sark had put a bullet through the man's head and blown him to oblivion. For a split second Sydney had frozen as the trajectory of the bullet had made no sense to her, as both Dixon and Vaughn were behind her. Sark coldly and calculatedly slammed a bullet into the brick wall at her back, startling her past her confusion and shoving her into the truck.

The three agents, and the bomb, escaped in the vehicle.

Up on the hill, Sark got his wild, lurching heartbeat back under control. For a second he felt almost physically sick. He had to bend double, kneeling over, almost on all fours trying not to retch.

Holy hell! Sydney was down there all along and I didn't even know! Fifteen minutes later and she would have been dead!

He was stunned. He'd always thought … it was stupid of him he knew, but he'd always imagined that he'd know when Sydney was in the game – some extra sense had always told him in the past. When he'd first seen her at that Moscow factory, he knew who she was. When they'd fought with latajangs, he'd known it was her. Even when she had been playing the vamp in Paris he had known, even though he had let her think he hadn't.

He had never forgotten that time in Paris, when she'd cut loose and camped it up on the stage. She'd shown her true colours then, because she thought no-one would see that it was the real her doing it. Watching her, he had suddenly known that the only way she could be fully alive was when she was pretending to be someone else, because she was too scared to plainly be herself.

Was that when I started to care for her?

He defiantly shook the thought out of his head. I care about her, not for her! There's a big difference!

Well, however he had known she was there before, he'd had no inkling tonight, not the remotest blip. It was as though some inner radar had been shaken out of line.

Sydney had been the one he had spotted as having taken a beating. She must have gone in a while ago, gotten captured and gotten tortured. He was betting that Dixon and Vaughn had come along much later to rescue her.

Vaughn, that fucker! Suppose I ought to give him one inch of respect for coming for her.

But his aside about Vaughn was a distraction and he knew it. Truth was, she'd been down there and he hadn't known it. He faced up to the reality: he'd been about to kill her. His whole body tensed almost to locking point at the recognition. He wanted to scream. He was rigid with anger: anger at himself, anger at Sloane and his dealings with Kabir, anger at the whole situation which enmeshed him. Like wildly arcing lightning, his rage sought out an external target to earth itself upon, and found one.

The stupid fucking CIA! Why hadn't they called in an air strike instead of sending in a lone agent? Why did they have to go for the complicated trick-shot over the obvious play every fucking time?

As he watched the truck safely depart, taking the bomb with it, he resentfully radioed to call off the imminent air strike, resentfully because he'd paid for it whether it happened or not. Besides, he would love to blow up Kabir's base, the bastard had it coming, but it wouldn't do though. It was counter-productive. The bomb had been retrieved already, blowing up the base with Russian jets would just tip his hand when right now the blame was squarely on the CIA and Kabir's own stupidity. It was time for him to leave. He turned to rise from his position, body unlocking from its anger-induced stiffness, his nausea conquered, and felt the razor edged knife of one of Kabir's long-range patrolmen at his throat.

He didn't even need to think. In one movement he gripped the man's wrist, snapped it, took the knife and gutted his opponent: in under the belly, up in a straight line and then out again. It took less than three seconds. He didn't even bother to look at the results as he casually dropped the man's own knife and stepped away into the dark, all anger spent.

The dark was quite happy to receive him. After all, in many ways Mr. Sark was one of its own.

The dying man slumped to the ground, his life flooding out of him. In the moonlight he had seen the stranger's pale hair and even paler skin. The silvery light had caught the trespasser's eyes as he had turned, rendering their irises to an almost inhuman, mirrored sheen.

The man died, having only time for one thought: I've been killed by a White Devil …

Sydney lay in the bath when she got home after Kandahar, gazing within herself, drained, beyond all tears. Vaughn crouched on the floor beside her, leaning against the side of the tub, trying to comfort her just by being there.

If only she could whole-heartedly love the man who was with her now, but she couldn't; she was grappling again with the presence of the monster under the bed, the wolf at the door: Sark.

She had tried to hold on to her rage against him – to use it as a shield against her feelings for him – but she couldn't. She kept mentally shouting at herself that he'd taped her having sex, that he'd been laughing at her; her mind kept shouting about the firebomb in Mexico, but her inner shouts kept turning to sobs. She couldn't hold her anger together. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't make herself hate Sark.

She thought she was losing her mind.

All through her ordeal at Kabir's base one of the things that had kept her going was the utter conviction that Sark would come and get her. And how crazy was that? But she had held fast to it. She knew that Sloane was there, and so she had clung to the certainty that as Sloane were there then surely Sark must be there too. That Sark must know she were held captive and being put to torture, that he would finally snap and change sides and come and save her. Rationalising that Sark was near she had found herself focussing on him obsessively, almost as though sheer telepathy could bring him to her.

But then Sloane had left, and Sark had still not come … and at great personal risk Vaughn and Dixon had.

How could she not love Vaughn after all he'd done for her? What kept her clinging on to the possibility that Sark might be human, even after all the things he had done to her?

He was a murderer, a liar, he had betrayed her personally, the only reason he wasn't a convicted killer was that no government had ever caught up with him. He was the enemy. Why couldn't she just give up on him? Why couldn't she commit to Vaughn, who was tired, battered, worn, but despite everyone's vague, dark suspicions about she and Sark, had still risked his life to come and save her?

Just how far down did Sark have to sink before she could let him go?

She didn't even really know him. A man who had mass-murdered his way through a church congregation? A man who had bugged her home while she had sex and had no doubt been callously laughing at her? How far down into some black, icy sea was she prepared to let him drag her until the evidence finally forced her to give up her grip on him, to give up the conviction that he was capable of … redemption?

Giving up on Sark. She knew she should, she knew she must, but almost with a self-hate, she knew she hadn't done it yet.

All the terrible things he'd done, to her and to others and at times even to himself, and yet she still could not hate him.

She wanted to weep in frustration and grief. What was wrong with her that she still held on?

Thinking of his crimes, she spoke, almost talking to herself. "Every time we think we've seen the worst, and it's never over … "

Author's note: and yup, the interpretation of Sydney's motivation for that last line of dialogue is sheer fanwank. And do I care? No!