Chapter 33: Mediatajo - cuts made from the elbow (faster than from the shoulder but not as strong).
"Leaving us to stew, huh? That old trick."
"He always did lack imagination in interrogation."
Sloane had stood in front of Jack and Irina with that aimless smile on his face. The fact that he had quite openly stood there was worrying, because patently he didn't give a shit whether they knew it was him or not. Did he not care because he knew that at the end they wouldn't be alive to tell? He had left, they knew that next time he returned, the 'questioning' would start.
They each struggled against their individual bonds, Irina unable to reach Jack to untie him and Jack unable to reach Irina. Their breath came in annoyed gasps as they each quietly twisted and strained. Irina flicked a look across at Jack. "I can't believe you hated that orange paint."
Jack glared across at her. "You asked me and I told you. If you didn't want to know, you shouldn't have enquired. Besides … you knew perfectly well at the time that I hated it."
"How was I supposed to know when you never said? What am I psychic? I was supposed to know that you wanted the brown paint? - which you only admit now, by the way, decades after the fact!"
"I did say so at the time!"
"When? We stood in that hardware store looking at the two colours we'd narrowed it down to and you said, 'which colour do you want, the orange or the brown?' and I said the orange!"
"Well it was obvious I wanted the brown. I said brown last so I wanted you to pick brown. Besides, who in their right mind has a dining room that's orange?"
"What? I was supposed to pick brown because you said it last? What kind of logic's that? And orange, I'll remind you, was very fashionable at the time and … and a very sensible colour for a dining room because it's … it's …" she fished around wildly, "it's the colour of food!"
"The colour of food – that is a reason? Well if we're going to use that as the basis of our logic, why not choose brown? After all, it's got food named after it – Fudge Brownies!"
Irina glared at him, trying to think of a way to outflank him … "oranges!"
The two operatives glared at each other from across the room: trapped, at the mercy of a madman, in a situation from which either or neither might come out alive and arguing bitterly about Irina's choice of paint more than twenty years ago. Each held the other's gaze mutinously, and then in the same slow second, like a glacier finally cracking in a late Spring thaw, each began to roar with laughter.
Sark looked down, smiled serenely at Walker, and kicked him in the head.
Sark and Sydney had experienced a surprisingly easy time of it, most of the guards were already dead outside, those few remaining inside had been caught in a pincer movement by a Simon Walker who'd weighed things up, taken his chances and decided to switch sides to join whoever had turned up and not just wait for Sloane to kill him.
Sark moved swiftly down on James who immediately turned on her heel and sprinted for a door. He caught her, picked her up, and clamped her down onto the table-top.
"GET OFF ME!"
"Yep, still hating me I see."
Sark jerked his head and spoke over his shoulder to a Sydney who had just entered and was quickly cuffing the semi-conscious Walker and yanking her ski-mask down backwards over his head, blindfolding him. "Forty-five seconds Sydney, pin her down!"
"What?" A screaming James jerked her head up at Sydney who swooped down on her, grabbing here. "I've seen a picture of you! You're CIA! Why are you helping him?" She saw Sark twirling a scalpel between his fingers like a conductor's baton. "Get away from me with that thing, you maniac!"
"Your husband is a spy for the Russians," Sydney spoke, trying to pin the struggling woman flat.
"Graham? He hasn't got the imagination to be a spy!"
"Hold her down Sydney! Your husband is a spy for the Russians, he was a sleeper sent to keep tabs on you. They chipped you with a radio tracker which was why we were able to find you – and they also implanted you with a cyanide pellet which is due to go off in under a minute. We have to get it out."
He ripped her jacket off and yanking off up the sleeves of her shirt.
"Are you crazy? That's the stupidest thing I've heard since … ever!"
Sark turned to Sydney. "The pellet implant's normally in the forearm, look for a scar."
There was a diminutive circular scar in James' inner left forearm, about the side of a large lentil.
"How did you get that?" Sark prodded it with the scalpel.
"How the fuck do I know!"
"For Christ sakes Sydney, will you hold her down!"
Angrily, Sydney slammed James forearm hard down onto the table.
"Ow! You freaky bitch!"
Without prior warning Sark plunged the scalpel into the scar, making a neat, short incision in James' arm. James started screaming for him to stop. Sark had no intention of stopping. Skilled with enough medical knowledge to perform full-scale field operations – on himself if he had to – he had missed all the major blood vessels. He inserted a pair of long-stemmed tweezers into the gap. His heart was hammering, his internal clock told him he had twelve seconds left. He was fishing for the target, not even fully knowing if it was there, beating off that growing inner clamour that was screaming ever more loudly: I can't find it! It's not here! Then he found it, the thing that shouldn't be there. Round, hard, a pellet. He felt around it with the tweezer ends and got it.
"Five seconds!" screamed Sydney.
And then he lost it again. It was too slippy.
"Four seconds!"
Time seemed to dip into slow motion, Sydney's voice was some long, deep drawl of a recording running on slow-play, he looked up at the screaming James and knew what he had to do: he plunged three fingers into the cut and ripped the pellet out. A small blue plastic ball. He flicked it into a glass cookie jar that was open on the kitchen table and slammed shut the airtight lid.
All three of them looked at it a second later when the deadline ran out: nothing happened.
And then … SPLAT! It coated the inside of the jar with flecks of blue plastic and a thick, viscous liquid.
James stopped screaming and threw up.
The kitchen was a maelstrom of raised voices.
"You blond motherfucker, I am gonna kill you when all this is done!" James was almost sobbing with shock - wet-faced with snot, tears and sweat - crouched over, holding her arm, whimpering and rocking to and fro.
"Fine! Just add 'saving your life' to the rest of the sins you hate me for! And you think your husband's too dull to be a spy? You should see her boyfriend," Sark flung and arm wildly in Sydney's direction. "He's got 'dull' down to such an art you'd think it was the western equivalent of Japanese flower arranging!"
Sydney's voice rose another notch. "Don't criticise Vaughn!"
"Why not? He's not even here to help you! You picked Marshall as back up! Remember?"
Sark was on a frantic edge. He was having to deal With James' resentment in front of the audience of Sydney and having to deal with Sydney's wrath in front of the audience of James. He was a man deeply uncomfortable with emotions, and now he was having to deal with two outstanding sets of heightened ones at once.
For her part Sydney had felt an implosion of angry despair. Sark cared for this woman Dodgson, she knew it. It was obvious. They might claw and snarl at each other, Dodgson might even hate Sark, but Sark cared for her and Sydney could see it. She, Sydney, had left it all too late. Her fury was from fear and grief and anger: she'd lost him before she had ever really had him.
James angrily wiped her nose on the only thing she had, her sleeve, and gave a wet snort of harsh, unbalanced laughter as she took in the screaming, angry Sydney. "Glad to see you have this effect on other women and not just me!"
Sark heard the white hiss of anger in his head. "Christ, are you ever going to give me a break?"
"Duh, shot me. Remember?"
Sark and James' match was interrupted by Sydney who was screaming something about Russia.
"Just answer the question!" she screamed, fists balled. "Are you the White Devil?" Sark nearly jumped on the spot. What the fuck? Irina had told her? Sydney screamed on. "Are you The Out Of Nowhere, Moscow crime boss?"
Sark gave an abrupt, sarcastic snort of laughter, derision born of sheer relief. "Oh, that one."
"Don't be so sarcastic! You're making it really hard for me to like you Sark!" screamed Sydney.
"All part of his 'cunning plan'," spat a tear-stained James. "He's full of 'em."
"Sark, how am I supposed to have any faith in you if you won't let me?" screamed Sydney, ignoring James. "Look, Dad thinks you used Echelon to tip off the CIA about that church bombing, did you?"
"What?" screamed James. "A church bombing?"
"Not a church, it was the Vatican Embassy," Sydney reprimanded harshly.
"What?" James gawped at Sark. "The Vatican? You hit the Pope?"
"Not the Vatican!" screeched Sydney. "I said the Vatican Embassy - in Mexico!"
"You bombed a church?"
"Oh for God's sake! It was the only way to get her mother out of prison!" Sark roared. He jabbed a finger at Sydney. "The truth is Sydney, that out of the two of us the only one who's ever broken into the Vatican is you! When you shot one of the guards!"
"That is not how it - " Sydney felt her outrage choke her. "Oh, you are lying, cheating and deception on a stick!"
Sark laughed, tilting his head back. "You forgot 'sex'."
"You're not half the man Vaughn is!"
"Considering trading up are you?"
"How could I trade up to you?"
"From the base-line of a little whinger I thrashed in a stairwell in Stuttgart? - quite easily!"
"Oh I forgot, you beat him in a fight, just before you blew up the building killing scores of people!"
"You what?" screamed James. "For Chrissakes Sark, is there any place you haven't shot the shit out of?"
"I did it for her mother!"
"You did it for her mother? That's a reason?"
"Don't blame my mother!"
"Hey! Don't snap at me, Miss arm-slicing, CIA Super Bitch!"
"I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to him!" Sydney turned back to Sark. "And in Stuttgart you were going to shoot Vaughn through the head, even though you already had him on the ground! You were going to blow him away!"
"What? Oh, that does it!" snarled Sark. "I was going to blow him away? Well, we'll never know, will we? Because you ever so nobly shot the gun out of my hand, didn't you? What, couldn't you bear to shoot me?"
"Is that supposed to be irony?" screamed Sydney.
"Oh puhleeze," sneered James, "try to keep up can't you, Little Miss CIA? That's sarcasm, he charges extra for 'irony'."
Sydney ignored her. "God, I think I preferred it when you were straight evil!"
"Compared to Agent Yawn - or should that be Agent Fawn? - you'd prefer me any way you could get me! Christ, what a boring bastard! His 'special field-skill' is speaking French! I speak French and so do sixty million French people, so what's so frigging special about that? He's an arsehole, a self-questioning little wimp, a man who needs you to save his life on practically every mission you both go on – how many times have you nearly been killed saving him? – and …" Sark scrabbled for the worst thing he could think of, "and he's badly dressed!"
"Vaughn and I have an adult relationship based on mutual respect!"
"Adult? ADULT? You write his name on your CIA standard-issue pencil case and plaster your Situations Update folder with cute little slogans: 'The One True Pairing', 'We Always Find Each Other', 'Soul Mates'. As far as I'm concerned you can have him! You suit each other!"
"Well you should know, seeing how you bugged my house so you could watch us HAVING SEX!"
"I did not do that, it was Sloane!" Sark roared. "And if you really want to know, I fast forwarded through those damned sex-tapes so I wouldn't have to watch!"
"What?" Despite her shouting, Sydney felt a slight stutter of confusion. "What? It wasn't hot enough for you?"
"Hot? HOT? I've seen hotter action watching field-mice shag on the Discovery Channel! Jesus! It took a year of mutual angst before you even kissed! What were you waiting for, your virginity to grow back?"
"We had National Security to consider!"
"National Security?" sneered Sark. "If you two worked in the Library service you'd fret about leaving a gas-ring switched on when you left for work in the morning."
"Vaughn is a wonderful lover!"
"That fumbling bastard? The clue's in the name! Run it through a Spellchecker and it'd come out 'Michael Vague'! No wonder you have to get your kicks out in the field, dressing as a prostitute, whoring yourself out for the CIA! Christ! The things I've seen you dressed as, it'd make a pole-dancer blush!"
"I do not know what you're talking about! I dress appropriately for the Alias!"
"Appropriately? I've seen more conservative clothing on a Bangkok hooker! In fact with the fishnets, cheap nylon, hooker-wigs and just about anything red, these days I just look around to see if there's a spectacularly ill-dressed woman present and I assume it's you!
"Thanks for the life-advice … Jedi Master!"
"Don't stand on ceremony, call me Darth!"
"Darth what? Darth Sark? Darth Sarcasticus? Darth Sardonicus?"
"Oh please!" spat James. "It's obvious! - Darth Bastard!"
There was a ringing silence and then glaring at a nonplussed Sark, Sydney splintered into a howling, full-throated laughter.
