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Vaughn's POV
Is something wrong? She doesn't know the half of it. "Yeah… yeah, I guess you could say that," I tell her. You could definitely say that. Everything is wrong in Michael Vaughn's life. "Like what? I mean, if you don't mind me asking, that is…" she trails off. Like what? Oh, I don't know. Maybe something like "The woman I was in love with disappeared 6 years ago." She suddenly can't look at me. I don't blame her. I can hardly look at me. I should have been able to save her. It was a simple mission. Irina directed Sydney to Battle Creek, Michigan, where she would retrieve a disk containing valuable info. Simple op, we'd done it a thousand times. Syd went in, got the disk, and confirmed that she was on her way to the extraction point.
She never made it.
I never heard anything else from her. No fights, no words, nothing. She was just… gone. Jack and I were on a plane out to Battle Creek 1 hour later. Kendall made us wait to confirm that Sydney was indeed MIA, and not just delayed in making the rendezvous. Some not-so-veiled threats from Jack, myself, and even Irina helped him decide to cut down the wait time.
We found nothing. No blood. No equipment. No disk. She had vanished without a trace. At first, Jack refused to leave Battle Creek until she was found. It took me pointing out that we couldn't help Syd by looking around aimlessly out there. He finally agreed to leave, but he was then at the Ops Center all night, and he didn't bother going to SD-6 the next day. After a lot of work on my part, he was convinced that he needed to go see Sloane with a cover for Sydney's absence. I reminded him that Sloane would more than likely be willing to expend some of his SD-6 resources to search for Sydney. Jack agreed with me, and told Sloane that she had left for Michigan to visit an old friend, but she had never arrived, and hadn't made contact with him. Sloane bought it without question, and instantly sent a small team out to look for her. Dixon insisted upon being part of the team, and Sloane made him the leader.
However, as the year progressed with no sign of Sydney, Dixon was assigned a new partner, and the SD-6 search team dwindled. Jack spent more and more time at the Ops Center, and less time at SD-6 or home. I had hoped that reminding him that destroying SD-6 was what Sydney lived for would be enough motivation to pull himself out and finish the job. Instead, he became more detached. Eventually, Sloane started becoming suspicious. He had given Jack a surprising amount of leeway when it came to looking for Sydney, but enough was enough. Finally, the CIA had to pull Jack out. He had been exposed.
Ooooh… I'm just gonna leave it there for now. Mainly because the next part has all of 2 paragraphs, so I'm not ready to do anything with it yet. But since I kinda like this story, I promise it wont be a really really long time before I update! Please review, it would be a great birthday and christmas present, since my b-day is 2 days before X-mas and all…