FAMILY MATTERS

Eyghon

"Doctor Jain is the guy you're looking for."

"Wait…you mean…he's the one? The one that…raped me?"

"Torturing him…cutting him to pieces…feeding him to the sharks. Whatever you want, but Mom and I want in on it also."

Chapter 18: The Derevko revenge

"Doctor Jain!" The man turned around, startled, to find Sydney Bristow hurrying toward him.

"Hello, Agent Bristow…I mean, Director Bristow. I heard about your promotion, congratulations." He returned her smile and they shook hands.

"Thank you."

They were in the parking garage of the Stafford Naval Hospital where Sydney and Nadia were treated, like many agents of the CIA and APO. Sydney looked around the deserted area, acutely aware of the cameras covering every angle of the parking. Jain was supposed to finish his shift at 21h00 and it was now nearing midnight. The good doctor didn't mind putting in extra work apparently.

"Were you injured?" He inquired kindly, searching for obvious sign of injuries.

"No, I was just here to fill in some paperwork for Nadia," she explained. He didn't flinch at the mention of her sister. "I had a long day at the office and could only come in now. I'm on my way home." She motioned toward her SUV, parked a few rows away.

"Oh, of course, sorry for keeping you. Here, I'll walk you to your car."

They made their way to alley 7 and he held the door open for her like a true gentleman. She had to muster all her training to keep a polite smile on her face and not rip his eyeballs out.

"Goodbye Doctor."

"Goodbye Director Bristow, take care."

Her car emitted a pitiful cough when she turned the key in the ignition and then nothing. Doctor Jain came back toward her as her third attempt failed. She popped the hood and slammed the door behind her.

"I don't see anything wrong," he said, frowning in contemplation of her motor. "But then again, I specialise in the human body, not car engines."

She chuckled, pretending to be smitten with him, and adopted a sorrowful frown. "Damn, it picked the worst time to die on me. I have to get home now. I left Nadia with a friend but she'll freak if she doesn't see me before going to bed."

"Well…I suppose I could drive you home. You won't get a tow truck in here tonight anyway."

She resisted the urge to smile in triumph. The man was doing everything she had thought he would. A perfect gentleman. Her plan was working to perfection.

"Really? It would be so nice of you, thank you!" She put a "broke down" sign on her windshield. The security here was tight and her parking pass only allowed her to stay for two hours. She didn't need a zealous soldier deem her car a security risk and tow it away to have it blown up. She made a show of closing the hood and locking her car for the cameras' sake before following the good doctor to his car.

He didn't know where she lived so she gave him directions. To his surprise, thirty minutes later, they didn't end up at her house but on the docks. He never noticed the SUV with tainted windows that was following him since they'd left the hospital.

He looked at her in confusion. "I don't understand, you don't live here," he told her, looking thoroughly confused.

"No, I don't. Sorry to drag you out here at such an hour but…I wanted you to meet someone."

He shivered. Something was wrong with her. She looked at him with a scowl on her face and she sounded cold. It suddenly dawned on him then, alas too late: she knew. She knew what he'd done. His door was pulled open from the outside and before his very eyes stood the infamous Irina Derevko. He recognised her easily because of her resemblance to her daughter. Before he could react, she grabbed him by his jacket lapel and threw him on the ground where he landed roughly. Rolling in the dirt until he faced the ceiling, he noticed a third person was there. Nadia Santos.

She glared down at him and kicked him in the head hard enough for him to black out.

When he awoke, he'd been moved from the floor to another part of the warehouse. He knew he hadn't changed location though because he could still see his car, parked at the same spot he'd left it.

The three women were standing a few feet away, talking among themselves. Probably plotting his death. If he was lucky it'd be quick but he had no such illusions. He had no doubt he would not walk out of this place alive. He'd heard rumours about Sydney Bristow and Irina Derevko. Even if they usually were on opposite sides, they were a family. He'd attacked one of them and there would be hell to pay for it soon.

He'd been stupid, certain he wouldn't get caught. After all, the girl was supposed to stay insane for the rest of her life. Locked up in a padded cell where he could have access to her all he wanted. But her sister, the sweet Sydney, had insisted on checking her out of the facility and taking her home with her. Then, she'd apparently found a cure and discovered about his little 'infatuation'.

The CIA screened for people like him. They had tests, questions, psychological analyses to keep what they called 'bad elements' or 'unstable people' from their ranks. He'd passed with flying colours. He hadn't been detected as a sociopath or a psychopath. Everybody saw him as a kind, caring doctor. Over the years, he'd been careful to preserve that image. His superiors. His colleagues. His patients. All of them bought it. Even Sydney and Jack Bristow.

Nadia Santos was just one among others. He wasn't a pervert, just an opportunist. People called that a sickness. They had medication now, to get rid of one's uncontrollable urges. But his were controlled. He was careful whom he picked and when he picked them.

He caught the voice of Sydney. She was talking to her sister and seemed angry.

"You will not see that tape."

"I need to know, Sydney," softly argued Nadia. "Mom?"

"Don't 'mom' me, sweetheart. I tried…Sydney destroyed the whole archive and has the only copy of…the video." Irina shook her head, apparently irritated at being dictated her conduct by her eldest daughter.

"I thought you wouldn't want anybody else to see it," whispered Sydney, squeezing her sister's shoulder.

"Thank you. Really. But I need closure…"

"That's why we're here. Believe me, you don't need to get those pictures in your head. Trust me Nadia, I'm doing this for you." She glanced at the man they'd dumped a few feet away from them.

From the corner of his eye he saw Agent Bristow glare at him when their eyes met. She nudged her mother and the three women walked to him. He couldn't help but marvel at their beauty, their striking resemblance.

There was no fear in his eyes, no regret, for he felt. He never felt much of anything. Sydney and Derevko walked toward him, a cold, determined look on their faces. Nadia stayed back, watching. He did not try to get up, did not struggle. Until Derevko grabbed him and slammed him against a wall before literally nailing his hands to it. He looked down at himself in stupefaction, his feet dangling a few inches above the ground. Pain registered in his hands, where nails stuck in his palms held him in place. Lastly, his eyes laid on the nail gun Derevko was holding in her hands. She smiled at him.

"He'll hold for a few hours," she said, looking over her elder daughter. He didn't know if she meant he'd live or remain stuck in his current position for a few hours. It did not matter. For the first time in a very long time, he felt scared, and he didn't like the feeling at all.

"You've done that before, haven't you?"

"Yes. Nails can seem a little…old fashioned at first sight, but it's easy to use and procure and is very painful."

"Tooth extraction is painful as hell too," mumbled Sydney somberly.

"That's why I brought a few more toys with me. We can do it all." She sighed and turned her full attention to Sydney. "About that, I meant to apologise for what happened during your first visit in Taipei. I wasn't there when you came, but I did receive a report of your break-in, capture, interrogation and escape. Brilliant, as always. I'm just sorry you had to meet Doctor Lee."

Sydney smirked but didn't offer a reply as Nadia appeared at their side, her eyes intent on Dr Jain. She exulted contempt but her hesitance was visible as she lazily let her hand travel over a set of instruments lying on a table. The doctor recognised every single one. He was, after all, a surgeon. The irony of the situation was not lost on him.

A scalpel, a lancet, a drill, a rasp, a retractor, a haemostat, tweezers, forceps, a few needles and even some kind of miniaturised laser. Everything you needed to inflict pain, cut open someone and poke around their body. Nothing was missing. An involuntary shiver made its way through his body.

Irina picked up a scalpel. "You don't have to do that if you don't want to Nadia," she started softly, holding on to the tool. "I am perfectly capable of finishing the job. I promise you he'll suffer for what he did."

"It's not that…I mean…I want to, I hate him, he's a bastard, he deserves it…it's just that…"

"You've never done that before," interrupted Sydney, realising her sister's dilemma.

Nadia lowered her head down, feeling like an idiot. "I'm new in the intelligence business, I only fulfilled one assignment for Argentinean intelligence before that thing in Chechnya. And then I got recruited by the CIA. I didn't exactly learned torture. Just to spy, steal, blend in, defuse bombs and look pretty. And fight too, but I already knew a lot in that area before...I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I don't want to kill him too fast you know."

Sydney smiled kindly at her. "Torturing someone isn't something they teach at the Farm either, trust me." Actually, she had no clue since she'd never had to go through training at the renowned Farm like her fellow CIA agents. It was Vaughn that had told her about his training there, and it didn't include torture. SD-6 didn't train her in that field either. "It's going to sound stupid but it's something you learn by yourself, on the job, literally."

Nadia gave her a puzzled look, so Irina butted in. "You were never captured, Nadia, were you?"

"No. But they taught us what to do in that eventuality."

"That's not my point. What Sydney is trying to tell you is that, when torturing someone, each individual as his own patterns. There is no manual teaching how to inflict pain and keep one's prisoner alive and conscious for as long as possible. You just do what has been done to you, what you know from personal experience. You reproduce what you learned from your captors, interrogators, and go on from that."

"Oh." Her face fell. She looked from Sydney to Irina. "Oh."

"But of course," started Sydney, "you can inspire yourself from movies, TV series…ever seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Nip/Tuck maybe?"

"Oh yeah, the show with the two hotshots surgeons from Miami, right?"

"Yeah that's the one!"

"It's so gross…oh, okay, I get it know." After a minute of reflection, she gave the man a wicked smile. "I feel like making that jackass a new smile." She took the scalpel from her mother's proffered hand and caught the woman's smile before turning to her 'canvas'.

So began the nightmare of Doctor Maneesha Jain.

Somewhere within the underground levels of the JTF in Los Angeles, a man sat on a thin bed in a cell, staring at the tiled ground. He had no books, no pillow, no blanket. He deserved nothing, he'd been told. The people holding him interrogated him tirelessly. He'd been passed on from hand to hand to end up here. He'd never seen this place before, but the guard who brought him his meals had told him who had occupied this very cell before him. Irina Derevko. How ironic.

The man had laughed and added Sloane would spend the rest of his life in this cell and probably die in it. Of old age. Arvin couldn't imagine a crueller punishment than to stare at the same bricks for the rest of his life. And it was cold in here.

The buzz rang as the bars rose, rising Arvin from his thoughts. The aforementioned guard appeared, a lunch tray in his hands. He snickered at his prisoner before shoving the food through the hole in the glass panel of the cell. Arvin watched him with dead eyes, and frowned as the man went back the way he came from. Usually he stayed to watch him eat. Something about regulations, a guard had told him one day. So why didn't the guard stay today? Arvin didn't care either way. He had stopped fomenting plans and wondering about the little details of his monotone everyday life a long time ago.

He dug in his plate and hastily swallowed spoonful after spoonful of mashed potatoes. The thing tasted awful but it wouldn't stay lukewarm very long so he always ate as soon as the plate was given to him. It was the only source of heat he had access to.

Something itched in his throat, like when you're about to cough. He massaged his neck, hoping to make it go away but it only got worse. He gulped down a glass of ice cold water and licked his lips as he felt liquid dripping from his mouth. Except it wasn't water like he'd assumed but blood. His blood. It dawned on him then as he glanced at his unfinished plate. His lunch was laced with tiny pieces of sharp edged glass.

He tried to scream but the pieces of glass he swallowed had shredded his pharynx and probably severed his vocal cords. The pain was so intense. A gurgle of blood spluttered out of his mouth onto the glass wall. He looked at the cameras with desperation in his eyes. They widened in horror. The cameras were off. Nobody could see him.

Someone laced his lunch, turned off the cameras in his cell and paid the guard to leave his duty. Someone with enough power had gotten to him even though he was in a CIA bunker. Someone was trying to kill him and doing a very good job at it. Irina Derevko was the only name that came to mind. He could only assume that the woman had finally learned about what he'd done to their daughter while Irina was in Elena's clutches.

Derevko had a strange habit of hurting her children but getting mad when someone else did. There was a time when she was as obsessed as him by Rambaldi. Back then, she would have injected Nadia with the green fluid herself. Now, she was making him pay for doing that.

He collapsed on the ground, thick blood still coming out of his mouth in a slow trickle.

"Agent Bristow…Sydney…please, help me!" Begged Doctor Jain in one of the last lucid moment he'd experience. He knew of the three she was the most likely to stop this madness. He'd been nice to her and she was so human. Surely she wouldn't let her mother and sister kill him.

His face ached were Nadia had cut him first, enlarging his smile up to his ears. Then, she had literally peeled his eyebrows off his face, cutting the skin around it. His nose had been attacked as well. "Are you going for Michael Jackson," had asked Sydney to her younger sister when Nadia had started poking his nose with a little motorised drill.

On Sydney's initiative they had taken turns to pull out all of his 32 teeth, careful that he could not swallow and choke on them. Then they'd moved to his upper body. He wasn't a hairy man and Nadia had madly carved his body. He was bleeding from every little cut she had inflicted. So much that he couldn't see what intricate design she'd been going for. Pain had no secret for him now. Dull, shooting, itching, burning… His back was left intact.

Derevko stepped forward when Nadia was finished with her carving. "Shall we continue down, sweetheart?"

Nadia swallowed hard, the hand holding the surgical tool shook. She'd gotten a little carried away with the doctor and hated how he made her feel. The man, the so-called man never begged. He'd screamed, a lot, but he'd never asked her to stop, never apologised or asked for her forgiveness.

What she was doing to him made her feel queasy when it was supposed to ease her pain. She wanted to feel better. Needed to. And if hurting him like he'd hurt her didn't accomplish that, then what would? She hoped an apology would, an explanation maybe. But the man remained mute when his throat was too sore to scream.

She would carry on until she felt better. Until she got something other than screams out of him. She had no better solution.

Quite some time later, the Indian man expired his last breath. His body was bloodless. He'd begged, apologised and screamed all at once in the end, shortly after she'd moved down to his masculinity. It made her feel better, but she still felt…different. Now she could see the end of the tunnel, which was an improvement from just torment and pain.

Her mother and sister surrounded her, contemplating Doctor Jain.

"What do we do about the body?" Asked Sydney to her mother.

"I'll call your father. He's good at this, from what I understand it's always been part of his job for SD-6. Clean up the messes. That scumbag is CIA. They may be even already looking for him. We can't afford him to be linked to us. And after all, it's only fair Jack be a part of this."

"Why is that?" Asked Nadia, confused.

Irina sighed and looked away from the dead man. "Nadia, there is something I need to tell you. It might not be the perfect time but…it cannot wait longer. It's about your father."

"Sloane? What does he have to…"

"Not Sloane. He's not your father, sweetheart."

"What?" She gasped, her mind reeling. "Then who the hell…" she started, angry.

"Jack." She needn't say more and carefully watched her daughter's reaction.

"How…why…"

"You all assumed you were Sloane's because of…my indiscretion with him."

"Oh." She noticed Sydney didn't look surprised. "Wait, you knew about this?"

Startled, her sister hurriedly corrected her assumption. "No, no! I mean yes, but Mom told me while you were…out of it."

"Oh, okay then." Nadia was glad her sister hadn't been hiding things from her. She sometimes forgot how much time had passed while she was 'out of it'. She remembered many things but not all of it. She wasn't lucid at all times, she realised that now.

"Nadia, I told Jack about you. Just before the mission to Sovogda."

"You did?"

"I…hinted, but I know he knows. He probably had a DNA test made to confirm my sayings."

"So why didn't he say anything?"

"When could he?" Softly asked Sydney.

"Oh, yeah, right, out of it. Okay."

"Relax, Nadia. Everything's going to be okay." Sydney came to hug her little sister. Nadia seemed so distressed over everything that was falling on her all at once. She wasn't sure she'd deal any better if she were in her place.

They waited in silence for Jack to arrive and dispose of the body. Nadia was lost in thoughts, wondering about what she would say to her father when he arrived but also what he would say to her.

She made a silent prayer that things turn out okay. She wasn't eager for a relationship with the man. She had no illusions, seeing his and Sydney's relationship. Maybe lunch or dinner once a month would be a good start. Or was it too much to ask for? She'd have to ask Sydney for advice about that. God was she nervous to meet her 'new' father!

Hopefully, that one wouldn't pump her full of Rambaldi fluid.

TBC