On the plane, Sydney leaned her head back against the cream colored headrest and tried to concentrate on the thick file of pictures and reports they'd compiled for her to help track Sark. They had him at baggage, then at an ATM in the outskirts of London, then finally on a train platform in Oxford. After that…

She sighed and stared at the pictures. Then out the window. Her eyes closed momentarily, but she snapped them open. Focus, she commanded herself.

The last time they'd been on the plane, coming home… Mindlessly her eyes were drawn to the endless blackness outside the plane.

Four weeks ago. Had it only been four weeks? She doodled aimlessly on the edge of the paper with Sark's stats on it.

Well, you're fine now, she steeled herself. Don't think about that.

"Julian Alexsandr Sark (neé Lazarey)" she read silently. "Born: March 11, 1978. Height: 6', Weight: 160 lbs (73 kg)approx, Hair: Blonde, Eyes: Blue. "

Could he really be that young, she wondered. She felt ancient compared to him. God, that meant that he'd barely been legal to order a drink, that first time she saw him in Moscow 7 years ago. She was 33, something Vaughn's mother reminded her of constantly.

Ulgh, she thought, Mommie Dearest.

"By the time I was your age, honey, " she muttered in a sing-song tone under her breath, "I had been married and had a son and was already a widow."

Mrs. Bill Vaughn needed a good fucking, she smiled.

And so does Mrs. Michael Vaughn, she thought as her smile dropped from her lips. She stared again out into the infinite ebony night, the stars still high above the plane.

The iPod, she thought, and drew the slender silver device from its holster in her bag. It was his, she noticed with a trace of dismay. She wished she'd had her own music, but she put the ear buds in anyway, and started one of the playlists.

Kate Bush's fragile, flighty soprano filled her ears: I know you have a little life in you yet- I know you have a lotta strength left…

Immediately, the song reminded her of Danny- her sweet Danny.

All the things I shoulda said that I never said, all the things we shoulda done that we never did…1

More like the things I never shoulda said that I DID say, she thought, the ones that got him killed.

She drifted into a reverie; how crazed she'd been after he'd died. She had been… insane, a different person- desperate and stupid. He was her everything- her first, and she had hoped, her last love. So much for that. She'd never been that good with guys. In high school, in college- she was a nerd.

A nerd ripe for the picking, she thought, a bookworm too shy to speak to guys at parties until she was too drunk to make a good impression on them anyway. Danny had been tender, and in a good way. In the way a girl needs her first time around the Love Shack. He was also the first person she'd dated… on the outside. There had been several guys prior to him, but they were all affiliated with SD-6 in one way or another; cover, at least complete cover, wasn't necessary with them.

The song ended, and Dave Gahan's voice sang, whispery and dark, "Can you feel a little love?"

As your bony fingers close around me long and spindly death becomes me heaven can you see what I see?

Death. That specter that hung over them all, all the time at work. They were always one step from it, either the administration or the receipt of it. She had once liked to think, in a pat moralistic way, that the people they administered it to deserved it, but even that judgment was becoming increasingly grey for her.

Payin' debt to karma, your body for a living, what you take won't kill you but careful what you're giving.

Yes.

There's no time for hesitating, pain is ready, pain is waiting- primed to do its educating.2

Pain, like death, she surmised, kept them all going. Like Noah, her assassin. When he'd asked her to come to Fiji with him, she'd almost gone. The fear (fear, she'd once had sense to be afraid!) of Security Section tracking them down had kept her from it; little did she know how good her instincts had been on that one. She could still see in her mind the hurt, surprised look on his face when she'd pulled off the ski mask and revealed him as the Snowman, the assassin who'd been trying to kill her in that kitchen just as certainly as they'd killed each other the night they were holed up in that cabin.

Can you feel a little love? Can you feel a little love? Dream on- dream on. . .

The Depeche Mode song spooled itself out, and the iPod shuffled to a Peter Gabriel song.

It was only one hour ago- it was all so different then- cuz nothing yet has really sunk in- looks like it always did, this flesh and bone…

Sydney closed her eyes, again tracing the scar under the edge of her shirt. She couldn't remember that day, the day the Covenant had harvested her eggs on that side.

She and Vaughn. They were 50-50, a couple of cripples, she smiled to herself. She was missing half her eggs, and the virus that had nearly killed him, the antidote for which had lead to Plot Number One of Many to Kill Sloane, had left him all but sterile.

Vaughn was… a hoper, she thought. Was that even a word? Hoper? She didn't like to think she was hope-less, per say, but he certainly had a different outlook on things than she did. Like how they should settle down, maybe even quit the Agency, go into the WPP.

God, that had once been her reality, too. Back… before Danny. She'd imagined it: English teacher, married to a pediatrician, a couple of kids, a dog. No more SD-6. Before she'd learned there is no walking away from this life.

Who'd take care of a dog now, she wondered, we travel so much for work.

Life carries on and on and on and on, life carries on and on and on, Peter sang. This is the car that we ride in, the home we reside in, the face that we hide in, the way we are tied in3

She opened her eyes, and flicked off the iPod with a touch of her finger. She slid her wedding rings off and put them on the gold chain around her neck- she had never really worn jewelry on her fingers, especially in the field.

She flipped idly through the pages of Sark intel, and a handwritten scrap of paper fluttered out onto her lap.

"Syd," it read, in Vaughn's precise, slanting, masculine printing, "I miss you already. Please come home safe. There'll be plenty more chances. V."

She smiled, just a bit, that he signed it V and not M.

Yup. 50-50.

"Dude," Weiss's voice broke into Vaughn's daydream, "What is with you? Do we need to have a bitch session at the bar after work?"

Vaughn looked up at Weiss's expectant face, flushed and not a little round. "Nah, I just worry about her, you know."

Weiss shoved his hands in his pockets and blew a lungful of air out expectantly. "Look, she's a big girl. She can take care of herself. You need to move past what happened the last time out. And this is just… surveillance. She's reporting back as needed. We'll know if she needs help."

Vaughn shrugged and inspected his keyboard. There was a crumb of something in between the T and the 6 keys.

"It's not her, it's Sark I'm worried about," he mumbled. Cocky little shit- he should've broken his head that time instead of just his arm and his nose.

"C'mon, Mike, if he'd wanted to hurt her, there were plenty of chances before now that he could've done it, and he hasn't.

"Have a little faith in her," Weiss concluded, and moved back to his desk.

Sydney holed up in the hotel room she'd been given for the night. She desperately wanted to sleep, but she had a hard time sleeping in hotels. Even on their honeymoon, she'd had trouble letting her guard down. Hotels were lonely places, she'd decided. They didn't belong to anyone. And if they didn't belong to anyone, the place had no loyalty, either- hotels were the kind of places where people could be murdered without context. A hotel didn't care if you were a mother, or a sister, or a husband.

Sark was, as best as they could guess, in Cheltenham, likely in the vicinity of the Penbroke Boarding and Preparatory School for Boys. He'd spent most of his childhood and teen years there, as much as they knew, far from his father in Bucharest and mother, who they'd never been able to track down. Lazarey was most definitely pushing up daisies- Lauren and Sark had seen to that, but not before Lazarey had been tortured by his own son.

She shivered a little under her t-shirt and imagined what it would be like to be tortured by Jack. Scary, scary thought- she pushed it out of her mind.

The clunky pea green phone on the desk rang shrilly, its call echoing in the bare little room. It would be her confirmation call- the line was secure.

"Room service," her father's voice said.

"Wrong room," she replied from wrote, "I didn't order anything."

She replaced the receiver silently and stretched out on the brown and tan striped comforter. There were many hours left until dawn.

The next morning she moved out into the field, taking a train towards the Cotswolds. Her wig, a long straight blonde thing, was firmly in place, along with her glasses. She looked like an English country girl-next-door, an outfit complete with a jumper and a pair of corduroys.

These pants made her ass look fat, she thought, as she examined her get-up in the tiny train bathroom mirror. Or was it….

No, she told herself, no way.

She shouldered her backpack as she entered the train car she'd been seated in and brushed past the elderly gentleman who'd ardently made conversation with her until she'd excused herself to the bathroom to disguise herself. He didn't look up from his London Standard.

The train rattled and shook its way through the eastern half of the country over the course of a couple hours. She hid her Sark file in a large textbook, and explained, "I'm studying for boards" to the woman across from her who was being too nosy.

Julian Sark, associate of Arvin Sloane, Irina Derevko, Kazari Bomani, Russian mafia, Covenant, Lauren Reed, Alliance, conspirator with K-Directorate.

What did they really know about him, though? She always felt like he looked right through her, and she knew nothing about him. Did he sing in the shower? What kind of cologne did he wear? Girls? Boys? Both? She knew he'd bedded Francie's double, Allison Doren, and Lauren, but who knew what went on in a boys' boarding school. Where was his damn mother? Was she tied up in this whole mess, too?

She sighed in frustration. It was times like this that she and Vaughn had a parting of ways over the CIA's capabilities. He truly believed, she thought, that the government was a bumbling behemoth that was essentially trying to do the right thing, but always falling just that tiny bit short. She couldn't accept this shortcoming as easily; these people, they'd taken her life. Even her dad had a hand in that.

The train gave its initial jolt to signal that it would, eventually, slow to a stop.

She gathered her things, securing the file under the top lid of the giant European-style travel backpack, and slipping on some dark sunglasses.

Her first stop in Cheltenham was to check in with their local contact, a butcher named Nigel. Nigel was approximately 55, with an American wife and American sympathies, but an English sensibility for undercover work that so many of the newbies lacked, she mused. You needed to be cool. Collected. Lying like a snake in the grass, undetected, until you could strike with deadly force if needed. The Agency had recently recruited so many of these square-jawed frat-boy types, the ones who assumed spy work was like it was in the movies or on TV. She and Vaughn sometimes watched Le Femme Nikita, but they'd stopped after getting annoyed with its inaccuracies.

Mostly, though, their assumption that Agency work was a career, something you chose and could back out of, needled at her.

"Syd," Nigel smooched her on each cheek but didn't touch her with his blood-stained hands. "Come on, love. It's good to see you."

They wound their way through his freezer room, past the dripping sides of beef and pork hung up by their ankles, to his business office in the back.

"How are you, darling?" he asked, concern clouding his eyes. "I heard you got a bit banged up your last time out."

God, did they publish that ops report on the damn Internet? She wondered. This was the other thing the newbies didn't realize yet- nothing is private. She knew about their outings to strip clubs, how the boldest one with the filthy mouth was a closet homo, how the other one secretly loved Joni Mitchell but would never admit it to The Guys.

"It's fine," she assured him, "I'm here, right?"

He smiled and wiped his hands on an already-stained handkerchief. "That's the spirit- buck up and you won't feel so punk, my mum told me."

"Awright," he continued, pulling a file from under his desk calendar and handing it over to her. "I was able to get some photos of your Mr. Sark- he got into town maybe a day or two ago? As near as anyone can figure, he's holed up at this manor about 4 miles out of town," he stabbed his fat, stubby finger on the map included in the file. "It's fairly secluded," he warned her, "You may have trouble getting near enough to get any intel without being noticed."

She shrugged, and looked at the photos. These were better than the Gatwick security camera; Nigel prided himself on his photography, especially with a long-range lens.

"Spent a few years in Africa in the Army Corps," he'd told her once, with the proud bearing of an ex-military man, "Shooting game- literally and figuratively."

"Does the house belong to someone here?"

"No," Nigel shook his head, "The name on the title is a Ms. Natashya Lorien, but no one around here knows her, when the house was purchased, if anyone lives there, any of that. It was assumed by many to be empty."

"Guards?"

"Not that I could see," he concluded, "You can see I got some pictures of the house."

Indeed, Sydney noticed, were those… horses? The house was large, but not overly so. And hardly opulent. A modest country manor of some kind.

"Ok, Nigel," she stood and shook his hand, "This is a good start."

"Do you want to check in, love?" Nigel asked, hesitant.

"No. I'm off comms and on my own this time—check in only as needed," she smiled sweetly at him. She was relieved to have a break from everyone watching her. It was like she had been a specimen these last few weeks, some kind of alien being that needed to be studied to be understood.

He nodded, silent. "Just be careful. I read his file- he's a nasty little bugger."

Songs:

1 "This Woman's Work." The Sensual World, Kate Bush.

2 "Dream On." Exciter, Depeche Mode.

3 "I Grieve". Up, Peter Gabriel.