She and her father boarded the CIA jet waiting at one of the back runways at LAX. He'd made up a fake mission that only the two of them could go on as a ruse to make contact with Irina again.

She had packed that afternoon in the stillness of their house, when Vaughn had come home early.

"Hey," he'd said, sounding surprised to find her there, "You're leaving me again?"

"Yeah," she said quietly, folding a pair of jeans into her suitcase, "Dad and I are going to Germany for a quick reconnaissance, as a favor to the NSC. There's a terrorist group forming there that we need to get a lead on."

He accepted this without comment and loosened his tie. "Are you sure you want to travel again, so soon? You just got back from England."

She knew what he really was asking, which was, how are we going to have a baby if you're never here?

"Michael," she said softly, "It's fine, there's plenty of time."

She had secretly gone back on birth control. She kept the package in her desk at work.

He lay down on the bed, on top of the covers, and watched her pack. As she leaned over to place another set of shoes in her bag, he caught her left hand and said, "Hey, where are your rings?"

She stared at him, frozen. Sark had kissed the palm of her left hand in the car two days ago. There were still scratches from where she'd scrubbed it.

"Oh," she said, smiling sweetly, "I already put them in my suitcase, on my necklace. I'm kind of bloated- they were tight and I didn't want them to get stuck on." She rubbed her hard, flat stomach for emphasis.

He pulled her towards him by her left hand, onto the bed. They lay together, her head on his shoulder and his thumb in her left palm, rubbing it.

He sighed heavily, "Sometimes you make it hard to love you, you know that?"

She raised her head and frowned at him. What was that supposed to mean?

"In a good way," he assured her, smoothing her hair down with his free hand. "Like I can't pin down who you really are. You keep me guessing."

Where was this going? She needed to get to her plane.

"You know, we never talked about what happened," he said, his face against her hair. "And I'm not saying we have to right now, cuz you've gotta go—you know how your dad is when people are late—" they both chuckled at that, "But maybe we ought to. You know, sometime."

She nodded against his shoulder. They had never discussed what happened, why she hadn't told him she'd been pregnant. It was another of her secrets; she wasn't sure she even knew the real reason herself. Not to mention talking about it—getting pregnant-- made her feel like an animal, like an prize broodmare whose fertility needed to be assessed. Like she wasn't even human.

She didn't know how to be, how to play a mom. Her mom hadn't been around long enough for her to pick up any kind of template for that kind of alias. She couldn't even imagine what it would be like, talking to other people about their kids. What would she have to say on play dates, at YMCA swim class? She had nothing real in common to talk about with other people their age who had kids. Worst, she couldn't imagine not working, to go from… this life to staying at home with a child. It made her feel simultaneously superior to women who chose to stay home, and terribly guilty and selfish for not wanting the one thing that seemed to make so many others happy.

She shoved the thoughts down that threatened to throw her into a panic, and said, "Maybe when I get back from Berlin."

"Sure," he said, sleepily. "I wish you could stay and nap with me."

"I know."

On the plane she and Jack sat mostly in silence, punctuated by occasional conversation about their "mission" to fool the air marshals flying with them.

"Sydney," Jack said after they were well over the Atlantic Ocean and the guards had moved to the rear of the plane to doze, "Is there more to your pact with Sark than intel gathering?"

"What?" she stared at him, "Why do you ask that?"

"Intuition, I guess." Jack was as casual as Jack got at work. His suit coat was off, and his tie was loose, the top button of his white dress shirt undone.

"No," she lied. "What makes you think there is?"

He cocked his head and looked at her. "Just wondering."

So as to avoid any more weird Spy Daddy moments, she pulled her iPod out of her bag and said she was going to try to sleep.

She turned on the random playlist, and was dozing off when a sultry, slow Sarah McLachlan tune came on.

Make me a witness

Take me up, out of darkness

Out of doubt

I won't weigh you down

With good intentions

Won't make fire out of clay

Or other inventions

Will we burn in heaven

Like we do down here1

She kept her eyes closed and thought about Sark's scorching kiss on her hand, and tried not to burn into ashes right there under her father's watchful gaze.

Berlin sprawled out below their plane, huge and old. They were due at Tempelhof in 10 minutes. Berlin was eight times the size of Paris, but whereas Paris had sprung ahead during the latter 20th century, Berlin had remained an oasis in the vast wasteland that eastern Europe had become. Their landmarks were dilapidated, the palace of Fredrick the Great in Potsdam fallen into disrepair under the Communist rule. Still, she had always liked Berlin. They'd done several jobs here, mostly to find hackers who frequented Goth bars and sex clubs. Something about the pre-fab concrete housing structures and seeing the giant globe of the TV tower that overlooked Alexanderplatz made her heart beat a little faster. It wasn't beautiful, but stuff happened here. She remembered seeing the Berliners breaking through the wall on that night in 1989, when she was 17. How young some of them had looked—they were just kids, like her, but they were doing something that was changing the world.

They hit the ground with a little squeal from the tires—there was a slight crosswind—and the plane taxied to a hanger far away from the main terminal.

They gathered their things together and disembarked. It was cool, a little windy, and Sydney wrapped her suede coat a little tighter around her. It had been two years since her dad had let Irina walk free in Russia, when she had helped them hunt down Elena and dismantle the giant Mueller device.

Her family… she sighed inaudibly to Jack, but he felt her ribs heave where he had his hand on her back.

"It'll be fine, Sydney," he said, in his quiet way. "She wants to know how you are."

Sydney, her mother had said, You may not see me on your wedding day, but I'll be watching you i

She nodded wordlessly and hoped that they weren't falling into some kind of elaborate trap. It wouldn't be the first time.

They were set to meet Irina in the Beate Uhse Erotikmuseum, off the Ku'Damm in former West Berlin.

After dropping their things at the CIA safe house, they made their way on the S-Bahn, the elevated city train, to the former West sector. Once at the museum, they bought tickets to the special exhibit—a selection of Oriental erotic art— and strode through the tourist shop full of American college students and other tourists to the museum entrance. She caught her dad sneaking a glance at her after he saw a life-sized mannequin dressed in black leather dominatrix gear. Silently, she shook her head at him and he seemed relieved.

There was a movie theater on the 2nd floor of the museum, a historical retrospective about Uhse's life. She had founded the company after WWII because even German women needed porn and sexual satisfaction, according to some signage Sydney had read on the way up the escalator.

They went in, to the little hard benches without backs, and sat down. There was no one else in the theater.

They were just getting wrapped up in the retrospective when Irina sat down on the bench behind them.

Silently, she placed her hand on Sydney's shoulder.

Sydney turned and looked at her mother. Irina still looked amazing, though she looked at Sydney almost sadly before she said, "Sweetheart, it's so good to see you."

What had that been, Sydney wondered, but she turned and embraced her mother then anyway.

"Have you been well," Irina asked, her eyes a little teary. "How is Vaughn?"

"Good, good," she was getting a little choked up too. "He's fine," she whispered. Why were they whispering, it wasn't like there was anyone else they could disturb.

Her mother placed one of her long slender hands on her cheek, rubbed the water off Sydney's cheekbone then, and said, "Good. I'm glad you're happy."

Sydney ached to blurt out the whole awful truth to her mother; no, Mom, it's not fine, it's anything but, I was already losing him and it's my own stupid fault, then I lost our baby and slept with another man and now… But she couldn't say that.

Jack turned then and stood. "Irina."

"Jack." They were cordial, but the past was irreconcilable. They were meant to meet like ships passing in the night, two forces so strong they almost pushed each other apart like magnets that were polarized the wrong way.

"I need your help," Jack began, "We need intel about a woman named Anastasia Szarkochev."

At the mention of her name, Irina's eyes flicked towards Sydney for a split second, then she said, "I know."

"You know?" Sydney was confused. "I don't understand."

"Sark contacted me," Irina confessed. "I had told him his mother was dead, to keep him from tracking her down when he began working for me, 12 years ago."

At the mention of his name, Sydney's stomach began to produce an insane amount of acid. She had had ulcers on and off over the years, basically since she'd begun working as an operative at SD-6. If Sark had contacted her mother, it couldn't mean anything good.

"He was as confused as you are, when his acquaintance sent him the picture of his mother. It was my mistake for letting it go this long without telling him the truth," Irina admitted.

"Let's get out of here," Jack suggested, "And go somewhere we can talk."

Songs:

1 "Witness." Surfacing, Sarah McLachlan.

Episodes:

i Before the Flood. Season 4, Episode 22 . Written by Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec.