"Leave us."
Sydney heard the voice through a dull fog of pain. Her life seemed to be on a repetitious loop. Hadn't she just gone through this whole knocked-out-strapped-to-a-chair bit just two weeks earlier? Her skills were slipping.
The door clicked closed behind her and she heard footsteps behind her. A woman's footsteps. Immediately her mind flashed back to Taipei, when she had been captured and her mother—the 'Man'—had reappeared only to shoot her in the shoulder.
Click. Click. Click. Scuff. Click.
The woman was wearing heels, she could tell that much. Was this the person who had kicked her in the gut? She couldn't tell for certain.
"So, you are following Mr. Wells," the voice said, in English but heavily accented.
She stayed silent. The base of her skull throbbed too badly to risk turning to try to see the speaker. She was afraid she might vomit.
"Julian- with him you are working?" the voice asked. Actually, it was more like, Julian, viz heem you are vorkink?
"Well, I'm not working for him, that's for sure." Yeah, good one Syd. That was like the old Syd. Sassy. Tough.
"You are not a… how do you say, a… prostitute, then?" the voice sounded amused.
"No, I'm sure prostitutes make better money than I do," she said wryly.
"We were not sure," the voice explained. "You were very flirty at the restaurant yesterday night."
Sydney stared at a spot on the floor. It looked like it might be old blood.
Click. Click. Click.
Sydney felt a hand on her hair. Her skin crawled as The Voice stroked her hair, played with it.
"You have the same hair as your mother," the speaker said. "Irina was always vain about her looks."
"Who are you?" Sydney asked at last.
Clickclickclick. The speaker stepped around in front of her in a quick movement.
Sydney swallowed as Anastasia looked down at her, flipping her auburn hair over her shoulder. "Irina told me so much about you, in her letters. How proud she was of you. You were her proudest accomplishment."
Sydney sat in tightlipped disbelief. Had Irina known Anastasia was alive? She had a sinking feeling she'd been right about the photo of Anastasia; it had all been an elaborate ruse to draw Sark out of hiding.
Wells hurried Sark to a limo with tinted windows waiting outside the library at the curb. Sark, against his better judgment, got into the car first and arranged himself across from Wells so he could draw his gun if he needed to.
The car swayed and bounced along the potholed streets, like a boat charting rough waters. Mostly they just stared at each other.
"So, how's life been, Julian?" Wells asked, a gleam of malice in his eye. "I figured by now you'd be running the whole intelligence world ragged with some evil plot to take over the world." This was clearly a jab at Sark's repeated incarceration by the CIA.
"I see you've fared no better," Sark said, bored. "I at least had the sense to get out of the business for awhile until the market bottomed out and came around again."
"You," Wells said, his voice slightly accusatory, "Have no business sucking up a market share from the rest of us. What does a dilettante like you need with ops work, with your fortune?"
Sark eyed Wells, not giving anything away. How did this sorry fuck know about his inheritance? And if he knew, how could he NOT know that there was nothing left of it?
"I like to keep busy," he said with a one-shouldered shrug. "Helps prevent Alzheimer's, keeping one's brain active."
Wells stared at him. "You always were a wanker."
"Takes one to know one."
Wells smiled at that, and they fell silent.
"Irina, Irina, Irina," Anastasia turned her mother's name over on her tongue like a piece of hard candy, "How is your darling mother? I haven't heard from her in so long."
"What do you want with us?" Sydney ignored the question about Irina. She wasn't here to discuss her own mother.
Anastasia made a small voiceless noise with her tongue that sounded distinctly like one that Sark made when he was disappointed, "My dear, everyone likes to know what's happened to old friends."
Sydney stuck her chin out and looked Anastasia in the eye.
"Fine, then," Anastasia shrugged and drew a package of cigarettes out of her pocket. She drew one out with her long, slender fingers, and flicked her lighter in the general vicinity of the tip of the cigarette. She closed her bright blue eyes, almost as if in ecstasy, as she dragged a deep breath of smoke into her lungs. She held it for what seemed like an impossibly long time before she exhaled it into Sydney's face.
"Irina and I had a lot in common," Anastasia began, in Russian. Sydney wished she had paid better attention in language protocol at SD-6. Sark was right, her Russian was pathetic.
"We were so impressionable, when we were 18 and in the KGB. So much promise. We were special- or, we thought we were, anyway," she gave a short, braying laugh, a sound uncharacteristic of such an elegant, refined being. "We thought your mother had it bad—new country, new language, so far from home and her friends. Nikola and I were lucky!"
Sydney pressed her lips together and wondered if Sark had found Wells. Then the thought passed over her like a shudder; what if Sark had betrayed her? Had he kicked her out of the car, knowing someone was waiting to attack her?
"My assignment," Anastasia drew on the cigarette heartily, "was fun at first. To be… the other woman, the plaything. I liked it. Even though I knew it wasn't for real. Lazarey was a great fuck in his day," she laughed throatily and tendrils of smoke curled over her upper lip from her nostrils. "I wonder if he passed that on," she said, raising one scarlet eyebrow at Sydney.
She just stared back, but she could feel her cheeks flush a little.
"Lazarey had a temper, such a temper," Anastasia smiled a bit, maybe wistfully, "He would be sullen and fly into a fit of rage, smash things."
"Julian was the best thing about that assignment," she said, now certainly wistful. "Those first few years of his life were so precious. He was so precocious, curious about everything. Why, why why—it was always why this or that, Mummy, how come there are animals with legs and some with wings, how come there are different languages?"
She stared sullenly at Anastasia's little walk down memory lane. This was such a joke. Her life was a great cosmic joke.
"Lazarey resented Julian's presence, I think. The secrecy of his birth, how he was entrapped from both sides by the government," Anastasia continued. "There was nowhere to go; he had Nikola and Natashya to take care of, he couldn't afford our relationship to be public. Which, of course, was exactly the idea."
Anastasia paused, and she looked at Sydney with a gaze that felt like she could see into Sydney's very organs—the same way he looked at her. "After several years of his rages, his terrorizing us, Irina suggested we send Julian away, somewhere where he was safe from Lazarey and the designs the Special Research division of the KGB had on his inheritance."
"I was supposed to go to meet him, eventually, raise him myself," Anastasia hissed. "But instead, Irina took off and took him for herself. Your greedy, selfish mother took my own son from me."
Sydney stared straight ahead without blinking. This didn't bode well for her, or for Sark.
Irina strode through Otopeni airport; she never appeared hurried, even when she was in a rush. She moved with a strong, confident, languid gait. One she'd passed on to all her progeny in one way or another. The girls, particularly, had a characteristic strut when they were working.
Sark had been more difficult. He was sullen, stubborn when she'd collected him from the prep school. Perhaps understandably so—she'd deliberately left him basically on his own, tending only to his tuition payments and periodically meeting in secret with the headmaster to make sure they didn't expel him for his behavior.
Anastasia was not dead, after all. She was back, here in Bucharest. Irina had networked her way here, finding out that Wells was in Anastasia's employ for several years now.
Outside in the fading daylight, Irina hailed a cab.
"City library, please," she told the driver, and leaned back against the worn leather seat as he tore off into the evening traffic jam.
She knew the librarian who ran the archives, an unassuming woman who had a lot of time on her hands and whose acquaintance she had made when she and Anastasia had met there, 20 years earlier, to sketch out their plan to put Sark into hiding.
Anastasia had been reluctant, but Irina was more skilled at persuasion than her friend, and Anastasia had eventually acquiesced. They had originally planned on a school closer to them, perhaps in Austria or West Germany, but after a particularly brutal fight with Lazarey that had left Anastasia with a black eye, they'd settled on England.
She had been Anastasia's link to Sark, keeping her informed about how her son was doing. She didn't let Anastasia know that Julian had been put into agent training at the school. It was no accident that they picked the school they had in England. She knew it was a proving ground for MI-6's version of Project Christmas. So in a way, she and Jack had had similar reasoning for what they had done.
It didn't change her anger that Jack had subjected Sydney to the protocol. But it was too late.
But then, unexpectedly, Anastasia had dropped out of contact. Sark had been about 10, when Anastasia had stopped making their meets in Berlin. She had no idea where she'd gone. Nikola didn't know, and neither did anyone else at the KGB. Then the USSR had dissolved, and everything had gotten completely messed up.
40 minutes later, the cab screeched to a halt outside the library, and she threw too much money over the seat at the cabbie. "Keep the change," she commanded as his eyeballs grew wide at the wad of cash.