Jack drove, his left hand clamped around the steering wheel of the 2002 Grand Marquis, his right foot solidly on the gas pedal. LA's freeways were clear this time of night, and Jack drove as if he were OJ with the entire LAPD hot on his tail. Franklin lived further out than he would've expected; he felt like he was driving to China.

At last he pulled to the curb on a residential street outside what appeared to be a house subdivided into several residences. Glancing at the file he had in his hand to double check the address, Jack strode to the front door and pressed the buzzer for 1B. He could see there was a light on in one of the downstairs apartments.

After several minutes with no response, Jack left his thumb on the button without pause until Franklin's bewildered voice crackled through the vintage intercom system, "Who's there? What?"

"Agent Franklin, this is Lead Agent Bristow," he said, more calmly than he really felt, "I need to have a word with you."

"Now?" came Franklin's whiny voice.

"Yes," Jack said, "Now."

The door buzzed and Jack opened the door into the foyer of the house and located 1B. It was Franklin's light he had seen from the outside—the coward was hiding from him. Just as Jack raised his hand to knock, the door opened a crack and Franklin's eye peeked out through it, several inches above the chain, which was firmly in place. The smell of patchouli wafted out into the hallway, and Jack resisted the urge to make a face in disgust. Awful.

"So, um, what's going on," Franklin asked, "Is there some emergency?"

"Yes, but it would be better if I could step inside to discuss a matter pertaining to national security, don't you think?"

"Oh, sorry," Franklin muttered, and the door closed for a second. Jack heard the chain come off the door, and he also heard Franklin check his gun before he opened the door. Jack stepped to the side and drew his own gun from his holster under his trench coat. The door opened next to him.

"Agent Bristow?" Franklin made the amateur mistake of poking his head out of his door to look for his unexpected caller, and Jack felt a small amount of pride glowing in his chest as the butt of his gun connected with Franklin's temple.

"Age will outwit youth and beauty every time," Jack muttered to himself as he dragged Franklin's limp body into the apartment and shut the door with a kick of his foot.

"Would you really have split the money with Lauren?" Sydney didn't believe it for a second.

He studied her for a moment before replying, "I'm sure the percentages wouldn't have been equitable, given that it was my money in the first place, but Ms. Reed did deserve to be paid for the… services that were rendered during her time with the Covenant."

Sydney pressed her lips together, thinking of what he could possibly mean by "services." She decided not to ask. Just as quickly as she had felt some tiny sliver of appreciation for his presence, he had managed to reverse that to more than a small feeling of irritation. She loathed the uneven, emotional rollercoaster she always seemed to be on when she was around him. It had always been this way; one minute he was like her annoying but lovable little brother, the next she wanted to scratch his eyes out. This was the longest she'd ever been around him, continuously, besides those maddening few weeks when he was working with SD-6 and she'd had to pretend like she didn't despise him with every hair on her head. Even more so, since it was her doing that had brought them together. More than once, she'd only been able to save her sanity during briefings, to keep from jamming her pen into his windpipe when he wouldn't stop staring at her, by holding her breath until she felt as though she might pass out before she allowed herself to breathe again.

Even to this day, she wondered what he had meant in Paris when he'd warned her that he and Lauren had a certain "reputation." What could possibly have been so unique or interesting about the woman's sex act on that people would have actually wanted to watch? She'd found Lauren to be fairly bland; that is, bland when she wasn't being an evil double-crossing spy bitch, anyway. Lauren was exactly the type of girl she supposed most guys liked: slender, blonde, smart, but not smart enough to actually threaten the man's sense of superiority.

Woman was God's second mistake, the Nietzsche quote flashed through her mind. Sark had used it as a pass phrase for a server they'd been trying to hack once.

"Are we done playing twenty questions about my financial status," Sark's amused tone cut into her thoughts. His blue eyes smiled even though his lips were set in a grim line.

"Which of them is your asset?" she returned to the subject of the mole.

"A young gentleman by the name of Jonathan Franklin," Sark said, smoothly. "He's more capable than the agency gives him credit for, though he is fairly unimaginative in his ministrations."

She sighed. Franklin… the kid had never even had a chance. Her father would dispatch him unceremoniously to the next life when he unraveled what he'd done. There would be a phone call to his mother in North Carolina, the "regret to inform you blah blah duty to his country blah blah blah honorable citizen blah blah beloved friend" conversation.

"How did you meet?"

Sark chuckled, "I was unrelated business in LA, having a drink at the hotel bar, when I was approached by Mr. Franklin." Sark's left cheek was dimpling with the smile that was playing at his lips. "Apparently I am as attractive to the same sex as I am to the opposite."

"Don't flatter yourself, it's not becoming," she sneered, feeling sorry for Franklin that he would try to pick up a deranged, sociopathic nutcase like Sark. When she was done feeling sorry for Closet Homo Newbie, maybe she would start feeling sorry for herself, too. Or maybe not, since self-pity might actually involve acknowledging that there was a certain—she hated the very word--chemistry between them.

"I'm sure most men wouldn't consider the advances of another man terribly flattering," he replied calmly, "Franklin is a handsome enough type… He's just not my type," Sark shrugged.

He was doing it, again—baiting her into asking him questions because her curiosity would get the better of it. Well, screw him, she thought. She was putting her curiosity into a lockbox—no, make that a Lockbox—like the one Al Gore had had for Social Security during his 2000 campaign.

But slowly, her insane curiosity found a way to pick the lock, maybe saw it off with a hacksaw, even, and she heard herself asking out loud, as though the voice came from another body besides hers, "And what would your type be, huh? I didn't know they made an 'Evil Blonde Double Agent' blow-up doll."

"Sydney, really, you wound me," he said with fake pout, "You must think me incapable of affection, which I assure you, I'm not." His blue eyes glittered with his amusement, she supposed at her curiosity. "I enjoy a certain… challenge in my pursuits. Even Ms. Reed did not succumb immediately to my charms, despite her boredom with Vaughn. I was surprisingly fond of her by the time she met her death at his hand. Really, you ought to thank me—had it not been for our partnership, she might still be married to Vaughn."

Franklin's eyes opened, slowly. His temple and the right side of his face, near his ear, were one solid mass of pain. It reminded him of getting hit with a lacrosse stick at prep school. Then he remembered how he had come to feel this way.

"Good, you're awake," Agent Bristow said, from his seat across from him. They were seated at Franklin's kitchen table, but Franklin noticed with growing alarm that he was duct-taped in several places to the chair. This could only mean one thing. And it wasn't a good thing.

"Yes?" Franklin croaked. "Why am I taped to the chair?"

"I would hate for you to be distracted while we discuss this matter," Jack threw the report containing account re-activations across the table in Franklin's general direction. "Who gave you permission to reactivate this account?"

"No one," Franklin mumbled.

"Then why did you do that?" Agent Bristow's tone was completely condescending.

Franklin shrugged.

"Do you know whose account this is?" Jack's eyes narrowed in suspicion.

"No," Franklin decided sarcasm was an appropriate response. This guy had had it in for him since the second he'd stepped into the Ops center 6 months ago. "I pulled a name out of a hat."

Agent Bristow's fist slammed down on the table, causing Franklin to jump as much as his tape restraints would allow. "Tell me… who you're working for," Jack's voice was low, savage.

"I reactivated it for Mr. Sark," Franklin said, quickly rethinking his prior impertinence, but also thinking back to that fateful night. If he just played it cool, not acted on his impulse to walk over to the tall, slender gentleman with hair the color of new straw, the one whose accent he'd heard as he'd ordered a glass of red wine, he would not be sitting here taped to the chairs his parents had bought him as a graduation gift.

"Very good," Agent Bristow said, now sarcastic himself. "Why?"

Why. Oh, why? Suddenly the money didn't seem as important as it had when he had made the first deal with Sark. What had he earned now, twenty-five g's? Sure, it was more than three quarters of his annual salary, a nice supplement with his student loans, but he had a sneaking suspicion he might not need to worry about his debt, wherever he was going.

"I… He paid me," Franklin said. It was his own fault for telling a perfect stranger what he actually did for a living.

"So does this country," Agent Bristow was clearly unsympathetic to his cause.

Franklin was on the verge of sniveling, Jack could see it. The kid's eyes were wide, his pupils dilated nearly to the edges of his irises. "Your actions," Jack continued, "May have compromised a long-term effort to apprehend and incarcerate one of the most elusive terrorists in recent memory." Perhaps he was giving Sark a little too much credit there, but he wanted Franklin to sweat. "And you expect me to believe that you were motivated merely by money?"

"Agent Bristow, I—"

"You what?" Jack narrowed his eyes. "What explanation can you possibly offer for this, this… disgrace? Because of your little arrangement, Mr. Sark is now able to fund his operations. Just why did you join the agency, if not to stop just exactly something like this from happening?"

Franklin looked down at his lap, at the table, basically anywhere except at Jack. Jack glowered and folded his fingers neatly together on top of the folder containing the records. He had stopped himself just short of going on a tirade about how Franklin had enabled Sark to wreck Sydney's personal life as well.

"I didn't know it would be this big a deal," Franklin said at last, lamely. "I didn't know it would be a repeat thing. I mean, one thing lead to another, and…" He closed his mouth and was silent. "My family doesn't know… about… they think I'm—"

"If you were having trouble dealing with being in the closet," Jack interjected, "You could've talked to any number of capable psychologists that the agency employs for just these purposes. They're very adept at dealing with the issues of employees who lead double lives."

Franklin's gaze snapped up to meet Jack's in surprise, probably because he thought no one at the agency knew about his preferences.

"Yes, we know about that," Jack confirmed, averting his eyes for a second, "Though the agency generally employs the don't-ask-don't-tell policy when it concerns such matters."

"I meant, Sark said he would tell my family," Franklin stammered, "When I met him, I thought he—"

Jack glowered even more, and Franklin stopped speaking in midsentence.

"There is no way to excuse your rogue behavior, Agent Franklin," he said. A tiny voice nagged him that he was being too hard on the kid, when he had overlooked exactly the same type of behavior for Sydney. Franklin didn't know that, though. He got up, casually almost, and went into Franklin's kitchen. He began opening drawers and rummaging through them, in search of an implement.

Stepping over the body of the guard she'd just shot, Irina tried not to notice the bright, coppery scent that hung in the air, not to see the spatters of blood bright red with oxygen, the tiny chips of bone. It smelled like a new penny, a scent that Irina still hated after all these years. To her, the coins smelled like blood. Steeling herself, she placed her hand on the doorknob, silently grateful that she'd remembered to bring gloves so that she wouldn't have to touch the slippery wetness of the metal coated with bodily fluids, feel it slip under her fingers as she struggled to turn the stiff mechanism.

Closing her eyes for a second, she tried to see something else in her mind's eye besides the pulpy, bloody mess that was the guard's head next to her on the chair. When had she ever been bothered by the sight of gore before now? She couldn't understand why she was suddenly so sensitive—not even when she was undercover, married to Jack with a baby at home, had she hesitated to pull the trigger or draw a knife across someone's throat, feel it catch a little as it cut the cartilage in their windpipe.

A voice danced in Irina's mind, as she slipped through the doorway to the next hallway, one that was lit only by a single buzzing fluorescent tube, a voice that whispered, you're too late this time, there's nothing you can do.

She moved cautiously down the hall and ignored the voice. She couldn't tell if she was more upset at the thought that one of them might be harmed, or that it was her negligence in keeping tabs on Anastasia's whereabouts that had lead to this. If there was one thing she knew certainly, it was that when she was 18, she hadn't seen this in her future. She didn't know what she had seen, but it wasn't this. Most people her age had a few grandchildren, were thinking about retiring, maybe moving to the country. She had failed to imagine anything for herself besides what was put in front of her, and now…