Sark was rather enjoying this mission, aside from the fact that he was strapped to a chair with no current plan of escape. He'd gotten out of worse; he'd get out of this, too. His confidence in his own ability was supreme. Sydney was clearly growing annoyed with being stuck in the same room with him for this long—it was, after all, the longest amount of time they'd spent in each others' presence.
"I will never thank you for any of the things you've done to the people I care about," she said, her voice low and even. "How dare you even suggest that I owe you some kind of… gratitude, or that I should believe you actually care about my feelings."
He shrugged casually, and looked to the floor. "We can't exactly undo what's already been done, Sydney," he said obviously, not feeling a trace of guilt. "You and I are different that way—I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the past."
"Oh, so that's it, then," she shot back, "I'm a charity case who lives in the past, huh? Well, at least I have a past to look back on that doesn't keep me awake at night."
"Oh, really? Which part doesn't keep you awake? The part where you bargained for someone to be killed to save someone you cared for? The part when you willingly mislead your own partner about your allegiance to better suit your own nee—"
"Like you're so much better!" she spat at him, "How can you pass judgment on me, you murdering, lying sonuvabitch!"
"I, unlike you, do not harbor any illusions that one of us is better or worse, and your stubborn persistence in doing so is illogical at best," Sark said calmly, "Why is it so difficult for you to admit that we're alike, you and I? To just acknowledge that you lie, murder and steal just the same as I do?"
"Why do you need for us to be the same?" she replied stubbornly. "What's the matter, is it lonely on your ice planet, Sark? Do you need a friend?" She let her lower lip roll out in a mock pout, and parroted the voice of a saccharine grade-school teacher, "'Poor Julian, he doesn't have any friends to play with in his little sociopathic universe.'"
"Like I said, Sydney," Sark deliberately kept his voice even, "I don't need anything from you. Between the two of us, you are the needy party. What was it that Joseph Conrad wrote? 'I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.'"
"Oh, God!" she rolled her eyes at him, "Seriously, what is wrong with you? Why do you have to be different than everyone else? Why can't you just admit you need other people, too? Surely in your short, twisted life there's been someone that you were sorry to see go, someone you missed a teeny-tiny bit—c'mon, think about it—it's not like we're in a hurry!"
He stared at her, silent. Her hysteria was beginning to make him doubt himself, just a little. Maybe there was something wrong with him? Was it really that unnatural to be so independent of human attachment—she certainly seemed to think so.
"I'm afraid that's need-to-know information," he said coolly.
"I'm afraid you're totally full of shit," she replied without so much as a second's pause.
How could he ever say it? Like saying it aloud would make it real—that he felt an illogical, inexplicable connection to… her, he always had, even before he'd known her. That night in Moscow, when he'd seen her dangling outside the window of the warehouse in that ridiculous fur hat, it was like seeing someone from another life, someone he had known. Even though he hadn't glimpsed her for more than a second, he had known somehow it was Irina's daughter, her sainted eldest child that she'd left behind in the US. But to say it out loud to her—it was like something a crazy person would say.
To you, he said in his mind, and only to you.
It had been his seventeenth birthday, not that it had really meant much to him. His birthdays had always passed unmarked at school; why should it be any different now that he was working for her? And what was a birthday, anyway—age was just a number that some people attached unnecessary meaning to that had little to no bearing on one's maturity or capabilities. Boarding school had proved this theory beyond a doubt for him.
He was slouched in the worn leather armchair across from her at her big wooden desk, bouncing one foot just to annoy her. She hated that he did that out of nervousness, but he hated it when she summoned him only to ignore him while she continued working in his presence. He considered them even.
She was writing, writing, writing something endlessly in a bound book on her desk, and while he waited for her to speak, he cautiously looked at the pictures on her desk. There was one of her with her two sisters, Katya and Elena, when they were all younger. Even in that snapshot, one could see that Irina was the most mischievous of the three. Elena bore the stern, pinched look of an eldest child, and Katya's round face was serene, the ever-calm, even-tempered middle child. Next to that photo was a picture of her parents, black and white in an oval frame.
Then he noticed a photo, curled with age, lying at Irina's elbow. Nonchalantly as possibly, more as if he were shifting in the chair than craning to see it, he took a quick look, but she caught him red-handed.
"Yes?" Irina paused in writing without lifting the pen from the paper.
"Nothing."
Without a word she pushed the photo across the surface of the desk towards him. He grasped it by the edges and looked at it carefully. It was an early color photo, one whose colors had not held up well over time. A little girl squinted in the sun, her chubby cheeks puffed up in what Sark supposed was a smile, though it looked more like a grimace. He would've grimaced too, had he been forced to wear a little yellow skirt with matching yarn ties for pigtails, along with a frilly, high-necked white blouse that was smocked across the bodice. She was alone in the picture, though he could discern the shadows of two people in front her; her parents?
"Is that you?" he asked, knowing that it wasn't.
"No," Irina said fondly, taking the picture back from him gently. Her face looked the softest he'd ever seen it as she gazed at the picture for a second before placing it back where it had been. "It's my daughter."
"Oh," was all he could think to say at first. He had never considered the possibility that she might be a mother herself. "Where does she live?"
"In America. With her father," Irina replied without looking up.
"How old is she?" He found himself suddenly, insatiably curious about her by virtue of knowing nothing.
"In the picture, or now," Irina asked without pausing in her writing.
He shrugged, "Either one."
She paused and glanced up at him before continuing to write. "That picture was taken when she was 4. She's going to be 23 next month."
Sark accepted this without comment. So, she was somewhat older than him. "Do you see her?"
"No," Irina sighed deeply, "They believe I died, when she was 6. I haven't seen her since then."
"Do you miss her? What about her father?"
"Sometimes." He wasn't clear from her answer if she meant her daughter, or the girl's father, or both? He sat forward in the chair, waiting for her to continue. At last, she stopped writing and placed the cap on the pen carefully before putting the picture in the center desk drawer and closing it. She folded her hands on the desk and studied him.
"Julian," she addressed him, "There are times in this business when you have to choose what master to serve. You have to be flexible, and remember, sometimes truth takes time."
He nodded like he understood, but he didn't, not at the time. Later, when she was out of the house, he'd returned back to the desk to look for the picture, but it was gone, and the memory of the little girl's face was already imperfect in his memory. He didn't even know her name.
Nearing the end of the hall, Irina could make out the edge of yet another staircase. Where did this building lead? It was like a maze. She moved silently, walking heel-to-toe in a half-walk, half-jog gait that covered slightly more ground. At the corner she sank again to one knee and peered around, low to the ground. Again, a single guard outside the door; Irina was beginning to wonder at the ease of this job. Her instincts were telling her it was too easy to be true. Nothing in this business ever went this easily.
She was checking the magazine on her gun when she heard a noise from the bottom of the stairs. It sounded like… voices? She glanced quickly around the corner and saw the guard glance over his shoulder at the door, shrug, and shake his head a little. Irina held her breath and listened, listened so hard and so still that even the sound of her own heartbeat seemed loud in comparison.
There it was again—the sound like voices. There were high notes, a woman's voice, no doubt, and then the low murmurings of a male voice too low to make out. She couldn't understand what they were saying, but it didn't matter. Relief shot through Irina's limbs like the burn of alcohol on a cold winter's night—it was them. They were alive. They were OK; hell, it even sounded like they were arguing. Imagine that.
Irina smiled as she whipped around the corner and shot the guard blatantly in the forehead.
It was cold in LA after dark, even in the late summer, and Vaughn felt the goose bumps on his forearms under his dress shirt. Glancing at his watch, he discovered he'd been sitting outside for several hours longer than he had intended.
Actually, there had been no intention; he'd come home from work, shrugged off Weiss's attempts to get him to go out or at least come over for a drink, and had walked out here to get…something when he'd sank down on this deck chair and not moved since. A light breeze had come up, but he'd stayed seated, just thinking. Just breathing. It was all he could do right now. There was no script for this kind of stuff. He knew people were starting to wonder where Sydney was; they were starting to approach him with that same look they got after they thought she had died, that, "Hey, man, how're things," the question he thought he'd go crazy from having to answer for the hundred millionth time. I'm fine. It's all fine.
Looking at the orange glow of the sky over downtown, Vaughn wondered if there was one moment when this could all have been avoided. There were, of course, plenty that sprang to mind. He could've said he was busy when Director Devlin had stepped into his crowded little office and asked if he could process the Agency's latest walk-in. Could've asked to have been replaced as her case officer—he wasn't qualified anyway, but she liked him for some strange reason, even when her skills were so beyond his.
No wonder the terrorists were winning the war on terror, he thought, their agents were ten times as skilled as the CIA's ever were.
More moments: could've stashed his father's wristwatch that broke that fateful day—October 1— somewhere in a drawer and never showed it to her, never told her that ridiculous story about how you could set your heart by the watch and how it had stopped the day they met. He cringed now, sitting in the chair, thinking about it. Could've ignored her big brown eyes and just concentrated on working things out with Alice. Alice was a nice girl, the kind you took home to Mom. For God's sakes, she even got squeamish about touching raw meat and stuff like that. She was, in a nutshell, everything that Sydney was not.
Moment Number He'd Lost Track of Its Number: when Will had threatened him in the post office about hurting Sydney's feelings, he could've heeded the warning. But… no. Curiously, Will's admonishment had made him bolder, made him even more convinced that they could somehow work things out between them.
Could've resisted Weiss's advice to ask her out to dinner when they were on a counter mission in France, could've not told her that endearing but idiotic story about why his code name was Boy Scout.
He could've sat there all night, thinking of ways to have avoided his sitting there thinking of all those scenarios.
But no amount of thinking about it would turn back the clock to any of them, any of those moments—what was done was done. It almost made him believe in destiny—in the inevitability of their course in life. If being with her was his fate, though, where was the moment he could've stopped things from leading to… this.
He couldn't think of a single one.