Part 16
Every eye in the room turned on the agent sitting across the conference table. Previously, Vaughn's head had been in his hands as he felt the guilt of Sydney taking broken bones on his behalf press his stomach into his guts, but the moment his name left her lips his head shot up and he locked eyes with his agent. She didn't know he was watching, but her pain-filled brown stare looked straight into the camera because she assumed he was there.
"Why is she giving you up?" Kendal growled, Vaughn shaking his head.
"She wouldn't...she isn't. She doesn't, uh, only my mom calls me Michael. We...we missed something - maybe...maybe something he said. Rewind it," he ordered.
"We can't here, it's live. You'll have to get to a different-" Paul, the analyst, explained, Vaughn already out of the chair and to the door before he finished his sentence.
The wind rushed by his ears as he ran down the hallway into the control room, Marshall sleeping with his forehead flat on the desk as a program ran on the monitor. Vaughn shook him awake, the techie jumping in panic until he saw who had grabbed him.
"I need you to rewind the video, we...we missed something."
"Uh...okay," Marshall wiped the sleep from his eyes, bleary and bloodshot, and typed quickly. The video began playing, Michael grabbing the mouse and fast-forwarding. "Start here."
Marshall put the pair of headphones into Michael's hands and he slipped them on, closing his eyes to try and hear past her pain-filled groans and harsh breaths.
"Who [garble], Sydney? [too low to hear] a name. Is it [garble] in your [breaks up] office? Someone [too low to hear] in meetings? Someone you've [garble]?"
"I can't make it out," Vaughn growled, Marshall rewinding a bit and turning up the volume.
"Who is it, Sydney? [too low to hear] Is it [garble] here in your field office? [too low to hear] to in meetings? [garble] worked with before?"
"What's she doing here?" Marshall's finger touched the screen before clicking rewind, his hand smacking Vaughn's elbow as the agent stood with the earpieces pushed against his head.
"Play it again, Marshall," he ordered, stopping when he saw him pointing at something.
"No, look. She's...blinking at the camera."
He was right. It was slow, her attempt to hide it, but it was obviously morse code. She repeated it only once, Michael frowning in confusion.
"H, E, R, E. She spelled 'here'. Why?" The question was rhetorical, Marshall shrugging anyway. "One more time, as loud as it will go," Vaughn ordered putting the headphones back on, closing his eyes, and pressing them as hard as he could over his ears.
"Who is it, Sydney? I just need a name. [too low to hear] someone that works here in your field office? Someone you sit next [garble]? [too low to hear] you've worked with before?"
Vaughn's eyes went wide, Marshall looking up with bated breath waiting for an explanation. "He said here. Oh my god," he panted, eyes glazing over unseeing as he stared off in no particular direction, "that son of a bitch." Yanking the headphones off, Vaughn bolted back toward the conference room.
"Wait!" Marshall hopped up and followed with hurried, awkward strides, though Vaughn didn't answer nor did he slow down.
Barging back into the room with the techie on his heels, "that bastard brought her back to Los Angeles. She's in the city; she's been here the whole time."
Half a dozen people were on their feet instantly, Kendall quieting the voices down before taking over. "Do they know this? The Alliance watching the feed?"
"I don't think so," Vaughn panted out of breath.
Will, still in shock, was the first to answer, "every single person in this room missed the hint. It wasn't until she said Vaughn's first name that we even thought something had happened. It's the one thing she could have said to catch our attention and no one else's."
"This doesn't leave this room. I need volunteers, people. If you have extraction and tactical insertion training, I want you to get with Agent Weiss who will be team lead. You be ready to go as soon as we have a location." Weiss left the room with a determined step, half a dozen following intent on volunteering. Michael was stopped only because of Kendall's fingers suddenly grasping the front of his shirt and keeping him in place.
"Mister Flinkman, you find her. I don't care how you do it, but I want a location A.S.A.P.." He lowered his eyes, turning and speaking to someone at his left, "I need PR up here," he said quietly. "Jack, Vaughn, and Will - come with me."
The teams split, and though two of them were desperate to stay and watch the feed despite the content, they rose and followed. The third was connected to Kendall by a fierce grip and was all but dragged from the room. Vaughn's want to follow Weiss and prepare for Sydney's extraction was strong, just not stronger than the director's grasp.
Ending up in Kendall's office, they stood before the large desk as the man released his captive and fell into his seat heaving a sigh.
"None of you three are going to like what I have to say, but I'm just going to come out and say it." The man's voice was weary and Jack noticed that the multi-day stubble and deep circled eyes matched his own from what the mirror showed him this morning. "Look, I would have made this decision on my own and agree with what they have to say, so I'm prefacing my next statement with that. I spoke with the president this afternoon. Yes; the president. He, along with his national security advisors, the chief director of both the CIA, FBI, and NSA all came to the conclusion that we cannot risk a rescue while that camera is streaming."
Will surprised everyone by being the first to jump in. "What the hell does that mean? What if he doesn't end the stream? What...what if he's gonna kill her in 30 minutes?"
Kendall sighed, his eyes breaking away and resting on the paperwork that had been piling up on his desk, "we have to wait."
Jack and Vaughn felt lead drop in their stomachs knowing that Kendall was right, though their hearts screamed to fight back. Will saw their defeated faces and his face grew red. "This is bullshit."
"Mister Tippin-"
"No. This is bullshit, and you know it. With how much she's done, you're telling me it's not worth even risking a rescue?"
Jack's shaking, low, tired voice was the last anyone expected to hear, "Will," he swallowed the lump rising in his throat, "there are hundreds of pounds of high-density explosives buried in the sublevels of the Credit Dauphine building-"
The surprise was short-lived on the reporter's face. "There's...no guarantee that it'll be set off." He tried to sound confident, but the small tremor between his words belied this attempt.
"We can't risk that." Kendall's bark was as soft as any had heard.
"So we...we evacuate the-" Vaughn was shaking his head, his arms folding over his chest defensively as his voice gave out.
"If the people in that cell see us rescue her, it'll break the rule that is the foundation of SD-6 and every other SD cell: secrecy. They are all taught that no matter how bad it gets, rescue won't be attempted if anyone outside the organization would be made aware of their existence."
"But-"
"Will," Michael ground out, "we can't until the stream goes dead. No...no matter how much we want to." He couldn't meet the pleading blue eyes, his own tear-filled orbs directed to the edge of the wooden desk. He sucked in a shuddering breath as his chin quivered.
"She doesn't deserve that," Tippin groaned as hot tears ran down his cheeks.
Every head avidly nodded in agreement, her father jumping back in. "Sydney would volunteer to take their place, you know she would. She...she'd never want us to do something that would put innocent lives at risk."
"None of you are allowed on the extraction team," Kendall changed the subject abruptly knowing it was a hard transition, but that it would be even harder for at least one of them to accept. Seeing fiery objection leap into Vaughn's eyes, right on cue, he held up his hand stopping the young man from speaking as he continued. "How long have you been awake? I mean, in six days, how many hours have you actually slept?"
'Counting the hours that Jack drugged me? Like, 2 hours a day...maybe.' Michael's mind answered. "That's not the point; I can still help."
"You will be helping, but it'll be from here." Someone else opened the door behind them, the three recognizing the lawyer-looking woman from the first twenty hours. Kendall beckoned her to join them and continued as he saw the other three try and compose themselves.
"Right now, the five of us need to come up with what happens after that feed goes down. Flynn's never streamed for this long, and how tired he is, is showing. Odds are good that he'll end it soon, and that's when Weiss and the team goes in. We just...have to assume that's the order of things. Brenda," he gave up the soapbox gladly, his voice tired and raspy.
"The media is heavily covering the feed, and the clip of her beating the shit out of him is the most viral thing the internet has seen in years. We still get daily requests for confirmation that she's CIA, which we still have to deny. If she survives and the extraction team isn't a retrieval team, we need to make her dead. Uh...paperwork dead, not dead, dead."
Kendall spoke back up, "Agent Bristow will be declared KIA. It cannot get back to the Alliance that she's been rescued; if that's what happens, it'll compromise the entire SD-6 office as well as every ounce of information Jack and Sydney collected in Luxembourg. Not to mention a damn city block of innocent people at risk from the C-4 in the sublevels. They still don't know what we know, and we need to keep it that way or everything she, and you Jack, fought for will be moot."
"Witness protection?" Jack's voice was steely and hard, and the other two could tell that he was trying to hold back every emotion threatening to bubble to the surface. Brenda shook her head.
"It's too much of a risk. This website was global, and with around the clock news coverage, those that never even searched out the link know everything about her that's out there. Hell, CNN did a biopic from a half dozen people that shared classes with her in college. Her face is everywhere. I mean...there's nowhere for her to hide." The woman looked back and forth between pages in a file folder.
"She'll stay here," Kendall announced. "It's the least we can do. This way she can still be involved in bringing the Alliance down, and she'll be safe. The bottom floor of this facility is only accessible by access card, and I'm the only guy that can program the cards. Give me a list of those you want to know she's alive, everyone else will be kept in the dark. And I mean everyone else - the president won't even know. The five of us will know - and anyone else you put on that list, but you keep that number low."
Jack balked, "I'm more than willing to spend the rest of my life in a basement, but I don't want that for my daughter. Is there nowhere we could place her that would be away from everything that just tortured her for a week?"
Kendall chuckled, "Jack, I get it. But if you were Sydney, wouldn't you want a chance at revenge?"
…
Flynn took a fair amount of pride in the harsh sobs and ragged breaths from the woman before him, his hands on her shoulders setting fire to the dislocated shoulder causing her to slump slightly left.
"Forearms are pesky, aren't they, darling? I thought maybe I could do it in one fell swoop," he commented wryly, stepping back and seeing her lower left arm at an odd angle between the elbow and the bound wire around her wrists holding them together behind the chair.
She caught her breath, trying to suck air in through her nose and blow it out through her mouth, willing her mind to partition the pain behind some kind of filter. But each time he touched her skin made her muscles tense and renewed the throbbing ache despite the machine not being connected.
"Tomorrow's our last day together, Sydney."
"Quitter."
Flynn chuckled. "Through everything, my biggest disappointment is that I couldn't break you. I mean...you're broken, sure, but I really hoped to get something out of you."
"Sorry to...disappoint."
He rolled his eyes and ran his finger down her misshapen forearm making her whimper and scrunch her face as the muscles tightened around the broken bones. "Even if you just begged me to kill you I'd consider it a success. Screw the intel, love, I don't even care anymore."
"I..." she blinked as more tears dropped down well-worn trails on her cheeks. He moved forward and crouched before her, so she met his eyes exuding all the fight she had left. "I...won't...break for you."
Flynn scoffed and rose, sitting in the chair. "Just give up, Sydney - no one cares that you're here. They're still not claiming you, you know."
"You first."
"We got a call from your father. We thought he ghosted you, but no longer. He begged for your life, darling."
Sydney hung her head low and sighed as much as she could past the painful stitch in her ribs that flared up into her shoulder. "Did he...threaten you?"
"Oh no, he was timid as a deer."
She gave a slight shake of her head, "nice try."
It was his turn to sigh, which turned into a groan as he rose and made his way back behind her trembling figure. She gasped and sobbed as he flicked her arm with a sadistic smile, "shall we keep going?"
…
"I...I...I..." Marshall's stutter made Vaughn want to punch him, though he knew that reaction was born from extreme stress and a lack of sleep.
"Focus," he snapped.
"I think I...found her," he typed rapidly, the group around him not expecting that answer as they crowded closer around his workstation. The wave of excitement was palpable, and even side conversations were higher pitched with the news.
Jack leaned in with a palm flat against the top of Marshall's desk, "where is she?"
For once, Marshall ignored the man and kept typing. "I...when you mentioned L.A., I searched through the points one by one."
Will crossed his arms over his head, "all 70,000?"
"Yeah."
"Holy shit, you did that in," Will looked at his watch, "one hour?"
Marshall rolled his eyes, "well...I didn't; I wrote a program to do it. I found three signals that bounced around L.A. - they didn't...really...register on the list because we were, you know, looking in Europe. Plus, we just assumed those signals were coming to us, but we were wrong. They're almost complete, no degradation." He began typing again, two minutes skipping by as he became engrossed in what he was doing. No one wanted to pester him with more questions, however, as he'd been the only one to get close enough to a location the entire time.
"Does that mean you can triangulate?" Weiss asked from behind the group, bouncing from his left to right foot itching to get the extraction team close and pull his friend out of reach from this sadistic freak. He was in near full tactical gear and stood out like a sore thumb in the crowd of rumpled business casual.
Jack almost took a smack to the face as Marshall threw his arms in the air with an excited shriek, the map on his screen showing three nodes in a triangle with a dot in the center. While everyone else celebrated, Jack's face fell. While everyone else shouted and applauded, his heart sunk low with sadness before quickly refilling with rage.
"Son of a bitch," he growled, stepping away to another terminal and typing furiously. Records and files opened one at a time beginning to overlap. While others were busy congratulating Marshall on many days of hard, sleepless work, Vaughn and Weiss moved to see what the elder Bristow was doing. The scowl on his face was eerie and out of place with the news they'd just received, which usually wasn't a good sign.
The two younger agents saw his shoulders slump as he leaned down over the keyboard with his palms flat against the desk, head hung low. "Jack, what's up?"
"Credit Dauphine Central L.A. offices. Sloane mentioned once how impressive their conference rooms were. She's there. She's been ten minutes away this whole time." Jack's words dripped with rage, his steel-blue eyes like a hot flame as he gripped the desk with white knuckles. Michael had attributed the slump of his shoulders to fatigue and regret, but it was simply the father trying not to throw something across the office.
Michael had never heard that tone from the man and realized that every time Jack had been angry at him in the last two years, he hadn't really been angry. This was anger. This was rage. And he felt it too. The Alliance was evil enough to force them all to watch her tortured, but this was the icing on a shit cake: she had been just three blocks away.
Kendall gathered up papers and moved away from the excited crowd bunched around the techie's desk, "Agent Weiss, get your team en route. Everyone that can bear it, conference room: now!"
Feet scrambled and there wasn't a bare space left. The half a dozen people that had stayed behind included the medical and psychological staff and a single tech analyst, and they all looked sick to their stomachs. It dropped a lead weight of worry into Vaughn's stomach, his eyes jumping to the screen. Something had changed. He'd become accustomed to seeing her grimaces of pain here and there, but her face right now was the definition of agony.
"What happened?"
"He broke her arm. Subsequently, her shoulder dislocated. It's...been rough." The man looked sad and angry all at once, though when the flood of people streamed into the room, he was thankful that it pulled their attention from the streaming horror show.
Kendall took over. "We have a location." He let the team cheer, his hands raised to calm them back down. "This is the part that I don't want to say out loud, and the part that you don't want to hear," the director's voice was oddly unsteady, and he looked down at the papers scattered on the table before sighing. "We wait until this session ends."
Shouts, hollers, angry voices, it all erupted the moment the words left his mouth. He let them rant for a moment before attempting to corral the din.
"We...listen! Her extraction has to be done without the Alliance knowing, and that means we wait until the camera goes dark. I know it's been hard; I know that, and I'm sorry to make it just that much harder, but today is the last day she sits in that chair, I promise you that."
A contemplative silence filled the room, save for her ragged breathing over the speakers keeping them all on edge. One of the psychologists spoke up, timid at first. "Can I point out the obvious elephant in the room?" Kendall waved his hand and took his seat, "what if she doesn't survive to extraction?"
You could hear a pin drop. "We...we would switch from extraction to recovery. Either way, she's coming home."
The room went silent, which wasn't what the bald-headed man expected - he genuinely thought half a dozen at the table would jump across to punch his lights out.
"If this bastard sticks to his timetable we have one more day. The best-case scenario is that she's rescued tonight, or whenever he disconnects the stream. Weiss and the team are en route and will be less than a block away waiting for the go-code."
The same doctor spoke up again, "I think he's too unstable and reckless at this stage for us to assume that he's going to let it go another day. He's gotten increasingly violent, and admitted verbally he didn't care about the intel less than an hour ago. Not to mention that this has been the longest session at," he looked at his watch, "going on fifteen hours."
Medical chimed in. "The human body is a remarkable machine and she is tough as nails, but we're talking about massive amounts of blood loss, critical dehydration, systemic shock, and subsequent infection. This is what I can see. What I can't see is the myriad of broken bones and damage from internal bleeding. It is not going to get any better. We should risk it; we can risk it. Send the team in, damn the camera. Let the world see us rescue someone that needs rescuing."
Others agreed with a rumble, though dissenting opinions were silent shaking heads rather than any outward noise. The error in their thinking was that Kendall was entertaining alternatives in the first place.
"I'll take personal responsibility as head of this task force for whatever happens to Sydney Bristow and the possible PR nightmare that will occur if she dies on camera. We will wait until the stream ends. At that moment we'll switch to the operational vest and helmet-mounted cameras and audio for the extraction process."
"But sir-" the medical expert pressed.
Interrupting, "we wait."
…
