XV

Sydney clutched her laptop so tightly her knuckles were white, barely conscious of the rotor noise of the helicopter she was sitting in, or of the shouted conversation Dixon was having with Marshall over the radio as they tried to locate the position of the downed plane. All her attention was focused on the small, dim rectangle of video footage and her father's even smaller figure in the corner of it.

He still hadn't moved. She couldn't even tell if he was breathing.

In fact, she was so focused on her father to the exclusion of all else that she didn't even notice what was happening in the rest of the footage until Vaughn's voice spoke in her ear. "Sloane's getting up."

Sydney hissed as she witnessed Arvin Sloane tentatively pulling himself to his feet. He was moving cautiously, but not visibly badly injured. If he'd come out of this without a scratch, if he'd planned this - if her father was dead-

Her dire mental threats were momentarily derailed as she watched Sloane edge his way over to her dad and bend down to take a pulse. Her father's head moved weakly away from the touch, and Sydney let out a gulping gasp that could as easily have been a laugh or a sob.

"Jack's alive." Vaughn's steady voice confirmed the evidence of her own eyes.

"Do we have audio?" she asked, snapping back into a more professional mode as Sloane stooped and said something to her father. The camera angle hid Sloane's face, and her father's pained squint offered no clue as to whether the words might be a threat or an assurance. With Sloane, it could equally well be both in the same breath.

"Negative, Mountaineer, there's too much interference to pick up the signals from the mikes," Vaughn said. Marshall had probably worked a minor miracle just to get the video, but all Sydney could feel was frustration. They could see what was going on, but there was no way of knowing how long it would take them to reach the plane. Her father needed medical attention, now.

He'd clearly taken some kind of head injury, as Sloane helped him remove his tie and hold the wadded cloth to staunch the bleeding. Then Sloane patted him on the shoulder and stood up.

"He's leaving," Vaughn said in disgust, as Sloane made his way down the plane, disappearing off the camera footage.

"Bastard," Sydney hissed in a low breath.

Dixon squeezed her arm. "Syd, we'll get there," he said reassuringly.

"Not in time to catch Sloane," she said, glaring daggers at the screen. "When I find him, I'm gonna rip his little-"

"Sydney!" Dixon pointed at a moving shadow on the screen. A moment later, Sloane reappeared on the footage, holding the folded shape of an emergency blanket.

So he'd decided to stay and help after all. But as Sydney watched her father's dizzy attempts to stand with Sloane's assistance, she couldn't help but worry that if they didn't find the plane soon, it wasn't going to make a lot of difference.


Jack's weight leaned heavily against his side as Arvin helped him out of the plane. Despite the cold conditions, his face was flushed, and his breathing was loud and slightly ragged.

Not good signs. He was at least aware enough to keep holding the makeshift bandage to his own head, but the lack of overt protestations at the assistance was cause for concern.

They struggled to make it a safe distance from the plane. Arvin was feeling fairly battered himself, though he seemed to have escaped any major harm. The bomb inside the cockpit had been low-yield, and from what Arvin could surmise, planted directly under the pilot's seat. A backup plan for if the hijacking was discovered, intended to cause a crash but not destroy the plane utterly.

Whoever had set this up had wanted to take them alive, but had been willing to roll the dice on the chance of killing them. Someone who was unafraid to take risks, and considered capturing one or both of them from the CIA worth the possibility of doing them damage.

It was a foolish man indeed who wouldn't place some money on the Derevko sisters.

"It's likely that whoever set this up will find us before the CIA," he said, as he helped Jack to lie down, propping up his head and shoulders. It was uncertain whether the CIA was even aware of the crash yet, and it would take them time to get agents on-scene. If this was indeed Irina's work, she was sure to have operatives waiting nearby to take them into custody.

Jack's dark eyes met his. "I already gave you my gun," he said, with a wry twist to his mouth. Jack's sense of humour did insist on manifesting at the most perverse times.

Arvin had lost track of the weapon in the crash, and saw little merit in attempting to retrieve it. It was likely Irina's forces would have superior weaponry, and even if they didn't, a shootout would hardly help their position. It would be better by far to go along peaceably; he was more than confident of his ability to negotiate a mutually satisfying bargain with the Derevkos.

It would compromise his standing with the CIA, which was something of an annoyance, but Jack's presence should help support his bona fides. Assuming that Jack was in any state to support him. The focus of his gaze had drifted during the lull, but Arvin suspected that any attempt to perform the standard consciousness checks would not go down well.

"This is likely the work of Irina Derevko," he said instead. He thought it best to avoid untoward intimacy when speaking of that woman - for several reasons. "The main question is which one of us she arranged this to acquire." Mostly likely both, in fact, since Irina was nothing if not efficient, but one of them had to have been the primary target.

"Irina Derevko has no interest in me," Jack said stiffly. Arvin wasn't sure that was entirely true, but on the whole it was probably best that Jack believed so. Jack was far too much of a romantic for his own good. Disillusionment hadn't erased that, only bolted it down with iron denial, and poking holes in that denial was apt to cause it to spill out in uncontrolled bursts.

That was the main reason Arvin had been willing to abide by the CIA's ruling that Jack should not be told of his former wife's survival. Jack was not capable of mixed emotions when it came to his affections - either he loved with single-minded intensity, or not at all. His only way to handle the truth about Irina was to believe that the Laura he had loved had been wholly illusion. Open the possibility that any aspect of her had belonged the true Irina, then Jack would have to admit he'd loved part of her - and if he loved part of her, he loved all of her, because that was the way that Jack functioned.

Personally, Arvin would much rather Jack malign some small corner of Irina's motives unfairly than view the whole of them through overly romantic eyes. He didn't doubt the rightness of his original decision. But nonetheless, perhaps this was an opportunity to clear the air on that matter.

"I never apologised for not telling you that your wife had survived," he said.

"You did as you thought best," Jack said, in that neutral way he had of addressing the issues he preferred to pretend didn't hurt him. "I admit that in the early months, I would have reacted," he took a laboured breath, "irrationally. And after that, we... grew apart."

It was neither accusation nor forgiveness, just a statement of fact. They had both withdrawn from the other's company; Jack's reasons were obvious, Arvin's perhaps less so from his point of view.

"Yes." Arvin studied his hands, his wedding ring side by side with the scar around the finger Jack had severed for him. The ties of his life, illustrated with an almost too-apt symbolism.

He wouldn't trade the scar any more than he would the ring, for all that it had been a much more painful acquisition.

And perhaps it was time to admit now how their separation had first begun. It had been such a long time...

"Yes," he repeated, without looking at Jack. "Emily and I intended to... start a new life in Europe. Begin afresh." His mind drifted unbidden to the villa in Italy. Funny how the interior of the house was almost a dream to him now, but he could still see the garden, as fresh in his mind's eye as if he'd left it yesterday. He would always remember the flowers - or, perhaps, remember noticing the flowers. Days of endless spring, when everything had been in hopeful bloom.

"We were going to name her after you," he said, and found himself in the midst of the confession without having consciously decided to make it. "Jacquelyn." He couldn't help but smile at the recollection, even as the long-suppressed tears prickled at the corners of his eyes. "I hoped to surprise you. Emily didn't want to celebrate prematurely, not after her previous... setbacks, but it really seemed that everything was going to be all right this time."

He shifted position. "I remember, at the hospital... Emily was so panicked, it was early, but first babies are often early. And when she was born, she was so small, but you could tell she was a fighter. She fought so hard, and it didn't seem possible that she could be here just for a short visit. She was so determined - my baby girl..."

He found himself too choked to continue. Jack grasped his arm, but Arvin could take little comfort from the gesture. Then Jack's fingers went slack, and Arvin abruptly turned to face him, registering too late that Jack's breathing had been growing steadily slower the whole time.

"Arvin," Jack said urgently, but it was a slurred mumble, the vowels barely there.

Arvin clasped his hand, feeling the cold air chill the tears still on his face. "Jack, don't-"

"Arvin," Jack repeated stubbornly. He swallowed and took a moment to muster his next words, the pause several beats longer than natural. "You need to tell Sydney..." He licked his lips with excruciating slowness and tried again. "You need to tell Sydney-"

Arvin shook his head. "No, I don't," he said, squeezing Jack's hand. "Shh. It's okay." He pressed gently on Jack's chest to discourage his weak attempts to sit up.

Jack still struggled, showing no signs of having heard or understood. "Sydney..." he said again. It trailed off into an exhaled breath.

Arvin waited for the inhale to replace it.

But it didn't come.


Sydney's tension had been ratcheting up ever since her father and Sloane had disappeared from the plane's on-board camera. Sloane could have walked off into the mountains and left her father to die. Hell, Sloane could have smashed his head in with a rock before he went. Sydney would put nothing past him.

The rescue helicopter was still searching, and they still hadn't spotted the plane. "Marshall!" she barked into her headset.

"Okay, Syd, you should be, almost, er," he stuttered helplessly in her headphones, "according to this you should be right on top of them."

"Sydney!" Dixon called from the other side of the helicopter, and she turned to look. As the helicopter rose up out of a dip in the terrain, she could see the crashed plane up ahead. The cockpit was crushed beyond repair, but it seemed to have taken the brunt of the impact, and she dared to hope that her father hadn't been too badly thrown around in the crash.

That hope died as she saw the two small figures below, one of them leaning down over the other.

"Sloane's doing CPR!" Dixon reported into the radio. Sydney's heart lurched.

"We're going to have fly further out to land!" the helicopter pilot said. Sydney gripped the edge of her seat. Her instincts screamed at her to leap out of the rescue copter on a rope - who needed to land? - but she knew there was nothing she could do on the ground without the medical team down there with her.

Nothing more than Sloane was doing already. She lost sight of him as the helicopter circled away, but still twisted round, trying to see. How long had he been doing the compressions? Maybe only moments - why would he have even started, if he hadn't heard the helicopter? He had to have known the odds of rescue arriving in the few minutes he could keep it up effectively were remote.

If he could even manage minutes. Sloane was in his sixties, and he could have hidden injuries of his own from the plane crash. Hell, he'd suffered a punctured lung and fractured rib when he'd been shot six months ago - was he fully recovered from that? He could lose his strength to continue any second.

And the gap between Sloane stopping and the medical team taking over could be fatal.

Sydney leapt out of the helicopter almost before it had fully touched down and led the footrace to her father's position. Sloane didn't acknowledge her arrival, still doggedly repeating chest compressions.

Her father looked totally dead. Sydney faltered, her own breath seizing up in her chest. She hadn't fully allowed herself to realise until this moment that CPR meant that her father's heart had stopped beating.

Was it already too late?

The medical team rattled past her. They tried to take over from Sloane, but he resisted being removed. Sydney dived into action, relieved to find something she could actually do. She hauled Sloane back from her father's - God, no, not her father's body, from her father - and pulled him away. He struggled against her grip for a moment, with more strength than she would have expected of him, but subsided as the medics got to work.

Sydney stood and watched, paralysed, as they set him up with medical equipment and loaded him onto the helicopter. There was no sign of life from him, not even a twitch. They might as well have been handling a CPR dummy. Or a corpse.

She realised she was still standing with her arm round Sloane's shoulders, and pulled away with a jerk.

Dixon beckoned them towards the helicopter. "They're going to airlift him direct to the hospital," he said. Obvious, but hearing it in Dixon's voice somehow made it more concrete and reassuring. She accepted his hand up into the rescue helicopter. She paid no attention to how or if Sloane got in and the conversations flying back and forth between the helicopter, the hospital and LA as they took off. All her attention was focused on her father.

She held his hand all the way to the hospital. His skin was as cold as ice.


Waiting rooms were the same the world over, whether they were military, CIA or civilian. The uncomfortable chairs, the ugly green walls, the noticeboards with pinned-up medical leaflets that you read over and over in a vain attempt to find some kind of distraction.

And the echoing silence. The sterile flooring carried every footfall from the hallway outside, and every time Sydney sat bolt upright, waiting for the news that didn't come.

Why was it taking so long? What if they couldn't get him stabilised? What if he'd been without oxygen long enough to cause brain damage? What if, what if, what if...

She wasn't sure if it would have been better or worse to have someone there to clutch her hand. She wasn't sure it would have made any difference at all. Dixon had been there for a while at first, but now he'd gone off to make his report to Kendall.

Which left her sharing a waiting room with Sloane. She couldn't quite kick him out after seeing him desperately trying to keep her father's heart going, but she didn't want his company either. After she'd snapped at his first attempt to talk to her, he'd left her alone. She almost wished he'd be his usual creepily over-intimate self, so she could have something to lash out at. So things would feel a little more like whatever warped standard passed for normal in her life, and a little less like the end of the world.

And then the doctor arrived. He was a sombre-faced man, maybe only in his late thirties, but already grey at the temples. The ravages of years of breaking bad news. Oh, God...

Sydney was only dimly aware of standing up, of Sloane doing the same at the corner of her vision. Her heart was fluttering like the wings of a startled bird trying to break loose from her ribcage. All the world narrowed, the lights over-bright and the sound coming distorted down a metal tube. She found herself fixating on the doctor's lips, with the strangest impression that they weren't moving in time with his words, that what she was hearing was something different from what he was saying, a poorly dubbed alternate version of reality.

What she heard was, "Agent Bristow, I'm sorry. Your father suffered an intracranial haematoma following the head injury he received in the crash, and although we tried to stop the bleeding, there simply wasn't-"

"No," she said, shaking her head and backing away. She wasn't even aware that she was crying until she heard the word come out in a horrified sob.

Sloane stepped towards her, his face pale. "Sydney..." He reached out a hand.

"No," she repeated. She turned around and ran - from him, from both of them, from all of it.

She just ran.