XVIII. Still Ain't Over You
Better never to have met you in my dream
than to wake and reach for hands that are not there.
"Sydney. Jack. What a pleasant surprise."
It was a perfectly acceptable greeting, discarding the fact that Sloane looked neither surprised nor particularly pleased. His eyes did linger on Sydney, however, with a familiar and infuriating glint. I know something you don't know.
"Director Dixon has sent us here on official business," said Jack. "It would be in your best interest to cooperate."
"Of course I'll do my best— it's good to see you're still alive, Sydney. You look more like your mother every day." He ignored the matching and implacable glares this statement earned, choosing instead to sit back down at his desk. "Well then. How can I be of assistance?"
The Bristows exchanged a quick glance; her father gave her a slight nod. Sydney stepped forward. "Prior to Sark's defection to the Covenant—" there, how lightly the words could pass her lips "—he requested a Rambaldi artifact from the CIA. The—"
"In exchange for what?" Sloane interrupted.
Jack's brow furrowed and he looked at Sydney again. It was something he expected Arvin to have learned from his old contacts. "For Sydney's safe return."
"I see." He stared into Sydney's eyes with the look of a man who is putting two and two together and enjoying the process immensely.
"The request was granted," she continued stiffly. "Now we need any information you can give us on this hourglass."
A light flashed in Arvin Sloane's dark eyes, and they both saw. It made his next words that much harder to take. "You should have called ahead, Sydney, instead of wasting so much time. I'm afraid there are some Rambaldi secrets of which even I have barely skimmed the surface. I believe there may be a few references to the object, in the old documents . . . odd references to a "Passenger" . . . but nothing clear. Nothing that might be useful."
In the faint reflection on the glass wall, she saw her father's lip curl. "Then I guess we're done here."
Outside the Omnifam building, Sydney ran a rough hand through her hair. "The bastard knows something!"
"Clearly," agreed Jack. "But so long as the CIA trusts him, we have no choice but to take him at his word."
"Dixon doesn't trust him."
Jack's mouth twitched, a tiny expression of frustration and futility masquerading as a half-smile. "Even Dixon has to take orders."
"And for all we know, Sloane could be helping the Covenant." They moved with smooth efficiency through the crowded streets of Zurich to their car, parked several blocks away.
"Possible. Even likely, if they share his obsession with Rambaldi."
"What about the device he was building before I was taken, Il Dire? Could it be related?"
Jack squinted, looking ahead for the car and any possible threats. "According to Sloane, the entirety of the machine's message was a single word. Peace."
"Oh, god. Please tell me that no one actually took him seriously."
Her father shrugged with a sideways tilt of his head. "It couldn't be disproved—and given his newfound humanitarianism, few people were inclined to argue."
A thought struck her. "Wait. Irina . . . doesn't my mother's name mean peace?"
"Yes, it does." Jack only sighed; clearly the thought had occurred to him as well and gone nowhere. "Personally, I would have found it anticlimactic," he mused, "that, after expecting to assemble a weapon of ultimate power, he ended up with a revelation he could have acquired from a fortune cookie."
Sydney grinned broadly at him and was rewarded with a smile that, if still small, was at least completely real. She swung herself into the passenger seat of the rented sedan and put her gun in the glove compartment. Back to Los Angeles, then, with no more credible information than they'd arrived with. But despite the complete lack of actual progress or improvement . . . for the moment, driving through Switzerland with her dad, everything seemed okay.
x
Sark snapped his cell phone shut and tapped it thoughtfully on the table. The abduction of Arvin Sloane had gone without a hitch the night before, apparently excellent news for the Covenant— now if only he knew why. Perhaps he should have paid closer attention to Sloane and Derevko's half-worshipful mutterings about the 15th century inventor-prophet Rambaldi. At the time he'd found it difficult to even take them seriously. Now that his ascension in this shadowy organization could depend on it . . . But his thoughts were interrupted by familiar clacking heels on the floor outside.
Reed sauntered in, as usual, on her lunch break to pass on the information she'd gleaned from her unwitting husband during the previous week. She might not have been able to secure a job in the rotunda office as she'd hoped, but the intelligence she managed to gather was substantial nonetheless. The husband she'd coaxed back into the CIA seemed remarkably willing to share—whether because of her feminine wiles or her high security clearance was anyone's guess.
"The CIA found out you're working for the Covenant," she told Sark right away, searching his face for a reaction she hadn't yet learned she wouldn't see. "According to Michael, no one was surprised except Sydney Bristow. You must have really had her convinced." Lauren's full lips curved into the smile she usually gave him, half sly and half seductive. Another thing she hadn't learned was that he wasn't remotely interested, but he enjoyed watching her efforts. It amused him, on a rather peurile level, to know that Michael Vaughn was apparently incapable of keeping his wife satisfied.
Then again, the CIA's boy scout was unlikely to fathom any of the appetites harbored by his supposedly doting spouse, whether a lust for power or . . . other predilections. Sark had already witnessed Lauren's talent for deception; it was nothing short of superb. Nearly on par, in fact, with his own.
Hurting Sydney, however . . . that had never been part of the plan. It took nothing less than extraordinary circumstances for him to feel remorse over any course of action; causing Sydney pain should not have met that requirement, but it seemed to do the trick quite handily. An intolerable chink in his armor, and one that he had hoped would cease to be an issue now that he had put safe distance between himself and the unwelcome complications she so easily produced.
He met Lauren's eyes and smirked. The truth was that if it hadn't been for Sydney, he might have been tempted.
"As I'm sure you've discovered, these CIA agents can be tricked into believing the best of even the most despicable person— a tendency quite simple to exploit."
Her eyes narrowed a fraction. Like most of the things he said to her, the comment skirted the line between a simple statement and a carefully concealed insult, but she had yet to make an issue of it. That was wise. She could be an amusing diversion, but his patience with his new partner was wearing thin.
This entire situation with the Covenant was frustrating in the extreme. He did not appreciate losing millions of dollars to become a glorified foot soldier, an arrangement which would be nearly impossible to change until he got an idea of who was actually behind this bizarre and well-connected group.
The two weeks of traveling with Sydney hovered in his mind like the memory of a pleasant vacation: no elaborate plans, no authority to be obeyed. Just the two of them and their false identification, flying across the world to wreak havoc on the very organization that now had employed him. At best, the two of them in bed (wall, shower, floor, elevator, table, airplane lavatory…). But those memories were nothing now but a distraction, irrelevant to the task at hand.
As they went over the rest of Reed's information, Sark did his best to concentrate—pushing aside, with utter ruthlessness, all errant thoughts of Sydney Bristow.
x
One night, going home from the Rotunda took Sydney longer than it should have; she slipped into the automatic habits of driving and turned onto the road that led to her old apartment. When she realized what she'd done she cursed and chalked it up to exhaustion. Their efforts against the Covenant were keeping her in the office for long hours with no apparent progress, and she still wasn't sleeping well.
Vaughn was avoiding her as well as he could. It was the best thing for them—it was what she wanted—she hated every second. Lauren visited one day with Robert Lindsey, and she'd been more than upset. She wanted to rip out the other woman's throat. She could have distracted herself and talked to Weiss, or Marshall, or even gone back to Barnett. Instead Sydney pretended to care about a worthless set of surveillance reports, constructing a mental catalogue of the things she hated about Lauren Reed. The smug, superior and apparently unremovable pout sat near the top of that list.
It seemed Sark's betrayal had removed the last of her emotional insulation. Not only was she the fool who'd thought Michael Vaughn would never give up on her; now she was the inexcusable idiot who had actually begun to trust in Julian Sark. But a weakened, emotionally damaged agent would do the CIA no good, so she was compartmentalizing once again. Julia Thorne had been showing up for work more and more often.
The clarity of that persona was perhaps the greatest blessing, in that it reminded her—coldly, objectively—of her own strength. These circumstances weren't nearly enough to break her. She was Sydney and Julia, a Bristow and a Derevko, and the actions of two men could only hurt her down to a certain point. The storm would pass as it always did, leaving her lonely, perhaps, but more capable than ever.
Pulling into the driveway, she noticed movement between her and the front door. It was too dark to distinguish features, but it was a tall male figure and it appeared to be waiting for her. Calling someone never occurred to her; she had a gun in hand before she cut the engine, and she immediately bolted from her seat before the intruder could take aim. Her arm swung true to where she'd seen motion . . .
"No! Syd, it's me!"
Vaughn stepped out of the shadows so that she could see his face, and his arms raised in surrender. "It's me."
"Prove it," she snarled—wondering, in the back of her mind, if knowing it was Vaughn would actually make her less likely to shoot.
"The first time we met, your hair was bright red. I gave you the name of a dentist."
She holstered the weapon, not without reluctance. "What do you want?"
"I . . . I need to talk to you."
Sydney could feel her father's icy glare stiffening her jaw. "I'm not interested." She moved toward the house, but he sidestepped, intercepting her.
"Syd, wait."
It was his tone of voice that did it; low, rough, breaking under the weight of rage and despair. She really looked at him for the first time and took in how pale he was, the ill, disheveled look of a man who had been pushed beyond endurance and the wild dark eyes of one who didn't much care.
"What the hell happened to you?" she asked, and all her intended harshness evaporated.
"Inside."
She nodded once, still searching his face for a hint of what had occurred. He followed her closely into the house, like a shadow; as she unlocked and opened the door it was impossible not to remember. The Zamboni's your favorite part? No, coming home with you after the game is my favorite part . . . the Zamboni is a close second. It was hard, nearly three years later, to imagine him entering her home under more different circumstances.
Vaughn sat at the kitchen table and buried his face in his hands before lifting his head to stare unwaveringly at Sydney.
"Lauren is working for the Covenant."
Shit.
"You . . ." She was sitting diagonally from him without being entirely sure of how it had happened. "Vaughn, are you sure?"
"Yes," he hissed. His fists were clenched, white-knuckled, on the table. "We found another source . . . footage of Lazarey's murder. I used Marshall's restoration program, it . . . it was her," he said, nodding half to himself. "She killed him."
It didn't feel real. This most intimate, most devastating of betrayals, suffered twenty years ago by Jonathan Donihue Bristow—it could not be happening to Vaughn; it simply could not. Everything—her affair with Sark, Vaughn's abandonment and marriage, but especially, especially this ugly revelation, as if Sydney's uncontrollable hatred of Lauren Reed had brought about its own justification—it was all just patently absurd, a poorly constructed nightmare, and she was ready to wake up.
And yet, Vaughn was still speaking.
"That was yesterday. I didn't . . ." He shuddered, and his fists tightened further. "I couldn't believe it. I thought there had to be some explanation, so I— I didn't say anything. And she came home that night and we— I still—"
"I don't want to hear it," she told him, trying to force gentleness into her cold tone.
"Then I found her second cell phone and I redialed the last number she'd called. It was McKenas Cole."
"Have you told Kendall? Dixon?" she corrected herself.
"No." His lip curled and somehow, his green eyes looked black as pitch. "I wanted to kill her."
"Vaughn—"
"I know! I know," he growled. His hands twitched spasmodically before he clenched them once more. He lowered his head for a long moment, and Sydney could only watch the veins in his neck until he met her eyes again. He looked like a man drowning, or burning to death. "I'm here, aren't I?"
Yes, he was. As much as he wanted revenge and as much as she wanted to say fine, kill the bitch—here they were at her kitchen table, bound together by the choice they'd each made to serve their country by justice, not vengeance; to play by the rules even—especially—when every second was a struggle.
Vaughn took a deep breath; let it out in a harsh rush as he stood. "I'll make the call."
"Is there anything . . ."
"No." Then, more quietly: "Thanks."
She watched him go without saying another word. At the door, he looked back. "Syd . . . I'm sorry."
They looked at each other, and she knew that it was really, truly over. The connection between them had been severed, almost as abruptly as it had formed, and she felt neither triumph nor sadness. The past was the past, and there was no point in trying to pretend anymore.
So Michael Vaughn walked out.
x
Reed was late.
Sark disapproved of tardiness, as a rule; his well-bred streak couldn't help but frown upon the implied disrespect, and his much broader streak of violent, sociopathic behavior did not respond well to disrespect, implied or otherwise. That was only one of the reasons for the Smith & Wesson 5903 currently in his right hand. The other reason—the main reason, in fact—was that the steps currently approaching him clearly were not made by Reed's ostentatious pumps.
With a smooth, almost casual motion, he raised the gun to aim squarely at the head of the intruder.
"Just me, man. No worries."
The sight of McKenas Cole did not inspire him to lower his weapon with a great deal of speed or enthusiasm.
Cole's next words directly contradicted his first. "Well, Julian, looks like we've got ourselves an itsy-bitsy problem."
"Do we." Sark's eyebrows rose, indicating his willingness to hear more. Rather than holster his gun, he crossed his arms over his chest and hoped, insofar as he actually gave a damn, that his holding on to the gun in Cole's presence wouldn't be considered overly hostile.
Cole's prominent jaw twitched back and forth, a sure sign of true anger—or at least strong annoyance—beneath his cheerful façade. "We do, my friend," he replied, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. "It seems our little Miss Reed got herself into some trouble. Her husband figured things out and right now, she's sittin' pretty with the Feds. Not exactly a primo spot for our trusted mole, ya dig?"
Sark wondered if Cole actually expected him to reply with Yeah, I dig. He wondered if Cole also held out hope for the Easter bunny and Santa Claus.
"Is the Covenant planning on an extraction?" he asked in an impeccably neutral tone.
"Nah, nah." Cole waved the idea away like he were swatting at an errant fly. "Truth is, Reed was only good as long as she kept her cover, and now that's blown, there's really not much use for her. Her work's been sloppy lately, too—maybe the CIA was on to her. Anyway, she'll probably have a little accident sometime soon, but . . . just wanted to let you know. Congrats your promotion, man. North American cell is alllllll yours."
In a way, he thought that Cole was underestimating Reed's level of skill. She was a fantastic liar and a convincing actress. On the other hand, her apprehension proved that those talents were insufficient, and the Covenant had no patience for recovering such an agent. To fail them was to utterly discredit yourself, and your life was inevitably forfeit.
"Interesting," was all Sark trusted himself to say immediately. He did, however, finally put his gun in its holster and shake Cole's proffered hand.
"Try not to screw up," the man advised. His tone was joking. The psychotic, dangerous gleam in his dark eyes was decidedly less so.
"I will do my best. In light of the CIA apprehending Miss Reed, I believe the best course of action may be for me to lie low temporarily. In absence of any Covenant activity they may come to believe she was our only asset in the region, which would grant me a greater mobility in the future."
"Your call now, buddy," said Cole, already on his way to the door. "I'm headed back to Europe. Champagne here is crap."
And with those words of wisdom, Sark was left to his own devices. He kept his hands in his pockets and listened to the footsteps receding until Cole was well and truly gone. After two major escapes, the CIA would take no chances with Miss Reed. No matter what her ultimate fate, she would never be able to return to the fold, leaving him to run their operation single-handedly. By evening, McKenas would be on the other side of the Atlantic, in no position to bother him further.
Sark tilted his head to one side, wearing his usual smirk, but there was something in his eyes—something that looked very much like triumph.
x
Sydney felt a little bad, accepting meals from people as if she were an invalid, but Carrie had been too sweet to argue with. The two of them had never been friends, considering the relatively short amount of time between Carrie's arrival and Sydney's abduction, but seeing familiar, friendly faces was one of the things that helped convince Sydney that she had been right to return. And she still couldn't quite get over the fact that Marshall had gotten someone pregnant.
Hearing about Carrie's pregnancy had been one thing, but seeing her swollen belly and the happy glow on the other woman's face had involuntarily provoked the kind of absurd cooing behavior she had once sworn never to emulate. If Sydney experienced a moment of regret—if, for a moment, she pictured herself pregnant, picking out baby clothes, visiting the doctor with Vaughn to hold her hand—she quickly shook it off. There was the life you hoped for, and then there was the life you got.
Despite her firm belief that she would start cooking any day now, Carrie's gift of enchiladas ready to be put in the oven was received with more enthusiasm than reluctance. She still felt a little like an invalid, but she was on her way to being a very well-fed invalid indeed.
The days at the Rotunda . . . well, they could be worse. After that night, Vaughn had avoided her more than ever, but since he was avoiding everyone it was hard to take it personally. She knew Dixon was trying to get him to take a leave of absence. He wouldn't force the issue, but it would be quite a long time until Vaughn was allowed out into the field again. Dixon remembered what Diane's death had done to him . . . what he had done. He wouldn't wish that darkness on anyone.
She wondered if Vaughn would leave again. Perhaps he would, after Internal Affairs was through with him. The only reason he hadn't been arrested along with Lauren was that he'd been the one to turn her in; still, an exhaustive investigation of everything he had or hadn't known about his wife was inevitable. While she couldn't exactly conjure up sympathy for him being forced to justify his marriage to that pouty-faced harpy, she knew intellectually that it was unfortunate.
The doorbell rang, sounding a little too loud in the relative silence of her apartment.
On her way to put her plate in the sink, Sydney wondered who it might be at this hour of the night. Her father was a safe bet, as was Weiss—or anyone else from the Rotunda, for that matter. Nobody ever joined the CIA for the luxury of a full night's sleep.
The doorbell rang again.
"I heard you," she muttered. Something about the insistence of the noise made her want to go back to her room and grab a gun. Telling herself that she was just being paranoid, she walked out of the kitchen to face her unknown visitor.
She opened the door and was confronted with a view that simply made no sense. Her eyes skidded to the periphery of the scene as if to defend her brain from trying to understand what she was seeing. She took in Dixon standing on the right, an armed security guard on the left, and . . . there was no avoiding it.
Squarely in the middle, unrestrained and looking right at her, there was Sark.
Clearly, she should have gotten her gun.