Shane stared at John. "Mauritius? Lawrence sure does get around."

John shrugged. "I don't know. If you want . . . I've got a passport and check it out."

"No," Shane said. "Tarrington would never let you back into the country. Let things blow over a bit before you take any foreign trips."

"Yeah, partner, that's probably a good idea." John chuckled. "Well, I'll do what I can to keep up with my contacts. Hopefully, word of the return of the real Roman Brady won't spread too quickly."

"You didn't have any problem with that?"

John shook his head. "Not at all. Nobody asked any questions."

Shane was not that surprised. He doubted the ISA higher-ups wanted word to get around that the ISA had failed to discover that John was not really Roman Brady. "See if you can get any idea of what Lawrence is doing in Mauritius. If I'd hazard a guess, he's probably moved his labs there. It's relatively stable, has no real groups that international law enforcement would track, and probably has eminently bribe-able officials."

John raised an eyebrow. "Not only have you heard of Mauritius, but you actually know something about it?" He shook his head. "Don't bother explaining how. . . . If you're right about that, it sounds right up Larry's alley."

Just before Shane could respond, there was a knock at the library door and Simmons entered. "Master Roman Brady is here to see you."

Shane tensed. Roman is here? The last time Roman had shown up at the house was when he had nearly strangled Shane. That had been four days earlier.

"Want me to deal with him?" John asked.

"No," Shane answered. He suspected Roman was there because of something Kim had said. She had told Shane about her visit to her brother and how he agreed to listen to Shane's explanation. Maybe Roman had decided to follow through. "Show him in, Simmons." Then Shane turned to John. "I doubt you want to be here for this."

"I'm not going anywhere," John said. "He may be wearing a cup this time."

Shane grimaced at the reminder of how he had kneed Roman in the groin the other day. It had been an act of desperation and not one that Shane was particularly proud about. But it had given him more incentive to push his physical therapist into increasing his strength training.

Pushing that thought aside, Shane remembering Johns' quip and responded. "I don't think he's going to attack me. He wouldn't have had Simmons announce him."

"Fine," John replied, crossing his arms and leaning against Shane's desk. "I'll just make sure he continues to play nice."

There was no further time to debate the issue, because Simmons returned a moment later. "Master Brady, sir."

Roman gave Simmons a curious look as he stepped through the door. He scowled immediately on seeing John.

"Why am I not surprised to see you're here?" he said, his voice little more than a growl.

Shane responded before John could. "Roman, please. . . ."

"Fine," Roman muttered. "I promised Doc I'd be nice."

"How nice of her," John said under his breath. It did not appear that Roman heard him. Shane glanced at John, but decided to ignore the comment.

"So I gather you're here to discuss Rachel Knight's article," Shane said.

Roman took a few closer. "I'm here because of my sister. I'm not going to pretend I trust you, Donovan, but Kimmie said I should at least hear you out, so I'm here."

Shane pointed to the couch. "Why don't you have a seat? Do you want some tea? Something stronger."

"No, I don't want some tea - or anything else from you," Roman snapped, as he sat down. He stopped, raised both hands, and took a noticeable breath. "Look," he said, more calmly, though he continued to glare. "Just tell me about this thing with Stefano. Kimmie said I should give you a chance to explain. . . . So explain."

Shane exchanged a look with John, who stared back with an expectant look. It dawned on Shane that he had never told John the whole story. Maybe he was curious. He still had Roman Brady's memories, after all.

"All right." Shane paused as he figured out exactly where to begin. He had not really rehearsed this, even though he had often thought about what he would say if it ever came up. He looked at Roman who stared back.

"Any time now," Roman said.

Shane nodded as he decided how to begin. "Okay. . . . This happened in January '85. It was only a few weeks after we thought you'd died."

"You knew that early?" John asked, sounding surprised.

"Just hear me out," Shane said. "We knew Stefano was coming to Salem to try to get the third prism - you remember the prisms, right?" When Roman nodded, Shane continued. "So I was here already, but there was another part of our operation still going on in the Caribbean."

Roman interrupted. "Stefano's island, let me guess?"

"A former compound that we knew of," Shane explained. "We had no intelligence that Stefano had been there in years, but after he blew up his compound on the island where he caught me, we began looking at his other known haunts in the Caribbean. He had been on a yacht when you were killed - I mean when we thought-"

"I know what you mean," Roman said. "So you checked out this old compound?"

Shane nodded, remembering being in the operations office with Nickerson and listening to the radio traffic. "We had no idea that Stefano had prisoners there. We couldn't send planes overhead, because it would have raised red flags, and surveillance ships couldn't get too close. Pretty much all we knew was from monitoring traffic by radar and sonar to the island, but all that told us was that there was movement." He paused as he thought about the initial planning meetings with Nickerson. "We debated sending in a large force, but I didn't think we should - not until we knew what we were dealing with."

"Makes sense," John said. Shane could see Roman nodding, though probably unaware he was doing so.

"So we sent in a three-man commando unit, had aerial back-up ready. . . you know the operation." In Shane's mind, he heard the radio traffic. He was back in the operations room, just him and Nickerson. "The surveillance team divided up. One of the agents managed to access what he thought might be a research facility. Remember, we knew Stefano had some plan to use the prisms to cure himself, and finding out what we could about the prisms was a priority objective."

"Viking 1, we have a situation."

Almost as if it were happening again, Shane heard the radio call. Instantly, he knew they had found something completely unexpected. Even before the mission had commenced, Shane had a sense of foreboding, but hearing those words had told him something was gravely wrong. "It wasn't a research facility," Shane said to Roman and John. "It was some type of secure medical facility. And there were two patients."

"Let me guess." Roman cut Shane off. "Me and this brother of yours?"

"Yes," Shane said. "At first, we didn't know it, but the agents described you both to a tee. "You were both drugged. Drew - my brother - was semi-conscious; you weren't."

Roman interrupted again. "But you knew I was alive, right?"

"We did. And we would've figured something out, but then the shooting started."

"The shooting?" That came from John.

Shane nodded. "A patrol spotted another agent, and everything cratered quite rapidly. Nickerson called in the back-up and ordered the unit to the beach. I-" Shane stopped short as Roman stood up from the couch. He took a few steps and frowned.

"Why didn't you order a rescue?"

"I tried," Shane insisted. He remembered the argument with Nickerson. "I pushed him to scramble a marine unit out of Guantanamo, but Nickerson refused. There was no time for them to get to the island, and we didn't have the manpower on the ground. But he threw me a bone - he said our agent inside . . . could perform a rescue. But there was a catch. We could only save one agent."

Roman eyed him. "And you chose your brother."

"That's . . . that right," Shane said. He shook his head as he thought about all the times he had replayed that decision in his head. "I could tell you all the good tactical reasons for choosing Drew-"

"Such as?" Roman interrupted, his glare never wavering.

"We didn't know your condition, let alone if you could be moved safely. Bloody hell, Roman, you'd been shot and fallen off a cliff just weeks earlier. Trying to get you out of there might have killed you. From the report, Drew at least seemed like he could carry some of his own weight out of there. And Drew had been with Stefano longer, so he probably could give us more intelligence on his operations. Not to mention-" Shane cut himself off. "Look. . . . I said I could tell you all the reasons, but I won't lie to you and say those were my reasons."

Shane took a deep breath and looked at the picture on the mantle over the fireplace. It was of him and Drew, taken shortly after their graduation from Eton. The two young men were virtually indistinguishable.

"So are you going to tell me your reasons?" Roman asked impatiently.

Shane turned back to Roman. "He was my brother. Plain and simple. I had a choice and I chose my brother."

Roman harrumphed. "Your brother and a traitor."

"I didn't know that," Shane said. "I had no reason to suspect anything. Drew had always been a loyal agent. He believed in the ISA so much he joined up as early as he could."

The room fell silent for a minute, and Shane waited for Roman to respond. "Okay, so you didn't know he was a traitor. Am I still supposed to just accept that you left me there?"

"No." Shane ran a hand through his head. "I don't expect you to accept anything. I can understand why you're angry. I'm just trying to make you understand why I made that decision at that time."

John looked at Roman and interrupted. "Come on, pal. Don't tell me you wouldn't have done the same thing. If it were Bo and some random agent? You'd pick Bo 100 times out of 100."

"Oh, you know that, do you?" Roman snapped.

"Yeah, I do," John shot back. "Because I would've done the same thing. If it were Bo and Shane back then, I'd have saved Bo, even though all the logic would say to get Shane out. In a time like that, to hell with logic."

Roman seemed to concede the point. "Okay . . . so you had okay reasons to choose your brother. But why didn't you come back for me?"

"I wanted to, Roman." Shane remembered his arguments with Nickerson in the weeks that followed. Shane had tried to organize a Navy SEAL team for a rescue mission, but Nickerson had nixed it. "Intelligence said you were moved. DiMera's people cleared the place out right after, and we didn't know where they moved you. We knew Stefano was in Caracas, but nothing indicated that you were taken there. Now we know you were probably taken to San Cristobal, but we didn't know about any operations Stefano had there. . . . Under the circumstances, I decided the best chance of finding you was to capture Stefano in Salem. But then Marlena shot him and we thought he died."

Roman began to pace. "Doc told me how she shot him. . . . But the ISA knew Stefano was still alive-"

"I didn't" Shane said quickly. "I didn't know about that until much later. I thought Marlena had killed him." That was the truth. He had still believed it a year later. Shane remembered how shocked he had been when Bo told him Marlena believed John Black was Stefano.

"I'm having a hard time believing that," Roman growled. "You were heading the DiMera task force."

Shane knew he had to explain what happened after Stefano's apparent death, but he also knew he had to carefully choose his words. If he told Roman about dropping the third prism in the Atlantic, it would probably confirm in his mind that Shane was a traitor. And Kim and Leopold Bronski was a subject that Shane also knew he should avoid. "Let's just say that a lot happened on that mission to bring down Stefano, and I left the ISA after Marlena shot him."

Roman's eyes narrowed. Obviously, he knew there was a lot Shane was not saying. "You just left?"

"Yes," Shane said. Of course, he would have been fired if he had not left, but again, that was not a fact worth discussing right now. "I left and when I came back, I had a new assignment."

"Victor Kiriakis," John said.

Shane nodded. "Yes, Victor. I didn't find out Stefano was alive until 1988. By that time, we believed you were back."

Roman still had questions. "Okay, so you didn't know about Stefano, but why didn't you tell my family I was alive? Even if I accept everything else, that's the one thing that's inexcusable."

Maybe it was, Shane thought to himself. Maybe there is no excuse, not even an explanation. "Roman . . . that was one of the hardest things I've had to live with. At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing."

"Oh?" Roman stopped pacing and crossed his arms in a defiant stance. "Why don't you explain that?"

I'll try. "It was Nickerson. I didn't realize it at the time, but he probably knew you were alive from the beginning."

"Nickerson knew?" Roman raised an eyebrow.

At first surprised, Shane then remembered that there was no reason for Roman to have known about the game Nickerson had played with Victor and Petrov. John had been the Pawn, and there was no reason that the real Roman Brady had to have known anything about the Pawn, Nickerson or anything else about the game.

"Nickerson was a traitor. He and Victor Kiriakis and Petrov-"

"DiMera's Petrov?"

"The very one," Shane told Roman. "They had some kind of game. Winner take all. Victor put up the money, Nickerson put up some kind of deal that would give the winner a lot of power - probably some type of immunity from prosecution - and Petrov put up the Pawn, someone unknown to the ISA at the time, but very important to the competitors."

"Me," John said.

Shane nodded again. "You, or who we thought was Roman Brady. . . . Nickerson had to know who the Pawn was to participate in the game. And he couldn't have me telling people Roman was alive."

"What did the bastard do?" John asked.

"Blackmail. After we got Drew out, Stefano put a bounty out on him. Looking back, that must have been a sham - something Stefano did to make us trust Drew - but it seemed real at the time." Shane walked over to the mantle and again looked at the picture. "The ISA put him in protective custody. And Nickerson told me he'd cut Drew loose if I said anything about Roman being alive. I couldn't take that chance."

Roman shook his head. "I can't believe that. You could've told my family. If they had to keep it secret, they would have. I don't believe you could've loved my sister and kept her in the dark about it."

Shane could feel his frustration rising. "I don't know if I could have either," he said. "I suspect I would've probably told her at some point, but then it became moot. You - or who we thought was you - came back. After that, what was the point in telling her I knew you were alive in those intervening months?"

"Seems like the coward's way out," Roman said evenly. "Leaving Marlena, my folks . . . Kim in the dark."

"Maybe it was," Shane replied. "Maybe I should have done something different. Knowing what I know now about Drew, I wish I'd done something different. But I can't change the past."

Roman just stood there, arms crossed and scowling. "And that's it? The past is the past? I'm supposed to go, 'Oh, now I understand and it's fine that I spent all those years in DiMera's hellhole because of it?' Maybe you had your reasons, but it doesn't change what I went through. And it doesn't change the fact that you could've done something about it - even if it was just checking out him" - Roman pointed at John - "a little."

Shane did not know what to say. Maybe he should have tried to learn more about John at the time. But Shane was focused on other things - Kim, Andrew, and Victor. And everyone seemed convinced by John. Shane shook his head. None of that mattered to Roman. He wanted a reason to mistrust Shane. There was really no reason to continue, Shane thought, wanting to throw up his hands and be done with it.

"So you don't have anything to say," Roman muttered. His voice rising, he said, "Fine. . . . I told Kimmie I'd listen, and I listened. Maybe you had your reasons, and maybe when I think it over, I'll even understand. But here's something you'd better understand. I know you want me to believe the ISA framed an innocent agent, but I don't buy that. The ISA wouldn't do something to hurt a loyal agent."

"No?" John asked sharply. "Maybe you should ask Marlena how much she liked Vaughn kidnapping her."

"That was Vaughn, not the ISA," Roman said.

John stepped forward. "For the ISA . . . but even if you don't believe that, what about this story. Why do you think the ISA leaked it, except to hurt all of us? Don't you see they're using you right now"

"Hey! Nobody's using me, pal." Roman started toward John. John responded in kind, fists raised.

"Enough," Shane shouted, startling the others, who stopped and turned toward him. "Fighting won't solve anything. If you come to blows, it's only going to hurt Marlena and Kim."

To Shane's surprise, that seemed to work. John and Roman stepped back from one another.

"I think you'd better be going, pal," John growled.

Roman snorted. "Sound about right." He looked at Shane. "I did what Kimmie asked, but it doesn't change things. I still don't trust you." With that, he spun around and stomped through the door.

Left alone with John, Shane could only sigh and shake his head. He glanced at John, who shrugged. "You tried," John said.

I did, even if it was futile. But there was nothing he could do about it now, so he turned back to John. "Maybe actions speak louder than words," Shane said. "When we bring in Alamain, he's going to have to trust us. So . . . let's go back to that, and figure out how we're going to keep tabs on him in Mauritius."