Chapter One


Jack Bristow stood in the center of the restaurant that topped the Xanadu Casino and Resort in Las Vegas, taking in the spectacle that lay before him. Beyond the restaurant's windows stretched the city in all its gaudy splendor: the Eiffel Tower in pink, the Great Wall of China in blue, the canals of Venice to his left, the Great Pyramids to his right, all of it spotlighted and aglow in the darkness.

If only it were really all this close, he thought. I'd have a hell of a lot less jet lag.

Stepping around various tables to get closer to the glass, he slipped his cell phone from the chest pocket of his tuxedo. Of course, this particular cell phone had a few extras - one of which he needed at the moment. Jack tapped what looked like an ordinary redial key, then murmured: "Final call. Check in."

One by one, they answered.

**

Sydney was standing in a dressing room, staring at breasts.

At first she'd been embarrassed, then asked herself a few questions about her orientation, then realized that, no - when you were surrounded by breasts this enormous, this fake, this plentiful, and this abundantly decorated with rhinestones, there was nothing to do but stare.

At her father's voice, she tilted her head, pretending to adjust the heavy, feathered headdress she wore. "Checking in. Situation normal."

He didn't reply; she didn't expect him to. Just as well - there was something unnerving about trying to think of her father in a room with three dozen half-naked showgirls.

Make that three dozen OTHER half-naked showgirls, Sydney corrected herself, glimpsing her own outfit in the mirror. She had a silvery bikini top, like the other girls who would be out on the floor instead of onstage. At first, when she'd gotten that assignment, she'd been relieved. But now, staring at C and D cups that levitated unnaturally, she found herself looking down and musing, Is this just a hint to get a Wonderbra?

To hell with it. She checked her look in the mirror once more - long, feathery brunette wig, platinum lipstick, fake lashes that glittered and about ten square inches of strategically placed silver spandex. Sydney smiled and whispered, "Showtime."

"This your first time, honey?" one of the other dancers said.

"Oh, you know," Sydney said. "Not exactly."

**

Vaughn leaned against a fuse box and muttered into the brim of his cap, "Everything's good here."

Nobody heard him, it seemed; a few stagehands for the show were pushing a cart nearby, but they were concentrating on their task, trying to maneuver weight and wheels over various taped-down cables. Vaughn stared up at the lights, able to feel the intensity of their heat even from twenty feet below. Already, the cheap gray polyester of his uniform felt sticky and uncomfortable.

The lights were ugly, viewed from behind - knotted black wires, heavy metal clamps, duct tape in Xs everywhere. Out in the audience it would look beautiful - silver-white beams streaming through the darkness. Here, it was just hardware.

Maybe it always looked like that, when you got down to the core of beauty. Maybe it was all an illusion. Maybe everything beneath was ugly and basic and hard, just there to do a job.

Vaughn closed his eyes and breathed out hard, thinking only, Concentrate.

Then he strolled down the corridor, the dim lights reflecting off the badge on his chest that read SECURITY.

**

"We got it covered," Weiss said, then grimaced and turned down the radio, so Marva Whitney wasn't blaring into Jack Bristow's ear. "It's all working."

"According to the terms of the agreement," Jack replied, "I need to hear from you both."

Weiss rolled his eyes, then said, "I haven't used my gun. Not because I didn't want to."

Jack didn't laugh. Big shock there. "Hand over the phone, Retriever."

With a sigh, Weiss held out his cell to the woman sitting next to him in a loose, sunflower-patterned dress, frizzy brown wig and dreamcatcher earrings. Ridiculous outfit, in Weiss' opinion, but as he was wearing a bright yellow tie-dyed T-shirt, pajama pants and a hairpiece that made him look like Gregg Allman, in a bad way, he didn't have much room to talk. Just a good reason to kick Marshall's ass. "Talk to the man."

Lauren Reed snatched the phone from Weiss' hand, scowling at him. How had he known her for two and a half years without ever noticing the scowl factor? That girl could contort her face like crazy. Like a Muppet or something. "I'm here, Watchtower. The plan is still on-target."

No reply. Jack just hung up. Weiss wished he could do the same.

"Shouldn't we be toking up?" He gestured at the VW van they were camped in, its faded orange paint a standout in a parking lot full of dark, shining rental cars. "The people we're playing, they'd definitely be high by now."

"If only," Lauren snapped, which would've been funny if he hadn't wanted to punch her in the face. She slapped the car's radio, and the Godfather of Soul pounded out the rhythm again.

**

"Everything's going quite well here, Watchtower." Julian Sark stood on the other side of the highway, gazing up at the emerald-neon outline of the Xanadu Casino. If Bristow was following his own plan, he was at the very top of that structure at the moment, maybe even now looking down at Sark himself. A rather precarious position to be in, all things considered.

He shut off the signal to Bristow, then hit the sequence of numbers that would, within five minutes, turn his cell phone into a detonator.

Then he dropped the would-be detonator in his pocket, straightened his tie, and began strolling away from the area. He had plenty of time to put some distance between him and the explosives.

**

"Me? I'm fine and dandy, peachy as they say, or maybe they used to say. I guess peachy is sort of old slang, kind of out of date, you think? Would you say peachy is current?"

Jack didn't reply right away, then said, "You're on schedule?"

"Oh, yeah, definitely." Marshall Flinkman stopped to admire himself in one of the mirrored panels on a column on the gaming floor of the Xanadu: mullet, acid-washed jeans, red T-shirt in honor of Dale Earnhardt. Perfect. He was surrounded by slot machines, roulette wheels, noise and color and light and a million different permutations of probability. The equations for any one of these games were simple, but when you started trying to put them together - "There's some serious math going down here."

"Does that mean there's a problem?"

Marshall would never understand why so many people responded negatively to math. "Doing good. Doing real good. Talk to you soon, Mr., ah, I mean, Watchtower, sir."

Silence followed, with Marshall took to be a good sign. Clapping his hands together, he looked for - and found - a blackjack table. "Let's play us some cards, shall we?"

**

"I'm here, of course," said Arvin Sloane. "Though I have little enough to do, at this point. You could have given me more of a role in this, you know."

"As a sign of trust?" Jack's voice was dry enough to crack the cell phone into powder.

"As a sign that we now have to work together. As we always have done. And as we always will, whether you like it or not."

"Those days are coming to an end."

Sloane smiled. "But not tonight."

There was no reply. He hadn't really expected one. Sloane had gotten in the last word, but he could take little pleasure in such hollow triumph. Standing here in this hotel room - luxurious, even palatial, but impersonal all the same - Sloane was reminded, as he too often was these days, of the dark truth of Pyrrhic victory. 

He could not question if it was all worth it, any more than Jack Bristow could. He could only make his next move in the game.

**

Dixon straightened his bow tie, pretending to have some difficulty with it. "Standing by," he said smoothly.

"Good," Jack replied, the relief in his voice evident. "The two members who can't check in by voice have sent their codes. We can proceed."

Beginning his shift at the blackjack table would be the signal that set this entire heist in motion. Dixon had his doubts about it; Jack's strategic skills were second to none, but this plan had so many variables, so many twists and turns.

Then again - when you were in the field, sometimes you just had to ignore the damn variables and get the job done. And, as the adrenalin coursing through his veins was reminding him, it had been too long since Marcus Dixon had been in the field.

Quickly he brushed his hands over the red vest he wore as part of his dealer's uniform, then said, "I'm headed to the table now."

Jack didn't answer.

After another few moments, Dixon repeated, "Repeat, I am headed to the table."

"Yes," Jack said, sounding unfocused and unsure - in other words, entirely unlike himself. "It's - do that. Go ahead."

"Hang on a second." Dixon kept turning this way and that as he moved through the throngs of gamblers, trying not to let anyone watch him apparently talking to himself for too long. "What aren't you telling me? Do we have a problem?"

**

Jack stood, his back to the city, staring across the restaurant. The patrons and the chandeliers and the music had all fallen silent, become invisible. He could only look across the room at a woman in a black evening gown, cut low at the neck and high on the side. He hadn't expected to see her tonight - or, quite possibly, ever again.

Irina Derevko stared back at him, disguising her shock as poorly as Jack suspected he was disguising his.

From the phone, Dixon's voice repeated, "Watchtower, do we have a problem? Watchtower?"

Jack tried to find his voice, and couldn't.

"Watchtower?"

**

72 HOURS EARLIER

Vaughn looks so different, Sydney thought. So - damaged.

Even as she put words to the idea, she knew where she'd used them before: Years ago, they were the only way she'd been able to tell Vaughn what her father looked like, as they sat together in the rain and talked about her mother's betrayal. Nobody's defenses were stronger than her father's, nobody's stoicism as unshakeable - and yet he'd looked broken, and wounded, and old.

Never had Sydney thought she'd see that expression in Vaughn's eyes. Now she wondered if she'd ever see anything else.

"You know, staring is very in for spring," Weiss said, straightening his tie near her desk. "Tres chic. So keep that up."

"Was I that obvious?"

"To the rest of the spies in the room? Uh, yeah. To the Vaughnbot over there? Listen, I think we could set off a fireworks display without him noticing anything."

"I hate this," Sydney whispered. "I hate not knowing what to say or do. Not having any way to make this easier for him."

Weiss patted her shoulder, then pulled back, as if self-conscious. "Okay, I might be slightly out-of-bounds here - like, by twenty miles - but does your dad have any ideas? What with the whole been-there, done-that aspect of the situation?"

Sydney shrugged. "He says the best thing we can do for Vaughn right now is help him do his job."

"So, this might be a good time to mention that the meeting is about to start?"

"I'll leave it to you," she said. Somehow, she had the sense that when she reached out to Vaughn - even in such minor ways - she only made it worse.

**

Jack glanced over at Sydney as she sat next to him in the briefing room. She gave him a smile - something she did much more often, these days, but it never lost the power to surprise and move him.

With a click, Dixon brought up a screen image of a bronze-and-silver globe, one that seemed to be made of an intricate lace of metal wires. "This appears to be the device known in Rambaldi literature as 'The Waning Moon.' Something important - God only knows what - is located in the center of the sphere."

"Let me make a wild, crazy guess here," Weiss offered. "We don't know what it is, and we wouldn't care, if it weren't for the fact that our good buddies the Covenant are after it. Am I right?"

"Gets better than that," Marshall said. To Jack, it looked as though Marshall were positively excited about the complications, as though they were puzzles for him to play with. "The Waning Moon will only open to one specific key - it's not just a locks-and-tumblers situation, either. Some really specific metallurgy is involved too. It's like, maybe, a fashionista, you know? 'No fake for me, only real gold.'" The feminized voice Marshall used for this was less than convincing. "And, uh, the Covenant's already got their hands on that puppy."

"So they're after the Waning Moon right now." Sydney said. "Do we have any leads?"

Dixon sighed. "We know exactly where it is, for once. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's in a casino vault in Las Vegas."

Jack raised an eyebrow. "A casino?"

"A Rambaldi follower who was given the responsibility of bringing the Waning Moon to the Covenant stopped off in Las Vegas on the way to spend a few hours at the Xanadu Casino," Dixon said. "Apparently the man had a history of gambling addiction. Believe it or not, he lost it in a game of five-card stud."

A casino vault. Jack thought about that, began considering everything he knew. A casino vault.

"Wow," Weiss said. "What a loser. Bet his face is red."

Dixon replied, "It's actually rather pale, because they fished his dead body out of the Carson River last week."  Weiss made a face, and Marshall slipped a finger between his collar and his neck, as if he needed a little more air.

Vaughn spoke for the first time. "So we get out to Vegas and get it before the Covenant does." It was a simple, ordinary comment - but everyone's attention was instantly focused on him. Too focused. Jack remembered that too well - the way everyone watched you so carefully. Even when they meant well, it only made you remember how badly you wanted to be invisible.

Quickly, Jack said, "Easier said than done. Casino security is the best in the world. There are nuclear reactors kept under less careful guard than the night's winnings at any establishment in Vegas."

"We've broken into casinos before," Sydney protested. "Dixon and I did three - I mean, five years ago. And then Marshall and I got in last year, remember?"

Jack would have objected, but Dixon beat him to it. "We only tried to get into the back rooms, to cut off one or two security functions that would cover those areas. The vaults are a different matter entirely. They have dozens of well-trained guards - some of them former FBI. They have computerized locks, heat-sensitive materials, laser sensors, you name it. And the vaults are all located underground."

"Sounds un-fun." Weiss stared at his screen, as if weighing whether the Waning Moon could possibly be worth it. "Who's going in? Sydney? Syd and Vaughn? Do I go along for the ride this time?"

"Depends on how we strategize this," Dixon replied. "And that means, we need to know what our game theorist thinks."

Everyone turned and looked at Jack.

He considered casino vaults, the general levels of security, the unique interpersonal connections that would be involved in the heist. Certain goals needed to be achieved, and they might be better achieved at once. Of course, several elements were still unclear - he would need far more complete schematics on the Xanadu before he could begin finalizing a plan. But Jack knew one element immediately.

"I'll need eleven people," he said.

"Eleven?" Sydney stared at him, as well she might. Sometimes, Jack felt as though the CIA had some rule against allowing his daughter more than one backup agent per mission. "That's not overkill?"

"Eleven," Jack repeated. "Counting myself."

"You're going with me?"

Jack had to resist a smile. "I wouldn't miss this one." 

**

They all trusted Jack.

As Vaughn glanced back over his shoulder, he could see Marshall leaning over Jack's shoulder in the conference room, no doubt pointing out something important in the blueprints of the Xanadu Casino. Dixon had taken it as a given that Jack would plan the operation. And Sydney's face had lit up when she'd realized her father would be on the mission with her.

So there you go, Vaughn thinks. You can get played for a fool, humiliated in front of your coworkers and your country and the woman you love - and someday, if you play your cards just right, they might trust you again. Maybe.

Of course, if he took Jack Bristow for a model, he could also look forward to another two decades of professional second-guessing and total social exclusion, not to mention a love life as dead as that schmuck they pulled out of the Carson River.

And right now, if he had a little girl to go home to (the thought of a daughter that was Lauren's, that had Lauren's blood in her veins, made him shiver), Vaughn imagined he'd probably fuck that up just like Jack too. How were you supposed to take care of a kid when all you wanted to do was get to the bottom of a bottle of Crown Royal, and stay there?

Jack Bristow started over twenty years later. Vaughn thought about spending twenty years feeling like this - then turned on his heel and went to the stairwell. He needed some fresh air, and he needed it now.

A few minutes later, as he breathed in what passed for fresh air in Los Angeles, strolling on the roof, he heard a soft voice say, "You left in a hurry."

He didn't turn to face Sydney. Sometimes Vaughn didn't know how to face her anymore. "Just wanted to get outside, you know?"

"Sure." Sydney didn't sound convinced. She walked to his side; the cars on the street below zipped by as tiny reflections in her mirrored sunglasses. "Sounds like we're all headed to Vegas. Kinda like a field trip in school."

"And your dad's driving the bus." The mental image - Jack Bristow scowling at the wheel of a bus filled with screeching middle-schoolers  -- made Vaughn smile for a moment, despite himself.

"I'm glad we're all going. That you're going." Sydney hesitated before adding, "It'll be nice, spending some time together."

Vaughn sighed. "It's not your imagination. I've been avoiding you."

"I didn't think it was my imagination." She folded her arms across her chest, unconsciously defending herself. How was it that Vaughn could read her like a book, and he'd never been able to read Lauren at all? "If you need some space - I understand that."

"You deserve better than that. You deserve better than to have a man in your life shove you aside again, because of what some other woman did to him."

Sydney breathed in sharply. "It's not the same -"

"Except for the part where it is."

"I'm a grown woman this time. And I don't need you to take care of me." She stepped a little closer to him, and he could hear the next words before she spoke them: Let me take care of you. And that was something Vaughn couldn't bear to hear.

"Sydney, I'm not the guy you remember. I'm not the guy I remember." How could he tell her what was wrong - how much was wrong? That he had nightmares about trying to make love to Lauren while she laughed at him? That he was sweeping his apartment for bugs obsessively, four or five or six times a night? That he was second-guessing himself so constantly that he sometimes couldn't decide which intersection to choose for a right turn? Yesterday, he'd had to pull over and think about it for five minutes - not because he didn't know the way, but because any choice seemed impossible to get right. Sydney could never understand that; no matter how hard life hit her, she kept going. She knew her direction, as if she had a compass to guide her every second, every day. That was one of the things he loved about her - but it was one more of things dividing them now. All Vaughn could add was, "I'm not any good to you, not like this."

Quickly, she turned her head from him, shifting on her feet. "I think I should be allowed to make up my own mind."

"I've made up mine."

"And that's it?" Sydney looked upward, and he knew that behind those mirrored lenses, she was blinking her eyes to keep back the tears. "Well, you were right about one thing."

"Even one thing sounds like too many," Vaughn answered. "So what is it?"

"I guess you're going to be just like my father after all."

She stalked back into the building without another word. All Vaughn could do was watch her go.

**

Dixon had thought that it would take Jack Bristow only five hours to come up with the plan to break into the Xanadu Casino. He was wrong.

It took him three.

"I'd like to make one thing clear," Jack said, by way of a beginning. "Though I understand the potential importance of the Waning Moon, I don't think this is the best use of the agency's time and resources. We could - and should - be designing an operation to capture or kill members of the Covenant."

Despite all the countless red marks in Bristow's record, for all the doubts Dixon sometimes had about the man's stability, there was no way Dixon would ever begrudge the man for being a protective father. "I understand that they're a risk to Sydney, and to others as well. But the Covenant wants this device; going after it is going after them."

"It's not the same."

"No." Dixon sighed. "Jack, I've urged a stronger posture. More resources, more people. Right now, I can't get it; the nation has other security priorities."

Jack pressed his lips together in a thin line. "We don't need resources. We only need permission."

"We're not going to get that. Not now."

For a moment, Dixon worried that Jack was going to dig his heels in, make some kind of harebrained demand with God-knew-what kind of strings attached. But then he simply nodded and pushed a hard copy of the plan across the briefing table. "We should call everyone in for a meeting tomorrow," Jack said as Dixon began reading the notes. "Tonight will give us a chance to make a few preliminary calls."

Jack's voice sounded odd as he said that, but Dixon was too distracted to question him. "This is unusual."

"What's that?"

"There's a name I hadn't expected on your list of requested field agents." Dixon raised an eyebrow. "Mine."

"You were a field agent for more than a decade," Jack said. "One of the best. You know how to deal with surprises, and we're going to need as much of the unit as possible to work together smoothly. The only other option is to pull in someone who doesn't ordinarily work with the rest of us, and that's one variable too many."

Dixon knew all of this to be logical and true, but he said, "I took a management job for a reason, Jack."

After a pause, Jack said, "Your children. Of course." His expression became unreadable as he said, "I probably should have done the same thing."

"Can't really imagine you spending all your time behind a desk."

"You say that as though you didn't like it." Jack hesitated, then said, "This mission promises to be fairly low-risk - as our work goes. Your role isn't one of the more hazardous ones. You'd be in the country, with recourse available through the law in a worst-case scenario. And you wouldn't lack for backup."

In the field again. Gun at his side, cloaked in a disguise.

With a jolt, Dixon realized - DAMN, that sounded good.

Grinning, he said, "So, that gives us Sydney, Vaughn, Marshall, Weiss, you - and me. That's only six of your eleven."

"We'll be going outside the agency for the other players."

"Outside the agency?" Dixon's unease only grew as he saw the look on Jack's face.

"Believe me when I say that I am the only person in the world who hates this more than you do," Jack began. "Especially given what we just discussed -"

"Oh, no -"

Jack kept going, ignoring the warning to stop. "The first call we need to make tonight is to Arvin Sloane."

**

Read on to the next chapter.
Return to the "Bristow's 11" Index Page.
Return to the New Fic Index Page.
Return to Yahtzee's Main Page.