By the rivers dark
I wandered on
I lived my life
In Babylon

And I did forget
My holy song
And I had no strength
In Babylon

By the rivers dark
I could not see
Who was waiting there
Who was hunting me

And he cut my lip
And he cut my heart
So I could not drink
From the river dark

And he covered me
And I saw within
My lawless heart
And my wedding ring

Then he struck my heart
With a deadly force
And he said, "This heart
It is not yours."

By the rivers dark
In a wounded dawn
I live my life
In Babylon

-- Leonard Cohen, "By the Rivers Dark"

IRENICON: Book Two

I.


Toronto, Canada


Kathy's e-mail read: "Have you seen this?"

Alice clicked on the link, which took her to a news site for a station back home in L.A. Just a short piece, three paragraphs, that said State Department employee Michael Vaughn was missing and presumed dead. Investigators suspected suicide: His car had been found near a bridge. The third tragedy in recent months for that family, after the suicide of Vaughn's father-in-law, Senator George Reed, and the death of his wife, Lauren, in a plane crash overseas.

It was all there in black and white, illustrated by a small photograph of police officers huddled around Michael's car. She had helped him shop for that car four years ago; they'd held hands in the dealer's lot.

Alice held her hand to her mouth, grateful that she was traveling for business, that Tim wasn't with her, that she could be alone to hear this. She didn't have to hide in the bathroom to cry.

When her partners at the consulting group called her room, wondering why she hadn't come down to dinner, Alice begged off. Bad news from home, she said, and was grateful they didn't pry.

Michael, dead. It seemed impossible. And - suicide? Surely not. He was too strong for that, too determined, too focused on the future.

But his wife had died, and after a tragedy like that, who could say? Alice tried to imagine losing Tim and shivered. No, there was no telling what kind of madness might grip you when you were grieving.

She'd met Lauren once, not quite two years ago, when she and Tim ran into Michael and Lauren at a bar they both used to like. The awkwardness had been smoothed over with a joke about how they ought to have expected it - then Tim and Michael both turned out to be fans of the band playing on the jukebox. Then Lauren started making jokes about wedding preparations, and Alice had needed to blow off some steam about that herself. Finally they ended up sharing a couple pitchers and laughing until midnight. It had felt so good to be Michael's friend again.

She'd even teased him about having a thing for blondes, which Lauren seemed to find funnier than he did.

They attended each other's weddings, though there was no time to talk during the hubbub, of course. And then Alice had always meant to call him, to stay in touch, but she never had. After she'd read about the plane crash, Alice sent flowers; she'd just been waiting a couple more weeks before looking him up to see if he was okay. She hadn't wanted to intrude, and so she hadn't known he was in trouble, and now it was all too late.

Alice was shocked by her bloodshot eyes when she washed her face that night, but she shouldn't have been. No sooner was she tucked under the covers than she started crying again.

Why am I carrying on like this? Alice thought. I loved Michael, but it was a long time ago.

But it was more than that. It was realizing how fragile life was, how little time everyone really had.

Just last month, Tim had asked about starting a family, and she'd said she wasn't ready. Lying in her hotel room, thousands of miles from her home, Alice was no longer certain of that. Maybe she should think about it more seriously. And it would make Tim so happy -

She fell asleep thinking of good names for a boy.

At 3 a.m., Alice awoke, nauseated. Her mind supplied the name "Jacob," as if on autopilot, and she tried to laugh. Was she really neurotic enough to have conjured up morning sickness before a pregnancy? No, no doubt she was still upset. Crying hard for a long time could turn you into a wreck.

But by 5 a.m., she was running a fever, too. Great, she thought. Just great. Her annoyance and having become ill on a business trip, in another country even, crowded out both baby names and grief as she forced herself to roll over and call the concierge for help.

The doctor seemed to take a very long time to get there. By that time, Alice no longer felt much of anything but the heavy weight on her chest. What was on her chest? It made it so hard to breathe.

A maroon-jacketed clerk stood several feet away, holding a Kleenex across her nose. "We've got seven of these. It's not SARS, is it?"

"No." The doctor's voice was kind; Alice could see her reflection in his bifocals. Her eyes were now dark red, which scared her, but he patted her shoulder. "Not SARS."

"It's nothing they ate, because they were all at different restaurants, except this one, and she didn't eat at all."

The doctor wasn't really listening, Alice could tell. His fingertips were at the pulse point of her wrist, his mouth a frown. "The symptoms they're describing - it's almost like viral pneumonia, but to have so many cases of that so close together -"

Viral pneumonia was dangerous. Alice knew that much. "Am I going to be okay?"

"Don't worry. Just relax. I'm going to give you an injection - help you rest -"

Alice closed her blood-hot eyes gratefully, and she sank into darkness without ever considering that it might be for the last time.

**

II.


"It doesn't look as though you're very glad to see me."

Vaughn stared up at his father, unable to talk, to think, to do anything but sit there slack-jawed.

Bill Vaughn ducked his head, a gesture Vaughn recognized as one of his own. Everything about this man was familiar: it was his own face with wrinkles, his hair faded gray, his frame with a few more muscles. "I realize my appearance raises a lot of questions, Michael. And I don't know if you're going to like all the answers, at least at first. But still - I spent so many years thinking about you - I hoped you'd be glad to see me, at least a little."

The plane shifted - air pocket - and it jolted Vaughn back into reality. He forced himself to stand up, one hand against the wall for balance, so he could look Bill - Dad - Bill in the eyes.

This man, he thought, abandoned me and my mother. This man kidnapped a newborn baby. This man is so deep in the Rambaldi cults that he makes Jack Bristow look like an amateur. For all I know, he helped take Sydney away from me.

But none of that was the reason Vaughn had to fight for control. The worst of it - the absolute worst - was that, despite everything, Vaughn was glad to see him.

"They said you were dead. They said Irina Derevko murdered you."

"Derevko tried." Bill's voice was dry, almost amused. "For many years, she thought she'd succeeded. I think she's learned the truth in the past few months. It doesn't matter anymore."

"They - Thomas Brill -" Only after clarifying himself did Vaughn realize he was spilling intel to a person that was, obviously, seriously suspect. He thought, Stop treating this guy like your dad. You don't know him. "They said you took Nadia when she was just a baby."

"I did." Bill sounded -- proud. "That's the only reason Nadia lived to be an adult. A group of us protected her, guarded her, watched her all the time. Her mother wouldn't have done it. Not for long."

He means it, Vaughn thought. He really means it. And God knew Irina Derevko was a dangerous woman; hadn't she shot Sydney? Vaughn had never fully bought her excuse for that one. Was it possible that his father was telling the truth?

Perhaps reading his thoughts, his father added, "Michael, all I ask is that you keep an open mind."

His heart was thumping fast - much too fast. Sweat had slicked his skin. Vaughn was on adrenalin overload, as though he were preparing to fight for his life. "If you're ready to tell me the truth, I'm ready to listen."

"Piece by piece. Step by step."

Truth takes time, Vaughn's brain supplied. He didn't find the similarity between his situation and Sydney's all that comforting.

Oh, shit, Sydney. She'd be worried sick. Had Dad - Bill - his father even thought of that? "Why can't you just tell me?"

"It takes a long time to understand, Mike. But eventually, you're going to know the truth about Rambaldi's work." The gleam in his father's eyes was nothing Vaughn had ever seen there before - though he'd glimpsed it in Irina Derevko, in Julian Sark, even in Arvin Sloane. "You'll be a part of it."

Maybe it was the name Rambaldi. Maybe it was fear for Sydney. Maybe it was just that he'd been sliding down for a long, long time and had only now hit bottom. But it hit - physically hit, making him reel - and Vaughn lost it.

"I'm going to be sick," he choked out. "Move."

Stumbling past his father, Vaughn half-walked, half-fell into the airplane's bathroom and was sick until he felt as though he'd turned inside out. Even when it was over, when there was nothing left of dinner or lunch or anything he'd ever had inside him, he couldn't make himself stand up again. His heartbeat was so hard it ached; his face throbbed, and his chest pounded so that he could see it through his shirt.

Then, in another sickening rush of heat, he lost his sense of time and place completely: Everything that had ever happened to him - all of it was happening right now:


Lauren hung from a hook, panic and deceit in her eyes, begging to live, swearing she loved him -

Sydney braced herself as the jet began plummeting toward the ground, unwilling to meet his eyes as they headed toward a crash and probably toward death -

"You have to be my big boy now," his mother said, still wearing her black dress for the funeral. "Promise me?"

Sark grinned as he held up a strange white device Vaughn didn't recognize but knew was meant to cause him pain -

"Oh, Michael, yes," Lauren moaned as he moved inside her, hating her, playing the part of her husband and wondering if Sydney was being forced to listen - 

Sydney's apartment was nothing but ash and smoke - the kitchen where they'd laughed, the bed where they'd made love --- and the coroners were using a stretcher to carry out something that didn't even look human anymore -


Vaughn gulped in a breath, trying to steady himself, trying to place himself in time and space. Was he even in an airplane? That couldn't have been his father outside, could it? Nothing made any sense anymore. And his heart was still pounding so fast that it made him shake.

One part of his brain, still functioning long after everything else, helpfully supplied the information that dangerous surges in adrenalin levels were often a sign of a brief psychotic episode, what lay people often referred to as a "nervous breakdown." It seemed like good information to have, but he couldn't hold onto the idea. Everything was slipping from him, washed away in the same tide that was drowning him.

His ears popped, and Vaughn thought: At least I know the plane's landing. If I'm on a plane.

The floor shuddered, and after a while the bathroom door opened. Vaughn jumped, both astonished to see his father back from the dead and wondering what had taken him so long. Then he thought about that for a moment. "I'm sick," he said. It was the one thing he was sure of.

"Come on." Bill guided him out of the plane to a landing field that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere - no hanger, no town, just landing lights and a strip and then a swath of darkness so vast it might have been the far side of the moon. Was he hallucinating now? Was this all some kind of dream?

As they got in Jeeps and began driving - through the desert, he thought, though what desert he didn't know - Vaughn tried to resurrect his training and his sanity to deal with the situation. He could see "bodyguards" in other Jeeps around them; his father kept a pretty sizeable private force.

His father -- 

When he could make the world stop whirling, he glanced over at Bill. At Dad. The hands on the steering wheel had helped build model airplanes, steadier with the glue than any kid could ever be. The profile against the darkness was the one that had squinted into traffic while driving to school, his paper-bag lunch piled on top of the Hong Kong Phooey lunchbox.

How many nights had he prayed for this? When he was a kid, Vaughn had been able to tell himself it was all a mistake, some big mistake; they hadn't even found his body, had they? He would lie awake for hours, looking up at the model planes suspended from his ceiling on wires so that they made lazy circles above his pillow, all the while waiting for the sign that it was all a big lie and Dad would come back someday.

Go figure, Vaughn thought. I knew more about the world when I was 11 than I do right now.

Or maybe I am 11. Maybe this is a dream I'm having beneath the model planes.

He knew he ought to be arguing, fighting, at least demanding more answers. But the words vanished from his mind before he could get them to his mouth; his attention zigged and zagged, too fast for him to grab onto any idea for long. I'm sick, Vaughn thought. I'm sick.

When his father finally shut off the motor, Vaughn could hear water nearby - the ocean, or a large lake? In front of them was a house, perhaps a mansion, so white and beautiful it seemed to hover above the sand. This had to be a hallucination. This couldn't be real.

Vaughn tired to speak calmly. "Seems nice, for a prison."

"I'll tell you one thing I've learned, Michael." His father's face was, at that moment, as gentle as in Vaughn's earliest memories. "This whole world's a prison. You're just lucky if you get to choose your cellmates."

Bill - Dad - sounded so tired, so sad. So sorry. Maybe it was possible, just possible, that he had an explanation. All these people chasing after Rambaldi - there had to be something to it, didn't there? Vaughn didn't want to believe that, but he could feel the hope creeping in, maybe just because it gave him something in this upside-down world to grab hold of. When he saw Sydney again - oh, God, Sydney -

The world tilted once more, crazily off balance, and Vaughn wondered if it was even possible for him to get sick again.

His father guided him into a basement kitchen with painted-tile floors and granite countertops. Nice, Vaughn thought, though he was aware that it was bizarre to fixate on the decor. To his surprise, Bill called out, "We're here!"

"Wait - this isn't - who lives here?"

"We're guests, Mike. Be polite. And stand up straight."

Holy crap, Vaughn thought, next he's going to tell me to go wash my hands. But he'd already straightened up. His father's voice was a powerful thing -

"There you are." A shadow emerged from the stairs and then stepped out onto the tile, holding a wineglass. "You're late. Must be tired."

It couldn't be. It could not be --

"Sloane." Vaughn spat the word out. "What are you doing here?"

"I live here. As do you, for the foreseeable future." Sloane's crinkled face turned up in a smile. "I suspect you'll be wanting a drink."

"Who's here?" Nadia called, running down the steps - then freezing, just behind her father, as she glimpsed Vaughn. She obviously had been expecting this - she wasn't all that surprised - but she didn't welcome his intrusion.

Punch-drunk and exhausted, Vaughn started to laugh, the unhinged sound of it echoing in the room. It sounded scary. It felt scary. He leaned against the granite countertop, grateful for its cool solidity beneath his hands.  Maybe at least this was real.

"Michael? I know it's a lot to take in -" Bill leaned close to him, too close.

Vaughn pushed him back and shook his head. "You just lost the benefit of the doubt."

One elbow and WHAM - his father went down, tumbling onto that really great painted tile. Vaughn bolted for the door, not caring if he could make it or not, just determined to try -

The taser bolt caught him in the small of his back, and oh, shit, it hurt even worse. The world went white and black as he spiraled downward. Even after he hit the ground, he felt as though he were still falling.

"Is he all right?" A woman's voice. Nadia's.

"He will be," said the voice that might have been his father's.

**

III.


"There has to be some sign," Sydney pleaded. "Some trace. Something. God, Marshall, you can track brainwaves all over the world, and you can't find Vaughn?"

"Syd, I swear to God, I'm trying!" Marshall's necktie was loose around his neck, and it looked like he hadn't shaved in a couple of days. The many empty Styrofoam cups on his desk were a testament to extreme caffeine consumption. Sydney knew he was working hard, but she couldn't help feeling the strong urge to just shake Marshall until the solution fell out. "We don't, uh, actually have a record of Vaughn's brainwaves, which is kinda odd when you think about it, seeing how long he worked here. But it's not standard data collection, not yet anyway, though now that we have the satellites it might be a good idea to add -"

"That's the future. I'm worried about right now." She stared at the slowly rotating world map on Marshall's monitor. "What about DNA? You have his DNA profiled, right?"

"Down to the guanine," Marshall promised. "But for that to help us, Vaughn would have to be checked into a hospital - not that he's hurt! I'm sure he's just fine, except, you know, if he's just fine, then no hospital's going to end up entering his DNA into a database, which means we're pretty much screwed."

Three weeks. Vaughn had been missing for three weeks, and the entire CIA couldn't turn up a single damned clue. The suicide ruse was obviously that, meant to cover up an abduction, carried out by Sark or Sloane, maybe both of them together. Was it revenge for Lauren? Something to do with his late father's connection to Rambaldi? Just to hurt her? Just to make sure their destruction of Vaughn's life was complete?

"Surely there's something else we can try, Marshall."

"I'll think of something. I promise." Marshall ran his hands through his already wild hair. "It's just, it's crazy right now, you know? I'm trying to crunch the numbers on that weird pneumonia outbreak in Toronto and make sure that's not deliberate, and track Covenant members, plus Mitchell's teething, so the sleep factor is not real high right now. And looking for Vaughn, that's priority number one, full-time, all the time until he shows back up here and says, 'Hey, Marshall, knock it off,' in his trademark laconic fashion. But the other stuff's still got to get done --"

"Call me if something turns up," she said flatly.

"You know it. The instant. The second. The nanosecond." Marshall hesitated, then said, "And get some sleep, okay? You look kinda tired. Cute, though! You always look cute, just now -- in a tired way."

Sydney managed to smile. "I'll try."

In the three weeks since Vaughn's disappearance, she'd slept no more than a few hours a night. Every day, she'd hunted leads, analyzed clues, pored over Echelon alert logs in desperate search of a clue - any clue - that might tell her what had happened to Vaughn. Just the night before, Weiss had sat up with her until four in the morning, typing furiously into the laptop computer, following a hunch of hers about their decryption keys for Covenant intel being incorrect. The hunch didn't lead anywhere.

There were other suspects besides Sloane or Sark, but each of them hurt worse than the last. Nadia was her sister, the promise of family - but Nadia had chosen Sloane and obsession over Sydney and love. Irina Derevko was her mother - but her mother's lies only contained more lies, every "disclosure" just another deception. She'd killed Vaughn's father; why not - kidnap - Vaughn?

Jack Bristow was her father. He hated Vaughn And he'd lied to her throughout her life, using her, manipulating her, because of the genes she carried - and hadn't Vaughn been born into Project Christmas too?

Sydney didn't believe her family was behind this, but she wondered if that was no more than the influence of her last remaining scrap of foolish innocence.

Her work was a lie. Her sister and her parents had betrayed her. And now Vaughn was gone.

As she stepped into the parking garage, Sydney felt her eyes filling with tears. Not here, she thought desperately. Just let me get home where I can lie under a blanket and be alone -

"Sydney?"

She wheeled around to see her father. He shifted awkwardly from one foot to the next, as though he scarcely remembered being human well enough to know how to stand. Their eyes met for the first time since Wittenburg.

"Do you know something?" She forced her voice to remain even. "If you do, tell me now. You owe me that much."

"I don't know anything. I would tell you if I did."

"Then why are you here?" Sydney had promised herself she'd never have to get through one of these conversations again; her world was bad enough without her father in it.

He just blinked at her. "I wanted to know if you were all right."

"All right? All right? Vaughn's disappeared, and you thought I'd be all right with that?"

"That's not what I meant, and you know it."

The correction drove her over the edge. "What, do you need the data? For one of your reports? 'The subject's grief process?' Did you ever stop and think that maybe, just maybe, if you'd shared some of the secrets you've kept all these years, Vaughn might have known enough to protect himself? But then, you never cared about Vaughn at all, did you?"

Her father didn't even react; it was like he wasn't even listening. Maybe he never had been. "I'll find out what I can. I can go through - alternate channels."

"Don't pretend that you're doing any of this for me, Agent Bristow." Sydney hurried for the truck, hoping he wouldn't follow, and yet vaguely disappointed when he did not.

**

IV.


"Checkin' this out for your daughter, huh?" Thomas Brill smiled across the chessboard, taking his hand from the rook to pick up his cigar. The summer wind rustled the leaves of the trees above their table in the park.

"I have my own reasons for needing to know Mr. Vaughn's whereabouts." Jack slid his bishop across to counter the rook.

"You sound awfully sure he's still alive."

Jack wasn't sure of that at all; in fact, he considered it surpassingly unlikely. "No purpose would be served by looking for him, otherwise. The facts of his theoretical demise would be useless to us."

"Us. Who's us, Jack?"

Us, in this context, meant him and Sydney, even if Sydney didn't agree. But Brill didn't need to know that Jack was basically acting alone. "If you don't have information for me, don't extend this interview. The exposure is dangerous for us both."

Brill shifted a pawn, a move that was purely stalling, and slapped the time clock. "Like I don't know that. Listen, Jack, all I know about Michael Vaughn is the rumor that some people wanted him to go the way of his father."

Jack closed his eyes for a moment. If Vaughn had been killed, Sydney would be destroyed. "What people?"

"That's a harder question to answer. It would take time. People. Money."

"I can give you two million if you start today."

"Five."

"Done." The breeze ruffled Jack's hair, and he took a deep breath before edging his queen forward a single square.

"Jack, Jack, Jack." Brill laughed as he took the queen with one of his knights. "Since when did you get so -"

Jack went for the gun, three moves and it was in his hand, cocked, trigger ready, muzzle in Brill's face.

"-careless," Brill finished, grinning around his cigar. "Just outta curiosity, Jack, what tipped you off?"

"Two million was more than sufficient for the kind of investigation needed. The Thomas Brill I knew, faced with a mission to find Bill Vaughn's son - he would never have haggled for a higher fee."

"Times are tough all over. Priorities have to change."

Jack glared. "That depends on what your priorities were to begin with."

"You realize I've got a gunman on you, right?"

"I'm surprised there's only one. But I think it's important that he understands that either we're both leaving this park alive, or neither of us is."

A nearby luncher stared at them, then seeing the smile still on Brill's face, shrugged and went back to her sandwich. Probably, Jack thought, she thinks we're rehearsing a scene. Los Angeles covered any number of evils.

"Walk on outta here, Jack." Brill began separating the chess pieces back to their sides of the board, white with white, black with black. "For what good it'll do you. The Rain of Gold is coming, and there's nothing anybody can do to stop it."

"You don't know that," Jack said, though he was very close to believing it himself. "Were you telling the truth about Vaughn?"

Brill cocked his head, studying Jack's face as though they had just met. "Partly. Jack, that boy's with his father now. That's all there is to it."

Dead. Michael Vaughn was dead.

"I'm about ready to stop having a gun pointed in my face," Brill said. "Get out of here before I decide to take my chances that my sniper's faster on the trigger than you."

Jack backed away across the grass, lowering the gun slowly as he neared the main road. Brill just kept studying the chessboard.

He should tell Sydney. But if he told Sydney, she wouldn't believe him, and she'd blame him, and she'd - she'd give up. So many times, during the previous year, Jack had been sick with fear that his daughter was on the verge of doing exactly that. Not committing suicide - Sydney was far too strong for that, Jack thought - but giving up on happiness altogether.

She doesn't need to know, Jack decided. Not yet.

**

V.


London, England, United Kingdom


"Madam?" The maid spoke politely, but her thumping on the door was becoming insistent. "I'm sorry, but those are the rules. Someone from the management must enter the hotel rooms at least once a week -"

Irina grabbed the neck of the empty vodka bottle by the bed and hurled it toward the door with all her might. The bottle shattered so hard it stripped some of the door's paint off, and the maid screamed. The thumping of her footsteps got further and further away as she ran for the front desk.

"Chort vosmi," Irina groaned. Now they'd throw her out, and while she was nearly ready to leave London, she would have preferred a more civilized exit.

Carefully she pushed herself up into a seated position, back against the padded headboard. Her head spun unpleasantly, but she could manage. Apparently this hangover wouldn't be as bad as yesterday's, though it was far worse than the one the day before.

Giving in to despair? Katya's voice taunted her from memory

Jack joined in: Regrets?

They understood her, these two perhaps alone in all the world. But even now, they didn't know the whole truth. If they had, would they perhaps forgive her? Or would they hate her even more?

Irina was certain of only one thing: They could not hate her as much as she despised herself at this moment.

She had betrayed Jack in their marriage bed. She had gone without seeing Sydney for twenty years and without Nadia for twenty-five. She had exposed men who worked for her - men who trusted her - to biological weapons that turned their flesh to pulp long before they found the mercy of death. Irina had done all this for a single mission, a single justification, a single goal.

And she had failed.

This hotel was where she had come to crash and to burn. She'd spent days indulging in alcohol, cigarettes and, four nights ago, one of the security guards, a dark-skinned man half her age. Irina had been trying to sear everything from her soul that held her back: love and hope, self-pity and despair, all of it. If she could hurt her body badly enough, turn it into something to be used and no more, maybe she'd be hollowed out. Maybe the shell of the woman she used to be could bear to take this next, most hated step.

Yet, as she ran her hands through her matted hair and grimaced at the harsh tobacco taste in her mouth, Irina knew she hadn't succeeded. Instead she just looked rough - the reflection in the mirror was that of a woman older than her age, and she'd always prided herself on looking younger - and felt worse.

And Irina dreaded this day's work as much as she ever had. All the same, it had to be done.

She showered quickly and was dressed before the security guards showed up to escort her out. One of them was the young man she'd had, but they didn't make eye contact as she snatched up her one duffle bag and swept regally out the door.

Days before, she'd mapped out the path to the nearest internet cafe. A fake ID and credit card got her an uninterrupted hour at one of the machines.

Irina typed in the account name and password that had been encrypted in the ad in the China Mail. Then she wrote: WE SHOULD MEET. WE HAVE A LOT TO TALK ABOUT.

The response came within minutes:

I AGREE. I'LL COME TO YOU. SEND A LOCATION AND A DATE, AND WE"LL WORK IT OUT.

I'VE MISSED YOU.

--ARVIN

**

VI.


Only a month ago, Nadia had daydreamed of herself as a princess in a palace, far away from all the world's cares. With the arrival of Michael Vaughn, all of that changed for the worse.

Michael would not talk to his father or to hers. He wanted answers they would not give - shouted his questions at the top of his lungs, no matter how many times he was denied. Some of his questions made senses; others were disconnected from events, even from reality, to a degree that frightened her. His escape attempts had all proved unsuccessful. In quieter moments, he asked to leave or at least to call Sydney, but his father refused, sometimes with tears in his eyes. One night he had broken everything he could get his hands on: her father's beautiful paintings, the pottery, even one of the windows, before the guards shocked him into semi-consciousness again.

Surely there was a limit to how many times a person could endure taser shock without permanent damage. Nadia thought Michael must be near it.

Until Michael arrived, Nadia hadn't thought much about the guards. It was astonishing, she thought, how deeply and how quickly a lifetime's suspicion and judgment could be dulled by the promise of love. Perhaps she should have been grateful to Michael, for keeping her suspicions alive - but instead she resented him, aware all the while of the injustice of doing so. He wasn't well. Michael Vaughn was more clearly unwell than virtually anyone else Nadia had ever known in her life.

Bill Vaughn, on the other hand, was delightful company, never disturbing the fragile towers of her palace; he could chat about opera and wine, the cities where he'd traveled, the various books he'd read. The one subject he never broached was Rambaldi. At first Nadia found that something of a relief; as the days went on, the evasion felt more and more unnatural. But she suspected that Sloane wasn't ready for her to raise the issue herself.

Not to say that they didn't talk.

"Why is Michael here?" she asked Sloane, during one of their late-night chats. "He's unwell - mentally, I mean. For his own good, he should probably be in hospital."

"Michael is with us because I owe his father very, very deeply." He sighed, settling back into the cushions of the sofa that looked out on the waves. "Bill Vaughn saved your life, Nadia. Years before I even knew you had been born, before I could find you to take care of you, Bill made sure that you got a chance to grow up. I know you had a difficult childhood, but all the while, people were looking out for you. Bill was one of them."

She remembered long nights in the orphanage, listening to the new ones cry as she huddled under her thin blanket. Had she been protected, all that time? It was frightening, Nadia thought, how badly she needed to believe that. And yet - she'd had to ask herself if the guards that watched over Michael weren't also there for her. "If his father loves him so much, he should want him to be properly cared for. He needs a therapist, or medication. Both, maybe. Instead, he's just - staying here."

"A father's love is a powerful thing, my dearest." Sloane stroked her hair once, the first time he had dared such a touch. It warmed her, but she didn't let herself smile. "We want what's best for our children, even when our children don't know it for themselves."

Was that why he had injected the Rambaldi fluid into her? The incandescent beauty of those visions had never made Nadia forget the agony of cramping fire racing through her veins. "How is this best for Michael?"

"That will become clear in time." Her father was very good at answering questions without answering them at all.

The next day, at lunch, Nadia was startled when Michael appeared in the kitchen. Until then, he'd stayed in his room every moment he wasn't shouting, and his meals had been left on a tray by his door. Most of them were brought back untouched hours later. But now he was standing uneasily in the doorway, his face unshaven - well on its way to a beard - and his demeanor subdued.

"Michael." Bill started to rise, then sat back down, obviously determined to pretend that this was any other meal. "We're having pasta. Linguini di mare."

Michael closed his eyes for a moment, as if uncomfortable, but then he nodded. "I'd like that. Thanks." He sounded reasonable - he sounded sane. Bill deftly set him a place opposite Nadia, who noticed that they didn't give Michael a knife.

From his position at the end of the table, Sloane smiled and lifted a wineglass. "Would you like some wine? A white Chateauneuf, 1999 - extraordinary vintage."

"Sure." Michael's face showed little reaction. "That would be - great."

He sat heavily in his chair, and for a moment Nadia pitied him. Yes, he'd regained some equilibrium - but this was a kind of surrender, nonetheless. She had never made such a surrender herself, but she had looked long into those depths. "This is delicious," she said. It was the first she'd dared to speak to him since his arrival. "They brought the scallops in from the ocean this morning."

Their eyes met. Nadia realized how much weight he had lost, and wondered if he was capable of caring about anything so mundane as the quality of their meal.

Bill smiled at his son the entire time Michael filled his plate. "Me, I'm not much into Italian food as a rule, but this is nice."

"You've simply never had Italian food prepared correctly," Sloane scoffed. "If you had, you couldn't say such a thing."

"I lived in Milan for five years. Trust me, I know."

"Which five years was that?" Michael said, never looking up from the pasta he was twirling around his fork. "How old was I?"

The question hung in the silence for a moment before Bill replied, "The years you spent in high school and your first year of college." At first Nadia found it touching that he knew so precisely - then remembered that Bill Vaughn, unlike her own father, always had the choice to be with his child. It was a choice he had refused. A glimmer of Michael's anger reflected into her then, shining bright for an instant.

Her father smiled at her. "Nadia, I just realized - I don't even know where you went to college."

"Universidad de Buenos Aires." Stories welled up inside her, of her scholarship, the night jobs, the friends she'd made. "I had the greatest  --"

Michael's hand, clutching his wineglass, slammed down on the edge of the table. Glass and wine sprayed in all directions, and before Nadia could react, Michael had pressed the sharp edge of his goblet against her father's throat.

"Michael, no!" Bill was on his feet, face red with either embarrassment or anger.

Her father remained calm - despite this, despite everything, he was so brave - as he said, "What is it you hope to accomplish, Mr. Vaughn?"

"I want a phone," Michael growled. His hand was shaking - not from lack of resolve, Nadia thought, but from weakness. He had eaten so little, the past few weeks. "I want a working phone, and I want Nadia to dial the number I'll call out to her."

"You want to call Sydney," her father said. He was so kind, even to the man holding broken glass against his jugular vein. "That's understandable. But it's impossible."

"It's not impossible if I've got a phone."

Nadia braced her hands against the edge of the table.

Already, Bill had begun to sweat. "You don't know what you're doing, son."

"Don't call me -"

Nadia swung her feet over the table, lightning-fast, and felt the thump-crunch of Vaughn's ribs against her toes. He collapsed to the floor, but not before she saw the bright crimson welling of blood at her father's throat.

"Papa!" she cried, as the guards descended upon Michael. "Papa, are you -"

"I'm fine, my dearest." He held his napkin to his neck, beaming at her even as the bloodstain spread. "It's not deep."

"I want a phone," Michael choked out, beneath the guards' fists. "I want - I want a phone -"

"Take him to his room," Bill said, his voice hoarse. "Be gentle with him."

"Papa, are you sure you're all right?"

"I'm safe, thanks to your bravery." His smile lit up his entire face, and he brushed his free hand against hers. "I've never been better."

Why was he so happy? Then Nadia realized - she had called him Papa. And from now on, she would never be able to call him anything else.

**

VII.


When it all began, Eric hadn't been able to reflect on the irony. He'd just been scared as hell for his best friend.

From the initial call - about Vaughn's abandoned car and the crushed cellphone they'd found nearby - Eric had gone into crazy mode. He'd driven out there, re-fingerprinted the car himself, taken samples from the steering wheel and the unused ashtray and the tire treads. You could tell a lot from mud, sometimes. Not this time.

He hadn't been forced to break it to Sydney; she'd just appeared at his side, three hours into the search. She had looked so heartbreakingly vulnerable - her slacks and jacket mismatched, her lovely face bare of makeup, her hair still rumpled from sleep. Only a few hours before, they'd been at a restaurant telling each other silly stories. Now she clutched his arm for support.

"We'll find him," Eric had said, and on the first day he believed it.

But the first day turned into the first week, and the first week turned into the first month. Quickly Eric and the others discerned that Vaughn hadn't been abducted from the location where his car had been found; the scene was way too clean for that. Yet traces of Vaughn's usual routes and paths revealed nothing. Had Vaughn realized he was being followed? Had he taken a detour that didn't do its job? Probably so. All that meant, in the end, was that they were devoid of any further clues.

Everyone shook their informants for any scrap of useful knowledge. That included Jack Bristow; Eric talked to him, not caring that Sydney would disapprove. If the man turned up anything useful, that was a good thing, and Syd could bitch Eric out about his sources later.

Eric went over every inch of Syd and Vaughn's apartment. He took samples from their bathtub, Vaughn's toothbrush, the mustard jar in the fridge: no evidence of poisons or biological weapons. Poking through the drawer that held a box of condoms and a vibrator felt beyond creepy, but Sydney, working at his side, was too focused to be embarrassed. He pored over their phone bills, surprised to see his own cell as the line most frequently dialed, and called all the unfamiliar numbers: a movie theatre, a car-detailing place, a wine merchant. Nothing useful.

All the while, he had to watch Sydney's slow disintegration. She hadn't been in such great shape before Vaughn left; now, it seemed to Eric that she was becoming paler and less substantial before his eyes - going transparent.

She didn't eat. She scarcely slept. He sat up with her nights, playing out her hunches, talking through her theories. It wasn't that he really believed in the hunches or the theories, not after a while; even his own considerable ability to hope could only carry him so far. But Sydney didn't need to be alone, so he needed to be with her.

And that was where the irony came in - the cruelty, the kicker, the part that kept Eric up nights long after he'd left Syd's apartment and wandered across the courtyard to his own bed.

I wanted Sydney to myself, he thought. I didn't want Vaughn to get her back. Be careful what you wish for, pal.

He hadn't wanted it like this - not ever, ever like this. Vaughn was the best friend he'd ever had or ever needed; the guy who'd kept him sane during CIA training, while all the other superfit guys were running laps around him. Vaughn was the guy who'd saved his life after Irina Derevko shot him in the throat, the one who had visited him in the hospital as often as Eric's own parents. Vaughn was the one who bought the beer at Lakers games, who fed Alan while Eric was on assignment, who'd asked Eric to be the best man at his wedding. (Okay, it was a total sham wedding set up by his psycho bride, but still, the thought counted for something.)

Even if he'd thought he ever stood a chance in hell of being with a woman like Sydney, Eric could have given up her for Vaughn's sake. Even if he had loved her. He could have given up a lot for his best friend.

But instead, his best friend was missing, and Vaughn's absence taunted Eric for the one small scrap of selfishness he'd allowed himself in their friendship. Sydney was his now, all his, and Eric had never wanted that less.

Worse: He wanted to take care of Syd, and she so badly needed it, but his guilt held him back. Then again, there were other ways of helping out.

"What are you working on, Mr. Weiss?" Jack Bristow said one day, six weeks after Vaughn's disappearance.

"Right now? I'm checking Vaughn's DNA pattern against hospital records again. Going nation by nation; he hasn't been admitted to any facilities in Finland today. Not that I was seriously hoping for that."

Jack's eyes were hard as he studied Eric; he hadn't been at the receiving end of that stare very often, which was just how Eric preferred it. "What were you hoping for?"

"Something. Anything. I don't know." The question put into sharp focus Eric's uncertainty about Vaughn, and he wished Jack would go find something else to do.

"Did Sydney devise this search pattern?"

"Syd? No, she's re-analyzing a lot of the Rambaldi work, running data, trying to find any links to Vaughn." As soon as he'd said this, Eric realized that Jack would have the information already. He wasn't asking about Sydney's efforts to find Vaughn; he was asking about Sydney herself. "She's still really motivated. Very focused. I mean, it doesn't look good, and she sees that. Syd's smart enough to face facts. But - she's tough enough to face them and keep going."

The furrowed line between Jack's brows smoothed as his face relaxed. "Continue what you're doing, Mr. Weiss." That was as close as the man got to "thanks," Eric figured.

That night, he arrived home only a few minutes before midnight. Despite the fact that Syd's records said she'd been in the office by 6 a.m., her lights were still on. Probably she was working. Still searching for Vaughn.

Eric wanted to go over there. He wanted to help her search, if she was searching; he wanted to comfort her, if she needed comforting. But those impulses were tangled up with other things he had wanted, less noble, more selfish. No, he thought, I'm not doing it. I'm not adding to the confusion.

But just as he went to his door, hers opened. A rectangle of golden light outlined Sydney's body; he couldn't see her face, and they lived too far across from each other for her to shout, but he understood that he was being summoned. Eric palmed his keys and walked toward her.

Once he was close enough, he could see the tracks of tears on her cheeks. She was having a bad night. "I heard your car."

"You don't have to explain. Not ever. You know that, right?"

She nodded and stepped inside her apartment, leaving Eric to follow. A wineglass sat nearly empty on the nearby end table, and Eric made a mental note to check the bottle in the fridge later to see how much she'd had. This was the first time since Vaughn's departure that he'd seen her drink, and though she seemed reasonably in control, he intended to know if it became a trend later.

Her feet were curled beneath her on the sofa; she wore a T-shirt and jeans, which Eric would have considered a positive sign in other circumstances - Syd hadn't allowed herself much time to relax since Vaughn's disappearance. The many knots of Kleenex in the nearby can paid testament to a crying jag that had lasted a long time.

Eric sat next to Sydney, waiting to follow her lead. Only after many minutes did she speak. "I was so tired when I came home tonight. Just - exhausted."

"You've been working hard."

"We're always working hard," she said, which Eric had to grant her. "But tonight, it was like, if I didn't get some sleep, I'd die. I stretched out on the bed in my work clothes, and I was just going to crash and deal with everything later, and I thought -" Syd swallowed hard. "I thought, I'm so glad I've got some time alone."

As her tears began again, Eric rubbed her back. "Syd, it's okay. It's natural to think stuff like that."

She shook her head. "I was happy Vaughn wasn't here. Because - after Lauren - he wasn't like himself, you know? I thought I was going to help him, but I wasn't helping him. I was too wrapped up in my own problems. He was - hard to be with, and I resented him for it even though it wasn't his fault, and now he's gone, and I feel so ashamed."

"Hey." Eric took one of her hands in his. "Everybody has rough times. You guys came by yours honestly, you know? It doesn't mean you didn't love each other." He felt a sharp jab of guilt for using the past tense, but fortunately Syd didn't catch it.

"I know. I know." Sydney wiped her eyes and gave him a watery smile. "Could you just hang out over here for a while? I know I'm not good company -"

"As long as you want."

Leaving Syd alone was NOT an option. Maybe he, too, had been selfish before Vaughn disappeared. Didn't matter. Not taking care of Sydney in a feeble attempt to guard against his own feelings was its own kind of selfishness.

This isn't about me, Eric thought. It's about her.

**

VIII.


Almost two months after the Toronto incident, Jack finally received the official report, confirming what he had already suspected to be true: The virus that had killed 11 guests in a single hotel was not Legionnaire's, as had been reported in the press, but a close cousin to the virus recovered from the bodies found in Rambaldi's cave. This one acted more slowly - requiring approximately 12-16 hours to kill the infected - but was still too fast to be an effective biological weapon against a mass population.

A test, Jack thought, as he entered his apartment. He made the usual cursory check of the front room - everything appeared undisturbed - then returned to his thoughts as he took off his jacket and began loosening his tie. How many tests would it require for Sloane to be confident of his work? How much more time did they have to find and stop him? Did they have any time left at all?

From the bathroom, Jack heard a soft splash.

His first thought was of an intruder. His second thought was that an intruder was unlikely to have broken in for the express purpose of washing his hands, and that he probably had problems with the plumbing. Jack took his handgun with him to the bathroom anyway. One quick kick forced the door open to reveal -

"Jack." Katya reclined in a bubble bath, lit only by a small candle she'd placed near the sink's edge. "Imagine. You had a gun in your pocket AND you're happy to see me."

He was in no mood for small talk; he and Katya had one issue between them that superseded everything else: "You tried to kill Sydney."

She was completely unruffled. "Yes. I came to explain why."

This, Jack felt, could have been accomplished in many ways that did not involve bubble baths. However, he understood her approach. Besides the blunt sexual invitation, Katya was also communicating other messages: that she was unarmed, alone and - he studied the fishtail curve of her legs, outlined beneath the bubbles - submissive.

Like Irina, Katya obviously found sex the only endurable way of offering an apology. Jack was not at all certain he intended to accept either, but he would hear the explanation.

"Remain still," he commanded. She raised an eyebrow but obeyed as he rolled up his shirtsleeves, picked the gun up once more, then knelt by the side of the tub. He dipped his free hand in the water and ran it around the edges of the tub, feeling the warm silk of her skin against the back of his hand. Although he hadn't seriously expected her to be hiding a knife or garrote beneath the bubbles, it was just as well to be sure. "All right," he said, withdrawing his hand. "Explain."

Katya breathed out, as if less certain of her purpose now that she had come to it. "I believed Sydney to be the source of the Rain of Gold."

"That's absurd."

"It's incorrect, as I now know. But it's not absurd."

"Of course it is." Jack hesitated, then said the words aloud for the first time: "Sydney is the Irenicon."

"We know that now." Katya frowned at him, becoming slightly impatient. "After Genga and Toronto, we know the role Nadia played - and the role Sydney will have to play. But before that? How could you be certain?"

There was no answer to this question. Jack remembered his exasperation with a 5-year-old Sydney who, dissatisfied with his cursory summary of optics, kept demanding to know WHY the sky was blue. "It's obvious."

"You assumed. And the fact that your assumption was correct doesn't make it any less irresponsible." Katya rolled her eyes and sank a bit deeper beneath the water. "Irina told me once that every parent is a monster. Once you have a baby, she says, there is a part of you that would happily watch the rest of the world burn, if it were necessary to keep your own child alive and safe."

Jack felt that he had many crimes to answer for in his life, but protecting Sydney was not among them. "That doesn't explain your attack on Michael Vaughn, or your liberation of Lauren Reed."

"The information given to me about Sydney came from the Covenant. They made contact not long after my last visit to you." Her eyes darted up to his, and Jack could not help remembering the way her bare skin had felt against the back of his hand. "Perhaps they were manipulating me. But I have reason to believe that Arvin Sloane was behind the misinformation, that he was manipulating us all."

That was all too plausible. The Covenant had incentive to preserve Sydney's life when she had been in their custody three years before - but once Nadia's existence was known and discovered, if they had misidentified which sister would play which role -

"The Covenant knew I could move freely and without suspicion. I was given the mission to murder Mr. Vaughn, to remove him as a threat to their operatives, and to work with Lauren Reed to kill Sydney in her turn. Fortunately, I underestimated Sydney's ability to fight back."

Vaughn's wound, while serious and incapacitating, would not have been fatal as long as he received medical attention within a few hours; they had never satisfactorily identified the source of the 911 call that had summoned the ambulance. If Katya had wanted Vaughn dead, he would have died that day.

Was it possible Katya was still lying to him? Jack knew that it was, but on the balance he thought it improbable. Her explanation fit all the facts. "You never considered telling me about the Covenant's information."

Laughing, Katya splashed suds in his general direction; he felt the warm water soaking through the rolled sleeve of his shirt. "You would have killed me where I stood. And if what I then believed had been true, the implications would have been far greater than my own wretched fate." Then she became quieter. "What I believed was not true. The gravity of my mistake sickens me. I can only apologize to you. And to Sydney, if you think she'll talk to me."

"I couldn't say. We barely speak." When Katya raised her eyebrows, Jack sighed. "Before Lauren Reed informed her otherwise, Sydney had never understood the greater implications of Project Christmas. She still doesn't know everything. But she knows enough to feel - violated."

Katya watched him in silence for a few moments, then tentatively stretched her hand toward his face. Jack allowed her to brush two damp fingers along his cheek. The surge of longing for her that struck him surprised him in its intensity. She whispered, "I'm sorry."

"So am I." After a moment's consideration, he unloaded the gun and set it aside. "I meant to tell her, eventually. I thought - we were doing so much better, and I thought Sydney might be ready to hear some part of the truth. I never thought it would be easy, but I thought it was - possible. I was wrong."

"She'll understand someday. You know that." Her thumb brushed the edge of his lower lip. The bubble bath had perfumed her skin, and Jack breathed in, absorbing it. The bruising memories of the past few months were fading into softer relief as he began to think only of the moment, only of sensation, only of Katya. "Is there anything I can do?"

"I could use a bath," Jack said.

Katya smiled.

**

IX.


Sydney stopped at the Walgreen's on her way to work; she drove by it nearly every day, but had never actually gone there before. These days, she was trying to make her moves as unpredictable as possible. Besides, the past few weeks, she hadn't been taking care of herself properly - this gave her a chance to amend that. As she walked by items, she grabbed anything that looked useful: vitamins, facial scrub, manicure scissors. Even during checkout, she kept selecting things, and after she'd paid with her credit card, Syd grabbed one more thing. "I'm sorry - I'm so absent-minded these days -"

"Don't worry about it, honey," the checkout lady said. "I've been there."

I doubt it, Sydney thought, but she smiled as she dropped a $20 bill on the counter.

She walked into the CIA with her shopping bag; when she caught a glimpse of her father at the far end of the hallway, it seemed like a good time to duck into the bathroom. Nobody else was there.

Minutes later, after she'd dropped the receipts for both her credit card and cash purchases into the toilet, Sydney remained in the stall, staring down at the small plastic stick in her hand.

A purple plus sign stared back at her.

That Friday night, Sydney thought tiredly. The one when I drank as much as Vaughn did, and we didn't even make it to the bedroom, and - well, the best laid plans --

Sydney knew she ought to feel something powerful - fear or joy or horror or love. But at the moment she couldn't process anything that enormous or complicated; all she could think was that she'd have to go back to the Walgreen's in the early hours of the morning. She had avoided creating an electronic record of her purchase, but she'd need to destroy the security tapes too.

Nothing in her life - not her dearest loves or her deepest grief - had ever been a secret. It had all been used against her, by her father, her mother, Arvin Sloane, the Covenant, and probably countless others she couldn't even guess.

For as long as she could manage it, Sydney decided, her pregnancy would be different.

**

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