* * * * The flight back to Los Angeles was five hours longer than the flight out had been, including a brief layover in Shanghai. Jack willed himself to sleep for as much of it as he could. It wasn’t that difficult. His body was exhausted and his mind was strangely at ease. Two years of searching had finally produced results. Sydney was on her way home. Even the contemplation of what trauma might have caused her memory block wasn’t enough to dampen his relief and joy at the thought of being able to see his daughter again in a few hours.
He did have a twinge of guilt at not feeling more remorse over leaving Sark. He was too tired, however, to do more than note dimly that Kendall would probably happily court-martial him if he knew that Jack had deliberately reunited Irina and her favorite lieutenant. His last semi-conscious thought before drifting off somewhere over the Pacific was that scarred and damaged though they might be, at least for the moment both of his children were safe.
* * * * He paused, taking a few moments to observe Sydney through the two-way mirror before entering the room where she was pacing restlessly. She seemed thinner than he remembered, but not much. Her paleness reminded him briefly of the ashen-faced boy he’d left behind nearly a day ago, as did the dark hollows beneath her eyes.
She’d had nearly twenty-four hours to begin processing her situation. Shock and confusion were already being replaced by frustration and impatience. Resilience, he thought. Pragmatism. Stubbornness. He wondered briefly if Irina saw the same characteristics in their offspring that he did or if her view encompassed different aspects of them.
“Dad!” Sydney’s expression when she saw him at the door was one of relief and eagerness... but not two years’ worth.
He resisted the urge to cling to her just a little longer when she hugged him, not wanting to overwhelm her with enthusiasm that her abbreviated memory could not justify reciprocating. He was certain that she would get enough of that from her friends and other colleagues.
“Welcome home, Sydney.”
“When are they letting me out of here?” she asked. There was nothing unexpected about her impatient tone. At this close range, however, Jack could see the anxiety that she was trying to suppress. She had begun to accept that this was not a dream or an elaborate hoax, but the inability of anyone to pin down precisely what had happened understandably troubled her.
“We can leave right now.” He smiled as her face brightened. “I’m sure you have a lot of questions. And that you haven’t been getting a lot of answers,” he added at her wry look. “I hope you don’t mind... One of the stipulations of your release from observation is that you’ll stay with me - for a little while at least.”
Sydney shrugged with feigned indifference. “It’s not like I have anywhere else to go. My apartment is gone, isn’t it?”
It was a rhetorical question and his heart fell as her expression darkened. He didn’t want to remind her of Francie or Allison, but he supposed that she didn’t need his help to remember. In her mind, it was still so fresh.
“I didn’t see any point in holding on to it,” he said quietly. “I didn’t expect that you would want to go back there anyway.”
“Did they ever find...? Nobody would tell me anything.”
“No.” The knot in his chest tightened. He could see that his answer brought no easing of her pain. “Sark didn’t know what Doren had done with her body.”
“And you believe him?”
“He never lied about anything else. I don’t expect he lied about that either.”
“I can’t believe he’s loose again,” she shook her head in disgust. “Can’t the CIA hang on to anybody?”
Another rhetorical question. He knew that the abrupt shift in mood and tone was an attempt to distance herself from thoughts of her dead friend. He let the subject go for now. They would deal with it in a more private setting later - when she was ready. “Is there anything you have to take with you?”
“Just these.” Her face softened as she retrieved a violently colorful bouquet of flowers. “Marshall brought them by a little while ago. He was so absolutely tongue-tied that he couldn’t get a single sentence out coherently.” She grinned suddenly at the memory, grasping at the one bright moment in her bewildering day. “It’s good to know that some things haven’t changed.”
There wasn’t much conversation of a personal nature on the drive home. Small talk centered around the ever-evolving cityscape - new gas stations and mini-malls raised, old restaurants and movie theaters razed. The faint tension that Sydney had radiated throughout the ride didn’t ease as they entered Jack’s neighborhood. She had been there so seldom before her disappearance that it probably felt just as unfamiliar to her as the rest of her off-kilter world did.
“Is your house clean?” she asked once they were inside. Knowing that she wasn’t critiquing the neglectful layer of dust in his living room, he nodded. “Has there been any word about Mom while I was... gone?”
He had expected the question and his face was impassive as he nodded again. “We’ve been in contact a time or two. She has been just as concerned about you as I was.”
“You’ve been working together,” his quick-witted daughter surmised.
“Yes.”
“Didn’t seem to do much good,” she said. “I had to ‘find’ myself... didn’t I?” Doubt seeped into her expression.
“I’m not so sure.”
“Something happened, didn’t it? There’s a specific reason why I woke up last night in Hong Kong. Isn’t there?” Her desperate need for reassurance tore at him.
He and Irina had discussed how much to tell her, how much she needed to know immediately. They had agreed that further muddying of the familial waters was something that could wait. The bitter issues of Francie’s murder and the death of Allison at Sydney’s hand were problems that could keep a team of good therapists occupied for decades. It was clear that asking Sydney to accept Sark as a brother would simply be too much at this point. Still, the revelation would have to come before their paths had any chance of crossing again. Jack and Irina had also agreed that allowing their children to continue facing one another in potentially lethal conflicts was unacceptable.
“We believe that an independent operative may have been responsible for the events that led to your reappearance,” he said carefully. “He had apparently been tracking you for several weeks and his investigation may have been the catalyst.”
“Independent operative? Not CIA?” she asked as he shook his head. “Yours? Mom’s?”
Jack almost smiled at that. Both, he thought. And neither. He shook his head again instead. “Not exactly.”
“Who?” Her tone was wary and he suspected that she already had a hunch.
“Sark.”
“He’s not what I’d call independent, Dad. He’s always been working for Mom.”
“He’s been on his own ever since he escaped CIA custody six months ago. And yes, I’m as certain about that as I can be,” he added to forestall the question he could see forming on her lips.
“Why would he do that? Trying to get back in good with Mom?”
This time Jack couldn’t keep the corner of his mouth from twitching upward ironically. “Perhaps. I believe it may also have been a matter of honor. While he was in our custody, I had been using him to search for you. I think that he intended to make a point by finding you himself.”
“What sort of point?” she asked, curious in spite of her skepticism.
“That he isn’t entirely what other people have made of him.” His gaze was direct, making sure she met his eyes. “Sark didn’t have to keep looking for you after his escape. He could have gone straight back to Irina and fallen in with whatever schemes she had going. He didn’t. He could have used what he’d learned about various CIA operations to advance his own prospects. He didn’t. As far as either your mother or I can determine, he’s spent the past six months on little else but searching for you - to prove that he is capable of more than merely destroying things at the command of others. He’s put something back together.”
“You actually almost admire him, don’t you?” she said in astonishment.
“He brought you back to us. That covers a lot of sins in my book.”
“He’s a terrorist. He’s been responsible for more deaths than I can count.”
“As have I,” Jack quietly reminded her. “None of us in this business have clean hands.”
“What kind of reverse Stockholm syndrome did he pull on you while he was here? I can’t believe you’re actually defending him.”
“I’m not saying that he’s innocent. Not by any means. He’s made a lot of bad decisions with his eyes wide open... but I don’t believe that this life as a whole is something that he ever chose for himself.”
“So you think that a year and a half in a CIA detention block has convinced him of the error of his ways and now he’s trying to make amends? That’s ridiculous.”
Despite her angry words, however, Jack could see that the seed had been planted. If she was not yet ready to pardon Sark, she was at least beginning to consider the possibility that his motives were even more complicated than she’d once believed. He could tell that she was also searching for the deception that she knew was mingled with the partial truth of his answers and half-expected her to call him on it. He was relieved when she looked away first.
“Nobody at the Agency knows about any of this, do they?” she asked finally. “About you and Mom, about Sark being in Hong Kong?”
“No.”
There was another long pause as she stared unseeing at the bookshelves that lined the walls. Then she sighed wearily.
“I’m going to take a long hot bath,” she said. “If that’s okay? And then I’m going to bed. Between the flight and the tests and the questions and... everything, I’m exhausted.”
“Of course.”
Several hours later, once he was certain that she was asleep, he took out the phone that technically did not exist.
“Is she really all right?”
“She seems well. A little bewildered, a lot frustrated - but very strong. There were some trace chemicals in her bloodstream that the lab is trying to retro-engineer into a recognizable compound, but no word yet on results. The doctors seem to think that with regression therapy they’ll be able to work through the memory blocks eventually. We won’t know until then what the real damage is, but whatever has happened to her, it doesn’t seem to have broken her. Stephen?”
“Awake. Annoyed. Irritable.” She sounded slightly amused. “I don’t think that he can decide whether to be more perturbed at not being able to hand us Sydney personally, at missing you, or at waking up to find me here.”
“I don’t imagine that he much enjoys being an invalid either.”
“No,” she laughed, startling him with the sound. “He really doesn’t.”
“Have you found any other leads on this mystery organization he’s been tracking?”
“Not yet. The fire at the warehouse has finally been put out, but it has been difficult to get in and there doesn’t seem to be much left to pick through anyway. I’ve already set my own people on retracing the past few weeks. Maybe they’ll be able to turn up something useful that Stephen’s associates have missed, but I’m not optimistic. Despite their botched surveillance yesterday, his people aren’t entirely inept. The local CIA cell has been active,” she noted. “But our paths aren’t crossing. They don’t have any idea what they’re looking for, do they?”
“Probably not.”
“And your absence? Has that raised any questions?”
“Nothing that I haven’t been able to cover so far. If the Hong Kong team turns up any evidence that I was in the city in the past forty-eight hours though, I may have a bit of explaining to do.”
“I don’t think there will be anything for them to find. Not even if they knew where to look.”
He wasn’t certain whether the statement was intended to be a warning or a reassurance. The point, he knew, was that Sark and Irina were no longer in Hong Kong, and he realized that he wasn’t going to analyze it any further.
* * * *
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