Chapter 1.3 — Reflections

Wednesday, July 17, 2002

When Vaughn runs, it is in the morning. Calm all around, and a haze the sun has yet to beat out of the air.

He curses the disruption as a pickup truck rumble-clanks past, American flag flapping from its passenger side window. They have dwindled lately — the flags — that en vogue wave of patriotism fading with them. It's just as well, as far as he's concerned. They only make him feel the need to examine his motivations, make his car look strange as one of the few on the road without one.

Previously, he ran every day. Punish the sidewalk — thump-thump-thump — with his feet, ran until he couldn't breathe and his legs turned to jelly. Only then was he exhausted enough to meet with his agent without broadcasting nervous energy — dropped papers and fingers twirling at his forehead, get the words out, damn it.

He has scaled back to a few times a week, exhaustion no longer necessary, and this means he breathes harder, disrupts the stillness more. On some days it is still necessary — clears the ache of too much to drink the night before, too many late hours at work, too much wanting of things he cannot have.

Today he runs for all of these reasons, but mostly because he will have to work an operation with Christine Watkins.

———

Calling the op-tech room a "room" is a bit of an understatement. Spanning most of the length of the building on the fifth floor, it meanders — a maze of desks and tables, thick bundles of wires, and temporary office dividers that have become permanent. The lighting is brighter than the rest of the building, illuminating both tools strewn across tables and the piles of computer equipment that have accumulated wherever something makes a corner. The gadgets are everywhere, too, and these give the room a bizarre appearance — cellular telephones, eyeglasses and lipstick tubes scattered amidst the more obvious technology.

Vaughn finds Watkins in a tiny gray square created by some of the dividers, paging through one file of a sizable stack of manila. The computer monitor beside her has gone blank, and he takes a moment to study her reflection.

She looks nothing like her mother, Mila, a small, round Russian immigrant who worked two jobs and lived with her only daughter in an old brick apartment building. Enough sweat and hours to let her daughter earn the grades that got her into MIT.

Mila died — car accident, auto-pedestrian — a year after Watkins left for Russia. Vaughn attended the funeral; she was conspicuously absent.

He has always assumed she looks like her father, although paternity was not a subject broached between them. An unwritten rule, established after each learned the bare facts. His: killed doing his job. Hers: skipped when she was two.

"You going to stand there all day?" Her tone is edgy, but almost friendly. The computer screen is no longer blank, and she is waving the file folder in the air. "I should have just kept my mouth shut. They've had me reviewing intel all morning."

Almost friendly is enough to move a few steps closer. She looks at him full-on, and the fluorescent lights settle into the wrinkles around her eyes. "Look. If we're going to work together, we need to leave the past in the past."

A challenge. I've grown up, have you?

He nods, wonders if they really can ignore things that have been left painfully unaddressed. "You have everything you need for this afternoon?"

"Getting there. I still need to excavate a Cyrillic keyboard from the mess out there."

"You want me to look for it?"

"Nah. I got it." She turns back to the monitor and it shines off her eyes. Missile software. "See you at one."

Well, fuck. Maybe we can be civil. He almost trips over a knot of wires on the way out.

———

It is midnight in the Western end of Russia and 1 p.m. in Los Angeles when Vaughn enters the tiny operations room. Watkins and a techie whose name he can't recall are already seated, faces illuminated by the 12 video monitors that dominate the wall. Three are blank, two quiver with static, and the rest show that Volgograd will likely see some rain before morning. Satellite imagery will not be of much help today.

In 20 minutes, Sydney Bristow and Marcus Dixon will pose as safety inspectors and enter the Slava Chemical Refinery. Both will go hot mike in 15 — one of the new advantages of partner doubles. For now, they wait.

Watkins has found her keyboard, foreign lines and circles underneath close-cropped nails. She types, smooth but casually slow, glancing up occasionally at an equally foreign display on the monitor in front of her.

"We're good to go, Michael." He claims the seat beside her, careful to keep it equidistant between her and the nameless techie. Still closer than he was to Sydney on the park bench.

This part is routine. Headset on, check the volume. He has spent a lot of time in this room, chatting with Sydney — if you can call it that, with him in the middle of CIA headquarters and her halfway around the world. Eyes up toward the monitors, still mostly clouds.

"Vaughn?" Sydney comes on with a slight crackle in his ear.

"Good evening." Maybe she smiles. He always imagines she does. "Dixon?"

"I'm here." Composed, but strained. The only tone he's ever heard from Dixon.

"Vaughn, we're headed in." Rapid-fire Russian from someone, he assumes at the company's front desk, followed by a short response from Sydney. She can speak serviceable Russian, he knows, but is spread too thin over other languages for depth.

He looks to Watkins for more insight, and she shapes the beige lips through a silent, "they're fine," before turning toward her monitor. The conversation on the other end of the comm link stops, replaced by footsteps that echo down what sounds like a long, concrete-floored hallway.

From here, they will activate a signal jammer to disrupt the building's security cameras, disable their escort, and enter the large room at the end of the hallway. It contains what Watkins calls a "big old warhorse of a mainframe," and they will have five minutes to search it after activating the jammer.

"Go." This from Sydney, and he jabs his thumb at a stopwatch. A short grunt from Dixon, and then the sound of someone thump-slump on the floor. They are in the room 11 seconds later, the CIA's transmitter placed two after that, and then there is nothing for him to do but wait and watch Watkins.

Noise from the keyboard is the easiest way to track her progress. Plastic popping and pounding, click-click-click-clack-click. Her fingers remind him of the legs on a racehorse, galloping through the files. Bones glide beneath the skin, veins blue beneath and swelling. She once told him she can top 100 words a minute; he has never doubted it. Strong hands, and he knows they have talents beyond typing.

"Two minutes." No response, just click-click-clack-click-click-clack-click. Her eyes roll a short back-and-forth over the characters cascading across the screen; blinking, when it comes, is swift, and then she is back to sharp focus. He stands to get a better angle on the screen. Click-clack-click-click-click-click.

"One minute. You close?"

"Yeah. Just — " The next few keystrokes are more final, deeper clacks. "The document is in Khabarovsk, being held by a Lashuk Petrov." Her speech is perfect apple-pie American, until she rolls over the Russian words. Then her accent rattles, staccato, the words fitting her just as well as the English ones did, and he can see her blending perfectly into the Moscow masses.

Thirty seconds to spare. One hand goes to adjust his microphone, and he realizes the other is resting on her shoulder. "We've got it, Syd. Clear out." The renegade hand slides slowly from the warmth of the gray suit jacket. She does not acknowledge its presence or absence.

"Copy that, Vaughn." They begin running down the hallway.

"Sydney, tell SD-6 that the document is in Khabarovsk, held by Lashuk Petrov."

"Is it?"

"Yes."

He can hear gravel skittering beneath her feet now, Dixon running beside her. She is breathing harder. "Why — " Short gasp. "Why are we just handing this over to SD-6?"

"Syd, we're going to have to let SD-6 scout this out. We can't send in a team right now. You know we don't have the manpower."

Her voice lowers and the static crinkles for her next words. Something about "bullshit."

———

Like many people who drink too much coffee and live by themselves, Vaughn has mugs littered throughout his apartment. Like the subset of these people who are otherwise tidy, he is disgusted when he notices them. He notices today, and moves about the sparse apartment, collecting. Five this time, one less than last time, so perhaps he is getting better. Or perhaps he just noticed sooner.

Faucet on, soap suds squirted in, a growing mass of bubbles, and lemon scent wafting up with the steam. Strangely, he finds this comforting. It brings him back to washing dishes with his mother in a much older, homier kitchen with pea green tiles; up on tiptoes to reach into the sink while his mother dried them. Michael and Mom, always together, always waiting for Dad to come home.

And then one day he didn't.

Still, it is calming, the muffled clank as ceramic collides in the warm water. Domestic, almost.

Coke can from the fridge, two Excedrin from the cabinet. His head aches from too many nights of too much alcohol.

The Coke sweats in his hand as he slumps into the overstuffed couch, realizes there's still a damned tie around his neck and yanks it off, draping it over the far arm of the couch. Then on to the remote.

ESPN. Wednesday Night Baseball Doubleheader. The announcers are too loud, too enthusiastic, but he doesn't turn the volume down. They will calm eventually, and then the only sound will be pitches popping into gloves, cracking off of bats.

Sports escape. The teams don't matter, and neither does the score.

He finds this refreshing.