Chapter 1.4 — Overlap

Thursday, July 18, 2002

This is the way SD-6 does business.

Until today, Lashuk Petrov was a low-level operative in Irina Derevko's network. Not, by any means, a good man, Petrov was a relative bottom-feeder in the intelligence world, not important enough to merit significant interest from other agencies. His primary tasks consisted of developing false identities, smuggling agents and materials across various borders, and assisting in the occasional assassination of similarly low-level K-Directorate agents.

On this morning, an SD-6 team burst through the door of Petrov's apartment in Khabarovsk. Asked Petrov politely — if you consider pistol-whipping polite — where the Rambaldi document was. Petrov said nothing.

A search of the tiny cinderblock apartment proved futile. The following interrogation was not so polite.

Two hours later, his blood making tiny streams down a wooden chair, over his handcuffs, into rivers on the floor, Petrov broke. He did not have the manuscript, but he knew who did: Nikolai Marusov.

They put a bullet in Petrov's head for his troubles.

———

Bill Devlin is the only person on the other side when the elevator dings and the metallic doors glide open.

"Good morning, Agent Vaughn."

"Morning, sir." Both are well-pressed, fitted and no afternoon wrinkles yet, but bucking the traditional CIA color code: dark suit, white shirt. Devlin does this because he is the boss, needs to stand out. Vaughn does it because he has somehow always felt the need to throw a little grain of sand at protocol — a little blue shirt irritant.

"How is SD-6 going?" It is polite elevator talk more than a need to know; if he had a wife and kids, perhaps Devlin would ask about those. Neither of them have a family, so shop talk is small talk.

"Fine, sir." Suppose I should thank him for complicating my life. "We really could still use more agents, but one is better than none."

"I'm doing what I can, Agent Vaughn. And we may have someone else for you." Devlin glances up, checking their progress in the numbered lights above the doors. "We're throwing a lot of people into Libya. Bletcher pulled a good lead out of there yesterday and we're going to try to smoke it out. So things may be back to normal soon."

The lights announce that they have reached Devlin's floor; another ding and the doors glide open to reveal five dark suits and white shirts waiting to get on.

———

He is always unsure of what to call her. To him, mostly, she is Irina, Russian evil fucking bitch assassin, the woman who killed his father. To her, she is Mom.

Sydney received little peace from the few hours she spent with the former Laura Bristow. Told him one day she wished she had left her mother dead. The topic rarely comes up now, and he is glad.

She slips into the building at noon for her monthly briefing, sits with perfect posture in the chair in front of his desk and answers questions in her crisp, proper, literature student voice — "yes, I did" and "no, I did not." He refers to her mother as "Derevko."

"Anything on Petrov?" he asks, after they have passed the older items.

"Yes." Her eyes pool a little and her face becomes more agitated. This, he knows, means Petrov is dead. "SD-6 sent a team in to interrogate him. They got a name, Nikolai Marusov, and then they killed him."

"Sydney — "

A click at the doorway.

"Michael, I can't go over the mission specs unless you give me a mission." Watkins, leaning on the cane, has just saved him from the admonish-or-condole decision. A different awkward moment, instead. But Vaughn thinks it may — if he plays it right — turn out to be more enjoyable. Will Fucking Tippin.

"Oh." Watkins looks down at Sydney as if she's just noticed her, which would, he realizes, be atypically unobservant of her. "Sorry." Sydney, meanwhile, has snapped around to stare at the other woman, and maybe, he thinks, she even tensed a little in reaction to Watkins's use of "Michael." Or you might be imagining things.

"Sydney, this is Christine Watkins. She's working on the SD-6 case now. Chris, Sydney Bristow." A definite reaction — little panic eyes — to "Chris."

"Hi." Watkins smiles, but it is mouth only, eyes still cool blue. Sydney freezes her face, a half-developed lie, searching for an emotion and drawing a blank. "Hello." He wonders if the cane is as conspicuous to others as it is to him.

If there is a winner of the exchange, he decides, it is Watkins. And he realizes he wants her to win. Will Fucking Tippin. Sydney is a good liar, no doubt, but Watkins has spent every minute of the last seven years lying. Practice makes perfect, or something like that.

There is a startling overlap here, as the two women consider each other. Clashing standards, he thinks. Because before Sydney Bristow, Christine Watkins was the standard. He has let numerous women walk into his life, fall short of the standard, and walk back out, until eventually the futility of that surrounded him.

And then there was Sydney. Not the Sydney with the pink hair and the train wreck mouth. Sydney-as-standard came later — in the precision of her missions, their warehouse conversations, the way her beauty peaks when she is most determined.

A combination of time and Sydney let him replace the old standard. But in his mind, they have always held a certain sort of shared perfection of personalities, appearances, emotions, intelligence. And when he presses himself for a critique now — current Sydney versus old Chris — he cannot find fault in either.

The Chris of today has suffered from time. And experience, he suspects. She left him a Sydney and came back something else entirely. Dark. Dirty. Lined. Flawed. He can see beyond the ice eyes — knows where to look.

And the other standard?

———

He turns to his computer after Sydney leaves and starts typing her report. Pauses for a moment to figure out what he needs to do once he finishes — or if there is something else he is supposed to be working on now — and wishes, not for the first time, to have his Post-it notes back.

Vaughn spent the years after graduation — UCLA, poli-sci, and pretty damn high in his class — as something marginally higher than a gofer in the governor's office. Lots of little tasks to do, to remember, all scribbled down on Post-it notes, stuck around his desk, on the computer monitor. Night classes, for a master's that never quite materialized, then finally the call from Langley. Would you like a job, and no shit I'd like a job, why the hell do you think I sent you my fucking resume all those years ago, don't you know who my father was?

It didn't take them long to tell him the Post-it notes were going to have to go. You can't write down classified material and leave it stuck to your computer monitor, they said, which made sense. Notes now in his head, special folders on his hard drive, encrypted and secured, the key changed by someone from tech support twice a week. He is allowed cryptic scribblings on legal pads, presuming, of course, that they stay on his person or locked in his briefcase. Vaughn pulls one out as Watkins barges into his office for the fourth time in the last two days.

"We get a location on Marusov yet?"

He thinks it is beginning to feel like old times. Of course, in old times, the office was dingier, and smaller, and she would shut the door so they could discuss things that had nothing to do with work. "I just sent the name through. Everything's — "

" — slow. I've noticed." He gives her a faint smile, thinks about the ones she used to warrant, and wonders about the things they have effectively ignored today. Wonders why she barges into his office, seems to want to spend time discussing things with him, with all those things said in the end. Perhaps it is just familiarity, important in a new building with new agents, after seven years in a wholly different place.

If he gave her the old smile, he wonders, would she melt the ice eyes and return it? Maybe her eyes can't melt anymore.

"So that's Sydney." He nods. Safer territory than his thoughts currently. "You're good with her." A pause, and maybe a shadow on her face. Then back to matter-of-fact Chris. "My handler was an ass."

———

Couch and television again, this time a sweaty Budweiser bottle instead of the Coke. Surely his liver has recovered enough — and besides, he needs to stop thinking.

Maybe it is part of the job, like brush passes and dead drops and looking for tails. He knows he is not the only one to do this. Sydney occasionally walks into a late-night meeting with cabernet on her breath. Name the bar, and Weiss will outpace him. And Chris could fucking drink you under the table.

The thought flits across his mind, flaps and jumps and won't go away.

Your father didn't drink like this. Maybe it had something to do with his mother. Maybe it had something to do with him. His father, he thinks, didn't do a lot of the things he does. Couldn't have thought the things he thinks. Couldn't have had these doubts.

But they had other things in common. Even more so than him, the job was his father's life. William C. Vaughn, he knows, lived the Agency until the day it killed him.

Vaughn remembers a lot about that day, the days after it.

The way his mother clutched the phone — pea green, like the rest of the kitchen — as she sank to the floor. The pain on her face as the phone bobbed up and down on its spiral cord beside her, and that it took her a long time to cry. Shock for so long, and he knew something was horribly wrong, asked her quietly, "Mommy, what happened?" He had been trying to abandon the moniker for something more mature — "Mom" or even "Mother" — but it seemed the only thing to call her at the time.

It took her a long time — maybe hours, he thinks, but probably not — to recover. To cease holding him so tight he wanted to squirm. To finally speak, and tell him that Dad would not be coming home. Ever.

After that, there were the black lace gloves on her hands. A chilly funeral home with faded ivy-print wallpaper, mahogany crown molding he traced with his eyes when he caught her stabbing at her face with a tissue. The cemetery and its rows of uniform white headstones. The stoic men in dark suits.

And then it was back to Michael and Mom. At least, he thinks, he will leave no one behind.