Airs, Waters, Places 2/4
Jul. 1st, 2003 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaznettiHeaders and disclaimers in Part 1
Part 2: Europe
If Sark was feigning sleep, Jack decided, he was doing a good job of it. Jack himself managed to doze off once or twice in the course of the flight; each time, a vision of his daughter's frightened eyes made him jerk himself awake. He reminded himself that she wasn't a little girl any more. She was stronger than he was. She could look after herself and defeat Sloane too, if she had to. She wasn't the child he had failed over and over again after Laura's--after Derevko's--disappearance.
He refused to consider the possibility that he might fail her again.
Sark twitched and grumbled something under his breath. A glance at his watch reminded Jack that it was time to release a dose of the antidote: he dug out the transmitter and keyed in the code Marshall had given him. Another eight hours of life for Sark. Another nine before they landed in Athens. He'd send the CIA plane back after that, use Sark's contacts and a few of his own resources.
He looked up and into Sark's alert blue eyes. "Care to explain what you've done to me?"
"The first implant is slowly releasing a poison into your bloodstream. To keep you alive, I release a dose of the antidote every eight hours."
"How charmingly ingenious. And let me guess: if I try to remove the implants, it will release a fatal dose of the poison."
"You'd have ninety seconds to consider your stupidity."
"Generous."
"More than you deserve," Jack told him.
*
They left the CIA behind along with the plane at the Athens airport. Jack understood Sloane's game well enough: so long as he used CIA resources, the other man would never reply. Sark, he thought, would consider it a victory. In Jack's opinion, it was likely that Sark would attempt to steal the controller and escape after his next dose. It would do him no good without the codes, but Sark was probably trying to figure out a way around that problem as they drove into the city.
He let Sark direct a taxi through the stop-and-go of early morning Athens traffic to a nondescript concrete apartment block with a travel agency and a computer store on the ground floor. The apartment was on the eighth floor, equally nondescript: Jack stepped inside and found himself in the living room: tile floors and two bare couches arranged around a coffee table. The kitchen was in an alcove to the left and a closed door across from him probably led to a bedroom.
"Make yourself at home," Sark said. He locked the apartment door behind them and headed for the bedroom.
"Where do you think you're going?"
Sark raised an eyebrow. "To take a shower. Do you need to verify that sort of thing personally?"
"You're wasting time."
"I'm maintaining our cover. If I turn up to meet a contact looking and smelling like this, they'll know immediately that all is not well." He waited patiently as Jack checked the bedroom and bathroom: they were as deserted as the rest of the apartment, aside from a few clothes hanging in the closet. Sark's, probably.
"Who else has a key to this apartment?" he asked.
"Aside from the old woman on the first floor? No one."
"Hiding your profits in real estate?"
"I'll have sold it and dissolved the holding company before you can get back to the CIA and use the address to track me."
Jack looked around at the simple furniture, the walls badly in need of a paint job: no place to hide a bug or a camera. "You won't get the real value. How do you intend to find Arvin Sloane?"
"Quietly," Sark answered. "And after a shower."
*
Another taxi took him and Sark--clean, shaved and dressed in another of his expensive suits--to the yacht harbor down at the Piraeus. He followed Sark through a series of yacht-leasing agencies, examining one catalogue after another full of pictures of big white boats; Sark was looking for something specific, and Jack kept quiet and let him look.
Yet another large, sunny office. He watched Sark charm the receptionist until she put down the telephone and stopped examining her fingernails and went off, hips swinging, to find the office manager. In a minute she was back, leading a short, thin man behind her. She'd fixed her lipstick, as well. The manager introduced himself--Mr. Petridis--in passable English as he ushered them back into his office. "I'm confident that we have something that will suit you and your father," he said.
Sark turned to look at Jack, his face bright with malicious amusement. With Petridis there, there was nothing Jack could say, but he hoped Sark caught the warning in his eyes. "I'm sure you do," Sark said mildly.
The same routine: they sat, drank coffee, looked at pictures. While Jack paged through a binder, Sark glanced around the office at the pictures on the wall, and stood. "What about this one?" he asked. To Jack's eye, the yachts were starting to blur together, but this one was, he supposed, aesthetically pleasing.
"That? I'm sorry, that one isn't for rent."
"Too bad. I don't suppose we could go see it anyway?"
"The owner came and took it out a few days ago. In any case, he's a very private man." There was just a flicker of suspicion in the manager's eyes as he put them off: Sark would have seen it too. They chatted a little while longer, and then Petridis led them down to the pier to a launch that would take them to the motor yacht Sark was feigning interest in. Out on the water, a cool breeze was blowing the oil and brine smell of the Piraeus away. Sark kept up an effortless conversation with Petridis, pausing only once to watch a ketch tack its way out of the harbor; a private memory of some kind, Jack decided, and filed it away for later.
The yacht was small, compared to most of the ones they'd seen: forty-two feet, an open plan living area and three staterooms. They were in the second stateroom when Sark whirled around without warning and hit the manager in the face.
Petridis fell back onto the bed. Sark, Jack noted, seemed just as capable hitting people with his left arm. "Where did Sloane go?" he asked.
"I don't know what you're talking about," the man protested.
"Arvin Sloane. He took a yacht out yesterday, loaded it up with equipment, probably in the middle of the night."
"You've made a mistake!"
Sark leaned down to pull the man back up onto his feet. When he was standing, he let him go and hit him again. "He owns your company, Mr. Petridis. He owns the yacht I asked about. He came and took it yesterday."
"I don't know--"
Sark turned to Jack. "Would you like to..." Jack shook his head. Petridis took advantage of Sark's apparent distraction by grabbing the lamp on the bedside table and trying to smash it over the young man's head. Sark stepped to the side and the blow glanced off his right shoulder. He winced and ducked another blow: in the tiny room he didn't have much space to maneuver.
Jack stayed pressed against the wall, letting Sark handle things, until the manager drew a gun. He was having trouble keeping his eye on both of them, and Jack didn't care for the way he was swinging the gun around. Time to step in, but before he could find an opening Sark had ducked and kicked at Petridis, knocking the gun out of his hand. It dropped to the floor and Sark dove for it, his head colliding with Petridis' chest as he did the same--Petridis staggered back against Jack's body and Sark stood up, the gun in his left hand, just a little too confident for Jack's comfort. But by then Jack had one arm around the manager's neck and the other holding his own gun to the man's ribs.
He met Sark's eyes. "In case you're getting any ideas, Marshall programmed the transmitter. You won't break his codes in time."
"I wouldn't expect anything less from you," Sark answered, slightly breathless. "Now," he turned his attention back to the manager, "shall we try this again? Where was Sloane heading?"
"I'm telling you, he didn't say!" At least the man wasn't claiming never to have heard of Sloane.
In the end, the manager talked. But it was more evidence for Jack's private theory that the relationship between the difficulty in getting a man to talk and the importance of his information wasn't quantifiable. Sloane really hadn't told the man where he was heading, although he had food and water for at least a week. They got the registration and the radio signature and the news that the boat had left around 2 am, and that was all.
At the end, they looked at each other across the man's body. Then Sark shrugged and shot the man in the head. No hint of awkwardness, Jack noted, although it wasn't a difficult shot. Best to work on the assumption that Sark was as proficient with his left as with his right.
They'd moved into the galley for the interrogation itself, but the noise echoed through the yacht and the sharp gunpowder smell drifted over them. Blood splattered the veneer of the cabinets and pooled on the floor, running first one way then the other as the boat swayed back and forth.
Sark had one eyebrow raised: a challenge.
He stared back. Did Sark honestly expect him to be appalled by the murder? Jack knew that he was perfectly capable of killing every man in the city of Athens if it would lead him to Sydney: he was hardly going to lose sleep over another of Sloane's lackeys. There was only one point he wanted to be perfectly clear. "We will not pose as father and son."
Another malicious smile from Sark. "If I'm not your son, people will assume I'm your lover."
Jack looked him up and down. "I don't care." He started to go up to the upper deck, pausing at the stairs; Sark was still standing over the body. "Find his keys and clean up the mess. We're leaving."
*
They motored out of Piraeus at an easy pace, heading south to the Cyclades, nothing to attract attention. An hour out, Jack set the autopilot and looked downstairs to check on Sark; the other man had found a length of chain and was wrapping it around the manager's dead body. An awkward task, with only one working hand.
"You don't usually have to tie people up after you kill them, Sark."
The young man looked up at him. "I'm not sharing a cabin with the body, and I'd rather it didn't wash up on the beach in the very near future." He stood and grabbed a stack of laminated pages from the counter, walking over to the steps and holding them up to Jack. "Here. More charts. We'll stop in Serifos first, I think."
"Why?"
"Unlike Sloane, we left Athens in something of a hurry. The water is full, but we will need other supplies."
Jack nodded. "How did you know he came through Athens? And that he's use a yacht?"
A shrug. "Irina was scouting for a base in the eastern Mediterranean. She went to Cyprus, but she and Sloane never told each other the truth about what they were doing. So it won't be Cyprus, but it will be somewhere accessible from Cyprus. And the yacht was something he'd mentioned once."
"When you planned his disappearance."
"And the destruction of the Alliance," Sark reminded him, as if he expected credit for it. "We might start with Thira. A cataclysmic eruption destroys an entire civilization, the origin of Plato's myth of Atlantis. It's the sort of thing that interested Rambaldi."
"Maybe," Jack agreed.
But it wasn't Thira, or Naxos, or any of the other islands they passed, making their way west to east and back east to west. The pace and isolation imposed an odd intimacy on the two men. It was a familiar risk, Jack thought: opposing agents on the ground often developed more sympathy for their opposites than for their superiors.
He watched Sark, trying to detect Derevko's hand in him. It occupied the mind and distracted him from his constant thoughts of Sydney, somewhere nearby, out on the water or perhaps just one island away. Now that Sark was out of custody, his vulnerabilities were well-hidden: a casual reference to Allison Doren, couched in sympathy, was rewarded with a wistful, "Do we ever really know where the appearances end and the real woman begins, though?"
After that, they stayed away from personal topics. Except once, when Sark found him sitting in the dark before dawn on the upper deck and said, "Arvin Sloane is very fond of Sydney. He is unlikely to harm her." Jack didn't answer, and after a minute or so he heard the rustle of movement and the other man's steps back down to the saloon.
He filed away the unlikely reassurance with the rest of the data he was collecting: Sark knew how to use the fishing equipment they found stored in a chest, disliked resinated wine, preferred sailboats to powerboats. Was not quite as capable of concealing his irritation at their lack of progress as he probably believed. He suspected that Sark was doing the same: it was the best explanation for the odd moments when he looked up to find Sark's eyes on him and an unreadable expression on his face. Gathering data, storing it all away until it would become useful: when he decided to try to escape.
Jack was beginning to wish that Sark would make the attempt. At least it would provide a break in their routine, the careful questions in one port after another, the constant monitoring of the radio channels. It was as if Sloane had vanished after sailing out of the Piraeus. Or as if Sark were leading him on a wild goose chase, Jack supposed. But Sark was banking on two things: that he could figure out the transmitter, given enough time, and that once Jack found Sloane he'd have more important things to worry about than Sark's whereabouts. The second was true, and Jack didn't really care about the first.
*
He came up to the upper deck at dawn to find Sark already awake, staring at the charts. "Crete or the Dodecanese?" he said at the sound of Jack's step. "What do you think, flip a coin?"
"Don't pretend to be stupid," Jack said.
"Rhodes is a possibility. Sacred to the Greek god Helios. There might be a tie-in with Rambaldi's fascination with fusion energy."
"Maybe," Jack said. Sark stood and went down to the galley, and came up a few minutes later with coffee. Jack took the cup and sipped absently, already lost in the maps. Where are you hiding, Arvin, he wondered. His calculations indicated the Dodecanese, the string of islands running up the coast of Turkey. Sloane might even be on the Turkish mainland somewhere, or over in Lebanon: either would be easier than Greece to operate in, with its jealous officials suspicious of foreign meddling even--maybe especially--by its NATO allies. The departure from Athens might have been a blind: there was plenty of time for Sloane to make his way all the way across the Mediterranean.
"Crete," he decided.
Sark nodded. "Crete it is, then."
They were two hours out of Iraklion when their radio chirped to life. Sloane's call sign and a single word: Sitia. Arvin was ready to be found.
*
Sitia was a large town on the eastern side of the island, a pile of concrete buildings rising up the hillside from the harbor. They saw Sloane's yacht tied up at the end of the pier, and they were spotted as well: a launch shadowing them as they coasted into a slip.
Jack glanced over at Sark, expressionless behind his sunglasses. He didn't delude himself about the likelihood of Sark continuing to assist him, now that they had found Sloane. But the young man had served his purpose and his ability to interfere with Jack's goals was limited: what could he do, tell Sloane that Jack intended to free Sydney and escape? Sloane wasn't so mad that he didn't know that.
The men waiting at the pier kept their guns pointed at Jack, not at Sark. They walked Jack to the black Mercedes waiting at the far end of the pier, leaving Sark to follow them, and put him into the back seat, one guard on either side of him. Sark sat in front, next to the driver. As they pulled out, he twisted in the seat to meet Jack's eyes, but if there was a message in the gesture, Jack couldn't decipher it.
*
Sloane was waiting for them.
They drove uphill past the concrete houses of Sitia and inland on a twisting mountain road, the hillsides covered in rocks and rough green-brown scrub, every now and then allowing a glimpse of row after row of olive terraces growing out of the pale soil. The traffic on the main road was heavy: speeding trucks and mopeds and jeeps all passing each other on the hairpin curves. Then they turned onto a dirt road and were alone, jostling past the olive trees and grape-vines of small farms, dust everywhere, until they climbed up another barren hillside, observed only by a solemn herd of goats.
The car stopped outside a modest house of white-painted stucco. Jack knew he should have been paying attention to the layout and the surroundings--information that would be valuable when he planned his escape--but his eyes were drawn to Arvin, standing in the doorway. He had the same energy crackling around him as at their last meeting; just for a moment, the memory of Sloane's confident prediction that they would be working together again made Jack hesitate. Arvin was not a sane man, he reminded himself. That was the source of his strange intensity. It made him dangerously unpredictable, but it gave him no special insight into the future.
He felt less certain when they were standing face to face and Arvin's smile was making the hair prickle on his arms. Arvin dismissed the guards; Sark disappeared with them, somewhere into the house. "I'm glad that you're here, Jack," Arvin said. "You deserve to be." He gestured to Jack to follow him and they walked around the side of the house to look out at the valley below them. "Beautiful, isn't it?" He took a deep breath.
"Where is my daughter, Arvin?"
"All in good time, Jack. Sydney is a very special young woman. More special than you can guess."
"She's my daughter. I want to see her."
"And you will. I promise you that. Are you hungry? Thirsty?"
"All I want is to see Sydney."
Sloane smiled at him. "Now, Jack. You must have something else to say."
"Not really."
Sloane was still smiling as he looked out over the terraces. "You know," he said, "the culture here in Eastern Crete is particularly interesting. This is the last place on earth that the Minoan language was spoken and understood. It's one of the great undeciphered languages of the ancient world."
"I suppose Rambaldi deciphered it?" Jack asked sourly. He was going to have to play Sloane's game, but he didn't have to enjoy it.
"He may have. Crete is a land of mysteries, and Rambaldi enjoyed mysteries. Under Mount Ida you can visit the cave where Zeus was hidden during his childhood, until he could defeat his father Kronos. This is a good land for hiding things."
"Is that what you're doing here, Arvin? Hiding?"
Arvin ignored the question. "I know what you intend, Jack. You believe that I've stolen Sydney from you and am holding her against her will, and that you need to rescue her. But I also know that when you understand what we've done here, you won't believe that any more. You have so much to learn, Jack. So do we all. Did you know that the Minoans worshipped a supreme goddess? They understood the power a woman could hold. So many have forgotten that, since then, even in our own times. But Rambaldi knew it as well." Sloane turned his head to stare directly at Jack. "You will know it too, when we're finished here."
In the bright sunlight, Jack should not have felt this cold. "What are you doing to my daughter, Arvin?"
"There's nothing I could do to hurt Sydney. She's far beyond that. When I found her in her apartment..." He trailed off and turned away to look at the view. "She healed that young man. Mr. Tippin. He was on the verge of death--he may have been dead--and she healed him." Then he took of his sunglasses and met Jack's eyes. "This is her destiny. In the end, you'll understand that."
*
Sloane may have had the confidence of his insanity, but he wasn't stupid. He put Jack in a secure room: more of a store-room, actually, no windows and just room for a man to lie down in it. It was completely bare. Jack paced its length, checked walls, floor and ceiling inch by inch and settled down to wait. He could hear people passing back and forth outside the door, and thought he heard Sark's voice once or twice, but couldn't make out the words.
Sark, Sloane, the three men in the car. He ought to assume that the two he'd seen in the boat as they came into Sitia were here as well. At least one against seven, then, and there might be others. And of course, they were armed and Jack wasn't, not any more. Perhaps he should have taken up Kendall's offer of a means of communicating with the CIA.
The next time he heard steps--just one man, good--he knocked on the door. The other man opened it and asked what he wanted.
"Something to drink," Jack said. "And I'd like to see Arvin again." And there it was, the split second when the man glanced down the hall, looking for backup, someone else to make this decision for him. That was all the time Jack needed to slam into the man, pushing him back across the hall and into the wall, ignoring the pain in his leg where the man recovered from his stumble to kick him, because he was going to have to do this quickly. He drew a breath, and shoved his hand into the other man's face, no time for anything fancy, pushing the cartilage in his nose up into his brain. He slumped to the floor, dead.
Jack bent to search him and--was it possible that the man wasn't carrying a gun? It was the one eventuality that he had failed to consider. Nothing. He raised his head at a noise--someone would be here soon. There was a marble-topped table by the store-room door, the incongruously domestic touch of a bowl of fruit, and next to the bowl, the transmitter he was using to control Sark. He grabbed it and turned as two men appeared at the far end of the corridor. They had guns, of course. He overturned the table and used it as cover, not that it would last. Something at the other end of the hall caught his attention--he spared a glance, saw Sark standing there as well, a gun in his left hand, and typed in the code to release the poison. One less enemy to worry about, and maybe he could get to Sark's gun.
Three shots rang out in that time, then two more. Oh.
The two men at the end of the hall were dead. Sark, surprise replacing amusement on his face, sank against the wall to the ground.
Jack heard him say, quite distinctly, "See if I ever try to help the Bristow family again," as his gun came sliding across the floor to Jack. Jack grabbed it, but the time he'd spent watching Sark's collapse had let another man sneak up on him: this was the fourth, Jack thought, there was at least one more, as chunks of marble went flying under the fire from the automatic weapon. He fired blindly, just to give himself some maneuvering room, then aimed more carefully.
He felt the bullet that hit him as momentum, pushing him back against the floor. He forced himself to concentrate on the man walking down the hall toward him, and not on the way his leg hurt, the burning pain and the trickle of blood inside and out on his thigh. The bullet had missed the artery, he thought. One more step, and... He saw the man's head, saw that the other man knew it, and shot him.
Jack pushed himself into a sitting position. Still one more man unaccounted for, and Sark slumped against the wall. How much time had passed? He scrabbled around in the shards or marble--where the hell was the transmitter? As he picked it up Sark coughed something; Jack turned, saw the last man, and fired. He fell to the ground with a satisfying noise.
He typed in the code that would release the full dose of the antidote. It might not be sufficient to reverse the damage: he hadn't planned for the need to save Sark's life.
His thigh wasn't as bad as he'd feared: more scraped by the bullet than actually hit, and already bleeding less badly. Next, he dragged himself over to Sark, who was curled on his side, his body shaking in dry heaves. At Jack's approach he pushed himself up. "That was particularly unpleasant."
A word of apology was on the tip of Jack's tongue; he swallowed it. In the silence, he heard a regular beating noise. A helicopter. No, two. "Who is that?"
"The seventh cavalry, I hope," Sark answered. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a large white handkerchief. "You're bleeding."
"I noticed," Jack answered. He bandaged his leg and stood. Shaky, but not too bad. "Come on."
"No, thank you," Sark said. The smile on his face was familiar, even against his yellow-tinged pallor. "But if you go down the hall to Sloane's office, you'll find a passage in the wall behind the desk. Check behind the icon."
Jack nodded and set off.
*
An explosion at the far end of the house shook the wall he was leaning on. Who did Sark mean by the seventh cavalry? Not the CIA, certainly. No time to worry about that, though. Jack found the office, the icon, felt himself sigh in relief as a doorway appeared behind the desk and went through it.
A staircase led down into the ground. He limped down the stone steps, his hand on the stone walls for support. Both were solid, carved into the side of the mountain. They curved down, leaving him in near darkness; after another curve he could see light coming from the bottom and began to hurry.
He came out into a rock-cut room. There was a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, but most of the light was coming from the device in the center of the room. He blinked once, trying to understand it, but saw only Sydney, lying still on her back at its heart.
"I knew you would come," Sloane said. "Look at her. Isn't she beautiful?" He was standing at the far side of the room, the machinery between them.
Jack's mouth was dry. "What... what are you doing to her? What is that?"
"Il Dire," Sloane answered, the awe clear in his voice. "Rambaldi's masterpiece." It was made of two parts, Jack saw. Sydney was lying on top of a glass case: inside the case were models of the organs of the human body, brain, heart, lungs, stomach, liver, all held in a mesh of silver metal. Above her was a network of glass tubes in an irregular pattern--Jack couldn't quite make it out--glowing as energy of some kind passed through them. "Isn't it glorious?"
"No. Stop it, Arvin, or I swear, I'll--"
"You don't understand. The process is almost complete."
"I won't let you do this to her. I won't let you use Sydney."
"I'm not using her. I'm setting her free. When she is released from Il Dire, she'll have all Rambaldi's knowledge. She'll know all his secrets, she'll have his power. Your daughter is no pawn, Jack. She's greater than you know." As he spoke, Sloane walked around the machine until he was between Jack and it.
"She is my daughter," Jack grated out. He hurled himself off the last step and onto Sloane, but Arvin was stronger than he looked and Jack was rocked back. Arvin caught him by the shoulders, saying, "Wait!" Jack broke away, nearly fell, and had to catch at Arvin to keep himself standing. They reeled across the room, Jack trying to reach his daughter and Sloane holding him back, until a final blow sent Arvin smashing across the wall. Jack rushed to the machine, grabbed the network of glass covering Sydney's body, and pulled.
"No!" Sloane shouted and rushed to the machine. The glass was hot in Jack's hands, too hot to hold on to, and as it slipped from his hands to crash on the floor, there was a burst of white light. Sloane shouted again, and Jack blinked his eyes furiously to clear his vision.
The dim light of the bulb showed him the glass case lying empty. Sydney was gone.
He turned to Sloane, a hundred questions on his lips. Sloane, too, had disappeared.
"Jack," said another voice. Irina Derevko stood in the doorway, Sark leaning on the wall a few steps above her, still shaky looking. Jack kept his eyes on his ex-wife's face. "Jack, what have you done to our daughter?"
End 2/4
Go on to Part 3
Part 2: Europe
If Sark was feigning sleep, Jack decided, he was doing a good job of it. Jack himself managed to doze off once or twice in the course of the flight; each time, a vision of his daughter's frightened eyes made him jerk himself awake. He reminded himself that she wasn't a little girl any more. She was stronger than he was. She could look after herself and defeat Sloane too, if she had to. She wasn't the child he had failed over and over again after Laura's--after Derevko's--disappearance.
He refused to consider the possibility that he might fail her again.
Sark twitched and grumbled something under his breath. A glance at his watch reminded Jack that it was time to release a dose of the antidote: he dug out the transmitter and keyed in the code Marshall had given him. Another eight hours of life for Sark. Another nine before they landed in Athens. He'd send the CIA plane back after that, use Sark's contacts and a few of his own resources.
He looked up and into Sark's alert blue eyes. "Care to explain what you've done to me?"
"The first implant is slowly releasing a poison into your bloodstream. To keep you alive, I release a dose of the antidote every eight hours."
"How charmingly ingenious. And let me guess: if I try to remove the implants, it will release a fatal dose of the poison."
"You'd have ninety seconds to consider your stupidity."
"Generous."
"More than you deserve," Jack told him.
*
They left the CIA behind along with the plane at the Athens airport. Jack understood Sloane's game well enough: so long as he used CIA resources, the other man would never reply. Sark, he thought, would consider it a victory. In Jack's opinion, it was likely that Sark would attempt to steal the controller and escape after his next dose. It would do him no good without the codes, but Sark was probably trying to figure out a way around that problem as they drove into the city.
He let Sark direct a taxi through the stop-and-go of early morning Athens traffic to a nondescript concrete apartment block with a travel agency and a computer store on the ground floor. The apartment was on the eighth floor, equally nondescript: Jack stepped inside and found himself in the living room: tile floors and two bare couches arranged around a coffee table. The kitchen was in an alcove to the left and a closed door across from him probably led to a bedroom.
"Make yourself at home," Sark said. He locked the apartment door behind them and headed for the bedroom.
"Where do you think you're going?"
Sark raised an eyebrow. "To take a shower. Do you need to verify that sort of thing personally?"
"You're wasting time."
"I'm maintaining our cover. If I turn up to meet a contact looking and smelling like this, they'll know immediately that all is not well." He waited patiently as Jack checked the bedroom and bathroom: they were as deserted as the rest of the apartment, aside from a few clothes hanging in the closet. Sark's, probably.
"Who else has a key to this apartment?" he asked.
"Aside from the old woman on the first floor? No one."
"Hiding your profits in real estate?"
"I'll have sold it and dissolved the holding company before you can get back to the CIA and use the address to track me."
Jack looked around at the simple furniture, the walls badly in need of a paint job: no place to hide a bug or a camera. "You won't get the real value. How do you intend to find Arvin Sloane?"
"Quietly," Sark answered. "And after a shower."
*
Another taxi took him and Sark--clean, shaved and dressed in another of his expensive suits--to the yacht harbor down at the Piraeus. He followed Sark through a series of yacht-leasing agencies, examining one catalogue after another full of pictures of big white boats; Sark was looking for something specific, and Jack kept quiet and let him look.
Yet another large, sunny office. He watched Sark charm the receptionist until she put down the telephone and stopped examining her fingernails and went off, hips swinging, to find the office manager. In a minute she was back, leading a short, thin man behind her. She'd fixed her lipstick, as well. The manager introduced himself--Mr. Petridis--in passable English as he ushered them back into his office. "I'm confident that we have something that will suit you and your father," he said.
Sark turned to look at Jack, his face bright with malicious amusement. With Petridis there, there was nothing Jack could say, but he hoped Sark caught the warning in his eyes. "I'm sure you do," Sark said mildly.
The same routine: they sat, drank coffee, looked at pictures. While Jack paged through a binder, Sark glanced around the office at the pictures on the wall, and stood. "What about this one?" he asked. To Jack's eye, the yachts were starting to blur together, but this one was, he supposed, aesthetically pleasing.
"That? I'm sorry, that one isn't for rent."
"Too bad. I don't suppose we could go see it anyway?"
"The owner came and took it out a few days ago. In any case, he's a very private man." There was just a flicker of suspicion in the manager's eyes as he put them off: Sark would have seen it too. They chatted a little while longer, and then Petridis led them down to the pier to a launch that would take them to the motor yacht Sark was feigning interest in. Out on the water, a cool breeze was blowing the oil and brine smell of the Piraeus away. Sark kept up an effortless conversation with Petridis, pausing only once to watch a ketch tack its way out of the harbor; a private memory of some kind, Jack decided, and filed it away for later.
The yacht was small, compared to most of the ones they'd seen: forty-two feet, an open plan living area and three staterooms. They were in the second stateroom when Sark whirled around without warning and hit the manager in the face.
Petridis fell back onto the bed. Sark, Jack noted, seemed just as capable hitting people with his left arm. "Where did Sloane go?" he asked.
"I don't know what you're talking about," the man protested.
"Arvin Sloane. He took a yacht out yesterday, loaded it up with equipment, probably in the middle of the night."
"You've made a mistake!"
Sark leaned down to pull the man back up onto his feet. When he was standing, he let him go and hit him again. "He owns your company, Mr. Petridis. He owns the yacht I asked about. He came and took it yesterday."
"I don't know--"
Sark turned to Jack. "Would you like to..." Jack shook his head. Petridis took advantage of Sark's apparent distraction by grabbing the lamp on the bedside table and trying to smash it over the young man's head. Sark stepped to the side and the blow glanced off his right shoulder. He winced and ducked another blow: in the tiny room he didn't have much space to maneuver.
Jack stayed pressed against the wall, letting Sark handle things, until the manager drew a gun. He was having trouble keeping his eye on both of them, and Jack didn't care for the way he was swinging the gun around. Time to step in, but before he could find an opening Sark had ducked and kicked at Petridis, knocking the gun out of his hand. It dropped to the floor and Sark dove for it, his head colliding with Petridis' chest as he did the same--Petridis staggered back against Jack's body and Sark stood up, the gun in his left hand, just a little too confident for Jack's comfort. But by then Jack had one arm around the manager's neck and the other holding his own gun to the man's ribs.
He met Sark's eyes. "In case you're getting any ideas, Marshall programmed the transmitter. You won't break his codes in time."
"I wouldn't expect anything less from you," Sark answered, slightly breathless. "Now," he turned his attention back to the manager, "shall we try this again? Where was Sloane heading?"
"I'm telling you, he didn't say!" At least the man wasn't claiming never to have heard of Sloane.
In the end, the manager talked. But it was more evidence for Jack's private theory that the relationship between the difficulty in getting a man to talk and the importance of his information wasn't quantifiable. Sloane really hadn't told the man where he was heading, although he had food and water for at least a week. They got the registration and the radio signature and the news that the boat had left around 2 am, and that was all.
At the end, they looked at each other across the man's body. Then Sark shrugged and shot the man in the head. No hint of awkwardness, Jack noted, although it wasn't a difficult shot. Best to work on the assumption that Sark was as proficient with his left as with his right.
They'd moved into the galley for the interrogation itself, but the noise echoed through the yacht and the sharp gunpowder smell drifted over them. Blood splattered the veneer of the cabinets and pooled on the floor, running first one way then the other as the boat swayed back and forth.
Sark had one eyebrow raised: a challenge.
He stared back. Did Sark honestly expect him to be appalled by the murder? Jack knew that he was perfectly capable of killing every man in the city of Athens if it would lead him to Sydney: he was hardly going to lose sleep over another of Sloane's lackeys. There was only one point he wanted to be perfectly clear. "We will not pose as father and son."
Another malicious smile from Sark. "If I'm not your son, people will assume I'm your lover."
Jack looked him up and down. "I don't care." He started to go up to the upper deck, pausing at the stairs; Sark was still standing over the body. "Find his keys and clean up the mess. We're leaving."
*
They motored out of Piraeus at an easy pace, heading south to the Cyclades, nothing to attract attention. An hour out, Jack set the autopilot and looked downstairs to check on Sark; the other man had found a length of chain and was wrapping it around the manager's dead body. An awkward task, with only one working hand.
"You don't usually have to tie people up after you kill them, Sark."
The young man looked up at him. "I'm not sharing a cabin with the body, and I'd rather it didn't wash up on the beach in the very near future." He stood and grabbed a stack of laminated pages from the counter, walking over to the steps and holding them up to Jack. "Here. More charts. We'll stop in Serifos first, I think."
"Why?"
"Unlike Sloane, we left Athens in something of a hurry. The water is full, but we will need other supplies."
Jack nodded. "How did you know he came through Athens? And that he's use a yacht?"
A shrug. "Irina was scouting for a base in the eastern Mediterranean. She went to Cyprus, but she and Sloane never told each other the truth about what they were doing. So it won't be Cyprus, but it will be somewhere accessible from Cyprus. And the yacht was something he'd mentioned once."
"When you planned his disappearance."
"And the destruction of the Alliance," Sark reminded him, as if he expected credit for it. "We might start with Thira. A cataclysmic eruption destroys an entire civilization, the origin of Plato's myth of Atlantis. It's the sort of thing that interested Rambaldi."
"Maybe," Jack agreed.
But it wasn't Thira, or Naxos, or any of the other islands they passed, making their way west to east and back east to west. The pace and isolation imposed an odd intimacy on the two men. It was a familiar risk, Jack thought: opposing agents on the ground often developed more sympathy for their opposites than for their superiors.
He watched Sark, trying to detect Derevko's hand in him. It occupied the mind and distracted him from his constant thoughts of Sydney, somewhere nearby, out on the water or perhaps just one island away. Now that Sark was out of custody, his vulnerabilities were well-hidden: a casual reference to Allison Doren, couched in sympathy, was rewarded with a wistful, "Do we ever really know where the appearances end and the real woman begins, though?"
After that, they stayed away from personal topics. Except once, when Sark found him sitting in the dark before dawn on the upper deck and said, "Arvin Sloane is very fond of Sydney. He is unlikely to harm her." Jack didn't answer, and after a minute or so he heard the rustle of movement and the other man's steps back down to the saloon.
He filed away the unlikely reassurance with the rest of the data he was collecting: Sark knew how to use the fishing equipment they found stored in a chest, disliked resinated wine, preferred sailboats to powerboats. Was not quite as capable of concealing his irritation at their lack of progress as he probably believed. He suspected that Sark was doing the same: it was the best explanation for the odd moments when he looked up to find Sark's eyes on him and an unreadable expression on his face. Gathering data, storing it all away until it would become useful: when he decided to try to escape.
Jack was beginning to wish that Sark would make the attempt. At least it would provide a break in their routine, the careful questions in one port after another, the constant monitoring of the radio channels. It was as if Sloane had vanished after sailing out of the Piraeus. Or as if Sark were leading him on a wild goose chase, Jack supposed. But Sark was banking on two things: that he could figure out the transmitter, given enough time, and that once Jack found Sloane he'd have more important things to worry about than Sark's whereabouts. The second was true, and Jack didn't really care about the first.
*
He came up to the upper deck at dawn to find Sark already awake, staring at the charts. "Crete or the Dodecanese?" he said at the sound of Jack's step. "What do you think, flip a coin?"
"Don't pretend to be stupid," Jack said.
"Rhodes is a possibility. Sacred to the Greek god Helios. There might be a tie-in with Rambaldi's fascination with fusion energy."
"Maybe," Jack said. Sark stood and went down to the galley, and came up a few minutes later with coffee. Jack took the cup and sipped absently, already lost in the maps. Where are you hiding, Arvin, he wondered. His calculations indicated the Dodecanese, the string of islands running up the coast of Turkey. Sloane might even be on the Turkish mainland somewhere, or over in Lebanon: either would be easier than Greece to operate in, with its jealous officials suspicious of foreign meddling even--maybe especially--by its NATO allies. The departure from Athens might have been a blind: there was plenty of time for Sloane to make his way all the way across the Mediterranean.
"Crete," he decided.
Sark nodded. "Crete it is, then."
They were two hours out of Iraklion when their radio chirped to life. Sloane's call sign and a single word: Sitia. Arvin was ready to be found.
*
Sitia was a large town on the eastern side of the island, a pile of concrete buildings rising up the hillside from the harbor. They saw Sloane's yacht tied up at the end of the pier, and they were spotted as well: a launch shadowing them as they coasted into a slip.
Jack glanced over at Sark, expressionless behind his sunglasses. He didn't delude himself about the likelihood of Sark continuing to assist him, now that they had found Sloane. But the young man had served his purpose and his ability to interfere with Jack's goals was limited: what could he do, tell Sloane that Jack intended to free Sydney and escape? Sloane wasn't so mad that he didn't know that.
The men waiting at the pier kept their guns pointed at Jack, not at Sark. They walked Jack to the black Mercedes waiting at the far end of the pier, leaving Sark to follow them, and put him into the back seat, one guard on either side of him. Sark sat in front, next to the driver. As they pulled out, he twisted in the seat to meet Jack's eyes, but if there was a message in the gesture, Jack couldn't decipher it.
*
Sloane was waiting for them.
They drove uphill past the concrete houses of Sitia and inland on a twisting mountain road, the hillsides covered in rocks and rough green-brown scrub, every now and then allowing a glimpse of row after row of olive terraces growing out of the pale soil. The traffic on the main road was heavy: speeding trucks and mopeds and jeeps all passing each other on the hairpin curves. Then they turned onto a dirt road and were alone, jostling past the olive trees and grape-vines of small farms, dust everywhere, until they climbed up another barren hillside, observed only by a solemn herd of goats.
The car stopped outside a modest house of white-painted stucco. Jack knew he should have been paying attention to the layout and the surroundings--information that would be valuable when he planned his escape--but his eyes were drawn to Arvin, standing in the doorway. He had the same energy crackling around him as at their last meeting; just for a moment, the memory of Sloane's confident prediction that they would be working together again made Jack hesitate. Arvin was not a sane man, he reminded himself. That was the source of his strange intensity. It made him dangerously unpredictable, but it gave him no special insight into the future.
He felt less certain when they were standing face to face and Arvin's smile was making the hair prickle on his arms. Arvin dismissed the guards; Sark disappeared with them, somewhere into the house. "I'm glad that you're here, Jack," Arvin said. "You deserve to be." He gestured to Jack to follow him and they walked around the side of the house to look out at the valley below them. "Beautiful, isn't it?" He took a deep breath.
"Where is my daughter, Arvin?"
"All in good time, Jack. Sydney is a very special young woman. More special than you can guess."
"She's my daughter. I want to see her."
"And you will. I promise you that. Are you hungry? Thirsty?"
"All I want is to see Sydney."
Sloane smiled at him. "Now, Jack. You must have something else to say."
"Not really."
Sloane was still smiling as he looked out over the terraces. "You know," he said, "the culture here in Eastern Crete is particularly interesting. This is the last place on earth that the Minoan language was spoken and understood. It's one of the great undeciphered languages of the ancient world."
"I suppose Rambaldi deciphered it?" Jack asked sourly. He was going to have to play Sloane's game, but he didn't have to enjoy it.
"He may have. Crete is a land of mysteries, and Rambaldi enjoyed mysteries. Under Mount Ida you can visit the cave where Zeus was hidden during his childhood, until he could defeat his father Kronos. This is a good land for hiding things."
"Is that what you're doing here, Arvin? Hiding?"
Arvin ignored the question. "I know what you intend, Jack. You believe that I've stolen Sydney from you and am holding her against her will, and that you need to rescue her. But I also know that when you understand what we've done here, you won't believe that any more. You have so much to learn, Jack. So do we all. Did you know that the Minoans worshipped a supreme goddess? They understood the power a woman could hold. So many have forgotten that, since then, even in our own times. But Rambaldi knew it as well." Sloane turned his head to stare directly at Jack. "You will know it too, when we're finished here."
In the bright sunlight, Jack should not have felt this cold. "What are you doing to my daughter, Arvin?"
"There's nothing I could do to hurt Sydney. She's far beyond that. When I found her in her apartment..." He trailed off and turned away to look at the view. "She healed that young man. Mr. Tippin. He was on the verge of death--he may have been dead--and she healed him." Then he took of his sunglasses and met Jack's eyes. "This is her destiny. In the end, you'll understand that."
*
Sloane may have had the confidence of his insanity, but he wasn't stupid. He put Jack in a secure room: more of a store-room, actually, no windows and just room for a man to lie down in it. It was completely bare. Jack paced its length, checked walls, floor and ceiling inch by inch and settled down to wait. He could hear people passing back and forth outside the door, and thought he heard Sark's voice once or twice, but couldn't make out the words.
Sark, Sloane, the three men in the car. He ought to assume that the two he'd seen in the boat as they came into Sitia were here as well. At least one against seven, then, and there might be others. And of course, they were armed and Jack wasn't, not any more. Perhaps he should have taken up Kendall's offer of a means of communicating with the CIA.
The next time he heard steps--just one man, good--he knocked on the door. The other man opened it and asked what he wanted.
"Something to drink," Jack said. "And I'd like to see Arvin again." And there it was, the split second when the man glanced down the hall, looking for backup, someone else to make this decision for him. That was all the time Jack needed to slam into the man, pushing him back across the hall and into the wall, ignoring the pain in his leg where the man recovered from his stumble to kick him, because he was going to have to do this quickly. He drew a breath, and shoved his hand into the other man's face, no time for anything fancy, pushing the cartilage in his nose up into his brain. He slumped to the floor, dead.
Jack bent to search him and--was it possible that the man wasn't carrying a gun? It was the one eventuality that he had failed to consider. Nothing. He raised his head at a noise--someone would be here soon. There was a marble-topped table by the store-room door, the incongruously domestic touch of a bowl of fruit, and next to the bowl, the transmitter he was using to control Sark. He grabbed it and turned as two men appeared at the far end of the corridor. They had guns, of course. He overturned the table and used it as cover, not that it would last. Something at the other end of the hall caught his attention--he spared a glance, saw Sark standing there as well, a gun in his left hand, and typed in the code to release the poison. One less enemy to worry about, and maybe he could get to Sark's gun.
Three shots rang out in that time, then two more. Oh.
The two men at the end of the hall were dead. Sark, surprise replacing amusement on his face, sank against the wall to the ground.
Jack heard him say, quite distinctly, "See if I ever try to help the Bristow family again," as his gun came sliding across the floor to Jack. Jack grabbed it, but the time he'd spent watching Sark's collapse had let another man sneak up on him: this was the fourth, Jack thought, there was at least one more, as chunks of marble went flying under the fire from the automatic weapon. He fired blindly, just to give himself some maneuvering room, then aimed more carefully.
He felt the bullet that hit him as momentum, pushing him back against the floor. He forced himself to concentrate on the man walking down the hall toward him, and not on the way his leg hurt, the burning pain and the trickle of blood inside and out on his thigh. The bullet had missed the artery, he thought. One more step, and... He saw the man's head, saw that the other man knew it, and shot him.
Jack pushed himself into a sitting position. Still one more man unaccounted for, and Sark slumped against the wall. How much time had passed? He scrabbled around in the shards or marble--where the hell was the transmitter? As he picked it up Sark coughed something; Jack turned, saw the last man, and fired. He fell to the ground with a satisfying noise.
He typed in the code that would release the full dose of the antidote. It might not be sufficient to reverse the damage: he hadn't planned for the need to save Sark's life.
His thigh wasn't as bad as he'd feared: more scraped by the bullet than actually hit, and already bleeding less badly. Next, he dragged himself over to Sark, who was curled on his side, his body shaking in dry heaves. At Jack's approach he pushed himself up. "That was particularly unpleasant."
A word of apology was on the tip of Jack's tongue; he swallowed it. In the silence, he heard a regular beating noise. A helicopter. No, two. "Who is that?"
"The seventh cavalry, I hope," Sark answered. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a large white handkerchief. "You're bleeding."
"I noticed," Jack answered. He bandaged his leg and stood. Shaky, but not too bad. "Come on."
"No, thank you," Sark said. The smile on his face was familiar, even against his yellow-tinged pallor. "But if you go down the hall to Sloane's office, you'll find a passage in the wall behind the desk. Check behind the icon."
Jack nodded and set off.
*
An explosion at the far end of the house shook the wall he was leaning on. Who did Sark mean by the seventh cavalry? Not the CIA, certainly. No time to worry about that, though. Jack found the office, the icon, felt himself sigh in relief as a doorway appeared behind the desk and went through it.
A staircase led down into the ground. He limped down the stone steps, his hand on the stone walls for support. Both were solid, carved into the side of the mountain. They curved down, leaving him in near darkness; after another curve he could see light coming from the bottom and began to hurry.
He came out into a rock-cut room. There was a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, but most of the light was coming from the device in the center of the room. He blinked once, trying to understand it, but saw only Sydney, lying still on her back at its heart.
"I knew you would come," Sloane said. "Look at her. Isn't she beautiful?" He was standing at the far side of the room, the machinery between them.
Jack's mouth was dry. "What... what are you doing to her? What is that?"
"Il Dire," Sloane answered, the awe clear in his voice. "Rambaldi's masterpiece." It was made of two parts, Jack saw. Sydney was lying on top of a glass case: inside the case were models of the organs of the human body, brain, heart, lungs, stomach, liver, all held in a mesh of silver metal. Above her was a network of glass tubes in an irregular pattern--Jack couldn't quite make it out--glowing as energy of some kind passed through them. "Isn't it glorious?"
"No. Stop it, Arvin, or I swear, I'll--"
"You don't understand. The process is almost complete."
"I won't let you do this to her. I won't let you use Sydney."
"I'm not using her. I'm setting her free. When she is released from Il Dire, she'll have all Rambaldi's knowledge. She'll know all his secrets, she'll have his power. Your daughter is no pawn, Jack. She's greater than you know." As he spoke, Sloane walked around the machine until he was between Jack and it.
"She is my daughter," Jack grated out. He hurled himself off the last step and onto Sloane, but Arvin was stronger than he looked and Jack was rocked back. Arvin caught him by the shoulders, saying, "Wait!" Jack broke away, nearly fell, and had to catch at Arvin to keep himself standing. They reeled across the room, Jack trying to reach his daughter and Sloane holding him back, until a final blow sent Arvin smashing across the wall. Jack rushed to the machine, grabbed the network of glass covering Sydney's body, and pulled.
"No!" Sloane shouted and rushed to the machine. The glass was hot in Jack's hands, too hot to hold on to, and as it slipped from his hands to crash on the floor, there was a burst of white light. Sloane shouted again, and Jack blinked his eyes furiously to clear his vision.
The dim light of the bulb showed him the glass case lying empty. Sydney was gone.
He turned to Sloane, a hundred questions on his lips. Sloane, too, had disappeared.
"Jack," said another voice. Irina Derevko stood in the doorway, Sark leaning on the wall a few steps above her, still shaky looking. Jack kept his eyes on his ex-wife's face. "Jack, what have you done to our daughter?"
End 2/4
Go on to Part 3
