The Perfect Weapon Chapter 2005: Part 2
Chapter 2005: Part 2:
“What the hell kind of asinine story is this, Weiss?” Kendall snapped, slamming his hands down on the desk.
“I’m tellin’ you.” Weiss stood up and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I put Sark back into his cell. I talked to him, told him Jack was unavailable but had told me to talk to him. He tried to talk to me, tell me the intel, but he couldn’t. Something was preventing him. Something...” Weiss shrugged. “Dunno. He kept pacing back and forth, rubbing his temple. I think we need to call Jack back in.”
“You’re seriously contemplating calling Jack this soon and telling him that he has to come right back?” Kendall asked. He looked down at his watch. “They probably haven’t even gotten all that crap of hers into Jack’s apartment, let alone... And you want to call him and tell him to get his ass back in here to interrogate that flying monkey?”
“Well, that’s probably not my best option,” Weiss admitted. To himself, he admitted that he was going to sneak into a stall in the men's bathroom and call Jack no matter what anyone said. It didn't feel, well, right, not to call. There was something going on...
“Nah, it’s not,” Marshall agreed. “Irina, Derevko, Mrs. Bristow---”
“Whatever,” Weiss and Kendall nearly shouted.
“Yeah, her. She looked pretty tired; Jack’s probably going to want to tuck her into bed.. What?” Marshall asked, looking from one man to the other as they both snorted.
“Nothing, Marshall,” Weiss said, putting his hand on Marshall’s shoulder. “Jack’s probably cleaning out a drawer for her underwear right now. We can wait a little while to figure out Sark’s story.”
“I suppose so. It’s not like anyone’s going to live or die by anything he has to say, right?” Marshall asked.
Ring
“Speaking of living and dying,” Weiss groaned when he flipped open his phone. “Hey, Mike, what’s shaking?”
“Eric, where are you?” Vaughn asked, hearing noises in the background. “Are you still at work? Shouldn’t you have gone home?”
“Well, lots to do today,” Weiss answered, his eyes wide. “Why’d you call?”
“Just to let you know we’re heading home today. A day early,” Vaughn said sourly with a sidelong glance at Sydney who was petulantly looking out of the window after round one of their argument. “Do you know if Syd’s apartment is done?”
“Yeah, for the most part. Jack’s had almost everything delivered.” Weiss decided Vaughn didn’t need to know about the package Irina had delivered there. Or rather, Vaughn didn’t need to know that from him. “But he didn’t want to overstep his bounds and put anything away. He figured Syd would get---”
“Pissy about it?” Vaughn nodded, looking straight ahead out the car window. ”Yeah, I see the point.”
“Are you talking about me?” Sydney said, twisting in her seat to stare at Vaughn.
“Yeah, I am actually,” Vaughn admitted. “You’re a little hard on your father. As I’ve been telling you.”
“I think I’ll hang up now. Sounds like you’re gonna have your hands full in a sec,” Weiss laughed and flipped his phone closed. “Now I don’t have a choice. I gotta call Jack. Syd’s on her way back home.”
“Well, Jack’s got time,” Kendall quipped. “After all, Sydney will probably have to call for directions to Jack’s home, won’t she?”
Weiss smiled. “What makes you think she’d be going to his home? Dollars to donuts, she’ll show up here, assuming that he’s at work.”
Kendall and Marshall looked at each other and smiled. “Assumptions are dangerous things,” Kendall noted.
“Very dangerous,” Marshall agreed. “It’s like when I’m trying to find the bug in a program because it’s created this infinite loop and...”
Sydney glared at Vaughn and crossed her arms over her chest. “What do you mean, I’m too hard on my father?”
“I mean...Listen.” Vaughn firmed his lips, gripped the steering wheel and looked out the car window. This cab of the car was too small to hold Sydney’s anger, he decided. Hell, the whole Western hemisphere was too small to contain her anger. Maybe he needed to move farther away. Her face was growing redder by the second; any moment now it would match the red in her striped shirt. “I told myself, told Jack, that we’d have this conversation and---”
“You told my father what? When?”
“This morning,” Vaughn told her. “Yeah, I admit it. I called him while you were in the shower.”
“Why? Was this conversation we’re having his idea?” Sydney asked suspiciously. “I bet it was. I bet it was his idea that you defend him. That’s it! This is just some game of his, you realize and---”
“I swear, if you call me a dupe, I’ll... For the love of...” Vaughn ground his teeth together. No wonder Jack used that phrase on a regular basis. “Your father pointed out certain truths to me. That I need you to listen to me--”
“I am listening to you! That’s why I’m mad.” Sydney tapped her foot on the floorboards of the car and glared at her boyfriend, as she recrossed her arms.
“Fine. Why did I say that, that you don’t give your father enough of a chance? Listen to yourself, look at yourself. You’re sitting there...” Vaughn took a deep breath. “Negative body posture. Pouting. And it was your idea to go home first thing. Why? Because your father said he’d talk to you. He made that offer. But now and for the last half hour I’ve had to listen to you conjure up reasons why he’d lie to you or ---”
“Oh, he wouldn’t lie. Not exactly. He’d tell a mistruth---”
“I think he uses misdirections more often, actually.” Vaughn straightened the sleeves of his blue shirt at a red light. “He avoids making outright lies.”
“Whatever!” Sydney threw up her hands in disgust, before recrossing her arms and looking away as the light turned green. “There’s no difference in the end---”
“Oh, I think Jack sees a difference---”
“That’s my point! Either way I don’t know the full story!”
“And why is that? Could it be...” Vaughn bit off his words. He wasn’t sure he had the nuts or would be nuts to continue this conversation.
“Could it be what?”
Vaughn had told himself he was going to have this discussion with her. If for no other reason than the fact that they seemed to spend half of their time together discussing Jack. He’d like to move forward with this relationship but that wasn’t going to happen while she was still so tied to her father. Like now. They’d had to leave first thing in the morning, just grabbing donuts at Krispy Kreme rather than having a nice breakfast, because Jack had said he’d talk to Sydney when she got home. But the closer they got to home, the more she was dragging her heels and setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy of failed expectations because she was going to begin the conversation with Jack with such a chip on her shoulder that Jack would immediately get defensive and... Was he the only one who could see this pattern, damn it!
“Vaughn, I’m waiting.”
“So am I.” Waiting for you to act like a reasonable adult! Vaughn bit off those words, deciding that they were a truth that might not be helpful. Or maybe he was just afraid. Perhaps he was too fearful of opening cans, fearing to find worms, only to find the worms were around him anyway. And perhaps he should ask Jack for help with analogies, Vaughn decided. Pressing his lips together, he finally took a breath and told her, “It’s no secret that your mother shoots you in the shoulder, to say nothing else she’s done, and no matter what you say, you’re ready to forgive her. Your father forgets that... say, you like chocolate cake donuts better than raised donuts and you’re ready to stop speaking to him--”
“It’s a little more complicated than that!”
“That was just an analogy, for crying out---” Vaughn exclaimed in frustration.
“I know what analogies are---”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re an English major---”
“And my father used them all the time too,” Sydney remembered suddenly. “Then.”
Vaughn looked at her sharply. “Didn’t your head hurt remembering that?”
“No. Actually, it didn’t. If my head hurts it’s because you’re being a jerk!”
“If being a jerk means that I’m being honest, then yeah! I’m being a jerk.” Vaughn slapped his hand on the steering wheel. “Listen, let’s calm down and talk about this when we get home, the traffic is heavy and I should concentrate on steering my way through this mess---”
“I don’t want to go home, let’s go to work!” Sydney ordered. “That’s probably where my father is anyway. He has no life. So turn the car around and head back--”
“Fine!” Vaughn snarled back at her and made a U-turn in the road. Then he hit his hand on the steering wheel and did another U-turn.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Sydney asked. “Why are you going toward my place now? Work is the other---”
“I want to go home. You want to go to work. You can drive yourself. I’ll go to my apartment and take the rest of the day off since it was coming to me anyway.”
“Fine!” Sydney turned her face away. “And a day off is about the only thing that’s going to be coming to you, you know!”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. And another thing, I want to go to work to see my father. I’m not trying to avoid him. I want to talk to him.”
“Yeah, you want to talk at him. Or just give him dirty looks from across the room. You don’t actually want to have a conversation---”
“Yes. I do! And you don’t know my father. My father---”
Vaughn slammed the car into another U-turn. “That’s it. I am taking you to see your father. See your father and get this over with or...” He paused, concentrating on avoiding the wrath of the driver whose car he had nearly squashed.
“Or what?” Sydney fought to avoid gulping.
Vaughn looked over at her sharply. Immediately, he put his hand on her knee. “Syd, I’m sorry for upsetting you. You know....I love you.”
“So you said in the hospital,” Sydney said quietly, looking down at the hand on her knee. Tentatively, she put her own over it. Geez, her hand was about the same size as his. Like...her parents’ hands had been so similar, she remembered suddenly. A good match. At least in hands, if not in hearts.
“And I meant it. Then. Now. I won’t leave you, either, Syd, over this issue.” Vaughn said it firmly, sensing her fear. “But we can’t avoid it.”
“You mean the way you avoid talking about my mother?”
“Yeah. Like that,” Vaughn agreed with a self-deprecatory smile.
“We do have to talk about that.”
“I think...I don’t know if I’m ready yet. I think, maybe, I’ll talk about it with your father first, actually.”
“What? Talk with my dad? I just can’t see talking with him--”
“Speaking of which.” Vaughn took a deep breath. Turning his hand over so that they were palm to palm, he squeezed her hand. “Let’s talk about this logically. Okay?” He waited and Sydney nodded. “Let me tell you what I know---”
“You know nothing, Vaughn and--” Sydney said quietly, fighting to keep her impatience back in the little box where it undoubtedly belonged.
“I know more than you. I know that if you have this attitude when you talk to your father you won’t get anything out of him other than a verbal sparring match.”
“Oh, like he’s going to tell the truth anyway?”
Vaughn rubbed his forehead. “He told you it was your mother the other night. He knows something. He offered to talk to you about...whatever. He made the offer. If he didn’t intend---”
“It could just be some end run. That’s the most plausible option.”
Vaughn nodded. “That’s logical, but...”
“But...” Sydney prompted. Vaughn was thinking hard about something; his forehead had approximately twenty wrinkles on it. And sometimes, he was correct, after all. And maybe she wasn’t entirely rational on the subject of her father. Maybe. She wasn’t willing to admit she was wrong quite yet.
“It’s just... Haven’t we seen a pattern in our lives? Sometimes what’s plausible and what’s true are not the same. Sometimes the most implausible idea is in fact the truth. Hasn’t everything we’ve experienced proven that? So, another option is that what he tells you could be the truth.”
“But how would I know? Know the difference between a truth and a...mistruth?”
“Syd... You said once that you can tell when he’s telling you a bold-faced lie, right? So, why can’t you tell when he’s giving you the truth? Is it because you don’t want to hear it most of the time?”
Sydney hissed in a breath, trying to keep her anger in at the same time. “Humph. It’s going to be some story he’s concocted that has enough of the truth in it to seem plausible, to be hard to detect the bullshit factor---”
Vaughn ground his teeth. Just when he thought he was making progress, pushing her in a new path, she’d backtrack to the old one. “What? What could he tell you? The options are limited---”
“Ha. You know nothing. With my father, the options are infinite.”
“Welll, that’s true,” Vaughn admitted. “But look at it this way. Think about it, calmly. He knew it was your mother putting those blankets over you and Will, right? How did he know?”
“Educated guess. Or deductive reasoning--”
“No. He wouldn’t have told you so emphatically. He would have couched his words differently. Therefore, he knows it was your mother. So what’s left? What explanations could there be for his knowledge? What are the options? Think about it. Did he find fingerprints? Hair fibers? A calling card? Did your mother tell him? Have he and your mother been working together since Panama or---”
“Now, that’s ridiculous.” Sydney crossed her legs and rolled down her window. It was stuffy in here with all of the hot air Vaughn was blowing her way. “A ridiculous story. They would have had no reason to keep that a secret from me.”
“You don’t think so?” Vaughn asked carefully, hoping that particular option was not the truth. Please, let Derevko stay out there. Somewhere. Anywhere. Just not here. Then he sighed as he drew near the CIA building. Silently, he wondered if Sydney would have known her way to her father's house anyway. But that was unfair, she had gone there that one time when Jack was hiding from Ariana Kane. Had she been there any other time? Her anger, her fear, blinded her to the possibilities, to the truth. “Sydney, your father has a pattern that you don’t seem to see.”
“Which is what?” Sydney frowned as Vaughn turned into the parking garage and pulled out his access card. “What’s his pattern?” She asked as Vaughn shoved the card into the security box and snatched it out impatiently.
As the door lifted, Vaughn looked over at her. “He’s always trying to protect you. Don’t you see that?”
“He’s trying to control me,” Sydney retorted as the door closed behind them. “Keep me in some little box---”
“He’s trying to make sure you don’t end up in a little box,” Vaughn argued as he parked in his assigned space and they opened their car doors.
Sydney shook her head and changed the subject. “I thought you were going home,” she noted as they both walked toward the elevators.
“I think I’ll drop in and check out a few things.” Vaughn smiled down at Sydney and put his arm around her. And I’ll also be here to pick up the pieces when you and Jack have the inevitable meltdown. Someday, he hoped, this would all just be a funny story to tell their kids. Someday. He pressed the button for the elevator.
"So, no problem with elevators, Jack?" Irina asked as they rode upwards in an elevator in Jack’s apartment building. “They’re small little boxes, after all.”
"They’re not coffins and I don't have claustrophobia. Honestly, what is it with you and Judy and this insistence on a phobia I don’t have?" Jack tapped his fingers on the pile of luggage before him.
"Sure, Jack. And I don't have a slight problem with obsessions about puzzles," Irina scoffed as she watched his hand. Nice hands, she had always thought. Nice and big and warm and... Wait, he was talking.
“So, what’s our story going to be?” Jack asked Irina.
“Well, if you’re right, which is always doubtful,” Irina smiled and touched Jack’s hand. No ring. She would have to remedy that sooner rather than later. “The best lie is the one closest to the truth. So, I guess we were married before, were...separated, and have now reunited?”
“Sounds good to me,” Jack agreed, curling his hand around hers. “Stranger things have happened, after all. To me.”
“Yes, like the wife pretending to die and then coming back to life?” Irina looked at Jack carefully, searching for signs of... well, a grudge. But there didn’t seem to be one. In fact, he was looking at a spot above her shoulder, deep in thought. “Jack...” she nudged him. “Are you with me? What are you thinking?” She had a feeling she’d be asking that question a million times during the rest of their life together. Which was far far better than the other option - never asking him any questions at all.
“I had this dream last night before you called. I heard this voice saying, ‘Life from death is always the best surprise.’” Jack looked down at her and shook his head, trying to dislodge the memory. “I suppose that was just a warning of your return--”
Irina touched the puzzlebox and frowned. “I want to talk to you about---”
“About what?” Jack smiled as he reached out a finger and set the puzzlebox and key swinging. It would take her no longer to find the lock for that key than it had taken her to unlock the secret of the puzzlebox so long ago. Her obsession with puzzles was useful on occasion.
Irina grabbed his finger and brought it to her lips. “I want to talk to you about the infinity charm in my puzzlebox---”
Ding
The elevator door opened.
TBC at Chapter 2005: Part 3 section 1 of