FAMILY MATTERS
Eyghon
Chapter 6: Reminiscing
“Nice,” commented Sydney, admiring the luxurious Beamer. “That’s exactly the kind of car I pictured you driving,” she smiled, “fast, expensive and classy all at once. Tinted windows, leather interior I bet, with all options imaginable. And all black, of course.”
“Well I must say I was surprised when I ran your name in the DMV and found out you drove a 2005 Ford Expedition. I thought you were more a sedan kind of woman.”
Sydney snorted. “A sedan? Are you kidding? Why not a minivan while you’re at it? Seriously Mom, ‘Dad’ drives a sedan, Weiss, Vaughn, Kendall…everybody I know drives a government issued Ford Taurus, except Marshall. You should see him behind the wheel of his Mini he’s so funny! I still wonder how he fits his wife and kid in the little thing.”
Irina smiled, remembering fondly the babbling man who had implanted a tracker on her, so many years ago.
“Well next time, I’ll make sure not to make such idiotic assumptions about you.”
Irina’s driving fitted her character. Smooth but fast, though not enough to be stopped by a police car. She had one hand loosely holding the wheel, the other on the gear stick. European cars came with automatic box in option, but Sydney understood her mother’s need for control. And manual gear offered so much more performance feel to the driver. They slid into the night in comfortable silence.
“Did you have any particular place in mind?” Asked Irina, suddenly remembering she had picked the club, and that she would like to see what kind of place her daughter liked to frequent.
“Actually yes, I know a bar, cozy, discreet. It’s over near the beach. It’s called The TimeOut.”
They arrived at the bar shortly after, and settled into a booth by the back entrance with strawberry margaritas.
“Mom, I wondered…you never asked how we found you, in Guatemala.”
“True,” replied Irina, slightly thrown off by yet again a new topic of conversation she had not been expecting. “My mind was on other things and…I was so relieved you had finally found me. So how did you? Find me I mean. Why at that moment?”
“Dixon, Nadia, and I infiltrated Yelena’s facility in Prague. Nadia and I were busy looking for Sloane, but Dixon was outside the building. He saw Sloane, but he was shot by Yelena. When he woke up, he told us…he saw you Mom, in chains being led into a van. He told us you were Yelena’s prisoner.”
“It seems I owe this man my life. He was your partner at SD-6, wasn’t he?”
“Yes! We’ve always been close. He was my mentor when I started on the job at SD-6. I learned a lot from him, but I had to lie to him about working for the CIA.”
“That time is over now, thankfully. I’ll have to thank him properly next time I see him…for keeping an eye on my daughter and saving my life.”
Sydney smiled, wondering what a ‘thank you’ would entail from Irina Derevko. “I feel kind of ashamed because I didn’t believe him; I thought he was plainly delirious, because he had lost so much blood. Dad insisted it was worth investigating though. I still think it was his guilt talking.
Anyway, we identified one of the men who broke into a DSR facility on Yelena’s orders. His name was Lucien Lassard, a former Covenant agent. Marshall managed to place him in the facility in Prague at the same time we were there. Then, all hell broke loose in Sovogda, and Dad decided that our best course of action was to find you, because you were the only one who knew how to safely deactivate the Mueller Device.”
“Always the practical one,” said Irina thinking of her husband.
“Mom, I’m really sorry I didn’t find you sooner.” After a short hesitation, she added, “when I learned what Dad had done…or what we thought he’d done, I found your body and identified it. It was you, Mom. I had you cremated and put in a mausoleum near where you were born in Moscow.”
“That’s…sweet of you, though it’s disturbing to hear about it. You have nothing to reproach yourself for sweetheart. I don’t blame you, so you shouldn’t either. What happened after you decided to find me?”
“Dad was determined. Honestly, I didn’t believe it would lead us to anything. But Vaughn and I tracked Lassard to a nightclub in Ibiza, which lead to a pretty awkward moment,” she muttered in remembering. Irina raised her eyebrow in question. “Vaughn and I had a private conversation that was overheard through our comms.”
“What kind of private conversation, overheard by whom?” Asked Irina, curiosity pricked at yet another chance of getting a peek inside her daughter’s life.
“Marshall and Dad. Thank God, he didn’t comment on it. We learned that Lassard liked it rough, so Vaughn and I had a disagreement about who should be rough, me or him, and the conversation slid into the topic of our private life…and God, I can’t believe I’m repeating that! I finally noticed that we were on comms, Dad confirmed it for me, I found it quite funny actually at the time. Anyway, we went on with the mission and made ourselves noticed by Lassard.”
“Let me guess, you got him isolated by the promise of rough sex with you?”
“Yeah, it always works.” Sydney grimaced as Irina smiled, agreeing with her unvoiced assessment. Men were pigs.
“I thank you for your devotion to my cause,” smiled Irina sincerely.
“My pleasure. I must confess I enjoyed making him talk. He admitted that Elena found the Helix protocol and that you were doubled because she wanted people to believe you were dead.” She sighed. “He said a volunteer agreed to be doubled, knowing she’d be killed.”
“Some people are devoted to their cause to the point of being a fanatic, willing to lose their life over it.”
“Well, I can’t comprehend it.” She sighed again, and looked her mother straight in the eye. “I asked if you were alive. He said…’of course she is’.”
“Is he dead?”
“No. I left him with his head in the toilet bowl, but he was conscious, so there’s no chance he drowned, sorry. Vaughn stayed with him to supervise his extradition. He was ex-Covenant. I’m sure the folks at Camp Harris had many questions for him. Actually, for all I know, he might be dead. After that, I met Nadia and Dad in Guatemala, and you know the rest.”
Irina nodded, as lost in thought as her daughter was. They both had tears in their eyes, though Sydney spoke first.
“When I saw you in that pit I…couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe it was you, that you were alive, all this time.”
“And I couldn’t believe you had found me,” confessed Irina. “I knew you’d come, but when I saw you, I thought it was another hallucinations, or a new trick of Yelena’s.”
“I often hallucinated you too, you know. When I grew up. I would dream about you, or think about how you would react to what I did, stuff like that. You were always with me.”
“I thought about you a lot too. I imagined holding you at night, it helped me keep warm and fall asleep. Most recently, the hope that you’d realise I was not dead kept me alive.” Irina went quiet, not used to confessing her feelings. She still wasn’t over what had happened to her. Talking certainly helped though.
The silence was heavy with untold professions of love that neither dared to make. Eventually, Sydney broke the uneasy moment.
“Did it feel good? To hit Dad?” She asked, smiling.
“Yes. Very good.” Irina nodded smiling softly. “Though I regret I was not at my full strength then. He deserved more than a slap for what he did, CIA approval or not. I was still his wife and the mother of his children.”
“Children?” Asked Sydney, puzzled. “Is there anyone else beside Nadia and me?”
Irina scolded her, “No. It’s only the two of you. What do you take me for?”
“Mom, you don’t have to pretend with me, I know you had an affair with Sloane.”
“I did, but it’s not for you and I to discuss. Nadia was not the result of that affair. She’s Jack’s, no matter what he may think.”
“You mean…?”
“He doesn’t know…or he does and is too damn stubborn to admit it to himself. It’s a wonder you could consider for even a second that Nadia was Sloane’s daughter. They look nothing like each other!”
“Well, actually, we learned of her existence because Sloane told the CIA shrink, our dearly beloved Dr Barnett, that he had had an affair with you. He hinted it had resulted in the birth of a little girl, and DNA tests proved she was his.”
“DNA is not to be trusted. I thought you of all people would now that,” snapped Irina.
Sydney winced. It was true, she did know DNA was not reliable anymore. It could be faked. “I won’t apologise for assuming Sloane was her father Mom.”
“I don’t expect you to,” quietly replied Irina, sipping her drink.
“Are you going to tell Dad someday?”
“I told him. Not directly, but I’m sure he figurerd it out. Like I said, he’s just too stubborn to deal with it. How did you manage to find Nadia? I looked for her for years. I found nothing…how did you?”
“It was thanks to Sloane actually. I found her in a Chechnyan prison…I screwed up Mom. I threw her into this f***ed up Rambaldi world. Sloane backstabbed Dad and me and he took her. He held her against her will and injected her with the Rambaldi fluid.”
Irina nodded, heartsick at what happened to Nadia. “No matter what happened, I am glad you found her and befriended her, Sydney. My truest regret was not giving you a sibling, and your father another child. Nadia was supposed to be my gift to him when I left. Instead, my extraction orders came earlier than expected and I had Nadia while in prison for treason.”
“What happened to her from there?”
“They took her away from me. They told me she would be raised to hate America, to become a terrorist and kill thousands of Americans.”
“I guess Yelena got her hands on her somewhere along the way.”
Irina frowned. “What do you mean? What does Elena have to do with Nadia?”
“You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
Sydney shook her head, bewildered. “Nadia spent her childhood in an orphanage, and entered Argentinean Intelligence when she was a teenager. Mom, Elena was the director of the orphanage. Nadia has always known her as Sofia Vargas. A few weeks ago, she came to LA to visit Nadia. She stayed at our apartment, and used us to gain access to the NSA facility where Lassard stole the Rambaldi artifacts to build the Mueller Device. We only discovered her true identity after she was gone. Nadia was shattered, Sofia was like a mother to her.”
“My God!” Whispered Irina horrified at her sister’s cruelty and treachery.
“Yeah. Talk about twisted. When I think I cooked for her, and ate the food she made…makes me shudder.”
Irina winced. That’s something she would never get to do. She had barely stayed 24 hours in her daughter’s apartment when she had visited ten days ago. Yelena had probably shared meals and watched TV with Nadia and Sydney. The three women had settled in a routine at some point. Maybe Yelena had cooked a nice dinner to her nieces and respective boyfriends. Irina would never get to experience that…never.
Jealousy was not something she had tasted since childhood. However, at that moment, she hated her sister even more and wished she had not let her off so easily, with a bullet between the eyes. It was not mercy that pushed her to execute Yelena, nor hatred. It was self-preservation. Yelena knew all her secrets. Her fears, her regrets, her expectations. Yelena had violated Irina in the worst kind of way. She had literally gotten into her mind and taken everything she had wanted from there.
Yelena knew how to break Irina and she couldn’t be allowed to live with such knowledge. She didn’t want anyone to know what had been done to her in Kashmir, in Camp Harris, and more recently in her sister’s custody. She couldn’t allow their conversations to be repeated to her daughters or the CIA for instance. There were some things children should never know about their parents and other things that she needed to tell them herself. Basically, she had killed Yelena on instinct. To keep herself out of harm’s way…emotional harm.
“I don’t have any other sister, so you only have to watch out for Katya.” Wasn’t joking the best way to deal with pain?
“Yeah, about Katya, I heard she was released shortly after we came back from Sovogda. Have you seen her?”
Irina smiled a devilish smile. “Yes I did. I actually picked her up right outside the penitentiary.”
Sydney’s mouth moved wordlessly for a few seconds. “No…you didn’t! You’ve got to be kidding me,” then she laughed, shaking her head in disbelief. Sobering up, she went on, “what did she tell you?”
“That Nadia had visited her a few times, asking about me, but she said Nadia refused to talk about you.”
“Why would she even ask about me?”
“She never had children of her own. Family has always been sacred to her and sides do not matter. I was gone, so it was her role to watch over both my daughters, to the best of her ability.”
“Does trying to blow my head off count as protection? Cause that’s kind of the reason I never tried to interact with her, to Nadia’s complete incomprehension.”
“She tried to shoot you?”
“Yeah. It’s actually what led her to jail.”
“I see.”
“She ended up eating chocolate purposely to get sick and asked for me to visit her right before she collapsed. I went to the hospital to see her, do some threatening, which didn’t faze her a bit. She actually lectured me on how bad it was to give up on you so easily. It hit home. She told me she had proof that someone had set you up for the hit on my life. I found your music box. Katya was telling the truth, you were innocent.” She sighed.
“I’m sorry she upset you. Know that I hold no grudge against you for thinking me capable of hurting you. I can’t say I’m pleased, or that I expected it, but I know how people perceive me. I’m surprised you trusted Katya enough to follow her lead though.”
“She did raise interesting questions about the reasons you would try to have me killed. Questions I had asked myself without coming up with a plausible answer. Everything she said was right. I shouldn’t have been so quick to believe you had hired a hit man to off me.“
“Let’s not talk about this anymore.”
“You’re right. Did Katya tell you about Nadia?”
“Yes, but very little. Nadia was more inclined to ask questions about me than to answer questions about herself.”
“You can ask me about her, if you want. We lived together for a couple of months. I’d be happy to share with you. We never talked much about you. It was too painful, because of the hit, though she didn’t know about it until she told me about Katya. I had to give her a reason why I didn’t want to interact with Katya, why I didn’t want to hear about your childhood. I guess I should have known she would go to Katya for information, and I’m glad Katya told her about you. Nadia deserved to know you. Will you tell Katya I say ‘hi’ next time you see her?”
“I will.”
They stared off into space silently, enjoying the music. Sydney broke the silence. “So you’re back in business? You know so much about things you shouldn’t, you must be.”
Irina smiled. “I did miss a lot and am trying to catch up on everything that’s going on in the intelligence world. I won’t get in your way for a while.”
Sydney smiled. “Yeah, you missed a lot. I practically killed Dad a few months ago, because I was convinced he was trying to kill me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I was infected with some hallucinogen drug. Not my best moment.” She sighed, readying herself for her next confession. “About that…Mom, there’s something I need to tell you, about you shooting me…”
Irina tensed, shivering as she remembered that dreadful moment where she had had to make a choice…shoot her daughter or watch her die and be killed herself. “Yes?”
“I…I understand now. I mean, I believed you, when you said Cuvee was watching and would have killed us both, but…I was in the same situation, almost two years ago. I was undercover, and got busted with Vaughn, who was identified as CIA. The guy I was working with had a gun to Vaughn’s head, and to keep my cover in place and save him…I offered to kill him myself. I stabbed him, Mom. I stabbed him and left him on the side of a dirt road for hours.”
“My God, Sydney…”
“I practically killed him Mom. The little hole in my shoulder was nothing compared to what I did to him. I just wanted you to know, that I understand completely, and that I hold no grudge whatsoever against you for it. I wanted to say thank you, actually, because you saved my life that day, like I saved Vaughn’s.”
Irina smiled and nodded, tears in her eyes. Sydney had granted her absolution for the thing she most reproached herself. She was just saddened Sydney had to go through the same thing as she did to forgive her.
They quickly ran out of things to discuss but neither Sydney nor Irina saw this evening as a mistake, or as lost time. They had come a long way, and taking things slow was the best option.
Irina parked beside Sydney’s car under The Executive Suite and got out to say her goodbyes. “One last thing I meant to ask you…”
“Yes?” Prompted Sydney, intrigued at her mother’s demeanour.
“How is your father coping with his demotion?”
Sydney frowned. Not because her mother was asking about something she shouldn’t know for hundreds of reason, she was not surprised anymore to hear her talk about classified information and so on, but because she could read genuine concern on Irina’s face. “I have his job, how do you think he feels?” Asked Sydney a bit reproachfully. She didn’t particularly enjoy discussing the issue, with anyone.
Irina sighed, even more worried than before. She had hoped Sydney would give her some reassurance about Jack but it was all to the contrary. “Alright. I just…wondered.”
“He’s okay, I think. He’s not going to throw himself out the window anytime soon.”
“Good to know.”
“He lives in a first floor apartment. With a cat.”
“Did you say a cat?”
“Yes. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.”
“Is it dead?”
“No! Dad feeds him, though I can’t picture him playing with it.”
“I always thought Jack abhorred animals.”
“Me too. By the way, I almost forgot, thank you for the book. Everything I had was destroyed by the fire at my house. When I got back, Eric Weiss, asked me what was the thing I missed most. It was that book. We were pretty drunk…actually we were wasted, but…a few days later, he got me a third edition of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. I cried for hours.”
“He seems like a wonderful man.”
“Yeah. He’s like…the brother I never had. Dixon was kind of like that too, but more like a…cross between what a Dad should be and a brother. Now he’s my boss so we don’t have that anymore.”
“You are lucky to have such men in your life Sydney,” said Irina, squeezing her hand.
“Yeah. I am. I also had two wonderful best friends until they were killed because of me.”
“Will Tippin is hardly dead, Sydney; we both know it. I’m sorry about Miss Calfo. I wish I had known it was she who was chosen to be doubled. It would have saved you so much pain…I assumed Sloane had picked one of your colleagues, someone with direct access to both you and the CIA. I was wrong and I’ll never forgive myself for that.”
“It’s okay, you don’t need to apologize. The past is what it is, the past.” She sighed heavily. “Mom,” said Sydney, catching Irina by the arm before she could make it back to her car.
“Yes?” Asked Irina, uncertain.
“Thank you. For earlier, here.” She motioned above her, at the now-closed club. “I’ll be sure to think about what you said if I ever need someone to talk to.”
“It would be my pleasure, Sydney.” Irina softly touched her daughter’s face, smiling contentedly.
Sydney put her hand on Irina’s, squeezed it softly, and turned toward her car.
Finally, a little bit of trust in the kingdom of deceit.
TBC
Next in “FM – Chapter 7: First job”, Sydney and Irina take the first step to find a cure for Nadia.
