ante mortem

Voices in the air…

Sark leaned back against the car's seat and listened to the caller. Ten in the morning but the day was dark, the rain driving down from the overcast, beating against the car's roof and hood. Spangles and ribbons of it ran down the windshield, kaleidoscopes of color splintering through each drop whenever a set of headlights played over the parked vehicle.

The deep hum of the engine mingled with the fan forcing warm air through the heating vents. His leather coat squeaked against the leather upholstery. Traffic sounds mingled with the drum of the hard rain; he had to listen carefully.

"I need to meet with Gamboni," Sloane said.

"I'll arrange it." Sark didn't ask who the Argentine shooter was going to hit.

"There is a Dr. Brezzel. He has recently conducted an effort to retrieve Sydney's memories. The Covenant will want to know what she has remembered."

Sark waited patiently. What the Covenant wanted wouldn't be what Sloane wanted from him.

"Find out what he learned and make sure they can't," Sloane instructed. "You know where to access the details. The password is Panama."

"A pleasure."

"And Sark?"

"Yes?"

"Never endanger Sydney the way you did by revealing her to the NSC again."

Sark smiled because Sloane couldn't see him. "It got you what you wanted, didn't it?" he said into the cellphone. "Jack Bristow working with you again and access to Ms. Bristow's secrets." It wasn't as if the surgery would have destroyed Ms. Bristow. She would have recovered, thanks to Rambaldi's formula and her own genetics. Admittedly, she would have suffered ... but that had been the point. "The Covenant expected me to act on the information they provided."

"Never again, Mr. Sark."

"Very well," he lied.

He flipped on the windshield wipers, watched the blurred, softened world swept aside and replaced by dull, focused reality. His hands clenched on the steering wheel.


He stood in the darkness, beyond the bank of monitoring equipment, outside the central pool of cold fluorescent light, the sheen of steel and flickering computer screens, in the vastness. Something about converted warehouses and parking garages seemed to draw his kind. The emptiness and the never-banished shadows that held no welcome or comfort offered no rejection either.

Behind him, the morphine did its job and Brezzel flatlined. No alarm protested; Sark hadn't connected any of the equipment except the IV drip. Not the man's fault he ended up a loose end, so Sark gave him as painless a death as the circumstances allowed. Painless if you didn't count the bullet wound to his leg, and Sark didn't; it had been necessary to focus the man.

He tapped in the number and waited for her to answer.

"Yes?"

"You know who this is," he said.

"Where are you?"

"The US. New Haven. Following Bristow."

"Do you know where she's going?"

"Not yet."

Sark hesitated. He'd always wondered what she really felt about the man. He shrugged.

"Tippin's alive."

"He's dead," she denied in a harsh tone. He heard her breathing through the cellphone.

"Apparently not," he corrected her ironically. He strolled to the oxidized orange door and opened it. The sunlight was golden, heavy as honey, as he stepped outside. "I need to access his new name and location out of the CIA's witness protection department database."

"He's two years out of the loop--"

So she still had that soft spot for Tippin. Sark's mouth turned down.

"Bristow is going after him."

He put on his sunglasses.

"So he knows something," Allison said slowly.

Sark stood in the late afternoon sun, his shadow stretching long across the pavement to his parked rental car. He dipped his head, listening closely to her voice, listening for what wasn't there in it, or what was. The warm light seemed to wrap the world in amber. Briefly, he was reminded of Mexico, but the light here was a lie. The air was chill and the streets were damp, cold set in the concrete, cold like stone in winter.

"Can you get me what I need?"

"If I can't?"

"There's Sloane."

His shadow dissolved into grayness. The light was gone, the false warmth drained out the day.

"You don't trust him, do you?"

"Don't be stupid," Sark said.

"I'll call you when I have the information."

They didn't say good-bye. He turned to the west. The last sliver of incandescence slid below the horizon.

Sunset.


He dragged Lazarey's unconscious body into the back of the van with impersonal efficiency. Plucked the trank dart out of the gaunt man's neck and checked his pulse. Knelt on the grimy floorboards, with just the dim interior light casting his shadow across the figure, and stared.

"So, you're alive," he murmured.

He tried to summon some memories of this face, some younger version of it, from the haze that was his childhood. A sick, hot sweat broke out on his skin. Nausea twisted through him and he swallowed over and over, trying to shove it back down.

Unconsciously, he touched the inside of his arm, the tender hollow where forearm met elbow. He couldn't feel the scar through his clothes. It was the only mark that hadn't healed and faded. Smooth, barely raised, white, smaller than the tip of his little finger now, it wasn't numb so much as less sensitive than the rest of his skin.

It was a cigarette scar. He'd endured much, much worse in interrogations since. But the burn had been part of him as long as he could remember. Bruises and broken bones were half forgotten, less so that sibilant voice oozing contempt, but the cigarette he remembered clearly. Maybe he wouldn't have survived if Lazarey hadn't abandoned him, wouldn't have come into Irina's hands and learned the truth about his heritage, but that didn't translate into forgiveness.

He pulled out his cellphone and opened it. The call was picked up immediately.

"Have the plane readied," he instructed the Covenant pilot. "We're returning to Moscow. I have the package."

He closed the phone and began securing Lazarey's hands and feet. He wrapped a strip of duct tape over Lazeray's eyes. He should have reported to Irina. She'd wanted everything the Covenant had on 'St. Aidan'. But the memory of the cigarette was stronger.

She hadn't told him St. Aidan was Lazeray.

No, he would tell her he'd found the man ... after Lazarey talked to him.

He'd made sure Sydney Bristow paid for Allison's scars. It was time Andrian Lazeray paid for Sark's, paid for turning his back on his child because he had been born with Rambaldi's marks. He needed Lazarey to see him and know the truth.

And then he would choose, finally, his place – with Irina and the guardians or with Allison and the Covenant.