a_sloane

Poof. You just got sucked into a Christmas Carol and are playing the role of Scrooge. One or all of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future come to visit you

( Briault was dead: to begin with... )

When one is young, one tends to try out quite a rich gallery of images. I did not know yet what I wished to be when I joined the CIA, but I did know I wished to suceed. Aside from the obvious requirements - intelligence, skill, dedication, and so forth - showing interest in the various occupations and passions of your superiors was an easy way to do so. When one of them complimented me on my shooting skills, I told him my father had taken me hunting as a boy. His face lit up, and he invited me to a hunting trip in Maine for the weekend.

"That was a bit obvious, don't you think?" said my new partner Jack Bristow later, when we were alone. We didn't know each other very well yet, but he was clearly the most gifted agent of my own age I had been able to discover, which made him either the worst rival or the best ally I could hope for. Getting assigned together might let me find out which it was going to be, which was why I had pushed for it. Now I gave him my best noncommittal look.

"My father took me hunting," he quoted. "Your father is a peaceful record store owner in Brooklyn who never touched a gun in his life."

This was entirely correct, but what was most interesting was this: I had not talked about my family background with Jack. Not out of any desire to hide it, but there were more interesting topics of conversation. Which meant he must have accessed my file. Because he was curious, or because he was looking for a weakness. Either possibility intrigued me, as did the fact he was letting me know what he had done, because there was no way he was not aware of the conclusion I would draw from his little observation. I looked at him and smiled.

"The truth is usually just an excuse for a lack of imagination," I conceded.

"Not if your imagination leaves you stuck with Pryors in Maine for the weekend," Jack said, deadpan.

Now I had little interest in hunting or Adam Pryors, other than his usefulness to me professionally. And I was reasonably sure the weekend would be dull, though no more so than having to do standard surveillance for an arms dealer's second cousin once removed, which was the sort of job young and inexperienced agents such as ourselves got. But he had made it just that much more colourful.

"Well," I said, "if it gets too bad, I shall rely on you coming to the rescue. There should be a phone in Pryors' lodge, and you can practice for work by telling him all about my aunt having had a heart attack."

Jack folded his arms and leaned back on the chair he sat on. "What makes you think I don't have anything better to do during the weekend than waiting for your phonecall in case you get bored with cozying up to Pryors?"

"Because we're partners, Jack," I said, and felt it the first time, that electric charge I was going to associate with him. Forget the either/or, I thought, regarding the future possibilities of rivalry versus alliance. Why shouldn't it be both/and? "And my father did teach me never to refuse a favor from a friend."

He looked as if he was going to protest he had not offered any favors, but that would only lead to me pointing out that he wouldn't have brought up the entire subject otherwise, and he knew it. So instead, he gave me one of his narrow long looks. And nodded.

I knew parental lessons would come in handy. Especially if one invents them.

Tolstoy once wrote in a somewhat overrated novel dealing with, among other things, a marriage, that all families were happy in the same way but that each was miserable in their own unique fashion. I'd qualify this: nobody is married in the same way, happily or not. In my time, I have seen marriages of convenience, marriages of passion, and the union of Jack and Irina, which defies description. He never stopped referring to her as his wife, you know, and yet it startled me to hear Irina refer to him as her husband. We were on something of a race against the clock then, trying to assemble Il Dire, and I had just returned from Tibet and new revelations which I wasn't yet prepared to share. It was just a casual mention, perhaps more remarkable for the fact it occured at all, because as a rule we tried not to raise the subject of either Jack or Sydney, not after the first time in the air plane when she had commanded silence in her imperial way. But there it was. "My husband". She had spent perhaps seven years with him as Laura, and only a few hours each week for half a year when he knew her as Irina. Tired as I was then, somewhere on the brink between being emptied by Emily's death and grasping for that new revelation, fatherhood, I nearly said out loud this did not equate marriage in my mind, but stopped myself doing so just in time. After all, there was work to be done.

Besides, the woman you once had an affair with is the very last person to discuss marriage with, or your late wife.

Still. I dare say when Emily and I married we were in love like most young couples are, to give Tolstoy his due; what changed this passionate state of being entranced with each other into a marriage was not the exchange of vows as such but the decades we spent together. What made it a marriage was knowing each other at all times of the day and night, down to knowing by the noises we made when reading the newspaper what kind of article the other had just started. What made it a marriage was watching each other age and finding those signs of age so much a part of the other that we would not have traded them for our younger incarnations. What made it a marriage were the dark times, the lost child we never spoke of, the confession I made about my betrayal without naming a name and the way Emily received it, and the long fight against her cancer. What made it a marriage was the language we shared, and which we could not share with anyone else; allusions to a moment or a sensation gone since years and recalled with a word, or a look.

What made it a marriage was that in over thirty years, we did not leave each other. It probably would have been better for Emily if she had done. She tried, once, near the end. But I asked her to come with me again, and she did; only half an hour later I had her blood on my hands, springing from the wound a bullet had left that had been meant for me. This, too, then turned out to be marriage, to me: bringing death to the person I loved more than anyone else.

There is a custom, rapidly going out of fashion, about marriage rings. Widowers and widows wear the rings of their spouses as well as their own. When we faked Emily's death, not even a year before she did die, she had to leave her wedding ring with me. I took it as a pledge then, for our reunion once the Alliance had fallen. It was in fact her second ring; at one point during her cancer treatment, her fingers had swollen and her first ring had to be cut open. Later, I found out she had taken those two halfs, had gotten a goldsmith to melt them together again and had kept that first ring with her during those three months of secrecy and plotting. It was the one she wore then Dixon shot her. Later, Jack sent it to me, poste restante, to Switzerland, care of the Zurich central post office.

I'm wearing all three now. The first one she gave me, when we were young; it has never left my hand, and you can probably hardly read the inscription by now. Which is simply her name; Emily was not one for hallmark sentiments. The second one she gave me; new, and worn by her only for a few months. There are edges, and they cut into my flesh. And the one I gave her, broken, remelded, and, I fear, with an inscription, as sentimental as young men in love, or old men, for that matter, are ever going to get. After all, I never claimed Emily's virtues for myself.

These rings have been with me since she died, and they always will be.

This is what marriage means to me.

“Friend” is a word we use far too easily, until we forget what it means. But then again, it rarely means the same thing to more than two or three persons; we are too different from each other. To me, the meaning got defined decades ago, and has been redefining itself ever since.

It wasn’t that Jack Bristow and myself worked together when young; naturally professionalism demands you get along with your partner in the field. But those kind of relationships are quickly established and easily discarded, if needs be. Jack had other partners, especially since I got promoted somewhat faster, and so did I. Jack used to remark we shared an unsentimental patriotism and the devotion to our wives in those days, but these traits were not exactly rare among C.I.A. agents, either; we could have found them in other people as well. There was, of course, the lack of false modesty and the awareness we were both brilliant, which simply demanded either rivalry or alliance, though I myself never was a friend of either/or; the obvious solution was both/and, to me. Yet again, we were not unique in this, either. And we did have other friends. But even before I made the choices that were to cause me to leave the C.I.A., even before Laura became Irina and Jack lost a part of himself that enabled him to open to – selected - strangers, there was a distinction. It was forged somewhere between those walks in Washington, talking while the lanterns ignited, somewhere between patching each other up after the mole in Berlin we were supposed to question turned out to be a triple and arguing over the new restrictions handed out to the Company in the aftermath of the Nixon administration. Somewhere between enduring his peculiar fondness for ABBA and defending the works of an admittedly overpopular British composer who nonetheless did produce some of my favourite songs. Somewhere between tacit agreements certain interrogation methods would never make it into the official report and the sunset watched on Mount Abu in India during a stakeout. Decades later, it was still there, despite or perhaps because of what had happened in between.

It might be the very thing that seperates comfortable aquaintance from friendship; betrayal, and the aftermath. I betrayed Jack through my affair with his wife, and later through recruiting his daughter. Jack betrayed me through doing to me what Irina had done to him, and later by trading in my life twice, though the bargain was never called in, once for, as I later found out, Vaughn who amazingly had enough blood to need a cure after all, and once because Katya and Irina or solely Katya were in a mood for games. He put me through death and resurrection; I did the same to him. We were in vastly different states at the respective time, yet I was and remain convinced of this: neither of us would have dealt out death if we had not known we could also resurrect.

We were, after all, best friends.

This might or might not have happened. After all, he is quite adroit at rewriting his past.

But this is the way he remembers it, in the dark.

Six-years-old Sydney, busy assembling all her stuffed animals, hiding them on her bed, under her bed, building a fortress with the carpet as well. (An expensive carpet; this used to be his office and has only just been transformed into a children's room, improvised on the spot because the CIA when arresting Sydney's father did not give advance warning.) Somewhere - in kindergarden, in school, who really knows? - she heard the story of the flood, and is somehow convinced there will be a new one. She thinks it rather unfair there will be only two of each kind allowed to survive, though; she wants to save them all.

"You can't," Arvin says, asked for his opinion. In other circumstances, he'd smile benignly and express approval, but he is not exactly himself these days. The idea of Jack getting interrogated as a potential traitor is infuriating; the revelation that the late Laura Bristow was never Laura at all, but a KGB agent named Irina Derevko and might not be dead at all is more than that.

"Yes, I can," Sydney insists, and Arvin Sloane has odd thoughts. Ridiculous thoughts. He could, for example, report to the Assistant Director. Tell the man that Agent Bristow was not the only one taken in by Laura - by Derevko, he corrects himself, not wishing to call her Irina, a name which with its Byzantine connotations carries a strange allure. One of the reasons why Jack is now suspected of having been Derevko's accomplice instead of her dupe is Jack's previous track record. He's one of the best agents around, no one's fool; could such a man be fooled for near seven years? Well, Sir, yes; look at my own record. I am no one's fool, either, and she did the same thing to me. In fact, I believe some of the information Derevko gathered, which you believe indicates Agent Bristow's guilt as it concerned cases he was not involved with, came through me. So you see, Sir, it should either be both of us in that interrogation cell, or neither of us.

Why, thank you, Agent Sloane. Please join Agent Bristow in state custody. Oh, and your wife has just filed her divorce papers. But at least you don't have to worry about Agent Bristow's little daughter any more. Upon hearing of your touching confession, Agent Bristow changed his request regarding you as a custodian. She'll be raised in an excellent orphanage instead.

"Sometimes," Arvin says to Sydney, "you have to sacrifice some to protect those you love best. Or you'll lose them all."

He won't say anything to the Assistant Director. Of course he won't.

Sydney stares at him, a frown on her forehead which could have been her father's, brown eyes darkening into her mother's near black.

"You're lying," she states flatly. It's not like Sydney to be disrespectful to an adult, but that is what she says. A part of him hopes she'll be able to keep that naiveté for a long time.

It says something about his disturbed state, though, that he wonders, even for a moment, whether she isn't right.

The linguist in me strongly objects to the simplification and indeed misuse of the term "Nemesis". I take it the question refers to a rather banal definition like "greatest enemy" or "most constant rival", or even "most hated person". Now of course there are several people in my life to whom such designations could be applied, and yet they do not really fit any of them.

Take Sydney. From the time she learned the truth about SD 6, she was without a doubt one of my most formidable opponents. I have always taken a certain pride in this, vain as it may sound; still, I can not see how one can deny Sydney became the magnificent warrior she is in part because of myself, both because I recruited her and trained her, and because later, once she had started to fight me, I was her reason to continue as an agent more often than not. But even if you ignore those periods in which we were allies, even while she continued to hate me, I have never seen Sydney as my enemy. I never hated her; the one time I genuinenly tried to kill her, I believed her to be someone else, and sought to avenge her death.

Or should I apply the title to Jack? I might have deliberately driven Sydney to shoot me, but what Jack did afterwards was entirely unplanned. He did, as he pointed out, best me even after I had bested Death herself. Given that Jack and I have worked with and against each other for most of our lives, quite often at the same time, you might certainly call him "a little more than kin and less than kind", as Shakespeare phrased it; and yet even in the times when we were most certainly fighting against each other, he was my friend. There were two occasions when he traded my life away to help Sydney - and yet I did not die - and one when he killed and resurrected me; when I shot him, I did so only because I knew I could bring him back. Surely, a true enemy seeks the complete annihilation of his foe?

And then there is Irina. We always saw each other a little too clearly for comfort, and we competed, for many years. For Jack for Sydney, for power - for Irina, which many of her opponents ignore to their detriment, headed the one organization to truly challenge the Alliance before its downfall - for Rambaldi. Jack understands obsession with a person, but not with an idea; Irina, on the other hand, understands the lure of the mystery itself only too well, though her motives still were somewhat different. But the idea of an enemy above all other enemies implies a certain exclusive intimacy, and I dare say Irina never gave me this, though we were, perhaps, more to each other at times than I ever wished to admit to myself. No, Irina and Jack always were each other's in this regard as in others, and I never fooled myself about this.

In any case, neither Sydney nor Jack nor Irina took from me what I loved most, and they most certainly did not transform me into who I became. I did not need to spend considerable time in the darkness to understand just who did this to me. There is a curse implied in the commandment of the Delphic Oracle, you know. Know thyself. Know thyself indeed.

But to call oneself one's greatest enemy has become such a trite cliché these days. In any case, and to return to the beginning, this is not what the term "nemesis" really means. Given the sad decline of education these days, I'm not suprised at the general ignorance, but rather than lamenting it, I shall attempt a little explanation. Nemesis is a Greek goddess, you see. The goddess of just anger. No, not one of the furies, though she resembles them in some of her obligations. Nemesis avenges hubris, that quality that makes us assume we are indeed not just the captains of our fate but can also shape the world to our liking; that we can even triumph over the gods themselves. Next to hubris, she punishes offenses to Themis, the goddess of justice and morality.

But most of all, she punishes heartless lovers. Understand that this does not mean "people who feign love". No, it means "people who love and yet hurt those they love".

Given all of this, there can really be no other choice. Who should my Nemesis be but my daughter Nadia?

Jack did not see her when I did. Nor did anyone else - certainly not the unlamented members of Prophet Five when she first started appearing to me. Maybe I am, and yet, I cannot think of anything more appropriate, and I have come to accept it as just. Nemesis always is, you know.

So, Nadia.

I did not know of her existence for most of her life. Even today, I wonder what would have happened to both of us if I had known, or found out after she was taken from Irina. But be that as it may, I learned of Nadia shortly after my wife Emily had died. At this point, I had startled young Mr. Sark and Irina by leaving them with the ongoing compilation of Il Dire, indeed all my Rambaldi collections, and whatever else I had, and disappearing. I went to Tibet, to see the man who, the army corps of engineers aside, had first drawn my attention to Milo Rambaldi. We all reach a point where we are exhausted and worn out enough to have no other question but "why?", like a child: and this was the one I posed. In reply, he showed me a manuscript that told me, in words written centuries before either she or I were born, that I had a daughter. It also told me my daughter was none other than the Passenger.

(Later, when I had started looking for her, Irina and I had an angry conversation on the phone. She said I should stop looking for her. "You're not looking for your daughter," she continued, "you're looking for the Passenger." "I'm looking for both," I replied.

I should have known then I had just doomed us both.)

I searched the world for her, not even knowing her name. When I had finally found her, she seemed at once heartbreakingly real and utterly remote: a beautiful young woman, Ophelia as painted by Millais. There was nothing of me that I recognized, though one could see the resemblance to both Irina and Sydney. I still remember the very moment when I knew she was my daughter in my heart as well as I had known it in my mind: not when she tried to escape - that was Irina - but when she told me she had tricked me as well as the CIA.

Nadia's decision to love me was a miraculous gift after that. For it was a decision, and not made blindly; she had seen just what I was capable of before we even started our journey, and she got another reminder when we arrived in Siena. It was my turn to make a decision afterwards. I finally saw mere biology was not enough; I had to become her father by transforming myself. All those years of watching Jack and Sydney, of loving Sydney myself, and I had still not understood this quintessential thing: a child changes you as much or more as you can ever hope to influence it. Unless, of course, you do not allow it.

For one year, one year that turned out to be the last I can never regret, I changed as much as I was and probably will be able to. I did not, to borrow an obvious image, become Paul, nor did I ever, but I was Saul somewhere between the ground and Damascus. It wasn't a sudden or simple thing, or something I felt unambiguous about. Events such as Anna Espinosa's return or the ursurper using my name made me feel I had betrayed something holy to me. I had stopped the quest, I had allowed to let Rambaldi's heritage to fall in the hands of greedy ignorants by turning my back on it. But I had gained my daughter, my daughter who greeted me each morning when I came to work and allowed me to be part of her life, my daughter who was happy, by and large, and surely, this was worth it?

Nemesis can be kind before she strikes.

My own last attempt to change the world was what claimed Nadia, with the malicious help of Yelena Derevko, granted, but Yelena would have never been able to use the drug that took Nadia's free will and sanity from her if I had not used the basic formula two years earlier. As a result, I killed my daughter three times, and perhaps the greatest irony, truly worthy of the Greeks as their most masterful and their most cruel, is that the third and fatal time, which had come without intention, was the true betrayal. The first time, when I shot her before she could kill her sister, she did not actually die, but sank into a coma; it did not make the action itself less of a killing. I had never loved Nadia more than when I pulled the trigger; there was no other choice, none but death to not just Sydney but everyone else, though I cannot claim I shot her to save the world; I did it because that was what she would have wanted had she been in possession of her mind. Nadia, you see, was a heroine.

The second time, I killed her because that was what was supposed to end the coma and bring her back. It was, I had been told, her one chance. Before she could be injected with the cure for the virus still affecting her, she had to be dead for thirty seconds. And so I killed her again. I had no guarantee it would work, of course, but at that point, nearly a year after that shot, there was little else I had not tried. This time, there was no distance, as there had been in Russia; she was in my arms, and I felt her shudder and struggle. I felt the death I brought her; every one of those thirty seconds.

It worked. Pandora, another of those so very appropriate Greek myths, had in her box all the plagues ever unleashed on men, and they all escaped. The most terrible of them, the last one, which has remained with us every since, was hope.

She did not have more than twenty four hours to live after that. The last time I killed my daughter Nadia did not happen through a gun shot or a cloth pressed on her face to stop her breath. I did not even see her die, and that makes the lack of intention irrelevant: it was the greatest betrayal of all. I pushed her to one side to snatch the Rambaldi manuscript she had thrown into the fire, and when I held it, the light had left her eyes.

It was not the last time I saw her. Of course it wasn't. And you see, it does not matter whether her form is something chosen by madness or fate, whether her voice is that of my own mind or truly her voice, proving all my previous smug dismissals of ghosts untrue. What I told her when she was still alive, that last day, is still true: I will always need her more than she ever needed me.

Nemesis is the daughter of Nyx, the goddess of the Night - and Oceanos, who is Water. Her anger is just, and her words are true, and she will not let go until she finds you well and duly punished.

There was really no one else it could have been.

If asked, no matter by whom, Arvin Sloane would tell you either a lie or at best a half truth. If, on the other hand, you asked his enemies or friends - who sometimes amount to the same thing - or even the people he worked with, they would not tell you the truth, either. They would tell you what, in their opinion, made him detrimental to their lives.

Take Ariana Kane, former head of Alliance Intelligence. Ms Kane thought Arvin Sloane was ridiculously sentimental when it came to Jack and Sydney Bristow, to the point of getting senile, and that he was overlooking the obvious signs of their disloyalty because of that. Of course, Ms. Kane ended up being framed by Arvin Sloane for a crime no one had committed - the murder of his then very much alive wife - and only then realized he had been using both Bristows in addition to herself.

On the other hand, Marcus Dixon, who did kill Emily Sloane in the end, accidentally as he was trying to kill her husband, would argue that Arvin Sloane had no weakness because he had no genuine feeling for anyone at all, safe for Rambaldi and himself. He would tell you that Sloane's obsession with Rambaldi was a trait that could be counted on as persistent, but to call it his fatal weakness would imply that Arvin Sloane had some good points as well, the capability to be a good man despite all his crimes, and that this meant giving Sloane too much credit. Arvin Sloane, Dixon would tell you, was evil to the core. There was nothing in him that could have been redeemed, and never had been.

Of course, Marcus Dixon was hardly what you could call unprejudiced.

Judy Barnett, closing his file after his reported death in Mongolia, looked back on her years of studying the man and the brief time during which she had been involved with him, and came to the conclusion that Arvin Sloane's fatal weakness was his inability to let go of anything that ever meant anything to him, even if this resulted in two very different desires. Looking over the various testimonies, she did not think his actions during the last weeks of his life meant he finally had made a definite choice as much as one had been made for him which he had been unable to come to terms with, with the result being a course of thinly disguised self-annihilation.

Of course, few people and causes did genuinenly mean something to Arvin Sloane. And Dr. Barnett had been known to be wrong before.

But then again, anyone who could confirm or contradict her diagnosis was dead. Or were they?

He’s very young, almost a rookie. Being allowed to participate in a White House briefing is an honor he’s keenly aware of, though he does not feel entirely undeserving. He knows what he’s worth, and he worked hard for this. There’s just one junior agent whose performance has been on a similar exemplary level, one J. D. Bristow, and Bristow, J.D., has a reputation for being not exactly a team player, which means he’d never have been first choice for a briefing in the White House. Actually, Sloane, A., does not regard this as an advantage; he likes his victories to be not by default. He’ll try to get assigned with Bristow, J.D., he’ll make the man into a team player, and then, then they’ll see whether it will still be Sloane who gets to meet the President.

Tonight, though. Tonight he’s living the perfect moment. He does his job, he makes his minor part during the briefing succinct and impressive precisely, he gets a presidential handshake, though he doesn’t doubt the President will have forgotten him within the next hours, or at most after the next day. That is alright, though. It wasn’t the President he wanted to impress; Presidents come and go. His superiors, on the other hand, are in for a longer time, and they won’t regret having chosen him.

“Coming, Arvin?” one of them says, pointing to the limousine which is supposed to bring them all back to Langley, and he surprises himself.

“No,” he says. “I’m going to walk for a while.”

The approving smiles all around falter slightly. It is early February, and the night is cold. He doesn’t even have a coat, and he’s small and wiry, not the athletic type with pounds of flesh for protection. This is an excentric statement, and excentricity is not approved by the CIA.

“I need to get some air,” he says hastily, and they nod in understanding relief. It’s been a big day. Any kid would feel a bit weak in the knees. Nothing wrong with that.

Having said his goodbyes, he walks down the steps of the White House and tries to determine just what he feels. The cold night air around him makes it possible to see the stars, very clearly, and he can recognize individual constellations. Every breath he takes is filled with promise. His career within the CIA will flourish; he knows it will. He’ll meet a woman he can love, and who will love him. He’ll make friends, true friends, not the casual useful acquaintances he has cultivated so far. And one day, he’ll have children as well.

Die now, the Greeks used to say about such moments.

After a while, he realizes he’s heading towards Jefferson Memorial. Jefferson the wordsmith, the man of contradictions, the intellectual among the Presidents, inspiration to explorers, the devoted husband who in all likelihood had fathered illegitimate children, called the Sphinx among American statesmen; he has always been Arvin Sloane’s favourite President.

The Memorial doesn’t provide its usual calm and comfort, though. He feels increasingly restless, and pursued by something he cannot trace down. Not literary; he may be young, but he thinks he’d be able to spot someone following him. But something is there, making it harder for him to breathe, and it’s not the February cold.

He doesn’t understand why he’s not happy, why the joy this moment should provide is not forthcoming.

Looking over the basin, he can see Lincoln. Stern white features, square jaw. Father of the nation, martyr of the nation. No room for ambiguities there. But the illumination used to highlight Lincoln in the night doesn’t reach across the waters, and suddenly he knows. As surely as he knows that life will give him all he wants, the career, a loving wife, a friend, a child, he knows there is a darkness coming that will swallow it all.

Anything that lives, dies. Nothing is eternal. Not these monuments, either; he can already see the decay setting in, the slow rotting away, and they’re nothing compared to the remains of truly old cultures, a mere century or two. He has always known this, but suddenly, tonight of all nights, it seems unbearable. On a whim, he takes out his matches and strikes one. He’s not a heavy smoker, and he doesn’t smoke now; he just watches the match burn, a small glow in the darkness, and the brief, sharp pain when the flame reaches his skin manages to extinguish all forebodings for just that second.

When he leaves Jefferson Memorial behind, the darkness swallows him whole.

All in all, it had taken far longer than he had expected to end his imprisonment, but it did, at last, end.

“You’ve got to be joking,” said the Senator whose name he always had trouble recalling during his parole hearing.

“This man is directly responsible for murder, extortion, kidnapping and torture. How can you even think of letting him go?”

“If you look at every psychiatric evaluation done on him,” his lawyer argued passionately, “as well as the testimony of Mr. Flinkman, you will admit that he was in no way in control of or responsible for his actions.”

The hearing took a long time, which gave him ample opportunity to reflect on the irony of the situation. Psychiatric evaluations. So despite all their decades together, it wasn’t going to be Jack who would be securing his release. Despite the fact he loved her like a daughter, it would not be Sydney.

“…very well. Your client will be transferred to a medical facility. But regular reports will have to be…”

A medical facility. Well, that should not be a problem. It would be almost insultingly easy.

“…Mr. Bolger? Do you understand these conditions?”

“Naturally.”

If only they would not keep insisting on this masquerade and calling him by another name. He was Arvin Sloane, not someone named Ned Bolger. Still, it was a minor irritation. He could bear with it if it meant regaining his freedom. He should have known it would be through a lot of anonymous people he could care less about. Friendship, love, hate, they put you in chains visible or invisible; but you could always depend on the kindness of strangers.

Footnote: Ned Bolger was the man brainwashed into believing he was Arvin Sloane and featured in the s4 episodes Pandora, Another Mr. Sloane and In Dreams.