He arrives at work stiff, body aching, exhausted beyond the half-pot of coffee he's already downed. At least he is used to working like this, maybe even good at it.

No new messages. At the top of the last used page on the legal pad, scrawled out yesterday when he'd finished plowing through the operational files, his list of four maybes:

He double-clicks records, new query for everything directly related to Jeffrey Black. It returns with five hits and an error message: "Some references not available electronically."

Vaughn groans, although he expected this. Electronic filing of records has been mandated for less than a year; anything older usually exists in paper form only. Black is a 7-year veteran, which necessitates a trip to Records if he wants everything on the agent.

He'll go now, and take his list. All of his suspects have been in the Agency for at least a year, and they'll all need paper records pulled.

He takes the elevator to the basement. They moved everything here shortly before he left to work at the JTF full-time. There was some talk of having a small team of high-clearance secretaries work on converting everything to the new system, but that had died in budget cuts. Instead, it all went down here. There if anyone needs it, which is rare — old files are only for people doing jobs like his.

He swipes his access card, slaps his hand on the biometric scanner. It grows green around his fingers for a few seconds, then the massive steel door clunks open. He walks inside; this is the first time he's been down here since they moved everything.

The room is dizzyingly large — it runs the entire length of the building, with only support columns and row after row of wide beige filing cabinets to break up the space. The lights hum fluorescent, harsh off white cinder block walls, freshly painted, impossibly distant from where he stands. It feels like there must be many more files in here than the old Records room.

He walks toward the first row of cabinets. "A-Ae," printed on a small white card on the end of the row, like a library. He walks past rows two and three — still in the As. Four is "Ar-Ba," Five, "Bc-Bh." Six, finally, "Bi-Br."

It registers that Jeffrey Black should be down this aisle somewhere, but he finds himself drawn to "Br" instead.

He passes the "Bl-Bm" cabinet on his way. Pulls open the heavy door of "Br," scraping loud on its tracks. Each cabinet holds three levels of files, drawers four file folders wide, and deep. Still, it doesn't take long to find "Bristow." Top level, third set of folders over.

He thumbs through Sydney's file first; everything is in order, ending when he'd started filing his reports electronically. All those paper bags — every one she's ever dead dropped — in storage at a separate, larger facility, far outside the city. Rambaldi documents, computer disks and the like, too, although those are more heavily guarded.

He pinches the top of Jack's file with his fingers, slides it out. It is a good three inches thick, but still thinner than he remembers. He lays it down on the top of the file cabinet and opens to the last page, the list of references.

Everything in the primary cabinets is classified Alpha-10, the lowest clearance level the Agency has. Still enough to require security to get into the room, but far below his own clearance. According to the white laminate sign on the wall, he'll need to cross the basement, to separate sets of filing cabinets, each corresponding to clearance levels, and look up the file numbers referenced in the back of Jack's file.

With his new, higher historical security clearance, he will be able to see more of Jack's file than what he'd copied for Sydney so long ago. Maybe there's something in there. What if there is?

Vaughn picks up the folder and walks to the end of the aisle, crossing the basement along the cinder block wall. Omega-17, nearly in the back, inside one of several glass rooms. He presses his hand against another scanner, enters. The files are numbered, here, each cabinet requiring a swipe of his access card just to open it, and he begins the process of looking up every number on Jack's long list.

———

He returns to his office with a stack of file folders halfway up his chest. Sets them down on the floor beside his desk and pulls off the top one to read.

It is a classified SD-6 mission, dated just after he'd been assigned Sydney's case. He'd been aware of the mission, but hadn't known the details. He wasn't privy to a lot of details back then — a higher security clearance had come with his promotion to senior agent.

He skims the file, and the Omega-17 version of Jack Bristow looks a lot like the version he already knows. The next few files are similar, and he skims through the top half of the pile. Back before Vaughn joined the Agency, through operations he has never heard of. Back to the beginning of SD-6, the Alliance.

A file full of statements from that time. Pages of tiny, neat print.

Back even further. Missions in the Soviet Union, Iran. Project Christmas, which gives him pause, but he picks through that file and finds there is nothing he didn't already know or suspect. Sydney's name is never mentioned.

More missions in the Soviet Union, and East Germany. Berlin, simple wiretap job, and half a page in, William Vaughn a member of the team.

It shocks him, although it shouldn't. His father and Jack were contemporaries; it would make sense that they worked together, or at least saw each other in the halls back at Langley. Stopped to chat about their kids and their wives, never knowing that Jack's wife would kill his father. That their children's paths would cross, years later.

He reads through the operational file, but the details are mundane, the mission easy and successful. The date just under two months before his father's death.

Vaughn picks up the next file. Berlin, again — they must have been there for awhile. This time just Jack and his father.

More files, more operations. Occasionally partners, often on the same team. And a few of those included Arvin Sloane. Moscow, Tehran, Leningrad, Kiev.

Jack and his father didn't just work together every once and awhile; it was nearly every high-level mission, for years. And Jack never once said anything. Why?

Perhaps because of Irina, what his wife did. But he could have said something, even just a mention in passing — by the way, I worked with your father.

He runs his finger along the curved tab of the folder on his desk. Leipzig, snatch and grab. He recognizes it from his father's journal, but his father rarely mentioned other agents there. And never Jack, or Sloane.

He has come a long way from the young recruit who waited only hours after he earned his security clearance and took his first opportunity to slip away to records, to read everything he could about his father. He's done so again, and again, throughout the years, every time his clearance was raised. Learning the truth, a truth he'd never expected, has dulled that curiosity.

But it is still there. He still needs to know.

He stands and begins the journey back to Records. He locks his office door on the way.

———

His father's stack of references is substantial, but much shorter than Jack Bristow's. Maybe if he'd lived —

Most of the files, like Jack's, are operational references. But there is one supplemental file on his death. Vaughn pauses before he opens it; Delta-15 came with pictures and details he hadn't been prepared for.

This file contains copies of those pictures, of the coroner's report, of the dental x-rays that had ultimately been used to identify him. None of these are new. In the back, though, a lengthy briefing paper implicating Irina Derevko in his death, explaining her relationship to Jack Bristow, her faked death.

Beyond that, initial briefings for the four days he'd been designated "missing." In that time, Derevko had questioned him, tortured him. Made him what appeared in those pictures.

He cringes, closes the file. Nothing he didn't already know, and not worth seeing all of that again.

On to the first operational file — his father's last mission before he'd gone missing, Leningrad, Jack absent from this one. Vaughn finds he's familiar with the mission — it is the last entry in his father's journal.

He reads back through the missions. He is familiar with some from the journals, and others he's already read at a lower clearance. Many of the Omega-17 cases match with Jack's.

Berlin, again, then Kiev, this time retrieval of computer code. This one in the journal, too. The mission had been difficult, he remembers — a Soviet storage facility, heavily guarded — and his father had been so happy that they'd succeeded. But here —

Vaughn flips back through the files, rereading. It must be a different mission, although it sounds like the one in the journal. It has to be. Perhaps his memory is flawed; it has been a long time since he's read through the journals.

———

Several more possible discrepancies emerge as he works through the rest of his father's operational files. You must have things mixed up. It's not like you have them memorized or anything.

"I was wondering when you'd get around to that."

Devlin, standing in the doorway, one hand resting on the frame.

Vaughn glances around his desk; fortunately, he'd placed Jack's files on the floor, out of sight from Devlin's vantage point.

"What?"

"Reading your father's Omega-17 material." Devlin walks inside, pulls the door closed behind him. Eases himself into one of the chairs in front of Vaughn's desk. "I thought of that as soon as your new assignment crossed my desk. The historical security clearance."

You've been caught. Shit. "Yeah."

"You don't have to be ashamed, Michael. I'd be concerned if you didn't." Devlin says. "He was good, your father."

"Did you work with him?" He doesn't remember encountering Devlin's name in the files, and certainly he would have noticed.

"Only occasionally, never on missions. We were in different departments. I knew him mostly by reputation."

"He did work a lot with Jack Bristow. I wasn't aware of that."

"I'm not surprised Jack didn't mention it to you. Those were strange times, back then, for the Agency. Church committee hearings, a lot of agents killed, by Derevko and others. A lot of agents who went to the Alliance not far down the road. I assume Arvin Sloane's name came up a few times?"

"Yeah."

"Yes, strange times." Devlin pauses. "Speaking of, how is Agent Bristow? Sydney, I mean."

"She's, um — she's good. On a mission right now."

"Ah." Devlin rises. "I have to ask, and this doesn't go beyond this room, but I want to know. Were the two of you involved while you were her handler?"

The question doesn't surprise Vaughn. If anything, he is surprised Devlin did not ask it earlier. "No. Absolutely not. We waited. Probably not as long as we should have, but we waited."

"I thought so." Devlin turns, begins to walk out. He stops with a hand on the doorknob and looks back at Vaughn. "I think you already know how I feel about how they handled this. We used to be a lot more intelligent here about our assignments. Hell, some of our best teams have been husband and wife."

———

He still has a key to his mother's house, a tiny white three-bedroom on a street full of them, but it has been a long time since he's felt comfortable walking in without knocking.

Her five-year-old Ford sits in the driveway, and she answers, as expected, gardening gloves clutched in her left hand.

"Michael? I didn't hear the phone. Is something wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong, Mom. I'm sorry I didn't call — I wanted to look through Dad's journals, if that's okay. I figured I'd just stop by."

"Of course." She smiles softly, steps inside. No mention of how long it's been since he just stopped by. "I've actually been planning on going through some of that attic, so I can go up there with you. Unless you want to be alone?"

"No. I'd appreciate the company."

He follows her inside, through the living room filled with furniture that has been there since he was a child. End tables and shelves filled with pictures, faux-gold frames.

Recent ones on the end tables. His high school and college graduations — similar poses, similar caps and gowns. Him, playing hockey, late teens. Trying to interest Donovan in a frisbee some Fourth of July not long after he'd graduated college. Her, standing with some of the staff at the hospital, and again with the women in her book club.

Old, yellowed shots on the shelves. His mother in a long lace wedding dress, standing in front of his father, his arms crossed over her stomach, both of them grinning, glowing. All of them, together, snapped by some stranger on the beach. Michael and Dad, playing catch in the long grass, not long before his father's death. Amidst all of them, barely faded in a triangular glass-and-wood case, his father's flag, white stars on blue facing out.

He lingers on the flag, as always, during the walk through the living room. Right turn and up the stairs. He steps in front of her when they reach the hallway, reaches up on tiptoes and pulls the cord down to release the panel in the ceiling. He rolls the ladder down, nearly to the floor, gestures to his mother to go first.

When she's pulled her legs clear of the opening, he climbs the ladder, steps up into a thick layer of dust on the unfinished wood floor. She has never been able to control that, or the thick cobwebs in the corners, but for the most part his mother has kept this place well-organized, nearly everything packaged into clear Rubbermaid containers, stacked along the walls and in clusters on the floor.

"I think I'm going to have a yard sale," she says, walking toward a stack of containers. "This is more junk than any old woman needs."

He leaves her, walking to the far corner — the one area not filled with plastic. Old trunks, here, the best of the ones she'd used to ship their possessions back to the United States. She saved them for the things of his father's she'd kept: clothing, books, postcards and letters, mostly. And in one of them, a stack of leather-bound journals, nested atop a pile of neatly folded old sweaters.

He opens that one and carefully lifts the stack, placing it on one of the other trunks and sitting down beside it. His mother has tried to give them to him many times before, but he's always said no — they belong here, with the rest of his father's things. And he's never been sure he wants them in his possession.

His mother has not read them. They were off-limits to her when William Vaughn was alive; he'd told her there were work-related things in there and she respected that, she's said, understood that he needed an outlet. Even after his death, she felt it would be betraying his trust, somehow, and she had been so angry the day she'd come up here and found Vaughn reading them. She spoke in a harsh whisper, and it was the most frightening thing he'd heard, at that point in his life:

"Go to your room. Now. And don't you ever touch those again. Ever. Michael, do you understand me?"

It took hours, it seemed, for her to come down the ladder, her steps tap-tap-tap outside his bedroom door, to walk into the room. She'd been crying in that time — he knew it instantly, and felt a war brewing inside. To know more about his father was to hurt his mother, and did he want one as badly as he hated the other?

"I'm sorry, Michael," she'd said, sitting on his bed. "I know you want to know more about him. But those journals — he asked me not to read them, and I haven't, even now. I suppose it's okay for you to read them. Maybe he would have wanted it."

He'd clambered up that ladder the next day and read them all the way through, something he's done again and again, over the years. But he has never wanted to move them. This is their place.

The light is decent, here, close to the lone dusty window. He starts with the last one, chronologically — what he remembered as Kiev should be in here. Flipping gingerly through brittle yellow pages to the entry dated Oct. 3, 1975. Kiev in the file was October 5.

And then Oct. 6, 1975:

He lays the book down open on the trunk, beside the stack.

He picks up the journal and flips back to the beginning.

———

Click. The overhead bulb shining, his mother across the attic, releasing the cord.

"Thanks, Mom."

It is darker now, deep into twilight. He has lost track of time and place, something the journals always do to him. As a child, he would read and imagine the action, the exotic locales. What would New Delhi look like? Buenos Aires? Kiev? Now, he sees real locations, real details, his father running through the same city streets he has, a long way from this attic.

"I'm going to head down and heat up some dinner," his mother says. "Would you like some?"

"Yeah, I would. Just — I just need a minute."

"Take your time," she says. "Michael, are you sure you don't want to take those with you?"

"I think — yes, I would. If that's okay."

She studies him closely, as if she's looking for the reason for this turnabout after so many years. "Of course."

His mother starts down the ladder and Vaughn closes the last journal, picks up the stack in his arms. After all this time, you finally take them because they're, what, evidence? Of what?

He has read through almost all of them, now, and there are more discrepancies. And maybe they really were just his father describing how he'd wanted those missions to go. But there are other entries, for both successes and failures, that match up exactly with their case files.

———

He is sitting on his couch at home, beer in hand, when Sydney calls.

"Hey. Sorry I didn't call earlier," she says. "I'm not going to make it back until tomorrow night."

"It's okay," he says, guilty, thinking of Jack's secret and the stack of journals on his end table, untouched since he got here. "Is everything okay?"

"Yeah, it's fine. We were just delayed. I miss you."

"I miss you too, Syd."

"How was your day?"

"It was okay," he says. "Long."

"Oh. How's your assignment going?"

"Better. I finally feel like I've got the hang of what I'm supposed to be doing."

"Good." She pauses. "Hey, Vaughn, I've got to get going. I'll see you tomorrow."

"Okay. Call me when you get in."

"I will. Goodbye."

"Bye. Be safe, Syd."

He ends the call and readies himself for another night alone.