Chapter 1.1 — Postcards and Paper Bags

Tuesday, July 16, 2002

He hates this place. Too clean, too new, too white. It is Tuesday, so they have cleaned his floor the night before. It smells like a doctor's office — the antiseptic push of whatever cleanser makes institutional tiles extra-glossy. Here, when you let the paper do what paper, inherently, wants to do — make piles on your desk — people stare.

Like something is wrong with you for working like a normal person.

There are certainly advantages. Weather comes to mind, sunny on a light blue sky, a little too balmy and perfect and L.A., mocking the summer thunderstorms pummeling the rest of the country. Mocking the nuclear winter on everyone's mind, the tension that has steeped through this building like tea in hot water. It has been saturated for two months now.

They gave him a temporary assignment at Langley once. Two months on a floor with threadbare brown carpeting and walls that haven't seen white since men sat within them and debated the things he had read about in history books. Not to mention the things that never make the history books. You have to tiptoe through the scents to find anything good, best to focus on the coffee in your cup, properly burnt for late nights. There, they let you make piles on your desk. Expect it. They get work done there.

They get work done here, too, just without the piles. But today, Eric Weiss will not get any work done. His job is still SD-6, therefore less important, and irrelevant enough for him to be pulled off of analysis to give yet another new agent the grand tour of the place he hates. Yo-yos and practical jokes aside, he takes his job seriously, and his job is on hiatus. Again.

His office is far from — well, far from freaking everything — but most importantly, at this point, far from the elevator. He starts the long walk down the shiny-floored hallway and wonders briefly why more people don't slip and fall from this shit. They have missed a spot, by the chrome trash cylinder next to the elevator. One dull little circle in the midst of the shine, and somehow this is comforting to him.

———

The warehouse today, and Dixon only.

Marcus Dixon drives a minivan, and it earns him Michael Vaughn's envy. Vaughn considers this as he steps through the doorway of the warehouse, the steel door clapping shut behind him. Somehow, Dixon has succeeded where he and so many of his peers have failed.

Vaughn has known him for little over a month, but he can somehow see Dixon at his kitchen counter, packing lunches. Peanut butter and jelly and juice boxes slid in paper bags, into little hands, kisses on foreheads and off to school with you. A big, fatherly smile as they trot out the door.

The only paper bags Vaughn touches are the ones that arrive on his desk every few days. Little balls of brown paper, covered with careful, looping Sydney script — and more recently Dixon's jagged print — uncrumpled on his desktop, pads of fingers smoothing the wrinkles.

Generally, however, Marcus Dixon is not a man to envy. He is not a double agent by choice. A double agent, instead, because Jack Bristow held him at gunpoint two months ago and marched him to the CIA's L.A. headquarters, where they laid out the truth, slow and harsh. Vaughn wasn't around at the time, but he's heard Dixon crumpled like one of those bags.

"Afternoon." The metal fencing chings against itself as he slides it to the side, and he pulls his hand away, frowning at the layer of rust it leaves on his fingers.

Dixon only nods. His eyes are wary with too many trusts snapped and allegiances broken. Vaughn knows Dixon does not trust him, nor should he trust Dixon. From Sydney, he feels he knows the man, but he needs to build his own case, draw his own conclusions. You can't transfer trust.

Vaughn proffers a small black box. "The CIA wants a duplicate copy of whatever you pull off the mainframe. Seat 18-D, just like last time."

Dixon nods again, and stares at him. Analysis, perhaps, by a man who has needed to reanalyze his entire world in the last few months.

"Um, how is Sydney?" He had promised himself that he would not ask. But there it is, leaving his mouth.

"She's fine." At least it helps him draw words. "She had to work on a paper."

Vaughn has not seen his other agent in — it takes him a moment to do the math, and he is a bit proud of this — a little over a week. That was when she stared at the swirls of sawdust on the floor and asked quietly if he would please call her at Will Tippin's residence now.

———

Despite the cane, she can keep a pretty decent pace.

She is Christine Watkins, Weiss's charge for the day, and a very pleasant surprise. Pale blue eyes, startling enough that you notice them first and stay stuck there for awhile. Long and lean — wicked, he thinks — in a black pantsuit. Dark brown hair, twisted into a bun that should seem severe, but translates somehow into stunning instead.

Surprising enough that he — too busy ogling — tried to shake her hand when the elevator doors opened, not noticing until too late the metal tube flowing from her left hand and the file folder in her right. She laughed it off: "Sorry. Doc says maybe I can ditch this thing by the end of the week."

They are walking through the slick hallways now, but she is steady, the cane clicking as it hits the floor, rhythmic with her steps: tap-tap-click, tap-tap-click. She has been personable, pleasant, and he thinks maybe he should ask if she has plans for dinner. But there is a distance to her; steady observance, wariness, as if she feels the need to soak things from the environment that are outside his sphere of perception.

This, he has learned, is because she is not the green agent he had anticipated. Instead, she comes off seven years in Russia, ended with a bullet that now necessitates the cane.

"So were you ever in the L.A. office before?" More small talk; he will bide his time and try to get a better read.

"I spent about a year here before I went into the field, but that was in the old building." He would have liked the old building, he decides. Especially with her in it.

Tap-tap-click, and they reach the end of the hallway. "Did you want to see the op-tech room now?"

She looks almost embarrassed, and runs a faint smile across perfect lips, eyes trailing down to her cane hand. "Actually, if you don't mind, could we take a little breather?"

Right. Faux pas number two. But he has not noticed any change in her carriage or facial expressions. Note to self: This is why they discourage inter-office dating. Because hitting on a spy is just damn hard.

"Yeah-sure-sorry." He runs them together and it feels like high school again. "My office is just around the corner."

They turn the corner, and he attempts chivalry by holding the door open — surely a lost cause by now. She sinks slowly into the fabric of the chair in front of his desk, then sets to absorbing the room. He has left the yo-yo sitting on top of his desk, and curses himself for it, but she does not linger there. Eyes sweeping, soaking, and then she props the cane up against the desk and swings the chair around to face the door. To face the threat, he realizes.

"Would you like some coffee?"

"Yes, please." She focuses on the activity behind him. "Black."

He turns to fetch the coffee and decides it is time to give up. Christine Watkins is a hard one to read.

———

It is somewhat of a wonder that Michael Vaughn still has a job. He has been by-the-book since the mess in Taipei, but really should have been fired for said mess. That he was not is more a testament to the CIA's current need for manpower than his service record.

There is something to be said for getting lost in the shuffle.

It is also somewhat of a wonder that Michael Vaughn is still alive. He owes this to the fortuitous air duct that gave him oxygen and then an escape route. From there came a desperate search — fruitful, after five minute of dripping through the Taipei night — to find a pay phone. A call to one of many numbers he keeps burned in his brain, a harsh warning about unsecured lines, and finally acquiescence. They would send a team.

And they did, extracting Sydney five hours later. Irina Derevko was nowhere to be found.

He tries not to focus on that as he pounds down the stairs to the lower levels of the CIA's L.A. headquarters. This trip is about peacemaking for events before Taipei. Gathering the scattered pieces of a friendship and seeing if maybe some couldn't be stuck back together again.

The stairs are the fastest way to reach Weiss's office. They allow him to avoid the unfortunate maze of hallways, and besides, he woke with too much of a headache to run today.

This is a poor substitute, but at least it is something.

The same as his proposed peace offering — "want to hit the bar tonight?" — simple but still rolled over in his mind many times for practice, tested and worn smooth like river rocks. Something, at least.

He reaches the landing on the proper floor, opens the white-painted door and steps into the bustle. Everything is frantic now, but it is a delirious game of hurry-up-and-wait; the worry is plentiful and the intelligence thin. He is glad "the nuke," the unofficial nickname of the cause of all this, is not in his domain, but the worry is there nonetheless. It is for everyone who knows.

There are cubicles on one side, offices another, and a long narrow pass to cross. A secretary nearly runs into him, a pad of fluorescent pink "While you were out" notes leading her way. He dodges her and continues on his way; the route is automatic, traveled many times, although not recently.

This is the unpredictability of life. Every day, countless people crash into the unforeseen. There are car accidents, heart attacks, convenience store robberies. Unexpected promotions. Unexpected firings. Some are surprised by other people. Unexpected compliments, insults. Shifts in personality. New people. Old people.

So it is for Michael Vaughn when he turns a familiar corner and walks into a ghost.

———

There is a pause — one minute, five minutes, he does not know — and only staring.

Staring and observing.

Her eyes are still the same strange blue. But now they are edged with faint lines. More tortured. Wiser, perhaps. Her hair, dark brown — almost black — without the sun streaks that eased its depth when he knew her. The bun should seem stern, austere at least. Instead, it only serves to show off the angles of her face, drawing on sharp cheekbones and those eyes to pull it all off.

Beige lipstick on those old curves. Pale, traditional. Before, wine-colored, a few shades too dark and bold to fit in here. Her skirts, too, always existed a few inches too short of protocol. Pants today. Traditional, classy, and the air of wildness that surrounded her — red lips and short skirts and impetuous eyes — is absent.

The attitude is not, when she finally destroys the silence.

"Don't look at me like that, Michael. If it was up to me, I'd still be in Moscow and I'd still have a fucking spleen."

Many years ago, they played darts this way. Launch words as weapons, then duck for the rebuttal. He is still too speechless for a counterstrike, too shocked to duck.

He manages only one word, and it is hardly more than a whispered acknowledgement of recognition. "Chris." Seven years. Then, he would have had more to say.

Or yell.

There is something else. Something his initial observation has missed. Something off in her posture. He does not catch it until she stands, left hand sliding behind her to pull out the cane.

There is a moment where his anger dissipates, replaced with brief, stinging ache. Her movements are stiff, slow, and his eyes set anchor on the cane, but catch something like a grimace in the periphery. His features soften, and a little pain creeps in. This is not something to be felt, and Vaughn pushes it out of the way.

"This was not my choice." Calm, level, but the undertones are bitter.

The cane flicks forward as she starts to leave, and Weiss picks this moment to walk in, a ribbed Styrofoam coffee cup in each hand.

A pause, a moment of observation.

"I take it you two have already met."

———

Seven years ago, there was a postcard. The generic gift shop variety — palm trees and sunshine for the forgetful at LAX. Three words, scrawled on the back.

She might have even addressed it, if the flight had been delayed a little longer. If her tears hadn't made the ink run.

It went into the trash instead of the mail.