| Subject: Chapter Three |
Author:
grit kitty
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Date Posted: 19:00:21 03/12/01 Mon
In reply to:
grit kitty
's message, "Learning Birkoff" on 18:56:34 03/12/01 Mon
~~~
THREE
“Hey.”
Absorbed in his work, the soft voice skipped off Jason’s awareness like a flat stone off water.
“Hey, Jason.”
He looked up when he felt a tug on his sleeve; it was Quinn, reaching over from her station behind his.
“What?”
She nodded her head towards Munitions. “That big fellow over there, talking to Walter. He was pointing at you. Do you know him?”
Jason looked across the way. ‘Big’ was just a warm-up for this man’s description. He towered over Walter, the dark skin of his exposed arms rippling with thick muscles, making the old man look like a pale gecko in the shadow of a wall.
“No.” He looked at Quinn. “Do you?”
She shook her head slowly. “No, but I think you’re about to find out.”
He turned to look. The dark giant strode across the floor in a straight line towards him. Jason tried to match up the face with those in his memory; the size of the man alone should have trigged recognition, but he couldn’t remember ever meeting him.
“I reckon I will find out,” Jason said softly. He glanced back at Quinn and saw only her chair, lazily rotating, empty.
“Excuse me,” said the man. He stopped just shy of the dais that defined Comm’s perimeter: a newly built mountain looming over Jason. “I just wanted to have a few words with you, if I could.” The man’s velvety baritone rang with French undertones.
“Sure. I’m Jason Crawford.” He didn’t stand or offer his hand. “You’re…?”
“Philippe.”
“What can I do for you?” Jason had to crane his neck.
“I wanted to see the face of a man I admire. He is dead, but this strange miracle has brought you here.” The man sniffed deeply, his chest swelling with a massive sigh that he released gustily. “Ah, it’s good to see him in his brother.”
Jason wondered if he needed a new category of smile.
“I mean no disrespect, Jason. You see, young Birkoff saved my life, four years ago. And only months ago, he saved it one last time, saved me and everyone here in Section.”
“I - I’d heard about that,” Jason whispered hoarsely. The sudden dry band around his throat scared him. He coughed lightly into his fist.
“I made myself available, four years ago, but the opportunity to repay him never presented itself,” said Philippe. “I left One for Section Three, transferred just after he died, and I worried; how could I remove this debt of honor? It seemed I would never have the chance until I learned of you. Now, I know what I can do.”
Philippe regarded him warmly, beaming down from a height like the sun.
“I don’t think I’m following you, Philippe.”
“I can never directly repay Birkoff for what he has done for me, the friendship he gave me, but now that you’re here, I can repay him through you. If you require assistance, you ask for Philippe. Any thing, any time.” He leaned down and patted Jason’s shoulder. “Philippe. Remember that.”
“Thanks.”
Jason watched, bemused, as the giant strolled away.
“Is he gone yet?” asked Quinn. She crept back quietly as she’d abandoned him.
“He’s gone all right.”
“What did he want?”
Jason paused. He glanced across the way to Munitions; Walter gazed back, then turned and dissolved into the dark recesses of his department.
“He just wanted a freak show.”
“Freak show?” She slid into her chair.
“Yeah. Come see the amazing living, breathing ghost!” He laughed bitterly. “I should charge admission, darlin’. I’d make a killin’.”
“You know, I’d never met your brother, not in the flesh, but I did know him, just a little.”
Jason rotated his chair to face her. He felt the clutch of naked curiosity grab him by the nape and shake him, hard. “How?”
“I was at Five; we coordinated on those missions that intersected. I wanted his job.”
“You got it, honey. Not bad.”
“That was years ago. Before Mr. Jones. By the time I’d gotten his job, my priorities had changed.” Quinn looked down at her hands clasped in her lap. “I wish I could tell you about him, but I didn’t know him well. He was good at what he did, and he did just about everything around here.”
“That’s all?”
Quinn nodded. “Oh, one thing. He seemed to like messy sandwiches. I’d caught him more than once with one at his elbow. Ugly, greasy, American-looking things.”
A smile hit him, unexpectedly; the kind of smile that made his ears pull back and his eyes crinkle up.
It felt good.
~~~
An explosion rocked the speakers in Comm. Quinn caught Jason’s eye, her brows caught up with helplessness. “We lost them,” she said.
Jason took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The mild pain of eyestrain had bloomed hours ago into a verdant jungle of throbbing ache. He’d never suffered headaches before Madeline had altered his eyes.
“Jason, what happened?” The internal speaker threw out Nikita’s concerned voice.
“They got the team.”
“Casualties?”
Jason glanced to his monitor at the thermal hot-spot that radiated where the van should have been. He saw nothing warmer than rocks and vegetation around the inferno.
“Hundred percent.” He ground his knuckles into the hot hollows of his eye. “We lost this one.”
“We can’t lose this one, Jason,” Nikita said, her voice steely. “That’s a nuclear warhead heading into a hostile country. Do something.”
“Do what? Nobody’s alive!”
Quinn shifted in her chair, about to speak, but was forestalled by Nikita’s voice.
“Contact the substation in Singapore. Have a flash mission flank the enemy on their way to the border.”
Jason looked at Quinn. She nodded, mutely.
“Do it now, Jason. Seconds count.”
He opened a secure connection to the substation, visual and audio. As he waited for the protocols to line up, he turned to Quinn.
“You knew.”
“Yes. You did, too.”
Jason stared at her mutely; his features stilled so he knew she would see nothing in his face, not regret or fear.
“We’re open, One. Gillian here.”
Jason swiveled his chair to face the screen. A woman looked out at him soberly, her face softened by his myopic vision. He fumbled his glasses to his face. For a heartbeat, he saw her clearly and caught a gestalt impression of soft brown hair, pink rose cheeks, a scatter of freckles on her nose, bright eyes.
She gasped, and blanched, the color visibly draining from her face so that the freckles stood out sharp on her sallow skin.
“We need a flash mission, priority one,” said Jason.
“I – I – I –“ She stuttered, blinked, and swallowed visibly. “Yes, of course. Flash mission. Priority one.”
She remained in view, her head bent to her task, her voice softly calling orders through the headset she wore. Jason prepared the relevant mission files, encrypting them in preparation for rapid transmission to the substation. He spared a glance to the monitor and caught the woman darting a haunted expression to her end of the channel. Jason felt a vague embarrassment, as if he’d seen something naked in her face.
“Ready on this end,” she said.
“Sending now.”
“Received.” The minutes stretched impossibly long. Gillian looked everywhere but into her monitor. Jason heard a soft bleat, and she said, “Mission deployed. ETA is twenty-three minutes.”
Jason relayed the information to Nikita. “Keep a live interface with the Singapore station,” she ordered.
He looked at the monitor. Gillian stared down at something out of his view. Her face remained paper-white, the freckles looked as if they floated just above the skin.
“Y’know, I hate this waiting game. Boring as hell,” said Jason, his voice casual and coaxing.
Gillian raised her eyes in fits and starts, then snapped to his face and stayed there. The arrangement of cameras and monitors had long ago been configured to best convey the effect of direct eye contact during communications. The transmission was real-time, smooth, crisp. He could see her eyes shift minutely, lingering on his mouth, his hair.
Déjà vu.
They all did that. Searching for the differences, the similarities. Gillian seemed to have a particularly vested interest. Jason had known instinctively, within heartbeats of seeing her first reaction. He knew women.
She had cared about his brother, was probably his lover when he’d died.
He felt his face brawl with the affable mask he wore, struggling to express a sudden inner turmoil he could not identify. There was no smile he could plaster on, no evasions of the slug of bitterness building in his guts.
Gillian cleared her throat, and said softly, “I’d heard a rumor so hideous, I didn’t think it could be true.” Her voice flowed with a genteel British accent. She leaned forward, filling the screen with her face and shoulders and folded arms. “You know who I am, don’t you?”
“Yes, I believe I have an idea,” he replied, as softly as she spoke.
“It was the glasses,” she said tightly. A glimmer of light betrayed the fulsome swell of tears welling in her eyes. “The hair, it’s different. Your face…it’s, it’s…you don’t smile like he did. But, you, you…” Her breath came faster, caught on jagged grief in her throat. “You fumbled for your glasses, just like he did, when he was tired.” Gillian bowed her head. Long, straight hair slid forward over her shoulder. She tucked it behind her ear with an impatient gesture, mussing her bangs at the same time.
“I…” Jason blinked rapidly, at a loss for what to say, what to do.
“I might have been able to…deal, but…”
She paused.
“The glasses,” she whispered.
All glib words had gone. No word, not one had remained. He was empty.
“It was the glasses.”
~~~~
Jason sat on the edge of his bed, leaning his elbows on his knees and contemplating his shoes. Italian leather, expensive; for some reason, the designer’s name escaped him. He cared about clothes, and dressing well, and it bothered him that he couldn’t think of the name.
The mission had concluded with a surprise success. Gillian had said nothing further to Jason, and he had said nothing back. He’d felt sick with sorrow and pity for her; it choked him. When he’d stood up and retreated from his chair, Quinn had silently slipped into it, pity and sorrow for him tying up her eyebrows and shadowing her eyes.
Jason pushed the mission and Gillian from his mind, and returned to the puzzle of his designer shoes. Santoni. That was it. He toed them off and fell back on the bed. His glasses nodded up off the bridge of his nose and banged him on the forehead; he took them off and laid them on the mattress at arm’s length.
The world blurred. Nothing too extreme. He could still see the checkerboard pattern in the ceiling although the texture of each panel had smoothed to nothing. His eyes swiveled, traversing the room; he could see the rectangle of door (but not the knob), a stack of entertainment equipment (but they melted into one solid rectangle of black plastic), a picture on the wall that he knew was of a sailboat on the ocean (but could only make out a light blotch which was the sail, and a dark blotch that was the water). He turned his head and looked at the clock next to the bed. He could see the glowing red numbers. If he squinted, just a little bit, he could read them: 12:43 A.M. Nope, not so bad. Not really.
”Fuck you, Madeline!”
The epithet spewed forth with hatred and spit, emerging from the bottom of his diaphragm without conscious volition. Jason was shocked that he’d yelled, and then shocked at the burning anger in his breast. He turned on his side and hammered the bed with a fist, again and again, making his glasses jump and skitter to the edge and fall off. He heard the soft thump when they hit the carpet. He stopped abusing his mattress, curled his legs up, and covered his head with his bent arm as if he could somehow stop or hide the sudden pounding tears.
“I don’t -- I don’t want to be my brother,” he gasped, and tensed, holding his breath until the ache of his clenched muscles killed the urge to sob.
~~~
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