White Flag

Author: Janet (SkyGirl5)

Genre: Jack/Irina

Summary: Shortly after their engagment, Irina decieds to tell Jack the truth about her spying status. His initial reaction is obviously negative, but will she be able to win him over in the end and live the life she really wants?

Disclaimer: Jack, Irina, etc are properties of JJ Abrams and ABC.

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Chapters 1-12 + Epilogue

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Chapter 1

She wrung her hands nervously as she paced back and forth across the narrow hallway. Could she really tell him? Could she really break his heart? Could she destroy his life that way? She knew she had to tell him. Ever since he had proposed two weeks earlier, she’d known. After all, a marriage shouldn’t be based on lies, for lies are eventually revealed and fall apart, bringing relationships down along with them. Unfortunately, since the beginning their year-long relationship had been a lie, an unavoidable circumstance of her life perhaps, but also, her.

Her stomach flipped; it was twisted in knots and she knew they’d never go away until she told him. Looking down at her hands, she saw they had begun to tremble. She cursed herself for becoming so unraveled. Almost always, she was the calm one, the cool one, the one that never lost her head, or really, showed much emotion at all. But now, her emotions were getting the better of her and she feared that once she began to reveal her truths to him, she would begin to cry. When was the last time she had cried? She couldn’t remember; when she was a child, perhaps? That was one of the reasons why she was so good, or at least, why they thought she was so good at what she did; emotions didn’t get in the way. She hadn’t really had any true emotions, not until him anyway. He had been like a secret key, unlocking a side of her she didn’t know existed, and ironically, he had been her assignment.

The door squeaked open and her head snapped toward the sound, her heart jumping into her throat. “It’s raining like mad out there,” he groaned, shaking off his umbrella outside the door before propping it up against the wall. “But I got the last one,” he smiled, holding up the tub of ice cream he had braved the elements to obtain.

“I told you that you didn’t have to Jack,” she laughed softly.

“But I told you, Laura, I wanted to,” he smiled back at her.

She sighed nervously as she approached him, her heels clicking on the hardwood floors of his townhouse. She had to do it now or she’d chicken out for the third time. She just knew it.

“You want this now or should I put it away for later?” he asked.

“Later,” she told him. He nodded, walked into the kitchen and placed the ice cream tub into the freezer. “Um, can you come with me a second?”

“Where are we going?” he laughed softly. She said nothing, but took his hand and walked back through the hall with him, up the stairs, and into the master bath, where she shut the door and cranked on both faucets to the sink and the shower. Then, she turned to him, his face contorted with confusion.

“Jack, I have – I have to tell you something,” she stammered. The confusion on his face turned to worry as his brow furrowed. She took a deep breath and exhaled while saying, “My name isn’t Laura.”

Out of all the things he thought she might have been about to say, this wasn’t one of them. Jack cleared his throat and managed to utter with confusion, “Excuse me?”

Though he didn’t know it, they actually worked in the same field, so there was no reason for her to patronize him with simplified explanations; she could say it bluntly. “My real name is Irina Derevko and I work for the KGB.”

Jack immediately took a few steps back from her. Suddenly it all made sense; the bathroom, the water-- simple bug killers. “You… what?!” he asked, his voice now harsh.

Her head fell to her chest as she uttered an apology that would mean nothing to him; not then. “I’m sorry, Jack,” she sighed.

“You…I…. Who are you?” he asked in horror.

“I’m not a literature professor; I never was,” she told him. “Well I mean, I was, but it’s just a cover. I was sent here from Russia by the KGB to steal secrets from the CIA.”

To say that Jack was horrified would have been a large understatement. His chest was tight, his head was spinning, he couldn’t breathe and he felt as though he was going to be ill. Slowly, he began to put the pieces together. His CIA status had never been a secret between them, not ever. Sure, certain aspects of his job were secret, but the fact that he worked for the CIA was not. If she – Laura, Irina, whatever her name was – was stealing secrets from the CIA, it meant she was stealing secrets from him. Suddenly, everything in the past year of his life was a lie and he was livid.

“You… you’re a TERROIST?!” he boomed.

She cringed slightly at that word. “Not exactly…”

Then, Jack went off ranting, muttering things like ‘enemy in my house’ and ‘unbelievable’. Finally, he turned to her, his eyes cold and filled with bitter hatred. She gulped and took a step back from him. “Why?” he snapped.

“Why what?” she asked slowly, for there could be a million different ‘why’s’ in their scenario.

“Why are you telling me this?” he grunted.

She sighed and looked down at her feet. Suddenly, the real reason seemed so childish, so fairytale-like. After all, what had she expected? For him to comfort her and say, ‘It’s alright sweetheart.’ No, of course not. That was foolish, perhaps, even more foolish than actually telling him the truth. “Because I couldn’t go on any longer without you knowing the truth,” she told him honestly as a tear slid down her cheek.

This comment, however, didn’t seem to appease his anger at all. Instead, it made him even more furious. “Get out!” he spat. “OUT!”

She clamped her eyes shut tightly and rushed past him, down the stairs, out of his house and, most likely, out of his life.



Chapter 2

By the time Irina reached her own apartment, her tears had stopped. Foolish, childish and reckless were all ways she knew her colleagues and friends and even her sisters would have described her. Tears were foolish. They gave you nothing but a headache and red, mopey-looking eyes; they did nothing to solve any of your problems. That was what they thought anyway, and they felt the same way about love and relationships. The only thing they truly understood was the barrel of a gun. After all, that was the nature of the sort of people she worked with; that was the person she was trained to be and for a while, she thought that’s who she was, but the more time she spent with Jack, the more she began to question this.

What if she only felt that way because she thought she was supposed to feel that way? What if she was different than them? What if love wasn’t so bad? What if it actually was a good thing? Irina knew she loved Jack. However, unlike most things she truly knew, love had no protocol, except that she knew the love she had for Jack, could very well get her killed.

It had all started out so simply, so innocently, so harmlessly – on the surface, that was. She received an assignment; she was to carry it out. Simple, yes? She had been given dozens of assignments in the past and they were all relatively simple. Go here, get this, come back. Go here, kill this person, report back. Not this time though. This wasn’t a simple mission. This was long term. This was deep cover. This was….in a word: messy.

She wasn’t sure then, nor would she ever be sure, why exactly, at the tender age of twenty-three, the KGB had entrusted her with such a delicate mission. Perhaps it was her young age that enticed them to choose her. She was still idealistic and not yet jaded with the real world. She had yet to see some of the real, true, harsh realities of their world; the spy world. Yet on the other hand, maybe they expected her to fail, maybe they wanted an excuse to eliminate her. Either way, she wasn’t sure, all she knew was that a mere hour after receiving her assignment, she was on her way to America to fabricate a life for herself.

She was determined to do it right and let nothing stand in her way. She would make them proud. She would show her two older sisters that their laughter towards her was unfounded; she was a better agent than they and she would prove it.

Her stoic attitude only worked for about a month. Soon her real feelings began mixing in with her fabricated ones. She could no longer separate ‘Laura’ from ‘Irina’. She began to think of Jack as her boyfriend and not her assignment. Then those three little words came, and any thought of holding back her emotions was lost.

Some nights after she met with her handler, which was about every two weeks, she would lie awake and wonder what she was doing. She was playing a very dangerous game with herself and with the other people’s lives that were at stake. It was after those nights that she’d fight to return to her purpose, but then he would smile at her, kiss her or gently touch her cheek and she’d go weak. Unfortunately, in her world, weaknesses were deadly, but only once they were discovered. If a weakness could be kept secret, survival was possible for a little while anyway, for all weaknesses would eventually be revealed.

No matter how hard she fought, he always broke her down and, the funny thing was, he wasn’t even trying to. He was simply being him, the man she had fallen in love with because of who he was. On the surface, to everyone around him, he appeared stoic and stern, but to her, he was gentle, kind and even, shockingly, funny. It was around him that she could be herself, a self she wasn’t even aware existed. She would laugh and she felt free to be silly. Silliness was certainly something that was incomprehensible in her world.

Finally, she stopped fighting and gave in, but then the guilt settled in. She felt horrible that, in a way, she was making him out to be, well, a fool. She would get secrets from him because of a trust that she had built up with him upon false pretenses. Then, on nights they spent together, she would snoop through his house while he slept. That was when she felt the worst. The only way she could talk herself out of being consumed with her guilt was by telling herself that if she didn’t do her job, they were both dead. Still, she felt horrible about it and with that guilt came another realization.

If she felt guilt about doing something her country expected her to do, what did that mean? That was treason. That was horrible, to them anyway. She wasn’t exactly sure what to do with that thought.

Woefully, she sighed and forced herself to get ready for bed. There was no use dwelling on the past, because, starting tomorrow, her life would take an entirely different direction. Namely, one straight to the grave. If she couldn’t take secrets from Jack and pass them on to the KGB, her neck was on the line, quite literally. They wouldn’t just pat her on the back and tell her that it was alright, she could try harder next time. Definitely not. She was in very big trouble, but amazingly, that wasn’t the thing she was most concerned about. She was most upset about losing him.



Chapter 3

For quite some time after she left, Jack simply stood in his bathroom, frozen. Eventually he turned off all the water and made his way out to his bed and flopped down, but he was still too consumed with his thoughts to even think about sleep. Mostly, he was trying to figure out how he had missed it.

Usually, he was so perfectly on top of things. Sometimes he even thought he had a sixth sense about certain things, so to speak. He had an instinct about joining the CIA, so he did. Once there he passed all aptitude tests with ease and quickly rose above his colleagues to be one of the most respected and most sought after agents. He had an instinct about the business, so why did he not have an instinct about this? How was he unable to see that Laura wasn’t who she claimed to be?

For virtually the whole night, he filtered through what seemed like their entire relationship in his mind. Looking back, he could see little things. She did seem awfully intrigued with his work. At the time, though, he hadn’t found that unusual. After all, saying you work for the CIA certainly can’t be taken as casually as ‘Oh, I work for a bank’ or ‘Oh, I just work in an office’. So, naturally, people were intrigued by his job, not that he flashed it around; he didn’t. In fact, it hadn’t been until a few months into their relationship when he felt he trusted her (a trust that had apparently been misplaced) that he revealed the true nature of his job to her.

In addition to that, he recalled several occasions when he would wake in the middle of the night and find his bed empty. Only once did he question her, and she explained it simply by saying she had a scratchy throat and was in need of a glass of water. A person in any sort of normal situation wouldn’t find that odd at all, but looking back, he did.

The more he thought, the more anger took precedence in the range of feelings he was currently experiencing. She used him for her own personal gain. She had most likely snooped in his things, searching for details about missions. Perhaps she had even hypnotized him without his knowledge. He could have revealed hundreds of things to her and never known. He was horrified. How could he show his face back at the CIA knowing that he had been the reason that the Russians now knew things they never wanted them to know.

The CIA. How would they react? He took a brief moment and tried to clear his head of any bias (which was difficult) to clearly think about what would happen to the CIA if they found out that a person had been behaving in the way that she apparently had been. They would take that person into custody, question them in perhaps not the gentlest manner and then sentence them to death.

Death. The thought of death to the person who, five hours earlier, he was madly in love with made the blood in his veins run cold. Could he really sentence her to such a fate? He wasn’t sure yet and knew it was unwise for him to make such a life-altering decision while suffering still from such an emotional betrayal.

Though he was livid at her for using him as a puppet, something he couldn’t tolerate at all from anyone in any situation in life, and though he knew that he would most likely come up with more reasons in the coming hours and days as to why he loathed her, he was still crushed by what she had done. He was never a very emotional man; never had been, so he kept it under the surface as much as he could, but still the truth remained, he had loved her.

He recalled that when he had first asked her out, after she had flirted with him in a coffee shop, he thought he was mad to ask and then found her to be more mad when she actually said yes. Feeling sick, he realized then that it was simply a game. Everyone who had been stunned that someone like him could have won the heart of a woman like her was now right in their doubts and shock and he hated that. He hated that they had been right; he wanted to prove them all wrong.

He wasn’t a hideous man, this he knew, but he also knew he certainly wasn’t the most desirable of the bunch. He had a stocky build, and though he was in shape, his form wasn’t bursting with muscles either. And that was only his physical appearance. He had trouble making friends, mostly because of his suspicious nature towards people, and girlfriends were a whole other story. He hadn’t had much chance to really pick apart any of the women he dated to find their flaws like he tended to, for they never stuck around very long. All of them except her and sadly, her reasons for staying weren’t pure.

She had intrigued Jack like no other woman had. The first thing that attracted him to her was her beautiful smile and the mysterious look in her eyes. Upon getting to know her further, he found that she was a very mysterious and intriguing person, even more of a reason that he was drawn to her. If he had to pick one thing he loved most about her, it would undoubtedly be the way she laughed. Her laugh was infectious and it even brought him to tears from his own laughter once, something that had never before happened in his life.

Sadly, he realized that all of that was probably a lie. Well, her laugh wasn’t for laughing is an involuntary reaction (at least sometimes), but everything else was. He didn’t know anything about her. She was no one.



Chapter 4

The next morning when Irina awoke, she stared at the ceiling for a long time before she even thought about getting out of bed. It was summer, and since her job was as a professor, she didn’t have much to do. Earlier in the summer she had taught a brief three week course, but that was over now. Theoretically she should have been working on the book, which was part of her cover, but truthfully, she wasn’t really sure what to write and, after all, it was just a cover.

Lying there, she wasn’t even hungry or thirsty, though she figured she should eat. A last meal, she thought bitterly. Well, not quite. She still had three days before her next scheduled meet with her handler. Three days left to live and all she wanted to do was lie in bed and mope. She was behaving as though she really had lost a boyfriend, or in this case a fiancé, but to her, Jack was as real as he was supposed to be. When he had proposed to her, she had cried genuine tears of joy and shock from being loved so much by him that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. When she had said yes, she meant it, just like she meant it when she told him ‘I love you’. Now, none of that mattered though. If she went after him to even attempt to explain herself, which she knew was impossible, he would more than likely put a bullet through her head. If there was one thing she knew about him, he wasn’t one to cross.

Finally, she dragged herself out of bed at the thought that what were most likely her final days on the planet (or at the very least, in the country) should not be spent in bed. She should get out, enjoy the sunshine and take a walk. Perhaps that would clear her head a bit from her thoughts of Jack and the fractured mess that was now her life.

~*~

In the morning, after only a few hours of fitful sleep, Jack dragged himself from bed. It was then he decided that instead of dealing with his feelings (now a mixture of pain and hatred), he needed to dive into work. Regrettably, in this case, he was the work. He decided to approach the situation from a CIA spy point of view. That way, he could hopefully find out some intel to quell his own curiosity and also help the CIA in the process. After all, it was possible he wasn’t the only victim of this unique strategy of the KGB. He needed to find out as much as possible. Unfortunately, to do that, he needed Laura-Irina, whatever.

He knew exactly where to find her, he just wasn’t sure that he’d be able to swallow enough of his pride to actually follow through with his plan.

~*~

On her walk, Irina found herself at the observatory, a place she loved. There was just something so intriguing to her about a place where far off stars and planets could be seen. Besides, the observatory in Los Angeles was set on a rocky cliff where the sea could be seen. Standing at the railing, she could look out across towards the land of her birth, though it was, of course, thousands of miles away. She wondered then if she ever truly wanted to return to her home. Usually, every time she met with her handler, she thought about how long her mission would last. How long term was ‘long term’? How would it all end? What would happen to Jack?

The difference between her life back there and her life in America was almost literally the difference between night and day. In St. Petersburg, she had been a dark person, partly a victim of her surroundings and partly because she hadn’t actually seen the light of what she could be until she had found it in him. She found that a life being a spy wasn’t the only thing that could make her happy, as she once thought. She actually enjoyed teaching Russian literature to UCLA students. She loved the stunned and horrified looks on their faces when she would suddenly (and sometimes unintentionally) slip into speaking her native tongue. She also enjoyed fascinating them with some random Russian facts now and then.

In addition to the actual teaching, she enjoyed interacting with the students, who weren’t much younger than she. This was a nice change of pace from being around extremely older, scary Russian men. Also, she found the schedule much more agreeable. Being a spy meant jet setting around the world on a whim, which often left a person sleep deprived, cranky, and often times a disaster, which could be disastrous in that type of business. With teaching, she had a set schedule of class hours, office hours, and for the first time in her life, free hours, where she could do whatever she wanted, whenever (assuming she didn’t have a meeting with her hander… or with Jack). Thinking about that schedule, she wondered how she would ever be able to phase herself back into the volatile life of a spy.

Of course the other main source to her happiness was Jack. Though he lived the life of a spy and often went out on missions at the spur of a moment, he was still around for the most part, and she enjoyed having him around more than she could ever say. Sadly though, she realized she couldn’t exactly count him as one of her happiness sources anymore, because she’d never see him again. Or so she thought, until he showed up right beside her there at the observatory.



Chapter 5

When she heard footsteps behind her, she simply thought it was a random person passing, but then those footsteps drew nearer and nearer until they landed right beside her. When she saw out of the corner of her eye that it was him, she was stunned. She turned her head slightly towards him and simply gaped at him. It was all she could do. He didn’t look at her; he looked out across the crystal ocean.

Finally, after five minutes, she was unable to stand their painful silence any longer, so she asked quietly, “Are you here to arrest me, Jack?”

He glanced at her briefly, but said nothing. After another minute of silence, he leaned down on the railing with his forearms and his back arched slightly. Then he asked quietly, “Why me?”

She looked down at him for a moment, trying to understand his question. “Why did the KGB pick you?” she asked softly. He gave a gentle nod. “I don’t know,” she told him honestly. He looked up at her suspiciously. “I don’t!” she insisted. “As you may imagine, they don’t exactly broadcast their secret plans to all their lower level agents.”

He grunted, knowing this was true. “Are there others?”

“Not that I know of, but it wouldn’t surprise me,” she said softly. Again, he grunted and then went back into silence. Feeling slightly brave and possibly foolishly hopeful, she added, “It wasn’t all a lie, Jack.”

Jack gave a muffled laugh, clearly not believing her. “It wasn’t,” she told him.

He glared up at her. “I’ll just believe you then,” he muttered.

She sighed and looked away. “Ask me anything you want; I won’t lie to you anymore.”

“I find that hard to believe,” he told her bitterly.

“Well, you can either stand there, glaring at me, or you can ask me some of the million questions that are floating around in your head. It’s your choice,” she told him.

He stiffened slightly and stood up straight. “How many of my operations did you compromise? How many secrets did you feed to the Russians? How many US agents have you killed?” he spat, his voice rising with each question.

“Would you keep your voice down?!” she hissed. “I haven’t killed anyone. Assassination is more my sister’s forte.”

He looked horrified. “You have sisters?!”

“Two, both older, both KGB,” she said casually. “And I don’t know how many of your operations were compromised; I don’t get feedback or congratulations on a job well done from the KGB.”

Jack gave a few incoherent grunts, still trying to process all the information. “You just…. You…what are you trying to do?”

She sighed and looked out across the ocean; there was a question. She gave the only honest answer she could, “I have no idea.” Then, she looked back at him. “I don’t know, Jack; this wasn’t a well-thought-out plan.”

“Clearly,” he muttered.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” she told him once more. He looked away. “I don’t know what else to say to you Jack, I am sorry,” she sighed.

Jack was silent for a few moments. Honestly, he didn’t now what he wanted her to say. He wasn’t even sure what he wanted to do about her at the moment. “Well, you were just doing your job,” he said very harshly.

Irina closed her eyes, trying not to wince at the way his tone had plunged through her and straight to her heart. “It wasn’t… you just, you don’t know what it’s like over there,” she told him.

“Cold winters and vodka?” he said very, very quietly.

For a moment, she almost laughed, but she was able to maintain her serious face as she looked at him, “I… I didn’t realize at the time exactly what this would be like… I didn’t realize it would be so…,” but her voice drifted off and Jack noticed that her eyes were growing wide, wider than he had ever seen them.

“What?” he asked.

She looked away and mumbled, “Viktor’s here.”

“Who the hell is Viktor?” Jack asked, rather dreading the answer to that question.

“My handler,” she mumbled even more quietly.

“You’re hand-” but she cut off his near shout by clamping her hand over his mouth.

“Do you want to get yourself killed?!” she hissed at him. Jack shoved her hand off and went to walk away but she grabbed his arm, “Wait, you know this is-” but she didn’t get to finish her sentence. He shrugged off her arm and walked away quickly.

After he was gone, she sighed and turned back to the ocean, realizing that her original estimate of two days to live had been horribly inaccurate now that Viktor had come early; she might not even make it through the afternoon. It was only a few moments before Viktor walked up beside her and said coolly, “Trouble in paradise?”

“It was an argument; I’m sure you’re familiar with the term,” she retorted.

“Arguments aren’t supposed to happen,” he told her.

“Arguments are real, Viktor, and here I was thinking we were to be keeping up reality,” she snapped as she looked over at him. He didn’t respond. “What are you doing here? You’re early and it’s the middle of the day!”

“I am simply an American out for a walk on this lovely summer day, can’t you tell?”

Irina nearly rolled her eyes at his odd sense of humor. “The accent is a dead giveaway,” she told him of his Russian accent, even thicker than hers.

“Do you have what we need?” he asked, forgetting the pleasantries and getting straight down to business.

“Of course not. How was I to know I’d run into you when we’re not to meet for two days yet,” she told him.

“You haven’t done your job?” he asked her harshly.

“I didn’t say that. I meant I do not have them with me,” she said.

“Fine. Meet me here tomorrow at ten p.m.,” he told her.

“HERE?!” she gasped. “That is not protocol.”

“Meet me here,” he repeated in a more forceful manner before walking away. Irina sighed and tightened her grip on the railing in front of her; this did not bode well.



Chapter 6

For part of the day, Irina sulked. Then, she realized that not only was her behavior completely uncharacteristic of herself, it was flat out stupid. She was simply giving up; waiting for death; waiting for Viktor to come and put a bullet in her head, and that wasn’t her. She was a fighter, so she was going to fight. She knew Jack was an intensely loyal person and hated betrayals. His hatred of betrayal didn’t exactly work to her advantage, but his loyalty did. He loved her at one point so there was a small chance, a very small one, that he would be willing to help her now. The only problem was, she wasn’t sure what exactly she needed help in achieving (aside from breathing another day).

That evening, she went over to Jack’s condo. Her excuse partly was for ‘keeping up appearances’, but she had another plan as well. When he opened the door, his face was stone. “Hi sweetheart,” she said in a loud fake voice, as she pushed past him. He was too shocked to even move or say anything. She shut the door and walked directly over to the lamp in his foyer. She pulled out the bug she had placed, dropped it on the floor and smashed it with the heel of her shoe. She then proceeded to do this with the three other bugs she had planted before returning to Jack in the foyer, who was still staring down at the mangled pile of metal on the floor.

He looked up at her and she sighed. “There, I just signed my own death sentence,” she muttered at him. It was true. If Viktor found out that she had crushed the bugs, she wouldn’t even be alive long enough to open her mouth and attempt to explain herself.

“Why did you do that?” Jack asked.

“Why did I plant the bugs or why did I crush them?” she asked with a sigh.

“Either,” he said, still looking down at the floor.

“I planted them because they told me to; I crushed them because… I’m trying to fix this,” she told him.

With this, he looked up at her with an amused look on his face. “You cannot possibly be seriously,” he said. Then, he walked past her and into his sitting room.

“Look,” she sighed. “I assume from the fact that I’m not shackled right now and locked in some dark room that you didn’t tell the CIA what I told you and I thank you for that.” Jack stiffened but said nothing. “Why didn’t you tell them?” she asked softly.

“You don’t get to ask questions,” he snapped.

“Fair enough,” she sighed. “Jack, I… I need your help,” she told him. He looked over at her incredulously. “If… if Viktor finds out… I’m dead; I’m already dead,” she said as she gestured to one of the crushed bugs on the floor.

“That’s your problem,” he said harshly.

“No, it’s your problem too. If he finds out you know I’m KGB he won’t hesitate to kill you,” she told him.

“You dragged me into this disaster!” he shouted at her. “You! It’s all you! You’re the one to blame and now my life is at stake!? You caused this; you fix it.”

“I don’t know how to fix it!” she shouted back at him.

“Then you shouldn’t have started it!” he retorted.

She opened her mouth to shout back at him, but closed it quickly and took a deep breath. “Shouting at each other won’t solve anything. We have a little over twenty-four hours before I meet with Viktor-”

“To feed him more things you stole from me,” Jack muttered.

“If he knows I blew my cover; if he figures out that I smashed the bugs, neither of us will live until morning,” she told him.

“Then you had better start coming up with a plan,” he told her gruffly before flopping down on his couch and pretending to read the paper.

She walked over to the couch and sat at the end opposite from him. “If we can make it through tomorrow’s meet, it will buy us two weeks.”

“And then what?” he asked her. “What do you want out of this?”

She lowered her eyes to the floor. Truthfully she would have said ‘not to lose you’ but she wasn’t stupid enough to say that out loud; he would not have reacted well to such a statement. “Right now, I just want to live to see Friday,” she said quietly.

Jack sighed into his paper. Part of him, the part that was still livid at her, wanted to chuck her out, say good riddance and move on. But the other part of him, the larger part, the spy in him that loved a challenge, was chomping at the bit to solve this problem. This was the kind of life or death excitement that made the blood pump through his veins. This was what he lived for.

He sighed, set his paper down and asked her, “Where do the bugs transmit to?”

“I’m not sure exactly where. Some place local though. The people there scan the transmissions and pick out anything that would be of importance to them and then send that back to Russia,” she told him.

“Well, that’s ridiculous. I’d never talk about something in my foyer,” he said. She just shrugged. He sighed, “Will they know the bugs have been smashed or will they think they’ve just stopped transmitting.”

“They’ll know the bugs are broken in some way,” she told him. “But it’s far too coincidental that all the bugs went at once; they’ll know something happened.”

He was silent for a moment before explaining, “The CIA often sends people around to search for bugs in their agent’s homes. A reasonable explanation would be that this place was searched by that team today and I simply failed to tell you.”

“That could work,” Irina said. “But Viktor is already suspicious of me.”

“Why’s that?” he asked her.

Irina looked down at her feet and sighed. Another question she didn’t want to answer honestly, for the truth was that Viktor noticed her emotional involvement with the case and knew that she was too emotionally involved, no matter how much she tried to hide it. As stoic as she usually was though, she did find it hard to hide her feelings for Jack because they were so real. “He…he doesn’t think I’m keeping my head in the game,” she told him, using a phrase she had picked up from one of her students.

“Not stealing enough were you?” he asked sharply. She looked over at him, slightly hurt, but he ignored it. “When is your meet tomorrow?”

“Ten p.m. at the observatory,” she told him.

“Out in the open?!” he asked with a surprise.

“No, a deserted place where he could easily throw my body over the railing and onto the sharp rocks below,” she corrected.

“Oh,” he said, cringing slightly.

“We usually meet in his hotel room,” she continued.

“Great,” Jack muttered.

“It’s not like that,” she assured him. “Viktor is nearly three times my age.”

“HE’S NINTY?!” Jack asked in shock, knowing that she had told him she was only a year younger than him, making her nearly twenty-nine.

“I’m only twenty-four,” she told him quietly.

“T-twenty-four,” he repeated in shock. Although that did explain something, he thought to himself. He had always thought she looked awfully young to be twenty-nine. “Well, you lied about everything else…,” he muttered at her sheepish look.

“I told you, it wasn’t all a lie,” she told him firmly.

“Oh really? Then what, pray tell, was the truth? Your age was a lie, your name, your job, your family. Oh, I guess you did tell the truth about being from Russia,” he said in a mock voice.

“I didn’t lie about loving you either,” she told him quietly. He looked away and scoffed. “I didn’t!”

“Of course you did; it was simply another one of your games, which quite frankly, I’m sick of. You’re probably playing one right now,” he told her.

“Oh am I? Then why did I smash the bugs? Why did I tell you the truth?” she asked him.

“So you could….. lure me somewhere and kill me,” he said in a tone making it obvious he had no idea what he was saying.

“I’m not going to kill you, Jack. Besides, if I wanted you dead why would I take you anywhere? We’re alone right here, but I assure you I am unarmed,” she told him as he looked at her in a slightly worried way.

“That still begs the question – why did you tell me the truth?” he challenged her.

She took a deep breath as a tear pricked her eye. “Because two weeks ago you asked me to marry you and when I said yes, I meant it, and I couldn’t stand lying to you anymore.”

He looked over at her and saw the tear fall down her cheek, the first tear he had ever seen from her in their year long relationship and for some reason, he wasn’t sure why, but he believed that tear was real and not a fake. “Come back tomorrow at dinner,” he told her quietly. “We’ll form a plan then.”

Without another word, she nodded, and then left his apartment.



Chapter 7

Jack had to force himself to pay attention at work the following day. He tried to focus, but his thoughts kept drifting back to her. The one thing he knew for certain that she wasn’t lying about was that both their lives were in danger. If the KGB knew he knew about her status, there was no way they’d let him live, for he could take that information back to the CIA and thus blow the cover off of their infiltration.

Sitting there, he was wondering what the hell he was going to do, for even if they managed to conquer her handler, which was possible, there would be others. He could tell the CIA the truth and they’d take Irina into custody, but then he’d still be in danger. He needed to know if they suspected that he knew and then they would have to proceed with a plan. What that plan would be, though, he wasn’t sure.

~*~

Irina spent the day driving up and down the coastline. She couldn’t stand sitting in her apartment waiting for that evening; it was driving her mad. Her head was so cluttered with thoughts that she found she thought of nothing. If she let herself think about the deep, deep hole she was in and the fact that she had no way to get out of it, she suddenly had the urge to drive her car off a cliff, which wouldn’t do anyone any good.

Finally, when she figured Jack would be home and it was around dinner, she went to his house and knocked on the front door. He let her in silently without a word and then returned to the kitchen, where he was making something on the stovetop. Irina followed him and sat down at the kitchen table. They were silent a few minutes before Jack turned to her and asked, “Can I ask you something?” She nodded for him to continue. “What did you do before this?”

Confused, she said, “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“I mean, did you pretend to be in love with another man to steal his secrets?” he asked her.

Deciding to ignore his ‘pretend to be in love with’ comment, she said, “No. This is the first assignment of this kind I’ve received. I was only a field agent for about a year before I received this assignment.”

“Why’s that?” he asked.

“My age,” she said. “And I was still in University.”

“So what missions did you do?” he asked her.

“Retrieval missions. Mostly I was backup. My partner wasn’t exactly a fan of me, neither of them were come to think of it,” she sighed as she rested her chin in her palm while propping her elbow up on the table.

“Are you going to answer every question I ask you?” he asked almost amused at how easily an ‘interrogation’ was going.

“Yes,” she told him.

“Who were your partners?” he asked.

“My first partner was a man named Peter, but he was killed in action. My second partner, who I didn’t work with very often, was my eldest sister. She was an assassin,” Irina told him.

“You must have one hell of a family dinner,” he muttered.

She couldn’t help but laugh softly. “Oh, you don’t know the half of it.” He turned around and looked at her, intrigued, so she continued. “My parents weren’t wealthy, not even close. We lived in a very low class neighborhood. My mother was very sickly, I never knew why, and she ended up dying when I was eight. My father worked in a factory and so my eldest sister, Yelena, who was five years older than me, was stuck taking care of me, something she always resented me for.

“Anyway, Yelena isn’t a very loving person; in fact, she’s cruel to the bone. She left home and left my middle sister, Katya, to care for me. How she joined the KGB I don’t know, but one evening, about a year after she left, she came back. She and our father had an argument and she shot him right in our kitchen,” Irina told him.

Jack nearly choked on drink he had just sipped. “You’re kidding?” She shook her head. “Wait, wait, how old was she?”

“Eighteen, maybe nineteen,” Irina told her.

For a moment Jack was silent in pure shock. He couldn’t even begin to imagine that. Surely, no matter who you were, no matter what your background, to watch your father murdered by your elder sister at the age of thirteen would affect anybody. He actually felt sorry for her. “So…,” he began slowly, “what happened to you then?”

“I was sent to live with a family friend while I finished school. Then as soon as I turned eighteen, the KGB contacted me and offered to pay for my further education in exchange for becoming one of their minions,” she said.

“Minions?” he laughed. “How patriotic of you.”

She sighed and looked down at the table in front of her. She ran her fingers across it and tried to rub out some of the water spots on the wood as she said, “I used to think that being a spy was the only thing that would make me happy… after all, it was really all I had known, but… I was wrong.”

Jack thought for a moment on what she had said before asking cautiously, “Are you saying that you want out?”

She laughed softly. “I’m not naïve enough to believe that there is an ‘out’ unless that out comes at the price of being six feet under.”

“Well… why don’t we get to the business of keeping ourselves alive at least until dawn, shall we?” he asked as he sat across from her. She looked up at him. “So… how confident are you in the fact that this Viktor person does or does not believe you’ve revealed your true identity to me.”

“I’m ninety percent certain he believes I wanted to reveal my identity, but … I’d say only twenty-five percent certain that he thinks I’ve already done it. But that combined with the bugs….”

“You can’t act shocked when he tells you they’re no longer functioning?” he asked.

“Well, I can, it’s all a matter of whether or not he’ll believe me,” she sighed.

“Okay, okay, so assume for a second that Viktor wasn’t suspicious of you at all. What would you be doing if this was just a regular meeting?” he asked her.

“Um… I’d give him what I had collected since our last meet. He might give me a more specific assignment… it all depends,” she shrugged.

“Alright so what will you be giving him?” Jack asked dully.

“Nothing; I don’t have anything. I stopped looking for things after…,” she let her voice drift off, feeling she didn’t need to remind him of their engagement again.

“Well, that was stupid,” he said rather harshly. She gave him a look. “I mean…what happens if you show up with nothing?!”

“I wasn’t thinking about that,” she told him honestly. “I kept trying to tell you the truth. These past two weeks I’ve been trying, but I always…. I always stopped myself at the last minute,” she added quietly. He grunted and groaned as he stalked out of the kitchen and disappeared into his office.

“What are you doing?” she called after him.

“I’m trying to find something to give him,” he called back.

“But you don’t even know what I give him!”

Jack poked his head out of his office. “Good point. What do you give him?”

“Notes usually,” she sighed as she got up from the table and walked into the office with him. “Notes on things I overheard… or a paper I’d find… or something.”

“Fine,” he sighed. “Next week the CIA will be doing a delicate operation in India; they’re looking for nuclear weapons.”

“That’ll work,” she said. Then she walked over to his desk, grabbed a pen and a piece of paper off a tablet he kept there and scribbled down the information he had just told her.

Looking over her shoulder Jack pointed out in a very obvious way, “That’s not Russian.”

“Yes, thank you,” she said sarcastically. “It’s code.”

“Why do you write it in code?” he asked.

“Does the CIA send important transmissions in plain English?” she retorted. He gave her a look meaning ‘good point’.

“How many languages can you speak?” he asked her.

“Well, that was rather random,” she retorted. He shrugged. “I can speak eight languages fluently and four others semi-fluently.”

“Did you learn them all at University?” he asked her.

“No… I’ve spoken Russian and English as well as French since childhood. My mother spoke French and for some reason she was very proud of it, so she taught it to all of us. In grade school I took German and…. The others I just picked up along the way,” she explained.

He just nodded and walked back towards the hallway. She didn’t follow and he turned. “Don’t you want a last meal?”

She gave him a look. “That’s not funny, Jack.”

They ate in relative silence, aside from Jack asking a few more questions about her childhood and then, once they were finished, Irina walked towards the door.

“So… I’ll hear from you?” Jack asked cautiously.

“You’ll either hear from me again, or you won’t,” she told him frankly. “And if you don’t…,” she added after a moments silence. “I really do love you, Jack,” she told him. Then, without giving him a chance to respond, she left.



Chapter 8

The whole time Jack was driving to the observatory, he was cursing his own stupidity. First, he was going to attempt to protect a woman who he still hated (at least in part). Second, he was risking both of their lives, especially if he was spotted. Third, he had no idea what exactly he was going to do if he found Irina’s life was in danger. He was just going.

Somehow he knew that Viktor had already figured out about Irina revealing her identity and he knew if that was true, no matter how much he hid, he would never be safe, so it was just as well that he was going; he was dead either way.

~*~

Walking up to Viktor at the observatory, Irina had to cram her hands down into her pockets to try to keep them from trembling violently. She took a few deep breaths, for her nerves would only give her away more.

“Good evening, Irina,” Viktor said coolly from his position against the railing in the darkest place between the lamps around the observatory.

“Good evening, Viktor,” she said, her voice equally cool.

“I trust you have your things with you this evening?” he asked.

“I do,” she said as she pulled out the scrap of paper she had scribbled on only a few hours earlier in Jack’s office. “A nuclear weapons operation in India,” she said after he had taken it from her and was struggling to read it in the dim light.

“This is all?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “He’s been busy with other things these past two weeks. He hasn’t been working at the office much,” she told him, struggling to keep from smiling at the recollection of the two days after their engagement that they had spent practically exclusively in his bedroom.

“Busy?” Viktor raised an eyebrow.

“He wants to marry me. That is what you wanted, is it not?” she told him.

“Yes, that is what we want, but my concern is that it’s what you want,” he said to her.

“I’ve told you time and time again Viktor, I am focused on the mission,” she said firmly.

He gave her a skeptical look but changed the subject. “Are you aware that your bugs are no longer working?”

Her heart nearly leapt into her throat, but she managed to keep her voice even as she asked, “Really? Which one is it? I can replace it.”

“All of them, actually,” he told her.

“All of them?” she asked trying to emphasize the surprise in her voice. “How is that possible?”

“Why don’t you tell me,” he said to her.

“Well, I have no idea,” she insisted. “Isn’t it possible that he found them?”

“Possible… but unlikely,” Viktor said. “Tell me, Irina, what sort of pillow talk has been going on between you and your assignment?”

“I’m not quite sure what you’re insinuating, Viktor,” she told him as she took a step back. In one swift motion, Viktor reached out and wrenched her wrist with one hand, pulling her close to him, and with the other hand, he pulled a long knife from his pocket and held it to her neck. She gulped and tried to get away, but he held her firm.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about, Irina. What were you thinking? That he’d forgive you because he loves you,” he mocked. “He doesn’t love you; his love is a lie and so is yours, but I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore,” he said as he pressed the blade of the knife more sharply into her throat.

Seeing an opportunity, she raised up her foot and drove her sharp heel down into the top of his foot while wrenching her neck back as far as possible. Yelping in pain, Viktor brought the knife blade down quickly and it scraped across her collarbone, nicking her. She tried to get away, but he still held her wrist firmly. He sliced at her with the knife and she felt a sharp pain across her abdomen. Ignoring it, she was about to bring her foot up and use her heel for other damage, but a shot rang out and Viktor froze for a moment with a contorted look on his face before toppling back over the railing.

Irina didn’t move, she simply breathed heavily as she watched him fall. Then, she heard her name being called out and she raced towards it, her hand clamped down over her bleeding stomach.

~*~

In the dim light as he watched them from afar, Jack saw the glint of a blade when the light reflected off of it. That was when he exited his car, gun held at the ready, and slowly crept towards them. As soon as he watched the man try to stab her, he fired and hit is target dead on, like he always did. Seeing her frozen there, he shouted out her name and she took off running.

“Jack, what are you doing?” she hissed as she approached him.

“Just get in the car,” he called back to her while jogging toward to his abandoned vehicle. Once they were both inside, he sped off. At a red light, he glanced over and saw her trembling hand covered in a dark substance. “Are you bleeding?!” he asked in shock.

“Yes,” she said in a trembling voice.

“Where?! How bad?!” he asked obviously concerned.

“Below my ribs… I think it’s just a scratch…,” she managed. Not with that much blood, Jack thought in horror.

Once at his place, he helped her out of the car, though, shockingly, she seemed to be walking fine. In the house, once the light was on her he could see the blood beginning to seep through her pink shirt making it a deep maroon color. There was a thin line of it surrounding a rip in the top of her shirt, near the collar and a very thick area spreading around a rip near her belly button. “Go, upstairs,” he commanded as he raced to his kitchen to grab some supplies before following her into the bathroom.

“What are you waiting for woman, come on!” he exclaimed impatiently as she just stood there, her hands shaking. She bit her lip as she painfully lifted her shirt enough for him to see her wound. He pressed some gauze to it and she jumped back while hissing slightly. “This… obviously isn’t working. You need to go lay down so you can’t move.”

“Going to tie me up, are you?” she managed to jest through gritted teeth as she slowly made her way to his bed. He rolled his eyes and ignored her as he followed her with the supplies he needed.

Once she was down, he noticed that the four inch long cut wasn’t very deep, but he told her she should have a few stitches. “No,” she refused.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because hospitals ask questions.”

“I could do it.”

“Then definitely no,” she told him.

He sighed and put a few more drops of alcohol on her stomach before taping gauze over it. “You’re going to have a scar,” he said warningly.

“I guess I won’t be wearing that bikini after all then…,” she said causally.

He let out a short, breathy laugh. “I guess not. I need to fix the other one now,” he told her.

She grumbled and struggled to take off her shirt. “You’re enjoying this,” she muttered to him.

“Hardly,” he laughed as he examined the cut at her collarbone. “This is just a scratch. It should be fine,” he told her before he began to put gauze over that one as well.

“Very well… it’s a shame though; I liked that shirt,” she sighed.

“Better the shirt than your life,” he told her seriously.

“Mmm, and here I thought you’d want me dead,” she told him.

“That’s a little harsh. I’d settle for a five by five prison cell for eternity,” he said so casually it made her laugh.

Her laugh, his favorite part about her, made his heart flutter in a way that he realized, no matter how much he tried to hate her, he didn’t. He’d obviously proven this fact by saving her life at great risk to his own. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was, perhaps it was the ‘allure of the forbidden’ concept, or the fact that her identity revelation had made her even more mysterious, or even the fact that she was a ‘bad girl’ in some respects, at least ‘bad’ compared to his usual ‘straight-laced, follow the rules’ behavior. No matter what it was, though (and it certainly wasn’t the pathetically large gauze bandages now covering her torso), but he found her even more attractive.

She sat up on the bed, attempting to adjust the tape he had used on her bandages from painfully pulling at her skin at an odd angle, when he reached over and gently brushed his fingertips underneath her chin. She looked over, shocked at his tenderness, but before she had a chance to say anything at all, his lips crashed into hers. She knew it was most likely a poor idea; she knew she should have stopped them, but she just didn’t want to. She wanted the chance to say goodbye, if that’s what it was, and if it wasn’t… well, they could deal with it tomorrow.



Chapter 9

“Are you alright?” Jack asked softly. It was the middle of the night and he had awoken to the bed jostling as Irina got out and got back in. He ignored it until he remembered her cuts and was concerned that perhaps they were still bleeding.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Just cold.”

He rolled his eyes. When she first told him how ‘freezing’ she was when it was seventy-five degrees out he thought she was insane, especially since she came from Russia which wasn’t exactly the tropics, but as it turned out, she was just one of those ‘cold-natured’ people. “Are your cuts alright?”

“Yes, they’re fine,” she told him quietly. He grunted in acknowledgement before rearranging his pillow and trying to get comfortable once more. “Jack…,” she said quietly. He grunted again. “You know what I’m most afraid of? It’s not what the KGB will do to me… but it’s after all this… I’m afraid that I’ll lose you,” she told him very quietly, but with great honesty.

Jack was quiet for a moment, thinking about a way to respond. “You know what we discuss in this bed never leaves this bed, right? I mean, I will deny I ever said this,” he told her firmly. She nodded softly. He looked down at the sheets, loathing himself for what he was about to say. “You… hurt me; you betrayed me… my trust.”

“I know,” she whispered as a tear escaped her eye and ran down into the pillow her head was resting on. “I never… I never meant to… I mean, it started and it was too late… I didn’t want to hurt you, Jack.”

He sighed, reached down underneath the covers and clasped her hand. “First, we fix this mess we’ve caused… then we can talk about us,” he told her.

Irina had to fight her lips from cracking into a smile. “Okay,” she agreed softly. Then, still holding onto his hand, she let her head drift towards his shoulder and rested it there. He responded by kissing it softly. Smiling, she squeezed his hand and then tried to fall back to sleep.

~*~

“What are you doing?” Irina grumbled early the next morning at Jack, who was messing around with the gauze on her wound.

“You’re oozing,” he told her.

“Oozing?” she asked.

“Yes, oozing. There is blood coming through this. You really should have let me stitch it,” he told her.

“No, that’s alright,” she sighed. “It’ll be fine.”

“Fine,” Jack sighed. He sat back on his heels once her bandage was changed to his satisfaction. Then, he looked down at her looking up at him. “We need a plan.”

“I agree,” she said.

“How long before they realize Viktor is dead?” he asked her.

She looked over at the clock and then back at him. “They probably already know,” she sighed. “We’re not dead yet, which is a good sign.”

“Obviously,” Jack muttered.

“The fact that it’s now day gives us a slight advantage, but only a little one. They may not know that you know; Viktor might not have told them,” she said hopefully.

“Viktor knew?” he asked. She nodded. “Do you think we should take this to the CIA?”

“I don’t know that I have a better plan. The CIA can protect you and… well, they’ll throw me in prison so the KGB can’t get me there,” she sighed. A devious smile crossed his face causing her to ask, “What?”

“What if we play this to your advantage… you could say you want to leave the KGB. They won’t treat you as a criminal then; you’d be an asset,” he told her.

“Could work… though they might get slightly suspicious of my cuts,” she said gesturing towards her stomach.

He shrugged. “We can pretend you told me in the kitchen… and I got a little upset.”

“A little upset?!” she laughed.

“Yes. Be glad you told me in a bathroom where the most I could attack you with was a toothbrush,” he told her. She laughed loudly and then clutched her stomach in pain. “Don’t laugh.”

“Don’t make me,” she retorted.

“Alright, we need to go if we’re going to do this,” he told her as he climbed off the bed. “You need help?”

“Nah,” she grimaced slightly as she stood. Then she slowly shuffled over to her drawer in his bedroom and pulled out clean clothes. “It’s good I keep these here since it would definitely be unsafe to go back to my apartment.”

“Right,” he laughed softly. “It’s getting so late… we should have left sooner,” he sighed in an almost irritated tone. “Last night preferably,” he glanced over at her as if it was her fault.

She cocked her head to the side and gave him a look. “Oh right, I forgot, who was it that started last night again?” A small smirk crossed Jack’s face as he turned away from her.

After he had changed his own clothes, he walked past the window that viewed out the front of his apartment. Upon glancing out it, he did a double take. His mouth went dry and all he could do was stare; the family resemblance was undeniable.

“Irina,” he began very quietly. “Does your sister have black hair?”

“What?” she almost laughed at his ridiculously random question.

Jack looked back out the window at the black-haired woman approaching his townhouse with a large black bag over her shoulder. Though he was above her, he could tell that she had the same facial structure and even a similar walk to the woman in the same room as him.

Noticing how pale he was, Irina walked over to the window and let out a little choked gasp. Then she turned her eyes up and looked at him in horror. “Now would be a really, really good time for a backup plan.”



Chapter 10

“Do you think they sent her?” Jack asked quickly as he dropped to the floor to remove his stashed weapons from under the bed.

“No. Once she heard, I’m sure she came voluntarily,” Irina told him. Jack removed one of the guns and tossed it to her; she caught it. “Whatever you do, don’t let her get you in her sight; Yelena’s a perfect shot.”

“Good to know,” he muttered as he groped under his bed for his other weapon. “Do we have a plan?”

“Not really,” Irina said while making sure her weapon was loaded and ready. “Do you have more ammunition than this?”

“What like a silver bullet?” he asked. She looked unamused. “No, I don’t. I never expected to wage a war in the house.”

“Where are your car keys?” she asked him.

He scanned his mind for a second before saying, “I left them by the door.”

She sighed; that was a problem. Before she could think another thought though, the doorbell rang. “She’s using the door?!” Jack hissed.

“Well, it is the middle of the morning,” Irina hiss back. “Just go out the back… I’ll answer the door.”

“No, she’ll shoot you on the spot,” he argued.

“This is really not the time…,” she let her voice drift off as she ran out of the bedroom, gun at the ready.

“Would you just-”

“I know her better than you do,” Irina snapped back. “You’re going to have to trust me.”

Jack followed her helplessly as she crammed her gun down the back of her pants and jogged casually up to the door. He crept past her and back towards the kitchen, where the back exit was. Slowly, he looked out the back of the house and he saw, across the tiny grassy backyard, a dark figure behind a tree. Yelena had clearly come prepared with back-up. However, this was a very delicate situation. It was a suburban neighborhood during the day, KGB or not, they couldn’t just rage a fire fight; no one was that stupid. At the same time though, he wouldn’t just be able to walk away. He had to gauge his steps very carefully.

Knowing that Irina was most likely waiting to hear if he had gone, he opened the door, held it for a second and then shut it ever so carefully. The moment this was done, he heard the front door open. “Sister dear,” came a voice he didn’t recognize and thus he assumed it was Yelena’s. At that moment, Jack had never been more thankful that he understood Russian, for that’s what they were speaking.

“You are a fool to come here,” Irina told her.

“A fool? You are one to talk,” she countered.

“I don’t know what you’re speaking about but you had better leave before Jack gets back. How am I to explain you?” she asked.

“I could be your friend,” Yelena said.

“He’s not blind; we look identical,” Irina told her. “You need to leave.”

“You need to come with me,” Yelena countered. After this statement, Jack heard the front door shut. From his limited vantage point, he could see only a few shadows on the hall floor, but he heard footsteps and knew they were making their way back towards him.

“Tell me, Irina, why did you do it?” she asked.

“Do what?” Irina asked innocently.

“Why did you betray us? You knew you could never win. You let your foolish heart guide you… Pity, you could have been a fine agent,” she sighed.

“You know Yelena, a little love never hurt anybody,” Irina countered.

“Until now…,” she said. Then Jack could hear the sounds of a bag being unzipped and assumed a weapon was being removed. “Tell me, Irina, where is he? This man you claim to love.”

“I told you, he isn’t here,” Irina said.

“Impossible. I’ve been watching your house all morning. He hasn’t left.”

“Yelena, you don’t want to do this here. This is a neighborhood; there are children and families,” Irina told her.

“Only you would care about such things. Besides, I told you to come with me, but I will do this here if I have to,” Yelena told her.

“I will go nowhere with you. There is one think you’ve forgotten, Yelena. You may be skilled with a gun, but hand to hand combat is your weakness,” Irina said. Then, there was a loud smashing nose and a clatter that sounded like a gun colliding with the hardwood floor. After that, there was more scrambling and grunting, clearly noise of a physical fight until the deafening noise of a gun firing. Thus the battle began.

The moment the blast was heart, Jack looked out the door and saw Yelena’s backup henchmen heading quickly towards the house. Knowing he had only one shot, Jack cracked the door open, took aim and fired. The man fell immediately.

Quickly, Jack scrambled to his feet and slunk out to the foyer where Irina and her sister were still battling it out. Suddenly, Irina charged towards him and skidded into the kitchen, seeking refuge there. “What are you doing?” she asked breathlessly. “I told you to go!”

“I wasn’t leaving you here,” he told her. “What happened?”

“I shot her in the leg, but not well,” Irina grunted. Out in the foyer they could hear Yelena scrambling to her feet. Irina poked her head around the corner to the kitchen, but saw Yelena was out of view. Taking a brief calm in the fight, Jack grabbed the phone off the wall and found that it was, in fact, still working.

Knowing that was the first thing he would have disabled if he was doing a job like they were supposed to be doing, he muttered to himself as he dialed the endless number of digits to reach the CIA. Once connected, he explained he was under attack at his house, but he never was able to finish his phone call, for they were met with a barrage of Yelena’s bullets.

Both of them ducked behind the kitchen counter to hide at first then Irina reached her arm around the corner and shot back. “Damn it, I’m out of bullets,” she hissed.

“Go,” he said to her in a hushed voice while gesturing towards the back door.

“What? No, I’m not leaving you,” she told him.

“You’re not… get the car; go do it,” he said sharply. She didn’t budge. “There is a gun in my glove box; we’re going to need it. I can hold her, just go.”

Irina reluctantly crawled to the door and opened it silently, then she raced out without shutting the door. She ran around to the front of the townhouse as quickly as she could. There she froze. She knew the front door creaked, so opening it would give her away and thus would be useless. Then, she heard a gunshot and knew she had her window.

She burst through the door and found that she was behind Yelena, who appeared not to have noticed her. She grabbed the nearest sharp object she could find, Jack’s car keys, and jammed them in the back of her sister’s spine. Yelena yelped and spun around. Irina tried to rip the gun from her hand, but Yelena’s elbow nailed her in the jaw, sending her sprawling to the floor.

A wicked smile crossed Yelena’s face as she aimed the gun down at her helpless sister. But as this was happening, Jack emerged from the kitchen and Yelena changed her target. “NO!” Irina shouted, pushing herself up off the floor and directly into the path of Yelena’s bullet, which sent her back down to the floor immediately.

Jack, who had drawn his gun at the same time Yelena moved hers to target him, fired and his bullet collided with Yelena’s head, squarely between her eyes, killing her instantly. As the distant sounds of sirens blared, Jack skidded over to Irina, and his breath caught in his chest as he found her drenched in blood.



Chapter 11

“Irina,” he uttered, his voice barely a whisper. She didn’t respond, but she had also hit her head hard against the wall on the way down. Frantically, he began checking her chest for the source of the blood. He finally found it, a high wound on her chest, only a few inches beside one of her scrapes from the previous evening. He sighed a breath of relief; the wound wasn’t fatal if she could get to a hospital in time, which by the sound of the approaching sirens, he figured would happen. Quickly, he pressed his palm down on the wound to attempt to stop some of the bleeding as he whispered to her, “You’re going to be alright.”

“God damn it, Jack,” came the voice of his boss at the CIA, Director Landon, a few moments later as the man stood in the doorway of his war torn townhouse. “What the hell happened here?”

“That is a question I’d rather answer after she gets medical attention,” Jack told him. Director Landon ushered in the paramedics.

“Jesus, isn’t that your fiancée? How did she get mixed up in this?” Landon asked.

Jack said nothing, taking his hand off Irina’s wound only as it was replaced by the hand of one of the paramedics. Then he slowly crawled to his feet as they lifted her off the floor and quickly raced out the door with her. He had only a moment to formulate a plan and it needed to be a good one.

“This morning,” Jack sighed. “Early this morning, she revealed to me that she wasn’t who she said she was. Her name is Irina Derevko and she’s an operative of the KGB. She told me because she wanted me to take her to the CIA headquarters so that she could turn herself in.”

“Is that some sort of joke?” Landon actually laughed at him.

“Unfortunately, it’s not,” Jack sighed.

“So what the hell is this?” Landon asked, gesturing towards the bullet holes and corpse on the floor.

“Oh, there is also a body of a man in the backyard,” Jack told him.

“Jesus, did you kill the neighbors too? Make a clean job of it?”

Jack ignored him. “She told me that last night she had a fight with her handler, about what I don’t know, but he attacked her and she killed him in self-defense by knocking him over the railings of the observatory. But I knew nothing of this until this morning. She came here, she was shaken but she told me nothing, so we went to bed, this morning is when she told me everything.”

“You’re amazingly calm for a man who just found out his fiancée has been betraying him,” Landon pointed out.

“To be honest, sir, I don’t believe it’s sunk in yet,” he told him. That wasn’t a complete lie either.

“So wait a second, go back,” the director said, trying to grasp the unimaginable. “She tells you that she works for the KGB… how did you get to this fire fight?”

“Well, she told me that the KGB wanted her to start stealing secrets from me, but she refused. Perhaps that was what her argument with her handler was about, I’m not sure. But apparently the KGB found out about it and must have thought her a security risk because that is, or rather was, a KGB assassin – her sister Yelena,” he said, pointing toward the body.

“The dead girl is your fiancée’s sister?” Landon asked. Jack nodded. “Jesus Jack, you know how to pick ‘em… alright well, I’ve got to call this in.”

“Wait, call what in?” Jack asked.

“That woman needs to be watched; she’s a terrorist,” Landon told him.

“Wait, no she didn’t do anything wrong,” Jack insisted. Landon turned around and gaped at him with a ‘you’ve got to be joking’ expression. “Well… I mean she refused to spy for them. Can’t we just treat her as someone who wanted to defect?”

“Jack, explain something to me,” Landon began while rubbing his brow. “This woman tricked you, did she not? I mean, from what I recall, you’ve been in a relationship with her for quite some time. She lied to you. So why exactly are you her biggest fan right now?”

Jack sighed and lowered his head. Now there was an interesting question with an even more interesting answer. He decided the best answer was the immediate truth. “She took that bullet for me sir. She didn’t have to; but she did.”

“Alright Jack… let’s see if she pulls through the surgery before we discuss this any further,” Landon sighed.

It was then that Jack nearly had a panic attack. If they spoke with Irina first, she would go off on the real explanation; not his fabricated one. Somehow, he had to be the first one she talked to when she woke up and considering she was going to be guarded, that was going to be difficult.

~*~

Jack waited at the hospital through Irina’s two hour surgery. Once she was out, the doctors said after a recovery period that she’d be fine and she would have full use of the shoulder that had been hit. Luckily for him, the Director stepped out just as Irina’s anesthesia was wearing off and he was close friends with one of the guards at her door, so he was able to slip inside.

He went directly to her side and grasped her hand as she was stirring. “Irina,” he said softly as he brought a hand up to stroke her face gently. “Irina.”

“Mmm Jack?” she mumbled quietly.

“Yeah it’s me… I only have a few minutes so listen carefully. I told the CIA director that last night you argued with your handler when he told you that you needed to start stealing secrets from me. Up until then you took nothing, you were just an idle agent. Then you threw him over the railing when he attacked you with a knife. You came back to my place, but told me nothing until this morning. That’s when you told me about your KGB status. You told me that you wanted to defect.”

“What?” she mumbled. “I-I heard you… but why?”

“If you defect and stick to that story, they won’t charge you with anything as long as you cooperate,” he said quickly for he saw the director approaching.

“Jack, what are you doing?” Landon demanded.

“I was just telling her she was in the hospital, sir, and that she was going to be alright,” Jack said quickly.

The director eyed him suspiciously but then turned to the woman in the hospital bed. “Ms. Derevko, we need to ask you a few questions.”



Chapter 12

For over an hour, Jack waited very impatiently outside Irina’s hospital room while she was being interrogated by Director Landon and two observers. Finally, Landon came out and ushered Jack aside. “Cut the bull here, Jack; what’s going on?”

“I don’t understand…” Jack said convincingly.

“Your stories are too in-sync. What’s really going on here? Why are you protecting her?” Landon asked.

“Protecting her?” Jack laughed. “Why would I do that? I’m only telling you what she told me. Perhaps that’s why the stories match, after all, the truth can only be told one way.”

“So be it Jack, I just hope you know what kind of game you’re playing,” Landon told him.

“So what’s the verdict on her?” Jack asked, nodding towards Irina’s hospital room.

“Well…she needs to be in the hospital at least a week. After that, we’ll extract all the information we can from her, fill out all sorts of paperwork…. And I assume by that point, you might have another plan,” Landon told him.

Jack nodded and then walked past him and into Irina’s room. She was asleep, but he sat in the chair beside her to watch over her. Sitting there, he thought about the crazy direction his life had taken over the past four days and he nearly burst out laughing. He went from being a perfectly happily engaged man, to never wanting to see his fiancée again, then saving her life, having her save his life and finally lying to the US government to protect her. Now, he was about to embark on perhaps the most foolish thing yet – spending his life with her, after they talked out their issues, of course.

He fell asleep sitting there with his fingers laced through hers and when he awoke a nurse was checking on her and she was watching him. “Good morning,” she smiled at him.

“It’s not morning, is it?” Jack asked with a slight laugh.

“No, it’s the middle of the evening,” she told him.

“How’s your shoulder?” he asked her.

She gave a slight shrug with her good shoulder and said, “I’ll live. I’ve been shot before.”

“When?” he asked.

“The KGB finds it to be a good training tool to shoot their recruits in a non-life threatening fashion,” she told him.

“Wonderful,” he smiled, obviously being sarcastic.

It was only another minute before the nurse left them alone and Irina asked quietly, “Jack, why did you do that?”

“You saved my life, I was simply returning the favor,” he said casually.

“But you already saved my life at the observatory,” she told him quietly.

He shrugged. “So you owe me… I might have an idea or two as to how you can make it up to me.”

She laughed at his suggestive tone. “Don’t get too many ideas; I won’t be moving from this bed for a while. I’m serious though, Jack.”

“Well, you know,” he sighed in an almost helpless way. “I’m over thirty and I wouldn’t be able to find anyone else probably… so I’ll just have settle fo-AH!” he groaned when she dug her finger nails into the palm of his hand.

“Jack Bristow! That is a horrible thing to say!” she scolded him. Then, noting the smirk plastered across his face she added, “You have the sickest sense of humor of anyone I’ve ever known.”

“Really? I even beat out the KGB thugs?” he said in an almost proud way.

“No, they have no sense of humor whatsoever,” she told him.

“Ah… well I suppose I should be going… although my home is a crime scene… I’ll find someplace to sleep. You’ll be alright?”

“Yes, I suppose I will live through the night, it might be touchy for a while though,” she told him. He rolled his eyes, kissed the back of her hand and then left.

~*~

A week later, Irina was released from the hospital and after spending almost an entire day talking to the CIA for her debrief, they released her as well. She joined Jack at the hotel where he was temporary living since, not only was his home a crime scene, but his neighbors weren’t particularly fond of him anymore.

“So… what’s the plan?” she asked him as she sat down on the bed while holding tightly to her arm that was in a sling across her body to immobilize it as much as possible.

“Plan?” he laughed. “You think I have a plan?” She gave him a look. “Alright well, obviously things here are a bit messed up.”

“Obviously,” she repeated dully.

“You think the KGB will come after you?” he asked her.

“Most likely not. I’m not worth it to them to start a war with the CIA. Still, I wouldn’t be planning any vacations to Russia in the near future,” she sighed. Then she paused for a moment before saying, “I used to think I’d be a spy for the rest of my life… not that I thought I’d be an eighty-year-old woman with a cane in one hand and a gun in the other… I knew the job would kill me but… I thought that was it; that’s what I’m supposed to be.

“But then I came here and I was a teacher, a profession I never would have even considered, but still there I was….. and I really loved it, I did. And…. and there was you,” she said softly as she looked up at him. He was standing about five feet from her, leaning up against the wall with his arms folded over his chest.

She looked back down towards her lap and began picking at a frayed string on her sling. “You know when it started being real for me, Jack? You remember… it was about four, not quite four and a half months after our first date and I, um, I caught a cold from one of my students… and I said to you ‘No, I can’t come over; I’ll get you sick’ and then you said that you hadn’t been sick in years. You were completely impervious to illness,” she smiled softly recalling this.

“So I went over and I was all… horrible with my nose running and I fell asleep on your couch because I was too miserable to do anything else but sleep…. And the next morning, I woke up, still on your couch and it was awful…I was even worse, but you wouldn’t let me leave; you said I shouldn’t be alone, you… you took care of me and then you got sick,” she said with a very soft laugh. “But you didn’t even care. I felt awful but you said it wasn’t my fault it was the germ’s fault for being so damn contagious.” She looked up at him and saw him cracking a smile, obviously recalling the incident, though he tried to hide it.

A tear slid down her face as she slowly got up off the bed and walked over to him. “I knew I loved you then and… and when you told me you loved me and I said it back, I meant it. I did! And… and I knew that I had to tell you the truth because I didn’t want to lose you, even though it was pretty much guaranteed that I would, but I knew that if there was a chance of not losing you I had to take it because I couldn’t stand anything else to be a lie,” she managed, though her voice trembled at the end.

For a moment, he just stared at her and the tears dripping slowly down her cheeks. Then, he opened his arms and took a step forward. She met him in the middle, resting her chin on his shoulder and wrapping her good arm around his back. He held her tightly for a few minutes before saying very quietly, “What do you think about Virginia?”

“Virginia?” she laughed softly.

“Yes… it’s the other side of the country… there are actually seasons there with snow and I know how much you love snow,” he said. She laughed softly. “There are many good universities there,” he continued.

“And Langley,” she added.

“And Langley,” he said.

She pulled back from their hug and looked at him. “You’re sure you want to move there?”

He shrugged. “I’m getting bored here; need a change of pace.”

“Mhmm,” she smiled.

He leaned down and kissed her softly. “You know, I’d be really bored without you.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, I’m glad I’m here to entertain you.”



Epilogue

“Jaaaack,” Irina whined from where she was hovering just outside the doorframe to their new home. It had been six months since they’d left LA; two since they had been married and they were finally moving in.

“What woman?!” he called back. “I got all your boxes.”

“But you forgot me,” she smiled innocently when he ducked his head to look at her from his position halfway up the stairs. He grumbled and groaned as he stalked down the stairs and over to her. He lifted her only a few inches off the ground and moved her to the inside of the house. “That was pathetic,” she told him with an eye roll.

He just shrugged. “We’ve got unpacking to do,” he said, trying to walk away, but she held him back and protruded her bottom lip in a pout. “You know,” he sighed. “If we ever have a daughter that has that exact same expression, I’m going to be in trouble.”

She smiled at him. “I won’t let your secret get out.”

“Uh huh,” he said before scooping her up by her waist.

She squealed for a moment before noticing that there were two people walking up the front path to their new home, most likely their neighbors coming to rescue them. “Jack, Jack! Put me down. We have company,” she told him.

Jack set her down and turned to see a tall, sandy-haired man approaching. He was accompanied by a slightly shorter woman with golden brown hair, carrying a basket. “Hello,” she said with an obviously thick French accent. “We don’t mean to intrude…”

“You’re not intruding at all,” Irina smiled at her.

The woman laughed softly upon hearing Irina’s accent. “We’re your neighbors,” she said with a gesture towards her house. “I’m Amelia Vaughn and this is my husband, Bill.”

“Irina,” she smiled as she shook the woman’s hand. “This is my husband, Jack.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” Amelia smiled as the four of them exchanged handshakes. “You are new to this area?”

“Yes, we’ve moved from Los Angeles,” Jack told her.

“Well, we’ve lived here for a few years now, so if you need directions or anything, let us know,” she said with smile.

“Thank you very much,” Irina smiled as she took the basket Amelia held out to her. Once they had left, Irina turned to her husband and smile. “I think we’re gonna like it here.”

He put an arm around her and smiled, “Me too.”

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