cicatrice

Lange with identity papers.  As we speak, he's getting drunk, in the club."

He's in the club when she and Bristow turn it into a shooting gallery. He isn't thrilled. He hates being pushed.

Screaming, shoving, kicking, the crowd explodes along with the bullets. Glass is blown out of the shattered bar, liquor is running across the floor. Someone takes a moment to loot the till, even in the midst of chaos. Humanity displayed at its selfish peak; each hedonistic club-goer fighting the rest to get away from the sudden introduction of reality into their night-time fantasy. The music is still pounding, but no one hears it. Long dormant instinct has tuned their ears to the sound of the hunters, the bullet's report, the prey's cry. They're running for the doors.

Lemmings.

He thinks it no wonder terrorists like bombing nightclubs. It isn't too hard, detaching any compassion for the mindless mass. They're little more than meat. Of course, he's still numb. He's been this way since San'ko sprang his little surprise. He's begun to think the feelings aren't coming back.

Not that that bothers him.

It's hard to get upset when you no longer have much in the way of emotion.

While the crowd screams and careens off each other trying to get out, he leans against a column that provides a modicum of cover, hands in his pants' pockets, and observes. Anyone who gets too close, he'll shoot.

He's not in a good mood. He's already spent several hours watching Strauss, waiting for Lange to show. Flunky work. He's fended off a dozen offers, to have a drink or a dance or sex or drugs, or all of the above, to go into the washroom or the stairwell or just go home with them, from too many men and too many women for the night. The music and the lighting have given him a throbbing headache.

He wants a shower and the clean impersonality of a hotel bedroom.

He is tapped into the radio feed between Bristow and her handler and was listening earlier. Vaughn's running commentary amused him distantly. He could contact Allison, warn her about the man working his way toward her position now. He could, if he wanted to.

Apparently, he doesn't.

She wouldn't thank him if he did.

Very well, she can fend for herself, just as he will.

Christ, could she waste a little more ammunition? It's a sniper rifle, an instrument of precision, not a room-sweeper. A mental countdown begins in his head, a calculation of how long until the carabenieri show up. Whatever happens, he means to be long gone before that time limit's up.

Strauss is dead.

Lange is running.

Allison is so full of rage, so hungry for violence, he has no doubt she'll catch up with the scientist. He almost pities the man. Not because she'll kill him. He has no difficulties with that. It's the knowledge Allison will take too much pleasure in Lange's terror and pain as she takes what the Covenant wants from him that disturbs. It's a primarily intellectual disturbance though, prompted by the knowledge that a sadist can get too caught up in feeding that addiction, that needing things will only provide an enemy a key to that weakness.

Needing anything leads to mistakes.

He walks out of the club, using a private exit he'd mapped out and memorized before following Allison in. There's another elevator. He uses a security key to over-ride it and rides down to the basement parking garage in solitude. By the time he's checked the car for tampering, Allison will be at the rendezvous, waiting. He's absolutely confident she'll succeed, despite Sydney Bristow's presence.

It's simply so much easier to accomplish a task when killing is just another option, not a last resort.

The radio feed brings him Michael Vaughn's frustrated report that Allison's gone down the elevator shaft after Lange.

Sark shudders.

She's gotten bloody reckless. As though surviving Bristow's three bullets means nothing can touch her now. He knows about the Rambaldi formula they experimented on her with, knows more about it than she does. He knows she isn't invulnerable. The scars prove that. The formula doesn't heal everything, and nothing inside.

He knows both women have scars.

Rambaldi's marks.

He's so bloody tired of it all.

He hears Vaughn find Bristow, along with Lange's body. So Allison left her alive. Interesting. The Covenant must have told her Bristow was out of bounds for now. He imagines how angry Allison will be over that.

She'll have the RFID chip Lange had hidden in his tooth.

That means the two of them will be going after the key program Lange designed next. He'll have to let Sloane know. Otherwise the CIA won't act in time to intercept their retrieval mission and the Covenant will have it.

Sark sighs.

So very, very tired of this game. He just wants to be done with it.

He doesn't know when it will end though, only that Irina has promised that it will.

He supposes it will.

Everybody dies.

-fin