contortionist

"In twenty four hours I'll know the truth…and you'll still be in the dark."

Twenty-four hours passed and he knew the truth. The truth was that he was trapped.
He'd rather have remained in the dark, even remained in the CIA cell.

Not because he felt any grief, though.

San'ko relished telling him what the Covenant had discovered.

"Have some of the wine," the Covenant operative instructed. "When we want to drug you, we won't bother with it."

Sark tasted it, found it bitter, and wondered if he'd lost his appreciation for anything alcoholic after two years abstinence. Perhaps it was the vintage; he'd come to associate it with captivity and unpleasantness. He still admired the color, the deep, vivid red shade of it, the light of the single halogen bulb above the table glowing through it.

"Andrian Lazeray," San'ko said.

Sark raised an eyebrow.

"Not a name I'm familiar with."

San'ko's smile grew crueler.

"A clever man, Lazeray. He survived the transition from the Soviet Union's diplomatic corps and continued with the Russian Federation and never revealed his own secrets. He was a descendant of a cadet branch of the Romanovs."

"I presume you learned this from one of the White Russian groups who still dream of returning to rule the Rodina after generations in exile," Sark said in a bored tone. His own mother had been one of them, telling him stories of Anastasia and massacres, troikas and wolves following through the snow for miles many times.

"Tell me, my little prince," San'ko said, "any clotting problems?"

He'd never known his father, beyond the man's name. A distant descendant of White Russian exiles, his mother had told him, as she was herself. He'd provided the money that paid for Sark's schooling in England. Nothing more. Discovering the man was a Romanov didn't impress Sark. Learning he was putative royalty only made him laugh.

Andrian Lazeray meant nothing to him. The man's death didn't move him. It was nothing more than another move on the chessboard, one that brought the Covenant one step closer to the Romanov millions the man had held in trust. Sark repeated that to himself like an incantation.

Perhaps it was merely coincidence that Sark had been taken from there to train in the KGB's version of Project Christmas. Perhaps Lazeray had orchestrated that too. It didn't matter anymore.

Eight hundred million dollars in gold bullion, stacked in a vault in the Caymans, and Sark turned it over to Sanko.

Not voluntarily.

"I learned many of my techniques at the Serbsky Institute," Verushkin told Sark as he began. "Others were pioneered in Argentina and China. The French and the British have had significant successes with combinations of drugs, sensory deprivation and virtual reality. Our program uses elements from them all."

He paused and observed Sark where he'd been strapped onto a gurney.

"If my superiors weren't in so much of a hurry, I'd take this much slower," the gaunt doctor explained. Sark thought the man probably never spoke of his 'work' with anyone who wasn't about to be subjected to it. It made him lonely and talkative. "It's always a mistake to hurry things. That's how I lost my favorite, you know."

"Your favorite?" Sark asked, despite himself.

"Oh, yes," Verushkin said, nodding as he filled a syringe. "She was lovely. She fought so hard." He smiled at Sark and injected the contents into the IV line running into the back of his hand. "She said she would kill me."

"What a shame she didn't," Sark murmured.

Verushkin beamed.

"Soon you'll understand, just as she did, Mr. Sark," he said. "In a few days, you'll belong to us…"

He stroked his hand along Sark's cheek in a nearly affectionate manner.

"You'll be my best subject yet. I won't make the mistakes I made programming Ms. Bristow."

It took longer than a few days to break Sark. Verushkin didn't understand that. Two years had taught Sark to face his own weaknesses and raze them out. Even with drugs, Verushkin couldn't crawl his way into Sark's mind so quickly. San'ko wanted Sark compliant. Verushkin muttered imprecations and accelerated the conditioning program.

Sark held out.

Sark knew despair when they showed him the training tapes with Sydney Bristow, though. Surveillance footage taken from Lazeray's office when she killed the man for them. Records of what they did to her, the drugs and conditioning, the way they steadily reshaped her into their tool. Watching it was worse than torture, because he knew the faceless leaders of the Covenant had decreed Sark was to serve them as Sydney had.

Knowing what they were doing to him, understanding it, wasn't enough to fight it. He did fight, of course. Sydney had fought too, but in the end she did their bidding.

As did he.

Seeing Sydney Bristow turned into a blank-eyed zombie, following orders, turning into someone else, frightened Sark more than torture or death. They erased her.

Sark bent, because otherwise, he'd break. He gave up control in an effort to hold onto himself, to remember and remain sane. No one was going to help him, no one was going to save him. He had to do that himself and if he forgot that, then the Covenant would use him and dispose of him.

He held onto the thought of Sydney Bristow even as he stopped resisting Verushkin's 'treatments'. She was his talisman. She'd stood in front of the glass of his cell only days ago and burned with all the life he'd admired in her before. She'd broken free of the hold the Covenant had on her mind. What she could do, he would do.

The Caymans were the first test. He could have said something, made it clear he was under coercion by Ushek San'ko and the guards. The bank had extensive security measures, protocols that dealt with such attempts at theft. He didn't. He couldn't.

He tested the limits of his enforced obedience in Mexico, and found them stringent. He couldn't disobey his orders, only twist how he followed them. He spotted Sydney watching as he waited for Oransky to arrive, and said nothing because he hadn't been instructed to. He even allowed her a line of sight on the sat photos, raising his voice so she would hear what the Covenant was after. No one had told him not to, after all.

He walked away while Oransky played Mexican stand-off with Sydney, regretting only that she merely shot the man in the leg and not the head. It meant he would have to try to work with the volatile man again in Russia.

He had to close his eyes when he looked down at her and Agent Vaughn from the Medusa control room beneath the Ministry of Science building. It was so like Paldiski and so different. He'd been pulling the strings then. Now he was the puppet.

He wanted to tell her things as he stood behind the bulletproof glass. Wanted to thank her for keeping her word and killing Verushkin. Instead he held his tongue.

Vaughn was with her.

Verushkin had tapes of Agent Michael Vaughn's programming, too. The doctor had worked on the man for months, done his work so subtly the man probably didn't even remember being compromised. Didn't know he was the one who had reported to San'ko that the CIA was sending Sydney to recover Medusa ahead of them.

True to his expectations, Sydney blew something up, frying the Medusa prototype in the process. He left Oransky raving and rejoined the crowd above, slipping away in the post explosion confusion.

He let himself seem angry over the wrecked mission when he debriefed to his Covenant handler. Inside, he was grinning with glee. He'd succeeded in sabotaging them. He'd circumvented the conditioning. He could do it; he could get free, just as Sydney had.

Someday, he would destroy the Covenant. For now, he would play the good puppet, learn their secrets, let them trust they owned him mind and soul.

It wasn't forever.

And he wasn't in the dark.