__________

Drops fell one at a time from the faucet into steaming bath water, rhythmically wrinkling the surface.

Plop!

Plop!

Each tiny clash echoed hypnotically off bare walls and cold floor, providing relief from the unremitting silence. Birkoff was thoroughly sick of silence.

Birkoff hated this mission from the start with such fervor that his stomach ached. The fear was the worst, but hunger had soon overshadowed even that. He forced his brain to replay, over and over, the Section-generated profile of Jean-Marc Rousseau and his terrorist cult Soldat de la Liberte. His crude techniques of culturing loyalty among his converts began with the adversities of fatigue and hunger. Forced by his duties within Section One, Birkoff and fatigue had long ago come to terms with each other, but going without food was a hardship unknown to him. His intellect knew that the starvation diet was just a trick, but his body rebelled loudly. He wanted something to eat!

Not long after he had hacked their computer network, several men had grabbed Birkoff outside the bogus apartment Section set up for him. He expected to be kidnapped, and he expected they would be rough, but he had few experiences with physical pain for comparison and the reality surpassed his memory. Three men lay hands on him hard enough to leave bruises on his arms while a fourth punched him three times in the ribs. Yellowish-brown smudges were all that remained on his arms, but his ribs still hurt.

After that, they had locked him in a room and left him for three days without food. A sink provided rusty water next to a cracked but functional toilet. Those hungry days of enforced solitude had stretched into endless hours spent pacing, or sitting, or lying on the floor as his stomach clutched tighter and tighter on nothing and hurt worse than his ribs. Periodically, a young woman came in to break his sleep at odd hours and ask him the same questions over and over: "Who do you work for? Who's your boss?" Each time he answered with a lie, and each time the girl left without feeding him.

Plip!

Plop!

Now, he felt infused with comfort. After wolfing down two buttered rolls, some grapes and a hank of sweet cheese, the bath was luxury heaped upon luxury. Coming hard on the heels of unwashed days fed with little more than a few apples and hard bread, the extra food and hot water sent him into a languorous stupor.

Plop!

That small, almost musical noise helped Birkoff remain anchored to the present. After days of silence or distant chaos, he relished any normal sound that might relive the tedium. Occasionally he could hear the muted roar of human voices rise up beneath his feet in a heavy chant. Sometimes, the sound of automatic weapons fire rattled the windowpanes as ragged young men and women trained for their new calling as terrorists.

Mostly he heard nothing.

Only when he took action and moved around could he beat back the utter stillness and break the hissing white hum that is silence. Locked in a tower prison, insulated from the outside world by thick beams and old plaster, he felt imprisoned by time as well. Faucet-dropped water marked off the minutes in audible reality; a soothing reminder that he did pass forward towards the future . . . and eventual escape.

Noise outside the door brought his attention from drowsy contemplation of ripples on clear water to the world at large with a brain twisting rush. Birkoff froze, looking around for something to cover his nudity. He felt particularly vulnerable, naked and submerged in contentment. He came close to a nervous laugh when he realized he was more frightened of being caught exposed than of bodily harm.

The door opened. Mia entered with a cold draft, no apology in her eyes for the imposition. Birkoff hastily arranged the woefully small scrap of washcloth in his lap with an awkward splash.

"Mia!" he exclaimed.

"I wanted to see you," she said as she slid into the room then leaned back on the closed the door behind her.

"Why?"

She pushed away from the door. "I just wanted to be with you."

Birkoff was quickly forgetting his discomfiture as anger flushed his face. "I suppose Rousseau sent you up here?" His cynicism for authority figures was raging after Operations left him to hang in the wind. Rousseau was little better, playing obvious head-games with him, offering Birkoff a new room with real plumbing and a soft bed after he improved the computer security protocols. After he had admitted to Rousseau his status as a Section agent, the cheese and rolls and grapes had appeared -- a feast. Birkoff supposed that Mia was the latest carrot to reward the 'trust' between them.

Mia stopped, startled by his animosity. She stared at the floor, her cheeks reddened in shame. "Yes. He asked me to come. But . . ."

"But what?" Birkoff prompted her, his voice softer as he tamped down his hostility with effort. He knew the importance of remaining within the trust of these people. Before, it had been strangely easy to keep his resentment trapped just under the surface while he suffered the hardships of his imprisonment. Now...

She looked up. "I wanted to."

"Oh." Without his glasses he could not read all of the subtle nuances of her expression. Her dark eyes regarded him solemnly, but did her lips curve in a slight smile?

He remembered their meeting in the stairwell. Holding his expression open and friendly got harder when she inquired after his health and confessed her trust in him. At the time he knew she wanted to kiss him, but he had been rattled by her trust in his fidelity to her cause. Her belief in his motives was utterly misguided since he was there specifically to destroy Soldat de la Liberte. Someone had come down the stairs and he had used the intrusion as an excuse to pull back just as her lips grazed his mouth, then retreat, confused.

He also remembered how she questioned him periodically for three days without food.

Mia walked closer and knelt next to the oversized tub. Manufactured in a different era exclusively for some rich person's soaking pleasure, it dominated the room as it stood cracked and rusted but still sound on ball-claw feet. It also put Birkoff's head on the same level as Mia's as she leaned against the chipped rim. There was a shy, anticipatory lilt on her mouth. "I'm not usually this forward, but . . . I sense that you and I are a lot alike. And I have so few people that I can trust in this world."

Trust. It was a concept that loomed large in Birkoff's mind. He felt precious little trust for anyone lately. He trusted Walter, but Walter was in no position to help him as things stood now. Hillinger, that terminal pain-in-the-ass, was forcing him to sprout eyes in the back of his head just to figure out what the roach was up to -- and right now he had a free rein in Birkoff's domain. Operations always ran hot-and-cold and right now he was an iceberg waiting in the dark. Michael, well...he was fairly sure Michael would try his best to save him, but he could also trust that Michael would do his job, even if it included canceling him.

Nikita raised his ire the most, only because he trusted her the most and so far she wasn't coming through for him. He could tell she didn't believe his suspicions about Operations' motive as he pled his case to her before he left. She promised to keep an eye on him, but he had yet to hear from her. Every day of his confinement he hoped to hear her voice, just once! But no. Greg answered his queries. Always. Sometimes he even woke up the channel just to gloat. "Hey, Seymour, just checking in. Oh, don't worry, the signal isn't compromised, it's just me chewing; my pizza just got here. Wouldn't want it to get cold. So, got anything to report . . . other than, oh . . . nothing?"

Birkoff let his chin drop to his chest as he sunk deeper into the water. Trust... It might be the key, but he would have to be convincing. He was positive that Greg recorded everything he did over the com, just looking for a chance to pounce if Birkoff screwed up. And he knew that Greg wouldn't be able to resist passing on this bit of surveillance to Operations. This...this will help convince them, he thought. He looked up at Mia without moving his head, brown eyes heavily lidded.

"I . . . I think we do have a lot in common, Mia." He felt a ruthless sense of control affect a change in his brain, heady and scary all at once. I can do this, he thought. It would be harder than faking allegiance to Rousseau in a loud declaration of "Strength! Power!" but . . . I can do this.

Mia smiled at him and reached over to caress the side of his head as she had done in the stairwell. Birkoff sat up taller and met her mouth square on. His eyes closed as they always did when he kissed, and he automatically reached up to cup the back of her neck with one dripping hand. She smelled of cool air, dusty skin, and faint gunpowder. Her mouth tasted of apples. He opened his eyes halfway and watched her blissful expression.

I'm using her, Birkoff suddenly thought. She trusts me . . . and I'm using her. Will it be enough? Will I have to do more? A pang of guilt stabbed his decency, but it refused to fight back. Women had injured it too often and deeply to rally, not now. Valerie's scorn, Tatiana's treason, Abby's duplicity, Gail's infidelity . . . all spun around a mocking litany of betrayal. He pulled away from Mia just enough to look at her. Her face was soft now, but he remembered the hardened strength she had used to question him. She opened her eyes and looked back at him, smiling and faintly puzzled as he silently regarded her through calculating eyes.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Nothing." Birkoff lowered his grip on her neck, clutching the vulnerable junction of neck and shoulder. He found he could control her movements well that way and pulled her forward to kiss her again with more force. He raised up enough to pull her into the tub with him, sloshing water over the sides that hit the floor with wet splats and eliciting a squeal from Mia.

"Ah!" she exclaimed. "You are feeling stronger, aren't you?"

Birkoff smiled a closed-mouth smile at her as the calculating expression in his eyes never altered. "You have no idea."

I'm using you, he thought. And I can.

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