The Pursuit (Alias) Read online

  A MICHAEL VAUGHN NOVEL

  LIZZIE SKURNICK

  AN ORIGINAL PREQUEL NOVEL BASED ON THE

  HIT TV SERIES CREATED BY J. J. ABRAMS

  BANTAM BOOKS

  NEW YORK • TORONTO • LONDON • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Don’t miss any of the

  OFFICIAL ALIAS BOOKS

  from BANTAM BOOKS!

  Copyright Page

  1

  THE PUCK SMASHED INTO the goal like a grenade exploding.

  Making a quarter turn with his stick, Michael deftly flipped a new puck onto the ice from the quickly emptying bucket at his feet. Moving like a low-flying plane, he approached the goal and crossed the bar. Before another second had passed, an orange puck had smashed almost through the nubbly gray net and joined the other pucks scattered at the bottom of the goal.

  At least I can still aim, Michael thought, looking with satisfaction at the growing constellation of pucks that had shot back onto the ice after being pounded inside the bounds. Too bad I’m fifty thousand times too slow to be the next Wayne Gretzky.

  In the cold air of the rink, Michael’s breath made plumes of smoke as he skated over to his bag to take a swig from his water bottle. Though at this point, I’d be happy to take a job cleaning the ice.

  He surveyed the rows and rows of darkened seats that surrounded the rink. His loud, ragged breathing was the only sound in the place, that and the hum of the overhead fluorescents. Michael always snapped the lights on when he had these late-night practice sessions at Orca, an indoor ice rink with distinctive black-and-white patterning.

  Michael took a long pull from his water bottle and placed the cap back on. A low, groaning sound suddenly seemed to rise from the benches around him, like a beast slowly waking. Michael tensed, snapping his head around to find the cause. Then his shoulders relaxed. The groan, he realized, had come directly from him.

  Before Michael could stop it, another groan escaped, this one like the whoosh of air escaping a tire. He began to pound his chest as if he were having a choking fit. It seemed like the first real exhalation he had allowed himself in months, but for some reason, he was afraid. If he let himself feel anything right now, he might discover that he was filled with enough rage to smash up the whole arena.

  Well, isn’t that what hockey players are supposed to do? he thought, surprised to find a small smile making its way across his features, like a hiker clambering over unfamiliar terrain. Maybe I’m cut out for a life on ice after all.

  A life on ice was right. Ever since he’d reached the spring of his senior year at Georgetown University, that’s how he’d felt—shelved, on hold. Michael smiled again. This was easily his first real smile in months. Or at least his first real smile since he’d finally accepted the fact that no matter how hard he’d worked to fit the profile and prepare himself for his chosen career, no matter who his father was, the CIA just wasn’t going to respond to the application he’d sent them nearly a year ago.

  They hadn’t even sent a form letter to acknowledge receipt.

  Cursing and mumbling under his breath, Michael grabbed his bucket and skated back out onto the ice to begin the tedious task of rounding up all the pucks. Kneeling down to grasp one that had lodged under the skeleton of the goal, he slipped, then found himself sprawled out nearly full length under the battered hood, his ear smarting where he’d winged the side of the goal on his way down.

  Michael looked up at the ceiling, the bulbs of the hanging orbs blinding him momentarily.

  Now I’m really on ice, he thought. And the CIA’s sent my application to the penalty box.

  It had been a long, hot summer in D.C. A long senior year, in fact. And it would have been even longer without Nora.

  Except now Nora was gone.

  Michael had spent the fall like most Georgetown seniors: hanging out with friends, getting recommendations from all his best professors lined up, and of course, attempting to dutifully attend all the classes that suddenly seemed a little more voluntary now that it was all coming to an end. Luckily, Michael was a natural grind—finished with most of his coursework, he had picked up advanced classes in French, Italian, and Spanish, then blown by his classmates. Raised bilingual, with a French mother and an American father, Michael had always found Romance languages a breeze.

  Until the first semester of his senior year, when he’d met Nora, Michael had felt only a vague impatience for college to end so that his career with the CIA could begin. But after he met Nora, it was almost as if he had split in two: There was the Michael who loved hanging out with his pretty, smart, sophisticated girlfriend, and there was the Michael who was planning to work for the American government the minute they got their act together and came for him.

  Needless to say, the two Michaels had never even been introduced.

  Michael met Nora in a beginner’s art class, the one easy course he had allowed himself to take after three and a half straight years of hard-core international relations, with healthy doses of history and economics thrown in for good measure. Michael smiled again, thinking of his arrival that first day and his shock at the damp, cramped basement where the art class had met, so unlike the wood-paneled seminar rooms where he was used to debating whether to forgive the debt to Third World nations or what were the actual causes of World War I.

  “You? Taking an art course?” his mother had chortled when Michael had informed her of his plan during one of his monthly calls to her northern California retreat. He heard ice tinkling in a glass and knew she was probably out on her sun porch, holding a tall, frosted iced tea, watching the waves of the Pacific crash against worn-down pilings. She had moved to the rambling house when Michael had gone to college, and he loved to visit, taking breaks from his sucession of tiny dorm rooms, each with its own small leaded-glass window from which he watched the leaves change, fall, and grow back.

  “They say some genetic traits take longer to express themselves than others,” Michael had responded, laughing. Both he and his mother knew that although she had filled their house with enormous paintings and stylized, intricate sculptures in the years following his father’s death—eventually even achieving a limited local fame for her own vivid, sun-splashed canvases—he had never graduated beyond the stick-figure montage most kids abandon after the first grade.

  “Well, I’ve saved all your art so far,” his mother said, sounding faintly bemused. Michael wondered if she was referring to the ancient crayon drawings of a dragon, a lizard, and some slug like object she had managed to coax from him at an early age and tape to the kitchen wall, before he learned he was happier playing with old radios and—once he got his first PC—computers. “I guess it won’t kill me to tack up a few more masterpieces.”

  Michael had bought all the pads and charcoals the course required. Though the art supplies cost far more dinero than his used economics textbooks ever had, he was excited at the prospect of a course that didn’t require his reading a packet as thick as a telephone book. As was his habit, he had arrived on time the first day, awkwardly wielding his sketch pad like a shield. An empty room stared back at him. There was only a scattering of stools, a bunch of tall metal easels tossed into a heap in the corner, and a large plywood platform in the center. Down the hall, Michael heard the rise and fall of approaching voices. He turned to see a group of students—could they possibly be freshmen?—all dressed in black,
most of them with hair dyed colors Michael usually associated with nuclear fallout. A girl or boy—Michael couldn’t tell—brushed by him on the way to the stack of easels. “Excuse me,” he—she—it said, expertly hefting one of the steel skeletons to a standing position.

  With every Andy Warhol clone that crossed the threshold holding a well-used portfolio like an old friend, Michael felt his spirits sinking. They said this was a beginner’s course, Michael thought, wanting to be amused that he was getting panicky over an art course but horrified that his palms were actually sweating. Why does everyone else seem like they would be at home in some Left Bank café?

  Watching the classroom fill, Michael noticed that all the newcomers—boys with piercings and chains, girls with black tights and platform shoes—seemed suspiciously handy with an easel. Michael felt particularly conspicuous as he tried to get his into a standing position. As a woman who looked like an older sister to the female students entered the room and mounted the platform, he found himself in a truly excruciating position, kneeling over the tangled legs of his easel like a farm boy trying to untip a cow.

  “Please let me live,” a voice whispered from above his right shoulder. Michael looked up, ready to let fly with some sarcasm of his own, but he stopped when he saw a brown-eyed, dark-haired beauty smiling down at him. She made a mock-strangulation move on her neck, as if to illustrate what he was doing to the poor pieces of metal. “I can’t stand it!”

  “You better learn to stand it . . . or stand up,” Michael whispered back, finally sliding a bolt into the right catch so that the easel stood upright in what appeared to be a steady posture.

  “See—you just had to give it some TLC,” the girl whispered back, her eyes dancing. The woman on the platform was issuing directions. Michael looked around and saw that everyone one else—his new friend included—had clipped their pads to the easels and were holding large pieces of what looked like orange chalk at the ready.

  Michael didn’t even remember where he had left his pad. He was also pretty sure that he hadn’t bought anything orange.

  The girl assessed his situation and acted. “Quick,” she whispered, passing him her piece of chalk and pulling one for herself from a plastic box filled with various artsy utensils. “Now find your pad, or Mireille will get mad.”

  Michael leaned closer. The girl smelled both delicious and dangerous—a light floral underlaid with something spicy. He knew he was in trouble. The few times he had fallen, it had always been for tall brunettes with dark, dark eyes. “Who’s Mireille?” he hissed back.

  A dark shadow approached his easel, like the cloud of an oncoming storm. Michael looked up into the pale blue eyes of a very angry woman. Mireille was the teacher, of course, and he was, he realized, probably very much in trouble.

  “I am,” she said in a—how could he have missed it?—commanding French accent. She could have come from the same Normandy region where his mother had been born.

  “Pardon, Madame,” he replied automatically, as if he were speaking to his mother. Mireille’s eyes flared as if he’d just cursed her out. She probably got a lot of mileage around these Americans for her accent, he realized. It must not be pleasant to find that one of her insolent students had the same one.

  Michael switched back to English immediately. “I was just having a little trouble. . . .”

  “Making trouble, you mean,” Mireille interrupted. “And holding up my class. Silence. Class, this is Shannon,” she said, gesturing to a redhead in a white robe who’d just emerged from the corner. As the class watched, Shannon mounted the platform, glared at all of them defiantly, and removed her robe.

  Michael almost knocked over his easel.

  The girl on the left leaned over to whisper to him again. Her eyes sparkled with mischief. “Don’t worry,” she said, shrugging and beginning to sketch. “We probably won’t get around to you for a couple of weeks.”

  By the time fall turned decisively into winter—and by the time Nora explained that the art department actually hired nude models and didn’t use the students in the class—he and Nora were almost inseparable. He moved most of his things into her attic apartment in a crumbling Victorian in Georgetown (her marigold walls and queen-sized futon were a big step up from his Spartan cell with its screeching cot), and they spent the semester seeing the blockbusters Nora adored two months late at the three-dollar theater, eating waffles and scrambled eggs at the corner diner, and drawing each other’s feet and hands until both decided they weren’t cut out for the art world and dropped Mireille’s course.

  Nora Carlisle was as unlike Michael as anyone he’d ever met. While he had majored in solid, unromantic disciplines, she has chosen (in his opinion) the goofiest, most made-up major in the world next to sociology: psychology. Time after time, he argued that she was wasting her brains on a bunch of nonsense created by “spiritual” Europeans. “Believe me, Freud didn’t know anything,” he argued. “Why don’t you become a mathematician instead?” He knew that her clinical work involved some complex equations even her advisor couldn’t follow. “Or become a real doctor, for heaven’s sake?”

  Nora was always unruffled by his pleas. “Your insistence that your personality isn’t worth studying” she would say, planting a gentle kiss on his head, “is exactly what makes studying you so interesting to me.”

  And the differences only multiplied. While Nora had gone to a huge, urban public school, where daughters of diplomats and sons of janitors took SAT prep side by side, Michael had attended the same small, private boys’ school his father had gone to, mixing with the sons of his father’s old friends. While Nora knew everyone, everywhere—the lady behind the counter in the deli, a group of freshman girls trying to sell raffle tickets at the train station, the dean of the Environmental Sciences department—Michael had only a few close friends. And most important, while Nora had an enormous family back in New York—so large that she claimed she couldn’t take the subway without running into a cousin or uncle—Michael had only his mother; his father had died in the line of duty. (According to his mother, there was an extremely distant and extremely religious set of cousins still in France somewhere, but she claimed she’d pretend to be someone else if they tried to contact her.)

  Sometimes that year, Michael was almost sure that what he was feeling was what everybody else called love. Did he love seeing Nora every day? Check. Did he love arguing with her so fiercely over a movie that he didn’t even notice until the last minute that she was sneaking the last piece of bacon from his plate? Check. Did he love the way his stomach flipped at the sight of her approaching in her trademark fringed jacket and worn cowboy boots? Definite check.

  But did he love her?

  Rain check.

  He loved their time together—watching her hushed concentration over her psychology books, seeing how efficiently she managed the lab where she’d worked all four years of school, hearing the shout of her laughter during funny parts in movies—sometimes so loud that people shushed them—so it seemed probable that he was in love. But it was a funny kind of love, he was sure. His feelings for Nora were like jewels kept behind glass, guarded by an intricate burglary system. Michael could look at what was under the glass, but he couldn’t touch what was inside.

  With a sigh, Michael skated slowly across the ice, considering. The CIA had been the big unspoken issue between him and Nora all along. The CIA and my father. He picked up a puck and threw it, sending it skittering.

  Michael didn’t hide his father’s death from his close friends at school—they knew he had died when Michael was eight. But most of his friends were male, and men weren’t big on poking around at obviously painful places or wanting to talk about their feelings.

  Though, for all Michael’s fears about telling Nora about his father’s death, neither was she. When, a month into their relationship, he had given her the brief run-through of his family history, Nora was silent. “You’re doing that psychology thing, aren’t you?” Michael finally asked. “Not say
ing anything so I’ll tell you about the bodies in the basement?”

  Nora simply continued to look at him and held up the wooden spoon from the soup she was stirring. “Is that what you think I’m doing?” she asked lightly.

  Michael let out a very audible groan. “If you’re going to play doctor—” he began, but Nora held up a warning spoon for him to stop.

  “I’m sorry,” she broke in. “I didn’t mean to be flip. I just figure that if you ever want to really talk about it, you’ll tell me.”

  Michael expected to feel relief at her words but instead felt as if steel bands were tightening around his chest. Am I mad that she doesn’t want to know more? he asked himself, watching her calmly stir the split-pea soup that had been simmering all day. Or am I just scared of telling her more? The bands started to become a straightjacket.

  Nora looked at him, and this time, something in her gaze immediately dissolved all his anxiety. “Sweetie, please don’t worry,” she said, holding her free hand out toward him. He took it. “The soup isn’t going to be so bad this time, I promise.” They both laughed, and suddenly it was over.

  And that had been the first and only time they’d ever talked about his father. Michael didn’t even know what he would have been able to add to the story. He didn’t know much, except that his father had worked for the CIA and that he’d been killed in the line of duty. After his father’s death, he and his mother had returned briefly to France, then moved to California. Until he went away to high school, the two had made the pilgrimage once a year to his father’s grave, eaten dinner at a restaurant that had always looked to Michael like the inside of a funeral home—stiff white cloths and heaps of flowers—then returned to California, where his mother took him to soccer and hockey practices as usual and cheered on the sidelines at his games. There was an album filled with photographs of them as a family on a shelf in the living room, but he hadn’t taken it down since he was ten.