La Mer: Part 1
i. “Lie to them. If you do it half as well as you lie to yourself, they’ll believe you.”
It was like clockwork. Five minutes after the unexpected courier had delivered the sealed envelope of documents and photographs, Cobb’s phone rang. He stopped in mid-paragraph to answer. The call was coming from a screened number.
“Hello?”
“Have you read it yet?” Even though it had been six months, Saito’s clipped voice was still all-too familiar.
Cobb should have known. He sat down, his eyes on the children playing with hula-hoops in the backyard and his mind wishing this conversation wasn’t happening. Flipping through the pages in front of him, he replied, “Just the overview page. What’s going on?”
“I know you said Fischer would be your last job of this kind, but I am hoping you will consider taking on another assignment for me.”
Cobb’s fingers drummed an anxious beat on the table. Technically, he knew he could say no. But practically, he knew he wouldn’t. Crime had bound them together: him, Saito, all of them---hell, even Fischer, regardless of whether or not he’d ever know it. Saito could and would keep coming back, but with the tacit understanding that nothing too morally reprehensible would be required.
“Depends on what it is,” he finally replied, fingers quickening their rhythm. The last job still rankled at the back of Cobb’s conscience. He couldn’t watch the news for fear of seeing reports on Fischer’s company; he didn’t want to know how well it had worked. He went back to the photograph on the cover sheet, where a serious-looking man with hauntingly sad eyes stared back at him. “I’m guessing the job’s on Sayid Jarrah?”
“You have heard of him?”
Of course, Cobb had heard of him. The whole world had heard of him. It had been a couple of years since the height of the Oceanic Six’s fame, but given the ubiquitous news coverage the crash and the six survivors’ miraculous reappearance had received at the time, no one would ever forget their faces and names.
So yeah. Cobb knew who the guy was. But the files in front of him didn’t specify what he was supposed to do with him. “Are you asking me to do another inception?”
“No, what I’m asking is much easier than that---someone of your talents will find it laughably simple. For the past two years, Sayid Jarrah has perpetrated targeted assassinations on a number of high-ranking businessmen around the world. Most recently, he killed an associate of mine in the Seychelles.”
Hero turned villain. Nice.
“If everyone knows he did it, then why isn’t he in jail?”
Smug and secretive, Saito replied, “Just because I know does not mean everyone knows.”
“Fine, then. But why don’t you hand the evidence over and have him turned in?”
“If I do that, I will never find out why he is killing these people. I will never find out for whom he is working, and what targets are next on his list. Discovering these facts is much more productive than bringing him to justice. He has killed executives of Widmore Industries, a competitor of mine. He has killed the remnants of a secretive scientific research group called the Dharma Initiative, which I unsuccessfully tried to acquire in the 80s. I want to know why he has done this and how much he knows. The people he’s killed are already dead; locking him up will not bring them back.”
Saito’s idea of justice---or, rather, his lack of an idea---was unsurprising.
“So you want me to get this information via extraction. Why? Why not just…”
Saito spared Cobb from having to ask the unsavory question they both knew was coming. “He’s a former torturer for the Iraqi Republican Guard. My sources doubt he will respond to traditional methods of… interrogation.”
Watching the kids play, and knowing how indebted he was to Saito just to be in the position to make choices like this, Cobb weighed his options.
Saito was Machiavellian, but he wasn’t evil. Looked at in a certain way (in the way of a man who has already resigned himself to accepting the job), Cobb would be helping to save the lives of Jarrah’s future victims. It was something he could get behind. What Saito might choose to do with that information was none of his business.
“I can’t do this alone,” he said.
“So reassemble your team,” Saito replied, as though it were just that easy.
It wasn’t just the dreaming Cobb was nervous about (he hadn’t engaged in controlled dreaming since the last job); it was who he could find to do this with. Everyone had scattered as soon as they disembarked at LAX, both to cover their tracks, but also in order to deal with their own issues. Miles had mentioned that Ariadne was back in Paris, more confident in her skills, but less enthused about assigned projects than she had been before. Eames had gone off to wherever it was that Eames always went, blending in everywhere but fitting in nowhere. Yusuf was back in Mombasa. And Arthur…
“I don’t know where they are,” Cobb explained.
“I do,” Saito said.
Apparently it was just that easy. After that, everything magically began falling into place, as it seemed to whenever Saito got involved in something.
Saito was too busy with business to be part of the team this time… or so he said. Cobb had a feeling that either he now trusted them enough to do the job without him, or he was too traumatized by what had happened the last time; either way, Saito wasn’t the type to admit either of those things. Together they decided that LA should be the team’s base of operations. Not only did Cobb live there, but LA was pivotal for this particular subject; the few friends Sayid Jarrah had were there, as well as his long-abandoned house. Saito’s men would track Jarrah’s movements and, when Cobb and his team were ready, he would arrange for them to travel to wherever in the world Jarrah might be.
Yusuf was the first to arrive. The ideas that were slowly fleshing out in Cobb’s mind didn’t like they’d call for the kinds of complex drugs they’d used the last time, but Yusuf was still necessary, if not for his unique skills, then at least for morale. It wasn’t the job that would be difficult (Saito was right that it seemed pretty straightforward); the rub was going to be reforging that camaraderie among the team after such a long separation and traumatizing last job.
Yusuf and Cobb spent a couple of days stalking Jack Shephard and Kate Austen and pretending to visit a patient at Hurley Reyes’s mental hospital in order to learn more about Jarrah through his friends. All three of them wore a version of the same haunted sadness that lay behind Sayid Jarrah’s eyes, not only on the cover of Cobb’s folder, but in every single picture of the man.
“If you’d lived through a plane crash and watched three of your fellow survivors die on an island somewhere in the Pacific, you’d look like that, too,” Yusuf remarked. It was the logical answer, but Cobb had a nagging feeling that there was something more.
Arthur came next, looking somewhat worse for wear, but with an even more impressive than usual amount of research already completed. He’d been wandering for the past few months, taking on odd jobs, none of which fit. He didn’t need the money---Saito had paid them all obscenely well. Of all of them, Arthur was the most enthusiastic about the job. Thinking about it through the lens of the project, Cobb decided that Arthur was a lot like Jarrah; both craved structure and order, and yet existed in a contradictory nomadic state.
As the days went by, it became difficult for Cobb to look at anything except through the lens of the project. Despite his initial reluctance, the more he looked into the case, the more he found himself drawn to it, and the more he felt a strange kind of kinship with the subject, torturer and murderer though he might be. Like Arthur and himself, Jarrah had always been good at getting into people’s heads. For years he’d roamed the earth in search of a woman, based on little more than guilt and a fleeting memory, and now that she, his wife of only nine short months, was dead, he’d turned to a life of crime. It was a dedication to a romantic ideal that Cobb understood all too well, with all of its potentially unhealthy consequences.
Together, Cobb, Arthur, and Yusuf built on the preliminary research Saito had provided. They learned everything they could about Jarrah and his life. For one thing, he didn’t have much of one. He had no living family, no former lovers except for Nadia, and no friends except his fellow castaways, with whom he hadn’t kept in touch since Nadia’s death. Sayid Jarrah was less rooted in reality than most projections.
They discovered how to break into Jarrah’s house in Malibu. No one had lived in it for two years; Jarrah had left LA to bury Nadia back in Iraq, and had never returned. Arthur disabled the security system; Ariadne would need to spend a lot of time there when she arrived, learning the layout and memorizing the details.
“This should be easy for her. Jarrah only spent a few months here, and it’s been so long since he was last here that he won’t notice if anything is off,” Yusuf remarked on their way back to the loft one night.
“He’ll notice,” Arthur replied. “From what I can tell, he’s the kind of guy who would notice a hair out of place. But it’s okay. Ariadne won’t mess up. It’s Eames who has the hard job.”
The two people in question arrived the next day at the loft Cobb had rented for meetings. Ariadne was tanned and jet-lagged, and Eames was tanned and pretending not to be jet-lagged. He strolled into the loft carrying nothing but an apple, while Ariadne came with a stack of photographs, drawings, and painstakingly detailed topographical maps of a minuscule island in the South Pacific.
“I get sent to a bloody war zone, while little miss architect gets to loll at the beach. Where’s the justice in that?” Eames asked after finishing his description of his time in Iraq learning about Nadia.
“It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I don’t know how they lived on that island for three months. It was tiny. I had every detail memorized by the second day.”
Cobb had sent Ariadne to the previously unknown but now world-famous island of Membata without having a crystal clear idea of what he wanted her to do, but after a few days spent walking around Jarrah’s house and learning about the man, he felt comfortable proposing his final plan to the group. “I’m thinking of doing the job in two levels. One will be the island. We’ll take you to Jarrah’s house tomorrow to help you prep for the other level.”
“So what’s the plan?” Arthur asked.
Cobb leaned forward in his chair and clasped his hands together. “Here’s what I’m thinking. Jarrah’s been traveling; Saito will tell us where to find him when we’re ready. We’ll make sure he’s drugged---lightly, though; this job isn’t nearly as complicated as the last one. As for strategy…” Cobb looked around the room and realized that although Arthur and Eames were well-versed in this stuff, Ariadne and Yusuf were still rookies at the heist aspects of this business. “It’s possible to make someone confused between real life memories and the dream.”
He looked at Arthur for support; they’d done this kind of job before and Arthur had always been better at teaching than he had. Turning to Ariadne and Yusuf, Arthur continued for him, “Basically, we create a situation that is tied to a particular point in his past. We get Jarrah to believe that everything that’s happened in reality since that point was a dream.”
Ariadne’s head nodded slowly, and Cobb wondered if maybe she’d experienced this phenomenon before naturally. “How do we do that?”
“Two levels of dreaming,” Cobb explained. “First level, we drop Jarrah in his house in Malibu. The only time he’s lived there was during the nine months between being rescued and when Nadia was killed, so he’ll date himself into a narrow timeframe---the timeframe we want. This’ll be Arthur’s dream. It starts with Jarrah in his bedroom, blinds closed, clock saying midnight. Every reason for him to believe it’s bedtime. There’s a glass of water on the night stand. It’s drugged. As soon as he’s in bed and asleep, we go in with the PASIV and send him to the next dream.”
“And within the dream, he dreams of the island, right?” Ariadne guessed.
“Right. That’ll be Yusuf’s dream, if that’s okay with you.” He turned towards Yusuf, who smiled in agreement.
“Just use the bathroom this time. There’s nothing worse than a tropical paradise in the rain,” Arthur chided. Yusuf grimaced, tired of the teasing.
Cobb continued. “It’s the perfect location for two reasons. First, it’s a nice, contained space---like you said, Ariadne, tiny and boring. Plus, there were only ever seven other people on the island with him, so no matter what happens, there are only seven projections he can muster to attack us, which makes things relatively safe. The other reason for setting it there is that I want to give him a nightmare. And what better setting for a nightmare than the place he was stranded for three months?”
“How do we do that?”
“We ambush them. Ariadne can enter the dream on the island to monitor where Jarrah and all the projections are and let us know which angle to hit them from. Then the rest of us can come on a boat---”
“What boat?” Arthur inquired.
Eames sighed. “Our imaginary boat. It’s a dream, Arthur, You so often fail to remember this crucial concept.”
Nipping the inevitable snark war in the bud, Cobb continued, “Yeah, our imaginary boat. We get to the island, pretend to be pirates, rough Jarrah and his friends up a bit… you get the idea. We make sure Eames dies first---”
“I’m so honored to be your sacrificial lamb.”
“---so he has time to kick back into the LA dream. He and Arthur wake us all up so we get out of the room before Jarrah wakes up to find ‘Nadia’”---Cobb gestured at Eames---“in bed with him.”
Ariadne’s eyes grew bright with excitement, as she started to grasp it. “So, you’re saying he’ll think that it’s still the nine months when they were together, and that everything that’s happened since then---her dying, him killing people---he’ll think all that was a dream he had just before the island nightmare?”
“With the proper guidance, yes,” Eames confirmed, also having gotten the idea. “He’ll think that he’s just woken up from two separate nightmares, one in which he went on a two-year killing spree, and the other in which he and his friends were taken hostage on the island. Given that the latter never happened, he’ll be relieved and that much more likely to interpret the former as a dream, especially when he finds himself so comfortably in bed with his wife. And then Nadia---meaning me---will coax out of him the content of his dreams, specifically the first one. And that’s how we’ll find out who he’s working for and why.”
Cobb nodded. “Exactly. I think it’ll work. But the whole thing relies on you two,” he said, pointing at Eames and Ariadne, “being at the top of your games.”
“Membata won’t be hard,” Ariadne reassured all of them. “There isn’t much to it. Just some sand and a few trees. And I doubt Jarrah’s house will be too complicated. Not like last time.” Cobb noted that she looked almost disappointed.
“I have to say, this will be the first time I’m impersonating someone I never met, but the particulars of this case make it potentially feasible.” Eames yawned and leaned back in his chair.
Arthur frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve spoken with everyone on three continents who ever knew Nadia. She sounded… perfect. Beautiful, brilliant, brave, heroic, forgiving. You get the picture. Bloody saint, it sounds like.”
Ariadne looked up from her notes, forehead wrinkled in a question. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Eames shrugged. “Ideals are wonderful, but they don’t make for the most exciting roles.”
Cobb wasn’t so sure about that. In his experience, it depended on the individual. At any rate, Nadia sounded like she’d been lovely, exactly the kind of woman who might inspire an eight-year quest.
Bringing them back to the job, Arthur pointed out, “It doesn’t matter. Nadia’s the only option we’ve got. Unless you can find me someone else he was sleeping with. And trust me, I’ve looked. The guy was practically a eunuch.”
“It’s always about sex with you, Arthur, isn’t it?”
“Oh, shut up, Eames.”
Cobb rolled his eyes. The team was definitely back together again.
The next few days flew by with finalizing plans and teaching the team Ariadne’s plans. Finally, they flew Saito’s airline to Sydney, where his spies said Jarrah had just checked into a swanky hotel.
“Is he on a job, or is a this vacation?” he’d asked Saito on the last phone call before they left.
“My men have not been able to find out. I trust you are prepared for either eventuality.”
“Sure.” Cobb wasn’t sure what the difference between the two eventualities was (both cases involved a dangerous assassin), but Saito liked a confident captain, so he played the part.
It wasn’t hard to find Jarrah, sitting alone at the hotel bar with his eyes glazed over, a million miles away.
“What’re you drinking?” Cobb asked in a friendly manner just after sliding into place two stools down from him.
It took awhile for Jarrah to look up and respond; it was like getting an answer from a corpse that needed reanimating first. “MacCutcheon.”
Cobb flashed the warm, personable grin that had never failed him in the past; Jarrah’s face remained impassive. This was going to be harder than he’d expected. “I’ll have what he’s having.”
“You sure?” the bartender asked and passed him the menu so he could see the price.
“I’m good for it.” Or rather Saito was good for it, but no one needed to know who was paying his bills. The bartender shrugged and poured a small amount of scotch---Cobb couldn’t see the label---into a glass. He took a sip and whistled. “Thanks for the recommendation.” Then after a convincing pause, he said, “You look familiar,” Cobb said, pointing at Jarrah as if he was halfway to figuring it out.
Jarrah simply looked bored; after almost three years, these kinds of encounters must have become more and more annoying.
Without looking up he stated, “You know me from the news.”
This was the moment. Cobb scooted over to sit next to him, a perfect picture of feigned eagerness. “Are you a politician? Let me guess which country…”
But Jarrah cut him off, finally making eye contact. “I am the survivor of a plane crash. Oceanic 815. That is why I look familiar.”
Cobb whistled. “Right. You’re right. The Oceanic Six, right? Living on nothing but coconuts and fish for three months? That was the most amazing story.”
Jarrah closed his eyes, as if in pain. “Yes,” he hissed, sounding oddly flat about it. “Just us six and some coconuts.”
“The plane took off from Sydney, didn’t it?”
“It did.”
“Sydney to LA, right? Longest flight in the world. Only route I’d believe a pilot could get lost flying. Twelve hours,” Cobb announced.
“I wouldn’t know. In my case, it took three and a half months.”
The fact that that flight was where it all ended---or began, depending on how you looked at it---for both of them, was not lost on Cobb. He stared into his drink. You and me both, he thought. Recovering, he said out loud, “Wow, you must have nerves of steel. If I were you, I’d never come back. You here on business?”
“No.”
Cobb noted that he didn’t say he was here on pleasure either, though. Now that he’d been forced to engage somewhat, Jarrah’s eyes narrowed.
“But why is it that you look familiar? Perhaps you do know me from somewhere other than the news.”
It wasn’t often that people outside of law-enforcement recognized him; the story hadn’t been well-publicized. However, whatever he could do to draw this man in and learn something more about him before starting the job would be helpful.
“You might have read about me. My wife died. They said I killed her.”
“Did you?” Jarrah studied him, and Cobb could sense something dark, something shared behind those huge eyes. No judgment, only empathy, and it drew him in. He was glad they weren’t on comms yet; the others didn’t need to hear this.
“No. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t my fault,” he answered, more truthfully than he had any business doing. It was the first time he’d said it out loud.
He could see why Saito had struck out the possibility of interrogating this man; Cobb was here to do an extraction, and already he felt that he was the one being laid bare. This guy was good, really good; he didn’t know why Jarrah had ever felt the need to physically torture anyone. It seemed unnecessary, given his skills.
“My wife died as well… And so…” Jarrah drifted off again. “And now it’s as if she never existed. It might as well have all been a dream.”
He was lost in drink and depression; in such a state, this man was a threat only to himself.
“I’m so sorry,” Cobb replied, understanding too well to spout the kinds of platitudes anyone else might have.
Jarrah didn’t respond, but it didn’t matter. Cobb had accomplished his mission. Somewhere between the coconuts and the wives, he had managed to pass his hand over Jarrah’s glass and drop a few grains of a compound Yusuf had whipped up into the man’s scotch. It was designed to dissolve into alcohol, without producing adverse side effects on someone already intoxicated. It would keep Jarrah sleepy but not irrevocably knocked out.
No one wanted to deal with limbo again, not after the last time.
After another five minutes of silence, Jarrah got up and nodded goodbye. Cobb looked at his watch. The guy would be asleep in fifteen minutes, tops. It would take another fifteen minutes for the others to silently break into the room and set up. Arthur would take care of everything.
In the meanwhile, he needed that half hour to recover from their conversation.
By the time he was knocking three times---two long, one short---on the door of room #1623, he’d pulled it together. Yusuf opened the door. Everything was set: Jarrah was in bed fast asleep; everyone was sitting in tippable chairs; the PASIV was out.
Cobb nodded, took his seat, and together, they plugged in and passed out.