Alias season 2, episode 5
Original air date: November 03, 2002

Sydney's mother has been transferred to another facility after the explosives incident in Madagascar. Sydney goes to her cell and finds one of the earrings she had brought from her mother's personal effects still in the cell. Jack finds her there, and she apologizes once again for not believing him when he warned her away from Derevko.

SD-6 discovers that the Triad - an organized crime group in Europe - has killed one of its own agents that was working as a double agent for SD-6. He was giving SD-6 information about the Triad's growing weapons trade. The Triad is apparently developing 16 "next generation" weapons in Budapest, so Sydney's sent there to hack into the Triad's computers and get photos of the weapons. Sydney breaks into the computers to get the plans for the weapons for the CIA, which puts up some dummy files that SD-6 can see so that her mission isn't compromised. Turns out, when she gets the photos of the "weapons" that they're 16 children being programmed to be spies. Their memories will be erased at the end of their training, and then when they're mature, they'll be recruited by the Triad to be operatives.

Meanwhile, Vaughn's suspicious of how Jack knew about the explosives in Madagascar. He runs into a fellow agent friend of his who is in town to interrogate a US national who was captured in Madagascar with explosives, and it raises a red flag for Vaughn. Vaughn interrogates De Souza who reveals that he had wired the building for Jack. Vaughn warns Jack that if he doesn't tell Sydney about the betrayal, then Vaughn will.

Someone's continuing to mess with Sloane about Emily's death. He explains to Jack that he had killed Emily to get promoted within the Alliance and asks Jack to look into who else might have been passed over for partner with the Alliance, thinking that may be the source of the antagonism. Sloane's taking a shower, and when he steps out, there's a glass of red wine on the bathroom counter. His security cameras are all offline as well, but his guards bring them back up immediately, and no one's on the grounds. He has an SD-6 agent analyze the wine, and it turns out there was VTX in it - an antidote to the sodium morphate that Sloane had given Emily. With the VTX counteracting the sodium morphate, a person would appear to be dead for 8-12 hours and then would recover.

The programming of the children in Budapest is weighing on Sydney, because there was a KGB program in the 80s to do much the same thing. As further proof, when she captured the Triad agent who was running the program, she found a puzzle made of blocks in his house. One of the tasks the children were taught was to put the puzzle together blindfolded, and to her surprise, Sydney finds herself putting the puzzle together from memory. She asks a CIA psychologist to regress her memory, thinking that her mother may have used Sydney as a subject in the KGB experiment. To her surprise, though, she discovers in her memory that it wasn't her mother using her as a subject, it was her father. She confronts him and tells him that she'll never forgive him.