E-MAIL: eli @ popullus.net
ARCHIVE: Ask, please.
RATING: PG-13
POSTED: Dec. 24, 2006
SUMMARY: Broken agents aren't paper to be shredded, or hard drives to be wiped before being put out on the stoop and all doors locked behind them.
AUTHOR NOTES: Written for zarah hemla in the Yuletide 2006 Challenge. Many thanks to Rez and Pouncer, two lovely ladies with views different enough to form the most thorough of beta nets.
DISCLAIMER: Read
It's a Tuesday when Harry tilts his head over the daily brief. His eyes narrowing, he draws in a deliberate breath. And when he frowns, and Ruth stares, it's still Tuesday, and she suddenly recalls what day it is in this office: One Day After Tom.
"I'll..."
She stops when Harry's eyes meet hers, a straightforward look that nonetheless feels askance, but that's just Harry; it's Harry being the director who's examining an officer not behaving as expected and desired. She knows exactly why she is on the receiving end of that look at this time on this day, and she clears her throat and straightens, and starts over.
"It will be in the afternoon brief. There..." Her lips tighten over the rest; there isn't any excuse. She should have remembered. "I'll have it then."
Harry gives that a tight nod, granting her the reprieve. Or perhaps expressing understanding, because she knows that as calm and cynical as he's always been, even with blood on his clothes or his arm in a cast, the weeks since Tom's resurrection haven't been any easier on him.
Then he grimaces down at the sheet on the top, which provides what scant highlights the French have scraped together on the Brotherhood of Aeshemogha. "Camel demon," he says, a weary note playing at the edges of the amusement lacing both well-enunciated words, and for all its logic, Ruth doesn't want to handle a change in topic, not when she'll have to return to tangling with it as soon as she walks back onto the grid. "Growing ever more poetic, aren't they?"
"Head of a camel," Ruth elaborates as she half-turns, trying to back out of his office without blatantly fleeing. "And the secret to scouring humanity from the face of the earth."
Harry arches one eyebrow. "How delightfully...specific."
One hand on the doorframe, Ruth flashes a pained smile, and then slides the door shut quickly behind her.
No one ever truly falls out of MI5's notice, especially not those marked for it. A conspirator, for example, might contrive to drop from sight for a time, it's true, but he can't accomplish much of anything whilst doing the nothing that such a disappearance would require. In another common ploy, a rising voice will set out to ensure she is heard whether or not she is her, but although an officer might perform one cursory background check, under Harry they'll never do so twice.
The watch on people like that, though, is a glance, a casual thing compared to the scrutiny given to another group; a smaller group; a select group, even.
Black sheep dismissed from the fold are watched. Broken agents aren't paper to be shredded, or hard drives to be wiped before being put out on the stoop and all doors locked behind them. A mind no longer fit for service to Queen and country doesn't simply forget all that it knows.
In what often feels a lifetime of sliding along the august halls of government, Ruth had never seen anyone flame out as spectacularly as Tom Quinn. Like the Hindenburg, in a way, she'd considered one night after perhaps too much wine. The cause of his downfall had more theories, with more wildly possible triggers and pointed fingers than anyone had thought to be on the alert for along the way. There had at least been fewer physical casualties than on that doomed flight. She doesn't like to be callous about it -- she liked Tom -- but every time she looks around at the people still on the grid, she knows that the chaos of his departure ending with only two unclaimed bodies in a morgue had little to nothing to do with any action he took.
In any case, there's a standard procedure for this sort of thing. There are both general and specific steps of Track, Watch, and Report that are...not all that pleasant to think about. Few will die in the line of duty, after all, but they could all find themselves at the edge, staring out over their choices and thinking, Jumping makes so much more sense than this.
Once again secure at her desk and behind the wide shield of her computer, Ruth administers a mental slap, out of patience with herself. Just what was she thinking this morning? Besides the obvious answer of "nothing."
"Everything all right?"
Ruth jerks her head up to look over her monitor, and into Zoe's worried and puzzled frown. "Of course," she says automatically.
Zoe widens her eyes, and then pointedly drops them to Ruth's throat, and Ruth realizes that she's twisting the center bead on her necklace back and forth, rubbing the smooth, pointed stone between her thumb and middle finger. She lowers her hand to her keyboard and sets her jaw against babbling.
"Sure?" Zoe asks, her eyebrows raised with far more skepticism than her voice.
The last people who need to be reminded that Tom Quinn is now a man under watch are the former members of his team. If she needed Harry to remind her of that, Ruth thinks, she'd resign her position before a full gathering of Queen and court.
"Positive," she says, infusing the word with all the assurance she can muster.
The first report to Harry is simple and nothing but dry facts. Fact, more precisely: Location -- home.
Tom walked out of Thames House, according to their own cameras. He then walked home, according to CCTV. There is nothing else to report.
There's one camera fixed on Tom's front door. Ruth can guess when Malcolm put it in -- processing Tom's departure didn't happen in a moment, or even two -- but she wonders whether he sent one of the lower-ranked techs to do it, or took this particular menial job on himself.
When she returns to her desk with Harry's dry Thank you, Ruth in her ears, she sits still for a minute to gather her thoughts. The grid moves and buzzes around her as people head toward meetings and answer phones, like any other office if the voices are silenced.
With a sigh, she starts composing an e-mail. They'll need to get Tom his car out of the garage.
It becomes routine, of course. Everything she discovers goes in another growing file in another tracked folder with another seal of secrecy.
This isn't even the first time Ruth has counted surveillance of a former colleague amongst her duties. Andrew Bardsley. He returned to GCHQ after a year as an MI6 liaison with a jitter in his step and the inability to hold a direct look, and of course she dug into it, curiosity and concern both ruling her. What he'd seen...understanding his horror over what he'd failed to object to was why she had agreed to the double duty at MI5 to start. She's seen worse herself now. She can imagine worse, as there are more and more groups banding together with greater purpose than becoming the namesakes of ancient demons. And every time, she doesn't think too hard or long on what it means that she's still here.
Tom's file expands slowly with details of his trips for groceries, an almost daily journey; his first disagreement with the leader of his systems support team at a minor architecture firm, a job that Five quietly arranged; his new habit of 4 a.m. walks along the Thames just below the Eye. It's noteworthy for its absences -- leisure and friends, most of all -- rather than its events.
Routine though it may be for all involved, there's something there in Tom's life that keeps Ruth from becoming comfortable with the observation; she'd never watched him take on a new legend, become a new person, but this is nothing like that, is all she can think. He seems so determined to make this new life work. From a high, thorough vantage point there's a sense that it's more than purpose driving him, a grim and stiff air about the way Tom moves forward through every day.
And then comes the observed event that rushes out of Ruth's mouth One Month After Tom.
"He's made contact."
Harry looks up without raising his head, his eyes locking onto her. "Hmm?"
Clearing her throat, Ruth steps fully into Harry's office and drops a sheet of paper onto Harry's desk with one section from Saturday highlighted. "Tom."
10:12 -- Boarded train, London King's Cross for Cambridge.
11:04 -- Hired taxi to city center.
11:33 -- Entered Fitzwilliam Museum.
12:35 -- Exited museum in the company of a blond woman. [Identified. Dale, Christine, see: File #A34CR1.]
12:40 -- Entered Browns, Trumpington St., with Dale.
[13:39 -- Dale exited, on foot.]
13:47 -- Hired taxi to Cambridge station.
14:13 -- Boarded train, Cambridge for London King's Cross.
Harry's lips compress as he makes another quiet noise. "An arranged meeting?" he asks.
"Impossible to tell. The standard initial surveillance doesn't include audio," Ruth points out. "He could have phoned her from work or home, and we'd never--"
"Or she could have phoned him."
Ruth takes a breath, and meets Harry's calculating eyes. "Yes."
The sound from Harry this time is primarily a sigh. He turns his chair and reaches across his desk. Before he can press the speaker on his phone and issue the summons to Adam that Ruth can sense is about to happen, she speaks up again, driven by the same odd urge that sent her in here.
"We don't know that there's anything. She resigned after Mace had no more use for her, and who could blame her. She left the CIA weeks before Tom..."
She trails off, the acid in her words fading when Harry's mouth opens slightly, but after a pause, he leans back in his chair and gives her only a patient, skeptical look. It's patience that, if he knows anything about her by now, he must know is wasted. Ruth stands her ground. "They're both out of the service. They're both civilians. It could be nothing more than a friendly lunch."
Harry nods slowly, then cocks his head and asks, "So you rushed into my office to...tell me not to worry about the two high-level former spies and lovers who, between them, caused all manner of political complications for their long-suffering governments?"
"No." That hadn't been her intention; she'd seen the report from the weekend team, and her first reaction had been a full breath of relief, with her second being frustration that there wasn't anyone with whom to share the lightening of that load. "Honestly, I reviewed the tapes, and they weren't exactly carousing, but they looked like--"
"Friends."
The light scorn on that word gets up Ruth's hackles faster than the suggestion that it's possible to separate philosophy from literature. "Christine Dale lives in Cambridge now," she says, folding her arms. "She's a lecturer at the university. School of the Humanities and Social Sciences."
"Ah. Anthropology?"
She exhales hard, letting out a measure of the frustration built inside, but then there's a slight curl to his lips, and she gives in to the clear invitation to join in his amusement. "Politics and sociology," she admits. "She's becoming quite popular with the younger males."
Harry shakes his head, the hint of a smile expanding into wry acceptance. "Surprise, surprise. Well," he says, folding his hands in front of him and pinning her with a raised eyebrow, "shall we see what more we can see when we all use our eyes to look," and it's not a question.
Two weeks later, Ruth suspects that it was in fact chance that brought about the encounter in Cambridge.
It isn't necessary for Malcolm and Colin to slip their gadgets into Tom's house; every month, it seems, technology makes it more possible for watchers to avoid detection by even the most paranoid of people. There aren't any fancy tools or miniature playthings to make writing that week's report any easier. There were three calls -- each initiated by Tom and all short. Ruth listened to Tom's voice, feeling for the first time as though she were truly eavesdropping, which makes very little logical sense given all she knows about each of their subjects, yet This is Tom, now, isn't it? ran constantly through her head.
She listened, and she could hear how tight his voice became, and how short he got by the end of the second call. The third lasted less than a minute. When that one ended, the last thing Ruth heard all night was Tom's bitten-off curse; there was no other sound in the rest of that digital file.
Speculation is all she has, logic guiding her to multiple possibilities, and that is what will go in her report, she knows: Tom Quinn and Christine Dale are most likely not conspiring to do a damned thing.
But as before, she wants to include more. She wants to know more.
When Christine appears on the video in the grey and black stone lobby of the building housing Tom's firm, Ruth can imagine that her expression is much like the one that flashes across Tom's face as he steps off the lift. He wipes the shock away with only a blink, only a breath before Christine turns from the listing of offices and takes a half step back upon seeing him. And Ruth is sure that she should be as quick, but when Danny's head turns her way and he comes to a stop in front of her, instead of continuing on to his desk, it's all too obvious that she isn't.
"Don't tell me it's the minutes from that deadly tedious meeting with the French that's put that look on your face, Ruth," Danny says with half a smile as she hits Pause. "I won't believe it."
"What? No." She minimizes the video window with one button, and brings forward another document with a second. "A request, actually. From Six, that we provide what information we have on the Parkmount mosque."
"Oh lord," Danny moans. "They're on that again?"
"They're convinced there's another cell rising under cover of the ashes. I shouldn't be surprised, given the tail-chasing habits of the requestor," Ruth says quietly, giving a quick glance around, as though she's looking for anyone who could overhear her slagging their sister Service. Then she moves forward, and Danny's hands come down flat on the edge of her desk as he leans in as well. "But you understand my shock," she says with a tight grimace.
"Oh, yeah." Danny's grimace is wider, and looks like it could turn into a full-fledged complaint, but then he straightens with a sharp shake of his head, and gives her a wink.
After he walks away, Ruth does gather the information requested in the memo on her screen. It's another half hour before she brings back up the video with the actors on that stage still halted between one step and the next.
They transition smoothly into motion once more and finish their movement: Christine walking forward slowly, Tom standing firm where he is, the two of them coming together by the front desk that's staffed by a young woman wearing a suit in a shade that doesn't translate well to black and white. She is only a bit player, though, and Ruth is riveted as Christine speaks to Tom's rigid form, as Christine reaches out one hand and -- after a pause long enough to make Ruth check the counter on her screen -- Tom takes it.
When Christine's nascent frown smooths out into a smile, Ruth presses Pause again and turns away.
The report isn't due to Harry until tomorrow. She'll come back to this later, when she can look at it again with an eye for reality, not fantasy.
She's counting because she has to, so Ruth knows that it's three meetings between the two of them when she finally sees Tom beginning to lose the grim set to his mouth. He and Christine aren't acting the lovebirds in any of the lunches or walks that Ruth has observed, but something's easier between them. She can't remember ever seeing them this relaxed when they were both in good standing with their bosses.
It's silly, but it feels as if the surveillance is more like checking in on Tom now, nothing more than seeing how he's doing.
Ruth thinks about mentioning that to Harry. Then she snorts, rolls her eyes, and gathers up the box of transcripts that need to go back to GCHQ.
The duty is no longer a task, though. Especially on the morning when she's going through the video and catches Tom's eyes, because he was looking directly into hers through that camera in the recess of the nose of the small gargoyle stationed across from his door. The gargoyle doesn't react, of course, but Ruth does, catching her lip in her teeth when Tom's mouth tilts in a wry smile. Then he raises one hand in a wave that instantly turns into a summons for a cab when he turns toward the street: a covert mirroring of the night he walked down the front stairs and away from Thames House for good.
Ruth's smile as she shuts down the video file is softer than Tom's had been, and it surfaces again when she walks down those same steps at the end of the day.
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