"But the Hebrew word, the word timshel – 'Thou mayest' – that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if 'Thou mayest' – it is also true that 'Thou mayest not.' Don't you see?…
"And I feel that a man is a very important thing – maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed – because 'Thou mayest.'"
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
On January seventeenth, the day Holly positively identified the hacker, she left the office with twenty pounds extra in her pocket and what felt like a heavy weight in her chest, as though she, and not the kid, was the one ensnared.
The twenty pounds had come from Sullivan, who had bet her that the hacker would turn out to be ex-military.
"I don't care about statistics," he had said over lunch three months prior, during their first week on the case, when they had all still felt giddy over their new positions as consultants to the Secret Intelligence Service. "I know some of the guys who worked on this before we did. Ted Harmon and I worked together on bank security in Switzerland. If this guy can get past Ted and his crew, he must have lots of training from the intelligence sector. Years. He's got to be at least my age."
"Who says it's a guy?" Maggie demanded.
"I do," Holly insisted. "He'll be the perfect statistical norm of a hacker, that's my prediction. White male, in his twenties, upbringing comfortable enough to give him lifelong access to computers and a sense of entitlement."
The heavy weight had come from the absolute lack of vindication she felt when they realized that she was right.
"His name is Ben Rossum," she told the clump of people clustered at the closest end of the conference table – her security fellows, the Quartermaster, and M's chief-of-staff. She had prepared a single slide for them with the hacker's picture, date of birth, and current address. It was not a very flattering picture; she had obtained it from the DVLA. "He's a postgrad at Cambridge doing – surprise – computer science. He's twenty-three."
The chief-of-staff – Tanner, possibly, Holly was bad with names – shifted in his chair and said, "You mean he was twenty-three when he started hacking, or he's twenty-three now?"
Holly thought she had been clear, but then she realized that hearing and believing were separate things. "He's twenty-three now, meaning he first gained access to your servers when he was nineteen."
Silence. Tanner looked all around the table to confirm that at least one other person was as shocked as he was. Maggie shook her head, slowly, eyes facing front. Jeffries stared at his lap. The Quartermaster had his hand clasped over his mouth and Holly could not read his eyes.
Then Sullivan pushed his chair back, pulled his wallet from his trouser pocket, and slid twenty pounds across the table to Holly.
When she returned to her cubicle, she sat at her computer and pulled up the folder of personal information she had collected on Ben Rossum, postgrad, twenty-three. His online presence under his real identity was surprisingly limited. She had found eight academic papers with his name attached, and although she could grasp the concepts, the dry writing had convinced her to pass these off to Sullivan to read. No social media, except a barely-used account on a career-networking site for Cambridge graduates. A handful of articles about student groups he had been part of, written by local or student journalists. Four pictures: the DVLA, his Cambridge ID card (not much more flattering than his driver's license), a grainy enlargement from a group photo of the Cambridge Science and Technology Student Association, and an accompaniment to a ten-year-old article about a second-form science club that had won some awards in a national tournament. This last picture made her uneasy for inarticulate reasons; she could not look at it for more than a second or two at a time. He was standing on the end of the row, barely thirteen, hands in the pockets of his hooded sweatshirt, smiling through large glasses and overgrown fringe. There was something voyeuristic about her possession of this photo, never mind that she had found similar photos of other hackers she had traced before, never mind that when he broke into MI6 he had consented to play this game.
She could not find anything on his parents – not that she had tried very hard; they did not need to be involved. His Cambridge paperwork listed as emergency contact one Angela Rossum, relationship: grandmother. A quick search revealed an obituary, dated almost four years prior. She leaves behind her grandson, Benjamin. Full stop. No other relatives listed.
The twenty quid in her pocket felt like blood money. On her way into the Tube she threw it into a collection box for Save the Children.
They brought him in on February first. Agents had been watching him for a fortnight, bugging his phone, reading his emails, snapping surreptitious pictures to add to Holly's stash. They were all variations on a theme: him in trainers and a Cambridge sweatshirt and dark-framed glasses, walking to class or the computer lab, standing in a queue at a coffee shop, curled in a chair in the library with his computer on his lap. He was always alone; in fact, he seemed to keep a deliberate distance between himself and other people. The watching agents reported that he rarely spoke.
Holly spent a little too much time cataloguing the pictures. There was something in his eyes that bothered her, and she was desperate to understand.
When Keegan put his head round the cubicle divider and said, "Holly, they've got him here," she nodded and forced herself to stand up slowly and walk, not run, to the main security room where the rest of her team was already crowded around the MI6 monitoring crew and their bank of screens. They had put him in a prisoner's jumpsuit and chained him to the table. Holly felt as if she were viewing live footage of the Loch Ness monster; somehow her brain had never grasped that she and the hacker existed in the same universe. Now they were in the same building. If she knew the entry code, she could walk down to his cell right now and take him by the shoulders and shake him, say Do you understand what you've done, do you see what you've made me do.
At home that night Jeremy said, "You were just doing your job. It's better that he can't do any harm." Very pat, very pragmatic. Jeremy was a bookkeeper; his only experience with criminal investigations came from telly, cheap paperbacks, and the stories Holly could tell him only after some heavy editing. She realized that if she could not articulate her frustrations to herself, there was no way she could do so for another person – but he was her husband, her rock, the one person in the world whose understanding she craved.
Jeremy was looking at her with a soft sadness that she hated more than pity. He held out his arms and she walked into them, without feeling.
"They can't start making exceptions, love," he whispered against her hair.
She chuckled; it came out sounding like a sob. "I know." But she didn't understand.
They all came in on Monday, the entire security team, to clean out their desks and hand over all the files to MI6. Holly did not look at the pictures once.
M had kept her promise and arranged for their lunch to be catered, but the mood in the break room was subdued. Only Jeffries was obviously his usual self, cracking wise around a mouthful of sushi ("Fuck the NDA, we caught one of the most notorious hackers in British history and we can't even use it to get a book deal"); Sullivan's default attitude was taciturn enough to be interpreted as either content or melancholy and Holly had no idea which he was today.
"You know, I might actually miss this place," Keegan said, attempting to lift his sushi with chopsticks and watching it fall apart all over the tablecloth.
"I won't," Maggie said decisively, "but I'm not looking forward to unemployment again."
"We've got recommendations from MI6 now," O'Toole pointed out. "We're not going to be unemployed for long."
Someone cleared their throat in the doorway, and six heads swiveled round to look. It was Tanner.
"I was going to announce a meeting, but since you're conveniently gathered I might as well just share my news," he said dryly. "In light of the crucial roles you have played in the resolution of a matter essential to the security of the nation, MI6 is offering all of you permanent positions as members of our research and technology department."
A breathless silence – Holly thought her head might explode from the shock and the tension and the swirl of emotions she could not possibly sort into separate strands.
Then Jeffries said, "I'm in." He glanced around at the others as though he could not understand why they had not immediately joined him.
Maggie was shaking her head. "I'm sorry, Mr. Tanner, it's very gracious of you –"
"I'd like to hear more details," O'Toole was saying simultaneously, "but I'm honored, sir."
Tanner held up his hands to cut them off. "There's no need to decide right now, and you certainly shouldn't let your peers decide for you." Holly had a feeling this was directed at Jeffries, but he didn't look the faintest bit abashed. "You may discuss the details of the position with the Quartermaster at any point before two o'clock; he'll be in his office. You have until five o'clock Wednesday evening to officially accept or reject."
"Well, I can tell you right now I'll do it," Jeffries reiterated. Maggie didn't even try to hide her disgust.
"Then you may come with me to the Quartermaster's office," Tanner said without fluster. "To the rest of you – think it over, discuss it with your family. I will warn you now that you will be required to maintain a high degree of secrecy as a condition of your employment. I know that all of you have practice with discretion, but the stakes are higher here than anywhere else in Britain. Think carefully about the demands this may place on you and your relationships." And Holly could have sworn he gave her a knowing look before he turned and held the door for Jeffries.
Holly went back to her cubicle and stared at her blank desktop for a while. Then she got up and walked to the loo, because she needed to move and she had no place better to go. After she had repeated this cycle three times, she said "Bugger this" under her breath and put on her coat and picked up her handbag and the cardboard box of family photos she had brought to decorate her desk and walked in the direction of the closest Tube stop. She made it outside the building, to the edge of the car park, before she turned around.
When she opened the door to the Quartermaster's office, the hacker was sitting in an armchair in front of the desk.
She froze with her hand on the doorknob and they regarded each other for a moment. It was definitely him – Ben – looking slightly uncomfortable in a collared shirt and a tie and black trousers that were a little too short. He had made at least a marginal attempt to comb his hair.
"Ah, hello, Mrs. Mason," the Quartermaster boomed from his desk chair. "Mr. Tanner warned me about your distaste for knocking."
Holly knew she must be flushed; the kid turned his head away as though he were embarrassed for her. "Sorry, sir. I… just… wanted to catch you before two."
"Yes, yes, about the job offer." He waved her into the office, got up from his desk, and walked around to shut the door himself. "You'll be glad to hear, I hope, that Mr. Jeffries has already signed on."
"He was very enthusiastic about it, sir."
Q chuckled. He reminded Holly of an indulgent grandfather. "Well, I'd be delighted to have you on as well; have a seat and we'll talk. Mr. Shaw –" The hacker looked up. "– That means you are dismissed."
The boy gave a single quick nod and was almost out the door before Q clicked his fingers and said, "Wait, my manners – you'll be colleagues – that is, assuming Mrs. Mason takes the job – so go on, introduce yourselves."
Holly smiled awkwardly; the kid did not return it. "I'm Holly Mason. Lovely to meet you."
He grasped her hand briefly, then dropped it. "Robert Shaw."
Perhaps Q saw Holly's look of confusion, or perhaps he had decided his job entailed creating as much awkwardness for his subordinates as possible. "Mrs. Mason and her team dug up quite a bit of information on you and your little schemes. I daresay they know your habits better than you do at this point."
"Considering that all of my habits have changed overnight, that wouldn't be an astounding feat," Ben – Robert – said. His voice was controlled, carrying despite its softness, and his expression was carefully blank, but Holly could see the stiffness of his spine.
Q turned to Holly as though the boy had not spoken. "Your friend Mr. Rossum is working for us now, under a new identity. I'm sure it will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
The kid's lips twitched; Holly could not tell if he had been about to smile or scowl. When Q nodded, he turned and left the room without a word. As the door shut behind him, Holly noticed a security guard waiting in the hallway beyond.
They can't start making exceptions, love.
Of course they can – it's MI6.
They put the remains of her team – her and Jeffries and Sullivan and O'Toole – to work on the security software. For a month their foursome was busy with patches, then for three with an overhaul of the way the system verified IP addresses. Ben – Robert, she reminded herself, Robert – never set foot on the security floor. She did a little snooping and discovered that he had been assigned to weaponry, where they were teaching him how to outfit vehicles with armored plating and defensive artillery. (She found it humorous that they had identified that department as the one where he could do the least damage.)
Technically she was not responsible for him anymore, and she didn't have the right or the security clearance to know the particulars, but she had soft footfalls and sharp ears and she collected details the way a child gathers seashells on the beach – bit by bit, without much thought or purpose, solely to assuage a need to have.
They had fitted his flat with cameras and listening devices and intercepted all electronic communication. A guard armed with a stun gun picked him up at the flat every morning and dropped him off every evening in a discreet black car. Somehow – Holly did not pry, this was one detail she did not want – they knew where he was even when he left the flat, which was not often. He was not allowed to have any contact with anyone he had known in his previous life.
Holly knew the head of the monitoring team, a gleefully cynical woman named Charlotte who went through a whole pack of chewing gum in a day, and she cultivated their friendship with patient listening, pretend agreement, and an endless supply of spare gum until she was welcome in the main security room at any time.
"For an international cyberterrorist, he's extremely boring," Charlotte remarked, switching his flat's security feed to the main screen. "He reads a lot. He doesn't clean – typical man. He spends a lot of time in the bathroom. The boys are taking bets on what he does in there."
A corner of the white board had been squared off to display the odds; wanking was listed at 1/100.
Holly looked again at the collection of videos and understood. "It's the only room in the flat that isn't bugged."
"Yeah, but what's he doing in there? He never brings any of his gadgets, so it's not like he's up to something."
"It doesn't matter what he's doing. Not even to him."
Charlotte shrugged, uncomprehending, and blew a lazy pink bubble at the screen.
Sometimes he did things that worried her. Sometimes he stayed up all night playing endless Solitaire on his living-room floor. Sometimes he shut the door of the flat behind him, shed his outer layer of clothing, collapsed on the couch, and didn't move until morning. He watched the entirety of Star Trek: The Next Generation over and over again with his feet propped on the edge of the coffee table and an untouched mug of tea cooling in his hands and eyes that reflected but did not absorb. He took unnecessarily long showers. Once he made dinner and sat at the kitchen table long after he had finished, spinning the steak knife like a roulette wheel, and Holly had never gripped the edges of a chair so hard in her life.
As a condition of his employment he had been attending in-house therapy since his first week with MI6. After three sessions he walked out on the first therapist; after six sessions the second therapist walked out on him.
You can't fix him, you can't fix him beat in Holly's head like a mantra, even as she disabled the lock on the records room and pulled his file (she looked under Rossum first and suffered a moment of disappointment and confusion before she remembered to look under Shaw).
Provides deliberately superficial answers to questions… Shows a strong awareness of common therapy techniques and an ability to manipulate them to his advantage… Severe trust issues will hinder further therapy.
But his work had been excellent, his behavior docile, so the sessions were suspended. Then in May he left an audiobook of Fight Club playing on a loop in his flat for the security team to listen to, and M bounced him right back into therapy.
On July twelfth, Holly approached Q with a request.
"You want to turn Robert loose on our new security system," he distilled.
"Yes, sir. If he can't get through, then we'll know we've done our job."
Q watched her solemnly over steepled fingers. The back of Holly's neck prickled and she wondered if he knew about her spying; she should have understood by now that MI6 watched their own as much as they watched their targets. But she held his gaze calmly – she had two children, she was an expert at getting her way in the face of stiff opposition – and he nodded and dialed down to weaponry, and in fifteen minutes they had the program running under the hacker's eye.
Sullivan had arranged a standing desk and projected his monitor onto a blank wall so they could all see his process – they being the four-man security team and Q and Tanner and, to Holly's unease, M. She worried that the presence of so much authority might make him reluctant to try his best tricks.
But in front of the computer a change came over him as naturally and suddenly as wakening. He came out from behind his eyes and his shoulders relaxed and his fingers darted across the keys almost of their own accord. Holly didn't believe in a divine plan, didn't believe that a person had no say in their purpose, but she felt a strong sense of should as she watched him work – he should be here, he should do this, it was right, it was natural.
The program blocked his first attempts, and he breathed, "Oh, that's new."
They sat in a silence that he seemed oblivious to. After a while he lapsed into a frown without frustration or malice. O'Toole offered M a seat twice and both times she refused him with a silent shake of the head. Holly glanced over at Sullivan and saw that he was taking notes – something she should have thought of, but predicting this kid made her feel like the second man in a cavalry column; she could follow, but she couldn't see the road ahead.
Then the locks opened and their source code spread across the screen.
"Oh, look at that –" He looked over his shoulder at the team, turned the fullness of his gaze on them as though he had never paid attention before. "This is very impressive, good work."
Jeffries smirked and O'Toole rolled his eyes, but Holly saw a smile tugging at the corners of Sullivan's mouth.
For several minutes he raked through the code, one arm folded across his chest and the other tapping the arrow keys. Occasionally he would pause and highlight certain functions; Holly had no idea if that was habit or a road sign for their benefit. His eyes zigzagged, dizzying to watch, frightening to comprehend.
Then he opened a third window and wrote, injected this new command into the source with the precision of a doctor entering a needle into a vein, and before he even hit Run Holly knew the game was up.
He looked over his shoulder again and said, unnecessarily, "I'm in."
Sullivan glanced at his watch. "Twenty-eight minutes, thirty-seven seconds." Jeffries threw up his hands. A wicked little voice in Holly's head turned it into a story problem: If four people work for five months on one security system, how long will it take one Cambridge polymath to dismantle the whole thing?
"Well, that was very educational, Mr. Shaw," Q said. "I daresay our security team will put what you've shown them to good use."
Holly nodded, for the kid, but he was looking at M with those eyes that had only now come alive, those eyes that held a challenge and a promise and a plea. M's expression had not changed. She turned and walked from the room with Tanner in her wake. She did not look back, so she did not see the way his eyes tracked her through the door and down the hallway, the way he tensed a little, and retreated – but Holly saw, and Holly understood.
She found him sitting in the deserted garage, in the driver's seat of a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow that was up on cinderblocks, no glass in any of the windows. He had his seat belt fastened and his hands on the steering wheel, as though he were actually capable of going somewhere.
"It's hard to be smarter than everyone else, isn't it?"
He snapped his chin up to stare at her with suspicious eyes, and Holly thought of the coyotes she had seen on holiday in the American desert, the way they circled your campsite outside the firelight, retreating if you approached, just enough to keep constant the distance between you and them.
"I'm not saying that to mock you. It's legitimately difficult to be more intelligent than the people around you. Especially when you're young."
She came around to the passenger side and got in, shutting the door gently. They both sat very still.
"Other kids are confusing. You make them angry and you don't understand why. Adults are worse. You can see how the way they look at you changes – for a few years you're cute, then you're threatening. You know before you even open your mouth that whatever you say won't be what they want to hear."
In the darkness there was nothing for his glasses to reflect, no glare for him to hide behind.
"So you put your head down and you pretend to be average and you hate the teachers who brag about your perfect marks in front of the class. Or you decide, fuck it, and you push back and you start to enjoy the way you scare people and you convince yourself you don't care, because the alternative is so fucking lonely you don't think you'd be able to take it."
"You did the former."
"Yes."
"How did that work out for you?" Holly had never heard anyone convey such heavy disdain with such small inflection.
"Not well, for many years," she admitted. "My father was very traditional. He would tell me all the time that I should leave the computer stuff to the gents. My last year of secondary school I won a prize from Microsoft for a PC game I coded. They offered to fly my whole family to their regional office in France for the awards ceremony. He didn't come. He didn't even have an excuse, like work, or… I mean, he did have work, but he could have taken the time."
The hurt was old, perspective grown over it like new skin, but there were still sharp things embedded that poked when she least expected it. For a moment she struggled. He blinked patiently behind his glasses.
"I gave in," she sighed. "I assimilated. I went to uni to study psychology and social work. When I got to postgrad I took a class on online communication, how the internet is changing our social landscape, that sort of thing. We were assigned a random anonymous partner and asked to get to know them during the term using only an instant messaging platform. But the program had all sorts of bugs, it would crash all the time, especially the night before a section of the project was due and everyone was trying to work on it all at once." She caught the edge of his wry smile. "Eventually I got so frustrated that I opened up the source code, ran some tests, wrote some patches, and sent them to the IT department. I was so rusty on programming that it took me the rest of the bloody term, so I never did find out if they actually took my suggestions. But that was it. That was all it took. I changed my course of study to computer engineering. Had a huge row with my father – he threatened to cut me off financially, I said piss off and went out and got a job. Paid the rest of my way. Took me a bloody long time to graduate, but I made it." She shot him a quick grin so he would understand that she was teasing, not accusing. "And I never got arrested for treason along the way."
He laughed, softly. "I wouldn't recommend it, but it's an interesting experience. Really helps you understand other people's priorities."
Holly smiled with him even as some uncomfortable emotion squirmed through her insides. "What about your priorities?"
Any amusement faded; the look he gave her was an outright dare. "You already know everything about me."
He was young enough, and arrogant enough, to think knowing and understanding were the same – perhaps so far they had been, for him.
Holly shook her head. "I don't flatter myself that much. A person's more than the sum of their internet postings." She opened the door, swung one foot out of the car, then paused. This conversation had not changed her choice, but for a second she had an ominous, exhilarating feeling of teetering in the crux of two universes. "You need to be on the security team with me. I'm putting in a request with Q tomorrow. Fair warning."
She expected some sort of reaction – any reaction – but he only blinked and said steadily, "M will say no."
"Well, maybe she'd say yes if you hadn't played bloody Fight Club –"
That finally provoked him: he tossed his head and his eyes flared and Holly imagined him at fifteen, groaning at stupid grown-ups. "I honestly didn't think they'd read so much into it. I played it because it has artistic merit, not as a manifesto." Then his eyes slid sideways, slyly. "You're not helping your argument that you don't know the details of my life."
"I'm in security," she said as she got out and walked around the bonnet. "I'm used to vetting the people I want to work with."
Before she had taken three steps towards the exit he said in a rush, as though the words couldn't quite keep pace with his brain, "And you like me. Because I remind you of yourself. Because you're a little bit bored with the people you work with right now and I'm fresh blood. And because you feel guilty that you can't or don't spend society's idea of 'adequate time' with your children, so you're substituting in a lost soul."
That last spun her on the spot, hands crumpled in her lab-coat pockets. She wavered between angry and afraid.
Evidently he understood that he had encroached on forbidden territory; his gaze dropped to the floor and self-reproach laced his voice. "Still want me on the security team?"
"…Do you do this to everyone?"
He peered up over his glasses with a quiet embarrassment. "Usually I keep it to myself."
Holly couldn't help smiling at that. "Make you a deal – I'll get you into security if you behave yourself enough to stay there."
"Extremely vague terms. I'm still learning what constitutes good behavior around here."
"You're a smart boy, I'm sure you'll figure it out." She held out a hand for him to shake, again. "Deal?"
"All right." Just as their hands touched, he snatched his away. For an alarming instant she thought he was serious, but his eyes were disarmingly, innocently wide. "If you quote Casablanca, deal's off."
She scowled and folded her arms in mock offense. "I respect that movie far too much to quote it willy-nilly."
With difficulty he clamped down the smile creeping across his face. "Mrs. Mason."
"Call me Holly."
They shook on it.
Two days later Holly walked onto the security floor earlier than usual, to find the massive monitor on the far wall already up and running and a familiar moptop standing in front of it.
"I see that M approves," she called as she dumped her handbag at her desk, picked up yesterday's coffee mug, and cast a discerning eye over the crusted grounds to determine how many more days she could go without washing it.
"Mmm." He had two windows open side-by-side and was making notes in a third. Holly recognized their security program even from a distance.
She sidled up next to him with her arms folded in what she hoped was a stern stance. "M did approve, didn't she? Because if you're up here without –"
"Please. I promised good behavior." He waved a stylus at the screen, at monitors on surrounding desks that he had commandeered to run tests, at the security cameras pointed in their direction. "This is what it looks like when I'm on my best."
Then his eyes settled on hers and it took a long moment for her to understand: now he was waiting for her approval. Dumbstruck, she nodded, and his attention fluttered away.
"Now, so far I've found twenty-seven errors or weak points we might want to take a look at –"
She frowned. "How long have you been here?"
He shrugged. "Half hour?"
"…All right."
Somehow – he wasn't even looking at her – he saw her shellshock and asked again, lips curling with amusement and self-satisfaction and just a little sadness, "Still want me on the team?"
Incredulity was shaking her head for her. "I can't handle you before my first cup of coffee."
His mouth quirked and he said, "Of course you can't, you're only human," and she understood that it was not just arrogance, that there were walls and walls and things she would never see.
His presence did not make their lives easier. Everything he wrote had to be combed over and signed off on by someone else, and he bridled under their lack of trust, and under his own reluctant understanding that he had not earned better, not yet. His work was scrupulous, but he did not teach and he did not apologize and he did not know how to work with a team. Jeffries complained frequently and Holly refused to make excuses for either of them.
Once she dragged him into the hallway by the sleeve of his sweater after he and O'Toole had swapped sharp words over the latest software implementation, and she said, "You cannot keep doing this."
"Doing what? Being right? You know I'm right."
And he was, damn him, but that wasn't the point.
"No one will care if you're right if you drive off everyone you work with." She jabbed a finger at the door. "Those boys are experts, not to mention some of my dearest friends, and they deserve a little respect –"
"Your friends." He spat the word out as though it were filthy. "I suppose I owe a great deal to you and your friends. I suppose you want my gratitude."
And that was precisely the wrong thing to say, because Elliot had had a fever all week and they had halted the last Chinese cyberattack by the skin of their teeth and under protocol she could not explain to Jeremy why the bags beneath her eyes were getting bigger.
"Do you understand what it means that I stuck my neck out for you?" she snapped. "These people have every reason to keep you away from their servers, and if it weren't for me you'd be attaching flotation devices to cars or sorting the post –"
"If it weren't for you, I'd be setting my own hours doing research at Cambridge and my name would still be –" But he froze – they both froze, his mouth still open and hers parting around her dying retort, as if the words were magically warded, a literal taboo.
They stared at each other. He balled his hands into fists, helplessly. Holly thought, with a sick drop in her stomach, Oh, god, they erased someone's child. She leaves behind nothing and no one. Full stop.
And she felt it hanging over them like a blade: the enormity of alternatives, the world of choices she had denied him in a single stroke, and no, she didn't want his gratitude, but she ached for his understanding.
She opened her mouth to try again, to say something probably insufficient, something he wouldn't accept – but he was already gone, with only the afterimage to suggest he had ever been there at all.
That night – many nights – she thought back and got angry. He had stolen millions of pounds and exposed field agents and cost many people their jobs and surely he knew that if you spat in the face of the British government they would come for you. She had made it her job to catch people like him because she believed that everyone should be able to trust the systems that kept their secrets, and by violating that privacy hackers ceded the right to their own.
She had done all she could for him by getting him on the security team, putting him in a place where he could hone his talents instead of letting them rot. It was more than he deserved. The debt sheet between them was clean; if anything, he was the one who owed.
But knowing with the mind did not cleanly translate into understanding with the heart.
Despite their difficulties Holly took him out to lunch every week, because even M had someone to take her out to lunch occasionally, and because she and Sullivan had bonded over chips and chicken salad during their partnership's early days, and because sometimes when they sat around for an hour talking about Doctor Who some of the stiffness would ease out of his shoulders. Often a rotating cast of other Q-Branch techies would join them, and she would watch him appraise the others from behind the safety screen of his glasses, listening to their stories and asking technical questions and occasionally flicking his eyes over to gauge her reaction.
Gradually he made acquaintances and allies in the other departments, and they began to borrow him for certain projects, sometimes for a week, sometimes for a month, sometimes longer. Holly had a feeling that normally this wouldn't be allowed, but Q seemed to understand that it was good for Robert, that he thrived on challenge and variety and that he needed a lesson or two on how to fit in with the rest of the Branch. He continued to work for security even if he wasn't physically present, and the time stamps on his system access log made her sigh: two AM, three-thirty AM, five.
Gradually Q drew her security team into close orbit, trusting them with increasingly classified and crucial tasks. After a year Holly had her own office; after two she had an intern to make her coffee and manage her paperwork and carry out basic bug fixes. (Robert also had an office, which he did not decorate and rarely used, and sometimes when Holly walked past she thought about the fact that most of the techs on the floor these days didn't know who he was, had never called him anything but the name on his door.)
Gradually their team dynamic shifted to let him in, and it wasn't even Holly who bent first. When they paired up for their first project after O'Toole and his wife moved to Scotland, Sullivan requested Robert. At first Holly thought this was a mercy, since if she had worked with Sullivan as usual that would have left Robert with Jeffries, and although they were at least civil now Holly would sleep better at night if someone enforced a little distance between them. It took her three days to figure out that Sullivan wanted Robert because he always wanted the best.
Holly interpreted that as a challenge. She read his work not only to check for mischief but to find the new and unpredictable bits, the ones that made her glad he was on their side. Over the rare lonely lunches, she prodded the conversation toward his current projects and assembled mental files on fiber optics and ammunition and Robert. She learned his language faster than the others. For someone who hid so often behind schooled faces and cutting wit, he was surprisingly honest about his thoughts, if you understood the meaning of a little sigh or an unsettled hand.
And gradually it began to flow between them like alternating current – an energy, a patter.
"Double-oh-three's in Bangkok –"
"Yes, got the early satellite scan."
"We'll need better by –"
"– Tomorrow, looks like."
"Twelve hours?"
"Make it ten. You're clever, you can handle it."
"Only clever? I thought I'd reached brilliant by now, at least."
"Do it in seven and I'll give you brilliant."
"Make me a trophy?"
"Anything you like. But no rush job, this is the fate of the nation we're talking about."
"I take the fate of the nation very seriously."
"Mind that facetious tongue of yours, you're among spies."
"As if you're not one of them."
"As if you're not one of them."
He made requests, and the Branch began to grant them. He wanted faster wireless, upgraded servers, mobile synchronization, and more recruits who weren't satisfied even with these toys. He wrote memos to the right people and put together graphs and learned how to stretch a budget. On the day that they returned full control of his bank accounts he bought a nice suit and wore it to meetings with a triumphant spark in his eyes, and Holly wondered if they had remade him in their image, or if he was remaking them in his.
"I've set my mobile to show a picture of Catherine Tate every time you call," he informed her over unpronounceable Thai food on the fourth anniversary of his arrival at Six. "You should feel honored."
"Mine plays the sound of a dial-up modem when you call," she told him, spearing something that might be eggplant with her fork, "because I imagine you feel a disturbance in the Force every time that sound reaches human ears." Around the mouthful of the mystery food – definitely eggplant – she added, childishly, "It's also a metaphor for how much you annoy me."
He didn't dignify that with an outright response, but his eyebrows quirked up and his eyes went a tiny bit wider and she knew that was a certain variation of Oh, really? – amusement and sarcasm and challenge at the same time. Meanwhile his fingers zoomed in on a file on his mobile, and he put it between their plates for her to see.
"This is what I want for the UAV project. Longer range, smaller size, better cameras, but much more expensive."
As Holly scrolled through the blueprints, her eyebrows crept farther and farther up her forehead. MI6 had had the side effect of making his ideas even more audacious. "I would love this, but you're right, it's too much. Q'll say no."
He pointed his fork at her. "He'll say no to me, but not to you. You're his favorite."
She narrowed her eyes, playacting suspicion. "Oh, I see now what our friendship is. It's all a sham – you're using me to get what you want at the office. I bet you had this planned from the moment we met each other. I bet you had me picked out as the perfect mark –"
It was there and gone so fast she might have imagined it, like the flash of fish just below the water's surface – in his eyes, a flicker of fear. For an instant he had doubted her. He had thought she was serious.
Surprise stopped her short. He found open affection unpalatable and so she had come to package it as banter, little gems of her regard hidden like pills in peanut butter. He understood this, or at least she had thought he did. Not for the first time she considered the gap that by all rights should exist between them, the small startling things that came from places he had not shared.
"You want to ask me a question." He said it evenly, a statement of fact, and Holly remembered that the current ran both ways.
"Do you ever think about…" She stopped and started over, because it was ridiculous to ask him if he had thought about something. "Does it ever bother you that… the people you spend most of your time with… don't… share your life experiences? As in, do you ever wish you knew more young people who were at the same place in their lives?"
"You mean does it bother me that one of my best mates is a thirty-four-year-old married woman?" he rephrased with a tiny impish smile, and she felt both relief and a desire to kill him, right now, for his flippancy.
"I was trying to be delicate, but yeah."
He looked down at his rice noodles, pushed them around meaninglessly with his fork. Finally he said, with a protective distance in his eyes, "In my position it would be very difficult to have friends who shared my life experiences."
Funny how the emotions could still blindside her when she had spent so much time with them, when she could shape them and name them as easily as she could picture her children.
"But," he said, and she looked up into his waiting gaze. "It's for the better this way, don't you think? I'll be better for it."
Later she would look back and realize that he had been trying to tell her something important from the beginning of the conversation, and, for all that she knew him, she had failed to understand.
That summer a rumor ran round the Branch that the Quartermaster would retire in the autumn. He spent longer and longer spans of time shut in his office with folder-wielding suits from HR; Tanner put in an appearance once or twice, accompanied by a double-breast suspected to belong to the Intelligence and Security Committee. Everyone agreed that they were vetting candidates for Q's replacement, and everyone had an opinion on who those candidates were, or should be.
"I heard you're on the shortlist for the new Quartermaster," Sullivan said with a twinkle in his eye as he helped himself to coffee.
Holly stared. It had been a long week tracking a double-oh through Bangladesh and she wouldn't be at all surprised if she were hearing things. "What?"
Sullivan shrugged and sipped. "That's the word in certain circles."
She turned to her computer screen, then back to Sullivan, then back to the screen. Gracie's school pictures had arrived last Thursday and she had stuck a wallet-size to the corner of her monitor. "I do get a choice, don't I?"
Sullivan laughed, but his smile was reassuring.
"Who else is on this list?" she asked, partly out of curiosity but mostly to distract herself. Despite his age the Quartermaster seemed a fixed part of the branch, and if he had to be replaced she was quite certain it wouldn't be her.
"Goodman. Maxwell from Mechanical Engineering. Lisa Stuber from Telecommunications." Sullivan turned his laser gaze on Holly and she knew what the last name would be before he said it. "Robert."
It made sense. He had worked for almost every department and written dozens of grants and sat on the line with her and Q and a field agent who was dying. It made so much sense.
"They can't," Holly said, and the words stuck in her throat. "They can't, because of –" But here was the taboo, and she could only lift her palms toward Sullivan, supplicate his understanding, and he gave it with a nod.
Again Holly collected things she was not supposed to know, little cast-off bits dropped in the break room or the canteen or the hallways. Sullivan had been modest – his name was among those being bandied about, and the prospect made her proud. The primary objection – the only objection – to Robert was his age; even Jeffries made his good faith known, to Holly's satisfaction. Her name met with a surprising amount of enthusiasm, and one night she went home and cried, actually cried, that all these good and talented people would consider her for their leader, for a position she would never accept.
On October fifth, Robert materialized at her office door before she had even removed her coat.
"Don't get comfortable," he said, and he was grinning in a way Holly had never seen before – a child's grin, no pretense, just excitement that wired and lit him from within. "You're moving to a new office, I'm giving you a promotion."
"What?" Inexplicably she looked around at all the stuff that had collected in her office, the filing cabinets and wires and knickknacks that would have to be moved. It took a moment for understanding to settle in.
She looked him in the eye. "You're giving me a promotion."
He tried for deadpan, but the grin came back.
"Robert," she said, in her best You-had-better-be-telling-me-the-truth-young-man voice.
"It's not Robert anymore," he said, and this time it was a victory.
Holly thought she might laugh, or cry, or do both simultaneously. "This has got to be some kind of record."
He inclined his head in a mock bow. "Youngest Quartermaster in MI6 history." Then all mischief vanished and his eyes went soft. "And I would be honored if you would be the Quartermaster's first female chief-of-staff."
She threw her arms out like the opening of a door. "Tell me where to sign."
And she didn't even think about the hours and the meetings that would take her away from the computers and the children she loved, the burden of the secrets she would be asked to bear, becausewith anyone else she would wear this job like an off-the-rack suit, but with him, they could be perfect. They could be clever. They could be dangerous.
They were almost talking over each other in their mutual excitement:
"Get your laptop, Q wants to see us in his office –"
"When is it official? I thought he wasn't leaving for another two weeks –"
"As soon as the papers are signed it's done. He's staying on for that time as a consultant, to make sure I don't blow anything up, I suppose –"
Holly stopped dead with her laptop under her arm and a pen behind her ear and a stack of folders she didn't remember grabbing in her hands. "Does this mean I have to call you sir?"
"That's the way it works, yes."
"Well, then you can forget it." And she turned her back on him and began rummaging through a drawer as though the matter were closed.
He didn't protest, didn't walk away, just stood in the doorway with a veneer of calm – and it was this inaction, the absence of his usual whipcrack retorts, that told her how much he had placed on her choice.
"Come off it, you know I'm yanking your chain." Her eyes were actually damp. This boy would be the death of her. "It's my honor, Q."
Then the sky fell.
They were unpacking boxes in Holly's new office and talking quietly, in half-finished sentences, about the stolen hard drive when all of their devices lit up at once: both mobiles, Holly's computer, Q's laptop. The drive had been accessed, their encryption unraveling at an alarming rate.
"It's coming from –" She didn't need to finish.
His eyes were on his email alerts. "Tanner says to trace it."
The team downstairs had had the tracing program primed for weeks. Holly felt frustration radiating from him, then anger, and as the trace found the room three stories above, as her heartbeat spiked with fear, she remained aware of his fingers tightening on the back of her chair.
"I'm going up there." He reached the door before she could rise from her seat. "We might have to kill the hardware."
Sullivan, on her computer screen, relaying a message from Tanner: Shut it down. She called up their firewalls, and then the building exploded.
Books and files and Tupperware crashed to the floor; the clay pencil cup Gracie had made in summer art camp shattered against the edge of a desk, flinging pens and paper clips like shrapnel. The lights and her monitor flickered, went out – then the backup generator roared it all back to life. Her ears rang and her blood pounded and she felt every hair follicle.
She flew through R&D and security and the garage, with reassurances for the frightened and curses for the stubborn. Get out; leave it, are you fucking mental, just leave it; don't cry, we'll make it through. Three people unaccounted for: two techs and Q.
In the car park he appeared like a ghost among the medics, watching the injured wheeled away with a blankness the uninitiated might mistake for apathy. Holly had tried to hug him before and he had always stepped away, but this time he allowed her to slip one arm around his waist and pull him close and touch her head to his shoulder.
All he said was, "Good thing I took the stairs instead of the lift."
The two techs were dead. After the funerals they fled underground like rabbits, white tails up in alarm, and for days Holly's head spun with an old rhyme:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again.
They tried, stringing wires like a listless gothic Christmas through tunnels not meant for wireless, built in a time when people could barely conceive of a terrorist attacking through invisible signals, with no army, no airplanes, no bombs. Just a man and a message, alone at a computer with his anger, and Holly knew that Q was perfectly aware of the uncomfortable comparisons.
His voice had been perfectly composed. Good thing I took the stairs.
But she had felt him shaking.
All Holly would ever know of Raoul Silva was his picture and his programs and the way Q would only hold his laptop at arm's length as though it might grow legs or fangs at any moment. She missed the fatal day because Elliot's appendix ruptured at 6:30 in the morning, right as she bent down to help him tie his school shoes, and she and Jeremy spent the next twelve hours in a hospital, white-faced and pacing and unaware that her boss was dying. When she returned to the office midway through Wednesday, she found Q in the same clothes he had been wearing on Monday.
"Why didn't you call?" she demanded, and he stared at her, as though the answer were obvious, until she left the room with disgust for their weaknesses, and for the injustice of finite time, so limited that she must choose.
Double-oh-seven was off the grid until almost eight o'clock, when he radioed to request medical and evac. She did not know him well, but she had loved enough to understand the brittleness of his voice, as though his throat had been seared away. There would be another funeral.
Alone that night in the concrete cube she and Q called an office, Holly opened Silva's laptop. The screen came up in garish red and black, a mocking skull and a single line of text:
Not such a clever boy.
He was dead, so they would never find out how much he knew, but he had read their personnel files. Holly's resume, the questionnaire she had had to fill out for a psychological profile, the confidentiality agreements she had had to sign. And, oh god – pictures of Jeremy, of her children. Maybe he had found the picture of Ben Rossum's second-form science club, the little cache of evidence they told her they had erased but she knew had to exist somewhere, because this was MI6 and they never let go of their secrets. Maybe he had seen the security footage of a young man with an artificial name in a silent gamble with a knife on his kitchen table.
Many people within Six had called Holly soft, but in that moment she understood rage.
She barely saw Q for the rest of the week; they kept him constantly in meetings, which meant the running of the department fell to her. When he did come down to the Branch she only glimpsed him from a distance, and she was reminded painfully of the differences between them, of the way tragedy turned her towards others and him away.
Before leaving on Friday she stopped at the toilet, a utilitarian construction of no gender distinction, and when she walked in Q was sitting on the bench across from the sinks. He was wearing his coat as though he had started to leave and lost his nerve or his motivation halfway to the door.
She sat beside him on the bench. Neither of them spoke. His face was so pale that she could see the blue veins threaded around his eyes. Holly stared at their reflections in the mirror until everything began to blur.
"There's going to be an inquiry." His voice was lifeless. "I spoke to Mallory off the record. The committee members don't know about the electronic trail, but I'll have to answer for the rest. Mallory says I won't be sacked, but I'll almost certainly be suspended, for a month or maybe longer."
She turned to look at him. He was blinking hard and deliberately. When he swallowed she could see his pulse quivering in his throat and she understood the fragility of the human body, how a universe of neurons could cease with one cell's error.
"Do you think it would be appropriate for me to attend the funeral," he said, lacking even the inflection to turn it into a question. "Because I –"
He stopped himself, and Holly felt horror at the things he had almost said.
Suddenly he shoved away from the wall and into a toilet stall, banging the door behind him. She heard coughing, then retching.
He hadn't locked the door and instinct led her up to it, but then he made a sound like a sob and cowardice drew her hand away. In four years she had never seen him cry.
"Ben."
More retching. She leaned against the stall frame. The laminate felt cool and soothing against her forehead, and her fluttering thoughts settled as if the wind roaring through her brain had finally died down. Maybe she had reached a truce with her emotions, or maybe it was only a temporary ceasefire, but calm hit her like a high and she knew enough to take advantage.
"Ben, I'm coming in, all right?"
He didn't answer. He was crumpled on the floor with his hands fisted in his hair and his elbows propped on the toilet seat, eyes glassy and breath shuddering. She took his glasses off his face and stroked his damp fringe away from his forehead and traced reassuring circles into the small of his back with the tips of her fingers. It took only a minute or two for the immediate crisis to pass. Holly flushed the toilet and returned his glasses and they sat side-by-side against the partition, wedged between the toilet and the door, touching at the shoulders and hips.
"I'm sorry," he said. "This is hardly behavior befitting the Quartermaster."
Holly shook her head. "You're too young for this," she said, partly because it would rile him, and partly because it was true.
He rewarded her with an indignant little glance, almost ordinary. "I am not. J. Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI when he was in his twenties."
"Yeah, but back then they couldn't even carry guns."
He chuckled; it sounded like it hurt him. His face was dry, but tiny flecks of damp glistened on his eyelashes. The florescent lights cast stark shadows, like bruises, around his eyes.
"I'm going to cry later," Holly said into the silence. "I haven't felt at all like crying yet, but tonight when everyone's in bed and it's dark and quiet, I'll feel it. And Jeremy'll make me a cuppa and hold me for a while, but that won't be enough to make it better."
"What are you going to tell him?"
"That my boss died. No hows or whys." She hoped he wouldn't read the bitterness, but he was much too clever and too close. "He knows I liked her, but he'll never really understand. He can't."
Q nodded. Then he gave her a curious look, face still half-turned away, eyes flicking down and then back as though looking at her for too long caused him pain. It was almost shy, and he was never shy, and Holly stared in spite of herself, trying to reconcile.
It baffled her that she hadn't seen it before, because she had been saying it to others for years: Everyone should be able to trust the systems that keep their secrets.
All this time she had thought he trusted her despite the fact that she had caught him and she knew the secrets he was not allowed to voice, but really he trusted her because. Because he had understood, or at least hoped, that she wouldn't walk away, that she would call him by the name so few people knew, that even with her imperfect understanding she would try again until she got it right.
And Holly had a sudden sense of their uniqueness, of the uncountable universes where this had never happened: worlds where she had refused the post when he offered it to her, or he had never offered it to her at all; where the old Q had chosen her or Sullivan or Maxwell from Mechanical Engineering; where she had reached the Tube and boarded a train and decided it would be too much effort to turn around; where Ben Rossum, postgrad, twenty-three had escaped their custody by way of a knife spinning on a table, or opted out of conviction for prison instead of recruitment, or slipped through their net and finished his doctorate and carried a different set of secrets for the rest of his life. How strange, how improbable, that she had found the courage to defy her father, that she and M and the former Quartermaster had all seen something worth saving in this complicated man, that they should exist at all with their unique combinations of genes and overcome the limitations of language to connect and support and trust.
The words sprang to her mind unbidden, echoes of something she had read years ago: Come… Dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg.
"We're still alive," she said, in wonder.
He made a harsh noise that could have been a scoff or an expression of pain. "I'm not sure how I feel about that."
Holly couldn't sort everything into words; she felt pulled by a frightening and exhilarating tide. "It's… quantum universes. Every choice is important. Every choice creates a split. A brave new world."
With a razor's edge of reproach he said, "I wonder which of her choices she regretted."
Holly seized his hand. "Don't." He tried to pull away, but she wouldn't give. "I'm not saying bad things happen for a reason – because they don't, we're not being tested or… or proven or any of that – but what we choose to do afterwards, that's what makes us who we are. That's what builds the world. And all of us have that power, even when we think it's the end."
She had been too focused on her words to pay attention to his expression, though she knew at the edge of her vision that he was watching her. Now she turned her head towards his and saw something like a smile in his eyes.
He said, gently, "I told you I'd be better for it."
Holly risked a little teasing. "Is that gratitude?"
Now the smile seeped into the line of his lips. "I think you're imagining things."
She swiped her thumb across his knuckles, affectionately, and let him have his hand back. "In that case, I'd best go home and hug my children and kiss my husband before I completely lose touch with reality."
He nodded and they both stood up and Holly flattened herself against the wall so he could swing the door open around her. Outside she glanced again at their paired reflections, two mismatched people in a dingy bomb-shelter toilet facing days of darkness, and she would make sure it couldn't take either of them without a fight.
"You look awful. Sleep at some point this weekend, all right?" She knew he wouldn't, but at least she had said it.
"I'll see you tomorrow?" For some reason it was a question.
She nodded. "I'll be here."
She had made her choice.
And death is at your doorstep
And it will steal your innocence
But it will not steal your substance…
And you have your choices
And these are what make man great
His ladder to the stars
But you are not alone in this
And you are not alone in this
As brothers we will stand and we'll hold your hand
Hold your hand
Mumford and Sons, "Timshel"
Author's notes:
It was not a very flattering picture; she had obtained it from the DVLA.
The DVLA is the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, the U.K. equivalent of the Department/Bureau of Motor Vehicles in the States.
"Your friend Mr. Rossum is working for us now, under a new identity. I'm sure it will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
As I said in the notes for "All the Kids Have Always Known," Q's real name comes from Ben Whishaw, the actor who portrays him, and Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language. I picked "Robert Shaw" for his MI6-assigned name because it's deliberately boring; Ian Fleming picked "James Bond" for the exact same reason.
For an instant he had doubted her. He had thought she was serious.
For those of you who have read "All the Kids Have Always Known" - Holly doesn't know about Q's toxic friendship with Colin Burns, and she won't until the events of that story.
He rewarded her with an indignant little glance, almost ordinary. "I am not. J. Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI when he was in his twenties."
"Yeah, but back then they couldn't even carry guns."
The FBI's powers and jurisdiction were very poorly defined in its early days. I'm currently reading a fantastic book on the subject called Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 (on which the 2009 Michael Mann movie - enjoyable but historically inaccurate - is based). J. Edgar Hoover was twenty-nine when he became director of the FBI.
Come… Dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg.
This is a Dr. Manhattan quote from Watchmen.
Songs I kept on repeat during the conception and writing of this fic: Danielle Ate the Sandwich, "The Have Nots"; fun., "Some Nights Intro/Some Nights"; Fleet Foxes, "Helplessness Blues"; The Beatles, "Carry That Weight"; and of course, Mumford and Sons, "Timshel." Alabama Shakes' "Hold On" also powered me through the final edit.