The late September day was sunny and warm, but the conversation Helena was having with Robert, a former colleague from the CIA, was downright chilly. They were seated at a terrace table of a café, seemingly enjoying the beautiful day, but in reality, there was nothing enjoyable about the situation.
"You owe me, I took the fall for you when that interrogation went to shit, so don't give me excuses, just do it," she muttered.
"All right, fine. Give me the address and the schedule and I'll have it done," he let out a defeated sigh.
"She's going to be at work at least from seven A.M. until three-thirty P.M. so you've got plenty of time," Helena said and slid a piece of paper with an address over to him.
"What's she done, why is she a person of interest anyway?" he frowned as he looked at the name and let out a quiet slow whistle at the address. Whoever this Ingrid Hunnigan was, she certainly lived in the better part of town, probably paid more rent than he made in a month.
"That is none of your concern."
"You are asking me to assign a team to install surveillance in her apartment, I think I deserve to know why, especially since it's my ass on the line."
"I'm not asking you to do it, I'm telling you to do it," Helena corrected, finished her coffee and got up. "Call me when you're done, and I'll come pick up the equipment I'll need," she said and walked away.
"When I said 'do whatever makes you happy', I obviously meant 'do things that make you happy within the confines of the legal system', stalking Hunnigan isn't within the confines of the legal system!" Leon hissed agitatedly as he took a seat next to Helena. They were in her apartment and it hadn't been her intention to let him in on her project, but once he'd seen the screens and the images displayed on them, he'd demanded an explanation.
"I'm not stalking her, I'm trying to protect her, and since she refused to let me do that and since she refuses to take this seriously, I have to go around some rules."
"If she finds out about this, she will murder you."
"I know, so let's just hope it won't come to that. The sooner we find the guy, the better and that way, Hunnigan will never have to know," Helena reasoned with a small shrug.
Contrary to what one might have expected, "The Guy" didn't seem to be someone who had decided to target a random, relatively high-ranking government agent because on paper, Hunnigan was just a desk jockey and her deeper involvement regarding handling missions was never disclosed in any reports or news. An ex-partner would've been the obvious answer, but all Hunnigan's exes had been cleared.
The Guy had dressed up as a pizza delivery person and brought a box into the office, left it at Hunnigan's desk and exited the building. Instead of a pizza, the box had contained a home-made bomb. Fortunately, Hunnigan had recalled never ordering it and had given it to Leon who had accidentally set the bomb off when he'd carelessly tossed the box onto the table in the kitchenette. No one had gotten hurt aside from minor bruises and scratches but had Hunnigan (or anyone else) opened the box right in front of herself, she could've gotten killed.
All her exes had air tight alibis for when that had happened, so it couldn't have been any of them. Unless, of course, Hunnigan was leaving someone out for some reason. Frankly, Helena was beginning to think that was the case, and she told as much to Leon.
"I doubt that. I mean, she's a private introvert, what did you expect, that she'd jump for joy at the thought of having someone stay with her twenty-four-seven?" Leon scoffed.
"I like my privacy as much as the next girl, but this is her life we're talking about."
"Mm-hm, so when she told you she would not have you following her everywhere, you decided to bug her home. And you think she's the one who's behaving strangely?"
"Okay, this is not going to sound very convincing considering the circumstances we met under way back when, but I was really fucking good at my job as a protective agent in the CIA and as one of the President's personal guards when I was in the Secret Service, I know what I'm doing."
Leon could've made a snide remark, but the truth was, had Simmons been dumb enough to recruit any other agent for his personal project, it would've failed because it was like Helena said, she truly was good at her job.
"Look. We're talking about a guy who had the nerve to waltz into the DSO headquarters pretending to deliver a damn pizza, what's stopping him from just turning up at Hunnigan's door at some point? Since Hunnigan won't let me be a guard dog at the door, this is all I got," Helena explained.
"Well, the building does have a doorman."
"Yeah, that eighty-year old guy… who looks very dashing in his uniform and is really nice… or that younger guy who is glued to his phone. Bottom line, I've been in and out of there and they've never asked a question or ID… and I seriously doubt they'd even be able to tell a fake ID from a real one, so… very secure indeed," Helena said sarcastically.
"Are you gonna help me or not?" she then sighed, and Leon blew a raspberry as he thought about it and exhaled deeply.
"For the record, this makes me incredibly uncomfortable. But yeah, I'll help out. A little. If anyone asks, I did nothing."
"Noted."
How do you not get lonely? Or bored? Helena wondered, completely unaware of the irony of it seeing as she'd spent the past two weeks doing even less than what Hunnigan had been doing while at home; she'd spent hours sitting at her computer watching… Hunnigan sit at her computer. Sometimes she'd curl up with a book, and frankly, the only thing that had surprised Helena regarding Hunnigan and her personal, private life was that she didn't curl up with a book and a bottle of wine, rather she grabbed a six-pack. Helena had never imagined Hunnigan as the beer-drinking type.
The thing Helena had noticed above everything else was how… lonely Hunnigan's life seemed. She didn't call anyone and aside from the odd telemarketer or two, no one called her. There were no visitors and she didn't visit anyone, never stopped by at a friend's on her way home from work; the only stop she made was at the grocery store. As far as Helena could tell, no one at the store seemed to be The Guy either, no one following her afterward or acting weird.
Well, no one aside from Helena who felt both proud of being so discreet Hunnigan never even noticed her, and then upset because this was just proving a point; this was how easy it was to follow someone, and they never even know it's happening. Granted, Helena was a professional, but Hunnigan knew her, she should've recognized her, they'd passed each other face-to-face more than once. Helena didn't like to advocate unnecessary paranoia, but Hunnigan just wasn't paying attention to anything happening around her.
Helena couldn't quite understand how that was even possible. When at work, Hunnigan saw and knew everything. She knew the way each of the other FOS agents in her office liked their coffee. She knew the names of everyone's kids, pets and spouses. She knew what brand of cigarettes the smokers preferred, and she knew who was afraid of water and who was afraid of dogs. She listened, she paid attention, so why was her situational awareness such a joke when it came to her surroundings anywhere else?
Helena perked up when she heard Hunnigan's doorbell ring. She leaned closer to the screen and turned the volume up as she watched Hunnigan walk across her apartment and answer the door. Helena internally rolled her eyes at Hunnigan for not asking who it was or even taking a second to look through the peephole before opening the door.
"You're late."
"Like, two minutes!" a female voice laughed.
"I'm still docking that from your pay," Hunnigan smirked when a tall blonde entered the apartment.
"We both already know you're not gonna do that," she chuckled.
"Speaking of your pay, let's get this out of the way, it'd be awkward if I forget," Hunnigan then said and handed her a stack of bills. Helena couldn't make out how much was there exactly, but she was more curious about what Hunnigan was paying for anyway.
"It's still a thousand, yes?"
"It's never been more than eight hundred, and you know it," the blonde laughed gently as she accepted the money and put it in her wallet.
"Well, at least this way you'll never be able to say I wasn't fair," Hunnigan shrugged with a smile.
"You know it, I totally call you a sugar mama behind your back," the blonde chortled and Hunnigan laughed.
"Ah, Nic, I think it's adorable that you believe I didn't know you do that," she shook her head and headed into the kitchen, inquiring the blonde… who was apparently named Nic… if she wanted something.
Wait, is she… a prostitute? Helena frowned when Nic called out that she didn't want anything and then headed straight into the bedroom.
No, a thousand bucks is too much for that… at least I think it is. Then again, I believe that if Hunnigan were to hire someone for that, she wouldn't pick up just anyone, Helena mused. She didn't have a view of the bed, she'd specifically asked Robert to leave that and the bathroom out. She was nosing around Hunnigan's life, but that was where she drew the line. Besides, as far as safety went, there was no reason to expand the view to those areas; the windows in the bathroom and bedroom were unreachable unless you were Spider-Man or had a jet-pack, so Helena really only needed to see the doors.
Hunnigan entered the bedroom and judging from the sounds, she and Nic got in bed.
Oh-kay, no, nope, don't need to hear that, Helena grumbled internally and muted her laptop as Hunnigan and Nic spoke quietly, the mutters and murmurs accompanied by the quiet swishing of the bedsheets offering too much information as it was.
Seeing Nic, however, made Helena realize something. Maybe The Guy wasn't a guy. Hunnigan hadn't disclosed any female lovers when she'd listed her exes, but Helena assumed she had chosen not to do so. Which meant maybe there was someone who didn't have an alibi for the bombing.
"Yeah, but why would she have not said anything?" Helena muttered to herself. Maybe she was ashamed. Maybe she was still in the closet. Maybe she just didn't want anyone to know any more of her personal life than they had to, admitting to this "anomaly" would mean giving away more information that she felt even half-comfortable sharing. Maybe it was none of those reasons if there was one at all. What mattered was that in her search for The Guy, Helena had never even stopped to consider he could be The Gal instead.
