London - Thursday 17th September 2009:
Summer appears to have gasped its last. Only a week earlier he had stood out here and lifted his face to a warm and soothing sun, while today the air on the roof balcony bites his exposed skin, and even with the sun momentarily breaking the cloud cover, his mood is dark and brooding. He doesn't know where to go from here. He has been here before, but this time the stakes are higher.
"Harry?" He hears the door to the roof opening, followed by her voice, but he doesn't turn, and nor does she expect him to. The two of them have an understanding which dates back years.
"Ros," he replies, staring straight ahead, hoping the orderly appearance of the building opposite will bring some semblance of order to his thoughts, and thence to his life.
Ros slowly crosses the balcony to his side, glancing at him before joining him in his contemplating the visual syncopation that is a modern multi-storeyed office building across the street from Thames House. "You wouldn't have climbed those stairs without a good reason," he adds at last, breaking the silence, which had been teetering on the edge of becoming uncomfortable.
"I was hoping to find Ruth here," Ros says quietly, "with you."
Her last two words have Harry's head whipping around to glare at Ros. "Why would she be here?"
Ros knows she's poked at a wound, and she even suspects she'd done it deliberately. "To give you a bollocking, most likely." Ros waits a heartbeat or two before continuing her thought. "You need to talk to her, Harry."
"I tried. She's not talking to me."
The gruff edge to his voice hides the emotion which Ros knows would shatter the windows of the office building opposite were Harry ever to let it off the tight leash of his self control. He is wound up like a spring - an incendiary device on long-term countdown.
"You must know where she is. Perhaps ..."
"Maybe," is all he says, and it's all Ros is getting. To his ears her visit sounds like a fact-finding mission.
"Well," Ros adds, half turning, preparing to return downstairs, "I'll leave you to it, then, but you need to apologise to her."
Harry says nothing more, as Ros quickly leaves, the roof door closing silently behind her. He hates it when others are right, but most of all he hates it when others know that he knows they are right. Chances are the whole of Section D knows how badly he'd fucked up. Five dead, and it's all down to him.
Harry sighs heavily, turning from the balustrade. If only the balustrade could talk. He's relieved that it can't, because along with his greatest triumphs, it could share all his many foibles and failures.
He knows where to find Ruth. There is only one place she can be.
Harry checks along Millbank, but there is no sign of Ruth. In the unlikely event that she has crossed the river, he hurries towards Lambeth Bridge. He hadn't expected to find her standing on the southern side of the bridge, her body close to the wall, her eyes gazing upstream, but she's there, a lone figure dressed in black. In an attempt to gauge her mood, he stands still, watching her. Like him, she appears brooding, perhaps even angry. He is not looking forward to this encounter, but it is something he must do.
It is seven months since she'd returned to London in a blaze of gunfire, death, and unspoken accusations. Since Ruth's return to Thames House they have worked well together, managing to forge a delicate trust in one another. There remains a shadow of their former personal relationship, to which Harry is always open, and eternally hopeful. He also knows that it is far too soon for Ruth to be considering him in that way.
Quietly, he moves closer to her, until he steps beside her, watching her closely as she glances at him, and then away. It is as though she'd been expecting him. "Hi," he says, and he detects a slight nod of her head in reply. So far not so good. "I thought we needed to talk," he adds.
Harry is standing quite close to her side, and like him, her hands are stuffed deep into the pockets of her black woollen coat. He silently berates himself for not having thought to bring her gloves. Her hands must be freezing.
"I'm sorry, Ruth," he says after a painfully long silence, one which hovers between them, having attained its own peculiar identity. "I needed to have listened to you. I believed Sadik to have had no history of violence."
"That was certainly true," she replies calmly, "on paper."
"I believed that sending in a couple of agents to talk him down would have .. escalated the situation."
"I know, Harry. I do understand why you ..."
"And I know you felt dismissed," and seeing Ruth's smile, he adds, "What's so amusing?"
Ruth turns to him, but doesn't quite give him direct eye contact, her eyes settling on the collar of his coat, her face relaxed. "You sound like you've just been to one of those seminars for management: How To Communicate With Sensitivity, or some such."
Despite his prevailing mood, Harry finds that he's chuckling quietly. "You'd never find me at one of those," he says gruffly.
"I know."
"Am I that bad?" he asks, already knowing the answer.
"Only sometimes." Ruth has turned back to examining the river as the water flows towards them, and beneath the bridge to the sea.
They are standing side by side at the bridge wall, and this time the silence between them is comfortable, companionable, although not yet relaxed. Harry finds himself glancing at her, trying - and failing - to read her mind. If he knows her well, and he believes that even given their years apart he still does, she is mentally composing her next sentence.
"I've been thinking," she says at last, after a silence of several minutes, "while everyone - including me - has been fussing over how your decision to not bring in Ekrem Sadik has led to the deaths of five innocent people, their focus on your ... role in this has blinded them to the intended actions of Sadik. He was the terrorist, not you. It's so easy to forget that." She turns to him, then, and her eyes are softer as they meet his. "I see that as unfair."
Of course she does. Ruth believes in balance and fairness.
Despite a surge of warm hope from deep inside him, the morning's events cannot that easily be brushed aside. "But I ignored your assessment of the situation."
She nods. "And not for the first time."
"No, but the price paid was higher. A five-year-old child died."
She holds his eyes, and he finds he can't look away. "I've been so angry with you .." and this time it is he who nods, "but I'm also angry with myself."
"Why, Ruth? You did nothing -"
"I should have insisted -"
"But you did insist."
"I should have made the call myself."
"Had you, I would have had to discipline you for insubordination. The buck will always stop at my desk."
She sighs heavily, pulling her eyes back to the river below, dark and dirty, and as turbulent as his thoughts. "Did you know that the name Sadik means loyal?" she says at last.
He didn't, of course. How could he? Turkish names are not one of his obsessions. He is watching her closely, waiting for the inevitable `more'. Then the penny drops. "Do you mean, Ruth, that you took Sadik's threats seriously because of his name?"
"No, there were other .. historical .. indicators, but his name was what swayed me .. in the end. After all, Pearce is a variant of Peter, and means `steadfast in faith'. It even dates back to the Bible, when Jesus gave Simon the name Simon Peter. Of all the people I've ever known - excluding terrorists - you're perhaps the one most steadfast in your faith ... in your beliefs." She smiles at his surprise that she knows the origin of his surname, something of which he has only ever had a vague understanding, and little interest. "In Turkey they have the option to choose their own last names, so a name's meaning is significant. Ekrem Sadik's loyalty to his cause had him reacting in a violent way, but ..."
"But what, Ruth?"
"I also need you to know that I took a huge risk when I recommended he be brought in."
With this added information, one thought has been bothering him. "Why didn't you tell me all this at the time?"
"I was hoping you'd believe me, and take me seriously, and I suppose I was also testing you."
Jesus. "You'll have to explain that."
"I was testing your faith in me ... and my abilities as an analyst."
"That's hardly fair, Ruth. Without all the information at hand, I couldn't have acted on what you told me this morning. Even Ros agreed that we couldn't act without further information."
Harry sighs heavily, stuffing his hands deeper into his pockets. While he knows how complex Ruth can be, he hadn't expected this level of complexity from her, not when addressing a possible terror threat. He doesn't know who is more at fault - him or her. Perhaps it's both of them.
"Tell me something," she says quietly, "did you know him to be armed?"
"He had only ever indicated that he planned to harm himself, so I assumed he had a weapon of some kind."
"But not an automatic weapon," Ruth says quietly.
"Not that, no. We - Ros and I - thought it likely that he had a Yavuz 16, or some other kind of Turkish handgun. The information on him is sketchy at best. I'm sorry we hadn't taken your fears more seriously, Ruth."
"I accept your apology," she says quietly, after a long silence, "and I ask you to understand my point of view also." Harry nods. All in all, she has let him off rather easily. "Just before you turned up here," she continues, "I was thinking that it was ... a relief that after he'd killed the people on the street, Sadik took his own life."
Harry lifts one side of his mouth. "In one way, yes, but I'll still be expected to provide an explanation for what happened. Four of the people he killed were British citizens."
"I'm sure the Chinese citizen was of value too, Harry, and the Chinese consulate will demand an explanation."
He nods, unhappy all over again. Any number of citizens from any country being killed in a terrorist attack, no matter how small, is too many. "I've been expecting the Home Secretary to be on the blower to me, but so far ..."
"Isn't Ros handling that side of things? She and Andrew Lawrence seem ... friendly."
"She's closer to his age than I am, so I trust that she'll be capable of calming him. He'll have to report the events to Parliament in a way which will make it sound like we acted in accordance with Sadik's level of threat."
"I suspect we may have to cobble something together to keep the politicians happy," Ruth muses, and Harry smiles. She is fast turning into him.
Again they fall into silence, but this time they are more comfortable. While he doesn't necessarily agree with her that Sadik is better off dead, Harry is prepared to accept that she has a point. His life following a terror event in a major city would be spent behind bars, and his name would forever be associated with a terrorist attack on London's streets.
Beside him he notices Ruth's body shudder. He is about to reach out to touch her, but at the last minute changes his mind, pulling his hand back to his side. "Are you cold?" he asks, and when she nods, he steps a little away from the wall. "We should be heading back, before -"
"- Ros sends out a search party."
Thankfully, Ruth smiles up at him as she turns to face him. "Are we good?" he asks, hopeful as ever. When Ruth glances up at him and smiles, and then gives him the briefest of nods, he considers his anxiety leading up to meeting her a reasonable price to pay for the resultant calm which has settled over him.
As though of one mind, they turn together towards Millbank, and stroll along the pathway beside the road across the bridge.
"Thank you," Ruth says quietly.
"For what?"
"For caring enough to come looking for me."
Harry smiles down at her, but she is looking ahead, so he is surprised when he feels her hand seek his own, squeezing his fingers before attempting to pull away. He's having none of it. He threads his fingers through hers, so that even had she wanted to, she'd not be able to pull her hand away. They continue to walk hand in hand, both pretending that they do this all the time.
"Just until we reach Horseferry Road," Ruth says quietly. "We wouldn't want to ..."
".. create a disturbance?" He can't look at her, for fear he'll ruin the moment.
"I was thinking more of the likelihood anyone who sees us ... like this .. will gossip."
"Being gossiped about is not a terminal condition, Ruth," he says lightly.
"Maybe not to you."
Harry doesn't care about the gossiping of others, but he is prepared to be sensitive to Ruth's need for privacy. Suddenly the day is not so cold, and the Thames is no longer a dark and dismal waterway which snakes through his city.
Just as they leave Lambeth Bridge Harry looks upwards to see heavy clouds moving in. "It looks like it might rain," he says.
Ruth chooses that moment to slide her hand from his grasp. "It'll be all right, Harry," she says, and he knows she's not talking about the weather.
If this day has taught him anything, it's humility, and the need to listen more closely to Ruth whenever she insists upon standing her ground. Not only is she smarter than he is, but she's also wiser, and he'd best not forget that.