You've been very thorough… I wish our lot were half as good as you." ~ Mycroft Holmes to Irene Adler, "A Scandal in Belgravia"
July 2012
It did not particularly surprise a certain Julianne Grey –Parker (formerly known as Irene Adler) to find Mycroft Holmes seated at her dining room table, reading a copy of the New York Times. She had gone out for a quick run around Hyde Park and returned to find the man known in intelligence circles as the personification of the British Government looking quite comfortable in her Sydney apartment, with a cup of tea he'd obviously made himself. 'Well, it was only a matter of time', she thought, as she removed her sweatshirt and took the seat across from him.
"Sydney? I would have thought Hong Kong or Dubai." he remarked, folding up his newspaper to look at her. "I suppose Australia is as good as place as any for a woman who likes horses and punting as much as you do."
Irene shrugged. "It suits my purposes. Busy, but not overly so. Besides, my Arabic is questionable and my Cantonese is subpar. But you already knew that." She reached across the table to pour herself a glass of water from the jug she had laid out earlier before she commenced her run. "Can I offer you anything else with your tea? I haven't done any shopping but I can run outside to get you something."
"No thank you." he replied. He deliberated for a few moments before speaking. "You are a perceptive woman Miss Adler, I presume that you know why I came to see you today." he finally said.
"In light of recent events, I can only assume it has something to do with your brother's demise and/or Jim Moriarty blowing his brains out on top of a hospital in London. In which case, I have nothing to offer you except my most sincere condolences for the former and congratulations for the latter." she replied.
"And how are you liking Sydney, Mrs. Grey-Parker? I can see you've settled in."" he said, noting the sparseness of the apartment and the wedding ring on her finger. "Divorcee or widow?"
"Widow. Less questions," she replied, setting her glass down on the table. "As far as the people of Sydney know, I train and deal with horses that my recently deceased husband's insurance policy purchased. That's it."
"This profession seems to suit you. I trust that the accommodations are to your liking? This isn't exactly Belgravia but it is a nice neighborhood. But we can arrange for something better," he said.
Irene was noncommittal. "This is standard issue for diplomatic staff. Far less ostentatious, more my taste. Besides, haven't you heard? My native country is in a recession." Mycroft gave a wry grin. "But you didn't come all the way here to talk about my decorator or economics. How is Sherlock?" She had hoped, in one way or another, that Sherlock had survived the fall and that Mycroft must have planned an out for his brother but she wasn't able to ascertain anything else from Neilson when she called him that morning from her satellite phone. "Let the Brits clean up their mess," he had said irritatedly and he hung up before she was able to press for more details. Neilson never did get over the whole "out the window" incident in Baker Street.
Mycroft gave her an appraising look. "Am I to hazard a guess that the affection you felt for my brother was not entirely feigned?" She did not respond.
"Never mind, Sherlock is none of your concern right now, we have more pressing issues." He reached underneath the table for some files in his briefcase, which he held out to her across the table. Irene stiffened.
"Moriarty is dead, the mission is finished. There is no more Operation Spider." she said, crossing her arms. She refused to take the files.
After seven years of living and breathing Operation Spider – the multiagency operation designed to dismantle James Moriarty's organization – Irene couldn't bear the thought of resuming work on that assignment again. She'd given almost everything for love of country and even though she always wanted to fight for the greater good, lately she wasn't sure what the greater good was anymore. She didn't even know if she was the same person, or if there was anything left of the young woman Mycroft had first met in Oxford all those years ago.
Mycroft looked at her with some distaste, almost as if she was a petulant child throwing a tantrum.
"Miss Adler, I don't understand. When you agreed to accept this mission, I thought you were committed to seeing it through." He placed the files on the table and steepled his hands under his chin. "Perhaps I overestimated your resilience or your professionalism.", he sniffed.
Irene was stung, but she tried her best not to show it. She composed herself for a few minutes before she formulated her answer.
"Sir, I don't see why my continued involvement is necessary. Nielson assured me that I would be transferred to Langley once they were certain that all of the compromised agents had been identified. It was agreed that I would keep a low profile until everything was sorted out."
A full week after she parted ways with Sherlock in Amsterdam, Irene called in her handler and met him in Prague. After a torturous debriefing session that lasted all of 72 hours with the agency's psychiatric experts, Irene expected that she would be repatriated to the United States to assume another post. She was surprised when Nielson handed her a dossier and told her that she was going to be assigned a nondescript name and identity in a safe country, until further notice – hence, Julianne Grey-Parker, the American widow in Sydney. It was a significant deviation from protocol and one she didn't pay much attention to until the older Holmes brother reentered her life. Suddenly, Irene started to piece together the reasons for her reassignment.
"Mister Holmes, am I in Sydney because of an anomaly in my psychiatric evaluation?" She asked, although she already knew the answer.
Mycroft remained silent. Irene had heard of double agents being retired prematurely due to the unwitting risks they posed to themselves and to their governments, but she had never expected that it would happen to her. Her entire record had been full of commendations for her work and she was circumspect in every aspect of her career. Women in her line of work were never taken seriously and she did not want to give her superiors the impression that she was anything but perfectly competent.
She rose from the table. "Since the day I took this job, I have done everything you and my superiors have asked of me." she said, her disappointment radiating from every pore.
Mycroft remained seated. "Agent Adler, you were missing for a full week after Karachi. The account you provided of your time after my dear brother came to your rescue was full of inconsistencies. We are aware of what you are capable of because we trained you. Given your… relationship with the late James Moriarty, we cannot take the risk that you alerted other members of his network of the other steps we have taken."
Irene had observed Mycroft Homes well enough to know when he was lying. This wasn't about Jim at all, it was about Sherlock. She sighed. "With all due respect sir, I think we both know that is not the real reason. I was always fully supervised when I was with the target and you yourself debriefed me after each meeting." If she was going to be let go, she might as well tell the truth. "The real reason is that you are afraid of what I might have told Sherlock. That I told him about our arrangement and the real reason why he and I met." She had always suspected that Mycroft's distrust of her began when she deviated from the script he had carefully authored, and now she finally had her confirmation.
She was not meant to contact James Moriarty for at least another year before she was sent a code red message that indicated she needed to call him immediately, kinky princesses be damned. Professional sex work with monarchs and those in the upper reaches of government was her cover, but it was also M15's way of ensuring that enterprising prostitutes did not have access to any sensitive information. If Britain took anything out of the cold war, it was to ensure that the perversions and sexual deviancies of its most high-profile targets remained in-house. Mycroft had strategically placed her in that profession in order to build a convincing pretext as to why she would require Moriarty's service. The mission began to operate on an expedited timeline after her phone call with Moriarty and she suspected that higher powers were starting to become uncomfortable with the sway she held over her clients. In hindsight, however, Irene realized it was because of her nascent relationship with Sherlock.
Sherlock's involvement was meant to be incidental but after she had relayed the details of their first meeting to Moriarty, he had rubbed his hands with demonic glee and insisted that she do everything in her power to seduce and destroy him. When Irene had relayed Moriarty's strategy to Mycroft, he simply nodded his assent. Originally, it was planned that Irene would simply use her position as a purveyor of secrets to give Moriarty false information. His fixation on Sherlock, however, meant that drastic alterations had to be made. As the months progressed and the new plan took shape, Irene could not help but feel sorry for Sherlock that his own older brother was tacitly permitting the emotional devastation designed for him by his deranged mortal enemy. Despite herself and despite everything she had seen in her line of work, she found herself sympathizing with Sherlock – the only truly innocent person in the whole drama who never deserved the hand she dealt.
Everything proceeded accordingly until the night of the Bond Air debacle. The passcode to her phone had been set up so that it would automatically yield its contents on the fourth try, at a preprogrammed time and date. It did not particularly matter what code Sherlock entered, the idea was that he would conclusively gain access to her phone and therefore solve the mystery, ending his seeming preoccupation with her. She had been instructed to go through her paces and give the impression that she had been thoroughly bested. What Mycroft had failed to take into account was the growing mutual attraction that she and Sherlock shared and the surprisingly romantic bent of Sherlock's deductions. Sherlock's evident pain almost prompted an honest admission on that fateful evening– one that did not go unnoticed by her superiors. She remembered walking out of Mycroft's dining room that night in a fitful state, unable to remain in the presence of someone who could callously order an agent to break his own brother's heart. It was the first time she sincerely questioned the morality of what she did for a living and it sparked her ambivalence towards her former life – ambivalence, she assumed, that made itself evident during her psychiatric evaluation in Prague.
Irene snapped out of her reverie and refocused on Mycroft. Who was looking at her as if he was aware of every thought that had just gone through her head. Bastard.
"I can assure you Miss Adler, I am well aware that you did not tell my brother about the true nature of your profession or you wouldn't be alive today." Irene felt a chill up her spine as he smiled coldly at her.
He rose and started for the door, leaving the files on the table.
"If you are still so intent on retiring to an office desk somewhere in Virginia, so be it. I'll see what I can arrange. But there are still many loose ends in Operation Spider that only you can attend to. Irrespective of how you feel about myself or my actions, I know I can trust you to do the right thing." Mycroft took his coat from the rack and he left her apartment without another word. He knew that within hours of his departure, Irene Adler would have made all the necessary arrangements for her next assignment, leaving no trace of Julianne Grey-Parker.