"Penny."Sheldon whispered, involuntarily.
He was going to die, and it would be Penny's bullet that killed him.
Sheldon has always been of the opinion that he is intelligent. It's his biggest defining characteristic. The one word he would use to describe himself. Over the years his genius has gotten him in and out of plenty of trouble. He has reached plenty of wrong conclusions, made plenty of mistakes, but he has always maintained that his evidence was substantial enough to lead him astray. These things happened, no matter how smart someone was. Even Einstein made mistakes, he knew someday one of his theories would be his version of the 'cosmological constant'. No one was perfect, it didn't mean he was unintelligent.
Standing in front of Penny, his neighbor, his friend and watching her point a gun at him felt like a revelation. He had spent the entirety of his life completely and utterly wrong. He had just walked into certain death on his own violation.
He was an idiot. A moron of the highest order.
Then Penny pulled the trigger.
x
Pasadena was boring. Getting access to the Caltech Server was cakewalk. Three days, a friendly dinner, and the copy of her own key was enough to have her neighbors hand theirs over. Of course she hadn't seen Sheldon's raid on the mess in her apartment coming. She'd been so relieved she'd kept all her more 'sensitive' materials in her room. She'd railed at them about it and got her key back. Sheldon of course asked for his key back as well, but by then she'd already made a copy.
The easy excuse of needing milk was ready in case they caught her in their living room, but it was never a problem. Sheldon, and by virtue of being his roommate, Leonard kept to a schedule so rigid that Penny didn't actually need subterfuge. But her training demanded it. Her training was especially effective in regards to Leonard and his friends, whose eyes were usually trained on her pretty face and hints of skin. So busy dreaming up everything she could be to them that they almost never bothered to look at what she actually was.
Sheldon was paradoxically easier, and much more complicated. Sheldon wasn't easily distracted, tank tops and boy shorts never held the whole of his attention. He didn't know she was an agent; wasn't looking for any deception. Plus he thought she was an idiot, but when he spoke to her, he was speaking to Penny. Not the pretty girl next door, not the hot blonde, not the socialite. There was no role in his head for her to play to. In front of Sheldon she had no choice but to be Penny. It made the role more solid in her head, as though she really was Penny; as if she wasn't actually playing a role but truly living this life. Like she really was some hot headed community college drop out from Nebraska, busting her ass as a waitress and trying to make it in showbiz.
She's particularly grateful when they all signed up for the arctic thing. Four months had been plenty of time for a few short ops. And she rather desperately needed the break from playing Penny. She needs to remember who she truly is; Agent Thirteen.
x
He starts hunting the perpetrators. Know thy enemy is the kind of adage he believes in. It's slow going. Of course it is. Being careful means going slowly. The government en mass is made up of many letter agencies and quite a few are 'unofficial', so to speak. The ones that are widely known the CIA, and FBI, are too well know to risk operating in such a manner. But he's kept an eye on enough 'secret' operations over the years to know the markers he is looking for. In his experience it always comes down to the money. Where it's actually going and where paper pushers claim it has gone.
Sheldon has always had something of a gift for math. And he can afford to be careful. The spiders are viral, infiltrating almost every network that hooks up to the Caltech serves. It's the sign of a longstanding operation. Whoever these people are-they aren't going anywhere. He can take the time he needs to be sure he isn't caught of guard again.
Let them think they had won. They could have the first round. He would win the war. All he had to do was find them.
x
Dating Leonard is easy camouflage. Camouflage she ends up needing, because someone is on to her. The deletion of her spy codes was a pretty big clue. It doesn't take long to figure it out though. Sheldon. Of course it would be Sheldon. He's the only one who ever made things difficult. Leonard would gladly give her the moon if she could get him to think it was his idea-But Sheldon was a completely different animal. Her wiles didn't work on him. Not the way she wanted them to anyway. He seemed kind of confused after checking her out sometimes. As though he didn't understand what he'd just done. But Sheldon's inability to understand regular human behavior wasn't the issue. His inability to give up was. She needed to scare him off. Shut down his curiosity before he got it into his head that it would be okay for him to intervene.
She'd never failed an op before. She wasn't going to start now. So she'd started playing cat and mouse with Sheldon. Shuck into their living room just before he got home to leave a politely threatening missive she left open on his laptop. Knowing Sheldon, he'd think for sure he'd been hacked. He'd get all in a tizzy trying to find the non existent spyware. While he was confused and flustered, it would be time to strike.
He deleted all her spy codes again and she paid one of the guys from one of her old acting classes to pretend to be a government agent. Rented the tux for him and told him it was for a prank. That she was trying to freak her neighbor out. Her prettiest smile and a few hundred bucks later, Alex, the guy, handed Sheldon an exact replica of the letter. He'd had dealing with government agencies before. From a very young age even, according to his mother, quite a few had a standard operating procedure in regards to Sheldon. She decided to emulate their style. Then he'd know the line drawn in the sand. That a third strike would mean business. That his safety was at risk if he insisted on meddling.
Of course she could call Grey in. Have him remove Sheldon without the threat of compromising her cover. But the very idea was ludicrous. It was Sheldon, sure the guy was too smart for his own good, but he was harmless. Hell, without him she would have never fleshed out her cover as completely as she had. Would have never had to consider all the bit's and pieces that had made Penny real enough to pass muster for years. He was more help than a hindrance.
And if a little voice in the back of her head considered him a friend and didn't want him hurt? Well. That part didn't need to go on her report.
x
Sheldon's social circle grew slowly but surely. He would like to think that that is the reason behind his failure, but it would be a lie. The agency interested in his university had proven particularly elusive. That wasn't to say that Sheldon hadn't found other agencies. Many of which the government would never admit to financing, or the awareness of their existence even. They merely weren't the right one.
There was one in particular though. One he'd heard whispers of. One only vaguely hinted at that might possibly have some involvement. But it's like trying to catch smoke. He can find the silhouette. Pieces of data that indicate general shape of what he's looking for, but he can't seem to find any substance. No hard facts or clear indicators.
It slowly become a personal quest. The idea of finding the agency and revealing their spying is a distant daydream. Now Sheldon simply wishes to find it. To prove to himself without doubt that they exists, however illegally. So he doesn't tell anyone, not Leonard and Penny, not Howard, Bernadette, or Raj, who he now works with, not even Amy.
It's become a question of skill. His pride demands he find them, no matter how many years it takes.
x
Penny doesn't expect it to work off the bat.
Which is why she's on her guard and paranoid enough to constantly monitor Sheldon's laptop. Dating Leonard is her usual way in-every time she catches just a hint of something. It's not usually conclusive, but fuck it, Sheldon isn't the smart one in a group of geniuses for nothing. She does her best to distract him, especially when presented with someone like Amy, whose puppy like behavior makes her terribly easy to manipulate. She doesn't even consider feeling bad about it. Manipulating others in order to reach their objectives were simply what agents were trained to do.
Besides, Amy saw her as a popular girl from high school who was finally her friend mixed with a sexual object. It's almost exactly the way Leonard used to see her before they had sex, but as Amy is a woman, and either unaware or in denial about her attraction to women, the relationship was different. It seemed Amy was readily willing to consider herself Penny's best friend. She was exactly the kind of person Penny's training worked on best. Much like with Leonard-it was almost too easy. They were so certain in their convictions, they practically fooled themselves.
Bernadette was a little tricky on occasion the same way Sheldon was. She actually looked at 'Penny'. And it had gotten to the point where Penny was too easy to put on. When the mask sometimes felt like herself. When, sometimes, she was home alone and forgot she wasn't Penny. Took her a while to remember that she was more than a wannabe actress. More than a pretty neighbor. That she was Agent Thirteen.
And then she got proof that Sheldon really hadn't given up. Because he was closer than anyone had ever been to finding the agent's produced by the Agency.
x
Sheldon considered his social circle. Almost six years of his life and it had finally dawned on him that they had an agent nearby. That there was someone monitoring him closely. Too closely to be confined to the world of the internet. It had to be someone with regular access to his domicile.
Amy is out of the running merely because she was the last person introduced into his circle. She was far too late to be the person who had first placed all of the spiders. He considered the rest of his friends. And not a few of his enemies. Winkle in particular he could have easily seen as the culprit.
When he really thought about it, when he analyzed the date without letting his perceptions of the people around him get in the way...Penny was the best candidate for the infiltrator.
But the very thought was preposterous.
Penny wasn't a spy. Wasn't dangerous. Was she?