Chapter Two: Saccharine and Sacrilege.
Alec Freeman hated every time he had to do it. There he stood, end of shift, approaching Ed's office, only it wasn't his anymore. Ed had been missing for the best part of a year, and SHADO was tiptoeing around it, pretending it didn't exist, like having an important dinner guest wearing a lampshade at your party, and acting as if things were normal. Alec could feel eyes on him from Command Centre; sense the pity from one or two. Well, bugger most of them, he was second in command still, and as long as he was by God, they'd know it.
Reluctantly, he buzzed the office door and the doors opened to swallow him, not receive him. There was the woman behind the desk, looking up, smiling, when Alec hated her guts and made no pretense otherwise and he knew she knew it.
"Commander."
God he hated calling her that.
Commander Marjorie Jenkins. She was a decent woman he supposed. Late forties, a handsome woman, under other circumstances he might have asked her to dinner, he admitted to himself. Scottish, short, most likely dyed blond hair in tight curls, widow. She'd come to SHADO from the Special Branch, he knew her story from her dossier, she'd shown admirable courage, her hands had been badly burned on her first case in an attempt to rescue a kidnap victim. Jenkins was an expert at hostage negotiation turned terrorism and brainwashing expert turned alien hunter. She sometimes wore thin cotton gloves to spare onlookers the harsh sight of her burn wounds, but she never wore them with him around.
Solid background. Cleared by the security boys. Reliable. Kind to animals. More beloved than the late Queen Mum. Patronizing saccharine smile.
I hate her guts.
Alec hated her guts for no good rational reason, he admitted. Unless you counted what she'd done to the office.
Ed's office, goddamn it!
A touch screen map of Great Britain had replaced the electronic mural of swirling colours, the mini bar was gone, replaced by a computer system and a bookcase just adjacent to the map. It held some classics and miscellaneous feminine items. There was a heavy copper bust of Churchill next to some kind of climbing ivy plant. Churchill was the only thing of hers Alec liked.
Churchill scowled. Churchill always scowled. Maybe he hated her guts too, reasoned Alec, with some satisfaction.
"Colonel, please come in. There's an UFO incident issue you mentioned we need to discuss?" She stood and extended her hand, as she always did. He ignored it as usual. She only smiled as she always did. It was enough to turn his stomach. Not only that, rumor had it she could hold her liquor. You couldn't trust a woman who could hold her liquor.
Christ he hated her. Self-confident bitch.
Alec took a few steps over to the desk, but refused to take his customary chair. At least my chair is still there, he thought.
'That last UFO, we lost the chance to get the bodies-." Alec announced.
"Colonel, I've told you before, I don't care about that side of it. We weren't going to take any chances, I had good people out on that location, and details just don't interest me. I wanted to blow that thing out of the sky and keep my team and England safe, that's my job. Nothing is accomplished by having post mortems, which are famous for telling us nothing and waste time and money. I do my job, I take it seriously."
"Ed would hav-"
"Colonel, I am commander of this outfit now. You need to come to terms with it. You're a veteran, I know, one of our best. However, quite frankly you're obsessed with Ed Straker." She started to pour herself some tea from a ceramic pot, sipped some, put the mug down. She tapped a second empty mug.
"Tea?"
Alec ignored the offer.
"Look, Jenkins, you're new to this, maybe you ought to go back and reconsider how this organization needs to be run. Go back over Commander Straker's experience, his rationale, and above all, his success in protecting our arses from those monsters. Ed believed-"
"Alec, please listen to-."
"In here I am Colonel Freeman! Especially to you!" He struck down his fist on her desk, no! on Ed's desk. The tea splattered. He didn't bother to apologise. Had Ed been there, it would have been coffee light with two sugars, not the horrid tea and Ed would glare at him, and then make him pay double for what spilled out of his own pocket, the bastard.
I must be crazy to actually miss you, Ed. You were the most bloody minded, self-righteous, brilliant tyrant of a man with the melodic, precise enunciation of an angel, and a quick wrath that would humiliate the devil.
Biggest Yank son of a bitch in the world I ever had the misfortune to meet.
I miss you.
Why did I have to admit I needed you in my life when you weren't here to hear it? Ten, no, more years, Ed, more years and we never spoke, and you needed me even though you were as solid as steel to most, yet as transparent as glass to me. Ed Straker, the ice-cold calculating monster.
Anything but, Ed! Maybe I was the only one to see it. Was that why I always came back when I threw my resignation at you and left, because I was the only one to see it?
Now you're the one who is gone.
God, Ed. don't do this to me. I can't take it. I can't take having to be civil to Miss Perfection.
She was studying his face. Bloody twit of a woman. She seemed to come to some inner decision.
"Colonel, we both know it isn't my style you're objecting to. It's the shrine of Ed Straker you feel I've trashed, a sacrilege of his memory and you don't like it. I know the two of you were friends. I also know that in his last years Straker had burned out, he was weary –"
"The Commander is not dead." Alec yelled adamantly, screw behaving in a professional manner with this imbecile, he thought. I ought to kill her now and plea insanity at the court martial later.
She paid no attention to him. She never changed her expression.
Women! He thought with disgust.
"Straker was tired. The responsibility he carried can do a lot of damage. I know in his last years he was headstrong, sometimes inconsiderate, and often not caring whom he used to get the job done. He was behaving irrationally, even hiding things from you- "
Damn woman knows exactly what buttons of mine to push.
"Everyone has their moments, the man was human."
"Yet he never acted like it. SHADO become his obsession, not his job. He went chasing after something, maybe even something he only imagined existed without filling you in, and it killed him. Let him go, Alec." She implored him. Throwing his first name in his face, He'd seen that expression before, too. She wanted something from him. God, he could use a drink. A double.
"I told you, Commander, I'm Colonel to you. Concerning Commander Straker's fate, that's your description, want to hear mine?"
"Colonel, we're going around in circles, I've heard it all, and I read your report." She sank into her chair, picked up her cup of tea, patted the small spills dry with a napkin, and then nodded as if indulging a child's tantrum, Alec thought angrily.
"Ed may have been investigating something on his own, something about the aliens, something far too dangerous to reveal to me completely. That last Intel conference he attended, people vanishing like that, he must have opened a can of worms somewhere. I know Ed. He wouldn't have just gone off like that without a reason."
"Their disappearance is a joint Intelligences matter, probably the work of terrorists, not a SHADO matter, and the investigation, as you already know very well, is ongoing. "
"Not a SHADO matter? Ed Straker's GONE, damn you! Someone broke into his flat, took everything, clothes, books, personal belongings, and stripped his place bare! You don't call that a SHADO matter?" Alec seethed.
"No, I don't. I ordered the SHADO forensics team working the case to go and handle other cases. I allowed his home to be sold. There was nothing to preserve from the crime scene. Nothing left of the man, certainly not a will. He took all his money out of his bank, and just vanished. You know everything I do. I know that made things harder on you. The MO makes it pretty clear to me that this isn't anything the aliens dreamed up."
"I'm telling you-"
She said with sadness, "You want to find out Straker died in some glorious attempt to stop aliens, became a martyr, when the fact is, he was just a victim. An ordinary victim of ordinary thugs. Face it, Straker is dead."
"You're wrong, "Alec protested, "He's alive, I feel it."
"Colonel, I can't continue to investigate on what you feel. I looked at the file on Straker, you and he spent a lot of time with each other, respected one another. I also know and so do you that being in this business, with its limitations, means you have to set your priorities straight. Our job is to kill those alien bastards. That's what the Commission put me here for. I told you when I took this job that as long as you wanted, you had an allotment of money and work force to investigate Straker's absence, but like everything in the new economy, things dried up. I'm sorry, Colonel. In my old job, I've seen what losing someone does to civilians. The shock, the grief. Colonel, you're grieving. My guess is Straker got too close to something way out of his experience, and the terrorists got rid of him."
"Then you tell me where the hell his body is, and why we never got a ransom note? You tell me why those people just disappeared in thin air, and the so called terrorists don't boast of what they did via the regular channels, or ask for terms, demand money, anything!"
"God only knows. It's as simple as that. Maybe they took his money and ran. Terrorists aren't common everyday people, Alec. I don't have the time to put everything aside and find your lost friend, give you all the answers. Colonel Freeman, you need to bury Straker. You need some way to find closure. I'm sure that he'd say the same thing to you. Your time is better spent-"
"Is there anything else, Jenkins?" he said angrily. Screw protocol!
"Yes. Colonel, you were a loyal friend to Straker. A superb second to me, none finer, but you're still a lonely man and have to go on with your life. "Jenkins told him. She held up her hand toward him. "I never talk about it, but it took me a long time to get used to these. My mates kidded me in the branch that now that my fingerprints had been burned off, I should divert my attention to committing crimes," she chuckled. "I miss those nutters in the Branch, I admit it."
Was she actually showing him some genuine humanity? Some insight into her true self? He doubted it. When Alec flinched at the word lonely, folded his arms and didn't respond, she shrugged and went on.
"I never talked about losing my hands, what it felt like to have them like this, and the nightmare of the skin grafts, being in the burn unit. It's a loss I have to bear. You come to terms with it, Colonel. I wish you luck in the process. That's all, you're dismissed."
Alec balled his hands into fists and stormed out, out of SHADO, out of the studio, out of his troubled thoughts. He got into his SHADO car, opened a hidden compartment and took out a bottle of whiskey, examined it, longed for it. Then he shoved it back and shoved the compartment closed. He took out his mobile, retrieved and viewed a colour photo of Straker scowling. Alec had taken it at a private studio picnic, where studio personnel, among them several SHADO operatives, were enjoying the anniversary of Harlington Straker Studios' grand opening.
Ed had been required to go for cover and the morale factor.
That and me threatening to carry him there if he didn't attend, Alec remembered with glee.
Ed had been required to wear jeans and a casual shirt. Therefore, he had. Mouths had dropped open. Chicken drumsticks and salads had dropped off paper plates. Women (and some men) drooled, and it wasn't from hunger. On the other hand, maybe it was. Straker's perfect features always drew looks of longing.
Speaking of such, one look from Straker and things went back to normal. As normal as getting Ed to wear real clothes could get. Commander Straker not in a Nehru but brand new navy jeans and a blue and cream pattered silk shirt. Civilian clothing.
Only because I dragged him into Harrods to buy that clothing, remembered Alec.
Ed had seen Alec's mobile, but not in time to prevent the picture being from taken. Nor was he going or able to make a scene at the event about it, a fact which Alec was relishing taking advantage of.
Ed Straker had to be more photogenic than any actor there was on the studio lot, but he loathed having his picture taken, and it had been taken by the publicity people for the event, something he had to tolerate, but it was under Straker's control. Alec took the candid, shoved the mobile into his windbreaker and grinned at Ed, loving getting away with it.
Wait, Ed was waving at him. This was not good.
RUN!
"Alec! So good to see you here. Enjoying yourself?"
Ed had launched himself at Alec like a platinum-headed missile. Alec gulped. He nodded.
"Great day for this kind of thing, isn't it? Blue skies, friendly people?" Ed said breezily.
Ed pressed Alec's shoulder in a greeting.
With his whole hand using strength that nobody ever expected to come out of such a slender, almost ethereal looking man.
Using some sort of martial arts grip.
Right on a nerve.
For at least two minutes.
"Why, Alec, you're turning the same colour as the potato salad. You all right? I keep telling you to lay off the sauce. Well, I'm off. Enjoy the day."
Ed's hand came down hard on target again, in a innocent looking farewell pat of affection.
Enjoy the day?
What Alec had enjoyed was a pinched nerve treated fifteen minutes later in the SHADO Medical Centre.
However, he had the candid.
Straker zero, Freeman a crippled ten.
Alec sighed, snapped the mobile closed, shoved it into a pant pocket.
I haven't touched a drop. Not since I went to your place and found you gone. I'll celebrate when you come back and torment me again.
Alec roughly rubbed away tears with a fist.
Ed, if you're gone, then I need to know. I need to hold your body and damn myself for allowing you to be what you never should have been, what you pretended to ignore, and in reality feared.
Lonely.
Because Ed, if you're really dead, than so am I.
I'm going to find you.
Or your corpse.
Or I'm going to be the next one.
Alec started up the turbine motor of the SHADO car, and sped away into the now colder night.