Thank you for all the feedback/subscriptions etc. to the last chapter! This chapter isn't too exciting, but the story is going somewhere, I promise!
Chapter 2:
The warehouse seemed to shake as the door clattered behind Eames. He walked over to the tables where plans and maps and details were strewn out in the centre of the room. The building was flooded with the sunlight that was streaming through the windows but none of the inhabitants were feeling particularly awake. It was with an appreciative murmur that they each took one of the cups of coffee Eames placed on the desk.
"I'm still not convinced any of this is a good plan," Arthur stated, leaning against the table and surveying some of the information they'd got.
"Oh really? That's news to me!" Eames retorted, his voice thick with sarcasm. "Let's go extract information from a girl who more than likely knows nothing, so we can not get paid and probably get killed. I still don't understand why the daughter's the mark."
They had had this conversation numerous times, their words running around in similar circles until they reached equally similar non-conclusions.
"It's emotional isn't it?" Ariadne commented, tapping her cheek thoughtfully with the end of a pencil. She looked up reluctantly from the drawings she had created and waited to see if anyone replied. No one did. "Well, it's more than sabotage. It must be some sort of deep seated hatred because he wants to be able to not only ruin Smith's business, but he wants to be able to say that his daughter helped him do it," she concluded, bowing her head modestly when Eames and Arthur stared incredulously. "âĶI think."
"You might actually have a point, but even so, all this," Eames continued, gesturing towards the files on the table. "Suggests that she's cut off almost all contact with her father. The only input he has now is financial. It just seems pointless."
"It's not like you to argue so much against a million dollars," Arthur observed smirking. "Even so, it doesn't exactly seem like we can walk away from this one. Martov made that relatively clear. We're better off just seeing what we can do."
Eames studied Arthur for a moment, looking pensively from him to Ariadne. "Alright, what's the plan?"
"Research," Arthur replied, ignoring the noise of disgust Eames emitted. They had always had irreconcilably different methods. "I made the mistake on the Fischer job of not doing enough background. I've learnt my lesson." He sank into thought for a moment, worry forcing his eyebrows to crease together, before he looked up and continued. "Ariadne, you need to carry on with the designs, we can modify them as we collect more information. I'm going to follow the girl, Ophelia, and see what we can find out from that. Eames, you're going to need to â"
"Do anything else? I'm on it. Let me know if you need any documents forging," he complied. "Are we going to need Yusuf again?"
"We might do," Arthur conceded, thinking to himself. "It depends how difficult it's going to be to implement. I'll keep you posted on that. Shall we call it a day?"
"I'm going to stay and finish this off," Ariadne murmured, holding up an intricate drawing of a floor plan. She said goodnight to Eames and Arthur and watched as they left the warehouse, smiling inwardly at the fact that Arthur seemed to have assumed the leadership role and Eames seemed to have handled it relatively well.
It didn't take long for Arthur to reach the apartment he was renting during their stay in London. He switched on a lamp and placed his black, leather briefcase on the table, alongside the metal one that was already there, containing all they needed to enter and share dreams. He shrugged out of his jacket, put his gun on the table and sat down in one of the dining chairs, staring disdainfully at the furnishings. They were not his own, of course. He barely had time to decorate his own home, let alone to organise temporary accommodation, hence the awful, minimal, pale wood furnishings, with the neutral colours and the soulless finishings - the fake lilies on the table and the beige candles on the windowsill. It was every kind of awful. He couldn't dwell on details like that though, not when there were far more important details to memorise.
He sighed heavily, a small display of the put-up-and-shut-up attitude he had learned to adopt so long ago, and fetched a slender cardboard folder out of his briefcase. Tomorrow he would commence his research into the mark, and he wanted to prepared. The only thing he was not prepared to do was to ignore essential details. Not this time.
There was an extremely limited amount of information in the folder that Martov had provided, and the whole job felt somewhat like the blind leading the blind, something one could not afford to be in this field of espionage. He placed all of the information separately on the table in order to observe them as a whole - each piece of paper parallel, true to Arthur's precise form.
There, in the centre, was a photo of the mark, Ophelia Smith, leaving a town house in Central London that must've cost more than some people made in a year. It looked like the sort of shot you'd find in a celebrity magazine, a young girl photographed unawares as she left her home and the wind whipped her hair across her face. Arthur could only imagine the lengths Martov had gone to to acquire such a shot. She was undeniably a beautiful girl, but she looked too young and too innocent to be embroiled in such a scheme. Arthur felt a tug of guilt that she was to become involved in the whole thing.
He leaned back to study her features. Her long, blonde hair fell around her face and shoulders in haphazard waves, her darker roots showing at her centre parting. She was thin, but not obnoxiously so, only the faint hint of cheek and collar bones struggling against her pale flesh. Her facial features were small, delicate. She looked like a normal university student, not like a girl about to unwittingly become involved in illegal activities.
Arthur glanced over the rest of the information that Martov had provided â childhood, residences, bank accounts, education â making brief notes as he went along. She lived in the fourth floor apartment of a townhouse near Regents Park in Central London. She was studying Psychology at UCL and every morning she would travel by foot to the university, before returning home on the tube, getting on at Euston Square and off at Baker Street. Aside from these basics, which would have been obvious to anyone tailing her, they had very little to go on.
Arthur exhaled, resolving to follow her tomorrow and try to pick up something more substantial. Until the sun rose, there was really very little to be done. He kicked away from the table, moving into the small kitchen and fetching two sleeping pills and a glass of water. It was not long before he fell asleep on the couch, his mind completely clear. No dreams could permeate his mind anymore, and he had still formed no opinion on whether that was good or not.
Reviews would be amazing. I'd love to hear what you all think! Criticism also welcome ;)
