Thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed this story, it means a lot. Just a reminder that my OCs are all purely fictional, even if they exist within a framework that is real and belong to groups that were real.

Northern Ireland is a land of many initials. Here's a few of them:

OFMDFM – Office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister

PSNI – Police Service of Northern Ireland

RUC – Royal Ulster Constabulary (now defunct)

Chapter Four: Hillsborough

As the aircraft began its descent into Belfast's George Best Airport, Harry couldn't escape the feeling he was stepping back into a Gladiator's arena. His gaze slid sideways, towards the small window out of which the province could now be seen. From that altitude, it really was the Emerald Isle: vast expanses of green fields stretching out in all directions, punctuated by the large blue blimp of Lough Neagh and ringed by swelling mountains. A restless sea battered the rugged northern coastlines, white peaked waves visible even from up high. Soon, the plane passed over land, banking left to make the dizzyingly sharp turn onto the airstrip. Then, the grey urban sprawl of Belfast slipped into view seemingly out of nowhere, before rushing up to meet them as the plane made its smooth downward journey.

Beside him, sat next to the window, was Ruth. She was leaning to the left, watching as the city came into view. Seemingly captivated and silent, she made no attempt at conversation before the plane's wheels bumped against the tarmac and her view was limited to only the grey-green blur of the runway. The aircraft draws to a halt and Harry feels like he's travelled back in time.

"The last time I saw Belfast was from the window of a chinook helicopter," he told Ruth. "You could actually see the smoke billowing out of the city centre from the burning wreckage of a bombed out building."

But it was as they were leaving – always the best view of Belfast. Ruth turned to look at him and placed one hand on his arm, where it was propped against the armrest. She wore the expression of a barefoot child treading through a nest of nettles.

"You…you never talk about it," she stammered. "Why-"

"There's really nothing to say," he lied.

Luckily, their conversation was cut short as they were ushered quickly off the plane and through the VIP arrival area, to where cars and their luggage was already waiting for them. Compared to his last visit, these were extravagant luxuries courtesy of the Office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister. It brought a wry smile to Harry's face when he recalled that the two men who filled those high offices of state, not so long ago, wanted him and his kind dead. The feeling had been mutual.

"Did you remember to bring those files?" he asked as they climbed into the back of their limo.

"Of course," replied Ruth, rolling her eyes. "You only reminded me every ten minutes."

Before the car pulled out onto the Sydenham bypass bound for Hillsborough Castle, Harry looked back at the airport. What had once been an iron bound, bomb proof fortress manned by British Army officers and RUC armed to the teeth; is now an ornate glass fronted building named after Ireland's most notoriously self-destructive footballer. But as the car rolled out onto the road, the airport gave way to the docklands of East Belfast, where the twin cranes of Harland and Wolff continued to dominate the skyline. Ruth gasped excitedly as the recognition hit instantly, before gushing a stream of Titanic related babble that Harry hadn't the heart to even pretend to listen to. In the blink of an eye they had passed from a genius sportsman who had drank himself to death, to a place made famous for building an unsinkable ship that was gulped down by the waves of the Atlantic Ocean on its maiden voyage. That, right there, was Northern Ireland all wrapped up in one beautiful metaphor.

"I wish I was an iceberg," he muttered darkly. "Then I could sink this whole place."

Ruth glanced over at him apologetically. "It's not that simple, Harry. Even taking continental drift in to account, the force of impact-"

"Joke, Ruth," he sighed, heavily. "It was a joke."

Ruth grinned. "Oh, I thought you were suggesting a permanent solution to the Irish Question there."

Harry made a brave attempt at laughter. But he enjoyed seeing the smile on her face. Whenever she did it, she looked like the nerdy kid at school whose punchlines went over everyone else's heads and she was the only one who got it. An awkward and gawky, yet ultimately endearing feature of her. Covering her hand with his own, he made an effort to shift some of the weight that accumulated in his mind, to make himself lighter. An endeavour made easier by the fact that they didn't actually go into Belfast itself, but skirted the eastern lip of the city before heading into the countryside.

The route took them through the foothills of the Mountains of Mourne, where they were afforded spectacular views of not just Ulster itself, but over the sea to Scotland and the tiny Isle of Man. Once, even these mountains were scarred by British Army watchtowers and installations, checkpoints on every bend in the road. Helipads and tanks; hulking Saracens rolling through the tranquil stillness and tearing up the local beauty. Now it was gone. Not even a fence, nor stray piece of barbed wire remained to tell of what once happened here. Harry looked out of the windows again, and realised he was seeing it for the first time.

Ros and Lucas emerged from the back of their own car and thanked the driver. The air was clean, with a brisk wind bearing the first bite of winter on its restless current sweeping up around them. Rural, but not so far from the nearest town, also called Hillsborough. Belfast was thirty miles north, and still visible at this altitude. The Castle itself was easily as fine as any other in Europe, with lawns wide and immaculately manicured. Golf ranges, tennis courts and even a vast lake all made up the locale. Ros took it all in expressionlessly; mentally weighing up every brick and every petal in the gardens.

"I think I could get used to this," she eventually said. "Shame about the hundreds of others who'll be getting in our way soon."

The talks weren't due to start for another two days, but they needed to work fast if they were to get every room in the place bugged before Wednesday. Then they needed to peg the risk level from about twenty different armed groups that all seemed to be active at present. That was before they safely transported the First Minister to Dublin and back, before stopping any local fighters of freedom from slotting any of the main players and plunging the province back into war.

"If we're lucky," said Lucas, taking her hand in his own. "There might be some bugs left over from the last summit that was held here."

Ros made a face. "They'll all need checking and updating. Best install news ones, if you ask me. But Tariq's bound to have some ideas."

Somewhere, at the darkest and yet most optimistic part of Ros' mind, she had hoped to at least give their first day or two in Northern Ireland the veneer of a real holiday. She had hoped that being physically unable to respond to an emergency summons to Thames House, and the Grid left far behind her, it might feel like a break. But it taken all of two minutes after their arrival for work to rear its nebulous head. They made their way inside, hand in hand and still managing to raise a smile, to find the others already in there. Nathan was sat on his suitcase in a corner of the lobby, despite their being chairs available, and texting someone furiously. Beth was leaning against the Reception desk and chatting to Ruth, while Harry grew argumentative with a man in uniform. In that instant, even the empty façade of this being a holiday crumbled into dust.

Beth's gaze jumped from Ruth to Ros, whence she proceeded to wave and actually smile. An act that set Ros' teeth on edge, but through which she endured with grace.

"Here they are," she said, more to Ruth than to Ros and Lucas. "Your room's sorted already, just check in and get your keys."

Lucas nodded his thanks as they both approached the Reception desk, where they were confronted by a woman so advanced in age Ros became fearful she was about to drop dead. But the old girl had sharp eyes that fixed them both in an uncompromising glare over gold rimmed spectacles.

"Mr and Mrs North, I assume?"

Ros and Lucas exchanged a glance, both quietly puzzled over the heavy emphasis on the 'Mrs'. Meanwhile, the old girl picked up a set of keys from behind the desk.

"Er, no," replied Lucas, magnanimously. "I'm Mr North and this is Ms Myers."

Discreetly, the keys were replaced. "Just you hang on a minute."

In the background, Harry continued his heated discussion with the Security Guard while Ruth became over involved in her conversation with Beth. Nathan had taken to pacing the floor while engaged in an argument with someone over the phone about Chairman Mao. "No, no, don't give him that," he was insisting, "it gives him diarrhoea! Just give him the dry food."

"What the-?" Lucas began, casting an askance glance at the new boy.

Everyone else had done the same. It took Nathan a moment to notice the fact that he'd become the centre of attention, to which he responded by flushing and covering his mobile. "It's my cat," he clarified, giving an apologetic shrug. "Chairman Meow. He hates catteries."

He immediately returned to the conversation, then took it outside. Leaving Beth to ask them why Nathan's partner wasn't looking after the cat.

"Who cares?" replied Ros, supreme indifference enhanced with a shrug.

Lucas tried to disguise his laugh as a cough. "I applaud his choice of cat name, though."

Ros' further involvement in the conversation was cut off as the Reception lady handed her a set of keys with instructions on how to find their room. It was already evening and no one would be doing anything else that day besides dinner and a few drinks in the bar. But Ros and Lucas already had other ideas about how to fill the empty hours. They hurriedly left the scene and jabbed the button on every elevator on the ground floor before hauling their suitcases into the first that opened to admit them. Without even taking a proper look around at their plush new surroundings, they headed straight for their room. Neither of them had expected to be put up in the presidential suites, or anything like as a grand as that which the local politicians would be holed up in over the next week. But Ros found herself admitting that one of those double Jacuzzis would be a good start.

When they reached their door on the fourth floor, they found it tucked discreetly round the corner opposite what looked like a store cupboard used by the cleaners. But they paid it no heed as they kissed each other deeply before Lucas could even get the key in the door. He had to reach around her as they carried on engaging in their vertical wrestling match in the doorway. After a lot of fumbling and blind jabbing at the door, he got the door unlocked and, still entwined in each other's limbs, they both almost tumbled over as the door gave way behind Ros. She threw her arms around his neck to steady herself, but almost brought him down on top of her, so he grabbed for the wall and just about prevented a disaster.

Then he got his first look at the bedroom and froze, turning his face away from Ros'.

"Oh, shit!" he groaned.

Suddenly anxious, Ros twisted her own head so she could see over his shoulder, to where he was looking. Slowly extricating herself from him, she looked at the two tiny, narrow single beds set six feet apart and almost burst out laughing. But the most obvious solution prevented any serious outburst of temper.

"Just push them together and to hell with miss prissy pants down there," she huffed, getting ready to give the bed closest to her a quick shove. But she pushed as hard as she could and the frame refused to budge an inch, causing Ros to almost fall over herself to the floor, banging her knee against the polished wood floor. With a high curse, she pulled up the over-hanging counterpane to reveal bed legs bolted to the floor. She glared at then mutinously, their romantic moment spoiled. "You have got to be kidding me!"

Still on her hands and knees, Ros looked up at Lucas who was leaning casually against a tall wooden wardrobe, hands in pockets and a knowing smirk on his face. "Now you know how I felt growing up in a God fearing Protestant household!"

Ruth moved slowly through the castle, one hand brushing delicately against the gallery walls. Long, wide and airy, the gallery walls were adorned with ancient portraits of former Governors and earls of Ulster, dating back to an era that filled her dizziest dreams. A royal coat of arms took up the far end of the gallery, overhead hung ornate crystal chandeliers; light enhanced with large bay windows that looked out over the extensive grounds of the castle. But she was looking up, the points of light from the chandeliers reflected in her eyes, open wide as saucers as she studied the decorative lattice work on the ceiling. She wanted to touch it; to breathe in its heady scent of history, and epochs and times gone by in which the day she found herself had been inevitably shaped. From the Medieval part of the castle, she stepped through a connecting passageway and found herself in the Renaissance part, with its Italianate interiors and ostentatious glitz. From the Renaissance, to the even gaudier Baroque.

Not long after dining, she had lost Harry. Last she saw him he was trying to figure out directions to the nearest bar, deaf to her pleas for a tour of the castle. "But Harry, we'll find a bar while we're on the bloody tour!" So panicked at the prospect of a night without whiskey, he had been made blind to common sense. She was here, on her own with just a leaflet collected from the stuffy Receptionist to guide her. Alone, that was, until her phone rang. She sighed and reached into her handbag to answer it before the caller rang off. The number was unrecognised, causing Ruth's anticipation to rise a little as she jabbed the answer button. She stepped into a nearby window bay to take the call, while looking out over the darkening grounds where the crescent moon reflected in the rippling surface of the lake outside.

"Hello, Rachel Evans speaking."

A moment's pause, followed by a man's confused 'er-ing'.

"Er, Jim Fraser here. I heard someone on this number was trying to reach me?"

Jim Fraser spoke with a soft, lilting Southern Welsh accent that made her think of Dylan Thomas. On top of all the Historical sight-seeing, it was almost too much. But Ruth pulled herself together and kept her tone casual.

"Yes, Mister Fraser, I'm from Human Resources and I believe we have your son working for us," she explained, failing to name any organisation or company. For all she knew, Nathan could have told his father something entirely different, if they ever spoke at all which was something she couldn't rule out. "I just need to confirm that."

"Oh … Nathan, is it? Nathan Charles Fraser? I doubt he wants you contacting me. Anyway, he could be working for the Russians in Timbuktu for all I know."

Ruth's brow creased into a frown at the throwaway line, but the wording struck her. Until the sound of light laughter made her realise it really was just a throwaway line.

"It's nothing like that, I promise," she replied. "We only check just in case we need to contact next of kin in the event of an emergency, anyway. That's all I needed to know Mr Fraser; thank you for your time."

The call ended and Ruth slipped the mobile back into her handbag. Her impromptu tour had been forgotten already, but she remained standing in the window bay where she carried on looking out over the gardens for several minutes.

When she did return to their room, situated at the rear of the castle in the old Medieval building, she found Harry nursing a whiskey in an armchair. Predictably. At least his Knighthood guaranteed they got one of the nice rooms. The other agents had been stashed away in little more than storage cupboards, from what she had heard from a highly disgruntled Beth.

"You know that number Nathan keeps ringing?" she asked, purely rhetorically. "Well, it's his parents."

Harry set the whiskey glass down on a side table and made room for her on the plush armchair. "So, it really is just personal then?"

"Looks that way," she concurred, getting settled beside him. "But why make silent phone calls to your own parents? And Jim said the strangest of thing-"

"Ruth!" Harry cut her off, giving her shoulders a squeeze. "It is personal, which means we're leaving them to sort it out alone, doesn't it?"

Taking the hint, Ruth drew a deep breath. "Yes Harry."

Harry nodded. "This is to be filed under 'None of Our Bloody Business,' isn't it?"

"Of course," she dutifully answered. "I was just curious, that's all."

Silent phone calls could have been a signal for anything. Ring a person, wait a few moments, then hang up. The length of the silent call itself was usually the encoded message. You couldn't be too careful in their game. But Harry was right, this clearly wasn't a matter for MI5, despite her niggling doubts. "But don't you think Nathan's made it our business-"

"No, I don't!" Harry retorted, cutting her off again. "We're about to spend a week sorting out Northern Ireland. Do you think we really need some convoluted family squabble piling in on top of that?"

Harry extricated himself from her, hauled himself out of the chair and crossed the room to where large French windows opened onto a balcony that overlooked the same lake Ruth had seen earlier that day. But he didn't go out, he remained with his back to her silently huffing away to himself. Ruth sighed heavily, letting her head fall back against the rest, pissed off because now he was pissed off. A mutual sharing of pissed-off-ness. Only the thought of soon trying out their four poster, canopied bed cheered her up. It was the sort of thing fairy-princesses spent the night in. A little on the excessive side for everyday use, but great to try out and be able to say you've actually done it and bring you one step closer to being a bit like the Queen. All courtesy of OFMDFM. Already she was thinking of what knick-knacks she was going to lift as a souvenir and cursed the smoking ban which meant ashtrays were no longer a viable option.

"I'm sorry," she said, addressing his back still. "I really didn't mean to interfere, Harry. All I wanted to do was check."

"It's not that," replied Harry, turning sharply to face her again. "There's something else, actually. Something I think we do need to look at."

Thinking he'd been annoyed at her, he was actually annoyed at a problem clearly mushrooming into something greater. She sat up in the armchair, giving him a silent nod to continue while worrying about bugs that may have been planted in the room before they arrived.

"The night Sean Mallon tried to contact me was the same night we had our 'visitor' at home, right?" he asked.

Ruth was hardly likely to forget. She could still see the man's face, hidden behind a distorted balaclava, even now. "The same night Ros also had an uninvited guest at her house?"

"Yes. And also, it might interest you to know, the same night Nathan's partner vanished without trace."

Ros was not present in her home at the time of the intruder's attempted break in, but the alarms had all been triggered and the police arrived at the scene shortly before she did. It was two hours after their guest had left, more than enough time to travel between the two addresses. But Ruth had had no idea about Nathan's partner. Nathan's private life, for reasons that were completely understandable, was exactly that: private.

"Beth was telling me," he explained, before she could even accuse him of interfering. "She was wondering why the partner couldn't take care of the cat and Nathan mentioned the, er, incident. Beth met him, the partner that is, while taking Nathan home after the Britain First Op. She saw the man herself, and said he was annoyed because of the state Nathan had gotten himself into, but not excessively so."

"What time was that at?" asked Ruth.

"About two am, by Beth's reckoning. I believe she'd had a few too many herself. Well, they all did."

Ruth worked it out in her head. "So, the mystery man turned up at ours at ten. By midnight, he had turned up at Ros'. Then two am, to Nathan's. No alarms triggered because both men were in. No, wait, it would have triggered an alarm anyway, at that hour of the morning. And we don't know what time Nathan's partner left, do we? We don't even know the man's name. Harry, this could be exactly what it looks like: a broken down relationship."

Harry shrugged. "Of course. I agree. But let's keep in mind the timing and the day it happened."

Still unconvinced, Ruth still stored the information in the reserves of her memory. "But why take the partner and not Nathan?"

Before she even finished the question, she had answered it. But still, she let Harry do the honours while she groaned audibly.

"Easy. Mistaken identity. Mr Anonymous perhaps doesn't realise MI5 has gay people too and takes the first man to walk out of that house. Or, it could even be deliberate and there's a ransom note waiting on Nathan's desk back at the Grid right now. At this stage, it's impossible to say. And then there's the third element in all this. Sean Mallon himself."

That name cropped up time and time again, but Harry refused to discuss him in any great detail. Now, Ruth decided she wasn't letting Harry get away with it any longer. She wanted the truth.

"Harry, who is he? Was he an old asset?"

"We wish!" he guffawed in response. "Myself and countless others tried to turn him, to no avail. He was on the IRA's ruling Army Council, you know."

The Provisional IRA's Army Council was a group of no more than eighteen men and women who together controlled every operation, every mission and every hit the IRA had ever performed. The faces and names had changed over the years as some retired, others discovered a love of politics and others were killed in action or arrested. But the function remained the same. Deadly; efficient; impenetrable. Only they knew what the next move would be and their lips were firmly sealed to the outside world.

"So what does he want from you now?" she asked. "He's never talked before, so what's going on, Harry?"

Harry finally move from the French Windows and crossed the room, to where a mini bar was set up nearby. From inside, he produced the whiskey bottle he had earlier and held it up for her to see.

"Fine. I'll tell you," he replied. "But you might want to consider this, first."

Sensing she would be needing it, Ruth nodded. "Thanks, Harry."

Thanks again for reading. If you have a minute, reviews would be welcome.