If the businessmen drink my blood
Like the kids in art school said they would
Then I guess I'll just begin again
You say, "Can we still be friends?"

If I was scared - I would
And if I was bored - you know I would
And if I was yours - but I'm not

- Arcade Fire, "Ready to Start"

Six. A standoff ensues.

"Hello, Colin. If you wanted to catch up, you could have phoned, instead of arranging a kidnapping."

"I didn't arrange anything. I simply let it be known, to the world at large, that I wanted to get in touch with you." Colin glanced at the bandage on Q's head with a poor imitation of pity. "The microchip incident was unavoidable, but I did ask that you not be harmed. I docked Rafferty ten percent of his pay for what he did to you."

"I'm charmed to know that you still care."

Colin's lips curved, but not in a smile. He sat down at the table and motioned for Q to do the same.

"I'm fine where I am, thanks." Q could not keep his eyes from wandering to the man with the riding crop, who was leaning against the wall beside the door and idly scrolling down the screen of an iPhone.

"Don't worry about Dwyer," Colin said calmly, setting his heavy briefcase on the table in front of him. "He's my bodyguard – just here as insurance."

Q raised his eyebrows in patronizing surprise. "You're important enough to have a bodyguard."

"Yes. I'm surprised that you aren't, given the work you do for MI6."

Another unexpected point in an unexpected conversation. Q had already considered the possibility that Colin Burns was behind his abduction and, separately, the possibility that Colin knew about his position with Q branch, but the combined probability had seemed so small that he had dismissed the idea. Over the years he had come to believe that he had permanently extricated himself from Colin; Q couldn't imagine him expending the effort it must have taken to track down a person with an entirely new identity. And he was impatient – if Colin wanted revenge, why hadn't he attempted it when they were still living on the same campus? He studied Colin's face, twisting the variables like the sides of a Rubik's Cube, sorting them into what he hoped was the correct color scheme.

This time Colin actually smiled. It made him look both boyish and experienced – a cherub with a devil peeking through the eyes. At eighteen Q had been jealous of the way that smile attracted women.

"Now that's a look I haven't seen in a long time," Colin said slyly. "You puzzling out some problem you can't quite get. When you solved it you could be a right smug bastard, and if you didn't you'd mope for days." He mocked a pout, then slid into a smirk. "I don't want to see either of those sides of you today, so I'll explain everything, you'll do me a favor, and then we'll never have to see each other again, hmm?"

"I'm thrilled about that last part, yes," Q said.

Colin's eyebrows twitched. For a second he looked at Q as though savoring something secret, something this meeting had suddenly reminded him of.

"When I left Cambridge," he said, "I tried to look you up. I thought it might be a good idea for us to resolve some of our unfinished business."

Q narrowed his eyes, and Colin laughed.

"And there's your skeptical look. I have to admit, sometimes I get nostalgic for our days as a team." He rested a hand on his heart, briefly. Q kept his eyes narrowed and hoped that Colin burned in the heat of his distrust.

"All right, I admit it," Colin continued, "I wanted revenge. I had all these half-formed plans about how I was going to take down your one-man hacking operation, expose you, send you to prison, steal from you the way you did me –" He paused, collected himself, and leaned back in his chair. A light of fascination came into his eyes. "Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Ben Rossum never graduated from Cambridge – nor was there any record that he had actually attended Cambridge at all. He wasn't on any electoral roll in the United Kingdom. He had never been issued a passport or a driver's license. No known address. No telephone number. He simply didn't exist.

"Now, at the time, I thought you had gotten yourself in trouble and somehow fled the country. But why erase the old records? Paranoia?" Colin turned his eyes to the ceiling and twisted his mouth in pretend contemplation. "No, you've never been paranoid – you think you're too smart for anyone to catch you. I pondered it for a few months, poked around in a few places I thought you might be, and then I gave it up. I was working for Barclays and making good money and I was in a pretty good place. I'd even given up hacking – mostly."

Then he paused. Q knew this game: Colin wouldn't say more until the eager listener begged him to continue. Q resolved not to frame it as a question, or in any other way that could be construed as begging. "But that didn't last long, I take it."

"Bored." Colin shrugged. "You know the feeling. No challenge anymore. So I decided to set myself up for a comfortable life, beyond Barclays and beyond England. I was high enough in Barclays that I could view the details of any account I wished – any number of accounts, all at once. Just sitting there. Ripe for the taking."

Q understood. He had suspected it would go this way ever since Colin had said he worked for a bank. "Penny slicing."

"Exactly. We'd done it once before, do you remember?" Colin waited for Q to nod before he went on. "Steal a few pennies from one account and all you've got is street change. Steal a few pennies from a few million accounts each and you've got enough to support yourself for a lifetime. I knew the code. I had the overseas accounts ready and waiting. But there was a snag in Barclays' security software. I actually had to look closely at the source code to find the problem." Colin rolled his eyes to indicate just how far beneath him that was – and then he smirked with a rapacious glee that made Q's knuckles whiten on the chair back. "And as soon as I saw it, I knew it was you."

"…What?" Q didn't actually need an explanation, but that look had thrown him. He had seen its prototype many times, in the thrill of the hack, but until now it had never been directed at him.

"You wrote it. I know the way you write code – how many times did you dismantle mine and make it better, faster, more efficient? And you had written it recently, too; there were tricks in there no one had even imagined seven years ago at Cambridge. So Ben Rossum really was out there, somewhere, and writing security software for Barclays.

"I made some inquiries. Barclays had bought the software from Consolidated Internet Security. Turns out they're a shell corporation that modifies and markets products developed by the Secret Intelligence Service for use by private companies."

Colin's grin was smaller now, more secretive, but it still brimmed with a discomfiting greed.

"Ben Rossum, coding for MI6. And doing so much sensitive coding that they felt it would be best for you to disappear." Something in Q's face made Colin hold up his hands disarmingly. "I'm not going to ask for government secrets. I just want to bypass Barclays' security, I promise." He flicked the locks on the briefcase, opened the lid, and withdrew a laptop with the power light already on and waiting.

Q marshaled the full force of his disdain. "You remain a man of small ambition."

All of Colin's good humor dropped away. His eyes lidded contemptuously and his mouth twitched. "I remember questions of my... ambition being the source of most of our disagreements at school. Let's not let it get in the way of business today, hmm?"

"What if I refuse?" Q asked, just to know the particulars.

Colin pretended to consider for a moment. Q decided that these melodramatic tendencies were more annoying than he remembered.

"Well, Dwyer's not exactly excited about spending his afternoon watching two old friends reminisce. I suppose he could vent his frustrations on you."

Q glanced at Dwyer, who gave him a quick courtesy smile and went back to his phone. The riding crop tapped against his leg in an ominous metronomic rhythm.

In the silence Q was sharply aware of time ticking by, of the conflicting paths of appeasement and escape and their many permutations, of the fact that the longer he stayed in the kidnapper's grip the less likely he was to be found alive. He looked down at the computer and nodded. With a grin, Colin passed it over. Q sat down and propped his elbows on the table edge, leaning forward so the chain draped over his legs like a snake.

"I need your password."

"Can't you figure it out?" Colin teased.

Q bit down the urge to sigh or roll his eyes. Appeasement, not provocation. Not yet. "I could. But it'd be much faster if you just gave it to me."

Colin shrugged, conceding the point, and leaned across the table to take the laptop back, rising half-out of his seat.

Q had the chain around his neck in a blink, had Colin dragged around the table and pressed against him like a shield. Dwyer sprang forward a step, riding crop drawn back like a tennis racket, hand poised over a trouser pocket.

Face white, Colin snarled, "Take him, you moron, he's –" Q jerked the chain and the words cut off with a squawk.

"You're going to give me the knife you've got hidden in your pocket," he ordered Dwyer, with the same professional certainty he adopted around the much-older members of Q branch; give them any reason to question your authority and they'd pounce. "Then you're going to undo the chain around my neck or I'll twist until his head snaps off."

Dwyer looked from Q, whose eyes were ice, to Colin, who mouthed something Q didn't catch. Then he nodded, drew out the switchblade, placed it on the table away from both of them. Q tightened his grip, tightened the chain, as Dwyer approached, and Colin made a wheezing, hissing sound. The inside of Q's wrist pressed against Colin's neck and he had no idea if the pounding heartbeat he felt was Colin's or his own.

Dwyer reached up with both hands for the loop of chain around Q's neck. Q felt a tug.

Then Dwyer drove the heel of his hand into Q's bandaged wound and pain exploded at the back of his neck, inside his head, behind his eyes, and his whole body jerked away from Colin and Dwyer, the chain trailing out between his fingers like kite string unwinding. Colin twisted away; Q made a grab for the chain still draped around Colin's neck, but the riding crop cracked across his shoulders and he stumbled. His hand scrabbled at the table, clawing for the knife, but Dwyer swept it to the floor with a flick of the crop and Colin dove for it. Q tackled him and they rolled over, like schoolboys in a locker-room brawl, but then the chain closed like a noose around Q's neck: Dwyer had coiled most of the ten feet around his arm, and he reeled Q in until he could fist the chain right behind Q's head and hold on tight.

Colin got to his feet with the knife in one hand and slicked back his hair. The chain had marked his throat from ear to ear, like a grotesque smile.

"You've always been a little bastard, Ben," he rasped.

Q could not speak. Dwyer had grabbed a fistful of hair along with the chain and the microchip wound burned and it hurt to turn his neck, hurt even to draw breath.

"Leave his hands and his eyes," Colin said, talking to Dwyer but staring down at Q. "For all his deficiencies, he's smart, and I'm sure he'll choose to cooperate."

Dwyer dragged Q to his feet with the chain. Colin came closer, tentatively, bouncing from foot to foot like a boxer. His hand shot out and swiped Q's glasses; a fingernail caught Q on the bridge of his nose.

As Dwyer hooked the chain around a ceiling pipe fitting, hauling Q up like a side of meat until he had to stand on his toes or be strangled, Colin held Q's glasses up to the light and shook his head like a disapproving grandmother.

"Filthy." He polished them with his tie.

Dwyer pulled a plastic zip tie from his jacket and bound Q's hands. Q felt a thin line of blood trickle from under the bandage, between his shoulder blades and down his spine.

"I'm sorry it had to come to this," Colin said, almost mournfully.

"Liar," Q snarled soundlessly, teeth biting off the word.

Colin's lips curled and it was the devil, not the cherub, that Q saw.

Author's notes:

"Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Ben Rossum never graduated from Cambridge."

I took Q's real name from Ben Whishaw, the actor who portrays him, and Guido van Rossum, the author of the Python programming language (the only programming language I know anything about!). Python is open source, which I think young!Q would appreciate.

Penny slicing

Anyone who's seen Office Space will be familiar with this scheme.