6. High-rise car park. 16:20 hours.

The meeting place was in a high-rise car-park in an office block five minute's drive from their respective offices. At this hour of the day it was emptying rapidly so they managed to find a largely uninhabited area where they could park away from others, near the open wall overlooking the street (might as well make it easy for Sasha, Harry had said); she had seen his car disappearing up the ramp as she drove in and so had simply followed him. As she approached they were both feeling nervous: the subject matter of the conversation was not going to be comfortable for either of them but had to be said in order to get Sasha to take the bait. Harry was dreading it; in an odd sort of way, Ruth was looking forward to it. After learning what she had over the past few hours and then thinking about it, endlessly, she was no longer under any illusion that he had any feelings for Elena, apart from revenge, and that he had probably never really had any genuine ones, besides concern for her as Sasha's mother. The boy himself was a different issue but she could relate to that better: although Nico hadn't been hers, they had developed a close bond over the eighteen months in Cyprus and the gut-wrenching pain (and searing guilt) of how that had ended gave her what she thought was an acute insight into how Harry was feeling today, although his pain on finding out the truth must be significantly worse than what she had felt. She knew how much he loved his children, despite their fractious relationship, and to suffer through thirty years of separation from an eldest son only to find out he was no son at all must have been devastating. Let alone the effect of everything else attached to that situation.

Lifting a hand in greeting as she approached the car, she opened the door and slid inside, all of those thoughts still swirling in her mind. He smiled tentatively, unsure of his welcome.

"Just like old times."

She glanced over at him, seeing weary, wary eyes looking back at her.

"You look tired."

He continued gazing at her, out of unfathomable, dark depths that were making her more uncomfortable, so she looked down at the glove-box as he replied.

"I feel tired. I don't know who to trust any more. That includes myself."

God, how freakish was that? She thought, Elena's words in the art gallery echoing around her mind.

"Huh." She couldn't stop the slightly bitter exclamation as she lifted her eyes to look out of the windscreen, past the grimy car-park wall to the almost as grimy building opposite.

"What?" he leaned forward a little, puzzled by her reaction. He had a sneaking suspicion that what they were about to go through wouldn't all be acting, or not from her side anyway. He didn't need it but he also couldn't blame her…

"Elena Gavrik said the same thing about you. That you couldn't even trust yourself." That should have got Sasha's attention, they both thought and they were right. In his position off to the side of the meeting room, he had just got his earphones in place and his heart had lurched at the mention of his mother. In the car, Ruth had turned to face Harry, daring him to say something but he didn't respond so she looked away and shook her head. "I didn't know what she meant." Gazing down at her hands twisting in her lap, she missed the total exhaustion that momentarily washed over his face. He was right, this wasn't acting. He wondered when Elena had come out with that one: probably early on, possibly when they had met up to exchange messages, but clearly she had been planting seeds in Ruth's mind almost from the first moment they had met. It was one of her skills, he reflected, equally bitterly: she was an expert at finding your weak point and then focussed in on it with the accuracy of a laser. In his case it was the potential in Sasha; for Ruth, it looked like she had decided it was the potential relationship with himself.

Resting his wrist on the steering wheel he leaned a little further towards her.

"You have the wrong idea about Elena and I." She glanced at him and he looked away, avoiding her eyes, his partly defeated face matching the resignation in his voice. "I don't blame you. Guilt can look a lot like love." That was only the truth but he wasn't sure if she would believe it. Heaving a sigh, he forced himself to carry on, remembering who the real target was and staring across her as he spoke as she continued to steadfastly stare ahead, out the windscreen. "I did try to extract Elena and Sasha from Berlin. I wanted to bring them here, to Britain." Sasha knew all that, it wouldn't be a surprise, but the next bit might be, depending on what, exactly, his mother had told him. He focussed on Ruth for a moment but she wasn't looking so he let his gaze slide away again. "It was Jim Coaver that stopped me." At that she finally looked back at him, reminded of their purpose. "But the reason I didn't tell you about her wasn't—" he hesitated for a moment, looking for an appropriate word and adding to the atmosphere of the performance in the process "—heartbreak." She looked at him, recognising the cost this was extracting from him but, in some odd way, almost enjoying observing his suffering. His next words made her deeply repent that observation. "It was shame." The expression on his face underlined the truth of that statement. There was real shame there, along with what appeared to be a good dose of self-loathing. "Shame at my own cowardice." Cowardice that I hadn't taken on Jim's hollow threat. He had seen that Jim really didn't want to be behind that gun he was pointing at his head and that he probably would have succeeded if he had just called his bluff and walked away. But he hadn't. He had used the gun as the excuse to not finish the extraction. An extraction that he knew would have been pointless: if it had gone ahead, he would never have been able to see either of them again, for their own safety. At the deepest of levels he knew they were better off staying where they were. Now, of course, the truth had come out, making the whole episode even more pointless… He realised she was looking at him, intently, and finally met her eyes again. "Really, she's a stranger to me." She couldn't stop a flash of disbelief crossing her face, despite knowing that he was right, after what the CIA had revealed to them, was it only this morning? "But I feel this sense of – duty, to protect her—" he looked down, about to drop what he hoped would be another hook for their listener "—and him. The boy. Most of all."

For Ruth, this had stopped being an act again. She knew he was good, but the distress in his voice when talking about events that had happened while Ruth was still a school-girl was real, she had no doubt about that. Despite all the misunderstandings of recent years she could still recognise the truth at times like this, rare though those times were these days. Blowing out a breath she admitted slowly, hesitantly, thinking of George and Nico and the terrible, soul-crushing burden of guilt and remorse she had been carrying on that subject for the past two years, not least because she had, in some ways, been more fond of the son than of the father and how that now related to Harry and Sasha,

"Well, um, guilt is something I understand." She nodded to herself, relieved to have finally admitted it to him. "Jealousy, too," she added, looking over at him with a slightly self-deprecating smile, "it would seem." They gazed at each other, in another world for a moment, until she suddenly remembered. Her expression hardened a little as she drew the conversation away from dangerous ground and back on track. "But both of them can blind you to the truth."

He had turned to scan outside the area outside the vehicle but looked back at her, somewhat puzzled at the sudden change of tone.

"The truth?"

"You said yourself. Whoever's behind this knows about your shared history with Jim and Elena."

In the meeting room, Sasha sat up a little straighter, wondering what was about to come. So far, apart from the mention of the American, they hadn't discussed anything that he didn't already know from his mother.

Ah. Excellent opening gambit, Ruth, he thought, as he took her up on it.

"This is beginning to positively reek of Ilya Gavrik. Before Coaver died he said it was all in a file on his laptop."

"What?" Ruth's response reflected Sasha's own reaction. He had to get that laptop. They could not seriously be thinking his father had anything to do with the attack on himself, let alone that on his wife? What possible evidence could they think they had?

"They've taken that laptop to the American Embassy. Someone with a high level of diplomatic clearance—" the look he gave her was as subtle as an anvil falling from the sky, Sasha could probably see it from wherever he was listening in, let alone hear it, she thought "—might be able to lift it."

Continuing to act her part, and reflecting what her real reaction had been, she gave a quiet snort of disbelief as she turned away.

"Oh, bloody hell. No, you are not serious." She looked at him with something of the expression he guessed she had been pinning Towers to his chair with not so long back on her face.

"We'd give you the full backing of the Grid."

She had turned away again, to stare out the windscreen as she responded concisely,

"Harry, I'm a civil servant now." Looking across at him she spelled it out as though to someone who didn't quite understand English, repeating some of her words from earlier. "I have a P.A., called Margot. I don't work for the security services any more."

Looking away, she missed him taking a breath to deliver what he knew would be totally unexpected, to either listener.

"This will be the last time and I will take full responsibility for all my actions, and that includes everything I've asked you to do." She was shaking her head, still not looking, but wondering where he was heading with this elaboration. What he said next made her turn sharply back to face him. "I'm going to stand down after this mess. I'm going to resign my commission, whatever happens—"

"I'm not asking for that." That hadn't been a planned part of the conversation but his statement had been real. There was a note of finality in his voice and in his eyes which, combined with the utter exhaustion on his face, drove any doubt out of her mind about whether he was telling the truth. Suddenly, completely inappropriately, her heart leapt. Maybe that crazy idea revolving around a cottage in Suffolk wasn't so crazy after all.

"I know," he said, gently, as he watched the shock in her eyes ebb away, to be replaced by something else he couldn't quite identify. Hope? "But we both know it's time."

They stared at each other again for a moment, half-forgetting the listener, before she broke the gaze to turn away again.

"Okay, so I find this – laptop. Then what?"

Grateful for the reminder, he assumed a business-like tone again.

"Bring it straight to me." Sasha's eyes narrowed at that. He would have to find a way to intercept the woman and that computer. "I need to see Jim's files before anybody else does."

Eyes locked, the woman raised a questioning eyebrow. Harry nodded and gave a thumbs up – that should have been enough to draw Sasha in.

"Very well," Ruth responded crisply, like him back in work mode. "I have to go. The Home Secretary has a meeting with the US Ambassador at five so I will accompany him and see what I can do."

"I will get the Grid onto organising your resources." As she opened the door and got out he added, "Thank you, Ruth."

Staring back at him, cold, she replied,

"The last time, Harry," before snapping the door closed and heading to her own vehicle without a backwards glance. Watching her drive away he felt the tension washing away with her. That had been significantly harder than he had thought it would be and had strayed further into personal territory than he would have wished so he was very glad it was over. Whether she recognised the truth or not, and whether that would do any good, he had no idea.