A/N – I'm in a rush to get this done to by the date I've set for myself, so here are three chapters at once. Thanks for all the lovely comments – and a special thanks to all the lovely people who fix my grammatical/spelling/stupid plot hole mistakes. Should be more Christmas and more H/R tomorrow. –Silver.

Chapter 10 – Breakthrough

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December 17, 2011

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As the days stretched on, Ruth found herself falling more and more into the dark world of Bethan Shayne. Tariq's decryption of the information on the dog's microchip had led them to a program which accessed an online databank of files, allowing Ruth to match the reference numbers on the mind-map to solid source material. Unfortunately, however, being in possession of all the data only got them halfway to solving the problem. Now that they had a profile, they had to suffer through the arduous process of narrowing down the suspect pool on their end, eliminating personnel until they had a small enough group to put surveillance on.

It was necessary but frustrating; pretty much an advertisement for what her job, to be honest.

No, that wasn't entirely fair, Ruth thought, leaning back in her chair and taking a moment out to stare up at the ceiling. Her job was not all bad. She loved her job, really, underneath all the complaining and griping at her colleagues. At heart, she was an analyst. She liked things in order. She liked working in the confines of the Grid and, she could admit now, she even enjoyed the occasional foray out into the wider world – the thrill of mad, dangerous adrenaline that raced through her when she was in the field, Calum or Harry's voice guiding her through an operation, through her earpiece. And Harry, of course. She was pretty mad about working near Harry.

Ruth glanced over at his empty office. He seemed a little less down these last few days, compared to the few before, that was. Still, there was definitely something up with him. He spent a lot of time on the phone. He was almost always gone from the office by six o' clock and appeared a little more flustered than usual when he did come in. Ruth knew that the talks with the Russians had fallen through, whatever they had entailed (Harry hadn't mentioned that either) so what was keeping him, she wondered? Was this the family business he had been dealing with, with his solicitor?

Almost a week having past since she had cornered him in his office, Ruth knew she should be satisfied that he was not avoiding her and leave it at that, but she couldn't help herself. She was naturally curious. Harry was being unnaturally evasive. She had to find out what was going on.

Resolved to finding out what Harry was hiding, Ruth had cornered him twice again, over the last two days, and – her boldness somehow feeding on itself, in a sort of positive feedback reaction – asked him for coffee sometime.

She was going insane, she knew she was, but it felt strangely liberating. It had felt gloriously freeing to stand across from Harry and ask him for coffee sometime, to watch the way he watched her cautiously, holding back the pleasure in his eyes until he was sure he wasn't misreading the situation. The fear in her had not lessened any, she thought, taking a moment to analyst her memory of the moment. It was still there, raw and biting in her belly. It seemed different, though. No less potent, but somehow less important than other feelings running through her.

Things were complicated but so was life. She was ready for something more but he was still cautious. Naturally, then, she was going to have to make him less cautious. She was going to have to give him reason to feel secure – to know she wanted this.

He had turned her down for coffee the other day because of his busy schedule. Maybe she should ask him again, when he arrived this morning, Ruth thought, playing with a strand of hair from the back of her ponytail, running the tips of it against her finger pads. She was wearing her nice clothes, today. She was even wearing a little makeup. Now would be a sensible time to make a move – not that she thought the state of her mascara would sway Harry very much. He had seen her at her worst. He had seen her sprayed with tears and blood.

Her thoughts were shattered by the appearance of Calum and Dimitri at her elbow, the latter brandishing his bandage-wrapped arm aloft.

"Look who's back!" Calum exclaimed, pushing the younger officer forwards with an enormous slap on the shoulder. "And he's somehow walked away with all ten fingers intact, yet again."

"Jammy bugger," Ruth quipped, regarding the pair of them. "I take it you two have just broken free from the clutches of medical?"

"Yeah, they're keeping Daniel in another day," Dimitri informed her, preventing her from having to ask how the other young officer who had been injured in the bomb blast was doing.

The pair of them had been involved in Erin's operation to infiltrate and disband a dangerous quasi-Christian fundamentalist group, led by a man who's primary interest seemed to be mass human casualties, rather than spiritual enlightenment. It had all been going smoothly until a young woman who Dimitri was turning, inside the lower ranks of the cult, had a change of heart and had gone running back to her parents – close friends of the cult's charismatic (and rather mad) leader. Realising that his plan was on the verge of disembowelment by the Security Service, the cult leader had called all of his people to worship and tried to make martyrs of the lot of them in an unwitting suicide – poisoning the wine they used in their quasi-communion.

SO19, using Dimitri's knowledge of the building and a secret passage there, managed to get in and stop things before they got out of hand. Two civilians, Dimitri and one of his fellow field officers were injured in the gunfight that ensued, but there were no casualties save the cult leader. They were lucky. Dimitri was lucky, in particular, to have only caught the bullet across the side of his forearm. It had taken a couple of stitches to get him back together, but it could have been worse. Much worse.

"How does it feel?" Ruth asked, motioning towards his arm.

"Oh, it's fine..." the young officer pulled a face, "a bit stiff but nothing I can't handle."

"He's just being macho, Ruth, to impress you," Calum informed her, in a stage whisper. "He cried like a baby all the way back from the hospital."

Dimitri shot him a slightly irritated look, but Ruth saw a smile hiding not too far beneath the surface.

It was nice, seeing them all begin to gel together, she thought with her own hidden smile. This was what it must be like for Harry, over the years, seeing them all come and go, seeing new teams form from the fragments of the old team, seeing his people grow closer – only to be ripped apart by the next sacrifice. Hopefully the next sacrifice wouldn't be for a while, she thought, watching Calum continue to goad and Dimitri eventually rise to the bait, squabbling back. Hopefully they would have time to get closer, to learn each other a little, to know what each other truly were and what they dreamt of – to make some memories before they were taken by the Service.

That was the only thing that made the inevitability of their deaths bearable, Ruth had learned, after years of trying to keep her colleagues at arms' distance. The belief in what they were doing, the knowing that they would be remembered; that was what got them through. She still thought of Zaf and Adam, of Jo and Ros, of Danny and Zoe. She thought of them every day. It might not have made their deaths worth it but, coupled with the lives that they had saved, it made them make sense.

"How many stitches?" she asked Dimitri as she moved a thick wad of folders to one side of her desk, making room for Calum to sit on the end.

"Fourteen."

"I got more than that when I cut my thumb on an iron gate, when I was ten," Calum prodded.

"Yeah, but the thread they used on mine is that dissolvable stuff. It's practically twine."

"It's very impressive," Ruth commented, from the side. "You look practically debilitated."

Both men looked over, Dimitri looking slightly proud, Calum looking slightly indignant. He was just opening his mouth to make another clever comment when Tariq ran through – actually ran – skidding to a halt on front of the desk. The three spooks fell silent, staring at him.

"I've got-," he panted, "-got him... Vincent..." he raised a paper and held it out to Ruth.

For a second she faltered, not sure what he meant, then her brain clicked into gear.

Vincent. He'd found Vincent.

"How?" she stammered, sitting bolt upright in her chair and snatching the paper from the young technical officer's hand. "And who is he?"

"His name is Avery Price," Tariq told her, breathlessly, gesturing towards the sheet of paper. "Works for C Section, on systems analysis. He matches our profile one hundred percent and I've looked into his banking practices – his real ones, not the ones he has submitted to Internal Affairs. He accessed an account in Switzerland the other week which has seen five hundred thousand pass through it in the last year alone."

"And he couldn't make that through legal means?" asked Ruth, poring over the page.

Tariq raised an eyebrow.

"How much do you earn, doing analysis?"

"Okay," Ruth nodded, conceding, "do we have his current details?"

"Yes. On the bottom of that page..." the young officer leant against the desk, giving another heavy puff of breath. "Phew... sorry," he apologised, as Calum looked enquiringly at him, "just ran all the way up from Archives."

"Are you going to make it?" Calum asked sarcastically.

"I think I'll be fine," Tariq answered – missing the tone completely.

Ignoring their interchange, Ruth continued to scan the piece of paper he had given her, Dimitri craning to read over her shoulder. The top half was a rambling paragraph of personnel numbers and dates, but the bottom half was more interesting. It listed the operations he had been on, during his time with the Service. His current mission was listed under a code that sparked familiarity, somewhere deep in Ruth's brain. She frowned. She knew that code. She had read it recently... but where? Where had she seen it?

An idea sparked.

Abandoning the paper Tariq had handed her to Calum and Dimitri, she reached over and opened up an internal network file search, on her system. Tapping in a string of numbers and letters, then her clearance codes when a request popped up, she hit enter and leant eagerly forwards in her chair. After a few seconds of searching, an operation file sprang onto her screen. It was accompanied by a feeling of 'oh shit' deep in her stomach.

"What's that?" asked Calum, leaning over.

"Avery Price's current operation. He's on a security detail," Ruth frowned, "something run by his Section Chief and the MOD."

"That can't be good..." Calum muttered.

Dimitri and Tariq made noises of agreement.

Ruth scrolled down, searching. When she had found what she was looking for, she muttered "crap," and leant back in her chair again.

"What is it?" Dimitri asked, while Calum leant forwards to find the answer for himself instead.

"He's watching a package they intercepted from a hostile group," Ruth sighed, turning to face her three colleagues. "I knew I had seen the code before. It was during a briefing I attended with Harry, last week." The others exchanged a brief glance, perhaps wondering why she had been included. Feeling an irrational need to justify why Harry had chosen her above any of the rest of the team, Ruth leant forwards a little and explained. "We were brought in to debrief on a similar project we had run, about a year before I had to leave the Service. You probably know about it – it was the reason I was brought back from exile." A euphemism if ever there was one. "Certain people on our radar were discovered to have access to a WMD," she explained, for any present who did not know the story. "We had to take it into our custody to prevent lives being lost. Myself and Harry were told in our briefing, the other morning, that this was a similar situation." She motioned towards the report on the computer screen. "C Section lifted a package suspected of being a weapon, during a raid on a terrorist group. The package is said to be 'a target-capable mass-casualty weapon' which, in the wrong hands, could pose a serious threat to British lives."

"Sounds not dissimilar to Albany," Calum noted as he read, prompting Dimitri and Tariq to look slightly uncomfortable.

Ruth didn't bother with discomfort. Calum didn't mean it that way. He never did. He said things bluntly and as they were. It was something she was getting used to and, funnily enough, quite enjoying. It was liberating, finally having someone who was willing to say exactly what he thought about a situation, or a person, straight to her face. He was the only one of the team, for instance, who ever complained to her about Harry or Harry's operational decisions. Everyone else seemed to think she'd fly off the handle, or side with their boss without question. Not Calum, though. Calum didn't ignore the fact that she and Harry had a long, complicated and somewhat intimate history, but he didn't define her by it either.

It was nice, for a change, to be considered an unremarkable phenomenon – just two people who happened to have fallen in love. It made Ruth feel grounded in a way she had never felt before, during her and Harry's long and arduous journey. It made them seem like less of a mad dream and more of a reality. Perhaps, Ruth thought, he was why she was growing so bold, in her small steps back towards their boss. Perhaps having someone blunt and tactless in her life that wasn't Harry was helping her realise what her situation really looked like and not just how it felt, from the inside.

"Yes," she nodded, reaching over and pressing several keys, "it sounds a little like Albany." Pulling up the lower part of the report, she pressed on a series of photo attachments and clicked on them to fill the screen. "Whatever it is is different, however, in that it yields results. Thirty five dead in Pakistan, earlier this year. Fourteen of them were school children under the age of ten. This is a real weapon – not some scare-tactic kept as a deterrent."

Calum frowned, looking through the photos. "Shit, what is it?"

"It's classified. C Section gave us a briefing of its capabilities but, for now, we're without the details. From the damage inflicted by previous attacks and the facilities under which its being kept, now, we've gathered its a biological agent, dispersed by a novel piece of software."

"Software?"

"An advanced intelligent program which targets infrastructure – water, electrics ect. It's actually a bigger threat than what it spreads, in the long run." Ruth started then turned to Tariq, who finished the explanation for her.

"...a computer program can be used to more devastating effect than an atomic bomb, if correctly judged. Our cities are so completely reliant on technology that we could be brought to our knees by some sort of super mutating virus."

"So how come this hasn't happened before?"

"It has, to a certain degree," Ruth stepped in and told them. "There have been cyber attacks on individual systems and on the more complex networks like gas, water, or our internet service providers. So far no one's designed something that can handle multiple firewall attacks simultaneously, however, and its targeting more than one system that would cause the most destruction. Its the bogeyman on the counterterrorism scene," she explained, as Tariq nodded beside her. "Take down one system and then all the systems that could bring it back online. And then attack. Repeatedly."

The four spooks turned their eyes back to the screen.

A silence fell between them as they took it all in.

A weapon which might have huge implications on the future security of their city, which could lead to the deaths of tens of thousands if not millions of British citizens, was in the hands of a rogue agent. He was one member of a three-man team assigned to guard it. Three man teams meant that, at some point, he was going to be left alone while the other two were either sleeping. He was going to be in sole control of the package. The possibilities, with the contacts Shayne said he had, were endless – and almost too terrible to imagine. The images of the dead Pakistani schoolchildren burned through Ruth's eyes, into her mind. Reaching over, she minimized the window and turned to the others.

Someone needed to get them moving. With Erin and Harry absent, seniority fell to Calum in the field and to her, on the Grid – making it slightly debatable as to which of them was to take control now. Technically, they were still on site, but their movements were in regard to a field operation. Calum did not immediately move forwards, however, so she decided to make a stab at it. Taking a deep breath, she lifted her gaze and fixed her colleagues in it.

"Okay," she said slowly, working things through in her head, "this is bad, but we have to consider the positive aspect. If Price is on active guard duty, then someone has to know where he is at all times. He's probably holed up in a safehouse somewhere. His Section Chief is running this operation so he'll know, even if its not logged in on the internal network."

Tariq tapped hurriedly into his handheld. "I have a number for Price's direct superior but I don't know if we can risk it. Anything that implies we know something is up with their operation could alert the mole and he could run."

"If he runs, he'll take everything he has access to," Calum pointed out. "That means either the information he's gathered at home, or the secret he's guarding at work."

Ruth nodded vigorously. "Mm. You're right, we can't risk it." She frowned, wracking her brain. "Okay... other ways to find him... Calum?" she turned to the blonde officer, who was watching her intently. "Can you find out what safehouses we have 'in use' and find out which are really being used and which are actually dormant, awaiting meets? The best way is to check the gas and electricity bills listed to the properties. If they're camping out in their all day, in this weather, then they have the heating on at more than 'defrost'."

"Good idea," he nodded and stood up, making his way quickly over to his own system, a few metres away. "I'm on it."

"Thanks. Make sure you don't mention Price. Now," Ruth continued. "Tariq, you and I need to get as much together as we can. Background, family details, etcetera. We can't access it on the internal network without risking setting off some sort of booby trap so we'll go down to archives and access it straight from the server. Dimitri," she turned. The ex-SBS man stood, almost to attention. "I need you to get Harry and Erin in here and brief them on what's going on." She reached down and grabbed her phone off the desktop. "Harry's in with the Home Secretary so use my emergency line. That should get you through." She did not bother to stop and justify why she was the only one apart from Erin – who had cause, being Harry's Section Chief – to have an emergency patch-through to him. The situation was volatile. They needed to work fast and keep their minds on the job. "Keep radio silence on Price, as before. If he realises we're onto him and he'll disappear faster than we can blink. He's had years to plan an exit. Let's not let him use it."

Dimitri nodded and darted off to his own desk, followed by Tariq, tapping madly on his handheld as he went – probably accessing the programs they would need once they were down in archives, streaming information directly to their consoles. He was a good officer. Fast. Clever. Brilliant.

"Should I call SO19?" Calum called, as Ruth logged quickly out of her system and prepared to follow her youngest colleague down to the basement archive rooms.

"Yes. Get two teams on standby – get Erin or Harry to call and give them the clearance as soon as you can. You're in charge, by the way, until they get in. I'll keep in contact with what we find, downstairs." She grabbed a pen and a pad of paper and switched off her screen, throwing her coat over her shoulder and her phone into her pocket in case she needed to go somewhere directly from downstairs, later. "Thanks by the way," she added, glancing over at her colleague as she started out across the room. "For not contesting my lead, back there."

Calum shot her a cheeky grin.

"Darling, there are worse aspects of my job than being your 'yes man'."

Ruth would have blushed, or shot back some clever retort, if she had not been in such a rush. As it was, she just had time to throw him a vaguely disgruntled look before hurtling out through the door.

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