Chapter 12 – Out in the open

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December 19, 2011

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Harry emerged from a three-hour meeting with the DG with more problems buzzing around his head than he had gone in with. Bureaucracy had always brought him out in hives but this was different, he thought, bitterly. This was opposition from within his own ranks. The man who had spent the last few hours metaphorically thrashing him with a metal rod was the man who should, by all accounts, be thanking him for uprooting a dangerous mole. Instead, of course, Harry was just hearing the endless tirade about transparency and responsibility and protocol.

He knew that he should have informed his superior of his actions and of the operation which he had been running. Protocol, however – as he pointed out to said superior, in slightly harsher terms – had not been about to save their asses if the mole had cottoned on to what they were doing and decided to jump ship with everything they had.

"Well, you didn't manage to do much better, did you?" the DG had snipped, in reply. "Do you know what that man is walking around with, Harry, do you?"

Weaponised Bacillus anthracis.

Anthrax.

It was the holy grail of biological terrorism. One gram contained one hundred million lethal doses. It could be dispersed as an aerosol in powder form, or be ingested and retain its lethality. Weaponised strains, like the one they were dealing with here, had more or less a fifty percent fatality rate. It was bad, not quite 'enormous nuclear warhead gone missing and AQ rubbing their hands together gleefully', but bad all the same. A few small vials of powder were harder to find than a whopping great nuke, after all, and the man who carried them was a professional. He had contacts. He could get in touch with all the right people and he would, thought Harry, darkly. He would find a buyer and that buyer would use it to take human lives. And, of course, in a small way, it would be his fault. His fault for going in without knowing absolutely everything about the man's security, his fault for scaring him into running.

He couldn't have bloody done anything else, of course – even the DG knew that, behind his posturing. He had to go in, knowing about the officer's loyalties and what he was in charge of. He could not have alerted anyone because – and he was glad he had heeded Tariq's word about this because their suspicions had been true – Avery Price had been monitoring communications via the landline phones at Thames House, checking for keywords such as his own name, the locations of his house and his safehouse. Harry could not have called the man in charge of Price because that man would have reacted the same way as Harry would have, should someone accuse one of his officers of such a crime. He would go to Price and make his inquiries but by then it would be too late and everything would have been revealed.

They had needed to go in with a tactical assault. It had been their only option. They had made the right call. It had just been unlucky that Tariq had not spotted the tracing program Price had placed down on the Server access computers, in the basement rooms. It had just been unlucky that any access to files on the safehouse he had been lodging in was primed to send a message to his mobile, alerting him of a security breach. It had been unlucky and the bad guy had escaped. That was how it worked, in their business. They had to be lucky all of the time. The bad guys only had to be lucky once. They were overwhelming odds, really, thought Harry, pulling his gloves on and walking down the last few steps of the building, stepping out onto the pavement and hurrying across the street, towards the river. What overwhelming odds to play against, every day.

He walked along the embankment and across Lambeth Bridge, then down towards the Southbank – an aimless wandering as he had nowhere to go. He should get a taxi home, he thought, but he did not want to be in such a terrible mood when he arrived back. His house was not just his own, now. He shared it with one another and the little beagle, of course, who he had grown quite fond of over the last week. He didn't get to go home and brood anymore, Harry thought, with a sigh. Oh well, it was probably good for him. Better than going back and sitting by himself in darkness, with a scotch, anyway. Moving a little faster along the pavement, he looked out across the water and gritted his teeth a little tighter.

Anthrax. Their mole was in possession of Anthrax.

Fuck.

The fury did not die as he lengthened his stride so he slowed down again, turning in to lean against the railings and look out over the rippling Thames. It was almost still, tonight. The wind was down and the only waves on the water were those corresponding to the dark currents beneath. Their soft ridges caught the lamplights glowing along each side of the river and shone like pale orange snakes. Constantly moving, constantly slithering downriver towards the estuary at the far end. And then the sea.

Harry leant against the railing, pressing his palms against cold metal – not quite feeling it for the thick warmth of his gloves.

When was the last time he had seen the sea, he wondered. Was it weeks ago, months ago, years? He should go there, sometime. He should take his new guest and Harry the beagle and turn his phone off. Just go. Get up and go. Maybe Ruth would come.

He closed his eyes when she came into his head, trying to calm the rage inside of him. It didn't seem right to pair the thought of her with anger. Ruth was good – Ruth stood for all that was good in his life. She was sweet and kind and good. She was everything that he was not. Light and warmth and beauty. She had come to him, the other morning, and asked to get coffee sometime, when he had a spare moment. She said they needed to breathe, to get away from this place. She had teasingly said it was her job to make him see that. He had given her some excuse, some almost-true excuse that he was too busy to have coffee with her. The truth was he was trying to protect the both of them.

He was protecting himself because he didn't think he was strong enough, to have her let him in just to pull away again. Right now, his life was a mess. Everything seemed to be falling apart around him. Things he had never expected to have to face again were creeping back into his life. Responsibilities he had not even imagined had reared their head. During the course of the last week, he had inherited rather more than a dog and he wasn't sure if he could hack it as the man people expected him to be. They all had such high expectations and, try as hard as he did, Harry just couldn't live up to them, not all the time. He didn't want Ruth to be the one he let down – not again. He was protecting her, as well, by saying 'no' for now.

God, he had wanted to say 'yes', though. He had wanted it more than anything. Maybe he should just tell her, he thought, just risk it and tell her.

He was just considering how he might go about that when a strange feeling, of a presence at his shoulder, caused him to still. Old reflexes reared their head. He felt his body, judging where his weight was distributed, should he need to move fast – either in evasion or defense He tried to remember what he had in his pockets and determine what of it could be used to inflict bodily damage on another person and, if so, how. He determined who could be behind him and what threat they could pose. He had a minor thrill of panic when he thought that it could be their mole, before he ruled that out as a silly indulgence of paranoid fantasy and forced himself to calm.

Slowly, carefully, he turned his head, casting a sideways look at whomever was lurking not so far behind him. A short dark coat caught his eye, shielding a slightly unfamiliar figure, but a slightly too familiar face.

Harry let out a heavy breath of air and turned back forwards.

"What the bloody hell are you doing here?" he asked Bethan Shayne, as relief and confusion flooded through him in equal measure.

He was glad she was not a sinister assassin, or someone come to give him further bollocking, for having no regard for protocol, but what the bloody hell was she doing here? Shayne was taking an enormous risk, coming to see him in such proximity to the great building where he worked. What if he had been followed or had people with him? Had she followed him from the doors, he wondered? Had she been lurking nearby Thames House for days, he wondered, watching them track her mole down? Did she know he had eluded them, was that why she was here? It made sense, Harry reminded himself. It would be a hell of a coincidence if she had just picked tonight for a friendly catch-up.

"Hello to you too, Harry," she said softly, moving forwards to mirror his position a foot or so further down the embankment, her palms pressed against the railings. She was not wearing gloves and her fingertips, where Harry glanced down to see them, were pink with cold. She had been outside for a while. "Disappointing night meeting, was it?"

Harry said nothing for a moment, then turned his head slightly, so he could watch her in his peripheral vision.

"More so than usual, yes. I'm sure you've heard all about what's going on, by now." He shot her a slightly nasty look. "My sources tell me that your sources are well informed."

Beside him, Bethan Shayne shifted, slightly, moving infinitesimally closer.

"Oh, don't be sore about it, Harry. You must have known I had people inside of Five. It was never personal and I never intended for him to turn – I vetted him stringently and continually, throughout his contract."

Harry gave a long sigh, closing his eyes momentarily again.

It figured that Bethan Shayne had contracts with her assets. She had always been such an organised little spook.

Finally finding it within himself, he tore his eyes away from the river on front of them and turned to face his old companion fully. What he found was slight unnerving; a strange mixture of the familiar and the old combining. An old friend and a new stranger, in one.

Bethan Shayne had aged well. Despite being a woman well into her fifties, she had managed to hang onto the more rounded cheeks of youth. Her skin was marked with time, a little sunworn in places, a little creased in others such as her eyes, but generally in good condition. Her rather plain but symmetric features marked out a nondescript face, surrounded by somewhat shaggy blonde hair. She still hadn't caught on to the idea of styling, then, noted Harry with a soft fondness inside. She never had been one for doing much more than a swipe of mascara and a scooping back of her hair in a ponytail, even to the most formal of occasions.

"It's been a long time, Beth," he told her.

"Speak for yourself, I've been watching you for days." Her dark grey eyes traveled over him, a sad smile not far below the surface. "The years haven't been kind to you, Harry. You used to be a pretty little thing."

"I suppose I now qualify as neither pretty nor little?"

"No. Tongue's still as sharp as ever, though,"

Harry chose not to reply.

Shayne sighed and looked back down at her hands, playing short-nailed fingertips over one another in an apparent attempt to keep warm.

"I am sorry, about involving you in all of this, you know," she admitted, slightly abashedly, after a long ten seconds had passed. "I never meant for any of it to happen and, once it had, I never meant to drag you into it – of all people. It's just you were the only one I could trust wasn't involved with him and..." she trailed off, looking up to Harry as if for confirmation that she had done the right thing.

To be honest, he didn't have anything for her, in that department. He was as conflicted over what she had done as she was. If he ignored the fact that she shouldn't have had a man inside Five in the first place, he supposed he might have approached things in the same manner which she had. He supposed he might have done the same.

"Why did you come here?" he asked her, after a long minute had passed and she had continued to stare down at her hands in that self-doubting way she had always done so well. "You know I should call this in, right now. I'm conspiring with a traitor just talking to you."

Shayne raised her eyes.

"Perhaps they can give us adjoining cells – hang us side by side on Tower bridge?"

A small smile cracked Harry's lips, despite himself. She had always had a cutting turn of phrase. He forced the smile down, however, as quickly as it had come. He was not here to chat with her, or joke, or reminisce about old times. She was a traitor. She had put a mole inside his bloody Service.

When he did not reply for a while, Shayne sighed and tried again to initiate friendly conversation. "I knew you wouldn't shop me, Harry," she told him, in answer to his previous question. "It's not your style. I wanted to see you, though, to thank you for what you've done."

He frowned at that, surprised. "Thank me?"

"I worked for weeks, trying to find out who Vincent was. You flushed him out in just over one."

"My analysis team did the majority of the work."

"Nonetheless, I am grateful. I know I hardly gave you a choice in the matter, with how I went about things, but I am grateful you put what you did into this. I'm grateful you used the full force of your team. They are quite exceptional, by the way," she added, "I had a look at their files, when I was doing my preliminary vetting. They truly are a testament to their leader."

"Gosh, It's lucky its dark, Beth. I've not blushed so much since Katie Gillespie asked me to the sixth form dance..."

Bethan Shayne chuckled, a laugh which had not changed a jot over the years.

Harry felt suddenly melancholy again.

"Why the hell did you do this?" he asked, with a sigh. "You could have accepted what management had said about your team. You could have come to me, privately, and asked me to look into it. You could have walked away, clean, at the end of all this – helped me catch this mole, as a team, rather than skulking around in the darkness."

Their eyes met. She gave him another sad smile, the laughter vanished from her voice as she replied. "I don't think this is one I get to walk away clean from," she told him, softly. "God, Harry, they're all gone. People I've worked with for years, just vanished..."

Harry held silence. He knew that feeling, that terribly empty, guilty feeling. It was all-consuming. There had been days, after Adam and Zaf had died, after Joanna Portman had died, after Ros had died in particular, that he had considered packing it all in. Retiring. Leaving while he still could. But he never could, he thought, not really. It was like Shayne said. Once you lost enough of them, you didn't get to walk away clean. Their blood, however much they offered it freely, however much their sacrifice had been necessary and heroic, was on his hands. He would always be red with it.

"I'm sorry about your team," he told Shayne, sincerely. "I really am."

"I know." Shayne reached over and rested her elbow against his, a small movement of solidarity.

It brought back strange and sudden memories of Paris in the summer of '78. It had been a hot year. There had been one day when he and Shayne had been stuck on a surveillance detail, following a young man all over the city to try and find out where he was placing a dead-drop. It had been a wild goose chase. Halfway through the day they had realised that he was a decoy, sent out to waste their time. It had been tremendous fun, however. Instead of going back to base, they had continued to wander through the city, stopping to watch artists who made them laugh, buying ice cream on rue Saint-Louis-en-L'ile, eating bread for their dinner on the bank of the seine and getting horribly sunburnt as they walked back to the hotel, afterwards. It was a rare moment of happiness amongst an otherwise tumultuous period in his life.

Juliet had been furious, Harry could remember, (though he could not remember whether it had been the fact that he had skived of for three hours, or the fact that he had skived off in female company, that was bothering her so). Whichever it was, he and Shayne had been split up and put on separate details for the next few weeks. It had made them friends, though. Good friends. They had continued to spend time in each other's company out of work hours – in a platonic fashion, as well, which was unusual for him, at the time. She had been a good friend to him. One of the few he could truly say that of, over the years.

Regarding her across the way, Harry picked out a sudden tightness in her shoulders and forehead. She was close to tears, he realised, as she thought about the ones who she had lost. The years had aged her, she had grown stronger and more resilient – been promoted and weighed down by responsibility and the things she had seen and done – but there was something of that young, deceptively sweet girl he had known still in her. Pressing his elbow back a little into hers, he tilted his head until she met his eyes again.

"You couldn't have known." he offered, in comfort. "The trap he sent you into."

"Ah, yes, the trap that we had made for him," Shayne sighed, the irony heavy and bitter in her voice. "No, you're wrong, Harry. I could have known. His handler, my-," she cut herself off, cleared her throat and continued on. "Nicholas said he was smart. He kept warning me against underestimating him. But I looked at the information he had brought me and I underestimated him, despite what my own officer had told me. I was so distracted at the time, so preoccupied with a million other things – operations I had to get back to, once we'd caught Victor, meetings, paperwork..."

"Christ, do Six still do paperwork? I thought they abolished that along with secrecy, in '94."

Shayne gave only a half-laugh, but cast an appreciative look over at Harry, for his trouble.

They both held themselves in silence for a long moment, before he spoke again.

"Nicholas, your chief technical officer," he began, a little cautiously. He was not sure how she would take this. "Was he the man who was living with you, at the address you gave us?"

Slowly, Shayne nodded.

Harry looked back to the river. He had suspected so. He had looked at the placement of his photo, among the others, and read significance in it. Pairing that with the suspicion that someone else had lived in the small house with her, he had surmised a relationship – perhaps a secret one.

"You were partners?" he asked, after a pause.

Shayne nodded again.

"Partners, lovers... the house I gave you was our bolt hole," she explained, eventually, after silence had weighed on them for half a minute or so. "We bought it under aliases, a year ago in October. I wanted somewhere off the radar, away from the Service's all-seeing eye, somewhere that we could have where nobody would know we existed, where nobody would know what we were, where we were truly invisible – to everyone, even our own team."

Harry nodded. He could understand wanting that.

"You know, I recruited Nicholas, originally," Shayne continued. "I brought him in from the private sector and convinced him to put his skills to fighting for Queen and Country." She pulled a slight face, narrow nose wrinkling across the bridge. "He was seven years younger than me, you know," she glanced over at Harry. "He could do things with a computer which put Vauxhall's cyber-crime unit to shame – your people too, probably. He was a genius, a cut above us battered spooks, but he thought the sun shone out my arse and I let him, because he made me happy."

Harry gave a tiny smile, at her wording, but said nothing. Nothing need be said.

They stood for a time, looking out over the water in silence. Then, Shayne sighed heavily.

"He's gone..." she murmured, directing her words up into the cold night air, her breath rising in mist from her lips. "Now, they're all gone."

Harry tried for a moment to imagine what it would feel like to lose Ruth, someone he loved like Shayne had loved this man, Nicholas – though he supposed it wasn't quite the same. He had never lived with Ruth, or made a life with her. They had never bought a house together and vowed to spend time there, hiding from the world, hiding in each other. Maybe he should suggest, he thought. She was looking at a house in the country, after all. He had noticed a tab open in her system, the other week. Maybe he should suggest her buying it. Her buying it and them living there. Together.

Of course he would have to tell her everything, first, all the things that were going on in his life right now. And after that, who knew if she would still want to flirt with him about coffee and touch his hand... He hoped she would, though. He really hoped she would...

"Did you come to deliver a message to me?" he asked Shayne, once the conversation had drifted into silence for too long to hope to continue.

Next to him, she shook her head, slightly. "You have everything I know about him. You have a top-class team. Use them. Find Vincent. Stop him." She fixed Harry with suddenly much harder grey eyes. "I came here tonight to say thank you and to assure you that I am still doing everything I can, on my end."

Harry could only imagine that her extensive contacts list was getting raided and every favour she was ever owed was being called in. From the look in her eyes, this meant everything to her. And, after learning of the details, he finally understood. This was about more than revenge for a team. This was something much more personal than that. This man he was chasing had taken something precious away from her and she was asking him, as an old friend, to help her take her revenge. That her revenge coincided with stopping a terrorist attack was a boon.

"We'll find him," he assured Shayne, quietly, not quite sure why he was going to let her walk away from him, now, and not call it in – not quite sure if it was the right thing to do, by protocol, but knowing he could not do anything else. His gut told him that last part. Or maybe his heart. He wasn't sure which parts of him were which, these days.

"I know you'll try."

"It was good to see you, to know you're still well."

"As well as can be expected." A moment passed in heavy silence. "I'm sorry I can't stay longer, Harry, but I shouldn't really risk getting seen together. You know the story."

"I know the story," he nodded. Then, struck by an idea, he asked, "Do you remember the old drop we used to have, in Finchley?"

Shayne nodded, frowning slightly.

"Well, if you need to contact me, do so through there." He told her. "It won't be watched."

She nodded again and, for a moment, it looked to Harry like she might lean forwards and hug him. In the end, however, she chose not to, drawing back away from the railing and straightening her coat.

Harry watched her, not quite sure whether he was disappointed by the lack of contact. He was not generally a physical person but there were some nights when it would be nice to feel another person against him. Even if it was only a friend and not the woman he really wanted, with her arms around him.

"I'll see you soon, Harry," Shayne told him, softly. "Once this is all over, we'll talk. Catch up."

She stood a moment longer, then brushed her unruly hair back behind her ears and turned, heading back up the embankment and away from him.

Harry watched her go. The anger had left his body, but he was feeling strangely more melancholy than he had been before their encounter. He missed having a friend around. He missed human contact that was not strictly professional. He was so sick of this, he thought, turning away from the river and Shayne had heading further south, along the bank. He was sick of feeling empty and lonely. Ruth had put out her hand to him, he wasn't going to brush it away again. So what if it failed, he added, to himself. He needed to do something. He couldn't go on like he was, now.

Following the path as it banked away from the river, he slid his hands in his pockets and made a decision. He would tell her, he told himself. He would tell Ruth everything and see if she was still holding out her hand, at the end of it. If she was, then he was going to take it, no matter the circumstances, no matter the risk. He was going to take it and they were going to move forwards. He was done with feeling empty.

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