"I'm nearing the floor."
"I see you." Q watched Bond use pure upper-body strength to haul himself onto the scaffold on the 5th floor. "Bathroom window's on the left-hand side. Quiet as you can. Whoever's in there is in the bedroom next door."
"They have their music on very loud. I'll doubt they'll notice if I used their toilet," Bond quipped, and sure enough, Q could hear the heavy metal playing in the background; bit of a stereotype.
"How charming, 007," Q replied with an eye-roll, glancing down at his screen to get the pass code for the front door. "You in yet?"
"Almost," Bond whispered back. He glanced up in time to see the man disappear through the window.
"I'm coming up. Let me know when it's clear to approach the flat," Q told Bond as he closed up his laptop. He jumped out of the car and headed across the road. He could still hear the heavy metal playing through his earpiece as he punched in the code, slipping through the front door with ease and heading towards where the blueprints indicated the stairs were. The music went dead as he reached the second floor; he stopped walking so as to listen to what was happening inside the flat.
"Come out. I know you're there," a woman called out to Bond. Fuck.
"Is she the only target?" Q asked quietly, continuing his journey upstairs when he noticed a couple heading towards the stairwell.
Tap.
One tap meant 'yes', two for 'no', and three for 'don't know'. He almost sighed in relief; 007 could take one person.
"Armed?"
Tap. Tap. Tap.
"Find out," Q demanded harshly, just as the woman called out again. It was quiet on the other end and all Q could hear were two pairs of feet. The woman's moving frantically round the flat and Bond's quieter, more practised footsteps.
Tap. Armed. God damn it.
"Try talking her down first. Then engage if she doesn't cooperate." M wanted someone questioned and body bags couldn't talk.
"Put the gun down. No one needs to get hurt we just want to talk." Bond's voice was firm yet had a soft edge.
"I'll keep hold of it, but thanks for the offer." Not as easy as all that, then? "What organisation are you from?"
Bond didn't say anything and it took a couple of seconds for Q to realise he was waiting for permission to tell her. "Go ahead."
"MI6." That was followed by a hollow laugh from the woman, which made Q frown and quicken his steps - he was only just reaching the fourth floor.
"He told me you might come. He also told me what to do if you did."
"What did he tell you to do?"
"This." The gunshot rang out loud and clear through the earpiece, soon followed by an explosion that made the stairwell shudder and Q's knees give way. His hands hit the cool stone floor as he released a harsh breath and for a moment there was a deadly silence, only for a moment, before chaos descended on MI6's Quartermaster.
The fire alarm sounded – a shrill ringing – just before the other residents began exiting their respective flats. Women were screaming, children crying, and men shouting, but all Q could hear was the static in his earpiece. He knew Bond was alive as their bond was still intact, though that didn't mean the man wasn't gravely injured. He was starting to get jostled by people running past him so he climbed to his feet and ran up the last few steps before entering the fifth-floor corridor. He could see the door to the flat, and unfortunately for Q, there was no Double-oh making a quick exit. He pulled off his earpiece, pocketing it knowing that it was useless now. Q fished out his phone, at the same time speed dialling Tanner, who picked up on the second ring.
"There's been an explosion," Q told him before the man had even said anything. There was silence for a few seconds before the man answered. "Yes. It's been reported. Emergency services are on their way."
"Bond's still in there." He took a step in the direction of the apartment.
"Get yourself out of there, Q. Wait for the fire crews." Q could hear the man patching the call through to M's office.
"I'm nearly at the door." He was only about a meter away now. No point turning around when he had already come this far, was there?
"Q. 007 can look after himself. There maybe someone else in there with him and you are not trained to engage an enemy."
"I have to." Q was reaching for the door handle now, with his cardigan sleeve pulled over his hand encase the metal was hot.
"What's happening?" M's voice demanded. Q terminated the phone call, not wanting M to order him to stop.
He took a deep breath and pushed the door handle down. He took in the devastation in the flat; he could see straight through into the living room from his vantage point in the doorway. The woman was lying on the floor, clearly dead; next to her were the remains of a computer. He moved into the flat, noticing that smoke was beginning to gather on the living room ceiling as furnishing caught fire. Q headed straight for the bathroom, which was the first door on the left, and slipped into it. Bond lay on the floor, clearly having been knocked out from the blast but otherwise looked unharmed. He sunk to his knees beside the man and began shaking him to try and wake him. The blue eyes soon snapped open, alert and taking in his surroundings.
"What the hell are you doing here?" the agent asked, jumping to his feet, aiming his gun dead ahead.
"Rescuing you." He'd never felt relief like it to see the man on his feet ready for battle again.
"We're getting out of here. Suspect's dead." James grabbed his forearm and started dragging him towards the bathroom door when Q caught a whiff of something through the smoke fumes.
"There's a child here."
"A what!?" the blond almost shouted, giving Q an incredulous look.
"A child - I can smell them, the bedroom most likely," Q reasoned.
"I can't smell anything."
"Of course not. You're an Alpha. Get the child, Bond." The man just nodded, hauling Q out of the bathroom and giving him a push towards the door.
"Go. Wait for me at the stairs." And with that Bond moved further into the flat. Q wanted to go with him, but that was most definitely an order. He followed the instructions, running out of the flat and back to the stairs. He got there just in time to see Bond exit the flat, carrying a bundled up baby that looked no older than 18 months.
Once the man reached him, he passed the baby over to Q who automatically rested him against his hip, silently looking for injuries.
"He seems to be fine. Though I did find crushed-up sleeping pills next to his bottles, which explains why the explosion didn't wake him." Bond the gently pushed him into the stairwell. "Come on. We need to contact M."
Q walked as quickly as he could down the stairs with the added weight of the baby. Bond stayed behind him the whole way, only sheathing his gun when they exited the building. The fire crew were just arriving as their faces were chilled by the cold night air. Q took in the area as any good MI6 worker should; the street was full of people crying and trying to call their loved ones.
"We'll stand across the street." Bond told him, nodding across the road. Once they got there, Bond sat him down, and Q pulled the sleeping baby to sit in his lap before pulling out his phone. The agent remained standing, clearly watching the area for suspicious activity. He had five missed calls on his phone, two from Tanner and three from M - as if on cue, his phone buzzed again; M.
"Q," he answered, trying to keep his voice low, not that anyone else would notice them in all this activity.
"What the bloody hell is happening?" M was angry.
"We're out. There was an explosion in the flat," Q told him.
"Fatalities."
"The suspect, a woman."
"How can a simple mission like this go so bloody wrong." M's voice rose to a shout at the end of the sentence, making Q hold the phone slightly away from his ear.
"They were waiting for MI6. They planned the explosion for if they were ever found."
"They? I thought there was only a woman?"
"She spoke of a man telling her what she should do if we happened to turn up. Listen to the recordings; they should have transmitted to the mission file by now." Fingers crossed if the earpiece hadn't been too damaged, but Q was confident in his equipment's fail-safes.
"Alright. We'll have a team sent out to retrieve the body and anything else in that flat once the situation is under control." M sounded calmer now.
"M. There's something else." M just grunted and Q took that as a sign that he should continue. "There was a child... Is a child. We took him from the flat."
"Is he injured?" M asked after a brief pause, probably to digest the information.
"No, he's asleep. Bond found crushed-up sleeping pills next to his bottles." Not sure if that was important for M to know, but told him anyway.
"Drugged?" His voice had gone dangerously quiet and Q could practically hear the profanities that M was calling the baby's parents. "The suspect's child?"
"Most likely, yes."
"Excellent." Q frowned. The child had just lost its mother - there was nothing excellent about it. "Alright. Here's what I want you to do. Book into a hotel and I'll send a medical team to your room to check you all over. Tomorrow we should have the body and possessions and you and Bond can bring the child down with the clean-up team... I suppose you could travel in a car because I'm not sure Bond can cope with your fear of flying and a child. Find out all you can from your hotel room but I have a hunch that that child is the man's that the woman spoke of. Perhaps we can lure him out of the woodwork."
"Okay."
"E-mail me the hotel details and anything you happen to discover. I'll see you at some point tomorrow." With that, M terminated the call, and Q looked up at Bond who was clearly waiting for their next orders.
"We need to find a hotel, then M's sending a medical team." He didn't need to add that there was more as James would know that already and know that this wasn't the place to talk about it.
"There's a Hilton not far from here," Bond told him, as he helped Q to his feet while trying not to jostle the child. They exited the scene where the police had arrived and were trying to get all the inhabitants' details. Luckily, no one saw them. When they arrived at the hotel, Bond went inside to book them a room before coming back out and escorting Q and the baby up to a family room. Apparently, the Hilton didn't supply baby cots but what they had done was place a single mattress on the floor between two double beds with a thin yellow sheet on. Q immediately lay the baby down on it so he could sleep more comfortably, and also to free his hands up to e-mail M.
"What did you tell the hotel?" Q asked.
"What do you mean?" Bond asked, while peeling his suit jacket off and sitting on the bed nearest the door.
"Well, surely they thought it was strange for us to be booking into a room with a baby and no luggage?" Q bent down and took a quick peek at the label inside the baby's top so he could request that the medical team bring supplies with them.
"Hotels like this don't ask questions... Well, Beta receptionists don't question Alphas anyway." He lay back on the bed and gave a tired sigh. "ETA on the medical team."
"Erm..." Q stalled while opening up the reply email. "Thirty to forty-five minutes."
"I wonder if we ordered Chinese, which would be quicker," the blond mused, getting up from the bed and heading to the bathroom.
"You're weird sometimes, 007," Q told him with a frown, while starting the process of securing the body and flat's possessions and organising for them to be collected by the clean-up team during the night.
"I'm going to have a shower. Order some Room Service, will you." With that, the bathroom door clicked shut, and Q was left alone with the sleeping child.