A/N: Once again we want to thank all the Burners out there that have read and reviewed our little tale of forbidden love on the run with such great enthusiasm and for all the favorites and retweets. We hope to be able to update more regularly with somewhat shorter (for us anyway) offerings.
BE BRAVE LITTLE ANGEL
Chapter Twenty
Mason Gilroy strolled casually along the third floor hallway of the five star Westminster Hotel, the heels of his Oxford brogues hitting the black and white marble tiled floor echoing along the dark wood lined walls of the corridor as he made his way towards the dual elevators, one of which would take him back down to the ground floor.
If there was one thing the blond haired killer loved in a victim, it was one who was so wonderfully predictable as the nuclear scientist he had been sent to silence. The man always stayed in the same hotel when he came to London and he always went down for dinner at eight and returned to his room at eleven after having a night cap of a single malt whisky.
Reaching the elevator, the former spy for hire stood to one side as the doors slid open, making room for the tall middle-aged academic to disembark. Yes, predictable people always made the job so much easier. He had thought about slipping a little something into the man's drink, but after his failure with Westen and the Glenanne girl, he decided to go with something with a little more flash.
Smirking, Gilroy watched as the older man came to a stop outside of Room 302, his hand patting and then reaching inside the pocket of his jacket to retrieve his room key. Something with a little more flash… and bang…
Satisfied he had the right target, the assassin stepped into the elevator smiling happily that he was two minutes away from collecting a lot of money. Pulling out his cell phone, he keyed in the number of his most recent employer; it was time to give them the good news.
"You might want to look out of your hotel window." Nothing impressed a client more than getting the chance to witness what their money was paying for.
"It's off," came a blunt reply.
"Off?"
"There's a revocation order on you... I'm sorry, Mason, but you know what that means. Lose my number and get out of there."
The former spy, and now persona non grata thanks to the British Intelligence Services, stared at his phone in disbelief, his mind for the first time in many years going blank. The sound of the lift doors opening caused the assassin's survival instincts to kick in and, as he stepped into the deserted lobby, Gilroy tossed the phone into the nearest rubbish bin and strode outside.
He needed to get out of the city as fast as he could. The hired gun looked up and down the street. There were security cameras on nearly every corner, outside every place of business, recording the faces of every pedestrian and vehicle passing by. Damn it, he should have never come to London. It was his own pride which had made him think Richard Chambers wouldn't react in the way he had.
Pursing his lips and dipping his head down, Gilroy stepped out onto the pavement and crossed over the road. He should have swallowed his pride and gone to that meeting, taken the reprimand from the pencil pushing civil servant and then gone his own way. Now he had not only lost the good graces of MI6; but with that order hanging over his head he was completely out in the cold.
Turning back, he stared up at the third floor room that he had covered all the soft furnishings with odorless kerosene and left a rather nifty little remote detonator hidden in the hem of the equally delightful, highly flammable curtains. Reaching into his trouser pocket his fingers wrapped around the trigger switch.
Watching with a smile as the third floor window was blown out and flames licked up the outside of the building, Mason Gilroy knew he wasn't going to get paid, but he had made damned sure he wasn't the only one who got burned.
()()()()()()
People with happy families don't become spies. A bad childhood is the perfect background for covert ops - you don't trust anyone, you're used to getting smacked around and you never get homesick…
Letting his head loll back against the couch, Michael stared up at the row of photographs and momentos lining the oak mantle piece above what had been earlier in the evening a roaring fire but was now little more than a few glowing embers amongst the pile of ash.
The sheer generosity of the Coleraines and Esme Hooley was overwhelming to the former spy who was more accustomed to using smooth manipulation or the threat of violence to get what he wanted. But all his considerable skills in negotiation had been unnecessary in the face of the surprisingly honest decency portrayed by the aged trio, who had welcomed two complete strangers into their home without asking for a single thing in return.
"Come along nar, get tham coats off and get washed up. Am serving tea," Cathy had called out as soon as they had walked through the door after their quick reconnaissance of the farm yard.
The meal laid out on the large kitchen table had been as good and plentiful as anything Maeve Glenanne had ever served up for Sunday dinner for her large family and far better than anything his own mother ever produced even on her best day: a roasted leg of lamb seasoned with sprigs of rosemary, peas, carrots, roast turnips and potatoes all smothered in a thick gravy.
He remembered how they had all been a little stunned at the vigour with which his tiny delicate framed spouse had attacked the food she had piled up on her plate, eating as if it was the first decent meal she had had in months. The guilt he had felt then washed over him again. It had been over a week since Fiona had had a chance to eat anything that hadn't come out of a can or been cooked on a camping stove at a time when she wasn't only supposed to be nourishing herself but their baby too.
The dark haired man glanced down to where his now thoroughly sated girlfriend napped peacefully with her head on his lap and her legs taking up the rest of the room on the three-seater couch.
Smiling wistfully, Michael softly stroked his fingers through his sleeping beloved's short shorn hair as he wondered if they could ever have a life like the one displayed in the mostly black and white photographs on the Coleraine's mantle piece. A church wedding surrounded by family and friends was most likely impossible, but a healthy child and somewhere safe far away from the troubles of Ireland and out of reach of his own multitude of enemies, surely that wasn't too much to wish for?
Chewing on his lower lip, Michael felt a small pang of remorse for the lies he had spun. The Coleraines and Esme Hooley were good people he had no doubt of that; however, telling them the truth would put them in danger if any of the many people hunting them came to the farm.
Perhaps it was exhaustion setting in now that they had found a temporary safe haven, post operational stress as it were, or maybe it was being surrounded by what appeared to be genuinely kind loving family, something he'd had no experience with or some combination of the two. But the ex-operative suddenly found himself brought up short by his own musings. Since when did Michael Westen have hope for a peaceful little family of his own or even sympathy for his assets?
A slight change in position caused the tightly wrapped poultice, which Cathy had insisted on applying to his bruised ribs after they had finished their hearty meal, to slip and a little of the now cold, mashed-up comfrey to leak out against his borrowed shirt.
Gently touching a hand to his side to stop the liquid from running down his ribs and onto his still slumbering lover, Michael couldn't help but think about all the care and attention which had come his way from the two elderly ladies.
At first it had made him very uncomfortable when they had insisted he strip off his shirt and then had to listen to their sympathetic mutterings as Esme had applied a hot folded cloth containing the crushed and boiled comfrey leaves to his side while Cathy carefully wrapped his torso with a wide elasticated bandage. He wasn't used to being fussed over, not even by the woman who had abandoned her family to be with him.
Stop playing the Boy Scout. It doesn't suit you...The voice of Larry Sizemore intruded on his thoughts, making his blood run cold. You know what you've got to do. Stop wasting your time and being such a dammed softie... Get the girlfriend out of the way and then deal with the old folks... The spectre of his old partner callously passed on his advice. Think of it as a mercy killing if you have to... You know it makes sound tactical sense... And all those times he'd coldly committed tactically sound homicides started to rush to forefront of his mind, threatening to overwhelm him.
Closing his eyes, the former ace operative attempted to banish the ghost of his old mentor back to the fiery pit where he must surely be residing. Nobody has to die, Lare... I'm better than that. I've learned another way. Michael forcefully pushed the memories of another isolated farmhouse away.
He knew why the ghost of the deceased rogue agent was haunting his thoughts and in truth his choice to take no action was worrying him more than he cared to admit.
Was impending fatherhood really effecting his judgement and making him soft?
A little over an hour ago, Gerry had put aside the book which had been resting on his lap and risen to his feet, signalling to the sisters who had been keeping their guest entertained all evening with tales about their own sons that it was time to retire. "Well, wa're off ta bed, laddie, tis an early start in tha morning. If ya hear us moving around, thar's no reason fer ye ta get up, less ya want ta."
"Will ya an' Kim nae be joining us at Mass, Bobby?" Cathy had gently tutted.
He had known it was Saturday evening and he should have guessed that his hosts would be church goers, because although there weren't any of the usual religious decorations on show, he did recall that Esme had mentioned that she planned on taking flowers to their parents' graves in the morning after the service. Though he'd had to sit through more than one Mass during his time in Ireland, Michel McBride had avoided it whenever possible, a combination of worry that he would not perform the religious ritual properly and his own discomfort with the spectacle of "high church."
Caught flat-footed, he had been unable to come up with a suitable reply quickly enough. Luckily, Gerry had come to his rescue.
"Leave tham be, woman. Thar both done in. Tha young missus has been asleep all evening. A long lie in will do tham far more good than listening ta one o' Father Declan's sermons." The old man had winked at him and then, using one of crutches like a shepherd's staff, had gently herded his wife and sister in law towards the stairs.
"Make sure ya turn off all tha lights an' check tha doors befer ya come up, lad."
"An' thar's some hot chocolate in a tin by tha kettle if ya want a drink befer bed," Cathy had added, as she stood aside so she could keep a close eye on her injured husband as he made his way up the narrow creaking staircase balanced precariously as he was on his crutches.
He twisted around as far as Fiona and his damaged ribs would allow, as close to panicking as he had been since the mother of his child had keeled over fainting in his arms that morning. His highly trained mind screamed out that allowing the three senior citizens out of his sight to go to church was a step too far. You're slipping, sport, the voice of Tom Card counseled. This is why you're supposed to think with your big head and not your little one. Some mess you gotten yourself into this time, hot shot. So, you're really going to put your fate in the hands of three untrained super chatty civilians?
At the moment, with them all in the house, he was in control of the situation. If anything happened, the ex-spy would be there to manage the problem. Letting them go off alone meant he was going to have to trust them not to accidentally reveal they had two visitors fresh from the wilds of the Slieveamon Forest staying at their remote home. If that happened, there was no telling what he might have to do to ensure their escape. The amount of collateral damage would be unpredictable.
Yer not gonna last long in this world if you donnae trust anyone, McBride. Fiona's words of advice from another time had helped settle his fears then. If ya spend yar time looking over yar shoulder ta see who's coming after ya, ya cannae see whare yer going... Sometimes ya just have to trust yar gut.
It took a lot for him to put his trust in near strangers, regardless of how kind and helpful they had been because his gut was telling him that one wrong word and their chance of a little respite would be ruined and, if they were lucky enough to slip past their pursuers, they would be back on the run instead of making a planned escape to another country.
"For a spy, loyalty is a strange thing. Your job is to deceive, to live among your enemies, to perform dark deeds for a noble purpose. You can have loyalty to a lot of things, the Company, your country, your partner, but at the end of the day, it's that noble purpose that's supposed to guide you through the darkness. When you lose sight of that, the darkness is all there is."
The words Station Chief Rayna Kopec had spoken to him shortly after he had single-handedly taken apart a whole Russian special ops team came back to him. He had been straying into the darkness far too willingly back then and in the process had gained a fearsome reputation. She had been trying to warn the young agent under her command against letting his loyalty to his senior partner lead him into doing something terrible.
Was that what he was doing? Was he letting the spectre of Larry get to him now?
Nobody knew exactly where they left the forest, nobody saw them get into Esme's car and nobody other than the three people upstairs had seen them get out of the car at the farm, he reasoned, though it was in his nature as well as in his training to expect the worse from any given scenario.
Admittedly, the tracker Liam had employed would eventually find the trail they left and then from that moment on, Fiona's oldest brother would expand the search outwards. But the Coleraine's farm was at least twenty miles away from where Esme picked them up which meant as long as they stayed out of sight, the chances of the Glenannes finding them was slim.
The bigger danger was that by now the sniper whose corpse he had left in the forest must have missed at least one check in, which meant sooner rather than later either Tom Card or Richard Chambers would send out a search party looking for their man and once the body was discovered, the real manhunt would begin.
But none of that mattered just yet, because his gut was telling him the head of household had believed the tale he had told of a fellow soldier running off with the woman he loved against the wishes of her family. It had been pure spy craft playing on the old man's loyalty to the regiment he had served in during the Second World War and the romance of forbidden love.
Shifting slightly, the one-time terror of Kiev let his gaze linger on the one photograph that had given him a clue on how to win the trust of the aged farmer, Gerry Coleraine standing ramrod straight against a brick wall wearing his British army uniform with four medals pinned proudly to his chest.
There was no need to panic or act rashly, Michael decided. His tale was doing exactly as he had hoped, tugging at the heartstrings of the man, his wife and sister in law and turning the trio into perfect assets. Their cooperation was more valuable at the moment than acting pre-emptively to prevent a scenario that might not happen. Fiona was right… sometimes you just had to trust…
Stifling a yawn, the faux Irishman decided it was better to get some rest while he could than to obsess over things he couldn't control at the moment. The guest room on the upper floor was a more defensible position than sleeping on the couch together, though it offered less in terms of ease of escape. Michael debated briefly before realizing that attempting to carry his beloved up the narrow staircase with the poultice plastered to his ribs starting to ooze out was a recipe for disaster. Waking her up enough to get her upstairs was the safer albeit less chivalrous course of action.
Shaking his own head again at the changes taking place within him, the former agent extraordinaire gently shook his sleeping lover's shoulder, fairly confident for once that she wouldn't startle awake.
He allowed his hand slip down her arm, coming to rest lightly on the slight swell of her stomach, clearly visible with the flow of the flowery dress pinned beneath her body. The auburn haired beauty resting on his lap had captured his heart and the life within her that they had created together was more important to him now than anything he might have left behind, when or how that had happened and that he still didn't know quite how to cope with his new reality didn't really matter.
Michael vowed he would do whatever was necessary to keep them safe without resorting to becoming the monster he had once been. He owed all of them that much.
()()()()()
Twenty two hundred miles and several time zones away to the east, someone else was thinking about the changes that had come over Michael Westen and the impact those seismic shifts had had on her own life. The slender brunette's body may have tightly enfolded in the arms of her new lover, as they laid together in the predawn darkness in his almost palatial dacha outside of Moscow, but her mind was still focused on the dark haired spy who'd agreed to marry her two years ago.
Unable to sleep, Samantha Keyes found herself reviewing their brief relationship, searching for clues as to where it had gone wrong. Being with Michael had been so easy. He really got her in a way no one else had and she had understood that his job was his first priority and arranged her life around that accordingly. He had been everything she had wanted in a partner, in crime and in life.
"Think about it. We each have our own lives. You have your work, I have mine. Sometimes I help you when you want me to and I never ask you to help me. We have our own money. We live in hotels and luxury apartments. We don't keep tabs on each other. We don't question what happened on the others' job. We've never asked, never told and covers are what they are."
It had all seemed so perfect… they had completed a job for the CIA while dancing the night away on New Year's Eve in Krysha Ballroom of the Grand Hotel Europe. Returning to cold vodka and chilled caviar in their covers' hotel room, he had made love to her and she had proposed to him.
"Michael, we'll never fight over a mortgage or kids or who takes out the garbage. We can have all the good things in our lives, none of the bad things other people deal with, and we'll have each other too." She had held her breath until he'd smiled, a look of bemusement coming over his face.
"Well, when you put it that way, why not?"
She had thought then that he was as happy with the arrangement as she was. Within weeks Michael was off on another assignment for the CIA, one that hadn't included her, and over the months that followed, Samantha had seen him here and there in hotels rooms around Western Russia, where he slept more than he spoke, not even bothering to spin tales about what he had been doing on the job as they had always done before. Looking back on it now, their time together then seemed more like stolen moments of stress relief sex than their love making of the past. But she had been content.
Until her handsome raven haired fiancé had vanished altogether.
The brunette wondered again, as she had many times since learning that Michael had been caught in an explosion at a St. Petersburg oil refinery at the end of his mission, if the injuries, the head trauma in particular, had had something to do with his behavior thereafter. Even the spy's training officer, the unpleasant troll who'd had her snatched off the Moscow streets to put her in an interrogation cell in the CIA clandestine offices in London, even that man also seemed to think it was a possibility.
But she knew after going through the dossier Charlie had deposited on the table over breakfast yesterday morning that she was lying to herself even now, as the well connected Kazakhstani had no doubt intended when he'd delivered the materials. The part-time Company asset and talented master thief for hire had also worked for Abishuly Nazarbayev before, during and after her time with the CIA agent she'd become engaged to, and that man had delivered on his promises.
She had wanted to know what Michael had been doing during his two-year absence, some of which Samantha had had second-hand information about, and she had wanted to know about the woman who had apparently stolen his heart and was, if she had to guess, going to bear his child as well.
The Michael Westen she had known had no interest in children or homes or white picket fences. But the man in the photographs, some grainy and distance, some focused with painful clarity, was clearly in love with the petite redhead who was featured in more of the pictures than not, especially the current ones. She wondered how his bosses could have missed what was so blatantly obvious.
And she was afraid for him, the spy who'd gone rogue and run off with an Irish paramilitary guerrilla, running from his employers and her family apparently. When Charlie had put the word out through his many contacts in the acquisitions and exchange business, the heavy set man with the black eyes had let her know that if someone knew where her apparently now former fiancé was, he would find out, but there would be many other people also seeking this information. As deeply as Michael had hurt her, she didn't want to see him harmed the way her new protector was hinting at.
She had come to Abishuly Nazarbayev's bedroom that night knowing the cost of her answers. With Michael's bosses terrorizing her at will and him on the run for his life, she knew what she had to do to survive. Tatiana Samoilova had slept with this man during in their working relationship, mostly as thief and fence although they had done other jobs that bordered on espionage on occasion.
But as Samantha Keyes had stood at the foot of Charlie's bed and let the gauzy night robe she was wearing drop to the floor, she had felt naked in every sense of the word. It was her and not some version of herself who the powerful Kazakhstani had taken into his arms and made love to. She knew the difference in her heart between what she'd just experienced and what she'd had before.
And the brunette wondered if she had ever really known that other man. Was the Michael Westen she had been engaged to just another cover ID, just another façade he had shown her and the rest of the world until true love had blind-sided him? Had there ever really been anything between them or had she been nothing more than a helpful albeit gullible asset to the spy who'd said 'yes' to her?
One way or other, Michael's former fiancée was determined to have the answer to that question.
()()()()()()
From the outside, the rundown trailer parked on the middle of a piece of wasteland on the edge of the Killarney suburbs looked no different than it had every day since the morning it had turned up six months earlier pulled by a wreck of a car, which had ceased working just before Christmas and had been burned out not long thereafter.
Inside however things were very different.
The highly polished china and glass ornaments, which had filled every flat surface, had been smashed to pieces and lay scattered on the floor. The built-in was furniture broken and ripped out; the U-shaped couch, kitchen counters and wall cabinets were all destroyed. Lying amongst the debris was the bloody and battered body of the old gypsy, one reedy arm draped limply over the shaggy corpse of his faithful old dog.
Further inside, in the smaller of the two bedrooms, Robin Hennessy began to stir, soft groans escaping from between split and swollen lips as she rolled over onto her side.
"Ya talk nar or Am gonna take it out on yar daddy while me brudder sees ta ya. Is thot what ya want? Ya want me ta kill tha ol' man cuz I donnae think he can take much more o' this little girl." He'd grinned then, looking her up and down. "Or mabbe ya jus' wanna spend some time wif Kevin, I hear tell he's quite tha ladies man."
The final words of her attacker echoed through her head, driving her to fight through the pain and, by using one hand on her bed and the other on the top of her chest of drawers, the beaten young woman made it to her feet.
"Daddy!" she tried to shout, but the word came out as little more than a croak. Swallowing thickly, she took a breath and tried again. "Daddy?"
Getting no response, Robin slowly made her way to the door, stepping over the clothing which had been tossed on to the floor, doing her best not to notice the blood splattered and smeared on the walls and over her bed covers... Her blood from when the men who had invaded her home had grown tired of her refusal to answer their questions.
She had been in bed fast asleep when Tyree, her father's ancient Lurcher, had woken her with a loud threatening bark followed by a yelp. Before she had had a chance to rise and investigate the noise, she'd heard her father cry out and the muffled voices of three others. She had been reaching for the hockey stick she kept under her bed when the thin wood veneer door of her bedroom had caved in under the assault of a man's boot.
Blinking away the memories of what happened after she had been disarmed and dragged from her bed, the dark haired gypsy girl steeled herself for what she expected to find in the other room.
Her father had taken such a beating that she had barely recognized him when she'd been brought kicking and screaming to the living area. Tyree was already dead, killed by one of the two bastards holding silenced pistols in their hands. But her da, he had been alive, bleeding from his mouth, eyes and ears, but still alive when the men's patience had finally run its course and she'd been taken back to her room.
Wiping a shaking hand over her tear filled eyes, she gingerly made her way over the pots, pans and smashed plates which covered the floor, her heart heavy with dread.
The three men, brothers Martin and Kevin and Pat Moffatt, older but subordinate to the other two had taken turns attacking a man old enough to be their grandfather.
The sight which greeted her was even worse than she had prepared herself for. Sinking down on to her hands and knees, Robin crawled over the splintered china and glass which had once been treasured ornaments bought over the thirty five years of her parents' happily married life. Taking hold of her father's head, his devastated daughter cradled the ruined mass in her arms and wept.
"Am sorry… donnae leave me, daddy… donnae leave…"
It was too late, she knew that without checking for a pulse, his body already cold and stiff.
Overwhelmed by her grief, Robin lost all track of time, rocking back and forth slowly, gently stroking her fingers through her beloved father's shock of blood-matted grey hair, she prayed for his immortal soul and the slow painful death of the men that had taken him from her, Martin, Kevin and their older albeit less wiser friend, Pat Moffatt.
She focused on what she could remember of their appearance, burning the memory of their faces into her mind. Only when her sorrow had run its course and she had filled the cold dark hole in her heart with all the hate and rage she possessed, did the bloodied young gypsy woman get to her feet.
Her brothers couldn't help her with this. They would have no more idea how to find culprits than she did. No, she needed the man they had been looking for...
Digging out her jacket from under the pile of clothes which had been flung on the floor, she went through the pockets searching for a piece of paper. The bastards had been looking for Liam Glenanne, well, she would make sure they got to meet him – and she'd make sure she was there when they got their wish.
()()()()()
On a side note, anyone interested in the full story of Samantha's marriage proposal to Michael (and also what happened when he broke up with her in the canon timeline), the details can be found in Jedi Skysinger's M-rated tale "Who We Leave Behind – After Ireland." See you all next week!