Chapter 25 – Shabaan
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December 31, 2011
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Over the years, Ruth and Harry had somewhat perfected the art of walking at the same speed down corridors. Though she stood only up to his cheek and his legs were a great deal longer, they somehow managed to carry it off without having to alter their strides too much. It must be practise, she thought, as they headed across the Grid, over to the point where they would part from each other – he heading to his office and she heading back to her desk on the far side. It must just be the years of practice. She had stood at his side for longer than anyone else.
"...and of course," Harry was speaking, his tone terse and strained as he clearly ran through all of what was going on inside his head, trying to formulate a plan. "If the Met have told us then its already through the system and the Americans will know within a matter of minutes. God knows what's going to happen when they find out. It's not going to be pretty."
Ruth inclined her head, slightly, watching Harry's face; his furrowed brow and his worried eyes, the soft shadow of his cheekbone, the slight parting of his lips. He was anxious, more anxious than she had seen him in a very long time, at work anyway. And he had every right to be. This was a bad situation. The Syrians were already in the area, about to launch an attack against the Americans. This Sanderson fellow was also in contact with Price, of course, making the situation even more complicated. Sanderson was an unknown – a man, like Price, without a mission or agenda. They didn't know where he was going to strike but they did not know he was serious. Twenty-five thousand pounds serious. And his sympathies ran far more parallel to Price's than the Syrians' did.
"Harry?"she caught Harry mid-rant.
He turned his head, focussing down on her.
"I know you said to put a junior analyst on Sanderson but I think I can do more good," she stated, a little nervously. Asking him for a favour right was a little rich, considering how she had been treating him these last few days – considering how she had rebuffed him earlier. He had every right to turn around and tell her to stop questioning him and bloody well do as she was told. He was still her boss, after all.
Harry didn't snap, however, just raised an eyebrow enquiringly.
"How so?" he asked.
"Shabaan and the two other Syrian nationals specialise in attacks using surface to air missiles," Ruth stated, coming to a halt, Harry pausing across from her to meet her gaze. "If there is only enough anthrax to make one sale then it makes sense, to me at least, that Price would have sold it to Sanderson. Anti-government attackers like to use irony – to use the government's own weapons against them and all of that. Besides which," she added, "Price and Sanderson have the same objective. It makes more sense for him to have sold the Anthrax powder to Sanderson. I know that the consequences of this attack on the embassy are... massive, but I think that those we risk by not concentrating on Sanderson are far greater."
She watched, anxiously, as Harry considered this.
His forehead lined a little deeper. His eyes slid off her to concentrate on a spot somewhere in-between them. His fingers tightened ever-so-slightly against the tablet he was still holding in his hand.
"There is still a valid risk that the Syrians have the Anthrax."
"And we'll know that within ten minutes for sure," Ruth told him back. "Erin and Dimitri are on their way over. There is a SO19 team surrounding the place as we speak. I'm not going to find anything that Tariq can't, by himself. What we need is information on Sanderson. Trust my judgement on this, Harry," she urged him, before realising the implications behind her words – realising it was what she had screamed at him for not doing the other night.
Harry's eyes flickered for a second, then a muscle twitched in his jaw. He straightened, meeting her gaze more steadily. "You'll be on your own with Jenny," he warned her, motioning towards the junior analyst, beavering away on the other side of the Grid. "I can't spare anyone else."
"I can do that," Ruth assured him, feeling relief that he had not denied her request based on the words she had chosen to use. "We'll get started and, if the other threat clears, then we can get the others to join us. I'll streamline some tasks to make it easier."
Harry nodded and there was a strange little moment where she thought he might say something else to her – something personal and warm, like he used to. Then he looked down again.
"I've got to get in touch with the Home Secretary. No doubt, by now, he's inundated by Americans." No sooner had the words left his mouth than his phone had started to ring. Harry gave a little sigh and quirk of his eyebrow. "Here we go..."
Ruth nodded and backed away a step.
"I'll leave you to it."
Picking his phone up, Harry put it up against his ear and began to walk off in the direction of his office. Ruth caught the words "I'm quite sure, Home Secretary," before he got beyond her earshot.
A small tingle of guilt crept up inside her, watching him go. With everything that was going on, tonight, her perspective on what had occurred between her and Harry was beginning to shift. Perhaps she had been too hard on him, she thought, as she stood for a few seconds and watched him walk away. It was odd, considering it for the first time without the potent rage of the first few days after their row. She was still angry with him, now, but something had changed over the last few hours. It was just working in enforced close contact again, she supposed.
On their last few operations, Harry had taken a step back from hands-on work. He had checked in with them routinely but his time had mostly been taken up with political and management matters. His distance, Ruth realised in retrospect, had helped her stoke her anger to a higher degree. For the last hour or so, however, he had been right in there with them, going through intelligence reports, analysing their information from assets, helping Ruth and Shayne and Tariq while Erin and Dimitri ran up their own leads and Calum investigated Price's safehouse in Covent Garden. He had been right there, with them, and, having him right there, Ruth found it harder to be angry with him.
She had been a little harsh, she decided, as Harry made it to his office and disappeared inside, as she turned herself back to her desk and set down the tablet and folder upon it. She had been a little quick to bite at him and it was mainly due to the bashing her ego had taken. In all honesty, she had just never been turned down before and had not been prepared for how mortifying it had been. However, when she thought about it with a calmer perspective, Harry had probably been right to draw back. They had made so many missteps towards each other, over the years, that he was right to be cautious. How he had gone about it, however – what he had said and his refusal to trust her – had been completely wrong.
He was an idiot, she thought, forcing her eyes away from his office window. Right intentions or not, he could be a completely useless human being sometimes. What sort of dozy bugger turns down the opportunity of sex, after all, just because his OCD need for control is not satisfied?
Sighing, she brought up her login screen, hitting the keys a little harder than was necessary until the irritation which had flared in her chest died down. Logging in, she took a chance to look around the room at her colleagues. In the technical suite, Tariq and Shayne were arguing over trajectories. She could hear Erin and Dimitri's comm. link being brought online by the junior officer behind them, the static noise of an assault operation getting underway. For a brief moment, Ruth wondered whether she should have been with them, helping in whatever way she could. Then pragmatic logic took over.
Tariq, Shayne and the two junior officers who were working with them could manage the communications. Harry would be over to oversee them as soon as he had finished his call. She was best utilised over here, with Jenny the junior analyst, digging up anything on Sanderson that they could manage. Setting herself up at her system, she caught Jenny's eye, motioned for her to come over, and got started.
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They delved immediately into background checks performed on Sanderson earlier in the day – the ones which had deemed his threat to national security as 'low'. They traced his personnel details through various corporations back to his early years, growing up near Leeds, on a farm. They learned about the changes in government policy which had led to the Sanderson's farm going under, the poverty they had faced when forced to move into the city centre and scrape a living – both of Sanderson's parents working low-paid part-time jobs to try and put food on the table. They learned of the trouble Sanderson had gotten into at school, the juvenile records for an attack on another boy, the revolution he had undergone in prison when he was incarcerated at the age of sixteen, his emergence as an anti-government, anti-capitalist, pro-militia fanatic. They learned of his contemporaries and cross-checked them against recent action, drawing a blank on that account.
They drew up a profile and listed other searches to be performed, recruiting a junior officer who had come on shift voluntarily after seeing the security update memo – despite having only had a few hours of sleep from his double-shift the night before. The two other officers struggled through the vast majority of Sanderson's blog postings and video uploads on his own website while Ruth delved into the murkier world of what he had posted on other people's pages. She discovered a link to an American militia group who had been advising him on the locating of firearms and read on until he cut contact with that group, having made contact with another lot – and an individual who claimed to have information to sell about government weapons stocks. Close inspection of this claim proved it false but Sanderson seemed to have pursued the idea. Something must have led him to Price, she thought, drawing back from the computer as Harry approached her desk, a tense look on his face. Something must have put the two together and from there on disaster was inevitable.
"How are we doing?" Harry asked, walking over and standing at the other side of her desk, checking his phone with one hand.
"Badly," Ruth admitted openly. "We're finding no lack of information on Sanderson but there was nothing to suggest, before this video he posted today, that he was of any real threat."
"What details did we glean from the video?"
"Nothing but a rambling declaration of his ideology and the apocalyptic vision of the future he foresees for the country under what he views as 'corrupt faux-democratic rule'."
"Bourgeois democracy," Harry voiced, quietly.
"He's a rambling fanatic, Harry." Ruth replied back. "Whether his ideas come from a solid basis or not, he is using them to propagate fear and unrest. He is intending to harm." She reached over and brought up some of the earlier articles posted on his blog. "He glorifies the actions of previous attacks against the civilian population of the city, saying that they are as guilty as the capitalists who run it. They support the cause, buy the overpriced merchandise, live in opulent splendour while the men who built those buildings and farmed that food live in ruin and poverty..." she finished reading and looked back up at him. "He starts making less and less sense as he goes along."
"Any military experience?" asked Harry, as if he could sense where she was going next.
"Got through basic training and three months of service but was dishonourably discharged for action against a senior officer." She pulled a wry smile. "It's not just anti-capitalist dogma either, Harry. He has a chip on his shoulder against all authority figures and an axe to grind with anyone who 'capitulates with the government's agenda'."
Harry wrinkled his nose slightly, upper lip curling.
Ruth felt her eyes drag over him for a few seconds.
"How are Dimitri and Erin getting along?"
"They have the three Syrians identified in an upper level of the building. Pinned down with thermal cameras but they can't move in until they have the go-ahead from the HPA, who are trying to cordon off a perimeter. The Americans are jumpy." He held up his phone. "Its on mute but I've been on the line with CIA London for the last half an hour."
Ruth nodded, feeling a rush of anger at herself as the rest of her anger at Harry began to dribble away. He was a useless, dozy bugger at home because he was so very, very good at what he did here. And she shouldn't have expected him to be both at once. People didn't work that way, she thought, there had to be balance. She shouldn't have expected Harry to know what to do. She shouldn't have expected him to feel comfortable being out of his depth in a situation which he had been stung before. Admittedly, he should have known that those words would hurt her, but he had been drunk, she reasoned. He hadn't thought it through. He was insensitive and thoughtless but he wasn't malicious. He hadn't meant to hurt her.
For just a second or two, she considered reaching out and beckoning him around the desk, finding some excuse to touch him – just a brush of her fingers, just leaning against him as they looked through something together – but she resisted the temptation. She was still a little angry at him and it was best, she thought, if they just left it until after this was all over. Once Price was captured and the Syrians were brought in, once they found Sanderson and the anthrax, once it was all over, she and Harry could talk. Once she felt a little less resentment stirring in her, over her bruised pride.
She was about to speak again and go over possible targets for Sanderson's proposed attack when Harry's phone bleeped loudly. He looked down and frowned.
"NYE party has been evacuated to the opposite end of the complex," he read out loud. "Strike still high risk to civilians. Americans are organising their own strike. Like hell they are..." he added, muttering the last few word and clicking his phone, lifting it to his ear. "Jim, if I see one CIA helicopter in my sky, the Syrian missile will not be the only one flying tonight." A pause, where Ruth heard angry words down the line. "I don't give damn, Jim," Harry responded afterwards. "This is British airspace and you are not authorised. We have people in there now, organising an assault. Any strike you make would risk their lives, in the initial blast, and risk many more by setting off whatever the three men inside have in their possession. Yeah. No. Don't be a bloody fool, Jim, I know what we're up against." Harry glanced over at Ruth and nodded to her, indicating that she should get up and follow him through to the technical suite. "Give me five minutes, that's all I'm asking. Yes. Okay."
Reaching Tariq's lair, he dropped the phone back to his side and threw a dark look over his shoulder to where Ruth was standing, having strode swiftly over.
"The Americans have people at a seven hundred meter radius and one Chinook on a flight path towards central London carrying a laser-targeted missile. This situation needs to be rectified before whomever has their finger on the big red button gets too nervous. We are assuming that the Syrians are holed up in there planning to make their finale at twelve o' clock, for the New Year, but the Americans won't give us any more time. They don't want to wait for infrared confirmation of munitions. I think we're going to have to go in blind."
Ruth felt her stomach clench, slightly.
"What do you need me for?" she asked.
"We have a microphone going in now," Harry explained. It's about all we have time to get in over the next few minutes. Dimitri's fitting it against the wall of the room we think they're in. Shayne can provide real-time translation but I need someone there who is officially on my payroll. Besides," he added, "Its been over twenty years since Shayne has dealt with anything beyond Africa. Your identification of dialect is probably better."
Despite herself, Ruth felt a tingle of pride.
"I'll get a headset on," she told him, moving ahead into the room and over to where Shayne was sitting.
The slightly dishevelled blonde ex-spook held out a pair of headphones, clearly knowing of Harry's intentions before he appeared in the doorway and voiced them to the team. Ruth accepted and moved to sit beside her, nodding to Tariq as he put the comm. link through. Immediately, she could hear the scrabbling and scraping noise of the drill bit tunnelling through the wall. Apart from that, however, there was radio silence. Nobody wanted to risk alerting the Syrians to their presence. Dimitri and one other officer were the only ones inside that floor of the building. Everyone else was hiding downstairs. Quiet. Silent. Like shadows. Like ghosts.
"Mic in," Dimitri whispered down the line, as there was more shuffling as the microphone wire slipped through the wall.
Ruth felt herself surreptitiously holding her breath.
"We have contact," Tariq confirmed down the line, then tapped around his keyboard for a moment and shifted that line, too, over to Ruth and Shayne.
The two women leant forwards, cupping the headphones to their ears.
The sound of the three men inside praying was instantly obvious. Shayne relayed the information to Harry while Ruth scribbled down a translation and slipped it over. They had only caught the tail-end of the prayer, however. No sooner had they started listening than the men inside stopped and broke into conversation again – discussion of a football game they had been watching on the television, some angry comments about the Americans they were targeting and, finally, some reference to what they would be targeting with. One of the men, who Tariq quickly matched up as being the man the French had been watching – Malik something or other – was commenting on the missile, describing to the others the damage it would inflict and the blow they would strike to the heart of anglo-American trust. Several quite derogatory remarks were made about the British police force, who had missed them so completely (something Ruth would be pleased to tell them, later, was entirely wrong – it being London Met who had actually alerted the security service to their location) and then the men set about eating some sort of food they had obtained.
"This is as good a time as ever," Harry murmured down his own feed, to Erin. "They'll be distracted. Signal to Special Branch and move in now. I'll inform the Americans."
He took a few steps away from the screen, lifting his phone to his hear and giving a short word to whomever was on the other end of the line. Ruth suspected Jim Coaver, who was still in the country after being sent to oversee the British-Russian deal earlier that month – the one which had been destroyed by Elena Gavrik and resulted in the exposure of a Russian conspiracy. It was just a short message. Then, leaving the line open, he walked back over and leant on the back of Tariq's chair in what Ruth thought was a slightly unnecessarily aggressive manner.
"Where are they?" he demanded.
"Going in through the lower levels," Tariq informed him, as Ruth continued to scribble down translation and Shayne, beside her, ran the results of them – missile makes and models, possible weapons they could have in their possession – through the system, mirroring a copy of everything to Erin, on the ground. "We have contact in thirty seconds."
Harry tightened his grip on the back of the chair. Ruth lifted her eyes to him and gave him what she hoped was an encouraging smile – which startled both of them for a split second, before they went back to what they were each doing. Bad time to be making moves to apologise, Ruth reprimanded herself, focussing her eyes once more on the screen on front of her. Besides, she was supposed to still be angry with him. She had been sure of that this morning.
"At the elevators on floor seven," Erin reported, quietly, down the line. "We have visual on the door."
"Half around the back, through the internal wall," Harry reminded her.
"Small-scale explosives are in place," Erin confirmed. "It should blow through three seconds before we go in through the door. Make sure we have CCTV around the area in case someone gets through. Will confirm three down and any casualties in ten seconds. Over for now."
The line went dead.
Ruth listened to one of the Syrians telling a joke about the other's mother. She heard Shabaan snap back and made a derogatory comment about the first man's grandfather's ethnicity. Then,
BANG.
The interior wall of the room collapsed with the force of the explosives placed against it, from the other side and all three men – crying various words of alarm – opened fire. Ruth heard Shabaan take control after the first few seconds of confusion had happened. He cried for the others to get to the missile and prime it but they didn't move fast enough. Before Ruth had even heard them respond, Erin's team came charging through the door to the small room and gunfire ensued. Ruth could hear Dimitri and Erin shouting amongst the rest. All the Special Branch men were commanding the terrorists to put their weapons down. One man surrendered. The other barged forwards, opening fire, and was presumably injured because he let out an unearthly scream. There was smashing glass. The sound of something large falling over. The shout of 'officer down', though Ruth could not tell, from it, who was down or who had done the shouting. And then, slowly, things descended into more orderly chaos.
"Two targets down, one surrendered," Dimitri reported down the line. "We have one surface to surface missile, slightly damaged but not yet targeted, and no sign of biological weapons. Erin's been shot in the abdomen, no exit wound, and she's bleeding pretty badly. We need medical evac." He sounded worried.
Ruth felt her stomach chill.
Next to her, Tariq faltered for a split second before Harry pressed his shoulder and he confirmed that he was sending medical in, now. He looked to Ruth, who dropped her headset and grabbed the line, confirming with the medical teams they had on standby, several streets away, that their presence was needed.
"How many friendly casualties are we dealing with?" Harry prompted Dimitri, down the line. "And we need confirmation of our three terrorists. You should have the photographs on your phone now."
They heard Dimitri scuffle.
Ruth leaned over and told Harry that medical were just forty seconds away from the scene.
"Two officers injured as well as Erin," Dimitri panted, clearly shifting something heavy on the other end of the phone. "I can identify the unknown man on our system as our dead man here and the fellow the French call 'Malik' as our one surrendered," Dimitri paused for a moment, and Ruth heard footsteps. "Shabaan went through the window after being shot. We're seven floors up so I can't imagine its a pretty sight but I've sent two junior officers downstairs to recover the body."
Harry was just saying 'well done', when when Shayne muttered 'shit', at Ruth's left, and it drew both of their attentions over.
"What?" asked the Section Head, eyes suddenly worried.
"We have a fire escape two floors below, on level five." the ex-spook told him, scanning through black and white images off the street cameras below. "CCTV has Shabaan landing on it, after exiting the room via the window, and climbing down the ladder. He looks injured but is still moving. He's just reached the bottom and has headed east."
"Shit," Harry echoed her earlier sentiment.
"I'll get Special Branch redeployed," Ruth told Harry, tapping in the number. "You'd better warn the Americans. He's heading their way."
Harry did so, picking up the phone.
"He is unarmed," Ruth heard him reporting down the line, to Jim Coaver. "We have a smashed semi-automatic on the ground below the window and the other two men were only carrying one gun each, which are both accounted for. This man is of no threat and could be a major intelligence capture. We need him alive," Ruth heard him stress again. "Relay that to your people."
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For a horrible four minutes, they chased Shabaan around the side streets of the area, Americans nearly shooting Special Branch, Special Branch nearly shooting MI5, nobody knowing quite where anyone else was in the darkness of the moonless night. It was the Americans who eventually found the man they were pursuing, lying spread-eagled across a pavement near Hyde Park, where he had collapsed in exhaustion. He was bleeding from a gunshot wound to the shoulder and in shock from a bad break to his leg, which he had suffered from landing on the fire escape. The Americans rushed him to hospital and Ruth sat back at her computer, as Dimitri joined them, feeling a little piece of her panic wane.
It did not disappear altogether, however. They still did not know how Erin was doing, Ruth reminded herself. The Section Chief had been rushed to the nearest hospital, to remove the bullet lodged in her abdomen, but they had received no updates on her condition. The analyst's mind kept running over the little girl she would be leaving behind. Rosie. Such a sweet little girl and so full of life and love for her mother. She would be too young to understand what had happened. She was younger than Wes was, when he lost his mother, two years younger than when he lost his father and became an orphan. She would be so confused. What would her grandmother tell her, Ruth wondered, would she tell her that mummy was away? What would the story be for how she died? A car accident?
A slightly sick feeling welled inside her stomach and she knew she needed to get away from the others, just for a minute – get away from the constant droning of the comm. lines. Checking that Shayne had the in-line from Dimitri covered, she told Tariq that she needed to go and check up on the search for Sanderson, and wobbled away from the technical suite. As she made it out into the open Grid, her head began to clear, slightly, the nausea fading away.
Erin might be fine. They could do nothing about it now, anyway, she reminded herself. Now, her chief concern should be Sanderson. They had caught their Syrians but the anthrax was still out there. By the money appearing in Price's account, they could assume that an exchange had already taken place. Sanderson had the bioweapon and that gave them three hours until midnight – when he had stated his attack would take place by.
Three hours. They had three hours to stop a man from using a weapon which could decimate a huge proportion of the population. Infection of a large-scale target, such as a crowded London street on New Years' Eve, could result in the bacterial spores being trampled around half of the city. And with the weaponised strain that Price had been guarding being specially adapted for maximum lethality, more than sixty percent of those infected would die within seventy-two hours. It was a dire situation. Ruth knew that the chances of their success were minimal but she was also equipped with years of experience of dealing with similar situations.
A friend in hospital with a serious gunshot wound, a weapon on the loose in London, an open threat, a madman with an axe to grind; it looked terrible, from this side of the situation, but they had faced this before and they had come through it. They could come through it again. And if the didn't, she added to herself, then she had to be here and help deal with the consequences. Their job was not only about prevention but damage limitation. For now, however, she put the thought of the panic and the military intervention that would follow – martial law to contain the situation, people being bundled into quarantine zones and separated from their families – from her mind. For now, they had to concentrate on stopping Sanderson, then finding Price. They would cross the other bridge when and if they came to it.
Sitting down at her desk, she drew Jenny the junior analyst from her searches for an update. So far, she found out, progress was dismally slow. They had tracked Sanderson into the centre of London using a ticket bought from his credit card and gait-pattern recognition software, on CCTV cameras. Sanderson had pulled a hood down and a scarf up around his face, so that only his eyes and the tops of his cheeks were visible, so facial recog was out of the question. It's novel sister program, designed by Six and 'pimped out' by Tariq, monopolised a greater proportion of the network server and they simply could not run it fast enough to keep up a real-time link. Following Sanderson in retrospect, then, was a tricky business, involving the manual identification of him each time he changed from one series of cameras to another. Each corner he took, each double-back, meant they had to find him manually. Currently, they had lost him somewhere near Charing Cross. They would need the entire of D and C sections running on the same task, Ruth thought, to be able to find him in the throngs surging through the London dark, tonight.
She had finished briefing with Jenny and was leaning back in her seat, passing through her own tasks with a look of intense panic in her stomach, when Harry appeared at her shoulder.
"Ruth?"
She looked up and saw the flicker of worry which passed over him, to see her expression.
"I'm fine," she assured him, as she saw him open his mouth to say something. "What is it you need?"
"Synopsis of what you're doing on the Sanderson threat," he replied, hastily. "I've got a JIC meeting at the MOD bunker, north of the river." He looked pained by the idea. Ruth knew he hated leaving the Grid in a time of crisis. At the back of her mind, however, she knew that Harry was regarded as a resource by upper management. In the event that there was an Anthrax attack, they would want him to be safe in a bunker with the rest of the personnel capable of containing the situation. They couldn't risk losing him. "I don't know how long I'll be," he told her, running a hand over his head.
It was a little tic he did so often, these last few years; something that made him look simultaneously dangerous and untouchable, and vulnerable and alone.
Ruth felt a pang of regret in her stomach. There hadn't had to be such a distance between them. They had been moving forwards. If only he had just been a little more tactful (and she had managed to control her reactions) then they could have been more comfort to each other, in this moment. He was an idiot. (They were both idiots). Still, she couldn't quite summon the anger she had held towards him for it that morning. Seeing all of this made it hard to stay angry at each other. There was so much bad in the world – so much more reason to cling together than to fall apart. They would talk later, Ruth decided, when all of this was over and he came back from the JIC bunker. They would talk then. She would tell him that maybe she had been a little too harsh and maybe he deserved a chance to explain.
Reaching over, she transferred her ten-minutely report on the situation onto a USB stick. Harry would need it where he was going, to brief the Home Secretary. Then, picking herself up from her seat, she motioned towards the door.
"This should have all of our intel up until the last five minutes. I'll brief you on that on your way out."
Harry looked grateful and inclined his head for them to get started.
Walking swiftly, Ruth gave him a run-down of the little more personal information they had gleaned about Sanderson, as well as the methods which they were using to apprehend him – including her advice that they needed more people on it. Harry looked pained again and agreed, saying he had made all of the requests and C and A were doing what they can whilst dealing with their own New Year's problems. A huge shipment of drugs had been discovered coming in, just north of Hull, Harry informed her wearily. And the daughter of a foreign dignitary and gone missing, presumed held hostage. It was a busy night for everyone.
They reached the glass security doors and stopped, Ruth firing out the last few facts about their plans for containment and evacuation, should they discover where Sanderson was, and her list of a couple of possible targets – bankers New Years gatherings and corporately sponsored parties, places where the super-rich would gather.
"We have so many options, Harry, so many bases to cover..." she trailed helplessly into silence, before adding, "I'm not sure how useful any of this is to you."
Harry turned slightly in towards her, bringing them closer than they had been in days. There was a look of submission in his eyes, like he had relented to the need to be nice to her, though his mind was telling him differently – telling him, Ruth expected, that she had been horrible to him for days and probably deserved a little discomfort. "This is all we can do," he told her softly, more softly than she deserved. "This is all we can ever do. We do our best, even when we know its not enough."
Ruth felt another flicker of regret in her stomach. She lowered her eyes.
"What is it, Ruth?" Harry asked her, softly.
Time ticked for two seconds and Ruth bit down on her response. This was neither the time nor the place. They could talk later.
"Nothing. I'll call you if we have any updates," she told him, looking back up but avoiding meeting his gaze directly. She didn't want to share her sudden and irrational desire to keep him from leaving – out into the cold, the dark, the dangerous night. "As soon as we get them in."
"I know you will."
"We'll get all of the relevant places under surveillance and Tariq will try and get the network optimised to deal with our CCTV tracking. I can't promise anything on the gait-pattern recognition software but maybe we'll get lucky and-,"
"-you'll all do your best," Harry cut in, his voice soft. "I know. I trust you – all of you."
Ruth met his eyes.
"I'll update you on Erin's condition, when I get anything," she told him, voice weaker than she would have liked it to be. Then, trying desperately to stop her throat from tightening, she offered out the USB stick with her current report on it. "Here."
Harry reached out and took the drive, his fingers closing around it. For just the briefest of moments, their fingers entwined with one another, Harry's his thumb slipping to lie against the back of Ruth's hand. He curled his fingertips inwards, letting them scrape softly against her palm, prolonging the contact. Ruth squeezed her grip on his fingers, around the USB stick, a little tighter. He felt so warm. So familiarly Harry. They stood that way for a good few seconds. Then, leaning in, Ruth's boss brushed a soft 'thank you' near her ear and gently pulled away.
Ruth watched him go, took a moment to gather herself, then slowly returned to her seat and the chaos streaming across her screen. Time to go. Time to work. They could talk later.
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