The Seclusion of Mountain Valleys
Safe houses are usually such lonely places, being secluded and secret and solitary, as they are. Penelope's safe places dot the globe, and this one is a favourite. On more than one occasion she's retreated to it for entirely unprofessional reasons, and cocooned herself away from the world. The sky overhead is a perfect, cerulean blue, mirrored in the mountain lake that dominates half the landscape. The forest is dense, emerald green, and beyond the edge of the valley in which the chalet is situated, there are white capped mountains, majestic. In winter, this place is barricaded in white, the entire world bleached into nothingness beneath slate gray skies. Penelope usually comes here to lose herself, for a while, and to pretend that she's the only person in the entire world.
Still. In some ways, she supposes, it's nice to have company.
Even if that company includes Agent Gerad Jonquil, whistling cavalierly as he follows her up the path to the house. He's got his jacket folded, slung over his shoulder. His shirt is inky black, and he's stuffed his tie in its front pocket. You'd never know it to look at him, that he'd spent the entire two hour flight in a state of completely dissociative panic; part of it sobbing into her shoulder, part of it being restrained from violence by the curiously effective Marshall Krishna, and a great deal of it with his head pinned between his knees, fingers in his ears, and chattering fractured mantras to himself.
She doesn't glance over the still slightly damp patch her shoulder, though its tempting, because she wonders whether or not he even knows it.
"Damn," Jonquil comments, as the chalet comes into view at the crest of the path, sloping upwards through the a break in the woods that surround it. "Nice digs, Pen."
"They'll serve," she answers primly, though privately she knows they're both understating the case. Her chalet is gorgeous. Late afternoon sunshine glints golden off the windows, and the garage door is open. Penelope's already loosened the collar of her stolen white flightsuit, but she's itching to be out of it. The thing is confining and she hates the way she looks in white, all pale and washed out. Penelope is many things, but an angel isn't one of them.
She'll need to rid herself of Jonquil before she can speak to Virgil, and Virgil urgently needs to be spoken to. Virgil had gone on ahead, had left the plane with only a moment's attention spared for Penelope and his brother, and a brief, hard stare at Senior Marshal Krishna.
If any of their three extra guests are actual GDF Marshals, Penelope will chew the sleeves off her damned flightsuit.
"Come along, Jonquil," she calls over her shoulder, as she jogs up the steps to the front porch and her hand finds the handle of the door. Behind her there's the sound of another match striking, a rough grit of phosphorus on sandpaper, and she spins on her heel, stomps back down the steps and snatches the cigarette out from between his lips before he can light it, irate. "You are not," she declares, tearing the thing neatly in half and tossing the pieces away, scattering flecks of tobacco as she does so, "smoking in my safe house."
She's gotten right into his bubble now, arms folded over her chest as he grins down at her. It's an excuse to look him over again, to note the way his lower left eyelid twitches, the way he isn't quite drawn up to his full height. This is only about a hundred and seventy-five centimeters, and Penelope's only ever known Jonquil to stretch up into every last millimeter of it. Stress has him wanting a cigarette. Fatigue has him slouching. "Oh, no?"
No. Because it's Gerad Jonquil who smokes, and not Gordon Tracy. "No. And take your shoes off."
"Bossy," he says, and though his steps start to trip lightly up the short flight of stairs, Penelope catches the stumble at the tail end, charitably pretends she doesn't. She watches with her arms still folded as he kicks his black shoes off, and nudges them with stockinged feet to wait neatly beside the door. "You gonna show me around? Where's your bedroom?" he asks, and there's that vague, ever present undercurrent of indecency in his tone, the one she's proved herself equal to the measure of on more than one occasion.
This, of course, was before she knew he was the brainwashed younger brother of someone she's come to consider one of her closest friends. "I'll be along presently," she answers, brooking none of Jonquil's usual nonsense. "Go inside. Leave the Marshals alone. Don't make a mess. There'll be food in the pantry if you're hungry. Don't touch my things."
"I am gonna touch all your things." He holds his hands up and wiggles his fingers at her, grins that obscene, insincere grin.
Penelope doesn't bother to dignify this with a response and waves him inside. Her business awaits in the garage.
And, apparently, her business has started to conduct herself without her, because as she rounds the corner into the garage, Virgil is already having an argument with Marshal Krishna.
"—if he needs a doctor so urgently, then I'll drop the three of you at the nearest highway, and you can hitch your way into town. Three hour drive. There's a local hospital."
Krishna has planted his feet, folded his arms and argues calmly, rationally on behalf of his two subordinates, "He's half the reason we've made it here safely and undetected. The other half being his protege, who's the reason you weren't shot out of the sky. They've both been roughly handled, they're both done in. I'm not going to haul him to the side of a remote Norwegian highway and hope for the mercy of some passing motorist."
Penelope intercedes before Virgil can snap that it's not his problem, and don't they have a unit to get back to? "I won't have it said that I'm not a gracious host, darling," she says, light and smooth and changing the tone of the conversation as she addresses the Marshal, "We do thank you, very sincerely, for your help, and I apologize for having caught you three in the crossfire of our larger goals. SPECTRUM are hell to deal with at the best of times, and our objective was always going to cause friction."
"Agent Jonquil, you mean."
Agent Jonquil, indeed. Penelope shrugs her shoulders, still clad in the white of one of SPECTRUM's Angels, and in stark contrast to Agent Jonquil's monochrome black. "Agent Jonquil is a victim in this, perhaps more than anyone else. The details are…complicated. As long as I've known him, or at least known of him, I've only ever known half his story." She nods to Virgil. "His brother has the other half."
Virgil's gone quiet and his arms are tightly clasped across his chest. His face is a thundercloud and he glares at Penelope with undisguised irritation. "I'd rather not have the personal details of this whole endeavour spilled in front of strangers," he says, curt. "I'm not flying him to Oslo or anywhere else. You know as well as I do that he's no goddamn GDF Marshal, and neither are the other two."
Krishna has ceased to pay Virgil any attention and seems to realize that it's Penelope he should be dealing with. This is quite correct, and something Penelope wishes more people would realize, far sooner than they usually do. She remains calm and perfectly polite as she says, "Virgil, dearest, for the sake of politesse and with an eye towards protocol, for the present, I think we shall operate in deference to our guests' wishes to preserve some anonymity. They have, after all, been tremendously helpful. If Marshal—I'm sorry, the redhead? His name escapes me."
"Teegarden, your ladyship. Jacob will do. He has a heart condition and we were on our way to see a particular specialist." Krishna pauses. "I should like him to be in far better shape before I ask him to travel again. It would save time and spare his health to bring the doctor to him."
Virgil had already said so, though he'd also made a note that this wasn't all the redhead had. Cybernetic implants and something concealed as a pacemaker embedded in his chest. Penelope's curiosity has been more than piqued. "If Marshal Teegarden needs a few days to recover, then he's welcome here for as long as that should take."
Krishna nods his gratitude. "Thank you, my lady."
"And Virgil will of course accompany to Oslo, and he'll be prepared to fly you back," she continues, though it draws a baleful glare. "Can I offer you some tea, something to eat? I imagine you're in a hurry to depart."
"Something for the road, perhaps, but if it's all the same to you, the sooner I leave, the sooner I can be back. Teegarden does need attention quite urgently."
"I don't like this, Pen," Virgil thunders, still irate and defiant, and Penelope rounds on him with uncharacteristic impatience.
"I am aware," she returns, her own brand of rising temper, icy and disparaging, "And since you seem incapable or unwilling to infer my reasoning, then I will inform you directly: your presence poses a significant challenge to your brother. He's two separate thousand piece puzzles, whose boxes have been dumped together and shaken. He needs sorting out, and therefore I need to take him in hand. And I need you," she plants a finger in Virgil's chest and then jerks a thumb in Krishna's direction, "to remove yourself from the vicinity, and to ask him just what exactly happened on Cloudbase, to break the programming of one of SPECTRUM's very best agents—someone eight years entrenched in their organization; so thoroughly and completely indoctrinated that he didn't recognize you, barely disguised in a GDF uniform. I have your brother to manage and Krishna's subordinates as collateral. I shall have my hands quite full, and your cooperation should not need to be demanded, considering all I've done to serve your cause. So, Virgil, you will very obligingly fly Marshal Krishna to Oslo, whereupon you will report back with what he tells you, and hopefully the information will be of some use to us, and more importantly, to your brother. Have I made my motives clear?"
Virgil doesn't answer with more than a sullenly affirmative grunt, and storms out of the garage.
Penelope's cheeks have flushed and she can't help a stamp of her foot, despite the fact that Marshal Krishna still watches her with something like amusement. Incongruently, for some reason, she's reminded of Parker as he chuckles. "Perfectly clear, as far as I'm concerned, Lady Penelope," he says. "I only hope I can oblige." He bows, then, and she feels her cheeks grow slightly warmer. "I'll thank you to look after my boys, your ladyship."
"I'll apologize in advance for my companion's behaviour," she answers, wry. "I'll brew you some tea, Marshal."
"And I'll thank you again, Lady Penelope."