London, 1969

Hogan and the others retreated to the conference room and sat down at the table again.

"Boy," said Carter. "I sure didn't expect that."

"No," Hogan said, eyes narrowed. "But we probably should have."

"What do you mean, Colonel?" asked Kinch.

"I mean it's too convenient. Too easy," he said. "Is it just me, or did that look staged to anyone else?"

LeBeau shrugged. "Perhaps he simply did not want to face the consequences of his actions."

"Maybe. But if it were me, I would've tried to bluff my way through. At the very least I'd have tried to make a run for it before I gave up," Hogan said. "I would have had a plan for how to divert suspicion from myself. This is too pat."

"He's definitely the one I thought had done it," Carter said. "If he was being as much of a jerk to the other agents as he was to us, maybe the real killer thought that everyone would think he was the one."

"Exactly," said Hogan.

Kinch frowned. "Stephens seems to believe it. He said flat out that he didn't need our help anymore, because he already had his traitor."

Hogan nodded. "He sure did. So either he's falling for this hokey suicide explanation, hook, line, and sinker, or he's trying to make the traitor think he's falling for it, to lure him out into the open."

Kinch nodded slowly. "So what are we going to do about it? Sounds like our plan just went out the window."

"Yeah, I think it did," Hogan said.

Carter looked disappointed. "We're still going to do something, though, right?"

LeBeau shifted in his seat. "I do not see what we can do."

Hogan cleared his throat. Before he could continue, though, the door opened, and Kay walked in.

"I'm sorry to bother you," she said in a flat, controlled voice. "But this entire office is now a crime scene. We are all being asked to leave while the forensic examiners do their job."

"Of course," Hogan said, getting up. "We'll just get out of their way."

"Thank you," she said, lifelessly. "This way, please."

Hogan considered and rejected the idea of asking if she was all right. She wasn't all right. Either one of her teammates had killed Newkirk, and then himself, or else one of her teammates had killed both Newkirk and Moore, and was still at large. She was so far from 'all right' that she probably couldn't have found it with a high-powered telescope.

He reached into a pocket, and pulled out Newkirk's key ring. "May I ask you a question?"

"Of course," she said. "What is it?"

"I found these at Newkirk's apartment. Do you have any idea what they're for?"

She took the keys, studied them for a moment, and a smile licked at the corners of her mouth. "I can guess," she said. "The little one is for a safe deposit box; it will have a few things for emergencies. A full set of identity papers, contact lists, that sort of thing. More importantly, there would be anything else he would want to make sure he had if he had to suddenly disappear, and that he wouldn't want anyone to find in his flat afterwards. And if it's anything like my box, there will be a few Deltas in there, too."

"Deltas? What are those?" asked Carter.

She counted the letters off on her fingers. "DLTTYA. Don't Let Them Take You Alive. We're all given a few, in case we really have to disappear."

Kinch winced. "That's a grim thought."

She had a small silver locket around her neck; she tapped it with a finger. It was just big enough for a couple of tablets, and it was tarnished with long wear. "It's a grim world."

Hogan nodded. "And the other?"

She gave him a sidelong glance. "My flat. There are things in there that I'd rather my family didn't see. If it came down to it, he was going to do a quick tidy before my aunt had to wonder why there was a small arsenal hidden in a false bookcase."

"I see," Hogan said, not believing a word of it. There were reasons a woman might give a man a copy of her house key; that wasn't one of them. Although it had probably seemed like a viable excuse at the time.

Just as she had the day before, she flashed her ID to let them out of the building and hurried back inside. The four men started down the street with no very clear idea of where they were going, or what they would do when they arrived.

LeBeau, with the preoccupied, deliberate pace of a man with a great deal on his mind, lagged behind a bit. After about half a block, Hogan turned and went back to get him.

LeBeau didn't even let him say a word. "Mon Colonel," he began abruptly. "I heard you walking around the flat last night, and the cookbook was on the table this morning. I must ask. Did you do this?"

Hogan blinked, and a weight of tension he hadn't even realized he was carrying slipped off his shoulders. "No," he said simply. "I wanted to, but I didn't. And to be honest… I was going to ask you the same thing. You left and came back before I even woke up, and the apartment isn't that far from this office."

LeBeau relaxed. "Good. I was afraid. I would not have told, but the police might have figured it out for themselves."

"So it wasn't me, and it wasn't you. But it was someone," Hogan said, as they caught up with the others. "Someone really did murder him. Kay proved it."

"She did? When? How?" Carter asked.

Hogan made a gun with his fingers. "Guns are loud and messy and they hurt. If Moore had really wanted a ticket out of here, don't you think he would've he have used one of those Deltas she said they all have?"

"I probably would have," Kinch said.

"Yeah," said Hogan. "Me too. We've still got a killer to find."

*.*.*.*.*.*.*

Argentina, 1962

Kay had been too quiet all day, and it was making the hair on the back of Newkirk's neck stand on end. She was bent over her desk, scribbling busily on a notepad. Periodically, she ripped the sheet off the pad, crumpled it in her fist, and threw it away. Every time that happened, the paper was wadded a bit tighter, and hit the wastebasket a bit harder.

"All right," Newkirk said after a while. "Out with it."

"I'm pretty sure this message is an Enigma variant. I'm also pretty sure that I'm not a good enough cryptographer to decode it."

"I'm not talking about the intercepted message and you know it."

"Then I don't know what you are talking about. Must be Thursday."

"Pull the other one," Newkirk said. "And it's Sunday. According to God, we're not supposed to be working at all. Talk."

"It's nothing," she said. "It's a sad anniversary, that's all, and I don't want to talk about it."

Without really noticing it, the two of them had evolved a sort of tacit agreement to the effect that certain aspects of their respective pasts were not fit topics of conversation, but he knew that most of her 'anniversaries' were sad ones. "Oh. I'm sorry to hear it," he said. "What was it?"

She threw down the pencil and stood up, knives in her eyes and acid on her tongue. "Oh, bother. And here I thought I'd said that I didn't want to talk about it. You'll have to forgive me; English isn't my first language."

He shrugged. "Usually, when someone says he doesn't want to talk about something, it's because he'd rather not admit that it needs talking about." Louie had taught him that. Louie had been right. He hadn't enjoyed most of the ensuing conversations, and in all likelihood, Louie hadn't either, but he was honest enough to recognize that they were probably one of the main reasons he was still sane.

She glared at him, then looked sharply away. "It's the fifteenth of April," she told her interlaced fingers. Her knuckles were already turning white with pressure. "It's the day the Allies marched into Bergen Belsen."

"How is that a sad anniversary?" Newkirk remembered his own liberation vividly. It had been one of the best days of his life, even if it hadn't ended quite the way he might have preferred.

She studied her knuckles a bit longer, lips pressed tightly together and brow furrowed. "I looked up the exact numbers later," she finally said. "There were sixty thousand of us in there when your lot arrived. Do you know how many of us died in the first few days of our so-called freedom?"

He shook his head.

"Fourteen thousand. Almost one in four," she said. "Thirty one thousand of us were dead by autumn. More than half. It was a charnel house. They had to burn the place to the ground in the end. And do you know what they did then?" She didn't even wait for a head shake that time. "They took us straight to another camp, and they locked us right back up again! They took us out of one hellhole, and they clapped us into another before the ashes were cold!"

I was in a British prison less than a day after I'd gotten out of a German one. He remembered telling the Colonel that. And he remembered how gutted Hogan had looked when he'd heard. It was a strange thing, having the same conversation twice, once from either side. If anything, he decided, this side was worse.

He kept his voice even; if she was anything like him, pity was the last thing she'd want. "I'd heard that the DP camps weren't all that good."

"That's one way to put it. After everything, all the years of fighting to stay alive for just one more day, pinning all our hopes on the war ending, what did we get? What was that hope worth? Oh, there were no more mass executions, I suppose I ought to be grateful for that much, but we were still starving, still packed like sardines in a tin, and still looking at the inside of a fence day in and day out. That was our liberation. That was what they decided we were worth." She made a sound that was probably supposed to be a laugh. "Just one more betrayal for the collection. You know what? Half the time, the only difference between the Englanders and the SS was that one of them was speaking a foreign language. I had to figure it out from context. But when your teacher is holding a rifle, you learn fast. And then there's no difference at all."

That actually shocked him. What in hell was he supposed to say to that? "You're an Englander now, too, you know," he finally said.

"Am I?" she said. "Am I really? Because my parents thought we were Germans, and goodness gracious, were they surprised to find out they were wrong. How can I be sure that I'm not going to be in for a surprise or two of my own somewhere down the line?"

Another unanswerable question. Except that it wasn't; the answer leapt from his tongue before he even knew what he was going to say. "Because if you are, it'll be over my dead body," he said. It surprised him as much as it did her, and he backtracked a bit. "And the rest of the team's, too. It's never going to happen, Kay. Not here. You know that, don't you?"

"…Yes. At least, I knew it yesterday," she said, and the protective anger collapsed, leaving only a naked, helpless grief in its wake. "And I'll know it tomorrow. Today… the anniversary is always hard, that's all. I'm sorry, Jack. I'm being a fool, and you shouldn't have to deal with it. Just ignore me."

"Shan't. And don't apologize," he said. "Nothing foolish about this, not in the least."

"Why, Jack? I still can't understand. Why did it have to happen?" she asked, after a while. "Why did any of it have to happen?"

He gave her the only answer he had, in the gentlest voice he owned. "I don't know, Kay."

She choked back a sob, obviously at the end of her rope. "But why does the world have to be like this?"

"It doesn't," he said. "Do you hear me, Kay? It doesn't. That's what we're for, Stephens always says. We do what we do to give the world a fighting chance to be… better than it is. We're here to see to it that someday there won't have to be any more people like us."

He thought she heard him; something had penetrated past the utter agony in her eyes, but she was beyond replying in words. She just stood there, beaten and alone, head hung low, her shoulders bowed and her arms held tightly to her chest—her left hand gripping the end of her braid like a lifeline, her right hand clasped over her tattooed forearm—and trembling all over like a spent horse. He didn't even think about it. He just reached out and pulled her close, the way he had held his sister when she was afraid. The way LeBeau had held him when he'd cracked. The way everyone needs to be held sometimes. It doesn't change anything, but that's almost beside the point. It's necessary.

He didn't kiss her. It didn't even occur to him that he might someday want to. Not then. They had slid past Person-The-Boss-Ordered-Me-To-Work-With almost immediately, found their way into Reliable Colleague territory with no particular effort, and had achieved the heights of Trusted Partner by their second joint mission. But that had been the simpler half of the equation. Off the job, being (by nature) cheerfully gregarious on the outside and (by experience) painfully slow to trust inside, it had taken them a while to get past the shoals of Office Mate and into the deeper waters of Real Friend. Lover—casual or otherwise—wasn't even on the map. Yet.

But in some inexplicable, non-physical way, she fit against him, like a fresh-cut key slipping into an oiled lock, and he vaguely sensed how easy it would be to let long-closed doors creak open. How utterly simple. How utterly impossible. He pushed the thought away before it could do any harm.

She cried with the silent, wrenching, body-racking sobs of a person who had learned too early and too well that she had no right to ask for comfort, and less than no right to need it. Any such weakness was an automatic death sentence in her world. He recognized it immediately.

He had never seen her—no one had ever been allowed to see her—as anything other than indomitable. The Kay he knew was fearless, jaunty, sharp-eyed, sharp-witted, and sharp-tongued, dedicated almost to the point of obsession, and always, always up for anything. He had seen the tattoo before, of course, and he knew what it meant, but he hadn't known that any of this was lurking beneath.

When a bone breaks, it grows back stronger in the broken place, he remembered that from somewhere. But that didn't mean that the break had never occurred, or that it was a good thing, and it didn't even mean that it mightn't keep right on hurting even years after it had finished healing.

It was hard to tell if Kay was stronger in the broken places, because she was nothing but broken places. Part of him wanted to tell her that he understood what it was like to lose everything, even—especially—hope. Part of him wanted to tell her that while it might never get better, it would at least get easier. He didn't. All of him knew that it wouldn't have helped.

All too soon, she got herself under control and pulled back to stand on her own. "Thank you, Jack," she said. "I'm sorry you had to see that."

"See what?" he asked, with a half-smile that was a promise, I'll never tell. "I didn't see a ruddy thing. Now let's have another crack at that Enigma variant, shall we?"

She half-smiled back, and the Kay he knew began to coalesce back into place through sheer willpower. "Good idea. So far as I've gotten, it's either the plans for a new superweapon or someone's shopping list."

"Those can be quite tricky to tell apart," he said, and pulled up another chair beside hers.

*.*.*.*.*.*.*

Author's note: Kay isn't being entirely fair. But she isn't entirely wrong, either. The first few months after liberation were chaotic, and the documented conditions in the Bergen Belsen DP camp were pretty awful at first. Not for lack of compassion, but, well. It was an impossible situation. They weren't being imprisoned for punitive reasons, but because there was nowhere else for them to go. Thousands of people were simply too far gone to be saved. Disease was rampant. There was not enough food sent to the camp, not intentionally, but because there literally wasn't anything to send them. There was no free access in and out of the camps for a time; some soldiers were quoted later as feeling as though they were still running a concentration camp, and they were horrified by it. Things got so bad that the internees staged a hunger strike to protest the living conditions. Things did improve by the summer of '46… just in time for her to emigrate. This is a deeply traumatized child's view of things; it is not an objective description of the British treatment of Holocaust survivors, and no insult is intended.