1343 hours, 14/12/2020
"Hello, Ben," Alex greeted the dark-haired man who was sitting on the sofa in the corner of his office.
"Sir," he grinned back, like the annoying person he liked to be.
"Drop the 'sir' nonsense. I'm already sick of it."
"Alex, then." He was still wearing a smile, the one that promised something not good. "How have you been for the last few days?"
"I'm fine. Drowning in more paperwork than usual, a bit stressed from the pressure to perform but it's nothing I haven't felt before."
"That wasn't what I meant. How have you been?" Ben tried again.
"Who died and made you a therapist?" the younger couldn't help muttering under his breath. Couldn't Ben just stop for a while?
"Alex, talk to me." Apparently not then.
"I said, I'm fine." Alex attempted, more strongly than before.
"Try again. Have you been taking breaks properly? Eating and drinking water? Sleeping soundly?" Ben had seen right through the facade anyway. Why do I even bother sometimes, convincing Ben that I'm fine when he knows already, Alex thought.
"Ben, I'll be fine." he tried changing the statement a bit.
"Are you sure about that?" It seemed Agent Daniels was fast on a trail and he wasn't letting go then.
"Yes!" Alex shot back indignantly.
"And if there are any issues?"
"I can handle it. Besides, I know that if I can't then all the senior agents are here, right?" he retaliated, voice a bit less certain at the end.
Ben saw the last statement as the question it was, a small confirmation of support. "Yes, we are here. You just need to trust us to help."
Alex could feel himself untense a bit at that. "Good. Okay, anything else?"
"I guess not. I'm making sure you get home today though."
"What? I'm not eleven, Ben."
"No, but trouble follows you and I would rather you have support when that happens." He paused. "I've jinxed it, haven't I?"
Alex snorted a bit at that. "Understatement. Anything else to say?"
"Fine, fine. Since you're so keen to get rid of me, I'm going to go pretend to be a productive member of Six."
"I could always send you on assignment. I've done it to a few others but they were due a missio-" The door slammed shut behind the older agent. Alex sighed in exasperation and smiled. Some people never do learn…
1744 hours, 14/12/2020
The car ride back to Alex's Chelsea townhouse was spent in comfortable silence, neither of the partners having anything to say or willing to speak for the time being, and the driver knowing that anything said would be met with almost immediate consequences.
After what felt like eons, the Jaguar finally pulled into the gravel driveway.
Ben noticed something and had to ask. "Where's your car? The Aston Martin?"
Alex looked up, started from whatever was going through his head. "Smithers contacted me on Sunday, when you were up in Liverpool. Said he wanted to fit a few new experiments of his on to the Aston before Christmas. I said he could since I'm using the company car for the next nine days."
"Okay," He received the 'all clear' from the team watching the house and climbed out of the car, waiting for Alex to do the same before approaching the front door. "You've been awfully quiet."
"Just thinking," he replied. He was definitely thinking but it was probably time for a break.
"Don't hurt yourself," he teased, covering up his concern with a joke.
Alex, unlocking the front door, just responded with a weak smile. That was new. And worrying. Even on a mission, the younger agent still found time to make the most absurd comments, usually when things went wrong or someone was injured or killed. It was an unhealthy coping strategy, dark humour, but apparently Alex was feeling exhausted enough to not have a comeback. If he was simply tired, the snark would have gotten worse (or better, it really was depending on what end of it you were on).
"Are you going to stay for dinner?" he asked.
"I might as well. Finish up on some things and keep an eye on you at the same time." Ben tried again to get a better reaction, gauging how done Alex was. The boy just 'hmm'ed at him. Definitely not good.
"What are you making for dinner?" Ben asked as they walked in.
"Probably some kind of stir-fry. Quick and easy." Alex dropped the keys onto a small table and took his shoes off, stretching before making his way to the stairs.
"Making the security team jealous with better food than the take-away they would be eating, huh?" he called out to the agent who was well upstairs by that point.
"Well, you're helping me make it if you want any, so I wouldn't get ahead of myself." his voice rang out, slightly muffled by the floor between them.
Well played, Alex, Ben thought. Getting me to do half the work if I want to eat. Meh, it's worth it.
0928 hours, 15/12/2020
Alex walked through the white halls of St. Dominic's hospital. This, however, was one of the few times when it wasn't because he was being treated and going stir-crazy as a result of it. No, he was visiting.
He'd already talked to the doctor who was treating Agent Cel Tradat's injuries. She had been rendered medically unconscious because of the amount of pain she was in but she would probably wake up and heal quickly. Moderate brain damage was yet to be determined but the odds weren't too bad. It was mostly blood loss that was the issue, and from a quick glance at her file while he was in the car, Cel Tradat was tough to keep down under any circumstance. Alex had asked to be informed when she woke up, no matter what time of the day it was.
Alex was here for someone else though. Agent Brendan Cluanach. Second floor. Room 14.
Giving the nurse at the end of the corridor a nod, he knocked on the man's door and walked in after a few seconds. The other man was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing casual clothes and signing a few forms - discharge papers or a mission report then. From the look of it, he already had been expecting Alex but was still surprised to see someone so young.
"Good morning, sir," he said. Cool and professional. That was a good sign.
"Good morning, Agent Cluanach. How are you?"
"On the mend, sir. I'll be fine. Just a few nasty cuts. The worst damage they managed is a bruised ego and a broken nose." He lightly touched said nose, the splint on the crooked feature clearly hurting him, but he only winced slightly. "This will probably be crooked for a while."
"Probably." Alex responded curtly. The file had said that the agent was talkative by nature and generally well-liked by first impressions alone, making him a valuable aspect of an intelligence-gathering operation. No point in suspecting the person who couldn't keep their mouth shut if it was something as small as gossip to be trusted with state secrets.
"I can't exactly say the same about Cel Tradat though. I heard that they put her under, to help with the pain. How is she?" Asking about his colleague rather than the operation. That meant he already knew what had happened and the conclusions drawn from it. Forward-thinking and self-motivated, good traits of any employee, intelligence or not.
"She's still unconscious." Alex answered, testing the waters to see how much Cluanach knew.
"That's not good to say. When will she wake up?" There was no faking the concern in his eyes - along with something else familiar. Alex couldn't pinpoint it exactly.
"The doctors think sometime in the next two days." Actually, they had said that she was already starting to show some signs of responding and probably would be fully conscious by the end of the day.
"Thank you, sir. Anyway, my final report for this mission will be on your desk tonight."
"You're on medical leave for the next two weeks as well." Alex reminded him, letting a small smile across his face. Fake but there was something off about this guy.
"Of course, sir. I just need to pick up a few things from my desk. As soon as I'm discharged." he gave another one of his 'winning' smiles at him, presumably trying to keep a civil tongue without offending someone that he wanted answers from. Namely why someone so young would be put in charge.
But then again, Alex was wondering the same thing, so it looked like no one would be getting the answer they wanted.
2201 hours, 15/12/2020
Alex was sitting in his office. With more paperwork. It was well past the end of the working day, but there was always more to do. More forms to sign. More mission reports to review. More missions to approve.
He was reading Agent Cluanach's report. The man had already gone home and his final report was on his desk as promised earlier. Alex had told himself just to scan through it, leaving it for tomorrow but he had gone through the entire thing twice. And it wasn't right. The whole thing was perfectly written and concise, sure. Telling everything that had happened and how it had gone wrong. The only problem was that it made sense. Too much sense for Scorpia being involved. Too much sense for an almost hellish operation. Alex didn't like that, it was slightly unreasonable but his instinct was telling him to talk to the man again.
The door almost burst open, revealing namely one Miles Crawley, breathing hitched ever so slightly. He must have run all the way to Alex's office to tell him something if the lift was in use then. But if he of all people had decided not to knock on the door, this was probably really very bad.
"Sir, we have an emergency. As in, a national security type emergency." he huffed out. He looked deadly serious, staring right into Alex's eyes despite the worry lines on his face. "Mr Crawley and Officer Redwing sent me to get you as quickly as possible."
This feels like deja vu, Alex thought as he shot up, banging his knee on the bottom of his desk in the process. Or maybe not.
"What's the situation?" he asked.
"Agent Rider, this is Lieutenant Commander Roy Constance. He's on board the HMS St Albans in the North Sea at the moment." Crawley greeted Alex with a quick introduction as soon as he walked into the video conference room with Miles. He stood by the door in the corner of the room, simply observing everything going on. Redwing and another man were both on the side of the room, typing furiously at laptops, presumably something to do with the threat.
"So you're who's running this outfit?" the man on screen said, not really asking. He was sitting in some kind of control room on board a ship, glowing screens and navigation systems lighting up the dark background behind the smartly-uniformed man.
"I am. What's the issue?" Alex said politely. His body had tensed a bit, Crawley noticed from the corner of his eye, as if ready for combat. Not that there was any physical fighting to do.
"A network intrusion detected by one of my Midshipmen earlier. It didn't try to access intel but simply travelled through our onboard system." he answered curtly. Probably wasn't happy about that.
"This concerns MISO exactly how?" Crawley piped in. He hadn't been informed of whatever the threat was yet, the Lieutenant Commander saying that it was better to wait for the Chief Executive for him to repeat it. He could also see the cogs turning in Alex's head as he tried to guess how this related to them.
"Because it matches the one that tried to get into your systems two days ago." That wasn't exactly public knowledge, or even available to the other departments of the MoD. "One part of the code was bounced through my ship. They called it the Onion Route, with some other more technical terms."
"Thank you for that knowledge but that still doesn't explain why I am needed. You have told Officer Redwing this without me." Alex chose that moment to pipe in, matching the Lieutenant Commander's tone.
"My sailor managed to trace a part of the singal." He paused. "The origin point of it, to be exact. It's a computer inside your building."
Dead silence.
"Redwing, talk to me." Alex turned to the Chief Science Officer, voice tense. An understatement, actually. And understandable. How?
"He's right. We're working to trace exactly which desktop it's from but it's definitely part of our network." Redwing shot back, not even looking up at them. She seemed to falter for a second, then went back to frowning at the screen.
"I think I've got it." the younger man standing next to her chipped in. He looked to be in his mid-twenties and his eyes shone with the same curiosity as the analysts on the lower floors. "Tariq Khaled, I'm a Network Manager. One line of the program came from my old code, sir. But that's beside the point."
Alex nodded at him to stop right before he said anything too classified. Then he turned to the larger video screen in the darkened room. "Thank you, Lieutenant Commander, for telling us this on such short notice."
"If it keeps the country safe from immediate threat, there's no point in playing politics. Good luck, Agent Rider." He cut the call.
Alex looked away from the screen after a few moments of deliberation, staring right into space. "Whose desk, Mr Khaled?" he asked.
"Um, Agent Arianna Cel Tradat. Room 1234, floor 12."
Alex froze, as did Redwing from where she was. "That's not right, is it?" she asked.
"No. It isn't." Alex took a deep breath. This was somewhat familiar territory, investigating a case and drawing conclusions. "She's been unconscious for two days and on an operation in Egypt for three weeks before that."
"Who else has access to her office?" Crawley asked.
Khaled kept a cool head, answering immediately, "Anyone who was an active mission partner. How they would get into her desktop is something else. They would have to access it in person, not remotely, and have the correct codes. Codes that someone in the cyber department would have…"
"Brendan Cluanach. Her partner for the mission." Alex realised, knowing what the look in the agent's eyes had been in the hospital. Guilt. "But he can't have done this alone."
"Right. He's working with a member of the cyber division, so pulling up records of whoever had access to the computers on the twelfth floor two days ago." Redwing spun back towards her laptop. "So, Héctor Kike, Junior Network Analyst."
She pulled up an image and Alex recognised him almost immediately.
"Sir, we have a problem that requires your immediate attention," he respectfully said.
The man in the navy suit who had been sent to get Alex when the intrusion had been detected. Why he was so nervous wasn't because of Alex.
It was because he knew that he had failed.
"Sir, I've got CCTV records from earlier today." Khaled jumped in. "Cluanach and Kike both left the building together today. Strange?" It really wasn't a question from the grim look on his face.
"No. They're working together. Redwing, Khaled, start running facial recognition in the direction that they went in. Track them down. If they're running, they have a head-start of more than a few hours, so you'll have to work quickly. Crawley, mind if I borrow Miles until tomorrow? Ben has already gone home." At Crawley's quick nod, Alex continued to take charge. "Miles, check their offices for anything that might tell us more about their undercover operation. And Cel Tradat's room, just in case anything is hidden there. I'll help. Everyone has pretty much gone home, so we won't be disturbed."
The three of them nodded from their various places in the room and set off for their assigned tasks, leaving Crawley and Alex to stand in the blue glow of the screen behind them.
"I guess we're working a late night, then, Agent Rider. We'll stick around to see it through." Crawley apparently approved of Alex's taking charge. He walked out behind the still closing door.
Maybe I can do this, Alex thought. It was hopeful, sweet and pure, the kind of hope that set your heart racing at a hundred miles an hour with euphoria, even if you were standing still. It was freeing. It was stupidly optimistic but Alex didn't care. He had two traitors to track down.
So, to make up for a kinda-maybe-long time without an update, a longer chapter. Stuff is about to go down! And I'm sorry if this is confusing because it draws weird links to stuff that happened like three chapters ago, but I'll probably do more of that.
Also, this is random but kinda related. Names. Cluanach is an Irish surname (which I have misspelled a few chapters ago, so sorry), I read somewhere that it means something like deceitful, rogue or quick-witted. Cel Tradat is a Romanian surname meaning 'The Betrayed'. So hence the chapter title.
ALSO also. The video conference room at the end of the chapter is somewhat like MTAC from NCIS, if you watch it, but not exactly, so you now know what kind of set-up I was imagining.
Special shout-out to Riena369 because this is for you!