Whilst Malcolm had been busy trying to discover the who and why, Tariq had been working on the what and where aspect of whatever was being planned. On the basis of their research and working on the presumption that maximum impact was the objective, they'd reduced the list of probabilities to three. All due to take place in London over the Bank Holiday weekend in ten days, were The Queen's 90th Birthday celebration in the grounds of Windsor Castle that would prompt hundreds of street parties all over the capital, a huge celebrity fuelled Pop Concert at one of the largest football stadiums in South London that would be attended by thousands including youngsters, but most likely and what they knew would be the most difficult to monitor was the London Marathon that as always started in Greenwich Park and ended with the runners skirting St James's Park before finishing in The Mall, just a few metres from Buckingham Palace. They'd made a note of these along with the dozens of other possibilities, although until Malcolm had gone through the list and weighed up the security options, they hadn't been deemed to be any more significant than any of the others.
The work had been relentless and in addition to keeping tabs on Connie, he Tariq and Ben had paid visits to the sections huge list of associates and snitches that kept their ears to the ground and eyes peeled, only to be brought out of the woodwork when called upon to be quizzed about the latest buzzword on the streets. One particular young man that Ben had befriended during his time as a journalist was John Anderson, a one - time aspiring writer that had fallen on hard times, who was now living from hand to mouth with whatever he could scrounge and when he wasn't being moved on by the police, roamed his patch in and around Westminster Bridge.
'Tell me exactly what John told you,' Malcolm asked him, as Ben walked back into the room to join them, apologising because he was late yet again.
It'll be brilliant next week, he'd said to Ben, the police will be so busy setting up the diversion signs and altering the road markings for the London Marathon, that nobody will be taking any notice of me. I'll been able come and go where and when I like.
'Is he reliable this friend of yours, what's your take on us asking him to come in?'
'He'll be sceptical at best, mainly because he's had a really rough time from the authorities but through no fault of his own, but he's learnt to be street wise and nothing gets past him, so if someone else needs to talk to him, I'm more than happy to make the introductions.'
Thousands of runners, some of whom would be dressed in all manner of costumes, plus the huge crowd that would line the entire length of the route, via heaven knows many famous landmarks, at night for the first time ever, chaos could be wrought right across London and with half the world's media watching on, the authorities would be almost powerless to stop it.
'Contact the organisers and get me a list of the runners,' Malcolm told Tariq, 'then I need you and Ben to check the details of every single one of them.'
'But there are thousands,'
'And I'm sorry, but this is going to be another very long day and I need to go into the meeting room and talk to Ros, because there's a far more pressing problem that's just been flagged up.'
They were her friends, who in their own different ways had invited her into their personal space, so 'they're fine,' had been Jo's guarded response when Ros questioned her as to how Harry and Ruth were and whether or not they were still managing to survive under the same roof, until in a week where it seemed that eavesdropping was becoming the norm, Malcolm's head appeared around the door and announced that he was sorry, but he might just be about to toss a spanner into the works.
'I hate to be the bearer of more bad news,' he continued hesitatingly as Ros rolled her eyes, 'but it seems that someone has been hacking into our personal records,' he told her, passing round a list that contained the names of all the female personnel that for the last ten years or so had worked at five. 'Most worrying is the fact that Ruth's name is still on that list, despite the fact that we all know that Adam and Zaf went to great lengths to remove it when she was exiled,' he told them.
Ros's response to his announcement was barely discernible, thanking him in a voice that sounded anything but grateful and asking him to go and talk to Tariq and tell him that he had her permission to do whatever it took to discover who the hackers were, before standing up with her usual flourish and with what was becoming a daily occurrence, she asked if any of them had heard from Connie, or knew where the hell she was?
Malcolm thought better than to tell her that he had already given Tariq a task that would take him all day, and that the three of them were already drowning in a sea of data and misinformation.
Alec, who so far sat had through what up until Malcolm's arrival, had been teetering towards another non - productive meeting, suggested it was interesting that the list was totally gender biased and that in his opinion that made it significant.
'Whoever these people are they've been searching for women who have a connection, however tenuous, to Harry,' he told them, justifying his existence and prompting Ros to sit down again and to ask him keep talking. 'This, whatever there planning is female driven, I'll stake my life on it. Foreign powers or splinter groups, forget them, we should be looking for women that have worked closely with Harry or he might have pissed off in any way shape or form during the last ten years.'
'How long is a piece of string?' Ros muttered under her breath, wondering if Jo was up to the task of going back to visit their boss to pose the question, or whether perhaps she should be the one to do it.
'You should also be very worried given the circumstances of Ruth's departure and return that she still appears on that list. My suggestion would be that you move her to another location which is as far away from Harry as possible,' he continued, oblivious as to why what he had told them had changed the atmosphere in the room immesurably.
'And watch Harry combust or worse still have a coronary, no chance?' Ros muttered and Jo said, 'please God not Mace again,' louder than she intended.
Oblivious, also applied to the couple who had finally put duty to one side and having turned off their phones, were enjoying an intimate brunch rather than breakfast.
'Harry,'
'Yes Ruth,' was said with a real twinkle in his eyes, which she now knew she wasn't going to shatter into a hundred pieces as it once had. Why the hell had it taken them so long to reach this moment, to be sitting opposite the person that you truly wanted to spend the rest of your life with and do something as simple as eat breakfast together, having just made love for a second time? We need to talk had been said far too many times by both of them, it was as worn out as a pair of old slippers and would only raise doubts in his mind and send them spiralling downwards into one of their how the hell do we retrieve something out of this scenarios. Jo had hit the nail on the head when she'd told her that she needed to explain to Harry the full extent of the new life that she'd built for herself, and tell him that no, she hadn't found the man of her dreams in the US, that she'd left him behind when she'd sailed away and that nothing had changed. She needed to tell him that she'd loved him then and still did, but in the cold light of day, finding those three words, let alone tell Harry wasn't proving easy.
Harry was still marvelling that after years of expectation when so many times he'd believed that they might be at a point where they'd get past the winning post only to fall at the last fence, they'd actually managed to reach it, albeit as the result of an overheard conversation. Not only that, the entire experience had been perfect and by the look on Ruth's face this morning, when sticking to his horse racing analogy he'd insisted on a rerun, she appeared to agree. It was one thing to make love in the dark, but an entirely different kettle of fish to do it for only the second time, in the early morning light whilst anyone who was sane was still sleeping, and be able to watch the look of sheer abandonment and then contentment on the face of the person that you loved and were blissfully conjoined with. It had made him feel eons of years younger than his fifty something years.
'Harry,' she pressed him again, as she sat watching him moving his breakfast around the plate, drifting off into Harry land as he so often had in the past, although this time with the smile still intact on his face. 'I need you to listen to me while I elaborate on my two years in the States and there's something that I need to tell you.'
'Is this going to spoil my breakfast?' he asked her, the concern that had been missing, now evident in his voice.
'That rather depends on whether or not you still love me,' she said, as her mouth overtook her brain for once and she finally heard herself saying what was uppermost in her mind, and according to Jo, his as well.
As the air stilled around them and the earth momentarily stopped turning on its axis, in a flat where they'd been thrown together to be kept safe from those who wished them harm, wide eyed and disbelieving hazel locked with the deepest of blue. Breathing in unison to whatever song was quietly playing on the radio behind them, Harry gazed at Ruth, his breakfast abandoned, her question still unanswered.
In what should and would have been the grandest of gestures, had he been able to stay calm, Harry stood up and took a step forward.
'Bollocks,' he said, as his thigh collided with the side of the table in his attempt to reach Ruth without looking where he was going, relieving the tension that saw them both dissolving into laughter.
'I bet you're going to tell me you could have jumped over that table at one time,' she said with a real glint of affection in her eyes, which was only overtaken by what he said next.
'You said if I still love you?'
'So I did.'
'I seem to remember I tried to tell you once before and you stopped me.'
'Well I'm not stopping you now.'
An hour later.
'Before you tell me about what you got up to in the States, I need to tell you something that Ros said to me, when she and I were drinking far too much on the day that Adam died,' he told her, by which time they had showered and dressed and Harry had answered her question and then some. 'She told me that she and Adam were never meant to be, and although she never actually said it, I believe that it was her way of apologising and suggesting that you and I were, I like to think so anyway.'
'Because you like her or you want me to forgive her? It's not that easy Harry,' was said without rancour.
'Partly, but it's more than that. She saved me Ruth when you went away, struggling to get out of bed, stuck in the same routine every day, with your empty desk taunting me every time that I walked across the grid or looked out of my office window in the ridiculous hope that you'd be there. Everybody knowing that I was falling apart and not able to concentrate on doing my job properly. You have no idea how many analysts came and went because of my behaviour during that first year after you left.'
What Harry had said amounted to a confession which was so out of character with anything that Ruth had ever heard him say, that she found herself struggling to find an answer, other than to take both his hands in her own and to lift them to her lips and kiss his knuckles with all the gentleness she could muster. She'd spent the best part of two years imagining him sitting behind his desk and getting on with life as he always did. Hoping that she'd occasionally cross his mind and was missing her, but continuing to solve whatever problems was being thrown at him with the same doggedness and panache that had drawn her to him like a magnet in the first place. But seemingly not, he'd been as lost as she'd been and he needed to know that she understood that.
'I got my wish, in part anyway, although I still haven't been to New York,' she told him, causing Harry to lift his face to look at her with a recollection that was seared on both their hearts. 'I loved my job Harry and the normality that my life had taken on, and Boston is a wonderful place to live, I'd really like you to see it if we ever get that chance. But there wasn't a single day when I was living there and was walking across the green on my way home from work, that I didn't imagine you walking towards me. How ridiculous was that?'
It wasn't ridiculous at all, she'd been struggling along the same path as he'd been and the honesty with which she was speaking, no holding back, giving him all the answers to the questions that up until now he had only imagined, was almost unheard of, bearing in mind that it was Ruth that was telling him.
'I wish I'd known where you were Ruth,' was said barely above a whisper.
'But you didn't Harry and where would that have got us if you had? You jumping on plane and flying off to rescue me and bring me home, with Mace still in the frame and looking for me?'
'For the best then, all things considered.'
'I'd say so.'
The joyous atmosphere had changed, but the emotional closeness that they'd always had, had received the final coat of paint to seal it. They were bound together not only by their strengths but by the frailties that were theirs and theirs alone, brought to the forefront in one single conversation.
'I love you so very much,' he told her.
Heading across London was Jo, wondering if perhaps it wouldn't just be easier to move in with Harry and Ruth, rather than be required to make another visit in the space of less than twelve hours, whilst hoping that the reason that their phones were turned off as were their computers, wasn't because one or other of them had been spirited away, but was for reasons best known to her. It had taken all her powers of persuasion to get Ros to allow her to be the breaker of bad news, although in the short term she'd mercifully rejected Alec's quite probably sound advice, in favour of Harrys and quite probably Ruth's sanity. If Harry couldn't protect Ruth, who could Ros had pointed out, besides which, with the section stretched to breaking point and no one outside the core staff completely trustworthy until proved otherwise, they were as Ros had put it, stuffed.
You can do this she told herself, just remember to ignore Alec's suggestion. How could he have possibly imagined that with the love of his life sitting next to him, that in order to track down the culprits, I need you to tell me how many women you have pissed off or slept with in the last ten years Harry,would be the best way to start the conversation.
