Ruth almost ran rather than walked onto the empty grid until her steps stalled, as did her resolve. This being back here was what she'd once considered to be normal, but this was so far from normal. His office was empty, as were the desks that had been rearranged in such a way that they were so alien to her, that for a moment found herself wanting to turn and run. Had Harry been party to the change, she had no idea, but it was a stark reminder as to why she was here, so why in the life of her she'd imagine that he'd be sitting at his desk, she couldn't imagine. In the distance, a door opened and then closed. Muffled voices, footsteps echoing in the huge vacuum that was section D, brought back recollections of the last time that she'd stood there, as Mace and her colleagues lined up in front of her as her accusers, until Harry had stepped forward, in what had proved to be a futile attempt to save her. The whispers when he'd turned his back on them and stepped into the same pod as her before he'd driven her home. Their goodbye that was etched on her heart and would be until the day that she died. And now here she was again, the tables turned, and it was her who had to stand up and be counted. To shout at the invisible crowd that he was an innocent in all this and that she loved him.

'Ruth, God it's good to see you, we're in the meeting room,' said a familiar voice, as she turned to see a worried looking Ros walking towards her. So she was right, something had happened. Determining to keep herself in check, she followed Ros down the oh so familiar corridor, where Harry had once lent in, so close to her that she'd barely been able to breath such had been her feelings for him, on the day that he'd told her she was a born spook. Well she wasn't a spook any more, she was dead, and the only reason that she was here was to save Harry and be damned with the rest.

'Ruth, this is Tariq Masood,' Ros said, introducing the young man that Malcolm had told her endless tales about. Alec White, Harry had described to her in great detail, yet again he wasn't what she'd imagined. Tall like Adam he certainly wasn't, stocky like Harry maybe, but halfway through munching an apple as he shook her hand and with his mouth full said 'that he was sorry that they had to meet under these circumstances,' never. Harry was a gentleman. Her next thought was to wonder just how much had these two been told about her miraculous reincarnation and her relationship with Harry? But for once, the answer when it came was quick and she guessed meant everything.

'Ruth you know Harry better than any of us, where's he likely to have gone? Alec asked her, as a picture of Harry leaving Fitzwilliam House with someone else that she'd never met, but they told her was John, flashed up onto the screen.

Somewhere in the back of Ruth's mind was the fact that Harry had once had an asset there, but even with her ability to drag the most inconsequential things from nowhere, his name was eluding her. They were under pressure, they needed an answer and what she did know and presumed that no one else did, was where Harry stored his eyes only data. He'd told her on the day when Tom had gone rogue, when he'd asked her if he could trust her and sworn her to take it to the grave. She'd said yes without hesitation, she'd have said yes to anything that he'd asked of her, even then, as in a moment of almost stifled hysteria, she realised that as she was supposed to be dead anyway, in a bizarre sort of way, she could answer Alec's question.

'I need to go into Harry's office - on my own,' brought a raised eyebrow, but with it a nod of agreement from Ros.


It had been more than two years since she walked into, never mind sat in Harry's office, but yet it felt as safe to her now as it had done then. The only difference being, well apart from the fact that he wasn't there, was that the smell of him, the nearness of him that had stayed with her and sustained her throughout their time apart, were gone. Double checking that no one had followed her she closed the blinds, before as gently as she could, she slipped her hand under his desk and released the tiny clip that would reveal what she was looking for. Placing the file on top of the desk, she opened it, surprised that since she'd last seen it, that a photograph of her had been added to the bundle. Dog eared as if it had been fingered more times than not, she turned it over and moved on. Sentiment could come later, for now she needed to find the USB that she knew was amongst the paperwork.

The heading 'assets' produced what they needed and Jo and Ben were dispatched to Fitzwilliam House. Scrolling further down, she found what else she was looking for, his personal observations and comments on his key staff, the most important of which at this moment was Connie. Reams of notes about their time together during the troubles in Ireland she already knew about, but at some time during the last two years, he'd added extra documentation about their time in Berlin. Why then? Had he been sitting in this same chair thinking that he'd lost her and because of it had confronted his mortality, or had he always known that this moment would come and that Connie would want her revenge? Either way she needed to read it, to find answers as to why he was so hell bent on getting himself killed. Once she knew that, then maybe they'd have a pathway to prevent it.

Call it instinct, call it curiosity or a desperate need to stay just where she was, but she ploughed on. Further down in the batch, she felt her heart miss a beat and her eyes widen. There in front of her, hidden in amongst the other insignificant jottings that Harry had written, was another file with her name on it 'In the event of my death.' Taking a deep breath in an effort to sustain herself, she opened the cover and started to read, total disbelief sweeping her further into the depths of Harry's mind. Apologies and regrets that amounted to confessions, had anyone other than her read them, ran into endless pages. How could he honestly believe that he alone should take the responsibility for all the hurt and the deaths that had happened over god knows how many years, as messages to his children and his ex-wife and more recently to her and to Wes swam before her eyes. This final working of his mind that he'd kept hidden from her and she'd found it why he was still alive, was ridiculous in its probability. It was inconceivable that he thought that he alone was to blame, when Tom, Adam, Ros, and the hundreds of now faceless spies that had preceded them were all culpable, as was she. If she hadn't felt so unspeakably sad she'd have screamed, but gathering herself together, she tucked the USB in her pocket and shut down his computer. This was a conversation to be had on another day when they were far away from here. Her priority for now, was to help them to find him.


The Turrets when they reached it was an imposing building surrounded by an impressively tidy garden, all contained within a wrought iron railed fence, far too high to climb. The gates were heavily padlocked and within full view of the curtained windows, so Harry beckoned to John to follow him down what once would have been a well used footpath. Overgrown to the point where it needed a hefty boot to open it, or boots which in this case belonged to John, they found themselves looking at a far less imposing side entrance. Across the lawn and directly in front of them was a small door, above which was a window, which Harry surmised gave light to a staircase. Harry's finger across his lips and the look in his eyes, reminded John of his father, when they'd played hide and seek in the garden with his mother and he'd been allowed to pretend that he was a real soldier going in search of the enemy. His time for reflection was cut short, as Harry divested himself of his jacket and produced the gun that John hadn't known he'd been carrying, before he took off across the lawn, beckoning for John to follow him. Now with their backs pressed hard against the wall and with John's heart hammering in his chest, Harry was on the move again, edging his way to a side door that only Harry could conceive would lead them to a successful conclusion or oblivion. John added picking locks, to the talents that this extraordinary man possessed, as he squeezed himself through the small space and ducked down behind him.

'You do as I tell you no matter what happens, and remember no heroics,' Harry reminded him, his last words of instruction before putting his foot on the first and then second step.


She knew they were coming, or more precisely she knew that he'd come. The carrot that she'd been dangling was far too great for him to have sent someone else. They had history her and Harry and this reckoning that she'd been planning for years was inevitable, it always had been.

'Stop loitering, I know you're out there and put the bloody gun down,' brought Harry and John to a door on the top floor and with it two decisions. Harry's was to do as Connie was asking and walk into the room, and then to try and talk her down in the hope of help arriving, but with the potential of meeting his maker, whilst John had the foresight to switch his phone back on, in the vain hope that there might be a signal that would link them to the grid.

'This,' said Harry, gesturing to the room 'is all about Hugo, isn't it Connie?' saw a shift in her body language that Harry recognised as terribly dangerous, particularly as she was playing with a gun that was dancing unnerving between first her left and then right hand, with the potential of ending up a pointing straight at him. 'He was ill Connie, long before we got there, he knew he was going to die, that's why he pleaded with me to let him do it,' brought no change in what she'd believed to be a lie or in the way that she was looking at him.

Back on the grid, Ruth slid the file that she'd found across the table to Ros, which showed her the true picture as to how misguided Connie was in what she'd believed for over fifteen years. Hugo and Harry had been sent to Berlin on a joint mission with the Russians, to dismantle an experiment by a splinter group that were developing a nuclear agent to sell to the highest bidder. Hugo had already been diagnosed with cancer and was dying, but it wasn't until Harry had suggested that they toss a coin as to who should go in, that he'd told him.

'Bollocks,' resonated around the grid, as Connie's voice went up an octave.

'Listen to me Connie, we can find a way to sort this out,' saw Connie's eyes glaze over and a pronouncement that told all of them who were listening that she wasn't looking for a way out, that this was the end.

'I loved Hugo with everything I had Harry and you let him die,' she spat at him. 'Have you ever loved anyone so much, that you'd do anything to protect them, no of course you haven't you arrogant - - -'

'Bastard?' Harry suggested.

There was a pause during which time, only those on the grid had any idea as to what if anything Harry might be about to say, daring themselves to look at Ruth who had her head down and her eyes closed, holding tight to the table.

'I have and I do,' Harry answered her, praying it would buy him some time, or if not, that hopefully John would have the opportunity to tell Ruth that these had been his last words, as the meeting room suddenly felt decidedly short of air and Malcolm's hand searched for Ruth.

'Well whoever she is, she's about to be disappointed, goodbye Harry,' was the last thing they heard as Connie raised her gun.


Whilst Harry had been trying to delay the inevitable, his young companion had been scanning the room for an alternative option to a bullet through the head. He may have spent the last two years on the street, but if nothing else, it had taught him what neither his school or university had, and that was how to survive. He was damned if this lunatic, whoever she was, was going to destroy what he was now considering to be his future. He'd seen guns and knives aplenty, changing hands for money or more often for whatever it was that their owners could supply. But wherever this particular gun had come from it didn't matter, what did matter was that it was up close and personal, and it's owner had a deep seated desire to kill Harry and quite probably him.

He'd been so busy concentrating on his next move that he'd only been half listening, until Harry's heartfelt statement, that yes, he did have someone in his life. So there was an 'us' he loved her he said, he hadn't been making it up, and this changed everything. It evoked a memory so strong, one that he hadn't felt since the evening that he'd walked into the sitting room at home and found his mother crying, on the night when she'd received the visitors that had told her that his father had been killed. He'd been a young boy, buried in confusion and unable to comprehend the enormity of what his mother had been feeling, something that still haunted him. But this was now and whoever this woman was she was out there somewhere, and this time he could make a difference.

Completely ignoring Harry's instructions, as Connie raised her gun, Harry took the full force of John's weight as he launched himself through the air and hurled him to the ground. Lying in a pool of blood, the majority of which wasn't his but John's, Harry was dead to the world, having hit his head on the sharp corner of an iron bedstead, totally unaware of the chaos that was about to erupt around him.


Jo and Ben who'd been battling their way through the crowds, were no more than twenty metres away when they heard the first shot. The roads were packed with thousands of spectators, they'd been closed for hours. It was the people's race and to cancel it for the sake of one life, of a man that only a few of them knew existed, as devastated as they all felt in that moment and none more so than Ruth who had collapsed against Malcolm, had never been an option. As Ros cleared the meeting room with the nod of her head and the somewhat ridiculous statement that 'they weren't to worry, she was going to sort this out,' she left Malcolm to deal with Ruth.

'We need paramedics, John's been shot, but it's Harry that I'm really worried about, he's unconscious with a huge gouge in his head and he isn't moving,' was Jo's message, followed by the confirmation that Connie had shot herself. That at least had been music to Ros's ears, until she realised that any chance of paramedics getting through to her colleagues was virtually nil.

Pause, think, act, had always been Harry's mantra and that was what she needed to do now. 'Come on Ros, you're the section head, think woman,' she told herself. First things first, they needed to get Harry and John to a hospital and the only chance of doing that was by helicopter. The sky was full of them monitoring the race, surely there had to be one that had a doctor and have the means to get Harry and John out of there. Shouting at Tariq to keep in touch with Jo and Ben, she ordered Alec to get in contact with the met commander and to organise a ground to air evacuation.

That done she needed to front up, and that meant the unenviable job of walking back into the meeting room and telling Ruth the truth, well most of it. That for the moment at least, Harry was still alive.

'And what aren't you telling me?' The more than 'capable of reading between the lines Ruth' snapped back at her, giving her no option other than to tell her what Jo had just said.

'There's a problem with his breathing,' she told her.