A/N: many thanks for reading and for all the reviews of the first half of this chapter. Here's the second, then the story will be in hiatus until the new year. Wishing everyone all the best for the festive season! AC
4B. 26/12/2014
16:45 Canberra
Unexpected rain with a slightly chilly wind drove them back inside less than an hour later. Everyone, fully relaxed with each other by now, mixed freely amid much laughter as the swimmers dried off and got changed again. Straggling back up stairs they decamped back to the large, airy sitting room with its cathedral ceiling and double-height, bullet-proof windows gazing out across the small, manicured front yard onto the tree-lined street beyond, and spread themselves out on the comfortable chairs. One of them was occupied by an elderly, somewhat podgy but very beautiful Russian Blue cat; Ruth, spotting the animal as soon as she walked in, made a beeline for the chair, picked the cat up and plumped herself down, putting him back on her lap and crooning at him as she scratched around his ears and under his chin.
"Oh, hello gorgeous, who are you?"
Ilian grinned as she made herself comfortable on the large leather lounge between Harry and Wynne.
"That is Pusskin. He's almost fourteen, is spoiled rotten and runs the house."
"He's beautiful!"
"Well, that's Iona entertained for the rest of the afternoon," Harry murmured, sotto voce, but Ruth declined to listen, focussing instead on the cat's face and thick, velvet fur. Ilian prodded Harry in the arm and said,
"Interesting article of yours the other day, Laurence. Very incisive analysis of that nut-job Monis and his ilk."
Harry inclined his head.
"I've had a lot of practice with the likes of him."
Hope looked puzzled.
"I thought you were farming these days."
"He is but you know what he's like: has to get his opinion out there so he started writing letters to the editor to the national papers," Ruth responded slightly tartly but her expression was softened by a smile. "He was too good at it and now he's got a regular syndicated column."
"Not under your own name? That would be a bit risky, wouldn't it, especially with Mace in charge over there now. Anyway I monitor such things and haven't seen you anywhere. There is someone else who is very good, a Raymond Foyle… oh, that's you, isn't it?"
The man in question smiled again; Lucas, sharing the two-seater with Hope, stretched and responded,
"Got it in one!"
They talked about his articles, the events of the siege and the internal aftermath inside Ilian's organisation, which included her wanting to sack one of her analysts for their abject failure in understanding the import of everything from the letter that Monis had sent to the Attorney General some time before to the dozen or more calls they had received from the public about entries on the man's Facebook page the day before. Not only had the analyst misjudged the reports; they had also failed to inform Ilian or Ruby of their very existence. However, the person had been in the organisation a long time and had contacts so instead of Ilian achieving her aim of terminating their employment they were, much to her disgust, instead shifted sideways to somewhere where they could do no more harm. As that conversation wore itself out Meg asked,
"How are your studies going, Iona? I believe you are nearly finished your doctoral thesis on geopolitics, specialising in terrorism, if I've got that right?"
Ruth groaned.
"You have it right and I have been 'nearly finished' for months. I'll be glad when it's over, to be honest."
The slightly bitter tone of her voice surprised everyone except Harry, who knew the cause of it. Reaching out a foot to lightly rub her ankle with his toes he said,
"Don't worry, Fruit, you will never have to have anything to do with that person again soon."
A few sets of eyebrows were raised, Lucas' included.
"What happened? You were still enjoying it last time I heard, which wasn't so long ago."
"One of the external examiners is being difficult," Ruth sighed, sipping on her tea. "He wants me to rewrite part of my conclusions; I don't agree with what he wants and neither does my supervisor but I'm not being given any choice about it if I want the degree." The others looked appalled and a rustle of denial whispered through the group. "The man has absolutely no idea of what he's talking about, which doesn't help. That's been a problem on and off all the way through – people who have little to no practical experience marking your work. It's been incredibly frustrating, particularly as I can argue rings around them but then can't say where or how I know what I know!"
Ilian nodded sagely.
"Mmm, difficult to admit to years at GCHQ and in the heart of Five when you're in deep cover as a cow-cocky and that other person is supposed to be dead." She suddenly gave a shark-like smile. "Would you like me to make the man's life a misery for a while, or ruin his career or something?"
An opaline gaze met the bright aquamarine one.
"Get thee behind me, Satan…" Ruth huffed a sigh and added, "Much though I like the thought, he's actually not worth the effort."
"It could be fun," Ilian persisted, looking hopeful.
"Oh, it would be!" Harry commented, smiling expansively at the many memories he had of running similar operations. "We'll bear it in mind and let you know. Especially if he gives her any more grief…"
Pusskin stood up on Ruth's lap, stretched languidly and then jumped off to make his stately way across the floor and up the few stairs towards the kitchen. She watched him go and murmured,
"That was nice while it lasted."
"Maybe he was bored with the conversation," Lucas threw in but Meg shook her head and checked her watch.
"No, at this hour of the day he'll be heading outside for his ablutions and then looking for dinner. He's nothing if not a creature of habit."
"I'll feed him when he comes back in," Ilian yawned, elegantly. "How are your pair going, Iona? What were their names? Harry and Ruth?"
Hope gurgled in disbelief and Lucas laughed outright. The woman glanced from one half of the couple to the other.
"Seriously? Harry—" she looked at the man "—and Ruth?" Her gaze travelled to the woman, who blushed.
"Yes, okay, I regret my sense of humour sometimes. They're both fine." Her eyes slid sideways to where her husband was also enjoying the moment. "Harry's putting on weight as he's getting on—"
The man raised an eyebrow and cut in.
"And Ruth is getting crankier with approaching old-age!"
"If I'm reading the undercurrents right we'd better pull the pin on this conversation before it gets ugly," Megan interjected as Hope's and Lucas' laughter stuttered to a halt.
"Sorry, but I love it," Hope clarified, lifting her glass to her lips for a moment. "Brilliant cover for any little slips."
"It was, once or twice in the early days," Harry acknowledged, exchanging fond glances with Ruth. "We don't make slips any more because apart from the cats we've almost forgotten our old names."
"I wish I could say that," Lucas murmured, grimacing briefly. "Despite my best efforts they're all still in there, waiting to pop out at inopportune moments. One of them I don't mind but the rest…"
"Perhaps you should follow Tom's lead," Ruth suggested, equally as quietly. "Put them in boxes and file them away, even if only metaphorically."
"Perhaps," he nodded in agreement. "It would have to be metaphorical anyway, the only physical thing I have left is the ink."
"That would belong to the name you don't mind," Meg stated shrewdly. Lucas glanced at her, a little surprised she had put it together so quickly. Of course, Ilian could have mentioned something that had tipped her off but he doubted it as he knew his current boss was about as forthcoming on private matters relating to her underlings as his previous one had been. Still, the woman wasn't a High Court judge for nothing. He inclined his head and Wynne added,
"Despite everything that happened to him in Russia?"
"Yes. He was the best person I have ever been. The person I am still trying to be." Throwing back the last of his drink he suddenly smiled. "This has got a bit serious for Christmas. My apologies! What else is there to talk about? Have you got anything lined up to do, Wynne, or are you going to be a kept man for a while?"
"He wishes," Hope put in from her position next to him. She exchanged a glance with her husband and added, "No, we've got plans for him come February."
"I'm not sure I like the sound of that."
Wynne pulled a face.
"You'd better. It involves you."
Lucas' face was a picture to behold as the other man's words sank in. Polite enquiry was followed by a blank incomprehension which was in turn chased away by a mixture of apprehension and curiosity. His blue gaze flickered between Wynne, Ilian, Hope and back again; Hope winked at him and said sideways to her man,
"Put him out of his misery, darling."
It turned out that Wynne was returning to his old stamping ground of military intelligence but, like Lucas, on the training side of things. The military were aware of what Lucas was doing with his advanced interrogation resistance and torture survival training sessions and were interested in talking to him about updating their own training program for the special services, among other things. Wynne, who would be reinstated to his old rank of Brigadier in the counter-intelligence and insurgency section, would be running the program. Nothing was anywhere near decided yet, let alone settled but he was looking forward to discussing it with the other man and starting to work up some options.
Everyone could see it was tweaking Lucas' interest – they could almost see the cogs turning behind his eyes – but while he was thinking about it, during a natural pause in the conversation, Hope nodded towards Harry and suggested,
"You might want to talk this one into playing a part as he wrote one of the original books and has presumably revised it since."
The man in question stretched in his seat.
"I have. Several times, with input from as many sources as I could get hold of." He was thinking specifically of Adam at that point but there was something in Hope's wide green eyes and focussed, intensely interested expression as she looked at him that threw him somewhere entirely different: back to a night in a bar in Berlin over twenty five years before. The three of them – Hope, her then squeeze Jim Coaver and himself – having a relaxed night out as the Soviet empire collapsed around them and talking about what the future might bring. Not much of it had come true, of course, and it was nothing to do with what they were talking about in the here and now but it was the second time today that such memories had arisen, with all their pleasure as well as their pain. This time around at least it was more the former than the latter. It occurred to him to wonder if Hope was even aware of what had happened to her former short-term lover – they had made a very good looking couple, he remembered fondly – but today wasn't the time to discuss it. Maybe some time in the future.
That future wasn't as far removed as he had thought it would be. Had he remembered better he would have realised that Hope would have noticed something about his reactions. However, the initial moment passed without comment; later, just after the sun had disappeared behind the hills to the west, briefly lighting up the base of the remaining clouds with incandescent yellow, orange and red while their tops were a shining white fading into lilac and blue, he found out the truth.
He had left the group down on the lower level, picking at the remains of lunch that a few of them had retrieved from the fridge, while he wandered off to find the amenities; on the way back, side-tracked by the beauty of the sky and the lights beginning to twinkle on the far side of the lake, he diverted out onto a small covered deck off to the side of the kitchen, leaning on the railings to take in the view and the pleasure of some cool, early evening air. Five minutes later barely audible footsteps padding towards him warned him that he was about to have company. He didn't move as the woman joined him, leaning companionably against the railing. Her green eyes slid towards him just as his dark ones slid towards hers; a slight smile tweaked his lips as he said, gravely,
"Hello, Hope."
Her own smile started out just as slight but broadened as she spoke, somewhat teasingly.
"Hello…Laurence! It's about time I got you on your own for a catch up."
They chatted for a little while, mostly in generalities and sooner rather than later found themselves returning to times past, firstly to their international joint exercise chasing drug barons in Thailand back in the early nineties then further back to London before finally ending up, as they always knew it would, in Germany in 1989.
Late Summer, a couple of months before the Wall finally came down, Hope had been sent there by her superiors at ASIS to monitor the collapse of the Soviet Union from the epicentre of the events and had been supplied with the names of a couple of contacts, one from the local CIA desk and the other from MI6: James Jeffrey Coaver and Henry James Pearce, respectively. Thereafter known as Jim and Harry, they had a few short weeks of working and socialising together, all quite intense within the pressure cooker environment that was West Berlin at the time. Hope and Jim had taken full advantage, on the few occasions they could, of the no-strings-attached environment, albeit extremely discretely; Harry, still silently smarting from the scars inflicted by Elena Gavrik and the subsequent loss of his wife and family, at that point had been quite content to be the third wheel in the triumvirate.
This evening inevitably stirred up more memories as soon as they found themselves back a quarter of a century, memories that were now inevitably tinged for Harry by guilt-ridden sadness at Jim's end in that featureless London street with the rain gently falling around them as MI5 and the CIA faced off against each other, unknowing pawns in the hand of that same icy Russian puppet-master. A wistfulness crept into his voice; after a momentary break Hope gazed upwards at the burgeoning stars, enjoying the gentle evening breeze on her face, and asked quietly,
"What aren't you telling me? About Jim."
He quirked an eyebrow at her but she wasn't looking.
"What makes you think that?"
A smile flickered across her lips as she turned her attention from the stars to the waxing crescent moon that was descending to the west.
"Because every time you get anywhere near the subject you react. It's subtle and most people wouldn't notice but I do. And I bet Iona never misses it, either."
He hesitated and then sighed.
"No, she doesn't. But then she caries her own guilt as well – considers herself at least partly responsible for what happened, although she is not."
Finally she looked directly at him, her face largely shadowed but with moonlit highlights.
"What did happen? I heard through the grapevine when he died but never anything about how."
It wasn't a memory he cared to revisit but under the circumstances he would: she was entitled to know.
Hope listened quietly to the succinct, brutally honest account. She had genuinely liked Jim and they had kept in intermittent touch for many years but she had always had a strange feeling that he wouldn't make old bones. But not like that, not caught up as a bystander in some tawdry, misplaced attempt to influence European politics run by a sad psychopath lost in a past that could never be real again, was never real in the first place. That fate was neither fair nor worthy of the man. A wave of sadness tinged with regret and ennui swept over her and she closed her eyes for a moment.
"He was a good man. He deserved better."
When she looked at him again her eyes were suddenly ancient, as deep as the ocean and as green as the forest and in the face of their penetrating gaze Harry could only confess, tinged with bitter self-loathing,
"Yes, and I was so tied up in my own problems that I forgot that."
Her silence was neither angry nor judgemental, as he may have expected. Instead, it was, if anything, calming, almost zen-like as she honed in on the salient point.
"You were with him at the end?"
He nodded, wordless, and they locked eyes for a long moment. That was when they both felt it: the frisson of something so light and insubstantial that it blew away on the wind, an insubstantial whisper of what might have been, an alternate future – forever unknowable, now – viewed through the prism of distorting glass filling the schism in space and time that had prevented it from ever happening. Gone in an instant, it nevertheless left a faint echo of its electricity behind as she touched his hand gently and said,
"That's all that matters."
Reflexively winding his fingers through hers and giving them a squeeze as he fought the sudden misting of his eyes (he hadn't realized he was still so upset by it all) he gazed down and replied,
"I'm not so sure about that, as it was my fault, at least in part."
"Harry, look at me." It had been so long since anyone had used his name that he obeyed, startled. "It was not and you know it." She shook his hand and then let go. "You might be good but you're no mind reader so how the hell were you supposed to know that would happen? You had no idea what the Russians were up to and, even if Jim did suspect, he wouldn't have expected them to snatch him out of your grasp so blatantly. What happened, happened, and he didn't die alone. If he had to go like that, at least he had one of his oldest friends with him."
Ruth, who had been inside refilling the decanter of water from the fridge, had seen the look pass between them and the touch that followed and had suddenly plunged into fear, demons that she had thought long-buried suddenly peering up through a crack in the floor. She had sidled over to listen, hating herself for it, and had been intensely relieved to hear the conversation that followed. The green-eyed monster that had done so much damage in earlier times hadn't raised its head for years so its reappearance now was a genuine, very unwelcome, surprise. Determinedly, she shook herself, forced the dragon back into its den and resolutely turned away. Blind Freddy could see that Hope and Wynne adored each other, to the exclusion of the rest of the world; she and Harry were much the same so the monster could disappear back into its dark corner and stay there because she was well and truly sick of it and its sour exhalations. Taking the decanter, she moved away as quietly as she had arrived.
Oblivious out on the patio, Harry had acknowledged the truth in Hope's words with a sigh.
"I know. But don't tell me that you don't still harbour, somewhere deep in your soul, some residual, misplaced guilt for what happened to Wynne in Timor."
Ouch! Her smile was rueful.
"Touche!" She straightened up, stretched and checked her watch. "We've got to make tracks soon so we'd better get back inside."
Harry checked for himself and was surprised to see it was after eight.
"So do we." They returned indoors and continued talking as they moved towards the stairs. "We're on the road again tomorrow and need to get going early so we'd better go and do our good guest thing by helping to clean up."
Raucous laughter came from the lounge on the lower level where the others were congregated and the pair stopped to look over the balcony wall so see Lucas now sandwiched between Ilian and Meg, the three of them shaking with laughter at something, while Ruth and Wynne were comfortably ensconced on the smaller sofa, heads together momentarily before they grinned at each other, sat back, clinked their glasses together in a toast and drank. Hope smiled gently at the sight and then huffed something that was half sigh, half groan at her companion.
"Half your luck. I wish we could run away but we can't: we've only been back for a week so we'll be back to house-hunting tomorrow. If we can afford anything: the prices here these days are ridiculous."
He winked at her, suddenly reminding her of the sun-burned rogue in Bangkok all those years ago.
"Don't worry, you can always pitch a tent on the lawn on the roof of Parliament House!"