3. Calling Fire
"Here's what we know," Holly said unprompted, handing Bond a tablet displaying an interactive map of the world.
Bond had visited an unsuspecting Q-Branch nearly a dozen times over the last few weeks, on top of the typical appointments for one mission, a ten-day manhunt in South Korea that brought him dangerously close to the Demilitarized Zone and twice roused Q at what must have been four in the morning in Britain. He had snapped at Bond over the comm link like a disgruntled terrier but made it all worth it by grumbling that he hadn't forced his underlings to report "because I can't in good conscience subject them to you at this hour, and anyway Holly's got to be up in a bit with her kids." (Q cloaked his affections in such snideness that Bond regarded any sincere admittance of them as a victory – for whom, he could not say.)
Their operations had not bent to accommodate him, so he spent too much time lounging in spare chairs and waiting to see if Q or Holly or Sullivan had a free moment, training his ears on the techs and masking his annoyance at their mundane gossip. Teresa had blocked off a standing appointment with Q, half an hour twice a week, but meetings ran long or missions blew up and usually Bond entered the office to find Holly instead.
The map she had given him bristled, like a two-dimensional pincushion, with blue markers and hovering photographs. "Each dot represents an agent who's been compromised by the mole," she explained. "Tap one and it'll bring up the details of the case – what they were up to and who they were after, what information we think the mole leaked and its security level, and the damage done as a result."
Bond went through them at random:
Karim Bakkal – Egypt, February – monitoring militant supporters of Muslim Brotherhood; communications disrupted by introduction of signal-jamming equipment based on Q-Branch prototype, information level Gamma; Mr. Bakkal forced to abandon post after six weeks due to inability to request supplies or other aid; agents continue to face communication difficulties when posted in major Egyptian cities.
Michael Davies – Belize, March – infiltration of Triangle drug cartel, joint mission with the CIA; Mr. Davies and CIA agent REDACTED responsible for arrests of five high-ranking members; location of detainees leaked to cartel members, information level Alpha; detainees freed in firefight that wounded both agents; previous bases of operation now abandoned, location of cartel leader unknown, no significant decrease in illegal drug traffic in region.
Alexandra Scott – Singapore, May – undercover investigation of human trafficking ring; exclusive client revealed to be MI6 informant, information level Alpha; both client and Ms. Scott severely beaten and threatened with sexual assault prior to extraction; no agents or informants currently secured within trafficking operation.
"They're treating your firewalls like a revolving door," Bond remarked, careful not to let it sound like a condemnation.
"Ah, but there's the rub." Holly held up one finger like a schoolteacher. "We've had security breaches throughout the year – intelligence agencies attract that sort of thing, some legitimate and some just kids in their basements wanting to cause as much chaos as possible – but they don't match the leaks on our list. There certainly hasn't been enough data stolen to account for all of this bedlam." She gave him the kind of smile shared by people who know the same secret. "Certain spectacle-wearing Cambridge kids aside, we're actually quite good at catching intruders and locking them out before they can make off with our files."
Bond dropped his gaze to the tablet. "So whoever's doing this has high enough clearance to access all this information legitimately." He had known this from the beginning – they must all have known, M and Q and Holly and Sullivan – but until now no one had acknowledged it aloud. He looked back at Holly. "Doesn't that narrow the list?"
"Not as much as you'd think. There's a half-dozen people in M's office alone with high enough clearance. Our Branch is divided into eight different departments, and the heads of each department and their top staff have access to all these files as well. And – I'm telling you things you already know, but – the double-oh section can request access to nearly any file, if they can prove relevance to their latest mission. We've cleared all of you, by the way; none of you have been into the files for more than one of these cases."
"Isn't it possible that someone is… impersonating someone else with a higher security clearance? Piggybacking on their authorization?"
Holly grinned; he had impressed her, unexpectedly. "Yes, it's possible, though in our system it's extremely difficult. The more secure a file is, the more hoops you have to jump through to get to it. A fingerprint scan is more secure than a password, but the computer's record of that fingerprint is still a single piece of data that can be stolen or replaced. So you use combinations – fingerprint scan and password, voice recognition and retina scan." Then she sighed. "The problem with Q-Branch – with all of MI6, really – is we have sophisticated protocols everywhere you turn, but we also have the people who created all those protocols, and therefore know the best ways to exploit them."
This time the look they shared was grim, but Holly's voice retained its calm. "If you swipe over to the next screen, you'll find our list of all the people who have the right security clearance to be our mole."
Bond scanned the list, picking out the names he could match to faces and voices: Maxwell Goldberg; Alan Jeffries; Gareth Mallory; Holly Mason; Robert Shaw; Lisa Stuber; Lamar Sullivan; Bill Tanner.
Goldberg was a tall, thin-faced mechanical engineer with the sharp, jerky joints of a marionette; he stuttered when excited but had once guided Bond through a complex rewiring of an airplane's data recorder with unshakeable composure. Lisa Stuber was the humorless head of Telecommunications, the only woman in Q-Branch who had shown neither flattery nor disgust when confronted by Bond's smoothest smile. Goldberg had no poker face, unless the stutter was an elaborate act; Stuber, with servers full of incriminating words at her fingertips, made a much better candidate.
The most obvious suspects, the ones a child would guess, were the top staff of Information Security, and Bond had been watching them closely. (He wasn't quite hoping for the obvious answer – that would be dull, almost insulting. But a fast resolution meant healthier survivors – better a quick drench than a long soak.) Sullivan emanated such an aura of command that he could spark a room to attention with a single word, and Bond had had the pleasure of sitting in on a meeting with a pair of bureaucrats who had been thoroughly confused that this steel-spined military man deferred to a bespectacled kid in a lint-ridden cardigan. Sullivan's second, Jeffries, was a slicked-hair smartarse with a comfortable grin and a playful jibe for everyone who crossed his path. Bond liked him on sight.
Most of the other suspect names conjured an image and a posting, some shakier than others, but no memorable interactions. Bond filed them away for future investigation and toyed with the functions of the list. One of the buttons allowed him to sort both data and personnel by clearance level, and once he had done so, he scrolled straight to the top.
"Omega level – that's the highest level of clearance."
Something swept through Holly's eyes like headlights passing on a dark road, and he knew he had touched on something important, something she had been waiting for him to uncover. "Yes. The mole hasn't used any information from those files – yet."
"If he does, it'll narrow the list significantly."
She shook her head, slight and a little sad. "I don't think you really want that to happen."
"Why?"
"Because that would mean the mole is one of a very short list of people you don't want betraying MI6." She leaned over and tapped a button that highlighted the names:
Gareth Mallory; Holly Mason; Robert Shaw; Bill Tanner.
Both of them let the silence linger. Holly wiped some dust from the tablet screen with her thumb, sweeping twice across the names as though she could erase them. Bond wondered which hurt her more: seeing herself on the list of suspects, or realizing that the only other options were friends.
"Who do you think it is?" he asked, as gently as he knew how. "You must have some suspicions."
She regarded him with an uncharacteristic shutter over her face, void of the cheerfulness she wore as cheekily as her colorful trainers. For a moment she reminded him of her boss, blank calculation the only discernible sentiment – and it struck him, then, that he had yet to gain the full trust of the most trusting person, that even the locks-bolted Quartermaster had opened more doors for Bond than Holly had. Honesty came easily and sensibly to Holly, and so made her lack of trust harder to perceive, and that much harder to breach.
She shook herself as though she had just realized that she was staring. Bond saw her eyes dart to the closed door of Q's office with an inarticulate wariness.
"Whoever it is," she said, "it won't be pretty" – and Bond, who knew betrayal better than any of them, understood exactly what she was afraid of.
Early the following morning Bond returned to Q-Branch to corner its elusive leader. Holly had allowed him to keep the tablet if he agreed not to take it anywhere except his flat, and Bond considered all the things MI6 tracked with GPS (watches, mobiles, the Quartermaster) and understood that was no idle request. Over dinner he had read each entry twice, then gone for a jog along the river with the details churning in his mind like the wake behind a ferry.
Q-Branch was cavernous, if one included the garage and the server room, but Bond had invested significant time in a pudgy, keen-sighted man named Dooley, who appreciated caffeinated gifts and friendly banter and worked in the main monitoring room. On arrival he visited first Chemical Engineering, which stocked the best coffee, then Dooley, who was parked as usual in front of a bank of screens that fed him black-and-white evidence of the activities of the Branch. The coffee offering earned him a tip that Q was logged into a workstation at InfoSec.
Downstairs the door gaped wide, framing Q at a desk in the center of an empty maze of computer terminals. Bond paused just out of sight to observe the Quartermaster when he thought no one was watching. Spine straight, eyes focused, just as he had looked the first time Bond had seen him at work – but the similarity was only natural, because someone was always watching.
A door buzzed open on the opposite side of the room. Holly swept in with her eyes on her mobile and the other arm sagging under a stack of folders and books and a tablet.
"My BND meeting is in five minutes and Bill is still messaging me reminders – it's as if I've never done this before –"
Her gaze fell on Q's computer screen and Bond followed by instinct, because a change crossed her face as soon as she saw what Q was working on, a change that Bond didn't have time to articulate but he knew was bad. At this distance he couldn't read the text, but the sight of the graphics gritted his teeth: a painted skull, a radiating red map, the burned-out remains of what had once been a grand house…
"The Skyfall case is closed," Holly stated, but Bond heard the question beneath.
"I'm wondering," Q said slowly, as though each word were a step through a minefield, "if the mole's first successful disruption was in the service of Raoul Silva."
He looked at Holly with a challenge in the set of his shoulders. After several still seconds she dumped her armful on the adjacent desk and took a deep breath, and Bond knew she was preparing for war.
"If the mole helped Silva steal from us and escape," she ventured, treading as carefully as Q, "if his first double-cross was so… successful – why did he wait almost two months before trying again?"
The answer came so quickly that Bond knew Q had anticipated the question. "Fear of detection while we were retooling our defenses in the aftermath."
Holly tossed her head in frustration. "Yes, we rewrote parts of the system, but we also moved back to Babylon, and there was plenty of confusion during that time. Enough to justify some packets of insecure or missing data. Why waste the opportunity?"
Q stared at the monitor. His eyes moved back and forth and up and down as though he were reading, but there seemed to be a great distance between him and the screen. "Maybe he realized he was in too deep. Targeting the head of MI6 – the mole hasn't aided anyone else with a plan that audacious." He shot her a shadow of his usual sardonic smile. "After all, if he brings us down, then he hasn't got anything valuable to offer."
She came closer, leaned her hip on the desk inches from his elbow. Q's hands flew to the desk's edge, then dropped to his lap, as if his first impulse had been to push his chair away.
"Robert," she said, and Bond marveled at the mixture of so many meanings into one word, gentleness and a warning and a plea – "Please tell me this isn't –"
"I am investigating an avenue that might lead us to new evidence –"
"Look me in the eye and tell me you actually believe it."
Q swung sharply round to face her, half-formed words already fading from his lips. Their eyes locked. Between them silence spread like acetylene, invisible and explosive.
A mobile alarm ruptured the hush. Holly reached into her pocket to turn it off without looking. Her next words were so quiet that Bond almost missed them – but anger strung through them like barbed wire, accusation and desperation in equal measure.
"You don't believe it's true, you're hoping it's true. You're hoping there's somebody else out there to blame."
Then she turned on her heel, scooped up her folders, and left through the door from which she had come. Q stared after her, for a moment, then turned back to his computer and closed the files on his screen, one by one. A door had shut behind his eyes, but Bond caught the faintest tremor in the line of his throat as he stood up from the desk and began to walk away.
At least, Q thought ruefully, Silva had been straightforward about what he wanted, and relatively quick in announcing it.
If this were an outside attack he could design a dozen ways to defeat it. Instead it was a guessing game, a problem with too many undefined variables. The suspect list ran on an endless iterating loop, each permutation returning the same result.
It could be Lisa (she had accessed the relevant data the greatest number of times), or it could be Sullivan (he had programmed the gates that separated the clearance levels), or it could be M (in which case they were all buggered, especially him, because consider how easy, how enticing it would be to pin the blame on the pet criminal, how the story already had the ring of truth).
He combed the files, searching for something that could not be connected to any project or mission, any obscure code or suspicious information dumps. He sorted the data in combinations that made less and less sense the more he stared at them. Sometimes he saw patterns where there were none. Sometimes he woke gasping in the middle of the night (on the nights he slept at all) with a fear that he refused to look in the face.
One late evening he had gone again down the rabbit hole, following the access string with more feeling than thought, nursing a mug of cold tea and fighting irritation at the occasional disruption (InfoSec was rolling out the latest round of security patches, meaning the network might boot him without warning). Somehow he wound up in Archives among terabytes of digitized records and abandoned prototypes and copies of viruses that he imagined contained in glass like samples of a real disease. Keyloggers, worms, backdoors – probably his own malicious code, which he had rendered obsolete in both MI6's servers and his own store of knowledge. Files fell open at his fingertips, stacking the screen with blueprints and rich text and more folders like nested puzzle boxes, until he was running more than a dozen scripts –
And the program crashed.
Q sighed. No one had any business with Archives this late, which meant Jeffries was probably tinkering with the authorization, had maybe dismissed all active users without even checking to see if there were any active users –
But it wasn't just the program, his whole computer had locked up, cursor unresponsive, monitor cutting to black – and a single flash of text, bright enough to linger like sunspots even after it vanished from the screen –
Not such a clever boy.
He could not recall jumping to his feet, but he was standing, somehow, every nerve wired tight and firing like sparklers, hands fixed in fists that stretched the scar tissue and sparked pain through tendons that would always be weaker than before. The silence of the room pressed on his eardrums like water. The faint rush of the ventilation. A door slamming somewhere down the hall. A whirr from below (the garage; they were rotating tyres today). The hum of his computer, almost outside conscious hearing, and his own breathing – that was all. After a minute his screensaver activated, scrolling lazily through space shots from the Hubble Telescope.
Trembling seized him. Maybe he hadn't seen it at all. Maybe it had been a trick of the light, of an overtaxed mind. Maybe this had been how they felt, the security teams who had traced him, alone in the buzzing banality of an ordinary office, aware that beneath the silence something sinister was operating outside their control.
The shaking followed him out of the office and through the Tube and beneath the blankets in the solitude of his flat, where he had long since learned to bury his pains in silence so MI6 would never know.
"You look awful," Audrey greeted. She was leaning against the west side of a Trafalgar Square plinth, eating fish and chips out of a paper sack and seeking the fitful rays of sunlight that dribbled through a patchy blanket of clouds.
Q put his back against the cold stones, straightened his spine, and willed the ache between his shoulder blades to disappear. "Well, that's another entry on the list of women who find me distasteful."
"I didn't say you were awful, I said you look awful. Looking awful is fixable; being awful is usually permanent." She held out the bag. "Chip?"
Q took a handful and forced himself to eat them one at a time. Audrey scuffed her shoe across the pavement so that his left foot and her right were touching, side-by-side, and Q realized how small she was, and how strange that she occupied a much larger space in his mind than her size would suggest.
"What's wrong?" she asked. "Work?"
"Big project. Poorly defined parameters, looming deadline, anxiety-inducing corporate oversight. Massive headaches all the way round."
"Anything I can do to help?"
"Anything you do is helping."
He was not very good at the gentle phrases – much easier to sincerely express a dishonest sentiment than uncurl the soft underbelly of his emotions. But Audrey rewarded them with a smile or a touch or a reciprocal saying, and that was encouragement enough.
She passed him what remained of the bag of chips; Q abandoned decorum and shoveled the entire thing into his mouth. Audrey watched him with an eye-crinkling smile, the kind that both warmed him and rattled his nerves, because he could never be sure if she was amused by the present or some unknowable variation of the past.
"Do you really have a list of women who find you distasteful?"
"It's mostly my ex-girlfriend from uni and a couple of girls that I fancied in secondary school. The list of men who find me distasteful is much longer and a bit more concerning."
And it was Q's turn to smile at some secret amusement, because she wouldn't laugh if she knew how true that was.
Q had ordered tickets to The Importance of Being Earnest, because he had read it in secondary school but never seen it performed, and Audrey considered that a crime. ("It's one of my prerequisites, didn't we go over this on our first date?") It had been weeks since he had been in the proper mood for humor, but the actors projected such playfulness, their dialogue thrusting and parrying with a saber's speed, that he allowed himself to relax against the plush seating and glance at his mobile only two or three times per act. Audrey spent the performance leaning on his shoulder and tossing smart comments in his ear, most of them directed at the young man playing Algernon, who was exactly the sort of lean, dark-browed baritone Q would have eyed over the top of his laptop at uni.
By the time they stepped back onto the pavement, full night had fallen and taxi headlights illuminated swathes of silver rain like the revelation of ghosts. Q put up the hood of his raincoat and paced the block three times in pursuit of an unoccupied cab, returning wet to the knees and unsuccessful.
"Don't you live round here?" An unfair question – he knew the answer, had in fact bought the tickets for a late hour at a theater in Audrey's neighborhood on a night with a certainty of rain, because he could be a patient man but he was also a bit of a cheat.
Audrey was dancing from foot to foot beneath the awning, hugging herself against the chill. She turned so she could point in the right direction without unwrapping her arms. "Four blocks down, two blocks over. Make a run for it?"
Q had a longer stride, but Audrey had run track for her secondary school, and she hit the top step of the block of flats a full five seconds ahead of him. In the lobby they sagged panting and dripping against opposite sides of the stair railings. Q unzipped his raincoat and used his tie to wipe down his glasses; without them Audrey became the suggestion of a woman, curving impressionistic smudges of blue and white and red. When he put them back on she was smiling with a hint of ruefulness, as though she had tricked him into entering a contest she desperately wanted him to win.
"I think I have to offer you a cup of tea now," she said. "You did just run after me in the rain."
Q snorted with laughter. "Tea would be lovely."
They climbed the stairs and stopped outside the first door. Audrey fidgeted with her keys. "…I think both of my flatmates are home."
Q eyed the perfectly ordinary numbers on the back of the door and pressed his thumb over the peephole. The mere presence of peepholes, the fish-eye distortion, the way they allowed someone to creep close and monitor without your knowledge, had unsettled him even before he worked for MI6. "Is that a problem?"
"They're a bit…" She sucked in her cheeks and blew them out again with an exaggerated puff of breath. "…Um, enthusiastic. My last relationship was… it ended very badly, and they're excited because you haven't turned out to be the spawn of Satan."
"Not a high hurdle to clear."
Audrey's eyes flared. "I know."
For a long minute they stood in silence, Audrey staring down the door as though her glare could intimidate the objects and events waiting on the other side. Q's emotions pinged from discomfort to amusement and back again. Damp crept from his hair down the back of his neck and into his collar.
"Can we –"
Audrey shook herself. "Yeah."
She jammed the key into the lock, twisted, and shoved her way into the flat like a general charging the battlefield.
As soon as the door swung open, Q spotted the movement of shadows in the kitchen archway, heard a voice just out of sight: "Audrey, you didn't get caught in that, did you – oh."
A tiny, fine-boned woman with green hair and several creative piercings had taken one step into the front room and frozen like a curious animal, eyes wide and chin tilted as she stared. Then her face broke into a wide and welcoming smile that reminded Q of Holly – the expression equivalent of an enveloping hug.
"You must be Robert." Before Q or Audrey could confirm or deny, she leaned back into the kitchen and hollered, "Will, stop hiding, Eliza's brought her Freddy."
A thud echoed from the depths of the flat, followed by a second or two of creaking and rustling, and then a tall man with the broad shoulders of a field agent appeared behind the first flatmate, grinning through damp fringe. He wore nothing but a pair of loose sweatpants and a towel draped around his neck, as though he had just gotten out of the shower. Q heard Audrey mutter, "Of course."
"Finally, Audrey," the man – Will – boomed, wiggling past the delicate green-haired girl with a clumsiness that belied Q's initial assessment. "I was starting to think you'd invented him."
"Just because you're not touching a cute boy's dick doesn't mean other people lose the privilege," the female flatmate reminded, in the mild but tired tone of a mother who must constantly reiterate the rules.
"Thirty seconds," Audrey sputtered. "He and I have been here for all of thirty seconds and you lot can't contain yourselves –"
But Q snickered and shucked off his raincoat and sat down on the sofa to unlace his shoes, and Audrey looked at him with a fond mixture of disbelief and gratitude. Q gave her a little twinge of a smile from beneath his fringe.
Will bounced on the balls of his feet; he reminded Q of a large puppy that still thought itself a lapdog. "Well? Aren't you going to introduce us, Audrey?"
"Yeah, Audrey, mind your manners –"
Audrey held up a halting hand, then made a sweeping gesture that encompassed both Will, who was still bouncing, and the green-haired girl, who had perched cross-legged on the arm of a hideous floral-patterned armchair. "Robert, may I present my incorrigible flatmates: Katherine Devon, prefers to be known as Kitty or Kit, and William Wallace, not to be confused with the historical figure." Her face sharpened. "Now scoot."
"You can't order me around in my own flat," Will teased, mock sternness ruined by his persistent grin. "I have rights."
"Including the right to ogle Audrey's boyfriend, apparently," Kit deadpanned, raising an eyebrow at Q. "Watch out for him, Robert, he's not nearly as innocent as he looks. More than one committed skirt-chaser has turned for him."
Will snorted; Audrey tinged pink across the cheeks and opened her mouth to fend them off; Q knew, in the back of his mind, that defense was expected of him, but his gaze had caught a clutter of machinery on the coffee table, wheels and pulleys and an Arduino board winking light like a precious stone.
"Who's the maker?"
Will simultaneously raised his hand and ducked his head, as if his emotions were stretching him like taffy. "A mate and I teach an after-school science program at one of the primary schools. We're trying to build a robot that can pick up blocks with the crane, you know, like one of those claw games – but there's some glitch in our program. We can get the crane to drop the claw, but we can't get the angle of the arm to change."
"Where's your laptop?"
Will pointed confusedly at the archway behind him. "…Kitchen, I think."
Q beckoned with two fingers, the come here, bring that over, assist me motion he now expected everyone to follow – perhaps it was his demeanor, or some instinctual obedience, but people usually responded, even outside of Q-Branch. Will scuttled into the kitchen and returned with the laptop, and Q settled himself on the floor in front of the scattered components and mentally connected the wires and gears, examined the placement of pins on the microcontroller, spun two or three versions of the code he might need to control the joints of a crane.
He looked up at Will over the frame of his glasses. "Put it together."
Will fumbled for the wheel axles lying closest on the coffee table – instinctual obedience, then – but stopped himself. "What?"
Q flicked his eyes at the disassembled parts, then back at Will. "Put it together, I think I know what's wrong."
"But you haven't even looked at –"
"How much programming experience do you have?"
Will hesitated. "I took night classes for about a year. Learned a little bit of Java, Python, and Ruby –"
Q sighed through his nose. "Then I definitely know what's wrong. Put it together and I'll have it running in ten minutes."
Will dove into a cupboard in search of a screwdriver, and as Q opened the IDE he heard Kit mutter, with equal parts exasperation and amazement, "Well, he's got Will eating out of the palm of his hand – where did you find him?"
Audrey wrapped herself in a blanket and flopped into the ugly armchair. "Charing Corner. He was on special. Punch your frequent-buyer card ten times and get a free espresso and a software engineer."
Ten minutes was a conservative estimate. While Will snapped the parts together, Q used the extra time to comment out and fine-tune the code, carving it down to its core. So much of what he wrote for MI6 had to be obfuscated that making something simple and open felt liberating, a communication between programmers instead of a battle.
"I have no idea what you're doing," Audrey said just behind his shoulder, and Q jumped because he hadn't felt her come so close – "but I can tell that you're good at it."
He probably would have scoffed at the compliment if it had come from anyone else. "Something like this is easy, but has attractive tangible results." They watched Will plug in the Arduino board and put the assembled robot through its paces, picking up the telly remote and a stray sock with the claw. "It's a good demonstration."
"The kids'll like it," Will said. "Any chance I could get your number in case Harry or I have questions about the code?"
Kit warned, "It's a trap," but she was smiling, and Q didn't have as many second thoughts as he should have about typing his number into the mobile Will slid across the coffee table.
"Robert's going to stay the night, if that's all right with you two," Audrey said, in a tone that conveyed just how much of a kindness she was doing them by even pretending to ask permission.
"Of course, darling, we're not completely heartless." Kit lifted a slat of the blinds and peered out at the dark, drenched street. "He'd never get a cab in this weather."
"There's not one to be had for love or money," Q muttered.
He hadn't meant for anyone but Audrey to hear, but Will's face lit up. "Oh, and he reads –"
Audrey latched onto Q's arm. "He's mine, Wallace."
Will put up his hands placatingly. "Hey, I am an ardent supporter of Team Audrey. But a man can dream of finding his own tall, dark, and intellectual, right?"
Q rolled his eyes to hide how flattered he was. "I can recommend you someone. His name is Algernon. You'll have to be careful of his friend Earnest, he's a bit of a tosser."
That won him a laugh from all three of them.
"Well, I need to see this run of Earnest, if there's a fit Algernon," Will declared. "But since the robot's sorted, I'm going to turn in. Enjoy yourselves." He bestowed a wink on Q and Audrey that left no question about his meaning.
Kit said, "Don't be too loud, kids, I've already stayed up past my bedtime," and disappeared through a doorway down the hall. Audrey huffed and cast her eyes to the heavens.
They stood. Q took a couple of steps toward the kitchen with vague intentions of tea, but he heard the rustle of clothing and the creak of the floor and suddenly Audrey was pressed against him, face buried in the back of his shirt. "I'm sorry."
"About what?"
"There're only two of them, but somehow they manage to be drunk uncle, rambunctious cousin, and nagging grandmother all at once."
"You've never met my first flatmate," he said wryly. "I think I can handle them."
She smiled and leaned into him and they stood still for a moment, warm and alone and approaching unknown territory. When Audrey broke the embrace and slipped around him down the hall, Q's fingers twitched with the impulse to reach for her, pull her back.
At the end of the hall she pushed open a door and flicked on the lights. "My bedroom. Be there in a minute, I've got to wash off my face."
Q stepped inside, shut the door, and paused to absorb the room – smaller than his and more densely decorated, overstuffed bookshelf painted in TARDIS blue, bedraggled plants spilling from the windowsill, medical textbooks heaped on a desk next to a glowing Macbook and a vase of intricate origami flowers. The wall behind the bed was plastered floor-to-ceiling with posters of Audrey Hepburn films: Breakfast at Tiffany's, Roman Holiday, My Fair Lady. Q unknotted his tie and replaced his damp trousers with the blue-checked pajama bottoms he had hidden folded in the bottom of his bag, just in case he had had the courage or the trickery to end tonight in Audrey's flat. As he undressed, unease laid a cold hand at the base of his neck, the unmistakable prick of an unwelcome pair of eyes – Q spun round, but the door was closed and the blinds were down and there couldn't possibly be cameras, not here, he didn't even have to submit to cameras in his own flat anymore –
It took him two scans of the room to identify the source: Audrey, Kit, and Will, smiling up from a picture frame on the desk, heads together and arms around each other's shoulders. Kit's hair was pink, Audrey's much shorter; Q aged the photo at a year, maybe two. Other faces peeked out at him from unexpected places: on top of the bookshelf, Audrey and three other girls in matching plum dresses, a wedding; among the plants on the sill, a man roughly Q's age cuddling a beagle, a cousin or a friend; on the nightstand, a middle-aged couple flanked by two young redheaded men, Audrey seated in the center – her family.
The five of them together seemed crowded into the frame, but perhaps that was because Q's family had always numbered two. No, not true – a dimly-lit memory, a plain silver frame on his grandmother's nightstand, her in an awful turquoise pantsuit with her hands on a young man's shoulders, his arm in turn around the slim waist of a dark-haired woman with an infant clutched to her breast. This picture had made Q uncomfortable, because he could never view it with the reverence others expected; he did not know these people, only recognized them as his parents because he had been told. (He had no idea where the picture was now – it had disappeared during his move to London, or maybe during the auction of his grandmother's estate. Maybe a family friend had taken it from the house, or a stranger had bought it for a few pence to turn it into art. Maybe MI6 had found it and shredded it, just as they had destroyed most pieces of his past, wiped away all evidence that this dark beautiful woman had ever held their Quartermaster.)
A copy of Neruda's One Hundred Love Sonnets lay on the nightstand beside the framed family. Q picked it up and sat down on the floor, back against the bed, and opened it to a place where the repeated grip of sweaty hands had begun to darken the edges of the pages. The eyes of the photographs read over his shoulder: I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, / in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
The door creaked and Audrey slid in, wearing an old baggy T-shirt that revealed long pale legs and a hint of orange knickers. Everything about her seemed softer, somehow, bare face, bare feet, damp hair loose around her shoulders. Then she gave him a calculating look, and some of the familiar sharpness returned.
"I'd say you planned this. Unless you always carry pajama bottoms in your bag."
"Doesn't everyone?" Q asked with his best innocent expression.
"Arse," Audrey said, and kicked him, but it was really more of a nudge than a kick, and when she sat down on the floor she settled against his shoulder as though he were a permanent fixture of the room. Her fingers traced the right angles of the check, starting just above his knee and moving higher. "Tell me about this project that I'm very jealous of, since it gets to spend more time with you than I do."
But he wouldn't think of work, not when even the plastics-and-gunpowder smell of Six had started to make him feel sick and he could choose to spend his evening in the bedroom of a woman with no trousers instead. "It has to do with quantum computing. All very theoretical and the sort of thing guaranteed to put most people to sleep."
"Then we are lucky I'm not most people." She curled towards him, the length of her body pressed against his, one hand still on his thigh and the other a steady warmth against his back, their heads very close but not touching. "Go on."
Perhaps he should read the message of her touch, but for now he would trust her words and see where that took them. "I told you my focus is on software security. Most systems do a poor job of protecting their data simply because the people who use them don't want to be inconvenienced. An alphanumeric password is not an ideal way to protect sensitive information because it's too easily cracked, especially since the passwords people can easily remember, and therefore the ones they're most likely to use, are not strong passwords to begin with. And the faster computers become, the less clever they have to be, because if you're calculating at eight petaflops you can brute-force a password in a matter of minutes."
"But quantum computers are on a different level."
He was surprised to hear her speak; she had turned her face into the crook of his neck and gone still save for her fingers trailing along his pajama-leg seam. Q shifted so he could slide an arm around her and felt the muscles of her back tense at the touch, heard her draw a slow breath and let it out. Just then he knew keenly the presence of another mind, the sheer exciting unpredictability of a person; perhaps there was more than one plan at work, and he couldn't guess what form it might take, only hope.
"Yes. Theoretically it would be impossible for anyone to eavesdrop on any encryption process, because quantum systems react to any action taken against them, even observation."
"Such a small action with such significant consequences."
Her exploring fingers traveled over his hip and under the hem of his shirt, skimmed across bare skin, slid teasingly into the waistband of his pajamas. Q focused his eyes on the cupboard door and fought the temptation to squirm.
"But we're still a long way off from making quantum computers with – with practical applicability, be…cause…"
But his voice tightened and his heart rattled, sweat slicking his palms and curling his hair, because she was breathing shallow against his neck and her hand was still moving, lower and closer and – oh.
Q arched into her touch like a cat and let his head fall back against the mattress. "It's been bloody years –"
"Mmm." She radiated smugness. In most people Q would have interpreted that as a call to battle, but as long as she kept stroking him like that his pride couldn't be arsed to muster. Her lips brushed his temple. "No practical applicability because – what?"
Q gave her a wild, bewildered look, cut short by a devious twist of her fingers that made him close his eyes in defense. In the darkness he heard her say, hot and close against his ear, "I'm still listening," and, oh, if it was a game she wanted, she'd have it.
"Biggest problem is quantum de… decoherence, meaning the s-system loses information into, ah, the surrounding environment. All that h-helpful sensitivity works against you. But quantum physics operates on such a – a small scale, ah –" His eyes fluttered open against his will, and he fixed them on an old water stain in the center of the ceiling. "– that… it's… extremely difficult to isolate a system f-from all interaction and totally prevent… degradation."
He stopped and bit down on his lip to contain the embarrassing noises clawing their way up his throat. Not that it mattered, when she could feel his every reaction, the way he rocked his hips up to meet her hand, his pulse pounding in his neck beneath the touch of her lips. He had waited much too long to do this, had actually forgotten what it was like to be drawn out and teased by another set of hands, the interplay of anticipation and denial and satisfaction.
"The… other problem is… ah… scalability. Quantum bits exist in super…p-position, so the computer needs to store – ah – all possible states, the n… number of which increases exponentially –" Oh, but he was losing focus, losing control, the two things he kept on short rein at all times –
Audrey's hand stilled except for her thumb, which ran once, twice up the length of his cock and flicked teasingly over the head. "What's superposition?"
Q groaned. "An educated woman like you should know."
"Remind me."
"It's… the principle that… all… possible…" But he couldn't hold on anymore, he was shaking with it, this raw need – and Audrey tugged open his collar and licked a hot wet stripe from collarbone to jaw, caught his earlobe between her teeth and blew very gently in his ear – and he shuddered and came so hard his eyes watered, words crumbling and scattering as she stroked him through the aftershocks.
Q shoved his glasses up his forehead and dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, watching points of light pinwheel across the backs of his eyelids. After a settling minute Audrey's warmth and weight left his side; he heard the floor creaking and some small objects shuffling and then she returned with the rustling of tissues as she wiped her hands clean.
Q said, behind his hands, "Do give me some warning the next time you decide to do that."
"But you perform so well under pressure."
The words landed lightly, but when her eyes flicked up from beneath her lashes it was with apology, not coyness. Q nuzzled into her hair as reassurance and for a few minutes knew an extraordinary peace, thoughts separated from self like fish behind a wall of glass, bright baubles floating to the foreground and then drifting away, to be examined or not at his leisure.
Eventually Audrey climbed up on the bed and collapsed diagonally across the mattress. "C'mere."
Q got up on his knees by the bedside and ran a hand along the inside of her leg, stopping just short of presumption. "I'd like to return the favor."
When Audrey was pleased without pretense she smiled sideways, a self-conscious crooked grin that dimpled one cheek. Obligingly she scooted closer, lifted her hips enough for him to peel off her pants and toss them aside.
After what she had done to him Q had absolutely no qualms about teasing; he trailed lips and fingers up and down her thighs, stroked the backs of her knees with his thumbs until the muscles in her legs jumped and quivered.
"Oh my god, Robert –"
Q watched her lazily from beneath his lashes. "I should make you explain the function of the circulatory system while I'm doing this to you."
"Keep going and I'll show you."
And he could feel it, the thump of her pulse in her thigh under his fingertips, the femoral artery, a terrible way to die, even a nick and an agent could bleed out before medical arrived –
He pressed his tongue against her, inside her, to blot it all out with the slickness and the heat and the sound she made, praise and plea at once. She was already desperately wet and it only took a couple strokes of his tongue for her to drop her head against the pillows as though it had suddenly gone heavy, mouth slack and eyelids flickering. Q took his time, spreading her open, dragging the point of his tongue around but not on her clit in a way that made her whine with frustration. Finally he applied the barest hint of teeth and she bucked her hips.
"Stay still, now."
"Oh, like you weren't squirming when I had my hand down your pants –" He did it again, the thing with teeth, and she broke off with a gasp. "Squirming is… good. Squirming is a compliment."
This was something else he had forgotten about sex: the extraordinary rush of power at the other person's undoing, the way he could make her arch her back and dig in her heels with a slight scrape of fingernails, make her legs tense and then fall open by slipping off his glove and working in one finger, two. He established a rhythm, deeper and deeper, testing flicks of his tongue until he found the precise pressure that made her hand shoot out and grip the edge of the mattress, and he held her there until she was shivering, until he pressed a little bit harder and she came with a ragged breath that caught in her throat and made it out as a cry, her whole body twisting and then collapsing, limp and sated.
Q retrieved her pants and she wiggled back into them without sitting up. When he climbed onto the bed she seized a handful of his shirt and pulled him down right beside her, buried her face in the crook of his shoulder and gave a little contented hum.
"Apparently you can do something with your tongue other than turn a pretty phrase."
"I'm a man of many talents." The gentle rumble of thunder reminded him. "You realize we missed an opportunity to snog in the rain."
Audrey snickered. "And we didn't even have tea to make up for it. Poor boy, I'm depriving you."
They lay together with their legs tangled and their heads on the same pillow, the wash of rain the only sound. Audrey's fingers brushed his fringe back and traced the lines of his face with a musician's precision, along his eyebrow and round the curve of his ear, scraping the pad of her thumb the wrong way against the stubble on his jaw. After a minute her smile faded and her eyes began to drift.
"You're thinking about something," Q said.
"I'm always thinking about something."
"You're thinking about something that I remind you of, if only tangentially, so I think my curiosity is inevitable and justified."
She sighed. Her hand slowed and then stilled in the middle of its circuit, like a car running out of petrol, fingertips resting brush-light at the corner of his jaw. For a minute, silence; then she laughed with no pleasant humor, the kind of laugh that came because it was better than crying. "I was thinking about my ex-boyfriend."
Q's eyebrows lifted in surprise – he had been too concerned about what she thought of him, if his lack of practice would disappoint, if she would ask, finally, about the gloves and why he was rumpling his dress shirt by wearing it to sleep, and she hadn't been thinking of him at all –
"Exactly what every man wants to hear after intimacy, right? I can't believe I –" She broke off, rolled her head away and stared unseeing at the ceiling. Her eyes glimmered with a sheen of damp.
Finally she whispered, as if speaking to herself, "Funny, isn't it, that you think you've reached a point where you can talk about something calmly, and it almost seems like it happened to you in another life, and then you open your mouth and all your confidence is gone."
"You're not required to explain anything."
She shook her head ungracefully, urgently. "I want to. I put off bringing you here for so long because I was afraid. That it would turn out the same way as with… him. If you came over then it'd be real, you know, we'd be sleeping together and you'd know my flatmates and my parents would want to meet you next time they're in town –"
Now Q was the one to turn his head away in pursuit of a thought: most of his relationships had been in the early years of uni, when everyone was exercising their newfound freedom to date without their parents' knowledge or approval, and aside from one awkward dinner where he had been introduced as "a friend," he had never met his partners' families and never considered that strange. It had seemed reciprocal – he had no family to show them, and avoidance was much easier than explanation.
But Audrey would rather confront the truth than lie or hide.
"My ex and I started dating when I was twenty-one and he was twenty-nine. A mutual friend introduced us at a party and right away we were mad about each other. We ignored everyone else all night long and sat in a corner of the kitchen drinking cocktail after cocktail and talking about everything. I don't believe in destiny or soulmates or any of those romantic tropes, but it really feels like magic when you meet someone who makes you feel confident and sexy and fascinating from the first instant – when you catch fire." She looked at him with a silent question, a request for validation; Q gave it with a nod, and she pressed on. "We went on our first date two days later and after that we were together all the time. My friends were excited for me, and I met his family and they adored me, and everything was lovely.
"But over time I was less and less happy and I couldn't figure out why. I had started to notice things about him that bothered me, but I thought that was just the downside of a long relationship, you know, learning to put up with the other person's flaws. He was quite the lad's lad –" Q rolled his eyes and she said, "I know, before I met him I would have made that same face. He liked to get really pissed with the same pack of mates and when he brought me along it was like I was window-dressing. Once Will came with us to the pub, and my ex cracked some awful joke about how my tits were worth more than the GDP of a small country, and Will made such a scene in my defense that he got us thrown out of the pub."
"I knew there was good in him, he's a maker," Q said, with what he hoped was a comforting measure of warmth. Audrey smiled, thin but sincere, and shifted closer so she could rest her head against his chest.
"After that I had a huge row with each of them. My ex told me I was being too sensitive, and he would never have said it if he hadn't been pissed, and he was sorry he had hurt me but I really needed to calm down. Will said that he couldn't believe I was dating such a git, and if we went out again it would be without my boyfriend around. Of course, that just made me angrier, because by that point I didn't go anywhere without him. He would get very suspicious if I wanted to go somewhere alone, or with just me and my friends. Quite a few of my friends had stopped inviting me out anyway, because they knew I'd bring him and they didn't want that. And I… I just didn't understand what was so wrong, because yeah, he was a dick some of the time, but I couldn't believe that someone who cried at the end of The Notebook and had so many smart things to say about Foucault could be a bad person.
"After two years we decided that when my lease ran out on my flat, I'd move in with him. He lives right near St. Thomas's, and I had just found out I was going to do my foundation there, so it seemed perfect. I had everything packed in boxes in my bedroom and the term was almost over and every night I would sit on my bed and feel like crying.
"The day before my graduation, we went shopping because my mum insisted I needed a new dress for my graduation dinner. He was in a silly mood, and I tried on so many outfits that I would never think of buying so he and I could make fun of them, and it was just like the beginning of our relationship, when we were so playful with each other. Then I picked out a dress, and –" Her voice darkened. "– after I paid he told me I should go back into the dressing room and put it on, and he'd sneak in after me and take it off."
Q started to sit up, instinctively, but she had curled tight against him and he felt her tense when he moved, as though she were torn between a polite desire to let him up and a less rational desire to make him stay. And Q had once been the one to tell this type of story, so he lay back the way they had been arranged before, to give her the attention that she needed more than indignation.
She gave a fortifying sigh. "He was really into it, having sex in places where we might get caught, even though I'd told him over and over again that it made me uncomfortable. He'd talked me into giving him a handjob in the back of a taxi once. I did it because I was just relieved he hadn't asked for a blowjob.
"When he started to carry on about the dressing room, I told him flat out that I was not going to get arrested just so he could get off. He tried to argue, and I walked out of the store. He followed me for four blocks before I was able to hail a taxi and go home. I sat up all night wondering if he was going to show up at my flat and being afraid of what might happen if he did. And being afraid made me angry, because I shouldn't have been afraid, he shouldn't have had that power over me. The next morning I called him and told him it was over."
Q's eyebrows knitted in grim recognition. "He didn't go quietly, did he?"
"Fuck no. He rang me so many times over the next week that I had to change my number. I actually still have audio files of some of the last voicemails he left me, just in case he ever shows up again and I need to get a non-molestation order."
She scrubbed her palms over her face as though telling the story had made her feel unclean. "You must think I was absolutely mad. I feel like I've done a bad job explaining what made him so attractive in the first place. Because on good days he was very attractive."
"And because you have those good days," Q muttered, half to himself, "you're not really sure if the bad days are all in your head. You almost want them to be, because then the problem would be closer to your control."
Audrey lifted her head and examined him, brow furrowed in realization and concern and stifled relief at his understanding. Q couldn't look at her, couldn't absorb her emotions when he barely had command of his. He had gone years without acknowledging this part of his past, and six months ago he would never have guessed he would confess it twice.
"My first flatmate was the same kind of viper. Clever, charming, and absolutely devoid of any real regard for anyone except himself. I knew enough about him early on that I could have seen through him, if I had been clear-headed. But I held on to the few good things he did for me, and I sold myself a fiction of his genuine friendship, because I wanted it to be true."
"At least you didn't sleep with him," Audrey muttered, her face gentle, nimble fingers creasing his collar. Then she froze; her eyes snapped back to his face. "Did you?"
"No. He's aggressively heterosexual, and I'm particular about my partners. Although…" And the words tumbled out before he could stop them, the name of a fear he had never admitted: "…I am sometimes afraid of what would have happened if he had decided that was something he wanted."
Audrey ducked her head against his shoulder and lay unnaturally still, like an animal hiding in plain sight. Then he felt her nod, slowly and thoughtfully, and he knew that she understood the real fear: not of force but of subtlety, an insidious conditioning, the brick-by-brick dismantling of self-trust until he reached outside to grasp something reliable. But whatever anchor he found would crumble to rust and set him adrift and only then would he realize how he had been lured.
She moved suddenly as though she were getting up, and for a flash Q thought he had misjudged her sympathy. But she kissed him instead, hard and reassuring and grateful, the kind of kiss that both relaxed and lit him, and he thought of the way she had described attraction: when you catch fire. Something beautiful and natural and dangerous, mythologized so completely it was difficult to recognize in real life.
When they broke apart her eyes were still damp, but she was smiling, and Q supposed he was, too. Audrey pulled the blanket over them and settled against his side, face half-buried in the pillow, one pale-lashed eye occasionally winking open as if to check that he was still there. They did not need to speak.
After a while her breathing slowed, and Q reached up and turned out the light.
He dozed, off and on. He had left his mobile in his bag in an unreachable corner, but the clock on Audrey's desk counted the sleepless minutes for him, squared green numbers reflected curving and disproportionate in the vase like a funhouse mirror.
He should have known he would not be able to sleep no matter how well the night went, not in an unfamiliar space with sheets that smelled of Audrey, lights rippling past the curtains in an unsolved pattern, the building creaking and settling with little pops that jerked him alert like gunfire. At two a.m. someone – probably Will, from the heaviness of the footsteps – got up and used the toilet across the hallway, and suddenly Q's nerves burned with the knowledge that they were not alone, that only thin walls and an unlocked door isolated them from others who could let in even more. Once he had spent every night like this, awake with a creeping dread of the monster in the other room, a dread made more powerful by how weak it appeared in the light of day.
Eventually he gave up on sleep and slid gently out of bed. Audrey rolled over but did not wake. She looked so vulnerable that for a minute he considered the wisdom of leaving her alone – but he was not sure, in the end, if he would be able to protect her, if his presence might not be the most dangerous thing.
In the kitchen he found a tumbler in a cabinet of jumbled dishes and filled it with water from the tap, sat at the table with only his mobile and the light above the sink for company, and watched condensation slick the glass like sweat.
Audrey found him when the glass was half-empty.
"You all right?" She hugged herself, blinking languidly, shirt hanging low off one shoulder.
Q nodded and took another drink because it gave him an excuse not to answer aloud.
She didn't believe him. "Care for that tea?"
He had tried that before, of course, tried drinking tea and not drinking tea and making the tea without drinking it so the smell would soak his flat and any other number of folk remedies where doctors and pills had failed him. "Why not," he said tonelessly, and hoped too late that she wouldn't perceive that as ingratitude.
Audrey tiptoed across the kitchen, opened cabinets gently, ran the water low. Q knew she was doing it so not to wake her flatmates, but the care and the hush reminded him of hospitals and breakable things.
When she had the kettle on, she set out two mugs and leaned against the counter instead of coming close.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Q had been tracing a well-worn path through the maze of his mind, the kind where even the missteps and wrong turns felt weary with familiarity. When he followed the chain of his failures he always wound up in the same place. After the inquiry he had resolved not to speak of it, because they had made him repeat his deposition until he knew it by heart, like a schoolboy punished with lines, and there was nothing left to be said. Except, except – he wanted to grow the infant trust between them, had already shown her one wound on his heart just as she had shown him hers, and right now he could not bear another night shuttered with this.
"Last year," he began, "one of my colleagues died while she was… out… on a – a business trip." Audrey looked briefly surprised at the unexpected subject, but she stood patient as he measured his words. "It was… a series of stupid decisions on several people's parts, including mine. We sent her to a place we knew might not be safe, and she didn't come back. I have a lot of… questions. And regrets."
The skin around Audrey's eyes tensed. "Have you thought about seeing –"
"Please don't suggest I get a therapist, that's the one thing frightening enough to give me nightmares."
He had meant that as a joke, or at least he had meant to bury the truth beneath a layer of flippancy, but she knew him too well to be satisfied with what was on the surface.
"I'm not brushing you off," she said, her tone hinting that he should show her the same courtesy. "This is a bit above the scope of my practice."
But now that he had given himself permission to explain, he couldn't seem to stop, pressing on against her interjections and his own half-conscious protests, too much, too soon –
"You don't know what it's like, when someone else's life can be pinned on you, when you make choices and they have to suffer the consequences –"
"Robert –"
"– and you'll have to live with the judgment of everyone around you, the judgment of strangers, even though they couldn't have done any better in your situation –"
"Robert –"
"– and the worst part is you failed that person when they needed you, when someone who didn't usually ask for help sought you out and trusted you – I don't know if anyone can possibly understand wh –"
"Stop and think for a minute, Robert!"
He had seen her angry, but never like this. She vibrated with it, hands clenched to hide their trembling, a flush staining the tense muscles of her throat. Realization struck him like a lance: pictures on the fridge from her graduation, magnets shaped like stethoscopes and reflex hammers, the schedule from St. Thomas's tacked to the corkboard, the scope of my practice and someone else's life pinned on you and oh, he was so bloody stupid –
His mobile buzzed. Q's hands had already picked it up and unlocked the screen before his mind reminded him that this wasn't the proper response, that in front of him was a person who needed his attention more than his masters did, and Colin's smirk flashed behind his eyes: They have trained you well.
Tanner. Some mission gone wrong in Korea. Very few details, because it wasn't secure, and because they already knew he'd come when called.
"I have to go."
Audrey glanced at the clock on the microwave. "It's four in the morning."
Her frown had become bewildered, and for an instant he felt relieved – but some dark bitter ghost in his head wanted her anger instead, because it aligned with his expectations and his history and his unadmitted convictions about what he deserved.
"I have to go," he repeated, firmly, and she didn't argue.
She followed him to her bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed while he put his trousers on, hands tucked beneath her legs and shoulders drawn forward in a way that made her look young and scared. Silence stood between them like a pane of glass. When he walked out she didn't move, at first, but as he wrenched open the front door and stepped into the hallway he thought he saw a flutter of red hair appear against the white walls on the far side of the living room. Through the hush he heard the door open even from the bottom of the stairs, heard her call after him, once, "Robert –"
Q thought he was justified in not answering, because after all that wasn't his name.
Author's Notes:
Chapter title comes from "Fire" by Delta Rae.
"Omega level – that's the highest level of clearance."
"But, Wolf," you say, "isn't omega the last letter of the Greek alphabet?" Yes, yes it is – but omega also represents the null value in Structured Query Language (SQL), a data-management programming language. Null does not mean zero – it means the value is unknown or does not exist in the database. Appropriate, I thought, for the data MI6 would publicly deny.
"My BND meeting is in five minutes…"
BND is short for Bundesnachrichtendienst, the German foreign intelligence agency.
"William Wallace, not to be confused with the historical figure."
Though Will is named after that guy from Braveheart, my inspiration was Wallace Wells, the alliteratively-named, boyfriend-stealing roommate from Scott Pilgrim. Somehow Will ended up as a kinder, more sincere puppy-dog of a man.
His gaze had caught a clutter of machinery on the coffee table, wheels and pulleys and an Arduino board winking light like a precious stone. / as Q opened the IDE
An Arduino board is a customizable microcontroller – basically a simple computer on a single circuit board – that you can program to execute a wide variety of tasks. Makers (DIY-ers with a focus on engineering) use Arduino for everything from talking clocks to motion sensors to LED light displays. IDE stands for integrated development environment, a software application used to write programs.
"Will, stop hiding, Eliza's brought her Freddy." / "There's not one to be had for love or money," Q muttered.
I've been sneaking lots of references to Pygmalion/My Fair Lady into this story, for no other reason than I'm the Author and I Do What I Want. Although the rewritten ending of My Fair Lady gives a lot of people the impression that Eliza and Higgins are the main romantic pairing, the real romance is between Eliza and Freddy – hence Q quotes Freddy's line about the difficulties of getting a cab in the rain. Originally Q and Audrey were going to attend a performance of Pygmalion, but then I remembered that The Importance of Being Earnest is about men who conceal their identities from the women they are romancing.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, / in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
This is Neruda's Sonnet XVII, perhaps more famous for the lines, "I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; / so I love you because I know no other way."