Chapter 5
Daggers and Roses
Lucas and Ros returned to The Grid and were disconcerted to find that the open plan work space of Section D was deserted. Looking at one another in mild concern they made their way to the room Tariq had been using to set up live video feeds. The large screens showed them that some members of the human race were still alive as they moved in and out of the hotels but the room itself was empty.
They quietly made their way to Harry's office and were relieved to find Harry and Ruth sitting in it.
"Knocking?" Harry enquired, calmly.
"Sorry, when confronted with a building that looks as though it's been plagued by a zombie apocalypse, I always forget my manners." Ros said, taking a seat beside Ruth at the desk.
"What did you get from Salko?" Harry asked. Ruth glanced towards him but he silenced her with a look, she trusted that he would confront Lucas with his part in Sofia's cover up soon enough.
"We met Salko, a little twitchy but given our insights in Russian prison hospitality, we'll forgive that." Ros said, eyes flicking towards Lucas, "What he actually gave us...Is a little delicate, Harry perhaps." Ros said, casually, looking at Ruth.
"This delicacy concerns?" Harry asked.
Curiously Ros said, "Some, 'internal affairs'." Ros replied, evasively.
"Sofia?" Harry asked, softly.
"How did you-"Ros asked, as Lucas closed his eyes.
"Ruth found a connection between Salko and Sofia." Harry replied, testily.
"What kind of connection?" Ros asked.
Harry frowned at her and turned to Lucas before answering, "I will answer that question when I have it, first however, I need to speak to Sofia, and Lucas." He said pointedly.
Ros looked wordlessly between them before rising and silently heading to the door, Ruth was not as compliant,
"Harry?"
"Alone." He said, firmly, before adding gently, "Please Ruth..."
The two women left, Lucas had retreated as far from the desk as he could without leaving the room.
"I know what you're going to say." He murmured.
"Why Lucas?" he spat.
"It wasn't my choice to make Harry-"
"It was your choice to lie to me Lucas; she didn't put a gun to your head."
"She didn't have to Harry...I told you the truth, I wasn't going to put a gun to her head and force her to do the same thing."
"I trusted you Lucas." Harry said, in disgust.
"I haven't given you any reason not to."
"No? You're an intelligent man Lucas, you know what this could mean for us, yet-"
"Of course, but that doesn't justify me betraying her trust."
"What about my trust Lucas? You had no problem betraying that." Harry said, sharply.
"It's not the same..." he said, quietly, "The only one who stood to lose out with the Lighthouse was me. Nothing gives me the right to sell you other people's secrets Harry."
"No Lucas, the job that you do and the relationship between us entitles me to know that, knowing other people's secrets is what we do for a living. I believed you, I trusted you Lucas, after everything, I gave you back everything that you had thrown away, no questioned asked, you owed me more than this."
"I don't owe you anything..." he said, in a dangerous whisper, "I didn't ask you to trust me; I didn't beg for my life back, I didn't put a gun to your head Harry. I'm sick of you playing games with me because you believe that I owe you; having your trust when it suits you and you thinking that you can take it away and justify it based on what happened with Lighthouse. If you trust me, let's move forward, if not shoot me, send me back to Russia, forget I ever existed, just stop playing games with me Harry. Trust isn't a debt that you can call in when you want something from me."
Harry watched him carefully, "You're right, for that I apologise, I've been out of line these past few weeks but you cannot expect things to go back to the way they were Lucas."
"No, but you can't expect me to go against everything I am in order to make them...You know that, were the circumstances altered and it had been you with the secrets, that I wouldn't have revealed them without your permission. We've shared a lot of secrets over the years Harry and some of them have cost me much more than the trust of my colleagues." He murmured, darkly.
Harry was quiet for a moment before he said, "What were Salko's terms?"
Lucas was slightly fazed by the sudden subject change, but recovered and said, "He said he wanted Sofia to do something for him."
"Really, what, specifically?"
"He left a message for her on this," he said, removing the flash-drive from his pocket, "he said she would understand."
"Well, we're smart people; let's see if we can't understand it." Harry said, taking the flash-drive and loaded it into the computer.
There was only one file saved on the memory stick, labelled with Sofia's initials. It turned out to be a beautiful, hand-drawn black and white image. It meant to Harry nothing but Lucas turned pale and hissed, "Bastard."
The image reflected back at them on the screen was fairly simple, despite the detail that had been put into it, a plain white rose had been pierced in its heart by a thin, cruel dagger, small teardrops of blood wept from the point the dagger emerged from the delicate flower.
"Lucas?" Harry asked, softly.
He took a deep breath before explaining, "I told you, when you first got me back that there is a tattoo culture in Russian prisons. All of the images have a specific meaning, depending on where they are and what they're combined with. For example, churches represent how many years have been served, a sailing ship represents a desire for freedom, this, is based on those rules."
"A rose, and a dagger, Sofia and Salko?" he asked.
"Yes, but it's more specific than that. The rose represents innocence and purity, the dagger, in this context means death, murder. Murdering innocence...It means-"
"Rape." Said a cold voice from the doorway finished in hushed tones. "Salko?" she asked, calmly.
Lucas nodded and murmured, "They know." In Russian. S
"I had noticed." She replied, in English, moving further into the room.
"Lucas, would you?" Harry asked, softly, while motioning for her to sit.
"He should stay...If that's alright." She said, quietly.
"Very well..."Harry said as Lucas paused. "You lied to me Sofia."
"Your point being?" she asked coldly, studying him.
He leant back in his chair, surveying her. He had not known what to expect from her, denial, justification, a plea for forgiveness. "You find that acceptable?" he asked, delicately.
"Acceptable or not, I don't find it regrettable." She said quietly, "There are some lines that I won't cross, some boundaries I have to have. I won't compromise who I am because the alternative might piss you off."
"You've got balls if nothing else I'll give you that." Harry said grimly, watching her carefully, the more he thought he knew herm the less he actually did. "For the moment it will have to take a backseat, but this is not finished." He said firmly, the talks were too important to allow something like this to take precedence, "I need to know, everything you know about Artem Salko."
She hesitated, it went against every instinct she possessed to divulge information about her this easily, however she knew she was fighting a lost battle and while she may be stubborn she was not stupidly so, "What do you know already?" she asked, in a soft voice.
"That Salko was responsible for conducting several interrogations during your time in Russia."
"Then you know what he wants you to know, nothing more, nothing less. The first thing you need to understand is that he's careful, he knows how far he can push someone, with a precision with which he can identify and reach a person's physical and mental limits, and then knowing how far beyond those limits he can strain before they snap."
"Why was he chosen to interrogate you in particular? You were the only prisoner he had contact with for months at a time, why?"
She smiled bitterly, "I would use the term 'interrogate' loosely, this is what I meant, you know only what he has deemed absolutely necessary...They didn't pick him to torture me. He picked me to torture."
"Why?" Harry pressed, relentlessly.
She paused, watching him for a reaction, "You don't know?" she said, quietly.
"I wouldn't be asking if-"
"No, I mean you really don't know?"
He raised his eyebrows and spread his hands, shrugging. She watched him intently for a few moments before finally continuing,
"When Lucas and I were originally sent to Russia...It was supposed to be simple, I had barely turned twenty-one, they only really picked me because I could handle a conversation in Russian and they thought I would connect with her." She paused, before taking a deep breath to steady herself and continuing, "They wanted someone on the inside of an extremist Russian group in Moscow. They picked a young twenty year old girl named Nicole, they thought she would fit in, she was young, impressionable and her family had connections to the group. Whoever 'they' are, they were wrong, she was killed a few days before our cover was blown..." she trailed off momentarily before continuing in a voice barely more than a whisper, "He tortured me for weeks, for apparent fun before he told me she was his sister..."
"He used your imprisonment as an excuse for revenge?" Harry asked quietly.
"Yes...The strangest part was, I was sorry that she was dead..."
"What was the meaning of having her inside the group? Were they a threat or were they part of something larger?" Harry asked,
She studied him closely, with a strange emotion reflected in her eyes before saying, "He asked me that as well but I never knew the answer...He didn't believe me, he always swore that he would break me, that he would find the truth...I couldn't give him what I didn't have."
"If you had known, would you have told him?" Harry asked quietly,
Knowing that there was more to the question than what their appeared on the surface and that a simple 'no' was not what he was looking for she considered this for a moment, "Honestly, I don't know, he was very persuasive..."
"Why this, why now?" Harry asked, gesturing at the impaled rose still watching them innocently from the screen.
"I don't know...After I left Russia, he still had no answers...After a while he gave up questioning me...For a while all that he would say is that until he knew anything differently, I would be blamed for his sister's death, I would have to pay the full punishment. He couldn't find a reason so he invented some to justify taking his anger out on me. He was with me until my last breath in Russia, maybe now he has an excuse to punish me more...This is what this is about, he doesn't give a damn about peace talks and politics, and if he just wanted sex he would have hired a hooker...This is about control, and torture, revenge...Everything else is just a cover."
"Do you think he's genuine?" Lucas asked, "He said his information was invaluable, he even referenced Lighthouse, however obliquely, and she said that he had ensured that no-one else had access to his information."
"Oh, he's genuine...At first this was just about revenge, but it's festered away for almost a decade, it's become an obsession, a compulsion...Those words are used too much in today's society to hold any weight but the point is, he's lost control, he's lost control of himself, he's left himself with nothing left to live for. His information is genuine, and the only thing he will accept in return for it, is what he has asked for."
"Why would he ask for that? Why not demand intelligence on his sister?" Lucas pointed out.
"This is no longer just about Nicole Salko, as so often with these things, it often stops becoming about the victim far too quickly...And this became about more than that a long time ago. He told me he would break me, that he would have the truth from me...Truth is just closure to him, he doesn't need another human being to blame and destroy, he doesn't want that. Whether or not I tell him the truth about Nicole's death, it doesn't matter, he's been trapped in the details of the big picture for too long and he's been joined in them by the Devil. Either way I lose; either way I surrender my control to him, he has all the strings, I can cut them, but I can never pull them."
"Unless Salko is the attack, there must be the option to find out about from someone else on the inside."
"No, he's too careful for that, even if there are people, he'll get to them before we do...This is do or die...Literally." she said, darkly.
"I don't care if he's got information about a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, he can't ask for this." Lucas growled.
Harry said nothing.
"Harry?" Lucas hissed in disbelief.
"You want me to go through with it." Sofia murmured. It was not a question.
"If you were out in the field, and he asked you for the same thing, what would you do?"
"I would make a decision. But I'm not in the field, I'm in your office, and I want to know yours."
Harry said nothing once more. The silence filled the room, consuming everything in it until Sofia broke it once more.
"This is new...Even for you. If this is your idea of a test to see where my loyalties lie, some sort of game-"
"I don't think that the threat posed to people's lives is a game. We kill; we risk being killed on a daily basis for those same lives. It doesn't seem like a huge sacrifice-"
"That I allow the man who has raped and tortured me to sleep with me as his own personal form of justice? Don't pretend that you have any idea what I've been through, what either of us have been through in sacrifice." She snarled, standing up as she indicated herself and Lucas, "There are things worth dying for and there are things worse than dying. If you had given me a gun in that prison I'd have put a bullet in my head, no question asked. The ultimate sacrifice is not death, it is what comes before it, and you know nothing of it..."
She left the room, unable to look at him any longer.
Lucas quietly moved around the table and breathed, "I hope to God she's right and you're just playing games Harry. Whatever has come undone in your head, fix it...Before someone gets killed."
...
The cold clinical walls bore down upon her, they seemed to be squeezing ever tighter and the door at the end of the corridor was getting no closer. She hated herself, more than she should, another one of the many things that she could blame him for.
The door opened without her opening it and he invited her in, a warm smile twisting his lips beneath cruel eyes. She had barely stepped inside the room when he struck her across the head, the inviting rush of nothingness washed over her, but she knew that it was too easy...
When she regained consciousness she was lying on the bed, hands tied to the headboard behind her, the tight bands fitted perfectly with the familiar scars on her wrists.
He stood over her, smiling, a thin scalpel-sharp dagger in his hand. Like Lucas, she had a ship tattooed on her shoulder, but smaller and more elegant. The perfect black lines of which he now traced, tenderly with the blade, causing the perfect black lines to weep ruby tears.
She closed her eyes, hating herself for the weakness, but unable to look at him any longer, an action she regretted but could not take back.
Memories of her previous attacks, the vicious assaults in progress and the feelings of filth and violation following that which was somehow worse. The skin being stripped from her back by a merciless whip, the feelings that she was drowning, drowning in the shower of blood what surrounded her. She knew she wasn't drowning but he was making her body think that she was; wished that she was. To be lost to the welcoming oblivion, to know that she would never feel again.
His face loomed over her, smirking, the crimson-tainted silver blade flashed in his hands.
She woke up in a cold sweat, breathing hard. The nightmares had doubled in number and intensity since her return to The Grid. As always, her first instinct was Lucas but, as always, as her fingers closed around the cold phone on the bedside cabinet, she rejected human security and comfort, opting instead for the inanimate charm of her kettle.
Knowing she would not be sleeping that night, she quietly got dressed as she waited for the kettle to boil. Her eyes fell on the beautiful white rose, forever entombed within the soft sphere of glass enveloping it. Someone had given it to her as a gift years ago. It only really struck a chord with her now. Trapped, nowhere to go, no option but to be stared at, manipulated and exploited; passed from person to person without care or tenderness, without a choice.
She ran her fingers through her hair, almost screaming in frustration but knowing that it would wake the neighbours as she slid down the cold wall behind her, feeling pathetic and useless.
The small glass rose continued to watch her with silent innocence as she thought, fuck it.
A/N: Honestly, I don't know how I feel about this, when I first put it down on paper I liked it, when I came to type it up a few days later, after reading several of the reviews posted on here, I changed my mind...Feel free to ignore me but I would like to know your thoughts on this chapter and whether or not my insecurities are justified.