Author's Note: thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed this story, it means a lot. The usual disclaimers apply: I own none of this. Thanks again for reading and reviews would be most welcome.
Chapter Ten: An Act of Truth
The warm, placid darkness of the Grid lulled Harry Pearce into a semblance of relaxation. It was one of those rare moments in which every piece of machinery had fallen silent; energy saving lights had automatically dipped as low as they could go and the phones remained dormant in the dead of night. In his office, he breathed in the pungent steam of the strong coffee as he sipped tentatively, wincing against the bitter taste. It was approaching one am and he needed his wits about him; any minute now, and this new found tranquillity would be shattered like a bombed out side-street.
Before the inevitable happened, he awarded himself with the luxury of five minutes. Five minutes during which he could enjoy the solitude and remember. Accordingly, he turned to his computer screen and clicked through the relevant files. Ruth's image appeared on the screen. The word "DECEASED" in large red letters, emblazoned over the top of her file. When she first went, he hated seeing the word: like the insinuation of death was enough to make it real. Then there were the nights when he tormented himself with the knowledge that Ruth could be dead, and he would never know about it. Now he had the truth and it felt like a physical object that he ought to be doing something with.
For a long moment, it was just he and Ruth. Briefly, he glanced up from the screen to where her desk once stood on the Grid. He thought of all the times he would glance up and see her looking back, her smile, the way her hair framed her face. Lost in his thoughts, he blinked away the nostalgia as an altogether different, much more real face suddenly blocked his view. He hadn't even heard the whoosh of the pods.
"God, Harry, has world war three just been declared, or something?"
Jo Portman now sagged against his doorframe, large eyes glazed and dull, still in the grip of the sleep she had clearly been dragged from. Close on her heels, Ben Kaplan stumbled like a drunk through the pods, walking bodily into a coat stand with a muttered curse.
Harry tried to look apologetic.
"Get coffee," he said. "You're both going to need it."
Jo nodded before swaying off towards the kitchen. The time had come. He shut down his computer, and made for the meeting room. In the hour since Malcolm had left, he had gathered what information he could and prepared some form of presentation which he set up while Jo and Ben reclaimed their consciousness. They emerged from the kitchen ten minutes later, both looking to him for the reason behind their emergency recall.
"Sit down, both of you," he said, gesturing towards the neat rows of chairs either side of the table. "I have some bad news for you both."
They exchanged a dark look as they took their usual seats at the far end of the table. Harry switched on the screen, showing an image of Connie James. Jo's eyes widened. "Harry, has something happened to Connie?" She asked.
Conversations like these were never easy, but this had a unique difficulty about it. Connie was a woman he had trusted with his life. Jo and Ben were relatively new recruits, who had never been through a betrayal like this, before. Harry loosened his tie, a nervous habit of his as the going got choppy and he felt like he was struggling to breathe.
"I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but Connie is a double agent," he explained.
Ben choked on his coffee, while Jo's expression hardened in disbelief.
"She can't be!" she began, but words failed her.
"Earlier this evening, a message was intercepted in which she issued a kill order against another agent from Section D," he pressed on.
"Who? Why?" Ben asked, suddenly wide awake.
Harry pulled out the chair at the head of the table and sat down. "What I'm about to tell you exceeds both your clearance levels," he explained, deciding that they both needed and deserved the truth. "While Lucas North was incarcerated, he was tortured for information about a ring of assets with the codename Sugarhorse. These Assets are at the very highest levels of Government in Russia. The very fact that the Russian's new of the existence of Sugarhorse meant that we had a leak. Now, we have no direct, physical evidence that Connie is the mole, beside the kill order she issued against Lucas North. But the only reason she could possibly have to want to silence him, is because of Sugarhorse."
"Connie, working for the Russians!" Jo retorted, still baffled and confused.
Harry shrugged. "She was always over-compensating for something," he remarked. "But I need you both to go to the paper archive and check out these assets and these people in the know. All them; with a fine tooth comb. I know it's late, but I am sure you both understand the urgency of this."
The names flashed up on the screen while Ben and Jo committed them to memory. Harry hoped that having two minds working on the case, they could halve the time it took to get the hard evidence they needed to convict Connie for treason. The sad fact remained: all they had was the word of Lucas North, a traumatised man fresh from an eight year stint in a hellish prison. Everything now depended on him remembering some vital piece of information, something that would throw enough light on the whole case for everything else to fall into place.
"Where is Connie now?" asked Ben. "What will happen to her?"
"Malcolm has gone with some Officers to bring her in," Harry answered. "Nothing will happen, unless we get that evidence."
To show their understanding, they took their coffee and left. Once again alone, all he could do was wait. His main hope was that Connie would be a similar state to the others, exhausted and half-asleep, and possibly more malleable. But then, he also knew it was Connie he was dealing with. Harry checked the time again, it was coming on for two am and finally, the pods went off again, soon followed by the sound of Connie's voice, mid-flow.
"…when this misunderstanding has been cleared, I assure you I will be tending my resignation. No, really Malcolm, I expected better of you. Harry is paranoid, I expected no better of him, but you, Malcolm…"
Her voice grew louder, sharper, as she stormed across the Grid with Malcolm and some unfortunate Officers trailing in her slipstream. Harry blanked it out as best he could, making his way toward the interview suite. Given the lateness of the hour, he wanted this interrogation over and done with. But, with Connie at least in their protective custody, her betrayal had been caught in time. As he passed her on the Grid, he refused to look away. He met her gaze and held it.
"Harry!" she snapped at him, jowls aquiver in anger. ""Explain yourself, now. Explain this!"
"Come with us, and I'm sure all will become clear in time," he curtly replied, then turned and led the way to the interview room.
Malcolm and Harry sat side by side at the table situated in the centre of the room. Connie sat opposite them, still with her hairnet on. It detracted somewhat from the volcanic fury in her expression. Her pale blue eyes flickered between them both.
"You know me," she said, keeping her tone in check. "You know what I have done for this country, in all my years of service."
"We also know that you issued a kill order against another Officer," Harry added. "Why?"
"You have proof of this? A recording, perhaps?"
The honest answer was 'no'. They only had Lucas's word, backed up by the support of Ros. But, Harry was keen to gloss over that particular point.
"Connie, in respect of your long service, I thought we could spare you the humiliation of having your dirty linens aired quite so publicly," he reasoned. "Just tell us: what is going on? End this now."
Connie smiled knowingly. She knew them as well as they knew her. "That's a no then, is it?"
By the time Lucas and Ros got settled at the barracks, it was close to four in the morning. Personnel was kept to a minimum, so they found themselves alone together again, but sharing a dormitory. The same Alsation that welcomed them upon their arrival now sniffed at Lucas's hastily packed bag, while Ros tried to get some sleep. It was almost too dark to see, so Lucas lay back on his bunk and looked up towards the ceiling. He extended his hand over the edge of the bed, where he soon felt the wet nose of the dog snuffling at his fingers.
With the reassuring presence of the dog, he let his mind wander back to the Sugarhorse interrogations. He remembered as if it were yesterday, the waterboarding, the beatings and the smell of disinfectant hanging stagnant in the air. He shut his eyes, gripping the dog's fur, as he relived the experience, minute by minute. While his heart rate soared, he kept his breathing steady against the onslaught of his own terrors. Then, out of the blue, a memory from an altogether different time cut across his mind. Sitting up with a jolt he rolled off the bed and shook Ros awake.
"Ros!" he whispered. "Wake up!"
She hadn't been sleeping properly, just drifting off and she looked up at him alert enough.
"Is it Sugarhorse?" she asked.
"No," he replied. "Remember I said there was an English woman in Mace's hotel room?"
Ros sat up and nodded.
"It was Ruth Evershed," he added. "It was definitely her. I only just remembered."
Ros frowned, trying to make sense of it.
"She cannot possibly be working with Mace; he thinks she's dead, and he's responsible for it," she explained, trying to wring some sense out of the situation. "What the hell is she playing at now?"
After just one, fleeting, encounter with Ruth, Lucas could shed no further light on the question.
"Maybe she found out he was here and wanted to do some digging?" he suggested, feeling it was stating the obvious.
"She's been here for years, as well," Ros mused aloud. "He's only been here for a few weeks. But how did she find out? Unless she's checking who comes in and out of the country."
"It's easy enough to do," he put in. "Do you think we should tell Harry?"
Ros shook her head. "No, he'll be in with Connie and he needs to stay completely focused on that," she replied. "But if you remember anything at all about Sugarhorse, then that he will need to know."
She looked at him expectantly, her eyes boring into him in a way that made him feel almost uncomfortable. It felt like he was under a microscope. He swallowed, feeling like he was going to be sick again. In desperation, he clung to the only other recollection he had.
"There is something," he said. "When they thought I was knocked out, I heard them talking about something called Pilgrim. I remember it now. I think it could have been the codename of an Asset they had."
Ros allowed herself a hopeful smile. "It's worth a try," she replied, reaching for her phone. "Stay there, Harry may want a word with you. But remember, say nothing about Ruth."
Still fully clothed, she got up and dialled the number, taking the phone outside in the passageway. Lucas sat back down at his own bunk, listening to the muffled sound of her voice as she relayed the information during the brief call. The dog had fallen asleep, and he decided to try and follow suit before dawn rose and they had to go chasing down old spooks.
The effects of the chloroform wore off slowly. While she regained consciousness, Ruth felt as though she was swimming through a deep pool of treacle. She was hot, barely able to breathe and, when she did, it was as though her body was filling with thick fluid. When was eventually able to open her eyes, she could barely see anything but for a thin sliver of light emanating from under a door. After a few minutes, she was able to identify a loud humming as the sound of an engine running. Bumps in the road, which jolted her violently at regular intervals, confirmed her suspicion that was being taken far from Polis.
As she recalled the last few minutes of her life prior to blacking out, nausea washed over her as her mouth watered. She steadied herself against the wall of the transit van she was in and wretched. Spitting out the acrid residue, she retreated as far to the back of the van as possible, leaning against the back wall of the cabin to try and minimise the jolting. Once there, she let herself droop as the last side-effects of chloroform wore off slowly. Making any escape in her current condition would be suicide.
With no windows, it was impossible to gage the speed the driver was going at, or the direction. Nor could she even guess at how long they had travelling for. The only indication was the light under the door. It was daylight, and that was all she could tell. It was near midnight when she was taken; the sun rose at six am. When she felt strong enough, she sat up again and made a note of the directions the van was turning in. Regular sharp turns on rough, unkempt roads. Side streets and back routes, by the feel of it. The speed was regular, fast and steady. The driver wasn't slowing even for sharp turns, so they were clearly in a hurry.
Finally, after an indeterminate period of time, the van skidded to a halt. Ruth held her breath as footsteps approached round the side of the van and the handles turned. A sudden rush of broad daylight filled the van, burning her eyes and making her recoil. At least the fresh air cleared the smell of sick that had built up in the cabin. For a long moment, her captor regarded her coolly, hands on hips.
As soon as her eyes became adjusted to the bright light, she looked back at him at a loss for what to say. The only plan she had was to fight him off with all her power if he got any funny ideas about assaulting her. All the while, he stood there smiling at her.
"Don't worry, Ruth, I'm not going to hurt you," he said.
She didn't feel terribly assured by his promise.
"What do you want from me?" she asked, the words thick and clumsy on her drugged tongue. "Who are you?"
She remembered him, but only vaguely. He used to follow the Home Secretary around and once tried to usurp the power of MI5. But the details escaped her at this crucial time. Now, he reached inside the van and pulled her out of the van. Surprisingly gently, he helped her to stand. Now outside, she could see where she was, quite able to get a good look around. With growing fear, she took in the derelict hotels, the crumbling tourist attractions and forgotten theatre. The pavements were cracked, the asphalt on the roads broken up where nature reclaimed the streets of Famagusta, Europe's largest ghost town.
"I don't want anything from you, Ruth," he said, tying her hands behind her back – something she was powerless to resist while the chloroform was still affecting her. "It's who you can bring to me."
Ruth laughed. "You were friends with Mace, weren't you?" she said, putting up feeble resistance as he began marching her towards an abandoned hotel on the opposite side of the street. "Do you think Harry Pearce is going to come and rescue me? Is that what this is about? You and Mace are trying to trap him. I know what you're doing."
The man stopped abruptly and pulled on the bindings at her wrists. Pain shot through the length of her arm, making her yelp. The man had pulled her so close to him, that she could feel the breath against her neck. "You know nothing," he hissed in her ear. "Now move!"
Going by the tone of his voice, Ruth guessed that her abductor was no longer friends with Mace. But, she knew him and she was racking her brains, trying to get the name. All the while, he's pushing her through the doors of a hotel. Inside, the tables were still set for lunch, underneath a heavy shroud of cobwebs. When the invasion happened, there wasn't even enough time to loot the place properly.
"If the Turks find you here," she panted, breathless from being pushed up a flight of stairs. "They will shoot you without question!"
"Well, that's a chance I'm just going to have to take now, isn't it?"
It was a statement rather than a question, so Ruth let the rest of the journey pass in silence. He took her as high up the hotel's floors as he could go, before the stairs were blocked by fallen masonry that had crashed through the uppermost floors during the war. Going in her favour, was the small fact that there must be a hundred and one ways to escape from a place like this. Finally, he stopped outside a barricaded door and he sat her down while he let himself in.
"Friends reunited," the man said as he hauled her up again, and gave her shove into the old hotel room.
Ruth fell flat on her face. But, before she could do anything, the door slammed shut behind her and she listened in despair as the barricades were replaced. The sound of her abductor's footsteps soon receded down the passageway outside, leaving her utterly alone. Or, so she initially thought, as she struggled to get to her feet.
"Ruth Evershed."
A familiar voice called her name from a partitioned room adjacent to the one she was in. She whirled round, to find Oliver Mace peering at her through a small gap between the ceiling and the partition. He had two black eyes, one so bad it had almost completely closed over. A cut over his left eye had been left open and dirty, the surrounding area of skin purple and swollen. He was obviously standing on something to be able to see over the top of the partition, but he still gripped the top of it to steady himself. Even his hands looked as though they had been stamped on. His condition was so pitiful, she almost felt sorry for him. But, moments after that brief flicker of sympathy, a wave of molten anger took light as she rounded on him.
"For all the things you've done," she spat at him. "For everything you've done to me, you bloody well explain to me what's going on, right now!"
Mace sagged against the partition, tried to smile but only succeeded in showing off his now missing teeth. "He doesn't want you-"
"What does he want?" she cut over him. "Why am I here? Why are you here?"
Slowly, he shook his head. "It was a trap," he said. "He set it all up-"
"Just answer the fucking question, you bastard!"
"He wants me and he wants Harry Pearce," he finally answered, his words slow and cumbersome through a swollen mouth. "You remember the Tom Quinn debacle, years ago, he tried to bring down Harry Pearce and I pretended to help him. Once Tom's name was cleared, Harry and I humiliated him."
The story sounded familiar. She remembered Harry telling her, gleefully, about how he and Mace had had the man ejected from a Gentleman's Club. Then, the name came back to her.
"Jason Belling?" she asked, eyes narrowed as she cast her mind back.
But Mace hadn't finished. He renewed his grip on the partition, hoisting himself as high as he could, while Ruth settled against the bed.
"Eight months ago, he tried again," he continued. "He tried to wipe out the whole of Section D, but Harry and Connie James were on to him, right from the start. They sent Adam Carter round there to try and knock some sense into him, but it was too late-"
"Wait, Oliver. How could Belling do all this?" she asked. "Is Harry alright?"
"I haven't seen Harry for two years," he replied. "But I hear about him. I don't know all the details, but Belling came close to getting them all killed by some IRA sniper who was doing the rounds."
The whole story was making Ruth even more befuddled. She blinked through the fog of confusion that was rapidly building up, and decided not to question it any further. Instead, she sorted out the information she already had.
"So, this is merely Belling's latest, elaborate attempt to get revenge on you and Harry?"
Mace gave another painful nod. "When Belling found out that you were here," he explained. "He worked on the Turkish Intelligence Agency and encouraged them to invite me over here to discuss security issues and Turkey's EU membership application. At the same time, he told Golden Dawn that you were here and I was here to secretly work with you. When I went for talks with Golden Dawn, they lured me into a trap and now we're here."
Ruth listened, fixing her old nemesis with a steely look. "Why were you even talking to Golden Dawn?"
He laughed drily. "It was supposed to be a set up," he answered. "I was offering them intelligence at a price, maybe arms. We were trying to get several members of the organisation neutralised."
"And it would be just like you to use dirty tricks to get it done," she bitterly pointed out.
He looked at her as though he was about to say something about Acts of Truth and the set up. But, evidently, he changed his mind again and dropped his gaze. She could tell they were both thinking the same thing and it was pointless to pursue it any further. Not when they had so much else going on.
"So what's next?" she asked. "Has Belling gone to make sure Harry finds out that I'm here in the hope he'll drop everything to rescue me?"
"Belling already made sure that Harry found out about my trip to Cyprus by planting information on his counterpart in Six," Mace explained. "He could already have found out about you being here, even if Six weren't privy to that particular gem of information."
Ruth sagged, groaning aloud. She was being used as bait in a trap that, anything short of a national emergency back in England, she knew Harry would walk straight into. 'No heroics' was the phrase he used only in relation to other people. Behind her, Oliver Mace carried on mumbling about the set up and cursing Jason Belling. Ruth, however, absorbed the latest body blow and let her mind race, thinking of ways to get them both out before Belling could lose the plot completely.
After a few hours sleep, Harry woke up slumped across his desk and a file placed neatly beside his head. He looked at it for a moment. The word "Pilgrim" written in red Cyrillic text. On the front, Jo had stuck a post-it note, on which she had written: "brace yourself." He sighed deeply as he slid it over the desk, towards him. Surely, he thought, it cannot possibly get any worse.
But then, as it so often does, it did get worse. He opened the file to find the name of the leak, the man handling Connie James. His old mentor, Bernard Qualtrough. Inside, was an old black and white photograph of Qualtrough and Connie, in black and white, taken at least twenty-five years previously. Harry closed his eyes and buried his face in his hands. Qualtrough had taught him everything he knew and now, he too, was nothing more than a traitor to his country.
Once he had recovered himself, Harry progressed through the file. It had been secreted from inside the Russian Embassy courtesy of one of Ben's assets, something Harry made a note to remember when pay reviews came round. As he progressed through the file, he uncovered Qualtrough's plans to frame him, such detail that made him want to vomit. But, more importantly, enough to make him set aside his own personal feelings of betrayal, was the evidence they needed against Connie.
He swept up the file and returned to the interview room.