One year later
The Grid was quiet for once, thank goodness. Ros was getting increasingly frustrated with the level of office chatter, be it Jo and Ruth gossiping about their weekend or Zaf showing off about his new car or Adam planning his son's birthday party. It was all so bloody trivial and Ros refused to engage in such conversations.
But fortunately, she was now faced with a blissful silence - Adam and Harry had popped out for a natter with the Home Sec, Zaf and Jo were off on some op, and Ruth and Malcolm were sorting files in the Meeting Room. Ros took a sip of her forgotten and now stone-cold coffee and rigged up the MI5 personnel files, checking one last time that there was no-one looking over her shoulder.
Tom
Obviously it threw up hundreds of results and Ros had to trawl through picture after picture before finding the familiar face in an encrypted file – the reason for it being encrypted becoming apparent as Ros' eyes skimmed a detail at the bottom. He had been decommissioned from the Service over two years ago, but his impeccable operational record before the incidents that led to that decision meant that...
He was now discreetly offered one-off operations from Harry Pearce.
"Interesting read?" Adam's voice was suddenly in her ear and she nearly flinched. Nearly.
"Not really. Just another burn-out," she said with as much coolness as she could muster.
"Tom Quinn? He was a legend here," Adam reminisced, before a crease appeared between his eyebrows. "Why are you digging into him?"
"Just getting to grips with potential familiar faces in the new job," Ros replied sweetly.
"Nah, you won't end up seeing him around. He's a stranger now," Adam told her.
There was something so satisfying about the fact that Adam was so confident that her path and Tom's would never cross. Of course, she could have told him. But being the new girl and being looked down on was a poisonous enough combination and so the thought of a little secret from her superior, the man who everyone doted on, was very appealing indeed.
"I suppose you're right," she replied with a shrug, clicking the cross in the right-hand corner of the file and watching Tom's image disappear from the screen before plucking her empty mug from the desk and getting to her feet. "Coffee?"