Cannot believe this one has outstripped Chinese Boxes length-wise by now. At least the way things are looking, the two will have the same number of chapters!
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"What else do you know about Mitchum?" Selina asks eventually, but as Jamie rattles off what they already know – the HSBC job, the odd-job years, his university grades and other peripheral facts – Selina's mind keeps wandering. She may lack the hacking expertise to accurately judge Jamie's prowess that seems to have quite impressed her more tech-savvy companions, but for most of her life, she survived and got ahead by being street-smart and using common sense to judge people... and something about Jamie's demeanour does not add up. Above all, it is simply too good to be true: just when they thought they had hit a brick wall, along comes this Girl Wonder to save them. Even if she is not quite as wonderful as she claimed to be, she can obviously make for a useful ally, so long as there is enough substance behind her technical claims. Selina has kept a close eye on Jamie when she was describing her tortuous pursuit of Mitchum, and as far as she can tell, the other woman's nonverbal cues were consistent enough with telling the truth; but if so, how can this apparent show of competence be reconciled with her excited, almost silly eagerness once Bruce had floated the collaboration proposal?
A second after Jamie has finished, Selina pounces, her tone joking but her serious intent obvious.
"So if you're as good as this and have all this info, why do you need us? You can probably catch them all on your own without the GCHQ resources."
For a split second Jamie looks uncertain whether to take Selina's remark as mockery or at face value, then decides on a sort of midway response.
"I may be good but I'm not perfect," she says with just enough irony to show that she has caught the taunt. "And no, actually I can't do it on my own, I wouldn't be here if I could."
So much for helping their ungrateful arses and telling them to play nice. Let's see what else she was shitting us about.
"But why do you trust us? What made you think we were on the CIA's side? We could be mercenaries; we could be working for a different interested party that just wanted to steal the thing and bypass the bidding…"
"I don't think so," Jamie cuts her off, a bit impatiently for someone who should, by all accounts, be feeling cornered.
"Why not?" Bruce joins in.
Jamie shoots him a quick look and is palpably hesitant to reply, and it is obvious, looking at Theo and Bruce, that their suspicions by now are as acute as Selina's.
"Or," Theo says, mock-pensively, riffing off Selina's train of thought, "you could really be working for Mitchum, and could have come here to tell us what we already know as a way to win our trust so the two of you can play us."
Jamie looks offended, but does her best to sound unperturbed. "I can give you copies of my files and let you see the footage – "
"Here we go again," Selina picks up the attack. "But how do you know you can trust us with this intel? You just said you didn't know who we were."
What should have stumped the other woman has rather the opposite effect; Jamie looks as if she has made up her mind, and calmed down as a result. Selina wonders what the confession, or the next cover-up, is going to be.
"I don't know who you are. Well, you two," Jamie says glumly.
Tipping her head at Selina and Theo.
And leaving out Bruce.
The next couple of seconds pass in a heavy silence.
"I saw your obituary."
Interestingly, Bruce looks relieved even as Selina bites down on a curse and Theo does his best not to look worried.
"When?" Bruce asks her, completely casual.
"Just now. Well, actually about an hour ago, by now. I told you, I saw you getting in there. You had to switch off and put away your goggles before you set off the EMP so they wouldn't get fucked up. I hadn't seen you before and until you joined him," this is obviously meant for Selina, "I had no idea you two were a team. It was quite clear you weren't friends with Mitchum, considering what you were doing, but as you say, I didn't know who you were and why you wanted the Matrix and whether you could be trusted or had to be neutralised, not that I had an easy means of doing that. I no longer have access to updated GCHQ info, but I still have facial recognition software and an archived copy of a 90-terabyte photo ID database, pretty much everyone alive who has ever had a criminal conviction, and everyone alive who has ever crossed a state border in the past 10 years." So it would have still caught Bruce just before his self-imposed retirement. "I thought if I saw you were a terrorist, I'd sell you out to Mitchum to gain points with him and get closer, and if you were a mercenary I'd try and blackmail you into cooperating, bluff and say I was working on MI6 orders, I did a secondment with them so I know the basics of how they operate, enough to fool a layman. I ran the screengrab I'd taken of your face against that archive, and your name" – she pauses; Bruce still looks incongruously relaxed – "came up within two minutes. I didn't believe it at first so I did a search for Bruce Wayne for something with a photo." She looks at him point blank. "The obituary was the first news item that came up." This, unexpectedly, makes Bruce chuckle. "So I knew you folks weren't criminals."
It is Bruce's turn to get sarcastic. "You have so much trust in corporate sharks?"
Jamie apparently fails to see the irony. "I remember all the media discussions during the Gotham occupation, the panellists asking, if Wayne owned the nuclear reactor that would have made him even richer, why had he been pretending that it wasn't working? And the only reasonable answer was that you were too concerned about it being used to do harm. It wouldn't make sense for you to go back on that principle now."
"You never know. People can do strange things when they're dead." Is he enjoying himself?
"I reckoned that the CIA must have blackmailed you with your identity to make you work for them," Jamie goes on.
"And so," Bruce picks up; he is definitely enjoying himself. "…you knew I was an ex-tycoon with money and access to weapons, who wanted to stay dead, and the best idea you had was to come here and blackmail me too?" he looks as if this reminds him of a joke he has heard before.
For the first time, Jamie looks profoundly embarrassed. "I… I thought about it. But in the end I realised… well, the obvious. So I tried not to show that I knew who you were, and look where it got me. I just wanted to make sure it was really you and to see if there was anything I could do to help. The truth is, I really want Mitchum and his boss in prison. It probably won't make me feel less guilty – "
"It won't." Bruce had better watch his tongue, or else she'll end up figuring what other identity the guilt issues had once steered him into. "But yeah, I know what you mean."
"But I still want it to happen, and by now there's nothing else I can do on my own to get them."
"So you pretended to be in control when you really needed our help?" Selina taunts, but lays off the sarcastic tone for once.
"Didn't work, did it?" Jamie shoots back.
"For a couple of minutes it did," Selina grants her. "But then you yourself told us the whole story."
Jamie looks resigned by now. "I used to bluff for a living, sort of, as part of my online snooping duties. I may have done a good enough job of it in writing, never seeing the others' faces, but it's very different from… this." She gestures helplessly to her audience.
This, finally, makes sense. Jamie's brash attitude early on and her almost childish eagerness later; the combined result of technical proficiency and lack of streetwise experience and probably being in awe of Bruce to start with, that made her overdo it with the bravado and let her underlying relative naïvete show through in the end. Selina may not know how to parse metadata, but she sure as hell can run circles around a computer geek, male or female, when it comes to figuring out motives and intentions.
"Are you going to report me to Newell now?" Jamie asks, dejected; like a schoolgirl caught smoking.
Selina is momentarily at a loss as to who Jamie means until she remembers: their CIA last-resort contact. It should not be surprising that Jamie knows him, being from a partner-country spy agency; but somehow it still is.
"What made you think that?"
"He's the CIA top man in the region. And he hates me."
"Why?"
"Long story. Nothing to do with this case." She does not look evasive so much as pissed off, and Selina lets it go for now; it is not the best moment to be discussing petty rivalries.
"No, we won't," Bruce assures her in the meantime. "We haven't been in contact with him."
"Well, that's up to you," Jamie sighs, "Just let me go back to Sydney and I'll be out of your way."
Bruce looks amused. "No," he drawls, shaking his head, "by now you know too much. I'd rather keep you around and think of a way you can make yourself useful, now that you know who you're dealing with."
"Well, I know you," Jamie's answer is meant for Bruce but she is looking pointedly at Selina.
"Céline Wainwright," she offers; considering that Jamie knows who Bruce is, her own ironclad current identity poses no additional risk. "And you're Jamie Harper."
"Pleased to meet you," Jamie replies airily. "That's not my real name… either," she adds with a glance at Bruce, "though I changed mine ages ago."
This makes Selina curious. "Are you supposed to be dead too?"
Jamie laughs. "No, nothing like that. Quite innocent, actually. I hated my given name and changed it by deed poll as soon as I was sixteen. Of course my mother hates this one, can't see why I insist on being known by a boy's name."
"What was it?"
"Don't ask," Jamie groans.
"Come on, how bad can it be?" Selina insists, too curious to give up. She tries to think what more-feminine name Jamie could have been derived from. "Jasmine? Gemma?"
"Jemima," she sighs.
Selina makes a noncommittal gesture as an indication that she does not find the name particularly awful per se, though it rather makes her think of an elderly aunt in pearls and a twinset looking nothing like the tomboyish woman before her. At least your real name doesn't have an unfinished prison term that goes with it, she thinks.
"By the way," Bruce says, all too casually, "Outside of present company, I am known as Brandon – "
Jamie recognises the name before he is finished. "Of course. That was absolutely fucking dumb of me. You're Brandon Wainwright of Wainwright Security – "
"What, are we famous in the spy community?"
"Well… in a way."
"Bad reputation?"
"Not really. I mean, the equipment you sell has a great reputation. You two, however – " by now she has figured that Theo is part of the same outfit, "are known as picky bastards who are very particular about vetting buyers and use insanely complex encryption standards in your software…"
"Good," Bruce says smugly. "Can't let the stuff get into the wrong hands. We've all seen what happens then."
"But then… don't you also own the hypersonic research outfit near Oxford?"
"Yep. That one too." This is turning into an accidental Wayne ego trip. "And a couple of smaller alternative fuel research labs. And the bulk of Wayne Enterprises over in the US, though they still think I'm dead…"
"…and they think we Brits are eccentric," Jamie jumps in, a note of the early sarcasm creeping in.
"I had Welsh ancestors," Bruce shoots back.
"And as far as I recall, as Mr Wainwright you also own one of the twenty limited edition…"
"…Sesto Elemento models ever produced," Bruce finishes for her.
Jamie shakes her head. "Some people have all the luck."
Bruce smirks at her. "Only the dead ones."
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TBC
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