"Tariq," she called out across the Grid. "Have you informed Malcolm Wynn-Jones that Harry is missing?"

"No. Why?"

"Malcolm is the only person who can trace Harry's phone – and mine – even if it's turned off. I doubt Harry would go anywhere without that phone. Will you ring Malcolm, or should I?"

"I'll do it."

Tariq picked up his desk phone and called Malcolm, while Ruth busied herself contacting the front desk.

"Sir Harry signed out at 2.36 pm, Miss Evershed. I remember it clearly. He smiled and said it was a nice day for a walk. I thought that most uncharacteristic of him."

"Thank you, Bryan," Ruth replied, and hung up, writing the information on a blank pad on her desk. She couldn't help smiling at Bryan's comment. Harry certainly had been uncharacteristically happy during the past week, and she knew the reason. There was a very, very good reason. She looked towards Tariq, sitting at his desk with the phone tucked between his ear and his shoulder, signalling for she and Erin to come over.

"Yes, I'll tell them," he was saying into the phone. "Do you want me to stay on the line? Okay, speaker phone it is, then."

Tariq turned the phone to speaker, and put the phone back into the cradle. Malcolm's voice came over speaker phone.

"Ruth, are you there?"

"Yes, Malcolm. I'm here, and so is Erin Watts."

"I have an address for Harry's phone. Do you have someone out in the field currently? Someone who can get there quickly. I think we should get a rescue team on to it immediately. Harry's been missing over twelve hours, and his phone has been at this address for just on twelve hours, so every second may count."

"Malcolm, this is Erin Watts. I'll get Dimitri on the line. He's out with Calum Reid, and one of our junior operatives, Jason Craig. There are two more junior operatives in the area who can assist."

Erin opened her mobile, and pressed the third number on her speed dial. "Dimitri, I have an urgent job for you. Drop everything. Harry's seems to have been abducted, and he has been taken to this address. Malcolm?"

Malcolm gave the address, and Ruth's face went pale when she heard it. It was an industrial estate on a large patch of wasteland. Getting there unnoticed could prove difficult.

"Did you get that, Dimitri? Repeat it. Good. Now, get there, and if you need backup, wait for it to arrive. Don't be a hero. I don't think they'll let you just waltz in and ask for Harry back."

Harry lay on the cold cement floor in the dark, his hands tied behind his back, and his ankles tied. Both sets of ties were connected with a longer tie, forcing his ankles up towards his buttocks. He was cold, hungry, thirsty, and he missed Ruth. He was also afraid. He now had so much to live for, and yet he may not come out of this alive. His jacket had been ripped from his back as he was pushed into the building blind-folded. He had little sense of the time of day, or how long he'd been kept captive in this room. The sounds from outside the building were muted, and there were no tell-tale sounds, such as trains, aeroplanes, church bells, or industrial activity. Harry couldn't determine whether the dull hum he heard was the city in the distance, or the buzzing of pain inside his head.

Ruth knew to contact Malcolm if anything happened to him, and Malcolm would be able to trace him through his phone …... which was in his jacket. Even if his captors smashed his phone, he could still be traced through the chip beneath the battery. So where were they?

He tasted blood at the corner of his mouth. He'd been kicked and punched, mostly on his body. The last time they'd come to him, he'd been sat on a chair, and punched around the head. He felt quite well, considering he'd thus far received four beatings. He was sure he had sustained a couple of broken ribs, as it hurt to breathe, and should he ever get out of here, his face would look even less attractive than usual. He was attempting to focus his thoughts on Ruth, trying to figure out why it was she hadn't raised the alarm, when the door again opened, and a sliver of light spilled into the room.

"Harry Pearce," he heard a heavily accented voice say, "we meet again."

Harry breathed out heavily, a sense of dread settling in his gut. The voice belonged to an old adversary of his, someone he'd believed to have been executed over thirty years earlier. It was Babak Raad, former deputy director of SAVAK, the former intelligence service in Iran. They had been the bloodiest of all intelligence services. There were those who had been high up in the organisation who had escaped execution for their crimes. Babak Raad was one such man.

Harry closed his eyes and thought of Ruth. If he was about to die, he wanted his last thoughts on earth to be of her.

"We have CO19 on standby," Dimitri's voice came over comms. "We have evidence of five people in the building, and they appear to be in the basement, which makes our job easier, but still difficult. The basement has no windows, and only one entrance, so we'll have to go in with night-vision goggles, as will CO19. Alternatively, we could take in floodlights and provide our own light. If Harry is one of these five, then the other four will need to be taken out one at a time. We'll use silencers. Jason and I will go in first. He has the marksman skills, as have I. I'm leaving Calum with the van, overseeing comms. And he's not happy about that."

"Always the bloody bridesmaid," came Calum's voice in the background.

"We're now about to go silent. I'm leaving comms on, but we'll not be speaking until we have Harry. And we will get him back. We all need him …... not just you, Ruth."

At Dimitri's words, Ruth looked up at the others, feeling embarrassed. They all knew about she and Harry, of course, but mostly no-one ever mentioned it.

Raad had not laid a finger on Harry. In some ways that was worse.

"We need to know where you're storing the uranium, Harry. If you can't tell us, we know who will. We have her just through that doorway."

Suddenly the sound of a woman's screams echoed through the room. It was a muffled, distant sound, but seemed to come from close by. The scream went on and on, and then faded out to a cry, an animal wail. Was that Ruth? Did they have her? Is that why no-one had come to find him?

Before he could make sense of the screaming, a couple of thugs whose smell he remembered from his earlier beatings lifted him from the floor, untied the tie which held his feet and hands together, and then they roughly sat him on a chair. A light was turned on, and he had to close his eyes.

"I need water," Harry said, his mouth and throat almost too dry for him to speak.

"In good time, my friend," Said Raad. "I need to know where the uranium is. Your girlfriend didn't know, so she's being …... well, you can hear that, can't you?"

Another muffled female scream rang out. Harry was having difficulty in focusing. Something wasn't quite right, but he couldn't put his finger on it. He was about to speak, and he felt a blow to the side of his head which shattered any clear thoughts which were forming.

"Where. ….. is …... the …... fucking …... uranium ….. Harry? I'm being nice. To you, at least. Your lady is not so nice. She won't …... how do you English say it? …... she won't put out. So ….. we maybe have to remedy that."

Harry remained silent. He had to believe that this was a bluff, and that they didn't have Ruth. He'd never heard Ruth screaming (her cries as she climaxed were audible sighs, not screams) and so he had no idea how she sounded when she screamed. Could it be her? He couldn't say for sure.

"What would you want with uranium?" Harry said at last.

"It's not me who wants it. I'm just a …... a gopher. This time, I'm gophering uranium." He laughed lightly at his own word-joke. "You might be interested to know that the woman you were fucking for over a year needs uranium for her husband's latest hobby. Apparently you're not terribly talkative in the bedroom, Harry. Had you been more forthcoming with her, we wouldn't have to be doing this. So, as you can see, this is all your fault -"

The door suddenly burst open, and the room was flooded with artificial light. Perhaps there is the white light which we're meant to follow after we die, Harry thought, almost past caring. His muscles ached, his ribs hurt, and his head thumped like a drum. Shots rang out, and he heard bodies hit the cement floor.

"Harry?" A familiar voice spoke to him from right beside him. "Harry, are you alright? Speak to me, Harry."

Harry opened his eyes with difficulty, and looked into Dimitri's face. Harry blinked one, twice, before he passed out.

Ruth sat primly on a chair in the hospital corridor outside the room in which Harry would be recovering after his operation. She was worried about him, naturally, but she'd been assured he would recover fully, and live a normal life. She looked up as footsteps approached her.

"I'm Dr Lidcomb," he said. "I was one of two surgeons who operated on Sir Harry. I believe you're his wife."

"Partner. We're not married …... yet." Ruth surprised herself with her response. Maybe were she married to Harry, he wouldn't get himself into these situations.

"He'll be wheeled back here in around ten minutes. There was some internal bleeding that worried us, but we found the source, and he should recover well, and be home in a couple of days, maybe three. He'll be sore for a while. I'd suggest you stay with him during the recovery period. He shouldn't be back at work for at least a week, perhaps longer. He's no longer a young man."

Ruth thanked him, and then went back to her private musings. No longer a young man indeed!

When Harry was wheeled into his room, Ruth pulled a chair next to his bed, and sat by him, one of his hands in hers. She concentrated all her love for him into willing him to wake up.

In his den at home, Malcolm Wynn-Jones was compiling his report to deliver to the head of operations at North Yorkshire Aeronautics. What a messy web it was, too. A dodgy engineer who got greedy, and began designing weapons of mass destruction because the financial gains were considerable; his wife, who honey-trapped the head of security at North Yorkshire, and the head of counter-terrorism at MI-5; and a former member of SAVAK who orchestrated the whole thing. Malcolm added an addendum about the Chinese triads, but he suspected that they got in on the act hoping that they could find the uranium before anyone else, and auction it off to the highest bidder. They drew in Lucas North from MI-5 with a hidden pretext (now that North was dead), all the time hoping they could get him to share with them the location of the uranium. He pressed `save', and then prepared to visit the hospital to see Harry.

In the end, Harry went home from hospital to his own house, and Ruth took some of her things there so that she could look after him. Harry had not yet recovered his normal demeanour. He was morose, and as such, Ruth was finding him difficult. She'd ask him what was wrong, and he'd say, `nothing'. He ate, he slept, and he grumbled about wanting to go back to work.

"There's no way you're going back to work like this. You're still on a massive amount of pain killers, and you still have to heal."

"I can do without the pain killers."

"Alright," Ruth replied, "take yourself off them. See how you manage."

And he did. That night, Ruth lay awake beside him, while he rolled from side to side, groaning in his sleep. Ruth had only just fallen asleep, when she was woken by Harry's moaning and groaning.

"Harry, what is it?"

"My ribs are killing me. I can't sleep."

"Would you like some pain killers?"

"Yes. I'll get them."

"I'll come with you," she said.

They both went downstairs, and Ruth made them a pot of tea, while Harry took his pain killers. Within ten minutes they began to dull the pain in his ribs, his back, and his head.

"Harry," Ruth said after they'd been sitting in silence for some time, "are you angry with me for some reason?"

Harry didn't reply straight away. He appeared to be thinking about how best to word his answer.

"I'm not angry with you, Ruth," he said at last, "but I'm curious as to why you didn't inform Malcolm earlier that I was missing."

"I thought you may have come home here to sleep after your meeting at Whitehall."

"Whitehall didn't let you know I'd not made it to the meeting?"

"No. We rang them next morning, and it was only then that we realised that you were missing. I didn't even think anything was wrong when you didn't come home. I thought you must have come back here to get some rest. After all, neither of us were not getting a lot of rest at my flat."

Harry smiled at that. He smiled at the memory of their nights of passion …... two people who'd been apart for too long, making up for lost time.

"The beating I got has brought that to a sudden halt."

"Not forever, Harry. You'll be well in a week or so, two weeks at most."

"I feel so useless."

"Harry, you're not useless. You need a rest. The pain killers will help you rest."

"I know." He reached across the table and covered Ruth's hand with his own. They had barely touched since they had come home to his house, and they had only kissed briefly and without passion. Harry realised, as his hand covered Ruth's hand, that he had missed this. He had missed touching her, having her touch him, having her kiss him, hold him. He needed to let her back in. "I'm sorry, Ruth."

"What for?"

"I'm sorry I've been shutting you out. I've been trying to protect you from what happened to me."

"Harry, when something like this happens to you, it happens to me also. I love you. Your pain is never just yours - it's mine as well."

Harry had squeezed her hand as she had told him she loved him. "That's the first time you've said that …... that you love me."

"Is it? I thought you knew. I feel as though I say it to you every day …... just not in words."

They finished their tea, and hand in hand climbed the stairs to bed. Harry's pain killers had kicked in, so he lay behind Ruth, and pulled her against him, his arms around her, their hands clasped together against her stomach. They slept peacefully until just after dawn.