A/N: Going on vacation starting tomorrow so there won't be another chapter up until after Thanksgiving. Thanks for reading and enjoy your holiday!
Chapter 6
It was chilly in Washington. After all, it was the beginning of winter. James half suspected full snowfall before he left and to arrive home to frost on his windowsills. Pulling his coat on tighter against the wind, he took a precious second to check that his phone was on silent and also to make sure he hadn't missed any calls.
According to R, all calls directed to his house phone would now be forwarded to his cell phone, regardless of what sodding continent he was on or how frosty the air got. Surprisingly, she didn't ask him why he needed the favor done. She just set it up and then called him to prove it worked. As nice as that was, James worried what kind of favor she'd ask of him later in repayment.
But for the time being, he just knew that Q had not called since James' landing in Washington the night before. Now, with his phone switched to silent, he wouldn't hear the call even if he got it. But he couldn't risk his phone ringing when he snuck in somewhere. That would just be bad espionage.
Of his two possible targets, James had decided that Professor Arnold was the bigger potential threat. If the U.S. Government had a stake in the fungus research in Olympia, then the U.S. Government would be keeping a very close eye on that research. That was bad for espionage but also great for James, because that kind of attention meant anyone from Spectre would also have trouble getting to the fungus. Unless, perhaps, someone from Spectre worked for the U.S. Government.
But for now, James was working under the assumption that Spectre was after the easier, less government entangled target of Professor Arnold.
Getting onto the Professor's school campus was easy. So was finding his office. But he shared the space with another professor, and that would never be where he'd hide potentially damning evidence of working for a criminal organization. Regardless, James still let himself into the locked room and scanned through the good professor's files for anything that sounded suspicious. He found a file with a few things related to the professor's theory about the relationship between sound frequency and human emotion, but that was it.
He still took the file, though. Maybe someone back at MI-6 could find a message hidden in the language of the thesis. Arnold would probably notice it was missing, but as long as James wasn't caught snooping, he'd have no reason to suspect it had been stolen.
Then he was off across campus, calmly finding his way to the labs where Arnold taught and performed his studies. A cute college sophomore greeted him near the entrance to the lab and asked if she could help him with anything. She was in a lab coat, but under that she was just in jeans and a t-shirt. Her hands were gloved and she had sound cancelling headphones around her neck, like something a runway traffic director might wear.
"I've heard about the work Professor Arnold has been doing," James explained smoothly. His accent alone seemed to capture her entire attention. "And I was hoping to see it in action."
"Are you representing a grant or something?" she asked. "Because the professor recently received a separate grant, about a week ago, and I'm not sure if it might conflict with his eligibility for yours."
"Oh? Who awarded him his last grant?" James asked. They were alone in the lab, just the two of them and some test mice and a dog. Beyond the doors to the lab, James could faintly hear other scientists meandering to their own labs and classes, but no guards. No Professor Arnold. No Spectre.
"Well he usually likes to list all his supporters on the bulletin board over there, but this time he didn't. He said it was a private grant organization, though. New. Something about… Inspections?" the student guessed.
"Spectre?" James asked.
"So you're familiar with it, Mr…..?" the young woman asked, tilting her head to the side curiously and reaching up to hold onto her large headphones.
"Bond," James introduced with a smile, but did not complete it with his customary 'James Bond.' Instead, he let the surname hang in the air for a moment and then shrugged lazily. "And I have become aware of the organization lately. I'm very… interested in how they work and the projects they take notice of."
Something proud entered the young woman's expression and she tightened her grip on her headphones. "Well, Mr. Bond. It's your lucky day. Professor Arnold might not be here, but I am, and I've heard quite a lot about you. It'll be my honor, as a recruiting member of Spectre, to introduce you to our newest endeavor."
Her foot nudged a button at the base of the wall as her hands positioned the headphones over her ears, and then she just watched James. His stomach dropped when he realized she was onto his true intentions, realized she was part of the organization he was meant to gather information on, but it dropped farther still when he heard the click of that button.
At first he noticed nothing but took a step toward the door regardless. Then the mice began to screech and the dog was growling and getting to its feet and the mice were ramming against the sides of their cages and James' head started to hurt. He heard the most awful sound, but at the same time he couldn't say that he heard anything at all.
He stumbled back against a table, his heart rate rising, his mind feeling cloudy. Subconsciously, he pulled his gun, but when he went to aim it at the not-student, she wasn't in view. She was hiding somewhere in the lab. Her lack of appearance really made James mad, and the continued frenzy of the rats annoyed him to no end, and being sent to fucking Washington really pushed him to the breaking point. But his sudden anger and frustration had no target. He shouted at the empty lab, the logical side of his mind unable to remind him that the Spectre member was still in the room somewhere just out of sight.
The dog bit him when he got a little closer, and James found he had an outlet after all. Silencer on, he aimed his gun at the feral animal, which was lunging at James and choking itself on its collar and restraints. He pulled the trigger. The dog went down.
But James was still furious – at the dog, at the pain in his leg from the bite, at the noise that was not a noise, at the Spectre woman for vanishing, at the mice for their noise, at Mallory for this mission, at Eve for being devious, at Q for not admitting what Riley was really doing. He was livid and needed to punch or break or kill something else, something besides the already dead and pathetic lab dog.
He stumbled to the door, half-blind with rage, and when he entered the hall he found five other university students and employees locked in brutal combat. They shoved each other into walls, against glass display cases that cracked and shattered under the force, and into other people. It was an ugly, untrained brawl, and the rage in James wanted to be a part of it. But something about the civil, gangly way the others were fighting made an impression on James, reminded him about Professor Arnold's research and the button the woman had pushed, and he found a small spot of clarity through the mess of violent desires in his mind.
Clinging to it, fighting to hold on to it, James put his gun away and then stumbled and shoved his way out of the hall, out of the building, and as far as he needed to be before the stuffy feeling in his brain subsided and he was able to think clearly.
Professor Arnold's theory was no longer a theory, and that was a danger larger than any experimental fungus. Worse than that, Spectre was already on scene. How was James supposed to get back to the lab and retain his wits long enough to find what had produced the noise and figure out how to stop it? Or at least how to get it back to R&D at MI-6.
He pulled his phone from his pocket, intending to dial R, right when an incoming call lit up the screen. It was one of his forwarded calls from home. It was Q. James didn't really have time to talk about sisters and bad bosses, so he shouldn't answer. But wasn't Q a master of three different technology fields?
"Q," he answered, breath still heavy with exertion from fighting the urge to destroy everything he'd passed on his way out of the building.
"Well I was definitely calling to tell you about Riley and his newest scheme involving ghosts and how it's going to put me in an early, guilt ridden grave, but you sound to be in worse condition. What's wrong?" Q asked earnestly.
A huff of a laugh crossed James' lips. "You're a technology proficient, yes?"
"I'd say so, yes. How exactly does that help?" Q was undoubtedly trying to piece together James' labored breathing and a computer issue. Good luck with that.
"Hypothetically," James began, remembering that he technically wasn't allowed to talk about his work with civilians and proceeding to chuck the metaphorical rulebook through the metaphorical window. "If someone had managed to engineer a tone at a special frequency and it caused people to experience… extreme emotional effects… what might be done to counteract those effects or take down the system producing the tone?"
"Hypothetically," Q began, mimicking James, "a signal jammer would nullify any outgoing signal."
"Wonderful. Where do I get one or how do I make it?" James pressed, closing his eyes and tilting his face up to catch the sun.
"You can actually buy them at hardware or radio shops, or any shop with a technological lean," Q explained, and James actually took a step toward the university's radio tower before Q's voice stopped him again. "However, most of them are preset to jam signals at 800 MHz because that's the working frequency of a mobile phone. If the signal in your hypothetical differs from that, setting your jammer would be a literal guessing game."
"Damn."
He had no idea what frequency that tone was running on.
"Um. Hypothetically," Q continued, "you could be lying and this could not be a hypothetical at all. In which case, my supposition from the other day could prove fact, and you are, indeed, some type of spy."
"Q," James warned. Then he said, "Is there any other way to get around this frequency issue if I hypothetically don't know the frequency?"
"Well, I feel I need to point out that not knowing the frequency of a tone doesn't matter if you can't hear it." Q switched back to the topic at hand easily, and James thought back to the sound cancelling headphones worn by the Spectre woman. But he didn't have any of those, and the most likely place to get a pair was back in the lab where the frequency would get him again. "So either get a pair of sound cancelling headphones… or just blast some obnoxiously loud music in a regular pair. That should counteract the offending tone enough to get you to whatever machine is causing the noise without you falling under its effects. But again, this is merely a hypothetical."
"Of course," James agreed, looking around for students lying about on the grass or sitting at outdoor tables. He found one that suited his needs rather quickly.
There was an awed sort of breath from Q and then, "My God, you really are a spy or something, aren't you?"
"Hypothetically, I really can't violate the Official Secret's Act by divulging information about my employment to a civilian, regardless of relation." James strode over to the young man wearing a pair of Beats headphones and snatched up the young man's iPod from where it rested on the table beside him.
"Hey," the kid complained and pulled off his headphones.
"Relation?" Q questioned in that same flustered tone from when James bought him coffee.
"We'll talk later," James said and ended the call. To the student he said, "I need to borrow these. Thanks."
Then he took the headphones from the kid's stunned grip and quickly worked his way back toward the labs, where a small crowd of people was gathering outside, including several security officers who were speaking animatedly into their radios.
Ignoring the angry shouts of the student behind him, James scrolled quickly through the list of songs on the iPod and chose a rock band not known for pauses in their heavy metal deluge of music. Maybe James wasn't a fan of them, but world safety hung in the balance. So he slipped the headphones on, pleased to find them already minorly soundproofed, and hit play on the longest song in the album.
Security guards tried to stop him from entering, but he slipped through their grips and quickly dashed inside. He had only four minutes to fix this, after all.
The plane ride home was far more enjoyable than the one on the way to America… but that was undoubtedly because this time he had a private jet. Bringing prisoners back was complicated on a public airline, after all.
Once safely back in London, Professor Arnold was taken in for questioning, as was his little lab helper. James barely caught of glimpse of them as they were led away, and the two of them never noticed him watching. As James slid into the town car that would take him back to headquarters, he pulled his phone out and dialed his home number to check for any messages he may have received during the flight.
"Q, of course," the message began. "I assume you're off doing something heroic or mad or both. Hope the music idea helped…. For goodness sake, I was originally calling before because I wanted to shout at you some more about the coffee and to complain about work, but now I'm more concerned that you're slouched over in some ditch with a strange tone turning your brain into mush. I wish you'd given me more details. Hoping to catch you at home is unforgiving-ly nerve-wracking. You're a spy, aren't you? So you must have my number by now. Call me when you can and tell me you're alright, won't you? The silence is absolutely killing me."
Well he wasn't wrong. Now that the calls were forwarded to his phone, James actually did have Q's number. It was the newest unknown number in his calls list, and following Q's message, James made a contact page for the other man. Of course, calling him while in a company car wouldn't be a good idea, because he might say something to show he'd given Q classified information. But calling from the office would be no better. So he wouldn't be able to call until he got home. It was already past ten, the sky already dark, and by the time James got home it would be well past one or two in the morning. So then James would have to wait to call him until after the sun rose to be polite.
On the other hand, Q was worried, and James didn't think it was kind to keep him wondering for five or ten more hours.
"Hello?" Q answered after a few rings. He sounded tired, as though James was pulling him from a half-conscious state. Not full slumber, but something that happened when you were trying not to sleep when you desperately needed to.
"Did I wake you?" James asked, knowing the answer. His gut had that same strange feeling in it at hearing Q's groggy voice as it had gotten after hearing Q all flustered. Odd, indeed.
"James?" Q was definitely more awake now. "So you did have my number. I knew it. Anyway, how did it go? Are you alright?"
"I'm fine. But you sound exhausted. Is Riley keeping you up?" he couldn't talk about himself, not in this car, not for hours, but he could talk about Q until the sun came up.
"As a matter of fact, he is. Him and his son, but for completely different reasons." And Q launched into a story about Marnie and Charlie and an unexpected pregnancy and wow the story was off like a rocket when it had only just begun. James leaned his tired head against the window of the town car as London flashed by outside and focused on the sound of Q's voice tumbling over the words with pent up frustration and ire.
It was good to be home.
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