That evening Lucas had returned to the office to find Malcolm and Jo at their stations, tapping away attentively.
Over the course of the next hour or so, Jo sat silently at her computer, not uttering a word to him, except from a quiet "Hello," when he had entered the room and had only sounded the occasional murmer in response to Malcolm's comments.
Lucas thought as he watched her that eight years in a Russian Prison had made him hard. He had never been that good at dealing with raw emotion and tears anyway, but now he was back in the real world he was even more uncertain how to respond to those situations.
And yet something about the way Jo looked now made him regret that it had fallen to him as the senior officer to pull her up for her behaviour and also that he had done so in such a blunt way.
Before he had left for Russia it had been Elizabeta who had uncovered his softer side. She still could, but he knew he would have to put her away. Spying was a dangerous game, and he couldn't risk something so precious to him being damaged. To others he knew he could be cold. He had to be. It was the way he'd been trained and the only way he'd survived the past eight years.
Lucas strode up to Jo's desk, and paused, waiting for her to look up. She did eventually, the look in her eyes suggesting that the reason for her delay was not sullenness or resentment but more a kind of nervous apprehension, the fear that she had incurred his displeasure or that he would force her to speak about things she preferred left unspoken.
He asked her if she had any update from Ben about Ros. As he listened to her muted reply he sighed and wondered how long it would take for their relationship to return to the way it had been before today's events.
**
Later that evening, in Harry's office the frustrations of the day came to a head.
Elizabeta's news that Acer Dalek was part of the Russian Mafia and her demand that Lucas stop using her had been bad enough but Harry's request that he put himself back in prison to try to recall if anything was mentioned about Sugarhorse at the time had been entirely too much to ask.
'Do you know what they were doing to me when it was mentioned?" Lucas asked angrily.
Every night when he closed his eyes he could still feel the sheer terror from those sessions as the sensation of drowning took over. As the images flooded his mind, his body would tense in anticipation of the shock of the icy cold water that had drenched his body on those freezing cold winter days.
"Yes and I still need you to put yourself back there," Harry replied firmly.
"I was tortured for seventeen days. Continuously," Lucas said bitterly. "Was Sugarhorse the reason?" he demanded.
Harry paused, then looked Lucas in the eye, "I'm certain it was," he said quietly.
"And now you want me to just put myself back there without telling me anything about what I was tortured for," Lucas said, infuriated.
"Lucas," Harry said, a note of caution in his voice.
"Don't you dare try your sanctimonious Good of the Nation crap on me," Lucas said, enraged. "There are limits to what you can ask of people Harry, even in our business."
"I'm sorry," said Harry, as Lucas strode towards the door. When he reached the doorway he paused and added angrily, "By the way - if I were you, I'd talk to Jo. You probably haven't noticed but she's in trouble over what happened. A lot of trouble."
By the time he'd left the office Lucas was positively fuming. He thought angrily that Harry could deal with Jo. He didn't care to imagine how uncomfortable that conversation might be, but in his opinion Harry had spent far too much time lately behind a desk lately and it might do him good to get to grips with the human consequences of an operation gone wrong. Something, Lucas thought bitterly, his eight years in prison had made him all too familiar with himself.