Author's Note: Thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed this story, your input means a lot. The usual disclaimers apply and I own none of this. Thank you again for reading and reviews, as always, are most welcome. Apologies for the high level of sweariness in this chapter, too.

Chapter Eight: Half the Battle Lost

Lucas must have blacked out. The last thing he could remember was throwing himself bodily at the door of the cell and the blast, as if in response to his frantic cries, resounding through the whole building. It seemed to last forever, rumbling on interminably as it gathered momentum. The overhead strip light shook in its fittings, sending down a shower of hot sparks as he rolled out of its path as it fell, dragging Alexei with him. When he came around, he was under the bed with Alexei cowering beside him. It could only have been minutes since the blast; the air around him was thick with dust because the blast had forced tiles from the walls and destabilised the structure. With the lights blown, the windowless cell was in pitch darkness.

He took a moment to recover himself, gingerly poking at a sore spot near his temple. He couldn't see the blood on his fingertips, but they felt wet and that confirmed his fears of a head injury. This new awareness brought on a throbbing pain in his temples, making him wince as he cautiously groped his way across the cold, tiled floor of the cell.

"Wait here," he said to Alexei as he went, "it'll be all right."

Back out from under the bed, Lucas straightened himself up in slow, easy stages using the wall to steady himself. He couldn't see a thing, so he had to grope his way towards the door of the cell. Luckily, it was only five feet away. He couldn't even lie flat in the width of the room. Reaching the steel door, he groped along its edge feeling for any kind of opening. However, the bomb blast had not loosened the door an inch and they were still trapped.

"Fuck!" he cursed heavily.

Finding himself in another cell, the memories swelled, forming a landslide in his mind. Always the same ghosts resurrected from his depths of his subconscious; only the sequence changed. The ceaseless flow the water, dry drowning as he inhaled it deep into his lungs; next, he's crawling the walls under a bare, flickering electric bulb. He'll never see the open sky again. He tried to pull himself out of it, but it's like swimming against the current of a tidal river. Only the rough hands of another person can shake him out of his paralysis, but the residual memories still lay like a stale crust over his mind as he tried to steady his racing heart.

"They will come for us."

Lucas had almost forgotten about Alexei. His words were laboured; broken, heavily accented English and he was still holding Lucas down. The rescued had become the rescuer. However, he had said those words himself before, and they hadn't come for him then, either.

For a long moment after she replaced the telephone handset, Ruth said nothing. Just the slight tremor in her hands as she raised a glass of water to her dry lips betrayed her surging nerves. Only Malcolm, sat beside her and tracking Ros' progress at the Gangster Inn, noticed her sudden change of demeanour. He had been about to tell her something, she could see it in the way he his mouth opened but then closed suddenly again. He was frowning, but now he arranged his face into an expression of mild concern.

"Ruth," he said mildly, "has something happened?"

It seemed to take Ruth a moment to realise that Malcolm spoken to her. She started, as though jolted out of a private daydream, then hesitated. Like she wanted to protect Malcolm from the news, but everyone would know soon enough, anyway.

"Red flash from Jo," she explained flatly, "bomb explosion at New Scotland Yard."

It took a moment for him to connect the dots, then a looking of grim comprehension crossed his usually affable features. "Lucas," he said, "he's still in there."

Ruth gave a jerky nod of her head, confirming that. There was something more coming, she could almost taste it.

"I spoke to him barely ten minutes ago; before he went dark," said Malcolm. "He was making for the cells to free the prisoner."

"He's still in there," she added the last bit for him.

The look on his face told her all she needed to know. Without another word, she turned and walked towards Harry's office. He was hunched over some paperwork, pen scratching away as he amended, corrected and redacted the nameless, faceless bureaucrat's latest strands of red tape. Upholding the Section D tradition of walking straight in without so much as an introductory knock at the door, the look on her face silenced his usual snappy protest.

"Ruth, what is it?"

To him, Ruth's heart was an open book – a rare thing in their line of work. The tilt of her head, the purposeful stride, all bore the hallmarks of bad news. Ruth briefed him on the latest red flash as she herself had heard it. His expression, normally so passively unreadable, darkened considerably. She swallowed, trying to loosen the words in the dry, constricted throat.

"That's not all, Harry," she said, "Lucas is still in there. He was on his way to free the prisoner when the device went off. He's probably in there now, dead or trapped."

"Shit!" he cursed, dropping the pen and running a hand through his hair.

When they looked at each other again, a mutual understanding passed between them. She knew that Harry felt he had let Lucas down before; left him to fester in a Russian prison cell for eight years, let him believe himself abandoned and forgotten by his own organisation. They had danced in circles around each other ever since: Harry allowing Lucas free reign to prove himself, and Lucas taking risks to achieve those same ends. The bitter irony of what had now befallen Lucas was not lost on either of them.

However, the course of action was already clear to Harry. She could see it in the way his jaw set firm and his expression became fiercely resolute.

"Is Malcolm still guarding Ros?" he asked, getting to his feet and reaching for his overcoat.

"Yes."

"Good. Then I am on my way to get my Intelligence Officer back."

Ruth smiled. "And I'm coming with you," she replied.

Stopping suddenly, half way to the door, he turned to look at her in surprise; as though he'd expected her to try and dissuade him. Instead, he returned the smile and picked up his pace as they passed out onto the Grid. "Let's get to it, then."

Bookings, bookings and more bookings. Managing a bar really was quite simple, or so Ros thought. She sat in the public bar of Charlie Weir's pub, one ear on the news on the bar's widescreen TV; the other on the discussion Weir himself was having with another man not two feet away from her. All the while, she kept her eye fixed firmly on the large hard backed reservation book that she found behind the bar. None of her attention was really on that. Occasionally, she even risked a sidelong glance at her target, trying to decipher his body language and pick up snippets of unguarded conversation. Occasionally, he would look back at her as though he'd sensed her curiosity all along. The uncomfortable truth was that he unnerved her and that was half the battle lost, as far she was concerned.

She looked back at the reservation book and gave herself a mental shakedown. 'Come on, Rosalind,' she inwardly goaded herself.

"This is it now, Charlie."

She just caught Weir's guest pointing out, but she couldn't say for sure what it was in relation to. But a silence fell over the two men and they both turned to the news screen. Ros, also, surreptitiously abandoned her pretence at bar management and listened intently to what the news anchor was saying.

"The explosion inside New Scotland Yard occurred at 3.15pm. As yet, no one from within the Metropolitan Police Force has been available for comment, but there have been unconfirmed reports from a news agency that militant Islamic terrorists were sighted in the vicinity in recent days…"

Ros absorbed the impact of the news with barely a flinch, but inwardly panic swelled. She waited, motionless, as she steadied her breathing and bided her time. After a few minutes had passed, and Weir and his guest had risen to leave, she too got up and walked the length of the bar towards the ladies toilets. In an attempt to act naturally, she smiled and nodded at the barman who had greeted her enthusiastically when she'd arrived earlier that day. Aware that she had already aroused suspicion, she even stopped to exchange some pleasantries as she went.

Her hands were shaking, however, as she pushed open the swing door and entered the ladies. She bolted the cubicle behind her and reached for her mobile to call the Grid.

"Malcolm, that bomb at the Station," she said the moment his familiar voice answered. "I think these people here knew about it; they were waiting for it to come on the news. I don't know for certain, but it seemed like they were. I heard something earlier, too, but I didn't get a bloody recording. They knew Lucas would be there and, shit Malcolm, I think they're on to me, too!"

"Wait, wait!" Malcolm implored on the opposite end of the line. "Ros, stay calm but keep your wits about you. The others have all gone to the Station to make sure Lucas is all right, but I can get CO19 back up to you if you need it."

Ros took a few deep breaths as he suggested, but it didn't do much good as her thoughts turned to Lucas, on top of everything else. She tried to reassure herself with the knowledge of CO19 being just moments away.

"Give me more time," she replied. "They've been leaving me be for the last few hours. I think I might just be winning their trust after all, and I want to see if I can pick up more information about this bomb. If I need urgent back up I'll send you a blank text message. Got that?"

"Only if you're sure, Ros," Malcolm said. "Got that."

She disconnected the call and let herself sink to the floor. She needed a moment to compose herself. So, she distracted herself by reading the graffiti scrawled on the tiles of the cubicle she had locked herself in. The usual lurid details of sexual encounters emblazoned on the, otherwise brilliant white, tiles. A scrawled testament to the club's utter lack of any form of class. Once the distraction had worked its magic, she got up and quietly slid back the lock on the cubicle door and stepped outside. As she did so, she just caught the main door of the toilets shutting, and heard footsteps rushing down the bar.

"Shit!" she hissed, realising straight away that someone had been listening.

It had to be the barman and Ros knew she could make mince-meat of him. Without turning a hair, she threw open the door and gave chase just as he rounded the bar. She was gaining on him fast, but as he exited through the back doors of the bar, Weir and his friend were already there, lying in wait.

Weir smiled at her, really quite affably. "Going somewhere, Ms Myers?" he asked, sickening grin widening.

Dust swirled in the darkness, choking Jo and Clara as they clung to each other, probing their way through the bombed out Police Station. The silence was broken by the crackle of electricity, live wires sparking into life before abruptly giving up the ghost. A water pipe had burst, adding to the danger of the live wires, and dripped down ceaselessly from invisible leaks. The sound of crumbling plaster as walls gave way was regular, making the two women curse fluidly with fear.

"Stay close, Clara," Jo repeated as a mantra.

Normally, in such darkness, Jo would hug the walls. But the structure was so unstable that even that recourse was blocked to her. Instead, she and Clara clung to each other's hands as they passed through what was the Reception area. A shaft of sunlight made it in through the rubble that had almost blocked the door way, illuminating the path a few feet ahead of them. Clara stopped, pointed it out to Jo.

"There," she said, "that must be the way to the cells."

Jo squinted, the sudden light hard on her eyes that had become accustomed to the darkness. The light stopped, however, at fallen roof beams that barred the door to the corridor they needed.

Unwilling to admit defeat so soon, Clara carried on, even picking up her pace to reach the door way, dodging the detritus that blocked her path.

"The door's open!" she cried back to Jo. "We can climb over and get in!"

Somewhere in the depths of the building, masonry continued to fall. The sounds, amplified by the emptiness of the place, resonated down to where the two women cautiously commandeered the obstacles in their path. They stopped what they were doing every time it happened, looked about themselves in fear, their hearts hammering furiously. Soon, however, Clara was the first over the fallen beams. She waited on the other side for Jo to follow. However, as Jo placed her second foot on the beam to jump down the other side, it gave way under her weight.

"Fuck!" she cursed heavily as she fell into Clara's arms.

"I've got you!" Clara panted breathlessly back.

On the other side, they found themselves in darkness again. But it was the corridor they needed, Jo could just pick out the cell doors left conveniently open for them. They paused at the end of the corridor to get their breath back.

"You okay?" Jo asked Clara.

She didn't see it, but Clara nodded. "Oh I'm grand!" she replied, still breathless. Then, she laughed. "I'm sorry. I work in a Customer Care call centre for British Telecom. It's not every day I bust into bombed buildings to help rescue MI5 spies trapped in police cells. If I didn't laugh, I'd cry."

Jo grinned. "You're very brave, Clara. If you want to stop at any time, there's no shame in it. You didn't chose this."

"No way!" the other woman retorted, and Jo was secretly pleased.

Cautiously, they made their way down the corridor. Most of the doors had been blown off their hinges as they had been left open. However, it was silent. A silence that hung over the whole place like a funeral shroud. Not even the crumbling bricks could be heard; just the distant sirens from the car park outside. Jo had avoided calling out as thought the sound of her voice would bring down the rest of walls. But this close, she could no longer hold back.

"Lucas!"

The echo faded down the deserted corridor, followed by silence. Both women strained their ears, listening for even the most remote sign of life within the cells. Scared to walk on lest their footfalls would drown the sound of a response, they waited.

"Lucas!" both Jo and Clara called out in unison, now.

Again, silence. But after a few seconds, they sank to their knees in relief as someone, albeit not Lucas, called back: "In here!"

Hearing another's voice emboldened Jo enough to pick herself up and run the rest of the way through the holding cells. Clara, however, was quick on her heels, following the sound of the voice.

"Is that Alexei?" asked Jo as she ran straight into the still locked door of the cell.

"Yes," came the reply.

Then, a second wave of relief as Lucas finally made himself head. "Jo?"

"Yeah, it's me: Jo!" she called back, hammering on the cell door in triumph. "Sit tight Lucas, we can get you out of here!"

They blocked the exit. Ros couldn't slip past them, so she knew she needed to fight. The knowledge of it brought her round and back into her right senses. If she was going to be taken out by a jumped up Gangster, then she would make sure as hell she went out fighting. She bought herself some time by shrinking back towards the door she'd just come through, even though she knew rightly the 'friendly' barman was waiting to block her exit. She feigned fear.

"H-how did you know my real name?" she asked, stammering for effect as she built up the adrenaline to fight.

Weir smirked, the effect firing Ros up for when moment to strike came.

He tapped the tip of his nose, about to make some condescending reply when Ros brought her elbow sharply into the barman's stomach, making him cry out and double over in pain. With him writhing on the floor at her feet, she punched Weir's henchman directly in the face before he could even formulate a reaction, never mind actually carry it out.

"Fuck you!" she hissed in Weir's face as she went for him.

She managed to land a blow to the side of his head as she brought her knee up violently in to his crotch. However, as she knew all along, two men were always going to be too much for her, and even the third was battling against the pain he was in to re-join the fracas. All the same, she didn't stop until she was truly over-powered. The barman had an arm around her throat with her arms pinned behind her back; completely immobilised. She was forced to look into Charlie Weir's face as he swiftly recovered his composure and hit the call button on his mobile.

"Hello Frankie," he said, all smiles again after his brush with the wrath of Ros Myers. "Get yourself round here now. You'll never guess what I've got for you, now."