The loss of Zoe affects us all in different ways, none more so than Danny. For myself, I miss her cheerful presence on the Grid, and her operational efficiency in the field. She was a pleasure to work with, as the old chestnut goes – except that she really was. Danny's anger and grief, on the other hand, makes him anything but. Normally a positive and effective case officer, with more than a touch of brilliance at times, he becomes taciturn, unpredictable and surly. I know he blames Harry, but this is just a pretext; he has lost his best friend, along with all hopes of winning her hand, and he is grieving as if Zoe has died. I wonder if we will soon lose him, too; he has become disillusioned with the life he once loved. I have observed the same phenomenon, many times before, in other brave and talented officers…
It is a terrible thing to see, and only Ruth is brave enough to speak directly to Danny of his loss, even though he angrily (and quite unnecessarily nastily, as far as I'm concerned) brushes off her well-meant enquiries. It doesn't stop her from trying though, bless her heart. Adam, more used than most to the possibility of potentially losing officers, with his high-risk postings to…wherever Six sent him… appears to take things in his long, easy stride; but Danny's unhappiness is a potent reminder, and I sense the tension escalating between the two men with great uneasiness. Tom would have handled things differently, but Tom is long gone; his conscience finally caught up with him, and he could no longer continue with the ruthless game we play with the lives of others in order to ensure the greater public good – I often wonder what the Utilitarian philosophers would have made of the world in which we now live. Not much, I suspect…not much.
As for Harry, he wears his guilt about Zoe's fate like a penitential hair-shirt; every time he passes her empty workspace, his face sets and his shoulders take on an extra degree of tension, and he has less patience than usual when dealing with the political side of his job. Naturally, Ruth picks up on this too, and she glances at the inner sanctum more often than usual, her face full of concern; I can't blame her, not really, not when Harry, in his own way, is mourning the loss of one of his finest officers.
So I think it is fair to say, that we are none of us at our best when things start to go wrong in the most dramatic ways – sealed packets of paracetamol tablets leaving factories laced with extra menazorphine, causing several dreadful deaths, and general panic in the population; then an attack on one of the biggest banks in the country, followed by widespread failure of the national traffic grid, leading to chaos. It is Colin, really, who tumbles to it first; this is cyber-terrorism on an unprecedented scale, perpetrated by someone with unfettered access to the very stuff of the Internet itself, the staggeringly long and complex algorithms which govern every interaction with the World Wide Web. The very idea of it makes my blood run cold: nothing is safe from this hacker, nothing.
Enter Andrew Forrestal, and his supreme forensic computer science skills, who arrives from GCHQ to augment our tech section as we race to find the perpetrator, now making outrageous ransom demands. We are at the hacker's mercy, and we know it; Harry is like a blind dog snapping at fleas, out of his depth against an enemy who can turn every piece of modern technology against us in ways he can't even begin to fathom, and for once he welcomes outside assistance from the eggheads of Cheltenham, as he disparagingly calls anyone, Ruth excepted, from GCHQ. Colin is doing absolutely brilliant work, of course; but not even the two of us and the rest of Five's geeks combined have the resources or capacity to deal with the rapidly cascading threat.
From the minute Forrestal arrives on the Grid, I heartily dislike him. Perhaps it is the way Ruth greets him as an old friend (Harry spots this too, and he doesn't look impressed, either); perhaps it is that he is too quiet, too mild-mannered, too amenable; or perhaps it is to do with the way his eyes light up whenever he sees Ruth. At any rate, I feel very uneasy at letting GCHQ bods have access to the Grid systems; but Harry insists, and his word is law. Colin promises me that he will ensure they will have access only to a quarantined environment; still, I have grave misgivings. Ours not to reason why…sometimes I think that Tennyson, paraphrased, is the Poet Laureate of the security services. Except the fearsome odds we so frequently find ourselves up against make the Charge of the Light Brigade look like a Saturday afternoon Pony Club gymkhana.
I am spending every waking hour (and a good few that aren't generally considered to be so) in the tech suite, doing the back-end work while Colin runs with the logistics of the operation; if he does well with this, he is likely to be head-hunted, or at the least promoted, but I am delighted that he is finally getting to prove his worth. I have no interest in promotions; I have found my niche in life, and I intend to occupy it for as long as they'll have me. I have never really fitted in around other people, but at least here I feel that I am doing something worthwhile, something that really matters. Sometimes, I wonder if I was actually born in another age, and have somehow fallen through a crack in Time to land in this age of frantic activity and gross inelegance that is the twenty-first century…or perhaps I dropped out of the Tardis. To my great excitement, dear old Aunty has seen fit to reboot Doctor Who, after an interminably long hiatus, and thanks to a contact at the Beeb, I have the whole first season, ahead of broadcast, tucked away to enjoy whenever I have a spare moment…bliss!
Meanwhile, Ruth is doing what she does best, working on the bits of Arabic poetry the hacker teasingly sends us, drawing out meaning and context from the very letters on the faxed pages which keep arriving from an untraceable source. Not everyone sees the value in this, under the circumstances; Danny, for one makes his view crystal clear to Ruth, but I know his judgement, indeed his whole attitude, is coloured by loss at present; and I can't help but smile as I overhear Ruth's reference to Flaubert, when she gently rebuffs Danny's cynicism. God is in the details, indeed, and no-one knows this better than me, living as I do in a world of often tiny, precise technology, which our people rely on to function perfectly, and which often means the difference between life and death.
Forrestal has the audacity to just ask Ruth over for dinner, at his house, late one night, and thus begins the most terrifying time of my life at Five to date. The EERIE exercise we completed a while back, simulating a chemical attack on a rather prominent city, is nothing, in comparison to the enormous fear I feel when we realise that she has been abducted by this meek-mannered, murderous monster. Harry, after missing a major clue (as if Ruth has ever been known to text anyone, much less use that particular medium to call in sick…to Sam, of all people!) is quietly determined to extract her, and get Forrestal, at the same time; but we still have to play along with his demands, as he holds all the cards. I can't get the image of Ruth, alone, frightened, possibly ill-treated (or worse, the darkest corner of my mind whispers) out of my head, and I scour every millimetre of CCTV footage from Thames House to Forrestal's lair, retracing the progress of their taxi until I see them both disembarking the night before, and walking inside. She was alive then, I tell myself, and there's nothing for him to gain by killing her…I have to believe that, or I will be incapable of doing anything useful. And I desperately want to be of use to her. Just let me see her again, I pray, and I will do anything, anything in return. My life is nothing, without her in it…
Eventually, I get my chance; Forrestal demands payment of an obscene amount, in diamonds. Harry instructs me to find a way of tinkering with the stones to take him out. Normally, I would have serious moral qualms at being the once-removed agent of Death, but not this time. Crystalline carbon, I muse, pure and hard and impermeable… I upend the bag of diamonds, discreetly sourced from a friendly jeweller in Hatton Garden, and despite my fear and worry, I can't help but admire the beauty of the gems, like shattered ice scattered across my workstation. I recall a bit more from my advanced carbon chemistry course at Cambridge:
Diamond has an extremely low thermal expansion. It is chemically inert with respect to most acids and alkalis, is transparent from the far infrared through the deep ultraviolet, and is one of only a few materials with a negative work function (electron affinity). One consequence of the negative electron affinity is that diamonds repel water, but readily accept hydrocarbons such as wax or grease.
Hmmm…chemically inert. I begin to hatch a plan, and after a few calls around Five (plus one, on a secure line, to Six's South East Asian desk) I am ready to begin, and gathering up the diamonds, I head for the chemistry lab. A tiny vial in a bright yellow HazMat canister arrives soon after, and I waste no time in incorporating it into the witches' brew I am concocting. At first, I only use half of the contents of the vial; then I think, that bastard's got Ruth, and I tip in the lot with hands that are strangely steady, for someone who has just set out to kill a man. I want this to be a very fast death; I imagine Ruth's possible fear and distress at witnessing Forrestal's agony as the cobra venom's neurotoxins do their fatal work, and I am determined to spare her as much pain as possible, while completely neutralising the threat. When I have finished, I carefully take the poisoned diamonds back to the Grid and show Harry, who peers at them and nods grimly, sanctioning the use of a lethal weapon against one of our own…
A/N: Up next, the aftermath of 3.7 – I didn't want to pack everything into just one chapter. There is a lot happening, both on and off the Grid, as will be revealed…