/News/Astronomy/15.06.98: Scientists baffled by disappearance of sunspots. Two weeks ago we reported on the unusually large number of sunspots forming on the surface of the Sun. It has been well-observed that sunspot populations rise quickly, but then fall off slowly over the eleven-year solar cycle. It was a shock, then, when solar physicists today snapped a photo of the Sun's surface to find it completely devoid of sunspots.
"It is certainly strange," NASA's Dr. Alford commented. "And as of yet we have no conclusive explanation for the sudden lack of solar activity. Sunspots are essentially magnetic storms on the photosphere; much like hurricanes here on Earth, they are unpredictable and chaotic. We must also keep in mind that the Sun is billions of years old, and we have only been studying it for a century or so - it isn't surprising that we should observe what to us are irregularities, but what on the timescale of the Sun's existence may be perfectly normal."/
Brigid opened the cigarette pack as soon as she stepped out of the shop. She'd promised James that she'd try harder to give them up, and she had made it one whole day, plus the entire morning. But all that time her nerves had been rubbing her raw, and when she saw the shop just up the street, she hadn't been able to stop herself going in.
She lit one, her shopping bags hanging awkwardly from her arm. A woman holding two small children by the hand walked by, glanced at the store name on the bags, and gave Brigid a disapproving look. Brigid inhaled as obviously as she could and blew the stream of smoke in the woman's direction. The woman hurried on, frowning.
Brigid tried to keep her pace casual as she walked down Turnham Green towards the common. The sidewalk was crowded, full of lunchtime shoppers and people running out for a bite to eat. She navigated through the crowd carefully, keeping an eye out for anyone who might be watching her movements. Aside from the man who was tailing her. It was the ones you didn't see who were the real danger.
It was starting to come back to her, the feel of the game. That heightened state where you became aware of every little detail of the world around you, where every stranger on the street could be a potential enemy - or a potential mark. Several times she was tempted to try and lift a wallet from unsuspecting passersby, just to see if she still had her old touch. But she decided against it. It wouldn't be right of her to steal from them for no good reason; and she didn't want to cause a scene if it turned out that she wasn't up to her former standards.
There was a crossing up ahead, but she saw a break in the traffic and darted across the road. Just because she didn't care that the man was following was no reason to make it easy on him.
Chiswick Common was green and cheery. The day was nice, and she had to watch out for joggers as she made her way down the path. As she rounded a corner, two pigeons suddenly rose into the air right in front of her. They'd come from the left, she noticed, her heart in her throat. But they were pigeons. Pigeons didn't count. She raised her rosary to her lips and kissed it anyway, just to be safe.
Brigid was early to her appointment. So was Jack Simon. The junior MI-6 agent was sitting on a bench near a row of hydrangeas, arm thrown casually across the back, and reading a worn paperback novel. She couldn't read the title of the book, but the author's name was written in large letters: Ian Fleming.
"Is that what passes for training in the SIS these days?" Brigid said. She set her shopping down on the bench and took a seat on the far side, crossing one leg over the other. She flicked the ash from her cigarette onto the ground. Her shadow was currently lurking behind an oak tree just up the path.
Even with his sunglasses on, the annoyance was clear on Simon's face. He was wearing a white suit again - Brigid wondered if the stain had been that easy to get out, or if he just had a closet full of white suits. She was betting on the latter. Simon continued to hold the book as if he was really reading it, but he turned his head slightly in her direction.
"I trust nothing was seriously wrong the other night? You made it back home quickly enough, in any case."
If he was trying to spook her by letting her know that he was keeping an eye on her, it wasn't going to work. She shrugged, tapping her foot against the side of her leg. "Just a dizzy spell. The ER doctor said it happens sometimes - more blood flow is diverted to the uterus during pregnancy, and it can make some women lightheaded when they stand up or lean over. Or something." He'd also said that it could cause a temporary numb feeling in the extremities, but that wasn't what she'd felt; not even close.
"Here's a tip you won't find in your book," Brigid continued, raising her cigarette to her lips, "that you might want to tell your friend behind the tree there: if you're a man tailing a woman, it's generally not the smartest idea to follow her into a maternity clothing shop. You tend to stand out." She'd picked him up long before that, of course; she'd only gone in to see if he'd follow. And he had.
And then she'd thought that since she was there, she might as well do some shopping. Maternity fashion was sadly lacking in black; but she'd promised James that she'd try and let go of the past, so she'd picked out a couple of tops in navy blue and deep purple. It was a start.
Simon sighed wearily, then coughed as the wind shifted and blew the cigarette smoke towards him. "I don't exactly have the resources that my senior colleagues do. But I'll be honest, I was expecting to have to call in the police to arrest you on the way out of the country that night rather than keep surveillance on you. I'm surprised you're still in London, and even more surprised that you've kept your appointment with me."
Brigid used her cigarette to light another, then stamped out the old one on the bench and flicked it onto the path. "I'll be honest - I was going to run. I don't owe the English shit, and I'll be damned if I let some stuffed up dry shite of an MI-6 bollix force me to betray my own."
He took the insult easily enough, but she continued on before he could say anything. "How much do you know about my history?"
Simon looked back to his book as if the information was written there, and recited, "Your mother was a factory worker in Liverpool, father unknown. She died when you were thirteen; after that, you lived on the street and were in and out of trouble with the local police until you were formally arrested and charged after the incident with the fish. Instead of incarcerating you, the courts sent you to live with your maternal grandmother in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. I believe you were sixteen when she passed away; about two years later you turned up in Belfast in the company of Dillon Fitzgerald, with whom you ran the IRA splinter group known as the Cause." He turned back to her. "As far as details go, I'm afraid that's all we have."
Brigid took a long drag on her cigarette and stared out across the green park. Her foot was still tapping restlessly against her leg; she couldn't seem to stop it. "Mam'd been dead for a week before they found her. I was used to her not coming home nights - and when she did, she usually brought one of her 'gentlemen friends', who were no gentlemen at all. So I never thought anything might be wrong, til one day the police knocked on the door of our flat to say that they'd found her in a crack house one block over. It wasn't the crack that'd killed her - it was complications from malnutrition, they said. She'd drunk all her meals and starved herself to death.
"I managed to fend for myself for a few months, until they arrested me and sent me to Carrickmore. I hadn't even known that I had a grandmother; Mam never talked about her, or about home. And it was home, the first real home I'd had. We didn't have much, but I didn't care. I had someone who actually minded how I did, who made me soup when I was ill and had fresh baked bread with marmalade waiting when I came home from school."
She'd never told James any of this; even Dillon knew only a little of it. But for some reason it was easier to spill all her secrets to a complete stranger. "Gran was never well. Always in and out of hospital. I took care of her as best I could, but there wasn't much I could do. When Gran passed, the bank took the house. I could have kept some of her things, but I had no place for them. So I sold them. All I took was what I could carry."
She lifted up her wrist to show him her grandmother's rosary. "Gran always said that when you see two magpies on the right, that's good luck. Two magpies on the left, that's bad luck. I wear the feathers on my right hand, so I'll have good luck and protection wherever I go. One of them broke when I passed out the other night. I'll have to find another."
Brigid shifted on the bench and lit yet another cigarette. "I was friends with some older kids, who'd graduated school already but couldn't find good jobs in town. We were poor; the whole town was. Poor and Catholic. It was easy to blame the English for everything that was wrong with our lives. My father was English too," she added. "I don't know much about him, but I do know that. Anyway, we all went up to Belfast together the summer that Gran died, thinking it would be better, but it wasn't. I was about a day away from selling myself on the street for the price of a cigarette when I met Dillon."
The memory of that meeting was still fresh and clear in her mind, even after all these years. It was a bitter cold day. She was standing huddled in a graffiti-covered doorway trying to keep out of the wind - she'd traded her only jacket for a stale half sandwich the day before - when a tall man a few years older than herself walked out of the building next door, a black ski cap pulled down low over his ears to protect them from the chill. He stopped in front of her doorway and lit a cigarette. When he noticed her standing there, he looked her up and down once, then held out the smoke.
"You look like you can use this more'n I," he said.
Brigid took the cigarette, raised it to her lips and inhaled once, then handed it back. The smoke of her exhalation mingled with her breath and hovered in the air for a moment. "Thanks."
He laughed, green eyes twinkling. "You can have the whole thing, love."
"I don't need your fecking charity, ye maggoty gobshite," she told him, and looked away.
He laughed again, harder this time. "Well said, love, well said - sure you don't need charity, we none of us do. It's work we need. If you want to work, I might have a job for you."
She assumed that he meant prostitution; but what choice did she have? It was that or freeze on the street. And anyway, she liked his laugh. So she went with him - and to her surprise, he brought her not to a brothel, but to the abandoned loft where the members of the group that would soon be called the Cause were meeting; most of them lived there, too. There was food, and blankets to sleep on, and good cheer despite the trying times. And the force that held them all together was Dillon.
How could she explain to Simon what that cigarette had meant to her? "Dillon was…Dillon was fire, and passion. He was life itself. He had a dream for the future that he believed in with his whole being, and it was infectious. He taught me the game, and I never felt so alive as I did during a mission when the adrenaline was running high. But it was more than that. The Cause was my friends, my family, my entire reason for existing. Dillon saved me."
She turned and looked Simon dead in the eye. "Do you have any idea what it's like, being asked to betray someone you love as much as your own life?"
"No," he said, and removed his sunglasses. The compassion in his blue eyes surprised her.
They sat in silence for a long minute. Brigid let her cigarette burn down to the filter; she felt too drained to light another.
"Am I to assume, then, that you've decided to turn yourself in?" Simon asked her at last. He sounded disappointed.
"No," she said, proud of the way her voice didn't shake. "I'm taking you up on your offer."
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. "Then why tell me all of that?"
She gave him a hard look. "I want you to understand exactly what it is I'm betraying for you. But I have one condition: no one finds out. Not Dillon, not James, no one. Not ever."
"We can probably manage that," Simon said slowly. "Why are you agreeing to this, if I may ask?"
Brigid tossed her cigarette butt into the grass and ground it out with her foot. "I guess I've always been selfish at heart. It's what's best for our future, James' and mine. He gets to have his moment of glory, and realize that it's not all it's cracked up to be; I get one last chance to play the game. Then our slates are wiped clean, and we go on living just the same as before - right?" She let her voice drop dangerously low at that last word.
Simon nodded. "That's the deal. Of course, Fitzgerald will go to prison."
"I'm not worried about Dillon. He'll have them all on strike for prisoners' rights in a week, sure." She laughed, but with little mirth. "He just can't know it was me betrayed him. He'd never forgive me, and it'll be hard enough to live with myself after this without that weighing on me too."
"You have my word that Fitzgerald won't find out about your involvement from us," Simon told her, and she believed him. There were too many cracks in his poker face for him to be any sort of liar. MI-6 bastard or no.
Simon tucked his novel into his jacket pocket, and his voice turned businesslike again. "Our next step then is to get in touch when Fitzgerald makes contact with you. Do you think that will be soon?"
Brigid smiled. "Sure and I saw him the other night at the pub, didn't I." She laughed at the look of disbelief on his face. He really hadn't noticed Dillon walk in, so focused had he been on watching her.
"I don't know any of the details yet," she said, "because you kept me out in the front of the house while they were talking in the back. James and I are going down to Southall day after next to meet the rest of the crew. We'll talk specifics then. But from what James told me, it sounds like Dillon has something big planned."
Simon frowned at her. "I want to catch them in the act, as I told you - conviction will be more sure that way. But my superiors would not be very pleased with me if people actually get hurt."
"Don't worry. I can usually talk Dillon down from his more dangerous schemes; no one will get hurt." People are more important than a cause, after all.