A/N: A new character and some relevant backstory.

Pride, Prejudice, and Pretense

Chapter Two: Past Missions, and Changes

Kellynch had taken the issue as settled and, after instructing the late-night analysts to meet with Darcy to discuss travel and equipment, the Director dismissed them. But he made it clear, in a brief, firm decree, that Darcy was to be in charge of the team.

Lizzy understood that but railed against it silently. Bad enough to be working with a team, but to have to work under Darcy, an MI-6 agent — it galled her.

Darcy spoke briefly with Charlotte Lucas, who instructed him on how to find the conference room in which he was to meet with the analysts. When he had the instructions, he turned to Lizzy and Bingley, stepping away from Charlotte's desk and speaking softly.

"I will get in touch with you both later this morning. I expect our mark to leave DC soon, maybe as early as today, so be ready to leave on short notice." He glanced at Lizzy, at her dark hair, then turned from her and Bingley, and walked down the hallway with long strides.

Bingley shrugged and smiled at Lizzy, narrowing his eyes as he looked at her hair too. "Trying to imagine you blonde…"

She sighed. "Is it that hard?"

He shrugged again. "Maybe. Guess not — after all, it's just a disguise, part of a cover, a mission. I grew a mustache once for one."

She smiled despite her lingering anger and frustration. She found it as hard to imagine Bingley's boyish face with a mustache as he seemed to find imagining her with blonde hair.

"They say blondes have more fun…" Bingley offered weakly after she smiled.

Lizzy looked down the hallway at Darcy's retreating, tall form. "Not on this mission."

She waved a farewell to Charlotte and said a quiet goodbye to Bingley, and headed toward the exit.

She needed to make a stop at a twenty-four-hour drugstore and then she needed sleep.

As it turned out, after the stop at the drugstore, sleep eluded her.

She kept replaying the scene in Kellynch's office and cursing herself for a fool, twisting and turning in her blankets.

She did not like missions of this sort, honeypot missions. It was bad enough as a woman constantly to be objectified, but to objectify yourself, and so ruthlessly, and for so long…It was awful.

She had done it a couple of times early in her CIA career, fresh from the Farm, the school for agents run by the Company. In those days, still proving herself, she had practically no say in her missions, and she had not complained when they ended.

The first time, she had been twenty-one, still raw as an agent.

She had gone almost immediately from college at Haverford, where she had double-majored in English and Psychology, into her training at the Farm. She had been recruited at the beginning of the Spring term, senior year.

It had been a dark, tumultuous time in her life, marked by emotional upheaval — the death of her beloved father during the Christmas break — and a crisis of confidence in her planned career as a Literature professor. She was not sure that she had the patience necessary not only to succeed at that career but even to secure that career. English departments, humanities departments generally, were besieged, colleges conceiving of education as almost exclusively pre-something: pre-law, pre-med, pre-business. College was nothing more than a gateway to a career. The notion, dear to Lizzy, that college was to acculturate students, and that culture was an activity of thought, sensitivity to beauty and humane feeling, that notion seemed to have no purchase on the imaginations of the other students, even at the small liberal arts college she attended. As a result, positions of the sort she wanted were becoming rarer and rarer, English faculties shrinking, and the competition for the few open positions fierce.

She had been despondent about that when Christmas break arrived, and then her father had died suddenly, unexpectedly, of a heart attack a few days before the holidays. The house had plunged into chaos, all of it descending onto Lizzy. Her mother had been crazed with grief, and she had never been stable at her best. As the only child, Lizzy had been forced to cope with her own, quiet, intense grief while struggling to contain her mother's wild, public grief, and while arranging and overseeing the thousand details required by a death, funeral, burial, will. Lizzy had gotten back to Haverford's campus thin and stretched, talking her mother down by phone almost every night, and trying to keep up with her classes.

The CIA recruiter at the job fair had been a tall, attractive young woman, blonde and charming, herself still quite young, only a few years older than Lizzy. The recruiter's name was Jane Simons. She possessed a remarkable candor for someone recruiting people for a career of keeping secrets, and she won Lizzy over personally in just a few minutes. Before being a recruiter, Jane had been an analyst.

By the time Lizzy left the table, she had a handful of brochures and Jane's card, as well as an appointment to have dinner with Jane that evening. Over dinner, Lizzy made her decision. She would join the Agency, and become an agent.

And so she had.

Her first honeypot mission was her third mission overall, the first where she worked alone, without any direct supervision, without a handler.

The man targeted, the mark in Company parlance, had been older, in his early fifties. Hansen Stanwell. He was an arms dealer of a minor but annoying sort, supplying unusual weapons to determined combatants, and Lizzy had gone undercover as the temporary replacement of Stanwell's administrative assistant at the business he ran, a small toy company, Stretto Toys. It was incongruous, thinking of the man who ran a toy company famous for long-lasting, wooden toys for toddlers by day selling grenade launchers to desperate mercenaries by night.

The assignment became a honeypot assignment as it unfolded. That had not been the initial plan, not what Kellynch, himself new to the Directorship at the time, had told Lizzy to expect. The initial plan was for her to insinuate herself into Stanwell's good graces, then use her administrative access to his schedule and datebooks and visits and calls to determine when arms sales were happening, where they were happening, and who was involved. But Lizzy, inexperienced, had allowed herself to be too eagerly attentive with Stanwell, and he took her attentiveness to reveal a more personal interest in him. It was predictable, and Lizzy should have anticipated it. She was bright and pretty and young, doing her best to please Stanwell, and she had succeeded too well.

The older man, after a hesitant moment or two of disbelief, had been only too eager to accept that the young temp assistant was interested in him, a man in his mid-fifties. He was attractive, Danish, transplanted to the States and a citizen many years before, but still with an accent that colored his speech. Unmarried, he kept himself in good shape and could afford clothes and cars to make him believe he was younger than he actually was. At first, it had only been the frequency of times Lizzy was called into his office that worried her, but soon after, he began to touch her. First, her hands, handing her things, then her forearms. Within a few days, he was asking her to stay late to work, and then, with almost everyone gone, the touches had begun to wander. He rubbed her shoulders, slid his hands down her sides, and once encircled her narrow waist from behind. The itinerary was clear, the eventual destinations of his hands.

She had contacted the analyst assigned to her mission to report this change, Stanwell's clear declaration of amorous purpose. Later that night, Kellynch himself had contacted Lizzy on a secure line.

"Darren, the analyst, contacted me about your mission, about Stanwell." Kellynch did not elaborate but he said enough for Lizzy to know why he was calling, to know he understood her predicament.

"I'm sorry he involved you, sir, I was hoping for some guidance. This is new to me. Of course, I took the classes at the Farm, Manipulation classes…"

"The ones the students call 'Seduction classes'?" Kellynch asked.

Lizzy was surprised by that but she went on. "Yes, and I did well in them, I was a Psychology major in college — but I don't know what I'm supposed to do with Stanwell."

"Make him the victim of his own fantasies; use his imagination against him. Darren said Stanwell's been touching you?"

"Yes, he has, and it won't be long now before — "

"Before he slips his hand across a line?"

Lizzy was deeply uncomfortable talking about this with her boss, an older man. "Right, he's…got that look, you know? Male."

Kellynch laughed, a tincture of self-mockery in it. "I know it. — Remember, Agent Bennet, I am the Director of the CIA, not the madame of a brothel. You were not sent to Stretto Toys to sleep with Stanwell or to be pawed by him. As you were instructed in your Manipulation classes, the goal is to use the relevant passion — lust, in this case — as a weapon against the mark.

"Don't let Stanwell manage time alone with you. Keep from agreeing to work late. I'll have an analyst call, pretending to be your mother, asking to visit you, stay at your place. Use that visit to beg off late nights. If he's far gone, and it sounds like he is, he'll start bargaining for your time. Especially if you sweeten the deal, dress up a bit more, and show some skin or leg. Offer to trade him time for secrets, but never make it seem like that's what you're after."

It was all familiar to Lizzy from her Farm classes. The theory was easy enough, the practice ticklish. "Yes, sir, but how do I make those bargains?"

"No, Lizzy, he'll start bargaining. Once he feels sure you're interested, interested in him and not anything else, he'll begin to be frustrated that he can't…capitalize. And so he'll start trying to impress you further, hoping you'll let his hands stray farther."

The mission worked out as Kellynch predicted. Stanwell became progressively more desperate, progressively more irritated by no time alone with Lizzy, and he eventually started hinting at a large payday, and how, once it had happened, he would like to take Lizzy to some exotic location — as part of her cover, she claimed she had never traveled — and Lizzy had been able to use things he said to triangulate the time of Stanwell's next arms sale. He and his henchmen had been arrested, the stolen arms recovered, and Kellynch had been happy with Lizzy.

It had been the beginning of her rise in the Company. But she never forgot how it made her feel, dressing to arouse a man for whom she had no desire, making herself into his object, worse, her own object, for the sake of a mission. It was her first bitter, personal draught of the end justifies the means reasoning that pervaded the Company.

Integrity did not matter, results did.

Without saying much about it, she did afterward convey her distaste for the mission to Kellynch, and for a while, no more such missions came her way.

Lizzy got out of bed and walked to the bathroom.

She turned on the light and stared at herself in the mirror, at her heavy, dark brown hair, mussed and tumbled from the pillow, her sleeplessness.

A box of blonde hair dye she had bought at the drugstore stood on the bathroom counter.

She could have gone back to Langley, and had her hair dyed there by experts, the dye job perfect, undetectable. But Darcy's comments about her, his conviction that she was not the agent to manipulate Wickham still made her seethe.

As if bra and cup size were the measures of a female agent!

Lizzy had decided, more or less before leaving Kellynch's office, that she would not only be blonde the next time she saw Darcy but that she would be a brassy, bottle blonde. She would still convince Wickham she was everything he ever wanted, even playing with a handicap, as it were.

But after she picked up the box and began to consider the directions, she put it down. It would be easier with help. She left the bathroom, turned off the light, and went into the kitchen.

The sun was up and early beams stretched through her kitchen window, the striped curtains open, all the way to the opposite wall, ending in a pattern of yellow rectangles, the negative of the crisscross wooden frame of the window.

She made coffee, watching the clock. When it was seven a.m., she picked up her phone and called Jane.

She and Jane had remained friends, although the friendship was unexpected for both of them. They had liked each other immediately at Haverford, and their dinner together had been natural, relaxed, and fun. But Jane had obviously expected that when Lizzy became an agent, Lizzy would move in different circles than a Company recruiter, but instead, Lizzy had sought her out, and they remained close, best friends.

Jane picked up, muttering Hello in a disoriented, sleepy grumble.

"Jane, it's Liz. Have you ever dyed hair?" This was how they were with each other, no ceremony. Always to the point.

Jane yawned before answering, perhaps trying to remember. "A few times, I guess, back in high school, college. Yeah. Why?"

"I need to dye my hair blonde for a new mission."

Jane ignored the color change for a moment and seized on the other news. "New mission? Already? You're just back from the last one! We haven't even had a chance to go out, or drink too much wine at my place or yours! Catch up on all the non-redacted details."

"I know, and I'm sorry, but something came up. Kellynch called me late last night, early this morning."

"Need-to-know stuff?"

"Yeah, need-to-know."

"Well, I don't need to know. But I can help with your hair. Langley could do it better than I could, though. Movie star quality. I'm strictly amateur hour."

Lizzy chuckled. "Let's just say I don't care about being starlet blonde, better a little harlot blonde."

"Lizzy, you say the damndest things," Jane said with a mock gasp and a trailing giggle. "When do you need to do this?"

"Now? — It's early, but I just made a pot of strong coffee, and I'll make you pancakes to go with it if you hurry. I bought blueberries yesterday. Now I need to use them up or they will rot in my fridge. Come to think of it, you can take the extra home."

"Blueberry pancakes, strong coffee, and harlot-blonde Lizzy. I have the day off, it turns out. I'm there. Give me forty minutes!"

Lizzy ended the call, poured herself a coffee, and liberated the pantry and refrigerator items needed for pancakes.

She sat down and sipped the dark brew, staring into it between sips. She could not see the bottom of her cup and it reminded her of Darcy's eyes.

The other honeypot mission had been over a year later. This time, Lizzy knew about it going in, although the situation was different and more complicated. Her mission was to handle an asset, Oscar Smith.

Smith was no criminal. He was instead professionally useful to the CIA. He was a gifted mathematics graduate student at the University of Chicago, working on cryptological algorithms for quantum computers. The CIA, Kellynch, was very interested in Smith's work and began to fund it through a research grant from a dummy corporation.

But Smith began to wonder who was funding him, profiting from his work, and he searched for information. When he could find none, he balked, stopped working. Kellynch sent Lizzy in as a graduate student in English, and her mission was to restart Smith, to encourage him to work again. The suggestion was that she first befriend him, but if Smith were interested in more, she was to use that interest to her advantage.

It had worked too well. Smith was interested from the first moment he saw Lizzy. And, making it all much worse, she liked him. Her feelings were not romantic, but she enjoyed her time with Smith and admired his keen mind and quiet, quick humor. He was abstract but not lost in the clouds, kind and sympathetic. He cleared his mind by working at a local Humane Society and loved dogs and cats and kids. But he had no experience with women, was shy around them, and, getting to know Lizzy, he fell fast. She kept him interested and kept him hoping for more than friendship. She suggested they were already more than friends if not yet a couple, and she subtly encouraged him to return to his funded research, making vague but carefully worded promises of rewards for doing it, some to occur soon, and others involving a future together.

Lizzy hated herself the whole mission.

Smith returned to his funded research with vigor and then she vanished, left Chicago, the exit orchestrated by the Company, a note in his departmental mailbox, and a few withdrawn and withdrawing texts. Kellynch, sensing Lizzy's mounting self-loathing, tried to console her by pointing out that more great intellectual work was done because of broken hearts than because of entwined hearts. That seemed less consolation than a dark joke.

The memory of Oscar plagued Lizzy periodically ever after. The last time she'd asked Kellynch about him, he told her that Oscar had gotten his Ph.D. and was still pursuing the research the Company wanted. Single-mindedly, Kellynch added.

That description seemed another dark joke, a bad pun, but Lizzy did not ask for any enlightenment.

Better to let her sleeping lies lie.

Jane and Lizzy both looked into the mirror. Lizzy was in a kitchen chair, a towel around her shoulders. The dyeing was done.

Jane had done a good job, given the boxed dye. The color was even, with no dark roots. But it was brassy, very light. For a moment, Lizzy felt as if a stranger was gazing back at her from the mirror. The hair made her complexion seem slightly darker, her eyes too, and it brought her eyes forward, making her gaze seem more intense.

"Well," Jane said, tilting her head first one way and then another, "that's surprising. I don't know if I like it, but I don't not-like it. It's like someone dipped you in a vat of Cindy Lauper."

They both laughed and then Jane began to hum Girls Just Want to Have Fun. Lizzy hummed along too but then stopped. "Wait, wasn't Lauper's hair red, or reddish when that song came out?"

Jane chucked as she shrugged. "Maybe, but brassy — like you."

Lizzy stood up and Jane helped her with the towel. They walked back into the kitchen together, to the table still covered by the breakfast dishes. Lizzy's Company phone was also on the table.

Lizzy grabbed the half-empty coffee pot and poured them both more coffee. When she returned the pot to the coffee maker, she sat down. Jane, still humming, stopped and gave Lizzy a careful glance. "So, honeypot assignment? Not asking for details, but wondering about the hair."

Lizzy nodded, her nod small. "Yeah."

"Non-gentlemen prefer blondes?"

"Something like that. It's an odd assignment, a team thing."

One of Jane's eyebrows levitated. "Really? I didn't think you did the team thing?"

"Kellynch's choice, not mine."

Jane pursed her lips and then frowned.

Jane had never liked Kellynch. Although she was a successful recruiter for the Company, she had turned her back on her analyst job. Kellynch never quite forgave her for that; he thought of her taking the recruiting job as her demoting herself, becoming less serious, less essential. Frivolous. The one tension in Lizzy and Jane's friendship was their very different relations to the Director.

"He's an ass, Liz. He likes you but you shouldn't let that keep you from seeing him for what he is, an ambitious, unprincipled, career beaurocrat, part of the Eternal Boobocracy."

"And you say I say the damndest things," Lizzy responded, shaking her head, "But I do keep an eye on him."

Jane gave Lizzy an unconvinced look. "So, when do you leave?"

"Later today, I think. I haven't heard yet. My go bag's ready. And now, with my new hair, I'm fully prepared."

"It's impossible to be fully prepared for any mission, Liz. And didn't someone, maybe Thoreau, say that you should beware of all enterprises that require new hair?"

Lizzy choked a bit on a sip of her coffee. "Warn me next time you decide to distort a quotation!"

Jane laughed but there was a wariness in the sound.

It had taken Jane time to share with Lizzy why she stopped working as an analyst. Jane had been working closely with a team in the Middle East, and, in a sudden, desperate situation, forced to get them information in real-time, she had misinterpreted chatter and had led the team into a trap. Two of the four members died. It was not her fault but she had never forgiven herself, and while she refused to continue as an analyst, a sense of debt and loyalty to the agents who died kept her working for the Company. Lizzy never could fully wrap her mind around it; it was an opacity at the center of her friend. But Lizzy accepted it.

One thing her life in the Company had taught Lizzy is that no one is fully transparent, not to anyone else, and not to herself.

Lizzy's phone beeped. It was a text — from Darcy.

B will pick you up at 1 pm, the plane will be ready

"So, time to go?" Jane asked with a small smile.

"Soon."

Jane stood up, her smile disappearing, seriousness in her eyes. "Break a leg, Liz."

Next time, the mission begins. Love to hear from you!