Chapter Text
Thursday 18th February 2021
20:45
Tony had never been packed and ready for a trip so far in advance in all of his adult life. Maybe it was some residual rebellious streak that he hadn’t exhausted as a kid or maybe he was just lazy but packing a suitcase had always been a last-minute job. But with two days to go and enough reasons for his mind to go mad in the silence of his house, the mind-numbing task of folding clothes was a welcome distraction.
He tugged his bag into the hallway, dropping it besides the front door and filling the room with a drawn-out sigh that had really established itself in his day to day vocabulary in the last month. Two days to go until a man, who still hadn’t mastered packing a suitcase without leaving every piece of clothing creased, would be infiltrating an event advertised to rich entrepreneurs.
Wild Horse had always been quiet, even when an entire base worth of employees were working, eating and living there but the isolation of the last four weeks had become oppressive, leaving him with even fewer distractions from the task at hand than he would have had otherwise. Of course, if the town was still populated with base employees, it followed that Space Force would still be open so he wouldn’t be taking part in some amateur spy craft just to get his next paycheque.
There was a flash, amplified through the glass of his front window, the sudden light illuminating the small living area. He blinked in the new return of the darkness, moving back over to the front door and debating whether or not a spy would open the door and have a look around. His heart pounded momentarily in his chest and he wondered if he was getting more paranoid since Naird had started teaching him to always look over his shoulder.
The window was slightly ajar, letting in a fragment of the late evening air and, with it, a whispered curse. Tony frowned, trying to convince himself he didn’t recognise the voice, and opened the front door with the confidence of a man who definitely recognised the voice.
“Hannah?” He leant out of the door, looking down the steps and into the small flowerbed (which was more overgrown with weeds than anything else). “What are you doing here?”
He heard an exasperated sigh and then watched as Hannah extracted herself from the bushes, somehow still looking immaculate in a way that was more annoying than impressive. She lifted one hand, brushing an imaginary piece of dirt from her shoulder and putting on the patient expression of a parent who has caught their child doing something illogical. If Tony could ever have strung a series of words together in her presence that made sense, he’d have told her that he was the one who should have been looking at her that way.
“Just testing you, Scarapiducci,” she said as if it was obvious, “I don’t know why I ever believed you might have developed the skills you’d need to come and work for me but for some reason I decided to check.”
“By taking a picture of my living room?” Tony asked disbelievingly. “What does that prove?”
“That you aren’t taking the necessary precautions,” she replied, striding up the stairs and brushing past him as if it were her house they were entering. He followed at her heels, forgetting the judgemental tone of her voice and only registering that she could; maybe, possibly, hopefully; offer him a job. She had started to inspect the house, a permanently underwhelmed sneer on her face. “If you were in charge of keeping the paparazzi from invading the privacy of your client, you’d have fallen at the first hurdle.”
“This is my house!” Tony complained, not protesting when she flicked a switch and bathed the house in light. After all, it was bare enough to never really start looking untidy; not that he cared about impressing her. He definitely didn’t.
“And you think your client would be reassured to find this lazy approach to security in your own home?” She asked, wrinkling her nose at the mismatch of cushions that lay across the sofa.
“I caught you, didn’t I?” Tony challenged, perching on the arm of one chair and folding his arms. She stopped her inspection of the house, looking back and sighing with faux sympathy.
“Oh, Anthony, you have so much to learn,” she said airily, shaking her head, “In this scenario, I have the photo I want. You may have realised it happened, which is a start if I’m being generous, but the photo is still in my possession.”
“Not if I take your phone,” Tony replied, getting to his feet and walking over to her. She held her phone loosely between her fingers, swinging it idly as if daring him to even try. He knew it was a game to her and that she wanted him to try. So he did.
“What are you going to do once you have it? You can’t get into it without a passcode,” she taunted, holding it behind her as he tried to reach around and take it. She smiled sweetly and swapped it to the other hand, continuing to keep it out of his reach.
“Hannah,” Tony complained frustratedly, “Hannah! Come on…”
“How are you going to delete the picture?” She asked again, now phrasing every question as if she was the teacher leading a confused student to the correct answer.
“I’ll make you unlock it,” Tony grumbled under his breath. Truth be told, he hadn’t thought that far ahead. He didn’t think around Hannah very often. Their arrangement had never been one that required or afforded much thought. If he had thought about it, perhaps he’d have been uncomfortable with the rivalry between them which did more to keep them together than any real feelings that existed beyond the antagonism.
“I thought you were past the underhand techniques,” she teased, “Working for the government now… or not, anymore.” Tony sighed frustratedly, knowing that it was only a matter of time before she really got to the reason she was there. If there had been one constant thread running through the numerous setbacks in his career, it was Hannah, turning up to watch a carefully rebuilt reputation burn.
“What are you still doing here anyway?” She continued, looking around the house with another frown on her face, “Surely you haven’t stayed for the location. And what are you doing for work? I was surprised when Space Force hired you and it was definitely the only place around here that would take someone like you.”
“I’m doing some independent work,” he said easily, feeling Naird’s lie tripping off his tongue with a nonchalance that instilled a bit of hope in him that the weekend might work out okay. “You know, contract stuff for some different companies.”
“There isn’t much chance of this but – anywhere I’ve heard of?”
“I’m not stupid, Hannah,” Tony retorted witheringly, “As if I’m going to give you a list of places for you to send your lies to first thing tomorrow morning.”
“I wouldn’t,” she replied, much worse than lying than Tony thought he was, “But now that I’ve made a name for myself, working for Edison, I thought it was important that I checked in with you.
“And how’s Edison’s rocket fuel business coming along?” Tony knew it was childish but relished in the scowl on her usually impassive face. He stepped away from her, returning to his makeshift seat on the arm of the sofa.
“Are you giving up?” Hannah asked disappointedly, pocketing her phone and moving away from the wall.
“I’ve told you, I don’t need a job anyway,” he replied reluctantly, imagining Naird’s reaction if he abandoned the team so soon before Saturday and recoiling enough just from the thought of it that turning down Hannah seemed the more appealing option.
“You’re lucky I’d even consider you,” she said, “This whole business with Space Force is being covered up so much, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that you somehow had a part in ruining it.”
“Well I didn’t,” Tony snapped petulantly, folding his arms and aiming a glare at the ground. It was maybe the first job he’d lost where the blame could be traced back to someone else (General Naird) and their inexplicable belief in the loose team they’d put together.
“They didn’t even keep you on for the move to the Air Force,” Hannah argued back persistently. “You either caused the shutdown or didn’t make a big enough impact to be considered worth keeping.”
Tony rolled his eyes, still glaring at the ground. They’d been in the same position so many times, it felt like reading off a script. She’d tell him everything he’d done wrong since the last time they spoke. He’d weakly defend his bad choices and sometimes make her laugh with his stubborn belief in his own actions. One of them would kiss the other and they’d go from there.
It was always the same with her.
Saturday 20th February 2021
21:00
“Why are they even doing a trade in the open like this? Has the black market for government information not realised that emails exist?” Tony ignored Chan’s muffled laugh in reply, rubbing his hands together expectantly as he waited with Angela on the other side of the road from the event they were about to attend.
The steady stream of guests had started to dry up and they were waiting to slip in with some of the latecomers, hoping to at least avoid a public scene if Adrian and Chan’s hasty preparations had not paid off. Thinking about that made Tony’s hand drift to his pocket and the mocked-up invitation tucked away in there. Every movement he made felt like something that could give him away to any number of people who had no reason to even be looking for suspicious activity.
“Seriously though?” He pressed Chan further, quietly comforted by the sigh that filled his ear and awaiting the intelligent point that would prove why Tony should be putting himself into the dangerous situations whilst Chan was kept in a hotel room somewhere, only at risk of straining his eyes in front of a computer screen.
“You’re saying if you were in this situation you’d email the highly sensitive government secrets?”
Tony tempered the grin that threatened to break out across his face at Chan’s question, exhaling a laugh of his own.
“I’m saying I wouldn’t be walking around with a memory stick in my pocket,” he corrected belligerently, ignoring Angela as she rolled her eyes. This was a point that he had already made several times, even when General Naird had finally given in to his questioning with an assurance that this memory stick really did exist and was in fact the transportation method of choice when it came to exchanging the information they were in pursuit of.
“This whole event is full of people likely performing similar trades of information,” Chan replied patiently, pausing for a moment and letting the line fill with static and the faint sound of a keyboard being used, “They set up fancy dinners and parties to give everyone a place to be, mixed in with guests who would actually turn up to this sort of thing.”
“And, in doing so, give the people who are spying on them the perfect alibi to do so,” Tony interjected, again seeing an expression on Angela’s face that he imagined would be mirrored quite accurately on Chan’s.
“Do you want to say that any louder?” She raised an eyebrow in his direction and shook her head. “I know we’re both amateurs here but even I have refrained from announcing our intentions to the entire street.”
“Right, you two,” Adrian finally interrupted, his own hesitance just noticeable in the wavering of his voice. It was even less reassuring to think that he had gone to the effort of trying to hide it from them, however unsuccessfully. “Now seems like an appropriate time to approach the front gates. Just pass them your invitations, stick to the cover story if anyone makes small talk and don’t put your foot in it, Tony.”
“I thought we’d established that I should be handling the conversations given my unparalleled ability to bullshit everyone I’ve ever met,” Tony replied, paraphrasing what he was sure Naird had intended to be a compliment at their meeting earlier that week. Adrian’s aborted laugh suggested otherwise.
The gates were manned by two people, their figures made more imposing by well-fitted suits that even made Tony tug on his blazer a little sheepishly. He felt the rougher material of the thin vest Naird had tossed to him from the other side of their hotel room when he’d started to get ready. They hadn’t talked about it (mostly because Tony suspected Naird was starting to share his second thoughts about the safety of them being thrown into a potentially tricky situation) but there had been a steady weight in Naird’s eyes that had asked him not to bring it up. Tony wasn’t convinced it was thick enough to stop a bullet; then again, he was also trying not to consider that as a possibility at all.
“Good evening,” Tony greeted the two security guards as cheerfully as he could manage, pulling on the many years of experience he now had of feeling incredibly out of place in a room but trying to convey his unwavering confidence. One of them nodded mutely, taking the two invitations from Tony’s hand and looking them over. The second guard remained uninvolved, glancing up and down the road with the sort of boredom on his face that Tony was more used to seeing on Brad’s and Duncan’s.
The guard in front of them was taking her time, cross-referencing the fake names on their invites with the guest list that had hopefully been edited accordingly by Chan. Whilst both scientists had argued that their skill sets would not lend themselves to espionage, he had taken to hacking worryingly naturally and Tony suspected that he’d known more than he’d let on to begin with. He was a total nerd, after all.
Angela gave him a sideward glance as they were waiting to which he mustered a brief, uneasy smile. For all of her theoretical knowledge of combat situations, Angela was as out of her depth as he was when it came to selling a false identity.
“Go on in,” the woman in front of them drawled eventually, nodding her head through the open gates and towards the front door of the mansion.
The path leading to the open door was cobbled in expensive stone and lined by bushes cut into perfect spheres. There were coloured fountains dotted around the lawns beyond tall exterior walls, the lights beneath the water colouring it pink and blue. Tony tried not to be distracted by the majesty of their surroundings, instead cataloguing the building in front of them and attempting to search for emergency exit routes if it were to come to that.
“Why do you think they spent so long checking the list?” Angela asked, having glanced over her shoulder to ensure they were in private. Tony shrugged but her question reminded him that he wasn’t on his own and he held his arm out for her to take, which she did so reluctantly.
“Of course we have to be a couple,” she complained under her breath, “They could have given us a backstory that required less acting.”
“I’m offended that you’re finding it so difficult,” he replied drily, almost smiling at her glare before remembering what was going on. That happened a lot at the moment – it was easy to get caught up in having an important job to do, in having a purpose beyond running a twitter account (even though he did maintain that he had done more than just that at Space Force). And there had been something that had made him feel like a kid messing around with his friends when he, Angela and Chan had been preparing for their first mission.
The reality hit more acutely when they stepped across the threshold of the house, greeted by monumental pillars and a busy hall. Everyone looked so comfortable in that setting, reaching to take food from trays as they passed as if this was a normal thing to be doing and suddenly Tony felt like an imposter all over again.
“Okay, we’re in,” Angela muttered at his side, leading him towards the perimeter of the room and tightening her grip on his arm momentarily. It felt reassuring even if she was just doing it to ensure that they weren’t separated.
“Right, that’s one thing out of the way,” Adrian replied, almost sounding as if he was talking to himself, “Remember to keep an eye out for our target and don’t let her get out of sight. We need to verify that some sort of exchange took place before we start arranging for her movements to be tracked. And any information you can get about the person delivering the information would be useful to have.”
“What if the target disappears with someone?” Tony asked under his breath, aiming the question at Angela as if they were having a conversation between the two of them, “We follow them or-?”
“I suppose we’ll assess that situation if it arises,” Adrian replied, his continued uncertainty really not helping Tony’s faltering sense of confidence. Maybe the older man could sense that or maybe he’d just been kicked under the desk by Chan but he quickly followed up. “All we need is reasonable certainty that something has changed hands. I’d say that the target and someone else disappearing somewhere would give us that evidence.”
“Obviously if we could verify it had happened, that would be better though, right?” Angela asked, hearing the thoughtful affirmative from Adrian a moment later. Tony tried not to look too frustrated that she had suggested getting themselves into a potentially more dangerous situation and shook his own discomfort off once more.
General Naird was, much to his own reluctance, out at a military event nearby to reduce the likelihood of anyone suspecting him. It had been mentioned a couple of times at their makeshift base in Colorado that it would look conspicuous if the sources within the armed forces suddenly caught wind of the suspicion surrounding them so soon after Space Force had been shut down. Tony agreed with all of this of course but the proposed solution of Mark being unable to coordinate their first mission seemed like a bad one.
“There,” Angela murmured, dragging his thoughts away from the general and towards the direction she was nodding in, “Just entered the room.” Tony glanced over, looking over the heads of the gathered crowd and spotting the person who matched the grainy photo they’d been poring over for weeks.
“How do you want to do this?” Tony asked, stopping himself as another couple crossed in front of them. He waited for them to move away and continued. “Would it be easier to split up? We need to cover the exits to the room.” Angela looked reluctant but nodded nonetheless.
“I’ll take the main entrance,” she replied, pointing to the door at the opposite end of the room, “You go down there. And get a drink to have in your hands or something. You look like you’re about to pickpocket someone when you fidget like that.” Tony glanced down at his interlocked fingers and separated them, smiling lopsidedly at Angela’s faint amusement.
“Aye aye, Captain,” he murmured, returning his gaze to their target and heading off between the groups of guests, trying not to lose sight of her.
He made it across the room without having to make use of his hastily learned spiel about being a young entrepreneur, picking up a glass of champagne on his way and half-listening to Angela talking to someone else through their earpieces. When he turned back to survey the rest of the room, he caught sight of her as she was surrounded by a group of three seemingly talkative guests at the main doorway.
In a break in their conversation, she glanced idly across the room at him, looking apologetic.
“I can still see her,” Tony muttered into his earpiece, “Just work on getting rid of them.”
Their target was a blonde-haired woman, not much older than Tony. She seemed to be comfortable in her camouflage as a young, rich, successful person; well-dressed and holding herself with a confidence that Tony envied. She was looking out across the room casually, occasionally smiling at another guest and saying a few words. Unlike with Angela, they seemed to move away from her quickly enough.
“Angela isn’t getting out of this conversation any time soon,” Adrian reported to Tony, “Can you still see our target?”
“Yeah,” Tony replied, trying to follow the other woman’s gaze out across the room in search of the previous link in the chain. Their lead started and ended with her – if he didn’t get something on the person who turned up with the information, they would be no closer to identifying the source in the armed forces. Tony had his own, more selfish motivation as well and failure here would bring him no closer to getting his life back on a normal track.
He pulled his eyes back to the woman just as her back disappeared into the next room. He glanced around the main room once more, not seeing anyone following her and swore under his breath.
“What is it?” Chan asked swiftly. Tony almost cursed again, forgetting that every breath was currently audible to the two scientists.
“She’s moved,” he muttered, moving towards the doorway but hesitating without Angela to back him up. “I didn’t see anyone with her.”
“Can you confirm that some sort of exchange is taking place?” Adrian asked.
“I didn’t see anyone with her,” Tony repeated, casting one last glance towards Angela and then heading through to a slightly less populated room, although no less lavishly decorated. “I’ve moved through to the next room.”
“Ali, work on getting through to Tony,” Adrian’s voice continued over the earpiece, “We don’t want to separate the two of you too much.” Tony wondered at what point the older scientist would call Mark for back-up. It seemed that their makeshift plan falling apart wasn’t a sufficient reason.
He caught sight of their target, biting his lip when she headed swiftly towards a marble staircase and walked up it as if she was meant to be there. Tony glanced over his shoulder again, seeing no one following him or her.
“She’s going upstairs,” he said, “I can follow her…”
“That doesn’t seem sensible,” Chan hastened to interject, “Has no one else followed her up there?”
Tony was about to respond when a man appeared at the base of the staircase, ascending to the next floor with the same degree of assuredness that she had.
“A man just went up there too,” he said, “I can’t say for certain that the trade is taking place and I have no information about the person following her.”
“It’s your call,” Adrian said after some time, sounding reluctant to be giving Tony so much authority. It almost made him laugh, imagining the displeasure in his expression. “If you go up there, you need to keep your distance. We can’t let them know that we’re tailing them.”
Tony glanced backwards and forwards between the two rooms and the disappearing figure on the staircase. The rest of the room’s occupants seemed distracted or, at least, uninterested in the comings and goings of other guests. He took a single, deep breath and crossed the room with a certainty that he didn’t possess.
He wasn’t getting paid enough for this.