Chapter Text
“Give me a reason not to pull the trigger.”
Agent Lewison stiffened, his hands freezing in mid-air above his kitchen counter, “Orion, I presume.”
“You have ten seconds.”
“I really don’t understand why you’re here.” Lewison continued calmly, “I’m just an analyst. Are you blaming me for being so sloppy that we could catch you?”
“Your analysis puts me on the wrong plane. Try again.”
“The wrong plane?” A look of contemplation flashed over the analyst’s face, followed by almost immediate annoyance, “That seems unlikely.”
“Oh really.”
“It would be very uncharacteristic of me to make a mistake that big.” Lewison’s eyes flickered down to the block of knives next to his stove, over the steaming hot coffee he had just poured, over to the British agent reflected in the kitchen window, “I might go as far as to say that I’m right. All of the evidence will show it.”
“Gaslighting me doesn’t change the facts.”
“I’ll bet that we can find at least half a dozen passengers on that flight willing to swear under oath that you were on the flight.” Lewison cautiously peered over his shoulder, carefully assessing the situation one more time, “Because we both know the truth, don’t we Orion?”
“That there’s a traitor in the room?” Alex asked sardonically.
“Quite.” Lewison smirked, “And I’m going to be paid handsomely for bringing him in.”
Lewison took a step to the side as the gun went off, bullet embedding itself in his kitchen wall. A hand wrapped around his coffee mug and launched it towards Orion, who was forced to take a step back, giving the American time to grab a knife from the block and dash towards the British agent.
“Fuck,” said Alex.
Alex didn’t get a chance to react. The knife slashed out across Alex’s t-shirt, ripping the fabric and revealing an armoured vest underneath. Alex had never been so grateful that Lauren was so insistent about wearing vests on operations.
Lewison pursed his lips in annoyance, but switched to violent thrusts, trying to impale Alex. They both knew that the vest wouldn’t stand up to something suitably violent.
Alex dropped the gun and stepped inside Lewison’s grasp, both hands controlling the arm with the knife. Their muscles strained as they fought for control of the weapon, their feet slipping on the wet floor as they stumbled back and forth above the broken pieces of the coffee mug. Grunting, Alex scrabbled around until his feet found some purchase and then shoved Lewison backwards, gaining some space.
The explosive attack that immediately followed caught Lewison off-guard. A glancing hit to Alex’s arm left blood flowing, but the moment the first punch connected, Lewison knew he was in trouble. The second fist flew through his desperate defence and send him reeling backwards, only for a foot to connect solidly with the side of his head, knocking him flat.
“Let’s try that again.” Lewison heard the sound of knives being pulled from the knife block, before the pointed weight of a knee in the small of his back let the situation sink home. “Give me a reason not to stab this knife through your skull.”
“Fuck you.” Lewison spat out, before biting down on something in his mouth. “You can go and fu-”
His words cut off as he began to spasm, choking on the froth that spilled out of his mouth.
Alex leapt back from the dying man and stared at him in horror.
Suicide pills?
What the
fuck
.
Searching Lewison’s apartment was a complete waste of time. Or at least, nearly so. The body was cold by the time Alex finished rummaging through every cupboard, putting every phone, every laptop, every tablet in his back-pack, flicking through every folder of receipts at the bottom of every drawer in every room. Absolutely nothing had stood out. Everything was as you’d expect from a fairly senior analyst working for the CIA.
Except for the suicide pill, the advanced close combat training, and the fact that he was clearly a goddamn traitor who had falsified records to get Alex into some hot water, and who had contributed to fucking up Alex’s life this month. Alex couldn’t quite forget that bit.
But nothing useful had stood out, until Alex glanced over at the mantelpiece in the living room and found a photograph. It wasn’t much. Just a collection of faces that he had stumbled across here and there. He could put some names to some of their faces. He’d worked with them, when he was over here working for the CIA.
It wasn’t much of a lead, but names and faces were enough for a bit of sleuthing. He had three addresses for three names he wanted to check and, oddly enough, they were all within a few streets of each other.
Straight back into Washington it was.
He was barely on the highway when Lewison’s phone buzzed with a message from an unknown number. Alex’s eyebrows rose as he read it off the lock screen: Did you get any more information about Rider’s associates? Lauren Adams just entered the country .
Well then. He put his foot down. No need to waste time.
Lauren was not having a good time in America.
She had worked out that things were not going to go entirely smoothly when she was detained barely thirty seconds into her time on American soil. She quite literally hadn’t even managed to get off the plane before three suits quietly tapped on her shoulder and asked her to step this way please.
Joe Byrne, the man that the suits worked for, was a stern man with grey running through all of his hair.
“Alex mentioned you last time me and him met.” He started, “He said that I should trust you.”
Lauren said nothing.
Joe let the silence hang awkwardly for one second as he examined her face carefully.
Lauren glanced at the camera in the corner. The light was off. Probably not recording then, but it wasn’t exactly hard to fake.
“I’m going to give you one chance to tell me why I should let you into my country when a terrorist just assassinated the Secretary of State.” Joe tapped the table, drawing her eyes back to him, “Just one. Else we’re putting you on a plane back.”
“How many people are listening in?”
“No one I don’t trust.”
“And how many people is that?”
“Trust is in awfully short supply.” Joe lent over the table, “Give me a reason or get on a plane back. That’s the deal.”
“June 17th, 2007.” Joe’s face barely reacted. He couldn’t stop the instinctive twitch though. Just at the corner of his eye. The slightest hint of surprise. Lauren leaned in, “Drug ring was due to be busted by your suits. When you turned up, everyone was dead. Everything was gone. Completely clean. No one ever found out what had happened.”
“That was off the books.” Joe frowned, “And there was never a mission report because we didn’t have an operation to report on.”
“Funny, really.” Lauren leaned back in her chair, “Because Orion was lent to the CIA for a drugs bust on June 16th. Complete clean-up. No one left alive. Authorisation from Director of Operations, CIA and Director of Operations, MI6. The first joint operation of seven that year.”
“We don’t hire kids. Not after the first time. Skeleton Key was bad enough.” Joe dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “
“June 19th, July 2nd, July 16th, August 3rd, September 9th, October 10th.” Lauren rattled off the dates calmly, “The first seven times that Orion was lent out for an operation that doesn’t appear on the official MI6 records.”
Joe paused. “You have my attention.”
“And you have my passport.” Lauren held out her hand, “I’d like it back now.”
“I can see why Alex likes you.” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a folder with her name on the front. “There’s a lot of information about you out there, you know.”
“Really?”
“Recruited as a teenager as an informant. Collaboration with MI5. And then being picked up by Alex, who gave you access to MI6 resources. Let’s just say that your sim scores are the stuff of legend,” Joe said drily. Then a wicked smile crossed his face, “And then some CCTV footage of a girl smashing the shit out of a grab team on a street in London made the rounds this morning”
Lauren cocked an eyebrow, “I don’t see where this is going.”
“Are you in, or are you out?” Joe said, “Because if you’re in, and this is getting serious, you might want to consider a name.”
“Like Orion.”
“Like Orion.” Joe agreed. “Just to give your reports a bit of spice. Make our paperwork more interesting. Make it harder to track down your family. You know, the usual.”
“I didn’t know there was so much paperwork.” Lauren joked.
“Well…” Joe trailed off, before shaking his head slightly. “That’s if you’re in. If you’re out, and you want to stay out, you might want to do something about this folder in particular.”
Lauren lifted the folder from his hands. It felt heavier than it was. A lot heavier. She opened the folder for long enough to retrieve her passport before closing it firmly and reaching out to put it back on the table.
Joe stopped her. “That’s yours. Your copy.”
“My copy?”
“I don’t think you’re out.” Joe stood up, “But I don’t think you know what being in means either. You should read it. Just in case.”
“I’m training to become a doctor.” She said, “I’m getting out. I’m not going to need it.”
“Really?” Joe snorted with incredulity, “And how many of your lectures are you going to the next two weeks?”
The door didn’t close behind him. It still took her five minutes to take him up on the implicit invite and vanish further into America.
Chasing down Alex was an impossible task. She knew that. Even Jones thought it wasn’t really very likely. Her estimate of two weeks for the entirety of the American intelligence service to track Alex down? It was generous. But probably still accurate. She’d gathered enough from the news to confirm that Alex was stateside - the Americans weren’t demanding Mexico close any borders, and there had been too many news stories about delays at every way in and out of the states.
The only way to really find Alex before it was too late was to set it up so that Alex could find her. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack, except you were the needle and you had no idea where the haystack was.
She had some clues though.
I can see why Alex likes you .
Alex hadn’t been to America in the last year. He hadn’t mentioned Joe before. Alex had been to see Joe. Simple deduction, but a useful one. It meant that he was at least vaguely local to the area - or had been in the last couple of days. She was in the right place, or thereabouts.
The other interesting part was that the man had let her into the country anyway, despite knowing exactly who she was, what she was, and what she was here to do. Joe was probably on their side then. At least a little bit, even if not a whole lot.
She took the coffee off the man in the airport shop and sat at one of the tables to run through her plan again.
Get a hotel for the night. Work out who Alex would think he needed to deal with. Get to that person first. Sit and wait for him. Get this mess sorted out. Go back home and tie him to a soft surface for at least a week. Apologise to her professors. Get her degree. Live a long life.
Simple stuff.
But finding anything in the news to give her a clue was not going to be a good starting point. The sudden removal of one of the most senior members of the American government had caused the media to - for want of a better word - implode. Opinion pieces on potential successors were almost as common as empty platitudes. Angry demands screamed into the void for instant action against Mexico, against terrorist groups in the middle east, against someone were all that the media were serving up at the moment.
The kind of details that Lauren needed wouldn’t be found from flicking through TV channels.
Lauren had, instead, carefully cross-referenced the entirety of the MI6 mission records against Alex’s notes. She had focused around the American operations, pulling out anyone who worked on American soil. Some names only appeared in the official records. Some names appeared in both. The list of names that appeared only on the off-the-books missions was much shorter.
Some career military officers, a couple of agents. She had names , even. Jack Rollins, Benji Dunnover, Kristine Meriwether, some others. No more than a handful. Of those names, she had suspicions about just a few. The ones who were on the operations which were - to be frank - utterly fucked up.
Rollins stood out. He’d been on the drug busts. The guy that handled the sources. The guy that did clean-up. The guy that literally knew where the bodies were buried. If the CIA didn’t know anything about it all, then Rollins had done something spectacularly wrong.
But it was Meriwether that Lauren thought Alex would remember better. Would hunt down first. She had more links to the CIA, and if Alex had met Joe then he was probably chasing those angles down first. Meriwether had been the one to handle confirmation codes. Not just for the drug busts, but for every single operation with the CIA, legitimate or otherwise.
A single point of connection.
Even Lauren could see the writing on the wall there.
She even had an address, oddly enough. Merriwether was not privacy conscious. They had a Facebook profile. From there it was easy to track them down. Find their daughter’s school, hack into a undersecured school network, look up some parental addresses, do some verification against the slightly more secure state databases for registered voters. Secure enough to stop you just pulling the address. Insecure enough to let you check that you had the right one.
To top it off, it wasn’t even that far from the airport.
Lauren drank the last of her coffee.
It was going to be a long few days waiting for Alex to catch up.
She had barely finished that thought when a fresh cup of coffee was put down on the table next to her, and a sandy-haired blonde with sunglasses sat down opposite, “Funny who you meet at airports isn’t it?”
“Alex?!”
“You’ve attracted quite a lot of attention.” He lifted his eyebrows above the frame of the glasses and waggled them, “From me as well.”
“What do you mean?”
“The CIA had evidence pointing at me. The guy who found it had a suicide pill and a phone. Someone just texted him to ask for information on you.” Alex smiled coldly, “It could be the CIA, of course, but I figured that they probably already had information on you.”
Lauren lifted the folder, “This is apparently a copy of everything.”
“And how is Joe?” Alex took the folder off her immediately and flipped it open. He flicked through the first few pages of the folder, before reaching up and taking off his sunglasses, “I take it you didn’t take a look at what he gave you.”
“Not yet, why?”
“Because this is the home address of one Kristine Meriwether,” He flicked through the folder quickly, “These are the architect’s blueprints for the condo unit she lives in, and this is a list of every operation the CIA thought I was involved with.”
“Fuck!” She frowned, “I spent an hour looking for that.”
“If someone hands you a folder, read it.” Alex shrugged, “It’s one of the first lessons you learn in the business.”
“I’m not in the business. Not full-time, anyway.” Lauren objected, “But at least we’re all on the same page.”
“How many times have you had to say that recently?” Alex closed the folder and stood up, “I can tell that you don’t believe it.”
Lauren blinked, “Sorry?”
“If you weren’t in the business, you wouldn’t be here right now. You’d be at home, watching whatever shitty medical drama you want to rip to pieces this week.” Alex pulled her to her feet and started towards the door, “And you’d definitely be at your lecture with Dr Martinez. You never miss lectures with Dr Martinez.”
“Fine, okay.” Lauren scowled, “I don’t believe it. Are you happy now?”
“Are you?” Alex paused as they stepped into the short-stay car-park. “Because if you aren’t, then you should turn around and leave.”
“Joe said something similar. Tulip too.”
“Because they’re serious.” Alex took her hands and looked at her very closely, “You know what I do Lauren. Enough to know that the reason that you don’t know more is because the more you know, the more danger you’re in. On some of my missions, if something goes wrong - when something goes wrong - I don’t exist. The government has never heard of me.”
“Like this one.”
“This one is so fucked up that they won’t have heard of me even when it’s done.” Alex dropped her hands to throw his own up in the air, “I’m never going home Lauren. The best case scenario here is that I make some kind of deal with Joe and I get to live a quiet life in some rural hellhole that doesn’t even have decent internet.”
“Alex…”
“I’m serious. Like fuck.” Alex collapsed against a car and looked up at her, “You know what it takes for someone to get access to my authorisation codes? You know what that means? The CIA is compromised. MI6 is compromised. And if those two are compromised then it’s safe to assume that pretty much everyone is compromised. And if they’ve got my codes, they’ve got everything else. Mission reports. Known associates. Known haunts.”
Lauren sat down next to him, “Yeah, I’d guessed.”
“I don’t even know what the fuck I’m going to do. I haven’t given myself time to think, I haven’t given myself time to work it out, I haven-”
She took his hand and squeezed it, “Alex. If I have to choose right now, I’m staying.”
“You’d give it up?”
“Give up what?” Lauren snorted, “I sit there in my lectures, I sit there at home on the couch, I talk to my classmates, I talk to my family, my friends. We talk about the football, or about the professors, sometimes we even talk about what we used to do, those of us that used to do it. And it feels empty.”
“Laure-”
“No, let me finish. You know why my sim scores are so high? I’ve started sneaking into the bank to practice after my classes. The building is right there. It’s a forty-minute run from my classes. I get two hours. I signed up to a mixed martial arts class within two weeks of you taking me into your basement dojo, and when they stopped letting me beat up the instructors, I convinced the guys at Six to let me sit in on their classes instead.” Lauren took a deep breath, “Everyone keeps on telling me that it looks like I’m getting out, but does it? Really? I’ve spent more time buried in computer simulations of your past missions the last year than I’ve spent watching the Great British Bake Off and - let me tell you - that is not a sacrifice that anyone makes lightly.”
“Bu-”
“And then you go off on missions.” Lauren steamrolled over him. “You rearrange our date nights. And you know what I do?”
“No.”
“I sit and wait for whatever fucked up thing they’re making you do to hit the news.” She takes a deep breath, “And then I work out when you’re going to be home and I make sure I’m there.”
“I thought you didn’t approve of what I do. Of how I do it.”
“I don’t. You’re a machine. You shoot your way through situations that you should never be put into in the first place.” Lauren looked him in the eyes, “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t recognise that it might be necessary. You know Bolivia?”
“Bolivia wa-”
“I spent two weeks trying to find a non-violent solution to Bolivia.” Lauren shook her head, “Two weeks trying to find a way that you could have done it with less bodies.”
There was a pause as Lauren tried to find the words.
“It turns out that any other way gets even more people killed.” Lauren eventually settled on it, “The hostages don’t get out. Or you don’t get out. Or one of the hundreds of other things that they had going on in that compound gets out.”
“I killed all of them.” Alex was soft, but blunt, “I didn’t even hesitate.”
“I’m not going to be able to do that. At least, I don’t think so.” Lauren admitted, “But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to stand by your side when you need me most. And it doesn’t mean that I don’t know what I’m getting into. I mean it Alex, I’m here to stay.”
“What do you think happens after we deal with all of this?” Alex gestured around them, “What’s your plan?”
“Once we’ve dealt with the moles in the CIA? The moles in MI6? Dealt with whoever is behind all of it?” Lauren shrugged, “I figured that by then, they’d probably be willing to talk to you. Sort something out. Something a little less depressing than a dead-end road and a dead-end life in witness protection.”
“That’s optimistic.”
“Did you ask?”
“Did you?”
Lauren held up a phone, “Do you want to?”
Alex let his head fall into his hands, “You have an answer for everything don’t you?”
“Someone has to.”
He took the phone off her and turned it round in his hands as he looked up at her. “You’re really serious about this. About helping me. About giving up ever-”
“I’ll give up a year. Maybe two. Three.” Lauren shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant, “That should be enough.”
“And if it takes more than three years?”
“Then you’ll have to make it worth my while.”
“And how exactly am I going to do that?” Alex tried to hold back a smile, “We’re going to be on the run.”
“Oh there’s always time for opera. Ballet. Something like that.” She paused, “You could take me to Paris.”
“You’re going on the run with a fugitive, and you’re planning a trip to Paris.”
Lauren nudged him, a grin spreading across her face, “There’s always time for Paris.”
Alex looked at her for a long moment and then he laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed, until his eyes streamed with tears.
“You know what?” He pushed himself up, and nodded towards a car three rows over, “Let’s go do it.”