Chapter Text
Once, a little bird had whispered a fascinating tidbit of information in her ear.
It was early morning, the sun barely over the horizon and casting weak rays of pale light across the crisp white bedspread that was half falling off the bed. Jamie was half asleep, sex warm and mind-sluggish with the early hour. Beside her, a woman with olive-colored skin and riotous, dark brown curls was curled onto her side. She was pressed, shoulder to well-muscled thigh against Jamie’s side, soft snores of post-coital sleep escaping her parted lips.
Jamie stared up at the ceiling, at the cracked surface and the ancient-looking molding as light started to creep into the window. Last night had been a miscalculation, an overstepping of a personal rule so newly in place that she hated herself for even recalling why such a rule needed to exist at all.
He’s gone to New York now, mocking her with his sobriety. He dangled her failure to see her plan through to the end. He should be dead in a back alley, overdose jammed into his arm and no longer able to torment her heart.
(She cannot love, she cannot. She had to die in order to be free of him and all he makes her feel.)
“I see the people who walk into our vault, day after day.” The woman’s name was Clémence D’Ory. She worked as a receptionist for one of the largest privately held banks in the city, watching the daily comings and goings of the bank’s many important clients. Jamie had happened upon her quite by chance, which is to say entirely on purpose. Her name had come up in connection to something else, someone else. They’d since broken up, but Clémence had not outlived her usefulness.
“I know what they hide away, deep in our vault.”
Jamie leaned in, fingers splayed out on the rim of her wine glass. “What do they hide, darling?” She purred the words into Clémence’s ear, breath hot and implication heavy on her tongue. She’d wanted to know because little birds with eyes that see such secrets usually lacked the lips to tell them. “What secrets do they keep buried deep under the earth?”
“You’ve a way with words,” Clémence said. She didn’t pull away, Jamie’s lips widened into a broad smile. She refused to let it show in her eyes, such smiles were not for people like Clémence, not for people who meant nothing.
“I do try.”
Clémence’s smile was conspiratorial. “I’ve seen things, when I take the clients down there, they’re important men, you know.” Jamie did know, and she nodded her agreement and continued interest politely because this conversation was starting to grow stale. She would pry the information out of this woman bit by bit, but this was the easier option. Clémence was beautiful, not stunning, but certainly beautiful; Jamie would hate to have to injure her over something as petty as a secret she was going to tell anyway.
Jamie sipped her wine. “What sort of things?”
“Photographs, tapes – the little kind from tape recorders and older, regular, cassettes too; files and data keys. There are so many documents, I swear, half the time I take them down to the vault it’s just to ascertain that their things are still down there. Hard copies of the proof to all those rumors in the papers…” Clémence gives a little shrug. “You know?”
“I do.”
It was easy to take her home, to kiss her until Jamie was able to forget the nagging pain of a wound she refused to admit was still weeping. It was easy to press her lips into skin that was soft and fragrant, instead of hard and angular. There were no marks on this woman, not like his skin, not like her own. This woman was flawed, but her flaws were in the weakness of her mind, not the lines of her body. Jamie could have her; she could fuck her until she couldn’t remember anything else.
The sun dawned weak and hazy. Clouds danced across the sky, caught between the warm reds and yellows of sunrise and dark grey, heavy with the rain that would come later. Jamie had her answer; the plan was already forming in her mind. This would be her coup de grace, her greatest achievement. She could control an entire country with the knowledge contained in that underground vault. All she had to do was get Clémence D’Ory to tell her where to look.
A month later, Jamie had carried a folio of her medical records and a sachet of her mother’s jewelry into the lobby of the bank. She stood where she would be caught on camera, her skin crawling as she did so. It was not her nature to be seen, to allow herself to be caught. It was not her nature to act. Yet she was enjoying this, the flirtation with Clémence over the counter, the pretty way she laughed when Jamie leaned over to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. Clémence was easy, and the sex was good. The sex helped Jamie to forget the rule that she was breaking, for the sex had a goal in mind.
Her medical records should have been burned, all traces of them erased along with the doctor who’d dared tell Jamie of the melanoma growing on her back. Jamie had killed him, once he’d removed the growth and confirmed its cancerous nature. He wasn’t one of her doctors, a specialist she’d been referred to, and his death was a reaction to the infallible truth that Jamie was only human and not the superior being she liked to think herself to be.
Perhaps it was vanity that made her keep them, proof that she’d beaten something that could have killed her.
She procured a box, and let Clémence lead her down the three spiral staircases to the vault. Clémence’s eyes were dark, intense under her curls, and Jamie wanted her then and there, over the low table of the vault. She kept her hands on her folio and the pen tucked inside: ultraviolet ink.
“None of our vaults are numbered,” Clémence explained. She picked up the pen and crossed to the far wall. There was something wicked about watching this woman, this woman Jamie had so expertly needled and pushed to the point where she would do this willingly. “You must know what you’re looking for or else you will never decipher the code.”
There were no cameras in the vault. Jamie was told that by the account representative she’d spoken to a week ago. He had taken one look at her mother’s diamonds and the money that Jamie wanted to deposit and his eyes went almost black with glee. She was old money; her mother’s name still meant something in some circles, despite Jamie’s efforts to erase its meaning. “No one will ever know what you store within our vault. We pride ourselves on secrecy, ma’am.”
Clémence marked the boxes seemingly at random, her high stilettos taping out a staccato rhythm on the granite floor of the vault as she moved about the room. Jamie watched her, fingers curled around her folio. She stood as still as a statue, only her breath and the fall of her hair across her cheek the indication that she was indeed alive at all.
She was going to miss the sex.
Clémence, after all, was due for an accident.
Jamie got caught up on the whisperings she heard about Macedonia, another plan trickled its way into place at the back of her mind in short order. She was careful about this one, oh, so careful. It had to be in New York, and that irritated her, because it brought her too close to Sherlock. Too close to all the rules she could not stand to break.
The robbery, the idea of seizing control of an entire country through blackmail alone, fell by the wayside. Jamie watched, she waited. She saw Sherlock for who he had become. Saw him claw his way back out of a needle, saw him turn himself around.
(Saw him make a friend. What else could she be? He obviously wasn’t interested in sleeping with her. Jamie wanted to know more, so she settled in, she bided her time. Minute by minute, hour by hour, until her plan of action was just that: another thread in her endless web.)
She watched him from the shadows as he nearly killed Sebastian. It was too much, she’d always liked Sebastian. He had Jamie’s sense of the dramatic, at times, and he never questioned her authority.
It wasn’t until much later, when everything had been blown to pieces by a small woman with dark hair and intense eyes who Jamie had sorely underestimated, that she found herself thinking of that half-planned heist once more.
She had, after all, a great deal of time on her hands now.
-
Devon Gaspar’s betrayal had not been one that she’d foreseen, but it was a symptom of perhaps a more endemic problem. She was locked away, and could not maintain the tight control of her organization that she had once so enjoyed. The call had come in the Ledger, in the usual way, a kidnapping of a girl she’d tricked herself into forgetting about.
(A girl she could never forget.)
If her jailor noticed the slight stiffening of her shoulders, he said nothing, speaking quietly on into his mobile on the far side of the room. Something would happen soon. A welcome break in the monotony of this place.
How Devon had even known of the girl’s existence was another, perhaps more troubling matter. It sent Jamie into a spiral of thought, contemplating the girl’s father and how best she was going to stop him from spilling all of her secrets from this prison. The rules, after all, were very strict. She’d negotiated for amenities, as was her right, and slowly her secrets were bartered away until she felt stripped bare and rubbed raw by all that they had taken from her. All for paints, and the newspaper, her letters to Sherlock, it somehow seemed an unfair trade.
Twenty minutes later after she’d read the demand, Sherlock Holmes walked into her prison, Joan Watson on his heels. Jamie had not yet thought of a course of action, and when one had presented itself so prettily, she was not about to say no.
It was part of the plan, all along, that she would leave the prison of her own volition. “Come see me in a year,” she said to Watson. She wanted to see Watson, to see her socially, to understand her, to have her if she could. It was not often that Jamie was bested, a wound that festered at the back of her mind, eating away at her concentration and rendering her useless.
She’d be released, or she would leave.
And she would have Joan Watson.
Left with naught but her mind and her ever-present jailor, Jamie’s mind had drifted away from the white-hot rage she felt at being bested by one she’d determined to be so unremarkable and back to Clémence D’Ory. She had been beautiful, even in death, sprawled out in a back alleyway, her jewelry stripped from her body and her purse in a dumpster a few blocks away. Jamie had done it herself, had her up against the dirty alley wall, pretending to be wine-drunk and amorous. Clémence had never seen the gun coming; she’d never so much as felt it before the bullet had buried itself between her eyes.
Ramses Matoo, her jailor, was a smart man. Jamie liked that about him. They thought his homosexual tendencies would protect him from her charms, and he resisted well. But sex was not the only way to get people to do her bidding, it just happened to be how she’d chosen to study Sherlock Holmes. Really, she wouldn’t go around sleeping with just anyone. She had standards, and a gay man with a loving husband was not high on her list of conquests.
“Tell me something,” she asked, one day not long before Devon’s betrayal. Reports had come in that her organization was slipping. They’d been months without word from her now, and her control was weakening.
(She should have seen Devon coming a mile away.)
He’d looked up from the crossword. “Mn?” He taps his pen against the folded up newspaper. It was a daily ritual of theirs. “1983 Bryan Adams hit, 14 letters. --t----eak----.”
"I was all of two at the time, I wouldn't know." She'd never cared much for popular music or crossword puzzles. She had the patience and the knowledge to complete them, but they brought back memories that she would rather forget, faces better left dead and buried. She turned her attention back to the matter at hand, ignoring her jailor's inattentive supervision and pensive look. "How would you rob a bank?"
He looked up, all dark skin and pensive eyes. "You're not serious."
"Call it a thought exercise, Ramses." Jamie tilted her head to one side, all blank smile and feeling brittle.
"I suppose I'd just walk in and point my gun at the teller." He clicked the top of his pen, pushing the point down and up again. Jamie felt a surge of irritation at the back of her neck and had to bite down hard on the inside of her cheek to resist the urge to get to her feet and stab him in the eye with the pen. Blood filled her mouth. She relished the coppery taste. "What about you?"
"How would I go about it?"
"Yes."
"I suppose I've never thought about it particularly." Jamie affected a shrug. "I would like to think that I'd be more discrete than robbery at gunpoint."
He regarded her for a long time before turning his attention back to his crossword. He clicked the pen again.
Jamie's finger twitched. "Cuts like a knife, that's your answer."
As much as Jamie hated to admit it, her control was slipping. She was trapped by the limitations of her prison, by what she could say to her lawyers in layer upon layer of coded instruction. Her people were never fully under her control, and she was never fool enough to think that they were.
Devon would be an example, and the job in Geneva would be her coup de grace.
Pity that Agent Matoo would be caught in the crossfire, Jamie had always liked him.
Her mind was swimming as she slipped onto a public computer at one of the few Internet cafes that remained in the city. She could function still, but it was a challenge to keep her focus. The glass had cut too deeply. She was going to need stitches.
Three short emails from an anonymous account and she was gone, wrists screaming with the effort that it had taken to type. She had to play the hero now, and it wasn't a hat she wore well.
The girl child had wide eyes that reminded Jamie far too much of her younger brother. She saw the gun in Jamie's hand and swallowed, but her jaw was set resolute and she was not afraid. Jamie stared at her, in awe of this creature that she had created and allowed to live in a moment of vanity where she fancied herself in love. The child she could never love.
"Go down the stairs and out the door you find there." Jamie pointed back the way she'd come. They were all dead but Devon Gaspar now, and he wasn't going to be in any position to chase her. "There is a car waiting to take you back to your mother."
"Who are you?"
"No one."
"You're obviously someone." Christ, was she ever this talkative?
"It doesn't matter."
She would have never named this child Kayden.
The girl looked over her shoulder just once and then she was gone, fingers brushing against Jamie's side as she disappeared down the stairs.
Devon Gaspar's father was a Royal Marine, he was a middle-aged man with too much ambition and not nearly enough sense. Jamie relished taking his father's pen knife and plunging it into his neck. She did not simply cut, no that would be too good for him. She hacked and clawed until there was nothing left of his neck but a gaping bloody mess. "You should have known better, Devon," she told him, watching as he choked and spluttered, blood leaking over her boots. She scowled, knife hanging limply from one hand. She hadn't meant to get dirty. Pity.
The world tilted then and she could not stand up any more. Too much blood, she'd miscalculated, cut too deep.
Sherlock found her there, and Jamie wished it had been Watson. She wanted Watson to see what she'd done for this child that she should not have cared for. She had liked Devon, trusted him more than many others. She told Sherlock the truth of the matter, and hoped he'd have the good sense to listen.
Her plan worked, the news was in the paper not a week later. A list of names, a crew for the job. A date in six months, the target date. It set Jamie's mind racing with possibilities; they would release her before that date. And she would play the victim.
Her lips quirked upwards, a smile she hadn't foreseen quick enough to mask it. Joan Watson would help her, if she asked. Jamie was sure of that.
"Why are you smiling?" His neck still black and blue, Ramses Matoo sat across from her in the warehouse prison. Jamie admired his dedication. In another life, she would have targeted him for her organization. He would rise up the ranks quickly. Pity he was such a do-gooder.
"Painkillers."
"In the baseball box scores?"
"The Mets lost 19-3, it was amusing."
"You don't follow sports."
Scowling, Jamie turned the page in the paper. He was far too sharp for his own good. Next time she'd have to make sure she finished the job. "A girl must have some secrets, Agent Matoo."
He inclined his head to one side and let it drop.