Author's Notes:

You didn't think you'd get through one of my Bond fics without ~melodrama~, did you?

6. Tailor

The mole's next words unfurled slowly, character by character, savoring their fixed and unwilling attention: Care to reconsider?

Q did not turn around to face the screen. His eyes glanced at its reflection in his darkened mobile, and then his focus seemed to slide away, set adrift by the creatures trawling the depths of his mind.

Holly said softly, "Listen to me –"

"She was in my flat," Q murmured.

"Listen to me –"

Bond could feel it like the pressure drop before a storm, the new ionization of the atmosphere as Q's hands clenched against a shiver of rage. "Just once I let her into my flat –"

"This is exactly what he wants," Holly interrupted. "He wants us to be distracted, he wants us to lose our heads –"

"It's not my head that's at stake," Q snapped, and he turned his back on her, rounded on the screen in radiant anger.

"Tell me what you've done."

A long silence. The four techs watched the screen; Bond watched the screen and the side door and Q. Twenty seconds, thirty, then:

I can do one better. I can show you.

The center screen went black with a blip, like the tube blowing in an antique telly, and came back to life as a low-res video of – a cellar, Bond guessed, bare concrete walls and boxy fluorescents. Their greenish light color-washed the head and shoulders of a redheaded girl, collarbone strained as though her arms were tied behind her, sideswept fringe plastered to her temples with sweat. A shadow above her right eyebrow might have been a bruise. At the sight of her Q's face lost the last of its color.

Say hello, sweetheart.

The girl flinched, ducked her head, peered over her shoulder, saw nothing. Her eyes darted to the ceiling, then the corners, before apprehending the camera. For a moment she stared, gaze fixed on something just below their line of sight – words, Bond realized, she was reading and rereading a line of text, the slightest wobble of her eyes giving it away, and he began to understand what the rest of the room must look like: a locked door and a laptop, screen showing her only the commands of her kidnapper, no clues as to who was watching her and why.

For the first time she looked directly into the camera, her expression wary. "...Hello?"

Q exhaled, slowly. His voice was remarkably controlled. "Audrey?"

Recognition finally illuminated her face. "Robert? Oh god, Robert, are you all right? Where are you?"

"I'm fine, I'm at work – where are you?"

The shock and relief of a familiar voice had upset her emotional equilibrium, and the severity of the situation seemed to strike her anew; her composure collapsed, her head sagged, and she sobbed, twice, before she could speak. "I don't know."

Q wavered, the anger dissipating. His usual quick words had deserted him and without them he seemed diminished, a lost boy in an expensive tie and cheap gloves, the constant motion of his eyes arrested by a conundrum he could not solve, and Bond realized that whatever this girl meant to Q, he had never seen her cry.

Holly had evidently completed a similar calculus; she stepped up and spoke with soothing self-assurance.

"Audrey? My name is Holly Mason. I'm one of Robert's colleagues. We're going to get you out, all right?" Her eyes met Bond's and in that instant he knew, despite their probationary trust, that they were united behind their Quartermaster. "We're going to send a friend."

Bond gave her an appreciative nod and took up the baton. "Audrey, I need you to tell me every detail you can remember about what happened to you tonight. Can you do that?"

It took her a moment, a few deep breaths, but she gathered herself and spoke measuredly. "I left St. Thomas's at... eight-forty-five, eight-fifty? Usually I walk to Lambeth North to take the Tube. I was walking past... There's a building under construction on Upper Marsh, and it's got a security fence around it, you know? And a taxi pulled up right next to me e-even though I h-hadn't waved for one." She wiped her damp cheek clumsily on her shoulder. Her voice thickened. "The door opened right in front of me, and a man got out, and he said, 'Hello, love, need a cab?' and I said, 'No, I don't,' and he said, 'Yes, you do.' He threw me into the taxi and h-held my head down and... we drove around for... I don't know, it felt like forever, but... I don't know."

Bond frowned. "Long enough to get out of the city?"

She considered for a moment, then said definitively, "No."

"Do you have any clues about where you might be now? Noise, temperature, smell – anything unusual?"

Frustration flushed her like a wave of heat, searing her voice with sarcasm. "I'm in a cellar."

Her bitter deadpan slotted so perfectly into his concept of Q's preferences that Bond actually chuckled; Q looked at him as though he might be going mad.

Audrey shook her head at her own story with growing contempt. "Before they took me out of the taxi they made me put on some dark glasses, like for visually impaired people, so I couldn't see anything except the pavement right at my feet. But I heard music – live music – and people, lots of people, like a whole crowd just across the street."

Holly started typing before Q had finished his order: "Find any outdoor performances that happened tonight anywhere in the city. And –" To Jeffries. "– get me the security footage from the construction lot on Upper Marsh, or the lot across the street if you have to."

"We were only outdoors for a few seconds," Audrey continued. "They pulled me inside and brought me down here, tied me up, left me alone with the computer." Her voice had faded almost to a murmur. "I can't... I haven't heard anyone since they left. It's so quiet."

"Did you see the driver?"

"No."

"The man who got out of the taxi – what did he look like?"

"Very tall. He had on a hat, like one of those flat caps, you know? He had an awful little mustache, a blond mustache. And a dimple in his chin."

Bond turned to Sullivan, who shook his head: Not one of ours.

"There's a musical at Regent's Park," Holly reported, still scrolling. "They're playing The World's End at the Scoop... and a folk music festival all weekend at Covent Garden."

A realization struck Q, something that puckered his face in revulsion, but he pushed it away. "It'll be Covent Garden."

"You're sure?" Bond pressed. They had one shot, and if the kid was keeping yet more secrets from them –

"Because..." Q opened and closed his mouth several times as though he distrusted his own explanation; for the first time he looked faintly embarrassed. "When she came to my flat, we were talking about My Fair Lady, and Covent Garden –"

"– is where all the characters meet at the beginning of My Fair Lady," Holly finished with sudden understanding.

"That's bollocks," Jeffries scoffed. "Why the hell would he drop such a stupid clue –"

But Bond knew this type of villain, the ones on short fuses determined to destroy before they burnt out, to see awed faces washed in their self-immolating light. Desperation made them no less dangerous. "Audrey, do you think you might be at Covent Garden?"

His question didn't register; her expression had morphed into disbelief and disgust. "Oh my god, Robert, were they listening to us?"

Q wouldn't look at her. His hands were entering commands at an incredible speed, navigating the interface through muscle memory; Bond saw his own image flash onto Q's screen, then a menu of cars, one of which Q highlighted. "There's a Mercedes S400 waiting in the garage, if you can get it out. The NFC chip in your ID card should unlock the doors and start the engine."

"Take the lift," Sullivan called as Q took out a second earpiece kit for himself. "There's two of them waiting to ambush anyone who comes down the stairs."

The mob of new voices, their unusual technical capabilities, the word ambush – Audrey absorbed everything with growing suspicion. "Robert, what's going on? Who's doing this?"

Another shiver, and Q fumbled the earbud; he clenched it in his fist and breathed, steadying. "I don't know."

Liar. The word spread from screen to screen like a gathering swarm, dozens of shining, stinging characters crowding into the frames: liar, liar, liar –

Bond bolted for the door. On his way out he looked back one more time, in case it was the last he saw of them: Sullivan firm, Jeffries focused, Q turning his head from wall to wall, fragments of words mirrored in his glasses. And Holly Mason, on the far side of the desk, her eyes sharp and hard like steel.

The twelve seconds it took for the lift to arrive chafed Bond's patience raw. He flattened himself against the wall with the Walther cocked close to his chest, eyes on the service door less than ten meters away, one ear scanning for trouble and the other trained on Q's channel. These earpieces were designed to filter out background noise, relaying only the speech of the person wearing them, and the silence where he knew there to be sound left him straining for the faintest hint of voices, typing, reassurance.

"What's our system status?" Q said, to someone else – then: "Good. Progress on the source?... Anything you can do to fend him off a while longer."

He was keeping his voice low, probably to avoid alarming Audrey, but the clarity of the comm link sounded as if he were standing at Bond's shoulder, and when the lift doors slid shut it unnerved Bond to see himself reflected alone, as though the Quartermaster were an echo, a wraith.

As the lift settled and Bond trained his gun towards whatever might be waiting on the other side, Q's disembodied voice spoke again: "Bond – he's coming into the garage. The guard from the car park."

"Only one, hm? I'm not that old, am I?"

"I doubt you want my honest assessment."

Bond was in the open for the span of a blink; a black Audi parked immediately to the right of the lift covered him as he scoped out the garage, the damaged Jeeps hoisted on hydraulics, the sleek sports cars primed like missiles in their docks. Everything gleamed in a way that it shouldn't; Bond had always found the garage, or rather Q-Branch in general, eerily clean, the gore sanitized away before it ever stained the boffins' hands. Their only physical contact with his bloodstained existence was the microscopic traces they examined under clinical lamps, long rectangular bulbs like the garage lights, the motion-activated lights, which shouldn't have been lit before Bond even stepped out of the lift – A shadow shuddered and Bond spun around –

Cowering behind the car opposite was Dooley, his friend from the internal monitoring crew, one blood-smeared hand raised in tremulous surrender. He'd been wounded just below the left shoulder, a thin red rivulet staining his sleeve to the elbow. Bond lowered his gun, ducked across the gap, and plucked at the tear in the fabric: a graze, messy but not serious.

"Richardson shot at me," Dooley said with wonder. "Felt like I'd been sideswiped by a two-by-four, it did."

A trail of dark liquid flecks led Bond's gaze along the floor, onto the wall five meters away where the bullet had lodged in a spray of blood. He peered under the car, tracing an extrapolated trajectory, but there were too many places to hide. "Where is he now?"

"He was up by the entrance. Like he doesn't want anyone going in or out." Dooley braced his good shoulder against the car and hauled himself into a crouch. "We're under attack, aren't we?"

"Looks that way."

The bank of lights at the far end of the garage dimmed, then went out. In their absence the lights in the entry guardhouse gleamed like a distant bonfire. No sign of Richardson, but the central section was fading and they needed to move while they could still do so freely. "Q, where is he?"

A pause, long enough that Bond had preemptively rolled his eyes before Q even spoke. "Currently he's exploiting the blind spots in our cameras."

"Give me your semi-educated guess."

"He can't be moving around or he'd expose himself," Q muttered with an air of divided attention. "Cover your left, we've got a big gap behind those Range Rovers."

The Mercedes was two rows down from their hiding place, on the opposite side of the aisle. "Get behind that silver Rolls," Bond commanded, and as Dooley squeezed through the gap between car and wall, Bond swung into the open, gun cocked and stance taunting – and in that instant the central light bank snuffed and a bullet snapped the side mirror off a car inches from Bond's left hand.

Bond ran, didn't bother to swerve – twelve meters to cross the central aisle, and Q might think him old but he could still cover that distance fast enough – On the other side he dove behind a different Mercedes and scrambled on hands and knees to the correct one, yanked at the door handle – "Car's still locked."

"The mole's unassigned the –" Another gunshot blotted out the rest of Q's sentence. Bond could see flashes of Richardson at the edge of the light, weaving between the cars in a crouch, his hulking black vest swelling his shadow into something animal.

"Reassigning," Q said. "Count of three – three –" Bond gripped the handle. "Two –" He'd lost sight of Richardson. "One – now."

This time the lock gave, and as soon as his body hit the seat the engine roared to life. Three rows down Richardson sprang to his feet; the driver's window chipped and shuddered but held, held, against his third shot. Bond slammed the car into gear and reversed straight back into the aisle, swiping the Rolls opposite as if this were a game of dodgems; Dooley lunged for the passenger door and had barely slammed it behind him before Bond swerved in a rubber-burning turn and peeled for the exit, blowing past Richardson so close that he staggered from their wake. One bullet clipped their bumper, one more shattered the guardhouse window, and then the bar that blocked the exit snapped like a twig and they rocketed into the shimmering city, the garage behind them ablaze with light.

They sped north along the river, Dooley white-faced and mumbling, Bond watching the rearview for any familiar cars. At St. Thomas's he veered up to the pavement outside the emergency-room drive, ignoring the KEEP CLEAR stencils, and unlocked the doors. Dooley stared uncertainly, his thinning hair sticking out at odd angles around the crown of his head.

Bond dug a pen from the glove box and a scrap of paper from his jacket pocket and scribbled a mobile number he knew from memory. "Phone Miss Moneypenny and tell her to meet me at Covent Garden as soon as she can." Dooley wiped his hand on his trousers and accepted the paper with unsteady fingers. "Tell her to wear those stockings that I like."

"Covent Garden," Dooley repeated. "Stockings." Some of his usual shrewdness blinked back into his face. "You gonna be all right out there on your own?"

Bond tapped the earpiece with a grin.

Holly's hands knew the path through their labyrinth of code, the triggers for the bots that would comb it for recent modifications. It was a surprisingly methodical task, like setting mousetraps. She went through the departments one by one, rousing every possible program to their aid, and as she worked she talked, to blot out Q's tense commands and Jeffries's muttered cursing and her own gnawing worry, to give both herself and Audrey a focus beyond their fear.

"Audrey, tell me about yourself. What do you do at St. Thomas's?"

Audrey had cocked her head at the sound of her name, but it took her a long time to process the question. Holly could see the subtle shift in her eyes, the mind clicking from one schema to another. "I'm a foundation doctor. Right now I'm in surgery training."

"Is that what you want to do – surgery?"

"I want to be a GP. Because I can't choose, I suppose." Her eyes flared, her tone sliced through with self-deprecation; Holly heard the echo of uncomfortable conversations, backhanded concern and silent smugness. "Most of my friends at King's wanted to do paediatrics."

"Mm. You know this means you and I can't be friends."

"Why?"

"Because I went to UCL."

That coaxed a laugh, incredulous but real, and for a moment they smiled across the gap, a single streak of cometlike joy. Holly watched it break apart as it reentered the atmosphere, watched the fragments fall from Audrey's face and leave it darker than before. "Mrs. Mason?"

"Call me Holly, please."

"Can you tell me what's really happening? What this is really about?"

Holly looked Audrey's image in the eyes, but it didn't quite work, the focus wasn't quite right, and she felt a longing she often found in this impersonal but intimate job, a need to see and be seen, to share a spark of unvoiced understanding with the person on the other end of the comm link. "I think that needs to be between you and Robert, love."

Audrey's lips pressed tight and she turned her head away. The light gleamed on a strand of hair that had fallen in front of her face and Holly saw it shiver, a thin gold streak guttering like a flame, and then it stilled.

When she looked up her face had set with immovable intent.

"Robert."

Q was leaning over Sullivan's shoulder, his back to the main screen, the two of them talking in low tones.

"Robert. Robert."

That last had assumed a tone of command, and Holly watched the men's heads turn and thought, If we save this girl, she'll be an excellent doctor.

Q's attitude was ever-so-slightly abashed. "Yes?"

"Whatever's happening... I need to know. I need to know if I'm going to die –"

"You're not going to die," Q insisted.

Her face crinkled, neither a smile nor a sob, quick and plaintive and unexpectedly flattered, as though his certainty might almost be enough to convince her.

"Because of... my line of work, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I would like my life to end. And, I mean, I know better than most people that you usually don't get to choose. But... I see a lot of people who think that they can protect their children or their parents or their friends by lying."

Q looked down at his hands as though he didn't recognize them, but he said nothing, and she kept talking.

"My supervisor and I had a meeting with a man – his mum had dementia and late-stage lung cancer and she had made him her medical proxy. We had to tell him that the cancer was terminal, that she would be gone in less than six months. When we were done I walked past him in the hallway as he was wheeling her out, and he said, 'Everything's fine, the doctors say you're doing fine.' And I remember thinking, I never want that to happen to me. To be... in a place where I can't be trusted with the knowledge of my own death. So... please, please, please, tell me the truth."

She fixed on the camera and Q stared at the screen, two sets of unwavering eyes, and Holly knew that although they couldn't see each other they could come close, because they had stood before on either side of a frightening question – Would you like to have dinner? Will you come home with me? – and faced the other person's gaze.

"The truth is," Q said, then stopped. His eyes ran along the edge of the screen and down the side, darting from corner to corner like some caged creature throwing itself against the bars. "The truth is I haven't been entirely honest with you about what I do for a living."

A beat, and then Audrey said, "I know."

A fraction of the tension fizzled out like a filament cracking. The expression that swept over Q's face was so sincerely flummoxed that Holly gave a little gasp of laughter.

"What?" He sounded almost offended. "What do you mean, you know?"

Audrey smiled, half-sheepish, half-amused. "You work for a software developer that calls you into work at all hours of the day and night? I thought maybe you were the CEO of your own start-up, but you don't like to talk about your work, and the only lads I've known who created a start-up talked about it constantly – they had to, you know, self-preservation."

"I think you mean self-promotion."

Audrey shrugged as much as her bonds would allow. "Same thing." They both smiled in the same way, an unwitting tug at the corners of the mouth, eyes averted from the impropriety of humor in a crisis. Then Audrey cleared her throat and asked, with assumed composure, as though they were chatting across a bistro table on their first date, "So what do you do?"

"I work for the Secret Service."

"As in – oh. Data security." She glanced at the trappings of her kidnapping with new appraisal. "You must be in pretty deep."

"I'm the head of the research and technology division."

"The head of the – you told me you were twenty-eight."

Q's eyebrows knitted as though he didn't see the relevance. "I am twenty-eight."

"You're twenty-eight and you're the head of technology at MI6?"

"He's very good at what he does, love," Holly interjected.

"All right, you two are cute and this heart-to-heart was probably a long time coming," Jeffries deadpanned from his desk, "but you might want to look at the equipment that's currently checked out to 007."

He started to swivel his monitor around so they could all see, but Q was at his side in a flash, absorbing the image at lightspeed.

"Bond, he's got a bomb." He cocked his head wryly at Holly. "Bond says, 'Of course he does.'"

The room around Q bristled with motion: Sullivan strode over to see for himself and Holly began to pace but Audrey was the one who erupted.

"A bomb? Are you fucking –" The expletive encapsulated her anger, and she didn't even try to finish the sentence.

Q asked, "Are there any suspicious objects in the room with you?"

"Just the computer, but –" She twisted in her seat, craning her neck over each shoulder in turn. "It could be under the chair, I don't know." A wild light animated her face. "What are they trying to steal from you, Robert, the nuclear launch keys?"

"That's not my department," Q reassured hastily, and she rolled her eyes. "Bond, you'll be looking for a metallic cylindrical container about twenty-one centimeters long. Depending on the generation it'll have a five- or six-digit alphanumeric code that can be keyed into a back panel to disarm it." Though he knew it wouldn't matter he turned away from the screen, head and shoulders hunching around the earpiece, any gesture to help him feel like a shield. "Don't try any heroics, it's got enough blasting power to demolish a three-storey building."

"Sir –" Jeffries tapped his ear and made a slashing motion; Q muted his end of the comm link but kept one hand on the controls, a warning to hurry up and make it good.

Jeffries understood. "Do you think 007 is involved?"

Q had considered this in an instant and dismissed it with the same speed. "Just the opposite. I don't think the mole planned for him. M's office released the details of his current assignment less than three hours ago."

Sullivan concurred, "I doubt he would have held your friend in such an identifiable location if he believed we were capable of rescuing her."

Jeffries threw up his hands as though they were the ones making this difficult. "So why the bomb?"

"In case she's not enough." Holly was leaning hard on one hand, the other cupping her pregnant belly, face so pale she looked almost blue. Sullivan rolled over a chair and pressed a hand gently but firmly on her shoulder until she sat down. "In case we decide to sacrifice one person for the good of the system."

They let that sentence sit, avoiding each others' gaze. Even Audrey looked away from the camera, scanning the juncture of wall and ceiling as though searching for a weak point, but Q could see the sheen of unshed tears, and he said nothing, because he could not promise her that he had never done such a thing, or that he would never do it again.

Get the girl, disarm the bomb, keep your secrets... Can the Quartermaster's Branch do it all? A flourishing pause, like a game-show announcer manufacturing suspense. It's more fun if you have a sporting chance, so I'll give you a clue: a puzzle that will tell you the future. Solve it, and maybe the girl will live.

If he meant to stretch their attention between tasks then this was a mistake, because Q could already feel the clarity that came over him at such blatant intellectual challenge, the appeal to the dark part of his mind that converted risk into a game.

Perhaps the mole felt it too. Should be child's play for a group of your intellect. I'll loop it for… oh, two minutes, nineteen seconds.

"That's oddly specific," Jeffries remarked.

It came from all sides at once, speakers on desks and in the ceiling adding their voices to the harmony, John Lennon over a doo-wop beat, McCartney and Harrison answering –

You're gonna lose that girl
(Yes, yes, you're gonna lose that girl)
You're gonna lo-oo-se that girl...

For an instant they froze like a clutch of rabbits caught in their den, wits fleeing because the body could not. Something darted across Audrey's face and she started to speak, but the video cut out – Q took a half-step forward and raised a hand as though he could catch the stream, drag it back somehow, but she was gone, and in her place ran a string of characters like an alien stock ticker.

YKICPBLWSQVXYDAETRBLWMTVGHQAZILLNBLWOWETGCZPNQAKJBLWSJTYCVDEBLWRIEKLAZCNBLWUEIGH

"It's repeating one set of three letters," Sullivan observed. "B, L, W."

Holly and Jeffries shared a skeptical glance.

"Do you think that's the key?"

"It can't be that easy."

"Just try it, we're running out of time –"

I'll make a point of taking her away from you
(Watch what you do)
The way you treat her, what else can I do?

Each time the key appeared, Sullivan read aloud the letter that followed: "S, M, O, S –"

Jeffries guessed, "Moss?"

"R –"

"Rossum," Holly said, so softly the music almost swallowed it – but as close as they were they all heard, and all eyes turned on her. Sullivan's jaw tensed. Jeffries gaped as though she had just uttered an incredible obscenity. "It's 'Rossum,'" she repeated, with apology.

Above her head Q saw the confirming letters scroll by – B, L, W, U – and then the song ended and the code faded out with the reverb, surrendering the screen again to Audrey's image. She was calling for someone, useless random syllables, Robert, Robert, and Q didn't even think to respond, because directly across the desk Holly was staring with an awful rising tremor as though she feared for him, or feared him.

After a moment he remembered the comm link. "Bond –"

"I'm two minutes out –"

"The code to disarm the bomb is 'Rossum'."

Bond quietly tested the word; in his mouth it sounded foreign. "What is that? Is it a name?"

He should deny it, or say nothing, let Bond draw whatever conclusion he needed, but Q wanted to warn him somehow, to explain how a word could be so dangerous.

"It's my name."

Author's Notes:

"Because I went to UCL."

King's College London and University College London have a historic rivalry.