Full title is: "Leaving New York: This Is Becoming A Habit".

Here we go! This fic is the second part of "Loyalty and Betrayal", and picks up immediately after that left off.

This chapter is rated R for language. Later chapters will be rated for sex, violence and language.

Also, you'll see that there is a chapter of another fic, "What Happened At Glastonbury" posted immediately below this one. It's my first work to feature only my own original characters, and I'm posting it as it ties in with the events in "Betrayal's End". It's not essential that you read the "Glastonbury" chapters to understand "Betrayal's End" - feel free to skip it if it's not your thing - but it does fill in a lot of the background (including what REALLY happened between Sienna and a certain British agent...).

Enough of me talking. On with the fic!

***

“Uh, excuse me? Excuse me?”

Startled, I turned in my seat to face the man sat next to me on the plane. His eyes widened, and I realised I was glaring.

“I need to… put my…”

“Of course.” I smiled as sweetly as I could manage, which at this moment in time, wasn’t very. I sidled past the snoring guy beside me and stood in the aisle. My fellow traveller stumbled into the aisle, quickly stowed his coat in the overhead locket, then sat back down again quickly. I followed suit.

He nervously smiled at me. “Uh… thanks.”

I forced myself to reply appropriately, even though what I really wanted to say was Shut up, I’m trying to think. “You’re welcome. I’m sorry if I seemed a little… distracted.”

“Uh, no problem. We all get days like that, right?”

Well, let’s see now. “We all” are not Sienna Tovitz. I am Sienna Tovitz. I am thirty years old, I work for Interpol, and I have a psychotic ex-boyfriend who two days ago escaped from prison back in Britain, where I used to live. I am on a flight from New York back to Britain, supposedly so that the security services there can question me about my involvement in the attempt to foil a terrorist attack on a football stadium there this summer. In reality, probably so that they can dangle me out there as bait in the hope that said psychotic ex-boyfriend will come out of hiding so that he can even the score with me for my helping to put him in prison.

Oh, and my current boyfriend, Bobby Goren, at least I hope he’s my current boyfriend, is also coming over. Which would make me happy, since he’s a gold-shield detective with the NYPD Major Case Squad, and so is his partner, Alex Eames, who’s also coming over.

Except that yesterday, just before I had to catch this flight, he and I had an almighty row about the fact that whilst we were separated, I slept with someone he absolutely hates. Who also lives in Britain. And who we’re almost certainly going to meet in the next few days, since about the one person John Durham – that’s the psycho ex, keep up – hates more than me, is Drew Davenport, who actually put him in prison, and whom I slept with once, that’s once, well, once in the sense of “on one day”… and whom Bobby loathes with a vengeance.

And it’s nearly Christmas, and instead of spending time with my beloved Bobby and my family, I’m contemplating the small but very real chance that myself, himself, and our friends might all be dead in the next few days.

So, no. “We all” do not have days like this.

I smiled, though it probably looked more like I was baring my teeth. “Yes. I suppose we do.”

“Well, you know what…”

I cut him off. “Listen. I don’t mean to be rude, but right now I’m not very good company and I would prefer not to talk. Thank you.”

“Uh… okay.” He smiled nervously. As he turned away to fumble in his briefcase, he looked at me warily out of the corners of his eyes.

The hell with it, I didn’t care. Let him think me a crazy psycho bitch. Right now I had every right to be angry.

In fact, I was not just angry. I was furious. Had I been British, I would have been bloody furious, which was just as well, because the alternative was being scared shitless.

Actually, I thought, I’m both.

I was angry, I was scared, and I was all on my own.

I closed my eyes briefly; it didn’t help. When I opened them again, it was still as if I was the only real person on the plane, and everything, everyone else, was just a backdrop, just extras in the scene I was playing. The fact that it was an insanely happy flight didn’t help. Christmas was only a few days away, All around me were people heading for home, leaving behind the US to rejoin their families on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

I should be doing that too.

The thought was like a physical pain. If the world were the right way up, then I should be happy, too. I should be looking forward to seeing my friends again. I had missed Jack and Tanya so much, and the thought that I was going to travel 5000 miles, all the way to their home, their country, and not see them, was too bitter even to contemplate.

That’s the way it has to be. Tanya would tell you that herself, if you asked her.

But I couldn’t ask her. Right now, it was dangerous to be anywhere near me, and the thought of anyone harming Jack, Tanya or their unborn baby was too horrible to contemplate; I was almost more afraid for them than I was for myself.

That anyone might harm them… You mean John. You mean that John might try to harm either Jack or Tanya, to get to you.

I shivered all over at the thought, a horrible, skin-crawling feeling creeping over me, as, once again, the image of a handsome face forced itself into my consciousness.

There had been a time, only too briefly, when I had kissed that face. Kissed it, and done more. I shuddered again in revulsion. No-one, apart from my therapist (whom I was thinking of changing, if, when, I got back to New York) knew just how much I hated that. Normally, if you have a relationship with someone who turns out not to be who you thought they were, you can ditch them and move on, and the memories fade.

John, however, had been so much worse than I’d ever imagined. A senior police officer in the London Metropolitan Police, he’d been corrupt. On the payroll of one of the Eastern European mafias, supplying them with information and putting his fellow police officers’ lives at risk. I was stuck with the miserable knowledge that for six months I – Sienna Tovitz, dedicated Interpol officer – had been sleeping with that man. That my judgement had been that bad… well, I hadn’t been judging at all. I’d been looking for anything, anyone, to numb the pain of breaking up with the love of my life, and what better way to do it than by trying to frack it out of my system by throwing myself headfirst into a relationship with someone I barely knew?

And whose fault was that?

Another face floated before me, and I winced in pain. This pain was deep, sickeningly so. Why did you do that to me, Drew? I thought silently, as Drew’s face came to the forefront of my thoughts.

Bobby, Drew, John… All brilliant. All clever, all determined, and all with that streak of bastard in them that you like so much, Sienna, a little voice in my head muttered.

I couldn’t deny it. What did it say about me, that the three men I’d been involved with in the last four years all had that same characteristic, that urge to use their intelligence to dominate others? How many times had I seen Bobby, or Drew, or John, size up a person within a few minutes, and then ruthlessly take them apart with a few well-chosen words? They even had similar professions; Bobby and John, senior detectives; Drew, a intelligence officer with MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, and if there was one thing that marked out people in that line of work from the rest of us, it was that on one level, they didn’t consider themselves to be part of the rest of us.

They were set-aside, special, the defenders of law and order… right up to the point where John decided that he wanted some of the money and the lifestyle that the gang leaders he saw breaking the law every day and getting away with it had, and sold out his own side, his own people, to get it. He must have gone into work every day, looked at the people around him who trusted him, and laughed himself half to death on the inside, to think that he was cleverer than them.

But Bobby is different, I thought miserably. For the past few months, I had been able to take some comfort in that. Bobby was the only one of the three I had truly loved, and he was, by far, the better man. When he and I had parted, I had felt as though part of me had gone missing. When we had reunited, it had been like the sun coming back into my life. Finally, back in New York City with the man I loved, I had begun to feel happy again.

Until things changed. Until a horrible case at work and the revelation that Alex Eames, his partner and the only woman who understood him better than I did, had once secretly asked to be assigned a new partner, had caused him to sink into the black moods that sometimes afflicted him. It made him remote from all of us who loved him and I had tried so hard to get close, but in the end, only Bobby could break that wall down.

And then the two of us had had a screaming row. It had started stupidly with one of those slightly drunken disagreements over one of us wanting sex (him) and the other not wanting it (me – I was tired and had had two large glasses of wine), and degenerated into a row in which, furious at having to be the one always considering the other one’s feeling, I’d flung the one hurtful fact I’d been trying to conceal from him for months at his head.

Just looking back, I winced. I could still hear my own words: How could I sleep with Drew? The usual way, since you ask. And then, even worse, in response to Bobby’s nasty remark that he was surprised Drew had even managed to get it up, since he usually preferred men, Three times in one night, as it happens, and that’s more than you’re capable of right at this moment.

Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, I thought miserably. I tried to look on the positive side. Bobby had come to find me at the airport, this time. He had hugged me and kissed me and said that he trusted me, and I sincerely hoped that things would be different…

But what if they aren’t? What if he arrives in London having spent the hours since you said goodbye brooding on what you did? You need him right now, Sienna, and you might just have pushed him away for good with those manipulative last words of yours…

I shuddered to think of the consequences if I didn’t have Bobby beside me, and another memory came into my head.

John and I, this time. John and I in the airport I was about to fly into, which was a thought I could do without, but the memory would not be denied. It had been a weekend. The two of us had rarely spent a weekend together. John’s position as a senior detective and my new job at Interpol’s London headquarters meant that free time was a rarity for both of us, with free time that coincided with the other’s free time even rarer still. Our relationship had been largely conducted in the darkness of the city’s evenings. Meals at some restaurant or other, a fashionable bar here or there, energetic sex at my apartment or his, followed usually by one of us leaving the other asleep to hurry off to some early-morning meeting or other.

That weekend, however, I had wanted to get out of the city, just for a little while. Surprisingly, John had agreed with me that it would be pleasant to get out of the city, even just a little way, and walk in some green fields. We had headed west out of the city and walked around for a little while, eaten at a pub, and had been heading back home when I had suddenly remembered that I needed to buy a gift for Tanya’s birthday. Since we were near Heathrow Airport, it made sense to park there so that I could browse the shops and choose something.

After I’d bought a silk scarf with a vaguely Oriental-looking pattern that I hoped she would like, I looked for John and found him standing by one of the huge windows looking out onto the runways, watching as the planes lifted and lowered in the darkening sky beyond the glass.

I had smiled at him. “Wishing you were on one of those planes?”

He chuckled. “Not really. I like it here, Sienna. I like London. I have a good thing going here.” He paused, and tipped his head on one side, appraising me. “What about you, now? How long have you been here?”

He knew the answer, but I supplied it anyway, to make conversation. “About… hmm. Four months now.”

“Four months.” He turned away and stared out of the window. “So, do you wish you were on one of those planes? Going back to New York, maybe?”

I clenched my teeth. John had an unerring instinct for uncovering truths that you wanted kept secret. A useful talent in a police officer; and a personality trait I was increasingly beginning to think was something you did not want in a boyfriend. “No. There’s nothing left for me there.”

“Well, yes. It wouldn’t be much fun if you went back there and found that he’d replaced you, too, now, would it?”

I stared at him, open-mouthed. I couldn’t deny the truth, but…

“I’m not stupid, Sienna,” he said, very softly. Our eyes met, and locked. I shivered slightly, not from arousal, and thought briefly, No, John. No, you have not replaced Bobby, just before he lent in and kissed me, possessively, and I responded from instinct. We said no more, but left the airport, drove back to his apartment, and had sex for an hour before I left to get a cab back to my apartment to get ready for the following morning’s work.

Two weeks later, Drew Davenport shattered my world to broken pieces with a few words and some photographs of John in the company of several notorious Russian gangsters that Interpol, the Metropolitan Police and MI5 had all been trying to put away for years. Of course, I agreed to pretend to John that I was still his girlfriend, even though the thought of what he’d done made me physically sick. It was the only way I could salvage some of my self-respect from the situation, and it cost me a bullet wound and several long months of therapy, both mental and physical.

Why had I been attracted to John? I’d wondered that a lot in the two years since that had happened, and I supposed it was partly because I’d always sensed that he was keeping some part of himself hidden… and I responded the way women often respond to men who hold something of themselves back, becoming fascinated by him, wanting to be the only one who got to know the real man on the inside.

That, and he looked like Bobby, except that he was younger and fitter, and you wanted to frack, I thought viciously. How could I have acted like that?

Because you were manipulated. You trusted Drew, and he betrayed you.

That thought hurt, too. It hurt so much, and I would have given anything to be able to discuss my thoughts with Bobby, share what I was going through. Except that he didn’t want to hear about it…

Except that he had tried, once. Once, before everything went to pieces in the aftermath of the Harold Garrett trial, when he and I had gone to one of our favourite bars, to relax and listen to music and enjoy a quiet drink in each other’s company. We’d snuggled together on one of the battered comfortable sofas there, and I’d leant in against Bobby’s large, comfortable shoulder, feeling his huge hand gently stroking my hip. I’d looked up into that broad, handsome face, those dark sleepy eyes I loved so much, so wise, and so caring, because although Bobby had a ruthless streak in him, he, unlike Drew or John, was wise enough to know it, and a good enough person to have chosen to use it to serve others.

Bobby’s ruthless side came out only when he needed it to. The rest of the time, he could be amazingly gentle and a wonderful listener. He could also be a workaholic who forgot to wash the dishes and left his socks on the floor after he ran out in a hurry, having just had an sudden inspiration about a case he and Alex were working. Sometimes, he could be a typical American male who liked to drink beer and eat pastrami on rye and fix cars with his friend Lewis, then watch the football game at a bar afterwards. He was, in short, simply a man, with his own unique good traits, bad traits, and quirks, and I loved him immensely.

He’d smiled at me, and murmured “Sienna?”

“Yes?”

“I just…” He paused, thought for words, and began again. “Sienna, I just wanted to say… I know a lot happened to you whilst we were apart and maybe… Maybe I haven’t been very good at listening. I just wanted to say … if you want to talk to me about it…”

I’d looked at him then, really looked at him, my eyes flickering past the stubble on his chin and his messy salt-and-pepper curls, and looking deep into his dark eyes, and I’d felt my heart contract with love. It was a feeling so elemental I was powerless to resist it. I’d had relationships before, but Bobby… Bobby was the one. The man I loved, and at that moment, I’d nearly done something crazy and proposed.

I had nearly said, Bobby, I love you and you love me. We understand each other, we’re in the same line of work and we share the same values. We have great sex and the age difference doesn’t matter, it doesn’t mean anything except that sometimes you get admiring looks from other men wondering how you managed to bed the attractive young redhead. I can talk to you and you never think anything I say is dumb, and I always think everything you say is fascinating. Let’s stop wasting our time and agree to spend the rest of our lives together, and we’ll buy a large apartment together, and maybe in the fullness of time we’ll need to buy a bigger place because we’ll have little Gorens, and Alex will be Aunt Alex and spend Sunday afternoons in the park with us teaching the kids to play soccer and softball and throwing Frisbees, and we’ll grow old together, and neither of us will ever, ever, have to feel alone again.

But I hadn’t. Not because I feared Bobby’s reaction, but because at the back of my mind, I didn’t want to marry Bobby knowing that, sooner or later, John Durham would be released from prison. I couldn’t give myself to him knowing that that lay in our future.

So I’d smiled, and said “Bobby, thank you so much for saying that. But right now I want to just spend time with you… I want to forget all the bad stuff and just enjoy being with you.”

And he’d smiled and held me closer, and I’d nearly cried.

Later that night, back in my own apartment, I’d been unable to sleep for the thoughts racing through my head, one thought coming to dominate them all, Drew Davenport, you utter bastard, this is all your fault.

So I’d called him. Called him knowing perfectly well that England was five hours ahead of New York and that he would be asleep. He’d screwed up my life, the least he could do was to wake up and listen to me.

And Drew had answered, his voice surprisingly clear, and urgent. “SiSi, is everything all right?”

“No, Drew. No, everything is not alright.”

“Huh?” His voice changed. “Why are you ringing me?”

“Because I want some answers. I want an apology.”

He sighed heavily and for a few seconds I thought that he’d cut the call off, but then he replied: “Look, please can we not do this now. It’s five in the morning, and I need to sleep.”

“Did I wake Mike? Is that it?”

He sighed again, and spoke in slow, measured tones. “No, you didn’t wake Mike. You didn’t wake him because he’s not here.”

“Then you can fracking talk to me.”

“And say what? What is it you want me to say that’s so bloody urgent it can’t wait til a better time?”

“A better time? You fracked up my life, Drew! You let me fall for someone you knew was corrupt, and you used me to put him in prison, and you never once told me the truth. You used me as bait.”

“Yes. I did.” He sighed. “Look, SiSi… You want me to apologise. You want me to apologise, and to say I wish I hadn’t done it, and I can’t, okay? I can’t say that because I’d be lying. I did what I had to do to put a corrupt bastard in prison. Durham was putting people’s lives at risk, and he betrayed everything he was supposed to protect. I was told to stop him, and I did. I’m sorry you got hurt, but I can’t say I wish I hadn’t done it, because that’s not true. End of story.”

“Not end of story! You used me, you bastard. You manipulated me into leaving Bobby. You waited til I was vulnerable and you used that. You used me.” I thought of what had happened, or rather not happened, tonight, and nearly started crying. “You’re a complete bastard, Drew, you know that? Everything that’s gone to crap in my life, is that way because of you!”

Silence from the end of the phone. Then Drew’s voice, angry at me for the first time ever.

“Okay, Sienna, so your life didn’t work out perfectly? You want to put all your troubles with Goren on me?” He snorted derisively. “Fine, I don’t care. I’m a bastard, and you knew that, you’ve always known that. Put it all on me if you like, Sienna, but here’s the truth: you practically bit my hand off when I mentioned that job. You couldn’t have applied for it faster, and when you met Durham, you couldn’t get your pants off quickly enough. Face the facts; if you’d really wanted to stay in New York, I couldn’t have stopped you. You chose to apply for that job and leave him, Sienna, and that’s on you, not on me.”

He cut the call before I could reply. I put the phone down, carefully, and then grabbed the glass I’d been drinking from and flung it at the wall, screaming incoherently, then started sobbing.

Just the memory of it made me want to start crying again, but I forced myself not to. Forced myself to hold on to the rage I’d felt. How dared Drew speak to me like that! I’d been his friend, his closest friend, and he’d betrayed me – how dare he turn his anger on me?

Because everyone who know him thinks he’s a bastard. His boss encourages it and Tanya and Jack expect it of him because they’ve known him such a long time. You were the one person who liked him and thought he could be a better man. Now that that’s gone, why should he treat you any differently to the rest?

frack that. frack that. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to think logically. If Drew and I were still on good terms, he would be the logical person to go to for help. He and I were in the same boat; we’d both been responsible for putting John behind bars, and John undoubtedly hated us both.

But… dear God, no. I could not even begin to contemplate what I’d feel like if I went to Drew for help and he used me for bait to catch John again. And let’s face it, that’s why they’ve called you back.

Even worse… I knew Drew was right. It was why his words had hurt so much. I’d chosen to leave Bobby and go to London of my own free will. Bobby had forgiven me for that, but I still hadn’t forgiven myself, and I would never forgive myself if, through my own stupidity in trusting Drew, harm came to Bobby. I had no doubt at all that John wouldn’t stop at hurting him to get to me, and if it came to a choice between Drew or Bobby… well, that wasn’t a choice.

So, what did logic suggest?

I took a deep breath and shivered. I felt faintly ill at what I was contemplating doing.

What did it say about me, that the three men I’d been involved with were so similar in some ways? Was I attracted to them because (horrible thought) part of me was like that?

Or was I just a coward? Too afraid to risk my own life, so I was willing to risk someone else’s, someone I’d once called a friend?

If you do this, Sienna, you’re as bad as Drew, I thought blackly.

No, I’m not. No, I am not as bad as Drew. I’m not doing this because I want to earn plaudits at work, or because I can’t think of a better way to catch a criminal.

I’m doing this because I want myself, and Bobby, and Alex, and Tanya and Jack, and their baby, to live.

I ran over what I was going to say in my head, the arguments I was going to put to MI5. I might not be as devious as they were – that I’d never once suspected Drew had betrayed me demonstrated that only too well – but I could give any of them a run for their money in terms of stubbornness.

I needed to sleep, so I took a deep breath and visualised a box, a solid pine box, in my head. I pictured the box lid opening, and mentally placed all my worries inside it, then firmly closed and locked the box. My thoughts could keep in there for a while.

My last thought before I passed into sleep was one that should have gone in the box too…

…and besides, he really deserves a taste of his own medicine.

***
"What Happened at Glastonbury"
Chapter 1: "Tattoos, Wine and Beer"
Rating: R for some language and innuendo.

Interlude 1: “What Happened at Glastonbury 1: Tattoos and Wine.”


London, England.
June 2004.
House of Tanya and Jack Simmons-McAllister.


"So, what do you think - dragons or lions?"

I contemplated the designs Tanya was holding up thoughtfully. It was the day before we were due to catch the train to the Glastonbury Festival, where I'd agreed to join her, her husband Jack, our mutual friend (sort of) Drew Davenport, plus two others from the martial arts club she ran in her spare time, in help to run a bar to raise funds for a local women’s shelter.

The deal was that the six of us would work for six hours behind the bar on each day of the festival, and the charity would get paid for our labour. What we got out of it, other than the warm glow of helping a good cause, was free festival entry, free camping, free showers, free beer, free food, and time off to see the bands and drink. This was considered by all to be a good deal.

"Hmm…. well… dragons are a bit of a cliché."

Having booked the leave from work, packed the camping gear, and stocked up on Wellington boots and sunscreen, Tanya and I were just getting around to the important things, such as deciding which tattoo Tanya wanted to wear for the festival. She did in fact have several permanent ink tattoos, but these were mostly on her back and concealed by her clothing, since in her day job as a police self-defence instructor she had to at least try to look respectable.

This meant that on pretty much any occasion where she would be away from work for long enough, Tanya would design and paint on herself a really spectacular henna tattoo, somewhere that would be visible to everyone. The first time I'd met her at the club's training rooms, she'd just returned from Japan, and I'd spent most of my time in the changing room afterwards - when I wasn't rubbing my bruises - trying not to gape at the six-foot-two, 170-pound-plus woman with a Chinese dragon undulating up each calf, and two spectacular dragons fighting painted onto her belly, with the tail of one going all the way up to her neck, wrapping around it so that the point of the tail ended up on her cheek.

"Yep, I agree. Lions it is." Tanya nodded decisively, and began to flip through the book of designs. She drew them herself, and I was always amazed by the delicacy of the lines. (Amazed since this was also the same woman who could, and did, throw men outweighing her by fifty pounds over her shoulder with ease. )

I peered over her shoulder. "I like that one," I said, pointing to an image with a rather Egyptian look to it, an armoured woman with a lion's head.

"Sekhmet, goddess of the noontime sun?" Tanya grinned. "One of my favourites, too, that’s why I have her permanently on my back, but she's a vengeful warrior goddess, and that doesn't really fit with the whole Glastonbury thing."

"Peace and love, man?" I made the peace sign, we chuckled and swigged some more wine. Both of us had finished work that day, and were decidedly On Vacation (or in Tanya's case, On Holiday).

I had spent the day ignoring the jibes of some of my more staid colleagues at Interpol, who kept making cracks about hippies and swimming in mud, and was greatly looking forward to spending some time with my friends, away from the same old grind of crime, human misery, difficult cases and office politics. I liked my job, but it was exhausting.

I admit, I wasn't completely sold on the whole Glastonbury Festival thing myself, not yet, but I needed a break from work and Jack had practically forced me into agreeing to come. He himself had been bouncing around like Tigger since we'd had our places confirmed, and was currently downstairs fussing over whether we had everything packed.

I hadn't seen Drew much lately - he'd been in Moscow for the past week, working with the police force over there - but his emails for the past week or so had talked about little else. Then again, Drew often gave the impression that part of him was eternally seventeen, so it probably wasn't surprising he was looking forward to the festival too.

Well, if nothing else, the opportunity to sit in a field and slurp free beer should not be passed up. It had been far too long - over three years, in fact - since I'd cheerfully cast off my business suit and usual responsibilities and hit the open road. I'd travelled a lot when I was younger, but since I'd decided to change career and move from translating for Interpol into management, I'd just never managed to find the time.

And now, my tent, clothes and the rest of the gear I’d need for four days’ camping in a field was packed into my newly-purchased backpack, which was downstairs resting by Tanya and Jack’s front door, all ready for us to set off in the morning to go get the workers’ coach to the festival. My outfit was laid out ready for the morning, my own apartment was locked up with everything turned off, I was ready to go. Ready to leave real life behind for a few days…

"Ooh, I like that." I pointed to the design next to it, which showed a sinuous lioness stepping down from a rock, with the beast's head and forelegs in the foreground of the picture and an expression of elegant disdain on its beautiful face.

"Mmm yes… I'm having this one," Tanya decided, and selected one from over the page, labelled 'Lioness Rampant'. She sat up and picked up the stencil, applicator brush and henna paste. "Where do you want yours?"

"I'm sorry?"

"I'll do you. You should have one too. That one will suit you just nicely."

"We're back at work in five days' time; I don't want anything visible." I objected.

"Hmm." She cast a critical eye over my body; I was sprawled on my front on her bed. "Roll over." I obliged. She traced a finger thoughtfully up my belly and pursued her lips, looking at the design. "Yes, it will fit nicely there. You can have it visible if you want, and cover it up with a shirt whilst it fades."

"Where are you having yours?"

"My left shoulder and arm, if you don't mind helping out. Now get your kit off."

We partially stripped, Tanya shedding the top half of her clothes, me shedding the bottom half of mine. Since both of us had seen the other naked in the changing rooms more often than I could remember, this wasn't a big deal. She flopped forward onto her belly, exposing the broad muscled expanse of her back, pitted here and there with the scars and bumps of a lifetime spent fighting.

As ever, her skin was lightly tanned. Tanya’s skin was always pale gold, a legacy from her father, along with her height and build. (Or so we assumed; that her father had been black was the one thing she did know about him. Since her last attempt to find anything out from her mother had met with the response: “Look, I wish I’d never shagged him, alright?”, she’d pretty much given up.) I applied the stencil and began to paint, carefully.

Ten minutes later, I’d done painting her back, and she and I had very carefully manoeuvred ourselves, trying to avoid dislodging the paste from Tanya’s back, into a position where she could paint me. She was halfway through painting the tail, and I was trying not to giggle, because the brush was tickling like mad.

“Stop moving. If you move it’ll go all messy, then we’ll have to wash it off and start again.”

“I’m not sure I want it there anyway.”

“Well, it’s a bit late to be saying that now. What’s wrong with there, anyway? They won’t be able to see much more than the tail unless you wear hipsters or something. Men like that, it gets ‘em thinking.”

“What’s wrong with there is that I’m going to be plagued with guys asking if they can see my…”

Suddenly, the door flew open, followed by six feet of lanky blond British secret agent, clad in jeans and T-shirt and looking like he hadn’t slept in days, which was normal. I jumped, knocking the henna pot across the bedding.

“Drew, for frack’s sake, LEARN TO KNOCK!” Tanya yelled, more out of habit than anything else, since she was grinning hugely, whilst at the same time trying to help me mop up the henna.

“Why?” Drew grinned. His eyes were sparkling, an expression I’d come to know and be slightly apprehensive about.

“Because I could be in here shagging Jack. This is my bedroom, you know.”

“Jack’s downstairs fannying around with the backpacks and repacking stuff. Are we ready?” Drew paused and took in the scene, grinning widely at the sight of the two of us, half-naked, drunk, and covered in sticky black paste. “Hey, have the two of you been up to something?” He favoured me with a lecherous wink. I grinned back and shoved a wineglass in his direction.

“Well, if we had, it wouldn’t be anything that would interest you,” I pointed out. Drew’s sexual appetite was healthy, to the point of voracious, but limited strictly to his own sex.

“This is true.” He nodded and perched on the end of the bed, watching with interest as Tanya finished painting on the henna. Normally I would object to having a man I wasn’t actually sleeping with see me in nothing but my bra, but since Drew wasn’t interested in women (and I’d had two glasses of wine already), I didn’t much care.

“You know, it’s kind of rude to stare,” I remarked.

Drew shrugged, then smiled evilly at me over the rim of the wineglass. “Hey, I’ve seen it all before…”

I gave him my best Evil Glare of Doom, which left Drew unfazed, as eleven years of having Tanya glower at him on a regular basis had left him immune. “You said you weren’t looking.”

“I wasn’t looking at you, but you were kind of in my field of vision at the time. People who go around shagging other people in store cupboards shouldn’t go standing on their dignity… Are we going down the pub?”

“Shouldn’t you be packing or something?”

“I am packed. I’m always packed. Are we off down the pub?”

“Okay, yeah. In a few minutes.” Tanya packed up the tattoo kit, then went hunting for a towel.

“Need to get the henna off, huh?”

“No, Drew, we were thinking we’d carry on the lesbian experimentation part of the evening somewhere you’re not.”

“Fair enough… hi, Jack. You finished?”

Wandering in through the door, Jack waved hello, politely averted his gaze from my nearly-naked form, and pulled a mournful face at the sight of the empty bottle. “No, I just heard the words ‘lesbian experimentation’ and thought it sounded like more fun than packing tents.”

“We’re off down the pub.”

“Nearly as good.”

***

We’d intended to only go for a quick one at the Red Lion. Just one for the road to celebrate the start of the holiday, the start of the Festival. Whilst Tanya and I got the henna off ourselves, Drew disappeared downstairs to help Jack pack up the tents. From what I could tell, this had mainly involved the two of them shoving things into backpacks any old how, but it didn’t really matter, since we’d only have to carry things from the coach to the camping village away. It couldn’t be that far, I told myself as I lifted my first beer and toasted my three friends. It was tasty beer, and somehow it went down a lot more quickly than I’d intended it to. I must have been more thirsty than I thought.

“I shouldn’t mix my drinks,” I told Drew sincerely, as he put the second beer down in front of me.

“Well, in that case, you must stick to beer for the rest of the evening,” he replied, and nodded sagely whilst downing half of his in one swallow.

The second beer went down nicely as well. And the third. And possibly the fourth, although things got hazy at that point.

The next thing I knew, I was wandering happily back down the street in the warm evening moonlight from the Red Lion back to Tanya and Jack’s house, with my arm round Tanya’s waist and her arm around my shoulders, whilst behind us Jack and Drew had their arms slung round each other’s shoulders, and had apparently decided to treat the entire street to an a cappella rendition of “Me and My Shadow”. It actually wasn’t that bad; both of them could sing quite well. Neither Tanya or I, however, could, as she put it, “carry a tune in a bucket”, so we were content to let the boys enjoy themselves.

“Me, and my shadow…”

“…strolling down the a-ven-ue…”

Tanya and I got the giggles for no particular reason, and held on to each other more tightly. “Where am I sleeping again?” I asked her.

“On the sofa at this rate, sweetheart,” Tanya giggled, a sweeter sound than you’d normally hear from her. “So long as you don’t end up wrapped round the toilet like last time.”

“I was not wrapped around the toilet…”

“Not a soul can bust this team in two, we stick together like glue…”

“…I was just looking for my earring.”

“Yeah, for half an hour.” Tanya giggled again.

“Oh yeah? What about that time Drew and I and found you and Jack asleep on the sofa stark naked?”

“It’s my damn sofa and my damn husband.”
“Yeah, well, he’s not my husband, and I don’t need to see that first thing in the morning on an empty stomach.”

“Don’t be mean about my beloved,” Tanya playfully nudged me in the ribs with her elbow, and nearly knocked the wind out of my lungs. “Jack’s a fine specimen of man.”

Behind us, the mentioned one carolled at the top of his lungs, “You’d need a large crowbar, to pry us apart…” We giggled again for no reason.

“Ah, Tanni,” I murmured sentimentally, and hugged her one-armed. “I’m so glad I met you guys.”

“Yeah? Well, we’re really glad you met us, SiSi. I mean it,” Tanya said, and smiled. “Drew says you’re like the catalyst. You bring all of us together and make us work better.”

I wasn’t sure that was what a catalyst actually did, but I was absurdly touched to hear it. That Drew had said something like that made me feel good, feel like something good had come out of the last horrible year. I fought the urge to rub my leg and instead glanced back at the boys. Jack was looking happily around him at the street in the moonlight with the interested gaze of the more than slightly drunk, but Drew was looking at us.

He caught my eye, and smiled, and I felt a warm rush of happiness inside me. My three friends were around me, and I was going to spend the next four days just enjoying myself. What more could I ask?

::shielding eyes so I can't see the story yet::

Just wanted to pop in here and say YAY! I know what I'll be doing on my lunch break today. I'm seriously excited to have another Bobby and Sienna story!

I better make sure I have all my supplies:
Pillows for thudding--check
Ice bucket for cooling off--check
Full size freezer for times the ice bucket isn't enough--check
Cigarettes for after......well, you know--check

OK, I'm good to go!

OMG!!! I'm so excited I can't even see to read. Breathe.... breathe....

I've only ever read your completed fics, I've never had to wait for new chapters... this is going to be sweet torture.

I'm so excited to see this is here and started. Yay! Okay, where's the rest of it? Not the glastonbury stuff, the betrayal stuff...where is it? Maybe I can read it more than one chapter at a time over on ff.net? No, okay.....darn (I know it's no, cuz I've got alerts out on you....)

Finally I had time to sit and read this! Excellent as always and I can't wait for more. And I see that chapter 2 is up so I'm off to read it now.

By request of flashymom, I'm posting the chapters all in one thread for ease of reading. Hope this helps.


Chapter 2: ‘Trying to Communicate’.


London, England
December 2005
One day after the end of ‘Loyalty and Betrayal’.

***

It was bitterly cold, but the cold felt wrong.

That was his first impression of London proper, as he stepped out of the cab and into a dank, darkening, London night. He turned up his collar, pulled his woollen ski cap on, stuck his hands in his pockets, and began to follow the instructions Sienna had emailed to him last night, which he had had to log on at the last minute to collect before frantically dashing to the airport to make his flight.

Sienna had been so insistent on his ensuring he had them that he had felt obliged to pick them up before leaving, but as he struggled to negotiate the maze of streets with the aid of the printed instructions and an A-Z of London hastily purchased at the airport, he resisted the urge to call her and ask her why the hell she couldn’t just meet him somewhere public, why this ridiculous insistence on secrecy. He did not even know much about where it was going, just that it was: ‘A safe place. Somewhere we can talk in private’.

She’s spent far too much time with spies, they all think the world is listening in on them, just a bunch of egotists, he thought sourly, then forced himself to stop that line of thought. Whatever he thought of how Sienna was handling this, the fact remained that, for now, he needed to trust her judgement for both personal and professional reasons, or he could kiss goodbye to any hopes he had of reconciliation with her.

Not to mention what she said to me before she left… He was torn between hoping that Sienna hadn’t been being melodramatic and manipulative when she had said that to him, and hoping that she had been. The alternative – that she was telling the unexaggerated truth – had been preying on his mind all the way across the Atlantic, and he was only too aware that, somewhere at the back of his mind, was a terrible fear that he was already too late.

Don’t think that. Focus on the immediate situation, and deal with things as they occur.

He had tried to call her on her cellphone, and it had rung and gone to voicemail. He hoped that meant she was too busy… With a wrench, he refocused his mind on his surroundings, but that brought little comfort. It was not, he thought gloomily as he trudged along, particularly cold, not by New York standards, but somehow the cold felt different, danker and greyer compared to the sharp blue light of New York’s winter. The air scented different, alien, and the signs in the shops were unfamiliar. The people trudging past on the streets were, like himself, clad in dark winter coats and woollen hats and gloves, but their accents were unfamiliar, the rhythms of their speech jarring slightly to his ears (now chilling rapidly, like the rest of him).

Get your ass in gear, Bobby, he thought to himself astringently, as he navigated the maze of backstreets, trying hard not to wonder if Sienna had made a mistake with the directions, as he turned down yet another seeming dead-end of the faceless backs of office and apartment blocks, only to discover at the end of it that there was another alley, just off it to the side. It’s all in your head.

And it was, he knew only too well. If he and Sienna were here on a pleasure trip, London would seem fascinating and charming as it headed towards Christmas, the shops sparkling with light and warmth, determined shoppers thronging the streets in search of presents, the city trimmed out to celebrate the season in its winter hues of red and gold, endless music playing everywhere. As it was, everything about the city simply reminded him that this was not his home, and, like Sienna and Eames, he was here against his will.

I wish Eames were here, he thought unhappily. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, he and Eames had not been able to get tickets on the same flight from New York to London. She was travelling on the later flight, and would arrive the next day. He sighed deeply. He would never admit it, but the depth of his relationship with her sometimes worried him.

It was not that he was incapable of operating without her, he mused, as he punched the key-code Sienna had supplied him with into the number pad beside the door of a decrepit-looking block of apartments, and gratefully stepped indoors and out of the wind. It was just that over the years, the two of them had become accustomed to each other, to the point where they now worked best when they were together. And when we’re apart? he thought gloomily, beginning to climb the stairs inside. (Sienna’s instructions read, rather ominously, ‘Don’t trust the elevators’.) Now, of all times, Eames ought to be here.

He paused at the top of the stairs, took a breath, and tried to tell himself that it was just the stairs causing the breathlessness, just the stairs… but he knew it wasn’t. This was not a good situation, and he was only too aware that he no longer had any idea where he was. Although his sense of direction was by no means poor – he could have retraced his steps back to the main street – he had lost track of where he was in relation to where the cab had dropped him off, and, by extension, of where he was in relation to other human beings. The buildings around him were eerily, ominously, quiet.

And he had not heard from Sienna… Stop panicking, Bobby, and get your ass in gear, he reminded himself, and determinedly attacked the stairs again, doing his best to ignore his feelings. Nevertheless, Sienna’s words played in his head, over and over. Three sentences which he had gone over and over in his mind, trying to fathom all the possible implications.

They say they want us back to ask questions about the stadium, Bobby, but I think that’s just a cover.

And then the most frightening one, John Durham has escaped from prison, and he’s going to come after me.

And then the most disturbing one, I’m going to need you to…

…his thoughts were interrupted by the end of the short corridor at the top of the staircase at what appeared to be a blank white wall. He stared at it for a few seconds, and re-read the instructions, then put out his hand and pushed. It swung inwards, to reveal a solid-looking door with no handle.

He raised his hand, tried not to feel ridiculous, and knocked three times, paused, then two times, then a longer pause, then one.

The silence that followed after stretched to an ominous length. He wondered if he should knock again, or would that confuse her? Just as he was beginning to decide that he should try to call her, trying hard not to think about what it would mean if that door did not open and Sienna was not safe on the other side, there was a loud rattle from the door.

From the sounds coming from inside, it sounded as though the designers of Fort Knox could have learnt a few lessons from whoever had installed the security on the door. After what seemed ages of rattling and sliding, the door, finally, swung open, and he drew a deep breath – now was the moment of truth – then exhaled with relief at the unmistakeable sight of Sienna on the other side.

‘Oh, thank God,’ were her first words, followed by her swiftly grabbing his hand and yanking him indoors. She pushed the door shut, instantly, and turned her back on him, fiddling with the locks and bolts to secure it. As he waited, he took the time to scan the interior of the room.

He was in what looked like a small apartment, except that it was tiny, barely larger than his kitchen back home. There were no windows… yet, he realised, it was at least partly lit by natural light. He glanced up, and saw that there were small glass panels at the very top of two of the walls. Picturing the building in his head, he realised that they must face the stairwell – yet he had not seen the glass panels himself as he climbed. Perhaps he would notice them when he and Sienna departed, but he could as easily have never noticed at all that the room was here.

A bolthole, then. A refuge for someone who needed somewhere to hide where no-one would look. It was painted white and looked almost sterile, chilly even, except that it was not noticeably cold, almost warm compared to the damp coldness outside. The furniture was basic – a bed, left unmade with the covers thrown back, in one corner, a small desk, a dining table and two chairs – and had the soulless look of having been ordered from a catalogue. He began to wander around it, curious. Something about the place, despite – or perhaps because of – its sparsity suggested that the previous occupant had been male?

Looking closely, he saw that the previous occupant had made some attempts at decoration, after all. There were signs that posters had been hastily removed from the walls. A scrap of one of them still clung to the wall. He inspected it closely, and could just make out, in the corner, the words ‘…n Day 2005’. His memory made the link, filling in the missing letters, and, with a sense of irritated inevitability, he realised whose apartment it must be, or at least whom the previous occupant had most likely been.

He turned to find Sienna looking at him with an unreadable expression, and it struck him with a jolt that she seemed to be wearing that face more and more recently. He had always been able to read her like a book, her emotions and thoughts near to the surface (too near, sometimes). Now, there were times when he had no idea at all what was going on inside her head.

Part of him wanted to hold out his arms to her, to embrace her warmly after their brief separation… but he held back, unsure of how Sienna would react to that. She was dressed severely in a black suit and boots, a white shirt underneath, and no jewellery or colour to brighten things up. She might almost be about to attend a funeral, he thought, and shivered slightly. His warm, friendly Sienna was a long way away.

‘Where’s Alex?’

‘She... uh… they couldn’t find two seats on the same flight, she’s arriving later,’ he replied awkwardly.

‘Bobby,’ she said, then paused, then suddenly smiled warmly. ‘It’s so good to see you again.’

‘You… you too.’ He paused, and his words trailed off. He cocked his head on one side without realising what he was doing.

She drew a deep breath. ‘Well. This isn’t exactly easy, is it?’

‘No.’

‘So, let’s get started.’ She closed her eyes briefly, then opened then with a certain determination. ‘Okay, then. Do you want to talk about our professional problems first, or our personal problems?’

‘It’s interesting that you… you mention the two as if they’re equally important,’ he replied.

Sienna frowned, and for a heartstopping second he thought he had said entirely the wrong thing. She pursed her lips thoughtfully. ‘Well, let’s see. On the one hand, I have a quite possibly psychopathic ex-boyfriend with links to a major criminal organisation on the loose, who has made several threats to kill me. On the other hand, I have moved all the way away from somewhere I finally found to call home, away from my friends, to be with someone who I love, and we’ve had a major row, and I feel as though nothing I say or do is ever enough…’

She broke off, and looked at him almost apologetically, frowned tiredly, then completed her sentence. ‘One is a threat to my life, the other is a threat to my happiness… and I love you, Bobby. I do love you. In here, we’re safe for a little while. Talk to me, because I need to know if the two of us can work together, and I don’t think that I can do that if we’re continually trying to ignore an elephant in the room.’

‘You want us to be completely honest.’

‘Yes. I really do.’

‘Would you… would you go first?’

Sienna sighed heavily, and suddenly looked very tired. For the first time ever, he saw the ghosts of lines upon her face.

‘Okay, well…’ She paused, then suddenly frowned, screwing up her face. ‘You know what, Bobby? I feel like I’m always going first. I made the first move on you way back when we first got together, I made the arrangements to move to New York to be with you, not once, but twice. That is not easy, Bobby, it’s really not easy to move jobs with such short notice, and I had to call in every favour I was owed and then some to do that and it cost me a lot, both times…’

He wanted to interject, but she was on a roll…

‘…I tell you I love you, I tell you that if you ask me to marry you, I’ll say yes, I tell you that if you want children with me but you’re worried about passing on your mom’s illness, we could look at having children using a donor, whatever, I would do that because I love you and I want to be with you… ‘

She looked at him with an expression of hopelessness that chilled him. ‘Really, Bobby, what else can I do? Tell me! What more can I possibly do to reassure you? I do all this, and you get hung up on some stupid fixation about who I slept with whilst I was in London; did I ask you, even once, who you were screwing whilst we were apart? Sometimes I think you want this relationship to fail, so that you can stay on your own!’

They stared at each other for a minute. Sienna’s eyes were angry and hurt. He could only wonder what his looked like. For the first time in a long time, he was completely lost for words; though he could think of a great many things to say, he could not think of anything that wouldn’t make things worse.

More Sienna stories, I'm in heaven!!! As with the others you had me hooked within the first few sentences I can't wait for more.

I owe you a big thank you, it was actually your Sienna stories that got me into reading fanfiction. The first time I found them I ended up sitting up all night and the next day reading, I was glued to the computer for hours. I had read a few other stories and wasn't that impressed until I found yours, they just transported the reader to the place and time, not to mention you write a GREAT love scene. Afterwards I gave some other writers a chance and it amazed me how many good writers are out there.

Please hurry with the next chapter, I'm on pins and needles.

Now this is the sort of comment that makes writing fanfic really worthwhile. I'm blushing mightily. Thank you so much for writing that.


This next bit is posted for ciaddict. This is the master list of all the characters I've invented so far. I am going to aim to keep "Betrayal's End" focussed on Bobby, Sienna and Alex. I'm partly writing "What Happened At Glastonbury" just so I have somewhere to play with the original characters I've created.

Hope this helps!


Characters from Law and Order: Criminal Intent.
Detective Bobby Goren: You know who he is In my fic, he and Sienna met when he was around 41 years old, in summer 2002 (i.e. between the end of LOCI Season 1 and the start of Season 2). They were together for about a year, then the relationship ended when Sienna left to go work for Interpol in London. Following the events of "Bulletproof Armour", they got back together and Sienna moved to New York in late autumn 2005 (in terms of Season 5's events, this would be roughly in between the first episode with Nicole Wallace, but before the start of the Harold Garrett case). Loves Sienna very much, but afraid of losing her. Has a particular hatred for Andrew Davenport due to a) Davenport splitting up him and Sienna, Davenport subsequently getting Sienna shot on duty, and c) Davenport then sleeping with her.

Detective Alex Eames: You know who she is too! Smart, snarky, and capable. Has a cautious friendship with Sienna. In my fic, she didn't accompany Bobby on the surveillance operation where he first met Sienna (waaay back in "Army Fatigues"), but did accompany him to London in "Bulletproof Armour", when she saved Andrew Davenport's life, and also had a romantic encounter with one of Tanya Simmons' martial arts instructors. Currently on her way over to London as of "Betrayal's End", chapter 2.



Important Original Characters
Sienna Tovitz ("SiSi"): Thirty years old, red-headed, half-Russian on her father's side, and works for Interpol in New York. Also thoroughly in love with Bobby Goren, with whom she has had a passionate and rather stormy relationship since they met during the events of "Army Fatigues" when she was 26. There's roughly a 14-year age gap between them. Began work aged around 23 as a translator for Interpol due to her fluency in Russian and several Eastern European languages. Since then, has moved into management and is currently a Section Head (i.e. lower management level) for Interpol in New York.

We haven't yet met Sienna's immediate family, though we do know that most of them are in the oil industry; her uncle Peter, who put in a brief appearance in "Bulletproof Armour", works in this field. Sienna has hinted a couple of times that she is something of the “black sheep” of her family due to her refusal to go into the same line of work. She studied languages at college, including spending a year in Russia, then volunteered with the Peace Corps in Eastern Europe before applying to work for Interpol.

Sienna loves Bobby very much, but their relationship foundered the first time around on the rocks of the age difference between them, and their separate difficulties in adapting to having another person in their lives. This was also due in no small part to Sienna's "friend", MI5 Intelligence Officer Andrew Davenport, persuading her that her relationship with Bobby had no future and it would be better for her career if she applied to work as a liaison officer in London between Interpol and the London Metropolitan Police. Almost as soon as she got there, she began a rebound relationship with a British police officer, Detective Inspector John Durham.

This ended badly when Andrew Davenport revealed to her that Durham was corrupt, in the pay of a branch of the Russian mafia. Sienna agreed to pretend to still be Durham's girlfriend in order to entrap him. This went badly wrong when one of Durham's associates got suspicious and shot her, injuring her left leg (she eventually made a full recovery). Durham was imprisoned for a year, as lack of evidence meant he couldn't be imprisoned for longer.

Whilst in London, Sienna became very close friends with Davenport, and also with two of his friends, Tanya and Jack Simmons-McAllister. Her friendship with Davenport ended abruptly when it was revealed that he had known all along that Durham was corrupt, and had in fact persuaded her to come to London largely so that he could use her to entrap Durham. Since they (Davenport and Sienna) apparently became so close they slept together at one point, she's still very much figuring out how she feels about this, but she does know that she loves Bobby more than anyone else in the world - including Drew.


Andrew Davenport ("Drew"): Senior Intelligence Officer working for the Serious and Organised Crime Unit of MI5 (the British domestic security agency). 34 years old. First encountered Sienna and Bobby on the surveillance operation described in "Army Fatigues", in the course of which the three of them had to work together to save each other's lives. Stayed in touch with Sienna afterwards and persuaded her to come to London and leave Bobby. Became extremely close to Sienna, until their friendship ended acrimoniously when it was revealed that he'd known all along that Durham was corrupt, and had deliberately manipulated Sienna so that he could use her to entrap Durham.

Drew was a police officer for a couple of years when he was younger. He was recruited by MI5 whilst still serving in the police, when he was around 20 years old. He subsequently went to university to complete a degree in Politics with Russian, then returned to work for MI5 full-time. He claims to have no family, though was brought up by his father when his mother died when he was three. They subsequently became estranged when his father couldn't reconcile his religious beliefs with his son's sexuality, and sent him to live with his uncle, who sexually abused him. This may be why he is so determined to catch people responsible for human trafficking - and anyone who would assist them.

He was also close friends with Tanya Simmons (they met when he was 17), and Jack McAllister (who he used to share a house with when they were younger). This friendship ended abruptly when Jack revealed that he'd guessed that Drew had manipulated Sienna to help him catch Durham. He was also recently in a close relationship with another man, a young writer named Michael Jones, but this appears to have ended. Drew was injured - shot in his left arm - during the events of "Bulletproof Armour". Alex Eames saved his life by killing his attacker. He has yet to encounter either Bobby or Sienna since, but it's a safe bet that, if he does, things won't go well.

Jack McAllister-Simmons: Friend of Sienna in London. Journalist who also occasionally works with Drew. Sienna met him through Drew, who introduced her to Jack and Tanya when she first arrived in London. Jack’s passions in life are his wife, Tanya, his job, playing the piano, cooking, and trying to get Drew to be a better person, which he has been attempting to do since they first met over ten years ago. Since then the two men have had an awkward friendship. They were romantically involved at one point, but this ended some time ago after Jack realised he preferred women.

Shortly afterwards, Jack, who was still very much learning his trade as a journalist, tried to read several files on Drew’s computer as an exercise in getting information. When Drew caught him, he said that the best deal he could offer Jack was to work for MI5 from time to time or go to prison. (It apparently took Jack several years to realise that Drew set him up deliberately.) Jack accepted, and the two have had an apparently fruitful working and personal relationship ever since, with each supplying the other with useful pieces of information. Unfortunately this ended abruptly after Jack worked out that Drew had known all along that John Durham was corrupt, and confronted him with this in front of Sienna, Alex, Tanya, and Bobby. The two are still not on speaking terms.

Jack is technically Laird McAllister, as he’s the son of a Scottish lord, but he never uses his title. He appears to be on good terms with his family despite – or possibly because of – the fact that he lives in London whilst they live on the family estate in the Highlands.

Though by his own admission, Jack has the fighting ability of a depressed rabbit, he’s nevertheless both perceptive and able to think on his feet, and his more cautious and thoughtful approach to life (he’s older than Tanya, Drew and Sienna) makes a useful counterpoint to Drew and Tanya’s tendency to fling themselves into life headfirst. Like his wife, he’s fiercely loyal to his friends, and cares deeply about those he’s close to. He and Tanya are now expecting their first child.


Tanya McAllister-Simmons: Best friend of Drew, wife of Jack. A martial arts instructor, Tanya divides her work between teaching self-defence to trainee police officers during the day, and running her own martial arts academy (dojo) in the evenings. Fortunately, she has near-boundless energy and strength; she’s over six feet tall, muscular, and capable of taking on most men in a straight fight. She and Sienna met after Drew introduced them shortly after Sienna first moved to London, and became friends almost instantly, with Tanya teaching Sienna self-defence.

She is also Drew’s martial arts tutor; they met when he was 17 and she was 15. Though young, she already had her first black belt. Both alone and lost in London – Drew had been thrown out by his father and sent to live with his uncle, Tanya ran away from home to live in a squat with some friends – the two bonded instantly. (Drew likes to joke that Tanya has been beating him up for the past fifteen years.) Shortly afterwards, Tanya joined the British Army Transport Corps whilst Drew joined the police. She rose to the rank of Sergeant before leaving the Army in disillusionment after seeing too many of her fellow soldiers die, and spent a year or so drifting in London before leaving to travel for some years, eventually arriving in Japan, where she stayed for some time.

Tanya returned from Japan determined to forge a new career as a martial arts instructor. With a little help from Drew, she soon found her niche in life. Shortly afterwards, Jack took a self-defence course at the dojo she was teaching at, and the rest is history.

Tanya has a strained relationship with her family, probably due to her mother not actually knowing who her father was. She has a sister, about whom we know only that she is married but childless.

Though outwardly seeming very different to her beloved husband, Tanya shares Jack’s strong moral code and loyalty to his friends. Probably the most pragmatic of all four of them, she tends not to agonise, but simply to get on with things. Her experiences in the Army taught her to appreciate the good things in life, and she treasures her home with Jack above all else. Her loyalty to Drew took a severe knock when Jack revealed the truth about what he’d done to Sienna, and she’s still figuring out what this means for them, whilst also adjusting to her impending motherhood. Is around eight months’ pregnant at the time “Betrayal’s End” is set.


Duncan Ampirelli (“Amp”): Young man (20) living in London near Jack and Tanya. Studying martial arts at Tanya’s dojo. Friends with Jack and Tanya, for whom he often does odd jobs, also got to know Sienna when she lived in London. Currently employed as a maintenance worker by the local council, also works part-time in the kitchen of Tanya and Jack’s local, the Red Lion.

Amp hails from the north of England. He moved to London to work for his uncle, who is something of a minor criminal with a sideline in selling counterfeit DVDs and employed him to drive a van. When the police caught them, Drew Davenport intervened to act as a character witness and persuaded the police to charge him with a lesser offence. They were friends at one point, but this seems to have taken a knock when Drew used the favour he’d done for Amp to blackmail him into lending him a van when he needed one to run surveillance from during the events described in “Bulletproof Armour”.

By nature a cheerful, amiable person, Amp is usually happy to help out his friends. His driving and car maintenance skills come in handy in this respect, as does his size and strength – he’s about the same size as Tanya and Bobby.



Other characters.
Tim Whitefield: Sienna’s boss and mentor at Interpol when she worked in New York. Appears in “Army Fatigues” and “Bulletproof Armour”.

DI John Durham: Sienna’s ex-boyfriend. A corrupt police officer who was in the pay of a branch of the Russian mafia. Drew Davenport was tasked with stopping him. Has just escaped from prison.

DS Mark Donaghue: Metropolitan Police Officer, working in the team which tackles art-related crime. Also a student of Tanya Simmons. Had a romantic encounter with Alex Eames when she stayed in London during the events of “Bulletproof Armour”.

DI James Hood: Police officer who worked with Goren, Eames and Davenport to stop the planned attack on the stadium in “Bulletproof Armour”.

Anne Langford: Head of MI5’s Serious and Organised Crime Unit. Drew Davenport’s boss.

Dr Fritz Hoffman: Retired pathologist of German origin. Lives in New York with his wife. Friends with Bobby Goren.

Michael Jones: Young writer. Was romantically involved with Drew Davenport; they were engaged to have a civil partnership during the events of “Bulletproof Armour”, but this seems to have ended shortly afterwards.

WOW!!!! Impressive! Makes me look bad.....you're so organized.....

Anyway, thanks for posting this. I'm ready for more now, please!

Where's the next chapter???

It's been FIVE days and I don't know how much longer I wait.

Post this weekend, pleeease, pretty pleeease, with sugar on top...

I broke, I'm bored, and there are no new LOCI episodes, I NEED A NEW CHAPTER!!!!

I'm having serious Bobby withdrawls.....

Posted in response to VDObsessed's requests (flattery and begging will get you everywhere, especially with fanfic writers), with one proviso. This is still waiting to be beta-read, so it may change when my beta has had chance to comment. If so, I'll post up the changes ASAP.

If I don't post before Thursday - Merry Christmas!

***

Chapter 3 - "Turnaround" (PG)


Eventually, he had to speak. “Sienna… let’s talk about our professional problems.”

Her head snapped up, angry, but he raised a hand, and she quieted, looking at him with an expression of mixed anger and thought.

“Sienna… I don’t know what to say, okay? I really don’t. I just don’t. I don’t know what to say to… all that… that won’t make things worse. So let’s talk about Durham.”

Sienna sighed tiredly, her anger deflating. “Jesus… now I don’t know what to say.”

“Start with what happened; I hardly know anything.”

“Okay. John is – was – eligible for parole, probation they call it over here – as you know, he only got a one-year sentence, since they couldn’t get any of the more serious charges to stick. As part of that, he was being transferred to a facility in the north of England, I think mainly so that they’d have a headstart on getting him into witness protection before the Russian mobsters he was working for caught up with him. On the way there, the security van they were travelling in was rammed from behind with a truck and forced off the road. By the time the police got there, they found the correctional officers in the van knocked out and John was long gone. No body, no traces, nothing. He’s on the loose and no-one knows where.”

“I guess the police over here are looking for him?”

Sienna snorted. “Hell yes. I think half the British police force are looking for him, plus MI5; they’re really not happy about this…”

“…and that’s why we’re here.” As he completed the sentence, Sienna’s eyes met his, and he knew beyond a doubt that, however briefly, they were sharing the same thought.

She slowly nodded. “Yes, that’s what I think.”

He shook his head, feeling tired; perhaps the jet lag was catching up with him. “Sienna… don’t misunderstand me, I’m not criticising your judgement, but isn’t it a little – I don’t know, far-fetched? to think that MI5 would call you all the way back over here just to use you as bait?”

“To use me as bait again. I’m not letting that happen again, Bobby, I swear to God I’m not.”

He wished he could hold her and reassure her, taking away her fear, but feared she would take it the wrong way, and so stayed where he was.

“Anyway, yes, I really think that they would. They have the perfect cover; the three of us – you, I and Alex – were going to be called over here anyway to help with the investigation into the stadium attacks. Five could easily ask the investigating team to move the timetable forward a little so that we’d be back over here, and then they have the perfect cover for what they want; me to use as bait to draw John out, you and Alex so that they can say that it was all part of a perfectly legitimate investigation.”

“What is it about Durham that makes Five so interested in him?”

Sienna smiled humourlessly. “Well, Bobby, he was a rising star in the Metropolitan police. He knew a very great deal about their operations – particularly, their joint operations with MI5 to gather intelligence on the Russian and Eastern European mafias. That information is only a year old, and it takes a very long time to infiltrate criminal gangs successfully. With John in solitary in prison, they’ll have left their agents within those gangs in place. Pulling them out would be a massive loss in terms of intelligence gathering, they’ll have sunk a huge amount of time and effort into those operations. Now that John is on the loose…” She broke off, looking faintly nauseous.

He shared her feelings; the thought of what would happen to the people involved if their secret identities were revealed to the people they had been trying to infiltrate did not bear thinking about. “Now that he’s on the loose, that information is worth a lot.”

“It’s gold dust, Bobby. It’s more than worth them having me called back over here to use as bait.”

“And you don’t want that to happen again.”

“No… oh, God.” She shuddered all over and looked at him with anguished. “I know, I’m a coward. I should let them do it, Bobby, I know it’s for the greater good, but I can’t face it.”

“You see, this is why I have problems with Davenport.”

The sudden change of subject threw her, and she stared at him dully. “Huh?”

”Sienna… maybe now isn’t the time, but I have to say this. This is why I don’t want to talk about him. Hell, it’s why I hate him! He got you shot! He, and MI5, they screwed up that operation from soup to nuts, and you expect me to just… put that on one side, pretend we’re all friends!”

“I don’t want you to pretend to be Drew’s friend, Bobby!” He blinked at the force of her anger. “I’m not Drew’s friend right now, I hate him for what he did to me! I hate the bastard!” She took a deep breath. “But, let’s face it, he’s going to want John recaptured as much as you or I, probably more so, and he’s useful, so let’s all put our feelings on one side.” She smiled tightly.

“I don’t know if I can do that.” In response to her glare, he sighed deeply. “Sienna… how would you feel if I’d been shot on duty?”

From her surprised expression, it was obvious she had never thought of it that way. He felt the age difference between them rear its ugly head. She sighed herself, and looked older.

“I’d hate the person who caused it. Okay.” Her face tightened again, and she unconsciously rubbed her left leg.

He made a superhuman effort to stay calm and keep his voice as neutral as possible. “So… what does Davenport think about this? Have you had any contact with him at all?”

Sienna smiled a rather devious little smile, but her tone was calm. “No, I haven’t been able to make contact with him since I heard about John. He’s alive, I know that, but I can’t reach him.” Unnervingly, her smile remained.

“How do you know he’s alive?”

She winced slightly and explained: “Because he and I both left instructions with MI5 and with Interpol that, in the event of our deaths, the other was to be informed immediately; he has a similar arrangement with Jack and Tanya. I’ve been checking my cellphone every hour… no messages.”

Which could of course mean that he could be dead and Five haven’t discovered it yet… He decided instantly not to voice that opinion. If Davenport was dead – if Durham had caught up with him – Five would discover it soon enough and tell Sienna, and it would help no-one if Sienna was worrying fruitlessly about her… friend, he forced himself to think, rather than ex-lover.

He could think of several courses of action, none of them ideal, but all of them better than sitting around like fish in a barrel. The most obvious one was simply to leave London as soon as possible. There would be hell to pay in terms of relations between the NYPD and the Metropolitan Police, not to mention the repercussions for his career, but he could care less about that if it meant ensuring Sienna’s life wasn’t at risk. Except it wouldn’t just be my career… Eames’s too. Damn, this is complicated.

He glanced across, and realised that something about Sienna’s demeanour suggested she had something she was waiting to say, and then, suddenly, the possible meaning of the worrying phrase she had muttered into his ear just before she left to catch her flight to England began to become clear. He met her gaze, and asked: “Sienna… do you have a plan? Is that why you wanted to meet with me like this?”

A smile broke across Sienna’s face. A small, professional smile, but it was a vast improvement. “As it happens, Bobby, yes, I do.”

He tried his hardest to keep his tone neutral. “Is this to do with… what you asked me in the airport?”

She smiled again, a very wry expression. “Yup. I’ve been busy since I got here, Bobby, putting things into place… or trying to.” She yawned, trying to stifle it and not succeeding. “Jeez… sorry, I’m a little punchy from the jet lag. Anyway, today I had a very interesting meeting…”

***

London, England.
December 2005
Thames House: MI5 headquarters
Office of Anne Langford, Operations Chief, MI5 Serious and Organised Crime Unit

I strolled forwards into the office, trying not to wish that Bobby and Alex were beside me, and doing my best to look nonchalant. Not an easy task, since the woman sat in front of me was in no small part responsible for the large scar across my leg.

Anne Langford, MI5’s Head of the Serious and Organised Crime department and Drew Davenport’s boss – the Captain Deakins of his office, as it were – looked up from a mound of paperwork on her ostentatious desk, and regarded me with a polite and professional smile. I returned it with the same degree of sincerity. If it had been Drew who came up with the idea to use me as bait for John Durham, it had been Langford who had signed off on the idea and made it happen.

“Ms Tovitz, do sit down.” She gestured at a chair across from her desk.

I remained standing, and extended a hand. “Ms Langford, so glad you could fit me into your busy schedule.” I hoped the irony in my words wasn’t too obvious. Both of us knew that top of Langford’s schedule for today was seeing me. I wondered if Langford yet suspected that I knew the real reason why.

“Given the severity of the situation, I could hardly not do so.” She smiled, and again gestured to the chair. I decided my point had been made, and sat, smiling politely.

“Indeed. May I make a suggestion?”

“By all means.” Langford smiled toothily.

I returned the smile, but only with my mouth. My eyes fixed on her. “May I suggest we cut out the crap and get straight to the heart of the matter?”

Langford’s smile vanished. Her eyes went cold and I felt a certain amount of fear. Still, I continued: “John Durham has escaped from prison. You need to recapture him as soon as possible. Therefore, you requested that I be sent for under the pretence that myself, Detective Goren and Detective Eames are required to assist with the ongoing investigation. After all, since I worked so well as bait the first time…”

“It’s no pretence,” Langford interrupted. She was smiling, the amused smile of a spider watching an insect just realising it was caught in a web. “You really are needed to verify some of their information…”

“In person, just before Christmas, when we could as easily do this over a secure videolink?” I demurred. “Fool me once, Ms Langford, shame on you, fool me twice...” I smiled, and paused for effect. “I am interested by the notion that you seem to be convinced that John will come after me, as opposed to simply vanishing underground. I imagine half of London’s finest are out searching for him at this moment.”

Langford snorted. “Don’t be a idiot, Tovitz. Do you think that I don’t know what he said about you? What he’s been saying about you ever since?”

I forced myself to remain calm. “Yes, I do know. So. We both agree, John’s after me, and one way or the other, he wants me to suffer. Making me the perfect bait for you to dangle out in front of him.”

Langford shrugged her heavy shoulders. “Well, since you seem to be aware of what we intend, you may as well know why we consider this a matter of extreme urgency. John Durham, as you presumably know better than anyone else-“ she smiled nastily, my scar itched and I felt a sudden and hastily-stifled urge to slap her, hard “-is a very resourceful and dangerous man. Not only that, the information he carries in his head about our operations jeopardises years of careful investigate work into the Russian mafia and other criminal gangs, to say nothing of the lives of the people involved. If he sells that to the highest bidder, I dread to think of the consequences.”

“Indeed. I’m entirely familiar with the lengths to which you will go to catch him.” I returned the nasty smile. “However, I’m a little curious as to why you wanted me.”

Langford raised an eyebrow – was I that stupid? “Well, you are the ideal bait.”

“On the contrary.” I smiled as though putting down the winning hand. “I would be the ideal bait, were I still the rather naïve young woman I was when you sent Drew to bring me over here as bait for John the first time. I imagine you saw me coming over here all keen and eager to please, happy to cooperate, and if I just happened to leave the heavily-guarded environs of MI5 to go travel on my own to visit my pregnant friend in her home-“ I saw from Langford’s face that this was not too far off the mark “-yes. Yes, something like that. You and I both know now that’s not going to happen a second time.”

“Even though not recapturing Durham means putting the lives of many of our intelligence officers at risk?” Langford said softly.

Time to play hardball. I fortified myself with the knowledge that if my plan worked, everyone would be safe anyway. “As you say. They are your officers, not mine.”

“Interpol uses the intelligence we gather, too.” Langford pointed out.

“And I’m aware of that, which is why I have a suggestion to make, Ms Langford. One which I hope will resolve this messy situation to everyone’s satisfaction.”

“Indeed?” Langford smiled a wintry smile. “I almost feel I should apologise for underestimating you.” She smiled again, and I was struck, not for the first time, by how similar her facial expressions were to Drew’s.

Indeed you should, Ms Langford, I thought with a smile. “I am rather curious about one thing.”

Langford regarded me with a quizzical expression. I smiled as though putting down the winning hand. “Why you bothered to call me back… when you already have the perfect bait already here working for you?”

Langford did not take even a second to grasp my meaning. Her eyebrows actually rose and she drew out her words heavily, pausing between each one. “You want me to use one of my officers as bait?”

“Oh, not just any officer, Ms Langford. I’m thinking of the one who happens to be the only person John Durham hates more than me.”

Man this is getting sooooo good!!! I can't wait for the rest of it.

I'll beg and flatter you everyday if I need to, as long as you keep posting. Now, lets get on with chapter 4 it can be your Christmas gift to all of us.

So much complexity; emotions, relationships, professions. I can't wait for more.

She's very good, isn't she? LOVE her stuff; she inspires me.

Such a great chapter. I think I know who Sienna wants to throw under the bus, but I'm not going to say anything in case I'm wrong.....

I'm going to stand over here next to VDObsessed and beg you for another chapter.

Since you're such a great writer, with such a great story ::fawn, rant, rave::, could you please find it in your wonderfully generous heart to grace us with another chapter of your most excellently awesome story? Please? Pretty please? Pretty please with naked Bobby holding mistletoe in his hand on top?

Hee hee hee. Okay, then, here's the next chapter, which is again posted with the proviso that it may change once my beta-reader has given it the once-over.

I'm not sure whether you're going to love me or hate me for this one...



Chapter Four – “Reconnect” (rated "Adult")

London, England
December 2005
Bobby and Sienna.

He stared at her for several minutes, trying to decide how to react to what Sienna had just revealed . “That’s your plan? Use Davenport as bait?”

Sienna nodded briefly. He stared some more. It took some effort to strike Bobby Goren dumb, but this… He would never have imagined Sienna would come up with something like this.

“This is why I need you, Bobby. I need you to tell me if I’m right. See, the way I see it is, I’m certain John’s going to come after both of us, me and Drew. If anything, I think Drew’s his real target. Me…” She frowned with distaste and a little regret. “Me, he won’t care too much about.”

“Sienna… you betrayed him, to his way of thinking.” He was guessing, a little, without knowing more about Durham’s background, but male criminal psychology tended to change very little between individuals. “It’s an affront to his sense of himself, his sense of his own… manhood… that you, his girlfriend, his…”

“Possession?” Sienna suggested, then winced at his expression in reply. “Yes, I know, I should have had better sense, but John could be very, very charming and good company. It took me half a year before I started to even think that maybe I didn’t know the man behind the smile too well, and I was grieving, Bobby, and I didn’t want to stop and think, I just wanted to keep busy, and being with John helped with that.” She paused, then added: “I missed you so much, I didn’t want to have even a minute on my own, in case I started thinking about you and crying.”

He looked away from her for a second, overwhelmed. He had felt the same way; to hear Sienna say it out loud was both heartbreaking and strangely reassuring. He forced himself to continue, resisting the urge to draw Sienna into his arms and stroke her gently until she relaxed completely, the two of them almost melding into one…

“Well, that’s pretty much what I’m getting at,” Sienna replied, breaking his train of thought. “I don’t think John sees me as a person, Bobby, much less a rival. He’ll want to get even with me, but it’s Drew he’s going to really want to get revenge on.”

“What makes you say that?” He agreed, but wanted to test out how her mind was working. He had never worked directly with Sienna like this before.

She shrugged. “You said it yourself, Bobby; he doesn’t think much of me because I’m a woman, and if he wants to get even with me, it’s because letting me get away with putting him behind bars diminishes his sense of himself as a man. That goes double for Drew, doesn’t it?”

He cocked his head on one side. “Huh?”

“Drew’s a man, a man in a similar profession to John, which makes him a rival in a way that I’m not… but he’s a gay man, Bobby. For John to be beaten at his own game by Drew, that’s got to be really eating at him, at his… sense of manhood. He’ll want to beat Drew, to prove that he’s the stronger man.”

“Yes… I’d agree, but you’re forgetting something.” He almost hated to say this, wanting to protect Sienna, but knew that that was not what she wanted.

She cocked her head on one side. “Hmm?”

“The two of you are eyewitnesses to him being in that club, proving an association between him and the Barayev branch of the Russian mafia. If new evidence comes to light, he could be tried for crimes relating to that association… but without your testimony…”

She completed the sentence: “…They’d have a much smaller chance of success.” She shivered, and he wondered if the fact that her life was in serious danger was only just beginning to really sink in- or if she’d been managing to ignore it, and he’d just reminded her.

“Sienna, I really think the best thing to do would be to leave. Leave London, let the police here catch him.”

“And what if they never do?”

He had no immediate answer. She pressed the point. “What if they never do, Bobby? John always had money from somewhere, I’m certain he still has some stashed away, and he has connections to the Barayev gang. He could travel anywhere in the world, Bobby, and you and I aren’t exactly low-profile. I don’t… I do not want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder in case John’s waiting there, or panicking every time you’re called out in the middle of the night in case it’s a set-up and John’s waiting for you. Listen to me, he’s already messing with my head, and I want it over with. I want John back behind bars so that all of us can get on with our lives. Me, you, Alex, Drew, Tanya, Jack, and the baby.”

They looked at each other for several long seconds. Eventually, he nodded.

“So, how is this going to work?”

“Five’s original plan was to just dangle the bait out, and see if John bites. They were planning to let me be seen in public a few times, make sure that the Barayev gang knew that I was back in town, let a routine develop where I’d be in the same place at the same time for a few days, so that John knows where to find me, but keep me under surveillance the whole time.”

She shook her head. “I told them no. I’m not… I’m not a coward, Bobby, at least I hope I’m not, but I have no faith in them at all. They’ve proven already that as far as they’re concerned, I’m completely expendable, and I don’t trust them to protect me.”

Oh, damn it.

He looked at Sienna, really looked at her, and realised suddenly that he’d been blind for the past few months, and with that came an almighty surge of guilt, that he had been so wrapped up in his own problems, that he had been oblivious to the turmoil she had been going through. She’s been afraid. So very afraid. So very afraid, to be pushed to this. And yet the connection between them was still strong, else how else could he sense so clearly what she was about to say?

She took a deep breath. “They’re desperate to catch Durham. So I told them, if I’m going to help them, I want insurance. I want Drew involved in this too.” Her voice was soft. “The best idea we could come up with is this. You and I and Alex, we play along. We pretend like we’re just here to help with helping piece together what happened this summer, we walk in and out of offices and hotel rooms in a nice regular routine, and MI5 keep an eye out for John. As soon as they pick up that he’s in the area, I call Drew and put on the performance of my life to persuade him that I’m really sorry, I want the two of us to be friends. We arrange to meet up where I’m staying, and hope that John takes the bait and comes after us, but Drew comes to me, not the other way round.”

She smiled bitterly. “I’m expendable to Five, Bobby, but Drew isn’t, he’s the longest-serving officer in his department and one of their best field agents. They’ll watch him[/] like a hawk. They catch John, he goes away for life, we all live happily ever after.”

“And how is Durham going to know to catch you?”

“Because he’s out there, Bobby, looking for me, and once he finds even a small clue, he won’t stop until he finds me.” Sienna shivered, and he could almost see her heart rate jump. [i]Jesus, what did this guy do to her? “He’s not going to rest until he finds me. He knows that Drew, Jack and Tanya are my closest friends, he’ll undoubtedly still have contacts in the police that we didn’t manage to track down. He’ll know I’m back in town, Bobby.”

“Sienna…” He shook his head, unable to think of the right words.

“What? Bobby, what?”

“Why… why are you so sure that Durham wants to kill you?” He held up a hand quickly. “I’m asking because it’s obvious that this isn’t something you thought rationally about and decided. You’re sure of this, so sure that you have an emotional reaction every time someone even mentions his name. You’re terrified. Why?”

“Because, Bobby,” she said very quietly, “I’ve seen some of the transcripts from what John said when they tried to interrogate him. There was no usable information – he never told us anything about the organisations he was working for. Do you want to know what he did say? Here’s the sentence I remember most clearly, there are others: ‘Tell that red-headed bitch the only reason I pushed her out of the way of that bullet was so I could put one in her myself.’ That’s why I’m terrified, Bobby!”

She looked straight up and into his eyes. He had always loved Sienna’s green eyes, so open and expressive, and in that moment he felt the connection between them open fully again. He hadn’t realised until that moment how much he’d missed it.

“That’s why you said …in the airport…”

“Yes, that’s right.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “I don’t even know if I have the right to ask that of you anymore, Bobby, to ask you to put yourself in danger for me.”

“Sienna!” Almost involuntarily, he jumped to his feet and crossed the room swiftly. “How can you say that!” He leaned in, grasping her upper arms, stooping slightly to bring himself to her height. Her eyes were wide, her breath fast.

“How can you possibly say that?”

“Because…” She was uncharacteristically inarticulate. “Because… of everything…”

“Sienna… ***k it.” Her eyebrows shot up at that word from him. He almost never swore in her presence. He shook his head. “I’ve… we’ve… we’ve screwed this up, haven’t we?”

“Yes.” Her voice was low, almost ashamed. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?”

“I’m sorry I left.”

“I’m sorry you left. I’m sorry you left, I’m sorry if I drove you away, I’m sorry I’m not who you want me to be.”

“You are. Bobby, you are! You are always who I want you to be, I want you to be you, my Bobby!”

“Then how could you doubt for one minute, even one minute, that if you said that you needed me to save your life, I wouldn’t do it?” He was almost shouting, still holding her tightly.

“Because.” She smiled suddenly, fiercely, and his passionate Sienna was there in his arms like a flash of sunlight. “Because, sometimes, Bobby, I can be very stupid.”

“So can I…” He didn’t end his sentence with words, but reached down to her mouth hungrily with his, mumbling “the hell with it” very faintly before Sienna’s mouth opened underneath his and her tongue shoved hard into his mouth. They pushed hard against each other, mouths open and hungry. He was still holding her arms, and he half- pushed her onto the bed behind them, half found himself being pulled onto it as her hands grasped his shoulders.

As they crashed down onto it, he realised that the bed scented odd, strange, male, the scent of another man lingering on the sheets beneath Sienna. Odd, and weirdly arousing, as he kissed his way hungrily down Sienna’s neck and found her breasts, that Davenport’s scent was on the sheets below her, being drowned under the warm, strong, living, scents of Sienna’s body and his own.

Sienna groaned wildly, thrusting her hips hard against him, her hands pulling hard at his body, trying to pull him into her already, before she let go of his hips and grabbed for his belt and fly, opening them fiercely, then doing the same to her own. He groaned with relief, feeling himself being released from the pants and boxers that were suddenly far too tight, realising that he was nearly fully hard already, and Sienna’s scent told him that she was as aroused as he was, if not more so.

He propped himself briefly on one arm, then undid the buttons of her shirt roughly with his free hand so that he could find the bare skin of her breasts and suck hard. The new position caused him to grind his hips hard into hers, and she groaned once, then forced herself to stop, murmuring between whimpers, “We can’t… we shouldn’t be too loud… someone might hear…”

He grinned wildly, then deliberately shoved his hips against her body harder in just the right spot until she moaned helplessly, soft desperate whimpers coming from the back of her throat. Then it was his turn, as her fingers wrapped around him. He felt a tight sensation, and realised she was putting a condom on him. He lifted off her long enough to ask wordlessly, why? “Best to be safe… leave no trace…” she replied.

He propped himself on his forearms, pinning Sienna beneath him with one arm on either side, and as he was enveloped in her body, he gripped her wrists, not hard enough to leave bruises, but hard enough that she was trapped beneath him completely, and part of him wondered where this wildness was coming from, but knew that a lot of it was coming from her, because everything about her said that she wanted to be taken hard, by him, right there and then. He shoved himself hard into her, hearing her hiss with greedy satisfaction and moan fiercely, “More. More, give me more, right now, don’t stop, Bobby, don’t stop or…”

His mouth covered hers, his tongue dominating hers as his hips moved hard and rhythmically, reading her body like a book and finding exactly the right spot inside her. Sienna arched against the bed, grabbing his back hard as her face flushed and he thrust again and again, feeling her stifle her cries into a single high-pitched moan of satiation. Seeing her so wild, so abandoned, so thoroughly satisfied, was all he needed, and he felt his climax take his whole body over. He collapsed on top of her half-naked sweaty body, feeling her tremble beneath him as her breathing raced and her heart pounded.

She breathed out very slowly, then suddenly he heard her chuckle. “Oh my God. That was…”

“Yeah.” He lifted his head off her shoulder just far enough to look her in the eyes. “That…was.” He laughed softly. “That was worth crossing the Atlantic for.”

She snorted, her familiar snort of laughter. “Yeah. Yes, it was. My God, Bobby.” She looked him in the eyes again, her face slack and flushed and relaxed in a way he hadn’t seen it be in weeks. “Well, we may be in mortal danger and we’ve had our first major row since I got back from England, but at least the sex is still good, huh?”

He grinned, showing his teeth, and Sienna smiled a little coyly in response. “More than good. Amazing. You are amazing, my beautiful Sienna.”

“You’re with me, then, Bobby? You agree with me?”

He felt the outside world come back in again with a thud, and reluctantly began the process of untangling their bodies. “Yes.”

She looked straight at him. “I love you. I have always loved you, and I still do, Bobby. Please, don’t ever forget that, no matter what happens.”

“Then don’t you forget it, either. I…” He made himself say the words clearly and distinctly. “I love you, too, Sienna. Always.”

She smiled. “Do you need to meet Alex at the airport?”

The mundanity of the question threw him a little, then he looked at his watch and realised she was right. “Oh, yes, I do.”

“Then you go meet her. Do you mind if I don’t come with you?”

“Why not?”

She gave a huge yawn. “I’m exhausted, Bobby. I got about three hours’ rest on the plane, and I need to sleep soon or I’ll fall over. Here’s the best place.”

“What is it, anyway? This place,” he asked as he quickly pulled his clothes back on and hunted for his gloves and hat.

She shrugged. “A bolthole for spies. Drew told me about it ages ago. It’s not an official MI5 building, though they know it exists. It’s ancient, been here since the Second World War. There aren’t that many people who know about it, Drew only knew himself because one of his predecessors told him when he retired. I told Langford – Drew’s boss – I was going to stay here, rather than in a hotel. I don’t want too many people knowing where I am, and anyway it was the only place I could think of where I’d feel safe without you.”

Impulsively, he leaned over and kissed her. “Sienna, beautiful Sienna. What happens now?”

“I catch an hour’s sleep, you go meet Alex and the two of you come meet me here, we sleep through what’s left of the night, then-” she shivered “-we start making plans to go trolling for John with Drew as the bait.”

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Sienna, I promise I won’t let him hurt you.”

She sighed and smiled. “Funny. I was going to say that to you.”

“I can look after myself. Don’t worry about me, beautiful Sienna.”

“I love you, I’m supposed to worry about you.” She blew him a kiss. He blew one back, then carefully closed the door behind him and descended the stairs into the early evening’s cold. As he headed out through the maze of backstreets towards the main road where, hopefully, he could catch a cab, his thoughts raced, Sienna’s earlier words echoing in his head.

This is why I need you, Bobby. I need you to tell me if I’m right.

Was Sienna right, then? He knew only too well that he was hardly best placed to judge impartially, and wished fiercely for Eames’ presence. Her insight as both an experienced cop and an intelligent woman would have been invaluable.

Well, Sienna was certainly right that John Durham had to hate both herself and Drew Davenport with a vengeance, and a year in solitary confinement, broken only by MI5’s attempts to get him to talk, would have given him plenty of time to brood on that hatred. A rational man might take the view that, having escaped, he should flee the country as fast as possible. Then again, Goren thought, the sort of man who achieved a position of rank in one of the world’s major police forces and then went corrupt possessed exactly the combination of arrogance and intelligence necessary to believe that he could both take his revenge on those who had been responsible for his downfall, then cash in by selling the information he had on MI5’s intelligence operations to the highest bidder and disappear overseas for good.

Yes, Sienna was right that her life and Davenport’s were in danger, he thought, as, realistically, were those of anyone she cared about who happened to be within Durham’s reach. He shivered, thinking of Tanya and Jack McAllister-Simmons, and reassured himself with the thought that if anyone was capable of ensuring her own personal safety, it would be Tanya McAllister-Simmons. Jack, too, was intelligent – and cautious – enough not to take any risks.

But was Sienna’s solution the right one? Would Davenport agree to go along with it? Certainly, if her thinking was that, of the two of them, Davenport stood a better chance in any sort of one-on-one fight with Durham, he couldn’t fault the logic. As a field agent, he had years of training, and Goren knew from personal experience that, unlike Sienna, he would have no moral scruples about killing in self-defence if it was needed.

But to use a friend as bait… even an ex-friend… an ex-lover… That was very unlike his loving, gentle Sienna. She had toughened up, but only as much as she needed to in order to do her job. Painful as it was for him to admit, she clearly still did have some feelings for Davenport, although whether even she herself knew what they were he wasn’t sure.

However, he thought with some unease, he had never before heard her express such anger with him. He sighed heavily, called his years of police discipline to the fore, and forced himself to have the thought he’d been trying to avoid.

Does Sienna want to use Davenport as bait because she really thinks it’s the best way to catch Durham, or does she just want to do to him what he did to her, and see how he likes it?

He hated himself for even thinking that about his beloved… but let’s face it, Goren, if she was anyone else in this situation, it would be the first thing that came to mind.

“Excuse me, do you know where Albion Street is?”

The voice broke into his consciousness, disorientating him. He glanced up to see another man standing nearby with a puzzled expression, as near as he could tell beneath the ski cap and scarf the man was wearing.

“Uh… no, sorry. I’m visiting… I got lost,” he extemporised.

“Yes, these streets can be very confusing, can’t they? I’m a bit lost too and I think I’m late to meet someone. Do you know what time it is?”

He glanced down at his watch. “Uh, half past six.”

“Thanks. Oh, by the way… ”

He glanced up sharply at the nearness of the other man’s voice. In the handful of seconds it had taken him to check his watch, the other man had stepped in very close to him, too close…

He had the impression of a quick, flashing smile, his last sight before things went fuzzy and the world went black, and the last sounds were the stranger’s words:

“… wrong turn.”


Author's note: There is a more explicit version of this chapter, which I will post up in a more appropriate place when the whole thing has been beta-read. Contact me if you're of appropriate age and I can let you know where to find it.

*I'm on my knees, bowing at your feet* Now I need a cigarette!!!

You do love me, you really, really do!!!!

Another great chapter, I was so thrilled to see that you posted again so soon. I can't wait to see Bobby come to the rescue, or maybe Sienna is going to rescue Bobby?? I also can't wait to see Drew crash and burn, pay for all the grief he's put Sienna through. (I never really liked him for some reason) Well, you've made a very happy woman, especially with a love scene so early on.

There's a more explicit version? ::thud:: That one was plenty explicit enough, thank you very much! The mind needs no further embellishment with this chapter.

I am not happy tho, that you've had John Durham knock out Bobby already. Too soon! Too soon!

Poor Eames at the airport......please don't tell me that JD knows about the spy hideout and is going after Sienna next? Not good! Not good!

I'm glad the groveling worked, but now you're going to have me spending all my time running back here to see if you've posted another new chapter instead of getting my work done: laundry, shopping, cleaning, packing and getting the family ready to go to Mississippi early tomorrow morning.....

Thanks for a great early Christmas present, by the way! All my griping and complaining is simply because I love Sienna and Bobby so much and want them to be able to live happily ever after somewhere, f*cking each other's brains out and not having a care in the world.....And because I really love this story, and think you did a fantastic job with this chapter.......

::Leaves triple chocolate cheescake and hot cocoa and peppermint candy Hershey's kisses on the counter as a bribe for TW to write more awesome story......::

Pssst........Did anyone else see FM use the word "f*cking"?! I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!

And I realized that I had sent you a PM, but had neglected to say anything here. This was quite the hot little number, wasn't it? But I'm so glad Bobby and Sienna...uh....reconnected. And now we've got Bobby unconscious and Eames at the airport, probably not even knowing where Sienna's hideaway is, and Sienna taking a nap completely unaware. After all her worry about asking Bobby to risk his life to help her, it looks like she may be the one risking her life to save him. Aaaahhhh....So is the next chapter done yet?

Thank you all so much for your lovely words of encouragement. It means a huge amount.

BTW I do intend to read other people's fanfic and review it in due course. Unfortunately, I suffer from Fanfic Writer's Kryptonite, aka a very bad back which is aggravated by too much using of a computer. At present I have to limit the time I spend on my computer at home and stop once I feel tired, so at present I'm choosing to use my computer time to write fic. But I will read and review when I can.


So far he has been shot, lost his three best friends, and lost the person he loved most. You want him to suffer some more? Be careful what you wish for ::evil authorial laugh::


Oooh yeah!


Wait until you see what's a-coming, it might surprise you...



Probably not until next Monday at the earliest. It appears my family would like me to spend time with them this Christmas rather than my computer. What can you do?


Me too, to a large extent... but, you know, fairytales always end with the happy ever after. I don't want this one to end yet :-)


::Collects bribes, appreciates readers mightily, goes off to mentally plot next chapter, smiling.::

I agree with FM, I do love it when Bobby and Sienna "f*ck each other brains out"

And of course I want something bad to happen to Drew, he hurt Sienna therefor hurting my Bobby. That's something I can't stand for!!!

Did you get my e-mail?? It's entitled chapter 4, be sure to send me the info on the explict chapter.

You're stories always seem to put a little pep in my step, and I can use that about now. I especially loved, I think it's called "Silver and Black", the one where Bobby gets the key a bathroom in the basement. Oh, the dreams that one inspired.....

Sorry to hear about your back, I hope you feel better soon. Don't worry about reviewing, just write

Ok, I miss a couple of weeks in here and the whole place go mad. Mad, I tell ya. Now I am catching up and what a way to catch up. Geez, this story was amazing, especially the explicit/non explicit parts. I have no words for this story. Really I don't. It is good, I'll say that and I am looking forward to more. More, more, more.

Alright, I can see I have to resort to begging again.

Please,please,please,please,please,please,pleeeeeeeeeease post a new chapter.

You've left me with an irrational fear for Bobby's life and I NEED to know what's going to happen. Please hurry and post again, or at least let us know wether or not we're gonna have to wait much longer. The suspense is KILLING me!!!!

DITTO!!!!!

::plops down on couch next to VDObessed....both start bouncing up and down like impatient little kids who can't wait to open their presents:: I hope she gets more posted soon....please, please, please, please, please, please, please.........

PRETTY PLEASE WITH CHERRIES, WHIPPED CREAM, HANDCUFFS, AND NAKED BOBBY ON TOP???????????????

Whipped cream, handcuffs, and naked Bobby on top???

FM I hope you remembered to bring the ice bucket and the drool bucket.... I could use both about now!!!
You know that's a present I would LOVE to unwrap

::Looks over list::

Ice bucket -- check
Drool bucket -- check
Fluffy giant floor pillows -- double check!
Fire extinguisher -- triple check!
Food to eat later -- always an endless supply here
Reminder to 'twin friend' that the above mentioned present needs no unwrapping.....

nude fire ice food
good time for all

I must have forgot to mention I plan on putting a bow on him, I'll let you guess where
I can't help it, I need to unwrap something with my teeth!!!!

Take it I shocked you??
Sorry, my mind has been in the gutter for the past few days.

Another fabulous chapter! Can't wait to see what happens next.

Nothing yet??

*stomps foot and goes off to sulk in the corner*

Hi all. Just to confirm, I'm back from looking after my family over Christmas. I'll see what I can do about getting a new chapter up in the next week or so. Happy New Year to you all!

Welcome back, Trinity! I hope you had a nice visit. I'll take a new chapter from you whenever you can manage it.

Happy New Year to you, too!

WHOOOPPPIIEEE!!!!! The wait is almost over, it's been torture!!!

Hope you had with your family!!!

Happy New Year too you too.

Welcome back! And yay for another chapter coming soon!

Chapter 5: "Gram Central"


He came to in a large space. Even before he opened his eyes, he knew that; it was obvious from the echoes from the surrounding walls. Noises of traffic, and what sounded like a construction site… He opened his eyes, warily, and looked around.

It was dark with only a little murky light, but from what he could make out, he seemed to be in an abandoned office block. The traffic noise was slightly muted, and the patterns of shadows on the wall implied that he was at least one floor up from the ground, probably at least two.

Quickly, he surveyed the surrounding area. There appeared to be no-one else nearby, so he took a minute to survey himself. He still felt a little woozy from the chemicals he had inhaled, but his head seemed to be clearing rapidly. He had a slight headache, but nothing like the skull-splitting pain he would have expected. He was clothed in his shirt and pants; as he checked, he was unsurprised to find that his gun and badge were missing. His clothes appeared not to have been touched, but his feet were cold, and as he looked down, he realised that his socks and shoes were missing, along with his jacket and overcoat. At that latter realisation, he shivered reflexively, the cold beginning to bite.

Interesting, he thought, trying to form a profile of whoever had brought him here. That he had been left most of his clothes, but not his shoes or coat, suggested strongly that whoever had brought him here meant him no physical harm, but did intend some measure of control over him. It also conveyed another, more disturbing message: I can take your shoes, your gun, your badge and your coat. Annoy or displease me, and I could take the rest, too.

Apart from the headache, he seemed mostly physically unharmed, although his lower abdomen was slightly sore, and he pulled his shirt aside to examine it. The skin underneath was discoloured with the beginnings of a bruise, and he suspected from its location that he had been brought here by someone using a fireman’s carry, the bruise being where that person’s shoulder had dug into his belly during the carry.

That implied one person had brought him here, which in turn implied that the other person was male, and at least the same size as he himself; he doubted a woman or a smaller man would have been able to move his six-foot-plus frame up two flights of stairs.

As his eyes adjusted, he stood up, and began to walk towards the window.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

The voice was English, male, and sounded like the voice of an adult man; not young, not old. He turned slowly in its direction, trying to slow his heartbeat and not let the surprise show. As he turned, he could make out the shape of a human form against the rear wall of the old office.

A man was sitting upon a table there, his feet drawn up onto the table. He was in darkness, his face hidden, but his shape could be made out quite clearly against the pale wall. He was hugging his knees, and it struck Goren that this was an odd posture for his captor to take. Not dominant, not forceful, but oddly relaxed. The other man could have been sitting on a beach somewhere for all the tension that showed in his body; he looked completely in control of the situation.

“As I said,” the man continued, “I wouldn’t do that. Do you know where you are?”

“No.”

The man shrugged. “King’s Cross. Not the railway station, the surrounding area, which alas is home to quite a lot of people with substance abuse problems.” He chuckled softly. “They used to call this place “Gram Central”, then we raided it a few times, and the dealers and junkies went elsewhere. No-one’s yet got round to clearing it up…”

He gestured at the floor, and Goren saw with a shiver that there were several used syringes lying scattered on the floor. There were undoubtedly more that he couldn’t see, and he winced at the realisation of what could have happened if he’d stepped on one in his bare feet.

“Can I have my shoes?” he asked suddenly. The other man chuckled again.

“In due course, yes. I don’t mean you harm, you understand… but I’d rather you didn’t go running off any time soon.”

He stood, suddenly, and padded forward into the light. Goren noticed with a trace of sourness that the other man was wearing solid-looking boots with thick soles. He was also wearing black from head to toe, but what caught Goren’s attention, and made him blink with stunned surprise, was his face.

He could have been looking at himself. Well, himself ten years ago; the other man was in his early thirties. He was tall, Goren’s height, and heavily built with powerful muscles, clearly defined under the black roll-neck sweater he was wearing.

Their faces were not completely alike. Goren’s own ancestry contained Italian blood, and some German on his mother’s side. He knew nothing of this man’s family, but he guessed that several generations of British ancestors had donated their genes to his broad face. His broad, handsome, face, that resembled Goren’s just slightly. Not enough that they would be mistaken for each other, but still… the other man’s skin was a little paler, but he too had dark curly hair and dark eyes.

As if sensing his thoughts, the other man smiled slightly. “Do you know who I am?”

Goren felt his heart race faster. He was not a man to be easily afraid; his years in the Army and the NYPD had trained him not to flinch at bad situations. Still, he was alone with no backup, no-one who knew where he was, facing someone who undoubtedly knew the building and the surrounding area well, and who could easily be concealing several weapons.

Part of his mind whispered, alone with a killer…

“John Durham.” He said the words as plainly as he could.

The man smiled, tipping his head slightly. “Yes indeed.” He scrutinised Goren thoughtfully. “So, you haven’t seen a photo of me? That’s a bit slack. I’m surprised Sienna didn’t shove one in front of your nose marked “Kill on sight”.”

He wants a response; don’t give it to him. He shrugged. “They don’t want you dead; they want you caught.”

“I’m not talking about Five, I’m talking about her…” Durham shrugged. “I guess I’m not her favourite person.” He chuckled.

Again, Goren held his response in check, his mind racing. He recognised the probing technique Durham was using only too well, the seemingly light-hearted attempts to get someone to open up, to start talking. But why was he using it?

“Why did you bring me here?”

“You mean, as opposed to making you take me to Sienna and then twisting your arm until you started screaming loudly enough to wake her up and make her come out of the rabbit hole?” Durham smirked a little, and he sniffed a little, just slightly, but enough that it was obvious that he had detected Sienna’s scent on Goren’s body and clothes. Infuriatingly, Goren felt himself flush slightly.

“I could do that,” Durham went on. “I could have done that, couldn’t I? But I didn’t. Here you are, completely unharmed.”

“What do you want?”

Durham smiled patiently. “You don’t need to interrogate me, Goren. I’m getting there!” He turned slightly, as if gathering his thoughts, then turned back to Goren, and his face was deadly serious. “I have an offer for you.”

“Why would you think I’d be interested in anything you could offer me?” Goren let some of his anger show; it was time to take back some control of the situation. “You betrayed everything you were supposed to protect. You were corrupt, and you got Sienna shot, and you’ve said that you wanted to shoot her yourself.” And you slept with her.

“And I slept with her. Mind you, at least ten others got there before me, including you; she was a busy girl when she was younger…” He smiled a little at Goren’s expression, then his face went cold. “Enough of the screwing around. Listen to me, Goren, and don’t interrupt, because you’re going to want to hear this.” He leaned in, his voice going soft. “What if I told you that that everything you’ve been told about me is a lie? That I was never corrupt?”

“Why…”

“Don’t interrupt. Listen!” He turned suddenly, pacing the floor. “I wanted to infiltrate the Barayev organisation. They’re responsible for trafficking at least a quarter of the women currently in forced prostitution in London, plus god knows how many drugs. I couldn’t get approval to do that, so I decided to... improvise. I pretended to them that I wanted in, that they’d have me as their man on the inside.”

He turned to face Goren suddenly, leaning in close, and Goren heard the faint snap of a syringe cracking under his boot. “I was never corrupt, Goren. Never! But because I didn’t have authorisation, it looked that way. Then Five got involved, and screwed things up like they usually do.” He snarled. “If that stupid, incompetent bastard Davenport had done his job properly, he’d have realised that. But no, he needed a scalp to add to his belt, so he sent Sienna in to pretend to be my girlfriend, and I fell for it, because she does sweet and innocent very well…”

“She was innocent!”

“Yes, and the reason she isn’t, any more, is because that bastard got her involved in this. He’s the one that got her shot, Goren, not me. I’m the one who shoved her out of the way of that bullet, she’d be dead if it wasn’t for me. He’s the one whose neck you should want to break.”

“Even though you said yourself you wanted to shoot her?”

Durham sighed. “The Barayev organisation is big, Goren. They have people in prison who pass information to them. As far as they know, I’m still their man, but if they’d thought for one minute that I wasn’t…” He shivered. “I had to make it look convincing, but I don’t want Sienna.” He laughed suddenly. “I don’t want her for anything; you can have her! Here’s my proposal, Goren. I want my job back. I want to be reinstated, and I want Davenport fired, and I want you to help me with all of that.”

He looked expectantly at Goren, who didn’t reply, but stayed silent, waiting for the other man to go on. I can play the interrogation game too, he thought. Durham’s smugness was starting to grate.

After a pause, he continued. “I’m a wanted man, I can’t show my face in public, but I still have links to the Barayev organisation. Right now, they think I’m their man. They’re willing to help me get revenge, in exchange for what I know about their rivals and about the people who Five and the Met have inside their organisation. They’re supposed to be helping me do that tomorrow, Goren. What’s supposed to happen is, I get you, Sienna, and your colleague – what’s her name, Eames? – to go out somewhere they can get to you. Maybe Simmons and McAllister’s house. I mean, after you’ve finished your work with the Met and Five, Sienna would want to visit her friends before she flew back to the States, wouldn’t she, with it being just before Christmas? And there’s quite a lot of places for a nice ambush around there.”

His face was deadly serious. “The plan is, they shoot you and Eames, maybe Simmons and McAllister too if they get in the way, and take Sienna as a prisoner for me. Davenport comes looking for her, and…” He made a sudden, sharp twisting motion with his hands. “Well, after a while, anyway. A captured MI5 operative knows a lot of useful information, and everyone talks once you get out the electrodes.”

He looked Goren directly in the eyes. “That’s what they think is going to happen. I want you to help me make sure it doesn’t.” He smiled. “What’s going to happen is, the three of you play along with that, but Five watch you like hawks…”

“…and when things unfold just as you describe them, that’s proof that you’re telling the truth.” Durham made to speak, but Goren raised a hand, and he closed his mouth, smiling. “And with that as your calling card, you come back in and trade the information you’ve got on the Barayev organisation as the price of your re-entry into the Metropolitan Police.”

“All hail John Durham, the conquering hero!” Durham grinned. “You can see the appeal, can’t you? This works for all of us. I get my job back, we all put the Barayev gang out of business, you and Sienna can sail happily off into the sunset, and that incompetent bastard Davenport gets fired. Works well for us all – but I can’t do it without your help. They’ll never listen to me, but with the help of a decorated NYPD Major Case detective…”

Goren chuckled himself. “You can save the flattery.”

Durham returned the chuckle. “So, Goren. Are you in?”


***


Interlude 2: “What Happened At Glastonbury: A Bit Of Personal Growth”

“Wow, you four got ratted last night, didn’t you?”

“No, Duncan. These three did. I just had a couple.” Tanya’s Look made the point more effectively than her words. Which, if you looked closely at the dark marks under her eyes, were not strictly true, but she had a certain position as the invincible head of the dojo to maintain. Not to mention, she was bigger than either myself, Jack, or Drew, so probably the drink hadn’t affected her too badly.

The rest of us, on the other hand… Jack and Drew were wearing sunglasses and looking pasty. I was wearing a baseball cap pulled low on my forehead. And, probably, also looking pasty. We were hanging around in a large parking lot in London with our assorted luggage, awaiting the bus that would carry us to Glastonbury. Tanya had seen to it that we were ticked off on the register of volunteers and had our ID badges, and as I waited for the paracetamols I’d just swallowed to take effect, I looked around and was slightly stunned by the sheer scale of the operation. I’d known the Festival was big, but I hadn’t fully realised it was that big. There were hundreds of people waiting, and this was for one set of coaches on one day; there were others picking up from other locations across the UK both on the previous day and throughout the rest of the day, plus people who were making their own way down.

I nudged Tanya. “How many of us are there?”

“Working the bars?” She frowned briefly. “A couple of thousand.”

“Holy crap.”

“Yeah. Glastonbury has… ooh… about 188,000 people there in total.” She grinned and remarked professionally, “It’s quite an exercise in logistics!”

Amp grinned. “Anyone want a bacon sandwich? Nice, greasy, bacon sandwich, anyone?” He waved the remains of his first sandwich around in front of Jack, who shrank away from it, and glared sickly. Drew just shrugged. “Yeah, why not? Make yourself useful, Duncan, get two.” He looked at me. “Three? My treat.”

“No. Thank you.”

Beside me, Mark, who made up the remaining member of our team of six along with Duncan, chuckled from behind the newspaper he was reading. “Getting drunk before you go to Glastonbury? Not necessarily the brightest idea.”

Yeah, I’m really going to take advice from a guy whose wife kicked him out after he screwed the babysitter, I mentally snapped back, and then mentally kicked myself for being a bitch. Mark wasn’t a bad guy. A bit screwed-up, but who wasn’t?

It occurred to me with a certain unease that there might be ulterior motives behind Tanya’s choice of Mark to round out the team. There were actually twelve of us going altogether from the dojo. Tanya was heading up one team of six, with one of her instructors, Leo, heading up the other.

Technically, if leadership was being assigned in terms of seniority, it should have been Drew heading up the other team. He was Tanya’s longest-serving student; she had been teaching him since she was fifteen and he seventeen. But friendship had prevailed, and Drew was on our team with her, Jack, and me, or the “Awesome Foursome”, as Amp kept referring to us. Well, friendship, and the fact that Drew and Leo did not get on well, due to a combination of the fact that Leo held his more senior position in the dojo largely due to the fact that Drew didn’t particularly want the responsibility, meaning that at any point, technically, Drew could replace him.

That, and the fact that, according to Jack, Leo was secretly something of a homophobe, whereas Drew was an un-secret homophobe-phobe. Interestingly, though, I thought, Drew reined in his usual flamboyance about his sexuality whenever he was in the dojo. He was open if asked, but never made a point of it. Partly, I thought, because there were, sadly, various considerations that came into being about having an openly gay instructor in a school with children’s classes (even in this day and age), but I also wondered if it was partly due to his feeling secure enough in there to drop the act…

… In any case, Tanya had selected her teams, and Mark was on ours, which I found… concerning, I supposed. She and Jack had too much class to actually stick Mark under my nose and say “There you go, nice single male for you, get on with it”, but I wondered if this was her version of it.

I could see the logic. Mark was near my age, attractive, intelligent, gainfully employed in a similar line of work to me, at which he was successful (Detective Inspector in the Metropolitan Police’s Art Crimes Squad). Separated with two young kids, but who didn’t have a bit of a history at our age?

At our age, now, there was a depressing thought. Time to face reality, Sienna, I thought gloomily. Thirty is coming into view, so let’s face it, from now on it’s not single young guys with no baggage, it’s nearly middle-aged men with a divorce behind them, or something like it. And it’s not like you don’t have a past.

Which was the problem. I could see the appeal of Mark. I could see the logic; he would fit in just fine with myself, Jack and Tanya, and he even got on reasonably well with Drew. Although where exactly Drew himself would fit in with all this I still wasn’t sure. Unless he finds a partner… hah, a flying pig on Mars would be a more realistic picture.

But Mark wasn’t my type. You mean he’s not Bobby, my subconscious thought, and I pushed it away. Bobby was gone, and he and I would never be together again, so I should just face up to reality, and get on with it.

“All aboard!” Duncan yelled cheerfully, returning from the local sandwich shop with a couple of steaming sandwiches in his hand. He handed one to Drew, stuffed the other into his jacket pocket and trotted off to load the rucksacks into the belly of the buses. I followed him and offered to help, but he just shrugged and picked up two of the huge bags with one large hand. “It’s alright, SiSi, I’ve got it, but cheers… Hi, Robyn.” He waved to his girlfriend, who’d come to see him off, and who ran over to kiss him goodbye. I left them to it, and rejoined the others.

“Thank you, Amp,” Drew yelled, and cheerfully shoved his way onto the bus and up the stairs, commandeering six seats at the front on the top deck. Jack and I followed him up, shortly followed by Tanya, Mark and Amp. I chose a seat next to the window, wanting to see where we were going. I hadn’t seen as much of England as I wanted to, having been stuck in London for work for most of my time here, and I was quite looking forward to seeing more of it. At least, once my hangover lifted.

“Got everything you need?” Drew asked me, settling in beside me and stretching his long legs into the aisle.

“A new head would be nice,” I replied.

“Aww, poor little SiSi!” Drew teased me. “Sure you don’t want a bacon sandwich?” He waved his at me. I glared.

“Go. Away. And let me die in peace.”

He chuckled, hugged me briefly across the shoulders, kissed the side of my head, then started munching the sandwich as though his life depended on it. I returned to staring out of the window. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Tanya and Jack settling in in front of me, and Mark and Amp occupying the seats beside us, with Leo’s team following on behind them.

The bus gave an almighty shudder and jerk, then rolled forward to the accompaniment of much cheering throughout the bus.

“We’re off!” Duncan yelled behind me. “Woo-hoo!” More loud cheers came from behind him.

In front of me, Jack turned round and smiled. “Looking forward to this, SiSi? You okay?”

I smiled back at him, reached forward, and gently squeezed his arm. “Oh yeah, it’s going to be great!”

“Oh, you bet it will be.” He smiled hugely. “I haven’t been to the Festival since… Drew, when was it?”

Drew mmphed through a mouthful of sandwich. “Dunno… what year was it you were hanging around London wearing a leather jacket and trying out the starving-in-garret-unsigned-rock-star approach to life?”

“That was uncalled-for. Around the same time you were dying your hair bleached blond and prancing around in tight trousers in some of the dodgier bits of Soho. Could have been ’95, I guess.”

“Why are you two always so horrible to each other?” I asked.

“Because, if we were nice to each other, people would think we were gay,” Drew and Jack chorused in perfect unison, then looked at each other and frowned with identical expressions of concern.

“No, it’s only funny if I say it, Jack. If you say it, it just sounds prejudiced.”

“Alright, you two have got to stop this.” Amp leaned forward between myself and Drew. “It’s dead worrying. I mean, it starts with the two of you reading each other’s minds, and that’s all right, but what if it spreads? What if you start reading my mind? That would be bad.”

“You’re right, Duncan, that is a frightening thought,” Drew replied, and grinned. Amp flashed him the finger, grinned back, then settled back in his seat to discuss the Festival line-up with Mark. Drew and Jack exchanged wry smiles, then Jack turned round to snuggle in beside Tanya.

Hmm. Score one for the “Jack and Drew used to sleep together” theory? I wondered. I’d begun to suspect a while back that, just possibly, Jack and Drew had at one point been more to each other than just platonic friends. Jack was happily married to Tanya, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t played around a bit in his younger days, I thought. However, I was unlikely to find out for definite. I didn’t want to ask Jack or Drew directly in case it looked like I was prying into their personal lives, and, despite the fact that Tanya’s mind was as broad as a plank, I didn’t quite think I could ask even her the question “So, did your husband and your gay male best friend used to have sex?”

I shrugged and dismissed the thought, taking a swig from the bottle of water in my bag and noted that my headache seemed to be lifting.

“Flapjack?” Jack turned round again and offered me a small cake from a bag. I took one, deciding it would do me good to eat. It was delicious, as was everything Jack cooked. I took another, causing Jack to smile hugely and pat my arm, then leaned back into my seat and stared out the window, watching London’s streets sliding by. We were out of the city centre down and onto one of the big arterial roads leading to the west. I sighed, tried not to wish that Bobby was with me, and thought of nothing.

***

Three hours into the journey, and my hangover had been replaced by a sensation of dull boredom. We’d stopped once for a bathroom break, and we were supposedly near the festival site, but the journey seemed to be taking forever, and I wasn’t succeeding in my plans not to think of Bobby.

He would have loved this, I thought. It would have been a slightly odd picture, I supposed, to someone who didn’t know Bobby well, the New York City detective in his sharp suits hanging out with a load of kids and aging hippies in a muddy field… but only if you didn’t know Bobby well. Didn’t know that he found humanity infinitely interesting, and that he would have loved the festival even if he didn’t care too much about the music, because he would have loved the chance to watch people being people. That, and he would have liked it because you liked it, and you and he loved to see each other happy…

I banished the thought fiercely, reminding myself that if Bobby had really liked to see me happy, he’d have introduced me as his partner – his romantic partner – to his mother, and made our relationship permanent.

Or would he? Had I pushed too hard, too soon? Would I have got what I wanted if I’d been willing to wait for longer?

Who knew? I thought sadly. Bobby and I were history now. I loved him so much, but I would need to put him behind me if I was ever going to have another relationship.

Like you did with John? I thought miserably. I’d gone from one screwed-up relationship to another, even more screwed-up relationship, with a senior police officer who’d turned out to be corrupt. Not exactly ideal, since I worked for Interpol myself and couldn’t afford even the hint of corruption to attach itself to me. Drew, who had told me in the first place about John’s corruption, had helped me take John down, but not before I was nearly killed in the process. I still had a livid red scar on my left leg as a permanent reminder of what could have happened if the shot that had been intended for my heart hadn’t missed.

It really hadn’t been my year for romantic relationships.

“Look, there’s Stonehenge!”

I was roused out of my mood by a loud yell from behind me, and turned to see Amp pointing excitedly at the window. Around me, others were doing the same, peering excitedly through the windows to the large ring of ancient stones beside the road. I hadn’t realised it ran so close to the ancient monument; I could almost have reached out my hand and touched them.

Beside me, Drew looked up from the book he was reading and smiled. “Nearly there, hey?”

“How nearly is nearly?”

“Um. About an hour.”

“Oh, great.”

“Hey, there’s a lot of people trying to get into one small space,” he pointed out.

“Yeah.” I smiled half-heartedly, and returned to staring out of the window.

The next thing I knew, I was standing somewhere familiar. It was dark, and cold, and there was what felt like mud, no, wet sand beneath my four feet. I realised then that I was standing on all fours, but with dream-logic, that was quite normal.

I looked around under the stormy, orange and black sky over the beach, staring out over the jagged rocks to the wild sea beyond. Beside me, a giant lion with a black mane looked at me mournfully. I turned to mouth I’m sorry, but my new mouth wouldn’t form the words, and it loped off into the distance, vanishing beyond a hill out of sight.

I turned around slowly to see where I was. Over my head, a large bat fluttered, but I ignored it, focussing instead on another lion, lolling regally on a nearby sand dune. It had no mane, and I realised that it was a lioness. It grinned at me, then lowered its great head to affectionately lick the top of the head of a small tabby cat that lay curled comfortably between its great paws. The small tabby closed its eyes in happiness, then rubbed its head affectionately against the side of the great beast’s face, licking it gently.

I turned my gaze from the two cats, then spotted a nearby pool of water. I loped over to get a drink and stared at my reflection.

I was a fox. A small fox with red fur and sad green eyes looked up at me from the pool. I stared for a few moments, mesmerised, then became aware of another presence. Another fox appeared in the water beside me, and I turned to see a lanky, sandy-furred fox with grey eyes grinning at me. It lolled its tongue, and drank greedily from the pool.

“Didn’t you used to be a crow?” I asked.

The sandy-furred fox lolled its tongue at me again and spoke. “Everyone’s allowed a bit of personal growth. Come play.” It flicked its tail at me.

I shook my head, and it loped off wagging its tail. I looked down into the pool sadly, and saw another, horrible reflection.

I flicked my head up, and saw a hideous lizard there on the other side of the pool, with a giant frill around its neck and yellow staring eyes. It hissed at me. “Should have shot you, bitch, when I had the chance.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” I replied. “You’re in prison for life. You can’t do anything to any of us. I’m not afraid of you.”

“No, it’s me you should be afraid of.” A horrible rough voice boomed from behind me, and I felt fear for the first time. I whipped around to see a giant black dog with dripping jaws looming behind me. It smiled horribly, revealing rows of yellow teeth, and lunged for me. I tried to dodge, but it was too quick and grabbed my shoulder, shaking me…

“…Wake up, SiSi, we’re nearly here!”

I jerked awake to find Drew shaking my shoulder. “Wake up, sleepy!”

I bolted upright and realised that I’d been asleep on Drew’s shoulder for at least the past hour. “Where are we?”

“Nearly here, look!” Drew pointed excitedly out of the window and I gasped.

In front of us, as the bus trundled slowly down the hill, the Festival lay sprawled out across the hills. It seemed to cover the entire valley in a sea of blue tents, with here and there a candy-striped yellow and red giant tent, or white marquee, poking out above the throng. On one of them, a giant inflatable figure of a blue man lay reclining; elsewhere the silver point which I realised must be the Festival’s main stage, the Pyramid Stage, pointed skywards, and I could see a huge grey oblong which I suddenly realised was a cinema screen in one of the other fields. At the back I could see rows and rows of white points, which I realised must be tipis, then the white oblongs of caravans and Winnebagos, and then rows and rows and rows of cars. There was so much of it, filling the eye as far as I could see.

“Oh, holy crap, it’s a city,” I remarked.

“Yep, nearly two hundred thousand people. Pretty impressive, huh?”

I glanced at Drew’s face, and saw that he was smiling like a kid on Christmas morning. I’d never seen him look so purely happy in the two years I’d known him, and for his sake, I put on a big smile of my own. “Yeah!”

“You’re going to love this, SiSi,” he promised. “Just as well you got some sleep now.” He paused and rubbed his shoulder. “Even if you did just drool all over my jacket.”

I smiled. “It will wash. Are we nearly there yet?”

“Hell yes!” Tanya grinned at me. “Nearly there. We’ll put the tents up and go and explore!”

“Fantastic!” I smiled back at her, and decided that I was not going to let my crappy mood spoil my friends’ much-deserved vacation. Besides, I was starting to feel excited myself.

I had no idea what the next four days held, but at least it would be a break from reality.

Aaaahhhh....intrigue! I love it! Who's good, who's bad, how will Bobby figure it out? And if he believes Durham, how will he convince Sienna? I love twists and turns, and I love this story!

So is the next chapter done?

hmmm......so, who should Bobby trust? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

::flops down next to ciaddict and waits for next chapter::

Hi everyone. Just to say, it may be a while before I can post the next chapter. Real life is intruding into playtime in the form of illness in my family. I'll do my best to keep writing and will post when I can!

Illness is such a bummer. I hope everyone is back on their feet and feeling better very soon! You're in my prayers.

Hi everyone. Things still are not great at home, but I've managed to get some time to write a short new chapter. It hasn't been beta'd yet, but I think it might not need much work, so I'm going to post it here. Sorry for the delay!

***

Chapter 6 - "Uncertainty".

Rating: FRT


“Am I in or out?” He repeated Durham’s words thoughtfully, drawing them out, then turned on the spot to face the other man. “It’s very clever.”

Durham cocked his head on one side. It was difficult to see past the other man’s self-assurance, but Goren thought he detected just a tinge of uncertainty.

“What you’ve done here… it’s very clever.” He gestured eloquently around them. “You get me away from Sienna. You knock me out, but you don’t harm me or try to use me to get to Sienna… you just keep enough control to be sure I’ll listen to you. Even the officers in the van you escaped from, they were knocked out. It’s very clever. I have to admit… if you’re as guilty as I’ve been told, you’re hiding it very well. As performances go, it’s flawless.”

“I’m not performing, Goren. And I don’t have all day to stand here listening to you talk.”

“Now, you see, that? That was good too. That could be a threat… or it could be that that you’re an innocent man on the run, and every so often, the stress of it just gets to you.”

“You’re stalling,” Durham pointed out, almost smiling, but not quite.

“Yeah. What you’ve said…” He pretended to consider. “It’s a tempting offer. Very tempting.”

Durham smiled fully this time, a flash of teeth, white against the darkness of his stubble. “You don’t like that b- Davenport- very much either, do you?”

Goren returned the smile, hiding his real reason for smiling behind the pretence of playing along with Durham; the other man had just revealed his own thought processes. That’s what you think is the bait for me. You’re not appealing to my sense of justice or professional solidarity, not offering me the chance to bring down a criminal organisation, or restore the career of an wrongly imprisoned police officer. You think offering me the chance to get even with the man who stole my girlfriend is the way to get me on your side.

I’m just a little insulted.

“No… no, I don’t.” He didn’t have to fake that too much. If at all.

“He screwed me over, he screwed you over, most of all, he screwed Sienna over,” Durham said, and inwardly, Goren smiled, but didn’t let it show; the cold floor of the abandoned room was an ever-constant reminder that, physically at least, he was at Durham’s mercy. He wants to seal the deal. He’s in a hurry.

“Yeah.” Goren inwardly took a deep breath. This next part had to be convincing. “So, how does this work? I walk out of here and… do what?”

“Take my offer to MI5,” Durham said urgently. “Take my offer to MI5. They’ll take it, Goren. The Barayev organisation trafficks more drugs, women and illegal firearms into London than any other, and anything that inflicts even a small blow on them is something they’ll want.”

“And how do you know they won’t just side with their own agent?”

Durham smiled. He likes to display his own cleverness, Goren decided, and tried very hard not to think about how Sienna might have found that appealing. Perhaps that was why Durham was pushing the “even the score with Davenport” angle: he was trying to keep Goren’s mind off the fact that there, standing in front of him, was the man who had replaced him in Sienna’s affections and in her bed. If the situation had been reversed, he might have tried the same tactic, and it might even have worked…

Except that he could still scent Sienna, faintly, on his own skin. Except that she’s with me now, and I know that, and I’m going to get over this thing I have about her past, somehow… and, also, I don’t think with my dick.

“Well, that would be pretty much why I need you.” Durham grinned at him. “I hear that you can persuade anyone into going along with just about anything…”

“I’m not a con-artist.”

“Sorry, did I bruise your professional pride?” Durham chuckled. “No offence intended, Goren, but you see where I’m going with this. I need someone I can trust to put my case across, and, well,” he spread his hands and looked Goren in the eye “You’re my best chance. I need someone who can persuade them to take a chance on me, and, if they do, all of us win. I win, you win, Sienna wins, they win. Help me, Goren. Please.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll do it.” Durham smiled and closed his eyes briefly in satisfaction. “Excellent.”

“Can I have my shoes?”

“Of course.” Durham smiled, but didn’t make a move. “I’ll leave them by the door. Here.” He handed over a piece of card with a cellphone number written on. “Call me on that when you’ve spoken to Five.”

“That’s it?” Goren asked. “No code words? No pre-arranged phrases between us to let you know if Five have agreed to go ahead with it?”

“Nah.” Durham shook his head. “I leave that kind of crap to the spooks. Bastards.” His face darkened just for a second, then lightened again. “I’m in your hands, Goren. Don’t leave it too long before you call. Oh, and give it a good ten minutes before you follow me out.” He smiled, and walked away.

You’re in Sienna’s hands, he thought at Durham’s back, but didn’t say.

Ten minutes later, shivering inside the warmth of his coat and shoes, he stumbled out of the building, his mind in a whirl.

Focus, Bobby.

His immediate instinct was to run straight back to Sienna and tell her what had happened, and his rational decision as a experienced police officer was to head straight out into the street where there were plenty of potential witnesses and several CCTV cameras, where he walked about until he came across a shop selling cellphones, bought the cheapest he could find, then walked until he came to the entrance to a shopping mall, where the background noise would make listening in on him very difficult. His cellphone had been out of his possession for the length of time he’d been unconscious, and realistically he could no longer assume it was safe to use. If Durham had been lying about meaning him and Sienna no harm, if he wanted to track them or listen in on Goren’s cellphone, he’d had plenty of time to install recording and tracking software on it.

He wondered all the time if he was being unnecessarily paranoid. If Durham had wanted him dead or harmed, he could easily have done so at any point in the past – he checked his watch again – half hour.

But if he wants Sienna – if he’s lying to me – then he could well have decided that the fastest way to find her is to capture me, and spin me a story about how he’s the misunderstood victim, then let me go and watch me run straight back to where she is, because I’d resist being tortured if I had to, to keep her safe, so tricking me would be faster…

One thing he was sure of: everything Sienna had told him about Durham having been a excellent detective had been correct. The other man had the same mix of intelligence, deviousness and control over his emotions that he himself possessed. That Sienna finds attractive… The thought would have worried him, but the memory of Sienna’s naked body against his less than an hour ago kept it at bay.

It was immensely frustrating for him to admit, but he genuinely could not – quite – tell whether Durham was sincere or not. His usual approach when forming a profile was to look into someone’s background, see them in their home surroundings, so that when they met face-to-face in the interrogation room, he already had the background knowledge necessary to find their weak spots and make them crack. He had none of that knowledge available to him, except in the form of the knowledge inside Sienna’s head.

Sienna… First, last, and foremost, he thought, his priority must be to keep her safe. Her, and Eames, who – he looked at his watch with a wince – would be arriving in London at any moment. The thought lent him urgency, and without further hesitation, he flipped open his own cell, put Sienna’s number into the phone he’d just bought, and called.

Her voice was muzzy from sleep, and he suppressed a feeling of guilt at waking her. “Bobby? Are you okay?”

“Sienna, I’m fine. Listen, I don’t want you to w- Do you have a safe way of getting out of the place you are now?”

“Bobby, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m perfectly safe, and so are you, but we need to talk in person. How did you get to that apartment?”

“One of MI5’s driver’s took me there, I can get one of them to escort me out…” She was waking up rapidly, and he could hear it in her voice. “Bobby, are you okay?” Her voice was sharp with worry. “Are you hurt, Bobby, did someone-”

“Sienna!” He used his “cop” voice, the voice of authority, which he had never used to her before, but it was necessary now. Speaking slowly and firmly, he replied “Sienna, I’m well. I will meet you at the airport, if you have a safe way of getting there.”

“Yes – yes, one of Five’s drivers can meet me and take me there. Bobby, swear to me that you’re alright…”

“Sienna.” He softened his voice to a tone he only ever used with her, when they were alone together. “Sienna, I’m well. The only thing wrong with me is that I’m worried about you. Promise me that you won’t take any risks, and I’ll see you when we meet Alex.”

“Bobby, I promise.” He could hear in her voice that she was standing up, dressing, strapping her gun in its holster across her body and pulling on her shoes one-handed. “I’ll be perfectly safe. I love you.”

“I love you. See you at Heathrow airport.” He ended the call, took a deep breath, then rang Eames’ cell. No reply except her answering service. He thought quickly, then left a message: “Eames, it’s Bobby. I need you to wait for me at the airport. Don’t worry, but also don’t leave the airport unless myself and Sienna are there.”

Running out into the street, he hailed a cab, told the driver to take him to Heathrow airport as fast as he could (a challenge he accepted with alacrity), and sat on the edge of his seat as the man pulled out into traffic with a squeal from the clutch.

He turned over the situation in his head. What was he sure of, and what was he not sure of?

Firstly, Durham’s argument to him, though far-fetched, was not unconvincing. Even having met the man for barely thirty minutes, he was sure that Durham possessed the courage, the intelligence and the initiative (not to mention the sheer chutzpah) to have decided to go undercover without authorisation or backup if he thought it was the only way to get results.

Secondly, possessing courage and intelligence did not, in and of themselves, mean that a person was on the side of the angels. Having met the man for barely thirty minutes, he was not sure that Durham was telling the truth, or whether he had indeed been corrupt and was now trying to wriggle out of the consequences. In which case, anything that put him back in his old position in the police would be a near-catastrophic error.

Thirdly, though it was risky, he was as sure as Durham obviously was that the offer of evidence that could potentially bring down a major trafficking organisation was too tempting for MI5 and the Metropolitan Police to ignore. He could not, he thought, lie to them about having encountered Durham at all regardless of whether he trusted the man. Durham was, after all, a convicted felon on the run and not informing the authorities would be a breach of his own duties as a police officer. Therefore, he would have to do as Durham had suggested, and tell them the full details of what had just happened.

Fourthly, he himself had two options: to tell Sienna and Eames about his encounter with Durham immediately, or wait until they arrived at MI5’s headquarters, and then tell everyone involved at once.

He rejected the second option instantly. Both women would be rightfully furious that he’d cut them out of the decision-making process and, more importantly, he needed their insight into the situation. Therefore, he needed to speak to both Sienna and Eames about his encounter with Durham before they told MI5, and the three of them would have to decide together whether they believed he was sincere.

There were so many unknowns, he thought uneasily. He had no way of knowing how MI5 would react to this situation, whether they would in fact side with Davenport in believing that Durham was corrupt, whether they would take a chance on the possibility of Durham telling the truth in the hope of striking a telling blow in the ongoing war on trafficking and drugs, and what role exactly they intended he, Sienna and Eames to play in all of this. The scar on Sienna’s leg was a constant reminder that at least some people in Five were more than willing to risk injuring or killing a few pawns as part of a wider strategy...

What does the famous Detective Robert Goren think about this situation? he thought mordantly.

The famous Detective Robert Goren realised that, for all his intelligence, all his attempts to rationally think through the situation,

Did he trust Durham, or not?

And, if he did, would Sienna?

"Even having met the man for barely thirty minutes, he was sure that Durham possessed the courage, the intelligence and the initiative (not to mention the sheer chutzpah) to have decided to go undercover without authorisation or backup if he thought it was the only way to get results."

Hmm....sounds like another detective we all know and love. Another great chapter, TW!

Chapter 7 - "Trusting No-One" (FRT)

Author's Note: Many thanks, as always, to my awesome beta-readers, brynna and blucougar57, and to all the lovely people who leave comments and reviews. Hugs to you all.

***

Alex Eames rubbed her eyes wearily. She could swear she had grit in them. As she hauled herself through immigration and waited impatiently to snag her suitcase from the baggage carousel, she thought of all the things she would rather be doing than being stuck in rainy, dark London in the week before Christmas, away from her family and friends, helping out an investigation into events which, if she was entirely honest, she would have been just as happy to forget.

Duty calls, she reminded herself sternly, touching her gold shield where it rested securely in her coat’s inside pocket. As she dragged the suitcase off the carousel, she forced herself to focus.

It was not that she didn’t want to help out their fellow police officers in the Metropolitan Police. Nor that she didn’t want to do whatever she could to help the ongoing fight against terrorism.

She just wished she didn’t have to do it right now.

Not to mention the fact that Sienna’s psycho ex-boyfriend escaped from prison only recently…

She’d spent the flight over pondering whether Sienna was right, that the timing was a little too pat for this to be a coincidence – that they had been called over to London at precisely the same time that John Durham was the subject of a manhunt by the UK police and security services – or whether the younger woman was just being paranoid. She still wasn’t sure. Yes, it was a hell of a coincidence, but were MI5 really that manipulative?

Her thoughts were interrupted by someone calling her name loudly. “Alex! Over here!”

She turned her head and saw Sienna and Bobby waiting for her on the other side of the barrier. They were waving enthusiastically… no, not enthusiastically, she realised. Frantically was closer to it, she realised as she got nearer.

“Alex, you’re here, that’s great,” Sienna murmured, practically snatching the suitcase out of her hands. “We need to go, our car is waiting.”

“Uh… what?” She resisted the urge to rub her eyes again and yawn.

“We need to get going, now.”

“What’s the hurry?” She’d been keeping herself going throughout the last interminable hour on the plane with visions of a hotel room, a meal that hadn’t come out of a foil tray, a shower, fresh clothes, a comfortable bed to stretch out on and, if she were very lucky, enjoy a brief nap on.

“Sorry, Eames,” Bobby murmured from beside her. “We really need to go. Really.” He suddenly seemed to remember what he was holding. “Uh… I got you this.” He held out the most welcome sight she had seen in hours; a large white cardboard cup with a familiar green logo. She took a brief second to inhale the welcome scent, took a dainty sip, and nearly spat it out. She looked up at her partner accusingly.

“Bobby, this coffee has at least two sugars and double cream.”

“I thought you liked it that way.” He frowned.

“Yes, but you think it’s terrible and call it ‘cake in a cup’, and you usually only ever buy it for me when you want to apologise or ask me for something really big…”

“Can we focus, please!” Sienna’s voice was sharp, and Alex resisted the urge to glare.

“Sienna, I just got off the plane.”

“Yes, well, a lot of things happened whilst you were on the plane. Things that you need to know about, so can we please just get in the car?” Sienna was practically dancing on the spot, Eames noticed uneasily. What the hell had got her so rattled?

“Okay, yeah,” she said, hoping her irritation wasn’t too obvious, and followed the two of them towards a waiting black SUV with a man she didn’t recognise behind the wheel. Had she been in the States, she’d have instantly thought, FBI. Since she wasn’t, she wondered why they were being picked up by an MI5 agent. She could be wrong, but there was just something about him that shouted “domestic security”.

“What’s the situation?” she asked, once they were all seated in the rear of the SUV.

Sienna and Bobby looked at each other and apparently communicated without words, since Bobby spoke first and Sienna stayed silent.

“Eames…” He paused, then began again. “I was… contacted… by John Durham less than an hour ago.”

For a split second she just stared at him. “What? Wait a second… we’re talking about the same man here? Your…”

“Yes, Alex, my ex-boyfriend,” Sienna replied sharply. “Let’s get that out of the way now.”

What the hell is wrong with her? Eames thought, but her thoughts were interrupted as her partner continued.

“He claims that he’s innocent,” Bobby continued. “He says that-”

He didn’t get to complete his thought, as the car pulled swiftly in to the side of the road. The driver turned round and said “Did you say you’d been contacted by John Durham?”

“Bobby, you haven’t told the police here?” Eames didn’t- quite- shout, but her voice was nearly twice as loud as usual.

“Before I did anything else, I wanted to see with my own eyes that you were both safe,” he replied calmly and quietly.

“You haven’t reported this?” the driver continued.

Sienna leaned forward and fixed him with a glare. “No, Adams, we have not, and every minute you’re not driving us to Thames House is another minute we’re not reporting it, so get moving.”

He shook his head. “I have to call this in.” He reached for a radio handset beside the parking brake.

Sienna reached forward and placed her own hand over the handset, locking eyes with the driver. “No. You do not. We are going to report this in person to Ann Langford, and you need to get us to Thames House so that we can do that.”

“Get your hand off,” the man replied. “Every second counts, and I need to call this in now.”

Sienna shook her head. “No, you don’t. John will be long gone by now-“ She looked across at Bobby, who nodded. “You won’t catch him, even if you get a squad car to where he was last seen immediately. I need to report this to Ann Langford first: it impacts directly upon MI5’s operations, and if you have any sense of loyalty to-“

“I’m loyal to my job and my country.” He reached for Sienna’s small hand with his own large black-gloved hand, and her face went icy in a way Eames had never seen before. Her tone of voice, when she spoke, was almost cruel, one that Eames had never heard her use before.

“Well, you’re certainly not loyal to your wife.”

The man’s face went an unpleasant shade of grey as he stared at her, goggle-eyed. Sienna continued in a softer tone. “Sorry, Adams. I really didn’t want to say that. But you know, and I know, that you haven’t been working late over the past few months.”

“You’ve got no proof.”

“Just because I don’t live in this country any more, doesn’t mean I don’t have sources. Nor that I don’t have the telephone number for several of your colleagues, who’ll no doubt be delighted to hear what use you and the department secretary have been making of the back seats of these cars. Can you get fired for that? You certainly would if you worked for my organisation…”

“You bitch,” he replied softly.

She sighed. “I’m afraid so. Now put your foot on the gas pedal, and get us to Thames House. Now. And if you like having your job, you aren’t going to hear any of what we say in the next ten minutes, and you certainly aren’t going to repeat it.”

The man gave her a look of deep loathing, and pulled out into the traffic. Sienna released her grip on the radio handset, and settled back onto the leather seats, as Eames and Goren stared at her.

“You’ve done the same sort of thing yourselves,” Sienna said in reply to their expressions. “Now, can we focus on John? Bobby, what did you think?” Her expression was almost hungry, in a way that Eames found somehow deeply worrying.

“Think about what?” she asked.

Her partner exhaled sharply. “He claims he’s innocent. He claims that he was working undercover without authorisation to get intelligence on the gang he was supposedly on the take from, and that’s why MI5 thought he was corrupt… he wants his job back.”

“He wants myself and Bobby to go to MI5 and persuade them to trust him,” Sienna added in a tight voice. “He’s in contact with the gang he was supposedly working for, the Barayev branch of the Russian mafia.”

“What he wants is… Both MI5 and the Barayev gang expect him to try to… get to… Sienna. Kidnap her, take revenge on her. His plan is that he goes along with that, but lets MI5 in on when and where it’s supposed to happen…”

“…when it all goes according to how John describes it, that’s proof that he’s telling the truth. He comes back to a hero’s welcome, tells us everything he knows about the Barayev organisation, and with luck and good timing, we can make a surgical strike that should close down at least half of their operations in London in one go,” Sienna finished.

Eames stared for a few seconds, and sincerely wished she’d gotten more sleep on the flight. “How do you know he’s telling the truth?” she asked finally.

“We don’t,” Sienna said simply.

“He didn’t harm me, Eames,” Bobby replied. “He could have, easily – he knocked me out – but all he wanted to do was talk.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” she pointed out.

“No, but there’s at least the possibility that he’s telling the truth,” Sienna added. “And if he is… then this is an opportunity we can’t pass up.” Her eyes were hungry, a look Eames knew very well, the eagerness of the law enforcement professional when the opportunity to catch their prey suddenly appeared. “That’s why I want to speak to Langford first.”

“It’s a pretty far-out story,” Eames commented. “Undercover without permission? There aren’t many people crazy enough to do that.”

“Crazy, or determined, Alex,” Sienna replied. “Do you know what John’s nickname was? He got it after his team brought down someone they used to call the Invisible Man. He was an arms trader to the mafia, a major player. You name it, he could supply it, but he never left a paper trail. Everyone else had given up trying to catch him, but John just kept going. He wouldn’t stop. After they caught him, people started calling John “the Machine”, because he never, ever, stopped, just kept going until he got what he was after.”

“What if he’s lying?” she pointed out, again.

Sienna shrugged impatiently. “We’ll discuss that when we get to Thames House.” MI5’s headquarters, Eames reminded herself. “We’re nearly there now.” She pulled out her cellphone and placed a call. “Yes? This is Sienna Tovitz, Interpol Serious and Organised Crime, New York office. I need to speak to Ann Langford immediately. Yes, immediately.”

Eames exchanged glances with her partner. For the first time in years, she felt awkward with Bobby. Sienna’s presence was a sharp reminder that there was now an important part of his life that didn’t involve her in any way, shape or form. It was not a comfortable feeling.

It was not that she wanted Bobby for herself. He was an attractive man, she would have been the first to agree, but he was her friend and partner, and she would never risk that. That did not, however, prevent her feeling just a little… displaced. She was not the only female with whom Bobby Goren had a relationship now, and she was still getting used to the knowledge.

She was still considering her options when the car swept into the basement of Thames House, passing through endless security checks before they reached their destination, an elevator in the basement.

Five minutes later, they were waiting in a large office for Ann Langford, the Operations Chief of MI5’s Serious and Organised Crime Unit, to return from a meeting that had been hastily cut short once Sienna passed on the news about John Durham. Suddenly, the door opened, and Langford herself entered the room. A tall, heavily-built woman, she wore a navy blue trouser suit with low heels. Her greying blond hair was clipped back by a steel-grey barrette, revealing a face with one of the hardest expressions Eames had ever seen on anyone’s face, including several major criminals.

Imagine seeing that face every day, she thought. It’s no wonder Davenport turned out like…

“Detectives, Ms Tovitz,” Langford said perfunctorily. “Thank you for reporting this to me first. Detective Goren, I need to speak with you first. Alone,” she said, without bothering to face Sienna.

“We-“

“-will discuss this together, once I have the facts.” Langford’s tone was final, as her office assistant opened the door to a nearby small room with one table and two chairs visible, and gestured at Goren to enter. He exchanged a brief glance with Sienna, then rose steadily to his feet and joined Langford in the interrogation – no, it wasn’t an interrogation room, it just looked like one, Eames thought uncomfortably as the door closed. She stared at the door for a few seconds, then turned to Sienna.

“Sienna…” She paused, then selected one of the many questions she wanted to ask. “Do you think Durham is telling the truth?”

Sienna looked at her with an expression composed of equal parts hope, fear, and exhaustion. “I think he is, Alex. I hope he is.”

“You hope he is?”

Sienna closed her eyes briefly. “Yes. I’d like something good to come out of this whole sorry mess. I’d like to think that I wasn’t completely mistaken about John.”

“Sienna, you’ve said to me in the past that part of you always sensed that Durham was keeping something back from you. That when you heard he was corrupt – part of you wasn’t surprised.”

“Well, he was keeping something back from me, Alex. If he was undercover without permission, that’s a hell of a risk to take.”

”Assuming he’s telling the truth about that. He could be lying, Sienna. In which case-“

“In which case my life is in danger, Alex, yes, thank you, I know. I’ve known since I got the message that John was on the loose, though really, I’ve known for the past year, since John started his sentence, and I got to live my life in the happy knowledge that, sooner or later, his sentence would end and he’d be in ‘protective custody’.” She practically spat the words. “That’s a joke. I thought I’d be safe in New York with Bobby, but I should have known… how else did John know where to find Bobby? I thought we were being watched at JFK airport, and I must have been right. He had someone watching me there, Alex. Watching for me, and watching for Bobby, and for you, so that he’d know when we left and he could wait for us here. That’s the sort of man John is, Alex. He doesn’t stop. Ever. And I’m not going to, either. I want this resolved so that we can live our lives, all of us.”

“All of us?”

Sienna looked at her impatiently. “Yes. All of us. Do you know how worried I’ve been, thinking about Jack and Tanya, over here in the same country as John, with a baby on the way? But if John’s telling the truth – if he really is innocent-“ the hope showed on her face for just a few seconds, like sunlight through clouds “-then all that goes away, and we can just get on with our lives.”

Eames sighed. She was not a woman to back away from saying uncomfortable truths, but this was one of those rare occasions that she really didn’t want to say what she was about to. However, someone had to.

“What do you think Davenport is going to think about all this?”

Sienna’s face transformed itself into a mask of rage. It was an unpleasant sight, and Eames was glad that her partner was not in the room.

“I could not care less what Drew does, or does not think, Alex. He got me shot, and, if John’s right, it was for nothing.”

Wow, that’s a change from “he did try to make it up to me, he was my friend” , Eames thought in slightly stunned silence. What the hell happened? Something had clearly changed in Sienna’s feelings, but what had caused it?

She tried again. “Sienna… regardless of your personal feelings – listen to me! – regardless of your feelings about Davenport, he’s an MI5 officer. He must have thought there was good reason to think Durham was corrupt. Surely, he should be involved.” And I cannot believe I am having this argument.

Still, someone had to say it. Regardless of whether she liked Davenport as a person, or what she thought of his ethics, she had seen his intelligence and devotion to his job at first hand. She did not want them to lose out on the knowledge of the one person who knew the case against Durham better than anyone else because of Sienna’s emotions, regardless of how justified they might be. Particularly not when the stakes might be as high as their lives.

“Alex, just because you saved Drew’s life, don’t start thinking he’s a good person. I know you must want to…”

“This has got nothing to do with my feelings, Sienna.” Eames fixed the younger woman with her best “cop” expression, hard-faced and authoritative.

Sienna sighed very wearily, and Eames felt a surge of compassion briefly temper her increasing frustration at the younger woman’s stubbornness. “Jesus, Alex, would it kill you to be on my side?”

“I am on your side, Sienna. But it’s not my job to be a cheerleader. I don’t hesitate to speak out when I think Bobby isn’t seeing the full picture, and I’m not going to hesitate to do the same to you.”

“Oh, you don’t think I’m seeing the full picture?” Sienna’s glare was back in full force. Suddenly, she sprang off the couch and her hands flew to her belt buckle. As Eames and the office assistant (hiding behind her desk) gaped at her, she unbuckled the belt, undid her pants fastening and pulled them midway down her thighs.

Her suit jacket hid her panties, but it did not hide the puckered, messy scar on her left thigh. Some surgeon or other had tried to tidy it up, but there had been only so much he or she had been able to do, and even though it had largely faded from red to silver, it was still an unpleasant sight. Eames winced, imagining the pain, the burning sensation as the bullet tore through the skin and muscle, the shock as the blood loss started to kick in. (She tried hard not to think about what it must be like for Bobby, being reminded of one of the most painful incidents in Sienna’s past every time the two of them were intimate.)

“This is the full picture, Alex!” Sienna’s eyes locked with hers.

Eames took a deep breath. As the other woman angrily pulled her clothes back up, she replied as calmly as she could. “No. Sienna, I’m saying this as your friend as well as a detective with over fifteen years’ experience. You know as well as I do that you’re not thinking rationally…”

“Oh, I am thinking quite rationally, Alex,” Sienna replied, more calmly than Eames had expected. “Let me tell you what I think. I think that if John is innocent, he deserves this chance. I think that if he’s not innocent, then we should still do this, because it’s our best chance of drawing him out, and I really, really don’t want to go through the rest of my life expecting John to appear round the corner with a gun any moment. I want this over with.”

“So, why not involve Davenport? Give yourself the best chance of…”

“Because Drew and John hated each other. They were only ever in the same room once, when we had a meeting when I first got there, about setting up the new taskforce. But I could feel it, Alex. They were polite, but they hated each other, it was instinctive. Drew won’t listen to any of this, he’ll just want to take John down, and to hell with anyone else.”

“You’re not giving him a chance, Sienna,” Eames said, very gently. Truth be told, she was less concerned about Davenport’s well-being than Sienna’s. Aside from the fact that Davenport might well be privy to information they didn’t have, she knew very well that, once the situation was resolved, Sienna would make herself miserable over not having given her friend an chance to defend himself-

“Drew lost any right he ever had to have me consider his feelings or his well-being when he lied to me for two years, Alex.” Sienna’s words were utterly cold.

-or maybe not. Eames sighed. What the hell is going on, here? There’s a part of this puzzle I’m missing.

But she had no more time to think about that, as the door opened, and Langford and Goren emerged, looking grim but resolute.

Though she kept her professional face in place, she couldn’t help thinking the worst.

This has the potential to end very, very badly.

Excellent chapter! You've got me on edge here! And I had to laugh at this part:

“It’s a pretty far-out story,” Eames commented. “Undercover without permission? There aren’t many people crazy enough to do that.”

Nice foreshadowing of Untethered!

After all the angst of the past few chapters, I thought it was time to have a short break and enjoy a little Bobby and Sienna.

No, I haven't posted the wrong chapter. Keep reading...

***

Interlude 3 - "What Happened At Glastonbury: Early Evening Memories"


“We are not camping near the toilets.”

The dreadlocked young man Tanya was currently addressing looked slightly intimidated. As well he might, since Tanya was giving him a Level 2 hard stare. (Level 1 being “mildly annoyed”, Level 3 being “you are going to do what I want”, Level 4 being “you are going to do what I want OR ELSE”, Level 5 being “stop pissing me off OR ELSE”, and Level 6 being “Drew, stop being fracking annoying”.) He shrugged.

“Suit yourself, then… there’s not a whole lot of room left. If you’d got here yesterday…”

“Well, we didn’t,” Drew pointed out from behind Tanya, whilst the rest of us waited impatiently to go put up our tents and get in the first drink of the festival.

The man shrugged again and grinned. “Okay, suit yourselves, just camp wherever you can find. I think there’s some room at the top of the field.”

“Top of the field is fine,” Tanya replied, grinned back, and commenced leading her troops up a dusty path up the site of our campsite.

“It’s going to be a looong walk from the tents if we need to pee in the middle of the night,” I pointed out, memories of the last time I’d gone camping in Europe, way back before I joined Interpol, coming back to me.

“It won’t be that bad,” Jack replied.

“Easy for you to say, you’re a man, you can go pee in the bushes.”

“Only if they don’t get caught, SiSi,” Tanya replied.

“Caught?”

“You’re not supposed to piss on site anywhere but in the toilets, it damages the fields and poisons the stream. They have the Green Police-“

“-the Pee Police,” Amp chimed in, snickering.

“-who go round stopping people doing it.”

“How exactly do they do that?” I asked with a certain amount of worry.

“Run after anyone they catch doing it blowing whistles and yelling, mostly. And pointing, so we can all have a laugh,” Drew replied. “Are we nearly there yet?”

“Hmm.” Tanya paused and surveyed the ground. “Nearly…” She forged ahead, carrying her backpack as though it weighed nothing. “Hmm. Yes, here is the space for us.” We trudged ahead and joined her in what looked like the only remaining patch of grass big enough for all of us.

“Kind of a walk,” I murmured, looking down the field at the large white tent housing the bar and canteen, with the toilets and showers beside it. “Couldn’t we just have camped a bit further down the hill?”

Tanya shook her head. “No, you never want to camp at the bottom of a field, it’s asking for trouble.”

Lots of other people have, I thought, looking at the spread of tents before me and resentfully eyeing the long walk down to the rest of the site. I decided it wasn’t worth arguing about. Suddenly, an arm dropped lightly across my shoulders.

“Come on, cheer up,” Drew smiled at me, one of his rare small smiles that always made me feel special. There were not many people he liked enough to smile at.

I smiled back wryly. “Sorry, I think I’m still dealing with the remains of last night’s hangover.” I poked him in the ribs. “Which I am blaming on you.”

“Me? It’s all my fault, suddenly? Did I get a funnel and pour the drink down your throat? Was it me who said that one more before closing time wouldn’t harm?”

“It was you who bought me beer. You should never mix beer and wine. It’s all your fault.”

“I get the blame for everything that goes wrong around here,” Drew replied in a tone of injured innocence.

“Yes, because it’s often your fault. You attract trouble,” I replied, playfully punching his arm.

“And yet, SiSi, you and Jack and Tanni just can’t seem to stop hanging around with me, hmm?” He grinned wickedly. “Admit it, you like the sort of trouble I bring.”

“I like the sort of drinks you bring, and the first round is on you tonight,” I replied, and grinned back.

He squeezed my shoulders. “Hey, if that’s what it takes to get you smiling… Did that tattoo come out okay?”

“Mmm…yes, actually.” I’d almost forgotten I had it. I pulled up my shirt and pushed down my pants a little to show him. I really did like it, I thought, admiring the gracefully fluid lines of the lion Tanya had traced in henna on my belly.

“Very nice indeed,” Drew replied, tipping his head to examine it more closely. He started to reach out a finger to trace along it, then stopped.

“Perhaps I should think of getting a permanent one,” I mused aloud.

“Yeah, why not? Tanni and I both have.”

“Really?” I frowned. I already knew that Tanya had tattoos – they covered half her back, so were hard to miss – but I hadn’t realised that Drew had any. “Where’s yours?”

He smirked. “Let’s just say it’s somewhere you wouldn’t see unless you knew me really well.”

“How like you,” I replied, and grinned.

“Hoi! You two!” Amp yelled from across the field. “Are you putting your tents up or not? You’ll be keeping the rest of us from the bar, you lazy buggers.”

“Don’t be so bloody impatient,” Drew yelled back. He grinned at me, kissed my forehead lightly, and went off to pick a suitable camping spot. I reached into my backpack and applied myself to figuring out how to put my tent up.

An hour later, I was sitting around a table in the canteen with everyone else, nibbling on some leftover fries. I’d been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the food, which was not bad at all considering it had been cooked in a tent in a field.

“So, what’s the plan? Is there a plan?” Jack enquired hopefully. We debated back and forth, and eventually decided that we were all going to go out and have a drink together, then split up and go explore the festival site together. Mark knew someone who was camping out somewhere else on site, and who was having a campfire that night “with lots of beer, and his band’s going to play”.

“Count me in,” Amp stretched cheerfully. “I’m gonna go change, get a few things from the tent. See you all back here in half an hour?”

We agreed, and the party split up, some of us trailing back up the hill with Amp, whilst the others stayed behind in the bar tent, having a quiet drink. As I followed Amp’s broad back up the hill, I caught myself smiling unexpectedly. Well, why not? It was a gorgeous summer evening, with the sun setting slowly behind a nearby hill in a blaze of colour. I sniffed the air gently, catching woodsmoke, cooking smells, and grass on the breeze.

What a great place this is, I thought as I reached the top of the hill and paused outside my tent to stand and take in the view.

The festival site stretched before me. Seen from this angle, closer up, it was a beautiful sight in the golden evening sunlight, a sea of blue tents stretching out to the horizon, with here and there the odd splash of colour from one of the candy-striped beer tents, and the bright silver point of the Pyramid Stage in the distance. I’m gonna be standing there soon, I thought excitedly. Standing there with all my friends beside me.

But not the one person I really want.

I forced myself to be in the present, admiring the view, absorbing the sheer spectacle of the Festival. Each of those tents represented, what… one? Two people, at least? My senses flooded briefly, thinking of all those different lives, all here in this place, a time cut out of everyday life. People eating, drinking, making plans for the night, making music, making love…

Before I knew it, I was back in the past, over a year ago. I closed my eyes, remembering another time when I’d had the same sense of viewing humanity from above, that same overwhelming, near-religious sense of being a part of something much bigger than me.

Another time, and another place.

***

“What time do we need to be there?”

Bobby’s tone was just ever so slightly patient. “We’ve got plenty of time, we don’t need to be there until two pm.” The same as the last time you asked, he managed to not actually say, but I could swear I could hear it in his voice.

I forced myself to put down the coffee cup I was slurping from nervously. I always drank more quickly when I was nervous or fretting about something. Which Bobby will have noticed, I thought anxiously. He always notices.

But it was no good. I was nervous, in two minds about the whole thing.

Part of me was yelling, Are you mad? You haven’t ever had chance to really see New York before, and you’re going to go to the Empire State Building with your boyfriend, who bought you both an Express Pass so you can skip the queues, which is not cheap. You should be happy!

Another part of me was feeling awkwardly like a kid being taken out by her uncle. The Empire State Building: could I be any more of a tourist? I felt like I was acting like a school kid on her first trip out of state, like I was trying to tick off all the sights in the guidebook, sights that Bobby probably secretly thought were an incredible cliché. But the truth was, I couldn’t think of anything else to suggest.

frack, I hated the fourteen-year age gap. I really, really hated it. Everything was fine when we were in bed. No, it wasn’t fine. It was fantastic. It was not just that Bobby was good in bed, which he was. It was more that he was willing to let me try things out in a way that hadn’t really occurred to any of my previous boyfriends had ever really thought of doing.

The idea of practising sex had been a weird one at first. Until I’d met Bobby, I’d always wanted each time to be perfect. But Bobby had taught me that it was okay to try new things, okay for those new things to sometimes not work, and okay to laugh if it didn’t quite work out (usually followed by the two of us just doing it the old-fashioned way, which was always enjoyable).

But get us out of bed, and what the hell did we have in common? I thought miserably. Bobby was the most fascinating man I’d ever met. Both professionally and personally, he was incredibly interesting, a wonderful listener, an excellent cook… so what the hell did he see in me? Other than the obvious. Not that I thought he wanted me just for my body, he was not that kind of man, but I had a horrible feeling that one of these days he’d give me the “It’s been fun…” speech and leave in search of someone his own age.

“Sienna?”

“If you don’t want to do this, we don’t have to.”

I stared at him open-mouthed for a few seconds. There were times where Bobby’s near-telepathic ability to read minds left me feeling like I was completely transparent.

“Are you… I should have asked,” he stuttered a little “Um… do you get vertigo? Is that…”

“No. No, Bobby, no. No, I don’t get vertigo, I’m not scared of heights, at least not as long as there’s a nice thick window between me and them…” I babbled.

We stared at each other.

“Sienna… what’s wrong?”

“Nothing! Nothing is wrong. Absolutely nothing, so let’s go and have a good day.” I turned away and looked determinedly for my purse. Then stopped, as a very large hand gently caught the point of my chin and tipped my face up slightly towards Bobby’s. I forced myself to look him in the eyes.

“Sienna…” He tipped his head on one side, which caused me a brief flash of irritation; I really hated it when Bobby looked at me like a puzzle he was trying to figure out. It made me feel like a suspect.

“Yes?” I snapped, then regretted it instantly. “Bobby, I’m sorry. It’s nothing to do with you, okay? So let’s go and have a good time.”

He looked a little pissed off, and my stomach dropped. Oh crap, now I’ve fracked up, I thought miserably.

“Sienna…” He turned away, then turned back again, spinning on the spot, and exhaled sharply.

“Sienna…” Again his sentence trailed off.

“Um. Yes?” I prompted, when it became obvious he wasn’t going to continue.

“Let me in.”

He said that so quietly that I almost didn’t hear it. “What?”

“What’s going on in your head? I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. One minute you’re fine, the next minute you freeze up and you’re walking on eggshells around me and I have no idea why. What’s wrong?”

My eyes met his again. Those beautiful dark brown eyes… So deep, and so full of life, and, right now, so confused, and it really hurt to think that that confusion was because of me.

I forced myself to the realisation that this was one of those moments of truth. You had better be honest, Sienna, and if he does decide to ditch you because you’re too young for him or whatever, so be it, but he’ll ditch you for sure if you keep making him feel like this.

“Honestly, Bobby?”

He nodded.

“I’m scared. I’m scared because I don’t know you very well, and sometimes I have no idea what’s going on in your head, either. And right now,” I took a deep breath, “right now I really want to go to the Empire State Building and see New York from the Observatory with you there, but I don’t know if it’s what you want to do, or if you’re just being nice to me and secretly you think it’s a total cliché or whatever, and you want me to let you in, but half the time you don’t tell me what you’re thinking! I mean, okay, you talk to me about places you’ve been and things you like and people you know, but it’s all- stuff for public consumption! You don’t tell me what you’re thinking. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like Detective Goren lots, but I want to know Bobby Goren too, and he keeps hiding from me! And also-”

“Sienna!” That was the first time Bobby had ever sounded really annoyed with me, so I shut up for a few seconds, then rallied and added: “Well, you wanted to know!”

He jammed the palms of his hands against his eye sockets for a few seconds, then dropped them abruptly and looked at me. This is it. This is the “this isn’t going to work” moment, I thought, and braced myself, and swore to myself that this time around I wouldn’t cry until I was outside his apartment.

Suddenly, he snorted. I looked at him, incredulous, and realised something astonishing.

He was smiling. Not a big public smile, or a toothy confident Detective Goren smile, but a little private smile.

“Do you realise, that’s the first time you’ve ever been annoyed with me?” he asked softly.

“I think it’s the first time you’ve been annoyed with me,” I pointed out. We looked at each other for a few seconds, then Bobby crossed over to the kitchen counter I was leaning on, settled himself beside me, and tentatively wrapped a friendly arm around my shoulders. I accepted it, then leaned against him, enjoying the comfort. We stayed silent whilst both of us tried to decide what to say next.

“Sienna?”

“Mmm?”

Bobby sighed, and it was a Bobby Goren sigh. Not a Detective Goren at the end of a long day sigh, just a confused male sigh. “I like you a lot. I really do mean that.”

“Why? You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to,” I added hastily.

He smiled wryly. “For all the reasons that I think you’re nervous about. I like the fact that you’re younger than me, but that you’ve seen enough of the world that you get what I’m talking about. I like the fact that you’ve travelled and you’re open to other ideas and other cultures and you’re really interested in what I have to say. I like the fact that sometimes you tell stories about driving through ex-minefields in Bosnia when you were with the Peace Corps, because it explains the way you drive the rest of the time…”

I glared at him, and he laughed and stroked my cheek. “You’re a fascinating person. I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you that.” He paused, swallowed, then added, “I’m lucky to be with you.”

I snuggled my head on his shoulder a little more. “Wow.”

“Mmm.”

We hugged some more, then I plucked up the courage to ask: “Bobby… Please. Tell me what you really think about us going to the Empire State Building together.”

He looked at me with the classic male face of “Are we still talking about this?” It actually cheered me up to see that. There were times when Bobby could be so frighteningly smart and ahead of the game that I forgot he was human as well.

I reached out and dared to stroke his cheek. “I can’t read minds like you. So you have to tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Honestly?” He smiled. “I’m thinking that I love my city, Sienna. I could earn more working as a profiler somewhere else – you know that and I know that. The NYPD doesn’t pay that well, but I’m honoured to serve here. That may not be a fashionable thing to say, but… it’s the truth. And I want to show you my home, and I want you to have a great day with me, and I really, really, don’t want you to spend it worrying about what I’m thinking. So promise me you won’t.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay. I promise.”

“Sienna…” Bobby half-said, half-sighed my name, and, suddenly but gently, wrapped both of his arms around me. I wrapped mine around him, and snuggled in. It felt wonderful to be held by Bobby, to feel the faint rhythm of his heartbeat against my body. He stroked my back, gently, lovingly. Normally by now one of us would be reaching for the other, hands exploring with practised skill to find sensitive areas of flesh that would make one of us gasp in pleasure and rub harder against the other, working ourselves up, but this time that didn’t happen. We stayed in each other’s embrace, eyes closed, and when our lips met it was almost by accident, a tender, sweet, gentle kiss, a caressing of lips.

We pulled apart and looked each other in the eyes. I felt a deeper connection between us than ever before and knew that Bobby felt it too, and that if we went to bed, this time, it would unlike any other…

I smiled softly at him. “I think I want to go and see the Empire State.”

“I want to go see that too.” He smiled back, and released me. Our connection would keep until we returned home that evening. There was no rush. It would last.

***

But it didn’t, I thought sadly, back in the present, watching and shivering slightly as the sunlight began its slow fade over the first night of the Festival. Bobby was not part of my life any more and would never be again.

The past is the past, Sienna, I reminded myself. If you dwell in it, you’ll make yourself miserable.

From further down the hill, I could hear Drew calling, “SiSi! Are you coming, ‘cause we’re going!”

I sighed, closed my eyes, and forced them open again with determination.

My friends were calling me, and I needed to go. If I no longer had Bobby, at least I had them, my dearest friends who would always look after me.

Go forward into the future, I thought, closed the tent behind me, and skipped down the hill to join the party.

Love this! What a wonderful interlude. Makes me want to go see the Empire State Building. With Bobby, of course!

Chapter 9 - "Unspoken Words" (FRT)

He ran over the plan again in his mind.

They’d spent hours debating whether they could trust Durham or not, but in the end, the prospect of putting the Barayev organisation out of business with Durham’s information was too tempting. As the debate had worn on, it had become increasingly obvious that DCI Mills was a lone voice in the wilderness, with most of the personalities involved dividing into one of several camps. Firstly, the police officers who thought “he was one of our own, give him a chance”. Secondly, the police officers who thought “he was one of our own, give him a chance and let’s see if we can make those smug bastards at Five eat crow for a while for getting it wrong”.

Thirdly, the officers from both the police and MI5 who thought “Any chance to take down a major trafficking organisation is one that should be seized with both hands”.

And fourthly, he suspected, the hopefully very small minority of officers from both organisations who thought “any chance to take down a major trafficking organisation is one that should be seized with both hands, and if the people whose lives are at stake happen not to be our own staff… well, that’s not such a bad thing”.

He really hoped that Anne Langford wasn’t one of those, but he suspected she might be. She had been utterly adamant that Andrew Davenport could not be recalled from duty. With the result that, as Eames had pointed out as tactfully as possible, that when he came off-duty, he was going to walk back into MI5’s office to find one of his major cases being re-examined with a view to determining whether he’d been negligent.

Langford’s face had struck just the right combination of determination and concern as she replied that the situation simply did not allow for Davenport to be recalled. “I don’t like to believe that one of my officers could have been negligent. However, if Durham was undercover without permission...” She’d shrugged. “He was an excellent officer. It’s not impossible, much as I hate to admit it, that we might have been wrong, that he might have hidden himself undercover so thoroughly that we were fooled into thinking he was corrupt. If so, that wrong should be righted without delay.”

“And without giving Davenport the chance to defend himself?”

Langford’s expression had gone just ever so slightly steely; anyone other than Eames would have been daunted. “I appreciate your concern for someone whose live you saved, Detective. But we have bigger things at stake. This situation isn’t of our making; we must simply take advantage of it as best we can.” The finality of her tone indicated that the subject was closed to further discussion.

Of more concern to Bobby Goren that the fate of Andrew Davenport, however, was the interplay between the two women in his life. He’d spotted some tension between Sienna and Eames before their break, mainly in the form of short unhappy glances (on Eames’ part) and tight-jawed resignation (on Sienna’s). Since they’d come back from the break in the middle of the meeting, however, both of them looked slightly as though they were sucking lemons. He’d have liked to have thought that it was entirely down to the situation, but the fact that they kept exchanging reproachful (Eames) and angry (Sienna) looks indicated it wasn’t.

I thought the two of them liked each other. Half the time they team up to bust my ass like they’re old friends, and now they can’t look at each other. When did my life become so complicated?

“Detective?”

He looked up swiftly, covering for his lapse in concentration by frowning at the notes he’d been scribbling (in reality, random thoughts in German) as if he’d been trying to work out what to do next. “Hmm?”

“I believe we’re nearly ready for you to make the call.”

Oh crap, yes. Durham had made it pretty clear that Goren, and Goren alone, was to make the call to inform Durham as to whether they’d accepted his offer.

“It’s decided, then. You’re going to accept Durham’s proposal?”

“Yes. We are.”

And with that, the meeting dispersed. Suddenly, he realised Alex Eames was going in the wrong direction, following some of the officers… and then it hit him fully; she wasn’t going to be joining him and Sienna. She, he and Sienna had originally been called to London to assist the team investigating the stadium attack earlier that year. Since he and Sienna were needed to bring in Durham, Eames was the only one of them left to do that.

Sienna had thought it an excuse to bring them over to be used as bait to tempt Durham out of hiding, and perhaps there had been an element of that, but evidently there was a real need for their information. Of course, they’d discussed that during the meeting, but it hadn’t really hit him until now: if Eames had to assist the anti-terrorism team, he was going to be without her for however long it took to set Durham’s plan in motion, and carry it through.

Oblivious to how it might look to others, he hurried off down the corridor after her, leaving Langford and Sienna standing staring at his back in the room.

“Eames! Eames, wait up.”

She paused, and he saw her shoulders tighten for just a second before she turned round. He could see the tension in her jaw beneath her professional face, and wondered if he was now as transparent to her.

“Good luck, Bobby.”

“You… you too.” He halted, staring at her. She stared back.

“What…” He wasn’t sure what to say. “What happened?”

“I’m sorry?” Eames’ voice was both wary and weary. He hated that. Hated that his partner sounded that way to him.

He got closer, so that they could talk with less chance of being overheard. “Eames… something happened back then. Between you and Sienna.”

She looked at him, and he read the answer in her expression. “You’d better get going, Bobby – there are people behind you wondering where the hell you’ve gone.” She turned to follow the investigation team down the corridor.

“Alex!”

She whirled on the spot and stared at him.

“Please tell me what’s wrong?”

She sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. “Nothing… nothing, Bobby, nothing serious. Just…” She paused for breath. “Just, it seems as though this is very personal for Sienna, and I’m concerned about her. And about you.”

He reached out and gently grasped her arm, aiming to reassure. “Okay. I’ll watch out for that. Trust me, Eames, I don’t have any intention of getting either of us hurt.”

She grinned at him, her usual tough-cop grin. “Yeah. I’ll remember that when I’m sitting on my ass in a nice warm office whilst the two of you are off running round London in the cold.”

“I’m sorry, Eames.”

“It’s not your fault, Bobby, okay? I’ll be fine. You worry about you.”

They smiled at each other, and in a more private situation, he would have hugged her, but couldn’t, not in MI5’s offices. Her face screwed up into her familiar Alex Eames determined smile, and then she turned, and was gone.


***

Interlude 4 - "What Happened At Glastonbury: From Tthe Sky To the Ground"

I quickly scurried down to the bottom of the campsite to join the others, all of whom looked like nothing so much as a bunch of excitable teenagers. For a minute, the sheer ridiculousness of the situation hit me. Here we were, hanging out at a festival in a field like a bunch of hippies, and I guess to anyone else we would have looked like just another bunch of old-enough-to-know-better, young-enough-not-to-care festivalgoers. To me, though…

I looked at our little group and wondered what the other happy campers in the Festival would have thought if they’d known that our little group comprised one ex-soldier and black belt martial arts expert (Tanya), one prize-winning journalist (Jack), one Interpol officer (me), one MI5 agent (Drew), one part-time mechanic and pub cook (Amp, probably winning the prize for the most normal occupation), and several police officers of varying degrees of seniority (Leo, Mark, and most of Leo’s team).

Probably run away in fear, I though mordantly. Or at least muttered “crap!” and started getting rid of suspicious “cigarettes” and “headache pills”.

“What took you so long? Let’s go,” Drew remarked, and hurried off to catch with Tanya (leading the group, naturally) without waiting for a reply. We filed steadily down the hill, through the security gate and out into the festival proper. Everyone else had already set off, so I was left jogging along behind trying to catch up, an ongoing curse if you happen to be only 5ft 5in. As at most such events, it was a long walk through the camping and backstage areas to the parts of the Festival where the shops and stalls were, and I spent most of the walk trying to keep up whilst at the same time marvelling at the tattoos on Tanya’s back.

Not that I wasn’t familiar with them to some extent, having seen Tanya naked in the changing rooms a few times, but that situation didn’t exactly lend itself to detailed examination. Now, however, she was taking advantage of the warm weather to show off the ink decorating her skin with a nearly sheer mesh top and backless bra. (Or so I assumed. She had no bra strap across her back, and I doubted that even Tanya, even at the Glastonbury Festival, would go braless with a top that transparent.) I had no tattoos myself – the thought alone made me wince – but even I could see that they were remarkable pieces of work.

She had several tattoos, some of which were from her Army days, but the three most prominent were the warrior goddesses. On her lower right back, the lion-headed Egyptian warrior goddess Sekhmet turned her head towards the onlooker with a ferocious glare. On her upper left back, occupying most of the back of her shoulder, the Hindu goddess Kali danced madly, eyes wild and tongue lolling. Beside Sekhmet, a fierce woman in Celtic armour with a sword in hand and raven upon her shoulder decorated the other side of Tanya’s lower back. I’d always wondered who that was. On impulse, I decided to go up to her and ask.

“Hey, Tanni?”

“Yup?” Tanya finishing swigging water from a bottle, and handed it back to Jack. Who, I couldn’t help noticing, was hardly able to take his eyes off his wife in her skin-tight transparent top and tight black jeans. Despite the fact they’d been together for over two years, it was obvious to anyone who knew them that the honeymoon was still very much not over.

I felt – well, not jealous. I didn’t want them not to be happy. I just wanted to have what they had with someone who happened to be mine, and I didn’t. Or rather, I’d had it and lost it.

“Who’s that?” I pointed to her back. “I keep meaning to ask.”

She chuckled. “That’s Andraste. She’s a Celtic warrior goddess, Boudicca used to pray to her before she went into battle.”

“That’s… not totally a good omen,” I pointed out. My grasp of British history wasn’t that thorough, but even I knew that Boudicca’s Revolt had ended in defeat at the hands of the Roman army.

Tanya snorted. “True, but that’s not Andraste’s fault. You’d have needed divine intervention to defeat the Romans back then, and trust me when I say that doesn’t happen on the battlefield. I thought I should have something to reflect my roots. Mind you, for all I know I might be half-Egyptian. Not small enough to be Indian, though… Hey, where are you lot going?”

Mark and several of the others paused in their march off down one of the side paths. We were in the Festival itself now, the Dance Field, and surrounding by the music thumping out of the three huge marquees that sat at the ends of the field. Between them thronged a mixture of shops, food stalls and bars, the latter two pumping out a steady scent of fried onions and beer.

It was the night before the Festival really started, and you could almost taste the happy excitement in the warm night. Before the big acts took the stages tomorrow, now was the time to roam about, to explore the site, to stumble across the bar with the tiny band playing which consisted of two guys with guitars and one of their girlfriends on vocals, which you’d remember stopping to listen to every time you looked back on the Festival, but whose name you’d never remember, assuming you’d heard it at all.

“We’re off to see Johnny’s band, they’re playing at a bar over near the Acoustic Stage.”

I consulted the map hanging round my neck. “Wow, that’s a bit of a walk.”

“Worth it though, music and cheap beer!” Mark grinned. “Are you coming?”

I hesitated. “Umm… I want to, but I kind of want to see some other bits of the Festival first, so I know where we’re going tomorrow.” (I still had no idea where the bar we were supposed to be working in tomorrow was, but I was trusting that Tanya would sort that out.)

“You want to go for a bit of a wander, hmm?” Tanya grinned beside me. “Sounds like a plan.”

“Well, you guys can join us later. The bar’s right next to the Acoustic Stage, I can’t remember what it’s called, but you’ve got my mobile number, right?” Mark asked.

I was vaguely aware that he was looking at me quite intently, and that this might be… well, not a date, since there would be six other people present, but a sort of “let me buy you a drink somewhere we don’t normally go and get to know each other better” type of invitation.

You should take it, my “sensible” voice muttered to me. Mark’s not a bad guy, and you need to start getting out there again.

Yeah. But he’s not Bobby. And he doesn’t deserve to have a whole evening trying to chat up someone who is looking at him thinking not “You’re a great guy” but “You’re not Bobby”.

Still, I shouldn’t be rude. And besides, Drew would be there, and if needs be I could always buy him a drink and talk with him for a while. The thought cheered me up. “Yeah, I have.” I patted my cellphone. “You guys go, and I’ll walk round here for a while with Tanni and Jack, then come over and join you.”

“Sure you won’t get lost?”

“Yeah, I can manage,” I replied (untruthfully since I had no idea where the hell anywhere was in the Festival, but frack it, I had a map).

“Sure you don’t want to come with us now? It’s easy to get lost…”

“Mark. I’m a big girl. I can get myself there, I’m sure. See you in a while.”

Mark seemed to sense he’d pushed far enough and backed off with a faintly disappointed smile. “Excellent, okay, see you later. To the beer!” he yelled at the rest of the guys, who cheered enthusiastically and followed him down the path and out of sight.

Tanya and I snorted with laughter. “Men will be boys,” she commented.

“Oh yeah. Are you coming for a wander?”

“Maybe… Jack?”

“I fancy a drink and a smoke. See you in fifteen?” He gestured at a nearby bar which consisted of a stall selling drinks and some tiny wooden tables with candle lanterns flickering softly. People were sprawled around on the grass smoking and chattering peacefully.

“Um…” Tanya hesitated for just a second. “Uh…”

I patted her arm. “I really don’t mind exploring on my own if you and Jack want to go have a drink, I know you’ve seen it all before… shall I catch up with you here?”

Tanya smiled. “Yeah. If you don’t mind.”

“Course not.” I smiled back and headed off to explore the stalls, threading my way through the crowds to see if I could find the interesting stuff hidden behind the £1-a-camera, herbal highs, henna tattoos and other assorted tat stalls. Since Jack had put the idea in my head, I decided that I felt like a drink, and set that as my goal. What could I find that wasn’t beer?

Suddenly, music drifted out towards me, an old cheesy 80s disco track that made you want to just throw your hands in the air and dance like no-one was looking. And people were. As I got nearer the source of the sounds, I realised they were coming, not from one of the bar tents, but from a wine stall, a large white catering van with a huge model wineglass helpfully perched on the top. The owner had stuck some flashing lights and a ghetto blaster on top of the counter and turned the volume all the way up, and a crowd was dancing in front of it, both boys and girls - and some men and women, at least half of them were old enough to be my parents - spilling wine on each other and dancing badly with huge grins on their faces. Clearly, this was to be the drink for me. I wandered across, bought the largest glass of red wine they were selling, and allowed myself to be dragged into an impromptu boogie to “Dancing Queen” with two guys with dreadlocks.

This was more like it. This was the carnival atmosphere I’d been looking for. As I danced, I suddenly realised, no-one knew where I was. Not one person on the planet Earth knew exactly where I was right now, not my parents, not my friends, no-one. I could vanish. If I wanted to, I could stay here all night and dance with strangers. I could wander freely and go where I wanted, I could walk right out of the Festival and keep going, and no-one could find me. The thought was weirdly exhilarating.

I’d had a truly crap year so far. I’d started it having been shot, and ended the past six months of it by giving evidence to put the man responsible away. Which wouldn’t have been so bad, except that he was my ex-boyfriend.

If there’s one thing worse than standing up in court being cross-examined about the events leading up to you being shot in the leg and needing the sort of physiotherapy where you have to take painkillers before, during and after, it’s standing up in court giving that evidence knowing that every single other person in the court knows that you used to sleep with the person you’re giving evidence against, and is just waiting to hear the defence lawyer start dropping snide hints about how, just maybe, you might be a jealous unstable woman out to wreak havoc in the life of the man who broke up with you and your injuries were your own fault for meddling in things you had no right to get involved with. Because, obviously, when a woman sleeps with a man, her brain automatically stops working.

I realised that the guy I was dancing opposite was looking a little unnerved, and smiled quickly. The song ended, and the crowd began to disperse. I decided that I’d danced enough, and set off in search of more interesting experiences.

Bobby would have loved this…

Yet again I found myself in the grip of the past.


I was on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, and awestruck wasn’t too strong a word. I was lost for words. I’d known the views would be amazing, but nothing could have prepared me for seeing the city I’d been living in for barely a few weeks from up in the clouds. I almost didn’t know where to look next; should it be over there, at the Chrysler building, over here, looking out towards Staten Island, down there, where I was sure I could just glimpse the deli Bobby and I had gotten an early-morning coffee and bagel in (though common sense said that that was impossible and I was imagining that I could see that far down)?

Beside me, Bobby was going through the guidebook, reading the more fascinating parts aloud. “The Empire State is designed to act as a lightning conductor for the surrounding area and is struck by lightning over 100 times a year… you’re not listening, are you?”

That last part was said in a playful tone of voice, and I turned around and grinned. “I am listening, honestly… it’s just…” I tried to find the right words, shrugged expansively, and settled for exclaiming “Wow!”.

Bobby grinned back. “Now, are you glad you decided to be a tourist?”

“Oh my gosh, yes.” I spun back to peer out of the window again. “I can’t quite believe it, but, it’s just… it’s amazing, Bobby. Thank you.”

He smiled, a really heartstopping Bobby Goren smile that managed to make the wonders of the Empire State recede into the background for a good few seconds. “You’re welcome. Want to hear some more amazing facts?”

I grinned mischievously at him. “No, I don’t. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fascinating stuff, but I don’t want to hear about the guidebook. What do you see? What does Bobby Goren see when he looks at New York?”

“Wow.” Bobby tipped his head on one side and regarded me for a few seconds. His face settled into thought. After the silence had lasted a good few seconds, I decided to prompt him with a smile and an encouraging nod.

“It’s… It’s kinda tricky to say. Um.”

Oh, I’ve done it again. Said the wrong thing.

So, time to say the right thing. “I’m not asking for every single thing, Bobby,” I said gently. “It doesn’t have to be everything you see. Just something. What can you see from here that matters to you?” Stupid question, I thought as I said it, the answer’s “Ground Zero”, like for every New Yorker.

“Well.” He walked across to the window, placing his hands upon it and leaning forward, almost pressing his nose to the glass. I joined him, following his gaze.

“I see so much, Sienna, that I don’t know where to start.” He smiled wryly. “This… this is my home. Where I’m from. I suppose… I can see where I grew up, or at least see where it is…” He pointed in the general direction of Brooklyn. “I see the place I left as soon as I could. I see where my mom lived… where my dad used to live, before he died.”

I held my breath. This was the first time Bobby had ever really talked about his family. “And your brother? Where does he…”

Bobby cut me off. “Wherever he can.”

Suddenly, he turned from me and almost sprinted over to another window. I followed as fast as I could. “And here… over here, that’s my office.” He smiled teasingly at me, and pointed to One Police Plaza (or at least in its general direction). I chuckled.

“All of this…” He gestured widely with a sweep of his hand, taking in the city… “It’s mine, I suppose. My city. I…” he shrugged and looked embarrassed. “I do what I can for it.”

I took his hand. “You do so much, Bobby. Really. I admire you.”

Our eyes met, with no barriers between us. I had a sudden, powerful urge to be alone with Bobby. We didn’t speak for a good half minute, and when Bobby spoke his voice was low.

“I’m not perfect, Sienna. I’m…” He chuckled wryly. “A bit of an acquired taste.”

“I’m acquiring it,” I said lightly. “I care about you a lot.”

“I care about you, too.”

I closed my eyes. I’d never heard Bobby say that so plainly before.

I felt a large hand close over mine, very gently, then Bobby’s arm wrapped around my shoulders. “I can see something else from up here, as well…”

I opened my eyes. “What’s that?”

He led me over to another window and pointed. “Can you see over there? That state, over there in the distance? That’s Connecticut.” He smiled at me. “That’s something new I see. I see the place I found you.”

I reached my hand up and caressed Bobby’s large hand, on my shoulder, leaning my head against his broad chest. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” he murmured softly, and wrapped his arms around my waist.

“I want to be with you, Bobby,” I murmured softly, but without any of my usual sense of urgency. What was between us was real, and lasting, and it would keep.

And it did. We stayed at the top of the Empire State for another half hour, wandering around hand in hand and making sure we saw all the sights. Then we left, and went home, and made love in a way that had never happened between us before. It was as though all the previous times had just been practising for this one time, when we communicated without words and without having to show off or try things out or stage what we did. It happened so naturally that I was lost for words, because it had never been like that for me before, and, looking into Bobby’s eyes, I thought that perhaps it was the first time like this for him, too…


But Bobby is gone. Bobby Goren, the love of my life, was no longer part of it, and never would be. Back in the present, I missed him desperately. I missed the closeness and the friendship and the sex and everything.

I did not believe that everyone had only one soulmate; there were surely many potential partners out there. Having known Bobby, what I truly feared was that life is short and that we only meet people who could be real, true, partners for life once or twice. I feared that I’d met mine and lost him, and who knew if I’d meet another? Maybe that had been my chance.

Enough with the wandering, and brooding, I thought. I needed to stop dwelling on the past and get on with my life. Besides, I’d finished my drink, so it was time to hit the bar. I wandered back slowly towards the open-air bar where I’d left Jack and Tanya.

It was so beautiful, I thought as I got near and saw the little flickering lights of the lanterns. It was completely dark now, and someone had gone around and lit up some little white paper lanterns fluttering on slim metal stalks, like glowing flowers in between each table. How could anyone not love the Festival? I bought another drink, then picked my way slowly through the tables until I saw Jack, who was sprawled on his back with an empty glass beside him, and the happy smile of someone for whom the world had just gone mellow.

“Heeeeyy, SiSi.” He smiled and waved, and made no effort to get up. The remains of a rolled-up cigarette were stuck between his lips. I sniffed as I got closer, and realised the reason for the mellowness.

“Isn’t that a little bit risky?” I teased gently as I sat down beside him.

“Mmm… yeah, I guess so.” He giggled. “It’s okay, I smoked most of it over there…” He gestured loosely at several trees near the edge of the bar area, and I noticed that his accent seemed to have gotten thicker, more obviously Scottish. “Me and half the bar… hee hee.” He chuckled, then suddenly looked serious. “Och, hang on, do you get tested at work, like Drew? crap. I’d better put this out.” He swiftly stubbed it out on the tin, then fastidiously closed the tin and tucked it into his pocket, then flopped back onto his back, still smiling merrily.

“Where’s Tanni?” I asked.

“Gone for a pee. She’ll be gone a while.” He smiled at me. “Are you having a good time, SiSi? You okay?”

I smiled back. I really liked Jack. Having him around was a bit like having an older brother. The nice kind of older brother, who would look after you on your first day at school, agree to pick you up from your friend’s house party at twelve so that you didn’t have to suffer the ignominy of being collected by your parents, and who, if he saw you crying, would hug you and tell you it would all be okay in the end and that you should never forget you were special.

As opposed to the sort of older brother I actually had, who would steal your lunch money and threaten to smash your favourite toys if you told Mom and Dad, laugh when people at school called you names, and sleep with your best friend on prom night, then ditch her the day after for being “too clingy”.

Fortunately, that was in the past, and I didn’t ever have to talk to Richard beside the obligatory politeness at Thanksgiving and Christmas unless I chose to. I settled down beside Jack, flopping out on the grass and staring at the stars. I so rarely got to see them these days. Living in London meant that they tended to be drowned behind the street lighting, but here they were pin-sharp.

“Mmm? SiSi?”

“What? Oh, yeah.” I turned my head and smiled at him. He smiled back, his light brown eyes soft and gentle. “Yeah, Jack. I’m okay. I have you guys.”

He reached out and gently rubbed my cheek with the back of his hand, then let it drop back down onto his belly. “Good. That’s really good. You deserve that, SiSi. All of us… we care about you, you know?”

“I care about you too.” I stared peacefully at the stars some more. “I guess I should think about making a move if I’m going to catch up with the others… Drew’s probably wondering what happened to me.”

Jack frowned. “Oh no, he won’t be.”

“Huh?”

“He didn’t go with them, didn’t you hear him saying? When they left he was going to show Brian where the festival’s gay scene is.”

Brian was the other gay guy in Tanya’s dojo, I remembered. Both he and Drew were out, although in Brian’s case a lot more discreetly than Drew (not difficult). I felt suddenly and unexpectedly disappointed. “There’s a gay scene at the festival?” I asked, trying to cover my feelings.

“Oh aye.” He snorted. “And if there wasn’t, Drew would probably start one.”

“I thought he was going to go with the others, go listen to Mark’s friend’s band…” …with me.

Jack smiled a little bit wryly. “Well, SiSi… I think we all sometimes forget that, well, Drew’s Drew. He’s gay and we’re not. Sometimes he wants to be with other people like him, be himself for a bit.” He snorted with laughter. “Chase a few young men, get in a quick one round the back of the bar, knowing him.”

“Yeah.” I was surprised how much it hurt to be reminded that there was a whole area of Drew’s life to which I was definitely not invited.

Jack and I stared at the stars some more. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, feeling the earth beneath my back, the faint warmth of Jack beside me, the faint smell of male body… It was not an unpleasant scent. Tanni’s so lucky, I thought, opening my eyes a crack and smiling to see Jack peacefully watching the stars, his ribs gently rising and falling.
Jack was the sort of man you hoped you’d find, but secretly feared would already be taken. He was only a few years older than me, but radiated the content happiness of a man who had not only achieved everything he wanted in life, but was also old enough and wise enough to realise just how lucky he was to have it. “I’m so fracking lucky to have Jack,” Tanya had once told me, and I’d had to agree. He might not be the handsomest man I’d ever met, or the tallest, but he was once of the best.

Not to mention that, according to Tanni, he’s pretty good in the sack, too. I stifled the thought as unworthy, but it was a little hard not to remember it when Jack was sprawled in the grass beside me wearing only a thin white cotton t-shirt with his glasses tucked into the neck, a pair of faded denim shorts, and sandals. I could see the outlines of his body through the thin cloth. Tanya had once confided in me was that one of the things she liked most about Jack was that he was “just perfect, SiSi, he’s gorgeous, everything’s in proportion…” and she was right from what I could see.

He was one of the few men I’d met who was about the same size I was, which was probably what made him appear small and slight, but, closer to, you could see that he was broader through the shoulders than Drew. He wasn’t muscular, nothing like Tanya, but he was healthy, neither fat nor skinny, and his arms and shoulders were strong from riding around on his bike. His hands were strong too, quite broad and powerful-looking, and his face was nice to look at. Like Drew, he wasn’t classically handsome, but his intelligence and good nature showed in his quick expressions and warm smile.

What would it be like? I thought. It’s just a thought, after all. What would it be like, being with someone my size? Tanya had already told me, before I stopped her going into detail, that Jack was “sweet… really sweet and thoughtful… but he can be a little tiger, too, sometimes when he gets going it’s just like being…”

I’d stopped her there, since Jack was her husband and I had to look him in the face on a regular basis, but right now I couldn’t help wondering what she’d been going to say. It was normally hard to picture Jack, usually the sensible one of the four of us (and about the only person who could persuade Drew out of his crazier ideas), being wild in bed, but seeing him now, all rumpled hair and rucked-up clothing, the inch’s gap between his shorts and T-shirt showing a flat pale stomach with a thin line of dark brown hair running down it, it wasn’t so hard to picture.

“You okay there, SiSi?”

“Jack! That’s at least the third time you asked!” I pretended to be offended, pulling a mock-outraged face. He giggled.

“Sorry… whoa. I’m not used to this any more. I’m getting old.”

“Yeah, me too. I swear I’m getting a bad neck.”

“Here.” Jack hauled himself from fully- to semi- supine, reached across and rubbed it lightly. “You spend way too much time on computers and sitting at a desk, it’s not good for you.”

“Oh Jack, I never knew you cared.”

He snorted and lay down again. “Yes you do.” He fell silent, contemplating the stars again. I flopped back down beside him, realising I was a little bit closer than last time when I felt his bare arm against mine. I reached over and patted his arm. He smiled and gently covered my hand with his.

I turned my head and noticed that his face really wasn’t so far from mine. Only a few inches. What did Jack kiss like, I wondered? I’d seen him and Tanya kiss any number of times in public, but I’d only once seen them kiss for real, a stolen glimpse of the two of them making out outside a bar when Drew and I had gone off to find some food and a cab ride home. I shivered a bit, feeling a peculiar mixture of discomfort and fascination at the memory of Jack’s mouth fastening on Tanya’s. Everyone assumed that Tanya was the dominant partner, that Jack did whatever she said, but from what I remembered, Jack had been pretty damn enthusiastic, one of his hands at the back of her neck, the other on her back, pulling her close to him… That would feel pretty good…

“Hey, guys.”

For once in my life I was glad that I was sufficiently drunk (and possibly mildly stoned from pot fumes) that my reactions were dulled, since otherwise I would probably have leapt about three feet up in the air at the sound of Tanya’s voice.

“Oh, hey, Tanni!” Jack sat bolt upright, smiling hugely, my hand falling off his arm with a quickness. “Where were you?”

“I stopped by the bar to get a drink for my favourite husband.” She dropped down onto the grass beside him, and held out what looked like a small cup of whisky. Jack took it and sipped eagerly, then leaned over and kissed her mouth delicately. Tanya’s tongue flicked out over her lips, tasting the liquid.

“Thank you, though I am also your only husband, unless you’ve got another one I don’t know about.” Jack pouted, and she laughed and cupped his cheek. “Oh no, sweetheart, you know you’re the only one for me…” She leaned in and kissed him again with enthusiasm. Jack dropped the cup and wrapped an arm around her, leaning into her body and pressing up against her, dropping one of his legs over hers and hooking her legs against his. I could swear one of his hands was cupping one of her breasts, although maybe that was just my imagination since I couldn’t exactly see.

Ooo-kay. “Uh, guys, get a room?” I said in what I hoped was a just-kidding voice, not a could you maybe not make out in front of me? voice.

Tanya detached herself from Jack long enough to leer at me over his shoulder. “Don’t know about that, but we might find a few trees or something like that…”

I took the hint. “Okay, I’ll, uh, go join Mark and everyone and see you guys later…”

“Yeah, SiSi, you do that…” she mumbled, then fastened her mouth back on Jack’s with a finality that dismissed me completely. I picked up my cup, drained the remaining dregs of wine, then trudged off in a vile mood. How rude was that?

How often do you think that Tanni and Jack wish they didn’t have you and Drew always tagging along? They are husband and wife, and maybe sometimes they really wish you’d get your own life and give them some of their free time back to spend together.

I paused briefly, and frowned. Yeah. Well. There was that. Maybe I should be grateful for Tanya not actually telling me to piss off…

Maybe you should be grateful that she didn’t spot that you were thinking of MAKING A PLAY for HER HUSBAND.

And that thought was enough to stop me in my tracks.

Oh crap.

I wouldn’t have, would I? I was sure I wouldn’t have, that I’d have stopped myself.

Oh frack, I hoped so. What if I hadn’t? Oh Christ. The best-case scenario was that I’d have made a pass, Jack would have gracefully turned me down, and acted awkwardly around me ever after.

The worst-case scenario was that I’d have made a pass, Jack would have turned me down, and he’d have told Tanya, who would have killed me, and I’d have lost my three best friends, since I doubted Drew would have stuck around if I’d tried to wreck his best friends’ marriage.

No, scratch that. The worst-case scenario was that I’d have made a pass, Jack, being mildly stoned, mildly drunk, and male, would have responded, and that the two of us would have had to live with what we’d done for the rest of our lives, probably permanently screwing up his marriage and my chances of thinking of myself as a decent human being again.

No, scratch that. The absolute, absolute worst-case scenario was that I’d have made a pass, Jack would have responded, and Tanya would have caught us both when she returned from the bar. In which case, we’d both have been dead.

Oh, Jesus. What was wrong with me?

What do I do now? I thought despondently.

I want to go home.

I screwed up my eyes as the thought hit. I really, really wanted to be just about anywhere else right now, anywhere other than a field miles away from anywhere, surrounded by people I didn’t know, with all my friends off having fun without me.

Yeah, but where is my home? Where indeed? The crappy apartment in London I barely spent time in, other than to sleep? My parents’ house? Maybe. I loved my parents dearly, but going home meant encountering Richard and his second wife, both of whom I intensely disliked. Besides, there was nothing for me there, not any more. If I wasn’t going to join the rest of the family in the oil trade, I had no business going home. The apartment I’d once shared with my beloved Bobby? Not any more, not ever again.

The closest I had to home was Jack and Tanya’s house, and right now they didn’t want to see me.

You should go out. Go join Mark and the others.

I knew I should, but I couldn’t face having to trek halfway across the site, find somewhere I’d never been before, find Mark and the others, and pretend to be sociable when it was absolutely the last thing on Earth I wanted to do.

I sent a text message to the guys to let them know I wasn’t coming, making up an excuse about not feeling too great and going to bed, then started to trudge off back to the campsite in that particularly unpleasant state of mind known as “all of my friends are getting laid and having fun and I’m not”.

I could get laid, I thought morosely. I could go out into the Festival right now, maybe change my head and head back to Mark and the guys and go party, pull a random stranger and have sex in a tent. I could do that every night of the Festival if I wanted, and maybe when I was younger I would have done.

Yeah, but more because you felt like you ought to do that, than because you actually wanted to. And right now, I really didn’t want to sleep with someone I didn’t care about, and in any case, in my current state of my mind I was unlikely to achieve the mellow anything-goes-damn-I’m-horny-you’ll-do state of mind necessary to actually get aroused enough to have sex with someone I didn’t know.

I trudged back to the campsite, found the bar volunteers’ campsite bar, and medicated all my problems with a triple vodka. On top of the wine, that did the trick. I staggered off, found a toilet, pissed, then staggered back to my tent and didn’t so much fall asleep as pass out.

Nice! As always, it's very stressful for me when there is tension between Bobby and Alex...so I'm hoping that gets cleared up soon. And thank goodness nothing happened between Sienna and Jack! Whew! Although now you've got me feeling as melancholy as Sienna!