Vauxhall Cross
The death of an asset is never taken lightly. Any mourning period is limited, however, to the scant time that the Service can spare before corrective - and, hopefully, further proactive - measures must be taken.
In the case of the agent operating out of Ankara, only a brief shocked silence at the word of his absence and Station Ankara's inability to contact him is allotted to his remembrance. There is simply no time to plan a proper funeral or even say a prayer in his memory. No man understands this painful dichotomy between the emotional need to honor the fallen immediately and the practical need to continue their work just as immediately than C, the man who sent the Ankara operative to his death.
He sits in a crowded situation room in the heart of the Cross, staring blankly at an unmarked spot on the table. The news from Turkey is still new - it was shuttled into the room by an assistant only minutes ago - and the wound it gouged out is only now beginning to bleed. Its enormity is clear to the trusted advisers and their underlings in the room. They babble feverishly, passing scrawled notes and documents stamped TOP SECRET across the oak tabletop as they try to stop the hemorrhaging. The surface has been rubbed dull by these sorts of chaotic conferences, and C - the only person with clear space in front of him - spreads his hands palm-down over the lacquered wood, cool and firm and nothing like what his mind feels like. He should be thinking; he should be conducting some semblance of an orderly discourse here, but he simply isn't capable. He hasn't yet digested that the Ankara agent is dead, and he needs to do that before he can do anything else.
He needs to be able to stomach that, in his own haste, he's thrown his friend straight into hell. And the operative from Ankara was indeed his friend; they'd been in the Army together, and when he'd made the transition to intelligence in '91, he'd dragged the man with him. He - Younger - had been the economics major, and so he'd been the one put at a desk, but his friend had almost immediately started in on his escapades across the globe for the Crown, until he'd become relatively settled in and around Turkey a few years before he'd been made Senior Officer in Afghanistan.
They'd kept in touch and the camaraderie had never been lost, so when a trustworthy agent had been needed for this most sensitive mission, Younger hadn't hesitated in selecting his old friend. He'd even demanded that he be given a direct line into his comms - from all the way in London - for a few minutes to emphasize the significance of the mission. He'd told him that he'd trusted him. He'd told him to be cautious. He'd told him he'd loved him.
God, why did he have to die?
Alex glances up at the room and finds Charlie, his secretary, sitting in one of the underlings' chairs against a wall and watching him intently. He makes a drinking motion with his hand and head, asking wordlessly if his superior needs his customary midnight-black tea. Younger shakes his head slowly, forlornly. Charlie begins to nod understandingly in response when someone else's secretary appears at the door to the room and pushes through the crowd directly to him. The other secretary presses something into his hands with a quick spoken message, then hurries back out into the hall, carefully closing the door behind her. Charlie rises and shuffles to Younger's side. He leans over so as to not need to raise his voice over the hum in the room and slides the file he's received onto the table.
"I know you're preoccupied, sir," Charlie begins apologetically, "but this is urgent, and potentially related. It's about…"
He glances around before deciding that the risk of anyone who shouldn't hear him doing so is acceptably low.
"It's about TimeBreak."
Younger stiffens. Operation TimeBreak started and ended a year ago; it was the reason he had first heard of the Chronos artifact. It had been an utter failure. He doesn't want to hear about another operative's death - one he thought he'd gotten over but, by the exacerbation of his grief, he clearly hadn't - but he needs to know what information related to it could be so urgent so long after its termination.
He nods to Charlie to thank him and motions for him to leave the room. He understands. Cortisol is high and tea is in order.
Somebody near the other end of the room is waving a paper in the air and trying to get attention while saying something over and over again, but Younger blocks him out and gingerly opens the manila folder. What he expects to find are printouts, some whitewashed and refined summary of the mission and whatever new data has emerged, typed up in detached, professional verbiage.
What he sees instead sends a dagger through his heart anew. They're copies of correspondence records - manually filled forms for official communications and notes scribbled freely in the heat of candid conversation - all written in a hand all too familiar to him.
The TimeBreak agent - the one who'd died defending the Chronos when the mission had gone awry when a presumably trustworthy foreign mole had recanted and turned coat again to save his sorry skin - had been one of the precious few aware of the device's existence. Because that automatically made him more sensitive, he'd been kept on the Queen's island the way his friend had orbited Ankara like a small planet.
When he'd gone abroad, he'd worked on relatively benign intelligence gathering in the Mediterranean, the Service not being willing to put him in high-risk situations while letting him stretch his legs. When he'd finally been called upon to serve his unique purpose, he'd been sent to Greece, where he'd gotten used to using the device, then had been sent East through Turkey and North through Georgia to the Motherland. By the time the operation had gotten messy and their end was forced to close it, he'd been in communication with the mission's managing case officer for some time. Younger hadn't known anything about it then, and only now did he see who that case officer had been.
The penmanship is unmistakable. It had been his friend from the Army, the same friend whose body is now rotting somewhere in Syria, well out of the reach of any respectable British undertaker.
Charlie reappears at his side - a good, efficient secretary, he is - holding an oversized mug of scalding hot liquid electricity. Younger takes it gratefully and immediately takes a moment's relief from it. He looks back down at the tabletop, then up at the mania around him, and decides that whatever can be achieved from this chaos can be achieved without his immediate presence. He gathers up the file, and, holding it under his arm while Charlie clears a path for him through the fray, finds his way back to his office. The door clicks shut behind him. Here, he can work in relative peace.
He vaguely registers Charlie knocking about the office doing whatever it is that he does, but can focus only on the file before him, its innards spread across his desk. He pushes away anything else that intrudes on its territory in the center of the space, settles into his chair, takes a long draw from his tea, and digs into the file with as much of an objective administrator's view as possible. He reads feverishly, losing track of time and his own current anxiety, instead becoming enveloped in the story that the notes he's been given tell in detail.
Whereas he had assumed that the death of the TimeBreak agent had been due primarily to the collapse of the entire extended operation - as a result of their source's reconversion - his compatriot's notes presented a different series of events. It appeared that while the foreign source had had a change of heart late in the game, it wasn't as disastrous as Younger had thought. Instead of switching sides for the second time and delivering operational information back to his home government, the source had evidently just gotten spooked and disappeared someplace in fear for his life; he'd been somehow placed under the assumption that both sides - the Lion and the Bear alike - were on the verge of having him killed, and he'd wanted none of it.
His solvation into the ether only served to further destabilize an op that was evidently already on weak legs. According to the comm records, the operative had reported to his anchor in Ankara that the Chronos had been acting abnormally. He'd go almost whole days with it on, giving himself more than ample time to gather what he needed and examine information and prospects without intense pressure. He would only turn it off when he needed to move when it was critical to not seem out of the ordinary. After only about a week of such involved manipulative work, he'd noticed that every now and then, there would be hiccups in the device's usually smooth operation.
It would activate normally, but after a mere twenty minutes or so of working, its lights would go dark for a split second and the world would move normally, but the operator would be frozen stiff. Its power would rebound then, the lights would flare back up, and the usual state of altered time would stabilize. The frequency and duration of such "reset periods" - or so the field operative had called them - had begun to increase, and they were causing him some anxiety. In some cases, based on his friend's notes, Younger could tell that the agent had gotten downright frantic.
Together, the two had come to the conclusion that the Chronos was beginning to break down due to overuse - so that was why it had needed such rigorous repair upon its return - and his friend had advised that it, therefore, be activated only when absolutely necessary. The fact that this occurred just when the Russian source had decided to duck out seemed to be nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence, as it was only a matter of days after they lost contact with the mole before the hammer fell.
The Chronos seemed to give up, activating for only a few moments when twisted on, then revolting and shifting back to its idle setting. It had become almost useless except for very fleeting scenarios, and because the asset had already built the operation's foundation and impending events around the assumption that he'd be able to operate in slowed time, everything had begun to fall through very quickly. Communications with his managers in Ankara had become increasingly risky so that notes became infrequent, short, and deficient in details.
Eventually, they had dropped off altogether, until one last short, cryptic note that his friend had made, dated the day before the confirmed date of their field operative's death.
It read simply:
New cable from Granger -- began with "Send evac if convenient", ended with "Thank you and Godspeed".
He'd reached out one last time, seeking assistance but knowing that it was selfish, that it would, in all likelihood, jeopardize the mission more than anything. He'd known that he was likely going to his death, but had done it anyway out of dedication and what he thought was fitting gratitude for his position, for the nature of his duty. It also seemed that it was out of desperation, out of the absolute absence of any other option. And as his last act, he had, of course, sacrificed his life for the sake of a damned mass of copper gears.
Hands shaking, Younger reaches for his mug and is surprised to find it empty.