Page 8 of 72 Hours

So where had the security been for Niall Sutherland?

Niall’s home.

My gut cramped with familiar nausea. He might have been killed. It had been a matter of luck that he wasn’t. I hadn’t seen him for three months, and when I did, he was stumbling free of the jaws of a crumbling, crushing death.

There was a context to this whole mess, of course. Niall and I had history. Like, we weren’t born glaring at each other the way we did today. No, we’d been exemplary colleagues and fellow operatives, mature young men with a commitment to the Department and the Project Team. We’d been bright and appropriately aggressive and everyone had rated us well.

At least, that was in our professional life.

I couldn’t stop my thoughts returning to the attack on him. Judith’s details had been sparse, but Niall had confirmed that his apartment was now completely gutted. It presumably lay in a mess of exploded plaster and brick on the other side of London, miles away from here. I didn’t mind admitting, the thought of that wreckage stung me almost as much as it distressed him. Even leaving aside the injury to Niall and potential harm to others in the building, there’d been things in that apartment that were now destroyed forever—things that I’d known.

No, not just that. Things that had been mine, or at the very least, shared between us. Things that were treasured for memory alone, for a sentiment that nowadays I tried damned hard to despise. Things from a time that I tried even harder to forget.

For many months, I’d spent more time there than at my own apartment. There was a time when we ate together, did laundry together, watched TV, played chess, rehearsed our parts in upcoming missions, and rested after the frenzy of completed ones.

Lived, washed, cooked, breathed, laughed together.

Went to bed together—or the couch, or whatever square metre of carpeted floor we reached first. Yeah. That was the context.

It was a time when we were lovers.

​​​Chapter 4 – Tuesday 00:15

Niall slept, and I continued to brood.

I should have been sleeping, too, but I never could when I was disturbed. No excuse, really, for allowing the memories to clutch long, strong fingers around my neck and choke the emotions back out of me. But they did. I teased and tortured myself with recalling everything about him.

The memories were always vivid. But nowadays, I just never let them loose.

I joined the Department over a year ago. Initially, I just sort of drifted there. I was doing contract work for some neighbourhood guys I knew, working on a rather creative property deal with a major financial institution. Not that I knew anything about property; I was just there to liaise with the realtors on their behalf. Call me naïve, but I hadn’t realised the sketchy legality of the job, at least until I was approached privately by one of the financial firm’s paralegals who’d refused any part of the deal. He suggested I should look for a new career—and he introduced me to Judith Harrington. I soon saw the light and I dumped the ‘guys’. Smartish.

So I was hired, before I really knew what the job was! It was a pleasant surprise when Judith asked me to consider doing what I already enjoyed so much: becoming someone else for a while, working my way into places I hadn’t previously been invited, just taking on challenges and having damned good fun. That’s a very facile way to describe our work, I know, but at the time it was how I viewed it all.

And I thrived there, though I say so myself. She was building up the Team at the time, and I soon realised I’d been brought into the hub of the best people. It was small scale; we weren’t an army and we weren’t some kind of super secret agents. Just a group of people who wanted to make a difference, but were an uneasy fit with formal authority. It was good company for me. I hooked up with Brad and Simon and Joe as genuine friends, and I had a healthy respect for Judith as a boss. At the very least, there was plenty going on to keep me out of trouble.

In those first few months, I never bumped heads with Niall Sutherland at all. I think I’d seen his name on memos from Judith, but at that time he was a Departmental employee and not part of the Team. Besides, most of my work was in preparation, and I tended to work alone on that. I helped put together the best, most effective team: decided who were the critical people in the mission to influence—either for or against us—and then chose the particular skills we needed from our own team members. So I’d never met Niall, knew nothing of him except for his reputation in the Department and a certain amount of nervous admiration on the part of his workmates. Until Judith introduced us properly.

A Tuesday night, about 21:00. Yeah, I remembered the exact time. Judith was leaving the building, on her way home, but seeing a light still on, she came around to the office I was using. I often kept on working, regardless of office hours, until I got tired of concentrating on my latest project—or fell asleep, because that could run on into the small hours of the morning. I was working that day on planning the infiltration of a high-tech I.T. corporation, and I’d been picking Brad’s brains for several hours. This was now my quiet time, when I looked things over on my own, starting to get a more instinctive feel for the job. It was the part I liked the best—and I reckon it was my best talent.

Niall appeared at her shoulder, carrying his jacket over one arm. She introduced us, her eyes flickering between us. “Be nice to Niall,” she told me. “He’s just joined us. Excellent man, good weapons experts. He’ll be on the I.T. job with you, though he’s involved in exit strategy, not infiltration. Perhaps you can take him through some of the preliminary plans tomorrow. He’ll need to know what operative you’re putting in, the organisational structure of the target. Keep it as simple as you can, okay?” She smiled confidently. “It’s a strategy that’s always worked for us in the past.”

I nodded. At the time, I don’t think I was giving her my full attention because she coughed deliberately to get me to look up. “Make sure you put the time aside for a briefing, Tanner. I insist. I know you think we all get in your way. But you’ll live with it.” She pursed her lips in a half-smile and ran her gaze over what I called my office uniform. I was in faded jeans and a casual short-sleeved bowling shirt, my shoulder-length hair twisted into a short tail at the back of my neck. I think I probably had a chewed pencil in my mouth and my feet up on the desk; it was my usual pose when thinking through a mission plan. Someone in the past had dared to suggest that my dress and attitude weren’t particularly good for the Department’s image, but Judith had always been willing to show a little more tolerance if the job were done properly. I think she’d had a quiet word with the person who complained. I never heard anything more about it.

That evening, she’d been distracted, passing up on the chance to harass me about it. Instead, she turned back to her companion. “And I suggest you watch Tanner in return, Niall. He lives life on an impatient and unpredictable edge, and tells us all what he thinks we should know. But he’s also smart and sometimes sees things the rest of us miss. If he doesn’t exhaust you first, you’ll find his contribution to the missions invaluable.”

“Hey! And I’d always thought you such an excellent judge of character.” I was wondering whether I should be flattered or insulted, wondering whether I should let loose the grin her praise provoked. Instead, we smiled good night at each other, and she went on her way out of the building. I nodded to the new guy in a casual, friendly way and settled back to the task in hand.

I wasn’t bothered about Niall Sutherland joining the team. To be honest, I didn’t really have time to give it more thought. I had a pile of files in front of me with details of half a dozen Departmental employees. Judith had her unofficial eye on this selection, to see if they’d be suitable to join the Team. I was meant to consider them for this mission, but it was looking like a quest for the proverbial silk purse from a sow’s ear. There was a guy who looked more like he should be modelling designer briefs than passing himself off as a technician, and a couple who’d struggled with programming in their basic training and I doubt had progressed past basic HTML. Maybe I was being an arse about it, but I reckoned they all needed to prove to me they could blend into their environment better than an elephant in custard. So while I was considering developing new identities for these people, I knew all along I’d probably use one as a back-up cleaner or something similar and go into the Service Department myself. Couldn’t trust them to know their byte from their butt, right?

“Nothing good?” asked Niall’s voice, startling me.

I cursed, rather colourfully, and the multi-layered files scattered across my desk. Twisting around in my chair, I found him standing in the doorway of the office. I’d assumed he left in Judith’s wake, but it gave me a chance to look him over properly for the first time. He was wearing well-cut linen trousers and a long-sleeved dark blue shirt. Very suitable office attire. I smiled to myself. He had broad shoulders, a slim neck, darker skin than mine. Thick, short dark hair that reflected a purple sheen in the dim fluorescent lights of the office and looked damned attractive against the blue shirt. A straight nose and a generous mouth, with the hint of sharp white teeth behind the lips. A very good-looking man, I concluded, but with a serious expression. Obviously a man who wouldn’t get caught with his feet up on the desk. Dark eyes; deep, chocolate-brown irises. I got caught looking into those very eyes, and that’s where my gaze stayed.

“Can I help?” He smiled, put his jacket on a chair, and walked over to my desk. I scrabbled to collect up the files again and he watched me, quietly standing at my side. Close. He had a very pleasant smell, must have been his soap or his shampoo. Glancing over my shoulder at some of my notes—a hell of a lot of exclamation marks scrawled across them, as usual—he put a hand down to steady one of the papers. It was a strong hand. It looked well kept and graceful, but definitely strong. I stared at it for what seemed like ages, God knows why, and at how close it was to my own long-fingered hand lying beside it, half-curled around a pencil. I glanced up at his face, and suddenly he smiled, like something had pleased him. It was a striking contrast on his serious face.

It was one of those moments I thought only happened in fiction, but I remember very clearly the feelings his smile provoked, because I’d never known anything like it before. Warmth ran all through my veins, like some kind of real-time embalming. There was a churning in my gut like nausea, although I knew I’d had a reasonably bland lunch.

At the time, I laughed at myself. I tried to blame my reactions on the air conditioning, on the need for supper, on the weather, dammit. Ridiculous! This guy stood peering over my shoulder and I felt like I melted into sap. It took me a little longer to realise—and admit—what had happened.