Chapter Text
The day the power went out at MI6 headquarters, ‘panic’ took on a whole new meaning. Of course, being MI6, the execution of this panic was far different – as the focal point of Britain’s best spies, the personnel of MI6 weren’t the types to throw their hands in the air and scream in fright – but the panic was still real.
MI6 did not experience power outages like some second–rate housing complex.
“Bond, what’s your status?” M’s tight, tense voice snapped down the line like a verbalized spark. She sounded like she wanted to stab someone, and likely did.
MI6 had been in the dark for fifteen minutes already, and it was only thanks to the autonomy of cellphones that anyone was talking to anyone at all. The fact that it was midnight didn’t help either.
Bond, his face as untroubled as ever, the light of his phone and a more distant flashlight making his eyes an almost fluorescent ice color, pressed the ear-bud more securely into his ear before answering, “Here with Mr. Silva. We’re almost to the generators to try and figure out why they’re not kicking in.”
“Good,” M snapped, and then he heard her talking to someone else. From what Bond could tell, the communication network of MI6 had been reduced to multiple mobiles and party-lines. It was so embarrassing as to be almost unbelievable, and everyone was hoping that the media could be strangled before they made a story of this.
Then again, the truth was so ridiculous that Bond doubted anyone would believe them.
“Ahhh!” Silva exclaimed in that oiled-smooth, graceful way of his as his flashlight lit upon a door, “Heeere we are.” Sounding contented as a cat in the sun or a child finding his favorite toy, the larger agent tested the doorknob. Locked. The keypad next to it would have accepted codes that they knew, but that was like saying a car would take you somewhere without gasoline. The keypad was as blank and useless as everything else remotely electrical in the whole place.
Bond – reasonably sure that M wouldn’t be getting back to him for a bit yet – turned his attention to the door and pushed past Silva without a word, hammering a foot into the door with similar stoicism. Two such solid kicks saw the door as far less of an obstacle than before. In fact, it quite considerately swung open.
“And this is what we have been reduced to,” Silva mused with regret that may or may not have been feigned. It was hard to tell with Agent Silva; most people couldn’t even deal with him. Bond could, so far, but it was only a matter of luck and timing that he was even in the MI6 building right now, in between missions. Silva clucked his tongue reprovingly even as he let Bond precede him through the door with long, smooth strides. “Breaking into our own nest!”
Silva had always been a bit more of a… colorful being. For his part, Bond ignored the amusing metaphor and just scanned the new hallway they were in, getting his bearings. Since Silva had the flashlight, he let the man lead again. For two such disparate characters, they made a good team: Silva was terrifyingly smart, while Bond never hesitated, and had a poker face as impenetrable as a concrete wall. Bond also saw no problem in breaking down doors. Silva would probably mourn the damage done later, while his lidded eyes danced with amusement the whole time.
“Bond?” It was M again, making sure he knew she was back on the line and back in his ear.
Eyes on the darkness so as not to be blinded by Silva’s flashlight weaving ahead of them, Bond replied with polite succinctness, “Yes?”
“Progress? You say you’re still with Mr. Silva?” It was hard to tell which was more obvious in her voice: how harried she was, or how breathtakingly furious she was at this whole situation. For a woman who was used to control or at least a level of omnipotence through the technology of MI6, this had to be crippling.
“Yes, and nearly to the generators,” 007 replied with perfect assurance, knowing that it would do no good to admit that many of these halls looked disturbingly different when viewed in complete darkness rather than under the bright glare of fluorescent lights. Still, as one of the top field agents – Mr. Silva being his only rival, by all admittance – Bond was used to adversity, and Silva seemed far too self-assured to be lost.
“All right, get that up and running then. If… If it looks like it will take awhile-” The uncertainty was new; Bond quirked an eyebrow at the break in the flow of the woman’s perpetually tart words. This must have rattled her as much as everyone. What she proceeded to say, however, made it clear that there were others panicking far more than she: “-Let Mr. Silva stay and work on the generators, and make your own way over to the Quartermaster’s Branch. 008 says that the power loss has locked down the whole section, and all of the little technicians are mewling on the other side of the reinforced doors like small mice in a dark box. Those are 008’s words, verbatim, mind you.”
Bond’s mouth curled up into a bare smile, a grin by his standards, even as Silva turned to look over his shoulder at him. The flashlight beyond made a bright corona of the man’s pale hair, and glinted faintly off his unsettlingly intense eyes. “Dear old Mum having a spot of trouble?” he asked playfully in his rolling tones.
Ever-so-faint smile still in place, Bond just replied smoothly and obliquely, “Those of us who are not agents are not taking this power-outage quite so well. The quicker we see why the generators haven’t kicked in, the better.”
“Hmmmm,” Silva hummed again, if anything walking slower. He was still looking back at Bond, although that didn’t impede his footing in the slightest – the man was considered one of the best for a reason. He walked with catlike grace that belied his build and size and refusal to look where he was walking. “Well, then we’d better do as Mumsy says, shouldn’t we?”
“I’d imagine so.”
Finally done playing around and unwittingly extending the torment of the unfortunate technicians, Silva turned forward again and picked up the pace to a more acceptable speed: fast enough to get where they were going, slow enough not to be caught off-guard by anything unforeseen. Bond listened with one ear to the world around him and with the other to M’s barely hushed cursing on the other end of the line. It was amusing, but only because he’d long since made up his mind not to be disturbed by all of this. It was disturbing – this was an unprecedented event and should not have been happening – but Bond was a field agent, and that meant his mind was quick to accept things as they were. For example, asking why you were surrounded by enemy gunmen did not make them go away. Shooting them did, so Bond was now patiently (and metaphorically) ‘shooting’ this new problem, working with Silva to try and get MI6 up and running again.
Silva made one of the almost musical exclamations he was so known for, having found the door to the room he was looking for. “And here were are,” he stated pleasantly, and this time tried the door with more success, “And we aren’t even locked out.”
Bond noticed that this door did not have a keypad on the side – it was an older part of MI6. So far, it seemed that every door with any kind of electronic lock had been sealed. Slightly edgy beneath his veneer of calm, Bond remained at the door while Silva went in. After all, only one of them really had much technological knowledge. The extent of Bond’s ability with electronics were using a cellphone or hotwiring a car when needed, along with perhaps a few other tricks that he could pull out if needed. He mollified himself with the fact that he was a better shot than Silva was.
His flashlight sporadically jumping around the room as he inspected it, Mr. Silva talked almost constantly to himself as he made his way around the room and its nonfunctional contents. Used to this, Bond just folded his arms, leaned against the open doorway, murmured, “In the generator room. We’ll keep you posted,” for M to hear, and waited. As he’d expected, the other agent fell silent suddenly, meaning he’d finally found something to catch his attention.
“You know, this just might be interesting, James,” the statement rolled off his tongue from across the room.
“How so?” MI6 had had enough ‘interesting’ for one day. All of this was paramount to Fort Knox finding out that it had been broken into by termites: irrational, impossible, and yet somehow disastrously true.
Silva’s face was visible as he tapped at his lower lips with his steepled fingers, flashlight braced absentmindedly between his palms. “There is nothing wrong.”
And with that, Silva flipped a switch, and the generators all came on. The room itself lit up, and power hummed… but beyond the doorway Bond was standing in, darkness continued to reign. Blinking in surprise that he usually kept better hidden, Bond tried to take this in before looking back at Silva with a tight, angrily questioning expression.
“Do not blame me!” the pale-haired man waved aside the grim look flippantly, making a broad gesture at the generators, “It would appear that the problem is not quite so localized as we thought.”
“Bond, what is going on?” M demanded.
007 sighed, wishing that Silva hadn’t ‘misplaced’ his cellphone so M could bother both of them. He growled into the receiver by his ear, “We just turned the generators on. They’re working.”
“Obviously not,” was the sharp reply, “Because the rest of us are still in the dark!”
“I know. It would appear that we’ve got other problems.” Then, deciding he’d been heckled enough, he pulled the little bud out of his ear and extended it towards his partner. “Silva? Anything to add?” He managed to make the silk-smooth tone sound like a threat, or maybe it was in the hard, daring glint in his blue eyes.
Silva raised an eyebrow, but didn’t comment – he just reached out his hand and took the earpiece. Soon he and M were in what Bond imagined was a heated conversation about generators. He could only assume: he caught only Silva’s words, and Silva quite stubbornly refused to ever sound angry or flustered. Even with M no doubt screaming at him, the man spoke as if his tongue were spinning sugar. Soon the conversation devolved into computers. Having decidedly less experience in that area, Bond listened only long enough to catch the gist of it.
“Masterful work… No, no, there’s no way this was an accident, although, quite frankly, I’m not sure how it’s even possible… Whoever did this, I assume, must have attacked the computer system directly. Sort of like… hmmm… think of – dismantling a light switch instead of just flipping it off, hmm? … Well, yes, of course I can fix it. I’ll just need to run a new cable to a computer directly connected to MI6,” Silva finished with political smoothness, still smiling like a cat eating mice. Bond was unflappable, but Silva was indomitably well-pleased in appearance at all times.
M must have argued, because Silva’s smile sharpened just the faintest touch; mostly it was in his eyes, which slitted and became more like chips of cold stone than they usually were. “No, my dear, a laptop would not work. It hasn’t worked before now, so obviously it won’t work now. The whole mainframe would appear to have had its power cut – snip, snip, snip – see?”
Realizing that this chat might take awhile, Bond pushed away from his post at the door and smoothly padded forward to pick up the discarded flashlight. He indicated the still-dark hallway with it. “I’ll go see if there’s a way to run a cable from here to… wherever it is you need it,” he offered without making any effort to understand precisely what the more heavyset man was wanting.
Silva’s smile spread from ear to ear. “Oh, would you, James?” he purred, then added while obviously ignoring the head of MI6 in his ear, “I think the Quartermaster’s Branch might have a wire that would suffice. Perhaps they might even have enough brains amongst them to figure out how to stretch it between here and there.” The smile had turned smug and demeaning, and Bond was reminded of the ongoing troubles with the Quartermaster’s Branch – namely that they had no Quartermaster, per se. The last one had died quite suddenly of old age combined with a foolish stint with skydiving. The man had only gone on vacation once in his long career, and apparently had felt the need to stuff everything into it – including a sudden heart-attack. He hadn’t had time to train a replacement.
So far, the Quartermaster’s Branch was a misnomer, and was in fact run by many technicians but led by no one person. It wasn’t the best system, but it worked, and it was supposed to be temporary.
Supposed to. Thanks to Mr. Silva’s peculiarities and domineering personality, that was becoming a rather sticky situation.
First of all, Silva was very full of himself. This was known by all except perhaps Mr. Silva himself, who didn’t think he was anything but brilliant, which may or may not be the same thing. Bond was aware that his sometimes-teammate was pompous, and lived with that fact in the same way that he lived with the fact that M was snarky and every stand-in Quartermaster was overprotective of their equipment. The only real problem that Mr. Silva’s self-confident nature caused was that he was preventing a new Quartermaster from being chosen.
Bond thought of it like a possessive dog preventing his mistress from kissing her boyfriend. Silva just kept getting in the way and constantly insinuating himself in the location and the situation, so that it was severely uncomfortable any time anyone tried to step into the old Quartermaster’s shoes. The truth of it all? Silva wanted the title of Quartermaster.
Honestly, Bond only half understood it, and the politics undoubtedly behind it were above his pay-grade, as far as he was concerned. Silva had always liked having social clout, and being not only one of the top field-agents but also the field agent that had wormed his way into the lofty position of Quartermaster. It was arguable that Silva would actually be ten times the Quartermaster that old Sullivan had been, with his affinity for and love of technology.
All in all, there was no one that Bond could think of that he wanted around right now to ‘fix’ MI6, so he smirked faintly and stalked out the door to do as the other man asked. Pointedly, he left his cellphone behind. Sometimes it was much nicer to be off the grid.
The strangeness of MI6 in the dark was wearing off for the 00-agent, and he found the darkness comforting as he struck out on his own. He wrapped the front end of the flashlight in his fist, so that instead of a bright beam of light there was only a dull, reddish glow seeping through the flesh of his fingers. This was better; he had disliked how the full light of the flashlight had blinded his eyes. Silva was a top agent, but sometimes he missed the finer subtleties of survival.
Nobody had to know that James Bond got lost twice in his trek down to the Quartermaster’s Branch, but he got there without releasing the full glare of his borrowed flashlight, and therefore inadvertently snuck up on everyone like a ghost. He folded out of the darkness and into the frenetic light of two more flashlights and a smartphone with an LED light-app. At least one of the people he snuck up on was a 00-agent like himself, so it was just plain sad that the man didn’t hear him coming. Everyone jumped and Bond ignored them, instead turning his attention to the door that was still closed. Just for good measure, he tested the handle, releasing a little more light from his flashlight to remind him of just what kind of door he was dealing with, and then he gave a pound on the door. He could, indeed, hear technicians whining like kittens from beyond, and he called briefly, “Get back!” Then, reasonably sure that no one beyond the door could be injured anyway, he backed off and fired his gun.
The other 00-agent swore and everyone else screamed. Beyond the door were the sounds of stampeding herd animals – the Quartermaster’s Branch was home to a delicate sort of people, albeit smart ones. In the silence that followed there was a sigh from the phone’s speakerphone, and then M’s voice saying resignedly, “Bond is there, isn’t he?”
“The door’s open,” Bond offered helpfully in his own defense. A nudge of his boot had the damaged door swinging open. Eyes and spectacles reflected the rescuers' lights as technicians peered warily out from behind chairs and desks. They looked very much like nocturnal creatures blinking from within the dense darkness of their own little cave.
“Bond, you know we have to fix everything you break.”
“Mr. Silva said he needed high-tech supplies,” Bond shrugged, “You and I both know that that is not my department, so I needed to get into Q-Branch.”
Bond was the only one who still habitually called it Q-Branch, now that it was effectively Q-less. But Bond had always liked the nickname, and even more so, he liked brevity. If he could save syllables, he would. Now he worked on saving his ears as well by ignoring M – who groaned and then began berating him for constantly breaking MI6 equipment – and instead turned his attention to doing what he could to get MI6 up and running again. Belatedly realizing that their salvation was at hand, the technicians began pouring forth, but a few quick words from Bond stayed them. He relayed what he knew of Mr. Silva’s wishes. It was a testament to the pale-haired agent’s reputation that eyes immediately widened and the Q-Branch techies instantly began busying themselves. It was hard to tell if they feared or respected Silva more – the man was a force of nature, and very rarely a benign one. James Bond wasn’t exactly a house-cat either.
Driven by nervousness, intimidation, and the obvious need to fix up MI6’s electrical system, techies were soon rushing about.
“I thought you were in Egypt?” 003 asked, coming up to where Bond leaned idly against the wall and watched things happen around him. The other man was muscular, but somehow didn’t manage to radiate the level of dangerousness that Bond did just by existing.
Trusting that Silva’s wishes were being fulfilled even if he didn’t understand the technical side of this in the slightest, Bond turned opaque blue eyes to his comrade. “Well, if I’d known things were going to be this interesting here, I’d have stayed somewhere boring,” he muttered.
No one obviously wanted to say it, but only Bond was stoic enough to hold his tongue. 003 shifted from foot to foot like the uneasy knifer that he was before blurting, “What in the world is going on?! I mean – MI6 losing power? I haven’t lost power since I was in grade-school and a squirrel somehow got into the electrical box near our house.” He gave himself a shake, muscles flexing, as if trying to dispel the wrongness of all of this. “But MI6?! This just shouldn’t be able to bloody happen.”
Grunting in agreement, Bond nodded, “True. Can we contact any of the agents in the field?”
003 blinked as if this problem hadn’t occurred to him. “Um…I don’t know. I haven’t asked. That would be a bit of a sticky problem, wouldn’t it?”
This whole time, Bond had been considering the various reasons that anyone might want to impose a black-out situation on MI6, and that was just one of the possibilities that had come to his head. Bond didn’t trouble himself overly much with imaginative thinking, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t smart or able to formulate ideas in his head. Seeing agents stumble around in the dark might have been funny, but this was still a powerful spy organization with many delicate projects running at all times – projects that could be easily upset at great detriment to agents' lives if things at MI6 went crazy.
There was so much that MI6 was constantly doing that Bond would probably never know precisely why someone had decided to attack MI6. There were simply too many people with too many reasons to do something like this.
What troubled him was that there were precious few people with the skill to do this.
~^~
An hour later, and Silva had the connection he needed. Bond, lacking anything else to do, stood like a lazy bodyguard and watched without comprehending. He was effectively useless muscle at the moment: no one was physically breaching the walls of MI6, so he didn’t need to attack or defend anyone, and with the whole system down, there was no way for anyone to give him any assignments. He’d have just left to return to his flat and sleep, but that felt like a dereliction of duty.
So, all in all, he was next to useless here, but didn’t feel like leaving.
No wonder M thought he was annoying.
Silva was working in the generator room now, a laptop before him and a million wires connecting him to the heart of MI6 and even more wires connecting him to the only source of power that MI6 presently had. A small flock of uneasy techies fluttered around him, too timid to say anything to the domineering agent but ready to jump if he told them to. So far, Silva was in his own world, although he was muttering about it enough that everyone could share in the experience.
“My, my, my,” he clucked quickly while he eyed the screen and typed wildly, “… Extraordinary workmanship… artistic, really.” He continued to type, and Bond raised an eyebrow at his comrade’s antics. Silva spent some minutes looking enthralled and impressed as he took the problem apart, and just as many minutes looking monstrously angry as he was outsmarted by this conundrum.
Bond snagged one of the techies, having a question building in him that was finally getting too much to hold back. “Does it usually take this long for Silva to solve a problem?”
Eyes magnified by ridiculously thick spectacles turned pensively between Bond – a man known for shooting people – and Silva, a man known for having enough skill to ruin your life and weak enough morals to do it. Fortunately, the latter seemed as though he wasn’t listening. “He… uh… well…” The techy fiddled with his glasses before admitted in an undertone, “This is a particularly sophisticated piece of work, and it is taking even Mr. Silva a bit of effort.”
It was a candid answer; Bond could read it in the man’s face, and let the fellow go. From what he was hearing Silva say – and M reply, since she was now on speakerphone on the table next to the pale agent – it sounded like some pretty tricks had been used to hack and take down MI6. So far, power hadn’t even been restored yet, although Silva had narrowed down where the breaks were. Techies from the Quartermaster’s Branch had been sent to fix that in the simplest way Silva knew how – simply replacing things. If a wire was damaged, just replace it: that was the idea. In most cases, the damaged items were more complicated than just wires, but ‘techies’ were more than just simple orderlies. Silva optimistically predicted power to be back up before morning. By then, he also said that he’d have their attacker on his knees.
Bond suspected that Silva was boasting. Blue eyes narrowed, 007 considered Silva’s tendency to think excessively highly of himself, a fact that had caused MI6 problems in the past. It had been made very clear by M in the past that Silva was a dangerous agent when he started thinking that he was invincible, which was deliriously often. The problem was, sometimes Silva was invincible, and that only encouraged him. Bond was considered a ‘balancing influence’. Bond figured that what he really represented was a babysitter with a gun, one of the few agents skilled enough to easily shoot his way out of any problem that Silva’s ego got them into.
Right now, Silva was having his godlike invincibility tested by whoever had turned MI6 off like a nightlight. Usually a man full of jokes and oily smiles, Silva was beginning to show the more brutal side of his nature: the more he was thwarted, the more his shark-broad smile faltered and began to show more teeth in a grimace. Those eyes became like ice, and Bond became a little more watchful, aware that Silva had no problem with lashing out – and while Bond could handle himself, the techies were no match for a fully-trained field agent. Fortunately, all of Silva’s mind was taken up by his technological foe, something that no one had seen happen before.
Usually, Silva took apart computer problems with the speed of a riled school of piranhas taking apart an unlucky carcass. That meant he was rarely stumped for longer than fifteen minutes, no matter how tough the problem. Enemies of MI6 had tried to send all manner of viruses and destructive computer packages, but they’d been summarily shot down by the new would-be-Quartermaster of MI6 as Silva strutted his stuff. It was as if MI6 had been guarded by dogs up until now, but suddenly they’d found a wolf willing to do the job. Silva ‘the wolf’ was already making a lot of people mad with his ability to eat up all of their attempts at mischief. Silva loved the attention.
But now he was snarling as if he were getting his teeth pulled one by one, no matter how hard he tried to bite with them.
It was a full four hours before power was back up and MI6 was back in working order. The techies said in whispered tones that Silva only really managed to win because the mystery hacker must have gotten tired of fighting him first; Silva was a fireball of energy coupled with the determination of a wolverine at a jugular.
With MI6 up and running again, Silva celebrated with his usual lack of modesty or humility, and no one could argue that he had done the organization a great service. Even Bond had to admit that he was impressed. Obviously, whoever had attacked MI6’s systems was good, but Silva had bested this enemy.
And then, after barely a week of merriment and peace, the whole of MI6 crashed again.
~^~
“Bond, your status?”
Sometimes the concealed earpieces could be obnoxious and annoying, but this one was well hidden and turned down to an inconspicuous volume. It allowed the agent to sit at the little coffee shop without drawing attention as he watched other patrons drink coffee or eat bagels or make good use of the free wifi. It was the last option that had drawn him here.
Hiding the motion of his lips with his cup as he pretended to drink a cup of dark coffee, he replied in a relaxed murmur, “Same as last time you asked. If Silva is sure that this is the place where our hacker is hooking in from, then I’m sure that I’ll see something soon.”
There was a quiet moment, as if M were conferring with Silva in the background. Mr. Silva had still not reached his goal of becoming Quartermaster, but after the second shutdown of MI6 by an outside source, he’d definitely risen in the ranks to unprecedented heights. The whispered rumor – the whispered truth, possibly – was that Silva and his genius were the only reason that MI6 hadn’t fallen permanently. In fact, in the last attack (its perpetrator still unknown, its purpose still unclear), Silva had fought back with a viciousness that could only stem from lacerated pride, and he’d followed that thread of attack nearly back to its origin. Silva had been like a fire, burning a trail back down to its source.
That source had been wilier than even Silva, however, a fluffy white tail disappearing down a rabbit hole. As galling as it was, the best Mr. Silva could do was to deduce that the rabbit hole led vaguely here.
Thus, Bond’s assignment frequenting a large, open coffee shop with more computers in evidence than he had eyes to follow. The weather was nice and people were out, and Bond was using all of his significant skills to deduce which of these varied people was repeatedly making a mockery of MI6’s defenses and which were just wasting their lives on Facebook. That was why Bond had been sent: Silva was needed back ‘home’ with a computer, and none of the other 00-agents had Bond's record for reading body-language and situations.
Bond appreciated why M was talking to him and not Silva. Oh, he didn’t doubt that Silva wanted to talk – the man valued control, even if he didn’t want to admit it and everyone else did his or her best to politely ignore that fact. However, M was obviously keeping the large, pale-haired man in the background while she handled the communications more diplomatically. Considering how hard Silva could be to handle, this was quite a feat.
“Mr. Silva wants me to inform you that he is sure that the perpetrator is using the internet somewhere within that coffee shop, 007,” M’s clipped tones reassured him.
“Or does he mean just within reach of this wifi hotspot?” Bond rejoined, lips barely moving but eyes never stopping. Dressed in jeans and a button-up, slightly wrinkled tan shirt, Bond looked quite ordinary, especially as he kept himself carefully still and quiet so as not to bring attention to his athletic build and sapphire-sharp eyes.
There was a minor explosion in the background, indicating that Silva had lost his cool just a little, although that didn’t bother Bond in the slightest. He simply continued to pretend to play Solitaire on the laptop MI6 had provided him with and reminded himself that Silva was miles away.
M snapped something particularly cutting before her voice reappeared in Bond’s ear with a slightly tired sigh, “That is quite possible, Bond, meaning you should keep alert.”
“Always do, Ma'am,” he replied with all politeness in deference to her rank. It still had the faintest endearing sound to the title, but at least he never went so far as Silva, calling her ‘Mumsy’ and the like. That brave Bond was not. He went back to scanning the crowd around him.
It was a well-used sort of place. It had the space to accommodate many and the food and drink to please many. The town around it also catered to a variety of castes, from the rich to the poor to the frustratingly-in-between. There was a businessman two tables behind Bond, a mother of two just outside the broad awning and to his left, and an obvious druggy huddled against the wall just out of the slanting sunlight coming in from the east, all of them with some form of technology that could, conceivably, connect to the internet. How it could ride the internet and then plummet like an atmosphere-ripping meteorite through MI6 defenses was another matter entirely, and totally Mr. Silva’s business. Bond was just after the man.
“Twenty-six people with either laptops, iphone, or ipads in attendance, M,” he informed M obediently, eyes ticking off the possible suspect.
“Well, I hardly figure that the phones will be a threat to MI6,” was M’s comment, which Bond would have taken with a grain of salt, but then Silva managed to get his voice across the wire, too.
“Very true, very true. You may not know a lot about hacking, James,” purred Silva’s smooth voice, just a little less smooth as this hacker continued to evade his cyber fingers, “but just think of it as trying to use a water gun to shoot a suspect.”
Bond also took this taunting with a grain of salt. “I believe I can see the point,” he grumbled back with the faintest curl of his lip in wryness. He narrowed his list, which still contained the businessman but now cut out the mother of three and the nervous, thin druggy. There were at least eleven others. Bond began to use his training to read body-language, already thinking of what a nervous hacker would look like if battling a furious Silva over cyberspace.
“NO!” he heard Silva bellow distantly in his ear. It was not the first exclamation he’d heard: already, Silva was growing frustrated, and his façade of sugary calm broke when he was diverted again and again by the hacker. Now – today, in the third attack in one month – the hacker was digging his way determinedly towards files on shipping reports to France, and with every second winning. That was making Silva more enraged that anyone to date had seen, probably because no one had ever beaten him in such a way before. The shout Bond heard was a sign of another tally for the enemy, and Bond knew he had to work a little faster. Blue eyes narrowed, making him a picture in gold and glacial blue as the noonday sun spilled down across his tousled blond hair.
The frustrating thing was…no one looked like they were hacking MI6. Bond figured that such a task would involve a high level of stress and concentration, and while some people did show some of these things, there was nothing obvious. The 00-agent began to get a touch stressed himself, his jaw clenching and his eyes going from sapphire to ice.
M was no different, as things were obviously snowballing on her end. “Bond, you might need to speed things up a bit. According to Mr. Silva, our hacker is busting down firewalls like it’s a game.”
“I didn’t say that!” Silva bellowed without an ounce of his usual control, forcing Bond to realize that things were deadly-serious now. If Silva was losing his cool and shouting like a child – pride forgotten, or at least wounded so much that it was practically nonfunctional – then something truly atrocious was going on. No one but no one beat Silva at his own game, and Silva’s game was destroying opponents, and he very often did that through computers with almost artistic flair. Now, instead, he was yelling in wrathful outrage: “This hacker is… is… without direction, without focus! He should be an amateur, because only an amateur would care about the systems he’s targeting, yet he’s attacking with the skill of a master!”
Bond hid a wince as Silva got louder, but the real wince he felt came from the shock of the words: Silva was complimenting the hacker while at the same time frothing at the mouth from the sounds of it. Both were disturbing reactions, because it took a lot to make Silva show anger, and even more to impress him.
Whomever MI6 had suddenly fallen into battle with, they were good, and Bond needed to spot them. Feeling adrenalin singe his veins, bringing the world into razor focus, he asked in flat, stony, serious tone, “Are you sure that the hacker is in this coffee shop?”
Silva growled – actually growled. But before M could field an answer for him, the larger, pale-haired agent snapped, “Yes. He’s… skilled…” Now Silva was trying to backtrack, to take back just how impressed he was by the person who was beating him. “… But he’s not perfect. And I am.”
“Silva!” M snapped, putting her foot down as the God-complex reared its ugly head. Everyone knew that Silva had it, but most everyone tried to turn a blind eye to that massive, dangerous ego.
Silva continued stubbornly, “He hasn’t been able to cover all of his bases to keep me from flanking him – I know where he is. He’s there, with you. Or she.”
M snorted something about Silva being sexist, although his belated addendum was appreciated. Still, Bond could hear the edge on her voice: the stiff, snappy, sharp woman was afraid. She was afraid because Silva was failing.
The businessman was frowning tensely at his screen, but he wasn’t sweating; the woman with the flying fingers type-type-typing on her laptop was working on a screen that too closely resembled an online chat-room – Bond could just see a vague reflection in the window. The person with the iPad wasn’t concentrating enough. The old man with the angry face couldn’t type swiftly enough to be a threat.
So many people… Bond’s eyes were dashing from face to face while his body didn’t move. His body was a mass of tense muscle, a bomb waiting to explode at a touch. All the while he listened to M and Silva panicking in his ear, their words growing louder and sharper and wilder by the second. Through their narration, Bond experienced the systematic fall of MI6’s defenses. It sounded as though a ball of fire were falling through layer upon layer of cloth, hitting and burning, hitting and burning, fiery teeth eating their way to the next layer. And all the while, Bond felt horribly inadequate, because no matter how hard he scrutinized the crowd around him, he could not find a target.
“Bond! Status!” M demanded, Silva’s high-intensity emotions rubbing off on her as he raged like a thwarted child in the background – a large, smart, very dangerous child.
Truthfully, tightly, 007 replied under his breath, “Nothing conclusive. Believe it or not, there’s no one in here that’s advertising that they’re hacking MI6.”
“Well, someone must look suspicious! Surely hacking us is at least a bit of a challenge.”
“You’d think that, but apparently it’s not as much a challenge as we’d think.” Bond heard the furious, animalistic snarl rippling down the line from Silva, and watched his step. “There are a few people here who look nervous and who could be our hacker, but it’s not clear.” He paused, still scanning the crowd, and said a line he was very familiar with, “I do not have a clear shot.”
M replied with silence, but Bond knew that she was listening and taking him seriously now. Silva might have thought of no one but himself, but M had the ability to put herself in another’s shoes. Right now, Bond’s shoes weren’t easy to stand in: he felt like a heron hunting fish, but realizing that the fish he wanted was more elusive than the ripples in the water. His eyes couldn’t latch onto the target he wanted, but the waves kept rippling, sending out false alarms that were quickly driving Bond mad. His eyes were taking in everything, all at once and in pieces as his brain dissected everything: woman in back, young man two chairs over, elderly couple bent together over a screen, single woman with a frown growing on her face and her coffee growing cold.
But nothing looked enough like a hacker to free Bond from his leash, and just as he was twitching to stand up and shoot… anything!... there was a roar from Silva in his ear: “NO! No, you bloody little…!” Mr. Silva’s words quickly devolved into obscenities not fit for paper or ears.
Obviously, MI6 had lost. Again.
Bond sagged back against his chair with a frustrated, chest-shaking sigh that made a few of his neighbors turn to him for the first time. They hadn’t even noticed him until then. It was ironic: Bond had been a hair’s-breadth away from drawing a gun and killing, but had been all but invisible to those around him.
But not so invisible anymore – at Bond’s sudden, grievous, inadvertent sigh, someone across the room twitched. Blocking out the voices in his earpiece, Bond’s eyes focused like gun-sights.
Just in time to see the thin, timid druggy with the iPhone slip out the door.
On reflex alone – reflexes that 007 had learned to trust with his life – Bond sprung out of his seat. As people shouted and yelped in alarm all around him, he blocked out all but the necessary noises. Soon M was demanding an explanation for what she was hearing from him, but Bond denied her, too. Instead, he focused on the spooked hare that had quit the area with such speed.
People were a blur as Bond tore past them, and his determined eyes caught the way his target turned: tousled, unkempt brown hair, bespectacled eyes, turning to look back and then widening in shock and terror at the sight of Bond. Instantly, the figure sped up, and that was all the incrimination Bond needed.
“Do you have a suspect, Bond?” M demanded.
The druggy was a wasted figure – nothing compared to Bond’s healthy, athletic physique. But the hacker could sure dodge, and was zigzagging with enough skill to counter his ungainliness. “Yes,” Bond stated briefly.
“Good,” M controlled her words, even though she had to be feeling vicious triumph beneath it all, “If you have a shot, take it. But don’t shoot to kill – I want to learn who he’s working for and what they bloody want.”
Instead of going into the argument about how hard it was to shoot to do anything but kill, but just lifted his hand to his gun… and then lowered it. He always listened to MI6, but he didn’t always follow their instructions. One of the things that made him good at what he did was the fact that Bond thought for himself, and now was a good example of that as he raced after the skinny, fleeing young man. With a gun, there was always a chance of killing, and he decided not to risk it, even if it meant losing his target.
The next street posed a problem as Bond got caught on the wrong side of traffic: horns honked and breaks shrieked as people tried not to hit the blonde man weaving in amongst them. A car suddenly came in too fast, the bumper kissing his hip and sending him skidding into a roll. Exasperation roared through him so fast that he nearly shot the tires off the vehicle, but he knew it was more important that he get to his feet. Growling imprecations under his breath and otherwise ignoring the many drivers yelling at him, 007 lurched to his feet and tried to regain his stride.
But by then, he was too late. The last look he got was still across and down the street, at the edge of traffic: a van had stopped, and the flimsy-looking druggy had stopped beside it. Still looking scared as a hunted rabbit behind crooked glasses and a mop of brown hair, the young man stared back at Bond as the van’s side-door opened. Two heads emerged, likewise looking at Bond across the river of cars, their faces twisting into dangerous scowls. Then one of them grabbed the hacker’s arm, making the skinny figure jump, and then all were disappearing into the van.
Only then did Bond draw his gun, eliciting more yelling all around him. He didn’t shoot, however. As he calmly sited and coldly considered targets, the 00-agent nonetheless still felt no urge to shoot. Instincts told him not to, and instincts were usually right.
Instincts and M did not always agree, unfortunately.
“What in heaven’s name is going on?! Did you lose the target?! Did you get a shot?!”
Grimacing and realizing that explaining this was going to be painful, Bond holstered his gun. People around him were running and panicking as if he were Godzilla, but he just started walking off. “He got away,” he admitted, avoiding the fact that he’d had a shot – he’d had those wide, large brown eyes in his sights, and had trailed the muzzle of his gun down to one shaking shoulder – but hadn’t taken it. “The target got away, but I can give a description.”
“Good,” M snapped, barely covering the sound of Silva snorting derisively in the background, “Because I bloody want this dealt with, and I want to know who it is that keeps messing with my systems like they’re a cheap whore.”