Deleted Scenes - One Reality
Oct. 25th, 2010 01:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charybdisThis entire part produces nothing but deleted scenes. Raugh, frustration! Some of the scenes are redundant, because I thought trying a different way would help... nope. Some parts are missing. Anyway.
********
Arthur is still dripping from his shower when gets the call at eight twenty-three in the morning. By eight forty-five, he's on his way to Philadelphia and on his cellphone at the same time, trying to cancel his weekend plans with Steven without breaking up with him.
“This is the last time,” Arthur says, in an attempt to placate him, “In a month I’ll be attached to a different unit, and my schedule will settle down. Just. This is important; please understand.” He doesn’t say, Baby, I’ve been under a lot of stress lately. That ‘emergency’ last week? Was actually a funeral for a close friend. I’ve got a lot of things on my mind; I’m still mourning, because yeah, that’s classified information, and Arthur is nothing if not discreet.
Then Steven snaps, "I swear, you’re married to the job! This is the seventh time this year that you’ve stood me up in favor of work, Arthur. It's March," and Arthur hangs up on him. Steven’s great, but damn it, he doesn't have time for that shit, and anyone who's going to keep count needs to find a boyfriend who can tell his boss that he needs some time off, who isn't personally responsible for the security of US military secrets. Basically, a boyfriend who isn't Arthur.
It takes him a moment to get back under control. He bites his lip and stares at the road, but his hands are perfectly steady on the wheel.
Arthur's on the road to Philadelphia and he glances at the clock, mildly surprised and professionally pleased to find that his argument with Steven hasn't affected his travel time.
He’s been called to Philadelphia for a retrieval; there's been a security breach. Arthur hasn’t been told what's been taken or why. But 'why' has never been his job. He is told what he needs to know and that's good enough. The thief is some SAS fuck who apparently doesn't realize or doesn't respect that any technology stored in a top secret bunker should be treated like the motherfucking Hope Diamond. Fatal curse and all.
Though in the case of cutting-edge military technology, the fatal curse comes in the form of one impeccably-dressed government assassin who goes by the name of Arthur.
***
The hotel is surprisingly classy, more upscale than the thief might be expected to afford, given that he’s just gone AWOL with an important bit of military technology.
While the thief is out, Arthur checks into the room next door, smiling and charming the front desk, trying and mostly succeeding to look more like a young investment banker than a professional killer. He’s aware that his impression is not very good, that he gets by on the strength of fake wire-rimmed glasses and dimples.
The keycard lock on the door is a joke, takes Arthur less than a minute to recode and crack it open. He leaves the door unlocked behind him, immediately sees the sleek silver shine of his objective on the far side of the bed. Everything seems to be going smoothly.
Until the door handle turns, and the thief comes into the room, slow and cautious, already on guard, even though Arthur is certain that he didn’t leave any sign.
“Is there someone there?”
In a fraction of a second, Arthur has thrown him against the doorframe, forearm across his throat hard enough to cut off most of his air, pushing until his face goes red. He ignores the part of his mind that’s screaming, oh god, oh god, oh god. No.
“I found you.”
The thief goes immediately pliant under his hands and doesn’t even try to protest.
“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?” Arthur lets him draw a tight breath, careful not to release him.
“Who dares wins,” the thief rasps. Then, “And I am pleased to see you.”
With a final shove and a snort of disgust, Arthur lets him go and takes a step back. He resists the urge to run a hand through his hair.
“What the fuck, Eames?” He wants to say, I don’t need this, not now. It can’t be you I’m supposed to kill.
Eames appears unimpressed. “It had to be done.” He crosses his arms across his chest.
***
Arthur’s supposed to recover the stolen technology and apprehend or destroy the thief.
It's supposed to be his last assignment in this capacity, before he formally becomes part of the information extraction team. It’s the first assignment that Arthur ever fails to fulfill to perfection.
***
Mal introduced them, before she died. She had fluttered and laughed like it was a joke, and watched their every interaction like she was personally invested in it.
Arthur had known her since she caught him stealing into physics classes at her university when he was sixteen. Eames knew her because he’d been on her extraction team.
She was the daughter of one of the researchers, and a brilliant architect besides. She’d been part of the testing from the very start; no one knew it could be dangerous.
The funeral was crowded, but respectfully quiet. Mal would have approved.
Arthur misses her already, misses the way she could soothe his frustration with the idiocy of the world with a wry smile and touch on his shoulder. He misses the way she turned people’s minds into works of art, the way she once built a hotel with Mobius-strip corridors and non-periodic floor tiles, just for Arthur, and had delighted in running up and down the conditional-gravity staircases.
He misses the way she looked when she was hiding something, the way she smiled the night she opened the door for him and said, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet, Arthur,” and then burst out laughing at the way Arthur froze in the threshold, mouth open, while his brain tried to process strong, broad shoulders, beautiful eyes, full lips, and a shirt that had apparently been designed by a blind man in the seventies.
Damnit, he even misses the way she was completely, literally, figuratively right when she said, “You’ll get along precisely like a house on fire,” before they even worked a single day together.
Dom, the team architect, is standing beside the grave, pale and drawn. Arthur avoids him — even if he could come up with some comforting words, he isn’t sure that the man deserves them.
Dom headed up all of those extraction tests that Mal agreed to. Dom hid behind closed doors and turned her dreams into a disease, a time bomb, and never noticed that when she came back out, she was already ticking.
He remembers Dom asking Mal to marry him, how the entire team went out to celebrate with him when she said yes. He remembers them coming back, laughing and more than a little drunk, high on their own competence and invulnerability.
They were good. But they weren’t good enough.
Arthur makes the mistake of looking into the casket. He thinks it will do no harm, some vague part of him says, just one last memory, and he’s seen her dead body in far worse situations than this, while they were dreaming.
Mal’s face is perfect, silent and composed, eyes closed and flawlessly made-up. He’s never seen her corpse without the marks of violence — drowned-blue lips, slit-throat blood, cement-block bruises — between her and death.
The nausea that he feels then is the exact opposite of the resolve that forms later when, — holding a tumbler of whiskey and tilting back precariously in the dining room chair — Eames asks him if the world would be better without the PASIV.
***
Eames doesn’t even bother going into hiding for very long, just hops a few continents and comes back up in the employ of the Chinese government, too dangerous and too important for anyone to make an open attempt on his life. He seems no worse for the wear, though Arthur can hardly make a through assessment from half the globe away.
Arthur makes his report and barely hears the dressing-down he gets. He’s not interested in what the military thinks about losing twenty years of research and testing. He’s not interested in taking note of every slight and saving up a history of outrage, waiting for the right moment to go rogue. As far as he’s concerned, the PASIV incident was an isolated occurrence that he dealt with in the only acceptable way — in the same way you wouldn’t let a child have a handgun, because they would almost certainly hurt themselves or someone else. Mal’s face is perfect and serene in his mind’s eye as he stands in front of his commander, and he wonders if he will always remember her like this, silent and dead.
In the years that follow, Arthur receives increasingly ridiculous thank you cards every April, on the anniversary of the failed retrieval. All unsigned, of course, but all in the same, unexpectedly sprawling handwriting, all with a different phone number at the bottom, and all addressed to the same anonymous ‘Darling’.
He never sends anything in reply.
In his memory, Mal’s face stays blank and empty, and the US government, ever persistent, reassembles the original PASIV research team for another round of research and trials.
Eventually, inevitably, Arthur picks up the latest card and calls the number.
********
When Arthur gets to Philadelphia, he heads immediately for the contact address he's been given, four straight hours of driving not withstanding.
Thankfully, the contact who answers the door is Corey, who greets him with a quick hug and, “Four whole hours, hmm? You’ve either moved since the last time I checked, or you’re mellowing.”
Corey lays out the details of the job over lunch at the kitchen table. It’s a far cry from the standard procedure, but after five years as friends and classmates and two more as lovers, they have no need to stand on formalities.
Lunch is delicious. The view through the window is gray, even though it’s technically spring, bleak enough to make the inside of the kitchen seem cozy and content instead of close and too small.
***
The guy is good, but Arthur has time and Corey on his side.
It takes them all of two days to find the thief, even with all of Corey’s resources and their combined intellect working on it. Arthur gathers his things and heads for the downtown hotel where the thief is staying.
Corey calls after him as he’s leaving, “Let me know if you need help getting him to talk!” as cheerful and inappropriate as a rainbow-bedecked summer shower in the bleak gray street.
And Arthur finally remembers why they didn’t last.
***
Telephone wire and an ethernet cable serve well enough to tie the man to the room’s only chair in the few minutes that he’s unconscious. By the time he wakes up, groaning, Arthur’s just returning from his room, having retrieved all his things, including his gun.
He moves around the bed and picks up the objective; it's a sleek silver briefcase, not particularly heavy, but it's solid, made to keep things in, and Arthur puts it carefully on the table by the door before he turns to face the mark.
"This was a bad idea," Arthur informs him. "Amazing execution," he admits, because in spite of his split lip and the rapidly stiffening bruise along his ribs, he hasn't had this much excitement — all right, this much fun — in years, "but a bad idea."
"Who dares, wins," the mark rasps, voice not quite recovered from being throttled into unconsciousness. "I'd wager you don't have the slightest notion as to what you are doing. You don't understand the consequences of what you are here to do.”
Arthur is a professional. “I don’t care. I’m just doing my job.”
“As am I.”
“Britain is interested in sabotaging the American military? That war was over two centuries ago.”
“Do you know what that is? It’s the cutting edge of technology designed to break people’s minds. They’ve already begun using it on criminals, ostensibly to gather intelligence. But the effects of certain extraction procedures can be incredibly damaging. Think early-onset Alzheimer’s. Then multiply the horrors of the disease by the fact that it’s being initiated by other human beings. Complete mental degeneration takes days, not months or years.
“It’s been used to erase minds, and to rewrite them. What’s left isn’t fit to be called human.”
Arthur isn’t so distracted that he hasn’t noticed the mark trying to work his hands free behind his back. He grips his pistol, but trusts his knots to hold.
“I believe in the orders I have been given. I believe in the people who gave them to me.” He thinks of Corey, whose brilliance was always tempered by a careless cruelty that made Arthur uncomfortably aware of what lay under the easy laugh and quick smile.
The mark is suddenly livid, “You’d give this back to them? Twenty years of research on how to strip-mine the human brain, a machine that turns people into empty husks.”
“Why do you care?”
“Piss off. I’m just doing my job, aren’t I?”
Arthur’s eyes narrow. That doesn’t match the psych profile he read; the mark is much too upset for this to be just a mission gone wrong. He makes a show of cocking the hammer on his gun. “Next time you lie, I’ll perforate your skull,” he warns. “Tell me why you’re here.”
For a moment, the mark seems to consider a bullet to the brain an acceptable option — his eyes narrow in challenge and he presses his lips together in a thin, hard line — but the moment passes and he says, “One of the first test subjects was a friend of mine. A girl, a civilian, the daughter of one of the researchers.” He exhales sharply, as if in physical pain. “She was lovely.”
In spite of himself, Arthur asks, “She’s dead?”
The mark shrugs, slipping into nonchalance and away from the raw pain of the memory. “She was erased; her thoughts, her memories, personality, everything. They sent her home, but no one realized that they’d have to keep quite so close a watch on her. Wandered right out onto the M25, poor thing.”
“What do you want?”
“Get rid of it. Or are you so utterly wedded to your job that you’d unleash this technology on the unsuspecting world?”
If Arthur’s honest, it’s the ‘wedded to your job’ that gets him.
He’s supposed to recover the stolen technology and apprehend the thief. Instead, he smashes the PASIV, shreds the plans, and lights the whole mess on fire in the bathtub.
The loudest thought in his head is, I am not married to the job.
It's the first and only mission that Arthur ever fails to fulfill to perfection.
***
In the years that follow, he will receive increasingly ridiculous thank you cards every April, on the anniversary of the retrieval. All unsigned, of course, but all in the same, unexpectedly sprawling handwriting, and all with a different phone number at the bottom, next to the words in case you and the job ever split up.
He will never send anything in reply.
But eventually, inevitably, he will pick up the latest card and call the number.
********
“You were supposed to be gone two days ago; what the fuck, Eames?”
Eames leans against the door, rubbing his throat and grimacing. “I simply couldn’t leave without making certain that you were alright.” At Arthur’s unimpressed look, he adds, “And they’ve got a trace alarm on the machine. As far as I can tell, it will be activated if the case is moved more than a certain radius from the storage facility. Or if one attempts to disconnect it.”
“Why would they have a trace alarm that doesn’t activate until the machine is gone?”
“Presumably to allow researchers to take it home and test it out.”
Arthur swallows, stops the snap of something rude that jumps up in response to the twist of grief in his chest, the tightening in his throat.
“Right. And why not just the trace all the time? No matter where it’s taken?”
Eames shrugs. “There was one, but it wasn’t connected to the alarm. I removed that one straight off. Someone on the security team needs a little lesson in redundant systems.”
Arthur grits his teeth at the implied criticism, even though it’s pure luck that they’re able to exploit a flaw in the security system.
********
Whew! I feel better now, even if this is hardly progress. I just had to get it off my chest.
********
Arthur is still dripping from his shower when gets the call at eight twenty-three in the morning. By eight forty-five, he's on his way to Philadelphia and on his cellphone at the same time, trying to cancel his weekend plans with Steven without breaking up with him.
“This is the last time,” Arthur says, in an attempt to placate him, “In a month I’ll be attached to a different unit, and my schedule will settle down. Just. This is important; please understand.” He doesn’t say, Baby, I’ve been under a lot of stress lately. That ‘emergency’ last week? Was actually a funeral for a close friend. I’ve got a lot of things on my mind; I’m still mourning, because yeah, that’s classified information, and Arthur is nothing if not discreet.
Then Steven snaps, "I swear, you’re married to the job! This is the seventh time this year that you’ve stood me up in favor of work, Arthur. It's March," and Arthur hangs up on him. Steven’s great, but damn it, he doesn't have time for that shit, and anyone who's going to keep count needs to find a boyfriend who can tell his boss that he needs some time off, who isn't personally responsible for the security of US military secrets. Basically, a boyfriend who isn't Arthur.
It takes him a moment to get back under control. He bites his lip and stares at the road, but his hands are perfectly steady on the wheel.
Arthur's on the road to Philadelphia and he glances at the clock, mildly surprised and professionally pleased to find that his argument with Steven hasn't affected his travel time.
He’s been called to Philadelphia for a retrieval; there's been a security breach. Arthur hasn’t been told what's been taken or why. But 'why' has never been his job. He is told what he needs to know and that's good enough. The thief is some SAS fuck who apparently doesn't realize or doesn't respect that any technology stored in a top secret bunker should be treated like the motherfucking Hope Diamond. Fatal curse and all.
Though in the case of cutting-edge military technology, the fatal curse comes in the form of one impeccably-dressed government assassin who goes by the name of Arthur.
***
The hotel is surprisingly classy, more upscale than the thief might be expected to afford, given that he’s just gone AWOL with an important bit of military technology.
While the thief is out, Arthur checks into the room next door, smiling and charming the front desk, trying and mostly succeeding to look more like a young investment banker than a professional killer. He’s aware that his impression is not very good, that he gets by on the strength of fake wire-rimmed glasses and dimples.
The keycard lock on the door is a joke, takes Arthur less than a minute to recode and crack it open. He leaves the door unlocked behind him, immediately sees the sleek silver shine of his objective on the far side of the bed. Everything seems to be going smoothly.
Until the door handle turns, and the thief comes into the room, slow and cautious, already on guard, even though Arthur is certain that he didn’t leave any sign.
“Is there someone there?”
In a fraction of a second, Arthur has thrown him against the doorframe, forearm across his throat hard enough to cut off most of his air, pushing until his face goes red. He ignores the part of his mind that’s screaming, oh god, oh god, oh god. No.
“I found you.”
The thief goes immediately pliant under his hands and doesn’t even try to protest.
“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?” Arthur lets him draw a tight breath, careful not to release him.
“Who dares wins,” the thief rasps. Then, “And I am pleased to see you.”
With a final shove and a snort of disgust, Arthur lets him go and takes a step back. He resists the urge to run a hand through his hair.
“What the fuck, Eames?” He wants to say, I don’t need this, not now. It can’t be you I’m supposed to kill.
Eames appears unimpressed. “It had to be done.” He crosses his arms across his chest.
***
Arthur’s supposed to recover the stolen technology and apprehend or destroy the thief.
It's supposed to be his last assignment in this capacity, before he formally becomes part of the information extraction team. It’s the first assignment that Arthur ever fails to fulfill to perfection.
***
Mal introduced them, before she died. She had fluttered and laughed like it was a joke, and watched their every interaction like she was personally invested in it.
Arthur had known her since she caught him stealing into physics classes at her university when he was sixteen. Eames knew her because he’d been on her extraction team.
She was the daughter of one of the researchers, and a brilliant architect besides. She’d been part of the testing from the very start; no one knew it could be dangerous.
The funeral was crowded, but respectfully quiet. Mal would have approved.
Arthur misses her already, misses the way she could soothe his frustration with the idiocy of the world with a wry smile and touch on his shoulder. He misses the way she turned people’s minds into works of art, the way she once built a hotel with Mobius-strip corridors and non-periodic floor tiles, just for Arthur, and had delighted in running up and down the conditional-gravity staircases.
He misses the way she looked when she was hiding something, the way she smiled the night she opened the door for him and said, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet, Arthur,” and then burst out laughing at the way Arthur froze in the threshold, mouth open, while his brain tried to process strong, broad shoulders, beautiful eyes, full lips, and a shirt that had apparently been designed by a blind man in the seventies.
Damnit, he even misses the way she was completely, literally, figuratively right when she said, “You’ll get along precisely like a house on fire,” before they even worked a single day together.
Dom, the team architect, is standing beside the grave, pale and drawn. Arthur avoids him — even if he could come up with some comforting words, he isn’t sure that the man deserves them.
Dom headed up all of those extraction tests that Mal agreed to. Dom hid behind closed doors and turned her dreams into a disease, a time bomb, and never noticed that when she came back out, she was already ticking.
He remembers Dom asking Mal to marry him, how the entire team went out to celebrate with him when she said yes. He remembers them coming back, laughing and more than a little drunk, high on their own competence and invulnerability.
They were good. But they weren’t good enough.
Arthur makes the mistake of looking into the casket. He thinks it will do no harm, some vague part of him says, just one last memory, and he’s seen her dead body in far worse situations than this, while they were dreaming.
Mal’s face is perfect, silent and composed, eyes closed and flawlessly made-up. He’s never seen her corpse without the marks of violence — drowned-blue lips, slit-throat blood, cement-block bruises — between her and death.
The nausea that he feels then is the exact opposite of the resolve that forms later when, — holding a tumbler of whiskey and tilting back precariously in the dining room chair — Eames asks him if the world would be better without the PASIV.
***
Eames doesn’t even bother going into hiding for very long, just hops a few continents and comes back up in the employ of the Chinese government, too dangerous and too important for anyone to make an open attempt on his life. He seems no worse for the wear, though Arthur can hardly make a through assessment from half the globe away.
Arthur makes his report and barely hears the dressing-down he gets. He’s not interested in what the military thinks about losing twenty years of research and testing. He’s not interested in taking note of every slight and saving up a history of outrage, waiting for the right moment to go rogue. As far as he’s concerned, the PASIV incident was an isolated occurrence that he dealt with in the only acceptable way — in the same way you wouldn’t let a child have a handgun, because they would almost certainly hurt themselves or someone else. Mal’s face is perfect and serene in his mind’s eye as he stands in front of his commander, and he wonders if he will always remember her like this, silent and dead.
In the years that follow, Arthur receives increasingly ridiculous thank you cards every April, on the anniversary of the failed retrieval. All unsigned, of course, but all in the same, unexpectedly sprawling handwriting, all with a different phone number at the bottom, and all addressed to the same anonymous ‘Darling’.
He never sends anything in reply.
In his memory, Mal’s face stays blank and empty, and the US government, ever persistent, reassembles the original PASIV research team for another round of research and trials.
Eventually, inevitably, Arthur picks up the latest card and calls the number.
********
When Arthur gets to Philadelphia, he heads immediately for the contact address he's been given, four straight hours of driving not withstanding.
Thankfully, the contact who answers the door is Corey, who greets him with a quick hug and, “Four whole hours, hmm? You’ve either moved since the last time I checked, or you’re mellowing.”
Corey lays out the details of the job over lunch at the kitchen table. It’s a far cry from the standard procedure, but after five years as friends and classmates and two more as lovers, they have no need to stand on formalities.
Lunch is delicious. The view through the window is gray, even though it’s technically spring, bleak enough to make the inside of the kitchen seem cozy and content instead of close and too small.
***
The guy is good, but Arthur has time and Corey on his side.
It takes them all of two days to find the thief, even with all of Corey’s resources and their combined intellect working on it. Arthur gathers his things and heads for the downtown hotel where the thief is staying.
Corey calls after him as he’s leaving, “Let me know if you need help getting him to talk!” as cheerful and inappropriate as a rainbow-bedecked summer shower in the bleak gray street.
And Arthur finally remembers why they didn’t last.
***
Telephone wire and an ethernet cable serve well enough to tie the man to the room’s only chair in the few minutes that he’s unconscious. By the time he wakes up, groaning, Arthur’s just returning from his room, having retrieved all his things, including his gun.
He moves around the bed and picks up the objective; it's a sleek silver briefcase, not particularly heavy, but it's solid, made to keep things in, and Arthur puts it carefully on the table by the door before he turns to face the mark.
"This was a bad idea," Arthur informs him. "Amazing execution," he admits, because in spite of his split lip and the rapidly stiffening bruise along his ribs, he hasn't had this much excitement — all right, this much fun — in years, "but a bad idea."
"Who dares, wins," the mark rasps, voice not quite recovered from being throttled into unconsciousness. "I'd wager you don't have the slightest notion as to what you are doing. You don't understand the consequences of what you are here to do.”
Arthur is a professional. “I don’t care. I’m just doing my job.”
“As am I.”
“Britain is interested in sabotaging the American military? That war was over two centuries ago.”
“Do you know what that is? It’s the cutting edge of technology designed to break people’s minds. They’ve already begun using it on criminals, ostensibly to gather intelligence. But the effects of certain extraction procedures can be incredibly damaging. Think early-onset Alzheimer’s. Then multiply the horrors of the disease by the fact that it’s being initiated by other human beings. Complete mental degeneration takes days, not months or years.
“It’s been used to erase minds, and to rewrite them. What’s left isn’t fit to be called human.”
Arthur isn’t so distracted that he hasn’t noticed the mark trying to work his hands free behind his back. He grips his pistol, but trusts his knots to hold.
“I believe in the orders I have been given. I believe in the people who gave them to me.” He thinks of Corey, whose brilliance was always tempered by a careless cruelty that made Arthur uncomfortably aware of what lay under the easy laugh and quick smile.
The mark is suddenly livid, “You’d give this back to them? Twenty years of research on how to strip-mine the human brain, a machine that turns people into empty husks.”
“Why do you care?”
“Piss off. I’m just doing my job, aren’t I?”
Arthur’s eyes narrow. That doesn’t match the psych profile he read; the mark is much too upset for this to be just a mission gone wrong. He makes a show of cocking the hammer on his gun. “Next time you lie, I’ll perforate your skull,” he warns. “Tell me why you’re here.”
For a moment, the mark seems to consider a bullet to the brain an acceptable option — his eyes narrow in challenge and he presses his lips together in a thin, hard line — but the moment passes and he says, “One of the first test subjects was a friend of mine. A girl, a civilian, the daughter of one of the researchers.” He exhales sharply, as if in physical pain. “She was lovely.”
In spite of himself, Arthur asks, “She’s dead?”
The mark shrugs, slipping into nonchalance and away from the raw pain of the memory. “She was erased; her thoughts, her memories, personality, everything. They sent her home, but no one realized that they’d have to keep quite so close a watch on her. Wandered right out onto the M25, poor thing.”
“What do you want?”
“Get rid of it. Or are you so utterly wedded to your job that you’d unleash this technology on the unsuspecting world?”
If Arthur’s honest, it’s the ‘wedded to your job’ that gets him.
He’s supposed to recover the stolen technology and apprehend the thief. Instead, he smashes the PASIV, shreds the plans, and lights the whole mess on fire in the bathtub.
The loudest thought in his head is, I am not married to the job.
It's the first and only mission that Arthur ever fails to fulfill to perfection.
***
In the years that follow, he will receive increasingly ridiculous thank you cards every April, on the anniversary of the retrieval. All unsigned, of course, but all in the same, unexpectedly sprawling handwriting, and all with a different phone number at the bottom, next to the words in case you and the job ever split up.
He will never send anything in reply.
But eventually, inevitably, he will pick up the latest card and call the number.
********
“You were supposed to be gone two days ago; what the fuck, Eames?”
Eames leans against the door, rubbing his throat and grimacing. “I simply couldn’t leave without making certain that you were alright.” At Arthur’s unimpressed look, he adds, “And they’ve got a trace alarm on the machine. As far as I can tell, it will be activated if the case is moved more than a certain radius from the storage facility. Or if one attempts to disconnect it.”
“Why would they have a trace alarm that doesn’t activate until the machine is gone?”
“Presumably to allow researchers to take it home and test it out.”
Arthur swallows, stops the snap of something rude that jumps up in response to the twist of grief in his chest, the tightening in his throat.
“Right. And why not just the trace all the time? No matter where it’s taken?”
Eames shrugs. “There was one, but it wasn’t connected to the alarm. I removed that one straight off. Someone on the security team needs a little lesson in redundant systems.”
Arthur grits his teeth at the implied criticism, even though it’s pure luck that they’re able to exploit a flaw in the security system.
********
Whew! I feel better now, even if this is hardly progress. I just had to get it off my chest.
