[fic] What's Puzzling You Is The Nature Of My Game 2/?
Title: What's Puzzling You Is The Nature Of My Game, Part 2
Pairings: eventual Arthur/Merlin and background Lancelot/Gwen
Rating: PG-13 for now.
Word Count: ~2500 in this part.
Disclaimer: This version of Arthur, Merlin, et al belong to Shine and the BBC, not to me.
Summary: It's 1963, the Cold War is in full swing, and Arthur Pendragon, agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service, is about to meet the Service's newest Russian double agent: Merlin Emrys.
Author's Note: Thank you to
kerrykhat for the beta. LJ/Firefox were being huge bitches as I was trying to post this, so if you see anything wonky it's probably because HTML hates me. More notes at the end.
first part.
PART TWO
lemon tree very pretty
and the lemon flower is sweet
but the fruit of the poor lemon
is impossible to eat
Not long after he left his father’s office, just before calling it a day and going home for the night, Arthur made his way down to Gwen’s desk. Guinevere Smith was Morgana’s secretary; Arthur had been known to quip when he’d had a few too many martinis at a cocktail party that Morgana had staring contest with people until they talked and Gwen filed the paperwork. She and Morgana were quite the pair. They both managed to be professional in the office while simultaneously remaining up to date with all the current styles, all miniskirts and long legs, with Gwen’s dark ringlet curls a perfect counterpoint to Morgana’s short, Jackie Kennedy-esque bob. The two of them were good friends, being two of the only woman in an office that was almost exclusively male. Arthur had always liked Gwen. She was complimentary but not to the point of sucking up and she knew where to draw the line and tell you that you were being an idiot when you were being an idiot, even if you were the boss’ son.
Arthur leaned up against her open door now, his arms crossed. “How’s it going?” he asked, jerking his head in the direction of Leon’s office. Leon Knightly was the Service’s best analyzer and had been put to work checking and rechecking Petrovich’s statement.
Gwen glanced in the direction of the office and shrugged noncommittally. “I think it’s going all right,” she responded, “he hasn’t said much, you’ll have to ask him.” Arthur sighed at that and Gwen smirked knowingly. “Anxious?” she asked teasingly.
“I am a little nervous, yes,” Arthur admitted begrudgingly, trying to smile lightly but suspecting it turned out as more of a grimace. “This is a way higher profile operation than I’ve ever been assigned before, you know.”
The smirk vanished from Gwen’s face. “Oh, yes, of course,” she stammered, “I didn’t mean to imply—I’m sorry.”
Arthur’s scowl softened into a real smile, charmed as always by Gwen’s visible discomfort at the turn the conversation had taken. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, falling into the plush chair on the near side of her desk, “you were just making conversation.” His hands tangled in his lap as he fidgeted with them nervously and he went on, “This is just such a big operation, I’d be crazy to be totally calm about it.”
Gwen smiled knowingly. “You’ll be fine, Arthur,” she said. “Don’t worry, you were born to do this.” When Arthur rolled his eyes, skeptical, she continued, “No, really. You’re as high up in this organization as you are for a reason. It’s in your blood.”
Arthur gave a short, sarcastic laugh. “It’s in my name, you mean,” he said.
“No! Don’t ever believe that, Arthur!” Gwen scolded and then sighed, leaning over the desk towards him. “Look, your father was a great field agent in his day, and he’s a fine deputy chief, but you are a thousand times better at working with people than he ever could be, and he knows it. They gave you this assignment because you’re the best case handler we have and you’re the best man to bring the Russian kid into the fold.”
Arthur huffed, not very convinced, and his skepticism must have shown on his face because Gwen just sighed again, glanced at the clock and said. “Alright, it’s almost five o’clock anyway. Hang around for a minute and I’ll call Morgana, we can all go get some beer and forget about business for a little bit, how does that sound?”
A few hours and a few beers later, a tipsy Arthur stumbled into his flat, tossing the keys away and scrounging for the lights, and realized that he’d just been successful in not feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders for awhile, only to have it all come rushing back as he saw Petrovich’s face in his mind’s eye.
+
Because Petrovich was possibly under Soviet surveillance, it was decreed that they could only meet in relatively public spaces and not in private meetings within the safe confines of the MI6 Building, which Petrovich could be tracked to. To complicate matters even further, it was not safe for Merlin to be seen associating with the son of the director of SIS. Therefore, they could never actually talk face in public and instead had to deal with sitting back to back on park benches or in train stations or open marketplaces, hoping their voices carried just enough for the other to hear, but not enough for them to be overheard and reported for suspicious behaviour, or else huddled together in a locked men’s room with the water running nosily behind them. Arthur felt like an idiot trying to have a conversation with a man facing away from him, but he sucked it up. He knew he’d have to get used to it.
Their first meeting as case officer and asset went something like this.
Arthur arrived near the pond at Hyde Park at 14:15 and sat with that morning’s edition of The Times open, pretending to read about the new so-called “Mersey Sound” music coming down from the North that all kids were going crazy over these days. (He’d have to keep this in mind when looking for presents for his younger cousins when Christmastime rolled around.) Petrovich came strolling past him at 14:23 on the dot with a copy of an Ian Flemming novel under his arm. He circumnavigated the bench and sat directly behind Arthur. A few minutes later, Arthur heard his crisp English accent quietly ask, “Excuse me, do you know who won the cricket match last night?”
“Middlesex,” Arthur replied, affirming his identity and nodding despite the fact that the boy couldn’t see him.
“It’s good to see you again, Agent Pendragon.” the boy responded, obviously pleased with Arthur’s answer.
“It’s good to see you again, Agent Petrovich,” Arthur lied.
“Oh—God—call me Merlin!” He sounded genuinely surprised that Arthur would call him by his Russian surname; he’d obviously been under long enough that the name his mother had given him sounded foreign to his ears.
“Okay,” Arthur tried, “Merlin.” The name sounded strange on his tongue, Arthur had grown up in an environment defined by formality and this was a bit too familiar for his liking, but he figured he might as well just go with it. Then, trying to get off that awkward subject and break the ice, “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a Flemming fan, Merlin.”
“Didn’t you know,” Merlin shot back, a hint of humour in his voice that Arthur had never heard before, “James Bond is how the Kremlin taught us about the British Secret Service in our training.”
Arthur didn’t laugh, but it was a near thing; he could feel the awkwardness slipping away as with warmth in Petrovich’s—no, Merlin’s—voice washed over him. It was weird but nice to be joking around about a fictional agent from an annoyingly popular series of books and movies with this kid he barely knew.
Then Arthur could hear him shifting on the bench behind him and he realized the boy probably felt just as awkward as he did. “Anyway,” Merlin said, sounding a bit uncomfortable for the first time since Arthur had met him, and his voice had lost the humour, “I guess we’re supposed to talk about spy stuff now, huh?”
“Yes,” Arthur said.
“Alright, so, here’s the deal.” Merlin continued, “my superiors in Moscow are sending me to Berlin next week. It’s a retrieval operation from the US Mission Berlin.”
That was odd. “I thought you were stationed more or less permanently in London,” Arthur remembered out loud, “why are they sending you?”
“I have a fabricated British visa—one of the perks of being undercover—so I can get into the western city much more easily than an agent coming from the Soviet Union ever could.”
Arthur found that he felt more comfortable now that they were back on familiar, professional ground. Spy stuff, he could do that. This is what Arthur had been raised to do, bred to do, even. In this he could set aside all the baggage and stress that came along with this new assignment and concentrate on being at a rendezvous with a contact. He turned Merlin’s words over in his head—if the KGB wanted something from the United States' military and political headquarters in West Berlin this week, there could only be one reason. “This is about Kennedy, isn’t it?” he said.
“Of course it’s about Kennedy,” Merlin scoffed. “The president of the United States is going to be giving a speech to the people of Berlin mere miles from Soviet territory, you think they’re just going to sit around and let that go by?”
Arthur shook his head, forgetting that the man behind him wouldn’t be able to see. “Yeah, we’ve been speculating about that ourselves actually. The deputy chief was going to send Agent du Lac, I believe.”
“The deputy chief?” Merlin repeated, incredulous, like he couldn't believe Uther's son would refer to him as that, “why don’t you just suggest to your father that he send you instead? You can keep an eye on me. Don’t pretend you don’t want to, Agent Pendragon.” A lesser man than Arthur would have shivered at the sudden coldness in Merlin’s voice and Arthur cringed, suddenly feeling as though the all of Western society’s prejudice was settled on his own shoulders.
There was a pause before Arthur said anything. Finally, he simply said, “If I get to call you Merlin, Agent Petrovich, you get to call me Arthur.”
“Well, Arthur,” Merlin said, his voice now sounding slightly pleased while still maintaining a cold edge, and how did he do that? “I think we’re done here. If you need to reach me, I work at the used bookshop in Covenant Garden and you can get a message to me there.” Arthur felt his weight lift off the bench and wondered momentarily why this boy, who had been joking with him—about Ian Flemming of all things—just a few minutes before, had suddenly become so cold toward him. Where had Arthur gone wrong?
Arthur was about to chalk it up to the strange, strange mind of a Russian—and the fact that Arthur was thinking that, it occurred to him, was probably the problem—when Merlin came around the bench again, still clutching that damn Bond novel (which, Arthur had to consciously refrain himself from rolling his eyes upon discovering, was From Russia With Love) and flashed Arthur one of the most blinding smiles Arthur had ever seen. And Arthur almost couldn’t help but quirk his own lips in return.
+
As soon as Arthur got back to his office, he rang up Nimueh on her office phone. Viviane Nimueh was a middleman (though she would look you straight in the face and remind you that she wasn't a man, thank you very much, if you called her that to her face) between Arthur and Uther. Arthur had to report to her for all of his orders, which she got from his father. Arthur sometimes half heartedly wondered why he couldn't just get his orders directly from his father since he was, after all, his father, but the always quickly dismissed that and reminded himself that it was just Service policy.
After the secretary had put him through, Arthur heard Nimueh's voice on the other end. The woman didn't exactly engender the familiarity of first name basis; no one ever called her Viviane. "Yes?" she answered expectantly.
"Nimueh, it's Arthur."
"Oh, Arthur," she drawled, "how was the Russian?" Arthur cringed inwardly at the tone of her voice. There had always been something about the woman that set his teeth on edge. Nimueh had been in Arthur's life for as long as he could remember. She and Uther had worked together in the Service almost since they'd joined. The two of them had seen each other through a world war, the advent of the atom bomb and the first decade of this conflict with Russia, all in the name of Great Britain and Her Majesty the Queen. When Uther had been promoted to deputy chief, while she was just as qualified for the post, Nimueh had simply smiled, congratulated Uther, and clapped him on the back. Still, Arthur couldn't say what it was exactly, but there just seemed to him to be something off about her, but he'd never dared bring it up with his father. Uther awarded loyalty and friendship like Nimueh had displayed towards him with fierce loyalty of his own and almost unconditional defense of character, even coming from his own son. Now an agent in his own right, Arthur had to answer to her. He'd never been quite thrilled by that.
"Petrovich was fine," he told her, "he said the Kremlin's sending him to Berlin next week."
"Because of Kennedy, I assume."
"Yeah, because of Kennedy." Arthur paused, wishing he could avoid what came next but knowing he couldn’t. "Look," he forced himself to say, "he's requested that I go as well."
There was a pause on the other end. Arthur had known she wouldn't like that idea. Nimueh had been the one to assign Lancelot to that task and she didn't like to have her orders overridden. But a request from an agent who was implicit to the mission was hard to ignore and she couldn't even argue that Merlin was just a Russian, he was considered a British agent now and was to be awarded the same amount of respect anyone else would be. Finally, Nimueh spoke up again. "Agent du Lac has already been given that assignment," she said bracingly, like Arthur didn't already know it.
"I know," Arthur answered, patiently, although his annoyance level was rising, "but the man asked for me. Not Lancelot. And it's not like he's got some special skill set I haven't. I think Petrovich being sent over there puts this squarely in my operation folder."
“You’re a case officer, Arthur,” Nimueh reminded him, again unnecessarily. “You haven’t been on a field mission since you took your agent exam.”
It was true. Arthur had spent most of his working life behind a desk, coordinating missions other people went on. In truth, Arthur was bored out of his mind with it most of the time, and the prospect of having the opportunity to go out in the field was an exciting change of pace. Still, he wasn’t about to let on to Nimueh about that. So instead he simply said, “With all due respect, ma’am, I seem to remember passing that exam with flying colors.”
“That was four years ago.”
Arthur couldn’t help but roll his eyes and was thankful that Nimueh couldn’t see; she always had to make everything so difficult. Merlin was his responsibility, dammit. “Look,” he started bracingly, “Petrovich is my man. And he’s new to the Service, I think it would be wise if he had his case officer’s supervision. If this is his mission, so it should be mine too. I’ll even do a few field simulations if it makes you feel better, but I am going to Berlin.”
NOTE: Thank you to everyone who left feedback on the first part! I've been working on this story for a long time and I've put a lot into it, so it was very nice to see people enjoying it. I hope I can continue to deliver. As of right now I have about 16,000 words written and I'm steadily working on more; the plan is for me to stay well ahead of the posting and to get you guys an update fairly consistently every few days, so you can expect Part 3 up sometime Sunday.
next part.
Pairings: eventual Arthur/Merlin and background Lancelot/Gwen
Rating: PG-13 for now.
Word Count: ~2500 in this part.
Disclaimer: This version of Arthur, Merlin, et al belong to Shine and the BBC, not to me.
Summary: It's 1963, the Cold War is in full swing, and Arthur Pendragon, agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service, is about to meet the Service's newest Russian double agent: Merlin Emrys.
Author's Note: Thank you to
kerrykhat for the beta. LJ/Firefox were being huge bitches as I was trying to post this, so if you see anything wonky it's probably because HTML hates me. More notes at the end.first part.
PART TWO
and the lemon flower is sweet
but the fruit of the poor lemon
is impossible to eat
Not long after he left his father’s office, just before calling it a day and going home for the night, Arthur made his way down to Gwen’s desk. Guinevere Smith was Morgana’s secretary; Arthur had been known to quip when he’d had a few too many martinis at a cocktail party that Morgana had staring contest with people until they talked and Gwen filed the paperwork. She and Morgana were quite the pair. They both managed to be professional in the office while simultaneously remaining up to date with all the current styles, all miniskirts and long legs, with Gwen’s dark ringlet curls a perfect counterpoint to Morgana’s short, Jackie Kennedy-esque bob. The two of them were good friends, being two of the only woman in an office that was almost exclusively male. Arthur had always liked Gwen. She was complimentary but not to the point of sucking up and she knew where to draw the line and tell you that you were being an idiot when you were being an idiot, even if you were the boss’ son.
Arthur leaned up against her open door now, his arms crossed. “How’s it going?” he asked, jerking his head in the direction of Leon’s office. Leon Knightly was the Service’s best analyzer and had been put to work checking and rechecking Petrovich’s statement.
Gwen glanced in the direction of the office and shrugged noncommittally. “I think it’s going all right,” she responded, “he hasn’t said much, you’ll have to ask him.” Arthur sighed at that and Gwen smirked knowingly. “Anxious?” she asked teasingly.
“I am a little nervous, yes,” Arthur admitted begrudgingly, trying to smile lightly but suspecting it turned out as more of a grimace. “This is a way higher profile operation than I’ve ever been assigned before, you know.”
The smirk vanished from Gwen’s face. “Oh, yes, of course,” she stammered, “I didn’t mean to imply—I’m sorry.”
Arthur’s scowl softened into a real smile, charmed as always by Gwen’s visible discomfort at the turn the conversation had taken. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, falling into the plush chair on the near side of her desk, “you were just making conversation.” His hands tangled in his lap as he fidgeted with them nervously and he went on, “This is just such a big operation, I’d be crazy to be totally calm about it.”
Gwen smiled knowingly. “You’ll be fine, Arthur,” she said. “Don’t worry, you were born to do this.” When Arthur rolled his eyes, skeptical, she continued, “No, really. You’re as high up in this organization as you are for a reason. It’s in your blood.”
Arthur gave a short, sarcastic laugh. “It’s in my name, you mean,” he said.
“No! Don’t ever believe that, Arthur!” Gwen scolded and then sighed, leaning over the desk towards him. “Look, your father was a great field agent in his day, and he’s a fine deputy chief, but you are a thousand times better at working with people than he ever could be, and he knows it. They gave you this assignment because you’re the best case handler we have and you’re the best man to bring the Russian kid into the fold.”
Arthur huffed, not very convinced, and his skepticism must have shown on his face because Gwen just sighed again, glanced at the clock and said. “Alright, it’s almost five o’clock anyway. Hang around for a minute and I’ll call Morgana, we can all go get some beer and forget about business for a little bit, how does that sound?”
A few hours and a few beers later, a tipsy Arthur stumbled into his flat, tossing the keys away and scrounging for the lights, and realized that he’d just been successful in not feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders for awhile, only to have it all come rushing back as he saw Petrovich’s face in his mind’s eye.
Because Petrovich was possibly under Soviet surveillance, it was decreed that they could only meet in relatively public spaces and not in private meetings within the safe confines of the MI6 Building, which Petrovich could be tracked to. To complicate matters even further, it was not safe for Merlin to be seen associating with the son of the director of SIS. Therefore, they could never actually talk face in public and instead had to deal with sitting back to back on park benches or in train stations or open marketplaces, hoping their voices carried just enough for the other to hear, but not enough for them to be overheard and reported for suspicious behaviour, or else huddled together in a locked men’s room with the water running nosily behind them. Arthur felt like an idiot trying to have a conversation with a man facing away from him, but he sucked it up. He knew he’d have to get used to it.
Their first meeting as case officer and asset went something like this.
Arthur arrived near the pond at Hyde Park at 14:15 and sat with that morning’s edition of The Times open, pretending to read about the new so-called “Mersey Sound” music coming down from the North that all kids were going crazy over these days. (He’d have to keep this in mind when looking for presents for his younger cousins when Christmastime rolled around.) Petrovich came strolling past him at 14:23 on the dot with a copy of an Ian Flemming novel under his arm. He circumnavigated the bench and sat directly behind Arthur. A few minutes later, Arthur heard his crisp English accent quietly ask, “Excuse me, do you know who won the cricket match last night?”
“Middlesex,” Arthur replied, affirming his identity and nodding despite the fact that the boy couldn’t see him.
“It’s good to see you again, Agent Pendragon.” the boy responded, obviously pleased with Arthur’s answer.
“It’s good to see you again, Agent Petrovich,” Arthur lied.
“Oh—God—call me Merlin!” He sounded genuinely surprised that Arthur would call him by his Russian surname; he’d obviously been under long enough that the name his mother had given him sounded foreign to his ears.
“Okay,” Arthur tried, “Merlin.” The name sounded strange on his tongue, Arthur had grown up in an environment defined by formality and this was a bit too familiar for his liking, but he figured he might as well just go with it. Then, trying to get off that awkward subject and break the ice, “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a Flemming fan, Merlin.”
“Didn’t you know,” Merlin shot back, a hint of humour in his voice that Arthur had never heard before, “James Bond is how the Kremlin taught us about the British Secret Service in our training.”
Arthur didn’t laugh, but it was a near thing; he could feel the awkwardness slipping away as with warmth in Petrovich’s—no, Merlin’s—voice washed over him. It was weird but nice to be joking around about a fictional agent from an annoyingly popular series of books and movies with this kid he barely knew.
Then Arthur could hear him shifting on the bench behind him and he realized the boy probably felt just as awkward as he did. “Anyway,” Merlin said, sounding a bit uncomfortable for the first time since Arthur had met him, and his voice had lost the humour, “I guess we’re supposed to talk about spy stuff now, huh?”
“Yes,” Arthur said.
“Alright, so, here’s the deal.” Merlin continued, “my superiors in Moscow are sending me to Berlin next week. It’s a retrieval operation from the US Mission Berlin.”
That was odd. “I thought you were stationed more or less permanently in London,” Arthur remembered out loud, “why are they sending you?”
“I have a fabricated British visa—one of the perks of being undercover—so I can get into the western city much more easily than an agent coming from the Soviet Union ever could.”
Arthur found that he felt more comfortable now that they were back on familiar, professional ground. Spy stuff, he could do that. This is what Arthur had been raised to do, bred to do, even. In this he could set aside all the baggage and stress that came along with this new assignment and concentrate on being at a rendezvous with a contact. He turned Merlin’s words over in his head—if the KGB wanted something from the United States' military and political headquarters in West Berlin this week, there could only be one reason. “This is about Kennedy, isn’t it?” he said.
“Of course it’s about Kennedy,” Merlin scoffed. “The president of the United States is going to be giving a speech to the people of Berlin mere miles from Soviet territory, you think they’re just going to sit around and let that go by?”
Arthur shook his head, forgetting that the man behind him wouldn’t be able to see. “Yeah, we’ve been speculating about that ourselves actually. The deputy chief was going to send Agent du Lac, I believe.”
“The deputy chief?” Merlin repeated, incredulous, like he couldn't believe Uther's son would refer to him as that, “why don’t you just suggest to your father that he send you instead? You can keep an eye on me. Don’t pretend you don’t want to, Agent Pendragon.” A lesser man than Arthur would have shivered at the sudden coldness in Merlin’s voice and Arthur cringed, suddenly feeling as though the all of Western society’s prejudice was settled on his own shoulders.
There was a pause before Arthur said anything. Finally, he simply said, “If I get to call you Merlin, Agent Petrovich, you get to call me Arthur.”
“Well, Arthur,” Merlin said, his voice now sounding slightly pleased while still maintaining a cold edge, and how did he do that? “I think we’re done here. If you need to reach me, I work at the used bookshop in Covenant Garden and you can get a message to me there.” Arthur felt his weight lift off the bench and wondered momentarily why this boy, who had been joking with him—about Ian Flemming of all things—just a few minutes before, had suddenly become so cold toward him. Where had Arthur gone wrong?
Arthur was about to chalk it up to the strange, strange mind of a Russian—and the fact that Arthur was thinking that, it occurred to him, was probably the problem—when Merlin came around the bench again, still clutching that damn Bond novel (which, Arthur had to consciously refrain himself from rolling his eyes upon discovering, was From Russia With Love) and flashed Arthur one of the most blinding smiles Arthur had ever seen. And Arthur almost couldn’t help but quirk his own lips in return.
As soon as Arthur got back to his office, he rang up Nimueh on her office phone. Viviane Nimueh was a middleman (though she would look you straight in the face and remind you that she wasn't a man, thank you very much, if you called her that to her face) between Arthur and Uther. Arthur had to report to her for all of his orders, which she got from his father. Arthur sometimes half heartedly wondered why he couldn't just get his orders directly from his father since he was, after all, his father, but the always quickly dismissed that and reminded himself that it was just Service policy.
After the secretary had put him through, Arthur heard Nimueh's voice on the other end. The woman didn't exactly engender the familiarity of first name basis; no one ever called her Viviane. "Yes?" she answered expectantly.
"Nimueh, it's Arthur."
"Oh, Arthur," she drawled, "how was the Russian?" Arthur cringed inwardly at the tone of her voice. There had always been something about the woman that set his teeth on edge. Nimueh had been in Arthur's life for as long as he could remember. She and Uther had worked together in the Service almost since they'd joined. The two of them had seen each other through a world war, the advent of the atom bomb and the first decade of this conflict with Russia, all in the name of Great Britain and Her Majesty the Queen. When Uther had been promoted to deputy chief, while she was just as qualified for the post, Nimueh had simply smiled, congratulated Uther, and clapped him on the back. Still, Arthur couldn't say what it was exactly, but there just seemed to him to be something off about her, but he'd never dared bring it up with his father. Uther awarded loyalty and friendship like Nimueh had displayed towards him with fierce loyalty of his own and almost unconditional defense of character, even coming from his own son. Now an agent in his own right, Arthur had to answer to her. He'd never been quite thrilled by that.
"Petrovich was fine," he told her, "he said the Kremlin's sending him to Berlin next week."
"Because of Kennedy, I assume."
"Yeah, because of Kennedy." Arthur paused, wishing he could avoid what came next but knowing he couldn’t. "Look," he forced himself to say, "he's requested that I go as well."
There was a pause on the other end. Arthur had known she wouldn't like that idea. Nimueh had been the one to assign Lancelot to that task and she didn't like to have her orders overridden. But a request from an agent who was implicit to the mission was hard to ignore and she couldn't even argue that Merlin was just a Russian, he was considered a British agent now and was to be awarded the same amount of respect anyone else would be. Finally, Nimueh spoke up again. "Agent du Lac has already been given that assignment," she said bracingly, like Arthur didn't already know it.
"I know," Arthur answered, patiently, although his annoyance level was rising, "but the man asked for me. Not Lancelot. And it's not like he's got some special skill set I haven't. I think Petrovich being sent over there puts this squarely in my operation folder."
“You’re a case officer, Arthur,” Nimueh reminded him, again unnecessarily. “You haven’t been on a field mission since you took your agent exam.”
It was true. Arthur had spent most of his working life behind a desk, coordinating missions other people went on. In truth, Arthur was bored out of his mind with it most of the time, and the prospect of having the opportunity to go out in the field was an exciting change of pace. Still, he wasn’t about to let on to Nimueh about that. So instead he simply said, “With all due respect, ma’am, I seem to remember passing that exam with flying colors.”
“That was four years ago.”
Arthur couldn’t help but roll his eyes and was thankful that Nimueh couldn’t see; she always had to make everything so difficult. Merlin was his responsibility, dammit. “Look,” he started bracingly, “Petrovich is my man. And he’s new to the Service, I think it would be wise if he had his case officer’s supervision. If this is his mission, so it should be mine too. I’ll even do a few field simulations if it makes you feel better, but I am going to Berlin.”
NOTE: Thank you to everyone who left feedback on the first part! I've been working on this story for a long time and I've put a lot into it, so it was very nice to see people enjoying it. I hope I can continue to deliver. As of right now I have about 16,000 words written and I'm steadily working on more; the plan is for me to stay well ahead of the posting and to get you guys an update fairly consistently every few days, so you can expect Part 3 up sometime Sunday.
next part.