‘I need everyone on task. Beth, search the street cameras near the safe house. Elsa, I want you manning the phone in case Michael calls. He left his phone at the house, and ditched the burner I gave him a while back so there’s no way of tracing him by that means. I just hope he hasn’t done anything foolish,’ Ray says.
‘What will you be doing?’ asks Elsa.
Beth gives Elsa a sharp look, surprised that she feels she can question Ray, but Ray doesn’t get annoyed with her despite the fact that he’s in such a bad mood.
‘I have a meeting with Erik Steward,’ Ray says. ‘I’m going to find out how he knew where Mia and Ben had been relocated.’
Beth opens her access portals as Ray leaves for his meeting and begins to look at the footage around Michael’s safe house. A place that now can’t be used again because too many people know where it is.
‘Do you think Steward is involved?’ asks Elsa.
Beth shrugs, she’s never seen Ray so pissed off. He’d told her about the black van, and it appears the vehicle was missing from storage which implies that someone in MI6 is playing a double game. That same person may well be the one who bugged Archive’s offices. The thought of having a spy among them doesn’t please Beth anymore than it does Ray. She’d rather trust her colleagues but now they are all looking at each other and wondering who deceived them.
As the newbie in the group, Elsa is looking particularly suspicious to Beth too. For this reason, and until she’s proven to be innocent, Beth is reluctant to confide anything Ray has told her.
Beth is feeling uneasy about a lot of people right now. She frowns as she scans the images on the camera footage as she tries not to think about Elliot. He was at her house more than his own apartment these days and they’d even begun to talk about making this a permanent move when Elliot’s tenancy agreement is up for renewal.
‘It seems insane to have two homes, when clearly we are getting on so well together,’ Elliot had said.
Beth agreed it was practical. Though now she wonders what her mother will say about her moving someone into her home, so soon after her divorce.
Recently, she’d got back into a routine of seeing her boys again and they were staying overnight on occasion. With the security detail on hand, and no further attempts made to take her, Beth was starting to feel much safer again. And she missed the boys. On those nights, she told Elliot he can’t come over, it gave her time to think and she wasn’t sure the timing was right for them to meet her new boyfriend just yet. Especially with all of the upheaval of going to live permanently with their dad, Callum.
Beth finds herself zoning out from the camera footage and so she pauses it, while her mind wanders. She’s worried about Michael, and suspects that he has taken off with Neva. Any idiot could see that he was completely gone on the girl. No one gets that haunted look in their eyes unless betrayed and truly hurt by someone they care about. He’d been used. Beth understands it and she wonders now if Elliot is using her in the same way too.
There are just too many moments that Beth finds herself questioning. Like last night after she and Elliot made love. Beth had feigned sleep and Elliot got up and went downstairs. She’d heard his voice, muted but still drifting upstairs as he spoke to someone. Whoever it was, the receiver of his late-night calls was expecting him to ring.
As she’d done previously, Beth crept to the top of the stairs and tried to listen. But Elliot’s voice was too soft for her make out more than a few words. The impression she got was that Elliot was reporting to someone. And that person might well be at the Network. Or maybe he was working for MI6 on the side, reporting to Steward what Archive were doing. That would fit in with Ray’s suspicions that Steward was behind the bugging of their offices and that there was a mole, not in Archive, but in MI6.
But Elliot isn’t the only one Beth has suspicions about.
Leon Tchaikovsky’s sudden ‘promotion’ into MI6 had made her suspicious. Even though she and Mike hadn’t discussed it, they both knew Leon was a bit of a slacker. He always left her and Mike to do the work, and sometimes had taken credit for Beth’s successes, though he’d never tried that with Michael. Beth often thought that Ray must have been aware that Leon was cruising in the job. Sometimes heads of departments got together and discussed colleagues: the office grapevine often came up with gossip of that sort. Affairs in house, mis-usage of MI5 and MI6 resources. Steward had to have known that Leon was deadweight in Archive. It’s why Beth knew that Leon hadn’t earned any such promotion with his track record. Steward owed no loyalty to Leon, not unless he’d done him a huge favour. So why give him a job?
Now she thought about it, Leon had been acting weird before his departure. When he left, Beth had put it down to the fact that he had been schmoozing with Steward and knew he was being promoted. But maybe he’d been working for Steward all along?
Even so, Beth can’t make random accusations. She needs to find out more before she accuses anyone of anything, especially Leon.
Right now, with the paranoia in the Archive ramped right up, anyone could be the traitor. And sometimes it is those closest to you that you have to watch.
Now, Beth explores her feelings for Elliot as she sits and stares at her computer screen. She loves him, but she’ll give him up in a heartbeat if she discovers he is a spy. Damn. She will even shoot him. But she hopes her suspicions are nothing more than her fears of commitment.
Beth tries to reconcile her thoughts in the light of day. What does she really have to worry about with Elliot? She considers again what she’d heard him saying on those few occasions he’d made late night calls. He was talking about the murder case. He hadn’t said anything about Archive that she’d heard. Or anything that could really be seen as illegal, if she was honest. But why did his behaviour make her wary?
He could be getting advice on the case from another colleague, she reasons. Maybe to back up his own theories. There are so many excuses she can make to justify his behaviour… Except there aren’t really. Not when it comes down to it. Beth knows that Elliot isn’t getting advice from another expert. If he was, he’d call them during the daytime.
No matter how much benefit of the doubt she gives him, there’s only two real questions that she can’t answer. Why are the calls always at night? Why are they always when he believes Beth is asleep and can’t hear him?
Even if she can convince herself that Elliot is just working late, then why hide it from her? It’s conspicuous. And Beth, as a Security Agent, is trained to observe atypical behaviour. It all comes down to getting proof of wrongdoing. And she doesn’t have any. All she has is this gut feeling that something is wrong. And Beth has always been big on fact and not on suspicion.
Beth restarts the camera footage and forces herself to concentrate on the images on the screen. She manages this for a few moments before the idea of how to put her mind at rest comes into her head. I can clone his phone, she thinks.
She catches herself. To do this without the proper warrant would be illegal. But did whoever had been spying on them even consider the legality of their position?
I’m a spy, she thinks. I’m trusted when there’s judicious doubt. And this is reasonable, isn’t it? Beth goes through the pros and cons of doing something like this. MI5, under other circumstances, would probably investigate and spy on any new boyfriend she has. Elliot’s position in MI5 almost negates this. Unless there is a reason to suspect him of something. And Beth can truly say there is.
It might prove I’m imagining things and I can put all these thoughts away, she thinks, trying to justify it.
After concluding this is the way to go on a professional and personal level, Beth leaves Elsa in the office and goes downstairs to Equipment Acquisitions. She knows what she needs and she rehearses her lie all the way down in the lift.
When she returns to the office, she has an innocuous-looking device that resembles a pen drive in her pocket and a spare iPhone, the same model as Elliot’s.
If there’s nothing unusual on Elliot’s phone, Beth will return the erased cloning device and the phone back to Acquisitions. But if there is something wrong, she’ll own up to her use of MI5 equipment to Ray and take the consequences. If Elliot is their mole, Ray will only praise her for her initiative anyway.
‘You okay?’ asks Elsa, studying her from her desk on the other side of the room.
‘Yes,’ Beth says. ‘Needed a bit of fresh air. Watching this footage does your head in.’
‘Right,’ says Elsa.
With her personal situation organized, Beth goes back to the footage with better concentration. Almost immediately she sees Michael coming out onto the street that runs parallel with the one from the safe house. She tracks him to the end of the road. Then she sees a pale-blue Ford Focus pull up next to him.
Beth tries to zoom in on the driver but the camera angle is wrong and the picture is too grainy.
She takes some snaps of the car. Picks up the registration and puts it in her computer to search for ownership on DVLA records. The search soon reveals the car was stolen and then recovered near Euston station that morning. So, no leads through the owner.
‘Elsa? Can you help me please?’ she says.
‘What do you need?’ Elsa asks.
‘Check out the footage around Euston station around 9:30am this morning. See if you can spot Michael and find out if he’s alone.’
Elsa looks at Beth for a long moment and then nods. She turns to her computer and logs on to the camera systems. She scoots down the alphabetical list until she finds Euston station. Then she flicks through various cameras and views looking for the time she wants.
Though Elsa doesn’t know she’s doing this, at the same time, Beth is watching Elsa’s movements on the system: tracking her all the way through the camera footage. It’s a test to see what she does and how she does it. And if she admits seeing Michael too.
‘I found him,’ Elsa says after ten minutes or so. ‘He’s not alone.’
Beth drops her computer into standby mode and goes over to Elsa’s desk to pretend she’s seeing the footage for the first time. Michael is talking to someone. He’s facing the camera, but the person with him is deliberately keeping their face hidden.
‘It’s a woman,’ Beth says. ‘But I can’t tell who she is.’
‘I can,’ says Elsa. ‘It’s Neva.’
Beth looks at Elsa. ‘How do you know?’
‘I met her. That day at the Tower Bridge Hotel. She talked to me for a while – right before Granger accused her of being Angie. I noticed we were the same height. I’m tall for a girl so I don’t meet many women my size.’
‘Oh yes!’ says Beth. ‘I hadn’t thought of it. And I didn’t realize you were there as well.’
‘She’s back in London…’ Elsa says.
‘Yes. And she came for Michael. I have to wonder if they’ve continued to stay in touch, even though he’d said they hadn’t,’ Beth says, then she bites her lip.
‘Maybe he’s our spy?’ Elsa says.
Beth stares at the screen but doesn’t answer. Could Michael be the one who’d been spying on them, then ‘miraculously’ found the bugs? It certainly removed all suspicion from him and cast doubt on everyone else when he did.
Beth feels the weight of the phone and cloning device in her pocket. It’s never been easy working for MI5.
She returns to her desk and puts her screen back on.
Elsa is zooming in on Neva and taking screen shots of her at different angles. She doesn’t take any of Michael except for a distance shot of him with Neva. Beth glances at her and she sees the intensity with which Elsa watches the woman.
‘They are into each other,’ Elsa mouths.
Her expression changes but it’s brief because she looks up and sees Beth watching her. Afterwards, Beth is sure she imagined the whole thing. But she does think, just for a second, Elsa looked as though she wanted to kill. Maybe she resents traitors just as much as Beth does?