“Hello, Arthur.” Felicity looks up distractedly from her computer monitor. She pushes her reading glasses up her nose, then pulls them off with a sigh. She pinches the bridge of her nose.
“Is now not a good time?” God I hope it is one.
“No worse than any other.”
I smile sympathetically and take a seat. She’s set up her office the way it was in Oxford. Filing cabinets along one wall, plants along the shelves on another, daylight bulbs clipped in place. It’s a reassuringly familiar look.
“This is nice.” I gesture around. I’m itching to get to the point here, but I feel I need to give Felicity time to get into a receptive mood.
She tries to force a smile and ends up grimacing. “It’s hard to appreciate it when I’m reviewing Coleman’s proposed cost-cutting measures.”
“Ah.” I try to think of something more meaningful to say but I’m finding it hard to make small talk. So I just cut to the chase. “I’ve done some digging,” I say.
Felicity shifts her weight, perhaps sits up a little straighter. “Something I can bring to George?”
The way she says his name puts my teeth on edge, almost deferential, but Felicity made it clear—that’s the nature of the game now.
“I think so,” I say. Except I don’t just think so, I know so. I have my smoking gun.
“Tell me,” she says.
So I tell her. I describe my journey to the storage room, my meeting with the cleanup guy, my questions. And then, in excruciating detail, I go over his answers. By the end, I’m tapping my hand against my thigh, emphasizing each point.
“Residual,” tap, “temporal,” tap, “and spatial disturbances.” Tap. “Everywhere he looks.” Tap. “He can list them.” Double tap. I’m grinning like a child.
Felicity is not. “Arthur,” she says, slowly, carefully, “how much do you trust Ogden?”
I’m not too carried away to notice something is clearly off. “Who?” I ask.
Felicity nods, as if this was expected. “Our cleanup man in the subbasement. His name is Ogden Beauvielle. You didn’t know that, did you?”
I clap a hand to my head. “Oh, that’s it. I’d forgotten. But I don’t see how that’s important.”
Felicity contemplates a coffee mug. “You don’t know much about him.”
I shake my head. My stomach is sinking faster than a holed battleship.
“But you trust him as a source? Nothing seemed odd about him to you?”
Felicity reminds me of defense lawyers I’ve seen pick apart my cases in court. Go after the validity of the witness first.
“He had no reason to lie to me,” I counter, dodging Felicity’s precise question.
“I’ll take that as a yes then,” Felicity replies, her bullshitometer as effective as ever.
“He didn’t lie to me.” I try to say it calmly but I’m getting belligerent. And I really should play nice, but I’m getting sick of this. How many times can my evidence be ruled too thin? “He’s reporting exactly what he saw.”
Felicity spreads her hands palms down on the table, stares at them for just a moment before looking up at me. “I’m just asking you to see this from Coleman’s perspective. How will he respond to this?”
And it’s right there. Right in front of her. It’s plain as goddamn day. The smoking gun. All she has to do is pick it up and show it to the world.
Except…
She doesn’t believe me.
I mean… I’ve known that. Always known that, I suppose. But it’s not an easy thing to admit. And she’s trying to pretend she has an open mind, and I’ve been playing along, but she doesn’t. And… God… I should leave well alone, but I just feel fucking sick right now. It doesn’t get more obvious than this. They’re throwing the whole world away.
“Why is it so hard for you,” I say, “to imagine that I might be right on this one? Why do you have such a problem with it when other people can see it plain as day?”
Shaw cocks her head. “Other people? What other people?”
Oh shit. My heart doesn’t so much sink as it goes through the floor, heading for Winston’s subterranean branches. Oh shit and balls. Oh, I should not have said that. That was really—
“You mean, Devon?”
I try to keep the relief off my face, out of the heaviness of my breath.
“I mean,” Felicity carries on, “she’s nice enough, but talk about wet behind the—”
And then she stops.
And apparently I didn’t keep the relief off my face.
“No,” she says, and she shakes her head. “Not Devon.” Her brow furrows. “Who did you tell, Arthur? Who did you talk to about this?”
I close my eyes. And I am such a shitty liar. I have no idea how to get out of this. And I was so not prepared to fuck up this bad.
And then I don’t have to lie, because Felicity is smarter than that.
“Oh no,” she says. “Oh no, Arthur. Not them. Not the Weekenders.”
Clyde probably knows a spell about having the ground swallow you up. I should ask him about that.
“Fuck!” The curse explodes out of Felicity. She seems rocked by the force of it, flinging herself back in her chair, her arms going up. I take a step back. “Fuck!” she shouts it again. It seems so foreign coming from her, from this neat little woman, so foreign in this neat little room. She stands up, kicking her chair back. It slams off a filing cabinet and careens into a wall.
“Was I not fucking clear, Arthur? Was I not explicit enough for you?”
“You know—” I start, but Felicity has no time for my answers.
“You’re out, you know that, right?” She spins, seems constrained by the enormity of her rage. This room is hardly big enough to hold it. “Coleman will have every inch of your arse for this. He’ll have mine too. We’re fucked. We’re both fucked. Because of you.” She holds her head in her hands, as if trying to contain the thoughts, as if to hold everything together.
And it was bloody her that put me in this position. She has to see that. I step toward her. Try to get her to see one last time.
Her palm whips out. It crashes into my sternum and I stagger backwards, trip, sit down hard.
“Don’t you fucking touch me,” Felicity says to me. “Don’t you fucking dare.”
And… Jesus. That’s what it comes down to? That’s how this all ends? Me sitting on my arse in the remnants of my career and my relationship, staring at the end of everything.
And, God, is it really my fault? What exactly have I done wrong here? I’m the only one in MI37 who sees this threat for what it is. I’m the only one doing the right thing.
“What the fuck?” I’m yelling suddenly. Bug-eyed with anger, sitting on my arse. “Are you really so fucking blind?” I pick myself up. “I’m trying to do the right thing. I’m trying to save the bloody world. But Coleman, and Clyde, and, goddamn it, you, Felicity, you keep standing in my fucking way. You keep making mistakes and slapping me down when I try to fix them.”
“This? This is fixing a mistake?” Her laugh is bitter as coffee laced with lemon juice. “God, I’d love to see it when you really screw up.”
I close my eyes. She’s not just capitulating to Coleman, her psychology has been colonized by him. She’s as bad as him. “You’re handing the Russians the Chronometer,” I say. “When you cut the power to London, you’re serving it to them on a fucking platter. You!”
Felicity seizes her head again. Her mouth is stretched in the rictus of a smile on a face that’s been robbed of mirth. “And whose theory is that, Arthur?” she asks. “The Weekenders’? Whose life are you looking to end, Arthur? Whose do you want on your conscience? Clyde’s? Tabitha’s? Devon’s? Mine?”
And God, it’s as plain as goddamn day and she cannot see. She will not see.
“Do you want six fucking billion lives on yours?” I step in closer. Keeping just out of striking range.
I’m the only one here trying to fix this. It’s suddenly clear. MI37 is done. It’s finished and useless. Coleman has broken it irreparably. Whatever I do here, it will be too late.
“No, Arthur,” Felicity says. “I don’t want any lives on my conscience.” Her voice changes, is calm—an ice field crystallizing. “That’s why I’ll have your gun and your badge.”
And God, it’s so fucking cliché. It’s so the absurd echo of every action movie I’ve ever seen. It’s like Felicity and I are playing at cops and robbers. And what can I do? What else can I do, but what Kurt Russell would do?
I pull my badge from my pocket.
“Agent Arthur Wallace,” Felicity’s voice is shaking with anger. “You are hereby suspended—”
I fling the badge at her, hurl it in the face of her bullshit. “You know what?” I say. “I fucking quit.”