The Littlest Spy

3. Two Rules

"You're resigning?" Isadora managed to get the words out at last. A part of her was screaming inside, wanting to ask more questions, but just about everything she could have thought of to say would have been highly inappropriate. Brown had a husband? She'd had no idea. She thought that she knew him, but that revelation shattered the image in her mind. It was like there had been a part of himself that he always kept locked away; and once she started thinking about that, she was also realising that his professional demeanour had completely hidden any hint of a life outside work. She didn't know what music he liked, or what sports he followed; let alone his family. She knew that he could talk confidently about just about any topic, but that was pretty much a job requirement for an Operative. He needed to be at home around the water cooler when infiltrating any stratum of society; and there was no hint there about which topics were of interest to him personally. "What happened?"

"Davy called in for me," he said, looking down at his hands as he spoke. "Said he had a bad feeling, was worried about me. The Monitors decided to put him through; he'd had enough background checks, and they can trust me not to say anything he's not cleared for. But..."

"Did he overhear something?" Isadora guessed. She knew so little about Brown's latest mission that any guess she made would just be a stab in the dark. But she felt like she had to say something. She could feel that this decision was really hard, even for the man who was never scared of anything. And she needed to help him. A part of her still hoped that she could help him to make a different decision; but she wouldn't even know whether that was possible until she knew the truth.

"Kind of," he said, and flashed the kind of smile that is only ever used to hide pain. "We were ambushed. We were preparing for the start of the mission, and Doc thought it would be okay to put him through to me, to wish me luck. But the shooting started before we were ready. I was hit, a flesh wound really. But it was chaos, and everything went to hell. Doc called back to SO3 that I was hit, and Davy heard that. I heard his response, in that moment. For weeks afterwards, I kept playing it over and over in my head. And I knew I never wanted to scare him like that again. He's given up so much for me, and he deserves to know that I'll be coming home from work. So..."

"I'm sorry," Isadora said, eventually. "I never even thought... I guess I've never really been that close to someone. And I can see where you're coming from. But is there anyone who can do what you do? I mean... everybody knows you're one of the best. I'm worried that important jobs might start going to the wannabe James Bond types. There seems to be more and more of them, and... I guess I was hoping you'd be a positive role model for the newer Operatives, showing them what they're supposed to be." She started blushing again after that flood of words, and resisted the urge to pull her bendant out from beneath the collar of her shirt. It was special to her, a single piece of jewellery with a secret meaning, and holding it always helped to relieve stress. But it was also pretty childish, so she usually did her best to keep it out of sight when she was around anyone whose opinion she valued.

"I think I know the type you mean," Brown answered with a wry smile. "And I can think of one or two who still need ideas from the movies removing from their minds. But not as many as you might think. Certainly, amongst some of the old timers, there's a kind of hidden joke. If someone in the refectory asks how the latest job went and they don't want to reveal compartmentalised data, they'll describe it like an action movie. A lot of those stories enter into office gossip, but it really isn't how the Operatives in the question act in the field. Even my old friend and Monitor, Doc, has a reputation around the break room for sleeping with a gangster's moll on every assignment. But in reality, he sits in his room reading briefings. Everything at our classification level, every document we have access to, so that if our bandits cross over into someone else's assignment, he'll know who to get in touch with. Seriously, the guy won't step outside his hotel room once until he needs to be somewhere. And then it gets to the point where the admin staff make up their own stories to paper over the gaps if they don't know what we've been up to. Don't trust the gossip, that's one of the tips I wanted to give you."