Broken | Lucas North - Spooks/MI5 Story [Featured]

Chapter 30

Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of Kudos and BBC. The original characters and plot are the property of the author of this story. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any previously copyrighted material. No copyright infringement is intended.

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The young woman watching Alexa as the train started didn’t get this far in the game without using everything that nature gave her.  She’d always known that she was smart, though everyone who saw her could hardly get past the beautiful face long enough to find out that she knew more than she pretended not to. 

It paid to play dumb in a game that was run by people in positions of power and as far as she could tell, she was still in the game.  The man who had sent her on a one-way ticket to London for a chance of a new life, however, was dead.  

He’d been shot by Jools Siviter’s men two nights earlier and the woman knew that the final phase of the game had begun.  This time, there was no turning back and as she glanced at the man sitting in the same train car with Alexa, pretending to read a paperback, she also knew that he, and the man in the next car, belonged to Jools as well.

There had been too many distractions, she thought.  Ever since her arrival in London two years earlier, with her first stop at a club in Tottenham, in North London, it had been a struggle to maintain her focus - the real reason for her being here - Alexa George.

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“I will give you a new life in England, if you want,” the older man said to her one night, when she’d been sent as a “present” to cheer him up by the man called Arkady Kachimov, a senior FSB operative.  

There was no sex or dancing on this night.  The man wanted none of that.  He had only wanted to talk.

“Are you familiar with Hamlet?” Nathaniel George asked her that first night as she sat down on the sofa.  “‘Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.’”

She nodded, suspicious at first.  She’d had her share of madmen in her line of work and it was always the ones who started out the the nicest who ended up being of the worst kind.  But there was a kindness to this man, a sadness even.

“‘That I essentially am not in madness, but mad in craft,’” the old man continued, his eyes looking out at the darkness outside the window.  He lived in an expensive apartment, but one that the woman knew was paid for by FSB.  This man was under heavy guard and she was surprised that there was no one else in the room with them.  But maybe the whole place was bugged, she thought.  

Then there would be no need for a guard.

Nathaniel rose from the sofa and turned on the stereo, the strains of classical music that she could not identify filling the room.  He beckoned for her to sit next to him and she did.

“Do you know what those words mean?” He asked her.  “What I just said?”

She shook her head.  She was familiar with Shakespeare and knew what the lines meant, but in what context, she only wanted to hear it from him first.  She knew him as Sergei Fenix.  That was the name that Arkady had given her.

“It means that sometimes someone’s madness isn’t pure madness at all, but a calculated move to make people see one way and not the other.”

“Their madness is an act then?” 

Nathaniel nodded.  “Precisely.”  His Russian was perfect, his English accent barely recognizable.  “Do you think I am mad?”