Kill Me/Kiss Me- An Alex Rider Fanfic

Running the Redline

Mrs Jones placed her Versace handbag on her desk with a sharp thwack; she was growing impatient with the lack of news over Swallowtail. Her juniors had been working non-stop for days now and each of them seemed to be withering away with every hour spent in front of their computer. Mrs Jones was no exception; her nails were beginning to discolour as the long nights had led her to take up a bad habit. No longer could the act of sucking on a sweet suffice; she often escaped from meetings to have a cigarette in the quiet confines of the car park. The pressure was beginning to break the usually pristine and resilient woman. She had been in this line of work for a long time, she had seen all there was to see, but Mrs Jones was beginning to develop wrinkles around her eyes from frowning and no amount of La Prairie was going to fix them. Blunt was growing impatient. He hounded her day and night for some form of progress, for any sign of what Swallowtail was up to, but...nothing.

As the woman took her car keys from her handbag, she glanced at her filing cabinet beside her desk. The last file she had put away was Hera's. That girl, Mrs Jones frowned with frustration; she would be the end of all of them. Things had become stagnant, putrified, in Alex's Rider's absence, and Hera had taken a massive knock because of it. Mrs Jones never usually felt responsible for anything; she did her job for her country and that was that. But, she mused as she hitched her handbag up to hang on her arm, she could not help but realise that she was responsible for Hera's loss. The girl had killed her father and pushed away the only man she was ever close to. All because of her work with MI6. Mrs Jones had capitalised on that; took a lone warrior and crafted her into something deadly. Her gaze dropped from the filing cabinet as she wondered about Hera; had she ever had a normal life? Did she ever go and see a movie? Of course, Mrs Jones had never wondered such trivial things before but, this late in the game, she could not help but think about it.

She turned to her office door and pushed it open. The lights on this floor glared with full brightness down on the team who were working the graveyard shift. There was no such thing as a 'graveyard shift', in this business, but due to the lack of leads, the team had slowly adopted the phrase; every shift with this department was turning into a graveyard shift.

"Mrs Jones!" The woman looked up suddenly, her eyes trying to hide any trace of tiredness, as a junior approached her.

"Yes, Bennett?" She said, trying her hardest to stifle a yawn.

"There's been no activity in Alex Rider's house for seven hours now." He said in earnest, but his supervisor looked at him blankly. Now they were actually reporting the fact that there was no news?

"What exactly-"

"St Claire and Harris entered the house over seven and a half hours ago," Bennett interrupted, smoothing his hair away from his face in an irritated manner before handing Mrs Jones a sheaf of papers. "In the last seven hours there has been no movement, no sound vibrations, no lights turned on..." The woman glanced down at the papers in front of her: they were graphs showing the sound vibrations throughout the house, the times that lights were switched on and, it did seem odd from 7PM on a Saturday night to 2AM the next morning, that there should be no activity in a house where four people were supposed to be.

"Is it a glitch in the system?" She asked, putting her bag down on a nearby desk and leafing through the reports in front of her.

"That's what we assumed so we brought Smithers up to check his gadgets were doing their job." Bennett moved away and Mrs Jones followed him to the big screen in the middle of the wall on the other side of the room. On the screen was projected images of each room in Alex Rider's house, put there without his consent, each with a graph showing a sound recording. "Throughout the house there are hidden cameras, sound recorders, infrared detectors, thermal radiation-"