salute ➳ 〚h.s.〛 〚a.u.〛

chapter 8 - monitoring moscow & comforting cuddles

Being sick was the pits.

And also, Piper was weak. She was practically comatose with fatigue, she was hungry beyond belief, and she was in a lot of pain. And she was weak. She needed a distraction to get her through the last two hours before her shift was done and Netflix wasn't cutting it. It didn't help that the guy that worked next to her, Martin, kept leaning over to mutter spoilers to the episodes of Doctor Who that she was watching, despite the fact that she had told him she had already seen them multiple times before.

Her fingers had tapped across the screen, opening the MI6 operations program without her really realizing she had done it. She had already been halfway through typing the number to Harry's transmitter into the tracker before she realized just where she was and that it would be a terrible idea. She flipped back to Netflix instantly, pressing play halfway through A Good Man Goes to War.

"You know, Melody Pond turns out to be River Song."

"I already fucking know, Martin!" Piper snapped over her shoulder before shutting Netflix down altogether. She could not deal with Martin and his stupid comments. Instead, she slid on her headset, opening up The Rapture playlist on Spotify loud enough that Martin and his comments were completely washed out.

She couldn't help herself, after turning off her ultimate distraction source, from opening up the operations program once more. She was about to enter in Harry's code when she realized that he probably wasn't on a sanctioned mission. Best not to have it stored on MI6 servers. She took a moment to open up her ghost program that she had been coding that erased all of her recorded data the second it was collected, and then she went to town.

Harry's code brought up his location on the program within seconds. The little blue dot that identified him was coming from the far side of Revolution Square. Already, Piper was shaking her head, wondering who the fuck had chosen that for a meeting spot. It was too open, too many tourists, not enough sight points for whoever was following Harry's movement on CCTV, and it was way too close to the Kremlin.

It took a bit of digging but Piper, using that handy dandy number Harry had given her, had accessed a backdoor into the computer being used on their end to supervise the mission. Whoever Harry was using as an analyst was shit at it. She had waltzed right in under his or her nose and had pulled up the files without a password or anything. Lazy and sloppy.

She reviewed the files, reading over them quickly. Harry was meeting with a double agent that had been working in the Kremlin for well over ten years. He was a vetted informant and Harry had met with him before. That would take out some of the risk, thankfully. They were apparently exchanging military deployment plans against Ukraine. It was a really delicate situation.

Piper couldn't help herself. She switched off her music and opened up the audio feed between Harry's transmitter and the analyst. The moment it connected, she heard Harry's deep voice over the ambient noise around him. " – package is secure. Pasternak has cleared the square."

Piper smiled to herself a little at the Russian agent's codename. She wondered if it had been inspired by Boris Pasternak, who wrote Doctor Zhivago, one of the books Piper had read with her father ages ago.

"The square appears to be clear of any hostiles," a nasally voice said back. Piper grimaced on Harry's behalf, wondering how he had been working with this guy. She would have declared the voice unbearable after five minutes. "I haven't gotten word back from the extraction team," he continued, making Piper frown. "No use waiting though so you can make your way to the hotel."

Piper was already flicking through the files, reading the details of the extraction plan. A man was meant to be meeting Harry in the hotel lobby, dressed as a valet. Harry was supposed to recite a security script about a scratched door and demand that the valet come and examine it with him. They were to go down to the garage below the hotel which would be waiting to take Harry to the airport outside of the city.