salute [h.s]

chapter 31 - airport antics & grisly gunfights

"I'm sorry."

Harry's head jerked up, his attention shifting from his transmitter over to Piper. There was a confused frown on his face and it took him a second to put together what she'd said. "What do you mean, I'm sorry? For what?"

"This was all my fault," she mumbled, fidgeting her fingers in her lap so she had somewhere to look other than at Harry. Because she knew what she would see on his face — she'd see pity. She didn't think she could handle that right now.

"It's not your fault."

"'Course it is."

She jumped when Harry's hand landed firmly on her shoulder, forcing her to turn in her seat. His hands cupped her cheeks and he forced her to look at him. His green eyes were blazing as they caught hers. "Listen to me, Piper. This was not your fault."

"But it was," she countered. "I was supposed to be watching Petrucelli and when he left I just sat there like an idiot and I wasn't watching the table and if I had maybe I would have seen the person who took the documents —"

"That's a lot of ifs and maybes," Harry cut in, a pointed tone to his voice. "And usually that means that something is pretty much out of your control. This wasn't on you, Piper. Petrucelli didn't follow the protocol that you overheard so there was no way of either of us anticipating this."

"Maybe I heard wrong at lunch. Maybe he made a whole bunch of different arrangements and I just wrote them all wrong and my Italian was shit and I fucked this whole thing up."

"Piper, I don't want to hear you say that again," he said sternly. "You didn't do this. This wasn't your fault. And blaming yourself is only going to drag you down. Now, we've got a whole lot of work ahead of us tonight and we need to be at our best. So stop thinking about this and get your head in the game."

He didn't give her a chance to say anything else, just let her go and sat back in his seat. His attention was immediately back on his transmitter and Piper knew that his was the last word.

The problem was that his advice to stop thinking about it was impossible for her to follow. He should have known better than that. She was a master at getting lost in her thoughts, at rehashing minute details of everything, and her brain didn't miss a thing. There was no way she could shut that down and try to focus on what was ahead.

She spent the rest of the taxi ride replaying over and over every single thing that she'd done wrong.

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While it was nowhere near as large as Heathrow, the airport outside of Trieste was just as busy as Heathrow would have been. It was late on a Sunday night and the last flights across the continent were leaving over the next couple of hours so there were plenty of people milling about, heading home from weekend getaways.

Piper could tell that Harry was on edge the moment he caught sight of the crowds as they walked through the doors. It was going to make tracking the postman down a lot more difficult than they'd anticipated. The urgency of their task was clear in the set of Harry's shoulders. Gone was the easy going man she'd had dinner with less than an hour before, replaced with the controlled, collected spy who had his work cut out for him. There were no gentle touches, no hand holding or palms pressed against the small of her back — instead, Harry inclined his head toward the security desks and then took off, leaving Piper to follow.

She stood to the side as Harry flashed his MI6 ID and then explained the situation to head of security. She wasn't sure of what to do having never done any of this before so all she could do was keep out of the way as Harry interfaced with security and then spoke on the phone with someone from AISI — the Italian domestic intelligence service. When security guided them through the security checkpoint, Piper just followed along, having to jog to keep up with the group of men walking briskly through the airport toward the gates.