[fic] What's Puzzling You Is The Nature Of My Game 3/?
Title: What's Puzzling You Is The Nature Of My Game, Part 3
Pairings: eventual Arthur/Merlin and background Lancelot/Gwen
Rating: PG-13 for now.
Word Count: ~4600 in this part.
Disclaimer: This version of Arthur, Merlin, et al belong to Shine and the BBC, not to me.
Summary: It's 1963, the Cold War is in full swing, and Arthur Pendragon, agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service, is about to meet the Service's newest Russian double agent: Merlin Emrys.
Author's Notes: Many thanks to latenightcuppa for beta-ing this part.
first part. previous part.
I fell into a ring of fire
I went down, down, down
and the flames went higher
and it burns, burns, burns
the ring of fire
It turned out that they didn’t put Arthur through any simulations but they sent Lancelot with him. Arthur was glad for that, actually, since despite what he’d said to Nimueh, he really wasn’t very used to being out in the field and could use someone like Lancelot who really knew what they were doing. Plus, he was always happy to have some company, and it meant that he'd have someone to complain about Merlin to, at least. The boy’s hot and cold attitude towards him in the park still stung a bit when he thought of it.
But for the most part, he and Lancelot didn't have much to say on the train. The two of them had been at the Academy together and were generally friendly with one another but didn't have much in common. As far as Arthur could tell, actually, Lancelot didn't really have much of a personality. He was very nice and very good and his loyalty and dedication to the Crown were second to none but Arthur wasn't really sure what to say to him outside of a strictly professional environment.
Needless to say, this made for slightly awkward traveling.
"So..." Arthur started, finally, "did you watch the match last night?"
"No," Lancelot answered, "I don't much like sports."
"Oh," said Arthur. He didn't bother trying to talk for the rest of the trip.
+
The Service never spent top dollar on housing arrangements for their agents, but the accommodations were never shabby either. This hotel room had windows looking over West Berlin; Arthur could see the Wall in the distance. He dropped off his bag (just a small one, he'd only be there for a few days) and sat down on the bed to go over his itinerary for the next few days. It was the early evening on Sunday and Kennedy was scheduled to speak on Wednesday afternoon. Before that, Merlin, who had flown in on a commercial flight from Heathrow using his British passport, was under orders from his Russian superiors to get into the American embassy, using fake American identification to pose as a United States citizen (apparently Merlin could adopt an American accent as well as he could an English one) and retrieve whatever it was that the Kremlin wanted him to retrieve. The Service had instructed him to bring that to Arthur at their rendezvous. From there, Arthur would send it back to London so the Service could replace it with a replica, this time with incorrect information and return it to Merlin before he was to report back on Monday. That way, the Service and their allies at the CIA would have information on what the KGB was looking for, and the KGB would be thrown off course. It wasn’t a very complicated mission as these things went, and there was very little risk as long as Merlin didn’t get himself arrested at the embassy, but Arthur found himself a little jittery anyway.
He would have liked nothing better than to take a nap for a few hours. He hadn't slept very well the night before but he couldn't sleep now; he was meant to be meeting Merlin soon.
They had arranged to meet in the Teirgarten, near to where the stadtbahn crossed the canal. West Berlin had security on the Berlin Wall just as effective as its infamous Eastern counterpart, making it almost impossible for Russian spies to get into West Berlin unless they had already made it to another non-Soviet country, like Merlin had. Because of this, it was unlikely that Merlin would be tailed and it had been deemed unnecessary for them to go to the usual lengths for keeping their meetings secret. A public park at dusk was considered privacy enough. When Arthur got there, Merlin was waiting for him, shoes off and feet dangling in the water.
"Hello," Merlin greeted when Arthur sat next to him on the grass. He didn't put his feet in the water next to Merlin’s, but he did consider it.
"Hello," Arthur returned, "what did you tell your partner?" Merlin's partner at the KGB, who also lived undercover in London, had come with him to Germany and was the one loose cannon they had to be careful of. It wouldn't do if he trailed Merlin and then reported back to his superiors at the Kremlin that the boy had turned traitor; Merlin would be locked up in the Kremlin within a week.
"Don't worry about Will," Merlin assured him, "he's out drinking German beer and trying to pick up German women."
Arthur checked his watch in surprise. "It's only seven," he said.
Merlin just shrugged. "That’s Will,” he said. He’ll be one hundred percent professional tomorrow, despite the hangover, believe me, but tonight he’s on holiday."
"Will?" Arthur asked, "That's not his real name is it?"
Merlin stared at him for a second before he responded. "You really don't have any idea what it's like to live like this, do you?" he asked, wonderingly. When Arthur just looked at him, Merlin sighed and continued, "His real name is Ioann, but he doesn't like to be called that anymore than I like being called Alexei." Arthur just kept looking at him, not sure exactly what to say. There was no chapter in the Service handbook called What To Do When The Russian Double Agent Whose Case You Handle Starts Opening Up About His Life As A KGB Spy. "It's just--weird," Merlin went on, seemingly taking Arthur's silence as some kind of encouragement, which it wasn’t, really, "I've been stationed in London for two years, that’s almost since I was made an agent. I sell books to the American tourists who come to Covent Garden. Most of them are polite, nice people. Sometimes they're rude and abrasive, but that's just tourists, you know? It has nothing to do with their nationality. Not really, anyway. It's hard to keep thinking of myself as an America hating citizen of the Soviet Union when I'm advising them on which Dickens book they should add to their collection."
Arthur could honestly say he'd never thought of it that way before. On one hand, he was glad of the look into Merlin’s psyche, it helped him understand why the boy had chosen to turn traitor. But on the other hand, Arthur barely knew this kid and wasn’t particularly comfortable with this level of emotional honesty while he was still getting used to the fact that Merlin was an honest to God Russian. He cleared his throat and changed the subject in a supremely awkward way. "Um," he started, "have they told you yet what you're supposed to retrieve from the embassy tomorrow?"
Merlin stared at him in disbelief for a moment and Arthur felt a twinge of regret for walking all over his emotional moment. He was also reminded momentarily of the coldness in the boy's voice at the end of their last conversation and wondered what exactly was going on in Merlin's head that made him such an emotional powder keg. But, Arthur supposed, if he were in Merlin's position, he'd be kind of on edge too. "Yeah," Merlin answered, "Kennedy's brought a file with him that holds confidential information about the CIA's operations regarding the Soviet Union. The kind of operations that the Agency needs to have the president sign off on. So obviously, the Soviet Union want to know what it is."
Yes, that sounded like something the Russians would very much want, Arthur agreed. But another question occurred to him. "How do you know Kennedy has it with him?" he asked.
"Oh, Arthur," Merlin chided, smiling slyly, "if you think that the KGB hasn't got anyone on the inside in America, you're very naive."
He had a point. Arthur tried very hard not to let the feeling that the Russians were always ahead of them at every turn overpower him. "I'll wire this information back to London,” he said. “Wait for my signal to meet up again, when I have your orders for proceeding."
"Thank you," Merlin said, very business-like. Arthur nodded once and waited, half expecting him to say something else. When nothing happened after a few moments, he got to his feet and began to walk away. But Merlin called out to him before he had gotten too far. "Arthur," he said, "thank you."
“You just said that,” Arthur called back.
Merlin, who had also gotten to his feet by now and was standing with his back to the edge of the canal as the last rays of sun disappeared from sky, shrugged. "For listening," he said, "This isn’t a very easy situation for me, obviously, and you’re really the only person I can talk to about it, aren’t you? I appreciate you not just telling me to shut up." Arthur once again found himself at a loss for what to say, but Merlin didn’t seem to expect a response. He just gave Arthur a small, sort of sad smile and said, "I'll see you in a few days," and with that, he walked passed Arthur and back towards the street. Arthur stood there for a few moments, waiting for Merlin to leave the park before he followed just to be safe, and thought that that meeting had been weird, but strangely nice in a way. Was it disconcerting that he was already beginning to expect that sort of thing from Merlin?
+
Arthur spent the next few days wallowing around his hotel room, not doing much of anything. He'd been to Berlin a few times before and did not feel particularly compelled to go sightseeing. Therefore having a four day layover here in this foreign city before anything interesting happened when he could be at home, actually getting work done, was extremely tedious. Sometimes the bureaucracy inherent in the Service really rankled at Arthur, and this was one of those times. Morgana called him in his hotel room on his second night seemingly for the sole purpose of teasing him for not just enjoying a holiday, but Arthur was too tense about the mission to really be able to relax. But there was nothing he could do, however, so he spent his days lounging around in his hotel room, reading the newest Fleming novel (On Her Majesty's Secret Service). He secretly loved reading about the fictionalization and idealization of his profession as written by a journalist for the masses, even though he would never admit it. He also spent some time seeing how many push-ups he could do in one minute (sixty) and listening to German radio, which he could only partially understand.
He and Lancelot went out one night, for lack of anything at all better to do, and because by that time Arthur suspected that if he didn’t get out of his room right that minute, he’d do something drastic. Unsurprisingly, it was an awkward affair, but this time not because neither of them had anything to say. Arthur found that once you got some alcohol into him, Lancelot was actually quite talkative. No, the awkwardness came mostly from the fact that in the eight years they'd at school and working for the Service together, it had taken extreme boredom in a foreign city for them to actually try and get to know each other.
After two or three beers, Lancelot started to open up a bit. "It's not that I don't like sports in general," he said, "I find football quite interesting. It's more that I don't understand why people get so worked up over them?"
"Well, why shouldn't they?" Arthur demanded, downing the end of his own second pint and banging the glass down on the table.
"It's just a game!" Lancelot answered, throwing his hands into the air in exasperation. He hadn't put down his bottle and some of the beer splashed out of it and onto the floor. Lancelot continued unperturbed, "The outcome of a match will have no effect whatsoever on anyone's lives!"
"Yeah, but that's the point, isn't it?" Arthur countered, "People like to come home at the end of the day and have something to take their minds off their stressful jobs. I mean, look at us," he gestured between the two of them, "we work all day to keep the free world safe from the threat of communism and all that. We're under quite a bit of pressure, aren't we?" He paused and looked Lancelot dead in the eye, daring him to disagree. Lancelot quirked his head to the side as if to admit agreement and Arthur continued, "What do you do to decompress from it after work?"
"I play the piano," Lancelot told him seriously.
Arthur could honestly say that he had never met any other agent in Her Majesty's Secret Service quite like Lancelot du Lac.
+
The falsified intel arrived in Berlin on Tuesday morning, which was good because Merlin said he was having problems getting Will to continue holding off on the mission (apparently he'd gotten over the German beer and German women almost as quickly as Arthur had). Arthur and Merlin met by the stadtbahn again on Tuesday afternoon to go over plans for the next day. In comparison to their previous encounters, this one was uneventful. Merlin seemed intent on being professional to a tee and Arthur, still unsure exactly what to do with his emotional outbursts in the first place, didn't have any desire to push him, even if all the time by himself he'd had to think had made him sort of want to know more about the boy, to find out exactly what it was that drove him to do what he was doing. But all that came out of that meeting was their plan. Arthur and Lancelot would arrive at the Mission Berlin-the name of the American embassy in West Germany-at 0900 and Merlin and Will would get there a 0930. That would give Arthur and Lancelot plenty of time to locate the file in Kennedy's makeshift office there and replace the report with the fake that had arrived Tuesday morning. The Americans had been alerted of the mission, so they wouldn't have to worry about that, but the real work would be not making it look too easy-Merlin had assured Arthur that despite being more than happy to turn a mission into a holiday, Will was actually very conscientious while on the job.
And so it came to be Wednesday morning at 0900. Arthur and Lancelot walked the short distance from their hotel to the Mission and announced themselves at the front desk. "Hello," Arthur said to the young woman working there, flashing her his most charming smile and his badge, "I'm Agent Pendragon, this is Agent du Lac, we're from the Secret Intelligence Service. I believe we have an appointment."
The girl behind the desk blushed. "Yes, um, I think you do," she stammered, and even with just that Arthur found her American accent jarring to his ears. "I'll just call upstairs and let Mr. Fenn know you're here." She gave him a shy smile.
"Mr. Fenn?"
"He's the special assistant to the president. You'll be dealing with him this morning."
"Thank you very much," Arthur flashed her one of his trademark blinding smiles, which were pretty effective when dealing with women, he had to admit, and he and Lancelot turned away from the desk.
A man in a dark suit came down the stairs on the far side of the lobby a few minutes later and came down to meet them where they sat in the waiting area. "Hello," he said, reaching out his hand and grasping Arthur's and Lancelot's in turn, "I'm Dan Fenn, special assistant to the president."
"Agent du Lac," Lancelot introduced himself and held out his hand for Fenn to shake, "and this is Agent Pendragon."
Arthur shook his hand and nodded in acknowledgment.
"It's nice to meet you both," Fenn said. "What is it exactly that you fellows need from us?"
“It’s a pretty straight forward switch up operation, sir,” Lancelot told him. "One of the Service's informants inside the KGB has let us know that a pair of Russian agents will be here within the hour to obtain the contents of a confidential file we understand President Kennedy is carrying with him here regarding certain aspects of the United States' policy regarding the Soviet Union." He paused and let Fenn take in the information; the man looked suitably impressed with the espionage but not completely out of his element; Arthur supposed anyone in who'd gotten up the political ranks as high as he had would have been exposed to this kind of thing at least a few times before. "So,” Lancelot continued, “what's going to happen is that we're going to give you this fake file," he gestured to Arthur, who procured an official looking folder from the briefcase he was carrying and handed it to Fenn, "and you are going to put the real file in a safe deposit box and replace it with the fake. Then, the Russian agents will come in and take the fake information back to Moscow," he paused another moment to let Fenn process it. "Can you do that?" he asked finally.
Fenn nodded decisively once. "Yes, sir, I believe I can."
Lancelot grinned and clapped him on the back. "Good man," he said.
On their way back out onto the street, Lancelot whispered to him, "This so easily could have been a one man operation, you know. You totally could have done that on your own, Arthur. What the hell did I just spend four days in fucking Berlin for?"
Arthur just shrugged and shot him a sympathetic smile. "I could say the same for you, you know," he said. "But, you know, Nimueh's stubborn and she likes to get her way in everything." He feared for a moment that he'd overstepped his bounds when it came to mentioning his frustration with Nimueh, despite the close quarters for the last few days, he and Lancelot were still not very close, and gossip always spread through the Service surprisingly quickly.
But Lancelot suprised him. “Yes, you’re right,” he agreed, "Plus, she has some weird kind of power of persuasion over your father, doesn't she?"
Arthur just rolled his eyes, not wanting to give away how thankful for this agreement he really was. "I'm glad I’m not the only one who's noticed it," he muttered darkly, thinking of the way his skin prickled every time he spoke to Nimueh.
By the time they got back to their hotel, the conversation had shifted to much more mundane ground and, unsurprisingly, soon petered out of its own accord.
+
He called Merlin's hotel room posing as room service and relayed the agreed upon coded message. ("Mr. Jones, we are out of shrimp scampi," Arthur said. "I think you have the wrong room," Merlin replied, and hung up.) They met by the canal again as people began to gather for Kennedy's speech, just to make sure that everything had gone according to plan.
"Did everything go according to plan?" Arthur asked as he saw Merlin plop down on the grass next to him out of the corner of his eye.
"Yeah, unless you fucked up," Merlin answered easily.
Arthur couldn't help but smile a bit at that but he was determined to keep this professional. "So, Will didn't suspect anything?" he asked, still nervous about their wild card in Merlin's partner.
"We went in and got passed security with our American visas and if they knew we were the Russians they didn’t say anything. Then we broke into the president's temporary office, stole a file and got out without anyone apprehending us, what was there to suspect?"
Arthur nodded, appeased. They were beginning to hear the noise of the crowd that was forming in the square a few miles away as they waited for Kennedy’s speech to begin, a low hum that was growing louder slowly but surely and only really noticeable because it hadn't been there before. Suddenly, a thought struck Arthur that was a little crazy, completely spontaneous and would probably break about three different case/case officer rules, but he couldn't stop himself. "Hey," he said, nudging Merlin's foot with his own, "since we're here anyway, d'you wanna go hear the speech?"
Merlin looked at him, surprised but pleased. "I'm pretty sure that would be breaking all kinds of protocol, Agent Pendragon," he said cheekily.
Arthur just smirked at him for a minute and then finally broke out into a grin, asking again, "So, d'you wanna?"
Merlin momentarily returned his grin, saying, "Yeah, okay."
+
“Two thousand years ago," President Kennedy was saying from where he stood at the podium, hundreds of metres away, "two thousand years ago-the proudest boast was civis Romanus sum, today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ich bin ein Berliner!"
All around them, the crowd roared. On all sides, men women and children chattered away in excited German, laughing and smiling and elated to be in the presence of the leader of the free world. In contrast to all the commotion, Merlin stood silently at Arthur’s left shoulder, simply staring up at Kennedy.
He turned to look at Arthur as the president thanked his interpreter for translating his German (which was incorrect in the first place, even Arthur could tell with his limited knowledge of the language) and the boy looked so sad and contemplative that Arthur had to ask if he was all right. Merlin just nodded semi-distractedly and turned his attention back to the podium way up ahead.
The president was inviting those who didn’t see the grievous international problem communism posed to come and see this war torn and divided city for themselves. “And there are some,” he said, “who say in Europe and elsewhere, ‘we can work with the communists,’ let them come to Berlin!"
Arthur’s shoulder was barely brushing Merlin’s, but he could immediately feel the man tense at those words. Arthur looked towards him and their eyes met. Merlin looked more nervous and self-conscious then Arthur had ever seen him in the short time they had known each other.
He grabbed the man lightly by the wrist and cocked his head to the side, as if to suggest a direction, “Let’s get out of here.”
They made their way out of the crowd and back to Arthur's car. Even if it would be almost impossible for the KGB to get an agent Merlin wouldn't recognize into West Berlin, Arthur was careful to make sure they weren't being watched or followed and Merlin glanced over his shoulder more than a few times as well. He could hear Kennedy's voice continue to boom across the square as they went but Arthur had stopped listening to the meaning of his words.
They made their way to where Arthur had parked the car he’d been using in Berlin. He unlocked it and climbed into the driver’s seat as Merlin let himself in on the passenger side. Once they were safe inside the car Arthur turned straight to Merlin and asked, "Are you alright?"
Merlin's posture was defensive and standoffish as he answered, "What's it to you?"
"I'm your case officer, Merlin," Arthur scolded him, "It's my job to make sure you're to be awake and alert and mentally together whenever you are on the job. You're no use to the Service if you're not all there."
"Right." Merlin said blankly. "Of course. All I am to you is an asset."
Arthur winced, realizing his mistake. "Well," he hedged, "I don't exactly know you very well, do I? How am I supposed to feel about you?"
Merlin collapsed back into the seat and closed his eyes. “I don’t know, Arthur,” he said wearily. “I-just-I don’t know.” He shifted to his side, so that he facing Arthur, and slowly opened his eyes. Blue irises bore into Arthur’s own. “I’m sorry,” he sighed. “It’s just that I’m still adjusting to all this.”
“No one expects any more from you, Merlin,” Arthur told him, as gently as he could, “That’s completely normal.”
Merlin’s eyes closed again and he shook his head. “Look,” he said, “I know we don’t know each other all that well, but would you mind if I got something off my chest? I just-I need you to understand why I’m doing this.”
Arthur smiled, more glad to hear that than he would admit. “That’s what I’m here for, mate,” he replied. “If I can’t understand your motives, it’s harder for me to do my job properly.”
It took Merlin a few more starts and stops to get going, but once the words started coming they didn’t stop. He didn’t cry but his voice was rough and raw, clearly emotional. Even his accent, which usually sounded flawlessly and naturally British, faltered and a few times some distinctly eastern European sounds bled through. “Just because I was born in the Soviet Union doesn't mean I believe in communism,” he said. “Because I don't. Really. The communist government of the Soviet Union took me away from my family when I was three years old and they taught me things about the world that just aren't true. We were indoctrinated with the same kind of prejudice against the West that Westerners are against us. That's how they make good spies, Arthur, by making you truly hate the supposed enemy. And then they sent me here. They sent me to the place they'd taught me to hate ever since I was a child. And do you know what I found out when I got here? Do you?” he paused and looked expectantly at Arthur, who shook his head. “You lot are nothing like they said you'd be!” Merlin finished.
“What did you think we'd be like?" Arthur asked, supplying the obvious follow up question.
Merlin suddenly looked down at the hands in his lap, seemingly unable to look Arthur in the eye as he talked about this. He sounded dejected as he said it, his voice completely hollow. "They said that America was going to drop the atom bomb on us, just like they did in Japan, and that Britain and the other Western countries would help them. They said that if we didn't learn how to fight against you, our lives as we knew them would be destroyed. That they’d force us all to speak English, whether we liked it or not, and to give up our Russian customs and that we'd be subjugated to the horrors of a capitalist system."
But Arthur couldn't help the smirk that crept onto his face. Merlin glanced up just as it appeared and looked horribly insulted by it. "What's so funny?" he demanded.
Arthur's smile grew some more. "It's just that they told us the same things about you," he said. "Only, we'd all be speaking Russian."
Finally, Merlin's face brightened and he even smiled a little bit. Arthur grinned back and then they were both sitting face to face in the car, grinning at each other. Arthur looked at Merlin now, really looked at him for the first time, and in some distant part of his mind, he realized that Merlin had an exceedingly nice smile.
From there, the two of them parted and went their own ways back to their separate hotels. The trip back to London the next day was uneventful and Arthur went back to work the day after that. And Merlin, for his part, went back to pretending to be British at his job selling books in Covent Garden.
NOTES:
1) Kennedy's "ich bin ein Berliner" speech was delivered on 23 June 1963 and can be found in its entirety on YouTube here.
2) Dan Fenn was a staff assistant to President Kennedy who travelled with him to Berlin in 1963. He later went on to be the first director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.
3) Part 4 will be posted on Wednesday.
next part.
Pairings: eventual Arthur/Merlin and background Lancelot/Gwen
Rating: PG-13 for now.
Word Count: ~4600 in this part.
Disclaimer: This version of Arthur, Merlin, et al belong to Shine and the BBC, not to me.
Summary: It's 1963, the Cold War is in full swing, and Arthur Pendragon, agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service, is about to meet the Service's newest Russian double agent: Merlin Emrys.
Author's Notes: Many thanks to latenightcuppa for beta-ing this part.
first part. previous part.
I fell into a ring of fire
I went down, down, down
and the flames went higher
and it burns, burns, burns
the ring of fire
It turned out that they didn’t put Arthur through any simulations but they sent Lancelot with him. Arthur was glad for that, actually, since despite what he’d said to Nimueh, he really wasn’t very used to being out in the field and could use someone like Lancelot who really knew what they were doing. Plus, he was always happy to have some company, and it meant that he'd have someone to complain about Merlin to, at least. The boy’s hot and cold attitude towards him in the park still stung a bit when he thought of it.
But for the most part, he and Lancelot didn't have much to say on the train. The two of them had been at the Academy together and were generally friendly with one another but didn't have much in common. As far as Arthur could tell, actually, Lancelot didn't really have much of a personality. He was very nice and very good and his loyalty and dedication to the Crown were second to none but Arthur wasn't really sure what to say to him outside of a strictly professional environment.
Needless to say, this made for slightly awkward traveling.
"So..." Arthur started, finally, "did you watch the match last night?"
"No," Lancelot answered, "I don't much like sports."
"Oh," said Arthur. He didn't bother trying to talk for the rest of the trip.
+
The Service never spent top dollar on housing arrangements for their agents, but the accommodations were never shabby either. This hotel room had windows looking over West Berlin; Arthur could see the Wall in the distance. He dropped off his bag (just a small one, he'd only be there for a few days) and sat down on the bed to go over his itinerary for the next few days. It was the early evening on Sunday and Kennedy was scheduled to speak on Wednesday afternoon. Before that, Merlin, who had flown in on a commercial flight from Heathrow using his British passport, was under orders from his Russian superiors to get into the American embassy, using fake American identification to pose as a United States citizen (apparently Merlin could adopt an American accent as well as he could an English one) and retrieve whatever it was that the Kremlin wanted him to retrieve. The Service had instructed him to bring that to Arthur at their rendezvous. From there, Arthur would send it back to London so the Service could replace it with a replica, this time with incorrect information and return it to Merlin before he was to report back on Monday. That way, the Service and their allies at the CIA would have information on what the KGB was looking for, and the KGB would be thrown off course. It wasn’t a very complicated mission as these things went, and there was very little risk as long as Merlin didn’t get himself arrested at the embassy, but Arthur found himself a little jittery anyway.
He would have liked nothing better than to take a nap for a few hours. He hadn't slept very well the night before but he couldn't sleep now; he was meant to be meeting Merlin soon.
They had arranged to meet in the Teirgarten, near to where the stadtbahn crossed the canal. West Berlin had security on the Berlin Wall just as effective as its infamous Eastern counterpart, making it almost impossible for Russian spies to get into West Berlin unless they had already made it to another non-Soviet country, like Merlin had. Because of this, it was unlikely that Merlin would be tailed and it had been deemed unnecessary for them to go to the usual lengths for keeping their meetings secret. A public park at dusk was considered privacy enough. When Arthur got there, Merlin was waiting for him, shoes off and feet dangling in the water.
"Hello," Merlin greeted when Arthur sat next to him on the grass. He didn't put his feet in the water next to Merlin’s, but he did consider it.
"Hello," Arthur returned, "what did you tell your partner?" Merlin's partner at the KGB, who also lived undercover in London, had come with him to Germany and was the one loose cannon they had to be careful of. It wouldn't do if he trailed Merlin and then reported back to his superiors at the Kremlin that the boy had turned traitor; Merlin would be locked up in the Kremlin within a week.
"Don't worry about Will," Merlin assured him, "he's out drinking German beer and trying to pick up German women."
Arthur checked his watch in surprise. "It's only seven," he said.
Merlin just shrugged. "That’s Will,” he said. He’ll be one hundred percent professional tomorrow, despite the hangover, believe me, but tonight he’s on holiday."
"Will?" Arthur asked, "That's not his real name is it?"
Merlin stared at him for a second before he responded. "You really don't have any idea what it's like to live like this, do you?" he asked, wonderingly. When Arthur just looked at him, Merlin sighed and continued, "His real name is Ioann, but he doesn't like to be called that anymore than I like being called Alexei." Arthur just kept looking at him, not sure exactly what to say. There was no chapter in the Service handbook called What To Do When The Russian Double Agent Whose Case You Handle Starts Opening Up About His Life As A KGB Spy. "It's just--weird," Merlin went on, seemingly taking Arthur's silence as some kind of encouragement, which it wasn’t, really, "I've been stationed in London for two years, that’s almost since I was made an agent. I sell books to the American tourists who come to Covent Garden. Most of them are polite, nice people. Sometimes they're rude and abrasive, but that's just tourists, you know? It has nothing to do with their nationality. Not really, anyway. It's hard to keep thinking of myself as an America hating citizen of the Soviet Union when I'm advising them on which Dickens book they should add to their collection."
Arthur could honestly say he'd never thought of it that way before. On one hand, he was glad of the look into Merlin’s psyche, it helped him understand why the boy had chosen to turn traitor. But on the other hand, Arthur barely knew this kid and wasn’t particularly comfortable with this level of emotional honesty while he was still getting used to the fact that Merlin was an honest to God Russian. He cleared his throat and changed the subject in a supremely awkward way. "Um," he started, "have they told you yet what you're supposed to retrieve from the embassy tomorrow?"
Merlin stared at him in disbelief for a moment and Arthur felt a twinge of regret for walking all over his emotional moment. He was also reminded momentarily of the coldness in the boy's voice at the end of their last conversation and wondered what exactly was going on in Merlin's head that made him such an emotional powder keg. But, Arthur supposed, if he were in Merlin's position, he'd be kind of on edge too. "Yeah," Merlin answered, "Kennedy's brought a file with him that holds confidential information about the CIA's operations regarding the Soviet Union. The kind of operations that the Agency needs to have the president sign off on. So obviously, the Soviet Union want to know what it is."
Yes, that sounded like something the Russians would very much want, Arthur agreed. But another question occurred to him. "How do you know Kennedy has it with him?" he asked.
"Oh, Arthur," Merlin chided, smiling slyly, "if you think that the KGB hasn't got anyone on the inside in America, you're very naive."
He had a point. Arthur tried very hard not to let the feeling that the Russians were always ahead of them at every turn overpower him. "I'll wire this information back to London,” he said. “Wait for my signal to meet up again, when I have your orders for proceeding."
"Thank you," Merlin said, very business-like. Arthur nodded once and waited, half expecting him to say something else. When nothing happened after a few moments, he got to his feet and began to walk away. But Merlin called out to him before he had gotten too far. "Arthur," he said, "thank you."
“You just said that,” Arthur called back.
Merlin, who had also gotten to his feet by now and was standing with his back to the edge of the canal as the last rays of sun disappeared from sky, shrugged. "For listening," he said, "This isn’t a very easy situation for me, obviously, and you’re really the only person I can talk to about it, aren’t you? I appreciate you not just telling me to shut up." Arthur once again found himself at a loss for what to say, but Merlin didn’t seem to expect a response. He just gave Arthur a small, sort of sad smile and said, "I'll see you in a few days," and with that, he walked passed Arthur and back towards the street. Arthur stood there for a few moments, waiting for Merlin to leave the park before he followed just to be safe, and thought that that meeting had been weird, but strangely nice in a way. Was it disconcerting that he was already beginning to expect that sort of thing from Merlin?
+
Arthur spent the next few days wallowing around his hotel room, not doing much of anything. He'd been to Berlin a few times before and did not feel particularly compelled to go sightseeing. Therefore having a four day layover here in this foreign city before anything interesting happened when he could be at home, actually getting work done, was extremely tedious. Sometimes the bureaucracy inherent in the Service really rankled at Arthur, and this was one of those times. Morgana called him in his hotel room on his second night seemingly for the sole purpose of teasing him for not just enjoying a holiday, but Arthur was too tense about the mission to really be able to relax. But there was nothing he could do, however, so he spent his days lounging around in his hotel room, reading the newest Fleming novel (On Her Majesty's Secret Service). He secretly loved reading about the fictionalization and idealization of his profession as written by a journalist for the masses, even though he would never admit it. He also spent some time seeing how many push-ups he could do in one minute (sixty) and listening to German radio, which he could only partially understand.
He and Lancelot went out one night, for lack of anything at all better to do, and because by that time Arthur suspected that if he didn’t get out of his room right that minute, he’d do something drastic. Unsurprisingly, it was an awkward affair, but this time not because neither of them had anything to say. Arthur found that once you got some alcohol into him, Lancelot was actually quite talkative. No, the awkwardness came mostly from the fact that in the eight years they'd at school and working for the Service together, it had taken extreme boredom in a foreign city for them to actually try and get to know each other.
After two or three beers, Lancelot started to open up a bit. "It's not that I don't like sports in general," he said, "I find football quite interesting. It's more that I don't understand why people get so worked up over them?"
"Well, why shouldn't they?" Arthur demanded, downing the end of his own second pint and banging the glass down on the table.
"It's just a game!" Lancelot answered, throwing his hands into the air in exasperation. He hadn't put down his bottle and some of the beer splashed out of it and onto the floor. Lancelot continued unperturbed, "The outcome of a match will have no effect whatsoever on anyone's lives!"
"Yeah, but that's the point, isn't it?" Arthur countered, "People like to come home at the end of the day and have something to take their minds off their stressful jobs. I mean, look at us," he gestured between the two of them, "we work all day to keep the free world safe from the threat of communism and all that. We're under quite a bit of pressure, aren't we?" He paused and looked Lancelot dead in the eye, daring him to disagree. Lancelot quirked his head to the side as if to admit agreement and Arthur continued, "What do you do to decompress from it after work?"
"I play the piano," Lancelot told him seriously.
Arthur could honestly say that he had never met any other agent in Her Majesty's Secret Service quite like Lancelot du Lac.
+
The falsified intel arrived in Berlin on Tuesday morning, which was good because Merlin said he was having problems getting Will to continue holding off on the mission (apparently he'd gotten over the German beer and German women almost as quickly as Arthur had). Arthur and Merlin met by the stadtbahn again on Tuesday afternoon to go over plans for the next day. In comparison to their previous encounters, this one was uneventful. Merlin seemed intent on being professional to a tee and Arthur, still unsure exactly what to do with his emotional outbursts in the first place, didn't have any desire to push him, even if all the time by himself he'd had to think had made him sort of want to know more about the boy, to find out exactly what it was that drove him to do what he was doing. But all that came out of that meeting was their plan. Arthur and Lancelot would arrive at the Mission Berlin-the name of the American embassy in West Germany-at 0900 and Merlin and Will would get there a 0930. That would give Arthur and Lancelot plenty of time to locate the file in Kennedy's makeshift office there and replace the report with the fake that had arrived Tuesday morning. The Americans had been alerted of the mission, so they wouldn't have to worry about that, but the real work would be not making it look too easy-Merlin had assured Arthur that despite being more than happy to turn a mission into a holiday, Will was actually very conscientious while on the job.
And so it came to be Wednesday morning at 0900. Arthur and Lancelot walked the short distance from their hotel to the Mission and announced themselves at the front desk. "Hello," Arthur said to the young woman working there, flashing her his most charming smile and his badge, "I'm Agent Pendragon, this is Agent du Lac, we're from the Secret Intelligence Service. I believe we have an appointment."
The girl behind the desk blushed. "Yes, um, I think you do," she stammered, and even with just that Arthur found her American accent jarring to his ears. "I'll just call upstairs and let Mr. Fenn know you're here." She gave him a shy smile.
"Mr. Fenn?"
"He's the special assistant to the president. You'll be dealing with him this morning."
"Thank you very much," Arthur flashed her one of his trademark blinding smiles, which were pretty effective when dealing with women, he had to admit, and he and Lancelot turned away from the desk.
A man in a dark suit came down the stairs on the far side of the lobby a few minutes later and came down to meet them where they sat in the waiting area. "Hello," he said, reaching out his hand and grasping Arthur's and Lancelot's in turn, "I'm Dan Fenn, special assistant to the president."
"Agent du Lac," Lancelot introduced himself and held out his hand for Fenn to shake, "and this is Agent Pendragon."
Arthur shook his hand and nodded in acknowledgment.
"It's nice to meet you both," Fenn said. "What is it exactly that you fellows need from us?"
“It’s a pretty straight forward switch up operation, sir,” Lancelot told him. "One of the Service's informants inside the KGB has let us know that a pair of Russian agents will be here within the hour to obtain the contents of a confidential file we understand President Kennedy is carrying with him here regarding certain aspects of the United States' policy regarding the Soviet Union." He paused and let Fenn take in the information; the man looked suitably impressed with the espionage but not completely out of his element; Arthur supposed anyone in who'd gotten up the political ranks as high as he had would have been exposed to this kind of thing at least a few times before. "So,” Lancelot continued, “what's going to happen is that we're going to give you this fake file," he gestured to Arthur, who procured an official looking folder from the briefcase he was carrying and handed it to Fenn, "and you are going to put the real file in a safe deposit box and replace it with the fake. Then, the Russian agents will come in and take the fake information back to Moscow," he paused another moment to let Fenn process it. "Can you do that?" he asked finally.
Fenn nodded decisively once. "Yes, sir, I believe I can."
Lancelot grinned and clapped him on the back. "Good man," he said.
On their way back out onto the street, Lancelot whispered to him, "This so easily could have been a one man operation, you know. You totally could have done that on your own, Arthur. What the hell did I just spend four days in fucking Berlin for?"
Arthur just shrugged and shot him a sympathetic smile. "I could say the same for you, you know," he said. "But, you know, Nimueh's stubborn and she likes to get her way in everything." He feared for a moment that he'd overstepped his bounds when it came to mentioning his frustration with Nimueh, despite the close quarters for the last few days, he and Lancelot were still not very close, and gossip always spread through the Service surprisingly quickly.
But Lancelot suprised him. “Yes, you’re right,” he agreed, "Plus, she has some weird kind of power of persuasion over your father, doesn't she?"
Arthur just rolled his eyes, not wanting to give away how thankful for this agreement he really was. "I'm glad I’m not the only one who's noticed it," he muttered darkly, thinking of the way his skin prickled every time he spoke to Nimueh.
By the time they got back to their hotel, the conversation had shifted to much more mundane ground and, unsurprisingly, soon petered out of its own accord.
+
He called Merlin's hotel room posing as room service and relayed the agreed upon coded message. ("Mr. Jones, we are out of shrimp scampi," Arthur said. "I think you have the wrong room," Merlin replied, and hung up.) They met by the canal again as people began to gather for Kennedy's speech, just to make sure that everything had gone according to plan.
"Did everything go according to plan?" Arthur asked as he saw Merlin plop down on the grass next to him out of the corner of his eye.
"Yeah, unless you fucked up," Merlin answered easily.
Arthur couldn't help but smile a bit at that but he was determined to keep this professional. "So, Will didn't suspect anything?" he asked, still nervous about their wild card in Merlin's partner.
"We went in and got passed security with our American visas and if they knew we were the Russians they didn’t say anything. Then we broke into the president's temporary office, stole a file and got out without anyone apprehending us, what was there to suspect?"
Arthur nodded, appeased. They were beginning to hear the noise of the crowd that was forming in the square a few miles away as they waited for Kennedy’s speech to begin, a low hum that was growing louder slowly but surely and only really noticeable because it hadn't been there before. Suddenly, a thought struck Arthur that was a little crazy, completely spontaneous and would probably break about three different case/case officer rules, but he couldn't stop himself. "Hey," he said, nudging Merlin's foot with his own, "since we're here anyway, d'you wanna go hear the speech?"
Merlin looked at him, surprised but pleased. "I'm pretty sure that would be breaking all kinds of protocol, Agent Pendragon," he said cheekily.
Arthur just smirked at him for a minute and then finally broke out into a grin, asking again, "So, d'you wanna?"
Merlin momentarily returned his grin, saying, "Yeah, okay."
+
“Two thousand years ago," President Kennedy was saying from where he stood at the podium, hundreds of metres away, "two thousand years ago-the proudest boast was civis Romanus sum, today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ich bin ein Berliner!"
All around them, the crowd roared. On all sides, men women and children chattered away in excited German, laughing and smiling and elated to be in the presence of the leader of the free world. In contrast to all the commotion, Merlin stood silently at Arthur’s left shoulder, simply staring up at Kennedy.
He turned to look at Arthur as the president thanked his interpreter for translating his German (which was incorrect in the first place, even Arthur could tell with his limited knowledge of the language) and the boy looked so sad and contemplative that Arthur had to ask if he was all right. Merlin just nodded semi-distractedly and turned his attention back to the podium way up ahead.
The president was inviting those who didn’t see the grievous international problem communism posed to come and see this war torn and divided city for themselves. “And there are some,” he said, “who say in Europe and elsewhere, ‘we can work with the communists,’ let them come to Berlin!"
Arthur’s shoulder was barely brushing Merlin’s, but he could immediately feel the man tense at those words. Arthur looked towards him and their eyes met. Merlin looked more nervous and self-conscious then Arthur had ever seen him in the short time they had known each other.
He grabbed the man lightly by the wrist and cocked his head to the side, as if to suggest a direction, “Let’s get out of here.”
They made their way out of the crowd and back to Arthur's car. Even if it would be almost impossible for the KGB to get an agent Merlin wouldn't recognize into West Berlin, Arthur was careful to make sure they weren't being watched or followed and Merlin glanced over his shoulder more than a few times as well. He could hear Kennedy's voice continue to boom across the square as they went but Arthur had stopped listening to the meaning of his words.
They made their way to where Arthur had parked the car he’d been using in Berlin. He unlocked it and climbed into the driver’s seat as Merlin let himself in on the passenger side. Once they were safe inside the car Arthur turned straight to Merlin and asked, "Are you alright?"
Merlin's posture was defensive and standoffish as he answered, "What's it to you?"
"I'm your case officer, Merlin," Arthur scolded him, "It's my job to make sure you're to be awake and alert and mentally together whenever you are on the job. You're no use to the Service if you're not all there."
"Right." Merlin said blankly. "Of course. All I am to you is an asset."
Arthur winced, realizing his mistake. "Well," he hedged, "I don't exactly know you very well, do I? How am I supposed to feel about you?"
Merlin collapsed back into the seat and closed his eyes. “I don’t know, Arthur,” he said wearily. “I-just-I don’t know.” He shifted to his side, so that he facing Arthur, and slowly opened his eyes. Blue irises bore into Arthur’s own. “I’m sorry,” he sighed. “It’s just that I’m still adjusting to all this.”
“No one expects any more from you, Merlin,” Arthur told him, as gently as he could, “That’s completely normal.”
Merlin’s eyes closed again and he shook his head. “Look,” he said, “I know we don’t know each other all that well, but would you mind if I got something off my chest? I just-I need you to understand why I’m doing this.”
Arthur smiled, more glad to hear that than he would admit. “That’s what I’m here for, mate,” he replied. “If I can’t understand your motives, it’s harder for me to do my job properly.”
It took Merlin a few more starts and stops to get going, but once the words started coming they didn’t stop. He didn’t cry but his voice was rough and raw, clearly emotional. Even his accent, which usually sounded flawlessly and naturally British, faltered and a few times some distinctly eastern European sounds bled through. “Just because I was born in the Soviet Union doesn't mean I believe in communism,” he said. “Because I don't. Really. The communist government of the Soviet Union took me away from my family when I was three years old and they taught me things about the world that just aren't true. We were indoctrinated with the same kind of prejudice against the West that Westerners are against us. That's how they make good spies, Arthur, by making you truly hate the supposed enemy. And then they sent me here. They sent me to the place they'd taught me to hate ever since I was a child. And do you know what I found out when I got here? Do you?” he paused and looked expectantly at Arthur, who shook his head. “You lot are nothing like they said you'd be!” Merlin finished.
“What did you think we'd be like?" Arthur asked, supplying the obvious follow up question.
Merlin suddenly looked down at the hands in his lap, seemingly unable to look Arthur in the eye as he talked about this. He sounded dejected as he said it, his voice completely hollow. "They said that America was going to drop the atom bomb on us, just like they did in Japan, and that Britain and the other Western countries would help them. They said that if we didn't learn how to fight against you, our lives as we knew them would be destroyed. That they’d force us all to speak English, whether we liked it or not, and to give up our Russian customs and that we'd be subjugated to the horrors of a capitalist system."
But Arthur couldn't help the smirk that crept onto his face. Merlin glanced up just as it appeared and looked horribly insulted by it. "What's so funny?" he demanded.
Arthur's smile grew some more. "It's just that they told us the same things about you," he said. "Only, we'd all be speaking Russian."
Finally, Merlin's face brightened and he even smiled a little bit. Arthur grinned back and then they were both sitting face to face in the car, grinning at each other. Arthur looked at Merlin now, really looked at him for the first time, and in some distant part of his mind, he realized that Merlin had an exceedingly nice smile.
From there, the two of them parted and went their own ways back to their separate hotels. The trip back to London the next day was uneventful and Arthur went back to work the day after that. And Merlin, for his part, went back to pretending to be British at his job selling books in Covent Garden.
NOTES:
1) Kennedy's "ich bin ein Berliner" speech was delivered on 23 June 1963 and can be found in its entirety on YouTube here.
2) Dan Fenn was a staff assistant to President Kennedy who travelled with him to Berlin in 1963. He later went on to be the first director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.
3) Part 4 will be posted on Wednesday.
next part.