Secret Santa fic for bella_clover
feliz natal Clover!
This is just a Part 1 for now - had a hella busy December - but I figured I'd give you the first 3k today and get the rest of it done & posted asap.
It is, as requested, an AU/alternate reality fic set in NYC at about the same time as MGS3. What you didn't request were gratuitous James Bond fusion elements. :D mmm, I couldn't resist basing the fic on From Russia With Love (book, as I've never seen the movie), and it largely grew out of that one part where James Bond voices his appreciation for gay spies:
At once Bond had got into a hopeless wrangle with Troop over the employment of 'intellectuals' in the Secret Service.
Perversely, and knowing it would annoy, Bond had put forward the proposition that, if M.I.5 and the Secret Service were to concern themselves seriously with the atom age 'intellectual spy', they must employ a certain number of intellectuals to counter them. 'Retired officers of the Indian Army,' Bond had pronounced, 'can't possibly understand the thought processes of a Burgess or a Maclean. They won't even know such people exist-let alone be in a position to frequent their cliques and get to know their friends and their secrets. Once Burgess and Maclean went to Russia, the only way to make contact with them again and, perhaps, when they got tired of Russia, turn them into double agents against the Russians, would have been to send their closest friends to Moscow and Prague and Budapest with orders to wait until one of these chaps crept out of the masonry and made contact. And one of them, probably Burgess, would have been driven to make contact by his loneliness and by his ache to tell his story to someone. [Note: *Written in March 1956. I. F.] But they certainly wouldn't take the risk of revealing themselves to someone with a trench-coat and a cavalry moustache and a beta minus mind.'
'Oh really,' Troop had said with icy calm. 'So you suggest we should staff the organization with long-haired perverts. That's quite an original notion. I thought we were all agreed that homosexuals were about the worst security risk there is. I can't see the Americans handing over many atom secrets to a lot of pansies soaked in scent.'
'All intellectuals aren't homosexual. And many of them are bald. I'm just saying that ...'
...NEVER CHANGE, JB.
Bosscrit, pls. (and fuck authenticity, I left out the 60s homophobia, it's just not something I'm comfy writing fic about).
Title: Atom Age 'Intellectual' Spies
Pairings: BB/Ocelot
Rating: PG for now.
Warnings: Er, cracky James Bond lulz? No for srs warnings here.
Summary: Para-Medic offers him a date, but the Boss offers him a mission; to turn a Soviet defector back to the West.
April 7th 1964
Seven floors up, and Jack could still feel the hum of the city below grating against his eardrums in a cacophony of dullness and clutter. Slow, heavy raindrops spattered grey streaks against the window of his office, but did nothing to mute the sounds that came from below and above and from any other corner they could infiltrate. The torment was weatherproof, unquenchable, and constant.
Above his head, a ceiling fan fought a losing battle against the damp sea air.
Double-0-Snake hated being in New York. He missed the efficient calm of Langley, insulated from all the noise and crowds. He hated being embedded in this bustling, grimy city where the smog made his vision blur and burn.
It wasn't a soldier's place to question why the FOX Unit's base of operations had been moved to New York following the Dallas incident. His commander, B, had made that clear. And if his skin itched over suppressed thoughts of what they might have heard and seen if they'd remained at Langley, he hoped that B had yet to notice.
Perhaps he just needed more to do - something to take him away from his dreary office and the stream of memos about this Soviet missile test or that Chinese sleeper agent. The world of paperwork intelligence had proven its lack of worth last November; now, without even the lustre of illusion to lend it suport, it seemed like a sad quagmire and Jack had sunk in up to his neck.
His irritated thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door of his office - the cheerful ratattatat of someone who was not irritated by life in New York City at all. "Come in," he called, hoping it was something important.
Didn't seem so. It was P, the head of the unit's medical branch. He wasn't late for his annual physical, which meant it was likely to be a social call, and he was feeling far from sociable. P half-ran up to his desk and leaned over it, liquid brown eyes full of excitement, the tails of her neckscarf dancing in patterns dictated by the slowly-turning fan on the ceiling. She was waving two bits of pink paper at him, grinning. "Snake! Look what O gave me!"
"Huh?" he replied, curious. Whatever it was, it was likely to be either wonderful or terrible, and would certainly be deeply...English. O was B's deputy. He was a foreigner, new to the unit - though Jack had worked with him several times back when O had been MI6's liason with the CIA. The old man was fiercly patriotic towards his homeland but when B had asked him to work under her, he had left Her Majesty's Secret Service without hesitation or regret.
Jack could sense the reason why. It was a quiet, dutiful fervor that B inspired in all of them.
"He got me two tickets to a movie premiere tomorrow!" Jack nodded, slightly and slowly. Once P began talking about movies, it was difficult to get her to stop. "He saw it in the UK months ago and says it's really good. It's called From Russia With Love and it's about a spy and a beautiful defector who he meets in Istanbul while he's looking for a cryptography machine and he's got this -"
Mercifully, the phone rang. Jack reached for the black handset, feeling like he'd be thrilled if it were something as mundane as S needing him to test a new gadget or O badgering for a translation of the wiretap tape from the Russian embassy, or even his secretary asking if he needed another coffee (yes, yes, he did). He spent a dull-witted New York moment staring at his desk, and then grabbed the red handset; the direct line to B, the phone that hadn't rung in weeks.
He could take a knife and cut out the city, pare away the excess flesh and tear out the neon lights and the movies, and reduce his life to that thin cord that connected him to B's office. Nothing else really mattered.
P had fallen silent. B's voice in his ear was cool and steady, betraying nothing except haste. "Come to my office immediately." The line went dead before he could even voice an affirmative.
He watched P's face as he set it back in its cradle, and saw a mingling of curiosity and frustration, but she had a way of recovering from frustrations quickly. "...So you need to come see it with me," she finished smoothly.
He stood up, brushing past her as he walked, and said, "I'll let you know if I can make it." He shut the door of his office, gave a nod to the secretary outside, and felt like he was shutting out the dreary chaos of the grey springtime, of New York's anatomy, in there with the doctor. He walked to the elevator with a spring in his step and pushed the button for B's floor.
It only occurred to him as he was opening B's door that P had, to all intents, asked him on a date. That was...kind-of weird. He wasn't that kind of spy, and the only woman in his life was his boss.
*
Double-0-Snake stood by the doorway and saluted until she nodded him into a seat.
B's centre of operations was neat as a pin and smelt of tobacco and old leather. The blinds were tightly drawn, making it comfortingly shady but for the small desk lamp that tilted just slightly away from her face; her hair looked washed-out, the yellow of fading paper. Among the shadows of the room Jack could see a dozen places where an infiltrator could hide, but knew of none that would dare (and he was more daring than any). B kept her gun in full view, right next to the inkpot.
She was sat in a worn chair behind a huge mahogany desk that was completely cluttered with maps, memos and disassembled weapon parts, save for a mere eight-by-eight-inch square by her elbow. In the centre of that square were nestled a green-glass ashtray and a coffee mug proudly decorated with a chipped, splotchy American flag.
B grabbed it and took a sip, then set it down and cleared her throat. Snake's eyes widened, because she never did that.
"Jack, I have a mission for you." The words made the blood in his veins start to sing, but her tone, her eyes, spelt out complications. "It's not your usual type of work but it is something that no one else in the unit can do."
He nodded, silent, waiting for her to say something to make him understand.
"There's a Russian agent come to sniff around New York. His codename is Ocelot and he's a former defector, and we rate him as highly dangerous. The signal intelligence branch have intercepted a message he sent to another enemy agent we've been watching for some time, planning a public rendezvous for the night of April 8th." That was tomorrow. "We've detained the other interloper, and we want you to go and meet Ocelot in his place."
"You want me to kill him?"
"No," she said, a little forcefully. "Your mission will be make contact with Ocelot and to encourage him to...return to the fold."
Jack blinked slowly. Encourage his enemy to...? "Why me? Why can't you just bribe him or threaten him into -"
She pressed her lips into a flat line. "He doesn't work that way. If he comes over, it will have to be because he wants to do it, not because someone else has made him. He needs to make the choice for himself."
"...So you want me to make him feel like it's all his own idea?"
"No. We want you to make him want to defect. He belongs here, and I know you can show him that. Jack -" For a second her ever-calm eyes were afire with urgency. "- He and you are both men of a new age. There's no one else here who could mean anything to him." Not even you?, he thought, watching her eyes; in the poor light they were all pupil, sunk into her face like waiting mines. "Any more questions?" she asked, in a voice that said she hadn't liked the first one. She certainly wouldn't like the first one he thought of; why do you need this guy?
Stick with relevant information. "Who is it I have to impersonate?"
"You don't. Ocelot's never met the man before and only knows the man by his codename - EVA. They've communicated very little. They have a pass-phrase; he'll say "'Who are the Patriots?' and you must respond 'La-li-lu-le-lo.'."
He nodded, committing the strange words to memory. B pushed a map across the desk; she'd drawn an ominous black X at a point where two streets met. "That's where he'll be expecting you at 2030 tomorrow. Before you go, you should probably read this -" She shoved a dossier, a thick one with a buff-colored cover, in his direction. "Anything else?" He lifted the file, and found it heavy enough to promise a few answers. He didn't say anything, just got out of his chair and saluted again.
"Dismissed," she said, looking away and taking her pen in her hand.
*
There was no name on the front of the file. A GRU rank and codeword was apparently sufficient to denote his target's identity: MAJOR OCELOT.
It was three inches thick. That would not have struck Jack as unusual were it not for one detail on the first page; the man's DOB was 06/06/44. So he was nineteen, almost twenty, and had somehow amassed an espionage resume that would have been hefty for a man twice his age.
He'd begun his career at the age of fifteen, Jack read - a darling of the NSA. There was no mention of how they had found him, but it seemed natural enough that a teenage genius who spoke fluent Russian should find himself in their hands; perhaps they had plucked him from the youth chess circuits? In any case, his record there was flawless. Over the course of eighteen months he established himself as a promising cryptographer and a trusted member of America's intelligence community - and then he vanished without a trace during a mission in Germany, resurfacing months later on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
To coolly defect, without sending any warning signals beforehand, was daring enough at any age. It had happened in the December of 1960; Major Ocelot had been sixteen years old.
Jack pored over the reports of the subsequent investigation until past six o'clock, when his attention was finally roused by the the clatter of neat footsteps heading for the elevator as the secretaries all left for the night. He stuffed the file in his briefcase, straightened his tie, and waited for the sounds to die down before heading home himself. He stood at the back of the elevator, ignoring the two young women who walked in after him and talked over each other about their love-lives. He gave the security staff at the exit the same empty glower he gave them every night, his strides calm and unrushed. He knew he shouldn't be taking that file out of the building with him. That was a henious security breach. But Jack was too engrossed to stop reading it.
He stepped out into the street, and heard the two girls just ahead of him still yapping about the guys they were dating and the restaurants and the movies they were expecting to be treated to the next night. "That new British one about the spy," one of them said. "It looks so glamorous -"
He turned down a sidestreet just to get away from them. It was raining slightly and the steps down to the subway were dotted with puddles and morsels of sodden trash.
When Jack got back to his apartment in Upper Manhattan he made himself a quick meal of thinly-sliced potatoes and carefully undercooked veal and ate it slowly as he read between the lines of the documents, looking for a reason why the USSR had not extracted everything the defector knew and then had him summarily shot. The Russians were paranoid enough, and they'd done it before - it was more than just an idle tale to prevent defection. Russia wasn't short of brilliant young bilinguals. For Major Ocelot to still be alive, never mind trusted to be assigned on sensitive international missions, there must be some special reason that they prized him.
He found it in some notes sent by a double agent on the occassion of the man's promotion to an elite GRU squad. Departmental gossip had it that he was the son of a hero of the Allied intelligence effort in WW2. There was nothing more specific, only the name of an infiltrator unit - 'The Cobras' - that he'd never heard of before.
If that was enough to impress the Russian GRU, he should have heard of it, but he had not. Classified, perhaps, on some level far above Jack's rank.
He remembered B's face as she'd asked him to bring this prodigy back to America's fold. The pieces fit somehow - he knew it - but the key to the mystery was somewhere out of his reach. When he slept that night he dreamed about falling into some dark place and swimming towards it - looking for the answers, for a sharp face he knew only from grainy black-and-white photographs - but he awoke with no more enlightenment than he'd had the night before.
He arrived early that morning, and the first thing he did was send a one-word memo to the head of Medical: Sorry.
A word, a lie.
*
At 0915 his secretary brought him a note from B, asking for his assessment of the target. Jack hadn't a damn clue what to say. B knew him better than anyone else. She needed this done and she said he could do it. She'd never appreciated bravado or false confidence, but nor did she tolerate failure.
Interesting, he wrote in reply. Working on a method. He didn't ask any questions, as he knew that everything she wanted him to know would be somewhere in the file, and the one thing he wanted to know - why me? Why not you? - would not be answered. He skimmed over pages about the successes of the Ocelot Unit - assassinations, kidnappings, counter-espionage missions. Impressive, but the reports were focused on the unit as a whole, where Jack was only interested in one man.
Another promotion. Dead man's shoes. A frequent occurence in any military unit, but... There were photographs of the newly-minted GRU captain, posing with his unit beneath a drooping hammer-and-sickle; his face was solemn, but set with youthful arrogance. Would this man kill for his own advancement?
Jack flipped back to the biography on the front page of the file, wanting to know what colour Ocelot's eyes were.
He skipped over a wodge of further reports - just rumours about Ocelot's standing with the GRU's rivals, the KGB, unimportant - looking for more photographs. Anything recent. Young men changed. A profile on a parade ground, the previous spring. There was one from mere months ago - a candid and unposed shot that might have been taken in Berlin - in which Ocelot was standing by two members of his unit and scowling while his comrades laughed.
Out of step with the East. On the borderline. Jack thought of how the great savannah cats waited until one beast went astray from its herd, and then preyed upon it. He flipped from photograph to photograph, watching a slight cryptographer become a striding killer.
He felt hungry instincts engaging, as if he were becoming a predator himself.
Ocelot wasn't a mere target; Jack wasn't going to accomplish his task by means of martial skills or stealthiness. Nor was he a prized item that Jack had to procure for the CIA. This was spirit against spirit, something that B had known would have to engage the both of them fully - the task of making this man feel American again. Ocelot was a mission.
Snake felt fiercely loyal to this mission; possessive of it. But what to do with it? He mentally ran over the text looking for Ocelot's weaknesses, and found, bar his tangible arrogance, none. Was there a profile on his habits, his vices? There was, and it was distressingly thin; Ocelot didn't even smoke or drink. Or womanise - there was no list of girlfriends and mistresses. How could Snake bait a prey that didn't need anything - ?
All beasts had needs. If Ocelot didn't have any conventional bad habits, there must be unconventional ones he was indulging away from prying eyes. Snake turned a page and found another very short list; Known Peculiarities.
So Ocelot had abnormally high manual dexterity, a fascination with gambling - though never for cash - and he loved spaghetti westerns. How was that going to help Jack complete his mission?
- He stared at the map that B had handed him, and grabbed the street guide he kept in his desk drawer. He disliked New York, yes, disliked it because it was new territory for him and that made him a less effective hunter. So what kind of meeting place had Ocelot selected? He ran his finger down the streets, looking for the point where, on the other map, B had drawn a bold X on a street corner. What clue would be hidden in Ocelot's choice of street-corner cafe, used bookstore, mob hideout?
He found the right point in the guide. Ocelot was staging this tete-a-tete in a movie theatre.
Maybe Snake was getting somewhere after all.
TBC
This is just a Part 1 for now - had a hella busy December - but I figured I'd give you the first 3k today and get the rest of it done & posted asap.
It is, as requested, an AU/alternate reality fic set in NYC at about the same time as MGS3. What you didn't request were gratuitous James Bond fusion elements. :D mmm, I couldn't resist basing the fic on From Russia With Love (book, as I've never seen the movie), and it largely grew out of that one part where James Bond voices his appreciation for gay spies:
At once Bond had got into a hopeless wrangle with Troop over the employment of 'intellectuals' in the Secret Service.
Perversely, and knowing it would annoy, Bond had put forward the proposition that, if M.I.5 and the Secret Service were to concern themselves seriously with the atom age 'intellectual spy', they must employ a certain number of intellectuals to counter them. 'Retired officers of the Indian Army,' Bond had pronounced, 'can't possibly understand the thought processes of a Burgess or a Maclean. They won't even know such people exist-let alone be in a position to frequent their cliques and get to know their friends and their secrets. Once Burgess and Maclean went to Russia, the only way to make contact with them again and, perhaps, when they got tired of Russia, turn them into double agents against the Russians, would have been to send their closest friends to Moscow and Prague and Budapest with orders to wait until one of these chaps crept out of the masonry and made contact. And one of them, probably Burgess, would have been driven to make contact by his loneliness and by his ache to tell his story to someone. [Note: *Written in March 1956. I. F.] But they certainly wouldn't take the risk of revealing themselves to someone with a trench-coat and a cavalry moustache and a beta minus mind.'
'Oh really,' Troop had said with icy calm. 'So you suggest we should staff the organization with long-haired perverts. That's quite an original notion. I thought we were all agreed that homosexuals were about the worst security risk there is. I can't see the Americans handing over many atom secrets to a lot of pansies soaked in scent.'
'All intellectuals aren't homosexual. And many of them are bald. I'm just saying that ...'
...NEVER CHANGE, JB.
Bosscrit, pls. (and fuck authenticity, I left out the 60s homophobia, it's just not something I'm comfy writing fic about).
Title: Atom Age 'Intellectual' Spies
Pairings: BB/Ocelot
Rating: PG for now.
Warnings: Er, cracky James Bond lulz? No for srs warnings here.
Summary: Para-Medic offers him a date, but the Boss offers him a mission; to turn a Soviet defector back to the West.
April 7th 1964
Seven floors up, and Jack could still feel the hum of the city below grating against his eardrums in a cacophony of dullness and clutter. Slow, heavy raindrops spattered grey streaks against the window of his office, but did nothing to mute the sounds that came from below and above and from any other corner they could infiltrate. The torment was weatherproof, unquenchable, and constant.
Above his head, a ceiling fan fought a losing battle against the damp sea air.
Double-0-Snake hated being in New York. He missed the efficient calm of Langley, insulated from all the noise and crowds. He hated being embedded in this bustling, grimy city where the smog made his vision blur and burn.
It wasn't a soldier's place to question why the FOX Unit's base of operations had been moved to New York following the Dallas incident. His commander, B, had made that clear. And if his skin itched over suppressed thoughts of what they might have heard and seen if they'd remained at Langley, he hoped that B had yet to notice.
Perhaps he just needed more to do - something to take him away from his dreary office and the stream of memos about this Soviet missile test or that Chinese sleeper agent. The world of paperwork intelligence had proven its lack of worth last November; now, without even the lustre of illusion to lend it suport, it seemed like a sad quagmire and Jack had sunk in up to his neck.
His irritated thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door of his office - the cheerful ratattatat of someone who was not irritated by life in New York City at all. "Come in," he called, hoping it was something important.
Didn't seem so. It was P, the head of the unit's medical branch. He wasn't late for his annual physical, which meant it was likely to be a social call, and he was feeling far from sociable. P half-ran up to his desk and leaned over it, liquid brown eyes full of excitement, the tails of her neckscarf dancing in patterns dictated by the slowly-turning fan on the ceiling. She was waving two bits of pink paper at him, grinning. "Snake! Look what O gave me!"
"Huh?" he replied, curious. Whatever it was, it was likely to be either wonderful or terrible, and would certainly be deeply...English. O was B's deputy. He was a foreigner, new to the unit - though Jack had worked with him several times back when O had been MI6's liason with the CIA. The old man was fiercly patriotic towards his homeland but when B had asked him to work under her, he had left Her Majesty's Secret Service without hesitation or regret.
Jack could sense the reason why. It was a quiet, dutiful fervor that B inspired in all of them.
"He got me two tickets to a movie premiere tomorrow!" Jack nodded, slightly and slowly. Once P began talking about movies, it was difficult to get her to stop. "He saw it in the UK months ago and says it's really good. It's called From Russia With Love and it's about a spy and a beautiful defector who he meets in Istanbul while he's looking for a cryptography machine and he's got this -"
Mercifully, the phone rang. Jack reached for the black handset, feeling like he'd be thrilled if it were something as mundane as S needing him to test a new gadget or O badgering for a translation of the wiretap tape from the Russian embassy, or even his secretary asking if he needed another coffee (yes, yes, he did). He spent a dull-witted New York moment staring at his desk, and then grabbed the red handset; the direct line to B, the phone that hadn't rung in weeks.
He could take a knife and cut out the city, pare away the excess flesh and tear out the neon lights and the movies, and reduce his life to that thin cord that connected him to B's office. Nothing else really mattered.
P had fallen silent. B's voice in his ear was cool and steady, betraying nothing except haste. "Come to my office immediately." The line went dead before he could even voice an affirmative.
He watched P's face as he set it back in its cradle, and saw a mingling of curiosity and frustration, but she had a way of recovering from frustrations quickly. "...So you need to come see it with me," she finished smoothly.
He stood up, brushing past her as he walked, and said, "I'll let you know if I can make it." He shut the door of his office, gave a nod to the secretary outside, and felt like he was shutting out the dreary chaos of the grey springtime, of New York's anatomy, in there with the doctor. He walked to the elevator with a spring in his step and pushed the button for B's floor.
It only occurred to him as he was opening B's door that P had, to all intents, asked him on a date. That was...kind-of weird. He wasn't that kind of spy, and the only woman in his life was his boss.
*
Double-0-Snake stood by the doorway and saluted until she nodded him into a seat.
B's centre of operations was neat as a pin and smelt of tobacco and old leather. The blinds were tightly drawn, making it comfortingly shady but for the small desk lamp that tilted just slightly away from her face; her hair looked washed-out, the yellow of fading paper. Among the shadows of the room Jack could see a dozen places where an infiltrator could hide, but knew of none that would dare (and he was more daring than any). B kept her gun in full view, right next to the inkpot.
She was sat in a worn chair behind a huge mahogany desk that was completely cluttered with maps, memos and disassembled weapon parts, save for a mere eight-by-eight-inch square by her elbow. In the centre of that square were nestled a green-glass ashtray and a coffee mug proudly decorated with a chipped, splotchy American flag.
B grabbed it and took a sip, then set it down and cleared her throat. Snake's eyes widened, because she never did that.
"Jack, I have a mission for you." The words made the blood in his veins start to sing, but her tone, her eyes, spelt out complications. "It's not your usual type of work but it is something that no one else in the unit can do."
He nodded, silent, waiting for her to say something to make him understand.
"There's a Russian agent come to sniff around New York. His codename is Ocelot and he's a former defector, and we rate him as highly dangerous. The signal intelligence branch have intercepted a message he sent to another enemy agent we've been watching for some time, planning a public rendezvous for the night of April 8th." That was tomorrow. "We've detained the other interloper, and we want you to go and meet Ocelot in his place."
"You want me to kill him?"
"No," she said, a little forcefully. "Your mission will be make contact with Ocelot and to encourage him to...return to the fold."
Jack blinked slowly. Encourage his enemy to...? "Why me? Why can't you just bribe him or threaten him into -"
She pressed her lips into a flat line. "He doesn't work that way. If he comes over, it will have to be because he wants to do it, not because someone else has made him. He needs to make the choice for himself."
"...So you want me to make him feel like it's all his own idea?"
"No. We want you to make him want to defect. He belongs here, and I know you can show him that. Jack -" For a second her ever-calm eyes were afire with urgency. "- He and you are both men of a new age. There's no one else here who could mean anything to him." Not even you?, he thought, watching her eyes; in the poor light they were all pupil, sunk into her face like waiting mines. "Any more questions?" she asked, in a voice that said she hadn't liked the first one. She certainly wouldn't like the first one he thought of; why do you need this guy?
Stick with relevant information. "Who is it I have to impersonate?"
"You don't. Ocelot's never met the man before and only knows the man by his codename - EVA. They've communicated very little. They have a pass-phrase; he'll say "'Who are the Patriots?' and you must respond 'La-li-lu-le-lo.'."
He nodded, committing the strange words to memory. B pushed a map across the desk; she'd drawn an ominous black X at a point where two streets met. "That's where he'll be expecting you at 2030 tomorrow. Before you go, you should probably read this -" She shoved a dossier, a thick one with a buff-colored cover, in his direction. "Anything else?" He lifted the file, and found it heavy enough to promise a few answers. He didn't say anything, just got out of his chair and saluted again.
"Dismissed," she said, looking away and taking her pen in her hand.
*
There was no name on the front of the file. A GRU rank and codeword was apparently sufficient to denote his target's identity: MAJOR OCELOT.
It was three inches thick. That would not have struck Jack as unusual were it not for one detail on the first page; the man's DOB was 06/06/44. So he was nineteen, almost twenty, and had somehow amassed an espionage resume that would have been hefty for a man twice his age.
He'd begun his career at the age of fifteen, Jack read - a darling of the NSA. There was no mention of how they had found him, but it seemed natural enough that a teenage genius who spoke fluent Russian should find himself in their hands; perhaps they had plucked him from the youth chess circuits? In any case, his record there was flawless. Over the course of eighteen months he established himself as a promising cryptographer and a trusted member of America's intelligence community - and then he vanished without a trace during a mission in Germany, resurfacing months later on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
To coolly defect, without sending any warning signals beforehand, was daring enough at any age. It had happened in the December of 1960; Major Ocelot had been sixteen years old.
Jack pored over the reports of the subsequent investigation until past six o'clock, when his attention was finally roused by the the clatter of neat footsteps heading for the elevator as the secretaries all left for the night. He stuffed the file in his briefcase, straightened his tie, and waited for the sounds to die down before heading home himself. He stood at the back of the elevator, ignoring the two young women who walked in after him and talked over each other about their love-lives. He gave the security staff at the exit the same empty glower he gave them every night, his strides calm and unrushed. He knew he shouldn't be taking that file out of the building with him. That was a henious security breach. But Jack was too engrossed to stop reading it.
He stepped out into the street, and heard the two girls just ahead of him still yapping about the guys they were dating and the restaurants and the movies they were expecting to be treated to the next night. "That new British one about the spy," one of them said. "It looks so glamorous -"
He turned down a sidestreet just to get away from them. It was raining slightly and the steps down to the subway were dotted with puddles and morsels of sodden trash.
When Jack got back to his apartment in Upper Manhattan he made himself a quick meal of thinly-sliced potatoes and carefully undercooked veal and ate it slowly as he read between the lines of the documents, looking for a reason why the USSR had not extracted everything the defector knew and then had him summarily shot. The Russians were paranoid enough, and they'd done it before - it was more than just an idle tale to prevent defection. Russia wasn't short of brilliant young bilinguals. For Major Ocelot to still be alive, never mind trusted to be assigned on sensitive international missions, there must be some special reason that they prized him.
He found it in some notes sent by a double agent on the occassion of the man's promotion to an elite GRU squad. Departmental gossip had it that he was the son of a hero of the Allied intelligence effort in WW2. There was nothing more specific, only the name of an infiltrator unit - 'The Cobras' - that he'd never heard of before.
If that was enough to impress the Russian GRU, he should have heard of it, but he had not. Classified, perhaps, on some level far above Jack's rank.
He remembered B's face as she'd asked him to bring this prodigy back to America's fold. The pieces fit somehow - he knew it - but the key to the mystery was somewhere out of his reach. When he slept that night he dreamed about falling into some dark place and swimming towards it - looking for the answers, for a sharp face he knew only from grainy black-and-white photographs - but he awoke with no more enlightenment than he'd had the night before.
He arrived early that morning, and the first thing he did was send a one-word memo to the head of Medical: Sorry.
A word, a lie.
*
At 0915 his secretary brought him a note from B, asking for his assessment of the target. Jack hadn't a damn clue what to say. B knew him better than anyone else. She needed this done and she said he could do it. She'd never appreciated bravado or false confidence, but nor did she tolerate failure.
Interesting, he wrote in reply. Working on a method. He didn't ask any questions, as he knew that everything she wanted him to know would be somewhere in the file, and the one thing he wanted to know - why me? Why not you? - would not be answered. He skimmed over pages about the successes of the Ocelot Unit - assassinations, kidnappings, counter-espionage missions. Impressive, but the reports were focused on the unit as a whole, where Jack was only interested in one man.
Another promotion. Dead man's shoes. A frequent occurence in any military unit, but... There were photographs of the newly-minted GRU captain, posing with his unit beneath a drooping hammer-and-sickle; his face was solemn, but set with youthful arrogance. Would this man kill for his own advancement?
Jack flipped back to the biography on the front page of the file, wanting to know what colour Ocelot's eyes were.
He skipped over a wodge of further reports - just rumours about Ocelot's standing with the GRU's rivals, the KGB, unimportant - looking for more photographs. Anything recent. Young men changed. A profile on a parade ground, the previous spring. There was one from mere months ago - a candid and unposed shot that might have been taken in Berlin - in which Ocelot was standing by two members of his unit and scowling while his comrades laughed.
Out of step with the East. On the borderline. Jack thought of how the great savannah cats waited until one beast went astray from its herd, and then preyed upon it. He flipped from photograph to photograph, watching a slight cryptographer become a striding killer.
He felt hungry instincts engaging, as if he were becoming a predator himself.
Ocelot wasn't a mere target; Jack wasn't going to accomplish his task by means of martial skills or stealthiness. Nor was he a prized item that Jack had to procure for the CIA. This was spirit against spirit, something that B had known would have to engage the both of them fully - the task of making this man feel American again. Ocelot was a mission.
Snake felt fiercely loyal to this mission; possessive of it. But what to do with it? He mentally ran over the text looking for Ocelot's weaknesses, and found, bar his tangible arrogance, none. Was there a profile on his habits, his vices? There was, and it was distressingly thin; Ocelot didn't even smoke or drink. Or womanise - there was no list of girlfriends and mistresses. How could Snake bait a prey that didn't need anything - ?
All beasts had needs. If Ocelot didn't have any conventional bad habits, there must be unconventional ones he was indulging away from prying eyes. Snake turned a page and found another very short list; Known Peculiarities.
So Ocelot had abnormally high manual dexterity, a fascination with gambling - though never for cash - and he loved spaghetti westerns. How was that going to help Jack complete his mission?
- He stared at the map that B had handed him, and grabbed the street guide he kept in his desk drawer. He disliked New York, yes, disliked it because it was new territory for him and that made him a less effective hunter. So what kind of meeting place had Ocelot selected? He ran his finger down the streets, looking for the point where, on the other map, B had drawn a bold X on a street corner. What clue would be hidden in Ocelot's choice of street-corner cafe, used bookstore, mob hideout?
He found the right point in the guide. Ocelot was staging this tete-a-tete in a movie theatre.
Maybe Snake was getting somewhere after all.
TBC