The Spy Who Made Everyone Cold
It's Snidey Sarah's turn now - serves her right for being charmless and possibly the character possessing the least chemistry with a character played by Richard Armitage...
As Sarah Caulfield grew up, she was always a Daddy’s girl; of choice and of necessity, as it became rapidly obvious that her mother was utterly repulsed by her. That pale, expressionless face reminded Mrs Caulfield of something embalmed and she was highly perturbed by the thoughts and motivations that she was convinced circulated behind eyes as cold as the Siberian tundra and just as unattractive. The child had no redeeming qualities that she could see, unless you counted observational skills that could put a bird of prey to shame and an uncanny ability to recall events in painfully precise detail.
It was Sarah’s painfully precise revelation to Daddy that she’d seen Mommy kissing Someone Else that led him to think that she had Potential. He worked for the CIA and Mommy’s little indiscretions had passed him by: unsurprisingly, as his only real interests were work and the chilly child he had fathered. Mommy hadn’t fooled Snooping Sarah, though. Nothing passed her by: the slightest suspicion of anything untoward had her displaying all the tenacity of a fevered ferret, though none of the animation.
Daddy thought it amusing to encourage her in her ambition to be the World’s Most Outstanding Female Spy Ever! and to get definitive proof of his wife’s infidelity as a bonus. This did result in several embarrassing examples of Sarah’s tumbling from the wardrobes or cupboards within which she had secreted herself in order to accumulate evidence, yet they were as nothing when compared with the memorable occasion on which she hid herself inside the freezer compartment of their huge fridge freezer combination, the contents of which could have fed the entire populace of Ethiopia for a month, in order to eavesdrop on Mommy’s phone conversation with her latest squeeze. Her mother during the course of the call, observed her sharp beak of a nose through the small gap created by leaving the door open a fraction, and promptly slammed it shut. On the grounds that it must be faulty, she ensured that it stayed shut by application of a heavy chair propped against it.
Alas for Mrs Caulfield, however, Sarah merely lowered her metabolic rate in the manner of the cold-blooded representatives of the animal world that she so closely resembled and waited calmly for Cook to open the freezer in order to extract something for dinner. She emerged, a little torpid and very slightly red around the nostrils, stepped calmly over Cook who had slumped ungracefully to the floor, and departed to fill Daddy in on all the details. Her mother had to marvel at her tolerance for sub-zero temperatures and then progress to fantasies of melting the colourless little witch over a slow fire. Fantasies they remained, however, as she promptly became the ex-Mrs Caulfield and to her eternal relief, had no reason to have further contact with her icy offspring.
The child had no friends, although on occasion one or other of the vapid nannies Caulfield hired to replace his wife would invite the neighbourhood children to play in order to relieve herself of the burden of spending time in the company of her charge. These forays into normality were always doomed to failure from the outset. Nobody merited Sarah’s attention other than as practice partners on whom to hone her martial arts skills or as recipients of her latest interrogation techniques. Why, the riff-raff with which she was expected to associate! She gazed frostily down her patrician nose at them, uncaring of the fact that, as rich kids familiar with the ski resorts of Europe, they had nicknamed her Cresta to reflect the qualities of her proboscis: sharp, hard and decidedly icy. Those qualities could actually be applied to her whole demeanour, emphasised by a back-breakingly erect stance and the fact that she had read somewhere that smiling, laughing and frowning caused wrinkles in later life and so had resolved never to do any of those things.
Of course she joined the CIA, just like Daddy, and of course, she rose quickly through its ranks. Her self-containment, competence and gimlet eyed intelligence were admired, while her ability to turn any room into a refrigerator within thirty seconds was much marvelled at, though not admired. And so she went on, acquiring kudos but no friends. Male colleagues feared that any erotic contact would result in frostbite in personal places and the female ones simply closed ranks and only acknowledged her existence when saying loudly within her hearing that they thought she was becoming a little wrinkly and saggy and wasn’t it a shame?
The horror of this almost caused Sarah to frown, ever so slightly. The wonders of Botox beckoned. Sarah wasn’t going to let all those years of banishing any emotion or expression from her face go to waste. She would submit to the needle! Sarah wanted always to look her best and she liked to be prepared: after all, the road to the absolute top might require a little compromise on her part and a heroic effort by a brave man without fear of frozen wastes.
However, her next promotion required neither compromise nor an Antarctic explorer. Her colleagues were mightily relieved to discover that she’d been posted to London: wrapping themselves up in thick sweaters in the height of summer had made them look more than a little silly, but it was either that or hypothermia after prolonged contact. The leaving party was marked by ceremonial dumping of knitwear and profound enthusiasm from the guests and a palpable and pronounced bewilderment from the subject of the celebrations.
Her prospective workmates in London weren’t quite so thrilled. They’d had the lowdown on the Frostbot. A strategy was put in place to keep her in the field at every available opportunity and if she had been the slightest bit interested in what they felt or thought, she might have wondered why every office and corridor was completely devoid of human life when she did make an appearance. Her boss, Samuel Walker, when circumstances rendered it unavoidable, insisted on meeting her in a stiflingly hot coffee shop around the corner and even then he usually wore a scarf.
‘Are you not a little overheated in that?’ she enquired politely.
‘Um,’ he prevaricated, unwilling to stick the knife in so soon into their working relationship. ‘I find that I feel the cold more here than I ever did at home. Maybe it’s the dampness of the Brit Autumn that’s getting to me.’
‘It’s August!’ she snapped back, confirmed in her opinion of him as a congenital idiot. The weather might be crappy, but August in Britain was usually classified as a summer month and even at its worst, definitely did not merit the sporting of thick, woolly neck accessories.
She despised him, of course. One of those Old School types who liked to do everything by the book and operate within honourable, even if sometimes unorthodox, parameters - just like his Brit counterpart, Hairy Pearce. He was also annoyingly fit and well and middle-aged despite his over-sensitivity to temperature; retirement would not beckon for him any time soon and Sarah saw him as the roadblock under the greasy pole that she wished to climb. Hence her involvement with Nightingale, the group which had infiltrated the upper echelons of government, security, finance and all the areas of note in every major nation’s infrastructure. A new world order would begin, and she, Sarah Caulfield, the World’s Most Outstanding Female Spy Ever!, would be at the forefront.
She had not, however, taken her links with MI5 into consideration. Her liaison there was a challenge. For one thing, he was taller than she - a rare occurrence. Infuriatingly, he carried his height off with considerably more grace than she had ever managed. She was in need of diversion; Britain was such a little place and there were worse things in life than diverting oneself with a man that even she could recognise as being the epitome of cliché - tall, dark and handsome. Of course, things could pan out as they always did: either a panicked refusal and swift backing away or a single night of what passed for Sarah’s passion followed by a speedy exit stage left and an overwhelming desire for hot coffee and thermal blankets.
However, she would pursue this. She needed to intimidate this man and prove her superiority, something she usually did with a hard gaze from a lofty height. That obviously wouldn’t work here. She would bring him to submission by exploiting that male part which she always regarded as the gender’s biggest weakness and if she had to act the part of a normal human creature in order to achieve it, well so be it. She was more than up to that particular challenge.
Lucas North for his part had been locked away in a Russian prison for eight years and spurned by his ex-wife on his return. His resultant issues in forming relationships, particularly close ones and particularly ones with women, left him both vulnerable and open to exploitation. He was in turn astounded, shocked and flattered when his CIA liaison began taking an interest in more than official business. She was attractive enough if he overlooked the shivering generated by her presence. He was, without doubt, able to cope with it: Russian winters were, after all, ferocious affairs.
Lucas consequently worked hard at the relationship. He convinced himself that she had made him feel again even though what he usually felt was cold, unsettled and inadequate. He realised that his confidence in his abilities and his judgement was being compromised, but he couldn’t give her up. It was particularly disconcerting, though, to admit to his singular failure to elicit any overt passion from her, despite employing to the full the impact of his blue eyes, muscular frame, long legs, deep chocolate voice and winning half-smile. Sarah’s uncompromising and expressionless composure, even in what he would consider to be pivotal moments, made him wonder whether she were a Vulcan who had had her ears cropped or whether she were suffering from a unique form of facial paralysis. He began to weary of the bruising caused by sleeping next to a rigid assortment of sharp, bony outcrops. He was no expert on American dialects yet he wondered how much longer his ears could withstand the assault of the accent from Everywhere and Nowhere - always delivered with an aesthetically disastrous nasal twang that reminded him of someone packed to the gills with noxious and infected catarrh.
Still, he had to liaise and so he persevered. He also had nothing better on offer.
‘I love you so much,’ she whispered with all the enthusiasm of a week-dead haddock - though Lucas had to admit, she smelled slightly better. The comparison reminded him of the dreams that had plagued him of late - of lying helpless whilst being sucked to death by scores of fishy lips. He shrugged. At least it made a change from his usual sweet reminiscences about Russia.
Despite the drawbacks, he was being relentlessly pulled in by some hidden charisma she had to possess - a charisma so thoroughly hidden, however, that he could in no way identify it. He’d never had a predilection for cold-blooded animals nor corpses before. Sometimes her actions were inexplicable and he had struggled to defend some of them to his colleagues, whom he knew disliked her. Harry, because of his despair at being turned into the Hairy One, Ros, who as an adolescent, never took to those stories about a certain teenage American mystery solver called Nancy and Ruth, because Harry most certainly was not hairy.
More importantly, though, they now distrusted her. Sarah, the Supercilious Superspy, had become, with further alliteration, Suspicious. Sam Walker had taken a long drop off the balcony of the CIA watching station and despite not being there, Sarah had somehow contrived to use her mobile phone within a few metres of the plummet, at the precise time that he was plummeting. Even Lucas, biased as he was, found those points a little problematic to reconcile.
‘I’m sorry,’ both Harry and Ruth commented, as the latter set out incontrovertible proof of her deception. When challenged by the man she had so recently purported to love, Sarah turned nasty, albeit in a controlled, wooden way, and in her normal, unemotional manner threatened to splatter the contents of his cranium across the newly decorated walls of his ultra chic, ultra ugly flat. The fact that she ultimately pulled back from redistributing his facial furniture led to Lucas’s choosing hope over experience in thinking that perhaps his charm offensive had worked on some minor level. Charm offensives, however, were not in Ros’s vocabulary: after associating Sarah not only with Walker’s death but also with the infamous and deadly Nightingale, she determined that the final chapter had come for Nancy Drew. She resolved to finish it herself, as she remained unconvinced that when push came to shove, Lucas could find it within himself to shove hard enough. Besides, Sarah had once spoken to Ros about payback. She’d discover what payback meant in the hands of an expert.
Sarah almost made it away. She may have been ice-cold, calculating, devious and disloyal but those negative attributes also gave her the positive one of being no fool. The jig was up and it was time for her to jigger off. The helicopter waited, its rotors scything through the air. A few yards and she would be ensconced inside, lowering the temperature by umpteen degrees but en route to safety, a new identity and another finger in another pie. After all, a spy of her calibre only came along once in a lifetime: Nightingale would find a new task for her to complete and this unfortunate episode would be forgotten. In some tiny atom of her frigid being, the memory of Lucas North would be filed away; she had responded in her limited way to the best male totty MI5 had to offer, but as he couldn’t offer her the power and prestige dangled before her by Nightingale, he would just have to join the ranks of the other insignificances in her life. She was destined for better things.
Except that the interfering bitch Myers was approaching the chopper at speed, set on cutting her off. The effrontery of this jumped up Limey Loser attempting to thwart the ambitions of the World’s Most Outstanding Female Spy Ever! The fact that Myers was yet still too far away to prevent her escape caused her some satisfaction and she drew herself up even straighter, if that were possible. She believed that it made her appearance statuesque: the fact that lesser mortals thought less about her stance and more about who’d shoved the ramrod up her fundament didn’t impact upon her at all.
With dignity, but also with alacrity, she made for the helicopter. Just a few feet now! She even slowed a little, the more to emphasise to Myers that she was the one in control here. Concentrating on her posture, she forgot completely about her position as she neared the aircraft. Myers was shouting something, obviously something her small mind considered to be of importance. She, Sarah Caulfield, had outwitted both the CIA and MI5 and as added satisfaction, had put the boot into that blonde bitch currently gesticulating and pointing furiously at her. Sarah would have laughed aloud if the Botox had allowed her to do so, but had to content herself with a slight outward twitch of the lips.
A contemptuous and dismissive wave accompanied the twitch and Sarah moved forward, holding the MI5 officer’s sightline and treating her to the best sneer her frozen facial muscles could produce. Alas for Sarah, that was the exact second at which she walked straight into the tail rotor of the helicopter. A few inches lower and she’d have passed safely beneath, but her habitual gait and a reluctance to affect even the slightest stoop in front of the hated Myers, put her on an inexorable collision course with several tons of fast spinning metal.
An amazingly clean partition resulted. The blade passed neatly through the scrawny neck before it and Ros watched, incredulous, as the head that had stored such depths of treachery and heights of ambition sailed away from the body with surprising grace and considerable force, the pallid face registering but momentary shock before passing from view. The body fell to the ground, a scarlet fountain marking its descent, and lay, a rigid stain on the landscape, but Ros paid it no heed. She’d observed the trajectory of the head and assuming that The Company would prefer the return of its employee with all parts in the bag, followed its general direction. A twanging noise revealed the exact location; it proved easy enough to pinpoint. The head was still shuddering, impaled tightly in a tree trunk by its nose. Ros noticed with bemusement that the trunk was gradually frosting over, radiating outwards from the point of impact. She unceremoniously grasped a handful of hair, pulled the head back slightly in order to view the face more easily and thought regretfully that she’d have liked the opportunity to rearrange its features in just the way that the helicopter had done.
So, Sarah Caulfield, her ambitions unrealised, was no more. Ros had disagreed fundamentally with the American’s opinion of herself but, as she saw the cold, now dead eyes looking down that tree-encrusted nose as if staring at a member of the lower orders, she had to acknowledge that, though Sarah Caulfield would never now be the World’s Most Outstanding Female Spy Ever!, in death she’d certainly pass muster as the World’s Most Supercilious one.