Primeval fic: Exception to the Rule (Lester/Ryan) Part 1/4
Title: Exception to the rule
Characters: Lester/Ryan, Helen, OC
Rating: Eventually NC-17, this part PG13
Word count: 2,450 (Total 13,850)
Summary: Lester looked across sharply. “Don’t for one minute think I approve of this. Helen Cutter is going to disappear permanently whether the ARC gets involved or not. The one thing I can do is to ensure that whoever does the job does it quickly and professionally.”
AN: This was intended as a thank you to Fififolle for all beta work over the past year. In the event I wrote it and then pretty much begged her to beta again. So I still owe you. Thank you for the pairing - they rock! - and the much-needed nitpicking. Any mistakes left in the text belong to me. Anyone who knows anything about guns and forensics will have to do some wincing and hand-waving.
Trope Bingo: Fake Relationship.
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EXCEPTION TO THE RULE
Ryan distrusted Suits. In his experience they came in two types - the aloof, arrogant Playing Fields of Eton version, still convinced that Her Majesty knew best and mourning the non-existent glory days of colonialism, and the intelligent rat version, which was the more dangerous, combining as it did a dangerous mixture of cunning and cynicism.
Either variety was as likely to get you killed.
James Lester was definitely a Suit and one, moreover, who belonged in the second category. Although, to be fair, the image he projected just now was more over-heated dormouse than verminous plague carrier. Sweat beaded Lester’s upper lip and his pushed-back hair was damp. He lay on their bed, eyes closed as the air conditioner maxed out, battling to cool the room from the mid-day heat spilling through the open balcony doors.
Yes, their bed. His and Lester’s.
Ryan moved to the balcony and surveyed his surroundings. This was unexpected luxury. Of course, the job dictated the terrain but he’d stayed in enough dirt-infested tents to fully enjoy five-star pampering on the Cote d’Azur when it came his way. He pulled up a wicker chair and settled back to enjoy the uninterrupted view of the Mediterranean and the wide sweep of the Bay of Angels.
An appropriate enough setting from which to dispatch a woman into the hereafter.
Ryan didn’t know quite what he had expected when Lester had asked if he would be willing to take part in an undercover operation. He wasn’t even sure why he had agreed before knowing the full ins and outs. Perhaps because Lester had asked, rather than just assigned the mission to him, and because it was obviously a mission about which Lester himself had serious doubts. Not that Lester would ever have expressed it that way but when you knew someone, worked with them, you watched their back. You learned their ‘tells’. Lester was uncomfortable.
And when he explained the mission Ryan could see exactly why.
Lester had motioned him to a chair in his office and shut the door before sitting down at his desk. Once there, he pulled out the yellow box file that lodged the Special Forces’ expenses, flicking it open so that anyone glancing through the windows would assume that’s what he was discussing with Ryan, and then proceeded to ignore it.
Ryan took the cue, assumed the slightly bored expression Lester’s economic lectures usually inspired, and waited to hear the real reason for this meeting. The fact that Lester was clearly working up to the telling was worrying in itself.
“The matter we spoke about last week,” began Lester, jabbing a forefinger randomly at the charge sheet for April. “I want you know that you can back out now with no repercussions or reproaches.”
Ryan shifted slightly in his seat and yawned, as if the subject was indeed the scandalous amount of teabags his men seemed to get through. “I agreed then and I agree now. You would be ordering rather than asking if it wasn’t major. Now, are you going to tell me exactly what secret business this is I’ve agreed to take part in or shall I just sit here for a while longer and pretend that I care about this list of expenses?”
Lester looked, if possible, both relieved and more stressed than a moment earlier. He pinched the bridge of his nose.
“We’re going to assassinate Helen Cutter
“Like hell we are!” The denial was instinctive. Ryan raised his gaze from the paperwork to meet Lester’s glance. There was no humour whatsoever in the other man’s face. Whatever Ryan had expected it hadn’t been this.
“Hell,” he said again, softer this time. No wonder Lester was jumpy.
“That seems the most likely destination,” agreed Lester, watching him closely.
Ryan ignored the jibe. He knew what the answer would be but all the same he had to check. “You’re really not joking, are you?”
“Not one little bit.”
After the initial shocked reaction Ryan had demanded more details and Lester had supplied them as far as he was able, briefly, and without the usual sarcasm undercutting his words.
“Helen Cutter has moved on to new romantic pastures. Unfortunately, the pasture she’s grazing on is a Russian known as Anatoly Babanin.” He paused and turned to a new page of figures. Ryan gave a brief nod to indicate he was following. “I see you recognise the name. So you’ll understand that Helen has managed to ruffle more feathers than her ex-husband’s and some of those feathers belong to men in influential positions who don’t like being ruffled. Not one little bit. The upshot is she’s been deemed a political liability and is going to be ‘taken out’ as the polite euphemism goes.”
Ryan had heard vaguely of Babanin. He was one of the select few that had come out of the wreckage of the Soviet Union not just rich but super-rich. Rumour had it the man had made his first million through extortion and arms dealing, but nothing had ever been proven and, although the stories persisted, Babanin was savvy enough to invest later millions in legitimate businesses around the world. Around Ryan’s own age, Babanin had a reputation for being something of a playboy with a liking for flash cars and expensive women. Helen was not standard girlfriend material for such a man but her involvement didn’t exactly surprise Ryan either. The woman was a trouble magnet.
“Why us?” asked Ryan when all this was explained. Ugly as the set up was he didn’t question it for a moment. People disappeared. That didn’t mean he wanted anything to do with it.
Lester looked across sharply. “Don’t for one minute think I approve of this. Helen Cutter is going to disappear permanently whether the ARC gets involved or not. The one thing I can do is to ensure that whoever does the job does it quickly and professionally.”
Ryan grunted, “That’s not an answer. There are plenty of people who can give you quick and professional.”
“And personal,” added Lester. “Whatever I think of Helen Cutter we owe her husband that.”
Ryan did not respond. He’d killed a number of men, some no doubt better people than himself, but never a woman and never in a non-combat situation. The very idea was revolting. His instinct was to walk away, fast and far, and to let Helen take her chances elsewhere even if her chances were zero. This was, as Lester freely admitted, nothing to do with the ARC and they were only involved via circumstance.
Furthermore, he understood enough about the way these things operated to know that Lester must have really stuck his neck out and called in every favour he could think of to get this opportunity. If you could call this ridiculous sentimental gesture for a woman who would never know about it, and for a man who never forgive them, any sort of opportunity. It was a fool’s errand at best and Lester was asking Ryan to be the fool.
“Still with me?” asked Lester. The question was genuine, in both senses.
Ryan knew that whatever Lester had said earlier about not backtracking once he was committed the other man would not hold him to his word if he wanted out. Helen’s fate had been decreed. The only question was who was going to pull the trigger. He didn’t want to do it. But Lester was right in that respect. A death should mean something.
Ryan ran his finger down the line of numbers and stopped at the final entry. It was double underlined. He traced the numbers lightly before dropping his hand back in his lap.
“Still with you,” he said.
The folder shut with a sharp click indicating as clearly as words that their interview was over. Ryan stood up slowly. There was a lot more to say but just now Ryan wanted to get out of this office and get outside and breathe some fresh air. Lester watched him, face unreadable. As Ryan turned to go the other man spoke, a seemingly offhand comment.
“She got away from us once before.”
So that was it.
Ryan didn’t turn around and he didn’t bother to shut the door as he left.
*
Ryan narrowed his eyes against the sun causing the white granite paving to merge into the blue of the sea in an Impressionistic blur. He needed his shades but they were inside and he didn’t want to go back and risk waking Lester up. He wanted to be alone and to think. He wasn’t a particularly imaginative man, or an impulsive one, but he was here largely on impulse and now his imagination was working on unwelcome overtime.
Ryan had always had a somewhat uneasy relationship with Nick Cutter. Something about Cutter’s need to be always right, alongside his equally infuriating habit of nearly always actually being right, did not make for easy companionship. Add to that the fact that Ryan had no real interest in the academic puzzles and theoretical possibilities that so excited the field team and there wasn’t much common ground. He’d left school after A-levels and gone straight into the army. He saw - quite rightly, he believed - creature incursions in terms of threat to civilian lives rather than as displaced innocents to be herded back to the safety of their own time. The two men had a kind of grudging respect but it wasn’t friendship. He’d buy Cutter a pint if they met at the pub but Ryan wouldn’t have been the one to invite Cutter there in the first place.
Now Ryan was going to kill Cutter’s wife. Ex-wife, but the point still stood. He hoped Cutter would never find out but somehow he was going to have to face the guy day-in and day-out knowing what he had done. Fucking Suits.
And here he was pretending to be in a long-term relationship with one.
A red-logoed plane cut across the perfect sky banking in to land at the airport a few kilometres away. At ground level no one looked up or paid any attention to the familiar sight. Planes, both commercial and private, landed and took off approximately every twenty minutes. The noise and the constant sluggish flow of traffic reminded him of London. The sooner they got the job done, the sooner they could go home. The surroundings may be opulent but as far as Ryan was concerned this was still hostile territory. It wouldn’t do to forget that.
Or to get too involved.
He went back to the bedroom. Lester had fallen asleep, his chest rising and falling in slow even breaths. He slept neatly, economically, with limbs tucked in and contained to one side of the king-size bed. Ryan smiled. What else? Even in sleep his companion was giving nothing away. For lack of something better to do he lay down on the mattress beside Lester and shut his eyes. There would be work to do later.
*
Preparation had taken some weeks from the initial conversations with Lester - setting a time and place for Helen’s demise was not as simple as it sounded, but then in Ryan’s experience of covert operations these things never were. Babanin chose his men carefully, and although he was predictable in many things geographical location was not one of them. Like many of the super-rich the Russian spent his time flitting between different cities and resorts according to fashion and whim.
Ryan had done some research on Babanin and found him even shadier than rumours suggested. Alongside the extortion there was also a circumstantial trail of dead bodies where political or business associates had crossed a line or made the ‘wrong’ decision and had later suffered a convenient accident. If it had been Anatoly Babanin that Ryan had been commissioned to assassinate he thought he could do it without too many regrets. The world might be a better place.
The puzzle was what Helen could possibly see in such a man. He was good looking enough, something like a coarser version of Stephen Hart, but entirely uneducated. It must be power, he decided. That and money were the ultimate aphrodisiacs. And then, of course, Helen had never had anything that actually approached a moral compass. This was a woman who’d let her husband think she was dead for eight years. She probably didn’t give a damn what Babanin did in his spare time as long as it didn’t personally inconvenience her.
Of course, that was about to change, thought Ryan with grim humour, death being the ultimate in personal inconvenience.
Meanwhile the days passed as they always did with anomaly alarms to be followed up, creatures to be contained, bystanders to be protected, and reports to be written.
During the enforced waiting period Ryan noticed Lester becoming increasingly jumpy. That worried him slightly although he put it down to Lester preferring to orchestrate rather than wait on events. But still.
Lester had always been tetchy, to put it nicely, but now he could barely utter a word without causing offence to his subordinates who were constantly being reprimanded for some transgression or other. The notable exception was Lester’s assistant, Lorraine, who seemed to have the ability to simply smile and shrug and walk away. But then nothing ever seemed to faze Lorraine. Whatever her secret was she should bottle and sell it, thought Ryan, there would certainly be a market.
Ryan was just glad that his duties as Special Forces manager kept him largely out of Lester’s way. In work, that is, outside work he seemed to be spending most of his free time with the man.
Lester and Ryan did not interact any more than usual.
Tom and James were dating.
*
The assumed relationship scenario had not been mentioned at the time of Lester’s original request. It was thrown in somewhere in the planning stages and Lester simply presented it as a fait accompli, a necessary deception for the job in hand. At the time Ryan was not sure which part had outraged him more: the idea of James Lester as a romantic partner, or the implication that he, Ryan, was not to be trusted and would need watching.
The first aspect had been surprisingly easy to come to terms with. If you could overlook the fact that Lester was, generally-speaking, an officious prick and a devious bastard, he was also funny, perceptive, and surprisingly good company.
Outside work Lester was every bit as pernickety as he was in office hours but either Ryan was becoming immune or he was learning to see through the act.
The second aspect still rankled.
*
Part Two