The sight of Nathaniel and Liam running past the door knocked the wind out of Alexa the second time that night.  As she got to her feet, her knees threatening to buckle beneath her, Alexa ran to the door.  It was impossible, she thought, even though she knew she’d heard his voice just minutes earlier.

But hearing a familiar voice wasn’t the same as seeing a ghost run past the door, seconds after one shoots a man about to kill you.  Alexa watched them disappear through the back door of the deserted office building, calling after them.

Outside, Nathaniel kept going but Liam stopped, having heard Alexa call out his name.  He was scared and confused.  He’d just left his father back in the room by himself to fight the bad man with the gun, he thought.  

Just then, the door opened and Alexa emerged.  Liam ran towards her, clinging to her as best he could, but Alexa seemed as if she hadn’t heard him.  She looked towards the fading darkness after Nathaniel.  

As if snapping back to the present, Alexa looked at Liam and grabbed him by the shoulders.  “You stay right here, Liam,” she whispered.  “And don’t move till I come back.”

“But mummy--” Liam protested but Alexa just looked at him, her eyes blazing with anger.  

“Just stay right here, Liam,” she whispered again, her voice suddenly softening as Liam’s eyes filled with tears.  The boy was trembling.  “I’ll be back, I promise.”  

She planted a kiss on his forehead and without turning to look at him again, ran after Nathaniel.

>>><<<

Harry saw Nathaniel running ahead of him, heading towards the abandoned refinery, the masterpieces spray painted against the steel and metal surfaces cast in a psychedelic vision from yesteryear by the rising of the sun.  Nathaniel’s tall form was unmistakable, Harry thought, even after all these years.  He was still as wiry as ever.  And though Nathaniel’s thick blonde hair had been replaced with gray, Harry would never have mistaken him anywhere.

Nathaniel George was indeed alive.

As Harry rounded the corner of the main building, he saw Alexa hunched over Liam.  But before he could call out her name, she turned and ran after Nathaniel.  Harry cursed under his breath, torn between running after Alexa and staying behind to be with Liam.  

“Liam,” he called out.

Liam, his eyes wide as he turned to face Harry, ran towards him, bringing his arms around him tightly.  Harry bent down and held the boy, hearing footsteps behind him and for a moment, Harry thought it was one of Nathaniel’s men.  He reached into his coat to pull out a gun but heard a familiar voice.

“You should have brought back-up, Harry,” Jools said as armed members of CO19 kept running ahead.  “I never realized you had a death wish.”  He turned to look at Liam, smiling.  “Oh, hello there, young man.”

“Oh, shut up, Jools,” Harry muttered, his hold on Liam tightening.  “Maybe you should return to Baghdad.  I hear they miss you.”  

At the mention of Baghdad, Jools stiffened.  He’d been stationed there years earlier after being expelled from Washington for committing a lewd act during a Wagner play.  How he’d managed to get back to England and commandeer MI6 again was beyond anything Harry could comprehend, though he suspected it had something to do with his wife being a powerful barrister.

Everyone knew how upset she’d been having Jools stationed in Washington, and after that Baghdad.  With their children, Hillary Siviter stayed behind in London, keeping her position in court, even heading the prosecution of one of Harry’s own operatives, Zoe Reynolds, for conspiracy for murder three years earlier.

But if it was any consolation, Harry knew that knowledge of Jools‘ nontraditional trade arrangement of an important Foreign Service official such as Nathaniel George would be the last nail in Jools‘ professional coffin.  And this, Harry knew, was the main reason Jools couldn’t quite get himself out of Harry’s affairs tonight.  

He was after Nathaniel to save his own career.

“If you even disturb a hair on Nathaniel’s head, Jools --” Harry began but was interrupted by the sound of gunshots inside the building.   The three of them immediately sought cover, their backs against the wall just as the door burst open and Lucas came running out, calling for Alexa and Liam.

As soon as he saw them along the side of the building, Lucas reached out his arms towards Liam, his face breaking into a relieved smile.  “Liam,” his said, his voice almost a hoarse whisper.  “You gave me quite a scare, young man.”

The boy ran up to him as Lucas knelt down and held him, grateful that Liam was safe.  It was all Lucas could do as he held him, feeling Liam tremble in his arms, knowing that at that moment, he couldn’t leave the boy to run after Alexa, wherever she was.

Behind him, the door opened and Ros ran out.  She looked at Jools, frowning.  

“Where’s Alexa?”  She asked Harry, ignoring the MI6 department head.

“She went after Nathaniel,” Harry replied, walking towards the direction he’d last seen Nathaniel and Alexa.  “They headed to the refinery.”

That there were two sections of the abandoned refinery meant that they would be tackling a maze of rooms and floors, as both buildings had up to five levels.  Harry could only imagine where Nathaniel and Alexa were at the moment, knowing only the general direction they had both disappeared to.

As Lucas got up, Liam clung to him.  

“Please don’t go,” he whispered and Lucas nodded, frowning as he held onto Liam.  He wanted nothing more than to go after Alexa and make sure she was safe, but as he felt Liam’s arms around him, Lucas knew his job was to stay behind..  

“She’ll be safe,” Jools chided as he buried his gloved hands into the pockets of his coat, cursing under his breath at the chill in the air.  

Harry ignored Jools as he walked away. If there was one thing he needed to do, Harry thought as he made his way into the bowels of the refinery itself, it was to find Nathaniel before Jools’ men did, and get him safely back to the Grid, where he could arrange for Nathaniel to get his old life back.  

Nathaniel wouldn’t be able to do the work he used to do, but he would be able to live the rest of his life in comfort in England - and together they’d bury Jools Siviter for what he’d done.  Whatever Nathaniel had been forced to do in Russia, Harry would make things right, no matter what.

But to do that, Harry had to get to Nathaniel first.  

>>><<<

The abandoned refinery proved to be home for graffiti artists now, with every inch of bare wall covered with paint of many colors.  The nontraditional canvas provided great camouflage, Harry thought, perfect for one to blend in if he knew how to do it right.  The ground was littered with trash, glass crunching beneath his feet as he walked, the rising sun behind him.

Harry pulled out his gun from inside his coat, aware that Ros was nowhere nearby to cover for him.   And as much as he would have wanted Lucas to be with him, Harry could not leave Liam with Jools.  

No, this was just the way things had to be, he thought.  Harry thought of the missing file from the Records office - Operation Imogen - and Minerva.  The timing for its disappearance was just too convenient, he thought.  

Operation Imogen detailed Minerva’s history with MI5, beginning with her employment in Cologne.  At that time, twenty-nine years earlier, Harry had been assigned to a black op called Omega whose main goal was to provoke the German authorities to clamp down on the RAF activities in Germany.  RAF, which stood for the Red Army Faction, was Germany’s most prominent left-wing militant group.

Minerva was young, beautiful and fluent in German, Russian and Spanish, in addition to English.  Her father was a British soldier, and her mother, an Argentine model who used to appear in cigarette and sewing machine advertisements in South America.  Harry still remembered how he had found himself charmed by the twenty-five year old linguist who wanted nothing more than to go on an adventure, and in the process, serve her father’s country.

But what would never be in any official report was that two months into the operation, Minerva had fallen in love with Harry, begging him to leave his wife Catherine who was pregnant with their second child.  By the time Harry broke off the month-long affair, Nathaniel entered into the picture and had fallen head over heels in love with Minerva, much to Harry’s relief.  

Nathaniel, a brilliant intellectual who often felt more comfortable talking about gamma rays and isotopes, explaining nuclear energy policy to groups of like-minded individuals more than he did around women, wooed the exotic beauty with gifts and lavish dinners.  Never in his life would he even imagine that Minerva would fall for him.  

But she did, and three weeks later, they were married.  

Harry didn’t want to know if she had done it to spite him, in her own naive way, but he knew it was for the best.  Such were the temptations in his line of work, he thought, but Harry was glad to see that in the end, Minerva was truly happy with Nathaniel.

But then she’d turned against her country and against Harry.  Somehow, she’d been turned into an FSB asset during Nathaniel’s appointment in the Ukraine and Harry could only imagine why she’d done it.  Did they threaten her family?  Alexa?  

Harry wished she could have confided in him, remembering how her hand would graze against his during those dinners at the George family home, and how Harry would spend most of his time with Nathaniel, avoiding her gaze for there was something in her eyes.  It was as if she had wanted to tell him something.  

But Harry knew it was too late to dwell on such things.  Such was the nature of his life.  No one was who they seemed.

Harry reached a quiet section of the refinery, still on the first floor.  The ground was littered with broken bottles and dirty syringes.  The smell of urine filled the air and he turned to walk away.  

But then he heard it.  

The sound came from somewhere ahead of him and Harry moved forward as quietly as he could.  The hair at the back of his neck prickled and he brought his gun up, his finger caressing the side of the trigger.  The last time Harry had shot a gun had been less than forty-eight hours ago, he thought.  Arkady.

Suddenly Nathaniel appeared before Harry, half of him obscured by a metal pillar and Harry stopped.  Nathaniel’s shirt was soaked with blood.  He’d been betrayed once again, this time by the men who’d escorted him out of Russia and he knew it had be be under orders from Arkady, but Nathaniel knew that it was too late for regrets now.  It had to happen sooner or later.  Traitors didn’t deserve anything less than being betrayed themselves.

“Hello, Harry,” Nathaniel said.   

“Nathaniel,” Harry whispered, relieved to see his old friend after so long.  “I had no idea about the arrangement Jools made.  I would never have approved such a harebrained scheme.”

“It was best to keep you out of it, Harry,” Nathaniel said, resignation evident in his voice.  “I had no choice.  I had to do what I did then, just as I have to do what I’m doing now.”  

His last words had turned suddenly cold and Harry frowned.  Nathaniel finally stepped out into the open and with him, Alexa, held tightly against his side, his forearm pinning her by the neck in front of him.  

“Harry, I’m sorry,” she whispered.  She looked small against him, bruises dark against her pale face.  Nathaniel held a gun against her head.

She’d been too careless, running after her father like she did, wanting only to see for herself that it was real, that he was alive.  She’d gone after him without any other thought in the world about her safety, or anyone else’s.  It was simply too surreal, she thought.  

Everything in the last forty-eight hours had been too surreal.  Everyone she never thought she’d ever see again had returned, as if landing at her doorstep one after another and though she knew it was bound to happen, she never expected one of them to be her own father, a man she buried eight years earlier. 

As Nathaniel dragged her out in the open, Alexa’s shoulder throbbed, almost useless by her side.  She felt powerless against Nathaniel, almost allowing him to capture her and take her gun away from her.  At that moment, she’d felt like a child again, too confused to know what to do next.

“Jools’ little spy was just too eager,” Nathaniel said softly.  “She thought her daddy would be soft, easily wrapped around her little finger like he used to be.  Drop the gun, Harry. All I want to do is talk.”

Harry cursed under his breath as he lowered his own gun to the ground and stood back up.  “Then talk, Nathaniel.  I would have listened without you doing all this.  Let her go.”

“I can’t let her go, Harry.  Not anymore.  Not after everything that’s happened.”

“Then tell me what has happened, Nathaniel.  Whatever it is that you’ve found yourself in, we can fix it.”

Nathaniel laughed drily.  “You haven’t changed.  Everything can always be fixed by the ever-resourceful Harry Pearce.  Well, not this time.  This time, nothing can ever be fixed.”  He walked to the center of the platform, pulling Alexa with him.  

“I gave up everything for Alexa and Liam, Harry,” Nathaniel continued.  “All because they told me she destroyed Sugarhorse after I delivered it to them as their ransom.”  His arm tightened around Alexa and she gasped, her hands struggling to loosen Nathaniel’s hold on her. 

“You could have killed so many people, Daddy,” she whispered.  “I couldn’t let them have those names.  I had to delete it before Arkady got it.”

Harry stared at Nathaniel, horrified.  “You?  You delivered Sugarhorse to them?  How could you, Nathaniel?  I promised you I was going to get Alexa back.”

“You took too bloody long, Harry,” Nathaniel snapped.  “They had Alexa, and they contacted me, telling me I could get her back.  In exchange, they wanted what Minerva stole from you.  The names of all your Sugarhorse assets.”

Harry stared at Nathaniel incredulously.  Was it really true that it was him who compromised Sugarhorse?  His own operation?   “That’s impossible.  How could she have gotten it?”

Nathaniel sighed.  “You tell me, Harry.  How could Minerva have gotten into your house and collected the information?  It’s taken me years to figure this out, and I can’t quite believe it still.”

This time Harry did not say anything.  

“Did you know that William Blake said that it’s easier to forgive an enemy than it is to forgive a friend?”  Nathaniel asked.  “I loved Minerva with every fiber of my being, Harry.  Even you knew that, yet you betrayed me.  My own best friend.”

Harry was silent.  He remembered it now.  

He’d run into Minerva at the Savoy.  She was walking through the lobby just as Harry finished with a meeting with a colleague, and he’d called her name, surprised to see her there. He’d had a few drinks, and was not quite as formal as he always was.  Old habits died hard, he thought.  

Harry remembered asking her where Alexa was and she said that Alexa was at a friend’s house and that she had just met someone for tea.  Hours later, he found himself in the hotel room with her, mad at himself for being too weak to resist her.

Had it been then, he wondered, when she’d done it?  For two weeks later, his house had been burgled and though the thieves had stolen his television and other electronic devices, they could have gotten into his safe then, where the names of his assets had been stored.

“She loved you, Nathaniel,” Harry said.  “She loved her family.”

Nathaniel laughed.  “Did she really love me, Harry?  Or was it Alexa she really loved and the only reason she stayed with me?  Did you know that she wanted to leave me, Harry?  But she knew she wasn’t going to get a penny from me if she did, and so she stayed.”

This time Alexa stopped struggling against him.  “Daddy, stop it,” she whispered.  “Please stop it.”

“Stop speaking the truth about your mother?”  He tightened his forearm against her neck again but this time, Alexa didn’t fight him.  “You are just like her, you know.  You and your damn secrets.  And to think I gave up my life, my career, and my future for you because I thought you were innocent.”

“Nathaniel,” Harry said, finally finding his voice.  “Let her go.  This is between you and me.  She doesn’t have to be here.”

Nathaniel laughed again, though there was no happiness in it.  “Of course she has to be here, Harry.  All of this happened because of her.”

Harry swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry.  He shook his head.  “Why are you doing this, Nathaniel?  She’s your daughter.”

“I gave up my life to become a traitor against my own country, Harry.  Talked into a farce of a trade by Jools Siviter, damn him,” Nathaniel’s voice was filled with anger.  “All because Alexa had something the Russians wanted, though she pretended not to even know anything about it.”  His hold on her tightened but Alexa.  

“Nathaniel, we can bury Jools for what he did to you,” Harry said.  “I swear to you, I want him to go down for what he did as much as you do.”

Nathaniel shook his head.  “It doesn’t matter now, Harry.”  He turned to look at Alexa.  “For eight years I had to grovel to the Russians.  Can you imagine what I had to go through those first few years?  Reduced to being nothing till I could prove to them that I was loyal to their cause, that I would do as I was supposed to do just to keep you alive?  And all that time, thinking that you were just an innocent victim, I found out that you had what the Russians wanted all along, and that MI6 turned you into a whore to get the information.”

“Daddy, please stop this,” Alexa whispered.  

Nathaniel paused, closing his eyes as he felt the pain from his wound throb.  When the pain passed, he continued.  “The only reason I was able to leave Russia this time was because I promised them I’d get it back for them.  And I did.”

“No!”  Suddenly Alexa began to struggle against him, but Nathaniel, even with his injury, proved to be stronger than her.  She thought of Lucas, and of how he had given the thumb drive up so easily.  

“Imagine, if you will, Harry, nuclear bombs small enough to fit a suitcase or a backpack.  A nuclear bomb hidden somewhere in England, just waiting for the order to have them brought to the middle of the city and detonated,” Nathaniel laughed.  “America was too careless with one of  theirs and with my help, Russia was able to make a few more units, all hidden away in secret caches all over the world - even here.”

Harry stared at him, horrified.  “What happened to your loyalty, Nathaniel?”  Harry asked, a part of him wishing that Nathaniel was lying, that everything he was saying wasn’t true.  

“Oh, I kept my loyalty to England all those years, Harry, doing my job in bringing Russia one step ahead and two steps back each time.  But everything changed when I found out the truth about Alexa - about you and Minerva when she worked for you in Cologne.  That’s when my loyalty left me then.” 

He brought the gun back against Alexa’s temple, his finger on the trigger this time.  “I gave my my life for a daughter who wasn’t even mine.”  

“Nathaniel, please don’t do this,” Harry pleaded, taking a step forward, his face turning pale.  

“Do you know what true betrayal feels like,