Work Text:
The main communications lab at Q Branch is kept brightly lit at all hours. It creates an illusion of timelessness, and with the team working with agents across time zones in all parts of the world, it’s only a boon. The ethereal world of cyberspace is all-encompassing and all-consuming, with advances in research and development waiting for no man, and so Q Branch does not sleep.
It’s nearing three in the morning, and it’s one of the many reasons Q is still awake when his second-in-command passes quietly through the lab doors, looking composed and slightly pale. But then again, almost all members of Q Branch did. Q would venture that his team got just as much time shooting, fighting or blowing things up as the junior agents, but they did so behind blast-resistant walls and bulletproof glass, under the artificial white light of the testing rooms or range.
Q doesn’t take his eye off the wide screens, scanning the algorithm as it runs, lines of code streaming behind the spiralling polyhedron that is the geometrical representation of the MI6 headquarters. He inclines his head to one side as Riley comes up to his station.
His second pitches his voice low, but even. "We've lost contact with 007."
Q suppresses a sigh. “That’s nothing new or even out of the ordinary for our wayward Double-O.”
“He was in the middle of reconnaissance when he hit the quit button of his own volition. It’s been over forty-eight hours.”
Q’s eyes flash toward his second. “The retrieval team? Other contacts on site?”
“Have seen neither hide nor hair of him. He hasn’t turned on his communicator, either.”
It will surprise Q later how quickly he reacts, even though rationally he knows Q Branch is at its most placid this late at night and that he doesn’t need to babysit his code while it’s running. It surprises him because Q is systematic and rational and the very last person to coddle the agents, and still his hands fly over his keyboard. His phone lights up on the workstation, the flash of light indicating incoming data becoming a steady glow as Q transfers the majority of his control over to the little mobile device. "Reassign his connections and recorded data to my name."
"Sir."
Riley is at his most neutral, and Q meets his gaze. Q is head of the division, yes, but he’s young in the eyes of many and frankly he could care less what his team addresses him as long as they did their jobs and respected his lead. Most of his team address him in a mix of “sir” and “Q” except his second, who had been his predecessor’s assistant; Riley only ‘sir’s at him when—
—well, when Q is terrorizing his underlings a little too much or tying himself into knots over his tech, or, more rarely, his agents.
(yes, they are his—his to arm, to snark at and befuddle with his boyish good looks and guide with the brightest brain in Britain, just as he is their quartermaster and they can ever amaze and frustrate him with just how mad the agents of MI6 can be, and it’s a delicate, delicate balanced equation that Q is terribly fond of).
Q smiles wryly. "Now, Riley."
His second gives him another look, then settles in at his station with a sigh. “As you say, Q.”
He packs up his main workstation, switching core authority over to Riley before locking down his laptop. Somewhere beneath the part of his attention that is still focused on the keyboard under his hands, a slow burn of concern flickers to life. Most of Bond’s equipment is traceable, linked back to MI6 and his handlers for communication and retrieval, but such in-depth linkage means they can be vulnerable to hacking. Bond’s communications kit is encrypted to the highest level – all the Double O agents’ are; Q saw to that himself. And he had still installed a failsafe, a tiny quit button on the earpiece, matched to the agent’s fingerprints and voice activated, which would shut down all systems and isolate the agent. He’d disappear from every technological line attempting to trace him via his equipment.
There may only be six others out there who could match Q in cyber security and access, but that means there are still six others out there who are capable of hacking his codes, and a dozen others who would love a crack at it. After the mess with Silva, Q’s not taking any chances.
“Riley,” he calls out, “Q Branch is yours. The systems will continue running until the check is complete; don’t put it into beta mode until I’m back. As always, I will be available by phone if you need me.”
His second nods, pouring himself a cup of coffee as he types away one-handed at his keyboard, already settling in for a long second shift.
Q takes another glance at the monitors and his newly written program running on it, and leaves, the lab’s doors whispering close behind him.
*
James had turned off his communicator on purpose, engaging the quit button the moment he’d caught a glimpse of the sophisticated setup his targets were transporting to the lower decks of a commercial river cruise ship. Hiding aboard one of the smaller fishing boats moving in the same direction had seemed the best choice at the time. Yes, he could have gotten onto the guarded ship by detonating the highly flammable fuel stored in one of the port’s warehouses, but license to kill or not, James didn’t really feel like immolating the half the town and its residences as a mere distraction.
He’d spent a few interesting hours hopping from fishing boat to fishing boat until he and the ship he trailed docked at a small fishing village. He hadn’t meant to leave his communicator off for so long, but he didn’t need an irritated handler back at MI6 barking at him for going into more and more remote locations, and during the subsequent ambush, fire fights, and the successful elimination of his targets he hadn’t spared a thought to turning his connection back on either.
(or perhaps he did mean it – recklessness or a willingness to take risks, depending on who’s spinning the message, is a quality all agents require, and he’s erring towards the first of late).
But James truly hadn’t meant for the cormorant to snap out, to pluck his earpiece deftly with its beak and swallow the entire device whole.
He ducks instinctively away from the broad-winged water bird, ear stinging, gun still raised and trained on his chaser. On second glance, he notices what he had missed the first time: the blasted bird didn't have the characteristic choker ring around it's neck to prevent it from swallowing large fish, forcing the bird to regurgitate the catch for its owner.
It’s bad enough having his gun eaten by a komodo dragon, much less having an enemy informant with a side job as a cormorant fisher get the best of him by training his birds to steal.
The man whistles low, and James shoots him neatly in the head, damn the noise, before he can summon the rest of the flock. He has to make a ridiculous dive, to grab for the cormorant before it can dive into the river, startled by the gunshot.
James has faced worst odds, but getting from a remote location in central Asia back to any MI6 contact point without his communicator while being hunted might pose a bit of a problem, even for him.
*
It takes Q less than half an hour to get back home, and that’s only because he makes a stop at an all-night cafe for tea and a bag of pastries. It’s not time wasted on his part; with phone in hand, he’d perused Bond’s mission record and had already set out several minor searcher programs. He waits until he’s in the security of his flat before physically waking the multitude of his personal systems.
The den is a rather misleading name for the room, but it’s where Q feels most at home. It’s the technological heart of his flat, yes, but with the warm umber lights and the static-proof but comfortable furniture it’s snug and intimate in a way that Q Branch’s main lab could never be.
Q Branch has the firepower and sheer capacity to support what he wants to do, but it is inevitably linked to London - London codes, London servers and firewalls and no matter how much Q splices and bounces signals there will always be the most miniscule trace back to MI6, which will never move from the heart of its territory. His home domain, however, is a technological limbo, with connections to almost every location technologically advanced enough to host a network, and Q doesn't care who tries to hack him here; he enjoys the challenge.
He checks the records Riley forwarded him, and connects to the hub closest to where Bond had last checked in.
007's handler was not able to track him once he engaged his earpiece's quit button; the order, by nature, eliminates all oppurtunities for tracing through 007's equipment, Riley had marked in the file, and Q can hear the unasked question.
Q smiles thinly, and begins entering commands into his programs.
MI6 maintains files on all agents, and Q has had several weeks to compile his own file on Bond. He has the agent's vital statistics. He has logs of the man's physical patterns - the gait of his walk, the subconscious body language cues that no one can fully suppress. He has Bond's entire history and track record, anything and everything that has been filed in electronic form, and all of distilled into parameters he can siphon into a supercomputer capable of correlating all the factors and giving him the best answer, and a dozen other slightly less likely answers beside that.
Q doesn't have just one tracker on Bond. He has dozens of factors that he can follow like a breadcrumb trail until he finds the agent himself. What is cyberspace, after all, other than an elaborate network of information spanning the globe from which a fisher can trawl data from?
Q knows without a doubt that he'll find Bond. The critical question is how long it will take, and whether it would be in time to find the man alive.
He’s going to design a technological leash and slip it over Bond’s head at some point. Ethics be damned; the man is almost more trouble than he’s worth.
*
James swathes the cormorant in his coat, pinning its wings and protecting himself from that truly fearsome beak. It also helps muffle the bird’s outraged cries as he leaps from the boat and ducks under the dock, splashing in the shallows of the river.
He considers just shooting the bird, but sound travels over water and he’d left his suppressor with the dead targets (recklessness strikes again). Instead, James ties the jacket’s arms tightly around the bird and grabs for its long, sinuous neck through the fabric. The cormorant thrusts its head out a gap, beak snapping, wings struggling against its restraints, and James spares moment to admire its tenacity, the sheer animal instinct to survive and to go down fighting if it has to.
It's strange that for all the people he's killed and his supposed license to kill in the field James feels a mild twinge of regret at a bird's imminent demise.
He looks into the cormorant's blue-ringed eyes and neatly twists, breaking the bird's neck in one swift movement.
James no longer carries a combat knife in his boot, preferring his firearms. At any rate, he doesn't have time to gut the bird, not with the rustle of movement up on the dock and the splash of oars further down the river, but if he can't easily retrieve the earpiece or reactivate his communicator...
Well, he'd have to destroy it. The great fire ovens fuelling the village’s charcoal plant should do nicely.
*
The passive signal Bond's communicator emits blinks out on Q's screen. Q can’t decide if he should be pleased or irritated.
His earpieces, although turned off and untraceable, are still registered by a simple yes/no signal – yes, as a passive, functioning piece of equipment; no, as a wreck of twisted components, probably. Something has utterly destroyed the tracker, and the sudden flare of information - or lack of it - is enough to give Q a point of reference to trace. It means Bond is likely alive, but it also means man has ruined another piece of his equipment.
And Bond is one hundred and seventy-three miles from his original drop zone, in the middle of almost nowhere. Wonderful. No wonder Q hadn’t picked up much from his initial search.
Q gnaws on a cold apple strudel and begins hacking into the CCTV network of the three closest towns.
*
It occurs to James, as he tries not to visibly stagger, that stranding himself in a remote part of a large country where the main mode of transportation is by water (the boats and ships upon which are now crawling with terribly alert foes) is really quite a awful idea. Walking and hitchhiking his way to the closest sizeable town was tedious, and if the town had cameras on the streets, James is having trouble spotting them.
He lets himself linger on all the likely locations, making a looping circuit of them, careful to let only part of his face show. He might have destroyed his targets’ network servers and circuitry, but James wouldn’t bet his life that that was the only setup in the area.
"Come on, Q," he murmurs in a moment of sentimentality. "You've skimped on the gadgets lately. Show us why you've bet money and our lives on cyber-technology."
*
The camera footage shoots in horrible resolution and Q can only sharpen it so much before the lack of data foils him. The street corner the camera captures holds nothing of interest beyond a dilapidated phone booth, a flickering streetlamp and a figure skulking just barely within the camera's frame. The man's face is a blur of pixilated shadows, his outline fuzzy even without the giant plastic poncho obscuring his form.
It's Bond. The odds are more than good; at over sixty percent (the specifics don’t matter in this probability), it's far better than even Q expected, and despite all the confounding factors, Q knows it’s him.
He surveys the area as best he can, then makes a call to the public phone. On screen, Bond's head goes up, his hood pulling back slightly, but otherwise stays completely still.
The phone rings shrilly on.
Q glances up at the ceiling in exasperation, then drops his gaze back on Bond's shadowy figure. He doesn't even look down at his keyboard as he types out the new lines of code.
The phone goes silent, then starts up again, quick clicks of sound in long and short intervals.
Bond flicks up the receiver as the last dot sounds.
"Morse code, Q?"
"You should have picked up when I first rang," Q says. “Status, please.”
“Targets eliminated; the mission’s complete. Although I got a little sidetracked.”
“That much is obvious.” Q glances at the map on one of his screens. “How was your communicator compromised?”
“Hmm?”
“You didn’t cancel the quit order; in fact, you destroyed the earpiece. I can only assume that you did that because your line had been conpromised."
“No, I just lost the earpiece. Couldn’t really turn it back on.”
They’d had a variation of this conversation once: Lost the gun. Couldn’t really fire it with it gone. The man who picked it up couldn’t fire it either. That palm print reader worked just fine; the komodo dragons thank you.
That time, Bond had distracted him by shoving Silva's laptop into his arms. Q reaches for his tea now, stone cold as it is. "There's no point making my equipment impact, water and dust-proof if you keep feeding them to reptiles."
"A bird this time, actually. You should make your electronics less tasty."
Q can’t help the involuntary sound of irritation that escapes him, a noise low in his throat.
"I'm sending you to Hong Kong by ship," he says, almost resentfully. "If you can gallivant and joke around, I'm sure a few additional hours won't do you any harm."
Bond has the gall to chuckle at him, but Q’s attention homes in on the minute hitch in his breath.
“You’re injured.”
“It’s just a scratch.”
Q’s looking at rendezvous points, the fastest route back to London, maybe a medical team if he can manage it. “Can you lift a phone from someone?” He can’t do any guiding from a stationary phone booth, that’s for sure.
“It’s the middle of the night, Q, surely your cameras show you that much,” Bond says, and jumps tracks completely. “I brought you a present.”
“That’s very flattering, 007, but the last time you brought me something that wasn’t my own equipment, it allowed a hacker into our systems.”
Bond leans against the edge of the phone booth, turning his head until he’s staring at the hidden camera. For Q, it’s almost as if Bond’s looking right at him. “You’ll manage. I used the quit button because there was a setup that looked like one of your branch’s rooms. I took care of it, but I did keep a hard drive or two for you.”
“Lovely.” Q pulls off his glasses, pinches at the bridge of his nose. His eyes feel gritty with exhaustion. “Please tell me that’s not why you ran nearly two hundred miles from your original drop zone when your targets were right there.”
“I succeeded, didn’t I?”
Q shoves his glasses back on. “Without your communicator; what if you needed backup?”
"You said you'll be able to track me. Even with my equipment gone, even if I’ve dropped completely off your radar."
Q freezes completely, because he remembers that conversation and so does Bond, except—
He had meant it as a challenge, a distraction from the shifting sands under Bond’s feet; it had even been a bit of a threat, a warning to Bond that he wouldn’t be able to leave MI6 by simply vanishing again. Bait, Q called it at the time.
Q hadn’t known that to Bond, it was – is – a promise, that no matter how far Bond runs or how deeply he falls, Q will always find a way to bring him back.
“I did,” Q hears himself saying. “And so I have. But this is not carte blanche for you to disappear again. Listen; I’m giving you your rendezvous coordinates.”
“I always listen,” Bond says.
Q recites directions and retrieval instructions, and underneath those thoughts his mind picks and picks at the revelation. It’s one of those nuggets of data Q wants, a clear insight into the way James Bond’s mind ticks, but he’s tired with only cold tea and the whirl of his computers around him for company, and he still has a Double-O agent to bring back safely from his mission.
It’s full dark where Bond is. Outside Q’s flat, London swings into mid-afternoon. They’ll have to go without sleep a little longer, both of them.
“If you can’t bring my equipment back safely, you can at least bring yourself home in one piece, Bond,” Q says. "Go. I'll pick you up on the local CCTV."
“I’m counting on it,” Bond says, and hangs up before Q can respond.
Q watches as Bond leaves the phone booth, watches until he moves out of the camera’s line of sight, then switches to the next camera on Bond’s route.