A Gray Llove

Enter the Silver Bird

"Who is that?" From the upper level of a rooftop in Vienna, CIA agent Dani Miranda scornfully looked down the barrel of her tranquilizer gun at the muscled man in a navy jacket and white boating pants sprawled before her. 

A few feet away on the lower part of the roof, the agent Sierra Six wrinkled his nose. Even after exploding a well with a homemade bomb, being shot at, and deploying a hand grenade within the space of the past two minutes, Six thought what had really stunned him was his adversary's choice to wear white pants to a gunfight. The only thing he could figure was that the man had a lot of white pants to burn. Six shrugged and offered, "'Lloyd?'" 

Six had only previously made the other man's acquaintance over the phone, when Lloyd had more-or-less announced that he was holding Six's mentor, Donald Fitzroy, and his niece, Claire, prisoner in exchange for a mysterious encrypted drive which Six was supposed to have. He didn't have it, which no one – especially Denny Carmichael and whoever the hell this Lloyd was – seemed to understand. But they could keep chasing him if they wanted. It would keep them away from the drive's true location, and Six could handle it. Disappearing was his way of life.

Now what Lloyd, the man in white pants, truly was was down for the count. Miranda's tranquilizer darts were not to be messed with. Six glanced up at her with a faint smile and a nod, giving her a professional subtle thank you. Agents never really told each other thank you for saving my ass, even though it was something that could be said between partners fairly routinely. Instead, he gestured at Lloyd's brown Oxfords and mused, "He looks like an eleven." The grenade had blown off Six's own left shoe, as grenades were wont to do, and he was in the market for a cheap replacement. Lloyd's kicks looked like they probably cost a grand per foot. As long as they were the same size, Six wasn't picky.

He was forced to come out of his thoughts when Miranda suddenly waved her tranquillizer gun his way and arched her sharp brows. "Let's go."

And abruptly Six, who perhaps had gotten a bit too proud of his disappearing abilities, found himself marched to the boot of a car, tranquilized, and spirited away by his former mission partner. As he lost consciousness, Six reflected that at least he finally had a good excuse to sleep. Miranda was probably one of the people who was least likely to tie him to an anchor and drop him off a long pier. 

She reminded him of what it had been like, at one point, to have a friend. It must have been years ago, now, that Six actually had enjoyed a friendship. The Sierra program, his mentor Fitzroy's brainchild, had been assembled from solitary recruits who would have only endangered themselves if they had gotten to know each other too well. They trained solo. They imbibed weeks of intensive informational courses solo. They went out on missions solo. They spent all of their downtime solo, too. Sometimes it suited Six, but most of the time, he was lonely.

After eighteen years, the closest thing Six had ever had to friends were other operatives who stuck their necks out for him. (Miranda still fit in this category since he trusted that, despite drugging him and stuffing him in her trunk, she still probably wasn't going to kill him whenever they arrived at wherever they were driving.) Six supposed he was just too good at his job to generally give anyone the chance to play hero for him. But once, a green CIA agent only fresh out of training had picked off a sniper only milliseconds after a red target sight had appeared over Six's heart. They had happened to be both running missions in Melborne, and he had returned the favor by giving her a tip on her mark. In his stupor, Six couldn't remember the agent's name. But he hadn't forgotten how good a feeling it was to have someone watch his back when he really needed it.

Rolling in the back of Miranda's car in a sleepy, tranquilized fog, Six's ruminations began to turn back towards his present situation. Maybe he did have a friend in a Fitzroy – but not Donald. 

A couple of months back, Six had been asked by Fitzroy to play bodyguard for young Claire, his niece. It turned out that Six's protection had been very needed; Claire's pacemaker had unexpectedly failed in the middle of the night, requiring a high-speed trip to the emergency room, and Six had had to contend with an armored house intruder when they returned. Over a short period of time, though, Claire had become something else to Six other than his boss's niece. The spunky girl had teased him about his stoic nature, his operative name, and his tattoos. She had appeared to identify with Six's ennui. She had her heart problems to deal with – to never be fully free from – just as he had his mandate as a Sierra agent to take whatever job was handed to him. Six unerringly bonded with the girl. He thought the way he felt about Claire could be something like a friendship. She had actually called them family, by means of their shared link to Fitzroy, and Six hadn't corrected her. He had been a big brother for a time, and couldn't deny that he placed Claire in the same mental category as his little brother when it came to their safety. What they needed from him came before everything else, even if what they needed from him was extreme.

Affection aside, Six suspected it hadn't necessarily been a good thing for her to see him concuss the house intruder with a decorative bowl. Thanks to Lloyd and his stupid white pants, the violence the kid had accidentally seen that night had turned out to only be a prelude to what had happened to her next...

Six's eyes stretched wide at the thought of Claire in danger. He sat bolt upright, whacking his forehead against the roof of Miranda's car and landing hard on his back. The impact knocked the last of sleep out of his brain. Groaning, Six swore to himself that he would get to Claire any way he could, as fast as he could, to make sure nothing happened to her. He was sure he wouldn't have to try too hard to persuade Miranda to help him. Six would have Claire's back, no matter what.

And this Lloyd had better just starting watching his own back for the man called Sierra Six.