Midii was surprised when her phone rang and she was graced with the countenance of Lady Une at approximately one in the morning. The Lady said she wanted to see Midii immediately to discuss a few details about the next mission they were likely to be sent on. Midii didn’t know Lady Une well enough to discern whether she was actually telling the truth or not but the circumstances had seemed a little suspicious to her. As any good spy would she immediately suspected the worst and prepared for it. She armed herself with a few of her milder weapons from her bounty hunter work, the ones she used when her hit-profiles stressed “capture unharmed” rather than “kill” and began to walk back to the headquarters nearby.

She absentmindedly watched the empty streets and shadowed alleyways as she walked back to the headquarters of the Preventors alone. She was more than capable of handling her own in a one on one fight or even if she was accosted by a group, but it never hurt to be careful, a spy could never afford to let their guard down even for an instant. Midii was having more trouble than she liked to admit readjusting to the life of an indentured spy after having so many years of relative freedom. She hated the lies; she especially hated lying to Trowa. Against her will she had come to care for him, he had come to mean a lot to her and the thought of someday possibly having to hurt him in betrayal caused her heart to constrict and her breath to gasp out. She didn’t want to betray him! She wanted to be his ally. She didn’t want to have to guard her every word and action around him, she wanted to be his true partner.

In their short time together he had become as natural in her life as the air she breathed and just as necessary. She hated the thought that one day she would wake up and he wouldn’t be part of her world. Every day, despite the painful divisiveness of the situation, she looked forward to seeing him. Even if his cool exterior never seemed to betray a flicker of emotion at most times she lived for the next instant he turned his face her way. She couldn’t help it; her eyes followed him the way a sunflower was always turned toward the sun. Midii had never bothered feeling attracted to someone for she knew that one day she would be forced to either betray him or leave him, but in this instance there was no denying the call of her heart. Even though she knew damned well that she would have to both betray him and leave him she couldn’t stop herself from wanting to be with him. She’d memorized the outline of his long, lanky form, the curve of his jaw, the sweeping fall of hair with reddish brown highlights, the way he moved with effortless silence and grace, the calm timbre of his voice. Each memory she stored away carefully like a treasure for the time she knew was coming when she would have to be without him. She both dreaded and looked forward to the next day and the day after, knowing it was both one more day she could be with him and one less day she had until she had to leave him.

If only there were a way to make things right. There didn’t seem to be a way she could both save her family and be with Trowa at the same time. The desire to protect her father and brothers was part of her; a part of her bones her blood and her very essence. She could not turn away from them. She had denied herself so much already for their sakes; she had sacrificed her childhood, her innocent heart and walked down the road the spy and the bounty hunter. She had given herself over to the Consortium and its dangers so she could feed them, shelter them, and keep them safe during the war. She had sacrificed everything willingly, because she protected them. Any cost was worth paying to keep her family safe. Even her own hearts desire, even her love for Trowa… her beloved Nanashi.

<As ever, it seems that no matter what I try, my choices are limited and not what I would choose if I had the freedom to choose my ultimate destiny,> she thought with wistful resignation as she opened the door to the building and steeled her impregnable mask into place for her meeting with Lady Une.

* * *

Trowa had to admit that her private security system was challenging, especially for a cobbled-together system that had been built in only a matter of a few hours at most. She had spent most of her time at Preventors HQ or with him out on the missions. It was a challenge, even for a Gundam Pilot with his level of skill at infiltrating through security systems. Trowa was a little disgruntled by the thought that if she had been given more time and some better resources her security system would have been something he would not have been able to navigate without some heavy reconnaissance.

It took him a full fifteen minutes to slip into her apartment then another five to wipe any trace amounts of evidence of tampering from the systems buffers and recorders. It was the work of a few minutes to make the necessary adjustments to the sweeping and jamming devices themselves, then another few minutes to set the security system to cover all trace of his retreat. When he was safely away from the apartment he signaled Lady Une and presumably she would have found a way to end the meeting gracefully without seeming rushed.

Trowa in the meantime entered an apartment building about a block and a half away and took the elevator to the top floor. He had discretely rented a small space within range of Midii and her equipment for just such a contingency and had it all nicely loaded up with very sensitive receivers and some sophisticated equipment that would make his job easier. One wall was nothing but a mess of monitor screens, plastic electronics boxes and wires interconnecting them all in crazy patterns that made all the sense of a plate of spaghetti. Hurriedly he switched on the electricity and booted up the various interconnected systems. He wouldn’t have audio or visual, after seeing Midii’s security system he was sure of that but that didn’t mean Trowa wasn’t good enough to jimmy his way into her own system. He’d at least be able to confirm when she entered her apartment. She’d likely take a half an hour at least to sweep the room thoroughly for bugs, then put her jammers into place, and then… show time.

It fell out pretty much as he’d planned it, he hacked into her personal security system using one of the feed lines that were universal for the kinds of devices she used betting that she wouldn’t have had the time to add her own personal touches to it. She took a little longer than he’d expected to sweep the room, apparently she’d held off on that in order to take a shower and change into something more comfortable. The room was swept and Trowa was unsurprised yet relieved that the tampering had been pulled off to perfection. His signal was coming in loud and clear. The jammers were set up on all frequencies and it took an additional half hour For Midii to build to a range she was comfortable with, which was basically, maximum range and capacity.

He could almost see her leaning forward in anticipation as she accessed the data pod and decrypted her files. Trowa checked the same motion in himself as his screen sprang to life. As he had hoped she would, Midii went straight for the main missions files and began decrypting so that she could see what the Consortiums big master plan was…

<That’s it?!> Trowa thought when he read it. <That’s their master plan?! That’s what they’re going through all this trouble for?!>

He’d been expecting something more along the lines of eventual global domination, something involving massive fleets of mobile suits and a hostile take-over of the government. He’d been expecting something involving lofty ideals of showing the world that human nature could not be changed. That was all “old hat” apparently.

The Consortium had developed an agenda to rid the Earth sphere of its peace. Said plot involved not only getting rid of certain inconvenient high ranking government officials, but also of founding different “terrorist groups” and networks all across the globe to mask their real activities and purposes. The terrorist groups were only the first part in their plan (Roswell and his heir were really a means of making their work a little easier, not a key part in their agenda). By creating the illusion of unrest they hoped to instill true unrest and uneasiness in the minds and hearts of the people. Once people started to doubt that true peace could actually hold, it would so much easier to make them all give in to their own fears and selfish desires. With a few key assassinations, not the least among them being that of Vice Minister Darlian, the whole structure would eventually collapse in on itself. What made Trowa really disgusted by all of this was the entire purpose behind the Consortiums agenda. They did not intend to take over the world, merely to reintroduce violence and war back into the Earth Sphere so that their profits would go back up! The Consortium had kept their activities as a group of Arms dealers mostly covert even in times of war, the only one who really knew about them were the ones who needed to know.  When there had been a lot of wars and rebellions, the Consortium had made a lot of money supplying arms and weapons to not only the Alliance but to their enemies as well. But due to the peaceful atmosphere brought about by the Earth Sphere Unified Nation and all the open negotiations between Earth and Space the need for their unique services had all but died out. The only ones seeking their services now were the Space Pirates, who needed armaments in order to be able to rob the trade caravans traveling between colonies and between Space and Earth. All they wanted was their profit margins back!

Trowa was still shaking his head at that one when Midii signed out of that portion of the data pod. At least with Trieze, and to a lesser extent the Barton Foundation, there were some ideals involved; there was a purpose to having wars break out and people getting killed. This was just… greed. It was the most sickening thing he’d ever heard of. They were willing to ruin countless innocent people’s lives; Midii’s, her family’s, his own, and Catherine’s among them, just so that they could make money. Unforgivable.

He watched as she signed out of the data pod, but noted with dismay that the jammers in her own apartment blocked out the sending frequency of the chip he’d installed into her personal computer! He’d adjusted them for the frequency of the chips on the pod, but not the one for the chips on her personal computer. Now he could no longer see what she was doing on her private console, which left him in the dark as to what her next move would be. Shit! He didn’t even know what she was doing now, just the vague stuff he got via his connection to her personal security system which did not have internal visuals or audio, only motion sensors and vibration sensors and heat sensors. He knew only that she hadn’t left her computer. Damn! She was likely doing something crucially important on her computer right now and he didn’t know what she was up to. Which meant he didn’t know her next move. He was at a severe tactical disadvantage now; he could venture a few guesses based on his previous observances of her; she was nothing if not thorough and meticulous so she was most likely investigating the movements of the Consortium and its agents right now in order to confirm what she had learned. She could also be checking to see what up coming assignments had been delivered to the Consortium operatives and checking those against this new information to see what kind of picture she was coming up with. However, he didn’t know for sure and not knowing for certain at this stage in the game could well be crippling.

Trowa cleared his mind and clamped down on his rising unease. Just because the chips themselves were being jammed did not mean he was helpless at all. If she was accessing the net links; that was public domain… he could catch up to her there by bouncing a sympathetic frequency of his transmitting chips on the main streams of data, wich would resonate with her own thread burst that was out questing for whatever it was she was looking for. He wouldn’t have complete recovery but he’d be able to track her progress vaguely, know what places she accessed and for how long. He could access those later to piece together exactly what she had done while on this crusade of hers. Knowing this made him feel better, and he set his system to begin sending out the sympathetic frequency while he made a report to Lady Une about what he had found. Such reports were usually something he preffered to do in person in a secure location but he was otherwise occupied with Midii Une. This being the case he had no intention of going into any detail at the moment on a channel that could be accessed and since all channels could be accessed one way or another he simply told her that the Preventors were about to be as busy as they had been since the eve wars and he’d make a full report at oh seven hundred. It was already oh-two-hundred and Midii was quite likely to keep him up all night with her inquisitiveness. Damn but he hated not being one step ahead of her, now he’d have to play catch up.

* * *

Midii logged off her computer with a weary feeling of satisfaction in a job well done. She looked over at her clock, it was three thirty in the morning and she should be able to catch a few hours of exhausted sleep before she had to get up to report to Headquarters. Her eyes were scratchy and burning from tired and she felt like she hadn’t slept in days.

<I just wish this were all over with,> she thought wistfully. Trying to stay one step ahead of a powerful and ruthless organization that had taught her the tricks of being a spy in the first place was difficult enough, but when half of the people in that organization would kill her as soon as look at her and her family’s life hung in the balance she was really beginning to feel the strain. 

<Once, just once, I’d like to live a life with some semblance of normalacy. I’m not asking for much, a healthy family, a roof over their heads that won’t fall apart ant any minute, and a steady supply of food with which to keep them fed would be enough to satisfy me.>

The weight of her recent findings over the course of the night was not sitting well with her. She’d found what she was looking for, but it put her in a bit of a quandary.  The next mission that Lady Une had assigned her was guard duty at a political fete in Brussels. Unfortunately, the Consortium planned to start moving on their big agenda at that very same gathering, ie they intended to get rid of some of the politicians that they would find most inconvenient to their cause. Their primary target was the Prime Minister of Foreign Affairs, Peter Jameson. Naturally the key figures in promoting peace and understanding between Earth and Space had to be the first to be eliminated. Vice Speaker for the ESUN Council was going to be there as well, as were half of the Council reps.

The dilemma made her head hurt when she thought about it for too long. She’d been up for most of the night tracking down the mailed orders of each and every last one of the Consortium Agents involved. The agents of the Consortium were being moved into place. There were two different professional assassins waiting on stand-by in Luxembourg and a secure position in Belgium, a bomber was being shipped in from Metz, France, and several other agents were awaiting orders with regards to the night of the party, running interference and the like. The consortium was gathering its pieces together for a sudden strike on the heart of the Earth Sphere Council.

Midii had received her orders for the night of the party from the Consortium earlier that evening via untraceable documents in her account, with self-deleted one minute after she received it. She was under strict orders to do nothing to stop them or get in the way of their plans and for good reason too; they would have only one real shot at this and if they didn’t get most of their targets on that night, the rest of the targeted persons would be alerted and take extra precautions thus making the assassinations by the Consortium a lot harder. Midii’s other orders included not only inaction at the moment of truth, but downloading the plans for the security measures of the Preventors and sending them to the Consortium to be worked around. In essence she was to be the spy they had “hired” her to be.

Midii looked at the dossiers she had copied from Smiths hard drive and correlated it to the orders that had been sent out. It appeared that Smith was currently debating between using a lone sniper for the elimination or rigging the place with a series of explosives. Her inner spy insisted on being a logician and trying to estimate his next move based on the information available. Both had their advantages and disadvantages. The explosives would be the most effective in getting rid of all of the unwanted individuals attending the event; however they stood a good chance of being discovered by the sweeps performed by the Preventors prior to the party. The sniper stood the best chance of making its way around the guards but likely would not be able to reach all of the targets before being either eliminated or apprehended. It was most likely that he would hire several snipers with specific targets to begin shooting all at once at a specific time.

<At least I have the list of targets,> she thought wryly. It had taken her all night to get it, even with the information downloaded from Smiths personal computer. He hadn’t been taking any chances; he’d divided up the list into sections and had each section on a different computer. With something this important there was no way he was putting all of his eggs in one basket. Furthermore he’d sent his agents only the information they needed to know, thus ensuring that no one save the top brass had all of the pieces. An ordinary Preventor or espionage agent would not have been able to locate all of the pieces in time because they would have needed to know the names and codenames of all of the personnel involved. Something like that would take a member of long standing. Unfortunately for them, while Midii might have been inactive for such a long time she had been far from uninterested in their movements. The Consortium had unknowingly provided her with quite a few bounty-heads and she had found it neccessary to keep an eye on their actions purely in the interests of keeping well out of their power.

<I’ll try to think of a way to move around them tomorrow, I still have a few days ahead of me,> she thought wearily as she climbed into bed and flicked out the lights. Right now she was really tired and wanted nothing more than to get some sleep.