Fic, Transient Glory, Danny/Sarah, 12
Jun. 18th, 2020 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fredbassettTitle : Transient Glory
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 12
Characters : Danny/Sarah, Connor, Becker
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Summary : Sarah finds an unexpected connection with the ARC’s new team leader.
A/N : Written for the![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
primeval_denial pairing month featuring Danny/Sarah, as requested by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
clea2011.
“Fancy a cuppa?”
Danny, cheerful as ever, was brandishing a kettle at her. Sarah hadn’t even heard him come into the breakroom. “That would be lovely, thanks.”
She was curled up on the big sofa, trying to summon up the energy to go home, but if she was honest with herself, she was just too tired to drive. And clearly too tired even to notice who was coming and going around her.
The sense of elation from her impromptu excursion to the Middle Ages had quickly faded, leaving her with a a splitting headache and intrusive thoughts that insisted on cataloguing everything might have gone wrong. Luckily for her, Lester had been surprisingly diplomatic on the subject, no doubt due to Jenny’s calming influence. Even Becker, too busy woth Abby and the dracorex, hadn’t sounded off about the inadvisability of civilians taking matters into their own hands. Connor had wanted all the details, but Connor never criticised, so she was on safe ground with him.
She’d written her report, but then had just settled down in the breakroom and stared into space, going over everything in her mind, torn between wonder at what she’d seen and shock at what she’d done.
Danny put her tea down on the coffee table and sprawled out on the same sofa, his long legs stretched out comfortably in front of him.
“You look worn out.” His tone was kind and held a note of concern. “You’re not thinking of bunking down in this place overnight, are you?”
“It’s a choice between this and an empty flat,” she admitted. “I’ve got a stack of things I need to do tomorrow, so I might as well cut out the middleman and just stay here.”
“Don’t tell me you want to take potluck with the hotel art in the staff bedrooms? Whenever I kip here there’s only ever the room with the bilious yellow swirls and the off-centre orange dot left.”
“They’re all dire,” Sarah admitted. “I swear whoever fitted this place out hijacked a lorry intended for some chain hotel. But the sheets are clean and the beds are comfy.” She thought a moment then added, “Actually, the room with the red squares isn’t too bad. It reminds me of something I saw in the Tate Modern last year.”
“Bit recent for you, isn’t it?”
She laughed. “Danny, I’m an Egyptologist, not a complete philistine. I love the Tate Modern.”
“When I was a copper, I got called in to a case of vandalism there Someone had chucked paint over one of the exhibits. Buggered if we could work out which one, they all looked like that! When we did find it, even one of the staff said it was an improvement.”
Sarah opened her mouth to make a comment about Danny’s appreciation of modern art, but instead, completely different words tumbled out. “You fought a Medieval knight armed with a bit of fence. You could have been killed.”
Danny grinned, looking like a naughty schoolboy. “Yeah, probably not my brightest move. My old guv’nor used to give me hell for stunts like that.”
“I’m not sure there are any stunts like that!”
“You want to try some of the London beats. Covent Garden on a Friday night… drunkem tossers with more money than sense lawyering up before you’ve even finished the bloody caution. I’d take the guy with the sword any day over that lot. At least with him it was a fair fight.”
“Didn’t you think he might kill you?”
Danny’s cheerful face turned serious for a moment. “I hoped he wouldn’t. But it’s easier when it’s critters trying to take a chunk out of you rather than a bloke in armour.”
“You don’t like killing them, either.”
“Not their fault they don’t understand where they are. Same with Sir William. Even Soldier Boy’s not so trigger happy now.”
“Not if Abby’s got anything to do with it.”
“Never been mistaken for a demon before, though. Not even when I’m in full biker rig.” Danny stood up. “Come on, it’s been a bit of an eventful day. I’ll give you a lift home, you look knackered.” He held his hand down to her and smiled.
“No need, my car’s here.”
“Then leave it here, I’ll take you home and pick you up in the morning as well.”
Sarah was tempted by the thought of her own bed, but an empty flat and a fridge that was probably home to a culture more ancient than most of her Egyptian dynasties didn’t hold much appeal. At least the milk in the breakroom kitchen hadn’t gone off.
“Thanks for the offer, but I’m fine here, honestly.”
“Hang on a minute…” He unfolded his lanky frame and made for the door. “Don’t go away.”
Five minutes later, he was back with a bottle of red wine.
“Who did you nick that off?”
“I left an IOU! Anyway, you saved my life today. Least I can do to get you a drink.”
At least he hadn’t raided Lester’s not-so-secret stash of the decent Scotch he kept for emergencies. That was a P45 level misdemeanour.
“Would you rather be back at the museum?” he asked. “It’s been pretty full on since you joined.”
She hadn’t be expecting that question. Half a glass of wine later, she said, “No. Finding out about the anomalies was like discovering that all the magic I’d believed in as a child was suddenly real. I couldn’t just have walked away from what had happened, back to my safe… normal… life, not when I knew that something so huge was happening… and that it might always have been happening. There’s just so much we need to know to understand the anomalies.”
Danny topped up her glass. “So what was different about today?”
“I was the one taking a big risk. I’ve never done anything like that on my own before. I didn’t think I was a risk taker but...”
“You signed up to this place. That was pretty risky.” He touched her hand lightly. “You’ve had a hell of a day. Soldier boy and his lads would call it combat fatigue. You do something off the wall, get a rush like nothing you’ve ever felt before, then the adrenaline all drains away and you feel like you’ve been hit by a train. The rest of them are used to it.”
She turned her hand in his, feeling his rougher skin against hers, grateful for the quiet, pragmatic words of comfort. She knew that there was no way she could walk away from this life now. The death of Nick Cutter had proved that nothing about this job was safe and she was starting to realise that maybe she hadn’t really moved on from that either, or from the horror of the man-eating fungus. She’d felt like a bystander at so much of what had happened since she’d thrown away her old life and she’d wanted to prove herself as a full member of the team today, not just someone who would sit in a safe office reading books and researching from behind a desk. She wanted more than that and she’d seized an opportunity.
She just hadn’t expected to feel like this afterwards.
And she hadn’t expected the brash Danny Quinn to be the one to notice.
The second glass of wine helped, and by the time they’d finished the bottle, Sarah was laughing at his outrageous stories, the hollow, sick feeling banished by Danny’s undemanding companionship.
The second time he stood up and offered her his hand, she took it. Danny walked with her down the quiet corridors to the rooms set aside as staff accommodation. When he’d gone off for the wine, he’d also picked up the keycard for the room with the red square abstract design she liked.
“Thanks for the wine and the shoulder to lean on.” On impulse, she went up on her toes and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“Any time.” He took a couple of steps down the corridor then turned and called softly, “Fancy a trip to the Tate Modern? You could tell me which of the paint splodges are meant to be there.”
“And if we see an anomaly, we can just pretend it’s an art installation.”
“No bugger’d notice. There’s way weirder shit in there than that.”
****
“Why do elephants paint the bottom of their feet yellow?”
The woman standing next to Danny shot him a disapproving look. She obviously thought more of the yellow splodges on a lemon canvas than Sarah’s companion did.
The six-year-old on their other side grinned from ear to ear. “So they can hide upside down in the custard!”
Danny promptly high-fived the kid while Sarah did her best not to giggle.
“There’s one over there that looks like what our dog did on the carpet last night,” the kid confided in a stage whisper that could be heard at 20 paces.
Sarah glanced over at the opposite wall and winced. It was an accurate description but somehow she didn’t think the interpretation on the wall next to it was going to mention canine vomit. The visit wasn’t helping to change Danny’s views on modern art, but Sarah was having a lot of fun spending the day with him.
They’d met on Westminster Bridge then strolled along the river, enjoying the sunshine sparkling on the water. He’d greeted her with a hug and by Millennium Bridge they were holding hands.
After a coffee and a cake in the café, they started to ramble slowly around the building with Danny putting his comedic talents to use whenever the occasion demanded, but every now and then he stopped, tilted his head slightly to one side in a now-familiar gesture and stared at something with unexpected intensity. A small room filled with black and white photographs taken in an East End market was the first to capture his attention like that. Each one was taken from an unusual angle, often in extreme close up, mostly showing people’s hands, captured in the act of touching fruit and vegetables. Each hand was different, some young and unlined, others rough, lined, tanned, telling more about their lives than even faces would have done.
After 15 minutes, he’d smiled and they’d moved on into the next room, where he’d promptly whispered, “Two ferrets had an energetic shag over there.”
An elderly lady standing next to him had nodded vigorously, setting the tone for the next two rooms.
“The artist brings the viewer’s fears and prejudices to the surface and forces them to confront their own preconceived hierarchy of cultural values and assumptions of artistic worth.” Danny stared at a three metre square black canvas with one green dot in the bottom left corner.
Sarah rolled her eyes theatrically. “Shall I explain?”
“I was hoping you would.”
She whispered in his ear, “It’s pretentious bollocks.”
“Ah,” he intoned, his face a serious mask. “I see it now. It ruptures the fabric of post-structuralism and defies attempts to rationalise and contain our emotions.”
Two earnest-looking students with even less dress sense than Connor looked impressed.
Sarah slipped her hand into Danny’s and they moved on.
The next room was empty apart from crowd of people gathered around a large, two-metre-tall, highly polished grey plinth.
“It’s not doing much,” Danny commented.
“Just watch,” a woman next to him said quietly. “It’s amazing.”
Sarah and Danny joined the small crowd and waited.
Without warning, a burst of light reflected off the highly polished metal and a small globe of spinning diamond fragments revolved slowly in the air a few inches above the plinth. Gasps echoed around the room and children clapped and cheered.
“Shit,” Danny muttered, earning himself a hard stare from the father of a bouncing ten-year-old.
Sarah looked around quickly for a projector mounted high up on a wall. There was nothing obvious. The walls were all white painted and utterly bare of wires, holes or anything that could be used to create the spherical light show that everyone was watching with such rapt attention.
Danny quickly pulled a small coin out of his pocket and held it out on his palm. It was promptly plucked off by an invisible force and dragged into the broken light.
“Don’t do that again, please, sir,” the room steward said quickly. “We must ask you not to interfere with the exhibit.”
“How long has this been here?” Sarah asked, trying to sound calmer than she felt.
“Three weeks,” the woman told her. “Impressive, isn’t it?”
“It’s stunning.” All anomalies were - if you ignored the havoc they caused.
The anomaly winked out as though someone had flipped a switch.
Sarah let out a slow breath.
“It’ll be back,” the woman on her left told her. “We’ve been watching it for ages.”
“Where did that coin go?” demanded the bouncing ten-year-old, obviously hoping to supplement his pocket money.
“I’m calling it in,” Danny slipped his mobile out of his pocket.
“You’ll need to go out into the central area to get a signal, sir,” the room steward said, still looking disapproving.
“I’ll go,” Sarah told him. “You stay here in case it comes back and anything comes through. Be careful.”
“I always am!”
Sarah rolled her eyes and hurried from the room, pushing through a crowd of schoolchildren milling around outside the toilets to get to the gallery overlooking the huge central hall. There she was finally able to get a weak signal.
“I need Connor, quickly,” she told the duty operator. A few moments later, “Connor, we’ve got a problem. Get to the Tate Modern as fast as you can with the locking device. Intermittent anomaly, about half a metre in diameter. Get someone onto the Director and Head of Security here and tell them who I am.” She gave him the room and artist’s name and could hear Connor’s fingers on his keyboard as he entered the details as fast as she was delivering them, not interrupting with questions. “If you can get Becker and his men to look like some sort of art installation, that’d help.”
“On the case…”
Sarah drew a deep breath then dashed back to the artist’s room. The crowd was still gathered admiringly around the plinth, with Danny using his height to good advantage and maintaining a watch at the back of the small room.
He raised his eyebrows and she nodded. He beckoned her over to the explanation of the piece fixed to the wall beside him.
“Magnetite,” Sarah said, her eyes widening. “The same as the Sun Cage.”
Danny nodded.
“The team are on their way. We should have internal security here soon.”
Casting anxious looks at her watch, Sarah hovered in the doorway, hoping that someone from the ARC had been able to get through to the gallery’s security team. There were protocols in place to verify information from the security services and the ARC was now classified in the same way.
Exactly seven minutes after she’d come off the call to Connor, she saw a slim man in his mid-forties wearing a smart grey suit making his way through the children still milling around outside, in some sort of disorderly queue for the toilets. He walked purposefully and quickly, flanked by an older man with close cropped grey hair, dressed in dark trousers and a navy jumper. Sarah was certain he was ex-military. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t immediately work out where she recognised him from. He was followed by two uniformed security guards.
It was a good start.
She stepped up to meet them.
The younger man held out his hand to her. “Sarah Page? I’m Greg Barker, Deputy Director. This is Graeme Rider, our Head of Security. What do you need us to do?” He had a firm handshake with nothing to prove.
“Clear this room first, please, then clear the whole floor and the rest of the building as quickly as you can. We’ll have our own security and science team arriving soon with some equipment. Treat this as a bomb scare. We’ll get you open again as quickly as we can.”
Both men nodded and started issuing instructions over their radios.
Sarah was impressed. No questions, just calm acceptance that she knew what she was talking about. “Our team leader is in the room.” On cue, Danny appeared in the doorway and she nodded to him. “Danny Quinn, former Metropolitan Police.”
The men shook hands and one of Rider’s security guards started to usher all the visitors out of the opposite door, quietly but firmly, while the other began to clear the area immediately outside.
As soon as the room was clear, leaving only Rider in there with them, the head of security turned to Danny and said, “Do you think anything is likely to come through before your lads get here?”
Danny shot him a surprised look. “Unlikely if it’s been here for three days already without a problem, but we’ll need to sweep the building once it’s clear, just in case. So what do you know, mate?”
Rider held up a hand, a slight smile on his face, “My husband is head of security at the British Museum. He talked to me on the phone before you lot got him to sign the Act.”
“We met at the staff party last Christmas!” Sarah exclaimed.
Rider nodded. “We talked about Rameses II.” He took a portable radio of his belt. “I’ll make sure your team get brought straight up here and I’ll get floor plans for the room sweep.”
While Rider issued orders, Sarah and Danny stared at the anomaly as it came and went. Gone for three minutes exactly, then back for one minute. Connor was going to be over the moon to have this little beauty to study. Sarah’s thoughts flashed back to Nick Cutter. He would have loved it too. She hadn’t known him long, but his enthusiasm for researching the anomalies had been infectious and she was proud to be able to keep his legacy alive in any way she could.
By the time Becker and his men arrived, Rider’s team had already successfully cleared the building and were awaiting further orders.
“Nice one!” Connor said excitedly as two of Becker’s men started to get the locking device set up.
“Good stuff, this modern art,” Danny acknowledged. He pointed at the pedestal with its shining crown. “Transient Glory examines the hermeneutical depth of existence, reflecting humanity’s fleeting moment surmounting a greater intransient power.”
“You’ve just made that up.”
Danny waved nonchalantly in the direction of the interpretation board. “Would I bullshit you?”
“Yes,” Becker said, striding into the room with Rider at his heels. “Since when did you get into culture, Quinn?”
Danny smirked. “I’ve got hidden depths, soldier boy.”
“No, you haven’t.” He glanced at Rider. “There’ll be a lot of paperwork to sign.”
“He knows,” Sarah said, and explained.
“Makes our job easier,” Becker said.
“We’ll need to arrange transport for this little beauty back to our building. I can sign for it,” said Danny.
“No problem. I can get a van brought round. Does that gizmo need to keep pointing at it?”
“Yep.”
“Give me half an hour.” With that, Rider walked calmly off.
“Top bloke,” Danny declared. “OK, soldier boy, let’s see how fast we can get this place swept for beasties. Sarah, I need you and Connor to get this back to base and brief Lester.”
****
“That wasn’t quite what I thought we’d be doing today,” Sarah admitted, at the end of a long, relaxed Italian meal just around the corner from her flat.
Danny grinned. “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like! Best fun I’d had for ages. How about the National Gallery next weekend?”
Sarah laughed. “It’s a date.”
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 12
Characters : Danny/Sarah, Connor, Becker
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Summary : Sarah finds an unexpected connection with the ARC’s new team leader.
A/N : Written for the
primeval_denial pairing month featuring Danny/Sarah, as requested by clea2011.“Fancy a cuppa?”
Danny, cheerful as ever, was brandishing a kettle at her. Sarah hadn’t even heard him come into the breakroom. “That would be lovely, thanks.”
She was curled up on the big sofa, trying to summon up the energy to go home, but if she was honest with herself, she was just too tired to drive. And clearly too tired even to notice who was coming and going around her.
The sense of elation from her impromptu excursion to the Middle Ages had quickly faded, leaving her with a a splitting headache and intrusive thoughts that insisted on cataloguing everything might have gone wrong. Luckily for her, Lester had been surprisingly diplomatic on the subject, no doubt due to Jenny’s calming influence. Even Becker, too busy woth Abby and the dracorex, hadn’t sounded off about the inadvisability of civilians taking matters into their own hands. Connor had wanted all the details, but Connor never criticised, so she was on safe ground with him.
She’d written her report, but then had just settled down in the breakroom and stared into space, going over everything in her mind, torn between wonder at what she’d seen and shock at what she’d done.
Danny put her tea down on the coffee table and sprawled out on the same sofa, his long legs stretched out comfortably in front of him.
“You look worn out.” His tone was kind and held a note of concern. “You’re not thinking of bunking down in this place overnight, are you?”
“It’s a choice between this and an empty flat,” she admitted. “I’ve got a stack of things I need to do tomorrow, so I might as well cut out the middleman and just stay here.”
“Don’t tell me you want to take potluck with the hotel art in the staff bedrooms? Whenever I kip here there’s only ever the room with the bilious yellow swirls and the off-centre orange dot left.”
“They’re all dire,” Sarah admitted. “I swear whoever fitted this place out hijacked a lorry intended for some chain hotel. But the sheets are clean and the beds are comfy.” She thought a moment then added, “Actually, the room with the red squares isn’t too bad. It reminds me of something I saw in the Tate Modern last year.”
“Bit recent for you, isn’t it?”
She laughed. “Danny, I’m an Egyptologist, not a complete philistine. I love the Tate Modern.”
“When I was a copper, I got called in to a case of vandalism there Someone had chucked paint over one of the exhibits. Buggered if we could work out which one, they all looked like that! When we did find it, even one of the staff said it was an improvement.”
Sarah opened her mouth to make a comment about Danny’s appreciation of modern art, but instead, completely different words tumbled out. “You fought a Medieval knight armed with a bit of fence. You could have been killed.”
Danny grinned, looking like a naughty schoolboy. “Yeah, probably not my brightest move. My old guv’nor used to give me hell for stunts like that.”
“I’m not sure there are any stunts like that!”
“You want to try some of the London beats. Covent Garden on a Friday night… drunkem tossers with more money than sense lawyering up before you’ve even finished the bloody caution. I’d take the guy with the sword any day over that lot. At least with him it was a fair fight.”
“Didn’t you think he might kill you?”
Danny’s cheerful face turned serious for a moment. “I hoped he wouldn’t. But it’s easier when it’s critters trying to take a chunk out of you rather than a bloke in armour.”
“You don’t like killing them, either.”
“Not their fault they don’t understand where they are. Same with Sir William. Even Soldier Boy’s not so trigger happy now.”
“Not if Abby’s got anything to do with it.”
“Never been mistaken for a demon before, though. Not even when I’m in full biker rig.” Danny stood up. “Come on, it’s been a bit of an eventful day. I’ll give you a lift home, you look knackered.” He held his hand down to her and smiled.
“No need, my car’s here.”
“Then leave it here, I’ll take you home and pick you up in the morning as well.”
Sarah was tempted by the thought of her own bed, but an empty flat and a fridge that was probably home to a culture more ancient than most of her Egyptian dynasties didn’t hold much appeal. At least the milk in the breakroom kitchen hadn’t gone off.
“Thanks for the offer, but I’m fine here, honestly.”
“Hang on a minute…” He unfolded his lanky frame and made for the door. “Don’t go away.”
Five minutes later, he was back with a bottle of red wine.
“Who did you nick that off?”
“I left an IOU! Anyway, you saved my life today. Least I can do to get you a drink.”
At least he hadn’t raided Lester’s not-so-secret stash of the decent Scotch he kept for emergencies. That was a P45 level misdemeanour.
“Would you rather be back at the museum?” he asked. “It’s been pretty full on since you joined.”
She hadn’t be expecting that question. Half a glass of wine later, she said, “No. Finding out about the anomalies was like discovering that all the magic I’d believed in as a child was suddenly real. I couldn’t just have walked away from what had happened, back to my safe… normal… life, not when I knew that something so huge was happening… and that it might always have been happening. There’s just so much we need to know to understand the anomalies.”
Danny topped up her glass. “So what was different about today?”
“I was the one taking a big risk. I’ve never done anything like that on my own before. I didn’t think I was a risk taker but...”
“You signed up to this place. That was pretty risky.” He touched her hand lightly. “You’ve had a hell of a day. Soldier boy and his lads would call it combat fatigue. You do something off the wall, get a rush like nothing you’ve ever felt before, then the adrenaline all drains away and you feel like you’ve been hit by a train. The rest of them are used to it.”
She turned her hand in his, feeling his rougher skin against hers, grateful for the quiet, pragmatic words of comfort. She knew that there was no way she could walk away from this life now. The death of Nick Cutter had proved that nothing about this job was safe and she was starting to realise that maybe she hadn’t really moved on from that either, or from the horror of the man-eating fungus. She’d felt like a bystander at so much of what had happened since she’d thrown away her old life and she’d wanted to prove herself as a full member of the team today, not just someone who would sit in a safe office reading books and researching from behind a desk. She wanted more than that and she’d seized an opportunity.
She just hadn’t expected to feel like this afterwards.
And she hadn’t expected the brash Danny Quinn to be the one to notice.
The second glass of wine helped, and by the time they’d finished the bottle, Sarah was laughing at his outrageous stories, the hollow, sick feeling banished by Danny’s undemanding companionship.
The second time he stood up and offered her his hand, she took it. Danny walked with her down the quiet corridors to the rooms set aside as staff accommodation. When he’d gone off for the wine, he’d also picked up the keycard for the room with the red square abstract design she liked.
“Thanks for the wine and the shoulder to lean on.” On impulse, she went up on her toes and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“Any time.” He took a couple of steps down the corridor then turned and called softly, “Fancy a trip to the Tate Modern? You could tell me which of the paint splodges are meant to be there.”
“And if we see an anomaly, we can just pretend it’s an art installation.”
“No bugger’d notice. There’s way weirder shit in there than that.”
****
“Why do elephants paint the bottom of their feet yellow?”
The woman standing next to Danny shot him a disapproving look. She obviously thought more of the yellow splodges on a lemon canvas than Sarah’s companion did.
The six-year-old on their other side grinned from ear to ear. “So they can hide upside down in the custard!”
Danny promptly high-fived the kid while Sarah did her best not to giggle.
“There’s one over there that looks like what our dog did on the carpet last night,” the kid confided in a stage whisper that could be heard at 20 paces.
Sarah glanced over at the opposite wall and winced. It was an accurate description but somehow she didn’t think the interpretation on the wall next to it was going to mention canine vomit. The visit wasn’t helping to change Danny’s views on modern art, but Sarah was having a lot of fun spending the day with him.
They’d met on Westminster Bridge then strolled along the river, enjoying the sunshine sparkling on the water. He’d greeted her with a hug and by Millennium Bridge they were holding hands.
After a coffee and a cake in the café, they started to ramble slowly around the building with Danny putting his comedic talents to use whenever the occasion demanded, but every now and then he stopped, tilted his head slightly to one side in a now-familiar gesture and stared at something with unexpected intensity. A small room filled with black and white photographs taken in an East End market was the first to capture his attention like that. Each one was taken from an unusual angle, often in extreme close up, mostly showing people’s hands, captured in the act of touching fruit and vegetables. Each hand was different, some young and unlined, others rough, lined, tanned, telling more about their lives than even faces would have done.
After 15 minutes, he’d smiled and they’d moved on into the next room, where he’d promptly whispered, “Two ferrets had an energetic shag over there.”
An elderly lady standing next to him had nodded vigorously, setting the tone for the next two rooms.
“The artist brings the viewer’s fears and prejudices to the surface and forces them to confront their own preconceived hierarchy of cultural values and assumptions of artistic worth.” Danny stared at a three metre square black canvas with one green dot in the bottom left corner.
Sarah rolled her eyes theatrically. “Shall I explain?”
“I was hoping you would.”
She whispered in his ear, “It’s pretentious bollocks.”
“Ah,” he intoned, his face a serious mask. “I see it now. It ruptures the fabric of post-structuralism and defies attempts to rationalise and contain our emotions.”
Two earnest-looking students with even less dress sense than Connor looked impressed.
Sarah slipped her hand into Danny’s and they moved on.
The next room was empty apart from crowd of people gathered around a large, two-metre-tall, highly polished grey plinth.
“It’s not doing much,” Danny commented.
“Just watch,” a woman next to him said quietly. “It’s amazing.”
Sarah and Danny joined the small crowd and waited.
Without warning, a burst of light reflected off the highly polished metal and a small globe of spinning diamond fragments revolved slowly in the air a few inches above the plinth. Gasps echoed around the room and children clapped and cheered.
“Shit,” Danny muttered, earning himself a hard stare from the father of a bouncing ten-year-old.
Sarah looked around quickly for a projector mounted high up on a wall. There was nothing obvious. The walls were all white painted and utterly bare of wires, holes or anything that could be used to create the spherical light show that everyone was watching with such rapt attention.
Danny quickly pulled a small coin out of his pocket and held it out on his palm. It was promptly plucked off by an invisible force and dragged into the broken light.
“Don’t do that again, please, sir,” the room steward said quickly. “We must ask you not to interfere with the exhibit.”
“How long has this been here?” Sarah asked, trying to sound calmer than she felt.
“Three weeks,” the woman told her. “Impressive, isn’t it?”
“It’s stunning.” All anomalies were - if you ignored the havoc they caused.
The anomaly winked out as though someone had flipped a switch.
Sarah let out a slow breath.
“It’ll be back,” the woman on her left told her. “We’ve been watching it for ages.”
“Where did that coin go?” demanded the bouncing ten-year-old, obviously hoping to supplement his pocket money.
“I’m calling it in,” Danny slipped his mobile out of his pocket.
“You’ll need to go out into the central area to get a signal, sir,” the room steward said, still looking disapproving.
“I’ll go,” Sarah told him. “You stay here in case it comes back and anything comes through. Be careful.”
“I always am!”
Sarah rolled her eyes and hurried from the room, pushing through a crowd of schoolchildren milling around outside the toilets to get to the gallery overlooking the huge central hall. There she was finally able to get a weak signal.
“I need Connor, quickly,” she told the duty operator. A few moments later, “Connor, we’ve got a problem. Get to the Tate Modern as fast as you can with the locking device. Intermittent anomaly, about half a metre in diameter. Get someone onto the Director and Head of Security here and tell them who I am.” She gave him the room and artist’s name and could hear Connor’s fingers on his keyboard as he entered the details as fast as she was delivering them, not interrupting with questions. “If you can get Becker and his men to look like some sort of art installation, that’d help.”
“On the case…”
Sarah drew a deep breath then dashed back to the artist’s room. The crowd was still gathered admiringly around the plinth, with Danny using his height to good advantage and maintaining a watch at the back of the small room.
He raised his eyebrows and she nodded. He beckoned her over to the explanation of the piece fixed to the wall beside him.
“Magnetite,” Sarah said, her eyes widening. “The same as the Sun Cage.”
Danny nodded.
“The team are on their way. We should have internal security here soon.”
Casting anxious looks at her watch, Sarah hovered in the doorway, hoping that someone from the ARC had been able to get through to the gallery’s security team. There were protocols in place to verify information from the security services and the ARC was now classified in the same way.
Exactly seven minutes after she’d come off the call to Connor, she saw a slim man in his mid-forties wearing a smart grey suit making his way through the children still milling around outside, in some sort of disorderly queue for the toilets. He walked purposefully and quickly, flanked by an older man with close cropped grey hair, dressed in dark trousers and a navy jumper. Sarah was certain he was ex-military. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t immediately work out where she recognised him from. He was followed by two uniformed security guards.
It was a good start.
She stepped up to meet them.
The younger man held out his hand to her. “Sarah Page? I’m Greg Barker, Deputy Director. This is Graeme Rider, our Head of Security. What do you need us to do?” He had a firm handshake with nothing to prove.
“Clear this room first, please, then clear the whole floor and the rest of the building as quickly as you can. We’ll have our own security and science team arriving soon with some equipment. Treat this as a bomb scare. We’ll get you open again as quickly as we can.”
Both men nodded and started issuing instructions over their radios.
Sarah was impressed. No questions, just calm acceptance that she knew what she was talking about. “Our team leader is in the room.” On cue, Danny appeared in the doorway and she nodded to him. “Danny Quinn, former Metropolitan Police.”
The men shook hands and one of Rider’s security guards started to usher all the visitors out of the opposite door, quietly but firmly, while the other began to clear the area immediately outside.
As soon as the room was clear, leaving only Rider in there with them, the head of security turned to Danny and said, “Do you think anything is likely to come through before your lads get here?”
Danny shot him a surprised look. “Unlikely if it’s been here for three days already without a problem, but we’ll need to sweep the building once it’s clear, just in case. So what do you know, mate?”
Rider held up a hand, a slight smile on his face, “My husband is head of security at the British Museum. He talked to me on the phone before you lot got him to sign the Act.”
“We met at the staff party last Christmas!” Sarah exclaimed.
Rider nodded. “We talked about Rameses II.” He took a portable radio of his belt. “I’ll make sure your team get brought straight up here and I’ll get floor plans for the room sweep.”
While Rider issued orders, Sarah and Danny stared at the anomaly as it came and went. Gone for three minutes exactly, then back for one minute. Connor was going to be over the moon to have this little beauty to study. Sarah’s thoughts flashed back to Nick Cutter. He would have loved it too. She hadn’t known him long, but his enthusiasm for researching the anomalies had been infectious and she was proud to be able to keep his legacy alive in any way she could.
By the time Becker and his men arrived, Rider’s team had already successfully cleared the building and were awaiting further orders.
“Nice one!” Connor said excitedly as two of Becker’s men started to get the locking device set up.
“Good stuff, this modern art,” Danny acknowledged. He pointed at the pedestal with its shining crown. “Transient Glory examines the hermeneutical depth of existence, reflecting humanity’s fleeting moment surmounting a greater intransient power.”
“You’ve just made that up.”
Danny waved nonchalantly in the direction of the interpretation board. “Would I bullshit you?”
“Yes,” Becker said, striding into the room with Rider at his heels. “Since when did you get into culture, Quinn?”
Danny smirked. “I’ve got hidden depths, soldier boy.”
“No, you haven’t.” He glanced at Rider. “There’ll be a lot of paperwork to sign.”
“He knows,” Sarah said, and explained.
“Makes our job easier,” Becker said.
“We’ll need to arrange transport for this little beauty back to our building. I can sign for it,” said Danny.
“No problem. I can get a van brought round. Does that gizmo need to keep pointing at it?”
“Yep.”
“Give me half an hour.” With that, Rider walked calmly off.
“Top bloke,” Danny declared. “OK, soldier boy, let’s see how fast we can get this place swept for beasties. Sarah, I need you and Connor to get this back to base and brief Lester.”
****
“That wasn’t quite what I thought we’d be doing today,” Sarah admitted, at the end of a long, relaxed Italian meal just around the corner from her flat.
Danny grinned. “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like! Best fun I’d had for ages. How about the National Gallery next weekend?”
Sarah laughed. “It’s a date.”