Claire grabbed a handful of currency, tossing it on the table to pay for the late night meal, not caring that she was probably over-paying. She couldn't fall too far behind Hobbes, or they'd all be wandering around alone in pre-dawn London. Nothing at all mattered except finding Darien. His health was failing and if she didn't do something about it soon, he would most certainly die.

"Sodding Arnaud," she muttered to herself, nearly slipping on an icy patch in front of the pub. There were still enough people wandering the streets that she didn't immediately see Hobbes. It wasn't until he stepped past a couple kissing under a streetlamp that Claire caught sight of her friend. He was hunched over his cell phone. Snowflakes glistened in the sparse hair on the top of his head, sparkling in the light from the lamp, reminding her of Quicksilver. There was a lump in the back of her throat at the thought of Darien alone in a foreign city with the equivalent of a ticking time bomb in his head.

"Where is he?" she asked, when Hobbes flipped his phone closed. Claire shivered, pulling her coat tighter and buttoning it up against the wind.

"Never saw him," Hobbes snapped, his manner abrupt, and cold, and it had nothing to do with the weather. "What the hell did you do, Claire? Huh? You should have told us everything, right from the beginning!"

Her heart compressing under the weight of his accusations, Claire turned away, searching the dark street. She didn't expect to suddenly see Darien reappear in a shower of silver flakes, but the possibility was there, and she'd be lying to herself if she didn't hold out the tiniest hope for that happy conclusion. What she was actually looking for was parked down at the end of the block, half hidden by a red double-decker bus stopped on the corner: their rented SUV.

"Claire!" Hobbes grabbed her arm, obviously annoyed that she was ignoring him.

"Come on! We have to go after him!" Claire said urgently, practically running. The sidewalk was slippery so she slowed her pace with reluctance. "If we are going to find Darien, we need to think logically."

"And you think that means leaving the last place we saw him?" Hobbes asked incredulously. "We have to question people, find out what direction he went in... then again, if he Saran-wrapped, nobody would have seen him." Irritation crept into his voice. Irritation aimed at her.

"Don't get all shirty about it," Claire said, giving Hobbes an impatient push to get in the car. "Are you going to drive, or should I?"

She felt jumpy and disoriented inside, afraid one second and flooded with guilt the next. While Darien's condition wasn't entirely her fault by a long shot, she'd only added to the many strikes against him when it had taken her over a year to figure out the fundamental problem. What if the delays had caused irreversible organ damage? Now Arnaud was on the loose, Darien on the run, and the whole fate of her project, as well as her friend's life, rested on whether she could figure out a way to reverse the misguided 'cure' and restore the gland to its original state, with all that came with that.

"I got us here, didn't I?" Hobbes raised his hands in the air as if in surrender. "You think he went back to the other car. Logical, yeah." He swore under his breath, nearly colliding with her when he tried to get into the passenger's side instead of the driver's side. "Fawkes has the keys to the Lupo, and we don't." He scrambled around to the correct door and started the engine almost in one motion, lurching the SUV back very abruptly.

"Bobby!" Claire wailed at the reminder. She blew on her chilled fingers, trying desperately to come up with viable solutions. Hobbes might be the trained agent, but right now they needed more than commando skills and a working H&K. "Darien must have taught you something in all these years." She was impressed that he was doing a more than competent job of navigating the car through the throngs of people cha-chaing around Piccadilly Circus, and driving through London was never easy, on the best of days. Too many vehicles on narrow roads, too many people, too many confusing twists and turns. "Breaking and entering?" she said, and mimed picking a lock.

"Oh." Hobbes nodded, turning the two-letter word into two syllables. "Yeah, unless he drove the whole freakin' car away."

"Let's hope not," Claire said primly. That was just what she needed. She was already persona non-grata in her own country and suspected of being a spy, but if she were stranded without her passport? It was too much to think about. For now, she concentrated on Darien Fawkes.

Hobbes drummed his fingers restlessly against the dashboard, waiting out a red light, his face turned away from hers to stare out at the scenery. "You got any idea where Paddington Station is?" he asked darkly.

It had been probably a decade since Claire had last driven in the city limits of London and she finally resorted to pulling out a rental agency map and directing Hobbes street by street. The journey seemed to take forever, but finally they turned onto Edgeware Road, nearly at their destination. Parking the behemoth SUV was a nightmare, causing them to circle the block around Paddington Station several times.

"Claire, just explain to me why. Why didn't you see it coming? Arnaud... that Swiss miss mother--"

Claire sighed heavily. "Was sloppy," she interrupted. "It didn't help that I rushed him, and that he had taken more Percocet than he ought if he was to stay clear-headed. It was a case of events conspiring against us, only I didn't know it until a few months ago when I finally began to put it all together." It was her turn to stare out the windows silently for a moment. "As for why it took me so long," she paused unhappily. "Chalk it up to hubris. The gland had been cured. I thought it was that simple, silly me. I completely failed to take into account the possibility that Arnaud could have screwed it up! I mean, he designed the gene sequences for the toxin-producing cells! Who would know better than him how to remove them?" She banged the side of her head gently against the passenger window, wishing it wasn't too late for some sense to be knocked into it.

Beside her, Hobbes opened his mouth as if to reassure her, then closed it on whatever he'd been about to say. The truth was, she ought to have seen it coming. Arnaud was the worst of scientists--greed and slipshod lab practices taking the place of careful, controlled scientific processes. Add in a gunshot wound to the leg and no particular vested interest in getting the answer right, and it was no surprise Arnaud's 'cure' had caused more trouble than it had solved.

"Did he do this to Fawkes on purpose?" Bobby asked the question that had kept her up at night once she'd thought to ask it herself.

"I honestly don't think so, though he could have. He claimed he didn't when I accused him of it," she confided.

"And you believe him." It wasn't a question.

"Honestly? Yes," she nodded reluctantly.

Bobby's open hand smacked the steering wheel hard in frustration, and not because another vehicle had just slipped into the parking space they'd been waiting for for five minutes. "Why? Why would you believe a single thing that comes outta that man's mouth, Claire? Explain that to me, would ya?"

"Because he showed me the science to back it up," she replied simply. "It was a mistake. Exactly the kind of mistake that happens when someone is rushed or careless. And he was both."

Hobbes cruised the busy street, making another circuit of the block, vigilant for anyone who looked to be leaving. "I don't believe it," he muttered, cutting off another motorist who'd attempted to swipe a second space out from under them. Like greased lightning, Hobbes maneuvered the big SUV into a space Claire didn't think he could cram it into, and turned off the engine. "I don't believe he would have passed up an opportunity to screw Fawkes. He saw his opportunity and took it. Payback for that bullet in the leg."

Claire nodded, seeing the logic. "I know that's what it looks like, but you weren't there, Bobby. The expression on his face when I told him what was going on was... Well, let's just say that Arnaud is not that good an actor. And when he showed me the structure of the original gene-splice he did to insert the Quicksilver Madness toxin genes, it became clear to me that there was just too much room for error. Add the fact that I didn't have time--take time--to thoroughly analyze the suicide gene he designed into the cure, and hey, presto, suddenly I've wiped out not only the toxin producing cells, but the cells that convince Darien's immune system that the gland is part of his own body instead of an alien bit of protoplasm." She pulled her coat more tightly around her as she got out of the big car and waited on the sidewalk for Hobbes to lock it up and join her.

The grim set of Bobby's mouth made it plain he remained unconvinced. "I'm still not buyin' it," he said needlessly, leading the way down the snowy sidewalk.

"Whether he did or not, the results are the same, Bobby. Darien needs my--our--help. And restoring the gland to its original structure isn't permanent. We have the cure. And with fine-tuning, it will work as it was intended to. As soon as we get back, I'm going to make the Official hire a geneticist. We need to map the gland's full genetic structure. If we'd done that in the first place, I might well have been able to design a cure without Arnaud's input, and none of this would have happened."

Hobbes' snort of derision was unmistakable. "No way is he gonna bring in another scientist. In case you hadn't noticed, he's not real good at sharing information."

Claire couldn't argue with that assessment, but her instincts as a scientist told her that she needed help outside her own fields of expertise. "I'll find a way to make him," she answered grimly, stopping beside the tiny vehicle the boys had driven all over southern England in.

The pale blue car was half covered in snow, all except the passenger door, which had obviously recently been opened. There were frosty fingerprints on the window glass. Claire felt the air rush out of her, her hopes dashed that Darien might be sitting obediently inside, waiting for them. When had he ever been obedient?

"Door's unlocked," Hobbes noticed what she hadn't. He snicked the mechanism for the trunk and peered inside. "He didn't even take his clothes, probably just his own papers." He leaned against the cold metal bumper looking demoralized. "Claire, the kid could be anywhere, and he's dying."

"I know." Claire touched Bobby's arm and, for one second, felt him stiffen. Had he turned against her, too? Then he accepted her sympathy with a minute shift of muscles, softening until he pulled her into a rough, brief hug.

"As much as I hate to admit this, we've got to call the 'Fish, tell him what's up," Hobbes said. "Have him put a watch on the airports, train stations, that kinda thing. If Fawkes gets to Heathrow, he could be anywhere in a matter of hours."

"You may be angry at me when you hear this," Claire admitted. "But there is a very easy way to locate our Darien."

"And that would be?" Hobbes leveled his gaze at her, arms crossed over his chest, waiting.

"After he went missing in the desert," Claire shivered, wishing they could at least have this conversation in the warmth of the car, "the Official said we needed a way to find Darien at all times, so he..." She chewed on her lip, then blurted out the truth. "I inserted a transmitter with a satellite link in his molar. We can find him anywhere in the world in an instant."

"Then let's do it!" Hobbes declared. "Where's the receiver?"

"I wasn't thinking about that last week when I left because I didn't expect you'd follow me!" Claire blinked away the tears in her eyes. "It's at the Agency."

Hobbes pulled out the cell phone, staring at the read-out showing how many times he'd dialed Darien's number in the last hour. Fawkes had never picked up once, proving either that he was unable to, or simply didn't want to. "I'll make the call," he said quietly, and punched in the speed dial to the Agency.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[December 31, 6 p.m. San Diego time]

[January 1, approx. 2 a.m., London time]

"He wouldn't have done something stupid." Hobbes kept repeating to himself on their headlong rush into the Paddington Station Underground. "He promised me. He promised me!" Except, Darien hadn't--he'd only admitted that he thought about death less often. Had Claire's dire news thrown him right back over the edge?

He pushed through the turnstile and scanned the large space for signs of a lanky, spiky haired man in a Union Jack t-shirt. Images of Darien lying crushed on the electrical rail of the track haunted him.

"Which track do you think?" Hobbes asked frantically, trying to read the squiggly lines on the subway map but they didn't make any sense. He took a deep breath, tracing the lines from Paddington back to Victoria. "Where...?"

"Bobby," Claire panted, catching up to him. "Look around us. If there was some sort of... accident on one of the lines, wouldn't there be emergency personnel here? Police and an ambulance?" The late night crowd had thinned in the last hour and there were very few people catching a train home. The place was quiet, with only a single female cashier sitting in her booth. It took very little time to question her about any unusual activities on the tube. No deaths, no suicides, no injuries--and no sign of Darien.

"And we know he was at Victoria within the last half hour or so," Hobbes blew out a slow exhale, swearing under his breath for jumping to conclusions. "I guess we start asking questions here." He tapped the brightly colored map. "It's on the green line, too. Coulda easily gotten from here to there."

"Somehow, he must have known about the tracker--and maybe removed it?" Claire mused as they made their way back up the escalators to the main level. Twenty minutes on London's wrong-headed roads brought them to glass-domed Victoria Station.

The place was vast, and even at such an early hour, packed with people going to all points in England and beyond. Porters toted luggage to the many trains and travelers bought their tickets from the long row of cashiers. There were only a few shops open, all of them selling food, touristy clothing or books. Where to start looking for a wayward American?

"How?" Hobbes retorted, heading off towards a bank of mostly closed ticket windows across the echoing space.

"I don't know? He felt it?" she shrugged hopelessly, then gave a tiny smile. "He bit down on something hard and broke a tooth."

"Fawkes eating?" Hobbes let himself relax, marginally. "What a concept. So the kid got some flash, and he's on the lam. You think he'd fly out of here? Between finding that tracker and learning that the gland is defective, he's gotta feel like we bailed on him big time. We're probably lucky he didn't go rob a bank for the money."

"Darien's grown too much for that," Claire said soberly.

"Funny, he and I were talking about the same thing yesterday."

"He's come a long way, Bobby. He may be in a fight or flight mode right now, but I have to believe that common sense will kick in soon and he'll understand that I..." her voice quivered. When Hobbes glanced over at her, he caught the glint of a tear in her eyes. "I would never, ever mean to hurt..."

"Hey, we'll find him." He rubbed her arm before approaching one of the open windows. "Don't we always? We just gotta think like Fawkes would. Money, passport--he'll need some transport out of here, maybe a whole new look. Buy some duds, cut the hair." He shook his head. His partner's obsession with his hair was long-standing. Cutting the punky 'do was probably unthinkable. "Strike that, but he'd need styling products."

"I'm quite concerned about his having another seizure." Claire quietly wiped her eyes. "He's very unstable right now--I'd almost wonder if he hallucinated that he'd been inside a police box that was bigger on the inside than the outside if I hadn't seen him come out of the thing."

"That was some really weird mojo," Hobbes agreed. "I say we show his picture around in the hope that someone saw him."

Claire nodded agreement.

Hobbes pulled up a recent picture of Darien on his cell phone, one of the few brief moments that he and his partner had stood still long enough to see the sights. Darien out in front of the monument in Piccadilly Circus.

After standing in a long line of frustrated travelers, the first two cashiers Bobby showed it to shook their heads with suspicious expressions. At that point, Claire came up with a cover story that she was searching for her missing patient who was on a tour of the British Isles despite his serious medical condition, and he needed his medication immediately. This garnered far more sympathy to their plight and one cashier called her friend over to examine the photo, too.

"Could be, could be..." Mags sucked on her dentures thoughtfully. "There was a fella looked like him. American, he was. Asked for the train to Heathrow, if I recollect. Had on one a them t-shirts they sell over there." She pointed to the tourist shop, which featured the exact Union Jack style Darien had bought in Piccadilly. "He asked me if there was any good clothing shops in the airport." She cackled and hacked, the cough of a three-pack-a-day smoker. "Told him you could get anything at Heathrow, even a good...." She winked bawdily. "Meet a real nice lady, if you get my drift."

Claire cleared her throat when Hobbes grinned. "I doubt Darien would be in any condition for that sort of aerobic exercise just now. Thank you for your help."

Back in the SUV, Hobbes let Claire drive while he relayed the news to the Agency. "Looks like he went to Heathrow. Eberts, can you track any airline ticket purchases he made?" he asked, watching the sun rising over the British countryside. Beautiful and scary, since it proved how many hours Darien had already been missing. He couldn't help but castigate himself for not reading his partner better. He should have followed Darien quicker, grabbed his arm, something, to prevent losing Fawkes altogether. And that was what he was most afraid of: losing Darien forever to the gland.

Parking at the airport took almost as long as finding parking near the train stations had and both Claire and Hobbes were feeling the fatigue of being up for nearly 24 hours after such a stressful and action packed day. When they passed a ubiquitous Starbucks in the airport lobby, Hobbes started to follow his nose to the counter before Claire pulled him back and shoved him in the direction of Virgin Atlantic.

"Well, you've missed your flight," the V.A. ticket attendant said with slight reproach, tapping her computer screen. "All our flights to the States are booked solid for today. Would you like to try for a later flight?'

"No, we want to know if Darien Fawkes," Hobbes leaned over and pointed to Darien's name on the ticket list. "Exchanged his ticket..."

"Sir, I will ask you to step away before I classify your actions as hostile and call airport security," the woman said frostily, her hand on the telephone.

"We're very concerned that my patient, Darien Fawkes, may be suffering from mental trauma and is in desperate need of medication," Claire cut in, holding up her passport for proof of identity. "I'm a medical doctor. We were traveling together in England to..."

"You don't have a ticket at all on this airline." The attendant frowned, typing in Claire's name. "In fact..."

Hobbes smacked the counter, causing the woman behind it to jump back in alarm. "Lady, can you just tell me if Darien Fawkes cashed in his ticket or exchanged it for another flight."

"No," she said.

It wasn't obvious whether she meant that he hadn't or that she wasn't going to tell them but Bobby Hobbes was no fool; he knew when to vamoose. "We'll get outta your hair, then. Thanks for nothing." He could see her picking up the phone as he propelled Claire away from the line of waiting customers. "I think we may just have put our foot in it."

They walked quickly back toward the elevators leading to the parking area, but not quickly enough. Two burly soldiers from the Royal Army stepped in front of the doors just as they slid open, both holding their machine guns at the ready.

"If you will come with us, MI-5 is most anxious to speak with Dr. Saxe-Coburg," the taller of the two said politely but with obvious menace.