No-nonsense, he says, knowing full well that my life is almost entirely nonsense. I just happen to be exceptionally good at handling it with some manner of patience and… we’ll say flare. And by patience and flare that usually means with intensive study and lightly on fire… more often than not.
“Oh, so it’s not just the attitude that makes me fit the part, it’s the gray too. Lovely, good to know that we won’t be having to go to a quartermaster just to make sure I don’t look like I’m dying the gray away. What’s a little fake scar when superficial vanity says everything about a man anyone could hope to know?” he muttered to his coffee as he glanced down at the photo. It was horribly grainy, but otherwise the likeness between the two of them was somewhat startling. Pale eyes, lightly wavy hair, tall and lean. There was just the niggling matter of that scar across the bridge of the actual Billany’s hawkish nose. Well, I guess we’re similar in the nose too so I shouldn’t judge too harshly….
“Oh, well that’s lovely information I definitely don’t have and won’t take with me to my grave. Thanks for that.” Though it was useful, knowing that they at least weren’t going to run into the real McCoy somewhere out there on their as yet tenuous and dangerous sounding mission. That didn’t mean, however, that they weren’t possibly going to come across some OSS agents who could be in the know - that was always the problem with dealing with secrecy: one had to keep very good track of the lies, and one could never quite account for the lies other people did and did not know.
He cast the other man a withering glance, but nonetheless let himself be imbued by a bit of the other man’s confidence. Part of putting on the act was believing it, and the first step of that was suspending your own disbelief before stepping into another man’s shoes. Regardless of whether or not the dead man would ever walk in them again himself.
“I would never turn you down a favor, and that speaks a lot to both my understandings of friendship and self-preservation.” But if he were going to be honest, he at least trusted Napoleon’s attention to detail implicitly. His willingness to share completely, maybe not, but he didn’t trust Wong in that regard either so it was hardly a judgement. “So, why impersonate Billany anyway? Are we infiltrating, inveigling? Stealing?”
Napoleon settled back to allow Stephen space and time to process what was being asked of him. A reluctant operative was never a successful operative, and while Solo greatly resented how he’d come to find his position in the agency, he prided himself in his remarkable competency and ability to assess an individual’s likely motivations. If he’d been born a more moral person perhaps he would have sought it out himself instead of being leashed into the lifestyle.
As it was, Solo did his job and did it well in the name of keeping his sentence kept to fifteen years, to ensure that, in five years, he could walk out of that Langley building and never look back. That, and making himself reasonably indispensable encouraged a certain amount of turning heads when it came to his greedy fingers.
He’d rather gotten lost in the nuance of his espresso by the time Stephen spoke again, and Solo was pleased to find that the good Doctor remained intrigued. It really would be a difficult thing to pull off without him.
“Well, we need access to his safety deposit box. The wrinkle, in this instance, is that his safety deposit box is behind a lobby security desk, three locked doors, and an ocular identification. It cannot be opened without the fingerprint of a manager. So, as you might imagine, that knocks out the possibility of me just...” He wiggled his fingers vaguely. “Making my way in and helping myself. We need you. We’ve got the list of his chosen security questions and all the answers, and with a brain like yours I wouldn’t think memorizing the answers will be all that difficult, and we’ve got Billany’s key, which is really remarkable. So, we’re just going to walk through the front doors and get you to open your safety deposit box, empty it, and close out the account.”
