Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Arthur smiled as he opened his front door; a weary, exhausted smile, and breathed in the familiar, vaguely woody smell of his home. His plants were well-watered and happy thanks to his dear neighbour who had agreed to look after them. His bed was made, sheets brand new – he knew this because the last thing he had done after leaving was made his bed with new all-white sheets. It was a principle. After a job, Arthur considered it compulsory to be able to return to a fresh, clean bed.

This time, it was even more important. Arthur set his suitcase on the table, pushed his luggage against the wall and went into the bathroom. He stripped down quickly and put on the shower.

Inception. How the hell had he been talked into that? Damned Cobb and his recklessness. Arthur was not sure which fact was more shocking: that they had been dumb enough to try it, or that they had actually succeeded.

It did not matter, though. All is well that ends well. Arthur closed his eyes and let the shower pour over him, massage his shoulders, rinse out the stress.

His mind returned to their farewell at the airport. Saito had disappeared immediately. Cobb had just given Arthur a glance, smiled, and then he had been off – quite probably for good. Ariadne had gotten all babbly and confused; they were supposed to pretend to be strangers but she had opened a conversation with both Arthur and Yusuf while they were waiting for luggage. Apparently, she had never had time to consider what she would do in the States and was a little overwhelmed trying to figure it out. Arthur had pretended to never have met her and curtly advised her to have a holiday in L.A. Yusuf, the sneaky bastard, had grabbed his chance and offered to show her around, considering he had no fixed plans either. Ariadne had been stupid enough to fall for the trap, and Arthur had not warned her. Suited her right for breaking the security rules that she would soon learn that Yusuf’s idea of sightseeing was probably looking out of the hotel room window with a bottle of Champagne and cheesy music. Or suggest such, at least. Arthur wouldn't bet on it actually happening.

After Ariadne and Yusuf had been gone, however, Arthur had found himself standing in the lobby alone with Eames who had been watching the exchanges between his colleagues with a smirk on his face.

“Quite a journey, don’t you think?” Eames had said, way too loudly. Arthur, in turn, wondered if he should have tortured the team until they all had sworn by their mother’s names not to go talking to each other after the job.

“Until next time, Mr Eames,” he had ground out, grabbed his bag and gone without looking back. His cheeks had burned, and he had hoped so much that Eames had at least managed to miss that. He had hid in the airport toilets for an ungraceful half an hour – until he had been absolutely sure Eames had been gone. Then, he had booked his flight to New York City.

Admittedly, the cause of Arthur’s ridiculous camouflaging antics was not security. Just like the cause of Eames’ unprofessional behaviour, Arthur feared, had nothing to do with his usual tendency to dig blood out of his nose with Arthur’s finger.  

Instead, both had everything to do with a strange exchange of smiles that had just kind of happened, right in the middle of the job, just before Arthur had been left alone in his dream and the rest of the team had gone one level deeper. Under normal circumstances, Arthur and Eames never smiled at each other. Well, to be exact, Arthur never smiled at Eames and Eames had a habit of constantly throwing moodkiller smirks at Arthur like an overgrown school bully.

Cobb had once said that if Eames and Arthur didn’t have a “tendency for starting to behave like angry little children when put in the same room”, he would have hired the two of them for every job. Arthur would probably have felt embarrassed over this assessment – if he had not been too relieved to have some kind of guarantee that jobs without Eames still existed. It was bad enough to see him a few times a year.

Back in the dream, in the hotel, however, things had had different weight. Arthur had been more than a little worried by the fact that he was going to be surrounded by Fischer’s trigger-happy security projections, he had to protect all of them alone, and if he died he would end up in limbo and probably seal the same fate for the rest of the team.

Eames had been following the same line of thought.

“Security is gonna run down on you hard.”

We are probably all going to die, Arthur had thought, and let a smile slip on his face.  “And I will lead them on a merry chase.”

Eames had smiled back, unreadable as always, eyes dancing with what could have been anything between mockery and rectal itch. “Just be back before the kick.”

At that moment, their past arguments and rivalries had not seemed to matter that much.

“Go to sleep, Mr Eames.”

Afterwards, Arthur had expected for Eames to find some inventive way to start mocking Arthur’s unexpected friendliness, wind him up, but the man had stayed uncharacteristically silent for the rest of the journey. He had barely even spoken to Cobb.

By the time they had landed in L.A., Arthur had worked himself up thinking that Eames was just playing a new kind of game – staying mute and hoping for Arthur to come probing. He can wait, Arthur had thought. After landing, after Ariadne and Yusuf's little mishap, however, Eames had put his looking-for-trouble face, and Arthur had made his insta-exit. Tricks and traps, that was what it always was with Eames.

Arthur turned off the shower and stepped out to dry himself. The biggest favour he could do to himself was to forget about the whole thing. Take some time off. Care for his plants. Clean up the house properly. Renew his gym membership. Go to movies and see everything he had missed during the job. Maybe go out, find a date. Normal life, until he felt ready to take on another job. And this time it should be something without dysfunctional sedatives, Japanese entrepreneurs and limbo. Something nice and simple and, above all, not so disturbingly deadly.

xx

Arthur never had the chance to go on a date. He barely managed to watch a couple of movies and only made it as far as to call the gym to ask what he needed to do to get the renewal. He only mananaged to draft a plan for a little trip outside of the city and he only got around cleaning up the bathroom.

He did manage to give his plants some extra fertiliser. Maybe they would have sported flowers next, Arthur never found out. Because in the following morning after fertilising the plants, Arthur woke up to the sound of the door to his Manhattan flat being kicked in.

By instinct, Arthur sat up and grabbed his Glock from the nightstand, but Cobb’s hand was on his wrist before he could point it at anyone. Arthur blinked until the world came to focus.

It seemed that besides Cobb, a bunch of what looked like special agents – and Eames – had infiltrated his bedroom. All were pointing their guns at Arthur, save Cobb, of course, and Eames, who was just standing there with his hands in his pockets.

“What the hell is this?” Arthur asked.

“You need to come with us,” Cobb said.

He looked like shit. Eames was wearing the same jacket as at the airport. How long had it been? Six days. Had they been on this – whatever it was – since then?

“What’s going on?” Arthur tried again.

Cobb spread his hands. “We’ll tell you on the way.”

“What if I don’t want to come?”

“You don’t have a choice. Put the gun down.”

It looked terribly much like Cobb and Eames had been bought. Arthur glared at Cobb and dropped the gun back on the nightstand. 

“Can you at least tell me if you're asking me to walk to my death or if this is about something less sinister?”

Cobb let go of his wrist. “It's for a job.”

“It doesn’t look like one.”

“It’s different,” Cobb argued. Arthur caught his downwards glance and remembered he was sleeping topless. Fantastic.

“We need your help,” one of the agents said in a British accent.

“May I possibly find out who is we?”

“MI6,” Eames spoke up. “Look, I am sorry, darling. This is my fault. They contacted me and needed the best team. Who was I going to take aboard if not you?”

Arthur wanted to say several things, including but this was supposed to be my time off, we just got out of that nightmare and you’re trying to send us into another one, you had the fucking nerve to drag Cobb out of the reach of his children, why the hell do you work for MI6, how the hell did you find me, can’t you just go away and why are you staring me like that?

“Fine.” He stood up, braving the fact that he was only dressed in his light blue pyjama bottoms. “What do you need done?”

“If you could wear something less unsettling,” Eames said.

“Britain is threatened by a bioweapon.” One of the agents stepped forward and extended his hand to Arthur. “I apologise for us breaking into your apartment like this, but we were not sure how you would react. We have been warned that you lot keep a lot of illegal weapons here. My name is Ryan Woodhouse.”

Arthur shook the hand but kept his eyes on Cobb. “Is there a payout for this job or are you just holding me at gun-point?”

Woodhouse gestured at his men, who all lowered their guns at once. “As I said, it was only a precaution. You will be paid as much as you require.”

“I require significant amounts.” Now that Arthur was more awake, he was also getting more irritated.

“We will find a deal that satisfies both parties,” Woodhouse said. “I want to be honest with you, Arthur. What we are dealing with at the moment is completely beyond the capacity and experience of MI6. Does the name Radu Gajic ring a bell to you?”

“Of course it does.” Radu Gajic was one of the three people known to have been involved in the development of the first PASIV. He was most famous for being the first person to have ever entered another’s dream and most infamous for disappearing from the dreamshare community three years back. People had generally assumed he had been killed as a consequence of some job gone awry. Arthur voiced this:

“I thought he was dead.”

“This is what everybody thought until now. It appears his death had been staged. He was hired by a Chinese high-level security company for his expertise in chemistry, based on his merits at developing the PASIV. I don’t know how much they paid him to leave his dreamshare colleagues and turn him against his own country – he was a British citizen, although of Yugoslavian origin. We have recent intel that he is certainly alive and well, and has managed to develop a bioweapon way worse than any of the ones encountered to date. This one is a genius combination of some Somnacin’s characteristics and cellular structure of an already mutated human influenza virus. And, believe it or not, but he has also become the co-CEO of the company. If you met him in the street, you’d never guess he is anything more than a cocaine addiction beyond your ordinary businessman.”

“What does this virus do?” Arthur asked.

“After a symptomless incubation period of 48 hours, it starts out with flu-like symptoms,” Eames continued. “Muscular pain, swelling of throat, headache. When the fever rises, the hallucinations begin. The majority of the physical pain comes from breathing difficulties, and often the headache is so strong that it causes vomiting and even momentary blindness. However, even worse is what happens to the mind. The fatality rate of known victims stands at 100 per cent as of now so nobody has come back to explain how it feels, but apparently whatever artificial RNA Gajic had managed to create out of Somnacin is to blame for the limbo-like hallucinations that overtake the victim in the final stage of the virus. They do not fall asleep but at the same time, they stop being awake. What follows is a never-ending nightmare, until the body gives in. For the luckiest victims, it happens after a few hours. If you are less lucky, you live with your worst demons for up to a week.”

Now that Arthur looked at him longer, he realised Eames looked as shit as Cobb. Equally deprived of sleep, if better groomed.

“And they are bombarding exactly who with this virus?”

“Just the secret service for now,” Woodhouse replied. “And the situation is quite serious. We have several agents already contaminated – apparently as some kind of a warning of what they will unleash into the public. It is probably just their attempt at trying to see our attempt at disarming them. They start small. No doubt if they succeed here, the next one in line will be the US, and that time around it won’t be a guerrilla initiative by a private company. It will be the Chinese government themselves.”

“You think they are behind this?”

“Absolutely.”

“What do they want?”

“Simply for Britain to pull out of the Chinese market and stay put when it comes to the actions of China or any of its allies.”

“But – this is blackmailing. This means war.”

“Yes indeed, Arthur.” Woodhouse seemed young for an agent of his rank, but lacked no confidence. “It will be a war if it gets to that, and a global one too.“

“I can’t believe Gajic would do something like this.”

“He does anything he is capable of, if he is paid enough,” Cobb said.

“Yes – but PASIV was his life.”

“Precisely. He would not pass a chance to make it an international weapon and make obscene amounts of money while at it.”

“So—“ suddenly, Arthur realised the whole horrifying truth – why MI6 had gone to such an extent to get the best people on the job — “what you are trying to get to, here, is that Gajic is the mark. Am I right?”

“Yes. He has not shared his information with anyone, not even written it down.”

Gajic, who had developed the goddamn thing.

The man had been a genius. And an awful person. Arthur had only seen him twice, and never spoken to him directly. He had a voice that reminder Arthur of  Hitler’s and a face a little narrow and feminine for a man. His eyes were different size, and he smelled like expensive but industrial cologne. Balding with batches of dark hair on the sides of his head, brown eyes, big nose, pale skin. Walked with his legs spread wide, like his testicles were hurting all the time.

Arthur sighed. “Can I dress up first or do I have to come like this?”

“Thank you, Arthur,” Eames said in a strange voice, and they all left the room at once.

xx

It turned out that all except for Ariadne had been reassembled for this team. Eames’ choice of architect was a woman that Arthur had never worked with but whom he knew to have been an acquaintance of both Eames and Gajic himself. She was a thirty-something, red-headed, wore terrible blood-red lipstick and smelled like moth repellent. Her name was Minerva Brennan, and even with her platform heels she was a head shorter than Arthur, yet the way she carried herself made Arthur think she would be a formidable opponent in hand-to-hand combat.

“Why didn’t we take Ariadne?” Arthur asked Cobb when they were walking towards the London hotel where apparently a whole floor was reserved for the mission preparation.

“I managed to convince Eames to keep her away. She doesn’t deserve this.” Cobb’s voice was flat, resigned. Arthur wanted to tell him that he will get back to his children very soon, just as soon as this stupid job was over – but somehow the thought felt distant again. Arthur sincerely hoped it was true and fantasised briefly about shaking Eames against a wall until he said he should at least have spared Cobb, for all the hell the man had already been through.

“Eames is an asshole," Arthur said.

“He finished the inception while I was stuck in limbo," Cobb replied. "I owe him more than I can repay.”

Then again, as an extractor Cobb really had no equal.

Walking through the rain, Arthur remembered he hated London. He had only been there once – with his ex-girlfriend, on a holiday that had gone wrong from the start. The flight had been late, their luggage got lost, they had found mice in their five-star hotel room, most of the underground had been suspended because of rain all weekend and every restaurant they had visited had been substandard. On the way home, they had broken up.

The MI6-booked hotel seemed nice enough, though. The gigantic, Edwardian lobby lead to a lift, and at first glance Arthur realised they had been booked the suite floor. The corridors were wider, everything from the dark blue carpet to the dim spotlights against the dark flower pattern wallpaper spelled refurbished wealth. Not so Edwardian but hey, you could not get everything.

They met up in the biggest conference room; Cobb took his place in front of the whiteboard and rest of them sat down.

“Right. We all know the mark already, so some of Arthur’s job is already done.” Cobb wrote Radu Gajic on the whiteboard. Below: How to cure the virus.

“How do you know it can be cured?” Minerva Brennan asked immediately. She was sitting next to Eames. Arthur noticed they were sharing a notebook.

“Because it’s a contagious virus,” Cobb replied. “Not terribly contagious like flu, apparently it lost some of the influenza features in the mutation process. You can get it from another person’s blood, saliva or other excretion, but it doesn’t fly through the air. To be safe, they have to have something to protect themselves from their own weapon, otherwise using it would be too dangerous.”

“A vaccine?” Yusuf asked. Arthur had not had a chance to exchange a single word with the chemist, but his fake smile proved that he was feeling as awful as the rest of them.

“Possibly,” Cobb replied. “But MI6’s intel suggests they also have a cure. There is always a chance that the virus starts mutating once it starts spreading, and a vaccination will need to be a continuous effort to keep up with that. It’s too risky even for terrorists.”

“Something like traditional antiviral drug, then?” Yusuf asked. "Are they good enough for something as potent as this?"

“In all likelihood something more creative.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. It’s probably connected to Somnacin. Something tremendously advanced, quite possibly chemistry-based. Like a way to break the cellular structure of the virus. Like a poison that only works on them. We don’t know. But we know for sure that Gajic does. Hence, we need to get the information out of him.”

“How, exactly?” Arthur spoke up. He felt Eames turning to stare at him, along with the rest of them.

“Well, extraction,” Cobb said.

“You know as well as I do that it’s not going to be anywhere near a normal extraction. We are talking about Gajic here. How are we going to get anything out of him? He is beyond militarised, he is the god damn dream world himself.”

“Thank you very much for your insight, Arthur, we are all quite aware of that.”

Arthur shot Eames a look he hoped messaged I will punch your nose in. “Can someone answer my question?”

“First of all, we have to catch him when he is already sleeping, natural sleep,” Cobb said. “There is some proof that the mark is more likely to remain unaware when brought under from natural sleep rather than being drugged to unconsciousness. Then we will just take it from there.”

“Sounds promising.”

“We’ll have to go down three levels. Anything short of that won’t go deep enough to break his defences.”

Yusuf and Arthur groaned at once, Minerva gave a blank face.

“Three levels is not possible,” she said.

“Trust me, it is,” Cobb said.

“With the small added detail that if you die in the dream, you end up in limbo,” Arthur added. He thought everyone deserved to know.

“Not necessarily, or I hope at least,” Yusuf said. “I have some ideas on how to improve the compound. I started working on it right after,” he glanced at Cobb, “well, and – I have a compound almost ready for testing.”

“There are a lot of unknown factors here," Arthur said. "I don’t like it.”

“I am glad that you share your feelings with us, Arthur, thank you.” Eames was smirking again, as if the whole thing was some sort of a joke. “However, as it appears we are slightly short of choices.”

“You are out of choices,” Arthur corrected. “We got dragged in.”

Minerva looked at Eames, then Arthur, the rest of them, apparently registering the fact that they all knew something she didn’t. For a moment Arthur expected her to ask, but she pressed her lips into a thin line. “Right. And after we have entered Gajic’s dream straight from his normal sleeping state, and are on our way experimentally going three levels under by using a compound that may or may not throw us in limbo if we die, how exactly do we come about unravelling this secret?”

“We don’t know yet,” Cobb said. “This is as far as we have got for now. Arthur needs to start on his work, bring myself and Eames up to speed, and hopefully we will be able to come up with a plan soon and get you started on the levels. Meanwhile, Yusuf can finish with the compound and I will test it myself before the day of the job.”

Arthur felt a headache starting to creep in. “How much time do we have? I need a room with a secure server access.”

“It’s already been set up for you, darling,” Eames said. “We have twenty-nine hours until Gajic will be staying at a Paris hotel for business, which is about as close as he’ll ever come to this country again.”

“I haven’t slept for eighteen!”

“Best if you get to work then.”

xx

Finding something worth exploiting out of Gajic was like trying to arrange sand particles in the desert. He was a rich, successful former and current criminal, paranoid as all of them were, and the fact that he had staged his death and carried on under a fake identity did not help things. Arthur went through all of his official records methodically including every official note made on his company, plainly called Arrow, and found a load of nothing, as expected. He read MI6’s report and didn’t find anything he didn’t already know. He hacked into Gajic’s bank accounts and emails but they could have been those of any father of two who owned a company. After finding out that Gajic indeed did have two kids and a wife, Arthur went through even their records from the marriage certificate to the kids’ school marks, and found nothing. It was the most boring part of the point man’s work, to try and find out something that quite possibly did not even exist. After ten hours, Arthur managed to track down some Serbian medical records that indicated that Gajic had been treated for severe anger management issues prior to the Yugoslavian war, before the family had moved to Britain. Hardly a surprise and certainly not something that could be exploited on its own. Arthur made a note of it anyway.

By the time he had resorted to going through Gajic’s phone logs, he was so fed up with the work that he briefly considered emergency evacuating through the fifth floor window and disappearing into West End. He had not seen anyone, not even Cobb, since he had started his work. He had not slept or eaten. He had no idea what the rest of the team was up to – Yusuf was probably working on the compound and the rest were debriefed by MI6 regarding Paris. Arthur’s mind conjured an image of Cobb and Minerva sitting in front of MI6 officers, and Eames snoring away in his hotel room. Topless and wearing blue pyjama bottoms. Arthur closed his eyes, opened them again and tried to concentrate on the phone logs. Numbers kept on jumping from one row to another.

I need more time. This is not going to work.

Someone pushed a paper cup full of coffee in front of Arthur. Arthur spun around his chair, grabbed the wrist reflexively and swore when he realised it was Eames. He let go but didn’t miss the twitch of Eames’ lips.

“I brought you a croissant too but considering how you reacted at the coffee, I am slightly afraid of handing it to you.”

Arthur looked at the cup. “Are you trying to poison me?”

Something odd passed through Eames’ features. He threw the paper bag with the croissant on the table. “It would be most counter-effective at present.”

“Why, then?” Bringing breakfasts was not normal Eames behaviour, even if Arthur felt slightly embarrassed to press the matter.

Eames shrugged and took a seat on the other side of the table. He was holding a coffee of his own. “I went to get breakfast and thought I should get you something as well.”

“It’s night.”

“It’s five in the morning in fact.”

“Shit. When are we leaving?”

“In the afternoon.”

“Right.”

“Have you found anything?”

Arthur considered if he could get Eames out of the room just by asking him to go. He was already tired and irritated.

“He’s got anger management issues,” Arthur mumbled and focused on his screen again.

“He choked me unconscious on our first job together because I called him a baldie,” Eames said. “I am rather aware of this particular feature. Anything else?”

“No.”

Silence.

“Nothing else?”

“He is very meticulous at covering his tracks, Mr Eames. I am working on it, trust me.”

“Hmm.”

Under Eames’ unsettling stare, it took Arthur an embarrassing five minutes to identify Gajic’s wife’s number, his children’s number and his old mother’s number. He also tracked down the numbers of Gajic’s closest colleague, the Chinese co-CEO, as well as some suspicious contacts in Serbia. Arthur would need to dig up information on each of them separately.

There, with Eames staring at him across the table and Arthur’s brain trying to swell out of his skull, he saw it. Another number to which Gajic had made frequent calls.

It took him a few minutes to track it down. The name Liu Huang came up. An eighty-something Mandarin man with no presence on the internet, probably not even knowledge of what internet was. It did not make a lot of sense. Arthur connected to his master server at a warehouse he was renting in Chicago for the purpose, where he had stored a lot of useful information, including a mirror of some stolen Chinese population records they had needed for a job a few years back. After cross-checking Liu’s name, Arthur found his only daughter, his one sister, his dead wife – and one grandchild: Ti Huang. A woman, born in 1980 in a town close to where Liu Huang was claimed to live. Moved to the States in the early 2000s and started her own security business, later on moved back to China. She is keeping her phone in her grandfather’s name. Why?

Arthur kept on reading, his heartbeat speeding up. “Have you ever heard of a company called F4F?”

“Am I supposed to have?”

“It’s China’s biggest security company.”

“I thought Arrow was, actually.”

“It was three years ago. This competitor has taken over.”

“And?” Eames got up and walked behind Arthur to take a look at his screen.

Arthur pointed at the number. “He’s sent F4F’s CEO twenty-six texts a day, on average. Well, officially he’s sent them to the CEO’s eighty-year-old granddad but I doubt it.”

“Bloody hell,” Eames muttered. “Did you actually calculate that?”

“It was an approximation.” Arthur frowned at the screen. “Some phone calls, too, but mainly texts.”

“That’s rather dodgy. Can you pull up the content?"

“That’s going to take more work.”

“Try. I’ll get you another croissant if you manage.”

“No thanks.” Arthur straightened himself up in the chair. “Is it a possibility in any way that you could get out of here so I can work in peace?"

“Sure, darling,” Eames put a hand on Arthur’s shoulder and squeezed. Arthur closed his eyes and started counting to ten. “Anything to make you supple.”

xx 

Arthur wrote Ti Huang’s name on the whiteboard and felt smug despite the fact that his stomach was upside down from staying up and drinking coffee and his eyes were so dry from staring at the computer that thet felt like raisins.

“Three years back, Arrow was the biggest security company in China. The position was overtaken by another company called F4F. Ti Huang is the CEO of that company.” Arthur glanced at Eames, who was sitting at the edge of his seat. Let’s see if this shuts you up. “Gajic is in regular contact with her, by phone calls and texts. He had covered his tracks by contacting her on a phone that is owned by her grandfather, probably thinking that even if someone tracked down the activity, they would not be able to pull enough records to find out who he really is contacting. I did, and I managed to get the content of the text messages out as well.” Arthur didn’t reveal how much MI6’s money and his nerves it had taken. It was worth the look on Eames’ face.

“I expected them to have some kind of deal in the brewing, perhaps a merger,” he pressed on. “But the truth was far better. They are actually in a relationship.”

“Beautiful,” Eames said and clapped his hands together. “Anger management issues and a secret lover. Now I feel we are finally getting somewhere.”

“He is very jealous,” Arthur said and pushed a folder across the table towards Eames. “The message logs are here, see for yourself. He is constantly paranoid about her cheating on him.”

“That is a bit rich from someone who is already married,” Minerva said. “Does his wife know?”

“No. Gajic is hysterical about her finding out. She knows too much and they don’t have a prenup. If she found out, Gajic would risk losing not just his kids but also half of what he owns. Also, Gajic apparently dislikes his wife, or at least likes Huang to think he does. There is a lot of talk about her money-wasting habits and obsession about cleaning, even mockery of the way she looks.”

“Brilliant, Arthur,” Eames said, reading the file. “Do you think we can work on the concept of revenge? It’s a prominent element in the Balkan culture.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say,” Arthur replied and unsuccessfully tried to interpret whether Eames’ compliment was genuine or not.

“Eames is right, though,” Minerva interrupted. “He didn’t mean the war. It runs deeper than that. Revenge is about maintaining honour.”

What do you know about what he means? Arthur thought, suddenly irritated.

“How do we work on a concept of revenge?” Yusuf asked. “And especially why?”

To that, Arthur knew the answer. “Because this is Gajic, not your average mark. If we put anything that even distantly resembles a bank or a safe into the dream, I suspect it will turn bloodshed in an instant.”

Cobb nodded. “His subconscious is, by now, probably completely wired up against all normal methods. We cannot just walk in and expect to find what we want. That’s why we have to go deeper and do everything in our power to avoid him going lucid. We need a plot, similar to—“ he glanced at Arthur and fell silent.

“Indeed,” Eames said.

“Can someone explain me in which job have you previously gone three levels?” Minerva said. “Judging by the looks on your faces, it didn’t turn out well.”

“It was an inception, and it worked out just fine." Cobb stood up and left the room.

“An inception?”

Eames looked at Arthur over his papers and fucking winked. For the second time, Arthur considered escaping through the window.

xx

Eames had his plan ready within the next three hours. Arthur took a brief nap because he could not stand straight any longer, and when he was back in the conference room, Minerva was discussing level structures with Cobb. Yusuf was snoring away with his face against the table.

“Where’s Eames?” Arthur asked.

“In the server room, watching videos of Huang.”

“He’s going to forge her?”

“Yes.”

The plan was impressive, much better than Arthur thought he would have come up with on such short notice.

The first level, Cobb and Eames had decided, was all about trying to handle Gajic. He was bound to be the most resistant on that level, and there they had the smallest amount of time on their hands. In order to put the mark’s mind at ease (if that ever was possible in Gajic’s case) and pull his mind away from homicidal thoughts, they had settled on a slightly more complex-than-normal rural town, something that had a Serbian air to it, hopefully guiding Gajic’s mind towards fond memories from the past. The tricky bit was to make it complex enough for the projections – Minerva had said she could work it out by using repetitive content. At the heart of this town was a church, and this was where Eames believed the projection of Ti Huang would be discovered. Many of the late-night texts Gajic and Huang had exchanged were about Huang’s fascination with European churches, including Gajic’s lengthy descriptions of the beauty of Serbian Orthodox churches. The couple had even made half-hearted plans to visit the village of Gajic’s family some summer, so that Gajic could show Huang around.

The whole point of discovering Huang’s projection was to open up Gajic’s overprotected mind to process the topic of Huang with more ease. In all likelihood, he was mentally set up to protect himself against any possible attempts to find out about his secret relationship so that barrier needed to be overcome.

Moving down on levels was the trickiest part. Cobb believed that if a PASIV would be presented to Gajic in the dream without a context, the dream would turn lucid instantly. The man was too used to shared dreaming, too aware of its dangers.

Luckily, Gajic had not been able to resist showing shared dreaming to Huang. Judging by their texts, he had not spoken anything of its actual uses but rather presented is as an exclusive form of entertainment. What excited Eames to no end and made Arthur very weary was the fact that Gajic had actually taken Huang to dreams to have sex with her in ways that were not possible in reality. Worse, they had appeared to have replicated several churches as their dream sex scenes. Poking into this private fantasy was potentially very efficient but also quite a gamble. It was impossible to know what exactly they had done in those dreams, or how Gajic would react. Yet, setting up a level with a church in the middle, full of priests with PASIVs would be the best possible idea to get Gajic first of all to find his way where they wanted him to be – the church – without having to force him, and then to go one level deeper without his internal alarm bells ringing off. The most difficult part was to figure out how they would manage to get the whole team to go down with them – but Eames believed that he would be able to make Gajic want the priests to accompany the couple into a dream.

“I’ll improvise something,” he had said. “I’ll tell him that it’ll be like a kinky sacrifice mass. The priests will come and watch them having sex.” Arthur had wanted to retch at the thought, but the team trusted Eames.

On the second level, then, Eames was supposed to forge Huang. They intended to take advantage of the fact that the Gajic-Huang romance was spiced with a very strong competitive edge, springing from the fact that they were each other’s worst rivals. Although Gajic, judging by the texts, appeared to be very captivated by, possibly even in love with Huang, he generally did not trust her. In particular, he did not trust her faithfulness. To wind Gajic up against Huang was best done by making him dream of her cheating on him and mentioning Gajic’s marriage as the reason for her unfaithfulness. Eames and Cobb had decided the drama should take place in an enormous nightclub. “It’s likely to get less violent than a city in which you have cars to crash on you and buildings to jump off from.”

The idea was good on principle, but when Eames presented its details to the team, Arthur nearly got off his seat to wind a kick on his face. Although he had resigned to having to carry out this impossible mission and possibly not survive alive, he had not signed up for having to play the boyfriend of Eames-forged-as-Huang.

“Huang needs someone to cheat on with, and out of us only your and Yusuf’s faces are not familiar to Gajic. Although all of us can mask ourselves a little bit, I am the only forger and we cannot take the chance that Gajic will recognise, say, Cobb. That would be the end of it. Yusuf has to stay on the first level, so you are the only option.” That was Eames’ reasoning. He even took the trouble to make it sound professional.

“Besides, you will make a tremendously stunning secret lover.”

Well, professional up to a degree.

Going down the final level was supposed to be coaxed out of Gajic by trying to make him want to find out something about Arthur. Eames was going to convince Gajic that Arthur possesses damaging information about him, hoping Gajic would get paranoid enough to want to extract information out of Arthur by means that were most natural to him – by going into a dream. The final level would then be Arthur’s dream.

On the final level, Eames would forge Gajic’s wife, Sandra. She would be dying because of the bioweapon – Cobb and Eames believed that level three would be deep enough to bring up the topic of bioweapon without alerting Gajic’s consciousness. Hopefully, his anger for Huang would remain, his flair for revenge would be provoked and the team would have survived that far without being killed. Arthur’s job would be to find Huang’s projection from the map and bring him to rage around while Gajic’s wife was lying in her death bed. Cobb would be directing the events from the sidelines by playing a doctor. All they would then need was to let Gajic disclose him how to save his wife.

The kicks were going to be arranged as follows:

The dreamer of the first level would be Yusuf, so he would need to stay in the church. Its blasphemous design contained a big four-poster bed where normally was the altar. Chairs would be conveniently provided around the altar so that the priests could easily surround the couple, who would be on the bed. The floor would be lifted around the bed just so that it was possible to fit chairs around it but right behind them there would be a one foot drop. All it would take was to sit Yusuf the priest down on the other side as rest of them, and he could kick the bed, which would then push everyone else’s chair down, then grab hold of Gajic and follow suit by leaning back. Projection-Huang would remain asleep on the bed.

The nightclub’s dreamer would be Minerva. The kick was supposed to be a drop from what Eames thought should be a dance floor made of glass and Minerva thought should be just a glass ceiling. Either way, they would just need to arrange Gajic’s interrogation of Arthur to take place on the glass, and have the place as clear of projections as possible. The rest would pretend to be Gajic’s team, Cobb and Minerva even as themselves, and it would only be natural for Minerva to stay back in case someone tried to come in while the rest of them would go under to “find out about Arthur." She would shoot the glass to provide the kick when the time was right.

The final dream would be Arthur’s. The last kick was a level design-based kick, much like the one in the final level of the Fischer job – suggested for recycling by Eames. Cobb agreed that the kick mechanism should be the same, however pointed out that the terrain was unsuitable against militarisation, as had been proved in the Fischer job, and made Minerva plan an alternative location with a similar kick. Once again, Minerva asked more irritable questions about this mysterious inception job that apparently everyone else had been on, but when she realised nobody was going to talk, went on and designed a very passable level. This would be an underground hospital, no windows. The idea was to restrict the movement of Gajic’s projections again; they were dangerous enough in a contained space. Outside the building, the hospital would be surrounded by underground tunnels full of dynamite. There would be no access to the tunnels from inside of the hospital, save an emergency hatch in case something went wrong. The detonator was located inside the hospital, and all they needed to do for the kick was to set it off when the time was right: the tunnels would collapse and the whole floor would drop.

All in all, it was a remarkably competent three-level plan that would have made Arthur intrigued to see it being carried out – another job only possible for an all-stars team – if there only had not been for that cursed detail of him being forced to play Eames’ boyfriend.