Cohost writing prompt: @spy-thief-assassin-who — Spy who has started redecorating the safehouse
After the GLAIVE ORMER clusterfuck, nobody was outside suspicion. None of the former cell were allowed contact with each other. Everything they did was triple-scrutinised, analysed for hidden meaning.
Latimer stayed quiet, almost shell-shocked, for a long time, shuffled to a safehouse for safekeeping.
The first thing, eventually, was a cheap art print tacked to the wall. No way for it to be visible to the outside, no obvious political or subversive meanings; a still life, fruit in a bowl. A little colour, in a relentlessly beige and shabby space. Possibly even a promising sign of psychological health.
The second thing was a fired clay paperweight. Handmade, small enough to fit in a palm, glaze-washed. Not a credible weapon. Covertly removed, x-rayed, core sampled, and replaced when Latimer was out of the safehouse for a debrief.
Little touches. Splashes of colour. Nothing to them. And a while after the small, plain glass vase, occasional flowers to go in it. A long enough while, staggered through the other little touches, that the single overworked agent tasked with analysing her movements for covert meaning gave them a cursory glance and reported them as uninteresting and unrevealing, like everything else she did; the quality that had made her an asset to begin with. Boring, boring Latimer, not worth a second glance.
The vase is visible, using binoculars, from certain windows on the top floor of a specific building some distance away. Slowly, quietly, the flowers send a message.