Our driver got out of his car, opened the gates to the abandoned bunker, and just dipped.
"I expected something…", as I glanced about the bunker's entrance, reminiscent of a 20th century R&D division, "more than this."
The facility was three things at once. It was functional. It was utilitarian. And it was really claustrophobic. Concrete walls and fluorescent lighting and stained copper green seemed to surround me as wall and floors and ceiling. The sudden transition from the pouring rain to the tomb that the horrors cometh was disorienting to say the least.
"Remind me again what we're here for, Halloway?"
"To get me registered as a permanent member and to deal with the Zola interface fragment, whatever that is."
"Then stop complaining and move on."
Later, in the subterranean corridors where the hum of servers replaced the scratch of typewriters, I found what we came in here for.
A wall of glass framed endless reels of magnetic tape and blinking terminals. And in the center, a synthetic voice crawled out of a speaker, cold with unending patience:
"Unauthorized. State your function."
I deployed Deep Blue the moment he opened his shifting green screen mouth.
"He's with me. Get him registered." said Syl, as she rummaged around papers inside cabinets and drawers. Her maroon coat swayed as she rifled through a filing drawer. "Zola, provisional Halloway. Check the list."
The glass chamber flickered, and reels of magnetic tape clattered awake like a beast stirring.
"Halloway. Incomplete. Background insufficient. Redacted associations-"
I stepped forward and interrupted him with hands in my pockets and practiced diction to my voice.
"Incomplete because Strucker told me to keep it incomplete."
The screens stuttered, green lines zigzagging as if Zola's ghost bristled at the name.
"Designation: Strucker. Source file cross-reference… mismatch. No record of mentorship."
"That's because I'm not supposed to be in the records," I countered, putting enough impatience into my tone to mimic arrogance. "Strucker doesn't like his projects written down. You should know that by now."
Syl's head cocked slightly at me. She raised her eyebrows with a smirk as if watching a kid obviously lie.
"You presume authority," Zola's voice warbled and stretched syllables like elastic tape. "Why should I-"
"Because," I cut him off again and his face warped into one of petty indignation, "Strucker sent me here to evaluate his interface tails and the status in New York while he's overseas. Don't want anyone getting through to you, do we?"
His petty face warped again into one of harm, insulted as it were. That last word made Syl look up from her drawer. Her lips curved, faint amusement masking her suspicion.
The reels slowed. "Statement consistent with… pattern. Strucker's aversion to inefficiency: confirmed."
I pressed on, thinking I got through. "I'm his mentee, tasked with ensuring things around here are… stable. Either open your mouth and give me what I need or do I pull the plug on you and tell him I wasted my time in a tomb that smells of rust and mildew?
The green screens pulsed and settled into a jagged heartbeat. "Evaluation permitted. Temporary access granted. Archive channel: Strucker > Directorium."
Syl leaned against the cabinet with arms crossed and a whispering voice, pushing behind me and talking in my ears. "You talk like you've been in this… line of work longer than you claim. Mentee of Strucker, hm? What a laughable lie."
"Maybe," I said, letting the corners of my mouth twitch into something that could be mistaken for confidence. "But you believed it just enough to let me through."
"Or maybe I just find you funny and decided to play along for now?"
"Either way," I tilted my head and let my tone sharpen with mock gravity, "you like me, don't you?"
She scoffed softly, though not without amusement. "Like you? You've been here all of ten minutes and already you're bluffing your way into Strucker's archives. You're reckless, green, and entirely too smug."
"That wasn't a no."
"You mistake tolerance for affection, Halloway. Don't push your luck."
I shrugged, buying seconds while Deep Blue crawled unseen through the reel-to-reel tapes. "Luck's a funny thing. I seem to have plenty of it lately. Got me standing here, didn't I?"
Zola seemed to choke up slowly but surely, but Syl didn't notice.
"You mistake arrogance for skill," she said, but her voice had softened, just a shade.
"And you mistake curiosity for disdain."
A pause came between us as the words seemed to push down on her mind.
"Careful now, boy." I couldn't find a response to that.
The room hummed with Zola's fading processes. The tape reels seemed to slow down. Light flickers around us like the dying heartbeat of an old man displayed on a heart monitor.
PING
Assimilation complete, sir.
I let the silence linger between us as she unconsciously and giddily simpered into forgetting why we were even here.
The final sputter of the reels died down then the speakers crackled back to life with that same flat, mechanical patience.
"Registration confirmed. Provisional member: Halloway. Strucker file cross-referenced. Status elevated to permanent. Access approved."
The voice was Zola's… but it wasn't. A seamless illusion. It seems my creation has a talent for acting.
"That was… fast. Zola usually drags people through an audit that lasts hours."
I slipped my hands back into my pockets and gave her a small, knowing shrug. "What can I say? Strucker's mentee."
"Or maybe you just sweet-talked a machine as shamelessly as you try to sweet-talk me."
I pushed close enough that she could smell the faint trace of rain and petrichor still clinging to my collar. "Worked on both of you, didn't it?"
"Don't flatter yourself, Halloway. I'm humoring you. That's all." She closed her eyes and sighed with a quiet snigger like a wolf taken to prey.
Zola's ghost wearing Deep Blue's mask should be enough. If another Hydra branch pinged him, they'd never know the difference. The system was compromised from the inside out.
"Fine, you're permanent now. Strucker's little shadow." She pulled herself off of the drawers and leaned towards me again. Her voice gained a tone conspiratorial and nigh evil.
"But you've painted a target on your back as big as Manhattan. Everyone will want to know who the new favorite is. Not just Hydra but the Thule Society, SHIELD, the Sons of Anubis, and so on. And if you slip-"
Her finger tapped lightly on my chest and tugged on my tie.
"-you'll be swallowed whole."
I let her hand linger for a fraction too long before stepping back. "It seems to me you're already hungry, Syl."
The speakers cut back in, voice calm, neutral, and exactly as expected: "Permanent registry complete. Next directive: assist Ørsted-INV, Queens. Fragment priority remains."
Syl glanced at the screen and then back at me. "Looks like you're officially in the game, Halloway."
I forced myself not to smile at the irony. Officially in Hydra, while Hydra's god-machine was already mine.
And the woman behind me, clever, dangerous, tempting, still hadn't realized she was standing next to the person who had a knife pressed at the throat of her entire order and way of life.
—-
I leaned back against the cabinet, arms crossed, pretending my smirk was for his benefit.
I was simply starstruck. A voice not from practice but from inheritance. He cut off Zola with a sharp tongue and that unnatural steadiness.
And that smile. God help me, I almost let myself soften into it. He was quick and clever and everything I like. Smug in a petty way. Funny and sleazy in a likeness I wanted to swat down.
I felt it then, like a knife sliding cold between my ribs. The sudden realization that seemed to make me guilty like this should've come to me before we got in that car.
Strucker's name didn't tremble in his mouth.
He wasn't bluffing. He was the heir to be measured by the machine.
I almost forgot why I was here and almost let the charm win. But I know better. I'm S.H.I.E.L.D. I won't forget.
The Thule Society. Hydra. Strucker. They just gained themselves an heir.
—-
Manhattan. A few days later.
With Zola's intel, I've been mapping out Hydra's network. The money laundering, the companies, the outsourcing, the offshore accounts and the front businesses.
But what struck me the most was the existence of a vault, a trove for the High Council of Hydra in the event of a death in the family where they'll store their stuff for the time being. That's the original purpose but now it's taken up a lot of others.
It's a storage facility for the Thule Society. It's an info vault containing backups of Zola for the possibility of his death. It's a museum in a way, containing all the stuff relevant to their history over the millennia of their creation. A fallback box where they stashed the heirlooms of dead leaders, insurance for dynasties that refused to rot.
The occultist organization later known as the Thule Society was an ancient order of sorcerer-scientists with no real name and outlived the cultures from which they sprang.
They were totally dedicated to their cause, rising above death, holding the power of life and death and being as the gods. Among their plans, they searched for immortality for about 6,000 years. Every aspect of history, politics, science, and magic has been influenced by them and their many "tentacles", and the art of alchemy was a by-product of their Infinitas agenda.
It was a surprise to see that Hydra is not just a terrorist organization but also a magical society.
During the fallout of WW2, the original Hydra seemed to die off. Strucker and the Red Skull were super-soldiers of the Thule Society. After Skull's death, Strucker merged the new Hydra the Red Skull created and the Thule Society that he inherited into one.
Which brings us to where we are now.
We're inside a Manhattan branch of Strucker-Orsted, about to sabotage their key laundering hub and try to find the true location of the vault. I know that it's either here, in New York or in New Jersey, or it's somewhere in Japan, which if it is, I wasted my time here better spent on just taking on the other Hydra cells.
"Deep Blue, link start. Command initiate: Strucker-Orsted, obliterate."
As I strode about the top floor, where traders and investors and covert operatives disguised as executives frolicked about conversing with each other and talking and talking and talking, the screen in the front of the room blared red.
Deep Blue was hard-at-work whilst I was infiltrating Hydra. It was making copies and copies of viruses prime to fight against finance firms. Every transaction made within the last three months was now void and destroyed, cutting off the major artery that supplied nearly every cell in New York.
The sabotage would set off chaos in Hydra's chain of command.
Suffice to say, it worked. The first scream wasn't human but electronic. The shrills of the alarm from the trading floor's master screen rang out as Deep Blue's red code cascaded downward like a waterfall of blood.
The screams of the humans. Phones rang like manic church bells. The operatives dressed in pinstripe disguises and camouflage clawed at their terminals. They were sent into a cold sweat as they stood up and immediately ran towards their spaces and started calling.
"Reconcile that ledger!"
"It's gone… it's gone!"
One man actually ripped his tie loose and slammed his headset against the glass partition, the plastic shattering like a pistol shot.
Millions evaporated in the span of seconds. Their fortunes built on bribes and government support and shell companies and tax havens were all scrubbed clean and transferred to some pinata company to be destroyed as useless bytes of code as digital 'products' spilled onto the endless span of the world wide web firmament.
A woman near the elevators sobbed openly and clutched at her tablet like a rosary as she scrolled through numbers that only kept disappearing.
I stood still in the eye of the storm, hands in my pockets, as the world around me burned without fire. Executives turned feral, fighting each other for paper backups, shouting in six different languages. one shouted about Cayman accounts. Another about "the Vault protocols." A third vomited into a wastebasket, dry-heaving between curses.
Deep Blue's work painted itself across every screen as a black hole swallowed Hydra's empire digit by digit.
I didn't even have to move. I just let it happen. The metaphor to describe it would be like this. The Hydra wasn't bleeding red. It was bleeding green. And they panicked and ran and sprinted unlike soldiers but like addicts denied their fix. The chaos was my camouflage.
They spilled their guts onto their tables begging for the receiving end to believe that it was just a clerical error.
As they did so, I slipped into the fray. The building was similar to the last one. Split floors beneath and between floors, specific elevators leading to nothing, and some leading to rooms you can only access through said elevators.
My hand trailed across desks, palming printouts, invoices, routing slips.
Deep Blue turned off my pain receptors and cybernetically implanted new eyes for me, ones without peripheral vision but full vision all the way as it recorded every receipt and record that I rummaged through.
An hour later, the chaos was still very much alive. I made my way to the executive's private rooms. In the mess, I recognized a pattern. Every executive's room with ties to Hydra had secret hiding places for their dirty laundry.
Every fifth or sixth page had a common end-point, however different the prompts were. There were auction receipts and storage transfers. There were shipping manifests and cargo references. Some were black ops milsim hardware. Some were recovered artifacts around Ireland and the south of France.
And they all terminated the same way.
Red Hook - Pier 17
The words leapt out like graffiti on a tomb wall. Over and over again, buried in coded shorthand, the end of every trail fed into that single port. I stuffed the files into my inner coat pocket as two men nearly trampled me. I straightened, brushed my sleeves, and let my expression copy theirs. A mask of panic I donned but inside, I only felt triumph. I was one step closer to destroying Hydra.
The Vault wasn't in Zurich or Tokyo. It was right here, in New York.