Chapter 82
In the Aquarium, a sterile interrogation room within the Triskelion, silence hung heavy. Nick Fury stared at his own reflection at the one-way mirror.
He had questions. A lot of them. So many that for the first time in his long career, he simply did not know where to start. Much of that stemmed from Thompson's revelation about his tools. Absolute mental control. Control undetectable to victim and observer alike, because the controlled person believed everything was fine.
Fury did not believe everything was fine. He tiredly rubbed the bridge of his nose, a gesture unusually vulnerable. Both eyes were narrowed with exhaustion. He would have to examine himself. He would have to find a way to check his astral anchor, to see if any of this crap was lodged in it.
And he would also have to deal with Thompson. And that, he was beginning to understand, would be harder than dealing with Hydra.
The door to the interrogation room hissed open. Inside walked the man in question. Thompson. He had matured, his shoulders broader now. He was changed, not just physically, but on a more fundamental level. He was now far more serious than even a standard super-soldier like Cap. But far more terrifying than his physical capabilities were his mental ones.
Fury clenched his fists. Mind-breakers. He had never liked them. The very existence of Xavier had always grated on him subconsciously. But with Xavier, he could make peace for the sake of fragile balance. Thompson was different. He was an unknown variable. A nuclear bomb that was already ticking.
But right now, he needed to deal with Hydra. What to do about Thompson could be decided later.
"Are there surveillance or recording devices in here?" Thompson asked.
He aimed the question at Pierce, not Fury. That simple shift instantly changed the balance of power in the room. The master here was not Fury.
"No," Pierce answered calmly, almost cordially. "The Triskelion's Aquariums were used for handling our own problems as well. It would be stupid to expose ourselves in such a clumsy way."
"Then how did Hydra get information from here?"
"Every interrogation, regardless of classification, was documented and entered into a database. After that, it was Zola's department."
At the mention of that name, Fury pushed aside the useless thoughts that were doing more harm than good. He focused entirely on the interrogation.
"Arnim Zola? He died in 1972, according to the records. His body was cremated," Fury said flatly.
"Oh, Nick, Nick..." Pierce said with a smile. Not a crazed one. A calm, patronizing smile, like a man sharing insider secrets. A victor's smile. "Such a genius, so faithful to our organization's ideals, found a way to serve it even after his death. In that same year, 1972, right before his demise, Arnim transferred his consciousness into a digital space. Since then, he has been one of our most valuable and useful agents."
"Give me the details," Fury shot back, ignoring the smile. "What are his capabilities? What are his vulnerabilities? Where is the server located?"
If this Zola was really what Fury thought he was, then S.H.I.E.L.D. did not just have big problems. S.H.I.E.L.D. was the problem.
"Zola's Algorithm connects all Hydra cells," Pierce recited in a monotone. "It analyzes data from S.H.I.E.L.D. and other agencies we have access to. It identifies future enemies of Hydra and carries out plans for their elimination."
Then Pierce looked directly at Thompson.
"You were on this list, of course. Very high on it. Zola is also the keeper of most of our secrets, and precisely because he's so important, we never risked putting him on the open internet. The AI core sits on servers at Camp Lehigh."
"The old S.H.I.E.L.D. base in New Jersey," Fury said, nodding. His face was impenetrable, but inside he was seething at the realization of how deeply the enemy had penetrated. "I assume it's in a bunker. What about vulnerabilities?"
"Correct. In a bunker." Pierce smiled. "As for vulnerabilities, there are plenty. The server core is Zola's personality. Destroy it, and all communication channels with his junior models collapse. Without the core, they're nothing more than dummies programmed to transmit data."
"We cannot destroy Zola," Thompson interjected, speaking more to Fury than to Pierce.
Fury agreed. There was far too much valuable information stored inside him.
"I propose," Thompson continued, "that we cut all communication channels at Camp Lehigh and place Zola in a digital prison, an isolated server from which he cannot escape or send any signals."
"We'll discuss it later," Fury cut in, his voice sharp. He inwardly agreed with Thompson's plan, and immediately feared that agreement. Was it a genuine thought? Was it just another directive implanted in his astral anchor?
To suppress this surging paranoia, he forcefully turned his attention back to Pierce.
"The other key members of Hydra in S.H.I.E.L.D. I need their names. I need their roles. Now."
"Oh, Nick." Pierce smirked. This genuine smile scared Fury more than any torture could have. "You can't imagine how long this will take. But to start with, you should know about Gideon Malick."
"Gideon Malick?" Fury couldn't hide his shock. He hadn't expected anyone else. Generals, senators, but not Malick. Then again, he'd never expected Pierce either. Now it turned out that two of the six members of the World Security Council were Hydra. The entire henhouse had been a wolf den, feeding on its own.
"Yes. He's my colleague on the Council. More accurately, he's my colleague in two roles." Pierce grinned. "He also heads the Old Guard faction in Hydra."
"A faction?" Thompson cut in. "Isn't Hydra united by a single ideology? And what exactly does that ideology entail?"
Fury remained silent. He was also interested in hearing the truth. It wasn't every day you got to interrogate one of the world's shadow rulers.
"Humanity is not capable of governing itself." Pierce's voice carried a note of tired superiority. "Free will is a curse that inevitably leads to chaos. Only absolute control, imposed by us, can bring true peace to the planet. We are the saviors, Nick. It's just that few people understand us."
He shook his head in disappointment.
As for the factions, there's nothing surprising about each leader having his own agenda. Malick wants to bring his god back to Earth. He supposedly wants to bring back Hive. He believes this will help him control humanity. "Well, good luck to him, I guess," Pierce chuckled.
"A god?!" both Fury and Thompson exclaimed, almost simultaneously.
"I didn't dig into the details." Pierce shrugged. "And I wasn't particularly interested. His family has been trying to bring this thing back for over a thousand years. And in the last half-century, I've done more for Hydra and for the world than he has with his mystical nonsense."
"Nick, I'll tell you straight." Thompson jumped in, his voice unusually serious. "This most likely isn't nonsense."
He looked Fury dead in the eye, and Fury believed him instantly. That involuntary, absolute trust sent an icy chill down his spine. Damned paranoia, where are you when I actually need you?
"What makes you say that?" Fury forced out, trying to keep his voice steady.
"Gods are real. Kraven, whom I investigated, was bound by oath to one of them. To avoid misleading S.H.I.E.L.D. and creating unnecessary complications, I didn't include that in my report. But I know for a fact that gods exist, and they're very powerful. Some of them aren't exactly benevolent toward humanity."
"Divine anomalies..." Fury frowned, squinting as he dug through the strangest files in his memory. "We don't have a classification for that. Mysticism, yes. But not gods."
"The Tesseract," John said.
Fury's eyes narrowed sharply. How?! Where did he get all of this from?
"Oh, that is an entertaining trinket," Pierce interjected. He didn't care who was asking. "Malick spent some time studying the PEGASUS project and consulting with Strucker, but ultimately decided it wasn't worth the effort."
"PEGASUS? Strucker? Baron Strucker?" John asked.
And in that moment, Fury caught something in his tone. This wasn't a rhetorical question to keep the conversation moving. It was genuine curiosity.
Fury's inner analyst, momentarily suppressed by his paranoia, snapped to attention.
Thompson's knowledge... it was strange. Fragmentary. Patchy.
He knew about the Tesseract, but not about the PEGASUS project. He knew about Pierce, but apparently not about Malick. He knew about Hydra, but not about Strucker.
This wasn't divine omniscience. It was something else. Like torn pages from different books. Like a briefing from another world.
Fury looked at Thompson with new eyes. Who the hell was he?
I stood in the Aquarium next to Fury, listening to Pierce's calm, terrifyingly rational voice.
I felt, rather than saw, Gwen's tense, invisible figure nearby. She'd been smart enough to fly in on Pierce's private jet. I had a lot of respect for that. She had wanted proof, and I had promised it to her. Well, she was getting it.
Fury was not himself. From the moment I'd shown my cards in the grain warehouse, he'd been wound tight. That came as no surprise. I had known it would be this way. Now I could only hope I would have time to play my next cards. The ones that would rehabilitate me in his eyes.
The first of those cards was this interrogation.
Pierce, guided by the Worm, spoke. He spoke of Gideon Malick, another member of the World Security Council. Unpleasant, but expected, if you thought about it. Just a system of checks and balances. Malick watched Pierce, and Pierce watched Malick.
He spoke of Baron Strucker, Hydra's scientific genius and international terrorist, holed up in a fortress in Sokovia. Even Pierce winced as he discussed him, complaining that Strucker's projects were "too crude and too loud."
That was still within the expected range.
One of the most valuable moments came when Pierce mentioned Zola's Algorithm. It would have been a nasty surprise if we hadn't already known about it: an artificial intelligence built from the consciousness of a Nazi scientist. The problems it could have caused would have been far worse if the Aquarium had contained any bugs. But Pierce wasn't lying. Without a command from the head, the algorithm wouldn't act on its own. It would sincerely believe everything happening was part of Pierce's plan. Now that we knew its exact location, we had significantly reduced that threat.
The unpleasant surprise was the ideology itself. Total population control by stripping free will. That, unfortunately, fit right in with Fury's paranoia and my own approach to problem-solving.
But all of that paled in comparison when Pierce mentioned Malick's cult. His damned Hive.
I had absolutely no idea what that was. But considering the world we lived in, I wouldn't be surprised if Malick actually managed to reach this Hive at the worst possible moment. And then the world would most likely be doomed. There were no Avengers, no Strange, no experienced Fantastic Four, and no powered-up version of me.
Pierce naturally didn't know the details. He only knew that it was "some key thing the Malick family had been searching for, for generations, to bring Hive back to Earth."
One thing was certain: Malick was guaranteed to be the Mental Worm's next target. I glanced at Fury. Judging by his motionless, deathly pale face, he'd reached the same conclusion I had, right when I did. And he agreed.
Good. Gradually, he was starting to understand how thoroughly screwed the situation was. For some reason, it seemed to me that the threat level would only grow with each thread we unraveled.
The longer Pierce spoke, the worse it got.
There were the Inhumans and the experiments performed on them.
There were the Mutants. Dozens of projects run by Hydra on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s behalf had literally gutted the poor men and women unlucky enough to activate their X-gene.
There were the energy weapons based on the Tesseract. It turned out Hydra had studied it inside and out. S.H.I.E.L.D. had only gotten the scraps.
There were the names. Names of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, including high-ranking ones. Names of politicians. Names of corporate executives. Names of high-ranking military officers. Names of media figures.
Hydra was everywhere. Its roots had spread so deep that eventually, all of this was going to blow up.
And maybe I was imagining it, but it seemed to me that over the course of this hour, Fury's attitude toward my methods had softened slightly. At the very least, he had definitely recognized their practicality. Especially when Pierce, with that same calm smile, told him about the Dead Hand protocols, automatic orders for total retaliation that would trigger if Pierce died or was captured, protocols that my Worm had just completely bypassed.
"Yes, I have a cleanup implant built into me," Pierce admitted easily, talking about it like he was discussing the weather. "As soon as my vital signs deviate from the norm, my brain instantly turns to mush, and Zola receives a signal to act."
"A signal to do what?" Fury asked quietly.
"To create a global catastrophe, Nick," Pierce smiled. "All of the sleeper agents in S.H.I.E.L.D., and there are literally thousands of them, would receive orders for an immediate attack and the destruction of S.H.I.E.L.D. from within. All of Hydra's bases, and some of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s bases, including Camp Lehigh, would self-destruct. All of the politicians and media personalities would reveal the existence of S.H.I.E.L.D. to the world and unleash the most compromising material imaginable. And then there is the Insight project. You should be very grateful right now that our three new Helicarriers are not finished yet. Otherwise, they would definitely have destroyed a dozen cities with millions of people in them.
The interrogation went on for four hours. For four hours, there were revelations, each one more monstrous than the last. Finally, we understood that we had extracted the most critical details from Pierce, if not everything. It was time to shift the focus.
"And now, Nick, I have a question for you," I said when another pause settled over the interrogation room. "What will we learn from the other Hydra heads?"
I needed to redirect Fury's paranoia away from me toward something more constructive. Yes, he definitely feared me. And no gesture of goodwill, like destroying the Worms, transferring them to him, or creating a vaccine, would calm him down. Subjugate Fury? That was the easy path, and it would not end well. Kill him? That would be stupid.
There was only one way out. I had to change the very nature of our relationship. And Pierce, with his revelations, had helped me tremendously.
"Nothing good," Fury snapped, staring at the wall.
"And do you know what the funniest part of all this is, Nick?" I decided to finish him off.
I saw both of his eyes snap to focus on me. He did not know what to expect.
"This. Your Hydra." I gestured around the room. "It's a kindergarten. A nursery school. Compared to what's actually coming, there are threats from space. Hundreds of civilizations out there."
"They're just words." He shook his head.
"Words?" I smirked. "Half of Hydra is a cult of fanatics trying to summon a god from space to Earth. Are those just words too? What about the mages and vampires you know perfectly well exist? Are those just words? The fact that I did more to eradicate Hydra in one day than your S.H.I.E.L.D. has done in fifty years is that also just words?"
"My paranoia isn't baseless!" Fury snapped.
"If it leads you to try to eliminate me, then it's useless. There are so many threats in this world that I can and want to help with. I have to live here too, after all. But burn this bridge, and you'll only achieve one thing. I'll simply fly off to terraform Mars and leave this planet in your care." I shrugged.
"Playing God won't lead to anything good, Thompson."
Playing God? Do you know who actually is God? Or rather, who actually is one? It's Loki. The God of Illusions and Deception. He's real, Nick. And he can come for your Tesseract at any moment. He could open a portal over New York, and from there, hordes of Chitauri would pour out. Cruel, bloodthirsty aliens who would not leave a single stone standing in that city. And who's going to fight them, Nick?
For a while, the room was plunged into silence. Pierce, silently observing our exchange, only smiled faintly. He had said everything that needed to be said.
"We have Hyperion. We have the Hulk. We have the Mutants," Fury finally said. "S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and the military shouldn't be written off either."
"And what if I told you the Chitauri are only the first stage? That the true puppeteer will come after them, and his goal is to destroy half of all intelligent life in the entire universe?" I lowered my voice. "And what if I told you that even this isn't the end? That there are threats out there that make even that genocide look like mercy?"
Fury was silent for a long time, looking at Pierce, then at me.
"Hydra," he finally said. "First, we need to resolve the question of Hydra. And then... I'll think about it."
He looked directly into my eyes, as if trying to burn through me with his gaze. Then he wearily shook his head, shedding the accumulated tension.
Think about it, Nick. Think hard. As for Hydra, I suggest we bring in the Hyperion you mentioned earlier. You can consider that another element of the checks and balances system on your end. And speaking of which, here is my...
I turned to an empty corner of the room.
"Gwen, please come out."
-------------------------------------------
"Chapters on Patreon progress: Currently at;
1. Harry Potter: Satan? Nah, Just My Family Crest = CHAPTER 193
2.Marvel: Cosmic Forger of Infinity = CHAPTER 126
3.Harry Potter: Beyond Good and Evil in the Wizarding World = CHAPTER 186
4.Harry Potter: Reborn as Draco Black = CHAPTER 53
support me on Patreon for instant access to the 80+ advance chapters: patreon.com/redofic"