Rochade - A Game of Intrigue
Fianchetto
Chapter 10
Fianchetto
It took Natasha only a minute to open the door to the research facility that was supposedly secret and shouldn’t have existed in the first place. Night had fallen upon the great city of New York, a city of splendor and hidden treasures, of hell and heaven alike. Something like this facility was well-hidden among other buildings; some served for offices, others for laboratories. It was here where the trap was to be sprung.
“Perimeter secure for now. You go, girl.” She heard Clint talking in her earpiece. He was to watch her movements while she took upon a risky assignment. She was wearing her black catsuit and S.H.I.E.L.D. insignia, and they both had chosen this facility with care. First, they wanted to know who had them shadowed and protected. Both Clint and Natasha were in the game long enough to know that one had to know all the players in the field to maneuver, something that Cap had stressed when they had talked this mission over.
What’s more, Pepper Potts, of all people, had forwarded a vital piece of information: The Spymaster was somehow involved in this mess, and the flow of money was clear: This facility was at least financed by the Spymaster’s lackeys. This was no mission for infiltration; this was burglary and frontal assault in terms of gathering intelligence. If Natasha’s hidden protector was on the Spymaster’s payroll, they would know. If he wasn’t, it was all the easier to catch him now, as the Black Widow was about to piss off a heavyweight in terms of espionage and influence, so he had to intervene.
“Nothing so far. I don’t know much about that Spymaster guy.” Clint whispered into her earpiece, while she heard him crouching on one of the rooftops and fastening something on his belt.
Natasha smiled. “That’s because your approach is hands-on; Spymaster is more subtle. Your methods differ, so you don’t have much traffic.” Finally, the frontal door slid open, revealing two surprised security guards. One was reaching for his gun, but Natasha quickly grabbed his wrist and hit his elbow with the other hand. Bones cracked, and she kicked him in the knee for good measure, so he fell to the floor, writhing in pain. The other guard, a young man with big brown eyes, never even moved; he stood simply frozen in shock and surprise. Natasha didn’t give him the chance to recover. Every Judoka knows how to throw a person much heavier than oneself, and so she just threw him on the floor, hitting him on the chin to knock him out. Their radios were dispatched quickly with a device that was disguised as an eyeliner pen.
No more guards in this corridor. Weak security. She somehow liked the tapestry and thought that the potted plants on the shelves were a nice touch. “Spymaster is most likely a legacy name.” She told Clint via earpiece, unfazed by what happened around her and walking down the corridors. “He’s been around since the fifties, but switched his style in the eighties. It’s believed that someone else took on the mantle of Spymaster then. Before, he was much more politically inclined. Now it’s just money laundering and industrial espionage.” One lonely security guard on a desk in what looked like reception. He noticed her very late and looked up only to be headbutted. Security was really sloppy here; so nobody really expected a raid. Hubris. “He’s purely freelance; even S.H.I.E.L.D. has bought information from him on occasion. We also tried to track him down, but he’s really good at hiding.”
“He?” Clint asked.
In the next room, Natasha dispatched two more guards by throwing electroshocking pallets at them with uncanny precision. “I say ‘he’ because it’s practical. It could be a woman; it could really be anyone.” Access to the research department was limited, so it would take a while to hack through it.
“And when he was politically involved, what did he do?”
“He mostly backed the KGB,” Natasha replied while searching through the files, “but he wasn’t very reliable. Nowadays, his modus operandi has changed. He works through a system of blackmail and obligations - he applies pressure on someone to make him do little things: look the other way, take a break at a specific time, procure a seemingly unimportant file and so on. The people he uses don’t even know who’s getting to them, and he never asks too much. He uses these little things to get more leverage and further his influence, a micromanagement to weave a network. His operations are delicate, long-term and lucrative.”
“Sounds like someone we need to take care of.”
“Not really. He has a strict no-violence policy, keeps the flow of money going and he’s careful not to clash with us. Up until now, we thought that he didn’t favor anybody. Actually, he’s good for the economy and keeps them all on their toes.” Darn it. It seemed like she had triggered some kind of alarm. She had to move fast now.
Over her earpiece, she heard heavy breathing and blows being traded. She had no doubt that Clint was subduing her shadowy protector, who was lured out by her reckless behaviour. Hawkeye never failed unless he chose to fail.
There was still no security personnel on her, which was disturbing. That meant that there was something about this facility that she didn’t know. Either they really just experimented with cereals or the security was needed somewhere else more pressing instead of stopping an intruder who walked through the front door.
It took one of her gadgets to finally open the massive door to the research area and she had to pass through a plastic curtain. The surroundings changed drastically; before, it had been warm, soft colours, potted plants and tasteful curtains in rooms that must have been light-flooded by day. Now, the electrical light was just a tiny shade too bright to be comfortable, the walls were stark white and the smell of disinfectant hung in the air. It looked all clean, sterile, cold and impersonal. The corridors were just a bit more narrow than usual while a quick peering into one of the rooms revealed brightly lit laboratories, just as impersonal and sterile as the whole section of this building. Every room had what looked like an antique computer, but turned out to be a high-tech console, coloured white like just about everything in this clean and sterile section of the building.
The faint smell of smoke was the first thing to greet her under the disinfectant in the air. Suddenly, it dawned to her why nobody stood in her path - obviously, the personnel had deleted all the data, set fire to the laboratory and vacated the premises before the intruder could get any information at all. But instead of running out of the burning building, Natasha pressed forward. If she found the the fire source, perhaps she could extinguish it before all the intelligence she could gather would be lost. From one of the tables, she picked up a piece of cloth, rinsed it in water at a wash basin and fastened it around her lower face, just to be on the safe side and avoid the real danger of a small fire - smoke poisoning.
“Subjects in retreat. You need to pursue.” That was all she could let her partner know before she started searching through the laboratories. Clint would have a much better chance of catching fleeing people, and perhaps she could find some intel or even better, douse the fire before it spread. She stopped by a few consoles, only to be disappointed again. No network, all data was saved on one console only and completely deleted in case of emergency. Smart, but not foolproofed. The smoke didn’t get any thicker, so the fire was spreading slowly. Good, that gave her much more needed time to search through this facility. Eventually in one of the last rooms she checked, she found a console that hadn’t been fully scrubbed and worked fast to save some data and view it later. It was then when she heard a moan of pain in the next room.
She had to pass a plastic curtain again, only to be treated with a horrible sight. The room itself looked like an operating room, all white, with a bed in the middle that held the patient.
But what a patient it was: it was only a teenager, perhaps fourteen of fifteen years old, caucasian ethnicity, covered in green boils and blisters over and over. His shoulder looked grotesquely swollen, with grey tissue that had grown out uncontrolled. The boy spoke in a language Natasha didn’t speak, but sounded oddly familiar. A Belarussian dialect, perhaps, or Romanian. But one thing was for sure: under his cracked lips, dried throat and weak condition he could only manage the barest of whispers, and he pleaded for help.
Before she knew it, she had rushed to the kid and and stood helplessly at his side, unable to find a way to help him. In the back of her mind, she registered that there were no sign that the scientists had worn protective gear, so it was safe to be close to the boy. She attempted to take his hand, but stopped because of those appalling blisters. She couldn’t bring herself to touch the boy, but could neither bring herself to do nothing.
“It will be alright,” she told the boy in a soothing voice. She spoke Russian, the thing closest to his language, but didn’t really expect him to understand her pretty lie. Instead, she expected him to hear the sound of her voice and what it carried, and it seemed to calm him. She could barely make out his features under all the boils, and his hair had been completely shaven from his head. But under all the pain, she could see that he had very bright blue eyes. Those were the eyes of a mere child, wrestling with adolescence, eyes that adored and explored the world.
She could see the boy struggle, but then the light in his eyes flickered and died and he exhaled one last time, looking strangely relieved.
Natasha took a step back, appalled, shocked and feeling sick to her stomach. She had seen much in her career and done a lot of things that would drive other people insane, but she had never put a mere child in that much harm, nor would she ever.
Whoever did this to the boy would never do it again. She pressed her lips together and went to work, going through the motions like walking through a dream, strangely detached from the world and merely functioning in the most rational manner she could muster. The world of reason was a formidable sanctuary that had served her well over the years. Whenever something offended what was left of her moralities, she could always count on reason and intellect to shelter her and give her a new cause. It made her sleep well at night, it made her the person she was.
It didn’t take her long to find a fire extinguisher carelessly left behind, and the fire source was easily extinguished since the people working here had used insufficient fire accelerant. Sloppy, again. Worse, the fire source had been set over four more bodies of teenagers, two male, two female. All of them stark naked, all of them shaved all hair from the body, all of them wide eyed and freshly deceased, all of them obviously experimented upon. And none of them older than sixteen.
“Natasha?” She heard Clint over her earpiece. “I got your protector, but whoever worked here is gone. What’s your status?” She felt too sick to answer and knew that Clint would take what she found even harder. He had always had a soft spot for children and got angry whenever kids were harmed. He may be an assassin, but he drew the line when young people were involved, so she knew that he couldn’t bear the sight in this laboratory less than herself.
“Call for backup,” she replied curtly, still dealing with her nausea. “This is bigger than us. Get yourself to base before backup arrives and interrogate our prisoner. Let’s deal with this privately.”
Clint didn’t answer. He no doubt sensed that she had found something so disturbing that she didn’t want him to see it in person, but trusted her enough to brief him in time. It was good that she could rely on him and made her feel a little better in all of this misery.
Until backup arrived, she took a look in the facility. She didn’t find any more bodies, but old-fashioned files, on paper, no less. If the fire had spread, they wouldn’t have survived for sure. They detailed the experiments on the kids. Apparently, they all had some sort of gift and the objective had been to reinforce this gifts to the point where it could be used as a weapon. The blue eyed boy she had witnessed dying had been listed under the codename ‘Decay’, but this gift had turned against him. The others had died similarly.
Oddly enough, they had been turned in the day Cap had picked up Wanda Maximoff a couple of weeks ago. Natasha wondered if there was a connection. Speculation, there was no way to be sure at the moment. The only thing she knew for certain was that Spymaster was no longer just an industrial spy. As long as these large blue eyes from the boy haunted her, she would not rest well. From now on, Spymaster was her target.
It seemed to be the universal law that the closer a passenger sat the ground in a car, the more expensive it was. If so, the car Wanda was sitting in was too expensive for her taste. But then again, she was now one of the few people that could now boast that Tony Stark played chauffeur for her.
She glanced to the driver’s seat where Mr. Stark was sitting silently, his eyes transfixed on the road. They had been silent from the moment they had entered the car, and it was becoming uncomfortable now. “So …” Wanda said before she could stop herself. “You have a driver, no?” Happy Hogan was his name. She had met him. Jolly fellow. It would have been his job to oversee that Wanda wasn’t going to abuse the visit to Dr. Strange’s estate, but instead, she sat there with Tony Stark himself.
“Your doctor’s address is in Greenwich, near the point where Bruce Banner was last seen.” Stark sniffed. “Since the moment you’ve entered my tower, suspicious things became even more suspicious and weird things even more weird. Weirdness loves company, so perhaps it’s connected.” He fell silent after that, lost in thought while driving. The silence became awkward again.
“So …” Both said at the same time, Stark gave her a quick glance and she made an offering gesture, prompting him to go ahead. He grimaced. “I hear you are a witch.” Before she could say something, he added. “Cap explained it to me. Said something about bioelectric emissions not unlike body warmth and told me that he saw you do your thing.” It was clear that Mr. Stark, however, was not convinced about that, as she had guessed earlier. His mind worked with science and reason; superstition had no place in his world. That was why he took the term ‘witch’ as a hoax and herself as a con-artist. That he gave her the benefit of doubt was something that spoke much about his trust in Steve Rogers’ judgment.
“Ask your questions,” she said quietly, again making an offering gesture. It was to be expected to be doubted. When working with the occult, it was the scientist’s holy duty to doubt, and that was exactly what Tony Stark was going to do.
“What’s with the brooms?”
His flippant approach actually made Wanda chuckle. “There is indeed an answer to that.”
“Entertain me.”
She folded her hands onto her lap and started explaining, patiently and calm. Her own speech patterns were slow and deliberate in comparison to his, so it she had sometimes trouble keeping up with him. Having his ear was a nice change. “The term ‘witch’ or ‘hag’ derives from the old indo germanic term ‘hagazussa’, which means ‘sitting on a fence’. It is to be believed that the fence means the border between worlds. Another term to be considered is the Anglo-Saxon witan, ‘to know’ for ‘witch’. But that was a few linguistic revolutions and vocal evolutions ago. In time, the fence became a broomstick, and legend, superstition and storytelling made the broom flying. That’s why witches are associated with flying brooms.”
That explanation seemed to baffle Mr. Stark. “That makes sense,” he said, looking surprised that there was a scientific explanation at all, and even more so, that he could accept it. “But seriously … witch?” He shot her a doubting glance again, but at least he was willing to listen.
“Witchcraft is just the way I ritualize it. As Captain Rogers so aptly explained, it’s about energy emission, which is a genetic thing with me. But it takes focus, and I create my focus by gesturing or doing rituals.” She shook her head. “That doesn’t mean that I believe in some pagan spirits or deities; it just means that those rituals help me create effects that seem like magic …”
“... but are scientific in nature,” he concluded. “You must have a curious phenotype of mutation then. If people like you approach that problem with the same kind of ritualization, social evolution would dictate a whole new section of occultism, so science becomes magic. Thanks, Agent Cooper.”
That was certainly one way to put it. Wanda also sensed that, while Mr. Stark had only a passing knowledge about genetics and linguistics, he certainly had understanding, like every true genius did. Given just a little time, he would run circles around her knowledge she had spent years to acquire - like Jane, he was her superior intellectual by far. It was a humbling thought.
“There we are. Wow. Posh,” Tony Stark remarked when they reached the sliproad to Dr. Strange’s estate. He wasn’t referring to the house itself, which looked cozy even from the outside, but to the lush and well-cared-for garden enclosed by white picket fences. Even late in autumn, there were still flowers blooming under the great hickory. Small sculptures and bird basins decorated the site; one section had even been turned into a small rockery.
“Wow,” Mr. Stark said again, taking a few careful steps on the grass that managed to be flawless even though it should get mawed. “That’s the greenest of green I’ve ever seen.” He paused. “Hey, that rhymed. Anyway, does your Doctor practice his magic on plants? Or does he speak the language of flowers? How well do you know this guy anyway?”
“I’ve met him a few times, most recently a couple of months ago. He was teaching me about soul mirrors.” A lesson that Wanda had failed miserably, as she recalled. She was now walking towards the rockery, kneeling down to a small heap of pebbles. “He’s a friend of a friend, so to speak, and I was told to get help from him. And apparently, he is a magnificent gardener.”
“Right, and what are you doing there?”
She knelt and let her hand hover above the pebbles, answering the question with a knowing smile. “Checking my mail.” Indeed, one of the pebbles glowed ever so slightly when her palm hovered above it. There was just a trace of a minor enchantment on it, tailored to Wanda specifically, so that it was enough to store a message for her and her alone.
“Cooper ...” Stark’s voice sounded alarmed. She quickly picked the pebble up and caught up to him, only to see what made him so worried. When he tipped against the front door, it swung open, revealing the sight of a seriously messed up room. Wanda froze in her movements … the Doctor would never let himself go that way, and there were wards in place that prevented burglary - subtle wards that just gave any would-be burglar with the intention of stealing the strong impression to turn around and keep walking.
Something like this shouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. Dr. Strange was the most powerful sorcerer in the world. It was impossible that someone would just break into his home. Before Wanda could rush in, Tony Stark held her back.
“Call Fury?” He just asked.
“Not yet.” First, she needed to see. She needed to see that this was a joke, or that she terribly misunderstood the situation. Perhaps he had an apprentice and they messed up the house. Perhaps he wasn’t home, his ward had failed and it had been only a burglar. Perhaps everything was still fine and the Doctor was safe and sound.
She took a deep breath and stepped through the door, Tony Stark behind her. She should have felt a magical surge that was caused by his wards, filling her senses with magic, but nothing happened. She felt absolutely nothing. That meant that the wards had been deliberately destroyed.
The interior of Dr. Strange’s house was a mess. Everywhere they found signs of battle - furniture turned down, smashed and obviously thrown, smudges that looked like burn marks, holes in the walls. Some serious sorcery battle had been going on here, and it had been a while ago. The water marks on the carpet were long dried and the potted plants were wilting while a horrible stench filled the air.
The living room, however, treated Wanda and Tony a special sight indeed. The destruction of this home was worst here, with the smell of cold smoke and ash still hanging in the air, mixed with the stench of rot. The carpet, once a tasteful beige, was covered in brown stains. Dried blood. In what once had been a pool of blood lay a body, mauled beyond any recognition. His face was torn from his skull, showing muscles and sinews, while his shiny black hair was the only thing that could possibly shed light on his identity: Wang, the Doctor’s apprentice.
Wanda didn’t know what Tony Stark felt, but her heart skipped, leaving her with the impression of burning ice in her veins. Her stomach was turning as well, and for a moment, she thought she was going to throw up. Stark didn’t move either, didn’t joke. He just stared, and it took him a while to speak with an oddly leaden tongue. “I really hate this. Fury. Now.”
While he made his call, Wanda gathered all her strength and will to kneel beside the dried puddle that contained Wang, covering her mouth with a handkerchief to ward off the stench. She had to look, had to examine - perhaps she would find something the authorities couldn’t see, like it had been with the Hulk-head. Indeed, Wangs injuries looked very much like those on the mages in London, albeit much more messy and brutal. The sorcerer in London had been killed cleanly and quickly, cold and impersonal, but the Doctor’s apprentice had been mauled, not efficiently, but painfully. This hadn’t only been a murder, this had been cold-blooded torture.
“Judging from the state of decay, he’s been dead for two or three weeks.” She had to pause for a moment before she could continue. “This was done by someone like me.” Wanda only managed a throaty croak when she had Tony Stark’s attention. She only now noticed that he was pale as a sheet and equally appalled as she was by the situation. It was so strange, she hadn’t even known Wang. In truth, she was still surprised that she remembered his name at all, with him having been in the background during the Doctor’s visits in New Salem, if he had even ever been there.
“Same person as Banner’s attacker?”
“I cannot say, but it has the same feel to it.” She rose, but her knees felt weak. To her surprise, she was supported by Stark by the elbow.
“C’mon, let’s get out of here.”
She was ready to let herself be led, but then she remembered the pebble. With a sense of urgency, she searched for the pebble in her handbag, produced it and looked around in the room. “Wait. We have to see some magic first,” she told a baffled Tony Stark before she found what she was looking for. An old mirror on the wall, only slightly cracked would suffice nicely. With one quick motion of her wrist, she threw the pebble into the surface of the mirror, which didn’t shatter, but reacted like the surface of a calm pond.
The mirror billowed, and the face of Dr. Stephen Strange appeared as a mirror image. He was an older man ostensibly in his fifties, with aquiline features, dark eyes, short black hair and greying temples.
The true beauty of this spell however was not in the appearance of his face, but in the audio feature. She could hear his voice through the spell as clearly as he would be standing before her. “Hello Wanda. Welcome in my home.” The mirror image said, his expression mild and amiable. “You have guessed it by now, but there was more to the attack in New York. I need you to retrace the steps of Loki, the Jotun, when he visited our world before. He must have had some agenda. For research material, you can use any of my materials and books you like. Wang will fill you in. Don’t worry, we will get to the bottom of this.”
With these words, the vision of Dr. Strange faded, leaving Wanda feeling hollow and disappointed. She had hoped for clearer words, for answers to her questions. Instead, she had found more blood and destruction. In the end, she there was no help, no back-up from the magical world. Her friendships were targeted and her potential allies died, like poor Wang on the floor. In the end, she was on her own.
Fianchetto
It took Natasha only a minute to open the door to the research facility that was supposedly secret and shouldn’t have existed in the first place. Night had fallen upon the great city of New York, a city of splendor and hidden treasures, of hell and heaven alike. Something like this facility was well-hidden among other buildings; some served for offices, others for laboratories. It was here where the trap was to be sprung.
“Perimeter secure for now. You go, girl.” She heard Clint talking in her earpiece. He was to watch her movements while she took upon a risky assignment. She was wearing her black catsuit and S.H.I.E.L.D. insignia, and they both had chosen this facility with care. First, they wanted to know who had them shadowed and protected. Both Clint and Natasha were in the game long enough to know that one had to know all the players in the field to maneuver, something that Cap had stressed when they had talked this mission over.
What’s more, Pepper Potts, of all people, had forwarded a vital piece of information: The Spymaster was somehow involved in this mess, and the flow of money was clear: This facility was at least financed by the Spymaster’s lackeys. This was no mission for infiltration; this was burglary and frontal assault in terms of gathering intelligence. If Natasha’s hidden protector was on the Spymaster’s payroll, they would know. If he wasn’t, it was all the easier to catch him now, as the Black Widow was about to piss off a heavyweight in terms of espionage and influence, so he had to intervene.
“Nothing so far. I don’t know much about that Spymaster guy.” Clint whispered into her earpiece, while she heard him crouching on one of the rooftops and fastening something on his belt.
Natasha smiled. “That’s because your approach is hands-on; Spymaster is more subtle. Your methods differ, so you don’t have much traffic.” Finally, the frontal door slid open, revealing two surprised security guards. One was reaching for his gun, but Natasha quickly grabbed his wrist and hit his elbow with the other hand. Bones cracked, and she kicked him in the knee for good measure, so he fell to the floor, writhing in pain. The other guard, a young man with big brown eyes, never even moved; he stood simply frozen in shock and surprise. Natasha didn’t give him the chance to recover. Every Judoka knows how to throw a person much heavier than oneself, and so she just threw him on the floor, hitting him on the chin to knock him out. Their radios were dispatched quickly with a device that was disguised as an eyeliner pen.
No more guards in this corridor. Weak security. She somehow liked the tapestry and thought that the potted plants on the shelves were a nice touch. “Spymaster is most likely a legacy name.” She told Clint via earpiece, unfazed by what happened around her and walking down the corridors. “He’s been around since the fifties, but switched his style in the eighties. It’s believed that someone else took on the mantle of Spymaster then. Before, he was much more politically inclined. Now it’s just money laundering and industrial espionage.” One lonely security guard on a desk in what looked like reception. He noticed her very late and looked up only to be headbutted. Security was really sloppy here; so nobody really expected a raid. Hubris. “He’s purely freelance; even S.H.I.E.L.D. has bought information from him on occasion. We also tried to track him down, but he’s really good at hiding.”
“He?” Clint asked.
In the next room, Natasha dispatched two more guards by throwing electroshocking pallets at them with uncanny precision. “I say ‘he’ because it’s practical. It could be a woman; it could really be anyone.” Access to the research department was limited, so it would take a while to hack through it.
“And when he was politically involved, what did he do?”
“He mostly backed the KGB,” Natasha replied while searching through the files, “but he wasn’t very reliable. Nowadays, his modus operandi has changed. He works through a system of blackmail and obligations - he applies pressure on someone to make him do little things: look the other way, take a break at a specific time, procure a seemingly unimportant file and so on. The people he uses don’t even know who’s getting to them, and he never asks too much. He uses these little things to get more leverage and further his influence, a micromanagement to weave a network. His operations are delicate, long-term and lucrative.”
“Sounds like someone we need to take care of.”
“Not really. He has a strict no-violence policy, keeps the flow of money going and he’s careful not to clash with us. Up until now, we thought that he didn’t favor anybody. Actually, he’s good for the economy and keeps them all on their toes.” Darn it. It seemed like she had triggered some kind of alarm. She had to move fast now.
Over her earpiece, she heard heavy breathing and blows being traded. She had no doubt that Clint was subduing her shadowy protector, who was lured out by her reckless behaviour. Hawkeye never failed unless he chose to fail.
There was still no security personnel on her, which was disturbing. That meant that there was something about this facility that she didn’t know. Either they really just experimented with cereals or the security was needed somewhere else more pressing instead of stopping an intruder who walked through the front door.
It took one of her gadgets to finally open the massive door to the research area and she had to pass through a plastic curtain. The surroundings changed drastically; before, it had been warm, soft colours, potted plants and tasteful curtains in rooms that must have been light-flooded by day. Now, the electrical light was just a tiny shade too bright to be comfortable, the walls were stark white and the smell of disinfectant hung in the air. It looked all clean, sterile, cold and impersonal. The corridors were just a bit more narrow than usual while a quick peering into one of the rooms revealed brightly lit laboratories, just as impersonal and sterile as the whole section of this building. Every room had what looked like an antique computer, but turned out to be a high-tech console, coloured white like just about everything in this clean and sterile section of the building.
The faint smell of smoke was the first thing to greet her under the disinfectant in the air. Suddenly, it dawned to her why nobody stood in her path - obviously, the personnel had deleted all the data, set fire to the laboratory and vacated the premises before the intruder could get any information at all. But instead of running out of the burning building, Natasha pressed forward. If she found the the fire source, perhaps she could extinguish it before all the intelligence she could gather would be lost. From one of the tables, she picked up a piece of cloth, rinsed it in water at a wash basin and fastened it around her lower face, just to be on the safe side and avoid the real danger of a small fire - smoke poisoning.
“Subjects in retreat. You need to pursue.” That was all she could let her partner know before she started searching through the laboratories. Clint would have a much better chance of catching fleeing people, and perhaps she could find some intel or even better, douse the fire before it spread. She stopped by a few consoles, only to be disappointed again. No network, all data was saved on one console only and completely deleted in case of emergency. Smart, but not foolproofed. The smoke didn’t get any thicker, so the fire was spreading slowly. Good, that gave her much more needed time to search through this facility. Eventually in one of the last rooms she checked, she found a console that hadn’t been fully scrubbed and worked fast to save some data and view it later. It was then when she heard a moan of pain in the next room.
She had to pass a plastic curtain again, only to be treated with a horrible sight. The room itself looked like an operating room, all white, with a bed in the middle that held the patient.
But what a patient it was: it was only a teenager, perhaps fourteen of fifteen years old, caucasian ethnicity, covered in green boils and blisters over and over. His shoulder looked grotesquely swollen, with grey tissue that had grown out uncontrolled. The boy spoke in a language Natasha didn’t speak, but sounded oddly familiar. A Belarussian dialect, perhaps, or Romanian. But one thing was for sure: under his cracked lips, dried throat and weak condition he could only manage the barest of whispers, and he pleaded for help.
Before she knew it, she had rushed to the kid and and stood helplessly at his side, unable to find a way to help him. In the back of her mind, she registered that there were no sign that the scientists had worn protective gear, so it was safe to be close to the boy. She attempted to take his hand, but stopped because of those appalling blisters. She couldn’t bring herself to touch the boy, but could neither bring herself to do nothing.
“It will be alright,” she told the boy in a soothing voice. She spoke Russian, the thing closest to his language, but didn’t really expect him to understand her pretty lie. Instead, she expected him to hear the sound of her voice and what it carried, and it seemed to calm him. She could barely make out his features under all the boils, and his hair had been completely shaven from his head. But under all the pain, she could see that he had very bright blue eyes. Those were the eyes of a mere child, wrestling with adolescence, eyes that adored and explored the world.
She could see the boy struggle, but then the light in his eyes flickered and died and he exhaled one last time, looking strangely relieved.
Natasha took a step back, appalled, shocked and feeling sick to her stomach. She had seen much in her career and done a lot of things that would drive other people insane, but she had never put a mere child in that much harm, nor would she ever.
Whoever did this to the boy would never do it again. She pressed her lips together and went to work, going through the motions like walking through a dream, strangely detached from the world and merely functioning in the most rational manner she could muster. The world of reason was a formidable sanctuary that had served her well over the years. Whenever something offended what was left of her moralities, she could always count on reason and intellect to shelter her and give her a new cause. It made her sleep well at night, it made her the person she was.
It didn’t take her long to find a fire extinguisher carelessly left behind, and the fire source was easily extinguished since the people working here had used insufficient fire accelerant. Sloppy, again. Worse, the fire source had been set over four more bodies of teenagers, two male, two female. All of them stark naked, all of them shaved all hair from the body, all of them wide eyed and freshly deceased, all of them obviously experimented upon. And none of them older than sixteen.
“Natasha?” She heard Clint over her earpiece. “I got your protector, but whoever worked here is gone. What’s your status?” She felt too sick to answer and knew that Clint would take what she found even harder. He had always had a soft spot for children and got angry whenever kids were harmed. He may be an assassin, but he drew the line when young people were involved, so she knew that he couldn’t bear the sight in this laboratory less than herself.
“Call for backup,” she replied curtly, still dealing with her nausea. “This is bigger than us. Get yourself to base before backup arrives and interrogate our prisoner. Let’s deal with this privately.”
Clint didn’t answer. He no doubt sensed that she had found something so disturbing that she didn’t want him to see it in person, but trusted her enough to brief him in time. It was good that she could rely on him and made her feel a little better in all of this misery.
Until backup arrived, she took a look in the facility. She didn’t find any more bodies, but old-fashioned files, on paper, no less. If the fire had spread, they wouldn’t have survived for sure. They detailed the experiments on the kids. Apparently, they all had some sort of gift and the objective had been to reinforce this gifts to the point where it could be used as a weapon. The blue eyed boy she had witnessed dying had been listed under the codename ‘Decay’, but this gift had turned against him. The others had died similarly.
Oddly enough, they had been turned in the day Cap had picked up Wanda Maximoff a couple of weeks ago. Natasha wondered if there was a connection. Speculation, there was no way to be sure at the moment. The only thing she knew for certain was that Spymaster was no longer just an industrial spy. As long as these large blue eyes from the boy haunted her, she would not rest well. From now on, Spymaster was her target.
It seemed to be the universal law that the closer a passenger sat the ground in a car, the more expensive it was. If so, the car Wanda was sitting in was too expensive for her taste. But then again, she was now one of the few people that could now boast that Tony Stark played chauffeur for her.
She glanced to the driver’s seat where Mr. Stark was sitting silently, his eyes transfixed on the road. They had been silent from the moment they had entered the car, and it was becoming uncomfortable now. “So …” Wanda said before she could stop herself. “You have a driver, no?” Happy Hogan was his name. She had met him. Jolly fellow. It would have been his job to oversee that Wanda wasn’t going to abuse the visit to Dr. Strange’s estate, but instead, she sat there with Tony Stark himself.
“Your doctor’s address is in Greenwich, near the point where Bruce Banner was last seen.” Stark sniffed. “Since the moment you’ve entered my tower, suspicious things became even more suspicious and weird things even more weird. Weirdness loves company, so perhaps it’s connected.” He fell silent after that, lost in thought while driving. The silence became awkward again.
“So …” Both said at the same time, Stark gave her a quick glance and she made an offering gesture, prompting him to go ahead. He grimaced. “I hear you are a witch.” Before she could say something, he added. “Cap explained it to me. Said something about bioelectric emissions not unlike body warmth and told me that he saw you do your thing.” It was clear that Mr. Stark, however, was not convinced about that, as she had guessed earlier. His mind worked with science and reason; superstition had no place in his world. That was why he took the term ‘witch’ as a hoax and herself as a con-artist. That he gave her the benefit of doubt was something that spoke much about his trust in Steve Rogers’ judgment.
“Ask your questions,” she said quietly, again making an offering gesture. It was to be expected to be doubted. When working with the occult, it was the scientist’s holy duty to doubt, and that was exactly what Tony Stark was going to do.
“What’s with the brooms?”
His flippant approach actually made Wanda chuckle. “There is indeed an answer to that.”
“Entertain me.”
She folded her hands onto her lap and started explaining, patiently and calm. Her own speech patterns were slow and deliberate in comparison to his, so it she had sometimes trouble keeping up with him. Having his ear was a nice change. “The term ‘witch’ or ‘hag’ derives from the old indo germanic term ‘hagazussa’, which means ‘sitting on a fence’. It is to be believed that the fence means the border between worlds. Another term to be considered is the Anglo-Saxon witan, ‘to know’ for ‘witch’. But that was a few linguistic revolutions and vocal evolutions ago. In time, the fence became a broomstick, and legend, superstition and storytelling made the broom flying. That’s why witches are associated with flying brooms.”
That explanation seemed to baffle Mr. Stark. “That makes sense,” he said, looking surprised that there was a scientific explanation at all, and even more so, that he could accept it. “But seriously … witch?” He shot her a doubting glance again, but at least he was willing to listen.
“Witchcraft is just the way I ritualize it. As Captain Rogers so aptly explained, it’s about energy emission, which is a genetic thing with me. But it takes focus, and I create my focus by gesturing or doing rituals.” She shook her head. “That doesn’t mean that I believe in some pagan spirits or deities; it just means that those rituals help me create effects that seem like magic …”
“... but are scientific in nature,” he concluded. “You must have a curious phenotype of mutation then. If people like you approach that problem with the same kind of ritualization, social evolution would dictate a whole new section of occultism, so science becomes magic. Thanks, Agent Cooper.”
That was certainly one way to put it. Wanda also sensed that, while Mr. Stark had only a passing knowledge about genetics and linguistics, he certainly had understanding, like every true genius did. Given just a little time, he would run circles around her knowledge she had spent years to acquire - like Jane, he was her superior intellectual by far. It was a humbling thought.
“There we are. Wow. Posh,” Tony Stark remarked when they reached the sliproad to Dr. Strange’s estate. He wasn’t referring to the house itself, which looked cozy even from the outside, but to the lush and well-cared-for garden enclosed by white picket fences. Even late in autumn, there were still flowers blooming under the great hickory. Small sculptures and bird basins decorated the site; one section had even been turned into a small rockery.
“Wow,” Mr. Stark said again, taking a few careful steps on the grass that managed to be flawless even though it should get mawed. “That’s the greenest of green I’ve ever seen.” He paused. “Hey, that rhymed. Anyway, does your Doctor practice his magic on plants? Or does he speak the language of flowers? How well do you know this guy anyway?”
“I’ve met him a few times, most recently a couple of months ago. He was teaching me about soul mirrors.” A lesson that Wanda had failed miserably, as she recalled. She was now walking towards the rockery, kneeling down to a small heap of pebbles. “He’s a friend of a friend, so to speak, and I was told to get help from him. And apparently, he is a magnificent gardener.”
“Right, and what are you doing there?”
She knelt and let her hand hover above the pebbles, answering the question with a knowing smile. “Checking my mail.” Indeed, one of the pebbles glowed ever so slightly when her palm hovered above it. There was just a trace of a minor enchantment on it, tailored to Wanda specifically, so that it was enough to store a message for her and her alone.
“Cooper ...” Stark’s voice sounded alarmed. She quickly picked the pebble up and caught up to him, only to see what made him so worried. When he tipped against the front door, it swung open, revealing the sight of a seriously messed up room. Wanda froze in her movements … the Doctor would never let himself go that way, and there were wards in place that prevented burglary - subtle wards that just gave any would-be burglar with the intention of stealing the strong impression to turn around and keep walking.
Something like this shouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. Dr. Strange was the most powerful sorcerer in the world. It was impossible that someone would just break into his home. Before Wanda could rush in, Tony Stark held her back.
“Call Fury?” He just asked.
“Not yet.” First, she needed to see. She needed to see that this was a joke, or that she terribly misunderstood the situation. Perhaps he had an apprentice and they messed up the house. Perhaps he wasn’t home, his ward had failed and it had been only a burglar. Perhaps everything was still fine and the Doctor was safe and sound.
She took a deep breath and stepped through the door, Tony Stark behind her. She should have felt a magical surge that was caused by his wards, filling her senses with magic, but nothing happened. She felt absolutely nothing. That meant that the wards had been deliberately destroyed.
The interior of Dr. Strange’s house was a mess. Everywhere they found signs of battle - furniture turned down, smashed and obviously thrown, smudges that looked like burn marks, holes in the walls. Some serious sorcery battle had been going on here, and it had been a while ago. The water marks on the carpet were long dried and the potted plants were wilting while a horrible stench filled the air.
The living room, however, treated Wanda and Tony a special sight indeed. The destruction of this home was worst here, with the smell of cold smoke and ash still hanging in the air, mixed with the stench of rot. The carpet, once a tasteful beige, was covered in brown stains. Dried blood. In what once had been a pool of blood lay a body, mauled beyond any recognition. His face was torn from his skull, showing muscles and sinews, while his shiny black hair was the only thing that could possibly shed light on his identity: Wang, the Doctor’s apprentice.
Wanda didn’t know what Tony Stark felt, but her heart skipped, leaving her with the impression of burning ice in her veins. Her stomach was turning as well, and for a moment, she thought she was going to throw up. Stark didn’t move either, didn’t joke. He just stared, and it took him a while to speak with an oddly leaden tongue. “I really hate this. Fury. Now.”
While he made his call, Wanda gathered all her strength and will to kneel beside the dried puddle that contained Wang, covering her mouth with a handkerchief to ward off the stench. She had to look, had to examine - perhaps she would find something the authorities couldn’t see, like it had been with the Hulk-head. Indeed, Wangs injuries looked very much like those on the mages in London, albeit much more messy and brutal. The sorcerer in London had been killed cleanly and quickly, cold and impersonal, but the Doctor’s apprentice had been mauled, not efficiently, but painfully. This hadn’t only been a murder, this had been cold-blooded torture.
“Judging from the state of decay, he’s been dead for two or three weeks.” She had to pause for a moment before she could continue. “This was done by someone like me.” Wanda only managed a throaty croak when she had Tony Stark’s attention. She only now noticed that he was pale as a sheet and equally appalled as she was by the situation. It was so strange, she hadn’t even known Wang. In truth, she was still surprised that she remembered his name at all, with him having been in the background during the Doctor’s visits in New Salem, if he had even ever been there.
“Same person as Banner’s attacker?”
“I cannot say, but it has the same feel to it.” She rose, but her knees felt weak. To her surprise, she was supported by Stark by the elbow.
“C’mon, let’s get out of here.”
She was ready to let herself be led, but then she remembered the pebble. With a sense of urgency, she searched for the pebble in her handbag, produced it and looked around in the room. “Wait. We have to see some magic first,” she told a baffled Tony Stark before she found what she was looking for. An old mirror on the wall, only slightly cracked would suffice nicely. With one quick motion of her wrist, she threw the pebble into the surface of the mirror, which didn’t shatter, but reacted like the surface of a calm pond.
The mirror billowed, and the face of Dr. Stephen Strange appeared as a mirror image. He was an older man ostensibly in his fifties, with aquiline features, dark eyes, short black hair and greying temples.
The true beauty of this spell however was not in the appearance of his face, but in the audio feature. She could hear his voice through the spell as clearly as he would be standing before her. “Hello Wanda. Welcome in my home.” The mirror image said, his expression mild and amiable. “You have guessed it by now, but there was more to the attack in New York. I need you to retrace the steps of Loki, the Jotun, when he visited our world before. He must have had some agenda. For research material, you can use any of my materials and books you like. Wang will fill you in. Don’t worry, we will get to the bottom of this.”
With these words, the vision of Dr. Strange faded, leaving Wanda feeling hollow and disappointed. She had hoped for clearer words, for answers to her questions. Instead, she had found more blood and destruction. In the end, she there was no help, no back-up from the magical world. Her friendships were targeted and her potential allies died, like poor Wang on the floor. In the end, she was on her own.
11/27/13