The mission was over. Everyone at the storage facility had been discreetly handed over to the FBI. Still believing he’d been betrayed, and that the Feds had known more than they actually had, the Goldsmith had told them everything about Platzer’s activities, and even fingered Merns. Making charges stick against the Associate Deputy Director might be harder, but he would probably at least have to step down. “Seriously,” Coulson had said to them, “you did more damage to Hydra these past few days than we have in the past few months.”
Charges would stick against Max Obderbrowski, though. Already plenty of his people had expressed their willingness to testify against him. Pretzel might not even have to. At his age, he was likely to die in prison now.
Matt thought he should be contented. They’d done what they’d come here to do, and while Karen had been forced to kill one person, it had been as an act of self-defense, and it wasn’t someone who would haunt her too much.
But the death of Tommy was hanging hard over him. He and Karen should’ve known better, no matter what Coulson said. Lacking instructions from higher-ups for the first time in their lives wasn’t an excuse for how reckless they’d been.
“Karen’s coming,” he murmured to Agent Triplett when he first heard her coming up the stairs. Her step was heavy, and she came alone.
“Think she’ll know when we’re getting out of here?” he asked. “No offense or anything, this is an okay place you’ve got here-I assume that thing in the closet wasn’t yours, but we usually aren’t out in public this long. Coulson starts getting twitchy when we are, and then when we get home Agent May’s also gotten twitchy, and trust me, no one wants that…”
Karen had been crying. Matt was certain of it once she was through the door. Though she was perfectly composed as she walked in and sat down on the other side of the best. “You’ve probably gotten a new IT guy,” she informed them. “CJ wants to join S.H.I.E.L.D., and Coulson’s already agreed to take him back to the Playground.”
“And Pretzel?” Matt asked. He’d already guessed the answer, but there had to be more to it for Karen to be this upset.
Sure enough, she said, “I shouldn’t have tried to speak to her. She made clear how absolutely she wants nothing to do with any of us ever again, and we all had better never try to find out where they place her.”
“Harsh,” commented Isabelle Hartley, another agent who was standing near the door to the bedroom.
“She was right to be,” said Karen, and she shed another tear. “She said we killed him, just as much as we killed Craig MacGregor. She said he was the only person she’d felt safe around for years, even before they left Maine.”
“She’s going through withdrawal too right now,” Matt reminded her. “I’m pretty sure she shot up this morning, before getting herself captured, but by the time we rescued her it didn’t smell like it could’ve been less than at least a couple of hours.”
“Yeah, she was showing the first symptoms even before I handed her over.” This only made her sound more upset.
“Hey, she’ll be all right,” Matt tried. “She’s not all right now, and she won’t be tomorrow, or maybe even next week. But she’ll be all right.”
“I suppose. Though she needs new people. There was this one point where she and CJ were just sort of looking at each other, after they knew they’d made different decisions about where to go, and he just shook his head at her, and said, ‘I don’t have anything to say to you. It’s not even that I don’t want to, I just really don’t have anything.’ She just nodded sadly, and said it was the same for her.
He’s probably going to be furious at us, too,” she continued. “At this point I think he’s still in the shock stage of grieving, maybe overwhelmed by the whole secretly refounded organization taking him into a completely new life thing…”
“We rescued him, too, in a way,” said Matt. “His situation might not have been as bad as Pretzel’s, but he was still working for criminals, and associating with Hydra, and I don’t think that would’ve ended well for him.”
“And we got his boyfriend killed,” was all Karen said to that. “His recruitment into S.H.I.E.L.D. isn’t quite going like mine did.”
“Well, it wouldn’t anyway,” pointed out Agent Hartley. “We aren’t exactly the group you joined, are we?”
“No,” said Matt. “You aren’t.” Karen said nothing then.
They hadn’t needed to talk about what they were going to be doing now yet. This new S.H.I.E.L.D. needed to properly debrief them, get all the intelligence on Hydra they could get from everything they’d been exposed to, so of course they were going back to the base with them. But the more Matt thought about it, the more he wanted it to end there. He had now started the process of applying for law school, culling his list of schools and getting his recommendations, and the anticipation of it, of following the dream he’d had before he’d ever heard of S.H.I.E.L.D., had left him wanting it more than anything else. Certainly more than getting involved with an organization that had now been outlawed.
But while he doubted Karen even knew what she wanted, he feared she wouldn’t even let that matter. It had never been easy for him to walk away from the good fight, but he could do it. To his knowledge, she never had, unless forcibly ordered to. If, like him, she’d had a definite plan for her future, he thought maybe he could’ve persuaded her to do so. But as it was, he doubted he could get her to walk away with him.
Agent Triplett’s comm chirped, and Matt listened to Coulson speak on the other end when he answered it. Out of politeness he kept silent, and let Trip tell the others, “Okay, the boss has found us all a ride. Agent Hartley, you take Agents Idaho and Grovers out immediately, down two blocks, turn right, look for the license plate number EVR-572. The rest of us will leave in about an hour.”
“Will Matt really be ready to move by then?” Karen asked him.
“I got here,” Matt answered, which she would likely ignore.
“If you’re really worried, we can always carry him downstairs. Though I’m afraid we’re going to have to take him off the bed in a moment so we can pack your things up. Coulson’s willing to take everything with him to the Playground, so you won’t have to come back for it.” That did not mean they expected them to stay at the base, Matt reminded himself. They probably figured that when they left, they’d rather go directly back to DC, or to New York.
“Well, there’d still be the lease to deal with, and the rented furniture,” Karen replied, but she was already getting up and heading for the dresser.
There wasn’t all that much to pack, but there was enough for Matt to observe Triplett’s easy strength, when he lifted up their living room lamp, as well as his braille volumes. He could smell sweat on him too.
And he could smell Karen’s reaction. Also hear her breath catch and her heart rate jump up when Triplett grunted. He knew all her signs, whether they responded to him, or to someone else. Always secure of the bond between them, he’d never minded.
Until right this moment, when it was suddenly outlined to him just what could happen were she to stay where this man was when he didn’t, and Matt was suddenly flooded with jealousy. He wanted to kick or scream or hit something, and when Triplett came back in and said, “I’ll help you up,” Matt wanted to snap at him.
He forced himself not to, told himself to breathe, to make sure Karen didn’t see him in this state. He let the man help him up while turning his face away from where she watched. If he had to feel this way, than she absolutely could never know. It would have an effect on her, one he’d long sworn to himself he’d never cause.
“Matthew Michael Murdock,” Matt answered, trying to feel the fancy chair’s reactions as best he could. There were a lot of wires, most of them underneath him, most of them connected to recording devices of various kinds, he thought. The air around him was practically whirring as the chair measured his reactions.
It definitely was not the most comfortable thing to be hooked up in when he was far from recovered from his ordeal. When Billy Koenig had requested he go first, Karen had even protested. But the guy had insisted, and for a good reason. The room they were in had basic soundproofing, but Matt could still hear much of what was going on through half the base. They couldn’t keep him from listening in when it was Karen’s turn. “I want you answering the questions when you first hear them, not an hour later,” Koenig had said.
Before they’d disembarked, Agent Triplett had asked him to apply his senses to Agent Koenig. “He had a brother-killed by that asshole Ward-who looked and sounded exactly like him, and I mean exactly. Like they were robots. There’s something weird about that dude.”
If there was, Matt’s senses didn’t tell him about it. Billy Koenig had all the normal biorhythms. He sounded a bit overweight, blood pressure slightly elevated. His breathing might have been unusually consistent in its timing, but that might have just been Matt’s mind playing tricks on him. He kept up the same chipper tone as he asked about Matt’s eye color, marital history, and immediate family.
He was going to get plenty of measurements off that last one. “I’ve had two sets of parents, effectively. I was born to Jack and Maggie Murdock, in New York City. I don’t remember the latter. My grandmother claimed she tried to kill me as a baby, and then disappeared. I think she must have been mentally ill, but I can’t know for sure. My first dad was killed a few months after my accident.”
“Oh, wow, I’m so sorry,” said Agent Koenig, and he meant it. “But I thought I heard your foster dad…”
“Him too, I’m afraid.” Matt let out a grim smile. “When S.H.I.E.L.D. took me in, they put me with Agent Geoff Connelly and his wife Amanda as foster parents. They never officially adopted me, but I still consider them to be my parents too. I also have six foster siblings: Fox, George, Evelyn, Mariah, Stephen, and Jessie. Mariah’s got three kids, and Fox has one on the way.” He smiled, thinking about that. Then, on another thought, he said, “I’m sorry, too, about your brother.”
“Yeah. We’ve all lost people important to us. Some more than others.” There the peppiness dropped; when he paused, Matt could tell he was feeling the grief of it over again. He seemed to put it away, however, when he asked next, “What is the difference between an egg and a rock?”
Matt had a moment to consider what kind of answer he was going to give to that one, before going with the obvious route: “An egg is something laid by animals of certain species out of which their young hatch. A rock is…” He didn’t really have an easy definition for that one. “…a composite of sediments, I think.”
“What have you heard of Project Insight, and when?”
“First I heard of it was when Steve Rogers mentioned it to everyone in the Triskelion. I didn’t even know much more until Karen, my family, and I watched the news the next day. I was on the hit list, by the way. So was my dad.”
“We got a lot of people here who’ve been on that list.” He didn’t sound skeptical at all, just friendly and casual. Still he continued, “Ever had any contact with Alexander Pierce?”
“Kind of. He came into the room when I was working in the Triskelion once, talked to various people there, but not to me. It sounded like it was him just generally going around, seeing and being seen, that sort of thing, though I wasn’t paying that much attention.” He hadn’t even thought anything of it, at the time, that Pierce had never come near him.
It still shocked him, how many Hydra agents had managed to fool him, either had the ability to avoid giving deception away, or just avoided direct lies in his presence. Now, he thought back on every instance of unexplained behavior around him as suspicious.
“You wash up on a deserted island alone. Sitting on the sand is a box. What is in the box?”
Matt hadn’t thought another one of those questions necessary. Again he went with the obvious answer: “A collapsible boat, with accessible GPS.”
“S.H.I.E.L.D. was disbanded months ago. The agency remains classified as a terrorist organization. So why are you here?”
Matt briefly considered giving the literal answer yet again, or maybe a longer explanation. But a moment later, he decided the answer was brief and easy: “Karen.”
A pause; Koenig seemed to want more. “She had to come here.” If he wanted any further details there, he could ask her; he probably would anyway. “I wasn’t going to let her go alone.”
Thankfully that satisfied the guy, as he said, “Congratulations, Agent Murdock. I’ve got a lanyard prepared for you here.”
Both men stood up, and Matt heard Agent Koenig take a badge on a cord out of his pocket. “The lanyard itself is made of a pretty fine fiber; not the best you’ve ever had, maybe, but it shouldn’t really scratch. The badge itself is pretty standard; you can tell where the metal strip on it is, right?”
“It’s got quite a smell to it,” Matt told; that alone made it easy for him to take hold of the badge when Koenig held it up. He had a pretty good idea where the strip was even before a quick run of his fingers over both sides of the badge confirmed it.
“I’m afraid the Playground isn’t ADA compliant in general,” said Agent Koenig apologetically. “Built back in the forties, hasn’t had a proper upgrade since the sixties, I think. And we don’t have the resources available to make too many improvements. We’ll see what we can do for you, though.”
Except they wouldn’t have to, if he didn’t stay. Although if Karen did, she’d probably pester them about it anyway. They might even recruit another blind agent, since Matt hadn’t been the only one in S.H.I.E.L.D., but the probability of that remained low.
As he’d said, the cord wasn’t too uncomfortable, though the badge was just heavy enough for him to feel it tug. Karen had already described to him what they looked like, mostly having the logo on them.
She’d been waiting outside with Coulson. “Your turn,” he said to her. To him, he asked, “You want my statement immediately?”
“We’ll get one from the two of you together once she’s done,” said Coulson. “But there’s something else I want to talk to you about first.”
As Koenig hooked Karen into the chair, Coulson led Matt away, and started, “I know you want to go to law school, which would be hard to do if you joined us full time. Especially since everyone stationed at the Playground has had all their public records erased; we’ve got a hacker on staff who does that. But I don’t just need people here. I need them on the outside, too. People who act as S.H.I.E.L.D.’s eyes and ears on the world. In fact, we’ve managed to decode Mrs. Castillo’s piece of paper, and I think we might need someone who’s starting law school at Columbia in January-I happen to be able to pull a few strings with them-and, to make ends meet before then has taken a job as a PA, in a certain law firm.”
He was going to do it. Matt knew that immediately. He didn’t know how he felt about taking that extra under-the-table help when it came to his legal career. But he did know he’d have to make his peace with that. If it helped take down Hydra, or someone equally evil, that might make it easier.
Karen was now doing her interview. When asked to describe her immediately family, she only said, “Noone I’ll have anything to do with anymore if I can help it.” Agent Koenig seemed to take that in stride, going on to his question about eggs and rocks. Her response to that was, “Eggs are good scrambled or hard-boiled?”
Coulson was still talking. “I’m going to give you a few basic details on the assignment, and you can see how you feel about it. I’ve got a laptop in my office that does audio descriptions; I’m afraid the only things in the base that do right now are the newer tech we brought here with us. Karen can come join us there for your statements.”
“We’re nearly there,” he told Matt as Agent Koenig asked Karen why she was there. Matt focused in on her to make sure he heard her response.
It was, “Well, I have to help, don’t I? I’m an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and of all the things I’ve been, that’s the only thing I’ve liked being. I think I’m going to continue to be it.”
Agent Koenig sounded very happy as he presented Karen with her new lanyard. “You think Murdock will stay with you?” he asked. “With us?”
“I don’t know,” said Karen. In her voice there sat the same grief that now filled Matt’s heart.
He couldn’t pay attention to the rest of their conversation, because they’d entered Coulson’s office. “We had one stroke of luck: Mrs. Castillo’s note was written in one of the Hydra codes we have cracked already. But we think Hydra itself is a little fractured; separate factions working against each other, even some that are nominally answering to the same shadowy powerful figure-because there may be more than one of those. Her writings don’t quite confirm it, but they heavily imply she and Mr. Channing might have been trying to discredit the Goldsmith.
He’d opened his laptop up, and had been fiddling with it, presumably turning the accessibility settings on. “We’ve got half of a plain English version written out on here. Highlights of the second half included the conditions under which they’d try to get the weapons back from Astakhova and the ones under which they’d let her get away with them-but it really looks the priority was having the Goldsmith lose them.”
Then he had the screen reader on and the Word file opened. In it was written:
Darling,
I must give this to our CIA man, but I don’t think he’ll open it; he usually has a sense of honor about these things. I have important news for when this is done. I have gotten a man into the law firm. Ms. Sharpe has promised he will see to it Mr. F’s activities do not interfere with ours. When you next come to New York, you be approached by a man who will introduce himself as Mr. Wesley, and he may ask you questions. Do not attempt to lie to him, but try not to tell him too much.
“And that’s as far as we’ve fully done,” said Coulson when the screen reader had gotten through that. “We’re not quite sure who Mr. F. is; the only thing we really know is he isn’t Hydra. We have, however, identified Ms. Sharpe as a certain Rosalind Sharpe. Her highest-paying client is a man we’re pretty sure is Hydra. We don’t have it one hundred percent confirmed she knows that, but we do know he’s gone to meet with her a hell of a lot.
We know a bit more about Mr. Wesley, James Wesley, as just about everybody he does business with calls him. We’ve connected him to a law firm called Landman and Zack, which recently got two new men working there that both have connections to Ms. Sharpe. The first is the man you’ll be working for. His name is Larry Cranston, and he’s their newest attorney. Thirty five years of age, white with brown hair and eyes, five foot seven, heavy set-I’m sure you’ll hear that. His father and Ms. Sharpe are very old friends, and he himself has worked with her on multiple cases. Typical money-grabbing lawyer, with the case record to prove it. Apparently prides himself on his verbal cleverness. If he is their man, I’m afraid he’s probably the type who avoids telling direct lies while being so.”
That was inconvenient, but if it was a choice between two men, maybe Matt would be able to clear the other one. “And the second?”
“The second you may have to befriend on your own, and be careful about it, because he’s Sharpe’s son. Franklin Nelson. Twenty seven years of age, white with slightly overgrown blonde hair-just enough for you to hear, probably, blue eyes, five foot nine, overweight. Just got out of Columbia himself-he got in as a legacy; his mom went there too, and now he has an internship at the firm. We’re actually not sure how much contact he has with his mother; his parents divorced when he was still a baby. We can’t directly find her hand in his getting the internship, but we can’t find it in Cranston’s hiring, either. Accounts depict him as very friendly and personable, and surprisingly nice.”
That would at least make it relatively easy for Matt to befriend him. He might even be able to do it without “accidentally” bumping into him or spilling coffee on him. “But that can’t be all you want me to do there, can it?” he asked. “I mean, I could easily do that just be paying a visit to the firm, getting an appointment with Cranston, contrive to run into Nelson at some point…”
“True. We also want someone stationed there, positioned to act as well as observed, either on our orders, or, if they judge it the right course of action, on their own. Ideally, you wouldn’t have to, and even if you did, we’d do everything we could to keep the outside world from knowing about your involvement. But if you, or we, knew Hydra was about to do something that only you were in a position to stop…”
“A law firm doesn’t seem a likely location for such a scenario,” Matt felt the need to point out, though he knew as well as any S.H.I.E.L.D. agent that the crazy things they dealt with could happen anywhere.
Karen was now coming up to their office, being led by another female agent whom Matt believed to be a certain Melinda May, whom he’d known by reputation and was glad to be meeting. “It’s taken most of us a week or so to be able to get around this place without getting lost,” she was saying. “I think your friend Murdock might actually have an advantage there, being able to map the base out with his ears; maybe you should have him lead you around for once.”
“Perhaps,” said Karen, and the lack of even a chuckle from her was telling.
Coulson could hear them too, and with a, “And here comes Agent Page right now, I think,” had now gone to the door to peer down the hallway. When Matt stood in place by the desk, he noticed the older man’s movements were a little off, like he’d consumed too much caffeine, or his center of balance was gone slightly awry. He wondered how hard Coulson was driving himself as director, how much finding out the truth about the organization he’d literally died for had taken out of him.
As the two women came in, May said, “Channing’s popped up on Skye’s radar. In one of the richest parts of London.”
“Where he knows it won’t be worth the risk for us to go after him right now. Still a chance the Feds might arrest him on their own?”
“From what Agent 13 said of him and Castillo? More likely they’ll have to let her go, and then they’ll both go to ground together,” said Karen darkly.
“Well,” said Coulson, “we’ll keep monitoring that situation. I doubt we’ve seen the last of him.”