Back to GatefoldIssue #17 by Mike Hintze
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“Intelligence: Part Three of Four”
The first thing I heard was birds chirping. The sound of water crashing on a shore…
…and the click of actions on several weapons.
“He’s waking up, ma’am,” said a male voice…a soldier’s voice.
“Thank you, Agent Merrick,” said a female voice. I recognized it as belonging to Maria Hill, the SHIELD agent that had kicked my ass last I could remember anything. I had been in Madripoor when she had taken me down, put there by SHIELD as a way to keep me contained.
I had come across a child prostitution ring in New York while conducting surveillance on a mafia type named Fisarello. I took down the entire operation and freed several young girls from the hell they had been in. Hours later, SHIELD stormed my warehouse home and took me prisoner. I awoke in Madripoor, with Nick Fury telling me to behave with my new babysitter, Agent Hill. I managed to escape Hill’s tender mercies until she found me and put me out again. The woman was damn good, I’d give her that.
I was blindfolded, gagged and restrained in a prone position. I could feel the hot sun on my skin. Wherever I was, it sounded a lot nicer than Madripoor.
“Frank,” said Maria, “I’m going to remove your blindfold and gag. Don’t try to escape. It won’t work like last time.”
The blindfold came off and I was blinded by the light of the sun for several seconds until my eyes adjusted. Palm trees were around everywhere, and I would have thought I was on a tropical vacation were it not for the four SHIELD troopers with their weapons trained on me. I was on a sunbathing chair, but my arms and legs were tied down. I was wearing a muscle shirt and loose shorts.
“Any chance of getting these restraints off me? They’re going to leave terrible tan lines,” I said.
Maria smiled briefly. “After last time, I don’t think so, Frank.” She was in standard issue SHIELD garb, but the tropical heat didn’t seem to faze her or the troopers. Their uniforms must be environmentally adjustable. A bead of sweat trickling down my forehead made we wish I had one of those suits, too.
Maria reached out and dabbed a cloth on my forehead, stopping the sweat from reaching my eyes. “We’re on an island. I’m not telling you where. Needless to say, you’re staying put until Fury says you can go. Not a minute sooner.”
“No one has told me yet why the hell I’m here in the first place,” I said. “You’d think SHIELD would be giving me a medal for taking out child-rapists.”
“There’s more to this than you know,” said Maria. “There’s more involved in the world than what you see and hear. Much more.”
“Well,” I said, “Since I’m stuck here for the foreseeable future, why not enlighten me as to what I didn’t hear and what I didn’t see.”
Maria paused. “The prostitution ring you broke up had an undercover SHIELD agent inside it. An agent you killed, Frank.” She paused to let it sink in to me.
“If you had an agent inside that place,” I said, “And he allowed those girls to be victimized and raped repeatedly while doing nothing….and SHIELD itself knew this, then I have no bad feelings about what I did. You all left those girls to die. No amount of undercover work could make that all right. None.”
“I just follow orders,” said Maria. “Fury has his reasons for detaining you. I just thought you’d like to know.” She got up and started walking away. “You’ll be brought in within the hour. Enjoy the rest, Frank.”
The other troopers didn’t move, their gunsights never wavered. I set my head back and closed my eyes. I tried to replay the night I took down the prostitution ring and tried to figure which of the four men I killed might have been the agent. I couldn’t. Each of them had tried to come at me. If one of them had been an agent, he was as willing to kill me as the others had been. Agent or not, he got what he deserved.
I stopped thinking about it and tried to get some sleep…and think of a way out of this mess.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
That night, I was in a comfortable room with a more comfortable bed that I had known in quite some time. My restraints were in place on the bedposts, but I was left alone by the troopers for the night. My room was locked and I could hear them in the hallway. They weren’t far away. Any sound would have them in here faster than I could say it.
A cool breeze wafted in from the ocean. It was hard not to relax a bit with the fresh air and sun, even if it was forced. I did wonder why the hell Fury didn’t have me in a holding cell somewhere rather than wasting time and money giving me a forced vacation. None of this made any sense, especially if I have killed one of SHIELD’s own.
A small noise came from the open window. I looked to see someone clad in black lithely enter my room. The intruder crept to my bedside and put a finger up to his masked face to indicate me to be quiet. The intruder pulled up the mask….it was Maria Hill.
“Be quiet and do exactly as I say,” said Maria. She reached down with a small blade and snipped the plastic restraints on my arms and legs. My circulation was slowly returning as I rubbed my wrists when she pulled out a black uniform similar to her own and pushed it at me. “Strip down and put this on,” she said. “It will render you invisible to infra-red and motion sensor detection. Quietly.”
I had three choices here: 1) Make a sound and call the troopers in to see one of their own trying to help me escape. I get trussed up again, and Maria is exposed and imprisoned. 2) I take down Maria, escape myself and have all of SHIELD on my ass on a tropical island God knew where. 3) Go along with her….and see what happened.
I opted for #3.
As I put on the tight outfit (how guys like Spider-Man and Daredevil managed this with a straight face I’ll never know) Maria put a device on the bed where I had lain. A holographic image of myself appeared, showing me sleeping like a baby. It wouldn’t fool anyone come morning, but for now it would do nicely.
Maria and I crept out the window and shimmied along the narrow ledge of the second floor of the bungalow I had been in. At one corner, she leaped off, somersaulted and landed on bare grass silent as could be. Not being as graceful as she, I just jumped, landed with a roll and cursed myself at the noise I must have made. Surprisingly, no alarm was raised in the darkness.
Maria motioned for me to follow her. We went to a small path in the bushes and eventually came out on the beach, maybe a hundred yards from where I had been earlier that day. She continued to go on, heading to the water’s edge. She began to go into the ocean, and then dove under the waves. Having no air supply, I took a deep breath and hoped for the best. I was rapidly thinking I should have gone with Option #2.
Once under, my vision cleared up as night vision activated. I could see Maria a dozen feet ahead of me grabbing on to jet propelled device that divers used to move underwater. An oxygen mask was on her face, attached to a tank on the machine. Beside her, was one for me. I grabbed the mask off it, put it on and grabbed the machine’s handles. An instant later, we were both moving underwater and away from the shore incredibly fast.
My ears began to pop as I realized we were going deeper and deeper. Up ahead, I saw our destination: a small submarine. We slowed as we approached, and an airlock opened up. Maria entered and I followed.
Once the airlock had closed and cycled, Maria removed her mask. I did so as well, then grabbed her by the arm, pinning her against the wall. “I don’t let go until you tell me where the hell we are.”
The airlock door opened and a man stood in the dim doorway. “Let her go, Frank,” he said. “Come in and we’ll have a chat.”
It was Nick Fury.
“I’m getting tired as hell of this crap, Fury,” I said. “Tell me what the hell is going on. Now.”
“Let her go, Frank,” said Fury. “I’ll tell you everything.”
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
We were seated around a table in a small meeting room. The sub was not very large, but it had all the comforts of home. Fury poured a cup of coffee for himself and offered one to me. I nodded no, impatient to get to the point of this damn game. Maria had changed into a SHIELD uniform, drying her hair with a towel.
Fury sat across from me. “You stumbled across something that pissed a lot of people off, Frank.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said. “I don’t regret killing that agent if he was standing by while those girls were being hurt. I’m surprised you would condone that.”
“I don’t,” said Fury. “It makes me sick to my stomach. Fact is, I didn’t authorize that undercover operation. There’s a lot I don’t condone about SHIELD these days. The organization is sick, Frank. There’s people up top that shouldn’t be…and people calling some shots that have nothing to do with me.”
“You’re the boss there,” I said. “The buck stops with you.”
“If you really believe that,” said Fury, “Then you’re a very stupid man.” He sipped his coffee, but as he did so a vein in his forehead pulsed. He was angry. “There’s something going on in SHIELD and elsewhere. A conspiracy. It goes farther than you or I know…and I know a lot. Truth is, I can’t be as effective as I need to be in any official capacity, not without revealing myself. I need an agent to act unofficially, to take out what I need taking out, untraceable to me or SHIELD. That agent is going to be you.”
I’m not the kind of man to be driven speechless, but Fury’s cavalier declaration had even me dumbstruck.
“That child prostitution ring was connected to the conspiracy I’m talking about,” Fury continued. “A small connection, but one nonetheless. That agent undercover was a part of it. When you killed him, you pissed off the wrong people, and they wanted you taken down. I’ve managed to keep you alive since, being detained in Madripoor and now here, but truth be told, if you hadn’t left with Maria when you did, you would have been killed by morning. As it stands, all of your safehouses and equipment stashes have been found and co-opted by SHIELD in America. When you killed that agent, you brought the wrath of SHIELD’s full power upon you. If I were to let you go back out on your own, you would have no support, no way of continuing your mission, not for long. You would be dead within a week, if not sooner. Work with me, though, and you’ll live and be able to strike back at these guys.”
“Who was the agent I killed?” I asked. “What was his name?”
“Trevor Gladius,” said Fury. “I’m sure it’s a fake name, though. Whoever he really was, he was well connected to this conspiracy. His death knocked down a chain of dominoes that haven’t ended yet.”
“Where does she come in?” I asked, pointing at Maria. It occurred to me then that I was referring to her in her first name and not as a SHIELD agent. My wife’s name. I put it out of my mind.
“Agent Hill is going to be working with you,” said Fury. “I trust her. Don’t ask why.”
“So my choices are to go back to America and be hunted, go back to the island and killed, or join you and put some hurt on these conspirators.” I looked Fury dead in the eye, not blinking.
“That’s right,” said Fury. “You killed me once, remember? You owe me.” He gave a small smile.
“If I agree,” I said, “Then I get to have control in how I operate. You give me equipment, intel and that’s it.”
“Agreed,” said Fury.
“Plus,” I said, “If I do this, we’re even on my ‘killing you’.”
“Agreed again,” said Fury.
I took a deep breath. I exhaled slowly. “Tell me more,” I said.
Next Issue: ‘Intelligence’ concludes, as Frank embarks on his new mission….and first assignment as an Agent of Fury!
…and the click of actions on several weapons.
“He’s waking up, ma’am,” said a male voice…a soldier’s voice.
“Thank you, Agent Merrick,” said a female voice. I recognized it as belonging to Maria Hill, the SHIELD agent that had kicked my ass last I could remember anything. I had been in Madripoor when she had taken me down, put there by SHIELD as a way to keep me contained.
I had come across a child prostitution ring in New York while conducting surveillance on a mafia type named Fisarello. I took down the entire operation and freed several young girls from the hell they had been in. Hours later, SHIELD stormed my warehouse home and took me prisoner. I awoke in Madripoor, with Nick Fury telling me to behave with my new babysitter, Agent Hill. I managed to escape Hill’s tender mercies until she found me and put me out again. The woman was damn good, I’d give her that.
I was blindfolded, gagged and restrained in a prone position. I could feel the hot sun on my skin. Wherever I was, it sounded a lot nicer than Madripoor.
“Frank,” said Maria, “I’m going to remove your blindfold and gag. Don’t try to escape. It won’t work like last time.”
The blindfold came off and I was blinded by the light of the sun for several seconds until my eyes adjusted. Palm trees were around everywhere, and I would have thought I was on a tropical vacation were it not for the four SHIELD troopers with their weapons trained on me. I was on a sunbathing chair, but my arms and legs were tied down. I was wearing a muscle shirt and loose shorts.
“Any chance of getting these restraints off me? They’re going to leave terrible tan lines,” I said.
Maria smiled briefly. “After last time, I don’t think so, Frank.” She was in standard issue SHIELD garb, but the tropical heat didn’t seem to faze her or the troopers. Their uniforms must be environmentally adjustable. A bead of sweat trickling down my forehead made we wish I had one of those suits, too.
Maria reached out and dabbed a cloth on my forehead, stopping the sweat from reaching my eyes. “We’re on an island. I’m not telling you where. Needless to say, you’re staying put until Fury says you can go. Not a minute sooner.”
“No one has told me yet why the hell I’m here in the first place,” I said. “You’d think SHIELD would be giving me a medal for taking out child-rapists.”
“There’s more to this than you know,” said Maria. “There’s more involved in the world than what you see and hear. Much more.”
“Well,” I said, “Since I’m stuck here for the foreseeable future, why not enlighten me as to what I didn’t hear and what I didn’t see.”
Maria paused. “The prostitution ring you broke up had an undercover SHIELD agent inside it. An agent you killed, Frank.” She paused to let it sink in to me.
“If you had an agent inside that place,” I said, “And he allowed those girls to be victimized and raped repeatedly while doing nothing….and SHIELD itself knew this, then I have no bad feelings about what I did. You all left those girls to die. No amount of undercover work could make that all right. None.”
“I just follow orders,” said Maria. “Fury has his reasons for detaining you. I just thought you’d like to know.” She got up and started walking away. “You’ll be brought in within the hour. Enjoy the rest, Frank.”
The other troopers didn’t move, their gunsights never wavered. I set my head back and closed my eyes. I tried to replay the night I took down the prostitution ring and tried to figure which of the four men I killed might have been the agent. I couldn’t. Each of them had tried to come at me. If one of them had been an agent, he was as willing to kill me as the others had been. Agent or not, he got what he deserved.
I stopped thinking about it and tried to get some sleep…and think of a way out of this mess.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
That night, I was in a comfortable room with a more comfortable bed that I had known in quite some time. My restraints were in place on the bedposts, but I was left alone by the troopers for the night. My room was locked and I could hear them in the hallway. They weren’t far away. Any sound would have them in here faster than I could say it.
A cool breeze wafted in from the ocean. It was hard not to relax a bit with the fresh air and sun, even if it was forced. I did wonder why the hell Fury didn’t have me in a holding cell somewhere rather than wasting time and money giving me a forced vacation. None of this made any sense, especially if I have killed one of SHIELD’s own.
A small noise came from the open window. I looked to see someone clad in black lithely enter my room. The intruder crept to my bedside and put a finger up to his masked face to indicate me to be quiet. The intruder pulled up the mask….it was Maria Hill.
“Be quiet and do exactly as I say,” said Maria. She reached down with a small blade and snipped the plastic restraints on my arms and legs. My circulation was slowly returning as I rubbed my wrists when she pulled out a black uniform similar to her own and pushed it at me. “Strip down and put this on,” she said. “It will render you invisible to infra-red and motion sensor detection. Quietly.”
I had three choices here: 1) Make a sound and call the troopers in to see one of their own trying to help me escape. I get trussed up again, and Maria is exposed and imprisoned. 2) I take down Maria, escape myself and have all of SHIELD on my ass on a tropical island God knew where. 3) Go along with her….and see what happened.
I opted for #3.
As I put on the tight outfit (how guys like Spider-Man and Daredevil managed this with a straight face I’ll never know) Maria put a device on the bed where I had lain. A holographic image of myself appeared, showing me sleeping like a baby. It wouldn’t fool anyone come morning, but for now it would do nicely.
Maria and I crept out the window and shimmied along the narrow ledge of the second floor of the bungalow I had been in. At one corner, she leaped off, somersaulted and landed on bare grass silent as could be. Not being as graceful as she, I just jumped, landed with a roll and cursed myself at the noise I must have made. Surprisingly, no alarm was raised in the darkness.
Maria motioned for me to follow her. We went to a small path in the bushes and eventually came out on the beach, maybe a hundred yards from where I had been earlier that day. She continued to go on, heading to the water’s edge. She began to go into the ocean, and then dove under the waves. Having no air supply, I took a deep breath and hoped for the best. I was rapidly thinking I should have gone with Option #2.
Once under, my vision cleared up as night vision activated. I could see Maria a dozen feet ahead of me grabbing on to jet propelled device that divers used to move underwater. An oxygen mask was on her face, attached to a tank on the machine. Beside her, was one for me. I grabbed the mask off it, put it on and grabbed the machine’s handles. An instant later, we were both moving underwater and away from the shore incredibly fast.
My ears began to pop as I realized we were going deeper and deeper. Up ahead, I saw our destination: a small submarine. We slowed as we approached, and an airlock opened up. Maria entered and I followed.
Once the airlock had closed and cycled, Maria removed her mask. I did so as well, then grabbed her by the arm, pinning her against the wall. “I don’t let go until you tell me where the hell we are.”
The airlock door opened and a man stood in the dim doorway. “Let her go, Frank,” he said. “Come in and we’ll have a chat.”
It was Nick Fury.
“I’m getting tired as hell of this crap, Fury,” I said. “Tell me what the hell is going on. Now.”
“Let her go, Frank,” said Fury. “I’ll tell you everything.”
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
We were seated around a table in a small meeting room. The sub was not very large, but it had all the comforts of home. Fury poured a cup of coffee for himself and offered one to me. I nodded no, impatient to get to the point of this damn game. Maria had changed into a SHIELD uniform, drying her hair with a towel.
Fury sat across from me. “You stumbled across something that pissed a lot of people off, Frank.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said. “I don’t regret killing that agent if he was standing by while those girls were being hurt. I’m surprised you would condone that.”
“I don’t,” said Fury. “It makes me sick to my stomach. Fact is, I didn’t authorize that undercover operation. There’s a lot I don’t condone about SHIELD these days. The organization is sick, Frank. There’s people up top that shouldn’t be…and people calling some shots that have nothing to do with me.”
“You’re the boss there,” I said. “The buck stops with you.”
“If you really believe that,” said Fury, “Then you’re a very stupid man.” He sipped his coffee, but as he did so a vein in his forehead pulsed. He was angry. “There’s something going on in SHIELD and elsewhere. A conspiracy. It goes farther than you or I know…and I know a lot. Truth is, I can’t be as effective as I need to be in any official capacity, not without revealing myself. I need an agent to act unofficially, to take out what I need taking out, untraceable to me or SHIELD. That agent is going to be you.”
I’m not the kind of man to be driven speechless, but Fury’s cavalier declaration had even me dumbstruck.
“That child prostitution ring was connected to the conspiracy I’m talking about,” Fury continued. “A small connection, but one nonetheless. That agent undercover was a part of it. When you killed him, you pissed off the wrong people, and they wanted you taken down. I’ve managed to keep you alive since, being detained in Madripoor and now here, but truth be told, if you hadn’t left with Maria when you did, you would have been killed by morning. As it stands, all of your safehouses and equipment stashes have been found and co-opted by SHIELD in America. When you killed that agent, you brought the wrath of SHIELD’s full power upon you. If I were to let you go back out on your own, you would have no support, no way of continuing your mission, not for long. You would be dead within a week, if not sooner. Work with me, though, and you’ll live and be able to strike back at these guys.”
“Who was the agent I killed?” I asked. “What was his name?”
“Trevor Gladius,” said Fury. “I’m sure it’s a fake name, though. Whoever he really was, he was well connected to this conspiracy. His death knocked down a chain of dominoes that haven’t ended yet.”
“Where does she come in?” I asked, pointing at Maria. It occurred to me then that I was referring to her in her first name and not as a SHIELD agent. My wife’s name. I put it out of my mind.
“Agent Hill is going to be working with you,” said Fury. “I trust her. Don’t ask why.”
“So my choices are to go back to America and be hunted, go back to the island and killed, or join you and put some hurt on these conspirators.” I looked Fury dead in the eye, not blinking.
“That’s right,” said Fury. “You killed me once, remember? You owe me.” He gave a small smile.
“If I agree,” I said, “Then I get to have control in how I operate. You give me equipment, intel and that’s it.”
“Agreed,” said Fury.
“Plus,” I said, “If I do this, we’re even on my ‘killing you’.”
“Agreed again,” said Fury.
I took a deep breath. I exhaled slowly. “Tell me more,” I said.
Next Issue: ‘Intelligence’ concludes, as Frank embarks on his new mission….and first assignment as an Agent of Fury!