A/N: So this is my first foray into the Agent Carter world. I promised myself when watching that I wouldn't have a Thompson fic… I lied. I have a lot of other FF projects going at the same time, so updates will be inconsistent and I apologise. But I am dedicated to finishing this story.

I hope you all enjoy it, it is set after season 1 and before season 2.

Leave a review and let me know how you feel.

Chapter I: Out of the Trap

Friday, 21st June, 1946

"Top story! Actress survives murder attempt!"

"Gimme one of those, kid." Jack tossed a quarter to the paper boy up on his box.

The boy pulled one from the stack in his arm and handed it down to Jack, barely pausing to look at him before returning to calling out the day's main headline in varying forms. Jack tucked the paper under one arm to read in his break, and walked a few more blocks until he reached work. No one gave the New York Bell Company office building a second glance as they walked past it, which was of course why the SSR used it as their New York office.

He expected that he would be the first one in the building to relieve the agents on night shift, which was his habit ever since he was given the position of Acting Chief. Still no word from up high on whether or not the 'Acting' could be dropped from the title anytime soon, but he took the lack of any new Chief being assigned to their branch as a good thing.

It was a shock to him when Rose patched him into the office to see agents Wilkes, Miller, and Ramirez crowded around Wilkes' desk together. Wilkes and Sousa had been on night shift last night, so the others must have just been early. But why was Wilkes still here?

"What's going on?" He frowned, putting his hat on the coat rack and tossing the paper onto the closest desk. "And where is Sousa?"

"He's gone upstate with Dr. Standon." Miller spoke up. "I volunteered to go, but he insisted."

"Why? And why are you still here?" Jack directed the second question at Wilkes.

"We've had a prison break from The Cage." Wilkes answered grimly. "Sousa and I got the call just a couple hours ago."

"Shit." Jack's jaw tightened involuntarily.

Things had been relatively stress free at the SSR recently, after the Howard Stark case, and that hadn't been such a bad thing. Why did the first thing after Midnight Oil have to be this big? The Cage was a secret SSR prison base for holding prominent members of the HYDRA organisation. There were several of them around the country, it wasn't a good idea to keep them all in one place. Each facility was monitored by the closest SSR branch, which for The Cage, was his office.

"How did this happen? How many got out? What is the damage? Where are we on finding the escapees? And has Head Office been told?" He bit back all the other questions he had, and God there were a lot of them.

"They were alerted when we were." Wilkes flicked over the file in his hand. "Damage to the building was surprisingly minimal, only the cell door and some entry points suffered from the break. Sousa took Standon because of what happened to all those doors. They were melted, sir. With some kind of acid, but we don't know how or who smuggled it in. Standon will bring it back to the lab an analyse it."

"Alright." He had no choice but to bide his time to get answers on that front. "How many men did we lose and how many prisoners?"

"Ten men." Wilkes replied grimly. "But only one prisoner was sprung."

"Sprung? So this was an outside op.? Who got out?"

"It looks like, no evidence so far suggests the agents inside were dirty, and there was evidence of a break in." Wilkes flipped over a few sheets and then handed the file to Jack. "This is the guy who got out, Alaric Schroeder. He was Schmidt's right hand man until Zola was recruited, but even after that he remained a prominent scientist and engineer in HYDRA. Captured after the war at the same time as Reinhart, a close friend by all accounts as well as fellow high-up. Reinhart is in the Rat and we've tightened security on all prisons, especially his."

"Progress on recapture?" Jack inquired, studying the information packet in his hand. It listed Alaric's details, known associates, as well as his wartime and HYDRA past. A picture of the man was pinned to the top page and Jack studied it shrewdly. He was a hard-faced man, with cold eyes and a calm composure to his face. To look at this photograph you wouldn't have thought he had been posing for his mug shot.

"We haven't been able to firmly point in one direction to follow his tracks. There are several potential entering and exiting points, we aren't sure which one was used. We've put his description out in the area but haven't had any reports back." Miller scrubbed a hand through his hair. "We need more boots on the ground."

"Right." Jack checked the clock. "Miller and Ramirez, you guys go out to The Cage and comb the area for any trace of Schroeder. When you get there tell Sousa to check in with me. I will send the next three agents through the door after you."

"Yes, sir."

The two agents hurriedly grabbed their things and headed out the door. Jack caught sight of them both checking their sidearms on their way out.

"Wilkes, sorry to keep you after a night shift, but you'd better get some coffee." Jack draped his jacket over Wilkes' chair and rolled up his shirtsleeves. "I'm going to need you to tell me everything I've missed before I let you go home."

"It's no trouble, sir. This takes precedence over anything else going on right now." Wilkes walked over to the whiteboard and pulled it alongside the desk, taking out pens and reviewing the notes.

"Damn right." Just muttered, looking in closer detail at the information in his hands. "It says here that most of his known associates were within HYDRA with him, and almost all of them are stuck in our prisons to rot. But there were no attempts to break them out, or even from him to free them?"

"Nope." Wilkes starting listing names on the board and ticking them off. "Reinhart, Bayer, Kohl, Eckstein, Heinrich, and Schultz were those in HYDRA he worked with most, all in SSR hands."

"You checked them all?" Jack looked over their footnotes in Alaric's file. "Eckstein was held in The Cage too, there was no sign of Schroeder helping him?"

"No other facilities reported anything suspicious before we had them up the security. And even in The Cage very few prisoners were even aware Schroeder had been sprung, they aren't kept close. His cellmate was found dead."

Jack had seen who that had been, a Klaus Abel, Nazi general and no great loss as far as he was concerned.

Several hours later and they had made little headway. Jack had sent Carter, Wallace, and Johnson out after Miller and Ramirez with a quick brief on what it was they were expected to be doing. Jack very heavily stressed their need for urgency with their task. The window of opportunity was closing, fast, if they didn't find trace of Schroeder today then finding him at all was going to be a severe challenge.

He had set each agent their own research task, telling them he wanted the packets on his desk by lunchtime, no matter what state they were in as long as there was something there he could work with. His head was starting to feel numb from trying to force all the pieces together when there were too many missing to even hope to fit anything into shape. Sousa hadn't been able to shed any more light on the situation. All he had been able to report was that the alarm systems had been fried by the same acid found over the facility, which Standon didn't know the composition of yet. Whatever it was it was powerful enough to go through stone and iron, but they didn't know what kind of timeframe that might take. When they found that out it would give them a good idea of how much a lead Schroeder had on them.

"Sir?" Agent Reese stepped into Jack's office. "I think I've found something that might lead somewhere."

"What is it? A lead on his location?" It was a longshot, but that was what Jack really wanted to know.

"Sadly no. I was looking into his family history and I there are some threads we can at least try to follow up." He passed two sheets of paper to Jack. "His wife and eldest son died years ago, but these are his two living sons, Christofer and Wolfgang Schroeder. These files were pulled from a HYDRA operations base, they were soldiers there and have managed to avoid capture thus far, and no one has seen them since the war."

"Could they have broken him out?" Jack reviewed their files, translated from German. They didn't give him as much information as he would have liked.

"It's possible, but they would have to have gotten into the country somehow. We are chasing up that possibility now, seeing if any German immigrants match their descriptions. There is more though." Reese flipped open the manila folder in his hands and plopped it onto Jack's desk. "His daughter, Kerstin Schroeder, was declared missing in 1937. There was a little bit of investigation done into it, but Schroeder wanted the case dropped so the German police stopped looking."

"How does this fit into anything?" Jack frowned.

"When I sent the brothers' descriptions to Immigration I dropped her details as well, I figured if she was alive she might be a lead. They just got back to me, nothing about any Christofer or Wolfgang Schroeder, they weren't able to find a description match either, but in 1937 a German girl by the name of Kerstin Schroeder entered the country."

"She's in the States?" Jack clarified, sitting straight and feeling his mind become more alert now that it was getting some new information at last. "Do we know where? Is she in the area?"

"There has been no activity from her since she got into the country, but we do have her first address." Reese handed Jack a slip of paper with an address on it. "House belongs to an old lady, she and her late husband were refugees from World War I, they run a boarding house in Harlem."

"Still there?" Jack was already rolling down his sleeves and reaching for his jacket.

"Yup. I called the house and a little old lady confirmed it was still a boarding house."

"Let's go then." Jack pulled his jacket on and walked quickly out of the office, Reese on his heels.

Jack went as quickly as the car could take them through the streets of Manhattan, cursing the near-lunchtime rush that filled the streets. It took longer than he would have liked to reach the house in Harlem, but it was still fairly good as far as New York traffic time went. Thankfully he was able to find a park only a block away, and soon after pulling up was able to knock sharply on the door he wanted.

"Just a moment!" A heavily accented voice called, and a pitter-patter of approaching feet could be heard. An old woman opened the door, not so little and Reese had said earlier. She was tall for a woman, with her hair is tight curls against her scalp, but she had a beaming smile on her face.

"Mrs. Gruber?" Jack confirmed.

"Yes, that's me." She passed an eye over him and Reese. "What can I do for you, gentlemen?"

"Ma'am we're here from the SSR." Jack and Reese held up their badges. "We'd like to come in and ask you a few questions."

"Oh, well, of course." A frown darkened her face briefly, but she stepped away to let them into the house, gesturing them into a room to the left. "Can I offer you any refreshments? It's lovely to have some daytime company, even if it is officers."

"No thank you, we hope not to take up too much of your time." Jack took a seat in one of the armchairs in the spacious living room they were in. "Are any of your tenants about?"

"They all have jobs, so no one but me is home." She sat down on a long couch. "What can I help you with? Has one of my tenants been up to mischief? They are lovely, but some can be arschlochs."

Jack didn't understand that German word, but it didn't sound complimentary.

"How long have you been running this boarding house?" Reese inquired, pulling a pen and pad out of his inner pocket.

"Oh, since my husband and I came to America in 1922, so I suppose that's…24 years now."

"Do you remember every tenant who comes through here?" Reese questioned.

"Well, not every one." She make a tsking noise in the back of her throat. "24 years is a long time, and I'm not a young woman."

"Do you remember a girl named Kerstin Schroeder?" Jack took control of the questioning with a quietening glance at Reese. "This would have been 1937 or 38, she would have been a teenager. We have her registered to this address."

"Ah, Kerstin!" Mrs. Gruber clapped her hands in delight. "Yes, I remember her. But, she hasn't lived here in a long time…what is this about?"

"How long did she stay with you?"

"No more than a few months, I was sad to see her go. She and her friends were some of my best tenants, it was lovely to have some young people to speak my native tongue to." She sighed wistfully.

"She wasn't here alone?" Jack frowned. He had assumed she would have been, but of course the details of her entrance would be separate to whoever she came with.

"There were five of them. All friends that came on the same boat, two boys and four girls, including Kerstin. I remember them well because they paid extra to rent the entire house for themselves. This is normally an all-girls boarding establishment."

"Do you know where they got this money from?" Jack asked.

"No, and I didn't ask." Mrs. Gruber sounded offended at the very thought of such a question. "My tenants are entitled to privacy so long as they follow the house rules."

Jack decided to drop that line of questioning, it didn't give him any necessary information. Besides, background indicated that Schroeder had been a wealthy man before the war, likely that was where Kerstin had gotten the money.

"Her friends, what were their names? And how long did they all remain here?"

"Well, there was Kerstin, Maria Bauer and her brother Hans, Ivan and Adele Kruse, and Ava Goebel." She ticked them off on her fingers. "Kerstin and Ava remained only a few months, Ivan and Adele left about a year later, and the Bauers left at the same time, I don't think they could afford to extra cost on their own."

"What can you tell us about their time here?" Jack pressed. "We will need to know everything you can remember."

"Well they didn't go out much, kept very quiet and too themselves for the first few weeks, but were always happy to help around the house." Mrs. Gruber frowned as she looked into her memory for more. "I remember they kept refusing me and my husband's offers to find them work, said they would wait until they were ready. They would spend a lot of time clustered around the radio, all practicing their American accents, it was quite funny to watch!"

"They were practicing American accents?" Jack felt his hackles rise.

"Yes." Mrs. Gruber's expression suddenly hardened. "Do you know what it is like to be in this country with a German accent? Do you have any comprehension? It is not good, I tell you. We came to this country to escape our own but the reputation follows us. I wish I had done as they had when I first entered this country."

"My apologies." He didn't want an argument to make this interview go any longer. He inclined his head to her, but subtly checked the pad Reese was writing on. He had underlined 'American accents'. "What else can you tell us?"

"Not much I'm afraid." The stern expression had faded, but she didn't sound as open as she had previously. Jack hoped she wasn't holding back information because she had taken offence. "As I say they didn't get up to much in their time here, but were always friendly to my husband and me."

"Have you been in contact with any of them in recent years? Kerstin in particular?"

"No." She heaved a sad sigh. "I was quite upset that I never heard from any of them again after they left, I thought perhaps they might come back and see me."

"So you can't give us any information on their current whereabouts? Nothing at all?" Jack felt himself deflating mentally.

"I didn't say that." A cheeky glint lit up the woman's eye. "I haven't heard from any of them, don't want to be in touch with their old landlady I expect, but I have seen Kerstin."

Jack could have groaned. The woman had been sitting on this information the whole time. Still, it was a lead, and he leaned forwards eagerly.

"Where?"

"Well, I haven't seen her in person." Mrs. Gruber stressed. "But I see her all over the place, on posters."

"Posters? What do you mean?" Now Jack was wondering if perhaps this old woman wasn't the best source of information.

"Show posters." A proud smile broke open on her face. "I always knew she would do well! She was the most confident out of all of them."

"Please, Mrs. Gruber, could you just give us the information?" Jack asked tersely. "What show posters has Kerstin been on?"

"She's quite famous, don't you know?"

He gritted his teeth, great, now she was playing with him. This must have been payback for the slight she had felt about accents.

"I've never heard of a Kerstin Schroeder performing in anything, let alone big enough to be on a poster." He took a deep breath to control his voice. "Please, tells us what you know, this is very important."

"Oh very well. I do like having company in the day, but I see you boys don't want to be kept." She made that tsking noise again. "She changed her name. It confused me at first, recognising her face but not seeing her credited. She's older, of course, but I recognise that face for sure. She goes by the name Roxy Caine now, so long as those posters put up her real name and not her stage one."

"Did you say Roxy Caine?" Reese asked. "You're sure?"

"Why yes, I'm positive." Mrs. Gruber smiled. "Is there anything else?"

"And you have had no contact wither her despite knowing who she is?" Jack needed to know, and watched her for any potential tell-tale lying signs.

"None whatsoever." The smile turned sad. "She'd turning into quite the star, I wouldn't know how to get in touch with her if I tried."

"Thank you." He stood and straightened his jacket. "One last thing, do you know if any of her friends changed their names or where they might be? Did they leave forwarding addresses when they left?"

"No, I'm sorry." She stood too and led them to the door.

"If you remember anything else, please let us know." Jack handed her a card. "Anything at all."

"Of course." The card disappeared into a cardigan pocket. "Good day to you both."

The door had only just closed on them when Reese turned to Jack. "You know who she is, right?"

"Roxy Caine? Yeah." A half smile twisted his mouth. "Went on a date to some show she was in. It was ages ago now, worst date of my life. You seen her?"

"No, but she was in the paper today." Reese looked around quickly and spied someone about to throw the day's paper away having finished it. He went over and asked to take it, rushing back to Jack and holding the front page out to him. "See."

Jack took the paper and read the title.

Diva Dodges Death

The paperboy's words came back to him.

'Actress survives murder attempt!'

A picture of Roxy was below the article, Jack hadn't seen it in his because he hadn't even had time to unfold his paper before throwing himself into the case. It must have been from some photoshoot, she was looking right at the camera with a daring smirk and smoky eyes.

"Well I'll be damned." Jack skimmed the article, according to the journalist she had been hospitalised last night. Hopefully she was still there. He folded the paper up and handed it to Reese, setting a fast pace back to the car.

"Let's go pick her up."