The Girl Who Pushed Back
By Moonraker One
CHAPTER ONE
Groggy darkness of sleep faded away for one Lisbeth Salander, leading to the shock of several emotions at once. Confusion was first, almost immediately and simultaneously followed by fear, anger, and sorrow. Being the investigative individual she was, she put her incredible thought process to work. The last thing she remembered was sitting in a coffee shop, drinking their slightly over-roasted coffee, and using their free wi-fi to use a secure proxy to hack into a cell phone. Then, after taking a sip, her memory jumped to waking up in the situation she found herself just now in.
She looked up, seeing her hands chained together above her head, hanging from the ceiling. Clenching her teeth in anger, she forced herself not to cry, and instead took note of what was going on. Her legs were not attached to the ground, so she was only hung by her wrists. She was in a white room, with no windows and only one visible light above her. She still wore her clothes, and her body didn't hurt, so nobody had violated her, as far as her simple once-over look could tell. Quickly, she looked around the floor, and noticed a paperclip sitting in a pile of dust near her feet. Carefully, and with slight agony in her wrists, she slumped down to allow her feet to touch the floor. As cautiously as she could, she closed her feet together, grabbing the clip and bending until her knees touched her chest and she held her feet nearly to above her wrists. Knowing she would only get one shot at this, she carefully calculated to where her mouth was underneath her feet and let the clip go.
By some miracle, she managed to, on the first try, catch the paperclip between her teeth. The next part would hurt since she wasn't the physically strongest person. Forcing herself to ignore the pain, she pulled her face up to her hands. She managed to get the clip from her teeth into her right hand, and then slumped down again, unable to hold herself for more than a moment. Carefully, she worked part of the clip outward into a point, and bent the rest into a lower point. It took a while with one hand, but she successfully managed it. It was then about five more minutes, but she managed to pick the lock of her left hand. She then reached up, took the clip with her other hand, and spent another three minutes or so picking the right lock. She fell to the ground, landing on her feet, and quickly did a more thorough examination of herself.
I'm not injured, or bleeding, she realized. I'm missing all of my personal items, but other than that, no harm. Who did this and why? She could imagine only a few figures wanting her captured this way, and none of them seemed to fit the type of person who'd go to this trouble, but not kill her. She looked up at the chains her wrists had been bound in to chain her to the ceiling. She took note of it.
Her next step was to find a door. Every surface on the room was solid white, but she managed to find a door, and scraped away the paint covering a lock with her paperclip. Carefully, she picked this lock, and when she turned it, she found it didn't require a knob, merely a push. She shoved it open and escaped from her prison of white.
After taking a few steps, she noticed her "white room" was actually a box the size of an apartment room that was inside of a warehouse. Her initial amazement and confusion gave way to anger when she heard the sound of a man applauding. From out of her view, a man came up to a steel folding chair sitting next to a cheap fiber board picnic table. It had a laptop on it. Next to the laptop were her personal items. The man, an African-American man wearing an eye patch over his left eye, bald, and wearing a large black leather overcoat over some tough-looking pants and a shirt, sat down. "Eight minutes and forty-two seconds," he said. "Probably the second best time I've seen, certainly the best I've seen for a non-trained non-combatant." He waved at a chair positioned opposite him. "Forgive my lack of manners; please sit down, Miss Salander."
She moved closer, but still remained hesitant to sit down. "Who the hell are you and what the hell have you abducted me for? You ARE aware that moving someone across international lines without their permission is human trafficking."
He smiled. "You're as feisty as my report implies," he said. "For the record, you haven't been abducted. We're still in Sweden, and this warehouse has only two guards, and both of them are required by law to be around me for my protection."
"Notice you didn't answer my question," she flatly stated. "If I don't like what you say to me next, I may just have to get even feistier than your report implies."
He nodded. "Sure. I'm 'Mr. Anger,' for your information. Specifically, Mister Fury. Nick Fury, to be exact. I'm the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., and I'm particularly fascinated by how you hacked into my cell phone."
She gasped; her information had spoken of a man with the name "Fury," and it spoke of him being the head of a powerful agency that, as far as her contacts knew, didn't exist. Why had he brought her here? Overwhelmed by the sense of his authority, she sat down. After all, it didn't seem as though she could seriously oppose him. "I…I really don't know where to begin," she said. "How did you find information on me? I'm a ward of the state, my records are sealed."
"Let's start from the top, Lisbeth Salander," he said. "And to answer that question, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s information network is the best in the world. You can't keep information from us if we want it."
She thought back to day one, of how she got to know the name, Mr. Anger.
She had watched her first and possibly only romantic attempt crumble beneath her feet in the form of Mikael Blomkvist walking away, with the woman from his magazine in arms with him. Exactly two days later, in a sad attempt to fill her mind with work and empty her mind of him, she went to her most recent securities employer and begged for a case—anything—that would be consuming. Instead, she found a noticeable lack of anything resembling a challenge. She delivered six reports on various people in two weeks, none of which meant anything challenging compared to her check on Blomkvist for Henrik Vanger's sake. Just when it seemed she would have to make steps towards the so-called five stages of recovery, she found just what she was looking for; a name that nobody had ever heard of. She had been handed a standard size business card by one of her fellow hackers, that simply read, "Mister Anger" on it, in eight point Times New Roman font.
"Plague," she said to her friend, "where'd you get this and what does it mean?"
He shook his head. "Found it lying on the ground. I've looked everywhere, and I mean everywhere, and I haven't seen anyone named anger in any translation that seems remotely important enough to be carrying around an otherwise-blank business card." He gave it to her. "Maybe you can find something."
So, she took it. What started as a side hobby while she did other assignments for work, inevitably turned to obsession. She picked up a thesaurus, and started looking up every possible alternate word for anger. After almost five weeks, the only thing she turned up was a forum where conspiracy theorists posted crackpot ideas. One post spoke of a "Mister Fury," who ran a powerful organization that seemed immune to international laws and could disappear without a trace despite being so powerful, but nobody else believed they existed, and no other place anywhere mentioned anything. Then she lucked out and found a cell phone number that officially seemed to belong to an "anger management" agency, but upon further inspection, belonged to an unnamed agent of the United States Government that no information could be found about. And she had to break a lot of international laws to get that number at all, and it had no name or face attached to it.
The next morning, she took her laptop to a coffee shop, ordered a cup of coffee, and got to work. After securing her connection, she started hacking. She got all the way to a listing of contacts, the only one she got to see was the word "Stark," with no other name by it, and a number. After that, she took a sip of coffee and woke up in a familiar white room chained to the ceiling.
Upon relaying all of this information, the black man pulled from his overcoat a flask and drank from it, replaced it into his pocket, and resumed talking. "Miss Salander," he said. "That business card was stolen from a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent off duty and inevitably lost by the person that stole it. You have to have a special set of goggles to look through the card and see a number listed inside. The fact that you found my cell phone number, WITHOUT being able to do that, shows an incredible amount of talent. Forgive my abducting you, but you had accessed a list of numbers to some very important people. The 'Stark' you were looking at was Tony Stark."
That caught her off-guard. "You mean, Stark Industries' Tony Stark?"
He nodded. "Imagine if someone had hacked your computer at the same time. We had to put a stop to that immediately."
She folded her arms. "Okay, you've got my attention," she explained. "Now tell me what this 'shield' is and why I'm talking to its head."
"S.H.I.E.L.D. stands for Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate," Nick Fury replied. "We were created by the United Nations in tandem with the U.S. government for the sake of keeping the world safe from people who want to blow it and everyone on it up."
She actually laughed a bit. "So, Mister Nick Fury," she said. "You're telling me that cartoon super villains exist in the real world?"
He leaned in closer and got more serious, if such a thing were possible. "Of course not," he said, deadpan. "Real world super villains don't tell you their plan ahead of time, and real world super heroes don't have the luxury of retcons and deus ex machina plot lines to save them."
She rolled her eyes. "Let's say by some happenstance I believe that this war of good and evil really exists," she countered. "Your 'hero' types are probably big strong men who can punch through steel doors and break handcuffs with sheer power. What do you need a skinny, pale girl like me for? You have to have people smarter and more useful than I am."
Nick Fury spun the laptop around to face her. It had his phone records still on it. "You hacked the cell phone of the most secretive man in America, me," he shot back. "And you also escaped my test room in less than nine minutes, putting you approximately a whole quarter of a minute ahead of most trained S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives. I think that would catch anyone's attention."
She shrugged. "Okay, so I got your attention. I'm not joining some military organization and being ordered around. I'm an investigator, I work alone, I give reports. I'm not a hero of any kind. Besides, I'm hardly equipped to fight any…super villains…and I've got too much pride in myself to be relegated to working in some 'research division.' I am a freelancer. So if either of those things are what you want me for, I'm out."
"I discovered through my intelligence network, that you have a particular disdain for men preying on women," Nick Fury said in response. "I was just going to relegate this to back burner status, but something in my gut tells me it's important, even if I can't convince my superiors otherwise. So, I lucked out by coming across you. Thousands of women are disappearing across borders, and something tells me it isn't typical sex trafficking, even though all evidence says it does. Want in? You will answer only to me, and have unlimited access to all S.H.I.E.L.D. archives."
"You'd put some girl you've never known before into such a risky position? I might leak all I find to these enemies of yours," she said.
Fury gave a smirk. "That answer tells me you're in."
She stood up. "Damn right I am."
"I'll meet you tomorrow morning to iron out the rest of the details. For now, just go somewhere and enjoy the rest of your time. Agent Coulson will take you anywhere you need to go, and will return your motorcycle to your home upon arrival." He stood up to leave. "Oh, and one more thing. Don't drink anything alcoholic after ten P.M., because you're going to be given a medical examination."
At that point, as he disappeared behind a far exit, a man wearing a suit and looking notably middle aged walked up to her. "Miss Salander? I'm Phil Coulson, and I'm here to take you home. Are you going to need to make any stops along the way?"
She shook her head. "No."
"Alright then, this way." He led her to an expensive black car with bulletproof glass and armor under the body. She noticed it had a small trailer attached to it, and she imagined that her motorcycle was inside. He placed a leather bag with her collected personal items inside of it, in the back seat. She sat in the passenger's side. Within a matter of ten minutes, she was back at her own apartment.
She thought back to her time with Mikael on the case to find Harriet Vanger. Sure, it had been dangerous, and she recalled having to sew shut a wound on Mikael's forehead from a shot that was taken at him and missed. But this agency, this was a serious thing. She had agreed out of anger at the idea of women being taken advantage of, but now the reality was beginning to hit her. Still, she wasn't about to chicken out. She had an obligation to prevent from happening to those women what happened to her. So, she had to go and do her part. Still, super heroes and villains? Was she really ready to enter such a world?
She initially fought with her urge to call Mikael. At first, she wanted nothing to do with him. However, the more she thought of Nick Fury's test—and how they'd given her a way out—she knew she needed to call him. The enemy—whoever they were—weren't going to give her a way out of their traps. Hell, they probably weren't going to give her traps; they'd probably outright kill her without question. So she found herself dialing his number. Tears started to flow. "Mikael, Mikael," she said to his voicemail, "I've…taken a dangerous assignment…" She clicked to hang up. It was already too much for her to bear. "God damn it, Lisbeth!" she shouted out loud, collapsing to a seated position on the floor. "Fuck!" She buried her head on her knees, crying. "God damn it, Mikael!"
Her phone rang a moment later. "Lisbeth!" he said, his voice visibly affected by her crying. "What's wrong? Tell me what's going on?"
She wanted to scream at him through the phone, but found herself instead forcing herself to talk. "I'm pissed off at you, I'm pissed off at myself, and tomorrow morning I'm going to be reporting to a new employer and taking a dangerous international assignment, and for some fucked up reason, I found my gut telling me I've got to tell you what's going on in case I never get to speak to you again," she shouted, "but I want to just reach through the phone and punch you in the face!"
Mikael's voice, while still upset, softened considerably. "Lisbeth, do you want me to come up there and talk to you? "
"Do you love that woman?" Lisbeth found herself saying, against her will.
There was an uncomfortable pause. "I'm coming up. Be there in about ten minutes, we have to talk." He hung up.
She cried the entire time. True to his word, no later than ten minutes, he was knocking on her door. Somehow, she dragged herself to the door and let him in. He hugged her, and to her surprise, she noticed she wasn't pushing him away. "Lisbeth," he began, "no matter what I say, I have a hunch you're going to disagree. But I want you to know that, no matter what's been going on between me and…'that woman,' as you said, I really do care about you in a rather deep manner."
She slammed the door shut. "I…do you know how I felt when I saw you walking with her?"
Mikael sat down on the bed with her. "Lisbeth, let me explain something. You might think I'm an asshole who likes keeping his options open, but…" he looked at her angry, sad face and found his guilt rising and his ego crumbling. "but you'd actually have understated the matter. I can't apologize because I don't deserve to, and I can see that on your face."
"I'm so tired of being used!" she said, feebly pushing him back out of spite.
He shook his head. "I want to say I'm sorry, because I am, but that won't cut it with you, and to be fair, it really shouldn't cut it with anyone. But can I say that I do love you? And that, even if I have loved other women, I love you very deeply?"
She stared at him, wiping her eyes. "Ok, you can say that. How much?"
"I'll make you a deal," he said. "You tell me more about this assignment, and when you get back from it, I'll tell you just how much I love you, because by then, I think I'll have figured out how to say it that won't seem like a cop out."
She hugged him again. "I haven't forgiven you, you know."
"I'm not expecting it."
They sat and ate some of the takeout food he'd brought with him. She told him everything that had happened, and what had been said. At first, he found it quite shocking that she would even consider such a thing. After all, this Fury guy had kidnapped her and chained her to the ceiling of a room. That was just a test, and he felt quite afraid for her safety. However, he knew how impulsive she could be and that she wasn't going to say no, so he decided just to be supportive.
"So, they're going to pick you up in the morning?" he asked.
She nodded. "And I have no idea what I'm getting myself into," she replied.
"That's what I figured when I took the Vanger assignment. Who knows? The least I can do is cheer you on, and provide any other support you might need. Do you want me to stay?"
She looked at her empty plate. "No," she decided. "I have to prepare and I want to be alone before I realize I'm still pissed off at you."
He laughed a bit, along with her. "Sure thing. Don't take too many risks, now." He got up and made it to the door, closing it behind him. He waited outside her shut apartment door for a few minutes, hoping she'd call for him to come back in. However, she was adamant and he gave up to leave. Truthfully, she'd spent the better part of five minutes contemplating calling him back in, but wanted to be left alone.
After thirty minutes of researching Fury's organization on the internet and its back channels, and finding absolutely nothing conclusive, she picked up her phone and was part of the way through dialing Mikael's number before giving up and going in the bathroom to take a shower, and crying a bit again. As much as she found herself wanting to forgive him, she kept seeing the woman walking with him and felt betrayed. It hit so many nerves she didn't think would be hit.
Finally, after washing herself, and dressing herself, she went to her laptop, and hacked Fury's cell phone again. This time she left a text message on it. "Please pick me up now, don't want to wait until tomorrow, nerves shot. Just want to jump in. No distractions."
It wasn't even twenty minutes later, that a knock was on her door. She went up and saw Agent Coulson through the eyehole. She opened the door. "Good, you're dressed," he said. "You want to get started immediately? Great. An agent will come by to pick up all your belongings after we leave. Okay?" She nodded. "This way."
After getting in the car, they drove to a building just outside of town that looked like it was abandoned. They approached a decrepit looking newspaper box, and Coulson reached out the driver's window to put coins into it, and it opened up to reveal a keypad. He scanned his fingernail, and a ramp opened up in the ground below the building. They drove into the basement, and a vehicle elevator took them down deep below. He then drove out into a large, subterranean parking area, and they exited the vehicle.
"Wow, you've gone to all of this trouble for me?"
He shook his head. "No, we've got bases like this hidden all over the world. Can't be too sure, you know?"
They walked down a high-tech, secure hallway, and past a lot of armed guards. After a whole minute of walking, they passed through a security door and into a large room with lots of equipment, where Nick Fury stood in front of a large group of agents and scientists.
"I'm glad you decided to move the schedule up a bit," he said to her. "Honestly, I wasn't expecting you until tomorrow, but whatever, let's get started."
"I have a few questions," she said. "Am I going to get some kind of training, and if so, what kind?"
He shook his head. "That won't be necessary. You see, I can't afford to put you through the six month standard training for agents. So, thanks to some of our best scientists, I've devised a solution; we're going to take the training of some of our best thinkers and fighters, and put their training directly into your brain."
She found it hard to believe. "How do you plan on doing that? This isn't science fiction."
"No, science fiction is old and outdated compared to what we've got," he said. "It's all about replicating patterns of neuron connections. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but I've got men who've been working on these things for twenty years that tell me it hasn't failed once out of a thousand trials."
She folded her arms. "Fury, you still haven't dealt with a very important issue I've been thinking about this whole time. I'm skinny and frail. I can't fight back very well. How are you going to deal with that?"
He gave her a convinced smile. "I've been thinking about that ever since you hacked my cell phone and I looked you up," he answered. "I managed to get a completed sample of a serum one of the most brilliant biological scientists of the twentieth century developed for people just like you. Granted, it's only ever been tested once, and that was in 1941."
She pointed to the rack of vials of blue liquid on the counter behind him. "Is that what you're referring to? Steroids?"
He rolled his eyes. "Please. Steroids are so harmful and ineffective. This is much better. We'd lost it for years before we reproduced it. It does amazing things with no bad side effects."
"So, you're going to shoot me up and make me stronger? That's how you do things?"
"Let me put it this way," he answered. "I'm giving you a chance to save the lives of lots of women. Now, I don't know how the Swedish military ranking system works, I've never needed to, but in America, where I come from, most S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives start out at the rank of private."
She shrugged, confused. "So? That means…what?"
He pat her on the shoulder. "How'd you like to be a…captain?"