Mireille was being followed. The streets of Paris weren't all that crowded at this time of day, and so the Asian woman that was tailing her stood out. Unfortunately, shaking her wasn't as easy. She'd been working on it for half an hour, and the woman was still following her.
Since the woman wasn't doing anything but following, Mireille figured that she was waiting for a chance for the two of them to be alone before acting. She could work with that. Mireille changed her totally random course into a wandering route that would take her back to her apartment, where her partner would be waiting. The mystery woman was undoubtedly another Soldat assassin, and it wasn't as if they didn't already know her home address.
She had hoped that Les Soldats had given up on trying to kill them after the death of Altena, but it seemed that they had no intention of abandoning their policy of killing anyone who knowingly defied them. As Mireille's journey changed from an attempt to shake her pursuer to an attempt to lure her pursuer into a trap that looked like an attempt to shake a pursuer, she tried to figure out whether or not it would be practical to try to take this one alive for questioning. Maybe this one would know how to find someone high enough up in the organization that she and Kirika to coerce into rescinding the death mark. Being perpetually stalked was stressful, even for professional killers.
Mireille was not particularly surprised when the mystery woman approached her as she reached for the door to her apartment.
"Mireille Bouquet?" She asked.
With one hand, Mireille shoved open the door. Then she spun and grabbed the woman with the other, throwing her inside. As the woman rolled to her feet, Mireille pulled her gun out of her purse. As she trained it on her opponent, the woman charged at her. Before Mireille could get off a shot, she was on her back with her own gun in her face.
But by that time her partner was aware of the threat and moving as well. A well-aimed fork flew through the air and struck the woman's hand at a nerve center, forcing her to drop the weapon. Taking advantage of the opening, Mireille knocked the woman's feet out from under her. As the gun slid too far away for either of them to use, the two attacked each other hand to hand.
Unlike her partner, who could and frequently did fight with just about anything that came to hand, Mireille was primarily trained to use a pistol. Her opponent, on the other hand, was clearly an expert in close combat. It wasn't long before she found herself forced to the ground in a rather uncomfortable arm lock. But before the assassin could take advantage of this, a gun was pressed to her head.
"Let her go," Kirika ordered.
"Look down," The woman countered.
Mireille turned her head to the window. From across the street she could see a figure pointing a sniper rifle. Even from her position on the floor she could easily tell that it was aimed at her partner's chest.
"Are going to have to kill each other, or are you willing to accept that I came here to talk, not to fight?"
The three women sat around the pool table that Mireille used as a work desk holding cups of tea.
"So tell me, Agent May, what brings you here? I would think that given current events, what was left of SHIELD would be busy hiding, rather than trying to track down people like us." Mireille inquired, trying to not think about the fact that the Triplett person that May had talked to over the radio after the fight broke up was almost certainly still watching them and ready to shoot her or Kirika if the discussion went downhill.
"If were interested in shutting you down, we could have just left an anonymous tip giving away your identities to Interpol. I'm here for business reasons." May pulled a folder out of her jacket.
"We know a great deal about you, Miss Bouquet, from your childhood as the daughter of Corsica's most notorious crime boss to your setting up as a contract assassin after your family was wiped out by parties unknown. We know less about your partner, and everything we do know I suspect is wrong, seeing as the public record states that Kirika Yumura is the only child of two people who don't exist who work for a company that doesn't exist in a town that doesn't exist. Even with some of the best data analysis people in the world looking, we couldn't find the real records."
"They don't exist, and even if they did, there wouldn't be much in them." Kirika admitted.
"Another girl with no past. Is there a club or something?" May muttered under her breath, then returned to the matter at hand. "The interesting thing is that going over all the presumed and confirmed kills by the assassin team known as Noir, your choice of targets is noteworthy. Most of your kills are terrorists, war criminals, corrupt officials, and major figures in organized crime. The rest are all people who picked fights with you and lost. In two cases you even took out people that SHIELD was getting ready to deal with ourselves when you killed them. A pity we can't tell Agent Blake that the warlord he was assembling a massive task force to take down was killed by two girls." Her mouth quirked up at the thought of the potential embarrassment to an apparently disliked coworker.
"So what does this mean for us?" Mireille asked.
"Most of the people who were working for SHIELD this time last year are either dead, working for HYDRA, left after HYDRA came into the open, or are stuck in committee meetings over everything SHIELD has been up to for the past seventy years in light of the revelations about HYDRA for the indefinite future. Those of us who are left are seriously short-handed. We could use the skills of a team that can single-handedly wipe out an entire army platoon once we've identified key figures in HYDRA to strike against."
Mireille and Kirika exchanged glances. They hadn't been expecting a job offer. "And you see nothing wrong with hiring professional killers for this?" Mireille asked.
"You'd hardly be the first people with a checkered past to join. Hell, compared to Romanov your records are squeaky clean. In the old days we might have tried recruiting you outright. Unfortunately, your skill sets are a little too focused for the wide variety of missions we need, and we can't train you up at the moment - Most of the instructors at the Operations Academy were killed during the attempted HYDRA takeover, the rest of them are stuck in committee hearings, and those of us in the field are too busy running ops to train anyone. What we're proposing right now is contract work to capture or eliminate HYDRA leaders once we figure out who they are and where they're operating from. Nothing that you haven't been doing already, sometimes on the behalf of governments seeking plausible deniability for the operation."
Kirika and Mireille stepped aside to discuss the offer. After about twenty minutes of quiet debate, the two came to a conclusion. As the two returned to where May was waiting, Mireille grabbed some papers.
"I think we might be able to come to some arrangement, but first," Mireille laid the papers on the pool table. "What do you know of a conspiracy known as Les Soldats?"
A/N: Similar to Recruitment Drive: Divisions, this started when I PMed Afalstein asking if he was planning to include Noir in the list of series and him suggesting that I write something up myself. I figured that Kirika and Mireille would be good people to have on SHIELD's side when the time came to take the offensive, and Les Soldats would be the kind of thing that SHIELD is supposed to be dealing with.
The situations that Noir handled that SHIELD had been planning to are Noir episodes 4 (A 'security' company that specialized in helping their clients launch coups) and 7 (An African warlord).