"We just got a message from Gideon," Koenig said to Coulson. "Apparently Ward is talking. Well, talking might be stretching it. Croaking semi-intelligibly might be more accurate."
"Has he gotten anything out of him?"
"Unfortunately, no. Ward is now capable of communicating somewhat, but he has yet to say anything of importance. Breaking him is likely to take some time."
"A pity. We could use the information he has on HYDRA's facilities. Unfortunately, all our agents with interrogation skills are currently busy elsewhere at the moment and can't be spared."
There was a pair of beeps on Koenig's tablet. Koenig looked down.
"Let's see. One message is from Agent Root. It simply says 'Ask him.' The other is a nine digit number." The two men exchanged looks.
"As useful as the Machine can be, that doesn't make it any less disturbing when it does things like that. Who's the number?"
"Let's see... The number belongs to Rollin Hand, a former actor and stage magician who joined the IMF and was later recruited into SHIELD, now retired. Master of disguise, expert in sleight of hand, dozens of high profile interrogations completed... and father of the late Agent Victoria Hand."
Coulson smiled. "Why don't we ask him if he's interested in a little payback on her killer?"
Rollin Hand, the Man of a Thousand Faces, sighed as he flipped through the old photo album. This was all that he had left of his daughter now. When the news about HYDRA broke out, he had worried about her fate, as any father whose only child was in the middle of a war zone would. He certainly didn't expect that the first news he would get of her fate would be a secondhand message that her killer had been caught. He still didn't know who had killed her, the circumstances around her death, or where she was buried.
That discovery had put a serious damper on the pleasure of being reunited with his old teammates one last time, even more than the harassment he and all the others received from the Air Force after they left their little tribute on Dan's grave. In fact, Talbott's efforts at interrogation had been more amusing than terrifying. Rollin and the others had invented more ways of breaking a man than the self-righteous Colonel had ever dreamed of - on one occasion they had even tricked a man into interrogating himself to the breaking point. All Talbott's petty bullying had accomplished was to give Rollin something to think about other than his recent loss.
There was a knock at the door. Rollin ignored it. The knocking continued. Rollin rose with a groan and made his way to the door. On the other side was an Asian woman.
"Rollin Hand?" She asked. "My name's Melinda May. May I come in?"
"No." Rollin started to close the door.
May's hand shot out and grabbed the door frame. "It's about your daughter."
Rollin let the woman in. "So," He asked, as they sat down, "What do you have to do with my daughter?"
"I used to work with her." Which meant she was SHIELD, of course, but right now Rollin couldn't really care. "I brought in the man responsible for her death. I thought you should hear what had happened from someone who had been there, at least, someone as close as possible to being there."
Rollin nodded. "Go on."
"I don't have to tell you that your daughter was loyal." She began. "The day HYDRA came out, she secured our main base from the HYDRA agents who had been inserted into the security forces. In the process, she captured a high-level HYDRA agent, John Garrett, also known as the Clairvoyant."
"The old phony psychic routine?" Rollin asked.
"You've seen that?"
"It's not exactly a new trick. Have someone claim they can predict the future, while having a couple guys sneaking around ensuring the predictions come true until the mark believes it. Operations men have been using that scheme for at least fifty years now."
"It was a... bit more involved than that." May winced. "He'd used his SHIELD access to convince his criminal underlings he was omniscient. A huge thorn in our side. Your daughter decided to transport Garrett to the Fridge herself. One of Garrett's former protégés, an Agent Grant Ward, offered to be part of the guard detail on the flight. We all thought that he was disgusted with his mentor's treachery and wanted to personally see the man punished." May looked away. "It wasn't until much later that we realized that Garrett had recruited Ward into HYDRA long before arranging for him to attend the SHIELD Academy. While we don't know exactly what happened on that flight, only two people who were on it were ever seen again - John Garrett, and Grant Ward."
Rollin closed his eyes. For a moment there was silence. "You said you captured them." He said at last, eyes still closed. "Why haven't you questioned them?"
"Garrett is dead now. Quite dead. They had to clean up what was left of him with a mop and bury him in a bucket. As for Ward, I'm afraid I had to crush his larynx while subduing him." May's mouth twitched in what Rollin assumed was the woman's version of a smile. "He only regained the ability to speak a few days ago. So far, the interrogator the US Government has working him over at the prison he's currently held at hasn't been able to get anything out of him."
Rollin narrowed his eyes. "Could you get me a copy of his file? I've broken quite a few men over the years. I suppose I could come out of retirement to break one more."
May looked thoughtful. "It might be possible. I'll have to ask my superiors." She rose. "I'll contact you in a few days when I have the answer."
Two days later, May was back, bearing with her a pair of profiles. "This is Ward's original profile, from when we considered him a loyal agent." She said. "It's accurate, but obviously it's incomplete. The other file is what we've managed to glean since then." May frowned. "It's... not much to go on."
"I've worked with less." Rollin looked up with an almost hungry smile after flipping through both files. "I can do this, but I'm going to need a few things. First, I'll need the cooperation of the warden of the prison Ward is being held in and his official interrogator, unless you're willing to break him out so we can do this totally in-house."
"That won't be necessary." May shook her head. "We have an inside man."
"Your doctor Gideon?" Rollin asked. May inclined her head. "Don't have him mention my history with SHIELD - my old IMF credentials will probably get us farther at this point. Second, I'll need front and profile photographs of Andrew Ward and Leo Fitz, along with recordings of the voices of Susan Ward, Timothy Ward, and Leo Fitz."
"What sorts of recordings?" May looked faintly confused.
"It doesn't matter what they're saying, so long as there's enough data to get a solid voiceprint." Rollin waved his hand dismissively. "Finally, I'll need the assistance of your Agent Skye."
"Grant, help!" A young boy called out.
"Grant, help!" The boy called out, with a hint of a Scottish accent.
"Grant, help!" The accent became stronger.
Again and again the voice called out, with each time the accent getting stronger until it became the voice of Leo Fitz.
Rollin stopped playing the sound files. "Excellent. And you have these for all the various lines I scripted?"
Skye nodded. "Both the ones for the age-regressed voice of Ward's little brother and Fitz, and the ones for the age-regressed voice of Ward's sister and myself."
"The hidden speakers?"
"They're going to be planted in Ward's cell the next time he's taken out for interrogation." Doctor Gideon reported.
"Good. How about the well?"
"It's being dug, but it won't be ready for another week or so."
"That's alright. I won't be needing it until it's time for the endgame, which is going to take at least three weeks to set up."
"I still don't get how this is going to break Ward." Skye protested.
"Young lady," Rollin lectured, "Over the decades, people in the spy business have gotten more and more enamored with toys and have forgotten that the lynchpin of all intelligence work is the people. If you know how people think, you can predict how they'll react to a given situation. And if you then control their understanding of what's going on, you can trick them into doing whatever you want of their own free will, and they won't even realize they're being manipulated until it's too late. The technology is a tool to guide your target into thinking what you want them to think. It is a part of the solution, not the entire solution. The ultimate example of this is the long game HYDRA played on SHIELD. They pulled their manipulations off on entire countries on a generational scale, and they almost got away with it - if Fury had been a little easier to kill, it might have worked. But they became too enamored of how powerful Insight would make them when they got it running that they underestimated Fury's paranoia, which kept him alive long enough to warn Captain America and provide him with the means to shut Insight down. Because they failed to control one man at the wrong moment, their ultimate weapon was ultimately useless.
"That might be the real reason that SHIELD recruited from the IMF so often. We always worked on that principle, so HYDRA must have wanted to keep a close eye on as many of the people who understood their playbook as possible.
"In this case, we're going to remind Ward of his childhood. Both versions of his profile agree that this is what shaped the man he is today, even though they disagree as to how. We'll get him thinking about what made him who he is today, and then we'll shove a reminder of where life has brought him down his throat."
Grant Ward sat in his cell. He didn't know how long he'd been there. He never got to look out a window to see if it was day or night, the rooms he was allowed to see were always illuminated, the guards he saw were always the same, and the meals were always identical - a murky broth that occasionally varied slightly in consistency, since his throat injury meant that he wasn't allowed solid food. This was deliberate on the part of his jailors. Depriving prisoners of a sense of the passage of time was a traditional part of interrogation techniques.
There was a good chance that his last meal only been served an hour or so ago, but he started to eat anyway - since the guards fed him at random times, his next meal could be twenty hours from now. Picking up the flimsy plastic spoon (Chosen for its utter uselessness as a weapon in the event that he wanted to try a breakout), he slowly slurped up the broth. After finishing his meal, he laid down on the cot and tried to sleep. It was entirely possible that the guards would wake him up in half an hour just to mess with him, but he needed to at least try to rest.
After Ward fell asleep, the door to his cell opened. Rollin entered with a makeup kit, made a few subtle changes to the prisoner's face, and then left.
"Why didn't you just completely make over his face in one go?" Captain Anderson, the interrogator assigned to Ward, asked him after he left.
"The alterations I'm making are hardly weightless. If I do it all at once, he might realize that his head is several ounces heavier than it was when he went to sleep. I need to do it gradually so that he doesn't figure out that I'm constructing a mask on top of his real face."
"And this will break him?"
"Eventually. Now, next time you interrogate him, make sure to remind him of his family. Don't make them a major point in the interrogation, just casually bring them up and move on to the next topic. And continue to do that every second or third session after that."
"Are you sure this is going to do anything?"
"Captain, do you how many thousands of people who died when the Russians introduced botulism into every major reservoir in California back in the mid-sixties? Or how many millions died from a submarine launched nuclear missile strike two and a half years later?"
"None, they never happened."
"Exactly. But if you check with the Navy and Homeland Security, you will find records proving that they were attempted. This is not my first interrogation, Captain. I know what I'm doing. Just go along with the plan, and make sure he doesn't see anything reflective until it's time for the endgame."
Grant was thrown back into his cell after another fruitless interrogation. Knowing the routine, he sat down on the cot, waiting for the guards to decide it was time to either feed him again or interrogate him again.
Time passes slowly when have absolutely nothing to do and no way to mark its passage. It could have been ten minutes from when he was returned to his cell, or three hours, he couldn't tell. But after a while, he thought he could hear a faint splashing sound. It gradually grew clearer, until he thought he could hear a voice as well.
"lp!" The voice said.
"nt, help!" It came a little clearer.
"Grant, help!" It came a third time, just loud enough for him to make out the words, and then it faded out.
"Timothy?" Grant croaked. Then he shook his head. It must have been his imagination.
Watching from a security camera, Rollin looked at Ward's reaction and nodded with satisfaction. Then he carefully programmed an alarm clock to alert him in two hours and thirteen minutes and pulled out a book. When the alarm went off, it would be time to play the first of the sister clips.
Weeks passed. Rollin played the recordings of Grant's siblings in distress at random times, gradually transitioning to the versions that used the voices of his former comrades in the process. Every few days, the guards would drug the broth sufficiently to ensure that Ward would sleep soundly, at which point Rollin would add another layer to the disguise he was slowly adding to his face.
Rollin and Anderson watched as Ward became twitchier and twitchier about the voices he heard in his cell. Then one day, Rollin turned to his colleague. "It's time. The penultimate stage is to be done tonight. Give Ward this drug in his soup an hour after sunset. Once he's asleep, have the guards change his clothing and take him to the clearing I've had prepared.
"Meet me here at sunset so I can prepare you and an extra for your parts. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to mix some stage blood and prepare your makeup. Don't worry about your lines, I had them pre-recorded almost a month ago."
Ward opened his eyes blearily. As his vision focused, he saw that he wasn't in his cell. He was in a clearing. How had he gotten here?
"Grant..." A girl's voice called out in pain. His sister's voice.
"Grant... Why did you do that...?"
A dream. It must be a dream of how his brother Andrew had abused his siblings, and had forced him to participate.
"Why did you let him do that...?"
The voice was coming from nearby. Ward turned sluggishly and saw a body lying on the ground. As he moved closer to it, the body rolled over, and he could see its face. It wasn't Susan's.
"Why, Grant?" Skye asked. "Why did you let him do this to me?"
Ward stared with horror at the body of his former trainee, covered in blood the way she was the day that Quinn nearly killed her. As her weak voice continued to demand an explanation, he stepped back, trying to avoid the accusations. Then he heard the splashing, and the voice of his brother Timothy begging for rescue the way he had the day that Andrew had dropped him down the well. As he turned around, he saw that there was a well, and that the sounds were coming from there.
Shakily, Ward looked down into the well, and as he did, the voice changed from that of an American boy to a Scottish man. The person in the well wasn't Timothy Ward. It was Leo Fitz.
"Ward! Aren't we friends? Why did you do this?" Fitz plead as he struggled to stay above the water.
"Please Ward, help! Help!" Fitz's pleas faded out as his stamina gave out and he slid under.
Ward stared at the bubbles slowly forming on the dark surface of the water in the well. Then there was a sharp pain in his shoulder and he blacked out.
After Ward dropped from the tranquilizer dart in his shoulder, Skye got up off the ground and dusted herself off.
"Is that it?" She asked.
Rollin approached from a distance, accompanied by one of the prison guards. "Almost." Walking to the well, he called out "You can get out now, Captain."
Fitz's head popped out of the water, the air hose of a diving tank clenched between his teeth. After climbing out using a hidden ladder built into the side of the well, he reached around to the back of his neck and pulled off his mask, revealing the face of Captain Anderson.
"What's the next step?" He inquired.
"Now I put the finishing touches on his new face, we change him back into his old uniform, and we return him to his cell. When he wakes up, he'll think what he just saw was a dream. Make sure tomorrow's soup is nice and clear, so he can see his face in it." Rollin instructed.
"This should be interesting."
Ward slowly opened his eyes. What was that? Some sort of nightmare about his siblings and his former teammates? Looking around, he could see that he was still in his cell, as if nothing had ever happened. Shaking his head in an attempt to clear it, Ward prepared himself for another day of broth and questioning.
Eventually, the door to his cell opened. The usual guards entered. One of them covered him while the other presented him with the usual tray containing a bowl of broth and a cheap spoon. Then they collected the tray from the previous meal and left. Ward picked up the spoon and looked down at the tray. The guards had slipped up. Today's broth was clearly a different recipe from the usual. It was clear enough that he could see his reflection in it.
Wait.
It wasn't his reflection.
Staring back at Grant was the face of his brother Andrew.
Captain Anderson listened to the moan of despair coming from the cell and knew that his subject had cracked.
"And that's it?" He asked.
"That's it." Rollin concurred. "He's just drawn the connection between what his brother did to him and his siblings and what he's done to others as an agent of HYDRA. Give him a little while to stew, then bring him in for questioning. Make to bring up how much harm his actions have done. Once you've gotten him talking for a while, you can drug him again and give him his old face back."
"Thank you for your assistance, Mr. Hand." Anderson, offering his hand.
"My pleasure, Captain." Rollin said, taking it. "Could you do one small favor for me in return?"
"What did you have in mind?" Anderson's voice was guarded, wondering what the price for breaking the HYDRA agent would be now that it was due.
"The day after HYDRA came out in the open, Agent Ward hijacked a prisoner transport delivering his immediate superior in HYDRA to a SHIELD holding facility. I want to know what happened to the guards and crew on that transport."
"The guards and crew? Why do you want to know about them?" That was an odd request. The other enemy agent would be a far more important person to track.
"My daughter was in command of that mission." Rollin said flatly. "I know it's probably too much to hope that she and the others are being held prisoner somewhere, but..."
"You have to know," Anderson said, now understanding why the old man had volunteered to break Ward. "Alright, Mr. Hand. One way or the other, I will see to it that your daughter comes home."
"Thank you, Captain." Rollin shook his hand again and left the prison.
Two weeks later, Rollin was sitting down for breakfast when the phone rang.
"Mr. Hand?" Captain Anderson's voice said.
"Yes?" Rollin answered.
"A few days ago a team sent to verify a statement given by Agent Ward found a group of bodies. The DNA results just came back - one of the bodies is your daughter, Victoria Hand. I'm sorry."
Rollin bowed his head. "Thank you for letting me know."
"Are there any specific funeral arrangements you have in mind? It's already been decided that the people that Ward murdered on that flight are entitled to a burial with full honors at Arlington, if that's what would you like."
"Can I think about that for a bit?"
"Alright. You can call me back at this number."
Rollin wrote down the number, thanked the Captain again, and hung up.
And so it ended. His daughter's body had been found, and she would be remembered as a fallen hero, rather than a criminal. Her killer was being milked for all the intelligence on his employers that the United States Government could squeeze out of him. His final mission, self-assigned as it was, was over.
Rollin paused. Had his mission been self-assigned? Thinking back to the events of over a month before, he realized it hadn't been. SHIELD had wanted him to break Ward, but if they'd just sent someone to ask him to do it, he would have responded angrily and demanded they leave. So instead May came as a sympathetic figure offering him some closure, and maneuvered him into volunteering to break the man.
Rollin raised his coffee mug in salute. "Well, played, Agent May. Well played."
A/N: There are no canon names for Ward's brothers and sister at present, so I made some up.
This does not necessarily mean that Ward is going to be redeemed, just that he's now being used as a source of intelligence. Personally, I think that any attempt to plausibly redeem Ward would require a long story arc to get him to want redemption, followed by an even longer one to get the rest of the cast to honestly believe that he's trying to make amends. After all, Ward is very good at playing a role, and his former teammates know that he's very good at playing a role. They'd have to be complete idiots to look at a remorseful Ward and not think to themselves "How do I know he's not just playing another role?"