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Chapter Nine

Debaser

Drip drop drip drop drip drop drip drop

Clenching at the tap and fastening it so it would no longer irritate her, a black woman erring through her forties, with naturally short curls and a brain that had put her through more trouble than it might have been worth looked at herself in the mirror in the women's bathrooms of her underground facility.

She had washed her hands five minutes ago and finished with expelling her business ten minutes before. Truthfully, years of an operation that showed little results other than the proof of the existence of her greatest regret's continued lifespan a year ago at the hands of a small town police chief delivering goods into a box that transported itself to another dimension, was beginning to wear at her.

Her team were mixed in their opinions of the progress. Being motivated by stopping a man who had wronged them no matter how insignificant as well as the involvement of a telekinetic child powered some through to continue operations as long as three years. Others spoke abysmal prospects behind her, the director of this specific operation, back, too scared to say something to the wizened know-it-all woman who had grown a backbone or two and could retort with whipping speed to those who spoke ill of the purpose.

Zemora Jackson had just come across a water cooler situation similar to the negative jibes she could practically see coming from the desk workers, and watched as a white woman with overly large spectacles blushed profusely at her sudden presence as her conversational buddy averted his eyes once he spotted her, throwing out a quick greeting, while the woman couldn't think of anything worse but uttering her true emotionally high anxiety near her. Zemora gave them the brief nod and clenched her fists as she headed to the bathroom.

There had been a glimmer of hope that boosted the action around the underground office and it had been such a significant boost that field agents were far more active in their searches and scoping that she was seeing real results again.

As the nails dug into her skin, she calmed herself down, picturing that eight year old she had failed all those years ago. Zemora knew she was alive, and the sudden shift within the dimensions had proven useful in providing Zemora with that status. Yes, it meant the world was more in danger from a terrible place, but it meant she was back. They were still working on how to cut that dimension off, but it all seemed tied down to those who had ever traversed the universes complex wonders, and survived.

It all came down to Jane in some way or another. While she and her chief scientists couldn't be certain how to interpret her part for hours of brainstorming, Zemora had come to a daunting realisation while in an incubatory period making herself a cup of coffee, that she knew Jane was the key. That from her old reports and from when the portals to other dimensions such as this one opened up and wreaked havoc, she was the one to do so. Zemora's stomach dropped when she also saw the implications of this.

The director above her, a stern man with thick-rimmed glasses and a constant scowl about him, who hadn't seen much in her until her mentor had pushed her forward for more serious consideration, had been brutally honest when she proposed a safer way to obtain the last experiment of the MKUltra procedures and her subsequent tests when finding solutions to gathering intelligence on the KGB.

O'Connor hadn't been immediately convinced, still wrapped up in her previous mistakes and actions, mistakes and actions which should have seen her with a bullet in her head had she never been able to have the chance to explain. She had been far too intelligent to let go in such a wasteful way, and so he kept her on ice until her claims had been proven true.

But he'd been clear that his mind was still mulling over Jane's future. She'd been a dangerous little girl and had ended up killing many in her plight for freedom. Zemora couldn't help but send a pointed glare in his direction, which even made him blanch when what he said started to make an awful lot of sense to someone of her heritage.

"Maybe if we hadn't gone after her with the sole intent purpose of taking her back to a white block cell to live out the rest of her days, she wouldn't have felt the need to do so. I don't think many others would want to comply when they have a gun stuck in their face, along with her companions at the time."

"I'm just trying to warn you…there's a high chance that upon her return that the order will be to terminate her."

"Doesn't that come down to you? The director of the CIA?" she argued without hesitance.

O'Connor didn't appreciate an uppity woman, but he didn't meet her challenging stare with the sheer condescension as he once would.

"Not always. I do make many decisions based on the welfare of this country…but sometimes it's not my place."

Zemora had placed her head in her hands and tried to reason with him. "She isn't a weapon…she's a child who understood that she didn't want what we forced on her. Jane is capable of intelligent thought and if anything was gathered from her experience with those young boys it's that she has a moral compass!"

"Experiment Eleven may have all that and more, but if she proves to hurt more people and possibly innocents…this could be out of my hands Zemora. I'm just trying to warn you. You know this happens often."

Zemora had swallowed away any chance of a rebuttal when she too had just scraped the barrel of reasons for her own survival, despite never admitting that to anyone but James. She knew Jane had the potential to be dangerous, but she wasn't intentionally dangerous to the general populous, it was proven that most civilians died because of the reckless handling of trying to retain Jane in the first place.

And Zemora didn't truly believe that within all of this that the young girl, nearing her sixteenth birthday soon enough, would be the biggest threat to the U.S.

Something was crawling beneath the surface, amassing in numbers she could never calculate without real knowledge, but could only assume that it was as terrifying as Stephen King could imagine. Jane had helped make the crack within the universe confining these creatures, beasts who hungered from the scent of human blood and fear.

It would have been in insult to write off Jane as a danger to the American folks of that small Indiana town when she may have been the only thing to stop what could come for them all. Then they would be in real shit.

But Zemora didn't have those facts lined up when last discussing the progress with O'Connor. Everything had happened so quickly that the last fax they sent was two days ago and there was hardly an acknowledgement of the developments what with the fear of Communism still reeking strong within the CIA. Hopefully, nothing would happen out of her control for the time being, but it always sent Zemora into a panic, which had her escaping in the bathrooms of their underground facility.

She couldn't risk failure when several routes could lead her down to such. James was the only one with the same fears but never let them show, nor did it send him reeling. But it was also her head on the line, very literally and the sheer fact was beginning to drive her insane.

"Ms. Jackson?"

Her blurred focus sharpened so fast that she turned, hand on the small holster, carrying a small pistol for her protection. One of her laboratory assistants had her hands in a surrendered rise and immediately, Zemora lowered her guard.

"Apologies Harriet, I wasn't alert."

"I should apologise director. I should've knocked…it's just, we've got some news. Ford has returned from his surveillance shift and wants to speak with you urgently."

Zemora nodded firmly before leading the way out of the ladies bathroom and walking down the hall at a good pace as the laboratory assistant named Harriet Jenkins, who was occasionally treated like a secretary due to her gender, followed behind her. They eventually ended up back in the team meeting room, filled with the surface aspects of their case, dealing with those still left in the MKUltra scheme who were trying to track down Jane for their own gain rather than for her welfare. The walls were covered in the countless hours of detective work, pictures of similar and repeated images of the men working for the CIA but for the benefit of keeping themselves alive rather than for the country, trying to cover for their greatest mistake three years past.

Yanni Ford sat on the table, jet-black hair fresh from a shower, olive skin paling as the Indiana winter took away his complexion as it did hers, lighting up a fresh cigarette, eyes darting with anticipation. Her literal partner in crime James, the southern gentleman with boot camp sergeant looks with a heart of gold, crossed his arms, emboldening his impressive body mass as he did so, toothpick wiggling in suspense as he anxiously twisted it back and forth. Some would have seen this is a habit. Zemora knew it was a comforting mechanism for when he was stressed. She didn't know if it was working, and whether or not the cause for his rolling toothpick would also send her back to the women's bathroom.

When they walked in, they both stood up straight and James politely dismissed Harriet back to her work. "This ain't 'Nether' business I'm afraid Miss Jenkins."

She understood, knowing she was more valuable uncovering the mysteries of the Nether than speculating in detective matters where Zemora's mind had drifted closer after years of exploitation. As the door shut behind her, Zemora looked to Yanni with a keen plea in her eyes.

"This better be something new Ford, we're getting low on momentum after the universe shift proved to be true."

"I think you'll find this very useful Ms. Jackson," Yanni responded, an excitable jitter to his usually cool tone.

He picked up a manila folder from the table and took a drag on his cigarette. He handed it to her as she took a seat at the same table he was half sitting on again.

"I got these developed just after I took them. I wanted to come with some solid proof of my claims."

Flipping through, she could see an upscale home in the middle of nowhere; so contemporary in design it could have been a business or the home of a yuppie. A group of people went inside in the middle of the day and left an hour later with an extra person in tow.

Her brow knitted together as she looked closely at the image and saw a zoomed in snapshot of the new part of the group. They were a tall gentleman from the build, with bandaging covering most of their head and face, distorting any chances of facial feature recognition from natural eyesight. There was a couple of tufts of light hair poking through if the black and white photography was any indication and so she could only presume it to be a blond man. The house too plagued her, familiar to images she'd seen before many times.

"Remind me, why were you on surveillance at this location?"

"This was the house where Barbara Holland went missing, before she was declared dead. This is where that…that thing found her and took her. She cut her hand on a beer can and took the scent."

Zemora closed her eyes for a brief moment and nodded, finally in recognition of the images memory. "Right, of course."

"So the owner is housing the old MKUltra team? Was it abandoned?" James questioned as they came to his mind.

"No it's still a residence under the original owner," Yanni clarified. "We still don't have any idea as to what they were doing there but we're going to continue to do surveillance under your permission. If we can mic the place up when the resident isn't home, we think we'll get what we need."

Zemora sighed heavily, as James looked at her uncomfortably. She never liked going to these measures. If she knew the people that had dealt with this all three years before well enough, they were all quite paranoid and ready to rip out any source of outside equipment they saw it. Zemora wanted to her team to be like ghosts, supposedly legend and yet never suspected for fear of ridiculousness, not like the team three years before that blundered in like deadbeat drunk fathers after a night at a bar, smearing dirty work hands across the walls unsteadily trying to end up crashing on some comfy floor for sleep, while waking everyone else up to the realities of their situation.

"Was this resident heavily involved in the investigations last time?" she asked, rubbing her temples.

Yanni scrunched up his mouth and shook his head. "Nothing significant, but we're still looking into the owner's background, police checks, etcetera."

"Good, once you find out everything you can within our sources, if it checks out…we can go ahead with the total invasion of privacy."

"Who knew you were such a libertarian," Yanni lightly chided.

"Hardly…I just don't want to be so foolish with our actions…we can't risk any sort of cuts to our budget or our work. O'Connor isn't going to be forgiving this time around."

James solemnly agreed and Yanni shrugged his shoulders. "If I'm right about who the man with the most frustrating mask is, we might be a lot closer than we suspected."

Zemora looked to him with a small frown. "You know who he is?"

"No. I think he looks like someone familiar though…but it would be almost impossible if the paperwork was correct."

James and Zemora looked at the image carefully again, trying to zero in on anything that might stand out about the new character to the group. He was authoritative in stance, despite being the one with the most ailments. Almost like a comical G.I. Joe villain and yet sinister to the bone that the arms on her hairs began to stand on end.

Zemora felt her stomach drop as she noticed other things that put her on more edge than she'd care to admit. The shape of his head, the way he commanded the men surrounding him, his intimidating height and something that echoed a charming and trustworthy figure of importance. A figure that many in high places considered the greatest and most daring scientist, a pioneer of his field. A man who once catapulted her from the seventeen year old stem graduate of Harvard, to a woman very respected in his team, his main contributor of the MKUltra serum that he would take credit for so it actually made some leeway in the eyes of private investors and in government sectors. Or so he had explained to her.

And then he took it too far.

"It can't be…"

Zemora swallowed away the uncomfortable lump that had formed from the moment she started to see something eerily familiar with a past mentor of hers. Her heart picked up and her hands almost clenched the table.

"That hair isn't blond is it? Is it?" Zemora demanded an answer of her field agent.

The lax attitude had tightened at the sight of his boss reacting so violently to this fresh speculation. "White as snow…it's the only reason I thought so."

"Son of a gun, he's alive?" exclaimed James as he threw his toothpick in the bin and took the photograph from Zemora's grasp, of which she simply sat there with her fingers pinned together, shock overwriting her features.

If he was still alive, then it meant that Zemora was facing more than a dumb blundering enemy, but a determined and ambitious one. And Jane was in more danger of never seeing the light of day again.

That was one way to rock the boat for some more momentum. Zemora shook herself from the young woman she once was, enamoured by the man who had given her the much needed push into her prestigious career only to end in near infamy. The woman who now had much more on her shoulders and more lives at stake returned, with a hardened exterior and a rejuvenation of resolve as she stood up and took command of the few people left in the room.

"Bring everyone in here, including the laboratory workers. We need to start working fast and we're going to have to assign field agents to watch the originals for the sake of their safety...if it's him, then it's highly likely Jane is in the correct dimension after all these years. He'll find her in ways we haven't even thought of yet and I don't think he'll stop at much to get her this time."

"Yes Ma'am," Yanni said with a fierce nod of comprehension before exiting with haste to alert the others. Zemora avoided glaring at Ford, despising the term and very roughly pinned the new image to the corkboard, and circled his face in red pen, hoping others who had worked with him previously could identify the man who worked up such a fuss within her soul.

"Is this the end Zemora?"

She turned, her face set into the hell-bent fury she still held onto years after her first failure. James had been present, the first ally in her work, the most empathetic muscle within the entire CIA and the only reason she survived that attempt to remain here, useful in a rescue that may have been years in the making, but maybe worth the trials and tribulations that came with it.

"I need it to be James."

She knew now that there was no chance she could involve O'Connor. If she was going to take down her old mentor then she was going to do so with stealth and not an army surrounding him. Zemora was going to finish what she had started all those years ago, making up for what she left that eight year old shaved girl in and what she let Martin Brenner continue to do, exploiting the brilliant women who trusted him with their lives.

James didn't look remotely disagreeable. The soldier too, ruined of his faith in his previous employer, knew that no prison would hold him if he still held all his contacts and that no injustice served would keep his dearest friend alive. James knew there was only one absolute solution.

Hopefully, it wouldn't kill them in the end too.

Shortest chapter ever, but I didn't want to give too much away about these characters since they've appeared before (heavy hint guys).

Sorry it's been a while. I've properly planned out all my chapters and have a one shot series based on three time periods in this story. I'm also super aware of how close the second season is now and will try to get it finished before then now that I have a clear idea of how this story ends.
If I don't, my bad. But it will be finished either way. But the season 2 binge watch takes priority obvs.

It's been real,

Fadinggx