9. Bad Influence

. . .

"Phil!" Skye jogged up the corridor to catch up with the Director, on his way back upstairs from one of the other communication rooms. "Got some possibilities already from what May sent ahead. They're due to arrive in about another hour, by the way."

Coulson turned and walked backwards for a second, giving her time to pull aside him and slow down. He studied her face, hair knotted back and grey under her eyes as they walked together up the hall. "You okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine." She looked down at the notes on her tablet, looking up again at the silence. She sighed, a little ugh under her breath. "I'm going through one of my not-sleeping deals, yeah. It's okay. I'm not losing control of that or anything. It's... you know. Other stuff. Still happens now and then." She cleared her throat and waggled her tablet at him.

"Keep updated with medical. Get rest one way or another." He gestured at her tablet. "Whatcha got?"

"I rolled with a couple hunches and decided to match up timelines. First thing I did was take a page from our new agent's old crazy-cynical 'you can be pointlessly obvious with your attempts at cleverness' playbook."

He gave her a blank look.

"It's easy. I can say pretty firmly that whoever's dicking around with the Latverians isn't another established government. Collectively, governments tend to be too slow, too chicken, and not clever enough to play hide and seek like what we're seeing here. Not even Putin tries to mess with these guys, you know? If the world's literal Bond villain isn't FSBing it up along their border, then it's not anyone on that scale. So I looked private."

"Everyone in this house a rotten influence on everyone else."

"Tell me. I checked cloud storage, he's listened to Let It Go like eight times since I put it on his phone as a joke. I guarantee he will never, ever admit it." Skye rolled her eyes with a laugh and kept trucking. "So who would crave advanced Latverian tech and be willing to be dumb enough to go get it?"

He saw instantly where she was going with this. "Tech companies. To reverse engineer and sell it."

"Dolla, dolla bills, y'all. Not only that, has to be a tech company big enough and influential enough to be able to do crap like this and think they can get away with it. I didn't jump right to the obvious guess, I broke it down all carefully and got myself there the right way. But I got bad news for you."

Roxxon Oil. Phil sighed. Yeah, this was getting worse, fast. "Tell me how you got there."

"Matched up some stock holdings and some insider information on miniaturization breakthroughs from various companies through the last three quarters. Of them all on the field, only one of Roxxon's divisions – Brand, their tech outpost - posted about some funky new tidbits they were working on about two months ago. Three weeks after the first of the original gutted bodies showed up, and just under the wire for the annual 'yay team we're awesome!' pep talk." She flicked the screen on her tablet, showing him a handful of internal promotional memos. "Don't ask how I got these. Or do, y'know, you're the boss."

He took the tablet from her and scanned them with a frown. "Graphene based nano-wiring breakthroughs for possible medical and military applications. 100% communication uptime, no loss. The new era of cybernetic enhancements, blah blah. Got the Army already sniffing around. That's gonna be a rich contract if they can actually mass produce it. It's damning, Skye, especially the timing, but I'm not seeing the proof yet."

"Me, either. For one thing, the enemies the team described weren't the Hand or anybody cool. Just cash and carry mercs from some outfit or another. Private contractors. But I think it's where to start. Might be them thinking they're being clever, might be Roxxon has even more combat resources on tap than we thought."

The Director nodded and handed the tablet back, deciding to not keep chiding her as she yawned hugely into a fist. "I agree with you. Good work. So keep it going. Where do we go next?"

Skye giggled and pulled up another page to flash it at him. "I say we send someone out to question this guy, see if he's got any scuttlebutt on his old 'friends' we can scare out of him."

Phil stopped walking and stared at the surveillance shot, picking out the details of the high class restaurant and the familiarly slick, luxury car-salesman looking goon sitting alone at a table. "Where's he at?"

"Right now? Silicon Valley, trying to peddle his solo act for cash. He'll be there the next few days, too." Skye hugged her tablet close, clearly pleased with herself. One thumb fidgeted against the opposite wrist's black pressure gauntlet.

The Director thought it through, seeing the plan she had in mind and nodding his agreement with it. "You get to tell Loki he's on for this part. I'll prep some backup for him so he can really put on a scare-show if he wants."

"Me?"

"Your footwork, your call. Big new world of responsibility, Skye. Break it to him however you want. Be the Anna to his Elsa or whatever." He lifted a finger along with an eyebrow as Skye snorted loud enough to echo in the hall. "Don't tell him we're cracking jokes like that. Just be advised, Ian Quinn is not one of his favorite people."

. . .

Simmons and Mack watched Fitz fumble artfully with the wiring Romanoff loaned the laboratory, looking occasionally at the pictures of corpses old and new. The finished test slides of the samples taken from Stutgart were sitting in a tube rack on the shelf, long since the lost focus of the investigation. Without anything useful to hook into from the chemical compound used to kill the teacher, they were left with speculations instead. "This would be much easier if I weren't being stared at."

"Sorry, Fitz." Simmons grimaced and turned away slightly, leaning her hip against the counter and still not sure how she fit into this particular scene anymore.

"There's been a definite improvement, I can see that straightaway. The holes you photographed in Stutgart are about 65% smaller than the 1986 set. That's re-remarkable." Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Fitz shake his head at the brief stutter. "And you realize that's still not current."

"How do you mean?" She turned back, glancing up to meet the eyes of the watchful Mack, who was mostly studying the electrical output of the device on a screen.

"Well." Fitz set the nest of wires down to scruff a hand along the side of his head, fidgeting. "Unless they bring them back to upgrade regularly – and Stutgart hasn't been out of country in five years at least – his implantation was made when he became a sleeper agent. Which looks like it was when he was still in his twenties."

"Yeah." Mack flicked the screen down, hunkering onto his elbows to look at the pair of scientists. "Didn't the paperwork say he did a backpacking tour of Europe out of college?"

"That's right, he did." Simmons bit her lip. "Moved here when he was a child, a few trips back. That was the notable one. So early, mid 90's. The backpacking trip was in '93."

"That's when it was done. Long hiking trip, plenty of time to wire up and recover. That's a mad jump in less than a decade. Can't even imagine what a new set might look like." Fitz scruffled again, backing away from his worktable to pace behind Mack. "We've only recently started using carbon nanotubes, and in still narrow applications. Who knows what Latveria's got now. Maybe they're not even sending agents anymore, just... wee tiny bugs or such. And this is just one thing we know about." He flexed a hand at Simmons. "You remember our one professor at the academy? Uhh... Political landscapes and growth theories or suchlike?"

"Waller." She laughed. "She was funny."

"D'you remember the third semester, though? It was the first time we ever heard of Latveria." He nodded at her, grinning a little at her smile. Again, that whisper of old times.

"I do!"

Fitz turned to Mack. "Did you get her for any of your training?" Mack shook his head. "Ms. Waller was an expert, especially on balkanization and the Serbia-Croatian conflicts. Everything in that region, over the last sixty years. She was amazing." He took a breath. "The first time she said the name of that country to the class, it was in the exact tone you'd hear the word Voldemort in."

"So why doesn't anybody talk more about it? I know I never got much of a briefing on the place. Why do we keep it a big mystery? I mean, the maps are right there." Mack picked up a pen to point it at the commercially available world map pinned to the far wall. Sure enough, the tiny dot of Latveria was visible on it. Devoid of information, but visible.

"Because even we apparently knew of only two people that ever crossed the border of Latveria to gather intel in the last thirty years and then made it back out alive. Neither remained inside for longer than three days and neither made it to the capital. No, not even our very best. One killed himself a year later. The other?" Simmons crossed her arms to underline her point. "She's visiting. Which is why I know that scary little tidbit at all; from the brief Romanoff gave to Coulson when we got back. It used to be quite compartmentalized, apparently."

"So, no kidding, the-country-not-to-be-named." Mack shook his head. "No wonder the Director looks tense. What's the next move?"

"Don't know for certain, I'm not privy yet." Simmons shrugged. "Skye's got something in the works, I think. Seems like some of us get a tiny downtime meanwhile. Nobody thinks Latveria's going to just fly into a rage overnight. But then, we don't know bloody anything." She finished with a click of her tongue.

Mack snorted. "Some downtime. Everybody chill while the doomsday clock ticks. So here's my other question. If we weren't finding these sleeper agents before all this started going down, how was this group doing it?"

Fitz looked across his worktable at Simmons, who shook her head. "We simply don't know for certain yet. No one wishes to speculate."

. . .

Dario Agger stared down into the briefcase, picking up a tangle of wires from the mess of torn parts before letting it drop again. The expression on his face made the man on the other side of his desk recoil. Agger took his tinted glasses off and let them clatter carelessly to the table – if the eight thousand dollar pair of shades chipped, it meant nothing to him. He reached past the briefcase and picked up the black marble nameplate that always sat at the front of his desk, dancing it horizontally between the fingertips of both hands like a cheerleader's spirit stick. "What does this say?" he asked his contracted agent, his voice low and calm.

"Um. Sir?"

"Read it off to me."

The man cleared his throat and did as he was told. "Dario Agger. CEO: Roxxon Oil & Brand Industries."

"Is there any small print? Go ahead. Look close."

The man licked his lips and leaned forward, squinting. "N-"

The nameplate smacked him incredibly hard across the face and the man tumbled to the ground. Agger was on his feet, roaring as he chucked the nameplate hard at the groaning figure. "NO! What you are not reading, you incompetent waste, is 'Scrapyard Boss.' What you are not reading is 'Pawn Shop Broker.' I send you backwards thick-necked malcontents out with the best shit my money can buy, and I have one simple order: Take this information I found for you and get me my tech. Intact."

Agger shoved the briefcase off his table, scattering the busted contents across the floor towards the man cradling his jaw and staring at him through pain-bleary eyes. "You were told how. And you bring me a bag of garbage indistinguishable from the dumpster behind a dead Radio Shack! What precisely am I going to do with this? Give it to my board chairmen so their kids can use it for a school science fair project? Give me something, you complete idiot."

"It's not our fault!" snapped the man on the floor. Blood dripped from his nose. In another act of defiance, he picked up the nameplate and tried to snap it against the floor.

Agger stomped from behind his desk and easily tore his nameplate away from the man, slamming it back onto his desk. "It's titanium backed, Christ." He tugged at the legs of his Parisian bespoke trousers as he hunkered down next to his contract agent, his voice dulcet and quiet again. "Try again, Gabriel. How exactly was it not your fault?"

"First batch of people, yeah, we tore the stuff out fine. The lab got them all, you know that. The last three, that stuff there, those weren't our call. Someone's screwing us. They were dead before we got there! Then these other freaks started sniffing around before we could pull the corpses!"

Agger rolled his eyes. "Oh, is that all?" He sighed, his fury diffusing like it never existed. "Well, I can't say I wasn't warned." He snapped his fingers at the man on the floor before standing up again and going back to his desk, dropping himself lazily in his chair and stretching his legs up onto the desk. "Okay. Clean up your blood and get out. I've got it from here." He glanced at the man at the floor, staring up at him in stunned hurt and disbelief. He tugged a box of tissues out of one of the drawers and flung it at the other man. "What? You did your job. The back half of your pay will get sent out tonight."

"So that's it?"

"You want to go another round with something else on my desk?" Agger gave him a nasty smile. "Or you want to play with me direct? I know what Operations calls me behind my back. You wanna find out why?" He flicked a hand at the box of tissues, reaching for the call button on his desk phone. "We're done here."

"Sir," came the prompt, prim tone of his secretary. He watched the blood smear across his nice marble floor as the mercenary agent tried to sponge it up, the space between his eyes tightening his vision into a red veil as the offending stain spread despite the man on the floor's best efforts. "What can I do for you?"

"If our priority client calls again tonight, put her through instantly. I'll be staying in the office for another couple hours, but if I leave, push directly to my personal phone. The complication she predicted is in play. Can you do that for me, Greta?"

"Absolutely, sir." His procurer staggered out of the room, clutching the bloody tissues he'd used to half-wreck Agger's floor. He was tempted to take it out of the asshole's check, but the hell with it. Can't be said Agger wasn't a fair boss. Hard, but fair.

He smiled in approval, plain enough for her to hear it in his voice. Greta never had to hear the beast in him. At least he had one person around him that was forever competent. "Thank you, darlin'. Oh, and send in the cleaning staff real quick for me. Little mess on the floor."