As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.

—Marisha Pessl, Night Film

Part II: Gods and Monsters

1.

1979

By the time of discovery, scavengers had already reached the subject.

'Steady,' he whispered. A breeze rustled the underbrush, freed a few strands of Alice's dark hair from her ponytail, then settled them on the nape of her neck. This close behind her he could smell her floral shampoo, which annoyed him a little, even if they were downwind.

It pleased him more than it annoyed him, though. A reminder—as if he'd ever thought otherwise—of how quickly young people became reaccustomed to the comforts of home, regardless of how much their passions told them otherwise.

He nudged her elbow. She glanced at him, eyes widening a little, then nodded and adjusted the rifle's position before she looked through the scope again, brow furrowed in concentration.

Scavengers had already reached the subject.

On the other side of the clearing, a little over a hundred feet away, the deer raised his neck, shook his head, and let out a grunt. He was still young, but he had to be two-hundred and fifty pounds at the very least. Pierce thought of the first time he'd seen a deer up close, a real one, not one in the cartoon reels he'd watched as a kid. Smaller than this one, but to a ten-year-old the buck had been enormous, all muscle and coarse-haired skin and sharp animal smell.

'Ready the shot,' he said. The two of them were so still even the birds didn't notice them.

The deer lowered his head, antlers pointing towards them—it was still too early in the season for him to shed them—and went back to grazing.

Scavengers.

That line had kept bobbing up ever since he'd read the file, which bothered him a little. It felt foolish, and Alexander Pierce wasn't a foolish man. He supposed it was the sheer… primitiveness of the thing. Bumping into a man, of sorts, who had been nibbled on. It was like finding out that, in this day and age of Concorde flights and credit cards and urban sprawl, someone had been devoured by wolves in the Washington Mall. He couldn't help but wonder exactly what had begun eating that strange morsel. He wasn't sure if there had been wolves in the Austrian Alps thirty years ago, but of course all kinds of animals ate carrion, even carrion that wasn't quite dead yet.

Deer would eat bird chicks from time to time.

Alice braced for recoil and squeezed the trigger. The shot drove a flurry of birds off the trees. The deer bellowed, tossed his head back, and staggered forward. Pierce could see the place where he'd been hit, like a daub of paint on the fur.

'You just missed his heart,' he said. Alice looked at him, expressionless, then lowered the rifle, opened the break-action, and reached for the spent cartridge.

Another shot rang out just behind them. The deer feel forward, onto his knees, and finally thudded to the ground. Pierce turned to his guest, glad to have an excuse to look away. The hunt was necessary, of course: culling the excess, keeping the balance and all that. The meat would go to the staff, some of it in the form of his wife's excellent pies. And, when circumstances required it, he had never hesitated to end an animal's suffering with a well-placed bullet, or a quick slice of a bowie knife.

That did not mean, however, that he had to enjoy it.

'Great shot, Harry.'

'Alice there bagged him,' the other man said as he stepped closer to them, his gun held in the crook of his arm. Senator Thomas J. Harrison, Minority Whip, acquaintance of everyone and friend of all the right people, elder statesman even though he still had only a little grey in his dark hair, and the kind of man whose first bit of advice to Pierce when he'd first arrived in the State Department had been Never fuck the interns. Pony up for a professional, for Christ's sake. 'Nice shot, by the way.'

'Thank you, sir,' she said, then added, 'I prefer Liss.'

Pierce threw her a sharp glance. She knew what he thought of her new idiotic little nickname, so why she insisted on it, he couldn't even guess. She lowered her eyes. 'Well, her shot went a little wide. Let's get back to the lodge.'

Alice opened her mouth. 'Let's get back to the lodge,' Pierce repeated, and she closed it. She kept it mostly closed during the jeep ride back to the lodge, gaze lost in the tree line. She had been like that ever since Bogotá, dripping around the house—no question of her returning to school or work just yet—like a ghost. Pierce watched her as much as he could while keeping up with Harrison's chatter, and he felt his heart tighten. If he had lost her… He had pointed out often that he'd told her so, of course, that he'd warned her plenty of times even before he'd arranged things at the Department so he could at least keep an eye on her for part of her little foreign adventure. It had been no use, needless to say. Young people thought all it took to save the world was a year abroad and some enthusiasm.

But if he had lost her.

If Nick hadn't—

He shook the thought away. All that mattered was what was, not what could have been. Behind his daughter, the deer's tongue lolled out of its mouth, and one of its dead eyes was fastened on the sky. Scavengers. Pierce did not believe in fate, but one did not spend a decade as a S.H.I.E.L.D. field agent without coming to think that there was a kind of providence, a rightness. If Marshal Tolbukhin had crossed the Austrian border a little earlier or a little later, if his men hadn't come across a spot of red in the snow that turned out to be a body, half-alive when it should have been wholly dead. If Ribbentrop hadn't finally got his treaty signed in the small hours of a late August morning and Hydra hadn't slipped in right behind him, the first little tick in the Russian bear. If, if, if…

All things served a greater purpose.

The light meal waiting for them back at the lodge was a quick affair. Laura said the usual polite things about the weather and the senator's family, but otherwise had as little of importance to add as ever. Pierce had long since resigned himself to the fact that he had married a surprisingly stupid woman. And to think that they'd met when she'd been at Vassar and they'd spent nights talking about Mailer and Mary McCarthy. Thankfully, unlike their mother, both his children were remarkably clever, a quality he regularly praised them for. He was baffled by those men who tried to stamp out intelligence in their daughters.

By the time he and Harrison withdrew to the lodge's old smoking room, Pierce couldn't help but feel a little antsy. He disguised it thoroughly, of course, kept his motions calm and disciplined as he poured them some scotch.

'Hail Hydra,' Harrison said.

'Hail Hydra.' Pierce didn't think he was ever going to find the phrase anything other than embarrassing, though at least it beat the honest-to-goodness initiation ceremony he'd had to go through, as a new high-ranking member. He had even started to let doubts creep in until Harrison had come along afterwards, out of his robes and carrying a bottle and two glasses. If I'd wanted to wear aprons and do hand signs I'd have joined the Freemasons, Harry, Pierce had said. Harrison had laughed. I honestly think they're just doing it to keep the robes from getting moth-eaten. Anyway, I'll talk to the Baron. Bottoms up.

And that had been that.

'Cigar?'

'Cohiba Cubanos?' Harrison said, and took a cigar out of the box.

'There's a trade embargo with Cuba, Harry,' Pierce said, and snapped the box shut. 'I hope you're not suggesting I'd use my position in the DoS to get around that.'

Harrison slid the tip of the cigar into the cutter. 'Wouldn't dream of it,' he said, with a faint smirk. Pierce ignored it. He had always found Harry's little smirks a tad irritating. 'Not having one yourself, Al?'

'I don't smoke,' Pierce said, by way of explanation.

It was not until the room was thick with cedar-scented smoke and they were on their second tumbler of bourbon that Pierce placed the file on the table. Harrison said nothing and, very gently, swirled around the last finger of amber liquid inside his glass.

'Project Winter Soldier,' Pierce said, finally, as though that would loosen the Senator's tongue.

'Now there's a blast from the past.' He glanced at Pierce, deliberate and slow. 'Someone has been busy. Doing some catch-up reading?'

'I like to take an interest.'

Harrison said nothing for a few seconds, then spoke again. 'What a name, huh? What would our friends at the CCI say if they heard it? Slap us with a lawsuit?'

'I want to see him.' It? What was the proper way of referring to the asset, he wondered.

'Forget it, Al.' Harrison took one last puff on his cigar and stubbed it out on the ashtray sitting by the file. 'Our friend there is as useful as a goddamn cat-flap in the elephant house. I'm surprised you even found the project files.' Pierce was sure Harrison was going to speak again, but he added nothing.

'Come on, Harry. If he's so useless, why are we bothering to keep him on ice?'

'Oh, Zola always thought he could make more of him. Failure every time, of course, but still, the march of science or some crap or other. He gets mined for samples once in a while. I suppose it's easier to keep him on ice than to find out five years down the line that you didn't save enough blood or whatever for your big thing, but to be honest I'm not sure I buy it. Waste of everybody's time. All the eggheads love the assignment, mind you. Get paid to sit around and look at popsicles and screens. Shit, I'd love the assignment too.'

'Oh, I'm sure you'll be able to swing a few more working lunches, Harry.'

Harrison chuckled, went on. 'I don't think the Baron even realises our frosty friend is still stashed somewhere, otherwise he'd have pulled the plug a long time ago. No pun intended.' He took one last swig of his drink and brushed a piece of invisible lint off his trousers.

'I'm sure we won't go bankrupt over a freezer. Maybe if I chip in a few bucks for the bill…' That got a snort of amusement. Well, time to be serious. 'Zola had a great deal of success with him, didn't he? Ten missions, ten perfect kills. In and out like a ghost. Of course, there were a few things in the files about missions above my clearance level,' he added pointedly. 'Were those—'

'Those went fine.' The senator's gaze focused on a point above Pierce's shoulder, beyond the wall of the lodge. 'Listen, Al, this is above your pay grade, so you're not going to say you heard it, and if you do, I'm going to deny it ever came from me. Understood?'

Pierce responded with an almost imperceptible nod of his head.

'I'll cut straight to the chase: they couldn't control him without Zola.

'After the good Professor kicked the bucket, they all thought they just had to keep doing what they'd always done. They had the standard operating procedures, they had the tapes with Zola's voice to prime the asset before the mission briefing. So they pull him out of cryo. This was back in '73, by the way. They prime him, even run a whole lot of—what's it called? Conditioning? Whatever it was, they did it. Keep it safe, you know the drill. Everything seems normal, I mean, as normal as it gets with Murder Pops, so they give him the assignment.' He paused, looked Pierce in the eye. 'You know they kept moving him, right?'

Pierce nodded. One of the first things he had learned about Hydra, the first thing that let him know it was right, was the fact that they had gone beyond flags, borders, warring nation-states. They weren't everywhere. But from that first seed at the heart of S.H.I.E.L.D. they had spread shoots through enough of the powers and the super-powers. The new world was already being built, under the feverish, crumbling skin of the old one.

So too with the asset. Sometimes he'd been with Hydra's people in the Soviets' Department X, sometimes deep within S.H.I.E.L.D., brief sojourns with the British, the French, both Germanies. Zola had travelled a lot, under all kinds of names. And if someone had ever noticed anything irregular in his cover stories or his papers, well, who cared about a dumpy little professor and his conferences on enzymes and plant genetics? It all added to the mystique, in any case. Since no government, no bio-weapons facility, no spy shop in the world could know with confidence that they owned the asset, in the sober light of day, the intelligence community did not even acknowledge his existence. The few that did dismissed it as a spook's spook story, pointed out that alleged sightings had the assassin working for wildly different interests. Something for when you wanted to mess with baby operatives and didn't think they'd fall for the redacting carbon paper prank. After a few drinks, however, there were those few old warhorses who would say they'd seen him, caught a glimpse of him in Stanleyville, or Prague, or Tehran. He lived on as rumour.

What a blessed existence that must be.

'That time he was being stashed in D.C.,' Harrison went on. Pierce perked up but said nothing. 'Job was in Philly.'

'And they didn't think—'

'Oh, they thought, but he'd already done a job in US soil, so I guess they didn't think they'd run into any problems. Mind you, that was California.' He sounded and looked both faintly irritated and faintly amused at the idea of the mission having been carried out in his constituency.

He didn't seem to realise that there had been nothing about a California mission in the files Pierce had read. Above my clearance level, Pierce thought, and ferreted it away for future use.

'The East Coast turned out to be a different story.' Harrison trailed off.

Pierce didn't want to rise to the bait, but he couldn't help himself. Better get this over with. 'He didn't eliminate the target?'

'No, he whacked him all right. He just botched everything after that. Mind if I have some more of your excellent bourbon, Al? My throat's running a bit dry.'

Pierce waited as the other man poured himself another two fingers of bourbon. Dusk didn't last long this far south; the last few embers of sunlight were slinking out of the room, leaving inky shadows behind.

After a few leisurely moments, Harrison went on. 'There was a witness at the scene. That shouldn't have been a problem, because getting rid of any witnesses was part of the brief, but our pal just injured him. Then he went ahead and patched him up, can you believe it? After that he gave us the slip. Didn't show at the pick-up point, nothing. If he hadn't called 911 from the target's home…'

Pierce couldn't keep a note of surprise out of his voice. 'He called 911?'

'Yeah, he can talk. Or at least he could, back in the day. Of course, it was all bats in the belfry, but the idea was for him to be able to reason his way through missions, say whatever needed to be said. Lord knows if that's still the case, mind you. After we picked him up again, they fried his brain so hard we probably got ourselves a freezer with a whole lot of vegetable. Doesn't even matter we no longer have Zola around to keep him on a leash.'

The question hadn't been about that, but Pierce wasn't about to correct him. He had wanted to know how the asset had figured out which number he needed to dial. Emergency numbers hadn't existed back when the asset had still been just a man. They were of much more recent vintage—Pierce still remembered the FCC briefs. It's not just bats in the belfry, Senator, he thought, but he was not about to say it out loud.

Harrison took another swig. 'We picked up on the call, thank God. Mind you, it was an ungodly mess, we had to send in the cleaning lady to get rid of the loose ends, nearly had the whole thing spill out. Still, cut off one head…'

'… two more will take its place,' Pierce finished.

'Right. We ended up picking him up in New York a day or two later, managed to triangulate the tracking signal in his arm. He'd stolen a car but abandoned it when it ran out of gas, just wandered around after that. Turned into a homing pigeon without Zola, I guess. That's where the asset—the asset's body, I guess you'd call it, came from. Queens, I think.'

'Brooklyn. Brooklyn Heights.'

'Sure,' Harrison said, with a dismissive expression. 'He tried to give us the slip again when the team found him, but good luck with that. So we pick him up. And stick him back on ice.'

'And nobody tried—'

'Jesus, Al, of course we tried. We're not talking about a pack of gum here. We invested in that bastard. So one year after the New York escapade his handlers take him out of cryo. This was the same crew who'd worked with Zola here in the US, but that did as much good as a screen-door in a submarine. The asset wouldn't cooperate with the conditioning, all kinds of weird readings in their—their instruments, I guess. They call them bleeds. Things poking through, even though his brain must have been scrambled eggs by this point. Lost dog looking for its master? Who knows. They stuck him back on ice. Again. And that was that.'

'That wasn't in the file. Was it—'

'Classified? No. I think they just shredded everything. What was the point in keeping it? So.' Harrison placed the empty glass on the coffee table. 'Five years. Personally I think we've got everything we were ever going to get from him. Goddamn shame, but do you know what the Soviets are doing? Breeding themselves a new breed of operative, pardon the pun and excuse my French. When I heard about it I thought they were honest-to-shit going to resurrect the corn man to have someone to face off with the peanut farmer, but apparently they're dead serious. Hoping to have the first batch within the next five years and everything. Lord knows they need it, with this ungodly mess those sad bastards have got coming down the pipeline in Afghanistan.'

'We wouldn't happen to have anything to do with either of those, would we?' Pierce said, his tone light. Harrison's faint smile told him everything he needed to know.

Pierce let a reasonable amount of silence slip by before he spoke again. 'Still. If we could reactivate the asset.'

'Good luck with that. Good luck without Zola. Shit, good luck with Zola.'

'Come on, Harry. Imagine how handy we'd have found him in Chile. Or this business that's going on with the hostages…'

'Don't you mean "you", Al?' Harrison said, with a sharp glance.

In the months since Pierce had been welcomed into the fold, he and Harrison had gone through this dance on occasion. A quick reminder of who stood where. 'Of course,' he said, smooth and cool as glass.

The other man relaxed into his armchair again. 'I know, it's a real pity. After all that work getting him into shape, too.'

Pierce had carefully studied the work in question, even if he was not wholly familiar with the file's overabundance of biological and psychological jargon. Hippocampus pruning. Axonal modification. Psychogenic amygdala modulation. Operant conditioning. Reflexive action. It struck him as more heat than light. The clearing of all the debris from the asset's mind, that he agreed with. Most people had accumulated too much nonsense in their heads by the time they were eight, let alone twenty-eight. The wipes thus served a double practical purpose. They had got the asset back to a state where he could be shaped right, of course, but they had also freed him from his burden of memories, all the ruts of unthinking habit. Everything else, though? Smoke and mirrors.

He was not a prejudiced man, and he would hardly argue about the mechanics of the cryo-tube, or the asset's physical calibration. But he understood people, and how simple they could be once you knew how instinctively they yearned for someone who gave them a firm sense of place, of purpose, of belonging. He might have studied history instead of any of Zola's sciences, but he doubted there was anything in Zola's papers that couldn't be better learned in Thucydides. Or parenting, for that matter.

'Let me try,' he said.

'With the—'

'What do we have to lose, Harry?'

'Time. Resources better spent elsewhere.' He assumed the expression of a headmaster calmly rebuking his star pupil. 'You know he was dangerously unstable the last time he was taken out of cryo? I don't want to have to explain to a Senate subcommittee the whys and wherefores of the Deputy Secretary of State getting strangled by a maniac. That's the sort of thing that puts a real damper on your reelection prospects.'

Pierce chuckled politely at that. 'I will make sure to take the appropriate precautions. Just a skeleton team. Some armed guards.'

Harrison frowned. He was going to say no, Pierce knew. Better put all the pieces on the board. 'Give me a year. If he's not mission-ready within a year, then feel free to pull the plug. Or whatever protocol we follow under these circumstances. I'm sure Zola came up with one.'

'Probably in triplicate,' Harrison said with a faint smile.

'I did hand-pick Deputy Director Fury,' Pierce added.

'You did indeed,' Harrison said, and Pierce knew he had him. Perhaps he was not yet entirely convinced, but he would be.

'You know, I couldn't find anything much about what Zola was doing in the years before he died,' Pierce said. 'I thought he had kept on working right until the end.'

'Oh, he did.' Despite the bourbon, Harrison's eyes were clear and sober. 'Zebrafish, apparently.'

:=:=:=:

On the day the 40th Army started entering Kabul, Pierce's secretary came into his office after she and the rest of the staff were supposed to have gone home. Even in the cloudy day Pierce could see the flush in her face. He always set up a generous wine and cheese spread for his employees on every holiday.

'Anything wrong, Linda?' Pierce turned his eyes away from the papers on his desk, for politeness' sake. He would carry on working until it was late, then take the rest home to go over tomorrow and finally and firmly close his study's door when it was time for the girls to open their presents.

'Not at all, Mr Pierce. A card just arrived from Senator Harrison's office.' She already had her coat and gloves on. 'I thought you'd want it before you left.'

'Thank you, Linda,' he said as he took the envelope. 'That was very thoughtful. Give my regards to your mother.' He took great care to know about the families of his employees, and to send appropriate small gifts on the right occasions. 'Hope you enjoy the hamper.'

'Thank you, Mr Pierce. I'm sure we will. Merry Christmas.'

'Merry Christmas.'

He waited for a moment after the clack of her heels vanished down the corridor before he opened the envelope. His office and Harrison's office had already exchanged cards this year, through the usual channels and on the usual date. Harrison had made a joke about going for real signatures one day soon and dumping the mimeographed ones on the constituents.

There was a real card inside, a winter scene with silver-edged snowflakes. Even before Pierce opened it, he could feel the weight, so he wasn't surprised to see the key inside, the ExIm National logo engraved on its bow. A message had been scrawled inside the card.

Merry Christmas, Al.

TBC…

Author's note: So, in addition to exploring Pierce's relationship with Bucky and how Alexander Pierce, Horrible Nightmare of a Human Being, has absolutely everyone fooled, in Part II I am also hoping to make some sense of Hydra's actual ideology (speaking of horrible nightmares). As a committed anti-fascist, I've read quite a bit on fascist ideologies, but I admit I was pretty baffled by these douchewaffles. (Yeah, I know, I know, it's a super-hero story. But one of my favourite things about CA:TWS is that it's basically the super-hero version of a 70s political thriller, so hopefully I've come up with something coherent.) Also, because my mum did her post-grad work on the Cold War, lots and lots of 20th C history easter eggs are clearly my idea of a good time! :) I will mention, though, that Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin was a real person, and his troops, the 3rd Ukrainian Front, did cross into Austria on the 30th March 1945, so it makes sense that in this fictional universe they would be the ones who found Bucky after he fell off the train on the 5th May 1945. I'm guessing they bumped into fewer frozen science experiments in real life, though. When Pierce mentions the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, that's when Hydra first started putting down roots in the USSR, but the USSR had their own counterparts to Operation Paperclip etc later on, which would give Hydra many additional opportunities to find more cosy little nests (and get to work on rigging every Oscar night, idk). Also, yes, the maths with Harrison's talk about the Soviets' new breed of operative was on purpose, of course! Finally, the line You just missed his heart is from the film Hanna.