Chapter 19 – Nick Fury and Jacob Carter

"That poor Harley is going to go on strike on you, you know," said Joyce with a grin, as they were arranging to have Samantha's motorbike transported again, this time back to Bird City. The big machine had been the last element in a long list of things to do before she and Buffy headed east. Organizing the trip had been quite a job, changing ideas and places to visit as they went on. Half-way through the day, they had decided they would try to find people to stay with in the cities they were going to visit. It was not just a matter of saving money on overpriced hotel rooms; they both had been surprised and delighted to find how many friends and relatives lived east and were willing – sometimes downright eager – to see Sam and Buffy again, and maybe have them over for a few days. They had ended up finding places to stay in Washington DC, with Sam and Buffy's father; in Baltimore, with a college friend of Joyce's; in Philadelphia, with an astrophysicist who had long said he wanted to meet Sam in person; in Asbury Park, with Sam's Uncle Peter and Aunt Catherine; and in Boston, with an elderly Nielsen uncle of Joyce's and Debra's. And they had half a dozen other people they were going to meet again for the first time in years.

Asbury Park was the best they could do to be within reach of New York City. Sam and Buffy had briefly hoped to be able to spend time with their brother Mark, who had been living with Uncle Peter's family; but Mark had moved out the previous year, and at any rate he was in Europe for a long vacation. Still, this was going to be quite a holiday. Both Sam and Buffy had been emotionally bruised by recent experiences, and spending time catching up with old friends and well-loved relations might well be just what both needed.

There had only been one real difficulty. Jacob had of course told Jennifer Hailey about Sam and Buffy's plans. The girl, apart from being his house guest, saw "Lieutenant Sam" pretty much as the centre of her life, a combination of role model and personal heroine, and wanted to know everything about her and be with her as often as she could. And so, of course, as soon as she knew that Samantha would take a tour of the great Eastern cities, she had asked to be allowed to come along.

Jacob Carter suspected that two sisters taking time off from some pretty traumatic experiences might not welcome a tag-along, but had passed the request to Joyce. And he suspected that the couple of hours it had taken Joyce and the sisters to give an answer had been spent in troubled and possibly annoyed argument. But they had said yes; yes, Jennifer could come with them and stay where they stayed.

…...

As so often with Nick, it was business first; and Countess Valentina found this somehow comforting. He was still as she remembered him. He took her to be fitted for a SHIELD uniform and registered her as attached to him personally with no immediate time limit; and suddenly she was a SHIELD agent again. True, her position was anomalous: nobody had ever been personally attached to a Director or to anyone. And while Fury had never allowed the rule against love affairs within chain of command to be written down for his organization, it was still in the air. Anyone could have invoked it against a Director who attached his own girlfriend to himself personally.

"iNon daremo nessuna spiegazione a meno che qualcuno ce la chieda ufficialmente, Contessa; ma adesso scrivo una descrizione firmata della tua condizione, e cito il Dottor Cajetanis, e la metto in archivio, così che nessuno potrà dire che l'abbiamo tenuta nascosta./i" {We won't volunteer any explanation unless someone officially asks for one, Countess; but now I'm going to write a signed report on your condition, quoting , and file it, so nobody can say that we kept it hidden.)

iCapito/I ("Got it,") said the Countess simply, but somewhere in the jumble in her head there was the knowledge – and Fury knew it too – that this was at best an excuse, that would not do much if anyone wanted to make an issue of her position. But if it came to that, Fury would just resign. She mattered much more to him than a career that had lasted too long as it was. He was not Hoover, clinging to his post until well past retirement age and practically to his death. He felt he had done enough, sacrificed enough. And besides, the papers he was about to hand over to General Jacob Carter might spell the end of his own career, or worse.

...

There are some amazingly isolated places within reach of Washington DC. One of them is where the Potomac makes the large bend that forms Harrison Island area, a few miles above the falls. The Virginia side of the river is residential, but the Maryland side is all fields and woodlands and no major road south of Whites Ferry Road. At a particular point of the bend, General Jacob Carter was lazily holding a rod, with one ridiculously small fish on the blanket by his side. Near him, Suzanne Yap Marcello, the Hulk inquiry's counsel, was discussing DC's school system with James Jefferson, the investigator. They both had children of school age and worried about their education.

A small boat with an outboard engine approached and stopped, and Nick Fury got off, leaving a hooded woman behind. He and Jacob Carter had never met before, but they knew each other well by reputation. Fury knew that Carter was a by-the-book officer, not imaginative and without much of a sense of humour, but upright and trustworthy, and that he was taking his investigation much more seriously than many people would have wished. Carter knew that Fury had come up from the ranks, enlisting as a buck private as a way out of the roughest streets in the Five Boroughs, and that he had a reputation for getting things done and for being his own man, but also for not being too nice about the means he used. Each of them knew that the other had earned the loyalty of his subordinates and that neither seemed to be part of any of the factions that fought for territory in the Pentagon. So, while they were not really made to be friends, each hoped he could trust the other.

Fury saluted, which left Carter slightly surprised in this secret and confidential context. He took it to be a sign that Fury was serious and wanted to invoke the values that are supposed to go with the uniform; so he stood up and saluted back, and only then stretched out his hand for Fury to shake.

"General." said Fury.

"Director." answered Carter.

"Are they bitin'?" asked Fury. Carter just grimaced and pointed at the tiny fish on the blanket. Fury grinned, and said: "Think nothin' of it, sir. I think you'll find yourself a good catch today, anyway." And he handed over the large, heavy bag – something like an old-fashioned doctor's bag – that he had been carrying.

General Carter put it down on the ground, opened it, and started taking folders out. He raised an eyebrow at the first document he saw; the second made him audibly gasp, and his lawyer and his investigator turned to him. He gave Suzanne Yap Marcello the folder he had been holding, without saying a word. And a few seconds later, the middle-aged lawyer, who thought that nothing in this inquest could surprise her any more, was heard to go "Oh, my God!"

Fury was sitting on his boat, talking softly with Valentina. "There is no sign of human followers, Nick," she was saying. "I've had an eye on a couple of people who seemed to be lingering, but they're both gone. I can't answer for drones or remote sensing, of course. But really, the place seems quite safe."

He grunted in what she knew was assent of a sort. (It was so reassuring to meet all those remembered habits and ways to behave, good and bad. She needed him to be what she remembered him to be.) "Just keep watchin', though, because there's a few people who'd kill the whole Pentagon, let alone Carter or myself, to stop these papers becoming public". Or, for that matter, half the stuff that Carter had already unearthed without Fury's help.

Fury saw Carter calling him over, and crossed over from the boat again. "Director, can you help us with a few documents?"

"Sure. What do you need?"

"These medical records?"

"Look at the base where they were issued. The Cube. There isn't supposed to be a hospital with a cancer ward there, only a minor injuries department. But these servicemen were treated for cancer or radiation poisoning."

"What?"

"The Cube was handed over to us later, and it is our gamma monster detention facility. We have just sent the Hulk there, after being informed that he had been sighted in Idaho."

"Congratulations."

"Thanks. Well, someone did not clean up house before we moved in, as they should have. We found these records, and those other folders in there marked CUBE. And they show that people at the Cube were experimenting with radiation-induced mutations since the fifties. It did not all begin with the Hulk, as the media have been informed. Not even with the Abomination or the Leader."

Carter swore.

"These people used us as their clean-up crew, mopping up after their disasters. And they were so sloppy as to leave a bunch of documents in the Cube with names and dates. So, they are not just criminal, they are stupid. And the Gamma program was not only criminal, it was a protracted failure. Billions of taxpayers' money was poured in it over twenty solid years, and the only thing we have to show for it are half a dozen monsters so dangerous that we have to have a specialist Hulk-buster unit just for them. Considering that they failed completely and repeatedly, the very fact that they have been continued is a scandal and a theft of taxpayers' money."

"Yeah, I can see that. And they are not the only ones... Don't you find, Director, that there is something about the words 'super-soldier' that makes people go crazy?"

Fury was silent for a while. He had a decision to make.

"General... I know that just too well."

"You mean?"

"I head the Super-Hero Investigation, Examination and Law-enforcement Directorate. Superheroes are my main purview. I need agents who can cope with super-powers, and of course the best thing is if they have powers themselves. And I never have enough of those. So when I had a physicist called Franklin Hall come to me with an idea for a super-agent with incredible powers, I gave him all he wanted – including several SHIELD agents who had volunteered. These were all frontline guys who had had to deal with super-powered monsters and murderers, and who would have given anything for a chance to even the odds.

"I soon found that we were being gamed. Franklin didn't want the power for SHIELD or for America, but for himself. We managed to shut him down, but not before he had become a severe threat. He has to be kept under constant sedation... In fact, if I was as bad as they say, I'd have made sure he was dead."

"And you aren't."

"There are lines I will not cross, General, and killing in cold blood and without a sentence is one."

"I see. But if I understand right, that leaves you with prisoners to be kept permanently sedated and who are permanent threats."

"Yes. Is the status of prisoners like the Hulk part of your enquiry?"

"Not at present, no." Carter thought that he was reassuring Fury, but his answer showed that the man had something quite different in mind.

"Pity. Someone has to force the politicians' attention. I have been asking for policies and legislation on this sort of thing for a decade, and nobody is interested. I don't think most politicians have any idea what a threat superheroes could be, even after the Hulk. And the rest just don't want to be bothered, because there are no votes in it. It will take a disaster... a real catastrophe... for them to wake up, and then it will be people like you and I, General, who get blamed."