Two phone conversations were taking place at once, barely ten feet apart, and neither of them could in any way be described as calm, or collected.
"Whatever you are doing right now, STOP!" Beth yelled into her phone immediately after it connected with Jessica Jones.
"What?"
"What part of STOP did you not understand? Come to rest. Immediately. And don't fucking move."
"We're driving down Jersey State Highway 35. What, you want us to stop in the middle of the fucking road?"
"Pull over and stop! Christ!"
Kate Kane was standing a short distance away, the index finger on her left hand valiantly attempting to block out all sound on that side of her head while her phone was pressed firmly to her other ear.
"I need a way to get into this goddamn building, and I don't even have a fucking paper clip to do it with."
"What goddamn building are you talking about?" Luke asked after sitting almost at attention. His immediate change in posture did not go unnoticed by his sister Tiffany.
"What's happening?" she asked in that timid voice that she adopted when she sensed that something was about to go down.
"Nothing, kiddo. Work thing," he answered before standing up and walking towards his kitchen.
"A building with an ACD card reader, and I don't have a fucking card."
"Mag strip, or RFID tap scan?"
Kate was in no way any sort of techie, but at least she could tell a card reader that required you to swipe a card from one where you only had to hold the card close to the scanner.
"Mag strip."
"OK, old school. Do you have anything that can generate a magnetic field?"
"We were out for a ride! Why the fuck would I have something that can generate a magnetic field?"
"It was just a question. Does the door have a regular deadbolt lock?"
"Do you not remember the whole I don't even have a paperclip part of the conversation."
Beth was still looking through the door in question, and at the stack of metal cylinders that she had seen at another warehouse several months previously. On that occasion some of those canisters have been filled with stuff so deadly that just thinking about it had Elizabeth Kane on the verge of a heart attack.
"Misty, pull over. Beth's having one of her fits," Beth could hear Jessica say.
"I thought she was over those," Misty replied.
"So did I."
"I'm not having one of my fits. I'm about to lose my shit. Remember those canisters. The ones from Avenue C?"
Jessica felt the blood drain from her face as it was replaced by something close to terror.
"God, no..."
"I'm looking right at them."
"Shit. Shit, shit, shit shit shit. Shit," Jessica said as the view out of the windshield of Misty's SUV was replaced by the memory of the secret lab that was manufacturing a WMD when Beth and Jessica, working separately and not having yet met, interrupted the plans of whoever was behind the endeavor. It had been Beth who collected the evidence of what was being loaded into that extra large weapon. Canisters of high explosives, weaponized Curare, and an engineered, and very deadly, virus that had no known cure unless you included Beth's current boyfriend who had spent the better part of two weeks healing anyone who had been infected by it.
"OK," Misty said, not sure what exactly to add to that brief statement. She had seen Jessica Jones in some pretty hairy situations, but she had never seen her react like she was now.
"What do you want me to do?" Jessica asked Beth.
"Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not until I get back to you," Beth said before a thought occurred to her. "Remind me, who did your guy work for? The one your looking into right now."
"Great Western...no...no,no, fuck no. FUCK NO."
"What?" Misty asked as she began to realize that something was seriously wrong. "What is it?"
"Great Western Biotech. He's a specialist in Biologics. The fucking guy specialized in making shit from biological organisms," Jessica said to the world in general, in a tone of voice that meant, why does all this shit happen to me?
"And I'm staring at the building of a company that manufactures cylinders that ended up filled with a biological weapon," Beth said as she heard her sister's voice increase in volume.
Jessica placed her boot clad right foot up onto the dashboard of Misty's ride and swept her hair back with her free hand. "And two dead men that someone went to a lot of trouble trying to hide. And I guess now we know why. Christ. All I did was get out of bed this morning."
"Three dead men, not two. What the fuck are they going to find in Arkansas?"
"I don't know, but we can't risk sending anybody anywhere until we know more."
Kate and Luke's conversation was still focused on the relatively mundane detail of how she and Beth were going to gain access to the building and what they were going to do once they had it. At the very minimum Beth wanted a sample of the raw cylinders that sat on several pallets they could see. If Trish had been present her keen eyesight, that more resembled the 20/5 eyesight of a hawk rather than the 20/20 version that most humans aspired to, would have noticed that these cylinders lacked the fittings and the color coded bands that their filled siblings had possessed when Beth liberated them from a warehouse in Manhattan last summer.
"What do you have to work with?" Luke asked. "Look around. What do you see?"
"Nothing. A company van, giant tanks filled with compressed whatever, rusting chain link fences," Kate was recounting as her eyes took in the surroundings.
"Can you break the glass in the door?"
"It looks like security glass. If I had enough time, and a sledge hammer, maybe."
"The company van. Can you hot wire it?"
"What is this, the 1990's? No, I can't hot wire a van with an ignition immobilizer and a chip key," Kate replied as she stopped next to the van again and peered into the cabin. It was at that moment that her luck and, by extension, Beth's began to improve.
"Who's the patron saint of burglars?" Kate asked as she stared at the lanyard with the identification tag and key card dangling from one end where it hung from the rear view mirror.
"Is there one? And does it matter if there is, you being Jewish and all?" Luke asked.
"We can talk about it later," Kate replied as she sprinted to that part of the parking lot that was the most deteriorated. "Gotta go, need both hands," she said before ending the call. She returned her phone to the side pocket of her jacket and used both hands to pry up the largest chunk of broken asphalt in the bunch before sprinting back and adding her arm's strength to her forward momentum as she hurled the dense material at the passenger's side window of the van.
"What the fuck was that sound?" Jess asked Beth when the sound of breaking glass reached her ear. Beth watched as her sister unlocked the door, reached inside and existed again with her prize clutched in her right hand.
"Gotta go, talk later," Beth said as she ended her own call.
"Let's hope they didn't have any 4K camera watching that side of the building," Julia said later as the three women stared at the liter sized cylinder that sat on Kate's glass coffee table.
"They had bigger ones than that. Some of them were much bigger. We saw four or five different sizes. This one looked like the ones from before, and it was the only one that would fit into my saddle bag."
Julia had pulled up the footage from the warehouse on Avenue C and stopped it at the point where Beth had begun to place the color coded cylinders in the carry case. She overlay a grid on the frozen image and did a quick measurement. "It is definitely the same one. But it's missing the colored bands, and all that stuff on the end."
Beth's memory of that night had not faded in the least. The night she had stood just an arm's length away from a device that was being loaded with hundreds of these canisters. The night she had met Jess. The night that she, and a good chunk of New York City, had dodged a horrible death by the skin of their teeth.
Luke moved his face closer to the frozen image on the screen. "That thing that screws into the inside is a valve or a filling port of some sort, but I can't tell how it's opened or closed. That thing on the outside is some sort of collar, but I don't recognize it."
Beth was still a bundle of nervous energy and her pacing back and forth was not burning enough of it away to make any noticeable difference. "Where the hell are they?"
"They'll be here. Give them time. It's not like either one of them was sitting around waiting for us to call."
Kate had never seen the footage of what went on in the warehouse that was currently frozen on display on Julia's laptop screen, and her attention had been riveted on that screen once Julia had fast forwarded to the section she wanted and pressed play. It was only when the image was paused that Kate remembered an important detail.
"Didn't you tell Jessica you'd call her back?" Kate asked her nervous twin before leaning over and resuming the playback.
"Shit. I forgot," Beth said as she but her phone to her ear.
It took Jessica barely one ring to answer the call. "About fucking time."
Beth's step count was increasing at a steady rate as she marched back and forth in front of the large glass windows that looked out over the Gold Coast. "Where are you now?"
"Well we're not sitting on the side of the goddam highway anymore. We're in a bar not too far from the exit we took. And I'm trying to kill off all of my brain cells that are holding onto any memory of that fucking warehouse."
I need to calm the fuck down, Beth thought as her steps slowed but did not stop. "It's the same cylinder. No question. This one's new. Pristine. I'll send you the video of what we found. Has to be the company that made the batch that we found last summer."
Pacing seemed to be contagious in that instant as Jessica stood up and began to walk back and forth, drawing the attention of almost everyone in the bar. "So they sold them to someone. Who either sold them to someone else, or not. Either way, they ended up in that warehouse, and in that secret lab."
Beth finally came to rest as a thought occurred to her and she communicated that thought to Julia. "Remember all those shell companies that owned the company that owned that warehouse? I bet you one of those companies bought those cylinders, and then shipped them to the warehouse they owned."
Jessica could hear Beth's comment, and added her own idea. "Or one of those shell companies owns the company that makes them."
Julia did a quick search. "No, they've been around long enough that their original address was in West Germany. They seem legit."
"So what pieces of the puzzle are we missing? What does the guy from Arkansas have to do with this?" Jessica asked.
Beth had finally gotten her breathing under control with the help of a chant that a friend of Aric's had taught her.
Hózhó náhásdlíí'
Hózhó náhásdlíí'
Hózhó náhásdlíí' {it has become beauty again}
Breathe. Breathe in. Breathe out. Just Breathe. "I don't know. Might have to send someone out there to ask."
Kate had reached the part of the video where Beth was running towards a waiting SUV when she heard the familiar sound of the elevator arriving on her private floor of the Kane Building, and was not surprised when the door opened only a moment later.
"Seems like only yesterday that we were all here," Barbara said as she, Laurel and Trish walked back into Kate's apartment.
"When I told Kristen that I wanted today off so I could show Trish around, I meant show her more that this apartment," Laurel said, "not that I don't love your place, but still..."
"Wait till you see the..." Barbara started to say, but the words workshops evaporated under Kate's withering gaze.
"The what?" Laurel and Trish said almost in unison.
Kate was still searching for a verbal way out of the box that Barbara had painted herself (and Kate) into when she was rescued by her sister.
"Look what we found," Beth said as she picked up the cylinder and tossed it to Trish.
Trish had not taken part in the unmasking of the plot to detonate two WMD's on US soil, and she had only ever seen the devices in photos, but that had been enough exposure for her to recognize what she was now holding in her hands.
"No fucking way," she said as her mind tried to wrap itself around the idea. "No fucking...shit."
"What? Laurel asked, unknowingly repeating Misty's words verbatim, "what is it?"
Beth's mind had decided that another round of chanting was in order, so it was Kate that replied. "This is what we found in East Troy."
"You were supposed to look for what's-his-name's car in East Troy," Barbara replied. "What the Hell is this thing?"
"You might want to sit down."
"Got it. Stay safe," Jessica said before ending the call and placing her phone on the small table only to refill her hand with her drink. "Beth says to stand down. This fucking thing is about to get a whole lot bigger."
"Bigger as in two WMD's bigger? Bigger as in every alphabet agency in DC that has been trying to find out who was behind those things bigger?" Misty asked. "Are those agencies gonna take over looking for a 2005 Land Rover that belongs to a guy that was fished out of the Chicago River?"
"No. That's small potatoes compared to a few million people that are still alive because Beth and I tripped over their plans before they could finish them."
"I think it's time you filled me in about what we're talking about. Start at the beginning, and end with us sitting here while you sweat through your clothes and drink yourself stupid."
Misty was not wrong. The thought of what Jess and Beth had narrowly avoided, what a good portion of North America had narrowly avoided, was bringing her as close to a panic attack as she had ever been. It had taken three double bourbons before she could even talk about it.
"Fine," she said by way of a beginning, "flashback to July. I take a contract from Kyle Richmond to investigate a warehouse on Avenue C suspected of storing weapons. You know the one?"
"Sure. The one next to the Conn Edison Power Plant that the cops had cordoned off for a month."
"Turns out that Beth was investigating the same warehouse, though she and her partner were working solo. That was how the two of us met, and we met in the middle of a secret fucking lab that was building a weapon of mass destruction. Beth got farther inside than I did and was able to get samples of what they were loading into the weapon, samples that were contained in color coded cylinders. We bust up their plans, and the NYPD descends on them, quickly followed by feds of all sorts, and we think job well done. But guess what? They were building another one in southern California, except we find that out too late and it blows up inside their secret lab in San Diego."
"Holy shit. Holy fucking shit. Why did I never hear about this?"
"Why do you think you never heard about it. They covered it up. The feds, the NYPD, the SDPD, anyone and everyone involved made goddamn sure the truth didn't get out. How the hell would that look? One hundred times worse than 9-11. One thousand times worse."
"Nobody died in the explosion?"
"A bunch of people died in the explosion. But they were all people working on the weapon."
"Nobody died from the whatever it was?"
"It was a virus manufactured by crossing a coronavirus with a strain of influenza. They weaponized a virus so that it would spread rapidly and kill anyone it touched."
"Jesus fucking Christ. How many people did it kill?"
"None, as far as we know. Beth's new boy toy spent two weeks on the west coast cleaning up that mess, though they weren't officially a couple at that point."
"Cleaning up?"
"He healed everyone who was exposed, and probably a fair number that they only suspected might have been exposed. There's a shitload of really healthy people walking around California now that might be dead otherwise."
"He healed..."
"It's a long story. But the thing is that these three dead guys? One of them worked for the company that manufactured the containers we found holding that shit. Hundreds of containers, waiting to be loaded into some sort of delivery system. That's what Beth called me about. That's what she found."
"Shit. So that's what's got you so upset."
"I'm pretty fuck past upset at this point," Jessica replied before downing the rest of her drink. "You know how close we came to having most of the population of North America wiped off the map? Too. Fucking. Close. Aric could barely keep up with fucking San Diego. He can do some amazing shit, but he can't bring the dead back to life, and a lot of people have asked him to do just that. Tens of millions? Hundreds? We would have been royally fucked. But we weren't. We're aren't. Because me and a woman I hadn't met yet stumbled into the same fucking warehouse at the same fucking time. And the assholes that almost did that are still out there. Upset. For fuck sake."
Misty's head was spinning, figuratively and almost literally, as she tried to process what she had just heard. She was no stranger to secret groups plotting mass death and destruction in order to further their plans for world domination. The last plan she was involved in had cost her a perfectly good arm. But this...
She reached out her organic hand and closed it gently on Jessica's where it lay on the table. "Hey. I'm sorry. I didn't know. I just thought we were looking for a dead guy's car."
"We were. We are. At least I thought we were. Who the fuck could have predicted this...shit storm."
"What you said before...this guy specialized in making stuff from biological whatever. Did he make the virus?"
"No, the guy that made the virus wound up dead in some back alley in the city. This guy...he's connected somehow. Otherwise, why kill him? Why kill any of them unless they're all connected. And are these three the only ones?"
Misty remained calm, her voice reasonable as she asked her question."So there's still a question to be answered, right?"
Jessica took a deep breath and considered ordering another drink, but she knew that there was not enough bourbon on the planet to fix this problem, and she was already in line for a killer headache later, and making that worse wouldn't help either. "Right."
"So...we standing down?" Misty asked, reminding Jess of Beth's directive.
Jessica Jones' anger was rapidly burning off the alcohol in her bloodstream. She could feel her head clearing even while she was answering. "Not a fucking chance."