Chapter Text
05:30. The robotic beep of an alarm across the room, eyes already half open before it goes off and a tired form stretches to life. Feet on laminate flooring, a shiver at the cold wood, and trudging footsteps carrying you to your dresser. The clock is silenced, the sound of a live radio feed taking its place, spilling out the early morning news as you move to the window, tugging the blinds open and squinting at the pouring light. Still wriggling the life into your fingers and toes on the way to your bathroom, you stifle a yawn feeling unusually groggy this morning.
By 05:45 you’re kitted out for your morning jog, a smug smile lifting your lips as you relish in the quiet streets, loving being awake before most of the other people in your neighbourhood, a certain pride at being active and ready for the day. The chill of the fresh air filling your lungs helps push any residual sleepiness from your mind, and kick start your appetite for breakfast.
Having eaten, showered and dressed for work you’re settled at your desk by 09:00, sifting through files of data and trying to force your eyes to adjust to the scrolling code on your screen. Page after page of information and as you scan through them, you jot down notes in shorthand of all the connections between them, your notebook quickly filling up, the margins taken up by reminders of other things to check, people to reach out to and eventually you have a full web of data to present to your boss. As per usual, you work through lunch, too distracted by your work to notice time passing. When 18:00 came, your phone trilled to life just as you were tidying everything away, with slight apprehension, you lift the receiver to your ear.
“Hey, it’s Troy Marshall, remember from that Expo a few years back?” His voice is warm and friendly, but there’s a tension below the surface that tells you something’s wrong.
“Yeah, of course I remember, you okay? How’s your mum and Terry?” You could already tell this wasn’t a social call, but you didn’t want to jump straight into whatever was bothering him.
“They’re good, they’re good…” Oh god, he’s getting ready to spill something. Your finger twirls the cable anxiously, foot tapping away at the linoleum floor of your office, “So, you remember the expo… You know how you owe me that favour? You need to get to the airstrip for o-three-hundred tomorrow morning. Pack light, I’ve wired you some files to read up on while you fly over. You got all that?” His instructions are rushed, like time isn’t on his side.
“Uhh… Airstrip, three AM, pack light. Right?” You’d noted it down as he spoke, panic rising in your throat as you say your goodbyes and place the receiver back down once you hear the beep at the other end, rushing to catch up with your boss before he leaves for the evening.
The moment he sees you, he beams with pride, gushing about how his trusty intel officer was going to help Frank Woods, a personal friend and the man he thanked for not having everyone around him speaking Russian. You give an awkward laugh and he explains how it’s all been covered on his end - your absence would be recorded as an injury and he’ll make sure your job is secure for whenever you come back. The whirlwind speed at which your comfortable life had been thrown into disarray within a mere ten minutes has your head spinning, but either way you have work to do.
By the time you get home, the sun has gone down and rain is hammering at your windows like a clock ticking down until you needed to be at the strip. You stuff the basics into your duffle bag, a couple of outfits, a towel, pyjamas, toiletries, notebook, pens, and you place the files you’d printed at the very top for easy access.
The cab dropped you off at about 02:15, giving you time to sprint up the runway and be herded onto a helicopter, the guard in the passenger seat with you pulling you up as the propellers start to oscillate. You buckle in, pulling on a headset for communication with the pilot and that’s when you find out where you’re headed. Bulgaria. Just after the lifting of the iron curtain, specifically an abandoned KGB safe house, according to the files Troy sent you.
Said files seem to be dossiers on the location, along with each member of your team. Troy Marshall, who you already knew from an expo event that saw each of your promising career programs, among others, coming together to blow air up each other’s arses. He’d gotten you out of some bother with higher ups after you got tipsy and told them all about your opinion of them parading their overworked protégés around, using them and you to stroke their own egos. Since then, you owed him a favour, and this was how he was caching it in. William Calderon, Troy’s teammate who’d joined him in going rogue. Frank Woods, whose reputation precedes him, and a smile lifts your features when you see he’s taken Troy under his wing. That leaves Sevati Dumas, a freelance assassin who struck out from the Guild in Avalon, previously helping Adler investigate Pantheon, and finally Felix Neumann. Ex Stasi, completed compulsory military service in Germany and then went into training with East Germany’s secret police. You knew of them, Germany’s answer to the KGB, seeding distrust among their people and collecting informants among the general populace through fear and coercion. He’d been one of their enforcers, you dread to think the things he’d done at their orders. But apparently he’d seen the light, fleeing to West Germany in a bid to escape their brutality and wash his hands of violence. Direct violence, at least, as he’d moved onto providing his technical expertise to criminal organisations instead.
I guess we all have to get our hands dirty sometimes, you think, and this time it’s your turn. Once you’d scanned through every document, you let yourself drift off into sleep, hoping the remainder of the nine hour journey would pass you by in your slumber.