Chapter 19
“I’ve tried Erik’s number ten times and he’s not picking up.” Darcy stared at her phone as if it had offended her. “I don’t know where the hell he is!”
She paced the length of the kitchen in Peggy’s childhood home, growing increasingly more frustrated with every unanswered call she made. “I called him, I called Jane’s cell phone hoping she would pick up. She didn’t, of course, but...I don’t know, why won’t anyone answer?”
Peggy didn’t want to be the one to bring up to the distraught girl that she highly doubted that Asgard had things like Earth based cellular phone service on their world. She watched her tap her phone on yet another number, wandering with the device up to her ear, chewing on a thumbnail in worry and frustration. Meanwhile, Ian, whose last name was Boothby, as Peggy discovered, was fiddling with the dials and gadgets on Foster’s homemade devices.
“Do you know what you are doing with those?” Peggy eyed him skeptically, unsure that she even knew what to do with the strange electronic objects that seemed to be like something out of Howard’s lab than anything manufactured.
“Errr….some of them.” He shrugged, fiddling with one widget that beeped ominously, flashing red. “Maybe not as much as I thought I did.”
Peggy had far too much experience with strange devices created by a mad engineer that no one else seemed to understand, and thus she didn’t trust it. “What qualifications do you have to be working with Dr. Foster again?”
The affable Ian shrugged, wobbling his head in an iffy manner that left Peggy even more concerned. “Ahh, well, I finished studies in computer engineering. Just graduated and was looking for a job. That’s how I found Jane and...you know, Darcy.”
The girl was ignoring the conversation, dialing yet another number in the search for the seemingly missing Erik Selvig.
“I was a third when I graduated though,” he admitted in a bit of a pained, sheepish whisper. “I told that to Darcy when she hired me, but she said that was fine, so I got the job. I haven’t really gotten to, you know, talk to Jane about it as I just met her.”
If Peggy had any misgivings before this adventure began, she had even more now. “Just met her when?”
“Just today!”
Peggy counted to ten and then turned to Darcy, as she was, strangely, the only thing in this room that didn’t sound mad at the moment. “Any luck?”
“No!” She threw herself into one of the kitchen chairs, the wood scraping against the tile floor with a squeak. “I’ve called his cell phone - his mobile, I guess, for everyone over here - his home phone, his office phone. I even tried calling the department at his college at Oxford, but whoever was manning the phone said they were making no comment and hung up on me, and I don’t know what that means, but he’s officially gone off the radar.”
“Have you spoken to him lately?”
“Not since the summer, right before the start of the semester.” Darcy shrugged, looking surprisingly grim, an expression Peggy wasn’t even aware she could have. “He was off, but, you know, having an alien trickster god and some glowing metal mind-control spear in your head tends to do things to you. He said he was seeing a psychiatrist and on meds, but...who knows.”
Peggy, admittedly, had not been keeping tabs on the doctor, and she felt a tug of guilt on that. She wondered if either Betty Ross or Bruce Banner had. “Well, the cavalry is on a quinjet and should be here soon, at least the science part of the team.”
“So you really meant it when you said you were bringing in the Avengers, then?” For all that this Ian was a grown man, or at least an adult young person in his early twenties, he looked as if he were a child being told their favorite movie hero was about to arrive.
“That is what I do, oversee them,” Peggy replied, trying very hard not to cast a wondering look at Darcy. “The minute Thor got involved it is a threat that I felt we needed the entire team on this.”
“So, like...Iron Man?”
“Yes,” Peggy drawled, now openly looking to Darcy.
Darcy was quick to pick up Peggy’s disquiet. “Yeah, Jane deals with some big time people, so, if you are working for her, you got to get used to all these famous people and not get star-struck.”
“But I don’t work for Jane, I work for you, technically,” Ian countered.
Darcy was too quick on her feet for that sort of logic. “Yeah, well I work for Jane and I can’t lose my head over famous people and neither can you.”
Technically, save for a brief glimpse of Steve on a video call, Darcy had met none of them either, having not been involved with the battle in New York, but Peggy decided she was not about to involve herself in what was already quickly becoming an absurd conversation. “What do we have on Jane’s data so far?”
Ian swiveled in his seat to the laptop at his side, reviewing what looked to be a series of screens with wave graphs on them. “Not that I know anything that is going on here, but whatever is happening, it’s getting worse.”
“Let me see,” Darcy rolled her eyes, throwing herself up and around to look at the data over his shoulder. “Well, he isn’t wrong. Whatever is going on over at that warehouse is getting worse and it's moving...or spreading. I’m not sure.”
“Wonderful,” Peggy sighed, thinking briefly that whatever was going on, it was all rather like a case of the blind-leading-the-blind. “Can we tell where it’s spreading to?”
“No,” Darcy admitted, clearly sensing Peggy’s frustration. “Perhaps if we mapped this over the greater London area, tried to triangulate where we are picking up anomalies and see if we can find a pattern...”
She took over the computer from Ian, fingers flying across the keyboard as she began inputting data in a way Peggy would never understand. Darcy, for all of her sarcastic personality, was not stupid. Poor Ian beside her stared in fascination as within minutes she had set up something to trace the various data they needed.
“Not so hard, just a basic algorithm.” She preened, pleased she had thought of it, lightly punching the dumbstruck Ian in the shoulder. “I mean, you helped with getting all this data online and everything. So, yay, teamwork!”
Peggy owned that she was a perfect idiot when it came to computers, but even she knew that poor Ian Boothby would likely not have made that logical leap on his own, not without Peggy’s prompting. “Yeah...teamwork!”
Overhead the house shook, briefly, causing all three of them to turn up quickly to stare at the ceiling.
“I believe the cavalry has indeed arrived,” Peggy intoned, somewhat relieved that at least they would have one person who would understand what was going on. She made her way down the hallway and to the foyer, out to the drive. Beyond the wall that formed the line of the property, she could see the reflected glow of the quinjet landing in the parkland beyond.
“They got here fast,” Darcy had trailed behind, along with Ian.
“Quinjets move fast,” Peggy replied by way of explanation, already making her way to the end of the drive. Across the way in a swath of grass sat the quinjet, like some incongruous bird-of-prey coming to squat on Hampstead. From down the gangplank came Bruce Banner and Betty Ross, each carrying large cases with them.
“I didn’t know if you had all the bells and whistles here,” Bruce called from the growing twilight, looking somewhat sheepish. “So I brought what I could.”
“They have wifi, so it’s not totally barbaric,” Darcy called, shrugging at Peggy’s rather acerbic look. “I know, I know, it’s your childhood home and ancestral seat or whatever, but you can never tell with these places.”
“Says the girl who just tried calling Asgard from her cell phone,” Peggy shot back, rather ruffled that her home would be equated with barbaric.
“I don’t know, Asgardians are high tech, they may have...something!”
Banner and Betty ambled across the road, along with Peggy’s frequent pilot, Jake Jameson, also carrying an additional crate of whatever it was Banner felt he needed.
“Welcome,” Peggy offered as she met the group, grabbing a dangling bag off of Banner’s shoulder before it slid to the pavement. “For now my home is your home, as it were. Let’s get you inside and set up.”
She could see the trio assessing the large, stately house. Unsurprisingly, it was Banner who spoke up first. “So, your family was nobility, then?”
“Hardly,” Peggy snorted, leading them inside. “Americans assume that everyone here is either a lord of the manor or some cheeky London Cockney cabbie without anything in between.”
“All of Bruce’s experience with England comes from costume dramas, so excuse his uncultured naïveté,” Betty teased, slipping past him to follow Peggy to the kitchen.
“I know a British professor or two,” Bruce protested, somewhat miffed. “Actually more than that, now that I think about it, thank you very much.”
“You can set that on the counter, Jake,” Peggy instructed as cases and bags were set down. “We have you lot here at least. How about the others?”
“Rogers and Romanoff are waiting on Stark and they will be on their way,” Jake assured her.
That Tony wasn’t coming directly in his suit caught her by surprise, but she let it pass. Banner already was looking over the collection of Foster’s devices, pulling out his glasses from his breast pocket. He stared at one of them much the same way Peggy did, as if it might zap him if he touched it, which didn’t bode well for his input into these proceedings. “What do we got?”
Darcy ducked in, hovering protectively over the gadgets and the computer set up there. “As you can see from Jane’s devices, there are weird gravitational readings, spatial extrusions…”
“I get it, reality is doing some funky things,” Banner nodded, settling down in the spot that Ian had been sitting in. The poor fellow looked a bit at a loss with the older scientist taking up the space. “Something about a warehouse?”
“It seemed rooted in a derelict factory south of the Thames,” Peggy confirmed, leaning against the counter. “It happens to be near where the bomb went off last week.”
“And you think they are related?” Banner asked that in a way that said he wasn’t convinced.
Peggy shifted, uncomfortably. “Given that we were standing there when Jane herself gave off an explosion of violent energy before Thor whisked her away, yes, I think they might be connected.”
“Correlation doesn’t always equal causality,” Banner replied, frowning at the laptop screen. “So you’re already tracking the anomalies as they are growing?”
“That was me,” Darcy pipped up, looking pleased with herself. “Well, Ian was running the data in, but I used it to build the algorithm, simple tracking one.”
“Not bad,” Banner nodded, pleased. “You are?”
“Darcy Lewis,” she held out her hand to him. “Jane’s intern.”
“Oh, yeah, she’s talked about you. Got potential, good with computers, bit of a smart ass.”
Darcy looked insulted for the briefest of seconds. “Ummm...a lot of a smart ass? Only a bit? It’s like she doesn’t even know me.”
Banner chuckled, pointing to one of the other chairs. “You know Jane’s stuff?”
“Yeah...mostly. I mean, I help her put it together, and I watch it, and sometimes she rattles information off at me, so I get the gist of what she’s doing with it.”
“Good, then sit here and tell me and maybe we can figure it out.” He glanced over at Ian. “What about you?”
“I….errr…” Ian stammered, clearing his throat. “I’m Ian...Boothby! I got hired by Darcy to be her...um...intern?”
Peggy smothered a snort as Banner tried to process that. “Wait...you're the intern’s intern?”
Ian looked positively miserable. “Errr..yes?”
“And what does that entail?”
“Mostly just driving us around and lifting things,” Darcy admitted, pulling up devices. “But he is handy with computers. He has a degree and everything!”
Banner glanced at Peggy, who only held her hands up, helplessly. “Right, well Ian, sit over there and help Darcy out. Maybe between the three of us we can figure out what is going on here.”
“Just try not to blow up my family’s house,” Peggy warned, preparing to leave them to their work, just as Sharon finally arrived, glancing at the new arrivals in mild surprise.
“So...party at our place, I am guessing?”
“Something like that.” Peggy waved towards the trio at the kitchen island. “Banner just got here and he’s in with Darcy and her intern working on Foster’s data. How was your end of things?”
“We took what readings we could, but I don’t know what good they will do you.” She held up a thumb drive and passed it over the counter to Banner. “It’s all SHIELD’s data. Some of it might mirror Foster’s, some of it not. I will say this, it’s weird shit.”
“SHIELD’s technical term,” Betty asked from where she was setting up some of Banner’s brought equipment.
“If it isn’t, it should be. Unfortunately, none of it really ties back to our case with the Mandarin. Outside of strange and unexplained explosions outside of buildings in the area, that’s all the connection we have.”
Peggy didn’t want to say it, but that may be all the connection there was. “Anything more from your team on the MST site?”
“Still running forensics on most of what we got. If it turns out to be garden variety explosives, then I don’t think that the two of them are linked.”
“Well, it was worth a shot,” Peggy sighed, realizing her own brand of craziness meant she had her own case to worry about, one that conveniently kept her out of Sharon’s. “I had no idea any of this would become this...mad.”
Sharon shrugged with a zen sort of acceptance. “Well, in fairness, I think I’ve just come to expect mad things happening all around you.”
Perhaps Sharon was right. Madness just seemed to find Peggy, whether she liked it or not.