Chapter 5
While Steve drives to the bank across town, Leila continues to watch and rewatch the video footage of the gas attack on her phone, occasionally stopping to text or call her SHIELD contacts. Sitwell, Rumlow, even Foreman--none of them are picking up.
This isn’t unusual. Despite declaring it a SHIELD case, it’s not on file, and they have no reason to believe her calls are as important as they are. Hell, it’s more than possible that whatever they’re working on is more important than this, given the lack of a body count so far.
It’s still annoying.
Steve careens into the parking lot, taking the first spot available. When a cop comes over to tell them to leave, this time Leila doesn’t even have to flash him a badge; he just recognizes Steve, and stops mid-sentence, stuttering out a “sorry, Captain.”
Leila does get stopped at the yellow tape, though. They let Steve in instantly, but they make her show her badge, which is vaguely irritating time-wise but a relief in the big picture. Leila doesn’t want to be recognizable. Even in the aftermath of helping to save the world, apparently she’s not. Thank God for white male privilege.
She foregoes her SHIELD credentials in favor of the fake CIA creds she uses for smaller cases. SHIELD’s become slightly more well known in the aftermath of the chitauri attack, but it still doesn’t carry the same recognizability as the CIA or FBI, and the smaller organizations don’t tend to invite as many questions.
Most people prefer the FBI creds--they drew less attention--but Leila tends towards the CIA. A lot of cops, she’s found, have some kind of inferiority complex about the FBI. The CIA draws less hostility.
Once they get into the bank, she lets Steve investigate the room while she goes to the computers. So far, the officer in charge tells her, there haven’t been any casualties; none of the people in the bank seem sick or injured.
She watches the security camera footage as the bank, operating normally, suddenly fills with a thick, noxious-looking green miasma, and people begin to drop. It looks like a massacre, but if she looks closely enough--turns up her rapid learning ability and uses a zoom-in tool on her attention span--she can see that the officer is right. Everyone around her is breathing, and some of them are even moving, twitching in their unconsciousness.
“Do we know how long they’ll be out?”
“Not yet,” Officer Bradley says.
“Where was the source of the gas found?”
Bradley points to a few vents in turn. “There, there and there. Right inside the grates.”
“Thanks,” Leila mutters, and the officer goes on her way.
She turns back to the security cameras, singling out the ones that point to somewhere someone could get access to the vents. Her rapid learning is still awake (that’s the best way she can think to put it; it’s never fully off or not there, but sometimes she can set it aside, and sometimes, like now, she lets it take over) and yet, even watching all four camera feeds at once, she can’t find anyone who was there--
She looks up to find Steve talking to some CSI guy holding what has to be one of the explosives. There’s a black rectangle on it, blank now, but she recognizes it as a digital clock.
She turns back to the security cameras and goes back further, to the day before, and the day before that, and then--there. Three days ago, an hour before opening, she sees a guy behind the building in a ball cap. He flashes a badge under a card reader by the door, and it swings open.
For a brief moment, Leila’s ready to find someone to ask about bank employees, but then she sees him walk down the hallway, through motion sensors that are very much still on. She switches her attention to the next camera. He approaches a door that looks like it should be impenetrable--it’s got several locks and another card reader outside--but he opens it and strolls through like it’s nothing.
She watches him go on like that, making his way around the bank like he owns it while nothing that should stop him does, and leaves three detonators, each one in a different vent, before leaving the way he came. She swears if the cameras had audio, she’d hear him whistling.
The last appearance he makes is right after he leaves. She sees him again, in the same spot behind the building where he entered, except this time--this time, he stops. Before he disappears back into the shadows outside of the camera’s view, he stops, takes off his hat, looks directly up into the camera, and smiles.
One half of her brain starts putting that together: he wants them to know who he is. He wanted his identity to stay secret only up until this point. He wants attention, he wants fame, but he also wants time. That combined with the timer on the gas bombs--whatever his endgame is, he’s got a huge head start on it. He probably left for it immediately after leaving the library. He even set the gas bombs to go off after the exact amount of time it takes to travel between the library and the bank. The attention to detail indicates an organized criminal, not a disorganized one. He’s not doing this because the voices are telling him to.
The other half of her brain snaps the back off her phone and pulls out a tiny chip. Her ace in the hole. She’s not sure if it’s an emergency yet, but no one’s answering her calls. She’s on her own here, except Steve, and they need all the help they can get.
She sticks the chip into the back of the computer and waits for a moment as SHIELD’s OS takes control.
“What did you find?” Steve asks suddenly. There’s this spooky thing the rapid learning does sometimes, where it notices something without her noticing herself noticing it. She’s not surprised that he’s there now, but there’s a small part of her that’s a little surprised at the lack of surprise. It’s kind of circular, but it’s still more on her toes than she’d be able to be otherwise, so whatever.
“I found our guy,” she says, gesturing to the face on the screen. “And now I’m finding out who he is.”
It’s not the entirety of SHIELD’s intelligence files that the chip carries--even if they trusted her that much, it’d be way too dangerous to carry around in her day to day life, even without the five different passwords it requires to get in. But it’s a minimized version of it, for moments like this. Emergencies when no one’s answering.
“Felix Harker,” Leila says when the name pops up a moment later. “He’s been on a SHIELD watchlist since he was sixteen.”
“As a prospective bomber?”
“No, as a potential recruit. Weighted 5.0 GPA in high school, tons of science fair medals and trophies, graduated two years early, was all set to go to MIT.”
“Then what?”
“Drunk driving incident got his scholarship taken away. He couldn’t afford to attend, ended up at community college instead...now he works as a science teacher at Midtown High in Queens.”
“So what’s his endgame?”
“The bombs were installed two days ago. He wanted to stall us. He wanted us to see him on the library camera, then come here instead of go wherever he’s going. And he wanted you, specifically, to make sure the Avengers were doing something else. Which means he’s got a little bit of a God complex if he thinks this is an Avengers level threat.”
“I’m sure it would be if Fury decided it was,” Steve replies bitterly, but Leila doesn’t have the energy to respond. The rapid learning is starting to get to her. If she can just figure out--
“Midtown,” she says, as the search pops up. “They’re having their science fair tonight.”
“Why would he blow up a high school science fair?” Steve asks skeptically.
“Midtown High isn’t a normal high school. It’s a private school focusing on the sciences. These kids are future MIT grads.”
“Everything he wanted to be,” Steve says. “We need to go.” He starts to leave, setting a hand on her shoulder, but she stumbles forward, grabbing the desk for balance.
“Hey--” Steve rushes to her side. “Are you okay?”
“Don’t you fucking dare pick me up,” she says by way of response.
“So you can’t be doing too bad.”
She sets a hand on his shoulder and peels herself off the desk. “I’ll explain in the car. We’re going to Midtown.”
“But--”
“You’re driving.”
“Okay,” Steve says as he pulls onto the highway, “explain.”
She really doesn’t want to, honestly--she’d rather just take a nap--but she also knows that he’s not going to back down unless she gives him something.
“So one of the abilities I tend to keep on me is rapid learning.”
“Okay.”
“That’s what SHIELD calls it, but it’s really more like rapid thinking, in general. I pick up details and put them together quicker than most people, when I’m using it.”
“You’re not always using it?”
“No. I can sort of...turn it on and off. It’s always there, it’s sort of--do you have a computer?”
He glances at her, looking annoyed and amused at the same time. “Yes, Whittaker. I have a computer.”
“I mean a real one, not the moon landing one that took up a whole room. Oh, we landed on the moon, by the way.”
“It’s a laptop. We can’t all live on the upper east side and have big spare rooms, Manhattan.”
She looks out the window to hide her grin. “Okay. So when you minimize a program, it’s still there, running in the background, right? You just can’t see it, you’re not aware of it, but it’s not closed all the way, either. That’s sort of how the rapid learning-slash-thinking works.”
“Okay. So how does that translate to almost passing out at a crime scene?”
“I didn’t almost pass out.”
“That’s debatable.”
“Whatever.” She waves a hand. “So anyway. When I turn it on...okay, going back to the computer, you know when you use it for too long, or it’s using up too much RAM, and then the fans just start fucking screaming at you?”
“....Kind of?”
“Hah.” I knew he couldn’t be that computer literate yet. “So imagine my abilities are programs. Some of them take up more harddrive space than others, and some of them use up more energy to run. This is one of them.”
“So you used your rapid learning for too long, and that’s what made you almost pass out.”
“That’s debatable.”
“Are you okay?” He glances at her, and despite their banter, there’s genuine concern there. It almost makes her smile. Almost.
“I’m fine,” she says. “It doesn’t take me that long to recover if I close the program.”
He nods a little, then seems to change his mind. “No. You don’t look well.”
She glances at herself in the rearview mirror and is annoyed to find that he’s right. Her olive skin has gone a dull shade lighter, and there are circles under her eyes. Her mind might feel okay, but her body hasn’t recovered.
“Get some sleep,” Steve says. “We have a couple hours.”
“I cannot believe you broke out your Captain voice just to tell me to take a nap.”
“I don’t have a Captain voice. ”
“Don’t play dumb.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “I’ll admit I have a Captain voice if you agree to sleep.”
“...I’ll agree to try to sleep,” she replies. “No promises.”
“Deal.”
“Say it.”
“After the serum, they had me work with a voice coach for the USO shows,” he says, and she could swear he sounds embarrassed under that carefully cultivated neutral tone. “It...may have carried over onto the battlefield.”
“I knew it.”
“If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it, and you know they’ll believe me over you.”
She grins. “This is a fun side to you.”
“Go to sleep, Whittaker,” he says, and then, in a just slightly exaggerated version of the Captain voice they were discussing, he adds “That’s an order.”
“Ugh. Fine, whatever, dad,” she says, and reaches for his jacket in the back of the car before balling it up as a makeshift pillow.
She doesn’t actually plan on sleeping, just avoiding conversation, but apparently she’s more tired than she thought she was, because soon her eyes slip shut, and they don’t open for hours.