Shiva: Everything Begins

[x-maverick.livejournal.com]

On the eve of the Presidential Inauguration, intrigue and violence meet at the Watergate.



The crowd around the Watergate Hotel was thick, as would be expected during such a gala event. There were literally dozens of Inaugural Balls tonight in the District, with tickets having gone into the high five figures for some of the more prestigious ones, those where the new President of the United States would be making some of his first public appearances during his first evening in office.

The presence of D.C. police kept a subdued sense of order on the Potomac Parkway, keeping order as limousines disgorged their passengers, funnelling the well-heeled Washington elite towards the gala inside the hotel. The ubiquitous sight of black-suited men with their dark glasses and earpieces indicated a strong Secret Service presence as well. Even with every attendee having been vetted by security, no chances would be taken with anyone entering the hotel.

Which was why David North found himself shrugging out of his caterer's jacket and into a set of electrician's coveralls that he'd secreted under a dumpster near F Street days before. Separate from the Watergate Hotel was the infamous Watergate office complex, home to over fifty different corporate offices, and the site of the historic 1972 break-in that sealed the political career of Richard Nixon. North remembered - or rather, Cristophe Nord remembered - being seven years old and listening to his father talk about the obvious corruption in the West. Fitting that now three and a half decades later, the former East German agent found himself re-enacting history.

A purloined access card granted him entry into the office building, and the simple act of walking head-down with a clipboard under his arm and giving a small wave to the security guard on duty worked better than a smoke grenade - concealment via audacity, one of the first things that he'd learned at the Ministerium.

The elevator let him out at the fifteenth floor and North immediately took a left turn, heading for the fire stairwell. A magnet atop the doorframe was enough to prevent the alarms from going off while he opened the safety door, and then re-emerged on the thirteenth floor, a long hallway of identical office doors stretching before him.

"Dammit, Daniel," he breathed under his breath, "if you lied to me and this is a setup..." He could feel his adrenalin rising as he consulted the coded notes he'd written for himself after referencing the building plans. Fifteen years ago, the offices of Landau, Luckman and Lake had been on this floor, but the complex had been remodeled in 2000, and the law firm relocated to Dupont Circle. But North wasn't concerned with the law firm, but rather what remained within their office walls.

Literally.

Reaching a door bearing the cheap plastic placard of some internet marketing firm, he pressed a small cylinder to the deadbolt lock, hearing the small thump-hiss of a pneumatic piston, followed by the telltale clicks of a destroyed lock falling to pieces. He made his way inside, gloved hands immediately tracing along the edges of the drywall, removing framed advertisements and product photographs.

"This would have been his office, yes..." he mumbled to himself, looking about, trying to envision the way the room would have looked years ago. A desk, probably mahogany - something ostentatious. Wide enough so that someone coming in the door would have had to step aside to reach a chair, which would have put a file cabinet... there, and next to it...

Producing a crowbar from his sleeve, North tapped the wall in three places, then stabbed the iron bar deep into the drywall. As expected, the plaster gave way, and he began tearing it down in large chunks. Snaking his arm into the hole, he felt around until his fingers touched something small and rectangular inside a sealed bag.

Withdrawing his prize, he looked at the label on the bulky cassette tape in his palm. "STRYKER, W. 11NOV1996. CLASSIFIED."

"Got you," David North whispered.

A tall, heavyset man in his forties with close-cut graying hair strode out of the elevator on the fifteenth floor, scanning the halls briskly. The black suit that hung off his broad shoulders and tightened around a shoulder holster marked him as one of the many Secret Service agents canvassing the area, but in truth, he was no such thing. Where Maverick had chosen a workman's coveralls to blend in, Mastodon had chosen a different route to effective invisibility.

As he removed the dark glasses and tucked away the earpiece that hung down over his ear, Mastodon glanced around for signs of his target. Twelve hours earlier, the word 'mastodon' would have caused George Thompson, clerk in the law offices of Buckley, Goodman, and Lee to cock his head and shrug, assuming the speaker was referring to the prehistoric animal.

And in fact, thanks to the thoroughness of the Weapon X psychic 'deep cover' identity, twelve hours ago he -had- been George Thompson, working in an anonymous Washington office space, playing basketball for the office team in a recreational league, and whose biggest worries had been the leaky pipe in his small Alexandria apartment and the brief he was currently working on for one of the junior partners.

That had changed in an instant when his cell phone buzzed in his pocket and a dry, toneless computer voice had recited a series of seemingly unrelated phrases:

"They've got a message from the action man."

A blanked mind, and the rote, programmed response. "I'm happy. Hope you're happy too."

And George Thompson had become Mastodon, a human weapon. Weapon X, to be exact. As his core personality began to spin up after a long period of inactivity, the voice had recited several more phrases and another codename. A separate part of Mastodon's conditioning had awoken, one that he had never been aware of. Perhaps it was irony, the identity of the 'rogue' operative that Mastodon was being instructed to kill, given the meaning of his codename.

Maverick had to die.

Mastodon unbuttoned his jacket, allowing easier access to his shoulder holster, and moved down the hall towards the former Landau, Luckman, and Lake office. A quick glance at the remains of the door lock had him reaching for the Glock in his holster as he pushed the door open.

At the simultaneous sound of the door opening and the unique tone of a sidearm clearing a nylon holster, North spun and hit the ground, tucking the tape into a protective case inside his coveralls. Continuing his roll behind a bank of file servers, he rose to a knee, withdrawing a suppressed automatic pistol.

Centerline of mass, easy on a big bastard like this. Solar plexus, sternum, forehead. Three shots, one kill.

The training flashed back as quickly as the quiet shots from the pistol. Instead of the wet thuds of bullets hitting flesh, however, the high-pitched squeal of copper-jacketed rounds ricocheting from medical-grade titanium echoed off the walls. Rising fully, Maverick met the eyes of his former teammate.

"Oh shit," he gasped quietly. "Hi, George. Bye, George."

As a nine-millimeter round pulverized the plastic and metal server case behind him, North felt the telltale twinges of his power activating, and remembered William Stryker's words, twenty years long gone.

"We're going to fix that fortunetelling ability of yours, Christophe. Tie it into your adrenalin, make it more combat-effective. It'll take some getting used to, but remember, this is going to make you a better operative. For a better world, Christophe."

Flashes of imagery flooded North's brain as his eyes jerked spasmodically. Juke left - take a round in the kidney, next one in the brainpan. Duck and roll right, crushed under a rack of equipment, blinded by muzzle flash, shot in the face. Run straight--

Maverick sighed as he turned to fire another round at his pursuer. Sometimes all precognition was good for was letting you know just how much it was going to hurt.

The term 'silencer' was really a misnomer, as a suppressor did not eliminate all of the noise from a gun, merely reducing it to a quiet "phut" sound. Mastodon had considered not using a suppressor, as it tended to hamper one's ability to draw and fire quickly. Given his dress and the fake badge in his pocket, he could have passed himself off as an agent long enough to escape in the confusion when someone came running to the sound of gunfire. But a crowd would also give Maverick more opportunity to escape.

Our braintrust can think of at least six ways that your fellow operatives could be turned against you. And if there are six, then there is a seventh, and an eighth, and so on...

Maverick wasn't the only one remembering his lessons at the hands of Colonel William Stryker. Each of the Weapon X operatives, in the course of their tactical training, had been schooled in techniques to take their own teammates out. On top of the possibility of any one of them being turned against the others, it was hardly as if the operatives had a monopoly on their respective powers. Wolverine was hardly the only feral in the world, and Maverick not the only precognitive.

Reduce his options. His power puts him two jumps ahead of whatever you do, which means you need to think four jumps ahead.

Mastodon moved purposefully forward, herding Maverick with steady gunfire and not allowing him a chance to regain his composure. Keeping him off-balance and presenting him without any good choices was the key to taking him down. His clip emptied, but he already had a replacement out to slide in only seconds after he had hit the release to drop the empty towards the ground. Maverick would already know when he went empty, so it was imperative to not give him an opening.

An advantage of precognition, however, was knowing exactly when and where one's opponent would fire each round.

Maverick saw the twelfth round take him in the lower left abdomen, seconds before he moved out of the way and let it shatter a computer screen, sending sparks through the room. The thirteenth and fourteenth were set to double-tap him in the chest, so he stutter-stepped forward, letting the death-dealing bullets bury themselves in the drywall.

The suppressed thump of the fifteenth round was followed by the ceramic-on-ceramic scrape-click of the Glock's slide locking to the rear on an empty magazine. The bullet went wide - exactly as North had seen it before it happened - and he did the one thing he hadn't seen through his precognition.

He rushed the gigantic man, leaping forward, all elbows and knees in tight, controlled arcs. Bone-on-bone contact was jarring, with Mastodon's incredible mutant strength backed up by a titanium-reinforced skeleton. But Maverick didn't have to hurt him, only survive long enough to get away with the tape.

For all that he had the new clip already out so as not to provide Maverick an opening, the other man had created his own opening. The first elbow cracked against his wrist, spilling the full clip to the ground. The second and third elbows were blocked sharply, then a knee jabbed against his forearm, and he dropped the Glock as well.

Mastodon's businesslike expression didn't change, but inside he nodded. He'd expected Maverick to close to hand-to-hand range when he finished the clip. Maverick twisted and struck like a viper, but his mutant power and the titanium lacing on his skeleton would let him absorb plenty of punishment. Perhaps not as much as Wolverine, but it would take more than a few elbow strikes to bring him down.

Mastodon rained a series of blows at Maverick's head, stepping through a sparring sequence they'd each had drilled into their heads. Maverick moved in lockstep with him, the counters coming almost subconsciously from habit.

Show him what he expects to see, get him reacting and not thinking about his power, and then... Where the sequence should have ended with a powerful uppercut, Mastodon instead pivoted and planted his foot in Maverick's midsection.

North exhaled forcefully, folding around the blow and hooking an arm around Mastodon's calf. He knew another shot like that would probably rupture something important; this fight had to end now.

Sweeping his left arm upwards in an arc, Maverick hooked Mastodon's raised knee to keep the larger man off balance, then swept his other arm around to grab a heavy power supply by the cable, yanking it out of the wall and swinging the chunk of metal up into his former teammate's groin like a golf club.

Mastodon barely flinched, even as Maverick followed up the cheap shot by smashing the toaster-sized chunk of metal over his skull, the sound of metal-on-metal contact loud in the close quarters. In a fight like this, distance and positioning were as important as power, and both men knew it. Maverick was staying inside the reach of Mastodon's arms, not letting the bigger man put any force behind his blows; while Mastodon used his superior mass to prevent his target from getting a clear shot at what few vulnerable areas he possessed.

However, the close infighting betrayed Maverick when Mastodon simply enveloped his former teammate in a bear hug and charged forward. The two combatants smashed through one interior wall, charging through what appeared to be a cheaply-furnished conference room. Mastodon kept running, gaining momentum as he trampled the table and bullrushed through another wall, stopping only to throw Maverick to the ground like a sumo wrestler.

Coughing on plaster dust and wracked with pain, Maverick only had a flash of precognition to warn him of the massive stomp that would have pulped his chest had he not rolled slightly to the side. Finding some vestige of strength, he spun away, coming up in a crouch and looking around for anything to use for survival.

"Dammit, George," he spat through blood-flecked lips, "It's me! Remember Bogota? The twins? It's David. Whatever Stryker and the program have in your head, you've got to remember, it's me! We don't have to do this."

Mastodon's expression never changed, as if Maverick's pleading words had fallen on deaf ears. And in a sense, they had. Whatever part of 'George' that Maverick was trying to reach was completely buried under the Weapon X conditioning and imperatives that were telling him to kill his former teammate. To that automaton, the reason didn't matter, or Maverick's impassioned pleas. He'd been given an order, and he had to carry it out.

He grasped a large chunk of the massive conference table and flipped it at Maverick, knowing as he did that Maverick would have seen it and ducked away. Picking a spot to move the other man to, Mastodon threw more pieces of the table, positioning his throws to once again leave the slighter man with fewer options in how to react.

As he threw the last piece, Mastodon was already moving towards the place where he expected Maverick to evade to. Once again closing to a grapple, he brought his forearms down in powerful blows aimed at the other man's shoulders.

Maverick dropped to the floor, arms numbed and clumsy. The lack of reaction flipped a switch in his mind - this was no longer the man who'd been his teammate for years, no longer the friendly "heavy" supporting his fellow Weapon X operatives on missions. This was a kill-or-be-killed problem, and there was a simple brute-force solution.

Reaching out, Maverick's hands closed on a plastic tube. He swung wildly, sending a cloud of copier toner into Mastodon's face to blind the vastly stronger man and buy a few more seconds.

As Mastodon clawed at his eyes, Maverick pulled an anti-static Mylar bag off a desk and climbed onto a small cart to get enough elevation to lurch forward, locking his legs around Mastodon's waist and cinching the airtight bag down over the big man's head.

Choking, Mastodon's fists pummelled at Maverick's legs and shoulders, but couldn't get the leverage to do serious damage. Finally, the mammoth operative backpedaled as fast as he could, smashing his clinging attacker through more flimsy shelving and into walls, doors, anything to shake him free - but all the momentum did was allow Maverick to swing a forearm under Mastodon's chin and wrench upwards, stretching muscles and tendons and forcing him to try and suck for breath in futile gasps as the Mylar bag adhered to his face, cutting off any source of oxygen.

It took three long, interminable minutes for Mastodon to finally slump to the ground, and another five until Maverick let go of his throat. Removing the bag, he checked briefly for a pulse, then swore in German under his breath.

"Goodbye, George," he rasped out as he staggered back into the hallway and towards his escape route. Plans had to change, he knew a double-cross when he saw one. He'd been set up, routed right into a trap like a fox set upon by hounds. Time then, he thought, for the fox to go to ground.

Fifty-five minutes later, dressed in a dark brown suit, David North boarded the train at Union Station, eyes flicking down to his itinerary. DC to Baltimore, Baltimore to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to Chicago, Chicago to St. Paul, flight from St. Paul to Montreal.

In the back of his mind, however, he knew that there would be a pre-cached vehicle in Baltimore that he'd take straight up I-95 to the Turnpike to a county road winding on to Westchester County, New York.

Time for the fox to seek shelter among the wolves.