10029/Actus Reus: Familiar Faces

Actus Reus: Familiar Faces
Date of Scene:	24 February 2022
Location:	Europe
Synopsis:	Incomplete.
Cast of Characters:	Jane Foster, Natasha Romanoff, Jessica Drew, Achilles

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Jane Foster has posed:
Triskelion. 1100 hours.

SHIELD analysts frankly might beg for boring days. Run-of-the-mill intelligence work that amounts to one hour of operations to two hundred hours of surveillance and COMINT, please and thank you. Agents Culpepper and Zhu slug back crap black coffee, threading through cables sent from overseas offices and assets. On the ten-and-a-half hour of their shift, Culpepper rubs his face with an ink-stained hand and squints at the screen.

> ALERT. ACTIVE TARGET: Rostislav Khitrovo. PRIORITY: HIGH.
> LOCATION: 44.8125' N, 20.4612' E
> CLASSIFIED ASSET SEEN AT ERSTE BANK 0945 LOCAL TIME. CONFIRM SIGHTING WITH A-13 AT HANGAR NIGHTCLUB 1300 LOCAL TIME. NO OPERATIONS APPROVED FROM OPS. PLEASE ADVISE.

"Hey, Zhu?" He shifts in his seat. "You run a wire up and find out if there are any ops scheduled in..." He squints. "Wherever that is? I'm getting a positive on Khitrovo here. Seen his ugly face far too often these days." A finger prods his screen as the Chinese woman scoots over and peers at the lurid data in a stream of text.

She shrugs and casts off an email. "I added the photos in case. Isn't that... Lucia von Bardas' lieutenant? Whatever they're up to can't be good. Let's flag it and get lunch."

"Probably a false hit, you know what compies are like. I don't care /what/ Johnson says, they aren't be-all-end-all," Culpepper says. Then he lurches forward in his seat and cusses a blue streak, shooting off another higher-priority email. "What the shit is she doing there with him? In /Serbia/?"

> POSITIVE MATCH: 96.2%. Agent 13.

A bit of typing. The computer belches out 'Restricted Access.' Silent warnings strike any Level 6 or higher at the request for inquiries about Agent 13's whereabouts, not rude, but a distinct ping as if someone wanted to know where Natasha Romanoff was running around this afternoon.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
Natasha Romanoff is currently in one of the shooting galleries that had been setup. She's switched out her usual pistol combination for something a litlte outside of her normal weaponry. A small one hand crossbow that would fire small bolts. The bolts have been 'armed' with paintballs as she would be quickly cocking the hand-bow, firing it at a target on the wall, then snapping another in and firing the bolts as fast as she could at the center torso. From the splatter of the paint, it wasn't as accurate as she would like as she went through one group of them.

Then as soon as she would get the summons, she would immediately go to disarm herself, removing the remaining bolts, going to take up the hand crossbow to put it back to where she had taken it from the training armory, and she's immediately heading in response to the summons. Not bothering to brush off whatever small splatters of paint were still on her.

Jessica Drew has posed:
Some mutations are easy to integrate quickly, and others require a lot of work. Jessica curses under her breath as she comes down the rope strung, especially for her high in the gymnasium ceiling, trying not to favor her left wrist.

Spider mutagens should make the injury heal, but the docs suspects that her relatively new ability to make webs has pushed the tendons around too much for comfort. Grudgingly, the agent heads for her backpack when she is down on the floor and puts a chemical ice pack on herself. One-handed, she fishes her phone out of the bag when she hears the alert, reads the text and is out the door toward Senior Agent Romanoff's office.

Achilles has posed:
    Crap black coffee isn't crap. It's just standard fare. The more brackish and bitter.. the more military folks (and cops) seem to not only want it, but -need- it. Angelo has a cup that he is sipping on. Though he does like the finer things... he has learned over the many many years to tolerate just about anything. And to get his caffeine from wherever he can get it.

    Right now, he was drinking it to get a bit of energy back into his brain after having just finished showering and shaving after a good long workout. His muscles have that pleasantly warm and worn feeling without feeling like they are tearing themselves apart. He was in the commissary where he was having that coffee and some toast. Just a bit of a snack to quiet the dull roar, so to speak.

    The summons made him look at his phone, lift his brows.. gulp down the last of his coffee and head towards the gathering area. He's not late by any means. Not early, but not late.

Jane Foster has posed:
The pair of unhappy analysts send the packaged info-dump from their Serbian assets up the chain to Natasha's office, bundled into a rather succinct problem. Agent 13, a senior agent of no little finesse, appears in a series of photographs. Several are colour, a bit blurry from a cellphone zoom, showing the smiling woman meeting in a dingy neighbourhood populated by several nightclubs, converted warehouses, and muddy river oozing by in the cold. In one photo she cozies up to two men, chatting animatedly. On another, she's on her phone being steered to a club. A third, the Russian arms dealer shoot daggers at von Bardas' lieutenant (another wanted figure on Interpol's list for various offenses involving falsifying documents, trafficking, and several financial crimes) when he leans in.

Just one problem. Agent 13 is in Washington, D.C., and has no authorized assignments in Serbia or anywhere else for that matter. But the limited footage shows Agent 13 strolling around.

And so, on to Belgrade, posthaste, to find out what the hell is going on.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
Natasha Romanoff is going to rapidly review her data in her head that she knows on things. Going to skim over the information that was provided and what she laready knew. Going into the political situation in Serbia, what the briefing gave on the gunrunners.. On the entire trip there she's annoyed.

Whether or not the agent thinks there's something to be gained from this it hasn't been reported in, authorized, or sent to -any- department for signoff on (at least as far as orders say). To the team, she would go flatly, "This will be recon in force. We'll sweep the area and try to locate our agent. Pending circumstances we will be extracting them. Given the uncertain nature of events, I want us to have an idea of the groundside situation before we engage."

Jessica Drew has posed:
Serbia in the winter is not the agent's choice of venues. Traveling with a disgruntled senior agent adds to the chill. Both she and Angelo had shuffled the photos of Agent Thirteen and the men she had been in such close conversation with until their faces would be instantly recognizable on the street.

Jess had speculated out loud to the other agents on the mission whether this was the 'actual' Thirteen, a doppelganger or a set-up meant to draw attention to Serbia. Thirteen was seldom sloppy from what her dossier reports.

Achilles has posed:
    And so Angelo had set himself up with a pair of ICER pistols, and just to make sure, a Sniper variant of the ICER technology. It feels like being a kid quizzing for upcoming tests in school. Oh wait, he never attended modern school. Oops. The thought makes him smirk as he is studying the photos and the like.

    "Should we perhaps have a sedative injector we can use in a subtle situation? It might be better than starting a gunfight like it was the O.K. corral."

Jane Foster has posed:
Serbia could be nicer: Quinjet or not, it's a grey city on a brown river where a smaller tributary meets it, surrounded by barren hills. Hard to believe the Mediterranean Sea's not far off, but the rough terrain bears the brunt of dying winter. Brutal Yugoslavian architecture in its boxy concrete glory abounds, Serbian flags flying on every corner. Not the sort of place SHIELD gets a warm welcome, or any sort of welcome at all. It's an airborne drop over a football pitch for them, descending by wires or sheer audacity to land in the rough spot behind a wall of 70s' era apartments that show patched up signs from the Balkan War.

It's a kilometer hike or so to the Port on the riverfront, passing supermarkets and the dense cluster of buildings, but fortunately a fairly straight shot down Dunavaska Street. That's a busy thoroughfare by Serbian standards, fringed in fences and abandoned industrial yards where metal machines hunker down under the snow or frost-hardened tarps. There are cheap sedans and rusting pickup trucks to be had, shops and businesses more common the further west to the city centre they go.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
Natasha Romanoff would nod at Angelo, "Good idea. Again, there may be some atual operation here or Thirteen may have taken advantage of an opportunity we're not aware of. We want to get in there and assess the situation before we act. So we'll be dropping in as closely as we can to disguise mode. Remember Thirteen also knows normal retrieval and recovery parameters and that pursuit is expected if they -have- dropped. Priorities are to figure out what is going on first. If we cannot or we are engaged then primary mission changes to retrieval of the agent. Defend yourselves and use necessary force but not excessive. Getting into a firefight with arms dealers is messy and we don't want to -escalate- the political situation."

Jessica Drew has posed:
Like many the people who had been under Communists subjugation, Serbians are fashion enthusiasts. Still, Jess had chosen her wardrobe carefully, mid-chic, an ample well-cut black overcoat that hides an ICER with ease, black boots, easy to run in, black jeans- nothing to mark her out as police or foreign. There is a syringe in one of the coat's deep pockets. Her dark shoulder-length hair, pale skin, and green eyes are unremarkable in the eastern bloc.

The agent walks off the field with a soft gym bag in one hand and a knock-off designer bag on her shoulder.

Walking shoulder to shoulder with Angelo, she proposes, "Let's walk the streets and then meet up at Cafe Kuvar on the main thoroughfare if we don't turn anything on the first round. Does that work Agent Romanoff?"

Achilles has posed:
    IT should be noted that on the trip over here, Angelo did his usual routine of brushing up on the local languages... Serbian, Czech or whatnot. Both maybe. It is a handy talent to have traveled so much and learned so many languages that he just needs to freshen up on things. But now.... on the streets...

    With three 'click pens' that are really just cleverly disguised sedative injectors... tucked into a pocket inside the left breast of his jacket, Angelo walks along with Jessica. He has the pens situated so that he can reach for them with his right hand without too much effort.

    His jacket is a beige thing over a black turtleneck that is tucked into khaki trousers. He enjoys letting Jessica be the splash of color in the team. His shoes are even chosen for being local designs however. He even lets Jess do the speaking for him, because he figures why crowd the channel?

Jane Foster has posed:
They move with ease, though the street lacks a sidewalk and traffic threatens to sideswipe them a few times if they don't press up against a fence or duck into an alleyway full of unpleasant smells and sights. Just like New York, home stinky home. The three don't immediately stick out, though appreciative looks from other pedestrians and drivers fall on the agents equally. As it goes, 'average Joe' isn't really their watchword.

Heading for Cafe Kuvar offers a chance to loop around the small port, a gouged rectangle on the riverfront. Stubby lanes poke between the warehouses and industrial lots, linked to the main street. Short work for recon, low rooftops, but likewise a fair bit of exposure as it's not much of a labyrinth. The blinking, flashing lights of the harbourside entertainment district are in full neon swing, given the timezone difference and time to fly over; it's well after dark, glossed in neon and grey, grim splendour.

Using the photographs and short video, the agents shouldn't need more than twenty minutes to scout around and spot the bank directly south of the port or Hangar, the club, to the west of it.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
Natasha Romanoff is wearing the casual sort of clothes and colors that might have been someone in one of hte numerous small militias that dotted the region and acted as personal enforcers for the various ethnic grous traditionally. Her hair's been smudged over so it looks dark, and she's wearing something that makes her almost look androgynous. Her voice is deeper even as she's reviewing the major dialects spoken in the region and can do what passes to an accent from one of the nearby cities. She's going along with the group then and having a belt on that's hanging too loosely and looks threadbare. The blet is however reinforced to act as a garotte and Natasha probably has more weapons on her than the other two combined..

Well at least if one went by her reputation. But they were being subtle on this one so maybe hse wasn't. Or maybe she was. Hard to tell.

A quick glance over at the area as she would murmur to herself in one of the major dialects, grunting softly as she would do so. "Come on."

Jessica Drew has posed:
It amuses Jessica to watch the double-takes Angelo garners from women passing by; that aquiline profile lit by an overhead neon light could grace an amphora or a runway.

"Want to go clubbing? I'll put on you my dance-card," she throws him a smile, all the while alert to their surroundings.

Romanoff's terse command wipes the jesting smile off her face. "Where to?" Her Serbian is serviceable, but she wouldn't pass for a native in a conversation.

Achilles has posed:
    "I always did like to dance." remarks Angelo softly. He grins and wiggles his hips a little bit. But then he hears Natasha's words and and actually wishes he'd taken the time to disguise his blonde hair. But hey... he has always stood out for appearance... even in Ancient Greece when blondes were.. um... for lack of a better term, rare.

    When he speaks loudly enough to be heard, it is in the local lingo, and he gestures to a club as he says, <<There. We should dance there!>> while gripping Jessica's hand and leading her that way in what is for all appearances, a totally spontaneous and casual thing.