Chapter 763

Selling genetically enhanced Velociraptors to replace military working dogs was an excellent idea. The more Evenson thought about it, the more convinced he became that the plan would encounter very little resistance.

The advantages were obvious.

Their sense of smell was supposedly superior to that of ordinary canines. Their intelligence was impressive, and their appearance alone would terrify most people into reconsidering their life choices. As for combat ability, they might fall slightly short of a Husky in the one category that mattered most to Husky owners, namely their capacity for indiscriminate property destruction, but otherwise, Evenson doubted any ordinary dog could compete.

Of course, Velociraptors weren’t exactly suitable for every canine-related occupation.

A guard dog, guide dog, or household pet was supposed to be reasonably manageable. Velociraptors were apex predators. Keeping one as a family pet carried a small but non-negligible risk that an eighty-member family would eventually become an eighty-member buffet with a single survivor.

Still, that wasn’t necessarily a problem.

There were plenty of eccentric people in the world with more money than common sense. Dubai’s wealthiest princes, for instance, would probably pay a fortune to own a dinosaur. Nothing demonstrated individuality quite like having a prehistoric predator lounging beside your swimming pool.

Besides, some wealthy buyers had a peculiar preference for purchasing the most expensive item available, regardless of whether it was the best. If Evenson offered them a dinosaur for less than a million dollars, they might take it as a personal insult.

Russia also seemed promising. If the Russian people could get their hands on genetically enhanced Velociraptors, Evenson suspected the creatures might eventually establish their own wildlife preserve, funded entirely by whatever money they could extract from their owners.

The market practically sold itself.

Evenson was already mentally preparing the business proposal when the Eredar Twins poured cold water over his enthusiasm.

"Actually, we believe this will be one of our most troublesome projects."

Evenson blinked.

"What?"

He had spent the last few minutes considering the benefits. He hadn’t given much thought to the obstacles.

Salora spoke with a weary sigh.

"Perhaps it’s our fault for not understanding humanity well enough. But I still find it baffling. If you want to experiment on human beings, apparently all you need is a consent form and a signature. Nobody seems particularly concerned about what happens afterward."

She shook her head.

"But if you experiment on animals, certain people will practically dig up your ancestors’ graves to punish you."

Evenson’s expression fell.

"That’s what happens when civilization gets too comfortable. People have too much food, too much free time, and too few actual problems."

He spoke from experience.

He’d already suffered the consequences of this strange moral imbalance. He could beat Taylor black and blue without anyone making much of a fuss, yet the moment he’d merely given Hubs a little too much enthusiastic petting, he had nearly received a court summons.

Since then, he had learned his lesson.

He never petted dogs in public anymore. Instead, he would respectfully escort Hubs into a secluded room, close the door, and then resume their private sessions involving the rack, chili water, and a leather whip dipped in saltwater.

Truly, the price of loving animals was unbearable.

Fortunately, the military would probably care considerably less about animal welfare regulations.

They could start quietly and see how things went.

Even so, Evenson wasn’t entirely reassured. He looked at the Velociraptors floating in their containment tanks and turned to Moira.

"Are you absolutely certain these things are controllable?"

"Completely," Moira replied confidently. "I’ve implanted each one with the same ultimate safety mechanism used by the Chitauri."

Evenson considered that.

"Could they just dig it out?"

Moira rolled her eyes.

"The mechanism is integrated with their brains. If they try to remove it, they’ll have to pull their brains out along with it."

"Excellent. That’s what I call a reliable safety feature."

Evenson clapped his hands, satisfied.

Then he noticed something.

The Eredar Twins had stopped paying attention to the conversation. They were exchanging troubled looks, their brows furrowed as though an unexpected problem had just landed on their desks.

Evenson glanced between them.

"What’s happened?"

Aluseseth turned toward him, her expression caught somewhere between disbelief and irritation.

"We’ve just received a report from the security team. They’ve caught a spy."

"A what?"

Evenson stared at her.

Who in their right mind would sneak into this facility? Had the intruder failed to notice the giant biological weapons floating in tanks? Or had they simply developed an irresistible desire to become a research specimen?

More concerningly, Moira’s eyes had lit up the moment she heard the word spy.

Evenson made a mental note to keep an eye on her.

"The prisoner is with Peggy Carter," Salora explained, rubbing her temples. "She says the intruder is an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D."

"A S.H.I.E.L.D. agent?"

Evenson’s thoughts raced.

He considered the possibilities but couldn’t immediately work out why Nick Fury would send someone here.

"Fine. Let’s go see what sort of genius decided to break into our facility."

Nick Fury had been having a miserable time lately.

In fact, his brow had been furrowed for so long that he was beginning to suspect the muscles might never relax again.

The Dark Elf invasion had initially seemed like a rare success story for S.H.I.E.L.D. Fury had obtained advance intelligence about the attack and warned the British military, allowing them to prepare for the impending threat. The Security Council had praised his foresight and was even considering issuing an official commendation.

Then the British government started looking for someone to blame.

The trouble began when Asgard’s Bifrost appeared outside Buckingham Palace and deposited the British pilots who had been stranded after passing through the spatial rift.

That should have been the end of the matter.

Instead, the British Army’s secretary and the First Lord of the Admiralty promptly appeared before the Queen, with the Prime Minister present, and began an extraordinary exercise in blame-shifting.

The Army representative rounded on his naval counterpart.

"Your Navy should be ashamed of itself! Do you have any idea how close your reckless actions brought us to a diplomatic incident on an interplanetary scale?"

The naval official fired back without missing a beat.

"You Army idiots were utterly useless! You suffered casualties, accomplished nothing, and managed to blow up your own territory in the process. Don’t lecture us about competence!"

After trading insults for a while, the two officials suddenly found something on which they could agree.

The British military’s poor performance against the extraterrestrial invasion, they argued, had been entirely due to insufficient funding. They jointly petitioned the Queen and Parliament for a substantial increase in the defense budget.

The Queen frowned.

Her gardens still hadn’t been finished. There was no reason to discuss additional military spending before her birthday.

With that, she ordered her attendants to escort her back to the palace.

Unfortunately for Fury, the matter didn’t end there.

At the subsequent press conference, the two officials continued their performance, except this time they had found a more convenient target.

S.H.I.E.L.D.

According to their public statements, the British military had suffered such heavy losses because S.H.I.E.L.D.’s intelligence reports had been inadequate. The agency had supposedly failed to determine the enemy’s precise numbers and combat capabilities, leaving British forces unprepared for the invasion.

Therefore, the British military’s disastrous performance was S.H.I.E.L.D.’s fault.

Fury and Alexander Pierce had nearly overturned a table when they heard the accusation.

Are you serious?

They had obtained advance warning of an extraterrestrial invasion and passed the intelligence to the British military. The British had then complained that the warning hadn’t included enough details?

What did those politicians expect? A complete inventory of the enemy’s weapons, personnel, and strategic objectives, delivered with annotated diagrams and a complimentary operations manual?

The Security Council was equally furious.

Its response was swift and decisive. Pierce was informed that the restrictions on Project Insight had been lifted in full. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s funding would receive priority, and the organization was expected to accelerate construction without delay.

The message was unmistakable.

Next time an extraterrestrial invasion occurred, they wanted the ability to handle the situation themselves rather than depend on governments that would rather argue than fight.

That alone was enough to give Fury a headache.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the only thing troubling him.

Evenson Richter was acting suspiciously.

After passing along his intelligence about the Dark Elf invasion, Evenson had gone directly to Asgard without even informing Fury of his departure.

Fury had taken the information, arranged the necessary preparations, and then discovered that his source had vanished.

Every attempt to contact Evenson failed.

Worried that something had happened to the man, Fury mobilized a substantial portion of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s resources to locate him.

One of the agency’s standard methods involved tracking mobile phone signals. Naturally, if Evenson had been in Asgard, there would have been no signal to trace.

For several days, Fury received nothing.

Then Evenson’s signal suddenly reappeared.

According to S.H.I.E.L.D.’s records, he was no longer in Britain.

He was in New York, at the headquarters of a company called Gospel Corporation.

At first glance, the result seemed almost impossible.

Evenson never entered the Eredar Twins’ headquarters through the front door. He simply teleported there. The twins had also placed an enchantment over their location that functioned much like call forwarding.

Evenson’s phone signal originated from their headquarters, but the enchantment redirected tracking attempts toward his small shop instead.

Under ordinary circumstances, S.H.I.E.L.D. would never have discovered the connection.

This time, however, something unusual had happened.

Evenson had accidentally stumbled into Hela’s prison, where every connection to the outside world was severed. Even the Eredar Twins had been unable to sense his presence.

Alarmed by his sudden disappearance, they had attempted to summon him using the magical mark they had placed on his arm.

Their initial attempts failed.

The prison’s barriers were simply too powerful.

The more their summons failed, the more aggressively the twins strengthened the spell. Nothing worked until Evenson used the Scepter of Sargeras to punch a small hole through the prison’s defenses.

Thirty minutes of free fall later, the summoning spell finally caught him and dragged him back.

Unfortunately, the repeated upgrades to the twins’ summoning magic had generated spatial disturbances that temporarily disrupted numerous other spells, including the enchantment redirecting Evenson’s phone signal.

The disruption lasted only a short time.

By the time Evenson returned, the enchantment had recovered, and he had promptly traveled back to Britain.

But for one brief moment, his phone signal had been traced directly to Gospel Corporation’s headquarters.

That was the signal Fury had found.

His first reaction was that S.H.I.E.L.D.’s tracking system had malfunctioned.

After all, Fury knew a little about Gospel Corporation.

The company had reportedly helped finance Thaddeus Ross’s mayoral campaign. Its two directors had met with the President, and it maintained numerous connections with the military.

Its initial registered capital had supposedly been thirty billion dollars, with another thirty billion available in reserve.

The organization was enormous, wealthy, and politically connected.

What possible relationship could Evenson have with a corporation of that scale?

Still, Fury had never survived this long by dismissing suspicious coincidences. Following the principle that a little caution could prevent a great deal of trouble, he ordered an investigation into Gospel Corporation.

Then he looked into its directors.

Ada Wong and Kara Wong.

The two women’s backgrounds appeared entirely unremarkable.

In fact, they were suspiciously unremarkable.

Their records were so clean that Fury immediately concluded someone had gone to considerable effort to make them that way.

His first suspect was Ross.

The general had powerful political connections and every reason to conceal the identities of people associated with his campaign. Fury was convinced Ross had arranged the pristine records himself.

Evenson, meanwhile, was almost certainly uninvolved.

The man treated computers like gaming consoles. Fury doubted he could put together a convincing personnel file, let alone fabricate an entire corporate history. If someone asked him to format a Word document, he’d probably start looking for the start button.

For a moment, Fury considered ending the investigation and chalking up the phone signal to a technical error.

Then something caught his attention.

The two women looked familiar.

He stared at their photographs for a long time, trying to recall where he had seen them before.

Nothing came to mind.

An ordinary investigator might have dismissed the sensation as a trick of memory, the mind inventing connections where none existed.

Fury trusted his instincts too much for that.

He entered their photographs into S.H.I.E.L.D.’s systems and ordered a comprehensive search of the agency’s archives.

Eventually, he found something.

It was an old surveillance recording from shortly after Evenson had joined S.H.I.E.L.D., following the incident involving the Abomination.

The footage was grainy and poorly framed. It had been recorded outside a small hotel near New York’s famous Julie Hotel.

In the video, Evenson stood at the front desk, checking in.

Three women followed behind him.

Fury immediately recognized one of them.

Sarah, the cashier at Evenson’s little shop and Natasha Romanoff’s current girlfriend.

The other two stood near the edge of the frame, almost entirely hidden from the camera.

Ada Wong.

Kara Wong.

The same women who now served as directors of Gospel Corporation.

Fury leaned back as the memory returned.

Of course.

He remembered the incident now. He had even teased Evenson about it afterward, joking that the man had barely received his first paycheck before finding ways to spend it.

But the discovery raised more questions than it answered.

Who were Ada and Kara, really?

What was their relationship with Evenson?

Had the three of them simply crossed paths by chance and decided to spend a night together? Or was there something more complicated behind their connection?

Fury had no evidence either way.

That wasn’t a reason to stop investigating. It was a reason to investigate further.

He immediately decided to send an agent to look into the two women and determine what Gospel Corporation was actually doing.

There was, however, one complication.

Fury suspected Evenson might have a much closer relationship with the company than he appeared to.

And if that were true, sending an ordinary field agent would accomplish nothing.

Evenson had a talent for making trouble for people who underestimated him.

Fury would need someone special.

Someone who could enter places without being seen, bypass ordinary security measures, and gather information without leaving a trace.

He would send one of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s most unusual agents.

A ghost.

The agent had lived up to the designation so far.

Upon receiving Fury’s orders, the Ghost had immediately begun the infiltration.

Her unusual abilities allowed her to slip through solid matter, making ordinary security measures largely irrelevant. She could pass through walls, doors, and other obstacles as though they weren’t there.

She also maintained her invisibility, ensuring that nobody noticed her entry.

The operation proceeded smoothly.

Too smoothly, perhaps.

The Ghost phased through one of the walls of Gospel Corporation’s headquarters and entered the building undetected. She moved deeper into the facility until she reached a secluded room.

Then she crossed the threshold.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

A series of deep, reverberating impacts shook the chamber.

Green flames flickered in the darkness like ghostly will-o’-the-wisps.

Every figure inside turned toward her.

Dozens of eyes, burning with eerie green fire, fixed on the intruder.

The Ghost froze.

For the first time since beginning her infiltration, she had the distinct impression that she was the one who had walked into a trap.

And every pair of glowing eyes in the room was staring directly at her.