Chapter 9: HYDRA Sends Flowers

The interdepartmental transfer request arrived at 9:47 AM on Viktor's fourth day in the facility, slotted between a calibration memo from Nadia's lab and a facilities management notice about a scheduled HVAC maintenance window on sub-levels three through six. This was, Viktor would later note in his research log, its most sophisticated feature: the company it kept.

He was at the spectroscopy station when the document tray registered the delivery. The pneumatic system was old — original to the building's 1960s infrastructure, updated in the 1990s, not materially improved since — and it made a distinct triple-click when cycling a new document. He had catalogued the sound on his first morning. He catalogued most sounds now. It was easier than cataloguing the ones he hadn't chosen to hear.

The document arrived in a standard SHIELD buff envelope, inter-departmental routing codes printed in the upper left corner, his name rendered in the correct bureaucratic format: HARKER, V. / PROVISIONAL ASSET / SIGMA-9 / SL5. The routing origin was listed as SHIELD RESEARCH DIVISION, SUBDIRECTORATE FOR EXOTIC BIOLOGICAL STUDY, MANHATTAN ANNEX. He had not known there was a Manhattan Annex. He had not known there was a Subdirectorate for Exotic Biological Study.