261/Operation: Iconoclast

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Operation: Iconoclast
Date of Scene: 03 May 2017
Location: Harlem, New York City
Synopsis: The winter soldier goes for what should be an easy hit, and makes a surprising discovery
Cast of Characters: Joker, Winter Soldier




Joker has posed:
     Harlem, the burrough time wishes it could just forget, the crime rate's high, the wealth is low, and people keep to themselves. It's dark, here the power's been down for some time, truck went off the road and into a pylon taking out power to the whole block.

     Left in the wake is a world bathed in darkness, the only light coming from the moon high above in a cloudy sky. All the decent folk have long since went inside curled up to hope the power comes back soon. Shadows travel in the dark of alleyways moving about under a cover that finally see's all the security shut down. In the far background there are already a few stores finding themselves looted in what little time there is before power comes back on.

     In the middle of this land of the low on their luck there's a small building sandwiched between two tenement blocks. There's no label on the building itself, just a featureless structure that seems to be in decent enough repair. Only a few gang tags have been splattered across the front of the building, and most the windows haven't even been smashed in.

     Inside behind the plain gunmetal grey door is a small lobby. Behind the counter a lone man sets who looks hagered and worn down from age. He's about as down on his luck as anyone else here, but almost too much so. Hidden beneath those handmedown clothes and smile that's missing several teeth is a gun, and a shield badge. Just another safehouse, blended in plain site.

     At the back of the room is an elevator and a door leading to a stairwell. Anyone heading up or even down the elevator would just find more tenement rooms, cheap studio rooms the kind of thing no one actually wants to live in. Roaches skutter about the corners of the room, and it's clear this place hasn't been well cared for.

     Yet even still the clever eye might catch one or two tells, the grime is slightly too even, the walls of the room just that slight bit too small for the exterior of the structure. The fact that the lights are still on.

Winter Soldier has posed:
When the power goes out in Chelsea, they bring it back up fast. Upper East Side? Of course, less than an hour. West Village? No question -- can't let the starlets go without.

When the power goes out in Harlem? Tough shit, Con Edison isn't getting out there for hours. Con Edison doesn't even want to go out there, even though it's their job.

A certain somebody was banking on that, when he gave that truck a little nudge off its course. Necessary? Maybe not, but why take risks?

Under the cover of darkness, someone pauses in front of the incongruously-intact building. He's dressed casually, looking normal enough, though there's a bland faraway quality to his gaze that sits at odds with the eerie silence and the dark-- both qualities that are uncharacteristic to any part of Manhattan. It's a quality that persists as he steps in, giving the man behind the counter a glance as he makes to pass through.

He walks like someone who is expected. Like a guy on a casual errand. Because he is.

Joker has posed:
     The man behind the desk looks up for a moment, before just looking back down to his own work the moment he sees that red star. He knows what the soldier is here for, and there's no way he's getting in the way.

     The wonderful thing about the power outage is: While the lights may be on here, the camera's certainly aren't, and neither is the elevator. It's the perfect moment to simply slip in and back out with only physical security in the building to potentially even see a thing.

     The haggard man makes a slight show of that silver ring of his. The design is very much simplistic but it shows his allegiance without ever needing a word exchanged between the two. He flicks a switch, and the stairwell door opens, sliding to the side rather then swinging open. Behind the door is a simple metal ladder, leading deep down into the buildings basement.

Winter Soldier has posed:
The interchanged glance is a posturing ritual, a wordless assertion of identity. The star is shown, and its bearer waits for a response within acceptable parameters. The man looks down-- correct response number one-- and then turns his hand enough to show the ring. Correct response two.

The cold eyes of the Soldier assess, accept, and dismiss. Without a word, he steps forward, passing through the opened door. The ladder he takes in a long controlled slide rather than climbing it, left hand throwing quiet sparks where metal grates metal, landing without sound.

At the bottom, he unholsters a P220, chambered in .45 ACP, screwing on a suppressor with the calm, wasteland deliberation of a man whose mind is clean and monotone and lethal as a snowfield. It's a heavy round, suited for the game he expects.

He is not anticipating resistance, but he proceeds with caution anyway from long decades of habit, his steps making no sound even on the concrete.

Joker has posed:
     The ladder takes him down, down, down far into the belly of the facility. When he lands he finds himself surrounding by an icy frost all around. The cold is enough that one can see their breath on the air. The floor bellow is all metal grating the wall itself sliding open to allow him to step right out into a hallway past the security checkpoint.

     This mission was a long time coming, one that had been in the works since the discovery, a backup plan if all else failed. It was a mission that in many ways the Winter soldier was perfect for.

     To one side of the massive hallway a set of double doors the other leads back towards the security checkpoint Winter had managed to skip right by. The men there likely have no idea what they're even guarding, just that they need to guard it with their lives.

     In the middle of the ceiling rests the backup security, a .950-caliber automated turret. The thing itself is built to take on tanks and worse, belt fed from a pair of twin drums that stick up into the ceiling. The once brilliant glow of the red light on its surface has turned a dull grey, main power cut there isn't enough to keep it guarding.

     The doors themselves normally would lock down the minute power was lost keeping the area securely locked in place till agents can restore power and the automated defense systems. Instead it seems someone has jammed a bit of wood into the door itself, blocking it open just enough for the soldier to squeeze through.

Winter Soldier has posed:
Frost breathes off the floor when he touches down. The Winter Soldier finds himself wreathed in it, bathed in the kind of merciless cold that carries a visceral familiarity to him by now. His head tilts back slightly in an unconscious response. He always cants his head back for a last desperate breath before the cryostasis chamber freezes his lungs through--

Something realigns in his mind. He blinks and looks back down, hauled back to the present moment. The mission is waiting. It was given to him with ironic smiles he did not understand, but did not question. He was made fully aware of how imperative it was, now that things have come to this point.

He manually cocks the hammer on his pistol and walks on. He has one cursory glance for the automated turret, for the dull grey light pulsing in indication of its depowered state. A frown crosses his face like a passing cloud.

The bit of wood jamming open the doors is slightly irregular as well. The Winter Soldier considers this for a dispassionate moment, before-- weapon at the ready-- he slides through the slight open space, senses now on high alert.

Joker has posed:
     The air here is thick, and heavy, the chill having frosted hard to everything in site. A single bank of computers rests in a corner of the room, covered in advanced dials and controls the surfaces of each panel loaded up with every piece of information one might want.

     Wires lead along the frigged concrete ceiling, towards a central platform with a heavy shield around it. The harsh metal structure itself covers the station in question, the resting place of winters target.

     On the myriad of controls for the thick blast shield covered platform is a small lever. It's labeled clear as day "Blast Shield" Why anyone would need such a thing is a mystery, however it is the only lever left in the on position, the usual scientists who would be watching over this room are... oddly missing. The chair left behind at the desk seems to have but a single glove left on the seat.

Winter Soldier has posed:
By now, Winter is on high alert. Nothing is as he expected it, from the jammed-open doors to the absence of the expected reception. He glances at the bank of computers but doesn't approach -- not yet. There is still a chance, albeit a small one, that he is not alone, and he does not currently want to engage in something that would keep his attention tunnel-visioned and his back to the room.

He moves straight for the place where his target should be. He flicks the lever, though he has an idea already what it is he will see when-- if-- that blast shield slides open. His hand tightens on the readied pistol still held at the ready, just in case.

His attention turns to the area where the scientists should be. He steps softly over to have a closer look, noticing the glove on the seat once he draws near.

Joker has posed:
     The blast shield lifts slowly but surely. All around the low groan of the shield lifting up creaks out as ice breaks off from the surface, before clattering down to the ground with a hard ka-thunk as it breaks the light layer of ice on just about everything.

     The glove that Winter finds is a lone mitten, the sort of thing one might wear in this kind of environment. It's just been left there on the seat of the chair which was pushed over to one side, yet as he has chance to look back up he would notice quickly just why the glove was there... A man frozen solid to the ceiling. As if he'd been stuck there and locked in place his expression is one of surprise and he's missing his spare glove.

     At the same time the body is noticed the blast doors raise fully revealing the platform containing... nothing. It's empty. There's just an empty platform, the tubes and wires left connected to a small computer left on the raised pedestal of sorts, as a ramp descends to allow an individual to inspect what should have been his frozen target.

Winter Soldier has posed:
It is a macabre sight. Men aren't meant to be frozen to ceilings, expressions locked in a rigor mortis of shock. Winter Soldier looks up at it blandly, largely indifferent save for a vague curiosity how he got up there in the first place.

Behind him, the blast shield finishes opening, exposing Winter's first guess as to the hows of this unusual situation. A completely empty chamber.

It's at this juncture that most would curse, or at least show some kind of anger or emotion. The Winter Soldier shows nothing at all. He approaches close enough to confirm that absolutely no one is in the chamber, much less his target, though he steers far clear of actually getting close to the thing. Even animals know to instinctively avoid that which they associate with pain.

He finally looks down and dials in a missive to his handlers. It is brief, as most of his communications tends to be. Site clean on arrival. Target missing.

He finally moves over to the computer banks he noticed earlier. Moving matter-of-factly, he attempts to load them up. "Video logs from the past forty-eight hours," he requests, finally breaking his silence. His voice rasps with obvious disuse.

He multitasks that request with a search for any relevant textual data as well. If whatever happened was within the last hour, there's unlikely to be any video feed.

Joker has posed:
     The barrage of responses winter receives is a small wall in fact, a quick response for such a short missive. Winters handlers prove furious at the whole situation. "How could you possibly screw this up, we had the entire path clear for you, literally the only thing you needed to do was walk in, and put a bullet in his brain, we took care of everything else!" Spread out through multiple messages with much nastier wording as it seems the higher ups are FAR from happy with this whole thing.

     They go on about how much planning went into this how many people they needed to re-organize the schedules of, bribes that needed to be payed to make this as easy as possible, one final victory. "Find Captain America, and kill him or you're going to the one in the morgue" Is the angry final response before his usual handler sends a much more reasonable response, explains the situation and pops up... a member of HYDRA the winter soldier will need to deal with after he's done here.

     The video logs show it all going through the day so far, from the change of the guard, to the prep work of setting up a nice clear path. It becomes clear fast that this whole situation was engineered from the ground up. The only footage that points towards the potential of who might have taken the target is an image right before the power went out. A truck pulling to the front of the building with a Red Hammer on the side of it.

Winter Soldier has posed:
The Winter Soldier reads the scroll of incoming responses with bland indifference. The threat to put him in the morgue, in particular, garners an actual quarter of a smile that comes and goes without actually ever acquiring any humor.

Clearly, is his only dialed reply, everything else was not taken care of. You should have had me on this from the start.

His interactions with his usual handler are more casual, less adversarial. He sends back an acknowledged on the follow-up assignment, and then a brief summary of the relevant data he is able to pull from the footage, including a note about the truck with the Red Hammer sigil. There is little else to be gathered from the area, afterward. He cleans up and turns to make his way back out.

He has his next assignment.