Mirror, Mirror ↠ Steve Rogers

Chapter Five

While Steve drives to the bank across town, Leila continues to watch and rewatch the video footage of the gas attack on her phone, occasionally stopping to text or call her SHIELD contacts. Sitwell, Rumlow, even Foreman--none of them are picking up.

This isn't unusual. Despite declaring it a SHIELD case, it's not on file, and they have no reason to believe her calls are as important as they are. Hell, it's more than possible that whatever they're working on is more important than this, given the lack of a body count so far.

It's still annoying.

Steve careens into the parking lot, taking the first spot available. When a cop comes over to tell them to leave, this time Leila doesn't even have to flash him a badge; he just recognizes Steve, and stops mid-sentence, stuttering out a "sorry, Captain."

Leila does get stopped at the yellow tape, though. They let Steve in instantly, but they make her show her badge, which is vaguely irritating time-wise but a relief in the big picture. Leila doesn't want to be recognizable. Even in the aftermath of helping to save the world, apparently she's not. Thank God for white male privilege.

She foregoes her SHIELD credentials in favor of the fake CIA creds she uses for smaller cases. SHIELD's become slightly more well known in the aftermath of the chitauri attack, but it still doesn't carry the same recognizability as the CIA or FBI, and the smaller organizations don't tend to invite as many questions.

Most people prefer the FBI creds--they drew less attention--but Leila tends towards the CIA. A lot of cops, she's found, have some kind of inferiority complex about the FBI. The CIA draws less hostility.

Once they get into the bank, she lets Steve investigate the room while she goes to the computers. So far, the officer in charge tells her, there haven't been any casualties; none of the people in the bank seem sick or injured.

She watches the security camera footage as the bank, operating normally, suddenly fills with a thick, noxious-looking green miasma, and people begin to drop. It looks like a massacre, but if she looks closely enough--turns up her rapid learning ability and uses a zoom-in tool on her attention span--she can see that the officer is right. Everyone around her is breathing, and some of them are even moving, twitching in their unconsciousness.

"Do we know how long they'll be out?"

"Not yet," Officer Bradley says.

"Where was the source of the gas found?"

Bradley points to a few vents in turn. "There, there and there. Right inside the grates."

"Thanks," Leila mutters, and the officer goes on her way.

She turns back to the security cameras, singling out the ones that point to somewhere someone could get access to the vents. Her rapid learning is still awake (that's the best way she can think to put it; it's never fully off or not there, but sometimes she can set it aside, and sometimes, like now, she lets it take over) and yet, even watching all four camera feeds at once, she can't find anyone who was there--

She looks up to find Steve talking to some CSI guy holding what has to be one of the explosives. There's a black rectangle on it, blank now, but she recognizes it as a digital clock.

She turns back to the security cameras and goes back further, to the day before, and the day before that, and then--there. Three days ago, an hour before opening, she sees a guy behind the building in a ball cap. He flashes a badge under a card reader by the door, and it swings open.

For a brief moment, Leila's ready to find someone to ask about bank employees, but then she sees him walk down the hallway, through motion sensors that are very much still on. She switches her attention to the next camera. He approaches a door that looks like it should be impenetrable--it's got several locks and another card reader outside--but he opens it and strolls through like it's nothing.