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| Scene Title | In Sheep's Clothing |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Claire Bennet breaks into the residence of Homeland Security's CDC liaison Howard Lemay to earn Rebel's trust… |
| Date | March 28, 2010 |
Battery Park City
Eighteen floors up from the street, signs of forced entry aren't as common as street-level breaking and entering. A splintered door frame shows a gaping crack in the wood, splinters scattered on the hallway carpet on one side of the threshold and on the tile on the other. An iron pry bar rests just inside the door, leaning up against the powder blue painted wall beneath the light switch.
Snow is tracked in vague shapes of footprints beyond the door, gray melt water muddying what should be clear. Boot treads leave defined marks over by a coffee table scattered with loose paperwork that has clearly been sifted through. A MasterCard bill, an Ikea catalog, nothing worth the time it would take to more closely examine. This building's burgular has other intentions, and a father who excelled at keeping secrets exactly where this burglar wasn't allowed to look — his office.
Through the spacious and well lit apartment her watery boot prints leave a clear history of where she's been, and the boot mark on the middle of a faux wood door that had once been locked and closed, barring entrance into a private office is a substitute for the one she wishes she'd left on her own father's office door. There's so much substitution for aggression in Claire Bennet's life.
Sunlight plays across her blonde hair, what of it is visible beneath the dusty gray cap and wears, matching the maintenance jump suit draped over her small figure. Remarkably her largely absent credentials as an employee of the Sullivan Water Maintenance Company checked out at the front desk, the building security cameras always looked the other way when she approached, and right now the phones that should be ringing the front desk to report a suspicious noise at apartment 1801 aren't getting through, nor is the elevator stopping on the 18th floor.
Claire may have come alone, but she isn't alone in the strictest sense.
The office she's forced her way into is so reminiscent of her father's; a glass wall viewing out to the rest of the apartment shadowed by drawn blinds, a desk covered in paperwork, two tall filing cabinets, photographs of a family hanging on the wall, and yet not enough bedrooms for a wife and a son here. Maybe the man in these photographs is too much like her father.
It's that thought which has Claire more nervous than before.
Glancing around, Claire takes a deep breath letting it out slowly, she didn't think she would get this far truthfully. Fingers lift to flick a stray strand of blonde hair out of her face an d tuck it under her hat, as she eyes the desk. She moves to run fingers along the paperwork laying on the desk, looking for files. Anything with the file names of VS7101 or CS7102.
How many times had she peeked at his stuff when he accidentally left the door open, or rifled through boxes. It was her high school years all over again. Burying herself to the task, she lets her eyes scan over things quickly, a digital camera pulled from her pocket.
Rebel wasn't the only one she was there for.
The paperwork laid out ont he desk is all from the CDC, detailing the shipment of H5N10 vacciene through the city of New York, areas where it was orders and in what volume. There's a list of documents standing up in a black plastic filing rack that all bear a somewhat familiar logo, it's reminiscent of Pinehearst's DNA helix, but it is imposed on the logo of something called "The Commonwealth Institute." All of the documents, as Claire breezes through them, seem to describe a timetable of events that aren't readily obvious in their meaning:
3/29/10 - 3/30/10: Appointment of Site 17 Infected containment.
4/1/10: Sweep of Site 17 of Infected for removal.
Goal Outline: Establish checkpoints into Site 17, mobilize National Guard and Stillwater PMC.
Flipping through those documents, everything seems to be classified with codes and numbers and nothing concrete. Blue eyes manage to find the nearby filing cabinets, locks on each of the drawers, but these are more suited for her lockpick gun. Setting the papers down after snapping photographs of them, Claire's able to insert the prongs of the lockpick gun into each of the locks on the filing cabinet, squeezing the trigger repeatedly as it works and unfastens each of the much cheaper deterrents than the main entrance to the apartment.
These filing cabinets are filled with paper documents in standing folders. As Claire fingers through the tabs on the files, there's hundreds of documents labeled only with serial numbers. The left filing cabinet begins at VS7000 and ends somewhere around what looks like VS7300 on the bottom drawer, while the right filing cabinet begins at CS7000 and ends at CS7300. The documents Knox asked for have to be in here somewhere.
A glance goes to the way she came from, as she steps along side top drawer, head shifting to the side as she strains to listen for the sound of someone approaching. She hopes like hell Rebel will give her a heads up if someone is coming, since he is why she's here. Finally, her eyes drop to the drawer, finger nails click softly over tabs as she searches the VS files for the right number.
Once she's gone through those, the drawer is shut and the next open, fingers sliding till she is close, then they start to walk the files one by one.
VS7098
VS7099
VS7100
VS71..
There! The file is pulled out of the drawer, but she doesn't look yet, she tucks it under her arm and moves to repeat the procedure with the CS files, moving quickly. Once that one is found, then does the regenerator take the time to look. Dropping them on the desk, she flips one open.
A beep at her thigh, has her pulling out her cellphone, brows lifting, her heart giving a solid thump, as for a moment she fears that her time is up. Instead she finds a message to snap a photo of the desk with her phone?! Brows furrow and she glances at the desk, spotting the schedule again. That could be important. A snapshot is taken with her phone, before it's dropped into her pocket again, the same picture taken by the camera. Richard will want to see that.
Then she flips open the files and starts to snap pictures trying to get the information into the frames before she has to leave.
VS7101
Name: Classified
Age: Classified
Date of Birth: Classified
Status: Registered Evolved (Tier-3)
Ability: Magnetism Manipulation
Last Known Location: Moab Federal Penitentiary
Apprehending Agent: Bianca Karina
//[Paragraph Omitted: Classified]
The Company first learned about the subject after major law enforcement organizations across Europe and the United States linked a rash of unusual bank robberies to a single individual. The suspect— known only as "the German" due to witness accounts of his accent— apparently used extreme force to penetrate physical security measures, tearing bank vault doors in half and blasting holes through reinforced steel walls. Yet law enforcement agencies were unable to find any chemical or physical evidence of explosives or tools.Despite a pre-operational consensus that the subject was a posthuman capable of manipulating metal, the extent of the subject's abilities was not realized until the acquisition itself. [Sentence Omitted: Classified] At one point, the subject was able to redirect bullets in mid-air, killing Agent Patterson with his own weapon. [Sentence Omitted: Classified]
[Paragraph Omitted: Classified]
As a result of the subject's initial counter-strategy upon regaining consciousness after retrieval— see CSIR-0704 for facilities impact report— the subject has been maintained under Class IV sedation while additional measures are implemented to facilitate further communication. [Sentence Omitted: Classified]
Pre-operational analysis indicated that the subject inflicted bodily and extraneous property damage only when necessary to achieve primary objectives— generally large-scale theft— but new intelligence gained during the subject retrieval suggests significant potential for improvement in the initial psychological profile. Additional psychoanalysis is expected to reveal highly sociopathic instincts, apparently projected in close psychological association with the subject's SLC-expressive ability.
Claire's eyes scan over the document as she records it, brows furrowed and recalling those familiar details of a Company dossier, but the clear number of redactions on this one is staggering, typically the Company doesn't have anything at all to hide in these. As she closes that folder and moves to the next, opening it up to scan over, the details here are far more clear.
CS7102
Name: Williams, Ashley
Age: 25
Date of Birth: 05/11/1983
Status: Registered Evolved (Tier-3)
Ability: Peak Human Performance
Last Known Location: Moab Federal Penitentiary
Apprehending Agent: Non-Company
No Compay Dossier available. Recognized antisocial behavior, borderline personality, violent tendencies. Listed as known escapee of Moab detention center following temporal distortion, Homeland Security files unavailable.
Paging through Ashley's file, there's equally little information, and Claire's not quite able to put the pieces together on the why of these dossiers that she's sunken down into reading when there's a tell-tale sound in the threshold of the office; the click of a handgun's hammer snapping back. Unfortunately for Claire, there's not even so much as a warning shot or a who are you before the loud report of a forty-five caliber handgun blasts through the office, punching a two inch wide exit hole out her chest as blood and fragments of Claire's right lung and pectoral muscle sprays across the files and the opposite wall before she collapses to the ground.
In her periphery, in the brief moment of black that accompanies the bright white of what should be blinding pain, the blonde can make out a man well over six feet tall standing in the doorway, dress shirt pressed neatly, dark slacks and a crisp red tie. His wrinkled brow is furrowed, smoke venting out from the barrel of his distinctive Company-issue firearm. It lowers, slowly, and behind where the gargoylish countenance of Howard Lemay stands, there is a plastic basket of folded laundry.
Looks like he was in the building still.
Crumpling in on herself, the blonde can watch out of the corner of her eye, even if she can't hide the bloody weeze of her one working lung. As she forces air into her lung, her mouth hangs open, a line of blood pooling on the floor. Even as she bleeds out on the floor and her coveralls, Claire's body is doing it's work, repairing what damage is done. Each breath is a bit easier, but she doesn't dare cough. Fibers seek out others of their kind patching up the hole, she doesn't have much time, he'll figure it out soon enough.
Her mind casts back to Madagascar and her whole body goes still, her mind going to that place it hasn't been in sometime. It's the one thing she did over and over when she fought Rasoul's men. She simply starts pulling her legs under her, she should be dead right? Hopefully, the sight of the young blonde woman, moving is enough to give her time to pull the handgun out of her overalls and swing around to try and shoot a leg.
The look in those blue eyes is empty and devoid of emotions, something she hasn't been a long time. It's a look that says she's not afraid to die.
Howard Lemay has expected a lot of things in his time as an agent of the Company, but had he recognized Claire Bennet on his shoot-first entrance into his home office, he may have considered the fact that one .45 round to the chest wouldn't be taking her down. The snap of a gunshot from Claire strikes Howard square in the calf with a shred of his pantleg and a powder-puff spray of blood, sending him collapsing to the floor, Company-issue firearm falling from his hands and skidding across the floor, coming to a stop under the living room table.
Howard rolls onto his side, one hand clutching his leg, eyes wrenched shut and a breath sharply hissed out before he struggles to try and regain focus enough to start looking around and find where his gun even went. His other hand is going for his right pant leg, scrabbling and clawing at the pinstripe fabric, trying to pull up the cuff while he reaches down.
Claire is one her feet in an instant, files scooped up and stuffed in her coveralls even as she moves around the desk. Camera tucked in a pocket. "Just had to be home." Claire practically growls, out as she moves towards the man, the knit cap pulled off in a tumble of blonde hair, her blood is every anyhow.
Good bye pardon.
Of course, maybe that's what Rebel wanted. In truth in this moment, Claire couldn't care less about the pardon. A part of her is back overseas, this isn't a good thing. There is no feeling in the regenerators eyes as she hurries toward the man. Maybe it is the fact she hasn't broken, like Liz thought she would, or the fact that she hasn't let herself mourn her lost memories.
Whatever it is that drives the blonde, he better act quick if he can, cause a boot is headed for his head, since she hasn't missed what he's trying to do. Can't have him shooting her in the back as she leaves.
The moment that boot impacts with Howard's head, his world goes completely black. Silence is his world in that inscrutable span of time, abject silence and darkness, until bleary eyes slowly flutter open and he finds both his apartment dark from the passage of time into night, and the hand of a familiar man resting on his shoulder, brows furrowed and worry painted across his face. "…'owie…" he hears the sound muffled, "…Howie?…" a hand gently shakes his shoulder again, stirring Howard into consciousness as his dark eyes stare up at the young man in a dark jacket crouched over him.
"Jesus Christ Howie what the hell happened?" Gun out and scanning the apartment, Homeland Security agent Desmond Harper seems to go unfocused for a moment, pupils dilating and eyes shuddering from side to side before settling again. "Howie who shot you? Jesus christ buddy come on talk to me." There's a hand near his leg, fingertips padding tackily on blood.
"Bennet." Howard breathes out, dryly, looking down at the pool of dried blood near his leg. "It was Claire Bennet," he emphasizes, as if the name were not wholly unfamiliar between the two of them. Harper's brows furrow, one lifting higher than the other before he nods his head slowly and brings a hand up to one ear, tapping two fingers on his headset worn there.
"This is Agent Harper, I'm at Agent Lemay's house, he was attacked by Claire Bennet." Eyes wander to the office, brows furrowed. "We're looking at a possible security breach, I want eyes and ears on the street looking for her. No sign of security systems being activated here, she might be working with Rebel."
Howard swallows, dryly, and reaches up to curl his fingers into Harper's jacket. The younger agent looks down, a scowl forming on his lips. "No," Desmond states with a tense crease of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes to his headset. "Don't even bother calling Kershner, we need to find Bennet and find out what she knows. I need an ambulance here, too."
"Now."