update: marvel comics
[Despite the careful cover ups and easy culprits in the deaths of the respected diplomat and his friend the rebel leader, word is getting around to Hydra that someone wants their heads. They get nervous, and some cells start shutting down projects to move them elsewhere or putting them into cold storage. They move, and moving makes them vulnerable. These public assassinations, then, work exactly as their architect had planned.
Much like the deaths of the men in the bunker, the next attack is quiet. It does not hit the international press. Within Hydra, a report circulates. It goes like this:
A new guard, brought on from an outpost in France (a bunker full of smoke and blood and bodies - but these facts, as yet unknown, are not in the report), has been working at a Hydra compound in Romania. He works night shifts and keeps mostly to himself, but seems to be a capable worker. Three days go by. He sleeps in bunks beside the guards and scientists and a visiting army general from a nearby country. The guard eats with them. He watches their test subjects. He tells another guard jokes about his girlfriend.
On the fourth night, he convinces the other guard on duty that no one will know if he takes a nap. He volunteers to sit awake through the uneventful night. He seems eager to prove his worth, to be accepted. Most of the test subjects are by now too obedient to make much trouble, or even to stir from their beds. The other guard agrees, and settles into his chair for a nap.
Eighteen seconds later he's been shot in the head with a freshly assembled silenced pistol.
The guards all wear heart monitors that trigger the alarms if they're killed. The new guard learned from one of his co-workers how to fool the alarm into showing an EKG mimicking wakefulness, so no one knows if you sleep on duty, at the end of the third day.
It's a very quiet night. There's no blast, no shrieking alarms, no pounding of feet, no gunfire. There is a rhythmic sound, much like the continual peaking of a radio in another room. It is not enough to wake the other sleepers.
Seven minutes later, someone unlocks the cell doors, freeing the ten test subjects who have survived in this batch from an original twenty five. By the time they test the locks and stumble out into the frigid forest of wintry western Romania, everyone else in the facility is dead. Only the new guard is missing, even his identification card gone. The security footage of the last three days is destroyed.
The report is created after the thorough questioning of the one test subject they were able to recapture. The location of the other nine is unknown.
In small rooms inside the compound, still lit by the fluorescent lights of the hall, the masters of their domain rot quietly. No one comes for their corpses. No one dares be seen near this dead place.]