(Chapter 17)Into The Pride's Den

You know, when you said you wanted to go L.A., I thought you wanted to hang out on the beach, maybe watch me in a bikini." Andromeda said, as we were sitting in the van. "Not spying on some random family in Brentwood."

Hydra is full of ambitious, intelligent people who don't hesitate to kill and believe fervently that they (and with them, Hydra) should rule the world. One extension of this fact is that if it were possible to rise in the ranks of Hydra by killing upper level members, embarrassing peers, or undermining others' projects, Hydra would've imploded decades ago.

The path to advancement in Hydra was straightforward - Earn acclaim from other Hydra members. The way to do that was to advance the interests of Hydra - Fear among the masses that drove them towards authoritarian solutions and moving Hydra members into place to be those solutions by advancing their interests and reducing the interests of potential alternatives.

That was why, a week into this, I was sitting in a house down the street from the Wilders. The Pride were, fundamentally, bad people. A little circle of criminals working for an alien who controlled a cult called the Church of the Gibborim in exchange for control of some the more profitable companies in LA - Nemo, Wizard, Synergy, and Wilder's Construction (which was a front for a variety of criminal activity). But they were mostly bad people the way I was a bad person, so I saw a lot of benefit in bringing them into my circle of influence. And if I could kill the Gibborim - I couldn't remember his name, in retrospect I should've watched the second and third seasons - and obtain video evidence of a sacrifice, I'd have five powerful families in my thrall. And unlike the Gibborim, no yearly human sacrifice. A win for everyone involved.

"What do you know about the Church of the Gibborim?" I said, the glow of my monitors bathing my face, the mask and gloves to hide my face for emergencies at my feet.

"That weird cult that worships the Beings of Light? Isn't Tom Cruise part of it?"

"Frank Dean," I corrected. "Anyway, I think there's some truth to the beings of light. I think they're maybe extraterrestrial."

"Mike, these people don't even attend the Church of the Gibborim. They're AME, it literally says so on their Facebook pages."

"The Wilders have more significance than mere membership. I'm pretty sure he runs a local gang. And they're close to Leslie Dean, the head of the Church of the Gibborim." The Wilders have a little place in their basement, it has a pod that facilitates human sacrifices to the Gibborim. "A member of the Church of the Gibborim has gone missing, every year around the same time, for the past decade. Always a member who's been in for about year, someone who'd lost connections. I think they were sacrificed in the basement over there to an alien." I pulled out a sheet of paper with the plans of the building, "It should be under the office. Try fiddling with the coasters, I think that desk is rooted to the ground. Regardless, I think the path to the room is behind the bookshelf."

"An underground conspiracy that makes human sacrifices to an alien?" Andromeda looked genuinely concerned. "Mike, you know how crazy that sounds?"

"Your agency is literally in charge of alien artifacts. Look, I've been monitoring them for awhile. I got a few exotic energy readings and I've been trying to figure out why ever since. This is my best working theory, but even if the sacrifice thing doesn't bear out, there is something weird in that basement and I want to know what it is. Remember, don't disrupt anything if you can avoid it." I offered her the stick of small monitoring crawlers I'd designed for this purpose.

"Fair enough," Andromeda said, taking the bugs into her hand. No question about leaving a human eating sacrifice machine in the ground. Hail Hydra. "And they're out for the evening?"

"You've got the depth scanner?" I asked, to which she nodded "Tracking Mr. Wilders credit card, they just started watching a movie and their car is parked and off." I said.

"We're going to be making those movies soon," Andromeda said with a smirk as she pulled down her mask.

Yeah. Great.

"Hail Hydra," she said, locking her goggles and heads up camera into place.

"Hail Hydra."

Say what you will about the moral implications, but having a zealot girlfriend with more than basic competence at breaking and entering was nice. Andromeda wasn't a Black Widow, but she said she was "about as good as the average professional" and that had been more than enough. All kinds of crimes I didn't really have the competence to commit, now made easy with someone who was (at least in theory) disposable to my plans.

I watched through the heads up camera as Andromeda deftly avoided cameras, disabled the security system without setting it off, and picked the lock to the door. It was genuinely impressive. She glided into the office, which had no cameras of any note, and looked around. It was a nice looking place, there was a lot of old wood, ostentatious materials, and the big windows that were endemic in California.

She approached the desk, found the coasters and fiddled with them. Sure enough, they twisted and opened a secret door behind the desk.

"Man, disagreeing with you never works out for me," Andromeda said as she walked through the doorway, her way lit up by night vision from the camera.

"I'm a thorough guy," I said back. She gave the camera a thumbs up as a gesture of good humor and kept walking. There was a great staircase pointing downward, older than the house it was built under, and there was a weird wallpaper on the place.

"That's it," I said as she was cross a balcony and came across the sacrificial room.

"Well, certainly looks creepy enough to be a sacrificial area," she said once she was towards the bottom and could see no one was there either. There was a lot of gothic architecture at the bottom - Tall, arched roofing like an old church. Red robes, hanging on one wall, and a white phone, like an old spin dialer.

Huh. I did not anticipate that. It was on an ornate stand, of gold with strange bends in it. "Put one of the bugs on that, please." I told Andromeda. It looked like an old school landline, but that made no sense when you thought about it. And, sure enough, I could see the symptoms of advanced tech. "Yeah, definitely not terrestrial," I whispered into the field. "Do you see, like, a pod or anything like that down there? Maybe some cameras?"

"No," Andromeda said as she went down into the chamber. "Weird little box room though, with a lock on it and a giant chair."

"Definitely leave a bug there," I said, having no idea what it was. "Get a good sweep of the place, please."

Andromeda spent a few minutes giving the place a deliberate perusal before I heard a beeping and turned to my monitor, "Uh, Andromeda, looks like there's motion in the car and it's coming this way." LA Traffic, don't fail me now. "Put the last two bugs down and get out of there."

"Roger that," Andromeda said, putting one of the bugs on a wall in the central room that was the sacrifice chamber. She jolted up the steps to the balcony, put another one down there, and headed back up the staircase. "On my way to you now," she said. The camera was wobbly with a threat of getting seasick, so I turned away to watch our tracker on the screen as the car sat in traffic, winding its way home. It was about ten minutes away when I heard, "Mike," Andromeda said.

"Yeah," I said, looking at the screen. And she was staring at a wall where the door had been. "Uh, have you tried pushing it?"

She shoved it once for dramatic illustration, "I'm trapped."