>BLACKBOX >STORAGE CELLAR >ZERO DARK.../// Donnelley woke with a start, flailing and falling out of the musty couch he slept on. He lay on his back on the dusty floor and stared up at the darkness of the ceiling. It was a hard time, waking up, even nowadays. He breathed deep and hard, feeling his heart thumping in his chest like it was trying to break out through his ribs. His shirt was sticky with sweat, but he couldn’t remember what his dream was even about. Of course, nowadays, there wasn’t much variety to his dreams after Pakistan and every other forgotten spot on the globe where people were desperate as animals. He just lay there for a few minutes, fishing out his pack of cigarettes and taking a nip off his flask as he searched for his lighter. The flame glowed in the shadows of the cellar, adding light for barely a second as it kissed the end of his cigarette. He blew the smoke out, watching it spread and dissipate, flowing into a still cloud on the static air of the cellar. His eyes went to his pocket as it vibrated. Tapping it on, he went to his messages, seeing he had a new one from Ava in a group chat with the rest of them- [i]“Guys, guys, guys! I got a conference room, meet me as soon as possible, I have so much to tell you! This is so awesome everyone is going to be so happy fuck those Russian a-shores wait did it send”[/i] Donnelley snorted, a pleasant grin on his face. He checked the time, 00:02. The first smile of the day, thanks to Ava, and it was only two minutes in. Hopefully not the last. He groaned as he got to standing and stretched until he popped. Taking a few more drags off of his cigarette in quick succession and blowing them all out as one. Taking a deep swig of his flask and lamenting that it was getting a little light, he walked up the narrow stairway and out of the cellar. A guard was on patrol and happened to be coming up on him, “Good nap?” “Mm.” Donnelley shrugged. “Yeah.” The guard shrugged back and walked past. Donnelley went the other direction, following the signs on the wall and the maps to make his way to the meeting rooms. He yawned as he scanned the consoles set into the wall, watching out for Ava’s name. When he finally found it, he scanned his ID badge and the door hissed open, another guard behind the desk, “Weapons and-“ “Electronics, yeah.” Donnelley slid his phone and gun across the desk to the other man, walking through the door when it was finally unlocked to see it empty besides Ava. First one here. “How’s it go?” Donnelley asked as he smirked at a very disheveled Ava who looked about as manically sleep-deprived as he was before the long nap, taking a seat at the front of the room, “First the worst? Guess that checks out.” Ava looked up from her laptop, hooked up to the large screen in the middle of the room. There was a strange mixture of exhaustion and excitement on her features, as though she acknowledged how tired she was but didn’t care because whatever she had uncovered was worth it. Her eyes brightened at Donnelley and she straightened up with a wide grin. She was dressed in what might have been her pajamas. She wore a long hoodie that went past her waist that was white, covered in small pink flowers, had bell-like sleeves and made from material that was visibly very soft looking, as well as a pair of thermal grey leggings. Her hiking boots clashed with the otherwise cozy looking attire but Ava didn’t seem to care. “Donnelley!” She said excitedly. “Do you remember how we went out to steak after I found Jay’s information?” She beamed. “You’re going to want to buy me lobster after what I found.” Donnelley smiled and raised a brow, “I’m gonna hold you to that. Better have me at the edge of my seat.” Laine entered the conference room dressed in fresh clothing and her hair still slightly damp from a recent shower. She wore sneakers and dark gray leggings, a black thermal and over it a Ramones t-shirt she picked up from the Target in Idaho. Under her arm was her notebook and a cup of coffee in one hand, her black hoodie tied around her waist. She paused to appraise Ava, looking over at her, “I’d offer you my coffee but I think it might upset the balance you’re working on.” Her gaze shifted to Donnelley, looking him over briefly before taking a seat beside him as they waited for Dave. Laine leaned back in the chair, sipping from the cup she held with both hands. She had napped while Ava worked, then wandered around the expansive base before indulging in a hot shower. A twinge of guilt struck her as she noticed the dark circles under Ava’s bright eyes. Unnaturally bright with an electric excitement that seemed to vibrate off the small woman. She had found something big. Ava grinned again as Laine strode in, bouncing lightly on her feet. “I just chugged one of those little Starbucks Doubleshot Espressos from the cafeteria so I’m set on energy and caffeine and sugar.” She said rapidly. “I think I’ve consumed over 500mg of caffeine since I got to work.” She paused for a moment, looking down as she counted on her fingers. “Specifically 510mg of caffeine. I don’t even want to think about all the sugar I consumed in the past 12 hours, I probably shouldn’t have had that second hot chocolate.” Laine smiled slightly, the crash would come hard but not before the suffering. She had a small travel first aid bag in her suitcase that included stomach relief. “That’s…” Donnelley glanced at Laine, nodding his head along with Ava, “A lot.” "What's a lot?" Dave said, striding through the door to join the others. He'd showered after the range and the brawl, and had dispensed with the tactical gear. In its place were his familiar Wranglers and hiking boots, his Sig still riding on his thigh. Because of the controlled temperature he had foregone his usual flannel, wearing instead a black t-shirt sporting the Jack Daniels label. His "hat-hat" was settled on his shaggy hair, and his belt buckle was molded in the shape of an armored bulldozer. The Killdozer buckle had been a tongue-in-cheek gift from his son Mal, and Dave had enjoyed the looks he had gotten from the various government agents he passed, which ranged from amused to mildly perturbed, except for one man who had seemed outright offended. "Wha'd I miss?" He asked, looking around. “Dave!” Ava said, stepping from around the desk she was working at to run up and give him an excited hug. She looked up at him with a wide grin. “You’re just in time, I was able to decrypt the software coding that went into the tracker. I have dates and times and coordinates! Everywhere those Russians went!” She pressed her chin to his chest and kept grinning. “Am I the best or what?” “Definitely the best.” He returned the tight hug, grinning along with her. Her excitement was contagious, and he couldn’t help but feel a flutter of his own anticipation. Laine sat up, putting her coffee aside as she flashed a glance at Donnelley. The Russians. She took her note book out and pen, clicking it so she could write down anything she might need to look up later when Ava would launch into an explanation of such a technical piece of evidence. She rolled her eyes slightly at the word evidence, as if she was thinking ahead to preparing a case against international spies with strange weaponized children. “I’d like to hear what you found, it sounds exciting,” she said, watching the pair embrace openly then glanced at the camera in the corner of the ceiling. Laine clicked her pen a few times, forcing herself to not look at the man beside her. Instead she let her gaze wander to Dave’s odd belt buckle, furrowing her brow as she tried to figure out what it was. Donnelley sighed, looking to Laine and then turning in his chair to fix the pair of them with a steely gaze. As much as he didn’t like reminding anyone he was close to that he was their team lead and not their best friend… well, after everything they’d been through, the scrutiny, the interviews, the surveillance, he’d have to be that asshole sometimes. And he had to admit to himself that he was outright envious of the ability to be so brazen. He folded his arms tight, “How ‘bout we all get settled and go over this intelligence.” There was no sign of laid back and good-natured Donnelley in the man’s face, that old NCO was coming to the fore and he brought hard eyes and a stern frown, “[i]Please.[/i]” Dave quirked an eyebrow at Donnelley's tone. He gave Ava another quick squeeze, then released her to take his seat. "Never doubted ya, sugar," he said. "Give us the rundown." Ava looked over at Donnelley, taken aback from his shift in tone and demeanor. She lowered her head down slightly guiltily and quickly made her way over to her laptop. “Okay, okay,” She said, stopping in front of the computer and taking in a deep breath. She stared at it for a moment. “...Shit, how was I going to start?” She muttered to herself. “Uh, ah,” Ava snapped her fingers and tapped her forehead. “Wait, right! I remember!” She said, snapping her fingers and pointing over at them. “So, this friggin’ thing.” She tapped on her laptop and up popped a picture of the tracker on the large screen. “We’ll start with the hardware, very high level stuff.” Ava said, turning her head up to the screen and squinting at it as though it still frustrated her. “It has a range of up to 20 kilometers or 12.4 miles, the battery is half the size of the tracker but it has the same power capacity as a 5590 battery.” She turned to them with a frown. “It’s so well crafted that it doesn’t need that much power, so this leads me to believe that it was intended for long term use without needing to swap out the tracker with one with a fresher battery.” Ava waved her hand, the bell sleeve of her soft and plush hoodie swinging with the motion. “Like I told you all at breakfast, there are no manufatura markings inside or out so the exact origins of it are unknown, though my hunch is leading toward Russia for...obvious reasons. If I would have to guess this was the work of a very dedicated team with people of high intelligence working on it with some major state funding backing their work. Or a level of funding to rival a government backing. This technology is utterly unknown; nothing in the Program’s database comes close to matching it. The NSA and CIA have nothing like this, unless they’re keeping all the fun toys for themselves.” She suddenly grinned, a mischievous expression crossing her tired features. “Now onto the good news,” She tapped the laptop and a world map popped up on screen. “Their programing encryption fucking sucks.” She chirped, rubbing her hands together. “They probably spent months if not a year on that programming.” Ava grinned wider and started giggling. “I deciphered it in like 4 hours and found all of this.” She typed something into the laptop. Up on the screen red circles with lines pointing to dates, time and coordinates appeared on the map, located in Poland, the Netherlands, the UK, New York, and then finally West Virginia. Ava gestured with both hands to the screen in a ‘ta-da’ motion. “Looking through the metadata I was able to find the transmission history and the locations of where the tracker and it’s paired locating...locator? Location?” She mumbled to herself with a confused frown. She shook her head. “Anyway, the thing they use to find the tracker; these are the locations that they pinged at. Here’s where things get...well weird. Which is more, um, not great news.” She pointed to the times listed at each of the sites. “As you can see, they did quite a bit of globe trotting, but what’s concerning is the fact that the time between these locations is almost nothing despite all of these all occurring on the same day. There’s only a handful of hours in most cases, if even that. I mean, look at the time between the ping in the UK to the ping in New York! A flight from England to New York would take 7 to 10 hours, but they covered that distance in no time at all! Altogether, this world tour took them only 10 hours and the last ping from that day...” She tapped something on her computer and one of the red circles turned blue. The one over West Virginia. “...Is from a place in the middle of the woods, in Blackriver West Virginia.” She said gravely, looking at each of them. “And the day this took place? About a month before UMBRA’s case for the murder of Maria Vasquez officially started.” She grew quiet for a moment, trying to martial her next thoughts while letting the information sink in for the others. “Jay’s emails mentioned a shed in the middle of the woods where he would meet with his Russian contacts, so...” She trailed off, losing whatever point she had been about to make. “Anyway,” She continued with a shake of her head. “Based on this information, it looks like this was how the Russians got Muru from the Ukraine to the states. Why? I have no idea, but this is how they did it.” She pointed to each of the pings on the map. “And now we have points of interest to look into.” She turned back to her laptop and pressed a key, the map zooming in on West Virginia. “The last transmission from the tracker was from the day we met Muru, at the motel where we were supposed to pick her up at.” She frowned down at the laptop for a heart beat. “I’m also beginning to wonder if a similar tracker on Frank Wilkins is what gave away our original Safe House.” she muttered to herself. Ava shook her head, visibly rousing herself and snapping back into focus. She smiled again, less of an energetic smirk and more of a sly grin. “The other good news is that all of the programming software that went into this tracker is one of a kind. I can easily identify it if we come across it again.” She shrugged and continued to grin. “I’ll keep studying it though, see if I can find a way to use it against them.” She looked down at the laptop and then back up at them. “Uuh, that’s about it.” She paused. “Thank you for coming to my sleep deprived, caffeine and sugar fueled TedTALK.” “He’s teleporting…” Donnelley scoffed humorlessly, an edge of anger to it, “They’re teleporting. Queen said there’s no flight records to match with Nikolai Gorochev’s arrival in New York from Russia… he fucking [i]teleported.[/i]” Donnelley stood up, rubbing his hands through his hair, “The smell at the shack Michael talked about, the smell in Carlisle’s house... Electrical burn and ozone.” Donnelley rubbed at his eyes and sat back down, “[i]Walidu Alharb.[/i]” he muttered. Laine watched the presentation with intent concentration, writing notes of things she wanted to follow up on. It did explain how the Russians moved so fast, how they might have found UMBRA. She sat back, clicking her pen once Ava finished. The young woman looked as she had run herself ragged but had managed to get the first big break since Dulane leading them to the murder scene. She shivered at that memory, her scalp crawling and Laine reached up to brush her fingers through her dark hair. She glanced at Donnelley when he mentioned the smell of ozone and burning. "I think that was the scent we smelled before that...[I]Hound[/I] came after Renko when..." Laine paused, her eyes widened. "He just seemed to appear. He has to have access to the same technology. I think Dave was right, it was a clue. He was giving us not only Muru to keep safe but showing us...this." She gestured towards the image still on the screen. Laine looked up, "Do we know if that smell was ever associated with the shimmers and the voice in the woods that the ranger reported?" Laine wrote a few things then tapped her pen. "I'll go over the old statements. We never got into Blackriver's sheriff's computer." The whole West Virginia case seemed to step out of the darkness and she felt the urge to go back over everything they had. Laine stood up and went to give Ava a pat on the shoulder, "You did an amazing job, this really gives us a break in the Blackriver case. You should get some rest." She tried to smile but the reminder that they were in Alaska and not West Virginia dampened her excitement. "So what do we do with this?" Laine asked, stepping back over to seat besides Donnelley. Dave shot Ava a thumbs up and grinned at her while Laine spoke, not wanting to interrupt her, and then turned to Donnelley himself. He’d listened to the briefing with growing fascination; he knew they had kicked around some crazy ideas, but to hear the word [i]teleport[/i] said out-loud wasn’t something he’d expected, despite the strange things he’d seen so far with the Program. “Somethin’ like this, the teleportin’ and stuff...There’s never been any mention of this before, has there? In other cases, I mean?” He leaned forward a little, his elbows on the desk. “I know I’ve never heard it in anythin’ but TV.” Ava smiled at Laine and Dave, visibly happy with her accomplishment though her energy was now starting to flag. “Thanks guys, I’m happy to have done it.” She put her hands on her hips and breathed out. “I...need to sit.” She picked up some folders from the desk beside her computer and stepped forward to pass them each one. “Here’s the rundown of my findings, including the locations of each of the pings I found.” Ava fought a yawn and went over to one of the chairs in front of the screen. “I’m just gonna sit for...five minutes.” She said, plopping herself down. She flipped up the hood of her soft hoodie to pull over her eyes, revealing a pair of little white devil horns. She folded her arms over her chest and settled deep into her chair and the softness of her hoodie. Donnelley looked at the manilla folder in his hands, flipping it open and skimming over it. A tiny shake of his head as he looked at the bullet points of the Russians’ route through Europe to New York. “Russians from London.” He said, another humorless scoff, “So, Michael wasn’t blowin’ air. Guess he didn’t die for nothin’, thanks, Mike.” Laine looked at Donnelley, raising her brow as she said, "I'm certain that's good for your conscience but what do we do with the information? File a report for Foster and forget about it?" Her green eyes flashed as she folded her arms over her chest and sighed. There was not much else they could do but perhaps it could be leverage to get back on the case. "Do you think it could get us back in the loop about Blackriver?" “What we do with this…” Donnelley clapped the folder shut and weighed it in his hand, lips pursed as he mulled over what he was about to say. Pros and cons, what could go wrong… “We keep this. We turn it over to Foster after we make copies. This is ours.” Laine nodded, looking over at Ava but she was dozing off in her chair with the horned hood pulled over her. She shook her head, smiling slightly at the sight but the smile faded. Her attention turned back to Donnelley, “Do we give them everything? If there is a chance that...” She stopped herself, the spy shit was making her paranoid but the nagging feeling that something with Foster and Overman was off never left her. Clicking her pen once more, she said, “Right. We keep our copies, make a couple of back ups just in case.” Dave read along with the others, his lips moving silently as he worked through the words. He perked up at Laine’s question, grateful to have a reason to put the reading off. “I wouldn’t mind goin’ back to Blackriver. We got unfinished business there,” he said. “I don’t like leavin’ stuff half done, an’ whoever took over don’t know the place like we do.” Laine smiled at Dave, twirling the pen in her fingers, “That’s my thought, too. We didn’t finish, everything I had assumed about the unsub was turned over when we went to the cabin with Dulane. I understand things that I didn’t when I started, I think we can all agree there.” From behind the group, a soft snore sounded from beneath Ava’s hood.