Chapter 1352: Meeting, and Batman Dropping By
After finding the place, Luke immediately made a trip.
It only took the armor an hour to cover 500 kilometers.
Naturally, he couldn"t charge in and kill them all.
Such an "open" secret base couldn"t belong to Hydra. At most, Hydra would be in control under s.h.i.+ELD"s name.
If Batman did that, he would be in serious trouble.
So, he simply turned invisible and went for a spin.
As an ordinary base for processing evidence, the defenses here weren"t poor, but they weren"t the best.
It was a little difficult to physically infiltrate the place, but he was still able to sneak in soundlessly. After all, he was a master at covert infiltration.
He wasn"t interested in information. Instead, he found the surveillance system, hid in a corner, and started cracking it.
After gaining control of the surveillance system, he didn"t modify the image, because that was a one-time deal. Doing it just once was the same as telling someone that you were here.
He simply handed the surveillance system over to Alfred to a.n.a.lyze and find flaws.
It had to be said that the surveillance cameras here weren"t the best, but the system"s designer was quite good.
If everything followed what the designer intended, there would basically be no flaws or weaknesses in the system.
Unfortunately, there was always a gap between design and actual completion.
Even for Luke and Tony"s armor, most of the parts were finished or half-finished products that didn"t meet their requirements. In the end, they could only choose the next best thing.
Naturally, a lot of the surveillance system design had been abandoned.
No matter how good a condom was, a tiny hole was enough to take one"s life.
After running a simulation of the security and surveillance systems, Luke entered the base unhindered.
The first thing he took was evidence data.
What he needed most wasn"t the investigation reports, but the source itself.
s.h.i.+ELD basically dealt with extraordinary events, and Luke was looking forward to seeing how many superhumans were involved.
As he downloaded the information, he didn"t forget to look at the surveillance feed.
Phil had gone on missions with this person before, so whoever followed the baldie, Sitwell, might not be a bad person.
But Luke had an A.I. program. All he needed to do was find the target and then run a focused investigation.
There weren"t many opportunities to enter s.h.i.+ELD"s internal surveillance system.
Phil, Sitwell, and the other field agents and managers clearly had a different manner to the amateurs. Luke had already found over 100 of such individuals.
All of them were placed on his list of suspects.
After collecting the files, Luke quietly left.
The baldie was an operative, not a warehouse manager. Naturally, he wouldn"t hang around here.
However, while chatting to his co-workers in the base, this guy said that he was going back to s.h.i.+ELD"s D.C. headquarters.
After thinking about it, Luke decided to go as well.
D.C. had the heaviest surveillance in America, with cameras and agents everywhere. Even Luke didn"t dare recklessly set up a perimeter there.
However, the baldie might be going back to report the results of the operation to someone, so Luke was willing to waste some time and try his luck.
He had a clone, and D.C. wasn"t far from New York; it could be considered on the way.
Making up his mind, he left Los Angeles that night and headed east.
D.C. wasn"t as busy as New York at night, but it was where all the bigshots gathered.
Luke became cautious.
The last time he came here to deal with William Stryker from Sentinel Services, the guy fortunately had been living on the outskirts and not in the central area.
William"s men didn"t even enter Was.h.i.+ngton, and were killed on the fringe.
With the help of his inventory, everything had been peaceful and Luke didn"t draw any attention.
This time, the baldie, Sitwell, was in D.C.. He headed for Theodore Roosevelt Island, which was where s.h.i.+ELD"s D.C. headquarters, the Triskelion, was located.
It was slightly more than two kilometers away from the White House, and five kilometers from Congress.
Using the GPS on one of Sitwell"s men, Luke determined that the man had returned to HQ.
Luke certainly wouldn"t enter s.h.i.+ELD.
It would be stupid of him to charge into someone else"s nest and be surrounded.
Fury, this sly old fox, had no way to deal with Hydra inside, but his agents either dealt with superhumans or were on their way to doing so.
Phil might not be hostile toward Batman, but that might not be the case for other people, including Nick Fury.
After all, s.h.i.+ELD was responsible for preventing superhumans from committing crimes.
Luke was a vigilante, but his actions were still illegal.
There were even people in NYPD who still felt that they should arrest superheroes, though there were much fewer of them now; it was just that Batman had saved too many people, so they didn"t dare say anything.
But there would always be people who thought Batman was a criminal.
Luke had never placed his hopes on other people"s moral standards, especially when it came to Hydra in s.h.i.+ELD. There were probably a lot of people who wanted Batman dead.
Staring at the access points of the s.h.i.+ELD building from a distance, he suddenly found a familiar face.
The man flashed past a window. If it wasn"t for Luke"s dynamic vision and memory, he might have ignored him.
Rick Flegg! That operator from the Joint Advanced Research Unit or whatever!
Some time back, he had taken Jason Voorhees, that undying murderer, off Luke"s hands. Later, Luke even called him to clean up the incident with the big octopus on the cruise s.h.i.+p.
Robert, who had been on vacation on the s.h.i.+p back then, clearly knew this Flegg.
The organization Flegg worked for definitely wasn"t s.h.i.+ELD, but a compet.i.tor.
So what if they were all American organizations? There were many times when American organizations competed for power and suppressed each other.
There was a lot of discord between the president, Congress, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Defense, the military, and even the ocean, land, and air forces.
Biological siblings could turn hostile when it came to money, to say nothing of departments that struggled to obtain funding over the years.
A few minutes later, Luke saw Flegg and a s.h.i.+ny bald head walk past a window; it looked like they were talking.
Luke murmured in surprise, "Flegg is actually here for Sitwell?"
He hadn"t expected them to be connected.
But thinking about how s.h.i.+ELD and the Joint Advanced Research Unit could be considered colleagues in a sense, it wasn"t strange for them to communicate with each other.
Well, it wasn"t strange, so he just needed to ask Flegg when he came out.
Not say anything? Batman had specifically come to ask him, so how could Flegg not say anything?
Luke had a lot of ways to convince people.
Flegg didn"t tarry long in the building. He drove a black SUV out of the parking lot.
Luke quickly followed him and watched him make a call in the car. He spoke for a few minutes before he drove to a neighborhood on the edge of D.C.. He then stopped the car at a small bungalow and entered the house.