"Who is this? I don't know any Whitehall. You've got the wrong number."
Thick-framed glasses, a perfectly pressed suit, the whole picture of a successful professional. Sitwell might work in administration, but he was still an agent — he had the reflexes for it. He turned Daisy down without a second's hesitation.
She'd expected exactly this. She recited her next line like a student presenting rehearsed facts.
"In 1945, in Austria, Mr. Whitehall was taken into custody. The object he'd spent his life researching — the Obelisk — fell into S.H.I.E.L.D.'s hands. Mr. Whitehall requires that you use your clearance to retrieve the Obelisk from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s classified vault."
Inside the Obelisk was the Terrigen Crystal. It could only be opened in a specific location, and neither HYDRA nor S.H.I.E.L.D. had figured that out in fifty years of research. At this point, the artifact had been shelved and all but forgotten.
"The Obelisk?" Sitwell didn't actually know what that was. But he'd already confirmed enough from the conversation — whoever this was, they were HYDRA. Or at the very least, someone connected to Whitehall.
"Consider it a favor owed to you by Mr. Whitehall. I'll call again shortly. HYDRA!" Daisy hung up immediately and scrubbed her digital trail.
Sitwell snapped to attention on instinct, muttering a quiet "HYDRA!" back into the dead phone. He realized only then that the line was already gone.
For a Hispanic man to hold mid-level positions in both S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA simultaneously, Sitwell was neither stupid nor shortsighted. Among HYDRA's zealots — the kind who swallowed cyanide rather than talk — he was a rare anomaly. In the original timeline, Captain America had needed only one good threat to get him to sing like a canary, spilling everything he knew without pause. His survival instinct outweighed his loyalty by a country mile.
Unlike HYDRA's senior ranks, who dreamed of world domination, or the mid-level agents bitter about their place in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s political hierarchy, or the true believers who'd been brainwashed into service from the bottom up — Sitwell was in it for himself. He was a coward, and a deeply opportunistic one. Daisy had read him well.
Within HYDRA's fractured power structure, Sitwell belonged to Alexander Pierce — the Secretary of the World Security Council — a different faction entirely from Whitehall's circle. As a small fish in someone else's pond, he had to feel the pressure. His position wasn't exactly secure, and his real allegiance couldn't be exposed. A smart man like him wouldn't defect outright, but having a second lifeline? That was always worth keeping.
Over the next few days, Daisy tracked his phone signal from the shadows, mapped out his general range of movement, and pieced together threads from across the internet. Her read was right — he was looking into the Obelisk.
Whether he'd loop in his boss, Pierce, was another question. Daisy put the odds at seventy percent that he wouldn't.
If the big boss handled the contact personally and got results, the credit went to the big boss. Sitwell would get nothing. What kind of idiot would volunteer to cut himself out of a deal like that?
The man had ambition. That much was obvious.
Her roommate Angela had noticed something was off about her lately. Today, Angela watched her spot something across the courtyard and take off at a sprint.
Three minutes earlier, Daisy had seen Sitwell's phone signal exit a shielded zone. Call it intuition — she felt it in her gut. He had something.
She ducked away from Angela, covered her tracks, and dialed.
"Fast work, Agent Sitwell." She led with a compliment.
She couldn't see him this time, but she didn't need to — the smugness came through loud and clear over the voice modulator. He answered with a faint note of pride. "Viewing and relocating the Obelisk requires Level 10 clearance."
Daisy almost laughed. You think I'd be calling you if it didn't? He'd already implicitly accepted her HYDRA credentials. This was his victory lap.
She notched her tone up two degrees — HYDRA didn't do warmth. Anything softer would raise suspicion.
"That's hardly a challenge. There are hundreds of items sitting in that vault with unknown origins and no listed purpose. Borrowing Secretary Pierce's clearance for a moment shouldn't be a problem, should it?"
Hearing Pierce's name dropped so casually, Sitwell revised his assessment of whoever this was upward — significantly. His tone shifted into something almost fawning. "Yes, sir. How shall I deliver the Obelisk to you? And would I have the honor of meeting Mr. Whitehall in person?"
"Heh." Daisy let the voice modulator carry a low, unpleasant laugh. She switched to formal address. "Jasper Sitwell — do you really want to meet Mr. Whitehall?"
She pressed further, letting the words fall deliberately. "You've reviewed the Obelisk's history. You know what happens to the people who touch it. How many S.H.I.E.L.D. researchers turned to stone? How many?" A beat of silence. "And you still want to walk in there and hand it to him personally? Keep in mind — he's been confined for a very long time. His temper has been... unpredictable."
She left the rest unsaid, letting the blank spaces fill themselves in.
Sitwell's mind went immediately to the image of Whitehall gesturing at him to pick up the Obelisk. Treating subordinates as tools was standard HYDRA operating procedure — nothing shocking. But every single person who'd tried to handle that artifact had ended up as stone. He wasn't naive enough to think he'd be the exception.
Between his life and his ambitions, Sitwell chose his life.
He also arrived at a second conclusion: the voice on the phone was planning to take credit for this. Sitwell's name wouldn't be mentioned to Whitehall at all. The whole thing would vanish into someone else's ledger.
Calculating. Underhanded. Very HYDRA.
Believing he'd seen through the game, his tone cooled. "So all the credit goes to you. What exactly do I get out of this?"
"Safety. Steady advancement. And an emergency exit when you need one." Daisy let that land, then continued. "You don't think Pierce's faction is the only one operating inside S.H.I.E.L.D., do you? The organization is a major HYDRA asset — there are more players than you know."
She was writing checks she had no intention of cashing. The man had years left to live in this timeline — she could promise him anything.
"We can redirect certain resources to help your career along. Two legs are more stable than one."
The combination of cowardice, vanity, and ambition did its work. Sitwell agreed.
The call ended quickly. Daisy told him to leave the item in a specific trash can and hire a local drifter to retrieve it after he walked away.
In an alley, Daisy — hood pulled up — hit the man with her taser before he could react. She took a quick look: a rectangular metal case, its cover stamped with the designation S.S.R. 0-8-4.
Whether it had a tracker, she couldn't be sure. She pulled on her gloves and pried it open.
Inside sat a multi-faceted metal obelisk, just over a foot tall (roughly 30 cm / ~12 inches), shaped vaguely like a trophy. Something between a monolith and a spike.
No time to study it. She clamped it with a pair of tongs, shoved it into her backpack, then carried the case to a nearby chemical plant and dropped it into an acid tank.
No agent in the world could find that case now.
As for the Obelisk itself — she wasn't worried at all. This was Kree technology, seamless and self-contained. It disabled electronic devices. It turned non-Inhuman life forms to stone. At humanity's current technological level, there was no way anyone had managed to stick a tracker on it.
Under cover of darkness, Daisy looped back through the area, wiped the security cameras that had caught her, hailed a cab, and disappeared into the city.