The man stood in a cemetery, where the bodies of believers and clergy were buried.
But beneath the soil there weren't only bones. This 12th-century church was merely the newest of three that had existed at this site; those believers were now lying above church ruins dating back to the Roman era. In 1536, during the Geneva Reformation, John Calvin, founder of Calvinism, expounded his Reformed theology in the Calvin Chapel adjacent to St. Peter's Cathedral (then called the New Lady Chapel). Influenced by this thought were the Italian Waldensians, the Dutch Reformed Church, and the Scottish Presbyterians. As a result, the church saw a great deal of foot traffic, and even a stranger would not attract much attention—what's more, the two churches were now surrounded by restaurants, pastry shops, an archaeology museum, bureaucratic offices, and shyster lawyers. Helmut Zemo figured that even if he sat on a bench stuffing his face with sweets, no one would notice.
So he did exactly that. Right by the entrance of St. Peter's Cathedral was a French fine-chocolate shop called Confiserie Arn. Helmut Zemo bought a small cauldron-shaped chocolate, the cauldron stamped with a Holy Roman Empire shield crest. He planned to bring his wife here after the mission was completed—he had already found news of her in the latest task file. After the initial disbelief and ecstatic joy, Helmut Zemo quickly calmed down. He carefully reviewed his wife's medical list and found many suspicious points. He even suspected the Undying City was deceiving him, because no one could survive such horrific injuries.
Even if the Undying City possessed extremely advanced prosthetic implantation and bio-organ modification technology, someone with a comminuted mandibular fracture, a spine smashed into several pieces, and lungs heavily damaged would be hard-pressed to survive first aid at all, let alone get off the operating table and, after rehabilitation, manage daily life independently.
He didn't understand medicine, but his common sense told him it was impossible. He had seen the bodies of his son and his father; only his wife had gone missing. Now someone who had survived surgery claimed to be Mrs. Zemo. He could not give up even the slightest hope—once he got the intel from his informant, he could dial a temporary number. At that time, the woman calling herself Mrs. Zemo would answer. He had repeated that number in his mind hundreds of times, over and over confirming he hadn't misremembered the digits and the clandestine contact method, and that he hadn't forgotten the verification questions he would ask.
Each word had turned to iron in his heart, reddened by the constant burning of anxiety and suspicion, scorching his heart with the stench of char. He could even smell the odor of anxiety right in his nasal cavity, almost no different from the smell of the corpses he had burned in the past. He hoped it was true; he hoped his missing wife was still alive. He did not want to be disappointed again.
Helmut Zemo refocused on the imminent intel handoff. Switzerland was a neutral country, at least on the surface, but everyone knew that so-called "neutrality" was just a pretext. Though not a NATO member, Switzerland had long provided services to NATO. In the original plan, his target was Swiss Army Commander, Corps Commander André Blattmann; but after careful research, Helmut Zemo found a more valuable target.
The Command Support Base (FUB) under the Army Staff, which provided services in information and communication technology (ICT), command infrastructure, command methodology, electronic warfare, cryptography, and embassy radio for the military's overall command and for technical support to national crisis management, was more valuable as a relay for NATO military intelligence.
The head of this organization was then-Brigadier and Army Chief of Staff Jean-Paul Theler.
Compared with the career soldier, Army Commander André Blattmann, this economics PhD—Chief of Staff Jean-Paul Theler—was much easier to access; just by using publicly available information on the Internet, one could find relevant details. Jean-Paul Theler had earned a master's degree in mathematical economics from the London School of Economics and a doctorate from the University of Lausanne. The University of Lausanne had originated as the Lausanne Theological Academy.
Even now, the university still had a Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies that taught primarily in French.
Thanks to Helmut Zemo's investigative ability and the Undying City's near-miraculous capacity for filtering information, the brigadier's life lay bare before him—privately a devout believer, Jean-Paul Theler went there every Sunday to confess. His wife was also a Calvinist, and the priest who heard their confessions had signed a strict confidentiality agreement so that they could speak freely. For this reason, Helmut Zemo believed he could deviate from the plan and obtain a large amount of intelligence more quickly. St. Peter's Cathedral was precisely the church for Reformed (Calvinist) believers in French-speaking Switzerland, and the adjacent Calvin Chapel belonged to the Scottish Presbyterians. Helmut Zemo now sat on a pew in St. Peter's Cathedral with his hand in his inner jacket pocket, ready to draw his gun at any moment.
If the priest he had bribed to plant the bug did his job as agreed, no one would die here today.
Helmut Zemo thought he could even stage a kidnapping and, in the shortest possible time, use the most violent means to get what he wanted. The Undying City did not restrict his methods; it cared only about results. He felt he quite liked operating this way. The only thing that disgusted him was the cleanup guy the Undying City had sent.
What he didn't know was that the information-processing personnel he had encountered were not just one individual. In addition to Geneva, nearly every city with a significant NATO military base had an information handler, paired with an assassin hidden in the dark. Helmut Zemo had merely stumbled into one of the Undying City's electronic-warfare targets. If the intelligence command at the center of the web had not issued timely orders to prevent conflicts caused by compartmentalization, that assassin might already have been figuring out how to kill him.
The Undying City had made many preparations for the coming war and planned to launch a strategic offensive from three different directions. The objective of this blitzkrieg was to break NATO's military strength in Eastern and Southern Europe and win living space for Latovinia—to strike east into Romania, north into Hungary, and south into Serbia. Those three neighboring countries of Latovinia either hosted NATO military bases or had politicians flirting with NATO.
For manpower-scarce Latovinia, this was no simple task, but since the Undying City's interstellar missiles were already prepared, the most difficult part of the task would actually be the governance that followed. How to assuage the political demands of so many ethnic groups and avoid subsequent rebellion—that was what the Ministry of Internal Affairs currently found most vexing. Stephanie's suggestion was to eliminate all local governments, have locals recruited by the Undying City directly govern these places, and use Maya Hansen's unfinished work to form a super-soldier army.
As for that Wakandan industrial order, Stephanie thought it could be expanded further.
In any case, Helmut Zemo was already closing in on his target. Soon, Wakanda would be a vassal of the Undying City. Whether Erik Killmonger would still be obedient or not, the Undying City had already won over vibranium trafficker Ulysses Klaue and even made him a prosthetic to make up for the arm Ultron had cut off. At Solomon Damonet's direction, Stephanie Malik and Victoria Hand had prepared thoroughly and drafted contingency plans to address as many possible scenarios as they could.
Just as later studies of the life of that great monarch—who saved the human species and led it to the pinnacle of the galaxy—often noted, he himself once spoke an ancient piece of human wisdom: "Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will never be defeated in a hundred battles."
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