If Hydra were exposed now, the consequences would be catastrophic.
The entire world would turn on them.
Too many people still rembered World War II. Too many governnts still carried scars left behind by Hydra's atrocities. The mont their existence beca public again, every intelligence agency, military force, and superhuman organization on Earth would co crashing down on them at once.
The newly appointed leader of Hydra's North Arican division spoke with a dark expression.
"We can't pull out now. The Insight Project is entering its most critical phase. If we abandon it at this point, everything we've built will collapse."
"That's your project collapsing," Baron Strucker replied coldly.
"None of us ever believed in it to begin with."
Pierce's beloved Insight Project had always relied on Arnim Zola's predictive algorithm. The system scanned global data to identify individuals who could potentially threaten Hydra in the future, then used airborne helicarriers ard with precision strike missiles to eliminate them before they beca a problem.
The flaw was obvious.
When fragnts of the target list briefly appeared during activation tests, Bruce Banner's na had reportedly been among them.
Trying to assassinate the Hulk with conventional missiles was the kind of plan that only looked intelligent on paper.
To everyone else in Hydra, the project bordered on insanity.
Only Pierce and this new North Arican leader still treated it like humanity's greatest achievent.
The man's face stiffened after Strucker's dismissal.
"And if I rember correctly," he shot back, "you lost an entire facility last month. A high-priority one. Yet you still haven't explained what happened there."
His gaze sharpened.
"I think the rest of us deserve to know whether your private experints compromised Hydra's secrecy."
Strucker folded his arms and gave a dismissive snort.
"We're still investigating the incident, but it shouldn't endanger the organization. You have my word."
"With respect, Baron, that doesn't reassure anyone."
The pressure continued mounting around the table.
Everyone already knew Strucker spent most of his ti hidden away conducting experints on enhanced humans.
A large portion of Hydra's leadership had an unhealthy fascination with superpowers. Nearly every faction monitored Strucker's progress in one way or another.
The problem was that he never shared results.
Naturally, Strucker couldn't exactly tell them the truth.
He couldn't very well announce that his facility had been obliterated by a monster attack.
Not after spending years researching superhumans only to get crushed by one.
That kind of humiliation tended to raise uncomfortable questions about wasted funding.
Besides, in Strucker's mind, monsters were natural disasters. Losing to them didn't count as incompetence.
Elsewhere, Drex Valen listened in with growing amusent.
So unleashing monsters across the world had produced so unexpected side benefits after all.
Even Hydra had taken losses.
That thought entertained him far more than it probably should have.
Then another idea surfaced.
What if he simply beca Hydra's newest leader?
The concept sounded absurd at first glance.
But in Hydra?
It was practically tradition.
A completely unknown leader appearing out of nowhere while the rest of the organization remained clueless had happened multiple tis before.
Whitehall was the perfect example.
Back during World War II, he had been one of Hydra's senior commanders. After the war ended, the Howling Commandos destroyed his operations, and Agent Peggy Carter personally oversaw the raid that dragged him into prison.
Everyone assud he would rot there until death claid him.
Instead, decades later, his followers broke him out.
Using cells harvested from an Inhuman, Whitehall restored his youth and returned to power seemingly from nowhere, reclaiming a seat among Hydra's supre leadership.
Then there was Baron Heinrich Zemo.
Another major Hydra figure from the Red Skull era.
Another ghost from World War II who vanished for decades without explanation.
Most people assud he was long dead.
Then suddenly, without warning, he resurfaced and reclaid authority as if he had never left.
Hydra liked to present itself as a vast, sophisticated organization.
In reality, its internal managent structure was complete chaos.
Each leader ruled their own territory independently. They cooperated when necessary, but most operated more like rival warlords than mbers of a unified hierarchy.
Being a "Hydra leader" was less about official rank and more about raw power.
If you had enough weapons, soldiers, influence, and resources, you could sit down at the table and declare yourself important.
And Hydra's recruitnt standards only made things worse.
The organization aggressively absorbed talent from everywhere, often with almost no vetting whatsoever. If soone was useful, Hydra took them.
Half the ti, mbers didn't even know who else belonged to the organization.
Two Hydra agents could pass each other in a hallway without realizing they worked for the sa people.
The only reliable identification thod left was their ridiculous slogan.
"Hail Hydra."
Honestly, that explained a lot.
During the events surrounding the Avengers, Steve Rogers had apparently tricked undercover Hydra agents simply by casually saying the phrase aloud.
Which ant identifying Hydra spies was theoretically simple.
Walk through S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters saying "Hail Hydra" often enough, and eventually sobody would answer back.
As for Garrett...
Truthfully, he had never cared much about Hydra's ideology in the first place.
Nor had he ever felt particularly loyal toward Pierce.
He joined Hydra for the sa reason countless others did:
Resources.
Protection.
Opportunity.
A stable place inside the machine.
As he aged, Garrett's health deteriorated rapidly. Then ca the terminal illness.
Desperate to save himself, he used Hydra's resources to launch the Centipede Project, obsessively researching variants of the Super Soldier Serum in hopes of curing diseases modern dicine couldn't touch.
Progress had been painfully slow.
Every formula ca with flaws. Instability. Rejection. Failure.
All he had truly managed to accomplish was delaying his own death.
And ti was running out.
Garrett had heard that Baron Strucker possessed Hydra's most advanced superhuman research division, but Strucker's faction was filled with fanatics and extremists Garrett wanted nothing to do with.
Worse, Strucker guarded his discoveries obsessively. Even trusted subordinates rarely gained access.
Then there was Drex Valen.
The man had already developed revolutionary treatnts for AIDS and polio.
Garrett originally thought Drex might beco humanity's greatest dical scientist.
Instead, Drex abruptly shifted his focus toward Super Soldier research...
And without anyone realizing it, he handed the world the greatest shock imaginable.
He turned himself into the strongest man alive.
At this point, Garrett had seriously considered defecting.
Telling Drex the truth about Hydra's survival.
Not out of morality.
Not out of guilt.
He simply wanted to live.
His body was failing faster every day, and deep down, he no longer believed the Centipede Project could save him.
The only thing stopping him was uncertainty.
He had no idea how Drex Valen treated forr Hydra mbers.
If the man happened to possess an uncompromising hatred toward Hydra...
Then walking through that door would basically amount to delivering himself to execution personally.
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