just because she's on a mission...

Chapter 11

By the time Peggy and Jarvis made their way to Chief Dooley's office, the glowing, volatile electrical vest locked to his body made it abundantly clear that Peggy had been right all along, and had been telling the truth about everything.  Ivchenko was finally accepted as the villain he was (Thompson confessed that he'd been uneasy all along with the trust that the chief had been placing in "that Russian headshrinker"), and finally, at last, thanks to the trail of dead and unconscious agents she'd left upstairs, finding Dottie Underwood was an agency priority.

Peggy carefully neglected to mention the extent of her personal relationship with the Russian spy.  It wasn't relevant, she decided.  She only supplied that Dottie had been a neighbor of hers at Griffith House with whom she'd socialized with on occasion.

She remained baffled at Dottie's choice though, to break into the lion's den, so to speak, seemingly with the express purpose of a) setting Peggy loose, and b) essentially daring Peggy to chase her.

Tag, you're it.

Peggy was filled once again with that impending sense of something bearing down on her that wasn't sure she'd be able to stop.  But, strangely enough, it rather seemed that Dottie wanted her to try.

And so, for the second time in the last hour, Peggy watched someone hurl themselves out of a window in the SSR offices. 

*****

Dottie wheeled the baby carriage up the sidewalk to the front door of the theater; the baby carriage was bearing a canister of death and violence, assuming the stuff still worked as effectively as it had at Finnau.  But of course, that was why she was testing it out here first. 

She wondered how long it would take Peggy to catch up with her.  Dottie had seen Howard Stark's private car in midtown; with him in town, she expected they'd figure out pretty quickly which items were missing from the SSR offices and what was planned for them.

She caught sight of her reflection in the glass of the theater's front doors.  She was struck by what a pretty young mother she made, well-dressed and pushing such a quietly slumbering newborn in this lovely carriage.  It was a very nice carriage. It rode suspended on springs on very large, rubber wheels, which, the lady at the shop had explained, would give her baby a very smooth ride, even on those bumpy cobblestones in Greenwich Village.  It was, strictly speaking, a much nicer carriage than was necessary for wheeling a canister of rage-inducing poisoned gas into a movie house.  Nothing but the best for my baby, she thought wryly. 

While waiting in the ticket line, her eyes lit on a little blonde girl, standing in front of the movie posters in the lobby, pointing at them and holding her mother's hand.  Those soft curls, the still-babyish lilt to her speech.... They were familiar.

It was Molly, the little girl from the circus.

Too bad I don't believe in fate, she mused.

******

Peggy, Thompson and Souza stood in the lobby, surveying the carnage as body after body was wheeled out on stretchers.  "And you didn't see who barred the door?" Thompson pressed the manager.

The manager shook his head.  "No.  But, that lady and her kid want to talk to you guys," he said, pointing to a woman in her early thirties with a little blonde girl who anxiously clung to her mother's hand, sucking on a lollipop.

Peggy's face drained of its color.  What were the odds?

"Why's that?" she asked.

The manager shrugged.  "The mom thinks she saw something, I guess."