The Director of Rubicon

The Director of Rubicon By the time Red Agent: Island of Dr. Moreau starts, Britney and Avril have had enough of hiding. They’re being blamed for the Vatican bombing, their safehouses keep getting exposed, and the organization they used to work for has fallen apart. Britney finally reaches out to an old French intelligence contact to see whether there’s a way out of it. Instead of getting a quiet conversation with someone she knows, she gets the Director of Rubicon sitting down at her table. I like how quickly that meeting tells you what sort of boss this woman is going to be. She knows who they are. She’s arranged the contact. She calls them valuable assets before they’ve agreed to work for her. They’re looking for help, and she already has a job she wants done. Rubicon is a multinational intelligence agency that prefers to stay out of sight. With the Highborn Initiative gone, it’s becoming much more active. Britney and Avril are understandably not excited about another secret organization arriving to explain how much it needs them. The Director’s methods don’t exactly reassure them. After the meeting, she explains that everyone in the plaza was working for her and the apparent snipers weren’t carrying live ammunition. Nobody was actually going to massacre civilians. That’s good, but arranging the situation so your prospective recruits believe people might be killed is still a hell of a way to introduce yourself. Her target is Dr. Helena Moreau, a geneticist who had worked for HiboCorp on human-animal hybrids. Moreau was presumed dead after her project was shut down violently, but there’s no recovered body, the servers were wiped before the explosion, and new hybrid attacks are targeting people involved in that shutdown. The Director has enough information to suspect what happened. What she needs is someone who can get close to those creatures and survive. Britney makes a point of telling her that being able to become a wolf does not make her one of Moreau’s genetic experiments. The Director says she knows. She wants their abilities, not a discussion about how different their origins are. The part I find most telling comes after the mission. Britney and Avril don’t want the surviving hybrids dragged into another laboratory, so they tell her there were no survivors and they can’t find the island again. The Director responds with a hypothetical: if there were survivors, would they be a threat? They tell her no. She accepts that answer, clears their names, and offers another job. I read that as her giving them room to protect the people they saved without forcing the entire argument into the open. It doesn’t erase the manipulation at the beginning. It does make her more interesting than somebody who exists just to send agents after a target and complain when they come back. She gets the result she wanted, and they get their lives back. Whether that makes her someone they should trust is another question. For this story, it’s enough to get them talking about the next job. Spoilers for Red Agent: Island of Dr. Moreau #1–5.