May folded her arms and said a few terse words. "Facial recognition."
Skye's eyes lit up as she immediately understood what May meant. "Right! The files say Skrulls can't invent appearances out of thin air. They can only turn into human faces they've seen in person. If they're gathered in large numbers, they can't possibly kill everyone they imitate. That would cause mass disappearances and would have alerted the police long ago."
Skye's fingers blurred across the keyboard. "I just need to write an algorithm to pull surveillance footage from major airports, stations, and municipal cameras worldwide, then look for targets with exactly identical faces appearing in different places during the same time period. Any overlap will expose a weakness in the Skrulls' cover!"
"That could work, but screening will take time," Ward added. "We also need a second approach: monitoring the flow of supplies."
Ward looked at Coulson. "If they're secretly developing super soldiers, as we suspect, they can't pull that off by putting up a few racks in a basement. They'll have to purchase large quantities of biological reaction reagents, gamma radiation generators, high-pressure constant-temperature incubation chambers, and vast amounts of human experiment consumables."
"All those things are on the restricted lists under international conventions." Coulson nodded approvingly. "Whether they use the black market or multinational pharmaceutical companies' smuggling channels, using that equipment will leave financial and logistical traces. If we focus on tracking unusual movements of radioactive materials and large biological instruments, we can follow the trail."
Both approaches were clear and logically sound, without a single flaw to pick out.
Coulson felt a little relieved.
The team worked together even more smoothly than he had expected. Even without Fitz and Simmons, its framework hadn't fallen apart.
Still, Coulson didn't immediately give the order to proceed.
He