John Garrett (Earth-199999)

John Garrett, also known as the Clairvoyant, was an American agent of Hydra and S.H.I.E.L.D. He was responsible for initiating Project Centipede, an effort to permanently repair his body after radical cybernetic changes had proven ineffective in keeping him well following a grievous injury. He worked as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent while secretly acting on behalf of Hydra for decades before being exposed in early 2014 and being killed by Phil Coulson shortly after. He recruited a young Grant Ward into S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra, raising him with a warped loyalty to Hydra and Garrett.

Biography

Deathlok and Centipede

In the late 1980s, Garrett suffered a severe injury in action, taking a large chunk out of the side of his torso. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s perceived lack of care for him caused him to reconsider his loyalties and align with Hydra. In 1990, Garrett became a part of Project Deathlok, using Cybertek resources to create cybernetic enhancements in hopes of repairing his body. The artificial organs in Garrett's body were not a permanent solution, and gradually deteriorated throughout his life. In 1999, Garrett recruited a teenage Grant Ward, who was sitting in juvenile detention awaiting trial after committing arson on his family home. Garrett took advantage of Ward's vulnerability and hopelessness to raise him as a disciple of Hydra, leaving him alone in the woods to fend for himself and lose his "weakness." Ward became what Garrett hoped he would become, a supreme covert agent of Hydra within S.H.I.E.L.D.

Realizing the temporary nature of Project Deathlok, Garrett initiated Project Centipede, an effort to permanently heal his wounds. To most involved with Centipede, the project was intended to create an army of super soldiers using known methods of creating superpowered beings. There was a distinct level of abstraction between Centipede and Hydra at large, to the point that those working for Centipede didn't realize their ultimate allegiance to Hydra. Garrett communicated his desires for the project through Edison Po and was known to those in Centipede as the mysterious Clairvoyant: his supposed telepathic and predictive powers served as inspiration for many among Centipede, especially Raina. In truth, Garrett's vast knowledge of the inner workings of S.H.I.E.L.D. was naturally due to his high security clearance in that organization. He oversaw Centipede's operations as they established an army of super soldiers, including Michael Peterson, whom they used for a more advanced application of Project Deathlok. Businessman Ian Quinn was a major ally of Centipede, and took direct orders from the "Clairvoyant." Throughout late 2013, Centipede was repeatedly at odds with Phil Coulson and his team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents—of whom the duplicitous Grant Ward was a member.

Among Coulson's team

Still seeking a permanent solution to his increasingly poor health, Garrett became interested in Phil Coulson's highly mysterious death and resurrection. Coulson had died in the Battle of New York at the hands of Loki before somehow being revived under utterly confidential circumstances. Garrett knew that uncovering the secret behind Coulson's resurrection would help his own cause of permanently recovering from his injuries. Knowing that not even Coulson knew the truth, Garrett decided to lure Coulson to the answer as a means of learning it himself. After Coulson's team captured Ian Quinn, Garrett and his protege Antoine Triplett (not a Hydra agent) boarded Coulson's jet known as the Bus under the pretense of transferring control of the prisoner to S.H.I.E.L.D. at large. Garrett interrogated Quinn as a means of keeping up appearances—Quinn didn't know Garrett's identity as the Clairvoyant, and revealed to Coulson that the Clairvoyant was stringing him along to learn the truth of his resurrection. Garrett accompanied Coulson, Ward, and Leo Fitz to the Guest House, a decommissioned bunker where they believed an integral drug in Coulson's operation had been produced, GH-325. After taking down the security there, the team noticed that an explosive timer had been activated, giving them a limited window to escape. Fitz and Ward escaped safely with GH-325, while Coulson looked for more answers about his resurrection. Garrett, meanwhile, secretly stashed a number of other drugs for Hydra use. He and Coulson escaped moments before the facility exploded.

Some time later, Garrett had Michael Peterson—now known simply as Deathlok and armed with a series of powerful cybernetic enhancements—stage an attack against him and Antoine Triplett, making it look sufficiently real so as to fool Triplett. Garrett "helped" Coulson's team in tracking down the Clairvoyant, and they collectively determined that if the Clairvoyant did indeed have psychic powers, he may be on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Gifted Index under the previously disregarded list of purported psychics. Naturally, all of these were dead ends. One of their targets was Thomas Nash, a man who had been catatonic for four years after a car crash. Garrett secretly had Nash kidnapped from his nursing home and set Deathlok up there to defend it and make it seem as though Nash was being protected. Agents Melinda May and Felix Blake reported to the nursing home, but Deathlok fought them off, seriously injuring Blake in the process. However, Blake did manage to fire a tracking device onto Deathlok, allowing S.H.I.E.L.D. to follow his signal. A full team with significant backup trailed Deathlok to an abandoned racing facility in Pensacola, Florida. Though Deathlok quickly escaped, they found Nash in the basement surrounded by computer screens, perfectly motionless in his wheelchair. Garrett constructed the room to make it appear that the immobile but aware Nash was speaking through the computers around him as the Clairvoyant. Ward waited long enough for sufficient "evidence" to reveal itself, then shot and killed him under the guise of anger. Garrett and the others went their separate ways as the team began to splinter from within. Coulson thought something was off about the Nash situation, and soon figured out that the Clairvoyant was a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, leading him to be suspicious of virtually everyone around him.

Soon after, Garrett found himself being chased in his jet by hostile S.H.I.E.L.D. drones. An encoded message had recently been sent out across S.H.I.E.L.D. communication channels, apparently signaling those sympathetic to Hydra to rise up. Garrett came to the Bus for assistance, and Coulson shot the drones down and let Garrett onboard. The Bus's trajectory had been hijacked and was on its way forcefully to the Hub. Coulson believed that Victoria Hand was with Hydra and was bringing his people there to kill them. A group of armed agents were indeed waiting for them when they arrived, and Garrett and the others on the Bus covertly escaped the craft. Garrett, Coulson, May, and Fitz set out to take a Hub control center while Ward and Skye went to disable the Hub's controls, especially the facility's hold on the Bus. Another member of Coulson's team, Jemma Simmons, was already at the Hub, and in certain danger. As the foursome claimed a control center, Coulson pondered how best to rescue Simmons, while Garrett suggested that they should kill Victoria Hand outright. Coulson was unconvinced, and Garrett began angrily rattling off a list of the Clairvoyant's atrocities, including brainwashing Raina—something Coulson had never told him or anyone else and that only the Clairvoyant could know. Coulson realized the truth about Garrett's identity, and Garrett tried to backpedal for a moment, but gave up and sighed. Suddenly, several soldiers burst into the room, and Garrett told the Hydra sympathizers among them to take out the other soldiers, declaring, "Hail Hydra."

Garrett took a few moments to gloat over his victory. He was interested in taking Fitz into Hydra, willingly or not, and instructed his men to shoot him in the kneecaps while killing Coulson and May. Just before they could do so, Ward and Skye succeeded in destroying the Hub's "nerve center," detonating it with C4. The blackout knocked out the lights and forced a backup generator into action. Coulson and May took the opportunity to take the fight to Garrett and his men. Using a combination of fists, I.C.E.R.s, and Fitz's technology, they managed to knock out all of them. Hand, Simmons, and others walked in, having heard all of what went down through a surveillance unit on the wall. Garrett and his men were taken into custody. He was to be transported to the Fridge for imprisonment under Hand's personal watch, and Ward requested to come along, supposedly incensed at his former superior officer's betrayal. On the plane ride over, Hand offered Ward to shoot and kill Garrett outright as a way of making up for killing Nash. He stood up, cocked his gun, and shot and killed Agent Hand, nodding his allegiance to Garrett and Hydra.

Final battle with S.H.I.E.L.D.

Ward broke Raina out of prison and the remnants of Hydra—Garrett, Ward, Raina, and Deathlok—regrouped in a former S.H.I.E.L.D. base underneath a small barbershop in Havana. By this point, S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra were officially dead, having had their secrets publicly revealed by Black Widow, and virtually all S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and officials were now fugitives from the U.S. government. This was Raina's first introduction to Garrett, and she was quite disappointed that the Clairvoyant didn't possess any actual clairvoyant powers. Garrett gave her the drugs that he'd recovered from the Guest House and set her and a group of Hydra scientists to synthesizing GH-325 as best they could. Ward also handed off a hard drive he'd gotten from Skye containing the sum of knowledge that Coulson's team had amassed since their formation. While Raina and the others got to work, Garrett planned an infiltration of the Fridge to bolster Hydra's stocks, certain that they could take any number of invaluable objects from deep within S.H.I.E.L.D.'s stores. Garrett and Ward arrived on the roof of the hundred-floor Fridge under the guise of Ward taking Garrett in for imprisonment as planned. Without Hand's clearance, they staged an attack from a Hydra helicopter to get past the otherwise stringent security protocol, killing the guards once they were inside, and were soon joined by other backup agents.

The Hydra unit recovered several objects that Coulson's team had originally found, including the Berserker Staff and the 0-8-4 from Peru. They also released several high-level convicts. Ward used the 0-8-4 to blast open access to a bottom floor containing a large amount of gravitonium; a floor that even Garrett didn't know about. Back at their safehouse, the team learned that the hard drive Ward had supplied was equipped with a failsafe that would wipe the data if anyone other than Skye accessed it. Thus, Ward would have to get close to Skye once more and get the necessary information. Skye herself called Ward, having learned of the Fridge's fall and fearing for his safety. She told him that the team were staying in a secret base in Canada and that Nick Fury was dead; Garrett was very pleased at this news. Ward told Skye he'd see her at the base. To prepare for his espionage and make his lie believable, Ward had Garrett punch him in the face several times. Garrett gave Ward 24 hours to gather the necessary information; otherwise, he was to kill the rest of the team and bring Skye back alive. Ian Quinn, having been recently freed from the Fridge, confronted Garrett about throwing him in there in the first place. Quinn was furious at learning the true identity of the "Clairvoyant," and was adamant that he was done with the organization. He quickly changed his tune when Garrett showed him the gravitonium they had also recovered from the Fridge.

Ward's infiltration of the Canadian base, Providence, was a success. Much of the rest of Coulson's team went off to handle another mission, and Ward killed the base's watchman Eric Koenig and lured Skye away from the base and onto the Bus. Unbeknownst to him, Skye had found Koenig's body and deduced Ward's Hydra allegiance, and was now playing along with his deception to gain the tactical advantage. Garrett had Deathlok tail Ward and Skye to make sure everything went as planned; this proved to be a shrewd decision, as Skye soon gave the police her and Ward's location, willing to give herself up for the sake of taking Ward down. Ward escaped, and Deathlok grabbed him and Skye and took them both back to the Bus safely. Skye was adamant that she wouldn't cooperate with Ward or Hydra, and so Garrett forced the issue. He had Deathlok plant a heart-stopping device on Ward's chest and told Skye to reveal how to decrypt the hard drive or Ward would die. Even overcome with hatred for Ward, she couldn't bear to be responsible for his death, and complied.

Garrett learned of a recent robbery of Cybertek hard-copy files on Project Deathlok, and this motivated him to expedite moving operations from Cuba to the U.S. They boarded the Bus on an airfield several hours away from the barbershop. Ward found Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons scoping them out nearby and took them aboard. Garrett tauntingly spoke with them, but Fitz fried his Deathlok enhancements with a handheld electromagnetic pulse disguised as a joy buzzer. Fitz-Simmons were rushed into another room as Ward and Raina looked over Garrett alone. Garrett told Ward to kill Fitz-Simmons; he hesitated, but left the room to obey, leaving Raina alone with Garrett. Garrett opened up a hatch in his metal siding, showing his artificial innards powered by the Centipede serum, which he said had been barely keeping him alive for the past few months. He told Raina to "jumpstart" his system with the GH-325 facsimile, and she complied: after a brief, intense reaction, he recovered as planned, and seemed utterly euphoric.

The GH-325 interacted with the Centipede serum in Garrett's system, putting him in a manic state that seemed to give him supreme knowledge and awareness of the universe—or it had simply damaged his mind beyond repair. He claimed to be able to feel the universe and taste the future. He spoke of large-scale change for the world and the human race. Raina, for one, bought into his cultic declarations, seeing in him the "Clairvoyant" that she had wanted all along. Garrett and the others went to a Cybertek manufacturing facility in New Mexico, where Quinn was showing off their equipment to interested military officials. Garrett barged in and declared that they didn’t need the military. Garrett's new, ultra-ambitious mindset caused him to plunge his powerful hand into a general's chest, pulling out a rib and stabbing him with it as other Hydra soldiers held the remaining officials at gunpoint.

Garrett and the others established a presence at the facility as Coulson's team closed in on them for a final confrontation. Later, Garrett received a phone call from Skye. She had taken the phone of Kyle Zeller, Deathlok's handler at Cybertek, during a raid there by Coulson's team. Garrett took the opportunity to inform her that if anyone other than Zeller tried to control Deathlok, he would die, and also that Fitz-Simmons were dead. He ordered Ward to kill Skye, and he complied. Soon, Garrett was personally confronted by Phil Coulson and Nick Fury. Fury shot a clip of bullets into Garrett, but he survived almost without injury. Garrett looked forward to receiving assistance from Deathlok, but by this point Skye had taken control of the Cybertek system and found Deathlok's son Ace Peterson held captive elsewhere in the building. She had Ace send his father a message to indicate that he was safe, effectively ending Mike Peterson's servitude to Hydra. He blasted a rocket at Garrett, knocking him across the room and gravely injuring him. He further stomped a deep depression in Garrett's torso, seemingly killing him. The U.S. Marine Corps arrived on the scene and rounded up Centipede soldiers, who would go back to being "essentially normal" people without regular injections of the Centipede serum, and as soon as they had their "failsafe" eyes removed. Ward was also taken into custody. Workers assigned to carry away Garrett's body were left alone to do their jobs, which allowed the still-alive Garrett to fight back and kill them all. He attached himself to a Deathlok machine and emerged seemingly stronger than ever, proud and ready to fight back, but Coulson blasted him with the recently recovered Peru 0-8-4, instantly vaporizing him and killing him once and for all.