Sasha Bordeaux is the Black Queen of the United Nations-sanctioned covert operations agency Checkmate.
Originally working as a bodyguard for Bruce Wayne, Sasha fell in love with her charge and attempted to continue her job as his "Cover" during his vigilante activities. Falling into Checkmate's hands after Wayne was charged for the murder of Vesper Fairchild, Sasha's skills allowed her to work her way up the agency's hierarchy until she now served as a member of the agency's leading council.
Name: Sasha Bordeaux
Aliases: "Cover", Black King's Bishop, Blackknight 1, Black Queen
Species: Cyborg
Nationality: American
Marital Status: Single
Occupation: Government Agent
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Intel[]
Former United States Secret Service agent-turned private VIP security, Sasha Bordeaux was hired by Lucius Fox of Wayne Enterprises to serve as a bodyguard to Bruce Wayne after the CEO learned that the billionaire bachelor had lost the services of his butler, Alfred Pennyworth.
Although Wayne was resistant to the idea, Fox left Bruce with little choice but to accept Sasha. This led to a very strained working relationship as Sasha took her duties seriously and Bruce did not. She got the distinct impression that he was trying to make her quit and suspected there was something false about his playboy behaviour. He was too physically fit for such a laid back man; he disappeared at night for supposedly social reasons but almost never actually saw him with a woman. Her suspicions were confirmed when she found a secret compartment inside his suitcase containing Batman's field arsenal.
Some time passed without Sasha bringing it up, but it soon became clear to her that Bruce was aware that she knew. When the inevitable confrontation came, she had no intention of laying off her duty of protecting Bruce Wayne--whatever he may be wearing at the time--and Bruce judged her unfit for following him around at night. To solve this, Bruce put her through a rigorous 30-day training program to make her fit. Sasha rose to the challenge and persevered through the program. She was given a costume to patrol with Batman at night as his "Cover".
When David Cain framed Bruce Wayne for the murder of Vesper Fairchild, Sasha was implicated as well. She was convicted of murder before the truth was exposed and sentence to Blackgate Penitentiary. She refused to take the stand during her trial as telling the truth would have meant exposing Batman's identity, and so she said nothing.
After three months in Blackgate, Sasha's death was faked by agents of Checkmate and she was recruited by Agent Jessica Midnight, who sold her on the idea of joining and began her training. Reconstructive surgery gave Sasha a new face to go along with her new identity. However, Batman did not believe she died in prison and was tirelessly looking for her and harassing Checkmate for answers.
As Batman began interfering in Checkmate missions, Sasha was told to resolve the situation with Batman. Sasha met with Bruce and vented her frustrations over what had happened. She figured out that he had actually allowed her to "discover" his identity as Batman. It was the only way he knew how to deal with how close they were getting. She told him she loved him, and he admitted he loved her as well, but she wouldn't come back, and she asked that he not try to find her again.
Focusing on her new job and mission, Sasha quickly rose in the ranks of Checkmate, becoming the Black King (Maxwell Lord)'s Knight. As the protector and right hand woman of Lord, she would come to realise how dangerous of a man he was and she was present when Blue Beetle (Ted Kord) broke in and confronted Lord on his plans to use Brother Eye and the OMAC Project to kill the metahuman community. As Lord killed the hero, Sasha was ordered to incinerate his body, however, she also secretly sent Kord's broken lenses to Batman to put him on the trail of Lord's scheme. However, as Batman's investigation continued, Sasha was forced to further witness Lord's accession to power as he mind-controlled Jessica Midnight to kill the rest of Checkmate's royalty and take full control of the agency.
Discovering Sasha's betrayal, Lord captured Sasha while she was meeting with Batman. Unable to control her mind, Lord left her imprisoned alongside Jessica. Escaping imprisonment, Sasha and Jessica sought out Lord to kill him, only to find that he had already been killed by Wonder Woman and that Brother Eye had activated the OMAC army and begun purging what remained of Checkmate. Sasha was mortally wounded by an OMAC, but rather than die, she was transformed into a new generation of OMAC after being unknowingly been infected with nannites by Brother Eye to serve as a backup system should Brother Eye's satellite ever be compromised.
As the Infinite Crisis incident raged, Sasha and Jessica set to work re-organising what was left of Checkmate along with every other agency they could get a hold of to stop Brother Eye and the OMACs. A plan was devised that would allow Sasha to use her new transformation to wipe out a large portion of the OMACs if they could be gathered together. The world's superheroes banded together to engage the OMACs and serve as the bait, while Sasha hacked the network and initiated a shutdown command.
To deal with Brother Eye, Sasha was part of a unit of heroes assembled by Batman to go into orbit and take out the satellite. They activated its propulsion system to knock it out of orbit, sending it plummeting to Earth. What survived re-entry crashed down in the Rub Al-Khali Desert and Batman sent Sasha to make sure nothing of it could be rebuilt.
Sasha had to beat the Israelis, the Chinese, the Rocket Red Brigade and a Checkmate now under the command of Amanda Waller to the crash site but she made it into the crashed satellite only to confront a still operational Brother Eye who attempted to use her OMAC nannites to download itself into her body and use her as new vessel. However, as Brother Eye attempted to enter her, Sasha managed detonate the explosives she had brought with her and destroyed the remaining satellite systems.
When Checkmate became a U.N.-sanctioned agency, Sasha Bordeaux was appointed as its Black Queen, and Jessica Midnight joined as her Bishop. She had routine clashes with the royalty of Checkmate's White side. With Alan Scott (White King), it tended to be over her operational use of violence and the body count that came along with that. With Amanda Waller (White Queen), it was because Amanda was after her job as Black Queen. She also began a secret affair with Mr. Terrific, who was the White King's Bishop when it began. Early on, she lost her Knight, Jonah McCarthy, on a raid of a Kobra base in the Gulf of Aden. She would later replace him with the French special agent Mademoiselle Marie.
Leading a joint operation with The Outsiders to take out secret experiments on Oolong Island, Sasha was abducted and held captive by Egg Fu. The scientist conducted vicious experiments on her to study her nannites, going so far as to amputate her arm to see it would regenerate completely out of nannites. Batman joined the rescue effort and brought her back to Checkmate. Amanda Waller attempted to blackmail Sasha into resigning with proof of her inappropriate affair with Mr. Terrific. However, Sasha aligned with Mr. Terrific and Taleb Khalib to turn the tables on Waller, finding evidence of her reactivation of the Suicide Squad and her Salvation Run Project, forcing her resignation.
When Darkseid took over Earth during the Final Crisis incident, Sasha bunkered down with what remained of Checkmate in a facility deep in Antarctica to coordinate a resistance. However, the bunker was breached by Darkseid's enslaved forces, and Sasha was touched by the Anti-Life Equation. She made it to a more secure area of the bunker with Mr. Terrific and Taleb Beni Khalid but couldn't resist the Equation. Rather than become one of Darkseid's slaves, she gave herself over to her OMAC programming and went into stasis mode. In order to access some OMAC codes to implement a counterattack plan, Mr. Terrific had to awaken her. She was awakened long enough for the Anti-Life Equation to fully take her, but Mr. Terrific forced her bio-functions to shut down before she could do anything, forcing her into a comatose state with her OMAC nanotech sustaining her.
Sasha remained in a comatose state even after Darkseid's forces were defeated and the Earth was saved. All efforts to reawaken her failed, as her exposure to the Anti-Life Equation kept her in a critical condition. She was moved to the Justice Society of America's brownstone headquarters in New York City, where Mr. Terrific and Dr. Mid-Nite could give her as much specialized medical care as possible to free her from her slumbering prison.
Mr. Terrific never gave up hope on her, and his faith was rewarded after the Justice Society's conflict with a new incarnation of Kobra led by Jason Burr yielded the means to help her. Artificial intelligence programs Burr salvaged from Checkmate's Code Zoo came back into Mr. Terrific's possession, and one of them was an alien program capable of cleaning out the malicious code crippling Sasha's nanotech system. He ran it through her, and it succeeded in bringing her out of her coma shortly before reality was rewritten due to the Flashpoint Incident.
Trivia[]
- Sasha Bordeaux first appeared in Detective Comics #751 (December, 2000).