by Alex Irvine
Hurrying to the limo, Pepper said, “Give me the key.” Happy held out his arm so she could reach the lock on the football as they ran together out of the hotel and toward the VIP lot.
Left behind in the restaurant, Natalie spoke into her cell phone. “He’s going into turn ten.” She looked around to make sure no one was watching. “He is extremely vulnerable at the moment,” she said.
She was, too. Her support network was a long way off, and it would be very easy for a misunderstanding to escalate, compromising her mission. That could not be allowed to happen.
Natalie held the phone, listening for another moment, and then said, “Understood,” and hung up. Then, as Pepper had ordered, she dialed her phone again, to make sure the Stark Industries plane was ready to go when Tony was.
Oblivious to the disruption on the track, Tony was having the time of his life. He had just passed Hammer’s car with a grin and a wave.
Suddenly, he saw the cars in front of him veer crazily away from something in the center of the track. Just before one of the cars disappeared in a fireball, Tony could have sworn he saw a man… and something sparking, like live wires.
The fireball cleared, and Tony saw that there was a man on the track, walking against the direction of the race. From his hands dangled a pair of whips that glowed and sparked as he flicked them against the concrete.
The car in front of Tony braked and swerved. Tony stayed behind it, using it as a shield. A flickering line of energy shot out and split the car in half. The two pieces, spitting vapors and flame, tumbled into the crash barrier. Now Tony really stood on the brakes. He hauled on the steering wheel, felt the car skid, and watched in what felt like slow motion as the man flicked one of the whips toward Tony’s car.
The whip sheared through the chassis and split the car into two pieces, which flipped and slid along the track, coming to a stop upside down. Tony popped the steering wheel loose and tossed it out onto the track so that he could wriggle out of the driver’s seat. His helmet had cracked in the crash, and he stripped it off. The remains of his car rested between him and the guy with the whips and the metal exoskeleton, but right then he reached the wreck and slashed it into small pieces, shouting in Russian. Tony waited for just the right moment, then grabbed hold of the nearest bit of wreckage and swung it at the back of his head.
Tony put everything he had into the swing. It was a good one. The blow landed solidly… but had no visible effect.
The man roared like an animal and slashed at Tony, but Tony was already off and running for cover. All he saw were pieces of race cars, beautiful machines turned into expensive junk.
One car lay upside down at an angle that would provide brief cover, leaking gas all over the track. Tony had an idea. He dove under the car, yanked off the gas cap, and scrambled away from the splash of fuel. He got clear just as the man was close enough to strike.
The superheated whip slashed down through the car’s engine and into the pool of fuel on the track surface. The explosion that followed blew the car to unrecognizable pieces and sent Tony pinwheeling into a wall of hay bales at the edge of the track. He got to his feet and looked back toward the dissipating fireball.
There was the man, walking through the flames as if they weren’t there and coming toward Tony as though he were the only thing in the world that mattered.
“I see Tony!” Happy cried out. The thing about Monaco was the race was right through downtown, so the hotel was literally close enough that they almost could have run faster. Happy had just crashed through the gate and onto the track—going the wrong way. There were hulks of destroyed cars, pit crews running onto the track to save drivers, spectators rushing up and down the stands in waves. There was fire on the track, everywhere.
Happy lost sight of Tony. A fireball on the track hid everything. Happy accelerated that way.
There was Tony again.
Happy took in the situation all at once. Tony was half-buried in a collapsed pile of hay bales on the inside of the crash barriers, trying to get up. A big area of the track near Tony was on fire. Through the fire came the big nutcase with the laser whips, cracking them on the pavement and grinning.
There was one thing to do, and Happy did it. He cut the wheel hard and hammered down on the brakes, sending the limo into a drift and smashing the bad guy into the railing with the back end. The limo slammed hard into the crash barrier, crumpling the railings and setting off the air bags. It had pinned the guy to the wall.
What to do next? Happy wondered. His shattered window fell apart and he noticed the boss approaching the limo. Pepper was screaming at Tony to get in the car, Tony was shouting back at her to give him the case.
Happy, meanwhile, kept gunning the engine to hold the maniac with the whips at bay. As Tony reached for the case, the car lurched. The man reared up from behind it and, with a barbaric yell, whistled one of his whips past Tony’s head, splitting the nearest door in two. The second whip tore through the armored hood of the car as if it were aluminum foil. Tony spun away. The man slashed at the car to free himself. He hacked away at the hood and the engine compartment, his whips even slicing through to shred the seats into the backseat.
From the limo, Pepper called out, “Tony!” She slid the football across the slick pavement in his direction. Then she and Happy just ducked and hoped that Tony would take care of the situation before the car, with them in it, was carved up to scraps.
Incredibly, the lunatic, who was wearing an RT on his chest, had hacked away enough of the front end of the car that he was almost loose. He shoved free and stalked through the wreckage after Tony.
Tony entered a code into a pad next to the football’s handle. It chirped its acceptance. He opened the case and placed one foot in either half. A light, portable version of the Iron Man suit, the Mark V, built itself from the boots up around Tony’s body. It wasn’t the same as the full apparatus, but it was still a formidable piece of body armor.
The Mark V finished assembling itself just in time. The first crack from an energized whip left deep scoring in the suit’s shoulder. Tony dodged the next several swings and goggled at the RT on the man’s chest. How is that possible? Tony thought. Even the Department of Defense had no idea how Arc Reactor tech worked. Who was this person who had just shown up in Monaco and started wrecking the place with RT-powered whips?
A whip sparked across Tony’s torso, coming dangerously close to his own RT. Tony grabbed the arm holding the whip and flung the man into the smoking wreckage of two cars. When he got up, Tony had powered up the repulsors, and fired.
The man deflected the blast with one of the whips. That was something Tony had never seen before. In his brief moment of surprise, he left himself open. The maniac flicked one of them around his neck and jerked him to the ground. But that was where he overreached. Tony caught the whips, feeling them short out various circuits in the gauntlets. He swung the guy up and around, and drove him into the pavement. Then, before he could get up, Tony tore the RT from the whip wielder’s chest and looked at it. He couldn’t quite believe what he saw.
Police swarmed the downed lunatic, who laughed the whole time they were dragging him away. “You lose,” he said over and over, in an accent. “You lose.”
CHAPTER 27
By the time Tony walked into the local police station, he’d run some preliminary tests on the RT recovered from Whiplash—as the media had already named him. The results were startlingly similar to Tony’s own design.
In the hallway, he found a French prison official, who recognized him. “Who is he?”
“We are not sure yet. His first name is Ivan. We assume he’s Russian. We’re not even sure he speaks English. He hasn’t said a word since he got here.” The official let Tony into the holding cell where a manacled Ivan sat, wearing only his underwear with his back to the door. His skin was a gallery of tattoos.
“Pretty decent tech,” he said, and meant it. “If you’d gone to double cycles you’d get better yields. Some other
things you could have done. Little refinement here and there, you could make yourself a paycheck somewhere. North Korea, China.”
He walked around so Ivan could see him. “Where’d you get it?”
Vanko looked at him with no trace of fear. “You come from a family of thieves and butchers. And now you guilty men tried to rewrite your own history.”
A family of thieves. Tony stored away that statement. What did this Ivan know about his family? “Speaking of thieves, where did you get this design?” he asked.
“My father. Anton Vanko,” Ivan said reverently.
“Never heard of him.”
“My father is the reason you’re alive.”
“I’m alive because you had a shot and you took it and you missed,” Tony said.
Vanko laughed, a sound like rocks rubbing against each other. “If you could make God bleed, people would cease to believe in Him. There will be blood in the water, the sharks will come. All I have to do is sit back and watch as the world consumes you.”
The prison officials opened the door and let him know his visit was over.
“Where will you be watching this world consume me? A prison cell. I’ll send you a bar of soap,” Tony said, and headed for the door.
“Hey, Tony,” Ivan said. “Palladium in the chest. It’s a painful way to die.”
Tony stopped. How did Vanko know? For a moment Tony almost turned to ask. Then he decided, no. That’s giving him too much power. Using palladium wasn’t the hardest part of making an RT, and Vanko could have guessed that was what was making him sick.
But now Tony knew that even strangers could tell he looked sick. He had to do something about it. Time was running out.
“He’s completely unhinged. He thinks of the Iron Man weapon as a toy,” Senator Stern was complaining on TV while Tony flew back to the United States with Pepper.
“Mute,” he said, and sat down, irritated that Stern was still after him. Stark Industries was taking a beating in the press, and the company’s shareholders weren’t happy about the new directions Tony had taken it. They all wanted him to sell the Iron Man tech, which he thought was nuts. “They should be giving me a medal,” he grumbled to Pepper. “Here.” He set a covered plate down and then uncovered it.
“What’s that?” Pepper asked.
“Inflight meal,” Tony said.
“You made that?”
“Yeah, where do you think I’ve been for the last three hours?” He tried to sell the joke, but there was an expression on Pepper’s face that told him she was seeing through it.
“Tony,” Pepper said. “What are you not telling me?”
He thought about telling her. He wanted to tell her. In the end, though, he decided not to. She needed to run Stark Industries, and he needed to figure out how to refuel his RT without killing himself. Division of labor.
“Let’s cancel my birthday party and… let’s go to Venice,” he said.
Pepper shook her head. “Now? With things the way they are? I think as CEO, I need to show up.”
“As CEO, you can go on a retreat,” Tony said. “Get away. Recharge our batteries…”
“Not everybody runs on batteries, Tony.” She gave him a sad smile, and he had no answer. Because the way things looked, he wasn’t going to be running on a battery for much longer, either.
Three hours later, a guard arrived at Vanko’s cell door and set a tray of food on the shelf built into the bars. He made eye contact with Vanko, then walked away. Ivan looked at the food. There was a note. Enjoy the potatoes, it said. In Russian.
He picked up the potatoes. They were a single, smooth blob. He turned it over… and set into the underside of the blob was a digital time.
Ivan put it all together. At that moment, the guard returned. He guided another prisoner in and shut the door. This new prisoner was Ivan’s size, had Ivan’s hair… and his prison jumpsuit bore the number 6219.
Just like Ivan’s.
He jumped the new prisoner and smashed his head into the sink before dropping his limp body to the ground. The guard passed by a third time, and now he set a key on the shelf where he’d left the food.
Ivan planted the explosive charge on the wall. It started counting. :35, :34…
He had plenty of time to unlock the door and walk down the hall before the explosive went off. Whatever remained of the other prisoner 6219, no one would look very hard. Vanko ducked into a stairwell. Alarms shrieked and prison guards were everywhere. Two of them grabbed him and hooded him before dragging him out and throwing him into a van. It was dark inside, and hot. But Ivan Vanko was free.
Or would be soon.
At the end of the ride was a hangar with a private jet, and a table set for two. At the table sat an American in a white suit. “There he is!” the American called out. He had Ivan brought to the table, his handcuffs removed. The tablecloth was softer than any fabric he had ever owned. The American was eating ice cream that he said had been flown in from California. Ice cream, flown across oceans.
“I’m such a huge fan of yours,” he said. “My name is Justin Hammer. I’d like to do some business with you.” Over dessert, which Hammer ate first, he kept talking. “The way you stood up to Tony Stark there, in front of God and everybody… wow. That spoke to me. Because—if you don’t mind me saying—you don’t just go up and try to kill a guy. You go after his legacy. That’s what you kill.”
Interesting, thought Ivan. He had thoughts along the same lines, although he would have been happy just to kill Stark, too. “You need my resources,” Hammer said. “You need a benefactor. I’d like to be that guy.”
Ah well. This man wanted to give him a job to kill Tony Stark?
That was fine. Except for one thing.
“I want my bird,” Ivan said.
It took him some time to make himself understood, but when he had assurances that Irina would be on her way from Moscow, Ivan relaxed a little. What would come next, he did not know. It did not matter. What mattered was the humiliation of Tony Stark.
CHAPTER 28
Back at Stark Industries, Rhodey had arrived to talk to Tony. Pepper and Natalie were fielding media calls. “Where is he?” Rhodey asked.
“Downstairs,” Pepper said, over Natalie’s objections. She waved him down to the lab.
He got to the bottom of the stairs and peered through the glass walls. Tony sat in one of his cars, staring at his virtual desktop. He wasn’t looking at Iron Man schematics or breakdowns of engines, though. He was pulling gigabytes of old video footage, photographs, scanned-in reports.… Rhodey couldn’t quite see how they fit together, and he wouldn’t find out until he asked, so he knocked.
Tony glanced up and let him in.
“Tony, you have to get upstairs and get on top of this situation right now. I’ve been on the phone all day talking them out of rolling tanks up to your front door and taking these suits,” Rhodey said.
Tony didn’t answer. He just stared off into space, barely acknowledging Rhodey’s presence.
“You said it would be twenty years before someone else would figure out your technology. Well, guess what? Somebody had it yesterday,” Rhodey said. “It’s not theoretical anymore.”
He looked more closely at Tony and thought to himself that Tony looked like a man with one foot in the grave. “Are you listening to me? You okay?”
Tony got up out of the car and Rhodey helped him to his desk. Tony took out his RT and showed Rhodey the smoking depleted palladium cell.
“You had this in your body?” Rhodey said. He was starting to understand what was behind Tony’s recent behavior. “And how about that high-tech crossword puzzle on your neck?” he added, pointing to the purplish lines spreading up from under the collar of Tony’s shirt.
“Road rash,” Tony said, but Rhodey could see his heart wasn’t in the joke. Tony was dying. The RT was poisoning him.
“You don’t have to do this alone,” Rhodey said. There were plenty of doctors who could help… weren’t there?
<
br /> Tony shook his head and started to get back to work. “You have to trust me. Contrary to popular belief, I know exactly what I’m doing.”
Rhodey watched his old friend for a long time after that, but there was really nothing else to say.
“Here they are,” Hammer said to Vanko as they walked into the main Hammer Industries research lab. “Very excited. They’re combat-ready. I might have rushed the prototype.…” Hammer broke off as Vanko dug right into his heavily encrypted software and cracked it before Hammer could even ask someone to get him a password. Skills, thought Hammer. This guy had them.
Then he just watched as Vanko climbed a stepladder and started pulling pieces of one of the drone soldiers off. They were designed to accommodate a pilot, which was a tricky engineering problem.
“What you want them for?” Vanko said from the top of the ladder.
“Long term, I want them to get me into the Pentagon. But for now I want to make Iron Man look like an antique.”
“I can do that, no problem,” Vanko said with a throaty laugh.
“Hey, this is our guy!” Hammer said. “I had a feeling.”
Natalie helped Tony get ready for the party. He was exhausted and depressed and inclined to cancel the whole thing… but that wasn’t the Tony Stark people wanted to see.
“I should cancel the party,” Tony said.
She nodded. “Probably.”
“Because it sends the wrong message.”
She looked over her shoulder at him. “Inappropriate.”
Oh my, Tony thought. They looked at each other for a long moment. Natalie applied a little lotion to the bruises on Tony’s face. “Hypothetical question,” Tony said. “Bit odd. If this was your last birthday party, how would you celebrate it?”
Looking him right in the eye, Natalie said, “I’d do whatever I wanted to do. With whoever I wanted to do it with.”