“You think the answers are here somehow? The answer to how we can sever the link?” Alex looked over her shoulder at the photo—as if he expected it to answer him.
“Maybe. It all started here, didn’t it?” Ava stared at the picture, just as she had during the connecting flight from Moscow to Odessa, memorizing every line on her mother’s face. But that photograph had been taken long ago, when the dock—and Ava’s family—had seen better days.
Alex squeezed her jacketed arm with his gloved hand. “At least nobody here is trying to lock you up. Or wipe our brains. That’s good enough for me.”
“It’s an improvement,” Ava agreed, holding the picture higher.
Now, in the winter moonlight, she tried to compare the photo to the shipyard itself. The docks didn’t look like they did in the picture, or in her memories. From where she and Alex hid, crouching behind a row of empty oil drums at the edge of the water, she could see just how badly the ODESSA VERFI sign and everything around it had fallen into disrepair.
The general decay wasn’t limited to the sign itself; the whole place was in shambles, as if it had never really recovered from the last time she had been here. Scrawny wild cats roamed the rusting, splintering ruins, and what looked like vultures circled in the clouded moonlight overhead. Most of the ancient electric lights around the perimeter fence flickered on and off at will. Even the snow looked dirty, and the sky was as dark as the sooty shipyard beneath it, full of the promise of another storm.
This is not a place for the living.
It’s for ghosts like me.
Ava tried to breathe. She could feel her pulse racing and her heart hammering in her chest. She made a conscious effort to steady her hand, so the photo would stop shaking.
But this is it, isn’t it? The infamous warehouse from the photo?
This is where it all started, and here I am again.
Logically, Ava knew she had come of her own volition, but even seeing the place made her feel like she would never get away; it had some kind of hold on her and would always draw her back, no matter how hard she tried to escape.
No. This isn’t my life. This isn’t me.
It’s just a place I lived once.
Ava tried not to think about it, turning instead to Alex. “This has to be it. See the sign? Odessa Shipyard.”
Alex compared the photo to the burned-out shell of the warehouse in front of them, assessing the ruins in the cold moonlight. “I think you’re right. It seems like you’ve drawn this same warehouse at least ten times in that notebook of yours.”
Ava shivered. “I know.”
“So this is where the raid went down?”
She nodded.
He scanned the dockyard full of cargo ships. “This is probably also where Ivan smuggled in all his equipment. Straight off the boat. Pretty efficient.” He shook his head. “You have to wonder what else this dock has seen over the years.”
“Plenty. Fifty million tons of Black Sea traffic each year, and a direct connection to a major rail network—” Ava caught herself on QE overload and shrugged. “Can’t be good, I mean.”
“Look what else.” Alex pointed to the top of the warehouse building in the photograph. “Not as many cops back then.”
It was true; there were armed officers around the perimeter of the shipyard now. Militsiya. Ava could count their wooly gray ushanka trooper hats—and she was jealous of the earflaps. She and Alex had waited for a good forty-five minutes before managing to sneak into the restricted cargo dock, alongside a slow-rumbling truck that had offered only minimal cover.
“Pretty strange for a supposedly abandoned warehouse on an old dock, wouldn’t you say?” Alex counted the hired guns lingering around the dock’s gates. “To have a whole team of security?”
“Or pretty standard, when you’re Ivan Somodorov and you’re trying to cover up your history,” Ava said, lowering her voice as yet another guard walked past them.
“Well, we can’t take on that many of them. Not without setting off enough alarms to bring the entire Ukrainian police force down on us.” Alex sounded frustrated.
“Not to mention the rest of Ivan’s private militsiya,” Ava said, looking grim.
“What’s the play?” Alex looked at her, and she tried not to think of how much he sounded like a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. “Ava. We got this. You can think like a Romanoff.” He grinned. “And I’m pretty good in a fight.”
Ava closed her eyes, then opened them. “You’re right,” she said. “We got this.” She smiled. “But this time I’ll take left; you take right.”
They found themselves pushing open the rusting warehouse not four minutes and one neatly unconscious security guard later.
An uppercut beneath the jawbone. Contact at the mandibular angle. Generate minimal lateral movement. Snap the head straight up.
Ava had gone left; Alex had gone right.
We’re getting to be quite a team, she thought.
“If nobody finds our friend here,” she said, glancing back to the worn combat boots still sticking out from behind the oil drums, “we should have plenty of time to check things out inside.”
“You’re going to have to teach me that uppercut,” Alex said, giving the guard’s boots one final shove. “It seems handy.”
“Handy for what? Your future career at S.H.I.E.L.D.?” Ava surprised herself by how irritated she sounded as she flipped out her tactical microflashlight.
“Says the girl with all the spy gear.” He grinned. “But sure, why not? We can be partners. Bonnie and Clyde. Only for good guys. Like, Bonnie and Clyde Coulson.” He laughed.
“How do you know we’re the good guys?” Ava asked distractedly. She moved her flashlight through the darkness, across the cavernous interior of the warehouse. Even inside, it was so cold she could see the puffy white curls of her own breath.
She shivered. Hard to imagine that all these years later the whole place could still seem so terrifying.
Ava forced herself to keep talking. “Bonnie and Clyde? So we can use our fencing skills to right the wrongs of the international spy circuit?” It’s not a bad idea, she told herself, trying to think about anything other than where she was and why she had come back there.
And if I could figure out how to rig some kind of folding blade…
“Exactly. And we’ll only fly business class. With our dog, whose name will be Brat Junior.” Alex took her by the hand. “Plus, when you’re a brat, I can call you that and you’ll still think I’m talking to the dog.”
“I see you’ve got it all worked out,” Ava said.
She studied the shadows around her. Was that where Ivan strapped me down? Was it there? She tried to think, but she couldn’t control what appeared in the present, and what remained obscured by the terror and chaos of the past.
A bald man with eyes made of black shadows—
A maze of tattoos rising above his jacket collar—
The smell of sour cigarettes and strong coffee—
A belt with a brass buckle that sometimes left scars—
The lies, the lies that always did—
Alex squeezed her hand, gently but insistently, interrupting her thoughts. “But the cat? What will we name our cat?”
He wasn’t giving up.
She knew he was saying, I’m here. You’re not alone. Talk. Keep talking.
“Sasha Cat already has a name,” Ava said as she looked up at the now gaping hole in the roof. Snow was falling softly through it.
There.
That’s where I remember the row of big guns, she thought.
Snipers.
“Not Jerk?” Alex said, poking her in the ribs, bringing her back to him. “Because I decided that was the secret name for every cat on the day I was made to change my first feline diaper.” He poked her again. “Look it up; it’s a thing.”
“You’re terrible. Sasha and I hate you.” Ava smiled.
Seeing how hard Alex was working to cheer her up was its own kind of warmth. Ava
began to calm herself, despite everything. She didn’t know how he did it, but he made everything seem like it was going to be safe again.
Like it’s all going to be okay someday.
She exhaled.
Suck it up. We get in. We get out. Give it twelve hours. That’s what she told herself, but even she didn’t believe it.
Then what? What’s the next play? You’re going to take out Ivan Somodorov? You think you’ve got enough Black Widow in you now to do that?
Ava imagined she could do it if she had to, technically speaking. She had the capability. She even had three S.H.I.E.L.D. microdarts in her pack, each containing enough toxin to put down an elephant.
That wasn’t the problem.
She was.
It’s one thing to disable a guard. It’s another thing to kill one.
Those memories Natasha has in her mind, the ones that make you wake up screaming in the night?
Do you really want those for yourself?
“So this is it,” Alex said, looking around. “Just one big, trashed room. And yet the clues to everything in your past might be here somewhere.”
Ava nodded. “It looked really different, though. Before, you know. Ivan.” She pulled a fraying length of cable up from the floor. “And the whole explosion and fire and destruction thing.”
“And before Agent Romanoff,” Alex said, squatting to pull a chunk of concrete off what looked like an old metal locker. “She didn’t exactly let him go down easy.”
Ava shivered.
“He seems to have that effect on everything. Places and people.” Alex shook his head. “But I don’t get it. This place is a dump. It’s nothing.” He kicked a pile of charred rubble. “What’s still here that nobody wanted us to see? Why the security? Why the secrecy?”
“Good question.” Ava looked over the blackened ruins around her. “Maybe Ivan isn’t done here. Maybe there’s something he can’t afford to get rid of just yet.”
She moved her flashlight across the floor around them, which was cracked in a thousand places, unstable and uneven under their feet.
“Or maybe it’s a trap.” Alex stopped to pick up a shiny scrap of metal from the rubble beneath his feet. He had only noticed it as Ava’s flashlight had zoomed past.
It was stuck. “What’s this?” The thing was wedged halfway into a deep fissure in the concrete floor.
Ava held her light over it. “No idea.”
Alex knelt on the floor, tugging at the metal scrap with his fingers. “It looks like someone dropped it there.”
“Probably impacted during the explosion.” Ava knelt next to him with the light in one hand. With the other, she pulled a compact switchblade from her pocket.
He looked at her. “What are you, James Bond?”
She shrugged. “Other kids collected plastic ponies. I have a collection of old S.H.I.E.L.D. junk.”
Alex shook his head. He took the blade and dug out the object, which turned out to be a strangely formed piece of metal. He turned it over in his hands, blowing off the dust. “What do you think? Some piece of machinery? It might be stamped with something. A number? And I think words?” He rubbed the metal with his sleeve.
“It’s a key,” Ava said, picking it up from his palm. The metal surface was warm from friction, and she touched the stamped letters with her finger. “Those aren’t just numbers. That’s a name. Luxport—I recognize it. I used to see it painted on big trucks on the highways out of town.”
“Luxport?” Alex frowned. “That’s in your sketchbook, right?”
“And my dreams.”
“So maybe that’s some kind of clue. How many keys can there be that could have this same serial number?”
“I don’t know. Let’s keep going and check the other side,” Ava said. Now she was curious. Her mind was spinning. Four words had haunted her since Odessa. Stumbling across one of them now, and here, seemed like some kind of sign from her past.
It seemed almost hopeful.
They moved through the darkness, toward the far side of the warehouse, until Alex smacked right into a wall, or what he thought was one. “Wait—what’s that?” Alex rapped on the object in front of him. “The warehouse doesn’t end here. And look—this wall doesn’t match the roofline.”
“That’s because it’s not a wall,” Ava said. She shoved the flashlight between her teeth and rubbed at a spot in the dust with her hand. “I think it’s some kind of box. A shipping container, maybe. There’s a word on the side. The paint or ink or whatever is coming off now, but I think I can still make it out.”
LUXPORT.
“There it is again,” Alex said. “Just like the key.” They both stared.
This time, the word was painted in military stenciling.
Ava pulled her sketchbook out of her backpack. She held her flashlight so that Alex could see for himself. “From my dreams,” she said. “Just like Brat.”
KRASNAYA KOMNATA.
OPUS.
LUXPORT.
“That can’t be a coincidence.” Alex’s eyes narrowed.
Ava shook her head. “For a long time, those words were the only things I could remember about this place. And that night. I didn’t know if they were memories or dreams.”
“But why those four words?”
“I don’t know. Natasha never even thought of Luxport when she remembered this warehouse.” Ava sounded confused.“I was starting to think maybe Luxport had something to do with Ivan, but not on the night that S.H.I.E.L.D. found me.”
“Maybe.” Alex took a step backward, looking up. “This really is a giant shipping container. You could stack up what, a dozen of my mom’s minivans? And you’d still have room for a Prius or two.”
“Your mom drives a minivan?” Ava gave him a thumbs-up. “Cool.”
“Now’s not the time.”
“Wait. Does that mean you sometimes drive a minivan?”
“I don’t have my license yet. And you don’t get to make those jokes until you learn how to drive,” Alex said.
Ava ignored him, still smiling as she felt her way around the corner of the container until she found herself shaking a padlocked door in front of her.
“Luxport. For the third time. It says that on the lock as well.”
She held out the key.
Alex took it. “So it’s not a key to a warehouse.”
“Not a shipping warehouse. A shipping container. And it’s probably been sitting right here for eight years.”
He slid the key into the ancient padlock. Groaning with rust, the lock slowly began to open.
S.H.I.E.L.D. EYES ONLY
CLEARANCE LEVEL X
LINE-OF-DUTY DEATH [LODD] INVESTIGATION
REF: S.H.I.E.L.D. CASE 121A415
AGENT IN COMMAND [AIC]: PHILLIP COULSON
RE: AGENT NATASHA ROMANOFF A.K.A. BLACK WIDOW, A.K.A. NATASHA ROMANOVA
TRANSCRIPT: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, LODD INQUIRY HEARINGS.
DOD: So you went rogue, eh? AWOL? Mommy and Daddy must have loved that. That their number one agent now had it out for them?
ROMANOFF: I had just been told my brain had been wiped, sir. That’s not S.H.I.E.L.D. proprietary tech. That’s an old Moscow move. Pure Ivan Somodorov.
DOD: So you weren’t taking any chances?
ROMANOFF: Of course not. For all I knew, my name had been forged. My authorization code stolen. I needed to retrench. Dig in. Would you have done anything any differently in my position, sir? Would anyone?
DOD: That’s a tough question. Frankly, I can’t imagine ever being in your position, Agent Romanoff, and I hope I never am.
ROMANOFF: I didn’t know who to trust.
DOD: It doesn’t seem like you often do.
ROMANOFF: You get used to it, sir.
DOD: I imagine folks over there are a little sensitive about that.
ROMANOFF: You have no idea.
DOD: Your director reports to the same president I do, Agent Romanoff--so believe me when I say I do.
&n
bsp; ODESSA SHIPYARD WAREHOUSE
NEAR THE BLACK SEA, UKRAINE
Just turning the key wasn’t enough. The shipping container didn’t appear to have been opened in years, which meant it had no interest in allowing itself to be opened now.
Great.
Alex shoved his shoulder against the metal garagelike door. It wouldn’t budge. Ava joined him, which he had to admit was humiliating for his high-school-boy ego, but still better than going at it alone. Together they slammed against the metal until it finally gave way beneath them, starting to slide.
Alex yanked as hard as he could, and the door slowly groaned upward, revealing a further rectangle of darkness.
“Time to find out why Ivan has all those guards on the payroll.” Ava checked her watch. “I’m not sure when security will move on us again.”
“Got it, Agent Orlova.”
Ava smiled, flipping her compact flashlight to a wider setting. “Not Agent Orlova. Red Widow. Krasnaya Vdova. That was the name I came up with when I was little.” She ran the flashlight over the shipping container’s walls.
“Hold on. Red Widow? You had a superhero name picked out and everything?” Alex laughed, but he was impressed.
“Of course I did. I was a kid and I was stuck sitting around in 7B all day. What else was I going to do? But yes.” She inspected the wall more closely, ignoring the laughter. “I decided that I would be the opposite of the Black Widow in every way. She wore black, so I would wear white.”
“Like a fencer?” Alex smiled.
“Stop laughing,” Ava punched his arm.
“Ow. I’m not laughing.” He rubbed his arm. “Those Kevlar uniforms are bulletproof and blade proof—you could do a lot worse.”
“Right? And the Black Widow had her guns, so I would have my blades.”
“Ah. I see. A little bulky when you’re jumping off bridges, maybe?”
“A little.”
“You’d have to work on that one.”
Black Widow: Forever Red Page 19