The invisible currents that made up Tony’s parties had swept them apart and Maria had been called over to a conversational circle where Tony was holding court, but Steve had been grateful for her easing his discomfort, enough so that when he had gotten home that night, he had dug through his magazines until he found the story that had had such an impact on her. When it had turned out that he owned two copies of that issue of Galaxy, he had sent her the second one. It had seemed like the nice thing to do, and part of him had hoped that their chat was a sign that they were both ready to forget some of the conflicts in their past and move on. He’d received a nice handwritten note in return, but that had been the end of it, and the whole episode had barely crossed his mind since.
Now, in his den, Steve leaned over the coded page and began to transcribe the message. At first, he needed to keep referring back to the ring, but he soon had the hang of it, and the words took shape with increasing speed. Finally done, he sat back with a frown creasing his classic, all-American features. Even decoded, the message was still cryptic and made little sense.
Dear Steve,
If you’re reading this, you’ve remembered our conversation and know this is really me writing to you. I’m sorry for the old-school secret agent routine, but I couldn’t trust anything involving computers in any way. Besides, I thought you of all people would appreciate this.
I need your help. We haven’t always seen eye to eye, but I know that I can trust you to do what is right. That’s the only thing I feel certain I can trust right now.
Below, you will see a set of coordinates—they are to an abandoned warehouse. I will be waiting there tomorrow at 1900 hours. I hope you will meet me so I can explain everything.
Please come alone—and trust NO ONE.
MH
No matter how many times Steve read the message, his confusion remained. Why was Maria Hill asking him for help? And, more importantly, who was she trying to hide her message from?
Chapter 2
Arlington, Virginia: 1900 hours
Steve didn’t skulk—there was nothing more suspicious than someone who was obviously sneaking around—but he did avoid the glare of the few streetlights that still lit up this less than affluent neighborhood. The trick to being invisible was to hide in plain sight, looking like you belonged, so that the casual eye just slid past you. He wore a shabby trench coat—liberated from a Salvation Army donation bin—over his distinctive uniform, and he walked slightly slouched to disguise his height and build. In this neighborhood, he was just another schmo down on his luck, not even worth the trouble of mugging.
As Steve got closer to his destination, the street traffic thinned out until, finally, he was alone. He looked around to be sure, then moved a manhole cover aside, the two hundred and fifty-pound piece of cast iron barely making him strain. He slipped underground and pulled the cover back into place above him. Fortunately, Steve was only in a storm drain; the city had long since started sending waste through a new piping system. Some things about the modern world were definitely an improvement. Still, the dank, stone-lined tunnel’s stagnant water served as home to rats the size of small cats, and he couldn’t help but be relieved when he’d covered the distance needed to arrive inside the warehouse’s gate.
Steve emerged from the smell and the vermin into a shadowed alcove. There were a number of guards around the perimeter, all armed and wearing body armor. Their bulletproof vests bore no insignia, and Steve had no way of knowing whether the men were there with Maria, or whether they were the reason that she had taken so many precautions. Walking up and asking the men didn’t seem like an option, so, silently, Rogers waited for his moment, then darted out of the alcove and into the warehouse, breathing a sigh of relief as the door clicked shut behind him without any sign he had been noticed.
The first few rooms inside were deserted offices, rats playing where secretaries had once typed, and their nests the only contents of abandoned in and out trays. Moving past a water cooler half full of a noisome green liquid, he came to a door marked Loading Bay and gently nudged it open, looking around carefully before stepping into a vast, open space. Steve had no idea what kind of business had been running in the warehouse, or what had been stored there, but all that remained was dust, debris, and few scattered desks and chairs. The space was almost a hundred feet across, and about forty feet to the ceiling, which was dotted with lights. Some of them still worked, casting a few pools of radiance into the eerie dimness.
Maria stood in one of the pools of light, for a moment looking like a statue of some ancient Greek goddess lit by moonlight. Then she turned and smiled, breaking the illusion. Instead of a chiton, she was wearing body armor and carrying a Glock 19 on each hip. Steve knew she could use them—he’d fought beside her and seen her put a cluster of bullets the size of her fist through her targets with each hand. Her dark hair was cut shorter than he remembered, but other than that, she hadn’t changed at all since the last time he had seen her.
“Hello, Steve.”
“Hello, Maria. You should know better than to stand in the brightest part of the room.”
“I just wanted reassure you I was alone, Steve.”
He walked toward her, keeping his hand on his shield and his eyes constantly scanning the shadows. He trusted Maria as much as he trusted anyone in S.H.I.E.L.D. these days, but that wasn’t exactly a glowing recommendation.
“Are the guards meant to reassure me, too?”
“No, they’re all about reassuring me,” Maria said. “Don’t worry, they have no idea why I’m here. I might trust them with my life, but there are very few people I trust with my secrets. Which is why you should feel really privileged. I’m about to tell you a big one.”
“I feel very special,” Steve said. “Nice work with the decoder ring, by the way.”
“Thanks, I was rather proud of that one. I needed something that no one else would be able to identify—and something completely analog. Hard to come by these days.”
“Analog?”
“As opposed to digital. We use computers for everything now, but I can’t assume that they’re secure.” She smiled. “Plus, who doesn’t want to use a secret decoder ring?”
Steve grabbed a couple of the less battered chairs scattered around the loading bay. Brushing them off, he positioned them in the pool of light. He waited for Maria to take a seat, then sat down across from her.
He noticed with surprise that Maria’s hands were trembling slightly. She followed his gaze and flushed, clasping them in front of her to hide the shaking. The guards and the secrecy didn’t concern Steve all that much, but seeing that Maria was actually scared shook him deeply. He’d seen her face firefights and board meetings with exactly the same expression—she was unflappably calm in every situation, and anything capable of frightening her was to be taken very seriously indeed. A creaking caught his attention, and looking down, he saw the arms of his chair flexing under his grip. With a conscious effort, he willed himself to relax, and turned his attention back to Maria.
“Maria, what are you so concerned about? We’ve had our differences, but you know that I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
Maria took a deep breath and brushed her dark hair back from her face. “It’s that obvious?”
“Yes, it is.”
“S.H.I.E.L.D. is a large organization. Alongside field operations and counter intelligence, we’ve got a massive research and development division, and we’re always on the lookout for bright young minds to come and work for us. We take chances on people who don’t fit in to the conventional mold that government agencies look for, and it’s paying dividends. They keep us on the cutting edge—and a step ahead of some of the more established agencies that would happily see us shut down, or absorbed into their budgets.”
Steve shrugged. He’d never cared for interdepartmental politics except when they got in his way. All he wanted to do was fight the
bad guys. “Go on.”
“A few years back, my cousin called me. We were close as children, and the only reason we had drifted apart was because of time and busyness, nothing more. She had a daughter who had just finished college and she was worried about her. All her daughter—Katherine, her name is—wanted was to work for the government. The problem was that Katherine might have been brilliant, but her genius came with a large dose of nonconformity, and she didn’t fit in to the government’s neat little boxes. She was rejected by all the normal agencies—the CIA, the FBI, the Shop. She was heartbroken, and her mother knew I worked somewhere in the government, though not where, of course.”
“Of course.”
“So, I read her résumé and interviewed her, and realized that the other agencies had missed out on something special. She really was a genius. There was nothing she couldn’t get a computer to do. So I recruited her and put her to work in R and D. She didn’t get any preferential treatment, and started out the same way that everyone else does. She had her normal projects, but we’ve lifted a page from the Google playbook and we give every tech a day a week to work on their own pet projects. Some of our most useful tools have come from that.” Maria was talking quickly, the words coming out in a rapid fire.
“Maria, slow down and take your time.”
With a visible effort of will, Maria took a deep breath and composed herself, sitting straighter in her chair.
“Anyway, one day I got a phone call from Katherine asking if she could meet me. I didn’t think anything of it—we’d been talking about catching up for a while. But, when she arrived, well . . .” Maria trailed off.
“She was scared?” Steve asked.
“No!” Maria said. “She was furious. Absolutely incandescent with rage. It took me almost an hour and about three cosmopolitans to calm her down enough to get the story out of her.”
“So what happened?”
“How much do you know about computers, Steve?”
“Not much. Just that the phone that Tony gave me is a thousand times more powerful than the computers that took up whole rooms at S.S.R. headquarters back in my day. Oh, and that people have a lot of kitten pictures.”
“All true,” Maria laughed. “But more than that, computers have become absolutely central to every aspect of our lives. They not only shape the way we view the world, they control it.”
“Control it?” Steve frowned. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
“I wouldn’t say I do either. But it’s the way it is. We see the world through a screen, and it alters the way we perceive things.”
“There are lots of good things about computers, though. When I first returned from my . . . Arctic holiday . . . I spent hours online trying to catch up. I couldn’t believe how much information there was at my fingertips. If I’d had that in high school, I would have aced it. The only problem was filtering out all the noise and working out what was true and what was rubbish.”
“Don’t worry, that’s not just a newbie problem.”
“So, was that what Katherine was working on? A way of filtering the information?”
“No, but something even more valuable and dangerous. In the course of her research, she’d come across something that she said would revolutionize cryptography—that would change the way that information flowed across the internet.”
“What was it?” Steve asked, then laughed. “Not that I would understand it. I won’t lie, it took me fifteen hours just to work out how to turn on my computer the first time I used it.”
“Steve, we have limited time, and I’m not going to waste it by taking you through the evolution of computing. I’m not trying to be rude, but it’s really not important right now.”
“Fair enough,” Steve said. “I’m guessing the important part is what she told you that’s left you so rattled.”
Maria took a deep breath. “Katherine said that when she reported her findings to her supervisor, he told her to cease research immediately and forget she’d ever come up with the idea. When she protested, she was called in to the head of her department’s office and raked over the coals. Threatened with termination or exile to some remote office in Hicksville.”
“And she quit?” Steve asked.
“No. She may have a temper, but she’s smart enough to hide it when she has to. She stood and took the tongue-lashing, and then called me the next day. She wanted to know what I thought she should do.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“To keep her head down and do what she was told, of course.” Steve almost believed Maria for a second, then saw the mischievous glint in her eye. “No. I told her I would look into it, quietly, but she should just go about her work as if she’d learned her lesson.”
“Sneaky,” Steve said, admiration in his voice. “This is why I’m no good at this stuff. Just point me at a problem and I’ll deal with it, but anything more than that, and I get all confused.”
“Oh, don’t play the hayseed with me, Steve,” Maria said. She was shaking her head, but he could see that he was succeeding in distracting her from her concerns. A little, anyway. “You’ve been doing this a lot longer than I have.”
“I guess so. But even if I hadn’t, like I said before—it’s obvious you’re scared. Why?”
“Once I’d spoken to Katherine, I started investigating. It’s not that I don’t trust her, but the first thing I did was try and verify her claims. I managed to get access to her personal computer, but her files were gone—more than gone; it was as if they had never existed.”
“But something convinced you,” Steve said. “Or we wouldn’t be here.”
“My next step was checking the files on the systems of her supervisor and department head. If her research was everything she had claimed, and they had killed it, not only had they exceeded their authority, but something was really wrong—either gross incompetence or something more sinister. Either way, I felt it was something that needed to be looked into. But it was the same story—no evidence of her research. But this was when I realized that I was onto something. It wasn’t just that there was no research—there was nothing at all.”
“What do you mean?” Steve asked, puzzled.
“There was nothing else from Katherine on their machines. She had to have been producing something, or she wouldn’t have been employed for long. If I’d found the normal stuff, regular work projects and the like, I wouldn’t have been suspicious. But her whole file had been expunged. That was enough to set my alarms off.”
“So what did you do?”
“It put me in awkward position. I had no evidence other than her claims, but I’m sure they could have explained away the missing files and it would have been their word against hers. I would have been laughed at if I tried to launch an official investigation. It may not be the 1940s but the boys’ clubs haven’t disappeared completely.”
“What was your next step, then?” Steve asked.
“It was taken out of my hands. I like to think that I’m pretty good at covering my tracks, but someone must have worked out what I was up to.”
“What makes you say that?” Steve asked.
“It was little things at first. Last accessed dates on computer files changed, drawers in my office slightly askew. Then I started feeling like I was being followed. Whoever they were, they were very good, and I couldn’t prove it. But you know that feeling you get, that someone is tailing you?”
Maria gave Steve a defiant look, as if daring him to say that it was merely her imagination. Steve did no such thing; he knew exactly what she meant. In fact, that same feeling had saved his life on several occasions.
“Did you report anything?” Steve asked.
“No, all I had were suspicions. And, Steve, you’re missing something. Something important.”
He thought for a moment. “Sorry, you’ll have to help me out.”
She leaned forward. “Steve, you know how close I am to the top at S.H.I.E.L.D. There are very few people who have access to my office when I’m not around, or who could infiltrate my computer system. It has to have been someone on the inside. Not just the inside of S.H.I.E.L.D., but in my department. Even if Katherine’s superiors are traitors, they don’t have that level of access, so there has to be someone else.”
Steve frowned. “Hydra?”
“I doubt it. We’ve been extra vigilant since the . . . unpleasantness,” Maria said. “There are certain traits we now know to look for, common elements that we know to watch for. And, even if it was Hydra, we have protocols in place so that another bulk infiltration of the agency would be almost impossible. But one or two people in the right place—that’s much harder to guard against, and there’s still a capacity for a great deal of damage.”
“Maria, you’re still holding back something. I can understand you being scared for Katherine, but it’s obvious there’s something else, something more personal.”
“When I really started to get worried was when I came home to find that someone had been in my house, Steve. I’ve gone to great lengths to make sure there is no record of my real address. No one should know where I live. No one. Not even Nick knows.” Steve almost flinched at the raw fury in her voice, and she continued. “That place is my sanctuary from all this. Knowing that someone had intruded on that is an awful feeling. By the time this is over, someone will be very sorry for that.”
Marvel's Captain America: Sub Rosa Page 2