He raised one eyebrow.
“Next time you’re about to ride over a cliff onto a roof, can you give me some warning?”
Steve grinned at her. “No promises.”
Chapter 5
Appalachian Mountains, North Carolina: 0700 hours
The mountain air was cool and crisp, and Steve savored the feeling of the breeze blowing through his sweat-tangled hair as he removed his helmet. They had been riding for the better part of the day, and even his augmented muscles were complaining. He could only imagine what Katherine must be feeling, but, to her credit, she hadn’t complained of any soreness. Of course, she had complained about a lot other things, from Steve’s unwillingness to share their destination to the limited food options along the way. Steve had been able to use the excuse of road noise to ignore most of it, and as they had traveled, she had gradually quieted, lost in her own introspective thoughts.
By the time the remaining pursuers had arrived at the field, Steve and Katherine were already in the woods outside the city. They had little trouble following back roads out to a highway, and Steve had only stopped once, to make a call from a phone booth at a service station and to fuel up. After that, it had just been miles and miles of open road, the countryside slowly changing as their altitude increased. The trees had thinned out, and nothing stood between the travelers and the breathtaking views of the valleys around them. From time to time, Steve would pull over, giving the excuse that he needed to stretch his legs. They both knew it was so that they could take in the view, but Katherine didn’t say anything.
“So, are you going to tell me where we’re going?” Katherine asked, interrupting Steve’s enjoyment of the latest view. “Are we at least close? My butt fell asleep about a hundred miles ago, and I’m scared it will never wake up.”
“Yeah, it’s only a few miles farther,” Steve replied. “It’s nice; you’ll like it.”
They hopped back on the motorcycle and continued along the road, the mountain leveling out to a wide plateau. They kept going until they came to a narrow driveway. Steve carefully followed it as it wound up the slope, until it finally came out into a broad clearing that overlooked a valley. The view was exquisite; Steve could see immediately why the original builder had chosen this location. The valley stretched out for miles, trees hugging its curves, and far below he could see the sapphire ribbon of a swift-flowing river. The cabin itself was simple but well built out of roughly hewn logs so cunningly fitted together that not a single gap could be seen between them. The roof was shingled with dark slate and boasted a rather large number of solar panels. Several water tanks were positioned to either side of the house, and a satellite dish was mounted on the eave.
Behind the house was a well-tended vegetable garden, fenced off with chicken wire and metal stakes. A mix of plants grew in it—tomatoes and lettuce, as well as herbs and spices, and a battered scarecrow watched over all of them with one beady eye. On the other side of the garden, Katherine could make out a large shed with more solar panels on its roof. The whole place had an air of being well cared for, and all of the materials were good quality, right down to the expensive lock on the shed door.
“Wow, your friend is very thorough,” Katherine said. “Looks like he has all his bases covered. What is he, some sort of survivalist?”
“No, he just doesn’t like having to rely on anyone,” Steve replied.
“Including the power companies, I take it?”
“Anyone.”
“Well, looks like he doesn’t have to. How long can we stay?”
“As long as we want to,” Steve said. “But we’ll be doubling back to the city in a week or so to get in touch with your aunt.”
“You must have done this guy one big favor!”
“He thinks so. I thought I was just doing the right thing.”
Katherine looked over at him, an unreadable expression on her face. “You really are a big Boy Scout, aren’t you?”
Before he could say anything, she was walking toward the cabin. Steve pushed his bike into a clump of bushes and dragged branches across the opening to hide it from prying eyes. He stepped back and ran his eye over his work, grunting in satisfaction. He took a walk around the cabin, noting all the entrances, happy to see that all of the windows could be shuttered and locked from the inside, and that the trees had been cleared to provide an open view of the perimeter.
By the time that Steve was satisfied that anyone approaching the cabin would be doing so across open ground, and that if they reached the cabin, they would find it a harder nut to crack than they might have expected, the sun was low on the horizon. When he opened the cabin door, Katherine had already made herself at home and was looking through a cupboard.
“There’s enough food in here to last for months.”
“Hopefully it won’t be needed; this is only meant to be a temporary stop,” Steve said. “But, always nice to know that it’s there if it comes down to it. There’s something even better, though.”
“What’s that?”
Steve tossed her a towel. “Two bathrooms and plenty of hot water. I don’t know about you, but I feel like a long shower after that ride. There’s a spring that feeds the tanks, so we won’t run out.”
“I’m liking your friend more and more,” Katherine said. “We could stay here a long time if we needed to.”
“It’s only a brief stop, I’m afraid. My friend said he would keep out of our hair for the time we need to regroup, but he likes his privacy and doesn’t want us here much longer than that.”
“At least we’ll have a nice view.”
“After we freshen up, I think we need to have a talk,” Steve said.
“I guess so, but your friend had better have stocked up on coffee.”
Steve placed a steaming cup of coffee in front of Katherine and then took the seat across the kitchen table from her.
“How are you feeling?” he asked her.
She hesitated as if she were going to put on a brave face, and then sighed and took her coffee mug in both hands. She blew into it, and then took a sip.
“To be honest, I feel a bit shaky now that I have time to think about how close we came to getting killed back there.”
“They weren’t trying to kill you. In fact, they were trying very hard to avoid it.”
“I wasn’t really talking about them. You and that motorcycle . . .”
“Very funny. But, it does raise an interesting question—what’s changed? From what Maria told me, before, it seemed like they were trying to kill you. Now they’re doing everything they can to capture you.”
“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” she asked.
Steve flushed. “Not to me, it isn’t.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel stupid or anything. I keep forgetting that you’ve just come in on all this. The thing is, all my close calls happened when I was still working at S.H.I.E.L.D. Anyway, even if it was encrypted, all my research was there, stored on site. I didn’t keep it with me.”
“Let me guess,” Steve said. “You deleted everything on your way out the door.”
“Exactly!” Katherine said with a smile. “See? You aren’t just all big muscles, there’s a brain in there.”
“Um . . . thank you?”
“So, the difference is now they aren’t trying to silence me, they’re trying to get their hands on my research.”
“That makes sense,” Steve said. “But it doesn’t make you safe. If they were willing to kill you to keep you quiet and steal your research, then I doubt they’ll draw the line at a bit of torture to get it out of you.”
“I wish I could say that I thought you were wrong, but that’s what I think as well.”
Steve simply looked at her for a moment. The more he got to know Katherine, the more he admired her. He knew plenty of people who would have been a blubbering mess in this situ
ation, but the only sign that gave away the tension she must have been feeling was the way she was biting her lower lip. She could have been talking about an interesting software problem, rather than contemplating the existence of people who might kill or torture her given a half a chance.
“Katherine.” She looked up from her coffee at the sound of her name. “Don’t you think it’s time to tell me exactly what this project of yours was?”
For a moment, he thought he had pushed too hard and too quick. A stubborn look in her eyes, she gazed at him coolly for a moment, studying him intently and giving him the uncomfortable feeling of being weighed and measured. If that was what she was doing, the scales must have tilted in his favor.
“I guess I owe you that much. Crazy motorcycle shenanigans aside, you saved my life—or at least saved me from some very unpleasant stuff. You’ve shown that you’ve got my best interests at heart, even if we might disagree on exactly what those are.” She nodded to herself and began, “How much do you know about computers?”
Steve laughed. “People keep asking me that. Not much. Enough to surf the internet and that sort of thing. About as much about as most drivers know about their cars—how to get it running and take it where they want to go, but not much of what goes on under the hood.”
“I’ll keep it simple. Just don’t get all huffy if it seems condescending—it’s only because I’m trying to express something pretty complex in simple terms.”
“Trust me, you couldn’t possibly be as condescending as the guy who talked me through setting up my phone.”
She grinned. “Yeah, we’ve all been there. What you need to understand is that the internet is the biggest repository of information the world has ever known. That’s what makes it so powerful. If you have access to the internet, you have access to information, and information is power. Governments know this, and that’s why one of the first things tyrannical governments try to do is limit the information their populace gets. Back in your day, one of the best weapons the Allies had was the radio—Voice of America and the BBC. Using them, they were able to broadcast news to people behind enemy lines who were being kept in the dark about how the war was really going.”
Steve nodded. He well remembered listening to those broadcasts, and how the partisans he had fought with had treasured their shortwave radios almost as much as they had their rifles. Whenever they could, they’d tuned in to one of the Allied channels and listened avidly, storing away every scrap of news. During the hardest days of the occupation of Europe, the Allied broadcasts had been a light shining in the darkness that had helped keep hope alive.
“The internet is like that, times a thousand. Not only can you find out what’s happening in the world and share news with millions of other people, you can also read up on history and see what really happened, as opposed to what you’ve been told. We take it for granted here, but there are a lot of places where that’s something radical. When a government’s historical narrative is based on lies, there’s nothing they fear more than the truth.”
Katherine’s face had lit up, and her voice was full of passion and excitement. It was obviously a subject that mattered deeply to her.
“That’s why so many governments restrict access to the internet. They either filter it, censoring what the big search engines can display, or they block whole swathes of the net completely. The tool that I came up with can circumvent or burrow through anything out there, giving people completely unrestricted access to all of the information that’s floating around the web—no matter where they are.”
“That’s a powerful tool, indeed,” Steve said. “Even I know that.”
“Right?” Katherine said. “Originally, my idea was that we could use it to help revolutions against tyrannical regimes or people suffering under oppressive governments, the idea being that instead of imposing our processes on people, we give them the tools to free themselves. But when I took it to my immediate superior, he pointed out something I had missed, something that clearly terrified him.”
“What was that?” Steve asked, even though he was pretty sure he knew the answer. He wanted to see how far Katherine had pursued the chain of logic.
“He said that it was a double-edged sword. When I asked him what he meant, he asked me once it was out there, what was going to stop our citizens from using it?”
“And how did you answer?”
“How do you think?” she exclaimed. “I asked why it would matter? We live in a democracy—we shouldn’t be trying to hide anything from our citizens.”
“What did he say to that?” Steve asked.
“He laughed at me—told me I was naive, that your average person on the street wasn’t capable of deciding for themselves what to believe.”
By this point, Katherine was fairly shaking with anger, and two red spots had appeared on her cheeks.
“I told him that perhaps that wasn’t for him to decide,” she said.
“In those words?” Steve asked.
As mad as she was, that got her to smile.
“Maybe not exactly those words. But anyway, after I said it, he blew his top. He told me that he was going to write me up. The next day I got called in to see the department head, and my supervisor was with him. And I got read the riot act. I was told that I needed to have a think about my future and that we would be discussing it again at another meeting.”
“And that’s when you called Maria?”
“Yeah, she did a pretty good job of calming me down and we had a good chat. After my drinks with Aunt Maria, I knew how I had to play it, so when I met with them I told them that they were right—that it was too dangerous, and I would get rid of the research and forget all about it. Played the obedient little drone and all that.”
“And were they convinced?” Steve asked.
“Of course. Too convinced. They just about fell over themselves ordering me not to destroy anything, claiming that it might be able to be repurposed. I just nodded and smiled, but I knew that what they meant was that they wanted to find a way of using it against other countries without having to worry about it coming back to bite them.”
“They?”
“Oh, not them personally. But careers have been built on far less than that. I’m sure they could see a lot of promotions in their future.” She paused for a moment. “Or a lot of money. But there was no way they were getting their hands on it. All they had were schematic files, and there was no way they could re-create my research from that. They needed the originals, but all of our workstations are locked down with our own personal encryption. That way, even if anyone managed to hack into the S.H.I.E.L.D. system, they wouldn’t be able to get into individual computers. Of course, that means it’s just as safe from internal threats, especially after I disabled the supervisor overrides. I mean, eventually they might have been able to get to it, but it would have taken a lot of time and effort, and I would have known.”
“They were so wrong about you, weren’t they? You aren’t naive at all.”
She blushed slightly, and then went on.
“Then the accidents started. The subway. The fire in the rubbish bins behind my apartment building. Lots of little things. And I figured that they either wanted all the credit for themselves, or someone had offered them enough money that it was worth it to make me disappear.”
“Or they were worried you would take it to the public.”
“Yeah, but I like to think I was pretty convincing when I told them I’d seen the light. I told them that I hadn’t really thought through the consequences, thanked them even.”
“Sometimes even a slight doubt is too much risk when there’s enough money at stake—or enough power.”
She shrugged. “Whatever it was, I decided that it was time to make myself scarce. I deleted every trace of my research, except for my personal backups, and then called for help. Aunt Maria and I had arranged a signal, just in case
. She might be paranoid, but sometimes that comes in handy.”
“And here we are.”
“Yep, here we are. So what do you think? What should I have done? Should I have gone public with it?”
Steve considered his words very carefully. He knew that she wasn’t going to like what he was about to say.
“A lot of people tell me I’m old fashioned, and they’re probably right. I believe in this country, and one of the greatest things about it is the right to freedom of speech.” Katherine opened her mouth to say something, but he cut her off. “But I also remember being at war and some of the slogans I used to see. ‘Loose lips sink ships’ and all that. Maybe sometimes the government does need to keep secrets—when there are lives at stake.”
Katherine gave him an incredulous look. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I expected better than simplistic arguments like that from you.”
“Why? I’m just a simple soldier. I’m not a philosopher or a theologian. All I know is that the difference between right and wrong is usually pretty simple. We just like to complicate it, especially when we’re trying not to do what doing the right thing dictates.” Steve sighed and took another sip of his coffee. “But I don’t know what the answer is in all this, or how we find the balance between security and freedom. I leave questions like that to people at higher pay grade. I just want to stop the bad guys.”
“And when you leave it to other people, you become complicit in their decisions,” Katherine said. “Do you really think it stops with keeping secrets in wartime, or with saving lives? Next it’s ‘when it’s in the national interest,’ and that covers a multitude of sins. At least when there are no secrets, you can tell who the bad guys are.”
Steve though about that for a moment.
“Look, I need to think about that for a while, okay? We’re here for a few days at least, and I promise that I won’t make any decisions on your behalf about what to do about it. As far as I’m concerned, my job is keeping you alive, and that’s it. For now. Okay?” Katherine didn’t say anything and he repeated himself, louder. “Okay?”
Marvel's Captain America: Sub Rosa Page 5