Black Widow: Red Vengeance (A Marvel YA Novel)

by Margaret Stohl

  He consulted a panel on his digital tablet. “Almost,” Tony said. “Hang tight.”

  Natasha shook her head, frustrated. “I can’t just sit here. Something’s happening again. I can feel it, even if I can’t see how it all fits together yet.”

  Last year, it had been hard enough to locate the hidden synapses between a Ukrainian shipping company and Moscow’s black-tape military-industrial complex—not to mention between a future-tech underground Turkish laboratory and Ivan Somodorov’s legendary school for spies. It was overwhelming to try to see how that all connected to what had happened today.

  How it connected? Who do you think you’re kidding, Natashkaya? Everything in your life connects back to one place and one time.

  The Red Room.

  She’d guessed the Krasnaya Komnata would come for her the moment she had taken out Ivan Somodorov, hadn’t she? For all she knew, the Russian girl at the Cristo could be Red Room, herself. Beyond that, Natasha had only one true piece of intel to go on, the same tip that had brought Ava and her to Brazil six months ago. A few words taken from a dispatch that had been translated from an unfamiliar Ukrainian dialect.

  KRASNAYA KOMNATA POTREBNOSTI YUZHNOY AMERIKI DEN’GI—

  THE RED ROOM NEEDS SOUTH AMERICAN MONEY.

  Moscow Station had bumped it to S.H.I.E.L.D., and Maria Hill had tossed it to Natasha. It hadn’t come from any confirmable or reliable source, and they hadn’t determined if it was true, yet. All of this, plus the hack, plus the girl, could still amount to nothing. But—

  It also could be a first tremor, a single stray thread, or a hairline crack that might eventually bring the whole wall crumbling down.

  And the one thing Natasha Romanoff knew about walls was that they tended to come down, especially when the Avengers were around.

  This could be exactly what we’ve been waiting for—

  “You think it’s them?” Ava asked. She didn’t have to say the name. There was no one else.

  “That’s what we need to find out.” Natasha looked at her. “What do we have—a face if we can recognize it, a digital record if we can trace it?”

  “What about Rio’s city security footage? The Cristo’s a public monument, right? They could have something,” Tony said.

  “Already got Maria Hill on it. She said to give it a day.” Though I’m not sure I have a day. “Let’s focus on the girl.” There was something about Green Dress Girl that bothered her—a nagging feeling, a faint sense of déjà vu—even if she couldn’t place why or how she felt it…or even what precisely she felt, yet.

  “You think she’s Red Room’s latest model? Or a cutout?” Ava volunteered. “And yes, I know what a cutout is,” she said, trying not to sound too proud of herself for pulling out her Academy vocab.

  “Right,” Natasha said. “Which means she could be nobody and know nothing—except to follow her orders and keep her mouth shut. That’s the S.V.R. way.”

  S.V.R.: Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki. The Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. She let the shiver roll through her body as she said the acronym; even after all these years, she still felt the pull of cold, industrial dread whenever she heard those three letters.

  The K.G.B. had been no different before it, neither was the G.R.U., now. The characters bore a significance hammered from iron and snow; they stood for words that could never be spoken and pain that must forever be endured. That’s how it works, Natasha thought. The alphabet of fear.

  Ava looked anxious. “You really think Green Dress is S.V.R.?”

  “Would the S.V.R. be stupid enough to try a move like that on you?” Tony looked at her skeptically.

  “Who do you think taught me those moves? Someone in the S.V.R.’s Directorate X, the Division of Science and Technology—and in their Directorate S, the Division of Illegal Intelligence,” Natasha said.

  “Stop,” Ava said, shaking her head.

  But Natasha couldn’t, and the words came spilling out. “Ivan Somodorov was deputy director of both, at one time or another. He was born to it, his father was K.G.B., and his mother was a political officer for Stalin—a spy of spies. He once said even his brother was Spetsnaz.” Russian Special Forces. “What other kind of person could have run the Red Room?”

  “I don’t know, but it makes me think of a worse question. Who is running it now?” Ava sounded miserable.

  “That,” Tony said, “is one of those questions you really don’t want answered.”

  “So maybe that’s what this little meet-and-greet is about—the announcement of a new regime.” Natasha looked at the screen. “And to answer your question, people like that would do anything to anyone.”

  “But it’s not anyone,” Ava said, suddenly. “It’s you, and they know that. So they’d predict that you’d see their move coming, wouldn’t they?”

  Tony nodded. “Absolutely.”

  “And if they did, then was their first move the goal, or was your countermove? Were the attacks meant to scare you away or draw you in?” Ava frowned.

  She’s learning. That’s good. “They trained me as a spy—so if I had to guess, I’d say they wanted to give me something to spy on,” Natasha said.

  “So your countermove was the point.” Ava nodded. “To draw you in by launching your investigation for you. Because it’s always the second—”

  “—the second move that matters. Exactly.” Natasha nodded. Ava smiled.

  “So the girl at the Cristo was trained,” Tony said. “By someone who knows you, or who took the time to profile you. Someone who knew you’d visit the monument. That you’d be wearing your Cuff—and that Sparky here would be…sparking.”

  Neither Widow answered. It was a sobering thought.

  “Okay,” Tony said. “Green Dress had training. Green Dress had intel. Green Dress had access, right? A supply network. I mean, people don’t sell magnesium on the street corner.”

  “No, they don’t. But we’ll know more soon. I planted that RFID tracker on her. She has to turn up soon,” Natasha said.

  He shook his head. “Those things are so old-school we have to work through radio waves, not even satellite. We’ll be lucky to find her, even with that. It could take days.”

  “Data is data,” Natasha said. “And ‘old-school’ just means so old they won’t trace it back to me.”

  “Speaking of data…” Tony held up his tablet. “The Stark servers have just confirmed the trace on the data package.” He looked at Ava. “That’s the Sametime message N-Ro got—”

  “I know what a data package is,” Ava said crossly. “Don’t Tonysplain.”

  “Okay, okay. I don’t have the spy-school syllabus,” Tony said. “Snippy.”

  “So you confirmed the trace? And?” Natasha asked, impatient.

  “Then my network tracked that data package backward, through the first series of relays, as it connects again and again through almost every continent,” Tony went on, scrolling through the endless code. “The path almost doesn’t seem to stop.”

  Natasha nodded. “So they’re good.”

  “Very good. That’s some clean code, nice work,” Tony said. “Almost a crime that it’s a crime. I’d hire them in a second. Well, maybe five seconds, realistically speaking. A second is actually not very—”

  “Thought train,” Ava said. “It’s leaving the station.”

  He got to the point. “Right. Eventually, the data tracks back to a series of ghost accounts owned by other ghost accounts, which isn’t a surprise.”

  “Ghosts?” Ava looked at him strangely.

  “The surprise is that it’s a loop,” Tony continued. “It’s programmed to rewrite over and over itself so you can’t find an origin. It’s the chicken and the egg of big data.”

  “So we’re screwed,” Ava said. Natasha wordlessly sat back in her chair.

  “More like scrambled.” Tony arched an eyebrow. “Except this is me, so, please. Have a little faith. I think I can unscramble the data and try to step out of the loop. J
ust a sec—”

  Natasha looked up. “Go on.”

  “I asked my network to compare data streams. Not what we’re getting from the hacker’s ghost sites, but what those sites are getting from the rest of the web.” Tony tapped his screen. “I can’t get past the ghost accounts, but it looks like one particular spam website can.”

  “What?” Ava asked.

  He studied the screen. “Our hacker must have clicked on it once. Either way, it’s the only IP address sending anything that the fake hosts have in common.” Tony shook his head.

  “And? What is it?” Natasha asked.

  He looked up with a grin. “Meows of Moscow. And sadly, that is actually not a joke.”

  Ava looked incredulous. “What are you talking about?”

  “One pop-up. That’s all it takes. Our hacker opened one pop-up, possibly because he was sloppy but probably because he’s meowy funny.” Tony hit a few keys. “Now I’m asking my network to compare that site back against everything else it visited on the data path.”

  “And?” Natasha looked at him.

  “And…looks like there is one…two?…no, just one IP address not accounted for.”

  “Which is?” Ava moved in front of the wall screen.

  Tony studied the tablet. “It seems most of the heavy lifting here originates from an IP address owned by an account named ZeroHour, who also happens to be—and I’ll let you guess—”

  “Yeah, not guessing,” Natasha said.

  “Well, too bad. If you had said expert in zero-day vulnerabilities and other cool surveillance party tricks, you would have won a prize.” Tony said. “Instead, all you get is his snazzy web profile.” He held his tablet up to the monitor, and a tabloid photograph of a Russian guy with sunken eyes, pale skin, and an even paler bleached Mohawk appeared in his place. “And I ask you, who thinks neck tattoos are ever a good idea?”

  “Wow,” Ava said. “That’s our hacker?”

  “Maks Milosovich?” Natasha read off the screen. “I know that name. The Moscow party boy?”

  “Mosc-meow,” Tony corrected her. “But I’ve been accused of staying with a joke for too long.”

  “That,” Ava said.

  “No. It can’t be him.” Natasha was convinced. “All that Maks guy does is dance on tables and date live Barbie dolls.”

  “And yet you say that like it’s a bad thing,” Tony said dryly.

  Natasha looked at the caption beneath the photograph. “Zero-day expert? I think this one’s just a zero.”

  “Zero day? What does that mean again?” Ava asked.

  “Private tech security,” Natasha said. “Maks heads up a digital security company funded by his father, Vladimir Milosovich, a.k.a. obscene oligarch of the Russian new world order. They say Putin himself is jealous of his oil holdings.”

  “Go Vlad the Dad.” Tony whistled.

  “The Milosovich clan is from Moscow, right? Which means a Red Room connection isn’t out of the question.” Ava looked at Natasha.

  “Vladimir Milosovich is said to have made his fortune in tech stocks after working for Directorate X. You know the drill: sell your secrets to the government, then turn around and sell the government back their own secrets,” Natasha said.

  “Wait.” Tony looked at her. “Didn’t you just say Ivan Somodorov was a deputy dog or whatever in Directorate X?”

  For a moment, no one said a thing. Then Natasha shook her head. “That’s too easy, isn’t it? A rich Russian hacker comes after us because Ivan knows his father?”

  “You think they know each other?” Ava was startled.

  “Easy? What about that was easy? My ability to synthesize information? Yeah, I think you’re confusing easy with certifiable genius,” Tony said. “As is so often the case.”

  “I never said you weren’t certifiable.” Natasha looked at him.

  “Well, I vote this is our guy,” Tony said. “So have S.H.I.E.L.D. check it out. Confirm the intel. Listen to the chatter, or whatever it is those guys do up on the tenth floor.” He shrugged. “I feel like it’s definitely something about chatter.”

  “Don’t tell me about chatter. All we’ve gotten around here is chatter,” Natasha said, frustrated. “We need actual leads to follow. I want to know everything about our hacker and our girl in the green dress—and what they have to do with each other.”

  “Synthesize that,” Ava said, looking up at digital Tony.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Tony said. “We always do.”

  We have to, Natasha thought. Once again, the familiar ache overtook the empty space in her chest. Alexei’s gone, and they have to pay. All of them—

  She wanted a reckoning for her brother, an evening of the odds. More than that, she wanted payback—for Alexei and Ava and herself. Vengeance for our shared broken heart. And justice. That’s what she wanted now.

  But since when, she asked herself, have you ever gotten a single thing you’ve wanted?

  S.H.I.E.L.D. EYES ONLY

  CLEARANCE LEVEL X

  SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES & INDIVIDUALS (SCI) INVESTIGATION

  AGENT IN COMMAND (AIC): PHILLIP COULSON

  RE: AGENT NATASHA ROMANOFF A.K.A. BLACK WIDOW

  A.K.A. NATASHA ROMANOVA

  AAA HEARING TRANSCRIPT

  CC: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, SCI INQUIRY

  COULSON: So, the Russian.

  ROMANOFF: The Russian.

  COULSON: Why is there always a Russian?

  ROMANOFF: You know that’s what the rest of the world says about Americans, right?

  COULSON: Maybe it’s the vodka.

  ROMANOFF: This guy had bigger problems than vodka.

  COULSON: And Ava—how was our girl? After almost getting blown up?

  ROMANOFF: This wasn’t her first almost-getting-blown-up rodeo.

  COULSON: They start to add up, though. After a while, every death you’ve avoided—and every one your team hasn’t—it takes a toll.

  ROMANOFF: Tell me about it.

  COULSON: You spend enough time with S.H.I.E.L.D. and the ghosts are everywhere.

  ROMANOFF: I don’t believe in ghosts.

  COULSON: But you’re fine with gods and aliens and big green men?

  ROMANOFF: Yeah, well. I know those guys.

  COULSON: What if you knew the ghost? Or what about Quantum ghosts? The ghost of Schrödinger’s cat?

  ROMANOFF: Would I have to feed it?

  COULSON: Technically, I think you’d have to both feed it and not feed it at the same time.

  ROMANOFF: That would and would not be all right.

  COULSON: Think about it. Isn’t quantum entanglement just the possibility of matter resonating in two different places at the same time? How is that different from a ghost?

  ROMANOFF: Science, that’s how.

  COULSON: One day Tony will science the crap out of ghosts and then you’ll see.

  COPACABANA BEACH, RIO DE JANEIRO

  THE STARK PENTHOUSE,

  COPACABANA PALACE HOTEL

  This place is a maximum-luxury, maximum-security prison, Ava thought as she retreated back outside, past the soundproof Plexiglas living room walls to the hot, damp shade of the terrace on a Copacabana afternoon. Tony and Natasha were still online, trying to find a way to track down the hacker. When they had gotten hung up on arguing the finer merits of the Doomjuice worm versus the NIMDA virus, Ava had excused herself.

  She unrolled a monogrammed towel—A.E.S., for Anthony Edward Stark, though Natasha liked to pretend to misread it as A.S.S., as if that joke never got old—and settled into a canvas-padded chaise longue that overlooked the beach far below. Ava pulled out her comic book and her music (the playlist her best-and-only friend, Oksana, had made for her) and tried to tell her brain to shut up.

  She had no complaints about their accommodations. Excepting its rock-hard couches and space-age Howard Stark furniture, the penthouse was insane. Aside from adding monster-size plasma screens to every room, Tony had left the already impressive features of his fa
ther’s sixth-floor Brazilian getaway completely intact. The two-bedroom suite had its own rooftop pool, sauna, butler, and most conveniently, helipad, where a S.H.I.E.L.D.-registered (and highly armed) Sikorsky chopper was currently parked and waiting. Howard, aside from being a fan of Rio’s breathtaking beaches, had clearly had a taste for the finer things. It’s a long way from the basement of the Fort Greene Y, Ava thought.

  Not that she was entirely enjoying it, though she wasn’t sure she could say why not, aside from her general mood ever since Alexei died.

  Stop. Not now. Don’t go there.

  As Ava put in her earbuds, she stared down at the embarrassingly bright floral pattern of her matching tank top and board shorts. Look at you. Some intimidating operative you are. Ava had a harder time than Natasha outside of New York. Natasha had come to expect Rio’s inferno blast of heat and humidity; beyond S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue gear, she’d insisted they pack nothing and buy all their clothes from the cheap shops and stalls of the Bazar Centro do Saara—even shoes, though she rarely took her own motorcycle boots off. Natasha was fine with it, and always managed to look cool. Ava, in her neon tank top and awkwardly-fitting Velcro surf shorts and flimsy leather sandals that would fall apart in a minute if she tried to strafe and roll, did not.

  “This is fieldwork. You’re blending in. Deal with it,” Natasha had said when Ava had protested. “As long as you have enough pockets to hold your gear and a loose enough shirt to conceal your blades, what do you care what you’re wearing?”

  But it wasn’t just the shorts. Ava put down her comic and stared out at the soft blue-and-white-striped Brazilian sky. After today’s events, she couldn’t pretend anymore. The truth was obvious.

  We both want the same thing, but I can’t help her find it. I’m only slowing her down—when I’m not lighting her on fire.

  The reality was that Natasha had been targeted and attacked today. She had been the subject of some kind of foreign intelligence op, while Ava was distracted with what? Trying to take pictures of the sunset? Or a monkey? And as they fled the scene, her one big contribution was what? Torching her Harley? Helping Natasha unclasp her spy jewelry? Ava had barely gotten a look at the girl in green. She didn’t even know the hack was happening until it was over.