Natasha knew every prisoner had a breaking point, and at that moment Maks Milosovich reached his. He snapped right in front of them. His eyes went wide as he lunged for the door, frantically grabbing at the knob—
POP—
He went down on her first shot. Natasha heard the bone splinter and crumple just beneath his right kneecap.
He screamed—and with one look, rolled himself over the edge of the balcony.
“Maks!” Ava shouted. But it was too late.
There were some things more frightening than the two of them, apparently. We just need to find out what—or who.
Ava looked at Natasha, panicking. “He just—but he was just—”
Natasha sighed. “Come on.” But even she was unsettled, because she knew she now believed Maks Milosovich.
What did he say? I can’t buy them off and you can’t stop them?
What does that mean? What did he want to buy? What do we need to stop?
And what makes a person become so hopeless?
Or who—?
They found Maks unconscious but still breathing, wedged deep in the hedge between the hotel and the alley. After they dragged him back to the parking structure, they brought him to his own BMW—a mint-condition $200,000 race car hidden beneath a custom cover.
So much for keeping a low profile.
He was going to fit right in, in Orlando, if he ever made it there. In spite of everything, Natasha found herself starting to hope that he did.
The keys were under the floor mats.
Two hours later, Maks Milosovich was sedated and loaded onto the body of a Stark cargo plane out of Recife. Back to Coulson and temporary protective custody, pending arraignment. Hands secured with cable ties and duct tape, to be safe.
Over in Maks’s dump of a motel room, the Widows were in no rush. Natasha found two high-intensity work lamps among all the military gear and flooded the small rooms with uncomfortable light. “Now the real job begins,” she said, shoving a laptop toward Ava and opening up one herself.
Ava studied the computer screen. “What are we even looking for? Something about Green Dress Girl?”
“Not specific enough. Look for decrypted files. Check all the image attachments—you can hide encrypted text above or below or inside most jpegs.”
“Got it,” Ava said. She hit a few keys. “At least this hard drive isn’t fried.”
“Then search for key words. Somodorov. Red Room. Any of the IP addresses we’ve come across. The old port warehouse in Odessa. The lab in Istanbul. The O.P.U.S. project—” Natasha said, absorbed in what she was seeing on her own screen. “Or what Maks talked about. His father, or the Triad hack. Or something about this cyka boss.”
“Isn’t this what the tenth floor is for?” Ava asked. The tenth floor was the wonk room at the New York Triskelion. “Or one of Stark’s nerd herds?”
“First we see what’s there,” Natasha said as she worked. “Otherwise we don’t even know what to bring back with us.”
Ava kept scrolling. “Well, there’s nothing encrypted on this hard drive. It’s just scans of paperwork filed in random folders that seem to belong to some kind of holding company. I’m not sure what any of this is going to tell us.”
Natasha looked back up. “A holding company? What kind of company?”
“I don’t know,” Ava said, peering at the screen.
“Maks owns more than a few holding companies. So do his clients, probably,” Natasha said.
Ava frowned. “If this was important, wouldn’t he have hidden it better?”
“I don’t know. This drive is completely encrypted. Maybe whatever we’re looking for is here.”
“I hope so, because I’ve only got scans of some kind of receipts. They’re pretty much all the same.” Ava scrolled through more. “It looks like these are manifests for some kind of global shipping group. Veraport.”
“Veraport?” Natasha looked up. “Luxport was a container shipping group, remember? Ivan Somodorov’s front for the Red Room in Ukraine. Maybe they’re related?”
Ava scanned the screen. “Like I said, these aren’t even hidden files.”
Natasha shrugged. “Somodorov. Just search for the word. You might as well try, you never know.” She didn’t look up from her own screen.
“Okay, searching files now.” Ava typed in the name, then hit a few keystrokes and sat back in surprise. “Look at that. You can’t be serious—” She looked across the room. “You had better come see this.”
Natasha was already crawling through the boxes, and found a spot on the floor next to the computer. “What did you find?”
Ava shook her head. “You’re not going to believe it.” She zoomed in on a word at the bottom of the page. There it was.
The name.
In the signature for a Veraport cargo pickup originating at what was described as a “rubber factory” in Amazonas, Brazil.
Y. SOMODOROV.
“Ivan’s brother. From the Spetsnaz,” Natasha said slowly. “There it is. That’s our connection.”
Yuri Somodorov. Ivan’s little-known, little-seen brother.
The name was signed on one line of one hard-to-read scan of one almost illegible document. That was all—and it was still more than they’d ever had.
It’s the most we’ve been able to give Alexei since his death. But he deserves this, and more.
“Is that even possible?” Ava breathed.
“It has to be,” Natasha said. “It’s right there in front of us.”
Ava studied the scan. There was no address for the warehouse, only the name of a region. “Amazonas—Manaus—Parque Nacional do Jaú. Do we know where that is?”
“Amazonas is the Brazilian rain forest, in the north—and Manaus is the biggest city up there,” Natasha said. “Look it up.”
She did. “Parque Nacional do Jaú is a national park near Manaus,” she said. “By the Rio Negro.”
“Just because it’s a protected area now doesn’t mean it always was, especially when it comes to the rain forest,” Natasha said. “There could easily be an old ‘rubber factory’ somewhere around there.”
“It’s huge,” Ava said, pointing at a map on the screen. “Twenty thousand kilometers, the biggest protected forest in Brazil.”
“And that entrance looks to be, what? Maybe two hundred kilometers from Manaus?” Natasha stared at the map. “That has to be where it is.”
“How do we get in there?” Ava asked. “Looks like no roads.” She scanned a profile of the preserve. “Eight hours by speedboat from Manaus, and you can only travel the park by water. It’s slow going. The rangers live on houseboats.”
“Then we’ll go by chopper,” Natasha said. “I know S.H.I.E.L.D. had a satellite base in Manaus. A command post, disguised in some kind of condemned housing project, by the riverhead. It should have a landing pad, and then we’ll find a place to touch down in the park from there.”
“Actually condemned?” Ava asked.
“Could be worse.” Natasha sighed. “The Malaysian satellite office used to be in a trailer, not even a double-wide. I spent three weeks in that thing with Hawkeye, once. And that was before he figured out sambal petai means ‘stink-bean stew.’”
“Yeah, didn’t need to know that,” Ava said.
Natasha looked back at the screen. “We can be there by tomorrow.”
“Why wait?” Ava said. “I’m ready now.”
“When you say ready, you know it will be hotter than Hades with bugs bigger than your old cat, right?”
“Sasha Cat wasn’t all that big,” Ava said, pulling herself to her feet.
Natasha snapped the laptop shut. “You don’t have to come with me. I could head up to Manaus and pull a fast recon without you.”
“I know,” Ava said. “But you won’t.”
Natasha rose slowly from the floor. She was now facing Ava, and the two Widows stood eye to eye, both pale as ghosts and sharp as the blades Ava carried. “He was all the family I had, Ava.
I know you feel like you lost your whole life when you lost Alexei, but you’re young.”
“Sestra,” Ava warned. “Don’t.”
Natasha held up a hand. “We aren’t fighting the same fight, mladshaya sestra.” Little sister. “Just because I have to go down with this ship doesn’t mean you have to. Alexei wouldn’t want that for you.”
“You don’t know what Alexei wants,” Ava said. “Or wanted,” she corrected herself. “And you don’t get to tell me what I’m fighting for.”
“That’s part of the problem. I don’t know anything for certain,” Natasha said. “Not like I used to. I’m not…right.” She took a breath.
I’m not right in my head, because I’m stuck back in Istanbul. I’m lost in the cisterns and I’m beginning to think I always will be.
Every time I see you, I have to remember that again. I have to remember him again—
“It doesn’t matter. This isn’t about us,” Ava said, firmly. “I’m not going home until we find what we came looking for—and we end it, the Red Room, and the Somodorovs.” She took a deep breath. “And I don’t care what Alexei wanted, because that’s what Alexei deserves.”
Natasha stayed silent until the steel composure of the Romanoffs fell back into place. “Fine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Ava said nothing at all.
Natasha shoved both laptops into a storage crate. Then she looked at the rest of the worn-looking hotel room, what remained of it. Every surface was covered in a layer of white plaster dust, like a can of talcum powder had exploded inside. “We take as much as we can and torch the rest.”
Ava nodded.
It was only when they were walking away from the burning building—and she felt the heat at the back of her neck—that it began to sink in. They had a real lead. A name and a place to find him. This is happening. This is really happening.
Finally.
Natasha slung one arm over Ava’s shoulders. “Welcome to the real S.H.I.E.L.D., kid. Your first jungle op. Let’s make some memories, as Coulson would say.”
Adrenaline memories. The kind that last forever—
As they disappeared into the shadows of the alleyway, the Black Widow took a deep breath, inhaling the darkness.
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: Ivan had a brother.
ROMANOFF: And a partner.
COULSON: So you dumped the hacker on me and went to check it out.
ROMANOFF: I had to put the Russian somewhere. When I’ve got a big fish and no pond, you’re the guy.
COULSON: I’m your big-pond guy?
ROMANOFF: One of them.
COULSON: Maybe we should have tossed him back to the Triad.
ROMANOFF: For a death sentence? That was Stalin’s approach, right? No man, no problem. The Triad use the same playbook.
COULSON: Makes for a fast read.
ROMANOFF: Either way, we bagged the tech and shot up Maks’s place, so that anyone who came around would know we’d taken him.
COULSON: Speaking of sending messages.
ROMANOFF: After Recife, things got interesting.
COULSON: Romanoff interesting?
ROMANOFF: Amazon interesting.
S.H.I.E.L.D.
SATELLITE OFFICE, MANAUS
AMAZONAS, BRAZIL
Ava looked out the window as Natasha guided the Sikorsky down through the cloud base toward the uneven steps and layers of industrial rooftops. They’d been flying for what seemed like an eternity, and the longer they’d stayed up, the lower the sun had faded into the horizon.
“There,” Natasha shouted from the pilot’s seat, pointing down into the sea of stacked building tops. The sound of the rotating chopper blades was so loud that you had to shout to be heard, even when you were sitting right next to each other. The gray-green standard-issue DC aviation headsets they wore only partly helped. “The top of that old hospital, see it?”
“The one with all the broken-out windows?”
“You got it.” She circled the building, dropping lower. Ava gripped the side of the chopper as her stomach flipped over. Natasha was right, though; as their altitude fell and the humid air cleared, Ava could see a white X painted on a graying square on top of the decrepit building. A landing pad. Sort of.
“What if it collapses under our weight?” Ava shouted.
“Won’t be the first time.” Natasha grinned.
She stared down at it. “I’m more worried about it being the last—”
The chopper dropped its nose, pushing down toward the painted roof.
Here we go—
They didn’t even have to break down the rooftop door. Miraculously, the rusting steel security hatch was still running current S.H.I.E.L.D. protocols; it was even calibrated to open for Natasha’s fingerprints.
Why bother? Who cares about the inside of a condemned building?
The moment they were in, though, Ava realized that the building’s wrecked facade was an elaborate deception. Though no Triskelion, the interior space was clean and modern and bright; air and electricity had kicked in the moment the Widows had opened the hatch.
The station consisted primarily of a large rectangle of open space occupying the top three floors of the old hospital. There was a kitchen stocked with dehydrated food and coffee, and a bunk room offering clean, worn sheets; a locker room full of camo combat suits and body armor; a storage room shelved with floor-to-ceiling weapons and ammo—even military-issue rucksacks and sniper-style drag bags to carry it all.
The Widows ate their reconstituted rations while sitting on neighboring cots in the bunk room, atop blankets as scratchy as steel wool. Ava pointed with her fork to the row of exterior windows facing their beds. “How come the windows are all broken on the outside, but they look fine from in here? Is it a hologram? A projection? Some kind of three-dimensional distortion—”
Natasha put her bowl down on the polished concrete floor next to her cot. “I’m guessing paint on glass, the old-school S.H.I.E.L.D. classic. I’m not sure when this station was built or even recently used.”
“What happened? Why is this place such a ghost town?” Ava asked.
“Priorities change. Threats move. World War Two starts and Moscow’s your ally to fight Berlin; then the Cold War starts and suddenly West Berlin’s on your team against Moscow.” Natasha shrugged.
“It sounds insane when you say it like that,” Ava said.
“By the time the wall falls and you agree not to nuke each other, Moscow’s moving on Ukraine and China’s flexing on the South China Seas and the Arab Spring’s becoming the Syrian Winter—and now what? You find you’re fighting too many Cold Wars to fight any,” Natasha said.
“And that’s all before you factor in alien races and sentient machines and Entangled armies,” Ava responded gloomily.
“Not to mention Tony and Cap,” Natasha added.
“How can you save humanity from the rest of the universe when you have to spend so much time saving it from itself?” Ava asked.
“Good question.” Natasha sat back against her pillow and stared out at the empty room. “And after all that, we end up with empty places like this, built for what? An old administration’s War on Drugs? Who can even remember? But we don’t tear them down, either, because we know the theater of war will just keep on moving, and we could all end up back here again.”
Ava was incredulous. “How many buildings like this are there?”
“More than you would believe. So they sit and wait—and all you can do is hope they stay empty as long as they can.”
As Natasha spoke, Ava noticed she was wearing her new Widow’s Cuff, the one that had been waiting i
nside the facility’s secure safe, courtesy of a military courier earlier in the day.
And she just puts it back on and keeps going. She just keeps fighting. Someone has to. We all have to.
“We should crash. Early start tomorrow.” Natasha abruptly rolled over and killed the lights, even though they were both still fully dressed.
Ava curled up in a ball, listening to the air rumble through the vent over her head. She didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, and she didn’t know how to think about it. Either way, it didn’t seem like sleep was going to come anytime soon.
Ava looked to her side, and saw Alexei lying next to her, his hair scattered across her pillow.
“This is getting strange,” Alexei said.
She moved a finger to her lips. You think it’s strange? You’re the dead boyfriend. Imagine how I feel, Ava thought. Because I almost can’t anymore.
“Got it,” he said.
Then he smiled. “Strange never stopped us before, Mysh.”
Ava tried not to think about how close she was, at the moment, to both of the last Romanoffs—even if only one knew it.
What would Natasha say if I told her? Would she think it was a dream? Would she think I had gone mad?
Then Ava had a more terrifying thought: What if she knows already? What if the Quantum link connects her to how I see him, too? What if she’s been listening to everything we’ve been saying to each other?
She rolled the other way, lying with her back to Alexei now.
But when she stole a look at Natasha, she seemed to be sleeping, and Ava felt momentarily relieved. It’s impossible. That link goes both ways.
I would know, wouldn’t I?
“Of course,” Alexei mumbled in her right ear. “You would know.” He smiled. “You know her as well as I do—almost as well as you know yourself.”
Then she squeezed her eyes shut and pretended to sleep while she lay next to her dead boyfriend imagining her first mission into the Amazon.
Like any girl would—
S.H.I.E.L.D. EYES ONLY
CLEARANCE LEVEL X
CONFIDENTIAL: PHILLIP COULSON
CLASSIFIED / FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY (FOUO) / CRITICAL PROGRAM INFORMATION (CPI) / LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE (LES) / TOP SECRET / SUITE A ENCRYPTION + SUITE B ENCRYPTION / SIPRNET DISTRIBUTION ONLY (SIPDIS)
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