“That,” Tony said, “is the sixty-three-thousand-ruble question.”
“Then I’ll send it up the chain to the Oval, and to the U.N.,” Maria said. She looked at Carol. “You’re down here with me today, if you don’t mind. I’m going to need at least one person who speaks NASA on my end of the phone.”
Carol nodded and picked up her bag. “I speak NASA and Klingon.”
“So you kids are about to have a great day,” Tony said.
“Something tells me yours isn’t going to be much better,” Maria said. “You’ve got the wheel, Agent Coulson?”
Coulson nodded. “We’ll make an operational plan and reconnect on the hour.” He looked at Natasha. “Agent Romanoff will head it up, and we’ll put together the support team as needed.”
“Good luck,” Maria said, her eyes meeting Natasha’s. She disappeared out the door and into the hallway. Carol followed, pausing at the doorway.
“If you need me…” she said. She didn’t finish the sentence.
“I know.” Natasha nodded. She knew from a look what Earth’s mightiest hero was thinking, and she agreed. Life would be a whole lot simpler without both missiles and senators.
How would that be? If we had no bigger problems than rent and poker night.
Then the door closed behind Maria and Carol, and the grim reality of the task ahead settled into the room.
“So. You want to know who stashes nukes in the Amazon?” Natasha asked.
“Now might be a good time to figure that out,” Tony said.
“Veraport is the name of the front. The hired guns were Russian,” she said. “I think the Red Room is involved, somehow. Even if I can’t prove it yet. We were tipped off that they were running a financing racket through South America—and that looks like it could be true. Yuri Somodorov’s name was listed on a shipping manifest for the weapons depot where we found the warheads, outside of Manaus.”
“Yuri Somodorov was also found dead at the site,” Coulson added.
Tony looked at Natasha.
“Game-time call.” She shrugged. I don’t want to talk about it. That was the message she telegraphed in the silence that followed.
Tony got the message. “All right,” he said. “Fine.”
Coulson looked back at Natasha. “Seriously?”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” Natasha said.
“But—Yuri Somodorov?” Tony asked. He couldn’t resist, even though Natasha glared at him. “You didn’t think we might want to get a few answers out of the guy?”
What do you think? Of course I did.
“Of course you did. You’re the most strategic person I know. You would never do that.” Tony put his pen down on the table. Which means it wasn’t you who dropped him.
She knew he was thinking it, but he didn’t say it. He just looked at her for a second—then turned to Coulson. “Forget Yuri. We don’t have time for this. So—how are we going to handle those missiles?”
Natasha looked at him gratefully. “I tagged the missiles so we can track them. We have to be ready the moment someone tries to move them, but until then, I say we just let it play out.”
“Tracked how?” Tony asked. “Please tell me it doesn’t involve RFID tech, like last time. Seeing as we’ve only narrowed that search to ‘not South America.’”
“Hey, we may not know Green Dress Girl’s identity, but we were able to use her digital signature to get to Maks Mohawk. Don’t knock baby steps,” Natasha said.
“We have five stolen nuclear weapons. That’s not a time for baby steps.” Tony frowned.
“I’ve got a S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue hotbox sending out a timed cellular data signal. In other words, I put the equivalent of a cell phone on each one of them, just like you asked. It should run right through our satellite,” Natasha said.
“That’s more like it,” Tony said begrudgingly.
“I’ve got another question,” Coulson said. “What do we do now? Steal them back? Take out the Manaus depot?”
“No. We sit back and wait for someone to try to use them,” Natasha said.
“Are we really doing this? We’re going to use ten tons of nuclear missiles as the dangle in a smuggling op? Isn’t that a little like the tail wagging the…whale?” Coulson asked. He didn’t look at all convinced.
“Dog,” Tony said. “The tail wags the dog.”
Coulson shook his head. “No, I’m pretty sure this one’s a whale.”
“So we keep an eye on things, and make sure we move in before anything happens.” Natasha shrugged. “Not a problem.”
“No, nuclear warheads in the wind. They’re never a problem,” Tony said.
“I’m not going to let anything happen,” Natasha said. “We won’t.”
“How do you know?” Tony wasn’t buying it. “It’s not always up to you, or even us.”
“How else are we going to prove who is behind it? How else can we expose the Red Room for what they are? How are we going to see what the endgame is, who they’re targeting and why? How can we protect anyone if we don’t know who to protect, and what we’re protecting them from?” Natasha’s voice was rising.
“Sometimes you can’t know who to protect. Sometimes things just happen, N-Ro.” Tony didn’t say anything else, but everyone in the room heard what he was really saying.
“This isn’t just about me,” Natasha said. She could feel her face going red, which wasn’t like her, and felt like a betrayal.
“I’m just saying, we all know your feelings about the Red Room and the Somodorovs. Don’t make this personal,” Coulson said.
“Don’t tell me that. Of course it’s personal,” Natasha snapped.
“Maybe you should sit this one out,” Tony said, gently.
Natasha bristled. “Who else is there? Cap? Bruce?”
Coulson looked at her for a long moment, playing with the edge of the folder in front of him. “And Ava? What about her? How’s she doing with all this? Her first mission, first time in the field, after everything?” After Istanbul.
Nobody said it. They only think it.
Natasha looked out at the room in defiance.
How is Ava? She’s halfway to crazy, she almost killed a man, she hallucinates my dead brother—and she’s the only one of you who understands.
Natasha managed a smile. “Ava? Never better. I think you could say…she’s a natural.”
“What have we got on my trackers? Have any of the tagged warheads shown up?” Natasha asked the nerdy-looking desk jockey in the computer bank closest to the door.
He held up one hand and kept typing with the other, without glancing away from his computer. She briefly considered shooting out his plasma screen with her Glock, but thought better of it. Bullets were expensive.
Natasha was already in a foul mood; she hated coming into this part of any Triskelion—the tenth-floor war room. Every S.H.I.E.L.D. base had a war room like this one, which consisted of half an amphitheater of computer desks stacked with monitors and facing a curving wall of nine floor-to-ceiling screens, each covered with different map views of the world.
They were all the same, these rooms—not to mention these wonks—and you never found your way to any one of them unless you were in as much trouble as Natasha was in now.
Nuclear trouble.
“I’m sorry, am I disturbing you?” she asked again. In her mind, she was already hurling his office chair against the illuminated projection of the Eastern Seaboard occupying screen six on the wall across from them.
“Just give me a minute,” the techie said, otherwise ignoring her. “This is supes important.”
“Supes important?”
Maria Hill looked up from across the room, where she was engrossed in conversation with Coulson, and waved her over.
Natasha leaned in. “Supes? For reals?” On his screen, she saw a sniper on one side of a river bridge taking out a whole squadron on the other. “Let me get this straight. I’m asking you about the positioning of five actual,
live, missing nuclear missiles, and you can’t give me an update until you kill your pretend insurgents?”
“Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh,” the guy said, still not looking up. “Can’t talk. I’m the sniper. I’m on overwatch.”
Is there not one part of you that isn’t afraid of what I’m about to do to you? As, you know, an actual sniper?
“Yeah, okay,” Natasha said. “Sniper.” She shook her head.
Maria appeared by Natasha’s side. “Let’s leave Barry to do his thing.”
Natasha raised an eyebrow. “His thing? Do you mean his game?”
“Either way we need him to keep playing,” Maria said.
“Let me guess: because the twist is…that his game is real—and all my ops are fake?” Natasha asked.
Maria shrugged. “The game doesn’t matter, just who he’s playing it with.”
Now Natasha was interested. “Yeah? And who is that?”
“We don’t know. Barry was on missile watch, until fourteen minutes ago, when he got challenged from an UNSUB who somehow jacked into our secure mainframe through a Warrior World lobby, believe it or not.”
“Oh, I believe it,” Natasha said.
“Now he’s playing against an account with an IP address registered to a high-ranking S.H.I.E.L.D. operative.”
“And you’re telling me this because?”
Maria looked at her. “Which high-ranking S.H.I.E.L.D. operative do you think that IP address belongs to?”
“Me?” Natasha looked back down at the screen. “No.”
“Yep.”
“And how would this soldier superfan have found—Barry?” Natasha asked. “Doesn’t that seem a little suspicious?”
Maria shook her head. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.” She nodded to someone standing in the far doorway and waved them over. In response, Coulson made his way through the room.
“Do we have a status update?” he asked.
“Are you talking about the IRL ops or the virtual ops?” Natasha said. “This is ops central.”
“Either way, don’t ask the kid by the door. He is very busy,” Coulson said.
“But the more important status update: Was I winning?” Natasha asked. Coulson looked confused. Maria looked past her to Barry.
Because suddenly Barry was standing up in front of his monitor. “Uh, guys? You might want to come see this.”
“Pull it up on the big screen,” Maria said to the wonk at the desk immediately in front of her.
Another text box, from another UNSUB. At least, she assumed it had to be another one. Then she read the message:
UNSUB: HAVE A LITTLE FAITH, PTNETS
UNSUB: VERUYUSCHIKH SREDI NAS—
UNSUB: THE FAITHFUL ARE AMONG US
It’s from the same person.
But it can’t be from Maks. He’s locked up. This is the work of a second hacker. Maybe the person who hired Maks in the first place.
The one he was so afraid of.
Maybe even the one who ties him to Somodorov.
Despite everything S.H.I.E.L.D. had thrown at him, Maks still refused to give up the name of the person who had hired him.
Once again, the skull logo appeared on the screen—only this time the screen was nine screens tall and wide, and the image occupied the whole war-room wall.
No. Not again. Not here—
For probably the first time all day, every head in the room snapped up from its monitor. You could almost hear the vertebrae collectively clack and shuffle as the rows of spines straightened.
That’s how you know something is really wrong—
“How did that thing get into our network?” Maria roared, startling the tenth-floor wonks. “Get it out—Initiate X Protocol—now!”
As if on cue, the moment the words were out of her mouth, all the screens went black. “X Protocol initiating,” the wonk next to Maria reported breathlessly. “The network is locked onto override.”
Yeah, right—That was too easy—
“Thank you,” Maria said, to the room.
“He’s not done,” Natasha said, keeping her voice low. But the rows of monitors flashed back with rotating columns of bright white numbers as they began to reboot themselves. Only the screens on the wall remained dead black.
What’s he doing? The UNSUB? The one that isn’t Maks? Whoever this guy is, he’s not done. He can’t be.
He’s just showing me that he knows how to get to me.
Her mind went immediately to her vulnerabilities. Her phone. Her apartment. Her—
Ava.
Natasha pulled out her phone and began to text.
N_ROMANOFF: ava if up stay home stay offline don’t open door
N_ROMANOFF: shield hacked so going dark
N_ROMANOFF: back soon
Natasha pulled the sim card out of her phone and broke it in half, dropping it into the mug of stale coffee on the nearest desk.
“You should probably trash your sim cards, too. Whatever he’s written, it’s nasty and it replicates. Ask Stark, he was ready to hire the guy. This hack is the viral equivalent of bedbugs.”
“He?” Coulson quirked an eyebrow. “Who’s he?”
Natasha wished she knew.
“Face-to-face, we’ve only gotten eyes on three people: Maks the hacker, the would-be Rio assassin, and Yuri Somodorov,” Natasha said.
“One’s a corpse and one’s a convict,” Maria observed. “Which leaves the Rio assassin.”
“We know she’s in contact with Maks Mohawk,” Natasha said. “At least, we used her RFID tracker to find him. But that’s as far as we’ve gotten.”
“What is Maks’s side of the story?” Maria asked.
Natasha shrugged. “So far? No comment. But I did have to shoot him, which might have gotten in the way of some of his talking points.”
As she spoke, a tiny white dot appeared in the center of screen five, the middle screen of the middle row of the room.
It expanded into a light, and then words—
UNSUB: POVERNIS’
UNSUB: TURN AROUND
“He’s back,” Maria called out to the room. “How did he get in again? Shut down the network—where’s my X Protocol?”
Natasha spun around. All she could see were the rows of heads looking up from their monitors once again—
Except one.
Barry had fallen forward, his purple face resting on his keyboard, blood running from his mouth and nose and pooling on his desk.
The room broke out in chaos, but not before Natasha bent to the floor beneath Barry’s chair and picked up the empty glass vial.
Only a few of the sandy black granules still clung to the sides of the container, but it was enough. Natasha recognized them. She also knew they’d match the sample she’d brought back from the Veraport depot.
Barry from the war room—Barry the tenth-floor gamer—had kept the Faith, and then he’d died from it.
The Red Room was finally showing its hand.
VERUYUSCHIKH SREDI NAS—
The Faithful are among us.
She grabbed the sample and bolted.
“Where are you going?” Coulson called after her.
“Home,” she yelled back. “No phones—”
Ava—
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 (TEXT EXCHANGE)
CC: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, SCI INQUIRY
N_ROMANOFF: ava where are you
N_ROMANOFF: ava pick up the phone
N_ROMANOFF: this is n
N_ROMANOFF: don’t call my phone it doesn’t work
N_ROMANOFF: I borrowed the super’s phone now, from downstairs
N_ROMANOFF: am home but you are not
N_ROMANOFF: ava pick up the phone
&nbs
p; N_ROMANOFF: ava pick up the phone
N_ROMANOFF: not safe to call
N_ROMANOFF: not safe to be out
N_ROMANOFF: not sure how long it will be safe here
N_ROMANOFF: get your butt home
N_ROMANOFF: ava pick up the phone
N_ROMANOFF: ava pick up the phone
N_ROMANOFF: am waiting
N_ROMANOFF: also worried
N_ROMANOFF: also if one thing happens to that jacket
N_ROMANOFF: ava be safe
N_ROMANOFF: ava pick up the phone
STARK COMMUNITY SOUP KITCHEN
FORT GREENE, BROOKLYN
Dinner wasn’t as bad as Ava had imagined it would be. There were no fish sticks, but there was a crusty oregano-laced lasagna, and a pungent vegetable soup with so much cabbage that Ava could close her eyes and almost pretend it was shchi, the cabbage soup her mother—and every other Russian mother—used to make in the winter.
Almost.
Across the table from Ava, Dante kept busy eating his weight in garlic bread while Sana told funny stories about her customers or fencing, or about her stepsisters and brothers. Even one about drawing a butt instead of a heart in the cappuccino foam and waiting for someone to notice.
It was only the part where Ava and Dante didn’t manage to speak to each other all night that was painful. That, and the fact that her phone was dead, so she couldn’t dial star sixty-whatever and pretend to get a call and go. She hadn’t charged it since Manaus, except for the few minutes she was in the shower at Natasha’s apartment. Things S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t think about when building aircraft—
By the time they were halfway through the chocolate pudding, Ava didn’t think she could take it any longer. “You have to come with me to the restroom.” She grabbed Sana by the hand and yanked her toward the bathrooms, leaving Dante behind at the Stark CK table. As soon as they were out of earshot, Ava hissed into her friend’s ear. “Seriously? What are you trying to do, San?”
“Nothing.” Sana pushed through the bathroom door.
“You set me up. Tonight was sabotage. You should go to friend prison,” Ava said, following her in. “I’m not friends with him. He hates me. He blames me for—everything.”
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