fic: Revenant (1/?)
30 Oct 2013 12:06![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
domarzioneRevenant: Chapter One
PG-13-ish ; Black Widow/The Avengers/Captain America
Part of the Freezer Burn series. Prior reading not required.
One's a good news day, two's a coinkidink, and three's a phone call from NF waiting to happen. That's why the text. Keeping the line clear. :)
Natasha was in Montreal finishing up some perfectly above-board work (that had just happened to require a neutral third country meeting place and travel under a false passport), so she hadn't seen the news, nor had she checked her email since this morning. Fury hadn't called her, so whatever it was Clint was hinting at hadn't yet occurred, if it would at all. Sometimes, it was a little hard to tell when he was being serious over texts and emails; this could be work related or it could be that he had found Count Chocula at the grocery again.
She could spend time checking her inboxes or surfing to the news websites, instead, she just texted back a question mark because if it really was cereal, she'd be irritated at the effort otherwise expended. And then she turned her attention to the waitress who offered to refill her coffee cup and asked if she'd like a slice of sugar pie and smiled approvingly when she replied in the affirmative.
Clint sent her three links to the London newspapers. The first reported that the Latverian cultural attaché to the Court of St. James (like most cultural attachés, he was really a spy) had died of an apparent heart attack while enjoying a post-theater dinner with his wife at a trendy restaurant. The second said that a merger between two City investment firms was on hold after the principal of one, Oleg Semyonov, had been rendered comatose after a fall in his mansion's bathroom -- wet marble, so slippery; he was not expected to survive. Semyonov was (soon to be had been) Putin's main money-launderer in Europe. The third was an obituary of Sir Robert Atglen, a former permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Ministry turned Kronas Industries executive, of natural causes. Atglen had been a KGB spy handled by Aleksander Lukin during the Cold War and had been rewarded for his services. It was possible that it had been natural causes, but, as Clint had pointed out, the context was... curious.
"Oh, mili moi, what have you done?" she murmured, smiling sweetly up at the waitress who brought her cake.
Fury did not call her that day, nor the next, when she was back in New York. But on the third day, Natasha woke up to news that there had been massive explosions at both the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Rotterdam, no claims of responsibility yet, and while she did not know what had been damaged at each site, she'd have bet on Kronas Industries' insurance company having gotten at least one phone call. So when Neal Tapper, the Avengers' SHIELD liaison, issued a summons to the headquarters on 44th Street, she was unsurprised. Even less so to find Steve there already waiting, talking to Hill.
"Can you please try to look a little less giddy at the news of thirteen dead and hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and lost revenue?" Fury asked with a scowl as he stalked into the conference room, an aide trailing behind. "This is going to be a clusterfuck and that's with only the Port Authorities and Homeland Security tying up my phone line."
Natasha cocked an eyebrow; she hadn't been doing anything.
"Not you, Romanova," Fury said, looking pointedly at Steve. "Captain Happy over there."
Steve blushed. "I'm not pleased about the loss of life. That's a tragedy and I'm--"
"Save it," Fury cut him off, sitting down and waiting for the aide to deposit papers and tablet in front of him. "Far as we can tell, every single corpse comes with an Interpol file, so 'tragedy' is overstating the case. But that doesn't mean this isn't going to become one down the line. Whoever is behind this -- and I say that like I don't know exactly who is behind this -- has been busy and the busier he gets, the more dots there are to connect. Right now, it's just probably just Lukin and the Latverians, but eventually the Russians are going to clue in, too, because your boy? Is not being subtle. I get the need for revenge. I do. But we need to stop him before he starts something we can't contain."
Hill began the quick briefing then, throwing images up on to the plasma screen because it turned out that London had not been James's first stop on his quest to pay back those who'd used and abused him when he'd been the Winter Soldier. All of the research SHIELD had done back when they'd been looking to stop Latveria from using Lukin's connectios to import HYDRA technology and everything they'd researched to try to bring James Buchanan Barnes home, all of that had let them see exactly what he'd been up to in the six months since they'd lost him in Doomdstadt. Since they'd thought they'd watched him die rather than live with the guilt of what the Winter Soldier had done.
The proof of life, however, came with quite the body count.
Fury wanted Natasha, Steve, and Clint (when Clint got back from wherever he was) to start looking for him and, if they could, anticipate his next moves. A task made more complicated by the fact that the Winter Soldier had been better at what he did than both she and Clint were -- and what they were, Steve had never been -- and the fact that they didn't know what he looked like even if they could figure out where to look. They could assume that he still looked like James Barnes, but he could have changed his appearance or his use of the Tesseract could have changed it for him. Steve was adamant that that last would not be the case.
"He's not living in someone else's body," Steve insisted, since that was a possibility that had to be brought up. "He'd never do that to anyone else, not after what had been done to him."
The picture of Johann Schmidt wearing the face of Matthias Kuersteiner was up on the plasma screen.
"Probably not," Hill agreed, an edge of kindness to her voice that Steve almost sneered at. He hated being catered to like that and Hill knew better. "But he could simply look like someone else now. He'd said he couldn't look at himself in the mirror anymore and then he used the magic wishing cube. He could be a four-foot-three Mexican dude, he could be Lady Gaga, he could have simply dyed his hair or shaved it off. All are equally likely possibilities. We've been running facial rec from every CCTV in London for the three days surrounding his kill spree and that may not get us a single hit even if he looks straight into a camera and waves."
There was more, but the marching orders had been issued. Natasha waited for Steve afterward and suggested they go out for lunch. It was raining when they got down to the lobby and so he offered his elbow and they walked west on 44th under the protection of his umbrella. It was an old-fashioned gesture made instinctively by a man not nearly out of time as he used to be, although if she'd said anything he'd have told her primly that good manners were never out of date.
"I can't be happy that he's doing so much damage, that he's killing people," Steve said as they sat under an awning outside of a small Italian bistro on 46th. It was just warm enough for a spring day to be comfortable outside and the noise of the rain hitting the awning and then it pouring down off the edge gave them privacy. "But it's not like he's mowing down schoolchildren. Even Fury admitted he's doing SHIELD's job for us. He's going to do what we wish we could. What I probably would do."
"Kill Lukin and Doom?" Natasha asked mildly, tearing off a piece of the still-warm focaccia. "Would you really?"
Steve looked at her thoughtfully. "If I'd been through what he had, are you so sure I wouldn't?"
Natasha hadn't grown up with the iconography of Captain America the way the others had, hadn't seen the newsreels and the movies or read the books or pretended to be Cap and the Commandos in the schoolyard at recess. She hadn't fixed the idea of the spit-shined, fair-haired, noble boy in her mind through a lifetime of passive and active exposure, so when she'd met Captain America for real, she'd formed her opinions based on the evidence in front of her. Which told her that Steve Rogers was a soldier of unparalleled talent and a man of uncommonly deep decency and goodness and grace, but also a man with darkness in him, darkness he fought with the same strength he'd fought Nazis and now fought aliens and whatever else crossed the Avengers' path. So, no, she was not sure. And neither was Steve, which was what made him who he was.
"We have to find him," she said instead of answering the question aloud. "We won't be the only ones looking."
After Doomstadt, Steve had insisted that James had survived, that he hadn't used the Tesseract to suicide, although at the time she'd wondered if he was speaking out of hope or belief. Clint hadn't been so optimistic, but out of deference to Steve, he'd kept those doubts to himself. Natasha had gone back and forth, unsure of the man and even less sure of the alien technology that he'd wielded, and the time that had passed since then had not resolved that indecision. That had only come with the text from Clint, although it had brought with it a new set of concerns in exchange.
"No," Steve agreed, but then gave her a lopsided grin. "But I'm glad we have to."
Natasha left for London three days later, the first stop on a five-city tour of contacts, old acquaintances, and KGB drops and caches that James might look to make use of if he were in need of money or weapons. He had disappeared with only what he'd been wearing at the time, which had included a pair of large caliber handguns and at least two combat knives, but not enough cash to fund the sort of havoc he'd been wreaking for the last six weeks, if Hill's suspicions were correct. (They probably were; Hill was a far better analyst than she let on.) There could also be Latverian resources he might be tapping, but nobody really knew what kind of boltholes the Latverian security services had built for themselves and if anyone was going to realize that they might be at risk to a rogue agent, it would be Doom. So while some of the places and people she planned to investigate dated back to the Soviet era, to James they might be more reliable and more easily accessed.
They might be, but James was going nowhere near them. Whatever resources he had, he was drawing them from a completely different line of credit. Natasha returned to New York two weeks later with nothing to show but a healthy expense report. She'd talked to armorers and arms dealers, forgers, and the finest bomb-maker east of the Rhine and none of them had had dealings with the Winter Soldier recently, nor had they heard of anyone who had. Ernst, the bomb-maker, had been a little remorseful and a tiny bit jealous that he hadn't been the one to build the devices, but even after she gave him a copy of the forensic reports that told him exactly what the bombs had been made of, he couldn't give her a name. "It's someone in South America, I would guess," he'd said. "They do remote detonation better than the Arabs and I'd have heard of anyone in Europe or Asia working with that much untagged Semtex."
In the meanwhile, there'd been two more suspicious deaths of Russian billionaires with ties to both the old KGB and the new corruption and then the completely straightforward assassination of the head of a Latverian mining company in South Africa, a cousin and boyhood friend of Baron von Doom, although presumably there'd been some other factor because James had thus far avoided softer targets with much more direct connections to the Winter Soldier.
"Well, we know he's found a sniper rifle," Clint drawled as they sat in a corner of the dive bar near his apartment. The place was genuinely unfashionable and not artfully so, refused to serve anything but well drinks and the same five beers it had had on tap since the 1980s, and quietly produced a burger and fries (before 10pm only) that made a mockery of the Shake Shack a few blocks east. "I don't know where he's getting all this shit from, though. Between the two of us, we can cover anyone worth knowing outside of Asia and I am not quite ready to accept that he's buying wholesale from the Chinese or the North Koreans."
"He was in Vietnam in the Seventies. But I think they have people on the region already," Natasha said, then smiled gratefully at the busboy who delivered a full bottle of ketchup and their napkin-wrapped silverware and took away their empty pint glasses.
"I'm about ready to start asking Hill to ask the Army if he could be hitting up anything we might have left behind after V-E Day," Clint groused into the head of his new Harp.
Natasha gave him an incredulous look and he shrugged. "I am all out of practical and plausible suggestions and if I thought Steve would do anything but chew my head off about it, I would ask him if the Commandos had had any stashes that Barnes might remember."
Steve was off in Texas doing something at an Army base, but she wasn't sure he would have wanted to come to bitch and moan about the hunt for James even if he'd been in town. His frustration with their lack of progress was only partially because of its lack of success; the rest was his own lack of suitability to the task. Steve didn't have the connections an experienced field agent had, the friends in low places that made this work easier to survive, because he'd never been a clandestine operator. He'd done his share of covert work during his war, but this, what she and Clint and James did, was something else entirely. Making it worse was that, in this case, he was an insufficient analyst because while he could read quickly and make logical connections at a speed the rest of them could not match, he was missing too much context. The Winter Soldier's history was written in and of the Cold War, which Steve had read about but which he could not understand it in the bone-deep way that someone who'd lived through it would, let alone someone who helped shape it as the Winter Soldier had. He was helpless to find the man who he'd once been closer to than any other because he could no longer understand anything about that man's life. Of course it was eating him up inside.
It was bothering her a little, too, although she hid it better. Not perfectly, both Steve and Clint had come to her and, in their own ways, offered support if she needed it because hunting down an old love, a first love, was not simple. She'd never given either of them the full story of her and James, although she suspected both had picked up far more than she had said. And she'd spoken the truth when she'd admitted that she wasn't sure how she'd feel when (if) they found him. She'd lost him the first time when the Red Room had taken him from her and she had been burned every single time she'd risked believing she might've gotten a little bit of him back. She wasn't sure she even wanted him back. She wasn't the same person she'd been when they'd been together any more than he was, even if her changes had been organic and by her own choice. She had no idea who James Barnes was now and she didn't know how she felt about him, even if he remembered her.
"I think Steve's already been through the Commandos files with the SHIELD historians," she said rather than give any of those thoughts voice. "There was an argument about whether a particular mission existed because there were no records of it."
Clint laughed and drank at the same moment and so he had to put down his beer to cough. "I think I would have paid money to see that. Captain Photographic Memory versus a couple of eggheads whose grandparents weren't even born when it happened."
Natasha made a noise of agreement, shifting her own beer glass to the side as their burgers arrived.
The next two weeks brought more of the same: little progress, more frustration, and the hum of the intelligence world realizing that something large was afoot and nobody had figured out what. A puzzle, a riddle nobody had solved, and it was all the more appealing for it. The clues were there; the Latverians and the Russians were both clearly the targets of this campaign and if the Russians still hadn't figured out the who, Natasha was quite sure the Latverians had a very good idea. Which was why they were publicly keeping their mouths shut, suggesting plausible but clearly wrong theories for why their diplomats and citizens were being picked off, while privately sending scathing missives to Fury accusing him of a revenge program for the events in Doomstadt. The Latverians went back and forth on whether the Winter Soldier was involved; the Latverian troops had seen James disappear into thin air as clearly as the Avengers had. The Russians, on the other hand, were keeping quiet because they didn't know what was going on. They couldn't confess the real roles of some of the victims, couldn't sound like fools by even admitting that some of the dead were victims -- autopsies had been done, no foul play indicated -- and while they were happy to accuse SHIELD in particular and the American government in general of messing around, some of the Russian assets James had eliminated had been unknown by SHIELD to even be assets until after the fact. "We can't kill spies we don't know are spies," Fury had told an irate SVR caller. "Look inside your own house before you come storming over to mine."
And so the chase remained on as April turned into May and May turned into real spring and not the series of false alarms that meant packing for two seasons for even the shortest trip. There were other matters to deal with beyond the hunt for the Winter Soldier and Natasha spent most of the first half of May in Denmark and Sweden chasing down a former AIM biomedical engineer who was peddling an Extremis-based formula to the highest bidder.
But Memorial Day weekend, which was supposed to have been a vacation and a barbecue on Tony's penthouse deck, turned into a work trip far from the sailors and marines swanning through Manhattan for Fleet Week. She was in Berlin, making a two-day stopover to meet with an old contact and follow up on a potential new one, before heading off to Tallinn because there'd been a rumor of the Winter Soldier visiting one of the armorers there and putting in an order that would have to be picked up. She was pretty sure it was BS, but at this stage, she couldn't reasonably refuse to go. And so here she was, at least getting some real work done en route. Although not at the moment, since she'd stopped for a late lunch at a sun-drenched café. And so had half of Berlin, it seemed; the weather had apparently been rainy and cold all week and the city had turned out to enjoy the respite.
The atmosphere on the street changed subtly from blissful weekend afternoon to something less full of sunshine, a murmur that Natasha noticed in the tiny part of her professional mind that functioned even when she sipped affogato in sunglasses and a pretty dress, judged unthreatening, and proceeded to ignore. But when it grew louder, she stopped tuning it out and started to listen because it had the underlying urgency of something has happened and not in the good way.
"Ist er tot?"
"Wer könnte das überleben?"
Natasha no sooner realized "assassination" than she heard a name and went scrambling for her purse to pull out her phone. The video was already on the web, on every news site and all over Youtube.
It was a quiet, respectful scene at Arlington National Cemetery, the laying of the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns by the President of the United States. The wreath to be presented stood on an easel guarded by a soldier and the President waited for the signal to pick it up. A group of military personnel dressed in their finest, Captain America in his costume front and to the right, stood nearby. It was all solemn and respectful until Steve suddenly pitched forward and fell to the ground, at which point all hell broke loose.
There was more to the video, other videos that promised close-ups and better angles, but she'd seen enough. She stood up, surprised at her unsteadiness, dropped a handful of euros on the table, gathered her things and left. She answered her phone on the first ring, already knowing who it was.
"What do you want me to do?"
PG-13-ish ; Black Widow/The Avengers/Captain America
Six months after being freed from the Winter Soldier conditioning, James Barnes has been presumed dead until a series of fatal accidents and outright murders makes it clear how he's been planning on spending his time. Natasha understands why she's been sent to track him down, even if she's not sure how she'll feel once he's found.
Unfortunately, he's not the only one with revenge in mind.
Part of the Freezer Burn series. Prior reading not required.
One's a good news day, two's a coinkidink, and three's a phone call from NF waiting to happen. That's why the text. Keeping the line clear. :)
Natasha was in Montreal finishing up some perfectly above-board work (that had just happened to require a neutral third country meeting place and travel under a false passport), so she hadn't seen the news, nor had she checked her email since this morning. Fury hadn't called her, so whatever it was Clint was hinting at hadn't yet occurred, if it would at all. Sometimes, it was a little hard to tell when he was being serious over texts and emails; this could be work related or it could be that he had found Count Chocula at the grocery again.
She could spend time checking her inboxes or surfing to the news websites, instead, she just texted back a question mark because if it really was cereal, she'd be irritated at the effort otherwise expended. And then she turned her attention to the waitress who offered to refill her coffee cup and asked if she'd like a slice of sugar pie and smiled approvingly when she replied in the affirmative.
Clint sent her three links to the London newspapers. The first reported that the Latverian cultural attaché to the Court of St. James (like most cultural attachés, he was really a spy) had died of an apparent heart attack while enjoying a post-theater dinner with his wife at a trendy restaurant. The second said that a merger between two City investment firms was on hold after the principal of one, Oleg Semyonov, had been rendered comatose after a fall in his mansion's bathroom -- wet marble, so slippery; he was not expected to survive. Semyonov was (soon to be had been) Putin's main money-launderer in Europe. The third was an obituary of Sir Robert Atglen, a former permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Ministry turned Kronas Industries executive, of natural causes. Atglen had been a KGB spy handled by Aleksander Lukin during the Cold War and had been rewarded for his services. It was possible that it had been natural causes, but, as Clint had pointed out, the context was... curious.
"Oh, mili moi, what have you done?" she murmured, smiling sweetly up at the waitress who brought her cake.
Fury did not call her that day, nor the next, when she was back in New York. But on the third day, Natasha woke up to news that there had been massive explosions at both the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Rotterdam, no claims of responsibility yet, and while she did not know what had been damaged at each site, she'd have bet on Kronas Industries' insurance company having gotten at least one phone call. So when Neal Tapper, the Avengers' SHIELD liaison, issued a summons to the headquarters on 44th Street, she was unsurprised. Even less so to find Steve there already waiting, talking to Hill.
"Can you please try to look a little less giddy at the news of thirteen dead and hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and lost revenue?" Fury asked with a scowl as he stalked into the conference room, an aide trailing behind. "This is going to be a clusterfuck and that's with only the Port Authorities and Homeland Security tying up my phone line."
Natasha cocked an eyebrow; she hadn't been doing anything.
"Not you, Romanova," Fury said, looking pointedly at Steve. "Captain Happy over there."
Steve blushed. "I'm not pleased about the loss of life. That's a tragedy and I'm--"
"Save it," Fury cut him off, sitting down and waiting for the aide to deposit papers and tablet in front of him. "Far as we can tell, every single corpse comes with an Interpol file, so 'tragedy' is overstating the case. But that doesn't mean this isn't going to become one down the line. Whoever is behind this -- and I say that like I don't know exactly who is behind this -- has been busy and the busier he gets, the more dots there are to connect. Right now, it's just probably just Lukin and the Latverians, but eventually the Russians are going to clue in, too, because your boy? Is not being subtle. I get the need for revenge. I do. But we need to stop him before he starts something we can't contain."
Hill began the quick briefing then, throwing images up on to the plasma screen because it turned out that London had not been James's first stop on his quest to pay back those who'd used and abused him when he'd been the Winter Soldier. All of the research SHIELD had done back when they'd been looking to stop Latveria from using Lukin's connectios to import HYDRA technology and everything they'd researched to try to bring James Buchanan Barnes home, all of that had let them see exactly what he'd been up to in the six months since they'd lost him in Doomdstadt. Since they'd thought they'd watched him die rather than live with the guilt of what the Winter Soldier had done.
The proof of life, however, came with quite the body count.
Fury wanted Natasha, Steve, and Clint (when Clint got back from wherever he was) to start looking for him and, if they could, anticipate his next moves. A task made more complicated by the fact that the Winter Soldier had been better at what he did than both she and Clint were -- and what they were, Steve had never been -- and the fact that they didn't know what he looked like even if they could figure out where to look. They could assume that he still looked like James Barnes, but he could have changed his appearance or his use of the Tesseract could have changed it for him. Steve was adamant that that last would not be the case.
"He's not living in someone else's body," Steve insisted, since that was a possibility that had to be brought up. "He'd never do that to anyone else, not after what had been done to him."
The picture of Johann Schmidt wearing the face of Matthias Kuersteiner was up on the plasma screen.
"Probably not," Hill agreed, an edge of kindness to her voice that Steve almost sneered at. He hated being catered to like that and Hill knew better. "But he could simply look like someone else now. He'd said he couldn't look at himself in the mirror anymore and then he used the magic wishing cube. He could be a four-foot-three Mexican dude, he could be Lady Gaga, he could have simply dyed his hair or shaved it off. All are equally likely possibilities. We've been running facial rec from every CCTV in London for the three days surrounding his kill spree and that may not get us a single hit even if he looks straight into a camera and waves."
There was more, but the marching orders had been issued. Natasha waited for Steve afterward and suggested they go out for lunch. It was raining when they got down to the lobby and so he offered his elbow and they walked west on 44th under the protection of his umbrella. It was an old-fashioned gesture made instinctively by a man not nearly out of time as he used to be, although if she'd said anything he'd have told her primly that good manners were never out of date.
"I can't be happy that he's doing so much damage, that he's killing people," Steve said as they sat under an awning outside of a small Italian bistro on 46th. It was just warm enough for a spring day to be comfortable outside and the noise of the rain hitting the awning and then it pouring down off the edge gave them privacy. "But it's not like he's mowing down schoolchildren. Even Fury admitted he's doing SHIELD's job for us. He's going to do what we wish we could. What I probably would do."
"Kill Lukin and Doom?" Natasha asked mildly, tearing off a piece of the still-warm focaccia. "Would you really?"
Steve looked at her thoughtfully. "If I'd been through what he had, are you so sure I wouldn't?"
Natasha hadn't grown up with the iconography of Captain America the way the others had, hadn't seen the newsreels and the movies or read the books or pretended to be Cap and the Commandos in the schoolyard at recess. She hadn't fixed the idea of the spit-shined, fair-haired, noble boy in her mind through a lifetime of passive and active exposure, so when she'd met Captain America for real, she'd formed her opinions based on the evidence in front of her. Which told her that Steve Rogers was a soldier of unparalleled talent and a man of uncommonly deep decency and goodness and grace, but also a man with darkness in him, darkness he fought with the same strength he'd fought Nazis and now fought aliens and whatever else crossed the Avengers' path. So, no, she was not sure. And neither was Steve, which was what made him who he was.
"We have to find him," she said instead of answering the question aloud. "We won't be the only ones looking."
After Doomstadt, Steve had insisted that James had survived, that he hadn't used the Tesseract to suicide, although at the time she'd wondered if he was speaking out of hope or belief. Clint hadn't been so optimistic, but out of deference to Steve, he'd kept those doubts to himself. Natasha had gone back and forth, unsure of the man and even less sure of the alien technology that he'd wielded, and the time that had passed since then had not resolved that indecision. That had only come with the text from Clint, although it had brought with it a new set of concerns in exchange.
"No," Steve agreed, but then gave her a lopsided grin. "But I'm glad we have to."
Natasha left for London three days later, the first stop on a five-city tour of contacts, old acquaintances, and KGB drops and caches that James might look to make use of if he were in need of money or weapons. He had disappeared with only what he'd been wearing at the time, which had included a pair of large caliber handguns and at least two combat knives, but not enough cash to fund the sort of havoc he'd been wreaking for the last six weeks, if Hill's suspicions were correct. (They probably were; Hill was a far better analyst than she let on.) There could also be Latverian resources he might be tapping, but nobody really knew what kind of boltholes the Latverian security services had built for themselves and if anyone was going to realize that they might be at risk to a rogue agent, it would be Doom. So while some of the places and people she planned to investigate dated back to the Soviet era, to James they might be more reliable and more easily accessed.
They might be, but James was going nowhere near them. Whatever resources he had, he was drawing them from a completely different line of credit. Natasha returned to New York two weeks later with nothing to show but a healthy expense report. She'd talked to armorers and arms dealers, forgers, and the finest bomb-maker east of the Rhine and none of them had had dealings with the Winter Soldier recently, nor had they heard of anyone who had. Ernst, the bomb-maker, had been a little remorseful and a tiny bit jealous that he hadn't been the one to build the devices, but even after she gave him a copy of the forensic reports that told him exactly what the bombs had been made of, he couldn't give her a name. "It's someone in South America, I would guess," he'd said. "They do remote detonation better than the Arabs and I'd have heard of anyone in Europe or Asia working with that much untagged Semtex."
In the meanwhile, there'd been two more suspicious deaths of Russian billionaires with ties to both the old KGB and the new corruption and then the completely straightforward assassination of the head of a Latverian mining company in South Africa, a cousin and boyhood friend of Baron von Doom, although presumably there'd been some other factor because James had thus far avoided softer targets with much more direct connections to the Winter Soldier.
"Well, we know he's found a sniper rifle," Clint drawled as they sat in a corner of the dive bar near his apartment. The place was genuinely unfashionable and not artfully so, refused to serve anything but well drinks and the same five beers it had had on tap since the 1980s, and quietly produced a burger and fries (before 10pm only) that made a mockery of the Shake Shack a few blocks east. "I don't know where he's getting all this shit from, though. Between the two of us, we can cover anyone worth knowing outside of Asia and I am not quite ready to accept that he's buying wholesale from the Chinese or the North Koreans."
"He was in Vietnam in the Seventies. But I think they have people on the region already," Natasha said, then smiled gratefully at the busboy who delivered a full bottle of ketchup and their napkin-wrapped silverware and took away their empty pint glasses.
"I'm about ready to start asking Hill to ask the Army if he could be hitting up anything we might have left behind after V-E Day," Clint groused into the head of his new Harp.
Natasha gave him an incredulous look and he shrugged. "I am all out of practical and plausible suggestions and if I thought Steve would do anything but chew my head off about it, I would ask him if the Commandos had had any stashes that Barnes might remember."
Steve was off in Texas doing something at an Army base, but she wasn't sure he would have wanted to come to bitch and moan about the hunt for James even if he'd been in town. His frustration with their lack of progress was only partially because of its lack of success; the rest was his own lack of suitability to the task. Steve didn't have the connections an experienced field agent had, the friends in low places that made this work easier to survive, because he'd never been a clandestine operator. He'd done his share of covert work during his war, but this, what she and Clint and James did, was something else entirely. Making it worse was that, in this case, he was an insufficient analyst because while he could read quickly and make logical connections at a speed the rest of them could not match, he was missing too much context. The Winter Soldier's history was written in and of the Cold War, which Steve had read about but which he could not understand it in the bone-deep way that someone who'd lived through it would, let alone someone who helped shape it as the Winter Soldier had. He was helpless to find the man who he'd once been closer to than any other because he could no longer understand anything about that man's life. Of course it was eating him up inside.
It was bothering her a little, too, although she hid it better. Not perfectly, both Steve and Clint had come to her and, in their own ways, offered support if she needed it because hunting down an old love, a first love, was not simple. She'd never given either of them the full story of her and James, although she suspected both had picked up far more than she had said. And she'd spoken the truth when she'd admitted that she wasn't sure how she'd feel when (if) they found him. She'd lost him the first time when the Red Room had taken him from her and she had been burned every single time she'd risked believing she might've gotten a little bit of him back. She wasn't sure she even wanted him back. She wasn't the same person she'd been when they'd been together any more than he was, even if her changes had been organic and by her own choice. She had no idea who James Barnes was now and she didn't know how she felt about him, even if he remembered her.
"I think Steve's already been through the Commandos files with the SHIELD historians," she said rather than give any of those thoughts voice. "There was an argument about whether a particular mission existed because there were no records of it."
Clint laughed and drank at the same moment and so he had to put down his beer to cough. "I think I would have paid money to see that. Captain Photographic Memory versus a couple of eggheads whose grandparents weren't even born when it happened."
Natasha made a noise of agreement, shifting her own beer glass to the side as their burgers arrived.
The next two weeks brought more of the same: little progress, more frustration, and the hum of the intelligence world realizing that something large was afoot and nobody had figured out what. A puzzle, a riddle nobody had solved, and it was all the more appealing for it. The clues were there; the Latverians and the Russians were both clearly the targets of this campaign and if the Russians still hadn't figured out the who, Natasha was quite sure the Latverians had a very good idea. Which was why they were publicly keeping their mouths shut, suggesting plausible but clearly wrong theories for why their diplomats and citizens were being picked off, while privately sending scathing missives to Fury accusing him of a revenge program for the events in Doomstadt. The Latverians went back and forth on whether the Winter Soldier was involved; the Latverian troops had seen James disappear into thin air as clearly as the Avengers had. The Russians, on the other hand, were keeping quiet because they didn't know what was going on. They couldn't confess the real roles of some of the victims, couldn't sound like fools by even admitting that some of the dead were victims -- autopsies had been done, no foul play indicated -- and while they were happy to accuse SHIELD in particular and the American government in general of messing around, some of the Russian assets James had eliminated had been unknown by SHIELD to even be assets until after the fact. "We can't kill spies we don't know are spies," Fury had told an irate SVR caller. "Look inside your own house before you come storming over to mine."
And so the chase remained on as April turned into May and May turned into real spring and not the series of false alarms that meant packing for two seasons for even the shortest trip. There were other matters to deal with beyond the hunt for the Winter Soldier and Natasha spent most of the first half of May in Denmark and Sweden chasing down a former AIM biomedical engineer who was peddling an Extremis-based formula to the highest bidder.
But Memorial Day weekend, which was supposed to have been a vacation and a barbecue on Tony's penthouse deck, turned into a work trip far from the sailors and marines swanning through Manhattan for Fleet Week. She was in Berlin, making a two-day stopover to meet with an old contact and follow up on a potential new one, before heading off to Tallinn because there'd been a rumor of the Winter Soldier visiting one of the armorers there and putting in an order that would have to be picked up. She was pretty sure it was BS, but at this stage, she couldn't reasonably refuse to go. And so here she was, at least getting some real work done en route. Although not at the moment, since she'd stopped for a late lunch at a sun-drenched café. And so had half of Berlin, it seemed; the weather had apparently been rainy and cold all week and the city had turned out to enjoy the respite.
The atmosphere on the street changed subtly from blissful weekend afternoon to something less full of sunshine, a murmur that Natasha noticed in the tiny part of her professional mind that functioned even when she sipped affogato in sunglasses and a pretty dress, judged unthreatening, and proceeded to ignore. But when it grew louder, she stopped tuning it out and started to listen because it had the underlying urgency of something has happened and not in the good way.
"Ist er tot?"
"Wer könnte das überleben?"
Natasha no sooner realized "assassination" than she heard a name and went scrambling for her purse to pull out her phone. The video was already on the web, on every news site and all over Youtube.
It was a quiet, respectful scene at Arlington National Cemetery, the laying of the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns by the President of the United States. The wreath to be presented stood on an easel guarded by a soldier and the President waited for the signal to pick it up. A group of military personnel dressed in their finest, Captain America in his costume front and to the right, stood nearby. It was all solemn and respectful until Steve suddenly pitched forward and fell to the ground, at which point all hell broke loose.
There was more to the video, other videos that promised close-ups and better angles, but she'd seen enough. She stood up, surprised at her unsteadiness, dropped a handful of euros on the table, gathered her things and left. She answered her phone on the first ring, already knowing who it was.
"What do you want me to do?"
