Thaw (9/?)
3 Aug 2013 13:13![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
domarzioneThaw
Avengers/Captain America mashup; Clint Barton POV
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Summary: The Winter Soldier was the dog that ate the good guys' homework during the Cold War, a convenient bogeyman to explain failure, and Clint Barton was pretty sure those tall tales died with the fall of the Wall. But reality is stranger than fiction, something Clint really shouldn't be as surprised by as he is at this stage of his career, and now there are ghosts to chase once more.
Notes: Thaw is a sequel to Freezer Burn plotwise and a successor to BOHICA in terms of characterizations. Neither is required reading for this. However, I do recommend reading the post-credit scene to FB to establish the Winter Soldier within the context of this universe, which is compliant with Phase One movies but diverges afterward.
"... saying he's the next Keith Hernandez. But if you're going to stock your middle infield with guys with only a vague notion of which way to throw if they want to aim at first base, you trade a couple of home runs per year to not have to fish your ball out of the dugout three times a game." Clint took a swig from his water bottle -- no beer at the start of a game that began before noon -- then gestured with it toward third base, where the Pirate was currently standing clapping his hands in self-appreciation for what was a bunt triple until the official scorer got through with assigning blame.
Steve sighed and unearthed the lunches he'd brought for them from his backpack. "That was not a good start to the game."
Clint had been more than a little wary of going to a baseball game that had a ridiculous 11:35am start time so as to allow thousands of day campers to attend without having to leave early -- he was fine with day baseball, of course, but Camp Day games meant tens of thousands of screaming children and why would anyone not being paid to sit through that do so? But Steve had been insistent and had pointed out that there would be entire sections of upper deck practically unoccupied and Clint liked to sit up top, anyway. And he'd offered to bring food and they hadn't gone all season yet and so Clint had agreed because Steve was looking a little ragged around the edges because, by hook or by crook (mostly the latter because Tony had his uses), he'd gotten what he'd wanted and now had more access to the Winter Soldier material than he'd had before.
Also, there was the promise of a postgame stop at the Lemon Ice King of Corona and Clint's missionary zeal could not resist the chance to bear witness to that miracle and seek one more convert.
The Pirate on third somehow failed to score despite there being only one out at the time he arrived at said base and they went to the bottom of the first without too much despair.
And then Steve's phone rang. Steve pulled it out of his pocket and stared at the face for a moment. Clint leaned over to look because he was nosy and because Steve was clearly confused by what he was seeing.
"Who do you know in Israel?" he asked, curious, because he recognized the area code. "Besides Schmidt and he doesn't have call privileges."
Steve shook his head and shrugged and hit the button to accept the call. "Hello?... Who?... How did... Okay, hold on a second, I'm going to put you on speaker." Which he did while pulling Clint in by the elbow so he could hear, too. There wasn't anyone around them, so eavesdropping wasn't going to be a problem.
"Start from the beginning," Steve commanded.
"My name is Jarno Ahtola," a very terrified and not-Israeli voice began. "I am a propulsion engineer at Wellcome Aeronautics in Haifa. I was given a package by Doctor Jane Foster to hold and keep safe. She said that if anything happened, I should call you. There are men with guns looking for the package and they are killing people. They are going to kill me."
Clint exchanged a look with Steve -- what the hell? -- then gestured at the phone to indicate that he should keep Ahtola talking. He leaned away and pulled out his own phone, calling Coulson. "Put a tap-and-trace on Steve's phone now," he said in a low voice as soon as Coulson picked up. "And call Shabak and tell them that Wellcome Aeronautics in Haifa is under assault and it's not a couple of shaheeds looking for their virgins."
Coulson didn't ask what was going on, just confirmed the instructions and stayed on the line. Clint leaned back to hunch with Steve over his phone, holding his own to his other ear but the mouthpiece end away. There were a million questions to be asked, starting with why Jane Foster was handing out Captain America's phone number and what she was up to that she was giving something of apparent great value to a random Finn in Haifa and not to SHIELD or an Avenger or to Thor, who would gladly shed blood to protect anything she held valuable. But he didn't think they would have the time to get those answers.
"...said it would be better if I didn't know, but I know what her specialization is," Ahtola was saying. "Oh, god, they're getting closer. I need to--"
"You need to put your cell phone down, out of sight," Clint cut him off, speaking firmly. "Under a desk, under a cabinet, somewhere where we can still hear everything. And then you need to get out of there. Can you get to safety?"
Harsh breathing on the phone, short breaths with the occasional whimper of fear. "I can't get out of the lab," Ahtola reported, voice breaking as he realized that his call for help would not save him. "They're in the halls. I can hear the screaming and the gunfire. They're coming here. I have the box."
In the corner of his eye, Clint could see a cotton candy vendor, a streak of pink and blue disappearing from his field of vision.
"Can you find a place to hide?" Clint asked, closing his eyes to try to imagine a room he had never seen. "Nowhere near the box, nowhere near your phone. Is there a closet or a table in a corner?"
"Yes, but I--"
"We'll be here," Steve assured with the calm, controlled voice of Captain America, the voice that made everything less terrifying because it never wavered. Steve's eyes showed that he was thinking what Clint was thinking, that they were about to listen to a man die. But he kept it out of his voice. "You won't be alone. You won't ever be alone. Go hide yourself, Jarno. Now."
They heard the sound of the phone being put down and possibly covered by a piece of paper, nothing heavy that would muffle sound, and then the very faint click that might have been a closet door opening and closing. In Clint's other ear, Coulson informed him that the Haifa police were already responding to an incident at that address that had been reported fifteen minutes ago, that Shabak had been called, and that SHIELD had established a tap on Steve's phone and were recording. In the stadium, the PA said something and twelve thousand kids screamed in response; thankfully, they were all in the sections below and it didn't drown out the sounds from the phone, but Clint and Steve both had to lean closer even as Steve held it up.
What they heard from Haifa was a crash and then less violent noises, then distant voices that weren't understandable at first but then quickly got louder and resolved themselves into Russian.
"Ah, shit," Clint muttered in a low voice as they listened to the room be ransacked and then a voice call out "Here it is!"
"Close it and give it to me," a familiar Moscow-accented voice commanded sharply. "Go find the others."
Clint saw Steve's eyes go wide in recognition. His Russian had gotten much better with Natasha to work on his fluency, but it was the voice that was important, not the words.
They listened as the room was searched for papers, methodically and without the banging and crashing that had been used to find the box. And then they heard a cry as the closet door was opened. Jarno Ahtola begged for his life, in English and Finnish, but to no avail. They heard the shots -- a double-tap -- and then glass breaking and more paper shuffling that got louder until there was no sound but a sharp, ugly laugh.
"Good, but not good enough," the Winter Soldier said in English and then the call was disconnected.
A half-beat later, the screaming in the stadium redoubled because David Wright had just homered to tie the game.
Clint looked over at Steve, who was already starting to pack up his things.
"We'll have a jet ready for you two to bring you up to the Helicarrier when you get to 44th Street," Coulson said. "You'll probably be leaving for Haifa today."
With a heavy pat to Steve's shoulder, Clint stood up and, after a beat, Steve did, too. A guy in a Santana t-shirt yelled at them for not waiting until the inning was over -- Clint apologized, it was poor form -- as they made their way down the stairs. Once they were on the concession concourse heading for the escalators, they could hear music and more prompting from the PA announcer for the kids to let loose.
"You want to take the train or the bike?" Steve asked once they were outside the stadium. Steve would have to take the bike, but the 7 train rattling above them went to Times Square, too, and Steve knew Clint wasn't overfond of riding shotgun on highways.
"I'll deal with the bike," Clint answered.
Thirty-five minutes later, they were aboard a quinjet taking them to the Helicarrier. The police and security services were on the scene in Haifa, Coulson updated them through the jet's comms, but there'd been no sign of the attackers. And no survivors. The Israelis were none too pleased to be getting calls from SHIELD about violence happening live on their own soil, but were cooperating fully, at least once they understood that no, there was no way to have anticipated this one because SHIELD didn't know what the hell was going on, either.
"We haven't told them that it's the Winter Soldier yet, have we?" Clint asked dryly. "They're going to be a little less gracious once we 'fess that up."
He wondered what the Israelis would say when they found out that the Winter Soldier was real, let alone that he was a brainwashed American. If that part even got told; there were obvious reasons not to want to share anything about the existence of the Winter Soldier, but some of them conflicted with their stated hope that they bring him in alive. But the Winter Soldier was currently neither aware of nor in support of that hope and his body count was growing exponentially and that, too, was going to have to factor in. Sooner than later. Clint didn't know how Steve would handle the mathematics of saving James Barnes versus saving all of the people the Winter Soldier was going to kill before that could happen. But was a calculation that was going to have to be made at some point and they -- all of them -- were going to have to deal with the answer.
There was more news by the time the jet got to the Helicarrier, which was currently in the North Atlantic traveling back to the East Coast after a visit to the North Sea as part of some arrangement Fury had with the British security services. Jane Foster was not answering her cell phone and hadn't been in to her office in three weeks, which apparently was not that unusual and so nobody had considered her to be missing. There was still no actual evidence that she was missing -- she went into the field regularly, far more so than her SHIELD minders would prefer and very often with no advance warning -- and, since no one had gotten into her apartment yet, for all anyone knew, she was currently in bed enjoying a romp with Thor and simply wasn't one of the 42 percent of women who admitted to checking their phones during sex.
"Doctor Foster's sex habits are about to be the least of our problems," Tapper said as he walked into the outer office of Fury's suite holding up a tablet with graphs on it. They were waiting for Fury to finish whatever he was doing that was more important than this, which his secretary-slash-real-boss, Hsiang, insisted would be imminently but that had been more than five minutes ago. "We got a spike on Doctor Banner's gamma radiation sensor. In Haifa, timestamped exactly to when Doctor Foster's box was opened by the Winter Soldier's people."
Fury's door opened to admit them less than a minute later.
It took twenty minutes before Bruce could be brought in on a VTC, by which point Tony, Selvig, and various researchy people already had been introduced and they'd played the audio of the call from Jarno Ahtola, with Steve filling in the parts that had taken place before the recording had begun. Ahtola's connection to Foster had already been discovered -- he'd been a graduate student of one of Foster's exes, apparently -- and they were engaged in a discussion about what the hell could have possibly mimicked the Tesseract in its energy signature and why Foster (a) had had it, (b) had handed it to someone she barely knew along with (c) telling him to call Captain America if he ran into trouble with it. Which were all questions Clint had asked himself earlier, before they knew it had anything to do with the Tesseract, and he still had no great answers to them now that they did. Although he did have the usual creeping nausea that came with any long discussion of the Tesseract and its adventures on Earth.
"Whatever it is, I can't see why you're surprised she didn't hand it over to you," Tony said. "Considering your past history of possession -- let's see, you tried to use it as a weapon against Asgard and then let it got stolen by Loki to be used to further the very invasion you were hoping to prevent, in the process causing billions of dollars in damages to one of the world's most important cities. That definitely deserves a second chance. Or would it be a third?"
"Tony," Steve warned, but without heat. Clint didn't think Steve actually disagreed with the facts, just the snarky tone. Clint didn't disagree with either, but he was a little bit less irreplaceable than those two.
Once Bruce showed up virtually -- Clint loved that Bruce did not consider VTCs worth the bother of combing his hair or putting on a clean shirt -- the discussion turned more heavily to the science-y stuff and Clint allowed himself to zone a little. His understanding of physics was entirely practical and almost exclusively limited to mechanics and so his understanding of radiation did not extend past "good for frozen dinners and popcorn, bad for people." He knew that gamma radiation was what had given Bruce his alter ego, although not what differentiated gamma radiation from whatever powered his microwave or the average nuclear submarine, and he knew that Natasha had originally been sent to bring Bruce in because the Tesseract also produced gamma radiation. And that was it, so when Bruce started insisting that no, there wasn't a mock Tesseract because no, this wasn't something that could have been synthesized in a lab without anyone realizing it, Clint had no choice to accept it on faith.
"Could it be a shard of the Tesseract?" Steve asked. "Something someone chipped off at some point?"
"No!" Tony, Selvig, and Bruce answered almost together and with great feeling.
"If you tried to do that, you'd end up obliterating most of the solar system," Bruce continued in a gentler tone. "It's a source of power on a scale we don't have the proper means to measure. We can't count that high. The best we've been able to do is harness some of it and, for all that it has been used to open dimensional portals, it still hasn't been bled off enough for us to measure the decrease in capacity. Trying to destroy it or break it apart, there's no way to survive that."
"So what are we looking at?" Fury asked. "Is it possible that there's a second Tesseract?"
"Not likely," Selvig answered. "There's no evidence to support such a claim. The myths that led Schmidt to find the original only ever mentioned the one and Thor himself has always believed that there was only one -- something he apparently verified in Asgard. Doctor Banner's sensor has been running continuously since its launch and has not recorded any readings anywhere near this high before today. Also, from my research, I believe that if there were a second Tesseract, the two would react in some way."
"Like an awareness?" Tapper asked.
"More like two very strong magnets," Selvig answered. "Either there would be great affinity -- or its opposite."
There was more science-y stuff to talk about, but the end result was that there was a reasonable possibility that Jane Foster had somehow come back into possession of the Tesseract and then given it to Jarno Ahtola in Haifa to hold on to, a favor that had cost him his life. This wasn't reasonable in any normal sense of the word, of course, just that nobody could come up with a less batshit scenario to fit the facts as they had them. Foster was nowhere to be found and they had, unbelievably, no better way to contact Thor than to leave a note and hope Heimdall saw it. And, by the way, Steve and Clint were getting flown directly from the Helicarrier to Haifa via quinjet, so they better hope they had clean underwear in their lockers.
(They did, since this would not be the first or the fifth time they'd have to be thrown into a go-bag.) For the sake of comfort and trying to maintain some kind of low profile, they opted to wear a reasonable facsimile of standard SHIELD gear -- neither of the owned the sleek bodysuit -- and leave their uniforms behind. Clint was a known quantity in Israel and Steve would prefer it if he remained unknown and there wasn't much likelihood of getting caught in a fight with the Winter Soldier because the Israelis still hadn't found any trace of him or his crew. There was half a thought put to eating something before heading off, but Clint assured Steve that breakfast in the Middle East -- it would be oh-dark-thirty Israeli time when they got there -- would be worth the wait.
"I was feeling all offended that you were visiting everywhere but here," a familiar voice greeted them as the ramp of the jet lowered six hours later. "You go to Egypt, you go to Lebanon, you go to Syria, and yet you don't come here, where we actually like you for some strange reason. But if this is what you need to visit, then fuck off and go home."
"Nice to see you too, Eitan." Clint smiled and shook the outstretched hand, accepting a firm pat on the shoulder that turned into a quick bro-hug. "What are you doing here?"
Eitan was an agent in Shabak's Arab Affairs department and while they'd worked together a number of times back when Eitan had been with Aman, this particular case was far out of his jurisdiction. Granted, it was pretty fucking far out of Clint's, too, but his job description was a little fuzzier than Eitan's these days.
"Let's just say that my bosses didn't want to take your bosses at their word that this was not something that I needed to be involved in," Eitan replied with a 'what can you do?' shrug. "Your president is busy kissing our enemies' asses and so when we get a call saying that the Americans don't think the attack we just had has anything to do with our enemies, we don't say 'sure, okay, we'll go do something else now,' yeah? Especially when the guy they send to help out has just been on the grand tour of our neighbors' biggest messes."
Which was an explanation Clint couldn't really argue with as a self-defense strategy.
"Well, these two Americans are damned sure the mess you have has nothing to do with your department," he said instead. "Also, why are your friends following me around?"
Eitan smiled. "You are dangerous and an expert on the region, Clint, and Nick Fury does not send you on kebab runs. We're happier knowing where you are and why."
Clint grinned at Steve. "I'm big here," he announced as if he were impressed.
"Only because they use the metric system," Steve replied and Eitan nearly choked for laughing.
"Fuck you both," Clint growled, emphasizing it with a double bird-flip. "Where's breakfast?"
Breakfast was on the other side the morning's work. Wellcome Aeronautics, the top two floors of a three-story building, was already in the process of being turned from the scene of a crime to the scene of a tragedy; the bodies had been removed and the blood washed away and the place smelled strongly of disinfectant. The place was still a mess, though, broken windows and broken doors and bullet holes in the walls. Eitan took them through the small building on the same path as the Winter Soldier and his team, all the way to the lab where Jarno Ahtola had hidden and died. Clint could see the phone on the table, dropped by the Winter Soldier on top of a pile of graphs and printouts. There was the closet Ahtola had hidden in. The blood was gone, but the freshly-cleaned spot on the floor indicated where he'd died. It didn't match up at all to what had been in Clint's head at the time, but why should it?
He turned to ask Steve something, but Steve was by the table, holding something and with his back to Clint, so he walked over. It was a photo of a dark-haired man with a brunette wife and two small boys at what were probably the ruins at Caesarea. Clint looked away.
"The fellow who died here was on the phone when he was killed," Eitan said, gesturing toward the phone. "It was an outgoing call to a New York City number, but we can't get any info on who it is. We can't trade for it, we can't hack it, and nobody will even tell us why. Which means it was someone important and that, coupled with the area code and the fact that you are here... was it you he was calling, Clint? Fury himself?"
Steve put down the photograph. "It was me," he said, turning around to face Eitan.
Eitan nodded once. "Then who are you really and why was Doctor Ahtola calling you instead of his wife?"
Clint had only introduced him as Steve, not to be coy but because even in Israel, the job got more complicated if everyone knew that Captain America was wandering around and Steve was in no mood to deal with that sort of celebrity right now.
"You'd better go wake up the people who are going to be taking this case from you, Eitan, because I think we only want to go through this once."
It took an hour to get people from other agencies and other units of Shin Bet. It was one of the latter, Irit-from-Protective-Security, who gave Steve a cockeyed look and asked him if he was Captain America. Next to Clint, Eitan muttered a couple of really fabulous obscenities in Arabic.
Fury had briefed him and Steve before they'd left about what they could and could not tell the Israelis, which boiled down to not telling them anything about the Winter Soldier and being vague as fuck about what got stolen from Ahtola. ("But make it very clear that it's SHIELD property." "Thor might have an issue with that." "Well Thor can bring his issue when he comes to explain why he left the most powerful energy source in the universe in an unlocked box in Haifa.")
Yasha Yachmenev's name could be used if required, since it wasn't a name that was widely known within the Kremlin. ("He didn't have a name as far as anyone was concerned," Natasha had explained at some point in the past. "He was just the Winter Soldier. Yaakov Stepanovich Yachmenev was just what they put down on a form somewhere because they needed a name and so that's what he used because he didn't know his own.") They could tell the Israelis that the attackers had been a Russian mercenary team probably working for Latveria and leave it up to them to decide if it was Lukin or Doom. Clint thought that pretty shady, but Fury had cocked his visible eyebrow and asked if Clint knew for sure himself.
And so they told the Israelis about Ahtola being given something he should never have been near and how a team of Russian mercenaries being paid out of bank accounts in Doomstadt had come and taken it from him. Which was entirely true as far as it went and the Israelis understood that it wasn't nearly the whole story and that they just had to hope that SHIELD wasn't leaving out the good parts again. (SHIELD had gifted them with Johann Schmidt; they got a little more forgiveness here than in other quarters.)
Eitan called his boss and said yeah, this was not a matter for the Arab Affairs department and, after a breakfast at an outdoor cafe, turned them over to Irit and wished them well. The balance of the day was spent trying to figure out where the Winter Soldier and his team had gone after leaving Wellcome.
"The options are land, sea, air, or they went to ground," Irit started to explain. "We've got no leads on anything right now. They did a slick job on the building security system and we don't even know if they drove up or walked."
Wellcome shared a building with a travel agency and an accountant's office that had both closed hours before the attack and the lot across the street was a building under construction that had been halted two weeks earlier due to missing permits -- a perfect place to watch Wellcome and plan the attack. The particulars of the occupancy (or lack thereof) meant that road traffic was light and pedestrian traffic nonexistent and there were no road signs or traffic lights to force drivers to slow or halt, so getting witnesses would be impossible.
"Scratch land," Steve said. "A border crossing is too risky."
Irit smiled at him and Clint wondered, not for the first time today, if she were flirting with Captain America. "Most probably," she agreed.
"If they're going out by air," Dror, Irit's partner, added, "They'd have to stagger their departures because there's no way a half-dozen Russian hard men get through the airport at once without anyone noticing."
Clint, who had yet to get into or out of Israel flying commercial without being harassed at least once, agreed wholeheartedly. "I say it's by sea and they're probably having lunch in Tyre."
There were arguments for other destinations and the ability of the Israeli shore patrol, which had experience at this sort of thing, to intercept, but if Clint were planning an escape from Haifa and hoped to live through the experience, he got on a boat before it was light and went north and stopped well short of Beirut. He wasn't intimidated by the threat of UNIFIL and he doubted that the Winter Soldier would be, either.
Because of the irregular nature of their arrival in Israel -- no passports, no entry stamps -- and the problems that would result from a commercial flight home, they got a quinjet ride back to New York, which was uncomfortable but nothing two old soldiers couldn't handle. They each took a bench and stretched out as much as they were able and didn't even bother sitting up when Hill called in to debrief them.
Avengers/Captain America mashup; Clint Barton POV
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Summary: The Winter Soldier was the dog that ate the good guys' homework during the Cold War, a convenient bogeyman to explain failure, and Clint Barton was pretty sure those tall tales died with the fall of the Wall. But reality is stranger than fiction, something Clint really shouldn't be as surprised by as he is at this stage of his career, and now there are ghosts to chase once more.
Notes: Thaw is a sequel to Freezer Burn plotwise and a successor to BOHICA in terms of characterizations. Neither is required reading for this. However, I do recommend reading the post-credit scene to FB to establish the Winter Soldier within the context of this universe, which is compliant with Phase One movies but diverges afterward.
"... saying he's the next Keith Hernandez. But if you're going to stock your middle infield with guys with only a vague notion of which way to throw if they want to aim at first base, you trade a couple of home runs per year to not have to fish your ball out of the dugout three times a game." Clint took a swig from his water bottle -- no beer at the start of a game that began before noon -- then gestured with it toward third base, where the Pirate was currently standing clapping his hands in self-appreciation for what was a bunt triple until the official scorer got through with assigning blame.
Steve sighed and unearthed the lunches he'd brought for them from his backpack. "That was not a good start to the game."
Clint had been more than a little wary of going to a baseball game that had a ridiculous 11:35am start time so as to allow thousands of day campers to attend without having to leave early -- he was fine with day baseball, of course, but Camp Day games meant tens of thousands of screaming children and why would anyone not being paid to sit through that do so? But Steve had been insistent and had pointed out that there would be entire sections of upper deck practically unoccupied and Clint liked to sit up top, anyway. And he'd offered to bring food and they hadn't gone all season yet and so Clint had agreed because Steve was looking a little ragged around the edges because, by hook or by crook (mostly the latter because Tony had his uses), he'd gotten what he'd wanted and now had more access to the Winter Soldier material than he'd had before.
Also, there was the promise of a postgame stop at the Lemon Ice King of Corona and Clint's missionary zeal could not resist the chance to bear witness to that miracle and seek one more convert.
The Pirate on third somehow failed to score despite there being only one out at the time he arrived at said base and they went to the bottom of the first without too much despair.
And then Steve's phone rang. Steve pulled it out of his pocket and stared at the face for a moment. Clint leaned over to look because he was nosy and because Steve was clearly confused by what he was seeing.
"Who do you know in Israel?" he asked, curious, because he recognized the area code. "Besides Schmidt and he doesn't have call privileges."
Steve shook his head and shrugged and hit the button to accept the call. "Hello?... Who?... How did... Okay, hold on a second, I'm going to put you on speaker." Which he did while pulling Clint in by the elbow so he could hear, too. There wasn't anyone around them, so eavesdropping wasn't going to be a problem.
"Start from the beginning," Steve commanded.
"My name is Jarno Ahtola," a very terrified and not-Israeli voice began. "I am a propulsion engineer at Wellcome Aeronautics in Haifa. I was given a package by Doctor Jane Foster to hold and keep safe. She said that if anything happened, I should call you. There are men with guns looking for the package and they are killing people. They are going to kill me."
Clint exchanged a look with Steve -- what the hell? -- then gestured at the phone to indicate that he should keep Ahtola talking. He leaned away and pulled out his own phone, calling Coulson. "Put a tap-and-trace on Steve's phone now," he said in a low voice as soon as Coulson picked up. "And call Shabak and tell them that Wellcome Aeronautics in Haifa is under assault and it's not a couple of shaheeds looking for their virgins."
Coulson didn't ask what was going on, just confirmed the instructions and stayed on the line. Clint leaned back to hunch with Steve over his phone, holding his own to his other ear but the mouthpiece end away. There were a million questions to be asked, starting with why Jane Foster was handing out Captain America's phone number and what she was up to that she was giving something of apparent great value to a random Finn in Haifa and not to SHIELD or an Avenger or to Thor, who would gladly shed blood to protect anything she held valuable. But he didn't think they would have the time to get those answers.
"...said it would be better if I didn't know, but I know what her specialization is," Ahtola was saying. "Oh, god, they're getting closer. I need to--"
"You need to put your cell phone down, out of sight," Clint cut him off, speaking firmly. "Under a desk, under a cabinet, somewhere where we can still hear everything. And then you need to get out of there. Can you get to safety?"
Harsh breathing on the phone, short breaths with the occasional whimper of fear. "I can't get out of the lab," Ahtola reported, voice breaking as he realized that his call for help would not save him. "They're in the halls. I can hear the screaming and the gunfire. They're coming here. I have the box."
In the corner of his eye, Clint could see a cotton candy vendor, a streak of pink and blue disappearing from his field of vision.
"Can you find a place to hide?" Clint asked, closing his eyes to try to imagine a room he had never seen. "Nowhere near the box, nowhere near your phone. Is there a closet or a table in a corner?"
"Yes, but I--"
"We'll be here," Steve assured with the calm, controlled voice of Captain America, the voice that made everything less terrifying because it never wavered. Steve's eyes showed that he was thinking what Clint was thinking, that they were about to listen to a man die. But he kept it out of his voice. "You won't be alone. You won't ever be alone. Go hide yourself, Jarno. Now."
They heard the sound of the phone being put down and possibly covered by a piece of paper, nothing heavy that would muffle sound, and then the very faint click that might have been a closet door opening and closing. In Clint's other ear, Coulson informed him that the Haifa police were already responding to an incident at that address that had been reported fifteen minutes ago, that Shabak had been called, and that SHIELD had established a tap on Steve's phone and were recording. In the stadium, the PA said something and twelve thousand kids screamed in response; thankfully, they were all in the sections below and it didn't drown out the sounds from the phone, but Clint and Steve both had to lean closer even as Steve held it up.
What they heard from Haifa was a crash and then less violent noises, then distant voices that weren't understandable at first but then quickly got louder and resolved themselves into Russian.
"Ah, shit," Clint muttered in a low voice as they listened to the room be ransacked and then a voice call out "Here it is!"
"Close it and give it to me," a familiar Moscow-accented voice commanded sharply. "Go find the others."
Clint saw Steve's eyes go wide in recognition. His Russian had gotten much better with Natasha to work on his fluency, but it was the voice that was important, not the words.
They listened as the room was searched for papers, methodically and without the banging and crashing that had been used to find the box. And then they heard a cry as the closet door was opened. Jarno Ahtola begged for his life, in English and Finnish, but to no avail. They heard the shots -- a double-tap -- and then glass breaking and more paper shuffling that got louder until there was no sound but a sharp, ugly laugh.
"Good, but not good enough," the Winter Soldier said in English and then the call was disconnected.
A half-beat later, the screaming in the stadium redoubled because David Wright had just homered to tie the game.
Clint looked over at Steve, who was already starting to pack up his things.
"We'll have a jet ready for you two to bring you up to the Helicarrier when you get to 44th Street," Coulson said. "You'll probably be leaving for Haifa today."
With a heavy pat to Steve's shoulder, Clint stood up and, after a beat, Steve did, too. A guy in a Santana t-shirt yelled at them for not waiting until the inning was over -- Clint apologized, it was poor form -- as they made their way down the stairs. Once they were on the concession concourse heading for the escalators, they could hear music and more prompting from the PA announcer for the kids to let loose.
"You want to take the train or the bike?" Steve asked once they were outside the stadium. Steve would have to take the bike, but the 7 train rattling above them went to Times Square, too, and Steve knew Clint wasn't overfond of riding shotgun on highways.
"I'll deal with the bike," Clint answered.
Thirty-five minutes later, they were aboard a quinjet taking them to the Helicarrier. The police and security services were on the scene in Haifa, Coulson updated them through the jet's comms, but there'd been no sign of the attackers. And no survivors. The Israelis were none too pleased to be getting calls from SHIELD about violence happening live on their own soil, but were cooperating fully, at least once they understood that no, there was no way to have anticipated this one because SHIELD didn't know what the hell was going on, either.
"We haven't told them that it's the Winter Soldier yet, have we?" Clint asked dryly. "They're going to be a little less gracious once we 'fess that up."
He wondered what the Israelis would say when they found out that the Winter Soldier was real, let alone that he was a brainwashed American. If that part even got told; there were obvious reasons not to want to share anything about the existence of the Winter Soldier, but some of them conflicted with their stated hope that they bring him in alive. But the Winter Soldier was currently neither aware of nor in support of that hope and his body count was growing exponentially and that, too, was going to have to factor in. Sooner than later. Clint didn't know how Steve would handle the mathematics of saving James Barnes versus saving all of the people the Winter Soldier was going to kill before that could happen. But was a calculation that was going to have to be made at some point and they -- all of them -- were going to have to deal with the answer.
There was more news by the time the jet got to the Helicarrier, which was currently in the North Atlantic traveling back to the East Coast after a visit to the North Sea as part of some arrangement Fury had with the British security services. Jane Foster was not answering her cell phone and hadn't been in to her office in three weeks, which apparently was not that unusual and so nobody had considered her to be missing. There was still no actual evidence that she was missing -- she went into the field regularly, far more so than her SHIELD minders would prefer and very often with no advance warning -- and, since no one had gotten into her apartment yet, for all anyone knew, she was currently in bed enjoying a romp with Thor and simply wasn't one of the 42 percent of women who admitted to checking their phones during sex.
"Doctor Foster's sex habits are about to be the least of our problems," Tapper said as he walked into the outer office of Fury's suite holding up a tablet with graphs on it. They were waiting for Fury to finish whatever he was doing that was more important than this, which his secretary-slash-real-boss, Hsiang, insisted would be imminently but that had been more than five minutes ago. "We got a spike on Doctor Banner's gamma radiation sensor. In Haifa, timestamped exactly to when Doctor Foster's box was opened by the Winter Soldier's people."
Fury's door opened to admit them less than a minute later.
It took twenty minutes before Bruce could be brought in on a VTC, by which point Tony, Selvig, and various researchy people already had been introduced and they'd played the audio of the call from Jarno Ahtola, with Steve filling in the parts that had taken place before the recording had begun. Ahtola's connection to Foster had already been discovered -- he'd been a graduate student of one of Foster's exes, apparently -- and they were engaged in a discussion about what the hell could have possibly mimicked the Tesseract in its energy signature and why Foster (a) had had it, (b) had handed it to someone she barely knew along with (c) telling him to call Captain America if he ran into trouble with it. Which were all questions Clint had asked himself earlier, before they knew it had anything to do with the Tesseract, and he still had no great answers to them now that they did. Although he did have the usual creeping nausea that came with any long discussion of the Tesseract and its adventures on Earth.
"Whatever it is, I can't see why you're surprised she didn't hand it over to you," Tony said. "Considering your past history of possession -- let's see, you tried to use it as a weapon against Asgard and then let it got stolen by Loki to be used to further the very invasion you were hoping to prevent, in the process causing billions of dollars in damages to one of the world's most important cities. That definitely deserves a second chance. Or would it be a third?"
"Tony," Steve warned, but without heat. Clint didn't think Steve actually disagreed with the facts, just the snarky tone. Clint didn't disagree with either, but he was a little bit less irreplaceable than those two.
Once Bruce showed up virtually -- Clint loved that Bruce did not consider VTCs worth the bother of combing his hair or putting on a clean shirt -- the discussion turned more heavily to the science-y stuff and Clint allowed himself to zone a little. His understanding of physics was entirely practical and almost exclusively limited to mechanics and so his understanding of radiation did not extend past "good for frozen dinners and popcorn, bad for people." He knew that gamma radiation was what had given Bruce his alter ego, although not what differentiated gamma radiation from whatever powered his microwave or the average nuclear submarine, and he knew that Natasha had originally been sent to bring Bruce in because the Tesseract also produced gamma radiation. And that was it, so when Bruce started insisting that no, there wasn't a mock Tesseract because no, this wasn't something that could have been synthesized in a lab without anyone realizing it, Clint had no choice to accept it on faith.
"Could it be a shard of the Tesseract?" Steve asked. "Something someone chipped off at some point?"
"No!" Tony, Selvig, and Bruce answered almost together and with great feeling.
"If you tried to do that, you'd end up obliterating most of the solar system," Bruce continued in a gentler tone. "It's a source of power on a scale we don't have the proper means to measure. We can't count that high. The best we've been able to do is harness some of it and, for all that it has been used to open dimensional portals, it still hasn't been bled off enough for us to measure the decrease in capacity. Trying to destroy it or break it apart, there's no way to survive that."
"So what are we looking at?" Fury asked. "Is it possible that there's a second Tesseract?"
"Not likely," Selvig answered. "There's no evidence to support such a claim. The myths that led Schmidt to find the original only ever mentioned the one and Thor himself has always believed that there was only one -- something he apparently verified in Asgard. Doctor Banner's sensor has been running continuously since its launch and has not recorded any readings anywhere near this high before today. Also, from my research, I believe that if there were a second Tesseract, the two would react in some way."
"Like an awareness?" Tapper asked.
"More like two very strong magnets," Selvig answered. "Either there would be great affinity -- or its opposite."
There was more science-y stuff to talk about, but the end result was that there was a reasonable possibility that Jane Foster had somehow come back into possession of the Tesseract and then given it to Jarno Ahtola in Haifa to hold on to, a favor that had cost him his life. This wasn't reasonable in any normal sense of the word, of course, just that nobody could come up with a less batshit scenario to fit the facts as they had them. Foster was nowhere to be found and they had, unbelievably, no better way to contact Thor than to leave a note and hope Heimdall saw it. And, by the way, Steve and Clint were getting flown directly from the Helicarrier to Haifa via quinjet, so they better hope they had clean underwear in their lockers.
(They did, since this would not be the first or the fifth time they'd have to be thrown into a go-bag.) For the sake of comfort and trying to maintain some kind of low profile, they opted to wear a reasonable facsimile of standard SHIELD gear -- neither of the owned the sleek bodysuit -- and leave their uniforms behind. Clint was a known quantity in Israel and Steve would prefer it if he remained unknown and there wasn't much likelihood of getting caught in a fight with the Winter Soldier because the Israelis still hadn't found any trace of him or his crew. There was half a thought put to eating something before heading off, but Clint assured Steve that breakfast in the Middle East -- it would be oh-dark-thirty Israeli time when they got there -- would be worth the wait.
"I was feeling all offended that you were visiting everywhere but here," a familiar voice greeted them as the ramp of the jet lowered six hours later. "You go to Egypt, you go to Lebanon, you go to Syria, and yet you don't come here, where we actually like you for some strange reason. But if this is what you need to visit, then fuck off and go home."
"Nice to see you too, Eitan." Clint smiled and shook the outstretched hand, accepting a firm pat on the shoulder that turned into a quick bro-hug. "What are you doing here?"
Eitan was an agent in Shabak's Arab Affairs department and while they'd worked together a number of times back when Eitan had been with Aman, this particular case was far out of his jurisdiction. Granted, it was pretty fucking far out of Clint's, too, but his job description was a little fuzzier than Eitan's these days.
"Let's just say that my bosses didn't want to take your bosses at their word that this was not something that I needed to be involved in," Eitan replied with a 'what can you do?' shrug. "Your president is busy kissing our enemies' asses and so when we get a call saying that the Americans don't think the attack we just had has anything to do with our enemies, we don't say 'sure, okay, we'll go do something else now,' yeah? Especially when the guy they send to help out has just been on the grand tour of our neighbors' biggest messes."
Which was an explanation Clint couldn't really argue with as a self-defense strategy.
"Well, these two Americans are damned sure the mess you have has nothing to do with your department," he said instead. "Also, why are your friends following me around?"
Eitan smiled. "You are dangerous and an expert on the region, Clint, and Nick Fury does not send you on kebab runs. We're happier knowing where you are and why."
Clint grinned at Steve. "I'm big here," he announced as if he were impressed.
"Only because they use the metric system," Steve replied and Eitan nearly choked for laughing.
"Fuck you both," Clint growled, emphasizing it with a double bird-flip. "Where's breakfast?"
Breakfast was on the other side the morning's work. Wellcome Aeronautics, the top two floors of a three-story building, was already in the process of being turned from the scene of a crime to the scene of a tragedy; the bodies had been removed and the blood washed away and the place smelled strongly of disinfectant. The place was still a mess, though, broken windows and broken doors and bullet holes in the walls. Eitan took them through the small building on the same path as the Winter Soldier and his team, all the way to the lab where Jarno Ahtola had hidden and died. Clint could see the phone on the table, dropped by the Winter Soldier on top of a pile of graphs and printouts. There was the closet Ahtola had hidden in. The blood was gone, but the freshly-cleaned spot on the floor indicated where he'd died. It didn't match up at all to what had been in Clint's head at the time, but why should it?
He turned to ask Steve something, but Steve was by the table, holding something and with his back to Clint, so he walked over. It was a photo of a dark-haired man with a brunette wife and two small boys at what were probably the ruins at Caesarea. Clint looked away.
"The fellow who died here was on the phone when he was killed," Eitan said, gesturing toward the phone. "It was an outgoing call to a New York City number, but we can't get any info on who it is. We can't trade for it, we can't hack it, and nobody will even tell us why. Which means it was someone important and that, coupled with the area code and the fact that you are here... was it you he was calling, Clint? Fury himself?"
Steve put down the photograph. "It was me," he said, turning around to face Eitan.
Eitan nodded once. "Then who are you really and why was Doctor Ahtola calling you instead of his wife?"
Clint had only introduced him as Steve, not to be coy but because even in Israel, the job got more complicated if everyone knew that Captain America was wandering around and Steve was in no mood to deal with that sort of celebrity right now.
"You'd better go wake up the people who are going to be taking this case from you, Eitan, because I think we only want to go through this once."
It took an hour to get people from other agencies and other units of Shin Bet. It was one of the latter, Irit-from-Protective-Security, who gave Steve a cockeyed look and asked him if he was Captain America. Next to Clint, Eitan muttered a couple of really fabulous obscenities in Arabic.
Fury had briefed him and Steve before they'd left about what they could and could not tell the Israelis, which boiled down to not telling them anything about the Winter Soldier and being vague as fuck about what got stolen from Ahtola. ("But make it very clear that it's SHIELD property." "Thor might have an issue with that." "Well Thor can bring his issue when he comes to explain why he left the most powerful energy source in the universe in an unlocked box in Haifa.")
Yasha Yachmenev's name could be used if required, since it wasn't a name that was widely known within the Kremlin. ("He didn't have a name as far as anyone was concerned," Natasha had explained at some point in the past. "He was just the Winter Soldier. Yaakov Stepanovich Yachmenev was just what they put down on a form somewhere because they needed a name and so that's what he used because he didn't know his own.") They could tell the Israelis that the attackers had been a Russian mercenary team probably working for Latveria and leave it up to them to decide if it was Lukin or Doom. Clint thought that pretty shady, but Fury had cocked his visible eyebrow and asked if Clint knew for sure himself.
And so they told the Israelis about Ahtola being given something he should never have been near and how a team of Russian mercenaries being paid out of bank accounts in Doomstadt had come and taken it from him. Which was entirely true as far as it went and the Israelis understood that it wasn't nearly the whole story and that they just had to hope that SHIELD wasn't leaving out the good parts again. (SHIELD had gifted them with Johann Schmidt; they got a little more forgiveness here than in other quarters.)
Eitan called his boss and said yeah, this was not a matter for the Arab Affairs department and, after a breakfast at an outdoor cafe, turned them over to Irit and wished them well. The balance of the day was spent trying to figure out where the Winter Soldier and his team had gone after leaving Wellcome.
"The options are land, sea, air, or they went to ground," Irit started to explain. "We've got no leads on anything right now. They did a slick job on the building security system and we don't even know if they drove up or walked."
Wellcome shared a building with a travel agency and an accountant's office that had both closed hours before the attack and the lot across the street was a building under construction that had been halted two weeks earlier due to missing permits -- a perfect place to watch Wellcome and plan the attack. The particulars of the occupancy (or lack thereof) meant that road traffic was light and pedestrian traffic nonexistent and there were no road signs or traffic lights to force drivers to slow or halt, so getting witnesses would be impossible.
"Scratch land," Steve said. "A border crossing is too risky."
Irit smiled at him and Clint wondered, not for the first time today, if she were flirting with Captain America. "Most probably," she agreed.
"If they're going out by air," Dror, Irit's partner, added, "They'd have to stagger their departures because there's no way a half-dozen Russian hard men get through the airport at once without anyone noticing."
Clint, who had yet to get into or out of Israel flying commercial without being harassed at least once, agreed wholeheartedly. "I say it's by sea and they're probably having lunch in Tyre."
There were arguments for other destinations and the ability of the Israeli shore patrol, which had experience at this sort of thing, to intercept, but if Clint were planning an escape from Haifa and hoped to live through the experience, he got on a boat before it was light and went north and stopped well short of Beirut. He wasn't intimidated by the threat of UNIFIL and he doubted that the Winter Soldier would be, either.
Because of the irregular nature of their arrival in Israel -- no passports, no entry stamps -- and the problems that would result from a commercial flight home, they got a quinjet ride back to New York, which was uncomfortable but nothing two old soldiers couldn't handle. They each took a bench and stretched out as much as they were able and didn't even bother sitting up when Hill called in to debrief them.
