Chasing Tomorrows
“Hey.”
Howard Stark hunkered down in front of Natasha and offered her a tin cup full of coffee, saying gently, “That’s the real bean, not the ersatz stuff.”
The rich scent rising from the cup made that clear as Natasha took it from him; she had been in 1945 long enough to have gotten considerable experience with the assortment of coffee substitutes that had sprung up due to rationing. Some of them were tolerable to her twenty-first century tastebuds; some weren’t.
“Thanks,” she said, trying and failing to smile. She took a tiny sip, but the liquid was too hot for her to drink comfortably, and she balanced it on her knee instead, feeling the heat spread out across her thigh.
Howard produced a flask from inside his waistcoat and made a gesture with it towards the cup; when Natasha nodded he unscrewed the cap and poured a shot of what smelled like brandy into her coffee. He took a swig from the flask before he put the cap back on and tucked it away again, then sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of her.
They were both in the nearly-deserted lab, Natasha sitting on the metal steps leading up to one of the other SSR offices. The only other occupants were a couple of techs in the corner with the remains of the Department X bombs, not all of which had apparently been made to the same design and which had gotten some of the more technical members of the SSR bomb squad excited.
“We’ll find him,” Howard assured her. “He’s gone missing before and he’s turned up again every time.”
“You might be more used to him going missing than I am,” Natasha said, resisting the urge to tell him that it was a well-established piece of SHIELD trivia that Howard Stark had, in fact, looked for Steve Rogers for fifty-six years without ever finding him. That wasn’t something that Howard needed to know, especially right now. “The last time I had to chase him across half of Europe, but he was on the run then.”
“See?” Howard said encouragingly. “And we know he’s still in London. Not like there’s a whole lot of flights to Moscow or Leningrad right now.”
Leningrad, Natasha thought a little distantly. Right. It wouldn’t be Saint Petersburg again until 1991.
“I got a question for you,” Howard said, after she had taken a few more sips of her coffee. When Natasha looked up at him, he said, “Why would Steve be chasing this Winter Soldier project? You didn’t translate the whole message he gave Dugan.”
Natasha’s eyebrows shot upwards. “You speak Xhosa?”
“I get by,” Howard said. “Actually, mostly I don’t get by; I understand it a hell of a lot better than I speak it and according to T’Chanda I shouldn’t try to speak it because no one will understand me anyway. Steve said that if you didn’t find him in London, you’d have to backtrail the Winter Soldier, because that was what he’d be doing once he was in Russia. So – why would he be doing that? From what you guys said before, it didn’t sound like you guys knew all that much about Leviathan. This project have something to do with the Winter Guard?”
“No; the name’s just a coincidence.” Natasha rubbed at her forehead, wondering what she could say. “The Winter Soldier wasn’t a Leviathan project; SMERSH was running it until 1946 and they’ve always been rivals.” At Howard’s blank expression, she explained, “SMERSH is the Soviet counter-intelligence agency right now. It’s not really an acronym, it’s from the phrase smyert shpionam.”
“‘Death to spies,’” Howard translated. “Cute. Subtle. Very Russian.”
Natasha mentally filed away that Howard Stark spoke Russian along with Xhosa and went on, “After the war, SMERSH was dissolved and its duties were transferred to the Third Directorate of the MGB, the Ministry for State Security, along with the Winter Soldier project. When the MGB was dissolved, the project went to the new security agency, the KGB, and stayed there for most of the next fifty years. From what we were able to find out, it was always kept separate from Leviathan. Stalin didn’t like – doesn’t like – keeping all his eggs in the same basket.”
“So why would Steve want to go after it?” Howard asked, like a dog with a bone.
At this point they gained nothing from revealing that Bucky Barnes had survived his fall, not unless Steve actually did go to Russia, and if Steve went to Russia they were going to have bigger problems. Natasha said, more or less truthfully, “Because they have the prototype of a super soldier serum that Arnim Zola developed from Johann Schmidt’s blood and Abraham Erskine’s notes. Hydra was experimenting on Allied POWs and SMERSH overran some of their labs during the war. Steve feels responsible.”
His expression went hard, briefly dangerous. “The Soviets have any of our guys?”
“I don’t know,” Natasha lied.
Howard looked at her for what felt like a long time. Despite the physical resemblance to Tony, which at this distance was simultaneously both more and less marked, the shrewdness in his eyes was entirely his own. He said finally, “I’m not going to ask right now why you didn’t think Peg and Colonel Phillips should know that and I’m not going to tell them, either. But if it becomes important, then I am going to ask.”
Natasha nodded. “Agreed.” If Steve Rogers ended up in Leviathan’s tender hands, changing the future was going to be the least of their problems. Right now she knew that the Winter Guard and however many matryoshki had made it out of the Stork Club needed to keep him in one piece, probably by shooting him up with a lot of drugs. Which, when it came to Steve, was its own problem –
Howard leaned forward, apparently having seen her attention sharpen. “What is it?”
“Have you ever had to drug Steve?”
He nodded. “Couple times when he got hurt bad. Regular anesthetics doesn’t work real well on him, so I developed something that does it a little better, but even then it wears off pretty fast. Why?”
“Because Steve processes drugs a hell of a lot faster now than he did four years ago, when he was in the hospital with four bullet holes in him,” Natasha said. “And those are modern drugs, which are a lot better than what was – what is – available in the forties. No offense.”
Howard shrugged. “Go on.”
“The Winter Guard can’t beat Steve unconscious every five minutes,” Natasha said. “They know he’s tough, but that will kill someone sooner rather than later, and they need him alive; they can’t risk it. He’s not going to go on cooperating when they don’t have Morita and Dugan to hold over him, especially because they didn’t manage to grab me at the same time. They can’t just lock him up, either; even if it wasn’t incredibly difficult to keep someone prisoner, Steve’s a handful at the best of times. And he can punch through walls. They have to be planning on keeping him drugged until they’re back in Russia. Irene Lorraine might have passed your formula on to them, but their dosages are going to be calculated for Steve in 1945, not Steve in 2018, and those are two very different numbers.”
Howard’s lips pursed in a silent whistle. “So they’re going to mess up the dosage right off.”
“Almost definitely.” Belatedly, it occurred to Natasha that there was one other way that Department X could be planning on keeping Steve Rogers under control, but she was almost positive that they didn’t have the same cryo technology that Hydra had used on Bucky Barnes. Even if they did, what had been available in the 1940s (the earliest example they had ever found dated to 1953 and hadn’t been used on the Winter Soldier) would have been too bulky to bring to London. She thought. She hoped.
This revelation seemed to cheer Howard up.
“Also the last people that tried to kidnap Steve put twenty special ops guys in an elevator with him and he kicked the shit out of them with one hand tied behind his back,” Natasha said, hoping that sounded reassuring. “Then he jumped out of the elevator – twenty-five stories up, crashed through a plate-glass roof, hit a marble floor. Walked away from it without a scratch, unless you count his bad mood.”
Howard looked a little dreamy-eyed at the thought. “So why didn’t he fight this time?”
Natasha let her breath out. “Because of Dugan and Morita,” she said. She wasn’t certain, but she knew Steve’s thought process well enough to guess. “Because Jim Morita becomes a U.S. congressman and doesn’t die until 1993 and Timothy Dugan’s career military. He made command sergeant major, he was an SEA for SHIELD up until he retired in the eighties; he died in 2012. Steve wouldn’t risk changing any of that.”
“I don’t think that’s going to make them feel any better.”
“Probably not,” Natasha agreed. She finished drinking her coffee and set the cup aside, then rested her elbows on her knees, feeling suddenly very weary. She was still in the same dress she had worn to the Stork Club, now a little worse for wear. “I should have made him stay with me.”
“And what happens to Peg then?” Howard asked gently. “They would have just shot her if you weren’t there, right?” He flicked a glance at the door, as if to make sure Peggy Carter wasn’t about to come in, and went on, “They’re better than her, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Natasha said quietly, and then, “Yeah, they would have just shot her.”
“Well, I’m pretty glad they didn’t do that,” Howard said. “And she is, even if she probably hasn’t said so –”
She hadn’t.
“– and Steve will be once he finds out. And Phillips. And the rest of the Howlies.”
“Not to mention,” Natasha said slowly, “that if Peggy Carter dies in a nightclub bathroom in 1945, SHIELD never gets founded and the rest of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first, looks a hell of a lot different.” She rested her elbows on her knees and her chin on top of her fisted hands, thinking. There probably would have still been a post-war agency with a similar remit to SHIELD – the SSR had lasted for several years before its final dissolution and reorganization into SHIELD in the early 1950s – but she suspected that it wouldn’t have followed the same path as SHIELD.
She wondered suddenly if Hydra would have still managed to get its claws into it without Peggy Carter’s leadership. Probably the answer was yes, the same way they had gotten into SMERSH and then the MGB in the USSR, but it was a rather sobering thought. It was also one that she was never going to voice to Steve.
Howard’s brows furrowed, as he ran that line of thought backwards and forwards and was apparently intrigued by the implications. All he said was, “Look, it’s late. You should go wash up and get some sleep. There’ll be something to do in the morning. I don’t think they can risk moving Steve immediately.”
“They’ll have an exfil plan,” Natasha pointed out.
“Yeah,” Howard agreed, “but there’s nothing we can do about that right now.”
She looked at him for a long time, then nodded and let him help her to her feet. According to the clock on the wall, it was past three in the morning. “If you wanted me to sleep,” she said, “you probably should have just given me the brandy, not the coffee.”
He shrugged in response.
Sleep in an empty bed, at that, though the sheets had been changed while they had been at Beaulieu and they wouldn’t smell like Steve. They need him alive, Natasha reminded herself, and they need to get him back to Russia before they can do anything to him.
It wasn’t 2018 anymore. That last wasn’t a light proposition.
“Rogers. You still alive?”
“No thanks to you,” Steve said. He cracked an eye open to peer up at Aleksey Lebedev, who knew Steve well enough to stand back out of kicking range.
Lebedev was still in his British army officer’s uniform, though he had shed the jacket somewhere and had his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, revealing forearms corded with muscle that flexed as he took another drag on his cigarette. He exhaled a cloud of smoke like a dragon and said thoughtfully, “Always miss these English fags back home. Not very patriotic to say, but –” He made a vague what can you do? gesture.
“My heart bleeds buttermilk.” Steve let his gaze travel around the room as the pounding in his head began to recede. He suspected they had stuck him with something after Mikhail Ursus had knocked him out back at the Stork Club, but even if they hadn’t he was well-familiar with what getting knocked out felt like. It was harder to do after the serum, but he’d gotten his fair share of concussions both before and afterwards.
There was no shortage of damaged and deserted buildings in London these days thanks to the Blitz and the rocket attacks, which meant that there was no shortage of places for a good-sized group of foreign agents to hide. Steve didn’t know the interiors of buildings in London well enough to guess exactly where they were, but he could tell they were still in England. Past Lebedev he could see several other members of the Winter Guard and one of the women who had been with them at the Stork Club, the two men both asleep and the woman leafing through what looked like a magazine. He couldn’t see much else from this angle, since he was lying on the floor and bound hand and foot, but it was obvious that he was the only prisoner there and that the Winter Guard hadn’t brought Morita and Dugan along. If they had managed to grab Natasha, then they weren’t keeping her here.
Steve pushed himself up as well as he could manage with his hands cuffed behind him. Normally that wouldn’t bother him, since he could snap the chain on most handcuffs without breaking a sweat, but Lebedev had clearly come prepared. He watched as Steve tugged experimentally on the cuffs, letting that go on until he had finished his cigarette. As he dropped the butt and ground it out with the toe of his boot, he said, “Like that? Carbonadium. Dmitri came up with it after seeing your shield in Poland. Some kind of alloy, don’t ask me the details. He thought it would probably work on you.”
He drew out another cigarette and stuck it in his mouth to light it before stepping around Steve, circling the reach of his bound legs until he judged that the angle was too bad for Steve to kick him, and offered him the cigarette. “Smoke?”
“Fine.” Steve waited as Lebedev bent down to stick the cigarette in his mouth, then slammed his head upwards, snapping his forehead into Lebedev’s face. There was a crack as the other man’s nose broke with a spray of hot blood and he dropped the cigarette onto the floor beside Steve as he staggered back. Steve twisted onto his side and lashed out with both feet, connecting with Lebedev’s shins.
At this range the blow didn’t have as much impact as he would have preferred, but it still knocked Lebedev off his feet and onto his ass. There was a shout from the other side of the room and the clatter of running steps, overlaid by the sound of Lebedev swearing in Russian. He hadn’t yet succeeded in picking himself up yet when Josef Petkus, Nikolai Krylenko, and a blonde woman Steve didn’t recognize reached them. There was a brief struggle that Steve couldn’t win with his feet bound and his hands cuffed behind his back, but which ended in what sounded satisfyingly like at least one broken bone for Krylenko, Petkus curled up on the floor whimpering after Steve had nailed him in the balls, and the matryoshka sitting on Steve’s back with a gun pressed to his head while Krylenko held onto his legs.
By this time Lebedev was upright again, though his face was a mask of blood from his broken nose. He wiped some of it off and said rather thickly, “And here I was concerned that the Red Skull had knocked all the fight out of you when you gave up so easily back at the club. I’m glad to see that isn’t true.”
“Well, as long as you’re happy,” Steve said, his voice muffled by the dirty floorboards.
Lebedev crouched down in front of him and pulled his head up by the hair so that he could see Steve’s face. “This doesn’t have to be unpleasant, Captain Rogers. It will mean a great deal less trouble for you if you simply cooperate.”
“Maybe you should stop worrying about what’s going to cause me trouble and start worrying about yourself,” Steve suggested, a little breathless from the bad angle. “It’s a long way back to Moscow.”
“Not so long as all that,” Lebedev said. He switched to Russian to call over his shoulder, “Josef, if you’re still intact, bring the drug.”
Petkus staggered to his feet, whimpering a little as he stumbled over to the other side of the room, but he turned to shoot Steve a look of pure hatred.
Steve felt a muscle in his jaw tighten, a reaction which at this distance Lebedev couldn’t miss. “Is that really your plan?” he asked. “Keeping me drugged all the way to Moscow? You know that drugs don’t even work on me when I’d like them to.”
“Perhaps,” Lebedev said. “Perhaps not. I don’t believe we’ll have to, though we’re prepared enough if it comes to it.” He touched his free hand gingerly to his broken nose again and winced, then went on, “Your pretty wife, Captain, the lovely Mrs. Rogers –”
“If you had her here, you’d be shoving her in front of me,” Steve said. “So you don’t have her. And if you don’t have her, then I’m betting you don’t have the people you sent after her, either.”
He knew from the expression on Lebedev’s face that he had guessed correctly, but all Lebedev said was, “There were mistakes made last night, but nothing that can’t be fixed. You’ll have the company of your wife very soon and then, I think, you’ll be more than willing to – why are you laughing?”
Steve was still laughing, but he managed to stop long enough to say, “Please – try to get my wife. And then come back here and tell me all about it, assuming you still have a pulse after she’s done with you, I could use some entertainment.”
Lebedev looked a little taken aback by this reaction.
“The woman who says she’s one of us?” said the matryoshka sitting on Steve’s back; her English was perfect, American-accented. “Only no one knows who she is.”
“That’s her,” Steve said. In a way this whole mess would have been considerably easier if they had managed to capture Natasha; she was more used to being in situations like this than Steve was. He was fairly certain that she could have resolved it without breaking a sweat and they would have been back in the SSR in time for another terrible breakfast and ersatz coffee.
“Oh, you’ll see her again,” Lebedev said, apparently deciding that not taking Steve at his word was the better path of discretion. He took the leather folder that Petkus handed him and removed a syringe, a glass vial, and a hypodermic needle. As he fitted them together and filled the syringe, he said, “This is a special blend just for you. Irene Lorraine – or should I say, Irina Larionova – supplied us with Howard Stark’s cocktail from the last time you got shot in the face and Dmitri took it and made it better, just like he did the carbonadium.”
Steve bit the inside of his cheek, not thrilled about the idea of getting drugged but fully aware that it wasn’t going to work very well. Howard had done the best he could, but even in 1943 Steve had processed most drugs too quickly to be particularly effective. By 2018 it had been worse, the clearest sign to Steve that his serum was still changing him. Anaesthetics worked on him – but not for long.
Lorraine. Fuck. He didn’t let his reaction show on his face, just mentally cursed in three languages; almost every piece of paper that crossed Phillips’s desk went through her hands and had done for years. She had been at the Stork Club the previous night too; with any luck she had overplayed her hand and the SSR had picked her up. Since Steve couldn’t exactly do anything about that right now, he was going to have to trust in that.
Lebedev had clearly been waiting for more of a reaction than that; when Steve didn’t indulge him he just scowled and jabbed the needle into Steve’s upper arm, hard enough to penetrate the layers of his service coat and shirt before he depressed the plunger. Steve winced; Lebedev didn’t exactly have a light hand. His bedside manner was shit, too.
“This isn’t going to go the way you think,” Steve told him in Russian, just to make sure that everyone in the room got the message.
“I will never understand where you picked up that accent,” Lebedev said in the same language.
“Brooklyn.”
“Are there many Russian-speaking Lithuanians in New York?”
“It only takes one.”
“Does your wife speak Russian with you?”
“Only to complain about my accent,” Steve informed him, exaggerating it just to see Lebedev’s jaw twitch. He had never had to speak Russian often enough that he had needed to put the effort into losing the Lithuanian accent he had originally picked up from the Girenas family, whose twin sons he and Bucky had gone to school with and who had taught him both Russian and Lithuanian because Steve liked languages and would do odd jobs in exchange for lessons. It drove Natasha crazy.
Steve could feel the drug taking hold, making everything a little hazy, and shook his head a little in an attempt to clear it, which didn’t work. Going by Lebedev’s expression the other man had expected it to work more quickly.
Lebedev pulled Steve’s head up again by the hair, frowning at whatever he saw there. Then he released him with a thump as Steve’s forehead bounced painfully off the floor, tucked the syringe and empty vial away into the leather folder, and stood up.
Steve probably should have expected the kick to the head.
“Louise Pilkington, Women’s Royal Naval Service, MI9,” Peggy said, slapping identity papers down onto the conference table in front of her like she was dealing out cards. “Esther Lytton, Royal Canadian Air Force Women’s Division; Selina Frey, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry; Abigail O’Halloran, United States Army Nursing Corps; Irene Lorraine, Women’s Army Corps, Strategic Scientific Reserve.”
She was so angry she was literally shaking. She had spent time at MI9, the War Office department dedicated to helping Allied prisoners of war and soldiers trapped behind enemy lines escape; Brigadier Crockatt was going to lose his mind when he found out. That, fortunately, was Colonel Phillips’ bad news to pass along, which he had gone down to MI9’s Buckinghamshire headquarters to do in person. He was probably also going to have to argue for the SSR keeping hold of Louise Pilkington – a.k.a. Lyudmila, last name unknown – since one of the other things MI9 did was interrogation of enemy prisoners and Crockatt would want to keep hers in house.
Peggy didn’t know the other three women, but since they had all had their identity papers on them they could be chased down. Or at least their cover identities could be found out.
“And those are just the ones we know about,” she added grimly, flattening her palms on the table and resisting the urge to start screaming and not stop. She had managed to get a few hours of sleep after returning to headquarters, but right now she barely felt it. Natasha, sitting with a cup of coffee between her hands, didn’t look much better, nor did Falsworth, Dernier, or Jones; Dugan and Morita were still in hospital with bad concussions. Howard was at the far end of the table and chewing his nails down to the quick, probably to keep from chain-smoking. Given the usual quality of his nails, Peggy assumed that he was also consuming an alarming amount of engine grease.
“We’ve got teams keeping watch on Pilkington’s and Lorraine’s billets in London, but they haven’t been searched yet. We’re doing that today.” She hesitated for an instant, then looked over at Natasha. “Will you come?”
Natasha glanced up. “I didn’t think I was allowed out without a chaperone.”
“I’m the chaperone,” Peggy said.
Something flickered briefly in Natasha’s eyes, but all she did was nod and then go back to staring at her coffee. She didn’t look as desperately frightened as she had the previous night, but Peggy could still remember it, like the worst possible thing that Natasha Romanoff Rogers could think of was Steve Rogers in the hands of Department X.
Peggy wasn’t afraid. Peggy was angry.
“They say anything yet?” Jones asked.
“We’re letting them sweat,” Peggy said. “Also most of them have concussions.”
She flicked a glance at Natasha, who just said, “It doesn’t matter. We’re trained to resist interrogation.”
“All men break,” Dernier pointed out. “And all women.”
Natasha didn’t answer. Her grip on her coffee cup was white-knuckled. Peggy stared at her, wondering what on earth she could possibly be so afraid of. It wasn’t as though they were dealing with Hydra; the Soviets were, after all, their allies.
Yes, the kind of allies who send strike teams into nightclubs and put undercover agents into secret government agencies and kidnap military officers –
Falsworth must have been thinking along the same lines, because he said, “How much danger is Steve actually in? Now, I mean, before they take him out of the country. Even with the Germans on the back foot, it will be a beast of a job to get a team back to Soviet-occupied territory with an uncooperative prisoner. I’ve no idea how they managed to get the Winter Guard into England in the first place.”
“Probably landed them in Scotland by submarine and let them make their own way to London,” Natasha said absently.
Peggy nodded reluctantly. “There are enough foreign troops moving through England that no one would notice a few more men if they were in the right uniforms and didn’t speak too much, especially if at least one has the right accent.”
Natasha roused herself a little and looked up. “Priority will be to get Steve back to Leviathan at all costs, which means it doesn’t matter how many of their own they have to sacrifice as long as he’s alive when he gets there. It won’t be just Soviet territory, either; they have to hand him over specifically to Leviathan, not the Red Army, not SMERSH, not anyone else in the NKVD. They might try to get him out via submarine –” Her gaze went from Peggy to the three Commandos to Howard, a silent question.
After a moment Peggy realized she was admitting she didn’t know either Soviets’ or the British logistics in that direction. “There are still coastal defenses up all over the eastern coasts,” she said. “It would be very difficult to get a sub this close in, and they’d have to get him out of London –”
“Unless they’ve been taking notes from Hydra,” Howard said suddenly. As they turned and looked at him, he wiped his hands on the knees of his trousers and went on, “Remember Heinz Krüger’s escape plan back in New York, before Steve punched holes in it? You’d need something a little bigger for five or six guys, but you could get a small sub like that up the Thames as far as London Bridge without too much trouble as long as you could get past the patrols in the Channel.”
“Well, that’s terrifying,” Peggy said. “I’ll alert –” She had to think about who had jurisdiction over the River Thames, which she was choosing to blame on her lack of sleep. “I’ll alert the Royal Navy and Special Branch.” She looked back at Natasha. “I don’t believe you actually answered the question.”
Natasha freed one hand from around her coffee cup and made an impatient gesture Peggy had seen Steve make before. “I don’t know. They’ll prioritize getting him back to Leviathan alive above all else.”
“Let’s rephrase,” Peggy said. “If they can’t manage that, will they take a few blood samples, shoot him in the head, and dump him in the Thames?”
“Jesus, Peg,” Howard said, looking taken aback.
“I don’t know,” Natasha said. “I don’t know Aleksey Lebedev or his team; I can’t say what any of them would do.”
“Would you?” Peggy asked.
“Back then?” Natasha said. She didn’t seem insulted by the question, just thoughtful. “No, not without orders to do just that. ‘Alive at all costs’ means at all costs, no matter how long it takes or how complicated it is. There’s no back door out of that. Kill him and it’s all over. Leave him alive and they can always try again later. With a new team, if necessary, and faces Steve won’t recognize. Or that’s what the Red Room would have done, anyway. I don’t know about Department X or Leviathan.”
Despite the caveat, Peggy felt a little knot of unease loosen in the pit of her stomach. She wasn’t sure if she really believed that after all this trouble, the Soviets would let it be for nothing by killing Steve, but the confirmation that they probably wouldn’t was good to have.
“What about you?” Jones asked.
“What about me?” Natasha said.
“They’ve got that ‘alive at all costs’ order out on you too, at least according to those intercepts Room 17 decoded,” Jones clarified. “Even if one of the messages we couldn’t decrypt has you at a lower priority than Rogers, they’ve got to be thinking about it now. They’re going to want something to control Rogers with; his wife’s gotta be at the top of that list.”
Natasha shrugged. “They’re welcome to try. In fact, I hope they do. The worst thing that could happen is that they bring me to Steve.”
“From what I remember of Lebedev, I doubt he thinks all that highly of the – of the matryoshki,” Falsworth said thoughtfully, stumbling a little over the Russian word. “I’m sure last night’s events will only encourage him in that line of thinking.”
“Bully for him,” Peggy remarked. Maybe it would be something to use against the matryoshki once they started questioning them; no woman liked to be thought incompetent by men.
Natasha pushed her cup and saucer to one side and leaned forward a little. There was something very like Steve in the set of her head, the slightly leftwards slant of her eyes as she narrowed them, as intent as a hunting dog on the trail. “Tell me about the Winter Guard,” she said. “I’ve heard of them before, but until Steve told me that he had met them in Poland in 1944, I thought they were just another Soviet propaganda story. There was a lot of crazy stuff that happened in World War Two and the Cold War and seventy years on it’s difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff. All I know is they were supposed to have been an elite special forces team founded during the war and disbanded afterwards, though there’s a rumor that they were still active until 1953.”
“What happened in 1953?” Peggy asked, frowning. “Or – or will happen, I suppose.” She still wasn’t certain whether she believed the time travel story or not, despite everything. She certainly wasn’t willing to take anything Natasha Romanoff Rogers said at face value.
Natasha grimaced. “A lot. The relevant part is that the Winter Guard was supposed to have been, ah, liquidated then. Assuming they still existed, but I wouldn’t put it past anyone involved to go after the old members even if they were retired.”
Dernier scowled. “Russia,” he said.
Natasha shrugged in response, her expression briefly clouded before she prompted, “The Winter Guard?”
“Ah, the Winter Guard,” Falsworth said, after a moment of thought. “Russia’s answer to the Howling Commandos.”
“Though according to them, the Howlies are our answer to the Winter Guard,” Jones observed. “They say they were around first, but –” He shrugged. “I never heard of them.”
Dernier shrugged. “Who hears anything coming out of the east these days but horror stories? Not,” he added grimly, “that there aren’t a few horror stories about the Winter Guard.”
Jones noticed Natasha’s frown and clarified, “They’re Red Army, special operations like us. Aleksey Lebedev’s their CO; he’s a captain, same rank as Steve, only I’m pretty sure he’s had it longer. Senior NCO’s Mikhail Ursus; says his last name’s because his dad was a bear, but that’s obviously not true even if he looks kind of like one. Big guy, bruiser – he’s the one that knocked out Steve last night, though I doubt he could have done it in a straight-up fight.”
“We have sketches Steve did in Poland somewhere in our records,” Peggy said. “I’ll have someone find them. No photographs, of course, but they aren’t really necessary for him.”
“I know,” Natasha said; Peggy flicked a glance at her, but Natasha didn’t turn her head to acknowledge it. Presumably, Peggy admitted quietly to herself, she did know.
“Their techie’s Dmitri Bukharin,” Jones went on. “Radio, demolitions, freaky stuff –”
“Brilliant scientist,” Howard put in suddenly. “He used to publish before the war – electrical engineering, mechanical – did a little of everything. I’m surprised the Reds put him in a combat unit.”
“Well, all that everything comes in handy,” Falsworth said. “Especially when it comes to Hydra. Bukharin’s not bad at cutting throats, either.”
“Nikolai Krylenko,” Dernier provided. “Another bruiser like Ursus. He and Sergeant Barnes got into it in Poland,” he added thoughtfully. “No real reason that I ever heard of; they just didn’t get on.”
“Josef Petkus is their sniper,” Jones added. “Quiet guy, couldn’t tell you anything about him. I don’t think he said more than a dozen words in any language the whole time we were working together. Lebedev and Ursus are the only ones fluent in English – Bukharin speaks it, but not too well, and I don’t think Krylenko and Petkus have any at all. Some German, a little French, a little Polish. Captain Rogers speaks Russian, so he did a lot of the translating when we ran into each other.”
“Lebedev, Ursus, Bukharin, Krylenko, Petkus,” Natasha repeated. “And at least three matryoshki, maybe more.”
“You don’t believe there’s any chance you got them all?” Falsworth asked curiously. “Aside from the two Dugan and Morita said were with Lebedev, I mean.”
Natasha shook her head. “I know there was at least one more following us in the club, but I never saw her.”
“She’s right,” Peggy said reluctantly, and hoped she never had to repeat those particular words again. The fact that she had done so at all made Natasha flick an ironic glance at her, which made Peggy grind her teeth in turn. “There’s at least one more we never saw, likely more than that. We can ask our new friends about it.”
“They won’t talk,” Natasha said.
“We can be very persuasive.”
Natasha’s mouth twitched a little, but she didn’t say anything. Peggy ground her teeth again, which made her sore jaw ache. All of the Commandos looked uncomfortable; undoubtedly they had been hoping that Steve’s kidnapping would make Peggy and Natasha hate each other less. Well, Peggy didn’t think that Natasha actually cared enough about her to hate her, which made it worse somehow.
Dernier got up hastily, saying, “I will find the files on the Winter Guard. I believe there’s a secretary who wants to owe me a favor.”
“Does she know that?” Jones called after him.
“She will soon,” Dernier said, and fled.
“I’d better keep him from getting punched,” Jones said, beating a hasty retreat after him.
Peggy glanced at Falsworth, who looked a little tense, and said, “You might as well go too. We need a motorcar, but no driver.”
Falsworth fled after the other two Commandos.
Politely, Natasha said, “Is it better for me to be in civvies or in uniform?”
“Certainly not your Liberty Belle get-up,” Peggy said.
Natasha’s eyebrows shot upwards. “My what?”
“Mr. Sherman had some enterprising ideas about Captain America’s lady love,” Peggy said through clenched teeth.
“God, I hope he didn’t tell Steve about them,” Natasha muttered. “I already have a code name, thanks.”
“Which is what?” Howard said, interested.
“Black Widow.”
“Well, the funny pages definitely aren’t using that for Mrs. Captain America.”
“Uniform,” Peggy said, ignoring them both. “Not your Howling Commandos gear, a regular WAC’s uniform; I know you’ve been issued one. There aren’t many civilians in London these days.” She cocked her head at Natasha, and after a moment Natasha got to her feet. “I’ll come and get you when we’re ready to leave,” Peggy told her.
Howard waited for her to go and for the door to close behind her before he looked at Peggy and said, “I thought you two were getting along since last night.”
“What, because she didn’t shoot me in the head, only pretended that she was going to?” Peggy said. Her jaw ached and her cracked ribs hurt and she hadn’t gotten enough sleep; she was in no mood to be polite. Besides, it was only Howard. “That hardly changes anything. She’s still Steve’s –”
She bit her tongue on the word whore, but from Howard’s expression she knew that he guessed what she had been about to say. “He loves her.”
“Some part of his anatomy certainly does.”
“I know you two had another fight last night, but Peg, come on –”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Howard.” She shoved the matryoshki’s identity papers away from her for the sake of something to do with her hands, sending them spraying out across the table. She hadn’t told Phillips or the Commandos the exact words of Natasha’s lies, but she remembered them clearly enough.
You mean you dragged Captain America into bed.
Well, no one else was bothering. He’s a good lay, you know. He wanted it bad.
If they had been lies. Oh, the story was, Peggy could admit it now, but the rest of it –
She picked up Irene Lorraine’s War Department identity card, staring at the typed letters. More convincing lies. “Why aren’t you angry with her, Howard? Maybe you never had a chance with Steve, but –”
His eyebrows shot upwards. “Oh, thanks.”
Maybe that had been unfair, but Peggy wasn’t feeling particularly inclined to be fair. She picked up her coffee cup and was aggrieved to find that it had gone cold; Howard got up to hand her the pot at the center of the table, though by this time its contents had taken on the general taste and consistency of tar, with a distinct undertone of chicory that told her the amount of the real bean in it was probably minimal. The milk she poured in left a greasy film on its surface and clung to her spoon after she had lifted it out.
Howard sat down in one of the empty seats near her and watched this process in silence. He didn’t say anything again until Peggy had taken her first few awful sips. Then he said, “Peg, I know you don’t like her and I know you don’t like that Steve lied about her. But Steve loves her. That’s not going to stop any time soon. What is going to happen is that he’s going to start hating you for hating her, and he doesn’t want to do that. So if after we get him back – and we are going to get him back – you want him to still talk to you, then you’re going to have to find a way to live with the fact that he picked someone else. And if you can’t do that, then you’re going to have to live with him never talking to you again.”
Peggy wrapped her hands around the warm ceramic. “Is that what you do? Live with it?”
He frowned at her, then poured himself coffee. He tasted it and winced, setting the cup down with a clatter on the saucer. “Three weeks ago Steve was dead,” he said bluntly. “Would I rather have him in my bed than hers? Or yours, for that matter? Sure. But I’d a hell of a lot rather have him alive than anything else. He’s here, Peg. Don’t you get that that’s the part that matters? Steve’s here. Three weeks ago we didn’t have that. The rest is just details.”
When Steve woke up again, wincing at the pounding in his head, it was to find Aleksey Lebedev seated in a chair next to him, a revolver resting on his knee as he leafed through a file folder. He looked up at Steve’s low groan and said, “Back with us so soon?”
“If I say yes, are you going to stick me again?” Steve asked, shutting his eyes as the light in the room made his skull feel like it was being struck with a baseball bat. He tested his bonds and was unsurprised to find that he had been trussed up considerably more securely than he had before, with some sort of line – rope or chain, he couldn’t quite tell – running from his bound ankles to his manacled wrists. There was some kind of collar or chain around his neck, designed to choke him if he moved too much. Apparently the Winter Guard had learned their lesson about giving him too much slack.
“Sooner rather than later,” Lebedev said. “But not immediately unless you give us a reason.”
Steve opened an eye again at the sound of him cocking the hammer on the revolver, then closed it. “You’re not going to shoot me.”
“Not in the head,” Lebedev agreed, adjusting his aim. “The elbow, perhaps, or maybe the shoulder. I’ve heard you’ll recover from that sort of thing with no permanent damage. Have you ever found out?”
“Yes.”
“Fascinating.”
“Not the word I’d use.” Steve licked his lips, tasting dried blood where he must have cut himself on his own teeth when Lebedev had kicked him earlier. The injury itself had already closed up. The headache was fading rapidly too, to his relief; most of the time his accelerated healing was an advantage. “How’s the face?”
“I’ll live.”
“How are Petkus’s balls?”
“He’ll live. He just won’t be very happy about it for a while, but he doesn’t have any great need for them at the moment.” Lebedev leaned forward and confided, “Otdel X’s dolls aren’t very accommodating in that regard.”
“Can’t imagine why.”
“Well, given your recent nuptials you may have forgotten what celibacy’s like. Tell me, did you get tired of waiting for Agent Carter or did the present Mrs. Rogers simply give you a better offer?” When Steve didn’t respond, he said, “I saw her at the Stork Club, you know. Beautiful girl. Does she look as good out of her clothes as she does in them?”
Steve felt a muscle twitch in his jaw, but he didn’t take the bait. “Well, you can’t have found her yet, or you’d have led with that,” he said. “So I guess we’re both stuck here, unless the Kremlin’s decided that they only want me, not her too.”
He opened his eyes in time to see a line knit between Lebedev’s brows, but all the commando said was, “There’s no need for you to worry about what the Kremlin wants just yet. Leave that to me.”
“Not picking up the phone, huh?” Steve said. “Or was one of the women the SSR arrested the only one with Leviathan’s current codes?”
“Don’t worry yourself about our codes,” Lebedev said. He braced the barrel of his revolver on his thigh, still pointed at Steve, and leafed through the folder on his knee. When he found what he had been looking for, he held it up so that Steve could see. “Care to explain this?”
It was one of the photographs Irene Lorraine – or Irina Larionova, whatever her real name was – had taken of their arrival in Howard’s lab. The photograph rendered the flash of light that had accompanied them as white, but Steve knew it had been blue and green, the commingled colors of the Space and Time Stones. Helpfully, Lebedev held up the next photograph in the series, which showed Steve and Natasha on the floor of the lab.
Steve looked at him for a long moment, then said, “An alien from the future sent us back in time because he was tired of me punching him in the face.”
Lebedev stared at him. “Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Are you laughing?”
Lebedev shook his head slowly. “You Americans spend too much time at the cinema,” he said.
“Probably,” Steve agreed, though he couldn’t really complain too much about that as a card-carrying SAG member, or at least he had been one in 1945. As far as he knew his SAG-AFTRA membership was still good in 2018 since his dues were paid up every year and they hadn’t kicked him out when he went on the run, though he hadn’t been in a picture since 2013. That one had been a cameo as a favor to the nephew of an old USO friend, but he hadn’t minded doing it. For some reason the fact that he had been an actor never seemed to register with people, most of whom optimistically assumed that Captain America was incapable of lying. None of the serious soldiers in either decade had known how to mentally deal with his USO career, which had included a brief stint in Hollywood.
“Hydra, then,” Lebedev said, coming to the same conclusion as half of the SSR. The other half was clinging to various romantic fantasies about how Steve and Natasha had met.
Steve shrugged in response; if Lebedev didn’t want to believe him about Thanos that was his own problem, and Steve hadn’t expected him to anyway. He wished he had a better idea of what Hydra’s infiltration of the NKVD and Red Army actually looked like in 1945, since all the Avengers had been able to figure out about it was that it far predated Hydra’s infiltration of SHIELD. It might be something to try on Lebedev and the others later, though Steve doubted he would get all that far with it without real details.
Lebedev went on, “Is Schmidt dead? We’ve been through a few of their bases and everyone there certainly seemed to think so.”
“He’s dead,” Steve said, not bothering to either confirm or deny Lebedev’s assumption. He had clearly already made up his mind and it was better to let him keep thinking that than risk complicating the story further.
Lebedev cocked a pale eyebrow at him, not willing to take Steve’s word at face value. His hair was so light that from any distance it was near-impossible to see that he had eyebrows or eyelashes at all. “I take it you met the lovely Mrs. Rogers during this little sojourn with Hydra.”
Steve shut his eyes again, listening to Lebedev page through more photographs. “Beautiful girl,” he said again. “She told Irina that she was one of our dolls, did you know that?”
“Yeah, I know,” Steve said. “She told me.”
“She told you?”
“What, you’ve never had a real conversation with a woman before?” said Steve, opening his eyes. “No wonder you’re not getting along with the matryoshki.”
“Converse with a woman?” Lebedev said, laughing a little. “Is that what you and Mrs. Rogers do? It didn’t look much like that was what you were interested in last night. Haven’t you gotten her with child yet?”
Steve felt his face heat, which made Lebedev’s grin widen.
“I know the look of a woman who’s been well-ridden,” he said. “Very, very well-ridden.”
Steve jerked involuntarily against his bonds, feeling the choke-chain drag at his throat.
“Probably a firecracker in bed, that one,” Lebedev said, his gaze fixed on Steve’s face. “I’m sure Agent Carter’s regretting now that she never dropped her knickers for you, hmm? Last night she looked like she wanted to scratch Mrs. Rogers’s eyes out.” He rested the photographs on his knee to make a hooked-finger clawing gesture with one hand; the pistol he held in the other never wavered. “I suppose that means she’d never agree to a three. A nice thought,” he added, “and certainly a very pretty picture to consider, but I rather think that Agent Carter would kill both of you first. And Mrs. Rogers gains nothing from sharing, of course. But still – they’re both very beautiful women. Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it.”
“No,” Steve said, his voice rough and his ears burning from embarrassment. It would have been a very pretty picture, but after the past three weeks even his imagination couldn’t stretch to any scenario involving both Peggy and Natasha not at each other’s throats. Certainly not any erotic one.
He had trouble thinking about them in the same context even when he was looking right at them. It was as though the two of them marked out different parts of his life, Peggy and everything before the ice on one side and Natasha and everything after it on the other. As far as his own mind was concerned, they couldn’t exist in the same space.
Lebedev watched him with interest and said, “Not even once?”
“Go to hell.”
Lebedev ignored that and leaned forward in a confiding kind of way. Steve watched him, his fingers flexing behind his back. He thought he could probably break through the carbonadium bonds sooner rather than later, but the process would be helped along by having a lot more wiggle room than he actually had, not to mention that the way he’d been trussed up was meant to forestall exactly that.
Despite the message that he had given to Dum-Dum and Jim to pass along to Natasha, he had no interest in actually going to Russia. Everything he had heard about the Eastern Front before, during, and after the war was one horror story after another, no matter which side was involved. Even before the fighting had started he had never had any dreamy illusions about life in the Soviet Union the way a few of his friends had had and probably still did. Steve knew too many Russians who had emigrated to America for one reason or another after the Russian Civil War and he’d been able to read between the lines of the newspapers long before he had been the one making headlines. In 1945 it was worse; if he went in now, in the mess of the Second World War – the Great Patriotic War, as they called it – there was every chance he wouldn’t come out again. Bucky hadn’t.
Steve loved Natasha. He trusted her with his life, the same way he trusted Peggy and Howard and the Howling Commandos. Since he had come out of the ice, he had never once been able to bring himself to believe that anyone looking for him would be able to actually find him.
“Do you know what they say about Otdel X’s pretty dolls?” Lebedev asked him, his gaze still fixed on Steve’s face. “When they say anything about them at all, I mean.”
“‘They’?” Steve repeated.
“Back at Leviathan. Not,” he allowed, “that there are many who know about our lovely ladies, which does rather raise the question of how you do.”
“I’m good like that,” Steve said, watching him in return. Lebedev had a mean streak that he remembered from their brief encounters in Poland, though these days that wasn’t particularly exceptional. This war could make anyone cruel, including Steve himself.
Lebedev rifled absently through the other photographs on his lap without really looking at them. The barrel of his revolver stayed fixed on Steve the whole time. “They say that Otdel X’s dolls know a thousand ways to kill a man,” he said, “and a thousand ways to make a man wish they’d killed him, and another thousand to pleasure a man – before killing him, of course, like a – how do you say it in English?”
“Black widow,” Steve said quietly, refusing to take the bait. “Chernaya vdova.”
Lebedev raised an eyebrow, but all he said was, “Yes.” And then, “Your lovely wife –”
“Could kill you without breaking a sweat,” Steve informed him. He shut his eyes, weary of playing games with Aleksey Lebedev. “And I hope she does.”
Lebedev apparently wasn’t willing to be ignored. He reached down and grasped Steve’s chin with his free hand, forcing him to look up. “You know us, Rogers,” he said. “We never fail. You are coming to Moscow. And so is your woman, no matter how many brave words you say. And then we’ll get some truth out of you both –”
Steve bit him.
It was a common misconception that Captain America was above fighting dirty, one that very few people had the opportunity to make twice. The way Steve had grown up he had never had any option other than fighting dirty, not if he actually wanted to get a shot in during a fight. Steve had bitten a lot of people back in the day, including Bucky many years ago when they had first met.
These days people seldom got close enough in a fight to make it necessary, but it wasn’t as though Steve had lost the knack of it. He jerked his chin to break Lebedev’s grip and then sank his teeth into the side of his hand before Lebedev had a chance to snatch it back.
The average human’s bite force was a hundred and sixty pounds per square inch. Steve’s came in at well over a thousand, roughly the same as a hyena’s, which had brought Howard no end of delight when he had been running his initial tests back in 1943; for all Steve knew it was higher now, just like all the rest of his stats. Bone crunched between his teeth and he tasted blood, gun oil, and tobacco – more of blood than the other two. Flesh and muscle tore as Steve jerked his head back and Lebedev screamed, a high, shrill sound Steve had heard other men make before. There was a clatter of running footsteps and shouting in Russian from outside the room.
And then, as Steve had expected him to do, Aleksey Lebedev shot him.
There were parts of London, Natasha thought, that seemed virtually untouched by the passage of time. Except for the occasional bombed-out building they had been down more than a few streets that wouldn’t have looked out of place in 2018. Of course, she had to admit, that was probably because she had seen at least some of them in movies set during WWII. She watched them go by as Peggy maneuvered the staff car – it was a forest-green 1937 Hillman Minx – through the narrow streets, part of her still expecting to see camera crews in jeans and t-shirts roping off the filming zone.
“You know,” she said eventually, partially just to break the awkward silence that they had both been maintaining since they had left SSR headquarters, “back in our time, London is one of the most surveilled cities in the world.”
She saw Peggy’s jaw tighten a little at the our, but she didn’t comment on that. Instead, she said, “What, is His Majesty paying people to stand out on every street corner? That seems like rather a waste of tax money.”
“Her Majesty,” Natasha corrected, glancing at her. “Queen Elizabeth II. And no, not people – video cameras, closed-circuit television. That means –”
“I’m familiar with the concept,” Peggy said frostily. “Hydra uses them in some of their factories.” Grudgingly, she added, “I can see how that might be useful under the circumstances.”
“Not as useful as you’d think,” Natasha said. “Which is good if you’re on the run.” Though she and Steve and the others had generally avoided London.
That got a small sniff and an “I’m certain” in response. After a moment, Peggy added, “Queen Elizabeth? The princess?”
“1952,” Natasha said. “Longest-reigning British monarch in history.”
“Mmm.” She didn’t ask what had happened to George VI, just remarked, “I’ve met her. Just to be introduced to, nothing more serious.” She turned the Minx down another narrow street.
Natasha leaned her head back, trying to ease the knot of worry under her breastbone by reminding herself that getting Steve out of the country wasn’t anyone’s idea of an easy proposition, especially if the Winter Guard wanted to get him all the way back to Russia. He might get slapped around a little, but he wouldn’t be in serious danger until then. Even if the Winter Guard succeeded getting him over the Soviet border, they would have time; it had taken Hydra years to turn Bucky Barnes into the Winter Soldier, assuming that was even what Leviathan was thinking about doing to Steve Rogers. It might not be.
Only Leviathan and Department X had been around for a lot longer than Hydra. Department X had been around for decades before Hydra was even a glint in a madman’s eye. They had had time to develop their methods that Hydra hadn’t had.
Yet.
The Winter Guard is special forces and so are the matryoshki, she told herself for the thousandth time. The worst they can do themselves is knock him around.
“I have a question for you,” Peggy said eventually, and Natasha looked over at her, glad for the distraction but not eager for whatever argument was going to come next.
“What?”
“Was anything you said last night true?”
Natasha wondered what Peggy would do if she said that all of it had been lies except for Steve being good in bed. Shoot her, probably, she looked like she was about in the mood for that. All she said was, “No.”
“None of it?”
“Are you talking about the personal details or Hydra?” Natasha said dryly. “Because the former isn’t any of your business and the rest I made up.”
“I suppose Hydra would be a little before your time,” Peggy remarked.
That would have been nice. Natasha just said, “I know enough.”
Peggy was quiet for another block, then she said abruptly, “Will you marry him?”
“Steve?” Natasha asked warily.
“Is there someone else that question could apply to?”
“No, there’s not,” Natasha said. She lifted a hand to chew a nail and forced it back down. “Yes,” she said, without looking at Peggy. “Assuming he ever asks. He actually hasn’t.”
“Are you pregnant?”
Natasha jerked around so quickly that her elbow hit the passenger-side door with a bang. “No!”
Peggy’s gaze flickered sideways towards her for an instant, though she didn’t turn her face away from the street they were driving down. More terrace houses that had barely changed in the seventy-three years between 1945 and 2018 crawled by on either side of them. “Steve said you weren’t,” she said. “But men never really know, do they? God knows that he can’t seem to keep his hands off you.”
“I’m not trying to baby trap Captain America, if that’s what you’re asking,” Natasha said flatly.
Peggy might not have been familiar with the phrase, but she said, “Sometimes I think this would be easier to understand if you were.”
“Well, I’m not,” Natasha said, slumping back in her seat and rubbing her sore elbow. The thought gave her a slight pang. Natasha liked kids – or she liked Clint’s kids, anyway; she hadn’t been around many others – but even if it had been a possibility she didn’t think she should be responsible for any herself. That didn’t mean that she didn’t wish the decision was up to her.
Steve, a classic only child if she had ever met one, was generally ambivalent towards children; he didn’t actively avoid them the way Tony sometimes did, but he had a tendency to regard them with a combination of mild alarm and long-suffering patience. Natasha had absolutely no idea how he felt about having any of his own, though she suspected that for one reason or another he had simply never even considered it as an option open to him. They hadn’t talked about it.
She and Peggy spent the rest of the drive in silence.
Natasha identified Lyudmila’s – or Louise Pilkington’s – boarding house by the simple fact that it had two British Army MPs stationed outside it. Both men looked keenly up as Peggy expertly parked the Minx, then relaxed as she got out and they recognized her. They eyed Natasha with a little more uncertainty, but by this point everyone in the SSR knew who she was and had more or less accepted her. What was good enough for Captain America was good enough for the SSR, apparently.
“Any trouble, chaps?” Peggy asked. She chatted with the MPs for a few minutes while Natasha looked up and down the street. It was another one of those classic London neighborhoods that had changed very little in several centuries, let alone the seventy-three years between 1945 and 2018, except for the large hole at the other end of the block that must have come courtesy of the Blitz. Natasha let her gaze flicker upwards, tilting her head only as much as she needed to in order to eye the tops of the buildings and the upper-story windows, searching for a sniper’s nest or an observation post as she calculated lines of fire. The SSR would want someone who could watch both the boarding house’s front door and both ends of the street.
There.
Movement didn’t betray the sniper, but Natasha considered the angle of the half-open curtain and gave a little mental nod. She looked back to see Peggy watching her, expression unreadable.
“Shall we?”
They went up the narrow stone steps of the boarding house, low-heeled Oxfords clattering in a way that made the back of Natasha’s neck itch. Since they were dealing with civilians, they were both in full uniform, Peggy in her First Aid Nursing Yeomanry kit and Natasha in Women’s Army Corps gear. After considerable discussion, the SSR had elected to give her a first lieutenant’s silver bar but the title of “agent,” at least for the moment.
Another MP and the boarding house’s landlady met them just inside the door, the former looking put-upon and the latter clearly riling for a fight. She was what Natasha thought of as a classic British housewifely type, with the kind of rage in her eyes usually reserved for mad gods and ravening aliens. She looked entirely unimpressed to be confronted with two women in uniform, one of them American. Natasha suspected the bruises on Peggy’s face didn’t help either, even covered up as best as possible with makeup; the split lip had made it impossible for her to put on her usual red lipstick.
“Madam, I must protest this outrageous –”
“Agent Carter –” said the woebegone MP.
“Which room belongs to Louise Pilkington?” Peggy demanded, heading them both off. “Who was arrested last night,” she added as the landlady’s face went red and she opened her mouth again, “for acts of treason and espionage.”
Her mouth snapped shut.
“Third story, second on the left,” said the MP. “We checked that there was no one there when we arrived last night, then shut it up. No one’s been in or out since we arrived last night, Agent Carter.” He eyed Natasha a little dubiously, and then added, “Mrs. Rog – I mean, Agent Rogers.”
Even after several weeks of being called “Mrs. Rogers” by everyone in the SSR, it was something of a shock to hear her old title and Steve’s name. Natasha tried to cover up her slight start by asking, “What was Louise Pilkington like as a tenant?”
The landlady’s gaze went to Peggy’s bare left hand, then to the rings on Natasha’s. Apparently deciding that American or not, this evidence of marriage and the lack of bruises made Natasha the more respectable of the two, she addressed Natasha and said, “Very quiet, very polite. Always paid her rent on time, never made any trouble.”
“Did she ever have any visitors?” Peggy asked
“No gentleman callers,” the landlady said immediately.
“Other women?”
“Once or twice.”
Together Natasha and Peggy got a few more details out of her, but eventually they had to conclude that there just wasn’t all that much else to say. Louise Pilkington had been a quiet tenant who hadn’t done anything to get anyone’s attention. She had been out of London overnight several times a week for her war work, but not in the kind of way that had made the landlady think she was doing anything untoward.
They climbed the four flights of narrow stairs to the top floor, ignoring the handful of tenants who put their heads out of their rooms to inquire what was going on. Natasha wandered down the hallway as Peggy unlocked Lyudmila’s door with the key the landlady had reluctantly surrendered to the MPs, looking at the crown molding on the wall and studying the grates, listening to the way the floorboards sounded under her shoes. On her way back to Peggy she stopped and flipped back a corner of the threadbare carpet. It took her a few moments to find the right angle to dig her fingernails into a slight unevenness in one of the boards, but once she had done that she was able to pull it up easily. By then Peggy had joined her and was peering over her shoulder, reaching out to take the wax paper-wrapped parcel that Natasha handed her. There was a gun in there too, a TT-30 Tokarev with a box of extra ammunition. Natasha ran her fingers around the base of the hiding place, but didn’t find anything else. She replaced the board and the carpet and slid the gun and ammunition into her handbag.
Peggy didn’t unwrap the parcel until they were both inside Lyudmila’s small bedroom with the door closed, wary of prying eyes from the other tenants. “Identity papers, ration coupons, and currency,” she observed, fanning them out on the neatly made bed. “Another set of British papers, Canadian, German – hedging her bets, I see – Spanish, and Swiss. And Soviet. Think these are her real papers?”
Natasha picked up the Soviet identity card and run her thumbnail down the page with Lyudmila’s picture on it, then checked the military ID and Communist Party ID. “They’re real. Lyudmila Nikolayevna Plisetskaya,” she read. “She’d want her real ones; from what I’ve heard, SMERSH and the Osobyi otdel before them were always very trigger-happy with anyone who served abroad. She wouldn’t want to risk getting shot as a traitor before someone from Leviathan could clear her.”
“I see the Russians are as charming as ever,” Peggy said. “How did you know they would be in the hallway, not her room?”
“People search bedrooms,” Natasha said. “They don’t always search the rest of the building, but she’d want it nearby in case she had to make a run for it. I wouldn’t have kept it that close.” She tossed the little bundle of Soviet documents back onto the bed, resisting the urge to wipe her hands on her skirt.
Since Peggy had already begun searching the rest of the room, this got her a dry look, but since it wasn’t as bitter as most of the expressions Peggy Carter directed at her Natasha ignored it. She gathered Lyudmila’s papers and extra currency back together into the waxed-paper wrapping and set it aside to search the bed, turning up a garrote, a couple of stilettos, and a break-down sniper rifle in a case attached to the underside of the bedframe.
“I believe we’ve had a lucky break,” Peggy said from behind her, and Natasha turned to see her regarding the apparent typewriter on the desk with satisfaction.
“What is it?”
Peggy smiled, all teeth. “It’s a cypher machine. And, if I’m not mistaken, a wireless set.”