Of Home Near

“So who is she really?”

Colonel Phillips had returned from MI9’s Buckinghamshire headquarters in just as bad a mood as he had been when he had left London – worse, maybe. Somewhat to Peggy’s surprise, he had returned without being accompanied by an MI9 officer; she had expected Brigadier Crockatt to insist on having one of his own people present even if the SSR managed to hold onto Louise Pilkington. That, apparently, was because neither MI9 nor the SSR wanted to get MI5 involved until absolutely necessary; MI5 handled counterintelligence, usually rather adroitly, but at the moment their involvement would just confuse matters. Crockatt would do a better job holding them off than Phillips would; MI5 didn’t think particularly highly of their American counterparts at the best of times.

“Irina Ilyinichna Larionova,” Peggy said, tossing Irene Lorraine’s Soviet identity papers onto the desk in front of him. Hers had been better hidden than Lyudmila Plisetskaya’s, but Peggy and Natasha had turned them up after some searching. There hadn’t been a second cypher machine in her flat, but Peggy hadn’t expected there to be. If they were very, very lucky, the one in Plisetskaya’s possession had been the only one the strike team had and they were now cut off from their handlers in Moscow, but Peggy wasn’t counting on it.

Phillips picked up Lorraine’s Communist Party ID and scowled at it, then sorted through her other papers before handing them to Howard and turning to Plisetskaya’s. “Anything on the other three yet?”

“No. Wherever they were keeping their real papers, it wasn’t at either Lorraine’s or Pilkington’s billets.” Peggy grimaced. “Larionova and Plisetskaya, I should say. I was waiting for you to return before I started chatting with them.”

Phillips tapped Plisetskaya’s party ID thoughtfully on the edge of the desk, then said, “I want Rogers – Mrs. Rogers – to handle Lorraine’s interrogation.”

“Her?” Peggy said, astonished. “Whatever for? I’m more than capable of dealing with Lorraine – Larionova,” she corrected herself.

“Because Natasha Rogers is the only person in this building that Lorraine hasn’t been playing for a fool for the last two and a half years,” Phillips said. “Because I want to see what she does. Because Lorraine won’t be expecting it. Take your pick.”

“Lorraine definitely won’t see that coming,” Howard supplied helpfully, leafing through Lorraine’s documents, both the Soviet ones and the American ones. He held them up to compare them, his mouth tight. Peggy wondered how much of his work had made its way out of his lab and into the hands of the Soviets thanks to Lorraine; he had to be wondering that too.

With some effort Peggy resisted the urge to ask if they were sure Natasha Romanoff Rogers could run an interrogation if she wasn’t being held at gunpoint by her subject and said, “What about Plisetskaya and the others?”

“Let’s see what Lorraine says and then we’ll take a crack at Plisetskaya,” Phillips said. “MI9’s giving us twenty-four hours with her, unless MI5 gets their way; Brigadier Crockatt’s holding them off for us for now because he’s embarrassed about Plisetskaya. We can hang onto Lorraine because she’s SSR, but the others fall under MI5’s jurisdiction, except for O’Halloran, who goes to the OSS because she’s got American papers.”

“We can’t keep any of them but Larionova?” Peggy said, frowning.

“Not unless we give them a good reason and it had better be a damn good one.”

“The Soviets having their grubby hands on Captain America doesn’t count as a good reason?” Howard asked.

“We’re trying to avoid letting them know about that part,” Phillips admitted. “So wrap this up before we have to hand them all over to MI5.”

Peggy scowled. “Surely the Security Service has enough to do already, given that they are attempting to dictate a war.”

“They did that already. It’s why we’re winning it. Means they’re bored.”

“They could take up knitting for the troops,” Howard suggested, finally setting Lorraine’s papers aside and stretching out his legs. Peggy kicked his ankle when his feet got in her way and he pulled them back.

“They can collect scrap metal for all I care, as long as they do it somewhere other than here,” Phillips groused. “What about the magic typewriter?”

“Room 17’s got it now, along with Plisetskaya’s codebooks,” Howard said. “I had a look at it to make sure it wasn’t going to explode or implode or release poison gas, anything like that. It’s a cypher machine with a built-in wireless set. Type in your plaintext, the rotors do their thing, and it transmits in ciphertext; the cypher machine at the other end receives in ciphertext and prints it out in plaintext. Elegant, actually. Not as many rotors as the ECM Mark II or the Typex, but that’s because they need the space for the wireless equipment and the actual typewriter parts. Pretty elegant, actually; if I didn’t know better I’d think it was a real typewriter, and it does work like one if it’s not hooked up to the transceiver. None of ours do.”

“Who’s it transmit to?”

Howard’s eyebrows went up. “You want I should hook it up and ask who’s listening on the other end? You never know, they might write back.”

Phillips considered that proposal, then said, “Maybe later.” He looked at Peggy. “Any action around the embassy?”

“Nothing unusual yet, unless MI5 has noticed our people camped outside.” Keeping an eye on the Soviet embassy wasn’t supposed to be the SSR’s job; their job was supposed to be wrapping up what was left of Hydra. Peggy resented having to do MI5’s work for them because they apparently hadn’t noticed half a dozen Soviet illegals embedded in the British military.

In fairness to MI5, she allowed grudgingly, they had been busy micromanaging the entire German intelligence network in Britain. Since they were at war with Germany and not the Soviet Union that had been the higher priority, but it was still unbearably sloppy.

On the other hand, she had to admit, she hadn’t noticed the Soviet agent in the SSR either.

Howard leaned an elbow on the arm of his chair and said, “We don’t have to worry about the rezident at the embassy shoving Steve into the diplomatic bag and shipping him off that way, do we?”

“I’d be shocked if anyone in the rezidentura even knows the Winter Guard’s here,” Peggy said scornfully. “Running NOCs like the matryoshki is one thing, letting a commando team kidnap an American officer on allied soil is another.”

She scowled at nothing in particular. Since keeping an eye on them was MI5’s purview, Peggy knew very little about the rezidentura, the Soviet intelligence headquarters in the embassy; its chief, the rezident, and his operatives were all in Britain under what MI5 and MI6 delicately called official cover and the Soviets called being “legal” – in other words, that they were part of the embassy staff and diplomatically immune. Illegals – non-official cover to MI5 and MI6 – were spies who had no such diplomatic protection. Everyone knew that there were Soviet NOCs operating in Great Britain; the Comintern had been enthusiastically recruiting agents across the world since 1919, convincing anyone with socialist inclinations to pass information on to the NKVD or the GRU in the name of their political ideals. Peggy had a few friends from university who had been courted that way, though as far as she was aware none of them had gone so far as to actually hand any information over. She certainly hoped that she didn’t know anyone foolish enough to do something that stupid.

Howard cocked an eyebrow at Peggy. “What would you do if it was the other way around?”

“Not kidnap Captain Communism in the first place,” Peggy said dryly. “Or the Red Guardian or the Crimson Dynamo or whatever absurd nickname the Kremlin might think up.”

Phillips made a gesture at her to indicate that she should answer the question.

Peggy considered, then admitted, “I’d find a way to get a blood sample or ten into the diplomatic bag. No matter what orders the Winter Guard is operating under, Larionova and the others must have been passing on information to the rezidentura, not just sending wireless messages.” She shot a sideways glance at Howard, whose expression had gone hard. “Not all of it could be transmitted.”

He nodded once, short and sharp. They had to assume that most if not all of his work had been stolen, copied or photographed, and handed over to the Soviets.

“Tell our people to be on the lookout for anyone making a handoff to someone from the embassy.” Phillips cracked his knuckles, his expression hard. He looked tired, both from the trip to Buckinghamshire and the argument he had undoubtedly had with MI9. “Any sign of Rogers or the Winter Guard anywhere else?”

Peggy shook her head. “If they were smart and they have the personnel for it, then they have someone keeping an eye on Plisetskaya’s and Larionova’s billets, but we didn’t spot any watchers. Our people are still at both, though.”

Phillips nodded to himself. “Go tell Mrs. Rogers she’s going to take a crack at Lorraine. Let’s see what they both do.”

“I know you’re awake, Captain Rogers.”

Steve opened one eye to peer up at the woman standing over him – tall, blonde, pretty, holding a shotgun – and then closed it again. He had known that Lebedev was going to shoot him; he had also known that there was a good chance his aim was going to be wild under the circumstances. He had decided that he could deal with the risk of getting shot in the head; anything else he would heal from.

From the feel of it, the bullet had gone through the fleshy part of his shoulder where it wouldn’t do any critical damage. Lebedev had probably intended to shatter bone and temporarily cripple Steve, but in his pain and panic his aim had been off, for which Steve was relieved. He would heal from that kind of injury, but a few times it had involved rebreaking the bone so that it would set straight.

“Did the bullet go through?” he asked in Russian, fighting back nausea. The serum hadn’t done anything for his pain tolerance, which had always been pretty high; it just meant that he could shake off the effects more quickly. Howard Stark and Bruce Banner had both separately concluded that on several occasions he had been badly injured and healed from it without noticing because pre-serum he had been so used to being constantly in pain that post-serum it didn’t always register as being unusual. The pain wasn’t the only reason for his nausea; his mouth tasted like something had died in it, which was probably the natural result of biting Aleksey Lebedev. He was also pretty sure they had drugged him again; he didn’t pass out that easily.

“Yes, and you bled all over the floor,” the matryoshka said in the same language. “Then you stopped bleeding, so we decided you probably weren’t going to die and waste all our hard work.” She considered, then switched to English. “Your accent’s not that bad, Aleksey’s just a snob. Is that Vilnius I hear in the vowels?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Learned it from a friend’s parents when I was a kid. They came over in the twenties. Said they didn’t want to stick around and learn Polish.”

The matryoshka made a sound of acknowledgment, apparently familiar with what was, in 1945, fairly recent history.

Steve opened his eyes again when he thought he could do so without being sick. When he pushed himself upright with his elbows, the awkward motion sending pain shooting through his injured shoulder, he discovered that even though he was still manacled hand and foot, the extra restraints had been removed, probably so that they could bandage the bullet wound. He was still in his service jacket and shirt, though both had been cut through to get at the injury. The fabric around it and all down his left side was sodden with blood, flaking off where it had started to dry. Steve tested range of motion in his left arm as best he could and found that except for how much it hurt, he still had most of it. Trying made him white out briefly with pain, but he’d had worse. He’d fought with worse.

“How long will that take to heal?” the matryoshka inquired, sounding interested.

“For a through and through?” Steve said. “Three or four days. Of course, that’s without being tied up and drugged, so who the hell knows.” It was closer to two than three, but he wasn’t in the mood to admit that. In 1945 it had been closer to five than three, which he was guessing Irene Lorraine had passed along to Leviathan. All the better for him if Leviathan didn’t know that had changed over the course of seventy-three years.

He eyed the woman warily. “Are you going to drug me again?”

She shrugged. “In a little while, especially since Aleksey’s off feeling sorry for himself just now. You took off two of his fingers, you know.”

“Maybe he should be more careful about where he puts his hands,” Steve suggested. He couldn’t particularly bring himself to care; he’d done worse to other men with less reason. As far as he was concerned there was no real difference between using his teeth and using his fists. On the other hand, he could have done without the taste of Lebedev’s blood in his mouth.

“He really should,” she agreed. “They wander. I told him I’d break his fingers the next time he put them on me, so I’m not sorry about it.” She smiled in a small, pleased sort of way, looking smug, and then went on, “You should probably know that when we catch your wife, he’ll rape her. Just to show both of you who’s boss around here.” She shrugged matter-of-factly.

Steve felt a muscle in his jaw jump. “He’s not going to catch her. Not unless she wants to be caught, and then Aleksey and you and everyone else here is going to have bigger problems than who’s boss.”

“Mmm.” She gave another little shrug. “Is she a doll? No one seems to be certain about that, including the House.”

“She used to be,” Steve said. “She’s not anymore.”

“You don’t stop being one of us,” the matryoshka said, with the kind of note in her voice usually reserved for telling children that Santa Claus wasn’t real. “She would never have been able to take the five of us the SSR captured if she wasn’t; I doubt Peggy Carter did all that much.”

“You don’t know Peggy either,” Steve said.

“Do you?”

Steve felt a muscle in his jaw work. Once he would have said yes without hesitation; these days he wasn’t sure what the answer was. He would have liked it to have still been yes.

The matryoshka smiled a little and didn’t wait for him to come up with a response. “I’m Dottie. Late of the Women’s Army Corps.”

“Yeah, I’m sure about that,” Steve said dryly. “You have a real name?”

“Real is a matter of perception, Captain Rogers. It’s not all things to all people at all times. And neither am I.”

Steve felt his mouth twist a little in wry amusement. “I’ve heard that one before.”

“From your wife?”

He tipped his head in acknowledgment.

Dottie, or whatever her real name was, looked mildly intrigued. The whole time they had been talking she hadn’t taken a single step closer to him; the barrel of her shotgun hadn’t so much as twitched at all. It didn’t waver now as she said, “Tell me about your wife.”

“Are you really planning to shoot me with that thing?” Steve asked instead. “Because I can die –“ He hoped; the closet he had ever come to testing it out had involved a sixty-seven year nap. “– and a shotgun blast at close range is pretty fatal; I’ve seen the results.”

“Might be worth finding out,” Dottie said. “But I don’t think you want to find out either. I’m not Aleksey Lebedev, Captain, I don’t need to prove that mine’s bigger than yours. Talk.”

“Go to hell.”

“Such language to a lady.”

“A lady holding a shotgun on me.”

“A lady who patched up your bullet wound.”

“A lady who infiltrated – where were you stationed, anyway?”

“Camp Griffiss,” Dottie said, then smiled when Steve winced. Camp Griffiss had been SHAEF’s headquarters in London until the previous December, when General Eisenhower had taken most of his staff and decamped to France. Steve had been there twice in ’44, but couldn’t remember seeing her in the background.

“Don’t worry,” she went on, “I didn’t kill anyone.” Her smile broadened. “Not anyone important.”

“You probably didn’t kill anyone at all,” Steve told her coolly. “Not if you wanted to stay at Camp Griffiss.”

Dottie shrugged, still with that little smile. “Maybe. Or maybe not. You’ll always wonder now.”

Steve felt his mouth twist. He had learned after Hydra that that was the real danger of moles. The material harm could be significant; it could result in secrets revealed, battles lost, men and women killed, but the real cost came in what it did to the people who had been betrayed. Steve had watched the American government and intelligence apparatus tie itself into knots for years after SHIELD had fallen; that was ultimately what had resulted in the Sokovia Accords, not that those would have solved the real problem at all. He had read about Kim Philby in MI6 and the fallout that disaster had cost the British and American intelligence services, including James Angleton’s CIA witch hunts during the Cold War, some of which had spilled over into SHIELD. He had missed the aftermath of Heinz Krüger’s infiltration of the State Department in 1943, but he had heard a little about it from Peggy and Howard after he had come back to the SSR. Once you knew someone had done that to you – an enemy, a friend, a neutral party – you could never unknow it. You looked for it everywhere.

And now the SSR would too.

Steve wondered if that would make Hydra’s infiltration easier or harder. You never did know.

“Where did you meet your wife, Captain?” Dottie asked. “Aleksey thinks it was in a Hydra prison, but I think you’d just admit it if the Red Skull had had you. You’re proud, but you’re not too proud for that. So it has to be something else.”

“Why do you care?”

“Because she says she’s a doll and you say she’s a doll and the House says she isn’t,” Dottie said. “There aren’t that many of us. I want to know who she is and where she came from.”

Steve shut his eyes against the throbbing in his shoulder, trying to push his awareness of it aside. “What, Irene Lorraine didn’t hand it all over?”

“It’s just the funniest thing,” Dottie mused. “That wasn’t in any of the files. And Irina did look. She’s very good that way.”

Steve bit the inside of his cheek, remembering Lorraine asking him about Natasha the day before they had gone to Beaulieu. If she hadn’t known, then Phillips hadn’t written it down anywhere, probably wanting to avoid accidentally passing on what he clearly still considered a wild story. The SSR had very good security, but it still occasionally leaked around the edges, mostly to the other intelligence agencies in London, all of which cooperated with each other with varying degrees of willingness.

“Yeah, I’m sure she looked,” he said. “But either she didn’t find it or she didn’t tell you. Pick which of those you prefer.”

“I’ve seen photographs of your wife’s papers, you know,” Dottie said. “The ones the SSR did up because she didn’t have her own when you arrived.”

Great, Steve thought wearily. At this point he couldn’t even bring himself to be surprised; he knew Lorraine had been the one handling at least some of Natasha’s papers. All he said was, “So?”

“Her papers say she was born the same year the Red Terror started. She’d be one of the first of us if she is a doll.”

Steve bit the inside of his cheek again and swore silently. Natasha’s papers – War Department identification card, an old Nansen passport and a newer American one, marriage license, WAC enlistment papers – all gave her birth year as 1918, the same year Steve had been born; if you subtracted the icebox years he and Natasha only had six months between them. Since the Ohio story had gone out the window early on, her papers all said that she had been born in Leningrad (then Petrograd) in 1918, where no one would expect to be able to find a birth certificate anyway. Steve and Natasha hadn’t been consulted; it had been someone else’s bright idea, probably Howard’s or Peggy’s. They hadn’t been thinking about trying to fool Department X, just about giving Natasha some documentation. Natasha herself had said that she didn’t know the exact year Department X had started, though it had to postdate the Russian Civil War, which meant 1924 at the absolute earliest.

“So?” he said again. “Do you really think Department X would tell you if one of their golden children had defected?”

“Only to put a target on her head,” Dottie agreed readily. “And they haven’t asked for that. Do you want to know what I think, Captain?”

Steve shrugged, which made his bad shoulder throb.

“I think she defected before the war,” Dottie said, “and the House covered it up. They do that, you know. Everyone does, but them more than most. Maybe they even thought she was dead until she showed up at the SSR with you. But once Irina told them she was alive…” She let the words trail off, her gaze fixed on Steve’s.

His poker face wasn’t as good as Natasha’s; whatever she saw there made a tiny line knit between her brows. “You know,” she said, more curious than anything else. “You know what she is. And you don’t care.”

Lorraine was sitting calmly when Natasha went into the interrogation room. She was still wearing the same dress she had worn to the Stork Club the previous night, complete with blood stains down the front where Natasha had smashed her forehead open on a sink. Someone had carefully bandaged the injury, but Natasha was almost certain it would scar. It was the kind of mark that could be explained away after the war, whose privations covered up a multitude of sins, but Natasha considered the bandage with a certain amount of satisfaction anyway.

The manacles on her wrists jangled slightly as Lorraine flexed her fingers at the sight of Natasha. She was handcuffed to the table; she had also been searched for stray hair pins or lockpicks that could be sewn into the hems or cuffs of her dress or the underside of her brassiere. Natasha hadn’t had to tell anyone what to look for; Peggy and the other SSR women had already been familiar with all of those particular tricks.

She looked up as Natasha came in and apparently decided there was no point in striving for discretion as the better part of valor. “Taking Peggy’s job everywhere, not just in Captain Rogers’s bed?”

Natasha ignored the comment. She didn’t bother to sit down, just leaned her hip against the wall and crossed her arms over her chest, watching Lorraine with cool disinterest. Lorraine watched her back.

Natasha let the silence stretch out between them. Peggy Carter, who had no patience whatsoever, was watching from the observation room and probably wondering why Natasha didn’t just get on with it. Lorraine had been at the SSR since the summer of 1943; she knew not only Peggy’s methods but those of the other SSR interrogators, none of whom Natasha had met. Presumably she also knew Department X’s methods, which might or might not be the same as the Red Room’s. Neither Russian nor Soviet interrogation techniques were exactly what Natasha would call subtle.

The difference between Department X’s matryoshki and the Red Room’s Widows was that the matryoshki were spies first and killers second; the Widows were killers first and spies a distant second. Natasha had spent most of her life hunting men before she had moved on to hunting aliens and robots in company with gods, metahumans, and Captain America. She could be patient.

It took the better part of two hours, during which Natasha didn’t move at all, before Lorraine finally cracked and said, “Where did Rogers dig you up?”

“Same place you came from,” Natasha said.

“You’re not a doll,” Lorraine said.

“That’s not up to you to decide,” Natasha told her. She crossed to the table and leaned over it to grab Lorraine’s right hand. Lorraine jerked back, startled by the unexpected motion, but the manacles kept her from going anywhere. Natasha pushed her sleeve up to reveal the thin scar circling her wrist and nodded to herself, then released her and stepped away again.

“I killed the man who ran my House,” Natasha said, her tone light and conversational. “General Dreykov. He was a son of a bitch. Treated us like animals and thought of us as his children. Treated his own daughter that way too – nice to have while she was small and cute, nice to show around to all his party friends to prove what a good family man he was, but when she wasn’t small and cute anymore he put her in with the rest of us so he could have another attack dog. At least he never slept with us, but men don’t sleep with animals, do they?”

There was a flicker of something in Lorraine’s eyes, but she didn’t say anything, her gaze fixed on Natasha.

“Men lock animals up at night so that they don’t run away,” Natasha went on. “A animal born in a cage has no idea what an open door looks like. You can let it out and it will always come back. And if it doesn’t? If it’s killed out there in the world? There are always more.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Lorraine said.

“I was you,” Natasha said. She extracted a hairpin from her coiffure and tossed it down onto the table in front of her, out of Lorraine’s immediate reach but not impossible to get to. Lorraine’s gaze went to it, then back up to Natasha, wary and disbelieving.

“If you’re convicted of espionage, which you will be, you’ll go to prison,” Natasha went on. “I don’t think you’re worried about that and frankly I don’t think one could hold you; it’s a federal penitentiary, not the Gulag. Not that you’ll ever be able to compare, because the House won’t send you there. You screwed up and they know it. They’ll put a bullet in your head the same way they’d shoot a sick dog or a lame horse, because they don’t need you. There are always, always more.”

She nodded towards the hairpin. “There’s no one else to go running to Leviathan telling tales. You’re in here; they’re out there. Make your own choices.”

She turned her back on Lorraine and had her hand on the door before Lorraine said, “Who are you?”

Natasha glanced back over her shoulder; the other woman hadn’t moved. “Natalia Alianovna Romanova Rogers,” she said. “They call me the Black Widow – Chernaya vdova.”

She let herself out of the room when Lorraine didn’t respond.

As Natasha had expected, Peggy Carter came boiling out of the observation room almost as soon as the door had shut and locked behind her, with a stone-faced MP taking up his position outside it.

“What the devil was that?” she demanded.

Natasha shot a glance at the MP, who stared blandly forward as if he was on parade. She had no doubt that he would report every word of the conversation to Colonel Phillips. “What was what?”

“You are supposed to be interrogating her,” Peggy snapped. “Or have you forgotten? I’d like to find Steve before the Winter Guard takes him out of the country to God knows what fate.”

“God might know, but so do I,” Natasha said. “This isn’t my first rodeo, Agent Carter, I know what I’m doing.”

“Really? Because I have yet to see any evidence for that.”

“I guarantee you that if I went back in there and started pulling out fingernails, it wouldn’t have any effect,” Natasha said.

“Every minute you spend in that room feeding that little traitor a pack of lies – or God forbid, just standing there – is a minute taken from Steve’s life. If you actually cared about him at all, instead of –”

Natasha wondered briefly how much trouble she would be in if she just knocked Peggy out for a few hours and reluctantly decided against it; if nothing else, Steve would probably be annoyed when he found out. “If you get Steve killed because you’re too self-centered to let me do my job, I’ll kill you.”

That got the MP to look over.

Peggy’s mouth dropped open. “I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me.” Natasha went back into the interrogation room, the MP jumping hastily aside to let her pass. After a moment of frozen astonishment, Peggy followed her.

Lorraine was still seated, but the hairpin Natasha had left behind was nowhere in sight and her handcuffs were open on the table in front of her. Her gaze flicked from Natasha to Peggy and back to Natasha again as she sat down on the other side of the table. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because someone did it for me,” Natasha said. “It was in Paris. I was on a mark. It turned out to be a set-up by the Americans, but the agent sent to kill me made a different call. I didn’t take it very well at first.”

“Rogers,” Lorraine said.

“No, different guy, my old partner,” Natasha said, aware of Peggy settling against the wall behind her. “It was a long time before I met Steve. But before you ask, Steve knows all of this. He knows what I am.”

“And what’s that?”

“The same thing as you,” Natasha said. “A trained killer.”

Lorraine tilted her head to one side in acknowledgment. Natasha wondered for an instant about what Peggy was thinking of all this; she had been in the SSR with Lorraine for the last two years.

“Is that what you do for Captain Rogers?” Lorraine said. “Fuck him and kill for him?”

“He does his own killing; he doesn’t need me for that,” Natasha said calmly. “But he knows what I am.”

“I don’t want Captain Rogers,” Lorraine said. “He’s not my type.”

“That’s good to know,” Natasha said. “My husband’s not on offer.”

Lorraine’s gaze slid downwards to Natasha’s wedding and engagement rings, then went back to her face. “What do you want?”

“I want to know where the Winter Guard is holding Steve,” Natasha said.

“Why would I tell you that?” Lorraine asked. “Like you said, a federal penitentiary isn’t going to hold me.”

“I wouldn’t be so certain of that,” Peggy said from behind Natasha. “I think it’s at least worth a try. Or we could just shoot you; I’m rather fond of that idea myself.”

Natasha ignored her. “Because you hate Leviathan,” she told Lorraine. “You hate Department X. You hate them because they chained you to your bed every night when you were small and you hate them because you still do it today even when you’re on the other side of a continent from them. You hate them because they decide what you wear, what you eat, when you sleep, how you do your hair, what color you paint your nails, what lies you give to people they want to be your friends. You hate them because they tell you who to kill, who to fuck, who to be. You hate them because they’re the reason you know what it’s like to have someone take your brain and play, what it’s like to be unmade.”

There was another little flicker of something in Lorraine’s face, but she didn’t say anything.

“No pretty speeches about the glory of the Soviet Union for us,” Natasha said. “You don’t give speeches to animals and that is all we are to them; it’s all we have ever been and it’s all we ever will be as far as they’re concerned. Just animals to be worked until we can’t be worked anymore and then tossed aside because there are always, always more. More women. More little girls. More babies to steal from their families.”

Peggy stirred briefly behind Natasha, but didn’t say anything.

“Do you remember your parents?” Natasha asked.

This time a muscle worked briefly in Lorraine’s jaw. “I don’t know. Flashes, sometimes.” Then she blinked, as if she had just realized what she had said. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t remember my parents,” Natasha said. “My mother, my father. I went looking once; I could never find anything, not even their names. Alianovna is from his name – the man who trained me. Who’s Ilya, Irina Ilyinichna?”

Her gaze went sideways, then back to Natasha. She didn’t answer.

“How many of the girls from your generation are alive now?” Natasha asked her. “How many grew up so that Leviathan could send them to die in this war under names that aren’t their own, wearing uniforms that don’t belong to them, fighting for something they don’t believe in? How many of them never got that far? You hate Leviathan because you know exactly how many of your sisters died because Leviathan told you to kill them, and you did.”

A tear slid slowly down Lorraine’s cheek, lingered for an instant on her chin, and then fell to the metal surface of the table.

“You owe them nothing,” Natasha said. “You owe them less than nothing.”

“I don’t owe you anything, either.” Her voice was a little thick.

“No, you don’t,” Natasha agreed. “But I’ll tell you a secret.”

Lorraine’s gaze flickered upwards to her and she cocked her head a little.

Natasha braced her hands on the table and leaned forward, half-standing so that she could whisper in Lorraine’s ear, “They are going to burn. Not today, not tomorrow, not next week, not even next year, but they are going to burn and every one of those bastards with them.”

She sat back, her gaze fixed on Lorraine’s face.

For a long time, Lorraine didn’t say anything. When she did speak, her voice shook a little. “What did it feel like to know that he was dead?”

Natasha had to think about it. “It was a long time before I could really believe it,” she said finally. “Some days I still don’t. You can know something, but that doesn’t mean that you know it in your bones. But when I do – when I wake up in the night and I remember that I’m here and not there – it feels like I can breathe.”

“You know what she is,” Dottie repeated, curious and just a little bewildered. “It doesn’t bother you at all? It bothers them.” She tipped her head in the direction of the door, beyond which he assumed the Winter Guard was camped out. “Men like Aleksey or Misha say they don’t mind a woman who kills men, but at the end of the day, they do. They always need to think they’re bigger and tougher than a little girl.” She gave him her small, sly smile, like she was sharing a secret with him.

Steve just looked back at her. Natasha had said something like that to him before; he knew in his bones that most of the men they knew thought that in a fair fight they could take her, even if it would never have occurred to them to say so out loud. Not Clint or Sam; both of them had too much experience with women fighters and with Natasha specifically. Tony, though, Rhodey, Ross, even Bruce when he wasn’t the Hulk – most men just didn’t believe a woman could beat them in a fight, no matter who it was or how well they knew her. They might know it intellectually, but back in their lizard hindbrains –

Steve, who had spent the first quarter-century of his life getting beat up in back alleys, knew better than to hold any illusions about anyone’s physical capability, least of all his own or his team’s.

“The only problem I have with women who kill men is if the guy they’re trying to kill is me,” he said dryly. “We’re in a war, remember? Or have you been spending so long spying on your own side that you forgot?”

“You’re not my side,” Dottie said easily.

“Oh, right,” Steve said. “You guys play all the sides, don’t you, just like Stalin before Barbarossa? Some of you ladies over in Berlin right now too? You could have just knocked Hitler off six years ago and saved us all a lot of trouble.”

“You’re changing the subject, Captain.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “I love my wife. She and I both do the same thing for a living, so I don’t see why her doing it is supposed to bother me. Happy now?”

“Love’s a funny thing,” Dottie mused. “People are always talking about it, but –”

“Darya.”

A muscle twitched in Dottie’s jaw, but she looked over at the door, where Mikhail Ursus, Josef Petkus, and Nikolai Krylenko were standing; Krylenko was on crutches, to Steve’s private satisfaction. So he’d been right about having broken a bone or two during their brief scuffle. On the other hand, he had the feeling that Krylenko and Petkus were about to do their best to make him regret their earlier fight.

Ursus went on in Russian, “Take a break.”

“I don’t take orders from you,” Dottie said in the same language. Steve guessed that Darya was her real name, or at least whatever passed for it in Department X; he knew from Natasha that in that particular line of work real was, as Dottie had said, a matter of perception.

“Then stay if you want, but it won’t be a sight for a woman’s eyes. And Aleksey has something for you to do.”

“Such big, brave men,” Dottie said scornfully. “A tribute to the motherland, I’m sure.” She considered Steve, then the three Red Army commandos, before she shrugged and said, “You boys play nice.”

She handed the shotgun off to Ursus as she left, her low heels tapping against the floor.

“Fellas.” Steve, with difficulty and pain shooting through his bad shoulder, managed to lever himself to his feet as the three men approached; Krylenko’s crutches tapping against the floor and Petkus visibly limping. Steve let his gaze drift across them and then back up, smirking a little.

Ursus carefully took the shells out of the shotgun and put them into a pocket of his undoubtedly-stolen British army jacket, then tossed the weapon aside with a clatter. “I heard Barnes was killed, what, two months ago? Three? You don’t seem to be grieving overmuch.”

“I didn’t know you cared, Misha,” Steve said in Russian, feeling a muscle in his jaw twitch. Right now in 1945, Bucky was in Soviet hands. They had never been able to determine exactly what had happened, but as best he and Sam and Natasha had figured out, Bucky had been found by the Red Army and turned over to SMERSH, which had already been infiltrated by Hydra fifth columnists. The only thing was that the Red Army hadn’t been operating in that part of Austria at the time, which raised the question of who exactly had found him. It was entirely possible that it had been the Winter Guard, on the same mission that the Howling Commandos had been on but arriving too late. As far as he knew, it was only Department X that had a bitter rivalry with SMERSH; the Winter Guard would have turned Bucky over without hesitation.

He stared at Mikhail Ursus, trying to decide if there was something more to his mockery than what was on the surface. Ursus was an ass, that was no secret, and Steve probably should have expected him to throw Bucky in his face, but if he knew –

If he knew, Steve was going to tear his throat out. With his teeth, if necessary.

If he knew, he didn’t say as much “I thought maybe you were sad for him when you vanished with Schmidt, but here you are with a pretty new wife…” He let the words trail off meaningfully.

Steve just stared back at him. The first time around in 1945 Steve probably would have gone for him; this time he knew Bucky was alive, here and up in 2018. Maybe not happy about it, but alive, and he could live with that for now.

Ursus seemed a little disappointed by his lack of reaction. “Well,” he said, shrugged, and punched Steve in the face.

Steve staggered backwards but managed to stay on his feet despite the manacles on his ankles. He spat blood aside where he’d cut the inside of his lip on the edge of a tooth and said, “That’s what we’re going with, a beatdown? That’s original; what have you been doing, taking lessons from all the Hydra refugees you’ve been rounding up?”

Ursus threw another punch at him.

Steve had, over the course of the past ninety-nine years of his life – thirty-three if you wanted to subtract the icebox years – gotten knocked around by the Red Skull, successive waves of aliens, a god, Ultron and his gang of robots, most of the active STRIKE teams, Hydra goons in two different centuries, various enterprising and overly-optimistic terrorists, the Winter Soldier, Tony Stark in the Iron Man suit, the other half of his own team, and most recently Thanos himself, not to mention every bully in Brooklyn and a couple from each of the other four boroughs plus New Jersey. He could handle three pissed off Soviet commandos, even if he wasn’t going to be very happy about it either during or afterwards.

He turned his head so that Ursus’s fist went pass him with only a whistle of air, then dodged Petkus’s blow. He couldn’t do this for long, not with both hands and feet manacled, but if he hadn’t been chained up he would have just taken care of everyone here and gone back to the SSR hours ago. Steve was also well aware, mostly from the pre-serum days, that in the long run – long being the next five minutes – this was just going to make things worse, but in the short run it was very funny.

“Stand still,” Petkus said when Steve dodged the next couple of blows; Steve hadn’t paid much attention to his accent in 1944, not that Josef Petkus had ever been a big talker, but after three years with Wanda he was startled to recognize the Sokovian edge to the Russian vowels.

“I can arrange that,” Krylenko growled, and knocked Steve’s feet out from under him with one of his crutches.

Steve hit the floor hard, then had to bite his tongue on a reflexive yelp as Krylenko ground the end of his crutch down into his bullet wound. He curled up as best he could to protect his face against the punches and kicks that followed; he really didn’t want to find out if his enhanced healing would work as well on a crushed eyeball as it did on a punctured lung. He had also been beaten up enough times to not be anything other than grimly resigned to it, though he managed to get in a few good licks with his bound feet. What hadn’t changed pre- and post- serum was that he was more afraid than anything else of having his hands broken, so he kept them fisted behind him, trying to keep them out of the way. Broken hand bones would heal, but as small as they were, they would heal crooked and need to be rebroken later on in order to be set straight.

Despite the blows, he heard the sound of Aleksey Lebedev’s approach. He stood for a while watching the beating, then said bluntly, “Enough.” When that didn’t have the desired effect, he said it again, louder and with a soldier’s snap to it, “Enough!”

That got the desired effect, though Petkus got in last kick before he stepped back. Steve pushed himself upright, wincing, and spat out another mouthful of blood and a tooth, which was going to hurt like the devil to regrow. He could tell that his bullet wound had come open again; the entire left side of his shirt was sodden with fresh blood and his shoulder was one giant throb of pain.

Lebedev didn’t look all that much happier than Steve felt. His left hand was wrapped up in bandages and from what Steve could smell past the scent of his own blood, he had been self-medicating with alcohol.

He came over and looked down at Steve. “If Moscow didn’t want you alive –” he said in English, as if to be absolutely certain Steve understood him.

Steve spat again. “But they do,” he said in the same language. “So you can go straight to hell, and the Kremlin with you while you’re at it.”

Lebedev kicked him in the head, knocking him back down, then put the heel of his boot on Steve’s bullet wound and ground down, sending white-hot pain shooting through Steve’s body. Steve gritted his teeth against his reflexive yell, his vision whiting out briefly.

“There are ways,” Lebedev said, “that I could make you regret this very much.” He lifted his bandaged hand slightly.

“Yeah, I bet there are,” Steve told him coldly, panting a little. The Brooklyn was starting to come out in his vowels now, his old elocution lessons slipping from pain. “Maybe we’re both going to find out, huh?”

“I can assure you that we are,” Lebedev said.

Steve stared up at him, breathing hard, and thought, Do you know? If the Winter Guard had been the ones to find Bucky – if Lebedev knew that he had been turned over to SMERSH and SMERSH hadn’t handed him back over to the U.S. –

He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t read the knowledge on Lebedev’s face, but he couldn’t read the absence of it there either.

Lebedev put his good hand out behind him and Ursus put a hypodermic needle into it, the syringe already loaded up with the same damn thing they had given Steve a few times already. Petkus put a foot on Steve’s good shoulder to hold him down as Lebedev stuck him with the hypodermic and depressed the needle.

“Not long now, Captain,” he said.

“Larionova doesn’t know where the Winter Guard is holed up with Steve,” Peggy said, scrupulous about using Irina Larionova’s real name instead of her cover. “She says she didn’t have to know and it was better if she didn’t because she was embedded here.”

Phillips made a noise of disgust and sat back in his chair, tossing a pencil down onto his desk. He didn’t ask how Natasha had gotten Larionova to talk. “She say anything actually useful?”

“Shockingly, yes. She knows the protocol for alerting the rezidentura at the embassy that she or Plisetskaya needs to make a handover off-schedule. Normally she would pass everything along to Plisetskaya and Plisetskaya would pass it off to their handler in the embassy, who sticks it in the diplomatic bag and sends it off to Moscow, but Larionova knew it too, just in case Plisetskaya was out of the city or it was too bulky for a double handover.”

The sound of Howard grinding his teeth was loud enough that both Peggy and Phillips glanced over at him.

“How is this helpful now?” Phillips asked.

“Because we’ve confirmed that someone flew that particular flag in the last twenty-four hours,” Peggy said. “Which means that at 7:15 tonight there will be a member of the Soviet embassy staff approaching a particular street corner in Shepherd Market expecting to make contact with an NKVD asset. We can safely assume it’s neither Plisetskaya or Larionova, given that both of them are sitting in SSR cells just now. According to Larionova at least one other woman was also in the London area, but Plisetskaya handled both of them and Larionova never met her. Under the circumstances –”

“They’re handing over Steve’s blood samples,” Howard said.

“I think we can assume that, yes.”

He ground his teeth again. When Peggy had stopped by the lab to fetch him for this meeting, it had been in a state of high alarm, engineers and other scientists cowering and Howard stalking around in fury, all of them trying to figure out what Irina Larionova might have had access to and whether anything was missing. His obvious fear for Steve was only making the whole situation worse.

The only good thing, he had confided to Peggy on their way to Colonel Phillips’ office, was that all of the Project Rebirth research was back in the United States, where Larionova couldn’t get her hands on them. She had confirmed to Natasha that there hadn’t been any matryoshki involved in the original project back in 1942 and 1943. The only Rebirth material in the London headquarters was in Howard’s notes – and Steve himself.

“What are we doing about it?”

“We have people watching the embassy and people watching the rendezvous point,” Peggy said. “When they make the handover, one team will follow the embassy official –” Probably a junior staff member, like a driver or an attaché. “– and the other will follow the matryoshka. With luck she’ll lead us back to the Winter Guard’s hiding place. The Commandos will be standing by to move as soon as we have a confirmed site. Our first team will intercept the embassy official and relieve him of his package, preferably without him noticing, but I’m quite happy to make a fuss if it comes to that as long as we get it. I’ve told them that they’re to say they’re from the Security Service.”

“I’m sure MI5’s going to love that,” Howard muttered.

“Given that MI5 has an entire division dedicated to catching communist spies, I rather believe this is their problem in the first place and now we’re cleaning up after their mess,” Peggy snapped.

“Since Lorraine’s one of ours, that’s not how they’ll see it,” Phillips said. “They also know now that we ran an operation on British soil last night and they’re about as thrilled about that as you can imagine.”

Peggy looked at him in alarm. “We don’t have to take them with us tonight, do we?”

“Just don’t shoot anyone with diplomatic immunity and we’ll apologize afterwards.” Then he cocked an eyebrow at her. “‘We’?”

She shrugged in response, unrepentant.

“Just get this taken care of,” Phillips said. “And remember that we’re not actually at war with the Soviets, current appearances aside.”

“Yes, sir,” Peggy said, taking the dismissal for what it was and standing up. Howard followed a moment later and they left Phillips behind, chewing on the end of a stub of pencil and sorting through files. Howard wasn’t the only one who had to figure out what papers had been copied or stolen and passed onto the Soviets.

“Bad?” Peggy asked Howard in an undertone.

“Like you’ve got no idea,” he said, grinding his teeth again. “Lorraine didn’t happen to say what she’d passed along, did she?”

“We didn’t get that far,” Peggy said. She made a beckoning gesture at him and when Howard stared at her blankly, she clarified, “Flask.”

He dug it out from inside his waistcoat and passed it to her. “That bad, huh?”

Peggy shook the flask experimentally, then tucked it into her jacket. “It’s not for me.”

For a moment Howard looked confused, then his expression softened and he said again, his tone a little different this time, “That bad, huh?”

Peggy made a vague gesture.

“Want company?”

“I think in this particular case it’s probably better not to have it,” she said. “But thank you.”

Howard nodded. “Let me know before you go Red-hunting tonight,” he said.

“I will,” Peggy promised. She left him headed back in the direction of his lab in order to keep figuring out how much damage Irina Larionova had done and went upstairs to the canteen.

It was an off hour and there weren’t many people around. Natasha Romanoff Rogers was sitting at the end of a table with Jones and Falsworth a little ways along it, talking quietly and playing cards. They both looked up as Peggy came in, then got up at her nod and moved to the opposite end of the table. Natasha looked up too, her expression wary as Peggy sat down across from her.

Her eyebrows rose slightly as Peggy produced Howard’s flask and poured a tot of his good brandy into her mostly empty coffee cup, then found a new cup and poured herself some, sans coffee. From the smell Peggy could tell it was ersatz coffee, not the real thing, and she wasn’t in the mood for that.

“What do you want?” Natasha asked her, sounding tired.

“Do you hate me?” Peggy asked her. It wasn’t the question she had meant to ask.

Natasha shook her head. “Why would I hate you?”

“Because I’d take your husband if I could.” It was the first time Peggy had said the words out loud and even she winced a little at how blunt they were. She had never wanted to be that kind of woman; she wasn’t particularly enjoying finding out that she was that kind of woman.

Natasha shook her head again. “That’s not exactly grounds to hate someone. If I’m going to hate someone, I have better reasons for it.” For a moment her expression was bleak, though Peggy had the impression she was being allowed to see it.

You hate them because they tell you who to kill, who to fuck, who to be…

“It was true, wasn’t it?” Peggy asked her. “What you said to Larionova today?”

“Most of it,” Natasha said. “Not all the details. Some of it was different when I was there.” She tapped the back of her wrist with one finger. “They weren’t handcuffing us to our beds anymore, but that was a fairly recent development. I thought I saw the scars back at the club. Melina – an older Widow I know – still had them from when she was small.” She looked away, her gaze distant. After a moment she looked back and pushed her sleeves up to show Peggy her unmarked wrists.

Peggy inspected the smooth skin silently, not entirely certain what she could say. She would have liked to continue believing it was a lie, but there was a note of grim sincerity in Natasha’s voice that told her otherwise. And she had been in that room. She had seen Irina Larionova break.

“Did you kill him?” Peggy asked. “The man – Dreykov, you said his name was.”

Natasha’s mouth worked for a moment. “No, I just blew his daughter to hell trying. I thought I did, but it turns out I only sent him scurrying underground for the next eight years like the rat he was. He’s dead now – really dead, I saw it. But it wasn’t me, it was my sister. Who did it doesn’t matter, just that he’s dead and can’t hurt anyone else, and that the Red Room’s gone.”

She looked down at her coffee cup, readjusting her sleeves to cover her wrists again. “I spent eight years thinking that by destroying him I could destroy it and that things would just work out for everyone there, for all the Widows, but I just gave him the excuse he needed to disappear. And he kept killing people, destroying lives, until –” She lifted one hand in a vague gesture. “When I defected – I found out later, a lot later, that he had every Widow in my generation killed, just in case the flaws in my programming weren’t unique to me. And then he made sure that none of the other Widows could do the same thing I did.” She gave Peggy a thin smile. “So maybe I killed more people leaving than I ever would have if I’d stayed.”

“Would you have stayed if you’d known?” Peggy asked curiously. She was uncertain what exactly Natasha meant by programming, but the general meaning was clear.

“I don’t know,” Natasha said. She turned her coffee cup in precise quarter circles, the handle at right angles to the edge of the table. “I’d like to say that I would have, that I’d have found some other way, but I think I would have put a bullet in my brain before the year was out.” She shut her eyes, closing her hands convulsively around the cup; the slight clatter of her rings against the ceramic told Peggy that she was trembling. “When you’re desperate enough it doesn’t matter who you hurt as long as you can get out, and I needed out. I didn’t know I needed out until Clint threw me a rope.”

After a moment she drank off her brandy-laced ersatz coffee in one gulp.

“That’s the secret about places like the Red Room or Department X, Agent Carter,” she said quietly. “We’d all see them burn if we could, but most of us will never know that we want it. When you’re raised in a cage, you don’t know what an open door looks like until someone shows you one.”

Three hours later, Peggy was lingering in a doorway in London’s red-light district, which hopefully was Moscow’s idea of a joke and not Irina Larionova’s. There were a lot of civilian women around, likewise lingering, though with different intentions than Peggy; she had already been propositioned twice. She was thinking about shooting the next man who asked.

She wasn’t the only SSR agent out here, of course. Peggy didn’t bother looking around for any of the others, aware that in the darkness of the blackout and the thick fog that she wouldn’t spot them. They were there, that was the important part.

She rubbed her hands together against the damp chill in the air, shoving down her nervous prickle of unease at being out in the open during the blackout. If Steve and Natasha were right, then there wouldn’t be any more V-1s or V-2s, but after years living first with the Blitz and then with the rocket attacks Peggy couldn’t bring herself to believe that. Not until the lights came on again.

A flicker of movement in the shadows caught her attention. The woman who paused on the street corner opposite her was tall and blonde, wearing a heavy wool coat against the cold air. Peggy eyed her and tried to decide if she looked familiar. She didn’t have Steve’s memory for faces.

She was still watching when a heavyset man came striding up to the blonde woman and then past her. As if she had been signaled, the blonde turned and walked in the opposite direction. Peggy followed, drifting after her at a distance just far enough back that she could melt into the London fog if necessary. Less than a minute later the other woman stepped into a doorway where the man was waiting. They spoke for less than a minute; Peggy was intrigued to see the man recoil briefly in horror from whatever the woman had told him. They were gone again a moment later, the woman heading towards the Green Park Underground station and the man moving at right angles away from her. Peggy followed her.

At this hour there were still quite a number of people around; the Underground hadn’t stopped running yet, though shelterers had already started to camp out on the platforms. There weren’t as many as there had been during the Blitz, but Peggy knew that while Britain was still at war there were some people who would never feel safe sleeping in their own homes, assuming they still had them. They had no way of knowing that the rocket attacks had stopped.

Peggy spotted the other two SSR agents following the blonde woman only because she knew they were already there. None of them acknowledged each other, just collected their tickets and went down the stairs to the northbound Piccadilly Line platform. Peggy dodged two children pelting up and down the stairs and ignoring the calls of their mother to stop that, they’d kill someone, and took up a position on the platform. She produced a paperback novel from her jacket pocket and opened it as she waited for the train, pretending to read and watching the blonde woman over the top of the book.

When the train pulled in, Peggy closed the book and got on without hesitation, not waiting to see if the blonde boarded too. One of the other SSR agents had gotten himself embroiled in what seemed to be a conversation, looking anxiously at the train and then back in the direction of the stairs as he talked, like he was trying to determine if this was the right train to take. The other SSR agent was nowhere in sight.

The blonde swung onto the train just as the doors started to close, to Peggy’s intense relief; up until now she had been running the chance that she had been following a completely innocent civilian. The old spy trick of getting on or off a train or bus at the last moment must have been invented shortly after the invention of the first omnibus, if not the first boat, and was one that Peggy herself was extremely familiar with.

She produced her book again, making certain to turn pages from time to time to make it seem as though she was actually reading it, and kept an eye on the blonde, who was holding onto a rail at the other end of the compartment. Both women got off at King’s Cross St. Pancras and changed for the Circle Line, riding it once in its entirety before getting off at Monument and crossing to Bank to transfer to the Central Line. Peggy boarded the carriage behind the blonde and quickly pulled a scarf up over her hair to change her silhouette slightly; her plain dark coat was identical to a dozen others she had seen in the past hour.

This process was repeated for the better part of the next two hours, going on and off trains and the occasional bus when they left the Underground. Peggy thought they had managed to lose one of the other SSR agents, but she and the remaining agent stayed with the blonde all the way until she got off a bus in the Isle of Dogs, which at this hour didn’t have many people around. Peggy glanced at the faint glitter of the Thames in the dark and thought, Howard was right, they must be planning to leave via submarine.

She put her hand into her pocket for her pistol, closing her fingers around its reassuring grip, and trailed the blonde, the back of her neck prickling. The other SSR agent was on the opposite side of the street, moving purposefully along like he knew exactly where he was going. There was plenty of cover; the area around the docks had been heavily bombed during the Blitz and many of the warehouses in the area had either been completely destroyed or so damaged that they weren’t in use. It was the perfect place for an enemy strike team to hide with a captive officer; unlike the more residential parts of London no one would be around to hear any suspicious noises or watch their comings and goings. There were no tube stations nearby, either.

As she had expected, the blonde went into one of the damaged warehouses – one of the few left even partially standing in its immediate vicinity, which meant that Peggy and the other SSR agent couldn’t approach closely without risking being seen, blackout or no blackout. She got as close as she thought she safely could, gesturing to the other agent to circle around and check the perimeter. He did so and she waited in the damp chill dark of the night, listening to the distant sound of the Thames and its traffic.

When he returned, he crept to her side and they withdrew a little so that he could whisper, “I saw two on overwatch. It’ll be a beast to assault, ma’am, they’ll see anyone coming from a mile off.”

“Not until the sun comes up,” Peggy whispered back. “Any sign of Rogers?”

“Couldn’t get close enough.”

Peggy nodded to herself. Just now she would have given a lot for the miniaturized radio equipment that Steve and Natasha had been carrying when they arrived; the current equivalent was too bulky to use for undercover work. “Stay here,” she ordered the agent. “I’m going to find a telephone box or a cab and contact headquarters.”

God alone knew how she was going to find a telephone box in the Isle of Dogs at ten o’clock in the evening. The distinctive red paint might make them visible in the daytime, but it was next to useless in the blackout.

She ended up having to catch another bus, which she took all the way into the City before she spotted a phone box from the window. She couldn’t connect directly to the SSR; the operator sent her to another operator at the War Office switchboard, to whom Peggy gave her code before she was connected to the SSR, where she had to give her code again before she was connected to Colonel Phillips.

“We’ve got them,” she told Phillips as soon as he came on the line. “They’re holed up in an abandoned warehouse at the docks in the Isle of Dogs.”

He grunted acknowledgment. “Situation?”

Peggy laid it out for him as best she had been able to determine. Hopefully no one was bothering to tap the London public phone lines, but at the moment there was nothing Peggy could do about it. “I’d advise not waiting,” she finished.

“We’re moving now,” Phillips confirmed. “We’ll pick you up on the way. We’re ending this tonight.”