Chapter 6
Sharon was already on her phone at her desk, her computer monitor streaming two live feeds of the situation in London when Peggy tracked her down half-an-hour later. Many on Sharon’s level were in fact watching the events play out, but only Sharon was in the apparent thick of it. She met Peggy’s eye as she came to her cubicle, nodding and waving to an empty desk nearby.
“Right...the news hasn’t released any casualty numbers. There was a night shift on duty, but no word how close they were to the blast. Yeah...well, Scotland Yard is on the scene along with MI5, they will feed back to our office there. Yeah….as soon as I can. Thanks.”
With a sigh, she hung up her phone, turning to Peggy with a sad smile. “So, this is my day. How was yours?”
“Frustrating, but perhaps not in the same way yours has been.” She nodded to the news feed. “Whereabouts did they hit?”
“South London, mostly an industrial area, thankfully, so minimizes the people hit, but still enough. It’s the middle of the night there, so it was completely unexpected.” She frowned at the coverage for a long moment. “They hit a pharmaceutical place fairly badly and managed to get a shipping company, but reports are still coming in on damage.”
Peggy nodded, watching as flames poured out of a building with a glowing sign saying only MST. “Why the pharmaceutical company?”
“We don’t know yet,” Sharon replied, flipping through notes. “Could just be a coincidence or a mistake. There is a dockyard nearby that might have been a target.”
“I heard that MST Pharmaceuticals has a contract with the UN, doing work abroad in poor nations.” Peggy considered the conversation she had overheard. “I don’t know if that’s important or not, but the CIA is clearly not happy this case got bumped over to you.”
Sharon blinked up at her in mild surprise, startled at Peggy’s pronouncement. “How did you hear that?”
“I was just up at the Capital, and there is some woman over at Langley named Linda who has a whisper that carries in marble halls. How she is working for an intelligence agency, I don’t know.”
After a beat, Sharon shook her head, running her fingers through her hair. “I wish I could say I was surprised by either the fact that someone at the CIA was indiscreet or that you happened to ferret it out. Did they not see you standing there?”
“Worse, they knew I was and did it anyway.” Peggy couldn’t say she thought much of this Linda, however, Jake Nance was playing his own game. “I chatted with the NSA Director over it, though. He had a lot to say about SHIELD in general.”
“I bet he did. People are pretty pissed at us over there, but considering we did fire a nuke on a civilian population without any warning that it was an option, I sort of get the worry and resentment.”
“He was more worried about SHIELD having the Avengers.”
“Why? What does he think SHIELD would do with them?”
“I don’t know,” Peggy admitted, frowning softly, playing through the conversation. “There seems to be a general fear that SHIELD is somehow the biggest bullies on the block. They have the weapons, the armies, and now the Avengers, and only the UN to oversee them. I suppose that has them spooked.”
“This coming from a man who works for the government of the most powerful nation in the world, with the biggest army and arsenal in the world?” Sharon’s rather unladylike snort conveyed her feelings rather eloquently. “Honestly, they seem more upset that we came in and pissed in their yard.”
Peggy lifted a shoulder. “I suppose, he certainly sounded that way about this Mandarin case. He asked if you would consider working with some of his people on this.”
She suspected Sharon wouldn’t like that, and it was confirmed when her niece’s dark eyes flashed in annoyance. “Honestly? The CIA sat on this case for months and didn’t make any hay out of it. Now it’s suddenly an issue?”
“Did you know that there were more than just the three attacks you told me about?”
That caught Sharon short. “They only told me about those ones. How many?”
“Ten, my guess is the others are likely military, who won’t confess it, or are involved in some way that the CIA wants to cover it up.”
“Shit!” She tossed her pen viciously against her desk. The plastic bounced up and off her desk, rolling to the floor beyond her feet. “I thought there were missing pieces, but they insisted that was what they had. Why are they playing politics with this?”
“I don’t know.” Peggy wished she did, if nothing else to give Sharon a leg up. This was her first big case by herself as an operative, her first chance to shine, and she was being handicapped going out of the gate. Having been in that position a time or two herself, Peggy hated to see it for her.
She leaned down to snatch the pen angrily from the carpet, glaring at no one in particular. “We are dealing with a terrorist who is escalating and they want to play games of who gets to do what first?”
“I am only reporting what Director Nance discussed with me.” If there was one thing she could say hadn’t changed, it was the petty games of politics and intrigue that surrounded these sorts of things. She had witnessed it with the Whitney Frost case, and it still held true now. “I suppose that if you want more information on the others you perhaps should reach out to them.”
Sharon did not seem thrilled with that. “They will want to play political hardball with this and make life difficult.”
“I suppose they will, but as you say, if this is true, this Mandarin is escalating and people will start dying soon. You may not have a choice.”
“I know.” Sharon’s anger and disappointment were palatable. She tapped the pen lightly against her desk, shaking her head in annoyance. “You know, when Dad used to tell me all those stories about you, he made it all sound so glamorous. I spend most of my time trying to figure out which political minefield to step into or not. I suppose it’s not as cool as television and movies like to portray it as.”
“No,” Peggy admitted with a dry chuckle. “Certainly not like your Agent Knight television show.”
Sharon snorted, laughing outright. “Well, not all of us can be the cool, sexy secret agent, I suppose.
“I don’t think even I was that that way, whatever Angie and Howard concocted on that script.” Peggy had seen the show and found it mildly amusing and somewhat embarrassing, with none of it being true. “The truth is that very little of my work was glamorous. I had to deal with the same jurisdictional games you are, the same resistance, the same petty infighting, worse even because I had the added layer of working with men who had no desire to work with me.”
Sharon knew this, of course, but in the frustration of the moment often it was hard to remember that. She smiled, softly, a hint of admiration in her dark eyes. “How did you ever manage?”
“One could arguably say I didn’t. I left for the future where at least I’m only berated for not doing what some senator from Kentucky wanted, not because I’m a woman in a man’s world.”
“But you put up with it far longer than I would.” Sharon seemed convinced of this fact. Peggy somehow felt that her niece was made of sterner stuff than she was giving herself credit for.
“I don’t know, when you are living in it, breathing it, it’s your entire system and the only thing you’ve ever known, perhaps you are...I don’t know if patient is the right word, but I suppose I had grown rather expectant of it. It was there, I was fighting against it, but I knew it was the game and I knew what to expect and how to push against that. It would be difficult, I think, to not be used to that and then have to fight against it.”
“Don’t be fooled, we still do awful things to little girls.” Sharon frowned sadly for a long moment. “Little boys too, I suppose, but that’s a whole other discussion on gender and society we can have for another day, and has nothing to do with this.”
She turned back to her monitor, a reporter for British Broadcasting was now on screen, their voice silent for the moment, save the running text of the captioning on the bottom. “I’m heading out for the London office tonight. I’m hoping the team there is able to get more out of MI5 than I was out of the CIA. They are on the ground now, so who knows, maybe.”
Her mention of the London office and the team there brought a soft grin of reminiscence to Peggy’s face, a memory of a time that felt like only a minute ago to her, but in actuality was decades ago, the players now all mostly dead and gone. “The London office was the first non-American SHIELD office ever founded, you know.”
“By you, Fred Wells, and Grandpa, as I remember.” Sharon knew her history. “As I recall it was in response to all the Darkmoor business?”
“Yes.” Peggy’s memory wilted, slightly. It was all far more complicated than that, a moment that had shaken Peggy’s family and her own understanding of why she was walking the path that she was on. “In any case, I suppose it will be a sort of homecoming for you, then, going back there.”
“Something like that. I haven’t been back to England since Grandpa died, so this will be a first, but it won’t precisely be much of a vacation, not with this hanging overhead. No sight-seeing for me.”
“I haven’t seen it at all since then.” Despite being in the future now for over two years, Peggy had yet to make it back to her ancestral homeland. It was one of the ghosts of her past she was most pained to visit, the one wound she couldn’t bring herself to prod. “Admittedly, I haven’t precisely had a reason to.”
Sharon seemed to understand. “Well, the old house is there, you know, the old place in Hampstead. It was left to Dad and Maggie when Grandpa died and they just never got around to selling it, which considering the prices you can fetch there is a pity, but they are a whole ocean away. Besides, they tend to use it as a vacation home.”
There was some comfort in knowing her family’s old home was still intact and in the Carter family’s hands, more so than Peggy would have expected. She hadn’t lived there since she had left to join the SOE and hadn’t seen it since the business with Michael. She wondered, vaguely, if her mother’s old rose bushes were still there, grown and thriving nearly a century on. What had become of her father’s study, his shelves of law books and stacks of unorganized papers, all dusty and smelling of her father’s perpetual pipe smoke? If she were to visit, would she still find Michael’s tin soldiers buried in the garden or the old adventure magazines her father had always brought home for her to read. Did the ghost of who she had once been still wander her old home in Hampstead? What would that Peggy, the girl who had run around her garden pretending to be a knight and space warrior think of the woman who sat here now, thousands of miles and nine decades away, in a future that seemed fantastical to her then.
“You should go one of these days,” Sharon cut into her reminiscing, oblivious to the many feelings swirling within Peggy at the very idea of it. “Take Steve with you. He’s not been back there since the war. London now will blow your minds.”
“I’m sure.” When she had left the city she had grown up in had been ravaged by war and destruction, swathes of it bombed out of existence. Much of the country had been like that, and it had taken decades for it to recover. “Perhaps after he’s had some time to adjust more we can. It would be nice, I think.”
“You keep speaking as if he is completely overwhelmed by everything here and now. He seems to be adjusting all right.”
To be fair, Sharon was right, Steve was adapting at a rapid raid, faster than even Peggy had expected. Already he was technology savvy enough to manage the various household appliances that came with his new flat, even if he steadfastly insisted he preferred to have an old-fashioned style turntable to listen to music on over the surround sound system run off his phone that Stark had suggested he install. Steve’s adaptation to the modern world was happening far more quickly than Peggy’s had, if she were honest with herself.
“With him starting his new role here at SHIELD, partnering with Romanoff, it’s not a good time to drag him off to reminisce about old times and places long gone.” Perhaps that would be an excuse that was more palatable to her niece. “Let him get his feet under him with Romanoff and then maybe we can talk.”
Sharon narrowed her eyes at Peggy’s explanation, but didn’t argue with it. “You know, there is no such thing as ghosts, really.”
Peggy knew what she meant, but decided to tease her just the same. “You and I work in intelligence and espionage, we both know there are ghosts.”
“Not those type,” Sharon snorted, but it made her laugh and seemed to put her in a better mood. “Anyway, I need to get back to this and then get home and pack. I’ll let you know how things are going while I’m over there.”
“Please do.” Despite the fact she was not involved in the case and had no business being on it, Peggy found herself intrigued all the same. “And if there is any help I can give…”
“I’ll make sure to call you.” Sharon waved her off reassuringly. “When are you heading back to New York?”
“In a couple of days, they are setting up some new labs at Stark Tower for the ‘Avengers area’ as Stark is calling it. Betty Ross will be in town to help and I told Banner I would check in.”
“Where’s Stark at?”
“He headed back to Malibu.” It felt that Stark was everywhere at once, bouncing between New York and his home on the Pacific coast. And he had lectured her about long distance relationships. “He said something about the workers giving him hives, which we all know is him being over-dramatic and rather awful. I think he is hiding out there for now until things quiet down at the tower enough for him to come back.”
“Must be nice to be rich and snooty enough to hide from construction noise in a palatial mansion overlooking the ocean. Anyway, have fun up there. I’m sure you’ll be back in days to moon over Steve again.”
“I don’t moon,” Peggy retorted, despite the flush that rose to her cheeks that said she knew perfectly well Sharon’s teasing was true.
“Please! Being in the room with the pair of you gives me diabetes,” Sharon kidded, with the good-natured ribbing of family. “The only one worse about it all than you is Steve. He would never make it as a spy, he wears his heart too much on his sleeve.”
“That much is true,’ Peggy laughed, rising from her borrowed office chair. “He never has been particularly good at lying, I am afraid.”
“Well, a good thing here, as he’s smitten with you.” Sharon paused, sweetly thoughtful. “It’s nice, though, seeing you two happy with each other. Not all of us meet our soul mate, fewer of us get to spend our forever with them. We may give you two crap, but it’s still nice to see.”
It was a sort of earnestness she wasn’t expecting out of Sharon in the moment. “Thank you.” Unsure of what else she could say, she instead chose to grab her things, hauling her briefcase strap over her shoulder. “On that note, I should perhaps find my soldier and see what chaos he has wrought in his flat while I was away.”
“You are so certain that he has,” Sharon laughed, waggling her fingers as if to shoo her away. “I’ll let you know how London goes.”
Peggy left Sharon to her work,