Chapter 12
It wasn’t a question of if the news of Tony Stark’s current status would go public; it was when it would. Much to Peggy’s surprise, it took another three days for it to go public. When it did, however, it went off like the media atom bomb that Coulson and Peggy had been expecting.
Billionaire and Stark Industries CEO Tony Stark is missing somewhere in Afghanistan. Government sources suspect that local terrorist cells are involved…
In an official statement today, the Pentagon says that it has been mounting every resource available in the search for Stark, despite saying nothing about his disappearance over four weeks ago…
Chief Operating Officer and close friend of Tony Stark, Obadiah Stane, said in a statement today that he has full faith in the US State Department and their work with the government of Afghanistan in bringing Mr. Stark home. Stark Industries' stock took a hit with the news, falling off by 10 points to stand at….
Why all this secrecy around the whereabouts of Tony Stark? I mean, he’s a US citizen, captured, perhaps killed by terrorist forces out to destroy democracy. Had this been a journalist, we’d have been strafe-bombing Kabul by now…
There’s a gathering outside of Stark Tower right now as well-wishers have come to leave mementos in front of the iconic building midtown. A similar shrine has appeared in Queens just outside of the sight of the future Stark Expo, which has been under construction now for over a year. Most have come to leave signs of support for the eccentric and colorful billionaire who has been held captive now for several weeks…
We are doing everything in our power to ensure that Mr. Stark is returned home to America where he belongs, safe and sound, and to have a full Senate investigation into the lax response of our military in bringing one of our citizens home...
Peggy clicked off the face of the disingenuously concerned Senator Stern with the remote control, glaring at the still-glowing television screen in her office. She missed the days when most news came from only a limited amount of resources. The modern obsession with a 24-hour news cycle on television all the time meant that the moment Tony’s disappearance broke, everything from the cable news networks to the entertainment ones were covering the story. Her head was spinning as she tried to grasp the tail of the tiger, as it were, and found it careening about faster than she could lay a finger on it. Now the world knew that Tony Stark was missing, with some even wondering if he was even still alive.
She hoped he was alive. He had to be alive. Scott Lang had been very particular in what he said, Tony was one of the two men at the heart of the conflict in the Avengers, which meant he was something of a leader. Steve was the other. If they found one, they could find the other one, or at least she hoped so. She couldn’t just let Howard’s son die alone somewhere because of the incompetence of his government.
Beside her at the desk, her cell phone flashed to life, catching her attention with Coulson’s name. He likely had been watching the same news feed she had. She neatly slid her finger across the screen, pleased she had figured out this bit of the technology, as she raised it to her ear. “I’ve been watching,” she opened without preamble.
“I’m only shocked it hadn’t come out before now. I wonder who leaked.”
“Could have been anyone,” Peggy mused, looking at her dry-erase board, her notes still up. “Sharon flew to Los Angeles to talk with employees there, so they are aware. Chances are high Stark Industries released it hoping to get control of the story in case the worst has happened.”
“Doesn’t make our job easier,” he groused. He was right, it didn’t. “Has she found anything?”
“She’s spoken with Stark’s assistant, Pepper Potts.” Peggy wasn’t one to judge names, but that was one she was surprised a woman of Virginia Potts’ talent would want to still use professionally. “I have to say, judging from Sharon’s account of the conversation, I am a bit shocked SHIELD didn’t recruit her to work for them. That woman is as careful and protective of his secrets as a well-groomed tiger. She did state that the trip to Afghanistan was top secret; only she, his driver, Colonel Rhodes, and Stane knew about it in the company. She can’t speak for the Department of Defense, but she perhaps did have some very understated opinions on the matter.”
Coulson chuffed on the other end of the line. “I bet she did. Honestly, from the way they’ve managed this whole matter, I’m beginning to think that it’s a wonder this hadn’t happened before. Did she say whether there was any evidence of a credible threat that they were aware of?”
“None, but then again, with a man of Stark’s high profile, how many threats do they likely get a day? Chances are high that if there was even a hint of something, they didn’t notice it or pay attention or simply assumed that the military would be aware and take care of it. Whatever the case, Sharon assesses that Potts is as honest and protective of Stark as anyone could be, and so if there was a leak from somewhere around Stark, it wasn’t her.”
“What about anyone else?”
Peggy pulled up Sharon’s communication with the full extent of her assessment. “Sharon spoke with Stark’s driver and bodyguard, Hogan, to see if there had been any suspected threats. He shared that there were none he was aware of, though Stark had been in the company of one Christine Everhart, a reporter, I believe. She had spent the night with him the evening before. I doubt that the woman had been in his company for much beyond that or learned of anything other than what she needed for her story interests. Sharon is following up with Ms. Everhart on the matter now, but she will have to be careful. The woman is a reporter.”
“Wonderful. Couldn’t he have hooked up with a showgirl or a cocktail waitress like everyone else does in Vegas?”
“Considering the city was little more than a small, backwood town when I last recalled it, I can’t speak to what anyone does in Las Vegas, though from what I understand it is like a more glittering, loud, and obnoxious Atlantic City.”
“The shows aren’t bad, though,” Coulson offered, earning a small snort from Peggy. “Was Sharon able to find anything else?”
“Not really. She’s speaking with Stark’s main engineering teams later to see if there might be anything there, but she’s not hopeful. I have left messages with Obadiah Stanes' assistant, all of which have been unfruitful. Colonel Rhodes is in Afghanistan, but he offered to fly in to meet with me after a briefing with the Defense Department next week. How are your two out in the field?”
“A bit more fruitful but not really much more promising than yours. Romanoff’s contacts directed Barton towards a group known as the Ten Rings, a terrorist faction that is active in much of Central Asia but which seems to have a large foothold in Afghanistan.”
Peggy scrawled the name across the notepad by her computer, trying to place it in the plethora of information she had thrown at her over recent weeks. “The Ten Rings sounds rather dramatic. What are they about?”
“We don’t know, or rather we know very little. Most of what we got are murmurs and stories over the decades from different corners of Asia and Africa. The first solid evidence we got of them in this area was in the mid-'80s when the Soviets were in the middle of their war in the region. Most chalked them up to a resistance group, much like any of the others, and when the Soviets were finally driven out, they stuck around, controlling the territories the Taliban didn’t get and engaging in marauding and warfare ever since. Those that we did pinpoint were mostly warlords, those who created small fiefs of their own, fighting to take more and more territory. My guess here is that there is someone out there affiliated with them who is eager to expand his holdings and figured snagging a celebrity figure like Tony Stark with all of his weapons acumen might be a good start.”
What little Peggy did know of the current political situation told her that none of this was any good for any of them, least of all Tony. “So in the United States' desire to beat the Soviets at their own game, did we create them?”
Should could hear Coulson temporizing on the other end of the line. “I would say that we didn’t create them, but we certainly did give them life. This has been the game that’s been played since the end of World War II, even you know that. The West paid for the governments they wanted in countries, the Soviets funded insurgents to fight against them. The Soviets forced governments they supported into power, and the US then funded insurgents to fight against them. What no one considered in any of this was just who the insurgents were and if we weren’t siding with the devil to win our real-life game of Risk. It was only later that anyone thought about the sort of monsters we created.”
Peggy stared at the jet-black words scribbled on the yellow legal pad with a certain fatalistic gloom. “We fought a war thinking we would end it all and finally make a peaceful world, not create a new set of horrific problems.”
Coulson’s breath whispered across the receiver of his phone as he sighed, she imagined pensively. “I don’t know if that is the way wars work. The goal is to hopefully stop escalations before it gets to the point where you don’t have a choice, right?”
“That was the theory, at least.” She had hoped SHIELD could do that, help prevent that level of escalation. It saddened her it didn’t. “Now we’ve created something that’s taken Howard’s son.”
“We have,” he replied simply. Coulson, as she was learning, was a refreshingly frank man without ever devolving into the level of rancor or meanness. He was just simply honest and matter-of-fact. “There is a certain irony in that groups like these Ten Rings are funded by us to maintain a certain power balance in the hopes of stopping larger wars, but in doing so we give them the weapons and manpower to become something worse. I will guarantee this is where their interest in Stark lays, one of them got ambitious and saw an opportunity to snag the golden goose and they took it.”
“What would they hope to get out of him?”
“My guess is it’s a hope of having him build a weapon for them that they could then take and replicate without him. Then they either ransom him back for an exorbitant fee, which I think is doubtful, or they kill him and still get the weapon and the plans. Whatever the case, they take to the hills knowing that US forces can’t find them and then rain havoc on the region with whatever they got out of the bargain and the US looks like idiots for letting it happen. What’s more, there’s not a thing SHIELD can do about it because they didn’t come to us.”
“Which is why Fury gave this priority.” Peggy’s head ached as she considered the full ramifications of what was going on. “So we are playing catch up to the US military establishment who dropped the ball in the first place and now have made the situation so much worse. Have you ever heard of the term SNAFU, Agent Coulson?”
“Situation normal: all fucked up?” There was a hint of a chuckle as he said it, earning a grin out of Peggy to hear the clean-cut man swearing like that. “Yes, Director Carter, that’s exactly what this is. I’m just hoping at the end of this we find Stark alive.”
“So do I.” If she had chosen to walk away and leave Howard holding this ball, the least she could do was repay him by saving his son. “I will tell you what I find out from Stane.”
“Good luck.” With that, Coulson hung up with a perfunctory goodbye, leaving Peggy staring at the phone’s fading image thoughtfully. Here she was, holding an object that was so far out of the realm of possibility that it hadn’t even figured in the images of the “bright, new tomorrow” they had all dreamed of in her past. Somehow they had convinced themselves that the future would be a shining place of peace and harmony. Perhaps it was more peaceful by comparison, yes, but for whom and at what cost? Sharon had said as much that night they had first met when she raised her concerns about SHIELD. Certainly in the war between powerful nations, the United States had won, but places like Afghanistan had lost. Knowing Howard, he’d likely supported whatever actions were taken in the area, likely little knowing or foreseeing that this support would result in a fallout that would wrap up his son.
Actions always have consequences.
The knock on her door roused her as she blinked up to Cassandra Kam’s curious, smiling face. “You looked pretty deep in thought there. Everything okay?”
Peggy waved vaguely at the television screen. “The news broke today.”
“I saw. I figured you would need a friendly face and a coffee break.”
It was the sort of kind gesture Peggy would never have gotten from the boys in the SSR in the day and it gave her pause as she considered. “I don’t know if I have time, but I do appreciate the offer.”
“I get it.” She wandered into her office all the same, eyeing the stacks of files spread across her desk and every other available surface. “Did you clear the archives of everything on Stark?”
“Practically.” Peggy had been pouring over everything, from patents to old reports to newspaper articles on Howard and Tony’s respective worlds. It was a heartbreaking tour of the life Howard had led once Peggy disappeared, once that had seemed driven by his work, particularly on the potential uses of the Tesseract, his fears of existential threats, and trying to reign in a brilliant, genius son who he had neglected out of his hyper-focus on the other two. “I’m trying to find some evidence of who or what might have tipped Stark’s whereabouts to the group who took him.”
Cassie nodded, picking up a file that had printed copies of several newspaper articles discussing the younger Stark’s wayward and misspent youth. The top copy had a photo of an impossibly young Tony, glassy-eyed, sallow-cheeked, and unrepentant, being forcibly led out of a police station by his father who looked a little better. Howard’s grim anger under a headline that screamed something about Tony’s arrest - again - stood in contrast to Peggy’s memories of a man who would have laughed that sort of headline off if it were about himself. The two recalcitrant figures in the grainy color of the newsprint had nothing good to say to each other. Although the article and photo were over twenty years old, Peggy could feel the anger and irritation bleed out of it, a well of resentment between father and son.
“You know, I used to have a bit of a crush on him,” Cassie chuckled, holding up the article with a then-teenage Stark on it. “Back before I knew what a hot mess he was, that is. I think he was romantically linked to some actress I liked at the time and I thought he was cute.”
“Starks have that effect on people,” Peggy snorted, sorting through her notes.
“Oh, but he had that ‘bad boy so broken’ vibe to him that I think appealed to my pre-teen heart.” Cassie laughed at her own younger self with an eye roll for the foolishness of youth. “I am sure there were perhaps many a young woman who thought they could get a hold of Anthony Stark and somehow fix him, mend that wounded heart, and show him real love.”
“I can’t say I’ve ever felt that impulse for anyone,” Peggy replied dryly, utterly baffled by it.
“I don’t know, it’s a phase I think some of us go through. I grew out of it after dating one of those bad boys and figuring out he was just a jerk.” She shrugged, setting the file aside. “Still, I always did feel sorry for Tony Stark a little bit. Imagine being a kid like him. Being rich is bad enough, you can’t ever totally trust people around you and you are surrounded by other kids who are social sharks, living just to tear others apart. Add to that being a genius who is a zillion times smarter than just about everyone else, which had to make it hard to relate to anyone, and he was like five years younger than almost everyone he went to school with. Small wonder he got into the fast life so young, he probably was just trying to fit in somehow.”
It was a perspective on Tony that Peggy hadn’t even thought of, or even thought to consider. “You aren’t half bad at this.”
“At what?”
“Getting into the head of a person...investigating.”
Cassie flushed but shrugged it off. “When you are managing properties for an organization that likes to keep a low profile, you have to be able to think of all the parameters without asking too many questions. People get nervous when they hear SHIELD is coming into town.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Peggy chuckled, glancing at the files thoughtfully. “If I asked Coulson and Hill politely, would you mind coming and helping me with my work? It would be different for you, yes, certainly not as outrageously elegant as New York real estate, but you would be aiding myself and Agent Sharon Carter out a great deal.”
“Doing real case work?” The other woman blinked at Peggy, stunned. “I hadn’t considered it before.”
“Why not?”
Cassie shrugged, eyeing the clutter on Peggy’s desk. “I didn’t go to school for that. I was interested in law, actually, but freaked myself out about the bar. I fell into operations here because it was something I understood and could do easily.”
“I was supposed to get married and settle down with a family,” Peggy shrugged, leaning back in the frankly rather comfortable chair. “That was the expectation anyway, particularly for young ladies of my class. But I left school just before the war began. By the end of the year I was working at Bletchley Park as a codebreaker because it was a job they often gave to clever women like myself who were good at picking out patterns. After that...I suppose I fell into all the rest. I learned quite early on that sometimes life throws opportunities onto your lap. You don’t know where they are going to go or what you will be doing, but you take them and see what happens.”
Cassie’s studied her with narrow-eyed consideration. “Are you saying I should then take up your offer and see where it leads me?”
“I am not judging you for working acquisitions if that’s what you want.”
“No, it’s just...I don’t know. I’ve not done this before.” She picked up another file. “I am happy to help if you are happy to teach me.”
“All you need is an eye for detail and a head for contextualization and you’ll be fine.” Peggy directed her to a chair and set the file with the article on Tony’s arrest in front of her. “We are looking for anyone who might have reason or cause to be interested in removing Tony Stark from the field of play. You are more acquainted with this modern world than I am, and Sharon is already on the ground asking questions. I hope that between the three of us here and the two Coulson has on the ground we can gather enough data to try and pinpoint something tangible.”
Cassie still didn’t look as if she was certain this was a good idea. “How many people does it take to find one lost billionaire in an Afghan desert?”
“Whatever it takes to find him,” Peggy replied grimly, glancing at the article with its faded photo of Howard and Tony. “His father would never forgive me if I didn’t.”