Chapter 19
If Peggy could take comfort in small aspects of the world remaining the same, then the massive change of other parts of it still left her reeling when she stopped to think about it.
“It’s gotten so...big!”
Coulson’s chuckle beside her told Peggy he’d expected that response and perhaps was waiting for it. “Well, it has been nearly sixty years since you were last here.”
“But still!” From high above the city of Los Angeles, Peggy could see the full sprawl of it over hills and canyons, the wide, silver ribbons of giant roadways snaking through the jumble of houses, shopping areas, and streets that connected the whole mess like a patchwork blanket. When last she had been there - just the summer before in her timeline - Los Angeles had been a big city, perhaps not as large as New York, but certainly not small. Now, it looked like it had spread over every available surface, skirting the green-topped mountains and fanning out towards the ocean, dotted here and there by skylines of towers of glass, little crowns rising above all the rest of humanity.
“This used to be the land of movie stars and orange groves,” she murmured, her face practically pressed against the glass. “It was the glamorous place to go if you wanted to see or be seen and hope you got an autograph from someone famous.”
“It still is, though perhaps the fame isn’t quite as glittery as it used to be. Nowadays, everyone wants to be a YouTube star.”
“Is that the ridiculous video service Sharon keeps sending me videos from?”
“That would be it, yeah. Doesn’t quite have the glamor of Cary Grant or Rita Hayworth, though.”
“No,” she smiled, appreciating the familiar references. “I remember Mr. Jarvis loved it out here, all save for Howard’s flamingo, Bernard.” Oh, how he had been vexed by the damned bird, she recalled with a sad pang. He had hated it with the special passion she didn’t think Edwin Jarvis was ever capable of, turning the creature into his nemesis. “Is Howard’s mansion still here?”
“No, I believe it got purchased and torn down at some point, used for high-end apartments. Space is at a premium, if you couldn’t tell.”
“It wasn’t a nice home, honestly. Some movie star had built it as a recreation of a Spanish colonial style, and it was ugly and hard to secure, but he loved playing at being the movie executive there. Whatever happened to his film studio?”
“Sold that too, from what I understand, shortly after he sold the house. Did you ever see any of Howard Stark’s films?”
“On purpose?” Peggy grinned mischievously at Coulson. “I did watch a few to please him and not hurt his feelings. I suppose the Malibu property you mentioned is the one he purchased while he was out here.”
“Yeah, he had some famous architect build him a house on the side of a cliff. It’s quite spectacular. I’ve seen pictures of it...taken from far away...usually from surveillance footage or tabloids.”
Peggy laughed, shaking her head. “Howard did like to make a splash and always loved anything new and trendy. I’m surprised Tony makes it his home.”
“Believe me, if I inherited that house, I’d not want to give it up myself.” The quinjet they were passengers in had moved towards the spires at the center of the spread of the city, where several of the massive roadways converged. It was only when Peggy saw the obelisk-like building that was the Los Angeles City Hall in her day that she realized they were even downtown.
“They’ve built all of these tall buildings.” She blinked at the tallest one, which looked as if it had a crown on its top, as high as any of the buildings New York had.
“Most cities do now, even London.”
“London with a skyscraper?” That caught her short. Her last memories of her childhood home were of a city still desperately trying to recover from a war that had ravaged it just scant years before. There were still bombed-out husks of buildings, piles of rubble where old Victorian row houses once had been, and children climbing over the ruins of factories now turned into playgrounds for the city’s youngsters who had nowhere else to go to amuse themselves. The idea that it could be a glittering city the same as Los Angeles was turning out to be seemed beyond strange to her.
“The SHIELD offices are over there. Technically, it is the Daniel J. Sousa Building, but most just call it SHIELD LA HQ, or the Sousa building if they want to be picky.” He pointed towards an area to the west of the downtown area where the tall buildings gave way to apartment blocks and hotels. Several taller office blocks squatted in the middle of all of it. “It’s in the middle of Koreatown, which perhaps isn’t quite as glamorous, but the food is amazing, so that makes up for it.”
“Koreatown?” They had one of those now?
“Well, it’s a big mix of everything in the neighborhood; Korean, Central American, Mexican, Bangladeshi, it’s one of the most culturally diverse areas. Also, it’s where the consulates of about seven nations are located, which is the reason why we picked the area, but the late-night karaoke bars don’t hurt.”
“Karaoke?”
“Trust me, it’s something you would only ever do if you were drunk.”
“All right,” she took his word on that. “You named it for Daniel?”
“He was the first chief out here, so it seemed fitting, especially after he disappeared.”
Peggy whipped around to stare at him, cold, awful dread forming in her gut. “Disappeared? Did you say…”
Coulson was just as surprised as she was, flushing in open discomfort. “I... thought you knew...Fury didn’t tell you?”
“He told me Daniel had opened an investigation, not what happened to him!”
“But I thought Sharon…”
Peggy swallowed, eyes burning, the note in her email box with Daniel’s unopened file still waiting. “I...hadn’t looked at it yet. I couldn’t bring myself to, I...kept putting it off.”
“I see.” A mixture of understanding and resolve coalesced as he nodded to himself. “Chief Sousa was on a case out at a SHIELD facility in Nevada. No one knows what the case was or what it was about. He simply disappeared, much like you did. He was the second agent of SHIELD to go missing, and for a time, it caused panic in the ranks as Sousa had been close to you and had demanded a full investigation, only to disappear under as mysterious circumstances as you did. Considering this was at the height of the Red Scare, I think it was just assumed you both were taken out by Russian spies.”
“I wasn’t,” Peggy muttered, her mind reeling as she considered the possibilities. “No one saw him go?”
“No, but there were reports of him showing up in Los Angeles to deliver something to Howard Stark, but no trace of him was found. Not even his body turned up. It was as if he vanished.” Coulson frowned, carefully thoughtful. “You don’t think…”
Peggy did think, she was always thinking, and considering the circumstances of his disappearance, the strange way it happened, the fact he left without a trace. “Coulson, I’m not saying it does happen, I don’t know. Lang told me so very little about the future, only about the Avengers and that I was needed, and it could be a possibility. But it’s years at the least before the technology is developed. I certainly don’t even know how to work it, and the one person who did is the one who is just stepping off a plane after months of torture and abuse in Afghanistan. If it’s true...if that is what happened, it might be years before we know it.”
She could see the other man swallow hard at the thought. “And if that wasn’t what happened? What if he really was shot and killed and dumped somewhere in the Nevada desert, never to be seen again?”
“Then I want to at least find out the truth,” she murmured fiercely, her eyes stinging at the thought. “I...he was my friend when no one else in the department was. Everything else that happened...I need to do that much for him. I owe him that much.”
Coulson hadn’t expected any of this, clearly, but she could see him turn it over, a firm resolve settling in with a nod. “How about we get through this right now, see what we can settle on the Stark case, and then maybe we can look into it. Right now, we don’t know if Stark is mixed up in illegal arms or not, and I hate to say it, but that’s more pressing than a cold case on Daniel Sousa.”
He was right, much as she hated to admit it.
“Besides,” he continued pointedly. “We both have projects we are working on. You have to figure out how SHIELD can justify funding the Avengers Project, while I...will likely be stuck in the middle of the New Mexico desert for the next several months?”
That piqued Peggy’s curiosity. “New Mexico? For what?”
Coulson’s ever-equanimous expression barely flickered, but there was humor there all the same. “I’m sorry, Director, I don’t know if you have clearance for that.”
“No clearance for the top-secret project in the New Mexico desert when I’m working on the top-secret, superhero initiative?”
“Fury’s orders, I’m afraid, and I permit you to give him hell about it. Till then, I sadly have to keep it on a need-to-know basis.” He at least looked somewhat apologetic. “I hope you understand, Director. Even I have someone I answer to.”
“Wheels within wheels, is it?”
“Director Fury has many plates spinning. It’s part of why he passed the Avengers on to you.”
“And no one gets to know the whole picture?” Peggy thought uncomfortably of both Sharon and Cassandra’s concerns regarding SHIELD. She wondered if Coulson had any.
“I don’t even know the whole picture.”
“And you simply trust that Fury is correct and safe in his judgments?”
Coulson lifted a shoulder. “He trusted you when you walked into the door, didn’t he? His instincts aren’t so bad.”
She would give Coulson points for his loyalty. She knew little about him, but from what she could tell, he seemed a good man. Peggy also knew that good men could often be called on to do less than good things, even horrible ones. Michael had been a good man faced with such a dilemma. “You trust him implicitly?”
He nodded, letting loose a long sigh. “Fury recruited me out of college. I was twenty-two, thought I’d end up teaching high school history with my degree, because what else can you do with a history degree? I did my senior research thesis on SHIELD, actually...well, you specifically, and Colonel Philips, and Howard Stark, the triumvirate that built the SSR and founded SHIELD. I didn’t expect anyone to read it, but the next thing I know Fury’s showing up on my front doorstep from Bogata with the offer. I figured it was better than showing bored teenagers historical documentaries all day and then maybe coaching baseball on the side, so I said I was in. So when I signed up, they sent me straight over to the communications academy for training. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.”
The reference to passing go and money was lost on Peggy, but the Academy of Communication was not, as she had picked up in her training on the Farm. “What was wrong with that?”
In her all too brief acquaintance with him, Peggy didn’t think she had ever seen Coulson roll his eyes before. “Ask Sharon when next you speak to her, that’s the academy she went to as well. It’s the biggest, yes, and certainly, the work is needed, but it is...how to put it...not the one you want to get into if you want to be taken seriously as a field agent?”
Peggy thought of Cassandra Kam and their conversations together. “I see what you mean.”
“Yeah, relegated to the ranks of a future number cruncher and data analyst. Perhaps I would have made something investigatory, maybe.” He grimaced, his dignity and pride perhaps still stinging at that blow. “Anyway, so I graduated and got into the agency and was working mostly as a desk jockey here in the LA office. I likely would have stayed there if Fury hadn’t gotten assigned here under the chief. Keller was his name. If we hadn’t crossed paths again, I would have likely been stuck there. Instead, Fury put in a good word about me to Keller and sent me on an extraction mission with one of the top rookie agents at the time. Of course, Keller didn’t make it easy and the whole thing nearly backfired. My partner ended up in the San Francisco Bay for a few hours before I found her, but she was alive at least.”
“Not the most auspicious start,” Peggy teased, knowing she could say little more for some of her missions. “I see it didn’t wreck your promising career?”
“No, mostly because Fury went to bat for me with Keller. Between him and May, they gave me the chances no one else was going to. I was with Fury on the case where he came up with the Avengers Initiative. After that…”
He paused, carefully choosing his words. “Fury’s methods aren’t for everyone, I won’t lie. I’m more of a Steve Rogers type myself, I suppose, or I would at least like to be. Maybe that was why I wasn’t sent to the operative academy, who knows. Fury is a bit more practical in his methods, his thinking, of seeing the long game and what we have to do to ensure our protection. He is a good man, he wants to do what’s right, just sometimes to do what’s right you got to break a few eggs to do it.”
“Breaking a few eggs?” Howard was rather fond of that phrase as she recalled. “I’ll let you in on a secret, Coulson, for all that the world thought of Steve Rogers as a black and white man who always did right, he wasn't beyond breaking a few eggs himself...often. I sometimes thought he was determined to make any plan we ever built into an omelet. You are right on one score, he would have made a horrible operative.”
Coulson, ever hungry for stories of Captain America, stared at her with wide eyes. “Seriously, I will need the stories.”
“Well, when we have had some drinks and are singing karaoke somewhere near the Sousa Building, perhaps I will tell you.” She meant to make him laugh and at least succeeded in getting a grin out of him. He was always so uptight around her and rare she could get him to ever see her as a person and not the mythical Peggy Carter. Pleased with herself, she glanced out of the window once more to the cramped, closed-in buildings filling in every block of the city between the long ribbon of silver highway stretch from north to south and the wide, glittering expanse of dark blue in the distance, shimmering with light so bright it was almost blinding. “So where are we going?”
“Santa Monica, there is an airport there we can land at and meet a car we can drive up the coast with. Believe me, it’s much easier than trying to land at headquarters than drive from downtown to Malibu, we will spend the rest of our lives in traffic at this time of day.”
Judging from the number of cars on the highway below, she could see why.
They landed in a small airfield filled with planes that were not the giant, commercial variety that she had gotten to know in her few trips from New York to Washington. One section of the airport was closed off and private, and many other similar quinjets rested there, as well as helicopters, planes, and other vehicles. She guessed this part of the property was likely leased for SHIELD’s use. As the pilot let them out and began communicating via the radio to someone on the other end, she and Coulson made their way out, met already by a young, blonde agent who looked as intimidating meeting the two of them as Peggy had ever seen anyone be.
“Agent Coulson, Director Carter.” She stuck out a hand to greet both of them. “I’m Agent Meade, it’s a pleasure. I’ve requisitioned you a car for today. I’ve made sure it was filled up and checked and it should be ready to go.
She handed a tablet to Coulson who had slipped on his shiny aviator glasses and was perusing it carefully, nodding as he read through whatever document was on there. “Is this the part where I initial and then tell you I don’t want to purchase the company insurance because it’s a scam?”
Clearly, it was meant as a joke, but Peggy missed out on the humor. The young agent got it as she laughed, shaking her head. “Just a thumbprint, Agent Coulson. I will need one from Director Carter as well if she is going to be driving.”
“Oh no, not in that mess. I’ve seen that highway and that is terrifying.” She had braved driving in the modern era elsewhere, but she didn’t feel she was quite up for that yet. Mr. Jarvis, bless him, would have had heart palpitations at that.
“Welcome to the unique and particular horror that is the 405 Freeway, Director Carter,” Coulson teased as he took a key fob from the young agent. “I’ll bring it back without a scratch. It’s just Malibu, I can take the PCH up, right?”
The young agent frowned, shaking her head. “No, they didn’t radio you in the quinjet?”
Coulson paused in mid-stride to a large, black SUV. “Radio about what?”
The poor woman frowned apologetically. “Tony Stark has called a press conference at his offices in El Segundo. He’s on his way there from Edwards Air Force Base right now. Everyone who was camped outside of his house is scrambling down to get here in time.”
Coulson seemed more pleased with this. “Closer to us, though if he’s coming from Lancaster, it will be a while. Perhaps we can get a front-row seat.”
“Because that’s what I want this adventure to be, a spectacle,” Peggy grumbled as she followed Coulson to the large vehicle waiting for them.