Chapter 25
“So you think that Stark made it out of a terrorist base camp in the mountains of Afghanistan by coping the plot of from the movie The Rocketeer?”
Peggy blinked at Cassandra, not understanding the reference. “Does it involve World War II and insane plans for rocket packs?”
“Yes,” Cassandra nodded, delighted by this fact. “Wow, that part was real?”
“More or less...somewhat.” Peggy was digging through crates dropped off in her office, all of them filled with old files and plans, schematics and drawings for inventions and machines that Howard had dreamed up and surprisingly had restraint enough not to create or which had been put through a testing phase before being mothballed by him. “Howard had more ideas than he knew what to do with, some of them were just him spitting them out and some engineer taking it and running with it to see if they could figure it out. The rocket pack thing was one of those. He wondered why we risked the lives of airmen doing paramilitary air drops when we could have them fly themselves indirectly. He hoped to create something they could fly themselves, saving the use of airplanes to do it and at the same time having the added advantage of stealth. One man with a rocket pack isn’t as detectable as an entire air squadron, and they don’t tend to advertise their appearance.”
“Not the craziest thinking. So what happened with the plan?”
“What happened with many of Howard’s inventions was that he built it and discovered it had a flaw.” She yelped as she caught a fingertip on the edge of an old file, hissing through her teeth at the pain of the paper cut. “None of this was scanned electronically?”
“Says the woman who didn’t know how to use a computer a few months ago,” Cassandra teased as she helped Peggy lift the stack onto her desk.
“Till you’ve had to live in the hell of paper filing, you can’t know the joys of the electronic version. I had to do it for the entire SSR office.”
“Why?”
Oh, to be young and living in a time when your gender didn’t define what type of office work you were asked to do. “Because I knew the English alphabet. In any case, Howard did a few prototypes of his work but never any live tests that I know of. He never could get it right or make it cool efficiently. If you think about it, it’s essentially placing the same sort of engine they use in an airplane on a human’s back. That was never going to work. The heat exchange alone would cook a regular person in minutes, and that is to say nothing about ensuring that the fuel doesn’t catch on fire. In the end, it was more trouble than it was worth, so he scrapped it and focused on other things.”
“Things like a weapon that crushes a person’s arm completely?”
Peggy turned sharply to the notebook Cassandra had in her hands. “He said that was supposed to be a messenger.”
“The hell sort of massage did he get?”
“I wouldn’t get that one,” Peggy warned as a knock on her door caught her attention. She looked up to see Agent Burk, smiling at his prompt appearance. “Come in! You have the photographs?”
“That and something more.” He eyed the open crates with slight interest but wandered to one of the chairs in the room. “Mind if I connect to your monitor?”
“Not at all,” she replied, snagging a pile of books, files, and notebooks on various projects, inventions, and scrapped ideas, carrying them around her desk. “More information on the Stark case?”
“I’ve continued to dig into the data we collected off of Stark’s satellites. I think I picked up something interesting.” Within seconds, he had the screen on and several windows of numbers and letters up. “As you recall, we tracked the signals going back and forth over Stark’s satellites to Afghanistan, but it was all encrypted. I could track it to Afghanistan and Stark’s satellite network, but not away from there.”
Peggy frowned, feeling a bit lost. “What do you mean?”
Burk, blessedly, didn’t judge her confusion. “Whoever set it up was good and careful. They may have used the private signal on Stark’s satellites, but they set up a whole series of web protocols to hide their tracks - VPN accounts, changing IP addresses, nothing that was traceable beyond Stark’s satellite network. This means that while we could find the signal to Afghanistan and back, I couldn’t trace it back to the other end.”
“Let me guess,” Cassandra chimed in as she settled herself by Burk. “They are using a dark web setup?”
“Bingo! The only way to do it, really, for something like this.”
“Dark web?” Peggy felt herself grasping, unable to keep up with half of this technological jargon.
Blessedly, Cassandra took pity on her. “It’s the absolute dregs of the internet, the deepest parts of it that no search engine can ever find. You have to use special programs and protocols to even get in there. It’s where you go when you want to find something or do something illegal. Drug smuggling, murder for hire, terrorist activity...worse.”
“Worse?”
“Think of the worst acts you could imagine doing to someone, and I can guarantee there is a video of it on the dark web,” Burk muttered, looking grim. “I’ll spare you the details, but yeah, if it’s horrific and deviant, it’s out there.”
The very idea of that frightened Peggy. “And no one has thought to stop it?”
“Not a lot anyone can do to stop it. The digital web is a wild, crazy place, which makes it easy to find pockets of it to hide your activities. That’s what this person did.” With a few keystrokes, windows opened, communications of all sorts popping to life. “They created a fake VPN that mimicked that used by Stark’s personal AI, so even if anyone saw it, they would just assume it was something Stark was running.”
“AI?” Peggy wished heartily he would remember she didn’t understand half his slang.
Burk at least looked apologetic. “Sorry, artificial intelligence. Stark has a self-aware program, and it is connected through all of his satellites through a virtual private network, one it runs itself. The thing is that his AI’s VPN connection to the satellite is unique. It’s only ever used by the AI, which has a fixed location every time because it’s housed in a server farm in a specific location. The secondary network doesn’t do that. It has site-to-site capabilities, all within Stark Industries locations, and is usually accessed using incognito or dummy accounts. Since the data is all encrypted anyway, if anyone managed to even find it, they wouldn’t know what it was for and likely would just assume it was Stark Industries' business.”
“Clever,” Peggy mused. She may only understand a part of it, but the basic gist made sense to her. It wasn’t all that dissimilar to things they did during the war, even if it was decidedly less high-tech. “But you broke the encryption on it?”
“Took us weeks, but yeah. Wasn’t easy, we had to pick through what we had packet by packet, which was a nightmare, but we got some of it.” He nodded towards the screen. “Whoever it was used a fake name on a secure, dark web email account as their primary means of communication, and they weren’t messing around either. I have emails going back at least seven years with this particular group, and they aren’t the only ones our suspect is communicating with. You name it, there is a terrorist or insurgent group out there looking for arms, they’ve been in touch at least. Not all of them can meet the price, but all of them want Stark weapons.”
Peggy glanced at Cassandra, who looked impassive, shrugging. “They are the best! Can you blame them?”
“The Ten Rings group in Afghanistan comes into the picture just when things were getting crazy in Afghanistan.” Burk continued. “At first, they were just a small potato organization, referred from some Iranian group, looking for weapons and flashing money. Over time, they built a relationship with this person and started getting bigger orders, fancier weapons and demanding nicer stuff. Then, about a year ago, our guy started asking around the local groups in the region if they would be willing to take on a job, a high-profile one that could bring the risk of exposing themselves to NATO forces in the region. Most of them at least asked, and some even laid out terms. Most of the rest of them chickened out, I guess, figuring the price was too steep for that. The Ten Rings were the only ones who got far into the discussion. They set their price for shipments of Stark’s weapons plus a cash payout, and they agreed to kill whoever it was that our guy had as a target.”
“So it was supposed to be a hit on him?” Peggy felt vaguely ill at that. “It didn’t work, as he is still alive. What happened?”
Burk grimaced at that. “It’s not clear yet, there are still caches of data we are trying to break. My best guess, judging from the variables on the table and from the few communications we’ve decoded from after Stark’s disappearance, is that I don’t think the Ten Rings knew for certain who the target was. They agreed to a ‘high-profile target’ and took payment without asking a ton of questions beforehand. When it became clear to them who they were being asked to kill, however, the plan changed. My guess, and this is just conjecture from what little I’ve seen thus far, is that when they figured out it was Tony Stark himself, they hoped to capture him instead and demand more money for killing him.”
“They were never going to let him go, were they?” Cassandra hit the nail of the situation right on the head.
“I don’t think so,” Burk replied, nodding at the screen. “Judging from what we got here, and this isn’t even all of it, I think what they tried to do was blackmail the person who set it up, convince them to pay out more in exchange for actually killing him.”
“And in the meantime they could hold him hostage and have him build them a weapons system while they waited for their payout. Either way, they win.” Peggy considered the situation. It would have been rather tidy, all things considered, had it worked. Unfortunately, for all parties involved at least, Tony Stark was too smart for all of them. She regarded the dusty folders of plans and schematics that had once belonged to Howard, brushing the edges with a painted nail. “He must have figured out that was what they were up to, or at least enough to know that resisting wasn’t an option. He agrees to do it in principle, but in reality, uses the opportunity to get his way out of the situation.”
“The rocket pack?” Burk clicked on his keyboard again, pulling up the photos of Stark in the desert, the wreckage of something scattered across the sands. “We haven’t found it again, either it got covered up or the Ten Rings found it and took it. Either way, we won’t get our hands on it.”
“I just want the pictures,” Peggy murmured as Burk pulled them up, expanding them to fill the screen. They were blurry at best, but she got up to stare at the expanse of light and glass, to study the grainy images of sand and rock and scattered metal, and the footprints of Tony leading away from the scene. Most of what she was looking at didn’t make sense, not with the poor quality of the image and the fact that much of it was buried.
“You think it was a rocket pack after all?” Cassandra wandered up beside her to also study the picture.
“I’m not sure. It could be something different with the same notion, the idea of a single-man flight. Do we know what was in the weapons stockpiles at the Ten Rings base he destroyed?”
“Nope,” she replied promptly. “Coulson’s report from the US military said they flushed out the site, but the men and all the usable stuff were gone. Stark’s accounts said they had all sorts of weapons, things he was shocked they could get their hands on, mostly bombs and long-distance missiles, many they modified to their purposes.”
Peggy let her gaze slide over to Cassandra. “He didn’t happen to explain his escape in that report, did he?”
“Nope, only said he modified some of the tech to formulate an escape.” Cassandra was thoughtful for long moments. “But if you think about it, if you were a genius who had spent all of your life growing up around a military tech and weapons company, you could make anything out of that sort of weaponry.”
“And if you did it once with nothing more than the materials you happened to have at hand, then imagine what you could do when you got back home to your labs and with your materials.” Peggy thought of Howard’s “bad babies” and the amazing and horrific things he had created on his own. Leave Tony to his own devices and what would he create.
“If I were him and had just escaped a situation where I knew they were out to kill me and I had somehow made it out, I’d want to build a fortress where no one could get me.” Cassandra glanced back at the pile of nondescript dots that may or may not be rubble. “I’d go into hiding and never come out.”
“Or perhaps build something that I could take with me that would keep me safe no matter where I went.” Peggy remembered the strange suit that Lang had, the one in the weird wristwatch she had tucked away in her jewelry box, locked in a safe in her apartment. She’d not pulled it out since SHIELD had set her up there and she certainly hadn’t explained to them what it was or what it was about. All she knew was that it was “nanobots” as Lang had described them, and that they would be Stark’s invention. “What if he’s making a suit?”
Both Burk and Cassandra blinked in confusion at that. It was Burk who spoke up. “A suit? What kind of suit?”
“An armored one.” Peggy stepped back from the screen, still studying it critically. “He had all the materials at hand in that cave - metal, weapons, something to power it with, enough to jury rig something together to get him out and get him airborne and far enough away he could escape before they could regroup and recapture him.”
It all made sense, really, based on what they had and what little Peggy knew of the future. It sounded insane, yes, but then again so had most of Howard’s technology in the 1940s, and still, he had managed to create it, even when perhaps he shouldn’t have. Starks had a habit of thinking up insane ideas and figuring out how to make them happen, almost like magic.
Burk at least looked as if the idea wasn’t completely crazy. “You’re talking about a personalized, weaponized, flying suit of armor, right? Like...something out of anime?”
Cassandra got the strange reference, snorting and shaking her head as she eyed the screen. “I mean...I suppose it’s possible. I didn’t know the tech was even there to do anything mech like that.”
Peggy was lost in their clearly shared, popular culture reference. “The technology may not be there for everyone else, but Starks are always on the cutting edge of it.” She nodded to the stack of files on her desk. “Remember the massager?”
Cassandra winced. “That should not even be possible.”
“But it was, mostly because it didn’t occur to Howard that it wasn’t. Just because the rest of the industry isn’t on that level doesn’t mean Tony isn’t. Perhaps he saw this...what is it again?”
“Anime,” Cassandra supplied with a small smile. “Japanese animation, it’s the big, cool hip thing. One of my favorite topics has to do with robots and robot suits that people pilot and they go and fight. No one has ever really made a robot that could do that sort of thing, though, not successfully. Sure, they have them to do small tasks, fetch a beer, kick a ball, maybe help build a car, but not fly and shoot things and not with people in them.”
“But if there is anyone who could do it, it’s Stark,” Burk broke in, thoughtful. “I mean, I’m only slightly older than he is and I remember he was already doing things that were insane and awe-inspiring when I was in college. Imagine what he could do now with twenty years under his belt and desperation and fear driving him.”
Peggy could imagine, she’d seen evidence of what he could do herself. It was how she ended up in this time in the first place. “So we have two situations here. One, we know that someone was planning to have Stark killed, someone who had access to these private networks to hide in plain sight. We need to figure out who. The second, we now know Stark got out by building some sort of weaponized suit, one he’s likely hiding and perfecting now if I hazard a guess. That is a powerful weapon indeed, one that would be useful...if we can convince him to work with us.”
She had yet to explain anything about Fury’s project to Burk, so it was no surprise when he looked doubtful at Peggy’s final pronouncement. “Hate to say it, Stark is notorious for not liking to work with anyone. It’s why his research and development teams are so crazy, he does it all himself and then just dumps it on their laps and expects them to figure out how to utilize it. He doesn’t play well with others.”
“That I already guessed, but he’s going to have to learn.” Peggy got Howard to do it, more or less, how much harder would Tony be? “How long do you think it will be before someone outside of SHIELD finds out about it? And the minute any government does, they will scream bloody murder. SHIELD will be about the only protection he will have when that happens.”
Cassandra had the next pointed question. “So, let’s say he is building a suit of armor, he’d be an idiot to admit it. How do we convince him the jig is up and we know about it?”
Peggy frowned thoughtfully back at the screen, considering. “There is still a very real danger. Chances are high that if they went after Stark once, they will do it again. We need to figure it out. Once we do, we can approach him with that, and earn his trust. We need to get a hold of Coulson and Romanoff, the intel is crucial for them, but I think it’s time we start aligning our causes a bit more. With Romanoff on the inside, she likely will be able to find out who it is that has not only been selling weapons but setting this all up. With that in hand, we might be able to convince Stark to work with us, play upon our mutual desire to ensure the world is safe and that weapons like his don’t fall into the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.”
Cassandra still looked doubtful. “I don’t know if he will buy it. I mean, I know you were besties with his father and all, but Stark likes to be a maverick, doing his own thing, and not answering to anyone. I don’t know how much this will convince him to play with others.”
Peggy wasn’t sure either, outside of the cryptic bits of the future she had from the likes of Scott Lang. “He may not, but it’s better to try and win him over than to let him go on his own like a vigilante and make more headaches for us in the end. He may be well-meaning, and I believe with all my heart he is, but I also know the lessons of his father - just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should.”
Burk's doubtful snort underscored his opinions on the matter. “I doubt that will stop the likes of Stark.”
“No, but it may slow him down a bit.” Peggy nodded, regarding them both. “Well, Agent Burk, I feel it’s time I asked if you want to help me out on a pet project for Director Fury.”
A slow smile crossed his round face. “I thought you would never ask! What are we doing?”
“Putting together a team of heroes to try and save the world.” She glanced toward the fuzzy image on the screen behind her. “And he’s our first target.”