Chapter 27
The news broadcast made it sound so prosaic. Insurgent forces had zeroed in on the Gulmira valley, high in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, a community built off of the shepherding and wool, like other mountainous, agricultural areas in the region. It was economically poor, and its meager population was forced to flee for their lives in the conflict. Images flickered on the screen in full color of women and young children running as smoke and rubble surrounded them, bombs flying in from off-screen to rain down on ancient villages, the wounded being carried out by desperate-looking, able-bodied men, the camera brutally refusing to turn away from the blood and visceral damage of those caught in the horrific crossfire.
Peggy watched, remembering all too well similar situations from the war. She shivered, the sound of bombs still vivid despite the years, the memories of burning buildings crystal clear, mothers screaming for dead husbands and children, the wounded being carried away to hospitals, the smoking ruins of blackened and burned-out buildings. Those were all scars she carried with her. She’d been fortunate for most of the war. She’d been away from London and the worst of it, either in America or in Europe, and had only been back when she was in SSR HQ or when visiting her parents in relatively quieter Hampstead Heath. She hadn’t had to live through the full horror like so many others had - like these people were.
As ambivalently as it had been reported, the news moved on from the story to something else, as if these sorts of things were just everyday events, like a robbery or a car accident, and not the wanton destruction of a people and their way of life. Perhaps, in this modern world, it was. Peggy muted the sound of it, frowning as she flipped through pages of notes on Howard and his many inventions, specifically the rocket packs he had fiddled with during the war. She’d seen one or two of his experiments in this area. Howard had liked to show off, and none of them had ended well. One had nearly gotten them all killed in a fire that had destroyed one Army hanger and had cost Howard a pretty penny to rebuild. He’d continued the experiments off and on, especially as Stark Industries became more heavily involved in aerodynamics and aerospace, but he’d eventually abandoned it sometime after she disappeared, mostly out of the impracticality of it all. Howard had never figured out the inherent problems of strapping an engine fueled by petroleum products on someone’s back, all of which could lead to disaster if not designed right. Add to that the issues with controlling flight once in the air and protecting the body from not only the stresses of the flight itself but the unfortunate circumstances of either a fall or a flaming engine, and it all seemed hardly worth it. Besides, by the time he had set the project aside, the jet age had well and truly set in, and the project was seen as out-of-date and passé. Howard’s final comments on it in a memo closing it all down said that he doubted they would ever have the technological capability to make it a viable option, especially not for faster-than-sound travel. The project was mothballed and hadn’t been looked at in years, not even, it seemed by Tony.
And yet there sat the images Burk had taken of something in the desert sands that Tony had used to fly out of that camp. What was he building? Whatever it was, he had yet to poke his head out of his Malibu compound, not even to visit Stark Industries. Romanoff said that all briefs meant for his eyes were being passed through to Pepper Potts and that Stark hadn’t been seen in the building since January, before his disappearance. The rumor was that he was turning into a recluse, hiding away from the public, likely for good. Perhaps he was, but Peggy highly doubted that. Starks loved the limelight, and eventually, they would come above ground again, if nothing else because they were bored and liked the attention.
“Did you see the news on the financial markets?” Cassandra interrupted Peggy, pulling her from her thoughts.
“You might want to check this one out.” The other woman grabbed the remote from Peggy’s desk and began flipping through it expertly in a way Peggy still wasn’t comfortable with. She easily found a channel geared towards business because, of course, the future had channels just devoted to that. It didn’t take Peggy long to see why.
“The board is trying to shut Tony out?” She frowned at the headline screaming on the lower third of the screen, looking for any indication as to why.
“Don’t know yet. I took the liberty of reaching out to Coulson, though, and he said he’s on it.” Cassandra frowned. “If they band together, they could vote him out as CEO. He’ll lose control of his own company.”
Somewhere in her memory, Peggy could hear Howard’s outrage at that. “That’s his father’s company! Howard built that, they wouldn’t take it away.”
“They would after he’s unilaterally shut down production on the one thing Stark Industries is known for. They are the board of directors. They are there to make money, and SI has taken a wallop since Stark’s little announcement when he got back. The fact that he’s not come out with any new ideas has made most of them downright terrified, and now they want him gone.”
Peggy had seen, of course, the building tension as the company’s stock bottomed out. “If they remove him, they can put whoever they want on. Who holds the next largest share of stock on their board?”
Cassandra smirked as she held up her phone. “According to their financial information, that would be Stane. He has a giant chunk he was paid with years ago by Howard Stark and then has acquired his own. After Tony, he has the next largest amount to leverage, which I suppose he could use to block a vote of no confidence if he wanted.”
Pieces began to fall painfully into place. “Unless he doesn’t want to.” Small things began to click together and make a strange and unsettling amount of sense. She reached for her phone receiver, dialing the extension for Burk downstairs.
“Burk,” he rumbled pleasantly.
“It’s Carter. Do you have that data you decoded from the Stark satellites?”
“Yeah, though I’m still working on it.”
“Could you bring it up? I think we hit on something.”
“I’ll be up in five,” he replied, hanging up as Peggy stared at the phone thoughtfully.
“What’s up, boss?” Cassandra had yet to follow the full train of the thread that Peggy now pulled, unraveling all of it.
“I think I finally pieced together what’s been going on.” Peggy’s mind swirled, picking out pieces here and there, the scant evidence that had been right in front of her nose the whole time, which she hadn’t connected despite it being obvious. How had she missed it?
“Cassie, your files on Stark’s disappearance and motives. What do you have on Stane?”
The other woman blinked in mild surprise. “Let me go grab my files.”
Peggy watched her rush out the door as she pulled up her files. Cassandra was soon back with her tablet and a stack of files, settling at the far corner of Peggy’s desk. “You think he’s the one pulling the strings.”
“Honestly, I’m more irritated with myself for not seeing it sooner.” She grimaced as she pulled up the files. “Whoever was behind this had to not only be close enough to Stark to know his habits but have authority enough to be able to work behind his back if need be, and they had to know they could get away with it. Who was going to question the authority of Obadiah Stane?”
“No one,” Cassandra murmured, pulling up her information. Even as she did so, Burk was at the door, laptop in hand, a curious look on his face.
“Burk, come in. I need you to pull up what you have on those satellite files.”
He obliged her, but not without curiosity. “It’s not much more than I had the last time.”
“That’s fine. I more want to see the communications between the email account and the group holding Stark.”
These he pulled up fairly quickly, commandeering the television and changing it from the news to his computer display. “What are we looking for?”
“Clues,” Peggy murmured. “You said that whoever accessed this used encryption tools that hid who they were but not where they were.”
“Right, they are all Stark Industries locations.” Burk pulled up a list of numbers, none of which made sense to Peggy, but all of them had cities tied to them.
“Were any of the communications during Stark’s time in captivity?”
Burke clicked across his keyboard. “Yeah, these five.” He hovered his cursor arrow over the highlighted group. “Primarily, the VPN leads back to El Segundo, New York, Seattle, Malibu, the usual suspects.”
Peggy nodded, noting the two instances pinging from Malibu. “Why would there be uplinks from Malibu?”
Burk blinked, it hitting him how strange that would be. “Whoever is using this VPN incognito is using existing Stark networks they could reliably say other Stark employees use to cover their tracks.”
“Except no one would have been using anything from Malibu as that is Stark’s home and he wasn’t there.”
“His assistant was there, though, as was his driver and several maintenance people,” Cassandra supplied. “Sharon found most of that out when she interviewed them.”
“But I bet if we look, none of them were in New York and Seattle as well. Why would they be?” Peggy’s brain whirled as she considered. “And Stane has prime real estate in Ventura County, just north of where Stark’s house is at. It wouldn’t be hard to blur that, would it.”
“No,” Burk acknowledged, thoughtful. “And whoever was doing this knew what they were doing setting it up, the encryption, hiding the files, linking it to known Stark servers to cover their tracks, and hiding it on the satellites in the first place.”
“That’s how Stane got his start,” Peggy recalled, glancing at Cassandra. “Stane worked in the satellite industry before he was bought out, he was a pioneer in it. I bet if we look into the program at SI he is still intimately involved in it.”
“We have a suspicion, though, nothing concrete,” Cassandra countered, more pointedly than doubtfully. “To pin this on him we need to find that.”
“I need Coulson,” Peggy was already leaping ahead. Thankfully, Burk seemed to already be on it, establishing a digital link.
“Figured that would be your next statement.” He grinned under his large glasses. The small icon indicated it was waiting for a connection to the other end span for some time before a voice answered finally, without the video. “Coulson, how can I help you, Agent Burk?”
“It’s Carter,” she called, curious as to why he hadn’t chosen the video setting. “I think we’ve found who our insider is at Stark Industries.”
There was a long beat before he asked. “Who?”
“Stane,” Peggy replied, glancing at the other two. “He is the one who had the means and wherewithal, who had the authority to carry it out, and who would stand to benefit the most from Stark’s fall.”
Cassandra pipped in. “Stark’s being locked out of his own company by the board. Stane is the one shareholder who could block it if he sides with Stark, but he’s not doing it.”
“That hardly makes Stane our target. He’s a savvy businessman and it’s clear Stark isn’t doing anything to stop the hemorrhaging of his company.”
“There’s more,” Peggy nodded to Burk to fill in the other piece.
“I’ve been cracking through that data we got off of Stark’s satellites, his private network. Someone has been running private VPNs, encrypting the data, and trying to hide their trail, but they could only hide it so far. They’ve been using Stark data centers to help obfuscate their tracks, but some of it pinged using the same servers that Stark has, essentially trying to make it look like it something maybe he did.”
“Except he wouldn’t have been home for some of these dates as he was in a cave in Afghanistan,” Peggy added, glancing at the screen as if Coulson was there. “His private home is not far away, likely it is routed through the same place.”
She hoped that was right. She slid a glance to Burk who didn’t seem to look outraged at her assumption, and she hoped her 1940s understanding of modern, 21st-century technology held some water. Coulson at least seemed to listen as she heard him sigh softly on the other end of the line.
“Truth be told, I suspected something was up with him early on but didn’t want to trust that. He sold a good line about his care and concern for Stark.”
“He did.” Peggy had believed it for the most part. He’d sold the concern for Tony, the man he’d raised almost as a nephew. Peggy thought of her own family, of Harry and Maggie, of Sharon and her siblings, the brief connection they had together, and how already she would do whatever it took to protect them because they were her blood kin. It horrified her to think that for Stane it was all a lie.
“We don’t have a lot of evidence,” Coulson made the same leap Cassandra did. “We need something harder to nail him on, else no district attorney or even Stark will ever believe it.”
“We have a solid direction to give Romanoff now. Gives her a chance to dig.”
“Yeah, but how long will it take? If Stane is maneuvering the board to get Stark out, it’s so he can be put in place to take over and Stark loses his company. After that, it’s only a matter of time, because Stark’s usefulness will be over.”
“Well, we haven’t been successful getting to Stark.” Peggy admitted to feeling mildly disgruntled at that.
“No,” Coulson too sounded frustrated. “I think we should pay him another visit.”
“Back in Los Angeles?”
“Yeah, see if we can force the turtle out of his shell. You got to him the first time, would you be willing to come out again?”
She wasn’t sure why Coulson thought she would be any better at convincing Stark to cooperate than he would. “I suppose, though he hasn’t reached out to me either.”
“Perhaps the two of us could tag team. I’ll hit up his assistant again, you can target Stark, like last time. Maybe this time we will get somewhere.”
Peggy didn’t think so, and she could tell by Cassandra and Burk’s expressions they didn’t either. “So should I meet you in LA, then, Agent Coulson? I assume you will be coming directly from New Mexico.”
Both of her companions stared at her as she grinned, watching the screen at the beat of Coulson’s silence, knowing she had gotten the drop on the man. She could almost hear his eyes blinking, the only sign he normally gave when she caught him by surprise. “You are positive of that?”
“No, but you aren’t in the office because you aren’t using the video feature, and given that it took a moment to connect with you I figured you were in the field somewhere. You mentioned Project: Pegasus when last I saw you. Shot in the dark.”
“Yeah, I forgot that you also have impeccable aim.” His chuckle was mild. “Yeah, I’ll come from New Mexico, I’m driving in from where I’m at. It will take me about a day. I can meet you in there on Thursday?”
She nodded, looking to Cassandra to help her with the logistics of flights and hotels. “I’ll see if there is a SHIELD flight heading that way I can hop on board.”
“I’ll connect with Romanoff to see if she can be of any use in getting us into either Potts or Stark and in the meantime she can start digging up what we need on Stane.”
Burk spoke up then. “I can get her the stuff I’ve un-encrypted, give her a direction for her to start looking. I’ll send that over to Barton to pass along.”
“And then we can nail the son-of-a-bitch,” Coulson murmured, surprisingly more heated than Peggy expected. Peggy couldn’t disagree with him. Underneath the thrill of discovery and the determination to bring him to justice lay a surprising well of grief. Howard had been her friend, the one who believed in her when no one else did. She had walked away without even saying goodbye to him, without even thinking to do so save for her involved note. The only way she had of even making that up to him - or perhaps justifying it to herself - was ensuring the man who wanted to steal his company and murder his son was locked away well before he could do anything of the sort. To think he dared to call himself Howard’s closest friend to her face.
“I couldn’t agree more, Coulson,” she agreed, darkly.