Chapter 31
The truth behind the Santa Monica UFO became clearer by Monday morning when they made their way to the Los Angeles HQ.
“Air Force is claiming that it was a training accident.” Romanoff sat on the edge of her borrowed desk, legs crossed, eyeing James Rhodes at his press conference from Edwards Air Force Base. Why he was giving the presser had yet to be explained, as Peggy was well aware the Air Force, like other branches of the military, had their press team, but it wasn’t hard to think of the reason why. He was covering for Stark.
“If it is a training accident, then I’m the Queen of England,” Peggy muttered, glancing at Coulson. “What does Barton have to say on it?”
Romanoff quickly swept in, cutting off her superior, ignoring the fact that Peggy had addressed him and not her. “I had Barton reach out to his contacts in Afghanistan as soon as I heard chatter from Rhodes and the SI legal team. The only thing he could get off anyone over there was that the Ten Rings group that had been besieging Gulmira was taken out by a lone robot who killed the main henchmen and all his little buddies. It was shortly after that when this so-called ‘training accident’ happened.”
“Enemy fire,” Coulson asked, perturbed with Romanoff’s interruption but more eager than Peggy to let it slide.
“If it were that, they’d come clean with it. All the more reason to paint the Ten Rings as terrorists and give credence for more US action in the area. That’s not what Rhodes is doing, though.”
“Then maybe it was Stark’s fire,” Peggy muttered, ignoring her disgruntlement with Romanoff as she considered the situation at hand. “They said a robot showed up and wiped out the forces there. That’s likely his suit. Maybe he’s still working out the bugs in it, and something went wrong.”
“How did he get over there, though?” Coulson challenged. “We saw him Friday night, and none of his private airplanes cleared for take off. We checked.”
“If he could create a suit to fly out of that cave, don’t you think he could build a suit that flew faster and better than that to fly to Afghanistan?” It was perhaps far-fetched, but not unreasonable to Peggy, especially not for a Stark.
“To fly from Malibu to Gulmira?” Coulson wasn’t as easily convinced.
“Stark knows aerodynamics,” Romanoff cut in, pointedly nodding to Rhodes. “They’ve been building planes for years, not just weapons. It wouldn’t be hard for Stark to figure it out.”
Coulson looked at them both as if they and their hypothesis were insane. Peggy wasn’t about to deny that, she had no illusions just how mad the idea of a suit that could fly halfway across the globe in a few hours could be. All she knew was that Tony Stark had done it, and he had missed the memo on what was and wasn’t possible for his genius mind and capabilities to create.
“Fine, so let us say this is indeed Stark’s suit. How is he running it? How is he managing enough firepower for him to wipe out a group of men who have been besieging and terrorizing a small town for weeks?”
“That I don’t know,” Peggy admitted, glancing at Romanoff, who lifted a shoulder ruefully.
“I have yet to find anything. If Stark has discovered something, he’s yet to put a patent on it. He may be waiting to finish testing it out before he does, and then the legal team will be working overtime to do it.”
If Romanoff hadn’t just been rude to her, Peggy might have felt sorry for her. Instead, Peggy chose to focus on how Stark was making all of this work. “Does he have a power source we don’t know about that he’s using? Whatever happened to the Tesseract?”
She didn’t miss the way Coulson flinched as she said that. “It’s safe and contained for now.”
“And Stark doesn’t know about it?”
“That’s a classified artifact, and as we’ve established, Stark wasn’t brought into SHIELD.”
Coulson was tap dancing and doing it well, but not so well that Peggy couldn’t see it. Out of the corner of her eye, even Romanoff was watching him with quiet curiosity, though her speculative look was hardly different than her bland indifference. Still, it was clear she didn’t know about that artifact either, but Coulson did. Peggy took note and continued.
“That may well be, but Howard pulled it off the ocean floor. He studied it for years, trying to make heads or tails of it and understand how Schmidt used it to power his arsenal. I’m not an engineer or a scientist, but you can’t tell me that Arc Reactor of his isn’t one of his attempts to recreate the very sort of energy so he could more efficiently run his plant, do something good with it.”
It was a very Howard sort of way of thinking, and Peggy knew she was on the money when the tips of Coulson’s ears flushed. “That he did, but what does that have to do with Stark’s suit?”
“You asked how he was powering it,” Peggy replied, simply.
Coulson was a brilliant man, but even he hadn’t considered that possibility, judging from the hint of dubiousness now as he thought about it. Romanoff, who clearly could believe a lot of possibilities, at least looked as if she believed it plausible. It was she who spoke first in measured consideration as just a hint of her natural accent broke the surface, perhaps even unbeknownst to her.
“It’s possible, in theory,” she mused, dark green eyes narrowing as she braced the heels of her hands on either side along the edge of the desk, hunching her shoulders around her ears. “I mean, if we can shrink batteries enough to fit inside of cameras so small we can put them inside the human body to see, why can’t Stark create a smaller version of his father's reactor?”
“Would it even work?” Coulson wasn’t as sure, arms crossed as he paced the narrow confines of Romanoff’s borrowed office.
“I mean, if he cracked it, sure, but no one has cracked it before. What little I know of the development of it is that Howard Stark never got much further than the building of the large one in El Segundo. He had the patent on it and control of all other future developments with the technology, which may be why we’ve not heard anything about it. Stark doesn’t need to file anything with the US government for any special technology because he owns it.”
“Which leaves him to develop his new suit in secret.” Peggy nodded towards the screen. “Rhodes is his best friend. He would willingly cover for him if Stark asked.”
Coulson sighed heavily, stopping his steps to stare at the television. “So the timeline of events is this: Stark tests his technology sometime Friday night and takes a spin around Santa Monica Bay. He then goes to the gala, schmoozes for a few minutes before he heads back home, then at some point puts on the suit, flies to Afghanistan in time to get there late Saturday afternoon local time, and proceeds to clear out the Ten Rings forces in Gulmira. That’s when he engages with the US fighter pilots. I’m guessing that was a mistake.”
“Most likely, given that he’s donating a new plane to cover up for this training exercise,” Romanoff observed.
“Whatever happened, Stark makes it back home to Malibu sometime on Saturday in California. He’s certainly home by Sunday when he made an appearance at a Jamba Juice not far from his home.”
“And no one is the wiser for it.” Peggy supplied. In a world with satellites that could see everything, how could they miss this? “Do we have visuals on Gulmira?”
“Not that the US government would let us see, but I think if we get Burk on the case, his team might be able to find something.” Coulson looked to where Romanoff perched. “Has Stark made a move out of his mansion or to the office at all?”
“Not that I know of, but I do have one interesting tidbit. Stane left in a Stark Industries private jet this morning.”
“He said he was going to be in Europe this week on a business trip,” Peggy interjected, remembering too well their charged conversation from the other night.
Romanoff looked a bit like the cat who stole the cream. “Except his flight manifest has him making an unexpected and unscheduled stop to meet with NATO forces in Kabul. I stumbled on that one only because of the top-level clearance. It’s all hush-hush, cleared through the State Department, but the meeting with the brass seems on the level.”
Peggy’s mind pounced on this new information, fitting it into what they already knew. “He’s there to meet with them. Did he schedule it, or did they?”
“Not clear, but I’m guessing if his assistant was working on getting him clearance, he’s the one who put the request through.”
“Which means he’s likely going to reach out to his contacts there.” Peggy played through the discussion she and Stane had at the bar, of how he found her on the steps, his conversation with Stark just before, and the confrontation at the bar. “There was a woman who came up to Stark at the bar the other night, blonde, pretty, had some sort of point she was trying to make to him.”
Romanoff’s snort was delicate but pointed. “Frankly, that could be any attractive blonde around Stark.”
Peggy wasn’t about to deny that. “No, but she put photographs in front of his face. I didn’t catch what it was, but it was enough that he was upset. He spoke with Stane and then left. That was before Stane spotted me. Any way of knowing who the woman was?”
“I can pull up a guest list easily enough,” Romanoff reached for a tablet, already working her fingers across the glass.
Even Coulson appeared impressed with that. “Those French lessons paying off, then?”
Romanoff’s smile was fond and genuine for a change. “He’s a smart kid with indulgent parents. He won’t ever be Molier, but I think he can pass his AP language exam. His mother does need to learn how to encrypt her data on her home laptop, though, because you never know what sort of co-worker can get in and swipe potentially useful data.”
For all the complications around Romanoff, Peggy had to admit she was scarily good. “Anyone who could potentially fit our mysterious woman?”
“I think I got a hit pretty quickly.” Romanoff tapped the screen before flipping it around for Peggy to see. Up came footage of a reporter, the blonde with generic good looks and somewhat severe expression, her hair sleek and styled as she spoke into a camera.
“That’s her,” Peggy confirmed.
“Who is she,” Coulson asked as Romanoff flipped her tablet around again, pulling up data.
“Christine Everhart, she’s a reporter with Vanity Fair. The magazine’s owner donates big to the Stark Foundation and I’m guessing he used his pull to get her into the event, probably in the hopes of catching Stark again. Funny, she’s the reporter I had told you about, the one who was paying people to get in deep in Gulmira. She probably found out that Stark Industries was selling weapons to terrorists there and confronted Stark about it.”
“And he confronted Stane,” Peggy supplied with a certain sense of dread. “Which means he’s figured it out.”
“And that doesn’t leave us much time,” Coulson warned, looking grim. “If Stark knows, Stane will move to have him out one way or the other. I guess that a corporate takeover won’t be clean enough for him.”
Despite the fact she knew he had tried it once, the idea that Stane would work to attempt to assassinate Howard’s son all to gain control of Howard’s legacy left her feeling horrified and cold. In her first conversation with him, Stane had worked so hard to play up how close he had been to Howard, their friendship and mutuality, and the way he cared for Tony, the boy who was neglected and unappreciated by Howard. How much of that had been a lie? Had Howard been that neglectful of his only son or had Stane engineered all of that too? Had this been his slow play from the beginning, accepting Howard’s offer to join Stark Industries to slowly consume it from the inside, to take over Howard’s life and work?
“We need to get to Stark,” she murmured, a frantic edge in her voice. “We have to get him to listen.”
“With what?” Romanoff countered, pointedly. “With encrypted emails and suppositions. We don’t have enough of a hard and fast case yet.”
“We can just tell him something!”
“What if he knows?” Coulson was the one who cut in with reason, halting Peggy’s quickly spiraling thoughts. She blinked up at him and continued. “Stark’s a genius, if he’s figured out that Stane is the one dealing under the table and behind his back, he’s probably figured out that Stane is also mixed up with his disappearance or at least suspects that he is. Probably also knows Stane’s the one pushing him out of the company.”
“So do you propose we not approach him?” Peggy couldn’t help the flash of annoyance at that idea. She wasn’t going to stand around when she could help Howard’s son. “You said it yourself, he has likely figured it out. That may be what his stunt in Gulmira was, a shot across the bow at Stane. Are we going to let Stane use that to threaten him or tear him down?”
“Stark doesn’t trust us,” Coulson replied simply, cool in the face of even Peggy’s agitation. “That’s clear in the fact we’ve given him opportunities to talk to us and he hasn’t taken them.”
“Admittedly, it’s his MO,” Romanoff chimed in. “Stark doesn’t trust anyone who hasn’t earned a place in his inner circle. He doesn’t know SHIELD. You are better off talking with Potts. If you win her over, she’ll advocate for Stark. He trusts her.”
They were right. Peggy didn’t like it, but they were correct. “And she will help us?”
Coulson was the one to chuckle at that question. “You didn’t see her Friday night. If she’s not in love with Stark already, she’s most of the way there. Even if she weren’t, she’s always been protective of him. If we tip her off, she will do what she can to convince him.”
“But will she believe Stane is behind it?”
That Coulson seemed less sure of. “She’s the one who gave us access. If we lay it before her that we’ve been monitoring his communication for some time and give her evidence, she likely would.”
“Stark might have already tipped her off as well,” Romanoff interjected. “He confides in her the most, so she may be aware of at least some of it. She can tell us what he does know.”
It was far from ideal, but it was what they had on tap. “All right, we’ll sit tight till you have a chance to meet with her.” She nodded towards Coulson, unflappable as ever. She then glanced at Romanoff. “You’ll keep an eye on Stane’s movements, then?”
She nodded, curtly, slipping off her desk. “I got to get back. I’ll keep an eye out in case flying robots make an appearance in the area. Stark might try and test his new wings.”
Peggy had a feeling there would be a lot more sightings of him up and down the California coast. “Perhaps we should quietly pass the word on to those who might be frightened at the prospect of another unidentified flying object?”
“I’ll have our team pass on that SHIELD is developing some experimental technology that may be seen in the area and leave it at that. As long as Stark doesn’t get to showboat-y, we should be fine.”
Romanoff didn’t look as certain. “That will only cover us for a time before people start making a thing out of this. One crazed alien conspiracy theorist and they will be all over this.”
“Then I suppose we will have to work to get Stark under the banner of the Avengers. To do that, we need Stane first. I’ll see what I can do to set up time with him when he gets back in town.” She shifted, uncomfortable at the notion. “He seems to have a certain passing interest in me, I might as well use it to my advantage.”
For a brief moment, she thought she saw something akin to sympathy cross Romanoff’s face, but it was subsumed by a sardonic raise of an eyebrow. “It’s what a spy is supposed to do, right? Ingratiate ourselves to our enemies, earn their trust, and steal away their secrets to destroy them with?”
Peggy wondered for a moment if Romanoff was making an observation on her own life, Peggy’s, or the art of spying in general. “I suppose, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
Something passed for a moment between the two of them and was gone as Romanoff gathered herself up, looping a handbag and briefcase over her shoulder. “I need to get back, but let me know if Burk can pull up visuals of Gulmira. I’ll be in touch.”
Peggy watched the other woman walk out the door, feeling as if she had somehow missed a part of the conversation and not sure what it was.